[
    {
        "title": "Fire of the Phoenix",
        "author": "Azariah Jade",
        "genres": [
            "dragons",
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "\"The phoenix looks like nothing more than a giant bird with fire-colored feathers, but it's not a bird; it's a sun. Millennia ago, the phoenix fought the moon in an epic battle of dominance, and lost. As punishment, the moon threw it down to live on Galataia.\n\nEver since that fateful day, we dragons have had to live in the mountains where we can hide in caves and plant jublar trees near our nesting grounds. The stink from the trees is strong all year, but as much as we dislike it, the phoenix hates it more.\n\nNo longer are we dominant, no longer are we the strongest, for while we're ten times the size of the largest prey, the phoenix is ten times our better. Fighting it is suicide, as whenever it's near a dragon ready for battle, its feathers burst into flame, burning any who dare try to bite or scratch it. Our own fire does nothing to it, while its balls of white fire ash us instantly.\n\nFear it, my son, so you can live to see old age.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The black fog started grey, forming from nothing to shroud the whole valley a clawspan deep. Then the grey rose above the tall grasses and wildflowers, and the blackness shaped underneath it. As the grey climbed the mountains, the black stayed only a little behind.\n\nValfredo stood on the mountain ledge, refusing to look away. Every one of his scales tingled with excitement. Should he pace the ledge and look everywhere at once, or stay put watching one spot? He glanced back at the family cave where Mother stood in the exact center of the opening, sniffing the air. Plopping down in front of her, he looked down at the fog once again. Maybe if he acted calm, Mother would let him stay up long enough for it to reach the cave so he could touch it.\n\nThe blackness reached the top of the valley flowers, then covered them completely, smothering their once-strong scent with nothingness and cutting off the sound of crickets chirping. Everything the fog touched disappeared in sight, scent, and sound, like they simply stopped existing inside the swirling blackness. First the flowers, then the tall grasses, and now the bushes and small trees joined the emptiness. It didn't even feel like there was a ground anymore.\n\nValfredo shuddered and looked around the moon-lit nesting ground. Somewhere out there Father was helping anyone foolish enough to try going into the fog.\n\n\"Do you think he'll get lost if he has to rescue someone?\" he asked.\n\nMother walked over and nuzzled him. \"Don't worry about your father. He knows what he's doing.\" She looked down into the valley and inhaled sharply. \"It is, however, time for you to go to sleep.\"\n\n\"But, Mother\u2014\"\n\n\"No buts! I've already let you stay up longer than I should've.\"\n\n\"But it only comes once a century, and I want to touch it. Please, Mother? I promise I'll go to sleep right after I touch it.\"\n\nWith a sigh, Mother shook her head. \"You're as stubborn as your father.\"\n\nA twinge of hope tugged at Valfredo, but when Mother looked him in the eyes, he could tell she wasn't going to give in. She had the I'm your mother and you will obey me look. Pouting, he slumped down to a sit, not caring that he was acting more like a hatchling than a fledgling.\n\nMother raised an eyeridge and flared her wings. \"Go to your nest now.\"\n\nWith a groan, Valfredo trudged to his nest where he flopped into an awkward position. \"Elina's allowed to stay out,\" he grumbled.\n\nMother walked over and shifted his body to be more comfortable. \"Elina's an adolescent and is staying with a responsible friend.\" Then she nuzzled him and licked his cheek. \"You'll learn what it's like soon enough, my love. You'll watch it rise even above the mountains and enter every crevice. It'll swallow us as it has the valley, and when it does, you'll know what it's like to not exist. Your own tail will be forgotten from your body, your wings will have no feeling, and your tongue will have no taste. When that day comes, you'll understand why I didn't want you experiencing it now.\"\n\nHe shivered and curled into a circle. If that was what black fog felt like, he didn't want to touch it anymore."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Valfredo startled awake gasping for breath. The horrible screams from his nightmare still rang in his ears, making him shiver as he looked around the cave. It was too black to see anything and smelled of nothing, not even rock. He reached out to feel for Mother, but the farther his claw went from him, the less it felt attached, and he pulled it back. Even the ground beneath him didn't feel right, like it wanted to fall away and leave him stranded in the air. The only sounds were his own pounding heart and the muffled screams of terror and furious roars from his nightmare.\n\n\"Mother?\"\n\nNo response. Where was she? Could she hear him? The sounds were getting louder. Were they real, or was he still in the nightmare?\n\n\"Mother?\" he called a little louder. He didn't want to be here, in this place, in this darkness. He wanted out. He had to get out!\n\n\"Mother!\"\n\nSomething touched his cheek, and he squeaked and jerked away, hissing.\n\n\"It's me, little one.\" Mother's words were muffled, but real, and next to him. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\nThe warm impression of calm filled Valfredo, and he relaxed. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Her snout touched him. Then she reached around with her claw and pulled him close until he felt her all around him. \"The black fog is still too thick to see through.\"\n\nA faint white glow filled the cave entrance and quickly got brighter before dwindling back into blackness.\n\n\"What was that?\" Valfredo asked.\n\nMother's warmth left him, and a feeling of nothingness surrounded him.\n\n\"Mother, wait!\"\n\n\"Hush! And stay here.\"\n\nAnother glow of white filled the entrance, a little brighter this time, along with some heat. In the dim light, Valfredo could see Mother's silhouette. She stood tall and tense, staring at the entrance with her wings slightly flared.\n\nThe sounds were louder now, as if the white glow was morning sunlight burning off the suffocating fog.\n\nYet another glow flooded the cave, and when it passed, the scent of mingled fear, rage, and desperation entered the cave and made his nose quiver. He sneezed, but the scents still clung, piercing through his nose into his chest.\n\nValfredo shivered and held his wings tightly to his sides. Some of the black fog had burned off; the moon pierced through enough of it now to change what was total darkness into a faint cave opening and Mother's shadow. She paced the opening, stopping periodically to give the chirp meant to help young find their way home.\n\n\"Do you think Elina's okay?\" Valfredo asked.\n\nHer wings twitched, and she stopped pacing to look at him. \"Go further back in the cave. You'll be safe there.\"\n\n\"But I don't\u2014\"\n\nThe entrance glowed orange, and Mother jumped away. The thunderous sound of a large fire filled the cave, along with a heat that grew more intense until the orange glow faded into dull moonlight.\n\n\"What is going on?\" Mother mumbled, then trotted back to the opening to look around.\n\nA large shadow filled the entrance and crashed into her, making them both tumble into the cave. Mother sprang up and leaped between Valfredo and the intruder and growled.\n\n\"Lioth, it's me.\" Father's voice spoke frantically from the shadow.\n\nMother stopped growling, and the cave flooded with relief. \"Kerrath! What's going on outside? Do you know where\u2014\"\n\n\"Take Valfredo and get as far away from here as you can\u2014and don't hide in any caves! It can spit fire deep into them and ash everyone inside.\"\n\n\"What can? Kerrath, what is going on?\"\n\nAnother white light passed the entrance, pushing inside a burning heat that took more of the fog away. Father's talons dug into the cave's rock floor as he watched the light pass. Blood seeped from a gash in his shoulder and oozed down his leg, and the musk of suppressed emotion failed to hide his fear and desperation.\n\nThe scents stung Valfredo's nose and filled his lungs, making his heart beat faster and head pound as the emotions took hold and grew inside of himself. He crouched as low into the nest as he could and trembled. What horrible thing was outside that could even scare Father?\n\n\"It's the phoenix\u2014it's here,\" Father almost whispered.\n\nMother jerked back, nearly stepping on Valfredo. \"The phoenix! Here? But the jublar\u2014\"\n\n\"Their scent couldn't get through the fog.\" Father limped to the entrance and looked around, wings tense and tail lashing. \"But enough of it's burned off now to fly safely.\"\n\nHer muscles tensed for a moment. Then she went to him, took a deep breath, and nuzzled his neck. \"I don't want to lose you.\" Her words came out choked, as if they'd rather she cry instead of saying them.\n\nA lump formed in Valfredo's throat, urging him to burst into tears. He wanted to obey it, to cry and nestle into his parents' chests and be comforted, but his body wouldn't move, and his eyes wouldn't make tears.\n\nFather rumbled love and nuzzled her back. \"Get Valfredo out of here. I'll try to keep the phoenix busy.\" He whipped open his wings, looking both angry and frightened, and flew to the left.\n\nMother watched him leave before turning to Valfredo and impressing courage. \"You heard him. Let's go.\"\n\nThe impression tingled his brain, but he refused to let it drive out the fear. If Father was afraid, then he should be too. Fear was going to keep him alive, not courage... right?\n\n\"Valfredo,\" Mother whispered. \"You're too young to fly with that kind of fear. Now let my impression in so we can escape.\"\n\nThe impression grew stronger until it filled every bone and scale, giving the fear nowhere else to go but out. He stood and shook off what little remained of it, then followed Mother to the entrance where they flew in the opposite direction of Father's angry roars.\n\nFather was right; the fog was burning off. There was no blackness left, only a grey haze that let the fear, sadness, and determination of the clan fill the air. Valfredo looked around and saw other females and young flying with them between the mountains, trying to escape the chaos behind. He stared hard at the adolescent females, but Elina wasn't here\u2014and neither was there a single male adolescent or adult in the group. All the hatchlings were being carried by fledglings younger than himself, rather than by their mothers. One female asked a young fledgling to hold her hatchling, and Valfredo opened his mouth to volunteer, then closed it. If the phoenix attacked them, he was going to help fight it so the younger fledglings could escape with the hatchlings.\n\nThe sounds from behind dwindled into silence, and he turned around for a glance to see if the phoenix had left.\n\nA giant bird engulfed in orange flame held a limp warrior's body in its hooked beak. The warrior looked smaller than a rabbit in a fox's mouth, and when the phoenix bit down on the warrior, it cut right through his strong body. The parts of him not in its beak fell to the ground, burning. Two other warriors attacked, but the phoenix simply slapped one away, burning his body where its wing touched him, and snapped at the other, taking his tail and right hindclaw. The warriors tried to flee, but the phoenix crushed one in its talons and the other with its beak. Then it looked up, its black eyes sparkling with delight as they met Valfredo's.\n\n\"It's found us!\" an adolescent female screamed.\n\nMother whipped around and shouted, \"Adolescents and older, keep it distracted! Valfredo, lead the fledglings to safety!\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Do as I say!\" she called as she took off toward the oncoming phoenix.\n\n\"Mother!\" A rush of air pushed him back as all the older females flew past him. He looked around and glared at an older male fledgling. \"You can lead the others to safety. I'm going to help.\"\n\n\"No, you little fool!\" said the other fledgling. \"Don't you get it? When our mothers and sisters are dead, we older ones are your last chance to survive. Why do you think it's the youngers who are holding the hatchlings? We're staying right here to make sure you all get somewhere safe.\" He nodded to the other older fledglings, who were gathering in a group around him, and they all nodded solemnly. \"Go.\"\n\nValfredo glanced around. Everyone else was younger than him, some so young they struggled to keep flying. Their expressions were afraid, and the tiny hatchlings shivered in their claws. They needed someone confident to lead them.\n\nLetting his determination flood the air, Valfredo moved to the front of the group. \"Follow me, everyone!\"\n\nTwo flaps of his wings later, screams of terror filled the air, and a searing heat came from behind. \"Everyone, down!\" he screeched while diving. Then he looked back to see what had caused the sudden chaos. A large ball of white fire dwindled above him. Behind it fell white ash and blackened pieces of his young clanmates.\n\nHis stomach twisted, and more heat came from behind. He whirled around to see the phoenix coming at him, its eyes full of hunger and excitement. He dove, too late, and felt something slap him to the ground.\n\nPain shot through his legs, and he cried out before stopping himself. The phoenix was in the air, turning around. He looked around for escape, but his legs were in too much pain to move quickly. He tried to flap his wings, then bit his tongue to keep from crying out again. All he could feel from them was pain; the phoenix had burned them when it hit him.\n\nValfredo crouched low to the ground, his heart pounding. Maybe the phoenix didn't see where he was. Maybe if he stayed still, it'd fly over and forget about him.\n\nBut the phoenix landed in front of him and glared down with eyes of vicious pleasure. The fire surrounding its mountainous body danced around, as if it, too, was excited to be terrifying him.\n\n\"Help!\" He tried to shout the word and make it echo off the mountains so anyone nearby could hear it, but all that came out was a squeak. He took a deep breath to try again, but gave up before attempting it. It was useless; he was the only one left of the River clan. Father, Mother, the younger fledglings... everyone who had fought so hard to live was now ash or a meal in the phoenix's belly. There was no one left to fight the phoenix and rescue him.\n\nNo! He was still here, alive, and he was not going to just lie down and let it kill him\u2014he was going to fight. Mustering all his strength, he lunged at the phoenix and bit down hard on its toe.\n\nThe phoenix screeched and kicked, throwing him into the side of a cliff. Dizziness surrounded him, and he instinctively swallowed the phoenix flesh that was in his mouth. He closed his eyes to regain control of his vision, then opened them to see Father, burned black with only three legs, half a wing, no tail, and red blood oozing from every part of his body, leaping toward him. He grabbed Valfredo and shoved him through a small cave opening, then tore at the rocks above the cave.\n\n\"Father, no! You need to come inside!\"\n\nBut the entrance was already collapsing, and still Father tore at it. Rocks and boulders smothered the opening, and just before all the gaps were filled, a bright white light flooded them, along with intense heat.\n\n\"No!\" Valfredo desperately pulled at the rocks, but they were stuck tight. The phoenix screeched gleefully, prompting the piece of its flesh in his belly to flare into a hot fire. He screamed in pain and tried to vomit, but all that came out was stomach acid.\n\nThe sound of fire hitting the mountainside came again and again from outside, and each time the sound came, the fire in his belly flared and twisted. He clenched his jaw to keep from screaming more and watched through tears of pain as the boulders and rocks at the entrance grew red hot and melted together from the phoenix spitting fire on them.\n\nFinally, the fiery blasts were replaced by scraping and tapping, as if the phoenix was trying to scratch and bite its way in. But the wall was made strong by its attempts to ash him, and after a while it screeched and spat another ball of fire. Then the sound of large flapping wings came, followed by an eerie silence.\n\nValfredo collapsed, exhausted and in pain. The fire in his stomach continued to eat at him, and he fought the tears wanting to come out. He was not going to let the phoenix win against him. It was not going to make him cry. But the tears came anyway, filling the cave with the sound of dripping water. Wait, that wasn't his tears\u2014it was water! But where was it? He sniffed and focused his attention, trying to ignore the burning pain inside as he stood on shaky legs and followed the scent. Tears stung his eyes, and his legs burned from pain, but he forced himself to keep going further back into the cave until his foreclaw splashed into a pool. He drank the cool water, but it did nothing to calm the fire inside him. He lay down and cried. The phoenix had won, after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Valfredo rolled to his side and groaned. Sleep had come and gone many times, but never brought relief. How long had he been in here? It was so dark and lonely. Dripping water was the only sound in the whole world, and the only scent was wet rocks. If only it was all just a nightmare. He could be home, enjoying Mother's nuzzling, or learning to hunt with Father, or sitting next to Elina and watching her sparkling, laughing eyes while all the adolescent males tried to win her over.\n\nBut it was real; the phoenix had attacked, and now he had a piece of it burning inside him. He spat and heaved and tried to force it out, but it refused. The fire churned in his stomach, making the small, constant pain flare unbearably. \"Stop, please stop!\" he screeched, but the heat only grew until his whole body felt on fire. Then, finally, it dwindled into a dull burning in his stomach.\n\nValfredo gasped for breath and shivered, suddenly feeling very cold despite the heat inside him. He curled into a circle and licked the tears off his cheeks. Their saltiness was strangely soothing, and he lay there listening to the dripping water in another attempt to sleep.\n\nWere his eyes closed? He couldn't tell; the world was so black. It seemed to be spinning and moving, forcing his mind to sway back and forth. Father's face formed in the darkness. Then his body. He was running, running toward Valfredo. He started glowing orange, then white, then burned into a pile of ash.\n\nValfredo whimpered. \"Why didn't you come inside? Why couldn't you let me die with you? I'd rather be ashed instantly than burn so slowly.\"\n\nBut Father couldn't answer; he was dead. The phoenix had come to the nesting ground and killed him and everyone, and now Valfredo was dying all alone.\n\n\"Hey, is someone in here?\"\n\nThat sounded like Elina. Was it real? Was she really here? Was he finally joining everyone in the afterlife?\n\nThe sound of talons clicking on rock echoed through the cave. Valfredo opened his eyes and saw light reflecting dimly off the pool of water. Hope flooded his every scale. Was he finally going to leave the darkness?\n\n\"Hey, guys, I found someone. I think it's\u2014Valfredo! Don't worry, little brother, I'll get you out of here.\"\n\nA shadow moved in front of him, and someone lifted him. The movement made sharp pain pulse through his legs and his stomach churn and bubble.\n\n\"No, stop. It hurts!\" he cried.\n\n\"I know it hurts, but don't worry, we'll give you some healing mudfern and that'll make everything better.\" Her voice was soothing and full of love, dulling the pain into something bearable.\n\nValfredo moaned, but no longer protested as someone hefted him onto her back and she carried him out of the cave. Light flooded his eyes, making them cloud his vision with tears. All he could make out were colorful shapes of purple, white, green... colors of clanmates\u2014and the blue of his sister. Happiness swelled in his chest, but the pain in his body didn't go away.\n\n\"Am I dead?\" he asked. \"Why does it still hurt?\"\n\nShe let him down and rubbed her face against his neck and cheek, rumbling comfort. \"It still hurts because you're not dead. Here's some mudfern. You'll feel better after you eat.\"\n\nThe world spun and smelled of damp, bitter grass. The scent made him want to retch, but at least it was food, so he reached out and bit into the pile in front of him. The bitter, muddy flavor made his whole body shudder, but he couldn't stop eating. Then the food was gone, and another flare of heat started gnawing at him.\n\n\"Water!\" he wailed. \"It hurts! The fire, please, make it stop!\"\n\nColorful shapes of clanmates moved a little, but said nothing and brought no water. Why didn't they bring him water? Were they hurting too?\n\nElina lay down and wrapped a wing around him. \"The phoenix is gone, little brother. There's no more fire. Relax and let your body heal.\"\n\nHe moaned. She didn't understand! \"It's inside me. Please make it stop.\" Fresh tears fell down his cheeks, which Elina licked off. Impressed peace shivered through his body, trying to make it relax. But the impression was weak and incomplete; it did nothing to help.\n\nA blue and grey shape of an adolescent dragon landed near them and dropped a small, grey blob in front of Elina. \"It's been a week,\" he said. \"He needs real food.\"\n\nElina nodded and pushed the blob to Valfredo. \"The fire in your stomach is only hunger. Here, eat some ogre. It'll make you feel better.\"\n\nValfredo blinked away the tears so he could see. The ogre leg was freshly torn off with blood dripping out of it. The sight of it made his mouth water, but the scent made his stomach twist from hunger, which made the fire even worse. \"It hurts too much,\" he cried. \"Your stupid impression isn't working.\"\n\nElina huffed. \"It works fine on one less willful. You always know when you're being impressed, and you're too stubborn to let it affect you, even when it's good for you. You're hurting, Valfredo. You're distressed and hurting. You need to let me impress you with peace. Now won't you let it in?\"\n\nHe whimpered and tried to let his guard down, but the fire kept biting at him and shooting pain through his body, making it impossible to concentrate on anything. \"I can't.\"\n\nRumbling, she began licking his face and neck. \"There, now, you don't have to be so upset. I'm here, and the phoenix is gone. Doesn't that meat smell yummy?\"\n\nThe food did smell good this time, and her rumbling melted enough of the pain to let him eat. The ogre tasted juicy and delicious, but the moment it was gone, the pain was there again, just as strong as before, burning his insides. Stupid sister. She was wrong about the fire, and she couldn't impress emotions well enough to make him feel the peace she was trying to give. All he could do was lay there and suffer without enough strength to stand or walk or even see clearly. If Mother were here, she could make the pain\u2014no. He pushed the thought of her away. She wasn't here, and he wasn't going to think about her. But then all he could think about was the pain. What use was surviving if all he did was hurt?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Every time he awoke, the light was different. Sometimes it was day, sometimes night. With each waking, someone made him eat mudfern and, when the others didn't eat it first, meat. Despite the food and gentle love from Elina, the fire still wouldn't go away or even get smaller. It just continued to churn and bubble inside him, taking away his energy and reminding him how close he was to death.\n\nValfredo stretched his new wings, his heart filling with pride. At least his body was healed and growing stronger.\n\nKatel landed nearby and stood sentry at his usual spot, wings slightly flared and tailtip curled. A short time later, the other fledglings landed in a group, chatting excitedly. They each held a clawful of small rocks, which they dropped in a row of piles. After arguing over who should go first, they agreed to play youngest to oldest.\n\nSwallowing a knot in his throat, Valfredo gathered his strength and stood up. The fire bubbled, threatening to flare up again. Maybe if he moved slowly, he could play without it getting worse. He carefully took a few steps without raising his legs very high. But the fire did get worse, biting and nipping with every step, until he was sure it would flare with the next. Sighing, he lay back down and glowered at the others.\n\nMudfern dropped in front of him, startling him out of the glower. Then Elina landed beside it and released another mouthful of the disgusting plant on top of the already large pile.\n\nGroaning, he turned away.\n\n\"You have to eat it,\" she said. \"You won't get better without it.\"\n\nHe turned back to her with a scowl. \"I already told you I won't get better. I'm dying. The phoenix piece is killing me.\"\n\nElina's wings twitched and she took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment. \"No one can hurt the fallen sun, so stop insisting you did before I'm forced to discipline you. I have to go hunting again, so be good and eat your meal without complaining.\"\n\n\"But it's not a meal. It doesn't fill me up at all, and I'm sick of eating it. Can't I have some real food, like a deer, or a griffin, or something meat?\"\n\nHer face flashed anger, followed by sadness, and she looked away with her eyes full of thought.\n\n\"Is there a problem here?\" Katel said, coming up to them.\n\nAnger crossed Elina's face again before she closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, she looked calm, though her talons dug into the rock. \"He's feeling the strain of hunger, that's all.\"\n\nKatel snorted and looked like he was about to say something, but Elina gave him a hard glare. He glared back at her, but as the silence continued, her glare became lighter, followed by his, until they were both barely frowning.\n\n\"Just make sure he stops complaining about it,\" Katel said, then walked back to stand sentry.\n\nElina growled and turned back to Valfredo. \"Be a good brother and eat your food, and I'll be sure to bring back some meat for you, okay?\"\n\nThe tension between the two eldest had made Valfredo's stomach knot and the fire flare a little, but Elina's cheerful tone made him feel more relaxed, which made the heat deflate some. The knot changed from one of tension to one of guilt, and he looked at her with as sincere an expression as he could muster.\n\n\"I didn't mean to make him mad at you,\" he said.\n\nHer face broke into a beautiful happy smile, and she nuzzled him. \"Don't worry about it. He's just a little stressed. Things will get better soon. You'll see.\"\n\nHe smiled back at her, then looked at the pile of plant in front of him, sighed, and started reaching for a bite when some rocks fell from a ledge above.\n\nElina jumped and looked up at the ledge, eyes wide and wings flared, ready to fly. Katel roared and charged where the rocks fell from, and the shriek from a hatchling pierced Valfredo's ears.\n\nKatel stopped on the ledge, surprised, then snarled and flew down, dropping Claumi where everyone could see her. The glare he gave her was fierce, with his nostrils flaring and his entire body tense, ready to kill.\n\n\"Don't you ever do that again!\" he roared before whipping open his wings and flying into the sky, circling and looking more tense than before.\n\nClaumi lay shivering, eyes wide and breathing panicked. The other fledglings weren't far from her, cowering with fearful eyes and opened wings, looking like they couldn't decide whether to run and hide or fly away.\n\nValfredo's own heart pounded hard, and the fire in his stomach lurched and grew with every breath. He swallowed constantly and tried to breathe at a steady pace to calm his heart, but the tension in the air made it nearly impossible.\n\n\"I-it's okay, everyone,\" Elina said, her voice and legs shaking. \"N-nothing's up there. It was just Claumi playing. It's okay, everything's fine.\" She impressed calm, but as always it was weak and stuttered, and only seemed to help a little.\n\nValfredo took a deep breath and held it for a moment, but his heart still pounded, his body still shook, and the fire continued to grow and gnaw at his stomach. He wanted to scream and make Elina notice his pain and make it better, but he didn't dare make a sound and instead clenched his teeth, letting the tears fall silently.\n\nElina went to Claumi, telling her she did nothing wrong and continuing to reassure everyone. As her voice grew stronger and more sure, the others calmed down and started up their game again, this time including Claumi into it. Finally, Elina turned her attention to Valfredo.\n\nThe moment she looked at him, he couldn't stop the sobs from coming.\n\n\"Oh, you poor thing,\" she said, and trotted over to nuzzle him and rumble comfort.\n\nThe fire flared hotter than ever before, and Valfredo screamed in pain. The burning receded and he gasped for air. Then it increased again even more.\n\n\"Help me! Help me, it hurts!\" he screamed.\n\nThe fire moved back, forward, left, right, and up, burning hotter and more ferociously with every second. He screamed with all his strength, and the fire burst up his throat and out of his mouth\u2014white fire, phoenix fire. Terror struck his chest, and he screamed harder. Dark spots covered his vision, then blackness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"...have its fire?\"\n\n\"I don't know!\"\n\nThe angry voices slowly woke Valfredo, and he opened heavy eyelids to see an adolescent he didn't know. No, wait.... Valfredo blinked the blurriness away and took another look. It was Katel, and he was standing in an aggressive pose, scowling at Elina, who stood between him and Valfredo.\n\nWith a growl, Katel paced a few times before taking a deep breath and turning back to her, not looking any calmer than before. \"Will you at least try to be reasonable? No dragon has ever breathed white fire before, which can only mean he's turning into a phoenix. Do you want a second phoenix?\"\n\n\"Of course I don't! But\u2014\"\n\n\"Then let me kill him now while I still can!\"\n\nA deep growl vibrated from Elina. \"He's the only family I have left. I'm not letting you so much as touch him.\"\n\nKatel snarled. \"He almost killed you with that fire, and you expect us to just accept him back into the clan? Look at your tail. Look at your wing. Your whole side is burned!\"\n\nWhat? Burned? Valfredo tried to lift his head, but his body shook from lack of energy and refused to move. He tried again, this time just to turn it, and managed to look up and see her. Elina's beautiful blue side was burned black, her wing was completely gone, and her tail was only half-sized. Her right legs were also burned, and she was missing a few talons on her front right claw. Her injured legs were shaking and looked ready to collapse at any moment.Vomit started up Valfredo's throat, but a strong swallow forced it back down. Was that his fault? Did he do it? Was that what Katel was saying?\n\n\"The phoenix attacked him the same as us.\" Elina's voice was calm and only a little shaky.\n\nGuilt flooded Valfredo. How was she so strong? She didn't deserve to be hurt... especially by him.\n\n\"I don't know how he got that fire inside him,\" Elina continued, \"but it's out now, so we're no longer in danger. He and I will eat some more mudfern and meat and be better within a couple weeks, and then we can all find a new home. It'll all turn out fine. You'll see.\"\n\nA deep growl rumbled through the ground from Katel, but Elina stood her ground until the growling stopped.\n\n\"If you're wrong, and the phoenix has learned how to breed through him, you'll be responsible for every dragon killed by its hatchling,\" Katel said with a humph, and then left.\n\nThe instant he was out of sight, Elina collapsed. \"Will someone please get some food? Even mudfern will do.\"\n\nThe sound of scurrying clanmates came from the other side of her as she turned to him.\n\n\"Oh, you're awake! How do you feel? Is that nasty fire gone?\"\n\nNot really, he wanted to say, but nodded instead. It was much smaller than before, but still there burning contentedly inside his fire organ\u2014or so he assumed. Now that it was more bearable, he could tell it wasn't exactly in his stomach, but somewhere else somewhat connected. Was that what it felt like to be an adolescent? To have fire? Was there always a burning inside, or was he still in danger of being ashed?\n\nWhatever the truth was, his answer seemed to satisfy her, since she started licking his face and rumbling comfort. It felt good, like love. Almost like Mother.\n\nFor the first time since the attack, he couldn't push Mother's strong, loving smile out of his mind. It filled him with warmth and heartache, making him burst into tears. \"I miss her,\" he said. \"I miss her so much.\"\n\nThe rumbling increased. \"I know. We all miss them... all of them.\" She swallowed and looked away for a while. When she turned back to him, her eyes were clear, but her cheeks had tear streaks. \"But we're still alive. Our father\u2014our warriors\u2014distracted it enough to keep ten of us alive, plus you.\"\n\nShe chuckled weakly. \"When I saw that melted mountainside, I just knew someone was alive in there. I knew, somehow, the phoenix had melted it and failed to get someone, and I knew I had to dig in and get that someone. And you know what? I knew it was you! We're connected, little brother, and we'll always be together.\"\n\nHe sniffed and rested his head on her burned leg. \"Even when I hurt you?\"\n\nWith a nuzzle she said, \"It was the fire that hurt me, not you, so there's no need to feel guilty. Besides, you would never intentionally hurt me, so don't let that thought even start to worry you.\"\n\nTears streamed down his cheeks despite his attempt to stop them. How was he supposed to stop worrying about it when the fire was still alive inside him?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "It was surprising how much better he felt after breathing out the fire. The painful heat was still there, but at least it wasn't so bad he couldn't do anything. Valfredo flew a few circles around their little nesting spot, then landed on the ledge Claumi liked to play on. The fire bubbled inside him, threatening to come out, though at least it wasn't hotter. He placed a claw to his stomach and tried to feel the fire organ and force the phoenix piece out of it, but his retching did nothing to help, and the fire stopped bubbling at its usual pace.\n\nWith a sigh, he put his claw down. Every day he tested to see how long he could stay in the air, but every day the fire bubbled after the same length of time. When would he be able to really fly again? Or run around with everyone? He missed being able to make friends and play with them, not being stuck away from them because of the bloody fire. Even when it didn't act up, it had made everyone afraid of him when it came out. His tail twitched when another squeal of laughter rang out.\n\nEvery one of the other fledglings, and even Claumi, were down below playing predator and prey, chasing each other around and laughing.\n\n\"It's not a very fun game, anyway,\" Valfredo mumbled, then looked around to distract himself. Their little nesting spot was small compared to the whole nesting ground, but it was safe with a cliff on three sides, a rock floor, and the river a short distance away. There wasn't a single sign of the phoenix attack inside it. Then he looked out where there wasn't a cliff, and his heart twisted to see what his home had turned into.\n\nWhere there used to be tall, proud trees and undergrowth for prey there was now only ashes washed halfway into the dirt by rain. Black patches dotted the mountains, cliffs, and ground where the phoenix or its fire had touched them. The others said the nesting ground had smelled of nothing but death before Katel finished ashing the remnants of their clanmates and the rain washed most of the ash into the river.\n\n\"She caught something!\" Dellano shouted.\n\nValfredo looked over the ledge and saw Elina carrying a large deer in her jaws. Her walk was smooth on her healed legs, and her new scales shone beautifully in the evening sunlight. The only injury left from the fire was her missing wing, and even that was starting to grow back in.\n\nHe leaped down from the ledge and trotted toward her, but stayed a little way back as the others all crowded around her.\n\n\"Can we eat it now?\"\n\n\"Ooh, it's so big!\"\n\n\"May I have the heart? I love hearts.\"\n\nElina's eyes sparkled and a grin showed through her full mouth. She dropped the deer and shook herself head to tail, then nudged the less patient fledglings away from the meat before they snatched a second mouthful. Then she ripped off both back legs and nodded to Dellano.\n\n\"Divide the rest of it up based on size, but give Claumi a large portion,\" she said.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" he said, not taking his eyes off the meat.\n\n\"Everyone be good now and listen to Dellano. And if anyone steals from another, you get nothing from my next prey, understand?\"\n\nEveryone voiced their agreement, and Elina picked up the back legs and carried them to Valfredo, then placed them in front of him.\n\nHe stared at the food, nose quivering. The fresh, bloody scent made his mouth water and his stomach churn from hunger. It took constant swallowing to keep himself from drooling.\n\n\"They're for you,\" she said at last.\n\nJoy leaped in his heart, and he glanced up only long enough to give a grateful look before tearing into the meat. It was a little furry, but deliciously meaty. The blood left a wonderful tang on his tongue, and the strong bones gave his jaws some satisfying work. Even the sounds of ripping meat and crunching bones made him shiver with delight. Finally, something that actually filled his stomach! But all too soon it ended, and he was left licking the rocky ground for any blood that had escaped.\n\nWhen he was sure the last little drop was licked up, he licked the blood off his snout and gave Elina a grin. She smiled back, but it wasn't as happy a smile as he wanted, so he rubbed his head on her chest and rumbled contentment.\n\nShe rumbled back to him, then stopped suddenly. \"You didn't eat your mudfern.\"\n\nValfredo groaned and glared at the untouched pile near his nest.\n\nElina shoved him toward it. \"Go eat it. Now.\"\n\nHe wrinkled his snout and turned to her with begging eyes. \"But it's gross, and I don't need it.\"\n\n\"You do too. I've seen you hold your belly and try to cough something out.\"\n\nThat figured. Sisters noticed everything they weren't supposed to see.\n\n\"You haven't finished healing from that fire. Now eat.\" Her tone was sincere, but her eyes held some pity.\n\nMaybe if he played this right, he could get away from having to eat it. Trying to make his expression look genuinely concerned, he said, \"But you need it more than I do. Your wing's only half grown in.\"\n\nShe raised an eyeridge, and all signs of pity left her face. \"I ate my fill before and after hunting\u2014and it wasn't easy catching that deer, either. Do you know how hard it is to hunt when one can't drop down on prey and has shiny blue scales in the forest? I thought I was going to lose my mind waiting all day for a prey that didn't spot me before I could catch it! You owe me, little brother. Now eat your mudfern.\"\n\nWith a sigh, he went to the pile and began to eat. It was as disgustingly bitter as always and harder to choke down than it was the day before. How much longer was she going to make him eat this stuff? There couldn't be much left to find nearby, right? But what if there was? There was always tons of it growing in the river. What if eating it just made his body keep healing what the fire in him destroyed and he had to eat this stuff for the rest of his life? Would she really make him do that?\n\nValfredo groaned. \"Elina, I don't want to keep eating this stuff. Can't you just let it go? Please?\"\n\n\"Not until you're fully healed from that fire.\"\n\n\"But I'll never be fully healed! I'll have to eat mudfern for the rest of my life and then I'll die from starvation because it's gross.\"\n\nElina laughed and flicked him with her tail. \"You can be so dramatic sometimes. Look, if I can grow a wing back, you can heal from phoenix fire being inside you. Just be patient and keep doing what I tell you.\"\n\nHe breathed a long, intense sigh to show his annoyance, but she only chuckled, so he finished the sigh by glaring at her and sticking out his tongue.\n\nThat didn't bother her, either. She only nuzzled him and rumbled love. \"Just finish your pile and I promise to flick rocks with you tomorrow.\"\n\nExcited chatter came from the others, and Valfredo looked to see Katel landing near them with a griffin leg in his mouth. They didn't gather around him like they had Elina, but instead kept their distance while telling him about the deer and begging for the leg he held. Katel dropped the leg and growled at the few who'd gotten close, then bit off pieces of meat and gave them out youngest to oldest. When the last piece was divided, he brought the meaty bone to Elina and licked the blood covering his snout.\n\nElina narrowed her eyes and didn't touch the bone. \"Where's the rest of the griffin?\"\n\nKatel wiped his snout and checked his claw for signs of leftover blood. \"Just eat it, Elina.\"\n\n\"And Valfredo's piece? Where's that?\"\n\nKatel's wings twitched, and he stopped cleaning himself to glare at her. \"I don't feed phoenixes.\"\n\nAnger flooded from Elina, followed quickly by musk that smothered it and kept the air free of negative emotion. But her tailtip still curled, her nostrils flared, and her eyes glowed with rage. She looked ready to scream at him\u2014or bite him\u2014but she kept her mouth clamped shut. A deep, low growl emanated from her chest.\n\nWith a scoff, Katel picked up the griffin leg and walked away. The others watched with hungry eyes as he lay down and ate the leg. Then they all went to their nests for the night.\n\n\"Greedy, self-righteous pig,\" Elina growled. \"Doesn't deserve any respect.\" Her growl intensified, then she took a deep breath, and it stopped.\n\nValfredo touched her leg.\n\nShe jumped, looked down at him, and smiled. \"Bedtime,\" she said cheerfully. But her body was still tense as she walked him to his nest and lay down a few wingspans away.\n\nWith a sigh, Valfredo curled in a circle and rested his head. She hadn't slept near him since the fire burned her, and the tension between her and Katel seemed to grow worse every day. Females were suppose to relieve tension in the clan, and males were supposed to respect them enough to listen, so what were they supposed to do when the head female and clanhead were fighting?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Valfredo squealed delightedly. \"An ogre liver! And a leg! Where'd you get them? Never mind, I don't care. Are they both for me?\"\n\n\"You've been so good about eating your mudfern, I decided you deserve a reward,\" Elina said with a grin.\n\nWith another squeal he bit into the delicious liver. It was wonderfully fresh and full of blood. So much tastier than that nasty plant. Then he started on the leg, and the weaker flavor was made up for by the juicy fat and chewy meat. Ogres were the best food ever!\n\nKatel landed nearby and stared at Valfredo, then glared at Elina. \"Those were supposed to be for you.\"\n\nHer wings twitched. \"I know.\"\n\nValfredo's stomach tightened and he stopped eating to watch.\n\nThey stood there a moment with Katel glaring at Elina and Elina refusing to look at him. Her tailtip curled into a small tight spiral, and Katel's face twitched between a snarl and frown, his talons digging deep into the rock floor. Anger flowed from both of them, and with it the musky scent of emotion suppression. But the musk wasn't strong enough, and their anger flooded the air, filling it with the hot scent of rising danger.\n\nWere they going to fight? What could he do if they did? Katel was more than twice his size and a half head taller than Elina\u2014and he had full-grown wings. What chance did Elina have if he attacked?\n\nThe fire inside him grew hotter and moved toward his throat. He swallowed and shook the thoughts out of his head to regain control of it, but it only stopped growing without getting smaller.\n\n\"I told you to eat them,\" Katel growled through his teeth. \"Why aren't you?\"\n\nShe finally looked at him, eyes full of restrained anger. \"Because I told you I'd accept them only if you gave some to my brother as well.\"\n\nKatel lashed his tail, hitting Dellano in the side and knocking him down. Dellano yelped and scrambled out of reach, staying between Katel and the other young.\n\n\"I'm in charge of protecting the clan,\" said Katel. \"Feeding him means feeding that fire. I won't do it.\"\n\nA growl started deep inside Elina's throat, emphasizing the hatred now flowing unimpeded. \"The fire isn't\u2014\"\n\nValfredo quickly placed a claw on her and chirped distress to startle her out of talking. \"Please don't.\" He gave the pitiful expression that always made her give in and let his fear and worry go into the air.\n\nHer nose quivered, and her expression softened. Then she took a deep breath, and as she let it out, the hatred coming from her dwindled into steady resistance. With a warm, loving rumble, she nuzzled him and said, \"I'm sorry, little brother. I didn't mean to frighten you.\"\n\nValfredo nuzzled her back and whispered, \"Please don't fight him. He's mean, but he's the only warrior we have now. Just eat the meat like he said.\"\n\nWith a nod, she tore at the ogre leg, and in two bites it was gone. Then she sniffed around to find any bits that may have been missed. Satisfied there weren't any, she turned to Valfredo and gave a weak smile.\n\n\"That's better,\" Katel said. \"I found a new home safe from other clans. It's a long flight, so make sure you eat plenty and get the rest your body needs to heal.\"\n\nElina gave a short nod then turned away to glare at a rock.\n\nKatel's mouth twitched into a snarl before shifting into an angry frown. His tail lashed again, this time missing Dellano by a clawspan. Dellano moved further away anyway, pushing the youngers further back until they were all a couple wingspans from Katel. Their eyes were all wide and full of fear as they looked from one adolescent to the other.\n\n\"He doesn't need the food as much as you do, so stop pouting,\" Katel said.\n\nShe turned her glare on him. \"I'm not pouting.\"\n\n\"Then you're doing a terrible job of submitting.\"\n\n\"I did as you told me.\"\n\n\"After your brother told you to. I'm not deaf, Elina.\"\n\nHer talons dug into the rock, and her entire body went tense. Even her wings\u2014what was grown in of them\u2014were flared and shivering from tension. \"I ate it, didn't I? What do you care why?\"\n\nValfredo shifted and glanced around. This was worse than the other times. If it kept up, they might actually fight. Someone had to stop it, but Dellano just stood there with a frightened expression, and Katel hated Valfredo. Should he beg Elina to calm down again? Would it work a second time?\n\n\"Oh, I care. I care because I'm sick of you listening to these brats better than you listen to me. You're obsessed with them!\"\n\nAnger and hatred were back in the air, flowing freely from Elina with no musk to try covering them up. \"Obsessed!\" she screeched. \"I do everything I can every day to feed and care for them like our parents did, and you call that obsessed?\"\n\n\"When you starve yourself to feed them, I do.\"\n\n\"At least I feed them!\"\n\nKatel's frown turned into a snarl, and he lowered his head and flared his wings in challenge. \"I need to stay strong enough to protect the clan.\"\n\nThe bitter scent of hatred now emanated from both Katel and Elina, making the fire churn inside Valfredo. The knot in his stomach tightened, and he gave Dellano a desperate look. But Dellano just shook his head, eyes even wider than before. Valfredo swallowed hard to force the fire under control and touched Elina with his claw, but she shook him off and shoved him away with her wing before snarling back at Katel.\n\n\"You're not protecting the clan. You're killing it through starvation.\"\n\nWith a roar, Katel lunged at Elina, his eyes wild with rage.\n\nThe fire lurched inside Valfredo, growing hotter every second. \"Katel, stop!\" he screeched, but the fight between them continued. \"Please stop! You're our leaders! You're not supposed to fight!\"\n\nThe fire swirled inside his stomach, growing violently and becoming more unbearable. He swallowed constantly in a desperate attempt to control it, but it kept pressing on him, trying to push out.\n\n\"Stop fighting!\" he screamed, and looked frantically at the group for help, but no one was big enough to stop the battle on their own and they were all too afraid to try together.\n\nThen Katel pinned Elina to the ground and growled, \"Surrender, follow me as clanhead.\"\n\nAfter an attempt to break free of his grip, she spat in his face and said, \"I only follow clanheads who care for the little ones.\"\n\nKatel's anger flooded the air. It was murderous.\n\nElina cringed but didn't give in.\n\nFire flicked Katel's mouth, and he breathed in deeply to prepare his flame.\n\n\"No!\" Valfredo screeched. The phoenix fire pushed its way up his throat, and he desperately looked up and away from Elina just before it came out. The world turned into nothing but a blinding white light that forced his mouth to stay open. When the pressure of the fire lowered enough, he closed his mouth, cutting it off. Dizziness swirled around him, and he sat gasping for breath. The flame bubbled inside of him, as small as it was after the first time it had come out. It was never going to leave. It was going to keep growing and coming out and staying inside of him no matter how often he spat it out. There was no defeating the phoenix. Not even a small bite of it.\n\n\"V-Valfredo?\"\n\nIt was Elina's voice bidding him to look at her, but if he did would she be half gone? Had he turned the fire away from her in time?\n\n\"Wh-where did that come from? How\u2014how do you still have... that?\"\n\nHe glanced, then looked. The glance showed Elina all there and alive; the look showed Katel's top half gone and most of the rest of him burned black. He was dead. Gone. Destroyed by the fire that came from Valfredo.\n\n\"I... I didn't\u2014\" Valfredo squeaked. He tried to explain, to say it was an accident, that he didn't mean to kill Katel, but all that came out was vomit.\n\n\"Y-you're a hatchling phoenix,\" said Dellano, his face full of fear. \"just like he said.\"\n\nTears filled Elina's eyes, and her breathing became more frantic. The draining, pungent scent of fear and sadness emanated from her. Then she whirled around and ran away.\n\n\"Elina!\" Valfredo tried to run after her, but Dellano stepped in the way.\n\n\"Leave her alone. Can't you see she doesn't want you anymore?\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nDellano lowered his head and snarled, though the scent of fear was strong, and his body shivered. \"I said leave her alone. Are you really that determined to kill her?\"\n\nValfredo jerked back. How could he say something like that? \"She's my sister! I'd never hurt her.\"\n\n\"You already did. You almost killed her before you killed Katel.\" His voice was high-pitched and strained, and his entire body trembled. The pungent odor of fear rapidly filled the air. \"You need to leave\u2014now, before you hurt anyone else.\"\n\n\"But\u2014I\u2014\" Valfredo turned to the other young, but their eyes only grew wider and their bodies trembled harder. He looked for Elina, but she had disappeared.\n\n\"I didn't mean to hurt anyone,\" he finally said. He meant to say it with strength so Dellano would know how sincere he was, but his voice came out a quivering squeak that seemed to enrage Dellano, as his eyes changed from fearful to angry.\n\n\"Go!\" Dellano said. \"Go away, you monster! Go away and leave us alone!\"\n\n\"No, let me\u2014\"\n\nDellano's face of mixed fear and hatred shifted into a furious snarl. \"Go away! We don't want you here. Elina doesn't want you here. You're a monster\u2014a phoenix! Leave, and never come back!\"\n\nValfredo backed away and glanced at the others again. They scattered, running far from him as if they expected the fire to come out at any moment. Had he really frightened them that much?\n\nDellano stepped toward Valfredo, growling with his teeth bared and head lowered in challenge, though his body still trembled. \"Leave.\"\n\nWith a hard swallow to control his own sobs that were forming, Valfredo turned around and took flight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "He was a long way from the nesting ground before having to land in the forest to rest. The tears that were determined to keep coming made the world nothing more than a blur of darkness, which made his repeating thoughts of the clan's terror and words even stronger. What was the point of living if he terrified everyone he loved and killed everyone he didn't? Now he was alone and miserable.\n\n\"Curse you, phoenix! I hate you! I hate you and your bloody fire!\" he screamed to the sky, wishing with every scale the phoenix could hear and understand him. But the only answer he got was the gentle sound of the wind rustling the treetops. He collapsed and cried himself to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Valfredo awoke the next morning to the scent of rabbit. Carefully, he peeked open one eye, then the other. There was the rabbit walking awkwardly as it nibbled on some grass just inches from his snout. It was so close it shouldn't be hard to catch, but he wasn't in a position to pounce. Curses! If he moved even just a twitch, the rabbit would notice him and run deep into a hole before he could prepare to chase. Ah, it moved a little farther away. Maybe he could shift just a little... there! Valfredo leaped at the rabbit and cracked its back, then ate it in seconds. It was more of a snack than a meal, but at least it was something in his stomach.\n\nHe then looked back in the direction of the nesting ground. Should he go home? Would Elina let him rejoin the clan? Maybe if he asked really, really nicely and promised the fire would never come out again... could he even keep that promise? The fire was alive inside him, burning and quivering and feeling impatient. How long would it wait before pushing out to ash another clanmate?\n\nThe memory of Katel's body, half ashed, half burned black filled his mind. Then Elina running away and the clan's terror. Valfredo's chest tightened, making it all but impossible to breathe while tears begged to come out. Clenching his teeth, Valfredo closed his eyes and tried to force deep, even breaths.\n\n\"I am not a hatchling,\" he said through determined sobs. \"I swallowed the fire and killed him. I have no right to cry.\" A few more sobs escaped, then stopped.\n\n\"I'm not a hatchling. I will not cry.\" The knot of sorrow in his chest untangled and retied into one of determined anger. He opened his eyes, no longer feeling the need to cry. \"Dellano told me not to go back, and I won't.\"\n\nHe flew to the treetops and looked around. Where should he go? Where could he go? The River clan territory was surrounded by enemy clans that would chase him away or try to kill him if they saw him, and then the fire might come out and ash them. He shivered. Enemy or not, no dragon should be touched by phoenix fire.\n\nMaybe he could follow the river south. That way he'd always have water to drink and fish to catch while he found a new home. Yes, that was it... except he didn't know where the river was and he couldn't see anything from these treetops. After another quick look for danger, he flew straight up and searched around, but all he could find was an expanse of forest trees broken up only by rocks and mountain cliffs. There were no trees parting around a winding line, no sound of a waterfall, and no river birds.\n\nWith a sigh, he flew higher, and still found no sign of the river. Or any water, for that matter. Even the sky had no clouds of water in it, choosing instead to be just a large blue vastness holding the sun, teasing him with what was supposed to be a nice day for flying.\n\n\"Stupid river,\" he mumbled. \"I'll find my own way.\"\n\nFor the rest of the day, he did nothing but fly, rest, and wish for water and food. But he couldn't find any clean water source, and every time he saw prey, it escaped before he could land. The birds weren't much help, either, staying well away from him and disappearing into the trees when he managed to get close.\n\nThe sun had just reached late afternoon when he spotted a small stream full of fish and landed next to it. Mudfern grew from the sides and sent their long leaves to float around the top of the water, partially hiding the fish darting from one bunch to another. Ha! Stupid fish thought they could outsmart a dragon. All he had to do was memorize their swimming patterns. Then he could catch a few good-sized ones to fill his stomach and prove to them his superiority."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Valfredo flopped down on the streambank and whimpered. He had managed to get a fish, just one, and it was so small it only made his hunger worse. Why did he have to be so bad at hunting? Why couldn't he have hatched an expert? He was going to starve to death because he couldn't even catch a bunch of stupid fish! With a groan he curled into a circle and closed his eyes. Maybe, just maybe, he'd have better luck in the morning.\n\nWhen he woke the next morning, he did so cautiously, opening his eyes a little at a time. But this time there was no rabbit, or even a rat. With a sigh he stood and shook off his sleepiness.\n\n\"A rat wouldn't be large enough to bother with anyway,\" he said in an attempt to comfort himself, though it was useless. After taking a drink, he scanned the water for signs of food. Ah! There was a good-sized fish\u2014and it was close to the edge. He lifted his claw slowly so as not to startle it.\n\nThe sound of large wingbeats broke his concentration, and he looked up just in time to see a griffin land on his back, its sharp talons digging into his wings and weak fledgling scales. Valfredo screamed and fought to escape, but the griffin held his wings tightly, and its weight pinned him down so he could only partially turn to his side. The griffin lunged at his neck, and he jerked away, hissing and snapping at its head. It pulled back, still grabbing his wings, and screeched to its horde. Other griffins quickly descended, surrounding him.\n\nThe phoenix fire became enraged. It flared and pushed to get out, and this time he let it, aiming it at the griffins in front of him first, then to the sides. The remaining griffins screeched terror and flew away; the one on his back released its grip and went with them. Valfredo collapsed, feeling dizzy and completely drained of energy.\n\nFather had always told him fledglings couldn't handle the energy loss from using fire, and he was right. How was he going to survive if he didn't have the energy to hunt and protect himself? Even the stupid fish were hard to catch.\n\nHe turned his head to look at the river and saw a griffin. Startled, he began to move away, but then noticed its color. It was black with white ashes on the ground in front of it. It was dead! Food! He tried to stand, but his legs were too weak from lack of energy, so he crawled to the body instead and began to eat. There was a crisp texture and flavor of ash, but as he chewed deeper into its flesh it became more edible. Oh, it was wonderful food! Not bitter at all like mudfern\u2014\n\nOh, that was right; he was injured. Valfredo looked back at his broken and blood-covered wings and cringed. He was going to have to eat more mudfern."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The next few days were without food and with only a little water. His wings became heavy weights that dragged in the sky, making him fall more than fly, so with a sigh he landed and began to walk\u2014again... in the dark, lonely forest. His heart ached to hear the voices of his clanmates laughing, to hear Elina talk to him. Even listening to Katel's growls and watching him pace around would be better than being alone again. The fire bubbled inside him, gently, as if it wasn't angry. As if it, too, wanted to talk to someone.\n\nValfredo looked back to where he'd landed and sighed. \"I'm never going to get anywhere walking all the time,\" he said to the fire. \"How do prey do it? How can they live their whole lives walking so slowly all the time?\"\n\nYou wouldn't have to walk so much if you didn't use up your energy all the time, he imagined the fire responding.\n\n\"Yeah, well, that's your fault! I wouldn't need so much energy if it wasn't for you. In fact, I wouldn't even be here by myself if you didn't show up.\"\n\nWell, if you're going to talk like that, maybe I won't bother speaking to you.\n\n\"Wait! Okay, fine, I'm sorry, but you really are a\u2014did you hear that?\"\n\nSomething moved in the brush, but it didn't sound like a rabbit or deer. It sounded bigger. Valfredo stopped walking and sniffed the air. The forest smelled of normal dirt and greenery with hints of bark and various small prey and insects. But there was something about it not quite right, something instinct told him was off but that he couldn't find. What was it?\n\nThe birds chirped away like nothing was happening, and a rabbit crawled out from under a bush\u2014wait a minute, that was food!\n\nValfredo carefully twisted around to face the rabbit, moving slowly so as not to get its attention from the berries it munched. It was a large, plump rabbit that would make a small but juicy meal. He moved closer one step, then two, then one again. The rabbit lifted its head, nose twitching and ears alert. He stopped and held his breath, hoping his forest-colored scales would keep the meal from seeing him. The rabbit stayed alert a moment, then went back to its eating.\n\nMore cautiously this time, he crept closer until he was near enough to leap. Then with a bound he snatched the rabbit in his jaws and tasted its delicious blood as he sank his teeth into its neck, breaking both the bone and skin.\n\nA squeal of joy started and caught in his throat. The air in front of him shimmered like water reflecting the moon's light, changing from a patch of forest and air into a giant pile of silvery scales. Valfredo dropped the rabbit and took off running, but the giant snake had cut him off, circling him twice with its body, which it stacked to form a barrier twice as high as him\u2014and now it tightened the circle.\n\nHe whirled around to try looking for another way out, but found himself face-to-face with the snake's opening mouth. Leaping aside to dodge the attack, he flapped his wings to fly out of the trap and into the open air, but the snake whipped its tail and struck him in the side, knocking him back to the ground. The world spun, making it difficult to stand. His energy drained as the phoenix fire took it and flickered, but there wasn't enough for it to become a flame.\n\nCurses! His legs wobbled now from lack of energy, and the snake was staring at him again, tongue flicking, readying its aim and shrinking the space between him and its body even more. There was nowhere to go and not enough energy for flying. He only had one hope of escaping death. Shifting his stance, he readied for the attack.\n\nThe snake struck, and Valfredo dodged to the side and leaped onto its neck. But it was too high, and he was too weak to fully make it. With a frantic effort he managed to dig his talons between the scales for a hold and climb the last bit onto the neck. Then he began to run down its length to the body wall.\n\nThe snake moved and twisted, causing him to lose balance and slip, but with help from his wings he managed to stay on long enough to reach the wall and leap out of it. His heart pounded in his ears as he ran away from the snake following close behind, neither of them bothering with stealth as they crashed through the forest.\n\nHis legs cried to him, begging for rest, demanding it as they tripped on each other, but he forced them to keep going, forced them to keep him alive. The ground left them, and he looked down just in time to watch the cliff pull him down into a tumble. It rolled him over and over until he didn't know which way was up.\n\nFinally, he hit the bottom and stood, stumbling for balance. He shook his head and closed his eyes to send away the dizziness, then looked up to find the snake winding its way down the cliff after him.\n\nWith a groan he stepped away from the cliff, and a sharp pain went through his right foreleg.\n\nHe screeched, then clamped his mouth shut. The last thing he needed was to attract more griffins. Keeping his mouth clenched and leg up, he limped away from the cliff and pursuing snake. After a while, he glanced back and searched for the cliff, but he was far enough into the dense forest now for it to be hidden from view. Maybe the snake would give up and\u2014\n\nWhat was that? A large patch of bushes rustled. Valfredo cowered down and growled, wanting to both hide from and scare away whatever was behind the bushes. They rustled some more, moving around and closer to him. Whatever was in them wasn't even trying to hide. A shiver moved down his back. Was it another snake?\n\nA hornbeast stuck its head out of the bush and gave a menacing snarl. Its black eyes glinted with sadistic pleasure as it cocked its head, emphasizing its powerful humped shoulders and showing off the horns that pointed right at him. Drool formed around its snout and dripped down onto the ground as it drew nearer.\n\nValfredo backed away and tried to remember any good hiding places he'd passed, but he hadn't gone far from the cliff, and the snake was back there. There were no hiding places and his legs were too tired to run. Fledglings couldn't outrun hornbeasts anyway, he remembered, and their scales weren't strong enough to protect them from a hornbeast's powerful jaws.\n\nHe sat down, defeated. The hornbeast crept closer, bristling its fur and trying to urge him into a run, but he refused to give it the satisfaction of a chase. It stood as tall as he did, though its thick, muscled body made it look twice as massive. He'd seen hornbeasts before, when Father and Mother brought him one to eat, but they were always dead. Why did they seem so much smaller dead?\n\nHe backed away, and the hornbeast sneered. His body twitched, unable to stay in place. To stay and let the beast kill him just wasn't possible; he had to run. He leaped to the side to escape, but the hornbeast jumped onto him and dug its massive claws into his wings.\n\n\"Father, help me!\" he screamed, and the hornbeast was ripped off him.\n\nHe turned around looking for Father, but saw instead the giant snake with the hornbeast's hindquarters trapped in its mouth.\n\nThe hornbeast howled rage and fear as it struggled to free itself from the snake's grasp, but even its powerful claws and teeth did nothing against the scales, and the snake continued to swallow it alive, not even flinching when the hornbeast thrust its horns into the side of the snake's mouth as a last attempt to injure its killer. The snake swallowed the beast and the air filled with the sound of crushing bone.\n\nValfredo's stomach twisted as the sound became quieter and the bulge in the snake moved down to its belly. He tried to move, but his body wouldn't listen. The snake flicked its tongue and stared at him a long time. Then, finally, it slithered away, satisfied with its meal. Valfredo collapsed into a shivering mass."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "His journey continued for several weeks. Some days were feast where he could gorge on a good meal, but mostly the days were famine. Many were so awful he didn't even have water to fill his aching stomach.\n\nThe phoenix fire was his only companion, and he frequently found himself talking to it. Sometimes he cursed it for being there, and other times he spoke to it like a beloved friend, though he refused to give it kind words when it came out unbidden\u2014it didn't deserve his kindness that much. The energy it ate made him dangerously weak many times, and even though it saved him from more griffins, hornbeasts, and another giant snake, it never left much for him to eat.\n\nSeveral times he saw other dragons, but thanks to them being adults and larger adolescents and him being a small fledgling, he managed to spot them before they saw him, giving him time to hide. How he wished he could befriend them and join a clan again! But the instant the thought would come to mind, Elina's fear and what he'd done to Katel would cross with it and increase his resolve not to kill or terrify another dragon for as long as he lived.\n\n\"At least not with phoenix fire,\" he told himself.\n\nIt was five days since his last meal and two days since he'd seen water when he finally came across a very large, very sparkly lake. With a squeal of glee he dove straight into the water and gulped as much as he could before going back to the surface for air. But before he reached it something jerked his right hind leg. He looked down and saw a mass of thick vines grabbing it, so he grabbed them in his jaw and chewed. They wouldn't break. They didn't even fray. He kicked hard to free his leg of the mass, but it only grabbed his leg with more determination. His lungs cried for air. Kicking hard with his other three legs, he stretched his neck toward the surface, but his nose couldn't reach.\n\nHis lungs were screaming now, demanding air. He desperately turned around and clawed at the vines, but the more he struggled, the more tangled he became. Instinctively he chirped for help, then cursed himself for foolishly letting out air. His lungs were roaring now, demanding air or water; they didn't care which.\n\nThis was how his life was going to end, he realized, and closed his eyes before letting his final breath be water.\n\nThe world grew turbulent, pushing him to one side then the other. Another breath of water made its way in. Then he coughed, and his lungs gleefully took in air and pushed out the water. Valfredo lay coughing for a while before looking around to see what had happened.\n\nStanding in front of him was a large, old male dragon of forest green with shards of black intensifying the appearance of strength. His eyes were scolding and fierce, and his presence was powerful, pressing in like jaws clenched onto prey.\n\n\"Foolish young,\" he said with only a hint of anger. \"What are you doing so far from your clan? You're nothing but scales and bones. Did you think you could survive on your own?\"\n\nValfredo glanced around, unsure what to say. If he told the truth about the fire, the warrior might kill him. He had given in to death just moments ago, but now that he'd survived it, he didn't want to die.\n\nThe warrior narrowed his eyes. \"Answer.\"\n\nValfredo looked back at him and gulped. Maybe he could tell only some of the truth. \"I... I don't have a clan anymore.\"\n\nAn eyeridge raised on the stern face. \"No clan throws out a fledgling,\" he said very slowly.\n\nValfredo shrank back and resisted the urge to run. What else could he say to make the warrior believe him? Maybe if he just stood in place and kept quiet, the warrior would feel pity and let him go.\n\nBut the air grew pressured with impressed submission, making the jaws of the warrior's presence clench tighter. \"Respond,\" the warrior said.\n\nWith a gulp, he obeyed. \"I-it is true. I swear on my heart it's true. My clan\u2014the phoenix, it killed my clan. All of them, on the black fog night. I swear on my heart I'm telling the truth.\"\n\nThe warrior stared at him for a long time, making Valfredo feel more and more nervous. What would happen if the warrior didn't believe him? Would he kill him? Or torture him for information? Would he rip off his wings and make him eat them?\n\n\"What's your name?\"\n\nThe question surprised him, though whether it was the actual question or friendly tone that surprised him he wasn't sure.\n\n\"V-Valfredo.\"\n\nThe atmosphere relaxed, as did the warrior's posture. \"I'm Kaven. I haven't decided yet if I believe you, but I will for now pretend to. Come, I'll show you to my cave and hunt an ogre for you to eat.\"\n\nAn ogre! Valfredo's stomach rumbled just at the thought of the hearty, juicy meat. It might not be safe to live with Kaven, but he could visit long enough to eat a delicious ogre and leave before the fire came out.\n\nSwallowing a mouthful of drool, Valfredo followed Kaven to a large, comfortable cave with a large deep nest in the back, away from drafts.\n\n\"You'll sleep here until I make another one for you,\" said Kaven. \"Wait here until I bring the ogre\u2014and stay out of sight. There are many griffins around and I didn't choose the cave for its fledgling safety.\"\n\nValfredo cocked his head. \"Doesn't your clan scare away the griffins near the caves?\"\n\nKaven's wings twitched, and he stood for a while with a thoughtful expression before answering. \"I have no clan.\" Then he flew off in search of the promised ogre.\n\nHe was a loner? Father's words flooded Valfredo, bringing with them concern about staying with Kaven.\n\n\"Loners,\" Father had said, \"are dragons who decided they'd prefer harming clanmates or causing trouble more than they liked obeying the clanhead and listening to the head female. They're always willing to kill and are more than happy to fool you into harm. That's why the clanhead forced them to leave, and their spite only makes them more dangerous.\"\n\nSighing, he lay down in the nest and curled his tail around himself. He didn't have enough strength to fly away and hide from Kaven anyway. He may as well enjoy what little time he had left."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Thump! Valfredo startled awake and immediately smelled the strong, musky scent of a freshly caught ogre. His stomach rumbled and drool pooled in his mouth before his eyes adjusted to see the large boulder of meat in front of him.\n\n\"Eat and get strong, young one,\" Kaven said with a gentle tone. \"You need to get plenty of flesh on your bones before winter if you're going to survive it.\"\n\nValfredo tore into the ogre and ate his way to the liver and heart, his favorite pieces. Then he didn't care what parts he ate, as long as there was ogre meat in his mouth. Every bite was full of blood and deliciously tender. He'd barely started eating when Kaven placed his tail against Valfredo's chest and pushed him back, away from the meat. Valfredo pressed against the tail, but it was too strong, so he tried climbing over it instead, but Kaven adjusted it and shoved him back with more force. After trying to go under, then around, and being stopped both times, Valfredo looked at Kaven with pleading eyes.\n\n\"I'm still hungry!\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" Kaven said, \"which is more foolish? A dragon who eats himself to death or one who refuses to eat at all?\"\n\nWhat? Who was more foolish? What did that have to do with being hungry?\n\nKaven repeated the question and gave the look of expectancy adults made when they were teaching.\n\nSo the question was actually a lesson. Why in sun's light would Kaven be giving him a lesson now? With a huff, Valfredo looked back at the meat. \"Can't I finish eating and then learn a lesson?\"\n\n\"This one can't wait.\" Kaven's voice was very solemn, almost sad. \"Remember this, Valfredo: Never, and I mean never, let hunger control you. The hunger you feel now is in your mind. Your stomach had enough to be content long before I stopped you, and now look, your stomach is too large to sleep on.\"\n\nValfredo looked at his sides and belly. They were bulging, with his stomach nearly dragging the ground. If he'd eaten any more he may have become the fool who ate himself to death. He looked up at Kaven and suddenly felt very stupid.\n\n\"Go to the ledge and vomit out the excess meat,\" Kaven said. \"Then sleep off the rest of your meal.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Kaven didn't give Valfredo another whole ogre to eat, but he did give him a variety of meat and so many hearts and livers Mother would've scolded him for spoiling Valfredo. It was so nice to be cared for again that Valfredo ended up talking himself into staying just one more day, then one more day again, and then another day. Even after a few weeks, Kaven showed no sign of being annoyed at giving Valfredo food, lessons, and gentle rumbling. Maybe Kaven wasn't dangerous after all. Maybe he was a loner just because he liked being alone, but now he wanted to be with Valfredo. Yes, that must be it; he simply liked to be alone with Valfredo, and Valfredo was more than happy to oblige.\n\nHiding near a fledgling-sized hole Kaven had dug into the bottom of the cliff, Valfredo licked the last bits of meat off the ogre ribs and began chewing on the bones. They were difficult to bite through, requiring several attempts just to crack them open to get the marrow out. But the difficulty was strangely satisfying, sending wonderful shivers of happiness from snout to tail.\n\nA griffin screeched somewhere nearby, prompting Valfredo to squeeze into the hole and look around.\n\n\"Stay vigilant,\" Kaven had said. \"If there's any sign of danger, go into the hole and push this boulder in the way until I get back.\"\n\nBut Valfredo didn't want to be stuck in the dark again, so instead he watched the surrounding area until he was sure any griffins were gone.\n\n\"It probably smelled the meat,\" he mumbled as he crept out of the hole. There was no sign of any griffins, giant snakes, or hornbeast anywhere, so he settled down at the ribs again.\n\nBut the feeling of danger didn't leave, forcing his heart to pound too quickly to relax. Every few seconds he looked up, imagining a griffin swooping down on him. Then the sun peeked out of the clouds and shined brightly on the orange-yellow leaves of the trees in front of him.\n\nHis heart stopped, and his stomach nearly heaved. The long line of fiery trees morphed into an image of the phoenix. Their leaves danced in the wind as its fire had danced in its glee. The dark points between branches became a thousand dark eyes watching him with delight, knowing he couldn't escape.\n\nValfredo swallowed and closed his eyes, taking deep breaths to control the spinning fire inside him. \"It's just trees and sunshine. The phoenix isn't here. It isn't real.\" One by one he peeked open his eyes. The phoenix eyes were just empty spaces, and the dancing fire was glowing tree leaves. He breathed a sigh of relief, though the phoenix fire still spun and grew, pushing to come out.\n\nWhirling around, he aimed the fire at his hiding hole and let it out. The fire burst into the open and into the cave where it swirled and folded on itself, staying contained. When the pressure in his stomach was small, he closed his mouth. The cave glowed bright orange for a moment before cooling into a charred black color. Valfredo sniffed inside of it, looked around, and cringed. The boulder was melted to the cave wall, making it impossible to move. How was he going to explain that to Kaven?\n\n\"Is something wrong?\"\n\nValfredo yelped and jumped back to find Kaven standing a few lengths away. He clutched his chest with a foreclaw to help his pounding heart to calm down. His mind searched for excuses, but his mouth was faster. \"I\u2014uh\u2014there's... no, nothing's wrong.\"\n\nKaven raised an eyeridge, and the corners of his mouth turned up slightly. Whether the hidden smile meant something bad or good, Valfredo didn't know, but the rest of Kaven seemed to be very relaxed, so he decided to assume it was a good thing.\n\n\"Come,\" Kaven said, opening his wings. \"I have something to show you.\"\n\nValfredo followed him to a large, snow-capped mountain with trees growing only a little way up. On the mountainside was a strange path curving and turning back on itself. No, wait. That wasn't a path; it was a picture carved into the mountain. It looked to be about five times Kaven size and was roughly the shape of four dragon heads.\n\n\"Who did that?\" Valfredo asked.\n\n\"I did, when I first moved here,\" Kaven said, his voice strangely sad. \"But it's not what I'm showing you, so ignore it.\"\n\n\"Are they your family?\"\n\nWith a sigh, Kaven answered. \"They were, before a rival clan slaughtered them.\" He sped up, forcing Valfredo to flap faster to catch up. The picture disappeared behind the mountain.\n\n\"Didn't you get restitution?\"\n\nKaven glanced back, and his eyes seemed to say, \"No, now stop asking questions.\"\n\nValfredo swallowed the ones that were forming. Why would someone slaughter a young? Why didn't his clan declare war when the rival clan refuse restitution? Was his family's slaughter the reason he was a loner? Ugh! It was so unfair to stop him from asking!\n\nWith a humph, Valfredo followed him halfway around the mountain where a large, flat ledge had been carved out of its side. They landed on the ledge, and Kaven looked around before speaking.\n\n\"Now that you're stronger, you may explore more of my territory. This is one corner of it. All of that\u2014\" He motioned to the wide space in front of them. \"\u2014is mine and should be safe from trespassers.\" Then he gestured behind them. \"That is Spike clan territory. They kill everyone who goes even one length into their area. Don't go there.\"\n\nValfredo nodded then turned his attention to some distant movements. What he saw was the strangest meadow he'd ever seen. Its different grasses grew separately in large groups, and standing in rows in its center were small caves formed from tree trunks. Going in and out of the caves was prey that walked on two legs like an ogre, but they were much smaller, not grey, and had fur\u2014though the fur only seemed to grow over their chest, arms, and legs with a different kind of long fur on top of their heads. Some of their feet looked hoof-like, formed with no toes or talons, while others had feet with toes like ogres, but smaller and more shapely. The females, or what he assumed were females because of their smaller frame and the young following them, had extra fur circling around their legs, forming what he assumed would be a safe place for their young to escape rain.\n\n\"What are those?\" Valfredo asked, pointing to the prey.\n\n\"They're bogres,\" Kaven answered in a bored tone. \"And that's one of their nesting grounds.\"\n\n\"Those are bogres? But they don't look anything like ogres. I mean, they kind of do... I guess.\"\n\nKaven lay down with his tail hanging off the ledge. \"Of course they don't look just like them. They're a small, bony type of ogre. Not really worth eating, but interesting to watch sometimes.\"\n\nSo the stories about their strangeness were true. He'd always assumed the older dragons had made them up, but here, not far from this ledge, he was actually seeing them and their strange way of living. How did they live with those other prey\u2014and what were those other prey? The wolf-looking ones were too colorful and made the wrong noises to actually be wolves, and all they did was run around following the bogres and wag their tails. They weren't even trying to catch the prey surrounding them.\n\nEven the more normal looking parts of the meadow had prey he'd never seen, completely unafraid of the bogres. They simply ate their grass and let the bogres walk right up and touch them. Didn't they know bogres ate meat? Or maybe only ogres ate meat and that was why bogres were so small and bony compared to them. Or maybe these prey just weren't edible. The ones with white curly fur all over their bodies could taste like the clouds they resembled, and the large round ones with horns could be too tough for bogre teeth. The other large ones had long fur on their necks and tails that looked like the fur on the bogres' heads; maybe that was enough to fool the bogres into thinking they weren't tasty.\n\n\"How come they all live together like that? And what are all those strange things around the nesting grounds?\" Valfredo pointed to various objects the bogres were interacting with.\n\nKaven shrugged. \"The bogres make them. I never cared to find out why. Bogres are smarter than other prey, but still stupid. Do you see all those prey around them?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I've never seen them before. What are they called?\"\n\n\"The bogres eat them, and still the prey stay. They're so stupid no one's ever bothered to give them names.\"\n\nValfredo moved closer to the edge and watched the bogres and prey go about their day. \"Can they see us?\"\n\nKaven snorted. \"No. Only birds have sight as good as ours, and I doubt they're as good. See those different grasses surrounding the grounds? Soon the bogres will cut them down and put them into their caves.\"\n\n\"Really? Why?\"\n\n\"They eat them, I think, and feed some to the prey around them. But that's enough of this.\" Kaven stood and shook himself, readying for another flight. \"Hunting these prey will give you nothing worth learning.\"\n\nShoving himself up on his hindclaws, Valfredo placed his foreclaws on Kaven's shoulder and gave the most pleading eyes he could manage. \"But I want to know more, like why are bogres stupid if they can make their prey live near them? And how did those tree caves grow? And why does the meadow grow grass in groups like that?\"\n\nKaven sighed. \"Must you always be so curious?\"\n\nValfredo dropped back to the ground and looked down to the nesting ground, then back to Kaven. \"I'm sorry. It's just that I've never seen a bogre nest before and it's so weird.\"\n\nA gentle smile spread across Kaven's snout, though his eyes were annoyed and his ever-present musk hid the scent of any emotions, making it impossible to guess how he felt. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally answered.\n\n\"They're stupid because they don't live in rock caves where it's safe and because they bribe the prey to live so close to them they don't have to hunt, which makes them weak and unable to defend themselves. It's why they're so much smaller than ogres\u2014they don't build the muscle and bones needed for fighting. The other prey live near them because the bogres make the meadow grow their favorite grasses and feed them to the prey, or in the case of the wolves, the bogres get rid of their need to hunt by feeding them. The caves don't grow that way. The bogres make them from trees they tear down. See that? It's what's left of a tree after a bogre's torn it down.\"\n\nHe pointed to a tree that had a trunk wide enough to suggest an enormous size, but instead of growing taller than a grown dragon, it ended abruptly before getting as tall as a fledgling. The top of it was surprisingly smooth and it had no branches or leaves at all.\n\n\"It's time for another hunting lesson. You'll have plenty of time to watch the bogres later. Come.\"\n\nValfredo reluctantly obeyed, taking as much time as he could get away with to watch the bogres just a little longer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Every free moment Valfredo had was spent observing the bogres. He saw them tear down trees using shiny objects with teeth and then make the trees into things he couldn't figure out a use for, though the bogres seemed to think they were important. As Kaven had said, they started tearing down the grasses that grew in groups and put them into their tree caves. Later, they took some of the grass and fed it to the local prey.\n\nThe dull colors of their fur seemed to change periodically, from pink to purple or brown to blue. Even the long topfur on the females changed its shape at least once a week. It was all very confusing at first, until he started recognizing the furs they had on earlier hanging on vines pulled tightly between two caves. What sort of prey had the ability to take off its own body fur and put on a different one? Wasn't there anything they had in common with the ogres they were named after? Even the way they were born was different: Ogres were born able to walk and eat everything their mothers ate, but bogres were born utterly helpless, needing to be carried around by their mothers and even needing her help to suckle.\n\nAt least the males seemed similarly protective. When a griffin attacked, they grouped together and threw sharp sticks and swiped at it with long, pointed sticks. The griffin's feathers and tough hide protected it from most of the attacks, but it got tired of being assaulted, screeched in frustration, and flew off.\n\nBut on a day when there was only one section of really tall grass left, Valfredo watched a giant snake stealthily wind its way through the grass toward the bogre nesting ground. Except for the small imperfections in its camouflage, it was completely invisible\u2014even the grass being crushed beneath it looked untouched. He shivered, remembering the terror of facing one of them. Did the bogres stand a chance?\n\nThe wolves became alert and started making an incredible ruckus, and immediately the bogre females and young scared all the other prey into the larger caves and then raced to their own. The males gathered up their sharp sticks and raced to the tall grass just as the snake came out. But instead of fighting the snake like they did the griffin, they grabbed the wolves and ran for the tree caves, hiding inside before the snake picked one to eat. The snake slithered through the nesting ground and flicked its tongue at every cave, not bothering to hide itself.\n\nWhy didn't they fight it? Sure, it was as high as they were tall, but the little tree caves would be easy for it to crush or force its way into, so why not fight back?\n\nThen a bogre took one of the large round prey with horns out of its cave, wrapped some vines around its legs, and slapped it so that it walked to the meadow in perfect sight of the snake. The snake flicked its tongue, thought a moment, and slithered quickly toward the prey. The large round prey saw the snake and tried to run, but the vines around its legs prevented it.\n\nValfredo looked away while the snake swallowed its meal. Kaven was right. If bogres thought feeding a giant snake would make it leave their nesting ground alone, they were far too stupid to bother with. Disappointed, he flew away.\n\nBut the bogres were too interesting to stay away from completely. He explored the forest around them, sniffing the trees they tore down and searching for anything they'd left behind. A week after he saw the snake attack, the forest was full of the stench of rotten meat. Curious about what could make a stench so powerful, he raced around the underbrush until he found the corpse of a giant snake rotting into the ground.\n\nValfredo ran all around the snake, sniffing here and looking there, trying to find what had killed it. Finally, he tore open the stomach to see what it would look like, and gasped. It wasn't just a giant snake, it was the giant snake. The prey fed to it by bogres was still in its belly, partly digested and rotting with the snake. Could the prey have been deadly to the snake? Had the bogres purposefully fed it to the snake to kill it?\n\nA shiver of excitement went through his body, and he flew to Kaven to ask him about it.\n\n\"Of course they didn't plan to kill the snake,\" Kaven said in irritation. \"How could any prey be deadly once it's in the stomach? The snake was going to take a meal whether or not the bogres gave it one, so they sacrificed a different prey to save their own lives. Ogres do it all the time, leaving the weak and sickly ones out of their hiding places when they see a dragon.\"\n\nHis heart sank, sucking all the exited energy out of him and leaving him feeling drained. \"So then they really are weak.\"\n\n\"Did you ever really doubt it?\"\n\n\"Well... maybe. But if they're so weak, how come you told me to stay out of sight?\"\n\nKaven raised an eyeridge. \"Didn't your clan teach you anything?\"\n\nValfredo looked down and clawed the ground. He was not going to tell Kaven he'd always run away from lessons to spy on Elina and watch Father test warriors.\n\nThe ever-present musk hiding Kaven's emotions grew stronger, and his tail twitched slightly. His face remained expressionless.\n\nWhy'd he have to be so bloody good at hiding what he felt? Valfredo dug his talons deeper into the ground. It was so frustrating!\n\n\"Bogres,\" Kaven said at last, \"are strange, dangerous prey that are best left alone. They're all part of the same clan and their warriors stay in large groups. Sooner or later, the warriors always find the dragon that's harassing their clanmates and kill the one responsible\u2014along with everyone around the one responsible. Never underestimate them.\"\n\nValfredo laughed. \"But they're completely helpless! How can they possibly kill a dragon when they don't even have sharp talons?\"\n\nKaven knocked him to the ground with a swat, and the air burst with the scent of tangled emotions before the musk rose and smothered them all. \"Listen to me! They make weapons out of our scales, horns, and teeth. Weapons that can peel off our scales and pierce our hides in the hands of their warriors. Every dragon that harasses their nesting grounds eventually gets the warriors' attention and is killed. NEVER underestimate them.\"\n\nFeeling very stupid, Valfredo stood up and nodded. He'd been told about the bogre weapons since he was a hatchling, but had never taken the warnings seriously. Why would he when everyone who told him about them said in the same breath that bogres were some of the stupidest prey that ever lived? How could a prey be both the smartest and the stupidest, the weakest and the most dangerous? It didn't make sense!\n\n\"I don't want you watching them anymore. You're too curious and will get yourself killed.\" Kaven nuzzled him and rumbled, \"I care too much for you to let that happen.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Valfredo mumbled. If bogres were so stupid, he didn't want to watch them anyway."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"You're a fast learner,\" Kaven said after a flying lesson several weeks later. \"You have the makings of a great warrior.\"\n\nAn image of Father saying the exact same words flashed through Valfredo's mind. He shook his head to force the memory out, but it was replaced by Elina's happy smile as she gave away her only meat to feed everyone younger than herself. Guilt swelled in his chest, and he looked away from Kaven. What right did he have to all this goodness when his clanmates could be starving back home?\n\n\"Missing your family?\"\n\nHe looked up at Kaven and saw a knowing expression, as if Kaven had already decided he was right and nothing Valfredo said could change his mind. He looked back down and nodded.\n\n\"Then why don't you go home? You're a fledgling; the clan will take you back, and if there's any trouble with the clanhead, your mother will convince him to let you stay.\"\n\nSorrow welled in his chest, making it difficult to swallow and speak. He clawed at the ground, digging a rock out of the soil's surface and refusing to look at Kaven. \"I-I don't have a mother.\"\n\nSilence came, but it wasn't tense. It felt like Kaven wasn't even a little tense or angry.\n\n\"Then it's your father you're running from,\" Kaven finally said. \"Apologize and I'm sure he'll let you rejoin the clan.\"\n\nTears welled in Valfredo's eyes, and he whimpered. \"I don't have a father.\" Through blurry vision he looked at the lake that had nearly drowned him, his chest hurting so much that he now wished it had succeeded. \"I don't have anybody. They're all dead, and the only ones left are\u2014are\u2014they hate me. They're scared of me.\" Every word came out shakier than the last, and before he finished, tears were streaming down his cheeks.\n\nKaven rumbled comfort and lay down next to Valfredo, holding him tightly between his side and wing. Valfredo burst into a sob, no longer able to hold back the guilt and regret that wouldn't stop coming.\n\nThe loss of control seemed to last forever, bringing with it waves of terrible pain in his chest. But after a long cry, the knot in his chest loosened, the tears stopped coming, and his sobs turned into hiccups that died slowly into calmness.\n\n\"Tell me what happened,\" Kaven said when the calmness had lasted a short while.\n\nValfredo frowned at him. \"I told you already, the phoenix killed them, but you won't believe me.\"\n\nKaven stared him in the eyes, his face unreadable. \"I'm beginning to. Now tell me from the beginning what happened to your clan.\"\n\nValfredo looked away and found a bird flitting around the edge of the lake, catching tiny insects and tweeting gaily. The world here felt so untouched by the phoenix\u2014by death. He didn't want to remember the horrible night that ruined everything, and he especially didn't want to talk about it. But there was a small pressure growing inside of him, urging him to do what Kaven had asked. He shook his wings and swished his tail in an attempt to shake it, but it only seemed to take a stronger hold. Was Kaven impressing him? He glanced up and saw in Kaven's face a strange softness he'd never seen on it before.\n\nKaven's mouth was set almost to pity, and his eyeridges furrowed slightly in worry. For a moment, Valfredo thought that maybe he didn't have to answer Kaven's question, maybe he could ignore the impression and change the subject, but in Kaven's eyes was the determination grown dragons had when they weren't going to give up.\n\nWith a defeated sigh, he told Kaven everything that happened that night\u2014everything except the fire. Then he told about the following days, explaining his physical difficulties as normal injuries. When he reached the part where Katel and Elina battled, tears of anger welled in his eyes.\n\n\"So they fought, and I accidentally killed him and made Elina and everyone else hate me and send me away. I can't be part of my own clan anymore. I hate it, Kaven, I hate it! I hate that fallen sun! I wish the moon never threw it down here! We even had a whole forest of jublar trees blooming all around the nesting ground and it still came. How are we supposed to protect ourselves from a fallen sun? Why did the stupid moon even throw it down here? Didn't it care we'd all get eaten?\"\n\nThe tears tried to fall, but he brushed them away with his foreclaw and swallowed down the sorrow wanting to rise again.\n\nKaven didn't respond for a long time. He just stood there staring down with a solemn expression and tailtip twitching. Finally, he asked, \"Are you sure Elina hates you?\"\n\nWith a nod, Valfredo swallowed hard a second time. Now that he'd told the story, he wished he hadn't. All the horrible memories were fresh in his mind now. He shook his head to try forcing them out, but they only fled to his stomach where they burned like fire, tightening the knot that was already there.\n\n\"And you expect me to believe that you, a fledgling, could accidentally kill an adolescent? I want the truth, Valfredo\u2014now.\"\n\nNo, wait. How had he not noticed it earlier? It wasn't the memories burning in his stomach; it was the phoenix fire. \"Not now,\" he growled to it.\n\nHot anger filled the air. \"Yes now! Tell me the truth or be punished.\"\n\nThe fire grew with the riled air, making it increasingly difficult to control. Valfredo desperately looked around. He had to find a safe place and let it out where Kaven couldn't see it.\n\n\"Stop ignoring me and answer the question.\"\n\nValfredo took off running.\n\n\"Valfredo!\"\n\nIf he could just turn the corner, maybe Kaven wouldn't see the fire come. He was close, just a little farther. Kaven landed in front of him, and the fire pushed out.\n\nKaven yelped and jumped away from the fire, though his wingtip got burned black. \"What in sun's light was that?\" Heavy musk flooded the air, but failed to completely smother the scent of terror\u2014terror like Katel's.\n\nValfredo burst into tears, his legs shivering both from fear and exhaustion. \"Are you going to kill me?\"\n\nThe terror was gone now; the musk had controlled it and was now receding. \"That depends,\" Kaven growled, \"on how fire from the phoenix ended up inside you.\"\n\nValfredo swallowed and backed a few steps away. \"I\u2014I bit part of its toe off and accidentally swallowed it.\"\n\n\"You swallowed a piece of the phoenix? Do you really expect me to believe a story like that?\"\n\n\"But it's true, I swear on my heart it's true! The phoenix pinned me against a mountainside, so I attacked it and accidentally swallowed a bite when it kicked me. It's always burning inside me, and I'm not very good at controlling it. That's why everyone's scared of me and made me leave. Honest, that's the truth. Please believe me and don't kill me.\" He made the most pleading expression he could muster. Maybe there was still a chance. Maybe Kaven would believe him and not care that he had phoenix fire inside him.\n\nBut Kaven's eyes flashed with unreadable emotions, and his nose quivered with uneven breathing. A loud thump repeated like a heartbeat as his tail viciously lashed a large boulder, and the rocky ground crumbled beneath his flexing foreclaws. The air was tense, filling increasingly with musk that desperately tried to hide the confusing mix of scents coming off him.\n\n\"Have you tried to extinguish it?\" he said at last.\n\nHope rose inside Valfredo. If he was completely honest and apologetic, maybe Kaven would let him stay\u2014alive. \"Yes, but nothing works. I drank water and ate mudfern and ogre and everything, but it only grows and grows until it gets out, and then it gets small again, and then it just keeps growing again\u2014even faster when I'm really upset. I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm really, really sorry.\"\n\nAnger and fear came through the musk for a moment before being once again concealed. \"Not as sorry as you should be.\" Kaven's tail lashed one more time, slamming into the boulder with more force and splitting it into two pieces that fell.\n\nHe glared back at it and growled, then turned to Valfredo. \"What would you have done if your lack of control had killed me? You would've looked for a new clan or a loner to take you in, and then what? They'd be too young or foolish to consider the consequences of killing you, and would do so the moment they saw that fire.\"\n\n\"I'm really sorry,\" Valfredo said, looking down at his foreclaws.\n\n\"I don't want an apology, I want effort! Never has someone breathed the fire of the fallen sun, and that leaves us with a very serious problem. You're prone to getting in trouble, and your death could result in that fire eating your body and growing into another phoenix. Do you want to be the reason more clans die?\"\n\nValfredo jerked back in surprise. Why would Kaven ask a stupid question like that? \"Of course I don't!\"\n\n\"Then you'll do what I tell you so it doesn't happen?\"\n\n\"I already do, don't I?\" The scent of irritation escaped Valfredo and went into the air strong enough for anyone to smell it. Well, good! The old dragon deserved to know how irritating he was. Though just in case it'd make him angrier, Valfredo kept his body low in submission.\n\nBut instead of getting more angry, Kaven's shoulders relaxed, and the anger in his face melted away, along with the strong musk, until all that was left was his usual unreadable self. \"Come,\" he said, then took to the air.\n\nWhy wasn't Kaven mad at him anymore? Shouldn't he punish Valfredo for talking back, or glare at him, or something? The irritating old dragon was making no sense at all. With a frustrated sigh, Valfredo followed him many lengths from the nesting ground to a small patch of jublar trees. Ripe, purple fruit hung from the lower branches, while bees buzzed around the sickening, sweet-smelling pink flowers covering the upper branches. He sneezed in an attempt to get the scent out of his nose, but it was too strong.\n\n\"Why are we here?\" he asked. \"It smells awful.\"\n\nKaven grabbed one of the lower branches and shook it, making it rain jublar fruit. \"Eat one.\"\n\nValfredo jerked back in surprise. \"Why?\"\n\nThe only answer he got was a warning glare that said \"just do it.\" With a groan, he picked the smallest fruit and tried to wrap his jaws around to swallow it whole, but it seemed to grow bigger the harder he tried, and his teeth cut the skin, letting out the sweet juicy flavor.\n\n\"Bleh!\" He jerked away from the fruit and wiped his tongue, then looked at Kaven with pleading eyes. But all he got was another warning glare. Even whimpering seemed to have no effect. He wrinkled his snout at the fruit, wishing Kaven had given him a mountain-sized pile of mudfern instead. The only choice he had left was to eat it in as few bites as possible, so he took the biggest bite he could manage. Sweet, sticky juices burst from the fruit and filled his mouth. He shivered and gulped the bite. It slithered down his throat, leaving the nasty flavor of sweetness smeared all over his tongue. Why did prey love this stuff so much?\n\nAgain, he looked to Kaven for mercy, and again Kaven didn't budge. With an exaggerated whine, Valfredo swallowed two more big pieces before the fruit was finally gone. Then he sat back and sighed, glad that it was over.\n\n\"Well?\" Kaven asked.\n\nValfredo gave him a confused expression.\n\n\"Is the fire getting smaller?\"\n\nWas THAT why he made him eat the fruit? \"Why would jublar fruit make the fire smaller?\"\n\n\"Just answer the question.\"\n\n\"But I only want to know\u2014\"\n\n\"Answer!\" Anger burst into the air, and this time the musk didn't even try to smother it.\n\nWith a huff, Valfredo sat down and gave Kaven the most determined glare he could muster. Two could play this game.\n\nKaven flared his wings and growled a warning, but Valfredo only glared harder. They stood there for a long while, each refusing to budge. Then slowly the angry air softened into neutral calm, and Kaven shifted to a relaxed position.\n\n\"That stubbornness will get you into trouble some day,\" Kaven grumbled. \"But today I'm not in the mood to fight it.\" He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"Jublars are powerful trees capable of keeping away the phoenix. It stands to reason their fruit may be able to extinguish its fire inside of you. Now, is it, or is it not, extinguishing?\"\n\nThe way Kaven said it made sense. But the only thing the fruit did was make Valfredo want to vomit and rub his entire tongue on anything rough enough to scrape off all the sticky juices. If he told Kaven the truth, would Kaven admit defeat, or make him eat more fruit?\n\nNo, that was silly. Kaven was a warrior, and warriors always knew when they were defeated. Once Kaven knew jublars couldn't get rid of the fire, Valfredo would never have to eat another fruit again.\n\n\"It's exactly the same,\" he said at last.\n\nKaven's shoulders drooped. \"You're certain?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\nWith a growl, Kaven paced back and forth several times, then stopped and cocked his head like an idea came to him. Standing on his hindclaws, Kaven reached up to the blooming branches of a small jublar tree, broke off a branch, and dropped it in front of Valfredo.\n\n\"Eat it,\" he said.\n\nWhat? Was he crazy? Valfredo stepped back and shook his head wildly. \"No way!\"\n\nKaven flared his wings and growled, \"Eat it, or I will punish you.\"\n\n\"How? I already know you won't kill me, and if you hurt me the fire will come out. You can't punish me, and I'm not eating that!\"\n\nImpressed fear hit the air, causing hundreds of terrified birds to fly away in a panic. Valfredo swayed from dizziness and forced his stomach not to heave. The cold fear penetrated right through him, striking every bone and scale and making it impossible to resist the need to feel it. Shivering, he looked up at Kaven. He looked three times bigger than earlier\u2014and five times scarier. With a gulp, Valfredo obeyed the command and ate the flower-covered branch.\n\nThe next thing he knew, Kaven made him eat unripe and ripe fruit, flowers, leaves, bark, a branch, and a large piece of root. All of it sat heavily on the bottom of his stomach, making it churn and bubble until it finally heaved the vile contents out into a pile of smelly purple glop. One look at the pile made him heave again, until every last drop of stomach was emptied onto the ground.\n\nWith a groan, he asked, \"Can I please stop? Nothing's working and I feel sick.\" He added in a whine, \"I want mudfern.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Kaven said after a long, tense wait. \"If we can't extinguish the flame, you'll have to train hard how to fight, hunt, and control the fire. The last thing we need is for you to get yourself killed and become another phoenix.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Even after he was given some mudfern, Valfredo had to resist the urge to vomit for the entire walk back to the cave. When they finally reached it, all he wanted to do was go to his nest and lay down, but when Kaven stood on the cave's ledge and tore into the cliffside, he stopped walking to the nest and watched.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he asked.\n\n\"Lengthening the ledge.\" Kaven dug out a large piece of rock that fell in front of Valfredo.\n\nValfredo clawed at the rock, trying to dig into it like Kaven, but his talon could barely scratch it. He looked back up at Kaven's powerful talons and muscles ripping away the mountainside. Would he ever be that strong?\n\n\"I-I'm really glad you're letting me stay,\" he said.\n\nKaven scoffed.\n\n\"You're a really good clanhead.\"\n\n\"You and I are not a clan,\" Kaven said without slowing.\n\n\"But we can be, if we go and get my old clanmates.\"\n\nKaven stopped digging and held still.\n\n\"They'll love you,\" Valfredo said, filling with hope. \"I know they will. They have to love you because you can feed us and teach us to hunt and stuff.\"\n\nScowling, Kaven turned to him. \"What makes you think they want to be in the same clan as you when they already threw you out?\"\n\nValfredo shifted and clawed the rock floor. \"W-well that was before I met you. See, you can tell them I'm not a phoenix and\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to travel alone through another clan's territory? I wouldn't survive the journey! And if you think I'm going to risk my life to adopt a bunch of huntless young, you're wrong. I left my old clan for a reason; I don't care to form another.\" With a snort, he returned to his digging.\n\n\"But they might be starving to death! At least let me get them so you can teach them to hunt. Elina's already pretty good at it, and Dellano's only two years from his fire. It won't take them long to learn. Please?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nKaven whipped around and smacked him, sending him into the cave's wall. \"I said no and I mean it! Even if you did managed to live long enough to find your old nesting ground, what makes you think they'll still be there? And in the meantime you'll be getting yourself killed, cursing the world with another phoenix! You will not leave. You will not put yourself in danger. Do you understand?\"\n\nValfredo's head pounded with pain, forcing tears into his eyes as he nodded.\n\n\"Good. Now let me finish your cave in peace.\"\n\nKnots formed in his chest, catching his breath. \"You're making me live in a different cave?\"\n\n\"Do you think I want to breathe the same air as that fire? I'm not fool enough to think you can control it in your sleep.\"\n\nThe knots pulled tighter. Kaven wasn't going to kill him, but he did hate him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The lake glimmered beautifully in the midday sunlight, looking as blue as the sky and reflecting the clouds with near perfection. Valfredo made another circle around it, being sure to follow Kaven's instructions to stay too high up for prey to see. For once, he was glad Kaven had made him practice so much over the two years he'd been with him. Valfredo had thought for sure that going on his first large prey hunt years earlier than tradition would be too tiring and end in disaster, but his wings flapped with ease, not straining even a little when a gust of wind tried to push him in the wrong direction.\n\nOf course, that didn't mean he liked flying in circles waiting for prey to get their frightened tails out to the lake. It had been several hours now, and he had memorized every boring blade of grass and tree leaf in view. Even the insects scrambling away from birds were getting predictable. A yawn escaped, making him feel more bored. The sun seemed to be teasing him, telling him it was a lovely time for a nap. But Kaven would see if he landed, and napping and flying weren't possible to do at the same time... were they?\n\nA head poked out of the forest\u2014a deer head. Finally, something to hunt! The deer cautiously stepped out and turned its head, looking first one direction, then another, ears twitching. After a final search in the sky, it walked up to the lake for a drink.\n\nWhat a laugh! Prey were such blind, stupid things. Nothing could protect them from a dragon, especially lengths of air. He circled tighter around the deer, estimating where and when he should dive for the kill.\n\nJust before he folded his wings, an ogre stepped out of the brush and lumbered toward the water. The deer jerked its head up and prepared to run, but the ogre ignored it and bent down for a drink instead. The deer returned to its own business, now eating some plants from the lake, while the ogre took its time getting ready to slurp the water.\n\nValfredo made a loop around the forest's edge and found no more ogres. This one must be without a pack, but even a lone ogre could be dangerous to a fledgling. Should he go after it, or stay with the deer? Kaven only expected a deer, and it would be easy enough to kill if he aimed right... but killing the ogre would be so much better. He glanced in Kaven's direction and saw the small figure lying on the mountain ledge, waiting for him to complete the lesson.\n\nIf he caught the deer, he'd pass the lesson easily without any danger. He glanced back down at the prey. The deer still stood eating by the lake, and the ogre was lumbering back to the forest.\n\n\"I want to do more than just pass,\" he said, then dove for the ogre, being careful to keep his body straight and flap his wings quickly to increase speed. Within hearing range of the ogre, he folded his wings for silence, then whipped them open at the last moment, slowing his momentum just enough to not break his own body. A loud crack echoed through the air as the ogre's neck snapped and its body hit the ground.\n\nValfredo stepped off the meat and stared at it. He did it. He actually killed an ogre\u2014and a big one, too. He hadn't realized it, but this ogre was taller than he was.\n\nKaven's heavy wingbeats filled the air, sending shivers of excitement through his chest.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" Valfredo said as he leaped aside to give Kaven a full view of his kill. \"Did you see how I dove, and aimed, and killed it without a single mistake? My first large prey hunt, and I killed a big ogre!\"\n\nLight danced in Kaven's eyes as a smile spread across his snout. \"I saw. It was the perfect dive and the perfect hunt. Well done. Very well done.\" His voice was warm and sincere, the same tone Father had given after Valfredo's first rabbit kill.\n\nJoy swelled inside. He'd made Kaven proud. Finally! Maybe now they could become a real clan, and if he kept making Kaven proud, maybe they could even go find his clanmates and take them in.\n\nThe idea brought back memories of their fear and hatred\u2014and the pain of leaving Elina. Valfredo shook his head to get rid of the memories, but even though he managed to stop thinking about them, his stomach twisted in knots of negative emotions he didn't understand. Pressured heat burst into his chest and moved up his throat. Valfredo whipped around just as the fire pushed out. When the pressure reduced enough, he tightened his fire organ to cut off the flame. Dark spots dotted his vision for a moment, then went away, giving him a perfect view of ashes that were the ogre and surrounding grass.\n\nHis ogre... his perfect first large kill\u2014gone. Wasn't there anything the fire would let him keep? He knew the emotion forming knots in his stomach now: dread. Was Kaven angry? Would he forgive Valfredo for letting it catch him by surprise? Taking a deep breath, he turned to face Kaven.\n\nThe light in Kaven's eyes and smile on his snout were gone, replaced by a stern expressionlessness. His body was poised to jump\u2014or rather looked like it had already jumped. A closer look showed that his tailtip had gotten burned off.\n\nValfredo's heart sank. He'd only just gotten Kaven to like him again, and the fire ruined it. Why must it always ruin these moments? \"I-I'm sorry,\" he said, drooping his wings in apology and forcing his voice to come out in more than a squeak. \"I can catch another one and get some mudfern... if you want.\"\n\nKaven straightened himself to stand in a neutral pose. \"It's time for your next fire lesson.\" The tone was cold, almost choked. He turned and walked a short distance toward the caves, then stopped and stared over the lake.\n\nValfredo looked where he was staring, but saw nothing interesting, so he trotted over to get a better look. The air surrounding Kaven felt strangely still despite the wind blowing through the grass and trees. Nothing seemed important anymore, not the birds chirping, or the sun shining, or the spider running up his leg. It was as if all emotions and thoughts were replaced by a powerful silence that swallowed the world as the black fog had. Valfredo knew he should be fearful; he should shudder and run away from the stillness, but he couldn't stop staring into Kaven's eyes.\n\nThey were so calm, so full of thought. The life inside them reached deeper than the longest cave, and emotions swirled behind them, mixing and fighting unreadably. After a long time, tears glistened in front of them. The stillness cracked, and life poured back into the air. Taking a deep breath of lively air, Valfredo turned to leave before Kaven could bring back the silence.\n\n\"If not for that fire, I might have had a son again,\" Kaven mumbled.\n\nA son? Valfredo stopped and turned back. He wanted Valfredo to be his son? Hope tugged at his heart, and he moved to sit next to Kaven. \"I'd be a really good son. I already killed an ogre, and I'm not even an adolescent yet.\"\n\nFor a while, Kaven's expression remained unchanged. Then his eyes narrowed and mouth tightened in determination. \"I'm not here to be your father. I'm here to teach you to fight and keep that fire from becoming another phoenix. Come. It's time for your next lesson.\"\n\nTears stung Valfredo's eyes, and he blinked them away while slowly following Kaven. If it wasn't for the stupid fire, Kaven would love him. He slapped a rock into the lake, causing a school of fish to scatter. Why couldn't the phoenix have attacked some other clan? Why couldn't Mother and Father have survived? They would've loved him even with the fire and kept the clan together. They would've\u2014\n\nA red speck dove out of the clouds in the distance, bringing a small puff of cloud down with it. Valfredo stopped walking and cocked his head. The speck was far away, but still large, and it didn't move like a bird.\n\n\"A dragon!\" he whispered. And it didn't look like a Spike clan. Hope rose in his chest once again. Maybe he could find someone to like him, after all. Valfredo ran to catch up to Kaven and stood in front of him, pointing to the distant figure. \"There's another dragon over there! Can I go talk to him? Please? Maybe his clan will take me in and\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Kaven looked where he was pointing and snarled. \"Stay here. I'll go deal with the intruder.\"\n\n\"Wait!\"\n\nBut Kaven was already flying toward the other dragon, roaring the territorial challenge. Instead of screeching submission and leaving, the intruder roared back a challenge and changed direction to face Kaven. When he was close enough, the intruder spat a ball of fire at him, which Kaven dodged easily. Then Kaven burst in speed and flew over the intruder, grabbing the intruder's wing in his jaw and twisting it as he finished flying beyond the intruder's tail. The intruder screamed in pain and turned to face him, but the moment the intruder faced him, Kaven spat a stream of fire aimed directly at the intruder's head. The intruder screamed in pain again, then screeched surrender and flew away, his flight unsteady from the injured wing. Kaven flew back to Valfredo and landed without a single wound.\n\n\"Why'd you do that?\" Valfredo hissed, letting his growing anger heat the air. \"I could've had a clan, but you just went and scared him away! I wanted to go talk to him. Why didn't you let me?\"\n\nKaven snorted and glared down at him, anger glittering in his eyes. \"Fool. How long did you think it would take his clan to find out about the fire? How long until they'd decide to kill you, foolishly thinking it would kill that phoenix egg inside you?\"\n\nDigging his talons into the ground, Valfredo glared back and growled. \"I wouldn't let them find out.\"\n\n\"As long as you cannot control that fire, you'll never be able to hide it. Now come. It's time for your lesson\u2014and this time I want no interruptions.\"\n\nValfredo scowled, but obeyed. Some day he was going to find that clan and talk to them. He'd tell them he was flameless and lost his clan, and they'd take him in and love him. Then he could run and play like he used to, and only fly when he wanted to and compete with other fledglings in aerobatics. No more aerial fighting lessons that went all day, no more endurance lessons that only stopped when he couldn't move anymore. No more Kaven glaring at him, or scowling at him, or telling him to control himself.\n\n\"Spit a small ball of fire at the cliff,\" Kaven said. \"And remember to breathe properly this time. Your fire organ and breathing are connected; lose control of one, and you lose control of the other.\"\n\nWith a long, drawn-out sigh, he stoked the fire."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Valfredo coughed a ball of fire into the sky, letting out the pressure it was putting on his stomach. \"Between you and this new growth spurt,\" he growled at the fire, \"I'm going to have to keep food in my mouth at all times.\" He seized the second half of the deer he'd been eating and consumed it. The fire stirred again, but this time it didn't grow, and he could finally finish the ogre as well.\n\nWhy blame me? The fire seemed to whisper. You're the one who swallowed me.\n\n\"That was an accident! How was I supposed to know you'd turn into white fire?\" Why was he speaking to it, anyway? For sun's sake, he was sixteen now! Surely he could ignore something that couldn't actually talk.\n\nBut it burned inside him, pulsing with his breath and sending to his heart the things he didn't want to think or admit. He closed his eyes and shook his head to try sending the whispers away, but they clung to his chest and transformed into words in his mind.\n\nWhat else did you expect from a fallen sun? It's made of fire, and so am I. You have no right to be angry at me.\n\n\"No right?\" he snarled. \"You've ruined everything! I have no parents, no sister, and no friends. I'm finally starting my adolescent growth, and I have no one to share it with. No one!\"\n\nYou have Kaven.\n\nValfredo began pacing and growling. The fire churned and bubbled with his growing frustration. \"If only you'd go away, I could go back home, back to Elina, and have a family again. If you'd just go away, maybe Kaven would go with me and we could all start a new clan and be happy and carefree again. At the very least, I wouldn't keep losing control and having all my energy drained out of me. A dragon wasn't meant to breathe white fire!\"\n\nGo ahead and get angry if you want, but don't blame me when you lose control.\n\nWith a hiss, he lashed his tail into a small tree, snapping it off its roots and leaving a jagged trunk. It looked surprisingly strong and sharp, like a large brown dragon tooth. If only it was a tooth\u2014a tooth that could reach into his body and pull out the fire.\n\nWait a minute... Valfredo looked at his foreclaw. Why couldn't he reach in and pull out the fire? It lived in his fire organ, right? So, theoretically, if he pulled that out, the fire would come out with it. It'd be painful, sure, but he'd be free of the nuisance forever.\n\nTaking a deep breath, he felt around his abdomen and guessed where the organ would be. The burning sensation was never very defined, but close should be good enough if he ate mudfern right after. He glanced at the lake beside him. The top was nearly smothered by blue strings of leaves, proving it was the plant's peak season. At least he chose a good time to try this. Letting out one more breath to calm his nerves, he began to peel away the scales protecting where the organ should be.\n\nThe slight burning on his skin and sting of the sales being ripped off were surprisingly tolerable, letting him work quickly to expose a large area. Now all he needed to do was dig into his flesh and pull out the right thing\u2014and not scream from pain. He wasn't anywhere near full adolescent size, and the blood alone could attract dangerous attention.\n\nSteadying his breathing, he clenched his teeth and put his right foreclaw in place.\n\n\"This is for you, Elina,\" he said, and dug in. Sharp pain radiated from the tear, triggering the fire into thinking he was in danger. It swelled inside the fire organ and burned hotter, churning and bubbling as it did. Valfredo grinned through gritting teeth and ignored the growing feeling of dizziness. He knew exactly where to aim now, and readjusted his foreclaw. The pain from his talons was mild, letting him know of the threat his body thought existed.\n\nBut the fire grew wild, flaring and growing uncontrollably until he was forced to let it out as a stream of flame into the lake. With one last shove of his foreclaw, he grabbed the fire organ and ripped it out, even as the fire still escaped through his mouth.\n\nThe fire stopped. The pain stopped. As he looked at the bloody organ in his claw, darkness formed in the corners of his vision, moving rapidly toward the center. He tried to think\u2014to be happy\u2014but the world spun around, not giving him the time. The organ pulsed. The blood burned off. A feathered wing of white fire formed on it. Then a head... a bird head\u2014a phoenix head. It looked at him, eyes shining black. They looked frightened, betrayed, and angry. The blackness swallowed his sight, and the dizziness forced him to collapse.\n\nWhat a meathead he'd been. Of course Kaven had been right all along. Without his life and his own fire keeping the flame in check, it was free to grow into another phoenix. He'd doomed the world with a second phoenix\u2014one that would not only find dragons a tasty meal, but would also hate them with a passion.\n\n\"Fool!\" The word was sharp to his ears. \"What in sun's light were you thinking? You could've killed yourself, and then were would we be?\"\n\nBitter blood slid down his throat. What use was it? The second phoenix was hatched. Now it would eat him and Kaven, and grow big and strong.\n\nMore blood, more bitter this time. He couldn't feel his tail, or claws. He couldn't smell, couldn't see\u2014it was like black fog and fallen on him and taken everything. Was he dead now? Had the hatchling phoenix eaten his body?\n\n\"Fool. Stupid, liver-brained fool.\" Kaven's mumbling seemed louder, clearer.\n\nThe bitter blood kept coming, sliding down his throat without any need to swallow. A sudden pulse of sharp, excruciating pain struck his abdomen.\n\n\"Ahh!\" he screamed, then coughed the blood that rushed to his lungs. He opened his eyes to find a blurry image of Kaven. The sharp pain continued to pulse, along with the rest of his body, but covering it was a strange feeling of calm. Everything was going to be okay; the hatchling phoenix didn't matter.\n\nKaven offered some mudfern to him, and he accepted. His head was too heavy to move, and his jaw was stiff, but the mudfern was cool and wet, and he craved more. Next he was given a fatty chunk of ogre, then more mudfern, then more ogre. The meal kept coming, and with each swallow, Valfredo felt stronger and his senses clearer. Finally, he was able to sit up. The pain where he'd dug tried to stop him, but he needed to sit\u2014his body ached to sit and eat properly, and he gladly continued to accept the food Kaven gave him.\n\nAs he swallowed, Valfredo's eyes wondered around, scanning the area for the phoenix. A herd of deer nibbled on a nearby bush, while happy birds sat on their backs chattering to each other. Not far from them, a hornbeast lay in the grass soaking up sunshine.\n\nIt was an impression. That was why everything felt so calm; Kaven was sending out a powerful impression. Valfredo tried to shift for a better look, but his abdomen sent burning pain to his legs, preventing them from moving. He glanced around for the fire organ, but only found a pool of blood and singed grass.\n\n\"I put it back inside you,\" Kaven said, his voice stern, yet shaky. \"You'll be in pain for a while, and we'll have to sleep out here, but you'll live.\"\n\nThe dizziness came back, smaller this time and easier to overcome. Valfredo took a deep breath to force it away, then looked down to see what damage he'd done to himself. The fleshy area was burned, and the hole was pinned shut by sharpened bone.\n\n\"Lie down. It's not good for you to sit just yet.\"\n\nValfredo's body obeyed before he realized what the words meant. Lying on his stomach was too painful, so he lay on his side instead. It had been a long time since he'd felt this vulnerable. With blood everywhere and nothing but open sky above him, the potential danger was immense. Yet he couldn't be afraid. He couldn't even force it. The warmth of Kaven's calm impression was so welcome, so enveloping, Valfredo didn't want to try fighting it. He didn't want to break the wonderful feeling of being cared for. He didn't want the worried, loving expression to leave Kaven's face. But he had to ask\u2014he had to know\u2014if the hatchling phoenix escaped.\n\nSo he gathered up his strength and forced his voice to obey. \"The... little phoenix... did you kill it?\"\n\nKaven's eyes grew wide, and pungent fear burst into the air before being musked. \"What little phoenix?\"\n\n\"The one... on my organ. White fire... did you kill it?\"\n\nA sigh of relief was followed by a strange expression of reproach and sympathy. \"You never detached the organ, meathead. The fire is still inside it. There is no little phoenix.\"\n\nSo... it was a hallucination? But that meant it was safe to rip out the fire organ. A sob escaped. \"Why didn't you detach it?\" He knew the answer before asking the question, but the words couldn't be stopped. His heart ached with the feelings of relief and betrayal. Relief that the phoenix hadn't formed, and betrayal that Kaven hadn't helped him in the mission to be free of it.\n\nSoft rumbling vibrated through the ground, and Kaven's foreclaw rested gently on Valfredo's shoulder. \"You wouldn't survive without your fire organ. Now rest, little one. You need to sleep.\"\n\nAll thoughts merged together, swirling into a confusing mess until all that was left was peaceful darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "The white ball of fire flew between two large boulders and landed perfectly on the mark. Valfredo raised his head with pride. Controlling the fire got easier every day, and with today marking his nineteenth hatch day and the end of his adolescent growth spurt, it seemed a good time to talk Kaven into celebrating. Even the old grouch needed some rest time, after all.\n\nValfredo took flight and headed toward Kaven's favorite hunting ground. The morning sun cast a dark shadow beneath him, so he increased his distance from the ground to make the shadow disappear. The last thing he wanted to do was scare off Kaven's prey and make him more grumpy.\n\nThe hunting ground was active that morning, with rabbits racing around each other and a large pack of ogres performing mating rituals. Valfredo laughed and circled the ogre pack to watch. The females lumbered around in circles, stopping every now and then to slap their chests and snort at a male. In return, the male lifted his fat belly to show off how good he was at providing food and grunted if he liked her. It was such an amusing sight, Valfredo couldn't help circling a few more times.\n\nThen he spotted a small male sitting alone some distance away. It was the perfect size for a meal, so he dove down and snatched it up, killing it instantly and eating it while continuing to look for Kaven.\n\nBut after searching the entire hunting ground and doing a perimeter flight of the territory, he gave up and went back to the caves. There was Kaven, standing next to the stream where he'd hollowed out a large rock. Valfredo cringed. The hollowed rock had a globby, reddish-brown mixture in it, and Kaven was crushing some jublar leaves between his foreclaw and another rock. Maybe it'd be safer to go hide somewhere.\n\nNo, he'd tried that before. Somehow, Kaven always knew where to find him, and when he did, he always punished Valfredo for hiding. With a sigh, Valfredo glided down and landed next to Kaven. The mixture smelled of sweet mud with a bitter afterscent, making Valfredo's stomach twist in dread. He did not want to know what was in that.\n\n\"You were busy this morning,\" Kaven said, his words sounding more sarcastic than sincere. He scraped the crushed leaves into the concoction and stirred them in with a cleaned jublar branch. \"Find anything interesting on your perimeter flight?\"\n\n\"I was looking for you,\" Valfredo said, his snout wrinkling in anger. Why must Kaven always assume he played every time he wasn't being watched?\n\n\"Mmm.\"\n\nValfredo waited for more response\u2014a question of why, perhaps, or maybe an apology for being in the one place he claimed he wouldn't be today, but nothing came. Stirring the smelly mix of... whatever it was seemed to be the only thing holding Kaven's interest. Frustration bubbled in Valfredo, forcing him to swallow a growl or risk sabotaging his own request.\n\n\"It's the first day of spring,\" he said at last, keeping his voice calm.\n\n\"Mhm.\" Kaven took some water from the stream with his mouth and dropped it onto the mixture. The water splashed and pooled on top, and he began to stir it in.\n\nWas that the only response Kaven was capable of? Valfredo dug his talons into the soil and swallowed another growl. \"That means it's Hatch Day.\" He tried not to sound angry, but his voice was stubborn and wouldn't obey.\n\n\"What of it?\"\n\nLivers, he was infuriating! Couldn't he take a hint? What good was being an adult if he had to have everything explained to him? Valfredo let out an irritated sigh and glared at Kaven. \"It means I'm nineteen now, and in case you haven't noticed, my scales have hardened to adolescent strength, which means I've also finished my growth spurt.\"\n\n\"I noticed.\"\n\n\"Well then why didn't you say anything? Don't you care that I'm older now, or that I can control the fire? For sun's sake, everyone celebrates Hatch Day. The least you can do is say good morning!\" The fire churned in his organ, adding to the heat of his rising anger.\n\nKaven stirred in another mouthful of water, not bothering to so much as glance at Valfredo. \"I expected you to gain control with age, as all dragons do.\" Finally, he looked up and stared Valfredo in the eyes, impatience showing in his own. \"But dragon fire doesn't stir or come out unless we bid it. That fire inside you isn't being controlled\u2014it's being contained, and as long as it's there, we're in danger of a second phoenix forming. You keep asking why we can't have a day of rest, why we don't have celebration days.\n\n\"You know the answer, yet you keep pestering me for them, and when I say no, you try to find new ways of sneaking around me to play games instead of helping me search for ways of killing it.\"\n\nHe tossed the branch aside and gestured to the mixture. \"Now eat, and tell me what impact it has on the fire.\"\n\nHot anger rose in Valfredo, flowing through every scale and prompting him to shift into a sturdy fighting stance. \"No,\" he said, and gave Kaven a daring glare.\n\nKaven raised an eyeridge and stood to his full height with wings flared, looking more like an immovable mountain than a dragon. Sparks darted in his eyes, his muscles twitched, and his claws flexed; every part of him looked excited and ready for a challenge. \"Do you really want to fight me?\"\n\nValfredo took a step back, his heart sinking to his stomach. The cold impression of fear seeped through his scales and pushed deep into his bones. He tried to refuse it, to force it away, but it crept into his mind and became impossible to fight. All he could manage to do was shake his head and lie down in submission.\n\nThe impression dispersed, and Kaven relaxed. \"Good. Now eat.\"\n\nWith a gulp, Valfredo walked up to the hollowed rock and stared at the globby mixture. The terrible scent clung to his nose and made him sneeze, and he groaned and wrinkled his snout. \"Are you sure this won't kill me?\"\n\n\"Just eat it.\"\n\n\"But last time I was sick for a week.\"\n\nKaven gave an irritated sigh. \"I took out the jublar roots and put more fireflowers in. Eat it.\"\n\nWith another groan, Valfredo reached down to eat the repulsive concoction. Maybe he should've gone into hiding, after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Valfredo cautiously sniffed the night air, then peaked around the corner of his cave. Kaven wasn't anywhere to be seen. Being careful not to make a sound, he leaped off the ledge and glided down away from the caves, then flapped to climb in height. He glanced back and looked at the two caves, half expecting Kaven to be right behind him, catching up. But the sky was dark and empty, and the caves stood looking equally dark with the ledge connecting them giving off the faint glow of the full moon's light.\n\nHe grinned. \"Finally! Finally I'm free of his stupid rules and mixtures and trainings. I'm finally free! I'm going to find the small clan and join them, and everything will be normal again.\" Surely they'd like him now that his irritating growth spurt was over.\n\nThe fire leaped with his excitement, but its burning felt more sardonic than excited. Why should they accept you? It seemed to say. What could they possibly gain?\n\n\"Shut up, fire! I don't need your opinion tonight. Besides, it's a small, weak clan that's easily chased off by some old loner dragon. They'd love to have a warrior as strong and practiced as myself.\"\n\nKaven's two hundred and seventy\u2014and huge. He's old and experienced and ferocious. Of course they're easily chased away by him. It doesn't mean they're weak and will accept you just because you're strong.\n\n\"I thought I told you to shut up,\" he growled. But it was right. Being afraid of Kaven wasn't a sign of weakness. He was a mighty warrior who feared nothing. Even the great Spike clan didn't dare enter his territory without a group of warriors, and it only took one warning roar to send them back into their own.\n\nIt's going to boil his stomach to find out you've run away.\n\n\"Shut up.\" Valfredo shook his head and tried to stop the thoughts from coming, but his stomach twisted with anxiety and seemed to urge them on.\n\nEven if you can hide from him for several years, he's only going to be angrier when he does find you, and by then he'll be even bigger and stronger. What are you going to do, hide until he dies? He has thirty more years of life left\u2014if he dies early.\n\n\"I said shut up! I don't need your thoughts and opinions. I need freedom and a clan. I'm done with being sick and tired and alone all the time. I'm strong enough to make my own decisions now, and I've made the decision to get a new clan, no matter how many times I have to try!\" The fire flared and tried to make a retort, but Valfredo focused all his attention on the task ahead. No matter what Kaven might do if he found him, having a clan again was worth the risk.\n\nIt was past sunup before he spotted a couple male adolescent dragons by the river. It wasn't too far from Kaven's territory, so they must be from the small clan. They held a fighting stance and growled as he landed on their side of the river.\n\n\"What do you want?\" the larger one asked.\n\nThe air was hot and smelled of danger. Each of them was a half head taller than Valfredo, and had the bulk to match their height. Their foreclaws flexed and legs twitched, ready to pounce. Excitement played in their eyes as they glanced at him snout to tail, taking in how much smaller he was.\n\nOn closer look, their scales were stretched apart, almost showing the skin underneath. It was obvious they were beginning their final growth spurt to adulthood, and decided that fact must intimidate him. The pressure of impressed submission and sting of impressed fear clung to the air, but Valfredo easily shook them off. The two dragons weren't even a little threatening; their muscles were bulky, but not well toned, and their stance, while correct, was more playful than dangerous. They must've had very little experience\u2014if any\u2014in actual combat.\n\nStill, he'd rather not have to fight them. If they were to accept him into the clan, he needed to win them over as friends. He took a deep breath and pretended it was to calm his nerves, then stood in a nonaggressive pose.\n\n\"The clan I hatched to is dead, and I'm looking for a new one to join. Will you take me to your clanhead?\"\n\nThe smaller one started laughing, but the larger one hushed him with a wing flare. \"We'll be glad to take you... if you pass a test.\"\n\n\"A test?\" He didn't remember there being a test before outsiders could see Father. But then, he was only ten and wasn't much interested in that stuff when he could go off and play with his friends instead. Maybe this was normal.\n\n\"Yes, a test.\" The larger one turned to the confused-looking smaller one. \"You know, the special fire test to prove worthiness?\"\n\n\"Ohhh, that test,\" said the smaller one with a grin.\n\nUh oh. This did not bode well. The air was filling with the energetic scent of mischievous playfulness, and the look in their eyes showed they didn't intend to play nicely. A fight he could win, but how could he play properly with them? He wasn't sure he remembered how to wrestle without actually trying to harm the other, and if these two grew too serious in the match, the fire might come out. Valfredo shifted uneasily and glanced at the surroundings. If he could get in flight faster than them, he should be able to outfly them.\n\n\"Well, this was interesting,\" he said, \"but I really must be going.\" He opened his wings to take off and was hit with a cold wave of impressed fear. It had the feel of two dragons pressing it on him, making it stronger. But it was the forceful kind, not the sneaky, slithering kind Kaven used, and though it was strong enough to throw him a little off balance, it was easy to refuse on his emotions.\n\nGrowling, he turned to face the other two. \"Is that your weak way of saying you want a fight?\"\n\nThe larger one raised an eyeridge. \"You must have quite a strong will to shrug that off. Never mind, it doesn't matter. You still haven't passed your test. Pillath, would you mind starting it?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said the smaller one. Then he proceeded to spit a fireball at Valfredo.\n\nValfredo dodged the fire and took flight toward Kaven's territory. The other two followed, flying considerably faster than he'd anticipated. Had they spent all their battle-training time in flight?\n\n\"What's the matter, weakling?\" The larger one shouted. \"Don't you want to join our clan?\"\n\nThe white fire bubbled inside. Valfredo forced it to stay down, but it was difficult to concentrate while dodging the periodic balls of fire, and with each one that flew near him, the phoenix flame grew more violent.\n\n\"Stop spitting fire at me!\" Valfredo called back, then dodged another fireball.\n\n\"If we stop spitting fire at you, you'll never pass your test.\"\n\n\"I don't want some stupid test! I want you to leave me alone!\" He focused more energy into his wings, leaving very little to control the fire. If he could just get away from these two, he could let the fire out and be done with it.\n\nPillath laughed. \"You see that, Tagor? He's a fast little brat! Hey, brat, why don't you just surrender to us? We're not going to kill you.\"\n\nThe fire pressed up, and Valfredo refocused his energy to keeping it from escaping. The leaves and grass blurred together, then the trees. Then everything started swirling together in a mix of green and brown and yellow. The fire boiled with rage, and his wings flapped without prompting. He must control the fire, he must!\n\nA painful heat struck his wing, snapping the world back into clarity. The ground was flying at him. With a shout of fear, he changed focus to his wings and landed with a crash. The fire took advantage of the distraction and poured out of his mouth. But Valfredo felt it coming and aimed it into the air, then snapped his jaw shut after a few seconds, cutting it off. The pressure in his fire organ was bearable, and the usual black spots he saw after the sudden energy loss were already clearing.\n\nValfredo took a deep breath and assessed his energy. He'd lost a lot, but not enough to interfere with fighting off the troublemakers. He looked up and found they'd landed and were staring at him with wide eyes. Pungent fear weighed heavily in the air, making everything feel as though it were surrounded by a grey haze. He didn't even need to smell it to know it was there.\n\n\"Wh-what are you?\" Tagor asked, his voice trembling. He held his wings slightly flared, ready to fly at any moment.\n\nValfredo's heart sank to his stomach. If these two learned of the fire and remained afraid of it, they'd spread the word and ruin any chance he had of finding a clan willing to take him in. The only hope of ever having a family again was to calm them down and befriend them. Maybe having a secret this big would even strengthen their friendship.\n\nShifting into an exceptionally friendly posture, he spoke slowly with the calm rumble of a soothing father. \"I know what it looks like, but I swear on my heart I'm a dragon like you. This white fire isn't mine. I just contain it to prevent a second phoenix from hatching. I have no intension of hurting you or anyone else.\"\n\nBut the soothing rumble and calm words had no effect. Their fear continued to grow thicker, and Pillath trembled so violently he looked ready to fall apart. Even Tagor, who Valfredo suspected was the braver of the two, shook with fear and looked incapable of responding. Was there nothing he could do to calm them down?\n\nFinally, Pillath moved\u2014only to hide behind Tagor and squeak out, \"Is it going to eat us?\"\n\nThe question cut into Valfredo's heart and made it hot with anger. How dare the coward accuse him of being a cannibal! Couldn't he tell it was a dragon standing in front of him, not a phoenix? Katel and Elina were forgivable\u2014they'd been traumatized by the phoenix, but these two had no excuse! They should be able to see past the fire and believe him like Kaven had, to see that he was a dragon.\n\n\"I'd never eat another dragon.\" Valfredo growled. He didn't mean to let the anger through, but it came out and heated the air. There wasn't much of it, but what escaped burned his nostrils and made it clear his anger was the aggressive type.\n\nTagor shuddered and backed away, bumping into Pillath and pushing both of them into a large tree. His eyes pulsed with fear, and he held his wings tightly to his sides and legs ready to run.\n\nThe pungent scent of fear was strong enough to come from a whole herd of deer; it even smelled of prey, promising Valfredo a meal and urging him to attack. He sneezed in an attempt to get it out, but it clung tightly to his nostrils, making them quiver with excitement and send almost irresistible ideas of a fun kill to his mind.\n\nBut the fear came from dragons, not prey. They were standing there in front of him with scales and horns and wings and a tail\u2014there was no mistaking them for prey. His muscles twitched from the urge to charge at them, but no, he mustn't let himself do it; these were potential friends, not prey. They were dragons, not food. Why did they smell so much like prey?\n\n\"I don't\u2014\"\n\nThe words dug into his thoughts and opened his ears to listen. They'd come from Tagor, the larger dragon in front of him, the one who'd managed to stop trembling.\n\nTagor took a deep breath, then relaxed a little and let it out. \"I don't know how you look like a dragon,\" he said, his words much stronger now. \"And I don't know how you can speak. Maybe you were a dragon once, and it laid its egg inside you, but you're not a dragon anymore, and we will not take a baby phoenix to our clan.\"\n\nValfredo shook his head to reorient his thoughts. The scent of prey morphed back into frightened dragons, their pungent fear now mixing with the heat of aggression. Tagor stood ready to fight, and Pillath, though still trembling, looked ready to attack.\n\nThis was not the friendship he'd had in mind. Why couldn't they see he wasn't a phoenix? Why wouldn't they accept it? Maybe it was just their initial fear. Maybe he just needed to calm them down so they could think clearly. Taking a deep breath, he focused on impressing calm. He was younger and smaller than they were, and his impression wasn't as sneaky or strong as Kaven's, so it probably wouldn't work. But maybe it would prove to them that he was a dragon and didn't want to hurt them.\n\nPillath's eyes grew wide, and a wave of fear slapped Valfredo's nostrils.\n\n\"It's trying to lull us into obedience!\" Pillath screamed. \"Hurry, Tagor! We have to kill it!\"\n\nTogether, they ran at him with fear and attack in their eyes.\n\n\"I'm not trying to\u2014\" Valfredo dodged. \"Would you listen to me?\"\n\nBut they only surrounded him and charged again. A loud cracking sound came from behind. Then a large green dragon flew over Valfredo's head and landed on Tagor.\n\n\"Kaven, no!\"\n\nBut before the words were out, Kaven took Tagor's neck in his jaws and snapped it. Then he snarled at Valfredo and let the body fall to the ground. \"I warned you to stay away from them,\" he growled. \"I told you explicitly to stay away from all other dragons! To stay clear of that clan! Why did you go there? What did you tell them?\"\n\nValfredo glanced back at Pillath and found him dead, his back broken in half. Turning back to Kaven, Valfredo clenched the ground with his talons and let anger rise into his throat. \"Why'd you do it? Why'd you kill them?\" The words came out in a deep growl that vibrated the ground. \"They were innocent, harmless! They couldn't touch me! These were going to become my friends, and you killed them!\"\n\nThe final words came out as a roar full of pain and wrath. Even as he said them, the reality of what happened struck him. It wasn't the fire that kept him from having a clan\u2014it was Kaven. The old grouch was always watching him, always ordering him to stay close, and always telling him how dangerous the phoenix fire was.\n\nBut the fire in Valfredo had only killed one dragon who was attacking someone too weak to win; Kaven killed two dragons attacking someone who was stronger than they were. Kaven was the enemy, not the fire.\n\nAnger pulsed through Valfredo's muscles, lashing his tail, twitching his wings, and urging him to attack. The air smelled burning hot, though not as hot as he wanted. Not as hot as the white fire twisting inside of him, trying to gather enough energy to burst out and kill the heartless meat standing in front of him.\n\nKaven's snarl disappeared, morphing into expressionlessness. Then he chuckled. Then he laughed, and the air filled with a powerful emotion that smelled equally sweet and bitter.\n\nValfredo's anger melted into unease. His talons released the ground they'd dug into, and he backed away. Had Kaven lost his mind? The old dragon never laughed, yet now he was laughing without even trying to hide this strange emotion that suffocated Valfredo's own.\n\n\"You think they were going to become your friends?\" Kaven said at last. \"Fool! They were trying to kill you even as I killed them. What excuse do you have for that? Let me hear it, so I can finally break you of this stupidity.\"\n\nSo that was it. The emotion he was putting into the air was derision. Anger bubbled back up inside Valfredo, and he lowered his head in challenge and growled. \"I will not be your source of sadistic pleasure. I'm sick of living with you and your stupid rules and training. I've thrown up more in the last nine years than most dragons do in their entire lives\u2014and it's because of you and those disgusting, poisonous mixtures you force me to eat! And what do you do? Force me to down more mudfern so I can recover faster and train.\n\n\"I'm tired of doing nothing but eat, sleep, and train. I want to have a life! I want to have a sister and a father and a mother and friends to get into trouble with. I want to live in a clan again, and these two were going to be my way in. If you'd just given me some more time, I could've convinced them I wasn't their enemy, and they would've convinced their clanhead to let me join, and you killed them. I will never forgive you. NEVER!\"\n\nThe laughter left Kaven's eyes, and the air grew solemn. \"Look at their expressions. They hold terror, the kind that strikes through the heart and kills. It was not I who gave them that fear. It was you.\"\n\nLook at them? He'd already seen their fear when they were alive. It was Kaven who didn't give them a chance to overcome it. But the urge to obey tickled the back of his mind, pushing his muscles to turn and stare at Tagor.\n\nHis eyes pulsed with fear, as if they had survived death to warn others about the terror they had last seen. A glance at Pillath showed the same. His very scales seemed to radiate panic.\n\nValfredo's angry blood turned cold, clenching his jaw and curling his tail. Swallowing became necessary, but difficult to do around the lump growing in his throat. The other adolescents hadn't lived long enough to fear Kaven or realize he was going to kill them. It couldn't have been him that gave them that terror. It was the white fire... it was Valfredo.\n\n\"Do you really think they would've stopped and listened to you?\" Kaven said. \"Do you really think their clan would've taken you in? What did you plan to do if that fire came out in the nesting ground? What if you were surrounded by young and couldn't aim it away from everyone? Who would you kill, and who would you let live? Who would die in the panic that would've followed them all seeing it, and who would die in their attempt to protect the clan from you? That fire is of the phoenix. It does nothing but kill, destroy, and bring panic. You're tired of eating my mixtures? Then find another way to get rid of it.\n\n\"As long as I'm alive I'll train you into a powerful warrior, one who can defend himself from many enemies at once. But you must choose to use it, and you must choose to be wise. It only takes one foolish moment to kill someone, and many wise moments to keep them alive. Which will you be? The wise, or the foolish? Will the world live to see a second phoenix hatch from your body? Will that phoenix be immune to the jublar tree? Will it eat what's left of your old clan? Your sister? If you care so much about other dragons, fight harder to train your body and mind to stay alive and kill that egg inside of you.\"\n\nValfredo clenched his foreclaws and closed his eyes. A nagging thought throbbed in his head.\n\n\"Kaven's right,\" it said. \"You should give up on joining a clan or ever having a family again.\"\n\nBut he didn't want to give up. He refused to give up. Kaven was wrong. There was a clan for him somewhere. He still had a family\u2014there was Elina. He just needed to find her. If he told her the fire was gone, that he'd killed it, she'd take him back. Taking a deep breath, Valfredo relaxed. He'd pretend to obey Kaven until the moon was full again. Then he'd make his final escape to find Elina.\n\n\"I understand,\" he said.\n\nKaven nodded, then breathed fire on the two corpses until a flame surrounded them.\n\nThe scent of burning scales and dragon flesh filled the air, but Valfredo refused to sneeze it out; the dead would be respected, even if they died hating him. The fire began to dwindle again, but this time Kaven didn't breathe on them. He merely stood there watching with narrowed eyes and a solemn expression.\n\n\"Come,\" Kaven said when the last flame flickered out. \"The clan can ash their own.\"\n\nThen he took flight, only to immediately drop back down and flood the air with the pungent scent of fear. \"Hide! Into those jublar trees, now!\" He seemed to both whisper and shout the words as he shoved Valfredo toward the forest where a thick patch of young jublar trees stood a few lengths away.\n\nThe fear entered Valfredo's nose and pierced through his heart. He'd never seen Kaven afraid of anything\u2014except the phoenix. He followed Kaven's order and raced into the thicket of trees, for once feeling grateful for their powerful sweet scent that would mask his own.\n\nAfter breathing a short stream of fire onto the corpses, Kaven ran into the thicket beside Valfredo and ducked down, keeping his stomach on the ground and legs ready to flee.\n\nThe thunderous beating of large wings sounded both close and far away, as if he were dreaming something his ears heard and fed into the unconscious mind. The sound stopped, and Valfredo held his breath as a huge fiery shape glided around them in large circles, growing larger with every loop until it finally landed next to the burning bodies. He ducked down farther, trying to become part of the forest underbrush while still being able to watch. The heat coming off the phoenix pushed the trees and brush into a fury, looking as though a continuous and powerful gust of wind fell from the sky and forced them out like a thrown rock forming ripples in water.\n\nThe fire inside Valfredo churned and intensified, but it didn't take away the chill flowing snout to tailtip. The phoenix was here, just a few lengths away, and it was as huge as he remembered. Its beak touched Tagor's burning body, then picked it up and ate it. The sounds of breaking dragon bones and scales being crushed were all that filled Valfredo's mind. There was no Father here to shove him into a cave, and no rock wall to protect him. Only the scent of jublar trees and dense forest leaves hid him from the fallen sun this time.\n\nThe phoenix sniffed Pillath next, and then ate him. It glared around the forest, searching with hungry black eyes and sniffing audibly for more food. Its gaze landed on him, and it sniffed with intent. The world grew cold and stiff. Should he run or stay still? Each breath of the phoenix could be the last thing he'd ever hear. Every twitch it made seemed to last a lifetime. At last, it opened its beak, and Valfredo tried to run, but his legs wouldn't move. Its beak opened wider and wider.\n\nThen it sneezed. No fireball came out, no heat, just... a sneeze. It raised its head, shook itself, and took flight, going right over and past them. Valfredo let out his breath and sucked in fresh air. His lungs screamed for more, and he lay there gasping for some time. A glance at Kaven showed he was doing the same. His eyes were huge, and his body shivered with fear, legs splayed out and body crouched so low he looked melted to the forest floor.\n\nSeeing Kaven so terrified filled Valfredo with pride. He had survived staring down the phoenix once before. He had bitten a chunk of flesh off its foot\u2014and then swallowed it. The swelling pride deflated. He might be less afraid of the phoenix than Kaven, but he was more foolish. If Kaven had bitten it instead of him, there wouldn't have been any swallowing, no threat of a new phoenix forming. Valfredo stood and looked around. Despite the forceful heat coming off the phoenix, nothing looked burned. The plants around where it had stood appeared dried up, but there was no sign of actual burning. No blackness, no ashes, not even a spot of emptiness.\n\nNow that he thought about it, that made sense. Of course the phoenix wouldn't burn anything it didn't want to. The sun never started a fire; it only dried things up. Why would the phoenix be any different?\n\nBogre screaming sounded in the distance\u2014in the direction the phoenix had gone, the direction of the nesting ground he'd once obsessed with watching. His heart broke for them, and he was glad they weren't smart and capable of thinking like dragons were. If there were any survivors, they didn't need to know the pain he'd learned that horrible night nine years ago. The pain Elina had gone through as well.\n\nWith a sigh, he looked again at Kaven. The old dragon was right; he needed to learn to be content without a clan. Why should he chance endangering himself, and thus Elina and the world? As long as the blasted fire was inside him, he had to let their safety come first and swallow his own desires.\n\n\"Let's... go train,\" he said, and his body cringed at his own words. He might finally understand the need to train so hard, but he still wasn't going to enjoy it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Valfredo took a deep breath and sighed contentedly. The bright yellow ball of sun peeked halfway over the horizon, and for the first time in three weeks, was unimpeded by rain clouds. Who would have thought it could rain nonstop for so long? Everything was soaked through, even to the point of rotting. Thank the stars for rivers and lakes or the whole territory might be flooded.\n\n\"Thinking of...\" Valfredo trotted over to Kaven's cave and found him also staring out at the sun. He had a strange look of happiness until he saw Valfredo; then he just scowled.\n\n\"No,\" he said.\n\n\"How can you say no when I haven't even asked you anything?\"\n\n\"It's easy to anticipate what you're going to ask, and the answer is no.\"\n\n\"So you're going to refuse me an ogre breakfast?\" Valfredo said as sassily as he could. \"Honestly, Kaven, after all this time with nothing decent to eat, you're going to tell me you're not the slightest bit hungry for a good fatty meal? Or do your ogres not hide from the rain?\"\n\nKaven grunted. \"Sixty-five and you still act like an adolescent. One would think five years of adulthood would grow you up.\"\n\nValfredo scowled and flicked his tail, then winced as the tip slapped a flying bird and sent it careening toward the ground. The bird fluttered and flapped its wings in a desperate attempt to control its fall and, at the last second, managed to slow itself and land seemingly uninjured.\n\nKaven watched the incident and raised an eyeridge. The corners of his mouth twitched, and he stifled a snort of laughter. \"Perhaps you should think less about ogres and more about controlling your impulses.\" He stood and flapped his wings, then held them open in the sunshine. \"Now come. It's time for patrol.\"\n\n\"Patrol? Now? Don't you want to relax and enjoy this beautiful morning?\"\n\n\"You can enjoy it while patrolling our territory. Or would you rather spend the day in training?\"\n\nUgh! Kaven was such a pain. \"Fine, I'll go on patrol,\" Valfredo grumbled. \"But when I spot an ogre, I'm stopping to eat.\"\n\n\"I never said we wouldn't,\" Kaven said while scanning the area. \"I doubt we'll have to rescue prey from flooding today, so our goal will be to pick up all the boulders and rocks we used to direct water to the river and lakes. Be sure to put them where they'll be easy to get the next time a large storm comes.\"\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes. \"I know how to care for the territory, Kaven. Let's just get it over with.\" The first sun in three weeks and they had to spend the whole day cleaning up.\n\n\"Don't forget to pick up the fallen trees this time. Even one day can dry the ground enough to make it impossible to replant them.\"\n\n\"I know how to care for the territory. Will you please just trust me and let us get started? I'd like to have some sunlight left to enjoy when we finish.\"\n\nKaven gave him a glare. \"Act more responsibly and I'll start trusting you.\" Then he whipped open his wings and flew south.\n\nWith a sigh, Valfredo followed. What a perfectly ruined day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "It was several hours before Valfredo found an ogre to eat, but at least it was a large, fat one with plenty of meat to fill his stomach. He was considering catching a deer to finish off the rest of his hunger when a large red... something came into view, along with burnt trees and damaged ground\u2014signs of a battle. Perhaps this wasn't going to be such a boring territory patrol, after all. Valfredo stayed in the air and circled to look for more danger, while Kaven flew down for a better look. After searching around a bit, Kaven waved him down.\n\nValfredo landed next to the large red... meat? It smelled of blood and meat, but what prey would be so large, and why was it completely covered in blood? He sniffed around it, searching for its head. Then he found it\u2014and retched.\n\n\"A female! Kaven, it's a female dragon! But where are her horns, and talons, and scales? What did this to her? Is there another phoenix that doesn't eat our whole bodies?\" He turned to look at Kaven and saw a grave expression on the old dragon's face as he stared at the female's corpse.\n\nKaven went to her and gingerly pulled a lifeless young fledgling out from under her body. It was a brown male with scales dulled from lack of proper food. \"The rain kept her from finding him an ogre, so she took him hunting with her today.\" He looked to the sun and took a deep breath. \"On this day that was supposed to be gleeful and healing, she helplessly fought to keep her precious son alive. I can only imagine her last thoughts as she tried to protect him.\"\n\nLooking back down at the fledgling, he stroked the little cheek. The sharp scent of grief flooded the air, twisting Valfredo's stomach and making his muscles feel suddenly weak. He collapsed, legs no longer strong enough to hold him up, and knew that what had happened here was more than a small loss.\n\n\"You were unlucky today, little one,\" Kaven said, not even trying to musk his grief. \"May your afterlife be more pleasant.\" He opened his mouth ceremoniously and breathed fire on the fledgling. Then he breathed fire on the female.\n\nValfredo's stomach twisted tighter, and the white fire grew hotter, begging to help ash the bodies. But to ash them with fire from the fallen sun would be worse than leaving them to meat-eating prey. Tears stung his eyes as he watched Kaven keep the fires hot. Would there ever be a time when Valfredo could participate in ashing someone into the afterlife?\n\nThe sharpness of grief lessened as the bodies burned, and when the orange flame licked the last bone to ash, musk covered what remained of Kaven's emotions. He nodded to Valfredo and opened his wings.\n\nStrength returned to Valfredo's body, and he stood to open his wings as well. Together, they flapped at the ashes, scattering them to rest in as large an area as possible.\n\n\"May Galataia care for you now as it did when you lived,\" they said when the final cloud of ash had settled.\n\n\"What did this to them?\" Valfredo asked, making sure to keep his voice solemn.\n\nEmotions sparked in Kaven's eyes, and his nose quivered. \"Bogres.\"\n\nBogres? Did Kaven really expect him to believe those weak things could kill a grown female protecting her young?\n\nKaven dug his talons into the ground and narrowed his eyes. Anger tightened his jaw, but confusion lay behind his eyes, and frightened wings twitched to fly away. \"I've warned you about them before and you didn't believe me. Here's your proof.\"\n\nValfredo snorted. How could he not? The idea of bogres successfully killing this female was absurd. \"What proof? I've seen bogres hunt. They tear the skin off their prey and keep it, and then eat the meat. This female wasn't skinned\u2014her scales were heartlessly ripped off her skin, and her flesh was left here to rot like common prey. The young wasn't even touched, other than being killed. Besides, this female was far stronger than any giant snake, and they refused to fight that.\"\n\n\"They weren't after her flesh.\" Kaven's voice was strong with anger. \"They were after her scales, teeth, horns, and claws\u2014parts that are strong enough to help them kill us. They left him alone because fledgling parts are too weak to help them.\" He looked to Valfredo, eyes red with intense wrath.\n\nChills ran through Valfredo, and he backed away. The anger wasn't directed at him, rather at some memory or thought of injustice, but it was still strong enough to strike fear into his bones. He turned away and searched the area. There wasn't any sign of another dragon or phoenix, or anything larger than a bogre. The trees were left almost intact, except for a small patch obviously burned by the female. In fact, other than the ground being torn up, there wasn't much evidence of any kind of struggle. Valfredo sighed and looked back at Kaven, avoiding his eyes.\n\n\"I suppose it does look like only bogres could've done it. If only she'd had a strong friend with her, this wouldn't have happened.\"\n\n\"One other wouldn't have made any difference,\" Kaven said with a growl. \"You still don't understand, Valfredo. You still don't get it! In my lifetime they've learned to kill us with our own bodies, and in your lifetime they're perfecting it. When I was a young, they were weak and helpless against us, but now they're slaughtering grown warriors. They've become dangerous!\"\n\nValfredo laughed. \"How can they possibly be dangerous when you've always said they're very stupid?\"\n\n\"How many times must I tell you?\" Kaven snapped, his tail lashing so violently it threatened to clear the forest. \"How many times will you refuse to believe me? Their warriors are well trained and getting stronger. They take our bodies and make more weapons for more warriors, growing their number and strength. They're killing more of us every year and taking our territories\u2014look how they've moved into mine! The warriors were never here before, but now they're taking more trees and hunting more prey and killing off the ogres. I don't know how, I don't understand how, but they've become bold and determined. I've never known prey like this; I've never known bogres like this. In these last twenty years they've become far worse than anyone could've imagined.\"\n\nHe growled and began pacing, mumbling incoherently.\n\nWhat was wrong with him? The bogres killed a female and young, yes, but that was far from dangerous. She was weak; that was all it meant. She was too weak to protect her young and too foolish to realize she needed to bring a friend with her or let her mate do the hunting.\n\n\"That's it!\"\n\nValfredo jumped and glared at Kaven. \"Do you mind not... shouting?\" The anger for being startled twisted into unease. There was a glint of mischievous excitement in Kaven's eyes, and no musk came to hide the excited energy flowing from him.\n\nKaven continued to pace, though this time it seemed to control enthusiasm, not tension. \"I'll go tell the nearby clans what these bogres are doing and convince them to group together to kill the warriors.\" He paused, his forehead wrinkled in thought. \"Yes, yes they'll listen\u2014I'll start with my old clan. They'll know I'm not telling stories.\"\n\nThere were a lot of questions to ask about the plan, and a lot to ask about the mixed emotions escaping into the air unimpeded, but before Valfredo chose which question to ask first, Kaven glared at him.\n\n\"Just remember not to die while you cross Great Meadow.\"\n\nValfredo jerked back and flared his wings instinctively, ready to fly from potential danger. \"Cross Great Meadow? Have you lost your mind? Why are you acting so uncontrolled? These are just bogres, for sun's sake! They aren't worth getting upset about or killing myself in Great Meadow.\"\n\nWith a scoff, Kaven stood to his full height and gave a scolding look. \"You aren't going to die, Valfredo.\" His voice was strong and assured, and the emotions in the air were cut off suddenly by musk. \"You're faster, stronger, and a better hunter than anyone who's tried before. You'll make it through Great Meadow while I gather warriors to fight the bogres. I can not chance you around them\u2014that fire in you comes out at the worse possible times, and they'll rip you apart if they see it.\"\n\nValfredo shook his head and paced. It was official: Kaven had gone crazy. Why should they worry about a bogre clan just because a weakling female lost to a few of its warriors? If she'd been even a little stronger, she could've protected her young from such puny prey. For sun's sake, they couldn't even kill a giant snake! And to tell him to cross Great Meadow?\n\nA chill ran through his blood, making him shiver. The whole idea was insane. Since the time he was a hatchling, he'd been warned never to enter Great Meadow, that great warriors of the past had gone and never come back, or came back near death telling how it never ended and didn't have any prey to eat or water to drink. What was Kaven thinking?\n\nValfredo looked at him and growled, then continued pacing. He wasn't thinking, that what the problem. He was old, strong, and wise, but was losing his mind. Wasn't there a rare disease that made dragons weaker with age instead of stronger? Could Kaven have it? Well, why not? He was well over three hundred and in his last years. If he had that disease, now would be the time it showed itself.\n\nThen again, he was old and had lived through a lot. What if he was right? What if the bogres were becoming dangerous enough to worry about? Should the dragons just sit around and let them kill off the clans? Of course not! It made sense for Kaven to go alone and unite the clans. He was a great and powerful warrior who'd lived long enough to grow a head taller than most; they would likely listen to him. But if he brought Valfredo, and the other warriors started a fight, the white fire might come out. If that happened they'd be too focused on killing him to listen to Kaven, and then the bogres would go unche\u2014\n\nWait, this wasn't right. There was a pressure in the air... the pressure of obedience\u2014and the cold of fear. \"Stop impressing me!\" Valfredo roared. \"I will not listen to you, stubborn old fool. Bogres are weak prey, nothing more, and I'll prove it!\" He flew straight up and searched for the bogres. Curse Kaven and his sneaky impressions! If Valfredo hadn't caught that one when he did, it might've actually worked, and then he'd be just as foolish to fear the bogres.\n\n\"Valfredo!\" Kaven flew up to him. The impressions were gone, but the look on his face said the same as they had: fear the bogres, and obey me.\n\nValfredo snarled and flew away, keeping his guard up against being impressed. Stupid old dragon. Hadn't he learned yet that Valfredo always figured out when he was being impressed? Hadn't he given up on forcing thoughts and emotions into him? Valfredo glanced back to see how far Kaven had fallen behind, and smirked. At least all that training came in handy for something. Ah! There were the bogres. Time to prove to Kaven just how weak they really were.\n\nValfredo circled to study them and decide where he should attack first. Kaven did get one thing about them right: They were different from the other bogres. Instead of having various dull shades of colored fur, most of these were medium grey, with a good clawful of them being much more vibrantly colorful. None of them had long fur on their heads, and all of them were very shiny. The long-furred prey bogres liked to sit on seemed more or less like the ones living with the other bogres, except they were braver, unafraid of the young ogres walking between them. But that was probably because the bogres sitting on them were pointing weapons at the ogres to keep them from attacking.\n\nHe moved closer for a better look\u2014and growled. The colorful bogres were vibrant because they were covered in dragon scales! They even carried long weapons tipped with dragon claws that were somehow made smaller, sharper, and straight. Actually, most of the bogres seemed to have those weapons, and all of them tipped with dragon claws or teeth. They really did use a dragon's own body against his kind.\n\nOne of the bogres pulled a long stick away from his eye and started shouting, prompting many of them to look up and search the sky. They quickly scattered, moving their long-furred prey into more hidden areas. Then they took things that looked like shiny tangled vines and put them up high in the trees. They certainly seemed to like the stuff; most of what they'd brought with them was made of it.\n\nValfredo shook his head. He'd come here for a purpose, and it was time to fulfill that purpose. He glanced back and saw that Kaven had caught up to him, but was circling at a reasonable distance. Their eyes locked, giving Kaven a chance to send one final warning look, but one promising Valfredo a chance to try his mission. Valfredo sent a look back that he wouldn't follow the warning and was going for the attack, then gave his full attention back to the bogres.\n\nThey had moved to hide in bushes and trees and were now throwing leaves that were stuck together over everything, making their objects, prey, and themselves virtually disappear. But one young ogre had gotten tangled in a vine out in the open, and was now kicking to break free. The vine was rather short and looked like the brown ones bogres used a lot. Could they have left the ogre there on purpose, like the nest of them had done with the horned prey for the snake? If he ate it, would it kill him?\n\nValfredo snorted and dove for a hidden bogre group. As if they were smart enough to plan that, or him dumb enough to be tricked by it if they were. The group scattered quickly, only giving him enough time to kill a few with his claws. Fools! Did they really think they could hide from a dragon warrior? The air smelled of their... terror? Strange, the fear was dulled, more like anxiety mixed with determination and hostility. Kaven was right to call these ones their warriors; they were obviously not as afraid as the weaker ones from the nesting grounds. But why would the warriors be so far from their families? Why would they be in this large group, leaving none to defend their females and young?\n\nThe air smelled hot and bitter with dangerous bloodlust. Ha! Even the air thought these bogres were dangerous! He imagined Kaven's expression when he finished off the last bogre\u2014and grinned. This mission was going to be fun.\n\nWith one short leap he reached another group and clawed some to an instant death. The running ones he quickly slapped with claws and tail, breaking their bones and killing them. Others made whooping noises and ran at him on their long-furred prey. He chased them, forcing them to run away, but he quickly caught up and\u2014\n\nOne of the tangled shiny vines fell on him, covering him in an irritating way that kept his wings from opening very far. He lashed in an attempt to break them, but the bogres threw more onto him. The danger and bloodlust increased tenfold.\n\n\"Get your puny little vines away from me!\" Valfredo roared, but the warning only seemed to excite them more. A few of them crawled in under the vines within reach, and he lashed at them, but other bogres stuck some of the long weapons with dragonclaw tips in his face. He snapped at them and dove forward, but the tangled vines tripped him and he fell to his side. The bogres who were under the vines threw some more over his snout, and before he could respond, the vines tightened, forcing his mouth closed. More vines were thrown around his legs and then to trees.\n\n\"All right, you want to fight?\" Valfredo growled. \"You have one!\"\n\nWith more ferocity he threw his body around, lashing and slashing at everything. He grabbed the tangled vines with both claws and ripped them to shreds. Then he ripped off the ones over his snout.\n\nA fast-moving object flew at his eye and struck just as he blinked, sticking through his eyelid and making it difficult to open. Screeching anger, Valfredo rubbed off the object and snapped at the nearest bogres, but just as he closed his mouth, more vines were thrown to force it to stay shut.\n\n\"Leave him be!\" Kaven's roar and hot rage flooded the air. He landed next to Valfredo, thrashed at the bogres, and ripped off the vines over Valfredo's snout. \"Use the fire!\"\n\nValfredo jerked back. \"Wh-what?\"\n\n\"Use the fire, now!\" Kaven impressed fear, and the bogres scattered, then returned as their leaders yowled at them.\n\nValfredo stoked the flame, concentrating on controlling it while Kaven kept the bogres back.\n\n\"Release it on them!\"\n\nHe released it, ashing all the bogres within three lengths\u2014along with many tree bottoms. The air grew hot, and he stopped flaming. The sound of trees crashing and falling was deafening, and the smoke and heat in the forest increased with every second.\n\nKaven flew around beating the flames with his wings, putting them out.\n\nValfredo looked at the damage. Maybe there was more to these bogres than he'd thought. Maybe they had planned for the giant snake to die. Maybe they weren't so stupid. There were many things they did and could do that dragons hadn't even thought of, like using a dragon's body parts to kill other dragons, or convincing prey to happily live with them. How were the weapons so strong against dragons, anyway?\n\nDropped weapons lay scattered on the forest floor, and one particularly interesting one lay next to him. It was made of a dragon horn cut thin, and was about as long as a bogre's arm. The tip was carefully carved to have a point, and two sides looked very sharp despite their thinness. The entire thing was perfectly straight, except for the end where it changed from dragon horn to carved stick\u2014there another stick crossed it to separate the dragon horn from the part bogres grabbed onto.\n\nHe picked it up carefully, making sure not to touch the fragile stick part with his sharp talons. The weapon was very smooth, and the sharp part had the same thinness all around with no thick bits breaking it up. This wasn't a naturally formed horn\u2014it had been carved like this, like how dragons carved into rock. Bones, the bogres must've been determined. Damaging a horn wasn't easy, even for a dragon. Gingerly, he touched the tip with his talon. It didn't pierce through his scale, so he placed the tip at the back of a scale and pushed until it peeled the scale up a little. If he continued, the scale would completely peel off and leave some skin exposed.\n\nIf bogres were stupid, how could they make something so complicated and perfect? Maybe Kaven was right, and everyone had been underestimating the bogres all this time. They'd certainly proved themselves dangerous today. Maybe they weren't small, bony ogres... maybe they were small, fleshy dragons.\n\nValfredo laughed at the thought. \"They're smarter than ogres, but still foolish,\" he said as he tossed aside the weapon. Why else would they attack something so much more powerful than themselves? Surely they had to know dragons would catch on and kill them in one collective effort. With a final chuckle, he turned to watch Kaven put out the last bit of fire.\n\n\"Are you convinced now, or do I have to let you nearly die again?\" Kaven growled when the task was complete. Then he sneezed, causing a cloud of ash to surround his face. With a violent shake of his head, he growled at it. But the warning went unheeded, and some of the ash settled on his snout and head\u2014not that it made much difference. Ash had already covered his entire body, making him smell of burnt plants and adding a smoky grey to his green scales.\n\nValfredo's chest convulsed, trying to burst into laughter, and his mouth twitched intermittently into a grin. But he dared not let it out. The old dragon had helped him today and put out the fire so Valfredo could inspect the bogre weapon. He owed Kaven respect. Finally, he gained control and took a deep breath to calm his lungs. Then he looked at Kaven, whose glaring eyes and scowl showed he had noticed the hidden laughter.\n\n\"I'll admit their warriors are a threat, especially to females and young,\" Valfredo said. \"But it won't take much to kill them. A few good warriors ought to do it.\"\n\nKaven growled, then paced three steps before stopping and turning to Valfredo. \"You're just like everyone else. Thickheaded and willful.\" He paced a few more steps, wings opening and closing in agitation. \"When will you realize the danger they pose? When will you learn to be more cautious? It wasn't the bogres that nearly killed you today, it was your pride.\"\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes and debated on flying away again or waiting for the lecture to be over.\n\n\"Don't roll your eyes at me! It was that pride of yours that kept you from listening to your instincts. Your pride kept you from respecting the danger. Even that fire didn't respect the danger! Didn't you sense it? The bloodlust? The determination? They were excited when you showed up, excited to kill you. What prey do you know does that? What dragon do you know does that? We aren't stupid enough to attack the phoenix, so why are bogres so enthusiastic about fighting a dragon? They're unpredictable and dangerous. We can't chance you getting killed while we deal with them. Cross Great Meadow and stay out of danger.\"\n\nGesturing to the damaged forest, he added, \"This was only a handful of the warriors this bogre clan has; it may take some time to finish them off.\"\n\nFor sun's sake, Kaven was paranoid. The only reason the bogres had stood a chance against Valfredo was because he'd refused to use fire and didn't attack them seriously. But Kaven was beyond the point of listening to reason; there was no point in arguing with him anymore. Who would have thought Kaven could fear a few small prey almost as much as the phoenix fire?\n\n\"Fine, I'll fly through the meadow, but you'd better have a plan for how I can survive crossing an endless land that has no food or water.\"\n\nKaven relaxed and took to the air, then waited for Valfredo to catch up before beginning the flight to Great Meadow. \"We'll make sure you eat and drink well before entering it. Then you'll use air currents and superior speed to power through before your body gives way.\"\n\nHe called that a plan? It took energy to use that \"superior speed,\" and Valfredo didn't know any of the air currents in the meadow.\n\n\"I won't be there to help you hunt,\" Kaven said, \"so keep your eyes and nose open for prey while you cross.\"\n\n\"Obviously,\" Valfredo mumbled. There was no way he was going through with this fool's mission. The moment Kaven left him to start the flight, he'd turn away from the meadow and find a territory to call his own. Maybe some loners would even join him, and he could finally be in a clan again, now that he'd learned to control the fire.\n\nThe fire stirred, biting at his organ in seeming protest.\n\nValfredo hissed and grabbed where the organ sat, barely managing to keep his flight steady. Bloody fire. Every time he thought he'd gotten used to the burning pain, it found a new way to prove him wrong.\n\nAfter a few minutes, it calmed down and cooled into the usual burn. Valfredo sighed with relief and pulled his foreclaw away. So maybe he couldn't control it entirely; he was still excellent at keeping it inside the fire organ.\n\nElina's terrified face flashed before him, followed by Pillath's. Then the hatchling phoenix with its large, black eyes forming out of his fire organ. Valfredo shook his head, sending the images away. No, he didn't have nearly the control necessary to live within a clan. He had to continue living alone until the fire was eliminated. Perhaps he'd go through with the plan, after all. It'd certainly be an adventure, and he'd be free of Kaven's lessons for a while. Maybe he'd even find a way to kill the fire. Who knew what sort of answers he'd find on the other side of the meadow?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The week-long journey to Great Meadow was very relaxing. Not once did Kaven scold Valfredo or try to teach new lessons. They simply flew together at a casual pace, stopping to eat or drink whenever hunger entered their stomachs. Valfredo sighed when the last stretch of mountains lay behind them, and dread pulled at his heart. Once Kaven was gone, he'd be truly alone for the first time in fifty-five years.\n\nUnwanted tears stung his eyes, and the air on his wings grew heavy. Energy seeped out of his scales, leaving him drained of strength. His wing muscles strained with every flap to keep up with Kaven, but he was rapidly falling behind. The mountains behind grew steadily smaller, and the large rocky hills below changed into little grassy ones. He looked ahead and saw only hill upon hill of gold and green grasses waving in the breeze. Above them, Kaven flew strong and steady, seemingly unfazed by the knowledge he'd soon be separated from Valfredo.\n\nA rush of determination warmed Valfredo's blood, bringing strength to his muscles. The air below lifted him up, and his wings flapped with ease to catch up to Kaven. The strong scent of musk rushed into his nostrils, and Valfredo smiled. Perhaps the old dragon was upset, after all.\n\nThey flew on in silence for a long time, flying further and further from home. The grassy hills flattened into an enormous meadow where the grass could grow steadily taller. That was all Valfredo could see when he looked around: gold and green grass. The air smelled of them and their seeds, warmed by the setting sun. He glanced back and saw the thin line of mountains disappear. Sickness squeezed his stomach, and fear struck his heart. Was it really possible for him to make it through such vast nothingness?\n\nWhen the last bit of sun hid behind the horizon, Kaven glided to the ground. Without folding in his wings, he turned to Valfredo, his face expressionless. \"Continue going straight. Aim where the sun sets, and at night, follow the western tri-stars\u2014those stars there. Don't stop for more than absolutely necessary for sleep. Fly when you can, and when your wings tire, walk. When you get there, eat some of everything new until you find a cure. Don't forget to mix them as well.\"\n\nValfredo nodded, his jaw and chest too tight with dread to say anything, and watched Kaven fly back toward the mountains. The old dragon's wings flapped wearily, keeping his pace slow and low to the ground. With a sigh, Valfredo lay down and curled in a circle. He was alone again, and this time there was no hope of finding another dragon. If only he could just go home to Elina. With her sweet temperament, she was bound to forgive him and convince the clan to let him rejoin them. Then he'd have a home again, and this time it'd be with family who loved him.\n\nHope stirred in his chest. Maybe he should look for her. Kaven wasn't here to stop him this time, and with Valfredo's grown body and trained skills, it couldn't be that dangerous to search.\n\nThe fire stirred in his organ and seemed to speak. Yes, go. I want to finish what the phoenix started.\n\n\"I won't let you out to hurt them,\" Valfredo growled.\n\nI'll get out. I always do. What do you care if they live or die anyway? They rejected you, remember? Elina even rejected you, and after you saved her life from Katel. I killed him, saving both you and her, and she sent you away.\n\n\"It was Dellano who sent me away!\"\n\nHe did it on her behalf.\n\n\"Only because you terrified her!\" Valfredo stood up and paced. \"If it wasn't for you, Katel would never have attacked her, and you never would've come out and killed him. He was a clanmate, an adolescent warrior. I never wanted him dead.\" He tried to ignore the stirring fire and refuse to imagine its response, but his mind raced to fill in words the deadly parasite might say.\n\nIt was your weakness that made him fear me. You were too weak to control me. You gave in to the pain and whined about it. You took every opportunity to make Elina pity you and took everything she gave you, even as she wasted away. Katel's anger started because he was trying to protect her, not from me, but from you.\n\n\"He\u2014she\u2014I didn't\u2014\"\n\nUseless tongue! Useless, pathetic mouth! Why couldn't he speak? Why couldn't he come up with a retort? He sighed and stared up at the moon. It was full tonight and glowing brilliantly, reminding the phoenix of its great power. What would it be like to never have known fear of the phoenix? To never have lost his friends, home, and entire family to it?\n\nWith another sigh, he lay back down. The fire was right. After all these years, he finally understood the depths of pain Elina had gone through for him and the fear that had kept Katel tense. What a selfish fool Valfredo had been. What a selfish fool he was now. Kaven was right: to go back was dangerous and stupid. He'd be putting every dragon in every clan in danger by chancing the other dragon warriors killing him. The best thing to do for Elina, for everyone, was to cross the meadow and stay far away from others.\n\nHe curled back into a circle, and soft grasses gave way to his weight, crackling as they made him sink deeply into them. Their seed-laden heads tickled the inside of his nostrils and made him sneeze. Blasted meadow! He changed position to spread out his weight more and cringed when the grass popped and crackled, giving away that he was here to anything with ears... including the phoenix. If it attacked while he slept, how could he notice it coming? It'd take two bogres to see over this grass, and lying down, his eyes were far below that height. Would the phoenix even come into the meadow?\n\nNo, no that was silly. Why would the phoenix come here when its favorite meal never went near it? He stretched out and forced his body to relax. The phoenix had fewer reasons to come here than a dragon, so it wouldn't.\n\nBut the grass seemed to retain the scent of sunlight\u2014of fire. They hissed and rattled in the wind, then suddenly increased their speed with the wind, then slowed down again. Valfredo's heart pounded faster with them, but didn't slow down. What if the grasses sensed the phoenix coming? They were taller and more numerous than he'd ever seen before; who was to say they wouldn't react to its arrival? They tickled his nose, scratched at his eyes, and grabbed his twitching tail to keep it from moving freely. They knew something he didn't know... the grass was whispering to him, warning him to hide.\n\nValfredo leaped up and looked around, searching for anything large and fire-colored. But the sky was calm with no sign of a large bird shading the beautiful moonlight. The Western Tri-stars blinked at him, urging him to come. With a sigh, he walked toward them. If he couldn't sleep, he might as well continue the journey."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The sun peeked over the horizon behind him, bringing with its light a great big, unwelcome yawn from Valfredo. \"I'm not tired,\" he told his mouth. \"I've gone many nights without sleep, and this one was no different.\"\n\nBut his mouth yawned again, and was quickly followed by his stomach complaining and legs begging to rest.\n\n\"Stop complaining, all of you! I will cross this bloody meadow, even if it kills me.\" After traveling for a whole day and night, the end couldn't be much farther. He trudged on, ignoring the bite of hunger and ache running through his muscles. Just a little longer, and he'll have all the food and rest he desired.\n\nBut what about the phoenix? The thought was clear in his mind, as if the fire's voice grew stronger with his weakness. You're so exposed with nothing but open sky and grass half your height. Haven't you noticed it hasn't gotten any taller? Where can you hide if the phoenix comes?\n\nValfredo looked around at the flat, gold-green meadow. He'd hoped the grass would continue to get taller and cover him, but it hadn't increased in height for hours, and there was no sign of the meadow ending. There were no mountains, no trees, no caves\u2014not even valleys or ravines to hide in. Just open sky and grass too small to duck into. What if the phoenix did come? He had nowhere to go or hide before it saw him. What if there was something else that wasn't the phoenix, but was like the phoenix and ate dragons? If it lived in underground dens, it could hide in this meadow.\n\nThe grass nearby crackled, making him jump. Was it an underground phoenix? Then he saw the long, winding shimmer in the grass, and grinned. That wasn't a phoenix\u2014it was food! And it was too foolish to hide well, making it an easy kill. The giant snake circled him, moving so quickly its camouflage made it look more like a green-gold blur than grass. Valfredo followed the line with his eyes until he spotted the head.\n\nThe snake squeezed its body suddenly in an attempt to grab him, but Valfredo leaped out of the circle and dove at the snake's head. Then he dug into it with his talons and ripped out its brain. The snake's body twisted and thrashed around for several minutes before finally going limp enough to eat. He ripped off some of the skin and dug into the flesh with his teeth. But instead of tasting juicy, tender meat, he tasted moist, tough flesh that sat too close to the bone. Backing away, he looked closer at the body.\n\nThe snake's backbone was noticeably pointed, emphasizing how thin the body was, and the scales looked dry and pale. This snake hadn't eaten for a long, long time. Valfredo's heart sank. If a giant snake couldn't survive the meadow, did he stand a chance? Maybe he should turn back now before it was too late.\n\nBut if he did that, Kaven would hear about him, or another clan's warriors would attack. He'd be tempted to find Elina, and then the fire would come out and kill her.\n\nNo, he was going to cross this blasted meadow, and he was going to find a way to destroy the white fire, even if it kill\u2014almost killed him. He ate his fill of the snake, then settled down for some rest.\n\nAfter a fitful and short sleep, Valfredo ate more of the snake, which was too chewy and dry to be considered a decent meal, and continued his mission. The sun began to set, and one by one the stars showed themselves twinkling in the dark black sky. The moon was no longer full, but still shone brightly enough to cover the world in a calming glow. The meadow smelled crisp and full of nothingness, yet of life. Thousands of insects began their nightly chirps that mixed together to make a pleasant sound despite how loud it was. Various small prey skittered through the grasses so quietly even he almost couldn't hear them, except when they chewed on crunchy insects or grass. A particularly large, black cricket sang and leaped from one blade of grass to another, nearly falling over with every leap as it worked slowly toward some unknown goal.\n\nValfredo laughed. \"Hey, Kaven, come look at this,\" he called, but then remembered he was alone in this meadow of grass and tiny prey and endless dark sky. He looked up at the moon in big black emptiness. Could it talk to the stars? Did it play with the sun? Or was it alone and cold up there, away from the warmth of love and light?\n\n\"Are you happy, bright moon? Are you delighted with your power, or is it a curse?\" he asked, half expecting an answer. If only it could take away the phoenix fire within him, perhaps they could become friends. With a sigh, he took to the air and continued the long journey."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Hunger panged at his stomach, making it twist and growl.\n\n\"Easy, stomach, easy. It's only been three days since your last meal.\" A pitiful meal, but a meal. Maybe if that snake had been more moist, his tongue wouldn't feel so dry now. Just one juicy deer would be enough. Just one! But every time he managed to find one, it'd disappear into the bloody tall grass, and no amount of pouncing could catch it. He flew higher and looked around in every direction. Nothing but sky and grass could be seen.\n\n\"Even Great Meadow has to end sometime,\" he mumbled, and was disappointed to hear his own voice betray him with uncertainty. Too exhausted to continue, he flew down to the ground and watched the sun set, then settled in for some sleep. Before his eyes were closed, the insects began their nighttime chorus and the mice and rats stirred out of their holes. One particularly large rat scurried over his claw, and he snapped at it, but it was too small and escaped. He lay his head back down with a huff. It would've been too small to do any good anyway.\n\nThe sounds of tiny prey and insects moving about in the grass filled his ears, seeming to get louder and louder with every passing minute. Groaning, he buried his head under a wing, but it didn't even faze the noise. It just kept going, breaking through his hungry mind and making sleep impossible. All he could think about was food, how if he was the size of a hatchling, he might be able to catch and eat those rats and be full, or if he were a fledgling again, he could make a small meal from a fox. But everything now was too small, too small to bother trying and too small to start quenching his hunger and thirst even if he did catch them.\n\nGrass crackled loudly nearby in a rhythm suggesting deer. Valfredo uncovered his head and listened more carefully. There wasn't just one deer\u2014it was a herd! He counted at least five, and close by, near his tail. Slowly, carefully, he shifted to turn and face them for a pounce, but the grass snapped and crackled and before he was even halfway turned, the deer bounded off.\n\n\"No!\" He raced after them, but the noise he made in the grass far exceeded what they made, and he lost their sounds. He stopped running to listen and sniff for them, but they made no sound. Closing his eyes, he sniffed deeper\u2014and caught their scent just a couple lengths away. Should he fly up and dive on them? No, he'd never be able to spot them through the grass. His only hope was to catch them on the ground. He sniffed a few more times until he was sure where they were, then pounced.\n\nBut the grass had fooled him, and he missed with the initial leap, giving them time to scatter. Valfredo desperately chased one, but the grass barely moved where the deer ran, making it difficult to keep an eye on it. The deer disappeared, and the grass waved worthlessly in the wind, covering up what little trail there should've been.\n\n\"Curses!\" he hissed. \"This bloody meadow's trying to starve me to death. But you won't defeat me, meadow. You will not defeat me!\"\n\nHe let out the loudest, fiercest roar he could muster. \"I WILL DEFEAT YOU.\" The ground trembled under his wrath, and the world grew silent. Even the insects felt his aggression and quieted.\n\nThe hot anger melted into exhaustion, and he collapsed. \"I will defeat you. I will find your end.\"\n\nBefore resting his head, he carefully searched the sky in every direction. No phoenix, not yet. But it would come. It would come if he stayed here too long, and when it did, no matter how high he flew or how low he crouched, he wouldn't be safe.\n\n\"I will find the end.\" He lay his head down, but didn't dare close his eyes. Maybe if he saw the phoenix first, he could outfly it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Nine days. He'd been walking and flying in this endless meadow for nine long days and eight long nights. Valfredo looked around, but still no end was in sight. He didn't have enough energy left for flying, not enough desire left to fly. If he flew, the phoenix would see him sooner, and the deer would hide from him better. It was wiser to walk. It was safer. He glanced around again. Still no phoenix. Still no water. The sun was hot today, keeping the prey in their dens and hidden places. His claw fell into some mud, the second mud he'd found since coming to the meadow. But that was all it was: mud. Nothing to drink.\n\nThe fire in his organ burned sharper every day, and its voice had become impossible to ignore. You're going to die, it said, and I'll finally be free to eat you and grow like my father.\n\n\"You shut up! I will not die! I won't let you eat me, and I especially won't let you eat Elina!\"\n\nWho said anything about Elina?\n\n\"I said shut up!\"\n\n\"Who are you talking to?\"\n\nValfredo whirled around to find a large, dark red and brown warrior who held his head high with pride and confidence. His muscles were toned from use, making his lithe body look powerful.\n\nWait, Valfredo knew this dragon from somewhere... from long ago. From his clan? It was... \"Father!\" Tingles of excitement burst through his scales, and his heart ached to nuzzle Father and feel his warm breath. But Valfredo's body was stiff and wouldn't move.\n\n\"I can't believe you're here! We have so much to talk about!\" A sudden feeling of dread and pain hit his chest. How could Father be alive? \"How\u2014how did you escape? Why aren't you dead?\"\n\nFather cocked his head\u2014his clean, strong, not bloody or burned head. He'd completely healed, and once again had four legs and two wings and his long, powerful tail. There wasn't a single burned scale on him. \"What do you mean why aren't I dead? I was never dead.\"\n\n\"Y-you weren't? Then why didn't you look for me? Why didn't you help us?\"\n\n\"I was with the rest of the clan. Your friends have been asking for you. They want you to play with them, and your mother demands you clean yourself before eating your meal today. Look at you, you're filthy!\"\n\nWarm joy surged through his body, making his heart leap and eyes tear. \"Mother's alive?\" The words barely squeaked out, sounding more like sobs than speech. \"And everyone? But how?\"\n\n\"Come. I'll show you.\" Father bounded away, seemingly unimpeded by the long grasses. But of course they couldn't stop him; he was the greatest warrior that ever lived.\n\n\"Father, wait for me!\" Valfredo raced after him, but couldn't manage to get any closer. \"Father, slow down!\" He took to the air, flying just over the grass so he wouldn't lose Father, but still Father was faster, still he was uncatchable.\n\nStop! The phoenix fire flared in his stomach.\n\nValfredo's body seized, forcing him to land with a crash. \"What'd you do that for? Stupid fire.\" He stood and saw Father watching him in the distance, waiting for him to follow. He opened his wings and took flight again, and again the fire flared inside him and forced him to the ground.\n\n\"Stop doing that!\"\n\nLook harder.\n\n\"Don't you think I'd know my own father? Now stop flaring up and let me catch him!\"\n\nThe fire burbled inside him, readying another burst.\n\n\"Fine, if you won't stop flaring when I fly, I'll just run.\"\n\nBut his legs only walked. Even they didn't want to listen to him. Father, in his kindness, also only walked.\n\nThat's not your father.\n\n\"Yes he is,\" he growled.\n\nIt's a hallucination. Why would your father stay so far ahead of you? Why wouldn't he nuzzle you and lick your face? Why would he act so casually after so many years of separation?\n\nValfredo slowed his pace, and finally stopped. Father stopped and stared back at him. But only stared. No urging, no coming to him to see what was wrong, no flight. Valfredo's heart fell into his stomach. It wasn't Father. It was never Father. He was losing his mind to the meadow. Father shimmered and morphed into Kaven. The kind eyes turned stern, the proud jaw changed to a scowl, and the welcoming stance became determined.\n\n\"Go, and complete your mission,\" he seemed to say. \"I didn't raise you to die in this place.\"\n\n\"Yes, Kaven,\" Valfredo said, forcing the words through a tightening throat. \"I'll make it. I'll defeat this meadow.\" He blinked away his tears and took a deep breath to calm his crying heart, then glanced at the sun to figure out where to go. The hallucination had led him the wrong direction, but at least he hadn't gotten far\u2014or so he assumed. It was impossible to tell distance in this vast emptiness. With a sigh and heavy heart, he turned and walked in the right direction."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Every minute felt like an hour, and every hour felt like a day. Strange sounds came into his hearing, sounds of bogres and their prey, sounds of them screaming and hiding in their caves. He kept his head down, eyes staring only at the ground right in front of him. The last thing he needed was to be tempted by another hallucination. There was no food here, no water. Even bogres couldn't survive in this meadow.\n\nMore hours passed until it was night. The air smelled of water, but this was Great Meadow; there was no water. He kept walking, keeping his head down. At least the bogre hallucinations had stopped. He saw the meadow for what it was: nothing but grass and tiny, uncatchable prey. There was nothing here to eat, nothing here to dri\u2014\n\nHis claw fell into some water. Valfredo looked up, almost too afraid to know if it was real. It was a river, a decent sized river as wide as three of his length. Was it real? Could it be real? Blinking, he looked around. The grass here was smaller by over half. How had he not noticed? Was he dreaming? Or hallucinating? Gingerly, he put his mouth to the water and took a drink. Cool wet soaked into his cracked, dry tongue.\n\nIt was real! Oh, glorious, cool, fresh, clean, beautiful water! Valfredo squealed with glee and ran in, gulping water as he swam around in it. Then he got out and shook himself off. He was almost through the meadow! The grass was shorter, and there was a river\u2014he was almost through it!\n\n\"I'm not letting you out of my sight, life saver,\" he told the river. But should he follow it upstream, or downstream? Did it matter which way he went?\n\nNo, as long as he had it beside him, he didn't care if he went the wrong direction. If it started to end, he only had to follow it back. Valfredo smiled at the river, then held his breath. Standing on the other side was a large deer. It stared at him, fear in its eyes and uncertainty in its posture. He readied himself, and leaped. The deer took off running, but Valfredo was faster on his wings and the grass was short enough he could actually find it. With one quick dive, he caught and killed it, and in just a few bites it was sitting in his stomach.\n\nBeautiful, short grass! Wonderful, quenching river! He'd fly too high for deer to see and follow the river upstream. If he was lucky, he'd have a full stomach by the end of tonight and keep it full to the end of the meadow. And once he found the end of Great Meadow, he'd catch himself a fat, juicy ogre or two and eat until he was sick. Marvelous! With a laugh of joy, he flew high into the sky and watched the ground for deer while making his way upstream."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "After sunrise, a nap, and three delicious deer, Valfredo saw something grey and quite large in the distance. It looked like a giant rock in a strange shape, and it stood out in the open meadow by itself, as if a dragon clan had placed it there. A tingle of excitement raced snout to tailtip, and he flapped with increased speed. It looked like a mountain, in a way. It was definitely made of rock, but the shape was stranger the closer he came to it. Four tall, round parts sat at every corner of the rock's very straight, smooth-looking sides, and there seemed to be tiny, perfectly straight lines crisscrossing through it and creating a bunch of rectangles.\n\nThen he noticed the prey surrounding it\u2014bogre prey, and bogres with them. Ohh, this was a bogre nest. Valfredo increased his distance from the ground to be out of their sight. Surrounding the nest... mountain... thing were the usual meadow grasses that always surrounded their nesting grounds\u2014or rather what was left after they'd gathered the grass into their nests. There were also many more prey and bogres than he'd ever seen in a bogre nesting ground. And the colors! Bogre furs of green, purple, white, blue, and shades of every color danced in rows on vines, and decorating the sides of the mountain were large, colorful, rectangular fur-like things much too large for bogres to put on.\n\nThe plain-colored bogres looked very busy doing various tasks, while the more colorful ones just stood around looking pretty. And they were pretty with all those bright colors. One female especially had blue body fur exactly the color of Elina, and the long, black fur on top of her head reminded him of Elina's black, loving eyes.\n\nBut she wasn't Elina; she shared her color, but she wasn't Elina. His heart clenched. He still wanted that bogre. He wanted to play with her and feed her and love her as he did Elina. He wanted her to look at him and smile, and he wanted to watch her eyes sparkle. But he was a dragon, and she was only a bogre. What use would he have for her other than a bony meal?\n\nThen again... if bogres could take care of prey and feed them, why couldn't a dragon? Sure, she'd be frightened at first, but then she'd get used to him and enjoy living with him, as the bogres' prey did with them. He grinned and watched her twirl around, making her blue fur flare beautifully. He wanted her, and he was going to have her.\n\nDiving, he aimed straight at her, reaching her before the bogres had time to notice him and react. Carefully, but swiftly, he scooped her up and flew back into the open sky. She screamed in his claws, and a bugling sound came from the bogre mountain, but they were too late in their reactions; their weapons couldn't reach him. Now all he had to do was find a cave far away from them. The bogres chased after him on the large, long-furred prey. The female gasped for breath, and he looked down at her. She was clutching her head and looking dazed. For a moment he wondered what was wrong. Then he realized bogres were ground prey and might have difficulty breathing in the thin air he was flying in. He'd have to stay closer to the ground, maybe just a few dragon-lengths... though that made finding a way out of the meadow more\u2014\n\nWas that a mountain range? He turned and flew toward it, looking more carefully. It was definitely a mountain range\u2014freedom! They were only half a day away at casual speed.\n\nSomething hit his finger's scale. Did she just try to bite him? He looked down and found her trying to pierce him with a small weapon similar to the one he had explored, but it wasn't made from a dragon's horn and only tickled. He chuckled. She was lively enough to be interesting, at least."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "It was nearly nightfall when he found a suitable cave with plenty of food and water nearby\u2014it even had a waterfall flowing next to it, which was something he'd always wanted. There was something about the sound of cascading water he found soothing. Perhaps, he thought, it would even soothe his bogre. He set her down inside the cave, being careful not to let her tumble out of his claws and break her neck.\n\nShe sat there with eyes wide and staring blankly as her head turned slowly this way and that. Then she saw the cave opening, and before he could blink, she'd leaped up and run to it. When she reached the end of the ledge outside, she squeaked and stopped, waved her arms wildly, and fell backward onto her rear. Then she got up and ran to the wall, frantically searching it with her hands. Relief crossed her face, and she ducked into a small hole.\n\nValfredo laughed. Her antics were going to be more amusing than mating birds. But she wouldn't live long without food, and he wasn't going to make her be hungry. He opened his wings to start a hunting flight, but instead of flapping, they stretched out long and far and lead into an uncontrollable full-body stretch, followed by a long, wide-open yawn. Maybe he should sleep tonight and hunt tomorrow.\n\n\"Good night, my little bogre,\" he said to her hole. \"I'll catch you some food in the morning.\" Lying down to sleep, his chest swelled with warm excitement. He had his very own bogre to keep, and, with time, she would be happy to live with him. The pungent scent of her fear would become the precious aroma of happiness, and he would be the reason for that happiness. She'd never worry about being hungry or getting eaten, because he'd feed her all the food her stomach could handle and make sure no danger went near her. He would never be mean to her, and he would never eat her\u2014ever. He'd have a family, even if it was just a little female bogre.\n\nWith a contented sigh, Valfredo closed his eyes and let sleep come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Sunlight filtered dimly through his eyelids and woke him. His mouth opened into a wide yawn, and his rested limbs pushed into a long, satisfying stretch. The sun bade him to get up, but his eyes didn't want to open, and they were winning the argument. The warm sunlight added to the soothing sounds of the waterfall, and he wanted to lay there and enjoy it all.\n\nThen he smelled her sitting beside the hole. His bogre. How could he have forgotten about her? Was she watching him? Her fear was strong, but not panicked. He peeked an eye open enough to see with but not enough for her to notice. She flinched and turned her head, ready to jump back into the hole, but when he didn't move, she relaxed a little. Though pungent fear surrounded her, her face was full of curiosity, and after only a short time, she started creeping up to him.\n\nExcitement tingled through him, and he quickly musked it. A dragon's emotions were powerful even without impressions, and he didn't want to affect her natural emotional state. If she was going to overcome the fear, he had to let it happen on her time.\n\nHer eyes widened with every step, and as she drew nearer, her body began to shake. The cave reeked of fear, but she still crept closer. When she was finally within reach, she tentatively stretched out her arm and touched him with the tips of her fingers. Then she jerked back and stared at his face.\n\nHe kept his breathing steady and made sure his eye didn't move, along with the rest of his body. It wasn't easy with an itch starting on his tail, but he was determined not to frighten her any more than his presence already had.\n\nShe cautiously reached out and touched him again, this time without jerking back and instead slowly shifting forward to put her entire hand on him.\n\nThe itch clawed at his flesh, feeling like a thousand little pricks. Valfredo concentrated on keeping his tail from twitching.\n\nThe bogre breathed out, and some of the fear vanished.\n\nWas that admiration on her face? Did bogres feel admiration?\n\nHis tailtip twitched, and he forced it still. No prey had as many expressions or feelings as dragons, but bogres had more than the normal amount.\n\nThe little pricks grew stronger, making it all but impossible to hold his tail still. Was it possible bogres did have as many expressions as dragons? If that was true, it could mean they were smart, and he could teach his little bogre some tricks, and WOULD THAT ITCH JUST GO AWAY.\n\nValfredo whipped around and chewed the itch, ignoring the bogre's startled shriek. Finally, the loose scale came off and he swallowed it. Then he groaned and lay back down. Stupid itch. It made him scare the little bogre right back into her hole, where her heart beat faster than a rabbit's and her breathing was quite loud, though it sounded like she was trying to muffle it.\n\nUnless... that wasn't just breathing. He rolled onto his belly and listened. It sounded more like crying. Muffled, heavy crying. Had he frightened her that much? Bones, she was sensitive. No, wait, she wasn't crying or sensitive; those were dragon emotions. But then why was she crying? His heart ached for her to stop. He didn't mean to terrify her.\n\nLivers! \"Stop thinking of her as a dragon,\" he growled to himself. She was just a bogre; she didn't understand things or think like a dragon did.\n\nBut her crying\u2014or whatever she was doing that sounded like crying\u2014made his heart hurt for her. Sighing, he stood up and shook himself. There was no point in trying to rest until she calmed down. Come to think of it, he hadn't gotten her food yet. Maybe that was what was upsetting her. He sniffed the air, taking in the fresh, crisp scent of the waterfall. Then he turned for a last look at the bogre's hole, but she was too far in for him to see.\n\nWith all that crying, she was going to get thirsty. The stream inside the cave wasn't too far from her hole and should be visible even with her poor eyesight. Satisfied the little bogre wouldn't die of thirst while he was gone, he stepped off the ledge and glided over the trees.\n\nIt was the densest forest he'd ever seen. The trees grew near each other and stretched their branches like a mother bird spreading her wings to keep him from seeing vulnerable young underneath. It was irritating. He just wanted to eat and get back to the bogre.\n\nHmm, calling her \"the bogre\" was beginning to sound wrong. It simply didn't suit her anymore, but what else could he call her? She was a female and she was a bogre, nothing more and nothing less.\n\nThe trees opened to reveal a small lake. Valfredo carefully landed on the treetops and spread his wings to help balance his weight among as many trees as possible. Hopefully soon some decent prey would come to drink.\n\nAs he waited, he pondered the problem of his bogre. What she needed was a name. But what kind of name would suit a bogre? Should he give her a new name, or name her after a prey, or perhaps a bird or insect? Her eyes were certainly as large as a deer when she was afraid, but she smelled and looked nothing like them. Her heart was like a rabbit's, always fast... though not during that small moment of calmness when she had her palm on him. Maybe he should name her after what she was instead, like Curious or Fearful or Colorful.\n\nHe sighed. Nothing sounded right. He'd have to wait for a name to inspire him. In the meantime he needed to focus on finding food, and the lake wasn't providing any. He hadn't expected it to be so difficult to find food in so green a place, but the trees were so dense, it was impossible to dive onto prey or even walk through the forest. They needed to be thinned, but that would take years and he needed food now.\n\nHe was just going to have to find an opening or another place to hunt, further from the cave. But what if the bogre tried to climb down and fell? He'd never get there in time to catch her. Maybe he could block the entrance?\n\nAh, there was an opening in the trees near the river, and some deer were eating there. Maybe if he waited, an ogre would come to eat. Finding an updraft, he circled high overhead. Hunger pulled at his stomach. That ogre had better show up soon, or he was going to be stuck with deer, which hardly felt worth the effort. Only an ogre would moisten his drying scales, and he did not want another itch to frighten his bogre away. But what if this part of the world didn't have ogres? What if all it had were deer and griffins? Bleh! They were fine to make up most meals, but a dragon needed to eat at least one ogre a week to stay healthy... and sane. Who would want to eat deer all the time?\n\nIt seemed like hours passed before a large ogre tromped out of the forest. The deer startled and jumped, but didn't run. They watched the ogre, and when it showed no sign of going after them, they resumed their eating.\n\nValfredo dove at the ogre and whipped open his wings just before landing on it. The ogre died with a satisfying crack, and he leaped at the running deer to grab one in his jaws. The hot blood trickled onto his tongue and tasted delicious, but he wanted to make sure the bogre got plenty, so he held the prey carefully to make sure his teeth didn't pierce more holes than necessary to kill and hold onto it. Picking up the ogre carcass with his claws, he flew to the cave and dropped the prizes, the deer next to the bogre's hole. The ogre was just what he craved: juicy and delicious with plenty of fat.\n\nAfter finishing the meal, he flew down to the river and took a nice, long drink, then settled down on the quiet, short green grass for a nap. With him being far away from the bogre, she should feel safe enough to eat. Of course, that meant he couldn't watch her, but if she didn't eat, she'd die, and then what good would she be? So with a yawn and a hope she'd be less fearful after a meal, Valfredo closed his eyes and dreamed away the afternoon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "When he awoke that evening, he found the deer where he'd left it, untouched. With a huff he looked to the bogre's cave. Stubborn female. He knew she was hungry, she had to be, and bogres liked deer. He had watched them drag deer carcasses to their nests several times. Was there something wrong with this one? It smelled fine, not sick or starving, and its fur looked healthy. It didn't have all its blood, but most of the carcasses the bogres had brought home didn't have much blood.\n\nThen again, those were different bogres. Maybe this one required more blood. Maybe she didn't like deer without it. He wrinkled his snout and frowned. Or maybe she was just being picky. If he let her act out now, she'd never stop. With a sigh, he lay down by the stream and closed his eyes to imitate sleeping. When she got hungry enough, she'd eat the deer. In the meantime, he'd force her to overcome her fear of him... unless he'd frightened her too much with that itch.\n\nWould she be too afraid to touch him again? The last thing he wanted was a bogre who wasn't willing to try again. She'd had enough spunk when he first grabbed her; why wouldn't she still have it? He just needed to be patient. She'd come out when she was ready."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "It was a long, boring wait until she finally peeked out of the hole and stared at Valfredo. A tickle ran through his scales. She had a cute little face with deep brown eyes that were almost as beautiful as a dragon's.\n\nThe bogre slowly stepped out of the hole, watching him intently. She looked at the deer and wrinkled her nose, then scanned the area on either side of him. The only opening to the stream he'd left was near his head. Frowning, she walked over, stopping every few steps. When she was within arms' reach of his snout, she peered at him, head cocked, and the pungent scent of fear dissipated.\n\nExcitement flared in his chest and spread to every muscle, making it difficult to keep his breathing steady and even. Was she going to touch him? What was she thinking? Was she merely staring at the fly on his nose? Did bogres eat flies?\n\nShe reached out her hand, and he almost held his breath with anticipation. The fly buzzed around her, but she didn't try to catch it, choosing instead to watch it land further up his snout out of her reach.\n\nHer eyes landed back on his nose and she took a step closer. His breath stuck, and she stopped moving and stared at his eyes, her fear returning. He forced his breath out\u2014smoothly, so she wouldn't startle. It seemed to work, as her muscles relaxed some and she slowly let out a deep breath to get rid of her fear. Then she pulled her shoulders back, held her head high, stepped forward, and touched his snout.\n\nShe was touching him! The bogre was touching him\u2014again. She was a brave little thing to touch a warrior who could kill her in one bite. She needed a name, a good name, not just some thoughtless name.\n\nHer hand moved around his snout, fingers tracing his scales and feeling their smoothness. A spark of awe started in her eyes, spreading into a full-on sparkle that made her little brown eyes resemble a dragon hatchling's. They even seemed to hold an intelligence beyond that of prey, making her face, though a different color, flatter, and without scales, look exactly like Elina's.\n\nPerhaps that was the name she needed. Elina, in honor of his sister. No, wait, it would be too strange calling a bogre by her name. What about Kina? It was similar enough to still honor Elina, but different. Yes, Kina, that would be her name. Kina. It sounded right.\n\nShe walked beside him now, running her hand on his scales, feeling him. A gentle smile spread from one cheek to the other, though her body trembled with fearful caution. Her nervous excitement both energized the air and held it back, showing astonishing control of her emotions.\n\nMore and more she seemed almost dragon. Perhaps she was an unusually intelligent bogre; she was certainly unusually pretty and brave. He'd expected it to take weeks or months for her to be happy living near him, but she was already enjoying it. Her skin wasn't as white anymore, either. Did bogre skin change color with mood? He'd never noticed it when he watched them before. Then again, he never watched them this closely before. Why hadn't any dragons thought of this idea? It was wonderful to have his own little bogre around. Maybe some day, when he killed the white fire, he'd find a mate and get her a bogre, too.\n\nKina walked back to his head and reached up to touch the horn closest to her. She whispered a sound that, judging by her expression, would've been a compliment if bogres could talk. It was so tempting to raise his head in pride, but if he did that, he'd frighten her right back into the hole... or off the cliff. They were awfully close to it. Maybe he should put a large log in front of it so she wouldn't accidentally fall off.\n\nShe moved next to his wing\u2014ah! She touched it! His whole body tingled with excitement, taking all his strength to keep his breathing steady and not move. Kina ran her fingers across his wing, feeling every bit she could reach. Her breath kept catching, and she had to force it out several times, making mumbling sounds as she did so. How he wished she could talk!\n\nThe fly left his snout and buzzed around Kina's head. She jerked away, then frowned and waved at it until it looped around her and buzzed back to his nose\u2014right as he breathed in. A tiny sloop and tickle deep within his snout proved he'd breathed it in. The tickle burst throughout his nose, getting stronger until he couldn't hold it in any more.\n\n\"Ah-choo!\" The sneeze echoed off the cave walls and brought a full-body twitch, but the tickle wasn't gone yet. His nose wrinkled, and before he could stop them, two more sneezes came, sending his body into two uncontrollable, yet strangely satisfying convulsions.\n\nKina yipped and jumped back with each sneeze, and when they stopped, she raced back into her little hole and sent waves of terror into the cave.\n\nCurses! Why did the stupid fly have to be so brainless? Why hadn't he watched it more carefully so he wouldn't breathe it in? With a sigh, he stood and shook out the feeling of twitching muscles. If he couldn't enjoy her company for a while, he may as well find food she'd eat. A bogre that starved to death wouldn't bring much fun. He stretched his wings and glided down to the small meadow by the river.\n\nPerhaps she was more of a grass eater. Bogres spent an awful lot of time gathering and storing grass. Most of it they seemed to feed to their prey, but they must eat some of the grass themselves, or else why would they bother to grow so much of it? Raking his talons through the grass, Valfredo frowned. How was he going to gather it? Dragons weren't built to eat or collect grass. He snapped at it, but the few bits he did break off were impossible to get out of his mouth, and there was no way Kina was going to reach into his mouth to grab her food. There had to be another way. He didn't want to frighten her by flying her down here, but what could he do? It was getting dark rapidly. He didn't have much time before she went to sleep.\n\nMaybe if he... yes, that was it. He dug a talon into the ground and lifted a large clump of grass with the dirt still attached and took it back to the cave. Then he ate the deer and placed the clump where it used to be. Now Kina had plenty of fresh food to eat, though he'd have to keep an eye on it to make sure she didn't run low.\n\nThe sun left the horizon, replaced by the moon. He lay in front of the cave, well stretched so Kina wouldn't accidentally fall off in the dark. Tomorrow he'd have to find a good tree to put in front. Not so big it'd block her light or get in his way, but large enough to alert her when she got too close to the edge without tripping on it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "She hadn't eaten. All the grass was still there exactly as it was last night. Didn't bogres eat every day? Well, she'd get hungry soon enough. Valfredo sniffed the hole to confirm she was still there, then flipped down to the base of the waterfall. The cool water felt good pouring over his head, like a pounding rain that didn't lead to messy flooding. He lifted his foreclaws and placed them back down, feeling the mud squash beneath them and ooze between his talons. Giddiness sparked through him, and he leaped to another part of the river and laughed at the thousands of tiny fish darting away. The mud here was a little firmer. Not as fun. He stomped back toward the waterfall, laughing at the feel and sound of his claws squashing through the mud.\n\nKaven would call him a fledgling for acting this way, but he didn't care. The waterfall called to him, begging him to play in it, and he wanted to feel it\u2014not just on his head, neck, and chest, but on his entire body. Standing on his hindclaws, he grabbed the rocks behind the waterfall and leaned into the water. It poured all over him, washing with a fury in an attempt to wash away his scales and not just the dirt on them. He laughed, then choked on the water rushing into his mouth, then coughed and laughed again.\n\nWhat would happen if he opened his wings? Could the water hurt them? He glanced around and spotted mudfern growing on the riverbank some distance away. With a grin, he spread his wings into the waterfall. It gushed over and around them, breaking on the front and flowing like air. What a strange feeling! Like a powerful gust of wind that took him nowhere. He snapped at the water coming down and shook his wings. Was it possible to fly up a waterfall? Leaping as high as he could, he flapped his wings... and tumbled back down into the river. He stood up and prepared for another try.\n\nThe light sound of a voice laughing caught his ear, and he looked up at the cave. Kina stood on the ledge with a hand covering her mouth. Her eyes were sparkling, and he was sure she was smiling behind her hand.\n\nThen she noticed he was looking at her and the sparkle left her eyes as her fear began to return.\n\n\"Hello,\" he chirped. Kaven would have laughed if he'd heard Valfredo use a hatchling's chirp, but it was the only thing he could think of that might not frighten her.\n\nKina removed her hand from her mouth and stared at him. There was some fear, but not much. Mostly she seemed... curious. She slowly waved her hand at him, then held it to her chest.\n\nWhat an odd gesture. He looked at his foreclaw, then at her, then waved it back at her.\n\nHer eyes grew wide and she stepped back. Had he frightened her? She didn't smell frightened. She waved again, this time more enthusiastically.\n\nHe raised an eyeridge and waved back.\n\nShe grinned and slapped her hands together, making a loud snapping sound.\n\nHe looked down. How could he do that? He had to use at least one of his foreclaws to support himself. What if... ah, yes. He shoved himself up onto his hindclaws and quickly slapped his foreclaws together before replacing them under himself for the landing.\n\nHer eyes sparkled again as she giggled. Was this some sort of bogre game? He vaguely remembered doing something like this when he was a hatchling, trying to copy everything the leader of the game did. Did she think he was a hatchling? Maybe she would copy him if he did something first. He cocked his head, and she copied.\n\nIt was a game. They were playing a game! A bogre and a dragon, playing! Oh, this was fun! He stamped his feet, and she stamped hers. He chuckled. She was cute, like a little hatchling female. He twirled in a circle.\n\nShe twirled, then grabbed the fur around her legs and pulled it out on both sides while lowering herself. With a grin, she stood back up and released the fur. The motion was very smooth and quick, obviously something she'd done many times before.\n\nBut it wasn't something he could copy\u2014he didn't have fur. So instead, he raised his head and snorted. What would a bogre snort sound like?\n\nBut she didn't snort\u2014she giggled and stuck out her tongue.\n\nMaybe she'd gotten bored of the game. What else could they do together? Kina couldn't hunt or fly, and he couldn't cut grass or make tree caves. Hmm, perhaps he should get another female to keep her company. They could laugh and play and eat together all they wanted. After all, bogres never lived alone.\n\nBut what if she didn't get along with the other bogre? What if the other bogre killed her? No, he wasn't going to chance it. She was going to have to get used to a dragon being her only company, at least for a while. With that problem solved, it was time for her first lesson. Stepping out of the water, he found a nice, straight stick and flew it into the cave. Kina yipped and jerked toward the hole, but he was in the way and she froze.\n\nHe placed the stick down and looked around for a sharp rock. When he didn't find one, he scratched at the cave wall until just the right piece fell. Then with careful\u2014and frustratingly slow\u2014movement, he scooted the piece of rock to the tip of the stick so it looked like one of the weapons the bogres had used on him. Then he took another piece of rock and scratched at it until it resembled the weapon she had used on him.\n\nNow he needed a picture of a bogre. He could just carve one into the floor, but that'd make the floor ugly, and rock couldn't heal. The firmer river mud might work, but it'd take several trips to gather enough of it. He cocked his head at Kina, then rumbled gently and impressed calm.\n\n\"Stay right there,\" he said. Being careful to move slowly so she wouldn't startle, he opened his wings and glided down to the river where the mud was firmer. His foreclaws dug into it easily, and in only a short time, he'd made enough trips to have a big pile of reddish-orange mud that seemed to repel the water to keep its substance. Kina was a good female and had obeyed him, standing in place with her forehead furrowed. Valfredo spread the mud into a thick circle, then carved a picture of a bogre into it. It was a pathetic excuse of a picture, with muddy water rolling into the carved lines to blur the image, but it would have to do.\n\nOnce he moved aside so Kina could see the picture, she gasped, and her eyes seemed to double.\n\nHe cocked his head at her. What was so shocking about a picture? Were bogres unable to make them? Well, shock or no shock, he would teach her the lesson. He tapped the picture with his talon, then pointed to her. Then he pointed to the makeshift weapons and shook his head.\n\n\"You will not try to use these on me,\" he said with a gentle rumble. \"They won't work and will only make me angry.\"\n\nShe stared at him with wide eyes and a gaping jaw. Her skin went pale again.\n\nHad he frightened her? Was his rumble too loud? It was as gentle as he could make it, but considering how much stronger he was than her, maybe it was still too much. Should he impress calm again? Ugh! If he had to do that all the time, he'd go crazy. Maybe if he tried without speaking...\n\nHe pointed to the weapons again, then to her and shook his head.\n\nShe nodded, still wide-eyed and pale, mouth gaping. Then she closed her mouth, licked her lips, and made slow, shaky sounds with her mouth.\n\nDid that mean she understood him, or was it her attempt to calm herself? Valfredo sniffed her, but he neither smelled nor sensed fear, and her eyes and skin were returning to normal.\n\nShe repeated the sounds, a little louder and without the shakiness.\n\nIt was actually rather cute, like a little songbird making noise without any meaning. With a smile he lay down and watched her make her little sounds one more time. After the fourth attempt, she frowned and stared at him for a while before making sounds again. This time she made new sounds while pointing to herself and then to him.\n\nYes, you are mine, he thought, but refused to say aloud in case it'd frighten her again.\n\nShe took a deep breath and repeated the sounds and gestures. Then she did them again. And again. And again. Each time she made them with a little more emphasis.\n\nIf he didn't know any better, he'd think she was trying to talk to him. But bogres couldn't talk... right? Weren't they still stupid even though they convinced prey to live near them, and made meadows of specific grasses, and could kill dragons? Valfredo cocked his head and watched her more intently.\n\nExcitement fluttered into the air, and Kina repeated the sounds and gestures with more enthusiasm.\n\nThe excitement spurred a desire in him to accept her as smart, and he studied her face very carefully and gestured for her to repeat several times.\n\nThey were words. She was speaking to him! Bogres weren't stupid little ogres; they were small, fleshy dragons able to think and learn and love and hate\u2014and talk. A river of energy raced through his body, making his heart pound and body shiver snout to tail. He could talk to Kina!\n\nTaking a deep breath, he calmed himself and spoke very slowly so she might understand. \"You are a bogre, and I am a dragon.\"\n\nShe sat down, pointed to herself, and said something. It was short, like... like what? She repeated it, more slowly this time. Like a name? Was she telling him her name? Could he, perhaps, speak bogre?\n\nLying down and lowering his head to be at eye level with her, he stared at her mouth while she repeated her name again. The way her tongue moved was odd, but not so bad.\n\nHe attempted to speak her name in bogre. \"Jerankier.\"\n\nThat was not what she said. He tried again. \"Unakmnakithoph.\" He growled. That wasn't what she said either. Urging her to say it again, he watched her mouth with greater attention.\n\nShe obliged and said her name, slower and with more emphasis.\n\nHe urged her to do it again, and again, until she'd repeated herself four times while he practiced his tongue movement. Then he sat up, took a deep breath, and said her name.\n\nBut it was all in the growls and squeaks of dragonspeak, not the sharp, individual sounds of bogre. Kina shook her head, proving he hadn't said it right at all.\n\nBloody bogrespeak. If they were going to communicate, she'd have to learn dragon. It made much more sense. He cleared his throat and lowered his chin almost to the ground so she could see his tongue movements, then pointed to himself.\n\n\"Valfredo,\" he said, and repeated it more slowly several times.\n\nShe listened intently and practiced some rather pitiful sounding growls and hisses until she finally tried to say his name, but what came out was complete nonsense and without the lower pitch of dragon names.\n\n\"Um, no.\" He shook his head and repeated his name.\n\nTwelve more failed attempts frustrated her, and she gestured for him to try bogrespeak once again.\n\nHe sighed. This was going to take a while."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Kina stared at him with pitiful, hungry eyes. She hadn't eaten the deer and left the grass untouched for three days. Yet here she was acting like she was starving. Couldn't she just let him enjoy his griffin?\n\nMaybe bogres only ate griffins. No, that wasn't right. They ate those prey that lived near them, and deer, and lots of other prey besides griffins. But her clan might be different from the ones back home\u2014maybe her clan only ate griffins. Then why did they have the other prey he'd seen near other bogre nests? Bah! Was it really worth arguing with himself if she sat there looking so pitiful? He tore a chunk off the griffin and put it next to her.\n\nShe stared at it and licked her lips. Then she ripped out the feathers and looked around. Pointing at the large stick he'd brought in on their first day, she said something, supposedly asking for permission to use it for something.\n\nHe nodded. Maybe she'd do something entertaining.\n\nHurriedly, she took the stick and broke it in half, then tried to break it again, but she was too weak. After failing several more times, she threw down the halves and scowled.\n\nValfredo chuckled. Silly Kina hadn't even thought to ask him for more sticks. He teased her with a nudge and flew down to the trees. How many sticks did she want, and how large? Obviously short ones, but those were really hard to grab. Maybe if he got long, skinny ones, she could break them into whatever length she wanted. He'd have to be careful and make sure they were easy to break\u2014she was rather weak.\n\nIt took half the morning, but he finally found several long, thin sticks and branches that broke easily when he scratched them. The difficulty in picking them up without breaking them further made carrying them to the cave tricky, but at last he dropped them in front of Kina.\n\nGrinning with glee she immediately broke and arranged them in two piles, one larger than the other. Then she looked around, frowned, and asked him something.\n\nHe shrugged.\n\nShe pointed to her mouth and the smaller pile and asked again.\n\n\"You want to eat the sticks?\" Bogres ate sticks?\n\nShe frowned again and stared at the piles before her face brightened. Carefully, she picked a dry, orange leaf from one of the branches and put it to her open mouth. With swift movements, she moved the leaf from her mouth to the pile of sticks several times.\n\nOh. She wanted him to light it on fire. He shook his head. Even a small fireball would instantly ash the sticks and probably burn her as well.\n\nKina scowled at him, then started picking up small rocks and examining them before putting them back down.\n\nWhat in sun's light was she doing now? What did rocks have to do with fire?\n\nA squeal of joy erupted from her, and she scrambled back to the small pile, where she pulled out her little weapon. She set the tip of the weapon into the stick pile and hit the shiny part of it with the rock. A shower of tiny sparks flew from the contact point and landed everywhere.\n\nValfredo jumped back in surprise. She just made fire with a rock and stick. How was that even possible? Dragons made fire, lightning made fire, and the phoenix made fire, but rocks and sticks?\n\nShe hit the weapon again, and another shower of sparks came from it.\n\nAmazing! Why was she frowning? What was she doing now?\n\nTiny slivers slid off one of the sticks as she scraped it with her weapon. When there was a small pile, she hit the weapon with the rock again, this time over the pile she just made. Smoke rose from it, and she bent down and... breathed on it?\n\nA small flame popped out, and she carefully picked up the slivers and set them in the pile of sticks, then breathed on the fire. The flame grew larger and larger, until the sticks were well caught.\n\nGenius! No wonder bogres had found a way to kill giant snakes! Wait, if Kina could make fire like this, maybe she also knew how to kill fire. Maybe she could help him kill the phoenix fire. All he had to do was find a way to communicate with her and ask for suggestions. What was she doing now? Impaling the meat with a stick? What good would that\u2014why, in the stars, would she want to hold the meat over the fire.\n\nHe snorted, making her jump and look at him.\n\n\"You're wasting good food,\" he said, pointing to the meat. The fire's heat soaked into the once-perfect food and caused it to pop and drip bloody liquid down into the fire, which then hissed angrily.\n\nShe shrugged and continued holding the meat over the fire, adding more sticks when the fire got too low. When the food was thoroughly burned, she pulled it away from the fire, touched it, and jerked her hand away. Then she started breathing on it.\n\nWasn't she ever going to just eat? And why was she breathing on it again? Was it not hot enough for her?\n\nAfter some time she touched the meat again, and this time she eagerly started eating it.\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes. This ritual was going to become quite tiring."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Watching Kina play with the fire for the next four weeks grew very boring. Valfredo constantly had to gather more branches to feed it, until he got so tired of gathering, he just carried up whatever sticks were closest to the cave and tore the large ones to bits small enough for her to use. Not once did she destroy the fire. She only fed it to keep it going day and night so she could burn her meat on it or sleep by it. The acrid smoke only seemed to bother her when it blew into her face, but it preferred going into his nose and making him sneeze, which she frequently giggled at.\n\nValfredo dropped the day's worth of sticks into a pile and nudged Kina. \"Let's practice talking.\" Even though they hadn't gotten much better at communicating over the month, it was better than sitting down staring at a boring fire all day.\n\nBut she only shook her head, poked the fire, and sighed.\n\nHe nudged her again, but she ignored him. Irritation twinged in his heart, making his tailtip lash. Maybe an encouraging lie would cheer her up. Placing his snout right next to her, he said very gently. \"Oh, come on, your dragonspeech isn't that bad.\"\n\nFor a moment, it looked like she would cooperate, but his hopes were quickly dashed when she walked to the ledge of the cave and sat down to stare longingly over the forest... just as she had done every single day for the last week. The draining scent of depression flowed from her unendingly, making the already overcast day feel gloomy.\n\nValfredo flopped down with a huff. So much for that idea. How could he ask why she took off her fur to clean in the stream if she refused to practice communication? Sure, it was hard work and time consuming, but she was overreacting. Already, he understood a few basic bogre words, and she was... okay, she couldn't get any dragonspeech right. She always missed the high and low pitches, and no matter how many times he said the word \"leaf,\" she could never tell it apart from the word \"food.\" But that wasn't enough reason to get stubborn and depressed. Ugh! Why was she acting so bloody exasperating?\n\nAll day, Kina sat on the edge of the cliff and stared into the horizon, refusing to eat or drink or even cry.\n\nValfredo almost wished she'd jump off and splat on the rocks below. At least then he could watch meat-eating prey fight over her bones. An image of them ripping apart her body came, bringing with it a shudder that ran snout to tail. No, he wouldn't wish that on her. She was his bogre, and he liked her... even if she was irritating.\n\nFinally, when evening came, she moved away from the cliff and piled rocks into four groups connecting to one big pile. She pointed to herself then to the rocks.\n\nHe snarled and turned away. It was bad enough having to hunt down sticks for her to burn, he was not going to start fetching her rocks. Naturally, she started fussing and stamping her foot in an attempt to get his attention. Whatever she was trying to say, he wasn't interested.\n\nShe marched around to his face and pointed to the rock pile.\n\nGrowling, he pushed her away and curled his body into a tight circle. When she tried to climb him, he twitched to knock her off. Irritated chattering followed, which he promptly ignored.\n\nThen a rock hit him. He lifted his head a little and glanced at her. She stood by the rock pile glaring at him and holding another rock ready to be thrown. He yawned and tucked his head again, closing his eyes.\n\nKina fussed and fumed behind him, hitting him with fisted hands and rocks before finally growing silent.\n\nValfredo breathed a sigh of relief. With all of that out of the way, maybe she'd calm down and start working with him again. Perhaps tomorrow he'd even take her down to the river\u2014without letting her near the forest. He'd never be able to catch her again if she darted in there.\n\nWhat was that scraping sound? It sounded like\u2014no! He whipped around and looked over the cliff's edge. She was there, a bogre-length down and barely holding on with her fingers while desperately trying to find a foothold.\n\n\"Foolish bogre!\" Valfredo roared as he plucked her off the cliff. \"What a stupid thing to do!\"\n\nKina cowered down and threw her hands to her ears.\n\nShe was trying to ignore him! Well, if she was going to act like a young, he was going to treat her like one. With a snarl, he gave her a disciplinary swat. \"You will listen! I chose this cave specifically because bogres can't climb it. Did you want to get yourself killed? DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!\" Then he marched to the cave entrance and lay down so she couldn't try to sneak away again.\n\nStupid, foolish female. He never should've trusted her. Never! Once she was in her hole, he'd block it with the largest boulder he could find. Foolish female! Foolish! He was never going to trust her again. When she woke up, he would\u2014\n\nWait, why was she asleep? He lifted his head for a better look. She lay crumpled against the wall in an awkward position, but there was no sign of blood or injury, and he hadn't hit her that hard. But then why was she asleep? Crawling on his belly, he moved next to her and gave her a poke, but she didn't move. Her breathing sounded right, yet the air around her smelled wrong... and of blood. He examined her more closely and found blood coming from her head. He sniffed again, but other than the blood, he couldn't figure out what was wrong. Where was mudfern? She needed mudfern!\n\nValfredo raced to the cliff and leaped off into the river. Mudfern was plentiful, and in seconds he found a clawful and flew back to her. Gently, he placed the plant near her mouth and nudged her.\n\n\"Here, Kina, eat. It'll make you better.\"\n\nWould it? No prey seemed affected by it the way dragons were. They'd eat it and still have broken wings and lost legs.\n\nBut Kina was different. She was a bogre, a small fleshy dragon... right? He nudged her again. \"Eat, Kina. Please wake up and eat.\"\n\nSince when did he care so much if a bogre died? There were plenty more of them, so why should he care? Was it because he was lonely? Sure, he missed being with another dragon, but Kina wasn't a dragon. She was just a bogre, one single bogre he'd found in\u2014\n\nThe rock pile. It was shaped like... it was her home. Why hadn't he noticed it before? She'd even arranged sticks around it like the barriers bogres made from trees. That was why she was crying so much. She missed her clan. She was asking him to take her home. Her heart was breaking from being alone, and it was his fault.\n\nGuilt twisted in his chest, forcing tears to his eyes. Tentatively, he picked her up in his foreclaw and walked to the cave's edge. Only other bogres could save her now, if it wasn't already too late. He took flight toward her home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Time never passed so slowly as it did on this journey. Why had he chosen a cave so deep into the mountains? Kina still hadn't woken, and she smelled more like death than before. Bogre Mountain came in sight, and when he got close, it bugled. But even that didn't wake her. Landing as close to her home as he could, he carefully set her down in one of the dirt patches that always surrounded bogre nests. Then he leaped into the air and flew back to his cave.\n\nAt least now she could live or die with her family."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Valfredo stared at Kina's hole, half expecting her to come out. Pathetic. He huffed and turned away. Seven days alone had turned him into a slug of meat that felt nothing but self pity. Even the fire inside him was keeping quiet, too lonely to bother speaking up.\n\nIt was all Kina's fault. He flicked a stone at her rock pile, but it missed and flew over the cliff's ledge. If she hadn't been so likable, so dragon-like, he wouldn't be feeling so guilty and lonely, and he'd be able to continue his mission of killing the phoenix fire.\n\nWhat was the point, really? The whole reason for the mission was to give him a normal life with a clan, but no clan he knew would accept a full-grown warrior who already had his own ideas about everything. It would've been much easier to join one back when he was a fledgling with a small clan to learn new rules with. How were they doing now, anyway? Knowing Elina, she talked another clan into taking them in years ago. She could talk anyone into anything.\n\nThe fire inside him flickered, burning hotter for a few seconds to bite his organ. Valfredo sighed. Even she couldn't get him into a clan if he didn't kill this fire.\n\nAfter looking around the cave and admiring the waterfall, he left. There really wasn't any other choice. To die with the fire inside him invited a new phoenix to grow, and having to fight it every second of life wasn't really living at all. He had to find a way to kill it so he could live in peace. He had to force himself to eat, stay alive, and fight. There was no choice."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Rain pelted the canopy of tree leaves, causing them to flutter and hide small movements of prey. Valfredo flapped his wings, flicking droplets of water everywhere. Normally, he loved flying in the rain, but between the rain and the canopy, he hadn't found anything to eat for two days\u2014and he was getting quite hungry. The trees parted, giving a small opening between their branches, and in the opening was movement of large prey.\n\nValfredo's heart leaped for joy, and he began his aim. The undergrowth made it impossible to see what prey it was, but it was definitely large enough to be an ogre. Perhaps the ones here liked the rain. His stomach growled, and with an anticipating grin, he dove at the prey, talons extended. A head poked out of the brush, and a pair of brown eyes turned to him.\n\nThat wasn't prey\u2014it was a dragon!\n\nHe whipped open his wings and spread his legs apart, slamming into the ground around the little dragon just in time.\n\n\"Please don't eat me!\" she screamed, sending out powerful bursts of pungent fear.\n\n\"Eat you? Why would I eat you? You're a dragon! I think.\" She looked like a dragon, with scales and four legs and a pair of wings, but she had no horns and was only the size of a fledgling, yet her features were more like an adult.\n\nThe tiny female lay on her side, trembling and staring at him with wide eyes and a fear-stricken face. The air was full of her distress.\n\nRumbling softly, he impressed calm. \"It's all right, little one. I told you I won't eat you. I just... I've never seen a dragon as young as you out on its own before.\" Slowly, so as not to frighten her further, he stepped aside. \"There, now I'm not standing over you. Will you give me your name? Mine's Valfredo.\" Excitement pounded in his heart as an idea formed. If there was a dragon young here, there had to be a whole clan\u2014and since the bogres on this side of Great Meadow were so different from the ones back home, perhaps the dragons were too. They might even be willing to take him into their clan... as long as he kept the fire hidden. He didn't have to be alone anymore.\n\nThe impression gradually lessened her fear, though she watched him cautiously. \"P-Pelion. Y-you're really not going to eat me?\"\n\nHe snorted and flicked his tailtip. \"Only the phoenix eats dragons.\"\n\nWithout taking her eyes off him, Pelion shifted off her side and stood up, head cocked and eyes full of wonder. The rain fell in large drops on her face and trickled down, making it look as though she were crying. \"You're not from around here.\"\n\n\"No.\" He reached to wipe away the tear-looking streaks, but she jerked away and growled. With a sigh, he pulled back his foreclaw. \"Where are your parents?\"\n\nHot challenge burst into the air, unimpeded by the rain trying to cool it. \"Why do you care?\" Pelion growled.\n\nA laugh started in his chest, but he managed to suppress it with a cough. Imagine a fledgling challenging an adult! This young was foolish, but spunky, and quickly growing into his heart. \"There's no need to get defensive. I only asked so I can help you get back home safely. I know you want to be grown right now, but fledglings aren't\u2014\"\n\n\"Fledgling!\" she shrieked, flaring her wings. \"You're calling me a fledgling? I'm seventy-three and fully grown, thank you very much. And as for my parents, it's none of your business, so get lost and let me continue my hunt.\"\n\nThe laugh he'd suppressed escaped now, stronger than it was before. \"If you're an adult, you're the tiniest one I've ever seen.\"\n\nPelion's tail whipped into a bush, breaking a small branch. \"I am an adult, and if you're just going to stand there laughing at me, then good-bye.\" She backed up and bumped into a tree, then moved around the tree and continued walking backward without taking her eyes off him.\n\nThe rain stopped suddenly, chased away by the sun now peering through the canopy. Pelion's mixed scales of green, brown, and grey glowed with the wet forest, blending in so she was nearly invisible\u2014until she bumped into another tree.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he asked.\n\n\"Leaving,\" she said with a scowl.\n\n\"By going backwards?\" The laugh tickled in his chest, but he forced it down. Angering the first dragon he'd seen in weeks wouldn't be a good start in a new clan\u2014even if she was only a strange-looking fledgling.\n\n\"You don't think I'd give you another chance to eat me, do you?\"\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes and groaned. For sun's sake, why couldn't she accept that he wasn't going to eat her? Did her parents know someone was feeding her such stupid ideas? He lowered his head to meet hers, ignoring the fear in her widening eyes and the shudder going from snout to tail as she shifted positions to run.\n\n\"Dragons do not eat other dragons,\" he said while keeping eye contact. \"I thought you were an ogre.\"\n\nThe fear left her instantly, replaced by a glare. She lashed her tail, curling the tip as she stood proudly, almost flirtatiously, with her wings flared and head turned to the side. \"Since when were ogres as long as this?\"\n\nThe stance she took showed off her physical beauty\u2014and she was surprisingly pretty for a fledgling. Her snout didn't have the chubbiness of one, and her body was lean and strong with the muscles clearly showing. Even the wings looked too strong to be without many years of exercised flight\u2014and her scales, now that he was studying , were sharp and strong looking. The way she spoke was definitely more grown than young, and her talons curled into a strong tree root with ease.\n\nWas it possible for her to be a grown dragon at so small a size? And without horns? Horns always came in when they reached adolescence, but maybe the same defect that kept her small also prevented their growth.\n\nWith a sigh, he lay down and tightened his wings to appear smaller and more friendly. \"I couldn't see you well enough to notice your length. I'm sorry I frightened you, and I'm sorry I called you a fledgling. I've never met such a tiny adult before.\"\n\n\"I'm not tiny,\" she growled. Then she lifted her head in pride. \"I'm a Forest clan, not that a stranger would know anything about us. And you are strange. I don't suppose you'd be decent enough to tell me where you're from and how you got here?\"\n\nOh, right. Of course she wouldn't take him to her clan without knowing those things. But what could he tell her? If he said the wrong thing, her clan wouldn't take him in. They'd certainly never want someone raised by a grumpy loner, or someone who might be loyal to their original clan, or even someone who got into a fight with the clanhead. He'd have to make something up... or maybe speak a half truth\u2014aha!\n\nTaking a deep breath, he said, \"I was a River clan, but our territory was prone to catching fire, so I decided to look for a new clan. Does yours ever accept adults, or do they only take in young?\"\n\nPelion stood in silence with her mouth slightly open.\n\nHad he said something wrong, or asked the wrong question? Emotions flashed through her eyes and shifted in the air too quickly to understand. The only one he could make out was shock. Valfredo shifted and glanced around. What had he said that surprised her so much?\n\nFinally, she closed her mouth and swallowed, then asked, \"You... you want to join my clan?\"\n\nHe'd just said that. Frustration boiled in his stomach, and he took another deep breath\u2014silently\u2014to keep it from showing. He must remain patient and keep looking friendly. She was a tiny dragon, after all; it was wise for her to be so cautious.\n\n\"Yes, if they'll have me,\" he said.\n\nShe cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, looking him snout to tail before answering. \"We might let you join... if you swear not to eat anyone.\"\n\nValfredo groaned and rolled his eyes. \"I already told you I didn't know you were a dragon, and I don't eat other dragons.\" She was a grown female, for sun's sake! She should know how revolting cannibalism was.\n\nRelaxing her posture, she gave him a teasing smile. \"I figured you'd say something like that. I'm sure I can convince everyone to let you join\u2014your color's a lot like ours, and you seem nice. You'll need a much larger den, though, so you'll probably spend a few nights outside while we dig it.\"\n\nHe cocked his head. \"Larger... den?\" Dragons sleeping underground? Surely she was joking.\n\n\"Would you prefer a shallower nest closer to the surface, or a deep one further away? The shallower ones are softer, but the deep ones are safer from those large brutes.\"\n\n\"I don't want any den! Doesn't your clan sleep in caves? And what large brutes are you talking about? Why should I be wary of them?\" Was her clan so weak they couldn't protect themselves?\n\nWaving her foreclaw in dismissal, she said, \"Oh, don't worry. They won't bother you if you're careful. Now, what exactly did you want to do when you join our clan? You're obviously too big to help the hunting groups. Are you good at fighting? Maybe you can teach us some new techniques.\"\n\nWait... she said he'd need a larger den, and he was \"too big\" to help hunt. That meant he was bigger than her clanmates, which meant Pelion wasn't a tiny female in her clan; she was normal size. The Forest was a clan of tiny, hornless dragons, and he had just asked to join them.\n\nHe couldn't join a clan of tiny dragons! Who would he mate? How would he demean himself to follow a clanhead less than half his size? It wouldn't be right to challenge their clanhead after asking permission to join. Who would want to be clanhead over such tiny dragons anyway? Were the \"large brutes\" simply giant snakes and griffin hordes the tiny dragons couldn't fight off? Or perhaps... they were a clan of larger dragons?\n\n\"I want to know what or who the 'large brutes' are. Are they a clan of dragons my size?\" he said, impressing submission.\n\nBut she shrugged off the impression and said, \"They're nothing important. You look like a strong warrior, and you're not from here, so I bet you know ways of fighting we've never heard of. I'm sure my clan can learn a lot from you, maybe even enough to take on the Armor\u2014I mean, uh, maybe even enough to\u2014\"\n\n\"They are another clan, aren't they?\" Valfredo made his voice demanding and strengthened the impression. No Forest dragon was going to keep such a secret from him, not when the Armors might be his size.\n\nPelion shivered and cowered down, unable to shake off the impression this time. \"Well... yes, but they're vicious brutes who don't like other clans.\" Her shivering stopped as she answered, and she stood more confidently. \"There used to be another clan of big dragons, but the Armors killed them, and now they're killing us. Well, actually, I don't know what they're doing. When they kill us, they eat us right there, but lately they've been taking a lot of my clanmates alive somewhere. With your help, we can find where the Armors are taking them and get them back home, and then the clan will let you join for sure.\"\n\nHer big brown eyes looked up at him, pleading. \"Please help me, Valfredo. You're the only big dragon I've ever met who wasn't trying to eat me.\"\n\nHe'd stopped the impression, and now put out musk to hide his growing irritation. \"What right did you have to keep that a secret from me?\" A tremor in his voice betrayed the hot anger rising inside. \"I specifically asked if they're another clan, and you lied and said they aren't important. Then you tell me they're vicious brutes and expect me to believe you? Why should I help someone I can't trust?\"\n\n\"But I didn't lie\u2014well, okay, I did that once, but everything I've told you is the truth.\"\n\n\"Dragons do not eat other dragons!\" he roared, frightening her into backing away. Her wide, tear-filled eyes stared at him, tugging on his heart and cooling his hot blood. With a sigh, Valfredo softened his muscles, but kept his expression stern. \"Your story fails to convince me, Pelion. If you insist on keeping to your lies, fine, I'm not your clanhead, but I'm going to find the other clan and see if they'll accept me. I don't care to join a clan of tiny liars.\" He whipped open his wings to fly away, but Pelion raced up to him and stood on her hindclaws, her foreclaws resting on his chest.\n\n\"Please don't go! Please give me a chance to prove it to you. I didn't mean to make you angry\u2014I was afraid you'd join the Armors and start eating us too. I like you. You seem like a nice warrior, and I don't want you to be corrupted by them. We're smaller than you, I'll admit that, but we don't deserve to be eaten, do we? They're too strong for us to take down on our own, and when we try to move our nesting ground, they chase us back. We can't leave, and we won't live long if we stay. Please, Valfredo, please help us.\" Desperation and fear flooded the air, emphasized by her pleading expression.\n\nFor a moment, he almost did believe her. But she'd been deceptive before and was clearly good at it. He was not going to be controlled again\u2014not by a clan of small dragons. He took a deep breath and said very calmly, \"Dragons are not phoenixes, and you cannot convince me the Armors act like they are. Good-bye, Pelion.\"\n\nHe flapped up and took one last glimpse at her before flying away. Her face was grief-stricken, and the air around her was depressed. Guilt swelled, but he dismissed it. Dragons didn't eat other dragons, and he didn't need a lying friend."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Knowing there were tiny Forest dragons made it much more difficult to hunt. Any movement in brush had to be watched until he knew exactly what was making it. Valfredo sighed. Whatever was moving down there had to be an ogre, but if he couldn't see it, how could he be sure? He didn't want to terrify another Forest. Curses! Why didn't that ogre move into an opening?\n\nA presence came from above, and he jerked to the side in time to see a large black dragon dive bomb where he'd been flying. The warrior opened his wings and swooped just before hitting the trees, then flew up and turned around to face Valfredo and laugh. He was clearly no more than a year out of adolescence, yet larger than Valfredo by half a head.\n\n\"Not bad for a strange, small dragon,\" he said with a chuckle.\n\nValfredo scoffed. \"I may be smaller than you, but I'm faster.\" Were all the dragons here either tiny or huge?\n\nThe black warrior laughed again. \"Tell me, who are you, and where did you come from? I've never met one from your clan, unless you're a freakishly large Forest.\"\n\n\"I am most certainly not,\" Valfredo said, wrinkling his snout in disgust. \"My name is Valfredo, and I'm from the River clan... or I was before I left. Who are you?\"\n\n\"Roth, of the Armor clan,\" Roth said, raising his head and pushing out his chest. \"What are you doing in our territory?\"\n\n\"Seeking a new clan to join. Is yours willing?\" The words were out before he had time to think them through. What if the Armor clan was as bad as Pelion had said?\n\nBah! Valfredo shoved the thought aside. There was no way a dragon would eat another, and it was even stupider to think an entire clan would be cannibals. No, Pelion had been lying; the Armors were probably just a rival clan, and she didn't want them gaining another warrior.\n\nRoth hovered for a while, careful thinking in his eyes. \"It's up to Clanhead Warrior Arnack to decide, but you're interesting and new, and things have been very boring lately. I'm sure he'd like to meet you, at least. This way!\"\n\nClanhead Warrior Arnack? Was he so strong they felt the need to add the title warrior to his name, or were they just obsessed with him? Valfredo shook his head to keep away the growing uncertainty and followed Roth to the strangest nesting ground he'd ever seen. There were no jublar trees surrounding the nesting ground to protect it from the phoenix, and the ground itself was black and surprisingly smooth. A few scattered plants popped out of the black expanse, but there weren't any bushes or grass to let small prey grow for the young dragons to practice their hunting on. A strong, stinging scent wafted from afar, where there was an orange glow and smoke coming out of the ground. Fog came out of holes in the ground, sometimes in bursts, sometimes constant. It was very warm, and the fog seemed to bring more heat.\n\nHundreds, if not a thousand Armors watched Valfredo and Roth from caves and ledges dug into the mountainsides. Every one of them had the same shades of solid grey, black, and deep crimson red. How could the clan be the largest he'd ever seen, yet have so little color among them?\n\nMany of the clan followed them and watched intensely as they landed on the largest cave's ledge. Lying in front of the cave was the largest dragon Valfredo had ever seen\u2014larger, perhaps, than even Kaven. His presence clamped down similar to Kaven's, but its jaw felt bigger, and its teeth sharper. There seemed to be a subtle, natural impression of fear and awe emanating from him that made Valfredo's entire body quiver. Pelion had spoken one truth, at least: The Armor clan was something worthy to fear.\n\nThe large warrior didn't bother standing to greet Valfredo; he simply remained lying down with a bored expression and confidence oozing out of his every scale. \"Who's the runt?\"\n\n\"His name's Valfredo, and he wants to join our clan,\" Roth said with more enthusiasm than Valfredo felt. Then Roth turned to Valfredo. \"This is Warrior Arnack, our clanhead.\" He nodded to a dark grey female standing beside Arnack. \"And our mother and head female, Verth.\"\n\nValfredo rumbled greeting, but Arnack merely raised an eyeridge and said, \"He's a little small.\"\n\n\"He's only a half head shorter than I am. Besides, it's been so boring lately we're all going crazy.\"\n\nWas size the only thing that mattered to this clan? Come to think of it, Pelion had been quite offended when he'd called her tiny. Perhaps he owed her an apology...\n\nVerth nuzzled Arnack. \"He's right, my son. The new plans are exciting, but without challenge. Let us take in this lost one and spark new fire in our blood.\"\n\nArnack stared at Valfredo and didn't respond.\n\n\"I may be a little smaller than your clan,\" Valfredo said, flaring his wings, \"but I can fight my weight and more with ease. I will not be a hindrance when your enemies attack.\"\n\nA roar of Armors laughing surrounded him, with Arnack laughing the loudest.\n\n\"When my enemies attack?\" he said. \"We utterly destroyed them when I first became clanhead years ago. Luckily for you, however, Mother's right. The clan needs a new spark. Too bad you didn't bring more warriors with you. We could've had a great time slaughtering you all, but as a single dragon, you pose no real challenge.\n\n\"So we'll show you our great territory and teach you our ways, and soon you'll wish you could die and be hatched an Armor. But don't worry. When you feel great unworthiness for your life, my warriors will be glad to challenge you to a death match. Roth, you'll be in charge of our guest. Show him around and teach him how great we are. When he's ready for death, you'll have first rights of challenge.\"\n\nRoth chirped delight, which made Valfredo feel more strongly the uneasiness Arnack's words had given him. The Forest clan was a bunch of tiny liars, and apparently the Armor clan was one of exceedingly proud warriors hungry for a good fight. No amount of training and practice could fend off a clan of a thousand warriors and fighting females. He'd have to watch his back at all times and keep the phoenix fire tightly controlled.\n\nKaven would've scolded him for obeying his heart instead of his teachings. Had he made a mistake in asking to join? Valfredo shook the question out of his head. No, Kina had proven how much he'd missed having a companion, and even more, a clan. The Armors would accept him and calm down with time; he simply needed to be patient."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Valfredo spent the rest of that day and the next exploring the nesting ground and talking to hundreds of curious Armors. They pestered him with questions about his previous clan, why he left, and how he had found their clan. Out of fear for the clans back home, he didn't reveal where he'd come from; only that it was very far away and it had almost killed him to fly so far. When asked about his clan, he changed the subject, and his answer as to why he'd left his home was kept short and simple. By the end of the second day, every dragon in the clan was bored with his stories and began to give him some peace and room to move around.\n\nBut the following day, he discovered a new trait of the Armor clan that was irritating: They loved to brag. The reprieve of the day before was completely undone by the crowd that surrounded him to tell of the great victories, ideas, and territory that made up the Armor clan's history. They hardly gave time for him to breathe, let alone ask any questions\u2014and it was like that for the next several days. Every morning, he woke up before the sun with an Armor staring him in the face, waiting for their chance to tell him of the clan's greatness. Then after dark he'd go to sleep hearing the voice of another repeating the same stories as the first.\n\nIt was exhausting and a greater trial of patience than he thought possible. But patience he forced as he nodded and awed and shook his head in disbelief at the right moments and acted more interested for the sake of the young when it was their turn to brag. Despite the frustration, boredom, and suffocation that he felt, Valfredo found a peace inside to get him through: The peace of being in a clan for the first time in over fifty years.\n\nFinally, the clan grew tired of bragging and once again gave him some breathing room, and Valfredo sighed with relief and began to explore the grounds on his own, though there were still visits by individual Armors demanding his attention, which, now that they were less frequent, he welcomed. It was strange to be in a clan again. Everywhere he looked there were dragons. Males, females, families and their young. It was like being home before the phoenix attack. Everyone was happily going about their business, unafraid and undaunted by the danger that could strike at any moment. Come to think of it, why hadn't the phoenix attacked them? Why weren't they more cautious? There were hundreds of dragons here, and no jublar trees to repel the fallen sun.\n\nMaybe the Armors knew something about the phoenix his clan hadn't known, something that could help him kill the fire before it forced him to leave this clan. He glanced around and found Roth talking to a few adolescent friends. Roth would know the answer, and was one of the easier Armors to talk to, so Valfredo trotted over and waited to be noticed.\n\n\"Do you want something?\" Roth asked.\n\n\"I was just wondering how your clan keeps from getting attacked by the phoenix without using jublar trees. What keeps it away?\"\n\nRoth cocked his head and raised an eyeridge. \"Jublar what? Trees? What in the stars are those?\"\n\nWas he serious? \"How can you be a grown dragon and not know what a jublar tree is?\"\n\nWith a shrug, Roth answered, \"Guess I never bothered to learn.\"\n\nValfredo sighed. At least he was being honest. \"They're the large trees with grey bark that smell disgustingly sweet year-round and grow pink flowers and purple fruit.\"\n\nRoth and the others looked at each other, then shook their heads.\n\nHow could they all possibly not know about the flowers? Spring was the worst time of year because of them! Maybe if he explained the trees' impact on food, these ignorant young would remember. \"Basically all prey obsess over the fruit, and griffins like to nest in the top branches.\"\n\nMore confused expressions were glanced to each other, followed by them all shaking their heads again.\n\nDidn't these young warriors know anything other than Armor history and bragging? Wait, come to think of it, had he seen any jublar trees since crossing the meadow? Valfredo racked his memory, searching for the familiar scent and clustered leaves of the jublar tree. But he couldn't remember seeing them in the canopies he'd flown over or smelling anything sweet in the forests.\n\n\"I guess they don't grow here... but how can your clan still be alive if there aren't any jublar trees? What keeps the phoenix away from your nesting ground?\"\n\nThey all looked at each other and smirked.\n\n\"The mighty Armor clan doesn't fear that simple predator,\" one of them said. \"We're far too strong for it to dare try attacking.\" With a laugh he added, \"Even as a fledgling, I could've defeated it in battle!\"\n\n\"You couldn't,\" Roth said, nudging his friend. \"But Warrior Arnack could've!\"\n\nThe others cheered agreement, and the bragger sulked for only a second before grinning. \"All right, all right, you got me. The great and mighty and awesome Warrior Arnack could've defeated it as a fledgling, but the rest of us could still defeat it as adolescents,\" he said, then led the others into a group laugh.\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes and turned to leave, but stopped when Arnack flew down.\n\n\"Shouldn't you all be practicing your fighting techniques?\" Arnack asked the group.\n\nAdmiration flooded the air while the group ducked in submission, then flew off to begin play-fighting each other.\n\nThe subtle impressions of fear and awe still flowed from Arnack, seeping into Valfredo's bones without any way to block them. Valfredo shivered. Kaven's powerful, sneaky impressions were nothing compared to this one that felt as natural as air itself. It was frightening. How could a dragon put out such a perfect impression so constantly? Wasn't it exhausting?\n\n\"What were you pestering them with that had them laughing so hard?\" Arnack asked.\n\nShivers ran through every scale. That voice was full of such confidence and authority, it commanded submission. For once, Valfredo was glad Kaven had been so irritating and strong\u2014fighting him for so many years made it easier to evade Arnack's control. \"I only asked them how your clan keeps the phoenix from attacking your nesting ground, but they don't seem to be able to stay serious long enough to give a truthful answer.\"\n\nArnack grunted and looked into the distance to watch the group's aerobatics. The expression he wore was of strong pride\u2014pride of his brother more than the others, no doubt. Was anything this clanhead did not strong? If Father was still alive, was this the sort of strength he'd have? Was Valfredo just too young to recognize it before he died, or was Arnack really stronger than anyone he'd ever known?\n\n\"Impression.\"\n\nValfredo glanced where Arnack was looking, but saw no one he could be speaking to. \"Impression? What about it?\"\n\n\"It's how we keep the phoenix away.\"\n\nWhat? How could impressing emotions have any effect on the phoenix? It was a fallen sun! A simple dragon's impression could never protect a clan from its hunger.\n\nArnack turned to face Valfredo with a playful, dangerous glint in his eyes and a smirk spreading across his snout. \"Do you think my clan will hide in fear when we can instead make it run? Have you noticed the warriors flying around the edge of the nesting ground? They watch for it at all times of day and night, and when it's spotted, they bugle so every member knows to come to the middle of the nesting ground and impress fear in one powerful blow. Even before we see it, the phoenix feels the clan's impression and avoids our nesting ground. The phoenix might be a fallen sun, but it still knows fear. The moon taught it that.\"\n\n\"Oh... that's... really quite impressive.\" The phoenix knew fear? Could that really be possible? Arnack didn't seem the sort to lie, or else his clan wouldn't be able to trust him, but how could the fallen sun be affected by dragons? It made sense, though, if the clan as a whole had mastered impressions, and the moon had taught the phoenix how to fear.\n\nArnack raised his head with pride. \"I know. That's why we're the best. And now you know we're the best, and why we don't fear it.\"\n\n\"Fear what?\" a female voice behind them said.\n\nValfredo startled, making Arnack laugh.\n\n\"He's all yours, Mother,\" Arnack said with a chuckle. \"Enjoy the runt's admiration.\"\n\nVerth licked his cheek before he left. Then she sat down, tail curled around her fore and hind claws. \"What don't we fear?\"\n\nValfredo sighed and felt his wings droop. Did he really want to explain this conversation a third time? No, not really, but he had no choice; these Armors were tenacious if nothing else. \"He just finished telling me how your clan keeps the phoenix away from the nesting ground. I can see how that keeps you from fearing it coming here, but what about when you're hunting? Don't you fear it then?\"\n\nShe laughed a lovely female laugh, higher pitched and more beautiful than a male could ever have. \"My son is the greatest warrior that ever lived, but he also exaggerates. Of course we fear the phoenix. Why else would we impress it away from our home? But we almost never encounter it, even on a hunt. My guess is it stays away because it finds more food elsewhere, like the dragons where you're from.\"\n\nHe cringed. Even the clan's females were a little callous.\n\n\"We used to see it more often, when the Sun clan lived. They weren't good at hiding from it like the Forests are, and they weren't able to frighten it away like we can. Maybe that's why they attacked us so ruthlessly? They were jealous?\" She frowned in thought, then shook her head. \"It doesn't matter now. They're gone.\"\n\nDidn't Pelion say something about there being another clan of large dragons until the Armors killed them? Uh oh. Verth was getting that look in her eyes; the look that meant a story was coming.\n\nValfredo opened his wings and turned to leave. \"That was interesting, but I have to go and\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course, I know you want to learn what happened to them. I forbade anyone else from telling you, because they never tell it correctly. You must be dying of curiosity.\"\n\n\"Actually, I'm not\u2014\"\n\n\"It's a rather sad and regretful tale, I'm afraid, so you best lay down before I start.\"\n\nValfredo groaned inside and searched desperately for an escape, but Verth was flaring her wings, warning everyone that she was in a private conversation and wasn't to be disturbed. If he left now, she'd be deeply offended, and offending the head female would be begging for trouble. So with an inward sigh, he folded his wings and settled in to listen to yet another piece of Armor history.\n\nHer countenance shifted suddenly to sorrow and regret, as if she'd mastered changing her emotions with the story about to be said. \"They were dark times. The Suns had a new clanhead who led them into killing our females and young, defecating in our drinking water, burning our forests, and killing our prey. He claimed they were our superiors and demanded we sacrifice ourselves to the phoenix, saying our sacrifice would protect his clan forever from its wrath.\"\n\nAnger glittered in her eyes as she continued. \"Our clanhead refused to make war with them, claiming they'd simply get bored and move on to something new. The spineless meat was strong in body, but weak in mind. I think he feared a war, feared us losing, and so waited and hoped. He refused to give up being clanhead, and no one could confront him and win\u2014until my son, then only a young male of seventy, challenged him to a death match. He laughed at the idea, and the clan wanted to laugh with him. How could such a young warrior defeat a clanhead thrice his age? But Arnack was enraged, and strong in mind, body, and impression\u2014all of which he used to win against Kither. It was a glorious victory that brought the clan hope, and we celebrated, thrilled to have such a powerful new clanhead!\n\n\"But my son is unmerciful to those who make him their enemy, and the Sun clan was an enemy needing to be eliminated in its entirety. He led our warriors against them, refusing to let the battle die until the last drop of blood flowed out of the most innocent hatchling. The warriors still brag of the victory, but it was a terrible battle we females never should've allowed. We've convinced the warriors not to go into detail for our sake, and I try to keep it terrible in the hearts of our females, so our young will know better, our males will control their rage better, and our females will take action sooner to protect the innocent.\"\n\nValfredo shifted and looked into the distance so she couldn't read what he was thinking. \"That's quite the history.\"\n\nWhat else could he say? The actions of Arnack and the other warriors were unacceptable, no matter what the Suns had done to them. Slaughtering innocents was cruel and unnecessary. What if the Suns didn't agree with their new clanhead, but unlike the Armors, didn't have someone who could challenge him? Arnack should've made it his mission to kill the enemy clanhead and let the Suns elect or fight for a new one, then see what happened. The chance of the new clanhead being so bloodthirsty was almost nothing, and was certainly worth sparing innocent young.\n\nBut he couldn't very well tell her that. This clan revered Arnack beyond any reasoning; to say anything bad about him would surely end in a bloody mess. Verth still stood there expecting him to say more, but what could he say that wouldn't start a battle? Maybe there was one thing he could bring up, one thing he could discuss?\n\n\"And after all that,\" he said at last, \"your clan is stuck in a perpetual boredom.\"\n\nShe scoffed. \"Yes, it's become terribly boring since the Sun clan's defeat. There are no real challenges, no enemies to overcome, and nothing to test our skills against. Even with the new plans, there's hardly anything to do. Lately we've been considering a battle with the bogres, but they're far away and no match for us. It would provide only a short reprieve from this dreary boredom.\"\n\nHe nodded understanding, glad that Kina was, if still alive, safe from the Armors. \"There were many clans where I came from, and the ones of similar size were always combatting each other to keep from getting bored. I believe we had similar rules of honor, too, judging by your regret of the Suns' slaughter.\"\n\nA smile spread across her snout. \"Perhaps you'll bring what we need, after all.\" Then she took off before he could ask what she meant.\n\n\"Females,\" he mumbled, then continued exploring the nesting ground\u2014and for once wasn't bothered by Armors pestering him and blocking his view. Bones, there were a lot of them! And all of them shared the same basic frame and size on top of having the same three colors of varying shades. The males' larger, more muscular bodies were noticeably different from the lithe and powerful frames of the females, but other than that, there seemed to be nothing to tell them apart by.\n\nThe only three he could tell apart were Arnack, because he was the largest by half a head; Verth, because she held herself prouder than any of the other females; and Roth, because he was more exuberant than the rest. It was all very frustrating. Why couldn't they have a multitude of solid and mixed colors and body frames like the clans back home?\n\nEven the nesting ground was monotonous and lacked color with its rock and vegetation. He'd already figured out that the orange glow covering a swath of ground was nothing more than melted rock, and while he had no idea how the rock came out of the mountain so hot, he also didn't care enough to ask an Armor and start another bragging session.\n\nValfredo sighed. He'd finally joined a clan, and it was more boring than Kaven."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "After three days of exploring and trying to find some entertainment, Valfredo settled down next to one of the strange holes hot fog poured out of. There had to be some sort of underground heat melting the local rocks; maybe the strange fog was the source of the heat, and would make fire from ashable objects. He dropped a stick into the hole, but no fire came. Nothing happened with a branch, either, or a dead bird he'd found. Even crisp, dry leaves had no effect. The sound of someone's talons ticking on rock caught his attention, and he glanced up to see Roth stop a tail-length away and cock his head.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Testing.\"\n\n\"Testing what?\"\n\n\"If hot fog can turn into fire.\"\n\nRoth laughed. \"That's not fog\u2014it's steam! Underground water's made hot from the volcanos, and it comes up through these holes.\"\n\n\"Steam? I've never heard of it.\" He stared at the hole. Underground water and volcanos? This side of the meadow was very different than he ever could have imagined. What were volcanos, anyway? Were they the orange-hot rocks oozing out of the mountaintop? Could it be he had it wrong, and it was the rocks that heated the fog?\n\n\"Anyway,\" Roth said, \"Mother told me to invite you to come hunting. Well, she really said to tell you to come hunting, but you've grown on me, so I'm inviting.\"\n\nAt least one of them was genuinely liking him. Valfredo nodded enthusiastically and followed Roth to a small group of adolescents and adults. Excited fledglings bounced around the group, smiling and giggling. It looked as though Verth was about to tell the young ones a story, and Valfredo nearly turned away to escape the story, when Verth smiled at him.\n\n\"Are you ready for a good hunt?\"\n\nHe cocked his head. \"All of you are in one hunting group?\" There were five adults and three adolescents. How could they possibly use so many, especially in a forest so dense?\n\n\"Did your clan hunt in smaller groups?\"\n\n\"We usually hunted alone or in pairs. How do you use so many hunters?\" Could a dragon appear so strong and be so weak they needed to hunt in groups like bogres?\n\nRoth laughed. \"Come with us and see how to do a hunt right.\"\n\nValfredo sighed inwardly. It was pointless to be offended by their pride; he might as well take the abuse and enjoy the hunt. He nodded to the fledglings. \"We should probably tell them to go back to their nests so they don't try to follow us and get hurt.\"\n\n\"You poor thing,\" Verth said, her voice sounding as sympathetic as her expression appeared. \"Didn't your clan know how to hunt? Don't worry, Riome's leading this one, and he's an excellent teacher. That's him there. Just watch him and do what he does.\" She nodded to a light grey male who proudly whipped open his wings and started the flight.\n\nValfredo followed, a little concerned about the fledglings. Wasn't Verth worried about them at all? What if they fell prey to a giant snake, or some griffins caught them? Sure, sometimes a parent would bring a fledgling along, but only one, and only in a safe hunting area. But Verth was acting like these fledglings were important to the hunt. Wouldn't they be more in the way of the older dragons than they would be helpful? Were they planning on everyone taking a fledgling when they split up to hunt? He certainly didn't want to watch over a young while trying to find a meal.\n\nRiome stopped the group and circled, making gestures with foreclaws and tail Valfredo didn't understand. The fledglings swooped down into the forest in pairs, and the older dragons landed in a small clearing. A long silence followed. Valfredo nudged Roth and looked at him curiously.\n\n\"The fledglings will chase them to us,\" Roth said, then whispered, \"Shh.\"\n\nFledglings were going to chase prey to them? What about the dangerous ones, like griffins and hornbeasts? Was that why the fledglings were in pairs? To protect them?\n\nThe forest burst with fledgling hunting screams and the sound of running prey. The air filled with the scent of terror, and everything in the forest seemed to be coming to them.\n\n\"Be ready!\" Riome shouted. The Armors formed a circle and crouched, ready to pounce. Valfredo followed their example and waited. Deer, ogres, and even a griffin rushed out of the forest right into the claws and teeth of the waiting group. Blood and excitement surrounded Valfredo, and he laughed while killing a second ogre.\n\n\"This is great!\" he said. \"Who knew fledglings could be so useful in hunting?\"\n\nVerth smirked and swatted an escaping deer.\n\n\"That's the last of them,\" said Riome. \"Nine ogres, twelve deer, three griffins, and a hornbeast. Arnack will be pleased!\" He looked at Valfredo, head held high. \"Now you see how superior our hunts are.\"\n\nValfredo chuckled. \"It was fun, I'll give you that, but I wouldn't call it\u2014\"\n\n\"Riome?\" Verth said. \"Where's Nion? I don't see or smell her anywhere.\"Riome's eyes widened, and he took off running into the forest with several others.\n\nOne of the fledglings whined. \"She was right behind me when we found the deer. I didn't know she fell behind,\" he said.\n\nVerth nuzzled him and rumbled. \"No one blames you, little one. I'm sure she's just tangled in some vines.\"\n\nBut despite her words of encouragement, the air was very tense. The older dragons impressed calm for the little ones, but they themselves clawed the ground and paced, stopping to listen and look every now and then.\n\nValfredo held his tongue so he wouldn't say the words his mind begged to say: Do you still consider your clan's hunting technique superior? They would only incite aggression, and right now, they needed to prioritize Nion's recovery.\n\nAfter an agonizing amount of time, he held a foreclaw in front of Verth to stop her pacing and catch her attention. \"How long does it usually take to find a missing fledgling?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not this long. They usually call to us...\"\n\n\"Do they often go miss\u2014\"\n\n\"Get off her!\" Riome roared some distance away.\n\n\"Go!\" Verth yelled. \"Everyone, go to him!\"\n\nValfredo flared his wings to block an adolescent. \"Not you! Get the fledglings home.\"\n\nThe adolescent nodded and took off toward the nesting ground, calling for the youngers to follow.\n\nRiome roared again, giving Valfredo a direction. It didn't take long to find the group of Armors standing in the forest, though figuring out where to land was more difficult.\n\n\"What are you doing in our hunting grounds?\" Riome shouted down below. \"Tell me!\"\n\nA tiny ball of fire flew through the canopy, singeing some leaves.\n\nFinally finding an opening in the trees, Valfredo landed, then trotted to the area of commotion. Riome was in the center of the Armors with foreclaws pinning a struggling fledgling.\n\nWait... that wasn't a fledgling. Valfredo shoved his way between two adolescents to take a closer look. \"Pelion?\"\n\nPelion gave him a nervous smile. \"Heh, H-hi, Valfredo. Um, do you want to tell this big bru\u2014uh, I mean, this nice, big Armor to let me go?\"\n\nThe air reeked of her fear, though it diminished considerably when she saw him.\n\nRiome glared at Valfredo, his tail lashing unhindered. \"You know this Forest by name?\"\n\nIgnoring the question, Valfredo sighed. \"Pelion, what are you doing here?\"\n\nHer eyes darted from him to Riome then back to him. \"Um... I'd rather not say. It's kind of personal. You understand, right?\"\n\nHe raised an eyeridge. \"What I understand is that I was enjoying myself before you showed up to ruin everything.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Oh, sure, yeah you were enjoying yourself\u2014with a bunch of brutes!\"\n\nRiome growled and clenched his foreclaws, making her squeak and squirm.\n\n\"That's enough, Riome,\" said Valfredo. \"This female's mouthy but harmless. Let her go.\"\n\n\"'This female?'\" Riome scoffed. \"You're not seriously considering letting it go, are you?\"\n\nThe other Armors whispered to each other. One snickered.\n\n\"What else would you do with her?\" Valfredo said. \"She's a female, and...\" He gave Pelion an apologetic glance. \"... tiny. What harm can she do?\"\n\nRiome sneered and nodded to a fledgling with a gash on her snout. \"If I was any later, Nion would be dead now.\"\n\nPelion glared at Riome, then looked to Valfredo with a desperate expression. \"I wasn't trying to kill her. I was just holding her big mouth shut so she wouldn't\u2014ow!\"\n\nOnce again, Riome tightened his grasp on her, trying to dig his talons into her sides, and though her scales were strong enough to repel them, his strength squeezed her breath away.\n\n\"I said that's enough!\" Valfredo hissed at him.\n\nAt the same time, Verth said, \"Ha! Pleading with Valfredo will do you no good. He's a warrior, Forest, not prey like you.\"\n\nValfredo jerked back. \"Prey? She's not prey\u2014she's a dragon!\"\n\nThe others roared with laughter.\n\n\"'Not prey?'\" Verth said when the laughter died down. \"Valfredo, you may not have these pests where you're from, but trust me when I say they're not worthy of being called dragons.\"\n\nAnger broiled in his stomach. Pelion had been telling the truth all along. Imagine dragons eating other dragons! The whole idea was revolting, and the fact that the leading female would approve of such a disgusting practice made it even worse. He growled, \"It's you who regrets the slaughter of the Sun clan. What makes the Forests any different?\"\n\n\"Mother regrets the Suns' slaughter because they were other dragons. But these are just prey, so it doesn't really matter if we kill them,\" Roth offered without a drop of uncertainty in his tone.\n\n\"Of course! Just look at it,\" Verth said, nodding to Pelion. \"It's so small and frail. One of us can kill an entire group of them, and if our fledglings' scales and talons weren't so underdeveloped, even they would win a fight. Forests don't even have horns, and they live in holes in the ground like foxes and ogres. I know this is a new concept for you, but once you taste their flesh, I'm sure you'll change your mind.\"\n\nA sickening knot twisted in Valfredo's stomach. How she said it was as bad as what she said. There was no sign of remorse, no hint that she understood the horrors of what they were doing. Every rule\u2014every duty he was ever taught told him to kill all of these terrible monsters. He had the ability; he could use the phoenix fire. The entire Armor clan was full of heartless, murderous cannibals who deserved to be ashed by phoenix fire.\n\nSo why couldn't he get angry? Why was his stomach ill instead of angry? Why didn't the fire stir inside of him? He looked into Pelion's eyes. They were full of fear, anger, and hope. They begged him to help, not just her, but her clan. They were innocent and helpless. They'd done what they could to free themselves, but the Armors were numerous, experienced, and powerful. His heart ached to help the little Forests, but it also ached to stay with the Armors. Despite their horrifying deeds and endless bragging, they were a clan who'd accepted him, and he didn't want to kill them.\n\nThe group stood around in silence, watching him with anticipation. The entire forest hushed from the tension. Not one cricket chirped or bird sang\u2014even the wind stayed still, refusing to rustle so much as one leaf or sway a single blade of grass. Everything was so tense, yet they didn't know the future of two clans and encompassing territories depended on his decision. They thought only his own future was at stake.\n\nValfredo dug his talons into the ground. What would Father do? Or Kaven? Kaven would kill them; that was his way. But what would Father do? Would he let them go and just leave? Or would we protect the clan of smaller ones?\n\nRoth poked Verth and whispered, \"Maybe we should tell him the plan. That should excite him.\"\n\nVerth nodded, then turned to Valfredo. \"Perhaps this story will help your slow mind to realize the brilliance that is our clan. Many springs ago, we ripped out all the trees and underbrush for many lengths around a circular patch of forest, and within the patch remaining, we thinned the trees to allow easy passage. That is where we've been putting the captured Forest prey, where our warriors can watch for attempts to escape and chase them back into the thinned forest.\" Her eyes sparkled, and her tone changed from factual to excited. \"Warrior Arnack came up with the plan, and this winter, we shall finally be ready to complete it.\"\n\nExcitement and pride electrified the air, and someone tried to impress admiration into Valfredo, tempting his heart to fill with happiness at being here in their presence. But he refused it, closing his mind to its trickery and the innocent appearance of Verth's enthusiasm. Instead, his stomach twisted in knots, and his heart ached for the Forest clan and for himself. There was no walking away from this. What the Armors were doing was unacceptable, and with the Sun clan gone, he was the only one who could help the innocent.\n\n\"This winter,\" Verth continued, \"we shall finish our collection of mating Forests and burn the territory of the ones remaining into ash. They shall escape into their ground holes, and when they get hungry, they shall come out and be eaten by our waiting clan. By the following winter, the plants and prey will have returned to the old forest, which will then be a meadow that requires different hunting techniques. We shall have three sets of prey! One that is the Forests, one that is all the prey that still live in these crowded trees, and one that is the meadow of new prey.\"\n\nSickness took his stomach, forcing him to swallow rising vomit. He looked at Pelion, wishing her to say the Forest clan would take care of themselves; they didn't need him. But her wide eyes were full of terror and looked straight into his, tears forming in their corners. It was clear in their pained, loving stare: She had come into this dangerous place to find her missing clanmates, free them, and reunite them with their families... she was the Forests' Elina, and she was forced to listen as the Armors bragged about the future slaughter of her clan and ashing of her home.\n\nAnger burned the sick feeling away and heated his cold blood. He'd saved Elina from Katel, and he'd save Pelion from the Armors. If that meant he had to live alone forever, then so be it. Father and Mother had sacrificed themselves for the clan, and Elina had continued the example. Now it was his turn to follow their teachings. He would not let them down.\n\nValfredo snarled at Verth, his teeth itching to crush through her scales and sink deep into her tender throat. \"That's the most revolting idea I've ever heard. Let Pelion go, or be willing to fight a death match.\"\n\nBut Verth stood calmly with an eyeridge raised, as if he hadn't issued any challenge at all. \"Warrior Arnack gave the orders to kill or capture every Forest we come across. If you have an issue with that, feel free to make your request to him. Just don't expect to leave his presence alive.\"\n\nThe group snickered and began mumbling bets on which way Arnack would kill him. Riome was the only one who remained quiet, besides Verth, and he turned to her with a bored expression. \"May I kill it now? My leg's getting tired just holding it down.\"\n\nVerth nodded, and Riome placed his foreclaw on Pelion's throat.\n\nValfredo leaped and shoved Riome away, then stood over Pelion and growled at the Armors. \"If anyone wants to kill her, you'll have to go through me.\"\n\nEvery Armor held a surprised expression and glanced between him and Riome, who seemed the most surprised as he lay on his side a tail-length away, where Valfredo had pushed him.\n\nRoth's laugh broke the silence. \"You're strong for a little dragon. Let's take this matter to my brother. It'll be entertaining for him.\"\n\nRiome growled and stood, then shook off the wet leaves sticking to him. His talons dug into the ground, and his muscles quivered with fury. \"No. I'm going to kill him here and now. Everyone, back away!\"\n\nRoth growled and stepped between Riome and Valfredo. \"Clanhead Warrior Arnack gave me first rights to a death match with him, and I choose to give up that right to take this matter up with him.\"\n\nWith a snort, Riome said, \"Fine, but if he touches me again, I'll kill him.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Roth turned to Valfredo. \"Make sure that Forest knows not to try escaping, or she will be caught and eaten.\"\n\nThe words were threatening and his tone sincere, but there was a gentleness in his expression and a kindness in his eyes that suggested he didn't want to kill Pelion. He looked to the other adolescent Armors, and Valfredo followed his gaze. Curiosity showed in their expressions and scented the air around them. One even glanced a look of pity at Pelion, who crouched beneath Valfredo, watching them. Was it possible Valfredo's words had swayed their ideas about her clan? Maybe there was hope for the Armors, after all, if he could also sway Arnack. The clan's loyalty to their clanhead could change things instantly for the Forest and Armors\u2014they may even become friends.\n\nValfredo nodded and changed his stance to one less aggressive. \"All right, take us to Ar\u2014Warrior Arnack. Pelion will fly with me, and won't make an escape attempt.\" He nudged her to make sure she heard, and she nudged him back.\n\nVerth sighed and drooped her wings. \"Well, this has turned into quite the adventure. I'm afraid, dear son, you've made it end boringly. Your brother will kill our guest within seconds if he doesn't feel like playing, and then we'll be back to where we started with nothing to make our days exciting.\"\n\nBut the look she gave was one of pride, and she smiled openly. \"Come, everyone! We shall see this conflict to its end!\"\n\nWith a gleeful screech, all the Armors whipped open their wings and took flight, hovering above the trees for Valfredo and Pelion.\n\nPelion stepped out from under Valfredo, her face full of fear and determination. \"We might both be killed, you know. If you want, I can try to distract them while you escape.\"\n\nValfredo smiled. It was hard to believe he ever thought badly of her. \"If we die, we die together as friends.\"\n\nA smile crept across her snout, and the fear left her eyes, replaced with a sparkle. Together, they took flight and went within the circle of Armors to their nesting ground."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "\"What's this?\" Arnack growled, standing to his full height with wings flared. \"Why've you brought a live one to the nesting ground?\" His eyes glinted as he gave Valfredo a stern look. Despite being poised to fight, he appeared relaxed, as if he knew nothing could touch him without his permission.\n\n\"We found this Forest in our northern hunting territory,\" Verth said. \"Riome was going to kill it, but Valfredo insisted we let it go, so we decided to bring the argument to you.\"\n\nArnack snorted and asked Valfredo, \"What makes you think we should let it go?\" His tone was strong and commanding, and his wings twitched with anticipation of the answer.\n\nValfredo swallowed the worry knotting in his throat, but the constant impressions of fear and admiration for Arnack felt stronger than ever, and were difficult to ignore. The clanhead stood nearly two heads taller than Valfredo, and he had the bulk and confidence to match. Why had Valfredo been foolish enough to think he could sway this clanhead's opinion? His very bones shivered in Arnack's presence. What chance did he have if a fight broke out?\n\nThe rest of the clan was motionless, watching them with excitement sparking the air. They'd probably never seen a confrontation like this against Arnack. Not one that ended well for the other dragon, anyway.\n\nA current of warmth landed on Valfredo's scales, seeping in to calm his cold blood. The impression was gentle, but strong and very welcome. He accepted it, letting it soak into his muscles and bones to give him courage. A small foreclaw touched his, and he glanced down at Pelion, who gave him a confident smile. She, at least, believed in him. He smiled back, then shook his body to rid himself of the fearful appearance he no doubt had had. Then he raised his head proudly and spoke with the disciplinary tone Kaven had used so often.\n\n\"I want to let her go for the same reason I'd want any harmless female to be released. She's a dragon, no different from you except in appearance, and I will not tolerate cannibalism among my kind.\"\n\nThe whole crowd of Armors broke out in laughter.\n\n\"A Forest, a dragon?\" one said. \"What a stupid idea!\"\n\n\"He thinks he can tell Warrior Arnack what's acceptable!\" another said.\n\n\"Quiet down and let me hear!\" yet another hissed.\n\nThey hushed, letting out only a few scattered snickers.\n\nArnack raised an eyeridge, the corners of his mouth twitching an attempted grin he refused to let form. \"My father fed Forests to me, and his father to him. Why should we break with tradition to appease a stranger from another territory? The Forests are smarter than other prey, but they're still just prey.\"\n\nA sick feeling dropped into Valfredo's stomach. Those words were what he'd once said about bogres. Despite all the proof that said they were smarter than prey, he'd clung onto traditional belief that they were stupid and undeserving of further interest. If Arnack was as thick-headed as he'd once been, what could he possibly say to change the clanhead's mind?\n\nThe fire twisted inside, urging him to end the conversation and force the Armors to obey him. But he didn't want to kill them, especially not with phoenix fire. Arnack was still standing there, waiting for a response, which meant his opinion could still be changed.\n\nValfredo took a deep breath. \"Look at Pelion.\" He gestured to her, and her body stiffened, though she kept a confident expression. \"Other than her color, slimmer frame, and lack of horns, she looks like one of you. If she were larger, would you consider her a dragon? Earlier, she gave me an impression. What prey do you know can give impressions? What prey can speak with words we understand? They laugh and cry and hunt and play like we do. They have reason and understanding, and they go into dangerous territories to find their missing clanmates. What prey do you know does that?\"\n\nWhispers moved through the crowd, and though Valfredo couldn't hear the words, the atmosphere was promising. But Arnack's expression remained unchanged except for a dullness in his eyes suggesting boredom.\n\nThere had to be a way to break through to him. If he could not be convinced of the Forests' kind, perhaps he could be discouraged from killing and eating them.\n\n\"If I'm wrong,\" Valfredo continued, \"you lose a food source you don't need. But if I'm right, you're encouraging your clan to practice cannibalism, and cannibalism doesn't make dragons stronger\u2014it makes us weak. Once we start thinking of others as nothing more than meat, the clan will fall apart, and our young will become food instead of treasures to protect. What will be worth living for then? At what point is a dragon considered a dragon instead of prey? Will age determine it, or is it only the size that matters? Are horns part of it? Your clan looks up to you, which makes it your burden to stop this traditional cannibalism and lead the Armors to something better.\"\n\nThe attempt to sway Arnack sounded more like a speech a head female or clanhead would give, but once he'd started, he couldn't stop. His blood boiled at the thought of Pelion living through the same trauma he had, and the idea that the trauma to her came from other dragons instead of a merciless fallen sun was sickening. Killing Arnack wouldn't change the clan's mind; it'd infuriate them. They loved their clanhead far more than what was healthy, and they were far too prideful to follow a smaller, strange dragon. If he couldn't make Arnack understand, he'd end up having to help the Forests kill the entire Armor clan. How could he continue living if he did that?\n\nThe grin that had attempted to form across Arnack's snout succeeded, followed by a laugh so loud it echoed off the mountains. \"You really are a weakling to fall for an idea that stupid,\" Arnack said, excitement glinting in his eyes. \"If you want me to believe the Forests aren't prey, defeat me in battle!\"\n\nHe charged and shoved Valfredo off the ledge. Valfredo tumbled down, head over tail, then reached out with his foreclaws to grab at the cliff. His talons dug in, and his body slammed into it, scattering shards of rock. Digging in with his hindclaws, he righted himself and looked up. Arnack hovered overhead, laughing. Then, with a menacing grin, he dove. Valfredo pushed off the cliff to dodge, then watched as Arnack landed on a boulder, smashing it into pieces. Valfredo cringed inside. One wrong move, and he'd be a corpse.\n\nArnack took flight again and immediately charged. He was fast and agile, but his movements weren't very precise. Either he wasn't taking the fight seriously, or he wasn't as accurate as Kaven. Valfredo ducked and dodged, using little energy, but staying focused. Impressions of fear, defeat, and submission struck at him like powerful talons, but he shrugged them off, letting the battle distract his emotions.\n\nThe clan's cheers for Arnack came in waves, quieting when Valfredo dodged, and growing to a deafening roar when Arnack charged. The air itself was energized, like the air before a big lightning storm\u2014and Arnack soaked it in. His attacks grew faster, more powerful, and more accurate. His eyes nearly glowed with excitement. He flew above Valfredo and dove, coming down at an incredible speed that Valfredo barely dodged.\n\nValfredo dove after him, and when Arnack stopped his fall, Valfredo grabbed his foreleg and yanked it down with his momentum. A few scales scraped off, and he swallowed them before flying to a safe distance from Arnack, who hovered, looking a little stunned. Surely now he would listen to what Valfredo had said.\n\nThe clan hushed, and a strange stillness filled the air. Then Arnack laughed.\n\n\"I've never met a dragon who fought so well against me.\" His eyes sparked with delight, and the menacing grin returned. \"But you'll have to try harder than that if you want to defeat me.\" He took a deep breath and let out a long, hot stream of fire.\n\nThe white fire stirred in reaction, and though Valfredo managed to dodge most of Arnack's flame, his wingtip got singed. Pain made the white fire angry, and when another stream came close, the fire flared hot and pushed to get out.\n\n\"Not now,\" Valfredo growled to it. \"I don't want to kill him.\" But it didn't listen, and instead took both his energy and concentration to keep inside.\n\nA weight landed on his back, followed by sharp pain in his wings. Valfredo screeched and twisted in an attempt to throw Arnack off, but the pain only grew as strong talons dug in to grab on.\n\nArnack's grinning face appeared beside his. \"Time to die, weakling.\"\n\nIt was kill or be killed. Valfredo let the fire out in a short burst, twisting his neck to force Arnack to release him or die. Screams from the clan filled his ears, and the pain from Arnack's talons left his wings, freeing them to open just in time. He landed on the ground with a crash, but his bones were spared from breaking. Blood trickled down from where he'd been grabbed, but the injury was superficial; he could still fly if necessary. He looked around for ashes and burnt dragon parts, but there were none. He looked up at the ledge where Pelion stood, and there was Arnack staring down at him with wide-open eyes.\n\nRelief washed over Valfredo; he hadn't killed him. Then regret. They all knew now about the fire\u2014even Pelion, who stared down with eyes as open as Arnack's. The air was a mix of pungent fear and strong admiration; fear of the phoenix fire and admiration for Arnack, no doubt. Everyone stared at Valfredo with the same unreadable expression.\n\n\"Well?\" he shouted up to Arnack. \"Are we going to finish this fight, or are you going to listen?\" This time, he decided, he would not let his opponent get the upper claw. If Arnack insisted on using fire, he would not be so opposed to using it as well, even if it meant a dragon dying by phoenix flame. He was fighting for his life and the lives of the Forests. He would not lose again.\n\nArnack dropped off the ledge, and Valfredo braced for the fight, but instead of landing on him, Arnack landed in front of him and stood in a nonaggressive pose. Valfredo cocked his head and waited, claws tense and digging into the ground.\n\n\"Never in our history has the Armor clan known of a dragon with phoenix fire,\" Arnack said, his tone calm. \"Did you fly into the sun and breathe it in?\"\n\nValfredo snorted. \"Flying to the sun is impossible.\"\n\n\"Then how did you get it? Did you kill and eat the phoenix?\"\n\nWhy was he asking so many questions? Where were the fear and aggression? The whole clan saw he carried phoenix fire, so why weren't they attacking? Valfredo dared not take his eyes off Arnack for long, so he only glanced around at the clan. None of them had moved or looked ready to charge. If anything, they looked less aggressive. Was this some sort of trick to earn his trust?\n\nArnack stood there expectantly, waiting for an answer. But what answer could Valfredo give? There was no way the Armor clan would believe he'd faced the phoenix and lived\u2014They didn't believe anyone could be stronger than their clanhead. Yet, what other story could he tell?\n\nWith a sigh, he answered. \"When I was a fledgling, the phoenix attacked my clan. It had me pinned against a cliff, and I fought back by biting into its foot. It kicked me away, and I accidentally swallowed the flesh in my mouth. That piece turned into the white fire that burns inside me. I have no dragon fire; the phoenix fire ate it. I don't want to kill you or your clan, so I didn't use the it.\"\n\nWith a growl, he added, \"However, I will use it to stop your cannibalism, even if that means killing your entire clan.\"\n\nThe Armors remained silent for a long time. No attacking, no hot anger or pungent fear filling the air. In fact, the fear in the air quickly dissipated, replaced by more admiration for Arnack.\n\nThen, all at once, they began whispering to each other. Their chatting hisses and skeptical growls filled the valley, though the words were indistinguishable. Valfredo widened his stance and readied his wings for flight. The death match against the clan would start any moment.\n\nBut instead of ordering the attack, Arnack flared his wings to silence them, then sat down and curled his tail around, looking as harmless as a fledgling. \"You survived a phoenix attack and stole its fire. Then you came here and told me we're wrong to eat Forests, that we should be friends with them instead. I didn't believe you\u2014I trusted the traditions of my father and his father over your reasoning. I've always been proud of my fire's aim, impressions, and fighting prowess, yet you dodged me with ease, and your prowess nearly matches mine. If you'd used your fire, you could have easily defeated me.\"\n\nHe stood, then lowered his head in submission. \"I see now that I misjudged you. You're a far greater warrior than I am, and I will gladly follow your wishes.\" He looked up at the clan. \"If anyone kills a Forest unprovoked, they will be considered a traitor and killed, and their body left to rot!\"\n\nThe clan cheered, wholeheartedly agreeing with his declaration.\n\nUnbelievable. Valfredo stood there, unsure what to do or say. Could this really be happening? Could it be the Armors liked him having the phoenix fire? That they respected him for it? Then it dawned on him: The admiration in the air wasn't for their clanhead; it was for him. Kaven had been right about the clans back home, where fear of the phoenix overrode everything. But on this side of the meadow, where it attacked less often and they scared it away with impressions, the only thing that seemed to matter was the ability to win a fight\u2014something the phoenix fire made easy.\n\nThe clan energized the air with their enthusiasm. They didn't seem to care that their whole way of life had changed in an instant. In fact, they almost seemed happy about it. Even Galataia knew things were changing, as the atmosphere itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as Arnack stood in front of Pelion and apologized for everything he'd done to her clan, then ordered each clanmate to do the same. They lined up eagerly, even the fledglings, and flew off one by one with a happy screech when Pelion forgave them.\n\nCould this be what he'd been looking for? Could the Armors become his clan, and Forests his friends? Was it possible for two clans to become friends?\n\nPelion smiled down at him, her eyes sparkling with delight. He smiled back and waved, feeling a peaceful warmth inside. Well, if a dragon and a bogre could get along, why couldn't two dragon clans?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Almost the second the apologies were complete, the clan swarmed Pelion and began talking all at once, asking her questions and telling her about the greatness of their clan. Valfredo flew up to rescue her, but before he could scare the clan off, a few Armor females got between Pelion and the rest and growled warning.\n\n\"She's used to us eating her clan,\" one of the females said.\n\n\"So back off!\" said another.\n\nThe largest one simply lowered her head and growled, challenging anyone who disagreed with her friends.\n\nThe clan did back off, though not happily. They circled the group, looking for an opening or a chance to talk to Pelion, who stood crouched and wide-eyed with a determined set to her jaw.\n\n\"Leave her alone,\" Verth said while pushing through the crowd. \"Warrior Arnack has ordered us to treat her clan as equals, not inferiors. Show her respect and give her space.\"\n\nWith disappointed grunts, the clan left\u2014all but the three protective females and Verth.\n\n\"I do apologize,\" Verth said to Pelion. \"We're not used to having prey as a guest... or rather, what I mean is, we're not used to prey becoming equals.\"\n\nValfredo cringed. She wasn't very good at this\u2014and Pelion clearly felt it, as she also cringed before straightening out to stop looking frightened.\n\n\"When can I see my clanmates?\" she asked. \"The ones you've captured?\"\n\nArnack walked up from behind Verth and nodded west. \"That's where they are, but you should wait a few days. Having one Forest around will minimize the danger while my clan adjusts.\"\n\nPelion flapped her wings to show her impatience. \"But they're still living in fear. I at least want to tell them your clan won't eat us anymore.\"\n\nThe air around Arnack fell solemn. \"If your clanmates started wandering around thinking it's safe, some of my less controlled clanmates might get away with killing them. If we keep the danger centered on you, I can easily punish those who let instinct control them and kill those who disagree with my order. Don't worry about your captured friends. I've sent a few trusted warriors to order the guards away and protect the forest from uncooperative Armors.\"\n\nPelion's countenance fell, and she scratched the rock floor with her foreclaw. \"Oh. I understand.\" She looked up at him. \"How long do you think it'll take?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I can't imagine it taking more than a week. I have a good clan, and they respect me, and I respect Valfredo. It shouldn't take long for us to follow his example.\"\n\n\"A week... all right, I can wait that long if it means my clan is safe.\" She turned to the females who had defended her. \"In the meantime, maybe we can get to know each other.\"\n\nThe females grinned at each other, then at Pelion. \"We'd like that.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Over the next week, Arnack had to punish many young dragons who thought it'd be fun to frighten Pelion, and even more grown Armors who were used to hunting the Forests and let their habits take over. Pelion was strong through it all, forgiving those who sincerely apologized, and refusing to be guarded all the time. Her bravery was very useful in catching and disciplining the troublemakers, and her ability to notice danger and slip into cracks until the attacking Armor came back to his senses kept her safe. Even her uncanny ability to tell the Armors apart was helpful, as when a troublemaker didn't get caught in time, and didn't come forward to admit he'd done wrong, she could identify him for Arnack.\n\nIt was amazing how much the Armor clan changed over the week. Arnack and Verth constantly asked Valfredo's opinions and advice on things\u2014even past actions of the clan\u2014and then instructed the clan about the changes they made based on his answers. The slaughter of the Sun clan was officially bad, and on the last day of the week, every Armor flew to where the Sun's nesting ground had been and left a rock of remembrance. Then Verth declared that on that day every year, the clan would go back to the Sun's nesting ground and tell the story of the Armor's greatest failure as dragons.\n\n\"We females did not protect the innocent from the warrior's aggression,\" she said. \"And the warriors let their anger and bloodlust control them. Breather of Phoenix Fire Valfredo is right when he says we are not superior to other clans, but equal.\"\n\nVerth gave Pelion a gentle smile. \"No matter their size or physical strength.\"\n\nValfredo waited for the inevitable cheer, but the clan stood quiet and solemn, making the air heavy with the feeling of regret. Then he realized the Armors did everything in exaggeration, which meant they might never forgive themselves and forever force themselves to be sad because of this mistake. He looked to Pelion, and she looked at him, her forehead wrinkled with worry.\n\nShe nodded to him, urging him to say something, but he shook his head and whispered, \"They'll listen better to someone they've hurt just as much.\"\n\nWith a sigh\u2014and small glare aimed at him\u2014she cleared her throat to get the Armor's attention. Every one of them turned to her.\n\n\"This tragedy needs to be remembered,\" she said, \"and your clan needs to remember what you did wrong, but to be sad and hate yourselves for it is wrong, too. No amount of guilt will change what happened, so instead of putting energy into your guilt, how about you put it into teaching your young what the clan should've done, so your young will know what to do if this ever happens again?\"\n\nEvery head of every Armor cocked to the side, then hissing whispers went throughout, and as they talked, the heaviness in the air lifted.\n\n\"You have proven yourself worthy of our respect,\" Verth said. \"We will follow your suggestion.\" She glanced at Arnack, who nodded agreement.\n\nThis time, the clan cheered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "At last, it was time for Pelion to tell her captured clanmates they were free. She wriggled with excitement, eyes sparkling and wings flapping so quickly she kept having to circle Valfredo and Arnack. Between squeals of anticipation, she talked about her plans for the next couple centuries.\n\n\"And then we'll teach our young together, so they get used to...\" Her voice faded as she made another loop. \"... without any trouble!\"\n\n\"Is she ever going to shut up?\" Arnack growled, turning his gaze to follow her looping again. \"And hold still?\"\n\nValfredo laughed. \"No offense, but you kind of deserve to be annoyed by a Forest.\"\n\nArnack snorted disapproval, but his eyes laughed.\n\nThe trees beneath them stopped abruptly, opening into a large meadow with a circular forest in its center, and in the forest's center, a lake sparkled with blue sky and white cloud reflections. The trees in the forest were spread apart to allow a grown Armor easy access between them, probably to make hunting more practical. Valfredo shuddered. The area was beautiful, but ominous. He could only imagine how the Forests felt when they saw how vulnerable they were in their new home.\n\n\"Your clanmates haven't been taunted or attacked for over a week now,\" Arnack said as they landed by the forest. \"It should be easy to convince them.\"\n\nWith a grin, Pelion nodded and trotted in, not bothering to be quiet. The underbrush and fallen twigs crackled and snapped under her, sounding loud at first then gradually disappearing until everything grew silent.\n\n\"It's strange,\" Arnack said.\n\nValfredo waited to hear him say more, but when he kept silent, he prodded with, \"What is?\"\n\n\"To think of Forests as proper dragons. I spent all my life thinking of them as food. Smart food, but food. And yet... somehow this friendship feels right.\"\n\n\"That's because it is right.\" Memories of the phoenix attack came to mind, but Valfredo shook them away before they depressed him. \"No one should ever have to live in fear, and no young should ever experience their clan becoming a meal. I think, deep down inside, your clan knew this.\"\n\nArnack nodded solemnly. \"We'll be sure to teach our young the right things.\"\n\nThey both fell into silence, though a thought nagged Valfredo. What if, now that the Armors and Forests were friends, the Armors completed their idea to attack the bogres? What if Kina's clan was killed or forced to live in fear of them? How could he protect her family? Should he tell Arnack about her? Could a dragon who'd just accepted that one type of food wasn't food accept that yet another, even smaller and weaker prey was really a small, fleshy dragon? Or would Arnack just send him away with the entire clan laughing at him?\n\nHe glanced at Arnack, who was in the middle of yawning, and watched him lay down in the sunshine. Arnack had listened to him readily a week ago. Maybe, if Valfredo told the whole story, he'd listen again.\n\nValfredo cleared his throat. \"There's something I want to tell you... something about bogres. You're going to think I'm crazy or stupid, but I need you to listen to my whole story before judging.\"\n\nArnack gave a teasing grin. \"You're crazy and stupid. Now tell me the story.\"\n\nStarting with the bogres' strange activities back home, Valfredo told him everything he'd discovered about them. Arnack listened with a thoughtful, yet slightly bored look until the story came to the parts about Kina. Then Arnack perked up and listened intently, and when Valfredo came to the part where he'd realized she was as smart as a dragon, Arnack's eyeridges shot up and his eyes grew wide.\n\n\"If I'd just remembered how fragile they are, maybe I'd have controlled my temper better.\" Valfredo sighed. \"I still don't know if she survived, but I sincerely doubt it. Anyway, that's the story. You may tell me what you think.\"\n\nIt took only a moment for Arnack to blink away his amazement. Then he burst out laughing. \"I get it. You don't want us to attack the bogres, either! Tell me, can we still eat deer and ogres, or are they off limits too?\" His laughter continued, sending out a warm gayness that enveloped the meadow. When he calmed, his eyes still danced, and his voice remained cheerful. \"Very well, I'll make sure both the Armors and Forests know that Breather of Phoenix Fire Valfredo says bogres are to be left alone.\"\n\nValfredo breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. \"Thank you, my friend.\"\n\nArnack winked and said nothing more, though a chuckle and amused headshake escaped now and then."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "A few hours later, Pelion finally emerged from the forest, wearing a frown.\n\n\"What's wrong? Where're your clanmates?\" Valfredo asked.\n\n\"They won't listen to me. They don't believe the Armors are our friends now, and they really don't believe a dragon can breathe phoenix fire. I almost convinced a few warriors to come out, but when they saw you, they ran back and hid.\"\n\nArnack stood and, eyes glinting, said, \"Forests have always been cowards.\"\n\n\"We're not cowards! We're cautious. There's a difference, you know.\"\n\nA wry grin spread across his snout. \"Not much of one.\"\n\nPelion glared at him and growled, \"The reason they won't leave is because you're here.\" She put her foreclaws on his chest and pushed with all her weight. \"Move! You big...stupid...bully,\" she said between attempts to force him.\n\nArnack raised an eyeridge and didn't budge, the grin still spread on his snout. Then he looked at Valfredo, eyes full of some mischievous idea. Valfredo shook his head and gave a small glare that he hoped said, \"You started it by calling them cowards.\"\n\nArnack rolled his eyes before moving. \"Pesky female,\" he mumbled as he took off toward home.\n\n\"Finally,\" Pelion said in a triumphant tone. \"Now back to the clan!\" Head raised proudly, she trotted back into the forest.\n\nValfredo chuckled and shook his head. She really was a lot like a fledgling.\n\nA little while later, she emerged once again, looking even more frustrated than before. \"I can't believe it! I just can't believe it! Arnack was right, my clan is a whole bunch of cowards!\"\n\n\"What happened this time?\"\n\n\"They won't believe me! They won't believe it's safe to come out now! They said, 'Clanhead Niamo would never approve of us risking our lives on an Armor trick.' Can you believe that? Cowards! They're all a bunch of cowards! No wonder the Armors didn't respect us!\" She flopped down and gave a long, loud sigh. \"I just don't know what to do.\"\n\nValfredo rumbled and lay down to give her a reassuring nuzzle, but she glared at him before he could touch her.\n\n\"I'm not a young,\" she said.\n\n\"I know that.\" He changed the rumble to a stronger one, for grown dragons. \"I just didn't want to frighten you, that's all.\"\n\nShe scoffed and gave another loud sigh, then suddenly brightened. \"I know! We'll just have to fetch Niamo! They'll have to listen to her. Come on!\" In an instant she was in the air waiting for him.\n\nValfredo leaped into the air and flew toward her, but before he could catch her, she took off. \"Wait a moment, will you?\" he called, and she slowed down to let him catch up.\n\n\"You called your clanhead a her,\" he said. \"Is Niamo a female?\"\n\n\"Of course she's a female, meathead. Niamo happens to be a female name.\"\n\n\"Don't call me a meathead,\" he growled. \"I've never heard the name before, so how should I know it's female?\"\n\nShe shrugged, but offered no apology.\n\nArnack was right again; she was pesky.\n\nThen again, her face was scrunched in thought\u2014and she looked worried. Maybe she was just distracted by her mission. The other forests saw her with him and Arnack, yet they wouldn't believe her, so why would her clanhead?\n\nMaybe he should distract her with a few questions. He had a few on his mind anyway after hearing Niamo was female. But if the Forest's way of telling stories was anything like the Armor's, she'd never shut up. He groaned internally at the thought and looked back at Pelion. She still looked worried and unsure. He had to cheer her up, even if it meant suffering through hours of endless bragging.\n\n\"So... how did your clan get a female clanhead?\"\n\nPelion blinked out of her thoughts and looked at him with one eyeridge raised. \"What?\"\n\n\"How'd Niamo become the clanhead? I've only ever heard of male clanheads. Are Forest males weaker than females, so the females have to protect the clan?\"\n\nShe laughed and shook her head. \"Our males are far from weak. No, we decided generations ago to have a female clanhead. That way, if our head male has to lead a battle, we'll still have our leader, and if he dies, it'll be easier on the clan.\" She shrugged. \"It works for us.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" The more he learned about the dragons on this side of the meadow, the stranger they became\u2014though that strangeness was oddly endearing. Who'd want every clan to have the same traditions?\n\n\"It's amazing to think of all the changes that'll happen now that we're friends with the Armors,\" Pelion said. \"No more living in fear. No more living underground... do you know what it's like to constantly get dirt in your mouth?\"\n\nAn image of Pelion being too busy spitting dirt to speak came to mind, and Valfredo laughed.\n\n\"It's not funny!\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" He forced the laughter down to a chuckle, then just a smile. \"I know it's not funny.\"\n\nPelion frowned and flew faster, forcing Valfredo to stretch his muscles to pick up speed. Any faster, and he wouldn't be able to keep up.\n\n\"It's not like we live in dens by choice,\" she said. \"We used to have our nests spread out in the treetops where we could get sunshine and fresh air and see danger coming, and we even had several nesting places to move between so our enemies couldn't figure out exactly where we were.\"\n\nShe sighed and slowed her pace. \"I only vaguely remember living like that. The dens were a lot smaller then, and used only for hiding when an Armor or the phoenix passed by. But when the Armors became obsessed with eating us, our changing of nesting ground wasn't enough to hide our presence, and we were forced to make the dens our permanent home.\"\n\nNo wonder she'd gotten upset. To be forced into darkness after living in sunshine was unpleasant enough, but for that darkness to be surrounded by dirt that got into her mouth... it was a wonder she was so forgiving of the Armors. She was so much like Elina. So loving and strong. He was glad Kaven had sent him across the meadow, and glad that he'd met Pelion. A twinge of happiness to have the white fire started, but he forced it away. He would never be happy about that. Ever.\n\n\"I'm sorry for laughing,\" he said. \"I didn't realize you'd been through so much.\"\n\nShe shrugged and gave him a smile. \"We all make mistakes. Besides, you saved our clan. How could I stay mad at someone who did that?\"\n\nLoving warmth flooded the air, emanating from her\u2014no, wait. It emanated from both of them. His heart was swollen with it, radiating love through his body and into the air. He had a family again\u2014he was loved again, and she didn't hide it like Kaven had.\n\n\"Pelion?\"\n\n\"Hm?\"\n\n\"Do you mind\u2014I mean, would it be all right if I considered you my little sister?\"\n\nShe frowned at him. \"I'd be your older sister, meathead.\" Her tone was gentle without a hint of anger. \"And I don't mind.\"\n\nThey flew in silence for a short time before she glanced at him and grinned, a mischievous glint in her eyes.\n\nValfredo cocked his. \"Why are you\u2014\"\n\n\"Oops, you're falling behind!\" she said, and took off ahead of him.\n\n\"Hey!\" he shouted, and flew after her, but even at his fastest, she was quickly pulling away.\"Slow down, you little pest!\" he called, but either she didn't hear him, or she ignored him. How could such a tiny dragon fly so fast?\n\nFinally, she stopped and waited for him to catch up.\n\n\"What's the idea, flying off like that?\" He barely managed to get the words out when she dove into the forest. He growled frustration. Pelion wasn't as bossy as Elina, but she was just as irritating a sister. A quick study of the area proved the trees too close together for him to get through.\n\nPelion popped out of the canopy and hovered with a confused expression. \"Aren't you coming?\"\n\n\"How exactly do you expect me to get through those trees?\" he growled.\n\nShe looked him over, then studied the forest. \"Oh... um... aha! Over here.\" She glided a short distance away and dove down. This time the opening was large enough for him to follow.\n\nValfredo landed and shook off some frustration. \"How much farth\u2014Pelion?\" Where'd she go this time?\n\nHer head popped out of some brush. \"This way, come on!\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes and followed. The forest here was crowded with brush, shrubs, and trees. Frequently, he had to find a route different from the one she took, and not once was he able to see her. If she wasn't walking so noisily, he'd never be able to track her.\n\nA face appeared in front of him, and he snapped at it.\n\n\"Yeep!\" it said, jerking back and revealing it was Pelion.\n\n\"Don't do that!\" he snarled.\n\n\"Shh, we're almost there,\" she whispered. \"You have to be quiet now. My clan knows the sound of a large dragon's footfalls.\"\n\nValfredo sighed. Meeting a bunch of small, frightened dragons wasn't exactly appealing, but she seemed excited about it, so he might as well do it. Folding his wings in tightly, he carefully maneuvered to make as little sound as possible. It was still impossible to follow Pelion by sight, but she made constant little chirps for him to find her by.\n\nWait, what was that? Someone was chirping back. Was the chirping a secret Forest tongue? Or maybe they used the chirps to identify each other since they couldn't see if the incoming dragon was a clanmate.\n\n\"Ouch!\" The bush in front of him yelped.\n\nValfredo jerked, then sniffed the bush. \"Pelion?\"\n\n\"Of course it's me, griffin-breath,\" she hissed. \"Get off my tail!\"\n\nStepping back, he watched Pelion appear out of the bush and glare at him.\n\nRaising an eyeridge, he said, \"You can't expect me to avoid stepping on your tail if I can't see you.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. \"Lie down and hold still. Try to get really low to the ground. Yeah, like that.\" Running around, she took branches and leaves and started throwing them on top of him.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Shh! I don't want anyone to see you before it's time. Narrow your eyes\u2014they're noticeable. Good.\"\n\n\"Won't they notice a gigantic bush suddenly appearing outside the nesting ground?\"\n\n\"I said be quiet! And we're a little away from the ground, so no. These dens are freshly dug, and most of the clan spends their time inside, so unless a hunter comes before I can talk to Niamo, they shouldn't realize you're weird.\"\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes and huffed.\n\n\"Keep your eyes narrow!\"\n\nHe did as told, and she threw a final branch on his face before trotting into an clearing and making a long, loud rumble. Large sections of the forest ground popped up, revealing large holes Forest dragons crawled out of. Every one of them had the same green, brown, and grey coloring and nearly the same body frame. Telling them apart was going to be even harder than the Armors.\n\n\"Pelion!\" one of them\u2014female judging by the lighter voice\u2014squealed, then ran to Pelion and nuzzled her neck. \"We thought you'd gotten eaten for sure. Where have you been?\"\n\nPelion nuzzled her back and with sparkling eyes said, \"I only want to explain this once, so find Niamo and tell her I need to talk to her\u2014out here.\"\n\nThe female nodded enthusiastically and darted back into a hole.\n\nOne of the adolescent Forest's eyes rolled. \"So what crazy idea have you come up with this time?\" He sounded male, though his frame wasn't much bulkier than the females. \"Are the Armors throwing our clanmates into the volcanoes, or capturing us alive to feed their young? Or\u2014\" He faked a gasp and made his eyes wide. \"Have you given in to reason and figured out they aren't taking us alive?\"\n\nWith a scowl, Pelion stuck her tongue at him. He stuck his back, then yelped in pain when a nearby Forest whipped his head with their tail. He glowered at the clanmate, then slunk back into a hole.\n\n\"Younger brothers can be pests,\" the clanmate\u2014a male\u2014said. \"But they eventually grow out of it.\"\n\nPelion smirked. \"That's because their older brothers whip them into submission.\"\n\nNearby clanmates rolled their eyes, but the two laughed together. Then everyone quieted, and Pelion moved aside to let Valfredo see who'd come out of the den behind her. It looked to be an older female, judging by her size and gentle, feminine smile. She held herself regally with head held high and wings relaxed, but slightly flared to increase her mass. The air around her had a strong presence, much like Kaven and Arnack, though the jaws of it were somehow softer, as if she had the ability to crush all opponents, but chose not to. She moved swiftly to Pelion and nuzzled the top of her head.\n\n\"It's good to see you again, my dear,\" she said.\n\nPelion licked the older female's neck and rumbled. \"I didn't mean to worry everyone, grandmother, but I stayed away for a very good reason.\"\n\nThat was Pelion's grandmother? No wonder the pest was so spirited.\n\nThe grandmother's tailtip twitched, and her smile vanished, replaced by a stern set of her jaw. \"You were in their territory again, weren't you?\"\n\nPelion looked away and clawed at the ground. \"Well, yes, but\u2014\"\n\nThe grandmother sighed and shook her head. \"You're just like your mother. She didn't listen to me, either, and it got her killed. The Armors are not to be underestimated. Stay away from them, or I will have to punish you.\"\n\nTurning back to her, Pelion gave a pleading expression, though Valfredo sensed a hint of anger as well. \"Please just listen to me. I went to their territory to\u2014\"\n\n\"I know why you went!\" The grandmother's nostrils flared, and the air heated with anger. \"I am your clanhead, Pelion, not just your grandmother.\" She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, calming her anger. \"Do not force me to battle with you.\"\n\nPelion shifted and glanced at Valfredo, tears threatening her eyes. She looked lost, like she had to convince Niamo to listen, but had no way to. Her own grandmother, and she wouldn't listen.\n\nGrowling, he stood and shook off the branches hiding him. \"You'll listen to my friend, Niamo, or face me in a challenge.\"\n\nPungent fear hit the air, along with hot anger.\n\nNiamo glared at Pelion. \"You brought one of them here? What is the matter with you?\"\n\n\"He's not\u2014\"\n\n\"Kill him!\" Niamo roared. \"Kill him before he kills our young!\"\n\n\"No!\" Pelion screamed, but it was too late. They were already descending on him, biting and clawing and flaming.\n\nValfredo batted one away and whacked another with his wing. He roared to frighten them away, but they only scattered for a moment. The fire sensed the danger and flared, trying to get out, but he didn't want to kill Pelion's clanmates. He glanced at her with wild eyes, and her face said she got the message. Quickly, she darted into the battle and shoved the clanmates away from his front, away from the fire's reach.\n\nWith another roar, Valfredo let it out in a ball that ashed the bottom section of some trees. The unashed parts hit the ground, their tops so entwined with others they leaned as one, looking like a small patch of wind-blown trees with blackened trunks.\n\nThe Forests stopped their attack and stared wide-eyed, some at him, some at the trees.\n\n\"Now,\" Valfredo said with strained calmness. \"I suggest you listen to my friend. I did not come to kill anyone, but if I must, I will.\"\n\nThe Forests backed away and stood around Niamo. The air filled with shock, fear, and admiration\u2014emotions that were obvious on Niamo's face.\n\n\"Wh-what are you?\" she whispered.\n\n\"He's a dragon,\" Pelion said. \"It's what I've been trying to tell you. He's the most powerful dragon who ever lived. He stole that fire from the phoenix and made it his own, and now he's here, and he defeated the Armor clanhead and told him we're his friends. I've been living with the Armors for the last week, and I'm still alive because Valfredo\u2014this dragon here\u2014ordered the Armors to be friends. They're really nice when you get to know them.\"\n\nThe clan burst into whispers, but Niamo hushed them with a wing flare. Her eyes narrowed in a studying way, and she stared at Valfredo for a long while.\n\n\"Our clan has a saying: 'A dragon's heart shows through his eyes,'\" she said at last. \"I have seen your eyes and know your heart. It is full of pain and love and desire. There is no malice there, and no hunger for us.\"\n\nHer voice was calm and soothing, like the touch of cool water on a dry throat. She turned to Pelion and gave a nod. \"Fetch Head Warrior Jeero and take him to the Armor clanhead. Until he gives his approval, no one else is to go near an Armor.\" The last bit she said with a raised voice, and the small crowd of Forests lowered in submission.\n\nPelion grinned at Valfredo. \"Thank you... for everything.\"\n\nValfredo smiled back and opened his mouth to say \"you're welcome,\" but she continued before a word came out.\n\n\"When Head Warrior Jeero's finished, come back here with me\u2014there's something I want to show you on the way.\" Then, before he could respond, she slipped into a den entrance."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The Armors openly welcomed Jeero, though he hissed a warning to them when they began to swarm. Pelion, Valfredo, and Verth kept the clan some distance away until they got used to their newest guest and could respectfully\u2014and calmly\u2014approach him. Jeero held his head high and proud over the next few days, and his wide, cautious eyes gradually shrank to normal size and calmed. By the end of the fourth day, he went with Pelion to the captured Forests and told them of the changes. After a few hesitant questions, they finally believed him, and together they all flew back toward their clan.\n\nValfredo and Pelion started with them, but halfway to the Forest nesting ground, she turned to him with a twinkle in her eye and waved for him to follow. Then she swiftly moved into an air current that took her away from her clanmates.\n\nTurning, he found the same air current and caught up to her. \"Where are we going?\" he asked.\n\n\"The phoenix's sleeping cave.\"\n\nHe stopped to a hover. \"Where?\"\n\nSlowing for only a moment, she looked back at him and asked, \"Don't you want to see a sleeping sun?\"\n\n\"Suns don't sleep!\"\n\nHer eyes twinkled more, and a mischievous grin crossed her snout. \"Yeah, and they can't be hurt by fledgling dragons, either.\" Then she sped back up to continue her flight.\n\nFear grasped his heart, making it difficult to breathe. With rapid thumps, it warned him not to follow. But his wings obeyed his excited mind, which told him to go with her, that this was his chance.\n\nHis chance for what? To die?\n\nPelion looked back at him again and rolled her head in annoyance, then turned around to meet him.\n\nThis is your chance! Go! his mind said.\n\nYou'll die if you go. Stay where it's safe! his heart thumped.\n\nHe swallowed a forming lump that caught in his throat. Which one should he listen to?\n\n\"Valfredo?\" Concern was in Pelion's eyes. \"I know it killed your clan, but that's why I want to show it to you. I figured if anyone deserves to see it when it's harmless, you do.\"\n\nHarmless? Was it possible for the fallen sun to be harmless? Curiosity pricked his mind, strengthening its words.\n\nThis is your chance to see the fallen sun\u2014and kill it.\n\nWith a deep breath, he nodded and started after her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "The sun dipped lower in the sky to tell everyone evening was coming. They'd flown for several hours now, and most of it was out of the air current. Pelion's wings beat slower, showing she was tiring, but his still flapped with ease.\n\n\"Stoke your fire,\" Pelion called back.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You'll need the warmth, unless you want to turn into a dragon-shaped block of ice.\"\n\nIce? Summer had just ended; how could there be ice? Valfredo looked at the ground below. The lush, green plants disappeared into a brown and shriveled wasteland, and the small prey that bounded and flittered about were nowhere in sight. Not even a bird or rabbit could be found. Then the air suddenly grew cold, as if he had passed from summer into winter by flying through a wall. But this cold didn't feel like winter, coming from the outside; it pierced through his protective scales and drew the warmth right out of him, leaving behind its icy claws to freeze his bones.\n\n\"What happened?\" he asked, stoking the white fire until it overpowered the drain and warmed him.\n\n\"The phoenix does it,\" she said. \"I don't know how, but it pulls the heat out of everything while it sleeps. Dragons are the only ones who can get close to it because of our fire, though I heard bogres once tried to attack it. Their frozen bodies were scattered for miles around the mountain until the phoenix woke up and they thawed and rotted.\"\n\nThe landscape changed again, this time transforming from shriveled brown plants and no prey to a mix of brown and green plants with prey lying down, frozen in a sleeping pose. The air was even colder here with icicles everywhere.\n\nPelion fell back to fly beside him. \"These were frozen faster. When it first hibernates, everything gets cold so suddenly nothing can escape it. After that, the phoenix spreads its effects more slowly until it wakes.\"\n\nThe plants were now green and lush looking, and every now and then he spotted prey frozen in place, sometimes standing, sometimes in the middle of a stride. There was even a griffin with a ferocious, hungry expression biting into the neck of a leaping deer. If it wasn't for the tiny balls of hail and snow everywhere, he might think it was warm and full of life here. The air bit and drew the heat out of his body more fiercely, and he stoked the fire again, just in case.\n\nThey landed on top of a cliff covered in ice, and Pelion pointed to a large cave hidden behind some trees and large, long icicles. \"That's where it sleeps.\"\n\nValfredo sniffed the air and studied the area. It smelled bitter and dead, not crisp and clean like normal winter. There weren't any green or brown colors showing beneath the smothering white snow and hard ice, and though the sun tried to cheer Galataia with its golden light, only the blue light filtered through, covering everything in a depressing hue.\n\nA shiver ran through him. \"It's eerie.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" She spoke in almost a whisper.\n\nTheir words clung in the air, trying and failing to find a place. The breath that carried them froze immediately around their snouts, then warmed on their scales and dripped down, only to freeze again into tiny drops of ice the moment the water left their warmth.\n\n\"And you're sure this is the phoenix's doing?\" he asked. \"How could it be both the hottest and coldest thing on Galataia?\"\n\n\"I don't know how it makes everything cold, but this is what happens every fifty years when it sleeps.\"\n\nValfredo jerked back. \"'Every fifty years'? How do you know it sleeps every fifty years?\"\n\nShe gave a sad smile without breaking her eyes from watching the cave. \"This cave is in my clan's territory, so we've known about it for generations.\" She finally glanced at him, her eyes full of both fear and excitement. \"The first generation tried to kill the phoenix while it slept, but it woke up and slaughtered them all. Since then we avoid the area except when the eerie winter hits. Then a warrior checks to make sure it's the phoenix and reports back to the clan. That's how I know it's here right now.\"\n\nDoubt swirled in Valfredo like a jublar concoction, making him ill and dizzy. The Forests had already tried to kill the phoenix while it slept; what chance did he have? Why was he even thinking like this? No one could kill a sun\u2014no one! Yet one day, some time ago back home, a bogre had figured out how to kill dragons. If bogres could kill grown warriors, why couldn't a dragon kill the phoenix? The fire stirred inside him, bubbling hot with excitement.\n\n\"Don't you dare wake it,\" he growled to it.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" He forced long, deep breaths into his lungs and relaxed his muscles. The fire rapidly followed, calming to be only a little hotter than normal.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Pelion stared at him with her forehead wrinkled with worry. \"We can leave now if you want.\"\n\nHe stared again at the cave hiding behind the giant, glittering icicles. Some day, if it hadn't already, the phoenix would again threaten Elina. Killing it here and now was the only thing he could do for her, and he was going to do it. Maybe, if he was lucky, the fire inside him would die with its father.\n\n\"Let's go,\" he said, and started for the cave. Pelion stepped carefully behind him, her light footfalls barely making a sound on the ice-covered snow. His own feet fell through the ice, crackling and crunching and making him cringe with every step.\n\nFinally, they reached the cave and found a gap between the icicles just large enough for him to fit through. Valfredo lifted a foreclaw to step inside, but it stopped frozen halfway up, trembling in fear of the next step. The cave entrance loomed like a giant mouth waiting to swallow him, and the air coming out smelled of cold, ashy feathers. Warmth flowed out of him faster than ever, leaving an icy bite in his bones.\n\nHis foreclaw trembled more violently, then his leg trembled, then his body. The ice bit harder, and the white fire ignited. The cold fled from its heat, and with it, his fear. Taking a deep breath, he stole inside.\n\nIt took only a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The scent of the phoenix was strong, but the fallen sun was nowhere in sight. There were four tunnels right off the main cave, but they were too small for the fallen sun to crawl through. Where else could it\u2014\n\nSomething above him breathed. The chill in his bones returned, and he forced himself to look up.\n\nThe phoenix stared down at him, its orange eyes clouded and half lidded. He leaped back, stopping a yelp just before it escaped. But the phoenix didn't move or burst into flame. In fact, it was duller in color than he remembered, and its breathing was slow and deep. Was it still half asleep? Holding absolutely still, he waited. Every small moment yawned bigger and bigger until his body grew stiff. Then, finally, the phoenix closed its eyes. A sigh of relief escaped, breaking the stiffness that held him. Slowly, so as not to wake the phoenix, he circled below to study it from every direction.\n\nThe fallen sun was enormous\u2014at least ten times his size with a head as big as himself and a tail as long as his entire body. It clung horizontally to the high ceiling, grabbing large spikes with the claws centered in its wings. A tiredness surrounded it that was stronger than a hibernating bear. But suns didn't get tired, not like this, not for months at a time. And they didn't bring a freeze when they slept\u2014only the moon and wind brought the cold.\n\nA strange realization washed his bones. Could it really be possible the phoenix wasn't a sun at all, but a giant bird? Its feathers were fire-colored, but until the phoenix burst into flame, they were only feathers. They weren't always hot and strong like the sun in the sky\u2014it never went dull; it only went up and down, every day and every moment as strong as the last.\n\nExcitement tingled his scales. The phoenix really was nothing more than a giant bird with fire-colored feathers, and birds could be killed. This mission was going to succeed, and Elina would be safe forever.\n\nBut the phoenix was sleeping out of reach, making it difficult to attack. Any failed attempt would probably wake it, so he had to succeed on the first try, and quickly, before the attack woke it.\n\nMaybe he could fly up and break its neck. But that neck was massive; he'd never get his jaw around it, and the feathers would get in the way. What about breathing fire on it? No, that was stupid. Why would its own fire hurt it? Curses! How was he supposed to kill a bird impervious to fire, cold, and teeth?\n\nThe phoenix shifted and let out a deep breath. This must be what had killed the others who'd tried. They saw it vulnerable, assumed they could kill it, and attacked. Then the phoenix woke up and killed them. He had to do this the right way. He had to let himself think it all the way through. This was not a time to be rash.\n\n\"Valfredo?\"\n\n\"Yipe!\" Valfredo leaped back and swatted at the sound.\n\n\"Eek!\" Pelion squeaked while dodging his attack.\n\n\"Pelion! What in sun's light are you doing here?\" he asked so low she had to move closer to hear.\n\n\"I brought you here, remember?\" she whispered back, narrowing her eyes into a glare. \"You've seen it now, so let's go. This place is frightening and cold.\" She shivered as she spoke, and her wings clamped tightly to her sides.\n\n\"Not yet,\" he said, looking around for more ideas.\n\n\"What do you mean, 'not yet'? Don't you want to be warm and safe?\"\n\nWith a sigh, he turned back to her. \"You can go if you want, but I'm staying. The phoenix is an enemy, and I'm going to kill it.\"\n\nHer eyes grew wide, and her mouth opened to say something, then shut, then opened and shut again. Not even a squeak came out.\n\n\"Go on, then,\" he said. \"You think I'm crazy, but I don't care. This thing isn't a sun, and I'm going to kill it before it kills what's left of my clan. No one will have to fear it anymore, especially not Elina.\"\n\nHer forehead wrinkled curiously, then understanding filled her eyes, and she nodded. \"I understand.\" She looked up at the phoenix. \"But how will you kill it?\"\n\nHe clawed the ground and glanced away. \"I don't know yet.\"\n\nA long silence followed as the two of them walked around the cave and looked everywhere, searching for ideas. But every time one of them made a suggestion, the other pointed out why it wouldn't work. Finally, they sat in the cave's center, feeling defeated.\n\nThen Pelion's head jerked up, and her eyes glittered with excitement. \"Use your f\u2014\"\n\nValfredo leaped and clamped her mouth shut with his foreclaws. \"Shh!\"\n\nShe'd spoken the words dangerously loud, giving them some of her voice rather than a mere whisper. They looked up at the phoenix, but it didn't stir. With a relieved sigh, he released her.\n\n\"Use your fire,\" she said in a whisper.\n\n\"Are you crazy? It's that thing's fire, not mine. There's no way it'll work.\"\n\n\"Well just try it and see. What do you have to lose?\"\n\n\"My life.\"\n\nShe sighed and rolled her eyes. \"Dragons are hurt by dragon fire, but not weaker fire, right?\"\n\n\"Right...\"\n\n\"So dragon fire is weaker than phoenix fire, which is why we can't hurt it. But your fire is phoenix fire, which will hurt it. Make sense?\"\n\nIn an odd, frightening way, it did make sense. He looked up at the phoenix. It was still asleep and seemingly deaf to the conversation happening below.\n\n\"Fine,\" he said. \"I'll try it, but you stand over there out of the way. I don't want to chance you getting hurt.\"\n\nPelion backed into the cave's mouth beside an icicle as large as she was. It hid her from view with the exception of her head, which peaked around to watch.\n\nValfredo looked up once more and stoked the fire inside him. The whole mission depended on this succeeding. The fire was ready.\n\nAfter a deep breath, he let out a stream of white fire onto the phoenix. The cave trapped the fire's heat and made the air hot enough to burn his eyes into watering. The fire swirled and spread to cover the entire phoenix, hiding it from view with the bright flame. Dizziness threatened, so Valfredo cut off the fire and closed his mouth. The fire surrounding the phoenix dissipated, and the cave grew bitterly cold. Ice that had melted into water fell to the rocky cave bottom with a clatter, having turned back into ice during the short trip from the ceiling.\n\nHe lay down to rest and turned to Pelion. \"It didn't work.\" The words were choked, though the cold numbed his emotions. The phoenix was just a giant bird, but it was still untouchable.\n\nShe shook her head with a puzzled expression. \"I don't understand. I thought for sure it couldn't survive its own fire. It's so hot. How could the phoenix absorb it all?\"\n\nThe bite in the air left, and for a moment he was glad of it. Then a distant tinkle came, and another, and another. The sound of water hitting ice spread throughout the cave, and soon drops of icy water fell on him. A sickening knot clenched his stomach as he looked up. The phoenix didn't look as dull as before, and its eyes were partly open.\n\nBloody bones, it was waking up! And he still didn't know how to kill it! There was no choice; he had to break its neck. Flying up with a leap, he dug his talons into its feathers, opened his jaw wide, and bit down on its neck. But all he got was a mouthful of flaming feathers.\n\nValfredo screamed and dropped to the ground. His mouth burned with pain. The phoenix reached down with a fiery beak, barely missing Valfredo as he dodged. Then, with a leap, he forced his shivering legs to take him into one of the tunnels. Not far inside the tunnel's end stood in his way. The entire tunnel was only a few lengths deep, trapping him. Whirling around, he found the phoenix readying its flame. His stomach boiled. A ball of fire his size came at him, and he spat a stream of fire back at it. The fires collided at the tunnel entrance, flared, and dissipated. With a great leap he bolted past the phoenix and out of the cave. He had to hide, but where? The phoenix could spit fire into caves, and there were no jublar trees around to repel it.\n\nValfredo glided to some frozen trees, then flapped his wings hard to give a strong burst of strength. His body slammed into them, shattering them into thousands of tiny ice shards that, with the snow that once covered them, fell to hide him from the phoenix. Lying as flat as he could, he watched the phoenix exit the cave and look around. Icicles and snow melted under the heat of its flaming feathers. What could he possibly do against such a monster?\n\nThe phoenix lowered its head, sniffing. He held his breath and tried not to move. The remaining icicles around the cave's mouth melted and revealed Pelion, crouched and petrified with terror.\n\nThe phoenix turned its head toward her and raised its hackles in predatory glee.\n\n\"No!\" he screeched, and leaped out of the piled snow to spit a ball of fire at the phoenix. He was not going to survive another family.\n\nDodging the fireball, the phoenix jerked its head toward him and squawked, then spread its wings to fly.\n\n\"Pelion, get out of here!\" he screamed, then flew away from his hiding place to escape death.\n\nHeat came from behind, and he dodged to the left. A tug jerked his tail, followed by difficulty in steering. He kept flying, refusing to look back. The phoenix screeched excitement, scattering his thoughts. He dodged left, right, and up, then down, using agility to keep him alive. But the phoenix followed, filling the air with its heat and the whooshing sound of its enormous wings.\n\nThe white fire flared and twisted inside, and a strange feeling of familiarity washed over Valfredo. The fight with Arnack flashed through his mind\u2014how strong Arnack was, and how his clan kept the phoenix away. Summoning courage, Valfredo whirled around and roared, impressing the air with fear. The phoenix stopped, surprised enough to extinguish the flames on its feathers. Now was his chance! He flew at its wing and clamped down with his jaw. If he could just break its wing, he could escape.\n\nBut the bone was too large and too strong. He couldn't even get his jaw around it. The phoenix flamed up, burning his body and mouth again. Valfredo screamed and flew away, his mouth and throat pulsing angrily.\n\nThe phoenix gained and opened its beak around him. Valfredo flapped up, his heart growing too loud to hear where the phoenix was. Then it passed over in front of him, realized its mistake, and turned around to come back at him. This was useless; he couldn't outfly it. His only hope was to outmaneuver it. He dove beneath as it came at him, then took off as fast as he could. If he could get to that other mountain range, maybe he could escape.\n\nA beak surrounded him. He dove\u2014and felt the loss of control when the phoenix took the rest of his tail. The ground flew at him. He opened his wings wide in an attempt to slow his fall, but failed and landed hard. Bones cried with a loud crack, sending sharp pain through his body. Valfredo screamed, unable to stop it for the pain. He tried to stand, but his front legs bent the wrong way. Stabbing pain shot through them, forcing out another scream.\n\nThe phoenix landed and rolled him onto his back, where it pinned him with a toe and opened its beak for a bite.\n\nThe white fire flared angrily and, refusing to be held back from feeding its father, burst out in a long, hot stream aimed at the phoenix's belly. But instead of enjoying the fire, the phoenix screamed and hopped back. Its toe that had pinned Valfredo rolled him over again before scratching through his side. The phoenix screamed again before taking flight, pushing blackened feathers and the scent of burnt flesh to Valfredo.\n\nWith blurring vision, Valfredo watched the phoenix disappear. The white fire... worked. Pelion was right. She just didn't know the phoenix had to be awake. If only they'd known back in the cave, he might've had a chance. But it was too late now; his life was draining away. He lapped at the scratch, but it did no good. Blood seeped from it, falling into a pool quickly forming. His broken legs and slashed wings were useless for hunting. He couldn't even search for mudfern. A throbbing started in his head, growing loud and making him dizzy and tired.\n\nSomething moved in the forest. Was it Pelion? His vision was too blurry to see.\n\nShe was shiny now... and... silver? Oh, it wasn't Pelion. It was bogre warriors. They were coming for his parts. The throbbing grew worse, and his eyes became too tired to keep open. His head was too heavy, and he rested it on the ground. Darkness surrounded him, making everything spin. At least in death he didn't have to worry about being alone anymore.\n\nBloody bones, he'd forgotten Kaven's warning not to die. What would the others do if his body turned into another phoenix?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Blackness spun and throbbed. It smelled of blood and tasted bitter, so bitter. Too much pain. He must die.\n\nHe was already dead. The phoenix and bogres, they killed him. Mother, Father. Were their deaths this painful? Were they so black?\n\nGentle sounds pierced the darkness, up and down and waving.\n\n\"Live!\" they seemed to say. \"Live for those who were slaughtered. Live for the Forests and Armors. You must kill the phoenix. You must save them!\"\n\nNo, no! He must die! He wanted death, welcomed it. Life was too painful, too hard. The phoenix would kill him again if he tried, and the others would hate him for failing.\n\n\"Arnack respects you. Pelion loves you. Fight for them. Fight to free them all!\"\n\nNo, not possible! The phoenix was a fallen sun. It couldn't be killed.\n\n\"You blackened its feathers. You burned its flesh. Suns do not blacken or smell of burned flesh.\"\n\nHe didn't stand a chance. It was too fast, too strong, too hungry.\n\n\"When has a bird been stronger than a dragon? You are Valfredo, survivor of the River clan! Live for your father's sacrifice and mother's love. Live for your sister! Fight for her young so they don't suffer from fear.\"\n\nElina? Yes, Elina was still alive. She had Father's determination and Mother's love. She was his family. He had to kill the phoenix for her\u2014he had to survive.\n\nHis eyelids were less heavy now, and he opened them. Sitting in front of him, holding a strange piece of carved tree, was Kina. She held it to her chin with one hand, and with the other she moved a stick over the carving. Was he already dead? No, he couldn't be. The sounds she was making with the carving were the ones that had told him to live. Even now, the carving, though not saying words, seemed to be speaking love and hope into the world with its beautiful sounds.\n\nHe shifted. Pain shot through his broken legs, but it was a small and bearable pain, the kind that was simply there to remind him to be careful. His mouth was better, too, and there was a new tail stub where the old one had been missing completely. Had Kina fed him mudfern?\n\nShe stopped her sounds and looked at him. Her face brightened, and she said something excitedly while putting the carving down.\n\n\"No, do it again,\" he said, and sniffed at the carving.\n\nKina turned to it and smiled. Sitting down, she picked it back up and began sounding again. She spoke, but not like he'd ever heard. Her voice went up and down and swaying with the sound the carving made. Such gentle, beautiful sounds. So warm and happy. He smiled and rumbled contentment.\n\nKina giggled and continued sounding. She was such a kind, forgiving female after what he'd done to her. He'd almost killed her, yet here she was saving his life and comforting him. Maybe the voices were right. All this time, the fire inside him wasn't the phoenix's fire; it was his. And now he had to use it to kill the phoenix\u2014after he was better and had a plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Valfredo awoke to the scent of ogre and mudfern. When had he fallen asleep? Kina stood in front of him again, along with six warriors carrying long weapons with shiny, pointed ends. Standing all around the cave were many more warriors holding similar sticks. The air smelled of pungent heat, matching their dangerous expressions.\n\nHe shifted to a crouched position and growled, \"I will not die without a fight.\"\n\nThe warriors pointed their sticks at him and stood ready to fight. Kina moved in front of them and spoke. One spoke back angrily.\n\nValfredo let out his own hot warning so the warrior would know his anger. \"If you even think of harming her, I'll kill you.\"\n\nThe warrior pushed Kina away, and the ones standing around the room drew closer. Valfredo readied his fire, but before he could use it, Kina shoved her way in front of the angry warrior and slapped him. She spoke to him, filling the air with her rage. She pointed repeatedly away from Valfredo. Then she held up her hand and pointed to a strange object on one of her fingers. The warrior hesitated and stared at Valfredo.\n\n\"I suggest you obey her,\" Valfredo growled.\n\nThe warrior nodded toward him while speaking to Kina. She gave a loud, exasperated sigh and turned to Valfredo. Speaking to him in a calm, soothing voice, she moved her hands down in a soft, gentle motion. She wanted him to calm down.\n\nValfredo rumbled agreement and forced himself to relax... a little. He needed to be ready if they tried to hurt her. \"No more growling... if I can help it,\" he promised.\n\nKina grinned and held her head triumphantly while looking back at the warrior. She was so cute. A little like Pelion, really. The warrior sighed and motioned with his hand while saying something to the other warriors. They backed up and stood against the wall within Valfredo's eyesight, weapons pointed up instead of at him. Kina turned back to Valfredo, smiled, and gestured to a pile of ogre meat and mudfern.\n\nValfredo rumbled and nuzzled her, then ate the pile in a few bites. Kina frowned and turned to the warriors and spoke. A few of them nodded and walked out the cave. Valfredo looked around. It was a strange cave made of old prey skin. He'd seen bogres make such caves before and never could understand why they did. Being in one should help him understand, right? It didn't protect them from anything larger than a wolf\u2014even a bear could tear through the skins, and a bogre could easily kill anything wolf-sized or smaller. The cave did protect them from rain; he could hear the drops falling on it. Were bogres really that afraid of rain?\n\nThe warriors returned with more meat and mudfern and cautiously dropped them in front of Valfredo. He ate the food and sniffed around for water, but didn't find any.\n\n\"Where's water?\" he asked Kina.\n\nShe gave a puzzled expression and looked around, then turned back to him and shrugged. She didn't understand.\n\nHe licked his lips and pretended to drink.\n\nThat she understood. She turned to the warriors and said a few things, quite loudly. Valfredo chuckled. She must enjoy giving orders. Several of the warriors left and, after a while, returned with a large... thing made of cut trees that they set on the ground in front of him. Others came in with bloated dead prey. They walked to the tree thing and started pouring water out of the prey and into it.\n\nThere was a prey whose insides turned into water when it died? Incredible! There was no such thing back home. Perhaps he should take some there and let them breed. What did it taste like? He sniffed at one, and the warrior carrying it yelped and jumped back, dropping it. Valfredo sniffed it more thoroughly. It wasn't a whole prey, and it smelled a lot like the cave's skins. Had the bogres found a way to make prey skin carry water? He licked it and grimaced. It tasted horrible!\n\nKina laughed and picked up the skin, then pointed to the water. He wrinkled his nose. If the water tasted anything like the skin, he wasn't touching it. Handing the skin to a warrior, she pointed again to the water, this time giving Valfredo a demanding look. Females were so annoying sometimes. He raised his head in refusal, and the look she gave him could kill a whole herd of deer. Sighing, he sniffed the water. It smelled fine, not at all like the skin, so he licked it. It was fresh. After drinking all of it, he tried to stand.\n\nHis legs burned with pain, and he collapsed. Kina rushed to him and cooed, then said something to the warriors. Soon, three large piles of ogre meat and mudfern were in front of him, and beside him were three full water holders. He ate and drank everything, then settled down to sleep. If the warriors tried to harm him, Kina would stop them or wake him to fight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "With nothing to do but eat, sleep, and listen to Kina make sounds for him, it was difficult to tell how many days had passed, though it had been enough to make him feel cramped. Every time he tried to stretch, he'd touch a cave wall or ceiling, and Kina would tell him to stop. His legs and mouth were healed now, and his tail had fully grown back. It was time to go into the fresh air and sunshine\u2014and space.\n\nValfredo stared at the opening and cocked his head. Then he looked at Kina. \"How am I supposed to fit through that?\"\n\nShe smiled and nodded, then left the cave and spoke to someone outside. Warriors quickly surrounded the cave entrance and began taking apart the furs that made the cave. Soon half the skins were out of the way, leaving only long, thin sticks. The sun glowed high above, sending down its yellow light between the white, puffy clouds. Its warmth was welcome on his scales, though the autumn air sent a cold breeze to fight it. The trees had dropped their remaining leaves while he was healing, hinting that it had taken well over a week, maybe even two\u2014far longer than it should have, but Kina had done her best to keep his belly full and body healing.\n\nThe warriors were quiet as they finished pulling the last fur off the sticks. Valfredo didn't mind the silence at first, but the longer it went on, the more he was reminded they still didn't seem to trust him. They always stood a good distance away and held their muscles tense. Even now, they constantly sent him uncertain glances as they pulled apart the sticks.\n\nHe sighed and watched them work. They were fast, at least, and they worked well together. He'd never seen such an organized group, except maybe the Armors when they hunted. Was that the secret to killing something larger than himself?\n\nThe bogres who had attacked him back home were well organized. They'd planned the attack before starting, and they had planned it well. Dragon clans fought so differently, with every dragon doing what he thought best, attacking whichever enemy he felt needed to die next. But bogres attacked as a group. They always knew what the others in their clan were doing, and they always knew when the others needed help. Maybe if he learned how to do that, he could find a way to kill the phoenix. But even the Armors had no experience fighting something ten times their size, and he couldn't ask the bogres how they did it. Livers! What was he supposed to do?\n\nFinally, the last stick was removed, and he could stand up to stretch. The warriors ran away and urged Kina to do the same when he stretched out his wings, but she just stood there and grinned. Such a brave female. He flapped, then tested his legs. Their lack of use made them stiff and wobbly, forcing his steps to be painfully short. He glanced around to make sure no bogres were in the way, then jumped into the air and started a practice flight.\n\nHis wings stretched and pushed hard, but the air didn't whoosh under them as it should, and every flap felt sluggish. The new tail whipped around on its own, and when he told it to move another way, the muscles in it either barely twitched or pulled too much, sending him turning hard in the other direction.\n\nCurse the bogre cave! Normally he'd have practiced as he healed, giving himself strength and control, but because of that bloody cave closing him in, he hadn't had the space. How was he supposed to kill the phoenix with slow wings and a wild tail? Only a new fledgling flew this wobbly. Frustrated, he returned to the ground with a heavy thud, groaning as he did so. He couldn't even land well.\n\nKina sat on a log talking with another bogre female. At least she didn't seem to notice how poorly he'd flown.\n\nWalking was difficult with weak, shaky legs, so he lay down nearby and watched. The other female had short, brown topfur that went quite high on her head. He'd seen females with fur like that. Sometimes their fur would grow out overnight and hang down like Kina's. It was strange how bogres were always changing. Even Kina had changed. Her body fur was now purple rather than blue, and her black topfur was wavy. Did bogres control how they appeared, or did they just have to live with its constant change?\n\nThe other female glanced at him and squirmed, then pushed herself up slightly with her hands and sat a little further away from him. Kina continued talking without pause, filling the increased space between the two with wider gestures of her hands. She was the only bogre here who wasn't afraid of him\u2014even the warriors continued to watch him with leery eyes despite being busy getting ready to leave. It didn't matter anyway. Kina was obviously well respected in this clan, and as long as they all listened to her and didn't start trouble, he would keep the peace as well.\n\nKina noticed the gap between herself and the clanmate and scooted closer, acting as if nothing was different today than yesterday.\n\nHa! It served her friend right to have her fear ignored. He hadn't done anything to her and had proven for a week or more he wouldn't harm them. Yet the air around the female remained pungent, and her eyes widened when he yawned. Kina glanced at him, then turned back to her friend and continued the conversation. A strange loneliness washed over him, touching his heart with the memories of being in the River clan, but ignored. This was like that, with Kina giving this friend all of her attention and play while he was left alone watching. Heat stirred his stomach and grabbed his heart. He would not be ignored again, especially not by Kina\u2014she was his friend.\n\nCasually, so as not to alarm the warriors, he stretched his front legs as far as he could toward Kina and the other female. The other female's eyes went wide and her face whitened. Her pungent fear grew stronger, tickling his nostrils and sending playful ideas to his mind. Grinning, he dug his talons into the ground and moved forward on his belly until his front legs were no longer stretched. He was a length closer to them, and the female's mouth was wide open now, trying and failing to speak.\n\nKina turned to see what had frightened her so much, and when she saw Valfredo, she smiled and said something to him, then to her friend. Her voice was all charm and innocence, and her eyes sparkled as she continued gesturing and cooing to her friend. Her friend spoke in small squeaks and shook her head, until finally Kina frowned at her and reached out to Valfredo, smiling once again, with an outstretched hand.\n\nIf he touched it, the other female might die of fright, but would that really be his fault? He hadn't forced her to be so afraid, after all.\n\nGrinning, he extended his snout to Kina. The other female screamed and yanked her away. Valfredo jerked back, wincing from the high-pitched scream, and saw a fast-moving stick. He blinked just before it struck his eye. With a loud ring it bounced off his eyelid and fell to the ground. Warriors surrounded him, readying more weapons. For sun's sake, they were trying to kill him!\n\nKina ran around frantically saying something, but the warriors ignored her and descended on him. Quickly taking flight, he moved and hovered too high even for the fast-moving sticks. These bogres were so nervous even innocent play made them attack. No matter, he'd stay in the air while Kina calmed them down. She was already arguing with the same warrior who'd argued with her last time. He must be the clanhead.\n\nThey argued loudly, gesturing to him, the other female, and the warriors until they looked ready to kill each other. Then Kina pointed to the strange object on her finger. The warrior hesitated, argued once more, then turned away. Finally, he gave a long, frustrated sigh, said one thing to her with a warning look, and gestured to the other warriors while saying the same thing he'd said earlier to calm them down. The warriors slowly put their weapons down and began to do other tasks. The air reeked of tension.\n\nSo much for keeping the peace. Valfredo sighed and landed. He couldn't even play one simple game without them swarming. Were bogre warriors always this tense? For Kina's sake, he was going to have to try harder to befriend and not frighten them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "The blue sky held no clouds to block the morning sun, and the first crisp, chilly scent of winter tickled Valfredo's nostrils as he guided his new tail and wings. They obeyed him perfectly, flapping higher and faster, and making slow or sharp turns. He landed with a grin. Not bad for a week's practice. Movement in the bogre clan caught his eye, and he walked over to Kina. The warriors had finally woken up and were putting their sleeping furs back into their wagons. Kina used her hand to cover her mouth, but Valfredo could see her yawn anyway. Why did she bother trying to hide it?\n\nHer sleepy eyes opened and saw him, then sparkled for only a moment before a sadness took them. Her smile to him crinkled into a worried one, and she turned to respond to her female friend.\n\nShe spoke some words he didn't understand, with \"Polly\" in the middle of them. Kina turned back to Valfredo and pointed to her friend, then for the hundredth time, said \"Polly\" and gestured for him to be nice.\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes. \"I know already.\"\n\nThe warriors stopped their packing and watched him. Some pointed their weapons at him. A growl started deep inside Valfredo's throat, but he forced it to be swallowed.\n\nThe warrior who had argued with Kina walked around the others saying something, and several of them responded with, \"Yes, General.\" They finished packing, Kina sat in her carriage, and they continued their slow journey.\n\nThe top was down on the carriage, so Kina started up her daily routine of pointing and gesturing to bogre objects and prey and speaking their bogre names.\n\nWith a heavy sigh, Valfredo amused her, looking where she pointed and nodding when he understood. This was not a fun way to travel. Why were these horses so slow? And what was the point of these lessons when he had no way of communicating back to her? What he really wanted to do was demand she tell him what was bothering her so much. She smelled of nervous fear, and every day it grew worse, though she kept a fake smile and spoke gaily. Only when she was giving him lessens did the fear dissipate. No doubt that was why she focused so much on them.\n\nPolly spoke something, and Kina's fear spiked. She turned to Polly, hands tightening into fists clenching her fur, and spoke back. Polly responded with something that increased Kina's worry, though Polly didn't seem to notice as she spoke with excitement.\n\nValfredo narrowed his eyes and looked at Polly without turning his head. She chatted on for a short time before noticing his warning; then her eyes widened and she quieted.\n\nKina's head quickly turned to him, but before she could see him, he looked forward and made his face neutral.\n\n\"Valfredo.\" Kina said her bogre name for him with a scolding tone.\n\nHe turned to her, smiling innocently, and pretended to take seriously her reminder for him to be nice.\n\nWhen she turned back to Polly, Polly shrugged and gestured for Kina to continue giving Valfredo lessens\u2014a suggestion that spiked Kina's happiness and was gladly accepted by all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "They continued the boring journey for a few more days before another bogre mountain came into view. It was larger than Kina's and had more colorful furs hanging from its sides. A bugle rang out from it, telling the bogres to scramble everywhere. The warriors around him tensed, and pungent fear burst into the air.\n\nValfredo looked to Kina, who sat perfectly straight and still and clenched a handkerchief tightly in her fists. Strong as it was, the fear came only from her. He glared at the mountain ahead of them. There were many bogre warriors surrounding it now, wearing black armor instead of General's blue and red. This must be an enemy clan, and Kina and the other female were here to help General make a peace agreement. That meant Valfredo couldn't simply kill them to end her suffering.\n\nA deep growl rumbled in his chest, and this time he didn't stop it. What could he do to help when he could only understand a few of her words and she couldn't understand any of his? The tension in the air grew, making his own muscles tighten with the anticipation of a fight. General stopped the clan and turned to Valfredo with a frown, then shook his head.\n\nThe other warriors looked at Valfredo with anticipation. They seemed unsure of what to do, raising their weapons slightly toward him and glancing at General for instruction. With an irritated sigh, Valfredo forced the growl away and loosened his stance. The tension left the air, and they continued the journey.\n\nFear crept into the air again as they neared the enemy clan. Its warriors stood proud with weapons ready, but the pungent air didn't lie: They were terrified. Valfredo smirked and carefully kept his pace steady. One sudden movement could start a death match between the clans, and the last thing he wanted to do was sabotage Kina's attempt at peace.\n\nWhen they were within range of bogre arrows, the enemy clanmates who had them grabbed one and stood ready to attack. But the arrowheads were merely a shiny grey without dragon scale, tooth, or horn attached. Valfredo glanced around, studying the weapons and armor. None of the enemies carried a weapon capable of injuring him, and none wore dragon scales. This entire clan couldn't hurt him, even if they ignored Kina's warriors. Was the bogre clan back home the only one that knew how to kill dragons?\n\nCautiously, the warriors stepped aside to let Kina's clan through. The tension was thick, but no one made a move to attack. The entire mountain was made of rock except for a hole here and there and the large wooden piece in front of them. It moved, revealing the interior of the mountain and allowing a very colorful male to step out.\n\n\"General,\" he said, his voice smug and stance proud. He glanced at Valfredo, sneered, and continued to speak to General with words Valfredo didn't know. His arrogance was strong enough to smell, stinking up the air with his unearned confidence.\n\nHe was like a pig Valfredo had once met when he was an adolescent. The pig had charged at him again and again, squealing and snorting and trotting proudly away before turning back to charge again, though the attempts to scare him were futile, and the pig was swallowed in two small bites. That was what this bogre was\u2014a pig.\n\nGeneral bowed and spoke back, but the only words Valfredo knew were Kina's bogre names, Princess Jenna. It was a pretty enough name for a human, but \"Kina\" was far better, and that was what he'd call her.\n\nTheir conversation ended with General gesturing to Kina, and Pig grinning. It was a malicious grin, full of lust and greed.\n\nValfredo stepped in front of her, lowered his head, and growled challenge. \"Don't you even think of coming near her.\"\n\nPig scowled and spoke angrily with General, who spoke back calmly. Then General cleared his throat and walked cautiously toward Kina, and Valfredo let him through. Kina and General spoke for a while, glancing at Valfredo and Pig from time to time.\n\nSo that was what was troubling her. Pig was the enemy clanhead, and Kina knew he was evil enough to ignore a peace agreement. Why wasn't General listening to her? Females had great instincts when it came to who was trustworthy and who wasn't, and it was a male's duty to listen to them. Didn't General know that?\n\nKina sighed and called to Valfredo, then told him to calm down. They must've reached an agreement. After a final warning glare to Pig, he lay down and stopped his threatening pose. With no dragon-killing weapons in sight, it wasn't dangerous enough to remain standing and ready to strike.\n\nKina got off the carriage and followed General to Pig. An involuntary growl started deep in Valfredo's throat, and Pig's warriors readied to fight. Kina turned back and scolded him with a look and head shake.\n\nHe turned away and snorted. It wasn't like he wanted to ignore her wishes and growl at Pig... though he doubted eating him would upset her if it wasn't for the instant war it'd likely cause.\n\nWhen Valfredo finally stopped growling and glaring, Kina turned to Pig and stretched her long body fur to the sides and lowered into curtsy. Pig bowed, giving the malicious grin again. Another growl started in Valfredo's throat, but he swallowed and forced it away. Then Pig took her hand in his and lead her into his mountain. Kina glanced back at Valfredo nervously, and with her free hand gestured for him to stay calm and not start a fight.\n\nHe huffed. What was she thinking, going inside an enemy's nesting ground? One thing was certain: He was not going to leave, even to hunt, until Kina was safe and happy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Valfredo paced in front of the Pig's mountain. He'd neither seen nor heard from Kina since she went into it three days ago. Where was she? A loud bang came from above and he stopped to look, but it was only another female on the ledge. Growling, he continued pacing. He could force his way through the warriors Pig kept watching him, but to do it, he'd have to kill them and start a war, and what if Kina wasn't in danger? What if the war was started for nothing? Bogres had an irritating way of swarming when attacked, and with Kina inside the mountain where he couldn't reach her, he could kill her accidentally.\n\nWhat if he tore into the mountain? Kaven had told stories of dragons tearing apart bogre tree-caves; how was this mountain any different? He had adult talons, so tearing into rock was possible unless it was hard rock. He stopped pacing a moment and studied the mountain. It didn't look like hard rock. In fact, it looked like a stack of smaller rocks fused together. It should be easy enough to tear apart. But what if tearing it apart weakened its base and made it collapse? How could he protect Kina from that? He didn't even know where she was!\n\n\"This is so infuriating!\" he roared. \"General, get Kina out of that mountain before I kill someone!\" He whipped his tail toward a group of advancing warriors and hissed. \"Don't you even think about it.\"\n\nThe warriors leaped back from his warning and readied their weapons.\n\nValfredo lowered his head and growled. \"I'm getting tired of you pointing those things at me. Stop it, or I'll kill all of you!\"\n\nThe warriors behind him advanced. He could feel their tension and lust for blood. His stomach boiled. He would not aim the fire at the mountain, but these fools were safely away from\u2014\n\n\"Valfredo, no!\"\n\nKina? He turned and saw her standing in the large cave opening... standing next to Pig.\n\nHe glared at Pig and growled challenge. \"Step away from my Kina.\"\n\nPig's eyes narrowed and filled with a mix of fear and hate. He stepped forward with his chest out.\n\nPathetic, stupid bogre! He was leaving what little protection the mountain offered.\n\n\"Valfredo!\" Kina's voice snapped high and loud, and Valfredo winced and looked at her. \"Calm down,\" she said, making the gesture. Then she glanced a glare at Pig before smoothly telling the warriors to calm. They didn't listen, and she repeated her demands to Valfredo and the warriors. Again, the warriors didn't listen. So neither did he. This time it was the bogres' turn to calm first.\n\nGeneral stepped up to Pig and spoke to him. His voice was low and submissive. Why was a clanhead speaking submissively to an enemy? Didn't he know that was a sign of weakness? That it gave Pig all the power? Didn't he care to protect Kina and his clan?\n\nUnless this was his clan, and he was merely a head warrior. Was Pig their clanhead? If he was, it wasn't because Kina liked him. He didn't listen to Kina. He didn't listen to warnings. He frightened her and would never let her leave. He needed to die.\n\nFilling the air with his death challenge, Valfredo lowered himself for a pounce. Pig's eyes widened and he turned to run into the mountain, but not fast enough. Valfredo kicked off and opened his jaws around Pig, but he tasted Kina and heard her scream. Freezing his jaw, he jerked away and found her standing just in front of Pig and shaking. Her skin was pale, and she looked at him with nothing but terror in her eyes.\n\n\"Kina,\" he whined. \"Why did you\u2014\"\n\nThe warriors swarmed him and pulled their clanhead inside the mountain. They aimed their arrows at his eyes, but his inner eyelid was enough protection against the weak weapons. With a growl, he swatted them away, breaking dozens of weapons they'd tried to stab between his scales.\n\n\"Valfredo, stop!\" Kina screamed.\n\nHe whirled around to see the warriors dragging her into the mountain, though she squeezed out of one's grasp and shoved another away. Her eyes pleaded with Valfredo, and she repeated her request for him to stop.\n\nBut his heart was hot with fury, and his fire boiled with anger. The rest of the clan might be stuck with Pig, but not Kina. Valfredo took a deep breath and let out a furious roar, focusing the energy on the mountain, the warriors, and Pig. The mountain trembled and ground shook. The warriors screamed and pulled off their helmets to clasp their ears. Kina covered her ears and looked around bewildered. She didn't understand the roar of war.\n\nThen Valfredo snatched Kina and pulled her to his chest, carefully wrapping both claws around her before taking flight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Well away from Pig's Mountain and the sight of any bogres, Valfredo landed in a small meadow and gently put Kina down in the tall, soft grass. Her body was shaking and sending mixed emotions into the air. Tears streaked down her face, though she took deep breaths and wiped at the tears with her hands. She looked at him a moment, then flung herself on his snout and balled. Her emotions grew more erratic and filled the air with confusion.\n\nValfredo rumbled love and warmed the air with impressed calm. He wanted to say something to comfort her, to tell her everything was going to be fine, but no words came to mind, and she wouldn't understand them if they did. The only thing he could do was impress and let her cry out her sorrow... and hope she wouldn't hate him for taking her from her clan again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Morning sunlight pierced the darkness, waking the birds and putting to sleep the noisy crickets. The yellow sun glowed between orange leaves still left of the tree branches, trying to convince Valfredo to get up and enjoy its lovely light.\n\nBut Kina was still asleep on his snout. She'd cried herself to sleep there, and he wasn't going to wake her... though he wished she would wake up, as that itch in his nose was growing unbearable. How could a little tickle grow so tremendously distracting? The itch pinched and tickled and made his nose twitch, mocking him for not scratching it. But if he moved, Kina might wake up, and when she woke up, she might hate him.\n\nTears stung his eyes as they begged him to forget Kina and kill the laughing, pinching itch. His talons twitched, and he shifted his right foreclaw forward, then stopped as Kina inhaled deeply and stretched her arms and legs before settling back down to sleep.\n\nBlast! What was he going to do? The sun peeked over the trees now, welcoming him into the cloudless sky. He lifted his eyes to it, trying to focus his mind on its beauty instead of the cruelty inside his snout.\n\nKina giggled, and his eyes darted to her. She was awake and smiling at him, her brown eyes full of happiness. With another giggle, she tapped her nose with a finger. Then she slid off his snout and stood back, hands folded together in front, waiting.\n\nWith a sigh of relief, Valfredo dug a talon into his nose and scratched the itch away. A sneeze followed, and a swell of joy filled him. The cold grass called to him, and his scales responded with a tingle that could only be contented by one thing. Valfredo flopped to his side and scooted in the grass, inhaling its deep, clean aroma. Then he flipped over to his other side and made those scales happy. And finally, he stretched his foreclaws out far ahead and his hindclaws far behind, so that his belly was flat and happy on the ground.\n\nKina laughed, joining the gay birds in their lovely morning sounds. Valfredo grinned at her, and she grinned at him, but her smile only lasted a moment. Her eyes stopped sparkling, and her mouth dropped into a straight line.\n\n\"Valfredo,\" she said, then stopped to think. She frowned and looked around, then glanced at the sun and thought a bit longer before pointing to herself and toward Pig's home. She said something, it sounded like three words, and from her gesture, Valfredo guessed them to be \"take me back.\"\n\nA snort of refusal began, but he forced it into a sneeze. If he told her no, she'd get angry and stubborn. The best thing to do was pretend he didn't understand what she wanted until he found her a new clan that would respect her. So he cocked his head and gave a confused expression, and when she tried again to explain what she wanted, he made gestures to purposefully confuse her until she gave up trying to make him understand.\n\nWith that out of the way, he lifted her up again and took flight. She squirmed and fussed at him again, apparently not enjoying the flight, but he couldn't take the time to let her walk on her own. Winter was coming, and she needed a bogre home to stay warm and safe and bogre companions to be happy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "Kina was not happy with the constant travel. Every time he let her down after a flight, she scolded him and made big gestures to take her back to Pig. He continued pretending not to understand, but she didn't seem to believe it anymore, crossing her arms and scowling at him whenever he played his part. He continued the ploy anyway, using it to hide the fact he had to consider giving her what she wanted.\n\nWinter was coming fast. Already, it had ripped the last remaining leaves off the trees and left frost for the sun to melt. He couldn't keep flying around with her in his claws. She shivered a little more every day as they traveled, no matter how hard he tried to block the wind from reaching her. He could settle her down into a cave for the winter, but though it might keep her warm, it'd also make her miserable. Even if he could keep her busy, he couldn't feed her all winter. His fire ashed wood instantly, and Kina didn't have the rock necessary for her to make fire. Her stomach growled constantly as she picked the last few berries from every bush Valfredo landed near.\n\nValfredo sighed. Meadows and forests stretched as far as he could see, and still there was no sign of another bogre mountain for Kina to call home. Could Pig really be the clanhead to all this territory? He had to be, as these bogres seemed to divide their clans with the special mountains. But why would so many bogres follow such a clanhead?\n\nWait, what was that coming into view? Was it\u2014yes! It was a mountain range! Pig couldn't possibly control an entire mountain range and the meadows and forests, could he? There had to be another clan living there\u2014preferably one with a respectable clanhead. A nice, cold wind slapped his face, and he held Kina closer to keep her warm. A bogre-made barrier stood in front of the mountains. It was thick enough to keep out a stampede of ogres and tall enough to keep a hornbeast from jumping it. This was definitely the edge of Pig's territory.\n\nHe climbed a little higher, slowing his speed to sniff and scan for smoke. After only a few hours, he found a bogre nest. Landing near it, but out of view, he watched for signs of aggressive warriors. They seemed fairly simple, like the nests he was used to at home with prey living near them, a lot of open and forested land along the mountain slopes, and small tree-caves scattered throughout. Not one armored warrior walked among them. It was perfect!\n\nHe picked up the pouting Kina and flew to the nesting ground. The bogres screamed and scattered into their tree-caves while their prey ran into real caves hidden by snow. Landing in the center of the nesting ground, he carefully let Kina down.\n\n\"This is your new home,\" he said while nudging her.\n\nShe looked around, a confused look on her face. Then she turned to him and asked something. He cocked his head, and she frowned and walked to a tree-cave. Before reaching it, she called out and walked slower. Once she was at the part of the wall that opened, she banged on it with a fisted hand and called out again. After repeating it two more times, a bogre opened the wall and peered out. His eyes grew wide when he saw Valfredo, and he yanked open the wall and pulled Kina inside.\n\nValfredo listened carefully as he heard what sounded like another wall being opened and closed. Then Kina and some other bogres started talking. Her voice was muffled, but steady and unafraid. The only hint of upset in it was the same as when she'd told General to calm. He chuckled. No doubt she was explaining to them he was her friend. Yawning, he stretched and lay down to wait.\n\nIt seemed an eternity before she came back out, but when she did, she marched right up to Valfredo and placed her hand on his snout, then looked back and said something to a bogre peeking through the slightly opened wall piece. Slowly and with shaking legs, the bogre male exited the cave. Kina gestured him over, but he stood in place and stared at Valfredo.\n\nWere all the bogres in the nesting ground going to be so afraid? What a pain.\n\n\"It's all right, I won't hurt you,\" Valfredo softly rumbled, and impressed peace. It was strange to use a hatchling rumble for an adult, but bogres were afraid of anything louder, and he was tired of being patient.\n\nThe male inhaled and stepped back, then gulped and forced himself forward. A few bogres in other tree-caves whispered to each other with worried curiosity. Kina kept encouraging the male, and Valfredo made sure not to move. If the male was anything like Kina was at first, he'd be scared back into the cave with a simple twitch.\n\nFinally, he was within reach, and Kina took his hand and pulled it to Valfredo. But the male jerked it back and spoke nervously. Kina reassured him and patted Valfredo, then hugged him and reassured the male again. The male slowly reached out, hand shaking so hard it might've come off. Then the hand touched Valfredo's snout, and the male filled with excitement. His eyes sparkled and he spoke to Kina. Then he looked into Valfredo's eyes and spoke to him. Valfredo smiled and nuzzled him. Kina grinned and introduced the male as Thomas.\n\nOther bogres peered out of the cave next to Thomas's. A female called to Thomas, but her voice was barely above a whisper and he didn't hear her. A fledgling male shoved his way out of the cave and dodged the female's attempt to pull him back. Then he called to Thomas. Thomas turned and smiled, then gestured them over. Valfredo continued using the hatchling rumble and kept impressing peace and calm.\n\nThey were actually coming! A grown female, a grown male about Thomas's age, and three young were walking to him. What brave, wonderful little bogres! This was definitely the right home for Kina, full of bogres just like her. They were even worthy of being called little dragons. One of the young touched him and jerked away, squealing with glee. Then the fledgling male touched him and didn't jerk away. His eyes sparkled as he ran his hand over Valfredo's snout and admired him.\n\nThese bogres were just like Kina. All of them had sparkling eyes and great bravery. Other bogres were already leaving their caves and coming over. How funny that the young were less afraid than the adults. But then, they had Thomas and the others encouraging them over.\n\nValfredo sighed contentment and rested his head on the ground. He'd made the right decision to take Kina here. She was absolutely thrilled about the others braving their fears and petting him. Some of the young even started to climb on him and were surprisingly adorable. They cooed and giggled and laughed and dared each other to climb higher or touch his face. He couldn't help but smile and nuzzle them. The parents worried at first, but after only a few minutes, they relaxed and trusted him.\n\nThis was what a nesting ground should be like. Full of life and free of fear and worry. This was what he was fighting for\u2014for dragons.\n\nBut how could he kill the phoenix? He wasn't fast or strong or large enough. That was one thing to admire in bogres, at least; they could kill things ten times stronger and larger than themselves. If only dragons were so brave and creative, maybe they would've killed the phoenix a long time ago.\n\nHe shook his head. No, there was no point in wishing the phoenix was already dead. It wasn't, and it wasn't going to be until he himself killed it. It was a mission he'd failed, and a mission he would have to face and try again someday.\n\nUntil that time, he needed to make sure Kina's new home was safe for her and also tell her this was her new clan. But trying to talk with her always ended in disaster, with him being unable to speak bogre and her not being able to tell the difference between the dragon words for prey and claw. Surely there was a better way to communicate ideas than mediocre gestures and facial expressions, but what was it?\n\nAha! Pictures! He could draw pictures to communicate with! No, wait, those were difficult to get right; the best he could manage were simple lines and shapes\u2014nothing like what bogres were capable of. But perhaps he could give her an idea? Bogres were creative, after all. They could take a small idea and turn it into a big one.\n\nUsing his claw, he pushed snow aside and scratched into the ground a picture of Kina in a nest. Then he got her attention and pointed to the picture. She looked at it and cocked her head, then asked him a question and shrugged. He pointed to her, then the bogre in the picture. She nodded, and he pointed to the picture nest, then gestured to the nesting ground. She nodded again, but didn't seem to understand. How could he explain this was her home? Pictures weren't meant to tell stories; they were meant to aid the stories.\n\nSighing, he drew another nest with Pig's Mountain in it and Kina in front of the mountain. Then he drew a line from the mountain to Kina, to show her leaving it. Kina stared at the picture with an intense expression. At least she was trying to understand. He drew himself next to the picture of Kina, then drew a line to the Kina in the other nest, and tapped the picture.\n\nKina frowned and studied the pictures for a long time. Finally, she looked at him and shook her head.\n\nLivers! How could he make her understand?\n\nThomas said something to her and pointed to the picture of Pig's Mountain, then traced the line to New Home. Kina's face lit up, and she eagerly nodded. Thomas pushed snow aside, took a small weapon from his side, and started cutting into the frozen ground. He drew a picture that outlined perfectly a bogre mountain, far better than any dragon could draw. Then he drew another picture, a strange picture. He pointed to the mountain, then the other picture, and said something.\n\nValfredo looked from picture to picture. What was Thomas trying to say? The second picture somewhat resembled a bogre mountain, but warped and with pieces missing. Was that his way of drawing another nesting ground?\n\nThomas pointed again to the mountain picture, then to the second, and said the word. One word. That's what it sounded like. Was he telling Valfredo his word for bogre mountain? But what about the second picture? If he already had a picture for bogre mountains, why make a different one? If Valfredo was ever going to find out, he needed Thomas to continue, so he nodded.\n\nThomas then drew a picture of a bogre, again a very good picture, then another picture that was only about as good as a dragon could draw. He said the word, \"Human,\" while pointing to several bogres of various ages, including himself and Kina.\n\nMust be their word for bogre. Come to think of it, they should have a different name than bogre, since they were more dragon than ogre. Valfredo nodded to Thomas and made a mental thought to come up with a dragon word for \"human\" later. Then he smoothed the space where he'd drawn and copied the pictures Thomas had made. The picture he tried to copy that actually looked like a bogre mountain was pathetic. There were too many tiny details he couldn't get right, but the simpler picture turned out all right. Thomas grinned and looked proudly at Kina, who simply stared in amazement.\n\nValfredo nudged Thomas and said, \"Teach me more. I want to learn all of it.\" Finally! Finally, he'd have a real way to communicate with the bogerss.\n\nThomas laughed and pushed more snow aside, and the other bogres helped him while talking excitedly. Everyone started clearing ground and drawing pictures. Valfredo chuckled. At least he had no shortage of volunteers to teach him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "The flock of sheep bleated and scattered in a panic as Valfredo landed in the pasture. Fresh snow dulled the scents of the valley, strengthening the scent of the young griffin in his mouth and making it more tempting. But Shepherd was already gathering the sheep with his dog; he'd notice if Valfredo went back on his promise.\n\nWith a sigh, Valfredo trotted toward Shepherd. The griffin's head bobbed from the movement, tugging lightly on his gums and making his entire jaw ache from wanting to bite down and swallow. \"Do not eat it,\" he ordered his mouth, then focused on the mission.\n\nJust a few lengths away, the sheep bleated again and ran from him. The dog raced after them, circling them in a desperate attempt to regain control of the stupid prey. Shepherd whistled instructions to the sheep, but they refused to listen and instead chose to scatter everywhere so that even the dog gave up. Finally giving up as well, Shepherd stood still and gave Valfredo an exasperated look.\n\nHa! These humans were smart, but hadn't yet figured out how to herd prey. Shepherd needed help. Grinning, Valfredo lay the griffin at Shepherd's feet and took flight. Shepherd shouted something that had to be a fancy \"thank you\" as Valfredo flew a wide circle around the sheep and impressed a little calm into them. The effect was immediate, slowing them into a non-panicked run, and as he tightened the circle, they drew closer together. Little by little he impressed more calm until the sheep didn't bother running from him at all, and when he landed next to them, they merely shook their heads before bending down to eat.\n\nSatisfied of a job well done, he walked back to Shepherd and nudged the griffin toward him. \"To replace the sheep I ate, as promised,\" he said. Not that three sheep were worth a whole tender griffin\u2014their fur was the thickest and worst he'd ever tasted.\n\nBut instead of thanking him, Shepherd looked at him with an eyebrow raised and mouth crooked, as if he didn't know what to think of the gift.\n\nOh... right. Humans didn't understand Dragon. Ugh. A groan started in Valfredo's throat, but he forced it down. He was not going to get irritable with Kina's clan. So, after taking a deep, calming breath, he began to scratch \"for you\" into the snow.\n\nBut before one word was written, Shepherd jumped at him shouting, \"No, no, no! You... pasture... sheep!\" He spoke too quickly and with only a few words Valfredo knew, but his gestures suggested he didn't want the pasture scratched up. Then he pointed toward the village where a large area had been cleared for Valfredo's writing lessons.\n\nValfredo scowled. \"Forget it.\" Then he walked across the pasture\u2014away from the village. Kina was probably busy with more of Thomas's guests, anyway. She'd been here one month and was settling in nicely, meeting leaders from other villages and making female friends. He glanced back at the village where Thomas's large hut had been partly cut into the mountain. Smoke poured from a hole in it, and Kina stood outside laughing with a few others.\n\nShe was settling in... but he felt isolated again. The mountain humans were happy to teach and be around him, but without any real way of communicating or playing with them, what could he do? He couldn't even be a dragon without terrifying the humans' prey or upsetting someone. Sighing, he turned around and headed to the village. He might as well learn some more Human speech and writing. It was better than being alone and bored."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Valfredo listened at the big hut and groaned. If he'd known six months with the mountain people would lead to Kina sitting around a table talking about boring human problems with Thomas and the leaders of other mountain villages, he would've found her a different home.\n\nBoth she and Thomas insisted these \"politics\" were too important to ignore, but how could something so important make no sense at all? The longer they spoke, the more distressed they all got. Why couldn't they see the simplest solution? If Thomas was so upset at Pig wanting to marry Kina, why not challenge him to a death match? Pig wouldn't stand a chance against a warrior like Thomas, and the problem would be solved. But no, humans had to complicate everything.\n\n\"We just don't think like dragons,\" Kina had said.\n\n\"Dragons have a more unified mindset,\" Thomas had added. \"Humans need more independence, and while that's part of our strength, it also complicates our politics.\"\n\nBah! It was all so simple! If Pig was the problem, challenge and kill him. If his clan was a problem, challenge it with Thomas and Kina's clans. Simple!\n\n\"They have three times my father's army,\" Kina used as an excuse. \"Even with the mountain people helping, we wouldn't win, and there would be too much innocent blood shed.\"\n\nHah! She seemed to forget she had a dragon on her side. He could easily force Pig's army into submission.\n\nValfredo huffed and paced in a circle around the hut. The voices inside rose as the humans became more agitated\u2014something which seemed to happen faster every day.\n\n\"But if I don't marry him,\" Kina's voice said calmly but strained, \"he'll declare war and my people will suffer. The peace treaty is about to expire, and I must put my people first.\"\n\nSomeone slammed the table. \"Is it our fault your father can't make decent allies?\" The gruff voice was angry and loud. \"Must our people suffer for his incompetence?\"\n\nValfredo peered through the window behind Kina and saw Lawrence standing with his hands on the table and eyes almost glaring at her. This was the third time today he'd yelled at her; he needed correcting. Valfredo glared and gave him a warning growl that rumbled through the ground.\n\nLawrence glanced at him, paled, and sat down. Kina turned and mouthed a thank you to Valfredo as Thomas took over the discussion.\n\n\"We have the advantage of the mountains,\" he said. \"I'm sure we can defend ourselves if Tradon attacks.\"\n\nAnother leader voiced approval. \"They've been trying to suppress us for thirty years and haven't licked us yet. Besides, I'm sure the princess will have some influence on that runt of a king, and she doesn't want a war.\"\n\nLawrence crossed his arms and grunted.\n\n\"It's true, I don't want war,\" Kina said. Her tone was tense with little hope. \"I'll do my best to prevent it, but I don't know how much influence I'll have on Jerrold. He's quite stubborn when he's made a decision.\"\n\nLawrence scoffed. \"So you've said five times over the last three days. We're going in circles here. Why can't we just use the dragon and be done with it? He's certainly got a dog's loyalty.\"\n\nYes! Finally, someone remembered him! Surely Kina would agree to it.\n\nBut she shook her head. \"If we threaten Jerrold with a dragon, he may decide to take revenge when Valfredo isn't around. What use is preventing war now only to make it worse later?\"\n\nValfredo huffed and moved away. This was boring. Kina understood too well the males' need for her to prevent fights. She was not meant for war. Thomas was, but he listened too much and led too little to let war happen unless Kina agreed to it. Dragon clans were far better. If it were up to one of them, the solution would've been made and completed days ago.\n\nA commotion started to his right. Several human young hollered at a few escaped sheep eating the family garden. Stupid prey. Didn't they know the humans needed that food? Then a dog ran over and lowered its head. Its eyes stared at the sheep with predatory intent, though Valfredo knew the dog was well tamed and wouldn't kill them. The sheep stopped eating as the dog moved closer to them. Then with a sudden move forward, the dog scared them away to the pasture.\n\nNow that he understood it, Valfredo had to admit the dogs were quite smart, and the shepherds who bred and trained them genius. All a dog had to do was calmly pretend it would eat the sheep, and the sheep would run off without panicking.\n\nIf only it were that simple with Pig. But Kina was right; if she threatened him using Valfredo, Valfredo could never leave her side\u2014he'd be stuck as her helper forever, like the dogs that herded the sheep. He may have a dog's loyalty, but he needed other dragons. If Pig's people would only follow Kina, the problem would be solved. The mountain people would be safe with Kina leading the next clan, and Pig's people would get a better leader.\n\n\"Actually, that's not a bad idea,\" he mumbled to his fire. \"But how can we convince her of it?\"\n\nBy not giving her and Thomas a choice, it seemed to say with a grin.\n\nA wide grin spread across his snout as well. Now that they got along, the fire was really quite helpful. Whirling around, Valfredo went to the large hut and peered in. The humans were still arguing, but quieted quickly when he began rumbling and tapping carefully on the hut's side with a talon.\n\nWhile doing so, he used his right foreclaw to write in the ground, \"I know problem solve.\" It was a crude message, but it was the best he could do with writing.\n\nFinally, the humans stepped out of the hut, some looking grumpy and others relieved.\n\n\"Is everything okay, Valfredo?\" Kina asked.\n\nThomas read the message then looked up at Valfredo with a raised eyebrow. \"Your solutions don't normally work for humans, but please tell us what your idea is. We could all use a fresh mind on the subject.\"\n\nWith a smirk, Valfredo grabbed Kina and Thomas with his foreclaws and lifted into the air. Kina let out a screech of surprise, and Thomas hollered before immediately starting to scold and order Valfredo to put them down.\n\n\"Sorry, but I have a mission to complete, and it takes too long to write it out and get all of you to agree,\" Valfredo said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "The sun gave the sky to the moon, and still Valfredo flew. Kina and Thomas had quieted hours ago and only every once in a while demanded to be put down. They tried again now as they saw the last slivers of light dwindle between his claws, but he ignored them. Pig's castle was still a day's flight away, and he wanted this problem settled quickly. Besides, Kina and Thomas weren't the ones having to do the flying, so why should they mind?\n\n\"Valfredo,\" Kina's voice was very scolding. \"I have to defecate. Put me DOWN.\"\n\nDefecate? Oh, right. He definitely didn't want that happening in his claws. With a sigh, he found a decent small meadow with a large pond to drink from and landed, then opened his claws to let the humans out. Kina immediately looked around and frowned.\n\n\"Did you have to land where there aren't any trees or bushes?\"\n\nThomas raised his eyebrows. \"I think that's the least of your worries, Jenna.\" He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, then offered it to her. \"I'll look away while you get your business done. Leave the handkerchief behind when you're finished.\"\n\nKina gave him a grateful smile and took the handkerchief, then walked some distance away. Thomas obeyed his promise and didn't look at her even once. The whole scene was ridiculous. No matter how many times they'd tried to explain privacy to him, Valfredo couldn't understand it. When a woman was giving birth, she was vulnerable\u2014privacy for that made sense. Even animals walked away from the rest to give birth. But this? He sighed and shook his head. He could live a thousand years and humans wouldn't make sense.\n\n\"I'm finished,\" Kina said. Then she quickly added while scowling at Valfredo. \"But you've kidnapped me enough for one day\u2014for a lifetime, in fact. You owe me an explanation, and I mean now.\"\n\nPutting a hand on her shoulder, Thomas said, \"It's too dark to read his writing. Look, the last bit of sunlight is leaving and the moon is small tonight. Let's get some sleep and demand an explanation in the morning.\"\n\nHe gave a warning glare to Valfredo. \"That is if you want her to continue calling you a friend.\"\n\nHis tone was like Kaven's: stern without compromise. Whatever Thomas said was the truth, no matter what excuse might be made against it.\n\nValfredo's bones shivered. How could such a small man bring such force\u2014and without impression? Without realizing, he began to nod his head, and when he noticed it, he made the nod deeper. Perhaps he'd been wrong to take them this way. Kina looked exhausted and angry, and Thomas was being a protective leader. Come to think of it, they smelled exhausted. There was no energy in their scent, and no emotion but warm anger. A twinge of guilt tugged Valfredo's heart, and he lay on the ground and opened his wing for them to lay on. The least he could do was give them a comfortable nest to sleep in."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "Kina wasted no time in the morning. She woke up, then woke Thomas, and when both of them were off Valfredo's wing, she stood firmly on the ground and pointed to the meadow in front of Valfredo. \"Explain.\" Her brown eyes glittered as she spoke, daring him to disobey and threatening punishment if he did.\n\nShe really was like Elina. Valfredo sighed. After six months, he was getting really tired of having to tear up perfectly good grass just to talk to others. He missed being around other dragons\u2014he missed Elina, and even Kaven. Pelion was a pain, but fun, and Arnack was always willing to laugh.\n\nHis heart ached more and more as he tried to figure out the simplest and most meaningful way to explain why he'd taken his human friends. There didn't seem to be any decent way of saying it, but he finally managed to write, \"Idea fix problem. I kill Pig. Kina take castle.\"\n\nIt was crude, and he meant that he would challenge Pig, not kill him, but it would have to do. If only humans could learn to understand the dragon language! They would see how much better it was, and they would use it instead of Human. Then all humans and dragons would be able to communicate, and he wouldn't feel so bloody lonely around them.\n\n\"I'm not going to let you kill Jerrold,\" Kina said.\n\nDanger!\n\nInstinct pulsed the message suddenly and with such force, Valfredo stood to listen. But there was no sound except the singing birds and no scent but the meadow grasses and early spring flowers.\n\nDanger!\n\nNow his fire stirred with the instinct. There was danger nearby, but what was it? He looked desperately around for any signs of other dragons, a griffin horde, or a giant snake. But nothing was in the air, and no glimmer showed in the meadow grass. He sniffed again, but the air smelled clean.\n\n\"Valfredo!\" Kina's sharp voice made him cringe. \"Are you even listening to me?\"\n\n\"I think he's sensing danger,\" Thomas said. \"Look at the way he's standing.\"\n\n\"He does this. He pretends he doesn't understand, or that something big is happening when the truth is there's nothing around here we wouldn't see coming and that he couldn't easily frighten off.\"\n\nThey continued their argument, but Valfredo ignored them. His bones crawled with the feeling of menace, though Kina was right. Even a large griffin horde didn't stand a chance against a grown dragon. Maybe his instinct was wrong because he was around more vulnerable\u2014\n\n\"Danger! Danger!\" The white fire pulsed repeatedly with the instinct, not letting up its warning for even a moment.\n\nValfredo leaped away, first here, then there, and in each spot, he stood, listened, and sniffed. But there was nothing. Even the birds still fluttered and sang as if there was nothing.\n\nThen the wind shifted, and with it came the scent of ash... and a large bird.\n\nValfredo scooped up the humans and raced into the forest. Kina yelped and Thomas hollered with the first movement and continued to fuss as Valfredo searched for some Jublar trees. Then he remembered: there weren't any.\n\nHe dropped the humans aside and tore into the ground. The roar of fire came. Kina and Thomas quieted. Valfredo rolled in the dirt he'd dug out and lay down in the hole as far as he could. Kina and Thomas crept beside him and shivered.\n\nThe roar grew louder and louder until finally the phoenix, covered in fire, landed in the meadow. Small prey scattered everywhere. The grasses and flowers bowed to the phoenix and shriveled dry. The phoenix tossed its head, then flapped its wings a few times before folding them. The fire swirled on its body\u2014and vanished. The phoenix now looked like a giant predatory bird with fire-colored feathers, just as Father had always described it. It reached down for a drink like any other bird, it fluffed up its feathers and shook itself like any other bird, and turned its head this way and that, like any other bird.\n\nValfredo swallowed a gasp. It really was a bird and not a fallen sun. No wonder the white fire could hurt it. A deep growl started in his throat. Maybe he could sneak around the bird and kill it. But no, it was alert\u2014and huge. He couldn't kill it instantly. He'd tried that, and by the time his fire could break through its feathers and skin to kill it, it would burst into flame and kill him. He would have to wait, be patient, and figure out a better strategy.\n\nFinally, the phoenix finished its drink and took flight, this time without bursting into flame.\n\n\"It's safe,\" Valfredo rumbled to his human friends while standing. \"The phoenix is gone.\" Then he remembered they couldn't understand him, and he groaned inside before impressing peace.\n\nThomas gasped like he'd been holding his breath, and Kina breathed heavily.\n\n\"I never knew it was so big,\" she said.\n\n\"And you...\" Thomas stared wide-eyed at Valfredo. \"You wanted to attack it! I saw it in your eyes\u2014you had more anger than fear. Do you realize you'll get yourself killed if you attack that thing? My people may not have seen dragons for centuries, but we remember our legends. That thing eats dragons!\"\n\nValfredo snorted. It was cute how Thomas was trying to protect him, but also annoying. Of course he knew he'd die if he attacked the phoenix\u2014that was why he didn't!\n\n\"Valfredo,\" Thomas continued. \"Look at me!\"\n\nValfredo rolled his eyes and looked.\n\n\"How do you plan to even hurt that thing? You're like a mouse trying to kill a cat. Don't do it.\" As stern as Thomas's voice was, he smelled of pungent fear, and his body trembled. He was terrified, not only by the phoenix he'd just seen, but of the idea of losing a friend.\n\nThe fear tugged on Valfredo's heart, and he nuzzled Thomas and impressed peace more strongly. \"Don't worry, Thomas. I don't plan to leave you anytime soon.\" Come to think of it, Kina stood trembling as well. Tears welled in her eyes, and she looked at Valfredo as if he'd betrayed her.\n\nValfredo increased his impression, reaching out with it to the very edges of his ability and filling it with every bit of peace he could muster. But Kina shook her head, rejecting it.\n\n\"I know what you're doing,\" she said. \"You can't force me to be okay with this. I care too much for you.\" She walked to him and placed her hands gently on his snout. \"Don't fight the phoenix, please. You can't hurt it, and I don't want to lose you.\"\n\nTears trickled down her cheek, adding salt to her scent. How could he make them understand? He wasn't going to fight it recklessly. He didn't even want to fight it, but he had to. He was the only being in all of Galataia's history with a means of killing the phoenix, and for all the dragons\u2014and humans\u2014of Galataia, he had to kill the monster.\n\nBut how could he tell Kina and Thomas about the white fire? How could he make them understand it could burn the phoenix?\n\nWith a nudge to them to follow, he began the short walk back to the meadow. They followed, though slowly because of their short legs. When they finally reached the meadow, Valfredo scratched into it the words, \"Hurts phoenix.\"\n\nThey read it and looked at him with confused expressions. He grinned then turned his snout to the air and spat a short stream of fire where it couldn't burn anything. Kina and Thomas gasped as one, and when Valfredo turned back to look at them, their eyes were wide with wonder and sparkling from excitement.\n\n\"You have white fire!\" they said together. \"And it can hurt the phoenix!\"\n\nValfredo laughed, and they laughed with him. Then Valfredo settled down, ready to continue the conversation the phoenix had interrupted.\n\n\"Do you realize what this means?\" Thomas said, his voice excited as he turned to Kina. \"We have our solution!\"\n\nShe nodded enthusiastically. \"Who wouldn't take an opportunity like this? He'd be a fool to give it up!\"\n\nWhat? What solution? Who was \"he\"?\n\n\"Oh, but we'll need Father to agree to help first,\" Kina added, still making no sense. With a twinkle of excitement in her eyes, she turned to Valfredo. \"I need you to take us to Father's castle\u2014and please fly more smoothly this time.\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" said Thomas. \"I'd rather not empty my stomach on the king.\"\n\nWhat in sun's light were they talking about? What happened to the conversation before the phoenix? Valfredo huffed. How was he supposed to save their people if these two kept changing subjects all the time?\n\n\"Pay attention,\" he growled, then walked to the message he'd written before the phoenix came and pointed to it.\n\nThey reread the message, looked at each other with puzzled expressions, then burst out laughing.\n\n\"Poor Valfredo,\" Kina said. \"We forgot to tell you the new plan.\" She calmed her laughter and explained. \"We're going to convince my father and Jerrold to join your mission to kill the phoenix.\"\n\nWhat? \"No!\" Valfredo screeched. \"No way am I letting you get involved! Humans won't stand a chance\u2014\"\n\n\"Valfredo, please!\" Thomas said in a stern, sharp tone. \"Just listen.\"\n\nTheir eyes locked, each wanting the other to quiet down and listen. Valfredo considered trying to impress Thomas into surrendering, but knew it would prove useless; Thomas had too strong a mind.\n\n\"Please listen, Valfredo,\" Kina asked in her soft, soothing tone.\n\nValfredo growled, \"No,\" but her calmness spread, pulling the tension from his muscles. With a sigh, he looked at her and waited.\n\nShe smiled, melting him even more, before continuing her explanation. \"The phoenix is as much a danger to us as it is to you\u2014possibly more so. It comes and destroys entire villages, and sometimes even castles. It's forced us to live in the open where we're vulnerable to griffins but can see the phoenix coming, and when we do see it, all we can do is hide underground and hope it doesn't destroy everything we have and eat all our livestock.\n\n\"However, if the phoenix is killed, our kingdoms will be able to expand into regions that were too dangerous before. We won't have to fight over pastureland, lumber, or other resources, and without that pressure, Jerrold is sure to care more about friendships than ruling power.\"\n\nKina took a deep breath and stepped forward to place her hand on his snout. Her eyes were a mix of happiness and worry, and her scent matched them perfectly. \"You know going against it is suicide by yourself, so let us help you. We may be small, but we're strong and determined and can do things a dragon can't.\"\n\nThat... was more true than he wanted to admit. If the humans back home could figure out a way to kill dragons, why couldn't these humans find a way to kill the phoenix? She was right about doing the mission alone being suicide, too, but he could always ask the Armors to help. A shudder ran through him. Going back after six months, after essentially abandoning them just when he changed their way of life, didn't sound at all appealing. What would Pelion say? Would she hate him for failing to kill the phoenix? He'd acted so sure he could do it, and instead all he'd managed to do was wake it up and make it angry. She must be furious at him.\n\nSlowly, Valfredo dug his talon into the ground. \"I help you. You help me. Agreed.\" Then he scooped up Thomas and Kina.\n\n\"Oh, one more thing,\" Kina said in a hurry. \"Do you think you could catch a deer or something for us to cook and eat?\" Her expression was expectant and full of confidence that he must give in to her request. It also held a false plea that pretended to give him a choice to refuse.\n\nValfredo laughed. She was far too honest and strong a leader to make a convincing fake plea, but at least she respected him enough to try. With a smile, he gave her a nod, then, more gently this time, took flight toward her castle."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "Just a few hours after finding Great Meadow, Valfredo spotted Kina's castle. But something was different. Something was... wrong. What was the large, black area surrounding it? It was moving like a swarm of ants surrounding a fallen fruit. Valfredo focused on the moving mass until his eyes picked one ant out and recognized it.\n\nA human! The large mass of \"ants\" was a massive number of human warriors wearing the same black armor Pig's had worn. Why were they surrounding Kina's castle? He searched the area for signs of danger. Maybe they were protecting the castle from a griffin horde or a dragon clan he didn't know.\n\nTo the left, away from the castle, he spotted another group of humans. They were much smaller in number, and their blue and yellow armor made them look like the warriors who'd taken Kina to Pig. The colors also hid them well in the tall, yellow-green grasses of the meadow where small blue flowers grew abundant.\n\nOne of the warriors looked up with a spyglass, then shoved the glass into another's hands and began running through the grass in his direction. From this distance it was difficult to tell for certain, but the one running toward him looked a lot like General Humphry.\n\nValfredo swooped down to the ground and landed where the running warrior would reach them in just a few minutes. Then he carefully released Kina and Thomas. The grass here was taller than they were, and at this distance should hide even a dragon from those at the castle\u2014if he ducked.\n\nKina and Thomas hopped off his claws and looked around.\n\n\"Where are we?\" Kina asked. \"Where's the castle?\"\n\nValfredo ignored the questions and tore up a large section of grass, revealing a nice patch of dirt to write in. \"Warriors circle castle?\"\n\nKina read the words, then looked at him. \"Do you mean it's surrounded? Let me see.\"\n\nValfredo lowered his head to let her on, then raised it so she could see over the grass.\n\n\"I can't... all I can see is a blob.\" She tapped his head. \"Are the warriors all wearing black?\"\n\nHe lowered his head to let her off, then nodded.\n\nKina groaned. \"Thomas, he's brought his army to Father's door. The treaty isn't ended for another three weeks, and he's already here. What are we going to do?\" She sounded afraid and defeated, but smelled hot with anger.\n\nThomas scrunched his face in thought, but before he could suggest anything, the armored warrior pushed through the last wall of grass.\n\n\"Your Highness!\" General Humphry rushed into the clearing and bowed in front of Kina. \"I'm so glad you're alive and well! I see the dragon hasn't harmed you, after all.\" He glanced a frown of disapproval at Valfredo.\n\n\"Humphry! Where'd you come from? What's happening with Tradon? Are we at war? Is Father all right?\"\n\nHumphry stood and gestured in the direction he came from. \"My men are hiding in camouflaged camps where they can't see us, but so far we haven't found an opening to attack. As far as I know, your father's safe, but we must break this siege soon or he may starve. There was no war declared, but when I sent a messenger to King Jerrold, the messenger was captured. I've sent another messenger to the fortress south of us, and one to the western camp, but they won't be here for another two weeks. Please forgive me, Princess! We were away on a mission, and Tradon came so quickly we didn't know of their coming until they were here.\"\n\n\"But what about our friends? Won't any of them come?\" Kina's hands trembled, but her voice was steady. The scent of pungent fear mixed with bitter hatred, and her eyes glittered with a dragon's fury. As Humphry shook his head in answer, they narrowed into a glare.\n\n\"Do you know how we might get through that army to speak with the king?\" Thomas asked.\n\nHumphry gave Thomas a long look, then asked, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Thomas of the mountains,\" Thomas said, hand extended in an offer of friendship\u2014or greeting. Valfredo never did quite understand it.\n\nThe extended hand was grasped hesitantly by Humphry, who then gave it one quick shake before releasing it. \"Unfortunately, no. I don't think King Jerrold is in the mood to talk.\"\n\nThomas grasped his jaw in thought. \"What if we sent another messenger saying the princess is here and alive?\"\n\nHumphry shook his head. \"I sincerely doubt that would make a difference.\"\n\n\"It might if we...\"\n\nValfredo groaned and ignored the conversation\u2014humans talked way too much and made everything boring. Ah, something was happening at the castle. He moved closer, making sure to stay hidden beneath the grass. When he was close enough to hear words, he stopped and peeked over to watch.\n\n\"Manning!\"\n\nIt was Pig. He was riding up to the castle gates. A man wearing a crown\u2014Manning, Valfredo guessed\u2014stepped out of a turret and peeked over a wall to peer at Pig. He assumed Pig couldn't see him, according to his crouched posture.\n\nPig was at the gate now, and he jeered, \"Come out, you coward! Come out and surrender to me!\" He leaped off the horse and looked up, arms raised to the sides in a vulnerable pose. \"Are you also too cowardly to fight?\"\n\nManning slipped back inside, and Pig laughed. The soldiers on the castle wall paced and watched the scene with intensity, looking over the wall at the black-armored army constantly. The way they moved was quick and tense; they knew the danger pressing on them.\n\nWith a snort Valfredo stood and walked back to Kina, no longer bothering to hide himself. Jerrold really was a pig, and his men weren't worth hiding from. When Valfredo arrived at the clearing, he found Kina hopping off Thomas's shoulders with a spyglass in her hands. Other warriors of hers were in the clearing now, and one took the spyglass from her.\n\n\"Did you hear what they said?\" she asked Valfredo.\n\n\"It was too far a distance, Your Highness,\" Humphry said before he could answer. \"Not even dragons have that strong a hearing.\"\n\nValfredo snarled. Why did others always assume things about him?\n\n\"Even if he could hear the words,\" Humphry continued, ignoring the snarl, \"he wouldn't be able to understand them.\"\n\n\"That does it!\" Valfredo growled. \"I'm going to prove to you how good a warrior I am, and then you won't be able to stop apologizing, you'll be so embarrassed!\"\n\nKina gestured to the dirt patch, but before she could ask him to write his words, he scooped her and Thomas up with his wing and slid them down onto his back. Then he whipped Humphry and the warriors with his tail, not with enough force to hurt them, but enough to knock them down and prevent annoying attempts to stop him.\n\n\"Valfredo, what are you doing?\" Kina said from his shoulders. Then she gasped. \"You're going to the castle! Valfredo, stop, they'll kill us!\"\n\nValfredo ignored her plea and continued walking with head and tail held high and a proud, strong expression of confidence on his face. When they were close enough for the enemy to see clearly, he walked with greater resolve. Every muscle in his body rippled and flexed, and he impressed calm and peace while filling the air with his confidence.\n\nAs they approached the army, Kina and Thomas grew nervous and excited despite the impressed calm. A bugle rang out, and the entire army turned to face him. They were still too far away to attack, but they scrambled into fighting positions. Valfredo kept his pace steady. If he could just get them to see Kina, they'll think she'd tamed him like a horse and let him through. Then he could speak with Pig and Kina's coward father.\n\nThe warriors felt the air and shivered as he walked by. The impressed calm made them relax enough not to attack unprovoked, and his strength made them move out of his way, letting him through to the castle gates. Even near Pig, not one warrior had dragon-killing weapons. They just had the simple ones made of metal. He stopped impressing once he arrived in front of Pig, who stood at the gate wearing a smug grin and only half turned when the gates opened to let their king out.\n\nManning had tears in his eyes as he reached out for Kina. \"My daughter, I thought you were dead!\"\n\nValfredo lowered himself and spread his wing to touch the ground. The air smelled of pungent fear and bitter bloodlust. Pig's closest warriors watched every move Valfredo made, holding their weapons tightly and clenching their jaws in determination.\n\nBut Kina didn't seam to notice and smelled only of excitement as she slid down his wing and ran into her father's arms. \"I'm all right, Father. Valfredo thought I was in danger, that's all. Everything's all right now. I've explained it to him. He understands us now, and he can communicate, too.\"\n\nPig crossed his arms. \"Do you really expect us to believe a dragon is an intelligent being?\"\n\nKina whirled around to face Pig with the neutral expression she'd mastered to fool other humans. \"I'm not lying. He really can\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care what that thing can or can't do. What happened was a direct violation of our agreement, and you were the one who insisted on him being allowed to live.\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, Jerrold\u2014\"\n\n\"That's King Jerrold to you! I am not some love-crazed peasant who will simply roll over and forgive the insolence you've shown. Your father will either give me his kingdom, or he will pay the consequences!\"\n\nManning waved his hands about in a stupid manner, then motioned to the door. \"I think it best if we discuss this in private.\"\n\n\"No, Father, wait.\" Kina's soft, gentle tone held a firmness that would make any dragon warrior listen. \"Listen, Jerr\u2014King Jerrold. I have a proposal that may alleviate the tension between our kingdoms and solve a problem that has killed thousands on both sides.\"\n\nPig glanced at Valfredo and smirked. \"If you plan to teach us how to tame dragons, you might just be on the right track.\"\n\nKina took a deep breath and changed her stance to be less submissive, but still respectful. \"I'm sure you recall that I told you dragons are people, like us, but a different species.\"\n\nWith a scoff Jerrold said, \"An absurd suggestion, but I recall it.\"\n\n\"Well, as it turns out, the written language of Thomas's people\u2014oh, this is Thomas.\" She gestured to Thomas, who bowed before she continued. \"Their written language is perfect for Valfredo, and he's learned how to understand the common tongue and write in Thomas's language, so we're able to communicate with each other. Isn't that right, Valfredo?\"\n\nValfredo nodded, then scratched into the ground, \"This boring. May eat him?\" It was nice, well-trodden ground that had no grass, so his words were surprisingly clear.\n\n\"Fascinating!\" Manning said as Valfredo wrote. \"What did it say?\"\n\nThomas and Kina read the words quietly and looked at each other. Thomas cleared his throat.\n\n\"He suggested we get on with the proposal.\"\n\nValfredo snorted, though he wasn't sure if he was more amused or insulted. Getting on with the proposal was utterly pointless. Undeserved confidence and pride oozed from every part of Pig. Why should he agree to something that put his kingdom in danger when he already thought he won this war? Besides, even if he did agree to it, Valfredo would never fight with someone who would turn on him at the first chance. They were wasting their time trying to discuss a solution, but if he attacked Pig now, Kina would think it was unprovoked and get upset. With a sigh, Valfredo stood in a nonthreatening posture and waited for them to finish and Pig to attack\u2014and he would attack; every instinct in Valfredo's bones told him so.\n\n\"Yes, right,\" said Kina. \"During one of my conversations with Valfredo, he mentioned he has a mission to kill the phoenix.\"\n\nPig laughed. \"The phoenix is a mountain-size monster and is known to eat dragons. How does this oversized lizard expect to kill it? Food poisoning?\"\n\nA glare crossed Kina's face before she could correct it. Her hands grasped her dress, bunching some of it in tight fists. She looked ready to explode in a tongue-lashing, but stood quiet.\n\nThomas saw the fury in her and stepped between her and Pig, pretending it was to see both kings at once. \"Your highnesses, if I may be so bold, Valfredo is very determined, and very strong. If he says he can kill the phoenix, he can.\"\n\n\"And I should believe the word of a mountain peasant? Your clothes give you away, mountain man. Go back to your home while I still allow it.\"\n\nWith clenched fists and a firm stance, Thomas said, \"I'm the leader of the mountain tribes, and I know Valfredo well enough to believe he can kill the phoenix, with help from us.\"\n\n\"Then by all means take your people on a suicide mission with a dragon. I will not take part in it.\"\n\nValfredo groaned inside. When will this conversation end? His jaw ached from a yawn forced to stay hidden.\n\nKina placed a hand on Thomas's elbow, and he stepped back to let her speak. \"Will you consider it if Father agrees as well? The phoenix has cost thousands of lives in both livestock and people. Surely you see the benefit of killing such a thing?\"\n\n\"What would I have to gain from that?\" Pig snapped. \"I have everything I need, and I'll have everything I want as soon as your father surrenders.\" He turned to Manning and grinned. \"I'll get your kingdom either way, but surrendering it will be so much easier on your people.\"\n\nManning opened his mouth, stuttered some gibberish, then glanced at Kina and Valfredo. Without saying anything, he puffed up with fake confidence.\n\nKina watched his response with a cringe, then turned back to face Pig with a stern and genuinely confident expression. \"Jerrold\u2014\"\n\n\"I told you to call me King Jerrold!\" Pig glared at her, though he smelled more of pride than anger.\n\nGiving a return glare that demanded respect, Kina said, \"I will call you King Jerrold only if you act like a king and show some respect to my father and myself.\"\n\nExcited shivers ran through Valfredo. The air grew more violent with every moment; it wouldn't be long now before he could attack. He tensed his muscles and waited.\n\nThe movement caught Pig's attention, who glanced at him then narrowed his eyes and scowled as he looked back to Kina. \"I see. You think your precious dragon can protect you.\" He raised an arm, and anticipation quivered in Valfredo's bones. \"Good luck.\"\n\nThe warriors finally attacked, all of them aiming at Valfredo. With a screech of glee, he whirled around and slashed at them with his claws and whipped them with his tail. The warriors fired arrows at his eyes, but they were easily blinked away. When that failed, the warriors hacked with their swords and stabbed with their spears, but his scales were too strong and their weapons too weak and dull.\n\nValfredo laughed. \"You call this fighting?\" He slashed at several more, knocking them into others. \"The humans back home had better weapons than you\u2014and better techniques!\"\n\n\"Valfredo, stop!\" Kina sounded frantic and angry, but Valfredo had to ignore her as the warriors continued their attempts to hurt him.\n\n\"Jerrold, please tell them to stop.\" Kina said. \"This will only lead to a pointless loss of life. Please stop them!\"\n\nBut Pig only laughed.\n\nAnger boiled in Valfredo, and the white fire boiled with it. Pig needed to be taught a lesson in respect. He needed to learn not to pick a fight with a dragon\u2014especially a dragon who was friends with Kina. It was time to end this battle. He stoked his fire and aimed carefully. The human deaths would upset Kina, but the warriors' loyalty was to their king, and it would take a strong show of force to change their minds. When the fire was ready, he let out a stream to ash the semi-circle of warriors closest to him. When he stopped, the uninjured warriors ran two dragon-lengths away and stood in place, stunned and white-faced. The others screamed in agony, half-burned with armor melting onto them from the heat of his fire. His stomach twisted, and he finished ashing them to end their suffering. The air stank of hot metal and burnt flesh and was full of fear and horror.\n\nGrowling, he turned to Pig and wrote, \"Surrender or die.\"\n\nThomas read the words aloud, his voice smooth but strained.\n\nPig trembled and his jaw quaked. He struggled to breathe. \"I... that... th-that's not a dragon flame.\"\n\n\"I am Valfredo, wielder of phoenix fire,\" Valfredo said. \"Surrender now while I let you live.\"\n\nAt the same time, Thomas said, \"No, but it's his. I suggest you answer his demand.\"\n\nPig's knees gave way, and he collapsed, his heart pounding hard. \"I... surrender.\"\n\nValfredo lifted his head and roared victory. The castle screamed and shattered its windows. The air answered him with waves of fury, and the ground shook with laughter. It was a glorious roar! This victory would be long lived.\n\nMany humans fell to their knees and shivered in fear. The air was full of it. Full of fear and respect. Finally, he had gained what he needed. He looked Manning in the eyes and wrote, \"Kina marry who she wants.\" He made sure every word was clear and left out none that he could write. It was painfully slow, and he almost ran out of room, but he wanted to make sure the message was clear.\n\nWhen Thomas finished reading the words, Valfredo wiped them away and added, \"Or you die.\"\n\nThis time after hearing what he'd written, Manning sucked in his breath and hesitated before speaking. The air around him smelled of fear and confidence.\n\nValfredo swallowed a growl. Clashing emotions always meant trouble, and he was in no mood to argue.\n\n\"Jenna is a princess, and my only child,\" Manning finally said. \"I might\u2014\" He swallowed and cleared his throat. \"I might need her to marry someone to prevent war. Surely you must understand this.\" Even after he'd cleared it, his voice was shaky. If he knew the danger of disobedience, why did he refuse the demand? Fool!\n\n\"I won your war,\" Valfredo wrote. His talons itched with the desire to scratch the fool, but he forced down his hostility so the humans wouldn't sense it and it couldn't feed into his own anger. Losing his temper would be the death of Manning, and coward or not, he was Kina's father, and she loved him. \"Kina marry who she wants. Or I kill you.\"\n\n\"Valfredo, no!\" Kina shook her head emphatically. She was white as snow and shivering. \"No, please, spare my father your wrath, please! If you care for me at all, you'll spare him.\"\n\nManning relaxed, and the air around him grew smug. Jerrold wasn't the only pig king. Poor Kina deserved better. She deserved someone who would listen to her. Very well.\n\nValfredo rumbled reassurance and wrote, \"For you he will live. I will fight him.\"\n\n\"No, you can't!\" Her skin color was returning, and her voice grew stronger, though still held a desperate tone. \"You'll kill him. You won't mean to, but you will. You're powerful, Valfredo. Just look at what you did in a matter of seconds!\"\n\nShe gestured to the ashed area. \"Hundreds of men are dead because you fought them. Do not fight my father.\"\n\nThomas placed a hand on her shoulder. \"I don't think he's going to budge on this one. The whole reason he's gone this far is to protect you. He isn't going to just give you over to the next man who asks for your hand.\"\n\nKina clenched her fists and glared at Valfredo, though there was no heat in her scent. Her jaw was set stubbornly, and she stared him in the eyes as if she were more powerful. \"You owe me as much as I owe you. Remember your promise, and don't break it, or I'll never consider you a friend again.\"\n\nValfredo nodded slowly to show respect. Her stance, her strength in this moment, was a lot like Mother\u2014and Niamo, come to think of it. He would give her Pig's kingdom, and she would be a great leader.\n\nAfter closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Kina relaxed her body and opened her eyes into a more peaceful stare. \"Okay then, I'll trust you. But I can't be here when you discuss this.\"\n\nHe nodded, and she walked into the castle.\n\n\"J-Jenna!\" Manning called, but the doors closed. Pale and trembling, he turned to Valfredo. \"I'll do what you ask, dragon. Just don't hurt me.\"\n\nWhat a coward. All this time, he was hiding behind Kina. Her kingdom would be better with her leading it as well.\n\nPainfully slow so the words would be clear, he scratched into the ground, \"Give kingdom to Kina. She\u2014\"\n\nHe ran out of room. With a growl, he tore up some grassy area to finish. \"keeps Pig kingdom too.\"\n\nThomas read the message aloud for Manning. \"He demands you give your kingdom to Princess Jenna, and declares she will also rule Tradon.\"\n\nManning's face grew paler than before. \"Wh-what? B-But, she's just... she's so young and\u2014\"\n\n\"Do as I say!\" Valfredo roared. He'd had enough of this fool's excuses! He was not respectful enough to bother listening to.\n\nManning fell to the ground with his hands over his ears. \"Don't kill me I beg you. I'll give the kingdom to Jenna, just don't kill me!\"\n\nValfredo snorted. Good. The coward was finally obeying. Now for the warriors. Turning to them and wiping away his earlier message, he wrote, \"Kina your king now. Agree or leave or die. Choose.\"\n\nThomas stood in front of the warriors and spoke loud and clear. \"Valfredo, the dragon, has given you a choice. You may accept Princess Jenna as your queen, leave the kingdom, or fight him. He commands you to choose quickly, and threatens any who plans harm to the princess.\"\n\nThe warriors looked to each other. One, and then another got down on one knee and bowed his head. Others followed, and soon most of them were in the posture. The scent of respect and submission was strong.\n\n\"Guards,\" Thomas said to Manning's warriors, \"Take the weapons from the men still standing and escort them to the wildlands on the southern border. And take... Jerrold, to the prisons.\"\n\nThe guards obeyed, and Thomas sighed before looking to Valfredo. \"You've made quite a mess, my friend, and guess who has to clean it up?\" He turned back to Manning and held out his hand. \"I know Jenna will welcome my services, but I'd like your blessing as well. Will you allow me to stay and help?\"\n\nManning took the hand and stood up on shaking legs. \"I'll... give you my answer... tomorrow.\n\n\"Of course. I'll help you inside.\" As the big door closed behind them, Humphry arrived with his men and demanded to know what had happened."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "Kina stood on the balcony, eyes sparkling and queen's tiara shining atop her black wavy hair. Every part of her seemed to glitter with excitement\u2014even her white and yellow gown glistened in the sunlight. Anticipation filled the air, and the voices of a thousand excited humans drifted in waves as they waited in the garden. It should make Valfredo ecstatically happy, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't shake the darkness growing inside him.\n\n\"Can you believe it's been a year?\" Kina said. \"And thanks to you, I'm about to marry a man I actually love.\"\n\n\"I'm happy for you, Kina,\" he rumbled, though his heart twisted in pain.\n\n\"And I haven't forgotten my promise. Once I marry Thomas, our kingdom will stabilize, and we'll have the power to lend you our best generals. Don't worry, we'll find a way to kill the phoenix.\"\n\nWould they? It took an entire year just to stop the human revolts against Kina, and in that year not one idea had come to him on how to even injure the phoenix without being killed. It was powerful; being a giant bird instead of a fallen sun didn't change that. How could one dragon and an army of weaker humans hope to win against it?\n\nA servant entered the balcony and bowed. \"It's time, Your Highness.\"\n\nKina's emotions spiked for a moment, then settled on excited with a little nervousness. She kissed Valfredo's snout. \"Wish me luck, my wonderful friend.\"\n\nHe nuzzled her and rumbled, \"You don't need it, little one. He loves you and I trust him.\" Then he walked to his place next to Thomas.\n\nIt was a nice wedding. Everyone was happy for them, filling the air with joy and happiness. Kina practically glowed the whole time, and Thomas glowed right alongside her. They were so happy it made Valfredo hurt, though he managed to keep it from impressing the air. When everyone was busy congratulating the new couple, he walked away to lay down in a nearby meadow.\n\nThe darkness inside made his mind stupid and body tired. Even the white fire gave no feeling. The sounds and happy scents of the party wafted to him, sticking to his mind and tightening his chest. He missed being with other dragons. He missed his carefree youth before the phoenix attack. Kaven hadn't loved or even liked him after discovering the phoenix fire, but at least he was another dragon. The Armors respected him enough to change their whole lifestyle. He could easily have taken a mate, raised a family, and lived the life he dreamed of. But it was too late now. He'd abandoned them after telling them to change who they were. Who could care for him after that? What if war had broken out between the Forests and Armors while he was gone, and Pelion was killed?\n\nEven if they did still care for him and war hadn't broken out, how could he live life as if he had no weapon to kill the monster phoenix? How could he let his young live in fear, knowing that once he died, no one would be able to harm the phoenix? Yet he couldn't kill the phoenix alone, and he couldn't think of a way the humans could help.\n\nThe only hope he had was getting the Armors involved, but even if they offered to help, how could they? Facing the phoenix meant death. Who was to say his luck of survival would reach out to the Armors, who charged at death head-on? Did he really want to chance losing the only hope he had of having a clan again? Was he willing to watch another clan die?\n\n\"Valfredo?\" Kina's soft voice said as she came into view.\n\n\"I want to be alone,\" he growled, but Kina only moved closer.\n\n\"Thomas and I are worried about you.\"\n\nHe grunted.\n\n\"You haven't been yourself lately. You haven't been eating, you haven't been writing, and you always look depressed. What's wrong? You can tell me.\"\n\nHe lifted his claw to write \"nothing,\" but stopped and put it back down. What was the point? She wouldn't believe him, and he was sick of having to write to communicate. She didn't understand. No one understood. They could talk to each other, talk to him, and write only when they felt like it. He had to write all the time\u2014and destroy any grass, flowers, and roots while he was at it, unless there happened to be a bare patch of dirt. He missed having other dragons to talk to, and the chance of having it again was impossible as long as the phoenix lived, and the phoenix was impossible to kill.\n\n\"You're crying! Oh, you poor thing. Here, let me sing to you. You still like me singing to you, don't you?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, but she started singing anyway, and despite himself, he enjoyed it. Its movement flowed with the beauty of her voice and the flowers of the meadow, carrying their cheerfulness into his ears and tickling light in to fight the darkness. The more he fought the light, the more futile his attempt became. Music was something of sheer pleasure, and it was something humans had mastered.\n\n\"Feel better?\" she asked.\n\nSighing, he rumbled contentment. She giggled, then patted him and stood up.\n\n\"I have to go,\" she said. \"Everyone will wonder where I went. Are you going to be okay by yourself?\"\n\nTo answer, he closed his eyes and gave a smile. Finally, the darkness was gone and he had hope again. His clan had not died in vain; they died so he could kill the phoenix and protect the innocence in the world\u2014both dragon and human. For the first time, he had a purpose. No matter what it cost, he was going to complete this mission."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "\"No, that wouldn't work,\" said High General Humphry. \"The phoenix is too fast. What if instead we lure it there and fire ballista and boulders to distract it while Valfredo breathes fire at its head?\"\n\nUgh! They'd been at this for days and still didn't have a plan. Valfredo smoothed the wet sand and wrote, \"If I do that, the phoenix will breathe fire on me. Its neck is long and it can strike like a snake. Your ballista and boulders aren't distracting enough to keep it from noticing me, and I can't aim and dodge at the same time.\" Though having to communicate through writing still irritated him, at least he'd perfected it so he didn't have to sound stupid.\n\nGeneral Pole huffed and crossed his arms. \"The phoenix isn't killable. How many times have our ancestors attacked it with volleys of arrows, ballista, and boulders? Dozens? Nothing took it down. Nothing! How can we expect a single dragon to? That bird's fire is hot enough to instantly burn up anything, not to mention its the size of a small mountain and a really fast flyer. Even if Valfredo could catch it, he couldn't bite it without getting burned.\"\n\nValfredo held back a snort. Calling the phoenix fast was an understatement. Then again, he'd managed to outfly it for short bursts. If he could fly just a littler faster all the time, then maybe... no, that wasn't possible. He was as fast as he could get, and even Pelion could outfly him. Come to think of it, all the Forests were fast. Would they be able to outfly the phoenix?\n\n\"I agree,\" said General Bailey. \"Going against that monster is impossible. Even if we did find some solution to help Valfredo get to it, he's made it perfectly clear he wouldn't be able to do any real harm before it killed him. What's the point of trying when we'll lose far more men than the phoenix has killed in a century and still not win?\"\n\nHumphry gave each of them a stern look. \"We're generals. We've faced impossible odds before and won. This is a mission ordered by your king that will benefit generations to come. All we have to do is find the way to make it work.\"\n\nYes, the one way out of hundreds of possible tries. Valfredo looked at the beautiful fields now full of growing plants and fat animals with young. Pole and Bailey were right to be worried; Valfredo had gone against the phoenix and lost miserably. If it hadn't been for Kina and Humphry being there, he and his white fire would've died, and any hope of killing the phoenix with them. It didn't seem like a few humans could make a difference, but they were as determined as he was. Together, they would find a way, even if it took years of discussion\u2014oh, right. He'd forgotten to listen.\n\nPole was speaking again, though he luckily didn't seem to notice Valfredo's inattention. \"... impossible. Dragons weren't the first to discover the phoenix's sleeping cave, and if you know bestial history, you know why we haven't tried again. Every time it's fought, it acquires new techniques to defeat its attackers. The phoenix is big, and it learns. I'll bet it knows how to catch Valfredo in flight now. He would have to constantly change his strategy mid-battle just to get a few hits in, and there's no guarantee those hits will do any real damage.\"\n\nUgh! Another good point. If only he could ask the Armors for help. They were big and powerful and practiced in fighting\u2014they'd destroyed a whole other clan, for sun's sake! An image of a group of Armors surrounding the phoenix came to mind, and Valfredo smiled. Then the phoenix burst into flame and ate the few who'd survived the initial burst. No, he was not going to watch another clan die. He could do this with the humans' help; they just had to find the way.\n\nBailey sighed. \"We've been at this every hour for five days and gone nowhere. Frankly, I'm exhausted.\"\n\n\"As am I,\" said Pole with a nod. \"High General, why don't you see if King Thomas is willing to give us some time to rest our minds. Perhaps we can come up with a solution then.\"\n\nHumphry looked like he was about to agree when Bailey's eyes brightened and he waved his hand to get the others' attention.\n\n\"I have an idea, but we'll need a large metal net.\" He pointed to a valley on the map. \"If we string a large chain net here, we might slow the phoenix down enough for Valfredo to give a finishing blow.\"\n\nThe other generals stared at the map and furrowed their eyebrows in thought. Slowly, the energy of hope floated into the air.\n\n\"That just might work,\" Humphry said at last. \"We use nets to catch fish, so why not use one to catch a giant bird? We'll have to carry it in sections, but I'm sure the blacksmiths can figure out how to reconnect them.\"\n\nPole shook his head. \"There's another problem.\" He stood and unsheathed his sword, then placed its tip on the edge of one of Valfredo's toe scales. Directing the sword carefully, he began trying to force it under the scale. After a while, he pulled it away and rubbed his finger on the tip, showing it had dulled in the attempt. \"If I were to try hitting him with this, it would break, chip, or dent beyond repair. If our weapons can't even bite through a dragon's scales, how are they supposed to pierce a phoenix?\"\n\n\"It's Valfredo's job to kill the thing, not ours, and he has a weapon that can harm it,\" said Bailey.\n\n\"Ah, but he's made it clear he needs real support. Backup that can bite. If we can't distract the phoenix more than a few flies could distract a man in battle, what use would we be to him?\"\n\nThe other two generals sighed in unison and quieted into their own thoughts.\n\nValfredo looked to where Pole had tried to dig under his scale. It hadn't even begun to lift. Were the swords the humans made back home from dragon parts really that much stronger? If that was true, it must be the same for the arrows and spears\u2014and ballista, if the humans back home had those. If only steel could make better weapons like that, but he'd already asked, and they'd turned down every suggestion. Make it sharper and it would break, they'd said. Make it bigger and it couldn't be fired; make it stronger and it wouldn't be sharp enough. No wonder the humans back home were so dangerous! These ones lived so far from dragons, they probably never even thought to use dragon parts as weapons. The ones back home lived within dragon territories. All it took was one of them to get the idea and find the corpse of a loner that unexpectedly died and wasn't ashed yet. Then they'd tell someone else, and soon everyone in that clan would know.\n\nBut not having that knowledge meant these humans probably couldn't help him kill the phoenix, no matter how many metal nets or strategies they used. They couldn't possibly throw a chain around its beak like the humans back home had done on his snout. Those warriors had barely managed to get him, and he was far less powerful than the phoenix and didn't have the ability to burst into flame. How could these humans, who couldn't even kill a dragon without great effort, help him against the fallen sun?\n\nHis fire danced inside, seeming to say, You could tell them about the humans back home and suggest they use dragon parts against the phoenix.\n\n\"And risk them killing the dragons here like the ones back home were doing?\" he growled.\n\nHumans are inventive and determined; they'll eventually figure out how to kill these dragons as easily as the ones back home did. But I'm the only one who can hurt the phoenix, and I'm inside you. Once you die, the future generations will have no way to harm it. Is that worth keeping secret how the humans back home made weapons against your kind?\n\nValfredo sighed. No, it wasn't. Slowly, he wrote, \"I have one suggestion. Make the ballistae with dragonhorn tips.\"\n\nThe generals looked up in surprise. \"Dragonhorn tips?\" they asked in almost perfect unison.\n\n\"You told me that you humans have collected dragon parts over many years to use as decorations in large homes and castles. Use those to make the weapons to attack the phoenix.\" He then went on to explain how the dragon-part weapons back home were stronger and sharper than the steel ones they had here\u2014strong and sharp enough to kill a grown dragon warrior.\n\nHumphrey exhaled strongly and sat back. \"You must have a lot of faith to trust us with this kind of information. I thank you for it, but do you think it's wise to spread this knowledge? We can't keep it secret once we tell someone else. Eventually, the other kingdoms will find out\u2014and they might not be as friendly to your species.\"\n\nPole nodded. \"I know we haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but believe it or not I do respect you. I'd hate to see your trust lead to the destruction of your people.\"\n\nValfredo smiled. These humans were good friends. His fire was right to tell them. \"Yes, I'm sure. Dragons will have to fight humans in the future. I'm sure of that. But your kind is determined to overcome problems and are very imaginative. I need you to help me kill the phoenix, and if I'm going to put your lives at risk, the least I can do is help you strengthen yourselves. Besides, this knowledge will help us all to win, and I'd rather my young have to fight against dishonorable humans than the heartless phoenix.\"\n\n\"All right, it's settled then,\" said Bailey. \"We're going to use his suggestion and make the strongest, meanest ballistae the world's ever seen.\" He tapped the map. \"But there's yet another problem. How are we going to lure the phoenix into the trap? The only thing it chases is a dragon, and Valfredo won't be able to travel far without being caught. Even if he did make it, would he still have the strength to fight?\"\n\nOnce again they all fell into silence.\n\nA thought nagged at Valfredo.\n\nAsk the Forests; they're fast.\n\nHe shook it away. No way was he putting them in danger.\n\nThe Armors could protect them.\n\nNo! He was not going to watch another clan die.\n\nThe fire stirred inside him and seemed to agree with his thoughts. They're your only hope of winning.\n\nThat might be true, but there was no way they'd agree to it. He'd essentially abandoned them\u2014both clans. They had to be angry at him, or maybe even hate him. What if they started a war right after he left? How could he possibly ask them to work together then?\n\nShouldn't that be their choice? the fire seemed to say. The plan won't work without them.\n\nUgh. It was right. With a sigh, he wrote to the generals. \"I have an idea, but I need to ask them first. They might be angry at me.\"\n\nHumphrey looked at him in surprise. \"Who?\"\n\n\"The other dragons,\" Valfredo wrote, then opened his wings to take off.\n\n\"Wait, what other dragons?\" Humphrey asked, but at the very same moment, a man ran from the castle to him and said, \"High General, I have a message from Meadow Fort.\"\n\nHumphrey turned to the messenger, while Pole asked Valfredo not to leave.\n\nValfredo gladly stayed to hear what Kina's old home had to say.\n\n\"What's the message?\" Humphrey asked.\n\n\"Two large dragons have come out of the meadow and eaten nearly all the fattened pigs and scared off the cattle. The fort was going to help some local villages caught in a famine, and is in dire need of food support, but the queen doesn't want to send anyone into danger, and wants to know if you think it's safe.\"\n\nValfredo folded his wings. Two large dragons out of Great Meadow? Impossible! But also not\u2014after all, he'd gone through it. But who else would try? Maybe Kaven? No, he wouldn't bother. Who would?\n\n\"Are the dragons still there? Have they harmed anyone?\" Humphrey asked, glancing at Valfredo, who nodded. He was their only hope if the dragons were hostile, and he was willing to fight.\n\n\"No sir, they stayed around the farthest lake, and everyone hid inside the castle until they left.\"\n\nHumphrey sighed and his shoulders relaxed. \"They may not be aggressive, then. Tell her highness it should be safe. Valfredo will be going on a short errand, but should return before the dragons have a chance of causing any real harm.\"\n\nHe gave Valfredo a nod, and Valfredo took off. Whoever the mysterious dragons were, they could wait until after the phoenix was dealt with. He didn't want to kill them, after all, and dragons from the other side were likely to start a fight with a single dragon. Having a few Armors around when he confronted them should frighten them into submission\u2014if the Armors didn't hate him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "\"I can't believe I'm doing this,\" Valfredo mumbled as he flapped harder. Every stretch of distance he covered made the air feel heavier on his wings. What was he thinking, asking the other clans for help? Even if by some chance they hadn't started war with each other and didn't hate him for changing their lives, what dragon in their right mind would go against the phoenix? Sure, some Forests had tried in the past, but only while it was sleeping.\n\nThere was the mountain marking the Armor's nesting ground. What was he going to say to them? Someone bugled. He'd been spotted. Whether he liked it or not, he would soon be telling Arnack of his failure, then ask him to risk the lives of his clan in a suicidal mission.\n\nArnack was waiting when he arrived, surrounded by both Armors and Forests. Relief flooded Valfredo. Pelion's mission seemed to have gone better than he could've imagined; maybe his will go well, too.\n\nHe landed in front of Arnack on the same ledge where they had first met. Arnack's mighty presence was no weaker than that first day. In fact, it was stronger, which made the silence even less bearable. He shuddered inside.\n\n\"What took you so long?\" Arnack said with an irritated tone.\n\nValfredo cocked his head and gave a confused expression. \"What do you mean?\" Arnack didn't answer. He only stood there with the same stern, neutral expression. What in sun's light did he want from Valfredo? Taking a deep breath, Valfredo took his best guess and began to explain his absence by telling about his attempt to kill the phoenix. He didn't get very far, however, before Arnack snorted and rolled his eyes.\n\n\"Pelion already told me about your failure,\" he said.\n\nA cringe jerked at Valfredo, but he managed to suppress it before anyone saw.\n\n\"You're a great warrior, Valfredo, but not that great,\" Arnack continued. \"What you've mastered is survival, not winning a war.\" He raised his head to stand at full height, then flared his wings to appear even larger. The air filled with pride, both from him and others. \"The Armor clan, however, has mastered winning challenges. We're not afraid of a good battle, and we promised to follow you to our death.\"\n\nExcited whispers moved through the crowd.\n\nArnack glanced around and smirked. \"If you want to kill the phoenix,\" he said with a raised voice, \"use us!\"\n\nThe Armors all opened their mouths, supposedly to agree with him, but stopped suddenly and closed their mouths to glance at each other. A small amount of fear drifted into the air, and Arnack turned to his clan.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\nThey all looked at Roth, who swallowed before answering. \"Er, are you telling us to attack the phoenix? Won't that get us all killed?\"\n\nArnack's wings twitched. \"Not all of us, no, but some. Are you saying you don't want to fight?\"\n\n\"It's the phoenix, brother. What chance do we have?\"\n\nArnack laughed, then suddenly stopped and frowned in thought. \"I see your point.\" He looked around at the clan and spoke loud enough for all to hear. \"I shall make it your choice. Whoever wants to stay here may. Whoever comes to fight the phoenix, fights it with me and the breather of phoenix fire. Make your decision!\"\n\nThe clan whispered to each other for less then a breath before exploding into roars of agreement. It seemed every Armor wanted to fight. The Forests standing among them fell to the ground and covered their heads from the noise.\n\n\"Oh, and welcome back,\" Arnack said to Valfredo with a grin. \"We're glad you're still alive.\"\n\nValfredo looked around at the roaring crowd. Unbelievable. With just a few words, Arnack got them excited for an impossible mission and reminded them of the respect Valfredo had earned. His failure didn't lose him that respect, and his abandonment didn't make Arnack hate him. Arnack had even kept his promise to treat the Forests as equals. After forcing the Armors to change their way of thinking\u2014their whole way of life\u2014they were still willing to fight with Valfredo.\n\nA chuckle escaped. He should've known. They were an odd clan that seemed to never lose respect for another once it was earned. With a smile, he turned back to Arnack. \"You have an amazing clan. I thought I'd have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Valfredo!\"\n\nHe turned just in time to see Pelion flying at him before she crashed into his side, knocking him down. Then she proceeded to lick him all over his face like a fledgling. He couldn't help laughing.\n\n\"Pelion, stop! That's enough!\" he said between laughs.\n\nFinally, she stopped and stood next to him with a big smile on her face. \"I'm so happy you're alive! We all thought you were dead.\"\n\n\"I didn't,\" Arnack said proudly.\n\n\"Well you're just weird.\" She rolled her eyes and sighed, then turned to Valfredo. \"He thought you were alive just because you survived the first time. The rest of us thought you were dead, which was the sane thing to do.\"\n\nValfredo chuckled. It was so nice to be talking again. \"You just can't stand to be wrong, can you?\"\n\n\"That's absurd! Every sensible dragon thought you were dead, and you being alive doesn't change that. But, uh.\" She glanced around. \"Does your being here mean it's gone?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I can't kill it by myself, but I do have a plan, and it requires the help of everyone who's willing to work with humans and go on a possible suicide mission.\"\n\nPelion perked up. \"I'll help! Tell me what to do. Wait, did you say humans? What's a human?\"\n\n\"A bogre. It's a bit of a long story, but I call them humans now.\"\n\nThe crowd of dragons gathered closer to him and listened intently as he explained the story of Kina, Humphry, and their plan to kill the phoenix. As he told the story, he had to keep raising his voice so that the increasing number of dragons could hear him. Armors came running or flying, nearly crashing into another, when they realized a story was being told. Forests, acting with a little more dignity, squeezed between and beneath the Armors to listen. Niamo had come near the start and stood beside Arnack with her head held high. When Valfredo explained the Forests would be the bait to bring the phoenix to the trap, her eyes widened and jaw clenched.\n\n\"You want my clanmates to what?\" Niamo asked.\n\nPelion wriggled and her eyes sparkled. \"We can do that, sure! We're the fastest between our clans, and we're small enough to find hiding places.\"\n\nNiamo gave her a glare, but kept her voice and surrounding air calm. \"We only just came out of danger from the Armors. I will not put our clan at risk again.\"\n\n\"But he needs us! He helped us, and now he's asking for our help. Can't we let everyone decide for ourselves if we want to go on the mission?\"\n\nNiamo stared Pelion in the eyes and shook her head almost unnoticeably, but instead of dropping the subject or arguing her point more, Pelion remained quiet and stared back at Niamo. Both of their expressions changed to a strange neutral that twitched to suggest they were having a silent argument. Everything grew quiet as the air around them tensed.\n\nThen, suddenly, powerful impressions hit the air. Valfredo gasped and looked around to see every single Forest staring at another. The Armors glanced at the Forests nearest them and shifted uncomfortably, but stayed put.\n\nThe air grew thick with tension, and the atmosphere became turbulent. There was anger, desperation, forced submission, fear\u2014he stopped counting. Every Forest seemed to be putting off a different impression and emotion, as if they all had to decide if Niamo or Pelion was right or the entire clan would fall apart.\n\nA passing bird crashed to the ground, then took to the air again, only to flip upside down and hit the ground once more. It stood up, looked around, took flight, and crashed into a tree when another wave of mixed impressions hit the air. The bird shook itself off and gave up on flying, choosing instead to hop away in the straightest path it could, which turned every time one impression rose above the others. A few Armors snickered at the poor bird's plight, but Valfredo only felt pity. The poor thing stood no chance at fighting off mixed dragon impressions.\n\nFinally, Niamo sighed. \"You're right, then. We must help our friends who helped us.\"\n\nPelion squeaked delight and turned to Valfredo. \"Count the Forest clan in!\"\n\nAlmost the moment she said it, the tension broke, and every Forest spoke excitedly about the plan as if they'd never argued. Even the Armors sighed in relief.\n\nA thought came to Valfredo, and he turned back to Arnack. \"You'll need to tell your clan not to impress the phoenix. Keeping it in one spot is our only chance of killing it, and it knows your clan's impression of fear. We don't want to scare it away.\"\n\nArnack smirked and nodded, then turned to Niamo, and she nodded as well.\n\n\"We'll make sure the clans know,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "Valfredo glanced behind him. Nearly everyone from both clans followed him, numbering almost two thousand. It had taken only a week to spread word about the plan to kill the phoenix and gather volunteers. Everyone, even the young, wanted to come help, though they made the young stay behind with a few adults who agreed to watch them. Wouldn't Kaven be surprised! He couldn't help laughing at the idea of telling that old grumpy dragon there were two clans for him, fire and all.\n\nDown below, their shadows smothered the landscape and eagerness suffocated the air, causing all the prey within miles to go wild as they passed. Even the humans who saw them let out screams and ran for cover.\n\n\"They're kind of strange looking, aren't they?\" Pelion asked while flying up beside him.\n\n\"What are?\"\n\n\"Humans. I'd never seen one before now. Are they really as smart as we are?\"\n\nValfredo chuckled, remembering what it was like before he'd met Kina. \"Definitely, and they can be quite fun to be around, too... when they aren't too busy trying to talk things over.\"\n\nAnother nest of humans spotted them and panicked.\n\n\"I wish they weren't so afraid of us,\" Pelion said, her voice a little sad. \"We're not bullies, we aren't going to eat them.\"\n\n\"They'll learn to stop fearing with time. You'll see.\"\n\nShe smiled, and they continued flying without saying another word."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "Kina's castle came into view.\n\n\"There it is!\" Valfredo shouted as loud as he could. \"Everyone, start impressing!\"\n\nHisses of excitement filled the air as both clans impressed overwhelming calm. The livestock below stared up at the sky, but didn't panic and run. When they were close enough, he gave the signal and everyone started to land. The three generals, Thomas, and Kina were outside watching, wide-eyed and jaws dropped.\n\nValfredo landed in front of Kina and rumbled glee, then walked to the writing sand and wrote, \"They accepted the mission.\"\n\nRelief flooded the air, and the generals let out a great whoop of excitement.\n\n\"Now we're getting somewhere!\" Pole said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "The next several months were extremely busy. Valfredo was the only one who could communicate between humans and dragons, which meant he was writing and explaining from before sunup to after sundown. Pelion watched and listened to him intensely, and soon she was able to start helping with the basics, which was a great relief.\n\nThe humans began work immediately on the new weapons and net. The weapons were made larger and stronger with only metal and dragon parts on them. Every scale, horn, and tooth shed by the dragons was immediately given to the weapon makers to use. The chains for the net were huge, about as thick as Arnack's claw, making the net very strong, but even a small length of it impossible for a human to lift.\n\nThe Forests helped the humans do many tasks where the Armor's great size was too clumsy, such as carrying chain lengths, finding lost livestock, and building small, flat-bottom boats. Their speed, he found, was tremendously helpful for carrying messages from one end of the kingdom to another. The humans seemed to be the most comfortable around them, and Valfredo often found a few humans sleeping against a Forest napping in the sunshine.\n\nOne curious and genius thing the humans did was add long, strong chains to the flat-bottom boats the Forests helped them make. Then they attached large bars to the chains and asked the Armors to carry the boats from one place to another. The Armors were happy to oblige, and soon building materials, men, and food were quickly and easily transported across the vast kingdom. The Armors also patrolled the kingdom's territory borders, making sure no potential enemy of Kina's could threaten her kingdom while they focused on the phoenix mission.\n\nThen one day the building and transporting stopped, the net was set up, the signal fires built, and the men, dragons, and supplies were in place. It was time to hunt the phoenix."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "Valfredo shook himself in an attempt to calm his nerves, but his scales continued to tingle and his fire leaped and flared with greater ferocity. The unlit signal fires mocked him, teasing that it wasn't time yet. Somewhere out there the fast little Forests were hiding in caves and dens or searching for the phoenix. Once found, the one who spotted the phoenix would get its attention and fly quickly to his designated hiding place while the next Forest, far enough away for a head start, would get the phoenix's attention and continue the relay. Every moment for the past three days felt like an eternity. How much longer was it going to\u2014\n\nThe western signal ignited. It was time! The phoenix was on its way here. Tension and excitement filled the air. Armors stood everywhere, ready to pounce.\n\n\"Remember the plan,\" Arnack said. \"Lay low and don't fight until you see an opening. You're the only one who can hurt it, so don't do anything foolish.\"\n\nValfredo nodded. Everyone was counting on his fire now; he wasn't about to let them down.\n\nThere it was, burning with angry hues of orange, red, and yellow behind the tiny dot of a Forest. Its massive wings flapped just shy of the mountains surrounding the valley, and the small gap between its wings and the mountains glowed as it passed by and burned every living thing that dared be close. The phoenix drew nearer, and its power pressed on Valfredo, making it look even bigger\u2014bigger than the last time he'd seen it. Even the valley widening, giving its wings plenty of room, didn't take from its oppressing power and size.\n\nFear shivered through his scales, then reached his nostrils. The other dragons and humans scattered throughout the area saw the phoenix as well, saw how massive and powerful it was, and were understanding what Valfredo was realizing now: This was an impossible battle they never should've started.\n\nFear rose from each human, Armor, and Forest to combine and feed on itself until it grew strong and suffocating. Breathing became difficult, and his heart thundered, making it impossible to hear anything else. Why had he agreed to this? Why had he dragged all of them into it? The phoenix was nearing the last Forest of the relay race. Death was coming.\n\nExcitement and challenge hit the air, making him sway from the sudden shift in atmosphere. He looked and saw Arnack grinning, staring at the phoenix with eager anticipation. His whole body quivered, his nostrils flared, and his eyes sparked with delight. He wasn't frightened at all, rather pouring out his confidence in winning. The excitement and challenge he impressed into the air chased away the fear, eliminating it almost instantly and entirely. It was powerful, exhilarating, and irresistible. The other Armors were quickly affected by it, and in like manner impressed the air with the same as their clanhead, each feeding on another's enthusiasm.\n\nNo wonder the Armor clan was such a confident one. They were led by a powerful warrior who loved suicidal fights. Even the humans were affected by it. There wasn't even a hint of fear left in the air. Valfredo grinned. The phoenix didn't stand a chance.\n\nThe phoenix screeched furiously as it dove down at the Forest it was chasing, but he had escaped inside a den and collapsed the opening to prevent the phoenix's fire from reaching him.\n\n\"You can't catch me, you overgrown ball of fire!\" the final Forest in the relay screeched.\n\nThe air grew hotter as the phoenix approached. Valfredo and the Armors stayed behind the camouflaged fabric the humans had set up. If the phoenix learned of their positions before it was time, the plan could be ruined.\n\nThe phoenix quickly gained on the little Forest, coming closer and closer to the net. The net's large, painted chains were nearly invisible even to his sharp eyes. Blue flags marked where the net connected to the mountain; red marked the central hole for the Forest to fly through. The Forest dropped back, letting the phoenix get close enough to think it could catch him. Its beak surrounded him, and he went through the net.\n\nThe sound of metal chains snapping rang off the mountains and echoed for a great effect. The phoenix screamed and fell to the ground, the net wrapping around it. Valfredo dove at it, fire ready. The phoenix glared at him and burst into a blinding white flame.\n\nValfredo's heart leaped to his throat, and he flapped once to dodge before his wings curled in. He hit the ground hard, unable to see anything but black spots swimming in whiteness.\n\nThe sound of battle continued, but he couldn't move. Pungent fear smothered the air, and he lay in a crumpled mass, shivering. The phoenix could cover itself in white fire as easily as it could orange fire. No wonder it had taken his clan. And now he'd brought all his friends to their deaths. The whiteness in his sight dwindled, letting in colors of green, brown, and gray. Then his eyes recovered entirely, allowing him to see clearly.\n\nThe phoenix chased a group of forests. It was no longer covered in white flame, but it caught up to them, and in one bite, took two lives. Then Arnack flew in front of it, distracting it from the rest. He spat a ball of fire in its face, which it shook off before chasing him. A volley of arrows got between them, some hitting the phoenix's head and giving Arnack a chance to dive from its sight.\n\nValfredo slowed his breathing and stood on shaky legs. Had he imagined the white fire? He looked around for the other dragons, and the few he could see\u2014both Armor and Forest\u2014were hiding, their eyes wide and bodies trembling. The scent of their fear was as strong as that night... the one that took his clan. It was impressing the air, though the humans seemed to overcome it.\n\nNo, he hadn't imagined it. The phoenix had burst into white fire, and he had barely dodged being killed by it. Arnack was in the air again, this time with a few more dragons. He flew a wide circle in the valley, and as he passed them, more dragons took up the fight. Then he passed over Valfredo. The impression of strength flowed into his bones, stopping their shivering and allowing his wings to uncurl. Courage heated his heart, sending away the last bit of fear that had hit him so strongly. The pungent fear that once filled the air dwindled to nothing. Hundreds of dragons gave a battle roar and took flight, but not before the phoenix found a cave of humans and ashed them.\n\nValfredo looked away, then glared back at the bird. It was just a bird, and he must kill it. Everyone trusted him, and he would not let them down. Taking a deep breath, he moved to hide beneath some tree branches and waited. There were enough warriors fighting again to harass the phoenix. It screeched in frustration and dove at a dragon, then got bombarded with fire and human weapons. It glanced away from its target, giving the dragon enough time to dodge death.\n\nThen Arnack dove at the phoenix, breathing a hot fire at its face. The phoenix glared at him and burst into white flame. Valfredo squinted from the light, but managed to keep watching. Arnack dodged, his side singed black. The phoenix spat a ball of fire at him, and again he dodged. Then the phoenix flickered, the white fire sizzled out, and it burst again into normal orange fire. The other dragons, now expecting the sudden burst of white fire, continued the battle.\n\nA volley of ballista were fired at its head\u2014and this time, one pierced its eye. The phoenix screamed and shook its head, but the ballista remained inside. Now was his chance. Valfredo flew at the phoenix from its blind side and aimed his fire at its belly, pouring everything he had into it. The phoenix screeched and flapped away from him. He stopped flaming and searched for it, then saw a ball of white fire coming at him. Someone slammed into him, knocking him out of the way and into the mountainside, where he watched small bits of his Armor savior fall to the ground.\n\n\"Now!\" Arnack screeched, gesturing to the humans. \"Attack it now!\"\n\nMetal ballista and giant arrows fired from below, striking the phoenix where Valfredo had burned its protective feathers. They hit its blackened body and fell back out, dealing no real damage.\n\nThe phoenix screamed rage and spat balls of fire everywhere. Humans and dragons raced for cover. Rage burned Valfredo's chest, and he grabbed a falling ballista.\n\n\"You WILL die today!\" he roared to the phoenix, then spat a continuous flame while shoving the ballista through its stomach and into its chest. Heat surrounded as he fell away, burning his wings and body, though not enough to prevent flight.\n\nThe phoenix's feathers wavered. It grabbed at the ballista, but it was too far buried. The fire surrounding its feathers dissipated, and the phoenix screamed in pain. Then with a final gasp, it burst into a ball of fire and burned itself to ashes that fell to the ground.\n\nValfredo stood on a mountain ledge staring at the ashes. Had they really done it? Had they really killed the fallen sun?\n\nRoars of victory echoed off the mountains. The ground shook with joy, and the air laughed with it. The world filled with joyous relief, and the sounds of happiness escaped everyone from human to dragon. Valfredo laughed with them. They had won!\n\nThen, far away in the sky, two shapes caught his attention. One was a dark shape, and one was blue. They were too far away to see clearly, but they looked like dragons. Could they be the two who came from his homeland? What perfect timing they had, coming at the defeat of the terrible phoenix! Now all he had to do was\u2014\n\nA screech of terror rang out. The world shuddered. Valfredo looked down and saw a Forest looking horrified at a small fire sparking in the phoenix ashes. The flame flickered and began to grow.\n\nIt couldn't be! Surely even a sun couldn't come back from death! He spat fire at the ashes, but that only made the fire grow. It swirled, intensified, and began to take the shape of the phoenix. The ashes themselves moved together and formed a pile under the fire.\n\nHumphry called for water, and humans and dragons desperately began throwing buckets onto it. The water hissed and turned to steam, but the fire still grew.\n\nFear struck Valfredo's heart. Elina's happy face came to mind. She was laughing and telling Mother about another adolescent male who'd given her an ogre liver. Father was laying beside them, sharing a prideful look with Mother.\n\nA deep growl formed in Valfredo's chest. That was supposed to be the life they'd lived. They were supposed to be a happy family with a clan and a beautiful home. The phoenix had ruined it. The phoenix had no respect for life, and now it dared to bring back its own.\n\n\"I will not let you come back!\" Valfredo roared. He leaped at the ashes and swallowed them. The fire over them burned his face; the ashes burned his stomach. His white fire attacked the new ashes and their fire. The ashes tried to get out. They burned his stomach, his chest, his throat, but he clamped his mouth shut and forced his stomach not to heave. Tears streamed down his face for the pain. His body burned from the inside and tasted of blood.\n\n\"I will not let you win,\" he growled, then stoked his fire. The heat and pain intensified. His fire fought the ashes with a new-found ferocity until he couldn't hold it in any more and screamed. White flame shot out and took the shape of a small phoenix. It flickered, intensified, and finally dissipated. His fire shrank back and calmed.\n\nValfredo collapsed and fell into darkness.\n\nThe world was a mass of burning pain. Every inhale brought more pain, and with every exhale, life escaped. Then the taste of bitter mudfern came, bringing with it the energy of life. But yet... he didn't want it. He didn't mind dying now. He had killed the phoenix. Finally, the world was free of its terror. More of the bitter plant came to him, and he spat it out. He was sick of mudfern. Always, he was getting injured, and always he had to eat mudfern. No more. It was time to rest\u2014forever."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "Mudfern kept coming. Sometimes he was awake enough to spit it out, and sometimes its bitterness only entered his dreams. When consciousness almost took him, he could hear his friends worry about him. They said they wouldn't let him give up on life, then shove more disgusting mudfern into him. But in those moments, he was able to refuse it from his belly and clamp his mouth shut so they couldn't try again.\n\nArnack, Verth, and Niamo tried ordering him to accept it. Pelion tried to trick and plead him into it, and Kina tried singing. But the more they tried, the more he knew he wanted to leave them. His dreams were entirely of his clan, the River clan. They were beautiful and full of life and color. His home wasn't burned, but green from the trees, bushes, and grass. The blue river sparkled through the nesting ground, giving the young a place to play and practice their swimming. Everywhere he looked, friend and family were talking and laughing, and when he turned around, there were Father and Mother smiling. Elina wasn't there, but that made him happier; she could live free in the living world and have a family like she'd always wanted. Valfredo had done his part there and was ready to be back with their parents.\n\n\"Oh, Valfredo, you stupid, brave, stupid little brother.\" Elina's voice came from nowhere. Father didn't notice it; he was busy stopping a fight between two young. Mother hadn't heard it; she was busy chatting with friends. But the voice was clearer than their voices, and the words strong. A burning drop of water fell to his cheek.\n\n\"Don't give up on me now.\" Her voice sounded choked. \"I'm so sorry I let you leave. I'm sorry I didn't stand up for you when Dellano told you to leave. I was young and afraid, and I\u2014\" She sobbed. \"Please forgive me and come back.\"\n\nI'm trying! he wanted to scream. The dream shivered as he searched for her, looking behind a tree here and over a fledgling there. But she wasn't anywhere in the nesting ground. How could her voice be so clear when she wasn't here?\n\n\"Here, try this. He knows better than to spit it out.\" Kaven's voice. He was here too? How many dragons had died over the last few years?\n\nBitter mudfern touched his tongue again, and he nearly rejected it, but there was something else. Something familiar. Ogre blood with a hint of Jublar. Valfredo retched, but swallowed. Every scale wanted to empty the concoction from his stomach, but instinct warned him not to anger Kaven. Valfredo whimpered. Even now, with Father and the River clan, Kaven held power over him. It wasn't fair!\n\n\"He swallowed it!\" Pelion squealed. Was she also dead? No, wait, her voice came from outside. It came from the living.\n\nThe nesting ground began to fade as more concoction was forced into him.\n\n\"No!\" he yelled\u2014hopefully to the living\u2014as Father and Mother stood together and smiled, fading into nothing.\n\nDon't go! he wanted to shout to them, but his dream-self had no more voice. The nesting ground faded. The clan faded. And finally, his parents, still smiling proudly, faded.\n\nValfredo opened his eyes and screamed, \"No, don't leave me again! No!\"\n\nFor a moment, he saw Father and Mother standing in front of him with his living eyes. Then they vanished to stay with the dead. Pain grabbed his heart and he sobbed to the ones who had forced him back to life.\n\n\"Why did you do it?\" he asked. \"I was with them. I wanted to stay with them. Haven't I done enough here?\"\n\nWarmth impressed the air, and someone nuzzled his cheek with her snout. She smelled like water and flowers. Like home. Like love. It was such a gentle love, he couldn't help turning to her and accepting her licking on his face.\n\n\"There now,\" she said. \"You'll be all right.\"\n\nSlowly, the voice sunk in. It was Elina's voice. More grown-up, more like Mother's, but still Elina. It sent a shiver into him, a hope that it was really her, and a fear that it wasn't.\n\nShe chuckled, still like Elina. \"It's okay, Little Brother. You can look. I won't bite.\"\n\nLittle brother. Only Elina called him that\u2014only she could. Valfredo lifted his chin and looked. There was Elina, blue and beautiful and smiling with her sparkling black eyes.\n\n\"Elina?\" he asked. \"Is it... really you?\"\n\nWith another lick and a nuzzle, she answered yes. Then a great, forest-green dragon came into view. He was old and wise and powerful, and he had black flecks of scales scattered throughout his body. Everything about him was strong, but his scales were dull with no shine. He was in his last year.\n\n\"Kaven?\"\n\nThe old dragon laughed. It was a strange, happy laugh, and it was followed by the dragon coming closer and rumbling, \"Yes, you stubborn fool, it's me.\"\n\n\"But, I don't understand.\" Valfredo looked from Elina to Kaven, then to Arnack, who sat nearby watching with great interest.\n\n\"Eat for now, then rest,\" Elina said, offering him a mix of mudfern and ogre. \"We'll explain everything when you wake up.\"\n\nHe obeyed, and soon sleep took him again. This time, he was happy for when he woke. He'd be with his sister."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "\"After six months of searching,\" Elina said, \"I decided you must be dead, so I went back to the clan who'd adopted us. We lived happily there, though I never quite felt like I fit. Four years ago, when Kaven showed up telling us about the dangerous bogres and asking the clan to help him fight them back, I joined him. He'd gathered quite a few others, and together we fought the bogre\u2014\"\n\nArnack growled.\n\n\"Er, I mean, human, warriors. We killed every one of the dragon slayers and destroyed their weapons and armor. Then we hunted down the other groups of dragon slayers and killed them. I didn't like killing so many prey without eating them, but it was something that had to be done to protect our innocent. Everywhere we found them, we found evidence of nests, young, and their parents being slaughtered.\n\n\"When the problem was dealt with, Kaven and I got to know each other, and when he heard my name and story about our clan, he admitted that he knew my brother. I coaxed everything out of him about your life and where he'd sent you. Then we decided to look for you together.\"\n\nHappiness sparkled in her eyes. \"Oh, Valfredo, I was so happy you'd survived!\" Then she laughed. \"You can imagine our surprise when we saw a group of crazy dragons and bogres fighting\u2014\"\n\nArnack growled again, and Elina huffed and glanced a glare at him.\n\n\"Crazy dragons and humans fighting the phoenix\u2014and our shock when you, of all dragons, killed it.\"\n\nKaven snorted. \"If it wasn't for your guardian here,\" he nodded toward Arnack, who smirked and raised his head with pride, \"and Elina's insistence I don't fight him, we would've come to you sooner.\"\n\nHis eyes had a strange light in them as he spoke, and an emotion, not musk, emanated from him. The emotion had a warmth to it, a feeling of belonging and... love. It was love. Valfredo's heart pounded. Kaven would never purposefully let his emotions out; was he dreaming again?\n\nNo, this couldn't be a dream. Everything was too real. The scents, the sounds, and the sights\u2014it was all truly here. That meant Kaven must be here as well, showering him with love as his parents had. Tears stung Valfredo's eyes. All this time, Kaven must've loved him, and all this time, he'd been too afraid or stubborn to show it. Now, finally, Kaven was telling him without words.\n\n\"We really were a clan, weren't we?\" Valfredo asked.\n\nKaven's mouth twitched, then slowly turned into a smile. \"Yes, son, we were.\"\n\nElina moved to lay down next to Valfredo. \"And now we're a family again.\"\n\nA warm happiness filled him, from bone and scale. Kaven loved him. Elina loved him. They'd loved him all this time. All these years, he'd had a home. Nuzzling Elina, he rumbled, \"I missed you.\"\n\nShe gave the gentle, sparkling grin only Elina could have. \"I missed you, too, little brother.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "Valfredo laughed at the play's end. It was the third one he'd seen, and what a marvelous idea the humans had to make it an all-dragon story! The dragon actors had enjoyed themselves tremendously, and the human audience was thrilled to have such a new idea to watch. Everyone started talking enthusiastically about it, and he couldn't help overhearing the playwrights and Elina starting to plan another story with both humans and dragons acting in it.\n\nIt felt like both years and mere minutes had passed since the phoenix's death, and life couldn't be happier. Humans and dragons lived together as close friends, providing the dragons with new ways to enjoy life every day. There always seemed to be a new story to have a scribe read to them, or for them to tell the scribe. Plays, which Valfredo had discovered were a marvelous way to tell a story, were in great abundance, giving the dragons a chance to both act in the humans' plays and invent their own to act out for each other. And the music! Oh, the music! If only dragon-speech allowed them to sing like the humans! If only their mouths could play the flutes, and talons pluck the chords of an instrument! But this was something they could only get from humans, and one human singing or playing would quickly be surrounded by dozens of dragon admirers.\n\nEven the humans' way of preserving beauty was wonderful. Paintings, sculptures, and tapestries were perhaps his second favorite part of living among them. Nothing could be better than music.\n\nValfredo walked away from the crowd and stared up at the full moon with a contented sigh. It glowed brighter than ever, powerful and happy among the crowded stars. \"Now we both have a clan,\" he said to it. \"And neither has to live in fear.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragons 1) Bound in Scales",
        "author": "Steven De Luca",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "transformation",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "[ Prologue ]\n\nExcerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Black Dragon: draconis noire and daconis grandus noire.\n\nI have encountered two types of black dragon. The smaller of the species, draconis noire grows to approximately 20 feet in length from snout to tip of tail, and 8 feet in height, talon to head. The larger grandus noire is much bigger by comparison, easily twice that size.\n\nBoth varieties of black resemble the mountain species of dragon (see draconis montemous) most closely, but is sleeker and has a more graceful shape. They have long elegant necks, thickening to the trunk of the body, are four legged with equally long tapering tails, balancing the body shape in a perfect symmetry. Their wingspan, when fully extended, is generally twice the length of the body mass, less neck and tail.\n\nIt should be noted that black dragons are rare as fully developed adults and I have only come across two confirmed subjects during all my research and travels.\n\nAs an embryo, the unhatched foetus of most dragon eggs tends to be black, only developing colour after leaving the shell. Within the first few weeks of hatching, the scales lose the black of new birth and quickly change to their adult colour.\n\nIn the rare event of a dragon not developing any colour and remaining black, I suspect a pigment deficiency during developmental growth of the embryo. This results in a genetic trait that prohibits the scales to naturally change colour.\n\nThe black scales, while no less resilient than any other colour, are less metallic in appearance and do not reflect light as brightly as their coloured counterparts. On closer inspection, it appears that some light may be absorbed, rather than reflected.\n\nOne thing blacks can accomplish better than their coloured counterparts is the ability to fly at altitude, sustaining flight through both the troposphere and into the stratosphere. What they lack in scale pigment, nature has balanced with the ability to reach impressive heights far beyond that of any of the coloured species.\n\nBlack dragons are excellent fliers in general and possess high stamina, allowing them to spend long hours airborne.\n\nOne of the known black dragons is Nightstar, a male draconis grandus noire, spanning an impressive forty five feet in length. He has short thick horns atop a heavily armoured head ridge. He is pure black except for the silver patch emblazoned on his chest in the shape of a star, that his name derives from. His place of origin is unknown, and he is one of the more unusual examples of the dragon race. While there are little recorded facts about Nightstar, he has been known to display strong magical abilities."
            },
            {
                "title": "Transformation",
                "text": "Alduce dragged himself up the steep mountain path towards his destination. Wind tugged at the thick black cloak wrapping his medium frame, rustling a large sack slung across his shoulder. He approached the mouth of the cave and squeezed behind the thick bushes that disguised the entrance, the wind abating as he entered the rocky shelter.\n\nPulling back his hood he reached into his cloak and withdrew a small glass orb that flared, illuminating the inside of the cave. In the far corner, built into a recess not visible from the entrance, stood a metal door, no handles, locks or keyholes marring the solid impenetrable surface. Alduce placed a hand upon the door and a panel of light flared to life beneath his palm, scanning up then down. An internal locking mechanism clicked and the door slid back into the rock, magic to some and science to others. Stepping through the darkened recess, Alduce held up his light orb until he located a switch and flicked it on. He palmed the orb, its light dimming as he slipped it back inside his cloak. A generator whirred and bright panels in the cave's ceiling came to life, chasing away the darkness. It had been a big job sourcing and installing the power cells, but it was worth the effort.\n\nA laboratory filled the cave, full of strange apparatus and machinery, some of it technology, some alchemy. This was the workshop of both a scientist and a sorcerer. Alduce dropped the sack and shrugged off his cloak, draping it over a high backed leather bound chair situated in what appeared to be a living area.\n\nHe was of average height with black hair and a tanned face and looked to be in his early thirties, but in fact he was much older. He didn't have the kind of face that would stand out in a crowd and he liked it that way.\n\nHe rummaged in his sack and brought out eight thin metal rods, silver in colour and approximately the length of a man's index finger. There was a clear area at the rear of the cave where the roof sloped to meet the floor. Alduce carried the rods to that cave wall, where eight holes had been drilled into the rock to accommodate them. They were arranged like the points of a compass and he started at the point where north would be, inserting the first rod, then to the next, the north east position, moving round until each hole had one of the precious rods inserted. They fitted snugly, almost flush with the surface of the stone, only a small part left protruding. Once all the rods had been distributed, he dragged the high backed chair over to the cave wall, his cloak swinging as the legs scraped across the floor, placing it in front of the compass-like formation he'd constructed.\n\nHe reached into his robes and removed two further polished metal rods that he fitted together with a click, tugging on each end to test they were locked in place securely. One end was plain and the other was fashioned with a slot. He added a black handle to the end that wasn't slotted. The newly assembled device resembled a dangerous looking weapon roughly the length of his forearm. Sitting himself in the chair facing the cave wall, he removed a small dragon shaped pendant from around his neck. He slid the dragon off the chain and slotted it into the end of the wand, securing it in the tight groove that had been fashioned to hold it steady. He pocketed the chain and held the wand before him, arm outstretched, examining the device.\n\nHe had named it the Flairestaff and it was one of his more successful inventions. Thumbing the switch on the base of the handle started a slow stream of blue sparks flickering and jumping along the silvery metal shaft, turning and twisting along its length, drawn to the small dragon fixed at the end. The electrical sparks continued to flow, the pendant absorbing their charge until it glowed like white metal in a blacksmith's forge.\n\nThe electricity activated the raw power of the lightning stored within the dragon, a Flaire made artefact, imbued with the natural force of lightning and the magic of alchemy. The metal used to fashion the little dragon was extremely rare, highly valuable, and difficult to source.\n\nAlduce stretched out his arm, pointing the charged dragon artefact at the topmost rod in the circle, before pushing the switch in the Flairestaff's handle all the way down. A streak of blue-white lightning leapt from the artefact straight to the rod, crackling as it touched the metal sunken into the rock. Alduce started to turn his arm in a wide circle and the lightning jumped seamlessly from the top rod to the next in line, joining both with a thin streak of charge that sizzled and sparked. He moved smoothly on round the circle, leading the lightning to the next rod until he completed the circle, then thumbed the switch off.\n\nThe rock inside the circle shimmered as if viewed through rippling water, slowly changing until another cavern could be seen through the rock, blurry and out of focus, like a heat haze on a hot day. The effect faded and the view cleared, leaving behind a gateway to another place. Alduce had opened a portal, he didn't know exactly to where, but it wasn't his own world. The view through the opening on the cave wall was like looking through a window, into a cavern much like his own, except this one was empty and dark. Alduce took a deep breath, pocketed the wand and grabbed his cloak and sack. He slipped out his light orb, reactivated it and stepped through the portal into the cave beyond. Holding the orb high to light his way, he followed his own footprints in the sandy floor, left by his previous journeys to this unnamed world.\n\nThe portal behind him remained open, powered by the Flaire rods. They held enough natural charge to power the portal for decades but Alduce planned to only spend a few hours on this side of the gateway.\n\nHe emerged from the dark cave and looked out across the landscape of the new world he stood upon. Snow covered mountains walled the horizon far to the North and undulating grasslands, scattered between rocky hills, led away from the cave mouth. A few stands of sparse trees grew where they could on the slopes, fighting for nourishment in the stony soil. Alduce strode from the cavern with purpose; he knew where he was going. He'd made multiple trips here previously with a singular purpose in mind. As he walked, he glanced up, observing the skies above him. It would be fatal if he was spotted before he reached his destination.\n\nHe was confident that he had arrived at exactly the right time, but there was no harm in being cautious. He walked for half an hour or so, cresting the hill he climbed, crouching down as he neared the skyline. Two large boulders covered with a rock coloured canvas were his destination and he sneaked forward to the shelter he had made, keeping low. Wriggling between the rocks, he looked out from the gap facing the valley below, to observe his quarry.\n\nThere in the hollow between the hills sat a female dragon easily 30 feet in length. She was dark green in colour and her scales shone in the daylight, metallic and bright. Alduce settled down to wait pulling a long brass tube bound with bands of dark worn leather from his sack. He had uncovered plans for this device in an old book and while it wasn't his own invention, he was still proud of what he had fashioned. With the addition of specially ground glass lenses, fitted correctly, he assembled a viewing device that made things in the distance appear closer than they actually were. He named it Long Eye and it was an excellent way for observing dragons from the safety of his hide.\n\nHe extended the telescopic tube, tripling its length and peered through the eyepiece. He spied on the unsuspecting dragon taking care not to make any sudden movements or unnecessary sound. He was far enough away to feel safe\u2014or at least, as safe as he could hope to be when one observed a dragon. Being so close to the fabled creature, he knew only too well that if she discovered him, his fate would be sealed.\n\nWhen it came to humans, dragons were dangerous and unpredictable at best. When it came to a mother dragon sitting on a nest of eggs, Alduce was sure that danger would increase tenfold. He scanned around the nest. It wasn't a traditional nest, like a bird, but more a hollow in the rocky ground. He was rewarded when he spotted what he was looking for: cracked shells. Where there were cracked shells, there had to be hatchlings, probably hidden by their mother's bulk. Alduce watched and waited. Finally, the dragon rose and stretched her massive wings, then leapt into the air. In the depression she had vacated, there were three small shapes, craning their necks and beating the air with stumpy wings, not yet fully formed, squawking like hungry chicks.\n\nNewly hatched dragons.\n\nAlduce focused on the majestic green mother as she climbed into the sky and disappeared from sight. His patience had at long last been rewarded. Opportunity presented itself and it was time to seize it. Quickly, before he could change his mind, he scrambled out from his hiding place and half ran, half tumbled down the slope towards the nest. His large sack flapped behind him as he bounced and hopped over the loose gravel and scree, slipping and sliding until he reached the bottom. He scanned the sky in the direction the mother dragon had taken, then all around, alert eyes seeing nothing. Leaning over into the hollow, he peered into the nest. The smell of decaying flesh and faeces assaulted his nostrils, causing him to gag.\n\nThe nest was occupied with the female dragon's three offspring, a red and two greens\u2014one a bright emerald and the other a darker forest hue. Bones and skulls cluttered the nest, the unfortunate remains of animals the hungry dragonets had dined upon.\n\nAnd there, right at the back, the reason for his journey here. The object he desired. The unhatched egg.\n\nIt sat to the rear of the three young hatchlings, pushed aside and abandoned by its mother when it failed to hatch. Nature may have denied the unborn dragon inside a life, but Alduce hoped to provide it with a second chance. He jumped over the small heads of the three snapping dragons and carefully picked his way across the bones rolling and cracking beneath his feet. He grasped the unhatched egg with both hands\u2014it was much heavier than he expected\u2014and thrust it into his sack. Crawling quickly from the nest he took one last look at the magnificent creatures and sped off up the slope towards his shelter. By the time he reached the two rocks, sweat was running down his face. The uphill run and the weight of the egg, combined with the urgency to get back safely before the mother returned, had exhausted him. He squirmed back into his familiar sanctuary, breathing raggedly after his exertion and rested his head on his arms, closing his eyes. Relief swept over him and his breathing gradually returned to normal; he had done it, he had rescued the egg.\n\nHe had been observing the female dragon for months, watching the nest and waiting for the eggs to hatch. Four eggs had been laid and the one he now had in his sack was the smallest. Alduce wasn't sure what the normal size of a dragon egg should be, it probably depended on how big the dragon laying it was. His egg, as this is how he now saw it, just managed to fit inside his sack, even though it was the smallest of the clutch. When sat on its blunt end, the tapered end of the egg reached halfway between his knee and his waist, when he stood upright. It had failed to crack open with its siblings and been forgotten by its mother, but not by Alduce.\n\nThe sound of the mother dragon's wings passing overhead\u2014along with the renewed cacophony of squawking hatchlings\u2014alerted him to her return. He peered out from the gap as the dragon dropped a tawny coloured deer from her blood smeared jaws into the nest. Three ravenous miniature dragons descended on their meal and squabbled over their share, tearing chunks of flesh from the dead animal. The mother dragon watched her young as they fed, neither aware of the missing egg or the presence of its plunderer.\n\nAfter the young dragons had consumed their meal their mother settled back down into the hollow. Alduce crept from his shelter with his prize, crouching as he descended the other side of the hill. Maintaining a brisk pace he traversed the rocky ground with a practiced ease. He'd made this journey many times while waiting for the dragons to hatch. Soon he came in sight of the cave he had emerged from, his escape almost complete, ready to return to his own world.\n\nA dark shadow passed overhead, the sound of wings disturbing the air above him. Instinctively he crouched, covering his head with his arms and squeezing his eyes shut, not that this would help protect him from an angry mother dragon. If she had discovered her egg was missing and picked up his scent, she would be angry her nest had been violated. Although the egg hadn't hatched, the maternal dragon would still exact vengeance on the perpetrator. Alduce had been over confident and believed his escape had gone unnoticed. Thinking himself smarter than the dragon would be his undoing. The fear of being seared with flame or being torn apart by huge talons terrified him. He had been so close to procuring this vital element for his research.\n\nWhen his expected demise never came, Alduce cautiously opened his eyes and peered out from between his arms. What he saw wasn't what he expected, there was no vengeful dragon come to flame him in anger. Sitting calmly before him was a large black crow. It wasn't just large, it was massive! At least seven feet tall.\n\nAlduce had never seen anything like it before and stared, mesmerised as its black intelligent eyes watched him from a cocked head. It was as if the crow was studying him. The irony of the situation wasn't lost on Alduce: it was usually himself that was the scholar, not a huge bird. The mannerisms it displayed as it scrutinised its subject made it look almost human. But it wasn't. It was a fully formed giant crow, shiny black feathers, pale yellow legs and a dangerous looking beak.\n\nHis relief from his unexpected visitor not being the mother dragon faded. The scholar in him wanted to learn more about the unknown giant bird standing before him, but the practical survivalist in him took over. An encounter with this bird could be just as fatal as one with the dragon. While it may not be as large or as powerful, it was still more than a match for any human being, should it choose to attack. The crow hadn't made any aggressive moves toward him so far and Alduce hoped that was a good sign. He would need to get past the bird to return to the cave, as at present the colossal crow blocked his way entirely. Moving with exaggerated care and keeping his movements slow and steady, he attempted to circle round the crow. Once he was back inside the cave, it was just a short hop to the waiting portal and safety.\n\nThe big crow, unfortunately, wasn't having any of it. As Alduce tried to edge his way round the bird, it hopped back in front of him, halting any progress towards the cave. It was as if it understood what he planned to do and was deliberately trying to prevent it.\n\n\"Hey now, bird,\" Alduce soothed, \"I just need past.\" The big crow titled its head, as if listening to his words.\n\nHe tried again to circle round the black feathered obstacle, to no avail. The crow hopped once more between him and the cave mouth, cocking its head at a peculiar angle, almost playful, enjoying a new found game.\n\nAn idea came to Alduce. This giant crow may be clever, but he was Alduce, sorcerer and scientist. He studied and understood alchemy, science, and sorcery. He would not be outsmarted by a bird no matter how big it was! He reached inside his cloak and withdrew the light orb, holding it above his head and moving his arm from side to side, to attract its attention. The giant crow followed his movement, its head swaying in time to his arm, almost hypnotic. It liked the shiny bauble, just as Alduce hoped it would. He thumbed the orb's surface, slowly illuminating it and bringing the light from dim to bright. The big crow cawed in surprise, never taking its eyes from the now brightly lit orb.\n\n\"Oh, you like that, yes,\" Alduce crooned.\n\nThe giant crow squawked, almost in answer to his words, hopping now from one foot to the other, like an excited dog waiting for his master to throw a stick. If he tossed the orb away from the cave, he was sure the crow would be attracted to the shiny bauble. He would be able to make a dash for the cave once the bird was distracted. It would mean the loss of the orb however, which would be disappointing. They weren't difficult to make, but he'd owned this one since he'd graduated to master and it held some sentimental value for him. Regardless, it was a small price to pay to escape with his life and the dragon egg.\n\nTensed to make a dash for the entranceway, Alduce tossed the orb onto a patch of dense withered grass, reluctant to smash it on the hard rocky ground. After all, once it was broken, no light would be emitted and his plan would cease to work. The big crow watched the orb as it arced through the air and landed safely on target in the grass, glowing brightly. The crow looked at Alduce, then back towards the orb, head moving back and forth, watching the man, but tempted by gleaming glass. The moment stretched and for a second or two, Alduce didn't think it would take the bait. Then it sprang into the air, flapping its powerful wings and dived for the glowing orb.\n\nAlduce didn't stay to watch, although he was intrigued at the bird's actions and would have liked to study it more. Self-preservation won out over scientific interest and he turned and sprinted towards the cave mouth. He reached the entrance and ducked into the dark interior, panting as he skidded to a stop on the sandy floor. Only then did he look back, he could still see the crow from where he stood. It picked the orb up in its beak and turned its head from side to side, eyeing the glowing glass as it strutted back towards the cave entrance. Thankfully it was too big to fit through the slim cave mouth. Safe now, he observed the huge bird as it played with its new toy.\n\nThe crow arrived in front of the cave entrance, blocking out the natural daylight as it poked its head into the gap. It was smart enough to realise that it wouldn't fit inside and didn't attempt to squeeze its body any farther than its outstretched neck would allow. The darkness of the cave was illuminated with the brightly glowing orb, held fast in the giant bird's beak, lighting up its head and reflecting in its deep black eyes.\n\nWith a quick flick of its head, the crow opened its beak and tossed the orb directly at him. His reaction instinctive, Alduce snatched the orb from the air before it hit the ground and stood open mouthed. The crow had fetched the orb and returned it to him, when he thought it lost.\n\nNot what he expected.\n\n\"Thank you very much,\" he said and on an impulse, bowed to the wonderful creature in gratitude. The crow nodded its head as if it understood, then withdrew from the cave mouth, turned and launched itself into the air. Alduce pocketed the orb and walked back outside as the huge crow climbed higher and higher into the sky. It cawed as it flew off, the sound of its harsh voice forming a word.\n\n<Human>\n\nAlduce shook his head, convinced the stress of the acquiring the egg and confronting the giant crow were making him hear things. The huge bird climbed higher, its powerful wings carrying it into the distance, until it became a tiny dark speck. He would like to know more about these wondrous giant birds, but not today. A future project perhaps.\n\nHe hefted the sack, adjusting the strap on his shoulder. Patting the heavy egg at his side affectionately as he walked back through the cave to the waiting portal. Stepping through the shimmering curtain with his newly acquired prize, he returned to his own world."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The laboratory was crammed with all manner of weird and wonderful equipment. Cabinets and machines filled the floor, benches and shelves, stacked with jars and bottles, fought for space along the cluttered cave walls. Narrow pathways wound between the machines and devices to a clear well-lit workspace space where Alduce laboured.\n\nRemoving the drill from the top of the dragon egg, Alduce grunted from the effort as he turned it upside down. Rotating the egg on the stand, he positioned a glass bowl beneath the hole he'd made. Clear viscous liquid drained from the hole in the tough shell, dripping into the bowl. When the fluid from inside the egg had slowed to a stop, Alduce rotated the egg once more, the hole now back at the top. He transported the fluid from the egg to another apparatus, pouring its contents into the hollowed out centre of a turntable receptacle. Sealing the container with its lid, he stepped back and gripped a handle fixed to a side wheel attached to the apparatus. Cranking the wheel, he built up speed, spinning the turntable holding the precious amniotic fluid that had surrounded the dragon foetus. The faster he turned the side wheel, the faster the liquid spun and centrifugal force caused the fluid to separate, the less viscous part rising to the top.\n\nHe released the handle leaving the turntable to spin unaided and reached for a large syringe, set out on a tray on one of the many work benches surrounding the walls of his subterranean laboratory. The turntable slowed to a stop and Alduce quickly opened the lid, syphoning off the top part of the separated fluid. Once he harvested the precious liquid, he stored his syringe in his cold shelf cupboard, an invention he had made to keep things from spoiling. The cupboard was cold, but not quite freezing, which would help preserve the fluid inside the syringe until he was ready to use it.\n\nThe thick remains left in the receptacle of his spinning device would not be wasted either. This was also something he needed. Scooping out the gluey residue, he deposited it into a glass jar. He screwed on its lid and placed the jar into his cold shelf cupboard, alongside the syringe.\n\nReturning to the now drained egg, he scooped it up and transferred it to a large vice, tightening the custom made jaws securely. He chose a large bone saw from a vast selection of tools hanging on his wall, and proceeded to score the egg with the saw's blade. When he had made a groove in the shell's tough surface, he went to work in earnest, working the saw backwards and forwards, lightly at first, until there was enough depth in the score for him to apply pressure to his cutting. He worked his way around the surface of the shell, deepening the cut, careful to not break through to the inside of the egg.\n\nBy the time he had made a deep cut along the egg's surface, sweat was running from his forehead and his arms ached. He opened the vice, rotating the egg, exposing the underside. He rubbed his face on his sleeve, and with tired muscles, began the procedure on the unmarked side of the shell. He worked until he created the same groove along this side. When he was satisfied with the second groove he rotated the egg, firstly the top and then bottom, joining the cuts with the saw until a perfect channel ran completely around the circumference of the shell.\n\nAlduce blew on the saw blade, cleaning the dusty residue from the metal, then wiped it with a cloth. He worked all the excess dust from between the teeth. He didn't know if the dust from the shell would corrode the steel, but it was good practice to clean your tools when you had finished using them.\n\nThe resilient shell of the dragon egg had taken the edge from the blade and it would need sharpened, but that was a job for another time. For now, he hung it back in its place, swapping it for a hammer and a cold chisel, remembering a life before he had been a man of science and a practitioner of magic. In his past he had spent some time as an apprentice to a smith, working in a forge, learning how to use tools and craft things from metal. His time there had served him well, it was one of many skills he had mastered, one of many in his unusually long life.\n\nSetting the chisel into the groove, he focused intently as he positioned its handle perpendicular to the shell. He tapped the flat end with the face of the hammer, taking care and gently striking the metal, driving the wedge of the chisel blade down into the shell. He worked methodically from one end of the cut to the other, his progress painstakingly slow. Fearful that one misplaced stroke would damage the unhatched occupant.\n\nHe was finally in a position to advance his study of dragons and learn the secrets held within the shell. One careless mistake now could set his lifetime ambition back decades.\n\nHe turned the egg over once more, gripping the shell tightly, terrified he might drop his cumbersome burden, carefully repeating the process along the other side. As he reached the middle of the cut, his patience was rewarded with a loud crack, the shell remained intact, but was weakened sufficiently along the groove. Grinning like a small boy, he bit his lip in concentration as he removed the egg from the oversized vice and clasped it to his chest protectively, like a mother with a new born babe. He carried it across to a shiny metal workbench, clean and free from any of the usual clutter that filled the laboratory.\n\nHe placed it, wide side down, on the bench and retrieved his hammer. Holding the egg steady with his free hand, he took a large breath and raising his arm, brought the hammer down with precision, striking the top of the shell with a confidence he didn't feel. The hammer's head landed squarely across the hole he'd drilled to drain the fluid.\n\nA sharp resounding crack echoed around the cavern and the egg split neatly into two perfect halves, exposing the unborn dragon it had homed.\n\nAlduce removed the shell halves and stowed them away; these alone would fetch a king's ransom at any reputable apothecary shop. Anxious to examine the foetus the shell had protected, he spread the form of unborn dragonet out across the metal workbench, its miniature black scales glistening, still damp from the amniotic fluid.\n\nMyth and legend stated that all unborn dragons were black until they hatched and gained their true colour. Now Alduce knew it for certain. However, now he knew this to be true, it made him contemplate how this was known. Whoever recorded this information, must have opened more than one dragon egg or witnessed multiple hatchings. Something he would ponder at a later date, along with a great many other mysteries that his particular line of work often posed.\n\nHe unfurled the small wings, spreading them out on either side of the body and wondered why this unfortunate little creature had failed to hatch with the rest of its siblings. He carefully examined the front and rear legs, then the head, checking to see each was as it should be, satisfied that the unborn dragon was perfectly formed.\n\nAlduce crossed his laboratory and opened the doors of a large glass cabinet, sat atop a metal box with many dials and switches across the outer panel. He placed the dragon foetus inside and closed the doors, flicking a switch on the panel, the dials springing to life, the gauges lighting up and indicator needles bounced erratically as the apparatus began to hiss. The glass chamber emitted a faint green glow, lighting up the small form of the dragon as a mist began to fill the inside of the machine.\n\nHe had accomplished much this day and was physically and mentally drained. Opening a small doorway, near to where he had activated the portal, Alduce retired to his small sleeping area, formed from an extension of the original cavern.\n\nHe switched off the lights to the main laboratory, leaving only the eerie green glow behind. Pulling the small door closed on his greatest endeavour to date, he looked forward to some well-deserved sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Alduce stood outside the cave, the wind that had torn at his cloak yesterday replaced by the warmth of the morning sun. He wiped the sleep from his eyes, the welcome heat reinvigorating after a good night's rest. Travelling through the portals took its toll on the body, and added to that was his trek to the dragon's nest and carrying back the egg, which was a lot heavier than he expected. He ventured further outside to wake fully, enjoying the sunlight. It was difficult to keep a routine when he was working inside the laboratory. With no window to the outside world and no natural light, it was easy to lose himself in his experiments, never knowing if it were night or day.\n\nA screech from high overhead pealed out and he gazed up into the cloudless blue sky of the new morning. An eagle soared above the landscape, gliding on the warm thermals rising from the ground below. Its wingtips outstretched, feathers splayed, like fingers reaching out towards the heated air currents. Alduce contemplated what it would be like to soar like the eagle. His thoughts drifted back to yesterday's encounter with the giant crow, wondering where it had come from.\n\nHe hadn't really explored the world where he acquired the egg after discovering dragons thrived there. After his strange confrontation with the giant crow, he entertained the idea that it may be worth an extended visit. But not now, it would have to wait. One thing at a time. The work ahead of him would be difficult and he would need to put all other distractions aside if he wanted to succeed.\n\nHe watched the eagle as it grew smaller, disappearing into the blue sky, then like the eagle, he disappeared too, back into the shade of the cave, leaving the morning behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "The dragon foetus lay splayed out on the metal surface of the workbench, legs and wings pulled tight, fastened with an intricate arrangement of straps and wires. Alduce held the tiny foreleg with one hand as he carefully pushed the razor sharp scalpel between the small black scales of what he thought of as the dragon's wrist. He had commissioned the finest set of blades possible from a swordsmith known for his skills with metal and as the blade pierced the dragon's tough hide, he knew the tools were up to the task.\n\nOrdinarily, even the best steel would be no match against dragonhide. The scales of the unborn dragon hadn't had time to fully develop and they had spent a full night in the glass misting chamber, exposed to his own brew of chemicals, magically enhanced with a softening potion, allowing the scalpel to cut as it should. He would have to be quick, as the temporary effect on the scales wouldn't last the day. He was an accomplished sorcerer, but even his spells wouldn't weaken dragon scales permanently.\n\nSliding the blade deeper, he sliced the hide from the muscle and flesh beneath, peeling the dragon's skin away from its body, one scale at a time. While he was fully aware his time was limited, he couldn't rush such a delicate procedure. The dragon's skin wouldn't stay softened for long, a mistake now could have a detrimental effect on the overall project. Dragon eggs were rare, he knew only too well how difficult they were to come by and he had been searching an extremely long time for his opportunity. He couldn't afford any errors, not now he had all the ingredients he needed to succeed.\n\nTime rapidly passed as he slowly and methodically removed the hide, carefully cutting and slicing, pulling the freed sections of dragonhide from its small body, working over every inch of the creature. Turning and twisting the dragon's carcass, he grew adept at manipulating the skin and rotating the blade to attain the best cutting angle.\n\nHis fingers ached and his vision swam from the precise work as he made the final cut from the dragon's throat all the way over its belly to the base of its stubby little tail. He dropped the scalpel into a tray and wiped his hand clean of the dragon's red blood. It wasn't black or green ichor as he had suspected it might be, but red blood, just like his, which bode well for his future plans.\n\nHe peeled the hide from the carcass, like removing a cloak on a hot day, working until he detached it, the small partially developed wings still attached and intact. Taking it back to the misting chamber, he placed it inside, suspending it with rods and hooks. Arranging the hide so that it hung like a cape, he spread it out, to allow the flow of air inside. Setting the dials once more, he flicked the switch and the machine hummed into life, hissing vapour into the glass chamber. This time the process was for cleaning the skin and scales, no magic just steam, designed to remove any blood or stray pieces of flesh from the inside of the hide. The glass clouded as steam pumped through the chamber. There was no green mystical glow this time, just beads of condensation as they trickled down the glass inside the foggy chamber.\n\nAlduce returned to what remained of the dragon's body and with the practice of a seasoned butcher, set about his grizzly task. He cut and chopped, removing everything of value from the remains. Teeth, eyes, heart, tongue, everything from this dragon was worth something to someone. Dragons were not only rare, they were imbued with a natural magic. A magic that permeated every fibre, every part of its body no matter how small; if you knew how to release it and maximise its potential.\n\nHe stored the contents in jars and boxes, some suspended in preservation liquid, some to dry out naturally. With this part of his work complete, all that remained were the bones and a small skull the size of a clenched fist. He scooped them up and left the laboratory, it was dark outside now\u2014a whole day had passed while he worked on the dragon. The night sky was clear and he didn't need his light orb to show him the path that lead to the top of the hill. He had walked this path under the starlight many times, often sitting on the hilltop above his underground laboratory, gazing up at the night sky and marvelling at the many stars. He knew the stars he could see were distant suns, surrounded by other worlds, so far away from his own it was difficult to comprehend.\n\nHe set the dragon bones on the ground and placed the skull on a flat rock. The wind and sun would bleach them white, the elements cleaning them better than he ever could. He would let nature do her work, saving him the chore.\n\nStaring back up at the sky once more before heading back to his underground abode, he wondered if any of the stars he could see with the naked eye, were worlds he had reached using the portal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Green Dragon: draconis vertus.\n\nMy first encounter with a dragon was with a green, probably the most commonly seen of the whole draconis species. Greens are the most traditionally shaped dragon; as such many stories and myths are based around this variety. They are one of the larger breeds, fully grown adults are in excess of forty feet, and it isn't uncommon for them to grow larger. Their scales, when examined closely, are metallic and polished. When viewed in direct sunlight they appear pearlescent, the nacreous coating resulting in the optical effect of a multi-coloured spectrum beneath the base green, like oil on water.\n\nGreens have a typically triangular head with two widely spaced horns, sweeping back parallel to the protective spikes on the back of the head and neck. The green also displays a small beard of hard spikes underneath its chin - the longer and thicker this is, the older the subject. Rough ridges and small nose horns decorate the top half of the snout and their slit-eyes tend to be yellow or orange, with a narrow black pupil which results in the dragon having near perfect vision. Ears, barely distinguishable and situated to the rear of the heavily armoured head, below the horns, are extremely acute.\n\nGreens are found on many worlds that support dragons and are quick tempered and easy to upset. They will respond to flattery and are quick witted and intelligent. Caution should be employed when engaging any dragons in conversation, however, one should be extra aware when speaking with a green dragon. They can be tricky and devious and are known for their prowess when it comes to leading conversations and their ability of persuasion, which I strongly suspect is linked to their magic.\n\nGaldor the Green is one example of the many greens I have encountered. He is honourable and magnanimous, yet a force to be reckoned with if he believes you to be an adversary. He is particularly patient and his memory is long. I believe Galdor to be in excess of two hundred years old and his life experience has added to his wise outlook. If befriended, Galdor will stand with you as protector and ally, but anger him and he will search you out, his wrath unstoppable, his justice severe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Once the dragonhide had been fully cleaned, Alduce removed it from the misting chamber. The perfectly formed scales gleamed under the artificial light of the laboratory like tiny black mirrors. He marvelled at the way the scales flexed on the hide, stronger than metal yet supple enough to move like soft leather. Running his hand across the surface of the scales, he was aware of the magic they contained. Even though the dragon never hatched, it was a creature of magic, born of magic.\n\nSpreading the hide out on the clean surface of his metal workbench, Alduce used the scalpel to cut it until he had one flat piece, stretched out like a fireside rug, scales facing upwards. He measured the length and breadth of the hide, writing the results down in a small notebook and adding them to a formula, scribbling away until he had a final figure.\n\nTaking a needle, a cord and some clear tubing from one of the many storage cupboards, he sat down in front of the device containing the turntable and rolled up his sleeves. He connected one end of the tube to a valve on the machine and inserted the long needle into the other. He tied the cord around his upper arm and made a fist, the veins standing out as he clenched his fingers tightly and then opened them a few times. The vein in the crook of his arm stood out, raised and blue and he slid the needle beneath his skin, tapping the flow of blood.\n\nRed liquid crept into the clear tube as Alduce untied the cord and cranked the handle with his free hand, drawing his blood into the machine. It ran inside the device and was transferred into a glass beaker perched in the turntable recess, dripping onto the clean glass, covering the bottom of the container, steadily filling it with his lifeblood.\n\nWhen the required amount of blood had been extracted and the container was almost full, he removed the needle from his vein, using his finger to stem the puncture in his skin. After a few minutes he let the pressure off and was pleased to see the blood had stopped flowing. He stood up quickly, eager to get on with his experiment, but his head swam. Reaching out to steady himself, he gripped the back of his chair, catching his balance. He had taken a lot of blood and risen too soon, his body warning him he should recuperate, but he needed to finish the next part of the process with his warm blood before it cooled. He could rest when he was done.\n\nCarefully, he picked up the container holding the lifeblood spilled from his veins and carried it over to his work area. Retrieving the thicker fluid drained from the dragon's egg, stored in his cool cupboard, he sat it alongside the flask. Taking an empty jar from the shelf he poured the gelatinous residue, shaking the jar to dislodge its viscous contents, filling the new jar to a line indicating the half way mark, then added his warm blood. At first nothing happened: the blood sat atop the egg fluid, not mixing, like oil and water. He took the syringe and added its contents, injecting it into the centre of the flask between the blood and the clear thick jelly. And waited. Then, after a moment, a vapour began to creep from the flask, like steam rising from a kettle.\n\nSlowly at first, tendrils of red seeped down into the clear liquid below, like the growing roots of a plant, stretching and lengthening. The clear liquid acted in a similar way, reaching up into the thicker blood, clear shoots penetrating the red. More vapour rose and inside the glass flask the strange reaction continued. Alduce watched as the human blood battled with the clear liquid from the dragon's egg, the unnatural essence of man melding with that of mythical beast, swirling and writhing inside a container of glass as the combining liquid moved ever faster. It seemed that even at this level, human and dragon were foes.\n\nOnce the mixture had compounded, the reaction was complete. Alduce picked up the flask, the glass hot to the touch as he blew away the remains of vapour, peering inside at the now pink liquid. He wouldn't have been able to mix it any more thoroughly had he stirred it with a spoon for an hour. Sealing the flask with a lid and making sure it was tightly fastened, he returned the newly created mixture to the cold cupboard, where it would have to sit for at least two weeks until it was ready.\n\nHe tidied up his mess, cleaning his apparatus and stowing it back where it belonged. He abhorred an untidy laboratory, everything must be clean and neatly stored, after all, he was a scientist and he needed to behave like one when he wasn't practicing his magic.\n\nWhen he finished, he retired back to his living quarters, which were completely different inside compared to the laboratory part of his subterranean dwelling. There was his sleeping area, a small kitchen and his study, where he spent most of his waking hours. He had a large number of books and journals displayed in a huge bookcase, carved into the rock wall of the cavern and arranged by his own method of cataloguing.\n\nReaching up, he pulled down one such journal, bound in green dragonhide, the scales much larger than the small black ones of the newly acquired dragon skin. The hide that covered the journal was magically altered, reducing it enough to bind the book, as even a single fully grown scale from a green dragon would have been too large. Even though the black scales were smaller than the ones that bound the journal, they were no less impressive. Dragonhide, regardless of size and colour was always spectacular.\n\nThe journal was one of a large set, all bound in the same green metallic dragonhide, neatly arranged along the top shelf. He place this volume on his desk, sat down and opened it, preparing to record his findings and thoughts so far, regarding the egg. Picking up a quill, he hesitated before dipping the nib into the ink jar. He had seen other tools for getting ink onto paper, but preferred the quill, for his work, it felt right. When writing, he preferred the traditional method over the modern, even if it was a little more effort.\n\nHe stared at the blank pages bound into the dragonhide, ready to absorb the ink and the knowledge of his writings, but he didn't start. He closed the book and ran his hand over the surface of the green dragonhide, contemplating what he was about to undertake and any consequences his action might have.\n\nThe scales felt cold to his touch as he caressed the cover, reminding him of how he had obtained the dragonhide for these wonderful tomes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Alduce had been an apprentice, learning sorcery and magic under the watchful eye of his master, Caltus. He hadn't been educated about science yet\u2014that discovery was to come later when he acquired the dragon artefact and learned of portals and travelling to other worlds. Science was something his master hadn't yet shared with him. The old sorcerer was a traditionalist and told Alduce that once he had mastered sorcery he was free to dabble in the lesser arts.\n\nCaltus had sent him on an errand to find the black cave mushrooms he needed for an enchantment he was preparing. The mushrooms could only be found underground and Caltus had given Alduce his very own light orb. He had told his young apprentice he would need it for searching out his quarry and gruffly thrust the valuable orb into his hands.\n\nHis old master was never one to show emotion and this was his way of gifting the orb to his apprentice without appearing to be generous. Alduce still had the light orb somewhere in the laboratory, the magic Caltus had instilled in the glass long exhausted, but precious to him anyway, a nostalgic reminder of days long past.\n\nWith this newly acquired gift, the young Alduce had ventured forth, heading north from their home. They had been living in the South, near the city of Learning, named for its many academic buildings and scholarly organisations. Caltus told his young apprentice to search the caves, high up in the foothills of the Pendron mountain range. Caltus needed the cave mushrooms for his spell, that was true, but his old master hadn't just sent him on an errand. It had also been a test, a rite of passage. Alduce knew that if he was successful and returned with the rare mushrooms, Caltus would promote him from apprentice to journeyman.\n\nHe learned much from his master and was ready to progress, so he set out well prepared, with all the supplies he might need and a positive frame of mind. He bought a horse and enough provisions for seven days, giving himself three days to travel there, three to return and a full day to search the caves for the precious mushrooms. Little did he know that his adventure was going to be the start of something that would last a lot longer than his initial trip and he would discover mysteries beyond his wildest imagination.\n\nHe travelled for the first three days, riding by day, resting at night, encountering few people north of the city as most merchants and visitors arrived from the far south. He studied by firelight, reading the few books he brought along, appreciating the gift of his very own light orb. Alduce never stopped learning, avidly reading whenever there was a spare moment. He once remarked to Caltus when they visited Learning's grand library, there were so many books and never enough time to read them all. Caltus told him he needed to get his nose out of his books every now and then and experience the world around him. Practical experience was just as relevant in his education and training, his old master said. At the time, Alduce doubted his master's words, but now, thinking back, the old man had been wise indeed. He always was.\n\nHe arrived at the caves, impressed with the backdrop of the Pendron Mountains, giant snow covered peaks, pushing into the clouds and stretching north, far beyond the distant horizon. The lower foothills were riddled with caves and Alduce had to be careful as he traversed the land, open shafts common amongst the rocky terrain.\n\nOn the third night, as the sun dropped below the Pendron peaks, painting the sky in pastel oranges and pinks, he came across a deep cave, the mouth wide enough for him to lead his horse through and take shelter for the night. He was weary from travelling and only took time to feed and water his horse and himself, before building a fire outside the cave mouth and banking it up for the night.\n\nFire would keep away any Watchers, large feral creatures that were known to inhabit the remote hills. He didn't want to wake in the night to find he had an uninvited guest invading his shelter.\n\nHe settled down on the sandy floor, making himself comfortable in the warm dry cave, the sand softer than hard ground outside. Inside the protection of the rocky walls, the chill of the night was kept at bay. He quickly drifted off to sleep, the day's ride and the fresh mountain air contributing to his tiredness. Slipping deeper into his dreams, vivid images surfaced in his subconscious and a feeling of desolation and despair dragged him further down into the depths of an emerging nightmare.\n\nHe tossed and turned, restless and in conflict, though he didn't know why. He awoke in the darkness, sitting upright and startling his mount, drenched in sweat, like a man with a fever. His heart pounded, threatening to explode from his chest, his breath came in short rasps and he couldn't shake the feeling of isolation and agitation.\n\nHe tried to remember the nightmare and what it was about it that distressed him. But, as with all dreamers who wake, the memory of the dream fades quickly, leaving them unable to recall the details.\n\nRummaging in his cloak, he pulled out his orb and thumbed the glass surface, concentrating as he willed the light into being, banishing the darkness. All was as it should be, no danger hid in the shadows, nothing lurked in the darkness. Rising from the ground, he stepped out into the night, leaving the orb on his makeshift bed.\n\nHis fire had reduced itself to a glowing pile of embers and as he passed, he felt the heat on his clammy skin. Away from the remains of the fire, the night breeze chilled him as his breathing returned to normal. Looking up at the stars in the night sky, he took comfort in the familiar patterns and constellations.\n\nHis mind cleared as he focused on the distant stars, so far away it was staggering to even think how far one would need to travel to visit them. And if he ever travelled from his world to one of these heavenly destinations, what would he find there? Men like himself? Animals or plants he would recognise? Air he could breathe? There were so many more questions than answers. That was one of the attractions of studying, searching for the answers and unravelling the mysteries life held.\n\nAlduce returned to his sleeping roll, but he was no longer tired, he was wide awake now. Taking the orb, he decided he might as well enter into the depths of the caves and seek out the mushrooms. It didn't matter if he hunted for them during the day or at night as the caves were permanently dark. His illuminating orb would light the way, but he would need more than the light it provided to avoid becoming lost in the underground labyrinths.\n\nAlduce scouted around the sandy cave floor, picking out small pebbles and stones until he had enough to fill the pockets of his robes. Piling them in a mound on his blanket, he set the orb on top, cupping his hands around the heap. Reaching deep inside for his magic, his hands began to feel the rising heat as it flowed through his fingers and into the orb, cascading down into the stones and pebbles below.\n\nLight flared though the gaps in his fingers, his hands glowed in the darkness, the dark shapes of bones visible through translucent skin. The light flickered and dimmed, then surging one last time returned to its usual brightness.\n\nAlduce scooped up the orb and the pebbles below now glowed like smaller orbs, bright light emitting from each one. It was a simple spell, one which any first year apprentice could easily master with practice. The stones were now infused with light from the orb and shone like miniature suns. While the orb that Caltus had given Alduce would hold the light for over ten years of continuous use, the small pebbles would only last a day, maybe two, before the light faded and they returned to normal.\n\nThe secret of making an orb hold the light for any length of time was in the forging of the glass and the preparation of the incantation. Alduce had rushed the spell, as a temporary enchantment was all he needed. He didn't plan to be any more than half a day searching the caverns. The stones infused with light would be used as markers as he descended, making a trail to help him navigate out of the deep underground labyrinth when he was ready to return.\n\nHe patted his mare's neck, murmuring soothing sounds. She had a placid nature, was well trained and would remain in the cave without wandering off.\n\nPocketing the pebbles and holding the orb out to light his way, he proceeded to the rear of the cave. The tunnel burrowed downward and he followed its path, like a giant mole, in search of the black mushrooms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Alduce the apprentice scoured the dark caves, seeking out the mushrooms, frequently stopping to place a glowing pebble in a crevice or nook in the rock walls. If none were available, he sat the glowing guide stone in the middle of the path, placing it on top of a larger rock or scooping up the earth to make a mound.\n\nHe used the glowing pebbles sparingly, making tactical decisions when and where to leave them, often at a fork or junction, or when the path took a twist or a turn that might be confusing on his return. He did not want Caltus coming to search for him. If his apprentice didn't have the wits to figure out how not to get lost in the dark, he would never hear the end of it. And, if he did end up lost, he wouldn't see a journeyman's sash for at least another year. Caltus could be a cranky master sometimes and Alduce would suffer his temper, especially if the old sorcerer had to make the journey he had entrusted to his apprentice in order to rescue him.\n\nBlack mushrooms were rare, but Alduce had already picked at least a dozen, storing them in the small sack he'd brought along. He estimated that he'd been wandering below ground for at least three hours, though it was difficult in the constant dark to measure the passage of time accurately. If he could double his count of mushrooms, Caltus would be happy and he would be able to get back above ground and return to civilisation earlier than planned.\n\nThe tunnel he was currently exploring opened out into a wide cavern. He held the orb at arm's length, letting the light reach out into the blackness, illuminating the area. He scanned the floor for more mushrooms reasoning that such a large expanse would surely be home to the rare fungi, when he spotted two pin pricks of light, twinkling in the darkness. Covering the orb, the two points of light vanished. It must be a reflection of his light rather than something giving off its own. Uncovering the orb, Alduce searched for the unusual reflections, wondering what he might discover in the deep underground cave. Holding the orb aloft, he searched the darkness, but there was nothing there.\n\nPerhaps the lack of light was playing tricks on his eyes or maybe it was because he hadn't had a full night's sleep and his eyes were tired and strained. He turned away from where he thought the light had been and came face to face with its source.\n\nTwo huge eyes peered directly into his own.\n\nAlduce froze in terror as wave of panic washed over him. He dropped the orb to the sandy cave floor, where it rolled and came to rest, still shining brightly, revealing the head and neck of a dragon!\n\nGreen metallic scales reflected in the darkness, its eyes much larger than the pin pricks he had seen before.\n\nAlduce stood frozen to the spot as the beast blew air from its nostrils, the breeze warm as it rolled over his face. He was glad that it was only warm air and not the searing hot flame that the fire breathing creatures where capable of.\n\nHe wasn't near enough to the tunnel where he'd entered the cavern and didn't think it wise to turn and run, not with the dragon so close. He drew in a breath, only now aware he hadn't been breathing and squared his shoulders. The dragon hadn't yet burned him to a crisp, so he would take that as a good sign. Dragons were known to be intelligent creatures, some more intelligent than men. If this one intended to kill or eat him, there was nothing he could do to stop it.\n\nHe decided he would act. He had nothing to lose if he was going to end up being the dragon's dinner. He reached down and retrieved his fallen orb, holding it high its light ran along the scales of the mighty green beast, decorating the cavern walls with a deep green flickering, each hand sized scale shimmering like a polished mirror of green.\n\n\"Greetings, magnificent dragon,\" he said. His voice small and insignificant before the huge reptilian beast. \"I am Alduce and I mean you no harm. I've come in search of black mushrooms and I... er... didn't mean to... you know... disturb you.\" The words were out of his mouth before his brain had the chance to think what he had said. This was no way to speak to a dragon, but he wasn't sure what the right words were when you came across one face to face in its dark underground lair. The dragon's eyes stared into his own, small bright moons penetrating his soul, hypnotic and strange, but somehow calming too.\n\nAnd then the dragon spoke. Not at all what Alduce expected."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Drawing himself back to the present, Alduce opened the great dragonhide tome once more. Dipping his quill into the ink pot, he scratched the sharpened end of the feather across the pages, recording his findings. He wanted to write everything he had discovered so far, regarding his experimentation with the dragon egg.\n\nHe hadn't thought of Galdor the Green, the dragon he'd stumbled across while searching the caves of the Pendron Mountain range, in a long time. It was over one hundred years since his encounter with the green dragon, while he was green himself, still an apprentice with a lifetime of studying and learning ahead.\n\nHe concentrated on his writing, noting down the events of the last few days while they were still fresh in his mind. Each fact carefully penned, an accurate description of his experiments. When he finished, he left the book open, as he always did, allowing the ink to dry. Tired and weary, his eyelids became heavy and began to close. Tomorrow he would set out on the long journey to the city of Learning and he would pass close to the foothills of the Pendron range. Perhaps this was why he recalled his adventure underground. He left the open tome on the table, crawling into bed, exhausted and ready to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "A week later, Alduce rode into the city of Learning through the main north gate, leading a pony packed with the remains of the dragon egg that he intended to trade. After seven long and boring days through the empty and mostly barren northern lands, his supplied were nearly depleted. He had deliberately chosen the location of his laboratory to be far from civilisation and sometimes wished he could travel locally using the portals. It was exciting visiting strange new worlds, stepping through the portal and travelling unfathomable distances. Riding on horseback for a week to get to his nearest city was a chore he was never pleased to perform.\n\nHe rode his horse through the city, the people and the noise a diverse change from his usual isolation. As he entered the trading district, the city streets grew even more crowded. He weaved his way through the busy throng of people to his destination, dismounting outside the last shop at the end of the road. An old battered sign hung crookedly above the door professing supplies of the magical and arcane.\n\nHe tied his animals to the rail and the pony whickered as he removed the packs. Hitching one under each arm, he fumbled for the door handle and pushed his way into the shop, a small bell tinkling pleasantly as he entered.\n\nInside, shelves lined the walls, crammed with an assortment of containers, jars and boxes in a wide variety of colours and shapes. There was a welcoming aroma of herbs and spices mingling together to create a soothing smell. Alduce took a deep breath, enjoying the heady mixture of scents.\n\nA small grey haired shopkeeper stood behind the long counter, leaning lazily on its polished wooden surface. Rows of bookshelves stretched the length of the shop behind his head, volumes jammed into any available space, like oddly shaped bricks in a poorly built wall.\n\n\"What brings Alduce the elusive down from his mountain and into my shop?\" the grey haired shopkeeper asked.\n\n\"A horse,\" Alduce answered, swinging the packs up onto the counter, \"and highly valuable items to trade.\"\n\nThe shopkeeper grinned, \"Your jokes don't get any funnier, you know. Valuable items, you say? I'd better be the judge of that, if you don't mind.\" He reached for the first sack, pulling open the ties that held it closed.\n\n\"I believe I said highly valuable, master Bervus. Go ahead, paw the merchandise before you buy it. Didn't you tell me you hate people coming in here and pawing? Yes I'm sure the phrase you used was, pawing your merchandise like sticky fingered thieves.\"\n\n\"Bah!\" Bervus retorted, \"You sorcerers take things far too literally.\" He smiled at Alduce, taking the sting from his words and set the eye glasses hanging from a chain around his neck onto the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"How are the spectacles working out for you?\" Alduce asked.\n\n\"They're wonderful, Alduce, truly wonderful. I can see things a lot more clearly, helps me when I'm trading. I get a good look at things I could barely see before.\" He looked up, his eyes huge through the thick round lenses captured in the fine wire frames. \"You never did say where you got them from. Did you make them yourself? Some kind of lower magic?\"\n\n\"No, Bervus, I never made them, they came from... a place I know, many months travel from Learning,\" Bervus would never know just how far Alduce had travelled to find the shopkeepers spectacles and the man wouldn't believe him even if he told him. \"It's not magic. It's science.\"\n\n\"Science? Is that some kind of sorcerous word? Honestly, always with the mysteries. Now let's see what you've brought old Bervus. Something special I hope.\" Delving into the sack, he pulled out the contents, one by one, stacking them neatly along the counter.\n\nThere were sealed jars with organs inside, preserved in liquid. Boxes filled with similar items, dried out, the moisture removed to stop them from perishing. He looked up at Alduce when the sack was empty and indicated the second one. Alduce nodded and Bervus set out the contents from the second sack with the same practiced ease onto the now crowded bench. The last things he removed were two halves of the giant shell. He set one half on the counter and examined the other closely, sniffing the inside, peering at it and tapping it with his fingers.\n\n\"Tough and thick, and incredibly large. Are these what I think they are?\" he said.\n\n\"Well that depends on what exactly you think they are,\" Alduce teased.\n\n\"In that case, you won't mind if I test them to see if they're the genuine article? You won't be offended?\"\n\n\"I would insist upon it, Bervus, our transaction relies on both parties being fully satisfied.\"\n\n\"Very well. Bolt the door and pull the drapes, please.\" Alduce did as requested while Bervus searched through the drawers built into his side of the counter until he located what he was looking for.\n\nA small glass jar filled with what appeared to be finely grained yellow sand.\n\nThe shop dimmed as the light from the window was blocked out by the heavy drapes. Bervus unscrewed the lid and took a pinch of the fine yellow sand between his fingers, rubbing them together. Smoke drifted from the tips of his thumb and forefinger and he moved his hand along the counter above the items. Fine grains drifted slowly down, like suspended motes of dust caught in a beam of sunlight, changing from solid particles to wispy smoke, trailing along in his hand's wake. The smoke slowly enveloped the counter, covering everything set out on the wooden surface, curling around the jars and boxes, swirling along the surface of the egg shells as if drawn to the items. A soft golden light started to radiate from the dragon's remains, steadily getting brighter until everything set out on the bench emanated with a vibrant golden glow.\n\nAlduce touched each jar and box, naming the contents within. \"Dragon veal, vital organs, blood, teeth, eyes, heart, tongue.\"\n\nBervus stared at each in turn, his jaw dropping a little further with each item Alduce listed.\n\n\"And of course, dragon egg shell.\" He performed a little bow and smiled at the shopkeeper. \"Highly valuable, as promised, proven genuine by the authenticity powder, as you've witnessed.\" He smiled. \"Nice spell by the way. Did you prepare the sand yourself?\"\n\n\"It's the Cole Man's, he owes me a few favours and he's the expert when it comes to sniffing out fakes,\" Bervus said. \"Not,\" he quickly added, \"that I would ever suspect you'd bring me items that weren't genuine.\"\n\nThe golden glow faded and Alduce pulled open the drapes, letting the natural daylight flood back into the shop.\n\n\"Truly amazing, Alduce. Did you see how brightly they glowed, the potential magic they hold must be powerful indeed. Where did you acquire such items?\"\n\n\"That, my dear Bervus, is a trade secret. Be satisfied with the knowledge that each item is authentic.\"\n\n\"Bah! More mystery. Fine, have your secrets if it pleases you. Our deal still stands then?\"\n\n\"If you have managed to obtain what I want, it certainly does.\"\n\n\"But Alduce, you know the value of this merchandise. You know my clients and how much they would pay for even a small piece of shell alone! Our deal seems unfairly one-sided. Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Bervus, this is why I chose to deal with you. There are many shops like yours in this city, but you, my friend, are the fairest trader I know. Yes, I know the worth of what I bring. Worry not master apothecary, if you are so concerned, you can owe me a favour or two, next time I need something. Agreed?\"\n\n\"As long as it's not my eyes in a jar... or my heart!\" Bervus said. \"Come master sorcerer, I think I'll close up early and you and I can find somewhere to dine and have a drink or three, to celebrate our transaction. My treat.\" He carefully tided up, taking each item and storing it out of sight below the counter.\n\n\"We'll get your animals stabled and get you a room at one of the more reputable inns on the west side. My supplier is due to arrive in the city tomorrow and he has sent word that he brings exactly what you desire.\" Bervus lifted a hatch in the counter and joined Alduce on the other side. He unbolted the door and held it open.\n\n\"After you,\" he said and followed Alduce out into the street. Pulling the door closed behind them, he produced a large brass key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.\n\n\"I know a great tavern on the west side, the owner owes me a favour or two. They do the most fabulous steak you'll ever taste, served with a mouth-watering mushroom sauce.\"\n\nMushrooms, Alduce thought..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"Greetings, Alduce, collector of mushrooms,\" boomed the dragon. \"I am Galdor the Green. It has been many years since anyone has ventured this deep into these caverns and disturbed me.\"\n\nAlduce stood frozen to the cave floor, his jaw hanging wide, not quite believing his eyes.\n\nThe dragon had spoken to him and used his name.\n\nHe quickly gathered himself, as Caltus had taught him. It didn't matter that you stumbled or fell, his master often said, but that you got back up and kept going.\n\n\"It is my great honour to meet you, mighty Galdor,\" he said, \"I'm terribly sorry I've disturbed you.\"\n\nGaldor sniffed at Alduce, moving his long snout close to the man and inhaling noisily, wide nostrils flaring. Alduce barely saw the dragon's nose as all he could focus on was the beast's huge mouth and rows of ivory coloured fangs. A forked red tongue flicked out from between the razor sharp teeth, like an angry viper, tasting the air.\n\n\"You smell of magic,\" Galdor rumbled. \"Magic and mushrooms. I am hungry little human, I've been trapped here a long time.\"\n\n\"Trapped?\" Alduce asked, not wanting to mention the hunger.\n\n\"Yessss,\" the dragon hissed, \"trapped. And hungry.\" Galdor emerged from the shadows, stalking around behind Alduce, putting his considerable bulk between the apprentice and the tunnel he'd used to enter the cavern.\n\n\"Well, perhaps I could assist you, magnificent dragon,\" Alduce said, trying to think of a way out of his predicament. \"I could bring you some food, if you wish.\" He started to move around the dragon, searching past the beast's body for the cave mouth. If he could get into the narrow cave, the huge beast wouldn't be able to follow him.\n\n\"Really?\" Galdor asked, \"You would leave and return with something for me to eat? Most kind little Alduce, most kind.\"\n\nAlduce stepped slowly towards the cave mouth, nodding, \"Yes, that's exactly what I would do, bring you back a feast, a feast fit for a... dragon, yes.\"\n\n\"How stupid do you think I am?\" asked Galdor, thrusting his neck past Alduce and turning his head back to face the man, blocking his path to freedom. \"Maybe I shall eat you! Better to take what I have in front of me now.\" Galdor snorted, the heat of his breath wafting over Alduce.\n\n\"Nor are you enthralled by my voice. Your magic prevents you from falling under my hypnotic spell.\" He shook his head, \"No, I think if I let you leave, you would not return with food,\" Galdor's tongue danced along his teeth. \"You would return with more magic wielders, foul sorcerers and stinking mages. You would slaughter me after you cast your enchantments.\"\n\nAlduce could see no way out. The dragon's logic was sound and now he had insulted the creature's intelligence. The beast was smarter than he expected. If he was to be eaten, there was nothing he could do to stop it. The dragon was stronger, faster and much larger than him. Physically, he was Galdor's inferior. He could hear Caltus telling him to use his brain; if you can't solve a problem one way, his old mentor would say, try attacking it from a different angle. It was definitely time to employ another approach.\n\n\"Very well,\" he said, \"eat me if you must. But know this mighty Galdor, I am your best chance at freedom, eat me now and you'll never know if I could have freed you.\"\n\nThe dragon drew back his serpentine neck, head swaying from side to side like a cobra preparing to strike. Alduce stood his ground as Galdor roared, lunging forward with his jaws wide open."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Bervus had been true to his word, he was the perfect host and had made good on their deal. Alduce enjoyed the day he had spent with his old acquaintance immensely; most of the time he was so caught up in his work that he had no time for other things.\n\nA trip to the city of Learning was a welcome break, but whenever he was away from his laboratory, he couldn't help feeling guilty. He was all too aware the hours he passed in the company of others equated to time spent away from his work, a distraction from the advancement of his studies.\n\nHe removed the tack from the horse and pony as he returned to his mountain laboratory, letting the animals run free. He stored the equipment in a cave he used as a stable, near the foot of his mountain. Alduce preferred the animals roam the lowlands when he had no need of their services. He could easily catch them, when needed. They were smart enough to realise he supplemented their grazing with grains and vegetables when he could, making them easy to catch when he wished to make a trip. Gathering his belongings, he trudged up the steep incline to his secluded workshop, picking his way over the rough ground, finally reaching his destination.\n\nHe palmed the metal door inside the cave entrance and the familiar light swept down the length of his hand, welcoming him back. The door slid open and he stepped inside, depositing the full sacks brought back from the city of Learning, on the nearest workbench.\n\nHe strode purposefully across the laboratory to the chilled cupboard, overhead lights flickering to life as he passed beneath them. He reached inside and brought out the jar he had left settling and inspected the contents. It was no longer a pink liquefied mix of blood, but had solidified into a thick clear jelly. Everything was ready. He mentally prepared himself for the next phase of his experiment. He had gathered, stolen, traded, and prepared all the necessary ingredients he needed. It was time to put all his hard work, all his studies and research, to the test.\n\nSetting out all the necessary equipment, he bustled around the laboratory, whistling as he worked. He removed two sealed jars from the sack, leaving the rest of the items he had traded untouched for now. He emptied both jars into a large bowl, mixing the colourless liquids, then added the clear jelly he had made from his own blood and the fluid from the dragon egg.\n\nThe jars from Bervus contained two key ingredients necessary for the final stage of his experiment: a magical bonding elixir and a combustible agent. These ingredients were both created by a reputable mage master Bervus knew and trusted. Alduce could have formulated them himself, but they took months to perfect and travelling to the city to trade for them, even though he disliked the journey, was much quicker and convenient.\n\nTaking all the items he had collated and carefully lifting the bowl, he left the laboratory and climbed up to the top of his mountain.\n\nThe moment of truth was upon him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Alduce sat inside a circle made from the bones of the unborn dragon, pushed into the ground like grotesque monoliths. The night sky was darkening and a crescent moon tilted above the horizon, its dull glow casting an ethereal light across the mountain top.\n\nAlduce removed his clothing and stacked it neatly away from the bone circle. The cold wind chilled his skin and he could feel it tighten as the hairs on his neck stood up. But it wasn't a reaction to the cooling breeze, rather from the excitement and anticipation he felt.\n\nIf his experiment proceeded as planned, he would be the first sorcerer to complete the process successfully, as far as he was aware. He grasped the dragon pendant that hung around his neck, the only thing he now wore, and took a deep breath. No point in putting this off any longer, now was the time for action.\n\nHe dipped both his hands into the bowl and spread the viscous concoction over his body, the cold mixture making him shiver as he applied it to every inch of his skin, chilling him to the bone. With shaking hands, he picked up the small dragon skull and covered it with the mixture too before applying a generous coating to each vertical bone in the circle. Covered in the cold liquid, he reached for the dragonhide, draping it over his shoulders like a small cloak. Hands trembling, he steadied himself as he placed the dragon skull in the centre of his bone circle, reaching out and summoning his magic.\n\nThe black dragonhide shimmered and the scales rippled, creating a sound like tiny bells as their metallic surface moved, scale clinking against scale. Alduce braced himself as he felt the hide begin to grow, sliding over the mixture on his skin as it provided a magical lubricant.\n\nThe hide grew as it slipped over his back, encompassing limbs, wrapping them in the expanding cloak of scales. Alduce could feel a heat now, he was no longer cold as magic warmed his skin and the hide closed around his bare flesh. Where the hide covered his arms, it wrapped all the way around, meeting and joining, leaving no exposed skin. His back, legs and torso were all subjected to the same process as the hide magically stretched and engulfed the man beneath.\n\nHis face was the last to be covered and once his skin was hidden Alduce looked like a knight in a black armour of dragon scales. He could still breathe through his mouth and nose, see through his eyes and hear with his ears. The dragonhide hadn't grown to cover his sensory organs, for which Alduce was grateful.\n\nReaching down, he grasped the skull with alien hands that now resembled talons. He raised it above his head, calling forth the magic of the pendant, now hidden beneath the layer of dragon skin. His chest glowed brightly as the pendant, encased in the protective armour of scales, radiated magical light.\n\nLightning seared down from above, a blue-white flash struck the dragon skull and leapt, like a fiery spider web, to each bone in the circle. The skull's sockets burned white, eyes of lightning staring out before engulfing it fully and running down the upraised arms that held it aloft. Alduce dropped the skull and it struck the ground, empty and hollow, the irradiating lightning gone.\n\nThe light from the bones faded too, no longer bright candles of energy, the last of the magic and lightning dissipating. Blue sparks fizzled out, leaving the crescent moon to provide the only source of illumination on the mountaintop.\n\nAlduce swayed, his legs weak and his head dizzy. He had survived the magic and lightning. He was prepared mentally for what was to come next, but unprepared for the searing pain that engulfed him. The conduit between his own skin and the hide of the dragon, was the magical liquid he had prepared, a thin coating that now flowed through the space between the two.\n\nThe heat built uncomfortably, growing hotter, a raging inferno scorching the liquid, heating it until it transformed. Thousands of tendrils reached out. Minute creeping roots, digging into flesh and hide. Growing as they burrowed, knitting the coating of scales directly to the flesh of the man. Alduce opened his mouth to scream in pain, and found his voice replaced by a beastly roar, echoing eerily across the mountain top.\n\nHe fell forward, arms outstretched as he hit the ground, pushing himself to what he still thought of as his knees. As his own skin and flesh fused with the dragonhide, the pain increased and Alduce could only wait for the unbearable transformation to finish. Limbs stretched taking on the form and shape of a fully grown dragon, the beast that was once a man threw its head back and roared, no longer in pain but in triumph. Wings unfurled, leathery limbs growing in size, completing the final part of the metamorphosis.\n\nThe dragon reared up on powerful hind legs and extended its wings, flapping them a few times. The beast was completely black, except for its chest, where silver scales formed the shape of a star. The awareness of Alduce was still present, even though he was no longer a man. He had changed his form into a dragon, but still possessed the mind of a human. He knew there was one last vital step that needed to be taken or he might lose himself completely in the spirit of the dragon. This was unknown territory and he must proceed with caution.\n\nHe called on his magic, willing himself to become human once more.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nFrightened of being trapped in this form forever, Alduce almost lost himself completely to the wave of panic that engulfed him. But then finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the heat returned, burning from the inside, forcing him to forget about the terror. The dragon's magnificent form shimmered, white light glowed beneath the hide. The joints between each scale pulsed with magical energy, bathing it in a cold unearthly luminosity. Slowly the dragon shrank, growing smaller as the shape changed back to that of an armoured man, clad in black scales.\n\nThe glowing intensified as the scales reduced and were absorbed into the sorcerer's skin, until no trace of the mythical beast remained.\n\nAlduce stood for a moment as the glowing pendant around his neck faded and the magic ended. He looked down at his naked form, running human hands across his cold skin. He shivered mightily and his head swam as he lost consciousness and sank to the ground.\n\nHis last waking thoughts returned him to a time long past.\n\nBack to Galdor's cavern."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Galdor's mighty head lunged towards Alduce and the apprentice sorcerer screwed his eyes shut and braced himself for the inevitable. Surprisingly, it never came.\n\nHe waited, then after a moment opened his eyes to see Galdor's head level with his own. The dragon studied the man, tilting his head this way and that, trying to get a better look at his tiny prey.\n\n\"You think you can free me?\" Galdor purred like a giant cat, his voice vibrating inside the apprentice sorcerer's ears.\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" Alduce said. \"I am a sorcerer, I have magic at my disposal.\" He desperately tried to prolong his reprieve, perhaps there was a way to leave this cave and survive his encounter with this fearsome beast. \"Before I decide on the best approach to your... our predicament, you better tell me how you came to be stuck deep underground.\"\n\nIf he could get the dragon to tell him how he had come to be trapped here, maybe he could buy himself some time to plan an escape. \"And, just so you know, mighty Galdor, I would have returned with food for you. I intended no deception. I am a man of my word before anything else. Use your beastly magic, you will know I speak the truth!\" Alduce didn't know if the dragon had the ability to detect a lie and he hoped the confidence of his bluff would be enough to convince the creature.\n\n\"Very well, little sorcerer with the big heart, Galdor will tell you his tale. We will see what you can do to assist and if after that, you deceive me, you will return to being my next meal. Agreed?\"\n\nAlduce had no choice but to concede to Galdor's terms, but he paused before answering, giving the impression he was contemplating the dragon's proposal.\n\n\"Agreed,\" he consented, \"however, when I succeed, I shall ask a boon of you and you will grant it. These are my terms, if they are unacceptable, eat me now and be done with it.\"\n\nGaldor growled and didn't answer. Alduce hoped he hadn't pushed the beast too far. He wanted to appear confident and now he feared he had overplayed his hand. The dragon thrust his face as close to Alduce as possible without touching him, his huge eyes searched the sorcerer's soul, staring menacingly at the man.\n\n\"Agreed,\" he finally said, \"but do not test my patience, I warn you. I have become a touch less tolerant since being trapped in this underground prison.\" Only then did Alduce release his breath, grateful to still be alive, but unsure what he had let himself in for.\n\n\"Good. Tell me then, Galdor the Green,\" Alduce asked, \"how you came to be trapped in these caverns. I am intrigued to learn your story. I admit, I'm puzzled as to how such a large creature as yourself was confined here. Especially when the actual tunnels I used to get here are so narrow. I had to squeeze through at places and I'm small compared to you.\"\n\n\"Very well, human, listen well and do not interrupt me, green dragons do not appreciate interruptions. There will be ample time for any questions you may have, after I finish.\" Galdor drew in a huge breath, took a theatrical pause, like a bard waiting for his audience to settle, then began his tale.\n\n\"On another world, in another time I was once the mightiest of dragons, a leader and a king. Dragons were plentiful and we ruled the lands. No force could stand against us when we were united. We were revered and worshipped by humans. Understand, we did not ravage towns or burn villages, nor eat people, this is not generally in our nature. Although, I admit, there are times when some individuals will behave this way.\" He paused, staring at Alduce as if to impress this fact upon him.\n\nAlduce remained silent, heeding Galdor's warning about being interrupted.\n\n\"For thousands of years the balance was maintained. There was enough room on my home world for man and dragon, but as the millennia passed, our species dwindled, while yours bred. Mankind was like a plague across the lands, reaching out into the wilderness, building your towns and roads, cutting down forests and taming the world. Dragons were once a social race, but as time passed, we withdrew and distanced ourselves from the race of man, making our homes in faraway places, unpopulated by humans. Our Lands had a ruling council, the Dragon Moot, eleven of the oldest dragons, selected by their peers for their intelligence and knowledge. I, being their leader, ruled over the council and while everyone had a say, my voice was the final word on any decisions or rulings. I would hope I was a fair and just leader and while I was part of the moot. Even though our numbers lessened, our community was still strong.\" Galdor paused once more, looking up towards the roof of the cavern as he contemplated his next words.\n\n\"We endured.\"\n\nAlduce nodded, saying nothing, holding his tongue as he was bid. He settled down on the cave floor and sat the light orb on the ground beside him. The light radiated from the glowing globe, shining upwards and reflecting on the underside of Galdor's impressive frame. The scales of the dragon's belly were not green but a golden yellow, like sunlight rippling across water. The dragon was truly a magnificent creature and even though Alduce was terrified, he couldn't help marvelling at Galdor's deadly beauty.\n\n\"Anyway, that is all ancient history, a lifetime that once was and is now no more.\" Alduce was moved by the obvious sorrow in Galdor's voice. \"Everything was ruined by my adversary and fellow council member, Blaze. A black dragon, named so because of a flash of white lighting on his chest. We were once friends, or so I thought. Little did I know he plotted against me and would become my bitter enemy. I guided my species and upheld the peace. I advocated our withdrawal from the ever spreading population of mankind, believing our isolation best for all concerned. Blaze had other ideas. He debated that we should take back what was once ours by force. We should burn the cities of man, crush them with our strength and magic. He maintained your species were but an annoyance, insects to be crushed by the might of dragons. I should have foreseen his motives and recognised his deep rooted hatred earlier. Perhaps then I could have taken action and prevented his rise to power... and my downfall. Alas, as ever, we are wiser after the event than before it. I expect we dragons and you men can both relate to that.\"\n\nGaldor lay down on the cave floor, his wings rustled as he folded them on his back. Settling down beside Alduce, he rested his head on his outstretched front legs, like a dog lying beside its master, his large eyes reflecting in the light from the orb.\n\n\"Blaze the Black is why I'm here, Alduce. I learned, much to my dismay, black was his nature and blacker was his heart. Let me tell you of that black dragon's betrayal and how I came to be in my dark foreboding prison.\"\n\nAlduce leaned forward, spell bound, not by magic but by the dragon's natural ability to tell a tale, captivating his audience with every word.\n\nAfter all, it wasn't every day a dragon bared his soul to a human."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Alduce opened his eyes and winced. His head pounded, each thump like a hammer striking an anvil. As he became fully awake, he remembered the events of the previous night.\n\nHe had managed the transformation and taken the form of a dragon. All his research and hard work had been successful. He remembered the pain, the fire in his blood and the ripping of limbs and muscles as his shape changed, his bones moving and growing, becoming a beast of myth and magic.\n\nHe had actually changed. He had done it!\n\nHis throbbing head jerked him back to the here and now, a terrible side effect of his incredible metamorphosis\u2014severe dehydration.\n\nSlowly he rose from the dishevelled bed, his back sore and his neck stiff. He was wearing his robe and he vaguely recalled pulling it on before stumbling down from the mountain top and collapsing into a heap, completely exhausted.\n\nFrom his research, he had expected this would be a normal part of the process when he first changed shape. The larger the creature the subject changed into, the bigger the physical effect on the body. He also read that he would get used to it, the more he swapped back and forth between forms. He expected his body would acclimatise and adjust until the transition became bearable and the pain lessened.\n\nOr at least, he hoped that this was true. His research had only applied to what other sorcerers had recorded about shape changing. And none of those records mentioned transforming into a dragon.\n\nHe had never experienced pain so intensely before, nothing compared to the agony and ecstasy he felt. But even if it didn't improve, didn't get any easier, he knew it wouldn't stop him changing into a dragon. Not now he had the ability to do so.\n\nNot only was he a sorcerer and a scientist, now he was also a shape changer. He examined his body, hands running over skin that felt no different from the day before. There was no physical change to his appearance as a human, no tell tail signs of the beast within. No visible evidence of the absorbed hide.\n\nThe feeling he had experienced when he changed back to a human was hard to describe, like shrinking, a diminishing of being and a reduction of his true self. The way the scales and hide had been absorbed into his human body was astounding, and a little terrifying, but he felt and looked normal.\n\nThis was a reassuring sign.\n\nMixed up in the assault of emotions the transformation had wrought, he felt the spirit of the dragon coursing through each fibre of his being, powerful and alien. Was it the unborn spirit of the small unhatched beast he liberated from the egg? Or was it his own self, taking on a new persona, a dragon state of being? He didn't know the answers to these questions, but he needed to remain aware of any potential influence on his own individuality.\n\nHe fetched himself a glass of water from his kitchen and drank it down in one long draught, a sharp coldness stabbing the back of his brain. Re-filling the glass, he took smaller mouthfuls, his thirst still not fully quenched. Wandering around his living quarters in a dazed state, he contemplated his incredible accomplishment.\n\nA grumbling from his belly made him realise how ravenous he felt. He grinned to himself: the noise sounding like a tiny dragon inside him, crying out to be fed. No doubt another side effect from the transformation. His body had been through a lot and the ordeal had demanded much more than he could have anticipated.\n\nThis was nature's way of telling him to refuel. His resources had been exhausted when he changed shape and now they needed replenished. He would fix himself a hearty morning meal\u2014not a meagre breakfast as usual\u2014a feast, as that was what he desired. Once he attended to his hunger he would record last night's events, writing down the details of his experience and how he felt, both physically and mentally.\n\nHis mind raced, he had so much to document and the information he recorded would prove vital in his ongoing research. He should eat first, then sit and write it all down before he forgot anything.\n\nHe wanted to plan the next phase as well, as changing into a dragon was only the first step in his research. He wanted to fly, to cast magic in dragon form, to meet and interact with real dragons. The thought of how much he could learn and how much he would be able to accomplish if he was able to study dragons first hand, fuelled his desire. There was so much to try, the possibilities were endless.\n\nHe wondered if he would be able to fly naturally. Would this be something his dragon self would know instinctively? Or would he have to learn? Another question without an answer. One he planned to find out soon enough.\n\nHis stomach grumbled again, reminding him of another hungry dragon. One he stumbled across, so many years before."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Alduce listened as Galdor told his story, the dragon's voice conjuring a strong image of a society filled with dragons and their culture. A place where Alduce would truly like to visit and study someday.\n\nThe scholar and the dreamer in him recognised that this would be a fantastic opportunity, to visit and learn about a world inhabited by dragons. The realist worried that no matter how wonderful it all sounded, if he couldn't free Galdor, the only thing he would likely be studying was the inside of the beast's stomach.\n\n\"So, Blaze formed a pact with the mage,\" Galdor continued, \"and they plotted to get rid of me. Once I was removed from the council, nothing would stand in Blaze's way, and he would be free to assume charge of the moot and convince them to make war on mankind.\" He snorted his displeasure and hot dragon breath washed over Alduce again, reminding him just how deadly Galdor could be if he chose to end the apprentice's short life with a fiery blast.\n\n\"Blaze came to me and at the time, I believed his concern genuine. I was fooled by his supposed friendship and the way lies rolled easily from his foul tongue. He told me he had uncovered a plot, said that some of the council of eleven, my moot, had been collaborating with men. How they plotted to overthrow my rule and remove me from the council, that a revolt was inevitable and that we were the minority, that my kin supported them. I was such a fool, blinded by rage I failed to see what was right under my snout, and instead saw lies and mistruths, enemies where there were none, schemes and skulduggery where it didn't exist. Blaze was clever, he manipulated me and I was unaware that it was he that was the true traitor. It was him that sold his black heart to the mage, sold it for power and control at my expense. Only when I realised how stupid I had been, did I see the real Blaze, the power hungry creature that would bring ruin to my kin and blight our species in the eyes of humanity.\" Galdor fixed his stare on Alduce, his huge eyes sombre as he told his story.\n\n\"Why would dragons trust the mage?\" Alduce interrupted. Immediately he shrunk back against the cavern wall, realising what he had done. He had accidentally interrupted the dragon. But Galdor seemed unconcerned, caught up in the telling of his tale.\n\n\"A good question,\" Galdor said. \"I believe the mage was extremely powerful and he was able to shield himself from our ability to see his lies. His powers of persuasion must have been enhanced by his magical abilities. He wormed his way into Blaze's confidence with promises of power and wealth and Blaze, consumed with his greed, gave his words credence with the other dragons. No doubt making promises of his own to convince and manipulate them. At the time, it wasn't obvious to me, but being stuck here, with only time to reflect, I have though much about the events and how they transpired that day.\n\n\"He must have been powerful indeed,\" Alduce said.\n\n\"I trusted Blaze as he manipulated me into hunting down the mage he said was responsible for the unrest in our kin. My vanity helped fuel his untruths and give credence to his lies. He told me he followed the mage and overheard him conspiring with the moot, convincing them I was a weak leader. That they would prosper under a stronger and smarter king. It angered me that my kin would think so little of me and that anger blinded me to the convincing ruse that Blaze had spun. He said the mage turned their heads with the promise of his hoard and when he mentioned this, I coveted it too. I should have known this was a lie, but I was too obsessed. Everyone knows of our obsession with gold and jewels, and it was once a great addiction with me. Indeed, it is partly why I am trapped in this dark cavern. I trusted Blaze and he promised to lead me to the mage's secret stronghold, where we could not only confront him, but claim his hoard for our own. He told me that it had to be done that night, as this would be the only chance we had before the mage convinced the moot to rebel against me. We must strike now, the chance wouldn't come again. So it was that I set out, unprepared with only Blaze's story and no real evidence. He tricked me into acting before I had time to think. I should have found out more about this mystery mage, who he was and what his powers were, what abilities he was proficient in.\"\n\nAlduce hung on the dragon's every word in awe. This mighty beast was by no means stupid; in fact, he displayed an intelligence that was so much more than Alduce had ever imagined. This dragon was completely different to his preconceived expectation of the man eating, flame breathing, monsters of legend.\n\n\"Blaze led me far from our home, the Lifting Plateau,\" Galdor continued, shaking Alduce from his reverie, \"and we flew for hours into the deep wilderness where no man or beast had made their home. Even the trees and plants were scarce where we travelled, the blighted lands barren and empty. We landed close to a range of caves, deep black holes that ate into the mountainside, foreboding passages that only led to my downfall. Blaze said he had followed the mage here and watched him as he disappeared inside the mountain, where, Blaze had it on good authority, the mage had hidden his lair. And his gold.\n\n\"I was eager to end this mage and his plans to undermine my rightful position and barged by Blaze, into the cave he said the mage used. We dragons can see well in the dark, our eyes are no match for most, except probably owls, their eyes and a dragon's have much in common. Alduce stored this snippet of information away. Something else to ponder at a later date... if he survived.\n\n\"So, I led and Blaze followed, he guided me this way and that, turn left here, he would say, I think I can smell his scent, or take the middle fork, I see a footprint here or a disturbed stone there. Little did I know he had visited these caves before and this trip wasn't his first time inside the mountain. Fool I was, I took heed of his words, followed his advice without thought or question. We arrived at the mage's lair, quiet and stealthy, but he knew we were coming, he was expecting me and my duplicitous companion. They had prepared a trap and I had fallen foul of their subterfuge. We exited the labyrinth of tunnels and entered a large cavern, lit by globes similar to the one you carry with you now.\" Both sets of eyes glanced down instinctively at the glowing orb. Galdor was lost in the moment and Alduce waited for his gifted story-teller to continue.\n\n\"We could see the mage across the expanse of the cavern, he was through an archway that glistened with light and it looked like a cave within a cave. Blaze said we should enter into his inner cave, confront him and take his gold, he was sure this would be where the mage hid his valuable hoard. I should have suspected something was amiss, but I had been goaded and cajoled by Blaze for weeks and the red mist of my anger distorted my reason and shielded the truth from my eyes.\n\n\"I leapt from where we crouched and pounced through the archway into the smaller cave. As I sprang into action, the mage turned and smiled at me, quite unperturbed. He greeted me with contempt as he scorned me for my stupidity, and he told me of their scheme and how I had fallen for the web of lies he concocted with Blaze. As I stood looking back into the main cavern, the archway I had passed under started to reduce. I learned, much too late, that it wasn't another cave I had jumped into, but a passage to another world, this world, this very cave.\n\n\"The mage had opened a portal between my home world and yours, and they had tricked me into passing beyond the archway, lured me with false intent and trapped me here. The archway shrank as the mage controlled the portal, making it too small for me to return through. He attempted to jump back across the threshold of the ever shrinking archway and return to Blaze, who remained safely on the other side. A fierce anger welled up inside me, we dragons can often be led by our emotions, and I unleashed my wrath upon the mage. I truly believe he thought me peaceful enough that I would not be a threat to him. Perhaps Blaze had manipulated him too, as the black dragon rumbled his laughter from beyond the portal. I spewed a fiery blast from my jaws and engulfed the mage in a torrent of flame. His hair and clothing ignited and his skin and flesh melted like wax as it slewed from his bones. As he died, his magic died with him. The archway, now reduced to a circle the size of my head, a window on the cave wall, winked out of existence forever. The last sight that I saw of my home world was a gloating black dragon, victorious in his schemes as the rock wall solidified and he disappeared for ever.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Alduce dipped his quill into the inkpot, his steady hand recording his thoughts as the nib scratched across the pages. He took great care when he wrote in the tomes bound in green dragonhide, not only for their rarity and value, but because the precious hide of scales had been a gift from Galdor.\n\nThis particular journal was dedicated solely to his shape changing, the sorcery and the science of how he had transformed, the ingredients and the way in which he had prepared them, and his feelings and observations. He wrote of his experience and how he felt, the intense pain and the unexpected ecstasy that consumed him when he had transformed into the dragon's form.\n\nWhen he finished documenting his findings in the heavy paper pages, he set the huge book aside, leaving it open once again, allowing the ink to dry. He would hate for his writing to smudge the precious hide bound paper. He reached for and opened another scale bound tome. This new book was one he used specifically to record information about dragons. Galdor's skin had given him enough material to make many such books. He started writing down what he had discovered about the mother and her nest alongside all the other research he had managed to collate. Anything he could find in old books or local myths, gleaning information and talking to people who claimed to have seen or encountered dragons, would be recorded in this volume. That and his own encounters with these wondrous creatures, every detail important. With his new found ability to transform into a dragon himself, he expected to fill the pages with his own experiences too.\n\nHe outlined a sketch of a dragon, drawing a human figure to scale, then on a whim, added the giant crow he'd seen upon his return with the stolen egg. He would note down more about that encounter later, he planned to do a little research on the giant bird and find out what it was. It had certainly been unusual, another subject he would eventually get round to learning about.\n\nHis head felt better now the pounding had faded to a dull ache, but his buttocks had gone to sleep and his fingers tingled with cramp. How long had he remained in one position, writing? Standing, he stretched and his bones cracked at the movement. He had sat longer than planned, lost in his writing and his musings. Something Caltus had often chided him for when he was an apprentice.\n\nHe was eager to test the transformation again, but first he would eat and drink again, his body craved more sustenance. Transformation, he was to learn, took a lot out of a person.\n\nHe bustled round his kitchen, whistling tunelessly to himself. Putting together a huge meal of bread, cheese, and cold meats, he added dried fruit, mainly peaches, of which he always had a large store. They were his favourites. He drew a jug of cold water from his well, staying clear of ale or cider, imagining with slight amusement the havoc a drunk dragon could cause. Alcohol was best avoided when you practiced magical transformations.\n\nThe well water was fresh and cold, and he drank it down greedily. Alduce had bored through the rock when he first discovered the cave, tapping into a natural subterranean spring. It would have taken a year's solid labour, carving and drilling through the tough bedrock, without a little help from his magic.\n\nHe sat and ate, wolfing down his meal until his grumbling stomach was silenced and his hunger sated. He also emptied the water jug, drinking more than he needed in an attempt to combat the after effects of future dehydration.\n\nHe was subconsciously preparing for his next transformation and had already decided that he was going to attempt it again.\n\nMaking up his mind, he decided he couldn't wait. If he thought about the pain he might put it off.\n\nHe left his laboratory once more, still wearing yesterday's clothes. He would need to wash and change soon, it didn't pay to neglect the smaller comforts of being civilized, even when he lived on his own.\n\nExiting the cave he was surprised to see it was dark and much later than he expected. The black blanket of sky above was decorated with a million distant stars. Climbing the steep path to the mountain top, he sat next to the bones and skull used for the initial metamorphosis. He wouldn't need them now and should gather them up and take them inside. The bones would fetch a good price with master Bervus. Perhaps he would keep the skull, small though it was. He felt a strange connection to the unborn dragon and decided that he would hold on to it. It was an unusual feeling and he wondered where it had sprung from. Sentiment wasn't something he usually suffered from. Being a man of science he was normally extremely practical.\n\nAlduce removed his clothes, folding them neatly and placed the small skull on top, piling the bones from the spell circle next to them. The Dragon pendant swung forward as he bent down with the bones, the artefact had played an integral part in the shape changing: the power and magic it possessed were almost limitless and he wouldn't be able to change without it.\n\nHe considered himself lucky to have acquired the dragon pendant, Flaire artefacts were hard to come by and he had certainly earned his."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "\"Come, Alduce,\" Galdor said, \"come and meet the mage who trapped me here.\" The dragon turned and retreated into the darkness of the cavern looking back over his shoulder, \"And bring your light with you, there is something I believe you should examine.\"\n\nAlduce stood and brushed away the dust from the cavern floor. Picking up the light orb, he followed the dragon, mindful of Galdor's tail as it flicked from side to side a few feet off the floor. He imagined with some trepidation the damage a tail like that could cause if he were struck by accident, far less deliberately.\n\n\"Meet the nameless mage,\" Galdor said, a hint of humour in his voice. \"He lies where he fell, no gold or treasures did he have. Even though he was in league with Blaze, I do not think my black hearted adversary ever intended for him to survive, but instead to be trapped on this side of the portal with an angry dragon. Circumstances dictated he die with me, but had he survived and made it back through the archway to my own world, I suspect his life expectancy would have been short. He served his purpose and would have no further use to Blaze, of that I am sure. I do not know what lies he was fed or what promises were made to him. He surely must have believed it was worth the risk, meddling with our kind. He was no match for the black dragon's treachery.\"\n\nGaldor sniffed the corpse that lay at his feet, blackened like an overcooked roast, ancient and mummified. What remained of the skin was stretched tightly over the skull, its lipless mouth preserved in a deathly grimace.\n\n\"He looks like he's grinning,\" Alduce remarked, \"although I doubt his thoughts were pleasant while you seared his living body to charcoal.\"\n\n\"He deserved his fate,\" Galdor snapped, \"I fought for my freedom when I realised their game. He wouldn't be this way had he not intended me harm!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry Galdor, truly I am,\" Alduce replied, realising he had a new found respect for the imprisoned dragon. \"This man made a choice to oppose you, I am only here by chance and do not intend you any harm. I gave you my word that I would do everything I could to help you.\" Waving his hand at the charred corpse of the mage, he continued. \"You will have to excuse my comments, it's my way of dealing with a difficult situation. I don't wish to end up like the mage,\" adding a lot more quietly, \"or in your belly.\"\n\nThe cavern was thick with tension, Alduce and the dragon faced each other with only the orb to light the scene. He was afraid for his life, could see no means of escape and Galdor was too clever for him to talk his way to freedom. If he had overstepped the mark and angered the dragon, then so be it. He had managed to put on a brave face and keep himself going on sheer nerves alone. But those nerves were wearing thin and turning to hysteria. He could see no solution to his problem. He straightened his back and stared at Galdor. Two terrifying dragon eyes stared back unblinking and Alduce didn't know what to expect. He was shocked when Galdor started to chuckle, a deep rumbling sound that was quite infectious.\n\n\"Forgive me, Alduce. I am not use to dealing with men. Seeing the mage after telling you my story has opened old wounds. I was angry at being deceived, reliving the events is unpleasant for me. You show a spirit that is worthy of a dragon and I have been rude to the only intelligent guest I have had in over a century.\"\n\n\"A century! You've been trapped in this darkness all this time? One hundred years of imprisonment without seeing the sun. Galdor, that's terrible.\" Alduce was genuinely sympathetic to Galdor's plight, the thought of being trapped in an underground cavern for days was bad enough in his mind. Years would be unbearable; one hundred years was unimaginable.\n\n\"I too would be angry and bitter if our positions were reversed. There is no need for forgiveness, I was flippant because I was scared. I didn't stop to think. I didn't know. How have you survived so long? What do you... eat?\" Alduce asked the second question before thinking it through. He was now deeply entangled in Galdor's predicament and he hoped apprentice sorcerers wasn't the answer to his stupid question.\n\n\"I can see we have both formed pre-conceived ideas regarding one another. I believe I have misjudged you too, Alduce. Despite my predicament, I was once a good judge of character and my stay here has undermined that. What say we start anew? A fresh beginning is what is needed here.\" Galdor reared up and spread his wings.\n\n\"Greetings Alduce, I am Galdor the Green and I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I have been trapped in this underground cavern for over one hundred years and I am not my usual self. I'm sure you can appreciate why, after hearing my tale. I would be eternally grateful if you could help me with my plight, however, should you wish to leave, I will not stand in your way, nor will I eat you or burn you to death, like the unfortunate stinking mage,\" he snorted.\n\n\"I am able to sleep for long periods of time,\" Galdor explained, \"decades or longer, it's something dragons can do. I can preserve my strength that way without the need for food, which I admit, is incredibly scarce down here. I've managed to scavenge a few meals over the years, but only when something wanders into my prison.\" He didn't mention what that something was and Alduce didn't feel the urge for him to elaborate.\n\nHe was stunned, he had no words to express the relief he felt. Galdor had offered him his freedom with no repercussions or fear of death and yet all he could think to say was, \"Stinking mage?\"\n\n\"Yes, he stinks, but not of charred flesh. He stinks of a strong magic. I can smell it from his corpse even after all these years, like an acrid taste, bitter and foul.\"\n\nAlduce stepped forward and inhaled deeply but could smell nothing. Galdor gave another rumbling chuckle as Alduce sniffed.\n\n\"Can humans smell magic?\" he asked Alduce. \"Tell me you can, tell me he stinks of it.\"\n\n\"No, Galdor, I smell nothing. The mage is totally free from any odour I can detect, be it magic or decay. However,\" Alduce crouched down and stretched out his hand, \"I can feel it,\" he looked back to find Galdor's huge snout crowding in behind him. \"And you are correct, it's strong!\"\n\nRunning his hand along the prone form of the dead mage, he pulled it back as if burned, causing Galdor to withdraw his head.\n\n\"Sorry, Galdor, I didn't mean to make you jump.\" He smiled at the thought of someone his size startling such a huge beast.\n\n\"I was taken unawares by the power I feel emanating from the dead mage. After one hundred years any residual magic he may have held on to should long have dissipated.\" He waved his hand, as if shaking off a cramp. \"My hand is tingling from the magic I feel, as if the body is charged, like the air before a thunder storm.\" He rubbed his hands together. \"Interesting,\" he murmured almost to himself, \"very interesting.\" Galdor leaned back in, observing the man.\n\n\"If he died over one hundred years ago, why is his body still whole? He should be naught but dust and bone,\" Alduce mused, more to himself than his large acquaintance.\n\nHe ran his hands back over the dead mage and as he reached the man's neck he slowed down, fumbling through the folds of what remained of his robe. He pulled out a chain and untangled it from the remains, looping it over what was left of the charred head. As he did so, the corpse disintegrated before his very eyes, the rags crumbling and the remains of the mage withering until there was nothing left but dust and old bones, stained and pitted as if they had been exposed to the elements and eroded by time.\n\n\"Strong magic,\" Galdor said in Alduce's ear. \"That is what I have been smelling. That is the answer to why he remained whole. You have removed what preserved his body and he perished before our eyes.\"\n\nAlduce held up the chain and a small shape dangled down, a beautifully crafted pendant, fashioned in the image of a dragon. It appeared to be made of metal and shone as it caught the light from the orb. \"I've never seen anything like this. The metal is light and hasn't tainted, even though the mage was engulfed in flames. There's no sign of any soot or tarnish. It must be substantially strong too, as it didn't melt.\"\n\nStepping away from the remains, he instructed the dragon, \"Sniff the mage now Galdor, can you still smell magic from his bones?\"\n\nGaldor sniffed, drawing air in through his huge nostrils, making a sound like a strong wind on a blustery day.\n\nNudging the skull with the tip of his snout, he answered Alduce's question. \"I can smell no magic. It smells as it should. Dead. Very old and very dead, that is all.\"\n\n\"And what if you smell the pendant?\" Alduce asked. Galdor leaned in, eyeing the small talisman hanging from the chain in the sorcerer's fist and repeated his sniffing. \"Strong magic, stinks like all human magic, yes, potent and powerful. Do you know what it is Alduce? I believe this might be how the portal from your world to mine was controlled. It stands to reason, powerful magic would be required for a spell of that magnitude. I remember when I flamed the mage,\" he stopped eyeing the tiny dragon pendant and looked directly at Alduce. If a dragon could look sheepish, Alduce guessed, this was as close as it got. \"That is when the portal started to shrink.\" The dragon concluded.\n\n\"You may just have something there, Galdor. I suspect the pendant is some kind of focal charm that can store magic. It certainly feels powerful, extremely powerful. If the mage was using this to assist in a bridge between our two worlds, when his life was ended,\" Alduce didn't belabour that point, \"his hold on the magic would have ended and his control over it too, causing the spell to end.\"\n\nGaldor was enthralled, hanging on each word Alduce spoke. \"Alduce,\" he purred, \"do you think it would be possible, since you now possess this magical charm, that you could use it to re-open the way home for me?\"\n\nAlduce held the chain at arm's length, studying the spinning dragon charm as it twirled at the end of the chain, the excited dragon waiting for his answer.\n\n\"Galdor,\" he replied, \"Why don't we see? As my master is fond of telling me, you never know until you try!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Alduce stood on the mountain top, the cold wind chilling his naked body, the hairs on his skin standing on end once again. He reached for his magic, touching its source and drawing it into the Flaire pendant around his neck. The same dragon pendant he had lifted from the body of the dead mage so many years ago.\n\nThe sky brightened as a flash of lightning streaked down and Alduce focused the power at his command, using it as a catalyst for the transformation. This time he would only need to concentrate on changing from his human form to that of the dragon hidden inside, no other ingredients necessary after the initial spell.\n\nHe released the magic, letting it flood out from the artefact and into his body. Willing the change and fixing the image of the dragon in his mind's eye.\n\nHis skin burned as he felt the transformation take hold for the second time, human skin changing to black metallic scales, blood pounding through his veins, liquid fire coursing through his very being. The pain intensified to an unbearable level and only when he was close to losing consciousness, did it begin to fade. He fell forward onto his knees, arms outstretched. Where his hands had been, long claws sprang forth, black talons bursting from what had moments before been his fingertips.\n\nHis whole body stretched, growing larger in both length and height. His arms and legs metamorphosed into a dragon's limbs and wings emerged from his back, increasing in size until they were fully formed. Alduce didn't feel any more pain after the burning sensation subsided. As his form changed he experienced a stretching sensation and imagined if he were a tree growing this quickly, this is what it would feel like.\n\nThrowing his head back, he opened his newly acquired jaws and roared into the night sky. Powerful dragon lungs sounded out across the mountainside as the transformation finished. Where he had stood as a man, now a huge black dragon with a star of silver on its chest, took his place.\n\nHe extended his wings, and the leathery hide snapped like a mainsail as they unfurled to their full span. He flapped them experimentally, feeling the power and knowing how easily they would lift him skyward. Muscles rippled under the scaly hide that cloaked his back, their strength incredible.\n\nHe was ready, he knew he could fly, instinct had taken over and he crouched low to the ground and sprang upwards, huge back legs propelling him skyward.\n\nHe felt invincible. Nothing could stop him.\n\nHe was a dragon.\n\nAs he leapt from solid ground into the air, his wings took over, using minimal effort as they propelled him higher with each muscular stroke. It was as easy as breathing, with no conscious thought required, just a natural and instinctual process.\n\nAlduce rose, higher and higher, climbing from the mountain top as his wings pushed him into the sky. The ground receded and he basked in the euphoria of flight as it washed through his entire body.\n\nHe was flying. No effort needed, no practice, no fear of falling. No learning was necessary, his dragon form knew what to do. Even though his mind was still human, his body was all dragon, from the tip of his snout to the point of his tail, and he relished it.\n\nRoaring, he felt pleasure at the sound of his new voice. Setting his wings to glide, he sped through the darkness. His dragon eyes allowed him to see clearly, even though daylight had long since faded. Like an owl, the ability came naturally to him. He remembered Galdor's words and the comparison the green dragon had made. Instinct took over.\n\nAs he dropped back towards the ground, he tilted his wings, angling them to catch the air, stopping him from crashing back into the mountainside and propelling himself level with the land, wings set, gliding a few dragon widths above the rocks. His night vision picked out the form of a deer, warm blooded and scared as it fled before him. He could smell it, taste its fear as it scrabbled across the rocky ground, terror clouding its ability to flee from the massive predator above.\n\nAlduce tipped a wing, banking around as the deer veered to his left. Extending his talons, he prepared to strike. Then, at the last second he retracted his claws and skimmed over the deer, leaving it to run free. He would not kill for pleasure in his dragon form. He trumpeted a salute to the reprieved animal and pumped his wings once more towards the heavens. He gained height with ease, this time flying down to the lowlands and meadows until he reached inhabited lands. Small villages and hamlets stood out in the darkness\u2014their windows shone brightly making them easily seen from above.\n\nAlduce flew on, testing his abilities, climbing high then diving as fast as he could, pulling up at the last second and skimming treetops, down draughts from his huge wings disturbing the leaves like the wildest of gales. He twisted and pivoted, his manoeuvres agile and skilful despite his size, pushing his abilities and revelling in the thrill of the flight.\n\nAfter a few hours, he realised his flight had taken him much farther than he believed possible. He had become so engrossed in the act of flying that he hadn't noticed how far he had travelled. Before him glowed the lights of the city of Learning. A journey which had taken him days on horseback had taken only one night of flying.\n\nHe was sorely tempted to fly over the city and examine it from above, perhaps land on a rooftop of one of the larger buildings, but he decided against it. The buildings may not support his weight and Learning's residents might be afraid at the sudden appearance of a dragon, a creature that hadn't been seen in this part of the world for countless years.\n\nA solitary figure stared up from the city walls, peering into the darkness. With keen dragon sight, Alduce was able to witness an astonished expression on the guardsman's face. The man peered out into the darkness in disbelief. Alduce wondered if anyone would believe him if he told the tale of a dragon materialising out of the night sky.\n\nTurning around, he veered away from the warm lights of humanity, departing the city with a renewed vigour. Beating powerful wings, he rose majestically, disappearing silently into the darkness. He knew exactly which direction he needed to head, his internal dragon sense like a compass pointing the way home, back to his laboratory in the mountains."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Alduce was aware of Galdor's intent stare as he focused on the power of the dragon pendant. He opened himself to the magic, drawing on the energy he could feel stored inside it. He had used magical artefacts before and was aware of how they worked, storing latent energy that a sorcerer could access to enhance their power.\n\nWhat he didn't expect when he reached for the source of the magic was the incredible reservoir of power stored within such a small charm. He felt the magic brimming within the small metal dragon, much more than should be possible for its size and recalled Galdor's words.\n\nStrong magic, stinks like all human magic, yes, potent and powerful.\n\nThe green dragon wasn't wrong and Alduce flinched as lightning crackled inside the dark cavern and surged into the pendant dangling from the chain he grasped in his fist. Galdor's breath whistled as he exhaled and Alduce knew he wasn't the only one who felt the strength of the magic called forth. He wasn't sure what to do next, as the power was magnified through the swinging form of the small metal dragon. Before he had any time to decide how to contain such an abundance of magic, eight small trails of what appeared to be lightning leapt from the metal dragon towards the cavern wall.\n\nEach individual streak of the magical lightning spread out like points on a compass and struck the rock, north, north east, east and so on until eight glowing metal shafts were illuminated on the cave wall.\n\nThe magical lightning travelled from each point, joining and creating a circle which gathered speed, energy and magic, moving faster and faster until it was so fast that it blurred into one. The cave wall swirled before his eyes and inside the circle a point of light formed. Alduce was in control and felt that at any time he could stop the magic, by closing the opening he had created, even though it was new to him. Something special was happening and he wanted to see what this unknown magic could do. The metal rods had been set in the cavern wall deliberately and must somehow be connected to the mage's original spell. The spell that had opened a passageway between Galdor's world and his own.\n\nThe light at the centre expanded, rippling like the reflection of sunlight on water, blurred shapes came into focus and Galdor gasped as the image expanded and steadied.\n\n\"Alduce,\" the dragon crooned, \"you have done it! You have restored the archway. You are truly a sorcerer of great knowledge and power. You have opened the way home for me after more than one hundred years.\"\n\nThe gratitude in Galdor's voice was like a cold drink on a hot day and Alduce drank it down. The feeling from this proud and powerful creature, paying a lowly apprentice such a magnanimous compliment, was overwhelming.\n\n\"Galdor,\" he whispered, \"I am but an apprentice and you pay me a great compliment for accidentally stumbling across the answer you so desperately desired.\"\n\n\"Well then. Apprentice you may be now, I can only believe when you become a master, you will be the most powerful human who ever practiced magic! I would dearly love to stay and discuss the how and the why, Alduce, my rescuer, but I fear to waste another second stuck in this dank prison. I must return and see how the years and that black hearted dragon have changed the home I once knew.\" The dragon pushed his long neck through the window the portal had created, as if testing it. He withdrew his neck and shook his head then turned to face Alduce.\n\n\"You asked me a boon when we made our deal, sorcerer. Name it now and I will grant it.\"\n\nAlduce slowly nodded, \"My boon, mighty Galdor, was not to meet my end in this cave,\" he grinned. \"And remaining on the outside of your belly is reward enough for me.\"\n\nGaldor roared a rumbling dragon laugh.\n\n\"I desire no more,\" Alduce continued, \"to see you gain your freedom is more than enough payment. It's not every day I'm given the opportunity to meet a dragon.\"\n\n\"You are a humble man, Alduce, I doubt there are many among your race that would turn down such an offer. It gives me hope for the human race.\"\n\nThe dragon tucked one leg under his chest and bent the other in an imitation of a bow.\n\n\"I will remember this and the lesson you have taught me here today, that dragon kind and human beings can become friends.\" The dragon stood and raised himself up onto his hind legs, extending his wings. A gold shimmering light emanated from around him, growing brighter and like a snake shedding its skin, Galdor did the same with his. Dragon scales and hide slid from his body and the new scales beneath gleamed like a rainbow as multiple colours washed over his body then settled on the green that was Galdor's colour.\n\n\"I leave you my hide of skin and scales. A sorcerer such as yourself will find many uses for it, I am sure,\" the reborn dragon said. Stepping from his discarded skin, Galdor leapt through the portal. Alduce watched in amazement as the dragon turned and pushed his head back through the cave wall. He spoke, as if talking through an open window, this time from his own world.\n\n\"Galdor the Green owes you much more than the hide he has shed and the magical necklace you hold. Remember this Alduce, for I shall not forget. If you ever chance to visit this world, seek me out.\" Galdor pulled his head back through the portal and called from the other side.\n\n\"Quick now, close the archway behind me...\"\n\nAlduce let go the magic he held and the window between worlds started to recede, slowly closing. Just before the light on the cave wall winked out, he heard Galdor's voice, muffled and distant, \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe portal and his voice faded, leaving the young apprentice sorcerer alone in the now empty cavern. The light orb pierced the darkness, shining over the dead mage's bones. All that remained of the dragon was his magnificent hide and an unimaginably tall tale that no-one would ever believe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Alduce finished recording the night's events in the green scaled tome, bound with Galdor's hide. His fingers were numb from writing, cramming everything he remembered onto the pages. As soon as he had returned to his laboratory, he started writing so he would remember each little detail of the transformation and the flight.\n\nThe wonderful flight.\n\nEven the smallest detail or feeling might be vital to his ongoing research. Shape changing wasn't unheard of amongst sorcerers, mages or even witches. As far as he was aware, however, no-one had managed to become one of the rarest and mythical creatures ever to exist: a dragon.\n\nAlduce had been fascinated by dragons and their lore even before his unexpected meeting with Galdor. After the green dragon escaped his imprisonment, Alduce returned to his master. Caltus was pleased with the amount of black mushrooms he'd gathered.\n\nWhen he told Caltus of his encounter with Galdor, his master accused him of eating some of the mushrooms and hallucinating everything, scolding him for getting high when he should be working and learning.\n\nAlduce protested his innocence and eventually convinced his master the dragon was real and so was his part in assisting with Galdor's release. There was a dragonhide waiting to be retrieved, deep within the safety of the caves. Incontrovertible proof that Alduce's tale was true. Caltus hummed and hawed, trying to pick holes in his telling of the story. He wasn't going to journey to the Pendron Mountains on a fool's errand, he wanted to be positive Galdor and his gifted hide existed. But he relented when Alduce produced the small dragon pendant and showed it to the old sorcerer.\n\nCaltus recognised the metal at once and made Alduce tell him everything again, then a third time for good measure, nodding here and there as the young apprentice repeated each and every event. He rigorously questioned his apprentice, making Alduce elaborate when he required more information.\n\nThis was where Alduce had learned his attention to detail. His old master had often emphasised the importance of recording all the information, however insignificant it may appear. Hidden gems, the old man had told him on many an occasion. You never know what hidden gems the details can hold.\n\nCaltus told Alduce about the Flaire, the metal his dragon artefact, as he called it, was made of. The metal was able to hold great quantities of magic and could be used as a conduit to amplify sorcery. He had given his apprentice access to many books and scrolls, collected over the years. While there wasn't much information about the Flaire or its properties, between them they had pieced together a working knowledge of the potential of the small dragon on the chain. Alduce had tried to give the Flaire artefact to Caltus, he was his master after all and it was only right that the old man should take charge of such a valuable and powerful charm.\n\nMaster Caltus had refused, quite vehemently, telling his apprentice that while the temptation to own such a piece was great, everything he knew about such artefacts suggested that they did not just happen to be found by accident. He told Alduce that the Flaire dragon had sought him out for a reason. If Galdor's passage of time had been correct, and there was no reason to doubt a dragon as they were known to be extremely accurate time keepers, then the pendant had waited for over one hundred years for a new neck to hang round and it wasn't his. The respect Alduce already held for his master had increased tenfold that day. Even now, he still missed the old man and his infinite wisdom.\n\nLeaving the newly penned page open to dry, he contemplated his next move. He wanted to learn more about dragons, their behaviours and their culture. From the information Galdor had shared with him, he now knew they weren't the beasts from a bard's tales, all fire breathing and gold hoarding. They were intelligent and social creatures, with their own society, laws and rulers. He wanted to study them, speak with them and learn all about dragons first hand and he was now able to do so, as one himself. If he could travel to Galdor's world he would be able to live with the dragons there and study them, if they accepted him for one of their own. Perhaps it would be prudent to find somewhere else to practice being a dragon first, before he ventured into the unknown.\n\nHe didn't know what to expect and wondered if a real dragon would be able to sniff out a shape changer. If they learned his secret, how would they react? Would they punish him for stealing the unhatched egg? How would they view his actions and what he had done to complete the transformation?\n\nHe hoped if dragons knew what he was, they wouldn't be offended and seek to punish him. He did feel a little uncharacteristically guilty about the unhatched egg, but didn't know why.\n\nYet more questions that his scholarly mind begged answers to.\n\nThere was only one way to find out. As Caltus often liked to remind him, he would never know until he tried."
            },
            {
                "title": "Discovery",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\n\u2002The Yellow Dragon: draconis flavinium.\n\n\u2002The yellow dragon is one of the more spectacular breeds, not that all dragons are not highly spectacular, however yellows shine like the sun. Their scales are not truly yellow and never uniform in pigment and shade. Study of the yellow's scales has allowed me to reach the following conclusions. The top layer of the scales are an opaque yellow, and while this allows the overall colour to appear a base yellow from afar, on closer inspection, the scales hold a myriad of shades, ranging from a bright golden to a deep burnished orange.\n\n\u2002Viewing a yellow dragon in the morning sunrise, the midday sun or an evening sunset will make the same dragon look like three different specimens.\n\n\u2002Yellows are closely related to their larger cousins, the greens and their characteristics and shape are similar, if not smaller. Their physical shape and distinctive swept back wings make them the perfect candidates for flight. Their competitive nature and confidence in the air make them one of the best fliers, when it comes to aerial prowess.\n\n\u2002One distinctive feature of the yellow, that no other dragon I have encountered so far displays, is the darker 'shark fin' spines. These start behind the horns and grow larger as they run down the length of the neck. Other species neck decoration stops before the wing ridges, but with the yellow, they continue across the back and between the wings, growing largest at the shoulders then decreasing in size as they run along the spine to the tip of the tail, the last fin sitting upright on the tail point, forming a three bladed arrow head.\n\n\u2002Note: I believe that during the evolution of the yellow dragon, while it is one of the smaller species of all draconis, nature has equipped it with an extremely lethal weapon in the form of its unusual tail. The tail itself is all muscle and the three hard tail fins are, by design, tough as steel, incredibly sharp and hold a poison with effects similar to that of a scorpion sting.\n\n\u2002Sunburst the Yellow. (Subspecies: mountus, hill or mountain dragon.)\n\n\u2002I encountered Sunburst early into my dragon studies, or rather he encountered me. He was curious, but also hesitant at the same time. Once my relationship was established, Sunburst grew friendly and I earned his trust. Only then was he happy to converse for long periods, educating me and becoming a great font of dragon lore and behaviour.\n\n\u2002Sunburst displays the typical competitive nature of all yellows and is at his happiest when flying or hunting alongside a friendly adversary.\n\n\u2002Sunburst excels in low flight and his aerial expertise and ability to change direction quickly, make him one of the most competent fliers I have encountered in all the dragon types I have studied. He was also able to outfly Nightstar when flying through forested areas, on the hunt.\n\n\u2002It should also be noted that yellow dragons have green eyes and an acute sense of smell.\n\n\u2002Other dragons will eat out of necessity while yellows will also eat for pleasure and are the gourmets of the dragon world. They love their food with a passion and a yellow will fly for miles in an effort to find a tastier buck or a particular species of fish.\n\n\u2002It is my opinion, that while dragons could never be described as innocent or childlike, the yellow can sometimes feel like the younger sibling of the dragon family.\n\n\u2002Note: Sunburst can appear placid and non-confrontational and is mostly even tempered. However, if he is wronged, slighted or feels he has been taken advantage of, be warned, this dragon has a dark side."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Alduce flew above the land, his black scales gleaming like polished metal in the morning sunlight. The patch of silver scales blazed on his chest like a bright star against the night sky. The star appeared when he transformed, the Flaire artefact melding from rare metal into scales of silver, standing out against the black ones.\n\nAs he flew, Alduce was amazed at how exceptional the sight of a dragon was. Not only could he see admirably in the dark, during the daylight hours his vision was remarkable. Scouring the terrain below his wings, he drifted lazily on the warm air thermals, instinctually catching the heated updrafts rising from the ground.\n\nHe set his wings, holding them outstretched to maximise the lift and rode the air currents as if he had been flying all his life. Alduce created a new portal to travel here and the ground beneath was unfamiliar. This was a new world and he hoped it would be inhabited with real dragons. His main reason for coming here was to practice living as a dragon, flying, hunting, and learning what it was to be the beast he now had the ability to change into.\n\nHe arrived through the portal he created using newly fashioned Flaire spikes. Each set of eight he manufactured took him to a new world. He learned how to fashion the rare metal but, so far wasn't able to influence which world the newly made portal would take him to. He had also discovered other portals that could be used to travel through. But they were static and difficult to locate and he couldn't find much about who had created them or how.\n\nHe now owned three sets of spikes, one set that allowed him passage to the world where he had acquired the egg.\n\nThe set from the underground cavern on the slopes of the Pendron Mountains, which opened a portal to Galdor's home world.\n\nAnd his newest set, which brought him here. Wherever here was.\n\nAlduce wasn't ready to venture to either of the other worlds. He wanted to get familiar with his new form, somewhere new, where he knew no-one and no-one knew him.\n\nHe had made a new set of rods especially for this journey, using the raw Flaire metal Bervus acquired and traded for the dragon remains. Bervus thought he had the best part of their deal, and that might be true as in terms of income the apothecary would generate. Being able to fashion the raw Flaire into rods allowed Alduce the ability to travel to other worlds. That was worth more to him than any profit.\n\nAs he drifted above the countryside he noticed a lake in the distance reflecting in the sunlight. Tilting his wings, he adjusted his course towards the lake, descending towards the grassy hillside, relishing in the speed as he hurtled towards his destination. The lake nestled in a small valley and Alduce followed the undulating land as he came to the water's edge.\n\nTipping his wings, he trailed them in the water as he crossed the shoreline and glided out over surface of the lake, rippling the calm surface. He watched his reflection as it kept pace with him, speeding over the watery mirror below.\n\nAn unexpected realisation came to him, this was the first time he was actually able to see what he looked like in dragon form. He crossed to the far shore and pulled up, turning his huge black wings to catch the air and slow himself down, timing it perfectly and landing gracefully, the pebbles on the beach crunching beneath his talons.\n\nStanding at the water's edge, he peered at his reflection. A huge black dragon with a silver star emblazoned on his chest stared back.\n\nAn impressive sight.\n\nNo mirror would have been large enough for him to appreciate how impressive, in his current form. Examining his image he marvelled at what he had become, coming to the conclusion he was a perfect dragon. Science and sorcery had allowed him to transform, but he never imagined how imposing he would look. He titled his head, it was long and horse shaped, tapering to a snout with protruding nose holes, ridged and slightly upturned. He pulled back his gums in parody of a smile, jaws lined with ivory teeth, each one the size of a man's forearm. The man inside, remembered his encounter with Galdor, how terrified he had been when the green dragon flashed his razor sharp teeth at him.\n\nPiercing yellow eyes, part way between that of cat and snake, glowered from a flat face. Hard boned ridges curved around the contours of his eye sockets, like solid eye brows Alduce tried twitching, almost hypnotised by the effect. Small pointed ears and curved horns sat atop his head and a long serpentine neck thickened as it joined to his body.\n\nLeathery wings jutted out from either side of his spine ridge. Five wicked talons, black and shiny, protruded from each of his claws, each one a weapon, sharp and deadly. His front legs were shorter than the sturdy rear ones and when his talons were retracted, he could use his claws like hands. His larger back legs give him his stability when on land and provided power enough to propel his heavy mass into the air, even from a standing take off.\n\nHis scales were like overlapping shields, providing the legendary protection that made dragons so difficult to harm, black except where the silver ones formed the five pointed star on his chest.\n\nAll in all, he was an impressive sight. A black dragon, a beast of legend, appearing perfect in every way, full of power and truly magnificent.\n\nA sound from behind caused him to jump and he felt foolish as he turned to see a smaller, yellow dragon observing him from the embankment above the lake shore. Magnificent dragons, such as himself should not get startled, but he was only a dragon in shape\u2014he reminded himself\u2014he still possessed the mind of the man.\n\nHe wasn't sure what to do as the yellow dragon eyed him from where he perched on the ridge.\n\nWas there a protocol when dragons encountered one another?\n\nThis is why he was here, to learn, but he wasn't sure what to do, now that he had finally found another of his adopted kin.\n\nThe yellow dragon surprised him for a second time as he dropped his foreleg underneath the front of his body and bent his neck forward and showed deference to the larger black dragon, bowing like a courtier before his liege.\n\n\"Greetings, cousin black,\" he said. \"What do you seek in my lake?\" Alduce could understand the words the dragon spoke, the power of the Flaire artefact, even while manifested as scales, allowed him to understand any language and in turn, be understood.\n\nThe yellow dragon was half his size, but no less spectacular and showed no sign of subservience as he first suspected, speaking clearly as an equal. His bow wasn't from deference but a show of respect.\n\nHe remembered when he had helped Galdor escape. The mighty green had given him the same bow.\n\n\"Greetings yellow cousin,\" Alduce spoke back, his voice gruff and unused, but pleasant sounding to his ears. \"I seek nought, merely caught by my own refection, a moment of vanity, I confess.\" He instinctually knew the yellow dragon was a male, he didn't know how, he just knew, a dragon sense.\n\n\"We dragons can be vain, it is surely in our nature. I need not warn you of the pitfalls of continued indulgence along that path, it will only lead to one's own ruin.\" The yellow dragon's words held a message that Alduce was unable to interpret, but he maintained the appearance of understanding and intelligence before his smaller cousin.\n\n\"Wise words indeed, my friend,\" he replied. He could sense the magic from the yellow dragon, it wasn't as powerful as his own, but it was there, part of its being, crucial for its existence. He imitated the bow, dipping his own head as the yellow had done. \"May I enquire as to whom I address?\" he asked, keeping his tone formal.\n\n\"I am known as Sunburst, my yellow scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I burn across the sky like a celestial fire,\" the yellow replied. \"A little dramatic, I know.\" Then he grumbled, the sound like distant thunder, almost like a chuckle.\n\n\"Your words are as radiant as your yellow scales, friend Sunburst. I suspect when you take flight, two suns light the heavens,\" he mimicked the yellow's chuckle and was happy at the way the grumbling sound made him feel. He would have to record this feeling in his journal as this was something new and unexpected.\n\n\"You flatter me cousin black. I thank you for your kind words.\"\n\nAlduce took an instant liking to Sunburst, his manner was friendly and speaking dragon to dragon was exciting and fun.\n\n\"Now you know my name and have paid me praise,\" the yellow dragon said, \"I would enquire to know yours and perhaps return the compliment.\"\n\nAlduce hadn't considered a dragon name and he could hardly tell Sunburst his human one. He quickly thought of a suitable title that would sound right to a fellow dragon.\n\n\"I am Nightstar the Black,\" he improvised, copying the way Sunburst spoke, \"the star on my chest, silvery and bright, illuminates the darkness.\" He wasn't quite sure were the name had come from, but it felt right.\n\n\"Impressive introduction,\" the yellow dragon chuckled. \"We are a pair of opposites, you and I. You represent the qualities of night, black scales and silver starlight, while I am the day time, golden sunlight, bright and radiant. A balance, I think.\" Alduce liked the comparison. His new yellow acquaintance was right, they were as opposite as day and night. As opposite as dragon and man.\n\nHe wondered at the dragon mind and made a mental note to explore this further. Sunburst was not only intelligent, he was articulate and quick witted with an elegant prose Alduce had not expected from a dragon. He had hoped to learn more about dragons and this chance meeting was providing his first lesson.\n\n\"Cousin Sunburst, I am a stranger to your lands. I have travelled a great distance to meet new kin. It is fortuitous that we have met here on the shores of your lake. Would you share your knowledge of the land with me and educate me in your ways?\" Sunburst remained silent as he appeared to consider the request, contemplating his words.\n\n\"I propose we acquaint ourselves first, I think better on a full stomach and I would like to see how the mighty Nightstar carries himself in flight and on the hunt.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon crouched and then sprung into the air, unfurling his wings as he launched himself skyward. Alduce, now Nightstar, watched the yellow dragon, marvelling at the ease of his movements. The draft from his wings washed over, him causing the long grass on the embankment to ripple like waves upon the water.\n\nThe smaller yellow dragon presented him with a challenge of sorts and the beast within, Nightstar by name, accepted it. He felt he was being tested, given a rite of passage to prove himself worthy. Sunburst wanted to see how well he flew, how good a hunter he was. His dragon sense took over and he leapt into the sky behind the yellow dragon with a determination to prove himself worthy, not only to Sunburst, but also to himself.\n\nSunlight reflected off Sunburst's yellow body, causing him to glow, intense golden rays so bright Nightstar squinted from the glare. The yellow dragon wasn't wrong with his introduction, he was indeed a celestial fire lighting the sky. He was predominantly yellow, the colour deeper on his back and wings, gradually turning lighter as it reached his flanks. His chest was burnished orange and when his scales caught the sunlight a certain way, they glowed pearlescent gold.\n\nNightstar beat powerful wings, climbing above Sunburst and positioning himself where he wouldn't need to squint when he looked at the yellow dragon. The black dragon's wingspan was impressive and a lot wider than that of the yellow. Making the most of his size advantage, Nightstar climbed, higher and higher pulling his body into the air, farther and farther from the ground. Sunburst stayed with him, remaining below the mighty black, never faltering as they ascended. Nightstar turned as he rose, spinning his body in a lazy corkscrew manoeuvre as he pumped his wings. The dark shadow on the ground below diminished, growing smaller the higher he climbed. Even with the ability of his dragon sight, it wasn't long before he wasn't able to see it.\n\nAs they climbed, the air grew colder and the man inside the dragon knew that the atmosphere changed the higher you rose. He looked for Sunburst and was surprised to see he had dropped the smaller dragon and was now alone. Sunburst had levelled off and was gliding, maintaining his height and Nightstar suspected that he had pushed the yellow to his limit, the smaller dragon unable to follow any higher.\n\nBreathing became laboured as Nightstar pushed himself higher, testing his own limits. It became difficult to draw precious oxygen into his lungs, he too, had reached his zenith. He could see the glowing yellow dragon, now far below. Golden sunlight gleaming from his yellow scales make him easy to find in the vast expanse of infinite sky. If Sunburst's sight was half as good as his own, he was sure the yellow would be watching him and would be impressed by his ability to rise so high into the atmosphere.\n\nHe levelled off and set his wings wide, dipping the tip in a salute to Sunburst and was happy to see that the yellow dragon mimicked this action acknowledging him. Breath grew shorter and Nightstar couldn't sustain flight this high any longer. Taking a dragon sized lungful of thin air he rolled his wings and flipped himself upside down, his head now looking beyond the sky and out into the darkness that was the stratosphere.\n\nHis vision swam and he felt light-headed, he was as high as he had ever been and the light-headedness he was feeling was part excitement, part lack of oxygen. It was time to leave this wonderful place before he passed out. A sudden thought panicked him. If he lost consciousness, he didn't know if he would revert back to his human form. Not something he wished to contemplate, given his current location.\n\nTipping his neck backward he spiralled into a dive, folding his black leathery wings tight into his flanks. He gathered momentum, slowly at first, then picked up pace, getting faster and faster. He was aware of Sunburst's position below him and as he dropped, he adjusted his decent to speed past the smaller dragon as he plummeted towards the ground.\n\nSunburst peeled out of his glide and dropped into a dive, following Nightstar as he passed, tucking his yellow body into the slipstream created by the larger beast. The yellow dragon roared in joy and they both hurtled downward together. Sunrise following night.\n\nWhite mists of thin cloud scattered as the two dragons raced through them, streaking ever downward. Nightstar experienced a rush of elation, he never thought being a dragon would be like this. He was more than just a mythical creature and he was more than a man, more than a combination of the two, he was Alduce-Nightstar, creation of science and sorcery, he was...\n\nThe ground loomed before him and all sense of euphoria vanished, his moment of epiphany replaced by the realisation he needed to stop before he collided with the ground. He pulled out of the dive and attempted to open his wings but the air pressure and the speed fought against him.\n\nHe altered his descent reducing his downward angle and tried again. Wind caught in the huge black wings, cracking like a whip as they filled with air, slowing him down. He levelled his flight just in time, pulling up with seconds to spare. He flew low over the lake, talons dragged across the water disturbing the calm surface, pushing up frothy waves. He glided to the far shore and landed feeling his huge dragon heart pound beneath silver scales. Sunburst followed him from his place in the sky and lazily drifted across the lake's surface in a gentle descent, a lot more relaxed and controlled than Nightstar's near fatal plunge. He dropped onto the lake shore and landed gracefully beside the larger black, tilting his triangular head and eyeing the larger dragon.\n\n\"Nightstar, you are well named,\" he said. \"I never saw a dragon fly so high! When I reached my limit, you continued upward, fading into the darkness beyond the sky. Your black scales blended with the darkness, but the silver on your chest blazed fiercely, like a star in the night.\" He slowly shook his head, \"A night star indeed.\"\n\nAlduce, now thinking of himself as Nightstar, grinned inside, his chance choice of name had worked out better than he could have imagined. \"Thank you Sunburst, you flatter me, I think.\"\n\n\"Not at all, cousin black. Not only did you rise into the night that hides above the clouds, you dropped like a shooting star. I thought you were going to crash into the ground! Had you waited a heartbeat longer, you surely would have.\"\n\nInside Alduce glowed with pride, his stupid stunt earned him the respect of a real dragon. He wouldn't tell the yellow how close it had really been, not now that Sunburst believed his near miss to be deliberate and timed to perfection. He impressed the yellow dragon with his antics and was in a good position to use the situation to gather more information.\n\n\"I have been practicing my prowess in the air, I admit,\" Nightstar replied, \"I am happy to see it was worthwhile.\"\n\nHere he was, a human shape shifter who had been flying less than three weeks, getting praise from a dragon who had been flying all his life. His dragon sense and his natural instinct were responsible, he knew, but he felt a huge sense of achievement to have been given this praise. He decided he would take control of this conversation and show Sunburst he was a dragon worth his scales.\n\nWorth his scales? Where did that come from? When he was in dragon form, he noticed he thought like a dragon. Was Sunburst having an influence on his dragon self too? He would be sure to record this in his journal when he returned to being human. Much later. He was enjoying his new found dragon sense too much to think about going home just now.\n\n\"You said we would hunt, friend Sunburst. I am ready.\"\n\n\"As am I, Nightstar. Come, follow me. See if you can keep up.\" He grumbled his chuckling sound as he hopped into the air, looking back to see if Nightstar was with him.\n\n\"Your flight to the heavens was impressive, I grant you. Flying high and flying low are two different things, mighty black. Low valleys and forest trees are more suited to a yellow dragon's skills.\" He blew a trumpeting challenge and sped off, wings beating in a golden blur.\n\nNightstar leapt from the lakeshore in pursuit, the smaller dragon weaving this way and that as he undulated across the ground, flying fast and low. He swept down into a valley and flew along the inclines of the embankments, turning and twisting as he followed the contours and the hills.\n\nCresting a rise, Nightstar chased the nimble yellow as he approached a vast forest. The woodlands were populated with mighty oaks, tall elms and unknown varieties of trees that were new to Alduce. The scholar inside the dragon body made a mental note to return here and examine the leaves of these new and unknown woody giants.\n\nSunburst's statement hadn't been a boast. The smaller yellow flitted through the dense forest like a sparrow in a hedgerow, his size allowed him to pass through gaps in the foliage and branches where the larger Nightstar couldn't fit.\n\nSometimes, when Nightstar was faced with hitting a tree, he would rise above the forest canopy to avoid it and would hear Sunburst rumble his chuckle. The yellow dragon was having fun besting his larger companion, it seemed.\n\nThey carried on through the trees. Sometimes Nightstar was able to follow the twisting yellow shape of Sunburst as he wove through impossibly small gaps, but often needed to seek an alternative path that allowed his larger body to pass. Taking the less direct route meant that Sunburst pulled ahead and even though this wasn't a race, Nightstar was clearly a poor second to the more agile of the two dragons.\n\nThe forest started to thin and the ground beneath dropped away into a huge meadow, stretching off into the distance. Nightstar caught up with Sunburst as the yellow slowed, his frantic wingbeats forgotten as he glided to a halt in the long grass. Nightstar landed next to his new friend and Sunburst turned, as if noticing him for the first time.\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" he chuckled. \"I feared you had been lost in the trees mighty Nightstar.\"\n\n\"You had me at a disadvantage, Sunburst,\" he said allowing the yellow dragon his victory. \"It was a good flight and you are the better dragon when it comes to low flying through dense forests.\"\n\n\"And you when it comes to reaching impossible heights. It appears we both have our strengths and weaknesses. As it is with dragons.\"\n\n\"Wise words,\" Nightstar agreed. The same logic applied not only to dragons, but also to men, if only they would realise it.\n\n\"Now we will hunt. All this flying makes me hungry,\" the yellow dragon announced.\n\nNightstar hadn't eaten since he transformed. His last meal had been as Alduce, consuming human food. Until now he hadn't given much thought to eating while in dragon form. He had been too occupied with his flying and exploring since his arrival on this world. He wondered why that might be, was it something to do with the shape changing? Or could it be, as his research indicated, dragons would eat when hungry and not need to feed again for days or sometimes weeks? He suspected it was probably the latter, everything so far with his new form appeared to follow a natural pattern. It didn't matter to his physical dragon body there was a man inside. His stomach growled at the thought of food and a wave of ravenous hunger washed through him. Nostrils flared as he picked up the sweet scent of something on the wind.\n\n\"You smell them too? Your sense of smell is almost as keen as a yellow!\" Sunburst said, breaking his train of thought. He could certainly smell something, something appetising but he didn't know what it was. The scent was new to him, his dragon senses were different from his human ones and he was still adapting to these new sensations.\n\n\"They smell wonderful,\" he answered, not alerting Sunburst to the fact that he had no idea what it was they were talking about. \"I will follow your lead, yellow cousin. This is your hunting ground and I am your guest.\" Sunburst tipped his head, nodding his understanding, then swayed his short yellow neck from side to side, inhaling through his nostrils and flicking a light blue forked tongue this way and that, tasting the air.\n\n\"Our feast awaits,\" he stated, \"there is no ceremony in the hunt, Nightstar, though I appreciate the respect you have shown me. Eat your fill.\" He sprang from the grass and flapped his wings, keeping just above the ground, the long grasses bent and swayed as the downward strokes raked air over the meadow.\n\nNightstar felt himself salivate as the hunger took hold and he hopped into the air, drawn along by the scent that grew stronger and more pleasant.\n\nThe drumming of hooves was accompanied by a thin cloud of dust as Sunburst suddenly veered skyward and twisted in the air, changing direction. As Nightstar climbed he was able to see the animals spooked by the yellow dragon... and smell them!\n\nDragon senses took over completely as the four legged feast scattered about the meadow. He could sense the heartbeats of the strange animals, feel their terror as they attempted to cheat death. Sunburst chased what could only be described as a large woolly deer, somewhere between a sheep and a stag, its antlered head, barrel body and long legs were covered in a light brown mass of curly wool. It ran, changing direction often, in an attempt to evade pursuit. Sunburst roared as he missed the beast with a desperate lunge, travelling past where the beast had been just a moment before, his talons snatching at empty air.\n\nNightstar soared above the herd, the beast froze as his ominous shadow blocked out the sunlight, casting a patch of darkness over the meadow, startling the creature. That was all the time Sunburst needed to change direction and sink his wicked claws into the beast's back. The dying woolly deer screamed and Nightstar smelled its warm, appetising blood, as its flesh tore open.\n\nInstinct took over and he lost himself in the thrill of the chase. He was distantly aware of Sunburst as he started to devour his kill, but a more pressing need took hold as he singled out a beast for himself. He swooped down, talons facing forward, wings bent back as he went in for the kill. Rage and frustration vented from his mouth, his roar causing the herd to scatter everywhere as he missed his target.\n\nThese creatures were fast!\n\nHe spun, bloodlust coursing through his dragon form and roared once more, a challenge or a warning, he wasn't sure. He needed to make a kill and he needed it now. Looking for the beast that had escaped his first attempt, he banked round and made a second pass.\n\nThis time he was smarter, following the animal as it pivoted and darted in an effort to survive. Nightstar made a lunge and the deer stopped and turned, springing away from where it had expected the dragon to be. This time he was ready for the sudden change in direction and had faked the attack, pulling up short and using his left wing like a sail, he turned sharply into the oncoming path of the terrified animal. His talons sank into the animal, ripping skin and flesh, bones shattered beneath the crushing grip of his talons and warm blood sprayed in a fine mist, tantalising his senses.\n\nUsing his weight, he dragged the surprisingly robust animal to the ground, biting into its succulent neck. His teeth ripped through delicious tasting meat and warm blood filled his mouth, igniting his taste buds. The human part of him, deeply buried in the dragon at present, was a little shocked at the violent way in which he devoured his prey, but he also knew it was the natural order of things. Nature was a harsh mistress and dragons needed to eat.\n\nHe tore flesh from the bones of the dead deer, swallowing down great pieces of divine tasting meat and savouring the raw flavour. This animal grazed on grassy plains, fresh and wild, and the taste filled his senses. A lean dish of sweet meat, its blood and skin fuelling his appetite. Stripping flesh from beast was easy work, using a combination of talons and jaws, he soon reduced the deer to little more than a pile of bones.\n\nThe power a dragon had in its bite combined with the effective use of talons made it a killing machine. Nightstar was a force to be reckoned with, his size and strength coupled with the physical power of his body and the armour of his scales made him feel invincible. The sorcerer inside the dragon wondered if the kill was causing this feeling of power, he would have to catalogue this in his journals too and make a comparison the next time he fed.\n\nHis forked tongue rolled around blood stained teeth, licking them clean and enjoying the lingering flavour.\n\nSunburst swayed across the grass towards him, it was almost funny to watch the way he moved, his belly distended after feeding. But the red blood smeared on his yellow scales was a vivid reminder of the violent kill he had made.\n\n\"Curly bucks, difficult to catch but definitely worth the effort,\" he said. \"My stomach is filled to bursting.\"\n\nNightstar belched, \"Very tasty!\" he could easily devour a second buck. Sunburst may be full, but he was half his size. He peered out across the grasslands in hope of spotting another. \"The herd are long gone,\" Sunburst chuckled. \"They will have fled the plain and found hiding places among the trees. The can hide in the forest and are difficult to spot, their coats help them blend into the undergrowth. We were lucky to catch them in the open, they will be wary for a few days now,\" he chuckled again, \"but they soon forget.\"\n\n\"I didn't realise I was so hungry,\" Nightstar admitted.\n\n\"There's still plenty meat left on my kill,\" Sunburst offered. \"I couldn't eat another mouthful. I think my curly was bigger than yours too.\"\n\n\"But mine was faster and didn't freeze in terror like yours.\"\n\n\"A kill's a kill and mine was definitely the larger of the two,\" Sunburst stated with pride, his competitive nature obvious. \"I am ready for a rest and I always feel drowsy after I gorge.\" He yawned, flashing bloodstained fangs. Witnessing a dragon yawn was an imposing sight. However, Nightstar felt its infectious tug, not sure if it was a human reaction, but unconsciously copying the yellow dragon with a yawn of his own.\n\n\"Now we have flown together and hunted,\" Sunburst said, \"we are more than just acquaintances. You have proven yourself a worthy companion, Nightstar. I would gladly call you friend. You asked about these lands and said you were a stranger. I admit, I have never met a black dragon before, it is rare indeed for a hatchling to remain the colour we are inside the egg, rare and impressive.\"\n\n\"I am what I am,\" Nightstar said, not knowing until now, how rare his colouring was. It would be prudent to avoid having any conversations about his hatching, unsure how to answer any awkward questions that might arise. He attempted to change the subject. \"I'm not completely black, I have my silver scales too.\"\n\n\"Yes you do. I noticed the blood from the curly bucks doesn't stand out on your black scales as it does on my yellow. I need a bath,\" Sunburst yawned again. \"I need a nap first, though.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon turned round and round, like a dog before it settled, lying on the trampled grass with a satisfied sigh.\n\nNightstar felt tiredness descend as he watched his yellow companion lay his head on outstretched front legs and close his eyes. He copied the smaller dragon's actions and turned a few times himself before lying alongside the already snoring Sunburst.\n\nThe black dragon was content. Letting his mind drift, he welcomed sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Red Dragon: draconis rubaria.\n\nThe red dragon comes in many shades, males tend to be a flat solid red and females can range from a fiery scarlet to deep crimson.\n\nRed, along with green is the more common of the dragon pigments and where greens are known to have the more traditional dragon shape, the red is less squat, thinner and sleeker.\n\nAs one would expect, the red dragon is an elemental fire dragon and is capable of producing flame with little effort. Red females are extremely attractive to any male varieties and have an almost hypnotic effect. I have learned that female dragons secrete a hormone designed to attract males when they are in season. When they are ready to clutch, the red female can cause most males to feel a strong attraction towards her. The red female is renowned for producing the strongest scent and this may be why reds are one of the most common colours.\n\nOther traits that are more common in reds than other colours are that they are fond of riddles and have a great love of precious stones, rather than the usual metals such as gold and silver.\n\nThe red is of average size and normally get no larger than forty feet in length. They have wide wings, are robust and resilient and their scales are known to be one of the toughest amongst dragons. Their bodies are heavily armoured even though the adornments look decorative, they are incredibly practical in matters of defence.\n\nSubject: Blood Rose (female, crimson.)\n\nRose (also known as Blood Rose) is practical, friendly and loyal. Life mate to the yellow, Sunburst. She has high eye ridges that make her appear more feminine, if a dragon could be described as such. Her voice is soothing and her manner relaxed and informal. It is my opinion that Sunburst is the envy of many males that inhabit the White Mountains, as his mate is a perfect example of the draconis female."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Nightstar lazily opened one eye and cocked an ear in the direction of the sound that pulled him from his slumber. Sunburst still lay where he was, gently snoring like an old man in his favourite chair. Nightstar heard the noise again, a wet thudding sound that stopped and started with no discernible pattern. Opening his other eye, he slowly raised his head above the long grass and thick bushes that partially obscured him, peering in the direction of the noise.\n\nA large dark shape straddled the carcass of Sunburst's woolly buck, scavenging off the remains. The wet thudding sound was the beak of the biggest bird he had ever seen, pecking flesh from the bones of the dead animal. He remembered the man sized raven outside the cave when he retrieved the dragon egg. This wasn't the same one, obviously, as this was a different world, but it was surely the same species, just larger.\n\nAlduce hadn't come across these birds in any books when he was studying. Master Caltus hadn't mentioned any creatures like these when he had tutored his apprentice. These giant birds must be extremely rare if there were no written records or knowledge of them.\n\nHis second encounter with this species rekindled his interest. He had been too absorbed with his transformation to spend time pondering his first meeting, but now, as he lay there, sleepily observing through the eyes of a dragon, Alduce the scholar awoke.\n\nHe studied the huge black bird, its feathers like dark satin. It fed on the remains of the curly buck, distracted by its feast. He should try and get a little closer and get a better look.\n\nIt was strange how his human brain thought. His dragon eyes saw perfectly, but the man inside the tough hide and scales wanted to creep forward for a better look. Slowly and as quietly as he could, he lifted his bulk from the ground, keeping himself as low as possible so he wouldn't be seen and startle the bird. He crawled like a lizard, crouching with his legs splayed out and wings folded flat, edging closer.\n\nThe bird stopped pecking and looked up to see a dragon bearing down on it. The panic in its black intelligent eyes was plain as it launched into the air, flapping black feathery wings frantically in an effort to evade the dragon. It let out a long caw.\n\nDanger! It squawked, Drake! And Nightstar understood what it had said!\n\nHow could this be? He could understand many languages when he wore the Flaire artefact. Even when it was part of the silver scales that formed the star on his chest, it still performed this function.\n\nBut crows didn't speak, at least not as far as humans were aware. Perhaps when he was a dragon the artefact let him understand other creatures. Did it have new abilities when in its scale form? More mysteries to ponder.\n\nAnother black shape rose from behind the carcass and followed the first into the air, it was smaller and slower and appeared to be a youngster, judging by its size. Alduce now thought that the large bird that had returned his light orb had been a youngster too. Nightstar stood and watched the huge birds disappear into the sky, a mother and its offspring in all likelihood, making their escape.\n\n\"What's all the fuss?\" Sunburst asked as he joined Nightstar.\n\n\"Big birds eating your kill,\" Nightstar replied. \"I've seen... \" he hesitated. He was about to say he had seen their kind before, but that was on another world and might not be easily explained. \"I've seen big birds before, but never that large.\" Sunburst didn't notice the correction, or if he did, he failed to remark on it.\n\n\"Larcrowe,\" Sunburst stated, not surprised at all. \"They scavenge. As is their nature. Scrounging for a free meal.\" The yellow dragon had a way of stating the obvious, plainly speaking and straight to the point. The scholar that listened with Nightstar's ears liked that. And he found Sunburst likeable.\n\n\"Are they common here?\" Nightstar continued, not wanting to seem excited about this species. Would a dragon ask questions a scholar might? He didn't know. Sunburst didn't think it unusual as his answer was matter of fact.\n\n\"Not really. They sometime come across from the eastern lands, they live near the coast in the cooler parts. I think they prefer it, I've never seen them in the far south where it's warmer. I have flown near to their colonies once or twice, but they tend to stay away from dragons and our lands. They are good fliers, not as good as dragons, but good enough. They tend to be hard to catch in the air and not worth the effort. They don't make for good eating, tough and tasteless.\"\n\n\"I would like to see their colonies,\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"Not worth the trip, it's cold and windy in the east and you can smell the salty sea. The salt makes my snout itch. It isn't pleasant there and I don't like it. I prefer the grasslands, much kinder on the snout. And they are noisy! All that squawking and chattering. Mindless noise, just stupid birds.\"\n\nNightstar concluded that Sunburst couldn't understand what the Larcrowe had said when it flew off. But he had. Another interesting discovery he would have to write down in his journals. He was going to be extremely busy when he transformed back to his human self. He decided to change the subject as he sensed, this time from his human side, that there was nothing more to learn from Sunburst about these giant crows other than he had named them Larcrowe.\n\n\"So, Sunburst, you said you would tell me about your land. What is there that a stranger may find of interest?\"\n\n\"You are an odd dragon, Nightstar, you ask many questions.\"\n\n\"It is the way of my kind,\" he improvised. \"Black dragons are born curious and we like to travel. I have journeyed far from my own lands and wish to know what lies beyond their borders.\"\n\n\"And where is it you have come from?\" Sunburst asked. Nightstar needed to come up with an answer to the yellow dragon's question. He quickly scrabbled for a response the yellow dragon would find believable.\n\n\"My home is far to the east, beyond the salty sea you spoke of. An extremely long way from here.\" He hoped it sounded credible. If Sunburst didn't like the east, there was a fair chance he didn't know much about what lay beyond.\n\n\"There is only the vast ocean to the east. You have journeyed from the lands of men beyond the great waters?\"\n\n\"That is correct, my home is across the ocean, far beyond the lands of men.\"\n\n\"Strange, I thought all dragons left those shores in the times of the Great Exodus,\" Sunburst mused. \"It would appear not every dragon came west.\"\n\nAlduce quickly stored this information away. He would have to find out more about this exodus, there was a tale here that was worth hearing.\n\n\"Do the humans not hunt you?\" Sunburst continued, \"Their sorcerers with their foul magic, their warriors with their enchanted blades and magical staffs? Do they not drive you from your lands, take your skin and scales as trophies?\"\n\n\"No. My kin are few and live far from men, in places where only dragons can fly, safe from their reach and their cursed kind.\" He hoped Sunburst would accept this.\n\n\"It is told that the dragons of this land once came from across the great ocean to escape from the clutches of humans. They hunted our kind relentlessly, killing without reason and driving our kin from their homes. In our legends it is known as the Great Exodus. Many died before the crossing and only the strongest managed to traverse the great ocean. Not all our brothers and sisters, it would seem, left to make that crossing. The humans sometimes come here, but this is our land and any that arrive on our shores are chased away, turned back. If they resist, their wooden boats are flamed and they perish. Never again will we tolerate their cruelty.\"\n\nNightstar was surprised to hear the venom in Sunburst's words, furthermore, on his home word, people feared dragons and no man would deliberately seek to confront such powerful creatures. The men from the east must be powerful indeed, if dragons felt it necessary to flee from them.\n\n\"I need to bathe,\" Sunburst declared, changing the subject. \"The blood from the curly buck has dried all over my beautiful scales. Let us return to the lake and clean our hides.\"\n\nHe leapt into the early evening sky, the low sun turning his yellow hide a deep burning orange. Nightstar followed, his black hide paled in comparison to the yellow dragon. He felt he had more in common with the large black crow than the magnificent dragon that had befriended him, unaware he was really a despised human.\n\nBoth Dragons bathed in Sunburst's lake, cleaning their hides in the warm shallow waters until they gleamed. Alduce was enjoying living the life of Nightstar and was thankful the yellow dragon he had met was friendly. He had already pointed out that he thought Nightstar was odd, but he was content to answer his questions. They had flown and hunted together and a bond had been forged. This appeared to be the dragon way.\n\nThe evening sun weakened as it started to drop in the sky. Sunburst took advantage of what was left of the fading heat, sunning himself dry on the grassy shore while Nightstar chased the silvery fish that inhabited the lake. He eventually caught one and snapped it down, the raw fish tasting divine. His dragon taste buds were something else he would have to note, when he finally held a quill in his claw... No, his hand. The more time he spent as a dragon, the more his mind thought that way. Skin and scales, I'll have to keep on top of that, he thought.\n\nHe strode out of the lake, shaking the excess water from his body. It ran off the black waterproof scales easily, some of the drips splashing onto Sunburst.\n\n\"Have a care, Nightstar, you're wetting me. I cannot believe you're still hungry, eating fish now, after you feasted on curly buck.\" He snorted a noise that was as close to laughing as a dragon could manage. \"That will be why you're so large, I suspect, always eating.\"\n\n\"You think me large?\"\n\n\"Indeed, you are one of the largest dragons I have met. You are at least twice my size. Are all dragons across the eastern ocean as big as the mighty Nightstar?\"\n\n\"No, I am larger than most,\" Nightstar told Sunburst not wanting to lie to his new friend anymore that he had to. It did not sit well with him. \"Most dragons are a similar size to yourself. My colour and size are unusual among my community. I'm a bit of a loner, I suppose.\"\n\nNightstar had unconsciously described himself as Alduce. When he thought about it, he had closed himself off from society, living in his remote underground location, locked in his studies. Yes, he had friends, or perhaps they were professional acquaintances. His obsession with his work and constant thirst for knowledge had led to his isolation, living in a cave tunnelled into the side of a mountain. A laboratory he called home. Was it a coincidence that dragons also lived in caves? Perhaps it was the dragon mind that allowed him to see things differently. He had never dwelt on it before, never needed human company, content on his own. It wasn't until he became Nightstar that he realised he liked having a friend, especially a friend who was a yellow dragon. Yes, he was content as a human, but he was happier being a dragon.\n\n\"Well then,\" Sunburst said, \"you need not be alone in these lands. I understand that they are foreign to you and I've been pondering what it is that I find unusual about you. It has been like an itch under my scales since we met. Now I know.\"\n\nNightstar froze. Did the yellow dragon know his secret? Had he worked out the mighty Nightstar wasn't what he pretended to be? Could he smell the human beneath the armour of his scales? What would the yellow dragon do if he knew the truth?\n\n\"Don't look so worried,\" Sunburst rumbled, \"you are a stranger in a new land and our ways must be different from yours. You have travelled far and I understand now. Had I arrived on your shores I would feel the same. Relax and be at peace, friend. You are welcome here. Sunburst the Yellow will be your guide, should you wish it.\"\n\nHe extended his short yellow neck in the now familiar respectful bow and Nightstar was at a loss for words. This creature, this intelligent being had shown him, a stranger and an imposter, kindness and compassion. The dragons of myth burned homes, stole livestock, hoarded gold and breathed fire down on terrified villagers. They were heartless and cruel and not expected to show mercy. How wrong our human perceptions have been, the Alduce part of his awareness thought. He stood up and bowed low to Sunburst.\n\n\"Thank you, Sunburst. Your warm welcome and acceptance are more than I would have expected or deserve. I am truly fortunate to have made your acquaintance.\"\n\n\"You're not really, you know,\" Sunburst chuckled. \"It took me all my courage to approach you when I first saw you. I wasn't sure how a large black dragon, twice my size, would react to an impudent little yellow sneaking up on him. I believe you are not alone in being fortunate.\" Sunburst stood up and spread his now dry wings. \"Come, let us retire for the evening. I know of a cavern that isn't far and it is comfortable and large enough for oversized guests.\"\n\nHe sprang into the air, pivoted mid flap and flew towards the setting sun. Nightstar, relieved that the yellow dragon accepted him at face value, took off after his new friend. His first encounter in this new land, with a real dragon, had gone better than he expected.\n\nHe hoped his good fortune would continue."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Frost Drake: draco glacius.\n\nWinterfang, male: Elder of the White Mountains Moot.\n\nWhite Dragons come in many forms, one of which is the Frost Drake. The drake is one of the larger species, draco rather than draconis and is easily distinguished from the other varieties of whites by their smaller front legs. Their hind legs are larger and their wingspan is the most impressive across all dragon types.\n\nTheir scales differ in appearance, where most other dragons have a metallic look, a frost drakes scales are unique in their own way. On closer inspection, the scales resemble polished ice, smooth on the surface but multifaceted underneath the clear top coating. This allows light to reflect, creating an effect similar to the sun reflecting on frozen snow crystals.\n\nFrost drake's are on the whole, a pure brilliant white, while their horns, talons and bony ridges are the colour of worn ivory. Spikes grow from beneath the chin forming a long beard that resembles frozen icicles. As it is with other species, the longer the beard the older the dragon. Their eyes are a cold blue, however, there are some instances where this species have hatched with red eyes. At first, I believed the red eyes were that of an albino, but the subjects are not afflicted with the usual traits of albinism or hypopigmentation (see dracus albino) and I have concluded that eye colouration is genetic.\n\nFrost Drakes are highly intelligent and difficult to befriend. They have a preponderance to be loners and can often appear aloof when compared to the friendlier yellows and blues. As their name suggests, they are mostly found in the far northern regions and favour the higher altitudes. Their white scales are the perfect camouflage and allow them to become almost invisible on snow, when stationary. This species tend to have longer graceful necks and tails, compared to the squat thicker bodied species. They are fair flyers, but tend to lack stamina over distance. Note: possibly due to cold air and altitude.\n\nFrost Drakes are also known for their excellent swimming abilities and enjoy bathing.\n\nAs well as being able to breathe fire, the frost drake can produce an icy vapour of sub-zero temperature, freezing anything it touches.\n\nI encountered some frost drakes in the higher regions of the White Mountains, but the most memorable of them all was Winterfang.\n\nWinterfang: Male, Frost Drake, Elder of the White Mountain Moot.\n\nWinterfang is easily seventy five feet in length with an estimated wingspan of over eighty feet.\n\nHe has piercing blue eyes that are hypnotic when stared into. He is slim and sleek and is graceful in both the air and on land. He is highly respected throughout the White Mountain community and regarded as wise and just.\n\nI believe that his age is in excess of two hundred years. His experience and the loyalty he shows to his peers has resulted in him being chosen to lead the moot for many decades.\n\nHe is a true leader and an impressive creature who has the best interests of his community at heart."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Sunburst flew high over the plains and Nightstar followed. He had lived with the smaller yellow dragon for five days, sharing a cave that Sunburst called his temporary home. They had spent their time hunting and flying and Nightstar questioned his newly appointed guide about many dragon related topics, taking care not to be too obvious in his interrogations.\n\nSunburst was happy to tell Nightstar all about his world, its inhabitants and their lives. The part of his mind that was Alduce thought the dragon community didn't sound too different from the cities of humans. He would never have thought dragons would live and act as men did, but from what Sunburst had described, this was exactly the impression the yellow dragon had given.\n\nThey were flying to the yellow dragon's main dwelling place, the White Mountains, and at present the plains they flew over were all that filled Nightstar's vision.\n\nThe rolling grasslands were scattered with lakes, rivers and forests as far as his dragon eye could see. These lands would be an ideal place for men to settle, they were fertile and green with ample resources and fresh water in abundance. But he knew now that Sunburst's kin would never tolerate humans on their land. As they progressed across the plains, Nightstar could see giant herds of beasts traversing the ground below, many different species, a lot of them resembling cattle in appearance and behaviour.\n\nHe realised that in this land of plenty, the animals of the plains were more than enough to provide sustenance for more dragons than he could imagine. No wonder dragons thrived here.\n\nAs the two airborne companions passed over the herds, the animals scattered from the danger above, kicking up dust clouds in their panic. They might be easy pickings, but they still ran for their lives when dragons passed overhead.\n\nOn and on they flew, Nightstar strong now after days of flying practice. His dragon self was much more confident with the body he had created. He was more relaxed in his transformed skin and scales, more accepting and less concerned he would give his true self away. However, he still remained cautious, it would be a mistake to let his guard down fully. After his initial reservations he would trust his dragon instinct, allowing it to guide him on behaving as a dragon should.\n\nHe studied Sunburst and learned a lot from observing his mannerisms and actions. The more he mimicked the yellow dragon's behaviours, the more naturally they came to him. Sunburst was only one dragon though and Nightstar was still apprehensive at being immersed in the colony of dragons that made their home on the slopes of the White Mountains.\n\nHe learned from Sunburst that over one hundred dragons lived there, dragons of all colours and shapes. Forest dragons, sea dragons, mountain dragons, hill dragons, snow dragons, Sunburst's list went on forever. According to his stories, there were dragons named after each geographical feature. He even talked about dragons that lived in swamps. The Alduce part of him thought these sounded like alligators with wings.\n\nSunburst was a yellow hill dragon, he told Nightstar proudly, from a long line of yellows, and any clutch fathered by him stood a high chance of having yellow scales.\n\nAlduce wanted to meet as many different varieties of dragon as he could, wanting to catalogue them all in his journals, naming each one, their colour and size, their characteristics, each little difference that made them unique from their peers.\n\nHe could live among dragons for years and not have enough time to study them all. He was aware he would need to apply a certain carefulness to his research. He was an unknown dragon, a stranger in an even stranger land, a place that was not his home. He couldn't afford to ask too many questions that would make him stand out even more.\n\nHe was pleased he covered the basics with Sunburst. His yellow host chatted continuously and grew much more relaxed in the company of his large black friend. Nightstar had grown to like the yellow dragon and forged a fine friendship with him. Sunburst had a pleasing personality and was easy company\u2014easier than most humans he knew. He hoped that the other dragons of his colony were half as accommodating.\n\nNightstar lifted his head from the plains, pulling his vision from the tempting beasts below. He had been flying for hours, marvelling at the pleasant lands below his wings, studying the flora and fauna as he passed. It was easy to get lost in wondrous act of flying and relish soaring through the skies. Stamina and strength came naturally to him the more he flew and being airborne was now as instinctual as breathing. Long distance flying was something he could accomplish as his mind wandered, without thought of the actions. They had flown far today and he looked north to the horizon, he could see the distant peaks of their destination: the White Mountains.\n\nJust as the plains and grasslands had spanned below him for miles without end, so too did the impressive mountain range that now filled his vision. Snowy white peaks rising into the clouds, stretched across the horizon, pushing higher and higher into the sky. An awe inspiring wall of frost white monoliths that made Nightstar wonder\u2014or perhaps it was the scholar deep inside\u2014what lay beyond.\n\nAs Alduce, he would never be able to even consider such an incredible journey over the vast peaks. But as Nightstar, he would be able to soar above them and revel in their snowy beauty, bright white beneath his night black scales. When it came to travelling, flying over terrain humans found impossible to traverse, was just one advantage dragons possessed over mankind.\n\nOnward they flew, yellow and black, Sunburst leading, Nightstar content to follow. The air grew colder, not unpleasantly, the chill breeze refreshingly cool on his scales, like a bright autumn morning with a snap in the air. Upwards they climbed, flight undulating as the land rose and fell through the foothills and valleys of the nearing mountain range. Ascending gradually.\n\nNightstar climbed out of the last valley, sticking close to Sunburst's tail as they crested another range of low hills, leaving the plains and rivers behind. He drew in a breath, stunned at the sight before him. The vastness of the White Mountains filled his vision, stretching from east to west and ever north, vanishing into the distant snowy horizon.\n\nBefore him the slope dropped away, rolling scrub land descended, filled with rocky scree and stunted trees. After about half a mile the ground rose sharply, forming a cliff face, rising straight up from the lowest part of the valley floor, the huge rock wall riddled with caves. The air was busy with dozens of flying dragons, a multitude of colours and shapes, some dodged and spun, others glided, a constant flow as each dragon traversed the air to an unknown destination.\n\nThe cliff face was slate grey, devoid of any weeds or grass and was a warren of dark cave mouths, some occupied with dragons perched on ledges, others empty. Alduce was reminded of the busy main thoroughfare that clamoured with the human traffic conducting their business in the city of Learning. This wasn't just a few random caves in a cliff side, this was a dragon city, populated with every kind of dragon imaginable.\n\nThe vast rock wall stretched upward and where it stopped, the slopes of the mountains and the snows began. Alduce thought it looked as if a giant blade had cleaved straight through the mountainside, slicing away the lower slopes and exposing the grey rock. All along the top ridge, before the snowline started, dragons sat, lay and perched in the warm sun.\n\n\"Welcome to the White Mountains,\" Sunburst trumpeted, bending his neck backward. \"These are the snow spire cliffs where many of us make our home.\" He set his wings and plummeted downwards, descending towards the foot of the sheer cliff and a large gaping cave, the largest in the whole cliff face.\n\nNightstar dropped with him and they neared, he realised that the cave was much larger than he had first thought. The mouth formed an arch in the mountain's side, taller than the highest building in Learning. It was wide, a half circle that formed a perfect entranceway, reaching deep inside the mountain.\n\nSunburst plunged down and flew into the cave entrance, bright yellow scales catching the sunlight, his hide blazing a radiant gold, before disappearing into the darkness of the cave mouth. Nightstar had little choice but to follow and he entered into the vast cavern mouth for the first time. His eyes adjusted from the brightness of the snow covered slopes to the gloom inside the mountain and for the second time today day he was left breathless. His slit-eyes widened instinctually, reacting to the darkness inside the dim cave. Although the only source of light was from outside, his keen dragon eyes adjusted to the gloom and saw everything.\n\nHe entered a huge chamber that stretched back, deeper and deeper into the mountain. The hollow inside of the snow covered pyramid had to be at least a quarter of the entire mountain above. There were ledges and caves of all sizes, some at ground level and others scattered throughout the inner dome, a giant honeycomb alive with dragons, instead of bees.\n\nSunburst landed on the sandy floor of the cave and was rubbing necks with a red\u2014no a crimson dragon\u2014a little larger than the yellow. Nightstar approached and dropped down alongside his friend, folding his black wings and waiting for Sunburst to finish what appeared to be an intimate reunion.\n\nThe crimson dragon was sleek and graceful, vibrant even in the dim light. The scales that covered its body were more oval shaped and rounded, compared to his own, which were sharper and pointed. The elegant red neck and tapered head wound its way around the yellow neck of Sunburst, two primary colours clashing brightly. And, Nightstar noticed, his nostrils widening as he inhaled the scent of this intoxicating crimson dragon, it smelled wonderful. Realisation came to him as his sense of smell, coupled with his dragon sense, reinforced what he now understood.\n\nThe crimson dragon was a female, and she was beautiful."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe White Mountain Moot.\n\nThe Dragon Moot is the ruling body in any community. The members of a moot can number as little as three or as high as eleven. Their number is always odd, with one elder or lead dragon who hosts the moot. If anything is undecided by the ruling council the elder has the final decision. To be the elder dragon in any moot is a huge undertaking. Elders are chosen by their peers and can remain in their position for many years. It is not unheard of for respected and wise ruling elders to hold their position for decades.\n\nThe elder of the moot is the highest honour that can be bestowed on any individual and commands the utmost respect from each dragon under their wing. They are responsible for all major decisions involving their society and need to be morally just and intelligent.\n\nThe moot is made up of two wings, the left and right. Depending on the community traditions and beliefs, each wing is responsible for any number of duties.\n\nA moot can often result in differences of opinion, arguments and hissing, a dragon's way of showing displeasure without resorting to physical violence.\n\nAnother noteworthy fact regarding the White Mountain Moot is the pearl of wisdom that is on display. This rare and precious treasure is rumoured to have come from across the vast ocean to the east, at the time of the Great Exodus (see information on G.E.)\n\nI suspect a strong magic is harnessed within the pearl and it is not at all what it appears to be on the surface.\n\nNote: The etiquette of a moot is organised and traditional and any fire breathing, biting, clawing or fighting is regarded as highly unsavoury. Members of the moot who break this tradition, regardless of the instigator, will be ousted from their position. In severe cases, dragons who have been de-mooted have been banished from the community.\n\nThe White Mountain Moot members.\n\nLeader: Winterfang, frost drake. Elder. Note of interest: Symbolic spreading of wings over left and right contingents at start and finish of moot. Tradition showing protection for all dragons under elder's protection? Research ongoing.\n\nLeft Wing: Spring contingent.\n\nAurelian the Golden, Female. Blue-cap (the Blue?) Male, Sea Dragon. Amethyst the Purple, Female.\n\nRight Wing: Autumn contingent. Little Wing, Copper Female. Galvon, Forest Green, Male. Raynar the Russet, Male. (For more information on moot members, see index notes/individual bios.)\n\nNote: The White Mountain dragons use the collective noun as follows: A Wing or Flight of dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "\"This is my mate, Blood Rose,\" Sunburst introduced the crimson dragon. \"Her scales are the colour of blood and her beauty is like that of a rose, a flower protected by thorns.\"\n\n\"I cannot argue with that,\" Nightstar said. Folding his right leg beneath his body, he dipped his neck forward in greeting. \"I am pleased to meet you, Blood Rose. I am Nightstar.\"\n\n\"Well met, Nightstar,\" the crimson dragon said, her feminine voice full of welcome. \"You'll have to forgive Sunburst, he's always been a little protective of me. Even though he has no reason to be,\" she butted the yellow dragon's side playfully with her head. \"There's no need for formality, Nightstar. You may call me Rose. Blood Rose is so dramatic, don't you think?\"\n\nNightstar felt an attraction to the alluring crimson female and was unsure of the arousal she had awoken in him. He wondered if this was normal or if these feeling were something the human part of him would need to keep in check. Sunburst was his friend, he had grown to like the yellow dragon and did not want to upset him by showing anything other than the appropriate respect for his mate. He hardly believed that as a dragon, he would have to face the same issues that had plagued him as a human: women, or in this case, a female dragon.\n\nHe had lived a secluded life and chosen the path of scholar and sorcerer. The discipline he needed to employ to achieve his goals left very little time for the opposite sex.\n\nHe was never opposed to spending time with a woman, but he hadn't had much practice and his work didn't allow for many opportunities.\n\nA sudden realisation occurred to him. He wanted more from his life than sorcery and science, from the learning and the magic. He wanted a mate. A mate as attractive as Rose. He was unsure if this was the dragon inside him that made him feel this way or because he could look at his human self from a dragon's perspective.\n\nHe would never have thought the challenges he faced from shape changing would have been anything but physical.\n\n\"I think the mighty Nightstar has been blinded by your beauty,\" Sunburst said, chuckling.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Rose, \"he follows the formal ways. He shows respect in his greeting, unlike some, twisting necks in plain sight.\" Although Rose scolded Sunburst, Nightstar could tell she wasn't annoyed.\n\n\"And you'd not have me any other way,\" Sunburst said. \"I have been absent too long to waste time with formal greetings. You are my mate, we are partnered for life and I miss your companionship.\"\n\n\"Ah, you miss my companionship. Is that so? You disappear for days at a time. Don't think I don't know what you miss.\" Turning her head towards Nightstar so Sunburst couldn't see, she winked a huge yellow eye.\n\n\"I think you also miss the curly bucks. I think you miss them more than me! I can smell them on you, skin and scales. Why do yellows think more of their stomachs than they do of their...\"\n\n\"I am a free spirit, Blood Rose,\" Sunburst interrupted. \"All yellows are the same. You know it, Nightstar knows it,\" he chuckled, \"and curly bucks are my favourites. It's not my fault their herds don't come this far north.\"\n\n\"I have been instrumental in distracting Sunburst,\" Nightstar added. \"I am new to your lands and he kindly agreed to show me around. It is my fault he was delayed.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, Nightstar. I am broody and I want my mate close by. I wish to clutch and produce many fine eggs,\" she looked at her yellow mate, \"and would prefer if the yellow dragon I chose to father them was there to participate when it is time.\"\n\nSunburst puffed air, his nostrils flaring as he made a sighing sound, the dragon equivalent of exasperation. \"Our bond is for life, you would consider another to take my place if you came into season and I wasn't there with you?\"\n\n\"No, I would not,\" Rose said, \"but I do like to tease you.\" This crimson female had sense of humour.\n\nAlduce had researched everything he could find out about dragons after his encounter with Galdor, but had never come across anything resembling dragon humour. He had acquired many books, visited libraries near and far and even listened to folk tales, myths and tavern stories in his quest for knowledge about these creatures. While his research hadn't fully prepared him for living and acting as a dragon, there were many facts that he had uncovered that turned out to be beneficial.\n\nHe had visited the great library of Learning, they had extensive records on many mythical beasts and were renowned for their vast collection of dragon related literature. One thing he learned was dragons often mate for life. When they feel they are mature enough, they choose a partner and remain with them. If one dragon dies, the surviving other rarely seeks a new mate.\n\n\"You show Nightstar around the cavern and introduce him to some of the curious onlookers. It would seem they can't keep their eyes of his black hide,\" Rose said. \"You can both join me later, there is an empty roost next to my cave, Nightstar. You are welcome to use it while you stay with us.\"\n\nThe black dragon looked around, Rose was right. He was attracting attention from a variety of onlookers, younger dragons, not fully grown, some with black scales of their own scattered through their coloured hides.\n\n\"Thank you Rose, I would enjoy spending time here with your community.\" Nightstar bowed once again, dipping his head and pulling his leg beneath his body. Silver scales stood out against his black chest when he bowed and he could hear whispers from the small group of juvenile dragons that gathered to stare at the unknown black.\n\nHe straightened up and turned to face the curious youngsters, just as fascinated at their presence as they were with his. Once more he dipped his head, less formal than he had been with Rose and was rewarded for his actions with a collective gasp of surprise.\n\n\"I am... \" he had almost introduced himself as Alduce. Where had that come from? He needed to focus, he couldn't afford to slip up, especially in the midst of all these dragons. \"I am a... visitor from afar.\" The young dragons made a noise that was similar to children giggling, they had failed to notice he had almost made a mistake. \"I am called Nightstar.\"\n\nAs he finished introducing himself, some unseen sign caused all the young dragons to rush in and show their affection towards the newcomer. A dozen or so juveniles clamoured to get close to him, blues, greens, reds, yellows and a variety of other shades and colours. A rainbow of scales against his midnight black hide. They jostled and bumped him affectionately, as Rose had done with Sunburst, pushing under his wings, twining around his legs and nestling under his wings. Nightstar was overcome with a strong feeling of acceptance and welcome.\n\n\"He's black.\"\n\n\"He's so big!\"\n\n\"Where is he from?\"\n\n\"Look at the star.\"\n\nTheir chattering filled his ears and he felt like grinning, not something a dragon was able to do with ease, but in his heart, he knew the part of him that was Alduce was overwhelmingly happy at this reception.\n\n\"Enough!\" A voice boomed out across the cavern floor and a huge white dragon, all ice and snow with wings and horns, startled the young dragons into silence.\n\nNightstar was impressed and also a little bit intimidated. The white dragon was even larger than he was and had an air of authority about him. His scales glistened like the sunrise on morning frost and while he was all white, his horns, talons and ridges were the colour of ancient ivory, creating an impression of age and distinction. A long white beard hung down from his chin, the spines looked like icicles, frozen in place. This dragon was regal, a king among his kind and his demeanour reminded Alduce of Galdor.\n\n\"Ah, Winterfang, we were just coming to see you,\" Sunburst said. \"I have someone I would like you to meet.\"\n\n\"I can see that, Sunburst the Yellow,\" he intoned formally, addressing Sunburst with his full name. \"He's hard to miss.\" The imposing white dragon reared up and spread his wings, \"Dragonets, leave our guest. Your elders wish to speak. Uninterrupted!\"\n\nHis command was obeyed immediately and the young dragons scuttled free of Nightstar, taking flight, some faster, some more graceful, but all hurried to comply with the white dragon's bidding.\n\n\"Can we visit Nightstar again?\" a small copper coloured dragonet asked as she skipped across the cavern floor. \"He speaks with us and introduced himself, we like him.\"\n\n\"I am sure, if Nightstar wishes it, you can,\" Winterfang replied, less harshly. \"Now, off with you, copper menace!\" The dragonet hopped into the air, small wings blurring like a hummingbird.\n\n\"I am Winterfang the White, leader of the Dragon Moot, first elder of the White Mountains,\" he bowed formally. \"I gather you are named Nightstar. Welcome to the inner mountain.\"\n\nNightstar bowed low and tucked his leg underneath his body, holding his position for a little longer than was usual as a show of respect. This dragon was the leader of their community, not just another dragon. He was older and wiser, the elder that led the moot. He would have to be extremely careful. If any dragon could sniff out his verisimilitude, it would be Winterfang.\n\n\"Thank you, Elder Winterfang.\" Nightstar said, hoping he had addressed the white dragon with enough deference. \"I am Nightstar and I humbled by the warm welcome. The White Mountains might be a cold place, but the dragons who make their home here are nothing like the frost and snow.\"\n\nThe white dragon's ice blue eyes studied him and the seconds stretched out as he waited, concerned that Winterfang would see him for what he really was. A charlatan, a human in dragon's skin, a fake. An imposter. He looked nervously at Sunburst, who had sidled up to Rose. They too, waited for their leader to speak.\n\n\"Eloquently put,\" rumbled Winterfang, chuckling and Nightstar relaxed. \"Your tongue is as silver as the star you bear upon your chest. When you tire of Sunburst's constant chattering and tall stories, seek me out. I would enjoy talking with you and learning your story. Our youngsters appear to be fascinated with a black adult. It is rare colour and they haven't lived long enough to see someone like you. My years, however, are vastly greater than the sum of all those dragonets added together. I have known a few blacks over the centuries, but none as large as you. And, the star upon your chest is nothing I have encountered before.\" He dipped his head, \"Be welcome, Nightstar. I look forward to speaking with you soon.\" Winterfang took off, huge white wings powered the snow coloured elder up into the domed cavern of the inner mountain.\n\n\"Come on then,\" Sunburst said, \"we have a lot of ground to cover and it doesn't do to keep the elder of the moot waiting. His words may have sounded like a casual invitation, but when Winterfang requests an audience, you don't miss it.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Rose said, \"Winterfang only wants what's best for the moot and I'm sure he just wishes to know you a little better. The frost drake is a wise and just leader, but you would be smart not to anger him. His wrath is something no dragon wishes to face.\"\n\nHer warning words shocked him. Winterfang appeared friendly enough, but it would be a grave mistake to underestimate him. Nightstar would have to tread carefully.\n\n\"After all, it isn't every day we meet a new dragon,\" Rose continued, softening her words, \"especially one with black scales.\"\n\nNightstar followed after Sunburst, the yellow had already forgotten about his summons from Winterfang and was chattering about who was allowed to roost in the higher caves, how there were tunnels connecting this cave with that one and which dragon they would expect to see on their flight around the inner mountain.\n\nAlduce had not expected that interacting with dragons would be as challenging. He had hoped to just meet a few dragons and study them. He wasn't expecting them to live in groups, like humans in cities or towns. He was surprised they followed a political structure, with their own leaders and laws.\n\nHe had been foolish to underestimate dragons. His transformation into one of their own had gently eroded his usual caution. His dragon self was more relaxed that the human part of him. He couldn't let Nightstar's persona reveal his true self.\n\nEverything he read, each story, each tale, warned that if you made the mistake of underestimating a dragon, it would be fatal. Of course the rulers of the White Mountains would wish to question him. He was an outsider and unusually black. These dragons had lived here for centuries, they must know each other and be familiar with everyone. A new comer, a black scaled new comer with a distinct silver star, would stand out and be noticed.\n\nHe told Sunburst he came from the lands of the east, across the vast ocean. He couldn't change his story now and tell Winterfang something different. He should have prepared a back story before he rushed in and decided to wing it.\n\nWing it. As a dragon, the irony wasn't lost on him. Master Caltus had a saying when things didn't work out: never mind, he would say, you're only human. Alduce, the man, understood what his old master had meant. However, now he was quite sure the wisdom Caltus shared with him all those years ago, wasn't as relevant to him anymore. Now he was more than only human. Thinking of Caltus calmed his mind and his rising panic subsided. His old mentor's rationality reached out across the years, urging him to think.\n\nWhat would Caltus have advised him in this situation? He would have laughed at me for getting myself into this predicament in the first place. Then, he would have told me, don't worry about things you can't change, focus on what you can do.\n\nAlduce was creative, he was educated and smart. He would have to make sure that Winterfang believed his story and the reason why he had travelled here.\n\nAll he needed to do now was come up with a convincing tale and hope that Winterfang had never crossed the vast ocean and visited the lands in the east."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Nightstar entered the cavern of the moot alone. Sunburst was denied entry by the moot guard, two stocky greens that could have been twins. The cavern of the moot was guarded, Sunburst told him, and the pearl of wisdom was housed in the moot chamber. The yellow dragon was proud, informing Nightstar the pearl was a rare and valuable treasure.\n\nThe moot guard escorted their ward from the landing ledge, through a tunnel of solid rock, reaching deep into the centre of the mountain. Deep into the heart of the dragon council.\n\nNightstar could feel a rise in temperature as the tunnel widened. Sunburst told him the chamber was heated by fissures in the rock and the mountain sat atop a deep river of magma, the Earth Mothers gift to dragons. He had blown a little flame from his nostrils when he spoke of the Earth Mother. This was the first time he witnessed a dragon producing fire.\n\nHe was curious about the dragon fire, but more so about his friend's reference to the Earth Mother. Was this a metaphorical reference to the actual molten rock or did the dragons believed in a deity? He would have to question him about it later, if an opportunity presented itself, but for now, he needed to focus on his summons.\n\nThe tunnel ended and he entered into a substantial chamber, occupied by the seven most important dragons of the White Mountains: the Dragon Moot.\n\nThe seven were arranged in a circle, their backs to the cavern wall, leaving an empty space for their visitor to enter into their midst. There was no turning back now and Alduce remembered another saying that Caltus had been fond of. Fortune favours the brave.\n\nThis was the bravest thing he had ever done... or maybe the stupidest. Fortune wouldn't favour the stupid.\n\nLeaving his escort, he strode into the centre of the circle with what he hoped looked like confidence. A confidence he certainly didn't feel.\n\nBending his neck, he bowed, showing his respect to the ruling body of dragons before him.\n\n\"Elders of the White Mountains, my name is Nightstar.\" Recalling how Sunburst had spoken when they had first met, he imitated his style, \"The silver scales upon my black chest, light the night sky like a blazing star.\" If his language sounded like Sunburst, like a real dragon, his hope was that the moot would be more likely to accept him as one of their kin.\n\nWinterfang was flanked by three dragons on each side and in front of the frost drake, nestled in the hollow of a large slab of rock, sat a huge opaque globe of white. It resembled a giant white pearl, a muted ghostly sheen radiated across its surface, alluring and hypnotic.\n\nThe dragon opened his wings and stretched them over the dragons to his left and right, encompassing them beneath his impressive wingspan. The protective symbolism in the gesture said more than his words ever could.\n\n\"The moot is now open,\" he declared, \"all are welcome and are under my protection.\" He folded his wings and gripped the giant white orb in one clawed talon, \"Pearl of enlightenment, moonstone of white, grant me the wisdom and the strength to guide our moot wisely.\" Nightstar's dragon sense recognised the words were steeped in tradition. Winterfang unfurled his claw and the surface of the white pearl radiated and swirled, alive to his touch.\n\n\"Welcome Nightstar. We of the moot wish to learn more about you and your visit to our lands. Let me introduce my council.\"\n\nNightstar hadn't noticed when he first entered the chamber, but each of the seven assemble members were different. All representatives equal, regardless of type or colour. Humans could learn from the wisdom of the dragon moot.\n\nWinterfang turned to his right, this first dragon of the three was a small copper coloured female. \"This is Little Wing.\" The copper dragon bowed her head, acknowledging Nightstar, her deep golden eyes friendly and warm, scales gleaming like the metal of her colouring.\n\n\"Welcome Nightstar,\" she said.\n\n\"And Galvon, the forest green.\" Galvon's stare was cold. His scales the dark green of pine needles, his yellow eyes hateful as a viper. He barely tipped his head, his manner aloof and uninviting. It was obvious Galvon didn't like him.\n\n\"And Raynar the Brown,\" Winterfang said.\n\n\"Raynar the Russet! Not brown!\" Raynar protested.\n\n\"I'm sorry, my russet friend. Raynar the Russet,\" Winterfang corrected himself.\n\n\"Thank you. Bah, brown indeed. Greetings Nightstar, be welcome.\" Raynar gave a deep bow and Nightstar knew at once he liked this dragon. He was a deeper colour than plain brown, his scales glowing with a burnished reddish orange and Nightstar understood why he preferred to be called russet.\n\nLittle wing was the smallest of the three, Raynar and Galvon were what Nightstar now thought of as an average size, forty feet or so.\n\n\"These three dragons make up my right wing, they are the colours of autumn and are a balance to my winter. Nightstar bowed to the three dragons of the right wing, \"I am honoured to meet you.\"\n\nGalvon puffed under his breath and received a glower from Winterfang.\n\n\"My left wing is made up of Aurelian the Golden, Blue-cap and Amethyst the purple.\" Each dragon acknowledged Nightstar as Winterfang introduced them, each one spectacular in their own way. \"These three represent the spring, another perspective to my winter and balance to the right wing of autumn.\"\n\nAurelian glowed, her warm golden scales on a par with the metallic copper of Little Wing. Blue-cap was the colour of an azure sky with a royal blue patch that covered the top half of his snout and head, giving the impression he was wearing a dark blue hat. Amethyst's scales looked like the gem stones she took her name from and she winked one dark blue eye mischievously at Nightstar as he bowed to the members of the left wing.\n\n\"I am honoured to meet you all, too,\" Nightstar said and meant it. Each dragon was magnificent.\n\nAlduce surfaced in Nightstar's mind and scrutinized the seven dragons assembled. While he was still nervous, only Galvon displayed an unfriendliness. The others had been polite enough and Amethyst and Raynar had been openly friendly. None had given him cause to feel threatened or fear they knew he was a shape changing human.\n\nThe more he thought about it, the more he believed while he was in the form of Nightstar, he was undetectable as an imposter. These dragons were old and wise, if anyone could sniff out his secret, surely the seven most powerful dragons of the White Mountains would be able to. He remained careful, it would do no harm to stay alert and exercise caution, his theory wasn't proven, even if he felt he was correct.\n\n\"We have asked you to join us,\" Winterfang said, \"as we are interested in where you have travelled from. Perhaps you could tell us more about where you have journeyed from to be here.\" Nightstar understood the implied question was more than a request.\n\n\"Of course, Elder Winterfang,\" Nightstar answered formally. He had been working on a story while Sunburst had shown him around the inner mountain earlier. \"I have travelled far from the east, across the vast ocean in search of new lands. My kin are few and our numbers dwindle. The eastern lands are populated with men, their numbers grow, as do their cities. The never stop breeding and expanding.\"\n\nGalvon snorted, his dislike of humans even greater than his unfriendliness towards Nightstar. \"Why do you not stop them, crush their puny bodies and teach them who truly rules the lands?\" he sneered. \"Are the eastern dragons so weak? By fang and claw, have they forgotten the fire in their bellies? What...\"\n\n\"Galvon, let him speak,\" Amethyst cut in, thrusting her head towards the dark green dragon. \"He is one of us, I'm sure there is more to his story.\" She turned her head back to Nightstar, \"Continue, please. I am sure Galvon is only concerned for your kin.\"\n\nGalvon snorted again. Nightstar was starting to dislike this arrogant green. He bowed his head to Amethyst in thanks, she named him one of their own and that was a good sign. He carried on.\n\n\"To answer your questions, Galvon, no. My kin are far from weak, however, we are few while the humans are many. You are all aware of the Great Exodus,\" he said. He remembered the story Sunburst shared with him when they first met. \"Not all the dragons left my shores, some were forgotten, some chose to stay, some were too old to cross the vast ocean.\" He figured this was a viable assumption to make. \"The dragons who remained were spread far and wide, they didn't have a community or the numbers you have. Over the years, the amount of dragons in the east has dwindled. We have become solitary creatures.\"\n\nHe paused for effect, the moot now caught up in his tale. \"Your ancestors fled from my home land, they too were hunted and persecuted by the humans of the east. Some dragons stayed. I am a descendant of those ancestors. I never chose to stay. I was born there.\"\n\nThe moot remained silent, even Galvon made no comment this time and Nightstar was relieved they had accepted his story so far. He decided to carry on while his luck held.\n\n\"Dragons are now scarce in the eastern lands, my kin are all but extinct. I decided not to retreat into the wilderness and await the ever advancing cities of the humans. Each decade, the humans spread, forging deeper into what was once our home and our refuge. Dragons vanish from the land, some are hunted and slain and others succumb to the long sleep.\" He also recalled what Galdor told him, weaving it into his narrative, hoping it added credibility to his story.\n\n\"I chose to fly west into the great unknown and follow my ancestors. The crossing I undertook was arduous, even for a flier of my calibre. This is how I arrived on your shores. I have come in search of my long departed kin, I have lived most of my life alone and I was the only survivor of my clutch. I never knew my mother or father. I know some of you find me strange.\" He stared directly at Galvon to emphasise the point and to show he wouldn't be intimidated. He was a dragon and he should act like one. \"I know nothing of your ways and am ignorant of your customs.\" This was a good reason to explain why he was different, why he asked so many questions of the dragons of the White Mountains.\n\n\"I wish to learn more about my long lost relations. I would have withered and died had I remained in the land of my hatching. I hope the moot will accept me for who I am,\" or for who Nightstar is, he thought, \"and forgive any indiscretions in my behaviour. I wanted more, I want to be a better dragon, worthy of my kin and hope I can learn from you, my distant cousins.\" He bowed his head to the moot and waited on their reaction.\n\n\"It's a sad tale, Nightstar,\" Blue-cap said. \"To hear our distant kin have dwindled to near extinction. I am a sea dragon and have swam in the vast ocean to the east. I have never ventured as far as the distant shores of your land, but know they are indeed a great distance. You have travelled far to reach our mountain, Sunburst speaks true when he names you an exceptional flier. Only a dragon of great stamina and strength would be able to make such a journey.\"\n\nThe moot had already spoken to Sunburst about him and he was glad he stuck with his original story.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Winterfang agreed. \"I could not have made the trip Nightstar managed. Frost drakes are fine fliers, but my stamina for such a distance would not be enough.\" There were murmurs of agreement from the assemble dragons. Galvon treated his peers to a snort and it was Winterfang's turn to thrust his head out towards the cantankerous pine green dragon.\n\n\"You have something to add, Galvon? You wish to congratulate Nightstar on his brave adventure into the unknown?\"\n\n\"I don't think such a flight is... \" he said.\n\n\"No, you don't think,\" Amethyst snapped. \"A flight of that magnitude is beyond you. Just because you are unable to comprehend it, doesn't mean it can't be done. I don't know why Winterfang keeps you in the moot!\" she hissed, spitting her forked tongue at the green, who returned the gesture.\n\n\"Enough!\" Winterfang said. \"I keep Galvon in the moot, as I value his words, as I value yours, Amethyst. I can count on him to give me his honest opinion. Six dragons that agreed with everything I say would be of no benefit to our community. However, it would certainly be something my ears could learn to live with. I wouldn't miss the egg speak of squabbling hatchlings at all!\"\n\nAmethyst bowed her head to their leader, then in a gesture that Nightstar found surprising, she stretched out to Galvon and rubbed her neck on his.\n\n\"I will remember Nightstar's words and include them in our records. They are worthy of note.\" Galvon conceded, sounding a little less grumpy.\n\n\"Good,\" Winterfang said. \"You are free to depart the moot, friend Nightstar. You are only a stranger the first time you visit the White Mountains. I'm sure that Sunburst is desperate to speak with you. Heed his advice, he may be small, but he has a large heart and is a good judge of character. He spoke on your behalf and vouched for you and the moot have listened.\"\n\n\"Indeed we have,\" Amethyst added. \"You are welcome to stay with us for as long as you wish.\"\n\nThe other dragons, including Galvon, all welcomed Nightstar. Winterfang spread his wings out over the three dragons on his left and the three on his right. \"The moot is now ended,\" he announced.\n\nNightstar was relieved at the conclusion. The protective gesture of the frost drake's wings, this time, curved inwards to the centre of the circle, including the black dragon underneath them, too.\n\nNightstar bowed to the moot and when he raised his head, looked into the dark blue eyes of Amethyst and felt welcome."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\n\u2002Aurora and Grand Moot.\n\n\u2002Every seven years the aurora fills the skies above the White Mountains with purples and greens, heralding the time of the Grand Moot. Dragons come from far and wide, those living in isolation or small groups and other communities and colonies.\n\n\u2002The summer dragons are the largest community to attend the moot. They are not from the White Mountains, but are an independent colony that make their home in the far south of the western continent of Aurentania.\n\n\u2002The aurora, a fantastic display of polar lights, signals the migration of dragons to the White Mountain Grand Moot. Because of the high northern latitude, this natural phenomenon is highly spectacular and creates an atmosphere of celebration. Intensely vivid greens, purples, reds, yellows, and pinks ripple across the sky, lighting the moot with an impressive display of colours.\n\n\u2002There doesn't appear to be any reason why this aurora only occurs in a seven year cycle or why dragons flock to the area to observe it and bask under its light. After much investigation, I have concluded that dragons, much like some birds, or even whales, have some inborn instinct to migrate and gather at the time of the aurora.\n\n\u2002This coming together is a time of celebration and the Grand Moot allows dragons to socialise, story tell and mate. One theory might be that the allure of the aurora, while purely a natural phenomenon, has some magical properties that dragons are attracted to. Dragons from all over the continent congregate under the aurora's captivating lights. This gathering allows breeding lines to mix and stay strong, as dragons far removed from each other can cross breed, maintaining a strong genetic pool.\n\n\u2002The Grand Moot and the aurora are quite something to behold, not only are the skies filled with dragons of all colours and varieties, the aurora itself is a spectacular sight. The two events together are an occurrence that is beyond anything I have ever witnessed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Nightstar sat in the meadow south of the White Mountains. The morning sun climbed above the peaks and chased away the shadows, pleasantly warming his scales. Sunburst and Rose were curled together beside him, their three heads craned upward as they watched the arriving dragons. The sky was filled with an assortment of colourful creatures from every corner of the continent, all travelling to the White Mountains for the Grand Moot.\n\nNightstar had woken earlier that morning and noticed a difference in the dragons he had spent the last four months with. There was an air of expectation, full of charged energy and life, and he felt it too. Sunburst had rushed into his temporary home inside the great cavern, chattering wildly about it being time. At first he thought Rose was ready to clutch, as she was heavily pregnant. Nightstar imagined if she didn't lay her eggs soon, she might burst. When he was able to get some sense from his yellow companion, it wasn't that the expectant father's mate was ready to lay, but that there was to be a Grand Moot this evening.\n\n\"This will be your first Grand Moot!\" Sunburst told him, barley able to contain his excitement. \"Dragons come from the far flung corners of our lands to attend.\"\n\nNightstar wondered what the Grand Moot was and why he hadn't heard about such a large and obviously momentous event until this morning.\n\n\"Flaxe has woken!\" Sunburst told him, by way of explanation.\n\n\"Flaxe?\" Nightstar asked, unfamiliar with the name.\n\n\"Yes, he was once a summer dragon. When he wakes from the long sleep, it signals the Grand Moot. Everyone knows this!\"\n\n\"I can tell you are excited, Sunburst, but could you explain it to me, a stranger in your community, as I do not know.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry Nightstar, I forget you are from beyond the eastern ocean. You've been here long enough that you've become one of us. You are a dragon of the White Mountain. You will never be a stranger anymore.\" He repeated the phrase Winterfang used when he was summoned to the moot chamber. \"You are only a stranger the first time you visit the White Mountains.\"\n\n\"Thank you Sunburst, I am humbled by your acceptance and honoured that you think of me that way.\"\n\n\"Pah!\" The yellow dragon snorted and Nightstar thought he spotted a red flush on the yellow face of his friend.\n\n\"You are here, we are friends. It is simple. Besides, Amethyst likes having you around.\" Now it was Nightstar's turn to feel embarrassed. Sunburst had an uncanny knack of taking a situation and throwing it right back at him.\n\nNightstar liked Amethyst and was sure\u2014his dragon sense confirmed it\u2014she felt the same way towards him. However, Alduce, the human inside the dragon, was confused by the attraction. The dragon part of him was drawn to the female with scales the colour of the precious stones she was named after. She made him feel welcome and her deep blue eyes hinted at more. The man inside him was not practiced at reading such signs, but the dragon had a much better understanding of the dance she wove.\n\n\"Flaxe awoke from his long sleep this morning. He is old,\" Sunburst paused. \"So old. And incredibly wise. He only wakes from his slumber for important events. He has declared there will be a Grand Moot and has woken to celebrate the great gathering of our kin. He was once leader of the White Mountain dragons and is loved and respected by everyone.\" Sunburst then hurried Nightstar from his roosting cavern and had insisted they watch for new arrivals.\n\nThey quickly stopped to gather Rose, who was only too pleased to accompany them to the low meadow in which they now waited.\n\nNightstar watched Sunburst and his mate as they lay together. Rose was spectacular, her vermillion scales glowed brightly, the final stages of pregnancy making her radiant. He understood Sunburst's excitement when the yellow dragon explained that she was close to laying. He told Nightstar she would clutch tonight, the night of the Grand Moot. It would be seen as incredibly fortuitous. Eggs laid during a Grand Moot were seen as a good omen and hatched strong and healthy. Other dragons with this accolade had gone on to achieve great things, Winterfang himself had been a Grand Moot egg.\n\nThe yellow dragon had calmed down considerably since this morning. When he was with the red female she had that effect on him. Nightstar put it down to the soothing influence the red dragon projected. That and Sunburst didn't want to appear nervous around his mate, especially in her condition.\n\nHe hadn't been able to quiz Sunburst any more about Flaxe, the long sleep, or the Grand Moot, as his friend had been too excitable this morning. Now he had relaxed a little, Nightstar thought it a good time to approach the subject and see if he could get a better explanation.\n\n\"Tell me more of Flaxe, Sunburst,\" Nightstar asked. \"You spoke of him earlier before we rushed here and I was hoping to learn more about him.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" Sunburst said, \"I forget you weren't hatched here.\"\n\n\"You would forget your tail if it wasn't attached to your behind,\" Rose said sleepily, closing one eye and winking at Nightstar.\"\n\n\"My tail, I'll have you know... \" started Sunburst.\n\n\"...is long and yellow, oh, I know. You've wrapped it round me and my belly bulges as a result!\"\n\n\"I'm sure Nightstar doesn't need...\"\n\n\"Just tell him about Flaxe, or would you prefer I tell him for you?\"\n\n\"No, my Blood Rose, you rest and I will tell this story.\" Sunburst rolled his eyes, an unusual and human thing for a dragon to do and Nightstar gave a little snort that was almost a laugh.\n\n\"Flaxe is old, an ancient dragon. He led our moot before Winterfang.\" Sunburst started.\n\n\"For over one hundred years,\" Rose added, and looked up observing a large blue sea dragon as she passed overhead. \"Look! Belle Cinder of the sandy shore, Blue-cap will be pleased to see her.\"\n\n\"Yes, Belle the Blue, I see her. Now can I continue?\" Sunburst cocked his head towards his mate, flicking his tongue at her.\n\n\"Do go on, please,\" Rose teased him, rubbing her head along his serpentine yellow neck affectionately.\n\n\"Flaxe led the moot for over one hundred years,\" and he nodded at Rose, \"he was a wise leader and loved by all. When Winterfang became his successor, Flaxe decided he was ready for the long sleep. He chose a deep cave, far back from the central cavern and rests there, only emerging when he sees fit.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Nightstar said, wondering about the long sleep, he remembered Galdor had spoken to him of something similar, but he was hesitant to ask Sunburst outright. \"I'm afraid that the long sleep isn't something I have had much experience with or encountered much in the east. Is it something all western dragons do?\"\n\n\"Only the most powerful dragons can enter the long sleep, they have to be strong in magic and very wise to attain it,\" Rose supplied.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Sunburst said, \"and Flaxe is both. When a dragon such as Flaxe gets old and tired, if they are able, rather than passing on, they can enter the long sleep. They find a suitable place to retire, a quiet and secluded cave or an underground burrow or cavern, then seal themselves inside. They can use their magic to sleep for many years, slowing down their breathing until aging all but stops.\"\n\nNightstar touched the mind of Alduce as he thought about the great bears of his home world. They would hibernate during the long winter months in a similar way. This long sleep sounded like a magically enhanced hibernation. Alduce would have to make sure and record this in his journals, as this was something he wanted to learn more about.\n\n\"So what wakens a dragon from the long sleep?\" he asked.\n\n\"No-one knows,\" Sunburst answered. \"Until dragons are older and wiser, we never know if we can attain the long sleep and if we do, only then would we be able to say what wakens us.\"\n\nNightstar couldn't argue with that logic but he would be keen to speak with Flaxe, now his scholarly interest had been whetted. Perhaps Flaxe would be able to explain the process.\n\n\"I would very much like to speak with Flaxe, he sounds so interesting.\"\n\n\"Nightstar, you are an inquisitive one, but not all dragons respond well to questions. I know you are unfamiliar with our ways, and I do not mind answering you...\"\n\n\"Really?\" Rose purred, \"Who would have known.\"\n\n\"...as I have grown to understand your ways and your past,\" Sunburst continued, choosing to ignore his mate. \"Flaxe will not tell you about the long sleep. It is forbidden.\"\n\n\"Or you can learn the secrets from the pearl of wisdom,\" Rose said.\n\nNightstar had wondered about the mysterious pearl. When Winterfang had gripped it at the moot he had detected magic coming from the white orb.\n\n\"The pearl of wisdom? Only the leader of the moot is allowed to consult the pearl!\" Sunburst chastised his mate. \"If you are able to follow the path Flaxe has taken, your magic will provide the answer. If you are not, you will pass on to the next life, as is the fate of most dragons when they grow old and tired.\"\n\n\"But that is a long way off yet,\" Rose stated. \"Let us not dwell on this. I for one, am more interested in starting new lives, not pondering old ones.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Sunburst, flicking his tail gently over the swollen belly of his mate. She snapped playfully as it came close and Sunburst pulled it out of reach, her teeth clacking loudly on empty air.\n\nSunburst chuckled and Rose snorted, puffing some smoke from her nostrils. Nightstar joined in, enjoying the moment, happy in the company of his friends. But, as with all scholars, his curiosity returned and his thoughts were pulled back to the mysterious pearl."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Long Sleep.\n\nSome dragons are able to enter what they refer to as The Long Sleep. It is unclear exactly how they accomplish this, but the information I have gathered thus far, points to the following contributing factors.\n\nThe long sleep, while magical in origin is not unlike the hibernation cycle of animals, except that where an animal usually hibernates for the winter months to conserve energy and food, a dragon can choose to enter the long sleep and can stay this way indefinitely.\n\nDragons are not born with this ability and it is said to only be accessible to those who are extremely intelligent or wise.\n\nThe life cycle of a dragon is greater than most creatures; anywhere from 200 to 400 years normally (see: lifespan of the dragon) and when they die, or pass on to the next life as they call it, if there are able, they can prevent this by entering the long sleep.\n\nSide note: the next life is believed to be re-incarnation back to the egg to start their life cycle once again, the dragon spirit never dying and being reborn anew, with no recollection of a past life.\n\nThe long sleep, once the secret is known, allows the dragon to enter a state similar to hibernation. The dragon will seek out a secluded location, such as remote cave or underground tunnel where it is quiet. They will seal themselves inside and lower their breathing, heart rate, metabolic rate, and body temperature. Once in the dormant sleep like stage, they can bypass time without the need for sustenance.\n\nTheir magic slows the physical ageing process while they sleep and prolongs their life.\n\nObservation: I believe that Galdor, when trapped in the caverns of the Pendron Mountains, although not yet near the final years of his lifespan, relied on an ability similar to the long sleep to survive until he was freed.\n\nA wakeful state from the long sleep can be imposed and I have yet to determine how this is achieved. It is short lived, lasting a few days or as much as a week or two, depending on the subject's size, age, type, colour and magical ability. The wakened dragon can function as normal for this period but must return to the long sleep or face death if it does not.\n\nThe dragon must feast, replenishing energy prior to returning to its sleeping cavern.\n\nNote: dragons will take any accumulated treasure with them when they enter the long sleep. This hoard can be plentiful, as these ancients can gather many valuable gemstones and precious metals over an extremely long life time.\n\nWarning: fortune hunters beware. If you are lucky enough to find a dragon hoard and a sleeping dragon, know they have the ability to sense intrusions to their domain and will react aggressively to any violation or disturbance of their privacy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Evening descended on the White Mountains and with the dusk came the Aurora.\n\nNightstar, who had spent most of his day sitting with Sunburst and Rose watching the visiting dragons fly in for the Grand Moot, was in awe of this natural spectacle.\n\nAs the sky darkened, so the lights of the aurora increased in brightness. Vast waves of green rippled across the starry expanse, intense blues and reds swirled and circulated creating a kaleidoscope of colour, ethereal and alive.\n\nThe meadow filled with dragons of all varieties and colours, the aurora bathing them all in its mystical light.\n\nThe snow covered slopes, high upon the mountainside reflected the sky, the mountains changed from their usual icy white to the greens, purples and reds of the aurora, the huge snow fields a glowing canvas for the astral phenomenon.\n\nNightstar understood why the dragons of the White Mountains had been excited when Flaxe had woken to announce the impending Grand Moot. Not only was there a gathering of dragons from all over the continent, but this spectacular light show was also part of the celebrations. Sunburst, as usual, hadn't told him everything about the Grand Moot. This time Nightstar believed it wasn't because he had forgotten or only told part of the tale, as was his habit, but that he wanted it to be a surprise\u2014which it most certainly was.\n\nNightstar was content to sit and stare at the hypnotic sky, the mountainside and the gathered meadow of dragons, enjoying the feeling of happiness and companionship. There were dragons still arriving and as they sailed through the night sky, it was hard to tell what colour they were, the aurora painting them all the same.\n\nThe black scales on his body had taken on the colours of the aurora too, even a black dragon wasn't immune to the effects of the natural lights, making his appearance the same as any other dragon assembled. Nightstar was happy at this, as usually his black scales marked him as different, but tonight he was the same as everyone else, camouflaged in the colours of the aurora, another multi-coloured dragon, indistinguishably normal.\n\nFour dragons passed close by as they wandered through the meadow and the two males nodded in unison to Nightstar. He was now able to distinguish between male and female dragons and recognise individuals with ease. Even though the two males of the group appeared different, painted in the colours of the aurora, Nightstar knew them both. Verdune and Verdante, the two identical green dragons of the moot guard.\n\nThe two greens had shown Nightstar respect, but they were normally taciturn and serious. Tonight however, the atmosphere of the moot and the two females that accompanied them, gave them cause to relax and enjoy the event.\n\nNightstar nodded back and as he observed the throngs of dragons, he noticed that a lot of male and females were pairing up. Sunburst and Rose were happy to include him in their company but a sudden realisation made him feel like a third wing. His thoughts turned to Amethyst and he wished that she were here with him.\n\n\"I think I will take a flight through the skies of the aurora,\" he told his friends. \"There is something special about this evening and I would like to feel the magic of the lights as I fly.\"\n\n\"Don't go too far,\" Rose said. \"We would like it if you were present at the laying and I don't think it will be too long now.\"\n\n\"Rose feels her time is soon,\" Sunburst beamed. \"She will lay tonight, I am sure of it.\"\n\n\"I am... \" Nightstar was filled with an emotion so strong he was unable to express himself. Never would Alduce have been lost for words, but never would Alduce have been choked with this foreign emotion either. \"I would be privileged to attend. I have never been witness to something so personal.\"\n\n\"We would share this with our friend,\" Rose said. \"You have led a life of solitude and loneliness before coming to our shores. We would see this changed, if you so want it.\"\n\n\"I would,\" Nightstar replied softly.\n\n\"Fly high and fly free,\" Sunburst spoke the traditional words. \"And find that purple temptress and bring her too.\" He cocked one of his eye ridges like a quizzical eyebrow, implying more by leaving it unsaid.\n\nNightstar bowed to Sunburst and Rose, it was the best way he knew to show respect and thanks without speaking, as he feared he wouldn't be able to say the words. He launched himself into the air, powerful wings pushing him higher into the aurora filled sky, taking care to avoid the other flying dragons.\n\nAs he gained height he looked down over the meadow filled with dragons and marvelled at the sight. There were dragons everywhere, in small groups and in large crowds, the largest of which was a giant circle around a huge dragon. Flaxe. So many dragons had come to pay their respects to the ancient former leader. Nightstar wanted to speak with the old dragon, he would be uniquely interesting to study, but he would need to be careful in his approach. If Flaxe was old and clever, he would surely be curious about a black dragon from outside the White Mountains.\n\nHe pushed higher and the ground diminished along with the meadow and the mountains until he was so high that he almost reached the aurora itself, feeling like he was chasing a rainbow.\n\nHe understood the science of how the charged particles from the sun emitted flares of light as they collided with the atmosphere, forming the colours of the aurora\u2014but it didn't make it any less spectacular. Tonight the air was alive with magic and he basked in the wash of colours as he flew. Green ripples of light formed patterns that reminded him of the colour of the two dragons of the moot guard.\n\nThe two dragons he had seen in the meadow, occupied by the two visiting females, were not standing guard tonight outside the chamber of the moot. If the chamber was unguarded, and was likely to remain that way for the time being, what was to stop him investigating the pearl of wisdom?\n\nNothing!\n\nHe began a slow spiral, setting his wings and relishing in the downward glide, enjoying the moment and losing himself in the flight. All dragons looked similar under the colours of the aurora and no-one would notice his black scales as he returned to the inner mountain. Once he was inside, he would take care not to be noticed. It was unlikely there would be anyone occupying the cavern, everyone should be out and about, enjoying the moot. He needed to remain vigilant, just in case. He knew what he was about to do was wrong and he mustn't get caught.\n\nOnce he studied the pearl he would go in search of Amethyst.\n\nHe hoped the pearl of wisdom might enlighten him as to what it was a female dragon looked for in a mate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\n\u2002Flaxe: Yellow Dragon: draconis flavinium.\n\n\u2002Ancient Elder, former Moot Leader and Long Sleeper.\n\n\u2002Flaxe is thought to be over four hundred years old. Before entering the long sleep he was leader of the White Mountain Moot for over one hundred years. Old age and tiredness were the main reason he retired from this position. He also wanted to give Winterfang, his replacement, the opportunity to lead his community, stating that new blood and fresh perspectives maintain strength and objectivity within the moot. He is known to be extremely wise and knowledgeable and is loved and respected by all dragons.\n\n\u2002Although his scales are faded and hardly any pigment remains (a result of old age) he is of the species draconis flavinium and is unusually large for a yellow dragon. His colouring is that of ancient parchment and little remains of his vibrant yellow when compared to younger specimens of his species.\n\n\u2002No-one knows what triggers the awakening from the long sleep and dragons who are able to partake in this extended form of stasis, will not discuss the process and guard their secret closely.\n\n\u2002Flaxe, although extremely old, does not display any signs of tiredness when he is awake. His powerful magic continually sustains him while sleeping and allows him to remain active for a short period of time when awake.\n\n\u2002Young dragons flock to his side and follow the ancient dragon, fascinated by the historic stories he tells and his knowledge of past times. The mature dragons will often chastise their young for bothering the ancient dragon, but Flaxe has indicated that their attention and enthusiasm is welcomed and he enjoys the constant companionship.\n\n\u2002There is a hidden mystery to this dragon equivalent of an old and respected gentleman. He is still a force to be reckoned with and will wake, not only in times of celebration, but in times of need, when his wisdom may be called upon.\n\n\u2002The sleeping chamber Flaxe has chosen is deep within the inner dome of the White Mountain, far back from the central cavern. There is only one tunnel that leads in and out of his chamber. It is secluded and warm, heated by the magma below the mountain and rumoured to be filled with a horde of precious metals and gems accumulated over almost four hundred years."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Nightstar dropped from an empty ledge high up in the inner dome and glided silently through the darkness. Not many dragons occupied the high levels in the honeycomb of caves and the ones that did weren't at home tonight. Everyone was outside under the magical light of the aurora celebrating the Grand Moot. No guards stood watch at the entrance to the chamber of the pearl.\n\nNightstar landed quietly in the cave entrance, his talons lightly scraping the rock and echoing in the silence. He folded his wings and crept to the stone wall, crouching low. He scanned the inner tunnel, but as far as he could see, there were no signs of life. He took a last quick glance behind, making sure he hadn't been observed, then moved deeper inside, staying close to the cover of the wall.\n\nWhen the tunnel ended and opened out into the chamber of the moot, he stopped, suddenly aware of what he was doing. He had been so caught up in the excitement of the Grand Moot and the atmosphere the aurora brought, that he'd failed to consider his actions fully.\n\nHe was about to betray the trust of his friends. Friends that had taken him in, welcomed him and shown only kindness to a stranger. This wasn't the feelings of Alduce, this was all Nightstar. He wasn't just one person, or dragon, anymore, even though he knew he was.\n\nNightstar's persona had grown. He was both dragon and sorcerer and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two.\n\nAlduce's mind was unsure whether Nightstar was influencing the thoughts of the man, but he knew that when he interacted with other dragons, Nightstar's will and instinct became stronger. He never forgot he was human, but it was only when he was alone that Alduce surfaced fully to remind him.\n\nHe found it easier now, after months of learning, how to be a dragon and he believed that the dragon within him found it easier not to be a human. He was travelling in uncharted waters of the mind and the scholarly part of his being sailed through them headlong. The cautious man scoured these waters for dangerous reefs, but the dragon soul joined with that scholar and delighted in the journey, sails open to the wind that carried them both into the unknown.\n\nFocus! He scolded himself. This wasn't a time to let his mind ponder such things, he was here for a reason. He shook his head trying to clear his thoughts, he felt a little inebriated under the aurora and wondered if it was effecting his judgement. Nightstar could feel the presence of the pearl and wondered if being so close to what was most surely a magical object was also influencing his thoughts.\n\nPerhaps the pearl was protected by a glamour and this was what was making him feel conflicted. Alduce was more than an adept sorcerer and no charm, no matter how strong, would deter him from his objective.\n\nIt felt like the power of the spell was designed to keep dragons, that shouldn't have access to the pearl, at bay. It wasn't able to ward off the strength of Alduce the sorcerer, even in dragon form.\n\nStill, he should be cautious, the pearl was more than it seemed. Anything magical must be treated with respect. A lesson all apprentices must learn early, Caltus had often reminded Alduce, especially something unknown.\n\nNightstar crept closer to the pearl, it sat on the rock Winterfang had stood behind when he opened the moot. He breathed in, smelling the air and his forked tongue flicked from between his teeth, tasting it. The grassy smell of summer meadows and a taste, almost like sweet honey, filled his senses.\n\nDragon magic!\n\nHis suspicions were correct, the pearl was wrought with a subtle hidden charm.\n\nHe leaned in closer, large eyes dilating in the dim cave light, slit-eyed pupils widening to see as much as they could of the mysterious pearl before his snout.\n\nThe polished milky surface, like white veined marble, started to swirl. The spiky quills on Nightstar's neck stood to attention like the hackles of an angry wolf.\n\nHe wanted to touch it. He wanted to learn the secrets only ancient dragons were privy to. He wanted to steal it, take it back to his laboratory and study it. He wanted it for his own, to lock it away and covet it.\n\nNo! It was the pearl of wisdom, it should be respected by all dragons, and humans, Nightstar reminded Alduce. The magic of the pearl was stronger than he expected. He reached out his claw and the light from the pearl's surface reflected on his shiny black talons as he slowly closed them around the glowing orb. He braced himself in preparation, not knowing what to expect.\n\nThe magic of the pearl tingled on his talons and a pleasant sensation, warm and calming, enveloped his grip. He could feel the magical power inside and knew why it was named the pearl of wisdom. It held so many ancient secrets, it was crammed full of myths and stories, it had knowledge of a magic he never knew existed. It was everything a dragon should know and so much more.\n\nHe probed deeper into the white swirling mist of its secrets, spiralling down through a thousand million white threads, each one different and each one precious, unknown yet somehow familiar. It was far too much for one mind to absorb. It was too much for two minds, for both Alduce and Nightstar, to fully comprehend.\n\nThe power of the pearl swallowed him down and he was defenceless to resist its temptation as it pulled him deeper."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Great Exodus.\n\nNote: As told by dragons.\n\nThere were once no dragons on the western continent of Aurentania, so named from an ancient dragon word which translates to Land of the Aurora. Dragons originally thrived in the east, indigenous to the continent of Eusavus, over five hundred years previous.\n\nThese continents are the two largest land masses on the world of Salverta.\n\nThe story the dragons tell is that the land they once inhabited, over the ages, began to fill with more and more humans. Man arrived from the south, spreading across the lands, breeding and building, turning the wilderness into their cities and towns.\n\nThe dragons moved north, into less fertile lands, not wishing any contact with humans and everything was peaceful for a few centuries. But the march of humanity was unending and eventually men began to encroach once again, into the new lands the dragons now called home.\n\nHumans grew stronger and as their race advanced and their weapons and magic evolved with them. A time came when they were not content to share the land with dragons any longer and war parties pushed farther and farther north hunting and killing dragon kind.\n\nThe scales and hide of dragons were sought after for many reasons and sorcerers, mages and practitioners of the arcane coveted any piece of a dragon as they were imbued with powerful magic and could be used for a number of barbaric human spells. Flesh, bone, horns, blood, and even eggs were the prizes these slayers hunted for. Anything that was part of a dragon was of value to them.\n\nThe humans were clever, and through strength of numbers and the power of their own unique magic, learned how to fight and conquer dragons, singling out targets and binding them with spells. They forged sorcerous metal that was hard and lethal, creating fatal weapons and armour that was impervious to dragon attacks. They continued to steal dragon land, century after century, their numbers were limitless and their attacks relentless, until a once mighty race was reduced to near extinction.\n\nDragons became isolated from each other and searched for more distant and remote places to live. They sought out regions and areas where humans found it difficult to reach and took them a long time to travel to. But they knew, that if they didn't act, their kind would be hunted down until they were only a myth. No more dragons would exist and they would vanish from history completely.\n\nThe oldest and wisest of the dragons gathered and formed their first Dragon Moot out of a necessity for their survival. Their choices were limited and their continuing struggle over the centuries was a war they were destined to lose. The only outcome would be the slow annihilation of their species. For each human that was slain, and there were many, two more took their place.\n\nThe more scarce dragons became, the more their value to humans grew. Man was fuelled by an ever increasing greed to hunt and slay them. Dragons would have to do more than retreat and hide on this continent, if they wanted to survive.\n\nThe moot decided that the only course of action was to leave the land that was once their home and seek out a new place to live, unhampered by the constant threat of humanity.\n\nThe north was a barren waste, filled with snow and ice, that stretched on and on without end. While dragons could survive the harsh frosts and the constant cold, this was not a land most of them would be comfortable living in.\n\nThe south and east were no longer the wilderness they had once been, mankind had spoiled the beautiful forests, cutting down the trees for their wood. They had destroyed the hillsides, quarrying the stone and leaving their ugly mark upon the desecrated land. They had built their foul cities on the plains, filling the grasslands and meadows with their towns and villages, polluting the rivers and lakes with their waste. The wildlife, once plentiful, had been consumed by the ravenous hordes of mankind as their number sprawled and expanded, year after year, century after century.\n\nThis land was no longer beautiful, no longer the unspoiled wilderness it had once been and there was nothing left for dragons here anymore. Everything they had known, everything they loved, had been ravaged and destroyed by humans. They were a plague on nature. A disease with no cure, consuming the wilderness until there was nothing left to take.\n\nDragons no longer wanted part of their world, they lived in harmony with the nature, never taking more than they needed and the rise of man made them weep with great sadness and loss.\n\nIt was time to leave and the only direction to go was west, across the vast ocean, far away from humans and the spoiled lands.\n\nThe moot sent out their strongest flyers, four dragons representing earth, water, sky and spirit, to fly west and discover what, if anything, lay beyond the great body of water.\n\nWeeks crept slowly by as the moot waited and when the four returned, they gathered to hear the news they brought.\n\nThere was a new land, far to the west, unspoiled and best of all, empty of man. It was ideal place for dragons to settle and make into their new home.\n\nWord was passed to all the remaining dragons that were found, they were told to spread the news to any of their kin they could find. The moot proposed they would fly west to the shores of the ocean, gather there and wait for seven days for all who wished to embark to the new land.\n\nIt would be a long and difficult flight. They were to cross an ocean larger than the continent they currently lived on. The dragons gorged themselves before they departed and then rested to conserve their strength for the flight ahead. Not all would see the shores of the new land, only the strongest would survive the arduous Journey.\n\nBut dragons were creatures of legend, their strength and perseverance was part of what they were. The constant centuries of struggle with man had whittled out the weak and the slow, the dragons that remained were the last of their kind. They were the strongest, the fastest, and the smartest. They were the survivors, forged through adversity and they would succeed and they would prevail.\n\nThey were prepared to take the risk as the reward was great, and if they did not, they would fade from existence.\n\nNever again would dragons be driven from their home, their new world was far enough across the vast ocean, the wild untameable sea, that humans in their small pathetic boats would struggle to breach the gap between continents.\n\nAnd, if one day they ever did, dragons would flame their boats, destroy any men that dared set foot on their shores. They would not allow man to walk on their new land and take it from them.\n\nThey had once valued all life, even the tiny men. Allowing them to multiply and thrive had been a grave mistake. Gone was their conscience for human life. Their new world would be different and mankind would be subjected to the full wrath of dragons, should they ever make the mistake of coming to these shores."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Nightstar drifted through the pearl of wisdom, following threads of knowledge and meandering through the secrets it held. He latched on to a long white thread, awash with multiple colours dappled all along its length. As he examined the information within, he learned about the Great Exodus and experienced first-hand recollections of dragons long past.\n\nHe was able to relive the story of their first moot and witness the gathering on the shores of the ocean to the west. He travelled with the dragons, flying forever over an endless expanse of unchanging ocean, golden sunlight bright and glaring during the day, silver moonlight turning the sea to liquid metal at night. He felt the joy of their arrival on new shores and shared the tiredness of their wings. He knew the hunger of empty bellies and the thirst of parched throats after their arduous flight. But he also experienced their excitement of a new beginning in a new land.\n\nThe pearl shared the knowledge.\n\nA new thread caught his attention and a black scale filled his vision, dark as night, one scale among many, hard unyielding armour. Then it was gone, replaced by a dark smoke, potent and deadly dragon magic, swirling and drifting, filled with death and destruction.\n\nHe jumped to another thread, spinning and weaving, his thoughts reached out and instinct took over, his mind turning to the long sleep. He was rewarded with how to change his body, using magic stored within him to slow down his metabolism and rest. Resting, dreaming and sleeping. It was something that he could easily access, but not until he was much older.\n\nThe pearl provided the answer.\n\nHis thoughts changed again, searching through the random strands that manifested inside the heart of the pearl.\n\nHis vision returned to the black scale, this time it was being probed by a sharp pointed talon. It lifted the scale exposing the skin below, vulnerable and unprotected now the armour shielding it was pried aside. The vision of the scale faded, replaced by black wings, spread wide. The dark smoke emanating from them was denser than air, its weight causing it to sink, swirling to the ground, venomous and threatening.\n\nHe skipped once more, jumping to a new thread and discovered the ability to look into the eyes of another, see deep into their soul and learn how to tell if they spoke the truth. He knew at once how to separate lies from truth, to see inside the heart of someone, to stare into their eyes and use the hypnotic vision to search for falsehoods and deception.\n\nThe pearl provided the knowledge and showed him the way.\n\nHis vison returned to the sharp talon as it opened the skin beneath the scale and drops of blood pooled from the cut to gather on a claw. The vision shifted again.\n\nThick smoke coalesced, covering the ground, swirling and alive with power, created from deep inside the spell caster, born from the wings of a dragon.\n\nHe jumped one last time, uncontrolled and unasked for, latching onto another random thread, opaque and insubstantial, it circulated and swirled within the pearl.\n\nHe would have to stop, this was too much to absorb and his mind was pushing him back to the cavern of the moot.\n\nThe last thread contained the secret of invisibility, how to change his scales like a chameleon, to blend in to his surroundings, not truly invisible but a clever trick that now appeared simple, once he had been shown the way.\n\nThe pearl gifted him with forbidden knowledge. Was it somehow aware of what he wished to learn? He had contemplated some of the subjects it revealed, was it...\n\nSnap!\n\nHis claw unfurled and his connection with the pearl was broken. He was back in the gloomy cave, the bright threads of knowledge gone from his reach and the gossamer web of secrets vanished.\n\nHe knew so much more than he had before. The pearl exposed him to secrets a sorcerer could only dream of.\n\nStrangely, no time had passed, his journey into the memories of the pearl had only taken an instant, but even that short time was all he could endure.\n\nIt wasn't painful, he experienced no discomfort, but it had been difficult to maintain a connection with so much knowledge willing to flow freely and fill his brain. The pearl was eager to feed his hunger and drown him in its knowledge.\n\nThe secrets he discovered hadn't been random, these were some of the subjects he'd been thinking about, subconscious questions that he desired answers to.\n\nThe pearl had guided him, shown him the correct path among the millions of threads swirling in its secret sea. Just how many more infinite secrets the pearl stored in the swirling threads was unfathomable.\n\nHe had wondered about the Great Exodus, heard dragons speaking about it. The pearl had guided him to the correct thread, finding it with simple ease and shared the knowledge of the historic event.\n\nHe was intrigued with the long sleep, wanted to learn more about it. Again the pearl had shown him how to attain it and make it a reality, if he chose to enter into its indefinite slumber.\n\nHis mind often pondered how dragons could detect a lie, ever since his meeting with Galdor all those years ago. Now he knew how it was achieved and he had the ability to do so himself.\n\nHe wondered about the strange visions in between the threads he had explored, the black scale and the dark smoke. They nagged at his subconscious like forgotten memories, just out of reach, stored so deeply the knowledge was too distant to recall or make sense of.\n\nAll but the last secret he uncovered had been questions he wished answers to, and the pearl had provided them. Everything but the trick to change his scales to mimic the chameleon, to appear invisible and blend with the environment. This had been a random thread that he'd latched onto at the last minute.\n\nHe now understood how powerful the pearl of wisdom was and how wrong it was to use it for his own gain. Winterfang was leader of the moot and had the right to consult the pearl's knowledge for the good of his community. Nightstar was neither a leader nor a natural dragon. He felt guilty stealing the secrets of the pearl and betraying the trust of a community that welcomed him.\n\nGuilt and wonder, shame and excitement, a mix of dragon and human feelings creating conflict, warring emotions from two separate entities occupying his conscious at the same time. The part of him that was Nightstar might not be what Alduce thought of as a true dragon, but Nightstar was real. The part of him that had become Nightstar knew he was a true dragon, his origin might not be that of his brothers and sisters. He wasn't born from the shell like them but he was still a dragon, whether created by sorcery and scientific means, he was still Nightstar, he had the heart and soul of a White Mountain dragon, he was alive and as real as Alduce.\n\nMaybe it was the charm within the pearl effecting his reasoning, maybe it was something more. He wasn't entirely sure, he had searched deep within the pearl and perhaps this was influencing his decisions.\n\nClaws scrabbled on the landing and Nightstar froze as the sound echoed along the tunnel, breaking the silence and his train of thought. He strained to listen, sensitive ears alert for any sound and then he heard it a second time, followed by the rustle of leathery wings folding. This could only mean one thing, the moot guard had returned to their post, trapping him somewhere he shouldn't be. With no visible way out.\n\nVerdune and Verdante, the two green dragons had returned to their positions, safeguarding the chamber of the moot and the pearl within. Nightstar listened to their quiet rumbling voices as they discussed the females they had spent time with. The acoustics of the chamber made it easy to hear each word, even though they kept their voices low.\n\n\"I wish we had been able to sneak a little more time away from our duties,\" Verdante said. \"The aurora provides the perfect camouflage. All dragons look the same under its light. The pearl is safe, and it is Grand Moot.\"\n\n\"I agree brother,\" Verdune said. \"There will be time later when our relief comes to take over, then we will be free to bask under the aurora and chase any females we want.\"\n\n\"If old Winterfang hasn't forgotten to arrange our replacements, that is,\" his brother retorted.\n\n\"Old Winterfang forgets nothing!\" boomed a new voice. The leader of the White Mountain Moot had arrived on the ledge and Nightstar now feared he would soon be discovered.\n\n\"And old Winterfang can see everything too,\" he said. \"He sees that his trusted guards sneak away from their posts to chase the tails of summer females.\"\n\n\"We thought\u2026\" Verdune said.\n\n\"Relax,\" Winterfang said, \"I'm not so old that I can't remember what it's like to feel my blood rush at a red in heat.\"\n\n\"Or a glowing green with scales like emeralds and a\u2026\" Verdante began.\n\n\"I can see that you are both preoccupied and I have come to make you a proposal,\" Winterfang said. \"I understand that standing guard on one of the most eventful nights of the year\u2026\"\n\n\"The decade!\" Verdante said.\n\n\"\u2026can be difficult,\" Winterfang continued, \"especially when the aurora is in the sky, spreading its influence among us, and far distant females visit our home. I have come to check the pearl and relieve you of your duties until tomorrow. No-one need stand guard tonight. But be warned,\" and his voice took on a serious tone. \"If you ever leave the pearl unattended without my permission, when you are supposed to be guarding it\u2014our most valuable treasure\u2014you will know my wrath.\" Silence filled the cavern and neither Verdante nor his twin, Verdune, spoke.\n\n\"Do you understand?\" Winterfang prompted.\n\n\"Yes, mighty Winterfang,\" they replied in unison.\n\n\"Well, go then, enjoy the moot,\" Winterfang chuckled, taking the sting from his words.\n\nThe noise of claws scrabbling on rock and wings unfurling, filtered down into the chamber. Nightstar began to panic. Winterfang was here to check the pearl. He would come through the tunnel and into the chamber and there was nowhere for him to go, nowhere to hide and Winterfang would discover a black dragon somewhere he shouldn't be.\n\nNightstar was worried for Verdante and Verdune, they would be in so much trouble. Winterfang's wrath would be fierce and it would be his fault the two guards would suffer.\n\nStrange that he should worry about the two greens when his own predicament was even worse.\n\n\"Wait!\" Winterfang called out and the scrabbling claws of the guards silenced immediately. \"I would advise when you refer to the leader of the White Mountain Moot, the word old,\" and he drew it out, slowly exaggerating the syllable, \"would be best omitted.\" A silenced followed his words and Nightstar imagined cold blue eyes holding their attention. The moment stretched, before he continued. \"And remember, my wrath is something you should wish you never have the misfortune to experience.\"\n\nTwo sets of wings cracked as they caught the air and the green dragons departed the ledge.\n\n\"Wise Winterfang from now on, moot leader,\" a voice floated back through the tunnel. Nightstar thought it was Verdune that had spoken.\n\nWinterfang rumbled and Nightstar was sure it was more of a chuckle. The frost drake wasn't as cold as he pretended.\n\nClaws clicked on the tunnel floor as the moot leader neared, echoing like a ticking clock, counting down the seconds to his discovery.\n\nNightstar pushed himself back, pressing his body hard against the rock as he waited for Winterfang to appear, and wished he was invisible.\n\nHe shivered unexpectedly, even though the cavern wasn't cold, his scales shimmering like a heat haze. The chameleon effect encountered on the last thread of knowledge, began to change his appearance. He didn't vanish or turn invisible, but instead took on the appearance of the solid rock wall of the chamber. Where only seconds before a large black dragon had stood, fearful of discovery, now there was nothing but the illusion of plain old rock.\n\nNightstar had to look closely at his scales to tell if they were still there. He was amazed at just how hard it was to make out any of his form, and he knew where to look! He remained as still as the rock he clung to, not daring to breathe lest the air from his lungs disturbed the seemingly empty cavern and give him away.\n\nWinterfang entered the chamber and moved directly to the pearl of wisdom, sitting undisturbed upon its traditional resting place. He sniffed the air and bent his snout to the pearl, then walked around behind the slab rock it sat upon, staring back to where Nightstar crouched, camouflaged and still.\n\nNightstar fixed his gaze blankly looking forward, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the frost drake, sure that if he did catch his eye, Winterfang would notice him and see through the disguise. His nervousness at being discovered almost caused him to snigger hysterically at the poor term of phrase, see through his disguise. He was see-through, like the glass pane in a window. No-one looked at the glass, only what was beyond. The chameleon effect, as he named it, acted in exactly the same way. Winterfang looked through him and only saw the cavern wall. And the amazing and terrifying thing was, he was less than twenty feet away.\n\nThe frost coloured dragon cocked his head left then right, listening intently to the silence. His cold blue eyes alert as he scoured the inner chamber, prying into the darkness. Nightstar could only wait, fearing he would be caught, sensing Winterfang knew he wasn't alone, even though he couldn't see or hear anything.\n\nWinterfang sniffed the air, pointing his snout to the ceiling then the floor, like a hound on the trail of hidden game. He flicked out his tongue as if tasting the cavern air, then sharply turned his head, facing back towards the entrance, staring behind himself. He was acting spooked, as if he sensed another presence but was unable to detect where it was. He spun his head back round, facing the wall where Nightstar stood, staring and sniffing. Nightstar waited, the tension in the chamber unbearable, then, Winterfang puffed out his breath, sighing huffily and shook his head.\n\nHe stayed for a few more moments, long stretched out moments that felt like hours to the anxious Nightstar, then he turned and left the chamber, his snow coloured tail flicking back and forth in the air like the tail of an angry cat. The pearl responded to the movement as his tail passed over the milky globe. The surface patterns swirling gently then slowing to a stop, returning to its veined marble state as Winterfang left the chamber and Nightstar was alone once more.\n\nHe listened as the clacking of talons on stone receded down the tunnel, tracking the retreating dragon's departure. He remained motionless, never daring to move, still holding his breath. When he heard Winterfang's wings unfurl and was sure his wingbeats had taken him away from the landing ledge, he expelled air quietly and the only sound that remained was the thundering of his heart.\n\nExercising extreme caution, Nightstar stepped away from the wall and his skin and scales rippled back into view, the deep dark black they had always been.\n\nThe encounter was far too close for comfort and he was sure he would have been discovered. Just as the pearl of wisdom supplied the answers to his question and gave him the knowledge he had been searching for, it had also provided a solution to a problem he didn't even know he needed, until it arose. It was almost like the pearl predicted the future and anticipated his needs before they happened. This gave the sorcerer inside him a great deal to ponder, the mysteries and the power of the pearl were even greater that he believed. This was an ancient magic, ancient even by dragon standards, and that was old indeed. But now wasn't the time to wonder about such things, now he needed to get out of this chamber while the opportunity presented itself.\n\nCreeping as silently as he could, talons retracted and stepping on the hard pads of his feet, he made his way stealthily to the outside ledge. The landing area was empty and freedom was only a few wing beats away, but he stopped, keeping to the shadows, remembering something Winterfang had said to the green guards. Old Winterfang can see everything.\n\nNightstar didn't doubt it for a second.\n\nEager to leave but sensing the time wasn't right yet, he waited. His heartbeat slowed, but he was still on high alert. He had an itching feeling his exploits this evening weren't quite done yet. Intuition told him to wait, or perhaps it was his dragon sense. Trusting his instinct, he remained still, hugging the shadows of the cave wall. Waiting, but not knowing why.\n\nA large white shape glided by the entrance. The air from Winterfang's wings creating little dust eddies that swirled around the cave mouth as he passed. The moot leader was taking the opportunity for one last look into the cavern as he flew by on his way back outside. He had sensed there was something amiss and hadn't left, attempting to catch the suspected intruder off guard.\n\nAnd somehow Nightstar had understood that his way wasn't clear, the danger of discovery hadn't yet passed. He had been right to wait, even though he was desperate to escape. He had learned something valuable, a trait all dragons were born with.\n\nPatience.\n\nAs a scholar, he was always in a hurry to learn and to discover that which he didn't know. Sorcerers were no strangers to patience, and Alduce, while he could wait for experiments to react or spells to formulate, through necessity, wasn't the most patient person.\n\nHe never thought being a dragon could teach him qualities he could apply as a human, but he had been wrong. Caltus, once again, had been right. It wasn't the first time that his old master still managed to educate him, even though his days of being an apprentice were long gone. He had a wise saying for every situation, and we learn something new every day, was one of his favourites. It was still appropriate now, so many years later. Today, Nightstar had taken his old master's place and become the teacher and Alduce, the willing pupil.\n\nWinterfang descended towards the entrance, his white scales easily seen in the semi-darkness of the inner dome. He glowed like green ice as he exited into the outside light, the aurora reflecting on his body. He vanished from sight signalling to Nightstar that this time, the cautious old, no, wise leader, had truly gone. It was now safe for him to leave.\n\nTaking one last look behind, he hopped from the ledge and glided silently around the inner dome, wondering why Winterfang would chose to leave the pearl unattended. Perhaps the aurora was having the same intoxicating effect on the frost drake as it was on him, impairing his judgement. Aware of Alduce's presence, a memory the sorcerer recalled, came to mind.\n\nNever look a gift horse in the mouth. Another aphorism from Master Caltus. It was time to leave, while he could still do so, undetected. The honeycomb of cave mouths was thankfully empty of dragons, but he took his time getting to the exit of the huge inner cavern, making sure no-one was there to observe his furtive escape.\n\nHis mind returned to Amethyst, he should find her and join Sunburst and Rose. If he didn't return with the purple female, his inquisitive yellow friend would wonder why and want to know what he had been up to all this time. Funny how Sunburst heartedly scolded him for asking so many question, when the curious yellow dragon was full of questions himself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The gem like scales of Amethyst caught the purples of the aurora, making them appear crystalline and highlighted her natural colour, rather than disguising it. This made it easy for Nightstar to spot her as he flew across the meadow where a great number of dragons had assembled.\n\nHe had searched for the purple female, cruising the skies above the meadows, observing the wonders of the Grand Moot. Before he had located Amethyst, he had flown over a large group, mostly dragonets, gathered around Flaxe as he entertained them with his stories. It was true, the ancient dragon attracted the youngsters like iron to a magnet. It was by far the largest assembly of quiet and subdued dragons he'd come across. They hung on his every word, unusually silent and rarely interrupting with questions.\n\nNightstar had stopped, the scholar inside taking over for a while, he hung on the periphery of Flaxe's group, desperate to meet the ancient yellow and converse with him, but not in front of such a huge audience. The opportunity to listen to the great dragon speak and get to know him through his words was enough for now.\n\nFlaxe's voice captivated his listeners, but it wasn't loud or booming. He had a natural storyteller's voice and when he spoke, you were compelled to listen, his melodious words drew you in and submerged you in the narrative.\n\nNightstar recognised some of the smaller dragonets that had greeted him when he first arrived, sitting as close as they could get to Flaxe, quiet and attentive now, so different from when they had met him. He was seeing dragons as individuals now, able to pick out faces from a group, if he had met them before. The shape of a snout, the ridges on a head and the angle of horns, all were recognisable features to him now.\n\nHis perspectives were changing, previously they had all looked similar and he was only able to identify people by their colours. People? What other way could he think of them? Although they weren't really people, each dragon had a personality. Even personality wasn't the best word to describe dragons. Individuality, that was better, they were all individuals to him now. Nightstar thought more like an individual himself, but it was still difficult to fully distance himself from Alduce and his human side.\n\nHe found himself caught up in the story of the Great Exodus, as Flaxe wove a tale of desperate times and the hardship of the long flight across an endless sea. The ancient dragon then rewarded his audience with the finale of their huge achievement and a new beginning filled with hope. He was a master storyteller and he delivered the tale with sadness, adventure and excitement, all in equal measure.\n\nHaving experienced the exodus from the shared memories within the pearl of knowledge, Nightstar was amazed at how historically accurate Flaxe's rendition was. He had embellished some of the happenings, making them more exciting for his younger audience, but he hadn't detracted from the events or the actual facts.\n\nNightstar had stayed to listen to a few more stories, some of them funny, some sad, but always entertaining. He laughed along with the young dragons when Flaxe told them the exploits of the dragonet who couldn't fly. Finding humour at the amusing situation she found herself in, until eventually, she managed to take flight, revelling in the experience. Although the tale was similar to a children's bedtime story human mothers would tell their sleepy offspring, Nightstar enjoyed it immensely, soaring along with the triumphant dragonet on her first flight and relating it to the first time he had taken to the air.\n\nHe could have happily sat and listened to all of Faxe's tales, but the pull of another attraction worked its magic as he remembered the beauty of Amethyst purple scales, the curves of her neck and the mischief dancing in her dark blue eyes. Reluctant though he was to leave Flaxe and his mesmerising stories, he had set off in search of the object of his desires.\n\nThe aurora was having the same effect on all the adult dragons and as he flew above the meadow, he witnessed many dragons closely pressed together, their necks entwined intimately. Perhaps it was good that Flaxe kept the dragonets entertained, giving the mature dragons time to themselves.\n\nHe dropped down neatly, landing perfectly beside Amethyst, who was in the company of two male dragons, obviously vying to be suitable mates for the radiant purple female. Nightstar felt his quills rise and the spikes on his neck stand up, these males were his adversaries and he would see off any challengers for Amethyst's affections. All three heads turned to stare at the black dragon and he quickly reigned in his feelings, conscious that he had made some terrible mistake in etiquette.\n\nThe two interloping males backed away, dipping their heads in acknowledgement of the newly arrived suitor. Nightstar quickly realised that his display had been a declaration of his intent towards Amethyst and the two males had seen this and gracefully withdrew, leaving Amethyst exclusively to his company.\n\nAmethyst seemed pleased at his dramatic entrance. \"Nightstar,\" she purred, her voice like silk, \"you've chased off the competition it appears.\" Her eyes met his and he could tell she was happy at his arrival.\n\n\"I wanted to see you,\" Nightstar said, thinking how obviously stupid it sounded, a human reaction.\n\n\"And do you like what you look upon?\" she teased.\n\nThe dragon pushed aside the idiot human and took control, he was Nightstar and he wanted to be with this beautiful female, she was perfect for him. Her purple scales complimented his black and silver, they would be regal and magnificent together. \"I like what I see,\" he replied, \"very much. Purple is my favourite colour.\"\n\n\"That is well then, as I find myself drawn to the unusual black of your scales and the silver upon your chest.\" She gently stretched out her head and tentatively brushed his neck, lightly at first, then with more vigour when he didn't resist. A feeling of pure contentment washed over him, the sensation of Amethyst's head caressing his neck was intensely pleasing and a quiet gurgling purr escaped his throat.\n\n\"I was impressed with your display,\" she crooned. \"Those two were beginning to bore me and I was hoping you would find me.\"\n\n\"My display?\"\n\n\"The way your neck quills signalled your intent,\" she met his eyes, holding his gaze, waiting for a response.\n\n\"Ah, my intent, yes, I'm happy it pleases you.\" Nightstar wasn't exactly sure what his intent was, but now that he had made a show of displaying it, he suspected the two departed dragons were not as impressed as Amethyst.\n\n\"Now that you have declared for me, made it plain that you desire a coupling and will lay challenge to any who attempt to court me, I am content,\" she huffed a small laugh. \"I only wish you had raised your quills for me earlier.\"\n\nNightstar was dumfounded and barely managed a response, \"I wish to couple with you?\"\n\n\"And I with you,\" Amethyst mistook his question for a statement, \"and so we shall, but let us take time to enjoy the Grand Moot and the aurora first.\" She entwined her neck around his and wove her graceful tail along the length of his own. He remembered what Rose had said to Sunburst about their tails and rather than the shock he expected, he tightened the grip of his tail on hers.\n\n\"The aurora certainly has made you brazen,\" she said, \"I like this side of you, Nightstar, it is long since I took a mate that I found desirable.\" Nightstar was surprised how forward Amethyst was. Alduce had never been confident around women and they had posed something of a mystery to him. He should be nervous courting a female dragon, but he wasn't, even though he had no idea what came next. Well, he knew in theory, but this would be another first for the human turned dragon, and he didn't just want to experience this for research purposes, this was different. He felt comfortable with Amethyst and she seemed to feel the same way about him, which made him happy.\n\n\"Nightstar!\" called a voice from above. Looking up from where they sat, Nightstar saw the familiar yellow underbelly of Sunburst as he plunged towards them.\n\n\"Sunburst, you've found us,\" Nightstar replied.\n\n\"Where have you been? I've been looking all over for you!\"\n\n\"He's been busy,\" Amethyst announced proudly, \"declaring for me. Quills and spikes!\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't notice\u2026\" he stopped and looked at the intertwined tails of black and purple. \"I, eh, that's good. I can see you've eventually come to your senses Nightstar.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you approve,\" Nightstar puffed. \"You were looking for us?\"\n\n\"Yes! You distracted me. It's Rose. Its time!\"\n\n\"Time?\" Amethyst asked.\n\n\"Rose is going to clutch,\" Nightstar told her, \"and we are invited!\" Sunburst's infectious enthusiasm had him just as excited as the flustered yellow.\n\n\"She's ready to lay? During the aurora?\" Amethyst said, \"Why didn't you say? Skin and scales, Sunburst, take us to her.\" The yellow dragon had what Nightstar could only describe as an idiotic grin on his face. Any other dragon would find it difficult, but for Sunburst, right now, he was pulling it off admirably.\n\n\"Now!\" Amethyst shouted, shocking Sunburst into movement.\n\nHe leapt into the air, wings frantically beating. \"Follow me!\" He called back. Both Nightstar and Amethyst launched themselves after him, pounding the air to catch up with the aurora tinged yellow blur, as he darted through the busy sky to his waiting mate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Blood Rose gleamed under the light of the aurora, her ruby red scales bright and vibrant as she squatted for a third time and pushed out another egg. The glistening wet ovum rocked gently as it came to rest beside the first two. Its mottled surface rippled green then purple, mirroring the aurora above.\n\n\"Look! A third and your belly's still full!\" Sunburst declared. Nightstar received another blow to his side. Each time Rose laid an egg, Sunburst would head-butt him to emphasise the event.\n\n\"Believe me, I know,\" Rose replied, sounding weary, \"that was the biggest yet, my tail end\u2026\"\n\n\"It's strong and heathy,\" Sunburst interrupted purposely. Nightstar suspected Rose's comments embarrassed his yellow friend more than he admitted. She did have a certain way with expressing things with a crude descriptive accuracy.\n\n\"Just as an aurora lay should be,\" Amethyst said. She was pushed up snugly against Nightstar's flank and was enjoying herself immensely. \"You're doing fine, Rose. Clutching during the aurora will make for a healthy hatching and strong offspring.\"\n\nSunburst had led them back to where Rose waited and they had all escorted her to the secluded place where she had prepared her nest.\n\nNightstar wondered if the large crows he had seen made huge nests of branches, as this nest was disappointingly just a hollowed out piece of ground. Rose had chosen a spot between some large rocks, a few minutes flight from the meadow. She used her claws to scrape out the centre and pile the earth around the outside, creating a protective mound that would encircle her eggs, giving them no opportunity to roll away.\n\n\"Here comes another!\" Sunburst said and Nightstar tried to minimise the oncoming head-butt and absorb the blow by pulling back. He was too slow. He still managed to get hit. When he moved the other way he pressed firmly into Amethyst's side, which was more pleasant.\n\nBeing stuck between an overly enthusiastic father and a potentially enthusiastic mate wasn't the worst place to be, he was with his friends and was witnessing the actual laying of eggs. He was an onlooker in the first stage in the birth of dragons and suspected that he was the only human\u2014all be it as Nightstar\u2014ever to see such an incredible event.\n\nHe was conflicted with many emotions. The laying reminded him of the shame and sorrow he now felt over the unhatched egg he had stolen to become Nightstar. Troubled at the way he used the embryo to change shape, but also pleased he had given the spirit of the little unborn dragon a second chance. He now truly believed that some of that spirit lived on in his dragon persona.\n\nHe was also fascinated as a scholar, experiencing the act of laying. Being invited to attend such a personal event, filled him with happiness. But he also felt an acceptance. His friends wanted him there.\n\nAnd he felt a burning desire for the female dragon that pressed warmly to his side.\n\nBeing a dragon wasn't as simple as he had thought, but it was a much better adventure than he had expected. When he returned to his laboratory he would be able to fill his journals with so many eye witness facts and observations it would take him long months, if not years, to record them all.\n\nRose added two more eggs to her clutch, each one an exact replica of the first in size and shape, but the shells were a unique mixture of pastel colours. The first two were pale yellow, mottled with light brown patches, the third was light blue, surprisingly, and the last two were a light orange shade with a faint marble pattern.\n\nSunburst lay down beside his exhausted mate, fussing over her and helping to rearrange the eggs until she was satisfied. Nightstar wasn't sure if this would have any physical effect on the dragonets inside, but he was sure Rose new best.\n\n\"Five eggs is a fine number,\" he said to the soon to be parents, \"thank you for allowing us to be present tonight.\" Sunburst inclined his head slightly and he could see that Rose had closed her eyes.\n\n\"I think we should let them have some time alone,\" he said to Amethyst, \"Rose is asleep.\"\n\n\"I'm resting,\" Rose said, cocking open one eye at them, then closing it again.\n\n\"And so you should,\" Amethyst said. \"You've had a busy night. If the dragonets are as spectacular as their eggshells, when they hatch, they will be magnificent.\" It was true and was something that Alduce never considered when he had procured the unhatched egg. The shells were like works of art, their patterns and shades similar, yet each one different. As a scientist, he had been more concerned with the contents inside the shell. Now he looked at the dragon eggs with a different eye.\n\n\"I need to stretch my wings, come Nightstar and show me the aurora.\" She took one last peek at the five new eggs gathered together and launched into the air.\n\n\"Fly high and fly free.\" Sunburst said, dipping his head.\n\nNightstar bowed low to his friend and took off after the purple dragon as she climbed into the shimmering sky. She was taking her time, lazily flapping her wings as Nightstar caught up to her.\n\n\"I want to fly for a while, feel the wind under my wings and see the aurora on my scales,\" she said.\n\nNightstar was ready to fly, he needed some space and clean clear flying was just what he desired. He didn't mind the huge gathering of dragons, he actually enjoyed being part of the event. As a human he had been a solitary man, often spending long periods of his life alone. He was still tense after his encounter with Winterfang in the moot chamber and a flight would chase that tension away.\n\nHe revelled in the act of flying, a natural thing for any normal dragon, accepted without question. But for him, even after travelling hundreds of miles by wing, he still looked forward to each time he was in the air.\n\nAnd, he was exceptionally good at it.\n\n\"After all the excitement tonight, I would enjoy a simple flight,\" he said.\n\n\"I hope you've not had too much excitement,\" Amethyst called back. \"See if you can keep up!\" Her wings became a purple haze as she increased her speed, trying to put some distance between herself and Nightstar.\n\nHe suspected this was part of the game she played, he could quite easily catch her, but he let her stay ahead, chasing closely behind as they distanced themselves from the other dragons. They danced through the sky, undulating over low ground, soaring high then plummeting, Amethyst led and he followed.\n\nThey travelled south, caught up in the thrill of the chase, leaving the White Mountain behind. Nightstar crested a low hill, his snout almost touching Amethyst's sleek tail. He matched her aerobatics move for move, captivated by her graceful lines, the curve of her neck, the beauty she radiated. It wasn't until she dropped suddenly, so intently was he focused on the dragon in front of him, that he realised they were flying through a deep valley filled with a lake. Nightstar recognised the area as one of the many palaces Sunburst came to catch fish. She plunged downward, twisting like a corkscrew, wings spread wide, spiralling towards the water, Nightstar close behind and gaining. When Amethyst reached the surface of the lake, she levelled off, skimming above the waves, her tail trailing through the water's surface and creating a wake, flicking up a spray of droplets. He flew through the spray, each droplet of water caught the light of the aurora like a sparkling jewel, before it returned to the lake, disturbing the surface and creating whole new patterns.\n\nAmethyst landed on the sandy shore and Nightstar followed her lead, his claws sinking into the soft beach as he came to a halt beside her.\n\n\"You fly well,\" she said, \"I could feel you in my wake, unshakable.\"\n\n\"You were quick and agile, I didn't want to lose you.\"\n\n\"And you have not. I am strong and fast in the air, purples are good fliers, but blacks are just as good it would seem.\"\n\nShe moved close and wrapped her tail around his, her powerful grip alive like a snake constricting its prey, but not as deadly. Leaning into her embrace he rubbed her neck with his head, mimicking the action she had performed earlier. Amethyst tilted her head back and crooned in delight. \"We are alone now Nightstar. The thrill of the chase is over and I claim my prize.\"\n\nHe had followed her to the lake and realised he had fallen under her alluring spell, the chase she referred to was not the flight of tonight. He surrendered fully to her touch and instinct took over as their passion rose, fuelled by the intoxicating influence of the mystical aurora."
            },
            {
                "title": "Betrayal",
                "text": "Sunburst flew through the storm and Nightstar followed. Rain and wind buffeted both dragons, they were still far from home and the shelter it offered.\n\nIt had been over five months since Nightstar had attended the moot and the black dragon had lived with\u2014and learned from\u2014the White Mountain community. He should really return to his own home soon and record everything he had discovered in his journals. But he also wanted to stay and spend more time with the dragons. There was much to write and he probably should to do it while his memories were fresh.\n\nBlack storm clouds darkened the day as the rain grew heavier, huge drops battered his black scales and small rivulets flicked from his wings as he flew through the relentless downpour.\n\nSunburst was a bright beacon of yellow, easily seen, standing out in stark contrast to the darkening sky. Nightstar was thankful his smaller yellow friend had chosen to lead today, especially as the storm worsened. Sunburst knew the lowlands better than any other dragon, it was his favourite place for feeding and he took the opportunity to come here whenever he could.\n\nNightstar suspected that this particular trip was a good excuse for the yellow to take some time away from the demands of Rose and his new family. He was now sire to five dragonets, all starting to turn yellow like him, and Nightstar had been there to witness their hatching.\n\nIt had been an emotional time especially after the last nest of dragon eggs he had seen. Up until then, the only egg he had cared about was filled with a dead dragonet he had stolen and butchered. His perspective had shifted when he witnessed Rose and Sunburst's clutch emerge naturally from their shells.\n\nHis feelings were mixed. He regretted that the small life inside the shell had never come to anything, but he was also glad that he had taken the egg and used it for his transformation. The scientist in him, the part of his personality that was Alduce, was clinical and objective. If he had never taken the egg, he wouldn't have been able to experience life as a dragon. Never would have been able to fly or to hunt, to make friends and live among these magnificent beasts. His studies and research would still be confined to dusty old books. This kind of field work was invaluable and as far as he was aware, unheard of.\n\nThe dragon part of his mind and the living breathing entity that had evolved into Nightstar was ashamed and saddened at the act of theft and the loss of one small life that would never experience all the things he had. He knew, deep down, this hadn't been his fault. The egg hadn't hatched, this was a natural occurrence and he wasn't to blame. Had Alduce exploited the situation? Was he morally wrong to do so? He was literally in two minds about the whole process, his human and dragon minds, both part of the same being, but both individuals in their own right. This wasn't something Alduce had anticipated, there was no guide book to follow, no instructions on how to become a shape changer. He decided thoughts of this nature were probably best conducted in his human form, back in the safety of his laboratory and he would need to decide soon when he was going to return there.\n\nA rumble of distant thunder rolled through the rainclouds and muffled the unending noise of the downpour. Nightstar was pulled back from his daydreaming by the noise and peered through the storm, unable to see Sunburst. He scanned from side to side, searching the sky in front, but the yellow dragon had disappeared. The constant rain and the droning of the wind had a hypnotic effect when you flew through its midst. The sound eventually became secondary and his mind wandered, causing him to lose sight of his friend and guide.\n\nPanic isn't something a dragon is prone to. However, Alduce was all too familiar with the concept as it started to build. The dragon inside kept him level-headed, he was Nightstar, the mighty black dragon, wind and rain were nothing to be concerned about, his wings were strong and his scales were tough.\n\nHe squinted against the rain, scanning the storm clouds, flying blindly, but with more confidence now, looking below for land or anything visible that would help him. As he craned his neck towards the ground, the mystery of where Sunburst had gone was solved. The yellow dragon was flying directly below him, using the larger black as shelter from the worst of the torrential rain.\n\nThunder rumbled again, this time it was louder and accompanied by a flash of lightning a few seconds later. Nightstar felt a strange sensation in his chest, anxiety building as the tingling feeling grew. He folded his wings and dropped through the rain until he was alongside Sunburst, then levelled out. Rain bounced off the yellow dragon as his make shift shelter no longer offered protection from above.\n\nThe wind suddenly gusted, buffeting both dragons across the stormy sky and the driving rain drummed off their wings, adding to the already deafening noise of the elements. Thunder roared again, drowning out every other sound. Nightstar's ears throbbed and he could feel the thunder resonate throughout his body.\n\nThey were now directly in the path of the thunder and lightning and there was no calm at the heart of this storm. Electricity charged the air and Nightstar's scales tingled as he anticipated the impending strike.\n\nIt came with a terrifying crack that lit up the dark sky. A blinding flash left a jagged afterimage across his eyes. He blinked and raindrops ran like giant dragon tears as he tried to clear his vison. The human mind inside the dragon body could stand it no more, small claws of doubt and fear had burrowed their way deep into the man and he was no longer the powerful, fearless dragon.\n\nThe silver scales upon his chest thrummed now, there was no pain, but Alduce knew that something was wrong. He sensed the charged magic and could smell the overpowering stench of ozone all around. The last lightning strike had been so close it had almost hit him. Rising through the panic, the practical scientist buried deep within Alduce surfaced. The Flaire pendant was a vital part of the transformation process and it was forged by lightning, harnessing its natural power. It was attracting the lightning like a giant magnet!\n\nThe dragon pendant, an artefact forged from Flaire metal, had transformed into a silver star on his chest when he changed shape. It was still there, part of his scales, part of the spell, its fundamental structure unchanged and still the rare metal activated by lightning. He had to escape from the storm before it was too late, before whatever was happening to his body happened.\n\nHe screamed through the storm at Sunburst, \"We need to... \", but his words were obliterated by another ear splitting crescendo of thunder. It was no good trying to communicate, he had to act now. He folded his wings and started to dive. Lightning cracked, a jagged electric spear of intense blue-white, finally found what it was seeking. The bright star that blazed on his chest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Sunburst watched as Nightstar sailed past, his pace quickening. It was too noisy to shout to the black dragon and ask him why he had taken the lead. It was getting harder to maintain course as the storm worsened. The wind buffeted him angrily and the rain assisted, violently rattling off his scales. He pushed harder against the invisible barrier of wind in an effort to catch up to Nightstar, but was unable to regain the lead. He could only hope the black dragon had spotted a break in the clouds, found a better path for them to follow, a better way through the turbulent sky.\n\nDiving to gain speed, he folded his wings, his body like a yellow arrow as it cut through the storm in an effort to keep up with Nightstar. He found himself underneath the black dragon, and to his surprise, the driving rain lessened as Nightstar bore the brunt of the downpour. Tucking himself tightly below Nightstar's belly and taking advantage of his smaller size, he used his friend to break the worst of the rain, making his flight easier.\n\nThey were unlucky to get caught in the storm, especially as they were maintaining such a high altitude. He had hoped they would have been able to pass through the dark clouds, suffer the wind and rain for a short time, then emerge into calmer weather. This storm was proving to be larger than normal for this time of year. Usually a few minutes enduring the elements was enough if you met it head on. The storm swept past as you flew directly through it, travelling in the opposite direction. It was as if this storm was drawn to them.\n\nThunder rumbled distantly and Sunburst was glad he was no longer flying in front. Surely they would exit the storm clouds soon. If flying conditions got any worse, they were at risk of something dangerous happening. Collision with the unseen peak of a mountain or wing snapping gales. It was late in the summer season and the violent autumn weather had arrived earlier than normal. Sunburst decided that it was time to admit defeat and seek out a dry cave or even a sheltered valley and wait out the abnormal weather.\n\nThunder sounded again, this time closer and a few moments after his ears stopped ringing the lighting followed. A crisp flash illuminated his surroundings and the star of silver scales above his head started to flicker, oddly alive against the black of his friend's chest. Small sparks flittered and flicked across Nightstar's silver scales and Sunburst was reminded of the flight on the day they had first met. He had told Nightstar that his chest blazed fiercely, like a star in the night. It blazed now, but not with the serenity of a heavenly body, it blazed like the lightning itself, accompanied by the strong smell of magic, potent magic, detectible even through the howling wind and driving rain.\n\nThe elements intensified, resuming their attack, his tired wings exposed to the full force of the storm, the black dragon no longer sheltering him from above. Nightstar appeared at his side, not looking his usual robust self. Sunburst doubted he looked that good himself, but Nightstar actually looked pale, if a black dragon could ever look pallid.\n\nHe shouted something through the din of the storm, his words stolen by a peal of thunder, drowning out every other sound in the sky. It must be directly on top of them now. The air felt charged and alive, the thunder resonating through his wing membranes, his very bones.\n\nNightstar closed his wings and plummeted downwards, his glowing silver scales left a trail across the black sky like the tail of a comet. The inevitable lightning strike followed the thunderclap, streaking past Sunburst's head, so close he could taste the ozone, as the crackling bolt chased after the black dragon.\n\nAn explosion of blinding white erupted in a silver corona, rain water sizzled and evaporated. Sunburst blinked, his head pounded and his vision swam.\n\nHe peered through the storm in search of his friend, but Nightstar was gone!\n\nA small pale shape occupied the space where the huge black dragon had been, limp and falling fast. Sunburst closed his wings and fell into a dive, cutting through the stormy sky in pursuit of the lifeless object that dropped like a stone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Alduce slowly surfaced into awareness. His head throbbed and his limbs ached. He tried to move and pain lanced through the inside of his skull. The noise of wind and rain still persisted, muted and distant and he was no longer wet, no longer a dragon battling through a storm torn sky. He tentatively reached out his talon\u2014no, his hand\u2014his human hand, groping in the darkness at the solid ground his naked human form rested on. Prying open gritty eyes was painful and difficult. They didn't want to open but he forced them anyway.\n\nOppressive darkness surrounded him, pressing in from all sides and for a moment he feared he was blind. He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly a few times, a trick Caltus had employed when he needed to relax. Gradually his vision returned. He was inside a cave, its entrance dimly visible as a lighter arch in the blackness. The wind and rain still raged outside and he was thankful of the shelter the cave provided.\n\nWhy was he here, shivering and naked? His memory was fuzzy and he struggled to stay conscious. Black mushrooms, he thought, I was looking for black mushrooms. No, that wasn't right, he had been a black dragon, flying through the sky, a wonderful black dragon with... Lightning!\n\nHe sat up and instantly regretted moving. How was it possible to feel so much pain? He breathed deeply once more, trying to push the worst of it away. Pain was the least of his concerns just now, his body was intact, even though he was sore. He ran his hands slowly over his chilled scales\u2014no, chilled skin\u2014and was satisfied that no limbs were broken. He was badly bruised and pretty roughed up, but nothing that wouldn't heal in time. Then he explored his chest, it smelled scorched. He could feel the tender flesh, his skin broken and weeping and he was grateful he couldn't see it. Agony flared as he examined the wound and his hand came away damp and sticky.\n\nHe still wore the amulet around his neck, at least he hadn't lost it and that was something to be positive about. The Flaire had drawn the lightning from the storm and it had grounded on the silver scales of his dragon chest. The toughness of the Flaire scales had protected him. Dragon's armour was renowned for being almost impenetrable. That, coupled with the resilience of the Flaire metal and the powerful magic of his transformation spell, were all contributing factors in his survival.\n\nHe had weathered the storm in more ways than one, had been struck by a lightning bolt and still lived.\n\nWhich was a miracle.\n\nWhat he didn't understand was how he survived the fall.\n\nHis last waking memory after the lightning crashed into his scaled chest, was losing hold of his dragon form. The charge from the bolt had reversed his transformation spell and he experienced a mid-air metamorphosis from winged flying dragon to naked falling human. The pain, combined with the shock, had been too much for his frail human body to endure. All he could remember before he lost consciousness was gravity pulling him towards the ground and impending death.\n\nThe cave darkened slightly as a huge shape pushed noisily through the entrance, blocking out the faint light from outside as it moved inside. Alduce shuffled backwards, still in a sitting position. He wasn't ready to attempt standing on two legs, he was too weak and out of practice.\n\nThere was an almighty clatter from the opposite side of the cave and Alduce winced at the noise, his lightning hangover far worse than anything alcohol could inflict. Just as the pain started to fade to a bearable level, a blinding light illuminated the cave. Searing flame caused stabbing pains in his eyeballs, intense heat washed over his skin and his ruined chest, reminding him how burns react when exposed to more heat. It was too much pain for his already weakened body to bear. As he fainted, Alduce saw the source of his agony, a yellow dragon, fire spouting from its widely stretched jaws."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Sunburst sped downward cutting through the storm. Rain washed off his scales, trailing behind him, a wave of spray flying from his body as he ploughed through the black clouds. The sky had turned darker now with the approach of night and made it difficult to see anything, even with his powerful dragon eyes. Searching for a black dragon in a sky of rain filled storm clouds was an impossible task. The lightning struck his friend and Nightstar had vanished, his silver scaled star radiant for a second, then it was gone.\n\nHe wished he could pick out that beacon of light now as he scoured the turbulent sky. He fixed on a shape, pale and trivial as it tumbled and flailed, buffeted by the winds. It wasn't Nightstar, it was too small and insignificant, but it was all he could see. He pulled his wings tight to his flanks and increased his speed, gaining on the falling shape. As he neared he was able to identify what he was chasing.\n\nIt was a man!\n\nMen do not fly. Why would a man be dropping through the middle of a storm? There were no men on these shores, this was the land of dragons and no humans were welcome. Did this puny creature have something to do with Nightstar's disappearance? Surely not. How could such a small creature be a threat to a mighty dragon?\n\nSorcery! He could smell it now, a whiff of strong magic emanated from the pale human. If Sunburst could smell his magic, the man must still be alive, it was too strong to be otherwise. This man would answer for his foul deeds, he would tell Sunburst what he wanted to know. What he had done to Nightstar, what sorcerous wickedness had he wrought upon his friend? He would answer for his actions before Sunburst killed him.\n\nThe yellow dragon opened his wings and thrust out his hind legs, talons opened and wrapped around the human, careful not to crush the weak flesh. He needed the man alive. Once his prize was secure, Sunburst controlled his descent, the ground was somewhere beneath him and he didn't want it to rush up unexpectedly to meet him. He continued down, knowing that he must be close to landing. The storm abated slightly, a sign the ground was near, and as he passed through the low clouds he could see the dark landmass below.\n\nHe was far across the grasslands, somewhere near the plains where the curly bucks roamed. As he flew, he looked for landmarks he would recognise and soon he knew exactly where he was. There were caves not far from here. A good place to shelter and wait out the storm. He flew close to the ground where the wind was less severe, clutching the human, careful not to drop him. When he reached the forest where he had flown with Nightstar, he knew he was close to his destination. The trees swayed and their leaves rustled as they clung to the branches, too early in the season for them to let go.\n\nSunburst veered away from the forest as he passed the huge clearing, the caves he sought were just south of here. Soon, he came upon the entrance he was looking for, a tight arch with a large spacious cavern behind. A good place to shelter and the small entrance would keep out the worst of the storm.\n\nHe dropped the human body to the ground and it let out a groan, barely audible above the wind. He picked it up with his front legs, cradling it to his chest. Pushing into the cave, he set his burden down on the sandy floor, sniffing at the prone shape. It stank of sorcery, acrid and bitter, but he wasn't afraid, he was a dragon and he had his own magic, protection against sorcery.\n\nSunburst pushed back through the entrance, leaving the shelter of the cave. He would search for some fallen branches. If he made a fire inside the cavern, his captive would see him for what he was. A large intimidating yellow dragon. Better still, there would be enough light to look into the man's eyes and snare him with his hypnotic stare. He would get the answers he desired and would see any lies the man told. The man would know his life was in danger and he would tremble before the might of a White Mountain dragon.\n\nSunburst hopped into the air and flew back over the forest. He looked up as thunder, now far distant, rumbled and lightning flickered high up in the clouds. He scanned the night sky with keen eyes, and thought, where are you, Nightstar?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Alduce groaned as he awoke for a second time, his skin slick with sweat. He felt fevered. A fire burned on the opposite side of the cavern, thick boughs crackled and popped as they blazed. A large yellow dragon was curled up beside the flames, their flickering reflection dancing across his scales and casting a warm pattern across the dark rock. A fire burned in the sorcerer's chest and it throbbed like a beating heart.\n\nThe yellow dragon looked magnificent... and huge. You forgot just how large dragons were when you had been one yourself. One eyelid slid open and Sunburst glared at him, a deep green eye pierced his existence as the dragon looked deep inside his soul.\n\n\"What do you have to say for yourself, human?\" Sunburst hissed. \"What have you done with the black dragon?\"\n\nAlduce understood what Sunburst said and he felt the magic in the dragon's voice. Even without the Flaire artefact's help, he believed he would have known Sunburst's words.\n\n\"I have done nothing with Nightstar, mighty Sunburst,\" he croaked, his throat painful and dry.\n\n\"You speak my true name and his, sorcerer. Who has betrayed our trust to you?\"\n\n\"No-one has been betrayed. You know the power a sorcerer has over someone if he knows their true name. I will not share them with anyone, believe me.\"\n\n\"That I do believe, but you are still a liar! You are correct when you say no-one else will know our true names as you will not leave this cavern alive. Our secret will die with you,\" Sunburst growled.\n\n\"You remind me of Galdor the Green, he was an angry dragon when I first met him. Oh, he would threaten to eat me, try and terrify me with his awesome power, but I saved his live, I helped him escape his captivity, me, only me, a mere human and he named me friend.\" Alduce swayed, dizzy with fever. His mind wandered as his thoughts swam. He was sick, his ruined chest was infected and his open wound was red and inflamed. Heat prickled his skin, his body damp with sweat.\n\n\"Nightstar lives,\" Alduce raved, \"he is inside me! Yet I feel I am dying, he is dying.\" Images of black mushrooms and green dragons filled his head. \"If I die, Nightstar will be no more, all gone and no record.\" He staggered towards Sunburst and thrust out his arms. \"Can you not see me, Sunburst? Do you not understand?\" He lurched forward and grabbed the yellow dragon by the snout.\n\n\"Look into my eyes, see if I lie! I know you can tell.\" Alduce thrust his face at the dragon, staring into his green hypnotic eyes.\n\n\"What trickery is this?\" Sunburst said as he peered back. Alduce could feel the dragon's penetrating stare push deep inside his being, searching for the truth of his words. The magic that all dragons possessed. The power to detect when a lie was told or a truth spoken, probed his mind, desperate for the answer.\n\n\"You speak true, human,\" Sunburst said, pulling away. \"How is it so? Your words are nonsense, but they are true! Who is Galdor? You babble, you're words make no sense.\"\n\n\"I will tell you my tale, friend Sunburst, cousin and guide, lover of curly bucks, mate of Blood Rose...\"\n\n\"Enough!\" Sunburst roared, deafening Alduce.\n\n\"You sound just like old Winterfang. Wise Winterfang,\" he said. He laughed, putting his palms over his ears. Losing his balance, he stumbled, hands outstretched as he fell, attempting to use the cave wall to support himself. His hands touched the stone and he felt a flash of memory from the rock. Crude pictures adorned the cave wall, faded by time and barely visible, making them difficult to see.\n\nSmall men with spears and a great flying beast were scratched on to the stone. Alduce, fever fully ablaze, steadied himself on the cave wall and brushed his fingers gently across the images.\n\nHe was standing in the long grass, a spear tipped with sharpened flint, grasped tightly in his hands. A warm wind blew across the savannah and the scent of sweet grass filled his nostrils. The clear blue sky was dotted with a few white clouds and the midday sun warmed his body.\n\nHe was surrounded by other men, primitive and ancient. Their brown skin decorated with dark mud, applied in patterns and lines, different from man to man. They bent low, using the swaying grass for cover as they crept silently forward. Alduce looked through the eyes of the body he inhabited, beyond the men of his tribe. How did he know that?\n\nTall animals, long legged and long necked, grazed not far from their position, unaware they were being hunted. His fellow tribesmen stalked this herd and he was with them, he was a hunter.\n\nAnimal heads whipped up in unison, spooked as something alerted them to the stalking tribesmen. No-one had made a noise, they were camouflaged in the long grass and unable to be seen by the beasts. What had started them?\n\nThe sky above him darkened as a huge shadow blocked out the sunlight, then was gone. Wind whipped at his long straggly hair and the grasslands swayed around him, an ocean of green waves.\n\nFrantic braying shattered the peaceful silence and the herd beasts scattered in all directions as a huge green dragon banked above the panicking herd, wings spread wide, rear talons reaching forward as it dropped from the air. The braying was now accompanied with screaming as the dragon caught one of the long legged animals with sharp deadly claws, the pitiful screams were cut short as claws tore through the poor beast's body, crushing life and breath from the animal.\n\nAlduce, or rather the body that played host to the sorcerer, was thrown from his feet as a charging herd beast knocked into him as it fled from the dragon and its dying herd mate. Roars of rage filled the air as the angered tribesmen were denied their quarry and vented their anger on the dragon. A brown skinned warrior leapt over his fallen tribe mate, brandishing his own crudely made spear. Alduce watched, amazed, as these primitive men ran towards the green dragon, their long spears flew at the green scaled giant, bouncing off its natural amour like raindrops off leaves. He could only lie and watch as the green dragon turned on the source of its annoyance.\n\nBright gouts of flame spouted from the dragon's mouth and it roared at the small men that attacked it. Fire ignited the grass, dry and combustible and the world around Alduce was transformed into smoke and fire. His eyes stung and his lungs burned, the stench of scorched flesh assaulted his nose and the screaming of dying humans filled his ears. He rolled onto his belly and crawled, keeping low, away from the carnage.\n\nAlduce pulled his hand back from the cave drawings, as if his flesh had been scolded. Man and dragon opposed in battle, ancient enemies since the dawn of time.\n\nSunburst's roar was the last thing he remembered before he blacked out again, the images of his fellow tribesmen dying and the stink of their flesh burning, vivid in his fevered mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Sunburst listened as the naked human ranted and raved, his voice slurred and his step unsteady. He fell against the cave wall and babbled something about hunting, a green dragon and fire, before finally falling over and rolling on to his back.\n\nHe sniffed the still body and could smell magic, death and decaying flesh. The frail body of the small human was fevered and weak. He didn't think that he would survive much longer. The man had said he knew where Nightstar was and he spoke their true names. What did he mean when he said Nightstar was inside him? He even knew of Winterfang. This was extremely bewildering. Was the man's delirium contributing to his perplexing babble? He said he was dying and Sunburst, as much as he didn't want to, agreed with him. The man wouldn't last another day unless...\n\nNo! He couldn't do that. It was against everything he believed in. Humans were the enemy, they were known for their deceit. They weren't friends to dragon kind. Fang and Claw! This is the land of dragons and men shouldn't be here.\n\nBut, the man said if he died, Nightstar would die too. The human knew something about his friend and Sunburst was sure he hadn't lied. The man spoke the truth, any dragon could sniff out a lie. His perception, his dragon sense, informed him this man held the answers. Answers to the disappearance of Nightstar.\n\nMen don't fall from the sky and they don't learn a dragon's true name. And they do not grab a dragon by the snout!\n\nHe needed more time, needed the man to live long enough to tell him where Nightstar had gone. He couldn't \u2014 wouldn't \u2014 give up until he found his friend.\n\nSomething was desperately wrong and the black dragon he had accepted as his brother, needed his help.\n\nThe wound on the human's chest wept, the charred flesh stank and he could feel the heat from the man's skin as the fever gripped him and burned through his dying body. If this man was the key to saving his friend, and Sunburst strongly believed this was true, he couldn't let him die until he had given up his secret. He needed to understand what had happened inside the storm and what had happened to Nightstar.\n\nIf he was going to do this, he needed to do it soon.\n\nSunburst sat back on his haunches, extended a talon and flicked at a scale on his chest. Sliding the tapered point of his talon under the yellow scale, he flipped it away from his body and drew the razor sharp tip of his talon across the unprotected skin beneath. The lighter yellow flesh opened and beads of dragon blood dripped from the cut. They clung like red pearls to his talon as he carefully withdrew it and held it upright, making sure not to drop any on the cavern floor.\n\nBefore he could change his mind, he held the claw above the chest of the prone man and turned it over, allowing the blood to run back down. Beads pooled at the point of the talon, growing heavier until they were too heavy to hold on.\n\nDrip. A small droplet of dragon blood fell.\n\nDrip. Another followed.\n\nDrip. A third and final drop of blood was released and followed the first two into the open wound.\n\nSunburst quickly withdrew his claw, holding it up to his mouth as his tongue flicked out and cleaned the remaining blood away. All dragon blood was precious and should never be wasted, the smallest drop held magic so powerful, it should never be unleashed without serious consideration. For Sunburst, that moment had passed and he could contemplate it all day, wasting time while the man died. He needed to act now, his decision may be rash, but the small human before him was only one breath away from his last, whether it be from his own failing body or Sunburst's cleansing fire.\n\nThree drops were all he would risk. He patted the open scale flat on his chest and tapped it with his claw. His yellow armour sealed shut, protecting the scratch below, his skin already starting to heal, the magic in the dragon's blood closing the cut and setting the scale securely in place.\n\nThe man groaned quietly, the sound barely above a whisper, pathetic and weak. Sunburst waited, not knowing what to expect, he had never used his blood in this way before. He supposed there would only be two outcomes to his blood sharing. The man would live or the man would die. If he lived, he would make the man tell him what he wanted to know. Dragon blood magic was strong, it might extend the human's life long enough for him to be questioned, to give the answers Sunburst sought, but ultimately he would die from the effects. It would be too potent for the man to withstand for any length of time and would burn through his body, eventually turning his blood to poison.\n\nOnly dragons could withstand dragon blood.\n\nIf he was wrong and the man survived, Sunburst would have no choice but to kill him. If the moot found out what he had done, he would incur their wrath. Winterfang was a just leader, but he could be ruthless when it came to tradition and the protection of their community. Sunburst imagined sharing his blood with a human would be something that severely displeased the ruler of the White Mountain dragons.\n\nIf he was found out, he would be banished or worse. Once he had what he needed, he would make sure the man never left the cave, he would burn the body and no-one would even know what he had done. That was if the man survived.\n\nA hissing sound from the man's chest alerted Sunburst something had started to happen. He peered closely at the foul wound and noticed something metallic reflecting in the light from the fire. The man started to writhe, his arms and legs, slowly at first, scrabbled on the dirt floor and he mumbled. Not words that Sunburst understood, another tongue, foreign and arcane.\n\nThe silver object embedded in the tangle of torn flesh and blood, was more visible now. The drops of dragon blood had mixed into the mess, pushing away the man's own blood and skin and had exposed a small, perfectly crafted dragon! The dragon blood hissed as it touched the small silver dragon and wisps of steam rose from the wound. The man groaned louder, his legs thrashed and his arms flapped and flailed like wings that would never fly, but were determined to try.\n\nAn odour of magic filled the cave, foreign and acrid, and nothing like the pleasant scent of dragon magic. Sunburst didn't know what he had expected to happen, but this certainly wasn't it. He could only stare as his own blood mingled with the blood of the exposed wound. It moved of its own accord, slowly creeping over the damaged flesh, swirling and mixing, an amalgamation of human magic and dragon magic... and something else.\n\nThe wound began to heal, imperceptible at first, but the more Sunburst stared, the more he was able to see the outer damage knit and repair, human skin, paltry and thin formed, the ragged edges of the infected flesh regenerating. As the patch he was watching grew and new skin replaced the ruined old, he saw a shadow of something else below the surface of the new flesh. Black scales!\n\n\"NO!\" the man screamed out and his eyes flew open, staring sightlessly into Sunburst's own. \"Don't beat me!\" he whispered, \"please... \" His eyes closed and Sunburst was thankful. The intense look and the pain was more than he could stand. He had peered into the man's soul and relived an old hurt, a great suffering that this man had endured and it was not a pleasant sensation. The man mumbled again and Sunburst craned his head, moving closer, straining to hear the man's fading voice.\n\n\"Don't eat me, mighty Galdor,\" the man softly murmured. Sunburst was repulsed by the thought of eating this man. He stank of death, and of human magic. \"I'm looking for... looking for... black... \" his voice faded to a whisper.\n\nWhat was he looking for? A black dragon? It could only be Nightstar. This was the answer he was waiting for. He leaned in, positioning his ear as close as possible to the man's mouth so he didn't miss a single word.\n\n\"Mushrooms!\" Screamed the man. His back arched and his chest thrust out, slamming forcefully into Sunburst's snout. The yellow dragon pulled back, human blood covering his nostrils and lips. His forked tongue flicked out instinctually, cleaning away the damp red stain.\n\nHis universe exploded as the taste of blood, magic, pain and humanity dragged him from the waking world."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "The yellow dragon and the naked human lay side by side on the cave floor. One dreamed of places and times long past. The other slowly healed. Human blood mixing with the blood of the dragon, repairing the damage the lightning had wrought.\n\nNeither man nor dragon aware the unconventional mix would change their lives forever."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Alduce cringed as the orphanage overseer brought the leather strap down across his bare shoulders. The tough leather sang out like a drover's whip as it lashed his skin, leaving a third mark, an angry duplicate of the other two.\n\n\"Put on your shirt, boy,\" he snarled. \"If I catch you slacking again, next time it'll be six lashes and you'll get no supper. See how you like going hungry.\"\n\nAlduce pulled on his threadbare work shirt, wincing as the rough material rubbed painfully across his newly inflicted welts. It was bad enough that Bandel hated him, but if the fat overseer deprived him of his supper, watery gruel with lumps in it, he would never grow strong enough to escape.\n\n\"Move it!\" Bandel shouted and the fat overseer planted a cruel boot on his backside and pushed.\n\nAlduce sprawled forward, arms only partway inside his shirt sleeves, unable to reach out and protect himself. His face broke his fall as it ploughed into the ground and his mouth tasted dirt.\n\nBandel's sickening laugh rang in his ears as he pushed his arms through his sleeves and scrabbled out of the overseers reach..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "A jagged piece of metal, pointed and sharp like a row of dragon teeth, rasped over the surface of the egg. The tough shell resisted, but little by little, the constant movement of the sharp metal scored a groove across its surface. Each time the metal gouged the egg's surface, fine powdered shell drifted from the foul cut. Backwards and forwards, cutting deeper, a vile unthinkable violation of the unhatched dragon inside...\n\nAlduce ran towards the outside kitchen and joined the line of sorry looking boys from his work crew. Hot tears streaked through the dirt on his face as he remembered his parents and his loving home.\n\nThey were dead. The orphanage was his home now.\n\nHis life was harsh and cruel, filled with beatings, hard work and constant hunger. Desolation and anguish were all that he knew, and every day he was reminded of his worth. Self-pity and doubt were his constant companions. This was no life for a young boy and he wished the plague that had taken his mother and father had taken his life too..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Sunburst experienced the pain of the orphaned boy who had grown to be the dying human, through the magic of their mixed blood. The yellow dragon felt an overwhelming pity as he relived the poor boy's life, drowning in his misery. Human emotions filled with the anguish of losing his family saddened him and he could imagine how difficult his life would have been if he had hatched without his dragon kin.\n\nSunburst hated humans, an instinct he had been born with, but he would not have wished this torment on anyone, be it man or dragon. A small groan escaped from the dragon, his vivid dream delirium pulled him deeper into the man's miserable life. And Alduce was his true name."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "\"I'm sorry lad,\" Master Caltus said, \"I can't be taking on any apprentices without patrons or support.\"\n\n\"Please,\" a teenage Alduce begged. \"I'll work hard. I'm a keen study and I learn fast.\"\n\n\"No!\" Caltus raised his voice, \"I've told you before. I have to convince the guild before I take on a pupil and I've no reason to stick my neck out for a beggar.\" He tossed an old loaf from the doorway. Alduce deftly snatched it from the air before it landed in the gutter and someone or something else stole his next meal away. \"I'm sorry.\" Caltus said and closed the door in his face..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "The sharp metal teeth cut open the surface of the dragon egg. Two halves fell away and the unborn dragonet inside was exposed, tiny, black, still, and lifeless. Human hands reached in and pulled the pitiful creature free of the violated shell, invading the dead dragonet's resting place. Remorse and sadness filled Alduce as he cradled the magnificent unborn dragon, showing reverence and respect for the lifeless thing, but he also felt something else, satisfaction. Up until this moment, Sunburst had not experienced anything like this in the man's life, this was something new, Alduce had finally attained a dragon egg, and this heralded a new beginning for the human...\n\nAlduce was filled with disappointment, he had hoped the sorcerer would take him in this time and his perseverance would be rewarded. The master sorcerer had shown him more kindness than he was used to and built his hopes up, only to have them dashed on the rocky shores of despair.\n\nHe pulled a mouldy corner from the stale loaf and threw it violently away. A skinny rat darted from beneath some rubbish and grabbed the unintended offering and scuttled off in search of a safe place to consume its feast.\n\nThe rich sons of merchants and city officials, this year's intake of apprentices, sniggered at Alduce as they watched their new master reject him. Their contempt and scorn cut deeper than he expected. He felt like the rat everyone hated, but was grateful for the charity of the unasked for bread. He was destined to dine on the cast offs of his betters, but proud enough to know he could be so much more..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Sunburst felt the disdain and despair that Alduce had known. Humans were so cruel. Dragons would never subject their peers to this cruelty, to be treated like that rat and not as an equal was unforgivable. Dragons argued, sometimes they fought, but the moot saw to it that everyone was taken care of. He almost felt sorry for the young man as he relived his miserable existence. This was no way to live. It was no life at all being rejected by one's own community. Feeling like vermin, unwanted and unloved. The yellow dragon wondered if he would have managed to survived such hardships and nearly felt respect for this human who had endured such a pitiful reality.\n\nThus it continued, Sunburst experienced the life of Alduce, sharing the lows of his life and feeling his pain. The young boy had grown into a man and each step in his miserable life was filled with hardship and struggle. The one redeeming factor that he came to grudgingly admire was that whatever his life threw at him, no matter how low the human was brought, he stood back up and kept going. To do so on his own, with no support from his uncaring community was a sign of great strength, endurance to carry on, no matter how tough life became.\n\nSlowly, as he relived parts of his life, Sunburst came to appreciate and understand the man that was Alduce. His natural instinct led him to believe all humans were evil. Through a combination of fevered dreams, the yellow dragon came to learn just what the human, now sorcerer, had strived to achieve.\n\nThe scenes that unfolded and were communicated through the magic of the shared blood, were punctuated with strange visions of something else, the sorcerer conducting his experiments with a dragon's egg. Cutting and draining, scraping and stretching, strange devices that were used to perform unnatural actions that repulsed Sunburst to his very core.\n\nWhat this human had done to the poor egg was a total mystery to the dreaming dragon. Why he had done these thing was even harder to understand. Unhatched dragon eggs should be left for nature to dispose of. When an egg failed to open they were abandoned and forgotten, not mutilated by humans.\n\nHe was forced to witness these sorcerous activities, revealed through the fevered visions of this human's life, but was unable to understand them. They made him sad, Alduce made him sad. He knew he was dreaming and he also knew the dreams were real, memories of the human he had rescued from the storm.\n\nHe wished an end to these visions, he had seen more than enough, infected with human emotions and experiences, alien and wondrous, disgusting and yet somehow captivating. He wanted the visions to stop and wished he had never shared his blood. He knew it was wrong and yet he had carried on in hope of learning Nightstar's fate. He wanted them to stop but he also wanted to see more, he was confused at the feelings he experienced but he thirsted for answers. The need for knowledge burned inside his body like the legendary fire his kind could breathe.\n\nA vivid story came to Sunburst, it was an early memory the man clung to, a time before his suffering, a time of joy and of being loved. A cherished memory deep in his past."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Alduce sat in bed, covers pulled up to his chin, the flickering candle on his bedside table cast a warm glow upon the walls.\n\n\"What story would you like to hear tonight, son?\" Reytran asked.\n\n\"Tell me about the dragon, father!\" the young boy exclaimed. \"I love dragons!\"\n\n\"How did I know you were going to ask for that one? Young boys should be wary of dragons, lest they eat you all up!\" He leaned in close to Alduce holding his hands up like claws and roaring, then snapped his teeth together.\n\nAlduce giggled, drawing away from his father and pulling the covers over his head.\n\n\"Because it's your best story,\" he replied, the bed covers muffling his voice.\n\n\"Then you'll go to sleep, like a good boy?\" Reytran asked, pulling the covers back down and tucking them in neatly.\n\n\"Yes, father. I'll sleep like a log,\" he grinned.\n\n\"A good way for a woodcutter's son to sleep,\" his father smiled back.\n\n\"It was early in the morning and I had risen to the sound of birds singing. Mother was asleep with our new baby son\u2026\"\n\n\"That was me!\" Alduce squealed.\n\n\"\u2026yes it was. Anyway, I had to leave my warm bed to go to work. My task for this day was to hike all the way up to the north forest and fell some of the old giant oaks. The rest of my workmates were camping out there, but I had decided to come home, even though it was a long walk, to help mother look after our new son.\" He waited, but Alduce didn't interrupt him this time.\n\n\"I didn't have to take any tools or drive the wagon, as I had walked back through the trees and it was quicker that taking the old north trail.\"\n\n\"A short... cut, you called it,\" Alduce said, leaning back on his huge pillow.\n\n\"That's right, I was taking a shortcut. The trail swings around, taking the long way there. If I cut through the woods, I wouldn't have to walk as far, it would take me less time, and?\"\n\n\"You could have longer in bed!\" Alduce supplied. He knew the story, having heard it many times before.\n\n\"Yes,\" Reytran said. \"You are a smart lad. Anyway, off I set, trudging through the forest on my way to work. It was early and the birds were singing as I marched below the trees. Squirrels leapt from branch to branch, rabbits scuttled through the undergrowth...\"\n\n\"And you saw a bear!\" Alduce added, captivated by the tale.\n\n\"I was nearly knocked over by a bear. It came lopping down the path I followed and I don't think it even noticed me as I jumped into the bushes. I didn't know what had startled the bear at the time, but I would soon find out.\"\n\n\"It was the dragon, father. It scared the bear, that's why it was running along the trail.\"\n\n\"I suspect you are right again, son. Even something as large and fierce as a bear is no match for a dragon. So, I picked myself up and removed the leaves from my hair,\" Alduce giggled, \"and trudged north. As I continued through the forest, I noticed how quiet it had become. All the forest creatures had stopped their chatter, the birds no longer whistled and chirped, the were no squirrels jumping in the branches overhead and all the rabbits had gone into hiding.\n\n\"I thought it was a little unusual, but since a brown bear had passed this way a few moments before, I suspected this was why they were all quiet. The path grew steeper as I headed farther north, into the higher part of the forest. At last I came to the clearing and the only sound in the whole forest was the twigs snapping and the leaves rustling as I stepped on them. I was wondering to myself why it should be so quiet, now the bear had gone. The forest is usually filled with lots of sounds. And then I saw him...\"\n\n\"In the clearing? Right in front of you?\"\n\n\"Yes, he was in the clearing, but was quite a bit away. I crouched down, hiding behind a chestnut tree...\"\n\n\"The big one where we collect the conkers?\"\n\n\"The very same. Anyway, I peeked round the tree, I couldn't believe my eyes. There, in the middle of the clearing was the largest, greenest, fiercest dragon I had ever seen.\"\n\n\"But you've only ever seen one dragon! How could you know he was the largest greenest fiercest?\"\n\n\"Because he was! I could tell you a story of dolls and dresses if you'd prefer?\"\n\n\"No! That's for girls, I want to hear about the dragon.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Reytran teased, and Alduce nodded eagerly. \"Well, as I was saying, there in the clearing sat a huge green dragon. The sun shone down and reflected off his scales, like green mirrors. Its head was the size of our front door, with big yellow horns the size of my arms,\" and he held his arms high, stretching them out behind his own head, \"and white fangs just as long. A giant tail flicked left and right, the grass and bushes flattened in its path.\n\n\"As you can imagine, coming across such a terrifying creature wasn't something I was expecting and I was too scared to move from my hiding place. I watched the dragon as it devoured a deer it had caught for breakfast. Its mighty jaws crunched bones as it ate everything, even the hooves and antlers. I thought, if it's that hungry, I'd better not let it see me, I didn't want to end up in a dragon's belly.\n\n\"Once it had finished its meal, it spread huge wings the size of a barn roof and leapt into the air, flapping. The draught from its wings rustled the leaves, like a storm blasting through the treetops, as it took off. I watched it fly high into the sky until it was just a tiny speck, then it was gone, as if it had never been.\"\n\n\"Do you think it will come back?\" Alduce asked, his eyes drowsy with sleep.\n\n\"I don't think so, Alduce,\" Reytran said. \"Dragons are rarely seen these days. You don't have to worry.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried, father,\" he murmured. \"One day I will see a dragon and I won't be frightened.\"\n\n\"Maybe you will,\" Reytran said, standing and fixing the covers, tucking them in around his son.\n\n\"I wish I was a dragon,\" Alduce said as Reytran bent and kissed the small boy on the forehead.\n\n\"I'm glad you're not, Alduce. You'd need a bigger bed.\" Alduce closed his eyes, surrendering to sleep. Green dragons filled his dreams."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "The man continued to heal, aided by the power of the living dragon blood as it flowed through his veins and regenerated the damage the lightning had inflicted. His fever broke and the dragon blood worked its magic.\n\nAs the dragon's blood circulated through the man's body, it allowed his yellow saviour to experience his life and his emotions, both confusing and human, but it also changed his view on what a human was.\n\nOne last segment of the sorcerer's strange existence was yet to be revealed, exposing the sought after answers he so desperately wanted. The answer to the question he desired would not be the revelation he expected."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Sunburst's dreams swirled and merged with the fevered mind of Alduce. The man's body was healing, he could sense the magic and feel the power of his blood and knew this would end soon. A final vision swam up to meet him and he could feel the anticipation, the expectation of something long awaited by the sorcerer.\n\nIt was night and a crescent moon hung at a strange angle in a sky full of unfamiliar stars. Alduce was high on a hilltop, but nowhere as high as the White Mountains.\n\nHe was naked and alone, sitting inside a circle of bones, pushed into the ground. The bones of a small dragon! The skull of the unborn dragonet, torn from the egg in his previous visions, was placed at his feet. Sunburst didn't know how he knew this, he just did. He could feel the cold night wind as it brushed over the tense skin of the sorcerer. The feeling was nothing like the wind on his own scales. Hairs stood out on his human neck and he was filled with excitement. His heart beat and Sunburst could feel the thudding pulse as it pounded in his ears. Alduce was filled with anticipation... and fear.\n\nHe grasped the small silver dragon that hung around his neck and Sunburst could feel the thrum of intense magic from the tiny object. He dipped his fingers into the bowl that sat on the ground before him and began to rub the contents over his naked skin. The skin felt strange, smooth and soft, yielding and weak, so different from the tough protective feel of scales.\n\nAlduce shivered as the cold thick liquid made contact with his body and the yellow dragon shuddered as if an icy wind had chilled his very being. His body began to shake, there was something wrong, the liquid felt alive. He could sense another dragon's blood as it touched the flesh of the man, chilling him to the bone.\n\nAlduce positioned the small skull in the centre of the bone circle and Sunburst smelled blood, human and dragon. He placed a small coating of something dark upon his shoulders. Tiny dragon scales! Black and hard, cold and dead.\n\nSkin and scales! It was the hide of the unborn dragon!\n\nHe felt the thrum of magic as it started to build, his own scales prickled as it coursed through his body. A flood of magic unlike anything he had ever experienced before. The power was intense and was filled with the stolen life force of the dead dragonet.\n\nThe scales and skin enveloped Alduce, crawling across his pale human flesh, wrapping his limbs, sliding over the cold liquid, tinkling metallically as it moved.\n\nHeat blasted through him, burning the chill away, like molten magma over ice. The small black dragonhide grew, stretching and expanding, wrapping round limbs and hiding human skin as it fully covered the body of the man, sealing him inside. He picked up the small skull with fingers that had taken on the shape of talons and held it aloft. The silver scales that formed a star shape on the chest of the man-dragon glowed with an ethereal light. The night star! The sorcerer inside the dragon's skin used a lifetime of knowledge and understanding to call forth the magic that now begged for release.\n\nLightning erupted from above, blinding and bright as it lanced into the pitiful skull of his unborn kin. Jumping from the skull, the discharge of energy sparked and spat, connecting with the bones forming the circle. Sunburst felt the electricity course through his body, the body that was Alduce, now one and the same.\n\nAlduce dropped the skull and it bounced off the hard ground, the brightness from the lightning flash faded, pale moonlight the only source of illumination on the mountain.\n\nThe thing that was neither man nor dragon swayed and its legs buckled as it dropped to the ground. Heat burned as super charged magic flowed beneath his scales, beneath the human skin, it was difficult to separate the two, as everything was mixed together. Spears of pain probed through the burning heat and Sunburst's agonising roar echoed around the cavern where his body lay. His mind, he knew, was a world away upon a distant darkened hill top.\n\nJust when he thought the pain was as much as he could withstand, his limbs began to change, making it worse. Never had he imagined a pain so excruciating and so terribly intense. Unbearable and unstoppable.\n\nSlowly the thing that was a human-dragon hybrid started to grow, stretching and filling, flesh no longer human, transformed into the black scales of a dragon. Talons bulged, wings sprouted and a spiked tail thrashed out, a giant whip, tipped with a razor sharp point, the tail of a real dragon.\n\nThis new creature reared up on powerful dragon legs, the pain abruptly gone, and roared once more. Sunburst roared too. The first time his roar had been a sound of agony and pain, now it was one of triumphant success, exhilaration at finally completing the transformation.\n\nNightstar\u2014there was no doubt now in his mind that this was him\u2014stretched his wings fully and Sunburst knew he had witnessed the birth of his missing friend. Not from an egg, but from sorcery, lightning, human secrets, and lies.\n\nAdrenaline suddenly turned to panic, as Alduce, trapped in the form of this new dragon, feared he would never be able to change back. Why would he want to change back? This black dragon was perfect, magnificent and invincible. Scales of deepest night gleamed like black diamonds, a silver star upon his chest shone in vibrant contrast. Would such a puny human really be fearful of not being able to revert back to his former self when he could live as something more? Something so much better!\n\nThe will of the man asserted itself, taking control of the magic and slowly the dragon began to shrink. White light shimmered over his body, highlighting each scale as a reversal of the transformation reduced the huge form to a naked human. Scales shrank and were absorbed into the man's skin until no trace of the dragon remained.\n\nAlduce ran his hands over his skin and Sunburst could feel smooth cold flesh where the hard scales had been. The night breeze cooled his body and he shuddered, icy shivers wracking his tiny human frame. The trauma of the transformation took its toll and the man fell as he lost consciousness.\n\nThe connection between man and beast severed and the yellow dragon drifted deep into a restless slumber, thankful that he was no longer part of the man's memories."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Sunburst was miserable when he awoke. The blood healing had let him experience the negative events in the human's life. A human he had saved for the second time.\n\nThe connection to Alduce and his fevered dreams had been made when the man was dying, at the lowest point of his existence and he lived through the human's misery, tasted his pain and felt the anguish the man had endured. His usual happy demeanour had been influenced by the sadness and misery and he actually felt sympathy for Alduce, which was unexpected, as dragons did not empathise with humans, they loathed and despised them. They were untrustworthy.\n\nBut, he also felt the joy, the pure exhilaration of shape changing, transforming into something new and different and becoming a dragon. And the excruciating pain that had accompanied that transformation. How could such a small creature, so weak and seemingly fragile, endure so much agony? The man, Alduce, was stronger than he appeared, even on the brink of death he wouldn't give up and clung to life.\n\nThe drops of blood Sunburst had administered hadn't just postponed inevitable death, it appeared they were repairing the damage to his chest. His blood should not have cured the dying man. It should have sustained him for a short while, then burned through his body, consuming him. Sunburst now knew the reason why.\n\nAlduce was Nightstar. He used human sorcery, the charm he wore around his neck and the machines he had seen in their shared visions. Somehow he had used these to change from man to dragon.\n\nThis was not right! It should never be allowed. But who could have stopped it? No-one knew but him and it had already happened. It was an abomination, unnatural and\u2026 wrong?\n\nEverything screamed inside Sunburst that this shouldn't be, but this was Nightstar, his friend. They had become like egg brothers, he was everything a dragon should be. Everything a real dragon should be.\n\nNow he understood why the black dragon had acted so unusually. It wasn't that he came from beyond the eastern ocean or that he hadn't any traditional upbringing.\n\nHe had lied. He had made it all up, fiction to trick a stupid yellow, a gullible fool that believed any cruel lie fed to him.\n\nYet\u2026 he had come from somewhere and it was beyond the ocean and he hadn't been raised by dragons. Sunburst would have\u2014should have\u2014detected these untruths, but he hadn't. Was it because Nightstar... Alduce, he was called Alduce, could mask the truth? From a dragon? Impossible! Sunburst had been fooled, surely older wiser dragons would detect his secret and see him for what he really was. Winterfang has missed it too! And Amethyst. How could she have been fooled? They had grown close, why hadn't she found out what he really was?\n\nBut what was he? Nightstar was real, he was a dragon. This was all very confusing. Sunburst had never heard of anything like this, ever. In all the myths and tales of his kind, no-one had ever encountered a situation like this. He was the only dragon in existence to face this dilemma and he didn't have the first idea of what he should do.\n\nShould he flame Alduce where he lay? Burn him to a charred pile of bones? Finish this now and keep everything he had learned to himself? He couldn't bring himself to kill what was locked inside the human, he couldn't kill Nightstar. He didn't have the right to murder the black dragon like that. He didn't know if Alduce would still be able to change back to Nightstar. He had sustained near fatal injuries and had some of Sunburst's blood in his veins now, this might have altered him, altered his magic. Dragon and human magic shouldn't mix, should be incompatible. Sunburst had no idea if adding his live blood to the sorcerer's would change the balance, ruin the spell or kill the man.\n\nThere was only one thing he could do, repulsive as it sounded, he would have to wake Alduce and converse with him. This time he would ask the right questions now he knew Alduce was Nightstar. The man would answer and be held accountable. And if he didn't tell him everything he wanted to know and his blood didn't kill him. Well, then he would decide what action to take next."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "Alduce stirred, groaning as he opened his eyes. He was soaked in sweat but his fever had broken and he was still alive. He gently probed at the wound in his chest and was amazed to feel tenderness rather than the expected pain. The flesh had actually repaired itself. Tight pink skin replaced the charred and weeping mess that had been there before. Outside the cave, last night's storm had been replaced by the dull light of day. The embers of a vaguely remembered fire had all but burned out and lying beside it, the green-eyed yellow dragon stared at him, cold and unwelcoming. The face of his former friend bore an expression between disgust and hatred. The good natured Sunburst had vanished. This was the look of a dragon of legend, foreboding and fierce, no friend of mankind.\n\nAlduce understood his resentment. He had deliberately deceived Sunburst, told him lies, misled him, abused his trust and his friendship. He didn't blame the yellow dragon one bit, if their roles had been reversed, he would feel the same.\n\nHowever, he was still alive and that had to count for something. He couldn't remember much after the lightning had struck and reversed the transformation. All he could recall was falling through the storm, the terror of plummeting and the agony in his chest. He had been in a fevered state and dredged up unpleasant memories, bad times in his life he would rather forget, times of misery and hopelessness.\n\nHe met Sunburst's eyes and was lost for words, he wished the dragon would speak, rather than the unflinching stare he fixed on him. He should wait to be addressed and show respect but an idea came to him. He stood on shaking legs, weak from his ordeal and bowed deeply, as if presenting himself to a king. The dragon's eyes followed his movements, but his head was like a yellow statue, rigid as stone. Alduce held his bow for what seemed an eternity, naked and cold, his limbs trembled with fatigue as he waited for a reaction.\n\n\"Enough, Alduce,\" Sunburst spat. He hadn't revealed his true name, yet the dragon knew it.\n\n\"You know who I am?\" Alduce croaked, sitting down before his legs gave way.\n\n\"I know everything about you, sorcerer. I've tasted your vile blood and seen inside your soul, black as the scales you hid behind. You can deceive me no longer.\" Sunburst was a different dragon, he was angry and Alduce felt an implied threat behind his words. He could offer an apology, tell the dragon he was sorry but it wasn't enough. An apology felt trivial, a friend deserved more. He would try a different tactic. He needed to rescue this situation before Sunburst decided there were one too many humans present for his liking.\n\n\"If you know all about me, Sunburst, you will know that we were friends, true friends,\" Alduce spoke from the heart and a dragon would know this was no lie.\n\n\"I don't have the words to tell you how deeply shamed I am to stand here like this.\" There was no reaction from Sunburst, he had resumed his staring silence, but Alduce knew that he was listening. He was alive at Sunburst's indulgence when he should either be smashed and broken on the ground or burned so badly from the lightning it should have destroyed him.\n\nHe needed to get Sunburst talking. If he didn't, he could see in the dragon's eyes how this would end. He recalled the way Galdor had looked at him when they first met. A cold hatred towards humans and a murderous look in his eyes. The same look Sunburst fixed on him now. He remembered the terror of the young apprentice who feared for his life. He didn't want Sunburst to look on him like that. He didn't want to be afraid of his friend. The only difference between Galdor when he first encountered him\u2014and Sunburst now\u2014was the colour of their scales.\n\n\"I am alive because you rescued me and I don't know why.\" He let the statement hang between them, careful to phrase it so it didn't sound like a question, but hopeful Sunburst would supply an answer. He waited and was rewarded with a response, just not the one he wanted to hear.\n\n\"Clever, Alduce. You have posed me yet another question without asking it directly. However, I will answer it, but know you try my patience. Surely you must know how patient a dragon can be,\" he thrust his snout forward, scant inches between them, \"and how much you test mine.\" The yellow dragon pulled his head back, shaking it from side to side, his mannerism oddly human.\n\n\"I do not know the why either. Why I rescued you from falling through the storm or why I did what I had to do to keep you alive. What you should have asked is how.\" Now Sunburst waited, turning the situation and throwing it back at Alduce. A familiar trait the yellow dragon often employed. Alduce remembered the last time he had done this. They had been friends then.\n\nHe remembered when Sunburst had told Nightstar, that after his first visit to the White Mountain, he would never be a stranger again. The loss of that friendship pained him deeply, much more than he thought it would.\n\nSunburst's words confused him. The dragon couldn't give him a reason for saving him, only how he had done so. But would he tell that to the despised human?\n\n\"I think I understand. You don't know why you actually saved me, you did it, but you are unable to say what drove you to do so.\"\n\n\"I rescued a pitiful human who was dropping through the storm as the dragon who was my friend vanished, leaving strong traces of magic behind. I snatched you from the air before you fell to the ground because I wanted answers from you. You were all that was left in the sky after Nightstar had gone. I suspected you had something to do with his disappearance and I brought you here to find out what you knew. To see if there was something I could do to find Nightstar, help him if he needed it. What I discovered was, there is no Nightstar anymore, only Alduce the deceiver.\"\n\n\"Thank you for saving me.\" Alduce whispered.\n\n\"Do not give me your thanks. Your life hangs in the balance and the scales are tipped against you. I will tell you how you survived, as it makes no difference, your crime is punishable by death and you look upon your executioner.\"\n\n\"Nightstar isn't gone, you're wrong!\"\n\nSunburst started to growl, but Alduce needed to tell him the truth. \"At first, I thought I was Nightstar and he was me, but now he is more than just a shape I take. I'm still there, inside, but Nightstar has grown, become a dragon in his own right. A real dragon, not the black cloak of scales I donned. Nightstar has shown me things I could never have imagined. I, Alduce, am a scholar, a scientist, and a sorcerer, it is true. But I tell you this, Sunburst of the White Mountain, your kin have taught me that which I could not learn. Nightstar has shown me a new life, changed how I look at things and made the man into much more than just skin and scales. I know the dragon I brought forth isn't just a sorcerous conjuration, an illusion of life, he is Nightstar in his own right and always will be.\"\n\nIt felt like a confession as the words poured from him, the explanation said more than an apology ever could. He was glad he had finally told the yellow dragon what he was, how he felt and hoped his former friend would understand the turmoil inside him.\n\n\"Look into my eyes and tell me if I lie! You can see I speak the truth. Why do you think no-one saw Nightstar for anything other than what he was?\"\n\n\"Human sorcery and magic, you used it to trick everyone!\"\n\n\"I thought so too, I really did, but think about it for a minute. There's no magic a dragon can't sniff out, no matter how strong the spell, you said it yourself, you can smell it, taste it.\"\n\n\"But, you could have\u2026\"\n\n\"No, I couldn't, you know it! You named yourself my executioner, if you don't believe what I say, flame me, right now, end my miserable human life. I won't stop you. Even though I know your true name, I would never use it against you to protect myself.\"\n\nAlduce took a risk, if Sunburst meant to end his life, he could have simply let him drop through the storm.\n\nBut he didn't.\n\nIf he changed his mind after saving him, he could have easily left him to die in this cave.\n\nBut he didn't.\n\nInstead he had done something to heal him, something he was reluctant to tell him about. Yet another question to ask.\n\nAlduce spread out his arms, he would remain defenceless against any action Sunburst took against him. He could call on the magic of the Flaire pedant he wore, but he wouldn't. He would take a chance and put his fate into the hands, or claws, of the yellow dragon. He would accept any judgement Sunburst would make. He hoped Nightstar's friendship with Sunburst was enough to save him. He knew the yellow dragon, his heart was good and he didn't have the capacity to be a cold blooded murderer.\n\n\"If you wish to end my life, go ahead. I am ready to be judged and will accept any sentence you believe fit.\"\n\nSunburst began to grumble, wisps of smoke escaped from his nostrils and Alduce was close enough he could feel the heat from the fire in the dragon's throat. He had pushed the dragon too far and he was going to burn for his arrogance. He braced himself for the end, at least he had shared the experiences of Nightstar, had known other dragons and lived among them, even if only for a short while. His one regret was he never had the chance to record anything in his journals. Even if no-one ever read his life's work, he would always be a scholar.\n\nThe yellow dragon leaned forward and looked straight into his eyes. And stopped. Alduce could feel the hypnotic pull of Sunburst's gaze as he searched the truth of his words. Then, to his surprise, the yellow dragon sat back on his haunches like a faithful dog and swallowed down the flames he had summoned with a gulp.\n\n\"I can't kill you Alduce and I know I shouldn't let you live. Yet you speak the truth, I can see it plainly. What have you done? What have I done? What will we do now?\"\n\nAlduce breathed a sigh of relief. He had counted on the humanity of the yellow dragon to save him. He didn't know if humanity was the right word, but his day was confusing enough already to debate the use of the word. It worked for his brain, he just wouldn't dare put it that way to Sunburst.\n\nAlduce understood Sunburst's confusion, he had lived with the same conundrum for months and it still troubled him. But, he had an idea. He didn't only want to escape his fate, he wanted to save Nightstar.\n\n\"I will tell you what I think you have done. You have saved Nightstar, just as you wanted. Your friendship for him was once great, as his was for you. And still is. What I have done is more complicated. I have created a life, brought a dragon into being when all I expected was to take the shape of a creature I admired. I wanted to know more about dragons after my encounter with Galdor the Green, a wise an ancient dragon that showed me a kindness long ago. He took a chance and trusted me beyond our mutual prejudice.\"\n\nSunburst listened intently and Alduce could see some spark of Nightstar's friend in his eyes. It would be unfair to say that his expression softened, as he would never describe a dragon as soft, but with Sunburst, he was the exception to the rule.\n\n\"If I was given the chance to go back, knowing what I know now, would I do it again? No. I can see how I have hurt you, lied and deceived you and your kin. I would miss Nightstar, but I would miss his friendship with Sunburst even more. I cannot truly tell you what I have done, as I don't know myself. But, I have a suggestion to put to you. You asked what we will do now. I will leave your world, travel back to my own and you will never see me again and Nightstar will no longer fly in your skies. Alduce will never set foot on your world again. We will be gone, you won't have to kill me and I will take your true name to my grave.\"\n\nSilence returned to the cave as Alduce gave Sunburst time to consider his words. The yellow dragon had much to contemplate.\n\n\"I gave you my blood,\" Sunburst said. \"I saw it all, I lived your life through your eyes as you writhed in fever. I saw the orphanage, felt the whippings. How can one human do that to another? I felt the misery, the sorrow, and the shame. I saw Caltus, I saw Galdor. I felt the agony you endured when you become Nightstar, the pleasure of your first flight. I know your mind and your heart, I've seen what you were and what you've become. I saw you cut open the egg. The egg you stole and I hate you for it. I admire you for all you have accomplished, your strength, your thirst for knowledge and your tenacity. You never give up. You wouldn't lie down and die, even when the lighting burned a hole in you! I healed you with three drops of my blood, I thought it would revive you for a short while. I never knew it would save you, but it has.\" Sunburst faced him and Alduce was humbled by his next words.\n\n\"We are brothers of the blood. It should never have been, but it is done.\"\n\n\"You gave me your blood! You've seen my life?\"\n\n\"Not all of your life, but enough to know the man that you were and the man you have become. You are right, the differences between man and dragon are prejudices learned, and it is difficult to change them. Know this Alduce the sorcerer, Nightstar the Black, you are free to leave and return to your world. My blood will extend your life and give you good health, it is an unintentional gift I have bestowed upon you. I trust you to tell no-one of the magical properties of living dragon blood. You know we would be captured and bled, kept like cattle to cure human illness if this secret were ever known. It is fortunate that when we die, our blood magic dies with us.\"\n\n\"You have my word, Sunburst. I will need a few more days before I can travel to the place where I entered your world. It is too far for me to go on foot and I will need my strength before I attempt to summon Nightstar and fly again,\" he paused. \"If I can.\"\n\n\"There are fruit trees and water not far from the cave. Be careful you are not seen, as any other dragon would flame you to the bone should they see a human on our shores.\" Sunburst stood and turned his back, his tail flicking from side to side in agitation.\n\n\"Sunburst,\" Alduce called after him. \"Thank you, my friend.\"\n\n\"I have already told you, I don't want your thanks, your word will suffice. And we are not friends, Nightstar was my friend. We are at best adversaries, trussed together by a secret we should never know, by blood we should never have shared and a lie that should never be spoken.\"\n\nHe turned his back on the man, never looking behind as he left the cave. Once he was clear, Alduce stumbled to the entrance and watched as the yellow dragon climbed into the sombre morning sky. Sunburst breathed a gout of fire into the air, expelling the flame he had called forth to burn Alduce before he changed his mind. The sky was filled with a mighty roar as the yellow dragon vented his anger.\n\nAlduce dropped to his knees and wept."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Nightstar flew south. It had been four days since Sunburst had abandoned his former friend and left the cave where he recuperated. He had rested, sleeping long into the mornings, gathering fruit to eat and branches to burn at night to ward off the cold. He was still naked and had nothing to wear, with only the cave to provide shelter, he was glad it wasn't winter.\n\nAlduce waited four days before attempting to change back into Nightstar, his human form was weak and he needed to gather his strength. Concerned the lighting strike or the blood from Sunburst would somehow effect the transformation, he was relieved when he successfully changed back into the black dragon.\n\nAfter close examination, he was happy to find that nothing had changed, Nightstar was undamaged and fit for flight. The dull pain in his newly healed chest was to be expected, the magic from Sunburst's blood had performed a minor miracle, but as both Alduce and Nightstar, it would be a while until the pain faded and they were both fully healed.\n\nHe was alive and on reflection, he was lucky to have survived, and even luckier that Sunburst had chosen to save him and decided to let him live.\n\nAny hope that their friendship could be repaired, as his chest had been, was gone. No magical ingredient could have been added to change the hurt the yellow dragon felt. He had left Alduce, torn between a myriad of emotions, confused and angry. Alduce suspected that Sunburst understood more than he admitted. The dragon had seen inside his mind and touched his feelings. It may have been alien and new to him, but dragons were intelligent creatures and the complexity of the Alduce-Nightstar relationship hadn't been lost on the yellow dragon.\n\nWas that why he was so upset? He had told Alduce he admired him, then said he hated him. He had seen through human eyes and understood what Alduce had accomplished.\n\nThe scholar would have plenty of time to contemplate the last few months when he returned home. Home... it was a hollow lifeless place after living with the White Mountain dragons. It was a workplace, a laboratory, and a study. A place to work and a little room with a bed to sleep in. As Nightstar he had friends to share his life with. He would miss that. His studies and experiments would always be there for him, it was what his life as a human was. It had been fine before his experiences in Sunburst's world and he had been content with his life. It would be fine again. He had a lot of work to catch up with and that would keep him busy. But after the last few months he wasn't sure fine was good enough anymore.\n\nNightstar searched the hillside below for the cave he had used to enter this world. The portal he opened would still be hidden safely inside, out of sight. It was his way back.\n\nA metallic blur sped past his snout as he focused on the land below.\n\n\"Nightstar!\" the copper coloured dragon cried out, \"I have found you.\"\n\n\"Little Wing, you're far from home. Why are you looking for me?\" Nightstar was worried. What if Sunburst had changed his mind? Had he returned to Winterfang and told him about Alduce, about the imposter within their midst that he had set free? Surely the moot leader would have sent more than just one dragon to find him? Little Wing was of the autumn contingent, they tended to have more to do with upholding tradition and making sure everything ran smoothly. Something was amiss. At least it hadn't been Galvon that had found him, Nightstar was sure the green dragon was suspicious of everything and did not like him. Forest greens, he had discovered, were like that.\n\n\"I've been searching for you for days. Winterfang asked my wing to come south to find you. Galvon and Raynar are with me,\" she scanned the sky, \"somewhere.\"\n\n\"What does the moot leader want with me that's so important he sends you this far from your duties?\" There were only two reasons why the frost drake would be searching for him. Had Winterfang discovered Nightstar had trespassed in the moot chamber and interacted with the pearl? Or did he know the black dragon's secret? Either option was something he would rather avoid. He peered across the hillside searching for the cave that would grant his escape. He would easily be able to escape from Little Wing, but if Galvon and Raynar joined her, he would be in trouble with three dragons to outfly. He readied himself to flee, there was no sign of the other two dragons. He should lose Little Wing now, shake her off before her reinforcements arrived and return to his world, closing the portal behind him forever.\n\n\"Winterfang needs your help,\" Little Wing said. \"He thinks you might know why Sunburst left and where he has gone. Rose is worried. She said he was acting strange.\"\n\n\"Strange?\" Nightstar hesitated, this wasn't what he had expected.\n\n\"Well, stranger than that yellow normally behaves. You are his friend, you know what I mean. He returned to the mountain four nights ago. Rose told us he was agitated and she questioned him about you and why he returned alone. He told her you were lost.\"\n\n\"Let's land,\" he called to the copper dragon, \"and continue our conversation on the ground.\" He was curious to find out what Sunburst had said, what he'd done, and why Winterfang needed his help. He descended to a grassy hillock and Little Wing followed, landing beside him. He would still be able to evade her if necessary, but he didn't want to risk flying any farther as she might be able to sense the portal's energy if they flew any closer to the cave.\n\n\"Sunburst has left the White Mountain. No-one has seen him in three days. Rose knows his behaviours, he often disappears for longer, but he usually flies south or west, sometimes north. This time he flew east.\"\n\n\"There is nothing to the east,\" Nightstar said, \"the best hunting is south or west. The east has nothing Sunburst likes, just the ocean and he hates the smell of salt.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Little Wing said, \"Winterfang was right to have us search for you, out of all the White Mountain dragons, with the exception of Blood Rose, you know him best.\" Even the dragons of the moot thought of him as one of their own, it seemed.\n\n\"She was concerned with his mood, he spoke as if he would not be returning. I know she would have followed him if she could, but she has her hatchlings to tend to.\"\n\n\"That's not like him, she has five dragonets to look after. He wouldn't just leave. What more did he say?\"\n\n\"I do not know, Nightstar. Winterfang felt it was important that we find you soon. He consulted the pearl of wisdom and hopes you will help us, after all, you are one of us now. We were concerned for you both. Do you know why Sunburst would act like this? And why did he leave you here?\"\n\nNightstar considered what Little Wing had said. Could he really contemplate leaving without helping? Could he abandon Sunburst? It was his fault the yellow dragon was angry and upset. It was Alduce and his deceit that were to blame for Sunburst acting out of character. He had returned to Rose and then left her. Nightstar knew how much his mate and their clutch meant to the yellow dragon. Why had he abandoned them? Sunburst had been conflicted when they parted, upset with what he had discovered and at using his blood to save a human. It was Alduce who was responsible for this, he had driven Sunburst away and it was up to Nightstar to fix things. At first he thought Little Wing's story might be a ruse, to keep him occupied while her companions found them. That they knew his secret and this was all a trick to lure him back to Winterfang and the justice of the moot. Now his suspicion turned to concern. She was genuinely worried for Sunburst, his dragon sense confirmed it. He was too.\n\n\"I'm sorry Little Wing, I don't know why he would leave like that.\" He hadn't directly answered the first question she asked, he knew what had upset Sunburst but couldn't tell the copper dragon. \"We encountered a huge storm, five nights ago, we were far to the south. It was one of the worst storms I have ever experienced.\" That at least wasn't a lie.\n\nThe more he thought about how intense the storm was, the more he was convinced the Flaire artefact had acted as a catalyst, amplifying the unusually violent storm. They had hoped to fly through the worst of the weather, but the heart of the storm was wherever Nightstar flew. He had been at its centre and the Flaire had attracted the lightning.\n\n\"The sky was black and we were caught off guard, we tried to fly through it, but it was unending. Once the thunder and lightning were upon us, we became separated. We couldn't see each other, the wind and rain buffeted me, battered my wings so hard. I had to land, it was impossible to fly in such conditions.\"\n\n\"The storm passed over the mountain,\" Little Wing said. \"It was bad when it reached us and I can only imagine how wild it must have been for you to stop flying. Everyone knows how skilled you are in the air.\"\n\n\"Not skilled enough. I couldn't see Sunburst. I searched as best I could but the conditions were just too severe. That must be what he meant when he said I was lost.\" He had no choice but to tell another lie and hoped it would protect Sunburst as well as himself. \"I couldn't see him and when the storm subsided, I realised I had been driven a lot farther south than I expected. I spent a few days flying round in circles, looking for Sunburst, but if he returned to the White Mountain four days ago, he must have ended up north of where I was. I suspect he was carried by the winds, rather than landing, his smaller wingspan would have allowed him to keep flying. He's a better shape and size to navigate through such adverse weather.\"\n\n\"No-one doubts your loyalty to him, you were not to know where he was, or he you. It is commendable that you have taken these days to seek him out, others may not have done so.\"\n\nThey were distracted by the sound of wings in the sky above as Galvon and Raynar dropped down to land beside them.\n\n\"Well done 'Wing,\" Galvon said, \"you've found him.\"\n\n\"We are glad to see you safe, Nightstar,\" Raynar said. \"Aren't we Galvon?\n\n\"Yes. If it means we can return home, yes we are! If Winterfang thinks you can help, then yes. I know that dammed yellow is a nuisance but the moot leader is rarely wrong. The pearl has warned him. We need your help.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Galvon. Raynar,\" Nightstar replied. Even the crusty old green was asking for his aid. What had Winterfang foreseen? The pearl of wisdom must have shown the frost drake something to put the dragons on edge.\n\nAll thought of escape vanished. Alduce believed the best course of action was to return through the portal.\n\nNightstar decided otherwise.\n\n\"If the moot needs my help, then let us return.\"\n\nHe leapt into the air, the pain in his chest forgotten. If his former friend was in trouble, he couldn't leave.\n\nAnd if there were consequences, then so be it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nDragon Twins.\n\nWhen a fertile dragon egg is laid it usually takes four to six weeks to hatch. Eggs come in a variety of shapes and colours and their size is generally in proportion to their parents. Larger dragons producing bigger eggs than smaller dragons.\n\nThe only exception to this rule, I have discovered, is what I have named the twin egg. This occurrence is extremely rare and there is no direct bearing to the dragons involved and appears to be random.\n\nA twin egg can be detected as soon as it has been laid and is noticeably larger than the rest of the clutch by approximately one and a half times their size. The shell colour is a shade of mottled light green.\n\nWith mammals, twins are created by a division of the embryo. When it comes to dragons, two embryos occupy the same shell. As far as I am aware, this doesn't happen with any other egg laying creatures and is a result of the magic contained within these mythical creatures.\n\nDragon Twins are not to be confused with egg brothers or sisters, dragons hatched from the same clutch. Clutch mates can often be similar in colour and appearance, but they are not true twins.\n\nThe healthy hatching of an oversized twin egg is an event within the dragon community. It is regarded as a favourable omen and twins are believed to have enhanced magical abilities.\n\nInside the egg the developing embryos can mature in three different ways.\n\nThe first scenario is that the strongest and largest embryo will develop normally, taking all the sustenance from the weaker twin. Upon hatching, the weaker dragon will be still born, or live for a short while before dying.\n\nThe second is both dragons will hatch and one will be large and one small and under developed, a runt. This is considered a bad omen.\n\nAnd lastly, both hatchlings will be identical and grow to become true twins.\n\nAdditional note: The two green dragons of the White Mountain moot guard, Verdune and Verdante, are true identical twins.\n\nNewly hatched dragonets are usually black in colour when they emerge from the shell. Sometimes they are a darker shade of their adult colour, appearing almost black. The black fades as their colour develops. Dragon twins are born green and their pigment has already fully developed. After considerable research, green is one of the two strongest genetic strains (red being the other) in dragons and I believe that this is why twins are born this colour.\n\nNote: There has been no record of a red twin egg ever being laid."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Winterfang called the moot to order, spreading his wings over the dragons to his left and right. The seven members were joined by Nightstar and Blood Rose. They had all assembled in the chamber of the moot after Nightstar's return to the White Mountain.\n\n\"The moot is now open,\" Winterfang spoke, reciting the traditional words, \"all are welcome and are under my protection.\" His talon gripping the pearl of wisdom, \"Pearl of enlightenment, Moonstone of white, grant me the wisdom and the strength to guide our moot wisely.\"\n\nNightstar tried not to look at the swirling surface of the pearl, he didn't know if it would react to his proximity, now that he had touched it. He didn't want the moot to know he had made an illicit connection with the pearl and hoped his nervousness wasn't as obvious as he thought it was.\n\n\"The moot are concerned with the unusual disappearance of Sunburst the Yellow. Especially as his mate,\" the frost drake nodded to Rose, \"has informed us of his uncharacteristic behaviour prior to his departure.\"\n\n\"Rose, will you tell us what Sunburst said to you before he left?\" Aurelian the Golden asked.\n\n\"I want to thank you all,\" Rose said. \"I am lost without my mate, our dragonets need their sire to teach them, to help me provide and nurture them.\"\n\nNightstar looked down at his talons, ashamed his terrible secret had driven Sunburst from his home and family.\n\n\"We will give any help needed,\" Aurelian said. \"The moot will see to it.\"\n\n\"Indeed we will,\" Winterfang assured her, \"until Sunburst is found and returns home to take care of them himself. Now, tell us what he said, what upset him so, that he felt he had to leave?\"\n\nThe frost drake stared directly at Nightstar, his icy blue eyes devouring the black dragon, looking for an answer. Everyone knew that the black and yellow were close friends. It wasn't unreasonable for Winterfang to look to him for clues. Who other than his mate would have any idea of what ailed Sunburst?\n\n\"He was upset when he returned,\" she replied, \"he said Nightstar was lost.\" All eyes turned towards Nightstar. It was uncomfortable being the centre of attention and bearing the scrutiny of everyone assembled. The cavern felt like a much smaller space.\n\n\"We were separated during the storm,\" Nightstar said, feeling he was expected to speak.\n\n\"Little Wing has informed the moot of your conversation,\" Winterfang said, \"and now that you are found, we need to locate Sunburst. Please continue Rose.\"\n\n\"He wasn't himself, he was agitated and not making any sense...\"\n\n\"He's a yellow,\" Galvon muttered. Winterfang glowered at him and it was enough to silence the forest green.\n\n\"...and kept apologising, saying he was sorry for his bad judgement,\" Rose continued, ignoring Galvon's comment. \"He said he didn't know what he had done. He was confused. When he left, he said he was going to make amends, fix things. He left and flew east, I watched him as he vanished into the horizon and that was the last I saw of him.\" She paused, looking around the chamber. \"I know he can be unpredictable and other dragons,\" she looked towards Galvon, \"think him strange. But something is wrong, I know it is, call it perception if you will, but Sunburst needs help.\" She turned to Nightstar, \"Will you help find him, Nightstar? If anyone can track him, it's you. He has never had such a close friend. You have developed a bond with him and he respects you. I sense a connection between you both, you are my best hope.\"\n\n\"I will do everything I can,\" Nightstar said, wondering at the way she had emphasised the word\u2014perception. He understood this was how she referred to what he had thought of as his dragon sense, what he had come to interpret as a sixth sense, unique to dragons. He knew this was true as his own perception informed him.\n\n\"I would see your mate return home to the White Mountain.\" He knew Rose referred to their friendship, but now he had Sunburst's blood, there was another connection that tied him to the yellow dragon.\n\n\"Can you tell us anything more?\" Winterfang asked Nightstar. \"You spent some time with him when you flew south.\" He let the question hang and eight heads turned to Nightstar, looking for answers he couldn't give.\n\n\"I'm sorry moot leader,\" he replied, using his title and showing respect. \"I wish I could tell you more.\" He deliberately hadn't answered the question, he knew Winterfang would sniff out any untruths and hoped that his statement was accepted. He truly did wish he could tell them, but knew he would never be allowed to leave the chamber of the moot if they knew his secret. \"Everything was fine until the storm hit.\" Again, it was technically true, until he had been struck by the lightning, his friendship with Sunburst had been more than fine.\n\nAlduce had dug a deep hole and the black dragon felt himself slipping into the abyss. He cursed the storm and the lightning, it had changed everything when it struck him.\n\nThe power of the Flaire pendant was unpredictable, created by a race who could understand and control it. Alduce was an amateur compared to them. Yes, he had succeeded in using the power of the pendant to call down the lightning and combine it with the science and sorcery he practiced. He had opened portals and travelled to other worlds. He had used the elemental power of the lightning, bending it to his will.\n\nBut did he really know what he was doing? Was the great Alduce so conceited he couldn't admit he didn't know everything? Was it just an unfortunate coincidence that the lightning had struck him and changed him back? Or could it be some outside force, some unknown entity telling him what he had done was wrong? Dropping him to his death in the storm would certainly end his experiment.\n\nThis dragon life was no longer an experiment, Nightstar was more than science, more than just sorcery. Ever since Sunburst had shared his blood, the dragon within was stronger. His thoughts and his decisions were his own, he was still Alduce, but the man was becoming more like a passenger, an observer, carried along by a will that was still his, but was Nightstar's too.\n\n\"Nightstar?\" Winterfang said, \"You are deep in thought. Is there something else you know that might help?\"\n\n\"I was thinking where he would go. Why he felt he needed to make amends. What could lie to the east that would take him away from Rose and the dragonets?\" Nightstar replied.\n\n\"You would know better than any, what lies east,\" Galvon challenged, \"since it's where you came from.\"\n\n\"There's nothing east but the coast,\" said Blue-cap, \"and the sea.\"\n\n\"Mysteries and the unknown,\" Raynar said. \"Sunburst can be spontaneous, it's part of a yellow's nature, but this sounds as if something troubles him.\"\n\nNightstar knew the moot were concerned for Sunburst, just as he was. Alduce wished to leave and return to his laboratory but Nightstar couldn't abandon his friend. He knew it wasn't the wisest choice, but it was the right one.\n\n\"I shall fly east,\" he said. \"I will find Sunburst, I owe it to him as a friend. With the moot's permission I would leave and seek him out.\" Sunburst might not want to see Nightstar again, but his guilt wouldn't let him leave without knowing what had become of the yellow dragon.\n\nThere was a rumbling of consent from the assembled dragons.\n\n\"Bring him home, Nightstar,\" Rose said.\n\n\"I will not return to the White Mountain without him.\"\n\n\"I will accompany Nightstar,\" Amethyst said. Nightstar didn't want that, this was between Sunburst and himself. He tried to think of a reason to dissuade the purple.\n\n\"No,\" Winterfang said, saving him from fabricating another lie. \"Nightstar will go alone. I have consulted the pearl and this is how it must be.\"\n\nHe spread his wings over the dragons to his left and right, stretching his neck forward. \"Nightstar will search to the east and he will find Sunburst and bring him home. I will have no more White Mountain dragons involved, for now. The moot is now closed, my words are final. Aurelian, see to Blood Rose, make sure she is provided for. Go now, return to your duties.\"\n\nHe folded his wings and the dragons started to leave the chamber. It was plain to all assembled that Winterfang had made up his mind and he would tolerate no arguments on the matter.\n\nAmethyst caught Nightstar's eye and raised her eye ridge like a questioning human eyebrow. If he could have shrugged his shoulders, he would have. Instead he shook his head from side to side, a universal gesture understood by both humans and dragons. He pushed forward through the departing dragons, trying to catch up with her but stopped as his name was spoken.\n\n\"Nightstar,\" Winterfang commanded, \"I would speak with you.\"\n\n\"Come and find me when you're done, I'll be in the meadow,\" Amethyst softly spoke, then disappeared into the tunnel with her peers.\n\nGalvon was last to leave and he turned his head back, looking to Winterfang then to Nightstar, he was displeased at being dismissed, but he unexpectedly bobbed his head towards Nightstar. Did he know why Winterfang had held him back?\n\nWinterfang waited until the chamber was empty and Galvon had finally exited.\n\n\"What I have to say to you isn't for the ears of the moot. Some of its members might question you about what we have spoken of, but you will not discuss our conversation with them. Any of them. Is that clear?\"\n\nNightstar was unsure if Winterfang was angry with him, his tone was one of authority and he was used to being obeyed.\n\n\"I understand,\" he said and waited for him to continue.\n\nWinterfang craned his neck, making sure the tunnel was empty. \"I feel this isn't the first time we have faced each other across this chamber, just the two of us, alone.\" Nightstar didn't respond, it wasn't a question and he was positive he shouldn't be volunteering anything like a confirmation. If Winterfang suspected something about the night of the aurora, he wouldn't trick Nightstar into confessing.\n\n\"I have consulted the pearl,\" and he scrutinized Nightstar before continuing, \"and I have sensed Sunburst is in danger.\"\n\n\"Danger? What kind of danger?\" This wasn't something he expected to hear.\n\n\"That I cannot say, it is only a feeling, but it is a strong one. The pearl of wisdom can sometimes indicate what is to be, well, perhaps possibilities of what might come to pass. Something happened between you and Sunburst. That much I do know. What it was is a mystery to me. I know you would not see your friend come to harm and I suspect whatever the rift between you, you do not wish to speak of it.\"\n\n\"We had a falling out, a difference of opinion. One which I now truly regret.\"\n\n\"I see it eats at you, weighs heavy on your spirit. Listen to me Nightstar, if you wish to make this right, you need to find that yellow spike in my scales, make your peace and bring him home. Sunburst might enjoy playing the part, but he is no fool. The White Mountain would be a less interesting place without him. The wisdom of the pearl is seldom wrong, but it does not provide all the answers I seek, it only guides me. Reveals small clues, shows me hints and suggestions. It is difficult to explain. I don't expect you to understand, unless you had touched the pearl and felt its presence for yourself.\" He paused, then said, \"Or perhaps you understand everything.\" The implication was obvious.\n\nNightstar felt like a mouse and Winterfang was the cat, toying with him. It wasn't just the pearl that was supplying hints, the frost drake was telling him he knew he had been inside the chamber and touched the pearl. Was he giving him the opportunity to come clean? If he confessed what would the penalty for his violation of trust be? He had consulted the pearl and seen secrets he shouldn't.\n\nWinterfang watched, his icy blue eyes once more searching deep inside his consciousness and this time there were no chameleon scales to hide behind.\n\n\"I am sorry, Winterfang,\" Nightstar blurted before the screaming sorcerer inside his mind stopped him.\n\n\"What are you sorry for, black dragon? What do you want to tell me?\" Cold blue eyes bored into his own, vivid and bright against the frost white scales, willing him to tell the truth. Alduce knew what was happening and surfaced in Nightstar's conscience to break the hypnotic gaze before he revealed his deepest secret. He was sure Winterfang's reaction would not be as lenient as Sunburst's.\n\nThe turmoil within caused Nightstar to shake his head and Winterfang's spell was broken, but the damage was done.\n\n\"I touched the pearl,\" Nightstar confessed. If he gave Winterfang this, deflected his probing, hopefully it would save him.\n\n\"I know,\" Winterfang said. \"I have known since you touched it. I felt your presence in the chamber on the night of the aurora. I wanted to see if you would confess, tell me what you had done. Know that since you have, there is still hope for you.\"\n\n\"Hope? There is no hope for me, Winterfang, I fear all is lost.\"\n\n\"You sound like Sunburst. He said you were lost and I believe he didn't mean that he couldn't find you. You are a lost soul Nightstar, an enigma to me. Something inside you is wrong, something is missing. You are a lost dragon. Sunburst knew it, he is more perceptive than some give him credit for. Did he know you touched the pearl?\"\n\nHis deception was beginning to unravel, Winterfang knew there was something different about him. Of course he wasn't like other dragons. Winterfang said he was lost but it was Alduce that was lost. Nightstar was only just finding himself.\n\n\"No!\" Nightstar didn't want the yellow dragon to be accused of collusion, he had caused his friend enough suffering already. Winterfang mustn't think Sunburst had known he had touched the pearl, he didn't know anything about it. Had Sunburst seen anything when he shared some of Alduce's memories? He would have surely said if he had. Perhaps he was too angry to mention it. He must not find out, it would only make matters between them worse. Nightstar would make sure the yellow dragon was spared any further pain of betrayal, if he could.\n\n\"He didn't know, he mustn't know, my shame is something I would spare him from if I could.\"\n\n\"No-one will ever know, Nightstar,\" Winterfang said. \"I am angry you sneaked into the moot chamber and you will be punished, however, I said there is hope. I know the pull the pearl has on minds not wise or strong enough to resist. I should have made sure the twins didn't leave without replacing the guard. While I am disappointed in your actions, I must take some of the responsibility, I am, after all, responsible for all the dragons at White Mountain.\"\n\n\"Punishment?\" Nightstar asked, \"Please don't stop me from searching for Sunburst, I need...\"\n\n\"Silence! You will listen when your elder speaks, do not interrupt me again. If you mistake my understanding for leniency, you are sadly mistaken. I will get to your punishment, but first, you need to understand why. The pearl of wisdom should only be consulted by those who know its secret. I, being moot leader, am privy to this, you, being an immature fledgling, are not!\"\n\nNightstar was at the mercy of the frost drake, he felt like an apprentice once more, being chastised by Caltus for some misdeed or mistake he had made. When his master had been angry or annoyed, Alduce had stood and listened, taken the berating and held his tongue.\n\nEars open, mouth shut, another saying Caltus was fond of repeating to him. It seemed like exceptionally good advice to Nightstar. This was one thing both he and Alduce agreed on.\n\n\"While I blame myself for not taking the necessary precautions and leaving the pearl unattended, I am angry and disappointed at your actions. My perception told me you were in the chamber. Do you think me such an incompetent leader? That I do not know everything that occurs in the White Mountains?\n\nNightstar remained silent, hoping Winterfang's question was rhetorical. The silence stretched uncomfortably until Winterfang continued.\n\n\"I wanted to see what you would do. I gave you the freedom to fail, and you did. We took you in and made you welcome, Sunburst showed you our ways. You could not have had a better friend, believe me. Know this Nightstar; Sunburst recognised you were special. Your black scales are unusual. You are different. I see a potential in you for greatness, but there is something about you that is a mystery to me, to the pearl, and to Flaxe. Yes, we have discussed you, and the pearl bares your mark now.\" He waved his talon across the white orb and streaks of black and silver swirled across its surface.\n\n\"Like a talon print in the snow, I can follow your journey, I can see what you were shown, see what wisdom the pearl revealed to your eager mind. The power of invisibility is now yours and the secret of the long sleep. These are things you are not ready for. I forbid you from using this knowledge, you are not mature enough for it.\" He pushed his snout close to Nightstar. \"If you don't follow my requests, you will incur the wrath of every dragon here. Do you understand?\"\n\nNightstar bowed his head, \"I understand, moot leader. I am truly sorry and will do anything I can to make amends.\"\n\n\"That is good. The pearl not only imparts wisdom to those who are ready to receive it, but can corrupt too. I want you to understand why the pearl attracted you. If you realise, it will be easier to resist. The aurora can effect dragons in many different ways, it causes euphoria and impairs judgement.\" Nightstar thought back to the when the sky had intoxicated him with its magnificent lights, like alcohol to a human. Perhaps his judgement had been impaired, his inhibitions certainly had. He thought of Amethyst and the time they had shared at the lake.\n\n\"I believe it was a combination of the excitement of the Grand Moot and the aurora,\" Winterfang said, \"that and the draw of the pearl on your mind, which drew you to the chamber. Once you were alone with the pearl, you were too weak to resist. The pearl is an unusual object, it has an unknown past, even though it has been with us since before the Great Exodus. You are an intelligent dragon, Nightstar, I see this. I said you have a potential for greatness and the pearl senses this too. You are too young, too immature, to handle its power. Its attraction will become addiction if you are unprepared. Given another hundred years, you might have matured enough to learn, but you are a long way from that at present.\" He huffed out a sigh and continued.\n\n\"Here is what is going to happen. No-one must know you have touched the pearl and broken our trust. It would cause unrest in our community if they learned an outsider had accessed something they are deprived of. Dragons can be volatile and easy to anger in situations such as this. The knowledge of the pearl is forbidden to all but a select few. You will not use the knowledge the pearl has shared with you until I decide you are mature enough. You will be allowed to search for Sunburst.\" He drew in a breath that could only be a sigh, then continued.\n\n\"I want you to leave today, the quicker you depart the better it will be for you. I charge you with finding Sunburst and bringing him home. If you give me your promise that you will do as I command, I will let you fly from the White Mountain and bring your friend home. When you return, you will be banished for a year and a day.\" He waited, offering Nightstar the opportunity to fully understand his words.\n\n\"This is your only choice. If you wish to return after your banishment, you will be welcome. I think this will help you find what is missing inside, Nightstar the Black. If this is unacceptable to you, fly from here, right now. But look behind you as you leave, the moot of the White Mountain will be close behind and the justice we deliver will be much different from the terms I've offered.\"\n\n\"Your words hold great wisdom, moot leader,\" Nightstar said. \"You are correct, something is lost, but I'm not sure what it is. I think I can find it, deep inside, I feel it's just beyond my reach.\" Alduce was part of Nightstar, but Nightstar did not want to be part of Alduce. The dragon wanted to break free of his human side. It was his dragon soul he needed to find, the spirit that had departed the unhatched dragonet Alduce had stolen from its shell.\n\nBut it wasn't a dead ghost, it was something more, the dragon essence. It wasn't lost, he could feel it, below his human conscience, stronger now since Sunburst had given him the gift of his blood. If he could embrace it, join it with the physical body of Nightstar, he would be whole. Winterfang made him see this, he had shown him what he needed to seek. Sunburst provided the catalyst with three drops of his blood and that unexpected ingredient had awakened something new inside him.\n\n\"I will find Sunburst and bring him home, where he belongs. Perhaps it will help me find myself.\" He had a purpose now. His friend was in danger and he would repay the yellow dragon for all he had given, all he had sacrificed.\n\n\"I am pleased at your decision, Nightstar. I would expect nothing less from a White Mountain dragon. When you return we will discuss this further. I expect you to succeed, failure to do so will void our agreement and the terms for your survival will be renegotiated, by claw and fang. Do we have an understanding?\"\n\n\"We do. I accept your terms.\" Winterfang had given him purpose, the means to find redemption, a second chance. If he was successful he would get that chance. If he failed, the moot leader would show no mercy.\n\n\"Go now, say your farewells and fulfil your quest.\" Winterfang inclined his head. \"Our moot of two is ended.\" He stepped aside making space for Nightstar to depart the chamber. As he entered the tunnel, Winterfang's voice echoed from the stone walls. \"Fly high and fly free.\"\n\nNightstar had found something else, something other than a purpose. He now had direction and that direction was east."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\n\u2002Eggs and nests\n\n\u2002After conception, females can clutch as little as one egg or much as seven. The amount of eggs laid follows no pattern and is not determined by the size of the parents. The eggs will gestate in the female from three to six weeks, prior to laying. The female dragon becomes gravid, finding it difficult to fly with the extra bulk and weight and will prepare a nest while she is waiting to clutch.\n\n\u2002Note: Females can chose if they wish to produce a clutch after mating and are able to manage their level of fertility, giving them the ability to control colony population.\n\n\u2002Nests can range from a natural hollow in the ground or a dragon made depression, scraped out with their talons. Dragons have also been known to arrange a loose circle of rocks to keep the eggs together. There are no predators large or dangerous enough to be a threat to a clutch of unattended eggs, however females will remain instinctually protective. Few dragons will even build structures similar to a birds nest, located on flat areas of cliffs or mountains. These are more for privacy that any necessity to keep the eggs safe. The nest, and where it is located, must be strong and secure enough to support the weight of mother and hatchlings, resulting in a large structure. In an established colony, ancient nests are re-used and repaired, if available, rather than constructed from new.\n\n\u2002The laying process can be painful and difficult, resulting in physical exhaustion. After a successful clutching, the female will sit on her eggs and the male partner will attend her, often brining food until she recuperates. It is worth mentioning, that after the eggs have been laid, they need no further attention and generally hatch after another four weeks. The thickness of the shell and the magic contained within the embryos are enough to sustain the egg through the final weeks of development.\n\n\u2002Most hatchlings will emerge with black scales, however, sometimes they appear black, but are, in fact, a darker shade of their developing colour. As they mature, their scales will progressively take on the pigment of their adult colour."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "Amethyst waited for Nightstar in the meadow, the purple of her scales stood out against the green grass like a gem on satin pillow, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. He dropped from the sky, gliding towards her, wings fixed, then twisted sharply, spilling air from his leathery sails like a falling leaf. His skilful manoeuvre landing him close by her side, near enough to cover her with his wingspan.\n\n\"There's no need to impress me,\" Amethyst said. \"You know I think you are an expert flier. After all, you managed to catch me.\"\n\n\"I thank you for the compliment,\" Nightstar said. He wished he could share his secret with her, but suspected it would only cause her pain, as it had Sunburst. And he didn't want her to react like the yellow dragon, he didn't think he could stand the loss of her companionship.\n\n\"What was so important that old Winterfang asked you to stay?\"\n\n\"Please, Amethyst, I am not at liberty to discuss our conversation, I wish I could.\"\n\n\"Winterfang does what is best for the White Mountain. He is moot leader and I will respect his decisions, but I don't have to like them.\"\n\n\"My advice, for what it's worth, don't let him hear you calling him old.\"\n\nAmethyst snorted, small curls of smoke drifting from her nostrils, the sound somewhere between a chuckle and a laugh. \"Good advice,\" she said, \"I shall make sure and follow it. Now what can you tell me? When are you leaving on your search?\"\n\n\"I am to depart today, but I didn't want to leave without speaking with you.\" Nightstar wasn't comfortable saying goodbye to friends. He had messed up his final conversation with Sunburst and wanted to ensure he didn't repeat that with Amethyst. He was unsure of what exactly to say next, he was hardly an expert when it came to females of any species, and Alduce was no help either.\n\n\"That is good, Nightstar, I would have been disappointed if you left without seeking me out. I have grown to enjoy your company.\"\n\n\"It is something I shall miss too,\" he said. \"I wish things could be different, that we could go back to the night of the aurora.\" The memory of their time together at the lake, under magical green skies, brought him joy, but also great sadness at having to give it up.\n\n\"There will be time when you return, if that is what you want,\" her eyes met his and said more than words could.\n\n\"It is, but I need to find Sunburst first. I cannot return until I find him and he is safe.\"\n\n\"There is more to this than you are telling me,\" Amethyst said, \"but I understand if you can't talk about it. I have been part of the moot long enough to know Winterfang acts in the best interest of everyone. I will be here when you return.\"\n\n\"Even if it takes more than... a year?\" Nightstar didn't want to hear the answer, he was sure it would not be the one he wanted. \"There are things I must do, I have given my word to Winterfang and I owe it to Sunburst.\"\n\n\"If another black dragon comes along, I can't promise anything. Black is my favourite colour.\" She snorted again, trying to make light of her words, but Nightstar could sense she was hiding her emotions.\n\nBefore the metamorphosis, when he was Alduce, he could not have imagined the complexity of being a dragon. He had spent months at the White Mountain and learned that these creatures of legend were much more than anything he had ever read about. He wanted to record all he had learned, all he experienced, everything they had shown him, gather everything in his scale bound ledgers.\n\nHumans should know dragons were not as they believed, there was so much more to discover about these wonderful creatures. The blood from Sunburst pumped through his veins, opening his eyes to what was important to dragons, it made him feel strongly about telling their true story. He was now their voice, his discoveries would set the record straight. He knew the blood was effecting the dragon side of him, making Nightstar's essence stronger and he embraced the change. He welcomed it.\n\n\"I hope I am the only black you meet,\" he said, \"and if I'm not, I have already displayed for you. You know my intent.\"\n\n\"Return to me when you can then,\" she stepped in close and coiled her neck round his. \"I have chosen not to produce any eggs from our mating, this time. But perhaps when you are ready to settle... \" She left the sentence unfinished.\n\nNightstar wished he could stay, but the longer he spent with Amethyst, the more difficult it would be to leave.\n\n\"I can think of no place better to be. I would like to spend more time here. The White Mountains and the dragons who live here mean more to me than I can explain.\"\n\nHe had lost his family and home when he was a boy. He realised that he had found a place that filled the void, a place where he had made friends. A place he wished to be. As Nightstar, this was an easy choice to make. Alduce was quiet and offered no resistance, his awareness remained in the dragon's conscious mind, but he was more of an observer since Sunburst's blood repaired his damaged chest.\n\nA shadow passed overhead as the frost white moot leader glided by, his message clear to Nightstar.\n\n\"It is time,\" he told Amethyst as he unravelled his neck from hers.\n\n\"You are a loyal friend, Nightstar. Bring Sunburst home, find our lost brother and see him returned safely. I sense the path ahead will be difficult. The whole moot could feel Winterfang's concern.\"\n\n\"I will do what I can, what I must.\" He didn't feel like a loyal friend, he still felt like a deceiver. If he could find Sunburst and get him to return to Rose, then maybe he could find what was missing inside and repair what he had broken.\n\nHe stepped a small distance away from the purple dragon, the weight of separation heavy on his heart. Looking west, the afternoon sky was blue and cloudless. He launched himself into the air, the sun at his tail.\n\nHe didn't look behind as he left the White Mountains, he flew east towards grey skies that mirrored his mood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Redemption",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from Alduce's lost journals.\n\n\u2002The Larcrowe.\n\n\u2002The Larcrowe are a species of huge bird, standing over seven feet tall when fully grown, distantly related to the crow family. They closely resemble the physical attributes of the raven and are highly intelligent.\n\n\u2002Larcrowe have the ability to communicate and converse with man and believe in what they refer to as a Listener. A human who has the ability to understand the squawking and cawing of their own tongue and converse with them.\n\n\u2002Their feathers are black with a sheen of blues and greens when viewed in direct sunlight. They have sharp yellow beaks, black eyes, pale yellow legs and shiny black talons.\n\n\u2002I have encountered Larcrowe on a few rare occasions, coincidently on worlds that are also inhabited by dragons. I have not found any records, journals, books or scrolls that hold any mention of these creatures and find it strange, that after extensive research, no information about them exists.\n\n\u2002They appear to be friendly and curious and live in large communities, favouring the companionship of their species.\n\n\u2002Collective name: A Colony of Larcrowe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "Nightstar departed the White Mountain and flew east, maintaining an altitude that allowed him enough height to see a good distance in front, but not too high that he wasn't able to see the details of the landscape below. Scouring earth and air in search of a yellow dragon, his senses constantly alert, he forged on until the dimming light of twilight forced him to seek out somewhere to rest.\n\nHe spent the remainder of the first afternoon fruitlessly searching for any clue that would reveal if Sunburst had passed this way.\n\nHe set off at first light on the second day, stopping only to drink from a stream and snatch a scrawny beast that reminded him of a mountain goat. The meat from the beast wasn't unpleasant, but it was stringy and lean with an earthy taste. He longed for the succulent curly bucks of the south, tender and juicy, their flesh sweetened by the lush meadow grass they grazed on.\n\nThe curly bucks were Sunburst's favourite and Nightstar understood why. The smaller yellow dragon maintained that once you had eaten them, anything else was bland and tasteless. He now knew why Sunburst spent a lot of his time in the west and south of the White Mountains. The eastern lands were mostly featureless, hundreds of miles of rocky hills and scrub grass. There was life here, but nothing that would interest a dragon. Compared to the forest and lakes, the meadows and the mountains, the land he flew over was as dull and boring as his meal.\n\nWater glimmered on the horizon and Nightstar saw the eastern ocean for the first time. Even though the huge body of water was hazy and distant, as he flew closer, he could see that the coastline was unending, spanning far to the north and south. The ocean disappeared into the distant eastern horizon, nothing but waves and water. He continued east getting closer to where the land ended and the sea began. Surely if Sunburst had flown this way, there would be some sign of his passing.\n\nA murmuring sound drifted on the wind like voices from a distant crowd, reaching his sharp ears and peaking his interest. The sound was coming from south of his position and he deviated from his eastern heading to investigate. His flight so far had been uneventful and this was the first time he was presented with the opportunity to investigate anything other than hills and rocks.\n\nTilting his wings, Nightstar adjusted his direction, homing in on the noise, steadily increasing from a gentle murmur to a busy chattering. He flew low as he neared the location of the mysterious sound, following the undulations of the ground below until he reached the top of a steep incline. Cresting the ridge, the land beneath dropped away and a vast forest, populated with thousands of giant trees, stretched out across the valley below. The source of the noise was housed in the branches of the giant trees.\n\nThe Larcrowe.\n\nThe trees were occupied with the oversized crows, each adult easily the height of a man, black against the green foliage they perched amongst.\n\nInterest sparked inside the mind of Alduce as he looked out through Nightstar's eyes, curiosity had captured the mind of the scholar within, eager to learn more about these magnificent birds. The part of him that was Nightstar was more practical. In a colony of this size there was a good chance one of the birds may have noticed if a yellow dragon had passed this way.\n\nNightstar banked over the forest and the noise from below erupted as the Larcrowe spotted the dragon. Sounds of panic filled the air, chattering changed to a crescendo of squawking voices. The birds took to the air, startled by the sudden appearance of the black dragon above their roosting grounds, their beating wings adding to the din.\n\nAs they crowed and cawed, Nightstar was surprised to learn that he could pick out words amongst the increasing cacophony, Firedrake! Flee! Danger!\n\nAs he listened he recognised some of what the Larcrowe said. The Flaire artefact providing a partial translation of the Larcrowe squawking.\n\nHe knew when he was in his human form the pendant allowed him to understand and communicate in other tongues. It still worked when it was part of the transformed silver scales on Nightstar's chest, but just not as well. He was only understanding some of words the Larcrowe said and he needed to know more.\n\nThe Larcrowe filled the sky, large black wings clapped and flapped while their cries and screeches added to the thunderous sound. They circled around the flying dragon, voicing their indignation and fear, the message clear to Nightstar. His large bulk caught in the centre of a black whirlpool, hundreds, maybe thousands of Larcrowe, swirling around the dragon but keeping their distance, never getting too close.\n\nNightstar wanted to speak with these birds, they had fascinated him ever since he had encountered them on the plains.\n\nAlduce was equally intrigued, he had encountered a Larcrowe before and he wanted to know more about these creatures. He was a scholar and his compulsion to find out more about these unusually giant crows was strong.\n\nThe Larcrowe were intimidated by the large dragon in their midst, they darted in close, then swerved quickly out of reach. Alduce had seen this behaviour with normal sized crows when a bird of prey flew close to their roosting grounds. They would swoop and dive at the larger bird, attempting to draw it away from their home. Their larger cousins were attempting the same tactic, harrying him in the hope of steering him away from their colony.\n\nThese Larcrowe were obviously afraid of the dragon and he would need to adopt another tactic if he were to convince them otherwise. He closed his wings and dropped towards the ground, plummeting through the centre of the circling birds that surrounded him, aiming for a clear area in the forest. The Larcrowe followed him down, keeping a respectful distance. A huge black dragon trailed by a wake of oversized black crows.\n\nAlduce had an idea and Nightstar understood it and agreed, there was no debate, both man and dragon were decided on the next step they must take. He distanced himself from the Larcrowe and powered across the clearing, entering the giant forest, weaving between huge trunks and disappearing into the shade beneath the canopy of foliage.\n\nThis forest was different from the one Sunburst had led him through. The trees were enormous and the spaces between them were much wider and easier to navigate. He would have been able to compete with Sunburst through this forest as there was much more space for him to manoeuvre.\n\nLooking behind to make sure the Larcrowe weren't too close, he changed course, flying sharply to the left. He peered back through the tree trunks, checking to see his evasive tactics hadn't been seen. Below the leafy canopy the forest floor was shaded and dark, perfect camouflage for a black dragon.\n\nNightstar aimed himself for a wide space between two large trunks and spread his wings wide, pulling himself up short and stopping in the air. Leaves and twigs flew out in front of the black dragon as he came to a spectacular halt, sharp talons ploughing grooves in the earth as he landed. Twisting his long neck past the two concealing tree trunks, he glanced back the way he had come for any signs of pursuit, but for the moment, he was alone.\n\nAlduce reached for the magic that allowed him to hold the form of Nightstar. He was so used to being in dragon form that it took him no effort to remain that way now and he had to consciously choose to change back to a human. As the hold on the transformation spell slipped away and he willed himself to change, a wave of heat washed through him, burning from the inside. Nightstar's scales shimmered, each scale surrounded by white light as the magical metamorphosis took place. The black dragon shrank and changed shape, like melting ice, reducing until the man was all that remained.\n\nAlduce stepped from the giant grooves Nightstar's talons had left, naked except for the pendant he wore around his neck. The small silver coloured dragon was warm against his skin and tingled with the residue of sorcery from the transformation spell. Alduce could feel Nightstar's presence with him, the strength of the dragon within making his return to human form much more bearable than the first time. He rubbed his hand across the new skin on his chest, the damage from the lighting strike almost fully healed. The only sign of the wound was a circle of pink new skin where the charred black mess had been.\n\nThe dull ache that had throbbed in agony when he awoke in the cave, was gone. His fingers probed the new skin but no pain remained, just the annoying itch of healing tissue. The blood, warm and alive, Sunburst dripped into his wound, had saved his life and generated a magical healing. Alduce now believed that it was also helping him separate his thoughts from Nightstar's. Since his incident with the lightning he had a clearer understanding of where his persona and the dragon's met. No longer were they a mixed jumble of thoughts from both human and dragon. Now he was able to better separate the two conflicting entities contained in one consciousness. Why this had happened was a mystery to him, at present, but the scholar would not let this phenomenon pass him by without investigation. When the time was right. Whether it was the lightning or the dragon's blood, or a combination of the two, he didn't know. Research would need to wait until he returned to his laboratory.\n\nThe soft loam of the forest floor felt strange against his bare feet, just as walking on two legs in his true form took a few minutes to get used to.\n\nCaltus had once told him of a man who had lost a leg and come to his former master after the wound had healed, asking for help. The man told the sorcerer he could still feel the limb, painful and itching, even though it wasn't there. He wanted to know if Caltus could help with the phantom feeling. Alduce wasn't in pain, but as he walked, he could feel where his wings and tail should be, ghost limbs that were a just a memory and no longer physical anymore.\n\nHe shivered in the shade and shook off the feeling. As he stepped out into the clearing the sun warmed his thin human skin. Hundreds of Larcrowe perched in trees, flying in the air, and settled on the ground, turned their heads as he strolled into view. Their chatter increased as the naked man advanced to the centre of the clearing, steadier now and a little more confident on his two human legs. His dramatic entrance created a stir with the large birds, squawking and crowing to each other, no longer afraid, as they had been at Nightstar's presence. Now they were excited. And to his surprise, Alduce understood the word they spoke in awe.\n\nMan!\n\nThe Flaire artefact had the ability to translate words from languages he didn't speak and allowed him to converse in foreign tongues. Somehow, now he was able to translate the caws of the Larcrowe and understand their meaning. The silver dragon around his neck hadn't done this before and he had never been able to understand birds previously. He wondered if the transformation spell and the changes his body had undertaken, coupled with the blood from Sunburst, had contributed to this new ability. Another question he didn't have an answer to.\n\nMan. The voices repeated.\n\nThe Larcrowe, inhabitants of a continent populated only by dragons, were actually familiar with humans. They knew him for what he was and revered him. He believed he was in no danger from these strange and wonderful creatures. He could change back to Nightstar in an instant, should he desire to, but he knew that wouldn't be necessary. The chattering voices of so many huge birds, with larger voices than their smaller counterparts, was deafening. Alduce, used to being obeyed, held up his hand and the Larcrowe gradually quietened, watching intently, waiting for his next move.\n\nAlduce spoke and the power within the Flaire artefact shaped his voice into one the Larcrowe could understand.\n\nGreetings, he said, I mean you no harm. As the words left his mouth, he understood them, but to his ears, the sounds he made were the caws and crows of the birds around him.\n\nThe cacophony that answered him was one of surprise, as hundreds of Larcrowe voices, spoke a new word.\n\nListener! Listener! If birds could whisper, this is what they would sound like. They named him Listener, it sounded like a title, rather than a description of his ability to listen. There was more mystery to the Larcrowe than he knew.\n\nHe could understand them and they him. These birds were considerably more intelligent than he originally thought. Alduce wished he had time to spend with them, but he needed to find Sunburst and there was a sense of urgency connected to that feeling that he couldn't ignore.\n\nThe chattering of the Larcrowe subsided and from their midst, one of their flock approached. The bird stood taller than most of the others and carried itself with a proud, almost regal manner. The other birds deferred to it, pulling back and dipping their heads. A sea of black feathers parted creating a pathway through the crowd of gathered Larcrowe, making way for their leader.\n\nThe huge bird stopped before Alduce and cocked its head, a dark beady eye examined him, black and unfathomable. The sorcerer met the bird's gaze, trying to read its mood. Then, the Larcrowe squatted low and bowed its head to him and spoke.\n\nWelcome Listener, it cawed, holding its pose.\n\nI am honoured to meet you, Alduce crowed back in the bird's strange language, unsure of how one should address a huge crow.\n\nYou come from the forest where the black firedrake vanished, is it now safe? The Larcrowe asked, looking beyond Alduce and into the forest behind him.\n\nThe black dragon has gone, Alduce cawed. It will not bother you again.\n\nSafe! Safe! The flock behind their speaker murmured.\n\nYou have saved us from the drake, Listener. The colony is grateful.\n\nAlduce could use this to his advantage if the Larcrowe believed he had rescued them from the black dragon. He decided to play his hand while he held good cards.\n\nThis Listener is interested in these firedrakes, these dragons. I wish to know if you have seen more.\n\nThe bird cocked its head, eying him before it spoke.\n\nAnother passed before. A dra-gon the colour of the sun. Not the black of the Larcrowe or the drake the Listener chased away.\n\nSunburst! He had passed this way and the Larcrowe had seen him. Alduce was sure the yellow dragon would not have bothered the Larcrowe, he knew Sunburst thought them stupid and uninteresting. He needed to find out when they had spotted him and where he had gone.\n\nWhen did you see this sun coloured drake? He crowed.\n\nMany days have passed, but it has gone. We are safe. The leader of the Larcrowe said.\n\nMany days, it could only be four or five at most. Rather than push the Larcrowe about how long it had been he changed tact.\n\nWhere did this sun coloured drake go?\n\nIt flew over our forest, higher than the black drake. It did not come close, our scouts watched for danger. It flew out over the great water, out beyond our shores. We watched until it grew small and the morning sun rose to obscure it.\n\nSunburst had flown into the morning sun. East! Across the ocean. But to where? The Larcrowe usually wouldn't see dragons this far to the east. Sunburst had told him dragons didn't usually venture this way, there was nothing here for them. So where would he go?\n\nHad he flown out over the great eastern ocean for a reason? Why would he fly into the unknown without telling Rose where he was going? Alduce knew the only way to find out was to follow him.\n\nThis Listener is sure no more firedrakes will disturb you, he said.\n\nTipa thanks the Listener, the Larcrowe said, and the colony thank the Listener.\n\nTipa can call me Alduce. That is my name.\n\nThe Larcrowe repeated his name, the word sounded strange coming from a bird's beak. The flock joined in and Alduce heard his name like a chant as the birds spoke it.\n\nWhy does Al-duce visit the Larcrowe? Tipa asked.\n\nThe sorcerer thought about his answer, he was done lying and he wanted to be honest with these fantastic birds.\n\nI did not know that your colony was here and would like to learn more about the Larcrowe. Chatter rose from the flock and the Larcrowe were pleased with his words.\n\nThe Larcrowe were in awe of him, the title of Listener they bestowed upon him, he sensed, was one of great honour. These birds were a lot more than just giant crows. Sunburst had been wrong when he called them stupid and Alduce wished he could stay and learn more.\n\nI have urgent business that I must attend to, he said, but I would hope to return one day, if I am welcome.\n\nWelcome, the flock responded. Always welcome.\n\nEven though Alduce stood in the direct sunlight, he felt his skin prickle with gooseflesh. He was overwhelmed with the acceptance of the flock for what he was. He had tried so hard to be accepted by the White Mountain dragons, a human hiding behind the scales of a black dragon. Here, in the presence of the Larcrowe, he felt like a dragon, hiding beneath the skin of a man. This time though, he wasn't lying, he was a man. A man who knew it would be best not to tell the Larcrowe of the dragon within.\n\nI will return to the forest, Alduce announced, and when I am able, I will return to the colony and speak with Tipa again.\n\nTipa nodded to Alduce and backed away, joining the flock of Larcrowe gathered on the clearing floor. The sorcerer walked backed to the treeline and turned around, taking in the assembled colony of Larcrowe, a host of black eyes followed him as he returned to the forest. He raised one hand in final salute to these intelligent creatures. Tipa, head tilted back and beak pointing to the sky, cawed a single note. The colony responded as their leader had, open beaks lifted skyward and cawing, bidding an earie farewell to their visitor.\n\nAlduce walked back into the shadows beneath the trees, the hairs on his neck standing up as he withdrew from the Larcrowe host. He was pleased they hadn't seen him change from Nightstar to Alduce and he would like to keep it that way when he changed back. Only Sunburst knew his secret and he needed to protect it as best he could. If the Larcrowe had known, they may not have spoken with him or revealed to him where Sunburst had went. He now knew that Sunburst had flown east and Nightstar would follow him.\n\nOnce more Alduce would journey into the unknown, but this time, with Nightstar to help him, he was confident he would be better prepared for the unexpected when it undoubtedly arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "The sun moved west, slowly sinking in the evening sky. Pink tinged clouds darkened to red. The tranquil evening was illuminated by a flash of lightning as it streaked down from above the forest. The forked bolt penetrated the treetops, spearing downward through the leaves, singed twigs and the smell of ozone drifted on the breeze.\n\nA black shape burst forth from the canopy of foliage, a horned head followed by a long neck cleared the fragile leaves. Powerful wings propelling the body of the black dragon up and out of the forest, the treetops swaying in their downdraught. As Nightstar cleared the forest canopy, disturbed twigs and branches rattled and bounced from his body, raining down on the treetops below.\n\nLeaving the colony of the Larcrowe behind, the black dragon flew east in pursuit of his friend."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "Sunburst opened his eyes, the pain in his head severe, a sorcerous hangover hammering the inside of his skull in an attempt to break free. He studied his surroundings in the dim light, stone walls and iron bars suffused with human magic made up his prison. His legs and neck were shackled with huge bands of iron, attached to chains which were secured to metal rings, fixed into the solid rock floor. His cell was roughly twice his size, a deep hole cut into the rock with heavy iron bars blocking any exit. The rigid bars sank into the floor and disappeared into the rock above and a huge gate was fashioned into the metalwork.\n\nSunburst shook his head and instantly regretted it, the iron collar jerked sharply, the chain limiting his movement, reminding him of the pounding in his skull. He roared in anger and attempted to free himself, throwing his weight against the chains that held him captive, his aching head the least of his concerns. He fell just short of the iron bars, the chains pulling tight, hampering his effort. Even if he hadn't been tethered, he doubted it would have made any difference. And if he had managed to reach the bars he didn't think he would be able to break free in his weakened state.\n\nSunburst felt helpless for the first time in his life, the strength he usually possessed was gone.\n\nHuman magic ran through the metal of the bars and chains and Sunburst felt himself weaken as it drained his strength. He was a captive, held in a magical prison, powerless to escape. Not yet willing to concede defeat, he reached for his own dragon magic, hoping to counter the spells that held him in this depressing dungeon. There was nothing there, the magic, along with the strength he once possessed, had left him.\n\nHow had he ended up like this? After he found out the truth about Nightstar he'd thought things couldn't get any worse. His best friend had turned out to be something he wasn't. He'd shared his blood with a human and he couldn't shake the torment of his own inner conflict. His head hurt the more he thought about it. He left his home and family, unsure where to go or what to do, only to end up a helpless prisoner. He had been a fool, a stupid yellow dragon who had acted rashly and only had himself to blame. He needed to get away, he was confused and upset. Flying east on impulse, a stupid yellow's impulse, was another bad decision. Blinded by a turmoil of conflicting emotions, he had flown out over the sea to escape them, only to end up trapped once more. This time it was a cage of iron bars that held him. Freedom beyond his reach.\n\nA gate creaked, the sound coming from somewhere along the dark corridor outside his prison cell. He pushed his head forward against the cold metal collar, ignoring the irritating human magic and peered into the gloom. A faint light appeared at the end of the dark passageway accompanied by footsteps. The bobbing light grew brighter and the footsteps louder as a human figure strolled towards his cell. He held a tall wooden staff with a bright orb on top.\n\nWhite light radiated from the orb above the figure's head making it difficult to distinguish any features. His faceless enemy stopped and the light he carried revealed many cages similar to his own, lining the passageway. Most of them occupied by dragons!\n\nThe dark human shape approached the bars of the cage diagonally opposite Sunburst's and the light revealed a small green dragon. It did not look well. Not only was it small, it appeared frail and sick, a look of defeat in its dead eyes. It shrank back from view as the figure neared, chains rattling. The dark figure shrugged, removed something from his robes then bent down and marked the floor, scoring a white cross on the ground outside the cell. He rose and continued his approach until he stood directly outside Sunburst's cell.\n\nHe peered into the cell and studied the yellow dragon. Sunburst met the man's eyes and tried to bring him under his hypnotic spell, but his magic failed him. A wave of anger and frustration washed over him and he launched himself at the bars once more, knowing it was hopeless. The impact jarred his whole body, chains biting into his shackled limbs as he thrashed against his constraints.\n\nThe man never even flinched, standing just on the other side of the bars that separated them, his gaze unbroken as he glowered at Sunburst. The yellow dragon could feel himself weaken as he strained defiantly against the chains in an effort to break free, unwilling to stop trying even though he knew it was useless. He felt like a newly hatched dragonet, spent and exhausted after breaking out of the shell. He stopped his futile pushing, slumping onto the stone floor as much as the chains would allow. Hate burned in his stare, refusing to break eye contact with the man.\n\nShaking his head the man turned and walked away, the light fading with him as he went. Sunburst watched his back as he departed, the light from the staff reflecting in the eyes of the other imprisoned dragons as he passed their cages.\n\nWhen he escaped from this prison, this man would be held accountable, he was responsible for this dank dungeon, for all the dragons held captive here, and he would pay. In blood.\n\nThe gate groaned far along the passageway and then clanged shut with a depressing finality. He wished he had never met Nightstar, never found out about Alduce and had stayed at home with Rose. But he was too curious, he was a yellow dragon and it was in his nature, always sticking his snout where he shouldn't. This time it had landed him in more trouble than he could handle. His future looked bleak.\n\nWhy had this man taken him prisoner? Why were the sorry looking dragons in the other cells here? Would he end up like those pitiful creatures?\n\nHe closed his eyes and rested his head on his front legs, trying desperately to ignore the biting chains, and thought of Rose."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "Nightstar soared above the eastern ocean, his wings outstretched as he caught the warm thermals rising from the water's surface. He gorged himself on the scraggly goats after leaving the forest of the Larcrowe, taking as much sustenance as he could before embarking on his journey. He had flown for two days and could see no land behind him and nothing in front. The energy he used was minimal, gliding as much as possible to conserve his strength.\n\nWith no other distractions and only the ocean below to keep him company, he had more than enough time for contemplation. Nightstar's will was stronger than before and Alduce rarely influenced his decisions. Alduce was still there, part of everything Nightstar had become, but the dragon and the man were more at peace with each other now. It had taken some time for both entities to come to terms with their shared consciousness, but after the accident with the lightning strike and receiving Sunburst's blood, something had changed. Something both Nightstar and Alduce agreed was for the better.\n\nNow there was a clear understanding that without Alduce, Nightstar could not exist, but the dragon was no longer a cloak to be worn, he possessed a mind of his own. Subconsciously, Nightstar wouldn't do anything that would result in putting Alduce in danger. Alduce decided to stop fighting the dragon's mind and embrace the change, trusting the black dragon he'd created, as he would trust himself, as they were the same. Alduce felt the decisions Nightstar made were reflections of his own, he was both halves of the one mind and the choices he made, whether it be man or dragon, were for the best.\n\nHe was still a sorcerer and a scientist, but he was also a student, learning something new, learning to listen to Nightstar, allowing him the freedom to evolve.\n\nThere was still the conflict of two minds, but both Alduce and Nightstar had come to accept that this would always be, but there was room enough for both personalities, and, Alduce discovered, when it came to making decisions that impacted on dragons, it was best to let Nightstar's persona take the lead.\n\nAlduce wanted to run back to his laboratory, take the easy way out, but Nightstar had taught him that the easy option wasn't always the best one. Sunburst had been a true friend to him and it was wrong to abandon that friendship when things grew tough. Sunburst had shown him how to behave like a dragon, had taught him all about his culture and his home and he had repaid him with betrayal and lies.\n\nNightstar no longer blamed Alduce, it was what it was. It had happened and he regretted it. Simple dragon logic. He discovered that there was more to his human life than submerging himself in his studies and experiments. He could still have these things, they were still important to him, but friendship and acceptance had also become something he wanted. And now needed.\n\nSunburst had given him a taste of something new, something he had never experienced before, shown him there was something missing that he hadn't even realised he wanted. It had taken a yellow dragon to show him the empty space he once had in his life, then fill it full of a desire to live and enjoy it.\n\nAlduce was smart enough to understand this was what Winterfang meant when he said there was something missing, something lost that he needed to find. Sunburst's blood was helping him find a small part of what was missing, his dragon self. It was the unknown missing ingredient he didn't know he needed until now. It had shown him what he desired from his dragon life, and also his human one.\n\nIt wasn't only the fear of his secret being uncovered that made him feel empty inside, it was fear of living. He no longer needed to impress anyone, he had risen from the ashes and trauma of his past life, become a man, learned sorcery and excelled at it. But all he had to show for his labours was a lonely life in an empty laboratory. Nightstar had opened his eyes to a new world, new passions that invigorated his soul. Alduce would still be the man he had always been, but he believed now, with the help of Sunburst and Nightstar, he would be more than a sorcerer and a scientist, he would be able to be live his life as a man and understand how to enjoy it. The White Mountain dragons had shown him how. He would have Nightstar to guide him and show him how to employ these new attributes he had discovered. This would also help him become a better man.\n\nNightstar's thoughts returned to the present as movement in the waves below caught his keen dragon eye. The ocean had been peaceful and calm for the last two days, nothing but rolling waves, constant and unchanging. But now there was a new pattern disturbing the crests and troughs, a growing movement below the ocean's surface, breaking through the waves and disturbing the sunlight that reflected upon the water.\n\nNightstar descended from the high altitude he maintained, casually dropping from the sky until he was closer to the ocean's surface and the unusual activity. It was an unnecessary waste of his strength, but after two uneventful days of flying, anything that broke the monotony was a welcome distraction.\n\nHuge underwater creatures swam beneath the waves, and at first Nightstar thought they were whales. As he studied the creatures, he realised that their shape was not one of a whale, but more like a dragon without wings. Long graceful bodies with huge flippers instead of legs, wide powerful tails and long thick necks, raced through the water beneath him. The underwater leviathans surfaced, breaching the waves, giant dorsal ridges cut through the water, leaving wakes of white spindrift that sparkled in the sunlight.\n\nAlduce watched through Nightstar's eyes and believed these creatures to be distant relatives to the sea dragons, evolution changing their appearance and adapting them to the most efficient form for their environment. If creatures like these swam in the oceans of his own world, they would surely be named sea serpents by the sailors that navigated them.\n\nA streamlined head breached the waves, long trails of seawater ran from its sleek skin. The beast looked up with deep intelligent eyes at Nightstar. Two small nubs sat either side of the head, like worn down horns and behind them, gills flapped, opening and closing as the creature's neck rose higher out of the water. Smooth turquoise skin glistened in the sunlight, appearing blue then green, as the giant sea creature's body rose above the surface.\n\nIt opened its mouth and exposed a pink tongue surrounded by rows of small pointed teeth, then it produced a high pitched sound somewhere between squeaking and screaming. Nightstar was unable to fathom if this was a greeting or an attempt at communication. The Flaire artefact that made up his silver scales no help in translating this voice.\n\nHe responded to the sea creature with a trumpeting roar and was rewarded with more heads popping up from below the waves. Each creature emitted a sound, similar to the first, but each noise was a different pitch, some high, some low. He counted nine heads in total as they cut through the waves, taking turns to sound off, creating an eerie song that drifted across the ocean. A song only for the black dragon to hear. The strange singing continued for a few minutes, then just as quickly as they had appeared, one by one, the heads of the sea creatures disappeared below the waves, until only the original one remained. It tipped its head to the side once and Nightstar nodded his in return. The creature slowly descended back into the water, dorsal crest and head nubs the only thing breaking through the waves. It sped along for a few moments more, then vanished underneath the surface and Nightstar watched the graceful sea creatures as they disappeared into the ocean depths.\n\nAlduce would have to catalogue this in his journals when he returned to his laboratory, singing sea serpents were just one more wonderful occurrence witnessed through Nightstar's eyes.\n\nHe beat his wings, pushing upward and catching the warm currents of air rising from the ocean's surface. He climbed back into the sky, checking his position with the sun after the welcome distraction. He knew which direction he travelled, using his dragon sense instinctually like an internal compass. Trusting to this new ability, positive he flew due east, he wondered how far off the shores of the eastern continent lay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "Sunburst awoke again to the sound of the creaking gateway and observed the faint light as it crept down the passageway towards his cell. The dark figure that had visited him previously was missing from the group of humans that appeared out of the gloom. As they came closer, Sunburst counted five men, carrying lamps and burdened with an assortment of strange devices. The men stopped outside the cage of the small green dragon, examining the ground where the dark figure had made the mark. They offloaded their burdens and hung their lamps from the ceiling of the passageway, illuminating the area in front of the poorly green dragon's cage.\n\nOne of the men unlocked the cage and pulled open the heavy iron bars, standing aside as two of his companions stepped inside. They took hold of a circular device and heaved together, grunting as they rotated it. Chains rattled as the small green dragon hissed and was pulled back, away from the intruders, the chains tightening and pinning the defenceless beast tightly against the cave wall. The man that had unlocked the cage picked a long pole from the pile of equipment and stepped into the cell's doorway, raised the pole to his shoulder, pointing it at the helpless dragon.\n\nHe turned his head and looked at Sunburst, a wicked smile spreading over his lips, then he focused his attention on the green dragon within the cage.\n\nSunburst flinched as the deafening sound of thunder roared within the tunnel, a blinding flash of red flame leapt from the end of the pole. Smoke curled in the lamplight, the smell reaching his nostrils. The two men inside the cage released the circular device and stepped back into the passage. The confining chains rattled free and the device spun, the head of the green dragon slumped forward, its weight pulling it free to rest on the cell floor.\n\nA black hole at the base of the dragon's neck dripped blood onto the cold stone floor and dying eyes stared at Sunburst as its spirt departed and its life ended.\n\nPainful tears rolled down his yellow scales, unstoppable and filled with shame even though he could do nothing to help the condemned green. Sunburst was in no position to do anything but bear witness to the murder of one of his kind and it filled him with strong emotions of hate for these cruel humans. He pushed forward against his own chains, the metal collar tightened against his neck as he attempted to summon his fiery breath and send vengeful flames at the murderer who stood so close, yet so completely out of reach. Nothing came. The charm of incarceration and the human magic within his bonds prevented any attempt at breathing fire.\n\nFrustration and anger filled him as he opened his jaws and roared, he was thankful he still had his voice, but took little pleasure as the five men raised their hands and covered their ears. He might not be able to flame them, but his defiance was clear.\n\nThe man that had released the thunder walked slowly to the bars of Sunburst's cage and set a large key in the lock, all the time holding the yellow dragon's gaze. He showed no fear at meeting the stare, arrogant in his movements and confident the dragon was unable to do him harm. He must be aware that the confines of Sunburst's cell were not only physical, but also magically enhanced, inhibiting any attempt of attack.\n\nSharp words spilled from his cruel mouth, high pitched and harsh, and Sunburst didn't understand them, but the meaning they conveyed needed no translation. The man then turned his back on the yellow dragon, showing not only his earlier arrogance, but a contempt. An enemy of a dragon, ordinarily would never turn his back on his foe, but this man deliberately demonstrated that he didn't fear Sunburst in the slightest.\n\nThe yellow dragon pushed forward against the chains and roared again and was rewarded as the man jumped, the sound loud and unexpected behind his head. He left the cage and closed the gate, locking it behind him and walked back to his comrades without a backward glance. He spoke again and the four men laughed and looked in Sunburst's direction. He barked what could only be a command at the four subordinates and they scurried into action like busy rodents. They gathered their equipment and entered into the cage then proceeded to butcher the unfortunate green dragon.\n\nSunburst watched as the men systematically reduced the dragon to a pile of parts, cutting and dismembering the poor creature's body until nothing remained. Only blades enhanced by sorcery would be able to cut through the armour of a dragon. Limbs, scales, wings, claws and a lifeless head were stacked without any respect. The spilled blood was scraped up and gathered, nothing of the dragon wasted.\n\nIf the humans of the east treated dragons this way, the old stories must be true. Sunburst understood the men of this land were powerful enough to disable a dragon and its magic and could kill one without any remorse. No wonder his ancestors had taken flight and journeyed across the vast ocean in search of a new home. He was unaware he was keening quietly until another voice joined his, adding to the sad sound. The men continued with their grizzly task, oblivious to the sad lament of the dragon's death knell. More sorrow filled voices joined Sunburst's dirge, slowly at first, growing louder and with more intensity. As he peered from behind his bars, he saw the reflection of many dragon eyes, incarcerated in their own cells, imitating his own actions.\n\nHe wasn't alone in this terrible place, but after seeing more trapped souls than he wanted to, he wished he was."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "The morning sun appeared on the horizon, a red slither of light rising above the grey ocean, painting the distant sky a warm pink. Nightstar flew ever east using his instinct and the internal compass, confident in the knowledge his dragon sense, his perception, knew the way. It was nice to see the sunrise, knowing he flew unerringly in the right direction. This was his fifth sunrise since leaving the shores of the west, his wound was fully healed and he felt as strong as he ever had, confident he could travel as long as he needed to.\n\nAs the morning brightened, a dark shape was visible on the horizon. A small black stain on the otherwise unmarred grey of the constant ocean. As the sun climbed higher and turned from red to orange, then to bright yellow, the grey of the ocean gave way to blue and the black mark in the distance was easier to see.\n\nAfter five days of flying, gliding and flapping, flapping and gliding, following the same unending pattern, hope sprang forth and Nightstar's excitement grew. As he neared what could only be land, he longed to feel the ground beneath his claws, to rest his wings, to sleep soundly instead of the flying slumber he had adopted. As the dark shape on the ocean grew closer, he realised he'd discovered an island and was disappointed that it wasn't the eastern continent he searched for. But, it was an extremely large landmass and he would be able to land and take a well-earned rest. The distance to the island was a lot farther than he anticipated and the sun was almost at its zenith before green foliage replaced the waves beneath his wings.\n\nThe island was dominated by high mountain peaks at its centre, surrounded by densely populated forests and steep hillsides. The hills gave way to flatter lands, eventually becoming shores and beaches. Alduce concluded that the island had been birthed from a volcano rising from the ocean floor, the molten lava that had shaped the lofty peaks, now dormant. He would have liked to have witnessed that event as Nightstar, flying safely above the smoke, gases and newly formed rock, being present for the creation of a new land.\n\nGreen seas surrounded most of the island, the colour of the blue sky and the yellow sand changing the shallow waters from the normal blue-grey that the deeper ocean wore. The new colours were welcome to his eyes after days of the same unchanging hues.\n\nHe glided over treetops circling back towards a sandy bay, picking a wide stretch of golden sand to land on. As he descended, he spotted huge blunt nosed fish swimming in the shallows, their silver bodies easily seen in the clear water. Grumbling hunger pangs reminded Nightstar that it had been five days since he had eaten the stringy tasteless goats. The thought of fish for breakfast made him change direction and swoop back out over the ocean he had longed to be rid of.\n\nTalons opened wide and extended forward, Nightstar plunged into the sea and grasped a wriggling fish in each claw. Water ran from their silver scales as he plucked them from the safety of the ocean. The two captured fish unsuccessful as they writhed in an attempt to free themselves from the dragon's grip. Nightstar was amazed at how fat the fish were as he carried them towards the beach. The remainder of the shoal, scattered when the dragon had disturbed them, grouped back together now the danger was gone. The shadow of the dragon scudded over the calm waves of the bay, gliding over the sand beneath the water's surface until Nightstar dropped to the beach, dragon and shadow becoming one.\n\nHe folded his wings, sighing in exaggerated relief and tucked them to his sides, relaxing as the heat of the sun warmed his scales. He hadn't noticed the difference in temperature as he had flown and had become accustomed to the cooler heights and continuous breeze.\n\nHe tore into the first fish, the taste of sweet flesh, succulent and warm, exploded in his mouth as he gulped down his first food in five days. It was true that dragons could gorge on food and it would sustain them for weeks at a time, but the human part of him missed regular meals and delighted in his feast. After he devoured the second fish, Nightstar helped himself to seconds, then thirds. Dragons made excellent fishers and as he finished his meal, Nightstar shared a memory that Alduce recalled, another saying that Caltus favoured.\n\nGive a man a fish, he would eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he would eat every day.\n\nNightstar's forked tongue flicked between his teeth cleaning the remnants of his meal from his mouth. He licked his snout next and when he was satisfied that every last morsel of fish was gone, he curled up on the sand. He wondered if master Caltus would be able to teach a dragon how to fish, after he got over the shock of meeting one. His old master, or rather the master of a younger Alduce, would probably have tried. A small puff of smoke snorted from his nostrils as Nightstar laughed and Alduce understood and appreciated the dragon's humour. Nightstar had never known Caltus, but he knew how the old sorcerer behaved and he'd made a joke, based on how the old man would have reacted. Caltus would have attempted to teach a fish to fish and the irony would have been lost on his old mentor, but not on the dragon that shared his former pupil's mind.\n\nNow sated after the six large fish he had consumed, Nightstar wanted to sleep, but Alduce was eager to explore the temporary haven of the island. The dragon stretched out on the warm sand, drowsy with the heat and the meal, but also weary after five days flying. Sleep won and Nightstar closed his eyes and let himself drift peacefully into slumber. His last thoughts were of Caltus and of Sunburst and as dreams rose to fill his tired mind, he imagined the old man with a fishing rod, sitting on the shores of Sunburst's favourite lake, explaining the finer points of fishing to an enthusiastic yellow dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "Nightstar opened his eyes, the afternoon sun had lost its midday intensity as it travelled west towards the horizon. The black dragon felt refreshed after his sleep, his belly full and his wings rested. Flying such a long distance was possible for a dragon, but stopping to recuperate made it easier.\n\nNightstar was conscious he shouldn't delay his search for Sunburst unnecessarily, but he was intrigued to learn more about the island. He could spend a few hours exploring the green forests, the sandy shores, and mountainous crags and still depart in the darkness, as he could fly with or without light. He felt a growing urgency to find the yellow dragon, Winterfang had sensed he was in danger and Nightstar did not want to waste too much time.\n\nHe pushed upwards from his sandy beach and beat his wings, creating small sandstorms as he flapped. He banked out over the empty sea, the shoals of blunt nose fish no longer filled the bay. Lazily turning, he gained height and flew back over the beach, the marks of his time spent on the sand visible above the high tide line. Following the contours of the ground, he climbed, gaining height until he rose above the dense trees and was crossing the rocky slopes of the inland mountain peaks. Higher and higher he climbed until at last he was circling the crater mouth of the extinct volcano, the once deep depression had been shallowed by centuries of erosion.\n\nNightstar flew above the crater and saw he wasn't the first to have explored it. The volcanic sand that made up the crater floor had been disturbed and dark claw prints stood out against the sun bleached surface.\n\nNightstar dropped into the crater mouth and spiralled down, following the lip of the crater rim. He wanted to observe the disturbance before landing and adding his own claw marks to the existing ones. He circled the inside of the crater a few more times, taking a good look before landing, claw prints weren't the only trace the previous visitor had left behind.\n\nA half-eaten carcass, host now to buzzing insects, lay on the volcanic sand. Nightstar was reminded of the partially eaten curly buck Sunburst had left for the scavenging Larcrowe. The yellow dragon consumed his favourite parts of the beast, leaving the legs and head. The bloated remains of the animal, swarming with flies, a perfect match for Sunburst's left overs. Examining the claw marks in the sand and the depression where a smaller yellow dragon might have rested or slept, he was convinced his quarry had stopped here.\n\nNightstar was delighted at his find and eager now to continue his search, confident his friend had come this way and he was heading in the right direction. Having seen the evidence, he was sure that it could only have been Sunburst that had spent time in the volcano's crater. His enthusiasm was renewed. Days of flying over the eastern ocean with no land marks or traces of Sunburst's passing were difficult to accept. No longer did he doubt himself, no longer did he doubt his direction. He was Nightstar the Black, confident now he was closer to finding Sunburst, both physically and mentally.\n\nHe leapt from the sandy crater floor, disturbing a million angry insects from their fetid feast, the powerful downdraught of his wings dashing the black buzzing cloud in all directions. Beating his wings harder and faster, he cleared the rim of the crater and set his wings to glide down over the opposite mountainside, leaving the centre of the island and the dormant volcano behind. Gathering speed as he descended, he cleared the dense jungles and sandy beaches, leaving behind the shallow bays of the shoreline and replacing them with the cool blue depths of the ocean.\n\nA few hours later, with the sun sinking behind him, Nightstar travelled through the night sky. A vacuum of darkness surrounded the black dragon and the memory of the tropical island with its golden beaches and lush green forest felt like a distant dream.\n\nNightstar felt closer to his goal now and was confident he would find Sunburst and return him home to the White Mountains. With a renewed vigour, he looked to the horizon. The sunrise was still a long way off, but he looked forward to the new day with anticipation, sure that his long journey east was almost over."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "\"I am known as Sunburst,\" the yellow dragon addressed the dark, \"my yellow scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I burn across the sky like a celestial fire.\"\n\nSilence greeted his words, the other captive dragons shuffled in their cages, but none responded. If he were to escape this dungeon, he would need help and the only allies he could call on would be the other caged dragons that shared this dismal place with him.\n\n\"Are any of you able to speak?\" Sunburst asked.\n\n\"Yellow scales?\" A small voice asked from somewhere beyond his metal bars.\n\n\"There are no yellows left!\" A gruffer sounding voice scoffed. \"There is no sky to burn across down here. Be quiet. The Extractor will hear your empty rumblings and the less we see of him the better.\"\n\n\"Skin and scales! I'm stuck down here with Galvon's distant cousin,\" Sunburst said. \"I am yellow, as yellow as the sun. Who dares to dispute it?\" Silence once more filled the darkness. \"Tell me of the Extractor. Please. I've come a long way to end up stuck in this cell and I need some answers.\"\n\n\"Well, celestial Sunburst with the yellow scales, if you don't already know, you are a captive of the humans, held in an underground dungeon. Your blood will be drained from your body, extracted and used by humans to fuel their dark magic. When your blood grows weak from constant draining, when you tire and you are exhausted and useless to him, you'll end up like Elvor. Chopped into pieces and your magic will be extracted from your yellow scales, your skin, your wings, and your very bones. Nothing is wasted, the Extractor consumes it all.\"\n\nElvor must have been the unfortunate dragon Sunburst had witnessed being horribly dismembered. He was sure the Extractor was the evil human who had stood outside his bars taunting him with cruel words. He didn't understand the language, but the message was clear enough.\n\n\"The Extractor will pay for his crimes,\" Sunburst said. \"When I escape I will char his flesh, all he will extract will be his own ash!\" This human should be punished.\n\n\"Brave words,\" the gruff dragon replied. \"How is it you plan on escaping? You are chained by iron strengthened with human sorcery, it weakens the strongest of us, supressing our magic. It is impossible to fight back. Once you are taken, that's it. There is no escape.\"\n\n\"I'll think of something,\" Sunburst said, determined not to let the gruff voice dampen his fighting spirit. \"I'm not giving up.\"\n\n\"Brave words won't help you down here. We were all defiant when we were first captured, but after a while, the darkness and the draining wear you down. The Extractor may be cruel, but he is also cunning. He knows dragons and how to best them with sorcery and slow torture.\"\n\nSunburst put aside the notion of escape for the time being, that problem needed some more thought. For now this gruff dragon was talking to him. If he could find out more, it might help him come up with a plan.\n\n\"Will you tell me your name, cousin captive?\"\n\n\"You ask a lot of questions,\" the gruff voice said, then after a pause, it continued. \"I am Fentor the Green, of the forest, if you must know.\"\n\nSunburst was reminded of Nightstar and the questions he continually asked. He thought the black dragon asked many questions. It was strange that he now found himself in a similar role, looking for answers rather than providing them.\n\n\"I am pleased to make your acquaintance,\" Fentor added, \"though I wish it were not in this dungeon. I would like to look upon your yellow scales and see them shine in the sun. This dank hovel depresses me, it is no place for a dragon.\"\n\nA forest green, just like Galvon, no wonder he was reminded of the grumpy dragon from the White Mountain Moot.\n\n\"I am pleased, too, cousin Fentor, my line is also descended from forest dragons. We are well met.\" He would prefer if he could befriend these dragons, rather than upset them, as he often did with Galvon when he talked with him. Forest greens could be cranky and suspicious at the best of times.\n\n\"I'm Serth,\" the small voice piped up, \"I too would like to see your yellow scales, Sunburst.\"\n\n\"You don't have any yellow dragons here?\" Sunburst asked in an attempt to engage the timid female voice.\n\n\"Mostly greens,\" Serth said, her young voice more confident now.\n\n\"And a few reds and blues.\" Fentor added.\n\n\"Do you have any blacks?\" Sunburst asked.\n\n\"Blacks! Bah!\" Fentor grumbled. \"They are a myth, everyone knows that.\"\n\n\"I have a friend who's a black, with silver scales emblazoned on his chest,\" Sunburst needed to tell the dragons something to lift their spirits. \"He's larger than any dragon you've ever seen.\"\n\nHe wished Nightstar were here now, he would know what to do. He had left his home and travelled across the eastern ocean, too distressed to think, upset at the realisation his friend wasn't what he seemed. He had tried to forget Nightstar and Alduce, but he couldn't. It was strange, even after everything that had happened, he looked to Nightstar for answers.\n\nStuck here now, facing the same fate as poor Elvor, he began to question his decision. He was in a worse position than he had been when he left Nightstar. Was he wrong to let Alduce live? Being held captive and waiting to be tortured, his blood drained, with only death and dismemberment in his future, what he had given to Alduce didn't seem so bad now. The three drops of his blood he willingly gave to save the life of the sorcerer was a small thing compared to what the Extractor was doing. He was sure even Alduce would be appalled. Nightstar had lived as a dragon for months and he was as much a dragon as any other dragon Sunburst had known.\n\n\"Tell us about your friend,\" Serth asked. \"What is he called?\"\n\n\"And why is he not here with you?\" Fentor sneered. \"Myth I tell you, he's not here as he doesn't exist.\"\n\n\"Nightstar the Black is no myth. In some places dragons are believed to be myth by those who have never seen us, but we are real, we are all very real. Just because you haven't seen a black doesn't mean they are myth.\" Nightstar may be many other things, but these dragons didn't need to know that. \"When darkness fills the night sky, the star on his chest blazes silver, a beacon of hope in the blackest hour.\"\n\nSunburst remembered his first meeting with Nightstar and the joy of his friendship, before uncovering his terrible secret. He instantly liked the black dragon and enjoyed his company. Flying free with Nightstar was better that being a prisoner in these miserable dungeons. Even if he was part sorcerer.\n\n\"He is real,\" Sunburst said, almost to himself. He may also be a man, but the black dragon was real. He couldn't be anything else. He had flown and hunted with Nightstar, he was more than just a man in another shape and he had the spirit of a true dragon.\n\n\"I believe you,\" Serth said. \"I would like to have met your friend.\"\n\n\"I believe he would like to have met you too, all of you,\" Sunburst told them. It was true, Nightstar loved all dragons. He even liked Galvon!\n\n\"He should think himself lucky he wasn't stupid enough to get caught and end up down here with us. He wouldn't like that!\" Fentor said.\n\n\"He is one of the largest dragons you will ever meet, he wouldn't fit in these cages. And he is more powerful that you could know.\" Sunburst wasn't sure why he was defending Nightstar. He was still angry at his betrayal, but anger was a wasted emotion when you were waiting to die.\n\n\"Tell us more about Nightstar.\"\n\n\"Where do you come from?\"\n\n\"How did you get taken?\"\n\nNew voices spoke, sad and forlorn, sounding like faint reflections of once free dragons. Sunburst hoped the captives would forget their plight for a little while and he could lift their spirits. If he could get them talking perhaps he could uncover something that would help them all to escape.\n\nAnd so it began, one by one, dragons spoke their names in the darkness, twelve in total, introducing themselves to the newest inmate in the Extractor's prison. Sunburst could feel a difference in the atmosphere as each captured dragon spoke their name and expressed a wish to see his yellow scales and met the black dragon who was his friend. He provided his fellow captives with a respite from their inevitable doom as he told them where he had come from. He shared the story of his crossing of the eastern ocean. He told them how he had been captured, trapped in a sorcerous net he couldn't break free from.\n\nThe other dragons told of their own demise and shared their stories with Sunburst, slowly at first, then more confidently as Sunburst engaged them, realising that he was gently questioning, gathering information, as Nightstar had done with him.\n\nThey discussed the Great Exodus, the eastern dragons amazed as he told of them of his home and the lands to the west. They could hardly believe the land that lay beyond the vast ocean was free from humans.\n\nThe dragons that were left behind all those years ago, were smaller and weaker. The captives held in the dungeon of the Extractor were their descendants. If these survivors were all like poor Elvor, and his perception\u2014his dragon sense\u2014told him this was true, the years had been cruel to them. For five hundred years, the remaining dragons bred smaller and less powerful individuals, their colours less vibrant. Their magic had faded over time and even in his own weakened state, he could sense this.\n\nHe told them what they needed to hear, what they wanted to know. As he spoke, he wondered about his friendship with Nightstar, about the time they had spent together. The more he spoke about the black dragon the more he wondered what he could have done differently, if he had known what his future held.\n\nHe wasn't yet ready to admit that there was nothing he could do, even though things looked hopeless. He remembered his visions of Alduce and how, no matter what, the stubborn human never gave up. He would stay strong, not only for himself, but for the poor persecuted dragons that shared their fate with him.\n\nHe would wait, try and find out about the Extractor. He was larger and stronger than these eastern dragons. The Extractor hadn't faced a White Mountain dragon before.\n\nSunburst would show him he was a different breed from the victims he had previously picked on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "The eastern continent of Eusavus drifted by below Nightstar's wings. Finally crossing the ocean and arriving in the east, the vast sea replaced with dark countryside. It was still night and the morning's sunrise would herald the seventh day of travel for the black dragon.\n\nAs he flew, he scanned the land, occasionally spotting the isolated lights of human habitation. As the morning sun rose and daylight crept above the horizon, Nightstar identified small settlements and villages. He descended from his cruising altitude, conscious that as the morning sky grew lighter, he would be easily seen from below. The structures he observed so far were similar to rural residences from his homeland; farms and hamlets devoid of any signs of life this early in the day.\n\nThis was a new land and he wasn't familiar with the people who inhabited it, so he thought it best to remain hidden from the population until he learned more. He imagined that if dragons departed these shores over five hundred years ago, he would stand out and his appearance would be highly unusual. Something he wished to avoid, especially as the circumstances leading up the Great Exodus were less than favourable for dragon kind.\n\nIn the distance a large city spread out across the land, as good a place as any to seek answers, but not as a dragon. Nightstar changed direction, veering away from the man made place, circling the countryside and using the forests and hills as a natural shield, mindful that even though it was early, if he wasn't careful, he may attract unwanted attention.\n\nSpotting a remote farmstead, he looked for somewhere to land, far enough from the ramshackle buildings to stay hidden. Silently gliding until he found a sheltered spot behind a small copse, he dropped quickly to the ground, closing his wings and remaining alert for any signs of alarm. None came.\n\nNightstar withdrew, consciously letting the dragon form slip. Alduce had become comfortable holding the transformation spell. Remaining as Nightstar was effortless to him now. Only when he wanted to change back, did he need to think about it.\n\nThe awareness of Alduce came forward as the human part of his mind became more prevalent. The black dragon's body shimmered, soft white light surrounding each scale as he shrank, reducing his dragon's body and changing the black scales to pink skin, leaving a naked man where the giant dragon had stood.\n\nAlduce shivered in the cool morning air, his flesh raised and the small hairs of his human skin standing on end. It was a strange feeling after being almost impervious to the elements and he swayed slightly, finding his balance on two legs. Changing from Nightstar back to Alduce wasn't as painful anymore and the sense of disorientation was shorter. Alduce could still feel the ghost limbs of wings and tail, but that faded as he regressed back into his human body.\n\nNightstar was buried deep in his subconscious, but the dragon mind was still there, reachable and real. Rubbing hands up and down his arms vigorously to heat them, Alduce started walking in the direction of the old farm building that was close to his landing site. The ground was hard and small stones and sharp twigs dug into his bare feet. Human feet\u2014no longer protected by the tough hide and talons of dragon claws.\n\nRealisation of just how frail human beings really were, more obvious to the sorcerer now, when he compared his human body to the armour and strength of a dragon.\n\nAlduce didn't regret his human form, it was his natural state and there were advantages to being a man too. The dexterity of his fingers was a pleasure to him. He wiggled them unconsciously, bending and clenching the amazing digits. Such a normal action, but wonderful too. It was all down to perspective and if he could maintain the correct mind set when he was in either manifestation, he would be fine.\n\nAs he walked, there was less turmoil in his mind and the conflict between himself and Nightstar was now more tolerable. Gradually he was learning to accept his other persona. The worry he felt about Nightstar taking over his identity was replaced with a more comfortable relationship. The change in his physiology, blended with magic, had settled, stabilising as his body and mind adapted to the massive strain he had inflicted upon himself. Another saying Caltus often used came to mind.\n\nWhat doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.\n\nAlduce hadn't known what to expect when he performed his magic on the lonely hilltop all those months ago. Science and sorcery were never without risk, and the greater that risk, the greater the reward. He could feel the dragon in his blood when he reached for it, knew he could easily call on Nightstar and slide into his mind and his shape. Even the pain of transformation from man to dragon was less of a concern. His achievement with the original spell, while ground-breaking in his field, had lacked one key ingredient, the missing part that made the shape changing perfect.\n\nSunburst's living blood.\n\nThis was what made his transformation complete. The live dragon blood was potent beyond everything he knew. Not only had it saved him from the wound the lightning inflicted, it was the catalyst that he needed to find balance and sanity between his two personas.\n\nIf events hadn't transpired in this way, Alduce wasn't sure the long term results of his transformation would be as successful.\n\nHe needed to find Sunburst, the feeling of danger for his yellow friend was stronger than ever. Winterfang and the pearl had both sensed something was wrong. Nightstar knew it instinctively, his perception was clear. And as a result of the dichotomy between the dragon and the sorcerer, Alduce could feel it too. He couldn't quite understand how. He just knew.\n\nHe had been ready to leave this world and return to his own, but now he knew Nightstar was right, he could never abandon Sunburst. Even as Alduce, he was willing to stay and find him. Nightstar had shown him the meaning of true friendship and both man and dragon needed to make things right, as between them, they had ultimately been the cause of Sunburst's troubles. But first, he needed to find the yellow dragon and he already had the beginnings of an idea.\n\nAlduce wished he was able to carry clothes with him when he was Nightstar, changing back to human form and being naked was fine when you had access to your clothing. Another disadvantage of being a man.\n\nCursing the cold and shivering, he gripped the small silver dragon that hung around his neck, drawing warmth from the metal, letting it heat his body. Hopefully he would find something to wear at the nearby farmstead, which for the moment, was his priority. If he could clothe himself and depart undetected, all the better.\n\nIt didn't matter where you were, what world you walked upon, a naked man wearing only a valuable necklace would stand out. Alduce needed to blend in. Once he tackled the problem of his nudity, he would be ready to find Sunburst. He approached the outer buildings of the run down farm, the scholar already thinking about a plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 75",
                "text": "The Extractor drove the sharp wedged blade under one of the scales on Sunburst's belly. Cold metal forced its way into his armour, painful and foreign, burning with human magic. The hammer rang in the confines of the underground dungeon as it struck the head of the wedge repeatedly. With each heavy blow, the wedge prised open a gap, pushing the protective yellow scale away from the skin underneath.\n\nSunburst flinched each time the Extractor swung the hammer. Unable to resist as chains pulled his body back against the stone wall. The iron links and human magic held him firmly in place, allowing the Extractor and his men to perform their horrific deed unhampered. Sunburst coughed attempting to call forth his dragon flame, gagging loudly instead of releasing the fire he so desperately wished for. The magical bonds restraining his ability to do anything other than endure the invasive attack.\n\nWith a final blow, the metal wedge broke through the natural seal, separating the scale from the others, bending it at an angle and exposing the pale yellow flesh it protected. One of the Extractors men forced another piece of metal underneath, holding the scale away from Sunburst's body and preventing him from closing it back in place. The Extractor stood back, tossing the hammer out of the cell, where it landed on the stone floor with a clatter. He reached up and slapped Sunburst's side affectionately, opening his mouth, harsh unintelligible words spilled out. His companions laughed, a crude guttural noise that offended his ears, the vile humans finding humour at his expense.\n\nThe Extractor rummaged in a large bag of equipment sitting on the floor and removed a wicked looking device. A long tapered needle protruded from one end, sharp claws surrounding its base. A thick tube exited from the base, with levers fixed to the metal encasing it.\n\nThe Extractor checked the device, thumbing the tip as he tested its edge under the lamplight. When he was satisfied with his examination, he placed one hand on Sunburst's side, next to the open scale and drew back the device with the other.\n\nSunburst followed his actions, angling his head to see what his captors where doing. Straining on already tightened chains, the metal collar bit into his neck, the human magic subduing him. Without warning the Extractors arm lanced forward and the needle point of the device drove under the open scale and into the yellow skin.\n\nPain exploded through his body as cold metal suffused with foul human magic punctured his unprotected flesh. He threw back his head as far as his constraints would allow and roared. The sharp needle burrowed deep into his flesh, white hot pain causing dizziness and nausea. The human magic of the Extractor sapped his strength, draining his life-force and added to the agony. Low keening drifted from the surrounding cells as the other imprisoned dragons sympathised with their fellow captive's torture.\n\nSunburst was barely conscious, the agony almost too much to endure. The Extractor and his men scrabbled around the cell, clamping the device in place and attaching a long hose to the open end and rolling an open barrel to catch the flowing life blood spurting from the open end. Steam rose from the inside of the barrel as Sunburst's blood gushed from the open hose. The speed and efficiency of the well-practiced procedure ensured that not one single drop of the precious liquid escaped.\n\nThe men laughed and hopped around like insects on rotting flesh, pleased at their success. Sunburst's consciousness drifted as the pain from the restraining magic washed through his body. He hung limply in the chains as they supported his weight, weakness draining his spirit, physically beaten and unable to resist. His anger was all that kept him awake, meeting the eyes of the Extractor, his hateful stare conveyed his defiance. Sunburst forced his eyes to remain open and waited for what felt like hours as the blood drained from his body and into the barrel.\n\nWhen the men had finished stealing his blood, the Extractor removed the needle, sliding it painfully from his skin, taking care not to lose any precious drops. The men sealed the barrel and removed it from the cell and the Extractor followed them out, their harsh chatter echoing along the passageway.\n\nThe gate slammed shut, iron bars clanging into place and the Extractor released the mechanism that pinned Sunburst to the stone wall. Chains slackened and Sunburst slumped to the floor in a heap, exhausted and weak. His belly throbbed and his head swam. Before he finally surrendered to the unconsciousness that swallowed him, he wished, not for the first time, that he had never left the White Mountains and crossed the eastern ocean.\n\nThese shores offered nothing the yellow dragon wanted. He longed for the freedom of the skies and to fly high and fly free."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "The old man wandered through the city gates, his back bent, keeping close to the wagon he followed. If he appeared to be travelling with the wagon, the city watch wouldn't give him a second look and he didn't want to be stopped and questioned about his business in the city. Legitimate merchants and farmers were welcome in towns and cities, but ragged beggars would be chased off. There were enough homeless in any large town without adding any more to their number.\n\nWalking with his head down, the old man avoided eye contact. He wore a grey threadbare blanket wrapped over his shoulders, a functional work shirt and a pair of homespun trousers. A small shapeless hat, perched atop his head, completing the disguise. He appeared as a work weary farmhand accompanying his employer, and his produce filled wagon, to market.\n\nThe city watch paid him no mind and once he passed under the gateway and entered the city proper, he straightened his back and detached himself from the wagon. He no longer appeared old as he strode along the main thoroughfare, walking with the confidence of someone who belonged, even though he looked like a beggar. He clasped the blanket around his throat, not because it was cold, but because he didn't want the dragon pendant he wore around his neck to be seen. It was an extremely fine piece of workmanship and not something a ragged beggar would usually own. An unseen knife from the shadows would relieve him of his life and his valuable pendant if he didn't take care and keep it out of plain sight.\n\nAfter walking all morning Alduce chose to enter the city using a stealthy approach. A huge black dragon soaring through the skies would have attracted too much attention. His legs weren't use to the physical exercise as he had relied on his wings over the last few months. However, he enjoyed his walk, slow as it was, meeting strangers on the road as he neared the city known as Hermanton. Questioning the unsuspecting travellers he encountered, he enticed snippets of information from each one, piecing together as much as he could about this continent and its inhabitants.\n\nDragons were hunted and captured here, prized for their magic. There were regiments of soldiers trained for the task and there was a certain prestige attached to the hunt. They were armed with sorcerous weapons that could weaken a dragon and disable its natural magical defences. Alduce knew now why the Great Exodus was so important. This powerful race, strong in body and magic, had hunted dragons to near extinction.\n\nHe followed the main road into the heart of the city, careful to remain unobtrusive, favouring the adjacent streets and parallel avenues when possible. As he made his way deeper into human territory, he was surprised to feel like an outsider. His life over the past few years had been that of a recluse, hidden away in his laboratory, studying, learning and experimenting, happy in his solitude. After spending time at the White Mountain, he could appreciate the benefits of community. The dragons had welcomed him and shown him what it meant to be a part of their world.\n\nMaybe it was because this was a foreign city and he was a stranger that his experience felt more alien than human. He didn't know these people, although from what he learned from the ones he had spoken with, he wasn't sure he wanted to. When he returned to his own world, he would spend some time getting to know his own species, visit his acquaintances in the city of Learning. But first he would need to record his experiences in the dragon bound journals, always a scholar first, as Caltus said.\n\nOn the periphery of the market square, the poor gathered, seeking charity from the rich merchants and the townspeople who came to buy and trade. Ragged dirty people, dressed as he was, staked out their place along the wall surrounding the market. Crude shelters and piles of rags populated by the dregs of the city, the poor and homeless, the unworthy, criminals and beggars.\n\nAlduce joined them, sliding his back down the wall into the space between an old woman and a boy with one leg. Both had their begging bowls sitting in front of them, a few meagre coins in each. They eyed him suspiciously as he sat down and removed his hat, turning it upside down and dropping it on the ground in direct competition with their own source of income.\n\nA passing woman, dressed in expensive clothes dropped four small coins into Alduce's empty hat. He touched his forehead in deference to his betters and mumbled thanks, playing the role of a homeless bedraggled beggar to perfection. The woman walked on and the boy and old woman to either side glowered at him.\n\nHe reached into his hat scooping up two of the four small coins and tossed one into each of the beggar's bowls to his left and right, gaining a nod from the old woman and a suspicious look from the one legged boy. The old woman hesitantly reached her hand towards to the two remaining coins in his hat and waited, meeting his eyes. Alduce nodded and she deftly lifted the two remaining coins and tucked them under his own blanket, leaving his hat empty.\n\nLeaning back on the wall, Alduce listened to the world around him, eavesdropping snippets of conversations from the passers-by, learning all he could about Hermanton. Over the next few hours, he sat and pretended to be one of the invisible people who lived on the street, relying on the generosity of others to survive. Always listening, always learning. Each time he collected enough coins in his hat, he followed the old woman's lead. He would keep a few for himself and pass one to either side, one to the woman and one to the boy.\n\nThey kept their own bowls almost empty, hiding away the extra coins Alduce passed them. Human nature was something he had studied and being a scholar he was eager to learn how people acted. If he kept his own hat free from coins, while the beggars to either side of him had a few, the charitable donors were more likely to drop their offerings in his empty hat, rather than add to the beggars who had already received something.\n\nHis reaction from the woman and the boy changed as he kept them sweet, sharing his growing wealth. They may be ragged and down on their luck, but they weren't stupid. They worked together as a team, making sure the extra coins they received were hidden away safely, keeping the amount displayed in their begging bowls the same, a few paltry coins in each. If you were to survive on the street, you needed to adapt and Alduce was a quick study.\n\nWhen he first joined them, he was as welcome as a fox in a henhouse, encroaching on their turf, taking potential earnings from their pockets. Now, adding extra coins to their daily income, the old woman treated him to toothless smiles and even the boy grudgingly nodded to him each time he received a bonus coin. Alduce believed they both realised their new arrangement was a joint effort, they wouldn't get as many coins if they didn't all play their part and keep their bowls as they were.\n\nAfter ensuring that his new companions were well looked after, building a little trust, he started to engage them in conversation, slowly learning as much about Hermanton as he could. The information he received wasn't what he hoped for. Where to find a reasonably sheltered place to sleep, what inn keepers would pass out stale food, things that would be helpful for someone like his companions, but not the information he was looking for.\n\nThe jingle of coins alerted him to a new donation and he caught the last part of the conversation from the man who had provided it as he departed.\n\n\"...biggest one I ever saw, and yellow! I thought all the yellow dragons were gone.\"\n\nAlduce sat up at word of the yellow dragon, straining to hear what else the stranger said, his patience eventually paying off.\n\n\"Saw it too,\" the old woman said. She spoke for the first time, noticing his interest in the conversation. Reaching into his hat, Alduce fished out the coins the man deposited. He flipped a single one to the boy and turned back to the old woman. Adding a few more coins from the pile stashed under his ragged blanket, he held his hand out, three coins flat on his palm.\n\n\"Tell me about the yellow dragon, madam,\" he prompted.\n\nShe snatched for the offered coins and Alduce drew his hand back out of reach.\n\n\"Madam!\" The old woman cackled with a toothless laugh. \"I seen 'em bring it in, netted and chained, massive it was, biggest ever, I'd wager.\" Alduce dropped the coins into her hand and they disappeared with the skill of a conjuror.\n\n\"When was this?\"\n\n\"Four or five days ago, maybe a little more, week at most.\" the boy added, keen to earn more coins. \"I seen it too! Passed right by old Aggie and me. Trussed up like a hog, it was!\" He held out his hand and Alduce took a few more coins from his pile and passed them to the boy.\n\n\"Do you know where the dragon is now?\" Alduce asked.\n\n\"Where he takes them all. The Sanguinorium.\" The boy answered, as if stating the obvious.\n\n\"Who's he?\"\n\n\"The Extractor of course, the most powerful sorcerer and most feared dragon hunter in history, that's who,\" the old woman said.\n\n\"And how would one find this Extractor do you know? And where would you find the Sanguinorium?\"\n\nThe boy and the old woman looked up, beyond the canvas roofs of the market stalls and Alduce followed their gaze. A large building resembling a palace dominated the city skyline.\n\n\"There,\" the boy pointed. \"There's where you'd find them both. But the likes of us aren't welcome up there.\"\n\nFor the next hour Alduce quizzed his comrades about the Extractor and the Sanguinorium. He found out everything he could about when Sunburst arrived and how he had been captured. The boy and the woman liked to gossip, especially as their benevolent acquaintance made it worth their while.\n\nWhen he had gleaned all he could, Alduce thanked them both stood up and pocketed what was left in his hat, then placed it back on his head. He had accumulated enough money to get a meal and a beer. Where better than a local tavern to buy something to eat, sit and nurse a tankard or two and listen to the local gossip. Where alcohol was involved, people were more likely to have loose tongues.\n\nPerforming a small bow to his fellow beggars, the one legged boy touched his hand to his forehead and smiled, patting his pockets. \"Best day I've had in months.\"\n\nThe old woman grinned, nodding her agreement and gave him an unexpected wink. He winked back.\n\nAlduce headed in the direction of the large palace known as the Sanguinorium, in search of a tavern or inn. He would gather some more information and when he learned as much as he could, he would look for a way inside. The stories the beggars told him about dragons and what happened to them after the Extractor took them, filled him with dread.\n\nIf Sunburst had been taken there, he needed to find a way in before it was too late."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "Sunburst opened tired eyes, helpless to resist the ministrations of the Extractor and his subordinates. He felt the blood drain from his body, weakening his mind and his spirit. He floated, semi-conscious as the parasites stole his life, drop by drop.\n\nFentor had been right, there was nothing he could do to escape the dungeon, and the longer he was held captive, the harder it was to resist. The other dragons were left alone while the Extractor focused solely on his blood. Being larger and stronger, his blood was of higher value to the men that coveted it. More potent than that of his new friends. As a result, Fentor, Serth and the other caged dragons were given a respite from the draining, but Sunburst suspected this would only be temporary. When the Extractor had used him up, just as he had with poor Elvor, he would continue with his cruel torture of the smaller and weaker dragons.\n\nThey all received food and water, dead animals, functional but far from appetising. The Extractor would not allow his assets to die from thirst or starvation. The longer they were kept alive, the longer they could produce live blood. As a result of being left alone the other dragons had recovered some of their strength, engaging him in conversation in an attempt to keep up his morale. They spoke about what they would do to the Extractor if they ever escaped, but Sunburst admitted to himself that their fate would be the same as his. Draining and dismemberment.\n\nHe had arrived in the dungeon, bringing with him hope, determined to help these weak pathetic prisoners who had resigned themselves to their fate. Now it was he who had given up and the dragons of the eastern shores, smaller and weaker than himself, had strengthened their own resolve.\n\nThe Extractor ushered his men from Sunburst's cell, removing the contraption from under his violated scale. He leaned his hand on the yellow dragon's side, looking into his eyes. Sunburst glowered back, the hate that had once shown in his eyes replaced with defeat. The Extractor was taunting him, standing close, touching him without fear, unafraid he was inside the reach of the chains, confident the yellow dragon was beaten and unable to react.\n\nSunburst focused, willing the floating sensation to pass just enough for him to bite his tormentor's head off. It would probably taste worse than the fetid remains of the meat he was fed, but it would be sweeter that the tastiest curly buck as he crushed the man's skull between his jaws. He lunged forward, jaws wide, attempting to sink his teeth into his foul tormentor's head, only to fall short as he crashed to the floor, pain exploding inside his head.\n\nThe Extractor swung his leg, his booted foot connecting with his snout, delivering another shock to his skull. His vision swam and his eyes rolled. He felt so weak. He could easily close his eyes and drift away, embracing death and escaping this horrible place for ever. His vision slowly cleared and when his eyes focused, he was being observed by the Extractor, who squatted in front of him. He patted Sunburst's head and the cell filled with his disgusting laughter.\n\nPowerful hatred flared anew and Sunburst's thoughts of death vanished, no longer wishing to die. This man, this butcher of dragons, defiler of all that was good, did not deserve to live. As long as one drop of blood remained in his body, Sunburst would resist, he would fight back in any way he could. He met the Extractor's gaze, his sight clearer than before, his defiance rekindled.\n\nThe Extractor stood and departed the cell, slamming the gate closed, the clanging jarred inside Sunburst's already fragile head. Resistance was the only victory he could reach for, small as it was, he held on to it and fantasised about grinding the Extractor's bones between his teeth. As he slid into blackness, he cursed his bad luck and his last waking thoughts returned to how he had been captured."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "Sunburst flew across the forests of the eastern continent, feasting his eyes on the colours below, happy to have finally crossed the vast ocean. He travelled inland, exploring the terrain, searching for food and a place to rest. Fat animals, hooved and horned, roamed the open lands, areas with artificial boundaries of straight lines that didn't occur in nature. Plucking a beast from the scattering herd, the animals bleated and brayed in panic as they fled from the winged menace.\n\nAs he dined on his prey, men appeared and he sensed a strong human magic from them. He left his half eaten meal and climbed into the air, circling the area and watching the small men on the ground, scrabbling frantically and making more noise than the panicked beasts.\n\nThey launched magical blasts from long staffs and he evaded them, dodging and swerving as they streaked by, feeling heat on his scales and the power of the magic they contained. He climbed higher, hoping to move far enough away from the potential danger, aware that if the bolts of magic were to hit him, he would be in trouble.\n\nImages of the storm and the lightning striking Nightstar flashed through his mind, the disaster that had befallen the black dragon and the aftermath that followed. Harsh reminders of why he had fled from the west. He wouldn't become a human if the magical attacks struck him, but they could cause him to fall, as Alduce had. There would be no kindly yellow dragon to rescue his falling body from the hard ground and a dead drop mid-flight was not something he wanted to experience.\n\nUndulating and swerving, he continued east, away from the men and their magic. He should have followed the coast and found somewhere to rest, still tired from the long crossing. If he had been smarter and taken some time to recuperate he would have been ready for the next attack when it came.\n\nBolts of blue shot up from the ground as he skimmed over the tree tops, flitting and weaving until one magical bolt glanced his wingtip. Paralyzing pain lanced along the entire length of his wing, a combination of a freezing and burning at the same time. It was all he could do to stay in the sky, stretching out his wing as agony wracked the appendage, fearful if he didn't hold it there, he would plummet to the ground. It was impossible to flap the disabled wing, it remained stiff and stubborn and wouldn't do as he wanted.\n\nGliding was his only option, holding the wing straight, he tipped his body weight forward and angled away from his attackers, knowing that if he flapped the wing that wasn't frozen, he would spin in a circle, presenting an easy target. He had two choices. Land now while he had some control or risk the slow gliding and attempt to escape. If he chose the latter, relying only on blind luck to avoid another strike, and was hit again, he would crash into the ground uncontrolled.\n\nDiving towards the ground was the better of the two options and if he landed quickly, surprising his attackers, he might have a chance to fight back. Tipping his head forward and shifting his body weight, he dropped like a stone. The ground rushed up to meet him as he braced his talons, grabbing at the soft soil, claws ploughing dark furrows as he slowed to a jarring halt.\n\nHis frozen wing trailed along the ground after him, adding to the uncontrolled landing and acted like an anchor. Dirt and dust exploded and debris filled the air as he tumbled snout over tail, grinding to a stop.\n\nDazed and confused, he righted himself, his trailing wing refusing to behave as it should. Before he could shake the dirt from his scales, men appeared, some on foot, others riding large four legged beasts that looked and smelled appetising. Only a yellow could think of his stomach at a time like this! Cursing his nature, anger and frustration overwhelmed him as he darted his neck forward to the nearest human and missed, the small annoying enemy dodged quickly away from his snapping jaws. He felt a jolt of pain as a bolt of magic hit from behind. Pivoting round, he whipped his tail with all the force he could muster, the bladed appendage, unique to yellow dragons, clove into his attacker like a giant axe, severing him in half. But it was already too late, the attack sapped his strength, weaking him.\n\nMen, fearless and fast, danced round his disabled body, jabbing long spears that stung with magic as they made contact with his scales. His attackers circled, striking from all directions, shouting and screaming, arms waving. He turned to face one attacker and was struck from behind. As fast as he spun to defend himself, another tiny invader launched an attack from a new angle.\n\nThe more they struck, the weaker he became, their long staffs depleting his strength. Sunburst's anger grew and a rumbling in his throat sounded as he called forth his flame. He would show these men that a White Mountain yellow was not to be trifled with. Extending his neck and opening his jaws, dragon fire spewed from his mouth, hot and deathly satisfying. A semi-circle of flame blasted through the men and their mounts and the stench of roasting flesh assailed his nostrils. Burning figures screamed as the intense flames consumed them.\n\nSunburst twisted back to treat the remaining attackers to more of the same and opened his jaws for a second time. Pain criss-crossed his body and a heavy net landed atop him, neutralising his magic in an instant. An empty rumble escaped his belly but no flames came this time, only the feeling of paralysing emptiness and defeat. The net immobilised him, rendering any attempt at using his magic useless. The strong strands of netting stung his body where they touched, sapping his strength and constricting his movement.\n\nHe had been so distracted by the scrabbling men he failed to notice the crew that launched the net. Struggle as he might, he couldn't break free and he could no longer rely on his fiery breath, the net's magical constraints rendering flame impossible.\n\nFlying east was his way of dealing with the betrayal of Nightstar. He didn't know what to do and had flown from his problems. It was only now, when he thought of Rose and the dragonets that he wished he could return. He was too impulsive, a true yellow's nature. He should never have left his own shores, but blind rage had marred his already confused state. He regretted his rash actions and now it was too late.\n\nSunburst's efforts at evading escape over, order was restored to his captors. They quickly trussed him with chains, the metal links smothered in human magic, suppressing his strength. All the yellow dragon could do now was suffer the indignity of being bested by these small annoying men as they bound and contained his proud dragon body with their foul magic. The net and chains restrained him and the magic they held subdued any attempt to cast his dragon magic. He was winched on to a mobile platform, pulled by many four legged creatures.\n\nHe suffered the shame of being captured by humans and then transported through their city to his dungeon. The arrogant captors displayed their newly acquired prize as they dragged him deep into their maze of structures. Unpleasant and ugly, a mar on the landscape and a defilement of nature, this city of man, stinking of humanity as its occupants scurried like rats and cheered on his escort.\n\nThe memory was still painful, even though he had lost track of how long he had been held captive. His mind was weak and confused from the constant draining. His new home of blackness and despair replacing the daylight and the warmth of the sun he longed for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 79",
                "text": "He awoke to Serth's voice calling his name, his neck was stiff and his mouth dry. Cracking open one eyelid, he stared blankly at the floor of his cell.\n\n\"Sunburst!\" Serth hissed. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"I think that last draining has ended him,\" Fentor said.\n\nSunburst moved his head, lifting it from the floor, the weight of the chains like a mountain pushing down on his skull.\n\n\"Quiet Fentor, I think I can hear him moving.\"\n\n\"Quiet would be nice,\" Sunburst croaked. \"My head doesn't feel too good.\" Each word an effort, he wished they would shut up. He longed to drift back into the blackness, away from the pain and exhaustion that wouldn't leave.\n\n\"Don't sleep, Sunburst,\" Serth said. \"I fear you will never wake if you leave us now. The Extractor takes more from you than from all of us combined. He hasn't touched us in days. You grow weaker with every drop of blood he takes. I know you feel like sleeping the long sleep, but if you go there, only death waits behind closed eyes.\"\n\n\"Good advice, Serth,\" Fentor said, \"but how much longer can he take it? Any other dragon would have long since faded and died. He is strong, very strong, but eventually he won't be able to withstand it.\"\n\n\"I would have liked to see the White Mountains of his home,\" Serth said. \"The dragons there sound wonderful, the Grand Moot and the aurora. It gives me peace to think there are places where dragons can live without men to hunt us.\"\n\nSunburst could hear the respect in Fentor's voice and the longing in Serth's. He would have gone mad down here without their voices to keep him sane. He wondered what they looked like, it was difficult to get a good look inside the cells outside his own, due to the layout of the dungeon. Any dragons, however weak or small would be a welcome vision to him right now. He was sick of seeing the Extractor and his men, ugly humans, cruel and vulgar.\n\nThe eastern dragons had asked him all about his home, questioned him even more than Nightstar. How he longed for Nightstar's inquisitive words, he would happy spend days explaining things to the black dragon, even now he knew the truth about him. A dragon was a dragon, skin and scales! Nightstar had been his friend. He regretted their parting had been as difficult.\n\n\"I'm right here,\" Sunburst said. \"I haven't gone anywhere yet.\"\n\n\"Sunburst the strong,\" Fentor said. \"You inspire us with your resolve. Hold to life, yellow cousin, it is more precious with each day that passes in this bleak place.\"\n\nSunburst chuckled, Fentor's words made him think about the friendships he had forged in adversity, these dragons of the eastern continent were a hardy breed. They might be smaller and weaker on this side of the vast ocean, but what they lacked in strength, they made up for in spirit. They survived in this land against all odds. It was true, since his arrival, they had latched on to their newest inmate, stood by him as he suffered the torture of the Extractor. Talked to him, kept him sane, embraced him as part of their community and they hadn't had the chance to meet him properly or seen the colour of his fabulous scales.\n\n\"Sunburst the stupid,\" he replied, \"captured by men and held against my will. I would flame them all, these men of the east, crush them in my jaws and rip them apart with my talons!\" His anger returned, hatred for the Extractor and his men greater than any other emotion he felt. He no longer hated Nightstar or Alduce. Nightstar was a dragon and dungeons such as these and what these humans had done to their kind would disgust him. Somehow, Sunburst knew the same to be true of Alduce. Alduce loved dragons, even before he was Nightstar, his father's story was only the start of his passion. He had seen inside the man's mind and knew it to be true. Even the sorcerer would find this place vile and repulsive. He had looked deep into the heart of Alduce and he was nothing like these humans of the east.\n\nTiredness and exhaustion still plagued him, but he was determined to stay strong. He needed to for the sake of all the dragons held in the dungeons. Maybe he was unable to escape, but if he could offer his fellow captors even the smallest respite, give them the feeling of freedom and make things just a little more bearable, he would.\n\n\"Now,\" he cleared his throat, \"who wants to hear about a cool mountain lake full of delicious silver fish?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 80",
                "text": "Alduce left the tavern, his head buzzing with everything he had heard. It hadn't been too difficult to find out about recent events. All the inhabitants of this tavern could talk about was the capture of a giant yellow dragon. Tales of bravery about the dragon hunters were now standard fare for the minstrels and troubadours that plied their trade in the city.\n\nThe giant yellow dragon could only be Sunburst. Alduce learned that most dragons in the east were green or red, yellow being thought extinct. Added to that, according to the talk, the normal size of dragons here was half the size of the huge beast they'd captured.\n\nThe story the minstrel regaled the tavern common room held the drunken revellers enthralled. The man was a talented bard and was rewarded with a hat full of coins for his troubles.\n\nHis listeners were treated to a story about a huge yellow dragon that terrorised the countryside. The beast was of unnatural size and strength and yellow of his scales, yes, yellow, rare and unusual. Yellow dragons were known for the fierce and violent nature. The worst dragons to encounter. The residents of the tavern hung on the storyteller's words and Alduce wondered how they would feel if they came face to face with a black dragon. Woe betide these eastern men if they thought the amiable Sunburst was fierce.\n\nThe minstrel told of the yellow dragon's rampage, stealing cattle and burning everything in his path. Alduce struggled to hold his tongue, wanting to leap to Sunburst's defence and set the record straight. The minstrel embellished and exaggerated the facts, spinning a meatier tale would earn him a better reward.\n\nHe horrified his audience as he told of the heroic battle with the Extractor and his men as they rushed to the countryside's defence. Luckily they were alerted to dragon activity in the area and arrived in time to face the terrible creature. There ensued a gallant fight, where many of the heroes died, burned alive by the savage dragon. But in the end, the Extractor saved the day, trapping the fire breathing monster with a magical net, bravely putting himself in harm's way, no regard for anything but the safety of the people.\n\nVictorious in their conquest, the Extractor's crew restrained the massive yellow beast, trussing it with nets and chains and loading it onto a huge flat wagon. Ten horses were needed to pull the heavy prize back to the city, parading the rare yellow dragon through the streets for everyone to see, before taking it to the Extractor's dungeon.\n\nThe minstrel proclaimed that as long as the Extractor ruled, they would remain safe under his protection. The spoils of his fight, the pure blood of the yellow dragon, more potent with its magic than any other dragon captured in the last twenty years.\n\nListening to the words of the minstrel, Alduce separated fact from the fiction. He found it hard to believe his friend would wreak such havoc amongst humans, it was not in his nature. Sunburst was unable to kill him, the only human ever to set foot on the shores of Aurentania. Even though the dragons of the west instinctually loathed humans, this yellow dragon couldn't bring himself to destroy the man that had deceived him. Giving his blood to save a human life was against everything he believed and he wouldn't kill men for the sake of it.\n\nDragons residing on the eastern continent of Eusavus were perceived in a bad light by the humans who lived here. They were everything the story teller's tales made them out to be. He had lived with the community of the White Mountain dragons and he didn't think the descendants that remained in the east after the Great Exodus, would be any different from the ones he knew.\n\nIf Sunburst used his flame, he would only have done so as a means of defence. If he had battled the Extractor and his men and been subdued by their magic, it was only natural he would try to fight for his freedom. Dragons should not be held captive, they were creatures of the sky, free of spirt and of mind. Sunburst had taught him this, opened his mind to what a dragon really was. Once he would have believed the minstrel's tale, even though his love of dragons was strong, he only knew about dragons through human eyes. Nightstar had changed that preconception and shown him what dragons truly were. The eyes of the black dragon within saw more than any human ever could.\n\nHe needed to get inside the palace of the Extractor and find Sunburst. He didn't want to contemplate the stories of blood draining and the use of their parts for magic. If his friend was subjected to this treatment as a result of his actions, then he must do everything he could to save him.\n\nIt was true, he had stolen an egg and performed similar acts on the embryo inside, but he would never have dreamed of harvesting what he needed from a live dragon.\n\nHe had thought long and hard about his actions, from a human perspective and also when he was Nightstar. He wouldn't be the black dragon, would not exist, if he hadn't done what he needed to complete the transformation. But he regretted it, even though it was necessary. Being Nightstar, he could agree with Sunburst that what he had done was abhorrent, but although his actions were detestable, there would be no Nightstar if he hadn't stolen the egg.\n\nHe justified his actions by telling himself the unborn dragon had been dead, had no chance at a life and it would have decomposed, its vital resources going to waste. But what of the unborn spirit? After studying the dragons and living with them, he had come to realise it was their belief the dragon spirit was immortal. Creatures born of magic, reincarnated back to the egg. Alduce could neither prove nor disprove this, but as a student of all things, be they scientific or supernatural, he couldn't ignore the dragon's beliefs. Nightstar believed without question and it was hard to disagree with the strength of his conviction.\n\nAlduce would never have intentionally performed his metamorphosis, had he known about the dragon spirit, and he would never have known about it, if he hadn't. A paradox. One thing was clear to him, the persona that had grown to be Nightstar wasn't all Alduce. The black dragon was not just a man dressed in scales, he was more than a transformation spell. He was an entity with his own self, part Alduce and part something or someone else. The embryo that he cut from the unhatched egg, not only contributed its blood and scales, it provided an unknown ingredient into the mix. Unknown at the time, but Alduce now realised part of the fading spirit of the unborn dragonet had been incorporated into Nightstar's being. Merged with his mind, Nightstar was greater than the sum of his parts, more than a man and more than a dragon.\n\nIt was best not to dwell on this just now, he had larger concerns to address. There would be ample time to reflect when he returned to his laboratory and recorded everything in his journals. If he ever returned.\n\nFocusing on finding Sunburst, he followed the side streets, heading uphill towards the dominant structure of the Sanguinorium. Even the name of the place turned his stomach. These humans were not like the people of his home world. From everything he had learned, he would not want to live as a man on this continent. No wonder the dragons had left the east in search of a new home.\n\nThe Sanguinorium and the palace of the Extractor were not a place you could approach unnoticed. The buildings were surrounded with open grounds, providing nowhere to hide for a potential sneak thief. Alduce observed from the shadows of an alley, far enough away to remain safely inconspicuous, but too far to perceive any useful information for his infiltration.\n\nFrustration welled inside as he attempted to formulate a plan. He couldn't cross the open expanse without being spotted, guards were posted at the entrance to both palace and Sanguinorium. If he changed into Nightstar and stormed the place, he would alert the Extractor's men. They were practiced at fighting dragons and Alduce knew that rushing headlong at the problem would only result in disaster. Nightstar might be able to defeat the men, might even be able to resist their magic better than the other dragons, but ultimately he didn't stand any reasonable chance of breaking in and freeing Sunburst if he engaged the enemy in battle first.\n\nHe needed to think things through, come up with a better plan. Caltus had often told him to think before he acted, good advice if you had time to spare. Alduce was concerned that he needed to act sooner, rather than later. Sunburst was in danger, Winterfang told him, and the pearl had made it clear. He was convinced if he waited too long, Sunburst would not survive.\n\nThe burden of responsibility weighed heavy on his human heart, hopelessness and self-doubt ate at his resolve as daylight faded and the darkness of night crept into the alley. He wished he was able to use the chameleon spell Nightstar learned from the pearl of wisdom, but that was dragon magic and impossible for a human to learn. As Nightstar, he promised Winterfang he wouldn't use his knowledge and the black dragon intended to keep his word. He wanted to make amends with the moot leader. Winterfang had expressed his disappointment at Nightstar when he discovered he had touched the pearl and stolen its forbidden secrets. But the frost drake offered Nightstar the opportunity of redemption and Alduce not only wanted that redemption, he needed it. Not just for Nightstar but for himself.\n\nA memory from the pearl surfaced in his mind and Nightstar joined it. Alduce was no longer aware of his physical surrounding, the alley he hid in, forgotten. His vision transported him back to the night of the aurora. He swam in the silver threads of wisdom and secrets the pearl had revealed to the black dragon. Heat prickled his skin and sweat ran down his face as he recalled the pearl, the chamber of the moot and the forbidden spells it protected. A surge of energy pulsed though his human body and his mind reached out, unbidden, connecting with Nightstar's. His body shuddered as the heat subsided, tendrils of mist rose from his exposed flesh, like hot breath on a frosty morning, creating a shimmering vapour cloud. The steamy cloud swirled around his form, slowly at first then with greater speed, cooling human skin with dragon magic.\n\nAlduce couldn't believe what was happening, humans couldn't access dragon magic just as dragons couldn't access human magic. With the help of the dragon within him, something unheard of was happening. He could feel the dragon magic as it ran across his skin, he could reach out and touch it, bend it to his human will. He knew it as Nightstar did, could control it and shape it as he could his own human sorcery. He bathed himself in its strength and employed it as a dragon would.\n\nLifting his hands to his face, he peered in amazement.\n\nThey had become invisible! He embraced the chameleon spell as it came to him now, through necessity, just as it had for Nightstar in the chamber of the moot.\n\nAlduce, a human, had used dragon magic! If he was all but invisible to his own eye, he could use that to his advantage. Nightstar had agreed with Winterfang that he wouldn't use the pearl's secrets, but Alduce hadn't made any such promises about using the spell himself. He hadn't broken his word with the frost drake, Nightstar would not call on the wisdom of the pearl. Alduce, however, was not the black dragon and he wasn't using the same spell... not exactly. He would honour the promise he made as Nightstar. He really didn't want to betray the frost drake's trust. He had learned that lesson and understood when Winterfang explained it to him. As Alduce, he reasoned the necessity of finding Sunburst before it was too late, outweighed the luxury of doing what was right.\n\nWasting no time to ponder the implications of this newly discovered phenomenon, Alduce stepped from the shadows and quietly strode into the open. He may be difficult for the human eye to see, but he still made noise when he moved. Employing a stealthy walk, carefully placing one foot forward, heel first, he crept towards the perimeter of the Sanguinorium.\n\nAlduce wasn't just holding the chameleon spell, he was holding his breath and his chest ached. He silently expelled the air from his lungs and breathed normally, terrified the miracle of controlling dragon magic would vanish, but it didn't. He was a ghost, unseen as he slipped through the evening dusk, the chameleon spell and the fading light shielding him from discovery.\n\nAfter what felt like hours of sneaking and creeping, he arrived at the walls of the huge building, pressing his back to the stone, becoming part of the brickwork.\n\nLess than fifty feet away stood the huge double doors of the Sanguinorium. They were made from thick wood and the image of a dragon's head was carved into their surface, half a face on each door. The wooden dragon's face stared out, blind eyes seeing as much of Alduce as the two guards that stood either side of the giant entranceway. This must be where they had taken Sunburst, the oversized doors would only be made this size for one reason, to accommodate the entry of a dragon.\n\nAlduce needed a plan to get past the guards, he needed to lure them away from their post and sneak inside the building. He was unsure how long the chameleon spell would hold, dragon magic used by a human was new territory for him. He stuck to the wall, edging closer to the carved wooden doors, taking care to do so as quietly as possible.\n\nHe was contemplating what to do next when a group of the Extractor's men rolled up in a wagon stacked with animal carcases. The stench of rotting meat filled his nostrils, accompanied by the buzzing of insects. The entrance to the Sanguinorium became a hive of activity as the men started to unload and transport their grisly cargo inside. There would be no better opportunity to infiltrate the building than this, risky as it was. Alduce peeled himself from the wall and crept towards the wagon, taking care to give the men a wide berth. A collision with an invisible entity was the last thing these men needed to experience.\n\nHe waited until the last man approached the wooden doors, then fell in behind his unsuspecting escort, matching his footsteps as he entered the realm of the Extractor.\n\nDetaching himself from the man once they were inside, he hunkered down, seeking out the relative safety of shadows behind the main door as the man disappeared down a huge corridor. There were no guards inside, it was obvious the Extractor did not expect anyone to infiltrate his dragon prison. His arrogance was Alduce's good fortune.\n\nHe waited patiently, limbs stiffening up as he crouched in his shadowy corner, hesitant to let go of the chameleon spell. His magic wasn't unlimited and he didn't want to waste it unnecessarily. Listening for the return of the men, he released his hold on the spell, his skin tensing with the cold wave that followed, the hairs on his arms and neck standing up. His physical form returned to normal, but the corner he had chosen to hide in was nearly as good as the invisibility that had cloaked him. Confident he could call back the spell if he needed to use it, he settled down, stretching his legs. As he sat waiting for the men to return, his eyes adjusted to the dim corridor, wide as any town thoroughfare and large enough for a medium sized dragon to walk down comfortably.\n\nBefore too long creaking hinges and a metallic clang echoed along the corridor, followed by the scuffing of footsteps, accompanied by the bobbing of torchlight. Alduce reached for the chameleon spell and faded from sight, invisible and quiet, holding his breath as the men departed through the huge wooden doors, slamming them closed as they left. He waited, making sure the men had gone, then stood and released the spell.\n\nHe kept close to the wall as he padded down the corridor, his senses on full alert. He hadn't seen anybody else come or go since he'd been observing the building, but there was no reason to take chances, not now he had made it this far. Eventually he arrived at a huge metal gate spanning the entire corridor like an internal portcullis. It was locked but the spaces between the bars were large enough for him to slip through. This wasn't to keep men from passing, this was to prevent dragons from escaping. As he squeezed through the gaps in the bars, the metal brushed his skin and he could feel the protection spell infused within. Strong human magic ran through the steel bars, a warding spell against the magic of dragons, designed to leach their strength.\n\nWas this how the Extractor subdued his captors? If Sunburst was held behind powerful wards like this, he wouldn't have the strength to break free. Normal steel wouldn't hold a dragon for long, but steel steeped in this magic would make an impenetrable barrier. Alduce remembered the tale the minstrel had told, of the chains and nets the Extractor had used. No wonder Sunburst had been captured, this type of magic would render him defenceless.\n\nFollowing the wide corridor deeper inside the building, the floor angled downward and the brickwork walls changed to natural rock. The farther he travelled, the lower he descended, the path leading him underground.\n\nThe corridor widened, giving way to huge cells tunnelled from solid rock and fronted with metal bars infused with sapping magic. He could hear heavy breathing from the darkness of the recesses behind the bars. The cells were occupied!\n\nHe called once more on the chameleon spell, remembering he was human and fearful that the dungeon residents would see him as one of the Extractors men. He didn't want to reveal his human self to the unknown captives, he was here to find Sunburst. Quietly he paced along the middle of the corridor, peering into each cell he passed. Most of the cells housed smaller green dragons, sometimes a red and they were half the size of Sunburst, similar in build to Little Wing, the smallest adult dragon of the White Mountain.\n\nThe dragons were in poor shape, frail and weak. Confined inside the Sanguinorium and suffering at the hands of the Extractor, they reeked of despair. Each cell was positioned in such a way that the dragon that occupied it only had a limited view. They would be able to see the wall directly opposite their bars and if they strained, the cage fronts to either side. The cells had been designed to restrict the field of vision of the residents inside. It was bad enough that the captured dragons were imprisoned in this way and he was convinced that depriving them of seeing much of their fellow inmates, wasn't just coincidence, but was deliberate. The Extractor didn't just torture and drain these pitiful dragons physically, he used a cruel form of mental torture, depriving them of the ability to see very little of who they shared their fate with.\n\nAlduce continued down the corridor, invisible and silent, searching each cell he passed until he caught a glimpse of a pale shape, larger than the previous occupants. It was huddled as far back as the wall of the cell would allow. He pushed against the bars, staring into the darkness, the magic in the metal pulsed as it touched his skin. The constant power of the restraining magic would keep the occupants docile and subdued. Living with this sapping force each day would slowly kill the imprisoned dragons. How could the Extractor treat these once magnificent creatures this way? He must realise what he was doing and his barbaric practice made Alduce ashamed to be called human.\n\nHe slipped between the bars, narrow enough to let a man pass through and focussed on the unmoving, faded yellow scales, of the dragon within.\n\nSunburst lay on the dirty cell floor, exhausted and dying. Alduce stood in shock, this limp yellow shape, beaten and broken was all that was left of his friend. Alduce wished the pearl had been wrong, but it had foretold the truth. Sunburst was in danger, mortal danger for an almost immortal creature.\n\nHe remembered their first meeting and the words the yellow dragon had spoken. I am known as Sunburst, my yellow scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I burn across the sky like a celestial fire. The memory of Sunburst's words caused tears to wet his cheeks. There was no golden glow from the dragon's scales, his colour faded and pallid, the fire extinguished.\n\nThis was all his fault! He was responsible for Sunburst leaving the west. The Extractor may be guilty of many atrocities, but Alduce was equally to blame for his friend's suffering.\n\nHe slowly approached the dying yellow dragon, horrified at how terrible his friend looked. Crouching down beside Sunburst's head, he released the chameleon spell, shimmering back into existence and tentatively reached out his hand, gently stroking his snout.\n\nSunburst eye's opened in surprise and his nostrils flared. He jerked his head back, pulling away from Alduce's hand, chains rattling as they jerked tight. Terror filled his sad green eyes as he stared at Alduce, shrinking as far from the man as his restraints would allow.\n\nAlduce withdrew his hands, holding them palm up, indicating he posed no threat and hoping Sunburst recognised he was no danger. He was unable to offer the yellow dragon any words of comfort, the lump in his throat preventing speech. He swallowed and tried again.\n\n\"Sunburst,\" he whispered, afraid the dragon had lost his mind. \"It is Alduce. I mean you no harm. Do you remember me?\"\n\n\"Nightstar?\" The yellow dragon answered, his voice barely audible. \"Where is Nightstar?\" A pitiful sound escaped Sunburst's throat, half way between a sob and a moan. Alduce had never heard anything so sad. The pained look in the dragon's eyes spoke more than words ever could and what they said wasn't what Alduce wanted to hear. Shame consumed him and hot tears blurred his vision, obscuring the ruined dragon before him.\n\nThe Extractor had succeeded in draining the life from Sunburst, the constant syphoning of living blood weakening his body and spirit. The wrongness of everything this vile man had subjected Sunburst to, and every other eastern dragon before him, pierced his heart like white hot iron. He must stop this, now and forever, he would never let this happen to another dragon as long as he drew breath. He wiped his eyes, brushing tears from his face.\n\n\"Nightstar is with me,\" he told Sunburst, reaching out once more and gently stroking the bruised yellow snout. \"He is closer than you think, old friend.\" Sunburst didn't pull away this time, making a soft crooning sound deep in his chest, which was somehow sadder than the sobbing.\n\n\"Old friend?\" He asked, barely above a whisper.\n\n\"Always,\" Alduce said, \"if you will have him.\"\n\n\"We have been fools, you and I,\" Sunburst rasped, each word an effort. \"Nightstar should know I missed him. I have had time to reflect on what is important.\" He coughed and spasms wracked his body. Alduce patted the dry faded scales on Sunburst neck. The scales on his chest no longer blazed with their natural golden sheen and were dirty and dull. One scale was out of place, bent away from Sunburst's body, the unprotected skin underneath scared and scabbed, exposing a raw and bloody wound. This must be where the Extractor had breached the dragon's armour and was extracting the precious blood he coveted so much.\n\n\"I would see the sky one last time, sorcerer. The darkness is no place for a dragon to die.\"\n\nAlduce remembered Galdor, trapped underground, confined to the darkness for over a century. The sadness and sorrow of the green dragon was bad enough, but at least he hadn't been physically tortured. Galdor's spirit had been strong enough to survive the mental hardship. Sunburst's blood had been drained continually and in his weakened physical state, it was little wonder it was killing him. The knowledge that each visit from the Extractor would result in the pain of draining, the taking of his life blood, with no ability to resist, must have been extremely difficult for Sunburst to endure.\n\nWith no hope of escaping, a bleak future to look forward to, Sunburst held on remarkably well, but Alduce could see he was near his end.\n\n\"Return to Rose and the dragonets, tell them I am sorry,\" Sunburst choked back a harsh sounding cough. \"Fly high and fly free, friend Nightstar.\" The yellow dragon's head slumped, as if holding his own weight were too much effort. His green eyes fixed in a glassy stare as the life faded from them, his eyelids slowly drooping closed, anticipating his impending death like welcome sleep. One last snort fluttered wheezily from the dying dragon's nostrils and then he was still."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 81",
                "text": "Alduce dropped to his knees, cradling the lifeless head of Sunburst in his arms, silently weeping. A soft crooning filled the dungeon as the captive dragons, sensing Sunburst's demise, paid respect to their fallen comrade.\n\nThe needless loss of Sunburst's passing was too much for the sorcerer to bear. A crippling pain exploded in his chest, more painful than the lightning strike he had suffered. Emotions boiled inside, his blood pulsed through his body, his face flushed, hot tears mixing with sweat. His heart felt like it would burst from his chest and his head swam, nausea rising as dizziness and uncertainty assaulted him.\n\nHe attempted to stand, the soft crooning of the dragon's dirge roaring in his ears, the peaceful sound deafening him like a raging ocean, crashing onto the shores of his mind. Staggering backwards from Sunburst's fallen body, the metal bars held him upright when his legs failed him. He stumbled through the spaces, landing outside the cell and sprawled on his back. His mind swirled as a thick fog constricted his human brain and Alduce was powerless to resist.\n\nVisions of the pearl floated through his human mind, flashing memories from Nightstar's consciousness writhed inside his skull, accompanied by blinding pain. He was back in the cavern of the moot, once more experiencing the wisdom of the pearl, but this time, not as the black dragon, this time he saw it with his human mind, impossible, yet it was happening.\n\nA black scale was forced into his vision, black as the darkest night, one scale among the many. A hard and unyielding armour. A strong sense of reliving a previous moment in time surfaced as he jumped to another thread, weaving and spinning through his consciousness.\n\nThe memories of the pearl revealed more, a talon lifted the black scale, exposing the skin below, vulnerable and unprotected as the armour that shielded it slid aside.\n\nHe remembered now, he had seen these images before but he didn't know why. He hadn't understood them and he dismissed them as parts of the pearl's confusing, swirling mix of images. When he touched the pearl, it revealed its secrets. It had shown him the secret of the chameleon spell, it had revealed the long sleep, filled his mind with the Great Exodus and exposed how to the use the hypnotic stare. He now realised it had taught him more\u2014so much more. Information subconsciously hidden in the patterns and swirls, barely perceived and only half remembered.\n\nUntil now.\n\nA sharp talon opened the skin beneath the scale and drops of blood pooled from the cut to gather on it, blood red on midnight black. Blood, precious drops mixed and whirled through the haze of his memory.\n\nThe final part of the vision faded and Alduce opened his eyes, staring up at the cavern roof, the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth. He knew what he must do now, and how to do it.\n\nThe dragon pendant around his neck glowed brightly, casting an eerie light in the darkness. The pendant hot on his skin, tingling with faint traces of electrical energy. The magic of the ancient artefact, acquired all those years ago from the unknown dead sorcerer in Galdor's underground prison, took on a life of its own. Alduce was scared to move, the cold stone on his back a strange contrast to the heat from the artefact.\n\nHe had worked out how to tap into the artefact's magic when he was an apprentice, and was able to use it to call forth the vast reserves of energy it stored within. But even after all these years, he had barely scratched the surface of its potential. He knew it was there but hadn't been able to discover everything it was capable of.\n\nThe artefact had activated by itself, Alduce hadn't called on its magic. The artefact and its abilities were still a mystery to him and this was something new. The walls of the cavern crackled and small streaks of blue sparks leapt over the stone, their ethereal light merging with the glow from the pendant. The crooning of the mourning dragons had fallen silent, the only noise now the thrum of magic, tense and expectant.\n\nThe electrical sparks danced and jumped, leaping towards the dragon pendant and activating the artefact without the need of natural lightning. Alduce rolled over as the transformation began, hands and knees splayed out on the cold stone floor, his back arched as light consumed his human form. His limbs stretched and grew, his clothes ripped from his body as the glowing light radiated from the gaps between his black scales.\n\nNightstar returned.\n\nA huge black dragon with a silver star on his chest took the place of the tiny human, barely fitting in the confines of the corridor.\n\nThe Extractor built this terrible place to restrain the eastern dragons he captured. Sunburst managed to fit inside, being a yellow he was naturally smaller. Nightstar was a much larger specimen. The Extractor wrongly believed Sunburst the largest of the dragon's he'd captured.\n\nNightstar was ready to prove to the deluded human how mistaken he was.\n\nThe Extractor could wait, Nightstar had more pressing issues. He turned around, the cave wall restricted his movement, dust and dirt showered from the disturbed roof where his wings and shoulders touched. He faced the cell of his friend, metal bars separating them.\n\nHuge talons wrapped around the magic infused steel, the pulse of human magic flowed through the metal, magic any dragon should not be able to resist, However, Nightstar wasn't just any dragon. He was an amalgam of both human and dragon, both sides of the sorcery and magic.\n\nJust as Alduce had reached the chameleon spell, Nightstar was able to mimic his human counterpart. His talons gripped the metal bars, feeling the magic within the metal, magic designed by the Extractor to weaken and sap dragon strength.\n\nThe catalyst that assisted Alduce was his frustration and helplessness, it had made it possible for him to reach and use the chameleon spell, a spell only a dragon could perform. Nightstar reacted to a similar combination of anger and frustration. He pushed past the barriers and reached for the human magic, feeling its flow, touching its power, shaping it to his dragon will.\n\nHe bent the bars with his massive talons, rendering the human magic within useless, extracting it from the metal and into his body. It was neither foreign to him, nor foul. He embraced the power and used it against itself. His scales tingled with human magic, it ran from his claws, surging through his body to the tip of his tail. He understood it and knew instinctually how to manipulate it for his own purpose.\n\nMetal groaned and creaked as he ripped it from the stone, bending and breaking apart, the entranceway to Sunburst's cell cleared of its obstruction. He tossed the twisted remains of the metal into the darkness of the long corridor, clattering bars rattled as they struck stone.\n\nNightstar pushed into the recess, cramming as close to Sunburst as he could in the confined space. Pushing his snout right up to his still form, he sniffed his friend, nostrils flaring. There was still a tiny spark of life within the tormented yellow body chained to the cave wall. Nightstar forced his claws between the cruel metal and the scales of Sunburst's neck. He forced open the collar that restrained him, using the new human magic he'd learned, turning it to his own use. The collar shattered, dropping from Sunburst's neck. The magic within the metal no longer draining what remained of the yellow dragon's life-force. Nightstar ripped the chains from the wall and removed all the restraints, freeing the yellow dragon's limp body.\n\nSunburst slumped forward, rolling onto his side exposing his pale chest and belly. The battered and bruised dragon deathly pale, his yellow no longer bright. A broken scale protruded from his flank, the raw wound underneath, red and weeping.\n\nThe visions of the pearl flashed once more, this time through his dragon mind. A subliminal message planted like a seed, grew, showing him the way. He saw the black scales, the sharp talon, the dripping blood and it was clear what he must do.\n\nHe flicked out a long sharp talon, like a huge pointing finger, probing his scales until he found the right spot. Pushing hard, the needle thin point found its way between two scales. He used his dragon magic, coaxing the scale free from the rest, instinctually knowing where to probe, guided by the wisdom imprinted by the pearl. The scale lifted, tilting and twisting, opening a space in his armour.\n\nPushing the talon into the soft skin underneath the scale, Nightstar dragged his razor sharp claw quickly over the exposed flesh. Dragon skin may be softer than the scales that protected it, but it was still leathery and tough. Once the skin was punctured, Nightstar wiggled the claw, digging into the black flesh until he was rewarded with the trickling of blood.\n\nWisps of steam rose from the gash and the hot blood hissed, alive with potent magic. Nightstar dipped his claw into the red liquid that the Extractor so vehemently desired. He gently flicked his tongue across the raw wound beneath Sunburst bent scale, cleaning the crust of dried blood away, opening it up and revealing the soft flesh below. The yellow scale broke away from Sunburst's body rattling to the floor like a spinning coin.\n\nAfter he cleaned the skin surrounding the wound, he plunged his talon deep into the open puncture, forcing his blood inside Sunburst's body. Withdrawing the talon, he quickly licked it clean, then caught more drips from his own bleeding wound. Holding his claw above the hole in Sunburst's flesh, he dripped more of his hot sizzling blood into the yellow dragon.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nThe broken yellow scale lay on the cell floor, devoid of dragon magic, damaged and useless after the Extractor's continued abuse. Nightstar knew this missing part of his friend was the final piece of the puzzle. He needed to cover the wound and seal it, in order for his own healing magic to work. The tarnished yellow scale would take too long to heal and Sunburst was too weak to lend any of his body's own depleted magic. The pearl's influence swirled in his mind and showed him what he must do.\n\nNightstar gripped his own bent scale tightly between his talons, still amazed at the dexterity of his dragon claws. He ripped the scale from his body, the self-inflicted pain causing him to wince, but he was Nightstar, strong and fierce. He would bear it. The agony was a small price to pay. Blood flowed from the root where the scale had been torn, pooling in a puddle on the cell floor. Nightstar covered his detached scale with the warm sticky liquid\u2014a wellspring of magic and life.\n\nWasting no time, he jammed his own scale over the wound on Sunburst's side, his blood like glue, allowing the scale to stick to the flank of the yellow dragon. Once more Nightstar reached for his dragon magic, pushing it into the lone black scale, using his talon to hold it in place. Pulsing white light glowed from the flesh under the black piece of armour he had donated to his friend and this time he was rewarded with a reaction. The yellow scales surrounding his black one withdrew, shrinking back to allow the larger scale space. Nightstar pushed harder, both with his claw and the magic. The black scale rocked from side to side, moving on its own, sliding into the space and shrinking to fit. A burning sensation travelled up his claw and Nightstar pulled it back as the yellow scales moved back into their former positions, embracing the black replacement and locking it safely in place. This was the final step. The pearl had demanded a sacrifice from the black dragon, not only was his blood required, part of his body was needed too. The pearl of wisdom had guided his path and shown him the way.\n\nNightstar licked his self-inflicted wound, attempting to stem the flow, but the torn flesh still bled. Then, seeing the broken yellow scale from Sunburst's body, lying discarded on the floor, he grabbed it and forced it into the bleeding space where he'd torn free his own scale. He pushed his magic into the dead yellow scale, as he had done with his own and fused it to his black hide. The flow of blood slowed and gradually, the yellow scale, darker now, expanded to fill the larger gap left by the original.\n\nA sound from the cell floor brought his attention back to Sunburst, the yellow dragon moved, his limbs twitching like a newly hatched bird, feeble and weak. A low gurgling sound escaped his throat and a tiny curl of smoke rolled from his nostrils.\n\nHuge dragon tears spilled from Nightstar's eyes, relief and joy overwhelming him. Sunburst was alive!\n\nBefore he had time to contemplate it, he was swallowed up in the fevered dream of the yellow dragon, as their minds connected with the joining of the blood magic. Sunburst started thrashing on the cell floor, his legs flailing as strength and life returned to him.\n\nNightstar's role was reversed, once Alduce had been the receiver of blood, had been healed by his friend. Now it was his turn to pay back the favour and save Sunburst's life. The yellow dragon had shared Alduce's own dreams and nightmares, now Nightstar would share those of the yellow dragon.\n\nHe relived Sunburst's hatching, the exhilaration of breaking free of his shell. Something Nightstar had never experienced, until now, another gift that Sunburst had unintentionally given him.\n\nHe knew Sunburst's mother, his clutch mates, he saw the young dragon grow to maturity, shared moments from his life as his blood mixed and flowed through Sunburst's veins.\n\nNightstar may not have been hatched from the egg naturally, but the fevered recollections of the yellow dragon, as his blood repaired him, allowed him to know what it was like to be reborn a dragon.\n\nSunburst finally stopped writhing and opened his eyes, green globes rekindled with life. It had taken Alduce days to recuperate after the lighting strike when Sunburst had used his blood on him. It had taken Sunburst a few minutes, a few minutes that condensed a lifetime of memories, emotions and experiences that he shared with Nightstar, and ultimately Alduce.\n\n\"Thank you, Nightstar the Black,\" Sunburst said. His voice stronger and clearer, the fog of confusion driven from his mind, now the constricting magic had been lifted.\n\n\"You are most welcome,\" Nightstar managed, emotion betraying his voice. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"I feel better than I have in weeks, the dull pounding of my head has lessened and my mind is clearer,\" he sniffed and blew a little smoke, \"I can feel my magic! I'm almost a dragon again!\"\n\nNightstar understood the irony. Almost a dragon! Sunburst had a way with words that made him laugh. There was no anger from the yellow dragon, no confusion, he had returned from near death, back to his old self.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Sunburst.\" He was afraid to say anymore for fear of the hatred returning, the lie and the betrayal that stood between them, heavy in his heart.\n\n\"I know you now, Nightstar. I know Alduce, and I would call you both friend. You have given me back hope and life. You have come unasked and unexpected into this dangerous place when I was ready to die. Sunburst the Yellow holds no grudge, he has decided that Alduce has the heart of a dragon. Nightstar would not exist without the sorcerer. What you have done to get there, what you did with the egg was wrong. I know you understand, no words are needed, I have seen it all, our blood and bodies have shared much. We are brothers of that blood, now and always, we are connected by a bond stronger than kin. It is a dragon thing, something Nightstar knows and Alduce will learn, given time.\" He paused, expelling breath that sounded like a sigh. \"My words are easier to say in the dark. I am pleased you have given me a chance to say them aloud.\"\n\nAlduce didn't know what to say or how to respond to Sunburst's words. Anything he could say, any attempt at justification to what he had done, the lies he told and secrets he had kept, would be too soon and he would surely risk damaging their friendship again.\n\nThe articulate way in which the yellow dragon had filled the quiet void with his heartfelt words, were reflections of his own thoughts.\n\n\"We have much to discuss,\" Sunburst continued, \"and many comprises to make, you and I, but not now and not here. Not in this foul place, it isn't the time. I hope we can work it out, fly once more together as friends.\"\n\n\"Your words are wise, Sunburst. And you are right.\" A calm relief filled Nightstar, now Sunburst had spoken. \"We need to escape this place. I doubt we will be able to leave in the same manner I entered.\"\n\n\"And just how did you manage that?\"\n\n\"That,\" Nightstar said, \"is a tale for another time, as I don't fully understand it myself.\" He stepped back into the corridor. \"Are you well enough to fly?\"\n\n\"I could fly all the way to the White Mountain, all I need is the sky! But I fear for the others, they are smaller and have less stamina.\"\n\n\"Others?\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving without them. All twelve of them!\" He stepped around the puddle of blood in his cell, squeezing past Nightstar and into the corridor. \"Serth! Fentor!\" he called out into the darkness. \"Where are you? Speak out, I need to find your cells.\"\n\nNightstar followed Sunburst, the yellow dragon certainly didn't make things easy for him and it was something he was still trying to get used to. If this was the price of their renewed friendship, then he would willingly pay it.\n\nSunburst was right, the wisdom of dragons was something he would have to work harder at, if he wanted to live as one. Sunburst was many things, but most of all, he was a hero amongst dragons. Even if most of them didn't know it.\n\nTwelve more prisoners to rescue and escape with. Twelve lives to save. Twelve more tortured souls who deserved to see the sky. To once more fly high and fly free."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 82",
                "text": "Sunburst scrambled along the corridor in search of the other incarcerated dragons. He was free at last, free from the chains and the foul metal that sapped his strength. It was good to walk, unrestricted, even if it was within the confines of the prison.\n\n\"I'm in here,\" Serth's voice echoed from inside her cell. \"How are you free? What was all that noise? I can't see anything from my cell.\"\n\n\"It's another of his games,\" Fentor said. \"How could he be free? He's restrained like us. The Extractor would never risk his source of prize blood escaping. I can't see anything either because there's nothing to see. Nothing but metal bars and rock walls!\" Trust Fentor to doubt him, forest greens could be so annoying.\n\n\"The Extractor,\" Sunburst spat, \"didn't count on one thing.\" He pressed his head to the bars of Fentor's cell, the human magic causing him to jerk back in pain.\n\n\"Serth?\" Fentor said, \"There's a yellow dragon with green eyes standing outside my bars! I think I've finally succumbed to madness, this place has driven me to hallucinations!\"\n\n\"Help us!\"\n\n\"Save us!\"\n\n\"Free us!\"\n\nCries filled the corridor as the captured dragons pleaded for rescue.\n\n\"I'm looking at a yellow dragon!\" Fentor exclaimed.\n\n\"I'm no hallucination, Fentor,\" Sunburst chuckled. \"But you are still a mad forest green, that I can't help you with!\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Serth called out. The dark corridor filled with excited voices, each one asking to be saved, to be set free. They had remained silent as Nightstar freed Sunburst. Unsure in the darkness, not knowing what the noises were, they had cowered in their cells as Nightstar rescued him. An air of expectant hope replaced the tension, their mundane and unchangeable routine of imprisonment shattered.\n\n\"Sunburst, can you ask your friends to stay calm? The quicker and quieter we do this, they better for us all.\" Nightstar's powerful voice echoed off the cave walls, rumbling down the dark corridor.\n\nThe questioning stopped and the dragons fell silent at the commanding voice.\n\nAll except Fentor. \"Who is that? And what is this one amazing thing the Extractor didn't count on?\" Fentor demanded.\n\n\"That,\" Sunburst said, a smugness in his tone, \"would be the friend I told you about. The mighty Nightstar. He is the one dragon the Extractor didn't count on.\" He stepped aside and Nightstar took his place.\n\n\"Serth?\" Fentor whispered, \"He's... black! Black as night! And huge!\"\n\n\"I told you he was real,\" Serth said, \"you didn't believe. I want to see him.\"\n\n\"All in good time,\" Nightstar said, gripping the bars of Fentor's cage and ripping them from the stone. Fentor flinched and Sunburst soothed him. \"He is real,\" he said looking at Nightstar, \"as real a dragon as you will meet and he's our salvation. Let him free you, his magic is stronger than that which binds us.\" He wasn't sure how Nightstar's magic could break the bonds the Extractor used, he suspected it had something to do with the human element that was part of the black dragon, but he didn't care. Not anymore.\n\nThe black dragon had come, he was here now and that was all that mattered. That's what friends do, help each other. He had helped Alduce when he was dying because instinct, his perception, told him it was the right thing to do. He saved the dying man so he could find out what had happened to Nightstar. If he hadn't used his blood, Nightstar would have died along with the sorcerer that had given him life. A life of his own, not just an illusion or a spell, he knew now, beyond any doubt, Nightstar, as Fentor had discovered, was real.\n\nThe black dragon unshackled the quivering Fentor, tearing lose the chains and bursting the metal collar from his neck. The unbelieving forest green's eyes bulged, staring at the huge black dragon that had just released him.\n\n\"I thought you were a myth! Another one of Sunburst's tales, but you really are black,\" he said. \"Thank you mighty Nightstar.\" He tried to stand, his legs weak after his prolonged incarceration and his exposure to the human magic.\n\nSunburst studied Fentor, he was small and frail, weakened at the hands of the Extractor. Even had he been in perfect condition, he would never be as strong as the smallest White Mountain dragon. How could they expect to break free when the dragons were so fragile?\n\nHe had an idea. \"Fentor, can you walk?\"\n\n\"I can, although my legs are a little unsteady. I feel better now I'm free of the chains.\"\n\n\"I know how you feel, believe me.\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"I should have believed you before... before all of this\u2014whatever this is\u2014happened.\"\n\n\"You didn't know, how could you? I could show you so much more that these shores have to offer, a better life for you all.\"\n\n\"Better listen to him,\" Nightstar said, \"he's the wisest dragon I know.\" He winked at the dumbfounded green.\n\n\"Do you trust me?\" Sunburst asked Fentor, \"Will you follow my lead?\"\n\n\"I will follow you, Sunburst the Yellow, you have my trust, you have the trust of us all, I believe.\"\n\n\"Good! If we want to escape, we're going to have to work together. Nightstar, if you can free everybody, I think I have a plan that will help.\"\n\n\"You have my trust too, Sunburst and I would welcome any ideas you have.\" The huge black dragon hunched his way along the corridor to the next set of bars. Metal groaned as he set about releasing the next of the captives.\n\nFentor watched Nightstar, mesmerised and Sunburst understood why. The huge black dragon was a magnificent sight. He remembered his first meeting with him by the lakeside. The eastern dragons had doubted his stories, had never seen a yellow or a black. Dragons here were mostly green or red and small compared to their western counterparts. It was no surprise Fentor was in awe.\n\n\"Follow me,\" Sunburst said to Fentor. He led the small green dragon back to his own cell. \"Nightstar has brought more than his strength with him. He has magic more potent than you can know.\" He dipped his talon in the congealing puddle of blood that had leaked from Nightstar's side.\n\n\"Open your mouth, Fentor. Taste what it is to be free!\" He held his talon aloft and the green dragon sniffed at it, smelling Nightstar's elixir of strength. Cautiously he extended his tongue, licking the blood from the outstretched talon.\n\nSunburst watched as the green dragon consumed Nightstar's blood. Licking clean his talon and swallowing the red liquid, absorbing it into his stomach. It was cold now, not as powerful as it had been when the black dragon had administered it into his own dying body. It no longer sizzled and steamed with a life of its own, but it was still filled with the black dragon's unique magic, a mix of human and dragon, sorcerer and serpent. With Fentor the blood was consumed, with Sunburst it had been added directly into his own blood. Drinking it down wasn't as effective as adding it to another bloodstream, wasn't nearly as strong, but it still did what Sunburst hoped.\n\nFentor's eye's blazed, his small frame appeared to fill out and he looked greener, even in the darkness of the dungeon. He could see the change in Fentor as the magic worked, restoring him, revitalising him, giving him strength and feeding him what he needed.\n\n\"More!\" Fentor growled, \"I want more.\"\n\n\"No, friend Fentor,\" Sunburst soothed, \"you have had enough. I understand you want more, but we need to make sure everybody gets a little, we all need its strength.\" He didn't want to give the eastern dragons too much of Nightstar's blood as he didn't know what might happen. He knew it wouldn't have the same effect as it had on him, but these were desperate times and all would be lost if he didn't try something.\n\nFentor shook his head, dispelling his compulsion for more. \"I'm sorry, it's just... it feels so good after... after being trapped in here.\" Sunburst watched him carefully until the surge of adrenalin had peaked and the craving for more of the life giving blood passed.\n\n\"You'll be fine, I know how it feels. I experienced the rush, as you have, but stronger. Nightstar healed my wound with his live blood.\"\n\n\"Nightstar gave you his blood? Mixed it with your own? Not the cold spilled blood I tasted, he gave you it straight from his veins, hot and alive? No wonder you recovered so quickly.\" He lowered his head. \"I'm ashamed. I thought you were dead. I didn't think any dragon could survive the draining you suffered. The Extractor came each day, taking more and more. The dragons from the White Mountain are made of strong stuff, Sunburst the Yellow.\"\n\nSunburst was proud of his heritage, but the forest green standing with him was proud too. He had survived in a harsh land, filled with fearful enemies, he was strong in his own way.\n\n\"I am proud to call you friend, Fentor the Green, the dragons of the eastern shores may be smaller than my kin, but they have huge hearts.\"\n\nFentor dropped to one knee, his wobbly legs steady now as he bowed his head. \"How do the dragons of the west feel about the Extractor? Do you have enemies like him in the west?\"\n\n\"This dragon feels the Extractor is long overdue answering for his horrific deeds, but we need to escape his clutches. I know you want to exact vengeance for what he has put us through, but sometimes we must settle for what we can get.\" He thought of Nightstar and everything that had passed between them, his words a lesson for himself as much as Fentor.\n\n\"We don't have enemies in the west, only dragons. Let's help Nightstar with the others, they'll need calming and reassurance and you're just the level head we need.\"\n\n\"Me? I'm not convinced you...\"\n\n\"Well I am, don't argue with me! Are you sure you aren't descended from the same line as a forest green called Galvon?\"\n\n\"I think there was a Galvon, far back in my lineage. We forest greens are known for remembering our history.\" Fentor looked at him, cocking his head and Sunburst was sorry he'd snapped. It wasn't impossible Fentor could be distantly related to Galvon. They were so alike.\n\n\"Look, you just need to be there for them. Nightstar is a little overwhelming when you first meet him. I can only imagine what it's like for you, never seeing anything like him before. I need you Fentor, keep them calm, while I make sure they all receive some blood. Then we'll all be better prepared to leave this dungeon behind.\"\n\n\"I can see why Nightstar defers to you, he is correct when he says you are wise.\"\n\n\"Nightstar and I are equals,\" Sunburst said, \"we are both dragons of the White Mountain and we will do everything we can to help our distant cousins.\"\n\n\"Fentor! Sunburst!\" Serth called, \"You are a yellow! See Fentor, you were wrong!\" The little dragon tiredly trudged towards them. \"Did you see Nightstar? He is so big... and black!\"\n\n\"For once,\" Fentor said, \"I'm glad I was wrong. Go with Sunburst, he has something for you, something that will give you strength and hope.\" He squeezed by them both and headed for the sound of creaking metal.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Serth asked.\n\n\"To help,\" he replied.\n\nSerth stared after the green then faced Sunburst, \"What's gotten into him?\"\n\n\"I'm glad you asked, friend Serth, why don't I show you?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "Nightstar freed every dragon imprisoned in the Extractor's dungeon, bending the metal bars and using the magic infused within against itself. Reaching the human spell and using it as no other dragon could, breaking the chains that restrained them and removing their collars. He destroyed thirteen cells, freeing seven greens, four reds, one blue and of course, a yellow.\n\nThe captives were all in poor condition, weakened by torture, their strength sapped by the Extractor's leaching magic. But, there was an inner strength among them, forged hard by desperate times. Now they had something to believe in, no longer resigned to their dismal fate. Sunburst had given them hope. Nightstar listened to their quiet conversations as he freed them, heard how Sunburst rallied their dwindling spirits and told stories, preventing them from giving up.\n\nEven though Sunburst had known his situation was dire and he was near death himself, he had persevered, raising their spirits and giving them hope.\n\nSunburst won their hearts and now Nightstar was here to free them. Sunburst took the opportunity to use the spilled blood on his cell floor. His blood. It would seem that he had changed his opinion of what Nightstar was and didn't mind that the blood contained more than the magic of dragons, if it would save them.\n\nIf they survived, he would need to have a long difficult discussion with his yellow friend, there was so much they needed to straighten out, but now, he had hope too. Hope to mend his friendship and repair the broken trust between them.\n\nHe gently pushed his way through the throng of dragons, taking care for such a large creature, aware of his size compared to his smaller kin. They looked like juveniles, small alongside Sunburst, tiny beside him.\n\nNow everyone was liberated from their cells, they needed to break free from this miserable dungeon.\n\n\"Does anyone know,\" he asked the assembled escapees, \"if there's another way out of here?\" His question was met with silence, the dragons still a little awestruck by his presence.\n\n\"Sunburst? How did you get in here?\"\n\n\"I was flying over the forest... \" Sunburst began.\n\n\"I know how you were captured, I meant when you were brought inside the dungeon.\"\n\n\"Ah, well,\" Sunburst began, sounding a little disappointed at not being able to tell his story, \"as far as I know, and my experience is limited, those cells don't have the best view...\"\n\n\"Sunburst, think.\" Nightstar cut him off, \"Did you enter through huge wooden doors?\"\n\n\"It's not the only way in for dragons,\" said the small blue.\n\n\"What do you know Breeze?\" Serth asked the lone blue dragon.\n\n\"There are gates at the end of this row, it is how most of us smaller dragons were brought here. I've been here for months. I think the Extractor keeps me alive, as I'm a blue and less common than the others.\" He looked around nervously then carried on, \"My cell was the last one and I was able to see any new captives being brought in.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Breeze the Blue,\" Nightstar said. \"Sunburst, take Breeze and investigate, see if you are able to find another way out.\"\n\nHe tore away the bars that formed a gateway across the far end of the passageway, just beyond the cell Breeze had occupied. This would give Sunburst access to the far end of the corridor and allow him to search for an alternative exit.\n\n\"If we try and leave the way I came in, we'll alert the Extractor and his men. I might be able to withstand his magic, but I fear his human sorcery would be no match for you and the others.\"\n\n\"We would be struck from the sky with his fire lances. Once you've been hit, you don't stand a chance.\" Fentor said.\n\n\"And they sting!\" Serth said.\n\n\"And render you powerless, once I was hit, my wing was paralysed,\" Sunburst added.\n\n\"How did you get in, Nightstar? You are too large to slip in unnoticed.\" Serth asked.\n\n\"Nightstar's right, we need to hurry,\" Sunburst interrupted. Nightstar silently thanked the yellow dragon, he hadn't shared with him just how he managed to sneak in undetected, but he would know it wasn't all just the black dragon's doing.\n\nA creaking of metal sounded along the corridor and Nightstar froze, thirteen heads turned towards him, eyes of all colours looking for his guidance.\n\n\"Quickly, someone's coming!\" He hissed at Sunburst. \"Go! See if there's a way out behind us.\" Breeze followed the yellow dragon as he retreated into the darkness.\n\n\"Stay here,\" Nightstar said to the others, crouching low to the stone floor and advancing stealthily back towards the huge wooden doors he had sneaked through earlier.\n\nAlong the passageway the metal gate clanged in the darkness. Lamplight flickered off the walls, chasing the back shadows, as four men carrying swaying lanterns came into view. They were dragging flat barrows stacked with barrels and behind them strode a tall man filled with an air of importance, obvious by the way he held himself.\n\nThe Extractor.\n\nNightstar's rage devoured him as he realised this man, this sorcerer, had come to steal more blood from his friend. His arrogant demeanour brought forth a deep rumbling growl from his chest.\n\nThe men transporting the barrels stopped short, looking up into the face of an angry black dragon. He was almost invisible in the darkness, their lamplight highlighting the silver scales on his chest.\n\nPanicking men scrabbled backwards, tripping over each other in their haste to retreat, the last thing they expected to see was a huge black dragon filling the corridor and blocking their way.\n\nNightstar opened his jaws and called on his dragon's fire, feeling the heat rise from deep within his throat, rushing from his mouth with an intense fierceness that surprised him. The action was pure instinct, he didn't have to think about how to breathe fire. Dragon nature took over.\n\nFlames filled the passage, curling up walls and rolling along the ceiling, engulfing the first two men and igniting them like small suns. The two men behind managed to avoid the main blast, one fell in his rush to escape, dropping to the floor and the flames missed him completely. The other wasn't as fortunate. Dragon fire consumed his clothes, setting his hair ablaze and he ran screaming until he collided with the cave wall and fell, lying still. The stench of burning men, smouldering piles that had once been living humans, assaulted Nightstar's nostrils.\n\nThe Extractor stood his ground, unperturbed by the devastation, burning bodies and wooden barrels aflame with Nightstar's vengeance. Arm outstretched, he gripped a long staff emanating blue light. It surrounded him in a see-through bubble, protecting him from the flames in a cocoon of magic.\n\nNightstar met his eyes, the Extractor was calm and unruffled as he peered back through the blue haze of his magic. A sneer curled his mouth, part cruel smile, part challenge.\n\nThe lone survivor of the flames, scuttled like a crab, flailing arms and legs moving in a blur and he sought the safest place he knew, behind the Extractor's shield. From his belt he pulled a shorter shaft than the Extractor carried, leaned out from behind his master's shelter and released a bolt of blue-white energy from the magical weapon. The Extractor dropped his magical shield and used his staff in the same way. Two bolts flew towards Nightstar, one hitting his throat, the other his wing. Small jolts of pain, a pinprick of magic, attacking his scales. If the Extractor and his man through that these would disable or paralyse him, as they had the eastern dragons, they were sorely mistaken.\n\nThe mix of human and dragon within him absorbed the magic, drawing the power from the spell. His human blood, or what was left of the mix of human blood, counteracted the effect, rendering it useless.\n\nThe Extractor let fly once more, pointing the staff and releasing bolt after bolt in rapid succession. Nightstar had the measure of his magic and had already deactivated the spell, letting the bolts harmlessly bounce from his scales, reversing the energy and consuming its power. A fantastical magical light crackled and danced over his black scales, lighting the corridor in a celestial glow, surrounding him in a corona of sparkling magic, neither human or dragon, something new and more powerful than both.\n\nNightstar reached again for his flame, but it was slower to come this time. The first blast had expelled an incredible amount from deep within his chest, and magic or not, it needed time to recuperate.\n\nThe Extractor and his only remaining man, realising that their weapons were no match for this dragon, withdrew down the corridor, retreating from danger as fast as they could.\n\nNightstar's chest rumbled as he desperately tried to hurry the flame from deep within, chasing after his quarry, pushing his bulk along the passageway in pursuit. The Extractor reached the metal gate, turned and spun his staff, whipping it through the air and cracking the skull of his remaining lackey. The man wobbled, dazed by the unexpected blow. The Extractor leapt up and kicked out, planting his boot squarely on the man's chest and propelled him back along the corridor towards the advancing dragon. He leapt through the open gateway they had brought the barrels through earlier, slamming it closed with a clang. Pointing his staff at the lock he released a blast of energy and fused it closed.\n\nNightstar let loose his second volley of dragon fire as the confused man stumbled forward and was engulfed in the deadly fire, bursting into flame, absorbing the brunt of the blast. The Extractor faced the dragon, his expression one of anger and bewilderment. He swiftly spun on his heal and dashed for the huge wooden doors. Nightstar batted the burning man from his path and rushed towards the closed gate.\n\nThe magically sealed lock was of no concern as he gripped the bars with his talons and performed his own magic. As with the cell doors, he countered the spell contained in the metal, bending it to his will as he tore it from the stone that had held it for unknown years, tossing the twisted bars aside.\n\nThe Extractor turned at the sound of Nightstar's demolition, surprise now plain on his face. He muttered something, a curse or an oath, Nightstar wasn't sure, before slipping through the wicket in one of the wooden doors and escaping.\n\nNightstar roared in anger, the noise exploding from huge dragon lungs, his neck stretched forth and his jaws wide as frustration screamed out along the empty corridor, his body shaking with rage. He turned and withdrew down the corridor as fast as his bulk would allow. They would have to act fast now, if they wanted to break free. The Extractor was alerted and Nightstar was sure he would do everything in his power to stop his prize possessions from escaping. He was able to withstand the human magic, but he knew Sunburst and the eastern dragons didn't have his unique resistance.\n\nEven if they all managed to break free of the dungeon, the staffs of the Extractor and his soldiers would knock his friends from the sky. He had better find Sunburst and see if there was another way out, a safer path for them all to take."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 84",
                "text": "Sunburst charged back along the passageway, Nightstar's deafening roar ringing in the close confines of the dungeon.\n\n\"That sounds more like anger than pain,\" he said to Breeze, more to reassure himself than the little blue. \"Hurry now, we need to get everyone to safety.\" Breeze followed, struggling to keep up with Sunburst, his legs smaller than the yellow's.\n\nThey arrived back in time to meet Nightstar as he returned to the group of waiting dragons.\n\n\"Breeze, lead the way! Show them the way out,\" Sunburst instructed the blue dragon. \"There's a gateway at the end of the passage,\" he said to Nightstar, \"but,\" he hesitated, \"a word, Nightstar,\" and he pushed past the black, sniffing the air. \"Dragon fire?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Nightstar croaked, \"it's like vomiting lava.\"\n\n\"First time?\"\n\nNightstar nodded, hacking, the sound like waves on a gravel beach. He spat, saliva sizzled and hissed as it hit the cold stone floor and evaporated. He quickly told Sunburst of his encounter with the Extractor and his men.\n\n\"I wish he died in your flames,\" Sunburst said. \"He is wicked and cruel, an enemy of all dragons, east or west.\"\n\n\"I wish I had ended him. You are right, he's cunning and powerful. Men like him have a knack for evading justice and bending the world to their whims.\"\n\n\"I would see him bent and broken for the suffering he has inflicted,\" Sunburst growled.\n\n\"You said there was a gateway, but?\" Nightstar said, prompting Sunburst to finish what he had started before he became distracted.\n\n\"But you won't fit through... unless... \" He didn't want to say it out loud.\n\n\"No, I have an idea,\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"How did you get in, undetected?\"\n\n\"I had a little help from...\"\n\n\"Our friend,\" Sunburst finished, not mentioning Alduce and keeping his voice low.\n\n\"Yes, the very same. He is smaller and less obvious than a dragon. Look, we don't have time to discuss this now, I will tell you all about it, you have my word, but once we are safely away from here.\" He stared at Sunburst and the yellow dragon nodded in agreement.\n\nSunburst wanted to reassure Nightstar he had changed his mind about Alduce and their friendship. He had discovered more about how he really felt about Nightstar and his secret, as he slowly waited for death at the hands of the Extractor. Having nothing other to do than reflect on everything that had passed, he had decided that Nightstar was a real dragon. Alduce was part of that, but he wasn't either. It was confusing, but somehow, he felt he was right. He didn't know why, he couldn't explain it, even after the endless hours of contemplation in his miserable cell.\n\nAlduce had come to rescue him, Alduce and Nightstar. The man must have risked everything to sneak into the dungeon, but still he had come. And Nightstar, immune to the human magic that crippled the other dragons, had come too. He would accept them both for what they were, dragon and human, both part of one presence, but both strangely separate. One would not have existed without the other, but Sunburst suspected, no, he knew, that Nightstar was so much more than Alduce's creation. And, he thought, he is my friend.\n\n\"I look forward to that conversation, friend Nightstar. I too, have things I would say. But I will hold you to your word, when we are safe.\" He met the black dragons gaze and saw the turmoil in his eyes, words were difficult for him too.\n\n\"What is your idea? Can you not leave the way you came in, the humans won't be expecting a man after encountering Nightstar.\"\n\n\"No, if I disappear, they will hunt you down, pick you off and disable you with their staffs. The magic they use is strong.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is. I was caught once by it, never again!\"\n\n\"Then you will need time to escape. I can create a distraction, occupy them while you lead the others to safety. The Extractor has faced me and I have bloodied his nose, so to speak. He will be furious and will not wish to lose face. Anger will cloud his judgement. It is best to act now, take advantage while he's vulnerable. He will hunger to even the score, prove he is better than a dragon. Hopefully, if he's busy with me, that will be enough to let you escape unnoticed.\"\n\n\"You don't have to do this,\" Sunburst said, \"we could leave together.\"\n\n\"I think this is the only way. Go to your friends, see them safely away from this place. Wait until I've distracted the humans.\"\n\nDistracted the humans, Sunburst thought. Nightstar thought like a dragon, even with Alduce in there somewhere. All the more reason to trust his plan. A dragon's plan.\n\n\"How will I know when to go?\" he asked.\n\n\"You'll know,\" Nightstar said, a hint of humour in his voice. \"Everyone will know.\"\n\n\"Be careful. I don't want to be the one telling Amethyst or Winterfang you're not coming back.\"\n\nThe black dragon reared up as much as the corridor would allow.\n\n\"I am Nightstar the mighty, scourge of the Extractor, blood brother to Sunburst the brave. I am strong, my magic is powerful. I am a dragon of the White Mountain. The time for careful has long passed. Now is the time for freedom and redemption. Go Sunburst, ready our kin. When you escape the city of the Extractor, turn west, fly from these shores and wait for me at the island of the volcano.\"\n\nSunburst stepped forward and rested his triangular yellow head against Nightstar's. He looked down at the black dragon's scales and saw a yellow scale, bright against the dark.\n\n\"Fly high and fly free,\" Sunburst spoke the traditional words. They meant more to him now than they ever had.\n\nNightstar nodded once. \"Higher than you know,\" he whispered.\n\nSunburst turned and hurried after Breeze and the others, he had a feeling things were going to get interesting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 85",
                "text": "Nightstar watched Sunburst depart, the eastern dragons couldn't have had a better chaperone. Sunburst would lead them to safety, he was sure, as long as he created enough of a distraction and kept the Extractor and his men occupied. He was a powerful sorcerer, he knew that when he had faced him\u2014and the man had been unprepared. If Nightstar waited too long he would give the man time enough to regroup, he needed to act now before that happened.\n\nHe advanced towards the huge wooden doors, wondering what to expect when he exited the dungeon. The twisted metal of the gate lay where he had tossed it earlier. Picking up what was left of the bars, he crushed the metal into a rounded shape, drew back his talon and launched the makeshift projectile at the entranceway as hard as he could.\n\nThe twisted metal bars struck the door with the speed and power of a cannonball, wood shattered with an almighty crash and the doors splintered, their hinges ripping free.\n\nThrough the hole where the door had been, Nightstar watched his missile fly out across the courtyard, followed by what was left of the shattered door, wood and metal scattering far and wide, right into the heart of the Extractor's hastily assembled troops.\n\nHundreds of soldiers scattered as the debris tore into their ranks, but for each man who fell, there were many more to take his place. The soldiers were in mixed states of readiness, obviously mustered by the Extractor after his unexpected encounter with the black dragon. The majority of his men were heavily armoured and each one carried a staff. They were better prepared than he hoped. Even being caught off guard they appeared professional and disciplined.\n\nNightstar could feel the thrum of magic in the air, so many men, all armed with staffs of power. He could smell their fear. Even though they stood ready, they had never faced a foe as strong as him before.\n\nThese men were used to subduing smaller dragons, dragons who could be disabled by their magic, weaker opponents that they were prepared for.\n\nNightstar was going to teach them a lesson. They were not prepared for him, for his power, his fierce anger or his unique blend of magic. He would see to their education, but doubted they would be thankful of it.\n\nHe tipped his head back and bellowed, his neck strained and his jaws wide as the ear splitting roar exited the passageway, a challenge to every assembled man that stood against him.\n\nHe knew what he must do, he needed to engage the Extractor's army and distract them while Sunburst led the escape. He told the yellow dragon he would know when the time was right, all he needed to do now, was give him a sign.\n\nNightstar charged along the passageway towards the broken doorway, four legs fuelled by adrenaline and rage. He burst from the dungeon, the remains of the smashed doors scattering as his body forced itself through the gap.\n\nBounding forward, half leaping, half gliding, he landed in the centre of the courtyard, trampling bodies and swatting soldiers. He looked for the Extractor, but there was no sign of him in the ranks of his army. The men surrounding him pointed their staffs and struck back, the air filled with hundreds of blue bolts, crackling and sparking from their weapons.\n\nNightstar was bombarded with wave upon wave of needle sharp bolts, tiny points of agony, burrowing into his hide and jolting his scales. The magic was strong and he fought to resist it, withstanding the pain and absorbing the energy. He writhed, every strike hurting, the intensity multiplied each time another blue bolt hit. He could withstand one or two of these magical attacks, shrug them off with ease and combat the spell, but being assaulted with hundreds at one time was more than he could take.\n\nA man could be stung by one or two angry wasps and suffer little, but step on a wasp's nest and have them all sting you, was a different story. Nightstar had stood on that wasp's nest today.\n\nSlowly he fought back, taking each bolt and breaking down the energy, counteracting the spell, one by one, piece by piece, he managed to fight past the pain and steal the magic for his own. The more he was hit, the more he gathered the magic inside, each sting lessened, each bolt a little less painful than the last, until his body reacted instinctually, his scales taking the human magic and changing it, mixing it with his own unique power.\n\nHe stood, wings outstretched, catching the bolts like wind in a sail, filling his being with the magic that should have killed him. He pulsed with its power, overfilled with magical energy, his scales alive, crackling and sparking.\n\nEnough.\n\nBending his legs and crouching low, he sprang from the ground, leaping high as the strength of his jump thrust him skyward. The men below continued to send staff blasts after him, but now they bounced harmlessly from his scales. His body overflowed with the magic he had absorbed, creating a protective shield. Small wisps of smoke drifted from him where each blue bolt struck, reminding him of something just out of his memory's reach. It was similar to the vision of the black smoke the pearl shared with him. Unknown, yet important. He didn't know why, but he trusted his dragon sense.\n\nNightstar beat down once, his wings lifting him higher, small blue bolts followed him up, dragging in his wake.\n\nHe stroked again, powerful wings lifting him another full length of his body, hanging momentarily at the apex, the downward position of his wings parallel with his body.\n\nPushing his wings above his head, reaching as far as he could, he stretched the tips and grasped for every inch of sky he could take, his body hanging, his tail trailing low, his full length exposed, poised and ready.\n\nWith every ounce of power he could muster, he pulled his wings down, faster and harder than ever before, gaining speed as they passed his neck, a blur of motion, faster still as they thrust downward reaching the bottom of his stroke. This time, he didn't relax and pull them back to the apex for another wingbeat, this time he kept going, following through to the limits of his wingspan. There was no end to this stroke, no holding back, he pushed with every fibre of his being, forcing the power of his muscles, the physical strength of his limbs and the stored magic absorbed from the staffs.\n\nHis wings met beneath his body, colliding with such a force and speed that the came together with a thunderous crack that split the air. A thunder clap louder than the fiercest storm boomed from the coming together of wings and hundreds of men dropped to their knees, staffs forgotten as they covered their ears from the deafening sound.\n\nThick black fog rolled from between his wings as he pulled them apart, flapping once more. The dense cloud of black mist dropped like a stone. A mist created by the magic stolen from the human attacks and infused with the knowledge of Alduce and the power of Nightstar. The black fog trailed from his wingtips, like smoke from a dying fire, the swirling dense smoke the pearl had shown him.\n\nHe rose higher, a long dark cloud of potent deadly magic rolling down and settling on the ground, thick and dark, swirling and alive.\n\nThe army below pulled back from the black fog, unharmed. It sat like a huge cloud that had fallen from the sky, thick and menacing.\n\nNightstar climbed higher, the last of the swirling black mist dissipating from his wings. Higher and higher he climbed, no longer in range of the half-hearted thinning blue bolts from the soldiers below.\n\nUp and up he rose until at last he stopped, high enough. Closing his wings and shifting his body weight forward, he dropped into a dive. Tucking his wings tightly to his flanks, pushing his snout forward and straightening his tail behind, he plummeted back towards the courtyard, the soldiers, and the black cloud.\n\nAs he gathered speed, he thought back to the first day he had flown with Sunburst and the dive he made, almost crashing into the ground. He needed to time this dive to perfection or all would be lost.\n\nThe ground rushed up to meet him and at the last second he opened his wings, two huge anchors ripped through the air, spread wide to halt his breakneck descent. He pushed magic along his forewings, strengthening them as they caught the wind and were forced sharply backwards.\n\nThe downdraught blasted into the black cloud, exploding it outward, spreading it over the entire courtyard like a wave crashing over a sandy beach, engulfing everything in its path.\n\nNightstar braced for impact and his talons ripped into the ground, bending his legs and absorbing the shock, wings dragged behind, two black battle standards declaring his claim to the courtyard.\n\nHe stood in a clear circle, untouched by the spreading black fog as it blanketed the entire courtyard. The muted coughing and spluttering of the Extractor's army the only sign he wasn't alone.\n\nNightstar rose up, standing on his hind legs and unfurled his wings, disturbing the black mist with his movements. With head raised to the sky, he took a huge breath of clean clear air, sucking in as much as he could, filling his lungs to their capacity. Then, he shot his neck forward, plunging his head into the black fog that surrounded him and expelled his dragon fire, holding the flame, pushing everything he had into the cloud. He spun, facing the opposite way and repeated his action, turning his head through the swirling black fog and spraying flames into the dense mist.\n\nLeaping skyward, he climbed from the courtyard as the chain reaction accelerated. Orange flame crawled, slowly at first, through the black fog, bright lines creating a pattern like marble, stretching and growing, gathering speed as they wove through the fog. Crackling and sparking, leaping and jumping.\n\nThe voices from within, the men trapped inside the fog, changed. Coughing and confusion was replaced with wailing and screaming.\n\nNightstar rose higher, he could feel the intense heat from below on his belly, could see the writhing flames creeping through the dense cloud, spreading and stretching, veins of colour changing the black fog, making it brighter. Reds and oranges glowed and pulsed, turning lighter until the courtyard below was covered in a bright yellow spider's web of fire and fog.\n\nThe cauldron of magic, fog and dragon fire reached ignition point, exploding in huge waves of flame that engulfed the courtyard, turning the black fog to intense fire, consuming the enemy caught within.\n\nBlack smoke billowed up from the ground, a swirling ball chased by bright flames, filling the air with a column of cleansing fire.\n\nNightstar flew over the palace, spewing flame as he went, scorching the rooftops and igniting the stronghold of the Extractor. The occasional blue bolt of magic struck him as he flew, but resistance from the Extractor's men had lessened.\n\nHe flew east, destroying buildings randomly, crashing through high towers, flaming roofs and sowing the seeds of mayhem wherever he passed. With so much fire and destruction, the humans would be fully occupied and this would allow Sunburst the opportunity he needed.\n\nLet these men of the east believe in the tales of fire breathing dragons, creatures that terrorised and destroyed for no reason. He no longer cared what these humans believed, he knew the truth and that was all he needed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 86",
                "text": "Excerpt from Alduce's Atlas of Dragons.\n\nThe Forest Green Dragon: draconis vertus arbor.\n\nForest greens are darker than the common green dragons and are slightly smaller in size. They are known for their distrustful and argumentative nature and can be deliberately annoying and obtuse.\n\nThey question everything, believing little at face value and rarely take another dragon's word or explanation for anything remotely disputed, demanding proof or evidence.\n\nThey make ideal candidates for positons of authority, especially when involved in Dragon Moots, record keepers and other similar roles. They have exceedingly good memories and are seldom wrong when it comes to statistics or historical events.\n\nHowever, for all their social shortcomings, the forest green, when befriended is extremely loyal.\n\nNotable forest greens: Galvon, member of the White Mountain Moot and Fentor from the continent of Eusavus. These two dragons are so alike they could be related."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 87",
                "text": "Sunburst waited anxiously at the gateway to the rear of the dungeon corridor, peering out through the crack between the doors and listening to the crashing of metal and the splintering of wood. Behind him were assembled the twelve eastern dragons. It was up to him to lead them all to safety, far from the dungeon and the torturing grasp of the Extractor. No more would these dragons be subjected to his foul deeds, these dragons would escape and be free.\n\n\"What do you think he's doing?\" Breeze asked.\n\nA deafening roar of defiance was followed by the sound of smashing wood.\n\n\"Creating a distraction,\" Sunburst answered.\n\n\"Should we leave now?\" Serth asked.\n\n\"The humans have all gone,\" Fentor added.\n\n\"They were in a hurry,\" Breeze said.\n\n\"Getting ready to fight,\" Sunburst said. \"Nightstar is drawing them to himself, clearing us a path.\" They had observed the scrabbling rushing men through the gap in the door as they hurried to join the battle with Nightstar.\n\n\"Will he escape?\" Serth said. \"He must come with us, we can't leave him behind.\"\n\n\"He does what he needs to do, what a true friend must.\" Sunburst said, knowing that Serth was right, he shouldn't be left behind, but there was no other way. \"He is Nightstar, black scales and silver starlight, he will prevail.\" He would trust his friend, put his faith in the black dragon, it was what had to be done.\n\nThe crackling of magic prickled his scales and he could hear the voices of men. The sound of energy bolts filled the air like angry bees, making him shiver. He hoped Nightstar's magic was a match for the Extractor. Silence descended and Sunburst worried that it was all over before it had started.\n\n\"What is he doing?\" Fentor said. \"It's too...\"\n\nA thunderous crack split the air and even though it was far enough away, Sunburst's ears rang.\n\n\"Get ready.\" He could feel more magic in the air, not the human magic of the Extractor, this was dragon magic, Nightstar's magic, powerful and alive, causing the membranes of his wings to tingle.\n\nThey waited, poised on the brink of freedom, only a black dragon and his sacrifice between them and their escape. Sunburst believed it was enough.\n\nAn explosion filled the void of expectation, ripping through the air and giving Sunburst the sign he had been waiting for.\n\n\"Now!\" he roared above the din, \"Follow me!\" He flung open the double doorway and leapt out into daylight. His eyes slowly adjusted after weeks of darkness, to see the sun once again, to look up and see the sky, it was more than he had hoped for.\n\n\"West! Fly west, to the great ocean!\" He beat wings, closed for too long, enjoying the simple freedom of flight. Rising higher, he led the dragons away from the city of men, away from the hated dungeons of their imprisonment. Twelve smaller shapes rose into the sky, strengthened by the blood from the black dragon, the higher they climbed, the less chance they would be struck by the soldier's staffs.\n\nLooking over his shoulder, behind the flight of dragons that followed, he watched the black cloud rise, bright flames leaping and rolling after it, Nightstar's magic, fire and retribution. There was no sign of the black dragon, only the destruction he left in his wake. He contemplated letting the dragons carry on themselves and turning back to look for his friend. They wouldn't let him go alone, they would follow him, fight with him, and die for him.\n\nHe wished it were different, but somehow, he had become their hero, even though it was Nightstar who freed them. Sunburst the Yellow had arrived in their midst and been the main focus of the Extractor. While the vile human drained him of his lifeblood, he had left the others alone. They had regained their strength and recovered their pride and given them something they had lost.\n\nHope. He had helped them to remain strong and never give up, taught them how a White Mountain dragon behaved.\n\nWhen Alduce appeared in his cell he was broken and beaten, he hadn't believed he was real. He was delirious and near death, ready to lie down and die, but the man he had saved returned the favour, saving him. The sorcerer had given him his own hope back, but it had been a friend who had given him his blood.\n\nHe was a brother of blood, not only with a dragon, with a man too. He had seen inside this man's soul, knew his human heart and shared visions of his life. How could he not change his mind about Nightstar, about Alduce, after everything he had experienced? Their roles had been reversed when Nightstar had given him his blood. They had seen inside each other, been revived and repaired by the blood that flowed through them both, blood created from an ancient magic, a sorcerer's spell and a living dragon.\n\nThere were a lot of questions he wanted to ask Nightstar and he wanted to learn more about Alduce. But it wasn't what was important. What mattered was that he was free, regardless of who had freed him, be it man or dragon, he was thankful. He could accept Nightstar for what he was, he didn't need to question who he was anymore. He was a black dragon and a sorcerer, but more than that, he was his friend.\n\nAs much as he wished to return, he knew he must leave Nightstar to do what he must, to let them all escape.\n\nAs they cleared the city and flew over the countryside, he began to relax, the danger of the Extractor and his men behind them now. He looked back at his entourage and his heart lurched, there were no longer twelve dragons following him, one of their number had gone.\n\nHe counted again, eleven! Someone was missing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 88",
                "text": "Nightstar raged through the city and destruction followed in his wake. With each building he flamed, with every roof he smashed, he focused the attention of the soldiers on himself. The Extractor had more men than were assembled at the palace courtyard. Patrols of staff bearing troops trailed behind the rampaging dragon, using everything in their magical arsenal in an attempt to bring him down.\n\nAfter igniting the black fog, he saw Sunburst and the other dragons rise from the palace grounds, exiting the dungeon and fly west. Small dragon shapes taking to the sky, following the yellow lead dragon.\n\nNightstar still marvelled at the exceptional eyesight that dragons were graced with. He was even able to pick out the colours of each dragon as they followed Sunburst away from the city.\n\nHe drew the defenders away from the escaping dragons, heading east, but the fight was out of them. Once he evaded the Extractor and his men, he would circle back around and join Sunburst. Risking a quick look back, he could see the familiar yellow shape, sunlight catching his yellow scales. He appeared revitalised after the infusion of blood and some of his usual colour had returned. He hoped that he wouldn't be spotted, as he stood out, a target for anyone caring to look in that direction.\n\nA few random bolts streaked up from bellow the line of escaping dragons, most of them falling short. Just as they cleared the city walls, a lone bolt of energy shot from the battlements, clipping the last dragon in the line. The small blue dragon faltered in the air and dropped, wavering as it descended, out past the city and into the open fields below.\n\nThe flight of dragons, led by Sunburst, didn't see Breeze fall. He was the last in line and with no-one behind him to see him go down, he dropped from sight, separated from the others.\n\nNightstar banked west and headed after Sunburst and the escaping dragons. He had wreaked enough havoc to allow them the time they needed to exit the city.\n\nHe pushed through the air, adrenalin surging through his body, spurring him on. He was larger and stronger than the eastern dragons and he hadn't been tortured or drained, so he was in better shape. It didn't take him long to catch up to Sunburst's escape party.\n\n\"We've lost someone,\" Sunburst said, as he drew abreast with him.\n\n\"I know. Keep going, I'll find Breeze,\" he called back, \"I saw him fall. Don't stop until you reach the island.\"\n\n\"I should help!\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"You need to get everyone to safety, trust me, I'll find him.\" The look in the yellow dragon's eyes was one of pain and Nightstar knew how he felt at losing a friend. Sunburst gave a quick nod of agreement and Nightstar peeled away from the formation, turning back to where he had last seen the blue dragon. Scanning the fields and surrounding trees he spotted him, surrounded by soldiers.\n\nBreeze was pinned down by a net, the strands light and thin, but strengthened by human magic. The Extractor's troops, some on foot, some mounted, were attempting to harness the struggling dragon with chains and ropes. Nightstar could feel the Extractor's powerful magic as it worked to weaken Breeze, sapping his strength, restricting his movement and weakening his resistance.\n\nDescending rapidly from above, the black dragon swept down over the fight and grabbed the net that pinned Breeze down. He wrapped his talons around the ropes, his claws tingling as the magic attacked him, and pulled, tearing the net from the back of the blue dragon. He reversed the spell and absorbed the magic, drawing it from the net and making it his own.\n\nBreeze wriggled and twisted, free but unable to coordinate his movements, the energy bolts had temporarily stunned him and Nightstar remembered what Sunburst had said about being paralysed when he had been hit.\n\nMen shouted, high pitched and full of panic, as a larger foe entered the struggle. Nightstar tossed the net at a group of riders, horses and men going down in a tangle of limbs.\n\nHe pivoted back towards Breeze, dropping down beside him on the soft grass and asked, \"Can you fly?\"\n\n\"I c... can't feel my l... left wing,\" the little blue stammered. \"I've been hit by a st... staff.\"\n\nNightstar gathered his wings around them both, as Winterfang had done symbolically with the moot, sheltering them both and protecting the blue dragon from any further energy strikes. With Breeze wrapped inside the safety of his wings, he used his dragon magic, creating a shield around them both, his dragon sense instinctually guiding him. Keeping the men's attacks at bay, he searched inwards, probing Breeze, feeling for the human magic that disabled the blue dragon, repairing the damage and removing the spell.\n\n\"When I open my wings,\" he told the terrified blue, \"I want you to stand behind me. I've disabled the spell that trapped you. I'm going to hold off these men, while you fly west. Sunburst isn't that far ahead, catch up to him if you're able. If you can't, wait for me on the shores of the vast ocean, find somewhere to hide.\" He pushed his own head against the head of Breeze. \"Are you ready?\"\n\n\"I'm ready, Nightstar, and thank you,\" the gratitude obvious in Breeze's words.\n\n\"Now!\" he roared, opening his wings and spreading them wide, putting a black barrier between Breeze and their attackers. He pushed a protection spell from his wingtips, sending up a curtain of translucent red light, high and wide.\n\nBreeze didn't need any further encouragement, leaping into the air and using Nightstar as a protective barrier between himself and the barrage of staff bolts. They sparked and fizzled as they struck the shimmering curtain, unable to reach their intended target.\n\nNightstar watched Breeze as he flew west, keeping low and cleverly using the shimmering red curtain to his advantage. When the blue dragon was far enough away, he dropped the barrier and the curtain dissipated, fading from sight.\n\nNightstar was exhausted, he needed rest, he had used more magic today than he had for months and was physically drained. He turned to follow Breeze and pain lanced into his side as potent magic assaulted his tired body.\n\nThe Extractor rode into the fight upon a jet black warhorse, clad from head to foot in gleaming green dragon scale armour. He sported a huge helm, fashioned in the image of a dragons head, horns protruded from either side, the visor a dragon's snout. Nightstar wondered how many dragons had died to make such a suit.\n\nHe held aloft a staff, this one different from the one he had used in the dungeon passageway. This staff was crowned with a huge red jewel set in a Flaire wrought cage. He pointed the staff at Nightstar and released a second blast. The metal surrounding the jewel sparked with electricity and the red stone glowed, fed by the Flaire energy.\n\nThis was a magic to match his own and he understood the power of the Flaire. In his depleted state, any confrontation with the Extractor would be dangerous.\n\nHe drew his wings around him and cast another protection spell, this time he wove an explosive reaction into the surface of the barrier.\n\nThe Extractor's bolt struck the shield and Nightstar released his hold on the spell. The magic gave way as the bolt collided with the protective curtain of red and the explosive barrier erupted in a blinding flash of light. Nightstar released his dragon self and became Alduce, shrinking from the huge black dragon to the man. He embraced the chameleon spell and used the exploding shield to disguise the transformation.\n\nWhen the noise faded and the after effect of the blinding light disappeared, where once a huge black dragon had stood, there was nothing except a few fallen soldiers, who had been caught in the blast.\n\nThe Extractor's men gave a ragged cheer at the perceived destruction of the black dragon, the armour clad Extractor stood up in the stirrups of his warhorse, scouring the area in front of him where Nightstar had been, then held aloft his staff, inspiring another cheer, more hearty this time.\n\nAlduce remained a statue, naked and exposed. He felt vulnerable and unprotected, feeling the loss of protection from dragon scales and wings, his preferred armour, compared to that of his soft pink human skin.\n\nHe was counting on the dragon magic being used in such a small scale, that the Extractor wouldn't be able to sense the chameleon spell. After all, this was a secret from the pearl of wisdom and no human should be able to feel it, let alone master it.\n\nThe Extractor looked skyward at the departing blue dragon, then shouted at his men, rallying them as he rode west, chasing after Breeze. The soldiers gathered themselves and followed their leader, leaving their fallen comrades behind. Alduce waited, letting them leave, powerless in his present form to stop them.\n\nRed bolts of energy burst from the Extractor's staff, chasing through the air after the blue dragon. Breeze weaved and swerved, dodging the missiles that would bring him down. The blue dragon had spirit and a will to survive, but even if one of the energy bolts hit their target, his chasers would be on him again.\n\nThe soldiers, their vigour renewed by the Extractor's actions, joined the attack, raising their own staffs and sending blue blots to accompany the larger red ones from their commander.\n\nBreeze managed to keep one step ahead of his pursuers, his aerial prowess impressive after his incarceration, but Alduce knew the odds were stacked against the brave blue.\n\nRaising his arms high, he called on the power of the artefact, drawing the lightning from a clear sky and invoking the transformation. It was so much easier, almost instinctual, from the first time he had made the change, standing alone on his starry mountain top. There was less agony this time as his body stretched, pink flesh growing into black scales, long neck and tail sprouting from the small human form as wings grew. The pain of the metamorphosis was less intense, it was still uncomfortable, but now it was more bearable. It seemed that each time he transformed, it was less difficult than before. He stored his thoughts away, a subject to ponder another time, more to record in his journals when he eventually returned to his laboratory. It was bizarre to think of his research at a time like this. As Caltus often liked to remind him, he was always a scholar.\n\nNightstar rose from the ground, lifting into the sky, huge black wings propelling him after the Extractor and his men. The time for definite action was now, as a clarity of mind settled over him. His magic was nearly depleted and he was thankful that holding the dragon form only required the smallest spell.\n\nThe Flaire artefact was filled with an almost inexhaustible supply of power, stored within the rare metal of its manufacture, but a sorcerer needed his own magic to access and control that energy.\n\nNightstar would count on his strength now, the physical prowess of a dragon, powerful wings and strong muscles, tough scales and sharp talons were the weapons at his disposal.\n\nHe cut through the air with an impossible silence, his huge bulk should have made some sound, but was unnaturally quiet.\n\nThe black warhorse thundered across the grasslands, huge hooves drumming as the Extractor stood in the stirrups with his back to Nightstar's stealthy approach. He remained unnoticed by the Extractor or his men, as they continued to launch energy bolts, intent on bringing down the blue dragon they chased.\n\nNightstar tilted forward, angling his trajectory at the men on horseback as they galloped after the escaping dragon, oblivious to his presence.\n\nBlack and deadly, he scythed through the air, an ebony blade of vengeance, intent on the human that had tortured and destroyed an unknown number of dragons.\n\nThe time of reckoning was here at last, pent up anger and rage pulsed through his body. An immense hatred for the Extractor and all he stood for burned in his blood, igniting his desire to eliminate this enemy of dragon kind, once and for all.\n\nFaster and faster his descent thrust him towards his goal, air rushed over his sleek scales, wind tore at his eyes. Blurry tears formed, not from the draught, but tears of anger and pain for all his fallen kin.\n\nHis wings streamed behind him, shedding air silently as he plummeted downwards like a spear, then he pulled them back, opening them wide and creating a rush of intense air pressure, buffeting every fibre of his being.\n\nHe opened his jaws and roared, releasing the pent up emotion he held inside. Anger at the Extractor, the fear of his discovery, the loss of friendship, the frustration of helplessness and the pain of the all the stupid lies and deceit.\n\nThe Extractor turned in his saddle as Nightstar's talons closed around his armour encased body, his own scream joining the dragon's as the crushing grip tore him from the saddle.\n\nThe chasing soldiers scattered, horses fell and men were thrown from their mounts as a violent tidal wave of air crashed into them.\n\nNightstar squeezed the dragon scaled armour of the Extractor, crushing the shell he was encased in. The armour was strong, a protection against most attacks, but against Nightstar's forceful grip it was a poor second. He felt the scales give as his claws pierced and cracked the green armour, sinking with an unexpected satisfaction into the man encased within.\n\nThe Extractor went limp and the red glow from the jewelled staff faded, but it remained tightly grasped in the man's death grip.\n\nNightstar rose once more, the Extractor's limp corpse hung lifelessly below him, impaled on his talons. He could feel the man's blood seep from his crushed body, dripping through his claws as it leaked from the holes of his ruined armour. It was his blood that ran now, not that of the dragons he had harvested, an ironic justice and a fitting end to his existence.\n\nAlduce surfaced in Nightstar's consciousness, his human half thankful of the dragon spirit, a guiding strength that had steered him away from a similar path taken by the Extractor.\n\nHe roared again, scattering the remains of the Extractor's soldiers, no longer a threat, beaten and bested by the creatures they had, for too long, butchered and killed.\n\nHe carried the broken body with him, following after the tiny blue speck that was flying west. In search of the vast ocean, Sunburst and the dragons of Eusavus."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 89",
                "text": "The black and blue shapes of Nightstar and Breeze glided into the crater of the extinct volcano. Sunburst had reached the island with eleven free dragons. He refused to feast on the plentiful wildlife with the other dragons, instead pacing along the rocky crater ridge, watching and waiting. Searching the eastern horizon for his absent friends.\n\nStepping back, he gave the approaching pair space to land. Nightstar and Breeze dropped onto the black volcanic sand, side by side, blue and black scales vibrant in the warmth of the evening sun.\n\nA chorus of calls greeted the retuning pair as voices rose from the thick trees below, trumpeting in triumph, dragons greeting their own, happy and free.\n\n\"Are you hungry?\" Sunburst asked Breeze, cocking his head towards the other dragons. \"They've been feasting on beasts that look a lot like curly bucks.\"\n\n\"Like the ones you told us about when you hunted with Nightstar?\" Breeze asked.\n\nNightstar looked over at Sunburst and he nodded his head. \"Yes,\" he said, \"they look very like them. And on this island, there's not much chance of them running too far away.\"\n\n\"It will be good to hunt freely again.\" He looked at Nightstar and then back to Sunburst. \"If you'll both excuse me, I believe I'll join my cousins in the feast.\" The little blue was perceptive, recognising the yellow and black dragon would want to speak alone.\n\nHe dropped one foreleg to the volcanic sand and bowed to Nightstar, showing respect to the giant black before him.\n\n\"Thank you Nightstar, my life is yours, not once, but twice.\" He hopped over the ridge and dropped down into the trees, trumpeting to the dragons that were waiting below.\n\n\"It is good to see you, Nightstar,\" Sunburst said. \"I'm happy you brought Breeze back with you. I suspect there's a tale to tell about his rescue.\"\n\n\"It is good to be here,\" Nightstar paused, \"among friends,\" it was almost a question. He dipped his head, avoiding eye contact.\n\n\"Old and new friends, brother Nightstar,\" Sunburst reassured him. \"Tell me what happened?\"\n\n\"Anything for a story, eh?\" Nightstar said, sounding more like the black dragon he had known before everything changed. Sunburst listened as Nightstar told of finding Breeze and his encounter with the Extractor. These were the actions of a true dragon, not the human within.\n\n\"And what of the Extractor's body?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Extractor's body and his red jewelled staff will never be found, I dropped them into the ocean, in the deepest darkest waters I could find. No-one will have his power or wield that magic again.\"\n\n\"Did you... Alduce, not desire the staff?\" It was still strange, knowing the sorcerer was a part of the dragon before him, but it didn't bother him anymore.\n\n\"No. Let it lie on the ocean floor, far from any temptation or further corruption. We both made that decision,\" Nightstar said, putting an emphasis on the word. Sunburst understood that it wasn't just the choice of the black dragon. \"It is a magic best lost. Even the scholar in me knows the price is too high.\"\n\n\"And it would look odd carrying it home to the White Mountains,\" Sunburst said. Nightstar didn't answer when he mentioned home. \"You are coming back?\"\n\n\"I'll accompany you home, Sunburst, but I cannot stay.\"\n\n\"Why not? You're a hero! You set everyone free! Winterfang must be told of what you have accomplished.\"\n\nWinterfang. Sunburst recalled his fevered memories when Nightstar had shared his living blood with him. The moot leader told Nightstar he would be banished for a year and a day. He had tasked the black dragon with finding him and bringing him home, but he would still have to leave, his punishment for touching the pearl. Nightstar must realise that he knew he had touched the pearl, but Sunburst believed that without its influence, none of the dragons would have survived. Perhaps the pearl had intentionally shared its wisdom with Nightstar. Maybe it wasn't his fault, it could have compelled him, chosen the black to be their liberator. He supposed that was something else they would need to discuss, but for now, it could wait.\n\n\"I'm no hero, Sunburst. I might have freed the dragons from the dungeon, but it was you who truly freed them. You freed their minds and their spirits. You told them of a better life, of the White Mountains and all that is good there. You won their hearts and gave them hope, even when you were dying, you put them first. That's heroic and that is why they will follow you home, not me.\" He paused, as if searching for the right words to continue, but said no more.\n\n\"And you still carry the guilt of your... secret.\" finally, the subject that neither wished to discuss, but must be addressed before it grew and drove a wedge between them again. The words were difficult to say, but if he didn't tell Nightstar, the black dragon would be consumed forever, lost in his own turmoil.\n\n\"It is my secret too and it will remain so. We have shared too much for this to come between friends. I have had time to think and we have shared blood, not once but twice. I gave freely of my own, as you did. It's not just the mixing of our blood and the insight it gives us both, I understand you now, as you surely must me.\" It was said, out in the open, his decision made. \"We will face Winterfang together, as brothers.\"\n\nNightstar's lifted his head, \"After all I have done? You would stand with me? I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"Then say nothing more, it will be between us only. You have two sides to you, dragon and man. I have seen evil men, and I know that Alduce is not one of them. I admit to having prejudice, but I see things more clearly now. Life isn't as easy as right and wrong, I should know that!\" he snorted, \"I am a yellow after all.\"\n\n\"You will keep my secret, even though you know what I am?\" Nightstar whispered, doubt in his voice.\n\n\"You are a dragon first... to me at least. You might have a bit more to learn about your kin, but I will teach you, if you wish. Your banishment isn't forever and there are others at the White Mountain who will be pleased to see you again.\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" Nightstar said. \"It is more than I could have hoped for, after everything that has happened. You have already taught me more than you could ever know.\"\n\n\"Then let us put our differences behind us, brother black, a new beginning for us both.\"\n\n\"Agreed, a new beginning,\" Nightstar replied. \"Not just for us but for the dragons we saved. Do you think they will be able to cross the ocean with us? They are much smaller and less resilient than the dragons of the west.\"\n\n\"They have tasted the blood of the mighty Nightstar. Now they could cross over and back again, I'm sure of it. They may have been weak, but they are changed, like me. They are stronger now and will fly where we lead. Look at them Nightstar, they are reborn. We've given them a second chance. They are dragons and I'm taking them home.\" Home Sunburst thought, nothing more to say than that.\n\nHe leapt up onto the rim of the crater, turning back to face Nightstar. \"My yellow scale has turned black on you, look at it.\" He looked down at his own chest to the black scale Nightstar used to heal his wound. It had changed too, no longer black, but faded and turning yellow.\n\nThe black dragon looked at both swapped scales. \"And my scale is taking on your colour.\"\n\n\"Everything is as it should be,\" Sunburst chuckled. \"Back to normal.\"\n\n\"Normal?\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"Accept it brother. Now let's feast. I am ravenous!\" He stepped from the ridge and set his wings to glide, dropping down into the trees in search of food, hoping the eastern dragons hadn't eaten all the best bucks. Nightstar's deep voice reached his ears, following him down.\n\n\"Somethings never change.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 90",
                "text": "Eight days later, fourteen dragons arrived at the White Mountains on the western continent of Aurentania. Their party was led by the returning yellow dragon named Sunburst, followed by seven greens, four reds, and one blue. All natives of the eastern shores, newly liberated from across the vast ocean. A giant black, Nightstar by name, brought up the rear, carefully avoiding the attention of the native dragons.\n\nTheir arrival was later to be known at the Second Exodus and Sunburst the Yellow, basked in the glory that was bestowed upon him, as he told the tale of his adventure in the east.\n\nThe Moot Leader, Winterfang the frost drake, welcomed the new dragons to their community and a celebration was held for the safe return of one of their own and the new friends he brought with him.\n\nSunburst and Nightstar were summoned to a closed moot with Winterfang and what transpired inside the cavern was never made common knowledge. Shortly after the celebration, Nightstar departed on his own and flew south. He informed his friends that there was something that he must attend to, but he would return in a year and a day. Much mystery surrounded the disappearance of Sunburst, his return and Nightstar's part in his adventure, but such is the nature of rumours and speculation.\n\nPerhaps, one day, the full story would be revealed, but until that day, the version Sunburst told, and retold, would have to suffice."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "\u2002Excerpt from the private journals of Alduce.\n\n\u2002The differences between man and dragon are vast, like the difference in their size, but their minds, their hearts, their values, their morality and basic needs are closer than I would ever have guessed.\n\n\u2002The persona of my dragon self is an individual in his own right and I am Nightstar as much as he is Alduce. We both exist as separate entities and as one. We have learned to co-exist and I cannot write on a page, why or what that is. I only know what I feel and can finally accept it for what it is.\n\n\u2002Even now, I feel the dragon inside, part of my being and so much more of my soul, bound together forever, two sides of the same coin.\n\n\u2002The voyage I started so many months before, standing naked and alone on the mountainside, calling down the lightning and working the spell of transformation, has been filled with many emotions. Some I welcome and others I despise.\n\n\u2002I have felt physical pain, unbearable agony as my limbs stretched and changed as the fire in my blood burned. The strange feeling of loss when I am in my human form, small and insignificant.\n\n\u2002The joy of flying, free and unburdened, the exhilaration of flight. I have known true friendship, freely given, and unexpectedly welcomed.\n\n\u2002The weight of deep guilt and selfish betrayal and the web of lies that can pull one's very soul into the dark abyss of no return.\n\n\u2002But I have also found forgiveness and compassion where none were expected, acceptance and understanding, and also redemption.\n\n\u2002I never truly understood what it was to be human until I was a dragon, with dragons to teach and guide me. I am much more than a scholar and a sorcerer, more than any scientist or mage, yet I realise now just how humble I am.\n\n\u2002However much I strive for more answers, reach for the knowledge that drives me, I know now that I must stop on that journey and look around at the little things that are equally as important.\n\n\u2002Alduce."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 92",
                "text": "Alduce lay down his quill, leaving the pages of the book open, allowing the ink to dry. It was a habit he had adopted as he couldn't stand to see smudged ink on his precious scale bound pages. He had made many journals from the gift Galdor the Green had given him. Just books, but transformed into something special by the rarity of the beautiful green dragonhide they were bound in.\n\nThe bookshelves in his living quarters, deep inside his laboratory, were crammed with his work of the last eleven months, since his return from the White Mountains. He had written each day, recording his findings and thoughts, using the sorcery of a recall spell to aid him in remembering the smallest of details with accuracy, filling page after page, volume after volume. He had laughed and cried as he wrote, so vivid were the memories, the dragon's blood in his veins enhancing them and the emotions each one brought.\n\nHe didn't care if anyone would ever read them, they were personal to him, but educational as well. His discoveries would read like fairy tales to those that didn't know, didn't understand, but it was his journey, his story, his life that was immortalised in ink, and that was enough.\n\nThe Atlas of Dragons was the work he was most pleased with, it was a factual record of the many different dragons he had encountered, their lore and their lives. The pages were crammed with everything he had learned, but more importantly, there was no record of who Nightstar really was. He had remained objective, distanced his dragon self from this book, to provide an unbiased volume that scholars could learn from, should they ever read it.\n\nFurthermore, he had kept that secret, only himself and a particular yellow dragon shared that knowledge, and that was how they intended it to remain. His private writings would remain inside this laboratory, his eyes the only ones that would read them.\n\nHe stood and stretched, surveying his tiny room, taking a last quick look around now his writing was complete. Opening the door, he stepped into the laboratory and flicked the light switch, plunging his living quarters into darkness. He picked his way through the many benches and machines until he reached the table where the sets of Flaire rods lay.\n\nGathering up eight of the rods, he left the laboratory, palming the orb set beside the doorframe. The room behind him went dark and the metal door closed, the central panel briefly glowing with a faint light, then the lock clicked into position.\n\nThe outer cave had been expanded and Alduce walked to the far wall and placed the Flaire rods in the eight holes, hollowed from the rock and arranged like the points of a compass.\n\nHe turned from his work as a loud scuffling from behind alerted him to someone entering the inner cavern.\n\nSunburst pushed his bulk through the entranceway from outside. It was a tight squeeze for the yellow dragon, but Alduce hadn't wanted to enlarge the cave entrance too much, for fear of his private laboratory being discovered.\n\n\"Are you finished at last, sorcerer?\" The yellow dragon grumbled, shaking the dust and debris deposited on his back from squeezing through the narrow cave mouth.\n\n\"I am. And can you please stop calling me sorcerer, dragon! You know I don't like it.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon chuffed, amused with himself and Alduce couldn't help smiling at the infectious sound.\n\n\"Why do you think I do it?\" Sunburst said. \"You humans are so touchy. Are we ready to leave?\"\n\n\"Humans are not touchy, I think... \" He paused. \"Am I really touchy?\"\n\n\"You've spent months shut up in that cave. You need to stretch your wings.\"\n\n\"I need Nightstar. You're right. Tell me, how does a mere yellow get to be so wise?\" Alduce said, getting his own back.\n\n\"Enough sorcerer, or I'll eat that mangy pony of yours and terrorise the villagers.\"\n\n\"Don't bother my pony, he's a loyal friend...\"\n\n\"That you don't need, now you have wings,\" Sunburst chuckled. \"Relax, the pony is safe, there are much tastier bucks north of here. A dragon has to eat, you know.\"\n\n\"Are you ready then?\" Alduce asked.\n\n\"To meet the legendary Galdor the Green? To fly free through new skies? Alduce, I am more than ready. This little cave and your mountain are pleasant enough, but a yellow needs adventure in his life.\"\n\n\"Adventure? Remember that when you have to explain to Rose and Amethyst why we've been away for so long.\"\n\nSunburst puffed a little smoke from his nostrils. A gesture Alduce associated with his yellow friend when he was being dismissive.\n\n\"I'll just tell them I was off rescuing more dragons in need of my help.\"\n\n\"Sunburst, my friend, you are by far the most magnanimous dragon I've met.\"\n\n\"My charitable spirit and forgiving nature shine like my yellow scales, allowing me to ignore your sarcasm,\" the yellow dragon retorted.\n\nAlduce clipped the Flairestaff together, inserting his artefact into one end and pointing it at the circle of rods and thumbed the switch. Lightning crackled from the staff jumping to the rods set in the cave wall, sparks of energy leaping from rod to rod and completing the circle.\n\nThe rock inside the circle shimmered and a hazy view of a world beyond appeared, out of focus at first, then slowly becoming clear. Galdor's world.\n\nRemoving the Flaire pendant, he propped the staff against the cave wall. He dropped the chain over his neck, the silver of the tiny elegant dragon, catching the light beyond the portal.\n\nHe removed his clothes, tossing them on the cave floor beside the staff, looking down to the yellow shape on his skin, remarkably like dragon scale. He ran his human hand across the unusual mark and his fingers tingled at the dragon magic that was now a familiar part of him.\n\nAlduce stepped from the shadows of the cave into the warm sunlight of an unknown summer sun. He turned back and looked at the golden yellow of Sunburst, his name mimicking the light from this side of the portal.\n\nGrinning at the yellow dragon he said, \"Let's Fly!\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Princess of Beasts",
        "author": "Of The Wilds",
        "genres": [
            "steampunk",
            "furry"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Ten years earlier...",
                "text": "Deep in the night, Imperial Princess Nira hurried through dimly lit corridors. The grand palace at the heart of the Empire of the Black Star was eerily quiet, almost abandoned. The hallways were empty, with no sign of the heavily-armed guards usually posted at intersections and doorways to sensitive areas. Most of the brass gas-lit lamps lining the wood-paneled walls were extinguished, their gentle hiss silenced for the first time in memory. In the oppressive quiet, the only sounds were the swishing of Nira's dress, the whisper of her breath, and the loud echo of her footfalls against the white marble floor.\n\nThe echoes in particular went on a little too long, two echoing steps for every one of hers. A shiver racked her when she realized those were not echoes. Nira paused near the only lamp still working. It's flickering flame cast the entire hall in shades of ghostly orange, and seemed to draw the shadows in at the edges of its illumination. She listened, trying to determine how close her pursuer was. They continued for several heartbeats, but Nira could not parse if they were ahead of her, or behind her.\n\nNira made a snap decision, and hurried forward. She just needed to make it to her quarters, and her personal guards, and-\n\nNo sooner had she made up her mind than a large, hooded figure stepped out from an intersecting hallway, barring her path. Nira froze, setting her jaw. She could turn and run, but something told her she wouldn't get far. Besides, Nira had never in her life run from a fight. Why start now, she thought. Instead, she balled up her fists, and strode towards her taller adversary, sizing them up. In the darkness, it was hard to make out the fine details, but their large size told her it was a sturdily built man, wrapped in a deep green cloak, with a voluminous hood concealing his features.\n\nNira squared her shoulders as she neared him. \"Are you trying to look menacing?\" Nira forced strength into her voice, refusing to be intimidated. \"Because you're going to have to try harder than that.\"\n\nThe man reached up and yanked back his hood, revealing a very inhuman visage. He was not a man at all, but a gnoll, a monstrous humanoid beast resembling something akin to a mountain bear crossed with a furious hyena. Beige-brown fur covered his broad head, with a bristly, ebony ruff down the back of his neck. Pointed ears flattened back in threatening display. Sharp golden eyes fixed upon her. The beast snarled, revealing the many sharp, canine teeth lining his muzzle.\n\nNira gulped, taking a step back. \"That's actually far more menacing.\"\n\nThe gnoll surged towards her, from standstill to sprint in a single, smooth motion. Nira scrambled back, but the creature was too fast. It snatched her around the middle, hoisting her off her feet. Nira kicked and fought, then reached for the things face, intent on gouging its eyes out if she had to. In response, the gnoll dropped her back to her feet, only to snatch her by the throat. He shoved her back up against the wall, tightening his grip around her throat.\n\n\"Cut that out!\" The gnoll lowered his head, his snarling, spittle-flecked muzzle inches from her face. His voice was coarse, but he spoke her language well. \"Come along quietly, and you won't get hurt.\" He flashed his teeth, growling.\n\nNira glared into the monster's eyes, baring her teeth right back. \"Better idea! You let me go, and you won't get hurt!\"\n\nThe gnoll only snorted at her. He squeezed her throat, the dull claw tips at the ends of his fingers digging in painfully. \"You think you can hurt me, Girl?\"\n\nPrincess Nira scrabbled at his furred hand, trying to dislodge his fingers. \"Let's find out!\"\n\nWith that, Nira jammed her knee between the gnoll's legs with all the strength she could muster. Her assailant might not have been a man in the literal sense, but Nira was certain he was still male. She just hoped gnolls kept their assorted bits and pieces in the same place as humans did.\n\n\"AWWWWWH!\"\n\nThe gnoll's startled, yowling cry told her they did. He released her throat and stumbled back, cross-eyed and doubled over. The beast's maw gaped wide, his tongue hanging over his sharp teeth. His ears splayed out, and the creature slowly sagged to his knees, clutching himself in both hands. Then he hunched forward, eyes still crossed, and gave a low, anguished groan.\n\nAt that point, Nira could no longer maintain her composure. She burst into raucous laughter, pointing at the stricken beast. \"Oh Rog, you should see your face right now!\"\n\nThe gnoll, named Rog, glared at her through watering golden eyes. \"You weren't supposed to go full contact!\" Rog rubbed himself, calling down the hall. \"You really kneed me!\"\n\n\"And you weren't supposed to slam me up against the wall.\" Nira rubbed her aching throat, grimacing. \"Suppose we both got a little carried away.\" She glanced down the corridor, towards the hidden alcove where she knew Guard Captain Merriam was watching from. \"How'd I do that time?\"\n\n\"Quite well, your highness!\" An older woman in a trim blue and black captain's uniform, and a pistol on each hip popped open the hidden door, and emerged into the passage. \"That's the furthest you've managed to evade him, and the first time you've taken him down.\"\n\nRog groaned again, still clutching himself. \"Only cause she kneed me in the fuckin' balls.\"\n\n\"Yes, I saw.\" Merriam slapped the gnoll over the back of his head. \"And don't say 'fucking balls' around the princess.\"\n\n\"Yes, Rog!\" Nira folded her arms, grinning at him. \"It's quite improper to say 'fucking balls' around royalty. Who knows when I might pick up your bad habits?\"\n\nThe gnoll only grunted, taking a few deep breaths. \"Hilarious. That'd be a lot funnier if you hadn't just kneed my boys up around my ears.\"\n\nThat mental image left Nira laughing. \"Oh, now that would be a sight to see.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it?\" Merriam rested her hands on her pistols. \"Though, Rog's right. This isn't supposed to be a full contact exercise.\"\n\n\"Well, how else was I to find out if it works as well on gnolls as it does on human men?\"\n\nRog shifted, moving to sit up against the wall, resting his head on a wooden panel. \"Trust me, Princess, that's gonna work on anything with balls.\"\n\n\"Good to know.\" Trina smoothed out her indigo dress, and settled down alongside Rog. She patted his arm. \"I'm sorry, though. I know you're just trying to help me learn to protect myself. I'll be more careful about holding back, next time.\"\n\nRog turned his head to offer her a pained hyena smile. \"Thanks.\" He released himself to give Nira's hand a squeeze. \"I'll be alright. Didn't really want pups, anyway.\"\n\nMerriam rolled her eyes. \"Oh, she didn't knee you that hard, you big baby.\"\n\n\"It's for the best, anyway.\" Nira gestured with her free hand. \"Children are an immense responsibility, and you've got enough trouble on your hands just looking out for me. Besides.\" Nira glanced down the hall, still darkened. The other lamps wouldn't be turned back on till their evasion and defense exercises were complete. \"Raising pups would just get in the way of your drinking time.\"\n\nRog barked laughter, though it quickly faded under Merriam's withering glare. \"Yeah, uh, I don't know what you're referencing, your highness.\"\n\n\"Oh please, you're probably drunk right now.\" Nira giggled, twisting around to jab Rog in the ribs.\n\n\"Three ales is not drunk.\" Rog folded his arms. \"You keep that up and I won't share with you, anymore.\"\n\n\"That's just as well.\" Nira made a show of turning her nose up. \"Princesses don't drink, anyway.\"\n\nMerriam scuffed her boots against the marble floor. \"Oh, how I wish that were true.\"\n\n\"Oh, please.\" Nira pushed herself up to her feet, dusting off her dress. She turned and offered Rog her hand to help him up. \"I wouldn't be half as much fun if I was sober all the time.\"\n\n\"I'll second that.\" The gnoll took her hand, and slowly rose up. He grimaced, flattened his ears, and adjusted himself through his breeches. \"Ugh, my poor balls.\"\n\nNira glanced down, giggling. \"Charming, Rog. Charming.\"\n\nMerriam slapped the gnoll over the back of the head again. \"Manners, mutt!\"\n\n\"Yes, Rog!\" Nira gave her furred bodyguard a sly smile. \"Everyone knows it's horribly impolite to play with your fucking balls in front of a princess.\"\n\nMerriam pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing. \"You're worse than he is. At least he has an excuse, you're just doing it to annoy me.\"\n\nNira turned to the older woman, and offered her sweetest, most innocent smile. \"Why, doing what to annoy you, Guard Captain?\"\n\nThe Guard Captain twisted up the corners of her mouth. \"You're good at it, I'll give you that.\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" Nira made the most polite, formal curtsy she could manage. Then she straightened up, punching the gnoll on the arm. \"So, you ready to go again, or do you need a few more minutes?\"\n\nRog stared at her, a smile gradually spreading across his toothy snout. \"That's what she said.\"\n\n\"Hah!\" Nira clapped her hands once. \"I can always count on you to get my jokes.\"\n\nThe gnoll's grin widened. \"And trust me, Princess, gnolls are always ready to go again.\"\n\n\"Oh, are they?\" Nira quirked a brow.\n\n\"Alright, that's enough.\" Merriam snatched Rog's ear, twisting it till he yelped. \"If you keep encouraging her, I'm going to tell her to go full contact with you the rest of the day.\"\n\n\"Ooh, that sounds like fun.\" Nira rubbed her hands together.\n\nRog batted Merriam's hand away, backing up. \"Hey, so, about a different drill huh? Evasion and personal defense is good and all, but Princess here can't knee a whole invading army in the balls, yanno?\"\n\n\"Rog!\" The sudden sharpness in Merriam's voice silenced the gnoll in an instant. \"Enough!\"\n\nRog's eyes widened, then he gazed down at his own boots. \"S-sorry, I...\"\n\n\"I'm not stupid, you know.\" Nira lifted her head, fixing her gaze on Merriam. \"You don't have to dance around it. I know...\" Cold fingers squeezed her heart, and for a moment, stole her voice. When she finally found it again, each word was its own struggle. \"I know...I know we're losing.\"\n\nThe Empire of the Black Star, once masters of half the known world, now clung only to a handful of territories outside their ancestral home. \"I know they're coming.\" Nira leaned up against Rog, who gently put an arm around her. \"It's why everything's so tense, why mother and father are always busy with the generals, why the home guard's fully deployed for the first time in all my life.\" She rested her head against Rog's chest, chuckling, a bittersweet sound. \"It's why instead of getting to go drink in the taverns, I'm confined to the palace, being taught how to evade enemy soldiers and defend myself from assassins. They're...closing in on us, aren't they?\"\n\nHer only answer was silence, but it was all the answer Nira needed.\n\n\"That's what I thought.\"\n\nNira straightened again, taking a deep breath. Her heart hammered her sternum, and her stomach sucked up against her spine. She'd known for a while now that their once-great empire was going to fall, that the palace she called home was going to be invaded, and that all their lives would be in danger. But would good would it do her to sit around, paralyzed with fear? It wouldn't benefit her, and it sure as hell wouldn't help save her family, her friends, or her people. Nira wasn't about to start running from fights now.\n\n\"Rog's right.\" Nira pivoted on her heel to address her guard captain. She pushed aside her usual bawdy mirth, squaring her shoulders. \"Learning to fight off kidnappers and assassins isn't going to be enough. So what say we skip to something that might really help save our lives, hmm?\"\n\nA smile twisted at the corners of Merriam's mouth. \"So be it, your highness.\" She reached to her hips, unbuckling her hostlers. The guard captain drew one of her pistols, and handed it over to the princess. \"We'll skip to the end. Safety's engaged, but nonetheless, finger away from the trigger, barrel away from us.\"\n\nThe princess reverently took the weapon, hefting it. It was heavier than it looked, but its weight was oddly satisfying. She'd fired such a thing a few times before, but never had any serious training. The Guard Captain's pistols were custom-crafted, revolvers of the finest make. Both were decorated with ebony, ivory, and gold, an elaborate, ornamental design that belied their functionality, and the heavy use they'd seen. A dragon was inscribed upon one handle, a gryphon upon the other. They represented two of the great winged beasts upon the backs of which the empire had been forged.\n\n\"They're double-action, right?\" Nira glanced up at Merriam. \"May I see the other, too?\"\n\n\"They are.\" Merriam offered her the second pistol. \"But you're gonna learn to use one properly and safely before you even think about using both. So don't go waving them both around.\"\n\nNira lifted both pistols, pointing them down the hall.\n\nMerriam huffed, shaking her head. \"Never were one for taking instructions. Alright, then. Let's go teach you how to shoot.\"\n\nPrincess Nira smiled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The present..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Nira grimaced, wishing she could drown out the loud, repeating chime of the warning bell. Her head throbbed in painful echo of every sharp, brassy toll. She pressed her forehead to the cool pane of the brass-lined porthole. The coolness helped soothe her headache, if only a little. Nira focused on the hazy, shapeless clouds drifting beneath them. Thinner clouds spanned the azure sky above in bands of icy white. There was little view to be had, today, but at least the clouds gave her something to concentrate on till her stomach stopped somersaulting.\n\nGods, she thought, she'd had way to much to drink last night.\n\n\"Ya'okay, boss?\" A familiar, female voice drew her attention. \"If yer gonna puke, I can git yer puke bucket.\"\n\nNira chuckled, straightening. She turned around to find Kasis, her chief navigator, intelligence officer, and trusted advisor, standing in the doorway to her private quarters. \"I don't have a puke bucket, Kasis.\"\n\n\"Oh no?\" Kasis scratched at her little horns with a few clawed fingers as she padded into the room. A smirk stretched across her blunt, finely scaled muzzle. \"I figured someone who drinks that much would have a puke bucket.\"\n\n\"I don't drink that much,\" Nira said, taking a step towards Kasis. Immediately, she stubbed her toe on an empty wine bottle. \"Ow!\" Nira stumbled, wincing as the bottle rolled away across the floor. \"That's been there.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I noticed.\" Kasis crossed her arms across her chest, leaning against the ebony doorframe. \"Your booze hoard and your messy lair here's real princessy.\"\n\nNira settled onto her bed to rub her aching toes. \"Yeah, I know, I know. I gotta clean it one of these days. Don't suppose you'd like to do that for me?\"\n\nKasis nudged aside a discarded skirt and a pair of dirty breeches with her boot. \"Pretty sure I'd get lost in here if I tried.\"\n\n\"Only cause-\"\n\n\"No damn short jokes!\" Kasis shook a single, clawed finger at her. \"I get that enough from Rog.\"\n\nNira laughed and shook her head. Kasis was a kobold, a lizard-like race among the smallest of all the world's sapient species. And Kasis herself was on the short side, even by kobold standards. Dusky bronze scales covered her slender body from her blunt muzzle to her tapered tail. Small horns crowned her head. Indigo stripes ran from her eyes, across her ear holes, and down the back of her neck. A bevy of sharp teeth lined her snout, though they were but dull instruments compared to the sharpness of her tongue.\n\nKasis wore a dark gray and blue jumpsuit she'd tailored herself. It resembled a cross between an officer's formal uniform, and the sturdier gear the maintenance and engineering crews wore. A Black Star emblem marked one shoulder, with a navigator's compass and golden lines of rank emblazoned upon the other. Kasis was her bevy of pockets bulging with charts and various tools were hand-sewn onto the clothing, along with carabiners and latches designed to help her scale rigging, or any other part of the great ship they called home.\n\nNira set her foot back down, wishing she could ease the persistent ache in her head as easily. The once-plush maroon carpet beneath her bed was now obscured by evidence of far too much drinking, and not near enough laundry days. It had been a long time now since she had servants sweeping up her every crumb, and cleaning up her every minor mess. Lately, that minor mess had turned into a major one.\n\nThe warning bells sounded again, this time with two high, brassy chimes in quick succession. Nira winced, rubbing her temples. \"Dare I ask what that means?\"\n\nThe kobold licked her nose, glancing up towards the sounding tubes. \"First was general alert. That one, though, that's potentially hostile incoming.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Nira shot too her feet, grinding her teeth. \"Lemme find my boots.\"\n\nKasis held her little clawed hands up. \"Easy now, boss. We know who it is. And you ain't gonna be any use to anyone if you over do it and paint the hallways with whatever you got left in your stomach.\"\n\nNira pressed a hand to her belly at the thought. The worst of her nausea had faded, but the reminder didn't help. \"Who is it then?\"\n\n\"That white gryphon, again.\" Kasis rubbed her hands together, little tail twitching. \"Amelia took the other birds out to try and intercept him. Two chimes probably means they're bringing him back.\"\n\nSo much for sleeping off the hangover, Nira thought. The white-feathered gryphon had been tailing them on and off for weeks. Last time they saw him, they'd fired a few warning shots in his direction, and he vanished into the clouds. The fact he returned anyway did not portend well. It indicated he was more than just curious or hoping to steal some supplies. While Nira knew the gryphon might well just be tracking their location for local authorities, she also knew it could be far worse. He might be spying on them in preparation for some kind of attack. The sooner they knew, the safer they'd all be.\n\n\"How far out are they?\"\n\n\"No idea, but I figured I'd make sure you were awake.\" Kasis hooked a finger through a carabiner, idly tugging at it. \"You want me to get Rog, too?\"\n\n\"Please.\" Nira stretched her arms in front of herself. \"I'll find my boots, and meet you by his quarters, then we can head down to the bay together.\"\n\n\"One's in the hall.\" Kasis vanished through the open door, only to return hefting a black leather boot. She tossed it onto the floor. \"The other's probably in there, somewhere, unless you broke it off in someone's ass last night.\" She turned and left, tail flicking before it vanished into the hallway.\n\nNira laughed, fetching her boot. She shoved her foot into it, hopping around a few paces. Once it was snug, she bent over and swiftly tugged the straps and brass buckles into place. Then she straightened, gazing around her quarters, wondering where the hell she might have left the other. An expansive desk was were built into the wooden walls of one side of the room. Shelves, and display alcoves lined another wall. Both her desk and her shelves were overstuffed with all manner of books and charts, trophies and mementos. A globe covered intricate detail rested near one of several portholes. Maroon curtains surrounded each window, with thin, golden ties holding them open. Doorways lead to a closet, and to her personal bathing chamber where pipes brought water for her latrine, her sink, and hammered copper tub. She had a far more formal set of quarters and offices elsewhere on the ship, but she preferred to sleep in her cozy little room. The temperature was cooler near the outside of the ship, and the ever-present rumbles, clanks, and clatters were quieter. More importantly, here she was nearer to Rog and her other dear friends, to say nothing of the galley and the tavern.\n\nNira moved aside rumpled clothes, empty bottles, and piles of books, till she finally discovered her missing footware. The boot she'd worn only yesterday somehow lay beneath a green and gold dress she hadn't worn in weeks. How it ended up there, she'd never know. She flopped down onto the bed, putting on her boot. Nira brushed off her wrinkled, cream-colored blouse, and the black breeches she'd put on that morning after a quick bath. They were clean enough, and she didn't really have time to go digging for anything.\n\nShe rose up, and went to fetch her gear. She'd left her gun-belts and other weaponry atop her desk. As she approached it, she glanced over all the silver-hued portraits that occupied some of her shelves. They were held beneath protective glass, inside wooden frames. They were all old, from the days when she was princess of more than just an airship. Some of them were pictures of her alongside her mother, father, and sister. Another depicted her in a beautiful, flowing dress, standing alongside Rog, done up in elegant vests and coat and looking horribly displeased about it. The picture next to it was of the sprawling palace she once called home, all silvery windows and jagged towers. They were relics now, treasured memories of loved ones long lost, and a home lost with them.\n\nHer throat tightening, she reached out and brushed her fingers across the image of her parents. Years later, and their memory still plunged frozen steel into her chest. Technically, she was probably an empress now, if she could but ever allow herself to admit they were gone. Not that it mattered, in the end.\n\nNowadays, the Empire of the Black Star consisted only of the grand flying city-ship Cataclysm.\n\nIt was an absolute behemoth of an airship, the largest the world had ever known, made with the pinnacle of her homeland's technological and engineering prowess. It was at first intended to be a great war machine, able to reign enough destruction to devastate entire armies. Nira imagined that was where the name came from. Partway through its creation, however, that all changed. Instead it became a sort of flying fortress, intended to shelter the Imperial family and government in times of strife.\n\nShe'd dubbed it the Cataclysm herself. Not for its firepower, but for a calamity of a different and far more personal sort. The night she boarded the ship, all she knew in life was torn apart, and her family was ripped away.\n\nWhen the palace fell, no one from the Imperial Court made it onto that ship but her.\n\nNira snorted as she buckled her gun-belts on. Maybe it was a more fitting name than she cared to admit, she thought. She quickly checked each pistol, muttering to herself. \"Safeties on, barrels pointed away.\" An obvious mantra, but one drilled into her head years ago. She checked that each was loaded, and the cylinders cycled properly. Then she took a moment to simply admire one of the weapons. It was a gorgeous piece of work, ornamented with ebony, ivory, and gold. A stylized dragon was engraved upon the handle, while its twin bore a gryphon in the same location. Though they looked decorative, they were anything but. They were sturdy, reliable, accurate, and worth more to Nira than she could ever put to words.\n\n\"Miss you, Merriam.\" Nira sniffed, swallowing back a lump in her throat as she slipped the weapons into their holsters. She buckled them into place, and turned for the door.\n\nOn her way out, Nira considered also fetching her saber, or at least a knife or two. She also thought about grabbing some spare cartridges, but decided against it. Kasis and Rog would already be waiting for her, and she didn't know how long they had until their 'guest' arrived. Besides, she thought, if she needed more than a dozen shots to put something hostile down, a sword probably wouldn't do her much good anyway.\n\nNira slipped out of her room and closed the door behind her. She hurried down the adjoining corridor. Lamps in glass and copper fixtures illuminated the dark wood-paneled hallway. Brass rails ran along either wall, something to grasp in case of turbulence. Increasingly threadbare carpets lined the floors, their formerly vibrant colors hidden under layers of dirt and years of trampling boots. A faint scent of smoke tinted the air, though Nira hardly noticed it. There were some things she'd simply gotten used to. There was the smells of smoke and oil, and of too many people living together. Then there was the noise, the constant rumbling, the rattles and clanks, and all the shuddering vibrations they caused. At first they'd nearly driven her mad. Now they were just another part of home.\n\nRog's quarters were a short walk from her own. She found Kasis standing just outside the gnoll's door. A bronze nameplate next to it read, Guard Captain Rog. In truth, ranks and positions were as much honorary as anything else. Everyone knew the basic hierarchy, everyone had a job to do, and everyone did their job. Their mutual survival and continued freedoms depended on it. But even Nira admitted there was something comforting in ranks and titles, something to strive for, or fear having taken away.\n\nMore importantly, it meant something to them. When she bestowed Merriam's old title on Rog, it brought the gnoll to tears. She'd known Rog all her life, grown up with him, and it was one of the few times she'd ever seen him cry. Merriam had meant something dear to him, too. Honorary or not, that title had a great legacy behind it, and Nira knew Merriam would have been happy to see Rog take over in her stead.\n\n\"He's still asleep.\" Kasis spoke up as Nira reached her. She thumped the door for emphasis. It was ajar, and creaked and slightly open at the impact. \"I yelled for him, but...\" A low, ominous rumble, nearly loud enough to rattle the windows and drown out the ship's engines reverberated from inside Rog's room. Nira laughed, more than familiar with the gnoll's infamous drunken snores. \"Not sure he could hear me over the sounds of his whole head caving in.\"\n\nNira laughed, coming to a stop. \"So why didn't you go in and wake him?\"\n\n\"Cause he hates being woken up, and I'm half his size!\" Kasis folded her arms, grunting. \"He'd probably throw me across the damn room.\"\n\nNira tilted her head, looking the Kobold over. \"You're a third his size, at best.\"\n\nKasis hissed through her sharp teeth and grabbed her crotch. \"Why don't ya lick me, Princess?\"\n\n\"And make your Vekk jealous?\" Nira shrugged. \"I'd never heard the end of it.\" She turned towards the door. \"Fine, then. I'll go wake him.\"\n\n\"There's one other thing.\" Kasis gently grasped the hem of Nira's shirt to keep her from going in. \"He's also completely naked.\"\n\nNira smirked down at the smaller female. \"What are you, shy all of a sudden? I'd have half-expected you to sneak a peek.\"\n\n\"Oh, I tried!\" Kasis released her shirt, her little tail swishing. \"I ain't that I'm worried about seein' his goods. But I don't want him getting' pissed at me, for it. Besides.\" She stretched an arm out, admiring her own small claws. \"He's laying on his belly, anyway, with his tail down. Couldn't see a damn thing.\"\n\nThe warning bell chimed two more times, reminding Nira that she didn't have all day to stand around bantering with her friend, as much as she wanted too. \"Rog?\" She called out, pushing the door open a little further. \"Rog! Wake up, Rog!\"\n\nThe door's opening revealed a sleeping chamber that was, to Nira's dismay, not as messy as her own. Most of the gnoll's dirty clothes occupied a single pile in one corner, and all of his empty bottles another corner, surrounding an overflowing bin, waiting to be refilled. The rest of his room was surprisingly tidy. The room was larger than hers, as it was originally intended to house someone of greater importance then the cozier room she picked for herself.\n\nIt held a large, round table with padded chairs sturdy enough for a gnoll, an graceful walnut sofa with garish crimson cushions, bookshelves lined with tomes, a desk with reading lights and another layered in bits and pieces of broken weaponry. One of the walls had been retrofitted to display a variety of firearms, and close combat weapons. An open cabinet held a variety of liquor bottles. Recessed shelving displayed some of Rog's favorite battle trophies, including an elegant silver helmet she recognized all too well. At the far end of the room was a large bed surrounding by a lopsided pile of sheets and blankets. And as promised, sprawled belly down on the bed was a very naked gnoll.\n\n\"Rog?\" Nira called out again, lifting her voice. \"Rog!\" When the only response she got was another ship-shaking snore, she pushed false urgency into he voice. \"Rog, Rog! Wake up! The ship's on fire! The princess is trapped, you have to save her!\"\n\nRog snored louder.\n\nNira scowled. \"Well, that's nice to know.\"\n\nKasis moved into the doorway, folding her arms. \"Enjoy burning to death.\"\n\n\"Alright, time for plan B.\" Nira strode into the room, glancing around for something useful.\n\n\"You're gonna roll him over and let me smack him in the powder bag?\" Kasis chittered laughter, thumping her tail against the doorframe.\n\n\"Now that would get you tossed across the room.\" Nira found a wooden mug, full nearly to the top with clear liquid. She sniffed, and certain it was only water, approached the slumbering gnoll.\n\n\"Yeah, you're right. You better smack him, instead.\" Kasis waved her hand towards the bed. \"You sure he's not gonna be pissed about us seeing him naked and all?\"\n\nNira glanced at the kobold over her shoulder before. \"Oh, I've seen Rog naked before. Besides, he's going to be a lot more pissed about this.\"\n\nBefore she could think better of it, Nira poured the entire mug of water onto Rog's head in one sudden cascade. The gnoll bolted upright, yowling and flailing his arms. Nira burst out laughing, and Kasis joined her. The princess stumbled back out of range to make sure Rog wouldn't inadvertently smack her. His sopping ears swiveled towards the sound of her laughter. He rose onto his knees, glaring at her and wiping water from his muzzle.\n\n\"The fuck, Princess?\"\n\nNira set the cup down on his table, still giggling. \"You slept through the warning chimes, and us yelling at you. Had to wake you up somehow.\"\n\n\"Warning chimes?\" Rog flattened his ears, wiping his eyes with the back of a furry hand. He blinked a few times, and then his golden eyes settled on Nira's pistols. \"What's happening?\"\n\n\"Not totally sure.\" Nira pulled out a chair, and dropped into it. \"Think the birds are bringing in that white gryphon. You wanna put some clothes on and meet us down at the bay?\"\n\n\"Wait, clothes?\" Rog looked down at himself, ears flattened again. \"Oh, sorry.\" He snatched a pillow off the bed, and used it to cover himself.\n\n\"Nothing to apologize for.\" Nira waved at the room around them. \"It's your quarters, after all.\"\n\n\"I dunno,\" Kasis said, still leaning against the doorway. \"You could apologize for using that pillow that way. I was kinda enjoying the view.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself.\" Rog tossed the pillow back and stood up, stretching his arms over his head. \"Lemme get some clean clothes.\"\n\nFrom the way Kasis' eyes widened, she hadn't expected him to take her sarcasm literally. Then again, she didn't look away, either. Nira watched him for a few moments while he wandered around. As she told Kasis, it was hardly the first time she'd seen Rog nude. Gnolls weren't exactly known for their shame, while Nira was about as far away from bashful as could be. And she'd known him nearly her whole life. She'd certainly look away if he wished it, but if he didn't care, neither did Nira.\n\nWithout clothes, it was easier to see the intricacies of gnoll coloration and anatomy. Though his fur was roughly beige-brown, it was darkest along his back, and paler across his face, chest and belly. Black spots and blotches mottled his back from his shoulders down to his rump, and bushy, brown-furred tail. Muscles rolled beneath his hide. Rog's legs and feet were digitigrade, a fancy word she picked up from an anatomy tome she'd once read during a period of boredom. It that simply meant they were designed more like those of a canine than a human man. Which, she noticed, also described what rested between his legs.\n\nRog soon pulled on a black tunic, with a few silver buttons at the top. He fetched a matching pair of breeches, tugging those on next. He buttoned them, then dug boots out from under his bed. Most of Rog's attire and equipment was made to fit gnolls. His clothing lacked the latches and extra pockets that Kasis' had, but Rog wasn't about to go clambering up any rigging or crawling into maintenance shafts, either. He went to his wall of weaponry, looking it over, and finally reached out to remove a massive, double-headed axe from its display rack.\n\n\"You're bringing that thing?\" Nira stood up behind him.\n\n\"Figure you got the guns covered.\" Rog turned around, hefting his battleax. It was simple, but very well made, with a sturdy, ebony handle and very well honed blades. Rog had fancier weapons, and plenty of firearms, too. But he had an affinity for the weapons of old, from the days when his people were raiders. Back then, gnolls were best known for pillaging the so-called civilized lands, long before Nira's empire brought them powder, and and all the terrible weaponry it birthed. \"I'll bring one if you want.\"\n\n\"It's one gryphon,\" Kasis said, licking her bronze-scaled nose. \"Boss's got her guns, plus our birds will be there, and so will Amelia. I think we're good.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Rog rested his axe over his shoulder. \"Ready, then.\" He walked up alongside Nira, smiling, then gave a playful wag of his tail. \"Just like old times, huh Princess?\"\n\n\"Something like that, Rog.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Nira lead her friends through the familiar labyrinth of corridors and brass rails, lit by flickering lamps in brass fixtures. As they passed by the deck's kitchens, the scents of sizzling meat and baking bread wafted through the hallway, temporarily replacing the more astringent smells so common to the airship's halls. The scent made her stomach rumble. All her earlier nausea had already transitioned into hunger, as if by miraculous transmutation. Nira tried to ignore the hunger best she could, hoping the pendulum that was her indecisive stomach didn't swing back in the other direction just as quickly. She couldn't make a very imposing impression if the first thing their prisoner saw was the princess vomiting all over the floor.\n\nThe quickest way to their destination involved a taking a lift. Nira knew that wouldn't sit well with Kasis, and so kept a close eye on her. The closer they drew to the lift bank, the more agitated Kasis' tail twitches became. Nira also knew if it was up to Kasis, she'd sooner climb into the shaft itself and clamber down the assemble of gears, cables and pulleys. Hell, she'd seen Kasis do just that before, only to get yelled at by the mechanics later. Since then, the small kobold had taken to scrambling up and down the stairs as swiftly as she could, no matter how many flights she had to take. But Nira wasn't about to descend half a city-ship worth of stairs.\n\n\"Hey, uh...\" Kasis came to a stop once the chipped red and gold paint of the lift doors came into view. \"I'll meet you two down in the bay, right?\"\n\n\"That'll take you ages, or you'll stumble and break something cause you're trying to keep up with us.\" Nira glanced at the dials above the doors that indicated which deck the lift was on. The arrow's slow downward tick indicated the platform was already descending towards their deck from an upper level. She decided against ringing the service bell, and instead held her hand out towards the kobold. \"Come here. I'll hold your hand.\" There was no trace of sarcasm or derision in her voice. She wasn't teasing her friend, just offering a genuine comfort.\n\n\"Yeah, Kas.\" Rog hefted his axe over his shoulder, then extended his own larger hand. \"I'll hold the other one. You can stand between us.\"\n\nKasis held her hands up, her little pinkish palm pads exposed. \"That's sweet and all, but holdin' onto me ain't gonna do me any good when those cables break.\"\n\n\"Oh, we'll be fine, I promise.\" Nira waggled her fingers in invitation. \"The chances of another mishap are awfully small, especially after the repairs. And no one was seriously hurt last time, either.\"\n\n\"You promisin' is only jinxin' it.\" Kasis folded her arms, her tail tip flicking back and forth in time with her heart. \"I'll take the stairs.\"\n\nBefore Kasis could actually head for the nearby stairwell, a rumbling clatter in the walls announced the impending arrival of a lift platform. Unseen cables squeaked, and a silver bell chimed sharply as the lift shuddered to a stop. The battered, red and gold doors slowly parted, revealing a small, familiar, grease coated figure. The new arrival was taller than Kasis, but not by much.\n\n\"Oh! Perfect!\" The little figure scurried out, wiping his hands off on his grimy jumpsuit. \"Just the boozed up Princess I was looking for.\"\n\nNira laughed and shook her head. \"Hello, Vekk. You caught us just as we were headed to the Bay.\"\n\nVekk was an urd'thin, another of the many thinking peoples who crewed Nira's ship. Along with the kobolds, urd'thin were among the smallest folk in the known world. They were furred, like the gnolls, though if Rog's people were akin to hyena-bears, urd'thin were closer to fox-rats, with a few unique details of their own. The average urd'thin had pointed ears that looked too large for their heads. They also had short horns just above their eyes, big, dark eyes, and thick, silken fur.\n\nTo Nira's mind, Vekk's coloration always reminded her of a gray fox. Most of his face and muzzle were gray, palest around his eyes, and fading to a cream color along his throat. Black streaks marked the sides of his nose and tipped his otherwise rusty-red ears. The same rust-like hue covered the back of Vekk's head and neck. The bushy gray fur of his tail made it look as if it weighed nearly as much as the rest of him, with a black stripe down the back of it.\n\nVekk wore a mechanic's jumpsuit laden with pockets, loops, carabiners, latches, and more. Tools both visible and hidden rattled whenever he moved. Whatever the color the garment once was had long since been lost beneath countless layers of grease, dirt, grime, and probably blood. Vekk was technically her chief engineer, though he'd only accepted the title on the grounds he was able to continue his day to day work as a ship's mechanic. Considering he was her best mechanic, Nira was more than willing to make that concession.\n\nThere were multiple squads of mechanics on board the ship, and Vekk was in charge of all of them. They were mostly made up of urd'thin like him. His people were naturally mechanically inclined, and made for maintenance crew, boiler operators, and general engineers as well. Most mechanic squads also had at least one gnoll or other larger species amongst their ranks to help with the heavier lifting and harder labor. For the urd'thin, though, their jobs usually entailed climbing into places both hazardous and filthy. Some of them were too small for the larger mechanics fit into, while others were too high, or simply too dangerous for the less brave amongst them.\n\n\"That's why I was coming to find you! Make sure you direct the birds to return to the same bay they left. That's bay three.\" Vekk shook a single, grease-stained finger at Nira. \"Do not, I repeat, do not under any circumstances, attempt to open the doors of bay four.\" He dropped his hand back down, shrugging and glancing away. \"Or the door'll fall off.\"\n\nNira blinked, staring down at him. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"The door'll fall off!\" Vekk spoke louder, as if he believed that Nira simply hadn't heard him.\n\nThe princess took a deep breath, then let it back out in a disbelieving sigh. \"What? Why?\"\n\n\"He just told you.\" Rog nudged her, flashing her a mischievous grin. \"If you try and open it, the door will fall off.\"\n\nNira jabbed his arm with her elbow. \"Yes, thank you, Fuzz Nuts, I heard that.\"\n\n\"I think she means,\" Kasis said, striding swiftly towards the urd'thin. \"Why the hell is the damn door going to fall off?\"\n\n\"You know, cracked this, shattered that.\" Vekk pivoted to the kobold, a big smile on his muzzle. \"And hey there, Sunset! Didn't see you back there.\"\n\n\"She was hiding from the elevators.\" Rog rested his axe handle against the floor. \"I keep telling her, they don't eat kobolds.\"\n\n\"I was not hiding from them!\" Kasis shot the gnoll a searing glare, only to snap her focus back to Vekk as the urd'thin walked towards her. She hissed at him. \"Don't you even think about it!\"\n\nIgnoring her protest completely, Vekk strode right up and kissed the side of her muzzle, leaving a tiny smear of dark grass against her bronze scales.\n\nKasis shoved his muzzle away, laughter replacing her hiss. \"Ew! I keep telling you, not when you're all greasy from work.\"\n\nVekk wiped his muzzle off with his dirty sleeve, grinning. \"Better?\"\n\nKasis's eyes narrowed inside their indigo stripes as she stared at his filthy sleeve. \"Worse, I think.\"\n\n\"Love you too, Sunset.\" Vekk backed up a few paces towards the lift. \"Come on. I'll keep you safe. Promise.\"\n\nKasis and Vekk had been lovers for at least a year now, and Nira still didn't know where the pet name Sunset came from. It might well have been a reference to her dusky bronze scales, or an inside joke, or even the first time they kissed, or mated. Not that she'd ever asked. Though Vekk used the term in public, the term of endearment seemed to have more private meaning, and she wasn't about to pry or intrude.\n\nAfter a few moments spent warily eying both Vekk, and the lift, Kasis finally sighed. \"Oh, alright.\" Vekk entered the lift chamber, and Kasis followed him inside. He wrapped his arms around her middle, and pulled her up against his chest. This time, Kasis didn't seem to mind just how much of the day's grease and grime he was sharing with her. She rested her hands across his head, leaning her little horned head back against him. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Vekk rested his muzzle between her horns.\n\n\"You two are adorable.\" Nira followed them in, waiting for Rog before closing the doors. The lift was a square cubicle, with more brass handholds and dirty, mirrored walls. Once the doors were secured, Nira rang the bells indicating their destination, waited a moment, and rang them twice more. \"Ready, Kasis?\"\n\n\"No, but-URK!\" Kasis gave a little yelping noise when the lift lurched downwards. Cables creaked, and gears whined somewhere around them. The whole thing shuddered. \"You did that on purpose!\"\n\n\"Yup.\" Nira laughed to herself.\n\n\"You want support too, Princess?\" Rog reached towards her, waiting. \"You don't wanna fall over again when it stops.\"\n\n\"That only happened once,\" Nira said, rolling her eyes. \"And I was very drunk. Now I'm just hung over. She glanced back at the gnoll, moving a little closer. \"That said, doesn't hurt to be safe.\" Rog circled his arm around her waist. He pulled her up against his own powerful body, gently holding her in place. Nira set one of her hands across his own, idly tracing his fingers with hers. \"Thanks.\"\n\nRog smiled at her in the grimy mirror. \"Any time, Princess.\"\n\nAs the lift continued down, Kasis appraised herself in the dim reflection, tilting her head back and forth. Grease marks now marred her navigator's uniform in a number of places. \"You know, Vekk, you might be keepin' me safe and all, but you're also getting' me awfully messy.\"\n\nThe gnoll burst out laughing. \"Yeah, that's what she-\"\n\n\"Shove it up your dog-hole!\" Kasis snapped her teeth at him.\n\nRog kept talking, undeterred. \"I bet he was planning to make you messy later anyway, right Vekk?\"\n\nVekk tilted his head up, staring at the larger male. \"As a perfect gentlemen, I've no idea what you might be referring to, good sir.\"\n\n\"Smart answer,\" said Nira, patting Rog's hand.\n\nKasis growled at the gnoll anyway. \"You know, you might be twice my size, but that just means I'm at the perfect height to slug you right in the cargo satchel!\"\n\nRog only grinned at her. \"You gonna stand on Vekk's shoulders to reach?\"\n\n\"Nah, he's gonna help! I'll go left, he'll go right!\"\n\nThe gnoll snorted. \"Gonna kneecap me, huh?\"\n\nKasis waved a clawed hand at him. \"Keep up the short jokes, and I'm gonna use 'em like a damn rope swing!\"\n\nThat one had Rog wincing and laughing at the same time. He bowed his head, ears back in playful gnoll submission. \"Alright, alright, you win. And hey! Look! We're here.\"\n\nNira glanced at the dial just in time to see it's indicator hand stop at the deck where bay three was located. The platform lurched to a stop, and when the creaking and rattling of cables and gears ended, Rog released her waist. She moved to the door and opened it, then let Rog, Kasis, and Vekk exit before she followed them.\n\nOn the way out, Kasis glanced up at Rog with a sheepish looking smile. \"Thanks for the distraction, though.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, little lizard.\" Rog hefted his axe, waiting on Nira.\n\n\"Seriously though, the short jokes are gonna get you punched in the pears one of these days.\"\n\nNira took the lead again, letting her friends banter as they followed her. Dirty lamps illuminated signs in faded orange light. Nira glanced at the signs. Golden lettering indicated the deck's various bays and holds, with arrows pointing the way to each. Nira hadn't needed any of the ship's signage in nearly a decade now, but she habitually took stock of them nonetheless. She followed the arrow pointing towards bay three.\n\nThe area commonly referred to as The Bay occupied several decks in the ship's lower reaches. It was actually a series of separate but enormous docking bays and cargo holds. Much smaller craft once filled the docking bays, but most of them had been long since scavenged for spare parts and supplies or otherwise repurposed. Only one of the bays still had working ships. Those were maintained well enough for supply runs and crew transport when they were in safe lands, but without a facility large enough to dock the cataclysm. Several of the other bays now served as living space for their largest crew members. They were numbered, and three and four were often used as staging and departure points before supply runs, or other off-ship missions. Though from the sounds of things, they were down to a single working set of bay doors.\n\nBroken doors would have to be added to the nearly endless list of repairs, restorations, and refurbishments the great vessel constantly required. When she'd first boarded, forced to flee her fallen homeland, the interior of the ship was gorgeous. It was, after all, designed to house the Imperial family, along with their ministers and their own families, plus servants and crew. But a decade of use with few opportunities for drydocking, refurbishments, or extensive retrofitting meant the ship had definitely attained a lived-in sort of look. It wasn't exactly a floating slum, but nor was it a flying palace anymore. Still, the important thing was that it still flew, it still kept them safe, and it still gave them all a home.\n\nIt was strange to think that the only remnants left of the once mighty Empire of the Black Star were a solitary princess, and a small army's worth of creatures most of the world once saw as monsters. Hell, for all Nira knew, most of the world still saw gnolls and kobolds as marauders, thieves, and murderous beasts. Perhaps it was once a reputation well-earned. Maybe in some parts of the world, it still was. But Nira had always known them as so much more. Where the rest of the continent saw monsters, The Black Star saw an army. And long, long ago, that army helped conquer half the world. For their service to the empire, the 'monsters' had earned citizenship, and a nation that saw them as they truly were. People, like any other. Or at least, they had been for century, or so. Now, all that was undone.\n\nNira sighed, and tried to push the thoughts aside. She didn't like to think about what had happened to her home. To Rog's home. She could only hope that things had at least settled down, and for the average citizen, they'd returned to something akin to normalcy. Still, if grievous wrongs were so easily forgiven, they never would have been invaded in the first place.\n\nA murmuring din rolling down the wood-paneled corridor drew her attention. A sizable crowd had gathered up ahead, near the entryway to bay three. It looked like the alarm chimes had half the ship turning out to see if the birds were returning with a prisoner. There were urd'thin and gnoll mechanics, all in grease-stained jumpsuits. Some of the gnolls had immense wrenches, hammers, and other tools hanging from their clothes. Nira wondered if they'd been working on the broken door Vekk warned them about. A couple tall, scaly va'chaak cargo workers stood around, as well. A few kobolds in various uniforms had climbed up stacks of crates shrouded in cargo netting. Nira was pleased to see that none of the ship's gunnery officers or cannoneers were there. The chimes should have sent them all to their stations, just in case.\n\n\"Move aside!\" Rog called out, his deep, snarling voice reverberating down the hall. \"Princess coming through!\"\n\nThe crowds ahead quickly parted, many offering greetings as Nira and friends passed. She did her best to return as many greetings as she could, though she gave up on that when three loud, sharp chimes rang out above the noise of the crowd. Nira picked up her pace, boot heels thumping against the floorboards in quick staccato rhythm.\n\n\"That's the close-in warning bells.\" Kasis hurried along at Nirra's side, needing two swift steps for every one the princess took.\n\n\"I know.\" Nira set her jaw, and tensed, listening intent. When no cannons or other gunfire rang out, she relaxed again, but only slightly. That just confirmed their suspicions that it was likely Amelia returning, and escorting in a prisoner. \"Let's just hope whoever she's bringing back behaves themselves.\"\n\nAhead of them, a female gnoll in old studded armor and with a rifle slung over her shoulder pulled open one of the large sliding doors to bay three. Nira thanked her, and asked her to secure the doors again behind them, until they knew who, and what, they were dealing with. As soon as the four of them passed through the door, the gnoll did as asked. The door slid shut behind them, and the locking bars clicked into place.\n\nCold wind swirled inside the rectangular bay, rustling her clothes and buffeting her hair. Nira pushed dark strands out of her eyes, looking around. Wooden crates and iron-banded barrels lined the room. They were stacked in neat, orderly rows, lashed together with heavy ropes and further secured with layers of cargo netting. A handful of armored gnolls and va'chaak stood guard, hefting heavy rifles. They gave Nira casual salutes, but quickly refocused their attention on the ramp leading to the outside world.\n\nThick, woven landing pads lined the long ramp leading to the exterior doors, already open. Low-lying clouds drifted by beneath them. The Cataclysm wasn't flying all that high, but this part of the world often saw low, thick cloud cover. It helped keep them hidden, but it also meant that somedays they had to rely on Kasis and her topographic charts to ensure they weren't about to fly into a mountain. Nira took a step towards the ramp, peering down at the clouds. Even after years aboard the ship, seeing them from above still-\n\nAll at once, a great, gray-feathered beast erupted from the clouds, leaving them swirling in its wake. Massive wings beat the air, and the creature shot straight up into the opening, snatching at the ramp. Sharp black talons dug into the woven mats, catching hold. Nira scrambled back at the beast swiftly scaled the ramp.\n\n\"Back! Get back!\" The creature snapped a sharp black beak, pushing Rog back with an outstretched wing, sweeping Nira aside with a feathered tail. \"Here they come!\"\n\nNira knew the beast, of course. Her name was Lissir, and she was one of several female gryphons aboard the ship. Pale gray feathers covered her vaguely hawk-like head, and neck, while her vast wings were a far darker gray, peppered with black. Her colors grew paler still across her chest and underbelly, where the feathers gradually gave way to silken fur. The same soft gray fur coated all four limbs, with her hind legs darker than her front, and her tail feathers nearly black.\n\nLissir's pointed ears swiveled towards the ramp, and she turned towards it, hunkering down into a defensive crouch. \"Be ready!\"\n\n\"For what?\" Nira swiftly unbuckled one of her pistols and drew it, just in case. For now, she kept the safety engaged, and the barrel pointed at the floor.\n\nBefore Lissir could answer, a second gryphon emerged from the wall of clouds, thumping soundly onto the landing ramp. This one was a little larger and bulkier than Lissir, which indicated it was probably male. Both his feathers and his fur were stark white almost everywhere, from his avian head all the way to his tail. Ebony tips lined the feathers of his tail, and his wings, as if they'd been delicately dipped in ink. As soon as he had his claws in the landing pad, he froze, then hissed up at Lissir, yellowy beak part.\n\nLissir hissed right back at him. \"Get up here, down on your belly! Now!\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should make me!\" Instead of moving up the ramp, the white gryphon held his ground. \"I bet you won't be so tough without your friend pointing her rifle at me!\"\n\nNira lifted her pistol in a single, smooth motion, flicking off the safety. She aimed it at the gryphon, and following her lead, all the gathered guards did the same with their own guns. \"Does as she says, Bird.\"\n\nThe male gryphon snapped his attention to Nira, bright blue eyes focusing on her pistol. He glanced at the other guards, then gave a low, frustrated snarl. \"Oh, very well.\"\n\nAs he dragged himself up the ramp, Nira moved to the side, making room. Lissir pivoted to continue facing him, her own reddish eyes narrowed and fixed upon the male. At least, Nira assumed he was male. A quick glance back between his hind legs confirmed her suspicions. She took a few steps back, waving for her guards to do the same. She wanted to keep plenty of room between them just in case the white gryphon decided to try his luck, or worse, go down fighting.\n\nLissir took a breath, then gave a sharp, keening cry. In the closed confines of the docking bay, the sound was painfully loud, smothering the rushing wind as it reverberated off the walls. From outside the ship came an answering cry. A moment later, and Lissir's sister Sivik finally hurtled up out of the clouds. Where Lissir and the white male thumped down onto the ramp, Sivik alighted delicately, claws curling into the traction mates.\n\nSivik was a little smaller and thinner than her sibling, and with colors in opposing pattern. Where Lissir was dark, Sivik was pale, and vice versa. Sivik's head and forepaws were like dark storm clouds, her wings and tail like pale ash. Dark barring marked the underside of her wings. She shared her sister's striking reddish eyes, but where Lissir preferred to fly unencumbered, Sivik often carried a rider.\n\nToday was no exception, as Sivik carried the ship's finest long distance sharpshooter, a human woman named Amelia. Amelia currently sat buckled into a custom flight saddle, strapped around the gryphon with a patchwork harness of black leather and brass buckles. She wore a long, fur-lined leather flight jacket, with supply pouches and belts of spare rounds tucked away inside. Flight goggles clung to her face as she kept her long-barreled rifle snug against her shoulder. Amelia sighted down her rifle at the male gryphon as Sivik crested the ramp.\n\n\"Down, spy!\" Amelia snarled, her rifle following the male gryphon's every move. \"On your belly! Now! I warned you twice already, you want me to blow your fuckin' gryphon nuts off?\"\n\nThe male gryphon spun away from her, backing up till his hind end bumped against a stack of netting-clad crates. \"Let me guess, they only keep you around for your descriptive threats?\"\n\nNira drew her second pistol, flicked the safety off, and fired a single shot down the vacated ramp, out the opening. The report was deafening, its echo nearly as loud. The white gryphon cried out, clapping a paw over one of his sensitive ears. The others winced, but the shot had the desired effect, drawing everyone's attention back to her, and for a moment, shutting them up.\n\n\"You.\" Nira waved one of her pistols at the male gryphon, her voice as white-hot as her pistol's smoking barrel. \"Amelia ain't joking. The next bullet fired is going in you. So do as she says, and get your feathery ass down on your belly.\" She softened her tone, just a little. \"No one needs to get hurt. Not us, not you.\"\n\nThe snowy gryphon glared at her, but slowly did as she asked, easing himself down onto his belly. He stretched his forelegs out before, then turned his forepaws over, his pinkish pads exposed, and claws retracted. \"Very well. I am yours.\"\n\n\"Damn right you are.\" Amelia kept her rifle leveled at his head, even as she spoke to Nira. \"This is him, alright. The one that's been spying on us. He tried to speed off when we intercepted him, so I fired a warning shot right over his head. Made sure he knew he couldn't outfly a bullet. Made him follow Lissir back so we could find out who he is, and why the fuck he's been following us.\"\n\n\"Good work, you three.\" Nira tucked one pistol away, glancing around. \"Everybody good?\"\n\nShe got quick confirmation from everyone but poor Vekk. The urd'thin was busy rubbing both his oversized ears, wincing. When he spotted her looking at him he paused, head tilted. \"What'd you say?\"\n\nNira signaled for a few of the guards to start closing the door. \"I said, are you good? Your ears alright?\"\n\n\"What?\" Vekk raised his voice. \"Speak up!\"\n\nKasis put her hand on Vekk's shoulder. \"He needs a minute! He'll be alright.\"\n\nNira turned her attention back on the gryphon, advancing towards him. Rog followed at her side, his axe hefted in both hands. \"Alright then, you heard Amelia. Who are you, and why the fuck are you following us?\"\n\nThe white gryphon only tilted his head. \"I'm an aeronautical enthusiast.\"\n\n\"Uh huh.\" The princess idly spun her pistol around her fingers. \"No name, huh? You got a rank or anything you wanna give us, instead? Cause I'm guessing you're not exactly some wandering hunter from a local clan.\"\n\nThe gryphon only shrugged his black-edged wings.\n\n\"Fine then.\" When Nira's pistol was a little cooler, she flicked the safety back on and tucked it away. \"I'm gonna call you Snowballs.\"\n\nSnowballs hissed at her. \"Don't you dare!\"\n\n\"It fits.\" Savik flicked a wing towards him, gesturing with it. \"He's a snow gryphon, and he's male. And he's a city bird, so he's probably an easily offended prude.\"\n\nNira shot the female a grin. \"I didn't think gryphons could be offended, let alone prudish.\"\n\n\"I am not prudish!\" Snowballs thumped a paw against the ground. \"Nor am I-\"\n\n\"He's probably a virgin, too.\" Lissir settled onto her haunches, her beak parted and ears splayed in smug gryphon smile. \"I don't think he's very old. Educated. Probably brainwashed.\"\n\nSnowballs turned his head to Lissir, growling at her. \"I am not brainwashed.\"\n\nLissir tilted her head. \"So you are a virgin.\"\n\nAt nearly the same time, Sivik asked, \"Have you mounted and fucked anyone yet?\"\n\n\"No!\" Snowballs slapped his paw against the floor again, only to realize what he'd said. He snapped his beak at Sivik, flattening his ears at her laughter. \"I was answering the other question!\"\n\nSivik turned her head to make a show of preening one of her pale gray wings. \"It's just the same. I hear snow gryphon males are finished as soon as they started, anyway.\"\n\n\"So, city bird?\" Nira glanced at the two females. \"Is that in the literal sense?\"\n\nLissir nodded, following her sister's lead and preening. \"Yeah. Raised among humans, basically. A lot of snow gryphons are. Golden Union used to breed them as mounts and pets.\"\n\n\"Watch your mouth!\" Snowballs shook himself, snarling. \"We're-\"\n\n\"Golden Union?\" A shiver ran through Nira's core, and anger blossomed in its wake. \"You're fucking Golden Union?\" She stormed towards the gryphon, a hand already on her pistol again. \"They sent you after us?\"\n\n\"Easy, Princess,\" Rog said, curling an arm around her waist to hold her back. \"He can't tell us nothin' if you blow his brains out.\"\n\nAmelia smiled from behind her rifle. \"Why do you think I was aimin' for his nuts?\"\n\nNira took a deep breath, trying to tamp down on her anger. The Golden Union was responsible her homeland's ruin, for her life's greatest cataclysm. But up until now, they'd had a truce, of sorts. They hadn't come after her, and she hadn't turned the Cataclysm against them, or made any attempt to return home and take her throne. So why the hell would they start sending spies after her now?\n\nWhen she'd collected herself, Nira patted Rog's hand. She was thankful for his comfort. Strange that a gnoll, a creature once known for violence and fury, could be so calming to her. When Rog released her, she advanced on the gryphon again.\n\n\"Alright, Bird. Either you start talking?\" She jerked her thumb at Rog. \"Or my gnoll friend here starts lopping things off with his axe.\"\n\nRog flashed the gryphon a toothy grin, hefting his battleax. \"See, Princess? Told you this would come in handy.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Nira glared at the white-feathered gryphon, her blood boiling. If he truly worked for the Golden Union, she'd never be able to let him go. The Golden Union was the name given to the grand coalition of nations had overthrown the Empire of the Black Star. Where once Nira's people ruled half the known world, now there was only the Golden Union. They believed themselves heroes, and liberators. But Nira saw only self-righteous bullshit. For every so-called freedom they granted, came another they took away. To free one village, they'd burn another. Gnolls and kobolds slaughtered, their deaths praised as the vanquishing of 'monsters'. The great dragons sent by the Empire to rule over provinces called out as demons, and hunted down by dragon-slaying warships. Cathedrals built atop the nesting grounds of 'vermin', worship of their gods enforced by steel and lead.\n\nMaybe they'd had good intentions, once. Though the Empire saw its ancestral conquests as bringing peace to a once-divided region, and gave those once seen as monsters a chance to be seen as people, not everyone saw it that way. Oceans of blood were shed during a century of expansion, but a century more had passed since. Still, Nira was not na\u00efve. She knew those were wounds even time could not heal.\n\nAnd yet, the Union had a chance, in Nira's youth, to end their own campaign far earlier. The Empire offered them a peace treaty, a chance to not only keep their early territorial gains, but to work with the Empire to negotiate, to try and resolve all their myriad differences without further bloodshed. But the Union refused. To all their self-righteous leaders, Empire itself was just another monster to be slain for their so-called gods.\n\nNira hated the Union. They'd torn her home apart, murdered most of her family, her friends, slaughtered her people. They'd forced her from her home, and though they had not pursued her over the last decade, neither was she welcomed in any land they, or their allies controlled. She wasn't even allowed to try and communicate with survivors back home. She knew her sister lived, but little else.\n\nYet what sometimes angered Nira the most about the Union was their hypocrisy. They claimed themselves saviors, righting the wrongs of history, and yet all they did was commit the very same atrocities they swore they were avenging. Nira knew it didn't take a damn historian to see how this was all going to play out. Someday, long after she was gone, some band of rebellious rabble would rise, forge an army, and annihilate the union.\n\nThe cycle of bloodshed would continue, and Nira wanted no part of it.\n\nWhen she first took over the airship, she wanted to avenge her family, to attack the Union, to raise an army and fight back. Over the years, she'd accepted the fact to do so would be suicide. Now, her responsibility was to the ship's crew. In its own way, the Cataclysm was the Empire of the Black Star. These people, these so-called monsters, they were her family now, and the would do everything in her power to keep them safe.\n\nAnd if this Union spy of a gryphon put them in danger? She'd put a bullet in his brain herself.\n\n\"Alright, Bird.\" Nira drew her pistol, the one with the gryphon on it, and tapped it's barrel against her holster. \"Talk, before Rog starts lopping claws off. You work for the Union?\"\n\nThe gryphon did not reply at first. Instead, he made a show of stretching out his forelegs. A great yawn split his yellow beak, and he splayed his massive front paws, long brown talons unsheathed. \"These claws?\" The gryphon tilted his head, sizing Rog up. \"He'll have to get awfully close.\"\n\nThe beast's size dismayed her. He was bigger in every way than her own gryphon friends. Hell, much as she hated to admit it, he was one of the largest gryphons she'd seen. While she'd never bet against Lissir and Sivik in a fight, this spy was more than large enough to hold his own and give them both hell, if it came to it. If the average gryphon was close in size to the larger brown bears that roamed the thick forests, than this male was closer to the polar bears that hunted the icy tundra.\n\nRog licked his muzzle, stepping forward. \"Ready when you are, shit-pigeon.\"\n\nThe gryphon merely sunk his claws into the floor, and scratched deep lines in the wood as he retracted his legs. \"What was it you were asking again, Girl?\"\n\nNira grit her teeth, trying to keep her calm. \"Do you work for the Golden Union?\"\n\nFinally, the white-feathered beast cocked his head, his beak half-open and ears splayed in gryphon smirk. \"I don't remember.\"\n\nNira held her gun up. \"How'd you like me to pistol-whip that smirk off your beak?\"\n\nThe gryphon narrowed his icy blue eyes. \"How'd you like me to bite that hand off?\"\n\nAll around her, her crew stepped closer, rifles pointed at the white gryphon. Rog hefted his axe, while Kasis and Vekk clambered up cargo netting, seeking a higher vantage. Both had produced smaller pistols usually kept hidden in their clothing.\n\nWith one free hand, Amelia unbuckled her safety straps. Without taking her eyes or her aim off the gryphon, she swung a leg over Sivik's back and hopped to the floor. \"Bet he'd drop the attitude if I put one through his paw.\"\n\nThe white gryphon only snapped his beak at her. \"You'd better put one through my eye next, female.\"\n\nAmelia shrugged. \"That can be arranged.\"\n\n\"You don't seem to understand the situation you're in, gryphon.\" Nira took a step closer, waving her pistol. She was careful to remain outside his range, though she wasn't totally sure she'd be clear if he suddenly lunged. She'd just have to rely on Amelia's sure-handed aim to put a round in the beast's brain before he could shred her too badly. \"There's over a dozen guns pointed at you, and-\"\n\n\"And you don't seem to understand that your threats sound just like everyone else's.\" The gryphon lifted a black-tinged forepaw, waving it a circle. \"Threats which are empty, until you've proven you'll make good on them. And making good on most of yours would either kill me, or leave me in agony the likes of which would render me incapable of answering the questions which are so clearly burning a hole in your brain.\" He set his paw back down.\n\n\"Used to being threatened, are you Snowballs?\" Lissir gave a mocking coo. \"Poor snow gryphons, so mistreated by the Union.\"\n\nSnowballs gave a low, menacing growl, shifting his weight. \"Either shoot me, or bring me your leader so I can hold a civilized conversation. Until then?\" The gryphon clacked his beak. \"Get fucked.\" He glanced back and forth between Sivik and Lissir. \"You two especially.\"\n\nBoth female gryphons hissed, but before they could reply, Nira held up her free hand to ask for their silence. They'd have plenty of time to teach him some manners later. \"Bring you our leader?\" For the first time, Nira felt as if she held an advantage. \"Who is it you wish to speak with, Gryphon?\"\n\nThe gryphon slowly swung his head around to fix his gaze on here. \"Well, Girl, it is my understanding that-\"\n\nAnd that Rog kicked that advantage out of the airship and sent it tumbling down to earth. \"You know who you're talking too, Bird?\" He stormed forward, waving his axe at the princess. \"This is Imperial Princess Nira, of the Empire of the Black Star!\"\n\nThe gryphon lifted his head, his ears perked. \"Is it?\"\n\nIt occurred to her in that moment, that this gryphon might be here to kill her. Nira swiftly drew her other pistol, flicking both safeties off. The pieces wouldn't fit, though. If that was true, why wouldn't he have gotten himself caught earlier? But now that Rog had let the truth slip his tongue, she needed to be all the more cautious, just in case.\n\n\"Damn right it is!\" Rog gestured with his axe again. \"You address Princess Nira, the hard-fighting, hard-drinking, hard-fucking captain of the Cataclysm! So start addressing her properly, before I stomp your disrespectful beak in!\"\n\nNira shifted her gaze to Rog for just a moment, unable to hold back an amused smile despite the tension in the moment. \"Did you just describe me as hard-fucking?\"\n\nThe gnoll grinned at her while the other guards kept the gryphon covered. \"Well, aren't you?\"\n\nNira chuckled, nodding once. \"Carry on, Guard Captain.\"\n\nRog thumped his axe handle down against the floor, his voice rising into a forceful snarl. \"You wanted to speak to our leader? Start speakin'.\"\n\n\"So you're Princess Nira?\" The gryphon ignored Rog, focusing his attention on Nira. \"You should have said so in the first place.\"\n\nAs much as Nira wanted to point out the stupidity of that statement, she knew there was little reason to do so. \"I am. Why, you here to kill me?\" She lifted both pistols, aiming them squarely at the gryphon's head. \"Now's your chance, if you think you're quick enough.\"\n\n\"I don't think anyone's quick enough to avoid bullets.\" The gryphon slowly gazed around at all the firearms pointed his way. \"Let alone that many of them. No, if I was here to kill you...\" He slowly pushed himself up onto his haunches, every weapon in the room following him. \"I'd do it when I had a far better chance of success.\"\n\nNira clenched her jaw. \"That wasn't a no.\"\n\nThe gryphon only smiled, shrugging his wings. \"No, it wasn't. Maybe I am here to kill you.\"\n\nAmelia shifted her position, taking a step to the side, ensuring she had a clear shot at the gryphon's head without risking any crossfire. \"Just gimme the order, boss, I'll put him down here and now. You'll have a few new feather pillows by sundown.\"\n\n\"Does the girl with the rifle ever shut up?\" Snowballs stretched out his black-feathered wing, using it to shield his head from Amelia's view.\n\n\"You know feathers don't stop bullets, don't you?\" Amelia shifted her aim, lower, just past the gryphon's shoulder. \"And I can just shoot you in the heart, instead of the head, anyway.\"\n\nSnowballs snapped his beak. \"You ever shoot a creature my size in the heart, before? If your round makes it that far-\"\n\n\"Oh, it'll get there, Bird.\" Amelia took a step closer. \"Count on it.\"\n\n\"Then count on me living just long enough afterwards to tear your princess limb from limb!\" The gryphon hissed, then held up his forepaws towards Nira, pads up in supplication. \"Which, I assure you and your trigger-happy crew, I have no desire to do. In fact, if you'd all lower your guns, I think we'd all breathe easier.\" Slowly, the gryphon folded his wing back against his body, exposing his head for Amelia and the other guards again. \"I assure you that despite my bravado, I've no desire to be shot in the head, the heart, the paws...\" He glanced sideways, glaring at Amelia. \"And certainly not the testicles.\"\n\nAmelia only smirked at him, returning her aim to his head. \"I ain't lowerin' shit till you're in shackles.\"\n\nNira took a deep breath, considering the situation. If the gryphon really wanted to attack her, she was pretty sure Amelia could drop him. And if Amelia missed...Nira wasn't convinced she'd have time to put the bird down herself at such close proximity. At least, not before he'd already opened her up. They'd probably end up killing each other. Grinding her teeth, she made a decision to try and deescalate things, just a little.\n\n\"Alright, Gryphon. I'll give you a chance.\" She sunk a pistol back into its holster, then waggled a single finger at him. \"One chance. I'll put my guns away...\" She settled the other pistol into place, then buckled both down. \"And my guards will lower theirs.\" She gestured at the guards, and the gnolls and va'chaak slowly eased their weapons down. She waved Rog back, and her guard captain hesitantly stepped away. \"Amelia's stays, though. And if you try anything-\"\n\n\"You're tie me up and spank me like a naughty boy?\" The gryphon flared up the longer crown feathers around the back of his head. \"Yes, I understand the implications.\"\n\n\"Ooh, I dunno.\" Lissir turned towards her sister, offering a playful warble. \"Spanking a helpless male snow gryphon does sound fun, don't you think, Sisters?\"\n\n\"It sounds a delight!\" Sivik chirruped laughter, ruffling up her feathers. \"Princess, when you're done with him, do you think we can keep him?\"\n\nNira laughed, glancing towards her feathery friends. \"I'll think about it.\" She quickly turned her attention back towards the male gryphon. \"Now, Union bird. You have a name?\"\n\n\"Of course I have a name.\" The gryphon clicked his beak twice. \"I am called Alakor.\" He bowed head large head. \"And to answer your earlier question, yes. I work for the Golden Union. Though, not always entirely by choice.\"\n\nNira ground her teeth. She'd never actually met a gryphon that worked for the Union before. Most of their people seemed to view anything other humans to be lesser beings at best, monsters and vermin at worst. Then again, she'd never heard the term snow gryphon before, either. Sivik and Lissir made it sound as if such gryphons often worked for the Union. She'd have to ask them about it in private later.\n\nFor now, Nira drummed her fingers against her pistol handles. \"Go on. What do you mean, not always by choice?\"\n\n\"I mean, everyone works for them. There is no choice.\" The gryphon ruffled his feathers, snorting. \"You do as you're told, or you're punished.\"\n\nRog growled, low in his throat. \"Fucking Union. I knew they'd pull that shit. Burn the land, enslave the survivors, it's all they ever meant-\"\n\n\"Oh, pull your head out of your ass, dog.\" Alakor glanced at the gnoll. \"Your kind used to butcher human villages to take their food, their valuables, and you'd enslave the survivors.\" He flicked his wing towards Kasis. \"Her kind used to raid travelers in great swarms.\" He lifted a forepaw, flicking a single finger towards Nira. \"And her people pushed his people into the slums.\" He gestured at Vekk. \"And then they conquered the rest of you, made you part of their army, and used you to enslave half the damn continent.\"\n\nNira squeezed her pistol, her blood hot, her heart thumping hard enough to leave her pulse echoing in her grit teeth. \"That was centuries ago, gryphon. That was-\"\n\n\"The exact same thing the Union has now done.\" The sharpness in Alakor's voice was enough to cut through her own impulsive retort. He slapped his forepaw against the ground. \"Most of their people don't realize it, yet, but they've simply swapped out one oppressive society for another. Neither Empire nor Union was ever any better than the other, you're just...oppressive in different ways, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Except here?\" Sivik hissed, flaring out her wings. \"You won't be treated like an animal. A beast.\"\n\nRog thumped his axe against the ground. \"Or a monster, or a criminal, just cause your ancestors were bad people.\"\n\n\"Tell that to your Princess' serfs.\" The gryphon tilted his head, gazing at the gnoll. \"Their farmers. Where do you think all that food you got in the palace came from? Entire provinces of the empire were dedicated to farming, to rearing livestock. And not by choice, either. Those people had their whole lives dictated to them by the Imperial Court. Given land, told to farm it, and made to give all their crops to the court, to be distributed amongst the cities. Allowed to keep just enough to survive on, and that's it. That's their lives. You wonder why the Unions ranks swelled so quickly? Because they had entire nations of farmers, living in the dirt for generations, so they could feed the Empire's army of beasts.\"\n\nNira's whole face burned, her ears hottest of all. She knew well enough that things were not perfect in the Empire, but those systems were antiquated. Her own parents had spent a good portion of their lives trying to reform them, to improve the lives of those very farmers. \"You know, my mother and father had dedicated themselves to making things better, to bringing them-\"\n\nOnce again, Alakor cut her off. \"Your parents were too late. The Union gave them hope for a better life, immediately, a chance to fight for a future for the children.\" He snarled under his breath. \"It was all a lie, but false hope is hope just the same. They'll just be oppressed in a different way. Forced to build cathedrals, forced to worship the Union's gods, forced go out and fight. Their children won't be farming dirt. Instead, they'll be spreading the Union's golden light with steel, and lead and blood. They think things are better now, but soon enough they'll-\"\n\n\"Tell her where you come from.\" Lissir glared at him, prowling around him like a cat daring to toy with prey far beyond its measure. \"Tell her where snow gryphons come from.\"\n\nHer sister nodded, hissing. \"Yes, you're so eager to tear Nira's people down, to drag out all their darkest deeds as if the Princess herself gave those orders. Why don't you tell her one of the Union's dirty little secrets?\"\n\nAlakor leveled a smoldering glare at the two female gryphons, taking a slow, deep breath. \"I was only making a point. I assure you, I have no love for the Golden Union. As you said...\" He glanced down at his forepaws, his ears drooping. \"We're treated like animals. Beasts of burden, of war.\"\n\nNira folded her arms. \"I'm not surprised. I didn't think the Golden Union allowed any non-humans into their ranks, outside forcible conscription.\"\n\n\"Tell her where you come from.\" Lissir came to a stop alongside her sister, glowering at Alakor. \"Or I will!\"\n\n\"Do it, then.\" Alakor did not look up from his own paws. His wings hung limp at his sides, his tail lifeless behind him.\n\n\"They're bred.\" Lissir softened her tone, just a little. She did not sound so derisive now, rather she sounded as if she pitied him. \"Like beasts would be, on a farm. For their size, for their color. They saw how useful winged creatures can be, they know how effective the Empire's armies were. But we're monsters, you see.\" Lissir put a paw to her chest. \"At least to the nations who founded the Union. So they captured a whole clan of arctic gryphons, generations ago, and bred them for servitude, and for symbolism. They only wanted white ones that these particular gryphons were gifted to them by the gods, kissed by their glorious light. The white feathers indicated purity.\"\n\nWhen Lissir stopped speaking, Sivik continued for her. \"It's pitiable, really. Poor Alakor here probably doesn't even know his parents. To my knowledge, they're taken away in the egg, or as fledglings, then raised by the Union, taught to speak and fight and worship their gods, and be good little birdies. Or they're beaten. There's probably only a few hundred of them now, serving as spies and reconnaissance, and probably, special guards, mounts for important nobles, that sort of thing. Treated like good hounds, at best. Though...something tells me Alakor here was anything but good for his masters.\"\n\n\"Actually, that's where you're wrong.\" Alakor lifted his head again, some of his previous defiance returning. \"I've been good for a very long time. Very good, in fact. Worked a lot of dangerous missions, did as I was told, biding my time, waiting for an opportunity. A chance to tell them all to go fuck themselves.\"\n\n\"And...\" Nira waved a hand. \"Let me guess. That's why you're here? You slipped your leash to find me, and spill the Union's secrets, hoping for revenge against a cruel master?\" She shook her head. \"You're out of luck, bird. My crew and I decided years ago, as a group, that we wanted nothing to do with that whole mess. Much as it pains me, my country is gone, my family is gone, and nothing I can do will bring them back.\"\n\nAlakor tilted his head and perked his ears, a smile parting his beak. \"That's exactly what I was hoping you'd say. For firstly, I did not slip my leash. The Union sent me to find you.\"\n\nSomething cold twisted in Nira's belly, and she forced herself to swallow. \"Why?\"\n\n\"They believe you're dangerous. They're considering having you captured. Or killed.\" He lifted a forepaw, glancing at it, casual as could be. \"So they sent one of their most loyal spies to find your ship, chart your course a while, and report back to them. Of course, if that loyal, gods-fearing spy were to be captured, then his orders were to kill you if possible, even if it meant losing his own life.\"\n\nNira squeezed her pistol handles, fighting back the urge to draw them.\n\n\"So you are here to kill the Princess!\" With a furious snarl, Rog hefted his axe again.\n\nAlakor made an irritable chirruping noise, ruffling up his white feathers. \"Of course not, you silly mutt! Have you been listening to anything I've said? You think I have any intentions of undertaking their damn suicide mission? I'm not throwing my life away for those assholes! No, no.\"\n\n\"Then why are you here?\" Nira kept a grip on her guns, but left them holstered.\n\nThe white gryphon very slowly pushed himself back up onto his feet. He mantled his vast, black-tipped wings, lifting his head. Posing that way made it all the more obvious just how much bigger he was than the other gryphons aboard her ship. \"I am here, Princess Nira, because I'm tired of being treated as an animal. As disposable!\" Alakor said, bowing his head until his beak touched the floor. \"Because I seek to defect from the Golden Union. I wish to join your crew.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Nira's jaw dropped. For a few heartbeats, she simply stared at the great white gryphon, trying to process it. She'd never had anyone try to defect, before. Most of her crew had been with her from the beginning, loyal members of the former Imperial Empire. Soldiers, spies, mechanics, and so on. Others they'd gathered over the years. A few were rescued from the Union or other hostile forces, a few others were rather notorious outlaws she'd manage to befriend, and invite to join her. But this was different. This was very different.\n\nThe princess took a breath. Only then did he realize just how silent it had gotten in the docking bay. Amelia kept her gun pointed at the gryphon, but most of the other guards were glancing around at one another, uncertain. Rog, Kasis, and Vekk all stared at her. The gryphon sisters murmured to each other in their own tongue. Everyone, it seemed, was waiting to see how Nira reacted.\n\n\"Let me make one thing clear, Gryphon.\" Nira strode towards him, jabbing a finger in the air. She was close enough now to be in range of his claws, should he wish her harm. But if nothing else, she was fairly sure if the gryphon meant to attack her, he would have done so already. \"I don't trust you for a second.\"\n\n\"And yet, here you are, close enough for me to take that hand off, if I but wished to.\" The gryphon lifted his head, his black-edged tail swishing behind him.\n\n\"I don't have to trust you to assume you want to live.\" Nira waved at all her guards. \"Any harm comes to me, and blah, blah, blah, painful death.\"\n\n\"A fair point.\" Alakor folded his wings back against his body again. \"I don't expect you to trust me, anyway. I sure as hell don't trust you and your guard dog.\" He tossed his head towards Amelia. \"Or your sniper. Or your admittedly pretty little sparrow-sisters.\"\n\n\"Sparrow?\" Sivik hissed, hunkering down into a tensed up crouch. \"Call us sparrows again, you inbred city-bird. I dare you.\"\n\nAlakor ignored her threat. \"I also said you were pretty. The point is, I don't trust any of you, and I'm not foolish enough to expect you to trust me. Nonetheless, allow me to make it formal.\" The white gryphon lifted his large head, wings outstretched, then folded to sharp angles. \"I, Alakor, Second Flight, Aerial Reconnaissance and Special Mission Wing, hereby surrender myself to the Empire of the Black Star, thereupon requesting asylum until such time as my defection can be processed, and completed.\"\n\nSivik nudged her sister with her beak, chirping. \"Those city birds do know how to speak pretty, don't they?\"\n\nAlakor glanced back at her. \"Get you all tingly under the tail, does it?\"\n\nSivik only stared at him. \"I'm sorry, I'm not interested in virgins.\"\n\nAlakor brought his wings back in again. \"You are wildly mistaken about that.\" Then he returned his attention to Nira. \"Is there anything else I need to say, or do, to make it final?\"\n\nNira pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing. \"Fuck if I know. Alright, Amelia? Lower your rifle.\"\n\n\"You sure, Boss?\" Amelia grimaced. \"I don't trust this cocky shit-pigeon anymore than you do. How do we know he's not actually here to learn as much about us and our ship as he can? Then he slips away, and spills all our secrets to his masters.\"\n\n\"We don't know.\" Nira approached Amelia, and gently set her hand across the barrel of her rifle. \"But I think we've made it abundantly clear that any attack on the crew is going to result an overabundance of lead in his general vicinity.\" She pushed the barrel down, softening her voice. \"It's alright, Amelia. It's alright.\"\n\nAmelia sighed, dropping her gun from her shoulder to rest it across her arm, instead, the barrel pointed away from everyone. \"Well, shit. I never get to shoot anyone anymore.\"\n\n\"Let's try and consider that a win, shall we?\" Nira smiled, giving Amelia's arm a thankful squeeze. Then she turned back towards the male gryphon, approaching him again. \"Alright, Bird. I'm willing to grant you asylum on my ship, but only under very strict conditions. I'm going to put this bluntly. As far as I'm concerned, you're basically a prisoner until I've reason to trust you as anything more. I'll give you quarters, and allow you to go a few common areas, but that's it, for now. And you'll be under guard at all times, and all your actions will be reported to me.\"\n\n\"All my actions?\" The gryphon clicked his beak. \"It won't be a very exciting report, as I plan to do little more than rest while I've the chance.\" The gryphon waved a paw, adopting a slightly higher tone. \"The gryphon woke in the night, went for a piss. Went back to sleep. Woke again, possessed of an especially impressive morning erection. Dealt with it. Went back to sleep.\"\n\nNira folded her arms, smirking. \"What, they didn't let you do that back home?\"\n\nLissir whispered to her sister. \"I doubt it's that impressive, anyway.\"\n\nAlakor tossed his head. \"Seriously, though, your terms are acceptable. I have no intentions of making trouble for you, or your crew. In fact, in the interest of advancing mutual trust, I suggest you plot a course northwest, as soon as possible, and put the whip to your engines.\" He scrunched his face, ears flat. \"Or, whatever it is pirates say to an airship. Just make it go fast.\"\n\n\"Northwest?\" Kasis, perched atop a nearby stack of crates along with Vekk, finally spoke up. She had her tail draped across Vekk's lap, who was gently stroking it to keep her calm. \"From here? Why the hell would we go that way? We'll hit the Broken Teeth!\"\n\n\"Can you not fly high enough to top them?\" Alakor turned towards her, head tilted. \"Or the charts needed to guide you through the shattered sections? I can guide you, if you prefer.\"\n\n\"You'd probably fly us right into them!\" Kasis growled at him, balling up her fists.\n\n\"Easy, Sunset.\" Vekk kneaded her bronze-scaled tail.\n\nNira worked her fingers together, idly cracking her knuckles. \"Why do we need to go northwest?\"\n\n\"Because.\" The white gryphon turned his head, preening one of his wings. \"I'm two weeks late to report to my handlers. They're going to send someone looking for me. Whether that's other gryphons, or ships, I know not.\"\n\nRog leaned his axe up against the same tower of boxes Kasis sat atop, then folded his arms. \"Then we'll blow 'em out of the sky.\"\n\n\"You could,\" Alakor said, spitting a loose feather towards the female gryphons. From the way they both hissed at him, Nira guessed it must have been a rather serious insult among their people. \"But then the rest of them would know right where you are. And, while you've been playing hide and seek in all the low cloud cover, the Union is negotiating a treaty with the lands beneath you, giving them access.\" He settled his wing back. \"That's why I've been stationed out here.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Nira rubbed her forehead, glancing up at Kasis. \"Thoughts?\"\n\n\"Assuming he's telling the truth? Transiting the Broken Teeth would be the quickest route to safe skies.\" The kobold tapped little claw tips against the crate she sat on. \"But, technically, we're not exactly welcome there. I don't think Prav's people would be dumb enough to engage us, but you never know. They do gotta lotta guns there. Might have to pay 'em a visit first.\"\n\nThe urd'thin sitting next to her spoke up. \"You wanna bribe that asshole again?\"\n\nKasis shrugged, leaning her head against the urd'thin sitting next to her. \"On the plus side, might be able to learn something while we're there about the Union's movements or intentions. Or, instead, we could go around, but it would take longer, and we'd still have to cross embargoed lands.\" She tugged at one of the carabiners on her shirt. \"We're still waiting on the boys to return from their supply run, too. They were headed out that way, and should be back tonight, though, tomorrow morning at the latest. If we could get them word, they could meet us nearer the Teeth.\"\n\nAlakor glanced between the two of them. \"You can wait a little, I think, but I wouldn't dally too long, if you wish to avoid being discovered.\"\n\n\"Kasis, when we're done here, plot up a few courses for us. Let's be ready to move on, as soon as the boys are back.\" Nira turned back to the gryphon. \"Any other little warnings for us? Or any way to prove that there's not actually a trap waiting for us at the Teeth?\"\n\n\"Afraid not. Trust me, or don't.\" Alakor stretched his other wing forward, preening it next. \"As for other warnings, not at the moment. I've other things to share with you, but you'll forgive me if I wish to wait until I can trust you, too. Won't do me any good if you bleed me dry for all I know, and then kick me off your ship. The Union would have me executed, if they caught me and learned of my attempted defection.\"\n\nAmelia snorted, shifting her rifle to her other shoulder. \"Oh, well, we sure wouldn't want that.\"\n\nAlakor gave her a sidelong glance, still preening. \"Dare I ask who these 'boys' are you mentioned?\" He settled his wing back down. \"I'm guessing since you're waiting on them to return to this ship, they've either a smaller craft of their own, or wings? Perhaps a pair of male gryphons to go with your sharp-tongued females?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\" Nira didn't feel the need to elaborate. Assuming Alakor didn't do anything to get himself killed, or tossed off the ship, he'd find out soon enough.\n\nLissir gave a warbling coo. \"Oooh, Malaresh is going to love him.\"\n\n\"Oh, won't he?\" Sivik shook herself, fluffing her ashen feathers. \"I can't wait to see that. Though...\" She cast the white gryphon a playful look, her ears half perked. \"I still think the princess should let us string him up in the dungeon.\"\n\nLissir chirped laughter. \"Torture dungeon, or sex dungeon?\"\n\n\"Depends on how well he behaves himself!\" Sivik's answer had both female gryphons cackling.\n\nAlakor only heaved a throaty sigh, lashing his black-edged tail. \"If you're trying to intimidate me, it isn't going to work. You're on an airship, so I'm quite sure you've neither such place.\"\n\n\"Are you so sure?\" Lissir took a step towards him, flashing an open-beak grin. \"Where else would take prisoners to be interrogated? Or rewarded?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't press your luck, Snowballs.\" Nira rested her hands on her pistols, her mind whirling, trying to spin off in a thousand directions all at once. She needed to talk to her people about several different subjects, none of which she'd broach with the snow gryphon around. For now, she fixed her attention on him. \"Since you've accepted my terms, I hereby grant you asylum from the Golden Union, revocable at any time on my discretion. Your request for defection will be taken under consideration, and all acts you comment in our custody will be factored into that decision, as will all information you offer that aids us in any way. Anything else you'd like to say or add before I have you shown to your temporary quarters?\"\n\nAlakor shook his head. \"Nothing in the immediate present. Though I should request quarters with a nice, soft bed. I should also request something to eat and drink, whenever possible. I've not eaten since before dawn.\"\n\nNira pinched the bridge of her nose. \"I'll see what I can do.\"\n\n\"Making demands already?\" Sivik nudged her sister. \"He really will get along well with Malaresh.\"\n\nAmelia shrugged. \"I don't know what you're talking about, Malaresh is always a perfect gentleman around me.\"\n\nLissir clicked her beak. \"Cause you've always got that damn rifle strapped over your shoulder.\"\n\n\"If you had a custom Ebony Ranger, you'd keep it close, too.\" Amelia cradled it against her body, grinning.\n\n\"Gods, female, do you fuck the gun, too?\" Alakor turned towards her, flaring his wings.\n\nNira jabbed the gryphon's feathery shoulder. \"Watch your mouth, Gryphon. I won't tolerate any disrespect towards my crew from a prisoner, defection, or not defection. Keep that up, and you're going to regret.\"\n\nAmelia stared Alakar down, then made a show of stroking the rifle's barrel in an especially provocative manner. \"Gotta keep it happy, somehow.\"\n\n\"Careful now,\" Sivik said, bumping her gray feathered tail against Amelia. \"You'll excite the virgin.\"\n\nNira chuckled, turning away from them for a moment. She was well aware that her crew could take care of themselves, and hold their own against anyone. But that was not the point. They were her crew, her responsibility, and she'd stick up for them against anyone, anywhere, at any time. Sure, they insulted and teased each other plenty, but only in the way of family. They'd all earned that right. They shared bonds of blood, survival, friendship, respect, and even love.\n\nHer crew, her ship of beasts, they were a family.\n\nAnd Alakor was not part of that family.\n\n\"Rog, pick a few guards to reassign to Alakor, day shift and night shift both.\" When the gnoll nodded his understand, she looked up at Kasis. \"Slight chance of plans, I think. Plot us possible courses to the Teeth, but also to Prav's. And at least one course around the Teeth. Embargo or not, Verille's forces wouldn't be stupid enough to actually engage us. Or so I hope.\"\n\n\"Sure thing, boss.\" Kasis kicked her little booted feet, looking like a tiny lizard-child atop the box.\n\n\"Vekk, get the damn door in bay four fixed.\" Nira rubbed her forehead, trying to consider all the other preparations they might need to make. \"Order an inspection and test firing of all engines, the turbines and props, run a few drills, check all the pressure levels, the boilers, pistons, fuel lines, see if the gas bags...\" She trailed off when the urd'thin just stared at her with flattened ears. Vekk never did like being told how to do his job, even by his captain. She held up her hands. \"I know, I know. But we haven't had to run everything full-tilt in a while, so I just want make sure everything's ready.\"\n\n\"Boy, Princess, I wouldn't have thought of that!\" He nudged Kasis, whispering overloud. \"I probably woulda got us all killed!\"\n\n\"Point taken, Vekk, and thank you for your tireless hard work.\" Nira reached up and patted his boot with a smile.\n\nRog put a hand upon Nira's shoulder. \"Hey, Princess, where do you want to put the bird for now?\"\n\nNira thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. \"It's going to have to bay seven, for now.\"\n\n\"I dunno if Malaresh is gonna like that.\"\n\n\"He's going to have to deal with it, like all the rest of us.\" She waved towards Vekk. \"Once bay four is safe again, we can put Alakor in there. But till then, seven is the only place big enough to hold him. Plus it's got access to a gryphon suitable tub and latrine.\"\n\nAlakor cocked his head, and chirped. \"That already sounds better than what I had before.\" He glanced over his wings at the other two gryphons. \"Though it's a shame I don't get to spend my nights with those two lovely females.\"\n\nNira pursed her lips. \"They'd eat you alive.\"\n\n\"Literally!\" Sivik snapped her beak.\n\n\"Though, I wouldn't mind being his guard,\" Lissir said, looking Alakor over. \"Because then I could put him in shackles, and slap a chain pouch over that smart beak so he'll finally shut up.\"\n\nAlakor turned around towards the females, hissing. \"You know, I'm starting to think tying someone up is what gets your tail lifted. If I let you tie up my paws, you gonna let me climb on your back and fuck you a while, Pretty Sparrow?\"\n\n\"A while?\" Lissir only laughed, rustling her wings. \"I doubt you'd even know what to do without some Golden Union taskmaster yelling instructions at you.\" She lifted her voice an octave, to imitate a human. \"Not like that, bird! Don't just lay on her! Thrust! Thrust already!\"\n\n\"And that's all it would take,\" Sivik said as much to Alakor as her sister. \"Two pumps and he's crooning and spent.\"\n\n\"Oh, I suppose you would be the expert, hmm?\" Alakor pivoted towards them, his wings half-flared, a derisive sneer in his voice. \"The way you two question my prowess makes it sound as if you're hoping for a demonstration! If I'm so inexperienced, then what does that make you, the ship's whores?\"\n\nNira jerked her head up, spinning towards the gryphon. \"Alakor! You do not talk to my crew that way!\"\n\nAlakor ignored her, glancing back and forth between Lissir and Sivik. \"Do you two lift your tails for your rider, too?\" He sucked in a mock gasp, turning wide eyes towards Amelia. \"Is that what you use that rifle for? Well, I've got something you could--AAWWWRRKK!\"\n\nIt was at that point that Nira stormed up behind Alakor, snatched his tail for leverage, and kicked the gryphon in the testicles as hard as she could. The sound that came out of his beak as a result was highest-pitched, loudest squawk Nira had ever heard in her life. The gryphon's blue eyes popped out, and a forepaw shot back to clutch his battered pride. Alakor's hind legs came together, his eyes slowly went cross, and with a long, low groan, the big gryphon crumpled to the floor.\n\n\"That's for my crew!\" Nira folded her arms, glaring down at him. \"I warned you, bird! No one belittles my crew like that!\"\n\nAll around her, the gathered crew burst into laughter, along with a few quasi-sympathetic groans from the males. Kasis pointed down at him, cackling. \"Right in the bird-balls!\"\n\nAmelia flashed her a big grin. \"Oooh, bullseye! I coulda done that, yanno, didn't need you stepping in.\"\n\nNira shrugged. \"I know, but I already warned him once. I ain't letting him insult my crew, let alone my friends.\"\n\nAlakor groaned again his eyes squeezed shut as he ground his beak. He rocked around on the ground a few times, beating his wings against the air. \"Oooooh, ooooh, gods! What...is it with this ship, and going for the balls?\"\n\n\"If you're asking for it, you get it.\" Sivik strode forward, climbing up atop the fallen male, then seating herself upon him. She flared her wings in victorious display. \"I claim this snow gryphon on behalf of the good ship Cataclysm!\"\n\nAlakor groaned and wriggled, beating his wings again. He made a half-hearted effort to dislodge the female, but then gave up. \"Don't know what...you think you're claiming! You didn't even do it!\"\n\nSivik offered him a sweet smile, her ears happily perked. She lifted a forepaw, curling it into a fist. \"Would you like me to?\"\n\nAlakor gulped, awkwardly shaking his head against the floor. \"...I'll be good.\"\n\nSivik set her paw back down against him. \"That's what I thought.\"\n\nNira folded her arms, grinning at the female gryphons. \"Maybe you two should be his guards. At least when you haven't got any other duties.\"\n\n\"Oooh!\" Sivik warbled to her sister. \"That does sound like fun!\"\n\nAlakor coughed, squirming beneath Sivik, his voice somehow both hoarse, and squeaky at the same time. \"I think...if it's just the same to you...I'll stick with the gnoll guards.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm afraid not.\" Nira nudged the pinkish pads of the male gryphon's hind paw with the toe of her boot. \"You should have thought of that when I warned you to keep your beak shut.\" She glanced over her shoulder at Rog. The gnoll was wearing an odd expression, muzzle split with some combination of grimace and grin, one ear flat and the other perked. \"Add the girls to the list of his guards, would you?\"\n\n\"Sure thing, Princess.\"\n\n\"Right, then I think we're down there.\" Nira clasped her hands together, surveying the room. \"Well done, everyone! I'd like you riflemen to remain here, make sure our guest doesn't cause any trouble. Ladies?\" When the gryphons glanced her way, Nira continued. \"When Snowballs can stand up again, escort him to his quarters. Take the other guards with you, just in case.\"\n\nAmelia stepped forward, gesturing at Sivik. \"I'll go, too. I gotta get her saddle off, anyway.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Nira backed up a few paces to give the gryphons some room. \"When you've got him settled, Lissir? I want to talk.\" Nira had questions about Alakor's people that she didn't want to ask around him. \"Rog, Vekk, Kasis? You've all got your assignments. When everyone's finished, come find me in my office.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Alakor padded down the wide, wood-paneled corridor, deep in the bowels of the largest ship he'd ever conceived of. He had been on airships before, but never one this size. Some of the scents, sounds, and experiences were similar. The smells of smoke and oil, of strange gases and chemical mixtures, air that somehow mixed fresh and stale in constantly shifting measure. The way the whole thing shuddered around them, sometimes.\n\nSome of the other snow gryphons hated riding on airships, and not just because they were usually confined to the grimy and cramped lower decks. Instead, it was some instinctual fear of a fall they simply could not pull out of it. Gryphons were creatures born to fly, and yet, if catastrophe happened, they'd likely be trapped inside, where their wings would be unable to save them. They'd plummet like everyone else aboard.\n\nAlakor, though, had never had such fears. Not because he held any misguided beliefs in the wonder and safety of technology. He knew well enough that the Golden Union had lost a number of airships recently, in the race to build them ever larger, ever faster, ever more powerful. No, Alakor's lack of fear for the thing simply came from the fact that he'd risked his life in far too many other ways to worry about the idea of a damn airship falling out of the sky. As far as he was concerned, his odds of death were far greater earlier in the day, when people were pointing guns at his head, and other parts. That was the hardest part of his plan, he was certain. The rest was going to be damn relaxing by comparison.\n\nBesides, Alakor found airships fascinating. He knew little about them from a scientific sense, but that only made them all the more wondrous. The white gryphon had no idea no how such contraptions managed to stay aloft, much less travel across the world. Gryphons were not exactly taught the sciences and mechanics responsible for an airship's flight. Then again, gryphons who served the Union were rarely taught much beyond what their masters needed them to know. Whatever the case, keeping one this size in the skies for years on end was truly a marvel.\n\nHe paused, staring down an intersecting hallway lit with a strange lamps, affixed to the ceiling in triangular brass fixtures. Alakar was not sure what fueled them. Some manner of oil or gas, probably. Or something even more advanced, he thought. The technologies and inventions of the fallen Empire were in some ways familiar to those of the older Union kingdoms, but many others were advanced enough to seem almost completely foreign. Rumors abounded about the Empire discovering new ways to generate energy with their great steam engines, and other more mysterious fuels and sources. There were even rumors that just before the war took its toll, the Empire had been close to truly harnessing electricity. For all he knew, this ship might be the closest to fruition those efforts came.\n\nThe gryphon clacked his beak in thought. The Golden Union's successful conquest certainly wasn't due to superior technology, or industrial prowess. Rather, it was fueled more by the ease with which the oppressed bought into all the hope they offered, flooding their armies with recruits early in the war. These days, now that the old Empire now belonged to the rulers of the Union, so too did its technology, and it's knowledge.\n\nAt least...most of it. Alakor clicked his beak in thought, gazing down the hall. Signs pointed the way to storage areas and cargo bays, though he wondered what else was on board the vessel. To the best of his knowledge, few rank and file Union members had any inkling of just how impressive the Cataclysm truly was, and how mysteries. How important it was.\n\nHell, Alakor only knew because he'd gotten exceptionally good at knowing when to listen in to which conversations, and just where to position himself at what times to do so. Most of his superiors saw him as little more than a well-trained animal, not to speak unless spoken to. How Alakor hated the denigration of it, the humiliation. Yet, it had served his purpose. He had learned about this ship, it's crew...and over time, he realized that Union wanted it. The Princess was dangerous to them, to be sure, but to some of his superiors? The Princess was but a secondary concern. The ship, with its myriad secrets and mysterious technologies, that was the true prize.\n\nA shame then, for the Union, that they'd only ever treated him like a hound, barely even worthy of scraps from their table. Once, in his younger days, he might have blindly done as he was told like so many others did. He might have well have killed the princess while he had the chance, or let himself be caught, only to escape later once he'd cast light upon their darkest shadows and pried their most valuable secrets out of their grasp to deliver back to his masters.\n\n\"Move it, Bird.\" The human named Amelia prodded his haunch with her rifle. \"You haven't gotten clearance to go that way. Keep following Sivik.\"\n\n\"Only looking, Madame Shoots-A-Lot.\" Akalor tossed his head. \"And please don't prod me with a loaded weapon.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't shit your tailfeathers.\" Amelia rested the rifle across her shoulder. \"Safety's on.\"\n\nPerhaps if things went poorly here, he still would make off with a few of their secrets. Not for the Union, though. For himself, to sell to the highest bidder. Still, though...There was a part of Alakar that already ached to be a part of this ship. Just seeing the way gryphons were treated here, to say nothing of the other species? He'd never seen them all just...treated like friends, before. Like people. It was everything he'd hoped to see when he made his decision to disobey his orders, if he was caught. Witnessing it in person, to see humans standing up for gryphons? It was as if he suddenly that hole he felt deep inside himself, in the dark of night, sleeping on cold stone and worn blankets? All at once, he knew what was missing. Simple, basic kindness, as if he'd been left ignorant even of its existence.\n\n\"You're lucky, you know.\" Alakor spoke up, glancing at the two female gryphons. The one named Lissir walked in front of him, while her sister took up the rear, just beyond his tail. Amelia was at once side, with the various gun-toting gnolls and va'chaak taking up positions all around him. \"To live like this.\"\n\nLissir glanced back at him, flattening her dark gray wings. \"We're lucky to live like exiles?\"\n\nSivik spoke up behind him, picking up from her sister. \"Yes, what exactly makes us lucky? To never see our homeland again? To be embargoed by this country, hunted down by that one, to live like outlaws and sky pirates?\"\n\nAlakar warbled, offering each female an open-beak, perked-ear smile in turn. \"From the way you all act, I should think you enjoy living like pirates.\"\n\n\"I sure as hell do.\" Amelia laughed, patting the butt of her rifle.\n\n\"Oh, so do I!\" Sivik clicked her beak, but soon flattened back her ears, scowling. \"But it wasn't our choice. We were forced into this life. It was this, or chains.\" She shrugged her wings, glancing away. \"Or death, more likely. So yes, what luck!\" She slapped her forepaw against the ground.\n\nAlakor only stared at her, unblinking. \"I meant, you're lucky to have a place like this. A home, where everyone calls you friend.\" He let out a low, grumbling growl, glancing down at his ebony-smudged paws. \"Instead of pet. Or worse.\"\n\nLissir swished her tail, brushing the gray feathers that tipped it across his beak. \"Oh, that we are. But once, not that long ago? We had an entire nation that treated us that way. Now we've only an airship.\"\n\n\"Point taken.\" Alakor nipped at her tail. \"Though, outside your capital and your largest cities, I hear things were different.\" When Sivik did the same to his own tail, he flicked it against her head, then followed Lissir as she started forward. \"To much of the rest of the world, you were...\" He trailed off, cringing as the movement of his hind legs sent a little twinge of leaden pain rolling through him. \"Nevermind. Not worth arguing about.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Lissir glanced back at him again, her ears splayed in amusement. \"You alright back there?\"\n\nAlakor glared at her. \"Never better.\" In truth, the gryphon's testicles still ached, but he wasn't about to give them the satisfaction of knowing that. \"Besides, someday, once I'm used to free? Getting kicked in the balls by a human princess of an evil empire will make a great story for a tavern.\"\n\n\"And if you call the Black Star an evil empire around Nira, she'll kick them again.\" Sivik walked up alongside him, nipping at his haunch. \"As will my sister and I, should you insult us again. Now walk faster!\"\n\n\"Thank you for the warning, then.\" Alakor picked up his pace, trying to ignore the lingering aching sensation. \"I apologize for my early misbehavior.\"\n\nLissir turned a corner ahead of him, following signs that pointed towards Bay Seven. \"Somehow, I suspect your apology has more to do with the fact we've been named your guards, and less to do with actual contrition.\"\n\n\"A little from column A, a little from column B.\" Alakor offered them both a playful warble. \"Though, you two do make an imposing pair. And I must admit, the two of you provide a far more striking, beautiful view than any window will offer.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see how it is. The moment we're put in charge, you drop the insults and start trying to flatter us?\" Sivik bumped her haunches up against him, though whether it was playful gesture or vague threat, Alakor could not tell. \"What do you think sister, do you think he's being truthful now?\"\n\n\"About you?\" Lissir perked her ears, gazing back at her sister. She shook her head, sighing. \"No, I'm afraid he must be lying, because you're hideous. I, however, am so gorgeous I'm sure to fill his dreams and fantasies from now on.\" Lissir shook her haunches, as if just to make her point.\n\n\"Oh, Gods,\" Sivik chirruped laughter, trotting forward to swat her sister's hind leg. \"You filthy liar! We both know I'm the pretty one. Still, if he's going to 'fantasizing' about either of us...\" She shot Alakor a sidelong glare. \"Better you, than me.\"\n\n\"As far as I'm concerned, you're both worth fantasizing over.\" Alakor rumbled a low, throaty purr.\n\n\"Ugh.\" Amelia dragged her free hand down her face. \"He's even worse than Jirril. You gryphons really gotta learn subtlety.\"\n\nLissir chittered her amusement. \"I keep telling you, subtlety's for humans. Besides, where would the fun in that be?\"\n\nAlakor turned his head to gaze at Amelia. \"I'd offer to fantasize about you, too, but I suspect my balls would not appreciate your retaliation.\"\n\nA smile cracked Amelia's otherwise stoic veneer. \"You'd suspect right.\"\n\nAlakor wasn't quite sure what to make of her yet. It was clear the woman was fiercely protective of her friends, and her captain. That was certainly respectable. But beyond that, he couldn't quite tell which of her descriptive threats were genuine, and which were simply bravado or some odd sense of humor. For now, he thought it best not to press his luck.\n\n\"So....if I may ask.\" He tilted his head towards Amelia, waiting for her to allow him a question, or turn him away. When she nodded, he went on. \"Are yourself and the Princess the only humans on the ship?\"\n\nAmelia grunted. \"That sounds suspiciously like the sort of question a spy looking to learn about our crew would ask.\"\n\nAlakor flexed his wings. \"I shall take that as a yes. I had heard the ship was mostly crewed by other species, but I hadn't realized quite how true that was.\"\n\n\"Watch it, Spy.\" Amelia jabbed him in the ribs, but at least she used her finger this time. \"Nira might trust you enough to offer you our spare gryphon quarters, but if it was up to me, you'd be confined to a cell in the brig.\"\n\nThe white gryphon only smiled at her. \"Considering that an hour ago, you were more inclined to put a bullet in my brain, I'll call that a step in the right direction.\"\n\nLissir soon came to a stop. \"Here we are, Bay Seven.\" She turned to the door, stretching a wing to brush her flight feathers across his beak, and head. Alakor scrunched his face, backing away. When he'd given her a little room, she retracted her wing, and grasped the large, brass handle with a forepaw. \"Everything here is basically, retrofitted for gryphons. Granted, there's not much in here right now, it's just a spare room, but there's bedding, a tub, and a latrine.\"\n\nSivik padded up alongside her sister. \"The doors are large enough for gryphons, and the handles designed for our paws. With any luck, they'll even fit you, and your ego.\"\n\nAlakor clicked his beak, gazing not at the doors, but at both female gryphon's haunches, and swishing tails. \"Oh, I think I'd fit just fine.\"\n\nAmelia cleared her throat. \"You know he was staring at your asses when he said that, right?\"\n\n\"I had an inkling, yes.\" Sivik strode inside, followed shortly by her sister. \"But it's to be expected. Virgins can't help but fixate on mating.\"\n\n\"I'm not a damn virgin,\" Alakor said with an irritable squawk. The insult, old as it was getting, left the inside of his ears hot.\n\n\"Oh, so your old masters have already bred you, have they?\" Lissir turned back towards him, her ears splayed in gryphon smirk.\n\nAlakor froze, sucking in a breath. He quickly looked away, his belly twisting. \"I'm...\" He forced himself to reply, difficult as it was to suddenly find words. \"Not going to talk about that.\"\n\n\"Oh...\" Lissir swallowed, her smug expression turning to one of contrition, ears drooping a little. \"Perhaps we've all insulted each enough, for the moment.\"\n\nAlakor strode past her, no longer in the mood for banter. \"Perhaps so.\"\n\nWhile his guards looked on, Alakor wandered around the room, awash in unwanted memories. A female gryphon flashed through his mind, white, but with a tail darkening to gray. She was nervous, just like he was. They knew each other, but not in that way. Not till they were ordered to, anyway. They both knew they'd probably never see each other again, after that. He was almost too nervous for it to work, but she helped him along. Better for both of them that way, no one wanted to have to drink the 'medicine' for those who had trouble. When it happened, it was over quickly, but they were made to spend a week together. To make sure it took.\n\nAnd then she was gone, whisked away, along with....\n\nAlakor shook himself, wishing he could shake the damn memories out of his head. To think the Union would wonder why he wanted to escape them. Alakor forced himself to focus on his surroundings until he was able to lose himself in the moment again.\n\nFrom the way Lissir described it as a spare room, he'd expected something akin to a storage closet, connected to a small bathing chamber. Instead, he found himself roaming a voluminous cargo hold, so spacious he could have taken to his wings. A few light fixtures on the otherwise barren walls provided gentle illumination. There were no portholes or windows, and he was not sure how close they were to the ship's outer hull. Alakor turned a slow circle, letting out a low coo of approval. While it was true the room was mostly empty, for Alakor, that was a benefit, not a drawback.\n\n\"This is huge!\" He turned back towards the females. \"Have you other prisoners you're putting in here with me?\"\n\nLissir shook her head. \"Just you.\" She tilted her head. \"Bigger than the Union gave you, I take it?\"\n\n\"The Union usually kept us in a small barracks, at best, often with a half dozen gryphons in each room. Hard to sleep without bumping someone else.\" He ground his beak a moment, turning away. \"I think those who guard the palace now get better quarters, but...I'm not sure. And since I was a spy, I sometimes got a room to myself, on missions. But even that was...cramped, at best.\"\n\nAmelia wandered around at a distance, though it was clear she was keeping an eye on him. \"I'll admit, that sounds like shit. I know you gryphons aren't exactly bashful, but I'd think even you'd want a little privacy once in a while.\"\n\nAlakor simply nodded, spotting a large, rectangular structure in the corner. Layers of sky-blue blankets and gray sheets were piled atop it, along with a small mountain of cushions and pillows. \"Is that someone's bed?\" He padded towards it, calling back to the three females. \"I suppose they'll be coming to move it, yes? Do you suppose your Princess would let me steal a pillow or two? And maybe a blanket to spread on the floor?\"\n\nLissir walked up alongside him, her voice soft, her head low. \"Alakor, that's...\" She glanced back at her sister, who shrugged her wings, then returned her gaze to the male. \"That's your bed. Those are your blankets and things, now. Those were brought in here for you.\"\n\n\"R...really?\" Alakor swallowed, coming to a stop at the side of the bed. \"I've...\" He reached out, then hesitated, his ebony-smudged paw hovering above one of the indigo cushions. \"Never had a bed, before. Not...not a real bed, anyway. Not like this.\"\n\nThe idea that this was his, that even an enemy here got a bed, with blankets, with pillows? Between that, and the painful memories he was still struggling to forget, it was more than Alakor could take. His throat tightened, and his eyes burned, threatening tears. Alakor wanted to think that it took more to earn his loyalty than a damn bed, but when, in all his life, had he even had that? He stumbled back a few paces, never even touching the cushion. A weakness rushed through him, fueled by emotion, and a strange sort of sudden uncertainty. His hind legs wobbled, and he flopped back onto his haunches. The gryphon sniffled, wiping away a few stray tears with the back of a forepaws.\n\nGods, he thought, what was wrong with him? Alakor liked to think of himself as so much stronger than this. All his adult life, he'd served the Union as spy, an enforcer, even an assassin, whatever dangerous missions were required of him. He and the other snow gryphons suffered their masters' abuses and mistreatments, and still held their head high and their wings mantled in pride. The worse they were treated, the stronger it made them, or so he told himself. He'd clawed his way up their ranks, earning their trust, taking their callousness and cruelty in stride, in search of a chance to free himself from all that. So what was it that finally left him on the verge of sobbing like a lonely, frightened little fledgling?\n\nA bed. A gods-damned bed.\n\nAlakor wiped his eyes again, then set his forepaw back down. He dropped his head, staring at his own front paws in desperate attempt to focus on anything else. He sure as hell didn't want these pretty pirate sparrows to see him crying over something so foolish. Sure, he might he might have teared up a little when the princess booted him in the cargo pouch, but even for a gryphon, that was to be expected. Simpering over a damn bed was something else entirely. The very idea of it was so humiliating it churned his belly, yet still he found himself blinking back tears, and struggling to swallow down the stubborn lump in his unpleasantly tight throat. Besides, how could he present himself as a potentially indispensable member of their crew if-\n\n\"Alakor?\" Lissir settled on her haunches alongside him, her voice soft. When he forced himself to meet her eyes, he found confusion etched across her features. Her ears were cocked at odd angles, her head tilted, her dark gray crown feathers lifted around her head. \"You...really never had a bed, hmm?\"\n\nThe white gryphon shook his head once, taking a few deep breaths to steady himself.\n\nLissir clicked her beak, turning to stare at the assortment of blankets, and pillows. \"You know, where I grew up, we didn't have beds like this, either. But we had mats woven of discarded feathers, pillows made of stuffed animal hides...the sort of thing our ancestors used, long before the Empire folded us into their so-called civilization.\" She gave a little cooing noise, opening a wing. \"But I'm guessing you didn't even have that.\"\n\n\"A wooden floor, usually. Or the dirt, the grass. Or another gryphon to lay against, whether I liked it or not.\" Alakor unsheathed the tips of his retractable claws, idly scratching at the floor. \"Slept in a human-style bed a time or two, on missions or travels, though most places we'd stay wouldn't have something that would fit me, anyway. And if they did, the Handlers usually told me to sleep outside, or with the horses, or what have you.\"\n\n\"I suppose...\" Lissir spoke slowly, as if she was carefully choosing each and every word. \"When you believe, with all your heart, that your enemies control an army of evil monsters, it is...difficult to see those species as anything else. Even when they're on your side, or you've raised them yourself.\" Just as slowly, Lissir stretched her wing and gently laid it across his back. \"Anyway...you've a bed, now.\"\n\nAlakor tensed as the female's wing settled across him. It was a comforting, intimate gesture among gryphons, not unlike a hug. He'd certainly shared such comfort with other snow gryphons before, but never with those he once considered enemies. Under other circumstances, in his duties as a spy, he might drape his own wing across an enemy gryphon as part of an effort to secure their friendship, their trust. While Alakor knew it was possible that Lissir was doing the same to him, he did not sense any deception in her touch. She was simply offering him comfort in a difficult moment.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Alakor swallowed again, pressing his own wings to hers in gratitude. He closed his eyes, and if only for a moment, savored the solace found beneath another gryphon's wing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "While Alakor collected himself under Lissir's wing, her sister Sivik strolled past them. Sivik's ears were flattened, and Alakor could not begrudge her any suspicion. Despite Sivik's expression, her voice was soft. \"This isn't entirely human style. Their beds are usually too soft for gryphons, you'll sink into it or just flatten it too much after a few nights.\" She pulled aside some of the blankets, revealing the sturdy wooden platform beneath, and the layers of woven feather mats lining it. \"So this will support your weight, but also provide comfort beneath all the other blankets and cushions.\"\n\n\"It looks very comfortable.\" Alakor bowed his head to the other female. \"Thank you again.\"\n\nSivik patted the many, thick, warm-looking covers. \"It gets cold in here at night, especially when we're at altitude. You're descended from arctic stock, so you might be comfortable just laying on top. Otherwise, the blankets are warm, and...well...\" She chuckled, setting her paw down. \"I assume you know how blankets function, even if you've never had one.\"\n\nAlakor managed a little smile. \"I do, yes.\"\n\n\"Why don't you show the crybaby bird the shitter?\" The human's voice rang out behind them. \"Then we can leave him to cry about his fancy new bed without being so embarrassed for himself.\"\n\nAlakor glanced back at her, grinding his beak. He didn't much like being called the crybaby bird, but he supposed he'd said far worse to them not long ago. Plus, for all he knew, she might well actually be trying to give him some private time to let him deal with his emotions. She didn't exactly seem the sweet and soft-spoken type, after all. That was fine with him.\n\n\"Yes, you said there was a latrine nearby?\" Alakor nudged Lissir's wings once more, thankful for her comfort, then pushed himself up when she eased it back. \"And a bathtub?\"\n\nLissir stood up next to him, turning around. \"It's the same place as ours, Amelia. Lead the way, will you?\"\n\n\"Right.\" Amelia waved him forward, resting her rifle over her shoulder. \"Let's go, Snowballs.\"\n\n\"You know,\" Alakor said, padding after her. He still wasn't pleased with the nickname. \"The more you call me that, the more I wonder if you aren't hoping for an up close inspection of them.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure!\" Amelia flashed him a wicked grin. \"But you ain't gonna like what I do when I get my hands on 'em.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not.\" He watched her shift her rifle as they walked across the room. \"You know, they make straps for those.\"\n\n\"Nah, the Ebony Ranger's my gryphon riding gun. It secures into the side of Sivik's saddle.\" Amelia padded the gun's butt. \"Long as I'm stuck watching over you, though, I'd rather have it on me.\"\n\n\"I should think wielding it while flying is all the more reason to put a proper strap on it.\" He glanced towards Sivik, trailing at his side, but she only shrugged her wings. \"At least that way, if you dropped it in flight-\"\n\n\"If I ever dropped it in flight, it's because I just got shot.\" Amelia laughed, shaking her head. \"Then I got a bigger fuckin' problem than losing my gun.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Alakor looked Sivik over as they neared the edge of the room. The saddle and associated harness she wore looked over very high quality. The straps were all thick, sturdy but heavily padded. The buckles were all placed in such a way as to avoid digging into her at any point. \"That looks comfortable.\"\n\nSivik lifted a wing, looking herself over. \"Hardly even realize I'm wearing it, anymore. It's all custom-fitted.\" She flicked a wing towards her sister. \"She's got one too, and so do the boys. We've quite a few, really. Some for saddles, some cargo, others to carry weapons and so on. I'm sure your people wear similar.\"\n\n\"We do, though a lot less thought has been put into making ours comfortable. A few of the saddle harnesses are profoundly uncomfortable on purpose, to keep you in line.\" He shook his hind end, hissing. \"Especially for males.\"\n\nAmelia laughed as she came to a stop at a door. \"Ooh, can you imagine the look on the boys' faces if I tried to put a saddle like that on them?\"\n\nLissir grinned. \"I think Malaresh would literally eat you, if you tried to strap his balls into some kind of disciplinary saddle.\"\n\n\"I wonder who that would be more awkward for?\" Sivik giggled, nudging Amelia with her beak. \"You, or Malaresh?\"\n\n\"Malaresh.\" Amelia rubbed Sivik's ear. \"Grabbin' a dragon by the nuts would just be fun, for me.\"\n\nAlakor froze. \"A dragon?\" He flattened his ears back, wings tight to his body. A chill trickled down his spine, and into his hind paws. \"You have a dragon on board?\"\n\n\"...Oops.\" Amelia made a face. \"Not really supposed to let that slip, but you'd know soon enough. He's not on board, right now, though.\"\n\n\"Technically,\" Lissir said, lowering her voice. \"He's not exactly part of the crew.\"\n\nSivik clicked her beak. \"It's complicated. If you ask him, he's here because he owes Nira and her family a favor.\"\n\n\"Of course, he'd also tell anyone who listens that the ship should belong to him.\" Lissir tossed her head, swishing her tail. \"Just because he's a dragon.\"\n\n\"A dragon.\" Alakor slowly swung his head around, gazing at each of the three females in turn. \"A full size dragon? Or one of the little-\"\n\n\"Bigger than you,\" Lissir said, her voice flat. \"And with an ego to match. Still, he's one of the family, whether he likes it or not.\"\n\nSivik grinned at her sister. \"The same could be said for us.\"\n\nAlakor ground his beak. He'd been watching their ship for weeks, yet he hadn't seen a dragon leave the vessel at any point. \"I'd heard you were in contact with one, but I...didn't know he was actually part of your crew.\"\n\n\"He's been gone a while.\" Lissir stretched a wing forward to preen it. \"Sometimes he comes and goes on his own. He's supposed to be returning with supplies soon, actually. That's why we've been drifting in and out of this persistent cloud bank the last few weeks. It's where it was decided we'd meet back up with him.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" Alakor growled to himself, muttering under his breath. He lashed his tail, his earlier anxiety returning to grip his belly with cold fingers. \"Don't know how I missed that. Must be slipping, too focused on my plan to do my job. That's exactly the sort of thing I would have been expected to report, were I intending to return home. This might be a problem for me. Maybe for all of us.\"\n\n\"You're babbling, Snowballs.\" Amelia shifted her grip on her rifle, then sighed. \"Tell you what. You tell us what the hell you're muttering about, and I'll put this away. Deal?\"\n\nAlakor glanced up, beak parted in amused smile. \"You're just looking for an excuse to give your arms a rest. But very well.\"\n\nAmelia stowed her rifle on its holster at Sivik's side, buckling it into place. \"First hint of you causing trouble, and I'm-\"\n\n\"Taking it back out, and blowing something off of me, got it.\" He waited until the three of them were paying him their full attention, then gestured with a paw. \"You should know, that we don't get along with dragons.\"\n\nLissir flexed her wings. \"Dragons don't get along well with anyone, in my experience. I know, historically speaking, dragons and gryphons used to fight. But Malaresh and Jirril get along just fine.\"\n\n\"Just fine?\" Amelia folded her arms. \"I think everyone knows that blue parrot and the big, black lizard have fucked more than a few times.\"\n\n\"That's not what I meant.\" Alakor shifted his weight, uncomfortable. \"I meant, snow gryphons, and dragons. One of the Union's first major acts, early in the war, was to send snow gryphons out to track down the Dragon Lords who ruled the Empire's provinces. The Union warships and hunting parties later, but first? It was snow gryphons. My parents' generation helped kill and capture an awful lot of those Dragon Lords and their kin. Your...Malaresh, he may very well have a grudge against my people.\"\n\nAmelia scowled, scratching her cheek. \"Far as I can tell, Malaresh has a grudge against just about everyone involved with the Union.\" She held her hands up. \"Now, I never heard him badmouth any snow gryphons...hell, never even heard of snow gryphons, till today. And he gets along with the girls and Jirril as well as anyone, so...Well, Nira wouldn't let him incinerate you without good reason, so I wouldn't worry about it.\"\n\nAlakor just stared at her, trying to keep his beak from dropping. \"Perhaps you mean well, but that is far less comforting than you may have intended.\"\n\nLissir set her forepaw atop his own. \"How about this, then? I think he'll understand, when he realizes why you're defecting. But if not?\" She patted his paw. \"You're our prisoner, which makes your safety our responsibility. I promise you, we won't let the dragon do you any grievous harm.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Alakor bowed his head to her. \"That puts me...\" He blinked, lifting his head again, crown feathers lifted. \"Wait, grievous harm?\"\n\nSivik warbled her agreement with her sister. \"Well, we'll keep you safe, if we must, but if you start insulting us again, and making jokes about mounting us all the time, we might accidentally leave you two alone and let Malaresh knock you around a bit before we come back.\"\n\nAmelia laughed, flashing the male gryphon a wicked grin. \"Or you'll hit it off with the dragon, and you'll be the one who ends up getting mounted and fucked.\"\n\nAlakor blinked, a smile cracking his worried veneer. \"Perhaps so. Never been with a dragon. Could be one way to win his trust, I suppose.\" Then he blinked, wincing. \"Wait, how big is he?\"\n\nAmelia shrugged, then made an impressive indication of size between her outstretched hands. \"About like that, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I meant his body!\" Alakor stared at her, wide-eyed. \"And how do you know?\"\n\n\"Yes, Amelia!\" Sivik turned her head towards the human woman, grinning, her ears perked. \"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Oh, please.\" Amelia waved off the female gryphon. \"When you walk around, and sleep, without pants, sooner or later someone's gonna see it.\" She turned back towards Alakor. \"So you want us to show you the shitter, or not?\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure when you put it that way.\" Alakor chuckled to himself. \"Very well, then. Go ahead.\"\n\n\"S'right through here.\" Amelia went to the large door, outlined in white. She used both hands to push down the gryphon sized handle, and it swung open on oiled hingers. \"Come on.\"\n\nAlakor let the three females go in first, then followed them inside. The room beyond was much smaller, yet still larger than he'd expected. A great, hammered copper tub sat at one side of the room. A small staircase, sized for gryphons and complete with woven traction pads, led to the top of the tub. Another descended inside it. Copper pipes running along the wall connected to large faucets with oversized handles. One was painted blue, the other red.\n\n\"You have plumbing?\" Alakok's beak dropped open. \"In the damn cargo bay?\"\n\n\"Certainly do,\" Lissir said, striding past him. She swished her tail, and its feathers brushed across his beak. \"This thing was built for the Imperial family, you know, and all their ministers, guardians, and so on. There was no expense spared.\" She waved a paw at the tub. \"They probably expected the Imperials to have an entire flight of gryphons on board, considering the number of these down here.\"\n\nLissir turned away from the tub, padding across the room to another copper fixture. This one was a long sunken basin in the floor, with a large, open drain at one end, and a single, faucet-like structure at the other. Lissir flicked her wing open to point at it. \"I'm guessing you know what this is?\"\n\nAlakor, to his dismay, did not. \"Is it...for washing just your paws?\"\n\nThe two female gryphons shared a look, and both erupted into warbling laughter. Sivik shook her head, cringing. \"Oh, if you wash your paws in that, do not even think about touching us afterwards.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Alakor flattened his ears back, embarrassment heating his beak. \"That's the latrine, isn't it.\"\n\n\"It is.\" Lissir giggled, glancing down at the sunken basin. \"Never used one designed for us, hmm?\"\n\nAlakor shook his head once. \"Generally, we were given a pit dug in the ground. At best. Or told to just...\" He scrunched his face behind his beak, waving a paw. \"Go use the field nearby. So I...\" Alakor slunk a few steps closer, staring at the odd, elongated bowl set into the floor. \"Just...go in there?\"\n\n\"Basically.\" Lissir waggled a paw over it. \"You just squat over the basin or...stand, since you're male, I suppose you'll stand over it if you're just pissing. When you're done, you use this lever.\" She pushed the faucet's white-handled lever down, and soon, a steady flow of water poured it. It rushed through the basin, and into the drain. \"Till it's clean again.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" Alakor watched the last of the water drain away, then lifted his head, lashing his tail. \"Which...is never a word I expected to use to describe a latrine.\"\n\n\"Just be grateful someone took the time to consider how things work for creatures with four legs, instead of two. Mind you, the water tanks for this deck, while large, are still finite, so don't waste it.\" Lissir turned away, returning to the door. \"Well, that's your tour. I need to go and find the Princess.\" She glanced back at Sivik. \"If you think you can handle him alone?\"\n\n\"She ain't alone.\" Amelia thumped her thumb into her chest. \"She's got me.\" She followed Lissir out, and as Alakor wandered after her, pointed back to the main doors. \"And a small armor of gnolls and lizards out there with enough firepower to put down a dragon, let alone a gryphon. I think we'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Alakor said, making his way towards the bed. \"I assure you, I've no intention of causing trouble. Considering how little sleep I've had recently, I may just flop onto that lovely looking bed and pass out.\" He warbled to himself. \"At least until someone brings me something to eat, and drink. Or tells me I'm allowed to leave the room.\"\n\n\"I'll ask the Princess and Rog to let us know where you're allowed to roam.\" Lissir paused to shake a single, half-unsheathed claw at him. \"Under guard, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alakor crossed the expansive room as the females headed for the exit. \"I shall await a chance to gaze upon your various beauties again, then.\"\n\nSivik gave an irritable chirrup. \"You're horrible.\"\n\nAmelia just glared at him. \"You'd better be including me, in that.\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly.\" Alakor bowed his head, chuckling. \"So long as you're playing nice, I'm happy to extend you the same compliments and pleasantries.\"\n\nThe three females left the room, closing the doors behind it. While Alakor did not hear any locks or security bars clicked into place, the rest of the armed guards waiting just outside made it clear he was not supposed to leave. That was fine with Alakor. So long as they brought him food soon, the gryphon was content just to have a little time to relax, and test his new bed.\n\nAlakor went to the edge of the bed, staring at it. There were more blankets and cushions than his entire flight of gryphons had to share, back when he was part of a group. Hesitant at first, Alakor reached out and set his paw atop the bed. With all the woven mats, padding, and blankets, he couldn't even feel the wooden support platform beneath it all. The gryphon moved forward, lifting a hind leg up to set his back paw onto the bed. Still, he hesitated, half expecting one of his old handlers to pop out of some secret chamber and starting screaming at him.\n\nAnimals don't belong on the bed! Get to your stall, bird!\n\nWhen no such person emerged, Alakor stepped up onto the bed. Once atop it, he turned around in a tight circle, then did so a second time before flopping down onto the bedding. The hidden wood creaked under his weight, but showed no other signs of distress. Though it was likely designed with smaller gryphons in mind, he was certain it could support him.\n\nAlakar brushed his paw back and forth across the blankets. They were soft as silk against his pads, softer even than his own feathers. They were a far cry from the coarse, bristly blankets that the Union occasionally provided. And most of the time they weren't even given that much. Alakor stretched his foreleg, grasping one of the cushions. Like the blankets, it was mostly a pale sky blue color, with a single layer of silvery lace edging it. To Alakor, it looked like the sort of pillow royalty would use. If this was what they provided prisoners, here, he could only imagine the sort of unfathomable opulence Princess Nira must live in. But for Alakor, this was splendor enough. He pulled the pillow closer, and lay his head down upon it.\n\nAlakor perked his ears as he savored his newfound comfort. Everything was going according to plan. He'd survived his first meeting with the Princess, and learned the identities of those he assumed were her most loyal protectors. And, he'd taken the first step towards ingratiating himself as part of her crew.\n\nAlakor smiled.\n\nSo far, so good."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "With the prisoner secured, Lissir strode through the ship, heading for Princess Nira's office. Despite her years spent living in the ship with her sister, it still struck her just how much walking was involved to get from one section of the ship to another. The vessel was absolutely enormous, complete with multiple sets of lifts, stairwells, ladders, rigging, gangplanks and walkways, labyrinths of rooms and interconnecting corridors, and so on.\n\nSome of the crew called it a city-ship, and with good reason. It had its own resident population, spread across a number of distinctly different decks and sectors, not unlike a city's varied districts. They had everything from tailors and cobblers, to wood and metal workers, to gunsmiths, engineers, and even farmers raising crops and livestock. They had the galleys, of course, but they also had common areas which, over the years, had turned into pubs and taverns. The ship had a currency, adopted from a number of different regions of the world. Hell, they even had their own justice system to keep order.\n\nWhatever the Cataclysm was considered, it took a damn long time to traverse. Gryphons were not averse to walking a good distance, but under other circumstances, Lissir would simply take to her wings and fly. While some of the ship's larger rooms and passageways had the room necessary for a gryphon to spread her wings, it simply wasn't practical to fly from one section to another. If not for the fact that she was heading to an interior area, Lissir would have considered leaving via the docking bay, and flying around the outside of the ship to another entry point.\n\nGiven her size, Lissir had to take the main corridors. Many of the smaller side passages and hallways just weren't big enough for gryphons to comfortably walk. She could have squeezed herself into most of them, but more the walls brushed the feathers of her folded wings, the most claustrophobic she became. The primary passageways were filled with busy crew members of all species going about their days. The presence of so many people left their air swirling with a head-spinning array of scents, as well as a dizzying din that left her ears flattened back against her head.\n\nAt least she didn't have to worry about anyone getting in her way. One and all were quick to scramble out of the way of any oncoming gryphon. While she might not be as massive as Malaresh, or even as big as their white-feathered guest, she was still more than large enough to bowl over even the sturdy gnolls and va'chaak who made up the bulk of the security and maintenance divisions.\n\nAs Lissir reached one of the lifts large enough to support a creature her size, her thoughts wandered back to Alakor. Until today, she'd never actually met a snow gryphon before. She'd heard plenty about them over the years from other gryphons, both in her clan and those allied to hers, as well as from the Empire itself. She'd heard they were big, but Alakor was even larger than she expected. The name came from both their arctic lineage, and their mostly-white coloration. In most Empire gryphons, white was usually a highlight color, and rarely ever a primary. Yet for Alakor's people, it was just the opposite. It certainly gave him a striking, exotic appearance. Lissir had to admit, Alakor was not at all an unattractive male. It was a shame he was such an asshole, she thought.\n\nA trip up the lift took Lissir to the Imperial Court Residence deck. Or at least, that was what the deck was originally intended for. Nira was the only official member of the Imperial Court on board, and she preferred to sleep in her smaller room on the Common Quarters deck. Nira had given a few of the other larger quarters to some of her dearest friends and highest ranking officers, and turned a lot the other rooms into libraries, archives, and meeting areas. However, she kept the original living space for the Imperial Family, along with its associated offices, armory, monitoring stations, and communications equipment.\n\nThe deck was extravagant, once, as would have befit the imperial family. One wide, maroon carpeted hallway was lined with ancient portraits of Nira's ancestors, beneath silver light fixtures. Another was adorned with wooden panels engraved with images of the Empire's history. Near the central living areas, there were decorative reliefs carved in ivory and gold. Long display cases contained massive dragon bones carved into tiny, intricate scenes of airships taking to the skies above a palace. Another held antique ornamental rifles and pistols, plated in gold, inscribed with scenes of victories battles.\n\nThere were far fewer people on this deck than those before. The relative calm provided a pleasant respite. As she approached Nira's doors, Lissir spotted a few armored va'chaak in old indigo and ebony guard uniforms. One of the lizard-like bipeds was male, with dark green scales and golden speckles. The other guard was female, with pale blue scales, and silver marking along the side of her head, and little frills. Each bore a rifle slung over one shoulder, with a pistol at the hip, along with plenty of ammo. At this point, the guards were as much a formality as anything. With the possible exception of Alakor, Lissir couldn't imagine anyone on the ship who would wish to do the Princess harm. And should the alarm bells signal an imminent threat, dozens more such guards would flood the hallways and swarm to her protection, anyway.\n\n\"Hello!\" Lissir lifted her paw and waved it, offering her best imitation of a bipedal greeting. Then she dipped her head and mantled her wings, offering her respects in the way of her own people.\n\n\"Hi, Lissir.\" The female va'chaak came forward, eagerly rubbing and scratching at Lissir's ears as soon as the gryphon leaned into her touch. \"The Princess is waiting for you.\"\n\nThe gryphon leaned her head into the attention, a throaty purr coaxed from her. \"Mmm...that's nice.\" She felt a little guilty about not remembering the names of the guards, considering they knew hers. Granted, there were only a handful of gryphons board the ship, compared with hundreds of other people. There were probably not many crew members who didn't know the gryphons names. \"I hope she hasn't been waiting long?\"\n\n\"Not terribly.\" The male spoke up to answer her question. He approached and joined in with the petting, stroking her neck feathers. \"She knew you had business to attend. Sounds like we've got a new guest.\"\n\n\"You could say that.\" She closed her eyes, savoring all the affection. Let it never be said, she thought, that a gryphon was too proud to enjoy a good petting. She swished her tail, cooing. \"I'd stay here and enjoy this all day, if I could, but I'd better not keep her waiting much longer.\"\n\n\"No, probably not.\" The female va'chaak patted her head, then went to open the door.\n\nWhen the male backed away as well, Lissir straightened up, shaking herself. Though she did so enjoy being petted, it always left her feathers mussed, which in turn left her with a great urge to preen. Still, she forced herself not to sit here preening in front of them. They might well find it get the wrong idea and think she hadn't enjoyed all the attention. Instead, she asked their names. The female was Urga, and the male, Temok. Lissir thanked them, but feared she'd never remember them without meeting these two again at least a few more times.\n\nUrga knocked on the doors, and when Nira's muffled reply came from with, she pushed them open. The doors themselves were white, but inlaid with shimmering, iridescent blue-black pearl. When the doors were closed, the inlay created a gray black star, the symbol of the empire. To Lissir's knowledge, the name came from an old tale about the Empire's founders, and a mythical black star that led them to safety as they fled persecution. The same stay eventually led them their first alliance with the 'beasts', or so it was said.\n\nOnce the doors were open far enough, Lissir strode into Nira's office. The Princess' office was a large, circular room. The walls were the color of cream, divided into panels with elegant golden framework. Each panel had bore its own decorations. Some held frescoes of important figures, others had elegant silverwork flowers, or ornamental vases and crystalline sculptures. Light fixtures in hidden recesses cast gentle, faintly blue-tinted light throughout the room. A floor of pink marble spanned the room, with Nira's expansive, semi-circular desk at the center of it. As Nira often held meetings in her office, an assortment of chairs of various sizes and styles were also located in the room.\n\nThe desk was also marble, though it was white, with gold ribbons running through it. It looked as if it weighed more than Lissir did. Piles of books, charts, and writing utensils sat on one side of the desk. At the other side were a number of navigation tools and instruments of brass and crystal. Also sitting nearby were several spyglasses of varying length, along with handfuls of golden coins, and cartridges of various sizes for pistols and rifles.\n\nAll around the outside of the desk were carved images from the Empire's history. Most of them depicted grand battles, or the signing of great treaties, or even the flight of their first airship. Lissir had always been partial to the engraving of a human with a crown bowing before three tall gryphons. It symbolized the day that the first three warring gryphon clans voted to put aside their differences, and join the human's Empire, together. To spread their wings and fly into the future, before it left them behind.\n\nNira sat in the plush, black-leather chair behind her desk, gazing at an old, silver tinted photo held in a simple wooden frame, and kept under protective glass. The Princess had many other such images, though Lissir knew she kept most in her current sleeping chambers. The one she kept on her desk was different, though, special in its own way.\n\nThe image it held was of Nira's younger sister Tryn, the only other known survivor of the once great Imperial Family. Nira almost never spoke of her sister. Hell, Lissir couldn't remember the last time she'd even heard Nira utter her name. Sometimes, the gryphon wondered if it was hard for Nira to see her and Sivik together, joking around, being affectionate, even sniping at one another. Did Nira miss those things, with her own sister? Or had the years rendered those longings but dull aches, buried somewhere in her heart?\n\nBest Lissir could tell, Nira tried not to think about her sister the way she tried not to think about her parents. The situations were both similar and vastly different. Nira's parents were dead, a fact the whole ship knew and yet Nira refused to acknowledge. Nira also rarely acknowledged that her younger sister Tryn was still alive. Considering that Nira would never get to see her sister again, Lissir imagined it was just less painful for the Princess to convince herself her sibling was dead.\n\n\"Should I...\" Lissir kept her voice as soft as she could. \"Come back later?\"\n\n\"No.\" Nira turned the photo down on her desk, and pushed it aside to join an immense stack of books and charts. \"I was just...thinking. Thank you, though.\" She waved the gryphon forward. \"Come in, Lissir.\"\n\nLissir did as the princess asked. She settled into a sturdy, gryphon-style lounger across the desk from Nira. Loungers were the gryphon equivalent of a chair, an elevated surface that was either flat or lightly inclined. They allowed a gryphon a comfortable place to lay, while also elevating them above the floor. Luxurious padding in overstuffed, golden hued cushions lined this one. Lissir settled onto her belly on it, one hind leg casually hanging off the edge.\n\n\"Any trouble getting our new friend settled?\" Nira leaned back in her chair, folding her arms.\n\n\"Not really.\" Nira rubbed the recliner's cushion beneath a paw. \"I left him under guard, but I don't think he's going to bring us any problems. In fact, he...\" She trailed off, unsure if she should tell Nira about Alakor's reaction to the buddy. After a moment, she decided it was for the best. \"He cried, actually. When we presented his bed. Apparently, he...\" She sighed, patting the chair frame. \"Never had a bed, before.\"\n\nNira scowled, knitting her brows. \"Not exactly the reaction I expected.\"\n\n\"Nor I!\" Lissir swished her tail. \"But...perhaps I shouldn't have been too surprised, given what I've heard about snow gryphons.\"\n\n\"Go on.\" Nira rocked her chair. \"I wanted to hear about them, actually. Before the others arrive. You seem to know an awful lot about the species.\" She paused her rocking, her scowl deepening. \"Is it a separate species?\"\n\nLissir considered the question, stretching her wings. \"I don't think I'm scientifically minded enough to answer that.\"\n\nNira chuckled, resuming her idle rocking. \"Give it your best shot. I've never seen a gryphon with his colors, or his size, before.\"\n\n\"There are different types of gryphons, and different clans.\" Lissir splayed her ears, working the thoughts around in her head. Gryphons viewed such things differently than humans, and it was troublesome to translate those differences. \"We would consider the snow gryphons to be an isolated, unique clan. There are different...\" She clicked her beak. \"I suppose your word for it, would be...breeds, of gryphons? We tend to call them clans, now, but that can have several different meanings. A clan can be the whole of a breed, like the snow gryphons, or it can be a grand collection of family units and individuals, with a leadership structure, or even an army. We have different words for them, but also different ways of saying those words, or conveying meaning with body language. They don't translate well.\"\n\nNira rubbed her face with both hands, groaning. \"I understand. Alright, so...put it in simplistic terms even a dumb human can understand.\"\n\nThat made Lissir laugh. She lifted her head, her beak open and ears perked. \"You're hardly dumb, Boss. But humans can't even move their ears properly, let alone make half the sounds we do. You can't be expected to tell the difference chiirm, and chiiirrm...\" She cocked her ears to precise ankles, flattening back her wings, but splaying the feathers. Then she added a warbling, chirping noise to the word. \"Chirm!\"\n\nNira only blinked. \"There was a difference?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Lissir waved a paw. \"One speaks of a personal clan, one speaks of clan-species, and one speaks of a clan, as a nation.\"\n\nA smile tugged at Nira's lips. \"I thought I told you to put it in terms us dumb humans could understand.\"\n\nLissir warbled amusement, then fell silent. Her tail swished back and forth as she considered the easiest explanation. \"I suppose, if you were to speak to a biologist, they would tell you snow gryphons are a separate, but related species. Such as...\" She waggled a few half-unsheathed claws. \"Wolves, and coyotes. They're both similar, but wolves are much larger, and coyotes much more populous. Separate, but closely related enough to breed together, from time to time. To the same extent, there are different species of gryphons, but where our different clans once warred, eventually we united.\" She gestured to Nira's desk, to the image of the three gryphon rulers forging their alliance with the humans. \"Over the generations, the physical differences between our clans have blurred. But the snow gryphons, they were isolated, living in the mountains to the far, far south, where the Union was borne. So they remain a separate species of gryphon, a clan apart.\"\n\n\"That's a lot of words just to tell me yes, Alakor's a different species than you are.\" Nira leaned back again, putting her boots up on her desk. \"But thank you for the explanation, just the same.\"\n\nLissir chirped, lifting her crown feathers. \"I thought you'd appreciate the finer details. You do seem to have an interest in our people, after all.\"\n\n\"I sure as hell do. You're fascinating.\" Nira grunted, her jaw flexing. \"I'd be happy to sit and have a few drinks with you and your sister sometime, and just...learn all about gryphons. Hell, I wish Malaresh was half as forthcoming about dragons as you are about your species. For now, though, we'd best keep focused on our guest.\"\n\nLissir nodded once. \"Biologically speaking, I believe that he is a separate species from us. Not so distinct as to be unable to breed with us, though. Not that he's had the chance.\"\n\nNira grinned, tilting her head. \"I slightly get the feeling you'd be interested in giving him that chance, under other circumstances.\"\n\n\"He's a very impressive gryphon.\" Lissir let her beak slowly open and her ears gradually flatten in sly smile. \"And his colors are not at all unattractive. I've never seen colors like them. And, if the rest of him's just as impressive...\" She gave a mock sigh. \"Well, let's just say it's been far too long since a male's climbed on my back and given me a proper fucking.\"\n\nNira burst out laughing. \"Lissir, that's not how that expression works.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lissir cocked her head. She was certainly she'd used the correct human words for a satisfying mating experience. \"Proper fucking?\"\n\nThat only made Nira laugh harder for reasons Lissir didn't understand. She unfolded her arms to wave a hand at the gryphon. \"No, no. I meant, 'let's just say.' Usually when someone uses that phrase, they're about to subtly imply something, not just blurt it out.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Lissir rustled her wings, fluffing up. \"Gryphons don't do subtlety very well.\"\n\n\"So I've noticed.\"\n\n\"It's just as well.\" Lissir set her head down upon a curled forepaw at the front of the lounger. \"If what I've heard is true, it wouldn't matter how impressive his cock was. He wouldn't know how to use it, anyway.\"\n\n\"I suppose you two did tease Alakar an awful lot about being a virgin,\" Nira said, quirking a brow. \"Dare I ask if that's something gryphons can tell so easily?\"\n\nLissir chirruped and giggled. \"Oh, no, not really. It's not as if our feathers turn colors after someone pleasures us for the first time, or our crown feathers grow in after our first mating.\" She held up a paw. \"But to my understanding, all snow gryphons who serve the Golden Union are purposefully bred. The gryphons don't have a say in it, the union breeds whichever pairs it thinks will provide the offspring who best suit their needs. Then the Union takes away their eggs, and raises the fledglings to obey their masters.\"\n\nNira pulled her feet off her desk, leaning forward. \"You said earlier. It's rather, sickening, actually. The Union seems to think that anything that isn't human is somehow...lesser than them, no matter how intelligent they are.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Lissir clicked her beak. \"I rather doubt that snow gryphons are allowed much opportunity for recreational mating. Even if he's bred a few times, it's not as if he's going to be any good at it.\"\n\nNira rubbed her chin, smiling again. \"I suppose you'll just have to show him the ropes, then.\"\n\n\"Very funny.\" Lissir clicked her beak. \"Defecting or not, he's still Union. And an asshole, at that.\"\n\nNira chuckled, reaching for one of her navigational instruments. She picked up the collection of brass circles and dials, idly turning it over in her hands. \"Speaking of his defection, what's your honest assessment? Is he genuinely looking to defect, or is he fucking with us? It's certainly crossed my mind that he might still be working for the Union. He could be under orders to locate us, and fake a defection in order to worm his way into the crew, then flee with as many of our secrets as possible.\"\n\n\"I wondered as much, myself.\"\n\nAt the mention of secrets, Lissir glanced past Nira, towards the section of wall at the far side of the room. Though the room was circular, Lissir considered that area to be the back of it, as it was opposite the entryway. The room had several hidden doors in its white and gold paneled walls. One led to the secret corridor that connected to Imperial Family's private quarters, as well as a few other areas. Others led to various escape routes of emergency escape. One, however, led only to an immense door made of strange, black material. Lissir had seen the door only once, and it the sight of it left the skin under her pinfeathers prickling and tingling. It looked like stone, smooth and black like obsidian. And yet, no matter what manner of light reached it, cast no reflection whatsoever. It was as if the ship's builders created a door made from shadow itself, then hidden it away behind the Imperial Family's offices. Whatever that meant, she wasn't sure she wanted to know.\n\nAnd yet, curiosity was a beast ever seeking to escape from it's cage. Lissir gestured with her beak towards the far wall. \"Have you ever...?\"\n\nNira grunted, not looking back. \"Yes. And to answer your inevitable follow up question, what I found in there was a lot of very confusing things I decided it best not to mess with. I'd rather not talk about that, right now, aside from the hope that Alakor isn't actually here to try and steal whatever all that stuff is.\"\n\n\"Well, what's it look like?\" Lissir ruffled her feathers. \"Was it weapons, or tomes with forbidden knowledge, or-\"\n\nNira slapped her free hand against her desk. \"Not now. I want to know what to tell Rog before he gets here with the others. So. Can we trust Alakor or not?\" She held her hands up. \"You can only guess, I know, but you've a better insight into him than I do.\"\n\nLissir nodded, sitting up a little on her lounger. \"Fair enough.\" She took a slow, deep inhalation, fluffing herself up as she considered the question. It was difficult to say one way or the other. She simply hadn't had enough time to talk with, and observe, the white-feathered male. Then she let all the air back out in a long, deliberate sigh. \"I'm not certain.\"\n\nNira groaned, rubbing her forehead. \"Lissir...Just take your best gods-damned guess.\"\n\nThe gryphon chirred, an irritated noise. She did not like making guesses on important matters. Still, Nira went with her instincts more often than not, and most of the time, the princess's best guesses had panned out. A few of them had even saved their lives, in times past. Granted, Nira's guesses that hadn't worked out were often the reason their lives were in danger in the first place. But Lissir supposed as long as it all worked out well in the end, that was what mattered.\n\n\"What do your instincts tell you?\" Nira waved the astrolabe, leaning back in her chair again. \"You said he cried just because we'd given him a bed, right? Did it seem genuine? Was he truly moved by something so basic, or did it seem more like a spy playing for sympathy?\"\n\n\"I believe it was genuine.\" She ground her beak, pinning her ears. \"Genuine enough that I comforted him, in fact. The Union does likely treat them like animals. They're probably brainwashed from childhood, told they're...just beasts, given a chance to earn a soul by serving the Union's God, or some such bullshit.\" She snarled under her breath, flaring her crown feathers. \"And with his attitude, he probably got himself beaten for talking back an awful lot growing up, too.\"\n\nShe unsheathed a single claw tip, tapping it against the lounger, thinking out loud. \"If half the stories are true, it would have been a terribly difficult life, but he wouldn't have known any better for most of it. But late in the war, or after it, it would be harder and harder for the Union to hide the fact that the Empire's gryphons aren't servants. They're citizens. Or at least they were, before the Union. As a spy, he's probably been to places the Union doesn't control. Realized he doesn't to spend his whole life as their slave, beaten into submission. This place, our ship?\" She waved her paw at the space around them. \"It's probably his best chance to escape all that. Especially if he's telling the truth about the Union extending their influence into formally non-allied lands. Wouldn't do him much good to flee them if they're just going to annex whatever country he fled too. But with us, he'd be free, for the first time in his life.\"\n\nNira turned the astrolabe over in her hands a few times. \"You're making a pretty strong case for a genuine defection.\"\n\nLissir's worked her beak in silence, struggling for a reply. A few times, she'd caught something in the white gryphon's eyes, some haunted, anguished ghost drifting just behind his azure irises. It was there, when he was staring at the bed, and it was there, when she teased him about being bred and he could not meet her eyes. Wait...did that mean...?\n\n\"I think...\" She kneaded the edge of her lounger. \"I think maybe they bred him, recently. And...maybe that was the last straw, as your people say.\"\n\nNira leaned forward again. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"It was clear that teasing him about whether he'd mated or not was getting under his feathers, but maybe not for the reasons we thought. When we got him to his quarters, I asked him if his old masters had already bred him. I realized when I said it, it was a step too far, but...\" Her ears drooped. \"I think he has a child. Or...they bred him to some female he cared about. Maybe both. I don't think they'd let him see his child. Maybe he...he just couldn't stand to be part of that, anymore.\"\n\nNira frowned, quiet for a moment. When she spoke up again, her voice was softer, and heavy with sympathy. \"That's terrible. But...don't you think he'd want to stay, if only to make some effort to go and see his child?\"\n\nLissir tensed, slowly turning her eyes towards the face-down picture of Nira's younger sister. \"With respect, Princess...will you ever try and see your sister?\"\n\nAnger flashed in Nira's eyes, and slammed her hand on the desk. \"My sister is-\" She clamped her jaw shut, the fury melting away as swiftly as it arrived. \"Point taken.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Lissir bowed her head, best she could while lying on a lounger. \"That was too far.\"\n\n\"No, no.\" Nira sighed, saking her head. \"It was exactly far enough. If you're right, and they did force him to father a child...That could be grounds for him to finally undertake a defection he'd been considering. But...\" She cursed under her breath, tossing the astrolabe onto the desk. \"We also have to consider it could be grounds for blackmail. Tell him they'll bend the rules, let him raise his own child, if undertakes a dangerous, secret mission.\"\n\n\"That is...\" Lissir growled to herself, wishing she'd considered such a cruel, but entirely plausible, option herself. \"More likely than I'm comfortable with.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Nira held both hands up. \"Granted, we're just firing shots in the dark here, anyway. He may very well just be genuinely seeking an escape from the Union. Gods know I couldn't blame him there. And if he's telling us the truth, he'd make a hell of an ally. Kasis could pick his brain for Union intel for years. We've plenty of people on board the ship who'd love to get back at the Union, but far fewer who can actually give us real, up to date information on how they operate, and where they're operating. Alright, Lissir. If you had the make the decision right now, do you believe he's genuinely defecting?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Lissir nodded once. \"But, I-\"\n\n\"No but's.\" Nira shook a single finger at the gryphon. \"Yes, or no.\"\n\nLissir ground her beak. It was an impossible to distill such a question down to a simple yes or no answer, but her instincts said yes. If she was a brainwashed Union slave bird, who only just discovered the gryphons outside the Union weren't treated like animals, she'd want to get the hell out of there, too.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I concur.\" Nira reached across the desk and dragged a leather bound folder across it. She flipped it open, and pulled out a document. From the looks of things, she'd already filled it out in part. She pulled a pen from a stoneware container, and scribbled a few things out on the document. \"I'm authorizing an upgrade of his status. He's now officially a guest of the ship, and is further authorized to visit the following list of areas. However, he is to remain under guard, and I am officially placing you and your sister in charge of him. Anywhere not explicitly listed should be considered off limits.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Princess.\" Lissir clicked her beak twice, then dipped her head in a formal bow.\n\nNira lifted her pen and waggled it at the gryphon. \"Let's be clear on one thing. He is to remain under suspicion of possible continued Union allegiance until we have full and complete reason to believe otherwise. Watch him and listen to him carefully. If you, your sister, or anyone else see or anything the least bit suspicious, I want to know immediately. I'll tell Rog and the others in person. I'm keeping that off the documentation, because I want you to be able to show this to Alakor.\"\n\n\"A wise idea.\" Lissir tilted her head. \"Anything else?\"\n\nNira signed her name to the document, then blew on the ink. \"Just inform me directly of anything else you learn about him, or anything you deem important. For example, if he ends up confirming he does have a child, or if he lets slip any particularly grievous abuses he might wish to avenge, or if you fuck him, or-\"\n\n\"What was that last one?\" Lissir narrowed her ears, her ears pinned.\n\n\"Grievous abuses.\" Nira set the pen down, then laid the document atop the folder. \"It could be possible that he is genuinely defecting, but for purposes of using us as tools for revenge.\"\n\n\"Hilarious, Princess.\" Lissir fluffed herself up, then smiled. \"Do you really want to know?\"\n\n\"Only if you feel like bragging.\" Nira folded her arms again, matching the gryphon's grin. \"Or complaining, if he's as inexperienced as you believe.\"\n\nLissir gave a playful snarl. \"As you wish, Your Highness. But it's not likely to happen, anyway. If I wanted to mate with someone that egotistical, I'd go visit Malaresh.\"\n\nNira laughed, rocking her chair again. \"There's an idea. Though, I heard a dragon's penis has spines on it.\"\n\nLissir scrunched her face behind her beak. \"That sounds unpleasant. Thankfully, his tongue sure as hell doesn't.\"\n\nNira quirked a brow. \"Speaking from experience, are we?\"\n\nLissir just tossed her head. \"Hearsay, more like. Speaking of which, it seems as though Amelia's seen it. Perhaps we should ask her if it has spines.\"\n\nNira leaned forward, her eyes widening. \"She has? I didn't know she and Malaresh ever...well, anything. But I suppose she has spent a lot of time with him. And there was the episode where she had to have him fitted for a saddle. Oh, now I'm extra curious.\"\n\nLissir gave a chittering giggle. \"About the dragon's cock, or Amelia's knowledge of it?\"\n\n\"Both.\" A knock on the door interrupted Nira, and she called out. \"Yes?\"\n\nUrga opened the door a crack and pushed her blue scale muzzle through the opening. \"Guard Captain Rog, Chief Navigator Kasis, and Chief Mechanic Vekk are here to see you.\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" Nira offered the gryphon a playful smile. \"As much as I've enjoyed our chat, I've business to conduct. You're welcome to stick around, if you like.\"\n\nLissir shook her head. \"I'd better go and make sure Alakor's not giving Amelia or my sister any trouble. I'll tell him what we agreed upon, as well.\"\n\n\"Sounds good.\" Nira hopped out of her chair, and came around to give Lissir a hug around her neck. \"Thank you, Lissir, your help has been invaluable.\"\n\n\"Glad to hear it, Princess.\" Lissir happily leaned into the human's touch. Nira had been a dear friend for a long time, royalty or not. She lifted her foreleg and returned Nira's hug before pulling back. \"I'll talk with you later, then. Get a drink tonight?\"\n\n\"Love too.\" Nira returned to her desk, offering a farewell wave. \"See you then.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Nira smiled at her friends as they entered her office. Rog came in first, followed by Vekk and Kasis. Though she had plenty of other officers, over her decade or so on the ship, these three had proven themselves to be not only among her most trusted friends, but also her most her most competent crewmen. She'd made them her personal advisors as well as putting them in with their heads of their respective divisions.\n\nRog was still wearing the same clothes from before, the black tunic and breeches with silver buttons. He looked as if he'd brushed his fur, at least. He'd left the axe somewhere, and replaced it with a leather bound log-book, instead. Nira had always thought Rog looked sharp when well dressed. Now, if she could just get him to put on a formal jacket, or a fine vest, he might really look impressive. If nothing else, the idea of a big gnoll warrior in fine, formal attire amused her.\n\nAs Vekk and Kasis followed Rog in, they whispered and giggled to each other, holding hands. Between their short stature, Vekk's big ears and fluffy fur, and Kasis' blunt muzzle and twitching tail, Nira couldn't imagine a cuter couple. Vekk was in clean clothes, all the grease and grime washed from his thick gray and red fur. Now his pelt spilled out over the collar of his blue shirt, and protruded from between its buttons, as well as out of his sleeves. In the absence of his usual pockets filled with tools, he'd buckled a variety cargo bags across his chest and around his waist. Kasis was in fresh clothing as well, though hers was simply another hybrid jumpsuit she'd stitched together for herself, this time black. She carried a bulging satchel across her shoulder.\n\n\"You know, Kasis,\" Nira said, propping her boots up on her desk. \"I can't help but notice that not only is Vekk all nice and clean now, but you're in clean clothes, too.\"\n\n\"Someone's got to scrub all that grease out of his fur.\" Kasis shot her lover a playful glare. \"Gods know he sure as hell won't do it himself.\"\n\n\"Sure I will!\" Vekk hooked his free hand under the cargo strap across his chest. \"At the end of the day. But, yanno, no one's gonna say no when their female offers to help them wash up.\" He nudged Rog's leg with his elbow. \"Right big guy?\"\n\nRog flashed the smaller male a grin. \"Damn right.\"\n\nKasis flattened her tiny frills back, hissing. \"I am not 'your female.' You know I don't like it when you call me that.\"\n\n\"I know, I know.\" Vekk squeezed her hand. \"You prefer it when I call you my girl, right?\"\n\nKasis jerked her hand away from his, and slapped him over the head with it.\n\n\"Ow!\" Vekk rubbed his oversized ears, grinning sheepishly. \"Sorry, Sunset.\"\n\n\"You'd better be.\" She smiled at him, then kissed the side of his muzzle. \"Now knock it off.\"\n\n\"Yes, Sunset.\" Vekk dragged over one of the high chairs for her. Nira kept several such chairs in her office, kobold-sized seats, elevated to the level of the princess' desk. \"Lemme get that for you.\"\n\nKasis scrabbled up the chair, and settled herself, then pulled her satchel off her shoulder and tossed it onto the desk. Vekk pulled another chair over for himself, as Rog pushed the gryphon lounger out of the way. The gnoll replaced it with a larger chair better suited for gnolls, then plopped himself into it. Most of the furniture on the ship was better suited for non-humans than it was for humans. The chairs often had frames and designed to comfortably fit tails, as well as the animal-like leg and foot structures of other peoples.\n\n\"Got a guard regiment assigned,\" Rog said, passing Nira his log book. \"Put the girls and Amelia at the top of it, but also gave them authority to reassign others in their place or as needed.\"\n\n\"Good!\" Nira skimmed through the list of names. She recognized most of them, if not all, but anyone who Rog trusted with the job was good with her. \"I'm authorizing him to visit a few common areas, but he's to remain under guard for the time being. Lissir and I believe his defection request to be genuine, but there's no real way to prove it other than earning our trust over time. And that burden's on him.\" She fetched her pen, then signed off on the guard assignments, and passed the book back to Rog. \"I want everyone to keep a close eye on Alakor though. Watch what he does, where he goes, where he's looking...and listen to him, too. What he asks about, what he says about himself, anything he lets slip, and so on. As much as I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the safety of this ship and its crew, I need to consider him as a potential Union spy and saboteur.\"\n\n\"I think that's smart.\" Vekk tugged the cargo strap back and forth across his chest. The fur poking between black buttons shifted with it. \"I sure as hell don't want him going anywhere near the engines. Or the fuel depots. Or the boilers. Or the turbines. Or the gas pumps. Or the gas bag access-\"\n\nNira held her hand up to cut the urd'thin off. \"I get it, Vekk, I get it. Don't worry, right now he's only authorized for galleys, the lower decks pub, one viewing deck, and the shops. I don't even want him allowed onto any outside areas yet. He's obviously seen the ship plenty from the outside, but I don't want him to have a chance to find his way to any other exterior access points.\"\n\n\"Good, good.\" Vekk rubbed his hands together, then propped his elbow up on the arm of his chair. \"I ran all the inspections. Couple minor issues that popped up. There's a propulsion turbine I don't wanna use until we finish a repair, but we should have that done by the morning. A boiler that needs a re-weld. Everything else looks good, though. Haven't had time to run every test, but I'll get that done this evening.\"\n\nRog glanced down at Kasis, giving her a big, toothy gnoll grin. \"Yeah, Kasis had her own tests to run, sounds like.\"\n\nKasis stretched her bronze scaled arms out, interweaving her fingers, playfully cracking her knuckles. \"We had to test an especially important piston.\"\n\n\"Which, I might add.\" Vekk perked his over-sized gray ears, sitting up straighter. \"Performed in an exemplary way.\"\n\nThe kobold gave her lover a sly, sidelong look. \"I'd say it earned a satisfactory grade, at least. Could use replacing with a newer model.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Vekk slapped the arm of his chair, laughing. \"Very damn funny, Sunset!\" He huffed, pinning his big ears back, then returned his attention to Nira. \"Anyway, if we have any problems or discover anything problematic, I'll let you know right away. I think we should be good, though. If we had to run, or fight, I'd be confident in firing things up full go.\"\n\n\"Speaking of fighting,\" Rog said, scratching at the ruff of dark fur on the back of his neck. \"I told the gunnery crew to check and test every cannon and gun the ship's got, and any other weapons, too. Haven't heard back yet, but shouldn't be any real problems. Got security staff checkin' their own weapons too, and everything in the armories.\" He glanced at the urd'thin and kobold. \"You two should get your own groups to do the same. Just in case.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah.\" Kasis waved him off. \"Half of us don't even carry guns, but I'll pass it along.\"\n\n\"You better.\" Rog folded his arms. \"And when's the last time you cleaned yours?\"\n\n\"About the last time I fired it.\" Kasis twitched her tail.\n\n\"Which was when?\" Rog glowered down at her.\n\n\"Shit if I know!\" The little kobold threw her hands up. \"I got more important things to do than drop a pistol into a soapy tub. Yanno, like making sure we don't crash this thing into a fuckin' mountain.\"\n\nThe gnoll just stared at her, his muzzle hanging open. \"Please tell me you don't drop it into the tub.\"\n\nKasis snapped her jaws. \"Of course not! I just knew it'd piss ya off.\" She held her hands up sighing. \"I'll make sure it's well maintained, alright?\"\n\nRog smiled at her, nodding once. \"That's all I ask.\"\n\n\"Whatever. Don't forget to oil up and sharpen your precious axe.\" The kobold made an annoyed, growling noise. \"That way, when you get shot from a distance, you won't have to worry about being embarrassed when your killers loot you for a dull, rusty weapon.\"\n\nNira chuckled, shaking her head. \"Alright, alright. That's enough. Kasis, what have you got for us?\"\n\nRog gave an loud snort, flattening back his ears. \"A poorly maintained pistol, apparently.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Kasis hopped to her feet on the elevated chair, growling again, louder this time. \"You keep it up, mutt, and I'm gonna nail you one in the powder bag so hard, your weapon's gonna need some maintenance!\"\n\n\"Aww, are you inviting me to join you two's next bath?\" Rog let his muzzle hang open, his tongue lolling over his teeth, a rather insulting expression among gnolls. \"I'd be happy too! Wouldn't wanna make Vekk jealous, though.\"\n\n\"That's it! I'm taking you down, mutt!\" Kasis leapt off her chair with a snarling cry.\n\n\"ACK!\" Rog swiftly covered his crotch with one hand, using the other to fend off the furious kobold scrambling up his chair. He grabbed her around the throat, not painfully, just enough to hold her at bay. \"Truce, truce! Don't make me put you in time out, little lizard pup!\"\n\n\"Get yer hands off her!\" Vekk leapt out of his own chair, scrabbling to Kasis' defense. \"I'm coming, Sunset!\"\n\nNira just stared, watching it all unfold. At this point, as long as no one got serious injured, she was inclined just to let them all wear themselves out. Gods, she thought, it's like dealing with children. Dangerous, dangerous children. Soon Kasis and Vekk were on opposite sides of Rog, clambering over him and his chair as if they were scaling the ship's rigging. They across him, leaving the gnoll to try and keep them at arms length, or snatch them up and toss them back to the floor. Rog finally got an arm around Vekk's waist, and stood up, hefting the smaller creature up like a squirming sack of grain. He tried to snatch Kasis next, but she scrabbled up the front of Nira's desk before he could get hold. Just as quickly, Kasis propelled herself off of it right into the gnoll's chest.\n\nThe impact hit Rog hard enough to rock him back into his chair. That in turn upended the chair and sent everyone toppling backwards along with it. Wood cracked and shattered as the chair collapsed, and all three combatants thumped soundly against the marble floor. Nira winced, but since there weren't any screams, remained content to let things sort themselves out. Rog sprawled on his back, coughing. Vekk groaned alongside him, panting for breath. Kasis tumbled across the floor, and ended up flat on her belly, her tail sticking up in the air. She pushed herself up, looking around. Then with a little whimper, crawled back to the others.\n\nKasis climbed atop Rog, and sat upon his chest, smiling down at him. \"I win.\"\n\nRog coughed again, returning her smile, a bit more sheepishly. \"Good game.\"\n\nNira finally laughed, rising out of her seat to go help everyone up. \"You three are gonna kill each other, one of these days.\" She reached down and hoisted the kobold off of Rog's chest. Normally Kasis hated being picked up, but this time she hung limp from Nira's arms, and offered no protest as Nira returned her to her own seat. \"You owe me a new chair.\"\n\n\"Technically,\" Kasis said, a smile on her blunt, bronze muzzle. \"Rog broke it.\"\n\n\"Technically,\" Rog said, slowly sitting back up. \"Next time, I'm gonna throw you so hard you stick into the wall like a dart.\"\n\n\"That's not how 'technically' works, Rog.\" Nira bent over to offer Vekk her hand. The groaning urd'thin staggered back to his feet, and Nira helped him back into his elevated chair. She turned to help the gnoll up, next. \"And you did egg her own pretty hard, that time. But.\" She grasped Rog's hand with both of hers, pulling with all her might till the gnoll was standing. Then she turned back to Kasis, waving a finger. \"You broke the chair, so you pay for the replacement. And clean up the mess.\"\n\nKasis huffed, muttering something under her breath in the kobold tongue. Then she glanced at Nira. \"Yeah, yeah, alright.\"\n\nNira went back around to her desk, dropping into her chair with a sigh. \"So, now that you three have earned your bruises for the day, can we get back to business?\" She gestured at Kasis. \"You were about to tell us what you had.\" Then she shot Rog a glare. \"Keep your muzzle shut this time.\"\n\n\"No idea what you're inferring.\" Rog went to the gryphon lounger.\n\nKasis watched him closely, waiting until she was sure he wasn't going to interrupt before she began. She pointed to her satchel on the desk. \"I drew up three potential routes for us to take, but the more I thought about it, the more I think we should-\"\n\nSCCCRREEEEEEEEEEEE!\n\nAs Rog dragged the gryphon lounger back towards the desk, it made a horrible, grating sound against the floor. The noise drowned out Kasis' voice completely. Nira cringed at the obnoxious sound, pinching the bridge of her nose. The noise continued for a few moments, then Rog paused to glance back at everyone.\n\n\"Hey Kas, what were you saying?\"\n\nKasis folded her arms. \"I ain't gonna talk till you're done, otherwise you're just gonna-\"\n\nSCCCRREEEEEEEEEE!\n\nAs soon as he stopped once more, Kasis thrust an dull clawed finger at him. \"He's doin' that on purpose!\"\n\n\"Of course he is.\" Nira shot the gnoll a glare. \"Rog, cut it out.\"\n\nRog turned around, his ears swiveled in feigned innocence confusion. \"Cut what out?\"\n\n\"Rog, behave yourself, or I'm banning you from alcohol for a week.\"\n\nThe gnoll's jaw dropped. \"All alcohol?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Nira slapped her hand on the desk. \"Now either bring that thing over here and sit on it, or just stand here. Either way, stop needling Kasis.\"\n\nRog grumbled, dragging the lounger over without further scraping sounds. \"Give you something to sit on, more like.\"\n\nNira glared at him, even as she tried not to laugh at his childish but admittedly amusing retort. After all their years together, they still had practically the same juvenile sense of humor. The only real difference was Nira knew when to quit. \"I can hear you, you know.\"\n\n\"I kinda thought...\" Vekk gestured between Nira and Rog. \"You two had already...\"\n\nNira glanced over at the urd'thin. \"Vekk, please.\"\n\n\"You know.\" Vekk made a circle with his furred thumb and finger, then held up a single finger on the other. \"The ol'...\"\n\n\"Yes, Vekk, everyone knows what you're implying.\" Nira ignored his question.\n\nThe urd'thin moved his finger towards the circle. \"So, is that a yes? Have you and Rog-\"\n\n\"Vekk, if you complete that gesture?\" Nira set her hands on the desk, leaning over it towards him. \"I'm putting you on latrine scrubbing duty for the rest of the year. And Malaresh's latrine, at that.\"\n\nVekk dropped his hands into his lap. \"Speculation cheerfully withdrawn.\"\n\n\"The Emplacement!\" Kasis slapped the edge of Nira's desk. \"If you males would both stop being so damn obnoxious for at least one minute, I'm trying to tell the Princess I believe we should venture to The Emplacement.\"\n\nNira snapped her attention back to Kasis, her voice flat. \"The Emplacement. Really? Don't we have enough trouble?\"\n\nKasis shrugged, her tail twitching faster than usual. \"I know, I know, it's always a risk going there.\"\n\n\"A fun risk,\" Rog said, though he kept his voice soft.\n\nNira smirked. \"Also true. But why?\"\n\nKasis scratched her muzzle. \"We're already going towards the Teeth, right? As long as they're willing to let us through, The Emplacement is the easiest transit point. Plus can restock some things while we're there. See if we've any more connections on new sources of lifting gas, too. More importantly?\" She held up a finger. \"If that white-feathered shit-brain is telling the truth, there's a good chance someone at The Emplacement can verify it. Maybe not his defection, specifically, but the parts about the Union drawing up new truces with surrounding lands, and so on. There's usually at least few spies and other black market folks there willing to sell intel.\"\n\nVekk gave an irritable growl. \"Yeah, and some of them probably work for the Union.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Kasis said, snarling. \"We can kick 'em in the balls on behalf of the Empire.\"\n\nNira grinned at that idea. \"Wouldn't pass up the opportunity if it came along.\" She leaned back in her chair, considering it. \"We usually have a few contacts and connections of our own hanging around there, too.\"\n\n\"There's another thing, too.\" Kasis leaned forward, resting her palms on the edge of Nira's desk. \"If we take Alakor at his word, about being a spy, and assassin type, then he's probably got contacts there too, right? That's exactly the sorta place they'd wanna infiltrate or otherwise establish a contact in. If they don't realize he's defecting, maybe we can use him to draw out another Union agent, get ahold of him ourselves, see what they know. Might be a good way to test Alakor's loyalty.\" She leaned back again. \"If it turns out he's lying too us, or say...springs a trap, we can always put a bullet in that big white-feathered head.\"\n\n\"Or four bullets,\" Rog said, snorting.\n\n\"Or, yanno, all the bullets.\" Kasis rubbed her clawed fingers together. \"Plus, if we do gotta run to another region, The Emplacement's as good a place as any to get some information to help us decide where we're heading next.\"\n\nNira drummed on the arm of her chair. \"I'll admit, if there's anywhere we can go to find out why the Union's suddenly taken a renewed interest in us, and in me, it's probably The Emplacement. And since I don't get a better idea...\" She laughed, shaking her head. \"I guess we're going. Just...\" She held up her hands. \"Everybody try not to get shot this time. In fact, no shootouts in general.\"\n\nRog barked ominous laughter. \"Oooh, this is gonna be fun.\"\n\nThe Princess shot the gnoll a threatening look, then sighed. \"We better wait for Malaresh to get back, first. I have a feeling we're going to need the backup.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Late in the evening, Princess Nira stood upon the Cataclysm's largest external flight deck. The Cataclysm had several external areas, from observation platforms, to access points to weapons bays and engine maintenance areas, and so on. The flight deck was wide, and flat, located towards the rear of the ship, above the cargo holds and docking bays. A great, tarnished brass railing ran around the outside of it, ostensibly for safety. Immense, mirrored flood lamps illuminated the area with faintly yellow-hued light.\n\nDuring the ship's construction, it was intended to house a veritable army of its own, ready to be deployed to wars afield, or in final defense of the Imperial Family. Like the rest of the Empire's army, it would have been composed in large part of non-humans, the so-called beasts Nira had only ever called friend. That army was also intended to house at least one full flight of gryphons, and perhaps even multiple dragons. The flight deck where Nira now stood was meant to be both landing pad, and staging area for their winged warriors and their potential riders. When the ship was new, all sorts of bright red markings were painted upon the flight deck's surface, indicating landing areas and staging zones. Most of them were long gone now, scratched away over years of use, or faded from exposure to the elements.\n\nNot that it mattered, Nira supposed. The ship only had one dragon, and he'd have ignored any such directives, anyway.\n\nThat dragon was the reason Nira was standing in the cold winds, long after dark. Though she had intended to spend the evening hours drinking with her companions, a distinctive, brassy-toned alarm chime put an end to her plans before they'd even began. Unlike those warning bells earlier in the day, these signified Malaresh's impending return, along with Jirril, their third gryphon. So, she'd wrapped herself in a warm, body length black coat, and went to the flight deck to await the boys' return.\n\nJust as the two female gryphons were often referred as the girls, the male gryphon and dragon were collectively referred to as the boys. If her recollection held true, it was Amelia who started the nicknames. Given that she was the only one on board who regularly rode their winged companions, perhaps it was just easier for her to say she was taking the girls out, or going on patrol with the boys. Whatever the case, the terms stuck. So had their usual assignments, with the boys often being sent on supply runs, and the girls flying recon around the ship. Nira just hoped the boys wouldn't be too irritable about having to fly another mission to The Embankment so soon after their return.\n\nNira walked to the safety railing, leaning against it. Beyond the range of the ship's lights, darkness shrouded it like a smothering blanket. On the furthest horizon, a faint purple bruise lingered, but soon that too would fade. Nira glanced down past the ship's lowest deck, towards the ground somewhere far below. With darkness settled in, there was no evidence left that the world even existed beneath them. Nira always loved gazing out into the darkness, as if they were drifting not just through the sky, but through night itself. A few pinpoints of light, and she might well have believed they'd made it all the way to the stars. What an adventure that would be, she thought with a smile.\n\nStill, she had plenty of adventures here on the ship. Considering all the calamities that befell her people, her family, things had turned out a hell of a lot better for than she'd expected. The early years of her flight from home were treacherous, with Golden Union ships and spies always searching for her. Before the uneasy truce, Nira and her crew had to battle their way to freedom, to safety, more than once. Even after that, things certainly weren't easy, but there as absolutely something to be said for living a life in the skies.\n\nIn her youth, she'd sometimes dreamt and imagined what life might be like as a pirate, whether on the seas or in the skies, to be free to do as you pleased, go where you wished, and take what you wanted. It seemed funny now to think she'd once fantasized about living this way. Of course, in the way of youthful fantasies, a younger Nira had conveniently left out things like, struggling to keep a crew fed, or running from Union warships and law keeper vessels cause you were two low on ammo to make a stand. Let alone even how keep a ship afloat and airworthy without being able to frequently dock it. Then again, she supposed if she'd taken time to consider the difficulties of such a life, it wouldn't have made a very good fantasy.\n\nNira turned around to lean back against the rail, and gaze across the ship's exterior. From her current position, she could only see a portion of the great vessel. Though she'd spent at least a decade aboard it now, sometimes the sight of it still took her aback. Rows of portholes and other windows glowed with flickering lamplight, like twinkling stars stretching into the distance. Lines of reinforced armor plating spanned the hull in many places, interspersed occasionally with tangles of copper piping. Stout smokestacks and other openings vented smoke and steam, drifting away from the ship in dingy clouds. She spied a few propulsion propellers, often housed in protection cowling, some canted at odd angles.\n\nDespite all that, most of the ship's workings were kept deeper inside, and hidden behind more armor than the average warship. The pipes, dispersal vents, and smaller vents helped to keep things from overheating. Nira also caught a glimpse of the crystalline dome that house their greenhouse and garden, on an upper deck. Higher still was a bulging, reinforced shell contained the ship's massive gas bags, filled with an especially rare and difficult to refine lifting gas, lighter than any other yet discovered.\n\nMovement, vague and distant, drew Nira's attention. She shielded her eyes from the glare of the floodlights, and gazed into the darkness. Shadows danced at the furthest reaches of the ship's lights. They rose and fell in steady rhythm, gradually revealing themselves as massive, ebony wings. In the nighttime distance, the beast they were attached to looked formless, as if built of shadows still composing themselves. The sight left ice trickling through Nira's veins. She took a step back from the rail, shivering. She knew who it was, and yet that made it no less intimidating to see a great dragon emerge from out of the gloom, hurtling towards her.\n\nAs the dragon neared the ship, the floodlamps further defined him. Thick ebony scales covered most of the creature's body, with sturdier, scute-like plates across the front of his limbs, and protecting his chest. His four powerful limbs were tucked up against his belly as he flew, while his vast wings beat against the night sky. The dragon's head was shaped vaguely like a broad wedge, with a tapered muzzle filled with innumerable teeth. Ridged horns and spiny frills crowned the back of his skull. When his eyes caught the light, they shone as glittering emeralds. The dragon's long tail streamed out behind him, tipped with thick, curved spikes, and lined on either side of its base with spiny webbing that Nira imagined served him as a rudder, of sorts. The green color of the dragon's eyes also marked him in vaguely diamond shaped patterns down his back. A rich golden hue edged each marking. The same vibrant color also lined his wings, and tipped the spines upon his head and tail.\n\nCurrently, the dragon was covered in an immense cargo harness, leather straps and oversized brass buckles locked into place around his body and his limbs. Packs and pouches bulging with supplies hung all around him. Another larger satchel rested against his back, between his wings, with more strapped against chest and the upper part of his belly. At least it looked as if their mission had been successful, she thought, though she already dreaded having to ask him to undertake another one so soon after his return.\n\nWhile Nira was pleased to see the dragon's efforts had been fruitful, she saw no sign of Jirril, the male gryphon who should have been with him. They were close companions, to say they least. Usually they left for, and returned from, missions together. Still, it wouldn't be near the first time Jirril got districted by something else with pretty feathers. Or something shiny. With any luck he'd just fallen behind the dragon.\n\nAs the dragon neared the ship, Nira moved up against the flight deck doors. Though she was the only person out there, she wanted to give the beast as much room to land as possible. Not because dragons were clumsy, far from it. Rather, they simply expected smaller creatures to get out of their way. To a dragon, it wasn't their fault if they trod on someone smaller, or say, accidentally knocked them overboard. Instead, it was the smaller creature's fault for not moving aside. Hell, a dragon expected even princesses to make way. Considering that Malaresh was the largest and most powerful creature on the ship by far, Nira found that a reasonable demand.\n\nMalaresh was the so-called simple form of his name. The dragon himself claimed there was a complex version humans simply couldn't pronounce. Then again, the dragon also claimed to have been given many official titles, in the years before the war. Malaresh the Monarch. Malaresh the Majestic. Malaresh the Magnificent. Maleresh the Maurader. Apparently, Nira thought, he liked alliteration.\n\nThe dragon extended his hind legs as he reached the flight deck, touching down on his back paws. He hopped a step and beat his wings to catch his balance, cargo pouches jostling around him. Then he dropped his front paws down, trotting across the deck to bleed off the rest of his speed and momentum.\n\nMuscles rippled under the black and emerald hide. He stretched his vast, gold-edged wings, then neatly folded them against his back. The spiny frills around his head all flared to their full extension, golden tips on display. The dragon padded towards her, his every movement sinuous and graceful despite his great size. As Malaresh reached her, he arched his long neck, prideful but elegant. Nira could not help but smile up at him. Even she had to admit, that up close and personal, a dragon truly was a majestic creature, just like something out of a fairy tale from her youth.\n\nAnd then the dragon spoke.\n\n\"What the hell are you smiling about, human?\" Malaresh snorted at her, blowing her hair back. He lifted a hind leg and shook it a few times. \"Cease your daydreaming and get this fucking harness of me! It's pinching my damn balls.\"\n\nNira sighed. The regal illusion only ever lasted until they opened their mouths. When Malaresh lifted his head, she went to his chest to start opening the stiff, oversized buckles. \"And who's fault is that?\"\n\n\"Well, it certainly isn't mine!\" The dragon tossed his head, hissing. Then he curled his neck to gaze down at her, his head tilted. \"Unless you're suggesting it's because I possess an especially impressive set of testicles.\" He licked his nose, smug. \"Which I do.\"\n\nThe princess chuckled to herself as she worked a buckle open. His ego was as outsized, and outlandishly amusing, as ever. \"I'm suggesting your gear was designed so that you could put it on by yourself.\" The latch popped open, and she pulled on the strap, loosing it, then went to the next one. The dragons harness was pieced together of interlocking straps, latches, belts, rings, and so on. It was designed so that it could be assembled in a number of different ways, both for his comfort, and to support a wide variety of different loads and types of cargo, or even a saddle. It was also intended to be something he could buckle shut or remove himself, so it's sizable buckles took a good deal of effort for a human. \"So if you put it on incorrectly, that would make it your fault.\" Nira paused, glancing up at him again. \"Come to think of it, why the hell am I doing this?\"\n\n\"Because you're the human, and I'm the dragon.\" Malaresh stomped a forepaw like an impatient child. \"And servicing dragons is what humans are for.\"\n\nNira giggled under her breath, resuming her efforts. \"I'm not sure that means what you think it means.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps,\" the dragon said, a throaty, playful purr creeping into his voice. \"That was exactly how I intended it. There was, after all, a time when dragons were known for hosting princesses such as yourself, was there not? What do you think they were there to do for us?\"\n\nNira gently eased a heavy cargo satchel away from the dragon's chest. Light as it was for him, it was all she could do to heft it, and lower it to the deck. \"I think the word you're looking for is kidnapping princesses. Also...\" She moved to another strap, working it free. \"Those are only fairy tales, anyway. And they would have been long before your time, and-\"\n\n\"The point is, humans should serve dragons!\" Malaresh waved his forepaw, his tail lashing. \"Which is why I made those simpering idiots attach my harness and cargo for me. I shouldn't have to do such menial tasks myself. But they've clearly done something wrong, because the entirely flight, the straps around my hind legs kept inching up until they were-\"\n\n\"Pinching your damn balls,\" Nira said. \"Yes, I heard you the first time.\"\n\n\"Actually, I was going to say, invading my royal sack's sovereign territory.\"\n\nNira blinked, then burst out laughing. \"Okay, that's a new one to me.\" She patted his scaly hide. Despite the strength of his scales, they were smoother to the touch than they appeared, and quite warm. \"Dunno where you got the royal part, though.\"\n\nThe dragon put a paw to his chest. \"Dragons are naturally royal. We are all monarchs in our own right, which is why my barony once called me, Malaresh the Monarch.\"\n\n\"Then they should have called you Baron, not Monarch.\" Nira paused to rub her fingers. The stiff brass buckles left her knuckles and fingertips aching. \"Besides, you never had a barony.\"\n\nMalaresh turned his glittering emerald eyes upon her, his frills flattened back. \"Did so.\"\n\n\"Did not.\" Nira poked his foreleg. \"Even for a dragon, you're far too young to have held a barony. Those were long before your time.\"\n\n\"I'm a thousand years old!\" Malaresh hissed at her, thumping his spined tail against the deck.\n\n\"And the last barony ended over twelve hundred years ago.\" She flashed him a grin, just before working on the next strap. \"Besides, you're three hundred, at best.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled, shaking himself. His scales clicked, his wings rustled, and all his pouches jostled about against his body. Finally, he looked away, muttering half under his breath. \"I called it a barony, anyway.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say, Mister Magnificent.\" Nira stroked the scales of his chest, as if just to soothe his ego. \"Where's Jirril?\"\n\n\"Stopped for a piss, I think. He was drunk, when we left.\" The dragon snorted, flexing his wings. \"Not so drunk as he couldn't fly, but drunk enough to ramble incessantly at me the entire way home. At least, till he went to piss.\"\n\nNira eased another hefty, leather bag to the ground. \"What do you mean, stopped for a piss? Where the hell would he go?\"\n\nMalaresh scratched at his neck with the talon tipping an immense wing. \"How the hell should I know where gryphons go to urinate? I assumed he'd just...go!\"\n\n\"What, in the sky?\" Nira gaped at the dragon a moment. \"What if there's village or something down there?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" The dragon sucked in a breath. \"And he pissed all over it? Yes, you're right, human, that would be hilarious!\" Malaresh rumbled deep, brassy laughter. \"I'm going to try that next time!\"\n\n\"No!\" Nira shook a finger at him, though she doubted the dragon was even paying her any heed. \"You can't do that!\"\n\n\"Sure you can, it's easy. It's the same as pissing on the ground, after all.\" He lifted a forepaw, waggling his clawed digits. \"You just have to make sure the wind is right, or it gets all over you.\" He set his paw back down, making a point to stare out into the darkness. \"Not that such a thing has ever befallen me. Or any dragon!\"\n\nNira bit her lip, struggling to hold back laughter. \"No, no, of course not.\" She moved down his underbelly towards another set of belts and latches. \"So, what's in your biggest pouch?\"\n\nThe dragon flicked his tail. \"My testicles.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" Nira said, pinching the bridge of her nose. \"Walked right into that one, didn't I.\"\n\n\"You certainly did, human.\" Malaresh patted the largest cargo pouch under his belly with a front paw. \"This is filled with all the various spare parts, tools, implements, and so on that the little fuzzy one put on his list for me. The other large satchel along my back contains vats of oils, greases, and other unpleasant things, also for the fuzzy one.\"\n\n\"Don't suppose you brought my wine?\"\n\nThe dragon snorted, tossing his horned head again. \"Oh, I'm sorry, have I allotted too much cargo space to the things required to keep this rattling death trap afloat? How selfish of me, I clearly should have contributed to your excessive alcohol indulges, instead.\"\n\n\"Point taken, dragon, point taken.\" Nira took a step back, sizing up the rest of the harness and its many remaining pouches. She roughly estimated the dragon at nearly twenty feet from nose to tail tip, and nearly all of him was covered in cargo. \"I may need some help getting those last ones off you safely, as I suspect some of what Vekk asked for is quite fragile, and those larger bags are going to be far too heavy for me to lower to the deck myself. How far behind do you think Jirril is?\"\n\nMalaresh turned halfway around, forcing Nira to backpedal out of his way. \"That's a good question. Let's find out.\"\n\nAs the dragon took a deep breath, his scaly chest expanding, Nira clapped her hands over her ears. She was just in time to save most of her hearing as the dragon unleashed an eardrum shattering roar, loud enough to drown out the many noises of the ship, and the winds swirling around it. A dragon's roar was a terrifying mixture of primal fury and threatening cry, a signal that everything that could hear it should rightly fear its caller. Though, in the right situations, a dragon's roar also served as long distance communication. Nira imagined that Malaresh's people used all sorts of different tones and timbres to their roars that human ears simply could not discern. To her, they all just sounded horrifying.\n\nJust as Nira eased her hands away from her ears, an answering cry returned to them from the darkness. This sound was distant, and much higher in pitch, like an eagle's keening wail. Nira recognized the sound easily enough, as it was the sort of noise only a gryphon could make.\n\nMalaresh snorted. \"About that far. At least he didn't fly all the way back to The Emplacement.\"\n\nNira scowled. He'd just come from The Emplacement? She hadn't realized he'd end up there. Somehow, Nira doubted the dragon was going to appreciate being asked to go right back. \"You were at The Emplacement?\"\n\n\"That was our final destination, yes.\" The dragon gave a low, guttural growl. \"They do not like me there, but I was able to secure as many of the parts from the fuzzy one's list as possible, with a maximum of threats, and a minimum of incineration.\" He flicked his tail, chuckling. \"I suppose they like me even less there, now.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Nira rubbed her face, gritting her teeth. \"Please tell me you two didn't steal the parts you got there.\"\n\nMalaresh licked his nose. \"Not all of them. They didn't even shoot at us.\" He tilted his head. \"Well, not more than a few times, anyway.\"\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\n\"You keep saying that.\" Malaresh tilted his head. \"If you're that desperate, I suggest you head for the nearest latrine.\"\n\nNira stomped her foot. \"Not literally, you scaly sack of-\"\n\n\"Careful, Girl.\" Malaresh glared down at her, his green eyes narrowed, a dangerous edge in his voice.\n\nNira took a slow, deep breath. She didn't actually think the dragon would ever harm her but there was no sense pushing her luck, either. Of all the people and creatures on her ship, only Malaresh ever gave her pause, ever made her nervous. For of all her vast and varied crew, the dragon was the only one who's loyalty she never quite felt was truly unshakable.\n\nIn the olden days, her Empire secured the loyalty of dragons with positions of great power, with grand alliances, and with vast wealth. Nira had none of those things to offer Malaresh. He did, however, owe her and her crew his life. That was why he had joined her, at first, and at his own insistence, at that. But the dragon's debt to Nira was long since repaid, and why he remained now was a mystery. Nira liked to tell herself it was because he had earned not just a home here on her ship, but her crew's trust, and friendship. She also liked to tell herself they'd earned his friendship, in turn. But every once in a while, Nira wasn't so sure a dragon even truly had friendship to give. In those occasional moments, Nira felt a bit like she'd made a deal with the devil, and only the devil knew the terms.\n\n\"Sorry, Malaresh.\" Nira held up her hands. \"I have some news you're not going to like. And...\" She slowly lowered her hands, grimacing. \"A favor to ask that you're going to like even less.\"\n\n\"Do you.\" The dragon's voice was flat. He slowly eased himself back onto his haunches, and began to unbuckle the remaining harness straps. That wasn't a good sign, Nira thought. Doing work he could have made a human do for him rarely boded well for his mood, or his cooperation. \"So, flying missions for weeks on end, acquiring important things, and being shot at by angry humans is not favor enough?\" The dragon tossed down a few smaller cargo pouches, then began to unbuckle the larger one from under his belly. \"Is that why you haven't brought your usual army of servants to help unharness me? Afraid I'd get angry and knock someone over the railing?\"\n\n\"The thought crossed my-\"\n\n\"The favor, first.\" When the largest storage pack came loose, the dragon eased it down onto the deck. Once it was settled, he pushed it aside, and worked to undo the last harness straps from around his underbelly. \"What is it?\"\n\nNira took a deep breath, steeling herself for what was likely to be a very forceful 'no'. \"I know you just came from The Emplacement, but-\"\n\n\"No!\" The dragon slapped his forepaw against the deck, snarled, then went back to freeing himself from the harness. Soon, he wriggled free of the long, narrow bag situated along his spine, letting it slide down over his tail, and out behind him. \"Anything else?\"\n\nNira pressed on, undaunted. \"I need you to fly me back to The Emplacement, along with Rog and a few others. I'll need Jirril, too, and maybe Amelia and the girls. We may have a problem that needs dealing with. And we may need you to-\"\n\nMalaresh held up both forepaws, his mottled pink and gray pads exposed. \"Let me stop you right there, for I have a counteroffer to propose.\"\n\nThe princess set her jaw. She already knew what was coming. \"Is it going to be to su-\"\n\n\"How about instead of flying you back to the very place I just left, where they're likely to open fire on sight...\" The dragon flourished a single front paw. \"I stay here instead, relax, drink a little, and then you suck my majestic cock?\"\n\nNira sighed, rubbing her forehead. \"Malaresh, why are you like this?\"\n\n\"Because I'm a fucking dragon!\" He unbuckled the last of the straps from around his lower body, and hind legs, then ripped them away and tossed them aside. \"I am not your servant, your errand boy, or your mount! I am not here to do your bidding, and I will not bow down and kiss your royal human ass!\" Malaresh tilted his head back, and spat a gout of roiling, red-orange flame into the sky. Searing heat washed over Nira, but she ground her teeth, and kept from flinching. \"I ruled a barony, you know!\"\n\n\"And I ruled the empire that ruled your barony!\" Nira forced herself to meet the dragon's eyes, glaring up at him, unblinking. Nira was always willing to offer the dragon his due respect, but she was not about to back down.\n\n\"You ruled nothing!\" The dragon hissed, all his gold-edged frills on full, spiny display around his horned head. \"You're a princess, not a queen, or an empress.\"\n\nNira wasn't going to argue that point with him, she knew it would be a fruitless effort. Instead, she had a better point to make. \"But I did have an empire, of which, you and all the lands you ruled were part. You, however, never had a barony, because they haven't existed since before you were hatched.\"\n\n\"I should rule this whole vessel!\" The dragon waved his forepaw at the Cataclysm, then swatted a bag of cargo aside in frustration. It tumbled across the deck, hit the metal railing, and flipped over it, tumbling away into darkness. Malaresh watched it until it vanished, then snorted. \"I...\" His spines slowly flattened back down. \"Meant to do that.\"\n\nNira just sighed, shaking her head. \"Hope there wasn't anything important, in there.\"\n\n\"Think it was your wine, actually.\" Malaresh scratched his neck with a wing tip talon.\n\n\"So you really did bring me wine?\" Nira grimaced. Just her luck.\n\n\"I did, but...\" Malaresh shifted his weight, curling his tail around his paws. \"Perhaps I slightly overreacted.\"\n\nAs soon as Nira thought she saw an opening, she seized it. She stepped forward, and set her hand upon the dragon's chest. She'd learned, over the years, that Malaresh did not mind gentle contact, and shows of affection. If anything, he seemed to find it a show of respect, or even reverence. Or, Nira thought, maybe the dragon just didn't like to admit he enjoyed being petted. Nira stroked him just were the thicker plates protecting his heart and lungs melted into smaller scales.\n\n\"I know I'm asking a lot of you. And yes, you deserve a chance to rest, and relax.\" When Malaresh rumbled in his chest, she added her other hand, seeking to soothe both his likely-sore body and his bruised ego. \"You've done a very good job for us, and we probably wouldn't even still be flying these days, if not for you.\"\n\n\"No.\" The dragon snorted, gazing down at her, his expression more impassive than angry, now. \"You would not. Now continue your petting.\"\n\nChuckling, Nira did just that. She rubbed him up to the base of his neck, then back down, scratching at the finer scales where he was more sensitive. \"But we need your help again. We have a situation, and I need to go to The Emplacement. It may well be a dangerous trip, and I want my biggest, strongest, most dangerous ally there.\"\n\nMalaresh slowly cocked his head. \"You are ordering me to serve as your guardian?\"\n\nNira offered him her biggest, most shining smile. She knew the dragon would see right through it, but that wasn't the point. Malaresh had a longing for the way things were in the olden days, long before the advent of airships. Back when a single dragon was considered force enough to change the course of a war, or even a nation. When they were afforded the respect due to such a powerful creature.\n\n\"Ordering? Of course not. You're a dragon, and I, a mere human.\" She ran her hands up the base of his neck again, and when Malaresh lowered his head for her, she gently took his muzzle between her hands, stroking his jawline. \"I would never presume to order such a powerful being. I would, however, humbly request such protection from you, in keeping with the alliance your barony shares with my empire. I am in danger, and in need of a powerful dragon to keep my safe.\"\n\nMalaresh pushed his muzzle into her hands, his throaty purr rising, sounding like stones tumbling around in a barrel. \"You're laying it on a little too thick now, Human, but your efforts at flattery are appreciated, nonetheless.\"\n\n\"Tell you what,\" Nira said, moving one hand to rub the soft spot between the dragon's nostrils. \"You do this for me, and if there's trouble, I'll let you burn something. Something big.\"\n\n\"How big?\" The dragon cocked his head, his eyes fixed upon her.\n\n\"Oh, at least a large table.\"\n\nMalaresh snorted. \"Not big enough. I can burn something that small any time I wish.\"\n\n\"Alright, alright.\" Nira held her hands up. \"How about...a small outbuilding?\"\n\nThe dragon tilted his head in the other direction. \"Medium sized outbuilding, at the least.\"\n\n\"That sounds fair.\" Nira patted his muzzle, her smile twisting into a scowl. \"Hell, depending on how things go, you may get to burn down an entire tavern.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled his approval. \"Now you are sweetening the deal. Very well, I shall consider it, and have an offer for you by the morning. So tell me, then.\" The dragon pulled his head back from her hands, curling his neck into an S shape. \"Why do you wish to venture to this place, and why do you believe you will be in danger there?\"\n\nNira folded her arms, offering him an easy smile. \"Because some cranky dragon and his feathered concubine just stole a bunch of their merchandise.\"\n\n\"What hilarious wit you possess.\" Malaresh gestured with the tip of his spiky tail, swirling it in the air. \"Why, you could make a fine living, telling your jests and japes and sarcastic observations in taverns in exchange for cheers, and alms!\"\n\nNira blinked, unfolding her arms to rub the back of her neck. \"Jests and Japes? Alms? Gods, maybe you are old enough to have held a barony.\"\n\nThe dragon only grunted, flicking his tail against the deck. \"Anyway, Jirril is not my concubine.\"\n\n\"Oh no?\" Nira quirked a brow, grinning. \"I think the whole ship knows you and him-\"\n\n\"Concubine implies servitude,\" Malaresh said, licking his muzzle. \"Jirril is my companion, not my servant. Nonetheless, you have evaded the question.\" He sharpened his tongue, adding a low, menacing snarl. \"Who is endangering you? I will rend their limbs from their bodies, and incinerate what remains.\"\n\n\"It's not that simple, unfortunately.\" Nira rubbed her forehead, wishing there was an easy way to explain all she'd learned. \"It seems that the Union may be changing tactics. They may be looking to try and capture me, or even undertake an attempt on my life. Kasis thinks we should ask our contacts at The Emplacement what they know. It's also possible there may be even be Golden Union agents there, and-\"\n\n\"There are.\" Malaresh snapped his jaws. \"Who do you think we stole those airship parts from?\"\n\n\"Wait, what?\" Nira slowly turned towards the largest of the cargo bags now littering the deck. \"I thought you said you stole those from The Emplacement?\"\n\n\"I did.\" The dragon growled guttural laughter. \"There were several small Golden Union vessels docked there for repairs and resupply. I made the workers take the parts the little horned rat wanted out of the Union ships.\" He flexed his wings in a shrug. \"Really, who did you think was shooting at me?\"\n\nNira started to laugh, she should have expected something like that from Malaresh by now. The dragon did so enjoy his little games and manipulations. But her laughter died as quickly as it began, when she realized the true meaning of something else he'd said, too. \"You said someone would open fire on sight if you returned...You mean the Union, didn't you. They're still there, aren't they?\"\n\n\"I would assume so, yes.\" Malaresh sat up a little straighter, a fang-filled smile parting his tapered muzzle. \"Probably waiting on back up to arrive, considering that Jirril and I inflicted quite a bit of damage on their airships.\" He hissed through his sharp teeth. \"They're lucky they were docked at a neutral location. Otherwise I'd have burned them all down, and the docking structures with them. I can only assume they must have paid Prav's people a hefty sum to use his facilities and his mechanics. Probably charging them triple for work and supplies, as well. Otherwise I doubt he'd be willing to service the Union.\"\n\nNira scowled, pacing back and forth before the dragon. \"Maybe. It sounds like the Union is working on expansion, making treaties with our old neighbors, and so on. If they're looking to expand into the Sundered Lands, Prav might be trying to make nice. I know they've got spies and scouts in the area, I'm sure they've got at least a small fleet of ships, as well. What kind of vessels where they?\"\n\n\"Scouting vessels, mostly, recon. Armed, but not heavily so. Think they were Sparrow-Swifts.\" The dragon lifted a forepaw, half-unsheathing his retractable claws. \"But I did not bother to read their markings.\" Malaresh inspected his claws. \"You said you had news I would not like, yet you have not yet broken it to me. Dare I ask how you know they're attempting expansion through treaties? You said you know they have spies in the area...might I venture to guess you've caught one?\"\n\nNira watched the dragon closely, wondering just how much he knew. If there were Union agents at the Emplacement while he was there with Jirril, they could have overheard them discussing their operations. Or, they might have had another snow gryphon there with them. Perhaps the dragon had just taken an educated guess...or maybe she was reading too much into things.\n\n\"We did, yes.\"\n\n\"Was it by chance a white gryphon?\"\n\nThe princess tensed up. Lissir had filled her in on the history between the Golden Union's snow gryphons and the empire's dragons, and she wasn't sure how Malaresh was going to take this. \"It is, yes.\"\n\nMalaresh slowly, deliberate, set his paw back down. His claws remained unsheathed. Nira knew well enough that among dragons, that was not a friendly gesture. \"And have you killed him, yet?\"\n\n\"Of course not, Malaresh.\" She held her hands up. \"Listen, you need to understand-\"\n\n\"Good!\" The dragon pushed himself up to all fours, shaking out his great body, scales clicking. \"That means I still get to beat the shit out of him. And when I'm done, I'm going to break his wings and toss him overboard.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Nira put her hands against the dragon's chest. While she knew she couldn't even slow him down, she hoped the symbolism would at least give him pause. \"You know I can't let you kill him once we've accepted his surrender.\"\n\nMalaresh slowly turned his head down to glare at her hands upon his scales. \"Do you know how much dragon blood stains his paws?\"\n\n\"His paws?\" Nira kept her hands against the dragon, meeting his glare with her own steely resolve. \"His people? Yes, Lissir filled me in. But his paws, personally? I've no idea. Maybe a lot. Maybe none! Hell, most of that was probably before his time! It's all on the Union, anyway, the snow gryphons are practically their slaves, as Lissir tells it. And all that cruelty, the brainwashing, the bloodshed, that's what he's trying to escape. He's defecting, Malaresh. He's defecting to The Cataclsym.\"\n\n\"No.\" The dragon snarled, leaning forward just enough to push Nira back a few paces, her boots sliding across the deck. \"He isn't. He's manipulating you, feigning defection to enter into your good graces, as part of whatever mission they've sent him here on.\"\n\nNira grimaced and set her jaw. As much as she hated to admit it, she'd considered the exact same thing. \"I don't think so. It's possible, I'll admit, but Lissir and I think he's telling the truth. Whatever the case, I can't let you take his life.\"\n\nMalaresh heaved a great, deflated sigh. \"Then I shall simply have to beat a confession out of him.\"\n\n\"No, Malaresh.\" Nira slowly lowered her hands, convinced the dragon wasn't going to bowl her over. \"I understand how you feel, but-\"\n\n\"Can I at least castrate him?\" The dragon dropped back onto his haunches with a long, frustrated growl.\n\n\"No, you can't.\" Nira shook her head, chuckling under her breath. \"Besides, I think Amelia already has first dibs on that, if it comes to it.\"\n\nThe dragon curled his tail around his paws again, licking his nose. \"Smart girl. I like that one.\" He took a deep breath, then let it out in a another slow sigh. \"Very well. I shall endeavor not to tear his throat out just yet. What has the lying spy-bird told you?\"\n\n\"That the Union is reconsidering our unspoken truce, and might be looking to take me out, one way or another. Apparently they think I'm threat, for some reason.\" Nira turned away from the dragon to lean up against the rail. \"Which...if they push me into a corner, I sure as shit will be. But I've been going out of me way to avoid being a threat to them, until now. And they know that, so...\" She slapped the cold railing, grinding her teeth. \"Something must have changed.\"\n\n\"Maybe they've just decided this flying city-destroyer is too dangerous to leave alone.\" The dragon scratched noisily at the deck behind her. Even without looking back, Nira knew his claws were leaving ruts. \"Or perhaps they wish it for themselves.\"\n\n\"That thought crossed my mind, too.\" Nira drummed her fingers on the tarnished brass. \"That's why Kasis thinks we should go to The Emplacement. It's the easiest place for us to reach, where we might be able to find someone with answers. If we don't get answers there, we can keep looking. But Alakor...\" She glanced back at the dragon. \"The snow gryphon. He also suggested they may come looking for him, and unless we want to have to engage some Union ships, and really give them a reason to start hunting us, we should move on. Possibly via the Broken Teeth.\" Nira held a hand up to silence the reply she knew was coming. \"And yes, before you suggest it, I'm well aware there's a small chance Alakor is trying to lead us into a trap.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to say that.\" Malaresh thumped his tail against the deck. \"I was going to say it's likely.\"\n\n\"I understand your concerns, and I appreciate them.\" Nira turned back around towards the dragon. \"We'll be keeping a close eye on him.\"\n\n\"If he betrays you, I will kill him.\" Malaresh slowly arched his neck, hissing. \"And then I will remind you that I was right about him for the rest of your existence.\" He glared at her a moment, then waved his paw. \"Now, move aside.\"\n\nNira put her hands on her hips. \"Don't you start telling me what to do, Dragon!\"\n\nMalaresh only shrugged his wings, backing away. He grasped the largest cargo bag, and dragged it back with him. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\n\"What are you-Shit!\" Nira scrambled away when she realized what the dragon was doing.\n\nAn instant later, and a male gryphon with vibrant blue feathers hurtled up out of the darkness, and into the flood lights. He streaked across through the flight deck, whipping through the area where Nira had been only moments before. Pouches and cargo bags jostled around his feathery body. Halfway across the deck, he touched down on all four paws. The gryphon galloped across the deck, bleeding off speed, then spun back around towards her at the other end. He flared his azure and ebony wings, then gave a sharp, keening cry.\n\n\"You've got to be more careful, Princess!\" The gryphon trotted towards her. \"Could have taken your damn head off!\"\n\n\"I tried to warn her,\" Malaresh said, settling back onto his haunches again. \"But she wouldn't listen.\"\n\nNira groaned, running a hand down her face. \"Hello, Jirril.\"\n\n\"Hello, your would-be killer, more like!\" The gryphon deftly worked the silver buckles of his own cargo harness, dropping bits and pieces of gear all across the deck. \"You really need to pay for more attention to your surroundings. If I was an enemy, you'd be dead right now.\"\n\nNira scowled at the mess Jirril left behind him, normally there'd be workers here to collect everything behind him. At least he didn't expect her crew to do everything for him the way the dragon did. \"As much as I appreciate your training attempts, I really don't think I need you divebombing me every chance you get.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Malaresh lifted his frills in amusement. \"He could have ripped your head clean off.\"\n\n\"So I hear.\" Nira pivoted on her heel towards the gryphon. \"From Jirril.\" She glared at the gryphon. \"Every time he does that.\"\n\nJirril was the third gryphon in her crew, and until Alakor's capture, the only male of his species currently aboard. He was also far and away the most colorful of all her crew. Vibrant indigo feathers covered much of his body, from his vaguely hawk-like head down across his back, and wings, and all the way to his feather-lined tail. Black flight feathers tipped his blue wings, with a saddle-like swath of dark gray across his upper back and shoulders. The feathers that shrouded his upper body gave way to thick, silken pale-gay fur along his underside and limbs. He was larger than the two females aboard, though not as immense a gryphon as Alakor.\n\nBy the time Jirril reached her, he'd already divested himself of all his cargo, with only the basic harness still strapped around his body. He strolled right up to Nira, lifting a forepaw to cup her cheek. Large as he was, his warm pads nearly encompassed her whole head. She was thankful the gryphon at least kept his claws sheathed. Both gryphons and dragons had fully retractable claws, as well as opposable thumb digits on their front paws. Though they walked on their front feet, they also served quite capable as dexterous hands.\n\n\"Hello, my darling Princess.\" Jirril offered a warbling coo while he cupped her face.\n\nNira laughed and ducked away from his grip, shoving his paw aside. \"Quit doin' that. I dunno where those paws have been.\" She glanced at the dragon, smirking. \"Especially after Malaresh said you had to stop for a piss.\"\n\n\"Did he, then?\" Jirril turned away from her, the soft blue feathers of his tail sweeping across the Princess' body.\n\n\"Yes.\" Nira folded her arms, watching the gryphon closely for signs of intoxication. \"He also said you were nearly too drunk to fly. Which, I shouldn't have to tell you, is a very bad idea when approaching airships.\"\n\n\"Well, he's right about part of it.\" Jirril strolled up to the dragon, then nuzzled at Malaresh's belly before turning and brushing his entire body up against the dragon like an oversized cat. \"Which part, I shall leave to your imagination.\"\n\nNira ran a hand back through her hair, sighing. \"Well, at least you don't smell like you've pissed you're feathers.\"\n\n\"Of course I haven't! What a horrible thing to suggest to a gryphon. We're cleaner than you are, human.\" Jirril tossed his head, then flopped down onto his belly, leaning up against the dragon's front legs. He tilted his head back, gazing up at Malaresh. \"Well?\"\n\nThe dragon stared back at him. \"Well, what?\"\n\nThe gryphon made a loud, warbling noise, flicking his feathered tail against Malaresh. \"Well, pet me of course.\"\n\n\"Toss you overboard, more like.\" Despite the dragon's gruff sarcasm, he nonetheless lifted a forepaw, and began to knead and rub at the back of the gryphon's neck.\n\nJirril tilted his head back into the attention, his eyes drifting shut. One of the gryphon's hind paws twitched a few times, and he let out a happy sigh. \"Oooooh, yes, that's the spot.\"\n\nThe Princess arched a brow, grinning. \"Should I leave you two alone for a while?\"\n\n\"No,\" Jirril said, his eyes still closed. \"You should pet me, too.\"\n\nNira chuckled, walking over to the two of them. \"Oh, very well.\"\n\n\"Just mind where you step!\" The gryphon tucked his forepaws in. \"Don't want you to accidentally trod upon me with your clumsy human feet.\"\n\n\"One time,\" Nira said, setting her hands atop the gryphon's head. \"One time I accidentally stepped on your paw, in the dark, when you were passed out drunk in the hall.\" She rubbed the gryphon's pointed, blue ears, while the dragon caressed his neck and shoulders. \"That was hardly my fault, and I was very apologetic.\"\n\n\"Yes, you were,\" Jirril said, opening his eyes to dark slits. Given all the attention, a raspy purr was creeping into his voice. \"After you stopped laughing at me.\"\n\n\"Just be glad I didn't step on your gryphon plums, or I'd have laughed a whole lot harder.\" Nira worked a hand down over the gryphon's cheek, gently working her fingers through the fine, silken feathers there. Beneath them, the gryphon's skin was quite warm.\n\n\"Would have made a funnier story, too.\" Malaresh thumped his tail against the deck, spines scratching at the wood.\n\nJirril clicked his beak, bumping his head against the dragon's chest. \"You're one to talk. I ought to tell the Princess about the time-\"\n\nMalaresh seized the scruff of the gryphon's neck, snarling. \"I will pluck you bald, Bird, if you so much as breathe a word of that.\"\n\n\"I'll tell her in private then!\" The gryphon twisted a little, squawking. \"Besides, if you plucked me, you'd miss gazing upon my glorious plumage!\"\n\nWith a snort, the dragon released him. \"Suppose you'd make a less satisfying pillow, that way.\" Malaresh lowered his head, his neck curled, and gave the gryphon's neck a few licks, smoothing mussed feathers. He glanced at Nira over the gryphon's head. \"Anything embarrassing he tells you about me is clearly a lie, anyway.\"\n\n\"Clearly.\" The princess reached up and patted Malaresh's jaw, then shot the gryphon a sly look. \"Though I would like to hear it later, just the same.\"\n\n\"And so you shall!\" Jirril clacked his beak. \"Now, resume your petting.\"\n\nThe dragon snarled, a low, menacing sound, even as he continued to groom the back of the gryphon's neck with his tongue, and his forepaws. \"Careful, bird, I know where you live.\"\n\nNira laughed, moving her hands to gently caress Jirril's throat. \"You say that as if you don't sleep snuggled around him half the time.\"\n\nMalaresh gave a displeased grunt, pausing his affections for a moment. \"Dragons do not snuggle. He is soft, warm, and comfortable. Nothing more.\"\n\n\"Right, right, of course.\" Nira stroked down the sides of the gryphon's neck. \"Dragons don't have friends or loved ones, only servants and worshipers, right?\"\n\n\"Correct.\" Malaresh settled a paw between the gryphon's wings, gently kneading flight muscles Nira imagined were quite sore. \"However, we are not above rewarding our favored servants from time to time.\"\n\nNira only smiled, continuing her own affections. While the female gryphons aboard also enjoyed being petted from time to time, Jirril was more like a big damn cat. Not only did he demand it, but he often did so at the most inopportune times. Or in the middle of a meal. Or a conversation. Or whenever else he felt as if everyone should be paying far more attention to the blue gryphon.\n\nThere was a time when Nira was surprised Jirril was even able to convince the dragon to pet him like every one else did, but that time was long since gone. If anything, Malaresh was the quickest of all to attend the gryphon's need for physical affection. And once Jirril started spending as many nights in the dragon's so-called lair as his own sleeping chambers, the reason was increasingly clear. Come to think of it, Nira thought, perhaps Malaresh had something meaningful binding him to her ship and its crew, after all.\n\nThen again, with dragons and gryphons it was sometimes hard to parse a casual fling between friends from deeper relationships. Hell, it was hard determining that between humans, let alone the rest of their world's sapient species and their myriad moral and social codes. If Malaresh was anything to go by, then dragons would happily mate with anything that moved, and probably a few things that didn't. Gryphons were often the same, frequently attracted to either gender, and often to other sapient species, as well. She knew they were lovers, but whether their hearts, too, were intertwined, Nira was less sure. Then again, such things were none of her business, anyway.\n\nStill, she found herself hoping sometimes, just the same. She tilted her head back, smiling up at the dragon. If her ship and its monstrous crew could help even a bitter old dragon filled with fury discover love with a gryphon with a drinking problem, then that meant something. What it meant, she wasn't exactly sure. If nothing else, love amongst so-called monsters meant the Golden Union hadn't wiped out everything good about the Empire just yet.\n\n\"Why are you smiling at me that way?\" Malaresh tilted his head. \"You look as though you're hoping I'll ask if you want to be fucked, later.\"\n\nNira ground her teeth, though she soon let out an incredulous laugh. As much as she wanted to be angry at him for ruining the moment, it wasn't as if Malaresh could read her mind. At least, she sure as hell hoped he couldn't. She'd heard such rumors about dragons before, but to Nira's knowledge, that was all bullshit anyway. Regardless, Nira had long since stopped being surprised by the sort of things that tumbled out of the maw of the black-scaled marauder.\n\nThe princess patted the gryphon's head, backing away from the two of them. \"Wouldn't want to make your bird jealous.\"\n\n\"Jealous?\" Jirril warbled laughter. \"I'd join in!\"\n\n\"Tempting an offer as that is,\" Nira said, holding up her hands. \"I think I'll pass.\"\n\nMalaresh lowered his head, his muzzle brushing Jirril's ear. \"She speaks of jealousy, but I suspect her gnoll would be the jealous one.\"\n\nThe gryphon chirped, untucking a forepaw to playfully swat Malaresh. \"Or Amelia!\"\n\nNira blinked and slowly folded her arms. \"Wait, who's Amelia going to be jealous of?\"\n\n\"Well, you know.\" Jirril waggled his pale gray fingers. \"You and her are the only two humans on board. Haven't you ever...?\"\n\nNira shrugged as nonchalantly as she could, offering only an innocent smile. \"Maybe. Course, I also hear Amelia knows things about him.\" She inclined her head towards the dragon.\n\n\"Your point?\" Malaresh lifted his head again, cocking it slightly.\n\n\"Just curious.\" She rubbed her cheek. \"So...does she?\" She turned her attention to the gryphon, thinking he might be more forthcoming. \"Know things?\"\n\n\"She-mmph!\" Jirril's words trailed off into a muffled grunt when the dragon grasped his beak and held it shut.\n\nMalaresh arched his neck. \"Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't. You'll have to ask her that.\"\n\n\"I did, and she said it has spines on it.\" Nira kept her tone as even as possible, just trying to get a reaction out of the dragon, one or another.\n\nMalaresh met her stoicism with his own. He stared down at her without releasing the gryphon's beak. \"No, she didn't.\"\n\n\"That's not a no,\" Nira said, struggling to fight back a bawdy laugh.\n\n\"If you're that curious, you're welcome to ask me for a demonstration.\" Malaresh gazed down at her, still aside from his breathing, and an occasional blink.\n\nNira finally held her hands up, giving into her giggles. \"Alright, alright. You win. I'm not drunk enough to keep this up any longer.\" She moved forward and tapped one of the dragon's fingers where it encircled Jirril's dark beak. \"Let him up, so he can tell me what he brought back.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Malaresh gave Jirril's ear a gentle lick before releasing him. \"But don't spoil the game, bird.\"\n\nJirril pushed himself to his paws as soon as the dragon released him. He shook himself, fluffing up, then strode several paces away. \"Petting time is over!\" He flopped down onto his haunches, and set to irritably preening his wings instead.\n\n\"What a shame.\" The dragon picked up a loose feather from near his paws, and flicked it at the gryphon. \"Don't forget to tell the bird about the damn snow gryphon.\"\n\nJirril jerked his head up, another feather hanging from his beak. \"What snow gryphon?\"\n\nNira cringed inwardly. She'd hoped to ease into that, unsure how Jirril would react. She turned towards him, fiddling with the buttons of her coat. \"We have a guest.\"\n\n\"A prisoner,\" Malaresh said, slapping a paw against the deck. \"A snow gryphon that's been spying on us! And the girl won't even let me kill him.\"\n\n\"He's defecting,\" Nira said, quickly adding, \"Or at least he claims to be.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't believe him for an instant.\" Jirril turned his attention to his other wing, rearranging his feathers. \"They're brainwashed, you know. From birth. Taught they're just...\" He snorted, pinning his ears. \"Beasts, made to serve the Union and their god. Convinced that's all they're good for, all they exist for. They believe it, because they don't know any better. If he's genuine about defecting, then he's somehow seen through their lies were so few others do. It's far more likely he was sent here to feign a defection and infiltrate our crew.\"\n\nNira adjusted her black leather coat sleeve. \"So I've heard. Look, Jirril, I appreciate your concern, and Malaresh?\" She turned towards the dragon, softening her tone. \"I understand how you feel. We've all lose people to the Union, and their servants. But we owe him the benefit of the doubt, just in case it's true. What good does it do us to speak of them as monsters, if we deny one of their own a chance to escape from that? I've already ordered him to be kept under tight supervision, and I assure you, we'll be scrutinizing everything he says, and does. But if he is telling the truth?\" Nira pointed at the flight deck doors. \"Then he's just like everyone else inside this ship. He's a refugee, fleeing the Union. We owe him a chance, at least.\"\n\nMalaresh glowered at her, but did not argue. \"Very well.\" Slowly, the dragon pushed himself to his feet, rising to his full, impressive height. \"But if you expect me to agree to this, then I expect to be allowed to interrogate him myself. Immediately.\"\n\nNira set her jaw. \"I don't think that's a very good idea.\"\n\n\"And I don't care!\" Malaresh started towards the doors, padding around her. \"I will not even consider flying you and your companions to The Emplacement until I've had a chance to knock around this snowy shit-feather and ask him a few questions.\"\n\n\"Wait, what's this about going back to The Emplacement?\" Jirril jumped to his feet, hissing. \"We just left that damn place!\"\n\n\"The Princess believes she's in danger from the Union, and that's why they have gryphons spying on her.\" Malaresh came to a stop just in front of the flight deck entryway. \"She also believes they may have ships headed this way, quite possibly those we stole parts from. It's likely Union agents there would know why they'd suddenly after Nira again.\" The dragon flicked his spined tail at the princess. \"Does that about sum it up?\"\n\nNira grabbed at his tail spines, clutching them in vain attempt to hold him back. \"It does, yes, but he's only just arrived, he's barely even settled in yet. I don't want you doing any interrogation that involves 'knocking him around', is that understood?\"\n\nMalaresh grasped the handle and pushed the door open. Nira had a small army of servants waiting back there to come and gather up all the supplies and help the boys out of their harnesses. But when Malaresh snapped his jaws at them, everyone scrambled back. Nira dug her heels in, but when the dragon walked into the expansive hallway, he dragged her with him as if she wasn't even there.\n\n\"I don't care what you want, Princess. Nor do I know what you think you're going to accomplish back there.\" He glanced back at her over his folded wings. \"Are you going to tell me where he is, or am I going to have to drag you along until I find him myself?\"\n\nNira finally released his tail, sighing. \"Alright, alright. I'll take you to him.\" She hurried around the dragon to stand in his way, signaling for her workers to go and collect all the cargo. \"But only if you promise not to harm him.\"\n\nMalaresh tilted his head. \"No. If I believe he's lying to us, I'm going to beat the truth out of him.\" He splayed his ears, relenting slightly. \"But I will try to avoid doing him any lasting injuries.\"\n\nJirril trotted into the hallway, glancing at Nira as he brushed past the dragon. \"I'd take it, if I was you. That's the best deal you're going to get from him.\"\n\nThough Nira hated to admit it, she knew the gryphon was right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Malaresh stormed down the wide, wooden corridor, his unsheathed claw tips clicking and scratching at the wood. Whenever he returned from a lengthy mission, it always took him a little while to grew accustom to the ship again. From the scents of things burning that shouldn't burn, to the constant rattle and clank and mechanical whirr, to the way the faint vibrations left his paw pads tingling. He noticed them all anew each time he returned, just as he noticed the myriad strange, copper pipes crawling over everything, the odd dials and gauges indicating pressures and altitudes and so on. It was also impossible for Malaresh to miss the fact that he had no trouble at all walking the spacious hallways of the lower decks and cargo hold areas. He had to duck his head and tighten his wings here and there, but so long as he did not stray into the upper reaches, even a dragon had room to wander the ship.\n\nThough the world held many airships, few were built large enough to comfortably house a dragon, much less allow him to walk its depths. The Cataclysm was truly a magnificent vessel, that should have belonged to an equally magnificent lord. It should have been his, the dragon thought. It still irked him that it wasn't, like some sharp bit of bone in someone he'd swallowed, stuck in his throat, ever poking him. At least he had always been able to take consolation, however small, in the fact that Nira had proven herself a fit ruler.\n\nUntil she let a damn snow gryphon on board.\n\nIn fairness, the dragon doubted Nira knew a damn thing about the snow gryphons, or what they'd done to his people, starting in the early days of the war. They'd come like a white feathered swarm, for each of the great Dragon Lords who once ruled over the Empire's far-flung provinces.\n\nThe Dragon Lords kept the people in line, enforced the Empire's laws, but kept their lands safe, as well. The first few to fall were slain before the war was even raging in full, when the Union sought to remove the Empire's most dangerous weapons before their initial invasion. From there, it had only cascaded. At first, gryphons killed the dragons themselves, before anyone realized the army of strange, foreign gryphon was in truth, reared and commanded by the Golden Union. Once the rest of the dragons and their lands began preparing for war, and after the Dragon Lords in turn inflicted heavy losses upon the gryphons, then the Union sent their aerial gunships to aid them. Those that survived retreated, driven further and further away. After the war, there were few safe lands left for great dragons to make their own, let alone to claim for themselves in the way of their ancestors.\n\nAll of that was long before the Princess's time. And though the war was already raging while she grew up, Malaresh doubted her parents told her anything about it until she was old enough to figure it out on their own. Such coddling was typical of humans. Dragons would have told their young about the horror spreading across the land, and let that knowledge harden them in preparation for it. Malaresh had lived with such knowledge himself for longer than Nira had drawn breath.\n\nMemories brought fresh fury bubbling up in the dragon's heart. It flooded his blood, seared his breaths. Malaresh's heart thrashed at his sternum, an angry beast desperate to be unleashed from its cage. His pulse echoed in his wings, and down his tail, regulated in a few places by chambers the dragons called their minor-hearts. His anger also left his fire glands tingling and swollen. Bitter fire-bile dribbled into the back of his throat. He forced himself to swallow it down, wishing he could just burn all the white-feathers off the gryphon's body.\n\nAccording to the girl, the alabaster shit-pigeon was in the lower decks' common area. It served as a central place to eat, and drink, to relax and socialize. Though the ship had many such gathering places, the one located near the cargo holds was built to accommodate creatures as large as dragons. It was where the gryphons often went when they were not on duty. Sometimes, Malaresh even joined them. Though Malaresh did not always consider basic socialization to be within the nature of a great dragon such as himself, he was not averse to the benefits of companionship. If he wasn't going to be worshiped by the Princess's servants, he could at least be petted and flattered.\n\nNow, though, flattery was about the last thing the dragon wanted. As he approached the large, blue and gold-painted doors leading into the commons, he lashed his tail, snarling. That white-feathered-\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Nira punched the side of his tail, glaring at him. \"Watch your damn tail, you nearly bowled me over!\"\n\nMalaresh grunted, half-bowing his horned head in a show of apologetic respect. Though as far as he was concerned, a dragon could knock over whoever the damn hell they wanted, he had to admit, 'Princess' still outranked 'dragon'. He might not consider himself to take orders from her, but he did consider her worthy of his respect. Besides, this ship might be the only place left in all the world where the old power structures of empires, and princesses, and dragons remained. That gave him cause to honor her wishes on principal alone, at least, more often than not.\n\nMost of her wishes, anyway. Malaresh wasn't yet certain he wouldn't kill this filthy snow-bird eventually.\n\nThe dragon grasped the oversized handles, pushed them down till the mechanisms clicked, and then threw the doors open. The room beyond was filled with a half dozen round tables, sized and designed for gryphons and even dragons, rather than bipeds. They were large, and sturdy, with stone tops rather than wood to better stand up to claws, and anger. Most had gryphon-style cushioned loungers instead of chairs, though a few biped chairs were available, as well.\n\nThe room had a variety of amusements available, mostly of human and other biped design, and often upscaled to suit the ship's largest inhabitants. There were all sorts of game boards, along with things like darts to throw and balls to toss around, and even an area set aside for wrestling and play fights. Shelves along one wall also held leather-bound books large and sturdy enough to be easily handled by dragons and gryphons, as well.\n\nAt the far end of the room was a galley, complete with stored and preserved foods, a collection of wines, spirits, meads and other drinks, and a kitchen. Many were the times Malaresh had summoned some smaller biped to go into the kitchen and prepare something for himself and Jirril, or just to bring drinks out for the gryphons to share with him. Truthfully, this galley in particular was large enough for him to fit inside, but he feared he'd never quite lived down the time he went for wine and accidentally toppled the shelf, sending wine and shattered glass everywhere.\n\nNear that galley, white feathers drew his attention. The snow-gryphon sat on his haunches, alongside a table, surrounded by the ship's two female gryphons, and Amelia, the only other human aboard the ship. A dozen gnolls and va'chaak stood watch nearby, all with guard uniforms and rifles slung across their backs. Warbling gryphon laughter emanated from the table. Malaresh took a slow, deep breath, and then strode into the room, all coiled power and anger. He squeezed his fire glands, spitting just enough flame to let it flicker and dance beyond the edges of his teeth. Heat washed over his nose.\n\n\"Oh, fuck me,\" said the snow gryphon, using the common human tongue, albeit with an odd accent. He swallowed, pointing his beak towards the door. \"It's your dragon.\"\n\nMalaresh sneered at the very idea of being their dragon. But rather than address the insult directly, he turned his gaze to the squad of suddenly very uncertain looking guards. \"Get out. Now.\"\n\nNira ran up in front of him, holding her hands up as if to bar his war. \"Remember your promise.\" She glanced over her shoulder at the guards, waving them off towards the door. \"Wait outside.\"\n\nMalaresh lowered his head towards her, a low rumbling creeping into his voice. \"Wise choice. We both know they could not stop me, even if they wished it. And I remember my promise, Girl, I assure you.\"\n\n\"Hey there, big guy.\" Amelia rose up from her chair, picking up her favorite black rifle and slinging it over her shoulder as she approached the dragon. She stood alongside Nira, offering the dragon a nervous smile. \"You, uh, here to fight, drink, or do what Snowballs just said? I can let you do the last couple things, but...\"\n\nThe dragon glared down at her. Normally, he appreciated Amelia's sense of humor. She and Nira were so unlike the many other stuffy, prudish humans he'd dealt with, earlier in his life. Now, though, he was not in the mood for jests. \"Move aside, Amelia.\"\n\nAmelia fidgeted with her rifle strap, but neither she nor Nira moved out of his way. \"Look, Mal, I know what you want, and I don't blame you at all. But he's been real good so far, hasn't caused any trouble, and-\"\n\n\"Move.\" This time, when Malaresh spoke, it was no longer a request. \"Aside.\"\n\nAmelia swallowed, gently brushing her hand against Nira's in silent question. Nira nodded once, and the two of them vacated his path. \"Just play nice, alright?\"\n\nMalaresh ignored her request. He liked Amelia, liked her a lot, in fact. But if he wasn't going to take orders from the Princess, he damn sure wasn't going to take them from her subordinate. He quickly strode towards the table where the three gryphons were, but as soon as he neared it, Lissir and Sivik rose up out of their loungers. As one, they rounded the table, stretching their wings to bar him from reaching Alakor.\n\n\"Hey, Dragon,\" Lissir said, her stance already low and defensive, her muscles tense. \"I gotta ask what your intentions are, before I let you get any closer.\"\n\nSivik spoke up immediately after her sister. \"Snowballs here is under our supervision, which, as much as I hate it, also means we gotta keep him safe, as long as he's-\"\n\n\"You think this Union spy deserves safety?\" Malaresh snarled, dragging his claws against the floor, carving long ruts in the wood.\n\nLissir held up a single forepaw, shifting herself slightly as if to emphasize the gray feathers of her her open, spread wings. \"Until he's proven otherwise? Yes.\"\n\nMalaresh could not tell if they were simply using their wings to shield the gryphon from his sight, or to try and make themselves look bigger to dissuade him from challenging them. Either way, he took their lead and threw his own wings out, snapping them out to their full extension in an instant. He already significantly outsized the average female gryphon of their species, but with his wings spread he positively dwarfed them. They glanced at each other, one swallowed, the other clicked her beak, but neither backed down.\n\n\"Please, gryphons.\" Despite the slightly threatening nature of his display, Malaresh bowed his head to them, offering respect. \"I like you two. So please don't make me move you.\"\n\nSomewhere nearby, Nira, Amelia, and Jirril were all calling for the three of them to back down. But Malaresh had already stopped paying much attention to those three. Given the reaction of the female gryphons, so had they.\n\nSivik and Lissir both returned his bow, but when Sivik lifted her head, a dangerous sort of mischief glimmered in her eye. \"You're welcome to try, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Malaresh lifted his head again. He raised up a forepaw, and retracted his claws, making sure they could see it. Then did the same with his other paws, as well. He had no desire to harm the two females, but he would toss them aside if that was what it took. \"Remember, though. I asked nicely.\"\n\n\"Stop!\" The snow gryphon's voice rang out behind the females. \"Let him through. There's no need for you two lovely females to fight with your friend. If that's what the dragon's here for, I may as well just give him what he wants.\"\n\nAgain, the female gryphons gave each other a wary look. But when Nira voiced her consent for them to move aside, they parted from Malaresh's way. The dragon bowed his head to them once more. \"Wise decision, gryphons.\"\n\n\"Just keep your damn claws sheathed, will you?\" Lissir snapped her wings shut, bumping up against the dragon as she moved past him. \"No matter what happens.\"\n\n\"Yes, Malaresh!\" The Princess moved closer to him again, with Nira at her heels. Malaresh wondered where Rog was. The gnoll must be otherwise occupied, or already asleep somewhere, to not be at Nira's side at a time like this. That was fine with the dragon. That damn fool gnoll was going to get himself killed someday, trying to enforce Nira's ever uttered word. Nira held her hands up for his attention. \"Remember, you were only going to talk to him first, and-\"\n\n\"He's not here to talk, Princess.\" Beyond her, the snow gryphon slowly rose up to his feet. \"You should just get out of the way.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" Nira said, balling up her fists. She thumped one of them against the dragon's foreleg, but the impact barely registered. \"Just don't break anything, you hear me?\"\n\n\"Your furniture is replaceable.\" The dragon snorted, his wings still stretched.\n\n\"I meant bones!\" Nira turned away, shooing them rest out of the way. \"Move back to the doors, this is happening whether we like it or not!\"\n\nEveryone did as the Princess requested, though Amelia and Jirril were the last to leave. Amelia trailed her fingers across the scales of his tail, and when he turned his head to look back at her, she shook a single finger at him. \"You do what you gotta do, but remember. He's a guest. The Princess gave him temporary asylum. So no injuries. Got it?\"\n\nBefore Malaresh could reply, Jirril brushed up all along the dragon's body. \"I concur with our occasional rider. If the Princess has offered him asylum, you keep your damn claws sheathed like the females said! And don't damage anything that could be put to better use petting me!\" He slapped his tail up against the dragon's haunch. \"In fact, don't break anything, period. Yours, or his!\"\n\n\"I'll do my best.\" Malaresh offered Jirril and the others a begrudging nod. For now, anyway, he'd try to wring a few answers out of the gryphon without leaving more than bruises. \"Till he crosses us.\"\n\n\"I won't cross you, Dragon. That isn't why I'm here.\"\n\nMalaresh snapped his head back around, snarling at the snow gryphon. For a few long, silent moments, they sized each other up from across the expansive room. The spy bird now stood at his full, impressive height, his own ebon-edged wings spread at his sides. He had to admit, the snow gryphon was big, perhaps even the largest such creature Malaresh had ever seen. The dragon still outsized him, but the by a noticeably smaller margin than the others. Powerful muscles stood at taut attention beneath fur and feathers. The gryphon's tail, also edged in black, lashed the air in agitation. His beak hung half-open, tongue visibly moving with the gryphon's panting breaths. He was nervous, as he Malaresh thought he damn well should be. But though the toes of all four paws were splayed, gripping at the floor as if ready to pounce, his claws remained sheathed.\n\nScars marked his hide, visible only by the way they disturbed the lay of pelt and plumage. Well-hidden as they were, it was hard to what caused them. Some were likely bullets, and shot pellets, others were less familiar. Whippings and beatings from his masters, perhaps. Malaresh doubted the princess had even noticed them. The gryphons might have, but it was hard to say. Dragons had especially keen senses. Malaresh himself had always been good at picking out small details like that when taking the measure of friend and foe alike.\n\n\"Well, Dragon?\" The gryphon cocked his head, hiding his nervousness behind an sly smile, and a carefully constructed wall of crude charm and bravado. \"I know you're not here to talk, so have you come to fight me, or fuck me? I'm open to either idea, but if it's the latter could I at least get your name, first?\"\n\nThe bird had spirit, Malaresh had to give him that. \"I am called Malaresh the Magnificent, and no, Bird, I have not come to fuck you.\"\n\n\"Well...\" The white gryphon clicked his beak, shaking himself. He slowly folded his wings back. \"There goes my back up plan. Though I suppose given your size, if we're about to fight then I'm fucked either way.\"\n\n\"Yes, Bird...\" A smile crossed Malaresh's muzzle. His fire glands tingled, desperate to unleash their flames on his foe. Bitter fire bile dribbled against the back of his tongue. \"You are. We're going to have our fun, and then you're going to tell me why you're really here. And if you lie to me, things are going to get much, much worse for you.\" Malaresh unsheated a single claw, and used it to cut a long line in the wooden floor. When the gryphon gulped, he retracted it again. \"But since you're facing your fate with courage, I'll allow you to speak your name before we begin.\"\n\n\"How gracious of you.\" The gryphon dipped his head in quick bow. \"I'm Alakor.\" He glanced at the dragon's paws. \"Claws in?\"\n\n\"For now.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" The gryphon took a small step forward, adjusting his stance. \"In that case, ready when you are.\"\n\nMalaresh surged towards him, but the gryphon moved faster than he expected, almost impossibly fast. In a white blur, Alakor snatched up the nearest table in his forepaws, tearing it from its moorings in the floor. He rose to his hind legs in the same smooth motion, pivoted, and hurled the entire table at the dragon. Malaresh was forced to rear onto his own hind legs, to smash his own front paws into the table and knock it aside and out of the air. The stone top cracked, and the wood around it shattered as it crashed to the floor, exploding into splintered fragments and stone chunks.\n\nJust as quickly, the gryphon slammed into the dragon's midsection, using the distraction to cross the room in a breath. The impact knocked the air from the dragon's lungs with an agonizing cough, and sent him stumbling back a few paces. Yet Malaresh was not about to let the gryphon knock him onto his back, let alone allow Alakor a chance to strike at his throat, or his balls. He braced himself and snatched the gryphon's throat in a forepaw, grabbing him under a leg with the other. Then with snarl of effort, he twisted around and hurled the gryphon into a wall.\n\nAlakor cried out as he collided with the wall, cracking wood and collapsing to the floor. Malaresh dropped back down onto all fours, whirling around to charge at the gryphon again. Alakar staggered back to his feet just as Malaresh threw his weight at him, twisting sideways in the air. The gryphon scrambled out of the way, leaving the dragon to impact the same wall. Dull pain thudded through him, wood splintering under his great weight.\n\nBefore he had his balance again, Alakor lashed out with a forepaw, this time striking the dragon across the muzzle hard enough to jerk his head sideways. Pain rang out through his jaw and blue-white stars danced in his vision. Malaresh stumbled back, shaking his head, but this time was ready for the gryphon. Alakor took his bait, surging into follow up with another blow, but instead, it was Malaresh who slammed a balled up fist into the side of the gryphon's skull with everything he had.\n\nThe blow hit Alakor so hard it lifted his front feet off the ground and turned his body halfway to the side. Before the snow gryphon could react, Malaresh hit him again, this time with an open paw across his beak, knocking his head back the other way. The impact left his paw pads stinging, and blood dribbling from Alakor's beak. The gryphon couched, staggering back.\n\nMalaresh rushed after him, pressing his advantage over the smaller creature. Once again the dragon snatched the gryphon by the throat. This time he hoisted the gryphon up, forcing him to his back paws, before slamming him back up against the damaged wall. Alakor's size proved troublesome, however. Were he a smaller gryphon, Malaresh could have pinned him to the wall like that, hind paws off the ground, and choked him out. Instead, reared back, Alakor was nearly as tall as the dragon. Alakar scrabbled at the dragon's grip, beak gaping not in desperate plea for breath, but in silent, defiant snarl.\n\n\"You're a ballsy thing, bird, I'll give you that.\" Malaresh lowered his head, glaring into the gryphon's eyes, seeking truth behind walls of indigo. \"Why are you really here?\"\n\nThe gryphon managed to rasp out a single word, still struggling to pry Malaresh's fingers free. \"Defection!\"\n\nThe dragon snapped his teeth inches from Alakor's beak. \"I don't believe you!\"\n\n\"Don't...\" Alakar managed to twist his voice into an angry hiss. \"Care!\"\n\nAlakor dropped his paws away from Malaresh's wrists, only to ball them up into fists, and slam them directly into the dragon's fire glands, just where his jaw and his throat met. White-hot agony ripped through Malaresh, searing and sharp, all through his jaws and neck. The dragon screamed, releasing the gryphon to grasp his own throat instead. As Alakor dropped back down, Malaresh stumbled back, gasping, tears in his eyes. His fire glands throbbed, sending twin pulses of stabbing pain into the dragon's head.\n\nMalaresh knew in an instant he'd underestimated the gryphon, and cursed himself for doing so. Of course a snow gryphon would have been taught how to exploit a dragon's less obvious weak points. He never should have left his head so close, or assumed he'd already won. He gasped for breath, turned his head, spat a sputtering stream of off-color flame. Blood and fire bile mingled on his tongue, bitter, coppery, and nauseating.\n\nAlakor wasted no time in coming after Malaresh while he stumbled. The gryphon battered him with his forepaws, knocking his already throbbing head back and forth. Each blow left the dragon stumbling in a different direction, and suddenly Malaresh found himself struggled just to keep his balance. He reeled as the gryphon rained blows on him, trying to pull his head back out of the way. In return, he tried to strike back, but the stunning pain still ringing through his skull left him mildly disoriented, and his aim was off. The gryphon lashed out each time, blocking and deflecting the dragon's every attack.\n\nThe dragon decided to give the gryphon something he couldn't deflect. He pulled his head back out of range, took a few quick steps back, and then blasted fire over Alakor's head. Squeezing his sore fire glands to make flame left them aching worse than ever, but it had the desired effect. Roiling, red-orange flame just above him forced the gryphon to drop to his belly, covering his head with his paws as if to protect his eyes from the overwhelming heat.\n\nMalaresh knew he was going to catch hell from the Princess for using his flame aboard the ship, but damn it, that gryphon really pissed him off. Besides, he was certain they had enough water aboard to put out in anything that caught fire. Well, fairly certain, anyway. He made sure to use only used only a tiny stream, and cut it off as soon as the gryphon dropped.\n\nThe moment the gryphon hit his belly, Malaresh snapped his jaws shut and backed away. He tensed himself, and as soon as Alakor started to rise, Malaresh spun on his paws swiftly as he could. The dragon timed his movements just right, and no sooner was the gryphon back up on his feet than Malaresh's tail whipped around, smashing into the gryphon's head and shoulders. Malaresh was careful to use the mid-section, keeping the spiny end from doing any harm. But the impact struck Alakor so hard it lifted him off his feet and sent him tumbling sideways across the floor.\n\nSomewhere in the distance, people were shouting at him. Their voices were angry, but inconsequential. Between the furious pounding of his blood, and the ringing in his ears brought by pain, he couldn't make out the fine details of their yells and calls anyway. A quick glance around confirmed nothing important was on fire, just a bit of furniture. Assuming Nira's minions would deal with that, Malaresh returned his attention to the gryphon before he could pull any more tricks.\n\nAlakor was slower to rise this time, a little wobbly. But he shook himself, turning towards the dragon to face him again. Blood ran from his beak in dribbling lines, but the gryphon wiped it with a paw, staining the black and white feathers crimson. \"You had enough yet, Dragon?\"\n\nMalaresh snatched up an entire gryphon lounger, and hurled it into the gryphon. It exploded across him, broken wood and cushions flying in all directions. Alakar cried out, stumbled, and flopped right back into his belly. He clutched his head, gave a wheezing groan, then got his paws under himself to try and rise once more.\n\n\"Stay down, Bird!\" Malaresh snarled, swiftly advancing on him.\n\nAlakor did nothing of the sort, unsteadily pushing up to his paws once more. \"Go fuck yourself, lizard!\"\n\n\"If that's the way you want it, fine by me!\" Malaresh took a few swift steps up alongside the gryphon, then threw himself sideways, hurling his full weight into the smaller creature.\n\nThis time Alakor had no chance to avoid it. The gryphon took Malaresh's full bodyweight, toppling to the side and rolling across the floor again. The dragon was on him in an instant, trying to pin him to the ground. They grappled and fought, snapping teeth and beak in dangerous threat. Instinct bade Malaresh to unsheathe his claws and finish his foe off, but he forced himself to maintain some semblance of calm. After all, a dead gryphon couldn't answer his questions. That, and the Princes would be awfully angry with him if he broke his word and killed her guest after all.\n\nAlakor tried to gather himself, to brace his paws against the wooden floor, but Malaresh was ready. He seized the gryphon's foreleg, pushed his weight against him, and then forcibly rolled the gryphon over, onto his back. Alakor had to throw his wings open to keep from falling onto them. Malaresh swiftly moved to straddle him. The gryphon tried to tuck his hind legs in to defend his underbelly, but Malaresh dropped his haunches down against the gryphon's stomach. Alakor coughed, tongue protruding from his bloodied beak, as the dragon's weight crushed the air from his lungs. Malaresh curled his tail around one of the gryphon's back limbs to keep it under control, and prevent the gryphon for kicking at him. Tail spikes prodded Alakor's furry thigh, but did not penetrate his hide.\n\nMalaresh leaned forward, settling more of his weight against the gryphon's mid-section, till he felt the smaller beast's ribs creaking. He stretched a foreleg, grasping the gryphon's throat. This time, he let his claw tips slip out, digging them in just enough to draw tiny beads of crimson blood to stain the gryphon's white feathers.\n\n\"There,\" Malaresh said, lowering his head to glare into the gryphon's indigo eyes. \"I think we'd both agree I've won, wouldn't we?\"\n\nAlakor took a few wheezing breaths, defiance ever glittering in his eyes. \"I could still...grab you by the balls!\" He lifted a trembling forepaw and made a fist.\n\n\"You could, yes.\" The dragon chuckled. If nothing else, the gryphon's insolence was amusing. \"And I could still melt your beak right off your face, so perhaps you should admit you've lost while I'm allowing you the chance to do so.\"\n\nAlakor dropped his head back against the floor, panting. \"Good fight, Dragon. Let's...call it even.\" The gryphon turned his head, coughing. Bloody droplets splattered the floor.\n\n\"You don't know when to quit, do you bird?\" Malaresh shifted his weight, easing a little of it off the gryphon's body, but not releasing his throat. \"You've lost!\"\n\n\"So what?\" Alakor reached up with his forepaws to grip the dragon's wrist. \"Doesn't mean you've finished beating me! We both know you didn't come here to talk, or to fight. You just came here to beat a snow gryphon, for a while. So just let me know when you're finished.\" Despite the great amount of pain he must have been in there, the gryphon managed a loud, warbling laugh. \"I'll wait.\"\n\nMalaresh hissed, tightening his grip around the gryphon's neck. \"The fuck is wrong with you, Bird?\"\n\nAlakor forced his head back up, locking eyes with the dragon and glaring. \"You think you're the first to give me a beating, Dragon?\" Something new crept into the gryphon's voice, a an old, bruised bitterness, like a wound he'd nursed all his life that would never quite heal. \"How do you think the Union keeps us in line, when we're young and angry? What do you think they do, when we disobey? When we blaspheme? When we fail?\" He snarled, flecks of blood and spittle caked his beak, and the dragon's clutching paw. \"At least you had the dignity to let me fight back!\" With a slow, wheezing sigh, he dropped his head back down. \"That's already more respect than they ever show us.\"\n\nMalaresh's grip slackened around the gryphon's throat. Fury's flame slackened in his heart, and his furious blood cooled, just a little. Maybe he'd dealt out enough punishment for one day. He relaxed his tail's grip from around Alakor's leg, and slowly, pushed himself back up to his feet to stand over the defeated gryphon, careful of his wings.\n\n\"Admit you've lost, and it's over.\"\n\nAlakor took a few panting breaths. \"Fuck you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Perhaps after you've healed up.\" Malaresh stepped off of him, careful of his wings. \"In the meantime, I shall take that offer as your admittance of defeat. Now wait here.\"\n\n\"If I must, but I'm going to be late for my next beating.\" Alakor lifted a paw to wipe blood from his beak, slowly rolling over onto his belly.\n\nThe dragon ignored him, padding swiftly across the room. Already the hazy but disorienting empowerment of adrenaline was fading, leaving only pain in its wake. His head and jaws ached, his fire glands throbbed, and pain shot through his hip with every step from where he'd hit the wall. At least he was confident that the gryphon was in far worse shape. If anything, he might have beaten the gryphon a little too hard. Perhaps--\n\n\"Malaresh!\" An angry human female's voice cut through his pain, and his thoughts. Nira stormed towards him, dodging around debris, bloody pools, and blackened, smoldering wood. \"What the fuck was that? Not only did you promise me you were coming down here to talk to him, but you used your fire inside the ship?\"\n\nMalaresh flattened his ears back, grimacing. Much as he hated to admit it, the Princess had every rite to be angry with him. He quickly surveyed the room. Already Nira's servants were scurrying about, cleaning broken furniture, pouring water over burning wood, and rushing to check on the fallen gryphon. He flattened back his frills, but continued on his way.\n\n\"I got carried away. I apologize.\" He flicked his tail, glancing back at her as she hurried along at his side. \"But I need the room alone with the bird a little longer. Take your servants out.\"\n\n\"Malaresh, if you think-\"\n\n\"Not now, Nira.\"\n\nNira rushed around in front of him, anger flushing her face, glittering in her eyes, and etched across her features. \"Listen here, Dragon, you might think-\"\n\n\"Not. Now.\" Malaresh snarled each word as its own proclamation, giving them a dangerous finality. In this moment, he would not brook argument with a human, not even a human he respected. \"Give me the room with the bird, Nira.\"\n\nNira took a slow, deep breath. Malaresh readied himself for a string of insults, threats, and reminders of whose ship this was. Instead, Nira only sighed, running a hand back through her hair. \"Very well. But your fight with him? It's over. And this?\" She gestured between herself and the dragon a few times. \"This is very much not over.\"\n\nMalaresh nodded once, lowering his head towards her. \"Thank you. I will allow you to yell and scream at me later, and I will gladly suffer your verbal slings and arrows.\"\n\n\"After this? You'll be lucky if I don't use real slings and arrows.\" She jabbed his nose with a finger, growling under her breath. \"Hell, I oughta put my boot in your nuts for this little stunt.\"\n\nThe dragon flattened his ears at the idea, not entirely certain he wouldn't deserve it as the princess stomped away. While she ordered her servants to vacate the room, Malaresh returned to his task at hand. He carefully made his way into the galley, keeping his head low and his wings tight to his body. Though the place was designed for larger creatures, it remained a tight fit for an adult male dragon. As he hadn't been back there since the great wine spill, it took him a few moments to find what he was looking for. Once he did, he loaded everything he needed into a carrier basket, took the handle in his teeth, and returned to the gryphon.\n\nAlakor had made it to his belly, and someone had brought him a damp cloth to wipe his bloodied beak with. As the dragon approached, he glanced up at him. \"Round two, already? You dragons must have a hell of a quick refractory period. Don't suppose this time I can be on top?\"\n\nMalaresh set the basket down near the gryphon, then eased himself down onto his belly, just across from him. He wondered if the bird's tongue had always been that sharp, or if all the abuse heaped on him by the Union had simply forged it over time, like a blade. For now, he kept his own muzzle shut, unpacking the basket. He'd brought two wooden drinking bowls, one designed for gryphons and one his own. Malaresh also brought a large bottle of rum, with an oversized stopper usable by the ship's larger crew members.\n\nThe dragon gripped the rounded, crystalline bottle in one paw, and the stopper in the other. He twisted it and pulled it free, then set it aside. Malaresh poured a sizable portion of rum into the gryphon's drinking bowl, then pushed it over to him. Then he filled his own bowl, and set the bottle down. The dragon picked up his own bowl, and waited for the gryphon to do the same.\n\n\"Drink.\" When Alakor hesitantly took up the bowl, Malaresh nodded. \"All of it.\"\n\nAlakor sniffed the rum, then downed the whole thing in a few long gulps. Malaresh did the same. The dragon had grown to like just about every spirit and alcoholic indulge kept aboard the ship, but he'd developed a particular fondness for rum. Perhaps it came from the old human tales of adventurous and villainous pirates with a taste for the stuff, the same sort of stories he liked to imagine Nira modeled her crew on. This bottle in particular, was quite good, with flavors of vanilla, honey, burnt sugar, and other things the dragon could not name. It also brought with it a rolling wave of heat, and a flash of white-hot pain to his bruised fire glands. He cringed as he swallowed it down, hoping they'd heal swiftly.\n\nMalaresh thumped his bowl back down, glaring at the gryphon. \"You fought well.\"\n\nAlakor tilted his head back, blue eyes narrowed and ears flat. He stared up at the dragon, perhaps seeking the measure of his honesty. Finally, he gave a chirping noise, and set his own bowl down. \"So did you.\"\n\nThe dragon pulled the gryphon's bowl closer, and poured him a second round. As he returned it to him, he arched his neck, mantled his wings. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"Didn't they tell you?\" The gryphon picked up his bowl again, this time taking only a sip. \"I'm defecting to your crew.\"\n\nMalaresh gazed into the bird's eyes, unblinking. \"Why are you here?\"\n\nAlakor, meanwhile, blinked several times. \"Are you deaf, lizard? I said I'm defecting.\"\n\nWithout looking away from Alakor, the dragon poured himself more rum, as well. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"Oh, I get it.\" Alakor flattened his ears back, looking at. \"This is your attempt at spy craft, is it? Very well, dragon, I'll play along. You want to look into my eyes while I say it? Or do you have some arcane machine to strap me too, see if I'm lying or not? Perhaps you could bind me to a great chair, and dunk me in a river till I finally answer the way I want.\"\n\n\"Your eyes will do just fine.\" Malaresh took a slow drink of his own rum, savoring it this time. \"That's all a dragon ever needs.\"\n\nAlakor turned his head back towards the dragon, and Malaresh set his drinking vessel down. He reached out and cupped the gryphon's beak, gently this time, just enough to keep Alakor from turning his head away. Malaresh curled his neck, dropping his head down till his muzzle hovered just before Alakor's face. He stared into the gryphon's eyes, analyzing the sapphire depths, before repeating his singular question.\n\n\"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"I'm defecting to your crew.\" Alakor's answer came swiftly, decisively. He did not blink, his pupils did not dilate or shift away. Anger and hatred boiled behind them, searing in its intensity, yet Malaresh did not think it was directed at him. \"Though if one more person decides to put me on the floor today, I may have to seriously reconsider.\"\n\nIf the gryphon's sarcasm and defiance were walls constructed to defend him, they could not hide the roiling ocean of turmoil beyond his eyes. Yet, they hid something, and Malaresh could not quite tell what it was. \"Why-\"\n\n\"I'm fucking defecting!\" Alakor slapped a paw against the floor.\n\nMalaresh started over with the question the gryphon interrupted. \"Why are you defecting?\"\n\nAlakor blinked, swallowed, and a twitch of his neck told Malaresh he was resisting the urge to tug his beak away. \"To escape the union.\"\n\nMalaresh tilted his head. Something in the gryphon's eyes had shifted, nearly imperceptible, but there just the same. \"Are you being truthful, Bird?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The gryphon's voice was somehow both flat, and furious.\n\nMalaresh tightened his grip, just a little. \"Do you still serve the Union?\"\n\n\"No!\" The anger in his eyes grew, bleeding over into his voice.\n\nThe dragon repeated the question. \"Do you still serve the Union?\"\n\n\"Fuck the Union!\" The rage, the hatred hidden away behind the gryphon's sarcastic walls finally boiled over, burning bright and blue in his eyes. He jerked his beak away, slapped Malaresh's paw aside, and pushed his muzzle away. \"Fuck the Union, fuck the Empire, and fuck you, dragon!\" He sat up onto his haunches, throwing his wings wide. \"I wish to defect because you're not part of any of it, because you're free from all the self-righteous bullshit on both sides! Because they treat us like people here! They treat you like a person! I'm here because I will no longer allow myself to be anyone's slave!\"\n\nMalaresh slowly held up his paw. \"That's enough, gryphon. I've no more questions.\"\n\nAlakor heaved a wagged sigh, curling his wings around himself like a sulking fledging. \"You don't believe me.\"\n\n\"I did not say that.\" The dragon picked up his bowl, and took another drink of rum.\n\n\"You didn't have too.\" Alakor preened one his wings. After the fight, his feathers were in disarray, blood-stained in a few places, singed in others. \"You aren't the only one good at spotting deceptions.\"\n\n\"I offer no deception.\" The dragon set his bowl down, smiling. \"I believe you are genuinely defecting.\" His smile soon faded, replaced by flared spines all around his head. \"But I don't believe you're just looking to escape. There's too much anger and hatred in you, but at least it's aimed in the right direction.\" He snorted. \"At the Golden Union.\"\n\nAlakar snarled under his breath, glancing away.\n\n\"And probably at me.\" Malaresh chuckled, finishing his rum.\n\nThe gryphon gave a low, chirruping sigh. \"I don't hate you, Dragon, and I...I understand why you despise my people.\" He held up a paw. \"I may intensely dislike you, but I don't have you. Like I said.\" Alakor put his paw back down. \"At least you let me fight back. Never had that chance, before. I respect that.\"\n\n\"Then we shall drink to sharing both intense dislike and mutual respect.\" He refilled his own drink, then gryphon's as well.\n\nAlakor picked up his bowl, toasting the dragon with it. \"To getting my ass kicked by someone I don't quite hate.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled, then downed his entire bowl. He grimaced when the long drink left his fire glands complaining. He rubbed his throat. \"Ugh. Damn fire glands are gonna hurt when I swallow for days, now.\"\n\nAlakor drained his own rum, laughing. He wiped his beak with the back of a paw, then dropped his bowl. It clattered against the floor. \"You started it.\"\n\n\"That I did.\" Malaresh poured them both another round, then inspected the bottle. \"I'm going to need to get more of this.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Alakor picked his bowl right back up when it was full again. \"You are.\" He took a drink, then grimaced, rubbing himself between the hind legs. \"If it makes you feel any better, my balls are still sore, too.\"\n\nMalaresh cocked his head. \"I didn't hit you in the balls.\"\n\n\"No,\" the gryphon said, laughing. \"Your princess did.\"\n\nMalaresh laughed with him before finishing his rum. \"You know what? That does make me feel better.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Princess Nira paced back and forth across the wide, bare wood-paneled hallway in the lower decks. Everything here was designed for the beasts who dwelled in the lowest decks. The corridors and doorways were large enough even for dragons to comfortably traverse. There was no carpet on the floors, just sturdy flooring scruffed and scratched by a decade or so of immense footballs and angrily unsheathed claws. What few paintings and other decorations once marked the walls had long since been knocked down by the stretching of wings, or the playful roughhousing of creatures many times her size.\n\nNira visited the area often. The three gryphons who came here to relax were some of her best friends, and this was the easiest place for them to share a drink together. At least they could generally fit in other areas of the ship as well. For Malaresh, things were not so easy. If Nira restricted his access from this Common Room, the dragon would have few places on the ship left to venture outside his own so-called lair. She imagined it would infuriate him, and that was exactly why she was considering it. If nothing else, it would show him how she felt when she realized he'd only come down here to pick a fight with the gryphon, after all.\n\nThe Princess supposed she shouldn't be surprised. Malaresh probably thought he had honored his promises. In the dragon's mind, not using his claws or his teeth probably equated to ensuring the gryphon was not badly harmed. Even if she confronted him about it, he'd probably give her some bullshit about how humans simply did not understand the ways of dragons, or gryphons. After all, they had their own codes of honor, their own morals, and Nira knew sometimes she just had to let them sort out their issues their own way. Still, she brought the dragon down here to talk to the gryphon. Fighting him was supposed to be a last resort. Malaresh, it seemed, had other ideas.\n\nYet none of that was what had really pissed Nira off. The fighting was to be expected, really. Wasn't as if it was the first time the dragon got into a fight after promising not to, or the first time she'd seen him beat the crap out of something. Maybe violence was in dragon nature, or maybe it was just his nature. Of all her ship's crew, Malaresh was far and away the hardest one for her to read, or ever know what to expect from.\n\nBut she'd sure as hell never expected him to use his fire inside the ship. That was what really pissed her off. There were very few things she'd ever expressly forbidden her crew from doing, and fewer still for Malaresh. After all, she wasn't exactly in control of the dragon. But as far as she could tell, he'd always respected her authority over the ship, and her responsibility to keep its occupants safe. And one of the only things she'd ever outright ordered him not to do?\n\nBlast his fucking fire inside my ship.\n\nNira balled up her fists, clenching her jaw. She paced back and forth a few times, trying to tell herself the dragon must have had his reasons. At least...she hoped he did. If his only excuse for lighting her ship on fire in flight was because his pride was afraid of losing a fight he picked? She was going to rip one of his damn horns off and beat him with to death with it. Granted, it had only been a very small fire, with no real lasting damage done, but that wasn't the point.\n\n\"Nira...\" An soft voice, and a gentle touch on her shoulder pulled her from his thoughts. \"Everything's alright, now. Try and relax a little before you grind your teeth down to nothin'.\"\n\nThe princess took a deep breath, setting her hand atop Rog's. The gnoll had arrived a little while ago, and spent the entire time apologizing for things that would have been out of his control, anyway. Nira had given him the night off, told him she could handle the dragon's return on her own. Hell, she'd damn near ordered him to go and relax. While she was waiting for Malaresh, Rog had been spending time with drinking and socializing Kasis and Vekk. His freshly washed fur, and still clean gold and black clothing, told her he'd cut his night short to come help her as soon as he heard about the fight.\n\nWith a sigh, Nira turned to Rog, and laid her head against the gnoll's chest. She closed her eyes a moment, focusing on the steady, soothing thump of her lifelong friend's heartbeat. The gnoll gently hugged her, stroking her hair with the other hand. Despite her anger, Nira was glad the gnoll was there. She hated that Malaresh's actions had cost him his night off, but his steadying presence was, as always, a comfort. To think that people used to think gnolls were monsters, to imagine that the Union still did...it made her sick.\n\n\"Sorry I wasn't here to stop him.\" Rog stroked her head again, resting his muzzle atop it.\n\nNira scowled, slapping his arm. \"Stop apologizing. We both know you wouldn't have had any more luck than I did.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but...still shoulda been here.\" Rog flicked his tail, a frustrated grimace washing over his muzzle. \"Soon as I heard the chimes, I shoulda got up from the poker table, grabbed my axe, and ran my ass down here.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Nira said, drawing back with a smile. \"Because if anything can calm down a furious dragon, it's an aggressive gnoll barring his way with an axe.\"\n\nRog only shrugged. \"He'd have felt so bad about trampling me to death that he woulda forgotten all about the gryphon.\"\n\nNira laughed at that, then gave the gnoll a playful shove. \"Hilarious.\" She glanced up the corridor, to where she'd sent most of the guards. She wanted to prevent anyone else from coming to the lower decks commons, but also give Malaresh and Alakor a little space when they finally left. \"You should get back to Kasis and Vekk now that everything's calmed.\"\n\n\"Nah,\" Rog said, shaking his head. \"Someone's gotta soothe your nerves. Besides, they're probably doing something else, now that they're alone.\"\n\n\"Probably.\"\n\nNira turned back towards the Commons Area doors, where the three gryphons and Amelia waited. They'll all waited behind to watch over her, as much as Malaresh. She was certainly happy to have them all there to help soothe her frazzle nerves and furious anger. Their presence alone had been a great comfort. Once Rog arrived, they gave her some space with the gnoll. Now, Jirril and Amelia were both watching Malaresh and Alakor through the small opening. Sivik and Lissir lounged together nearby, speaking softly.\n\nRog put his hand on her shoulder. \"You know what I mean? Since they're alone, they're probably-\"\n\n\"Yes, Rog,\" Nira said, swatting his hand. \"I know.\"\n\nRog paused a beat, grinning. \"...Fucking.\"\n\nRather than take the bait, Nira tried to turn the tables. \"Oh, you're right!\" She spun on her heel, pushing him down the hall. \"Quick, go see if they'll let you join in!\"\n\nThe gnoll barked raucous laughter. \"Hah! I don't think it was that kind of invitation, earlier. Though...we were about to start playin' strip poker when I left.\"\n\nNira shook her head, smiling. Somehow, Rog always helped ease even the heaviest of weights form her mind. \"Strip poker? With Kasis and Vekk?\"\n\n\"Yeah, why not?\" Rog folded his arms, perking his ears. \"It sounds fun.\"\n\n\"For them, sure.\" Nira poked the gnoll's belly. \"You know Kasis is really good at counting cards, right?\"\n\n\"Wait...really?\" Rog's ears drooped, and a sneer twisting up his muzzle. \"No wonder I keep losing every time I play her!\"\n\n\"Maybe you should be playing strip poker then.\" Nira poked him again, smirking. \"That way all you've got to lose is your clothing.\"\n\n\"True...\" Rog scratch the thick ruff of fur on the back of his neck. \"Better my clothes than my coin. Or my bullets. Or my booze.\"\n\n\"And, after the other morning?\" Nira made a show of glancing down at the gnoll's crotch. \"She's already seen what you're packing, anyway. So you really don't have anything to lose.\"\n\nThe gnoll laughed, ears splaying back. \"Oh yeah. Kinda forgot about that. She did seem pretty interested.\"\n\n\"That she did,\" Nira said, sharing his laughter. \"Probably the first time she's seen a gnoll naked. Maybe she didn't know those things came in that size. Now come on.\" She walked towards the gryphons. \"Let's go see if anything's changed.\"\n\nRog followed at her side, his bushy tail wagging. \"So, if I go play strip poker with them sometime, you gonna come play too?\"\n\nNira grinned at the thought, shrugging. \"If I ever got invited, I might! Could be fun, with enough drink.\"\n\n\"You guys talkin' about strip poker with Vekk and Kasis?\" Amelia called out as they approached her. As Jirril sat on his haunches, watching through the opening, Amelia scratched his neck feathers. \"I love playin' with them. When's the next game?\"\n\nNira stared at the other woman. \"Wait, you've played with them, too?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah, couple times now.\" Amelia lifted a hand away from gryphon-petting duties to rub her chin. \"It's a hell of a lotta fun. We all get real drunk first, though. Kasis is ridin' a real hot streak, though, I ain't see her outta much more than her jumpsuit yet.\"\n\nNira rolled her eyes, sighing. \"She counts cards, Amelia.\"\n\n\"Oh...\" Amelia curled her lip. \"Well, shit.\" Then she laughed and went back to petting Jirril's indigo feathers. \"Still had a lotta fun. You gonna come play too, next time?\"\n\n\"If I get a damn invitation!\" Nira threw her hands up. \"How come everyone's getting invited to this stuff but me?\"\n\n\"Cause he's a gnoll,\" Amelia said, jerking a thumb at Rog. \"They're up for anything. And me? I'm a woman of the people. But you?\" She shot the princess a look of feigned disdain. \"You're a stuffy, uptight royal. Everyone knows you don't want nothin' to do with all the dirty drinkin' games us peasants play.\"\n\n\"The hell I don't!\" Nira laughed, thumping Aemlia on the shoulder. \"I'll drink, and strip you peasants under the table!\" Then she blinked, trailing off. \"That...sounded different in my head.\"\n\n\"Drinking and stripping?\" Jirril warbled chirping laughter. The blue and gray gryphon sat on his haunches just before the slightly parted doors. \"That sounds like my kind of table!\" He flicked his feathery tail against the floor. \"And my kind of game. How do I join in, darlings?\"\n\n\"You can't play,\" Amelia said, tweaking his ear. \"You don't wear clothes, so you don't have anything to take off when you lose a hand.\"\n\n\"That's not fair!\" Jirril slapped his paw against the floor. \"That's discrimination against nudists.\"\n\nNira giggled, joining Amelia in petting the male gryphon. \"Unless other gryphons suddenly start wearing clothes and you don't, you're not a nudist.\"\n\n\"Can I least join in for the drinking part?\" Jirril leaned his head into the women's touch. \"And watch the stripping?\"\n\n\"Now you're just fantasizing,\" Amelia said, playfully swatting his head.\n\nJirril ducked, hissing. \"Watch the feathers! Don't muss me.\" He tilted his head, gazing up at the women and Rog with one eye, ears splayed and beak half open in smug gryphon smile. \"Tell you what. How about I just start out on my belly, but take a series of increasingly provocative, and exposed positions? You can't say you wouldn't enjoy seeing that!\" He fluffed up his indigo feathers. \"Just look at me, I'm gorgeous!\"\n\n\"You're something, alright,\" Nira said, smoothing down the feathers on the back of his neck. She leaned against him, trying to peer through the doors. She couldn't get a proper angle, though, and could only see a bit of white feathers and black scales. \"So, has anything changed? What are they doing now?\"\n\n\"Well, they're not petting me, that's for certain.\" Jirril gave a plaintive warble, hanging his head. \"It's quite dismaying!\"\n\n\"Two people petting you isn't it?\" Amelia rubbed his ears, shaking her head.\n\n\"Of course not!\" Jirril rustled his wings against his back. \"A beautiful gryphon such as myself can never have enough petting.\" He turned his head to give Rog a baleful glare. \"Especially when someone is just standing there, not petting the gryphon like he should be.\"\n\nRog heaved a sigh, wading in around Amelia and Nira to start petting the gryphon's back and wings. \"Happy?\"\n\n\"Happier, anyway.\" Jirril thrummed a raspy purr, even as he twisted his head to smile at Sivik and Lissir. \"Ladies?\"\n\nSivik flared up her crown feathers, glaring at him. \"Don't even think about demanding we pet you.\"\n\nJirril leaned onto his haunches, holding his forepaws up. \"Wouldn't dream of it! It's simply not proper to ask another gryphon for pettings. Rather, I was going to suggest you come sit with me, and we share the pettings.\"\n\n\"Somehow,\" Lissir said, tilting her gray-feathered head. \"I suspect you'd keep hogging them, and find a way to rope us in, as well.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Jirril circled a paw before setting them both back down. \"If you offered, I wouldn't say no. Be terribly impolite.\"\n\nNira stroked the gryphons throat, trying not to laugh. \"Jirril, why are you like this?\"\n\n\"I just told you, its because I'm gorgeous!\" He stretched his forelegs in front of himself, splaying his paws. \"Wouldn't you be like this, if you were me?\"\n\n\"Must be some remnant of bird evolution.\" Amelia stroked him down to his shoulders, then scratched his neck all the way back up. \"You know, like peacocks. Look how showy the males get! Jirril's just like that, only it bleeds into his ego, and since gryphons can talk? He gets to show off with his beak, too.\"\n\nJirril twisted his head around to offer Amelia the same smarmy gryphon smile he'd given the female gryphons. \"Oh, you're right about that, my darling, I do so love to show off what I can do with my beak.\"\n\n\"You know why he's really like that, right?\" Lissir stretched her wings out, yawning.\n\n\"Because he has balls?\" Sivik warbled giggling laughter. \"The swamp clans with colorful males are notorious.\"\n\nJirril fluffed himself up, cocking a hind leg as if to show himself off. \"I do, they're fantastic, and yes, we are!\" He put a forepaw to his chest. \"Notoriously magnificent.\"\n\n\"Besides all that.\" Lissir waved her forepaw at him dismissively. \"It's because you keep encouraging him. The more you pet him whenever he wants it, the more he's going to ask for it.\"\n\nAs much as Nira knew it was true, she also knew she wasn't likely to stop any time soon. \"I think you're right. He's like a cat that won't stop flopping into your lap for attention. No matter how much you may sigh, you're still gonna pet the damn cat.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Jirril ruffled up his wings, smiling at everyone. \"I know! How about this?\" He waggled a forepaw. \"Since I don't have any clothes to take off, I could put clothes on!\"\n\nNira ran a hand back through her hair. \"Are you back on the damn strip poker thing again?\"\n\n\"I refuse to be excluded!\" Jirril puffed his feathers out all around his body. \"So the bipeds will take clothing off, and Malaresh and I-\"\n\n\"Wait, wait, wait!\" Nira glowered at the gryphon. \"Since when is Malaresh involved?\"\n\n\"Since now!\" Jirril turned his head to preen a wing. \"If I'm playing, he'll certainly want to play.\"\n\n\"Oh, Gods,\" Nira said, laughing. \"I can hear it now.\" She lowered her voice into the deepest, brassiest tone she could manage. \"I am victorious. Now...disrobe for me, Maiden!\"\n\nAmelia laughed with her, rubbing Jirril's neck. \"Yeah, that kinda does sound like what he says.\"\n\nNira blinked, glancing her way. \"And when does he say that, exactly?\"\n\n\"Oh, whenever.\" Amelia focused her attention on the gryphon, rubbing him harder. \"Who's a good bird!\"\n\n\"I am, of course!\" Jirril arched his neck into her touch.\n\nNira chuckled, nudging Rog with her elbow. \"I get the feeling Amelia's 'disrobed' in front of the dragon before.\"\n\nAmelia only shrugged. \"If I've been out riding him or the birds on a long mission, I want a bath when I come back. Sometimes it's just easier to use their tub.\"\n\n\"Oh really?\" Rog made a bawdy, growling noise. \"I just thought that was a dirty rumor.\"\n\nAmelia lifted her hands away from the gryphon long enough to wave them around, feigning panic. \"Oh no, creatures who never wear clothes have seen me naked! How will I ever bare the shame?\"\n\n\"Point taken, Amelia.\" Nira gently grasped Jirril's ear and gave it a playful shake. \"Not that this one would know shame if it bit him on the ass.\"\n\nJirril only smiled at her. \"Is that where you humans like to be bitten?\" He glanced at Amelia, beak open. \"Shall I remember that, for the next time you need to use our tub?\"\n\nAmelia flicked the tip of the gryphon's beak, making him yelp. \"Don't make me start bathing with my rifle.\"\n\n\"The way you fondle that thing, I'm surprised you doesn't already bathe with it.\" Rog barked laughter, flicking his tail.\n\nJirril gave an indignant squawk. \"I am not an 'it'! And any fondling that may or may not have occurred-\"\n\n\"The rifle!\" Amelia slapped the gryphon across the back of his head. \"He's talking about my rifle!\" She shot the gnoll a dirty look. \"Which I do not fondle.\"\n\nRog tilted his head. \"Is that cause you're too busy fondling the gryphon's 'rifle' instead?\"\n\nAmelia balled up her fists and took a threatening step towards the gnoll. \"You're about to get fondled by my boot!\"\n\nThe gnoll gave a mock yelp and hurried around behind the princess, pretending to cower behind the human woman. \"Quick, Princess, protect me!\"\n\n\"I am not your shield!\" Nira tried to move away but Rog stuck just behind her. \"Let alone your...your crotch protector!\"\n\nJirril pushed himself to his feet in a sudden, smooth movement, forcing everyone to step away from the doors. \"I think they've finished in there. Give them some room!\" He stretched out a wing in a grand, sweeping motion, pushing everyone back.\n\nNira batted at his wing as she moved aside. \"You're the one sprawled in the damn way.\"\n\nLissir peered through the cracked doors again. \"Alakor's approaching first.\" She nipped at her sister's neck, ushering her further down the hall. \"Let's let the Princess talk to them without us looming.\" She lifted her head to glance back at Jirril. \"You too. You can comfort your scaly lover after Nira's finished screaming at him.\"\n\n\"Oh, very well.\" Jirril brushed past Nira on his way down the hallway. \"Don't be too harsh on him. He had his reasons, and Alakor seems fine. Besides, it was only a little fire.\"\n\n\"How'd you like your bed set a little bit on fire?\" Amelia shoved at the gryphon's haunches. \"Get moving, you oversized feather house cat.\"\n\nNira rubbed her forehead. \"I'll only yell at him a little, for now. I'll yell more in the morning, when he's hungover. That way it'll really hurt.\"\n\nThe gryphons all moved to wait further down the hallway, leaving just Nira, Rog, and Amelia to greet Alakor when he emerged from the Commons Area doors. Malaresh must have been waiting to talk to her without the gryphon around. That part was perfectly fine, but he'd damn well better have something useful to tell her for all the trouble he'd caused. For now, she focused her attentions on Alakor.\n\nThe white gryphon emerged from the doors, limping just a little. He also wobbled slightly every few steps. Nira couldn't tell where the line between pained limp and drunken wobble was. He'd certainly taken a hell of a beating from the dragon, but the two of them had also drank an awful lot of liquor after finishing their brawl. A few splotches of dried blood still marked his beak and his white pelt, and she was sure his beak, head, and quite a few other areas were going to be heavily bruised, but he didn't seem to have suffered any serious injuries. Nira was thankful that Malaresh kept his promise about that, at least.\n\n\"Alakor.\" Nira stepped towards him, flanked by her two officers. A pang of guilt struck her, cold and sharp in her belly. She'd promised no harm would come to him while he was here, and failed to keep him safe. \"I am deeply sorry-\"\n\n\"Don't apologize.\" The gryphon managed a little smile, his ears slightly perked. He lifted a forepaw, pads towards her. \"You've nothing to be sorry for. He wanted a fight, so I gave him one. If anything, I should apologize to you, for fighting on your ship.\" The gryphon bowed his head, touching his beak to the floor. \"I apologize for causing your crew trouble, and for the damages.\"\n\nNira grit her jaw, balling up her hands. The gryphon didn't sound drunk. If anything, he sounded as if everything had gone as he expected. \"I'm guessing you knew that was going to happen.\"\n\nAlakor lifted his head again. \"Dragons and snow gryphons do not have a pleasant history. I assumed he'd come to throw me a beating, and now he has. Given the way you arrived with him, I'd wager he threatened to do more than just beat me.\"\n\nThe Princess decided against giving the gryphon the specifics. \"There were more detailed threats, yes. I tried to stop him, but-\"\n\n\"He's a dragon.\" The gryphon shook his head. \"Short of putting a very large caliber round into his skull, I doubt there's anything you could have done to stop him. I appreciate the effort, but you need not guilt yourself. Trust me.\" Alakor fluffed himself up, lifting his black-tipped crown feathers. \"It's better this way.\"\n\n\"Better?\" Nira arched a brow. \"Better than someone dying, yes.\"\n\n\"True, but not what I meant.\" Alakor turned, gazing back the way he'd come. Malaresh busied himself stowing away the last of the empty bottles and drinking vessels. The gryphon clicked his beak, watching him. \"He was going to fight me eventually, one way or another. Better to get it out of the way immediately, under controlled circumstances, with rules about claws and such. Otherwise, tension would have built between us, day by day.\" He settled onto his haunches, sighing. \"When it finally exploded, it would have been in an outburst of uncontained fury, with claws, and beaks, and teeth, and blood.\" He glanced down at a few red stains marring his chest feathers. \"Well, more blood. A fight like that, erupting at the wrong time, that's how people die, and things get destroyed. No, no, this was for the best.\" He preened at the stained feathers, and spat one to the floor. \"At least we have an understanding now, to an extent. I don't think you will see us fighting again.\"\n\n\"I sure as hell hope not.\" Nira took a deep breath, and ran a hand down her face. \"Alright, if that's the way you see it, I'm willing to leave it there. But I'd like the girls to escort you back to your quarters for the night. I'll send Amelia around in a bit. She'll bring medics to give you a thorough examination.\" Nira wagged a single finger at him, cutting off any potential protest. \"Which is mandatory.\"\n\nAlakor pushed himself back up to all fours. \"I understand.\" As Sivik and Lissir approached him, he bowed his head to the female gryphons. \"Thank you for standing up for me, earlier.\"\n\nLissir grunted and clacked her beak. \"Just following our orders, really. We're in charge of your security too, after all.\"\n\n\"Nonetheless, I do appreciate you helping to set the rules, and keep claws sheathed.\" He mantled his wings against the ground, then returned them to his back as he lifted his head. \"Ready when you are, my beauties.\"\n\nSivik gave an irritable sounding hiss as she turned away. \"Gets his ass kicked once, and he's right back to the smooth talk and flattery.\"\n\n\"This way, Snowballs.\" Lissir stretched her wing to brush it across his back, guiding him down the hallway.\n\nOnly when Alakor was long gone did Malaresh enter the hallway, and approach Nira. By then, the hottest fires of her anger had dwindled a bit to smoldering coals. She gestured for Jirril to go and see him first. She'd waited this long to chew the dragon out, the least she could was give his lover a moment to check on him.\n\nThe blue and gray gryphon hurried over to the dragon, hugging Malaresh around the neck with both forelegs. Jirril stroked the dragon's neck, and Malaresh stretched his vast, ebony wings forward to enshroud the gryphon with them. The dragon tucked his head under his wings, further muffling their whispered exchange. Nira turned away and leaned up against the wall. Under the circumstances she couldn't give them much privacy, but she could at least avoid staring at them.\n\nMalaresh soon withdrew his wings, and Jirril pulled away from him. The gryphon padded over to Nira, then settled on his haunches alongside her. He brushed his beak across her shoulder, his voice gentle. \"Thank you, for that. Now you may yell at him.\"\n\nNira rubbed the gryphon's beak, then smoothed back his ears with both hands. \"I'd have yelled a lot more a little while ago. But the night's young.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The dragon settled back on his haunches, in the middle of the hallway, his eyes on Nira. He was silent as she approached him, and she could only imagine he was steeling himself to take whatever onslaught she was about to unleash. She strode up to him, her arms folded. Nira tipped her head back to glare up at him, her eyes boring into Malaresh's. Several moments of silence passed before she finally spoke.\n\n\"You know we're on an airship, right?\" She unfolded her arms again, waving her hand. \"And that we're flying, thousands of feet above the earth? In an airship?\" She jabbed her fingers against his scales. \"A flammable fucking airship?\"\n\nMalaresh took a slow breath. He rustled his wings, then let out a great, weary sigh. \"I should not have used my flame.\"\n\n\"No fucking shit!\" Nira jabbed him again, then balled up her fist. \"Because allow me to fucking repeat myself! We're flying on a gods-damned airship! What do you think is going to happen to all of us if some arrogant dragon accidentally lights it all on fire, just because he's losing a fight he started to sate his own fucking pride?\"\n\n\"I was not losing the fight, I was-\"\n\n\"Answer the fucking question!\" Nira punched the dragon's lower chest, scraping her knuckles on his scales and jarring her wrist. \"What happens to all of us if you light the ship on fire, and we can't control it in time?\"\n\nMalaresh shifted his weight, curling his tail around his paws. \"We die.\"\n\n\"We die!\" Nira punched him again, heedless of the fact the angry gesture hurt her more than it hurt him. \"We all fucking die, because you broke the one rule I made you swear to! The one fucking rule! No!\" She slugged his scaled chest again with each word. \"Fire! Inside! The! Ship!\"\n\nMalaresh winced, though Nira was certainly it was more from embarrassment at being berated by a creature a tenth his size than from any physical discomfort she might be causing. \"I was careful not to-\"\n\n\"No!\" Nira glanced down, took aim, and stomped on his forepaw. This time she did intend it to hurt.\n\n\"OW!\" Malaresh yanked his forepaw up, shaking it and hissing. \"What are you doing? That hurts!\"\n\n\"Good! Since nothing else seems to get through to you, I'll stomp the other one, next!\" She snatched his front paw in both hands, tugging it down to glare up at his face. \"I don't want to hear your gods-damned excuses! The rule is not, a little fire inside the ship! Nor is it, fire is allowed when carefully applied! The rule is no fire!\" Nira tried to hurl the dragon's hand down in disgust, but managed little more than pushing it out of her grasp.\n\n\"I am sorry.\" Malaresh lowered his head, his muzzle hovering before head. His ears drooped, and there was genuine contrition in his voice. At least, Nira hoped it was genuine. She could never quite be sure with the dragon. \"I have violated your trust, and for that I genuinely apologize. I...let my anger and my pride get the better of me, and...acted foolishly, endangering your ship and your crew. I will accept whatever punishment you believe fitting.\"\n\nNira took the deepest breath she could, running her hands back through her hair. That was a more direct, more sincere apology than she expected. While it was possible the dragon was simply trying to manipulate his way out of trouble, Nira did not believe that the case. If nothing else, this ship was Jirril's home, too.\n\n\"Understand something, Dragon.\" Nira tapped her finger against the sensitive area between the dragon's nostrils. \"A serious fire, inside this ship, is one of the most dangerous things we could ever deal with. Yes, you only used a small amount of your flame, and yes, we put it out quickly. This time. But half the damn ship's made of wood, dragon. If things go south, it could burn through the ship before anyone could ever stop it. And then all we can do is hope to land quickly enough to give some of the crew a chance to evacuate before they burn to death, or choke on fumes. Or, if the fire burns through something vital too fast?\" She shrugged, shaking her head. \"We all go down with the ship. Including you...\" She thrust a finger at Jirril. \"And him, and the girls. Your wings aren't gonna do you any good if you can't get outside in time to use them. Hell, we don't even have the escape vessels we were meant too. Those we once had, have long since been scavenged for parts. There's a reason I gave you that rule. It's the same reason things like cooking are so tightly regulated, and why Vekk's got some many rules about engine upkeep, boiler maintenance, and so on.\"\n\nMalaresh stared down at his own forepaws, silent. Behind her, Amelia and Rog waited. She glanced back at them, inclining her head towards the dragon, curious to see if they had anything to add. After a moment, Rog stepped forward.\n\n\"Look, Dragon.\" He took a few steps forward, and put a steadying hand on Nira's shoulder. \"We're all glad you're one of us. But...you can't do this again. You can't endanger the ship. If that gryphon was an active enemy, and tryin' to kill you? If you were protecting Nira? Sure, we'd cut you some slack, since it was so easily put out.\"\n\n\"That's a big part of it, actually.\" Amelia walked up on the other side of Nira. \"Not just that you broke Nira's fire rule, but that you did it in a fight that you picked, just cause you were made.\" She held her hands up, warding off any reply. \"I don't wanna hear what his people did to yours, that ain't a part of this right now. You went there to start a fight you didn't have to, and you chose to use your fight to make sure you won. It wasn't life or death, you weren't protecting anyone, you were just mad.\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Nira slapped the back of her hand against her palm. \"That's what really pisses me off. Maybe I sound like I'm overreacting, or overblowing the threat of you using your fire aboard the ship. After all, the ship's made to engage in sustained combat. The whole crew is trained in fire suppression. Everyone knows where the nearest water storage tanks are, where the pressure hoses are, what areas can be sealed off and how to do so, and on and on. But combat's different. Everyone's awake, active, and at battle stations. It's the middle of the damn night right now, and most of the ship's asleep. It's the worst damn time to have a fire, cause it's going to take the longest to get an organized response.\" She wrung her hands, sighing. \"In the end, no, you blasting your fire in the Commons Area tavern probably isn't going to crash the ship. But that isn't the point. The point is, you...\" Nira scowled at the dragon. \"You said it yourself. You violated my trust.\"\n\n\"Yes, I did.\" Malaresh bowed his head till his muzzle brushed the floor, near Nira's boots. \"I apologize again. And I promise upon my honor, and my ancestors' honor, it will not happen again.\"\n\nNira had never heard the dragon use those terms before. She glanced at Jirril who gave her a sly nod as if to say, yes, that was a big deal for a dragon. Nira eached out and touched the dragon's neck. \"I really have little choice but to take you at your word. But I hope you realize this is the sort of thing I could have you exiled from the ship, for.\" Malaresh tensed under her touch. Jirril sucked in a breath, his crown feathers flared. Nira let them worry for a moment before clarify. \"I could but I won't. You've a home here, with us.\" She tilted her head towards the gryphon. \"With Jirril. You got...carried away in a fight, but, everyone makes mistakes.\"\n\n\"Everyone gets carried away in fights.\" Rog snorted, glowering at the princess a moment. \"And sparring matches.\"\n\nThe dragon slowly lifted his head, then pressed his muzzle to Nira's hand, gentle. \"I thank you for your mercy in allowing me to stay, Your Highness.\"\n\nNira patted his nose, unsure how to feel about all his sudden formality. Made her feel as if she was taking part in some kind of ancient draconic ritual she did not know the rules for. \"You're welcome. Besides...\" She gave his muzzle a gentle rub, then dropped her hand. \"You're our only dragon. And just because I'm letting you stay doesn't mean I'm not still pissed at you.\"\n\nThe dragon nodded once. \"I understand.\" He cocked his head. \"What punishment am I to suffer then, till your fury is assuaged?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I don't know.\" She glanced around at the others. \"You and Alakor did a pretty good job of punishing each other, already. Speaking of which, how're you feeling?\"\n\n\"Perfectly fine.\" The dragon shook himself, thumping his tail. His spines scratched at the floor. \"Hardly a bruise on me.\"\n\n\"Your swollen jaws say otherwise.\" With her anger abating, Nira took a moment to look the dragon over. His frills looked discolored where the gryphon had struck a number of blows around the sides of his head. Broken scales and scattered hints of dried blood along the dragon's jaws marked other bruised areas. \"I want the medics to look at you, too. Before you sleep.\"\n\nMalaresh hissed, lashing his tail against the wall, adding a few more scratches. \"Must they? I hate the medics! Always poking, and prodding, and sticking me with things, and looking in places!\"\n\n\"I know you do.\" Nira smirked, reaching out to cradle the dragon's jaws in her hands. \"So let's call that phase 1 of your punishment. A thorough...very thorough...medical examination. And you will do, and take, everything you're told, no matter how distasteful.\" She ran her hands up along his jawline, to where they met his head. The scales there felt very hot, and a few more showed signs of splitting and cracking. Just behind his jaws, the top of his neck was noticeably swelling up. \"This is where he punched you, when you were choking him.\" Nira touched one of the swollen areas, and the dragon yanked his head back, hissing. \"Sorry.\"\n\nMalaresh tossed his head, snarling. \"Fucking gryphon hit me in the fire glands!\" He reached up, rubbing one with a paw, wincing. \"Could hardly see straight for a few moments.\" He set his paw back down, licking his muzzle. \"Couldn't believe he did that.\"\n\n\"You were choking him, weren't you?\" Amelia crossed her arms. \"What'd you expect him to do?\"\n\n\"I didn't expect him to know how to target a dragon's fire glands in the first place.\" Malaresh worked his jaw around. \"Dragons sure as hell never do that to one another, unless their life is on the line.\"\n\n\"A, he's not a dragon,\" Amelia said, ticking off her fingers. \"And B, in the moment, he probably felt like his life was on the line.\"\n\n\"Regardless, sharpshooter,\" Malaresh said, still working his jaws. \"Hitting in the fire glands, in non-lethal combat, is highly offensive to a dragon.\"\n\nNira chuckled to herself. \"So should I tell him to just kick you in the balls, next time?\"\n\nMalaresh glared at her, ears flat and frills extended. \"Oh, what a hilarious jest!\" He tossed his head. \"And honestly, that would be less offensive, yes. Those are expected targets in pride battles and sparring bouts. Fire glands are not.\" He rubbed his throat again, wincing.\n\nRog rubbed one of his ears. \"Dragons are weird.\"\n\nNira glanced his way. \"What do gnolls consider off limits in fights like that?\"\n\nRog tilted his head, perking one ear and splaying the other. \"Nothing. Just don't kill 'em, and try not to break anything. That's about it.\"\n\nNira grinned, shook her head, and returned her attention to the dragon, her smile fading. \"Seriously though, you're not injured, are you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, no.\" The dragon set his paw back down. \"I spat blood a few times, but I think they're just bruised. They should heal fine like everything else.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Nira put her hand on Amelia's arm. \"I still want the medics to do a thorough assessment of all his injuries. Make sure he's not still bleeding inside his jaws or anything.\"\n\nAmelia nodded once. \"Understood.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled his disapproval but did not protest. \"I suppose I should expect further punishments?\"\n\nNira crossed her arms again, leaning against Rog. \"Honestly, I don't know yet. Let me string you along for the night, at least.\"\n\nThe dragon grunted, cocking his head. \"I hope you're not planning to...\" He cocked his head. \"How did you so eloquently phrase it earlier? Put your boot in my nuts?\"\n\nA hint of a smile cracked Nira's otherwise stoic fa\u00e7ade. \"Depends on how much more you piss me off. Though it might help you learn your damn lesson if the medics had to inspect those, too.\"\n\nAmelia laughed. \"Who would that inspection be punishing more, the dragon, or the medics?\"\n\nNira chuckled but her smile faded just as swiftly as it arrived. \"Either way, Malaresh, now I damn sure expect you to fly us to The Emplacement.\"\n\n\"Ugh.\" The dragon groaned. \"That again? I suppose I have fewer grounds upon which to decline, now.\"\n\n\"Damn right. But...\" Nira trailed off, deciding to cut the dragon some slack for the moment. \"It's late, you're in pain, I'm angry...we'll talk about in the morning. Before I send you back to your chambers, though...did it work?\"\n\nMalaresh tilted his head. \"Did what work?\" The tiniest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of the dragon's mouth.\n\nNira only glared at him. \"Not in the mood, Dragon. Don't play coy. You sent everyone out of the room so you could try your dragon mind games on the gryphon. So spit it out. Is he telling the truth? Can we trust him?\"\n\n\"Yeah, lizard.\" Amelia nudged the tip of his tail with her boot. \"Did your dragon tricks work, or what?\"\n\n\"To an extent.\"\n\n\"Alright, then Dragon. Let's hear it. Give me something useful, and maybe I'll consider you punished enough already.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Malaresh arched his neck. \"I believe the gryphon's defection is genuine, but I am not certain how completely we can trust him. Because...\" The dragon splayed his frills out, his tail tip twitching. \"I do not believe he is being wholly truthful about the reasons for his defection.\"\n\nNira took a slow, deep breath. She should have known better than to hope for a simple, concrete answer. Still, she'd take what she could get. \"I'm guessing you plan to elaborate in a vaguely mysterious, roundabout way, just so you can hold it over my head a little while longer?\" When the dragon only smiled at her, Nira sighed, waving her hand. \"Alright then, go ahead.\"\n\nMalaresh licked his nose, collecting his thoughts. After a few breaths, he began. \"Do you know what I saw, when I stared into his eyes?\" Malaresh stretched a single wing out, gesturing with it in a sweeping motion. \"Hatred. Anger, and hatred.\"\n\nNira scowled as she paced before the dragon. \"I don't like the sound of that.\"\n\n\"You say that as if I wouldn't see the same thing in your eyes.\" Malaresh lowered his head towards her, flicking his wing tip at Jirril. \"Or his.\" He pointed with it to Rog, and Amelia too. \"Or his, or hers, or everyone else on this rattling deathtrap.\"\n\nNira drummed her fingers against the handle of her pistol. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Union,\" Jirril said. The blue and gray gryphon sat near Malaresh, his feathered tail draped across the dragon's scaly one. \"He's talking about the Golden Union, right?\" Jirril tilted his head back to look up at Malaresh.\n\n\"Yes.\" The dragon offered the gryphon a little stroke with his outstretched wing. \"I am. After all, what does everyone on his ship hate more than anything else?\"\n\n\"Sittin' on your nuts?\" Rog grimaced, flattening back his ears. \"I hate when that happens.\"\n\nAmelia laughed, glancing at the gnoll. \"Not all of his have to worry about that, Rog. I'd say, drinking so much you spend the next day puking till you're just, dry heaving.\" She paused, then shook her head. \"No, wait, I don't hate the drinking part. Just the puking, and heaving. I bet everyone hates that, right?\"\n\nPrincess Nira pinched the bridge of her nose. \"I get that you're trying to diffuse the tension, but let's just be serious for a moment.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah.\" The gnoll cleared his throat with a growl, then focused on picking a few tangles out of his tail fur. \"Definitely what I was doing. Just...diffusing the tension.\"\n\nNira slugged him on the shoulder.\n\n\"The gnoll's humorous anatomical troubles aside...\" Malaresh rumbled, thumping his spined tail against the floor. \"Everyone aboard this ship hates the Golden Union, probably more than anything else. And the hatred I saw in Alakor's eyes was the same. The more I brought them up, the hotter those flames burned.\"\n\n\"So you believe his defection to be genuine, because you believe he despises the Golden Union as much as the rest of us.\" Nira pivoted on her heel to face the dragon again. \"Is that the gist of it?\"\n\nMalaresh nodded once in a single, slow motion. \"He mentioned to me that he's used to being hurt.\" The dragon cringed, flattening his ears and frills. \"Alakor made it sound as if being beaten was a regular occurrence, and he was...simply grateful to be allowed the privilege of fighting back, for once. Given the cruelty and spiteful bullshit the Union already espouses towards anything they consider a 'monster', and the things they do to their non-human captives...\"\n\nThe dragon trailed off. Ghosts drifted behind his emerald eyes, and his jaws trembled, a rare display of fear and uncertainty. The dragon swiftly looked away from everyone else, as if to hide his own momentary vulnerability. Jirril shifted positions to lay against the dragon, and offer him gentle comfort. While the gryphon nuzzled at the dragon, Nira turned towards her other friends to give Malaresh and Jirril a private moment.\n\nIt was the Golden Union that Nira and her crew saved Malaresh from in the first place. The Union had captured him just after the end of the war. They held him a while, perhaps trying to break him, and force him into serving their people. Or more likely, she thought, they planned to keep him alive just long enough to stage a grand public execution. He certainly would not have been the first 'demon' they'd put down in a public display meant to cow the other non-humans, and rally their own misguided supporters. Whatever the case, Malaresh was in rough shape when they first rescued him. Wounds both old and new littered his body, at the time. Most of them were faded now, dark scars against darker hide. They'd never spoken in detail about the things his captors inflicted upon him, nor did Nira plan to. She sure was hell wasn't going to make the dragon recount what she could only imagine must have been horrific experiences.\n\nNira stepped forward to pat the dragon's neck. \"I think we can safely assume Alakor's telling the truth about being beaten by his former masters.\" She stroked Malaresh's scales. \"The girls made it pretty clear to me that the Union is known for beating their snow gryphons into submission, and for brainwashing them into accepting it. I'd sure as hell want to get the hell away from that, too.\"\n\n\"As would I,\" Malaresh said, finally returning his attention to the others. He opened draped his half-open wing across Jirril's back. \"I do not believe we need to worry that he still serves the Union. He does not. Nor is he knowingly leading us into a trap. Those things were clear to me, despite the fact he is trained in deception, and in hiding truths.\" The dragon tapped unsheathed claw tips against the floor. \"There are some things that simply cannot be hidden from my kind. When the truth is written within your eyes, a dragon will always find it.\"\n\nNira paced again, striding back and forth between Malaresh and her other friends. \"And yet, you said he's not being truthful about the reasons for that defection. I don't suppose you found out what those reasons were?\"\n\nMalaresh snorted, easing himself down onto his belly alongside the gryphon. \"I can tell when he's being deceptive, Nira, but his thoughts are not written upon his eyes like old script carved into a wall.\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" She turned towards the dragon, trying to remain patient. \"But you have suspicious, I assume?\"\n\n\"The white bird told me he is defecting to our ship because he refuses to be a slave, any longer.\" Malaresh circled a paw in the air. \"And because he wishes to be treated, in his words, like a person. He believes this ship was afford him that.\"\n\nNira glanced at her friends. \"Which it will. Because he is a person. But...\" She clenched her jaw. \"There's more, isn't there?\"\n\nMalaresh only shrugged his wings. \"Imagine yourself in his place. Your life spend doing the Union's bidding, trying to avoid another beating, watching your species be treated as nothing more than animals to be sent, headlong, into the fire. If you saw a chance to escape, would you not take it?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Nira crossed her arms. Something didn't add up, and her mind was already trying to piece the puzzle together, even as Malaresh went on.\n\n\"So why isn't he escaping?\" The dragon's voice took on a sharp edge. \"Why doesn't he flee, while he has the chance?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Nira studied the dragon's face, his eyes, looking for any clues to what he was thinking. \"He is escaping. He's escaping the Union, by joining us.\"\n\nMalaresh only tilted his head, his frills lifted. \"Is that what you'd call this?\"\n\nNira heaved a growling sigh, wishing the dragon would just get to the damn point. She hated it when he knew something she didn't, because there was nothing she could do to stop him from lording it over her as long as he wished. \"Dragon, will you just skip to the end?\"\n\n\"Earlier...\" Malaresh slowly lifted his head, urgency creeping into his voice, bit by bit. \"You told me that Alakor believes the Union considers you a threat, again, and that they may be considering an attempt on your life. Correct?\"\n\nSomething icy skittered down Nira's spine, and left her shuddering. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" Malaresh unsheathed a few claws, studying them. \"If I was a snow gryphon looking to escape the Union, I'd fly towards the Broken Teeth, I think. Try and get as far away from Union controlled lands as I could, as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"That's...\" Nira glanced at Rog and Amelia, both of whom shrugged. \"That's the way he told us to go, though.\"\n\n\"That's the way anyone would go. From this area, it's the easiest way to leave the Union behind. So...\" The dragon set his paw back down, claws retracted. \"If all he wants is escape, why didn't he go there? If he left weeks ago, he'd already be out of Union lands. He'd already be free. If all he wanted was to escape the Union, he'd have already done it. Instead, he came here.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Nira rubbed her forehead as the pieces all started coming together. \"That's why he's defecting. He doesn't want to flee them, he wants to fight them.\"\n\nMalaresh smiled, bowing his head to her. \"He wants to fight them. This gryphon is filled with as much hatred for the Union as I am, maybe even more so. And he knows their operations, he knows their plans, he knows their people. And that's why he's defecting. He's joining with the strongest ship in all the world, just in time for his old masters to try and kill its captain. He doesn't want escape, he wants revenge. If he says they're coming for you, then they're coming for you, Nira.\"\n\n\"Shit, shit shit.\" Nira ran her hands down her face. It had been nearly a decade since she'd sworn off the war, sworn off revenge for her parents, sworn off being an Empress. \"So...we do like he said, and, head for the Broken Teeth, before the Union...\" Nira trailed off, stomping a boot. \"Fuck! They're already there, aren't they? The Union. Looking for him! You said it yourself, everyone would expect him to go that way. I bet that's why there were Union ships at the Emplacement, too. They're looking for their runaway spy.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Malaresh rumbled, as if pleased she'd finally caught up to his thinking. \"I believe there is a trap being set, and Alakor is leading us towards it. But the trap is not meant for us.\"\n\n\"It's meant for his old masters,\" Nira said, balling up her fists. \"We are the fucking trap.\"\n\n\"Well, shit.\" Amelia folded her arms, glaring at the dragon as if he'd somehow created the situation. After a moment, she told towards the Princess. \"So what do we do?\"\n\nRog growled. \"I say we wreck shit up.\"\n\nNira ground a fist into her palm, clenching her jaw. \"If Alakor's telling the truth about the Union wanting to come after me, then it doesn't matter what we do. They'll be coming for us, sooner or later. If we turn away from the Teeth, there's only so far we can fly till we're back in Union controlled lands, anyway. We've been avoiding this as long as we can, because I don't want to put any of you in danger, but...\"\n\n\"If hell's coming, Princess, then it's coming.\" Amelia put a hand on Nira's shoulder, gently squeezing. \"Even you can't hold back the storm, forever.\" She tilted her head towards Rog. \"So let's do like the gnoll says, and go wreck some shit.\"\n\nNira couldn't help but laugh at that, thankful for her friends comfort, and support. \"I suppose I did promise Rog a trip to the Emplacement, anyway.\"\n\n\"Damn right you did.\"\n\n\"Alright, alright.\" Nira held her hands up. \"We'll stick with out plan of heading to the Emplacement, and try to find out why they may be pursuing us again. But I want to talk to Alakor before that...see if we can squeeze any more information out of him.\"\n\nAmelia held up her hands, and slowly made two fists. \"Just tell me what to squeeze.\"\n\n\"I was thinking metaphorical squeezing, but we'll see how cooperative he is when we confront him with our suspicions.\" She dropped her hands down, resting them on her pistols. \"I'm sure as hell not getting into a war on his behalf, but...we already expected we might have to deal with some Union muscle, and guns, so if he wants to kick a few asses, I'm not sure not going to stop him.\" She ground her teeth a moment, then glanced at the dragon. \"I think that's all I have for you tonight. Go get some rest. I'll have some food sent by, after the medics have been around. For now, I'll defer any further punishments.\"\n\n\"That is appreciated. Good night then, Princess.\" Malaresh pushed himself up to his paws. \"Come along, bird.\" Then he gently bit down on the back of Jirril's neck, tugging the gryphon up to his paws by his scruff. Malaresh padded down the hall, dragging the stumbling, protesting gryphon along with him.\n\nWhen they were gone, Amelia gave Nira a sudden, forceful hug. It caught her off guard, but the comfort was certainly appreciated. Nira returned the hug, holding Amelia tightly for several long moments. Amelia rubbed her back, speaking gently into her ear.\n\n\"I know you wanna keep us all safe, Nira. But we're all a part of this thing, too. These decisions, these fights, these moments in your life? They don't ever have to be yours, and yours alone.\" Amelia hugged her tight, before pulling away and simply holding her hands. \"We're all in this without.\" A smile tugged at her lips. \"We might only be a buncha peasants, but everyone on this ship is behind you. And...whatever comes next, I'm...I'm always here for you.\" She tilted her head towards Rog, standing nearby. \"We're all here for you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Amelia.\" Nira squeezed her hands. \"That...that means everything, to me. I...I know you're all there, but...it's nice to hear it spoken, sometimes.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Amelia let her hands fall away from the Princess', then put them on her hips, grinning. \"Just don't forget it. Princess, Captain, whatever you wanna be called, you don't always gotta make these decisions on your own. I joke around a lot, but...I hope you know I'm here for you, if you need me. And you need a serious talk about what we're gonna do, I'm all for it. Any time you need it.\"\n\n\"I know, Amelia, and thank you for that, too.\" She took a breath, and then waved down the hall. \"I think, for now, I'm going to get a little drunk, and flop into bed. You'd better go make sure Alakor's not giving the girls too much trouble.\"\n\n\"What if he's givin' 'em something else?\" Amelia laughed, taking a few steps down the corridor.\n\n\"Then I guess they've decided he can be trusted!\" Nira laughed with her. \"Make sure the medics check him over, though, and for now, don't bring up what we discussed tonight. When the medics are done with Alakor, take them to see Malaresh. I don't want that lizard wriggling out of this without an examination.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Amelia waved. \"See you in the morning, Princess. Try not to be too hung over.\"\n\n\"No promises.\" Nira turned towards Rog, the only one left in the hallways with her. \"Plans for the rest of the night, Rog?\"\n\n\"For the night?\" The gnoll scratched at his ruff. \"Whatever you need me to do.\"\n\n\"I think we're good, actually.\" Nira ran her hands back through her hair, sighing. \"Been a hell of a day.\"\n\n\"Yup.\" Rog swished his tail a bit, scrunching up his muzzle in vain attempt to stifle a yawn. \"Probably oughta just sleep.\"\n\n\"Probably.\" Nira circled an arm around the gnoll's waist, flashing him a mischievous grin. \"How about instead of that, you escort Her Royal Highness back to her room, and help her get...\" She paused, grimacing at her own impending wordplay. \"Royally shitfaced?\"\n\n\"Love to.\" Rog scrunched his muzzle. \"But I'm gonna drink till I forget that pun.\"\n\n\"That's my Guard Captain.\" Nira leaned against the gnoll, smiling. \"Lead the way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Executor Harliss sat behind her expansive, ebony desk, inspecting the final cartridge in a long line. Though the Golden Union provided her ship the finest ammunition, she refused to load a single round into her pistols she hadn't personally inspected. The slightest sign of flaw in casing or bullet was enough for her to discard the round. Even odd variations in weight put her off. She would have preferred handloading her own ammo but lacked the time. Thankfully, the latest advancements in industry meant the machined rounds the Union provided were of the highest quality.\n\nHarliss set the last cartridge down on her desk, alongside its brethren. She leaned forward, studying her pistols. Each was custom crafted for her by a private gunsmith, and balanced to her exact specifications. Their cylinders held eight rounds rather than six. Two had longer barrels than usual, and were engineered for accuracy. She kept those at her sides, for when she had the luxury of taking her time to line up her shots. The pistols at her hips possessed slightly shorter barrels, designed to be drawn and fired in a blink. Those were especially heavily rifled to help prevent any loss of accuracy. Every component of all four firearms was engineered for maximum reliability.\n\nDespite their custom nature, Harliss kept her weapons' decorative adornments to a relative minimum. Their purpose was to defend, and to kill, not to draw the eye of auctioneers and collectors. The old sword sigil of the Executors was inlaid in ivory on one side of each grip. Each had her title inscribed along the inside of its barrel: Executor Harliss. Every gun also bore a single musical note embossed in gold upon its muzzle, highly stylized to resemble a pistol. It was the emblem of The Ballad, an old gunfighter code.\n\nThe code's full name was The Ballad of Barrel and Bullet. It originated from a time when both airships and firearms were still new. It was said The Ballad began with a secret society of world-traveling gunslingers who molded their lives around a set of principles and rules. Honor and fairness were chief amongst them, even amidst bloodshed. Nowadays, the old code was nearly forgotten. But to its remaining devotees, The Ballad was a religion onto itself.\n\nFor Executor Harliss, The Ballad was in her breath, and in her blood. She had followed it since her youth. Though Harliss served the Union faithfully, she considered the Ballad her only true master. Throughout her life, Harliss worked to perpetuate the Ballad, by weaving the same sort of legends that had once stirred her own restless soul. If she could inspire just one person to one day take up arms, and follow The Ballad's guiding principles, then she had succeeded. And if her name one day grew into myth? All the better to keep the Ballad alive.\n\nOpposite her title, her pistols bore further inscriptions taken from old Ballad oaths. The phrases were divided up into pairs. The outside of one barrel read, By My Song, while its twin said, You Are Undone. The other engravings read, Long May We Hear, and, The Cylinder's Song.\n\nHarliss traced a finger across an engraving. Then she lifted the weapon and popped the cylinder open. All eight chambers were empty. She'd already cleaned and oiled her firearms that morning, but it never hurt to double check. She spun the cylinder, savoring the satisfying series of rolling clicks. When it stopped, she took a deep breath. As she exhaled, Harliss loaded the weapon with swift, smooth motions. Her hands moved in a blur, plucking and inserting rounds, rotating the cylinder and loading more, all in a flash. By the time she took a second breath, the gun was loaded and holstered at her hip.\n\nShe buckled the black leather holster shut. \"Well?\"\n\n\"Worse.\" A voice, deep but gentle, replied from just behind her.\n\n\"What?\" Harliss spun her chair around, brown leather creaking.\n\nTwo immense, snow-white gryphons loomed over her, seated on their haunches. Each was male, and bore highlights of black in different patterns and places. One had ebony speckles across his wings, and limbs. The other had a single black forepaw, as if he'd accidentally trodden in a deep puddle of ink. The one with the black paw was the one who had spoken. Harliss had dubbed him, Sock.\n\nSock's gold-hued eyes met hers. \"Worse.\" The gryphon glanced at the other. \"Concur?\"\n\nThe second gryphon, called Speckles, fluffed up his feathers. \"Concur.\"\n\nHarliss took another breath, and spun back around to face her desk again. Aside from the guns and bullets, its dark, polished surface was empty. She picked up a second pistol, checked the cylinder, and once more, slowly exhaled. She loaded her second gun with the same mercurial speed and practiced precision. Harliss slammed the cylinder shut and holstered the weapon. This time she spun right back around towards the gryphons.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\nThe gryphons glanced at each other, and each nodded. \"Better.\"\n\n\"Concur. Better.\"\n\n\"Damn right it was-\"\n\nA knock on the large double doors of Harliss' meeting room interpreted her. She whirled towards the door, drawing her loaded pistols free. Both gryphons gave low, guttural growls.\n\nHarliss trained her sights on the doorway. \"Come in!\"\n\nA muffled, female voice answered her. \"You better not be pointin' those fuckin' guns at the door again!\"\n\nHarliss set her weapons down on the desk. \"Wouldn't dream of it.\" She busied herself loading the third at a more casual pace.\n\n\"Uh huh.\" One of the doors flew open. A short, slender woman in a long, red duster over a black and gold vest strolled in. Pistols hung at her hips. Belts loaded with knives crisscrossed her body, along with another holding bullets. Her dark hair looked as wind-tangled as ever. \"I could just feel you pointin' em at me, and-Oh!\" She gasped when she spotted the gryphons, her tone changing in an instant. \"Who's that I spy back there? Who's that?\" By the time she reached the desk, she was practically cooing at the gryphons. \"Is that the best boys I see? Is that the best boys?\"\n\n\"Of course, it is.\" Speckles ruffled his wings, chirruping.\n\n\"What have I got for you?\" The newly arrived woman stuffed her hands into the pockets of her red coat, pulling out handfuls of dried meats, dusted with sugar and spices. \"What have I got for you?\" By now, her voice had melted into a syrupy sweetness that grated against Harliss' every nerve. \"Is it treats? Is it good treats for good boys?\"\n\nHarliss holstered her third pistol, higher up on her side, then crossed her arms. \"Evlee, are you carrying treats in your damn coat, now?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Evlee held a big handful of jerky up to each of the gryphons. Sock and Speckles each delicately plucked a single piece at a time off the woman's palm. The birds were careful as could be with their sharp, yellow beaks. \"How else am I going to be prepared for pampering good boys and girls at all times?\"\n\nHarliss scowled as she loaded her final gun. \"They don't need treats at all times.\"\n\nEvlee gave a mock-horrified gasp. \"Don't listen to her! You good boys always deserve treats!\" When her hands were empty, she took to stroking the gryphons' feathers around their necks. They bowed their heads to her, and Evlee scratched at both their ears. \"Don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Sock tilted his head into her hand.\n\nSpeckles did the same, from the other direction. He gave a little chirp. \"Of course, we do!\"\n\n\"See?\" Evlee smirked at Harliss over her shoulder. \"Even the gryphons know they're good boys.\"\n\n\"Mhm.\" Harliss buckled her last pistol into place. She stood up and shoved her chair under the desk. \"Be that as it may, you're going to make my gryphons fat if you keep giving them treats.\"\n\n\"Is that true?\" Evlee gasped again, poking the gryphon's bellies. \"Is that true? Are you gonna be fat boys? Tubby birds?\" She ruffled the fur of their bellies, giggling to herself. \"Don't worry, if Harliss doesn't want you, I'll take care you! You can waddle around my quarters, you tubby, fluffy murder machines!\" She straightened back up, scratching their ears again. \"Isn't that right, good boys?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Sock leaned his head into her touch once more, but cast Harliss a helpless glance, his ears splayed.\n\nHarliss nudged Evlee away from the gryphons. \"Alright, that's enough. Now you're just patronizing them. You can pet my gryphons again later.\"\n\n\"Awww.\" Speckles hung his head, his ears drooping. \"I like getting pets.\"\n\nHarliss rolled her eyes. \"Oh, very well, you may continue to pet Speckles.\"\n\nEvlee did just that. \"Aww, does Mr. Speckles like his pets more than Mr. Sock does?\" She rubbed and scratched the gryphon's neck with both hands, sticking her tongue out at Sock. \"Mr. Sock is just a grumpy bird today!\"\n\n\"You know, Evlee.\" Harliss leaned back against her desk, gazing at the other woman. \"If it weren't for the fact that you can shoot almost as well as I can, there are days I'd like to feed you to those gryphons.\"\n\nSock clacked his beak, as if in quiet approval.\n\nEvlee only laughed. \"Oh, please. They'd miss getting all the pets! And all the treats.\"\n\nHarliss only stared at Evlee, her voice flat. \"However would they cope?\"\n\n\"You'd miss me too, Executor! You'd miss my bright and cheery demeanor!\" Evlee stroked the gryphon's feathers down to where they melted into fur across his shoulders. \"And you'd miss my joyful laughter!\" As Evlee spoke, one hand drifted ever so slowly lower. The movement was almost imperceptible, so much so that most people would have missed it. Harliss, however, did not. \"And you'd miss my spontaneity and my-\"\n\nIn a blink, Evlee went for her gun. She drew it in a single, smooth motion, turning towards Harliss. Evlee's movements were so quick and fluid that most people would have been dead even before they realized she'd drawn on them. But Executor Harliss was not most people. In a blur of motion she drew her own pistol free and shoved the barrel up under Evlee's chin hard enough to knock her teeth together.\n\n\"OW!\" Evlee pushed the gun away, holstering her own weapon again. \"Not so hard!\"\n\n\"You were close that time,\" Harliss said, sheathing her pistol as well. \"Well, you were closer, anyway. Your hand betrayed you, though.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind.\" Evlee rubbed her chin. \"Anyway, that's another thing you'd miss. My little tests.\"\n\n\"I would, actually.\" Harliss glanced down at herself, counting the extra rounds already loaded into her gunbelts. She had another eight rounds for each weapon. If she needed more than that, she thought, she was probably already dead. \"Are we ready go?\" She waved her hand, sighing. \"I'm getting bored of waiting for Tormin to be satisfied with our perimeter security.\"\n\n\"We're ready, yes.\" Evlee gave each gryphon a few more scratches around the neck, then dusted off her hands, and walked towards the door. \"You should have just ordered him out of the way an hour ago.\"\n\n\"If I did, I'd have to listen to his nagging about security this, and protocol that, and I couldn't be bothered.\" Harliss fetched her coat from a rack nearby. The long garment hung to her boots. Its leather was dyed the same stark white hue as her gryphon's feathers. A deep golden hue hemmed the sleeves, and collar, and the black buckle straps. Harliss tugged it on, but left it open to ensure easy access to her pistols. \"Besides, I used the time to inspect my rounds, anyway.\"\n\nThough Harliss had her own captain's quarters and offices, she preferred to use the meeting room to make her final preparations before disembarking. It was nearer the main exit, and had plenty of room for her gryphons to join her. She kept the room mostly empty, and its sparseness allowed her time to prepare mentally for a forthcoming mission.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Evlee said, pulling open a door. \"We all know you love playing with your bullets. Though, as often as you sequester yourself away with your gryphons, people are going to start wondering what else you're playing with in there.\"\n\n\"If you ever have a misfire in a firefight, don't expect me to help you.\" Harliss said, walking into the hall.\n\nHarliss glanced down the wide corridor. The walls were painted white, and glowing lamps shed bright golden light at regular intervals. She snapped her fingers twice. Both gryphons jumped to all fours, and trotted after her. Evlee pushed the second door open to make room. The beasts passed through, and took up positions behind Harliss. Evlee closed the doors again, then squeezed past the gryphons to join the Executor. Harliss made her way towards the exit, and the others followed her in lockstep.\n\nThe Stormcaller bustled with activity. Soldiers and intelligence officers hurried out of the way of the Executor and her gryphons before pausing to salute. Voices buzzed throughout the halls, and crackled over talk-boxes in adjoining rooms. Signal bells chimed, directing groups of engineers and squads of soldiers to take up positions and prepare for deployment. The vessel itself was one of the Union's newest. Its engines, armaments, communications systems, and so on were a mixture of highly refined equipment, and technology just out of the testing phase. Hell, Harliss thought, they were testing some of it themselves.\n\nTormin, her first officer, waited near the ship's main disembarkment area with a dozen heavily armed soldiers. Despite his bland, gray clothing, his standard issue dark gold officer's jacket, and his short-cropped hair, Tormin still stood out. Not counting her gryphons, Tormin was the largest person serving aboard Harliss's ship. He wasn't quite a mountain of a man, but he made for an awfully big foothill. When he saw her coming, he stepped forward and saluted. All the gathered soldiers did the same.\n\nOfficially, Tormin also served as one of her bodyguards. Some obscure rule declared that Executors were always required to maintain at least two bodyguards. Harliss did not mind, as only a fool would turn down extra guns. Her second bodyguard was Evlee, who had held the position for quite some time despite pushback from the Union higher-ups. They preferred a more pious person serve such a role. Yet there were few people in all existence that Harliss trusted more than Evlee.\n\nHell, she hadn't even trusted Tormin at first. Unlike Evlee, the Union had assigned him the role several years ago. Initially, his piousness grated on her, as did his disdain for her habits and methods. But Tormin had proven himself a highly capable combatant, and an officer completely worthy of her trust. She'd warmed to him considerably over the years, though she was not sure he felt the same.\n\nHarliss returned their salutes, then turned towards the exit. \"Ready, Tormin?\"\n\nTormin stepped in front of her. \"Nearly so, Executor. First, I've prepared the status report, if you like.\"\n\n\"I'd like to leave the ship.\" When Tormin looked crestfallen, she sighed, and threw her hands up. \"Oh, very well. Status report, First Officer.\"\n\n\"The ship is securely docked, and ready for resupply. However, per your orders, we remain configured for emergency departure. The crew is on standby to return to flight and combat configurations at a moment's notice. A secure perimeter has been established around the ship, and will remain under guard until our eventual departure.\" Tormin paused, his eyes fixed on the Executor.\n\nHarliss knew he had more to add, but was waiting for her permission to continue. She also knew if she didn't listen to the rest of his report, she'd end up getting a lecture later on about procedural protocols and the importance of being properly informed of a situation. \"And the Union vessels?\"\n\n\"Three in total, Sparrow-Swift class.\" Tormin tapped his boot toe against the floor. \"All three gave similar reports. They were performing intelligence gathering operations, and docked here for resupply. While docked, a dragon and a gryphon arrived, and forced the local workers to salvage a large variety of parts from all three vessels.\" Tormin scowled, he was never fond of beasts. \"The monsters possessed knowledge sufficient enough to inspect the parts, and make sure they were correct and in good shape. Before departing, they inflicted significant damage upon all three Sparrow-Swifts to prevent pursuit.\"\n\n\"Question!\" Evlee held up a hand like a student waiting to be acknowledged. \"Why the hell didn't they shoot the fuckers?\"\n\nTormin grunted, scowling. \"It is my understanding that most of the crews were currently housed within the local tavern and inn. Or worse, occupied at the brothel.\" He spat the word like poison, face twisting into a sneer of disgust. \"As larger monsters are not entirely uncommon visitors, no alarm was raised that would have indicated to the Union officials that their ships were being raided. Furthermore, the so-called local authorities...\" Torman spat. \"Forbid Union soldiers from carrying their armaments outside the ship. Those still aboard were forcibly sequestered by the local workers, under instructions from the beasts. Furthermore, due to docking configuration, the ships' guns were unable to be fired. By the time an alarm was raised to the rest of our soldiers, and they were able to procure their weapons again, the monsters were well in retreat, and thus, subject only to inaccurate small arms fire.\"\n\nHarliss fidgeted with the gold-hemmed sleeves of her white jacket. \"Beasts from The Cataclysm, almost certainly.\"\n\n\"Correct, Executor.\" Tormin grit his teeth. \"Possibly even with the local crime lord's blessing.\"\n\nEvlee folded her arms, her head tilted. \"Do you think it was that same dragon our watchmen sighted?\"\n\n\"Most likely.\" Tormin's eyes bored into Harliss. \"I told you we should have fired upon it. Even if only warning shots, we-\"\n\n\"Would have been wasting ammo,\" Harliss said, sharpening her tone. \"Chasing down random dragons is not our job. Besides, the Union wants a deal with Prav, not a war. It won't help matters if we go around blowing his customers out of the sky.\"\n\nTormin frowned, shifting his weight. \"And if it was The Cataclysm's dragon?\"\n\n\"Then I'm sure we'll see him again.\" Harliss put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing. \"I appreciate the dedication to your duty, but let it go. Now, is there anything else? Where are my other pets?\"\n\n\"As you wish, Executor.\" Tormin sighed, rubbing his neck. \"Your female gryphons are on patrol around the Sparrow-Swifts. I thought them well suited to ensuring none of the locals decide to help themselves to any more Union parts or weapons.\" He glanced up at Sock and Speckles, looming over everyone. \"I assumed the males were accompanying us.\"\n\n\"For the time being.\" Harliss took a step towards the exit. \"Is there anything else, or can we go now?\"\n\n\"I suppose I can hurry through my disciplinary recommendations while they prep for disembarking.\" Tormin gestured at the sealed doors, and several soldiers began unlocking them.\n\n\"We're disciplining our own people for being robbed, now?\"\n\n\"That is up to you, of course.\" Tormin worked his jaw, his face reddened slightly in unspoken anger. \"But I would recommend an investigation to find out everyone who was too busy being involved in brothelry to realize Union ships were being raided by monsters.\"\n\n\"Brothelry isn't a word, Tormin.\" Harliss glanced at him, grinning. \"But do continue.\"\n\nTormin ignored her playful jab. \"I suggest hitting them all with heavy pay sanctions, commiserate with the amount of pay wasted on prostitution. Or, you could have all their information transferred to the Military Justice division, and let them decide what to do.\"\n\n\"No, I think they'd punish them too severely.\" Harliss waved her hand. \"Having a bit of fun with their own pay is hardly grounds for demotion, or worse. Besides, the locals may be more cooperative to our future advances if they believe we're willing to let our people spend coin on their whores.\"\n\nTormin cleared his throat, an irritable noise. \"I should think charging our people triple costs for repairs and resupply more than makes up for lack of coin spent in their brothels.\"\n\n\"Ah, but we don't want to pay three times the cost forever, do we?\" Harliss patted his arm.\n\n\"We could just seize the port,\" Tormin said, muttering under his breath. \"Clean out all the criminals and monsters, and-\"\n\n\"And open the skies to Union Trade vessels.\" Harliss finished his thought for him. \"I've heard it all before, Tormin, and I'll hear it all again, I've no doubt. But you say that as if this is the only pirate port in the world.\"\n\nEvlee jabbed her finger against Tormin's chest. \"And as if they don't have at least a thousand guns pointed at the sky.\"\n\nTormin batted her hand away. \"They don't have a thousand guns. They have-\"\n\n\"Enough damn guns to cause us a serious problem, if we give them a reason.\" Harliss glared at her subordinate. \"Just because our ship may be able to outrange them doesn't mean they all can. And you'd still have to go in on the ground to seize everything. Then you'd incur even more losses, and Prav's people would probably just raze everything on the way out.\"\n\n\"Actually...\" Tormin scratched his chin. \"Then we could just build our own port atop it.\"\n\n\"Which would be attacked by vengeful pirates so often we'd have to fortify it as a military structure. Which is exactly why I told you only a moment ago the Union wants to make a deal with Prav.\" Harliss turned back towards the door, signaling the discussion was over. \"Distasteful as you may find it, we'll all be better off if we can make him and his port to work for us.\"\n\n\"Besides, Tormin.\" Evlee punched him on the arm. \"Don't be such a stick in the ass. Pirates and monsters and brothels can be fun!\"\n\nTormin only glared at her. \"Stick in the mud. The saying is, stick in the mud.\"\n\n\"There's always sticks in mud, Tormin, they call it a swamp.\" Evlee walked up alongside Harliss, grinning. \"A stick in the ass would be much more irritating.\"\n\nTormin snorted. He turned to a few soldiers standing nearby, waving them forward. One of them brought his long rifle, a Sharp-Sight Model 17. It was an older lever action model, but Harliss knew Tormin preferred it for its reliability and accuracy. Tormin quickly checked it over, then strapped it across his shoulder. Another soldier handed him his scatter gun, a Cloudburst 12. He opened the breech and peered inside, then clicked it shut, and turned to stand next to Harliss.\n\nSunlight and cold air spilled inside when the doors were finally opened. The chilly air was tinted with the scents of smoke and grease, and a bevy of other aromas. There was the smell of meats being cooked over flames, along hints of booze, and somewhere behind it all, the sharp tang of pine sap. Harliss shielded her eyes against the sunlight as she walked outside.\n\nDisembarkment ramps lead through the tangled skeleton of docking scaffolding. Such scaffolds were a common feature at airship ports, a towering web of ramps and rigging, ladders, towers, platforms, chains and hoses all surrounding a docking berth. They allowed maintenance workers access to the ship's exterior for inspections, repairs, resupply, and so on. Most berths and scaffolding docks also had mooring towers with lines and chains to anchor the ship to while docked. It helped keep ships stable, and prevented any dangerous drifting.\n\nAt Union ports, the docking scaffolds were all meticulously designed, and built from the sturdiest materials. Some were meant for only a single size, and class of ship. Others were built in hinged sections with joints and machinery to raise and lower them. Often they were built upon great, wheeled platforms so they could be pushed up alongside a moored ship. Mobile bollards could be locked into different areas, to allow adaptability in order to service multiple types of vessels. Everything was well ordered, and efficient.\n\nHere, though, at the pirate port called The Emplacement, the scaffolds were something else entirely. They were built haphazardly, and seemingly with whatever materials were at hand. The one in which The Stormcaller was docked looked to be constructed from parts of other, older airships. Harliss spotted floorboards repurposed as support poles. An old wall section from a passenger ship, still adorned with flaking magenta paint, now served as a work platform. Where the Union scaffolds were composed of evenly structured vertical and horizon lines of wood and steel, these looked like webs randomly cobbled together by an extremely drunken spider.\n\nThough the docking scaffolds were already in place around The Stormcaller, they were conspicuously free of workers. Normally, maintenance workers got started immediately. But at a port like this, no work was accomplished until payment was made in full. Not that Harliss had any interest in letting poorly trained pirate mechanics put their hands all over her precious ship. She'd pay for goods and supplies, but all the labor would be accomplished by her own specialized crew.\n\nAs Harliss descended the disembarkment ramps, she gazed across the vast stone plaza. There were dozens of docking spaces marked out across it. Union ships took up only a few of them. Many others were occupied by a variety of vessels, from small, private ships that would only hold a handful of people, to much larger pirate vessels, and freighters run by smuggling crews. Some had docking scaffolds in place around them, while other maintenance platforms went unused. Further away were plenty more empty berths.\n\nHarliss turned her attention towards the other Union vessels that were docked. By airship standards, the Sparrow-Swifts were small, and quick. They had long, internal bays housing their gasbags, filled with as much lifting gas as possible, along with powerful engines driving stacks of propellers designed to help propel them swiftly out of danger. Of course, that didn't do them any good while they were docked.\n\nAll three Sparrow-Swifts here had been put through hell. Broken turbines and engine parts lay scattered around, or missing completely. Doors and armor plates were ripped away. Oil and other liquids leaked from the ships, staining the stony ground. Tormin's report was right. The dragon and gryphon who had attacked them had certainly ensured they would not be pursued.\n\nSmart beasts, Harliss thought.\n\n\"I want those ships repaired.\" She glanced over at Tormin, cutting him off as soon as he opened his mouth to respond. \"Hire the locals to ensure it gets done quickly.\" She didn't want them touching The Stormcaller, but they were welcome to work on the lesser ships. \"Just make sure they're supervised by our own engineers. Pay whatever they ask, but make it clear we expect quality service, or they'll have bigger problems than issuing a refund.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" Tormin clenched his jaw. \"But it's going to be pricy. Especially if we ask for an all-human repair crew.\"\n\n\"Then don't.\" Harliss waved her hand. \"I don't care if they send monsters to help do the work, as long as the monsters can do the work.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Executor.\"\n\nAt the bottom of the ramp, two of her soldiers stood guard. Like all those deployed around the ship, each was armed with a rifle, and a pistol. They were all dressed in a dark gray uniform and jacket trimmed lightly with gold. Each wore also specialized armor made of thickly layered silk meshes, and metal plating. The armor was designed to first absorb a bullet's energy, and then to prevent it from penetrating any further. It was heavy, but proven to be quite effective against the basic firearms criminals and pirates tended to carry. It wasn't perfect, but the Union was working on upgrades all the time. Harliss rarely had her men wear it, but landing at a potentially hostile port run by a conniving crime lord seemed a good time to don it.\n\nHarliss spotted a star of rank on one of the men's jackets. She waved him over, and when he stopped before her to salute, she put her hand on his shoulder. \"We're going in. Maintain your positions. Until otherwise ordered, I don't want anyone we don't know approaching the ship. Send someone out to meet them, if need be, but no one breaches our perimeter. Understood?\"\n\nThe soldier nodded once. \"Yes, Executor. Order of response?\"\n\n\"First, verbal warnings. Second, warning shot.\" Harliss turned away, waving him back to his post. \"After that, shoot to kill. I'll send the girls here to back you up, just in case.\n\n\"Yes, Executor.\"\n\nHarliss stepped away from him, and put two fingers in her mouth. She whistled, loud and sharp. Immediately two keening cries responded from the nearby skies. Two immense, white-feathered female gryphons swooped down, landing gracefully just before her. They trotted towards her, and as one, bowed their massive heads. At Harliss's side, Evlee giggled and bounced on her toes. Harliss shot her a glare, and Evlee sighed, rolling her eyes.\n\n\"Hello, girls.\" Harliss signaled for them to rise, and both gryphons lifted their heads. \"Anything to report?\"\n\nThe first female gryphon, named Stripe for the black marking that ran down her crown feathers, pointed towards the damaged ships. \"Those aren't just damaged. They're ransacked.\"\n\nThe second female nodded her head. She was called Star, for the black pattern across her eyes, a faintly star-shaped mask. \"The dragon and gryphon took specific parts. They only broke things after they had what they needed.\"\n\nStripe warbled her agreement. \"Knew what they were doing, what to take, what to break. Broke what they didn't need.\"\n\nBehind her, Tormin spoke up. \"Your pets are right. They also broke different things on each ship. Think they took engine parts from one, then broke those same parts on another.\"\n\n\"Probably had a list,\" said Star. \"Filled the list first, trashed the ships second.\"\n\nHarliss reached out to scratch each gryphon's neck. \"Good eye, girls. Tormin gave me his report, as well. We suspect they're from The Cataclysm, picking up replacement parts for the former princess's floating behemoth.\"\n\n\"Hey, boss.\" Evlee nudged her with an elbow, whispering overloud. \"Can I give the good girls treats?\"\n\nHarliss sighed, then stepped back. \"Oh, very well. Evlee has treats for you.\"\n\nStripe and Star turned towards Evlee with hopeful coos. The other woman dug more spiced and sugared jerky out of her jacket pockets. She held out a handful to each gryphon. \"Who're good girls? You're good girls, yes you are! And good girls get treats, yes they do!\"\n\nTormin groaned, visibly cringing. \"She carries dried meat in her jacket, now?\"\n\n\"You know, that was my question, too.\" Harliss shook her head. \"She's going to-\"\n\n\"She's going to smell like jerky for the rest of her life!\"\n\n\"That's what I was going to say.\" Harliss rested her hands against two of her pistols, chuckling. \"Not that I expect her to care.\"\n\nEvlee glanced over her shoulder as the birds finished off their treats. \"You're just jealous cause they like me more than you.\" When the meat was gone, she dusted off her hands. \"Alright, good girls, that's all for now.\"\n\nThe gryphons warbled their thanks, then returned their attention to Harliss.\n\nHarliss pointed at The Stormcaller, behind them. \"Stay here, and make sure the ship is safe. Back up our soldiers, but don't engage unless needed.\" She pointed out the man in charge. \"Or if he gives you the order.\"\n\n\"Yes, Executor.\" The gryphons separated, heading in opposite directions to take up positions.\n\n\"I don't expect it to happen, but if it does, watch for crossfire. Be careful, girls.\" With that taken care of, Harliss pivoted on her heel, smiling at her officers. \"Everyone ready?\"\n\n\"Ready, Executor.\" Tormin squared his shoulders.\n\nEvlee rubbed her hands together, beaming. \"Hell yeah! I'm quite ready to have a little fun with some pirate monsters.\"\n\nHarliss only laughed. \"Not exactly what we're here for, but close enough. Alright. Time to find out what this den of debauchery knows about our runaway.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Harliss led the march across The Emplacement's vast docking plaza. This part of the continent was well beyond the Union's rule. Even the former Empire's grasp had not extended this far. It was a wild, anarchic frontier, divided up amongst warlords, tribal factions, and crime bosses. Each local ruler built their own so-called pirate ports in strategically important places. The Emplacement, named for the ancient gun batteries looming in the cliffs above it, was by far the most successful.\n\nThe Emplacement was ruled by a former warlord who went by the moniker Prav. Harliss had never met Prav, nor visited his establishment, but she'd read plenty of reports on both. The old warlord was said to be as well-informed as his port was well-stocked. Harliss hoped that was true, because despite its ramshackle scaffolds, Prav's port was a far cry more impressive than most pirate settlements.\n\nImmense tanks and storage units dotted the plaza between every docking berth. The Emplacement had almost everything an airship might need, from water and lifting gases, to oil, coal, and more modern fuels. Hangers in the distance provided space for long-term maintenance and elaborate repairs. Vast warehouses stored spare parts of every kind. The Emplacement's workers were able to fix or replace nearly anything on most airships. From engine systems both aged and modern, to ship-wide plumbing, to gasbag materials, gauges and dials, and even airship weapons and ammunition.\n\nThe Emplacement also maintained a thriving marketplace. A ship's crew could stock up on foods both fresh and preserved, along with barrels of ales, wines and spirits. They had clothes, materials, and all sorts of other necessities. And that was only the boring section of the market. Reports stated they also sold all manner of guns, ammunition, firing powders, explosives, and much more. There was trade in rare animals, and their parts, currency exchanges, and the sale of deeds, and bonds. Just about anything a pirate or criminal might want was available somewhere in the Emplacement's marketplace. Harliss hoped she might have time to wander such a market, if only for curiosity's sake.\n\nThe Executor shaded her eyes as she walked, turning her attention to the landscape that gave the area its name. Sheer cliffs of crimson stone towered over the pirate city, a natural red wall stretching further than Harliss could see. The cliffs were known as The Broken Teeth, part of a monstrous and oft-impassible mountain range which edged the south-western continent. Craters from cannon fire pock-marked the stone, along with tunnel entrances and alcoves bristling with artillery aimed at the sky.\n\nThe myriad armaments were first built by a small kingdom eager to seize control of the only local trade route that could reach the seas. They built a fort upon the lower plateau, and a vast network of tunnels throughout the upper cliffs. Most old airships could not safely ascend high enough to clear the mountains, and had to traverse The Broken Teeth through treacherous passes.\n\nThe passage here was among the safest, but ship wishing to use it was forced to pay the toll, or face the former kingdom's firepower. These days, the guns all belonged to Prav. Some of the old anti-air batteries were but rusted husks, while others had been destroyed in forgotten battles. Yet Prav's people had restored more than enough of them to protect his port, and enforce his tolls.\n\nThose fees were lucrative, as this was the most viable route to the seas. Not only was it the widest pass, but it led directly to a swath of shoreline where the first in a long chain of islands was visible upon the horizon. Those islands were a vital link for ships trying to cross to the far continent. The journey was an exceptionally long one. Many were the ships that had vanished attempting it. Various nations had endeavored to establish ports for both airships and sea-faring vessels along the way to make the trip easier.\n\nFurther south, more 'islands' jutted above a different kind of sea. Locally, it was called The Boiling Emptiness, filled not with water, but with freezing clouds perpetually churning. The Golden Union sometimes referred to it simply as The Abyss. Crossing it made for an even more dangerous excursion, but that did not stop people from trying. The landmasses jutting above it were home to city-states built by monsters, pirates, outlaws, and those who dared to live amongst them. Several successful ports catered to the brave and foolhardy alike. In another life, Harliss would have loved to call a place like that home. Those islands were damn near made for the Ballad.\n\nAccurate information on the Emptiness itself was difficult to come by, given the hazardous nature of studying it. That hadn't stopped the Empire from attempting to plumb its depths, and investigating the feasibility of heated suits and air supplies. Rumors about what they'd discovered there abounded, but few knew the truth. Harliss thought it was better that way.\n\nWhichever sea a traveler was crossing, The Emplacement awaited them. It began as an outpost for traders and pirates alike to stop for respite and recreation before returning to the skies. As their reputation grew, The Emplacement expanded bit by bit. It started as an inn complete with tavern and brothel, and eventually grew unto a port city all its own.\n\nA sprawling collection of mismatched houses and shacks smothered the plateau beyond the port. Some buildings were competently constructed, with sturdy wooden frames and stonework. Others looked as if a heavy breeze might topple them. Harliss saw houses entirely constructed from airship parts. Porthole windows from an old passenger compartment marked one shack's wall. Another hovel had a roof made from a wing-like stabilizer. Some of the homes were tinier than others, housing more diminutive monsters. Those were often built amidst tree limbs or stacked atop each other in unstable flats. Wobbly ladders and rickety walkways connected them. The streets were a muddy maze. Lampposts were scattered at random intervals, with no discernable thought or planning.\n\nHarliss kept close watch on the residential area as they skirted it. If anyone felt like taking a shot at Union officials, it would come from there. Prav's people might not like the Union, but they were disciplined enough to realize harming an Executor or her entourage would bring an ocean of fire down upon their little haven. Eyes watched her group from cracks in blinds, or half-open doors. A cluster of small, furry urd'thin in dirty clothes and leaning against a little food stall stared at them. A man with a grease-smeared face rested his hand on his pistol. The two gnolls just behind him readied their own weapons. A few lizards pushing a cart covered with a tarp paused to watch the Executor's group pass. The lizards whispered to each other, scrunching their muzzles in displeasure. Down another street, a gryphon with soot-stained gray feathers lounged on a stone rooftop. It glared at Sock and Speckles.\n\n\"Never seen a whole city of pirates and monsters.\" Tormin spat on the ground. \"I mean, I've seen plenty of monsters in the former Empire cities, but even they had some damn laws.\"\n\n\"I know!\" Evlee turned around, walking backwards a few paces, a big grin on her face. \"Isn't it exciting? I think I'd like to come here on leave sometime.\"\n\nTormin glared at her. \"Why the hell would you want to do something like that?\"\n\n\"For fun, you stodgy old shit.\" Evlee ticked off a few fingers. \"To drink, to gamble, to buy things the Union won't let me, to get in some fights, kick some ugly monster's ass...Oh! Maybe even fuck someone I shouldn't! You know, fun things.\"\n\n\"Ugh.\" Tormin scrunched his face. \"At least you said kick a monster's ass and have sex with someone you shouldn't. Better than the other way around.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, shaking her head. \"Like she needs any more ideas put in her head.\" She drummed her fingers against a pistol, grinning. \"But I agree with her, this is going to be fun. When's the last time the three of us got to run a mission together in hostile territory?\"\n\n\"Three months ago, and you almost got your head blown off!\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Harliss clapped her hands once, beaming. \"It's been far too long since we had that kind of fun.\" She climbed a few stairs to a wide, wooden boardwalk that stretched across muddy patches of ground. It led towards their destination. \"Behold!\" Harliss swept an arm out in a grand gesture. \"The original Emplacement, in all its...\" She scrunched her face when she got a better look at the place. \"Well...certainly not glory.\"\n\nJust up ahead was the rambling compound that served as The Emplacement's heart. The largest building was where the main tavern, inn, and brothel were located. It was a bizarre sort of mansion, like the fever dream of some drunken monster trying to imagine where wealthy humans might live. It was all dark wood, with too many exaggerated turrets and towers with pointed roofs. There were myriad odd angles, and an overabundance of columns, porches, and balconies. Black and red paint marked it unevenly, a black wall here, red shutters there. Golden frames surrounded large windows. Its multiple stories were entirely asymmetrical. Where one section of the building had four stories, another had three, while yet another had six. Harliss thought the whole thing looked as if a better-designed building had partly collapsed after a horrible earthquake, and no one could be bothered to rebuild.\n\nBoardwalks and elevated walkways led to other buildings. They shared the same odd color scheme, even if they weren't quite as completely misshapen. One looked to serve as extra inn space, with uneven windows lining its three-storied walls. Signs indicated another was a bathhouse, as did the myriad copper pipes pumping steam out into the cold mountain air. The immense doors and tall, arched roof of yet another structure told Harliss it was probably meant to house any oversized monsters who could not fit into the smaller rooms. Others held less obvious purposes, but equally ugly exteriors, all with more accruements than common sense.\n\nNearby were several boxy, stone structures from the original fort that had been repurposed. Cannons atop them pointed towards the docking plaza, ready to return fire should any visiting ships cause trouble. Harliss suspected that was where Prav's security forces kept their headquarters, assuming they had a command structure beyond 'ask the warlord.'\n\nNear the malformed inn, colorful signs posted to outbuildings depicted drunken men and women cavorting in various states of undress, with bottles of alcohol all around them. Others showed monsters such as gnolls and kobolds equally drunk, and equally undressed. Further along, other signs displayed the drunken revelers enjoying each other's company in a far more intimate fashion. Despite the acts on display, the signs were more tasteful than Harliss had expected.\n\n\"Disgusting.\" Tormin spat on the ground near one of the signs.\n\n\"Oh, don't be such a prude.\" Evlee punched him on the arm, then lifted her hand and worked it like a puppet's mouth. \"I'm Tormin, and I'm scared of sex! Boo hoo, how do I please a woman?\"\n\nTormin refused to take her bait, and instead, gestured at the sign. \"It's a gnoll!\" Tormin scrunched his face up. \"It's unnatural!\"\n\n\"A gnoll getting paid good money to do that with his tongue!\" Evlee laughed, tracing a finger along the happy-looking woman's face. \"Probably cause she's married to someone like you, who doesn't know how. Why, perhaps her husband is a Union officer in the capital, too busy filing paperwork all day realize his wife's secretly a feared air pirate commander! While he's stamping documents, she frequents a brothel to hire on her favorite gnoll concubine. And after he pleasures her? Ahe regales him with tales of her conquests, over wine and cuddles with the sort of warmth her husband never showed her.\"\n\nTormin, ever so slowly, turned to gape at her in silence.\n\nHarliss waggled her fingers alongside the other woman's head. \"You've built a whole other world in there, haven't you?\"\n\n\"Mhm!\" Evlee bounced on her toes. \"And it's so much more fun than what Mister Chastity Belt over here has.\"\n\nTormin turned back towards Harliss. He jerked his thumb at Evlee. \"You should really get her looked at when we get home. Something just ain't right up there.\"\n\nHarliss smirked. \"I'll certainly take that under consideration.\" Movement near the front of the inn drew her attention, and she sharpened her tone. \"Enough of that. Game faces, everyone, it's time to meet our welcoming committee.\"\n\nAt the front of the inn, at least a dozen guards emerged, a burly mix of gnolls, va'chaak, and humans. Some had pistols, others rifles, or scatter guns. One of the lizards bore an immense 3 barreled pepperbox of a make she'd never seen before. A few kobolds and urd'thin slipped out onto exposed balconies as well, each with small rifles with large scopes. The smaller monsters were often known to be excellent shots. Despite the show of force, no one had yet aimed a weapon at them. Harliss hoped to keep it that way.\n\nShe turned around towards the security detail trailing behind her, holding a hand up. They all came to a stop, standing in formation. \"Eyes and ears open, but guns down! We're here on peaceful terms, so no one here fires first. Understood?\" The soldiers answered in unison, and she went on. \"That said, if they aim at you, return the favor. And if anyone's stupid enough to fire on us, light them the fuck up! Once we're inside, hold your positions unless summoned.\" She smirked and patted one of her pistols. \"Don't worry if you hear some shots fired off. Just assume we're having a little fun in there. But if the fun doesn't stop, get your asses in there and join the party.\"\n\nHarliss turned to her gryphons. \"And boys? Same instructions. Otherwise, stay.\" Both gryphons sat on their haunches in the middle of the boardwalk as if keeping watch over her squad. She patted their heads, and then turned around, glancing at her officers. \"Shall we?\"\n\nThe Executor led the way to the grand tavern. As they walked, Tormin whispered under his breath, swiftly listing off every potential hostile. \"Two on the balcony, top left. Three, balcony right, third floor. One in a second-floor window, red shutters. Count four in the alley.\"\n\nHarliss's gaze followed Tormin's lead, and she checked off every person in her head, taking stock of their weaponry, their positions, potential exits they might use, and so on. \"Copy.\"\n\nAt the same time, Evlee tracked other information. \"Open door, right. Closed door, left. I see at least three exits through the windows, inside.\"\n\nHarliss's eyes flicked to every indicated door, counting. \"Concur.\"\n\nTormin alternated his whispers with Evlee's. \"I count three fingers on trigger guards ahead of us. Spot back-up inside. Lotsa criminals watching us through the windows.\"\n\n\"Consider them civilians unless they draw on us.\" Harliss rested her hands against the pistols at her hips, just in case.\n\n\"Understood.\" Tormin shifted his grip on his scattergun, carrying it across his chest, flicking off the safety. \"Local protocol says Union disarms for entry.\"\n\n\"Then we'll politely decline.\" Harliss disengaged her safeties, as well.\n\n\"And if they try to enforce it, and things go bad?\" Tormin kept his eyes forward, even as he spoke to the Executor. \"Kill, or wound?\"\n\nHarliss flashed the gnolls ahead of them a great, big smile, even as she whispered through it. \"Wound first, kill if they keep firing. But let's try peacefully, first.\"\n\nA single gnoll soon broke away from the group guarding the front entryway, and approached them. The beast wore a slate gray shirt over his powerful frame, with an oversized ebony vest across it, embroidered with silver patterns. Matching pants covered his legs. The gnoll also wore boots custom-cobbled to fit a monster's odd, animal-like feet. His fur was dark, golden beige, speckled with black. He rested a single hand against the impressively large pistol resting at his hip, but wisely did not draw it.\n\nThe gnoll held up his other hand, signaling them to stop. He flattened back his ears, a sign of nervousness amongst such monsters. \"Greetings from The Emplacement. My name is Deputy Hatha, and I-\"\n\n\"You have Deputies here?\" Harliss continued offering him a friendly smile, even as she cut him off. She stepped forward and offered the gnoll a hand. The Ballad dictated politeness, and respect whenever possible, gnoll or not. \"A pleasure to meet you, Deputy! My name is Executor Harliss. Tell me, how long ago did you bring real law to this establishment?\"\n\nThe gnoll glanced at her hand without immediately taking it, shifting his weight. \"We've had deputies for decades.\"\n\n\"Fascinating!\" Harliss kept her hand presented. \"And here I've been told this place was nothing but a lawless hell-hole festering with filthy, uncivilized pirates.\" She sniffed at the air. \"But you're not filthy at all, and you represent the law, so that's two of three slanderous rumors already disproven.\" Her gaze fell to her own outstretched hand, still waiting.\n\nHatha's tail flicked back and forth in a sure indicator of uncertainty. Soon, he reached out and shook Harliss's hand. The gnoll was almost too gentle. Perhaps he was just worried squeezing too tightly might get him shot. His hand was warm, and the pads on the underside soft. After a quick handshake, he withdrew his arm. Hatha's other hand never left his weapon.\n\n\"And that's three! Wonderful.\" Harliss patted his arm. \"Now, tell me, Deputy. Why've you come all this way without the company of your friends? Are you here to offer us complimentary drinks at your fine establishment?\" She glanced back at Evlee and Tormin. \"Wouldn't that be lovely?\"\n\nTormin smiled, cold and shallow. \"Lovely.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" the gnoll said, his voice level as could be. \"I've come to disarm you.\"\n\nHarliss withdrew her hand, waving him off as if dismissing a servant. \"Oh, no, no, no. I'm afraid not.\" Her smile faded.\n\nHatha took a slow, even breath. He'd clearly been expecting a denial. \"Emplacement law states, any and all Golden Union officials must completely disarm to be allowed entry.\" He held up a hand towards them again. \"It's nothing to do with you, Ma'am, it's just the law. I'm sure you can understand why such a law exists. The Union doesn't exactly look favorably upon our ilk.\"\n\n\"Oh, I understand.\" Harliss's smile returned as quickly as it left. \"I'd do the same, in your position. Union folk are terrible spoilsports, after all. Not to mention, from your point of view, some of them are damn near genocidal.\" She clucked her tongue and shook her head, as if discussing nothing more than a neighbor's sordid affair with a tavern wench. \"Which, I can assure you, is something I am not.\"\n\nHarliss stepped in even closer, lowering her voice as if whispering some great secret. \"But here's the problem, you see. While I don't agree with every Union policy, I am one of their Executors.\" She slowly shook her head, voice sharpening with every word. \"And your laws? They don't apply to Executors. We're not disarming.\"\n\nThe gnoll swallowed, looking from Harliss, to Tormin, to Evlee, and back to Harliss again. \"If you won't give up your guns, I'm going to have to take them from you.\"\n\n\"Oh, you couldn't.\" Harliss laughed, a soft, musical sound that belied its inherent threat. \"Brave of you to threaten it, though.\"\n\n\"Real, real brave.\" Evlee circled her fingers around the handles of two of her knives. \"Out here all by yourself, threatening an Executor and her bodyguards?\" She inclined her head. \"Must be some real big balls on you, gnoll. Wouldn't you say, Tormin?\"\n\nTormin's white-hot glare could have burned holes through the gnoll's skull. \"Real big.\"\n\n\"Mhm!\" Evlee bounced on her toes, smiling at the gnoll. \"Big ol' gnoll balls, for sure. In fact, if I were you, gnoll, I'd turn around and walk back while you still got 'em. Or they might end up someone's fancy coin purse.\"\n\nHatha gave a low growl, baring a few fangs. His fingers tightened around the butt of his pistol. \"Watch your mouth. I got more backup than you can count!\"\n\n\"Oh yeah?\" Tormin tilted his head. \"I guess gnolls can only count to twelve, huh?\"\n\n\"Now, now.\" Harliss lifted a hand, and her officers went silent. \"Let's be honest, here. I believe our new friend Hatha knows he's hopelessly outmatched against us. And surely he knows that if anything happens, he's going to be the first to die. Right, Hatha?\"\n\nHatha's snarl and flattened ears were all the answer Harliss needed. \"No one's gotta die, just hand over your guns. You'll get 'em back when you leave.\"\n\n\"Oh, we're in agreement on the first part. No one has to die here, including you, Hatha.\" Harliss lifted her hands away from her guns. \"I do admire your bravery, by the way. And don't mind Evlee, she's a soft spot for beasties like you. Now, I tell you what.\" She held her arms out to her sides, smiling. \"If you think you can disarm the three of us, physically I mean, then go ahead and try. You can start with me.\"\n\nHatha lowered his gaze, his eyes darting from pistol to pistol. He reached towards her, his hand shaking slightly, then hesitated.\n\n\"Ah, yes, see, you've starting to realize the problem, right?\" Harliss kept her arms out. \"I've got four guns, and you've going to have to take them all. And even though your hand is on your pistol? I guarantee you I can still draw one of mine faster than you can pull yours. Which I will, the moment you touch me.\"\n\n\"Aww, boss, let him try me!\" Evlee held her arms up over her head. \"Is this how you do it?\" She lowered her voice into a gruff faux whisper. \"Disarm me if you dare!\"\n\nHarliss glanced at the other woman. \"Not quite, but good effort.\" Then she returned her attention to the gnoll. \"Maybe Evlee's a better starting point. She's not as quick as me.\" As soon as the gnoll seemed to be considering it, Harliss went on. \"She is, however, going to stab you a number of times.\"\n\nEvlee giggled, wiggling her upraised fingers as if in some kind of macabre wave. \"Hi. I'm Evlee. I like stabbin'.\"\n\n\"Indeed she does.\" Harliss shrugged, still holding her arms out. \"How's your stabbing mood today, Evlee? Fatal, or non-fatal?\"\n\nEvlee made a shushing noise. \"Shh, it's a secret.\"\n\nThe gnoll made a noise halfway between a growl, and a whimper, slowly turning his attention to Tormin.\n\nHarliss waved at him. \"Yes, Tormin here's your safest starting bet. You see, while he doesn't like monsters, he does have a sense of honor. Which means if you don't draw on him, he won't blow your head off with that giant shotgun. No, he'll just use it to beat the hell out of you. Then he'll arrest you for impeding our investigation and toss you in the brig.\" She rolled her shoulders. \"But my arms are getting awfully tired, so hurry up and decide if you want to be shot, stabbed, or arrested. Or would you rather just let us keep our guns?\"\n\nHatha finally heaved a sigh, his ears drooping. He lifted his hand from his gun, and backed away. \"Maybe we can make an exception for Executors.\"\n\nThe Executor gasped in mock surprise. \"You'd do that for us? How sweet of you!\" She dropped her arms down, and her officers relaxed with her. \"Wise choice, Hatha. I see you're as wise a beast as you are brave.\"\n\nEvlee smiled at the gnoll. \"Good boy. I didn't really want to have to stab you, anyway.\"\n\n\"Now then,\" Harliss said. \"If you'd be so kind as to escort us inside your fine establishment? I really don't want to have to play this game with all your brethren.\"\n\n\"Yeah, alright.\" Hatha turned away, his tail hanging limp now. \"This way.\"\n\nAs the gnoll walked towards the tavern, Harliss fell into step behind him. She glanced over her shoulder, smiling. \"See, Tormin? This is fun.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Princess Nira made her way through The Cataclysm's lower decks, late in the morning. Her hair was still damp from a morning bath. She wore an indigo captain's jacket over a dark, silver blouse. The Empire's Black Star marked the jacket's shoulders, alongside the golden wing insignias of rank. Silver piping ran down the sides of her ebony breeches. It was rare for Nira to dress in anything formal, but the recent events called for it, she thought. Her pistols were once again loaded and strapped at her hips. Nira thought it best she used to carrying them again.\n\nThis deep in the ship's bowels, there was no carpet to muffle the sharp tap of her boot heels against the wooden floor. The sound carried up and down the corridor, echoes on echoes. The deck she traversed now was one of the deepest parts of The Bay. It was originally meant to provide living space for the ship's largest residents. Everything was designed with gryphons and dragons in mind, back when the ship was still expected to house a mobile air force. Nowadays, most of the sleeping berths held only cargo.\n\nMost, but not all.\n\nFloorboards well-worn by the frequent passing of a very heavy creature led the way to what Malaresh called his lair. The closer to his home Nira drew, the worse condition things were in. Scratches marked the floors. Deep gouges marred the walls where his heavy tail spines had dug into the wood with every irritable lash. Several arched doorways were so heavily scarred, the dragon must have used them to sharpen his claws, or mark his local territory. At least he hadn't pissed on whatever he considered his borders, Nira thought. She grimaced, deciding she'd better not give him any ideas.\n\nAs Nira walked, she contemplated the dragon who called her ship home. Many years back, they'd raided a Union intelligence vessel. On it, Kasis discovered information about a fort in a former Empire city that the Union had repurposed into a prison for captured dragons. The captives were interrogated, and then attempts were made to forcibly convert them to Union servitude. Failing that, the poor creatures were executed publicly as a show of force to the occupied city.\n\nBy the time they discovered the Union was holding another dragon there, Malaresh was already scheduled to be put to death. Nira gave the order to attack the fortress directly before the execution could be carried out. They'd turned the Cataclysm's cannons first on the Union's gunships, then on the outer walls and defenses of the fort itself. After that, Nira led a heavily armed landing party to find the dragon. At the time, it was the largest direct action she'd ever taken against the Union, and it remained one of her greatest successes. It helped to force the Union to agree to a truce with her, however temporary it may be.\n\nMore importantly, it saved Malaresh's life. The dragon was in bad shape when they'd first rescued him. It was clear his Union captors had put him through hell. His battered body was littered with the scars of torturous interrogations and failed conversion attempts. The dragon was also severely underweight. Nira doubted his captors fed him any more than necessary to keep him alive.\n\nNot that wounds or malnourishment prevented Malaresh from fighting like the hell-spawned demon the Union believed him to be. The moment they'd freed him from his physical bindings, Malaresh tore that horrible place asunder. Truth was, Nira doubted the dragon expected to survive. He fought like a creature resigned to die, and wanting only to take as many of his tormentors with him as possible. Malaresh took bullets, shrapnel, and poisons, yet none of them even seemed to register. Nira had seen dragons in battle before, but only ever from a distance. Up close, it was even more terrifying than she imagined. Malaresh wrought utter devastation. With flames, claws, fangs, and righteous fury, Malaresh reduced the Union outpost to a smoldering ruin.\n\nTo this day, Nira considered Malaresh the most dangerous creature she'd ever met.\n\nOnly when the Union's soldiers were all dead or fleeing did the dragon's many wounds finally catch up with him. He collapsed, exhausted, bleeding out, and ready at last for death. Nira, however, refused to let him die. Her medics bound his wounds, pumped him full of antidotes to the poisons, and ensured he made it through the night. The next morning, when the dragon awoke, he was genuinely surprised to still be alive.\n\nWhen Malaresh realized what happened, he demanded to speak to the 'pirate leader'. Nira identified herself, and the dragon informed her that he was joining her crew to fight the Union until his debt was repaid. Nira doubted she could have dissuaded him even if she tried. Not that she would have, a dragon made a powerful, if unpredictable, ally.\n\nMalaresh chose his own space on the ship, the largest such berth available. He kept to himself as his wounds healed, but Nira wanted him to know friendship was available, if he wished it. She visited him whenever able. Nira also assigned Amelia and Jirril to help care for him as he healed. They had both worked with dragons before. Amelia and Jirril brought Malaresh food and drink, showed him around the ship, and they made the same bawdy jokes at his expense they did with everyone else.\n\nBefore long, they convinced Malaresh to join them for drinks with Nira in the Commons area. Malaresh was uncertain about drinking in a tavern with humans and gryphons, but he took to it swiftly. Soon he was in there more nights than not, and the ship was running out of booze.\n\nLittle by little, the dragon opened up to his new crewmates. He began to make jokes and even play drinking games with Nira and others. He allowed Amelia to fit him for a saddle, and ride him on patrol or into battle. At some point, Malaresh invited Jirril to spend the night with him. By the end of the dragon's first year aboard the ship, it was already a common occurrence.\n\nSeveral years after Malaresh's arrival, he had his chance to repay his debt. Nira and her officers were ambushed, while on leave. They were outnumbered and outgunned, and nearly out of ammo when the dragon arrived. He incinerated their ambushers, obliterated their gunship, and ferried Nira and her friends safely back to The Cataclysm. Thankful as she was, Nira was also saddened. With his debt paid, Nira expected Malaresh to leave.\n\nInstead, not only did he stay, but he never once made mention of repaying his debt. A more striking silence, Nira could not imagine. There was nothing the dragon did not enjoy bragging about. His exploits as a great warrior, his days as a fearsome marauder, the barony he so often claimed to have ruled, his vast mating prowess, and so on. Any little nugget of information he had, he held it over the princess's head like a noble offering a peasant a golden coin, just out of reach.\n\nBut never did he speak of his debt repaid.\n\nIt was as though if he ever spoke it aloud, pride would demand he leave the ship. Nira doubted Malaresh could ever bring himself to admit that he'd found a home here. Hell, she doubted even ruling the ship would be enough to sate the dragon's pride. But if he never spoke it, then he'd never have to leave.\n\nWhile Nira was glad he'd stayed, she also knew Malaresh would always be the only crew member she could never fully control. When he occasionally refused an order, there was little she could do to enforce it. Beyond that, dragons were notoriously unpredictable. The Empire's past was littered with stories of great dragons who grew weary of serving, and sought to take power for themselves. Nira was reminded of those cautionary tales whenever Malaresh seemed to be playing a game in which only he knew the rules.\n\nThen again, history also spoke of dragons who were deeply loyal to those they cared for, and those who gave their people a home. Nira certainly hoped Malaresh knew he had a home here. Not for selfish reasons, either. Nira saw her crew as a family, and that included the dragon. Though she had threatened him with exile for blasting his flame inside the ship, that was the last thing she wanted. Like it or not, Malaresh was family now. A frightening, unpredictable black sheep, but family just the same.\n\nThe princess smiled. She hoped Malaresh knew that.\n\nAs she approached his home, Nira pulled herself from her thoughts and paused to look around. The ship's best artisans had transformed the airship's corridors into the tunnel entrance of a dragon's cavernous lair. Sprawling murals of rough-hewn stone and pale green mosses stretched across the walls and floor. Stalactites on the ceiling were painted with depth enough to make them look real. When the artisans were finished, Malaresh added his own touches. Actual boulders strewn about the corridor leant an air of authenticity. Nira just hoped someone on the ship was accounting for their weight.\n\nSomething new drew Nira's attention. Human leg bones, including intact femurs and feet, jutted out from under one of the boulders. The Princess grimaced, wondering where the hell Malaresh obtained those. She decided it was probably better she didn't know. At least it was nice, she supposed, that the dragon was comfortable enough to indulge his sense of humor, morbid as it was. Besides, Nira knew it could be worse. At least there weren't any skulls.\n\nAnd then, of course, she saw the skulls.\n\nThere were two of them, each seated atop another boulder. Together they stared at a nearly intact skeleton, leaning upon a wine cask. The skeleton had a bony hand draped across a goblet. Its own death grin made it look as if it was taunting the skulls, lording its wine and intact bones over them. Nira pinched the bridge of her nose, sighing. At least all the bones seemed boiled, bleached, and scoured. There was no sign of flesh, nor scent of rot. Nira hoped Malaresh had simply purchased them from some vendor who dealt in illicit goods and dark rituals.\n\nTwo wooden signs were posted behind the skeletons. Bright red lettering was painted upon them. The first recited an age-old warning. Here Be Dragons! It was a relic from the early days of airships and exploration, long before Nira's empire made pacts with the great beasts. The other sign once read, Tributes Required. However, the word 'required' had been crossed out and another word written beneath it. Now the sign said, Tributes Refused. Nira suspected Amelia was playing a joke on Malaresh.\n\nBehind the signs were massive double doors kept open, nearly large enough to fly a small shuttle-ship through. The open doors were painted as the yawning entrance to a grandiose cavern. Just beyond them, boxes, crates, barrels, chests, and other containers littered the area. Many more lined the towering walls, lashed in place by heavy ropes, nets, and rigging. Most of it was actual cargo belonging to the ship, but that hadn't stopped Malaresh from declaring it part of his hoard.\n\nIn his years aboard the ship, Malaresh had amassed a hoard worthy of the kingdom-terrorizing dragons of old. Countless coins of silver and gold lay scattered everywhere, and piled in random heaps. Sharply cut, faceted gems littered the floor. Bejeweled goblets lay alongside ornamental shields and ceremonial ebony armor inscribed with stylized beasts. A sword with a bright silver-blade, and a sapphire crusted hilt lay haphazardly across the top of a crate, overflowing with crystalline figurines.\n\nThere were also trophies claimed by the dragon during raids, or after great battles. An airship cannon from a Union artillery vessel lay amidst a heap of rifles and pistols. A blood stained, gold and white uniform from a commanding officer was draped across a plaque. The plaque itself displayed an ornate silver and black flintlock, awarded to some Union soldier or another sometime in the past.\n\nThe largest collection of treasure was at the back of the room, where heaps of coins and other valuables were mounded together into a grand pile. Most of it was hidden beneath layers of fanciful colored silks, thick, soft blankets, and tasseled cushions. It was as if the dragon had smothered the bulk of his hoard beneath an entire city's worth of bedclothes. Nira knew Malaresh savored the old, classical ideals of dragons. He fancied himself the sort of kingly conqueror depicted on antique tapestries, coiled atop a mountain of gold and holding court with the lesser creatures. Nira hoped, at least, the bedding made her treasure a little more comfortable for him.\n\nThat was what the dragon's hoard was, after all. Her treasure.\n\nIn the frantic hours before the ship first launched, Nira's parents ordered entire mountains of the Empire's treasure to be stowed aboard. There were countless chests of coins and jewels, historical artifacts and documents, priceless works of art, even bonds and deeds for holdings in foreign lands. The more of it they could keep out of Union hands, the better. More importantly, it ensured Nira was able to pay for anything the ship and its crew might ever need. Since then, the princess added more to their stockpile than she spent. They'd raided dozens of Union merchant vessels, as well as shipments of gold and other liquid assets.\n\nOnce upon a time, all the ship's vast treasury was neatly organized, and every coin accounted for. Entire rooms were filled with organized stacks of numbered chests, carefully catalogued pouches, drawers with individually appraised gemstones, display cases with antique jeweled goblets, and on and on. That lasted up until Malaresh decided to build a hoard by helping himself to the ship's wealth. To this day, numbered boxes still littered his quarters in brazen display of their unauthorized relocation. Nira was angry at first, but soon decided to let the dragon have his fun. Disorganization and poorly balanced accounting sheets were but a small price to pay for keeping the ship's most volatile crewmember content.\n\nThe Princess picked her way towards the dragon's treasure-bed. Flickering lamps lit the cargo hold in a ghostly orange hue. A faint, smoky haze hung in the air, drifting from brass censers. The dragon burned mixtures of herbal incenses to tint the air in his quarters with exotic scents. Malaresh liked them, though Nira always thought it smelt like smoking a pipe, in a medicinal shop, deep in a primal swamp.\n\nMalaresh lay atop his pile of treasure, curled completely around Jirril. Lamplight glistened against his black and green scales, and left his golden markings glowing. Nira found the light's effects fascinating. It made most of his scales look damp, even as it transmuted his gold tones to sunlight.\n\nThe dragon's left wing was draped across Jirril, mostly enveloping the gryphon. Jirril's head poked out from under the black expanse and rested upon the crook of Malaresh's foreleg. The gryphon's feathered tail twined with the dragon's, feathers brushing curved spines. Nira smiled at the sight of them so intimately sleeping together.\n\nFor all tales and myths that claimed dragons unable to truly know friendship, let alone love, seeing Malaresh snuggled with Jirril always proved a powerful counterpoint. Nira was increasingly convinced Jirril was the anchor which bound Malaresh to the ship. If that didn't prove dragons capable of love, Nira didn't know what would.\n\nMalaresh's eyes opened to glittering emerald slits, fixed immediately upon Nira. \"Yes?\"\n\nNira chuckled, her voice soft. \"Good morning to you, too. Sorry to wake you both, but it's getting pretty.\"\n\nMalaresh merely grunted. Despite the evenness of the dragon's breathing, Nira suspected he'd awoken the moment she set foot in his lair. He seemed to possess a nearly supernatural ability to sense when someone was intruding upon his space. \"And your point is?\"\n\nThe princess smiled, putting her hands on her hips. \"That we have plans to discuss. I know you were up late, but so was I.\"\n\nThe dragon lifted his head. \"You have not just returned from weeks spent flying or been in a fight with a feathered spy.\"\n\n\"Be that as it may, we haven't got a lot of time to waste.\" Nira shifted her attention to Jirril as the gryphon blinked awake. \"Morning, Jirril.\"\n\nJirril yawned, his beak parted wide, thin tongue curling within it. The gryphon stretched his forelegs out from under the dragon's wings, front paws splayed. His tail stretched behind him, fluffing up. \"Morning, my darling Princess.\" When his stretch ended, he clicked his beak, then perked his ears in gryphon smile. \"Don't suppose we can go back to sleep?\"\n\nNira shrugged, nudging a few loose coins with her boot. \"You can. The dragon can't.\"\n\n\"The hell he can't.\" The dragon curled his neck to drape his head across Jirril. \"Come back later.\"\n\n\"I thought you said dragons didn't snuggle.\" Nira folded her arms.\n\n\"I am not snuggling him,\" Malaresh said, his voice an irritable murmur. \"It is chilly. We are nestling for warmth.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say, Snuggles.\" Nira ignored the dragon's grunt of protest. \"Anyway, I wanted to talk to you before I go talk to Alakor.\" She tilted her head towards the mound of purloined gold upon which the two creatures lay. \"You know, just because you fucked a gryphon on all that treasure doesn't make it yours.\"\n\nMalaresh lifted his head, glancing between Jirril and Nira. \"The treasure, or the gryphon?\"\n\n\"Both of them!\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\" Malaresh gave a forceful snort, thumping his tail hard enough to send coins flying. \"They're both mine.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Jirril jerked his head back up, ruffling up his feathers in indignation. \"I might be yours, but I do not belong to you.\"\n\n\"Neither does any of this treasure,\" Nira said. \"But that's never stopped him.\"\n\n\"Oh, shush bird.\" Malaresh licked the back of Jirril's neck. \"Everything in this room belongs to me.\"\n\nNira loudly cleared her throat.\n\nMalaresh spared her a brief glance. \"Are you still here?\"\n\nJirril peered down at her, his crown feathers flared up. \"You'd better be making that noise in my defense.\"\n\n\"Was thinking more about myself, but yeah, alright.\" Nira grinned at the dragon. \"Neither of us belong to you, dragon. And the treasure-\"\n\n\"Is my dutifully earned fee for my many services.\" Malaresh bared his fangs, his frills extended in pride. \"Dragons do not come cheap.\"\n\n\"Fee?\" Jirril chirped, digging his paws under the blankets to try and scoop up some coins. \"He gets paid a fee?\"\n\n\"He does not get paid-\"\n\n\"I want a fee, too!\" Jirril warbled laughter, leaning against the dragon. \"I should expect gryphon services do not come cheaply, either.\"\n\n\"Incorrect.\" Malaresh selected a single gold coin, and set it before the gryphon. \"Here. Your fee for your services as concubine.\"\n\nNira arched her brows, taking a few steps back just in case that provoked any kind of physical retaliation from the gryphon.\n\nJirril stared at the coin. \"How. Dare.\" He tilted his head, looking up at the dragon. \"First? I am not your concubine. Second, you could not afford me if I was. Third-\"\n\n\"You're right.\" The dragon picked the coin back up, and set it aside. \"Concubines aren't paid. They're just expected to perform.\"\n\nJirril suddenly snapped his head forward, nipping at the dragon's neck several times in quick succession. Malaresh yelped and laughed, shoving the gryphon's beak away. Jirril nipped at his fingers instead, fluffing himself up. \"I shall not suffer your insults, lizard! Now take it back, or the next time, I go for your ears!\"\n\n\"Fine, fine. Cease your pecking, you irritable hen!\" Malaresh rubbed his neck. \"It tickles!\"\n\nJirril nipped him again, further up his neck.\n\n\"Ow!\" The dragon tried to grab Jirril's beak, but the gryphon evaded him. \"Very well, I take it back. You're not my concubine.\"\n\n\"That's better.\" Jirril made a show of smugly preening one of his wings. \"Besides, it'd be an easy job if I was.\" He glanced at Nira, beak parted and ears splayed in gryphon smirk. \"Dragons might not come cheaply, but they do come first.\"\n\nNira burst into laughter.\n\nMalaresh hissed at the gryphon, baring his fangs. \"Lies, and slanderous jests!\" He eased up, uncurling from around the gryphon. \"This is what I think of your cruel, and highly inaccurate abuse!\" He splayed a forepaw and dragged it against the lay of Jirril's feathers, all the way from his haunches to his head.\n\nThe gryphon gave a horrified squawk. \"My plumage!\" His preening took on a frantic pace. \"You've mussed me beyond recognition!\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The dragon made an odd noise, a rumbling murmur. \"You're sullied now, much as you've sullied my reputation in front of the Princess.\" He pushed up to all fours, and shook himself. \"Enough idle insults and unpleasantries. I'm going for a piss while the bird fixes himself up.\"\n\nJirril snapped his beak at the dragon's tail as it slipped past him. \"Someone ought to fix you!\"\n\n\"You'd miss them.\" Malaresh climbed down his bed of treasure, striding past Nira on his way towards the lavatory. \"Don't believe a word the bird says while I'm away.\"\n\nNira held her hands up. \"I don't think I'd believe a word either of you say about the other.\"\n\nAs the dragon strode past her, Nira could almost imagine the deck shaking under his heavy footballs. His tail brushed her, and she ran her fingers across the scales. They were warm, and pleasantly smooth to the touch. Nearer the end of his tail, she trailed her fingers across the curled spines that tipped it. Each was thick, heavy, and more than sturdy enough to punch through even heavy armor.\n\nMalaresh flicked his tail away from her. \"You may fondle my tail upon my return. First I need to piss before my bladder ruptures.\"\n\nNira laughed, dusting off her hands. She smiled at the gryphon. \"Charming creature, your lover.\"\n\n\"He has his moments.\" Jirril spat a feather onto the blankets. \"Admittedly, they are few and far between. Now, clamber up here and do me a favor, won't you, my darling?\"\n\n\"Let me guess.\" Nira carefully made her way up the hill of treasure, and blankets. \"Pet you?\"\n\n\"What?\" Jirril gave her a confused look, then shook his head, clicking his beak. \"No, no, no. First, we must get my feathers back in proper place!\" He chirped, rustling his wings. \"Then you must pet me.\"\n\nCoins and other trinkets shifted ominously beneath layers of blankets as Nira approached the gryphon. She kept her arms out for balance, though by the time she reached Jirril, things felt more stable. \"I don't know how you two can sleep on this.\"\n\n\"I couldn't, if it was just gold.\" Jirril twisted his head around, preening at his wings. \"But the blankets and cushions and such make it surprisingly comfortable. At least it doesn't shift around under us the way it used to.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself.\" Nira set her hands on the gryphon's back, smoothing down patches of ruffled indigo feathers. \"Climbing up here was like walking on pillows filled with sand. I could feel all the coins moving under me.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's nothing.\" Jirril flicked his tail. \"It was far worse at first before it all settled. A few times, Malaresh lost his balance and fell over. Another time his front legs slipped out when the coins gave way, and he smacked his jaw on the floor so hard I was afraid he was going to spit teeth!\" The gryphon warbled sympathetic laugh. \"He added a lot more blankets and pillows after that. I suspect as much for protection as for comfort!\"\n\nNira winced even as she laughed. She'd never imagined the more practical concerns dragons might have to consider when lounging about on piles of treasure. \"I'm glad he wasn't injured. It could have been worse.\"\n\n\"He was certainly in pain.\" Jirril preened at his other wing, then turned his head to try and survey Nira's work with the feathers he couldn't reach. \"But nothing damaged aside from his ego. Besides, he's had far more painful, and embarrassing accidents.\"\n\nNira brushed down a few swaths of ruffled blue plumage. \"Such as? I remember you mentioning one of those the other night. Malaresh threatened to pluck you if you told the story.\"\n\n\"Oh! That's right!\" Jirril cast a conspiratorial glance across the room, towards the oversized doorway that lead to the dragon's latrine and bathing area. \"Run me a bath, will you?\"\n\nA few moments later, and Malaresh's voice echoed back to them. \"Unless you're joining me in mine, yours can wait!\"\n\nSomewhere above her, pipes creaked, and steam hissed. The distant sound of running water soon followed. Like the gryphon area, several of the living quarters for dragons had their own piping, floor latrines, and copper tubs built in. Originally, they would have had to serve a whole flight of dragons. Malaresh had them to himself, now.\n\n\"I thought he went to take a piss?\" Nira stared at the bathing area's entryway. \"You think he's just decided on having a bath to keep me waiting?\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely.\" Jirril gave a little squawk. \"We took a long soak together last night, after we'd had our fun, so he hardly needs one now. I, however...\" He sighed, gazing back at himself. \"Will need to bathe for hours to get my poor plumage back in order.\"\n\nNira rolled her eyes, running her fingers through the gryphon's feathers. \"You're fine.\" She smoothed him down from his neck to his tail, chuckling. \"I couldn't even tell you'd been mussed at all.\"\n\n\"Of course not. You're a human.\" Jirril circled a paw around Nira's head. \"You barely even know what to do with this tangled mess! Let alone how to properly treat and arrange beautiful feathers and silken fur.\"\n\n\"My hair is not a tangled mess!\" Nira combed her fingers through her hair, catching a few tangles. She scowled. \"Well, it's not a mess, anyway.\" She dropped her hands down. \"Are you going to tell me about that story or not?\"\n\n\"That depends.\" Jirril tilted his head, clicking his beak twice. \"Are you going to pet me?\"\n\n\"Gods,\" Nira said, heaving a mock sigh. \"You are the neediest damn creature.\" She put her hands on Jirril's neck, rubbing and scratching around his ears in little circles.\n\nJirril cooed in delight, leaning his head into Nira's hands. \"Creatures as gorgeous as I am are not needy! We're deserving.\"\n\n\"Deserving of a swift kick in the gryphon plums, maybe.\" Nira worked her hands down Jirril's neck. \"Speaking of which, isn't that what reminded you of that story?\"\n\n\"Oh, that's right!\" Jirril swatted a paw against a cushion. His ears swiveling to the sounds of water. \"I'll tell you while he's got the water running. That ought to drown out our voices.\"\n\n\"Clever bird.\" Nira scratched back up towards his ears again. \"But you do two understand we don't have infinite water, right? Dirty water gets filtered and funneled up to serve in the boilers, but we're not hauling a damn ocean.\"\n\n\"Which is why we often share the bath.\"\n\nNira tweaked the gryphons ear, grinning. \"Yeah, I'm sure that's for water conservation. Is that also why Amelia uses your tub?\"\n\nJirril gave a little squawk. \"Oh, it's foremost on her mind when she's parading around nude before us.\"\n\n\"Parading?\" Nira quirked a brow, grinning. \"Do you suppose that's the same term she'd use?\"\n\n\"You'd have to ask her.\" Jirril lifted a forepaw, waggling a single half-unsheathed claw. \"Now, telling you an embarrassing story about Malaresh is likely to get me in trouble.\" He turned his head, bumping his beak against her hand. \"So, I expect you to use your authority to decree my plumage a national treasure, first.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen.\" Nira cupped the gryphon's beak. \"But I will protect you from being plucked.\"\n\n\"Good enough, I suppose.\" Jirril lifted his head, clearing his throat. \"It was morning, on an especially windy day. Turbulent enough to jar even this massive monstrosity.\" He waved his paw at the ship around them. \"Malaresh was being lazy, as usual. He'd been up for breakfast, and returned for a nap.\"\n\nThe Princess shook her head, smiling. \"I think that dragon could make a cat seem accomplished.\" She poked the side of his beak. \"Not that you gryphons are any better.\"\n\nJirril clicked his beak at her. \"I shall ignore that!\" He tossed his head, ruffling up his feathers. \"So, there he was, fast asleep upon his back.\" Jirril brushed her with a wing, nudging her away. \"A bit like this.\" The gryphon carefully eased over onto his back. He draped his wings across the bed, then stretched his forelegs up past his head, and let his hind legs sprawl out. \"Snoring! Adorable, really.\"\n\nNira looked the gryphon over, her hands on her hips. \"Are you sure you're not really part cat? Because that's exactly how cats sleep, sometimes.\"\n\n\"I wasn't the one doing it!\" Jirril lifted his head to glare at her. \"It was Malaresh! Besides, I'm sure lots of four-legged creatures occasionally sleep on their backs.\"\n\n\"Including gryphons?\"\n\n\"Do you want to hear the rest of this story, or not?\" Jirril flicked his wing tip against Nira's boots.\n\n\"Yes, yes, go on.\"\n\n\"Then give me a belly rub.\" Jirril pulled one of his wings closer to his body to make room.\n\n\"Oh, lord, you are a damn cat.\" Nira came forward and knelt alongside the gryphon, reaching out to rub his belly. Up close, the gray fur there was speckled with tiny black spots. \"You only rolled over because you wanted your belly rubbed, didn't you.\"\n\nJirril rumbled a velvety purr, eyes half lidded. \"Yes.\" After a few moments of savoring Nira's affection, he lifted a forepaw to point to the nearby wall. Several areas that once held cargo now stood empty, their rigging unused. \"There used to be crates of supplies, and barrels of ale and wine kept up there.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I remember Malaresh had them removed because he was paranoid something was going to come free and fall on him...\" Nira blinked, her hands stilling. \"In his sleep.\" She bit her lip to hold back a laugh, shaking her head. \"Oh, lord. Something did, didn't it.\"\n\n\"A wine cask!\" Jirril pointed up higher. \"All the way up there. He'd been collecting them for us. The ship hit turbulence, the worst of the day. It threw us hard one way, then another, then back again.\"\n\n\"I remember that.\" Nira rubbed the gryphon's exposed stomach in wide circles. \"Ship lost some fragile valuables that day.\"\n\n\"And it almost lost two more!\" The gryphon warbled laughter. \"Because all at once, the rigging went snap!\" He sharply clapped his forepaws together. \"And the topmost cask came free, toppled through the air...\" Jirril sent a foreleg into a diving motion towards his lower body. \"And it struck Malaresh, full force...\" Jirril pointed down between his own hind legs. \"Right in the balls!\"\n\n\"Oh, Gods!\" Nira burst out laughing, covering her face with a hand. \"That poor dragon!\"\n\nJirril laughed with her, a melodious chirruping sound. \"The barrel broke, spilled wine over everything. Malaresh woke up shrieking!\" He flattened back his ears and crown feathers, still laughing. \"I didn't even know dragons could shriek! He grabbed himself and as he curled up, he rolled right off the bed and down onto the floor. Ended up laying there in a sort of, wriggling heap of scales and twitching wings, making all sorts of strange noises.\"\n\nNira kept laughing and caressing the gryphon's belly. \"No wonder he doesn't want you telling this story.\"\n\n\"And yet he'd be ever so quick to tell everyone, if it were me that was nearly neutered by a rogue barrel!\" Jirril harrumphed and clacked his beak.\n\n\"He probably would, yes.\" Nira patted Jirril's underside. \"He wasn't injured though, right? Doesn't seem as though he had any, shall we say, anatomical rearrangements.\"\n\nJirril tilted his head, beak parted in gryphon smirk. \"Ooh, that's good, I like that. And yes, he was fine, thankfully. Though I was frightened he'd been injured, at first. I wanted to go get the medics immediately, but he strictly forbid it.\" Jirril chirped. \"Well, once he could do more than squeak and groan, anyway. I managed to get him to go soak himself in a cold tub a while, at least.\"\n\nNira patted the gryphon, then sat back. \"Wait, was that last year? I remember you had the crew wash and scrub all your blankets and everything. But he told everyone he'd been too sick to come out of his room.\"\n\n\"That's the day!\" Jirril waved a paw in the air. \"Somehow, it was less embarrassing for him to make everyone think he drank himself sick on red wine than to admit what really happened.\"\n\nThe Princess pushed herself back up to her feet. \"That scaly shit! When I asked why he was limping, he told me he puked so hard he pulled something. I actually felt sorry for him.\"\n\n\"Which is why he told you!\" Jirril rolled over onto his belly, shaking himself. \"If he told you a wine barrel fell on his nuts, you'd have laughed your ass off.\"\n\n\"Of course I would,\" Nira said, giggling again. \"But I'd still have sympathized. If you'd have told me when it happened, I could have ordered the medics to examine him.\" She chuckled again, imagining the looks on their faces at that order. \"I'm glad he was alright, though.\"\n\n\"As am I!\" Jirril turned his head, preening a wing. \"Because now we get to laugh about it!\"\n\n\"At least when he's not around, right?\" Nira turned towards the doorway to the dragon's bathing chamber. \"Speaking of which, how long is he likely to be bathing?\"\n\n\"Longer than you'd like to wait.\" Jirril folded his wing, and turned his attention to its twin. \"If only because he knows it will irritate you. Just go speak to him while he's bathing. It's not as if he's naked.\" He blinked, tilting his head. \"Well, he is, but he's always naked, so-\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\" Nira smoothed down the crown feathers on the back of Jirril's neck. \"I'm not going to see anything you gryphons and dragons aren't naturally displaying, anyway.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Jirril spat a feather on the ground, pausing his grooming. \"Well, unless he's hard.\"\n\nNira laughed, and shrugged. \"These things happen, gryphon, I understand.\"\n\nJirril clicked his beak twice. \"I just wouldn't want you to be offended.\"\n\n\"Offended?\" Nira arched her brows, grinning. \"Hell, with all the rumors I hear about dragons, I'd probably look.\"\n\nJirril warbled, and went back to preening. \"Ah, yes, the rumors. I can tell you, some are true, and some quite false, but I'll leave it to your imagination which is which.\"\n\n\"Some help you are.\" The princess patted his head, then made carefully made her way down from the bed of treasure and blankets. \"I'd better go speak with him before he falls asleep again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Nira headed for Malaresh's bathing chamber. It had no door, only a set of heavy maroon curtains. Why the gryphon lavatory areas had doors and the dragons had only sturdy curtains, Nira did not know. Perhaps the shipbuilders had run out of time to install doors appropriate for dragons. Or maybe they were told dragons held even fewer concerns for modesty than gryphons.\n\nMalaresh lounged in the sunken, copper tub, his wedge-shaped head resting on the ground. Puddles on the floor sluiced towards drains. The ship was designed to collect and recycle as much excess water as possible. A vast network of pipes and reservoirs helped keep water flowing as needed. Dirty water could be used in the boilers, or filtered for the gardens, and so on. The finicky pumps and filters kept Vekk's maintenance crews, but at least the systems worked.\n\nThe closer to the tub Nira drew, the more impossible it became to avoid the puddles. At least there wasn't enough to seep through into her boots. Steam wafted from the tub all around the, blanketing the dragon in warm mist. He watched her approach through slitted eyes.\n\n\"Where's Rog?\" Malaresh lifted his muzzle only enough to speak. \"Though he'd be with you.\"\n\nThe princess stopped front of his face. \"Not sure. He was still asleep when I left this morning.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Malaresh raised his head, a mischievous smile playing across his muzzle. \"Still asleep, where?\"\n\nNira only shrugged. \"In bed.\"\n\nMalaresh perked his ears. \"And which bed would that be?\"\n\nThe princess idly inspected her nails. \"The bed he slept in last night.\"\n\n\"Which is-\"\n\n\"Comfortable?\" Nira tilted her head, feigning confusion. \"So many questions about beds.\"\n\nMalaresh snorted. \"Did you and the gnoll sleep-\"\n\n\"In the same bed?\" Nira could him off before he could ask too direct a question. She phrased her words carefully. \"We slept next to each other, yes. Happens now and then.\" She gave him an innocent smile. \"If we're drunk it's safer to pass out where we are, rather than try and stumble back to our own rooms.\"\n\n\"And before you slept...\" Malaresh took a slow breath. \"Did you-\"\n\n\"Toss and turn?\" Nira nodded, scrunching her face. \"Absolutely. Rog snores, you know, it kept me up. But I got used to it and dropped off eventually.\"\n\nMalaresh finally gave a frustrated snarl. \"Did you fuck the gnoll or not?\"\n\nNira put a hand to her chest, gasping. \"What a horribly rude thing to ask! Besides, Rog is my lifelong companion, bodyguard, and best friend! Surely, no one has ever had sex under those circumstances.\"\n\nMalaresh snorted. \"Your sarcasm speaks volumes.\"\n\nThe princess smiled, and nodded once. \"Yes, just the way I wanted it to.\"\n\nThe dragon slapped his paw again. \"Damn it. Why don't you just come out and admit that you fucked the gnoll?\"\n\n\"I've no idea what you're talking about.\" Nira laughed, shrugging. It was far more fun to keep the dragon guessing, than admit anything one way or the other.\n\n\"Oh?\" Malaresh cocked his head. \"Was his performance so disappointing you've forgotten?\"\n\n\"Nice try,\" Nira said, deciding to turn the tables on the dragon. \"Say, how are your balls feeling?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" The dragon narrowed his eyes, flattening his ears. \"Why?\"\n\n\"No lingering after-effects of the incident with the harness?\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" Malaresh shook his head. \"No, they are fine, but your concern is noted.\"\n\n\"Good, good.\" Nira rubbed her hands, casually glancing around the room. \"And all recovered from having a wine barrel fall on them?\"\n\nMalaresh jerked his head up, gold-edged frills suddenly on full display. \"Jirril!\" He snarled towards the curtain-covered doorway. \"You told her about the wine barrel? When I'm finished with you, your whole body's going to be as bald as a damn vulture's head!\"\n\n\"You'll do no such thing!\" Jirril pushed the curtain aside, glaring at the dragon through it. \"Or not only will I tell her more of your embarrassing stories? But you'll be servicing yourself until every last feather has not only grown back in, but attained its full size and beauty!\"\n\nMalaresh hissed, baring his fangs. \"That goes both ways! Who would ever pleasure a bald old buzzard who can't keep secrets?\"\n\n\"Well, if that's your attitude, we're through!\" Jirril pulled his head back, vanishing behind the curtain. A moment later, he poked it back in, his voice all soothing charm and gentle playfulness. \"I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. You tell embarrassing stories about me to Amelia and the girls, after all!\"\n\nMalaresh sighed, scrunching his muzzle. \"That's different! You're with me at the time.\" He hung his head, relenting. \"Usually. Just don't tell anyone else.\" Malaresh glanced at the Princess. \"You either.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm absolutely telling Amelia.\" Nira ticked names off on her fingers. \"And Kasis. And the girls. And Rog. But no one else. Well, also Vekk. But that's it. Other than maybe-\"\n\nMalaresh growled. \"Don't you even think about telling that dirty snow pigeon!\"\n\nJirril warbled for the dragon's attention again. \"I'm going to get some food. Do you want me to bring you something?\"\n\n\"As it seems her Highness here refuses to let me bath without conversation, yes.\" Malaresh bowed his head to the gryphon. \"Please do, thank you.\"\n\n\"Alright.\" Jirril turned away again. He stuck his tail through the curtains just to shake the feathers at them. \"Back in a flurry, darlings!\"\n\n\"Back in a flurry?\" Nira scratched her head. \"Is that a gryphon saying? Cause I've never heard it.\"\n\n\"I think it's a Jirril saying.\" Malaresh lowered his head to lay it against the floor around the tub again. \"Alright, Human. What's so important that you must discuss it with me before I've even had my morning nap?\"\n\n\"You're flying with us to the Emplacement.\" Nira shook a finger at him. \"And that's final. After your fight with Alakor, you have no room to argue.\"\n\nMalaresh gave a low, rumbling noise of disappointment. \"Oh, very well. If you insist. Despite the fact I only just returned from that long, exhausting flight.\"\n\n\"Wasn't exhausting enough to prevent you from brawling.\" Nira tapped her boot, near the dragon's nose. \"Speaking of which.\" She leaned over, inspecting the back of the dragon's jaws. The area where they met his throat still looked swollen. Cracked and broken scales marred bruised areas of his muzzle. \"How're you feeling? And be honest with me. I have a report from the medics, so I'll know if you're lying.\"\n\nThe dragon grumbled in his native tongue. He lifted a paw, rubbing his throat. \"It hurts when I swallow. Feels like my fire glands are being squeezed. And my muzzle aches as if it's still being knocked around. But the pain will fade.\" He grunted, then nosed at her, unusually gentle. \"Thank you for your concern.\"\n\nNira smiled, rubbing his nose. \"You're welcome.\"\n\nJust as quickly, Malaresh's usual abrasiveness returned. \"It would be more touching if you weren't ordering me to fly somewhere I'm going to be shot at.\" Malaresh bared his fangs, hissing again.\n\n\"If the Union fires on you, you have my permission to fire back.\" Nira stroked one of his frills. \"With actual fire.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled, a smile creeping across his muzzle. \"Oh? Perhaps this trip won't be so bad, after all.\"\n\n\"I'm also planning to take Alakor.\"\n\n\"And, now it's all plopped into the shitter.\" Malaresh stretched a wing up from the water, using a wing-tip talon to scratch his head, just beneath a horn. \"Why the hell would you bring him?\"\n\n\"To test his allegiances, and his mettle.\" Nira spread her arms, waving a hand. \"If it comes to battle, we need to know he really is on our side. If so, I want to see what he can do. If not...we'll deal with him as we must.\" She stepped back, wringing her hands. \"Or the Union is there, but they refuse to start a firefight they can't win? Let's see if Alakar can hold back all that hatred you saw when I order him to stand down.\"\n\nMalaresh sat up, the top half of his body jutting from the sunken tub. Beads of water trickled down his black scales in tiny rivulets. \"That may well be a wise strategy.\"\n\n\"I thought so.\" Nira strode back and forth, her boots splashing in puddles. \"I need to know how far I can trust him, in combat and out of it. Can he fight other snow gryphons, if he must? What if we capture a commander known for his cruelty towards Alakor's people? Can Alakor restrain himself from ripping that commander apart? I need those kinds of answers, before our lives are on the line. I don't want unpleasant surprises.\"\n\n\"Nor I.\" Malaresh tucked his wing back, snorting.\n\n\"There's another reason too.\" Nira paused her pacing to face the dragon. \"He claims to be a spy, right? We may need his knowledge at The Emplacement. He might be able to point out undercover Union operatives. Or tell us if anyone we interrogate there is lying. Or verify any information we get from Prav's people, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"You wish him to prove his value as an intelligence asset?\"\n\nNira pursed her lips. She hadn't considered it that way, but the dragon wasn't wrong. \"Basically.\" She scratched her cheek. \"Plus, if they're actively looking for him, there must be be someone guiding that effort, right? Maybe we can use Alakor to flush them out. A high-ranking spymaster would be a hell of a catch.\"\n\nThe dragon cocked his head, considering it. \"If the Union has decided to consider you a target again, someone like that could tell us why.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Nira folded her arms, glad the dragon agreed with her reasoning, at least. \"So Alakor is going.\"\n\n\"Who else are you planning to take?\"\n\n\"All my trusted officers, I think.\" Nira clenched her jaw, considering. \"Though I'm hesitant to take Kasis and Vekk. If anything bad happens to us, the ship's gonna need them.\"\n\nThe dragon shrugged his wings. \"And yet, I suspect the little furred one and his mate will demand to accompany you.\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely.\" Nira resumed her pacing, her boots splashing against the wet floor. \"And I'd certainly love a chance to put them on one of those Union recon ships, if we can do it safely. Vekk could snatch all their technical manuals and documents, and get a look at any new technology we need to know about. And Kasis would kill to get her hands on some up to date intelligence dossiers and classified information. I just don't like the idea of leaving the ship so low on top officers.\"\n\n\"If you want my advice,\" Malaresh said, slowly lifting his head. \"I would bring the small ones, as well. Their various subordinates can step up, in the meantime. You, however, need someone to watch your back who is naturally out of the line of fire.\"\n\n\"I'm going to tell Kasis you're calling her short.\"\n\n\"Everyone is short compared to a dragon.\" Malaresh stretched his wings, holding them out above the floor. Water dripped and ran towards the drains. \"Kobolds are diminutive.\"\n\n\"Be that as it may,\" Nira said, holding back a laugh. \"Talking like that about Kasis is just asking to get punched.\"\n\nMalaresh snorted, outstretched wings flexing. \"I'd scarcely notice.\" He brandished a forepaw, flicking beads of water through the air. \"The point is, they should come with us. The fuzzy one is good with his tiny firearms, and Kasis is...\" He scrunched up his muzzle. \"Probably good at flinging herself around the room, biting people like she's gone rabid. More importantly, you trust them. That's why you're taking Alakor, right? To prove he's trustworthy. Well, the small ones have already proven that. If the worst happens, there is no one better to surround yourself with than those you trust most. Take them.\"\n\n\"Damn it.\" Nira rubbed her forehead, grimacing. \"I can't really think of a good argument. I guess you dragons really do have moments of ancient wisdom.\"\n\n\"Of course we do.\" Malaresh tucked a wing to hold its taloned tip against his chest. \"I happen to have more of them than most.\"\n\nThe princess rolled her eyes. \"Sure you do. Very well, then. I'll ask Kasis and Vekk if they're willing to accompany us. If so, I'll have Rog gear them up appropriately.\"\n\nThe dragon lifted his ears, a smile creeping across his muzzle. \"How appropriately?\"\n\n\"There's a chance we'll have to go up against Union soldiers, or even special operatives.\" Nira settled her hands on the grips of her pistols, drumming her fingers. \"So, I think we should roll in heavy. Real heavy.\"\n\nMalaresh gave a low, growling rumble. \"Good! Has the little fuzzy one finished making guns large enough for dragons, yet?\"\n\n\"Vekk's an engineer, he's not a gunsmith. I keep telling you that!\" Nira stared at the dragon, more bemused than irritated. \"He and Rog can clean and repair firearms, but I don't think they'd consider themselves capable of building you a giant gun.\"\n\nThe dragon crossed his forelegs, curling his neck in draconic sulk. \"Everyone else has guns. I want guns, too.\"\n\n\"We could strap a cannon to your back.\" Nira grinned at the mental image.\n\n\"We could?\" Malaresh lifted his head, maw parted and frills perked. \"Oh, yes, let's do that!\"\n\n\"I was being sarcastic.\" Nira shook her head, chuckling. \"How would you even load it? Or fire it?\"\n\nMalaresh drummed foreclaws against the edge of the tub. \"Strap the urd'thin to my back. He can fire it upon my command.\"\n\n\"You'd blow your own damn head off,\" Nira said. \"At best, you'd go deaf.\"\n\n\"The ship's cannoneers don't go deaf.\" The dragon rubbed one of his ears, as if contemplating it.\n\n\"They have ear protection!\" Nira stomped a boot against the damp floor. \"We're not strapping a cannon on your back.\"\n\nMalaresh arched his neck. \"Oh, very well. I shall wait until the dragon-back cannon technology has been improved.\"\n\n\"There is no dragon-back cannon technology!\"\n\n\"Then tell your engineers to get started on it!\" Malaresh lowered his head until his emerald eyes were boring into hers. \"I know your people once crafted guns and explosives for gryphons.\"\n\nNira wagged a finger at him. \"They tried to. That's a very important distinction. They had one or two gryphon flights equipped with prototypes, that were never perfected. The capital fell before they could make much progress.\"\n\n\"At least give me some bombs to hurl!\"\n\nNira arched a brow, considering it. \"That's actually a possibility.\" She shook a finger at the dragon. \"But only if you're very careful with them, and Amelia signs off.\"\n\n\"Amelia?\" Malaresh smiled, flashing far too many sharp, slightly yellowed teeth. \"She'll practically insist.\"\n\n\"Then she'd better 'insist' on giving you a safety course, first!\" Nira pinched the bridge of her nose, already regretting the idea.\n\n\"Why?\" The dragon cocked his head. \"They explode, what else is there to learn?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah,\" Nira said. \"You're definitely not going to blow yourself up.\" Nira held her hands up to ward off a reply. \"I do think we should get you and the gryphons in armor at least, just to be safe. Beyond that, we can talk about equipment as the time approaches. I want a few days to prepare, if we have them. I'm assuming those airships you and Jirril raided aren't going to be in any condition to fly before then?\"\n\nThe dragon shook his head. \"No. Ships and crews alike are stuck there until extensive repairs are completed. And Prav will likely have his people drag the work out, to inflate the labor costs.\"\n\n\"Fucking Prav.\" Nira growled, grinding a boot against the floor. She half-wished she was stepping on some especially tender part of that scaly bastard. \"Pisses me off that he even deals with the Union, considering they'd happily wipe his whole establishment out, given an excuse.\"\n\nThe dragon merely flexed his wings. \"He's always sold his services to everyone. So long as they have coin, credit, or are willing to owe him a favor.\"\n\n\"I know, I know.\" Nira grimaced, still grinding her boot in frustration. \"Maybe a few days stuck with Union forces will change his mind about including them among his customers.\"\n\n\"Or, perhaps his other guests will kill them, and he can claim their ships for himself.\"\n\nNira scowled. \"Shit. That's actually possible. Then we'd have to try and buy the intel from him, at best.\" Nira ran her hands down her face, groaning. \"We'll just have to hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. As soon as I talk with Alakor, I'll have Kasis plot some possible courses, as well as escape routes. Rog and Amelia can decide on gear and equipment.\"\n\nMalaresh watched her in silence for a moment. Gears turned behind the dragon's green eyes, but Nira found them unreadable. \"You should prepare your ship for battle.\"\n\nNira folded her arms. \"Oh? Something you haven't told me about your supply trip?\"\n\n\"There are surely other vessels nearby. Recon ships are vulnerable, and likely have protective escort, or a command vessel.\" The dragon swished his tail under the water. Little waves washed over the edge of the tub. \"I may have seen it.\"\n\n\"The command vessel?\" Nira kneaded the sleeve of her jacket, stepping away from the water sloshing out. \"When?\"\n\nMalaresh nodded once. \"It was not far from The Emplacement, though I only saw it at a distance. A larger ship, though not destroyer size. Sleek, white and gold in color. Definitely Golden Union, but not of any make or mark I am familiar with. It appeared well-armed, though at such a distance, it is hard to say. They did not engage me, but neither did I draw too near.\"\n\nNira shook her head. \"I'm glad. They probably just assumed you're a local dragon. At least most Union captains realize that firing unprovoked on a dragon your size is a bad idea. Most of their guns are made for aiming at the side of airships, or at the ground. Compared to their usual targets, you're small and mobile.\"\n\nA proud smile stretched across the dragon's muzzle. \"I have downed gunships before.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Nira pointed at the dragon's chest. \"Putting a shell in an agile, flying target like you is a hell of a lot harder than dropping one into the broadside of a ship. Even if they took you down, there's a reasonable chance you'd set them on fire, in the process.\"\n\n\"It worked before,\" the dragon said. \"You just fly extremely high, or exceptionally low, well beyond the angle at which their flak cannons can aim. Those are most dangerous to us, because they don't have to hit you directly to shred your wings.\" The dragon trailed off, gazing into old memories. Nira wondered anew just what he'd been doing before the Union caught him. Malaresh had never given her a complete answer. Finally, he grunted, blinking away the past. \"My point was, there was an unfamiliar ship lurking near The Emplacement. I suspect it houses someone of great importance.\"\n\nNira furrowed her brow. \"I'll ask Alakor about it. I'll also put us on general alert and set everyone to battle stations until this is over. Whoever they are, I doubt they're foolish enough to fuck with The Cataclysm, at least not directly. But we'll be ready, just in case.\"\n\n\"We should all be ready.\" Malaresh lifted a paw and gestured at the room around them. \"A ship this size is not exactly hard to see coming. If they glimpse us at a distance, they may attempt to organize enough vessels to surround us, and attack en masse.\" The dragon gave a derisive snort. \"They would still lose, but we would not go without damage. Or casualties.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Nira scowled, a cold tightness squeezing her heart. It had been a long time since they'd lost anyone. She sure as hell didn't want to go through it again. \"Let's just hope calm heads prevail.\" Then she poked the dragon's muzzle. \"On both sides.\"\n\nMalaresh ignored her. \"Furthermore, they may make an attempt on you, if you're recognized after disembarking.\"\n\n\"Which is why we're going in heavy.\" Nira let her hands come to rest on her guns again. \"We'll be as ready as we can be.\" She pivoted on her heel, gazing around. \"I think we're gonna bring the ship in close, this time. I'm not comfortable being in easy range of The Emplacements guns, but everyone's going to be a lot less likely to take shots at us...\" Nira glanced at the dragon. \"And you, if they realize doing so is gonna incur of the wrath of this big girl.\" She patted the wall.\n\n\"Agreed.\" The dragon lifted a paw from the water, gesturing with it. \"However, do consider that we may be between your ship and its targets.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know. It's not a great situation either way, but we've seen worse.\" Nira ground her teeth. \"Ideally, none of this will matter, and everything will go smoothly. We'll capture a few Union goons inside the tavern, get some intel from their ship, find out what they're planning, and get the hell out of there.\"\n\n\"That sounds profoundly optimistic.\"\n\n\"Like I said.\" Nira shrugged. \"Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Now. I need to talk to Alakor, before we get much further. I want you to be there.\" She ran a hand back over her hair. \"I'm going to talk to him alone, but I'd like you to be nearby, listening.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" The dragon licked his muzzle, lifting his frills. \"Afraid he's going to get a little rough with you?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" Nira smirked. \"If he does, I'll just kick him in the balls again.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled a happy laugh. \"I'm quite sorry I missed that.\"\n\n\"Me too, actually.\" She laughed with the dragon. \"But no, actually I want you to help me determine if he's being honest. If he knows you're listening in, watching him, he may be more truthful. If you do think he's lying, that's your cue to jump in and call him out on it. Hopefully, we can get the truth out of him one way or another.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Malaresh slowly eased himself back down into the tub, water sloshing around him. The dragon settled his head against the floor near the tub, closing his eyes. \"Now, if there's nothing else, I fancy a nap while the water's still warm.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nira said, turning away. \"You better rest up for the difficult act of eating breakfast.\"\n\n\"Speaking of which, if you do see Jirril, tell him-\"\n\n\"I'm not passing notes between you two like some go-between for childhood sweethearts.\" Nira paused at the exit, glancing back. \"But I'll expect you to be ready when I go to speak with Alakor this afternoon. Understood?\"\n\nThe dragon opened his eyes to gleaming slits. \"I will be there.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Executor Harliss followed Deputy Hatha to The Emplacement's front entrance. The tavern's front doors were bright red, with golden handles, and embedded in an even larger set of doors. They ensured the comfortable passage of creatures of any size. Hatha held one of the human-sized doors open for Harliss and her crew.\n\nAs the other guards parted for Harliss and her contingent, some of them uttered frustrated growls and snarls. A few made threats under their breath, or reminded Harliss that everyone else had guns, too. Despite their bluster, their body language told her Prav's security team was relieved to have avoided a shootout with an Executor and her contingent.\n\nHarliss walked inside, gazing around as her eyes adjusted. The massive pub's domed ceiling was at least three stories tall. Tiered balconies encircled the higher levels. At one side of the room was a long bar counter, constructed of old airship walls, cut down and sanded smooth. Copper piping crawled behind the counter, occasionally peeking over it to connect with taps. Barrels, kegs and crates lined the wall, along with bottles of every size and make Harliss had ever imagined. Several scaly kobolds with tapered muzzles and colorful clothing scurried back and forth across the bar top. They poured drinks and collected empty mugs from the collection of grizzled and gnarled bastards seated at the bar.\n\nHearths of stone and brick were built right into the walls, along with their chimneys. Potbelly stoves occupied smaller niches. Flames glowed from some of the hearths, while others sat cold and forgotten. A smoky haze hung in the air, and not just from the fireplaces. The scent of the place was almost overpowering, a combination of wood smoke, tobacco, incense, illegal herbs and other substances, along with booze, sweat, and other less pleasant things.\n\nThe crowd inside the tavern was nearly as raucous as Harliss expected. People of all races sat at tables and booths, drinking and laughing. A quick estimate placed a little under half the occupants as human, with the rest a mixture of gnolls, va'chaak, kobolds, and urd'thin. In one corner, a group gathered around a fight. A human and a gnoll threw drunken punches at each other, while the crowd passed around coins and paper notes. In another corner, musicians played horns, pipes, a fiddle, and a small drum. Their bouncy melodies just barely reached across the room among the chattering of voices, laughter, and angry shouts from the fight.\n\nAs Harliss followed the gnoll, she counted exits, potential hostiles, marked blind spots and positions of cover, and so on. Nearby groups of people fell silent, staring at the Union trio as they walked by. Harliss doubted they'd ever seen armed Union officers in here, before. Tormin pointed to a table, and gave Harliss a questioning look. The table's position gave it a clear view of most of the tavern, along with the visible points of entry.\n\n\"This will work, Deputy.\" Harliss pulled out a chair.\n\nHatha gave a growling sigh. \"Alright. Just please, don't make any trouble.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't dream of it,\" Harliss said. \"Now, would you be so kind as to arrange for food and water to be delivered to my men and my gryphons? They may be there a while. Also...\" She leaned in to whisper into the gnoll's ear. \"We need to speak with Prav. Do let him know Executor Harliss wishes to see him, personally.\"\n\nThe gnoll groaned. \"Are you serious? There's no way he's going to see anyone from the Union.\"\n\nHarliss patted his arm. \"Just pass it on, Deputy. I'm certain he'll see me. Unless he'd rather I come find him on my own.\"\n\nHatha made a frustrated, growling noise. \"Gods-damn it, I shoulda just let you shoot me. If this goes bad, it's gonna be my balls on the line.\"\n\n\"Aww, don't worry, Deputy Dogface.\" Evlee walked right up and grabbed the gnoll's crotch. He gasped, hunching forward, his eyes wide and ears flat. She smiled at him. \"I'll keep these safe...relatively. Hey, whaddya know, they are big! Don't suppose I can buy you, can I?\"\n\nHarliss put a hand on Evlee's shoulder, grinning. \"Alright, dear, that's enough. Let the brave Deputy get back to his work.\" She glanced at Hatha. \"If we need anything else, I'm going to ask for you by name.\"\n\n\"Of course, you are.\" Hatha stepped back when Evlee released him. \"And no.\" He rubbed himself through his breeches, glaring at her. \"Security staff are not part of the brothel services.\"\n\nEvlee made a little cooing noise of disappointment, flopping into her chair. \"Pity. And after I saw such interesting signs outside. Well, if you get bored when you're off duty, come find me.\"\n\n\"That's not likely to happen.\" Hatha turned away, though the quick glance he stole back at Evlee undermined his argument.\n\nAfter the gnoll departed, Harliss pivoted in her chair, giving the place a more careful examination. Mismatched tables and chairs filled the central area. Some were studiously constructed from mahogany and oak. Others had tabletops of polished granite, or marble. Plenty more were just made from discarded airship pieces. There were chairs of all types, some padded, some not. Others were meant to accommodate non-humans, with spaces for tails and so on. Along several walls were semi-enclosed booths, with high backs, and heavily padded seats. Some were freshly upholstered, while others were so threadbare and rickety, they were on the verge of collapse.\n\nLamps of all kinds were everywhere. They hung from wooden beams, jutted from walls, and dangled on chains from the from the ceiling. Some burned with the faint, tell-tale hiss of gas lamps. Others were older still, fueled by noxious oils. Airship cannons and weaponry were displayed upon the wood-paneled walls, like the heads of trophy beasts. Doorways of various sizes led to kitchens, latrines, stairwells, and other areas. Guards stood watch over important doors.\n\nWooden railings with surprisingly elegant designs edged the upper level balconies. Flags captured from merchant vessels and warships hung from the supports. People gathered behind the railings, many emerging from private rooms. Some wore less clothing than others, while a few wore nothing at all. Harliss wasn't sure if they were advertising the wares available, or simply lacked modesty. None of them were armed, and that was the important thing.\n\n\"You see any guards upstairs?\" Harliss glanced at Tormin, who was scanning the same balconies. He hadn't yet sat down.\n\n\"No. Strange.\" Any hint of discomfort he might feel about the nudity on display did not show on his face. \"They've got to protect their merchandise, though, so there must be guards somewhere up there.\"\n\n\"Alarm system, maybe?\" Evlee leaned back in her chair. \"A bell the workers can ring if someone gets rough or makes them uncomfortable?\"\n\n\"Or won't pay.\" Tormin chewed his lip. \"Yeah, it's possible. They wouldn't want to scare their customers. We better just assume if things go bad, there's gonna guns on us from above, too.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen many guards wandering the tavern, either.\" Harliss lowered her eyes, peering around the room. Most of the staff circulating looked to be servers, and whores. Other than the guards positioned at doors, she saw only a few others keeping watch on the tavern itself. \"Our greeting party has dispersed, as well. I think they're trying to avoid showing their hand.\"\n\nTormin nodded, removing his rifle strap from his shoulder. He rested the weapon across another chair in easy reach, then set his scatter gun on the table. Tormin kept the barrel pointed at a wall, away from everyone. He settled into a chair, folding his arms. \"Makes sense. Just means if things go bad, we won't know how many guns we're up against.\"\n\n\"Although, let's be honest.\" Evlee drew one of her knives, flicking it around her fingers. \"Most people here know not to cause trouble. The guards at a place like this ain't gonna be handing out fines.\"\n\nHarliss traced a finger against the butt a pistol. \"I could fire off a shot, see where everyone runs in from, and what they're packing.\"\n\n\"Aww, don't do that.\" Evlee looked up at the balcony again, grinning. \"You'd scare off the scenery.\"\n\nHarliss followed her gaze, towards a man who was particularly well built. \"I've seen worse views.\"\n\n\"You two are terrible.\" Tormin studied the room, instead.\n\n\"It's alright to look, Tormin.\" Evlee patted his arm. \"There's women, too.\"\n\n\"I noticed.\" Tormin cleared his throat, glancing away from everyone else. \"I'm actively trying not to notice again.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Evlee twined her fingers behind her head, her eyes openly wandering. \"Looking's free.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make it proper,\" Tormin said. \"Besides, we're on a mission, in hostile territory. Something I shouldn't think I'd have to remind the Executor about, but here we are.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry Tormin.\" Harliss flashed him a sly smile. \"I have the utmost faith in your ability to do your job, no matter how tight your trousers may get. Besides.\" A small male urd'thin with gray and black fur passed by. Harliss waved to him, intent on ordering a drink. \"If Prav wanted us dead, they'd have opened fire long before we ever got to the pub. We're perfectly safe.\" She pursed her lips, amending herself. \"For now.\"\n\nThe urd'thin hurried over. Unlike most of the other monstrous races, there were urd'thin in Union cities, too. Their numbers were limited, and they often congregated in slums and other foul places. They weren't always considered citizens, however. In most cities they were 'tolerated', at best. Despite their often-unsavory reputation, urd'thin were clever, and industrious. Harliss liked them for that, even if many others in the Union rarely agreed.\n\nThe Executor liked to imagine urd'thin as something a bored god first built out of spare parts. The short creatures had oversized ears like desert foxes, tiny horns, and muzzles akin to a cross between a coyote and a rat. This one was scarcely four feet tall. Dark fur covered him in shades of deep gray, dusted and speckled with black. The color faded across his face, and lower belly. White tips marked the tall ears that stood on either side of his little gray horns. The urd'thin was dressed in an unbuttoned tunic, and a kilt, both in shades of blue. A golden scarf encircled his neck, and ribbons of the same color were tied into his tail's dark fur.\n\n\"Oh!\" Evlee immediately refocused on her attention on the smaller creature. \"Look at your little ribbons!\"\n\nThe urd'thin turned away. He swished his tail to make the ribbons flutter. Harliss found the back of his bright blue kilt's design oddly fascinating. The accommodation for the urd'thin's tail was more like a fancy loop of fabric than a mere opening. It allowed his tail the comfort of free motion without showing off anything that hadn't been paid for.\n\nThe little creature glanced over his shoulder, grinning at Evlee. \"You like 'em?\"\n\n\"They're so cute!\" Evlee reached towards them, only for Harliss to smack her hand. \"Ow!\" She jerked it back, glaring at the Executor.\n\n\"Ask before you touch, Evlee.\" Harliss lifted a single finger. \"It's impolite, otherwise.\" She extended a second finger. \"And if he's a brothel worker, touching isn't free.\"\n\nThe urd'thin gave a chittering laugh. \"Hey, I appreciate that!\" He smiled at Harliss, all tiny, sharp teeth and perked, oversized ears. \"She can touch as long as she's gentle. I don't start chargin' till her hands roam a little too far.\"\n\nEvlee glared at the Executor, even as she spoke to the furred server. \"May I touch your tail and its ribbons?\"\n\n\"Sure!\" The urd'thin flicked his tail again. \"Just don't pet me against the fur, eh?\" Then he bowed to Harliss. \"I'm sorry, you called me over, what can I do for?\"\n\n\"You are a brothel worker, right?\" Harliss gazed around. None of the servers were dressed alike. \"Do you also serve food and drink for the tavern?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" The urd'thin turned his head to watch Evlee gently stroke the silken fur of his dark gray and black tail. \"Most of us do whatever's needed. So, you looking to eat, drink, purchase, hire? What's your pleasure? I dunno what the Union lets their fancy killers do, but all services are currently open and available.\"\n\n\"Drink, for now.\" Harliss glanced towards the bar. \"Whiskey. Something good.\" She turned her attention back to the urd'thin. \"By which I do not mean your most overpriced. I assure you, I can tell the difference.\"\n\nEvlee gently tugged on one of the golden ribbons. \"These are so cute. Oh, and I'll have the same, but more of it.\"\n\n\"Single for Fancy Union Killer One, a double for Fancy Union Killer Two.\" The urd'thin held his hands up towards Harliss. \"I should warn you, the Union gets charged a triple rate for, well, everything.\"\n\n\"The Union does.\" Harliss settled her hand upon a pistol. \"Executors do not. If they're willing to let us keep our weapons, they'll be willing to charge us the same rate as everyone else. Understood?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The urd'thin gulped, staring at her weapon. \"Understood.\"\n\n\"Aww, don't scare him, boss!\" Evlee ruffled the fur on the urd'thin's head, just between his horns and ears. \"Don't worry, I'll still tip you like we're paying triple.\"\n\n\"Hey, that'd be real sweet of you. And don't worry.\" The urd'thin gave a little chitter of nervous laughter. \"If she wanted to scare me, she'd have shoved it in my mouth.\"\n\n\"There's a phrase I bet you hear surprisingly often, around here.\" Tormin snorted. \"Just water, for me. Someone's got to keep their wits about them.\"\n\n\"Oh, Tormin, you can't visit a pirate pub and not have a drink.\" Evlee glared at him, still toying with the urd'thin's fur. \"If one drink leaves you too inebriated to shoot straight, you might want to find another crew.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine.\" Tormin leaned across the table, gesturing with a finger. \"Four measures cider, two measures rum, one measure sweet syrup, one dash cinnamon.\"\n\nHarliss stared at Tormin, quirking a brow.\n\n\"What?\" Tormin sat back, crossing his arms again. \"I'm allowed to enjoy things in life once in a while, aren't I?\"\n\n\"Certainly! That was just unexpectedly specific. I'm impressed.\" Harliss glanced back at the urd'thin. \"You got all that?\"\n\nThe urd'thin pointed at all three of them in turn. \"A single Gryphon Plume, a double Gryphon Plume, and for the gentlemen with the big scattergun, a Pants-Pisser.\"\n\nEvlee giggled, turning towards Tormin. \"That's what you ordered?\"\n\nTormin coughed, his face reddening. \"I hoped if I described it to you, you wouldn't call it that.\"\n\nThe urd'thin scratched the base of a horn. \"Yeah, sorry, guess I coulda gone with Trouser Tinkler.\"\n\nEvlee's giggles turned into full on laughter. \"Oh, that one's even better.\"\n\nTormin slapped his hand against the table. \"Just get my damn drink.\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir!\" The urd'thin flicked his tail away from Evlee's grasp, and gave them a little bow. \"I'll be right back with those drinks. My name is Coaldust, by the way.\"\n\nHarliss watched Coaldust dart off, weaving his way through the crowds, towards the bar. His golden scarf fluttered behind him. A topless female gnoll carrying a platter laden with pitchers and bottles nearly tripped over him, only for Coaldust to pirouette around her at the last moment. He reached the bar, and clambered up atop it as adeptly as a lifetime sailor scaling the rigging. The acrobatic scrabbling nearly offered a free peek at his 'available goods'. Harliss doubted that was by accident.\n\nOnce on the bar, Coaldust passed the order to the trio of kobolds Harliss saw earlier. They swiftly scrambled up and down the shelves, pushing a little wheeled ladder back and forth. One of the kobolds scaled the ladder and tossed bottles down to the other two. Each bottle was poured as needed, then heaved back up to be returned to the shelf. When the drinks were ready, they were arranged on a tray that was passed to Coaldust. The urd'thin managed to climb back down with the tray balanced on a single hand, then trotted back to the table.\n\n\"Your drinks, your sharp-shooting madams and sirs.\" Coaldust held the tray up.\n\nHarliss took the glasses, passing them out. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\" Coaldust tucked the tray against his body. \"What else can I get you for the moment?\"\n\n\"Some of your time, if it's available.\" Harliss slipped a hand into her jacket, retrieving a handful of gold coins. They were all Union-stamped, with their trio of golden stars on one side, and a silhouette of their capital city on the other. \"Do you accept Union currency? I have others, if not.\"\n\n\"It's gold, right? Can't take no fancy paper currencies or Union bonds, but as long as it's gold, we'll take it.\" A playful smirk stretched across his muzzle. \"Whatcha looking for? I've got a few red lines, but other than that, I can do just about anything you've ever wanted an urd'thin to-\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Harliss said, holding her hand up to cut him off. \"When I said your time, I meant that in the literal sense. I'd like you to remain as our exclusive server, and I'm assuming that isn't free, since you could be making money elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that all?\" Coaldust flattened his ears back, his tail tucked. \"Well, don't I feel like the soggy pup.\"\n\nHarliss had no idea what that urd'thin colloquialism meant. \"So is that a yes, or a no?\"\n\n\"It's a yes.\" He held up his tray for the coins. \"Pay's hourly, but if no one's gettin' fucked or sucked, it's minimum two hours. You don't gotta keep my company the whole time, but you do gotta pay for it. That'll be twenty, to start.\"\n\nTormin nearly choked on his drink. \"Twenty gold?\"\n\nHarliss ignored Tormin indignation, and paid the fee. She added a few more coins to cover the drinks. \"Here you are. I believe Evlee has your tip.\"\n\nEvlee dropped five more coins into a smaller pile atop the tray. \"Those are for you, Coaldust.\"\n\n\"Much obliged!\" Coaldust gave them another little bow. \"Be right back!\"\n\nAs the urd'thin scurried off, Evlee clapped her hands in excitement. \"Oh, this will be so fun! Our own little urd'thin whore!\"\n\n\"Are you crazy?\" Tormin glared at her over the rim of his drink. \"That's more than a day's damn wages!\"\n\nHarliss only shrugged. \"Not for us. Besides, how else am I going to learn how much money our men wasted in here? They sure as hell won't give us an honest answer, and neither will the Emplacement unless we're actually paying them. So, first I made it clear I expected the regular rates...\" She patted her pistol. \"Then I got drinks, and hired a whore. Now I've a better idea of just how to garnish their pay, commiserate with the amount of money they spent in here.\"\n\nTormin blinked at her. \"Wait, that was my idea.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was.\" Harliss leaned back, sipping her whiskey. \"And now that I've seen how overpriced this place, I'm all the angrier that they spent three times that on booze and whoring.\"\n\n\"So, you did like my punishment recommendation?\"\n\nHarliss took another sip, sighing in satisfaction. They were charging too much, but Gryphon Plume remained a damn fine spirit. \"Of course. I just preferred to look at the larger picture. I don't want to ruin these men's careers. I just want to teach them a lesson that stings while, so they don't do it again. We'll keep it in house, though. I don't want the Military Justice division to hear about it.\"\n\n\"A fair assessment.\" Tormin swirled his drink. \"We'll see who was too busy drinking and engaging in debauchery to go protect our ships, then we'll draft up a wage garnishment scale. I recommend we overestimate the amount they spent, as well.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" She leaned forward, lowering her voice a little. \"Plus, the urd'thin can give us a better idea.\"\n\nTormin smiled at her, a few too many teeth on display. \"Alright, I'll admit it, that's a good tactic. He might even know if our runaway spy's been spotted lately.\"\n\nHarliss arched her brows, feigning surprise. \"Really? What a wonderful idea!\"\n\nEvlee gasped. \"So that's why you hired him!\" She folded her arms, pouting. \"And here I thought you were just doing it for me.\" Then she rolled her eyes, laughing. \"That's why she's really hiring him, Tormin. The gryphon.\"\n\nHarliss smiled, and casually shrugged. \"Asking about our men's illicit spending habits just opens the door to more important information.\"\n\n\"Yes, Tormin, try to keep up.\" Evlee tasted her whiskey. \"Ooh, that's good.\"\n\nTormin just glared at Evlee. \"I'm sorry we don't all have minds as devious as yours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Nira stood at the edge of a large, circular promenade, watching Alakor wander stalls and shops of every kind. The Princess had provided him with funds enough to purchase a few things for himself, but the gryphon proved paralyzed by indecision. Alakor lingered at each vendor, inspecting their wares, and idly toying with the leather purse tied around his neck. Then he moved on, only to cast longing, uncertain glances back at previously visited merchants. Nira doubted the gryphon had ever been allowed to buy things for himself, before.\n\nSivik and Lissir accompanied him, serving as buffer between the snow gryphon and his many onlookers. Word of Alakor's defection had swiftly spread through the ship. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the exotic Union bird. A crowd followed him, with furred gnolls and scaly lizardfolk staring over the tall ears of urd'thin, and little horned heads of kobolds. Others hoisted up the smaller creatures or set them upon their shoulders.\n\nThe whole promenade buzzed with their chattering voices. Occasionally, Alakor turned to stare at them. Sometimes he bowed his head, or flashed a gryphon smile, all open beak and perked ears. The sisters stayed between him and the crowd, keeping everyone else at bay. For now, serving as his guards meant keeping him from getting swamped by curious crewmembers.\n\nNira took advantage of the distraction Alakor provided to make her way around the plaza unnoticed. The expansive commissary around the outside surrounded a social gathering area with all manner of tables, chairs, and loungers. This was the largest of several such shopping areas, as it was designed to accommodate gryphons and dragons. The princess did not want to rush Alakor, so she settled into an empty chair to track his progress.\n\nAlakor gave equal time to every vendor. He spent as long examining the goods of tailors and cobblers as he did merchants selling soaps and other hygienic products. Alakor chatted with a weaponsmith offering firearms maintenance and cleaning, then inspected a variety of thick blankets and soft cushions at a stall hawking hand-stitched bedclothes. Nira's ship had nearly everything a person could need. If it couldn't be made on the ship, it was brought aboard whenever groups went ashore to shop.\n\nThe gryphon finally made his first purchase when he reached a stand selling grilled meats and spiced jerkies. Alakor purchased a long skewer with hunks of herb-dusted mountain goat roasted over coals, along with a pouch full of dried venison strips coated with sugar and spice. As he settled down to eat his treats, he offered some to Lissir and Sivik. The three of them discussed the jerky, though Nira couldn't make out the details of the conversation.\n\nWhen the sisters took the lead, and Alakor just listened, Nira guessed they were explaining The Cataclysm's food chain. The ship had an entire agriculture division maintaining gardens, crops, and livestock. Given the limited scale of such operations, harvests and slaughters had strict limits imposed to maintain supply. Meat and produce were distributed throughout the ship to make sure everyone had enough food. In addition, people were allowed to grow or raise their own, where possible. Excess stock was available at fair prices, and often purchased by cooks who owned food stalls. Nira also tasked her winged crew members with supplementing the vessel's supply of meat whenever possible. If Alakor was true to his word, it might not be long before he was participating in those hunts.\n\nWhen the gryphon finished eating, he cinched up the pouch with his jerky treats. Alakor carefully tied that pouch around his neck, too. He resumed his wandering and was soon drawn into conversation with the owner of a jewelry stall. Before long, the owner was holding up various shiny decorations against Alakor's white feathers. Something must have struck his fancy, because Alakor dug into his coin purse again. That lead to a heated discussion. Nira wasn't sure if the vendor was trying to haggle, or just explain the ship's monetary system to the gryphon.\n\nThe Princess tried to keep the ship's currency rates as simple as possible. All coins minted of the same metal held equal, regardless of age or origin. A gold coin from the former Empire was worth the same as one from the Union. Coins from the lands beyond the Sunken Sea, or the islands of the Boiling Emptiness were also equal. The same was true for coins of lesser metals. Nira just wished she could switch out all the heavy coins for something lighter. But the black markets the ship had to resupply at had little interest in the newer paper currencies, deeds, or bonds.\n\nBefore Nira could see what Alakor purchased, Malaresh emerged into the plaza from a nearby corridor. Rog was at his side, talking with the dragon. Nira waved for their attention, and the two of them adjusted course towards her. The arrival of a dragon drew some of the crowd's attention away from Alakor. Malaresh stopped to flare out his wings and arch his neck, basking in their sudden attention.\n\nRog broke away from the dragon, and trotted up to Nira. The gnoll was dressed in a dark golden tunic, tucked into gray breeches with indigo threading. Ebony buttons ran up the front of his shirt. Beige-brown fur peeked out where the top few buttons were left undone. Rog's bushy tail poked out through a loop at the back of his pants, while custom-fitted black leather boots with silver buckles adorned his feet. His fur looked freshly washed and groomed, and the scent of flowery soaps clung to him.\n\nBefore Nira could greet him, Rog playfully thumped her on the shoulder. \"You coulda woke me, you know.\"\n\nNira grunted, rubbing her shoulder. \"Striking royalty is considered treason, you know. I could have executed.\"\n\n\"Uh huh.\" Rog folded his arms, a grin stretched across his canine-like muzzle. \"Next time, wake me.\"\n\n\"Oh, nonsense.\" Nira slugged him in return, earning a little wince. \"You were fast asleep, and I hardly need a security escort to talk to Malaresh.\"\n\nRog splayed his ears, his grin turning into a scowl.\n\nNira sighed, fidgeting with her sleeve. \"Alright, fine, Malaresh is probably the only person on the ship I may need extra security around, but-\"\n\n\"Not him.\" Rog snorted, and flicked his tail. \"The lizard ain't gonna hurt you.\" He turned towards Alakor, watching the white gryphon. \"Him, though. He ain't earned my trust. And I ain't no good as your Guard Captain if I leave you alone with people I don't trust.\"\n\n\"No, I suppose you're not.\" Nira made a show of looking the gnoll over.\n\nRog growled at her. \"You aren't supposed to agree with me about that part!\"\n\n\"I don't know...\" Nira rubbed her chin, pointedly inspecting him. \"You haven't even brought any weapons.\"\n\n\"Aww, damn it.\" Rog gave a deep, frustrated groan. \"I was this close to strappin' on my whole damn arsenal!\" He held a dull-clawed thumb and finger a short distance apart. \"Or at least my axe and my scattergun. But I was sure you'd yell at me for sendin' the wrong message to our guest.\" Rog stared down at Nira's gun belt. \"And now I see you came armed, yourself.\"\n\n\"Thought I'd get back into the habit.\" Nira set a hand on one of her pistols. \"You wanna borrow one?\"\n\n\"Nah, you keep 'em.\" Rog flashed her a fang-filled smile. \"If the bird gets rough, I'll just jump on his head and strangle 'em. Though...\" He stared down at himself. \"I do feel kinda naked without any weapons.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Nira quirked a brow. \"I didn't think you ever felt naked. Even when you're actually nude.\"\n\nThe gnoll wriggled, looking as uncomfortable as Nira could remember. \"Think I'd rather be naked with my axe or a big gun than I would be fully clothed and weaponless.\"\n\nNira patted his arm. \"How very 'raider' of you. Your ancestors would surely be proud.\" She dropped her hand back down, smiling. \"You look sharp, at least. You smell nice, too.\"\n\nRog scrunched his muzzle. \"I smell like damn flowers.\" He lifted his arm, sniffing his fur. \"It was the only soap you had.\"\n\n\"Like I said, you smell nice.\" Nira shook her head, smiling.\n\nIf Rog had used her bathtub, where had he gotten the clean clothes from? He must have gone to his own room, after. She wondered if he'd even bothered to wrap a towel around himself in the hallway. Nira enjoyed the mental image of the startled looks he might have earned.\n\n\"So, what's the plan, Princess?\" Rog folded his arms, turning a steely gaze towards the white gryphon as if eager to move beyond his unarmed status and floral aroma. \"The dragon says you're gonna interrogate Alakor.\"\n\n\"Malaresh may be exaggerating, slightly.\" She glanced at the dragon, still soaking up the attention of the curious crew. \"As usual. But I do plan to confront Alakor, and-\"\n\n\"Fuck.\" The gnoll bared his fangs. \"A confrontation? I knew I shoulda brought my damn weapons.\"\n\n\"Not that kind of confrontation.\" Nira chewed her tongue, trying to think of a better way to phrase it. \"I'm going to make it clear we believe he only joined us in order to set up a trap for his former masters.\"\n\n\"Ah. That's not so bad.\" Rog unfolded his arms to rub his muzzle. \"Though, it could turn into the other kind of confrontation, if things take a sharp turn into shit.\"\n\nNira chuckled. \"Indeed. But I'll have Malaresh there. And Lissir and Sivik will be nearby, as well.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see how it is.\" Rog glared at her, but mischief danced in his burnt golden eyes. \"Invite everyone but your Guard Captain, huh?\"\n\nNira put her hand on his arm again. \"That's because my Guard Captain has a terrible habit of showing up for confrontations without his weapons.\"\n\nRog barked laughter, flattening his ears. \"That better not become a running joke.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure I'll forget it in a few months, or so.\" Nira turned her attention back to the gryphon. \"Besides, at least you gnolls have natural weapons.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Rog grabbed his crotch. \"We sure do!\"\n\nNira snorted, shaking her head. \"I meant your teeth, Rog. Your claws and teeth.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Rog grunted and adjusted himself. \"So, uh, what's the plan?\"\n\n\"I'm going to ask him join me somewhere quieter.\" Nira pointed across the promenade. \"The observation area out there. He's going to know I brought him out there for a reason, so I may as well just jump into it.\"\n\n\"Right.\" The gnoll nodded, his tail swishing behind him. \"You wanna play good cop, or bad cop?\"\n\n\"Rog, you could never pull off the good cop routine.\" Nira drummed her fingers against a pistol. \"I want to talk to him by myself, anyway. When the time comes, just stand there and look menacing. Although...\" She glanced over at him, smirking. \"That'd be easier if you were armed.\"\n\n\"Hi-fucking-larious.\" Rog glared at her, but soon relented. \"You're right, though. The captain should do the talking. Make sure he remembers you're in charge.\"\n\nNira walked towards Malaresh. \"Don't worry, Rog. I plan to.\" As she approached the dragon, she lifted her voice. \"Have you absorbed enough attention to hit your daily quota yet?\"\n\nMalaresh looked over at her, then cleared his throat with a loud snarl. Rather than the sarcastic response she expected, the dragon called out in a brassy voice that echoed across the plaza. \"Make way for the princess!\"\n\nThe gathered crew quickly moved aside, offering little bows or salutes. She'd tried to dissuade the crew from offering her any formal sort of bows and prostrations, but the salutes were fine. Despite her royal status, Nira considered herself more a captain than a princess these days. Since there were a few dozen people gathered around the dragon, with many more in earshot, she decided to give them a quick address.\n\n\"Good day, everyone!\" Nira returned the crowd's collective salute before continuing. \"We'll be making our way towards Emplacement airspace in the next few days, where we may encounter Golden Union vessels.\" She held her hands up, cutting off any questions. \"Later in the day, we will sound the general alert. It will not be a drill! We'll remain at general alert or higher for the foreseeable future. Now's the time to make your preparations before battlestation shifts start. We'll do all we can to avoid combat, but we're sure as hell going to be ready for it, just the same. Security will be making announcements soon, but in the meantime, feel free to spread the word.\" She shifted her eyes to Rog, and gave him a barely perceptible nod.\n\nThe gnoll stepped forward, bellowing across the room. \"Dismissed!\"\n\nBetween Nira's announcement and Rog's shout, the promenade's crowd returned to their tasks with a little more urgency. Once they had some space, Nira approached the dragon, keeping her voice low.\n\n\"Alright, I'm going to go talk with Alakor,\" Nira said. \"There's an observation platform a short distance away. I'll take him out there for privacy. If you'd follow us, I'd appreciate it.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" Malaresh swept a paw out in a grand wave. \"After you, your Majesty.\"\n\nNira crossed the plaza, cutting between tables and chairs towards the trio of gryphons. Lissir and Sivik stood on either side of Alakor, making sure the gradually departing crew didn't cause any trouble. Both gray-hued females wore simple cargo satchels strapped around their necks, with leather pouches resting against their chests. They splayed their forelegs and bowed their heads to Nira. Alakor observed them, and then made the same gesture, touching the tip of his beak to the floor.\n\n\"Oh, don't bow, girls.\" Nira gestured for the gryphons to rise, sighing.\n\nLissir straightened, glancing at the white feathered male. \"She doesn't really like it when people bow to her, anymore.\"\n\n\"Which is why we do it,\" Sivik said, pushing up to her paws. \"Because it bothers her, and that makes it fun.\"\n\nThe snow gryphon lifted his head, ruffling himself. \"I rather doubt I've reached that level of familiarity with the princess.\"\n\n\"You have not.\" Nira noticed inspected Alakor for any lingering signs of his brawl with Malaresh. His fur and feathers were freshly washed, stark-white and fluffy. Even the black tips to his flight, tail, and crown feathers had a new luster. Something gold caught her eye. A necklace with a stylized golden feather hung around the gryphon's neck, near his carrying pouches. Nira pointed to it. \"That's pretty. I wondered what you were haggling about.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Alakor brushed his pads over it. \"It was...\" He warbled in thought, ears drooping just a little. \"Nice. To be able to buy something for myself.\" The gryphon bowed his head again. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\" Nira gently stroked one his ears. \"Anyway, you look good today.\"\n\n\"I always do.\" Alakor fluffed up.\n\nNira padded around him. \"If you say so. You looked like shit, after that fight. How're you feeling?\"\n\n\"Like I kicked a dragon's ass, of course.\" The gryphon glanced at Malaresh, looming nearby, and offered him an open-beaked smile.\n\nThe dragon glowered at him. \"Your ego is re-writing history, bird.\"\n\n\"I'm going to have to agree with Malaresh.\" Nira tweaked one of his tail feathers. According to the medic's report, there were numerous significant bruises under Alakor's snowy fluff. They'd also discovered an awful lot of scars, some older than others. \"You got pretty roughed up. How are you really feeling?\"\n\n\"Honestly?\" The gryphon flattened his ears, laying his feathers back down. \"Sore as hell, from my beak to my balls.\" He chirruped at Nira. \"That last one's your fault.\"\n\n\"No, that last one's your fault,\" Nira said, poking the gryphon's shoulder as she moved around him. \"For ignoring repeated warnings about disrespecting my crew.\" She examined the gryphon's face. One of his bright blue eyes remained noticeably bloodshot. A crack marred the upper right side of his beak. It looked clean now at least, with no signs of fresh blood. \"Will your beak heal up?\"\n\nAlakor brushed his paw pads over the fracture, wincing. \"Heal? Yes. Close up completely? I don't think so. It's only a little crack, though. It'll remind me not to get punched in the beak by a dragon again.\"\n\n\"So it shall,\" Nira said, chuckling. \"Now, if you're willing, I'd like you to accompany me to the nearby observation deck. There's something I'd like to discuss with you.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\" Alakor watched a few more crewmembers hurry about the plaza. \"Does it have anything to do with that general alert you mentioned?\"\n\n\"You know it does.\" Nira turned away, walking across the promenade. \"This way, if you would.\"\n\nAlakor swished his tail as he followed her, brushing black-edged feathers against both female gryphons. \"Will the lovely ladies be accompanying us?\"\n\n\"Ladies, he says.\" Sivik chirruped gryphon laughter, then nipped at his tail. \"Such a city bird.\"\n\n\"They'll be waiting just outside,\" Nira said. Both females gave her quick nods of understanding.\n\nLissir strolled towards the dragon, shaking her wings out. \"I suppose the dragon will have to entertain us. Preferably in ways that won't make Jirril jealous.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" Sivik said, striding up along the dragon's other side. \"That might be more fun.\"\n\n\"I'm sure I can find some way to entertain a few beautiful gryphons.\" Malaresh draped his wingtips across the sisters.\n\n\"Try not to distract each other too much.\" Nira turned away, gesturing for Alakor to follow.\n\nThe princess led the group into an adjoining corridor. Tarnished brass rails lined walls paneled in dark wood. The once-plush maroon carpet was flattened, threadbare, and marked with stains. The hallway's general disrepair mirrored most areas of the deck. Nira was used to it, but having a guest left her conscious of just how worn-down things had become. The entire ship could use a deep cleaning, and an interior overhaul. Nira wondered if they'd ever have the time and safety needed for such a luxury.\n\n\"How long does it take to get used to?\" Alakor gazed about as they walked. He opened a wing, waving it around himself. \"The noises, the vibrations, the sensation of movement.\"\n\n\"Movement?\" Nira paused. \"Good question.\" She scrunched her face. \"Are we moving? Unless we're in turbulence or really pushing the ship, I barely even notice anymore. The vibrations and noise, though...\"\n\nNira rested a hand against the nearest rail. Ever so slightly, the cool metal shivered under her touch. When she focused on it, the whole ship buzzed. The roars and rattles of distant engines, the shuddering of hidden pipes, the whirr of turbines and propellers turning. She pulled her hand back, her palm tingling from the vibrations.\n\n\"Unless I focus, I scarcely even register any of it.\" Nira folded her arms, considering the question. \"I've been on this ship a decade now, I think. These days, I feel stranger when I'm ashore. On the ground, I can't help but notice the lack of noise, the stillness of the world.\" She shrugged, furrowing her brow. \"I'd say it took me months, at least, to grow accustomed to it. I couldn't sleep at first, either.\" Old memories squeezed her heart with cold fingers. \"But that wasn't because of the noise.\"\n\nAlakor nodded, softening his voice. \"You'd just fled your home, right? That must have been difficult.\"\n\nNira rubbed her face, swallowing hard. \"You have no idea.\"\n\nThe Palace has fallen.\n\nThe four worst words Nira ever heard in all her life.\n\nNira turned away as shivers wracked her. In an instant, her mind was awash with shouts and screams, smoke and flames, gunfire, and valiant people dying.\n\n\"The night it happened, I didn't want to leave.\" Nira took a shaking breath, her throat tightening. A decade later, and her last day at the palace was still a knife in her heart. \"I wanted to find my parents. I wanted to fight for my people, and our home.\" She sniffed, and a bittersweet laugh escaped her. \"But mom and dad had other ideas.\"\n\nAlakor offered a soft coo of sympathy. \"They had to keep you safe.\"\n\n\"That they did,\" Rog said, his voice trembling. \"Nira's parents sent her sister away, when the Union was first closing in. On the same day, they gave her guards a secret order.\" The gnoll swallowed and rubbed his muzzle. \"If the palace ever fell, put the princess on The Cataclysm, and launch it.\" His ears drooped, and he thumped a fist against the burnished handrail. \"Fuckin' thing wasn't even ready yet.\"\n\nNira managed a smile, setting a hand on Rog's arm. \"It's not the ship's fault.\" She leaned against the gnoll, trying to keep her tone steady. \"We'd been developing this thing since before I was born. Designing, building, redesigning, rebuilding. A few months before the end, my father ordered our workers to focus on readying it to fly. Our people worked on it all day, every day, after that. They had to train a skeleton crew without even a test flight. The engineers thought it would fly, but...\" Nira shrugged.\n\n\"I thought the damn thing was gonna crash,\" Rog said. He ran a hand back over his ears. \"If I'm honest, I never thought we'd have to board it. I think Merriam knew, though.\"\n\nNira squeezed his hand. \"Yeah. Me too.\"\n\nRog glanced at Alakor. \"Merriam was Nira's Guard Captain before me. We used to train Nira together. That night, when the Golden Union breached the palace, we both knew what we had to do.\" The gnoll sniffled, shaking his head. \"And then, I had to tell Nira, that she...she couldn't...\"\n\nNira rested her head against his shoulder. \"You don't have to say it, Rog.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do.\" The gnoll cleared his throat, his voice raspy. \"I had to tell Nira that she couldn't say goodbye to her parents. That was all she wanted, in the end. A chance to say goodbye. But I couldn't let her.\" Rog wiped his eyes. \"There wasn't any time, left. And most of her guards were dead. So, I picked her up, and ran for the ship while one of our gryphons cleared a path. When we came under fire again, Merriam and some kobolds covered us. I hauled Nira aboard, and...\"\n\nWhen Rog trailed off, Nira picked up for him. \"And that was the last time I ever saw Merriam. Then we were in the sky, and I knew I'd never see my family again, either.\" Nira squeezed her eyes shut. Smoke and cannon fire filled her mind, and there was nothing she could do but let memory's dark water carry her along. \"The last of the Empire's Home Fleet closed ranks to protect us. The city was lost, by then. Our ships should have surrendered! But instead, they kept fighting, to ensure the Empire's survival.\" Nira faltered, blinking unshed tears from her eyes. \"My survival! And for what? How can I ever be worthy of such a sacrifice? How can I-\"\n\n\"It was their duty.\" Rog hugged her tightly. \"That was the oath they took. To defend the Empire with their lives. And that...that's courage, Nira. That's honor. Their sacrifice kept the Empire alive, in you! I'd like to think they can all rest easy now, knowing that.\" Rog sniffled, easing off his hug to wipe his muzzle with the back of a furred hand. \"I know you don't feel worthy of all those lives, but it's not about that.\" Rog managed a smile, his ears perked. Tears brimmed in his golden eyes. \"It's not about one life, for another. I told you before, it's about an ideal. It's about hope. Your survival gives all our people something to hope for.\"\n\nNira sighed, closing her eyes. \"I know. But there were so many lives...\"\n\n\"And there's so many more, on this ship.\" Rog gently stroked her hair. \"And they all look up to you. You, and this ship, are all they have left.\" He pulled his head back, and wagged his tail once. If it helps, think of it this way. It wasn't just you that our soldiers were protecting. It was all of us.\"\n\n\"It was an ideal,\" Alakor said, breaking his silence. The gryphon kept his voice soft, and respectful. \"This ideal.\" He swept a wing across everyone. \"For all your Empire's many faults, it put forth one great ideal.\" He set a paw upon his chest. \"That we did not have to be your pets, or your slaves.\" Alakor pointed to Rog, and the dragon. \"That they were not just monsters to be slain. Your Empire, cruel as it often was, nonetheless allowed us to be your equals. The world calls us beasts, but your Empire called us friend.\"\n\nAlakor took a slow breath, folding back his wing. \"If your people's sacrifices remain an anchor around your heart, then consider this. They died not for you, but for the great ideal you represent. An ideal borne out in this grand ship.\" Alakor gazed at everyone present. \"No monsters, no slaves. Only citizens.\"\n\nNira lifted her head from Rog, and wiped her eyes. \"I do like that better than dying so a Princess could become a pirate.\" She struggled to force a smile. \"Yet I cannot help but think so many of those poor people died, expecting me to return with some great, liberating army.\"\n\nRog gently thumped her shoulder. \"You sure as hell wanted too.\"\n\n\"I did.\" Nira rested her back against the gnoll. \"But those first few years were so difficult, and I had so many lives to worry about. When the Union offered me a truce, I had to take it, for the sake of everyone on this ship. My responsibility is to my crew, now. I won't give up their lives to pursue some unwinnable war that's already been lost.\" Nira hardened her voice. \"So, The Empire only lives on here, in our little flying corner of the world. Everyone's equal here, and I will fight tooth and nail for them, until my dying breath.\"\n\nAlakor dipped his head in a respectful bow. \"That's all your soldiers could have ever asked of you. They'd be immensely proud to hear you say that.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" Nira said, sighing.\n\nRog squeezed her hand. \"He is. Though, it is kinda ironic that an Empire founded by humans, now only has two of you left.\" He ruffled Nira's hair.\n\nNira batted his arm away. \"Oh, shut up.\"\n\nAlakor gave a curious warble. \"Is it truly just you, and Amelia?\"\n\n\"It has been for a while, yeah.\" Nira's eyes wandered. Malaresh and the girls had remained behind, though their perked ears told her they were still paying attention. \"We had a lot more humans, at first. After the truce, the Union offered amnesty for everyone on the ship. Anyone who trusted them enough to honor that offer was welcome to leave. Mostly, it was humans. Some risked it to return to their families, others just wanted to try and start a new life. Nobody believed they'd ever show gnolls or kobolds any amnesty, though. We were the only refuge they had left. So, after a couple years, it was just me and Amelia.\" She playfully nudged her elbow into Rog's ribs. \"And a buncha drunken beasts.\"\n\nRog just laughed. \"We learned from the best.\"\n\n\"You've certainly done right by them, Princess.\" Alakor stretched his wings out, filling the corridor. \"I do apologize for bringing up painful memories.\" He bowed his head. \"That was not my intention. I was legitimately curious how long it will take to grow accustomed to the ship.\"\n\n\"That's alright,\" Rog said, putting a hand on Nira's shoulder. \"She needs to talk about that stuff, instead of bottling it all up.\"\n\n\"Like you're any better.\" Nira elbowed him again, harder this time. \"When's the last time you talked about it? You were crying when we left the palace, too.\"\n\nRog scratched his ear. \"I don't remember crying.\"\n\nNira poked Rog in the belly. \"You were like a whimpering puppy.\"\n\nThe gnoll offered a lopsided grin, perking a single ear. \"I may have shed a tear or two.\" He glanced over at Alakor. \"Hey, Bird. What do you know about the battle over the city, after The Cataclysm first launched?\"\n\n\"Rog!\" Nira glared at him. \"We don't need to-\"\n\n\"Shortly before dawn,\" Alakor said, fluffing himself up. \"A massive ship launched from within a hidden, and highly fortified hanger. Both ship, and buried hanger, were considered incomplete prototypes at best. That changed when the stone itself rumbled and opened to unleash a cataclysmic hell-storm upon the Union's air destroyers.\" He clicked his beak. \"Wordplay intended.\" Alakor lifted a paw. \"Now, I was not present. But according to the reports, instead of immediately fleeing, the vessel actually changed course.\"\n\nAlakor peered into Nira's eyes as if taking the measure of her soul. \"You joined with the Empire's remaining ships to engage the Union air force directly. In fact, you damn near obliterated the entire Second Fleet. Does that sound about right?\"\n\nNira clenched her jaw. \"That's not exactly how I remember it.\"\n\n\"She stormed onto the bridge,\" Rog said, squeezing her shoulder. \"And screamed at the crew to fire everything we have!\"\n\nNira crossed her arms. \"I had to know what was happening to my people, so I made them take me to the bridge. Granted, on a ship like this there's only so much you can see from the bridge. But I saw enough.\" She took a shuddering breath. \"The whole night sky was on fire. It was...\" Nira swallowed. \"Horrible. Seemed like there were a hundred ships in that sky, exchanging constant volleys and barrages. So many of them were burning, and still fighting to the last damn moment. There were...\" She swept a hand towards Sivik and Lissir, watching in the distance. \"Gryphon flights, swooping amidst them, boarding Union vessels, bombing them. There were dragons, strafing ships with fire. The city was already lost, by then, but they were all so brave. I couldn't just leave. So rather than follow our escape route, I decided to punch right through the Union's fleet. One of the officers showed me how to activate the talk box, and I ordered every gun we have to fire until there was nothing left to shoot at.\"\n\n\"She wanted to stay and take on their reinforcements, too.\" Rog said. He sounded so proud that Nira couldn't bring herself to cut him off. \"But once we were through their lines, the last Empire ships took up an escort formation to make sure we got away, safely. Even when the city was behind us, Nira refused to leave the bridge. I finally had to carry her to bed when she couldn't fight off the exhaustion anymore.\"\n\nWhen the gnoll finished, Nira stepped away from him, rubbing her forehead. \"Alright, I think that's as much of that topic as I can handle. Let's just move on, shall we?\" She glanced at the white gryphon. \"We haven't even gotten to our discussion yet.\" Nira pointed to the end of the hall. \"The observation area is just out there. Mind going on ahead, so I can take a moment to collect myself?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\" Alakor dipped his head. \"Thank you for opening to me, just the same.\" He turned away, tail feathers brushing her. \"I'll see you when you're ready.\"\n\nLissir hurried over when Alakor was gone. \"Are you alright?\" She touched her beak to Nira's shoulder. Concern shone wet in her eyes.\n\n\"I'm fine.\" Nira rubbed Lissir's beak, thankful for her worry. \"But I should have just answered his question about the ship noise. I don't know why I let myself get lost in memories. Maybe the stress is getting to me.\"\n\nSivik approached and nuzzled at Nira's middle. \"We're always here to talk, if you need us.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Nira stroked the gryphons' heads, smiling. \"I really do appreciate you both immensely. Like Rog said, I probably bottle things up too much.\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Lissir locked her gaze with Nira's eyes. \"You should talk about your family, some night. Your parents, your sister. Painful as it is, it will ease their weight from your heart.\"\n\nNira cringed inwardly, pursing her lips. \"I can't promise anything.\" She glanced away. \"But I'm willing to admit I should.\"\n\n\"That's a start.\" Sivik rubbed against Nira, then stepped back to make room for Malaresh.\n\n\"You are a fine leader,\" the dragon said. \"And your crew greatly respects you.\" Malaresh brushed his muzzle against her cheek in an unusually tender gesture. \"If you have tears yet to shed, then it is long past time to do so.\" He pulled his head back. \"But indulge your weeping in private, so your subjects do not think you weak.\"\n\nNira gave him a blank look. \"You're trying to help, and that's what matters. So, thank you, Malaresh.\"\n\n\"You are welcome.\" The dragon glanced at everyone else. \"My advice, of course, was the most helpful.\"\n\n\"Sure, it was,\" Nira said. \"Alright. I'm as ready as I'm going to be to confront Alakor. Malaresh, I want you to watch from the door. Let him see you, so he knows damn well he'd better be truthful. But don't intervene unless you think he's deceiving me.\"\n\nThe dragon bowed his head. \"Understood. Ready when you are.\"\n\n\"Good. Let's get this over with, then.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Executor Harliss smiled when Coaldust returned to her table. His tray had been replaced with an oversized wooden mug carried in both hands. Foamy ale dribbled down the sides. It ran across his fingers till Coaldust licked them clean. The urd'thin took big pull, then wiped foam from his muzzle. He looked up at Harliss, his large ears perked.\n\n\"Alright. I'm yours, for the next two hours.\" Coaldust lifted his mug. \"Hope you don't mind me having a drink.\"\n\n\"Certainly not, Coaldust.\" Harliss toasted him with her own glass. \"Good choice on the Gryphon Plume, by the way.\" She flashed him a smile. \"Your people charge too much for it, but it's delicious.\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\" Coaldust swished his tail, little gold ribbons fluttering. \"I love that stuff. You're right, though. Costs about double what it would anywhere else.\" He made a show of gazing around the place. \"But where the fuck else you gonna get fine whiskey way out here?\" He clicked his teeth, then walked to a big, wooden column nearby. A lamp in a brass sconce flickered above him, leaving his coppery eyes flecked with fire. \"I'll be here when you need me.\"\n\nHarliss waved him right back over. \"Nonsense, Coaldust. You can't stand around drinking by yourself, waiting to be ordered around.\" She patted the table. \"Just because we're paying you doesn't mean you're going to be treated like a servant. Come join us.\"\n\nCoaldust tilted his head, lifting a single ear. \"Yeah? Alright, sure. Let me get an urd'thin chair.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Evlee called after him. \"You can sit on my lap instead, if you want.\"\n\nCoaldust shrugged and laughed. \"Hey, it's your money. If that's where you want me, that's where I'll be.\"\n\nTormin put his face in his hand. \"Really, Evlee? Just let him use a chair.\"\n\nEvlee poked her tongue out at Tormin. \"You just don't want him that close to you.\" Then she turned to Coaldust. \"Really, though, if you prefer a chair, fetch a chair.\"\n\n\"Yes, Coaldust.\" Harliss swirled her whiskey in her glass, shooting Evlee a look. \"I want to make it clear you're under no obligation. Sit wherever you're comfortable.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the consideration.\" The urd'thin put his drink up on the table, and then delicately hopped up onto Evlee's lap. \"But when a lady offers you her lap, you take her lap. Comfy?\"\n\n\"So far, yes.\" Evlee held her arms out to let him get positioned. \"You can rest your head against me, if you want. Where should I put my hands?\"\n\nCoaldust sat slightly sideways to make room for his tail. He leaned his head back, his ears brushing her jaw. \"You can put them anywhere you like, but this is my suggestion.\" The urd'thin gently pulled Evlee's hands down across his middle till she was holding him. \"There. How's that?\"\n\n\"Quite nice, actually!\" Evlee gave him a playful hug, ruffling his exposed belly fur. \"You're very soft. I hadn't realized urd'thin fur was so silky.\"\n\n\"Thanks!\" Coaldust leaned over her arms to fetch his drink. He picked it up, took a pull, and set it back down, all without disrupting Evlee's gentle hold on him. The ease of the maneuver told Harliss he'd done this countless times before. \"Our fur's way softer than gnoll fur. They'll argue that with us, of course. But if you ask me, spending a night with an urd'thin is like luxuriating in silks. A night with a gnoll's like...\" He waved his little hand. \"Fuckin' a bristly hairbrush.\"\n\nTormin gave a single cough, reaching for his drink. \"Really laying on that upsell to the whole night pretty thick.\"\n\nCoaldust swished his tail alongside Evlee's leg, the little ribbons brushing her. \"Just statin' the facts. How's that Pants Pisser treatin' ya?\"\n\nTormin scrunched up his face. \"Please don't call it that.\" He tasted it, sighed in satisfaction, and set it down. \"It's delicious, though.\"\n\n\"How did it get that name?\" Harliss glanced between Tormin and Coaldust.\n\n\"Cause it's easy to overdo it. Tastes real good, and hits real hard.\" Tormin set his glass down. \"Which is why I'm only having one and taking it very slowly.\"\n\n\"Yup!\" Coaldust fetched his own ale for another drink. \"Got its name cause when it first started showing up in popular pubs? People would have too many, and piss their pants without even realizing it. Or, yanno.\" The urd'thin glanced down at himself. \"Whatever they had on.\"\n\nEvlee ruffled the urd'thin's belly fur. \"Speaking from experience, are we?\"\n\n\"Not that I remember!\" The urd'thin chittered laughter. \"The name doesn't work as well with a kilt, anyway.\"\n\nEvlee reached down and felt the bright blue material. \"Is that what this is called?\"\n\n\"Think that's the human word for it, anyway.\" Coaldust scratched one of his ears. \"Human pants don't really fit our legs, and it's easier to get these made than get measured for custom breeches. Plus, they're comfortable, and I like how it looks.\"\n\n\"It is quite striking, actually.\" Harliss sipped her whiskey, waving her other hand at him. \"As are the scarf, and ribbons.\"\n\n\"Thanks!\" Coaldust leaned his head back against Evlee's chest. \"I always liked the way blue and gold look against my fur. Most of my clothes are one, or the other, or both.\"\n\n\"Good choices.\" Evlee smirked down at the urd'thin in her lap. \"So how much more would it cost to find out if you're wearing anything under that kilt?\"\n\nTormin groaned, and Coaldust laughed.\n\n\"Based on watching him scale the bar,\" Harliss said, \"I'm guessing he isn't.\"\n\n\"Ding ding ding!\" Coaldust thrust his mug towards her. \"Point to the Executor!\"\n\n\"Ooh, you naughty little mongrel.\" Evlee ruffled his ears. \"I'd best be extra careful where my hands go, just to be safe.\"\n\nCoaldust wagged his tail against her. \"No need. Your hands have two hours to go wherever they please.\"\n\nEvlee laughed, moving a hand to the urd'thin's thigh, at the edge of his kilt. \"Oh, really now?\"\n\nCoaldust stroked her fingers. \"The Executor's pay covers just about everything you might wanna do with me.\"\n\n\"Good to know.\" Evlee teased his thigh, just a little. \"In that case, at some point, I may be unable to stop my curious fingers from roaming.\"\n\nCoaldust swished his tail, laughing. \"Feel free. I sure as hell won't stop you.\"\n\n\"At least not for two hours, right?\" Harliss draped an arm over the back of her chair. \"Bet when the time's up, you'd leap off her so fast it'd be like someone stuck a hot coal under your ass.\"\n\n\"Nah, a lovely lady like this? I'd give her at least ten minutes warning. Maybe even forget that time's up for a little while.\" Coaldust took another drink, then set his half-empty mug down. \"Course, any more than that, and I gotta charge for another hour.\" He glanced around the table, scrunching his muzzle. \"Damn, forgot the food menus. I'd get one but...\" He snuggled up against Evlee, sighing. \"It's awfully warm and comfortable right here with this beautiful young woman.\"\n\n\"Awww, what a little sweetie.\" Evlee gave him a hug.\n\n\"He's angling for tips.\" Harliss laughed, and finished off her whiskey. When Coaldust glanced at her empty glass, ears lifted questioningly, she shook her head. \"No, I'm fine for now, thank you. I'll wait till the others are done. We don't need any food, anyway. I did have some questions, though, if you're inclined to answer.\"\n\n\"Yeah, shoot!\" The urd'thin glanced at her guns. \"Er...not literally.\"\n\n\"How does your payment situation work?\" Harliss rested her elbow over her chair's back again. \"I paid you twenty, for two hours, and Evlee added five for gratuity. How much of that do you, personally, get?\" She held a hand up. \"Don't answer if it'll get you in trouble, mind you.\"\n\n\"Nah, that won't get me in trouble, we're pretty open about it.\" He leaned forward, then glanced sideways as if just noticing Evlee's weaponry. \"Oh, wow, you got a lotta knives! Is that your fancy Union killer specialty, blade-work?\" He mimed stabbing in the air a few times, laughing, then glanced Harliss's way. \"Sorry, got distracted. We get a straight twenty-five percent cut of every gold we bring in through the brothel, rounded up. Another twenty-five percent goes straight to the boss. The other fifty percent goes towards paying the rest of the staff and security, buying supplies, general upkeep, expansion, etc. Plus, we get room and board, and we get huge discounts on basically everything.\"\n\nHarliss rubbed her chin. \"So, out of the twenty I gave you, for two hours, you get five gold.\"\n\n\"Yeah, plus the five my new friend here gave me.\" Coaldust patted Evlee's hand.\n\n\"Ten gold coins for two hours work.\" Tormin grunted. \"That's more than Union soldiers make.\"\n\nCoaldust stretched his arms out, interlocked his fingers, and cracked his knuckles. \"Sure is! Some of your fellow Goldies were in here recently, in fact. Got all drunk and started lamenting about how the Union wasn't even paying them as much as...\" He scrunched up his muzzle. \"A buncha whore-monsters, he called us. Kinda stupid. I mean, I know what he was going for, but it sounded like something you'd see in a really bad horror-play.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it?\" Evlee lifted her arms over her head, crooking her fingers into claws. \"Housewives beware! The Whore-Monsters are coming to eat your husbands!\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Coaldust stretched his arms as well, snarling and baring his fangs. \"Whoring soon, at a monstrous theater production near you!\"\n\nHarliss gave a playful, cooing sound. \"Aww, Tormin, they're soul-mates.\"\n\nTormin pursed his lips. \"Wonderful.\"\n\nHarliss returned her attention to the urd'thin. \"So, Coaldust, you were saying? Our men were lamenting their poor pay? How many of them frequented this place, anyway?\"\n\n\"I dunno, three dozen or so?\" Coaldust wriggled around on Evlee's lap, inspecting her knives. \"From the little ships, out on the docking area. Most of them just get food and drinks. Sometimes a lotta drinks. A couple more spent plenty of time time in the brothel.\" He glanced back at Harliss. \"Wait, am I snitchin'? I don't wanna get any customers in trouble.\" A smirk crossed his muzzle. \"Maybe the assholes.\"\n\nHarliss quirked a brow. \"Assholes?\"\n\n\"Yeah, like Mister Whore-Monster. Thinking they're all better than us, just cause he's human. Hell, one drunken sheath-lick got tossed out on his ass for yelling at a gnoll friend of mine. All kinds of nasty, racist, stuff about gnolls. So, the guards fucked him up a bit, and tossed him out. Literally.\"\n\nTormin leaned forward. \"Was that before, or after the dragon and gryphon attacked those ships?\"\n\n\"After.\" Coaldust tilted his muzzle. \"He'd been in here drinking and muttering to himself before that, but I think the raid tipped it for him. Started acting like it was our fault! The more he drank, the more the uglier it got.\"\n\n\"And that three dozen you mentioned.\" Tormin idly traced little circles on the table with a forefinger. \"How many of them were in here during the attack on our ships?\"\n\n\"Oh, probably at least half of them, maybe more?\" Coaldust held his hands up, little gray pawpads on display. \"Now, I should mention that it gets really loud in here on rowdy nights.\"\n\nEvlee looked around. \"It isn't rowdy now?\"\n\n\"Nah, this is damn near quiet.\" Coaldust dropped his hands down. \"But nobody could hear what was going on way over in the plaza. We sent some guards out, once we finally realized that ships were getting trashed under our watch. But by then it was too late.\"\n\nTormin glowered at the little urd'thin. \"And I'm sure the delay had nothing to do with the fact they were Golden Union ships?\"\n\nCoaldust offered him an all-too-earnest smile, all bared canine teeth and perked ears. \"Of course not!\" He quickly turned his smile to Evlee. \"Say, can I see one of those knives?\"\n\n\"Sure!\" Evlee reached for one. \"Throwing, or melee?\"\n\n\"Oh, throwing, please!\" Coaldust waggled his fingers in excitement.\n\n\"Evlee!\" Tormin growled at her through grit teeth.\n\nEvlee rolled her eyes. \"Oh, shush. What do you think he is, suicidal?\"\n\nHarliss set her hand on a pistol as Evlee drew a knife. She knew Evlee was right, but instinct bade her to be prepared, just in case. Urd'thin were quick, and agile. Just like kobolds, they could be exceptionally deadly with proper training. One of her closest scrapes in the past involved an entire hit squad of kobolds. Besides, for all Harliss knew, Prav might have half his protection detail posing as brothel workers.\n\nEvlee twirled the knife around her fingers. Each of Evlee's blades were custom forged to her preferred specifications. Those for throwing were balanced and weighted for precision and penetration. Her melee blades were longer, and as sturdy as they were sharp. Evlee was nearly as good with them, as Harliss was with her guns. Were Harliss ever forced to engage Evlee in a knife fight, she wasn't sure she'd win. Then again, if Harliss ever truly fought with Evlee, something had gone spectacularly wrong.\n\n\"So, Coaldust.\" Harliss kept her hand resting on her gun, just in case. \"Shall I take your excitement to mean you also enjoy tossing knives around?\"\n\n\"Sure do!\" His eyes darted about, following the increasingly complex dance of Evlee's blade between her fingers and through the air. \"The boss likes his workers to be able to protect themselves.\"\n\nTormin kept his eyes on the urd'thin's hands, ever watchful. \"Helps explain the lack of visible guards upstairs.\"\n\nEvlee brought her blade to a stop. She presented its handle to the urd'thin. \"Here you are. It's probably heavier than what you're used to, so be careful.\"\n\nCoaldust took the knife, hefting it. \"Oh, yeah, lots heavier.\" He held it up alongside his other hand, comparing its length to his fingers. \"Longer, too. Look at that bad boy.\" He waggled it at Evlee's hands. \"I can do some of that fancy stuff with my knives. But I better not try it with one this long.\"\n\n\"No, please don't.\" Harliss idly worked a fingertip around the rim of her empty glass. \"Prav won't be happy if we let you slice your fingers off.\"\n\nThe urd'thin chittered. \"Not used to Union folks knowing the boss's common name. Though...\" He gestured at her with the knife. \"I guess Executors aren't exactly-\"\n\n\"Please don't wave knives at me, Coaldust.\" Harliss tightened her grip on her pistol, her voice sharp.\n\n\"Oh...\" The urd'thin swallowed, his eyes drifting to her gun. \"Right, right. Sorry about that.\"\n\nHarliss relaxed, offering an easy smile. \"Forgiven. Speaking of Prav. I asked Deputy Hatha to inform him that we'd like to meet. How long should I expect to wait before one of Prav's lackeys inevitably comes out to tell us to fuck off?\"\n\nCoaldust flicked his ribbon-festooned tail. \"That probably is what's gonna happen, yeah. If I had to guess, I'd say within an hour or two from whenever you asked? That's about how long he usually likes to keep people waiting.\"\n\nHarliss chuckled. \"I don't suppose that has to do anything with the two-hour minimum you charged us?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, definitely not.\" Sarcasm dripped from the urd'thin's voice. He tossed the blade between his hands. \"He's definitely not looking to sell drinks and sex while people wait to see him. That would never happen. Especially not to uptight Union folks.\" He flashed Harliss a grin. \"Not that you three seem as uptight as most. Well...\" He leaned over to stare at Tormin. \"You do. But the Executor, less so, and this one?\" He tilted his head back against Evlee. \"I'd never guess this one was in the Union.\"\n\nEvlee giggled, and shrugged. \"Thank you! I'll take that as a compliment. We can't all be up stuffy, uptight monster-haters with sticks up our ass.\"\n\nCoaldust chittered laughter. \"You know, there's probably people that pay good money for that last part. But on that note, here's a question for you.\" He pivoted on Evlee's knees, towards Harliss. \"Madam Executor is probably the best one to ask.\"\n\nHarliss inclined her head. \"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"What is with all that monster shit?\" Coaldust tucked the knife against his arm, likely to avoid looking too threatening. \"How come most of the Union is so xenophobic? I hear that shit a lot from your people.\" He waved his free hand in a little circle, adopting a faux, upper-crust accent. \"I daresay, gnolls are filthy monsters! Kobolds are murderous beasts! Va'chaak are hideous lizards! Dragons are demons! Such vile spawn of evil should not exist.\"\n\nTormin snorted in derision. Whether he took more offense at the accent, or at the concept, Harliss wasn't certain. \"Probably cause not that long ago, those were the only impressions people ever had. Armies of murderous monsters, rampaging and slaughtering and-\"\n\nHarliss held her hand up, and Tormin cut himself off. \"Coaldust was asking me, Tormin.\"\n\nCoaldust glanced at Tormin. \"Yeah, uh, that sorta answer is exactly why I didn't ask you. You work around here long enough, you get a sense for the ones who'd rather see you wiped out. You kinda got that stink about you.\"\n\nTormin let out a long sigh. \"Not wiped out.\" He went for his drink, then gestured at Coaldust with his glass. \"And I don't have anything against urd'thin. We've had those in the Union for ages.\"\n\n\"You know, when you call us 'those', it kinda sounds like you do got something against urd'thin.\" Coaldust shrugged, and flipped his scarf over his shoulder dismissively. \"S'fine, though, I'm used to it from Union...\" He trailed off with his mouth open, amending whatever insulting term he was about to use. \"Guests.\" Instead, he turned his attention back to Harliss. \"So, yeah. All that monster stuff. What's that all about?\"\n\nHarliss shot Tormin a glare, a silent decree that he keep his damn mouth shut this time. \"I don't know how versed in world history you are, so I'll give you the short version. Generations ago, the lands that predated the Union were mostly inhabited by humans. They had isolated dragons, and gryphons, clashed with them over lands and conquests and such, but nothing like the southern half of the continent. Same with gnolls and kobolds and so on. The tribes of them we did have were mostly known for raids, and banditry.\"\n\n\"And then that big war, right? The first one?\" Coaldust idly swished his tail against Evlee's leg when she wrapped her arms around him, teasing at his belly fur. \"So what, you guys just still hate everyone a thousand years later, or whatever?\"\n\nHarliss chuckled. \"Not exactly the way I'd put it. The first real experience most of the Union's ancestors had with the non-human races came in the form of a great, conquering army, ravaging our lands. The Empire of the Black Star built an army out of the very creatures the rest of the world saw as monsters. Strategically speaking, it was a brilliant decision. Then they unleashed that armor to conquer the continent, in the worst mass shedding of blood the world's ever known.\" She paused. \"Well, the worst our continent has ever known, anyway. When it was done, the Empire placed its dragons in charge of its new provinces. They left their army of beasts behind to serve those dragons, and rule those lands. And rule them they did. Cruelly. For hundreds of years. Imagine generation after generation slaving away for the Empire, poor and poverty stricken. And watching their monstrous rulers grow fat off their labor. Or worse.\"\n\nSomething darker crept into her voice, her face hardening. \"Imagine a little girl, watching the va'chaak beat her father into a cripple, just because he didn't turn in enough lettuce that harvest. Or hearing her mother's screams, after the gnolls dragged her off to some back room. And all she can do is plead with the gods for a chance to stop it.\" Spittle flecked her lips, but she took a breath, relaxing. \"And that's how it was, for so much of what's now the Golden Union. For countless generations, that's all the Union's people ever knew them as. Monsters.\"\n\nCoaldust's ears stood rigid atop his head, his tail limp. He licked his muzzle, swallowed, and then picked up his mug. After wetting his throat, he bowed his head to the Executor. \"I'm sorry, I...I didn't mean to bring something that personal.\"\n\n\"Oh, think nothing of it.\" Harliss took her hand from her pistol, dismissing the idea with a quick wave. \"That was just an example, to answer your question.\"\n\nCoaldust gulped again. \"If you say so.\"\n\n\"I do say so.\" Harliss picked up her empty glass, staring into it. \"Don't worry, I save my personal stories for special occasions.\" She turned the glass over, watching a single golden droplet slowly slide down. \"Maybe Prav will even get to hear one.\" The droplet fell to the table, and Harliss thumped the glass back down. \"You can give Evlee's knife a toss, if you want. She won't mind, right Evlee?\"\n\n\"Not at all!\" Evlee pointed towards the large, wooden column nearby. \"Think you could stick it in there?\"\n\nCoaldust glanced between them, his ears splayed. \"You sure? I still kinda feel like I ruined the mood, with that question.\"\n\n\"Oh, Coaldust, please.\" Harliss leaned back, propping her boots up on the table. She offered the urd'thin a cheerful smile. \"You've been the afternoon's bright spot!\"\n\n\"You really have,\" Evlee said, trailing her fingers through his scarf. \"This is so pretty! Do you think I could try it on, while you try out my knife?\"\n\n\"Sure thing.\" Coaldust set the knife across his lap, then unwound the golden scarf and passed it to Evlee. The thick fur around the urd'thin's neck was flattened in odd places from the garment, but he quickly fluffed it back up with his fingers. \"Got scarf fur.\" He picked up the borrowed knife, and hopped off Evlee's lap.\n\nEvlee wrapped the scarf around herself, her hands roaming the golden silk. \"Ooh, I love it. How does it look?\"\n\n\"Surprisingly good,\" Tormin said, reaching out to straighten it. \"Fits you well.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Harliss locked her fingers behind her head. \"The gold matches your vest nicely, and goes well with the red in your jacket.\"\n\n\"Yeah, looks gorgeous on you.\" Coaldust smiled at her as he tested the balance of the knife. \"A beautiful scarf on a beautiful woman.\"\n\n\"Awwww!\" Evlee leaned down, cooing at him. \"You're just the sweetest little thing!\" She laughed, flourishing the scarf. \"Even if you are just fishing for another tip.\"\n\n\"What? Me?\" Coaldust put a hand to his chest, his ears flat in faux dismay. \"Never!\" He pivoted away from her. \"Okay, here goes.\" Coaldust lifted the knife over his head, and hurled it at the column with a grunt of effort. It spun through the air and stuck in the wood with a loud thunk, wobbling. \"Nice! I nailed it!\"\n\n\"You sure did!\" Evlee spun the end of the scarf around. \"Great throw!\"\n\n\"Thanks! I just barely got that rotation far enough around. That thing's heavy.\" Coaldust went to the post, grasped the knife, and started working it out of the wood.\n\n\"You'd refine your throw with practice, I'm sure.\" Harliss saluted him with her empty glass. The Executor wondered if Coaldust was truly just a brothel worker. \"Going to have another go?\"\n\n\"Nah, I better quit while I'm ahead.\" The knife came free all at once, and Coaldust stumbled back a few paces. \"Next time I'd clank it, for sure.\" He handed the knife back to Evlee. \"Thanks for lettin' me try that.\"\n\n\"You're more than welcome.\" Evlee gave the blade a cursory inspection. \"That really was an excellent throw.\" She tucked it away. \"Especially considering how unused to handling larger equipment you are.\"\n\n\"Oh, you'd be surprised how often I end up handing larger equipment.\" Coaldust picked up his mug. \"There's this gnoll who comes by now and then, and...\" He drained his ale, then licked his muzzle, pinning his ears. \"Wait, you're talking about knives, right? I knew that.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, rolling her glass around in her hand. \"Yes, Coaldust. Though, if they expect you to handle gnolls, I can see why they teach you how to use those knives in the first place.\" She tilted her head. \"I can't help but notice your mug is empty. If you're going for another, you could talk me into one, as well.\"\n\n\"Sure! Anyone else?\" He took Evlee's glass when she handed it to him, then glanced at Tormin, who shook his head. Harliss passed him coins for the next round, and he scampered off. \"Be right back!\"\n\n\"He's so cute!\" Evlee leaned towards Harliss. \"I wanna keep him!\"\n\nTormin stared at her, his mouth drawn into a line. \"They don't sell the whores, Evlee.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe I could hire him away!\" She toyed with the scarf, murmuring to herself.\n\n\"I sincerely doubt you could afford him, Evlee.\" Harliss twisted around to watch Coaldust scurry up the bar, and collect the drinks from the kobolds. \"It sounds like he makes more than enough money, already. And he's not going to want to move from somewhere he's accepted, to somewhere he's going to be sneered at.\"\n\nEvlee rolled her eyes. \"That's easy to deal with. Anyone who sneers at him answers to me.\"\n\nCoaldust soon hurried back. He set the tray up on the table, then plopped himself back down in Evlee's lap again. \"What'd I miss?\"\n\n\"Evlee here wants to hire you to be her servant.\" Harliss smirked at the other woman.\n\n\"Oh yeah?\" Coaldust laughed and took a drink of ale. \"I don't think I'm quite Executor-level material, but I appreciate the thought.\"\n\n\"That's roughly what I tried to tell her.\" Harliss sipped her whiskey, savoring it.\n\n\"Oh, I bet I could make it worth his while.\" Evlee rested her hands on the urd'thin's thighs, trailing her fingers through their fur.\n\nCoaldust shivered, and made a happy little chittering sound. \"I appreciate the offer, but believe it or not, I'm happy enough where I am. You know, where it's relatively safe, compared to a warship. But, you keep doing that, and I might give it some thought.\"\n\n\"Mhm.\" Evlee worked her hands in little circles, pushing his kilt up his legs. She rested her chin against Coaldust's head, leaving her face framed by his horns, and ears. \"So, gnolls, hmm? Are they as big as they seem? You know, everywhere else?\"\n\nThe urd'thin took another swig of his beer, stroking Evlee's arm. \"They're proportional, yeah, so while it varies by the individual, they can be pretty impressive.\" He laughed, shrugging. \"Then again, they're probably more impressive to an urd'thin than a human.\"\n\n\"And just how impressive is an urd'thin?\" Evlee giggled, her head still resting against his.\n\n\"You keep teasin' me like that, you're gonna find out.\" Coaldust laughed with her, sipping his beer.\n\nTormin sighed, leaning his head back. \"I'm just gonna stare at the ceiling.\"\n\n\"Come on, Tormin, don't act like you don't know what happens in a brothel.\" Harliss rolled her eyes.\n\n\"I just didn't expect Evlee to get involved.\" He rubbed his face, scowling. \"Well, maybe with a human.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd take a human!\" Evlee lifted her head towards the balcony, where a few half-clothed people wandered. \"I'd take him, or her...or both at once! I'd be half interested in that gnoll, too. Though, I think if I really going to indulge my curiosity, I'd go with Hatha.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah, Hatha's great. He's real nice.\" Coaldust fidgeted, adjusting his kilt. \"But he's not available. He's a security deputy.\"\n\n\"So, Coaldust.\" Harliss swirled her glass, watching Evlee's hands work their magic. The more distracted the urd'thin was, the less guarded his answers to her questions might be. \"Speaking of guests with, shall we say, impressive equipment? I couldn't help but notice the giant doors out front. What are those for?\" She knit her brows. \"Gryphons, or something?\"\n\nCoaldust shivered as Evlee kneaded at his furred thighs. \"Gryphons mostly, but we get occasional dragon guests, too. Honestly, I really like the gryphons. All those feathers are so pretty! I just wanna pet 'em and hug 'em.\"\n\n\"Must be interesting,\" Harliss said. \"Seeing all those different creatures.\" She sipped at her whiskey. \"Ever get anything really exotic?\"\n\n\"Well...\" The urd'thin's eyes were half-lidded, now. \"Think we had a swamp dragon, once. Webbed paws, emerald scales, and everything. Had a few people from another part of the world, looked kinda like wolves? Not sure what they were. Didn't speak much of the local tongue.\"\n\n\"Swamp dragons and wolf people?\" Harliss took a sip of whiskey, then set her glass down. \"No, I don't think we have those on this continent at all.\"\n\n\"Oh! One time?\" The urd'thin opened his eyes again, a spark of excitement shining in them. \"We had some visitors from that dragon empire, on one of the far continents.\" He gave a chittering laugh. \"Think they just called it, The Valley. At least they told us that's where they were from. Couple dragons, couple gryphons. Kinda stand-offish, though.\"\n\nHarliss stole a look at Tormin, who gave her a nearly imperceptible nod, then scoffed aloud. \"Dragon Empire? I still can't believe those hell-spawned monstrosities could ever build an empire.\"\n\n\"Gryphons helped them, you know.\" Evlee shifted herself beneath the urd'thin, draping an arm around his middle, the other still resting on his thigh. \"Which seems so strange to me. I thought they hated each other.\"\n\n\"No, Evlee,\" Harliss said, circling a finger on her glass. \"The Union's snow gryphon tribe hates dragons, and vice versa. But hat's not the case for all of them.\"\n\nCoaldust perked up, ears swiveled forward, his attention newly refocused on the conversation. \"You guys really do have a whole gryphon tribe?\"\n\nHarliss smiled, nodding. \"We do. You've probably seen them here before. They're white, like the snow, with black highlights. They're quite striking.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah!\" The urd'thin bounced on Evlee's lap. \"I have seen a few like that. But I didn't realize that whole tribe works for you.\" Coaldust narrowed his eyes. \"Don't your people hate gryphons, too?\"\n\nTormin picked up for Harliss. \"The snow gryphons are different. They've always lived in the far northern mountains of the Union. And a century or so ago, our people realized if we were going to have a chance against the Empire and its monsters, we needed some monsters of our own.\"\n\n\"So you made an alliance or something?\" Coaldust drank some ale, looking around at everyone.\n\n\"Something like that.\" Harliss leaned forward, smiling. \"Since you like gryphons, I'd be happy to let you meet mine, sometime.\"\n\nThe urd'thin gave a little gasp. \"You have some working for you?\"\n\n\"She does!\" Evlee giggled, sliding her fingers up the urd'thin's inner thigh to distract him again. \"And they're the bestest boys and goodest girls ever!\"\n\nEvlee's touch left Coaldust trembling. He collected himself, glancing at her. \"That's cute, but I dunno how they'd feel about being called that.\"\n\n\"Oh, they don't mind Evlee's eccentricities too much.\" Harliss lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. \"They'd even let you pet and hug them!\"\n\nCoaldust brightened, one of his ears splayed in lopsided fashion. \"That'd be fun! If it's okay with the gryphons, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course! I'll ask them tonight.\" Harliss leaned back in her chair. \"Say, Coaldust, have you had any of our gryphons in here lately? White ones with black highlights?\"\n\nThe urd'thin rubbed his gray muzzle in thought. \"I think so, yeah. A few weeks ago, I think. Maybe a month?\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Harliss sipped her whiskey again to help hide her interest. That almost had to be him. \"What did they look? Were they male, or female? Maybe I know them, I've worked with most of the snow gryphons assigned to this region at one point or another.\"\n\n\"White, like you said. But with black edges to his wings, and his tail. And big. Real big.\" Coaldust held his mug as high up as he could, as if indicating height. \"Way bigger than most gryphons, but I guess the white ones usually are. And he was male.\" A smirk flashed across his muzzle. \"Definitely male.\"\n\n\"Sneak a peek, did you?\" Harliss arched a brow.\n\nEvlee giggled, patting the urd'thin's leg. \"Maybe the gryphon paid for Coaldust's services!\"\n\nCoaldust put a hand over his muzzle, laughing in his palm. \"Oh, gods, I wouldn't even know where to start with a gryphon!\" He flattened his ears. \"It'd be like the size of my leg!\"\n\nEveryone at the table laughed, even Tormin. Through their laughter, Harliss exchanged quick glances with her two bodyguards. A male snow gryphon, with black edged wings. That was absolutely one of their targets. At least their previous lead had panned out. It confirmed Alakor had been here, if not as recently as she'd hoped. There was a lot of time now unaccounted for. Harliss had plenty of suspicions about his activities, but for now, she focused on learning more.\n\n\"So, did he hire someone else then?\" Evlee picked up the conversation. \"Oh, that naughty boy!\"\n\n\"No, no, nothing like that.\" The urd'thin took another swallow of his ale. \"I kinda get the feeling they're not really supposed to indulge that way.\" He set his beer down, wiping his muzzle with the back of his hand. \"They're way more disciplined then the other gryphons we get. But, a few of the white ones hire services, now and then.\"\n\nHarliss chuckled, shrugging. \"Don't worry, I won't tell on them. You said the one with the black-edged wings didn't, though?\"\n\n\"Nah, he just food, and lots of drinks. He was in here at least a few nights in a row. Boss tried to sell him company, of course, but he always seemed preoccupied.\" Coaldust idly caressed Evlee's arms, draped across him. \"He was asking about some of our other guests, kinda like you're doing, actually.\" A smile twitched at his muzzle. \"He lost, or something?\"\n\nHarliss tilted her head. \"Or something.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Coaldust gave a little nod. \"I don't like snitchin' on guests who don't cause trouble, but...I kinda feel like it's in my own best interests to do so.\"\n\n\"The more helpful you are, the bigger tip you're going to get.\" Harliss patted the coin purse tucked under her jacket, right next to one of her pistols. \"What guests was he asking about?\"\n\nCoaldust licked his nose. \"Some other gryphons, actually. The ones from The Valley. Asked about the dragons, too, but mostly the gryphons.\"\n\nHarliss tapped a finger against the table, wondering what the hell Alakor was doing. His files made it clear he'd been exposed to extremely dangerous knowledge. Somehow, Harliss she doubted just fleeing the Union was going to be enough for him. If he was looking for allies across the sea, it wasn't for refuge.\n\n\"I don't suppose you happened to overhear any of his specific conversations, did you?\" Harliss gestured towards his ears. \"Your people do have notoriously good hearing.\"\n\n\"It's because they have such big, adorable ears!\" Evlee traced her fingers across the edges of the urd'thin's ears.\n\n\"I may have heard a thing or two.\" Coaldust's white-tipped ears twitched under the attention.\n\nHarliss gazed around. Urd'thin workers were spread around the room, their ears constantly swiveling from person to person. \"I'm sure Prav never considered that your people might overhear all sorts of interesting tidbits, whilst they went relatively unnoticed.\"\n\nCoaldust gave a mock gasp, his maw hanging open. \"What?\" He put a hand to his chest. \"No, never!\"\n\nTormin leaned over, his voice low, and ever so slightly menacing. \"Just like I'm sure he'd never expect you to report back on whatever confidential conversation you might have with an Executor.\"\n\nCoaldust swallowed, holding up his hands. \"Hey, we're all friends here, right? I'd never betray that confidence.\" He reached for his mug, took a swallow, then offered them all a smile. \"At least, not in a way that might get me shot in the head tomorrow.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, slapping her hand against the table. \"That's not bad, Coaldust, not bad. But don't worry, I like you.\" She picked her up glass, gazing at the faintly golden liquid sloshing inside. \"And I hate shooting people I like.\" Harliss sipped her Gryphon Plume, savoring the hints of butterscotch and warming toffee, finishing with a trace of spice. \"This really is good.\" She glanced at the urd'thin. \"Alright, Mister Big Ears. What, specifically, was my lost bird inquiring about?\"\n\n\"I didn't get all the specifics, mind you.\" Coaldust rolled his mug between his hands, a hint of nervousness slinking into his voice. \"First, he just asked about the foreign gryphons. Seemed really disappointed he missed them. The next night it got weird, though. See, when those overseas dragons and gryphons were here, they were saying some real strange things. And your bird? He started asking about that.\"\n\n\"Strange things?\" Harliss sat back, scowling. None of the pieces were lining up quite the way she expected them too. \"Strange, how?\"\n\nCoaldust scratched at the base of his horns. \"Strange like...a cult, I guess? One of the dragons claimed to talk to the stars, or some weird shit like that. And one of the gryphons...\" He trailed off, scrunching his muzzle. \"What did he say?\" Coaldust drummed his fingers against his mug, then his eyes lit up. \"Oh, that was it! Said they were servants of the sun's feathers, or something. That's what your bird was asking about, all that cult shit the foreigners were discussing.\" Coaldust glanced around as the other three remained silent. He licked his nose. \"Honestly, I just thought he was investigating some crazy sect.\"\n\nHarliss took a slow breath, scowling. \"The Servants of the Sun-Feather.\" She paused, uncertain how best to describe them, or if she even should.\n\n\"It's damn gryphon blasphemy.\" Tormin slapped the table hard enough to rattle all the glasses and his shotgun. \"Bunch of feathered lunatics who think the world is ending, and some golden gryphon is going to save them...\" He trailed off, muttering under his breath.\n\nHarliss picked up for Tormin. \"They're a cult, Coaldust, you're right. They believe in an old gryphon myth.\" She waved a hand. \"That a gryphon was visited by the gods, anointed with golden feathers, and warned of the world's impending end.\" Harliss offered Coaldust a carefully constructed smile. The truth was far more complicated, and Harliss did not share the Union's view of it. But there were some things even the Union didn't need to know. \"Did you catch anything else, unusual? From either the cultists or the snow gryphon? Anything that sticks out in your mind as especially strange?\"\n\nThe urd'thin flicked his tail and took a drink of beer. \"The sun.\" He licked his nose, nervousness glittering in his eyes. \"They were talking about the sun. You ever hear those rumors, about how it's not as bright as it used to be?\"\n\nHarliss tensed deep inside. Outwardly, she projected nothing but practiced calm. \"I think everyone's heard the folk tales, yes.\"\n\n\"Well, they were talking about those stories. Only...\" Coaldust scowled, a few sharp teeth exposed. \"They didn't really sound like they thought they were stories. They sounded like they thought the sun was really dying.\"\n\nThe Executor offered a cold smile, while the others remained silent. \"That's where their name comes from, yes. Servants of the Sun-Feather.\"\n\nCoaldust scratched one of his ears. \"Guess it's not a cult till they think the apocalypse is coming.\" He chittered nervous laughter. \"I didn't think much of it, at the time. Not like they're the only crazies and cultists we get out here. Hell, we had this one human who tried to us there was some kind of...\" He waggled his mug. \"Ship, I guess, hidden under all the ice clouds in the Boiling Emptiness.\"\n\n\"A ship?\" Harliss arched a brow. \"There's probably hundreds of crashed ships down there.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but he didn't say crashed. He said hidden.\" Coaldust punctuated it by thrusting his mug. \"Like someone put it there on purpose. The best part was when he tried to tell us this hidden ship used sail to other worlds! Claimed the Empire was looking for it, before your Union conquered 'em.\" He shook his head, his ears splayed.\n\nAll at once, Harliss's blood went cold. The urd'thin wasn't as far from the truth as he thought. Then again, maybe those gryphons weren't, either. Harliss downed the last of her whiskey. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, forcing herself to maintain a mask of disinterest.\n\nTormin grunted, folding his arms. \"Sounds like a looney who musta fried his brain with something.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what I thought.\" Coaldust followed Harliss's lead, finishing his beer. He set the mug on the table, and settled back against Evlee. \"Course, I assumed the same thing about those gryphons and their dying sun, till that white bird started asking about it too.\"\n\nHarliss was happy to let them dismiss the rumors as the ravings of some drug-addled madman. For now, she seized the chance to redirect the conversation back towards her runaway spy. \"Oh? The snow gryphon was asking about the sun, as well?\"\n\n\"A little bit.\" Coaldust resumed stroking Evlee's arms as she teased his fur. \"Mostly asking if the cult was talking about it a dying sun.\"\n\nHarliss rubbed her chin, unable to stop a hint of dismay creeping across her features. Alakor had earned himself an unusually high level of trust among the snow gryphon spies. If he was actively cultivating that trust to gain access to secretive information, there was no telling what he might have learned. Then there were the reports from former squad mates, the things he muttered about in the throes of dreams. Was it somehow possible that he knew about-\n\n\"Hey! Union bitch!\"\n\nAn angry, hateful shout ripped through the tavern's cacophonous din like a bullet through flesh. Tormin and Evlee had guns in their hands in a flash. Silence fell across the gathered crowd like a smothering blanket. Harliss, meanwhile, made a point not to draw. If someone were going to shoot her in the back, they'd have already done it. Instead, she completely ignored whoever was shouting. Instead, she held out her glass towards the urd'thin.\n\n\"Coaldust, another drink, if you please.\" She waggled the glass. \"Quickly now.\"\n\n\"Yes, Coaldust.\" Evlee set one pistol down on the table. She unwound Coaldust's scarf, then draped it over his shoulder. \"I think it's time to get down, now.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Coaldust gathered up his scarf, and hopped down. He snatched the Executor's glass off the table. \"Back in a flash.\"\n\nHarliss gently caught his arm as he passed, lowering her voice. \"Careful now, Coaldust. I've a feeling things are about to get exciting.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Nira left Malaresh and the others at the entryway to the observation deck as she went inside. Despite the name, it was more akin to an enclosed patio. Tall, thick glass plates in brass frames spanned the outer wall in immense, rectangular windows. Their thickness distorted the view, but provided additional stability. Sunlight streaming in warmed the room despite the cold air just outside. Tables and chairs sat alongside padded gryphon loungers. A door locked with sturdy bolts provided access to a small exterior balcony ringed with tall railings.\n\nAlakor rested atop a lounger, though the massive gryphon scarcely fit. He brushed his paw pads across the dark wood and faded maroon upholstery. Alakor chirruped to himself, stroking a single finger over a line of threadbare golden stitching. He turned his head, inspecting scratches and gouges left from years of use by gryphons.\n\n\"Never saw anything like this, back in the Union.\" Alakor stroked the upholstery again as Nira approached. The gryphon flattened his ears. \"Furniture is for people, they said. We barely even had a place to sleep. We'd get animal hides, or an oversized hound's bed. Or a dozen of them, all in a row. They used to have us sleeping wing to wing in some drafty barn. We certainly never got chairs.\"\n\n\"You must really hate the Golden Union.\" Nira pulled up a seat alongside him, and eased into it. She gestured towards him. \"The Empire's gryphons call those things loungers. They were pretty common, back home.\"\n\n\"So, I've heard. But I doubt you came to lecture me on furniture. Are you here ask me about my former masters, then?\" For the briefest moment, anger and resentment roiled in Alakor's bright blue eyes. He blinked, and the look was gone, replaced once more by something unreadable. \"And how much I hate them?\"\n\n\"I suspect you know exactly what I'm here to ask you about.\" Nira watched the gryphon closely. Some small draft ruffled his white feathers. The black tips of his wings fluttered in random order, stirred by the unseen breeze. When Alakor didn't respond, Nira answered for him. \"Malaresh and I think you're here for revenge, not escape.\"\n\nThe gryphon did not flinch, or flatten his ears, or shift his weight. He merely stared out the thick glass windows, unperturbed. \"Could either of you blame me if I was?\"\n\n\"No.\" Nira leaned forward in her chair, sharpening her voice. \"But I could damn sure blame you for trying to manipulate me and my ship.\"\n\n\"I haven't been manipulating you.\" The gryphon swished his tail, but it was a casual, idle gesture, not a nervous one.\n\n\"Oh no?\" Nira clenched her jaw. \"You suggested which way we should go, framed it as if it were our best option. Yet you knew full well there would be Union ships awaiting us, didn't you?\"\n\nAlakor dipped his beak. \"I did.\"\n\n\"Ships you want us to shoot down!\" Nira slapped her knee for emphasis. \"What the hell do you call that, if not manipulation?\"\n\nAlakor rustled his wings. \"Your best option. The Union has deployed fleets across its borders in a show of force to all their neighbors. Your flight space is increasingly boxed in. One day, you'll find all your sanctuaries denied, and a full Union fleet in nearly every direction. But not at the Broken Teeth. Not yet, anyway. For now, there's recon ships, intelligence operatives, and spy hunters. It is your best option.\"\n\nNira grasped one of the long, black-tipped flight feathers lining Alakor's wings. \"And since you worked with their intelligence operatives, it's also your best option at a little revenge.\" Before the gryphon could reply, she yanked the feather free.\n\n\"Ow!\" The gryphon jerked back, hissing. \"Don't do that!\"\n\nMalaresh snorted amusement, somewhere behind Nira.\n\nThe princess twirled the large feather around her fingers, ignoring Alakor's protest. \"Those spy hunters are hunting you, I'm assuming. You're just trying to get us to blow them out of the sky, for you.\"\n\nAlakor shook his wing, wincing. \"Now that you mention it, that would helpful.\"\n\n\"How is that not manipulating us?\" Nira grit her teeth, squeezing the feather.\n\n\"I prefer to think of it as sharing mutual interests.\" The gryphon stretched his wing, inspecting it. \"That was a damn flight feather, you know.\"\n\n\"That's why I plucked it!\" Nira shook it at him. \"There's plenty more to yank out if I don't like your answers, or your attitude.\"\n\nAlakor folded his wing. \"I'm answering your questions, aren't I? Leave my poor plumage alone.\"\n\n\"You're dancing around them, more like.\" Nira ran her thumb against the feather. \"You really are a damn spy.\"\n\nAlakor flicked his tail. \"You sound as if you'd rather yell at me and tell me why you think I'm here. Go right ahead, if you think screaming will help matters.\" He pulled his wing tighter. \"Just don't pluck any more feathers, please.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to scream at you before, but I'm starting to.\" Nira leaned back in her chair. \"I'm guessing you get that a lot.\"\n\nAlakor shifted his weight, flattening his ears. \"Usually from my old masters, while they were beating me.\"\n\nNira rubbed her forehead, scowling. \"I'm not going to beat you, Alakor.\" When Alakor's gaze drifted past her, Nira twisted around to glance at Malaresh. The dragon sat in the entryway, his gazed fixed upon the gryphon. \"And neither is he. He's just keeping watch.\" She pivoted back to the gryphon. \"I'm trying to give you the chance to prove I can trust you. But I can't do that if you're constantly hiding things, or manipulating me.\" Nira leaned towards him. \"That makes sense, right? You have to understand why I need you to be truthful.\"\n\n\"Of course, it makes sense.\" Alakor waved a paw. \"I wouldn't want to serve a captain who was easily manipulated. So, I'm glad you're asking these questions.\" He tilted his head, staring at Malaresh. \"But there are things I am not yet comfortable discussing with you, or your especially large protector.\"\n\n\"That's not how this works, Alakor.\" Nira tossed his feather on the ground. \"You're defecting to my ship. You don't get to keep secrets. You tell me the truth, or I deny your defection.\"\n\nMalaresh thumped his tail against the floor, spines scratching at the wood. \"And then I toss you off the ship.\"\n\nNira shot the dragon a silencing glare, but did not deny his threat.\n\n\"That would be your right as captain.\" Alakor stretched a forepaw, gazing at it. \"If it's safe skies you want, I still recommend you transit The Broken Teeth, with or without me.\" He pulled his paw back, clicking his beak. \"Follow the island chains over the Sunken Seas if you want to reach the far continent. Diandrios might take you in. The Valley would, that's the dragon empire. But they'll want loyalty. If you wish to remain independent, find an island in the Abyss. The Boiling Emptiness, I think you call it.\"\n\nNira ran her hand down her face. \"You're fucking infuriating, you know that? I don't want to leave the whole continent behind. At least, not permanently.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Alakor's blue eyes pierced her deep into her soul. \"If you refuse to stand up to the Union's continued expansion-\"\n\n\"Shut your beak right there!\" Nira shot to her feet, balling up her fists. \"I'm not going to risk the lives of everyone on this ship fighting a war I cannot win! I already told you that. This ship's powerful, yes, but it wasn't enough to save the capital!\" She jabbed her finger at the gryphon. \"It helped down an already damaged fleet, but how many more did they have? How many fleets do they have now?\"\n\n\"Twelve.\" Alakor's voice was flat. \"With four more available as needed, pledged by their neighbors, as part of mutual protection truces. And more ships being laid down every day.\"\n\nNira heaved a sigh, dropping back into chair. Her anger rushed out as swiftly as it came, leaving behind only cold desolation. \"See? There's nothing we could do against them, anyway.\"\n\n\"Then why haven't you already left for good?\" Alakor gestured with a sweeping motion of his wing. \"You wander, to pirate ports, and islands, and even to the so-called small continents, but always you return here.\"\n\n\"Because the weather-\"\n\nAlakor held up a paw, cutting her off. \"You're going to say the weather here makes it easy to hide a ship this size, in the nearly ever-present clouds that skirt the mountains. You'll probably also say you've easy access to black markets for resupply.\" The gryphon dropped his paw down. \"But every nation has black markets, and places to hide. Hell, the islands that dot the Abyss are practically lawless. A ship like this, a crew like yours? You could take one over, if you wanted. But you don't.\" Alakor shook his head. \"You always come back here.\"\n\nNira settled her hands on her lap, staring out the window. \"How the hell did you turn this conversation around on me?\"\n\nA smile parted Alakor's beak. \"I'm good at what I do, Nira.\"\n\n\"So it seems.\" She stared towards the sun. The crystalline windows diffused its red-gold brilliance, and gave it a fuzzy, shimmering halo. \"How long have you been watching us?\"\n\n\"Me personally?\" Alakor flexed his wings in a shrug. \"Long enough. But the Union's been watching you at least since you freed him.\" He waved a wing towards Malaresh, who grunted. \"Saving the dragon proved to the Union they had to take you very seriously. It helped lead to the truce you signed, but it also ensured they'd never let you roam untracked again. They've surveilled you every way they can. From snow gryphons hiding in the clouds, to spies watching you in pirate ports. Every game of hide and seek you play with their patrols, every warning shot you fire, every raid you've undertaken, it's all been logged.\" The gryphon tilted his head. \"You've had ten years to fly this ship across the world, find somewhere safe, and never come back. But you haven't. That speaks volumes, Nira. To me, and to the Union.\"\n\nNira swallowed. \"Is that why you think they're considering another attempt on my life? They finally realized I'm not just going to run away to the other side of the world?\"\n\n\"That may be a factor.\" Alakor held up his forepaws up, pads towards her. \"I forewarn you that some of what I may offer is only speculation. Further, internal debates rage amongst the Union leadership.\"\n\n\"I understand that.\" Nira a breath and held it till her lungs burned. She let it out as slowly as she could. \"Let's start with the big one. Are they really planning to try and kill me again?\" She shook a finger at the gryphon. \"And don't bullshit me with some long, roundabout answer. Just give the truth.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Alakor drew himself up, draping his wings over his sides. \"The truth, as I know it, is that they want your ship. Whether you're dead or alive is but a secondary concern. Some of the Union's leadership wants you killed. Others want you captured. There's a schism there, but what unites them is this.\" He swept a paw around the room. \"They all want this vessel. Not only is it a formidable weapon onto itself, but there are technological advances present here that the Union still struggles to replicate.\" He paused, staring at her. \"More importantly, it's rumored there are things on this ship that are, shall we say...\" Alakor chirruped, prickling up his crown feathers. \"Otherworldly?\"\n\nNira shivered, turning her eyes away. There were things on the ship she couldn't explain, things no one else had seen. Things hidden behind black doors. But she wasn't about to tell Alakor. \"Sounds like nonsense, to me.\"\n\n\"Yet you shuddered when I mentioned it.\" The gryphon sharpened his tone, his eyes like knives. \"I think you know what I'm talking about.\" He tilted his head, ever so slightly. \"Is it true?\"\n\nNira forced herself to meet his gaze, stone-faced. \"Is what true?\" When the gryphon only clicked his beak, Nira brushed the idea aside. \"So, is that the only reason they're after me? For my ship?\"\n\n\"I have other theories.\" The gryphon softened his voice, laying his crown feathers back down. \"One of which involves your sister.\"\n\nNira sucked in a breath before she could stop herself. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"Empress Tryn.\" Alakor idly stroked the lounger's cushion. \"Did you know that's what they call her, now?\"\n\nSomething crumbled inside Nira, a warm bulwark against a cold truth she fought so hard to ignore. In the last years of the Empire, she scarcely saw her sister. Tryn was younger than Nira, and still wrapped in studies while Nira was busy drinking with Rog. Nira did not often take time to remember her sister. The heartache was simply too much, whenever she imagined what might have been. The laughter they could have shared in taverns, the heartbreak they might have consoled one another over, the adventures they could have snuck away on. None of those things would ever come to pass, now. Nira tried to avoid thinking about Tryn, not because it was easier to imagine she was gone, but because she longed for things that could never be.\n\n\"I know.\" Nira forced words through her suddenly dry mouth. \"It was part of the truce, with me. If I'd stop doing things like freeing him...\" Nira tilted her head towards Malaresh. \"Then not only would the Golden Union stop pursuing me, but they'd allow the heart of the Empire to maintain a modicum of self-rule. Tryn had already surrendered herself, to save the people protecting her. So, I got to see her again, for a little while.\" The memory made of their long embrace brought tears to her eyes even as it left her smiling. \"It wasn't much but...\" She sniffed. \"It meant the world.\"\n\nAlakor bowed his head, offering her a moment to collect herself.\n\nThe princess wiped her eyes and went on. \"The Union offered make her Empress. We knew she was only ever going to be their puppet, of course. But we both felt it was the best way to keep our people, and each other, safe. Tryn's smart enough to ask the capital to cooperate, because she knows the alternative would be worse.\"\n\nNira went quiet, grinding her teeth. As much as she hated the idea of her people accepting Union occupation, it was better than seeing them wiped out. And at least she knew Tryn was safe. Up until the truce, Nira hadn't even known where her sister was hiding. The princess thought it safer that way. No one could give up a location they did not have. But in the end, the Union found Tryn anyway. Sickening as the thought made her, Nira was thankful the Golden Union was more interested in a puppet than shedding any more Imperial blood.\n\nThe gryphon nodded. \"Your sister plays her role very well. Almost too well. There are fears she plans to reach out to you in secret. A ship and crew like this would make a fine shadow army for a rebellious lapdog to wield against her masters.\"\n\nNira straightened in an instant. \"No! No, she can't!\" She smacked a fist against the chair. \"She absolutely can't! It'll only put her in danger.\"\n\nThe gryphon flared up his crown feathers. \"When has danger ever stopped you? Your sister, I suspect, is no different.\" He clicked his beak. \"However, I assure you the risk is more yours to bear than hers. They can't exactly have her executed now that they've named her Empress. At least, not without triggering a fresh rebellion.\" Alakor tilted his head. \"You, however, have become a folk hero. If they killed you in secret, few would ever hear of it, and fewer still would believe it.\"\n\nNira dropped her hands into her lap, grimacing. \"And they wouldn't have to worry about me trying to help Tryn, someday.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Alakor held up a paw. \"Now, keep in mind, these are my theories. To know for certain, you'd have to ask someone more knowledgeable.\" The gryphon warbled, a thoughtful noise. \"Someone hunting a runaway spy, perhaps.\" He tapped his claw tips against the lounger. \"But wherever might you find such a person?\"\n\nNira groaned, putting her head in her hand. \"Let me guess. The fucking Emplacement.\"\n\nAlakor perked his ears. \"Yes, I think that's a good place to start. If I were hunting a runaway spy, I'd certainly look there.\"\n\nNira leaned back in her chair, appraising him. \"Kasis suggested The Emplacement from the beginning. She said their pass through the Teeth is the easiest to reach, and the safest. It also means we could stop and ask Prav's information brokers about the Union on the way.\" Nira's voice hardened. \"You knew that, didn't you?\"\n\nA smile parted the gryphon's beak. \"Yes. I chose to make myself known at a time when The Emplacement was your best option. If anything, you girls were late in apprehending me. I was about to risk approaching you myself.\"\n\nNira took a slow breath, setting her hand upon her gun. \"You know, I came here to confront you being manipulated for your revenge, but...\" She drummed her fingers. \"I think we're past that.\"\n\n\"You make it sound so callous.\" Alakor shook his head. \"But allow me to answer the questions you surely came here to ask.\" He lifted a paw, ticking off fingers. \"Yes, I want revenge against the Union. Yes, I have built a grand trap, of which you and your ship are very important pieces. And yes, I have already set its machinery in motion. The cogs are turning now, regardless of whether you agree to help me, or not.\" Alakor set his forepaw back down. \"But I assure you, my revenge, and your escape are not mutually exclusive.\"\n\nThe Princess watched him closely. Alakor gazed back at her, his expression blank and his body language as neutral as if he were merely discussing the weather. \"I'm starting to get the feeling this is about a lot more than having us blast a few ships for you.\"\n\nThe gryphon offered a smile, its friendliness belied by his words. \"Quite right. I have not awaited an opportunity like this, merely to see a few insignificant vessels downed.\"\n\n\"Then what if we just don't go to The Emplacement, at all?\" Nira leaned forward, trying to find some chink in his armor, something to get a rise out of him. \"What if I have you banished from my ship, forever?\"\n\nAlakor only shrugged his wings. \"That would be your prerogative as captain.\"\n\nA snarl crept into Nira's voice. \"Yes, it would! So what happens to your grand plan then, if you didn't have my ship playing its part?\"\n\nSlowly, deliberately, Alakor pushed himself up on the lounger until he was looming over Nira. Malaresh growled a warning behind her. Nira held a hand up, quieting the dragon. As the gryphon spread his vast wings, Nira forced herself to meet Alakor's gaze without so much as blinking.\n\n\"My dear Princess,\" Alakor said, crown feathers raised. \"Your ship will play its part regardless. The Union will see to that.\" He lowered his head towards her. \"But please, believe me. When that moment comes, you will want me on your side.\"\n\nNira shot to her feet, and snatched the gryphon by his beak. \"Believe you? How the hell do you expect me to do that, when you've done is lie?\"\n\n\"I have not lied to you.\" Alakor jerked his beak out of her grasp. Something new crept into his voice, a long-smoldering coal he'd kept hidden till now. \"I made a calculated choice to be as honest as I can without divulging every secret I possess. I understand I must earn your trust.\" He slapped his forepaw against the lounger, hissing. \"But you have to earn mine, too!\"\n\nNira finally relented, folding her arms. She glowered at him, refusing to let his size intimidate her. \"I could have you tortured, you know. Till you spilled all these secrets.\"\n\n\"No.\" Alakor shook his head, settling back onto his belly. \"You could not. I am not some common soldier to be so easily broken. You would kill me, before you would loosen my tongue.\"\n\nThe princess pinched the bridge of her nose. \"I wasn't being serious, Alakor.\" She turned towards the windows, gazing at the sky. \"But normally, a military defector shares their secret information and valuable intelligence. Otherwise, you're a just...\" She shrugged. \"A refugee. And I'd just take you somewhere safe.\"\n\n\"I have given you valuable information.\" Alakor watched her through narrowed blue eyes, his ears flat. \"I told you they're going to be hunting you-\"\n\n\"You told me what you needed me to know!\" Nira spun back towards him, jabbing a finger in the air. \"You gave me a bunch of nebulous theories, and filled my head with questions! You tossed me into a cloud of half-truths, so you can push me to seek clearer answers at The Emplacement! I don't call that valuable. I call that manipulative!\" She took a breath, and let it out slow. \"I know you have your reasons, but please. If you want me to trust you, give me something useful.\"\n\nAlakor ground his beak. \"Very well. The Union has designed new vessels based on their losses in battle against the Cataclysm. Their newest generation can significantly outfly you. They might not outgun you, but soon, their fleets will out-range you.\" The gryphon swept his wing out, gesturing at the ship's walls. \"They seek to nullify your advantage in weaponry by ensuring you cannot close the distance enough to return fire.\"\n\nA chill shook her. That wasn't a new fear, but hearing it put to words by someone from the Union left her blood running cold. \"Is that one of your secrets?\" Nira leaned against the window, grimacing. \"Because we already knew they've been working on faster ships with bigger guns.\"\n\n\"No, Princess.\" The gryphon stared at her, unblinking. \"The secret is that they're already fielding them.\"\n\nNira straightened, sucking in a breath. That was new. They thought the Union's next generation of warships was years away, if not decades. \"The Union is fielding new airships?\" Malaresh's words earlier in the day drifted through her mind. A Union vessel, but not of a make nor marking that I am familiar with.\n\nShe turned towards the dragon. \"Do you think that's what you saw?\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled from his spot in the doorway. \"It is certainly possible.\" The dragon licked his muzzle. \"I saw an unfamiliar vessel, bird. With strange colors, and markings.\"\n\n\"Can you describe it?\"\n\nThe dragon tilted his head. \"It was sleek, almost strangely so. Bigger than recon vessels, but not as large as a destroyer. Well armed, I think, though I only saw it at a distance. The Union rarely paints their entire vessels, but this one was completely white and gold.\"\n\n\"White and gold?\" Alakor swallowed hard, his black-tipped crown feathers rising in alarm. He worked his beak, muttering to himself. \"Then she's early. Or am I late?\" He ruffled himself up, then turned his attention back to the princess. \"That, your Highness, is The Stormcaller. It is an Executor ship.\"\n\nMalaresh hissed, an angry, disconcerting sound. The dragon's gold-tipped frills flared up in threatening display. He dragged unsheathed claws across the floor, scratching deep ruts. \"There's an Executor on that ship?\"\n\nAlakor nodded once. \"Her name is Harliss. She commands the newest ship in the-\"\n\n\"I should have attacked it!\" Malaresh lashed his tail, the spines gouging wood. \"And killed that damn Executor, just like the last one!\"\n\nNira furrowed her brow, scowling. While she knew the dragon had highly unpleasant personal experiences with an Executor during his captivity, he'd never truly discussed it. Nira was certainly not about to make him relive his trauma now. She walked back to Malaresh, then gently stroked his scales. \"Are you alright?\"\n\nThe dragon growled loud enough for Nira to feel the vibrations against her palm. \"I will be fine.\"\n\nThe Princess pointed towards the corridor, where the others waited. \"Do you want to wait outside? It's alright if-\"\n\n\"No!\" Malaresh stomped a forepaw. \"I will...\" He licked his muzzle, sighing. \"Calm myself.\" The dragon gazed at Alakor. \"Answer her questions, bird, I will hold my tongue.\"\n\n\"If you're certain.\" Nira patted Malaresh's chest, then returned to the gryphon. \"I'm afraid I don't know as much about the Union's Executors as you two. Give me the gist of it.\"\n\nAlakor stared at Malaresh, then turned his attention back to Nira. \"Executors are akin to special inquisitors, serving the Union's military and church alike. They are so-titled because they are considered to execute the will of the Three Gods. Technically speaking, they're high level field commanders with their own ships, crews, and carte-blanche authority.\" The gryphon waved a wing. \"They undertake all manner of dangerous missions, and secretive investigations. In this case, hunting down a rogue spy.\" He put a paw to his chest, then flicked his wingtip towards Nira. \"And apprehending enemy royalty.\"\n\n\"This Executor is here for both of us?\" Nira crossed her arms, clenching her jaw.\n\nAlakor only smiled. \"See? I told you my revenge and your escape were not mutually exclusive.\"\n\nNira shook her head. \"I should have just had you shot.\"\n\nThe gryphon warbled laughter. \"I get that a lot.\"\n\nMalaresh growled again. \"It's not to late to change your mind, Princess.\"\n\n\"Truthfully,\" Alakor said, ignoring the dragon. \"I am likely Executor Harliss's primary target. But she's likely been involved in the efforts to track you. You would make a tempting target of opportunity.\"\n\n\"As would this Executor,\" Nira said. \"If she's half as important as you make her sound.\" She scowled. \"Which makes me think you've lured her here, as well.\"\n\n\"Why set a trap, if not for the finest quarry?\" The gryphon offered an infuriating, open-beaked grin, but it swiftly faded. \"That said, The Stormcaller can fly rings around this ship, and is armed with much newer weaponry. The Cataclysm would be victorious, but not without potentially significant casualties. And the Executor herself is more dangerous still. Do not underestimate her.\"\n\nNira leaned against the window. The glass was cool against her shoulder. \"I'm sure she is. I rather doubt the Union picks these people from the rank and file.\"\n\n\"They most certainly do not.\" Alakor drummed his fingers against the lounger. \"They're the Golden Union's most renowned combatants and gunfighters. Each of the twelve current Executors attained the rank and title only after surviving at least one event that should have killed them. Their service records are littered with the impossible. Successfully completing suicide missions, singlehandedly outgunning entire Empire squads, surviving otherwise mortal wounds, and so on. As a result, the Church has declared them Sanctified. Their survivability is officially considered a divine blessing.\"\n\nMalaresh gave a derisive snort. \"They still burn.\"\n\nNira rolled her eyes. \"Sounds like bullshit, to me. They're well trained soldiers who got lucky.\"\n\nThe gryphon only shrugged his wings. \"Regardless, that's why they hold high ranks in both Church, and military hierarchies. The Church also tasks some of them with the Union's dirty work.\" Alakor fluffed up his feathers with a distasteful hiss. \"Assassinations, inquisitions, punishment of village-wide blasphemy...\" He trailed off, glancing at Malaresh. \"Do you wish me to stop?\"\n\nMalaresh lashed his tail again. \"Oh no, Bird. Tell her what else they do.\"\n\n\"Executors hunted dragons, during the war.\" Alakor shifted his weight, uneasy. \"They were often in command of the snow gryphons sent after Malaresh's people.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Nira turned towards the dragon. \"Mal, I didn't know-\"\n\nThe dragon waved her off, his voice terse. \"Continue your conversation.\"\n\nThe Princess sighed, turning back towards Alakor. \"I take it these Executors still command your people?\"\n\n\"They consider snow gryphons to be one of their 'tools', yes.\" He pinned his ears. \"I was not owned by one, but I was often deployed to an Executor's service.\"\n\nOwned by one? That made it sound as if some Executors had their own snow gryphons. Nira wondered anew if Alakor had a child, somewhere. Had they bred him with a female, while he worked for an Executor? She sighed, deciding now was not the time for that conversation. \"So, if we have to fight an Executor's gryphons, will-\"\n\n\"I will have no trouble shedding snow gryphon blood.\" Alakor answered almost too quickly. Nira wondered if he'd been rehearsing those words in his head, ever since he left his people. \"It will be painful, but I doubt their brainwashing could be broken.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Nira reached towards him. When Alakor did not pull away, she stroked his neck feathers. \"I'm sorry it may come to that, just the same.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Alakor closed his eyes, leaning into her touch.\n\n\"So, this Executor we're dealing with. Harliss, was it?\" She'd never heard the name, but that did not surprise her. After another caress, she pulled her hand back. \"On a scale of, 'one-to-we're fucked', how dangerous is she?\"\n\nAlakor opened his eyes to gleaming slits. \"Your scale doesn't go high enough.\" He unsheathed a single claw, tapping it against the lounger Tap. Tap. Tap. \"Officially, she's one of the fastest draws in the Union.\" Tap. Tap. Tap. \"Unofficially, she's the fastest individual gunfighter they have.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" Nira fidgeted with the buckle of her right holster. She popped it open, then closed it again. The thought of having to go up against someone like that left a cold hollow where her belly once was. \"So, put a bullet in the badass before she even thinks about going for her guns.\"\n\n\"I'd suggest you put six bullets in her, just to be sure.\"\n\nThe Princess ran her hands down her face. \"Maybe I'll put Amelia on her. She can level off her Ebony Ranger with this Executor's head. Then if Harliss even considers drawing on us, Amelia can take her head off before her hands ever reach her holsters.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be so sure about that.\" Alakor's voice was far too sincere for Nira's liking.\n\n\"We'll be as ready as we can.\" She waved at the gryphon. \"Maybe I'll put you on her instead. You manage to kill someone that important to the Union, and you'll definitely earn my trust.\"\n\n\"I'll bear that in mind.\" Alakor gave a bittersweet warble.\n\nNira shook a finger at him. \"You'd better also bear in mind that I expect you to keep your claws to yourself unless there's no other option. If we have to fight, then we'll fight like hell. But I'll tell you here and now I'm not about to let you use my crew to further your revenge.\"\n\n\"You have my word, I will not attack without proper provocation.\" Alakor bowed his head.\n\nThe Princess jabbed his beak. \"I'm not sure I can trust your word yet. Speaking of which, when the hell were you going to tell me about the Executor?\"\n\n\"When the time was right.\" Alakor shook his head. \"She's earlier than expected.\" He stared out the window, gazing at the distant, mist-shrouded mountains. \"Perhaps I left her a few too many feathers to follow. Nevertheless, we shall plan accordingly.\"\n\nNira folded her arms, glaring at the gryphon. \"I'm never going to get a complete answer out of you, am I?\"\n\nAlakor chirruped, a hint of feigned amusement in his voice. \"That depends how you define a complete answer.\" He perked his ears. \"For what it's worth, I promise you that my desire to defect to your crew is genuine. But if at any point, you wish me to leave your ship, I will abide your order.\"\n\n\"I've no intention of casting you back to the wolves, Alakor.\" Nira took a deep breath, holding it till her lungs ached. She lifted a single finger. \"But if I feel like you're manipulating me again? I'm going to have you tossed in the brig until you're willing to re-think your level of honesty.\" Nira grasped him by the beak, glaring into his eyes. \"And if your secrecy gets anyone in my crew killed? It won't be Union you have to fear, anymore. It'll be me. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\n\"Crystalline, Captain.\" Alakor bowed his head when she released him. \"And until I am comfortable divulging my knowledge to you, I thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\"See that you don't wear it out.\" Nira sighed, returning to her chair. She settled into it. \"Now, you've heard me talk about my past. I think it's time we talk about yours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Executor Harliss made a point to completely ignore whoever was shouting insults at her. As the urd'thin scurried off to fetch her drink, Harliss reclined in her chair and propped her boots up on the table. \"That was an interesting conversation.\"\n\n\"Yup.\" Tormin rested his shotgun over his forearm. \"Real interesting.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Evlee said, tracking someone with both pistols. \"Intriguing stuff.\"\n\n\"Hey! Union bitch! I'm talking to you!\" The same angry voice cried out, closer now. \"You better tell your friends to put those fuckin' guns down, or it's gonna start raining bullets from every damn direction!\"\n\n\"Anyone aiming at us?\" Harliss waited till Tormin gave a tiny shake of his head. She responded with an equally imperceptible nod, a tiny motion only her bodyguards would notice. Evlee slipped her pistols back into their holsters, and Tormin set his scatter gun down. \"Who are we dealing with?\"\n\n\"Big va'chaak,\" Tormin said, his lip curled. \"Pistol on his hip, but not drawn. Dark green scales, black clothes. Looks real mad.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Evlee said. \"His little head things are all red and standing up.\"\n\n\"Prav's 'fuck-off' messenger, probably.\" She flicked her eyes between her friends, making sure they agreed. \"Let's try polite first. If that doesn't work, I'll have to get rude.\"\n\n\"How rude?\" Tormin never took his eyes off the approaching va'chaak.\n\n\"Ruder than our lizard friend is going to enjoy.\" Harliss held her hand out when she saw Coaldust returning.\n\nThe urd'thin handed Harliss her drink, whispering. \"That's Yorlok, one of Prav's bar managers and bodyguards. He's an asshole. Be careful.\"\n\nHarliss nodded to him. \"Thank you, Coaldust.\" She sipped her whiskey, sighing happily.\n\n\"Certainly, ma'am.\" The urd'thin hurried away, then leaned against a nearby wooden post. \"I'll be here if you need me.\"\n\n\"Shut the fuck up, Coaldust!\" The angry voice was now just behind Harliss. \"And back to work, you lazy little rodent! You ain't gettin' paid to stand there lookin' pretty! Go suck a cock or something!\"\n\n\"Oh, that's where you're wrong.\" Evlee waved at Coaldust, smiling. \"We've paid for his company for two hours. He is working.\"\n\n\"Am I talking to you, gutter-slag?\" The va'chaak snarled at Evlee, then turned his attention back to the urd'thin. \"Coaldust, beat it, or I'm gonna beat you!\"\n\n\"Leave him alone.\" The smile never left Evlee's face, but Harliss saw the mischief drain from her eyes, replaced by something far more dangerous. \"Coaldust is working for his pay, he's doing everything he's been asked. You won't put a hand on him. Am I clear?\"\n\n\"Listen here, you genocidal Union rat-fuck, I wasn't talking to you!\" The va'chaak snarled again. Harliss watched his shadow carefully, saw him gesture at her. \"I was trying to get your boss bitch's attention, but it sounds like maybe you and I got something to discuss, first.\" The va'chaak took a few threatening steps towards Evlee, who just kept smiling at him.\n\nHarliss thrust her arm out, barring the lizard's way. All the pretense of friendliness was gone from her voice. Though she remained polite, her words were cold, authoritative, and completely in command. \"That's far enough, thank you.\"\n\n\"Oh, is it?\" The va'chaak glowered down at her. \"So, you finally notice me huh? Real funny trick, pretendin' to be deaf, you Union Bitch.\"\n\nHarliss lowered her arm as the va'chaak turned towards her. \"I'm sorry, I don't answer to Union Bitch.\" She took another sip of whiskey. \"You will refer to me as Executor Harliss.\"\n\n\"Fuck you!\" The va'chaak slapped her boots off the table. \"Get your fuckin' feet off my table. Gods-damn, do you even know who I am?\"\n\nAcross the table, Tormin and Evlee put their hands back on their guns.\n\nHarliss swirled her drink, shrugging. \"Someone of vast unimportance.\"\n\nThe va'chaak leaned down, baring all his many, sharp teeth. He was taller than anyone else in the bar, and muscles rippled under his dark green scales. His bulky frame barely fit in his formal cut black and silver shirt, and matching trousers. Several gold chains adorned his neck. Golden rings pierced the crimson-hued frills adorning his vaguely dragon-like had. Dark bronze eyes glared at her, narrowed in fury.\n\n\"You think you're real hot shit, just cause you're an Executor.\" He snorted, unpleasant breath blasted across her face. \"Well, I run this bar, and I count fifty guns with owners looking to put a bullet in anyone from the Union. Especially some fancy, high-ranking bitch like you.\"\n\nHarliss scrunched up her face. \"Only fifty?\" She clucked her tongue and laughed. \"You should have brought a lot more. Because yes, I am hot shit.\" She glanced at her friends. \"Ugly expression though, don't you think? Whoever decided heated feces was going to be mean you're good at something?\"\n\n\"Listen, Bitch-\"\n\n\"And last I heard, your name was Yorlok, not Prav.\" Harliss sharpened her voice as she cut him off. \"So no, this isn't your bar. Why don't you tuck your ugly tail back between your legs, and return to your master while you can still walk? Tell Prav that Executor Harliss is waiting to see him.\" She took a drink. \"Be sure to get the name right. It's important.\"\n\n\"Fuck your name!\" Yorlok slapped the glass out of her hand. It tumbled through the air, spilling whiskey everywhere. The vessel hit the floor and shattered, scattering glass in all directions. In the pub's sudden nervous silence, the startling crack was like a blast from a cannon. \"And fuck your title! Get the fuck out of my bar! Prav don't wanna see you, and you ain't welcome here anymore!\"\n\nHarliss turned her head to stare at the broken glass. \"Now, that was just rude.\"\n\n\"Last chance!\" Yorlok thrust his finger towards the exit. \"Get the fuck out of my bar, before you have to be dragged out.\"\n\n\"Counter-offer!\" Harliss jabbed a finger towards a nearby chair in open imitation of him. \"Pull up a seat, and have a drink with us. I really dislike being loomed over. I suggest you sit down, so we can have a polite conversation.\" She smiled. \"Oh, and what else was it you said? Oh, right.\" Her smile faded. \"Last chance.\"\n\n\"Are you fucking serious?\" Yorlok stared at her, his jaws hanging open. \"Oh, that's it. Somebody drag this bitch out by her fucking hair! If she resists, shoot her!\"\n\n\"Oh, very well,\" Harliss said with a shrug. \"Impolite it is.\"\n\nIn a single, smooth, impossibly fast motion, Harliss surged to her feet, drew one of her pistols, and slammed her knee into the scaly monster's crotch. The lizard gave a great, agonized cough, doubling over to grab himself. As he dropped to his knees, Harliss jammed her pistol barrel into his throat, hard enough to leave him choking. With her free hand, she pulled the lizard's gun from its holster, and tossed it onto the table. Harliss stared down at Yorlok, waiting for the gravity of the situation to catch up to the pain she'd put him in.\n\nWhen he managed a few gasping breaths, Harliss smiled. \"You know what? Maybe you're right. Sometimes impolite is more fun.\"\n\nEvlee leaned forward, smirking down at the stricken lizard. \"That's what you get for threatening poor Coaldust!\"\n\nCoaldust flashed her a grin. \"Appreciate that. But, ooh.\" Coaldust groaned in sympathy. \"You couldn't pay me enough to take a blow like that. Better his than mine!\"\n\nEvlee put her elbow on the table, and rested her chin against her palm. \"You know, I didn't even realize lizards had those.\"\n\n\"They aren't really lizards.\" Tormin hefted his shotgun. \"Kobolds and va'chaak are scaled, but warm-blooded. Like dragons.\"\n\n\"Oh, fascinating!\"\n\nHarliss let them banter. They might drive each other mad in private, but when the guns came out, they played off each other perfectly. Tormin's dismissive attitude, Evlee's seeming obliviousness, it was all part of a carefully choreographed act. Harliss knew even now, Evlee's eyes were roaming the crowds, watching for hands on guns. Tormin was watching entrances and exits.\n\n\"Now,\" Harliss said, pressing her gun harder into the lizard's throat. \"Do I have your attention?\"\n\nYorlok gagged. A dribble of blood ran down her pistol's barrel. He managed to nod.\n\n\"Good.\" Harliss twisted the barrel back and forth. \"Because I'm out of patience. First, after this, you leave Coaldust alone. Permanently. If you ever put a finger on him, if you garnish his pay, anything, you'll answer to us.\" She leaned in, snarling. \"And I assure you, we'll know.\" She let that sink in before continuing. \"Furthermore, when I remove my gun from your throat, I expect you to be the epitome of politeness. Are both those things understood?\"\n\nThe lizard nodded again.\n\nHarliss glanced at her bodyguards, making sure they were ready to cover her, just in case. Then she pulled back her gun, waving the barrel at him. \"Since you couldn't handle a polite conversation, maybe you can manage this. Crawl back to Prav, and tell him I'm tired of waiting.\"\n\nYorlok rubbed himself, groaning in pain \"Prav doesn't want to see you, you...crazy bitch!\"\n\nHarliss sighed, rolling her eyes. \"You know what? I'm done with you.\"\n\nExecutor Harliss whipped her pistol across the front of the Yorlok's muzzle. Scales split and blood splattered his shirt. With a cry, the lizard toppled over. He grabbed his rent snout, cursing, but Harliss wasn't done. She aimed her pistol at his foot and pulled the trigger. The gunshot came as a deafening roar, rending the silence like a furious beast. Blood sprayed across the floorboards and the bullet lodged in the wood. The acrid scent of gun smoke and the copper tint of blood mingled in the air; familiar, sickening, and exhilarating all at once. Yorlok screamed, curling up to grasp his ruined foot.\n\n\"On your right!\" Tomrin's voice rang like a warning bell, just after the first sharp report of gunfire faded.\n\nRecognizable movement in that direction was all Harliss needed. At another table, a man was rising and drawing his own pistol. Before he'd even cleared his holster, Harliss put a round through his shooting shoulder. The impact spun him around with a spray of blood, and sent him tumbling into a screaming heap. As he fell his gun went off. The echoing gunshots were joined by the telltale crack of a bullet streaking by, all near too. It splattered the wood just above Coaldust's head. He shrieked and ducked, covering his ears.\n\n\"Runner, left!\" Evlee opened fire at a va'chaak sprinting for a rifle resting on the nearby bar. She struck him in the leg and he cried out, rolling head over tail across the floor.\n\nTwo more people went for their guns, on opposite sides of the room. Harliss fired on a gnoll guard hefting his shotgun, striking him inside the shoulder. The impact punched through him, shattering his collarbone. At the same time, a scruffy-haired human near the far wall tried to pull his pistol. Harliss beat him to the draw and put a shot right through his arm. The gun fell to the ground, and he fell with it, screaming and grabbing his bloodied limb.\n\nThe loudest boom yet rang out behind her as Tormin fired his massive scatter gun. An upper story railing above them disintegrated, and pieces of a door blew off, driving back whoever was opening it. Just as quickly, he unloaded a second shell at another door where a rifle barrel was emerging. Then, only stillness. No one else dared to move. The sounds of gunfire faded to an echoing ring in Harliss's ears.\n\nHarliss called out, lifting her voice over the moans and screams. \"Listen up, and listen good! If you've just been shot, take a moment to realize you're still alive. I assure you, that is not by accident. Consider it a gesture of kindness that will not be extended again. If anyone else takes a shot me, I will not by aiming for limbs. But if you're willing to stake your life on outdrawing an Executor, I'm waiting!\"\n\nBehind her, Tormin spoke, his tones hushed and somber. \"How far are you taking this?\"\n\n\"As far as I fucking need to, to make my point.\" Harliss clambered up onto the table. \"Cover the balconies!\"\n\n\"Aw, shit,\" Evlee said, moving to a better vantage. \"I think she's actually mad.\"\n\n\"Yup.\" Tormin swiftly replaced his spent shells while Evlee covered the room. \"Here comes the Executor Harliss show. Might as well try and enjoy it.\"\n\n\"I always enjoy the show!\" Evlee took up a position opposite Tormin that allowed the two of them to survey the whole room. \"Covered, Executor. Reload!\"\n\nHarliss deftly popped her cylinders open, swapping spent cartridges for fresh ones from her gunbelts. While her bodyguards had the crowded tavern under watch, she offered Coaldust a smile. For him, her voice was gentle. \"Coaldust, dear, stay down behind the post, won't you?\"\n\nCoaldust lowered his hands from his ears as he looked up. Terror and exhilaration gripped him in equal measure. The urd'thin was wide-eyed and trembling, but with a nervous excitement gleaming in his eyes. \"I sure as shit ain't going anywhere else!\"\n\nExecutor Harliss snapped her cylinders back into place. Though she'd spent only a few rounds, she always preferred to be fully loaded. Harliss also savored the drama of so casually reloading in full view of everyone. If anyone dared to take a shot at her while she was indisposed, she was confident her bodyguards could handle it.\n\nHarliss scanned the stunned, uneasy crowd. The only movements came from those writhing in pain, bleeding on the floor. Only moans and screams broke the silence. Outside, the guards had guns in hand, but Hatha must have kept them from charging in. If so, he was a very wise gnoll, indeed. If the guards attacked, her own soldiers would sweep in behind them, and chaos would erupt. Harliss did not want to start a war, but she was more than ready to win one, if she had to.\n\n\"None of you wanted to try your luck?\" Harliss raised her voice to a booming call, louder even than the anguished cries. \"How very disappointing!\" She pointed a gun at Yorlok, circling it in the air. \"This slimy little lizard shit said there's fifty guns in here, ready to put a bullet in me.\" She waggled the other pistol. \"Now, maybe I miscounted, but I don't think we shot anywhere near fifty people yet. So, come one, come all!\" She spread her arms wide, offering herself as a target. \"There ought to be at least forty-three of you left, just itchin' to kill an Executor! But don't worry, I got bullets enough for all of ya! So, who's next?\"\n\nHer only answer came in the form of a few nervous coughs.\n\n\"No one?\" Harliss dropped her arms back down. \"Well, the offer stands. Take a shot at me any time you like. But when you're lying on the floor, drowning in your own blood? Remember, I warned you!\" Harliss swept her pistols across the crowd as if seeking fresh targets. \"You. Aren't. Fast enough.\"\n\nOne front door opened, and Harliss aimed at it in a blink. Hatha walked in, his hands raised. Behind him, a few of his guards pointed rifles through the opening, only for Hatha to carefully close the door again with the heel of his boot. He took a few steps forward, hands still up. Harliss gestured him forward with one of her guns, lowering the other.\n\n\"Deputy Hatha, perfect! Just the gnoll I wanted to see.\" She waved him closer. \"Don't be shy, come here, come here.\"\n\nHatha skirted between tables, glancing at every wounded person along the way. \"I thought I told you not to cause any trouble.\"\n\n\"You did, and for that, I apologize.\" Harliss bowed to him, then waggled her gun her at Yorlok. \"Your scaly friend here holds half the blame, though. He really pushed my buttons, and he tried to have me dragged out.\" She smirked. \"By my hair. I suppose not all of Prav's goons can be as wise as you, Hatha.\"\n\nHatha flattened his ears, glancing at Yorlok. He muttered something under his breath in the gnoll tongue. Whatever it was, sounded awfully insulting, but Harliss wasn't sure if it was meant for her, or Yorlok. Probably both, she thought. \"These people need medical attention.\"\n\n\"Yes, they do.\" Harliss shrugged. \"Be a dear and fetch them some. No one armed, of course.\"\n\nHatha turned and started towards another exit.\n\n\"Oh, and Deputy?\" Harliss pivoted on the table, watching him. The gnoll swiveled his ears towards her, but did not turn around. \"Do me a favor. Go ask Prav how many more of his thugs he'd like me to cripple before he's ready to see me?\"\n\nHatha nodded, then vanished through another doorway. With him gone, Harliss once again called out to the entire crowd. Her bellowing voice resounded through the tavern, a grand carnival announcer reveling in her favorite performance. \"While I hold your attention, allow me the honor of formerly introducing myself to one and all! I am Executor Harliss!\" She crossed an arm over her middle, bowing dramatically. Her eyes remained level with the crowd. \"The honor, I assume, is yours.\" She straightened again, a playful smile twisting her lips. \"Because you'd better be fucking honored to meet me!\"\n\n\"Executor Harliss!\" Evlee cried out, following Harliss's lead. \"The fastest gun in the Union!\"\n\n\"Executor Harliss!\" Tormin bellowed right after her. \"The law brought to the lawless, and the will of the Gods brought to the God-less!\"\n\nHarliss spun her pistols around her hands. \"Pistols forged in the blood of the Three Gods, and bullets guided by the hands of the divine!\" Harliss wondered how many of them bought that bullshit. Some days, she almost believed it herself. \"Wherever I go, the Union's law and jurisdiction goes with me! I could fly my ship halfway around the world, and I'd still be the fucking law!\"\n\nShe let that ring in the air a moment before continuing. \"Do you know why? Because I'm gods-damned Sanctified!\" Harliss mimed taking a shot at some poor kobold, who ducked under the table. She dropped her gun back down. \"Now, some of you probably don't know what Sanctified means, so let me tell you a-\"\n\nA side door opened, and people streamed into the room carrying doctor's bags and bandages. Some were human, a few were va'chaak, and one was an urd'thin. They spared the Executor and her bodyguards nervous glances, but Harliss paused her performance to allow them to get to work. They bandaged wounds, stabilized ruined limbs, and so on. Given how often a port like this saw violence, Prav probably paid qualified doctors good money to staff an infirmary for him.\n\nDeputy Hatha returned, now with a kobold at his side. The kobold stood less than half Hatha's height. Burnt-red scales covered his head and arms, fading to paler beige across his throat. He wore black, formal cut trousers tailored to fit kobold legs, but kept his clawed feet bare. A black vest with elaborate golden patterns embossed upon it covered his chest. Four kobold-sized pistols were strapped around his body, along with more bullets than Harliss could count. He glared up at her with dark golden eyes filled with fire and a dangerous sort of hunger. Harliss knew that look all too well. Sooner or later, that little monster was going to take up her challenge.\n\nWhen Hatha started to speak, the kobold immediately held up his hand. Hatha fell silent. The kobold spoke instead. \"Baron Prav will see you now, Executor Harliss.\"\n\nHarliss quirked a brow. \"Baron now, is it?\" She waved the kobold off. \"You know what? Tell him to wait.\" She turned back towards the crowd. \"I was about to explain to these good people how I came to be Sanctified! Prav's welcome to come hear the story, if he wants.\"\n\n\"Prav will-\"\n\n\"When I was a girl,\" Harliss said, cutting off the kobold's reply. Her voice was the loudest thing in the room, carrying over moans and murmurs. \"I lived in a small farming village, in the Empire of the Black Star. My mother died when I was little, so I worked alongside my father in her place. We raised crops, and livestock. Pigs, mostly. Every year, we gave everything we had to the Empire, just like everyone else.\"\n\nAs Harliss spoke, her eyes swept everywhere. She was attuned to any sign of moment, any twitch towards a weapon. She knew her bodyguards were keeping careful watch, as well. The kobold who'd come to fetch her folded his arms, waiting.\n\n\"We weren't paid for our contributions, mind you.\" Harliss shook her head, heaving an exaggerated sigh. \"They were simply expected. We were allowed to keep just enough food to feed our meager family, and that was it. The rest was to feed the Empire, or so they said. My father worked his fingers to the damn bone, keeping that farm running. Yet year by year, they took more and more from us. Father took odd jobs to make up for it. He exhausted himself on the farm during the day, and toiled away at night, doing repair work in the village. All just to earn an extra coin or two, so I'd have something to eat at night.\"\n\nHarliss paused to stare down at Yorlok. A medic was bandaging up his injured foot. \"Come to think of it, it was lizards like you who were responsible for collecting all the local farm's contributions. Funnily enough, the more rumors about war that circulated, the greedier the lizards got.\" She waggled her gun at him. \"They got meaner, too. They'd never been hesitant to resort to violence, but the closer the war got, the worse they became.\" Harliss took a slow, deep breath. \"One day, they decided my father wasn't giving them enough food. Mind you, we'd always given all we had, year after all.\"\n\nThe Executor paced the table. \"And yet four of them showed up that night, claiming we'd illegally stashed away food. They said if we didn't give it up immediately, they'd have my father jailed.\" She paused, flourishing one of her pistols. \"Now, jailed was usually code for executed. And all we had left was our food. It was a tiny, meager amount, but legally it was ours. When my father tried to stop them from claiming it, one of them smashed a fist right into his face!\" She punched the air with her gun. \"Shattered his nose, just like that. He went down, gushing blood, trying not to cry out. Trying to be strong, for me.\" Her voice darkened, pain and anger creeping in, word by bitter word. \"Wasn't near the first time I'd seen them make my father bleed.\"\n\nHarliss paused to let that sink in, pivoting on her heel. Nearly everyone was in rapt attention now, even if only out of fear for what the Executor might do next. Evlee and Tormin gave her barely noticeable nods. They still had everyone covered.\n\n\"With my father on his knees, the lizards went outside. We had one pig left, a sow, with piglets on the way. That pig was ours, and her piglets were to be ours, too. But the lizards disagreed, and their leader was the local Empire deputy. So, he went outside with his second, pulled his pistol...\" Harliss pointed her gun towards a twitchy gnoll in the crowd, who cringed and looked away. \"And shot our sow right in the head. My father ran outside, leaving two of the lizards to ransack our belongings. Father was still bleeding all over himself, struggling to tell the Deputy we needed that pig to survive the winter. The sow was dead, of course, but we could have preserved the meat. But the Deputy didn't like the backtalk. So...\" Harliss spun on her heel, and mimed firing her pistol. \"He shot my father.\"\n\nHarliss gave a sharp cry, as if she'd been hit. She stumbled back, clutching a pistol against her shoulder. \"Bullet punched right through him. He went down, screaming, blood everywhere.\" She dropped her gun back down. \"The lizards started arguing, but I was focused on my father. Seeing him, like that...\"\n\nHarliss's voice softened, her gaze distant, throat tightening. \"He'd always seemed to strong. And now he was bleeding out into the mud, just for trying to feed his little girl.\" She took a breath, shaking her head. \"Something in me just...\" All at once, her voice was a snarl, dark and terrible. \"Snapped. While the lizards were distracted, I went for their leader's gun. I wrenched it from his grasp before he realized what was happening. The lizard just stared at me, too shocked to react. They say time slows, in moments of crisis. And it did.\"\n\nHarliss held her pistol up, the weapon trembling noticeably. \"The gun was heavy. Far heavier than I thought it would be. I'd never fired a gun before, but I knew all I had to do was pull the trigger. I'd seen him do it twice, now.\" She paused, turning to the side. \"Out of the corner of my eye, I saw terror on my father's face. Not for himself, but for me. They would kill me for taking that gun.\" She shook her head. \"But I'd taken it to use it. I aimed it at their leader with both hands, and I pulled the trigger. The round went in through his chin, and erupted out the top of his head.\"\n\nBy now, even the medics were paying attention. Coaldust watched her with wide eyes, from behind the wooden pillar. Hatha stared, his muzzle ajar. Only the kobold beside him seemed unmoved. Harliss glanced at her bodyguards, and continued her tale.\n\n\"The sound and the sight were one, as if the great boom was the explosion of his skull.\" She feigned firing a shot with an exaggerated motion. \"The gun jumped so hard I nearly lost my grip. It jerked my arms, shuddered through my bones, and I stumbled back. Suddenly, another shot rang out. The second in command was returning fire from behind me.\"\n\nHarliss made a show of staggering, then awkwardly spun around. \"Something cracked the air, just alongside my head. I didn't even realize it was a bullet. I always thought they'd whiz, or buzz, but they don't. When they're that close, they just sound like another gunshot. The lizard fired again, and that one missed as well. I shot back at him, caught him in the belly. He stumbled and dropped his gun, then fell over, grabbing his guts.\"\n\nThe Executor paused, then spun around, as if started by something. \"The door flew open, and the other two lizards stormed out of the house. Both fired at me. One bullet skimmed my dress while another ruffled my hair, the cracks deafening. I shot the first one right in the chest, knocking him off his feet. The last lizard got another round off, but it missed me, too. The bullet went just under my arm, and splattered the dirt somewhere behind me. At the same time, I was already aiming at him. He looked so...\" She paused, furrowing her brow. \"Confused.\"\n\nHarliss let a baffled look cross her face. \"Just as I leveled off with his head, I knew what he was thinking. 'How the hell did this little girl get a gun, and why can't anyone hit her? This can't be how I die.' But it was.\" Harliss tapped a pistol to her forehead. \"Hit that bastard right between his lizard eyes. He just crumpled. I threw the gun away, ran to my father, and sobbed into his blood-soaked shirt. And...\" She took a shaking breath. \"That was the first day we were free. Years later, when they looked to name me Executor? That was my first miracle. My first time surviving the un-survivable.\"\n\nHarliss draped an arm across her waist, and bowed. \"And that is what Sanctified means! Whether I'm truly blessed by the gods, or just real fucking lucky, I remain...\" She straightened up, holding a gun over her heart. \"Sanctified. So, keep that in mind, if you feel like taking on an Executor. Or the next time I stand up on a table in a tavern, I might be telling a story about you!\"\n\nWith that, Executor Harliss dropped her pistols back into their holsters. She jumped off the table, and turned away from her audience without another word. Instead, she strode over to Hatha and the kobold. Tormin and Evlee followed her, keeping watch on the crowd.\n\nHarliss offered the scaly little gunslinger her friendliest smile. \"I believe you said Prav was ready for us?\"\n\nThe kobold glared up at her. \"Nice fuckin' story.\" Somehow, he made it sound like both compliment and insult, rolled into one. Before Harliss could reply, he turned around and strode into an adjoining hallway, tail swishing. \"This way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Nira pressed her forehead to the window, staring outside. Far below the ship, the foothills of craggy mountains were but a morass of brown and gray. Swaths of emerald pine and blue-green fir brought patchwork vibrancy. Distant villages hidden amongst the trees and stones were little more than dark smudges upon the horizon. Layers of white clouds obscured the tops of the rugged peaks The Cataclysm so often skirted.\n\nThose same clouds frequently hid the ship, though they could not always be relied upon. Nira did not like to fly too close to the mountains, despite Kasis's many detailed charts of elevation and topography. Normally, Nira was confident her scouts and their far-lenses would alert them to any potential adversary in time to respond. But after what Alakor told her about the Union's ships, she suddenly felt naked, without the clouds to cloak her vessel.\n\nThe gryphon now sat on his haunches alongside her, sharing the view. Even seated, Alakor still loomed over the princess. Nira glanced at him, wondering about the many of scars listed in the medic's report. How many of them came from battle, and how many more from beatings? Did all the snow gryphons go through the same hell? If so, why had only he slipped his leash?\n\n\"What makes you different from the other snow gryphons?\" Nira gazed up at his face, watching his expression shift. \"If they're all so brainwashed, why didn't it work on you?\"\n\n\"It did.\" Alakor grunted, clacking his beak. \"I was taught from birth that I was nothing but a beast, born only to serve the Three Gods. And for most of my life, I believed it.\"\n\n\"So, what changed?\" Nira reached out. When Alakor did not pull away, she gently stroked his wing. Some of his black-tipped flight feathers were longer than her arm. One of them was conspicuously missing where she'd yanked it out earlier. Nira brushed her fingers across the missing plume's silken neighbors. \"Something must have happened to you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you yanked my feather out.\" Alakor lightly batted her with his wing, then gave a low, bitter chirrup. \"My life started like any snow gryphon. Raised not by parents, but by Union handlers. We're reared in a group, and taught that we're...\" He shrugged his wings, sighing. \"Lesser. That the Three Gods gave us life only to serve and protect the Golden Union. We learn only what they want us to. Above all, we learn to obey.\" The gryphon ruffled himself. \"By the time we're deployed outside Union lands, there's precious little room left in our heads for the truth.\"\n\nNira cringed, smoothing down his feathers. \"That sounds horrible.\"\n\nAlakor leaned into her touch, cooing. \"A few of us see the truth, anyway, but you learn to keep your thoughts to yourself, for your own safety. Any gryphon caught spreading blasphemy or treasonous ideas is likely to be strung up front of the others, and beaten until it hurts just to think about disobedience.\" Alakor swallowed, his ears flat. \"Let alone desertion.\" Alakor swallowed, his voice shaking. \"I...I had a friend...\"\n\nThe Princess's hand went still. The sudden anguish in the gryphon's voice could only mean one thing. Her heart dropped. \"Oh...\" She rubbed his ear, softening her voice. \"You don't have to go on, if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"His name was Remiir.\" Fire heated Alakor's voice. He glanced at the princess, ghosts drifting behind his eyes. \"I appreciate the thought, but I will never let his story go unspoken.\"\n\nNira nodded, hugging the gryphon's neck. She might not fully trust him, but she could damn sure comfort him in a painful moment. \"Then tell me about Remiir.\" She glanced back at Malaresh, tilting her head towards the entryway.\n\nThe dragon bowed his head. \"I will grant you privacy for your tale, bird.\" He pushed up to his paws, turning away. \"I will be nearby, if I am needed.\"\n\n\"Remiir and I grew up together,\" Alakor said, when Malaresh was gone. \"We were reared in the same group. He was the kindest soul I knew. Sweet enough to stand up for any other gryphon, and brave enough to take the beating he got for it. He was everything I wished to see in myself. We became fast friends, always slinking off, together. Little by little, we discovered the outside world. And, eventually we discovered...\" Alakor splayed his ears, looking away. \"Other things.\"\n\nNira patted his shoulder, grinning. \"Very close friends indeed, then?\"\n\nAlakor softly warbled laughter. \"We were.\" He gave her a quick smile. \"Such dalliances amongst squad mates were usually ignored by our Handlers. Squads were all male or all female, so they didn't have to worry about 'unsanctioned breeding.' I suspect it was because they saw us only as beasts that it was allowed. After all, what do they care if animals rut in the darkness?\" Bitterness slipped into his voice. \"They probably thought it kept us compliant.\"\n\nThe princess made a face. \"I can't say it would surprise me.\" She lowered her voice to a gruff tone. \"Just let the dirty beasts fuck, it keeps them from rebelling.\"\n\nThe gryphon laughed, giving her a sidelong look. \"That's eerily close.\" He clicked his beak, and went on. \"The squad Remiir and I were part of was first deployed to a fortress the Union had recently seized from their foes. At night, Remiir and I skulked off from our makeshift barracks in the stables, in hopes of finding a little privacy. Instead, we stumbled on a place where the Empire once housed their own gryphons.\"\n\nHe perked his ears, wide-eyed, as if still in disbelief. \"They had beds! Real beds, like the one you offered me. And...and bathtubs.\" He ground his beak, snarling. \"All we'd ever known were straw mats, and a communal water pipe to stand under. The Empire's gryphons had their own quarters, their own mess hall! Things we'd always been told were just for...people.\" He sneered the last word. \"It was impossible not to wonder why our enemies treated their gryphons better than our masters did.\"\n\n\"I'm guessing your masters were not exactly appreciative of your discoveries.\" Nira scratched at his wing joint, waiting for him to go on.\n\n\"Not in the least. Our handlers caught Remiir telling the other gryphons about it, and the local commander beat him so badly he could hardly walk for days.\" Alakor sighed, hanging his head. \"Told the others we were lying. Moved us out of there shortly thereafter.\" He snorted. \"But the idea was planted. That somewhere out there, there was a better life, just waiting for us. We whispered about it often in secret, imagining what it might be like to have a bed. To be a person, and not a beast. We called the idea 'our home, waiting to be discovered.' To me, it was only ever a fantasy, a pleasant dream to get me through the day.\" Alakor quieted, staring into the distance. Nira could almost see the memory of the gryphon's dear friend, soaring just behind his eyes. \"But to Sweet Remmy, it was so much more.\"\n\nSweet Remmy. The pet name must have slipped out before Alakor could stop it. As soon as the words left his beak, the gryphon cringed as if someone struck him. He turned away, shrinking into himself. Alakor hid his face away behind a shaking wing, fighting back a sudden sob.\n\n\"Oh, Alakor, it's alright.\" Nira stroked his wing, her throat tightening in painful sympathy. \"Just let it out.\"\n\n\"No, princess...\" The gryphon struggled to force words. \"He deserves his story told not with sobs, but with fire, and anger!\" He took a few shaking breaths, gradually easing his wing back. Tears glittered in his blue eyes. \"Remiir, he...\" Alakor worked his beak in silence, considering his words. When he spoke again, there was cold fury amidst his sorrow. \"Remiir chafed at his leash, more even than I did. He believed we should flee to seek a better life, no matter the risk. But I was a coward.\"\n\nAlakor sniffed, rubbing his eyes with a paw. \"I was too scared to risk my life, for a home I never believed we would reach. But Remiir...\" His beak quavered, and more tears brimmed in his eyes than he could wipe away. \"Remiir had a heart full of courage, where mine knew only cowardice. And one morning, I awoke to find he was gone.\"\n\nNira bit her lip, silently stroking Alakor's neck. This story was his to tell, at his own pace.\n\n\"Our handlers were furious.\" The gryphon took a shuddering breath. \"They dragged us in for questioning, beat us when they did not like our answers. I took the worst of it, because I told them nothing. That night, I...\" Alakor swallowed hard. \"I prayed. Genuinely prayed. I called out to their Three Gods, for I knew no others. I begged them for their mercy, pleaded with them to keep Remiir safe. For a week, I prayed every night that my Sweet Remmy would find our home, waiting to be discovered.\"\n\nA snarl crept into his voice, his black-tipped crown feathers rising. \"But he didn't. Another snow gryphon unit caught him. Remiir fought like hell, maimed a few of them. But the rest dragged him back. Our squad was rounded up, and marched out to a great tree, in a field.\" Alakor's voice cracked, and fresh tears ran down his feathers. \"The commander tied Remiir to the tree, and...\"\n\nAlakor fought back a sob, struggling just to speak. \"He shot Remiir in the throat!\" He lifted a trembling paw, dragging fingers across his neck. \"Right here. And he...he made us watch!\" Another sob wracked him, nearly strangling his voice. \"I had to watch my Sweet Remmy die. Terrified, wheezing, choking on his own blood.\" He took a breath, letting it out in a shuddering sigh. \"They told us that was the only fate awaiting those who betrayed their Gods. And then left him there, to rot. So we wouldn't forget.\" The gryphon gave a ragged growl. \"And soon? They'll know I haven't.\"\n\n\"That's horrible.\" Nira smoothed down the tiny pinfeathers of his face, wiping some of his tears for him. \"I'm so sorry, Alakor.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" The gryphon unsheathed his claws, digging them into the wooden floor. His voice hardened. \"All the cowardice in me died along with Remiir. After that, I did not want to escape. I did not want a better life. All I wanted then, was revenge. For Remiir, for myself, for all our wasted lives.\"\n\nNira blinked back a few tears of her own. \"I can't say I'd have felt any different.\"\n\nThe gryphon offered her a somber smile, dipping his head. \"From then on, I knew the only path left for me. But I also knew I had to wait. So, I swallowed my grief, played my part, and made myself indispensable to all the right people.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine living that way. Suffering under someone's yoke is bad enough, but suffering in silence?\" Nira shook her head. \"I'd have gotten myself killed ages ago trying to take that commander out.\"\n\n\"Oh, I came very close.\" The gryphon swallowed, working some of the hoarseness out of voice. \"But I realized killing one cruel man wouldn't be enough. I wanted revenge on the whole gods-damned Union.\"\n\nAlakor went silent, collecting himself. He swallowed down his pain, and hid it away once more. The anger and sorrow drained from his eyes. The gryphon's body language shifted. He lifted his ears, swished his tail, and let an easy smile part his beak. It was as if he'd never been lamenting his lost lover at all. The change was impressive, Nira thought, almost eerily so. He must have been a very good spy.\n\n\"I never said I suffered in silence, by the way.\" Alakor clicked his beak. \"I let my hatred of the Union out in bits and pieces. I indulged in any sort of disobedience I could get away with it, from speaking my mind in angry outbursts, to the crudest of pranks. I decided if they were going to beat me anyway, I may as well make sure it was on my terms, not theirs.\"\n\nNira laughed, patting his shoulder. If he was that eager to move past the painful topic, she was happy to let him do so. \"Oh, you have to tell me about some of those pranks! It'll help lift your spirits, if only for a moment.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Alakor waved his paw. \"Simple things, mostly. If a commander was a fucking idiot, I'd tell him so to his face. In front of his superiors. Or if I was hungry, I'd barge in where I wasn't allowed to take some human officer's food. But I'm guessing you wanted to hear a crude one.\" The gryphon offered a sly smile. \"Once, a field commander refused to let us dig our own latrine areas. Forced us to use to some filthy communal pit, next to our sleeping area. Bastard told us that animals should live like animals. So...\" Alakor stretched a forepaw, smugly inspecting it. \"I did. I waited till my bladder was ready to burst, and then I flew tight circles just above his tent. Pissing on it.\"\n\nNira erupted into bawdy laughter. \"Oh, shit!\"\n\nAlakor chirped. \"He's lucky I didn't have to do that, at the time!\" He set his paw back down, warbling. \"Took a hell of a beating, but it was worth it. The next day, we were all allowed to dig private latrines outside the camp.\"\n\n\"I think that means you won.\" Nira leaned her shoulder against the window, folding her arms. \"Sounds like you were really pressing your luck, though.\"\n\n\"I had too. With every passing day, I hated the Union even more. Acting up was an outlet that helped keep my hatred from overwhelming me.\" Alakor flattened his ears back, his eyes narrowing. \"I was always careful, though. Never did anything punishable by more than a beating. And I undertook any mission I was sent on, no matter how distasteful, or dangerous. I had an extremely high success rate. In so doing, I cultivated exactly the image I needed them to see. A deeply loyal servant of the Golden Union, albeit one with an attitude problem.\"\n\n\"So they never even suspected you were plotting to defect?\"\n\n\"If they did,\" Alakor said, swishing his tail across the floor. \"They never acted on those suspicions. My successful performance was enough to override any doubts. Granted, at first, even I had no idea what form my revenge would take. I only knew killing a few cruel commanders wasn't enough. It had to be bigger.\" Alakor trailed off. He stared out the window, his gaze distant and fixed only on something in his mind. \"And then the dreams started.\"\n\n\"Dreams?\"\n\n\"Of the gods.\" Alakor's voice was a fervent, piercing hiss. \"Real gods! The Stars That Sing, and the Smoke That Seeks! Dreams of urd'thin pups dancing on warm sands, of broken husks wandering empty world, and of her. And her impossibly golden feathers.\"\n\nNira furrowed her brow. None of those sounded like any gods she'd ever heard of, but she wasn't exactly a scholar of the world's religions. She wondered if those were other names for the Union's family-like trio of deities. \"Her? Her who?\"\n\n\"She Who Met the Stars.\" Alakor spoke the phrase as if it was a name. A strange look crossed his face, his ears splayed. He brushed his paw pads across the gilded plume necklace he'd purchased. \"There are golden feathers, Nira.\"\n\n\"I...\" Nira faltered a little, wondering if that was a code phrase. She considered calling Malaresh back in, simply because she had no idea what Alakor was talking about. \"I'm afraid I don't follow. I don't know any of those names.\"\n\nAlakor shook himself, fluffing up. \"Never mind, then.\" He stroked his pendant, then set his paw back down. \"I'm getting distracted, anyway. The point is, through my dreams, I realized greater things awaited me if I survived long enough.\"\n\nNira took a slow, deep breath. It unnerved her how quickly Alakor brushed it all aside. It was as if he'd finally revealed one of his mysteries, only to realize he should have kept it to himself. It seemed important to the gryphon, yet she hadn't recognized any of it. Was he offering the first part of a riddle, hoping she'd respond correctly with the second?\n\nThe Princess rubbed her face, grimacing. \"Here I am asking for secrets, and when you finally offer one, I feel like I failed some game I didn't even know I was playing.\"\n\nThe gryphon smiled, his ears perked. \"Don't worry. You'll get another chance, soon enough.\"\n\n\"That does not put me at ease.\" Nira rested her hands against her pistols. \"Alright, then. So how did you get your chance to slip away from the Union?\"\n\n\"Remember how I said I was cultivating an image? That image drew the attention of an intelligence unit known for using snow gryphons as spies.\" He circled a forepaw in the air. \"They were looking to add new assets with a proven track record and in this case, my bad attitude worked in my favor. Outside the Union, a simpering, submissive gryphon draws far more suspicion than a cocky, outspoken one.\"\n\n\"So, your sharp tongue and ego actually helped you blend in?\" Nira couldn't help but laugh at that.\n\nAlakor tilted his head, his smile fading. \"I present the image people expect to see from a gryphon. Who says my ego isn't just part of that?\" He swished his tail. \"But yes, those things helped. My new unit was more tolerant of my outbursts, and made me their spy in plain sight. I often posed as a bodyguard, protecting officers during negotiations. In actuality, I was there to steal information. Other times I infiltrated dangerous areas, and captured valuable targets. I took a few bullets here and there, but none of them killed me. My success drew the attention of the Executors, and before long, my unit and I were taking their orders.\" He ruffled up, chirruping. \"It was considered a very high honor. To this day, I remain equal parts proud of my successes, and sickened by the fact they were on behalf of the Union.\"\n\n\"An understandable confusion, I should think.\"\n\nThe gryphon murmured, grinding his beak in thought. \"Perhaps. Either way, it allowed me access to highly secretive Golden Union knowledge. Sometimes I transported documents and data. Other times, I wriggled my way into an archive and stole a few tomes to read. There was even highly classified information left out in front of me by people I was guarding.\"\n\nNira quirked her brows. \"Really? Were your masters that inept, or did they think your loyalty that absolute?\"\n\nAlakor shrugged his wings. \"My masters were not so foolish. But those they sent me to work with or protect often were. You'd be surprised how many Union officers simply believed I couldn't read.\" He added an angry gruffness to his voice. \"Gryphon! Who are those documents addressed to?\" Alakor shifted his voice to something both meek and exasperated. \"I'm sorry, Master, but I'm afraid I still haven't been taught to read that language.\" He clicked his beak. \"He says, whilst speedily reading the confidential details of Union troop movements.\"\n\nNira laughed, shaking her head. \"No wonder they made you a spy. Were you surveilling us when you decided that this was your big chance?\"\n\n\"Essentially, yes.\" Alakor straightened up. \"They tasked my intelligence unit with helping to trace your movements. My old master theorized that solitary snow gryphons had the best chance of consistently tracking your ship without being spotted. And when it was my turn? I knew that was my opportunity to pursue something bigger.\" Alakor turned his attention to the blue sky beyond the window, and the red-gold beacon that was the sun. \"I woke that morning, filled with a sorrowful sort of calm. The other snow gryphons gathered to brush their wings across mine, as was our farewell tradition. As they wished me safe flight, it occurred to me that if I saw them again, it would be as their enemy. That hurt more than I expected. And I...\" He swallowed. \"I cried for them, when I was in the sky.\"\n\nNira nodded, reaching out to gently caress the gryphon's foreleg. \"That must have been painful to realize.\"\n\n\"And yet I would fight them without hesitation.\" Alakor twisted towards Nira, eyes boring into her, unblinking. \"I need you to know that. I need you to understand that I will fight against all the Union is, with or without you.\" He stretched a wing, curling it around her. \"But there is a great tide coming, Nira. Please believe me that when it arrives, you will want me in your lifeboat.\"\n\nNira scowled. \"You do enjoy a good ominous proclamation, don't you.\" She squeezed Alakor's shoulder. \"Let's hope it doesn't come to lifeboats.\" She let her hand drop down, turning back to the window. \"If nothing else, at least I understand you a little better. I hope you feel the same way.\"\n\nA wistful smile parted Alakor's beak, and he gave a little nod. The gryphon stared at the sky again, silent. He was quiet for so long that Nira decided to bid him farewell and leave him to his memories.\n\nJust before she could do so, Alakor spoke. \"The sun used to be brighter, Nira.\"\n\n\"Hmm?\" Nira shaded her eyes, peering out the window. She'd heard superstitions like that in the past, but that was all they were. Superstitions. \"Seems awfully bright to me.\"\n\nAlakor shrugged his wings. Something cold, and unsettling crept into his voice. \"It used to be brighter. It was warmer, once. Winters were shorter, summers longer.\"\n\nNira turned to watch the gryphon. He just stared into the sky, perfectly still aside from his slow, even breathing. \"According to who?\"\n\n\"Old dragon clans, first. They live longest, so they noticed the changes before anyone else. It was passed off as the ramblings of elders, wishing they could relieve their glory days. But their young grew up, and one day, they were telling their own children the same thing.\" The gryphon swallowed. \"That the sun used to be brighter. And it was.\"\n\n\"Alakor...\" Nira shivered. He spoke it as if it were established fact. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"They proved it.\" Alakor's voice was adrift now, awash in an ocean of uncertainty. \"A few decades ago, the Union proved it. The Empire probably did too, but-\"\n\n\"Proved what?\"\n\nThe gryphon's voice sharpened. \"That the sun is dying, Nira.\"\n\nAn icy talon carved Nira down to her very soul. That was impossible, she thought. Suns didn't die...did they? \"Bullshit! If that were true, The Empire would have known, so I would have known, too.\"\n\n\"Would you?\" Alakor swiveled his ears towards the princess. \"Your Empire was crumbling before you were even born. You had enough to worry about. There was no reason to tell you the truth, and every reason to shield you from it.\"\n\nNira glared at the gryphon. Whatever he was babbling about, it sounded like madness. Maybe there was something more insidious to his strange dreams than he let on. \"Why are you telling me this?\"\n\n\"You wanted a secret, right? I'm offering one.\" Ever so slowly, Alakor met her gaze. His once-piercing eyes now shone earnest, and chillingly afraid. \"Every decade, for fifty years, Union scientists and astronomers measured the sun's light. They used a variety of methods, and ever-more modern instruments.\" Alakor stared right through her, as if he were peering into some secret Union laboratory. \"Every consecutive study showed its light to be dimmer than the last. Eventually, they dug out historical measurements and astronomical data from the Union's archives for comparison. Those too, said the sunlight had dimmed. The sun used to be more gold, and less red.\" The gryphon swallowed but did not look away. \"Winters in the Union's northern reaches have grown measurably colder, and longer. Summers are cooler, and shorter. After the last such study, the Union's scientists presented the only conclusion they could reach. That the sun is slowly fading.\"\n\n\"You're serious about this?\" Nira put a hand to the empty pit where her stomach once was. It was a terrifying prospect.\n\nAlakor nodded once. \"The light's weakening is not noticeable, day to day. But over decades, centuries, it becomes impossible to miss. You may not live long enough to worry about what happens, when it grows too dim. But generations from now?\" Alakor shrugged his wings. \"One day, the world will be cold and dark. Maybe we find a way to survive.\" Something frightened glittered in Alakor's eyes. \"Or maybe everyone dies.\"\n\nNira folded her arms, scowling. She wasn't sure if she should believe it. After all, there was a time people thought the Boiling Emptiness was literally bottomless and empty. The salt-crusted wastes around the Sunken Seas were once thought to be unrelated deserts. Hell, there was even a time when the idea of a flying ship was laughed off as a madman's impossible dream.\n\nThe princess scowled. \"If that's all true, why haven't people heard about it?\"\n\n\"Because the Union's ruling Church covered it up. They had everything confiscated. Their test data, their results, even the historical studies.\" Alakor finally turned back to the window, grinding his beak. \"An Executor forced them all to recant their findings. Those who refused to admit to errors and miscalculations were locked away for High Blasphemy.\" Alakor snarled under his breath. \"After all, their discovery starkly contrasted with the Union's teachings about the Three Gods. So, the powers that be buried it all. They made certain their people would never learn of it, lest they start to ask questions of their own.\"\n\n\"I hate to admit it, but that definitely sounds like something they'd do.\"\n\n\"It was.\" Alakor perked his ears. \"I only learned of it because I often accompanied officers to an intelligence archive that maintained copies of Executor reports.\" He allowed himself a smile. \"Many of which I happened to accidentally read.\" The gryphon waved a paw. \"So, there you have it. One of my innumerable secrets. Whether you choose to believe it or not, is up to you.\"\n\nNira ran a hand through her hair. \"Honestly, I already wish I could forget it. But thank you for telling me, just the same.\" She rubbed the gryphon's ear.\n\n\"You are welcome.\" Alakor leaned his head into her touch. \"I forewarn you, many of my other secrets are no less disconcerting.\"\n\n\"Lovely.\" Nira sighed, scratching into his feathers. \"I think I've taken up enough of your time. I have preparations to make, and people to discuss them with.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" The gryphon worked his beak in silence, as if chewing on his thoughts. \"I think I'll stay here, and watch the sky a while.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Nira stroked his feathers. \"Thank you for telling me everything else, too.\" She leaned in, hugging him around the neck. \"Especially about Remiir.\"\n\n\"You are welcome.\" Alakor returned her hug with a wing. When she eased back, the gryphon curled his massive paw around Nira's hand, gentle as could be. \"I hope this helps you trust me, even if only a little.\"\n\nNira smiled, and squeezed his fingers. \"It does.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Executor Harliss followed Deputy Hatha and the kobold through labyrinthine halls. Evlee and Tormin walked at either side of her, a step behind. All three kept hands on guns. Though they did not speak, they remained in full communication. With a flick of their fingers, or a tilt of their heads, Harliss's bodyguards drew her attention to anything of concern.\n\nThe Emplacement's deep interior was designed like a maze. Hallways crisscrossed each other. Stairwells led up or down a half story here, two stories there. Identical blue doors lined one long corridor. Paint flecked off each one in the same place and pattern. Lamps with odd, silver pyramid fixtures were interspersed amongst them. In another passage, every door was different. One was red, with carved vines crawling across it, while another was painted silver, with strange numerical codes inscribed everywhere.\n\nAfter a while, Harliss saw the silver lamps again. Next, some of the doors looked familiar, albeit in a different order than last time. Their host must have been leading them in broken, mismatched loops to keep them from memorizing the layout. After all, it was hard to plan an assassination or an escape if you couldn't find your way through the building.\n\nHarliss decided to study the burnt-red kobold instead. Given the gold embossments on his ebony vest, and the way Deputy Hatha deferred to him, Harliss suspected the shorter lizard was one of Prav's Captains. The kobold rested his hands on his pistols, his holsters unbuckled. He carried himself with an easy confidence, despite the trio of armed Union officers just behind him. He never once glanced back at them, a show of respect few might recognize.\n\nBut Harliss did. She recognized it all. His posture told her he was ready to pull his guns in a blink. His confidence meant he believed he could hold his own against the three of them. As for the fact he never looked back? It was a show of respect that said he knew Harliss would never shoot him unaware.\n\nSomehow, those who followed the Ballad always recognized their own.\n\n\"Always be ready to draw,\" Harliss said, breaking their silence to recite one of her favorite principles.\n\n\"Always be ready to die.\" The kobold spoke the immediate follow-up, his little frills perking.\n\nA smile broke out across Harliss's face, despite her best attempts to fight it. \"You do follow the Ballad. I've never met a kobold who-\"\n\n\"And I ain't never met a Union officer who'd bother with honor, so I guess we're both surprised.\" He snapped his teeth. \"It don't make us friends.\"\n\nHarliss shook her head. \"Of course not. But it does help us understand one another.\"\n\nThe kobold grunted. \"That it does.\"\n\n\"Well, then, my associate in the Cylinder's Song, you know what we have to do.\" Harliss held her arms out, bringing her bodyguards to a stop.\n\nHatha turned around, giving Harliss a dirty look. \"I dunno what kind of trouble you're stirring up now, but-\"\n\n\"Shut it, gnoll. We got business.\" The kobold turned around to face Harliss, and Hatha fell silent. With a slow, showy movement, the kobold lifted a hand from his pistol. He offered it to Harliss, along with his name. \"Nok. Make the pledge.\"\n\nHarliss made the same motion, and took the kobold's outstretched hand. Though small, his grip was firm. The pads of his paw were warm, and his dull claws pressed to her skin. He did not shake her hand, merely held it. The ritual was a bond among Balladeers, gentle contact between two foes who might soon take each other's lives.\n\n\"Nok,\" Harliss said, repeating the kobold's name as part of the pledge. \"If my bullet proves your end, your name will know respect, and your memory will know honor.\" She gave the kobold's hand a tight squeeze. \"Harliss. Do the same.\"\n\n\"Harliss.\" The kobold squeezed her hand. \"If my bullet proves your end, your name will know respect, your memory will know honor.\" Their eyes met, and each nodded their agreement.\n\nHatha stared at them, his ears splayed in confusion. \"What the hell's all this?\"\n\nNok released Harliss's hand, then waved the Deputy onwards. \"Move it, gnoll, Prav's waiting.\" The kobold took the lead again, tail swaying as picked up his pace. He settled his hands upon his pistols once more.\n\n\"Oh, don't mind the Executor.\" Evlee patted the gnoll's arm. \"She always makes friends with gun people.\"\n\nTormin shifted his scattergun to carry it across his chest. \"The ones she doesn't have to kill, anyway.\"\n\nHarliss returned to following Nok. The kobold gave a single, sharp cough, then took both hands off his guns and hooked his fingers into his vest. Harliss arched a brow. It was clear he wanted her to see that. There were two ways to interpret such a gesture. One, Nok was silently announcing any hostilities now would be preceded by a formal challenge. Or two, he was insinuating he could beat her without even leaving his hands in position to draw.\n\nThe Executor smiled. It had been a long time since she'd got to play these kinds of games with another Ballad follower. She cleared her throat to draw Nok's attention. When he glanced back, Harliss not only took her hands off her guns, but folded her arms.\n\nNok growled under his breath. \"So it's like that, huh?\"\n\nHarliss shrugged. \"You initiated.\"\n\n\"Maybe I was just bein' polite.\" The kobold folded his arms, muttering to himself in his own language.\n\nWhen Nok made no further escalations, Harliss examined their surroundings. The deeper into The Emplacement they went, the more its disparate mishmash of strange architectural influences made themselves known. Dark wooden panels and brass accents gave way to lilac carpeting, and flowery wallpaper. Antique furniture lined one room, while another held nothing but mirrors, and detailed statues of anatomically correct beasts. Another chamber served as a private tavern and stage. Prav's guards and associates sat at mismatched tables, smoking from grand communal pipes. A group of urd'thin played music, and several male humans danced in the nude with a female gnoll. In a different room, men counted coins and other currency.\n\nA naked female kobold, seated in a gnoll's lap, watched Harliss pass. Evlee tilted her head towards the kobold in quiet warning. The female lizard was paying too close attention to the Executor and her group to be just a sex worker. Harliss wondered how many of the scenes Nok led them past were just for show. If she returned here with a force of soldiers, she doubted any of these rooms would be as she remembered them.\n\n\"Shame we're here on business,\" Evlee said, waving to the gnolls and kobold. \"Otherwise I could have a lot of fun.\"\n\n\"If you call catching a venereal disease fun.\" Tormin scowled at her. \"Just keep your eyes open. We're only seeing the guards they want us too. There's an ocean of them hidden away, ready to crash over us.\"\n\nHarliss smiled, happy to let them banter. She knew both her bodyguards were more focused than they seemed. They were mapping things in their minds just as she were, counting guards, mentally marking entrances and exits, glancing at weapons and ammunition, and so on.\n\n\"Don't worry, Tormin. My eyes are wide open.\" Evlee glanced through an open door to a lushly appointed room. Inside, a naked male gnoll with dark fur was playfully snarling at some unseen customer. \"Oooh, these must be private rooms for VIPs.\"\n\nTormin only snorted. \"Staring at some monster's balls doesn't count as keeping your eyes open.\"\n\nEvlee rolled her eyes. \"Oh please, Tormin.\" She smirked. \"I couldn't even see them, he was facing the wrong way. Besides, my curiosity is reserved for Coaldust.\" She playfully batted at the tip of Hatha's tail. \"And for the Deputy here.\"\n\nHatha walked faster, pulling his tail away from Evlee's hands. \"Please don't include me in this.\"\n\n\"I dunno, Hatha,\" Nok said. \"Might wanna take your chance with a human girl while you can, in case Prav's real mad about you lettin' them keep their guns.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry, Deputy Hatha.\" Harliss put a hand upon the gnoll's shoulder. \"If we've endangered your job, or worse, I'm sure we could find you a spot on my ship.\"\n\nHatha growled through clenched teeth, his ears flattened. \"I don't think being a Union slave is better than being dead, actually.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure it isn't that serious,\" Harliss said, glancing at Nok. \"I assume Prav knows we didn't give the Deputy a choice in the matter.\"\n\nNok shrugged. \"Yeah. If Prav's really in a bad mood, he'll probably just...\" He smirked up at Hatha, tiny sharp teeth on full display. \"Shave all the fur off his important places, then parade him around naked a while.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Evlee's steps took on an excited, skipping gait. \"I hope we're still around for that.\"\n\nHatha shot her a dirty look, his ears still pinned. \"Not funny.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm only teasing.\" Evlee glanced down an intersecting corridor, eyes darting from guard to worker and back again. \"If you're really in trouble, I'm sure we can help.\"\n\n\"Either that, or Prav lets you three punish Hatha to make a point.\" The kobold walked faster, clawed toes clicking against the wooden floor.\n\nTormin drummed his fingers against his cradled scattergun. \"What the hell point would that make?\"\n\n\"Baron Prav works in mysterious ways.\" The kobold stopped at an undersized door. \"We're here.\"\n\nFanciful golden dragons and runic script embossed the tiny door. Lamps with smudged, tulip-shaped glass fixtures flickered on either side of it. The handle was too low for anyone but Nok to comfortably reach. Harliss had the sneaking suspicion their host had taken them to an entryway built for kobolds and urd'thin, just to make them prostrate themselves to pass through it. If he was waiting for an irritated reaction, Harliss wasn't going to give him the pleasure.\n\n\"After you, my friendly host.\" Harliss offered a respectful bow.\n\nNok led them through the door. As expected, everyone else had to duck. Beyond the doorway was an elaborate servant's chamber. Harliss wasn't sure if taking them through it was meant as an insult. She decided not to dwell on it. Dozens of kobolds and urd'thin scurried around. Some of them plated food and poured drinks in a kitchen at one side of the room. Others helped a female va'chaak and a male gnoll into elaborate outfits with fanciful colors. More lounged around on pillows and cushions, talking and laughing.\n\nEveryone quickly scattered out of the group's way. Some stared wide-eyed at the Executor. A few more muttered curses under their breath. None spoke up or made the crude gestures they were no doubt considering. Two of them hurried to a set of double doors inlaid with dragon wings. The servants pushed the doors open, bowing their heads.\n\nAs they all crossed the room, Nok held a hand up to ask them to wait. He entered Prav's chamber first, calling out in a voice louder and more booming than she imagined such a small creature capable of. \"Presenting Executor Harliss, First Officer Tormin, and Protection Officer Evlee.\"\n\n\"Ooh, my title sounds so fancy when its announced that way.\" Evlee eased a pistol partway free, just in case.\n\n\"It's irritating they know our titles.\" Tormin slung his scattergun across his shoulder.\n\n\"That's the point, Tormin,\" Harliss said. \"Now, game faces, everyone. Ignore any insults, don't fixate on what he is, and focus on business. Violence only as a last resort.\"\n\nNok turned back around, glaring up at Hatha. \"Just the guests. You can go back to work.\"\n\n\"Come in, come in!\" A loud, rumbling voice beckoned from nearby. \"I so rarely get Union guests. Do make yourselves at home, won't you?\"\n\nHarliss walked past Nok into an impressively large meeting hall. Fluted columns lined it in twin rows, an open imitation of grand cathedrals. Pillows and cushions were scattered across the floor, in larger number and higher quality than those in the servant's quarters. Elegant crystal and gold lamps were affixed to the walls and ceilings. They buzzed faintly, shedding unusual blue-white light. Harliss wondered if Prav had electricity here, now. Or was it something else? If he hosted important travelers from overseas, who knew what manner of innovations they might bring. Either way, she imagined him eager to show it off to his Union visitors.\n\nAt the far end of the great room, a dragon watched her.\n\nHarliss gripped her pistols. She thought herself prepared, and yet it was all she could do to resist the urge to pull her guns. Harliss had seen plenty of dragons before, but only captives, or those who now served the Union. This was different. Coming face to face with a free dragon left a particularly exhilarating sort of instinctual fear running through her blood. Her heart thundered, and her hands went cold. Given her bodyguards muffled gasps and curses, they must have felt the same way. Harliss savored that fear, and approached the dragon with swift, steady steps.\n\n\"Greetings, Baron Prav,\" Harliss said, overemphasizing the title. \"A pleasure to meet you, at last.\" She offered him a playful smile. \"Congratulations on your recent promotion.\"\n\n\"A pleasure to meet you as well, Executor.\" The dragon's crisp enunciations of every syllable made him sound more like a diplomat than a powerful beast. He lowered his head in a deep bow. \"You're the first of your title I have ever hosted.\"\n\nHarliss returned the dragon's bow, signaling for her bodyguards to do the same. As she bent forward, she kept her eyes up, looking the dragon over. He was male. Gray-blue scales covered his lithe body in patchwork patterns, grayer here, bluer there. Myriad scars marked his hide. Some were from teeth and claws, others from bullets and shrapnel. Short, curved horns crowned his sharply triangular head. Spiny frills with vibrant, crimson spots circled the back of his skull. The dragon's silver eyes were so ghostly pale they almost looked blind. Gold and silver bracelets adorned all four limbs, with bejeweled circlets upon his tail.\n\nPrav was smaller, and leaner than the dragons she had seen before. While those beasts were significantly larger even than her snow gryphons, Prav scarcely outweighed Spot and Speckles. Not that his size was unusual for his species. The world had at least four known breeds of dragons. While Harliss did not know all the scientific names, colloquially Prav's sub-species were called cliff dragons.\n\nCliff dragons were smaller than their brethren. They were lither of body and faster on the wing. They were also one of the least common breeds of an already uncommon species. Most of them lived in clans throughout the cliffs and mountains that edged the eastern side of the continent. It was likely that cliff dragons helped carve the many old caverns and alcoves that now housed The Emplacement's anti-air batteries.\n\nAccording to the files Harliss read, Prav first claimed The Emplacement through blood and battle, amidst wars waged by dragon clans and their criminal allies. In the decades since, he'd turned the old fort into an extraordinarily successful enterprise. Other dragons now served him in establishing other locations to spread his influence.\n\n\"I should imagine I'm the first Executor ever to visit this place, let alone to meet you.\" Harliss straightened, keeping her tone as friendly as possible. \"I do apologize for keeping you waiting, and for shooting your people.\"\n\nPrav tossed his head. \"Nonsense, you only shot one of my people. Yorlok's been pressing his luck, anyway. The others, I'm told, are customers. They should have known better than to draw on an Executor. I'll comp all their fees. While they recover, I'll give them free access to whatever and whoever they want.\" The dragon snorted. \"It's hardly the first time people have been shot here.\" The dragon cocked his head. \"Captivating tale you wove, by the way.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Harliss offered him a theatrical half-bow. \"You should hear the one about my life as a street urchin, or the story where my father used to beat me.\"\n\n\"Are they equally entertaining?\" Prav glanced at Nok, waving his paw at a nearby door. The red-scaled gunslinger hurried over and banged on it three times. The dragon returned his attention to Harliss and her company. \"If so, you shall have to regale me. But I must ask, are any of your tales true?\"\n\n\"They all are.\" Harliss stepped closer, her posture easy and relaxed. \"Or none of them are. Perhaps reality is whatever the listener believes it is.\"\n\nGnolls emerged from the door, carrying a black table between them. A male gryphon followed, along with a human woman. All four of them were dressed only in flimsy, colorful silks. What looked revealing on the gnolls and the human looked oddly exotic on feathered beast. The gryphon held the handle of a large carrier basket in his beak, with platters, bottles, and drinkware inside.\n\nThe woman moved aside pillows and cushions, clearing a space before the dragon. The gnolls set the table down, and the gryphon put his basket upon it. Together, they unloaded everything with a flurry of activity. There were fresh and candied fruits, including figs and dates. Platters were laden with slices of cured meats, cheeses, crusty breads and all manner of spreads and jams. Glassware was distributed, and water, wine, and whiskey all poured. Then the bottles were placed behind the glasses, their labels on display.\n\nNext, the gnolls fetched chairs with dark wood frames, and plush, purple-hued cushions. They placed the chairs and bowed to the dragon before removing themselves. The gryphon and human lingered, sharing affection with Prav. The woman caressed his scales, and the gryphon nuzzled his chest. Prav stroked the gryphon's wings and the woman's arm, rumbling a throaty purr. Eventually he sent them on their way. Nok followed the departing servants, shut the door behind them, and then took up position at the dragon's side.\n\nHarliss settled into the offered chair, though companions remained standing. She glanced towards the well-armed kobold. \"Just the one bodyguard, then? Should I be insulted, or flattered?\"\n\nPrav cocked his head, spearing a few slices of meat with a single, unsheathed claw. He stared down at her as he popped the meat into his muzzle. \"If I thought you were here to kill me, Executor, I'd not have allowed you to meet me with your weapons.\"\n\n\"Fair point.\" Harliss looked the kobold over, smiling. \"Truthfully, Nok and I are already acquainted. I get the feeling you only need one bodyguard, when he's around.\"\n\nNok only stared at her, his expression blank.\n\nThe dragon gave a hearty, rumbling laugh. \"Oh, you're right about that. Nok is exceptionally good. And he tells me you might the fastest gun in the Union.\"\n\nHarliss arched a brow. \"Does he?\"\n\nNok snorted. \"You think I didn't recognize your name? I know who the fuck you are.\"\n\n\"Your reputation precedes you, Executor.\" Prav waved a paw at the kobold. \"And on that note, allow me to introduce the fastest gun outside the Union. Nok here has never lost-\"\n\n\"No need to brag.\" The kobold kept his eyes fixed on Harliss.\n\nHarliss inclined her head towards the kobold, finishing the principle he quoted. \"For the dead cannot defend their honor.\"\n\nThe dragon shrugged his wings. \"As you like. The point is, Executor, if Nok here couldn't beat you, then additional bodyguards aren't going to do any good. They'll just get in my way when I come after you myself.\"\n\nTormin took a step closer to Harliss. \"Not that you don't have a dozens of them nearby, ready to pour in.\"\n\nPrav only shrugged his wings. \"Why bother mentioning the obvious?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Harliss selected a single date, and bit it in half. She savored its sweetness, gesturing with it at the kobold. \"So, without bragging. Are you really that fast?\"\n\nNok folded his arms. \"Are you?\"\n\nHarliss smiled, finishing off the date. \"Only one way to find out.\"\n\nNok watched her, unmoved, unagitated. \"Whenever you're ready, Executor.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, reaching for a glass of whiskey. \"I like this kobold.\" She swirled the liquid in the glass. \"Perhaps we should have a friendly competition. Ballad rules. A little target shooting, some quick draw contests-\"\n\n\"Nok here doesn't like competitions.\" Prav flicked a wing towards the kobold. \"Doesn't like people to know how good he really is, until it's too late.\"\n\n\"Oh, think he'll make an exception.\" Harliss sipped her whiskey, shrugging. \"I get the feeling Nok here longs to be tested against real competition.\"\n\nThe kobold tilted his head. \"You sure you ain't just speakin' for yourself?\"\n\nHarliss sharpened her tone, ever so slightly. \"I believe I'm speaking for both of us.\" She took another sip. \"The offer stands, but I shan't be insulted if you decline.\" She held her glass out, staring at it. The taste still lingered on her tongue. Hints of pear, apple, and spices remained long after she swallowed it. \"Tits of the Mother, that's good!\"\n\n\"Executor!\" Tormin glowered down at her.\n\nHarliss waved her free hand. \"Oh, take a seat already, Tormin.\" She glanced at the dragon. \"He really dislikes it when I utter blasphemous curses.\"\n\n\"I'll sit when he sits.\" Tormin inclined his head at the kobold.\n\nNok just stared at him. \"I'll stand. Guests sit.\"\n\n\"Tormin.\" Harliss stared at the empty chair before him. \"Sit. I shan't have you being rude.\"\n\nTormin and Evlee exchanged a look, then both eased into their respective chairs. They angled them in different directions. That way, the two of them could cover as much of the room as possible.\n\n\"You know,\" Prav said, hefting a drinking bowl filled with wine. \"I didn't think Executors were allowed to utter blasphemous curses.\"\n\n\"Then you misunderstand Executors.\" Harliss tasted her whiskey again, sighing happily. \"We're allowed to do whatever the fuck we want.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" The dragon lapped some wine, then licked droplets from his blue-gray muzzle. \"And here I was, assuming your masters sent you so far into the frontier as a punishment. Are you saying you chose to work in what the Union considers the ass-end of nowhere?\"\n\nHarliss drained the glass and set it down. \"That's the gist of it, yes.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" The dragon returned his bowl to the table, his pale gaze leveled on Harliss, unblinking.\n\n\"What's fascinating is this whiskey.\" She tapped the rim of her drinking vessel. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"Fortune's Favorite, the forty-year vintage.\" The dragon stretched his wing, and delicately pushed the bottle towards her. \"Well, forty years in the barrel, bottled a decade or so ago. Comes from a distillery in the Empire of the Black Star. Smuggled out before your people burned the whole place down.\"\n\n\"What a shame.\" Harliss picked the bottle up, examining the label. Despite its age, it was in excellent condition. The image upon it depicted a dragon with an entire hoard of pot stills. Above it was the name, and a date embossed in faded gold. \"I can see why you like it.\"\n\n\"I like it because it's fucking delicious.\" Prav curled his tail around his paws. \"But I have more, so feel free to indulge.\" He glanced at Evlee and Tomrin. \"That goes for you two, as well.\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" Tormin said.\n\n\"I, for one, will take you up on that offer.\" Evlee leaned over the table, helping herself to the food. \"Thank you for your hospitality, Baron Prav.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\" The dragon bowed his head, his words rolling across his tongue with a pleased purr. \"Hospitality is my business. Servants of the Union or not, you're my guests. In times of peace, even enemies should be treated respectfully, so long as they deserve it.\"\n\nHarliss exchanged the bottle for a slice of brown, crusty bread. \"I concur, but it begs the question.\" She smeared some cherry jam across it. \"Are we your enemies?\"\n\n\"You three, specifically?\" The dragon shook himself, his wings rustling. \"Not so far. But your masters certainly are. They've murdered and enslaved my people, Nok's people...\" He shook his head. \"They'll do the same to anyone who does not resemble them, or worship their gods. Does that not make them my enemy?\"\n\nHarliss took the question in stride, biting into her bread. She chewed it, savoring the slight tartness of the cherry jam, then smiled at the dragon after swallowing. \"Is that not how cliff dragons decide battles for territory?\" She waved her half-eaten bread. \"Was it not through violence you first acquired this place?\"\n\nPrav tilted his head, eyes narrowed. \"Don't equate us. The Union isn't just fighting for land, or looking to expand their clan. After a battle, they don't forgive their enemies. My surviving foes serve me willingly.\"\n\nHarliss shrugged, taking another bite. \"If you say so. Regardless, you're happy to take the Union's coin, aren't you? Three times happier, given what you charge us.\"\n\n\"Of course. If I can profit from my enemies, why shouldn't I?\" The dragon gestured with a paw. \"Besides, I consider my territory neutral ground. If I denied the Union docking rights, that would set a slippery slope. What would stop some alliance of pirates from pressuring me to deny service to their rivals? It's easier if I remain open to everyone, regardless of my personal feelings.\" He lapped more wine, then smiled. \"It's far more profitable, too.\"\n\n\"Pragmatic.\" Harliss finished off her slice of bread, and went for another. \"I respect that. Would you say you'd go so far as to refuse to take sides in any potential conflict?\"\n\nThe dragon's red-spotted frills lifted around his head. \"Careful, Executor. Neutral territory does not mean I'll let you set up camp here to arrest all my best customers. If you expect me to cooperate with any fugitive hunts, you'd better provide some very compelling evidence of some very egregious crimes.\"\n\n\"Is that why you think I'm here?\" Harliss paired a hunk of cheese with a few slices of cured beef and pork. \"Fugitive hunting?\"\n\n\"You're damn sure not here to hire whores.\" Prav snorted, his voice hardening. \"Let's not waste each other's time. I know you're here because you're hunting a white gryphon named Alakor. An escaped slave.\" Prav lifted a paw to cut off her reply. \"Don't argue about whether or not your fugitive is a slave, your opinion doesn't matter. What matters is that this gryphon served your people as a faithful spy, and learned all your dirty secrets. Now, he's shaken off his brainwashing and fled from you, with all that forbidden knowledge.\" The dragon cocked his head. \"Do I have it right so far?\"\n\nHarliss took a bite of food, then waggled a piece of cheese at the dragon. \"More or less. Do go on, though.\"\n\n\"I assume you want my help in locating him.\" Prav lifted his frills, his eyes narrowed. \"And have something to offer me in return.\"\n\nExecutor Harliss shrugged, finishing off her cheese. \"You crime lords do tend to be awfully well informed. And wise enough to understand that in the long run, you'd rather have the Golden Union as your ally, than your enemy.\" She licked her fingers clean.\n\n\"You're not incorrect.\" The dragon used a single unsheathed claw to spear a few figs, then delicately plucked one free with his teeth. \"I am well informed.\" He chewed the fig, then took another just as carefully. \"And I am willing to offer you that information, free of charge and recompense, in the interest of the Union's continued recognition of my neutrality.\"\n\n\"How gracious of you.\" Harliss bowed her head. \"The Union appreciates your cooperation.\"\n\nThe dragon's voice grew colder. \"I'm certain they do.\" He ate the last fig and retracted his claw. \"However, I must warn you I don't think my information will be very helpful.\"\n\nHarliss rested her arm over the back of her chair. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"Because you're too late.\" Prav slowly set his forepaw back down.\n\nTormin and Evlee shifted on either side of her, ready to respond. Harliss lifted her fingers, a signal for patience. She did not think the dragon meant that as the ominous threat her bodyguards may have taken it as. \"Yes, I know he's already been and gone. But I was hoping you could point us in the right direction.\"\n\n\"Oh, I certainly can.\" The dragon stretched a wing, pointing with it as if to show her which direction to head. \"But that's what I mean about it being too late. He's already defected. To the Empire of the Black Star. Or at least, what's left of it.\"\n\nHarliss scowled, exchanging a look with Tormin and Evlee. \"We suspected he might be so inclined.\" She turned her attention back to the dragon. \"But how do you know?\"\n\nPrav studied his outstretched wing. A pattern of mottled, crisscrossing scars marked it, remnants of an old shrapnel wound. \"He told me himself. That was weeks ago, so by now I'm certain he's followed through with it.\" He folded his wing, an infuriating smile upon his gray-blue muzzle. \"I could point you in The Cataclysm's direction too, if you like. You're also hunting their Princess, aren't you?\"\n\nHarliss drummed her fingers against the chair. \"There are rumors to the effect.\"\n\n\"So I hear.\" Prav reached for the bottle of whisky, and poured himself a few dragon-sized shots worth. \"You'd be surprised at the sort of rumors that circulate in my tavern. Why, I hear some in the Union are more interested in the ship, than the Princess. I'm also told your leadership can't decide whether to kill the girl, or take her alive. I wonder, which side do you fall on, Executor?\"\n\n\"I don't pay attention to Church squabbles.\" Harliss offered Prav a polite smile. \"But if she's smart, she'll surrender, and that will take the choice out of the Union's hands. Now, I wonder-\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Prav said, his voice all snarl and sarcasm. \"Because the Union has never executed a captive before! And they'd never accidentally throw one off a ship in a failed escape attempt. I'm sure nothing bad could ever happen to that Princess and her crew if they surrendered.\"\n\n\"Not on our ship.\" Tormin leaned towards the dragon, the chair creaking under his mass. \"If she surrenders to us, she'll be safe. Even heretics and prisoners of war will be treated with dignity, if they peacefully surrender themselves.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes.\" Prav waved his paw as if dismissing Tormin entirely. \"Your grand religion is a true bastion of honor, kindness, and dignity. Speaking of which.\" The dragon glanced at each three of them in turn. \"The other Princess, the one your people made their puppet empress. Tryn, was it?\"\n\n\"It was, and still is.\" Harliss straightened up, deciding to let Prav think he was leading the conversation. That would only make it easier to catch him off guard, if needed. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"Well.\" Prav swung his head back towards her. \"Is it true the Empire sent her away, with a dragon to protect her? Before the capital fell, I mean.\"\n\nHarliss shrugged. \"It is.\"\n\n\"Hearsay tells me this human girl later surrendered herself peacefully, in an attempt to save the dragon's life.\" Prav tilted his slender, serpentine head. \"True?\"\n\n\"She did surrender, yes.\"\n\nPrav turned his gaze back to Tormin. \"You know what your honorable, dignified brethren did to that dragon, after his peaceful surrender?\" Prav hissed his words with disgust. \"First, they cut his balls off, just to make a point. When that wasn't enough, they took his head off, and mounted it in the palace, so the Princess would have to see it every day.\"\n\nTormin met the dragon's glare, his voice low, even, and prideful. \"No, they didn't.\"\n\n\"He's right.\" Evlee took a goblet of wine off the table. \"They didn't do either of those things. We've met the new Empress, and her pet dragon.\" She sipped the wine, staring at Prav. \"The beast is both alive, and fully intact.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Prav shifted his weight, focusing on Evlee. \"I've heard that's a different dragon. One that your people had brainwashed into serving as her captor, rather than her guardian.\"\n\n\"It isn't.\" Harliss slapped her hand against Prav's table. \"The Union did use the dragon to make a point, Prav. And that point was mercy. They spared his life, and his anatomy, because they had surrendered peacefully.\"\n\n\"You'll forgive me if I don't believe you.\"\n\nHarliss settled back into her chair. \"Believe what you like, but I'm bored of the subject.\" She offered the dragon her usual, friendly smile. \"So, Alakor personally told you he was defecting?\" She used the gryphon's name to ensure she had Prav's attention, but went on before he could remark on it. \"Why did you choose to meet with him?\"\n\n\"Why do you think?\" Prav snorted, lashing his tail. It sent a few silver-tasseled cushions flying. \"To pump him for information. Now, as I said, I can point you after him, but I doubt I have anything else to offer. However, in the interest of good faith, I'm willing to cover the costs of repairing your people's ships.\"\n\n\"Oh, Prav,\" Harliss said, clucking her tongue. \"I don't care about your money.\" Her eyes burned holes through the dragon's skull. \"I'm here for far more important matters than that.\"\n\nThe dragon tossed his head, a flippant gesture amongst his species. \"Are you? If this Alakor is really that important, I should have kept him for myself.\" He turned his head towards the kobold. \"Although, I thought he seemed a bit off, don't you think, Nok?\"\n\nThe kobold nodded. \"The bird was crazy, boss.\" He looked Harliss over, his blunt muzzle twisted into a scowl. \"Talked a lotta crazy, cult-bird shit.\"\n\nHarliss drummed her fingers against the arm of her chair. Coaldust had mentioned that Alakor spoke about the Servants of the Sun-Feather. But the urd'thin hadn't told her that Alakor met directly with Prav. Coaldust's information was probably carefully parsed. If Prav used his urd'thin workers as secret eyes and ears, they were probably trained in counterintelligence.\n\n\"You know,\" Harliss said, flourishing her hand. \"I'm surprised you decided to meet with Alakor. It seems incredibly risky for someone in your position to meet directly with a Union spy.\"\n\nPrav only smiled, his muzzle slightly parted. \"If the Union wanted me dead, I think they'd send more than one mopey snow gryphon.\"\n\n\"Oh, that they would.\" Harliss selected a glass of wine. \"Why, they might even send an Executor and her crew.\" She flashed Nok a smile, but he did not take her bait. \"Theoretically speaking.\" Harliss took a sip. She wasn't interested in the wine, just the show of drinking it, the conceit of relaxed conversation. \"I'm just surprised you took such a risk, that's all.\"\n\n\"Nok was here to protect me.\" Prav waved his wing towards the burnt-red kobold, his eyes fixed on Harliss. \"As he is now. Besides.\" He pulled his wing back. \"I'm quite certain I could best a single gryphon.\"\n\nHarliss swirled her vessel. \"Even so, I'd have thought you'd let your underlings meet with the bird, in your stead. Don't you think, Evlee?\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely.\" Evlee popped a date into her mouth, speaking around it. \"Especially when he's got so many sneaky little operatives out there. Why, I bet Coaldust could have pumped...\" She made a stroking motion with both hands. \"All sorts of secrets out of a poor, inexperienced snow gryphon.\"\n\nPrav rumbled deep, brassy laughter. \"So it's true? Your people really don't let them have sex? The poor things.\"\n\n\"Not exactly true, no.\" Harliss eased back in her chair. \"Depends on the master, I suppose. Perhaps I'll give my birds permission to come have a little fun, try a few things.\"\n\nThe dragon dipped his head. \"It'll be on the house, if you do.\"\n\n\"Well that just about seals, it then. I'd say they've earned a night off.\" She swirled her wine again, watching the dragon closely. \"Of course, my birds are trained for combat. Spies like Alakor are different. They're prepared for combat too, of course, but the spies get extensive counterintelligence training. Doubly so for someone trusted like Alakor.\"\n\n\"What a shame you've lost him, then.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled. \"Have I, though?\" She sipped her wine, then shrugged. \"You don't really know that, do you?\"\n\nThe dragon's voice twisted into a growl. \"You wouldn't be here if-\"\n\n\"I would be if Alakor learned something I can use against you.\" Harliss set the wine back down, her eyes fixed on her quarry. \"And if he reported it to me on his way to The Cataclysm. Where for all you know, he's still working for me.\"\n\nPrav's ears flattened, his claws clicked out against the floor. \"Is he?\"\n\n\"Maybe, maybe not.\" Harliss quirked a brow. \"The point is, you don't really know, do you? Which again, makes me wonder. Why would you meet with Alakor? Either you didn't realize just how well trained he really was, or you simply underestimated his ability to play you.\"\n\nThe dragon sneered, exposing his fangs. \"Considering his apparent defection, I'd say you're the ones who've been played. You'd better hope he's still working for you...\" Prav trailed off, then looked away, scratching his neck with a wingtip. \"I grow weary of your company. What else have you to say to me?\"\n\nNok took a slow step forward. \"You're startin' to get on the boss's nerves.\"\n\nHarliss cracked her knuckles, pleased to finally be getting somewhere. She'd rattled him, if only a little. The fact that Nok interjected when he did told her she was on the right track. \"I'd better hope, had I? How very ominous!\"\n\n\"You know,\" Tormin said, turning towards her. \"Prav here only meets with people of great importance, or great power.\"\n\n\"Or those who can offer him something very valuable.\" Evlee pivoted towards Harliss as well. \"Which one do you think we are to him, Executor? Important, or profitable?\"\n\n\"Oh, we're both.\" Harliss stared at the dragon, unblinking. \"We're absolutely both, even if he doesn't know it yet.\"\n\n\"Yes, I agree.\" Evlee ate a few bites of candied fruit. \"Which do you suppose the gryphon was? I bet he had to offer something valuable, just to get Prav's ear. Say...\" She tapped a finger against the table. \"Does intel on the Union count as valuable?\"\n\nTormin scratched his head. \"Yeah, I think it does. It could be made to sound ominous, too.\" He glanced at the dragon. \"And you sounded ominous just a minute ago.\"\n\n\"That he did.\" Harliss leaned towards him. \"Let's start there. What did the gryphon offer you, Prav? He must have offered something to earn a meeting with you, and then something bigger still once he had your ear. So, please. What was it?\" She smiled, but her voice hardened. \"And remember, this is the moment where I ask you politely.\"\n\nFor the first time since Harliss sat down, Nok put his hands back on his guns. Now she knew she was getting somewhere. She glanced at the kobold, and acknowledged his warning with a nod. Enemies or not, they had an understanding through the Ballad. Neither would draw and fire without warning, but Nok was officially escalating things between them.\n\nHarliss showed Nok her hands, then waved one between her pistols and the arm of her chair. Drawing from a seated position was considered a handicap. Nok returned her solitary nod. If it came to it, he'd let her stand first. Harliss offered the kobold a grateful smile, hoping to avoid that. She had never met a kobold who followed the Ballad before, and she sincerely did not want to kill him.\n\nPrav arched his neck, glowering at her. Fire roiled in his ghostly eyes. \"If you wish to accuse me of something, Executor, spit it out.\"\n\n\"I didn't hear her make an accusation.\" Evlee glanced towards Tormin. \"Did you?\"\n\n\"Not a one.\" Tormin cradled his scatter gun, eyes locked on Prav. If she had to shoot the kobold, Prav might attack. \"She just asked what the gryphon offered.\"\n\n\"Right! She just wondered what sort of offer Alakor made you, Prav.\" Evlee's hands drifted closer to her own pistols. \"Funny you'd take it as an accusation, though. Don't you agree Executor?\"\n\n\"Concur.\" Harliss offered only a cold smile. \"Funny. And now I can't help but assume there's something we should be accusing you of.\"\n\n\"Be very careful, Executor.\" Prav narrowed his eyes, his red-splotched frills flared in open threat. He glowered down at her, his voice all silken menace. \"Do remember who's in charge, here.\"\n\nNok wrapped his fingers around the grips of both pistols. The kobold was getting dangerously close to issuing an official challenge. If he did that, it was unlikely this would end with anything but violence. Harliss patted a weapon at her hip, a sign that she was ready, if he was. At the same time, the Executor wondered if Prav had any idea what was truly unfolding between her and his bodyguard.\n\n\"I assure you, Prav, I know exactly who's in charge.\" Harliss sharpened her tone, staring knives into the dragon's eyes. Time for a slight change of tactics. \"And I must inform you that the Golden Union considers harboring a defecting fugitive to be a very serious crime.\"\n\n\"I do not acknowledge your Union's laws!\" The dragon gave a frustrated snarl, his tail tip flicking back and forth. \"But I'm not harboring your damn gryphon, either.\"\n\nHarliss believed him, but she didn't want Prav to know that. \"Where is he, Prav? I am mandated to enforce Union law, even in Neutral Lands-\"\n\n\"Which we are.\" The dragon slapped a forepaw against the ground. \"Neutral! We have never brooked a side in any conflict!\" He hissed at her, lowering his head to flash his fangs. \"And you'd best be damn glad for it! Otherwise I'd have turned my guns on all you genocidal Union puppets the moment you drifted too close to my airspace!\"\n\nHarliss smiled at the dragon, easing to the edge of her chair. \"You know, when you say it like that, you don't really sound neutral. She rested a hand on a pistol, tapping her fingers against the grip in an odd-time rhythm. \"When you call us genocidal union puppets, I don't believe you are neutral. And then I must assume you're against the Union. Which begs the question I've been trying to ask. What did Alakor offer you?\"\n\nNok stepped forward, drawing two pistols. The kobold's movements were slow and deliberate. As he pulled his guns free, he kept the barrels pointed at the ground. \"Challenge.\"\n\nAnd there it was.\n\nA challenge was a standoff by Ballad rules, different from a duel. In duels, pistols had to be holstered until the last moment, where the quickest draw and surest aim would prevail. In a challenge, the guns came out first as a final warning. Not only was Nok allowing her to rise and ready herself, he was also giving her one last chance to back down before he shot her.\n\nHarliss had never backed down in all her life.\n\n\"Accept.\" Harliss snarled the word as she rose to her feet, tossing her chair out of her way.\n\n\"Shit!\" Evlee jumped up, moving aside.\n\nTormin did the same, giving her space.\n\nThe Executor turned her full attention to the kobold. She threw back her white coat, and drew the pistols at her hips. Her motions were smooth but gradual, and she kept the muzzles pointed at the floor just like the kobold. Their eyes met. Harliss offered Nok a deep, solitary nod in silent acknowledgement of their earlier ritual. That single movement offered both permission to try and kill her, and forgiveness should he succeed. The kobold returned it, granting her the same.\n\nThen, there was only silence. Challenges always began with long moments of unsettling quiet. Each gunfighter sized the other up, as if daring them to make the first move. It was a test of willpower, before it became a test of skills. Should one of them concede, the other was honor-bound to accept victory without bloodshed.\n\nHarliss could always tell someone when someone was going to back down. There was fear in their eyes, uncertainty in the way they gripped their guns. In Nok, she saw neither. His eyes were golden fire, and his grip, iron. He expected to win, but he was ready to die. Harliss was impressed. When this was over, she was going to sing this little kobold's name into legend for all who would listen.\n\nThat was it, then. All that was left was for one of them to die.\n\nNok's muscles twitched. His tail tip flicked. Harliss had no doubts at all that Nok was as good as claimed. She was certain she was better, but the margin was thinner than she liked. Prav glanced between them, but she ignored the dragon. Her bodyguards watched, wordless. Harliss started a countdown in her head. At zero, she was going to shoot him, unless he proved faster.\n\nFive.\n\nShe tapped a single pistol against her leg.\n\nFour.\n\nNok licked his nose.\n\nThree.\n\nHarliss kept her breathing slow, and even.\n\nTwo.\n\nThe kobold's tail stilled.\n\n\"Oh, put your damn guns away!\" Prav heaved a sigh, his confident posture wilting.\n\n\"Sorry, Boss.\" Nok scrunched his muzzle, grinding his teeth. The frustration in Nok's voice told Harliss he did not appreciate his employer's interruption. \"Can't do it.\"\n\n\"Concur.\" Harliss did not look away from the kobold. The dragon's outburst threw in an unexpected variable. While there were no specific rules against bystanders speaking up, there were rules against interruptions. If the dragon had thrown off Nok's concentration, Harliss could not rightfully shoot him until he'd collected himself. The most honorable thing to do was to let him make the call. \"Ready again on your go, Nok.\"\n\n\"On no one's go!\" Prav rumbled in anger, glaring at the kobold. \"Put your damn guns away! I'll tell her what she wants to know. This isn't worth spilling Executor blood in my quarters! I'll have Union warships rammed under my tail before I know it.\"\n\n\"Appreciate the vote of confidence.\" Nok's eyes never left hers. Harliss hadn't even seen the little kobold blink since this started.\n\n\"It's good to be appreciated by those you protect.\" Harliss dared not blink, either. If she did, he might take a shot at her. \"It's a shame he thinks this is about him, though.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nok's tail tip twitched back and forth, back and forth. \"You trust your people, for this?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nNok licked his nose again. \"Big man. Say when.\"\n\nTormin glanced at Harliss. \"Executor?\"\n\nHarliss never took her eyes off the kobold. \"Do it, Tormin.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" Tormin clenched his jaw. \"On three, then.\"\n\nNok nodded once. \"Count it.\"\n\nTormin moved into clear view, holding up a single finger. \"One.\" He lifted a second. \"Two-\"\n\nPrav threw his wing out between Harliss and the kobold, blocking them off from each other's view. \"I said put your gods-damned guns away!\" Prav's voice was a barely restrained roar.\n\n\"Fuck!\" Nok's curse was even angrier than the dragon's.\n\nHarliss cringed. Prav was as ignorant of the old codes as Nok was knowledgeable. The Ballad had extremely strict rules about direct interference in duels and challenges. An interruption like that was faulted to the party involved. In this case, Prav's action meant the kobold was forced into a 'Coward's Concession'. It was among the most dishonorable, humiliating ways to lose a challenge imaginable.\n\nUnless Harliss spared him the humiliation.\n\n\"I concede.\" Harliss shoved her pistols back into their holsters. \"I've holstered.\"\n\nPrav pulled his wing back, revealing the kobold still had his pistols out. Embarrassed anger had turned the burnt-red scales of Nok's head and face a deeper shade of scarlet. Nok's eyes darted to her guns to confirm her claim, and then he swiftly holstered his own. He balled up his fists, and took a few slow, steadying breaths. He shifted his weight, swallowed, and forced himself to meet Harliss's eyes again.\n\n\"It was a draw.\" Nok folded his arms. \"We're even.\"\n\nHarliss smiled at his unexpected offer. By rights, her voluntary concession overrode his forced one. Nok could declare victory. Though it would have been shallow and based on a technicality, Harliss would not have protested. Instead, he chose to save them both face. There was more honor in this so-called monster than in most of her superiors put together. Harliss was quite glad she didn't have to kill him.\n\n\"I accept.\" Harliss tucked a hand across her belly and offered a very formal bow. \"It was a draw.\"\n\nTormin fetched her upended chair, and brought it back to her. Harliss thanked him and sat down. Her bodyguards returned to their seats as well. Tormin rested his gun across his lap, his posture more relaxed than before. He hooked his elbow over the back of the chair. Evlee scooted closer to the table, pouring herself some of the Fortune's Favorite.\n\n\"I'd better try this whiskey before the rest of you hog it all, hmm?\" She picked up the glass, and gave the dragon a smile. She took a sip. \"Oh, that is good!\"\n\n\"That's it?\" Prav flattening back his frills, glancing around. \"You're all back to normal, just like that?\" He arched his neck, hissing. \"And I thought Nok was crazy.\"\n\n\"What,\" Tormin said, his voice tinted by bittersweet amusement. \"You think that's the first time we've seen her get challenged to a duel? I'm only glad it ended peacefully, for once.\"\n\nHarliss decided not to correct Tormin on the difference between a challenge, and a duel. She took a deep breath, and held it. Only now did Harliss notice the thunderous gallop of her heartbeat. She ran her hands back through her hair, contemplating how the moments after the action always seemed so much more intense. During a standoff or a gunfight, there was exhilaration and adrenaline. But when that adrenaline faded, the thoughts of what might have been settled in. One death would have likely triggered further violence. A lot more people would have died, in the ensuring battles.\n\nNearby, Nok paced, his tail lashing. Harliss retrieved the bottle of whiskey, and poured two shots. She held one out to the kobold. A peace offering to calm the nerves was only fair. Nok took the glass, and downed it a single pull. Harliss did the same. They thumped their glasses back down together. Nok wiped his muzzle with the back of his hand. He returned to his place alongside Prav, and gave Harliss a small nod of thanks.\n\nWith that taken care of, Harliss returned her attention to the dragon. \"I think your bodyguard and I have a proper understanding, now. Which means it's time for you and me to finish our chat. So, where were we?\" She steepled her fingers. \"Oh, that's right. You were just about to tell me everything Alakor offered you. Start talking.\" Harliss leaned forward, fixing her eyes on Prav's. Her voice dropped into a low, venomous snarl. \"I will not ask politely again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Malaresh sat on his haunches outside the observation deck, while the princess listened to Alakor's painful stories, and disconcerting secrets. Malaresh kept his ears swiveled towards them, attuned to their every word. Though the dragon was willing to give the gryphon space, Malaresh still needed to judge his honesty. Without staring into the gryphon's eyes it was difficult, but the dragon believed Alakor was speaking the truth. However, he also believed Alakor was parsing his words ever so carefully, omitting key details.\n\nThe bird was full of secrets, Malaresh knew that much. The dragon did not like secrets, unless they were his own. Despite his belief that The Cataclysm should belong to him, Malaresh considered its crew worthy of his protection. The dragon would fight for this ship, and its inhabitants, against any foe imaginable. After all, they had saved him. Nira had saved him. Honor dictated that he protect her in return.\n\nThe dragon hissed. Honor was a pain in the ass, he thought. Pride was a far more satisfying principle to follow, and far more assuaging to his ego. Pride snarled to him, told him that dragons should take orders from no one. Ego whispered into his ear that this ship should be his, that he should take it, if necessary. But honor, damned honor, sunk its teeth into his throat, and bid him to swear himself to Nira's protection until her dying day.\n\nAnd then there was love. Malaresh lashed his tail against the wood-paneled wall. The dragon didn't even want to think about love. It was a prison, and a dangerous one at that. Love bound him to this place, even if honor ever freed him from its grasp. For Malaresh knew that Jirril would never leave Nira's service, and the dragon could never bring himself to leave his beloved gryphon behind.\n\nHe snarled, unsheathing his claws and digging them into the floorboards. It pained him to admit he loved that stupid, fluffy, pompous peacock. How the hell he'd ever grown so close to a damned gryphon, he'd never know. Malaresh feared he was getting far too soft in his old age. Why, in his younger days, Malaresh the Marauder, the great Baron of-\n\n\"What are they saying?\" Rog thumped the dragon's scales.\n\n\"What?\" Malaresh glanced down at the gnoll, flattening his ears. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Them!\" Rog pointed into the observation deck, where Nira was wrapping up her discussion. \"You're the only one who's been listening in the whole time. And you kept snarling and clawing things, so whatever they're talking about must be serious.\" The gnoll folded his arms. \"So, what is it?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Malaresh tossed his head. \"It's private. None of your business.\"\n\n\"But you're listening.\"\n\nThe dragon smiled. \"Of course, I am. I'm a dragon. Everything on this ship is my business.\"\n\n\"He wasn't listening.\" Sivik, one of two female gryphons seated behind him, stretched her wing towards the dragon. \"He was thinking about his boyfriend. He always gets like that when he starts thinking about Jirril.\"\n\n\"I was not thinking about my boyfriend!\" The dragon snarled at her. How dare she assume the truth. \"And Jirril is not my boyfriend! Dragons do not have boyfriends!\" He paused, then gave a throaty growl, frustrated. \"That is, we would not use that term. I would say he is my mate, instead. But he isn't!\" He bared his fangs at her, frills flared. \"Jirril is my servant and concubine!\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Lissir, the other female gryphon, and Sivik's sister, cocked her head. \"I'll tell him you said that.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare!\" Malaresh stomped a forepaw, cracking floorboards. \"I'm already in trouble with him for calling him that earlier!\"\n\nThat only provoked a round of squawking laughter from the female gryphons.\n\nMalaresh hissed, stomping again. \"Oh, suck my majestic cock, the both of you!\"\n\n\"Perhaps if you were single, dragon,\" Sivik said, her crown feathers lifted. \"But, you know...\"\n\nLissir picked up for her, ears splayed in smug amusement. \"We wouldn't want to make you boyfriend jealous!\"\n\nBoth sisters burst into another round of laughter.\n\nMalaresh turned his attention away from the gryphons, curling his tail around his paws. He forced himself to return his focus to the end of Nira's conversation with Alakor. The gryphon seemed to have earned a little of her trust. Malaresh hoped the bird hadn't earned too much trust, given his myriad of potentially dangerous secrets. Still, Malaresh was willing to try and give Alakor the benefit of the doubt, at least. The princess soon returned from the observation deck, and Malaresh herded everyone back to make way.\n\nNira entered the corridor, running a hand back across her frazzled hair. \"Well, that was interesting.\"\n\nMalaresh lowered his head to eye-level with her. \"I do not believe that went as you intended.\"\n\nThe Princess grimaced, then pinched the bridge of her nose. \"No, dragon, it did not.\"\n\nRog approached and put a hand upon her shoulder, offering her a comforting squeeze. \"Hopefully you got something out of him, at least?\"\n\n\"Yes, and no.\" Nira set her hand atop Rog's, glancing up at the dragon. \"Weren't you listening?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I did not pass on your every word.\" The dragon licked his muzzle. \"I will leave it to you to decide what to share, and what to keep to yourself.\"\n\n\"Suppose I appreciate that.\" Nira patted the dragon's neck. \"Thank you for your support, by the way. I know you probably don't like being dragged down here only to sit by the wayside, but I'm glad we didn't have to involve you.\"\n\nThe dragon nodded once. \"I, too, am pleased you were not in danger, though I am disappointed I did not have an excuse to kick his feathery ass again.\"\n\nNira chuckled, stepping back from the dragon. \"I'm sure you'll have another chance, eventually.\" She held a hand up. \"But do try to get along with him. I asked him to do the same with you.\"\n\n\"I will do my best.\" The dragon pushed himself up onto all fours, shaking his scaled body. His wings rustled at his sides. \"However, I will now question him myself.\"\n\nNira scowled, resting her hands against her pistols. \"I'm not sure that's a good idea. I don't where his mind's at, right now.\"\n\n\"That is precisely the point.\" Malaresh stretched his front legs out, lowering his chest. He yawned, his tongue curling in his muzzle. He pushed back up and stretched his hind legs one at a time. It was a shame something important had to interrupt his comfortable lounging. \"To question him while he's off-guard.\"\n\nNira glanced back towards the observation deck. \"Dare I ask what you want to talk to him about?\"\n\nMalaresh licked his nose. \"Jirril urged me to seek common ground, as it were, to further my truce with the snow pidgeon.\" Malaresh snorted, flattening his ears. He was not fond of the idea, but he'd promised Jirril he would try. \"So I shall do so.\"\n\nNira set her hand on the dragon's shoulder. \"I think that's a great idea.\"\n\nLissir gave a playful coo. \"That's Malaresh's way of saying, his boyfriend ordered him to be friendly.\"\n\n\"Stuff a cannon under your tailfeathers, bird!\" Malaresh tossed his head. \"Dragons do not take orders from their boyfriends! Jirril makes suggestions, which I decline and then pretend to have come up with, as befits a dragon.\"\n\nLissir only smiled, lifting her crown feathers. \"So, you admit he is your boyfriend.\"\n\nMalaresh thumped a paw down. The already cracked floorboards creaked ominously. \"I admit nothing! Besides, I had follow-up questions to ask Alakor, anyway.\"\n\nSivik whispered to her sister, just loud enough for the dragon to hear. \"Questions like, what do gryphons fancy, that he can get his boyfriend for their anniversary?\"\n\nThe dragon flared up all his spines. \"I will pluck you bald, you squawking chicken.\" He glanced at Nira when the gryphons only laughed at his threat. \"I simply thought it best to let you handle the conversation alone, that you might earn his trust. Now that you've done so, I can ask my own questions without squandering your goodwill.\"\n\nRog gently put a hand on Nira's arm. \"Yeah, Princess. Let the dragon be the asshole, here.\"\n\n\"Thank you, gnoll.\" Malaresh narrowed his eyes, glaring down at the smaller creature. \"I think. Not exactly what I meant, but-\"\n\n\"Just like we talked about in the promenade, earlier.\" Rog gestured between Nira and himself. \"Good cop, bad cop! Only...\" He switched to indicating the princess and the dragon. \"Now it's trusted princess, asshole dragon.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled a low, growling threat. \"Do not call me that a third time.\"\n\nNira stepped between them, holding her hands up. \"Please don't get started.\" She pivoted towards the dragon, her eyes searching him. \"What Alakor said, about the sun. He said the idea came from dragons, first. Did you ever hear anything like that, when you were younger?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Malaresh softened his voice, his wings sagging at his sides. \"Though I was not part of a clan, I still heard tales. They were as he said. That the colors were different. That it's red-gold fire was once...just gold.\"\n\n\"Princess?\" Sivik stepped forward, looking between the two of them. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nNira turned towards the others. \"Alakor told me the sun is fading. And that the Union proved it.\"\n\n\"Fading?\" Lissir followed her sister. \"What the hell does that mean?\"\n\nNira rubbed her forehead. \"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it's not even true. Maybe-\"\n\n\"The sun is dying, Princess.\" Malaresh turned his eyes to each of them in turn. \"That is what it means. That is what dragons believed, even when I was younger. In time, all things die. The sun is no exception.\"\n\n\"That's stupid!\" Rog snarled, though the sound was more of fearful frustration than anything else. \"The sun can't die. It's-\"\n\n\"It's what?\" Malaresh sharpened his voice. \"Go ahead, gnoll, explain to me exactly what the sun is. Describe to me its properties! How it exists, what fuels it. What elements is it composed of?\"\n\nRog scratched at his ruff, sighing. \"I...I don't know. Never really studied science, or astronomy.\"\n\n\"Everything dies, gnoll.\" The dragon lifted a paw, flicking a claw out. \"Imagine a great fire, stoked eternally with coal. But when happens when there's no more coal to burn? Little by little, the flames subside to embers, and the embers slowly fade. Until, at last, the fire dies.\"\n\n\"Fuck.\" Rog took a slow breath, then dragged his hands down his muzzle. \"And...and that's happening? To us? To the sun?\"\n\n\"Easy, Rog.\" Nira put a hand on the gnoll's chest. \"It's only a theory.\" She shot the dragon a dark look, but the cold hollow in her eyes told him she worried it might be more than that. \"Even if the sun is fading, and I've yet to see even the smallest shred of proof, it's not like any of us could change that.\" She looked around at everyone. \"Even if the gryphon's right, that means it's been happening for centuries, at least. So it's not likely to even affect us in our lifetimes.\" Nira turned back towards the dragon. \"Right?\"\n\nMalaresh only shrugged his wings. He had heard these tales in his youth, and lived much of his life with the concept hidden away, in the back of his mind. As the Princess herself said, there was nothing to be done about it, truth or not. He saw no reason to argue with her.\n\n\"So, for now,\" Nira said, gesturing around the group. \"Let's keep between the officers. I sure as hell don't want to start a panic among the crew over something no one in the whole world could change.\"\n\n\"Suppose you got a point.\" Rog swallowed, his ears flat. \"Still, s'creepy as hell to hear.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nira grimaced, rubbing her arms when a shiver racked her. \"It is.\"\n\n\"For your own wellbeing, I suggest you either grow accustomed to the idea, or find a way to forget it.\" Malaresh bowed his head to the princess. \"Now, if you've nothing further for me, I am going to speak to the snow gryphon.\" He glared at the feathered sisters. \"Alone.\"\n\nLissir met his glare with her own. \"We're his guards, Dragon.\"\n\nNira patted Malaresh's shoulder. \"I think our scaly friend here can serve that role for a little while. Acceptable?\"\n\n\"No.\" Malaresh rumbled, a low, frustrated sound. \"But I will accept, nonetheless, if I must.\"\n\n\"You did say you wanted to make friends, right?\" Sivik laughed, flashing him an open beaked smile. \"Now's your chance!\"\n\n\"That is definitely not what I said.\"\n\nNira scratched at the gryphon's neck. \"Quit teasing the poor dragon.\" Then she waved down the hall. \"Come on, you girls can come with Rog and me. And Malaresh?\" She bowed her head to him, then shook a finger. \"Thank you again for your help, but if you learn anything important, I want to hear it immediately.\"\n\n\"As you wish, girl.\" Malaresh tossed his head. \"Go on, then. The more time you waste, the longer he has to collect himself and better guard against my questions.\"\n\nNira hooked an arm around Rog's waist. \"Let's go find the others. I'm gonna need you and Amelia to draw up tactical plans, and Kasis and Vekk to plot multiple courses for escape if things go badly.\" The princess paused, glancing back towards the dragon. \"And you know what? I'm gonna authorize your damn bombs.\"\n\nMalaresh smiled, excitement welling up in his chest. \"Oh, Princess, you have made my whole damn day.\" He couldn't wait.\n\n\"Thought you'd appreciate that.\" Nira flashed him a devious smile. \"After all, we gotta stay ahead of this Executor, one way or another. I don't care how damn Sanctified she is. If it comes to it, you blow her the hell up.\"\n\nMalaresh bowed his head, snarling in barely contained delight. \"With absolute pleasure.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Executor Harliss stared at the gray-blue dragon in silence, waiting for him to continue. She savored the way the beast shifted his weight, rustling his wings in nervous discomfort. Harliss was all too happy to let that anxious uncertainty weigh heavily upon him. The longer it took him to reply, the more honest she expected him to be.\n\n\"A deal.\" Prav finally gave a low, guttural sigh. He curled his tail around his paws, staring back at her. \"Your runaway gryphon offered me a deal.\" He growled through grit teeth. \"That I did not accept.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask if you accepted or not.\" Harliss rubbed her hands together. \"What did Alakor offer?\"\n\n\"Oh, he offered the usual such of things, through my associates.\" Prav glared down at his table of food and drink as if suddenly irritated by the sight of it. \"Union secrets, access to advanced technology and weapons. Possibly even Union ships.\" He snorted, tail tip flicking repeatedly against the floor. \"As interested as I was, it would be harder to claim neutrality if my people were hijacking Union shipments and vessels.\"\n\nHarliss listened, her head tilted. She let the dragon speak at his own pace now, prodding only when she suspected he wasn't filling in all the blanks. \"I'm sure you've had that sort of offer before.\"\n\n\"I have.\" Prav rustled his wings, still staring at the table. \"At first, I assumed it nothing more than entrapment. The Union would love to pin something actionable on me.\"\n\nThe Executor flashed him a playful smile. \"They would, yes. You've been quite the thorn in our collective asses.\" She glanced at Tormin and Evlee. \"Well, the Union's ass, anyway.\"\n\nPrav looked up, his pale eyes narrowed, ears flat. \"You say that as if you aren't Union.\"\n\n\"Let's just say I don't agree with their every policy.\" Harliss swirled a finger in the air. \"But we'll circle back around to that later. Go on. What did the bird say that finally convinced you to meet with him?\"\n\n\"He made more intriguing offers.\" Prav licked his nose, tapping his fingers against the floor. \"Such as alliances, with powerful forces from across the seas.\"\n\n\"Who?\" The Executor leaned towards the dragon. \"Names, Prav.\"\n\nPrav continued tapping claws. \"Diandrios. Shevar. Each looking to find allies against the other, as usual. And another possibility.\"\n\nHarliss sharpened her tone. \"Don't leave things out, Prav.\"\n\n\"Did you know there's an entire empire of dragons, now?\" Prav turned his head, gazing into the distance as though peering through the walls, and into the great world beyond. \"Imagine that. An entire empire of us. Building cities, airships...\" A smoldering edge crept into his voice. \"Armies. Imagine what an entire army of dragons, backed by modern machinery, by electricity, could accomplish.\"\n\nHarliss shrugged, careful to keep her body language as casual as could be. The Union was well-aware of that burgeoning empire. In Union documents, it was simply referred to as, The Dragon Empire. The Church refused it official recognition, and so did not use its formal name. For the time being, her employers did not consider it an immediate threat. The Dragon Empire was entire oceans away. Not just oceans of sea, and salt, but of great clouds of roiling, freezing death. There were trade routes between continents, of course, hazardous as they may be. But even dotted with islands, ships were usually required to cross them. If the dragons were building or acquiring airship fleets of their own, that changed things.\n\n\"The Valley, yes.\" Harliss crossed her arms. \"We're aware of their existence. Odd name for a country, though.\"\n\n\"It's short for something.\" Prav licked his nose. \"The Godsblood Valley, shorthand for their ancestral land. Named by one of their founders, I believe, in honor of a lost loved one.\"\n\nHarliss arched a brow. \"You seem to know an awful lot about them, for someone who pretends to be so neutral.\"\n\n\"I'm a dragon.\" Prav arched his neck, stretching his wings. \"Why wouldn't I take an interest in the first modern era society my people have ever built?\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Harliss waved the question off. She had the distinct feeling that each of them knew far more about the Dragon Empire than they wished to acknowledge. \"What about them?\"\n\n\"Your bird.\" Prav's tone remained sharp, dangerous. \"He's met their representatives. Claims he can broker an alliance between their people...\" Prav swept a wing around the room. \"And mine. That if I would help them establish a foothold here, they would help protect me from the Union.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" Harliss idly tugged at the gold-hemmed sleeve of her white jacket. \"Misguided, but interesting. Go on.\"\n\nThe dragon shifted his weight, like a hound resting on its haunches, impatient to be fed. \"My interest was piqued. Especially when my informants told me that not only had your snow gryphon been here a number of times before, but had met with agents of The Valley. Frequently. Gryphons, mostly, but a dragon or two as well.\"\n\nEvlee twisted in her chair, peering over at Tormin. \"You hear that, Tormin? People are paying attention to what's happening in the tavern! Why, surely it couldn't be all those big-eared urd'thin slinking everywhere.\"\n\nTormin shrugged, scowling. \"Nah, they're just whores and servants. Nothing suspicious about them at all. Private conversations in this place are definitely private.\"\n\nEvlee nodded her agreement. \"Of course! If Alakor met enemy gryphons, it definitely wasn't with the expectation that the urd'thin would listen in, and report back to Prav.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Tormin smiled at Evlee. \"He definitely wouldn't try to play the dragon like that.\"\n\nPrav snorted. \"Your sarcasm is noted, and ignored.\"\n\n\"These agents,\" Harliss said, watching the dragon carefully. \"Were they with the cultists?\"\n\n\"They were the cultists.\" Prav curled his neck a little, hissing through his teeth. \"Where do you think the Servants of the Sun-Feather come from?\" Prav waved his paw. \"What better way to shroud your real allegiance than some apocalyptic cult? Everyone just thinks you're crazy, and ignores you.\"\n\nHarliss furrowed her brow. \"So they weren't really Servants of the Sun-Feather? They were just posing, to hide their allegiance to The Valley?\"\n\nPrav lifted his paws. \"In truth, I suspect they're both. Agents for The Godsblood Valley, who are also Servants of the Sun-Feather. I've heard an awful lot of odd rumors, after all.\" He set his forepaws back down. \"The point is, gryphons from across the seas met multiple times with Alakor. That lent enough credence to his offers for me to agree to meet with him.\"\n\nHarliss leaned back, considering things. Had she misinterpreted Coaldust's information? Perhaps Alakor hadn't been trying to arrange a meeting with the cult, after all. Perhaps he was already meeting with them regularly and had simply arrived a few days too late for the latest gathering. Or maybe everyone only ever heard exactly what Alakor wanted them to.\n\n\"You claim you turned down his offers,\" Harliss said, shifting her weight. She hooked her arm over the back of the chair. \"I get the feeling it wasn't just because you were afraid of pissing off the Union.\"\n\n\"No,\" Prav said, sneering. \"It was not. It was because the more we talked, the more I believed your bird had genuinely fallen with the cult, and their golden goddess. A belief he cemented when he offered me...\" He gazed down at the kobold. \"What was he said, Nok? An escape?\"\n\nNok grunted. \"Escape. From a broken world.\"\n\n\"Right, that was what he offered me.\" Prav returned his gaze to Harliss, his muzzle once more parted in a predator's wide, toothy smile. He swept his paw through the air in a grand gesture, illustrating unseen propaganda. \"An escape from this broken world, and it's dying sun.\"\n\nHarliss's blood went cold. The gryphon had discovered far more forbidden knowledge than she'd realized. She forced a smile to match the dragon's, and kept her voice level. \"And you turned that down, too?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm still here, aren't I?\" Prav made a show of looking around himself, then snarled. \"I damn sure haven't escaped anything.\" He tossed his head. \"No, at that point I knew he was either crazy, or I was in way over my head. If you ask me, it's the first one.\" Prav scratched at his neck with a wing tip, leaning into it. \"I think that cult got to him and replaced your people's brainwashing with your own.\" When his itch was soothed, the dragon shrugged his wings. \"That's only my opinion, though. For all I know, he might well be playing all of us, the cult included.\"\n\nHarliss scowled, rubbing her forehead. The more she learned about what Alakor had been doing, the less certain she was about what he had planned. If he knew about the sun, what else did he know about? Was that why he sought Nira's ship? But then why involve the cult, and the agents from across the seas? Just what the hell was he weaving? How long had he been sowing these seeds? How many places had he been, telling people what they wanted to hear, playing a part for all to see and believe in? Whatever Alakor was doing, this felt bigger than simple defection, or revenge.\n\nHarliss felt as if she was trying to assemble some great, clockwork machine, with no blueprint and only half the gears and cogs. She needed to catch that damn bird, and soon. Harliss just hoped he'd actually talk to her, when she did. For now, she had to move on.\n\n\"So, this escape, as he called it.\" Harliss poured herself some water, then settled back with the glass. \"What was to be your end of the bargain? You haven't said what he wanted in return.\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" An odd smile flitted across the dragon's muzzle, his ears lifting slightly. \"He wanted me to do nothing, at all.\"\n\nAll at once, Prav was like a spider watching a fly dance at the very edge of its web, ever so close to disaster. Tormin and Evlee must have seen it, too, because their hands drifted towards their guns. Nok slowly unfolded his arms, readying himself.\n\n\"Go on.\" Harliss gestured with her water. \"Nothing can't mean nothing.\"\n\n\"Oh, but it does. All he asked for was my complete inaction.\" The dragon stretched a wing, gazing at her impassively. \"And for my blessing.\"\n\nHarliss tightened her fingers around her glass. \"Blessing for what?\"\n\n\"To ambush your ship and kill you all.\" The dragon's smile returned, more eager than ever, delighting in the fact the fly had finally been snared. \"He led you here, Executor! Why do you think he's defecting to The Cataclysm? To bringing the fucking sky down on anyone who comes after him!\"\n\n\"You son of a bitch!\" Tormin snarled, on his feet in an instant, lifting his scattergun towards Prav's head.\n\nNok was faster. In half a blink, he had two pistols out and aimed at Tormin before the big man even had his weapon halfway raised. \"Sit the fuck down, you bloated ogre!\"\n\nTormin reddened, his fingers tensing. When he did not sit, Harliss stood instead. She made sure Nok could see her hands were empty, then rested one against the barrel of Tormin's gun. She pressed down until Tormin lowered his weapon. He slowly sank back into his chair, grinding his teeth.\n\nAs Harliss sat back down, she glanced at Nok. \"Not bad. Not bad at all.\"\n\nNok nodded without taking his eyes off Tormin. \"Appreciated.\"\n\nHarliss folded her arms, giving him a playful smile. \"Not bad wouldn't cut it against me, though.\"\n\nNok only shrugged. \"I figured I'd give Grampa Scripture a chance. I'da drawn a lot faster on you.\"\n\n\"Good. Because you'd have to.\" Harliss looked Tormin over. \"Take a breath.\"\n\nTormin did so, only to let it back out in a long, growling sigh. \"Aren't you worried about what the dragon just said?\"\n\n\"I would be,\" Harliss said, giving Tormin a stern look. \"If he hadn't expressed to us repeatedly that he turned the offer down.\"\n\n\"And now you know why I didn't want to tell you, in the first place.\" Prav lashed his tail, upending a few more cushions. \"Because that's exactly the sort of reaction I expected.\" He laughed, the sound low and rumbling. \"Not that I didn't enjoy springing that on you.\"\n\n\"You're a piece of shit, Prav.\" Tormin rested his gun across his lap, grumbling under his breath.\n\n\"Two curses?\" Prav put a paw to his chest, cooing. \"Awww, I think I hurt his pious feelings, Nok.\"\n\n\"Seems that way.\" Nok glared at Tormin, waggling his pistols. \"If I draw these again, it won't end the same way. So don't make me.\" He tucked them back into the holsters, then glanced at Evlee. \"You either.\"\n\n\"What did I do?\" Evlee huffed, tossing her hair. \"For that matter, what didn't I do? I feel a little insulted you didn't point one of those at me.\"\n\n\"Nah.\" The kobold shook his red-scaled head. \"You act crazy, but you aren't really that rash. You'd pull one just for show. The big man, though.\" He inclined his muzzle towards Tormin. \"He only lifts that thing when he means it.\"\n\nPrav hissed at his smaller enforcer. \"You should have aimed one at the Executor, just in case.\" He glanced at Harliss. \"No offense, Executor, just speaking practically.\"\n\nHarliss held her hands up. \"None taken.\"\n\n\"Nope.\" The kobold shrugged, watching Harliss. \"Didn't need to. We got a thing going.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled. \"Concur.\"\n\nPrav studied Nok and Harliss in turn. \"I'm starting to wonder if you two want to shoot each other, or fuck each other! Or both.\"\n\nHarliss arched a brow. \"Well, I've shot kobolds before, but I've never fucked one. Suppose there's a first time for everything.\"\n\nNok gave her a blank stare. \"You couldn't handle me.\"\n\nPrav snorted, shaking his wings. \"You'd murder each other halfway through, anyway.\" He clacked his teeth for their attention. \"The Executor was right, by the way. I did turn the gryphon down. Alakor asked for my blessing to ambush Union ships on my lands, and in my skies. He further asked that I refrain from joining in on either side, so that I might maintain my neutrality in the Union's eyes. I politely declined.\"\n\nTormin leaned forward, fire still glowing in his eyes. \"To which part?\"\n\nThe dragon snarled, lifting his red splotched frills. \"I refused to grant him permission to stage any such ambush here.\"\n\n\"Did you also decline to stay out of any battle?\" Tormin gripped his gun till his knuckles stood out white. \"Meaning, you would pick a side, should a skirmish break out anyway?\"\n\n\"Is that a trick question?\" The dragon tossed his head. \"What are you, out of interrogation techniques?\"\n\nHarliss held up a hand, and Tormin clamped his jaws shut. \"Tormin's right, even if you don't want to admit it, Prav. You may have refused to allow Alakor to stage an ambush here, but we all know that bird doesn't give one shit whether you've given your blessing or not.\"\n\nPrav shrugged his wings, then made a show of gazing at the back of a forepaw. \"I certainly can't be held responsible for the actions of any renegade Princess. Let alone one who may or may not by led here by the dubious claims of a defecting spy.\" He flourished the same paw in a circular motion. \"Such a wild chain of events would be completely out of my hands.\"\n\n\"You could, however,\" Harliss said, careful to keep her voice even. \"Be held responsible for stalling us.\" She reached forward, and selected a piece of candied fruit, waving it at the dragon. \"If that was what you were doing.\" She popped the fruit into her mouth.\n\nEvlee picked up for her. \"And if said stalling was done to ensure we were still here when said ambush happened.\"\n\nPrav only smiled at them. \"I'm not stalling you. Leave any time you like. Get in your ship and go now, if you wish. Otherwise I'd say you have at least a few days to enjoy my hospitality.\" He glanced down at Nok, who nodded. \"But I wouldn't stick around any longer than that.\"\n\n\"Oh, Prav,\" Harliss said, rubbing her hands together. \"Why would I leave if the gryphon's going to bring the Princess right to me? No, no, no.\" Harliss clucked her tongue. \"We're not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself, Executor.\" Prav sat up straighter, curling his tail around his paws. \"Personally, I'd rather you left. The Union's really gonna be a pain in my ass after an Executor ship gets blown out of my airspace. But I'll be sure to have most of your ship's debris collected and returned to them.\" He smirked, glancing down at the kobold. \"Though, a few choice, valuable bits of technology might sadly be lost forever.\"\n\n\"Ever pragmatic, eh Prav?\" Harliss smoothed out her jacket's sleeves, casual as could be. \"Oh, there was one more thing I wanted to discuss. And now that I know The Cataclysm's on its way-\"\n\n\"Possibly on its way,\" Prav said, still smiling. \"I certainly forbid it, but who can stop that crazy Princess Nira from doing as she pleases?\"\n\nHarliss propped her boots up on the table, ignoring him. \"Now that I know The Cataclysm's on its way, I think it's time I present you my deal.\"\n\nThe dragon's smile dropped from his muzzle in an instant. \"I'm not making any deal with the Union.\"\n\nOnce more, Harliss completely ignored his protests. \"You see, I very much need to meet this Princess Nira, face to face. Alakor, too. But I'm going to need to make a few preparations, and for that, I'm going to need your help.\"\n\n\"I would not count on it, Executor.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you haven't even heard my deal yet.\" Harliss folded her hands behind her head, grinning. \"And I promise you, Prav, this is not the sort of deal you refuse.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Harliss and company followed Nok away from Prav's chamber. The route was as winding as before, and totally unfamiliar. They passed walls painted like blue skies, and a room lined with portraits of Prav in elegant, majestic poses. Another held glittering displays showcasing trophies from past battles. Harliss suspected Prav was just showing off. She certainly had no intention of marching back in there to find him again. Besides, the Executor had made it quite clear to Prav it was in his own best interests to cooperate with her.\n\nThey soon emerged back into the tavern to find it was bustling once more. Loud voices and raucous laughter waged a cacophonous war with music and song. Servers crisscrossed the room, weaving between tables and booths. Kobolds scurried across the bar and up ladders to fetch bottles. The wounded and the doctors had been replaced with workers scrubbing bloodstains and patching bullet holes. Given the way they were ignored, they must have been a common sight.\n\nHarliss rested a hand upon a pistol as they traversed the tavern. The Executor thought it best to be prepared in case some offended party sought revenge. She tried to listen in to nearby conversations, but it was difficult to pick out individual voices from the din. Those she overheard successfully sounded impressed, rather than upset. Harliss was pleased. The more people who saw her weave her tales and put bullets to bones, the better. Anything to keep the old legends alive, she thought.\n\nA century ago, people like Nok and her were the subject of folk tales and myths. The Ballad began with those who dared explore the world in rickety flying ships, and face their foes with weapons that spat fire, and lead. In those heady days, stories of unbeaten gunslingers were spun in taverns for enthralled audiences. Beer and whiskey were paired with tales of lands unexplored, of duels and gunfights, of death and forgiveness.\n\nBack then, all the world must have seemed a brave new frontier filled with beasts and outlaws, with sunken oceans and roiling clouds of death. And freedom. The Ballad spoke of it as a great paradox; an untamable land, open only to those who dared to try and tame it. At the time, it seemed only the Ballad's guiding principles could give shape to the beautiful, formless chaos of the unconquerable frontier.\n\nAnd then, with industry, everything changed.\n\nNow every little faction had its own airships. Factories were mass-producing guns, and pouring out shoddy machined ammo. Nations were growing and consuming one another, and their laws slowly superseded codes of honor. Any misguided fool could get themselves a gun, and throw their lives away with it. The frontier was dissolving, and all the old legends were dying out.\n\nBut Executor Harliss would be damned if she'd let them die. That was why she spun her tales. Everywhere she went, every interaction she had, was an opportunity to weave herself into myth's enduring fabric. Though the Ballad forbid her from being too prideful in her own legend, she knew well enough it existed. Nok had recognized her name, after all. But it wasn't recognition, she was after. It was inspiration.\n\nAs far as Harliss was concerned, the world needed people like her to inspire them. At a time when industry was replacing the unknown, and the sun was slowly fading, the world needed something impossible to believe in. That was why she let the Union name her Sanctified. Because the very idea of an unkillable gunslinger, dispensing justice and blessed by the gods, made for a perfect legend.\n\nThe truth was, she didn't care about the Union's laws. She cared about the legend she could build around them. If she could inspire others to believe in the old tales, then they might take up the Ballad next. Whether they did so to slay her or support her mattered not, so long as they followed The Cylinder's Song.\n\nSometimes, Harliss feared it was a losing effort. That she, like civilization itself, was simply born too late. At least out here in lands that remained so doggedly wild, the legends lived on. Nok was proof of that. In an earlier life, she might have built a rivalry for the ages with that little kobold.\n\nHarliss watched him as they neared the front doors. Nok's head was constantly moving, his eyes darting about. Harliss knew that behavior well. Nok was appraising every possible threat, marking them in his mind. Harliss followed his gaze. A man in the corner glared knives at her. Angry, but likely not stupid enough to go for his weapons. The drunken va'chaak looming nearby might be, though. He was already wobbling, and drunks were always more likely to draw. With a tiny tilt of his head, Nok assigned another guard to keep watch on the lizard.\n\nDeputy Hatha met them at the exit. The gnoll pushed a door open, holding it for them. \"I'll escort you back to your men, if you're ready.\" He flattened his ears, scowling. \"I'm told you're going to remain docked a little longer.\"\n\nEvlee stepped forward, trailing a finger down the gnoll's silver and black vest. \"Yes, Deputy, I'm afraid you're not going to be free of us that easily. Plenty of time for us to get to know each other.\"\n\nHatha sighed, his tail going limp. \"Wonderful.\" He turned his attention to Harliss. \"Executor, at any rate, I'd appreciate it if you'd allow me or another deputy to escort you to and from the tavern for the duration of your stay. That goes for any of your people.\"\n\nHarliss offered the gnoll a polite smile. \"If you think that's necessary.\"\n\n\"I do.\" Hatha grunted, resting a hand on his oversized revolver. \"Not that I think you need the protection. Far from it. But if there are any more...\" He licked his muzzle, baring a few fangs. \"Incidents, I want there to be an official witness from The Emplacement. It will make things easier for us.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" Harliss put a hand on the gnoll's shoulder, squeezing it. \"I appreciate your efforts today, Deputy, and your understanding. Now, I've suggested to Prav that he not give you any trouble about the whole disarmament issue. But if you have any problems, let me know.\"\n\nThe gnoll grumbled, rubbing at his neck ruff. \"Not sure how I feel about-\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry, Deputy!\" Evlee patted the gnoll's chest. \"We'll make sure you're not punished. Well...\" She looked him over, smirking. \"Not in ways you won't enjoy, anyway.\"\n\nHatha groaned, his ears drooping. \"I think I liked you better when you were threatening to stab me.\"\n\n\"So did I,\" Tormin said, glaring at Evlee.\n\nEvlee just smiled and turned away. \"Oh, neither of you are as much fun as Coaldust, anyway.\"\n\nHatha grunted, turning his attention to Harliss. \"Ready to depart, Executor?\"\n\nBefore Harliss could reply, Nok barred her way with a slender, red-scaled arm. \"Buyin' you a drink, first.\"\n\nHarliss arched a brow, peering down at him. \"Thank you for the offer, but I've had enough, already.\"\n\n\"Not asking.\" Nok did not lower his arm. \"Not a request. I buy, you drink. That's it.\"\n\nHarliss hooked her thumbs into her gun belts. \"Is this your way of getting the last word?\"\n\nThe kobold inclined his head towards an empty table in a corner alcove, near the bar. \"Sit.\"\n\n\"Executor,\" Tormin said, frowning. \"I don't think that's a good idea.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't expect you to, Tormin.\" Harliss gave the kobold a nod. \"Very well. But give me five minutes, first.\"\n\n\"Startin' now.\" Nok dropped his arm out of her way, and backed up. \"If you're late, I'm buyin' you two drinks.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, gesturing for Hatha to lead them back to her own men. \"I'll take my time, then.\"\n\nOutside, the sun had nearly set. A sliver of red-orange fire still burned above the serrated peaks of the Broken Teeth, and The Emplacement's many cliffside artillery batteries. But purple-hued shadows already smothered the grounds beyond the tavern. Gas lamps flickered alongside the wide, wooden boardwalk. The tangled streets of the grimy city beyond the brothel were darker still, as though night somehow found them hours earlier. A cool breeze rustled Harliss's hair, bringing with it enough fresh mountain air to tamp down on the smells of oil, smoke, and refuse.\n\nTormin and Evlee walked swiftly at her side as she followed Hatha down the boardwalk. Tormin glared at her, his mouth drawn into an angry line. \"Executor, you're not seriously considering taking that little monster up on his offer.\"\n\n\"I can't refuse now, Tormin.\" Harliss drummed fingers against a pistol as she strode after the gnoll. \"I'd lose face.\"\n\nTormin made a frustrated, growling noise, his boots falling heavy against the boardwalk. \"With respect, Executor. I do not think this is the time to indulge in old-fashioned gunslinger games.\" He held up a single finger. \"For one, you two already almost blew each other's heads off. And you involved me!\"\n\n\"Because I trusted you to be fair, Tormin, to both of us.\"\n\nFor two...\" Tormin ticked off another finger, ignoring her. \"You've already had more to drink that I'm comfortable with. Even you can't shoot your best if you're inebriated. And three?\" He held up a third finger. \"You're blackmailing his boss. What if that little monster-\"\n\n\"It's not blackmail, Tormin, it's reality.\" Harliss scowled, but did not otherwise argue with him. \"Prav is smart enough to read the writing on the wall. Sooner or later, the Union will make him choose.\"\n\nTormin ignored her interruption entirely. \"What if that little monster just wants to get you drunk enough to make sure he's faster than you? I know you woulda taken him in Prav's office, but what about when you're blind drunk? If he puts a bullet in your head, he solves a lotta Prav's problems.\"\n\n\"And creates ten times more down the road.\" Harliss waved him off. \"Having an Executor killed in his establishment would invite a bombardment the likes of which-\"\n\n\"So maybe it's not 'in his establishment.' Maybe...\" Tormin jabbed a finger towards her. \"You go for a drink, and then you just disappear. If we can't find you, we can't prove what happened, can we? Hell, he could pin it on someone working for the Princess, or that damn gryphon.\"\n\n\"Tormin.\" Harliss stopped and put a hand on his arm. \"Enough. I appreciate your concern, and your disagreements are noted.\" She offered Tormin a smile. Frustrating as he was, Harliss knew he only had her best interests in mind. \"You're welcome to lodge an official complaint, if it makes you feel better.\"\n\nThe big man rolled his eyes. \"A lot of good that would do. I just don't think this is a good idea.\"\n\n\"Oh, it absolutely isn't. It's a terrible idea.\" Harliss laughed, squeezing his arm. \"But I promise you, the kobold means me no harm.\" She flashed him a coy smile. \"Well, not tonight, anyway. I assure you, right now is the safest possible time for me to meet with him. He follows The Ballad, Tormin. He just wants to one-up me.\"\n\n\"Then let him.\" Tormin put his hand over hers, softening his voice. \"Please.\"\n\n\"Can't do it, Tormin.\" Harliss patted his hand, then turned back towards her waiting soldiers. \"But I genuinely appreciate your concern.\"\n\nTormin followed glaring at her all the while. \"Yeah, yeah. Maybe I just don't want us to lose our best weapon to a drinking game gone wrong.\"\n\nThat drew another laugh. \"One drink is not a drinking game. But if you keep delaying me, then he'll buy me two drinks, and who knows where it goes from there.\"\n\n\"You hear that, Tormin?\" Evlee shot him a playful grin around Harliss. \"If the Executor comes back stumbling drunk, it's your fault.\"\n\n\"Like hell it is!\"\n\nHarliss cut them both off with a loud, sharp whistle. Her two male snow gryphons returned the call with cries of their own. They remained seated on the boardwalk, keeping watch with her men. In the distance, the females also called out as they broke from their watchful patrols. They shot through the skies, and soon landed near the males. The four gryphons greeted and nuzzled one another before taking up positions on either side of the road, clearing the way for Harliss to approach the assembled soldiers.\n\nThe gnoll stepped aside. \"I'll escort you back, when you're ready.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Deputy.\" Harliss smiled at the gryphons, taking time to rub each of their necks, and scratch their ears. \"Good boys. Good girls.\" When that was done, she approached her soldiers. \"I've negotiated arrangement with the local leadership. We shall remain in port for the foreseeable future, while repairs are completed upon our sister vessels. The Stormcaller will be also be fully resupplied. For the time being, maintain a secure perimeter around all Union vessels. Close off that section of the docks. It belongs to us until we leave. No one visits or supplies our ships without Union supervision. I expect to be treated like guests.\"\n\nShe leveled her gaze with a few soldiers in particular. \"And I expect you to treat our hosts just as politely. We don't have to like them, to be respectful. Remember, we are here representing the Golden Union! And the Golden Union has great plans for this place. Peaceful plans. Every little bit of trouble or disrespect we offer is another thorn for Baron Prav to nettle our leadership with when negotiations commence. So, if I hear that anyone has done something to imperil those negotiations? Well...\" Harliss trailed off into a chuckle. \"I might just sell you to the brothel. Clear?\"\n\n\"Yes, Executor!\" Her soldiers answered, nearly in unison.\n\n\"Good!\" She turned her attention at the group's captain, thrusting a finger towards the damaged Union vessels in the distance. \"I want those ships not only ready to fly, but armed and prepared for battle, as per Sparrow-Swift emergency combat reconfiguration protocols. Have the work started as soon as you've closed the docks. Then assign repair shifts and perimeter watches for the next week. When that's finished, anyone not on duty may take the evening off. You're welcome to visit the tavern, but if you do, please act responsibly. I will hold you responsible for any trouble you're involved in.\"\n\nThe captain saluted. \"Yes, Executor! The offer is appreciated.\"\n\nHarliss nodded. \"Dismissed, then.\"\n\n\"You heard the Executor!\" The Captain turned towards his men. \"Move out!\"\n\nAs her soldiers marched back to The Stormcaller, Harliss turned her attention to the four snow gryphons. Evlee walked from gryphon to gryphon, feeding them figs, dates, cured meats, and other delights taken from Prav's table. Harliss waited until each gryphon had a turn delicately taking the delicious tidbits from Evlee's hands.\n\n\"As for you four, my good birds.\" Harliss paused till they were focused on her. \"I think it's only fair you know that The Cataclysm is on its way here. You need to be ready for battle.\" She looked each of them over, her voice soft but serious. \"Not just against guns, but other gryphons, and a dragon with a history of battling Executors.\" She paused, turning her full attention to Stripe. The female with the black line down her crown feathers waited expectantly, eyes shining. \"You also need to know that Alakor is the one leading The Cataclysm here. You may have to fight him.\"\n\nStripe stiffened, flattening back her ears. The other three all turned their faces towards her, offering little comforting coos. Stripe swallowed, working her beak. \"I will do whatever I must, Executor.\"\n\n\"I know you will, my lovely.\" Harliss stroked Stripe's ear. \"It is my genuine hope to avoid violence. But I rather doubt he's leading that ship here for a peace summit.\"\n\nThe gryphon leaned into Harliss's touch, closing her eyes. \"I will be ready, Executor. We all will.\"\n\nHer four snow gryphons all gave growled affirmations. Then they brushed their wings across Stripe in a show of support. Each also touched her paws, nuzzled her neck, and gently cooed to her. Her four birds had become like a family over the years. But for Stripe, this was different. Stripe, unlike the others, had actual family out there. Somewhere in the Union, Stripe had a fledging being reared in a combat group.\n\nIt pained Harliss to think Stripe might have to fight that child's father.\n\nSock eased away from Stripe, turning back to Harliss. \"Just give the order, Executor. We are ready.\" He swept his wing across Stripe's back. \"We can cover for her, if need be.\"\n\n\"I will have no trouble fighting him.\" Stripe snapped her beak, glaring at Sock.\n\n\"Concur.\" Speckles bumped his tail against Stripe. \"She will be ready. We all will. More than ready.\"\n\nStar nodded, warbling. \"We will do whatever must for you, Executor.\"\n\n\"I know you will.\" Harliss stroked each of their heads. While her birds served the Union like nearly all snow gryphons, Harliss knew where their loyalty truly lied. With her. She had rescued them, over the years, from more abusive owners. They behaved for her not because she beat them if they refused, but because she didn't. She'd saved the beatings for their former masters. \"Let's just hope it doesn't come to that.\"\n\nHarliss stepped back from the gryphons. \"Enough unpleasantness. I don't foresee any further trouble tonight, so the four of you are dismissed to your own recognizance.\" She swept a hand towards the tavern and brothel. \"Furthermore, you're hereby instructed to enjoy yourselves.\"\n\nThe four gryphons glanced at one another. Sock tilted his head, alabaster crest feathers raised. \"Enjoy ourselves? What...what are we allowed to do?\"\n\nHarliss shook her head, sighing. Her gryphons' original owners had filled their heads with so much subordination there was little room left for anything else. There was certainly a time and a place for snow gryphons to take orders and keep their beaks shut, but it was as if they'd had even the idea of independent thought beaten out of them.\n\n\"Anything you damn well please!\" Harliss put her hands on her hips, chuckling. \"You know, eat, drink, hire whores, get drunk and fuck, I don't care.\"\n\nSpeckles stared at her, his maw agape.\n\nStar blinked, tilting her head. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, really! Considering what's ahead, it's time the four of you have a night to live it up. Just don't trash the place.\" Harliss thrust a finger at the tavern. \"Now go have fun! That's an order.\"\n\nUncertainty lingered over the gryphons until Sock charged ahead, squawking excited laughter. That spurred the others to bound after him. Soon all four gryphons were racing one another. Stripe jumped into the air and beat her wings. She surged ahead only for Speckles to leap after her, nipping at her tail.\n\nEvlee giggled, bouncing in place and clapping her hands. \"Oooh, a night of drunken debauchery for the best boys and girls!\"\n\nHarliss smirked. \"Prav offered to pay. It would have rude not to take him up on it. Besides, I figured the birds deserve it.\"\n\nTormin gave a long, defeated sigh, watching The Emplacement's guards hurry to open the gryphon-sized doors. \"I don't think that's a good idea, either, but I suppose it doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't,\" Harliss said. \"But to make sure you won't spend all night worrying about my bad decisions, I'm leaving you in charge.\" She put a hand on his shoulder. \"The Stormcaller is yours till morning.\"\n\nTormin narrowed his eyes. \"I thought you were only having one drink?\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's been longer than five minutes, already.\" Harliss squeezed his shoulder, then pushed past him. \"Besides, when I'm back I'm flopping straight into bed.\"\n\n\"Assuming she doesn't flop into that kobold's bed, instead.\" Evlee laughed, and went to stand alongside Deputy Hatha.\n\n\"Oh, Evlee, please.\" Harliss rolled her eyes. \"I'd never fit in a kobold's bed.\"\n\n\"And she sure as hell won't be bringing him back here.\" Tormin glared at her, but his anger melted into a brief smile, and lingering salute. \"See you in the morning, Executor. Do be careful.\"\n\n\"I shall, Tormin. Thank you.\" Harliss returned the salute before Tormin walked away. Then she turned to Evlee. \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\"Oh, please, Executor.\" Evlee hooked her arm around Hatha's. \"The Deputy here is walking me back to the bar. If you get to spend the night drinking with monsters, I want to do the same.\"\n\nHatha swallowed audibly. \"I'm, uh, busy tonight.\"\n\n\"Which is why I'll be buying Coaldust a drink,\" Evlee said, tugging the gnoll forward. \"Not that you aren't welcome to join us, Deputy. But I was having a lovely time with that little urd'thin, earlier, before your rude friend interrupted us.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't call Yorlok my friend.\" Hatha stumbled forward, walking with Evlee.\n\n\"And I wouldn't call a quick whiskey with a kobold a night spent drinking with monsters.\" Harliss held up a finger. \"One drink, one monster.\"\n\nEvlee flashed her a smile. \"Whatever you say, Executor.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Nira made her way to Chief Navigator Kasis's personal office, near The Cataclysm's expansive bridge. Kasis had called for the Princess and her top officers to meet her there, to talk about the courses she was plotting. Though Kasis had a station on the bridge itself, she only attended it during active transit. Otherwise, she worked from the ship's nav office.\n\nThe Princess entered to find she was the last one to arrive. Rog and Amelia stood on one side of a large, circular table. Maps and charts were clipped to it everywhere. Kasis and Vekk stood across from them, each on wheeled step-ladders. The kobold and urd'thin were still finishing their calculations and muttering about fuel expenditures. Nira slipped up between Rog and Amelia to wait for her companions finish their work.\n\n\"Think you forgot to carry the one, Sunset.\" Vekk curled an arm around Kasis' waist.\n\n\"Aw, shit.\" Kasis grunted, scratched something out, and scribbled down fresh numbers. \"Damn airship mechanics,\" she said, her voice a playful growl. \"Always sticklers for math.\"\n\n\"If we weren't, things would explode.\" Vekk bumped his gray-furred muzzle against the kobold's snout in a gentle kiss.\n\n\"Yeah, well, navigatin' ain't gonna make anything explode.\" Kasis tapped her pencil against the paper. \"We'll just run outta fuel and crash.\"\n\n\"Can we not do that?\" Rog scratched at one of his ears. \"I'd like to not do that.\"\n\nAmelia folded her arms. \"We'd all like to not do that.\"\n\nKasis snapped her teeth, glaring up at the taller people. \"Then you should all shut up and let me finish calculating things!\"\n\nAmelia gave her a blank stare. \"You're the one who invited us here early.\"\n\n\"Because I expected the boss to get here first!\" Kasis thrust her pencil at Nira. \"She's smarter than the rest of you, so I thought she'd wanna hear the details. Instead, I've been stuck with Captain Smash Happy and Officer Shoots First.\"\n\nNira held her hands up, laughing. \"Oh no, keep me out of this.\"\n\nThe Princess watched Kasis and Vekk as they returned to work. The kobold wore her usual hand-tailored jumpsuit, a patchwork of grays and blues. It looked good against her bronze scales, and highlighted the azure stripes that ran from her eyes to her horns. The Empire's familiar Black Star decorated one shoulder of Kasis's jumpsuit. The other displayed the navigator's compass and her ranking. Countless pockets bulged with charts and instruments. Carabiners and latches stuck out everywhere. Her tapered tail swished behind her in time with her muttered numbers.\n\nVekk peered over Kasis's shoulder, double checking her math. Her chief engineer had always reminded Nira of a gray fox. The urd'thin's fur was a mixture of soft grays and rusty reds. A black stripe ran down the back of his bushy tail. Vekk rarely displayed any sign of his rank, and today was no different. His mechanic's jumpsuit was clean but totally unmarked. Tools protruded from deep pockets.\n\nWhile she waited, Nira looked over her two highest ranking officers. Rog still wore the golden tunic and gray breeches from earlier. An immense pistol was strapped at his hip, with an equally oversized scattergun across his back. It was unusual to see him with guns but not his cherished axe. Nira wondered if she'd teased him too much about his lack of weaponry earlier.\n\nAmelia wore her formal officer's jacket over gray and black clothes. Nira hadn't seen Amelia in her old, decorated uniform in ages. It resembled her own Captain's coat; indigo and with the Black Star on each shoulder. It also displayed the insignia of the special reconnaissance unit Amelia once commanded, along with high marks of rank. Technically speaking, Amelia outranked everyone on the ship but Nira herself. Myriad sharpshooter badges and medals adorned the garment's front. Nira imagined Amelia must have brought it out in anticipation of going up against an Executor. As usual, she had her favorite Ebony Ranger rifle slung across her shoulder.\n\nTime dragged on, and Nira turned her attention to the Navigation Office itself. The chamber had been designed for an entire team of navigators. It should have been too large for one human to use efficiently, let alone a single kobold. Yet thanks extensive personal retrofits, and seemingly boundless energy, Kasis hurtled around the room faster than any team of humans ever could.\n\nLadders, platforms, rigging, pulleys, and tethers were everywhere. Some were on wheels, while others glided along rails affixed to walls. More folded out from hidden chambers or dropped from the ceiling with the pull of a chain. There was nothing in the room Kasis couldn't swiftly access. One moment the kobold might be scaling a ladder to snatch a chart from a high alcove, the next she was hooking the carabiners on her jumpsuit to a tether, and ziplining across the room on a ceiling rail system.\n\nKasis had crammed the room full of everything she might need. Floor to ceiling alcoves stuff with maps and charts filled an entire wall. Most of the overflowing recesses weren't even labeled. Those few that were bore labels written in kobold. Only one little nook was identified in the common human language, and all it said was 'maps.' Fittingly, that alcove was empty.\n\nThe other side of the room was filled with drawers and padded display cases containing navigational aides and tools. The more delicate and antique mechanisms were kept secured for safety during turbulence. Kasis also collected photography and silver-graph equipment, including the newest camera models she could get her hands on.\n\nMahogany bookcases took up random spaces around the room, each focused around a different subject. One was filled with books on the early days of airship flight, and the so-called golden age of the air. Another held nothing but technical manuals for various airship models. Others had catalogues of navigational tools, books with images and silvery photographs of famous vessels, or fictional tales taking place across the untamed skies.\n\nThe Nav team's instrument station occupied the far end of the room. Like everything else, Kasis had heavily retrofitted its trio of workstations and orderly rows of devices and gauges to better suit herself. A sturdy, padded chair now slid back and forth on rails built on the inside of a nearly circular desk. The neat lines of compasses, altimeters, and so on had been replaced by something seemingly designed by some mad kobold scientist.\n\nGlass-covered indicators, bobbling needles and graphs, and brass-trimmed gauges encircled the sliding chair. Some jutted out at the end of makeshift copper extensions, or on oddly bent metallic tubes. A vast array of dials, switches, levers, and tiny adjustment wheels smothered one section of the desk. Kasis's station also provided access to all the ships comm's equipment, from its ship-wide chimes and talk boxes, to the sound-lines that allowed direct communication between vital ship areas.\n\nAn electric lamp in a crystalline fixture hanging from the ceiling shed plenty of blue-white light. Though Nira knew the wonders of electricity were starting to spread through some parts of the world, The Cataclysm's secretive systems remained more highly advanced than any other she knew of. With the ship drifting, and the primary propulsion turbines quiet, they were free to devote their engines towards additional electricity production.\n\nTruthfully, Nira wasn't comfortable relying on the Cataclysm's experimental electrical systems. Vekk came from a background of mechanical engineering, of steam engines and boilers, and grease and turbines and so on. He was not an electrician. The fact was, there were few such people qualified to be called that in all the world. And none of them were on her ship.\n\nThe ship's electrical systems weren't even finished before the ship was forced to launch. They had only been implemented across important decks, like those containing the bridge, main engineering, and so on. Vekk and the rest of her crew had done their best to learn and manage everything, but Nira remained distrustful of electricity. While everything was designed with as many safety precautions as possible, it still made her uneasy. She worried for her people any time they had to perform electrical maintenance, or deal with the hidden batteries and their mixtures of acids and other chemicals.\n\nThankfully, nothing on the ship required electricity to function. While the engines could produce it, they were not required to do so to power the ship. Everything had redundant back ups. Nira preferred to run things the old-fashioned way, with grand boilers and turbines bigger than some ships. They had engines built for every eventuality, some that burned coals and others designed for newer, liquid fuels. And even Nira had to admit, electricity probably wasn't any more dangerous than volatile gas lines for lamps, heaters, and-\n\n\"Hey, boss.\" Kasis tapped a pencil against the table. \"I think we're good, here. You wanna check my math?\"\n\n\"That's really not my strong suit.\" Nira shook her head, chuckling. \"Besides, I trust you to get it right.\" Then she nudged Rog with her elbow, pointing at Kasis's work. \"Bet you're glad you don't have to do that.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" The gnoll stared down at Kasis's tools. \"I'd probably break those tiny kobold tools if I tried to measure anything.\"\n\n\"Keep your big, clumsy gnoll hands off my navigational devices!\" Kasis glared up at Rog.\n\nRog held his hands up as if she'd pulled a gun on him. \"I am, I am! Princess said it, not me!\"\n\nNira rubbed her forehead. \"I meant the math. I wouldn't think you'd like to do all that math.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" The gnoll ran a hand down the ruff of fur along the back of his neck. \"I dunno, I don't mind math. How do you think I range out the cannons?\"\n\nThe kobold's tone shifted from menacing to playful. \"Princess is just bad at math.\"\n\n\"I am not!\" Nira laughed, tossing her hair. \"I just don't like it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, she doesn't like math.\" Rog jabbed a finger at the kobold, feigning a leap to Nira's defense. Then the gnoll gave her a sly, sidelong grin. \"Cause she's really bad at it.\"\n\nNira punched Rog on the shoulder hard enough to make him yelp.\n\nAmelia leaned forward to address the gnoll. \"You think we need to tutor her? Teach her how numbers work?\"\n\n\"You want one too?\" Nira held her fist up.\n\nAmelia tilted her head, smirking. \"Depends what you're offering.\"\n\nNira punched her on the shoulder just as hard. \"That.\"\n\n\"Ow!\" Amelia rubbed her arm, wincing. \"You're a bad student. Professor Rog and I are gonna give you detention.\"\n\nKasis slapped the table, rattling her tools. \"If you three are done flirting, I'm ready to proceed.\"\n\nAmelia arched a brow. \"If you think that's flirting, wait till you get the three of us at your strip poker games, together.\"\n\n\"Oh, gods.\" Nira put a hand over her face, muffling her laughter. \"Everyone would end up naked but Kasis.\"\n\nKasis only smiled. \"I can't help if I'm naturally gifted at card games.\"\n\n\"You're gifted at cheating at card games, anyway.\" Nira peered over the charts. \"I think that's why she's only ever invited one of you at a time. To keep you from realizing she's cheating you both.\"\n\nRog swished his tail. \"I only played her for coins and bullets and drinks. Ain't played her for clothes, so far.\"\n\n\"I have,\" Amelia said. \"Ain't seen her outta that jumpsuit yet.\" She glanced at Vekk, smirking. \"Him, though-\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, yeah!\" The urd'thin spoke up to cut Amelia off. \"We've all done embarrassing things when we're drunk at one of Sunset's strip poker tournaments.\"\n\nNira shook her head. \"I haven't. I haven't even been invited to...\" She trailed off, blinking. \"Wait, did you say tournaments?\"\n\n\"How else am I gonna establish myself as ship champion?\" Kasis tapped dull claw tips against a chart. \"You can come if you want, Princess. But when you sit at my table, you gotta play by my rules, royalty or not.\"\n\nNira put a hand on Rog and Amelia's shoulders. \"I'd love to play, but only if these two play as well. That way we can all keep an eye on you. If you want me out of my clothes, you're gonna have to work for it.\"\n\nKasis tilted her head, a grin parting her muzzle. \"Oh yeah?\"\n\nRog barked raucous gnoll laughter.\n\n\"That did not come out the way I intended.\" Nira tried not to laugh with him. \"I think you know what I meant.\"\n\n\"I dunno...\" Amelia appraised the princess with a sly smile. \"Wasn't that hard getting you out of your clothes, last time.\"\n\nNira punched her on the shoulder again.\n\n\"Ow!\" Amelia stumbled back, rubbing her arm. \"Same damn spot.\"\n\nNira turned her attention back to the kobold. \"Kasis, I believe you were ready?\"\n\n\"Right, yeah.\" Kasis pulled a tiny pewter Cataclysm figurine out of her pocket. \"We're here.\" She set it on the map, near a rugged basin alongside a vast stretch of mountains. She smirked at the group. \"Everyone with me so far?\"\n\n\"Oooh, where'd you get that?\" Rog plucked the pewter ship off the map. \"Aww, it's got cute little cannons and everything!\"\n\n\"I had it made!\" Kasis snatched for it, but the kobold couldn't reach far enough cross the table. \"A little help?\"\n\nNira took it from Rog, and returned it to the map. \"You can play with Kasis's toys later.\"\n\n\"First, they're not toys.\" Kasis adjusted the ship's location a half-inch. \"Second, no he can't.\"\n\n\"I dunno,\" Amelia said, reaching for it. \"It looks like a toy to me. Lemme see it.\"\n\nKasis slapped her hand away. \"Hands off! It's not a damn toy!\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Vekk tucked his hands into his own pockets, jostling some of his tools. \"It's a navigational aid.\"\n\nThe ease and quickness with which Vekk spat that out told Nira that Kasis had argued that very subject with him before. The Princess glanced around. \"Everyone leave Kasis's navigational aids alone.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Highness.\" Kasis bowed her head. Then she produced a tiny replica of the tavern located at The Emplacement. \"Here's our initial destination.\" She set it down near the map's mountainous coastline. \"So, to get here-\"\n\n\"How many of those have you got?\" Rog wagged his bushy tail, fingers twitching as if fighting back the urge to pick that one up next.\n\nAmelia bent forward to peer at the miniature tavern up close. \"Actually, I'd like to know that too. Are your pockets filled with those things?\" She tilted her head. \"This one's really detailed. You even got all its weird quirks right.\"\n\nKasis stared at Rog and Amelia, unblinking. After a few long moments, she turned her attention to Nira. \"I guess I'm just talking to you.\"\n\n\"Seems that way.\"\n\nAmelia straightened back up. \"I'm listening, I'm listening. Those things are nice, though. I'd love to get a few of myself riding the girls, or...\" When Kasis shifted, suddenly awkward, Amelia grinned. \"You have some, don't you?\"\n\n\"Well we can't plan out tactical situations without miniatures!\" Kasis stomped her little booted foot against the stepladder, making it wobble. She dug out a handful of small, silvery figurines, then tossed them at Amelia, scattering them across the table. \"There, happy? Why don't we all just play with toys instead of attending this very important briefing!\" She threw her hands up. \"I'll just pick a course on my own, and if someone disagrees later, we'll just toss them off the ship!\"\n\nRog only smiled at her, flashing slightly yellowed fangs. \"So you admit they are toys!\"\n\nKasis snarled, tiny frills flared. \"You are so getting slugged in the powder pouch later, gnoll!\"\n\n\"Ooooh!\" Amelia scooped up the figures, examining them. \"Here's me on Lissir, and on Sivik, and this one's Jirril! Oh, and here's one with me riding Malaresh. They're so detailed. You can just see the indignity on Mal's face!\"\n\nNira looked them over. They were quite detailed, right down to the gryphon's feathers, Malaresh's scales, and Amelia's choice of weaponry. \"Those are pretty spectacular.\" She gave a low whistle of approval, glancing at Kasis. \"Okay, now I wanna know where you got those, too.\"\n\n\"I had them all commissioned!\" Kasis folded her arms, sighing. \"From Teksi, one of the kobold artisans on deck thirty. Had to buy him a shitload of pewter. Just be careful with them, alright?\"\n\nVekk picked up the Cataclsym's figurine, waggling it. \"She got the idea from one of those tabletop games we play with my engineering buddies.\"\n\nKasis shot her mate a glare, pointing to the map.\n\n\"Sorry, Sunset.\" Vekk set the ship back down.\n\n\"Any more questions about my miniatures?\" She adjusted the ship's position, grumbling. \"Or can we move on to the important things?\"\n\n\"Please proceed,\" Nira said, giving everyone else a look to ensure they listened.\n\n\"I've been trying.\" Kasis hissed through her teeth, lashing her little tail. When no one interrupted her, she went on. \"As per the Princess's instructions, I've plotted a few courses to The Emplacement, and a few from The Emplacement.\"\n\nNira offered the kobold a little bow. \"Thank you for your hard work, Kasis.\"\n\n\"Yer welcome, boss.\" She licked her nose. \"So first, the quickest route. We follow the foothills to the cliffs, straight there.\" Kasis traced a finger across the map. \"The caveat being there's a blind spot.\" She tapped a mountain. \"That Executor could hide her fancy ship here, and we wouldn't see her till it was too late. If they were looking to inflict the most damage before we could return fire, that'd be the place to do it.\"\n\nRog growled. \"We'll blow her out of the fuckin' sky anyway.\"\n\nKasis nodded. \"Eventually. But if the snow bird's right about that ship, it won't be pretty.\"\n\nNira nodded. \"So, what's the alternative?\"\n\n\"We could go the long way around.\" Kasis drew a half-circle with a claw tip. \"The mountains here are just low enough for us to pass over them. That would put us in behind the blind spot. But it'll take a lot longer, and burn more fuel. If we go that route, I wouldn't feel comfortable about heading to sea unless we refueled at Prav's.\" Kasis scrunched her muzzle. \"Who we have to consider my not want us using his pass, at all.\"\n\nNira scrowled. \"We're not exactly his favorite people.\"\n\n\"No, we're not.\" Amelia scuffed her boot against the floor. \"Especially after what Mal and Jirril pulled. Union or not, Prav hates people fucking with his customers.\"\n\nNira rubbed her face, grimacing. \"I'll smooth things over with him, if I can. But that may depend on how bad things go with this Executor. Are there any other passes we could use, Kasis?\"\n\n\"Not many.\" Kasis pointed to a narrow valley south of The Emplacement. \"Just the Beggar's Cut. It's longer, and further from any of the islands, but it doesn't have an army of guns guarding it.\"\n\nAmelia studied the map. \"Anywhere the coastal mountains are low enough to cross?\"\n\n\"Not safely, no.\" Kasis tapped the miniature Cataclysm. \"Not unless you can pressurize and oxygenate this entire ship like the abyssal dive suits they use to explore the Boiling Emptiness.\"\n\nVekk picked up an unused figure, idly toying with it. \"Engines gotta breathe too, so to speak. And higher altitudes affect the lifting gas, pressures and so on.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Kasis said. \"After that, we can make it make it to the first island in the Sunken Seas. We'd have to resupply there, for sure. It has a decent port, but it's not very defensible. I wouldn't wanna be there for long.\"\n\nAmelia folded her arms. \"Alakor said there's a Union fleet somewhere behind us, right? If they heard we were out there, they might try and hit us while we were moored.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Kasis pulled a few Union ship figurines from her pockets, and lined them up on the map. \"Which is why Vekk and I think we should make for the Isle of Seven Whispers, instead.\"\n\n\"Oh, fuck me.\" Amelia groaned, sagging. \"That place was bad enough last time.\"\n\n\"To be fair,\" Nira said, glancing at her friend. \"That was sort of Malaresh's fault.\"\n\nRog whimpered, ears drooping. \"And I hate flying over the the Emptiness. It's creepy!\"\n\nKasis slapped the table, growling. \"I don't care! We know the Union won't follow us there, at least not yet. We can hold up and resupply, while we decide what to do next. If you want my recommendation, that's it.\" She hopped the tiny Cataclysm across the map, tapped it against the Emplacement, then moved it to an island amidst the blue-gray clouds and danger sigils of the Boiling Emptiness.\n\n\"Let's go with that, then.\" Nira waved at the chart. \"We'll take the direct way, ambush risk and all. If that Executor's as good as Alakor says, she won't risk a fight she can't win, just to inflict some damage. If she wants to attack us, she'll do it here.\" She tapped The Emplacement. \"In person.\"\n\nAmelia nodded. \"I agree. We just gotta be ready.\"\n\n\"You know, the smart thing to do would be to skip The Emplacement entirely.\" Vekk shoved his hands back into his pockets. \"Cause it kinda feels like we've whiplashed from planning an ambush, to expecting one. Fighting a few Union ships and soldiers feels a lot different from going up against an Executor.\"\n\nKasis tilted her head, staring up at Nira. \"He's not wrong. An Executor does change the calculous a bit. I could plot us a path up through pirate and outlaw territory, instead.\" She licked her nose. \"Boss, you absolutely sure you wanna do this?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nira said. \"I've been thinking about this all day.\" Her voice was soft at first, but fire crept into it with every word. \"Alakor's right about me. About us. We could have fled this place years ago. We could have taken refuge far across the seas, or settled down in the city-states dotting the Emptiness. But those places?\" Nira shook her head. \"They're not our home. This ship, and the land beneath it? That's our home! And as long as this ship remains here, then the Union still hasn't won. So long as we're free, the Empire lives on in our hearts!\"\n\nNira thumped fist against her chest. \"And my heart says I'm not leaving. I'm not running for the rest of my life!\" Nira gazed at each of her friends in turn. \"We all knew the Union was gonna come for us again, sooner or later. So, if they want to send a brand-new ship after us? I say we send it back in pieces. If they want to send an Executor after us?\" She jabbed her finger against the map. \"Maybe we send her back in pieces, too.\"\n\nRog snarled, pounding a fist against the table. \"Yeah! Smash her and her fancy ship up.\"\n\n\"They think she's the best in the Union?\" Nira grabbed Rog and Amelia by their shoulders, shaking them. \"Then let's see how she handles the best in the Empire!\"\n\nAmelia smiled, nodding. \"Appreciate that. But I'd feel better about the title if there was more to the Empire than one really big ship.\"\n\nThe gnoll snorted, his ears perked. \"She was talking about me, anyway.\"\n\nNira squeezed their shoulders, grinning. \"I meant both you wonderful idiots. Rog, you're the best fighter I've ever know, and Amelia, you're the best shot I've seen. I'll save the whole 'we've never fought someone like her' speech for later, but suffice it to say, you're the best we have. I believe in all of you. If she tries us, that Executor's gonna find out why we call this ship The Cataclysm.\"\n\nAmelia scowled, shifting her rifle. \"Never been up against an Executor before. Heard plenty of stories, though. Hard to tell what's real, and what's bullshit.\" She chewed her lip. \"Rog and I already went over some ideas. Those docking scaffolds would make a hell of a sniper's nest.\"\n\n\"I like the sound of that,\" Nira said. \"When we close in, we'll talk strategy. But we're going to have to be prepared to adapt.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Amelia clenched her jaw. \"Hard to plan our moves without knowing how our opponent is setting up the gameboard.\"\n\nRog growled. \"She doesn't know what we're gonna do either, though.\"\n\nNira patted his arm. \"We'll strategize best we can for as many eventualities as we can think of. If we can capture her alive, or hell, her ship? Who knows what we could learn about the Union's plans. And what better way to tell the Union not to fuck with us again than defeating an Executor?\" She offered the group a grim smile. \"Now, if anyone doesn't want go-\"\n\n\"Oh, we're going.\" Kasis snapped her teeth. \"Just because I think it's extremely stupid and dangerous, doesn't mean I don't agree with the tactical merits of it.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Nira said, then chuckled. \"I think. If possible, I want to get you two in one of those damaged recon ships.\"\n\nVekk rubbed his hands together. \"All of my yes. I'd love a good look in those. Hell, if they're flight capable at all, we could steal 'em.\"\n\nKasis nodded, licking her muzzle. \"Not to mention the intel we could find.\" As Nira lacked a dedicated information officer, Kasis also served as the ship's intel specialist. The kobold scrunched her nose. \"Though if they know we're coming, they'll probably burn it.\" She waggled a finger at the urd'thin. \"We need to get on that Executor ship.\"\n\n\"Right?\" Vekk turned towards her. \"That'd be a damn treasure trove of information.\"\n\n\"And a ship like that is gonna have all sorts of impressive new technology.\" Kasis idly stroked the urd'thin's arm. \"If it's as fast as that bird says, it must have brand engine designs. Probably real powerhouses, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, stop already!\" Vekk held up a hand as if warding her off. \"Yer gonna get me hard talkin' like that.\" Everyone laughed, and then Vekk stared up at Nira. \"In all seriousness, though, Princess? You're right. None of us believed the Union was gonna stick to that truce, forever.\" His oversized, red furred ears drooped. \"We've been a thorn in the Golden Union's side for a decade, now. Sooner or later, they're gonna try to yank that thorn out. So we may as well bury it as deeply as we can, right? Besides, if we can't take down one Executor, what the hell are we gonna do when they send the rest of them after us?\"\n\n\"The pup's right.\" Rog rested a hand against his immense pistol. \"If we run from one Executor, when do we ever stop running? This fight belongs to everyone on this ship, Princess. Anyone who didn't want part of it left your crew years ago.\" Rog offered her a showy, formal bow. \"If you're ready to fight the Union, so are we. And we'll follow you into the gods-damned abyss with a smile on our faces.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Rog.\" Nira gripped his hand, squeezing it. \"Are you all in agreement?\" She gazed around at the others. \"If anyone has objections, please voice them.\"\n\nVekk shook his head. \"It's worth the risk. We're outnumbered infinity to one, so we gotta seize any advantage we can.\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Kasis flashed her teeth in a wicked-looking kobold smile. \"Even though this might be the worst idea in our long history of bad ideas. But, then again, the last time I thought that, we were on our way to rescue a dragon. Now we can't get him to leave!\" Kasis chittered laughter. \"So I say we go after this Executor, before she comes after us. And if she forces our hand?\" Her smile faded. \"We kill her.\"\n\nNira gazed around the room, watching as everyone nodded in agreement. Though their support swelled her heart, it also frightened her. Their lives were in her hands. Nira just hoped she was making the right decision. \"Let's make it official, then. I want a vote. Hands in, we go after the Executor. Hands out, we don't.\"\n\nThe Princess set her hand on the map. Rog dropped his hand atop hers without hesitation. Amelia did the same. Kasis and Vekk put their hands in just as swiftly.\n\nNira slowly looked each of them in the eye. \"To the abyss, then. You'd better all be smiling when we reach it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Deputy Hatha escorted Harliss and Evlee back to the The Emplacement's tavern. Guards held the doors for them. They gave the Executor and her comrade dirty looks, but Harliss was confident no one who worked for Prav would trouble her now. She couldn't be as certain about his customers, but she hoped the day's events would dissuade more thugs and monsters than it emboldened.\n\nThe scents of smoke and incense, food and booze, and a few too many people all swirled around Harliss as she walked inside. She swept her gaze across the crowd, but saw no sign of anyone paying her and Evlee a suspicious amount of attention. Harliss did, however, spot her gryphons crowding into an especially spacious, circular booth designed to accommodate larger creatures. A small army of servers was flooding the area to take care of them. In another part of the tavern, Coaldust cast the gryphons longing looks as he ferried drinks to a crowded table. One of the occupants swatted the urd'thin on the rump, earning a yip and a playful glare.\n\nHarliss gestured towards him. \"Looks like you might have to outbid whatever they're tipping him.\"\n\nEvlee narrowed her eyes at the table. She gave Hatha's arm a squeeze. \"Deputy, do me a big favor, and find me a place to sit. And then tell Coaldust I'm hiring him.\" She smirked. \"For the night.\"\n\nHarliss lifted her brows. \"Are you?\"\n\n\"Oh, not like that Executor.\" Evlee rolled her eyes. \"But I've got to make it worth his while, don't I? Besides, I don't want anyone to steal him away this time.\" She released Hatha's arm, smiling. \"So, help me out, will you?\"\n\n\"Oh, gods damn it. Alright.\" Hatha's bushy tail twitched, and he started across the room, glancing back at Harliss. \"Please don't cause any more trouble.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled at him. \"Wouldn't dream of it, Deputy.\" She waggled her fingers at Evlee in playful wave. \"Enjoy your completely innocent night with the urd'thin.\"\n\nEvlee stuck her tongue out over her shoulder. \"Enjoy fucking the kobold you almost gunned down!\"\n\nThe Executor laughed, and made her way to the table where Nok was already seated. It was small, and circular, but high enough for a human. Nok sat in a chair designed for kobolds, with space for his tail, and elevated to place them comfortably at table level. Two glasses sat before him, one with something golden-hued, the other with clear liquid. An identical set of drinks rested on the other side of the table.\n\n\"You're late.\" Nok pointed at the only other chair. \"Sit.\"\n\n\"That I am.\" Harliss settled across from him, her hand hovering over the drinks. \"Which first?\"\n\nNok picked up the drink with the clear liquid. \"This. One go.\"\n\nHarliss picked the slender glass. The kobold downed his, and she did the same, swallowing the stuff in a single gulp. Whatever it was, it tasted faintly of cherries and burned like hell. Nok thumped the glass down, clearing his throat with a snarl. Harliss smacked her own glass down, fighting back a cough. Her throat stung, but the mix of sweet and tart cherry flavors lingered on her tongue, fading into vanilla.\n\n\"What the fuck was that?\" She picked up the vessel again, smelling it. More hints of cherry and almond lingered, but it left her nostrils burning. \"I think I could run my airship on that.\"\n\nNok snorted, the hint of a smile on his muzzle. \"S'kobold spirit. We call it ch'atta. Used to be ceremonial. You'd drink it before a raid. Or share it with an enemy tribe, during a truce. You like it?\"\n\nHarliss put the glass back down. \"I don't hate it. I'll assume that's what you planned to buy me, originally.\" She tapped the other drink. \"What'd I get for being late? Punishment, or reward?\"\n\nNok shrugged. \"That one's a kobold drink, too. Called nuraag, but it's kinda like rum. Usually go together. Ch'atta's like good sex, leaves ya sore but satisfied. The nuraag's like the cuddle afterwards, sweet, and puts you to sleep.\"\n\nThe description made Harliss laughed. She picked up the kobold rum, swirled it under her nose. It smelt of burnt molasses and cinnamon-sugar. Nok downed his in another long pull, so Harliss did the same. The nuraag went down much easier, with just a hint warmth following its sweet, sugar and spice flavor.\n\n\"That one's better.\" She regarded the glass. \"It does go well with the other.\"\n\nNok only grunted. He lifted a hand and twitched a few clawed fingers in the air. The kobolds tending bar sprang into action, fetching bottles and glasses from low shelves, and pouring a few more drinks. Whatever they'd selected, the labels were unfamiliar. Soon enough, the server hurried them over. The new drinks were larger pours than before, and dark gold in color. The attendant passed them out, then scurried back to the bar.\n\n\"And what's this one?\" Harliss sniffed the latest arrival, and found it's scent full apricots and apples, clove and candied ginger. \"Aside from enough to finish getting me drunk.\"\n\n\"S'kobold whiskey, basically.\" Nok sipped his. \"Don't gotta drink it, if you don't want.\"\n\nHarliss smirked. \"That's not how this works, and we both know it.\"\n\nNok shrugged, drumming little claw tips against the table. \"I ain't stoppin' ya from leaving.\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\" Harliss tasted the whiskey, and found it quite enjoyable. The fruit flavors were more pronounced than they were on the nose, and the spices made for a balancing background note. \"I think we both know where this is going.\" She took another sip. \"I like this one quite a bit.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Nok tilted his head, mischief glittering in his dark gold and vaguely reptilian eyes. \"You don't gotta finish it on my account.\"\n\nThat was a blatant lie, and they both knew it. Buying her the drink was already one-upping her after their earlier encounter. If she bowed out now, the kobold would win. While The Ballad did not have rules specific to drinking, personal honor was at stake. Since Nok made the initial offer, it was up to him to decide when to stop. Though Harliss was technically free to leave, to do so would be to concede defeat.\n\n\"You know, you have me at a disadvantage. I was drinking earlier in the day, with Coaldust and my crew.\" She glanced across the tavern to where Evlee was now sharing a booth seat with Coaldust. The urd'thin was leaning against her, and laughing. \"Then I had a few drinks wihle negotiating with your boss. You only had the one.\"\n\nNok shifted to watch Evlee and Coaldust too. \"I'm half your size. It'll hit me faster, anyway. We're even.\" He inclined his muzzle towards Coaldust. \"Your friend plannin' on keepin' him for the night?\"\n\n\"You know,\" Harliss said, folding her arms. \"I have no idea. She took a shine to him earlier, as did her roaming hands. But can never quite tell where pumping him for information ends, and personal curiosity begins.\"\n\nNok clicked his teeth. \"Pumping him, huh?\"\n\nHarliss smirked. \"Indeed.\" She turned her attention back to the kobold, shrugging. \"I'm sure she'll have a memorable evening one way or another.\"\n\nNok tilted his head. \"Ain't that against your Union laws, or something?\"\n\n\"Oh, who gives a shit.\" Harliss swirled her whiskey, grimacing.\n\n\"I'd figure you would, after that fancy speech you gave about bringing the Union's law jurisdiction, wherever you went. Which, by the way.\" He slapped a hand against the table. \"You don't.\"\n\n\"Nok, please.\" Harliss leaned forward, tapping a finger to her chest. \"You know which laws I follow. The same ones you do.\"\n\nThe kobold crossed his arms. \"Ballad kinda conflicts with some of them Union laws, don't it?\"\n\n\"Which is why I don't give a fuck about the Union's laws.\"\n\nNok watched her through slitted eyes. \"Think you just said the quiet part out loud.\"\n\nHarliss laughed at that, shaking her head. \"Oh, no, Nok, I enforce the laws, when required, but that doesn't mean I agree with them. And I certainly don't care who fucks who.\" Harliss took a drink, then gestured with her glass. \"No, I serve the Union for my own reasons. There's a reason I'm an Executor, after all.\"\n\nNok gave a mock coo. \"Aww, and here I thought that was just cause you act like a badass.\"\n\n\"For one, Nok,\" Harliss said, punctuating her words with a flourish of her drink. \"I am a badass. For two, Executors aren't required to follow the Union's laws.\" She sipped her drink, scowling. \"Some do, of course. Some bow and scrape and simper before the priests, others studiously enforce every law and code we have. But a few of them, like myself, find some of those laws...\" She trailed off, looking for the right word. \"Chafing. So I ignore them.\"\n\nThe kobold licked his muzzle. \"So why tell that law-bringer speech then?\"\n\n\"For the same reason I tell the stories.\" Harliss eased back in her chair. \"To make an indelible impression. There was a time, Nok, when we would have been legends. A hundred years ago, there were folk tales about Balladeers like us. I don't want that idea to die.\"\n\nShe waved at the boisterous evening crowd. \"What happened today, that'll be remembered precisely because I am an Executor, because I did give a dramatic speech. Otherwise, it would just be...\" She shifted her voice into an exasperated drawl. \"Another shooting at the bar, today. Some Union woman.\" Harliss shook her head. \"Forgotten, the very next time there's violence.\" A smile crept across her face. \"But that isn't what happened.\" Harliss lowered her voice, now an excited whisper. \"Did you hear? Executor Harliss outshot four people! I've never seen someone draw so fast. Then she forced everyone to sit through some crazy speech about her childhood, and how unkillable she is!\"\n\nNok chittered kobold laughter. \"It does make a better story, I'll give ya that.\"\n\n\"You're damn right it does, Nok.\" Harliss shook a finger at him. \"And that's the point. This world? There's fewer and fewer places left for people like us. The myths the first Balladeers once spawned are dissolving before our eyes.\" She tapped her chest again. \"So, I'm weaving new myths. You recognized my name, because I wanted you to.\"\n\nNok curled his lip. \"I recognized your name because you're good. You've a reputation.\"\n\nHarliss smiled at him, spreading her hands over the table. \"Exactly. All the Executors are good. But can name another one?\"\n\nNok grunted, nudging his glass back and forth. \"Nope.\"\n\n\"And yet, you knew my name before I ever set foot in this bar.\" Harliss leaned towards him. \"That isn't by accident, Nok. Wherever I go, I weave my stories, and thread by thread, a tapestry of myth comes together. Consider it my way of honoring those who came before us. The Ballad first spawned those old legends. And it's my hope that new legends will keep the Ballad alive.\"\n\nNok plucked his drink off the table. \"To the Ballad, then. And to your bullshit stories.\"\n\nHarliss grinned, sharing his toast. \"Appreciated, Nok. To the Ballad.\"\n\nBoth of them finished their drinks, and slammed their glasses down. Nok immediately signaled for more.\n\nWhile they waited, Harliss gestured at herself. \"So, how does the real Executor Harliss measure up to your expectations?\"\n\n\"Well...\" Nok made a show of looking her over. \"You talk a lotta shit, just like I expected. But your bullshit's even crazier, in person. And I ain't yet parsed out where the truth ends, and the melodramatic lies begin.\"\n\nHarliss offered a theatrical bow. \"The eternal question.\"\n\nNok grunted, and continued. \"I thought you'd be more like your big, pious friend. Always ready to beat us godless demon-spawn over the head with your book of scriptures.\" He tilted his head, still studying her. \"Honestly, that shit you said about bein' the Union's law-bringer? That's more like what I expected.\" Nok flicked his tongue over his nose. \"Sure as hell never thought an Executor would follow The Ballad.\"\n\n\"Nor I, a kobold,\" Harliss said. \"How long?\"\n\n\"Twenty years, give or take.\" Nok set his hands on the table, tapping a claw. \"You?\"\n\nHarliss studied Nok in silence. Honor demanded she answer that question more truthfully than she liked. \"Since I was fifteen. Don't know how that's been, though. Don't count my years, anymore.\"\n\nThe kobold nodded once. \"You find it? Or did it find you?\"\n\nHarliss doubted there were more than a few dozen people on the continent who'd even know what Nok meant. There was only one right answer. Her voice was low, but fervent. \"I've heard its song from the first moment I ever held a gun. The barrel sang to me...\"\n\nNok picked up for her. \"The bullets called to me...\"\n\nThey finished the last part together. \"And I knew it was meant for me.\"\n\nThe kobold tilted his head, a smile flitting across his muzzle. \"You are old-world Ballad.\"\n\n\"As are you, my new companion in smoke and cylinder.\" Harliss accepted the next round when the server arrived, thanked them, and then waggled the tumbler at Nok. \"Just so we're clear, if you draw on me while I'm drunk, that's an instant disqualification.\"\n\nNok snarled at her. \"I'm offended you'd even suggest it.\"\n\nHarliss sipped her whiskey. \"Offended enough to draw on me?\"\n\nThe kobold's snarl died off into a smug, toothy grin. \"Not while you're drunk.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, plopping the glass down. A little liquid sloshed over the side and onto the table.\n\nNok glanced at the spill, clacking his teeth. \"Now you owe me a bullet.\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Harliss draw one of her spare cartridges, and tossed it to the kobold.\n\nNok caught it, then studied it in the flicking lamplight. \"Human rounds always seem so big. You handload 'em?\"\n\n\"Not often, anymore.\" Harliss glanced down at her gun belts. \"Had to get out of the habit after I became an Executor. But I won't ever fire a round I haven't inspected myself. As much as I hate to admit it, some of the advancements in machining means the Union can probably produce a better-loaded round than I can.\"\n\n\"Never happen.\" Nok stood the cartridge up near his drink. \"But I'm sure yer fancy Union bullets ain't too bad. I pack my own, when I can. Though...\" His muzzle twisted into a scowl. \"Lately I spend so much time guardin' Prav's lazy ass I can't prep as many rounds as I like.\" He patted one of his pistols. \"Got all handloaded in these girls, but some of my spares are from Prav's gunsmiths. They're good, too. I just wouldn't wanna use any of that new mass-produced shit. Probably just misfire and blow your damn hands off.\"\n\nHarliss nodded. \"That's why I personally go over every round. Though, I assure you, the machined ammunition the Union supplies my ship is a far cry beyond what the average citizen can get ahold of.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah.\" The kobold waved his hand. \"Fancy Union killers get fancy Union ammo. The Ballad don't explicitly say you can't use mass-produced, but...\" He shrugged, fighting back a smile. \"Yanno. It implies it.\"\n\nHarliss shook a finger at him. \"It does not, and you know it.\"\n\nThe kobold glanced away. \"Only cause it predates factories and all that other bullshit.\"\n\n\"I'd have never guessed a kobold to be a Ballad traditionalist.\" Harliss lifted her drink, wiping away the small spill with her other hand. \"And I mean that as a compliment. You're a fascinating person, Mr. Nok.\"\n\nNok turned his gaze back towards her. \"And you ain't the worst Union officer I ever met.\"\n\n\"If you've met worse Union officials, I'd wager they didn't make it out of that encounter alive.\" She took a sip.\n\n\"Fucker drew on me, anyway.\" Nok scratched his muzzle. \"Or tried too. Blew his head off before he was halfway out of his holster. Would let the rest of men walk, no problem. He drew on me, not them. But they didn't know the code, and they wouldn't have given a shit if they did. So they pulled, and I had to put them down, too.\"\n\nHarliss nodded. \"You're certainly entitled to defend yourself. Somehow, I imagine those weren't the only Union folks you've killed.\"\n\n\"You'd imagine right.\" Nok shifted his weight, his tail swishing. \"What about you, you kill many kobolds?\"\n\n\"A fair few.\" Harliss took a drink. \"Empire had quite a few kobold squads. Now, the Union's feelings about your species are well known, but the military always respected what you could do in battle. One of my closest calls came when we were ambushed by a kobold kill squad, actually.\"\n\nNok nodded, sipping his whiskey. \"Yeah, I knew a few like that. You know, it's kinda funny. They were assholes.\" He laughed, a bitter, grating sort of laughter that made Harliss wonder what happened between him, and that kobold squad. \"Almost as bad as the Union. Worse, in a way, because they didn't think they were that bad. But one of 'em was tellin' this story about some Union village, and what they did there, and...\" He trailed off, then snarled and slapped the table. \"Same kinda shit the Union does to kobold villages! So fuck 'em both, Empire and the Union.\" He toasted to himself, hissing. \"May they both burn.\" He downed the whiskey, then smashed the glass against the floor. As servants scurried over to clean it up, Nok held up a hand to Harliss. \"You don't gotta follow that one, it don't count this time.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled at him, offering him a salute with her drink. \"The Empire's already burned. One day, perhaps sooner than you think, the Union will too.\"\n\n\"Better not let the Union hear that blasphemy.\" Nok passed the servants a few coins in apology for the mess, then ordered another round.\n\n\"I prefer to think of it as pragmatism, like your boss.\" Harliss took a drink. \"No civilization lasts forever. Right now, the Golden Union is damn near unstoppable. But so too was the Empire of the Black Star, once. One day, the sea will change again, and the tide will wash the Union away. Only a fool would believe otherwise.\"\n\nNok grumbled something in his own tongue, staring at the far wall. Soon, he turned his attention to Harliss's guns. \"Enough about them. Whaddya shoot?\"\n\nHarliss unbuttoned a holster, and drew one of her quick-draw pistols free. She passed it across the table. \"They're all custom engineered, by a private gunsmith. That one's for quick draw, slightly shorter barrel, but extra rifling to make up for it.\"\n\n\"Two extra rounds, huh?\" The kobold picked up her gun, examining it. He popped the cylinder open, then gently spun it. \"Think your cylinder alone weighs more than one of my pistols.\" He laughed, a slightly guttural, yet not unpleasant sound. He closed the cylinder, then turned it a few times, murmuring at each smooth click. \"Oooh. Yeah, that's nice.\"\n\n\"I thought so.\" Harliss watched him closely. \"You know, you're the first kobold I've ever let handle one of my guns. Hell, the first non-human, even.\"\n\nNok smirked, sharp little teeth unveiled all along his muzzle. \"I'd be honored, if you weren't some crazy theocracy's fancy murderer.\"\n\n\"And I'd be honored to handle one of yours.\" Harliss inclined her head. \"If you weren't some crime lord's filthy brothel enforcer.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Nok set Harliss's gun down, and drew one of his own. \"As long as neither of us is honored.\" He turned it around, and offered it to her.\n\nHarliss reverently took the gun. \"No, I'm positively disgusted to handle anything belonging to a kobold.\"\n\nNok just stared at her, his smirk lingering. \"Anything, huh?\"\n\nHarliss laughed, arching a brow. \"You know, in some parts of the Union, you'd probably be arrested for making that kind of innuendo towards a human woman.\"\n\nThe kobold scoffed, waving a hand. \"They'd have already strung me up by my balls just for bein' a kobold, anyway.\" He leaned forward, gesturing at his weapon. \"Mine aren't custom to me, but I think you'll appreciate them just the same.\"\n\nHarliss turned the weapon over in her hands, examining it. The barrel was silver, inlaid with stylistic splashes of black and crimson, like droplets of oil and blood. It had an unusually large cylinder for a kobold weapon, etched to look like as if it was being clutched in a clawed hand. The grip was engraved with layered scales. On the very bottom was an embossed emblem in faded gold. It depicted a spear, with three skulls hanging from it.\n\nShe glanced up at Nok, raising her brows. \"Is this an actual vintage War Monger?\"\n\n\"Damn right it is.\" Nok flashed his teeth again in prideful smile, patting another holster. \"Got four of 'em, all in perfect shape.\"\n\nThe War Monger models were an especially rare line of weapons, formerly produced in limited fashion in a far-flung Empire province. The gunsmith was a kobold himself, who set about producing exceptional firearms balanced and engineered to fit the smaller races. Their reputation was nothing short of impeccable, but they'd ceased production long before the Union overran the Empire.\n\n\"Lovely.\" Harliss hefted it, feeling the weight. She'd held kobold weapons before, but this one was far heavier. \"Got a lot of weight to it.\"\n\nNok nodded. \"Chambers a bigger round than most kobold guns. Needs a fatter cylinder to fit 'em, so the rest of it's gotta be balanced to that. Longer barrel, too.\"\n\nHarliss snapped the cylinder open, peering at the six tightly packed rounds within. \"What's it chamber?\" She reached for one, pausing. \"May I?\"\n\n\"Go ahead.\" Nok watched as Harliss eased a cartridge free. \"We don't use the same measurements you do. Kobolds usually call 'em fulls, or halfs. There's also quarters, and three-quarters. Those are three-quarters.\"\n\nHarliss rested the weapon on the table, inspecting the round. It had a brass casing, not unlike her own, but it was larger than she expected. \"Bigger than I thought it'd be, for a kobold.\"\n\nNok tilted his head. \"That's not the only thing.\"\n\nHarliss laughed. \"You're a little more fun, when you're drunk.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Says the Executor, drinking with the kobold, in the brothel.\"\n\n\"Fair point, Nok.\" Harliss spun the round across her fingers. \"So why do you call it a three-quarter?\"\n\n\"Our measurements are based on the old musket rounds we used to pack into early muzzle-loaders. So, a full is basically an old musket ball.\" He licked his nose, glancing up at her. \"A kobold musket, that is. Don't really know how that translates to your terms. A three-quarter's just what it sounds like, three quarters the size, three-quarters the powder. Still a big round for a kobold to shoot in a handgun, but a little easier to control.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" Harliss glanced at Nok's other guns. \"Are they all three-quarters?\"\n\n\"That one and its sister are.\" Nok patted one of his other holstered weapons, a little larger. \"These two carry fulls, though. The three-quarters are my quick draws, the fulls are my, 'oh fuck, that's a big gnoll' pistols.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" Harliss chambered the bullet again, then spun the cylinder. It clicked smoothly, just like hers. \"This is a gorgeous weapon. First time I've actually held a War Monger.\" She studied it carefully, looking for flaws or imperfections. \"The craftsmanship is exquisite.\"\n\n\"Thank you. And yeah, it is.\" Nok crossed his arms. \"Stole 'em from some rich asshole, years back. Some human who was gonna put 'em display.\" Nok snarled his distaste. \"In a Union museum.\"\n\nThe very idea curled Harliss's lip. \"Glad they found their way back to a proper owner, then.\"\n\n\"Me too.\" Nok picked up Harliss's weapon again. \"So what about yours? Custom, you said?\"\n\nHarliss leaned over the table. \"Correct. Not as wonderfully vintage as yours, but crafted by the finest gunsmith I could find. Would have cost me a year's salary each, if I hadn't gotten the Union to pay for them.\"\n\n\"Guess they are good for somethin', then, once in a while.\" He weighed it in his hands, hefting it a few times. \"This would be a big fuckin' gun to a kobold, even without the space for the extra rounds.\" He opened the cylinder, then glanced at the cartridge she'd passed him earlier. \"They all the same?\"\n\nHarliss nodded. \"The calibers are. Pistols themselves aren't. I've two for drawing, and two for extracurricular activities.\" She chuckled at her own joke, patting one of the longer-barreled weapons. \"Better accuracy at range, and the bigger barrels are intimidating to someone who can't tell a War Monger from an Ebony Ranger. But they all chamber the same round. It's probably pretty close to your fulls.\"\n\n\"Looks it, yeah.\" Nok closed it up, turning the gun over to examine its adornments. He tapped the ivory sigil of the Executor's Sword. \"This is nice. Not quite as fancy as I expected.\" Nok ran his fingers across the golden script along the barrel. \"What's this say? I don't read Union.\"\n\n\"That's my name and title.\" She turned the gun over in his hands. \"The other side says, By My Song.\" She drew the companion pistol and showed it to him. \"While this one reads, You Are Undone.\" Harliss holstered it, then gestured at her other two weapons. \"And these have a line from The Cylinder's Song.\"\n\nNok gave a growling snicker. \"Ballad quotes? Shit.\" Nok snapped his teeth. \"That's good. Wish I'd thoughta that.\" He set the gun down, leaving the barrel pointing away from anyone.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Harliss put the War Monger on the table, in a similar position, then patted it. \"You wouldn't want to ruin these with engravings, anyway. Perhaps your next set.\"\n\n\"Yeah, maybe.\" Nok rubbed his muzzle, murmuring in thought. Then rubbed a fingerpad against the Executor sigil. \"So, I gotta ask. You believe in all that Sanctified bullshit? Or is that just part of your storytelling...\" He waggled his fingers at her. \"Thing.\"\n\n\"A little from each column.\" Harliss paused when a server arrived with Nok's whiskey. She finished her own, passed the server the glass, and requested another. As she waited, she turned her attention back to her drinking partner. \"An 'unkillable' religious gunfighter, protected by the gods themselves? It does make for a damn fine legend. But the Church does believe it. And the more impossible shit I survive? The more I start to believe in it, too.\"\n\nNok's muzzle twisted into a sneer. \"Yanno, no one's killed me yet, either. Maybe I'm Sanctified.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled. \"Maybe so! Shall I put your name forward, the next time there's an opening amongst the Executors?\"\n\n\"Yeah, you do that.\" Nok said, drumming clawtips against her pistol. \"If you ask me, there's nothing divine about it. You're just real good, and real lucky.\"\n\n\"Oh, that I am, my new friend.\" Harliss took her glass when the server returned with it. \"But who's to say luck, and skill, aren't divine blessings?\"\n\nNok held his hand up. \"Me.\"\n\nHarliss laughed and sipped her drink. \"You know, I must say, you kobolds make a surprisingly good whiskey.\"\n\n\"Appreciate it.\" Nook took a drink as well. \"It's no Fortune's Favorite Forty Year, but it's good stuff.\" He idly traced a claw tip around the rim of the glass. \"If I ask a serious question, can I get a serious answer?\"\n\nShe set the glass down. \"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe in all the Union's Three Gods shit?\" Nok tilted his head, his dark gold eyes fixed upon her.\n\n\"That's a very broad question, Nok.\"\n\nThe kobold nodded. \"And I'm gonna judge your answer real hard.\"\n\nHarliss grinned at him. \"In that case, the short answer is no, but the long answer is yes.\"\n\nNok grunted, folding his arms. \"Broad question, broad answer, huh?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Harliss flourished her hand. \"I absolutely believe in gods, but those beliefs are mine, not the Union's. I play my part for the Union, and I say what they want me to. But I don't think of the Gods in the strict way the Golden Union does.\" She held a finger. \"For one, the Union thinks of them as a family. A father, a mother, a child. For another...\" Harliss ticked off another finger. \"The Union represents them as humans.\"\n\n\"So what do you think they are?\" Nok tilted his head, smirking. \"Kobolds?\"\n\nHarliss leaned forward, sharpening her voice. \"They're Gods, Nok. They can be anything they damn well please. To assume they resemble any of the world's people is arrogance itself. Not to mention, profoundly lacking in imagination. The Gods, in their great and unknowable truth, are surely far more cosmic. Like the stars themselves. Entities we can't conceive of. If they ever look like the world's people, it's only because they've chosen to.\"\n\nThe kobold scratched his muzzle, scowling. \"That's deeper than I thought you'd get. Alright then, why the hell would they ever want to look like us?\"\n\nHarliss eased back, an easy smile on her face. \"To walk amongst us, unknown. There are more beliefs the world over than the Union will ever dare officially acknowledge. In Diandrios, there's a sect that believes the gods are urd'thin children.\" She tapped her fingers against the wood. \"While the dragons believe the gods are singing stars. The Sun-Feather cult believes their goddess to be a golden feathered gryphon!\" She dropped her hand down. \"Ask ten disparate people about the gods, and you'll get ten different answers. I posit, that's because the gods are all of them, all at once.\"\n\n\"That's far too profound for someone from the Union.\" Nok took a swig of whiskey, then wiped his muzzle with the back of his hand. \"But let's assume you're right. Why would these cosmic entities even want to walk amongst us?\"\n\nHarliss shrugged. \"Afraid all I can offer there is an opinion.\"\n\nNok snorted. \"Yeah, cause that last bit was pure scientific fact.\"\n\n\"Most religions,\" Harliss said, tracing random patterns on the table. \"Are littered with stories about the gods choosing heralds from amongst the mortals. It's my belief those stories stem from truth. From time to time, the gods visit us to choose their Champions, for good or ill, order or chaos.\"\n\nNok ran his tongue over his teeth, considering it. \"And here I was, just looking for an argument.\"\n\n\"Oh, my mistake.\" Harliss cleared her throat, then slapped the table. \"The only true deities are the Three Gods, you scaly, swamp-dwelling heathen!\" She smirked. \"Better?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah, that's the stuff.\" Nok chittered laughter, but his smile soon faded. \"So, if you actually believe in the other religions, how the hell do you justify hunting them down for blasphemy?\"\n\nHarliss sipped her whiskey. \"I don't.\" She gestured with her glass. \"The only time The Stormcaller ever gets sent after so-called Blasphemers is when they're plotting organized rebellion. I don't care about their beliefs, I care about stopping them from blowing up a Union port. Beyond that...\"\n\nHarliss trailed off. There were many things she dared not tell Nok about the missions she had undertaken, and the knowledge she gained. Some of that hard-earned knowledge was anathema to the Union, but it had shaped her beliefs profoundly. While few in the Church would dare accuse Harliss of blasphemy without mountains of evidence and an entire army behind them, even she knew when to keep her mouth shut.\n\n\"Let's just say I believe the gods have unleashed me to fulfill a great purpose.\" Harliss held her glass up to a lamp, watching the flame's glow dance in the golden liquid. \"An instrument of change arriving just before the wave sweeps clean the shore.\"\n\nNok licked his muzzle. \"You've lost me.\"\n\nHarliss turned the glass back and forth. \"Imagine society as a sandcastle, built by fools who thought they could withstand the tide. All nations share the same problem.\" She scrunched her face. \"The Union is no different. They're preoccupied with cementing their power, and with persecuting their enemies. They're too busy to realize the tide is rolling in, and the waves are rising.\" Harliss sipped her whiskey, sighing. \"The wise and learned few plead for them to build a seawall, while there's still time. But the Union will not listen to heretics, and the tide is ever rising.\"\n\nNok tilted his head, staring at her. \"You know, if you said that earlier, I'd have thought you were the wall, trying to protect them.\" The kobold narrowed his eyes. \"But now you got me wondering if you're really the tide, just waiting to roll in.\"\n\nHarliss only smiled. \"Maybe I'm still waiting for the gods to tell me.\" She took a drink, and set the glass down. \"Suffice it to say, the tide doesn't need to be believed in, to exist. And neither do the gods.\"\n\n\"Fair point.\" The kobold grunted. \"You get real thoughtful when you're drinking, don'tcha? I don't suppose all the other Executors are as interesting as you?\"\n\n\"Alas, no.\" Harliss gave a great, exaggerated sigh. \"Some of them are a bit too much like Tormin.\"\n\n\"Can't say I was real fond of Grandpa Scripture.\"\n\nHarliss chuckled. \"I don't blame you. He's a good man, at heart. But he's got his head so far up the Church's ass, he's blinded to everything I'm trying to show him. Still, I'll keep pulling on his shoulders and trying to dislodge him, just the same.\" She pushed her whiskey aside. \"Enough talk of the gods. How about we play a game, instead?\"\n\nNok set Harliss's cartridge sideways on the table, and spun it around. \"Guns, knives, or cards?\"\n\nHarliss picked up Nok's War Monger, waggling it. \"Guns, of course. Knives and cards are more Evlee's thing.\" She glanced towards Evlee and Coaldust. Piles of cards were now spread out before each of them. Three knives jutted from the table. \"Exhibit A.\"\n\nNok twisted around to watch Evlee deal another hand. \"Remind me not to play her. I ain't that good, so she'd probably get me naked without even cheatin'.\"\n\n\"You know, it's possible to play cards without stripping.\" Harliss laughed, tossing the War Monger to her other hand.\n\n\"People get a lot more angry about losing money than showin' their bits.\" The kobold spun Harliss's cartridge around again. \"That's why Prav's got rules about playin' for money. Little games among friends are fine, but anything bigger needs a House witness. All bets are at own risk, and get paid, period. Enforceable by us.\"\n\nHarliss watched as Evlee showed Coaldust, in slow movements, how to produce hidden cards without being spotted. \"And what about cheaters?\"\n\n\"Like I said.\" Nok shrugged. \"At own risk. You get fleeced, you shouldn't have bet in the first place.\" He held up a hand. \"That's for casual games, mind you. If you get caught cheating in a tournament or something, you forfeit all winnings to the offended parties. And they get to beat the shit out of you. Then you get a lifetime ban from The Emplacement. Course, if you don't get caught, you probably get rich. Real tournaments are rare, though. Most people just play for clothes, or for bullets.\"\n\n\"It does sound safer that way.\" Harliss opened up the kobold's gun, and pulled a cartridge free. She set it upright on the table. \"Rounds out, if you please. And you're right, by the way. Evlee would have you in nothing but your gun belts before you knew it.\"\n\nNok gave a guttural laugh. \"Not the worst look for a kobold.\" He gazed at Evlee's table, a smirk on his muzzle. \"Pretty sure she's gonna have Coaldust naked by the end of the night, with or without a card game.\"\n\nHarliss took out the remaining ammunition and stacked it in a line. \"That she might. She's an adventurous girl, especially by Union standards.\" She set the gun down, then waggled a finger at Nok. \"You know, if Evlee hadn't already purchased his time, I might have bought you a night with Coaldust.\"\n\nThe kobold emptied Harliss's pistol the same way. \"Nice try, but you ain't gonna one up me again, Union girl.\"\n\n\"Hmm?\" Harliss arched a brow, grinning. \"Don't tell me you're only buying these drinks to get one over on me, after I conceded for you.\"\n\nNok lined up all eight bullets. \"Oh, no, not at all.\" Playful sarcasm hung heavy in his voice. \"I really wanted to spend time with a Union officer.\"\n\nHarliss put a hand against her chest. \"Aww, I'm hurt! I thought you just wanted to drink with me because I'm so much fun.\"\n\n\"Nope.\" Nok placed her gun on the table. \"That part just turned out to be a pleasant surprise.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, in that case...\" Harliss peered at Coaldust again. The urd'thin was balancing one of Evlee's knives on a single finger. \"I do believe purchasing you a whore for the night does one up buying me a drink.\"\n\nNok tapped his claw tips against the table's edge. \"And what if that ain't what I'm into?\"\n\n\"That's the beauty of it.\" Harliss flourished a hand at Evlee and Coaldust. \"It doesn't matter. You couldn't back out without conceding defeat, just I as couldn't back out from this drink.\" She looked down at her latest glass of whiskey. \"Which, somehow, has multiplied significantly.\"\n\n\"That it has.\" Nok rubbed his eyes, chuckling. \"Too bad for you, then, that Coaldust's taken.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Harliss swirled her glass. \"I could just hire you a different whore. Perhaps the biggest gnoll Prav employs, if only because I find the mental image amusing.\"\n\n\"We could call it even.\" Nok's tail twitched behind the chair as a smile played across his muzzle. \"Well, nearly even. I'm obviously a little bit ahead.\"\n\nHarliss looked him over like a cat sizing up a cornered mouse. \"Or, I could find some other way to retake the lead.\"\n\n\"Nah.\" Nok fixed his eyes on hers. \"Whatever you do, I'll just do better.\"\n\n\"That's dangerous talk, little lizard.\" Harliss set her hand on his unloaded pistol, smirking back at him. \"Very dangerous talk.\"\n\nNok matched her movements, curling his fingers around the hilt of Harliss's pistol. \"Pretty sure that's how you like it.\"\n\n\"I'd say danger runs in the blood for both of us.\" Harliss glanced at the bullets. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"I'm always ready, Executor.\" Nok sneered the title in playfully insulting fashion. \"Better enjoy your position while you can. The Union's gonna demote you when they hear you've been flirtin' with a murderous kobold.\"\n\n\"Oh, please, Nok.\" Harliss rolled her eyes, forcing a faux-disgusted scowl to her face. \"That's repulsive. A fine, upstanding, Three Gods fearing Union officer such as myself would never flirt with a foul, swamp-dwelling demonspawn like you.\"\n\n\"Good, good.\" Nok nodded, then flashed her his fangs. \"Cause an esteemed, frontier protecting, highly disciplined kobold gunfighter like me would never stoop to foolin' around with some close-minded, genocidal Union girl.\"\n\n\"Oh, now you are escalating things.\" Harliss swept her hand across the line of ammunition. \"The game is speed load. On your go, we load each other's pistols quick as we can. First cylinder snapped shut wins.\"\n\nNok hissed, glancing at his assembled cartridges. \"Now hold on there, Executor. I got eight bullets to load, and you only got six.\"\n\n\"Fair point.\" Harliss reached across the table, moving two of her rounds aside. \"We'll each load six. Ready?\"\n\n\"Go!\" Nok yanked Harliss's pistol off the table, flicking the cylinder open.\n\n\"You little shit!\" Harliss raced to catch up with him. She snatched up a bullet, only to fumble it as she tried to shove it into place. \"Damn it!\"\n\n\"Hah!\" Nok cackled as he jammed one of her rounds home, only to drop the second one. \"Fuck!\"\n\n\"Not so easy, is it!\" Harliss snatched up the cartridge again, and this time slid it home. But when she plucked up the second one, her once-practiced motions failed her. The bullet slid against the metal and popped out of her hand. \"Damn it, the holes aren't spaced right!\"\n\n\"That's what she said!\" Nok got a second one into place, only to struggle with the third as the gun wobbled in his grasp. \"Damn it! Your fuckin' gun's too heavy, and your oversized ammo's like shovin' logs into...\" Words failed the kobold as he worked to insert the third round. \"Into a meat grinder!\"\n\nHarliss laughed with him, taking her time to line up the second, and third rounds. \"That doesn't make any sense!\"\n\n\"That's cause I'm drunk!\" Nok made a victorious mewling noise as he got his own third cartridge home.\n\n\"You're drunk, and your bullets are too small!\" Harliss growled through grit teeth as she dropped another one. It clattered and rolled away, forcing her to waste a second reaching for it. \"Get back here, you little bastard!\"\n\n\"They are not too small!\" The insult distracted the drunken kobold enough to make him pause and snarl at her. \"Yours are just big for their own good, like everything humans build!\"\n\n\"Your bullets are small, just like kobolds!\" Harliss snatched up the runaway ammunition and dropped it into the chamber.\n\n\"Lies!\" Nok returned to the game, swiftly matching her. \"My bullets are perfectly sized, just like me!\"\n\nHarliss couldn't help but appreciate his bravado. In truth, Nok's rounds weren't much smaller than her own. But the size was just different enough to leave them feeling foreign in her fingers, while the alcohol made it harder to keep a proper grip. And Harliss was so used to the well-practiced movements of speed loading her own gear that the differences in size, weight, and chamber spacings really threw her off. She would have had trouble even if she were sober.\n\n\"Almost there!\" Harliss got the fifth bullet in, but the sixth slipped her grasp. \"Shit, shit, shit!\"\n\nNok took advantage of her miscue to carefully line up his final round. He slipped it home, then flicked the gun sideways, snapping the cylinder shut. \"Done!\"\n\n\"Damn it!\" Harliss finished a moment later. \"Well played, lizard.\"\n\n\"Thank you, human.\" Nok bowed his head, beaming.\n\n\"I blame the gear.\" Harliss emptied the gun again, smirking. \"After all, I've never handled kobold equipment before.\"\n\nNok unloaded too, but his eyes were on Harliss. \"First time for everything.\"\n\n\"That there is.\" Harliss lined up the ammo once more. \"Go again?\"\n\n\"Always do.\" When Nok was ready, he set his hand on Harliss's pistol. \"Your go, this time.\"\n\nHarliss locked eyes with the kobold, unblinking. She counted down in her head. Three, two, one. \"Go!\"\n\nThe Executor yanked the weapon up, opening it. This time, the movements were easier, and progress swifter. She focused on each motion, paying closer attention to the distance between chambers, the size of the rounds, and so on. Last time, muscle memory worked against her, but this time she was able to bend it to her will. The size and spacing of the chambers were different, but the motions were generally the same.\n\n\"Done!\" Harliss set the loaded weapon down just as Nok was chambering his final round.\n\n\"Aw, fuck.\" Nok closed up the weapon to formally finish the match. \"Clear victory. But since you like handling my gear so much...\" The kobold smirked. \"Best two out of three?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" Harliss traced a single finger along the barrel of Nok's pistol, teasing at the stylistic ebony and crimson droplets. \"I do hope I'm handling such a valuable weapon properly. Just let me know if it's about to go off unexpectedly.\"\n\nNok opened his mouth to reply, then just closed it again, shaking his head. After a moment, he grunted. \"Alright, that's pretty good. Point to the Executor.\"\n\n\"About damn time.\" Harliss swiftly prepared for the final round, as Nok did the same. \"Whenever you're ready, little lizard.\"\n\n\"You keep strokin' my gun like that, and I will be ready.\" Nok waggled his fingers above the gun, licking his nose. \"Go!\"\n\nThis time, they both raced through the loading process. The movements were easier still, but experience proved a boon to the kobold, as well. Each loaded round was equal until the very end. Finally, Harliss chambered the last cartridge and snapped the cylinder shut a split-second before Nok did the same.\n\n\"Damn it!\" Nok snarled, setting her weapon down. \"Good win, Executor.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Harliss bowed her head. \"Perhaps we should play again, when we're both sober.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't mind it.\" Nok held her weapon in both hands, looking it over. \"How feisty is this beauty, anyway?\"\n\n\"Oh, she's got some spirit, that's for sure,\" Harliss said. \"Not as much as you'd think, though. You wanna shoot her?\"\n\n\"The gun? Definitely.\" Nok lifted his head, flashing Harliss a wicked smile. \"But her?\" He looked the Executor over. \"Not anymore.\"\n\nHarliss only laughed. \"Concur, Nok. Concur.\"\n\n\"What is that, anyway? Concur.\" Nok returned Harliss's weapon to her. \"I know what it means, just don't hear people say it often. That old Ballad slang or something?\"\n\n\"Something like that. Picked it up in training, I think.\" She holstered her pistol. \"That was a serious offer, by the way. Would you like to shoot my pistol? Cause I'd sure as shit love to fire a War Monger.\" She admired Nok's weapon a little more, then passed it to him.\n\n\"Fuck yes, I would.\" Nok put the gun away, then held his hand up, signaling for one more round. When the servers noticed him, he called out something in kobold. They scrambled to fetch a bottle from a lower shelf. \"But first, we gotta finish this right.\"\n\n\"Actually, on that note-\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Nok wagged a little clawed finger at her. \"You are not conceding now! I won't let you!\"\n\n\"I was only going to suggest we wait until we're sober before playing any live fire games.\"\n\n\"That'd be smart, yeah. But not as much fun. Besides, don't you got a lot of...\" He waggled his hands. \"Executor shit to do tomorrow?\"\n\n\"That I do.\" Harliss watched the bartenders pour a disturbingly dark liquor into two oddly shaped glasses. \"And you've got a lot of watching Prav's ass to do.\"\n\nNok shrugged. \"I watch all of him, thank you very much.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Harliss chuckled, reclining back. \"But if you're free in the evening, so am I.\"\n\n\"I can be free, yeah.\" Nok took the drink when the servers brought it. \"More importantly, though, I'm free right now. And I'm already drunk enough to want to spend more time with an Executor.\"\n\nHarliss accepted her own libation, and regarded Nok with a smile, warmer than before. \"I cannot say the feeling's not mutual.\"\n\n\"Then why the fuck should we quit now?\" Nok set the oddly shaped glass down. It looked akin to a blooming flower, with a trio of short petals ringing its opening. \"We might wanna kill each other other again when we're sober.\"\n\n\"You do make a compelling argument, little lizard.\" Harliss sniffed the dark liquid, furrowing her brows. It smelled intensely like herbal medicine. \"What, dare I ask, is this?\"\n\n\"Traditional kobold spirit.\" Nok licked his muzzle. \"When someone breaks this out, it either means the night's over, or just beginning.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" Harliss leaned forward, grinning again. \"I'd hazard a guess that in our case, it's the latter.\"\n\n\"Up to you, I suppose.\" Nok tapped one of the petal-like extensions. \"Normally, you bite these, and tip it back to your muzzle. Supposed to drink it without hands. I'll make an exception for you, flat-face.\"\n\nHarliss swirled the odd vessel. \"I'd appreciate that. What are we drinking to?\"\n\n\"To the Ballad, again. For leading us to this...\" Nok scrunched his muzzle. \"Truce.\"\n\nHarliss clinked her glass against his. \"To the Ballad, then.\"\n\nNok gripped the glass petal in his teeth. He tipped his head back, pouring the stuff into his muzzle and down his throat in a single gulp. Afterwards, Nok wiped his muzzle with the back of his hand. \"To The Ballad! Long may we hear the Song of the Cylinder!\"\n\n\"Long may the bullets call our name!\" Harliss downed the stuff in one swallow. It tasted better than its smelled, with its herbal notes balanced by burnt sugars. She set the glass down, then leaned back in her chair, sighing. \"Nok, I must say, this has been an exceptional night. Thank you for trying ever so hard to one-up me.\"\n\nThe kobold tilted his head. \"Are you conceding the night?\"\n\nHarliss scoffed, slapping the table. \"Fuck, no.\"\n\n\"Then come with me.\" Nok hopped out of his chair, sweeping his hand towards a door at the back of the tavern. \"I'll show you my private gun range.\"\n\nHarliss laughed, following at his side. \"Is that all you're going to show me?\"\n\nNok just shrugged. \"The night's young. Who knows where we might end up?\"\n\nHarliss smiled. That was fine with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Malaresh found Alakor seated on his haunches alongside one of the observation deck's grand, crystalline windows. The sky Alakor stared at seemed a mirror for his cerulean eyes. Memories drifted across them like storm clouds. Malaresh approached slowly, till the swivel of the gryphon's ears told him Alakor knew he was there. The dragon sat nearby, curling his tail around his paws.\n\n\"Well?\" Alakor ruffled himself. \"Did I pass your tests?\"\n\nMalaresh shrugged his wings. \"I haven't tossed you off the ship yet.\"\n\nThe gryphon warbled soft laughter. \"Indeed. How're the fire glands?\"\n\n\"Sore.\" The dragon grunted, rubbing his throat with a paw. The reminder of their bruises was enough to leave them aching again. \"Hurts to swallow.\"\n\n\"That's all?\" Alakor clicked his beak. \"Consider yourself lucky. Right now, I'm finding it hurts to exist.\"\n\nMalaresh gazed down at the large, white-feathered gryphon. \"Yes. Because I won.\"\n\nAlakor brushed paw pads across his damaged beak. \"That you did, Dragon, that you did.\" He set his paw back down, perking his ears. \"How furious was the princess about your fire?\"\n\n\"Extremely.\" Malaresh flattened back his frills. \"I was given a long, shouty lecture about the ship's structural integrity as it relates to flames, and the many lives herein.\"\n\nThe gryphon warbled again. \"Is that it? I was hoping you might get worse than a lecture.\" Alakor smiled up at the dragon. \"Something like the lovely sisters mentioned, involving a drunken bet, and paddles.\"\n\nMalaresh snorted, glancing away. \"I would not consider the gossipy warbling of sparrows to be a font of truth.\"\n\n\"No?\" Alakor preened a wing as innocently as he could. \"I'll ask Amelia and the princess about it. I hear they were the ones doing the paddling.\"\n\n\"And they shall tell you nothing.\" Malaresh drew himself up taller, arching his neck. \"Defector or not, new arrivals are not privy to the crew's exciting stories, let alone their embarrassing anecdotery.\"\n\nThe gryphon blinked, tilting his head. \"I don't think anecdotery is a word. At least, not this century.\"\n\n\"It matters not!\" Malaresh slapped his paw against the deck. \"The point is, don't expect the ship's crew to share embarrassing tales about other crew members.\" He growled under his breath. \"At least, they'd better not.\"\n\n\"So it's true?\" Alakor chirruped. \"Now I really want to hear the details.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they should give you a first-hand demonstration, instead.\" The dragon glared down at him, baring a few fangs.\n\nAlakor glanced away as if to hide his smile. \"I might enjoy that more than you'd expect.\"\n\nMalaresh glowered, thumping his tail. \"You clearly haven't heard the story. But perhaps I'll help them give you a demonstration.\"\n\n\"I can tolerate anything you can, dragon.\" Alakor clicked his beak. \"By the way, is that what you consider yourself? A crew member?\"\n\nMalaresh waved a paw dismissively. \"I'm not playing your games, bird.\"\n\nThe gryphon stretched a wing. \"You dragons are a harder quarry than humans, that's for certain.\"\n\n\"Is that what you consider me?\" Malaresh lifted his voice, mimicking the gryphon's tone. \"Your quarry?\"\n\nAlakor brushed his black-tipped flight feathers across the dragon's scales. \"Depends on what sort of games we're playing, doesn't it?\"\n\nMalaresh cocked his head, gazing down at the bird. \"You're not unattractive, by gryphon standards, if that's what you're implying.\" He stretched a limb, gently stroking Alakor's foreleg. Then, just when a hint of curious uncertainty sparked to life in the gryphon's eyes, Malaresh sharply rapped his beak with a single digit. \"Now cease your attempts to distract me with flirtatious affectations.\"\n\n\"Oh, please.\" The gryphon rubbed his beak, scrunching his face. \"I could say the same-\"\n\n\"I was surprised you told her about the dying sun.\" Malaresh turned his attention to the skies beyond the ship, staring through the smudged, crystalline window. Gryphon spies were not the only ones who knew how to keep their verbal sparring partners off balance. \"That is why the Union is covering it up, right? Because our sun is but a great, dying ember?\"\n\nAlakor set his paw back down, growling under his breath. \"That is one theory, yes.\"\n\nMalaresh shrugged his wings. \"As much as I'd love to see the Union obliterated, I understand their reasoning.\" The dragon cocked his head. \"Why start a panic when there's nothing anyone can do about it?\"\n\nThe gryphon grunted, shifting his weight. \"I suppose so. Though, it's hardly the only thing the Union-\"\n\n\"Or is there?\" Malaresh watched the gryphon's reaction out of the corner his eye.\n\n\"Is there what?\" Alakor preened his alabaster plumage.\n\n\"Something we can do?\" Malaresh flicked his tail tip back and forth. \"About our dying sun.\"\n\nAlakor squawked, staring at the dragon as if he'd suddenly grown three more heads. \"What are you going to do, fly up there to put in a new wick, and fill it with fresh oil? Or maybe it's electrical!\" The gryphon put a paw to his chest. \"You could change its enormous illuminator filaments, and save the world!\"\n\nMalaresh slowly turned his gaze to the gryphon. \"Is that what you're looking to do? Save the world?\" He moved closer, staring deep into Alakor's eyes. Familiar hatred lingered there, an abyssal beast drifting in the darkness beneath an ocean. But there was something else, too, something Malaresh still couldn't quite place. \"No, I think you're more the sort to watch it all burn.\"\n\nAlakor snarled, turning his head away. \"The only thing I want to see burn is the Union.\"\n\n\"Oh, I believe that, gryphon.\" Malaresh glared at the back of the gryphon's head. \"My worry is that you don't care what else burns with them.\"\n\n\"Think what you want, dragon.\" Alakor ruffled up all his feathers, gazing out the window. \"It matters not to me.\"\n\n\"That's the problem, Bird.\" Malaresh hissed, sharpening his words. \"I don't think our lives matter to you, either. You don't care if we die, so long as the Union dies too.\"\n\n\"Of course I care, Dragon.\" Alakor shot him a wounded look, ears drooping. \"This ship might well the last bastion of freedom left on all the continent, for people like us. I would not throw that away. Your Princess and her people have taken me in. I promise you, I will not pay that back with betrayal.\"\n\nMalaresh licked his nose, softening his tone. \"You choose your words ever so carefully. You promise not to betray us, but you did not say you would not lead us blindly into danger.\"\n\n\"It's not blindly.\" Alakor tossed his head, bitter sarcasm tinting his voice. \"You know damn well you're flying into danger.\"\n\n\"Enough of your cynical smarm.\" Malaresh cuffed the gryphon over the head hard enough to make him yelp. \"I owe Princess Nira and her crew my life. I am honor-bound to protect her from her enemies, and her poor decisions.\" He jabbed a finger against the gryphon's beak. \"Nira might not understand what it means to go up against an Executor...\" Malaresh swallowed, a shiver rattling his scales. \"But I do.\"\n\n\"She knows perfectly well what she's doing.\" Alakor smoothed down his mussed feathers. \"You underestimate her.\"\n\n\"No, bird, I think you underestimate her.\" Malaresh set his paw down, sighing. \"If you get her people killed, she will come at you with everything she has.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Alakor gazed up at the dragon, his eyes hardened. \"An Empress must protect her own people at all costs. That is how it must be, for this to work.\"\n\nMalaresh rumbled, gesturing with a wing. \"Empress now, is it? Is that part of your plan? To rally enough forces to reinstate her, that she might rebuild the Empire and drive back the Union?\"\n\n\"Fuck the Empire, Dragon!\" Alakor growled, black-tipped crown feathers flared in unchecked anger. \"The Black Star is dead and gone, and it's long past time Nira admits that.\" He brandished a paw at the walls around them. \"The Cataclysm is a chance to build something greater than the Empire ever was. But the longer Nira clings to its corpse, the harder it will be to pry her from it when the time comes. When we're free from this place, she can call herself whatever the hell she wants. Empress, queen, president, I don't care.\"\n\nSomething in the gryphon's words rankled Malaresh, poking at his mind in ways he couldn't quite put a finger on. When we're free from this place. \"Whenever I think I've figured you out, you wrench another mystery out from under your tail.\"\n\nAlakor took a calming breath, settling his plumage. \"That sounds profoundly uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"As is being left with an unpleasant thought gnawing away at my mind.\" The dragon lashed his tail. \"When we're free from this place? What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Nothing I'm yet comfortable discussing.\" Alakor curled his tail, idly fidgeting with its feathers. \"You'll find out soon enough, if all goes well.\"\n\n\"Does being evasive not grow ever so tiresome?\" Malaresh heaved a frustrated sigh. \"Does it not burden your soul to hold so many secrets begging for release?\"\n\nAlakor opened his beak to reply, but could find no words. The gryphon looked like a fish, dragged from the water and struggling to breathe. He uttered an odd little whimper, only to strangle the sound into silence as quickly as it came. \"You have no idea how heavy their burden truly is, Dragon.\"\n\nMalaresh grunted, bumping the gryphon with his wing. \"It would benefit all of us if you would be release yourself from the weight of your secrecy. Surely, you wish to prove yourself a worthy member of this crew. Being honest with me would go a long way to helping you earn your status here. Is that not what you want?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alakor kneaded at his tail, staring at the feathers protruding from between his fingers. \"Given a chance, I'd make this ship my home. A real home, the likes of which Remiir and I once dreamed.\" He hung his head, giving a long sigh. \"That sounds so childish, said aloud.\" Alakor flattened his ears. \"Like a sad little fledging, pretending at a life he could never have.\"\n\nSomething in Malaresh withered. Once, long ago, that must have been exactly what Alakor was. A sad, scared little fledging, staring at a life of brainwashing and servitude. Longing for everything he knew he could never have. A home. A family. A life beyond service to masters who did not care, and gods who did not answer. What was it the gryphon said, to the princess?\n\nOur home, waiting to be discovered.\n\nSnow gryphon or not, it was an achingly familiar sentiment. Perhaps, Malaresh thought, he had been too hard on the white-feathered bastard. Malaresh imagined that carefully guarded secrecy was all Alakor had ever known. It had kept him alive this far, and the dragon could not fully blame him for clinging to it now.\n\n\"Isn't it strange,\" Malaresh said, his voice gentle. \"How something so simple can become so meaningful? How something so small...\" He gently set a forepaw on the back of Alakor's neck. \"Can become so important to us?\" Alakor tensed at first, but slowly relaxed as Malaresh stroked his crown feathers. \"Wanting a home does not sound childish, Gryphon. It sounds heartfelt.\" He glanced at the gryphon, and found Alakor staring down at his own forepaws. \"It may be the first truthful thing I've heard from you, aside from hatred, and anger. And it is a feeling I have come to know, all too well.\" Malaresh a slow breath, stroking Alakor's neck. \"Before I came to this ship, I was captured by an Executor.\"\n\nAlakor flattened his ears back, swallowing. \"I had wondered about that. I'm sorry to hear it.\"\n\nMalaresh grimaced as a surge of memories flooded his mind. Pain and humiliation untold, helplessness, terror, and suffering. And eventually, resignation. \"Perhaps I should be proud that it took an Executor to capture me. But there was precious little room for pride, in her captivity. The Executor oversaw my...\" The dragon shuddered, struggling to find words. More moments of fear, and anguish drifting through his mind, of chains and interrogations, of attempts to turn him against the Empire. His belly lurched. There was only one way to sum it up. \"Of my torture.\"\n\nAlakor turned to offer the dragon's paw a sympathetic nuzzle. \"You don't have to talk about it. I know what they do to captive dragons. That sort of cruelty is meant to force you to surrender yourself to Union servitude. You've a strong spirit, though. Clearly they could not break you.\"\n\n\"No. They could not.\" Anger heated Malaresh's voice, but the gryphon's gesture was appreciated. \"I have always believed in the old ways of dragons. Of rulership, power and pride.\" He licked his nose. \"And of loyalty. Though I did not serve the Empire, I considered them an ally. They were first to offer dragons what no other nation ever dared: friendship. The Union offered us only hatred, servitude, and death. I would never serve the Union. I prepared myself to die, hoping only for a chance to take them with me.\"\n\nSomething dangerous glinted in Alakor's bright blue eyes. \"I know that feeling well.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm aware of that, gryphon. That's what frightens me. I think you'd have happily wasted your life, fighting your former masters all on your own.\" He stroked the gryphon's head and neck, sighing. \"Instead, you've found yourself in Nira's embrace, just as I did. Nira and her crew saved me and gave me a chance to avenge my torment.\" As he spoke, his voice twisted into a sibilant snarl, a sound of barely checked fury. \"And avenge it, I did. But then, like you...\" Malaresh gestured with his paw. \"I was wounded, and I was lost. Our wounds are different. Yours were more internal, but we were both lost, the same way.\"\n\nAlakor shifted his weight, gazing at the floor. \"Perhaps, Dragon. Perhaps.\"\n\n\"I lost my home, my lands, my companions, everything I ever had, and I lost it to the Union.\" Malaresh stretched out his wing, draping it across the gryphon's back. \"I ruled a barony once, you know. I had a great reputation, far and wide.\"\n\nAlakor clacked his beak, but moved ever so slightly closer to the dragon, as if sheltering under his wing. \"There's no way you're old enough to have held a barony.\"\n\n\"Why does everyone always tell me that?\" Malaresh snorted, thumping his tail. \"The point is, Nira's crew took me aboard their ship. They offered me shelter and care while my wounds knit. Yet despite their kindness, I had every intention of leaving as soon as I was able. After all, I was used to ruling, not being ruled.\"\n\nAlakor scooted closer still, feathers brushing the dragon's sides. \"It's easy to see where you're going with this story, dragon, but don't let me stop you from finishing it.\"\n\nMalaresh curled his neck to offer the gryphon a smile. \"And it's easy to see you are damn near desperate to melt into someone's touch.\"\n\nAlakor hissed, anger surging anew. \"Shut the fuck up, Dragon!\" He tried to shrug off the dragon's wing, but his rage melted away as quickly as it sprang to life. \"Sorry.\" Alakor sagged, ears drooping. \"That was petulant. You did not mean that the way I took it.\"\n\n\"No.\" Malaresh eased away from the window, settling down onto his belly. \"I did not. But it proves my point.\" He lifted his wing, inviting the gryphon to join him. \"Come lay against me, under my wing. I will temporarily pretend I do not dislike you, because you clearly need the comfort.\"\n\nAlakor stared at him, unmoving. \"Is this another dragon mind trick? I can honestly admit, I was not trained for this one.\"\n\nMalaresh only chuckled. \"I somehow doubt any such training is effective without actual dragons.\" He shook his wing. \"Now, are you going to join me before I change my mind?\"\n\n\"Oh, very well.\" Alakor padded to the dragon's side. He lay down next to him, pressed to Malaresh's body. \"I suppose sharing a little comfort is the least you can do after kicking my ass the other night.\"\n\nMalaresh spread his outstretched wing across the gryphon like a blanket. The feeling of warm fur and feathers against him was an intimately familiar one, though Alakor was larger than Jirril. He curled his neck to nose at the gryphon's ears. \"You are one hell of a big gryphon.\"\n\n\"Damn right I am.\" Alakor snuggled up closer against the dragon, sighing. \"You're right, this is...\" He lay his head against Malaresh's shoulder. \"Nice. Go on, then. Finish your story before you remember you hate snow gryphons.\"\n\n\"How could I ever forget?\" Malaresh snorted, pulling his wing tighter. \"So, as I was saying. When my strength returned, I chafed at Nira's rule.\" He snorted. \"I refused to be ruled by a human, royalty or not. But as I owed her my life, I knew I had to stay until I could repay that debt.\" A smirk crossed his muzzle. \"Or seize the ship for myself, whichever came first.\" Malaresh draped a forepaw across Alakor's front leg. \"As you can see by my lack of rulership over this vessel...\" He swept his other wing out in a dramatic gesture. \"I chose to pay the debt.\"\n\nAlakor bumped his beak against the dragon's scales. \"And then you stayed, anyway. Because of Jirril?\"\n\n\"The girls have been gossiping to you,\" Malaresh said, rumbling. \"Yes, because of Jirril. Amelia used to ride him on patrol daily. At first, they visited me together. Soon, Jirril was visiting me on his own. Over time, he began to mean something to me.\" The dragon swallowed. \"Something dear. And before I knew it, so did this ship.\" The dragon lifted his head, staring out at the sky. \"But I did not realize what it meant to me, until the day I saved Nira's life.\"\n\nAlakor perked his ears. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"A Union ambush, while Nira and her friends were ashore.\" Malaresh waved a forepaw. \"They were cornered in a tavern. The Union had them surrounded, and with a gunship overhead. They had issued the Princess an ultimatum. Luckily, I arrived just as that ultimatum was expiring. I downed the gunship, and incinerated the Union's ranks on the ground.\"\n\n\"You downed a Union gunship, all by yourself?\" Alakor cocked his head.\n\n\"What?\" Malaresh made a show of inspecting unsheathed claws. \"Can't you do that?\"\n\nThe gryphon warbled laughter. \"Must have been a small ship.\"\n\nMalaresh refused to take his bait. \"When the battle was over, we returned to The Cataclysm, and got drunk to celebrate our survival. I did not mention at the time that my debt was paid, but the thought was there, in my mind. Only, to my surprise there was no excitement in me. No joy in my heart at finally being free of her rule. No urgent desire to flee from this place at first light.\"\n\nThe dragon's words were a pained whisper. \"Instead, there was emptiness...\" He put a paw to his chest, claw tips brushing sturdy plates. \"In my heart. And fear, in my belly. I trudged back to my lair, and found Jirril waiting for me, ready to celebrate my impending freedom. But something was off. Jirril tried to be his usual playful self, but I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice...\"\n\nMalaresh's throat tightened up. \"His heart was breaking, with every word. And I realized...\" Tears brimmed in the dragon's eyes. \"That he was really there, to say goodbye.\" Malaresh took a few shaking breaths. \"We'd never talked about...us. I think Jirril had long ago accepted that we were only temporary. That I would leave him someday, and that would be that. And still, when the moment came, it broke his poor heart.\" Malaresh sniffled, forcing himself to keep speaking. \"But in my heart, whenever I imagined flying free from this ship? Jirril was always at my side.\"\n\nMalaresh shook his head, his voice trembling. \"I should have realized Jirril would not go with me. He couldn't. Jirril has given his life to the Empire. He fought for Nira and her family as the capital fell. The Cataclysm is all that remains of his home. And that same home took me in, and nursed me back to health. It had showed me kindness, friendship, and even love.\" Malaresh wiped his eyes. \"It was then that I realized why I didn't want to leave. Because this ship had become my home, too. And that realization shattered me. I collapsed against Jirril, sobbing and overwhelmed by the simple knowledge that I had a home with someone who loved me.\"\n\nThe dragon blinked away tears, taking a slow breath. \"So when you tell me, this ship could be your home? It doesn't make you sound childish, at all.\" He sniffed, glancing away. \"It just makes you sound lonely. And like you deserve to be held, a while.\" He hugged the gryphon with his enclosing wing. \"Just as Jirril held me that night, while I cried out every tear I had.\" Malaresh swallowed, fighting a stubborn lump. \"That was years ago, and now? I'd never want to live anywhere but on this ship. I belong here.\"\n\nAlakor sighed, soft and low. \"That's not quite the story I thought you would tell. But, thank you for sharing it with me.\"\n\n\"You are welcome.\" Malaresh growled to try and clear his throat. The sooner he could return to dignified inscrutability, the better. \"You are also forbidden from telling the Princess I said that last part. It does not befit a dragon.\"\n\n\"I get the feeling she already knows.\" Alakor bumped his beak to the dragon's shoulder.\n\nThe dragon nodded once. \"Be that as it may, keep it to yourself. And remember that just because dragons do not often choose to share our feelings, does not mean we do not have them.\"\n\n\"Oh, I am sure, dragon.\" Alakor turned towards him, unshed tears shining in his eyes. He grasped Malaresh's paw, squeezing it tightly. \"But do not hold them back from Jirril. Tell him you love him! Tell him tonight, and tell him often. Do not make the same mistake I did!\" Alakor looked away, his whole body trembling. \"Remiir and I, we loved each other, but...\"\n\nMalaresh cringed. \"You never told him?\"\n\nAlakor shook his head, words twisting into a hoarse whisper. \"Never. We feared the Union would tear us apart, to punish us! So, we feigned at mere friendship, and casual trysts. But...\" The gryphon's breath shook. \"We were so much more to each other. I loved him like no other I have ever known, and...\" He worked his beak, but only a wordless whimper escaped him. He took a breath and forced himself to speak. \"I never spoke that love aloud! I never told him, that I loved him!\"\n\nMalaresh swallowed, throat tightening anew. \"I'm sure he knew, Bird.\"\n\n\"Did he?\" Alakor sniffled, wiping his eyes. \"He held me under his wing, one night, and lay his head near mine. And he whispered that he loved me!\" Tears ran down the gryphon's cheeks. \"For the first time, he spoke his love out loud, and...\" Alakor fought a sob, agony wrenching his voice. \"I did not say it back! As always, I was too afraid. I wanted to say it, but I could not find the strength to do so. And the next morning, he was gone.\"\n\n\"Oh...\" Malaresh pulled the gryphon tightly against himself, hugging him with a wing. \"I'm sorry, Bird.\"\n\nAlakor whimpered, his wings quivering. \"To this day, I lay in bed, and wonder. Would he have stayed, if only I told him I loved him too? Would he have lived, if not for my silence?\"\n\nMalaresh nuzzled the gryphon, his voice soft. \"Don't do that to yourself, Bird. I am certain his mind was already set on fleeing.\" The dragon struggled to keep his voice even, as the gryphon's pain threatened to bring fresh tears of his own. \"He just wanted you to know you were loved, while he still had time.\"\n\n\"I wanted him to know that, too!\" The snow gryphon took a few ragged breaths. His voice was a ship battered by a storm, barely cresting the waves of emotion. \"When they dragged him back, we all knew what was coming. I pushed through the crowd, intent on calling out my love. I had no more punishments to fear, for I was already losing him. But when our eyes met, for the last time? He...\"\n\nAlakor dropped his head against Malaresh, weeping into his scales. \"He smiled at me! Tied to a tree, beaten, facing his execution, and he...he smiled. As if he were alright with it ending this way, because at least he'd loved someone, in his short life. Because...\" A sob wracked him, and he dug his claws into the floor. \"Because I was the last thing he was going to see! So I found some tiny morsel of strength, inside myself, and I smiled back at him. And...just as I mouthed the words, I love you? They shot him! And all I could do was watch him die! My poor, Sweet Remmy died without ever hearing me say I loved him!\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry.\" Malaresh sniffed, tears running down his own scales. \"That's horrible.\" He curled his neck, offering the gryphon's ears a few tender licks, while Alakor cried. \"It's alright, bird. Just let it out.\"\n\n\"I watched him die!\" Anger crept into Alakor's voice, rising and twisting together with years of unreleased grief. \"And I did nothing! I see him, in my dreams! Bleeding, dying, and still I do nothing!\" Alakor slammed his fist against the deck, snarling through another tearful sob. \"But I will not stand idly by any longer! I will stand against the Union, and I will see their ruin.\" He took a shuddering breath, shaking his head. \"Whatever it takes.\"\n\n\"There you go, gryphon.\" Malaresh hugged Alakor tightly with his wing. \"Let it out. The pain, the anger? Spend it here and now, that it does not overwhelm you. Let it fuel you, but do not let it control you.\"\n\nAlakor hid his face against the dragon's side. He wept, uncontrolled and unhidden, against a creature who should have been his mortal enemy. Though Malaresh would never admit it, he was honored that his former foe should confide in him something so painful, and so personal. Alakor's tears left hot, wet streaks Malaresh's scales. The gryphon's wings trembled, their feathers tickled at him. The dragon stroked Alakor's foreleg, offering what comfort he could.\n\n\"Sometimes, I just want it to end.\" Alakor's words came as a sudden rasp. He lifted his face from the dragon's shoulder, staring out at the window. Something had changed in him, some insidious darkness creeping into his voice. \"And I don't want to live in this dying world anymore.\" He dragged his claws through the floor, cutting lines in the wood. \"But I will not abandon it, as the stars have. Not knowing that those monsters would rule what's left.\"\n\nMalaresh turned his head, gazing into the gryphon's tear-filled eyes. There was something new there, like roiling smoke trapped beneath an ocean of anguish. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nAlakor gave a strange, warbling laugh, shaking his head. His voice was little more than a rasping whisper, adrift on a lonely sea. \"This world is fractured, and there's no one left to fix it. The stars have all abandoned us, and the only song left, is chaos. All we can do now is flee this sinking ship. But I'll be damned before I let one wretched Union monster on board the only lifeboat. I will see the Union drowned, even if it means I drown with them.\"\n\nMalaresh slowly eased his head back, something cold unspooling in his heart. He had no idea what the gryphon was rambling about now. But whatever it was, Alakor wasn't even trying to hide it. That only made it more unnerving. Malaresh suddenly felt akin to a priest expecting a grand revelation from the gods, and receiving only the whispers of some abyssal horror.\n\n\"What...\" Malaresh squeezed Alakor's paw. \"What does all that mean?\"\n\nThe gryphon took his time in answering, waiting until he had composed himself anew. When he had, Alakor offered the dragon a cold smile. \"I suggest you ask Executor Harliss. After all, I've led her to us for a reason. It was from her reports I first gleaned the truth about this broken existence. She will give us the answers we seek, or I will sing to her of smoke, and chaos, and see her torn asunder.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Nira laid in bed, staring at the arched crossbeams that spanned her ceiling. In the darkness, it was easy to imagine she was trapped in the hold of some great, oceangoing ship. Nira supposed the truth wasn't that far off. She sighed, rolling to her side. Even after ten years in this behemoth, contemplating what might have been still kept her awake some nights.\n\nHow many countless adventures with her family had she missed out? How many meals filled with her parents' happy laughter had she been denied? How often could have she teased her father as his hair slowly turned silver? How many stern lectures would she have gotten? It was more painful still to consider what her parents missed out on. They never got to see the women their daughters grew into. Nira hoped they would have been proud of her.\n\nThe princess gazed out the window. There was nothing to see beyond the porthole but darkness. Night's darkest hours shrouded the world, and the moon was in hiding. She fidgeted with her pillow, some of the day's conversations still playing through her mind. Tryn was Empress now, even if in name only. But in another life, Nira would have Empress someday. Tonight, with the past's cruel grasp in firm control, Nira wondered what kind of Empress she would have been.\n\nNira was not foolish enough to think she could have fixed all the Empire's myriad problems. But she knew in her heart she would have done her damnedest to try. Her former populace had many genuine grievances, some of which the Union had capitalized upon. They had turned the impoverished people of the far provinces against their wealthier countrymen, and in so doing, swelled the Union's ranks. Had she been made Empress after all, Nira liked to think she would have made it her life's work to address that great inequality.\n\nWith a sigh, Nira sat up in bed. She decided if she wasn't going to be able to sleep, she may as well do something productive. She stood up and lit a single lamp. It's wavering, spectral glow lit her room in shades of pale orange. Nira glanced towards her expansive desk, where her pistols rested. She'd unloaded them before bed, storing the ammo in a new set of bandolier style gun belts. Perhaps now was a good time to practice reloading from them, she thought, before she had to do so under duress.\n\nNira went to fetch her weapons, then froze. At the center of her desk was a portrait of her family, in an ebony frame and kept beneath protective glass. Nira sank into her desk chair as cold hands squeezed her heart. The silver-hued photograph was one of the only images she had left of her family, together. It depicted Nira and Tryn alongside their parents. The ladies all wore elegant, flowing dresses. Her father was done up in a regal coat and formal trousers, along with a stately top hat. Her mother's dark hair had been ever so long, halfway down her back. Her father had a beard and moustache, trimmed short just before the photograph was taken. In the photo, they were all smiling.\n\nNira stared at it in silence. She remembered that day clearly. She and Tryn had argued about who would wear which color dress until their father reminded them the image would be silver-hued anyway. Later, Nira and Tryn refused to smile. Nira wanted to look serious, and Tryn wanted to be like her big sister. Mother forced both them to smile, anyway. Then the four of them had to smile until their faces hurt, so the image could develop before they relaxed their expressions.\n\nShe laughed, tracing her fingers over the glass. \"Even you had to admit we shouldn't have smiled, after that. Said your face was gonna hurt for days. But...\" Nira sniffled. \"I'm glad you made is smile, Mom. Because at least I have this, now.\"\n\nThe frame wobbled under her touch. Nira furrowed her brow, wondering how the photo had gotten there. Nira kept it on a shelf with the others for safe keeping. In the days before the palace fell, some thoughtful worker had brought dozens of photos and silver-graphs aboard along with other family heirlooms. If not for their thoughtfulness, Nira would have had nothing but memories left.\n\nNira moved the silver-graph aside, and discovered a folded piece of parchment beneath it. She opened it and spread it out on the desk, in the faint glow of the single illuminated lamp. The handwriting was rough, but familiar. It was Rog's.\n\nNira,\n\nI'm still ever so sorry that you couldn't say goodbye. I wonder, sometimes, if you ever forgave me. It haunts me more than you know. Since you hate talking about it, I left you this. There's something you need to do. Look into your parents faces, and tell them both goodbye.\n\nPlease, Nira.\n\nSay your goodbyes, one last time, and let them rest.\n\nIt's time to admit they're gone, and you're not the heir, anymore.\n\nBecause I'm not taking a princess to face an Executor.\n\nI'm taking an Empress.\n\nNira swallowed hard, setting the letter down with trembling hands. In her heart, she knew Rog was right. Some wounds would never heal, if she would not let them close. Nira picked up the silver-graph again, staring at her parents' smiling faces. It hit Nira then that she would never again see her mother smile. She would never again hear her father laugh. They would never again hold her, hug her, comfort her. Her parents were long dead, and gone.\n\n\"You're...you're dead, Mom.\" Nira brushed her fingers across her mother's face, struggling just to force the words. Pain lanced her deep inside. Her throat clenched, hot and aching. Tears brimmed in her eyes. \"You're dead. My mother is dead.\"\n\nNira stroked her thumb over her father, smearing the glass. \"You're dead too, Dad. You're both dead.\" She sniffled, tears spilling down her cheeks. \"I tried to say goodbye, but...I know you never heard me.\" Waves of sorrow and anger crashed over her, grief giving way to rage. \"It's not fair.\" She slammed her fist against her desk, hard enough to leave her hand aching \"It's not fucking fair! You never even got to hear me say goodbye!\"\n\nThe Princess snatched up the framed photograph, ready to hurl it against the wall in a moment of petulant fury. She stopped herself, just in time, horrified. If she damaged that photo, it could not be replaced. Nira set it down, and pushed it nearly out of reach. Then she dropped her head into her hands, overwhelmed with a sudden, wrenching sob.\n\n\"I miss you!\" Nira buried her face in her arms atop the desk, crying. \"I miss you both so much!\"\n\nMemories long held at bay washed over her, horrible images and terrifying moments from her last night in the palace. Normally, when they came, Nira turned to drink to help keep the pain at bay.\n\nThis time, she gave in, and let memory's dark tide sweep her away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Gunfire had never been so loud.\n\nNira had fired her pistols countless times at the range. She had trained with rifles alongside soldiers. She'd watched cannons and artillery unleash volleys at distant targets, felt the palace walls shudder from every barrage. But never had it been anything like this. Never had gunshots rang out inside enclosed walls. Never was it so steady, so constant. Never had every single shot been life, or death.\n\nThere was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could have prepared Imperial Princess Nira to fight for her life inside her own palace.\n\n\"Down!\" Guard Captain Merriam shoved Nira's head down. Bullets cracked the air around her, nearly as loud as the shots that loosed them. Standing over her, Merriam returned fire, three concussive blasts in a row. \"Stay down!\"\n\nA scream sounded from the darkened hallway, beyond the billowing smoke. Some of the smoke was from the constant gunfire. Most of it came from the flames left by artillery shells that penetrated the palace's fortified keep. The whole building shuddered as another struck home, the distant explosion muffled by stone. Dust fell, and debris rattled on the floor. The acrid smell of smoke left Nira's throat burning, but at least it covered the stench of spilled blood.\n\n\"Where's our fucking air force?\" Rog snarled at Merriam, passing Nira a freshly loaded pistol. \"You're loaded! Cover me in three!\"\n\n\"Where do you fucking think, gnoll?\" Steady, pulsing thuds reverberated somewhere above them as warships exchanged constant barrages.\n\nNira forced herself to focus on this moment, this task, and nothing else. In the back of her mind, she was terrified. She feared if her heart pounded any harder, it would burst and do the Union's job for them. But second to second, breath to breath, there was no fear. The initial wave of panic that hit when the Palace was first breeched had faded hours ago. In its wake, there was only numb determination. Live, or die. Survive this moment, then try to survive the next.\n\nOn a three count, Nira leaned out around the doorway she sheltered in, aiming her silver pistol down the corridor. Shapes moved behind the smoke. Nira tracked one, then pulled the trigger. The sound was deafening. The weapon spat fire and tried to jump from her hand. Nira kept it steady and fired again, thankful for all the days Merriam spent training her. A cry pierced the cacophony, and the shadow stumbled. Nira fired at another, then again, and again. Above her, Merriam did the same, a hail of lead from both her pistols.\n\nRog stepped out behind them, hoisting a bottle of spirits with a burning rag stuffed into it. The gnoll hurled it down the hallway with a guttural cry. It erupted into a boiling cloud of flame, illuminating Union soldiers with horrible, red-orange light. The fires consumed them as they screamed, burning alive. Some staggered and fell, while others struggled to quell the flames.\n\nNira aimed at one, and pulled the trigger. The hammer struck home, but provided only an empty click. \"Shit!\" Nira popped the cylinder open, dumping her spent cartridges. \"I'm empty!\"\n\nAs she pulled new rounds from a pouch with shaking fingers, Rog rushed past her. The gnoll moved faster and more fluidly than Nira thought possible. In a single, smooth motion he pulled his scatter gun off his back and lined up a shot with the nearest burning soldier. The point-blank blast tore the soldier open, lifting him off his feet. Blood splattered the scorched walls. The corridor trapped the explosive sound, and it left Nira's ears ringing anew even amidst all the other gunshots.\n\nRog pivoted, pumped another round into the chamber, and fired again. A Union captain's head disintegrated in horrific spray. Rog turned again as the body slumped over, firing on another burning soldier. Merriam's pistols sang above Nira's head, staggering an invader who had just drawn a bead on Rog. One lunged from a doorway, jabbing a bayonet towards the gnoll's middle. Rog saw him just in time to deflect the blade away with his weapon. Just as quickly, he rammed the butt of his gun into the man's face, crushing his nose and front teeth. The Union fighter stumbled back, blood gushing. Rog put the squad's last survivor down with a final shot from his scatter gun.\n\nThe moment the latest battle was over, Rog got to work scavenging for anything of use. The gnoll picked his way around patches of flame to snag a rifle. He slung it over his shoulder, then unbuckled a belt loaded with bullets for it.\n\n\"Don't watch him!\" Merriam grabbed Nira by the collar of her layered body armor. \"Load your weapon!\"\n\nNira hurried to pull cartridges from the pouch hastily tied around her waist. \"Right.\" Her fingers shook, and she dropped a round, then a second one. Nira cursed, snatching them up off the floor.\n\n\"Breathe, Princess.\" Merriam crouched down, grasping Nira's hands. The older woman's grip was steady as a damn rock. Nira didn't know how she did it. Merriam guided Nira through the motions of loading a single cartridge at a time. \"It's the same thing you've practiced. Nothing's changed about the motions, or the routine. Control what you can control.\"\n\n\"Control what I can control.\" Nira muttered the mantra to herself. It was one of several basic principles Merriam had drilled into her head. She loaded the last few rounds more carefully. When they were all in, she snapped the cylinder shut. \"Thanks. Ready!\"\n\nMerriam grabbed Nira's arm and hustled her forward. \"You're welcome, but now's not the time for thank you's! Now's the time for forgiveness, for anything that needs forgiving.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nira stumbled at first, trying to keep up with Merriam's pace. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nMerriam was silent, but worried look in the guard captain's eyes was all the answer Nira needed. The princess shivered when she realized she had never seen Merriam nervous before. It hit her then that Merriam didn't think they were going to survive. All the fear Nira had been holding back rushed over her. If not for Merriam's grip on her arm, she would have slumped to the floor.\n\n\"We're, we're not...\" Nira struggled to catch her breath, but her lungs refused to work. \"We're...we're going to...\"\n\nMerriam tucked her other pistol away, calling out to Rog. \"Gnoll, keep watch!\" She turned towards Nira, putting both hands on her shoulders. Merriam into Nira's eyes. \"You're going to live, Nira. Take a breath, and say it.\"\n\n\"I...I'm...\"\n\n\"You're going to live!\" Merriam squeezed the princess's shoulders till it hurt. All the nervousness in the guard captain's eyes was gone now, replaced with fiery resolve so intense Nira could almost reach out and claim it for herself. \"Say it! Say it now!\"\n\n\"I'm going to live!\" Nira squared her shoulders, forcing herself to swallow back her terror. These, too, were lessons and principles Merriam had drilled into her head over the last few years. Control what you can control. Seize the situation, and never let it seize you. She grasped Merriam's hand. \"We're going to live!\"\n\nMerriam nodded once, then released Nira. \"Let's move!\"\n\n\"Resupply!\" Rog shoved a few belts of bullets into Merriam's arms, along with another pistol. Then the gnoll turned to Nira, offering her the bayonet-tipped rifle. \"Only one that ain't burned to shit.\"\n\nNira holstered her pistol, and took it. The make and model were unfamiliar, some Union brand. But it was lever-action, and the cartridges looked of a similar size to Empire rounds. She slung it over her shoulder, then took the bandolier and strapped it across her body armor. \"Thanks, Rog.\"\n\n\"What'd I just tell you about saying thanks?\" Merriam shot her a glare.\n\n\"Well, what else was I gonna say?\" Nira forced herself to smile, if only to help keep the fear at bay. \"I forgive you for handing me a rifle?\"\n\nMerriam chuckled. \"Fair enough.\" She waved a pistol down the hall. \"Gnoll, take point!\"\n\nRog hurried down the hall, loading fresh shells into his scatter gun. Nira followed his lead, reloading her stolen rifle. As she skirted around scorched bodies, she forced herself to look at them, to see people reduced to gruesome ruin. Despite what they were doing here, despite that this was her home they were invading, Nira reminded herself they were still people. And the sight of humans burned, of heads blown apart and bodies ripped apart by weapons fire, it left her stomach churning. Union or not, it was a horrible, sorrowful sight, and she hoped she never grew accustomed to it. When this was all over, she was probably going to heave up everything.\n\nNira still couldn't believe how fast everything changed. Only months ago, Nira's parents sent her younger sister Tyrn to the far-flung capital of some small, allied nation. In public, they'd claimed the trip was for education. But they'd sent a ship full of elite soldiers with her, along with a very loyal dragon instructed to keep her out of Union hands at all costs. At the time, it seemed like an extreme measure.\n\nAnd then everything went to hell in a blink.\n\nJust weeks ago, they'd moved Nira's personal quarters deep inside the palace's fortified heart, to a smaller room complete with bomb shelter. By then, the capital was nearly encircled by an entire ocean of enemy forces. The Empire's remaining army and aerial fleets had mostly consolidated in the capital to protect the Imperial family. Those who hadn't made it back in time were now cut off.\n\nThe Union looked to be settling in for a prolonged siege. They set up camps as far as Empire lenses could see. They'd backed off their fleets of destroyers, and left only their gunships and ground bombardment vessels in range of Empire guns. Nira's parents and their generals had been discussing how best to hold out during a long-term siege. Their advisers believed the Union send in frequent probing attacks to force the Empire to expend resources repulsing them. That was why they moved Nira's chambers.\n\nIt was hoped that if the Empire could hold out long enough without surrendering, reinforcements may be able to break the siege. They had forces remaining in outposts and bases in allied nations. If they regrouped, they could hit the Union's forces from behind. Then the Empire could send out their Home Defense Fleet, and trap the Union between them two armies. All they had to do until then was hold out. After all, no one expected the Union to waste an entire fleet's worth of lives and ships just to blow a hole in the city's defenses.\n\nBut that was exactly what they did.\n\nThe siege preparations were only ever a cover for their real plan. It began with clusters of gunships on bombardment runs, just after nightfall. The Empire's Home Defense Fleet, a formidable force of air destroyers along with stalwart gryphons and dragons, flew out to engage them. The smaller vessels were no match, but that was never the point. The Union's first waves were all on suicide runs. They unleashed everything they had not against Empire vessels, but against walls and anti-air defenses. Wave after wave of ships shelled the city's every fortification. The burning husks of Union gunships soon littered the streets of the sprawling capital, but it made no difference. The damage was done.\n\nOnly when the way was cleared for the Union's army to surge into the city did they send their destroyers to engage the Empire's air force directly. Locked in combat, the Home Defense Fleet could not turn its full attention to the hoard of Union soldiers swarming below. The Empire's remaining ground forces met them in full, drowning the capital's streets and alleyways in a red tide. But it was not enough. One moment, Nira was huddled in her shelter, with Rog holding her and telling her the bombing would end soon. The next, Merriam was throwing the door open and shouting at Nira to get into her body armor.\n\nArmor, now! Fast as you can!\n\nBut...\n\nThe palace is falling!\n\nNira knew in an instant, something had gone wrong. Those four words were one of the emergency codes for a worst scenario. It meant the Union was inside the palace. An entire team of bodyguards and gryphons should have sprung into action to rush Nira to the Imperial bunker. Another team would have done the same for her parents.\n\nBut there were no bodyguards. There were no gryphons.\n\nThere was only Merriam, frantically helping Nira into her body armor. She'd worn it in training, but its layers of silken meshes and sturdy plating seemed heavier now. Her pistols and her ammunition were hastily strapped around her. Then, before her mind had even caught up to what was happening, Merriam and Rog were rushing her down the hall. They were ambushed, shortly thereafter. They survived, only to fight for their lives every step of the way since.\n\nIt must have been hours, now, trying to reach her parents. Exhaustion already pressed against Nira like a weight. When the others slowed, Nira leaned against a wall to catch her breath. When she collected herself, she hurried on, moving into a wide hallway intersection.\n\n\"Contact!\" Rog's roar was almost immediately drowned out by his ensuing scattergun blast. \"Down, down, get back!\"\n\nNira flattened herself to the floor just before a hail of bullets shattered the air above her. She scrambled backwards, cursing under her breath.\n\nMerriam snatched her, dragging her out of the line of fire. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Corridor on the left!\" Rog pushed himself up against the wall, at the intersection's edge. When the rounds stopped flying, he peeked around it. \"Fuckers got a crank gun!\" Then he pulled back, glancing back at Merriam. \"And you wouldn't let me get one!\"\n\nMerriam hurried over to the same wall Rog was sheltered against. \"How many men they have operating it?\" She moved up behind Rog, waving for Nira to follow.\n\n\"Three!\" Rog swapped his shotgun for the rifle slung across his back.\n\nMerriam tapped Rog's shoulder to let him know she was there. \"That's why I wouldn't let you have one. Even you can't carry, feed, and operate a damn crank gun all by yourself!\"\n\nNira touched Merriam's shoulder the same way. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"Fuckin' shoot 'em, that's what!\" Rog gestured with his gun for Merriam to come forward. \"I'm gonna hurtle it, you ready?\"\n\n\"What do you mean, hurtle it?\" Nira snatched at the edge of Rog's armor. \"You can't hurtle a fucking gun, Rog!\"\n\n\"Just be ready to shoot.\" Rog backed up the hall they'd come from. \"Aim for the gunner first. And don't miss!\"\n\n\"What the hell's he doing?\" Nira lifted her rifle, trying to keep her hands steady.\n\n\"Union crank guns have a delay, a second or so, from the time they start cranking it to the time it starts firing.\" Merriam tilted her head towards Rog. \"On your mark, gnoll.\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nRog sprinted, and leapt across the intersection. The Union gunners down the other hallway opened fire. Bullets splattered the wall in an uneven line, tracking Rog. The gnoll landed on the far side of the junction, flattening himself against the wall. More rounds struck the corner, blasting wooden shrapnel in all directions. The constant, steady concussion of crank gun fire drowned out Merriam's instructions, but Nira knew what to do. Merriam would aim for the gunner, so Nira's Merriam leaned into the hallway, opening fire on the gunner's nest. Nira popped out behind her just as Merriam's rounds tore through the man operating the massive gun, and the soldier feeding it ammo. Their captain took aim at Merriam, just as Nira fixed her rifle's sights on his head. Nira fired, and her bullet punched through his skull before he could pull the trigger. The rifle's power jarred her shoulder, left her ear screaming for mercy.\n\n\"Fucking right!\" Rog snarled, rejoining Nira and Merriam. \"Great shootin', you two!\"\n\n\"Are you fucking crazy?\" Nira glared at the gnoll. \"That thing woulda cut you in half!\"\n\nMerriam snatched Nira's shoulder, shaking her. \"I told you to stay back!\"\n\nNira scowled, gesturing with her bayonet at the crank gun. \"I couldn't hear what you said over that thing!\"\n\n\"Nevermind.\" Merriam walked down the adjoining hall, and put one last bullet in the head of a man still breathing. \"I'll take point. Gnoll, get her moving!\"\n\nRog nudged Nira till she followed Merriam. He glanced at the large weapon as they passed it. \"Were they waitin' for us with that thing?\"\n\n\"Possibly!\" Merriam reloaded her pistols as she jogged ahead. \"They may have spies in our ranks. They seem to have information on the palace's layout. And given how quickly they infiltrated it? I'm guessing a map wasn't the only help they had.\"\n\n\"Shit!\" Nira worked her rifle's lever, chambering a new round. \"Should we take a different route?\" Nira glanced around, furrowing her brow. Come to think of it, she didn't recognize this route at all. \"Wait, where are we? This isn't one of the routes we practiced.\" Merriam and Rog shared a worrying look, but neither replied. Something cold and sickening twisted in her belly. Nira came to a stop, hugging her rifle across her chest. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"We're getting you to safety!\" Merriam glanced back. \"So keep moving!\"\n\nNira didn't budge. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Now's not the time, Princess!\" Merriam tilted her head towards the gnoll. \"Rog, let's go.\"\n\nRog snatched Nira's arm, pulling her forward. Though it was clear the gnoll was careful not to hurt her, it was also clear he wasn't asking. \"Come on, Nira, we gotta go.\"\n\nNira did not resist. She knew Rog was only trying to keep her safe. \"Alright, I'm going, I'm going.\"\n\nRog released her as soon as she was walking again, his ears drooping. \"Sorry. I hope I didn't hurt you.\"\n\n\"No, I'm fine.\" She lifted her gaze, searching the gnoll's eyes. \"Do you know where we're going?\"\n\nRog swallowed, his voice suddenly soft. \"Staging area three.\"\n\nNira blinked. That wasn't where her family was. That was a bunker where people went to await evacuation. The only reason they'd take her there was if-\n\nA door exploded ahead of them as a Union officer smashed right through it. He hit the far wall with a nauseating crunch, and slumped to the ground, lifeless. A furious, keening cry sounded from beyond the shattered door. Gunshots followed it, and then a wrenching scream. More gunfire rang out in quick succession, quicker than before.\n\n\"That's a gryphon!\" Merriam headed for the shattered doorway, pressing up alongside it.\n\nNira followed just at her heels. \"About time we find someone friendly!\"\n\n\"I think those were kobold guns, too!\" Rog skidded to a stop near the women. The gnoll took a deep breath, then bellowed out a kobold code phrase. \"Tek Tek Tek!\"\n\n\"Kor Kor Kor!\" A distinctly kobold voice returned the call sign.\n\nGunfire shattered the air again, first in loud booms, then in a volley of sharp, staccato bursts. Immediately came a furious roar, and then the sickening sound of flesh hitting stone again. Merriam signaled a countdown. When the moment came, she led the way, barging into the room. Merriam opened fire immediately. Rog reached for Nira to hold her back, but she slipped his grasp. Nira followed Merriam through the doorway, shouldering her rifle.\n\nInside was a ballroom turned battlefield. Bodies littered the floor amidst the wreckage of elaborate crystalline chandeliers. Long tables and padded chairs alike were upended, turned into makeshift cover. Dying flames flickered across the remains of once-elegant golden curtains, and devoured a beautiful, silver-framed portrait of a former Emperor. Smoke and blood stained the cream-hued walls. Bullet holes now decorated everything.\n\nA blue and gray gryphon in full combat armor rampaged through a swarm of Union soldiers at the far end of the ballroom. Merriam pressed up against a pillar, firing in the gryphon's defense. Corpses were already scattered around the room. While most of the dead were Golden Union, there were Empire soldiers and Palace Guards mixed in, as well. Several small, scaled kobold bodies were strewn about, blood-soaked and still. More Union soldiers ducked behind toppled display cases. Across from them, surviving kobolds in head-to-tail combat armor took cover behind a long table, exchanging fire with the enemy.\n\nNira immediately took aim at the soldiers in cover, shooting as quickly as she could work the rifle's lever. Her first few shots missed, but one tore away a man's jaw. He toppled, gurgling blood. The next trigger pull brought only a hollow click. Rog snatched her arm, throwing her down behind the table with the kobolds. Merriam leapt over it a moment later.\n\nRog dropped in alongside Nira, snarling. \"They're here for you! Don't stand in the fucking open!\"\n\n\"Your highness!\" One of the kobolds gave her a quick bow, swiftly reloading his pistols. \"Lovely evening, isn't it?\" Tension edged his voice, despite his lingering sense of humor.\n\n\"Beautiful night!\" Nira forced a smile to her face as she reloaded her stolen weapon. Bullets tore through the table above her, splattering the wood. Nira cried out and ducked, dropping a round. \"Shit!\"\n\nAs the cartridge rolled away, the nearby kobold threw himself atop her. \"Protect the princess!\" He put as much of his armored body across her as possible. \"Return fire!\"\n\nTwo of them popped up and did so, unleashing a storm of lead that sent the Union soldiers back into cover. To Nira's knowledge, kobold weapons were usually smaller, but also designed with hair triggers. They might not have as much punch as some of the larger guns, but skilled kobolds could put two or three bullets into a target for every one the bigger weapons fired. At the same time, the fourth kobold swiftly reloaded weapons for the rest.\n\nNira patted the one atop her. \"Let me up!\"\n\nThe kobold protecting her eased up, hesitant at first. Nira slipped out from under him before he had a chance to think better, snatching up her rifle again. \"Help the gryphon, instead!\"\n\n\"You heard the princess!\" Merriam's voice cut through the din as she finished her own reloading. \"Cover the bird!\"\n\nNira eased up just over the edge of the table, leveling her rifle off. The gryphon was bleeding, and had clearly taken a few rounds. His armor had clearly stopped many more. Despite that, the gryphon was a whirlwind of beak and claws. He spun and pivoted, tearing through the soldiers, rending flesh and bone. No one seemed able to get a killing shot. One man put a pistol in the bird's face, only to lose his hand. Another backed away, aiming his rifle, only for a kobold to put two rounds in his chest.\n\nWith the kobolds covering the gryphon, Nira returned to firing on the Union infantry behind the display case. Rog joined her, firing shots through their cover to keep them pinned. The gryphon spun again, snatching a human off his feet. The man screamed as claws penetrated through his body armor and into his ribs. Rising to his hind legs, the gryphon hurled his victim straight into the furniture sheltering the rest of the Union soldiers. The hapless fighter smashed through it like a stone through glass, scattering the men behind it.\n\nThe kobold who'd protected her leapt over the table, a quick-action pistol in each hand. He darted around the taller humans, ducking and weaving, guns constantly firing. When he was empty, he tossed his weapons aside, scaling a soldier like a tree. With his bare claws, he ripped out the man's throat, and leapt from his toppling body.\n\nWith the tide turned, all the remaining soldiers split up. Some ran towards the doors, just trying to escape the gryphon. Others backed away slower, firing at Nira and others to cover their friends' escape. The princess and her contingent dropped back down. Nira crawled along the ground as bullets tore through wood just overhead. Wooden fragments fell against her head, clinging to her hair.\n\nFurther down the table, Merriam glanced at the kobolds. \"Swarm the fuckers, I'll cover you!\"\n\nNira doubted four kobolds counted as a swarm, but she knew what Merriam meant. She tossed her empty rifle aside, and drew her pistol. Merriam jumped up to support the kobolds, and Nira and Rog did the same. As the trio rained bullets down on the retreating soldiers, the kobolds all raced into danger. They used their small size and impressive speed to their advantage, sprinting around the room, firing constantly. They scrambled up debris and slid across the floor, shooting from every angle until their ammo was spent. Even then they kept going with claws, teeth, and little knives.\n\nFew Union invaders escaped their wrath. A couple managed to make it out of the ballroom, only for the gryphon to bound after them. Screams and gunshots followed in his wake. Merriam hurtled the table, snatching a service pistol from a dying officer's hand. She finished him off with his own gun. Then she strode around the room, putting another bullet in any Union fighter still breathing. By the time she was finished, the armored gryphon trotted back in. Fresh blood dripped from his beak.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" Nira said, wiping her forehead with the back of a hand. She quickly surveyed the ballroom. None of the fallen Union members stirred. Embers drifted through the smoky air, but at least the flames had mostly died out. \"Is that all of them?\"\n\n\"I believe so,\" the gryphon said. Pain and fatigue both weighed down his voice, but neither had slowed him in battle. He turned his head, inspecting his own bloodstained wings. He stretched one, testing it. The gryphon winced, but Nira was happy to see he had not suffered any loss of motion. \"Thank you for your help. But there will be more, so prepare yourselves.\"\n\n\"Bird's right.\" Rog staggered back to his feet, still panting. \"I'll see what those Union fucks left for us. You reload, Princess. Real quick now.\"\n\n\"Princess?\" The gryphon squawked, pivoting towards her. His eyes widened beneath his helmet. In the chaos, he must not have realized who had come to his aid. The gryphon dropped into a formal bow, touching his beak to the floor. \"I've been looking for you!\"\n\n\"Well, you found me.\" Nira tried to reload her pistols, but shaky fingers made it slow going. Rog steadied her hands, and Nira offered him a thankful smile.\n\n\"Bird!\" Merriam holstered her weapons and approached the gryphon. \"Report!\"\n\nThe gryphon turned to her, tilting his helmeted head. \"Guard captain?\" He slowly gazed from Merriam, to Rog, and finally to Nira. \"Where's the rest of her contingent?\"\n\nMerriam shook her head, her words terse, yet sorrowful. \"I'm the only one who made it to her.\"\n\nNira gasped, cringing inwardly. No wonder the rest of her guards were missing. Merriam was overseeing defense operations earlier in the day. She must have battled just to reach Nira. Merriam had lost people in the way, and never even mentioned it. Gods, Nira thought, no wonder she was nervous.\n\nThe princess gentle squeezed Merriam's hand. \"I'm sorry for your men, Merriam.\"\n\nMerriam gave Nira a grateful nod, but kept her attention on the gryphon. \"I asked for your report, Gryphon. You're looking for her? Are you from the Imperial Guard Flight?\"\n\nThe gryphon straightened up. \"Yes, Guard Captain. We were dispatched to find and evacuate the princess, but....\" He took a shuddering breath, his ears drooping alongside his helmet. \"My flight didn't make it, either.\"\n\n\"Then we do it our fuckin' selves!\" Rog joined Nira, standing before the gryphon. \"We can all grieve later!\"\n\nThe gryphon lifted his head, his ears perked as quickly as they'd fallen. \"Absolutely.\" He lifted a paw towards the princess. \"Don't worry, my darling. We're all the escort you'll ever need.\"\n\nNira forced herself to smile as she shook his bloodied paw. If Merriam and the gryphon could put on brave faces after watching their comrades die, she was sure as hell going to follow their example. \"I've no doubt, gryphon.\" She looked him over. Under his armor, his blue and gray feathers were matted with blood. \"Are you badly hurt?\"\n\n\"Nothing death won't cure.\" The gryphon shook himself, then cringed, groaning in pain. \"Besides, everyone's hurt.\" He turned his head towards the smaller lizard soldiers nearby. \"Kobolds, how are you faring?\"\n\nThe four surviving kobolds were tending to their dead kin. They knelt alongside their bodies, gently touching their muzzles, murmuring. The lead kobold pushed himself to his feet, wiping his eyes. \"Us four are still breathing. These five ain't. Guess we might as well keep fightin' till we ain't breathing, either.\"\n\nNira stepped closer. \"If you need time to tend to your dead, you-\"\n\n\"Nah.\" The squad leader shook his head. The palace rumbled and shook as an explosion reverberated through it. Dust fell from the ruined walls. Debris rattled on the floor. \"Death rites ain't gonna matter, now. Gods are either gonna accept 'em, or not.\" He turned towards the others. \"Finish up, boys.\"\n\nThe gryphon stepped in between Merriam and Rog. \"I'm sure you know, but the order has been given. Now that I've found you, I have to make it official.\"\n\nRog sighed, hanging his head. \"Yeah, I know.\"\n\nMerriam gestured at the gryphon. \"Make the proclamation, Imperial Guard. We'll confirm.\"\n\n\"What are you three talking about?\" Nira searched their faces, but she already knew the answer. Her heart sank. \"No!\"\n\n\"The palace has fallen.\" The blue and gray gryphon lifted his head, and solemnly spoke. \"Agree?\"\n\nRog nodded once. \"Agree. The palace has fallen.\" He turned his eyes to Merriam. \"Agree?\"\n\nMerriam set her jaw. \"Concur. The palace has fallen.\"\n\n\"Then by Imperial Decree,\" the gryphon said, his powerful voice echoing around the room. \"You are hereby ordered to evacuate Princess Nira to the city-ship immediately, at all and any cost.\"\n\nThe lead kobold called out to his subordinates. \"New mission, boys! The dead can wait. Gods know we'll see 'em again soon enough. Now the load the fuck up, we got a princess to protect!\"\n\nThe princess shook her head, balling up her fists. \"If you think for one second I'm going to let you take me to that damn ship without my family-\"\n\n\"Nira,\" Merriam said, her voice soft, but firm. \"You know we have to.\" She took Nira's hand, gently squeezing it. \"Please, your highness, don't fight us.\"\n\n\"Then we get my family first!\" Nira turned towards Rog, hoping she could sway him to her side. \"They can go with us!\"\n\n\"No, Nira,\" Rog said, his voice cracking. Tears brimmed in the gnoll's eyes. \"They can't.\"\n\n\"Yes, they can!\" Nira yanked her hand away from Merriam, backing up. \"They have to! We can't just leave my parents behind!\"\n\nRog stepped after her, tears running down his muzzle. \"We have orders, Nira.\" The gnoll sniffled, shaking his head. \"We have to get you on that ship while we still can.\"\n\n\"Then I order you to take me to my parents, first!\" Nira struggled to control her breathing. She searched everyone's eyes for some shred of hope, but found none. Her throat clenched, burning deep inside. \"We'll take them with us! I order it! I order you all!\"\n\nThe gryphon lowered his head. \"I'm ever so sorry, my darling princess, but an Imperial Decree supersedes your orders. Even if it didn't, there's no time left. This is our only chance.\"\n\nMerriam came forward, delicately grasping Nira's shoulder. \"Serving your family has been the absolute honor of my life.\" Her voice broke. \"But that's over, now. It's all over. Your parents chose this. To be here, to the last moment.\" Merriam wiped her eyes. \"To stand for their Empire onto the very end. Because they understand that the captain has to go down with the ship.\"\n\n\"It's not a fucking ship!\" Nira chocked back a sob, batting away Merriam's hand. \"That's my parents' lives you're talking about!\"\n\n\"Nira, we know!\" Rog squared himself in front of her. \"You think we want to do this? You think your parents don't know what this does to you?\" He jabbed a finger into her chest. \"They were crying when they gave us the order! They love you, Nira! But this is the only way they can keep you safe! By staying behind to ensure-\"\n\n\"To ensure what?\" Nira snarled at him, her raspy voice angrier and more hurtful than she intended. \"That I run away like some fucking coward? That I fly off in my fancy ship while my family dies? While my people get slaughtered? And I'm just supposed to go along with-\"\n\n\"Stop it!\" Rog roared at her, suddenly all fangs and fury. Never in her life had Rog shouted at her like that. He snatched her shoulders, and shook her hard enough to rattle her bones. \"You're the heir to the fucking Empire, Nira! Don't you get it? That ship's not just your lifeboat, it's all of ours! It's the Empire's!\" He growled his words, spittle flecking his muzzle. \"This is about so much more than your family, Nira! This is about hope.\"\n\nRog squeezed her arms, eyes boring into her. \"And that's what your survival gives your people. Hope. A tiny little light to hold the coming darkness at bay. They need to know that for all the hell the Union brought, it wasn't enough.\" Little by little, Rog's anger melted away into sorrow. \"They could not end The Empire of the Black Star. Because if you're alive, then the Empire's alive, too. And that gives people something to believe in.\" Rog fought back a sob. \"It's all they'll have left to cling to. So that's what you must be. Their hope.\" He let her go, wiping his eyes. \"I have to put you on that ship, now. Please don't fight me, Nira.\"\n\nDeep inside her battered heart, Nira knew Rog was right. This wasn't about her family, or whether fled or fought. It was about doing what she could, for her people, in the face of catastrophe. Against such impossible odds, there was nothing else she could do. The Empire was over. If she did not board the ship while she still had time, the Union would put her to the Gallows alongside her parents. And then they'd turn their sights to Tryn. If she left now, she could keep their attention focused on her, and not her sister. It was all she had left to offer. A small protection for her sister, and the flickering light of hope for her people.\n\nNira collapsed against Rog, sobbing into his armor. \"You're right.\" She sucked in a shuddering breath, fighting for words. \"But...can't I even say goodbye? Tell them I love them?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Nira...\" Rog's muzzle trembled. \"But, no. You can't.\" It was all Rog could do to keep from breaking down with her. \"We're out of time.\"\n\nSomewhere, in the distance, fresh gunfire rang out.\n\nMerriam wrapped an arm around Nira's middle, hugging her. \"We're both sorry, Nira. No one wanted it to end like this. But we must go, right now.\" She turned towards the gryphon, waiting a respectful distance away \"Do you know the route to the city-ship?\"\n\nThe gryphon nodded. \"I do.\"\n\nMerriam checked her weapons once, then hurried towards the door. \"Then clear us a path!\"\n\n\"It'd be my gods-damned honor.\" In a flurry of bloodied feathers, the gryphon whirled towards the exit, and bounded out in front.\n\nBehind her, the kobold captain called out to his squad. \"This is it, boys! Protect the princess and get her on that ship at all costs! Last mission of your lives, so get ready to tell the gods you faced it with a fucking smile!\"\n\nNira turned towards the kobolds, still crying but intent on thanking them for their courage, and their honor. But they were already on the move, and Nira's shaking legs nearly sent her toppling to the floor. She grabbed at Rog to steady herself. \"I need your arm, a moment.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Nira.\" Rog hoisted her up and cradled her against his chest. He put an arm beneath her, and another across her back. \"I'll carry you, for as long as you need it. You cry as much as you want, and make what peace you can. And when all your tears are spent, you get ready fight like hell again. Till then, just let it all out.\"\n\nNira hugged Rog around the neck, hiding her face against him. As they all ran, Nira wept into Rog's fur for the family she'd never see again. \"Mom! Dad! I love you! I love you so much!\" Though they could not hear her, Nira would be damned if she wouldn't say her farewells, just the same. \"Goodbye, Dad! Goodbye, Mom...goodbye...\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Nira.\" Rog's voice was a broken husk. Though she could not see his face, Nira knew the gnoll was crying with her. \"I'm so sorry.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Nira cried into her hands while the memories washed over her. Only when her tears were spent, and her wracking sobs had faded to gentle sniffles did she lift her head. Her bleary eyes wandered from Rog's note, to the portrait of her family, and back again. With trembling hands, she reached for Rog's letter, to read it once more.\n\n\u2002Nira,\n\n\u2002I'm still ever so sorry that you couldn't say goodbye. I wonder, sometimes, if you ever forgave me. It haunts me more than you know. Since you hate talking about it, I left you this. There's something you need to do. Look into your parents faces, and tell them both goodbye.\n\n\u2002Please, Nira.\n\n\u2002Say your goodbyes, one last time, and let them rest.\n\n\u2002It's time to admit they're gone, and you're not the heir, anymore.\n\n\u2002Because I'm not taking a princess to face an Executor.\n\n\u2002I'm taking an Empress.\n\nNira set the note aside, breath caught in her throat. \"Of course, I forgive you, Rog.\"\n\nNira sniffed again, heartsick that he feared otherwise. She wanted to hug him, swear that she forgave him, and take away his pain. But it was late, and with any luck, Rog was fast asleep. And Nira knew she could not face him now, until she did as he asked. Hesitantly, she picked up the portrait of her family.\n\n\"Ten years, now.\" Nira swallowed hard. Though her tears had ebbed, forcing words remained a battle. \"Ten years, you've been gone, and...still I struggle to say it. To admit it. But I'll do my best.\" Reverently, she touched her parents faces, whispering. \"Goodbye, Mom. Goodbye, Dad. I miss you. I love you.\" Nira wiped her eyes, sniffling. \"Goodbye.\"\n\nWhen it was done, there was no great change. No weight was lifted from her heart. No burden eased from her mind. This goodbye was as empty as the last, because they still hadn't heard her say it. But at least in her own way, Nira had accepted it. That would have to be enough, she thought, because there was nothing more she could do.\n\nOr was there?\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, she saw her pistols.\n\nThey were Merriam's, once. The beautiful weapons were a matching set, decorated with ebony, ivory, and gold. Though ornamental in appearance, they were crafted by the Empire's finest gunsmiths, and had fired more bullets than Nira could ever count. One of them bore a dragon upon its grip, while the other, a gryphon. They represented the two great winged beasts upon which the empire had been forged.\n\nMerriam had shoved her guns into Nira's hands, right before the end.\n\nThey're yours, now. They represent the Empire, just like you.\n\nRemember that, when you use them.\n\nNira picked up the pistol with the dragon on it and popped the cylinder open. Something about its empty chambers sat ill inside her. It looked hollow, incomplete. A weapon that represented the Empire should not go unloaded. Nira dragged the gun belt and its ammunition closer. If she was to face an Executor, then she needed a loaded gun. Nira pulled a round free and stared at it in the lamplight.\n\nMaybe there was something more she could do.\n\n\"For my mother.\" Nira loaded the cartridge, and drew another. \"For my father.\" She pushed into place.\n\nWith each recitation, Nira loaded another bullet. \"For my people. For my Empire.\" Her fingers trembled as she slipped in the fifth one. \"For Merriam.\"\n\nAt last, Nira pulled the sixth round free. She gazed at it for a long, quiet moment, then finally chambered it.\n\nNira snapped the cylinder shut. \"For me.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Rise of Nerizza",
        "author": "Lin Corey",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "The Spade"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "It was quiet, too quiet. It was a strange and unnerving silence. There was a village that seemed without life, but if one listened closely they could hear the terrified whispering and shuffling about of dragons. They were all hiding, scared.\n\nScared of what?\n\nA strange, dark presence that they could not see, smell, or hear. They could only feel it stirring in the air, crouching and waiting to pounce.\n\nA massive shadow swept over the village. A roar sounded from a distance, echoing around as if in a cave. It was the darkness, destroying everyone and everything in its wake. There were screams, the rumble of buildings crumbling to the ground, the sickening smell of blood, and finally\u2026 death.\n\nIt was all gone. There was merely a black and empty abyss. Again, the deafening silence came. The dark force had consumed everything.\n\n\"SPADE!\" a voice screamed, jolting the young dragon out of his nightmare. Spade gasped and leapt up in fright, wings flaring out. His golden-yellow scales with green swirls shivered. Sweat was dripping down his forehead.\n\n\"Pipe down,\" a voice groaned.\n\nThe dragonet peeked down at the bottom bunk to see his brother, Mikah, grumbling and feeling around for a blanket that had slid to the floor. Spade, knowing he would not be able to fall back asleep, let out a sigh and hopped down from the top of the bunk bed.\n\nHe exited the room and walked down a hallway, entering the living room. It was a spacious loft overlooking the kitchen. He sat down on the couch and stared out a large window. The sun was rising over the towering, black mountains in the distance.\n\nHe'd had that nightmare many times before. It seemed to come every week, ever since he had turned sixteen. He couldn't make any sense of it. It was just dark, and terrible, and terrifying. Just thinking about it sent a chill running down his spine. Despite it going on for a year, he had never told anybody about it.\n\nWingbeats made him turn his head. His mother, Kunashi, flew up quietly. She had glistening blue scales with blacks spots trailing down her back and encircling her eyes. She was thin and delicate, with two pearl-white horns.\n\n\"Trouble sleeping?\" she asked the obvious question. Her voice was soft and quiet.\n\nSpade nodded.\n\n\"I know I keep asking this but are you sure there's not something you want to tell me about?\"\n\nHe nodded again.\n\nKunashi stared at him for a moment. \"The mountains look lovely this morning.\" She changed the topic. \"It would be wonderful to vacation in the Kingdom of Diamondpeak this Summer, don't you think?\"\n\nSpade agreed with yet another nod.\n\n\"I hear the Crystal Lakes are beautiful at that time of year.\"\n\nThe bustling of other dragons waking up began to fill the house.\n\n\"Looks like the others are up. Remember, today's the day you all leave for the Academy. You'd better get ready,\" Kunashi instructed, and gave him one last concerned glance before gliding back down to the kitchen.\n\nThe Academy was the education center of the Kingdom of Harmony. Dragonets were schooled at home until they turned fourteen, when they would enroll in the Academy to start their formal education. The dragonets went through four years of Basic Education, where they would study mathematics, science, literature, and other academics. After that they chose a career path and went into Devotion Education, where they would study all aspects of that field, some courses taking longer than others.\n\nThe dragonets would live at the Academy for three-month periods, going home for breaks or holidays. Every kingdom had an Academy. Dragonets would even transfer between kingdoms to attend different ones. Some Academies were famous for their education of specific fields: Silverwood had incredible medical courses, while Tromonto was renowned for its technological courses.\n\nSpade flew up to the beautiful marble exterior of the Harmony Academy, landing with a soft thud. His brother and sister followed close behind him. Mikah had sky-blue scales with pale yellow spikes trailing his spine, and two small horns. Tigerlily was a lovely peach-color with tangerine spikes, and black dots on her back and around her eyes, just like Kunashi. They both liked to boast about how they were older than Spade, though their eggs had hatched only a few minutes before his.\n\nIn the courtyard outside the Academy stood a huge statue of a dragoness. The nameplate at its base read: \"In memory of Jade, the first teacher in the Kingdom of Harmony.\" Spade knew all about Jade. She had started a school in her own little two-room cottage, when Harmony was first being built, and her descendents had helped fund the building of the Harmony Academy. The statue was made out of the same precious material that she was named after, though it shone like gold in the morning sun.\n\n\"Think fast!\" a voice shouted.\n\nSpade ducked as a bolt of lightning snapped at the air right above his head. A dark blue dragon with lightning-like marks ran up to him. He had a leather satchel slung around his back.\n\n\"Well hello! Spaced out admiring your love again, I see?\"\n\n\"Quit it, Zao,\" Spade laughed, shoving his friend playfully. \"It's just so cool that she started the first school.\"\n\n\"Hey, I don't need another lecture on the whole cottage thing,\" Zao said with a roll of his eyes. \"I've heard that plenty of times and, as fascinating as it is, it's not fascinating at all.\"\n\nZao and Spade had been friends since they were hatchlings, and every year they were dorm-mates. Spade's only true friend, Zao was in his third year of Basic Education, same as Spade, and had a sarcastic playfulness to him that seemed to balance Spade's quiet, more down-to-earth personality.\n\nEntering the wide yet crowded halls of the Academy, Spade and Zao walked to their first class, Tigerlily and Mikah leaving them for a separate homeroom. The first day back at the Academy was always short, and then the dragonets were given time to settle down in their dorms.\n\nSpade padded through the arched entrance of a classroom and took a seat at a desk near the back. Zao flopped down on the cushion beside him, practically slamming down his satchel of texts and scrolls on his desk. He snickered as Spade hissed at him to be quiet. At Zao's ruckus their professor, the elderly Mrs. Helm, glared up at them from a book she had been scanning with narrow eyes. She shut it with an annoyed thud and strutted up to the blackboard, on which the word Anatomy was written in large, white letters. Three more dragonets shuffled inside to their seats, avoiding her icy stare, and she began.\n\n\"This semester we will be studying our anatomical structure. Tomorrow, we will begin our studies in wing anatomy, but for today we start by reviewing the fascinating history of anatomical research...\" As she drawled on in her monotone voice, Zao turned his satchel over and dumped out a pile of scrolls.\n\n\"Why do we even need these anymore?\" he asked in a hushed voice. \"I don't see why we can't just turn them all into books.\"\n\n\"Because there are a lot of scrolls in the world,\" Spade whispered in reply. \"And it takes a long time to make a scroll into a book.\"\n\n\"Mr. Evercrest, is there something you would like to share with the class?\" Mrs. Helm demanded.\n\nSpade's ears flicked back in apology as he said, \"Uh, no ma'am.\" When she looked away he shot a glare at Zao, who was holding back a laugh. The teacher resumed her lesson.\n\nMrs. Helm taught one of their classes every year, and every dragonet at the Harmony Academy loathed her. There was always talk that she would finally retire, but every year she returned. No one even knew how old she was; many guessed she had to be at least eighty.\n\nHer lectures were about as exciting as a snail race. Her emerald wings and tail were droopy, as if after years of teaching they were as exhausted by her voice as her students were. In fact, the most exciting part of her class was the odd-shaped succulent sitting on her desk, which the dragonets seemed more interested in than the teacher and her lessons.\n\nThe bell finally rang, echoing through the halls of the Academy, signaling their next class period. Zao was the first dragonet out the door, shoving his things in his satchel, Spade hurrying to keep up with him.\n\n\"Woo hoo, advanced elemental studies,\" Zao groaned as they moved down the hallway and up a set of stairs, scanning his class sheet. The walls around the dragonets were polished dark marble, lined with torches on silver mounts, with ceilings high overhead.\n\nAnother arched doorway led to their elements class. They took their seats as the professor, Mr. Veill, entered the room. Unlike in science, the two dragonets sat at the front of the class, Spade focusing intently on what Mr. Veil wrote on the board. The professor had taught their \"elements in the modern world\" class the previous semester, and was one of Spade's favorite teachers at the Academy.\n\nAfter a brief introduction, Mr. Veill dove into their first lesson. \"Magic, the basis of all elements,\" the elderly dragon said as he printed the words on the blackboard. \"Describe to me what the element magic is,\" he requested from the class.\n\n\"Controlling the energy around you?\" one red-scaled dragonet answered unsurely.\n\n\"In a broad sense, yes,\" the professor replied. \"What makes magic dragons unique from other dragons is their unusual connection with nature. Magic stems from the forces of dark and light, creation and destruction. Long ago, all dragons were born with magic as their element, but as time went on they would only inherit a section of their ancestors' elemental powers, and that is how we ended up with the elements we have today, such as fire, plasma, and lightning.\"\n\nZao snapped his claws and a bolt of lightning sparked between them.\n\n\"Now tell me,\" Mr. Veill continued, \"How many dragons today are born with magic as their element? Does anyone remember from last semester?\"\n\n\"Five percent?\" Spade answered.\n\n\"Correct. And how might this incredible decrease have happened, Spade?\"\n\nSpade bit his cheek as he thought. He loved it when Mr. Veill asked him to explain things. \"Well, you said magic dragons had a special connection with nature, so maybe this link weakened.\"\n\n\"Precisely. As dragons' connection with nature faded, so did their magic abilities. Instead of passing down all the energies of nature, they would only pass down one: the energy of fire, the energy of water, of plasma, ice, poison, lightning, earth, or wind; all the elements we will study over the course of this semester. Now, you should be familiar with mages from your readings. Mages were magic dragons who studied the boundaries and the abilities of magic energy. They were the creators of many of the spells we will study, and extremely powerful beings. They had a council, centered in the Kingdom of Light, which has long since been destroyed. But, can anyone tell me who the greatest magic dragons were, even more powerful than any mage?\"\n\n\"The Golden Guardians,\" Zao answered.\n\nMr. Veill smiled. It was clear he enjoyed talking about this subject. \"The Golden Guardians, yes. There had been twelve of them before the Great Disappearance, when Koro and the Golden Guardian Rhutani mysteriously vanished from this world one hundred years ago.\"\n\nSpade blinked his eyes as his head began to feel light. It felt like any normal headache, but then a voice whispered in his ear, Spade. He turned to see if Zao or the dragonet beside him had said his name, but they were both looking at Mr. Veill. Spade, the voice echoed. It sounded almost...familiar.\n\n\"Who can name the twelve ancient Golden Guardians?\" Mr. Veill asked.\n\nIt seemed as though at the words \"Golden Guardian\" the ache in Spade's head grew. Spade, the voice repeated, louder this time. A dark fog began to creep up out of the wooden panels of the floor, encircling his desk. Symbols flashed inside of it, fading away almost as soon as they appeared.\n\n\"Zao, do you see that?\" he asked quietly, gesturing to the strange fog.\n\nZoa raised an eyebrow. \"Yes, Spade, that's the floor.\"\n\n\"No, the mist stuff,\" Spade said, wincing as the pain in his head grew.\n\n\"Is something wrong, Spade?\" Mr. Veill asked. At the sound of his voice the headache and fog immediately vanished, and Spade gasped, looking around the room.\n\n\"Uh, everything's fine,\" Spade replied, suddenly realizing he was the only one who had noticed the mysterious fog. He sat in silence the remainder of the class.\n\nWhen the rest of their classes were over and the bell finally announced their dismissal, Spade blindly followed Zao out of the classroom and into the courtyard. Tigerlily and Mikah met up with them and began chatting about their assignments, though Spade barely heard them. His headache was back, and a chill ran down his spine as the dark fog reappeared, creeping over the courtyard walls. It seemed to call to him and drown out all his other senses. He blinked to see if it would clear away but it made no difference. The strange symbols began to flash again, and he squinted his eyes to try and make them out through the blanket of fog.\n\n<Something is coming,> the voice echoed in his mind. <The darkness is coming.>\n\nA sudden, violent shaking refocused his senses. \"Spade! Hey! Are you in there?\" Zao knocked on his head like a door. \"Dude, what is with you today? It's kind of freaky.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Tigerlily asked, giving her elegant wings a quick stretch.\n\n\"He was acting weird in our elements class, and was totally zoned out the rest of the day,\" Zao explained.\n\n\"Why am I the only one who can see the fog, though?\" Spade asked, eyes glaring threateningly at the creeping mist.\n\nZao sighed. \"He keeps going on about this fog, and headaches.\"\n\n\"And the voice,\" Spade added.\n\n\"And the voice,\" Zao repeated with a wave of his talon.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Tigerlily asked Spade in a concerned voice.\n\n\"I...I think so?\" Spade replied. He didn't know why he was seeing the fog. Maybe he was sick. But he felt fine, aside from when the mysterious headaches came.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Mikah sneered. \"Didn't get enough beauty sleep last night?\" He made a pouting face at Spade, and Tigerlily shoved him away.\n\n\"Leave him alone,\" she said. Spade gave her a grateful smile. \"But seriously, what's wrong?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I don't think anything's wrong,\" he lied, just as confused as they were. \"I'm probably just tired.\"\n\n\"I hear voices when I'm tired, too,\" Mikah said.\n\nTigerlily rolled her eyes. \"You do not hear voices, Mikah.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\" he retorted, pulling a jerky strip out of the satchel slung around his back and changing the subject. \"What are you doing for the lab report in Mr. Penta's class?\"\n\nTigerlily only gave him a look that said \"I am not letting you cheat off of my homework this semester.\"\n\n\"Zao, there's something I need to tell you. I have to go get a thing from Tigerlily first, and then I'll meet you back in our dorm,\" Spade said in a hushed voice as his siblings began to bicker, wandering away to their dorms.\n\nZao mimicked his quiet tone. \"Affirmative. Should I set up surveillance to make sure no one follows you?\"\n\n\"Very funny. We'll talk when I get back.\"\n\n\"Why not just tell me now?\"\n\n\"I can't, I have to do some research first.\"\n\nZao frowned. \"It's our first day back at the Academy, and you're already doing extra homework?\"\n\n\"This isn't about school, trust me. It's much more interesting than that.\"\n\n\"Fine, but if you're bluffing, you owe me six bags of fire crackers.\"\n\n\"Deal, I'll meet you back at the dorm.\" He waved as Zao leapt into the air and flew off.\n\nSpade then followed in the direction Mikah and Tigerlily had taken off. As he walked, he glanced back at the tall walls of the courtyard. Something bad is going to happen, he thought. A pit formed in his stomach. I just need to find out what, and why I'm the only one who knows about it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "\"Over four-hundred years ago, when kingdoms were first being established, there rose a terrible evil; Koro, a creature consumed by darkness, terrorized the lands. He was a demon warlord who sought the destruction of all things pure and light. Hundreds of dragons died at his talons on his merciless quest for power. He pillaged and plundered villages, leaving nothing behind but ashes.\n\n\"After years of his terror an ordinary dragon, Lumier, rose to face him. Lumier pleaded that he stop, but Koro had an unquenchable thirst for blood and death, and refused. Lumier fled in search of The Maker's Shrine. He hoped to find guidance from the wise creator. After weeks of searching he finally found it, and begged the divine one for help. Seeing his pure heart, The Maker gifted him with extraordinary powers. Lumier became the first ever Golden Guardian, protector of all things pure and light.\n\n\"Now armed with The Maker's power, Lumier returned to Koro. They battled for days, neither one faltering in strength. Lands were forever scarred by the blasts of their war. Eruptions of magic were said to have been seen from all Four Regions. On the final day, Lumier summoned all his strength, performing a destruction spell strong enough to banish Koro's power from our world, destroying his body along with it. All across the Four Regions there was held a ceremony to celebrate Lumier's victory, and the peace that then came. With Koro gone, Lumier departed on a journey across the Four Regions to establish sanctuaries: the Temples of Light.\n\n\"However, in his absence, a new darkness arose. Koro, from the world of spirits, used his dark magic to possess a mischievous dragon named Shadow. Unbeknownst to the Four Regions that he was possessed by the demon lord, Shadow became a powerful dictator and constructed a kingdom of his own: the Kingdom of Shadow. It was a secretive kingdom. No one knew what Lord Shadow's next move would be. After years of silence, he declared war on the whole Northern Region. Many bloody and gruesome battles followed. Thousands of dragons lost their lives. The War of Discord lasted for three years, until the sudden death of Lord Shadow. It was a mysterious death; His body was discovered in his chambers, covered in blood though unwounded. Some thought it was murder, while others rumored that his thirst for power had driven him to insanity and eventually suicide. Others said Lumier had returned to vanquish him. Nonetheless, a new ruler emerged, a peaceful ruler, and the War of Discord came to a sudden halt. The Kingdom of Shadow retreated back into its dark solitude.\n\n\"A new Guardian was born after Lumier's death, a dragoness of the Kingdom of Dorhium. Allura continued Lumier's Age of Peace, until Koro once again revealed himself, this time possessing Shadow's son, the villainous Malvagita. In his new form, Koro once again battled the Golden Guardian in his ruthless quest for power. Again an epic battle was held, Allura undoubtedly emerging the victor. With Koro's power once again at bay, Allura took on a new task: she cleansed the Eastern Region of the vile Raiders, a savage band of looters and thieves that had taken advantage of Koro's destructive encroachment-\u2014\n\nTigerlily looked up from her reading as a knock sounded on the door of her dorm room.\n\nThe book in her talons was titled History Of The Golden Guardian. She brought it everywhere with her; it was her favorite thing to read. She loved the wonder and mystery. It always left her thinking that maybe there was more to her life: More adventure, more daring quests, and maybe even more romance. Maybe she was destined for greatness, maybe there was something about herself that she didn't even know yet, something that could change the world. She would always just laugh at herself; it was a silly idea. How could she be anything special?\n\nTigerlily called for the dragon at her door to enter, and Spade walked in.\n\n\"Hey Tigerlily, I was wondering if you packed the-\" He stopped when he saw the book. \"Oh. Are you reading it?\"\n\n\"You can have it,\" Tigerlily offered, extending it out to him. She wanted to finish reading but there was a strange anxiousness in Spade's eyes. He snatched the book in his own talons and began flipping through the pages. Curious, Tigerlily stood and peeked over his shoulder when he stopped to view a page. It was a picture of one of the Temples of Light. His eyes were quickly scanning the image, and stopped on the symbol carved into the front of the temple. Spade suddenly gasped and held his head as though it were aching. Tigerlily caught the book as it fell from his talons.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" she asked.\n\n\"That symbol,\" he groaned. \"That's the one I saw. I knew I had seen it somewhere before.\"\n\nTigerlily turned to the page he had stopped on and looked at the image. \"You mean the sun symbol? Where did you see it?\"\n\n\"The fog,\" Spade explained. \"That symbol was flashing in the fog. Why?\" One ear twitched to the side, the way it always did when he was in deep thought.\n\nTigerlily watched him with raised eyebrows, absolutely bewildered. What in The Maker's name is he talking about? She wondered.\n\nSpade practically shoved the book in Zao's snout. \"These symbols,\" he began. \"They were in the fog, the fog that no one else saw. I think something bad is going to happen, and it has to do with the Golden Guardian.\"\n\nZao blinked slowly. \"I'm sorry, what?\"\n\n\"The voice told me 'the darkness is coming'.\" Spade didn't know how to explain, the words just seemed to be rushing out of his mouth as he tried to piece everything together. \"The Golden Guardian is the slayer of darkness, so maybe this means they're returning-\"\n\nThey had moved to Spade's dorm room, and Tigerlily had followed in confusion. Mikah, who just happened to be their third dorm-mate, was sitting on his bed, and had originally been organizing his Mythical Monsters game cards but stopped to listen to Spade's rambling.\n\nThe dorm was a spacious room with two large windows facing the Academy courtyard. There were three beds, three chests, and three desks, a simple yet sufficient set up. Aside from the basic furniture there was an assortment of plant life, bringing color to the rough stone walls.\n\n\"Spade, stop,\" Zao growled, sounding annoyed. \"You sound crazy right now.\"\n\n\"I know, but I'm not making this up, I swear. The voice, the fog, it's all real, but for some reason I'm the only one who can see it.\"\n\n\"Well that's awfully convenient, now, isn't it?\" Mikah commented.\n\nSpade continued to flip through the book, determined to make them understand what was going on, even though he didn't fully understand it himself. But just then, the eerie fog returned, pouring from the pages of the book like a waterfall, enwrapping the dragonets. Spade dropped the novel with a jump of fright. Spade, the voice called. This time the others began panicking as well, and Spade realized that now they, too, could finally see the fog.\n\n\"What is this stuff?!\" Tigerlily cried, her tail sweeping through the ever-growing blanket of fog.\n\nThe symbols flashed brighter than ever, and Spade grabbed his head as a terrible ringing filled his ears. <Spade!> The voice screamed.\n\nOh my Maker. It's the voice from the dream! He realized. That's why it sounded familiar! His scales began to glow, bright as the sun, and his eyes became pools of green light. His sense of the world around him began to fade as he fell into the aching transcendent state, the voice urging him on. A buzzing sensation overtook his talons and he shook them wildly, trying to make the unsettling feeling go away.\n\nSpade gasped as the voice screamed and a terrible pain filled his chest. He cried out in agony as magic energy spewed out of his mouth. He heard Tigerlily scream something. Talons were pulling on him. He saw a golden vortex open in front of him. There was a blinding white light--and then darkness.\n\nWhen Spade regained consciousness it was morning, the sun peaking over the top of the mountains. He wasn't in his dorm, though. He was lying on a soft patch of golden grass. Looking up, he found he was surrounded by pale trees with silky, vibrant leaves. He heard a groan and turned. The others were all on the ground behind him, waking.\n\n\"What happened?\" Mikah groaned, rubbing his head.\n\n\"Ask Mr. Magic Talons,\" Zao said, ruffling out his wings and shaking.\n\nThey all focused their attention on Spade.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell us you could do that?\" Tigerlily asked.\n\n\"I-I didn't know,\" Spade stammered. \"I don't even know what I did.\"\n\nThe dragonets were lying in the middle of a massive ruin. Crumbled stone structures seemed to have once made up a city, but now lay broken and covered with moss. Only a fountain remained, standing like a stoic soldier, roots of trees climbing into its pool where there had once been water. A sun insignia was plated to the rim of the fountain. Curious, Spade stood and inspected it. Upon his talons touching it, the same buzzing filled them, and he stumbled away.\n\n\"Guys, do you realize where we are?\" Tigerlily gasped, everyone turning to her with confused expressions that clearly said they did not, in fact, have any clue where they were. \"I think this is the Kingdom of Light!\" She glanced down and picked up The History of The Golden Guardian, which had been teleported with them. After flipping through the pages she revealed a picture of a bustling courtyard with a stunning fountain centerpiece. Though most of its intricate beauty was gone, Spade recognized it as the same fountain at which they stood before.\n\nTigerlily held the book up at eye level and compared the two structures. \"We must be in the center of the town.\" She went on to read a provided description. \"The center of the Kingdom of Light, the Grand Court was the busiest section of the whole kingdom. In its day, it was packed with booths, carts, and bustling dragons. It was marked by the majestic Fountain of the Sun as its centerpiece, which was rumored to spray out magic instead of water.\"\n\n\"Sounds like something from a fairytale,\" Zao laughed.\n\n\"Everything is so old, and broken,\" Mikah sounded almost sad, but then got to his point. \"Do you think there's any food left? Besides, you know, moldy meat and ancient avocados?\"\n\n\"This place was abandoned over three-hundred years ago, according to the book,\" Tigerlily explained dryly.\n\n\"Oh. So does that mean no food?\"\n\nZao walked up to Spade and gave him a light punch on the arm. \"Are you okay, dude?\" he asked.\n\nSpade nodded. \"I think so. I just can't believe this happened. My element is fire, not magic.\"\n\n\"You literally teleported us to the other side of the Northern Region, and you're telling me you're not magic?\"\n\n\"But how could I be magic? Me, of all dragons. Doesn't that seem ridiculous?\"\n\n\"You know what's ridiculous is that we're in the Kingdom of Light, which is like a five-day flight from Harmony.\"\n\nThe ringing in Spade's head returned and he winced. The voice began to whisper, drawing his eyes towards a nearby mountain.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Zao asked.\n\n\"I think we need to go there.\" Spade pointed and the others followed his gaze.\n\n\"I think we need to go home to Harmony,\" Mikah interjected.\n\n\"No, wait, the voice is telling me to go there,\" Spade insisted. \"Please, guys. You saw the fog, I wasn't lying about that. And I'm not lying about this. You've got to believe me.\"\n\nThe others hesitantly gave in, their expressions emanating doubt. With Spade in the lead, the group spread their wings and leapt into the air. It was strange for Spade to be up front. He was used to following, rather than leading. He kind of liked the feeling. It was as though they were all relying on him.\n\nAs they neared the mountain, Spade noticed the gaping mouth of a cave and dove down to it. Rain began to patter outside just as they entered. It was dark inside the cave, but Spade felt an odd tingling in his spine and his scales began to glow. He gazed down at them in awe as the hollow was illuminated.\n\nA set of large, crystal-like rocks suddenly lit up upon Spade's passing. Intrigued, he continued to walk forwards, the strange rocks lighting up all around him. Finally, he came to a stop at a massive set of pure gold doors that sparkled in the unnatural light. Spade could now make out a whole temple wall, carved into the back of the cave.\n\nEngraved into the gold doors were pictures, a sort of ancient language telling what seemed to be a story. Entranced, Spade ran a talon along their glittering surface. As he examined the illustration directly in front of him, he could make out the story of a dragon, one who seemed to have incredible power, facing dozens of enemies. It looked as if, after fighting, the powerful dragon banished its foes to some sort of wasteland.\n\n\"Tigerlily, does this look familiar?\" he asked, beckoning her forwards. His sister ran up to the golden doors and studied the pictures. She took a step back and gazed at the doors as a whole.\n\n\"I think it's some sort of account of the twelve Golden Guardians' deeds. Every panel starts with a dragon fighting the same creature. I don't know what it is. It almost looks like some sort of demon.\"\n\n\"It must be Koro, the ancient demon lord,\" Spade realized. \"So this must be Dawnbreak, the sixth Guardian,\" he said, refocusing on the image before him. \"When she cast out the hellions that were infesting the Kingdom of Silverwood.\"\n\nBefore Spade could continue tracing the story, the voice came again. It whispered his name and laughed before fading into the distance. The doors gave an eerie creak and opened slowly, revealing the gaping black mouth of a tunnel. Spade stumbled back, eyes fixed on the dark abyss, a strange presence from within beckoning him forwards.\n\n\"Big temple, creepy doorway, delusional brother, this is going to end well,\" Mikah remarked.\n\nBut Spade barely heard him. He was already five steps into the dark tunnel when Zao ran up to his side and stopped him. \"Woah, woah, woah,\" his friend said. \"I don't like the idea of us heading down there.\"\n\n\"But I have to,\" Spade replied, a strange determination stirring inside of him. After a year of being pestered by the voice he was finally about to find out who, or what, it belonged to. \"The voice is calling me.\"\n\nZao doubtfully huffed out a small spark but didn't protest any further. \"I'm trusting you on this one, dude. But if any of us end up dead, it's your fault.\"\n\n\"Are we actually going down there?\" Tigerlily asked nervously.\n\n\"You guys don't have to follow me,\" Spade said, and immediately regretted it. The last thing he wanted was to go into the tunnel alone.\n\nHe was relieved when Zao firmly replied, \"No, we are not letting you go down there alone.\"\n\nThere was a tense moment in which the four dragonets sat in silence, as if preparing themselves for the descent into the dark passage. Spade's claws fidgeted in nervous anxiety as he examined the other three. None of them looked very afraid. Was he the only one panicking?\n\n\"Well, what are we waiting around for?\" Zao finally broke the straining silence. He flapped his wings as though to shake away the nerves and took a step forwards. Spade followed, glad that he was not going first, though still rather terrified. The glow of his scales illuminated the tunnel with a soft yellow radiance as he entered. His talons clicked on the slick stone floor.\n\nSuddenly the two massive gold doors swung shut with a powerful slam that echoed down the length of their route. A squeak of a scream escaped from Tigerlily. Spade himself found his spikes bristling in fright, and he took a deep breath to calm his shaky body.\n\n\"Wow, I bet nobody saw that coming,\" came Mikah's sarcastic grumble.\n\nThe group continued walking down the shadowy tunnel, each one shaking in fright. No one spoke as they traveled, their talonsteps and an echoing breeze being the only noise. Spade cocked his head as the draft of air danced around his snout.\n\nThat means there must be an opening up ahead, he realized.\n\nAfter what felt like an eternity of shuffling through the hallway, they emerged into a cavernous room lit as though by sunlight, though there were no windows. The room was massive, with marble walls and golden pillars supporting the ceiling. It was decorated with exotic plants and intricate murals. Five huge, crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Doors lined the walls, each one marked by a golden arch. Amidst the carved marble beauty were formations of stone, as though the room had been built into the cave itself.\n\nSpade gazed around in awe, mouth hanging open as he took in the incredible sight. He noticed that his scales had ceased glowing. The others looked as astonished as he was, their eyes wide and wandering.\n\nThen the voice returned.\n\n<Spade, come to me,> it whispered softly. The dragonet looked around. His eyes landed on a doorway at the far end of the room. <Yes, come,> the voice urged. Spade was unaware that his talons had already begun moving towards the door, at which two golden statues stood guard. He gazed up at the sculptures as he approached. Their glittering eyes seemed to watch his every move.\n\nThe voice called him forward. Again it echoed that unsettling laugh that sent a chill down Spade's spine. Yet he obeyed. He lifted a talon to the door, and with a flash of light it opened."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Spade stared up at the face of darkness.\n\n\"Where do you think it goes?\" Zao asked as he came up to his side. The door had opened to reveal a staircase leading up into another shadowy abyss.\n\n\"Maybe it leads to a kitchen,\" Mikah guessed.\n\n\"Wherever it goes, it's probably not worth finding out,\" Tigerlily commented. \"We shouldn't explore too far. It could be dangerous.\"\n\nBut Spade was already halfway through the doorway. He could hardly render his senses. All he felt was a constant internal pulling, as though it was dragging him to the staircase. Finally he was completely through the doorway.\n\n\"Spade, where are you going?\" Zao asked.\n\nBefore Spade could reply the door slammed shut behind him. The noise snapped him out of the trance and he spun around.\n\n\"What is with this place and doors?\" Mikah's irritated voice shouted from the other side.\n\n\"Spade, are you okay?\" Tigerlily called.\n\n\"I'm fine! Can you get the doors open from that side?\" Spade returned. There were grunts as they tried to push the door open.\n\n\"No, it won't budge!\"\n\nSpade shuffled his talons in the darkness. He was trapped.\n\n\"See if there's an exit at the top of the staircase!\" Zao suggested.\n\n\"Uh, okay.\" Spade hesitantly turned and looked up, though there was nothing to see but black. The air felt thick as his talons fumbled for the first step. He slowly staggered upwards, wings pulled tight to his side.\n\nUpon ascending the staircase he was met by another door, one which was easily pushed open. This time Spade found himself in a massive maze of a library. Shelves towered over him, littered with books and scrolls. It smelled of dust, old paper and leather. Out of curiosity, he pulled a random book off of one of the shelves.\n\n\"Mastering simple magic,\" he read the title aloud, then looked for the author. \"Lumier Deyvar.\" Why did that name sound familiar?\n\nHe was drawn to a circular window, through which sunlight streamed inside. As he followed the beam of light to the floor a strange sensation settled over him. He was being watched. A shadow rushed through the beam of light and Spade jumped, ears alert and eyes scanning the labyrinth of books. A tail flicked behind one of the shelves and then disappeared.\n\n\"Hello?\" the dragonet called.\n\nAt first he received no answer, but then a figure crept out of the shadows. It was a dog-like creature with tall ears and tattoos decorating its fur. Its tail was long and thin, with a tuft at the end. The creature gazed at him with curious black eyes. It let out a small whimper as it inspected him, and then cocked its head to the side.\n\nSpade stared at the creature in return, not sure if he should be panicking. It seemed harmless enough, though after that day Spade was quite used to unexpected turns. The creature let out another whimper and took a few steps to its right, paws treading elegantly across the floor. It gestured with its nose, and barked at him. Spade peered in the direction the creature had referred to and spotted a marble pillar. Upon it sat a large, golden book.\n\nSpade glanced from the creature to the pillar, and then back again. The creature blinked at him, and then flicked its head towards the pillar with another yelp. It sat down, the tip of its tail thumping against the ground as it wagged eagerly.\n\nThe dragonet obeyed its prodding and approached the pedestal. Enchanted by the book's extraordinary glow, Spade stroked the cover with a talon. Wisps of light flew up like dust. A shuffling made him jump, but it was only the creature, scratching behind its ear with a back paw. When he returned his gaze to the book, it was open. He glanced around curiously and then looked to see what page it had opened to. It was a picture of a dragon with scales that seemed to be made of gold. He donned shining armor and gripped a sword in one talon.\n\n\"The Golden Guardian,\" Spade whispered.\n\n\"Welcome, Spade.\" The dragonet froze. This time the voice did not sound like an echo in his head. It was coming from a real dragon. A dragon who was there in the library with him. \"I have been waiting for you.\"\n\nZao let out a growl of pain as he slammed his shoulder into the door.\n\n\"It's no use,\" Tigerlily said. \"Please stop, you'll only hurt yourself.\" Zao glanced at her, and then slunked away with a sigh.\n\n\"Tails and talons, why won't it open?\" he snarled angrily, claws flexing as if he wanted to rip the whole wall down.\n\n\"I'm sure Spade is fine,\" she assured him, trying to persuade her own worried thoughts as well.\n\n\"Or he's dead,\" Mikah commented. He had slumped down into a crumbling, throne-like chair and was twirling his tail with a claw.\n\nTigerlily glowered at him. \"How could you say that?\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, I'm being sarcastic.\"\n\n\"This is not the time for sarcasm.\"\n\nMikah held his talons up defensively, ending the squabble before it could begin.\n\nTigerlily let out a sigh and walked away from him, examining their surroundings. A shadow moved in the distance. Curious, she wandered over. She spotted a thin tail with a cluster of fur at the end flicking back and forth. The possessor of the tail emerged and gazed up at Tigerlily curiously. It was one of the creatures with strange tattoos.\n\nTigerlily stared at it in bewilderment. She had never seen such an animal before. It flicked its tail and let out a small yip, and then bounded off, glancing back to beckon her forwards. Despite her confusion, Tigerlily found herself eager to follow the creature. It led her down the length of the grand room to an open doorway. She peeked inside and let out a gasp. Inside was a seemingly endless row of brilliant golden statues.\n\n\"What are these?\" she whispered to the creature, though she knew it wouldn't respond. It gave her an inquisitive tilt of its head and whimpered, heading deeper into the room. Tigerlily observed it as it placed a paw on one of the statues a ways down.\n\nShe began to walk forwards but stopped upon feeling something beneath her talons, an engraving on the floor. The words \"Hall of Guardians\" were inscribed in the stone, painted in gold. As Tigerlily walked over to the creature she read the nameplates at the base of each statue.\n\n\"Lumier, Allura, Charcoal, Visku\u2026 These are the twelve Golden Guardians.\" Each of the statue dragons was decorated with swirled tattoos on their scales.\n\nThe dragon after Rhutani, the Guardian who was famous for vanquishing Koro once and for all with a powerful spell, was someone Tigerlily had never read about before. Her name was Marble. She was a small and beautiful dragoness with delicate wings, thoughtful eyes, and a short snout.\n\nTigerlily was beginning to put the pieces together in her head. It seemed like an insane idea, but everything they had seen backed it up: the portal, the strange fog, the swirled markings.\n\nThe creature beckoned her on with a small yelp and Tigerlily went to continue her walk, freezing before the next statue.\n\n\"Oh my Maker,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Spade, I'm so glad you finally made it!\" the voice said, and Spade stumbled back, eyes flying around the library.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked.\n\n\"I am your guide. I was tasked with summoning you here. If you wish to reveal my presence, close the Book of Light.\"\n\nSpade stared down at the open pages of the shining book on the pedestal. <Don't touch it!> A distant thought rang in his transfixed mind. <Nothing good ever happens when you touch weird things!>\n\nHe put a talon under the cover and lifted it shut. As it closed it began to brighten, and he was startled when a beam of light shot out. The creature yelped in fright and ran behind a bookshelf. Spade shielded his eyes. As the light died away, he peeked out from his claws to see a magnificent, terrifying figure who seemed to be made entirely of light.\n\n\"Do not be afraid,\" the figure boomed. \"No harm will come to you.\" The assurance did not stop Spade's heart from racing. \"Spade, you have been summoned here for an event of which its importance cannot be stressed enough. You have come of age, and it is time for your initiation.\"\n\n\"What initiation?\" Spade asked in a voice hoarse with shock.\n\n\"You are the next Golden Guardian, protector of all things pure and light.\" The figure was sucked back into the book, the room returning to its dim lighting. Spade blinked and shuddered at the deafening silence.\n\n\"Down here!\" a small voice chirped, making him jump. He looked down and saw a small sprite-dragon dancing on the cover of the golden book. \"Hi there! My name is Lightflare. I'm your guide!\" The adorable little spriteling was no bigger than the palm of Spade's talon and glowed like a lantern. \"Sorry about the fancy light stuff, I got a little overexcited.\" She was covered in glistening white scales and had golden-yellow spikes smaller than Spade's fangs, with glittering symbols decorating her face. Her wings were flowy and transparent, and seemed to be made of mist.\n\n\"Uh, h-hi?\" Spade stammered.\n\n\"I know you're probably overwhelmed right now, as would be expected, so let me try to explain. After all, that's why I'm here!\" She closed her eyes and poofed away. The pages of the book flipped around as if by a wind, though no such breeze was present, and stopped when Lightflare reappeared. She pointed to the title: The Initiation of a New Guardian. A series of images and thorough explanations filled the following pages.\n\n\"So here's the thing,\" Lightflare started. She reminded Spade of a strangely knowledgeable youngling. \"When a Golden Guardian dies, he or she has a moment to travel through time and space to find the next candidate. Once the chosen dragon turns sixteen, they are ready to begin training and unlock their powers. Hundreds of years ago, every time a dragonet turned sixteen they would be brought before the Council of Mages to undergo a series of tests so that they could figure out who the next Guardian was. Unfortunately, the Council of Mages fell to the same fate as this wonderful kingdom; over time they became nothing but distant memories. It was up to us spritelings to trace the Guardians and initiate their training.\" She blushed proudly.\n\n\"The voice,\" Spade realized.\n\n\"Yup! That was me!\"\n\n\"But I thought the Golden Guardian was just some historic hero who rid the world of darkness or something. If I'm the next Guardian, do I have to fight somebody?\" He shivered at the thought.\n\n\"The Golden Guardian's role is to be the savior of the land. You do this mainly by keeping Koro at bay. Koro is basically your nemesis. He's a powerful demon with an unquenchable thirst for chaos and destruction.\"\n\n\"But Koro's gone. Rhutani defeated him\u2026 Right?\"\n\nLightflare's face made Spade uncomfortable. \"Actually,\" she began with some hesitance. \"Rhutani only put a restraining spell on him, a spell that only a handful of magic dragons were ever able to master. But nobody knew that, so historians thought she had actually defeated Koro once and for all.\"\n\n\"And then she died, so she couldn't tell anyone.\"\n\nThe spriteling nodded sadly. \"The spell completely drained her of magic energy and killed her.\" She perked back up. \"But that's why you're here! To stop Koro once his restraining spell ends.\"\n\n\"When does it end?\"\n\nLightflare's ears drooped nervously. \"It already has.\"\n\nSpade rubbed his temples and sighed.\n\n\"I know it's a lot to take in at once, but it's urgent that we start your training as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Training?\" Spade was flustered. \"No, this can't be happening. I'm not the Golden Guardian. I'm just a normal dragonet.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry but Marble chose you.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The past Guardian.\"\n\n\"Well she clearly made a mistake,\" Spade sighed. He didn't want to be special. Special meant standing out, and he was not one to stand out. Everything in him wanted to refuse the fate being handed to him\u2026 Except for a little spark that told him to go for it, to be extraordinary, to face the challenge. But that was a very small spark.\n\nLightflare was staring at him, head cocked expectantly. \"You are destined for incredible things,\" she said softly. \"Most dragonets your age would dream of a chance like this.\"\n\n\"Then why can't I give it to someone else?\"\n\n\"Well, you can, we would just have to kill you. But you can't just throw away this offer, Spade. Being the Golden Guardian is your responsibility now.\"\n\n\"I never asked for this, though. I don't want this.\"\n\n\"Life is full of unwanted responsibility. Sometimes we just can't control what happens, and the only thing we can do is accept it and make the best out of it. Marble saw something in you, something that made her want you, of all dragons, to inherit her extraordinary powers. To her, you were so much more than an ordinary dragonet. Also, if you don't accept it, the world as we know it will be completely destroyed and reshaped into Koro's dark empire. So, no pressure.\"\n\nSpade let out a frustrated sigh. If I don't accept it, I'll lose everything. My home, my friends, the Academy, it'll all be gone. There won't be anything left. Tigerlily, Mikah\u2026 His eyes widened. Oh no, Tigerlily and Mikah! They're still somewhere in the temple.\n\n\"And Zao,\" Lightflare said with a curt nod, as though reading his thoughts. \"They're all safe, don't worry. I can take you to them if you like.\" She flew up to him and touched three points on his chest. Spade felt a familiar tingle in his talons as a portal opened in front of them.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" He asked.\n\nLightflare giggled. \"I didn't, you did, silly! Wait! Don't forget the Book of Light!\"\n\nSpade grabbed the shining book off of its pedestal and walked through the portal, reappearing in front of an awestruck group.\n\n\"Uh, hi guys! How've you been?\" he greeted them with an awkward laugh.\n\n\"Hmm, how have we been?\" Zao pondered in a calm, sarcastic tone. His voice rose to a shout. \"We've been worried sick! You run off through some magic door and then pop up an hour later through some portal! How do you think we've been?!\"\n\n\"What is that thing?\" Mikah asked and gestured to Lightflare, who was perched on Spade's shoulder. \"Is it some sort of genie?\"\n\n\"This is Lightflare...my guide,\" Spade explained.\n\nThe spriteling nodded and puffed out her little chest. \"Keeper of the Book of Light, holder of incredible secrets, guide to the Golden Guardian-\"\n\n\"Golden Guardian?\" Mikah snorted.\n\n\"Spade is the Golden Guardian,\" Tigerlily spoke up. One of the creatures like Spade had seen in the library was sitting beside her. \"I saw his statue in the Hall of Guardians.\"\n\n\"The Hall of Guardians, Lumier's last creation before he died, an infinite room of pure gold statues marking every Golden Guardian that was, is, and will be,\" Lightflare spat out the information.\n\nSpade gulped as they all processed the news, and then tensed as the reactions came in a crashing wave.\n\n\"He's the what?!\"\n\n\"How? Why? When?!\"\n\n\"Him?! The Golden Guardian? You?!\"\n\n\"Show us some magic!\"\n\n\"That explains the portals.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell us?\"\n\n\"Can you read my mind?!\"\n\n\"This has got to be a joke! You're joking, right?\"\n\nSpade tried to think up answers for all the questions, though in all honesty he was just as confused as the rest of them.\n\n\"I...I don't know what's going on,\" he started. The others quieted as he spoke. \"I am the Golden Guardian, supposedly, but I just think there's been some sort of mistake. You guys know me, how could I ever be some kind of mythical hero?\" He paused, hoping for their support or agreement, but none came. \"I say we all go home and forget this ever happened.\" He shrugged, signaling that that was all he had to say.\n\nLightflare frowned and flew up in front of his face. \"Spade, what are you saying? Did you not listen to the part about total destruction? The fate of the world is resting in your talons!\" She turned to the other dragonets. \"Listen, you all know Spade better than I do. Do you think he has what it takes?\"\n\nNone of them spoke. Spade felt a pit form in his stomach. Wow. I really am nothing special. Although it was what he wanted, their silence still hurt.\n\nBut then Zao stepped forward and declared, \"Yes. He does have what it takes. He's the most loyal dragonet you'll ever meet. He's clever, and trustworthy, and\u2026\"\n\n\"Kind,\" Tigerlily offered. \"He'd risk it all for the dragons he loves.\" She gave Mikah a nudge.\n\n\"Yeah, he's pretty cool,\" Mikah said with a smirk.\n\nSpade felt a new warmth spread through his body, and a smile beamed on his face. He felt like the luckiest dragonet in the whole Northern Region. They really think I can do it. I can't let them down now.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" Lightflare asked him. \"Are you ready to accept your destiny?\"\n\nSpade took a deep breath and then gave a nod. \"Yeah, I think I am.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"It was the twelfth and final Guardian, the mighty Rhutani, who finally vanquished Koro for good. By harnessing the power of an ancient trinket, the Compass of Light, she banned Koro to the realm of spirits. One hundred years of peace have followed Rhutani's victory. With Koro gone, the Golden Guardians left as well, making Rhutani the final Guardian.\"\n\nTigerlily closed History of the Golden Guardians and looked at Lightflare, who was still seated upon Spade's shoulder. Rain still pattered outside the temple walls. Night was beginning to fall, yet the warm unnatural lighting of the main hall remained the same.\n\n\"Lightflare, why was there such a long gap between Rhutani and Spade? And why does everyone think Rhutani was the last Guardian?\" She asked.\n\nThe spriteling looked up at her and hopped down to the floor, examining the book in Tigerlily's talons. She gave a sigh. \"Modern historians can never get it right. In their defense, it is a very murky history. After Rhutani died, she gifted her powers to Marble. Marble is known as the Hidden Guardian, because she never revealed her gift. Why she did this is unknown to even me, but I'm sure she had good reasons.\"\n\nThe strange, tattooed creature from earlier padded over and sniffed the book in Tigerlily's talons. \"What are these things?\" She had seen more of them wandering around the temple, some carrying books or scrolls in their jaws, others sweeping dust with their long tails.\n\n\"Baygas. They're at all the temples. They're kind of like caretakers.\"\n\nTigerlily scratched the bayga behind it's tall ears, and it's back foot thumped on the ground happily. She then mentioned, \"This book says Rhutani defeated Koro. As in, he'll never come back.\"\n\n\"Rhutani put a restraining spell on his magic, but it only lasts a hundred years. So while his possession was still passed down, he could never fully possess the host. This could have been one of the reasons Marble stayed hidden; the world didn't necessarily need her powers. But the restraining spell just ended about six months ago, so Koro can now fully possess his host, whoever that is.\"\n\n\"How do we find out?\" Spade asked, joining the conversation.\n\nLightflare's glow seemed to brighten, as if all the questions were making her excited. \"You use a location spell.\" She tapped her chin thoughtfully. \"Although you've shown incredible magic abilities already, we will have to run a trial to test the extent of your energy, to make sure you're strong enough for the spell.\"\n\n\"A trial?\"\n\n\"I propose a destruction spell. Guardians are best at healing, purifying, and creating. Koro's magic destroys, kills, and deceives. It's not normal for a Guardian to destroy, which makes their magic more resistant to the spells. So, if you can accomplish a mild destruction spell, that will be basically the same level of energy you'll need to exert for the location spell, and that way if you do suffer from elemental deficiency you won't be stuck in a death trap.\"\n\n\"What do you mean death trap?\"\n\nLightflare casually waved a talon, dismissing the idea. \"Oh, we'll get to that later.\n\n\"Wait, Lightflare-\" But the little spriteling was already bounding across the hall to a fallen pillar. Spade gulped and followed.\n\nThe spriteling pointed to the pillar before her. \"Behold, your target. All you have to do is imagine yourself crushing it, and let the magic do the rest. There's not really a strict procedure. Just focus your energy in your chest, just like when you use your fire.\" She hopped out of the way as Spade approached and joined the trio gathered behind him.\n\nSpade locked his gaze on the pillar and took a deep breath. Eyes closed, he could sense the magic energy flowing in his veins and gathered it into his chest. There was a sudden sting in his chest and he grunted.\n\n\"It's okay, pain is normal,\" Lightflare assured him. He tried to ignore the sting as it grew. His jaw locked and he flicked his ears back in discomfort. He tensed his whole body as the magic moved down his legs to his claws. Cracks formed in the floor, spreading towards the pillar like jagged snakes, glowing energy rushing through them. Spade's breath came out in short, heavy pants.\n\n\"Is he okay?\" Tigerlily asked quietly. Lightflare didn't respond. Her eyes were locked on Spade, watching every twitch of his wings, every shift of his muscles. She looked worried.\n\nFinally the energy reached the column, consuming it in gold light. Spade had to push harder, feeling the solid column resisting his attempts to crush it. He heard a loud crack as his target began to crumble. But the pain suddenly shot down his arms and he screamed, releasing himself from the spell. The light from the energy faded away. He rubbed one arm and winced as the ache slowly faded away. Zao was at his side in an instant, helping him up.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" his friend asked.\n\nSpade nodded, sucking in sharp breaths as if he had just been stuck underwater. His muscles were weak and he felt exhausted.\n\nLightflare fluttered up in front of him, dancing in the air joyously. \"Did you see that? You were incredible! Look!\"\n\nSpade turned to see the column. It wasn't completely destroyed, but it was covered with cracks, and split in the middle. \"I thought I was supposed to destroy it, though. How is that incredible?\"\n\nThe spriteling laughed. \"Do you realize how hard it is for a beginner in magic to even start a destruction spell? The fact that you were able to deal that much damage on your first try is amazing!\" Spade felt himself smile at her praise. \"Now, you may be experiencing a slight case of elemental deficiency. That just means you used too much energy at once, so your body is drained. That's why it's important that we train, to develop stamina. Anyways, now that we know you can handle that much energy exertion, tomorrow we can do the location spell and find Koro's host. It's not much harder than the destruction spell, just a little more complicated. For now, get some rest. You'll need it.\"\n\nSpade nodded as the spriteling flew up to the Book of Light and, with a flash, poofed away.\n\n\"So, where are we going to sleep?\" Tigerlily asked, gazing around. \"It doesn't seem like there are bedrooms anywhere.\"\n\n\"We could sleep right here,\" Spade suggested.\n\nMikah gave a small \"pfft\" and said, \"Yes, on the cold stone floor. Brilliant.\"\n\nSpade felt a nudge and turned to see a bayga standing behind him. It grasped a dark blue blanket between its jaws. It gave him another nudge and when he accepted the gift, it ran off to fetch another. Two more creatures accompanied it back, bringing blankets to each of the dragonets.\n\nTigerlily smiled and pet the bayga before her. \"Looks like we might not have to sleep on the floor after all, Mikah. It's okay, you don't have to look so disappointed.\"\n\nMikah stuck out his tongue at her as she spread her blanket out on the floor and curled up to go to sleep.\n\nSpade snuggled into his own blanket. Despite being worn out from the spell, he did not feel tired. He layed silently as the rest of them fell asleep, their soft snores surrounding him.\n\nAbout an hour passed when he finally stood, certain he was not going to sleep. He entered the Hall of Guardians, mind pondering the spell. It had been painful yet exhilarating. He had felt so powerful.\n\nIs that what it's like everyday being a Guardian? He wondered. I wonder if the other Guardians were like me. Did they have to go through any of this? Were they just as confused and scared?\n\nWhen he reached Marble's statue he stopped.\n\n\"Why did you choose me?\" he asked aloud. \"Did you really see something special in me?\" He felt an unfamiliar pride warm his chest. She chose me. Of the thousands of dragons in the Four Regions, she picked me to follow in the talonsteps of legends.\n\nHe then looked at his own statue, and his jaw gaped slightly. He barely recognized himself. His eyes looked confident and wise, with his chest out and wings large and flared. \"Who will I choose?\" He wondered out loud. Curious, he peeked at the next statue, but it was as if he was looking through a fogged window. Only a vague shape of a dragon could be made out. He rubbed his eyes but it made no difference.\n\n\"You aren't allowed to know your successor,\" Lightflare chirped, bounding up to him. Spade startled at her voice. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Do you know who I choose?\" He inquired.\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, actually. I will help you choose, though. That's a spriteling's final job. They pass with their Guardian.\"\n\nSpade felt strange about that. \"So, each Guardian gets their own guide?\"\n\nLightflare nodded. \"Yup, you're stuck with me for the rest of your life. Can't change it.\" She laughed nervously.\n\n\"I don't mind,\" he said, sensing she was uncomfortable. \"You seem pretty cool to me.\"\n\nHer glow brightened. \"Really?\" She cleared her throat and looked at her claws. \"I mean, yeah, I am pretty cool.\" Spade laughed and she smiled up at him. \"Don't you think you should get some sleep before tomorrow?\"\n\nHe was getting tired, but he didn't want to leave just yet. \"I tried, but I can't go to bed.\"\n\n\"I can fix that,\" She blew into the palm of her talons and dust appeared. She held it out for him to look at. \"It's a sleeping spell.\"\n\n\"Thanks, but I think I'll stay here a little longer.\"\n\n\"Okey dokey. Holler if you need anything. Except maybe don't actually holler.\" She poofed away, leaving him again alone.\n\nSpade smiled and looked back up at Marble's statute.\n\nI wonder what you saw in me. If I'm not brave like Zao, or confident like Mikah, or smart like Tigerlily, then what am I? What made you think I would be a good Guardian?\n\nHe let out a yawn and laid before the statue, still gazing up at its shining splendor. Did she not want to be Guardian either? Was she as scared as I am?\n\nHe blinked and it seemed harder to keep his eyes open. His lids became heavy. For a moment he thought he saw the statue's eyes flash, too tired to find it strange.\n\nSpade woke with a small jump of surprise. As he stood and stretched he realized he was not in the Hall of Guardians anymore. Instead, he found himself in a black void.\n\nA stunning dragoness stood before him. She had soft pink scales decorated with violet swirls. A white veil covered her face and flowed behind her, carried by a breeze.\n\nSpade took a frightened step back.\n\n\"You are Spade,\" the dragoness said. Her voice was gentle and almost melodious.\n\n\"Y-yes,\" Spade stuttered in reply. \"Who are you?\"\n\nThe dragon smiled. \"I am the one who came before you.\"\n\n\"Marble? But\u2026 but how..?\"\n\n\"You are dreaming. But I am not a mere illusion. I am here to answer your questions. I knew I was the Golden Guardian before I was your age. My future was all laid out before me, and like you I panicked, and in my fear I made a terrible mistake. You must be careful not to fall as I did. The world is in need of a hero now more than ever. Koro's host is stronger than any of his previous forms and you, Spade, are the only one who can stop him. I was careless and ungrateful of my power. It is not something that can be abused without consequences. Be careful, young Guardian.\" Her image began to fade.\n\n\"Wait, what was your mistake? What happened?\"\n\n\"I turned from The Maker and the power he had granted me to pursue a different love, even though I knew that in the end I would be betrayed. And I paid the price. For now, that is all you need to know.\"\n\nSpade watched in confusion as Marble continued to dissolve into the darkness, and called, \"Wait, Marble! Why did you choose me?\"\n\nHer eyes blazed as she answered, voice fading with her body. \"Because I know that when the time of darkness comes, you will be able to see the true light.\" Her voice echoed away, scales dissolving into black.\n\nSpade opened his eyes with a gasp, talons scrabbling against the stone floor as he hastily stood. He had fallen asleep in front of Marble's statue.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked out loud, one ear twitching to the side. \"The true light? What is that?\"\n\n\"I. Am. Starving!\" Mikah's outburst cut through his thoughts. \"Please tell me we have something to eat.\" His blue-scaled head popped into the Hall. \"Spade, bro, can you magic up some breakfast?\"\n\n\"There's a storage of ration bars in one of the rooms,\" Lightflare piped up. \"Lumier made sure the temples kept stocked rooms for travelers to use, filled with supplies, meals and tools they might need.\"\n\nThe ration bars ended up being bars wrapped in cloth, perfectly preserved, but how, no one could tell. They couldn't even tell what they were made of, but everyone was so hungry that there were no complaints. A while after eating Spade returned to Lightflare, who was reading a page in the Book of Light, tiny glasses perched on her snout.\n\nUpon his presence she turned with a smile. \"My wish is your command, Guardian. How may I assist you?\"\n\nSpade took a deep breath. \"I--I think I'm ready to try the location spell.\"\n\nLightflare casually threw off her glasses, which poofed into non-existence. \"Great! We start by- actually, first let's just have everyone back up.\" The dragonets gathered behind Spade took a few steps back. \"Alright, this spell is a little complicated. You're going to start by closing your eyes and banishing all thoughts from your mind. You need to want to find Koro. If you call to him, he should be summoned by the magic energy, or a certain entity of him, in a sense. It won't really be Koro. You'll enter a void once he comes. Ask him where he is and he should show you. If he doesn't try boosting the spell with more energy. Beware, this is where it starts getting sticky! Remember when I mentioned something about a death trap? If Koro becomes conscious of the spell, he will try to trap you, especially if he senses your magic is weak. But he won't be able to actually see you, so make yourself seem bigger and tougher than, you know, this.\" She gestured to him with a wave of her talon. \"After you know who Koro's physical host is, release yourself from the spell as fast as you can.\"\n\nSpade nodded, processing the information for a minute. \"Alright, let's do this.\" His talons were shaking with nerves as they began to glow. He closed his eyes and focused, emptying his mind. Gold dust began swirling around him. Magic energy was surging through his veins, and his breaths became heavy from the rush of power.\n\nKoro. He thought. I need to find Koro. He felt himself become detached from the world.\n\n\"Who summons me?\" A deep, rumbling voice suddenly snarled, sending a chill rippling down Spade's spine. It was Koro.\n\n\"I--It is I,\" Spade stammered, trying to make his voice sound deeper. \"The Golden Guardian.\" He opened his eyes and saw only darkness. He was standing in a cold, empty abyss.\n\n\"The Golden Guardian?\" Koro repeated, a hint of surprise in his voice. \"Ah yes, I can sense the magic in you. You are strong, but not as strong as your predecessors.\"\n\nSpade felt a stabbing pain in his chest. Koro was testing him. \"I need to know where you are,\" he grunted, fighting through the pain. \"Tell me where you are!\" He demanded. The pain faded.\n\n\"As you wish,\" Koro hissed in a sly tone that made Spade gulp. Suddenly scenes began flashing through the abyss: forests, lakes, mountains, and fields. One after another, at an overwhelming speed, disorienting Spade. Finally it stopped at an image of the Kingdom of Shadow castle. Spade felt a dark presence drifting off of the place like steam.\n\n\"If this is where you are, then who's your host?\" Spade further inquired. The pain returned in his chest and he panicked. \"Who is your host?\"\n\n\"Do try and make me tell you,\" Koro teased.\n\nSpade tried to speak but fell to his knees. It felt like a talon was latched onto his throat, choking him. \"Show me\u2026 show...\" His vision faltered and he writhed around in pain.\n\n\"I'm waiting,\" Koro hissed with a laugh.\n\nI have to get out of here! A thought rang in his head. His lungs screamed and blood pounded in his ears. He grabbed at his throat in terrified panic. This is what it feels like to die.\n\nThen a gut-wrenching burn filled his chest and he screamed. The image faded and he was plunged into darkness. He lost all feeling in his body, choking out weak breaths, eyes unable to stay open.\n\nNew images flashed before him. He saw a war, fighting, blood, and collapsing buildings. Then, talons desperately reaching out, a bloody and beaten dragon pleading for help, and finally, a spear being driven into an armored chest. A gentle, soothing force then consumed him and voices echoed distantly in his ear.\n\n\"Nothing can separate us. We have a bond like brothers!\"\n\n\"I think I love her.\"\n\n\"What's gotten into you?!\"\n\n\"Please...don't do this.\"\n\n\"NO!\"\n\nThe group watched nervously as gold dust began swirling around Spade's feet. His eyes were shut tight and his whole body began to glow softly.\n\n\"He's started the spell,\" Lightflare let out a tense breath.\n\n\"How long will it take?\" Tigerlily asked nervously.\n\n\"It depends. Location spells don't tend to last very long, but since he is a beginner it should take about twenty minutes, though it will feel like a few seconds to him. I just hope he doesn't get into any trouble.\"\n\nTigerlily shuddered. Trouble? What does she mean? Will Spade be okay?\n\nA few minutes passed and everyone relaxed, tired of watching the dust swirl in continuous circles, their eyes hurting from the ever-brightening light coming off of his body. They lounged around the hall, chatting quietly.\n\nAll of a sudden Spade groaned and they all glanced up.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Tigerlily gasped.\n\n\"Is Spade okay?\" Zao asked.\n\n\"He is merely experiencing a little turmoil,\" Lightflare explained. She was watching Spade, her eyes wide and unblinking, unaffected by the almost blinding light.\n\nTigerlily watched as he began twitching his ears back and forth, revealing that he was nervous.\n\nWhy is he nervous? Is he in trouble? Has he found Koro yet? She tapped a claw on the floor anxiously. Zao sighed and began pacing. Mikah slouched on the floor and picked at his claws boredly. More time passed and Lightflare began flipping through the Book of Light.\n\n\"This isn't right,\" Tigerlily overheard her mutter. \"He should have been done by now.\"\n\nThe sound of Spade's talons scraping the floor made everyone jump up. He began to groan and writhe around as if in pain, his body twisting uncomfortably. His eyes, which were glowing white, flew open, and his talons gripped at his throat. Black foam began dripping from his mouth as he choked and sputtered. The dust around him pulsed in disorienting flashes.\n\nTigerlily screamed. Zao and Mikah rushed forward to grab him but Lightflare flew in front of them. \"Wait! Only a dragon with magic as their born-element can pull someone out of a spell! You could kill him!\"\n\n\"He looks like he's going to die anyways!\" Zao snarled. \"We need to do something!\"\n\n\"Only Spade can get out of this,\" Lightflare said, her voice tight. All across Spade's body his veins became black and tense. His nose and ears began to bleed. Tears streaked his quivering face.\n\nTigerlily knew she was crying too, but she was too numb with fear to feel it. Without thinking she lunged past Lightflare and pulled Spade from the cloud of dust. It fell to the floor with a sound like shattered glass.\n\nEveryone went quiet. The whole room seemed to become silent. Not a single breath, a gust of wind, a scurrying mouse, or a singing bird stirred the air. It was that terrible, deafening silence that could drive someone to insanity. It was as if every living thing was watching as Spade's limp body thumped to the ground."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "\"No,\" Tigerlily whispered, a feeling of horror falling over her. \"Oh, no.\"\n\nHe's dead. What was I thinking?\n\nShe was too shocked to move, to cry, to even breathe. She felt Mikah's talon rest gently on her shoulder. Her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to the ground beside her unmoving brother.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" she breathed out, barely audible. \"I just wanted to help. I was so scared. Now I ruined everything.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, look!\" Lightflare squeaked.\n\nTigerlily gasped as a shaky talon reached up and clutched her own. Righting herself, she saw Spade's eyes flutter open. \"Spade! You're alive!\"\n\nSpade coughed and slowly sat up, his breath coming out in wheezes. He gave his wings a delicate stretch and rubbed his neck as though it were sore. The others let out shouts of relief and ran to embrace him. He flinched at their touch and they parted apologetically.\n\nHe looked at Tigerlily and gave her a weak smile. His voice was almost inaudible. \"Thanks,\" he mumbled. \"You saved me.\" He coughed again, and then turned to Lightflare. Half-jokingly, he asked, \"How did I do?\"\n\nLightflare laughed through tears. \"You did amazing. Absolutely amazing.\"\n\nMikah patted Spade on the back, making him wince. \"Well, you um, yeah, good job.\" It was obvious he was blinking back tears. \"I was uh, a little scar--concerned, you know, with the whole magic stuff. I mean, I was totally fine, I'm still fine I just--\" he hugged Spade. \"Oh, blazes! Please don't do that ever again!\" Spade gave a weak laugh and returned the hug.\n\nZao was next. He embraced his friend and growled lovingly, \"You scared me, dude. Not cool.\"\n\n\"So\u2026 does this mean you're magic, too?\" Mikah asked Tigerlily.\n\nTigerlily stared down at her talons in wonder. Am I? Is there something special about me too? Could it be possible that Spade and I both have magic? \"I don't know,\" she quietly replied, half to her brother, half to her own thoughts.\n\nThe next thing she knew Lightflare was right in her face, spinning and dancing in the air excitedly. \"Isn't this incredible? This is so incredible. Like, unbelievably incredible! Tigerlily, you're magic! It's the only explanation for how you saved Spade! I don't know how I didn't sense it earlier! You must be a late developer.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"Dragons with magic typically develop their element in one of two ways: some are early developers, like Spade, who show large amounts of magic energy almost immediately. Others are late developers, which is what you must be. It means you have magic, it just isn't very strong at first, but grows as you age and practice.\"\n\n\"But my element is fire. That doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\"Actually, fire is just the strongest factor of magic that you inherited, so it seems like that's your born-element, but really your magic energy just needs time to fully develop; That's why you haven't seen it yet.\"\n\nSpade lifted himself up on all four legs, Zao letting him lean on his side for support. He limped over to one of the piles of blankets and fell down with a heavy breath. After he had settled down, Zao asked, \"So did you find the Koro?\"\n\nTigelrily walked over to them, curious to join in on the conversation. Lightflare fluttered after her.\n\nSpade rubbed his head before answering Zao. \"Kind of? I know where he is but he didn't show me his physical host. He showed me the castle in the Kingdom of Shadow. But then-\" He shuddered. \"He tried to kill me. Before he was able to, I felt something pulling me out. That must have been you, Tigerlily.\"\n\n\"So what do we have to do now?\" Tigerlily asked.\n\nLightflare spun excitedly in the air. \"We need to go to the Kingdom of Shadow.\"\n\nSpade sat with the group, a map of the Northern Region spread out before them on a long table. The sun had set and Spade was feeling better. He had washed the blood off of his face, and the black in his veins had almost faded away.\n\n\"Right now, we're here.\" Zao pointed to the Kingdom of Light. \"So it looks like the quickest way to the Kingdom of Shadow would be to cut straight through the Golden Fields and the Nightshade Swamp\u2026 But traveling directly through wilderness is pretty risky.\"\n\n\"We could go to Harmony and then to Shadow,\" Tigerlily suggested. \"That way we could stop for supplies.\"\n\nLightflare hopped onto the map and pointed to the Nightshade Swamp. \"It is rumored that there is a native tribe residing within the swamp.\"\n\n\"Are they friendly?\" Mikah inquired, voice tainted with skepticism.\n\n\"No one knows. There are some stories from travelers about strange dragons decorated in feathers and paint who helped them through the swamp, but these could be hallucinations. The swamp is responsible for dozens of lost dragons. It's filled with plants that excrete toxins, wild animals, and who knows what else. I'm not even fully aware of the dangers that reside within.\"\n\n\"What do you think, Spade?\"\n\nSpade thought for a minute. The route that Zao suggested would be the fastest, if we could navigate through the swamp. But it might be too dangerous. If we went with Tigerlily's route, it would be safer, and we would be crossing frequently traveled lands.\n\n\"I say we take the route Tigerlily suggested,\" he finally declared. The other four nodded in agreement.\n\n\"It's settled then,\" Lightflare said. \"We leave for Harmony in the morning. Let's pack and get moving as soon as we can.\"\n\n\"Is there even anything to pack?\" Mikah nodded at the interior of the temple, gesturing to its broken and aged condition.\n\nLightflare tapped her chin thoughtfully. Her eyes lit up and she snapped her claws. \"The travel rooms. They'll be filled with all the supplies we need.\"\n\nZao stood up enthusiastically. \"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go check them out!\"\n\nThe dragonets followed Lightflare down a long hallway and into a room with four doors, each one labeled for a different region. The chamber for the Northern Region was set up similar to a large closet. On one side were drawers and cabinets, and on the other were racks of pre-packed bags.\n\nMikah pulled down one of the packs and rummaged through its contents, then slung it over his neck. \"Huh. Spiffy.\"\n\nSpade also grabbed one of the bags and strapped it on, and opened a cabinet. It was filled with ration bars. He took a few and then checked a drawer, which was filled with miscellaneous items including lanterns, compasses, and telescopes. He picked through the tools and added them to his stash until the bag was stuffed full.\n\nOnce everyone was packed they returned to the main hall. Lightflare spread out their map and once again went over the route. \"It's about a six day trip from here to Harmony, then a five day trip to Shadow. We leave as soon as everybody's ready.\"\n\nAfter a quick supply check they headed to the exit. They traveled down the dark passage from where they had originally entered the temple and came upon the same two massive, golden doors. They creaked open as the dragonets approached, a cool gust of air drifting into the tunnel. Upon exiting the mouth of the cave, Spade squinted at the bright sunlight, realizing they'd been confined in the temple for over two days. He noticed Lightflare gazing down from the edge of the cave at the Kingdom of Light, her eyes distant and sad.\n\n\"This was once a magnificent and prosperous kingdom,\" the spriteling sighed. \"Now it is nothing but an abandoned pile of rubble.\"\n\n\"Did Koro do all this?\" Spade asked.\n\nLightflare nodded. \"He had help, though: War and time, two of the most efficient destroyers. Light fell behind as the world progressed. They sought no advancements in exploration or technology. In their minds, the dragons of Light were an accomplished civilization: prosperous in farming, friendly, peaceful, and simplistic. In the eyes of the rest of the kingdoms, however, their only worth was in the vast amounts of treasure and artifacts they had stored in the castle cellars. After Koro killed off the mages, raiders and neighboring kingdoms pillaged this place until there was nothing left.\"\n\n\"Who was Koro's host then?\"\n\n\"Shadow, the father of Malvagita. He was truly a terrible dragon, even without the corruption. He was a mad warlord.\"\n\n\"What about the Golden Guardian?\"\n\n\"Lumier had left the kingdom to explore the Four Regions. He returned to his home destroyed.\"\n\n\"Did he kill Shadow?\"\n\n\"Shadow was already dead, though how is still unanswered. Some think it was murder, some think it was suicide.\"\n\n\"Are we going?\" Mikah called impatiently to Spade. Lightflare took in one last scan of the ruins, then flew over to the others. Spade followed, an anxious thought nagging in the back of his mind. If Koro has the power to destroy a whole kingdom, how will I be able to stop him?\n\nThe sun was at its peak when the group stopped to rest in a shady patch of trees. They had been flying for over four hours. Tigerlily landed, digging her claws into the soft soil, and stretched her wings. She wasn't used to flying such long distances. She took out a ration bar and sniffed it, but then decided she wasn't hungry.\n\nI wonder what it will be like returning home, she wondered. Mother and Father must be worried sick. And what will we do about the Academy? We've already missed three days of class, but with all that's happened, does school even matter anymore? I mean, we're literally going to save the world.\n\nShe sniffed the air as a cold breeze drifted across her scales. There was the scent of rain and, glancing up, she saw dark clouds moving their way slowly. The branches of the trees began to dance in the growing wind. Despite her aching wings, she knew they needed to cover as much ground flying until the storm caught up. \"We should probably get going. By the looks of it, we won't be able to fly when that storm hits.\" The rest of the dragonets agreed with tired groans, spreading their wings and leaping into the air. Tigerlily followed with a wince as her wing cramped.\n\nTigerlily watched the ground as she flew, studying the plains below. It was a grassy field dotted with the occasional clump of trees. She spotted rabbits darting through the blades of grass, away from the storm. Bison and antelope grazed calmly. Her eyes drifted to the side and landed on a large figure in the distance. She squinted to better make out what it was. It was covered in brown fur and had a large, bushy tail. Scales ran down its spine and its tall ears twitched in the wind.\n\nShe gasped and felt a chill shoot down her spine. It was a hound, and it was staring right at her. Hounds were massive canine-creatures who roamed the lands between the kingdoms. Nicknamed \"Death Hounds,\" they were extremely territorial and had been known to attack and even kill dragons who strayed into their lands. Tigerlily kept her gaze locked onto the creature as the distance grew between them. It didn't look like it was going to attack; it was just sitting, watching curiously. Soon it faded into the horizon. No one had seen it except for Tigerlily. Are they hunting us? She wondered fearfully, periodically glancing behind her to see if they were being followed.\n\nThunder crashed overhead as the group continued on talon, heads bent low against the icy, pounding rain. Mud squelched beneath their talons as they trekked on. Spade shook out his wings, but in a matter of seconds they were once again drenched. He winced as he slipped on a wet stone and sliced the pad of his talon, the blood mixing with the rain; the ground was becoming gradually rockier. Lightflare was plodding along under him, using his body to block the worst of the storm. Her glow was very dim.\n\n\"What's that up ahead?\" Zao shouted over the roar of the downpour.\n\nSpade squinted through the sheet rain and made out the gaping mouth of a ravine, a scar amongst the field of golden plains. The group headed towards it in hopes of finding shelter. As they approached, Spade peered over the edge and could make out the bottom not too far below.\n\n\"Look for a way down!\" Zao called. The dragonets fanned out in search. Spade squinted around and thought he saw a rock formation along the side of the ravine that resembled stairs. To his surprise, when he advanced across the rocky ground towards it, he realized it was indeed an actual staircase, carved expertly into the stone. It was slippery from the rain, but not steep. He called to the rest of the dragonets and they filed down to the base of the ravine. Only a few strides away from the base of the stairs they found a small cave entrance in the stone wall.\n\nThey all filed inside and shook off with a chorus of relieved sighs.\n\n\"Why do you think that staircase was there?\" Tigerlily asked.\n\n\"Maybe someone used to live here, like some kind of ancient tribe,\" Zao suggested.\n\n\"Maybe it's haunted,\" Mikah said, glancing around with phony concern.\n\n\"Whatever the case, I'm just glad it was there. We might have had to climb down otherwise.\"\n\nThe cave was gloomy, and Spade could barely make out the end of his snout. How did I make my scales glow back at the Temple? He wondered. As if in response to the thought, his scales flickered softly, and then brightened to illuminate the area. Spade's mouth gaped at their surroundings. They were in what looked to be a throne room, the ceiling towering overhead. Huge pillars lined a walkway so long it disappeared into the shadows. Beautiful carved arches lined the ceiling, and on the ground, antique suits of armor stood at attention along a wall.\n\n\"Where are we?\" Tigerlily breathed, eyes wide and taking in every detail of the castle-like structure.\n\n\"It seems we have stumbled upon some sort of ancient fortress,\" Lightflare deducted as she observed the base of one of the pillars. She took a deep breath and then blew away a cloud of dust to reveal a fragment of carved text. Her small talon ran across its grooved surface. \"This text is beyond my knowledge. I have never seen anything like it before.\"\n\nThunder boomed outside and the dragonets jumped.\n\n\"While the storm is present, I suggest you all try and get some rest,\" the spriteling advised, turning away from the writing. \"We will resume our trip as soon as the weather clears\u2026 Though it looks like that may be a while.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Spade adjusted his position on the stone floor and wrapped his wings tightly around his sides. A new chill had fallen upon the air as the gray sky overhead began to dim with the approaching night. The rain still pounded down into the ravine, and had formed a small river through its middle.\n\nDespite being exhausted from the long day of travel, Spade found it difficult to fall asleep. Mikah, Tigerlily and Zao were snoring softly around him; They had huddled close together to keep warm. Spade closed his eyes with a heavy exhale and tucked his snout into his wing. A gentle buzzing filled his head, and at first he thought it was just sleepiness overtaking him, but then a ringing began to echo in his ears. He twitched his ears uncomfortably and tried to shake the feeling away. An image filled his mind; it was as though he was walking down a hallway in the strange fortress. He turned a corner, coming upon two sets of stairs, and ascended the one to the left. He entered what looked to be an old library. The buzzing grew stronger.\n\nSpade opened his eyes and glanced around as a strange sensation overtook him, but couldn't spy anything. Yet a dark presence filled the area. Something was there, watching him. Something\u2026 haunted.\n\nSpade stood with a yawn, drowsily stretching the sleep out of his wings. The rest of the dragonets were already awake and wandering around. The fortress was illuminated by the morning sun peeking through holes in the wall. With the interior fully lit up, it seemed so much bigger than the night before. Spade could now view the faded red carpet leading to a throne-like structure at the far end of the columned walkway, and the intricate candle chandeliers strung from the towering ceiling.\n\nUpon seeing that Spade was awake, Zao pulled him aside to a broken doorway. \"Do you want to go explore?\" he asked.\n\nSpade gave a shrug. \"I don't know-\"\n\n\"Oh, come on. It'll be fun.\" His friend was already pulling aside the large wooden door, which hung at an odd angle, only the top hinge still intact. With a scrape, he was able to pull it far enough to make a hole big for them to squeeze through. Spade peered into the darkness beyond and took a step back. There could be all kinds of creatures lurking on the other side, waiting in the unseen to pounce.\n\nZao turned to him with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, the kind he always got when he was about to do something he knew wasn't safe. The dragonet beckoned Spade with a flick of his tail as he wedged himself through the gap. Spade followed with a sigh, deciding going with Zao would be better than leaving him to get into trouble on his own.\n\nSpade concentrated his energy and lit up his scales, brightening their path. The two dragonets were in a hallway, masterfully carved into the stone surroundings.\n\n\"It's so cool that you can do that,\" Zao laughed, his voice echoing down the corridor. \"Do you think this place could actually be haunted?\" he asked as he began to walk away.\n\n\"I doubt it,\" Spade replied as he followed, though in his mind he immediately thought back to the strange feeling the night before.\n\n\"How cool would that be, though? Discovering an ancient, abandoned kingdom and a haunted castle all in one week?\"\n\nSpade didn't reply, only glanced back at the faint light coming from the hole in the doorway. More than anything he just wanted to go back, but he couldn't leave Zao.\n\nThe rotting interior of the fortress cracked and groaned, making Spade shiver. \"This place gives me the creeps. Maybe we should go.\"\n\n\"Aw, come on! Don't you want to see what's down here?\" Zao was pointing a claw down the dimly lit hallway.\n\nSpade shook his head. \"You realize nothing good ever comes out of exploring a long, dark hallway.\" His eyes widened as the familiar buzzing from the night before filled his head. There was some sort of dark force coming from the corridor. It felt like Koro's presence, from the location spell.\n\nIs Koro here? He thought in panic. We need to get out of here. But his body ignored his thoughts. He walked toward Zao, who was halfway down the hall already, but it was like he was trying to walk against the current of a river. He grunted as he forced his legs to take a step. A terrible ringing filled his ears as he went further down the hall.\n\n\"Spade, what's wrong?\" Zao's voice was filled with concern. \"What are you doing? Snap out of it. Dude, quit being freaky!\" He grabbed Spade's wrist. \"Cut it out!\"\n\nSpade snapped out of the trance and opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly the floor gave way beneath them and they plummeted down into a cellar. A cloud of dust was coughed into the air. The dragonets stood and brushed themselves off. Zao gasped and grabbed his wing, teeth gritted in pain.\n\n\"Is it broken?\" Spade asked, inspecting it.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Zao grunted. \"Just bruised.\" He tested it but pulled it back with a growl. \"There might be a way out down there.\" He gestured to the opposite end of the cellar. With the help of his glow, Spade could make out a doorway. He sensed the dark force was very close.\n\nWhat if it's Koro? Will he kill us? \"What if we get lost?\" Spade asked aloud.\n\nZao's voice was dripping with sarcasm. \"You're right, we should just stay here and call for help.\" He was already walking off. Spade sighed and followed. They went through the doorway and came to a cross section marked with signs. Spade's ears pounded as the vision from the night before flashed in his mind. They needed to turn left.\n\nZao was beginning to step into the right corridor when Spade shouted, \"Wait, it's the other way!\"\n\nZao turned back to him with a slight cock of his head. \"Uh, okay?\" Although he didn't refuse, he gave Spade a confused glance as he passed.\n\nOh, blazes, it was left, right? Spade thought worriedly as he trailed behind his friend. I turned right in the vision, which led to the strange room filled with that dark force... or did I turn left? He began to panic as they ascended a staircase. Their path opened to a musty room, the air thick, reeking of mold and dirt. It was filled with rows of collapsed or damaged bookshelves. Cobwebs decorated the cracks and crevices of the walls, and a thick layer of dust covered every surface.\n\nOh no, Spade thought as a dreadful realization settled over him. This is the library from the vision. We need to get out of here. He could feel a dark power stirring around the room.\n\n\"How are the torches still burning?\" Zao asked, and Spade realized he had been too lost in thought to even realize that the torches along the wall were lit, and his glow was no longer needed.\n\nSpade dimmed his scales and glanced around, getting that same spine-tingling sensation as when he'd had the vision of the library. They were being watched. Something was down there with them.\n\nSpade was about to say they should turn back and a noise made him jump. A stack of books had fallen to the floor and stirred up a cloud of dust. \"Come on, Zao, let's look for another way out-.\" A chill ran down his spine when he saw the expression on Zao's face. His friend's eyes were huge and terrified, focused on something behind Spade.\n\nZao's mouth moved as though he were trying to speak, but only small squeaks escaped, until he forced out, \"Ghost!\"\n\nSpade spun around with a yelp of fright, coming face to face with a massive dragon, whose body let off a dim, green glow. He towered over Spade and had blazing, yellow eyes. Armor covered his body, and a sword was strapped to his side.\n\nSpade's head became light as the figure examined the two dragonets with his piercing gaze, jaw bent in a snarl. Shuffling to his friend's side, Spade felt as though he might fall over from shaking so hard. Would it be smart to run? He didn't know if he could force himself to move. Everything inside of him seemed to be frozen in fear.\n\n\"I knew this place was haunted!\" Zao yelped. \"Please don't kill us, Mister Ghost, we're just lost!\"\n\nThe ghost-dragon pinned his ears back. \"Who are you?\" His voice was deep and powerful.\n\n\"My name is Spade,\" Spade replied, his voice trembling with fright. That must be Koro! I think I've heard his voice before. Can he not tell I'm the Golden Guardian? Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe we can get out of here. \"This is my friend Zao. We didn't mean any harm in coming here, we were actually just leaving, but then the floor gave way and we fell into a cellar and Zao hurt his wing so we couldn't fly out and then-\"\n\nThe dragon held up a talon and Spade quieted. \"Are there any more of you?\"\n\nSpade almost said yes, but then lied, \"No, it's just us.\" He didn't want this dragon to know about the others.\n\n\"We're really sorry we bothered you, Mr. Ghost Sir,\" Zao joined in. \"If you would just point us to the way out, we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\"What are two dragonets doing this far out in the wilderness?\" The ghost-dragon growled, suspicion in his voice.\n\n\"We need to get to the Kingdom of Harmony, to get supplies for our journey to the Kingdom of Shadow.\"\n\nThere was a pause in which the dragon again looked them up and down. His ear twitched. \"What business do you have in Shadow?\"\n\nSpade hesitated. If this was Koro, was he trying to trick Spade into revealing he was the Golden Guardian? Was he catching on that these were the dragonets coming to defeat him?\n\n\"He's the Golden Guardian and he has to get to Shadow to defeat Koro, this super bad dude who wants to destroy the world!\" Zao blurted.\n\nSpade's blood ran cold and he tensed for the dragon's reaction. But then something unexpected happened. The ghost-dragon's eyes widened and he stumbled back a few steps.\n\n\"By the Maker...\" He whispered. \"It can't be...you're the Golden Guardian? That's impossible.\"\n\nSpade figured this was the only chance he would get to fix Zao's mistake. \"Yes, it is! He's just joking.\" He said with a forced laugh, jabbing his friend in the side. \"I am not the Golden Guardian, and like I said, we were just on our way out.\"\n\nZao seemed to catch on and mouthed \"oh\" before saying, \"Yeah, ha ha, no Guardian here. That was a joke.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" the dragon said with a new hint of desperation in his voice. \"You have the same scale pattern as the ancient Guardians.\"\n\n\"That's just a coincidence,\" Zao laughed. Spade nodded with a nervous smile.\n\n\"All I ask is that you try. Please.\"\n\n\"Try what?\" Spade asked, curiosity beginning to take over his fear.\n\nThe dragon held out his front talons to reveal thick shackles around his wrists. Spade flinched at the painfully familiar presence emanating from the cuffs. It was Koro's work. That was the darkness he had been sensing.\n\n\"You're not Koro, are you,\" Spade realized.\n\nThe mystery dragon raised an eyebrow. \"Koro...as in the ancient demon?\" Spade nodded. \"Wha- no, I am not Koro.\"\n\n\"Then\u2026 who are you?\"\n\nThe dragon seemed to stand taller. \"My name is Lukai DeTaris, ex-High General of the Silverwood First Battalion. I was killed in battle and my soul was cursed to wander these halls until the Golden Guardian came to save me. I assume it was meant to be an eternal punishment, as no one expected a Guardian to return after Rhutani.\"\n\n\"Who cursed you? Was it Koro?\"\n\nLukai shook his head. \"Lord Nerizza, of the Kingdom of Shadow.\"\n\nSpade's ear twitched in thought. But the chains are Koro's work, I can sense it. Does this mean-- His eyes widened. \"Zao, Lord Nerizza is Koro's physical host!\"\n\n\"So, Nerizza is possessed by\u2026 Koro?\" Lukai clarified. Spade and Zao had just finished explaining everything to the warrior.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Spade said. \"And that's why he cursed you. Lord Nerizza doesn't have control over his actions. Koro is using him as his pawn.\"\n\n\"I knew something was wrong with him. Can you fix it?\"\n\n\"I--I don't know. I'm the Golden Guardian, though, so I guess it's kind of my job. First we need to free you and get back to the others.\"\n\n\"So there are others,\" the warrior said with an unsurprised nod.\n\n\"Yeah, we lied because we weren't sure if we could trust you\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes, I could tell. Now, uh, if you don't mind, may we proceed with the spell?\" Lukai again held out his chains.\n\nSpade nodded and awkwardly set his talons on the shackles, not entirely sure what to do.\n\nHe took a deep breath and then closed his eyes, focusing his thoughts. He tried to remember the destruction spell he had done back at the temple. I just have to do that, but to these shackles. It should be much easier than a whole pillar, right? He inhaled sharply as the magic energy gathered in his chest, and imagined the chains crumbling at his touch. A shocking surge rushed through his veins, and then heard the clank of metal hitting the floor. He opened his eyes and saw that the cuffs were opened.\n\nThe ghost-dragon's blazing eyes were wide, and his ears were pinned back in awe. He looked up at Spade. \"I don't believe it...\" He bowed hastily. \"Thank you, your Magnificence.\"\n\n\"Your Magnificence,\" Zao laughed.\n\n\"You don't need to...bow.\" Spade was amazed at the sight of the huge, armored dragon down in such a humbling position.\n\nThe ghost-dragon righted himself and moved to a bookcase that was standing against the wall. \"With all due respect, the least I can do is bow. You have saved me from twenty years of imprisonment.\"\n\n\"Twenty years,\" Zao repeated in awe. \"That's insane.\"\n\nLukai grabbed the end of the bookshelf and gave a tug, pulling it aside. It slid with a loud creak, disturbing the layers of settled dust. A hidden tunnel was revealed. \"This leads to the surface,\" the warrior explained. He gestured for them to follow and the dragonets filed after him into the tunnel.\n\n\"What is this place anyways?\" Spade asked as he trailed after the warrior.\n\nLukai shrugged. His faint green glow illuminated the narrow tunnel. \"I am unfamiliar with any of the symbols or architecture. I believe it was a castle or fortress built by the ancient ancestors, long before kingdoms were established.\"\n\n\"How do you know Lord Nerizza?\"\n\n\"We were schooled together when we were dragonets. He had been transferred to the Silverwood Academy to study their potions and medicines courses. We were close friends until he became Lord. That is when he started acting strange.\"\n\n\"Because that's when Koro's restraining spell ended,\" Spade realized. Lukai glanced down at him curiously, and Spade went on to explain, \"Rhutani didn't actually kill Koro. She put a restraining spell on his magic for one-hundred years. That's why he hasn't been able to take over another host.\"\n\nLukai narrowed his eyes and gave a low growl. \"Until now.\"\n\nAfter the mighty Rhutani fell, the Four Regions mourned, for the glorious reign of the Golden Guardians had come to an end. Although the Four Regions were finally at peace, they had entered a new age; an age in which they would need to learn to survive without the help of the divine Guardians.\n\nWith the Guardians gone, a new group arose: the Golden Sages. They tasked themselves with guarding the temples, and scouring the Four Regions for any traces of Koro.\n\n\"Why do you keep reading that if it's all fake?\" Mikah's voice made Tigerlily glance up. She closed the History of The Golden Guardian and set it in her satchel.\n\n\"It's not fake. It's just\u2026 misunderstood history. A lot of the things it mentions are real, it just got the details wrong.\"\n\n\"Seems like they got everything wrong, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"Well I didn't ask you, Mikah,\" Tigerlily said with an annoyed growl.\n\nMikah only rolled his eyes, and then changed the subject. \"Where did Spade and Zao wander off to? Aren't we supposed to be going soon?\"\n\nTigerlily hadn't even realized they were gone; she had been too immersed in reading. She stood and walked to the other side of the room, her talons clicking on the stone floor. After glancing side to side, it was apparent that they were no longer anywhere in the main hall.\n\nMikah groaned and smacked his tail on the ground. \"Ugh, they're probably off exploring. That must be so much more exciting than this. I wish I had gone with them.\"\n\nI hope they're not lost, Tigerlily thought. The sound of small talonsteps approaching them made the dragonets turn. Lightflare bounded across the tattered, velvet rug running down the middle of the hall and leapt into the air, fluttering up to Tigerlily.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" the spriteling asked, head cocked to one side in interest.\n\n\"Spade and Zao wandered off,\" Tigerlily explained. \"We don't know where they went.\"\n\nLightflare closed her eyes and her glow brightened. \"They're still somewhere in the fortress,\" she said, eyes still closed. \"I can sense them, but I cannot pinpoint their location. Something seems to be causing an interference.\"\n\n\"Do you think we should go looking for them?\"\n\n\"Yes, great idea,\" Mikah said. \"Let's do something, anything. I'm so bored.\"\n\n\"We may not need to,\" Lightflare replied, her eyes suddenly popping open. \"Spade just released a large amount of magic energy.\" Her talons danced through the air, as though she were writing something. \"Follow me,\" she said before fluttering off to a large door that was hanging to one side and connected by a single hinge. \"They went through here, though I can't tell where they went after that. It seems to be a straight hallway, but for some reason I sense that they are\u2026 below us?\"\n\nTigerlily and Mikah trailed after the spriteling as she flew up to the throne-like structure at the far end of the room. The elegant seat was half-crumbled from years of natural decay, and if one looked closely they could see that dust-covered gems were still embedded into its frame. Lightflare landed on the throne and brushed off a layer of dust with her thin, white tail. A symbol was revealed on the rough stone. The same symbol was woven into the velvet rug leading up to the throne.\n\n\"There is a secret door under the rug,\" the spriteling pointed out, and then flew into the space behind the throne. There was a click, and then a long, grinding creak as a part of the floor opened up, the end of the rug draping down into the opening.\n\n\"Cool,\" came Mikah's quiet gasp.\n\nTigerlily peered down into the dark hole and looked around. She let a flame rise up her throat and rest in her agape jaw, which brought only a small, teasing light to the shadows. For a moment she peered down into the hole and was unable to see anything but the faint outline of a tunnel. Then, a green glow appeared off in the distance. \"I think I see something,\" she said, and Mikah crouched beside her, sticking his head into the passage, ears forwards in excitement.\n\n\"It seems the doorway is already open,\" came a deep voice from down the passage.\n\nTigerlily's eyes widened. She let the flame in her throat die away. That didn't sound like Zao or Spade. Is there someone else in this place with us? She glanced down at her talons. Would I be able to use my magic to protect us? No, I don't even know how to harness my magic energy.\n\n\"Who was that?\" She whispered to Mikah.\n\nHer brother shrugged. \"How should I know?\" A smile crept across his face. \"Maybe it's a ghost.\"\n\n\"We should hide.\"\n\nLightflare crawled back up from the gap and bounded over to the two dragonets. \"What did you find?\" she squeaked. The dragonets both shushed her.\n\n\"There's someone coming,\" Mikah explained in a low voice. They could now hear multiple sets of approaching talonsteps.\n\n\"We need to hide,\" Tigerlily urged once again. Mikah silently agreed with a nod, a new glimmer of fear in his eyes. The trio hurried behind one of the large pillars as the mystery dragons continued to approach. Tigerlily kept her wings pulled tight to her side as she dared a peak out at the open passage. A short time passed while they hid in silence, and then a dragon emerged from the hole; It was Spade.\n\nTigerlily felt a sigh of relief escape from her throat.\n\nZao soon appeared behind her brother, following him out of the passage. \"It's only Spade and Zao,\" she said, emerging from the hiding place. The two dragonets looked up at her as she revealed herself, looking confused.\n\n\"Were you guys hiding?\" Zao asked as Mikah shuffled to Tigerlily's side.\n\n\"Hiding?\" Mikah scoffed. \"Of course not. We were just\u2026 looking at the writing on the pillars. What were you doing?\"\n\n\"We thought you guys had gotten lost,\" Tigerlily mentioned.\n\n\"We were just exploring,\" Spade explained, \"And then we met him.\" He nodded his head towards the hidden door as a huge, armored dragon emerged.\n\nTigerlily felt a scream rising up in her throat as she stumbled back. Mikah flared out a wing in front of her as the dragon looked them up and down with icy, yellow eyes.\n\n\"Who\u2026 Who is he?\" Tigerlily asked in a shaky voice.\n\n\"Dudes, chill,\" Zao said. \"He's not going to hurt us.\"\n\nSpade quickly offered an assuring talon, resting it on her shoulder. \"It's okay, he's a friend! His name is Lukai, and he's going to help up. He knows a lot about Lord Nerizza.\"\n\n\"Lord Nerizza-- as in the ruler of the Kingdom of Shadow,\" Mikah growled, not taking his eyes off of Lukai. \"What does he have to do with anything?\"\n\n\"He's Koro's physical host,\" Spade explained. \"Which means I have to...what exactly do I have to do to him?\" He turned to Lightflare, who was sitting on the open pages of the Book of Light, unphased by the ghostly warrior's appearance.\n\n\"Kill him!\" She beamed a huge smile.\n\nSpade's wings drooped. \"Right...\" His talons scraped at the uneven stone floor in discomfort.\n\n\"Wait,\" Lukai stepped forwards, making the group back up. \"He has to kill Nerizza? Isn't the Golden Guardian able to purify objects?\"\n\nLightflare's response was a curt nod.\n\n\"So why can't he just do that on Nerizza?\" The warrior's brow was furrowed in concern.\n\n\"In order to rid Koro from this world, the Golden Guardian needs to perform a purification spell so powerful, the host is seldom able to survive. Lord Nerizza has fallen to a terrible fate. It is not his fault, and it certainly is not fair, but he is a victim of Koro's corruption and must be sacrificed for the sake of every other dragon in the Four Regions. I'm sorry, but there is no other way.\"\n\nLukai didn't respond.\n\nHe only glared down at the little spriteling, ears twitching."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Night fell and Lukai opted to take the night watch, having no need for sleep in his ghostly state. Spade curled up on his blanket and watched the faint, green glow of the warrior as he silently circled the interior of the fortress. After a moment, Spade stood and walked over to him. The warrior's blazing eyes stared blankly into the darkness. In the moonlight, Spade noticed for the first time a long scar across the side of his mouth.\n\n\"Lukai? You, uh, mentioned being a general, right?\" Spade asked quietly as he came up on the warrior's side.\n\nLukai nodded. \"I used to be grand general of the Silverwood First Battalion. I was known as The Iron Wolf.\" He gestured to his helmet, which Spade just then noticed was shaped similar to the head of a wolf.\n\n\"So, you have a lot of experience with fighting?\"\n\nLukai raised an eyebrow. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\"Sixteen.\"\n\n\"I was your age when I joined the military force. It was illegal, of course, to enter that young, but I was able to trick my way in.\" He laughed softly. \"I fought in The North-West War, the Crystal War, and died fighting in the War of Ashes. So, yes. I have plenty of experience with fighting.\" There was a pause. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"I'm really nervous about fighting Koro. I haven't even performed any sort of combat in my life.\"\n\nFor the first time, it seemed, Lukai looked right at Spade and studied him up and down. Spade felt like he was examining every scale on his body, and in return found himself examining the warrior. Then, he felt his jaw drop slightly in realization. He had seen this dragon before. But where? The visions I had after the location spell. He was the dragon with the spear through his chest. If he really is a spirit, where's his body?\n\n\"You have great potential,\" Lukai finally announced. \"I sense a hidden strength in you. If you wish, I could train you. I mentored a number of officers back in the day.\"\n\n\"You would really do that?\" Spade felt relief sweep over him. \"Yes! Thank you! I mean, thank you, sir?\"\n\nLukai smiled. \"No need for respective titles. It would be a great honor to mentor a Guardian.\"\n\n\"When do we start?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning, so get some rest. I will keep watch the rest of the night.\"\n\nSpade nodded and returned to the cave. He yawned and lied down.\n\nMaybe there's nothing to worry about. Lukai is a great fighter, I'm sure. With him as my teacher, I'll be able to take down Koro. His ears pricked at the sound of Lukai talking. It was quiet and almost inaudible.\n\n\"He is only a dragonet.\"\n\nA pause.\n\n\"Yes, but I sense great power in him. His magic energy is incredible. I haven't felt anything like that since I trained Krait.\"\n\nAnother pause.\n\n\"Are you sure you are up to the task of training him, though? You are not as young as you used to be. Of course. I may be old, but without a true body I cease to feel the consequences of age.\"\n\nSilence, and then, \"Very well. One last adventure.\"\n\n\"We start with basic defense,\" Lukai instructed. Morning had come all too fast. Spade blinked the sleep out of his eyes, watching the warrior intently. \"The most common form of fighting you will run into is combat without weapons, or claw-to-claw combat. The key here is standing your ground. Now, are you ready to defend yourself?\"\n\nSpade jumped up enthusiastically and took what he figured was a solid fighting stance. \"I'm read-\" Before he could finish, Lukai swept his tail under Spade's talons and knocked him to the ground. Spade sat up with a groan, spitting out dirt.\n\n\"Your stance is awful,\" Lukai commented. \"You are off focus and too tense.\"\n\n\"So what do I need to do?\"\n\n\"Take up your stance again.\" Spade obeyed and Lukai walked up to his side. The warrior tweaked and adjusted his body.\n\n\"This feels super awkward,\" Spade grunted, trying to hold the position.\n\n\"Loosen your muscles,\" Lukai instructed. Spade obeyed, and the warrior again swept his tail under Spade's talons, and the young dragon crashed to the ground. \"You need to hold your ground.\"\n\n\"But how can I do that and relax?\"\n\n\"Find a balance. Reassume your stance.\"\n\nSpade did so and focused. <Find a balance,> he repeated in his head.\n\n\"Think of it as a tree,\" Lukai said. \"When a strong wind blows, trees bend and twist. But they remain planted on the ground. You must learn to bend the energy of the strike through your body, like a tree in the wind.\" He lashed his tail around once more. This time, as the blow came, Spade didn't move. A stinging shot through his legs as Lukai drew back his tail.\n\n\"Very good. This is the first step towards absorption. Later, you will learn how to completely absorb your attacker's blow, and redirect the energy. Only magic and plasma dragons can do this.\"\n\nSpade gingerly lifted an aching leg and let out a heavy, shaking breath. \"Can Lord Nerizza absorb my blows?\"\n\n\"Yes, his element is plasma. Now take up your stance again.\"\n\nThis time Spade felt ready. His legs still stung but he was prepared to take the blow. However, Lukai lashed out a talon and struck him on the chest instead, sending him flying back. Spade sat up with a gasp, the air having been knocked out of him.\n\nLukai lent a talon and lifted him up. \"You must be ready for any attack, young Guardian.\"\n\n\"Don't you think we're jumping into this a little too fast?\" Spade asked once he had regained his breath. \"Can't we start with... hitting trees or something?\"\n\n\"With all due respect, Guardian, I have a week to prepare you for battle. We have no choice but to 'jump in'.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? We have almost eleven days of traveling ahead of us.\"\n\n\"Yes, about that. I wanted to discuss your route with the rest of your companions. Why did you not choose to cut straight through Nightshade Swamp? It would make your journey much swifter, and it seems you must reach Koro as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Well, we figured it would be safer heading to Harmony, because it's a more frequently traveled route, and so we could stop for supplies.\"\n\n\"Of course, safety,\" Lukai grunted, unsheathing his sword and examining it in a ray of sunlight. \"Guardian, you are going to have to learn that you will not always be able to choose the safe route in life, especially not with a duty such as yours.\"\n\nSpade flicked his ears back uncomfortably. \"Then maybe I'm not cut out for this whole Guardian thing.\"\n\nLukai sheathed his sword. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I always choose the safe route. I'm not brave. I'm not a fighter. I mean, look at me! I'm half your size!\"\n\n\"And what are you going to do about that?\" Spade could tell Lukai was getting at something, but couldn't figure out what. \"Use your size to your advantage. You are much smaller than me, making you a harder target to hit. This is why we are working on standing your ground. You are already quick and agile, but you cannot focus on only one range of strengths if you wish to beat Koro.\"\n\n\"I just don't think I'm ready for this kind of training. You said it yourself, I'm just a dragonet.\"\n\nLukai cocked his head in question. \"When did I say that?\"\n\n\"Last night, when you were talking to yourself,\" Spade replied.\n\nThe warrior wrinkled his snout. \"I do not talk to myself. You must have been hearing things.\" He genuinely seemed to believe this, and Spade almost laughed.\n\n\"So, you're probably going to ignore everything I said about not being ready and we're just going to get back to training, aren't we?\"\n\nLukai nodded. \"Yes, that is precisely what is going to happen. I'm glad you figured that out. Take up your stance.\"\n\nThe morning dragged on, Spade getting more bruises than he could count. Finally the others woke, and Lukai declared that they had trained enough for the morning. Spade gladly joined the group to eat.\n\nZao spread out their map and studied it. \"If we keep heading North-East, we should reach Harmony in about four days.\"\n\nLukai walked over to the table and cleared his throat. \"Actually, young dragonets, I have a proposition.\" The four dragonets looked up at him as he continued. \"If we cut through the Nightshade Swamp we could greatly decrease your travel time, reaching Shadow four days earlier. Although I see why you would like to take a well-traveled path, time is our enemy. Every day that passes by is a day that Koro's power grows stronger. You have a spriteling, a mystic guide, why not put it to use?\"\n\nLightflare's glow brightened and she gave a little wave as everyone glanced over at her.\n\nSpade examined the others as they pondered Lukai's proposal. Tigerlily seemed to be the only one hesitant towards the plan. Her eyes gazed down at the map, and Spade could sense her unease.\n\n\"Well,\" Zao started. \"I agree that time isn't our friend right now. The safe option isn't always the best option. No offense, Tigerlily. I know this route was your idea.\" He gave her an apologetic shrug and she smiled back at him, as though to say \"it's fine.\"\n\n\"Cutting through the Nightshade Swamp may be the smarter decision,\" he continued. \"Now, let's not rule out Harmony just yet. I think we should all take a little time to think this over, and then we can come back and vote on what the best course of action will be. Sound good?\" With no opposition presented, the dragonets dispersed.\n\nSpade walked to the gap where they had first entered the fortress and peered out into the ravine. He glanced over at Zao, who was rummaging through a satchel, and let out a sigh. I wish I could take initiative like Zao. He's such a natural leader. No one would ever listen to me the way they do him. How has he always been so confident?\n\nTalonsteps made him turn away from his friend. Lukai approached Spade with a thoughtful face.\n\n\"Something is bothering you,\" the warrior declared.\n\nSpade shrugged away the comment. \"What do you mean? I'm fine.\"\n\n\"You think I don't know what self doubt looks like?\"\n\n\"I have no idea what you're talking about. I have no self doubt whatsoever.\"\n\n\"Oh really? Then I assume when you claimed you were nowhere near ready for combat training that you were simply joking?\"\n\n\"Well, I might have a little self doubt,\" Spade said with a sigh.\n\n\"You are jealous of your friend Zao's courage. You see nothing special in yourself and find that you constantly compare yourself to others.\"\n\nThe truth of his words stung, and Spade's wings drooped to the floor. \"Something like that,\" was all he muttered.\n\nLukai frowned. \"The greatest enemy we face in this world is ourselves, young Guardian. Koro's presence in our world causes dragons' minds to turn against them. Self doubt, feeling unworthy, jealousy, they are all tools that Koro uses to try and destroy us from the inside out. Do you understand?\"\n\nSpade nodded, staring at the floor.\n\n\"Hey Spade, it's time to decide!\" Zao called as the other dragonets returned to the open map.\n\nAs Spade got up, Lukai added, \"Only by turning to the greater power, the power of the Maker, are we able to overcome dark thoughts. You have a stronger connection to the divine one than other dragons. You must be willing to take advantage of that gift.\"\n\nSpade woke and stretched, unwillingly leaving the comfort of sleep. The sun was just peaking over the distant horizon, announcing the morning's arrival. After coming together back at the ancient fortress, the dragonets had decided to cut through the Nightshade Swamp to save time. Though Tigerlily was hesitant towards the idea, she had decided to go along with it. They had flown for hours the day before, and Spade's wings had never ached so much.\n\nThe group had stopped to rest in a small cluster of trees. The swamp was just ahead of them across a large, grassy field. The air above its dark treetops looked foggy. As Spade scanned the field, out of the corner of his eye he saw Lukai gesturing to him and walked over to the warrior.\n\n\"I have been thinking about what you said the other day, about training. How you don't think you're ready.\"\n\n\"... And?\" Spade asked hesitantly.\n\n\"I believe it is time we start 'hitting trees'.\"\n\nSpade tipped his head to the side in question. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nThey distanced themselves from the group. \"The most important thing to remember when in combat is to know your own strength and how to use that strength, otherwise you may end up doing something regrettable.\" Spade nodded, listening intently. \"As I said previously, claw-to-claw combat is what we will focus on most. However, since you are uncomfortable sparring with me, we must first build up your strength.\" Lukai bared his claws and raked them across the surface of a tree, causing a deep gash. He gestured for Spade to try.\n\nAfter a moment Spade swung his talon as hard as he could, digging his claws into the bark of the tree. They got snagged and he awkwardly pulled them out with his other talon as Lukai inspected the mark.\n\n\"Not bad,\" the warrior commented. \"But not great either. You focused your energy on the initial strike. You must be able to follow through with equal force. You must find a balance.\"\n\nSpade tried again. This time his claws merely grazed the surface of the bark, and he stumbled to the side at the momentum of his swing.\n\n\"I want you to work on that as we continue our journey,\" Lukai instructed. \"It is all a matter of controlled strength. In time, you will be able to gash boulders, and snap whole trees in half with your jaws.\"\n\nSpade raised his eyebrows and laughed. \"A whole tree?\"\n\nSensing his doubt, Lukai grabbed the scarred tree between his jaws and bit down. There was a snap and the top half crashed to the ground, the branches crackling upon impact. Spade's eyes were wide as the warrior shook and spat out bits of bark as if the demonstration had been nothing.\n\n\"Yes, Guardian. A whole tree,\" Lukai remarked with a smile. The warrior suddenly turned his head to the side, his ears straight up.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Spade asked upon seeing the concern in the warrior's eyes.\n\n\"We are being watched,\" Lukai said in a hushed tone, a growl rising in his throat.\n\nSpade followed the warrior's gaze. Hidden in a bush, Spade saw dark, glinting eyes observing the dragons. \"What is it?\" He asked.\n\n\"It is a hound. They have been following us since we left the ravine.\" Spade took a nervous step back towards the warrior. \"Don't worry, I have a plan. You four will head for the swamp. Fly as fast and as high as you can. I will fight them off.\"\n\n\"But what if there are a lot? Will you be able to handle all of them?\"\n\nLukai grinned mischievously. \"You underestimate me, young Guardian. Gather the others quickly and tell them to go. Move slowly so as not to provoke the beasts.\"\n\nSpade obeyed, glancing back at the bushes. The eyes had disappeared. He moved to the others and told them in a whisper, \"Guys, we need to fly to the swamp. There are hounds watching us.\"\n\n\"What?\" Tigerlily gasped.\n\nSpade held a claw to his mouth and gestured to the bushes where Lukai was standing and slowly drawing his sword. \"They're hiding. Lukai is going to fight them off.\" He grabbed his satchel and swung it onto his back. The others followed his instructions and packed up, making their way to the field.\n\nThey halted and Spade looked back at Lukai. The warrior watched the dragonets, and then after a pause gave a nod.\n\n\"Go!\" Spade hissed, and the dragonets leapt into the air. He heard the rustle of the beasts running forwards, and the snarls and clangs as they grappled with Lukai. Spade flapped his wings to gain height, the others right behind him. He could hear the heavy pawsteps pursuing them, and dared a look back. The hounds were charging after the dragonets, mouths foaming and bushy tails whipping behind them.\n\nLukai had stains of blood on his armor, and had pinned down one of the massive beasts, sinking his sword into its chest. It let out a squeal of pain and then layed limp. The warrior jumped into the air and landed in front of two of the hounds, flaring his wings and letting out a thunderous roar. The hounds growled in return and leapt at the warrior. Lukai hit one aside and slashed his claws across the face of the second. Both snarled in rage and whirled back to strike again. Lukai lowered his head, teeth bared as the beasts circled him. They attacked again and tackled him, jaws clanking against the metal of his armor. The warrior blasted a bolt of magic at the beasts, sending them flying into the air. One remained still on the ground, while another squirmed to its paws and limped off.\n\nSpade suddenly came to a jerking halt as one of the hounds leapt up and bit onto his tail, yanking him to the ground. He yelped at the painful sting of the beast's fangs and hit the ground with a thud. Quickly, he spun around and shot a ball of fire at the hound's face. It shrieked and released his tail, and then leapt at him. One huge paw pressed down on his chest, and another on his wing. He pushed at the beast's face as it snapped its jaws at him, inches from his snout. Screaming internally, he released another fireball into its mouth and it stumbled back, coughing up smoke. Lukai was upon the beast in an instant, jumping onto its back and wrapping his arms around its neck. It reared on its hind legs with a furious snarl and spun around, but the warrior held on tight, constricting his grip on its throat until the beast faltered in its step, and slowly crumpled to the ground.\n\nLukai, breathing heavily, slid off the hound's back and shook off. \"I haven't done that in a while,\" he said with a laugh.\n\n\"How\u2026 How many more are there?' Spade asked through gasps.\n\nThey looked back at the clump of trees and saw five more hounds emerging into the field. \"We need to go,\" Lukai instructed as the hounds began to run forwards. \"Now! Hurry!\" They flew up into the sky, spying the others far ahead, almost to the swamp. Lukai's chest lit up and he shot a powerful magic blast down at the beasts. They scattered as dirt showered into the air, the ground exploding upon contact with the blast.\n\nSpade flapped his wings as hard as he could, tail throbbing and dripping with blood. Soon they were high enough where the hounds could not reach them, and Spade asked, \"Where's your sword?\"\n\n\"I lost it. One of the hounds pulled it out of my grip, and before I could get it the hound had grabbed you.\"\n\n\"Oh. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"No need. I have gone through countless swords in my time as a military officer. They are only weapons and nothing more.\" He looked down. \"The hounds are still following us.\"\n\nSpade watched as the beasts trailed through the tall, wavy grass, heads bent up to stare at the dragons overhead. \"Do you think they're going to follow us all the way to the swamp?\"\n\n\"Hopefully they will let off soon\u2026 but I can't be sure.\"\n\nSpade and Lukai caught up to the others and took the lead. The hounds continued their pursuit below. The dragons found themselves immersed in a thin fog as they neared the swamp.\n\n\"They're not going to stop following us, are they?\" Tigerlily asked tiredly.\n\n\"Fighting may be our only option if we wish to escape them. You four fly ahead once we get over the swamp. They will not be able to track you through the trees. I will finish them off-\" Before he finished, there was a whoosh and a thwack. One of the hounds squealed and fell to the ground. Curious, the dragons stopped, hovering in the air to watch through the growing fog. Four more whooshes sounded, and the rest of the hounds dropped dead.\n\n\"What happened?\" Spade asked.\n\nThere was a rustling of tree branches, and three new dragons emerged from the swamp canopy below. Lukai growled as they circled around the group. But as they came into view, Spade realized something strange about these dragons: their wings were feathered. They were all three decorated in paint and beads. The dragons carried spears and bows, which they lowered upon approaching the dragonet group. They spoke amongst themselves in a strange language.\n\nThe one who seemed to be the leader came forwards and dipped his head. He looked young, and had green scales with dark, silvery feathers. \"Greetings, travelers. We are of the Nightshade Tribe. Do you require shelter and rest?\"\n\n\"Your offer is kind,\" Lukai addressed the mysterious dragon. \"But what assurance do we have that you won't harm us?\"\n\n\"You saw how we saved you from the hounds. If we meant to kill you, you would already be dead.\"\n\nLukai raised a suspicious eyebrow.\n\nThe feathered dragon's tone became anxious. \"Please, let us discuss this on the ground, where it is safe. You must not stay up here much longer.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\" Lukai inquired.\n\n\"The plants of the swamp, they release toxins that rise up and taint the air. It will poison our lungs if we do not retreat below the treetops.\"\n\nAfter a moment of hesitation, Lukai nodded for the feathered dragons to lead the way back to the ground. They nodded in return and dove for the trees. The dragonets followed behind Lukai.\n\nOnce safe on the ground, Lukai continued his discussion with the Nightshade dragons. A light rain began drizzling down from the sky, though the dragons were sheltered under the thick branches of trees. The ground was a muddy sheet dotted with puddles. Reeds sprouted out in clumps. The mix of alders and cypress offered a thick, leafy canopy.\n\n\"I wish there was more assurance we could offer you,\" the leader of the feathered dragons was saying. \"But our word is all that we can give. We have helped many travelers who have strayed into our swamp. It is a dangerous place, and lots of dragons die.\"\n\n\"Very well, we gratefully accept,\" Lukai declared, though his muscles were still tensed in uncertainty.\n\nThe Nightshade dragons nodded and led them away. They traveled deep into the marshy swamp. As they trekked, Spade overheard Mikah chatting with one of the dragons.\n\n\"So what exactly is so dangerous about this place?\" Mikah asked.\n\n\"There are many creatures that live here,\" the dragon began. \"Swarms of parasites that can eat a dragon alive, giant serpentines with tunneling ability known as lockjaws, poisonous flowers and trees, and much more. Most fruit that grows here is filled with a toxin that can corrupt a dragon's mind. It clouds your judgment and makes you see things that aren't really there. The swamp is also like a massive maze. If one does not know where he is going, he could easily get lost.\"\n\n\"So how do you guys know your way around?\"\n\n\"Generations of living here have given us a keen sense of direction. We have adapted to the harsh environment and know how to move through it with ease, and live in harmony with this fierce nature. To survive here, one must not try and control nature. One must respect it.\"\n\nThe Nightshade Village was nestled in a large hollow, beams of light shooting down from gaps in the thick, lush canopy towering overhead. The ceiling of branches was so high that dragons could fly around with ease. Two massive willows stood sentry at the entrance. In the center of the village was another willow, but this one was white as snow. Its pearly roots could be seen weaving throughout the huts and structures, seeming to connect everything.\n\nA dragoness emerged from the drapes of the white willow to meet them. She stood in a regal stance. Her scales were magenta and chestnut. Necklaces of beads and feathers decorated her body. \"Greetings, travelers,\" She said, her voice soft and sweet. \"I am Delilah-Rose, daughter of Chief Starblaze. My father will see you shortly. For now, please follow me to where you will be staying.\"\n\nThe dragonets filed after her. Spade turned when he realized Mikah wasn't following. His brother seemed to be frozen, eyes gazing down at where Delilah-Rose had been standing.\n\n\"Mikah?\" he asked. Mikah didn't seem to hear him, so Spade called again. Mikah's face snapped up and he stared after Delilah-Rose as she led the others away. Spade suddenly caught on and raised his eyebrows with a smile.\n\nEars pinned, Mikah scrunched his snout and glared at Spade dismissively. \"What are you looking at?\" he snapped, taking an awkward step forwards and tripping over his own talons. The dragonet quickly regained his footing and shuffled after the group, tail flicking back and forth.\n\nA circle of five small huts woven out of leafy branches serves as their dorms. Two were on the ground, while the other three were extended in the air by vines. The insides were beautiful, lined with cloth and leaves, and decorated with shining gems, feathers, and flowers.\n\n\"I hope this is adequate,\" Delilah-Rose said. Spade could tell she was more fluent in their language than the other Nightshade dragons. \"It is the best we have to offer. May I ask where you are traveling to?\"\n\n\"The Kingdom of Shadow,\" Tigerlily replied.\n\n\"Oh! Whatever is your business in that terrible place?\"\n\n\"What do you mean 'terrible'?\"\n\nDelilah-Rose seemed to grow uncomfortable, wings folding close to her side. She lowered her voice. \"We are not supposed to talk about it, but we have been sensing a darkness consuming that place. A dark power is growing, something strong enough to destroy the whole Four Regions. Even our swamp, a threshold of power and life, is not as green or rich as it used to be.\" She hesitated, and then whispered, \"Something, or someone, is trying to drain the life out of this world.\"\n\nSpade gulped. She was talking about Koro."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Spade paced the clearing around the huts anxiously, glancing up at every noise.\n\n\"You do not need to be nervous,\" Lukai commented.\n\n\"I'm not nervous,\" Spade replied. \"I'm just\u2026\" He stopped pacing and sat down. \"Yeah, I'm nervous.\"\n\nBright rays of sun streamed through small gaps in the leafy ceiling above the camp, and Spade guessed it was almost noon. It felt as though he had been waiting for hours. Finally the young, green-scaled dragon approached the dragonets and dipped his head in greeting. Spade recognized him; he had been in the trio that had first found the dragonets.\n\n\"My name is Fernwing,\" the dragon said in greeting. Paint decorated his face in branch-like patterns, running down his neck. \"Chief Starblaze requests an audience with you two.\" Fernwing gestured to Spade and Tigerlily.\n\nSpade wondered why the chief wanted to see Tigerlily as they followed Fernwing to the white willow in the center of the village. They pushed through the silky drape of leaves, finding a large, cone-shaped hut built around the trunk of the willow.\n\nChief Starblaze sat inside, contemplative eyes focused on a chain necklace in his talon. The necklace had a royal-blue gem connected to the cold chain. The chief was an amber-scaled dragon with a dark stripe running along his spine and black spikes. He wore bead necklaces and an impressive headpiece made from colorful feathers. His body was scarred from many battles. In a sense, he reminded Spade of Lukai.\n\n\"Greetings, young Guardian,\" the chief said as they entered the hut, setting the necklace in his talon on a low table. \"I am Chief Starblaze.\"\n\nSpade took a deep breath. \"I'm Spade, and this is my sister Tigerlily. It's a pleasure to meet you.\"\n\n\"Please, have a seat. I hear you are journeying to the Kingdom of Shadow. That is where Koro resides?\"\n\n\"You know about Koro?\"\n\n\"I know about many things, young Guardian.\"\n\nSpade flicked his tail to the side. Why was everyone's immediate title for him always \"young Guardian\"? Why wasn't it something cool, like \"mystic Guardian\" or \"valiant Guardian\"? Or even just \"Guardian\"?\n\n\"If you know about Koro, do you think you could help us?\" Tigerlily asked.\n\nThe chief pondered her question. \"If you mean, can I help you defeat Koro? Then, no. But I can help you in other ways. I sense strong magic in you.\" He pointed a claw at Tigerlily. \"It is rare that siblings are born with this element, especially two so close in age. You have a special connection that you are not aware of yet. I can help you both focus your magic and grow that link, if you wish. Here, let me show you what I am talking about.\" He grabbed their talons and set them so that they were touching palms. \"I want you to both close your eyes. Now, clear your minds. Tigerlily, think of something. Anything. Spade, see if you can sense what she is thinking of.\"\n\nSpade felt his talon begin to tingle. At first, he saw nothing in the darkness before his closed eyes. Then an image began to form. It was a journal, no, a book? It was white and gold, with pages made of light.\n\n\"The Book of Light?\" He guessed. Tigerlily smiled and nodded.\n\n\"Very good,\" Starblaze said. \"Now you try, Tigerlily. What is Spade thinking about?\" There was a moment of silence.\n\n\"Is it...Chief Starblaze's necklace?\"\n\nSpade replied yes and they opened their eyes. Tigerlily stared at her talon in wonder.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" She asked Starblaze.\n\nThe chief laughed. \"I did not do anything. It was all your magic.\" He picked up the necklace with the blue gem from the table and held it up for Spade to examine. Spade hadn't meant to think of it; he had actually been trying to think of Lukai, but he couldn't stop wondering why Starblaze seemed so captivated by that necklace.\n\n\"It was my wife's,\" the chief explained, a bittersweet smile on his face. \"She passed five years ago. This was my engagement gift to her.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" was all Spade could think to say.\n\nTalonsteps turned their attention to the entrance of the chief's hut. Two dragons entered, draping out their feathered wings and bowing. Starblaze spoke to them in their strange language and they stood.\n\n\"This is Morning-Flower and Rainstorm, my head scouts,\" Starblaze explained. \"What do you have to report?\"\n\n\"The vibrations from yesterday are growing stronger, and have neared the village,\" the dragoness Morning-Flower replied. \"We are almost certain now that they are lockjaws.\"\n\nThere was a hint of concern in Starblaze's voice as he said, \"Send two more groups out and keep me updated. I will make sure the guards are on alert.\"\n\nThe head scouts bowed once again and retreated from the hut, disappearing through the wall of white leaves.\n\n\"What are lockjaws?\" Tigerlily asked once they had gone.\n\n\"They are serpentine creatures who roam the swamp,\" Starblaze explained. \"They tend to stay underground in their tunnels, but are occasionally sighted on the surface. Over the past week they have seemed to become restless, advancing to the surface more often and spreading to further areas of the swamp.\"\n\n\"Have they ever attacked your village?\" Spade asked.\n\nStarblaze shook his head. \"No, but we are growing anxious of the beasts' wandering. But that is no concern of yours. Come, let us further explore your magic capabilities.\"\n\nSpade could tell Starblaze was merely attempting to brush away the topic. The dragonets followed him out of the white willow's barrier and through the village. Some dragons were leaving on patrols, while others cooked, sewed, or just walked around. Three older dragons were playing the drums, filling the village with a soft, peaceful tune.\n\nAs they walked to the edge of the village Starblaze gestured a dragon over who was clothed in thick, leather armor. The chief spoke to him quietly in their language, and the dragon gave a curt nod before walking away to address a group of more armored dragons. Spade guessed that those were the guards Starblaze had mentioned.\n\nThe chief took Spade and Tigerlily away from the village to a gorgeous clearing open to the sky. There was a pond in the center, with two large, flat stones on opposite sides.\n\n\"Each of you sit on top of a stone, facing each other,\" the chief instructed. They obeyed. \"Good. Now close your eyes and take a deep breath. You must be calm and centered.\"\n\nAs the chief spoke, Tigerlily slowly inhaled and exhaled, feeling slightly awkward at the exercise. But she didn't complain; She was excited to start using real magic. Ever since they had discovered her power back at the Northern Temple, she had been wondering if she would find a mentor, like Lukai was to Spade. Maybe it would be Starblaze. She liked him; He was very calm and wise, but not boring. He spoke with purpose and was to-the-point. She thought he would make a great mentor.\n\n\"Now as you relax,\" she refocused on the chief's voice. \"I want you to think of a sentence, Spade. Tigerlily, you will guess the sentence. Take your time. Feel the energy in the air between you.\"\n\nTigerlily pressed her eyes shut and scrunched her face as she focused. She felt a tingling in her temples and took a deep breath, trying to imagine waves of energy flowing from her mind to Spade's. Words began forming in her head. \"Why is...Mikah...always...so hungry,\" she said, then laughed.\n\nStarblaze had them try again, going back and forth for almost an hour.\n\n\"Very good,\" Starblaze sounded impressed after they finished the exercise. \"Now you will have a conversation. This is called a mind link, when dragons communicate through telepathic waves. This can normally only be done between two magic dragons. You may open your eyes during this exercise.\"\n\nTigerlily and Spade stared at each other intensely for a long time. Spade squinted.\n\nTigerlily rubbed her buzzing temples and called to him in her mind louder and louder.\n\n<Hello?> His voice suddenly echoed in her mind.\n\n<Spade! Can you hear me?> She called back.\n\nHis eyes widened. <Yes! I can hear you! It's working!>\n\n<Now what?>\n\n<Let's--> he cut off and Tigerlily had a sudden painful headache. She noticed Spade was rubbing his head as if he did too.\n\n\"No worries,\" Starblaze assured them. \"You simply lost your grip on the link. That was very good for your first attempt. I urge you to keep practicing-\" Suddenly his ears pricked and he turned and looked towards the village.\n\nTigerlily strained her ears and heard the ringing of a bell in the distance. \"What is that?\" she asked, noticing that Starblaze had become tense.\n\n\"It is the alarm,\" the chief gasped. \"Quickly, we must return to the village!\"\n\nThe village was a sea of chaos. Mothers rushed their younglings inside, the guards were gathering their weapons, screams filled the hollow, and near the far end Fernwing was frantically banging on the bell.\n\n\"Find the others and get somewhere safe,\" Spade instructed Tigerlily.\n\n\"But what about you?\" She asked, eyes wide in panic.\n\n\"I'll be fine, just go.\" Something inside of Spade longed to follow the chief and find out the cause of the sudden disarray. With a quick nod, Tigerlily obeyed him and bounded off towards the visitor huts.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Starblaze was asking Fernwing, who shrieked something in their language and then ran off in panic to join the guards.\n\n\"What did he say?\" Spade asked over the noise of the village.\n\n\"Lockjaws,\" Starblaze breathed. He darted into his hut and pulled out a spear, a sash of arrows, and a bow. \"You must get to safety with your friends, young Guardian,\" he urged.\n\nThere was a sudden violent rumbling near the entrance of the village. All of the Nightshade dragons were now hidden in their huts or crouching in the tree branches above. Starblaze held up a talon, signaling for Spade to stop, and stepped back into the drapes of the white willow.\n\nAs the rumbling grew, a mound of dirt rose up, as though something was slithering right beneath the surface of the ground. It was a lockjaw.\n\nStarblaze gave a quick signal with his talons to the guards, who crawled up into a clump of trees, ready to pounce. He then ushered Spade back into his hut and they crouched down behind the low table.\n\n\"If the lockjaw does not see us, there is a chance it may leave,\" Starblaze whispered. \"I am guessing that it is only a scout, examining the area for the others of its kind.\"\n\nSpade gulped as he heard a soft, singing-like noise that sent a chill down his spine.\n\nThe creature arose from the ground, dirt spilling off its bark-like scales. The lockjaw's long, serpentine body was thicker than a tree, and a branchy, crown-like frill decorated its head. Eight spider-like eyes were nestled above four-way parting jaws.\n\nThe glistening eyes scanned the empty camp like a hawk scans a field for prey. Still humming its eerie singing noise, the creature's jaws twitched and chewed, as though eager to rip into some innocent dragon's flesh.\n\nSpade craned his neck to watch as the lockjaw slithered around the clearing. His talon suddenly slipped and he caught himself with a thud, dreadfully loud in the stillness of the camp. The creature whipped its head around, jaws snapping at the air excitedly, and made its way over to the white willow.\n\nSpade felt sick as he scooted back behind the table and the pitiful extent of safety it offered. Starblaze was silently stringing an arrow onto his bow.\n\nThe creature's head was the first thing they could see as it pushed through the draping leaves. The spider-like eyes fixed themselves onto the chief's hut, and the singing came to an abrupt halt. All they could hear was the lockjaw's deep breathing as it slithered closer.\n\nThe silence pounded in Spade's ears.\n\nIt had just reached the entrance of the hut when Spade saw a flash of realization in its eyes as it spotted the two crouching dragons inside. Before it could react, Starblaze stood and released his arrow. It struck the creature straight in one of its larger eyes. The lockjaw lashed back its head and released an ear-splitting screech as blood spattered onto the hut from its wound. Its body squirmed and writhed in pain as it howled. Two more arrows came from the guards in the tree and struck it in the back of the head. With a final choked, gurgling squeal it fell limp to the ground.\n\nStarblaze ran out of his hut, leaping over the beast's corpse, and through the drapes of the willow. \"Climb into the trees!\" He roared to his tribe members. \"Your huts are no longer safe! More of the beasts will be coming-\" As he spoke, more violent rumbling neared. Three lockjaws exploded from the ground around him. Again the village erupted in screams as dragons scrambled from their huts up into the tree branches to safety.\n\nSpade, who had dashed to follow the chief, was knocked back as one of the creatures burst up right in front of his path. It twisted around to face him and parted its jaws in a shriek of fury. The lockjaw dove, smashing into the ground as Spade rolled out of the way. It recoiled to strike again and Spade shuffled back, eyes wide in terror, until he bumped into something. A hiss escaped the lockjaw's throat.\n\nSpade looked up to see Lukai standing over him. The warrior flared out his wings and gave a challenging roar. The lockjaw screeched in return and dove again. Lukai leapt into the air and flew past it, claws nicking the side of its neck, further drawing its attention away from Spade. His chest lit up and he released a bolt of magic that blasted the lockjaw in the back of the head. Furious, the creature whipped around and snapped at him, only to bite the air.\n\n\"Spade! Look out!\" the warrior suddenly yelled.\n\nSpade turned in time to see a massive lockjaw whip its tail around. It smacked into Spade and he was knocked into a hut, smashing through the walls. He groaned and stood on weak legs, focusing his vision. When he coughed, his chest seemed to burn. There was a crunch and he looked up as another lockjaw bit onto the top of the hut and lifted it into the air. He tried to jump out but his leg was stuck in the tangle of branches. As the lockjaw swung the hut back and forth, Spade tugged and pulled, stomach lurching. He shot a blast of magic at the branches and his leg finally snapped free. The hut spun and he braced his body, trying to find balance.\n\nA horrible feeling settled in his gut, the feeling of falling, as the lockjaw released the hut. There was a crash and sharp pain in his wing. His nose was bleeding as he stumbled out of the wreckage.\n\nI have to get to the others, he thought. Where would they have gone?\n\nTigerlily grasped the branches of the tree, claws digging into the hard bark and heart racing. She was above the village, hidden from the view of the rampaging lockjaws by a thick clump of leaves. Mikah and Zao were crouched beside her.\n\n\"Did anybody see where Spade went?\" She asked quietly, hesitant to raise her voice louder than a whisper.\n\n\"I thought I saw him with the chief,\" Zao replied, \"but I lost him when the lockjaws came.\"\n\n\"Look, there's Lukai!\" Tigerlily pointed a claw towards the warrior, who was wrestling with one of the beasts, armor stippled with fresh drops of blood. \"We should help him.\"\n\n\"Brilliant idea,\" Mikah hissed. \"After we scrape up your mauled body, would you prefer cremation or a traditional burial?\"\n\nTigerlily glared at him but stayed put, realizing there really wasn't any way she could help the warrior. If only I knew how to use my magic, she thought.\n\nJust then, Lukai sent a huge magic blast at the lockjaw, and it thrashed around in pain. It's flailing body slammed into the tree the dragonets were hidden in. There was a loud crack, and the tree snapped at the force of the blow. Tigerlily shut her eyes as she felt the tree begin to fall, a scream rising in her throat. Her stomach dropped as wind rushed past her face. There was a crunch as the tangle of branches smashed to the ground.\n\nTigerlily was thrown to the floor of the camp and gasped as she landed on her side. She quickly stumbled to her talons, noting where Mikah and Zao had landed nearby.\n\n\"Come on guys, get up!\" Tigerlily called, helping them to their talons.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Zao asked, pointing a claw at her forehead. Tigerlily felt around with her talon and winced as she came in contact with a gash. In her panic she hadn't even noticed it. It was as if at her sudden attention to the wound made it ache, and she touched it again, gingerly.\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" she said. \"We should find Spade.\"\n\n\"And Delilah-Rose,\" Mikah added quickly. Tigerlily raised an eyebrow, curious of his interest in the dragoness, and he returned her gesture with a glare. \"What? She's the chief's daughter, I'm sure Starblaze would want her safe.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Starblaze wants her safe,\" Zao snickered. Mikah didn't respond to the comment, only muttered something under his breath.\n\nTigerlily suggested they begin looking at the visitor huts. As the dragonets made their way across the bloody, tattered camp, Tigerlily heard Lukai roar, and turned. The lockjaw had regathered itself and grabbed the warrior's arm in its jaws. It yanked him into the air and swung him aside, sending him flying through the branches of the white willow. There was a loud crash as he smashed into Starblaze's hut inside.\n\n\"Lukai!\" Tigerlily gasped. At her cry, the beast turned its attention to the three dragonets. It lowered its head and hissed, blood dripping from its wounds. Before they could flee, an arrow stabbed into its neck and it whipped around with a shriek. Delilah-Rose stood only a few yards away, empty bow in her hands. Her eyes widened as the lockjaw charged. She reached for more arrows, but her quiver was empty.\n\nIn a swift move, Mikah grabbed a nearby broken spearhead and flew at the beast. He dug the blade into the back of its head, and it fell to the ground squirming. As it flailed and struggled, Mikah leaned his weight into the weapon, struggling to keep it in the beast's flesh.\n\n\"Run!\" Zao yelled to Delilah-Rose, bolting over to help Mikah.\n\nThe lockjaw growled and spat out blood, twisting under the dragonets' hold. Then, from the drapes of the willow, Lukai emerged with a mighty roar. He grasped a curved shortsword in his talons. Its handle was wrapped in a dark, worn leather and the blade had specks of rust from age. Lukai charged the beast and plunged the blade into its forehead. Finally, the beast ceased its struggle.\n\nTigerlily dashed over to join them. Mikah let out a heavy breath and stepped away from the limp body. Tigerlily could see his legs shaking. She found a warm, unfamiliar admiration rising in her chest as she looked at her brother. That was so brave of him, she thought. I...I didn't know he could even do something like that.\n\n\"Have you seen Spade?\" Lukai inquired as he ripped the sword from the beast's skull.\n\n\"No, we were just going to look for him,\" Tigerlily explained.\n\nDelilah-Rose approached Mikah and gave a shy smile. \"Thank you, brave one. You saved my life.\"\n\nMikah's cheeks turned bright red and he returned the grin. \"Oh, that? It was nothing.\"\n\nTigerlily exchanged a puzzled look with Zao and found herself taking a step back, as though to give them space. Then, they all turned as there came a high-pitched cry from one of the lockjaws. Tigerlily gasped when she saw what was going on. The beasts retreated from their scuffling, gathering together at the far end of camp. And in the middle of the assembled lockjaws stood Spade.\n\nSpade stared up as the lockjaw towered over him. It's eyes looked him over with curiosity, and then it bent down to sniff him. He took a nervous step back, but once he could look into the beast's soft gaze at eye level, he felt his fear begin to fade away. This lockjaw did not mean to hurt him. Why was it so interested in him, so much so that it had summoned its beastly companions to encircle him? The lockjaw glanced towards the edge of the village, to the thick swampland, and seemed to gesture to Spade.\n\n\"Spade!\" Lukai yelled, making him jump. The warrior ran over to him, and one of the lockjaws hissed. Lukai snarled in return and poised to strike, but Spade leapt in front of him.\n\n\"Wait!\" Spade cried, and the warrior stopped. \"Don't hurt them, they want to lead me somewhere.\"\n\nThe warrior's glare made Spade shrink back. \"And you think that's a good idea, why?\" he growled.\n\nThe biggest lockjaw chirped and nudged Lukai, who snapped at it threateningly. \"Lukai,\" Spade said, making the warrior turn his attention back to the dragonet. \"Maybe if I do what they want, they'll leave the village alone. You said it yourself, I have to be willing to take the dangerous path.\"\n\nLukai looked skeptical. The lockjaw hissed impatiently. \"I'm going with you,\" the warrior finally said. He took a step towards Spade and the largest lockjaw screeched, cutting off the warrior's path with its tail.\n\n\"I'll be okay alone,\" Spade said, trying to act more confident than he felt.\n\n\"If anything happened to you...\"\n\n\"See if they will allow you to take my daughter with you,\" Chief Starblaze spoke up. Delilah-Rose's eyes widened. Lukai raised an eyebrow. \"She is a fierce warrior, and she knows her way around the swamp. If anything goes wrong she will know a way out. Of course, only if you wish to go, my flower.\" He set a loving talon on Delilah-Rose's shoulder.\n\nShe nodded confidently. \"I will go, father.\"\n\nMikah touched wings with her as she moved away. \"Wait,\" he said, and hesitated before asking. \"Do\u2026 Do you want me to go with you?\"\n\nDelilah-Rose returned the touch and smiled. \"I will be alright, brave one. The Maker will protect your brother and I.\"\n\nThe lockjaws watched as Delilah-Rose came to Spade's side, but they did not react. Spade nodded to the leader and it chirped to the others, slithering into the trees. Spade and Delilah-Rose followed. Lockjaws surrounded them on all sides. Before they were completely engulfed by the swamp, Spade shot a final glance back at Lukai. The warrior was glaring after the beasts, sword clenched in his talon and nostrils flaring, and in his eyes there flashed a glimmer of fear.\n\nThey traveled far away from the village to a large cave draped in vines. The strange singing echoed from inside. Spade shivered as they entered. All of the lockjaws fanned off, leaving Spade and Delilah-Rose to follow only the largest beast. In the darkness of the tunnel, the lockjaw's veins glowed a soft green.\n\n\"The lockjaws are immune to the chemicals of the plants in the swamp,\" Delilah-Rose explained in a whisper. \"When they eat them, the toxins enter their bloodstream, which causes them to have luminescent blood.\"\n\nThe beast led them down for a long while, until eventually the ground sloped up to a wide space open to the sky, surrounded by walls of stone. A ring of small pools surrounded a massive lockjaw curled up on a slab of stone. It's muscles rippled with each labored breath, and its scales were tinted red. It woke upon their entrance and sang a few sad notes to the lockjaw leading the dragonets. They touched their foreheads lovingly and chirped.\n\nDelilah-Rose walked up to the red lockjaw and set a gentle talon on its neck. \"He's sick,\" she said. Spade joined her and the lockjaw's cloudy eyes focused on him. He set his talon next to Delilah-Rose's, and felt a surge of magic energy, eyes widening.\n\nDelilah-Rose seemed to notice his reaction. \"Lockjaws are said to have a strong connection to nature, just like dragons.\"\n\nSpade suddenly thought back to the mind link exercises Starblaze had taught him and Tigerlily. <Would I be able to form a link with the lockjaw?> He wondered. As if at the thought, he felt his talon begin to vibrate and a deep, rumbling voice filled his head.\n\n<Why dragons here?> The lockjaw growled.\n\n<Your friend brought me here,> Spade replied. <My name is Spade.>\n\n<Not a friend.> The lockjaw said. <She is mate. Amier.> The lockjaw gestured to him. <Your name Spade?> Spade nodded. <Mine Alpha Kyron.>\n\nSpade stopped the link and turned to Delilah-Rose. \"Do you know if we can help him?\"\n\n\"The Golden Guardian is prophesied to have incredible healing powers,\" she replied.\n\n\"I don't know any healing spells.\"\n\n\"Healing doesn't come from spells. You draw in the energy of nature.\"\n\nWith his talon still on Alpha Kyron, Spade took a deep breath. He sensed every tree, leaf, and animal of the swamp emanating life, and drew that force from the ground up into his talons, which glowed and buzzed. For a split second he felt the lockjaw's pain: a terrible headache, weak muscles, and spasms. Then it faded away.\n\nAlpha Kyron blinked his eyes and shook his head. He chirped, rising from his feeble, curled position. Amier chirped happily and nuzzled him, the frills of her crown rattling. She then locked eyes with Spade and he heard her voice in his head.\n\n<Thank you, kind dragon. Alpha Kyron sick for long time. Not know how to heal. We search for heal, and raid village. We wish to make amends.>\n\n\"What is it saying?\" Delilah-Rose asked.\n\n\"They want to make peace with your village,\" Spade explained.\n\n\"Really? So you are speaking to it? That's incredible. Who ever thought these creatures were actually that intelligent.\"\n\n<You are welcome to accompany us back to the village,> Spade said. Amier didn't respond. Spade tried again, energizing the link, and she seemed to receive the message. She chirped to Alpha Kyron, who screeched, summoning a group of lockjaws. He looked down at Spade, gesturing for him to lead the way.\n\n\"I know how to get back to the village,\" Delilah-Rose said, walking beside him.\n\nSpade smiled and held out a talon to the tunnel. \"Lead the way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Spade and Delilah-Rose returned to dozens of bewildered and wary faces. The Nightshade dragons clutched their weapons nervously as the two dragonets approached, followed by the pack of lockjaws, who hummed their eerie song. Lukai stood among the feathered dragons, blazing eyes watching the two dragonets approach.\n\nSpade glanced at Delilah-Rose, not sure what to do. The dragoness gave an encouraging smile and gestured with her wing to the crowd. Spade took a deep breath.\n\n\"They've come to make amends,\" he explained. \"The only reason they raided your village was because their alpha was sick, and they didn't know how to heal him. They are here to apologize.\"\n\nChief Starblaze walked to the front of the group, touching wings with Delilah-Rose as he passed. Four guards escorted him, eyes glaring at the serpentine beasts. Alpha Kyron slithered up to the chief and dipped his head. Spade could sense the energy of their mind link as they both stared at each other. After a moment Alpha Kyron hissed and chirped to his comrades, and two lockjaws branched off from the rest, carrying a large, red stone with their jaws. They set it beside Alpha Kyron and retreated back to their ranks. Starblaze's eyes widened.\n\n\"What is it?\" Spade asked.\n\n\"It is a ruby...but I have never seen one this size before. They are offering it as a sign of peace, to symbolize the blood shed by both our tribes.\"\n\nAgain, Starblaze and Alpha Kyron formed a mind link. They discussed something, then the chief turned to his tribe. \"Friends. Family,\" he began. \"It has been decided. These beasts and the dragons of Nightshade will no longer live in fear of each other, but shall instead peacefully coexist. They have offered us their help, and in return we give them ours. Let us celebrate this unity!\"\n\nThe Nightshade dragons roared and cheered. The lockjaws joined the cry, screeching to the sky.\n\nA party was held, lasting long into the night. Their joyous hollers could be heard throughout the entire swamp. Spade and his friends had their fill of the thrills: They danced, ate and sang with the rest of the village.\n\nAs the night dragged on, Spade found himself worn out, walking up to Lukai, who had been watching the festivities for the past few hours but never joining in.\n\nThe warrior was talking to himself softly. \"We do not celebrate. What is the point? It will only bring back memories. We do not think of the past. But we do. It must not be shown.\"\n\n\"Why haven't you joined the party?\" Spade asked.\n\nLukai's narrow eyes scanned the village scene. \"I have never been one for parties,\" was his excuse. \"I find them foolish.\" His jaw was tight.\n\n\"Are you sure that's why?\" Spade prodded.\n\nLukai nodded, but then admitted with a sigh, \"The last party I went to was after the North-West War. My best friend, Twilight, had died in that war. It was\u2026 strange, seeing dragons so happy and joyous, when I had witnessed the deaths of so many. I wanted to mourn their loss, not celebrate a victory that they died to achieve. I guess I've just never seen the appeal since then.\"\n\nSpade didn't know what to say. He couldn't imagine the things Lukai had seen in war that had affected him so terribly, even years after the fact. He stared up at the scarred warrior, who was watching the festivities with a blank expression, and wondered what he was thinking. What memories were flashing through his mind? Spade felt a small surge in his chest, running up his neck, and formed an involuntary mind link with Lukai.\n\nA terrible scene followed. Lukai was on a battlefield. The land was scorched, nothing but a field of dirt, ash, and mangled bodies. There were flaming stones crashing down from the sky, exploding on contact with the ground. Lukai was crouched in a ditch littered with fallen soldiers, a river of blood at his talons. His armor was dented, streaked with mud and ash. There was a dragon beside him, with dark blue scales that faded into a soft crimson red. The dragon was Twilight.\n\n\"Lukai, what's our next move?\" Twilight asked.\n\n\"We wait for General Zyro's orders,\" Lukai roared over the sound of an exploding shell. Dirt from the impact rained into the ditch on top of them. They shook out their wings.\n\n\"Lukai...the general is dead.\"\n\n\"What?!\"\n\n\"They surrounded him back at Sundazzle Lake, before we had to fall back.\"\n\n\"Then we need to regroup with the rest of the battalion. Do you know which way they went?\"\n\nTwilight shook his head, ducking at the rumble of another explosion. They had been separated from the main group upon retreating. \"They probably headed back to the fort in the Golden Fields.\"\n\n\"Then that's where we need to go.\"\n\n\"But that's a long distance with no cover.\"\n\n\"If we stay here, we'll die. Hightide forces are moving in fast.\"\n\nTwilight gave in with a nod. There was the growing whistle of another approaching shell.\n\n\"We fly out of here on three. One...two...\"\n\n\"Spade!\" Lukai was grasping Spade's arms and shaking him. Spade gasped and stumbled back, covered in sweat. His eyes focused on the warrior, who looked furious. \"Spade, what were you thinking?\" Lukai roared. \"Never do that again!\"\n\n\"I-I didn't mean to, it just happened, I'm sorry\" Spade stuttered, eyes wide and terrified.\n\nLukai was breathing heavily. He released Spade. \"There are things in my head that you should never have to see. It's\u2026\" His ear twitched. \"It's much too dark for you. You must be careful about whose minds you enter. Some dragons are plagued with dark memories, and that is a burden that they alone must carry. Mind reading is a dangerous gift, and you must learn how to use it wisely. Do you understand?\"\n\nSpade nodded.\n\nThey sat in silence.\n\n\"Can... I ask a question?\" Spade asked hesitantly. Lukai nodded. \"What happened to Twilight?\"\n\nThe warrior's ear twitched again. \"He never made it off the ground.\"\n\nThe moon was high when Spade finally retreated to his hut, stretching and curling up in the bed of leaves. He yawned and closed his eyes, listening to the faint sounds of the dying celebration, the dragons and lockjaws retiring from their partying. The air was humid and warm, creating a cozy atmosphere. Spade heard the chorus of night bugs and the faint rustle of branches as a breeze danced throughout the village.\n\nThere was a voice. It was deep and frighteningly familiar.\n\n\"Golden Guardian,\" it quietly hissed. \"I will find you. I will find you and I will kill you. There is no way of escaping me. I am the dark force.\"\n\nSpade woke with a jump, a chill running down his spine. He had only been asleep for about an hour. The voice had been Koro; he remembered the demon's tone from the location spell. Was it just a dream? Or had it actually been him? Was he coming for Spade? Was he coming to kill him?\n\nMorning came, though most dragons in the camp slept well into the day. Tigerlily, Spade, Mikah, and Zao gathered together right outside their clump of huts. Delilah-Rose had joined them. As the others conversed, Spade remained silent, his mind absorbed by the dream of Koro. It had felt so real, like the dark lord had been standing right beside him, whispering in Spade's ear.\n\n\"That was epic,\" Zao said with a laugh, referring to the party. Spade was quiet but offered a smile.\n\n\"My favorite part was when Mikah was singing with his mouth full of rolls,\" Tigerlily said. They all laughed.\n\nSpade glanced up when he heard Lukai call his name. The warrior gestured him over to a clearing.\n\n\"I know it is early in the day,\" Lukai said, \"But we must resume your training. Koro is no doubt growing in power with each passing day, and so you must do the same. Now, when you are ready, take up your fighting stance.\"\n\nSpade took a deep breath and obeyed, grateful for the distraction from his dream, but contemplating whether or not he should tell Lukai about it.\n\n\"Since you have learned how to take a blow,\" Lukai began, \"we will now go over the different blocking techniques. The first is for a strike coming from in front of you.\" The warrior held up his talon in front of his body to demonstrate. \"Remember to bend the force of the strike through your body.\"\n\nSpade copied the gesture and as he moved his talon, Lukai lashed out at him. There was a satisfying thwack as his blow struck the palm of Spade's raised talon rather than his chest.\n\n\"Very good. Next is for a side attack. Tuck your wing in tight, but not completely to your body.\" Lukai jabbed Spade's wing and the dragonet winced at the blow. \"Tighter,\" the warrior instructed, and Spade did so. \"When the enemy strikes your wing, you can flare it out to push them back. Try it.\"\n\nSpade watched the warrior's talon lash out, and pushed out his wing with a grunt the second he felt the claws on his skin. There was a pleased smile on Lukai's face.\n\n\"You are getting better at not repressing your strength. It is important that you challenge the limits of your power, otherwise you will never know the full damage you could inflict, and therefore could not prevent yourself from going too far. Ignorance is a dangerous thing for someone so connected to the Maker's divine force.\"\n\nSpade nodded, and then asked, \"If Lord Nerizza's element is plasma, isn't it important that I know how to block more than physical attacks?\"\n\nLukai nodded. \"Yes. If you wish to counter an elemental strike with your own, your attack must be equal to or stronger than the attacker's. Does this make sense? Good. Magic is the strongest of the elements, but only when trained up properly. Your elemental chamber works like a muscle. The only way to strengthen it is to use it, to build it up through practice. The chamber rests in your chest, against your rib cage. Are you familiar with pressure points?\"\n\nSpade gave a shrug. \"A little bit. We went over them a while ago back at the Academy.\"\n\n\"Well, there is a way to completely immobilize your attacker's elemental chamber. But it is hard to accomplish unless they are standing over you.\" The warrior took Spade's claws and pressed them at the bottom of Spade's ribcage. One claw poked the area above his stomach and Spade flinched. \"If you strike that area right, it will momentarily paralyze their elemental chamber.\"\n\nBefore Lukai could say any more, Fernwing ran up to the two dragons, dipping his head in greeting. \"Golden Guardian, there is a messenger from the Kingdom of Harmony who wishes to speak with you. He is waiting in Chief Starblaze's hut.\" The news surprised Spade, and he glanced up at Lukai, as though for permission to leave.\n\nThe warrior nodded, a frown on his face. \"Go on, I will head over shortly.\"\n\nSpade turned and followed Fernwing to Starblaze's hut, which was under repair from the lockjaw attack. The chief sat inside with five other dragons; four of them bore the armor of normal soldiers, while the fifth was dressed in a general's armor. They stood and bowed upon Spade's entrance.\n\n\"It is an honor, Golden Guardian,\" the general said.\n\nSpade dipped his head and smiled, hoping he didn't look as awkward as he felt. The general was a tall dragon, with white-gray scales patterned with deep orange streaks. His voice was rough, and there was something almost\u2026 demeaning about the way he looked down at Spade.\n\n\"My name is General Krait,\" The dragon continued. Spade raised an eyebrow; His name seemed familiar for some reason. \"I have been sent by Lord Tielo of Harmony with an urgent request for your assistance. Our kingdom is in grave danger. We need your help.\"\n\nSpade gulped. It was his duty as Guardian to help all dragons in the Four Regions, right? But shouldn't he focus on defeating Koro? Did he have time to help Lord Tielo? \"What do you need help with?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\"I apologize, but we are not allowed to discuss the circumstances around\u2026\" Krait glanced at Starblaze and Fernwing. \"Unauthorized personnel.\"\n\nThe way he looked at the Nightshade dragons made Spade uncomfortable. In fact, everything about Krait was unsettling, and a question suddenly arose in Spade's mind. \"How did you know where to find me?\"\n\nKrait frowned, but quickly caught himself and offered an unconvincing smile. He stuttered before answering, \"Rumor, of course. Everyone is talking about the new Golden Guardian and his whereabouts. It was risky, going off of word of mouth, but we had to take a chance to help Harmony.\"\n\n\"But I've been in the wilderness for the past few days. How would anyone even know I exist?\"\n\n\"Don't you think we're getting a bit off topic?\" Krait hissed through gritted teeth.\n\n\"Would any of you care for some refreshments?\" Starblaze offered, trying to ease the tension. The chief was studying Krait with suspicious eyes.\n\n\"Actually,\" the general said, \"I wish to speak with the Guardian alone.\"\n\nStarblaze looked to Spade, who nodded. Maybe he could figure out what it was about the general that made him so nervous. After a moment the chief nodded to Fernwing and they left the hut, followed by Krait's four soldiers. A chill ran down Spade's spine as he watched the general walk over to the small table, inspecting Starblaze's necklace, which he had left behind.\n\nHe picked up the dark blue gem and studied it before remarking, \"You and I are quite similar dragons, Guardian.\" Spade thought that to be a rather bold statement, considering they had just met. \"We both have a duty to protect others. I, in my own kingdom, and you, well, everywhere I suppose. And yet, when I travel all this way in search of your help, you refuse to come to Harmony's aid.\"\n\n\"I didn't refuse,\" Spade said. \"I just\u2026 I'm supposed to be going to the Kingdom of Shadow.\"\n\n\"Dragons in Harmony are suffering from disease and yet you prioritize a road trip?\"\n\nSpade flicked his ears back. It wasn't a road trip, he was on a mission. Krait didn't know what he was talking about. And yet Spade still felt a pang of guilt rising in his chest.\n\nJust as Krait opened his mouth to continue, Lukai pushed through the drapes of the white willow and entered the chief's hut. \"Spade, are you in here?\" he asked.\n\nKrait's eyes widened in astonishment upon seeing Lukai, jaws gaping slightly. \"The Iron Wolf?\" he gasped. \"It\u2026 It can't be! General DeTaris, you're\u2026 Alive?!\"\n\nLukai wore a similar expression as the general, staring at him in disbelief. \"What are you doing here?\" he growled.\n\n\"I watched you die,\" Krait breathed in a shaky voice, oblivious to the question. \"How in the Maker's name are you still alive?\" His eyes were bulging, like he had seen a ghost, and he stumbled back as Lukai approached him.\n\n\"You know each other?\" Spade asked. He was suddenly beginning to think Krait was not delivering a message from Harmony.\n\nRecovering from the initial shock, Lukai grinned. \"Yes, we know each other quite well. Don't we, student?\"\n\nKrait glowered at him. \"How dare you still call me that, you old fool.\"\n\n\"Well that's no way to treat your old general, now is it?\"\n\nSuddenly Krait drew his sword and grabbed Spade, holding the blade to his throat. Spade yelped and stared up at Lukai with terrified eyes.\n\nLukai was unphased, staring at Krait with an unimpressed glare as the general began to back out of the hut.\n\n\"If you know what's best for this dragonet, I suggest you don't follow me,\" Krait said. Despite the threat, the warrior padded after them as they moved through the willow's drapes and out into the village.\n\nStarblaze and Fernwing noticed them first and ran over. The other dragons in the village quickly became aware of the disruption and began crowding over.\n\n\"Stay back or the Guardian dies,\" Krait snarled, holding the sword closer to Spade's throat. \"If anyone follows me out of the village, I will kill him.\"\n\n\"And what difference would that make if you already intend to kill him,\" Lukai replied dryly. \"Why not just do it now?\"\n\nKrait gave a shaky laugh. \"Don't tempt me, DeTaris.\"\n\nSpade held his breath as the two generals stared each other down. The whole crowd was silent in anticipation, talons fidgeting nervously on the mossy ground.\n\nThen, an arrow whistled through the air. Krait snapped around and blocked it with his sword, losing his grip on Spade, who rolled away and leapt to his talons. Spade glanced at Starblaze, who was lowering an empty bow. The chief winked as the dragonet stumbled to safety.\n\nLukai jumped in front of Krait and flared his wings out, blocking Spade. \"Your move, student.\"\n\n\"Don't call me that!\" Krait roared. \"I surpassed being a student long ago.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you are mistaken. We are always students, our teachers simply change.\"\n\nKrait returned the comment with a glare. \"Still, I am not your pupil.\" He gave an angry roar and slashed at the warrior.\n\nLukai dodged and replied, \"Yes, that's quite obvious. I would have never trained such sloppy form. Even that dragonet over there performs better than you.\" He nodded his head to Spade with a mocking sneer.\n\nEnraged, Krait struck wildly at Lukai. The warrior blocked each strike with his talons, the sword spitting up sparks against his armor.\n\n\"I suggest you pay close attention, young Guardian,\" Lukai commented. \"This will be a great demonstration of those techniques we were going over.\" As Krait raised his sword, the warrior advised, \"Watch carefully, Spade.\"\n\nLukai tucked his wing and turned, flaring it out as Krait's sword came down. The general stumbled back and whipped his tail around. Lukai dodged and shot a bolt of magic out. Krait rolled to the side and grabbed Lukai's shoulders, shoving him onto his back talons. The two dragons pushed at each other, neither one faltering, until Lukai slammed his forehead into Krait's. The general snarled and slashed out a talon, catching Lukai's helmet. He tugged and his claw sliced the leather strap underneath. The helmet clanged to the ground.\n\nLukai fell back as Krait lunged on top of him. He hit the ground and the general pressed a talon down on his chest. Krait's neck began to glow green, and he opened his jaws to reveal two long, thin fangs.\n\n<Krait's element is poison,> Spade realized. <Why isn't Lukai getting up? Krait is going to kill him!>\n\n\"Oh no, you've got me!\" Lukai gasped. In his panic, Spade didn't catch the hint of sarcasm in the warrior's voice.\n\n\"I don't know how you survived Lord Nerizza's spear,\" Krait hissed, \"But I promise you I won't make the same mistake as he did.\" With a furious growl he bit down onto Lukai's neck, fangs dripping with venom.\n\n\"No!\" Spade screamed. He felt a huge burst of energy gather in his chest. It rushed up his neck, stinging his throat, and he released a powerful surge of magic that blasted Krait across the length of the village.\n\nSpade coughed and dropped his head, gasping for breath as smoke drifted from his gaping jaws. His whole body quivered and his throat burned. He blinked to try and focus his senses and staggered over to Lukai's limp body.\n\n\"Lukai,\" he gasped, nudging the warrior's arm. Lukai didn't move. Tears began to well up in his eyes. \"You can't leave. I\u2026 I can't defeat Koro without you.\"\n\nHe leapt back with a yelp as Lukai suddenly laughed, rolling into an upwards position to reveal the plates of armor lining the underside neck stained with venom, but unbroken.\n\n\"You're alive!\" Spade said, relief sweeping over him.\n\nLukai shook out and stood, wrinkles forming around his eyes. \"You think I would let that pathetic excuse of a general kill me? I was just toying with him.\" His smile faded slightly as he looked at Spade's watery eyes, which the dragonet was rubbing dry with his talons. \"Were you crying?\"\n\n\"What? No, of course not,\" Spade laughed. \"Allergies.\"\n\n\"Ah, I see.\"\n\n\"Yeah, lots of\u2026 weird plants in the swamp.\"\n\nLukai grinned and nodded towards Krait, who was groaning and struggling to his talons. The four soldiers hurried to help him up. \"That, young Guardian,\" Lukai said, \"Was just a taste of your full power.\"\n\nSpade smiled up at Lukai. It was strange seeing the warrior without his helmet. He had a square jaw, and the scar across his mouth stood out against his dull, green scales. Spade realized that if he looked close enough, Lukai's body, in its spiritual form, was translucent.\n\nStarblaze approached Krait and frowned as the soldiers blocked his path. Lukai joined the chief, Spade trailing close behind him.\n\n\"Who really sent you?\" the warrior asked.\n\nKrait wiped his bleeding nose and hissed, \"You know who.\"\n\n\"So he sent you to do his dirty work and kill off the Guardian before he could reach Shadow?\"\n\nKrait smirked. \"Precisely.\" The Nightshade guards surrounded Krait and his soldiers, spears drawn and bows at the ready. \"And I will be back to finish the job,\" the general added. Two of the soldiers released clouds of smoke from their mouths, engulfing them and their leader.\n\nLukai beat his wings, clearing away the fog to reveal that they had vanished.\n\n\"Who sent them?\" Spade asked.\n\n\"Nerizza. Or, Koro I suppose,\" Lukai replied. \"Which can only mean one thing.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"If they knew where to find you, then Koro must be tracking you, no doubt by your magic energy. We need an energy-cloaking spell.\"\n\nThere was a fizzing noise and Lightflare popped into the air beside the dragons. \"Did I hear someone say spell?\" she chirped.\n\n\"Lightflare, do you think you could teach me an energy-cloaking spell?\" Spade asked, happy to see the spriteling again. His mind wandered back to the dream of Koro he'd had. He still wasn't sure, but it must have really been the dark lord. Koro really was hunting him.\n\nLightflare scratched her head thoughtfully. \"Only a few dragons ever mastered that skill\u2026 In fact, the Aldreda family is famous for retaining this spell as a sort of family keepsake, as at least one dragon in every generation of the Aldredas is born with magic, and parents would pass down that spell to the magic-bearing dragonet.\"\n\n\"Aren't the Aldredas the royal family of the Kingdom of Silverwood?\"\n\n\"Lord Sagesse and Queen Everglade are the current rulers,\" Lukai joined in. \"I served under Sagesse for many years, so I suspect we will have a warm welcome awaiting us.\"\n\n\"But do we have time to travel all the way to Silverwood?\" Spade asked. \"Don't we have to get to Shadow as soon as possible?\"\n\n\"Without this spell, Koro will practically be able to track your every move. He will only keep sending more and more of his soldiers out to kill you.\"\n\nLightflare nodded. \"Lukai is right. The success of the mission depends on that spell.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Tigerlily put the final item in her satchel and swung it onto her back before heading to the other dragonets, who had gathered with Lukai and Starblaze just outside the white willow tree. She and the others had been mixed in with the crowd when Lukai had been fighting General Krait, and she wished she could have seen more of the fighting, instead of just peering through the mass of bodies to catch a glimpse of the two dragons.\n\n\"Just follow the river up stream, and you should reach the Land of Silver Trees in less than three days,\" Starblaze was saying as Tigerlily joined the group. \"Fernwing will escort you to the edge of the swamp and make sure you start off headed in the right direction.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Spade said. \"For everything you've done for us.\"\n\nStarblaze dipped his head. \"And thank you, young Guardian. You united us with the lockjaws, our age-old enemies, and for that we are eternally grateful.\" He flicked his tail and Fernwing stepped forward. \"I believe our guests are ready to depart.\"\n\nThe scout was about to lead them to the exit of the village when a voice called. They all turned as Delilah-Rose approached. \"Father, I have a request,\" she declared. When she stopped, she curled her tail nervously.\n\n\"What is it, my flower?\" Starblaze inquired, wise eyes studying his daughter.\n\n\"I\u2026 I wish to accompany our new friends on their journey.\"\n\nDespite the astonished faces of the rest of the dragons, Starblaze seemed unsurprised, as thought he knew his daughter would make such a request. \"Beyond the borders of the swamp lay unfamiliar lands. It would be frightening and overwhelming at times, are you aware of this?\"\n\n\"Yes, and I still wish to go. To see the kingdoms, fly in clear skies, meet new dragons, why, the possibilities seem endless. I love my village, Father, but I want to see the world outside the swamp.\"\n\nThere was a silent pause, and then Starblaze declared, \"You can go on one condition.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose nodded enthusiastically. \"Anything, Father. Anything you wish.\"\n\nThe chief hesitated at first, blinking his eyes quickly. \"If you wish to see the world, then I have no intention of holding you back from that desire. All I ask is that, after you have seen and experienced it all, you consider coming back home.\"\n\nThe dragoness smiled, blinking to hold back the tears that suddenly threatened to escape her eyes. \"Of course, Father. No matter what, I will always return home.\"\n\nWith a nod, the chief entered the drapes of the willow, and returned momentarily with his wife's necklace in a talon. He took a deep breath and then lifted it over Delilah-Rose's head. \"Take this, my flower, to remember us by. And to remind you that your mother and I will always be with you.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose embraced Starblaze tightly, and he wrapped his feathered wings around her as she returned the gesture. He sighed before letting her go, and then acknowledged the group as a whole. \"Safe travels, my friends. Spade and Tigerlily, do not forget the power of your link. After you activate the cloaking spell, I highly suggest you resume your exercises. Mikah, brave one, watch over my daughter.\" Mikah gave a small bow and stared at the ground. \"And Zao, keep them all out of trouble.\"\n\nThe chief dipped his head to Lukai. \"General, remember that many things have changed since you last walked these lands. Be careful not to dwell in the past.\"\n\nLukai bowed in acknowledgment.\n\n\"I also noticed you took a liking to this fine weapon during your combat with the lockjaws,\" Stablaze brought forth the shortsword Lukai had found in his hut. The leather on its handle had been replaced and the blade cleaned. \"It is an exceptional weapon. As I see you are without a blade, I wish to gift it to you.\" He put it in a sheath and held it out to the warrior.\n\nLukai took the weapon and held it up, viewing it in the sunlight. He bowed again in thanks and returned the blade to its sheath.\n\nTigerlily felt a pang of sadness as she walked to the two draping willows marking the exit of the camp. She glanced back and caught eyes with Starblaze as he stared after them. He blinked, and she heard his voice in her head.\n\n<I sense you will play a critical role in this venture. There is a reason the Maker connected you with the Golden Guardian. Dark times lay ahead, young one. Dark times.>\n\nA refreshing breeze danced over Tigerlily's scales as she followed Fernwing through the dense swamp. The air was thick and humid, and smelled of wet soil. Clouds of mist settled above the trees, venturing below the branches to inspect the forest floor. Tigerlily fluttered her wings and the mist wisped and twirled about. Birds and insects filled the swamp with a noisy chorus.\n\nTigerlily found herself watching Lukai. The Nightshade dragons had repaired his helmet, and his face was once again covered by it. Her gaze fell on the scar across his mouth.\n\n\"How did you get that scar?\" she asked.\n\nLukai turned his attention to her. \"The Crystal War. It was Silverwood against Diamondpeak.\"\n\n\"That was when the treaty was formed between those two kingdoms, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes. It actually started from an argument about possession over the Crystal Falls, the waterfall on the border of the two kingdoms, and grew into a full-scale war. In the end, however, it resulted in one of the strongest alliances in the Four Regions.\"\n\n\"Was Krait your student then?\"\n\nThe warrior nodded. \"It was after that war when he betrayed me. Shadow offered Silverwood a trade treaty, but Silverwood had just allied themselves with Diamondpeak and were already trading with four other kingdoms. At the time, Sagesse did not think they would be able to support any more trade routes. Krait had already been upset about the conclusion of the Crystal War; he had wanted Silverwood to best Diamondpeak. After Sagesse refused the treaty with Shadow, I suppose Krait finally snapped. He went on about how foolish and naive Sagesse was, and how he was too soft to rule a kingdom. After he left, I knew he would go to Shadow. They have always been viewed as a powerful kingdom, exactly what he wanted from Silverwood. I didn't see him until we met in battle at the Battle of the Mountaintop, the turning point of the War of Ashes. That was where I perished.\"\n\n\"Krait said Lord Nerizza killed you with a spear,\" Tigerliy said softly. Lukai's ear twitched and he gave a small nod. She knew it was a stupid question, but she asked it anyway, \"Did it hurt?\"\n\nLukai frowned. \"It hurts more looking back on it than it did in the moment.\"\n\nThe group reached the edge of the swamp and Fernwing stopped where the trees ended. \"This is where I must leave you,\" he said, then pointed to a distant stretch of hills. \"Over there is where you will find the Land of Silver Trees. Remember to follow the river.\"\n\n\"We are grateful for all of your help,\" Lukai said with a dip of his head. Fernwing returned the gesture, bowed to Delilah-Rose, and flew back the way they had come. The warrior took the lead of the dragonets. They were now traveling across a wide marshland open to the cloudy sky. Small, thin trees were spread out along the glade, and the mist had poured down from the swamp to linger over the boggy ground. The river was distinct on the flat, wide marsh, and its peaceful gurgling filled the quiet air.\n\nLukai glanced up and noted the sky above them. \"We are clear from the swamp's gasses. We should fly as far as we can, as it may rain soon.\"\n\nTigerlily sighed and leapt into the air, beating her wings to climb higher. She took her place in the skies beside Delilah-Rose. Tigerlily was excited to have another dragoness traveling with them.\n\n\"So, Delilah-Rose,\" she began.\n\n\"You can just call me Rose,\" Delilah-Rose offered with a grin.\n\n\"Okay. Rose, then, have you been in the swamp your whole life?\"\n\n\"Yes, unfortunately.\" She closed her eyes and inhaled the breeze whisking past them. \"It feels so good to fly in clean air. I wasn't allowed to fly over the treeline in the swamp. Even Nightshade dragons can only stay up there for a few minutes at a time.\"\n\n\"That sounds terrible.\"\n\n\"Oh, it wasn't that bad. The Nightshade Swamp is a wonderful place. It just gets a bit dull at times.\" Her eyes drifted to Mikah but quickly glanced away.\n\nTigerlily raised an eyebrow. \"So\u2026 The 'brave one.' What do you think of him?\"\n\n\"Your brother? Oh, well,\" her cheeks became red. \"He is a very nice dragon.\"\n\n\"You don't like him or anything?\"\n\n\"What? Of course I like him.\" Rose flicked her ears back and looked almost offended, but then realized what Tigerlily was asking. \"Oh, you mean\u2026 That kind of like. Well, I think it is a bit early to say, wouldn't you agree? After all, we only met a couple of days ago.\"\n\n\"And yet..?\"\n\nRose sighed. \"And yet he's awfully handsome.\"\n\nTigerlily clapped a talon over her snout to hold back a laugh. She never imagined the day she would hear a dragoness compliment Mikah, let alone call him \"awfully handsome.\" \"You're kidding.\"\n\n\"No, not in the slightest,\" her voice took on a dreamy tone. \"He's quite charming, in a cute, shy way.\" She ruffled out her feathers. \"Oh, what am I saying?\"\n\n\"You know, I think he likes you back,\" Tigerlily snickered.\n\nRose's eyes brightened. \"Really?\" She collected herself. \"I mean, oh, you don't say. That's nice.\" They both laughed and Rose blushed harder. \"I suppose we will just wait and see what happens. After all, we have a long journey ahead of us. And what about you, Tigerlily? Do you have any 'brave ones' in your life?\"\n\n\"Oh, me? No, not at all.\"\n\n\"Really? That surprises me. You're a very pretty dragoness.\"\n\nThis time Tigerlily blushed. \"Thanks. I guess I just haven't met the right dragon, you know?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. At times it can feel like, even with so many dragons in the world, you'll never meet the right one. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I spent the first fifteen years of my life in a little village where the only possible suitors were eight years older than me. And then this young, handsome, blue-scaled dragon came swooping in and saved my life.\" She let out a sigh and Tigerlily couldn't help but giggle. \"So I guess my point is, don't lose hope. You will find your brave one, Tigerlily.\"\n\n<Don't lose hope,> Tigerlily repeated in her mind, smiling at Rose. <I'll find my brave one\u2026 someday.>\n\nThe sun was beginning its descent from the sky when they stopped for a break. Spade landed on the soft sand lining the river and stretched his wings, letting out a relieved breath. <Finally, some time to rest,> he thought.\n\n\"Spade,\" Lukai called. \"While we are stopped we should continue your training. Have you been practicing your strike like I showed you?\"\n\nSpade scratched his neck. \"Uh, not really\u2026\"\n\nThe warrior's grin made Spade gulp. \"Then this will not be a pleasant session for you.\"\n\n\"Wait, we're actually fighting?\" Lukai swung his tail around and Spade scrambled out of the way. He rolled as the warrior fired a magic blast, searing the ground where he had stood only seconds before. \"Aren't you actually going to teach me how to fight first?\"\n\n\"I am teaching you,\" Lukai replied, striking Spade's chest with his palm and sending the dragonet crashing into the cold water of the river. \"You should have blocked that.\"\n\nSpade coughed and stumbled out of the current. He yelped and ducked as Lukai swung at him. The warrior's talon splashed up a wave, causing water drops to rain down.\n\n\"Stop dodging and make contact,\" Lukai instructed. \"Do not be afraid to use your strength. Block my attacks, you know how. Remember how you summoned your power when Krait attacked me.\"\n\nSpade held out his palm but fell back from the force of Lukai's strike. \"That was kind of an in-the-moment thing, I don't really know how I did that.\"\n\n\"That doesn't matter, stop holding back,\" the warrior growled. \"Fight like you mean it. Come on, strike me, blast me!\" He wrapped his tail around Spade's leg and pulled. The dragonet fell to the ground and Lukai pressed a talon down on his chest. Spade grabbed the warrior's arm and tugged, but it didn't budge.\n\n\"Spade,\" Lukai said as the dragonet struggled. \"You are afraid to use your power. If you go on like this, do you know what is going to happen?\" Spade didn't answer. \"Koro will kill you, do you understand?\"\n\nSpade stopped fighting against Lukai's hold and nodded, avoiding eye contact with the warrior. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Apologies are worth nothing,\" Lukai snarled, letting him go. \"If you keep holding back you will die. Koro will not show you any mercy, if you even make it that far. What if Krait returns and I'm not there to protect you? What will you do then? Will you fight him off? Well?\"\n\nSpade blinked his eyes furiously as he stood, still not meeting the warrior's fiery gaze. \"I don't know,\" he muttered.\n\nLukai raised his voice to an angry shout. \"You couldn't even handle a hound, what makes you think you could take on a demon lord?!\"\n\n\"What do you care?!\" Spade roared, rage swiftly consuming him. \"You're a general, you never mess up! Why do you expect me to be just like you?!\"\n\nLukai was silent. He stared down at Spade with an emotionless face. \"I don't want you to be just like me, Spade,\" he claimed after a pause. His ear twitched. \"I just don't want to see you killed.\"\n\n\"Well if I'm so weak and useless then why don't you just fight Koro yourself?\"\n\nThe warrior frowned. \"Maybe I will, since you obviously aren't willing to use your power.\"\n\nSpade glared up at the warrior. Before he could respond a howl sounded in the distance. The warrior pricked his ears towards the noise. \"The hounds are back,\" he growled. \"Everybody, head towards the hills! Hurry!\"\n\nThe rest of the dragonets quickly gathered their things and leapt into the sky. Spade turned away from Lukai, pushing down the growl that rose in his throat, and joined the others. The warrior remained fixed on the horizon, watching the brown splotches moving in the distance. With a heavy breath, he followed the dragonets.\n\nSpade headed toward the front of the group, but once Lukai took the lead he curved his wings to glide to the back. Zao moved with him.\n\n\"What was all that yelling with Lukai about?\" his friend inquired, concern in his sapphire eyes. Most dragons were born with black eyes, but Zao's were a dark, electric blue.\n\n\"It was nothing,\" Spade mumbled in response, shooting a glance towards the warrior before staring down at the fields rushing by underneath them.\n\n\"Oh, come on. I've been your best friend for like, sixteen years. Have I earned no right to listen to your deepest darkest emotions?\" Spade only shrugged. \"Hey, bros talk about feelings to bros. So come on dude, spill it. Look, we'll even back up so no one can hear us.\" Zao distanced himself from the back of the group.\n\nSpade found himself copying the act, and finally decided to give in. \"I just don't think I have what it takes to live up to anything he expects me to do,\" he admitted in a rush. \"I'm not a fighter, you of all dragons know this. I mean, look at me, do I look like Golden Guardian material to you?\" Zao opened his mouth to speak but Spade cut him off. \"Not at all! I'm just an ordinary dragonet who wants an ordinary life, in an ordinary kingdom attending an ordinary school!\"\n\n\"That's a lot of ordinaries.\"\n\n\"Sure, Marble has some mystic, poetic reason for why she wants me to stop Koro, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe she chose the wrong dragon.\"\n\n\"Wait, who's Marble?\"\n\n\"I just don't have what it takes,\" Spade continued, ignoring Zao's question. \"It's that simple. She made a mistake. I'm\u2026 a mistake.\" He stopped as his vision became foggy and quickly blinked the tears away.\n\nZao didn't speak for a moment, ears back and eyes wide in surprise. \"Wow,\" finally escaped his mouth, and he drifted closer to Spade. \"Don't\u2026 Don't say that, dude. You're not a mistake.\"\n\n\"Then why can't I seem to do anything right? You've basically been leading the group on this journey, Tigerlily pulled me out of the location spell, even Mikah saved Delilah-Rose from that lockjaw.\"\n\n\"Well, technically I did help him, but no one seems to be acknowledging that,\" Zao snickered. Spade frowned. \"What? I'm kidding! Listen, do you remember our first year at the Academy?\"\n\n\"Of course. You were the super confident student who knew everyone within a week and I was basically your shadow.\"\n\n\"No, not that stuff. I'm talking about all those late nights that you stayed up doing\u2026come on, you know what I'm getting at\u2026\"\n\n\"...Your homework?\"\n\n\"Yes! You're the only reason I made it to the second year, let alone the second semester. You would spend hours correcting my homework, tutoring me, explaining all the mumbo jumbo I didn't understand.\"\n\n\"So I'm good at school, so what?\"\n\n\"Great crackling skyfire, you're difficult. You're good at helping others,\" Zao declared, smacking a talon against his own forehead. \"That's what I'm saying, duh.\"\n\nA drop of water landed on Spade's head and he glanced out at the dark sky. When he looked back down Zao was giving him a \"now's the part where you respond to my very fantastic and heartfelt lecture\" face, and Spade smiled. \"Thanks,\" he replied. \"That\u2026that meant a lot.\"\n\n\"Good, because that was the extent of all the touchy feely goodness I have to offer.\"\n\nThey laughed and a soft roll of thunder announced that the drizzle of rain would soon thicken. A rocky bluff served as their landing point, just as the heavy downpour commenced.\n\nThe dragonets hurried to find somewhere to duck out of the rain. Delilah-Rose, on the other talon, eagerly turned her face to the sky and closed her eyes, blissfully taking in the shower. \"I've never been directly under a storm before,\" she laughed. \"The trees always block most of the rain.\"\n\nMikah smiled and watched her as he walked, eyes sparkling. Spade held back a snicker and moved past the two dragonets. He stopped quickly, however, upon noticing the large hole in front of him. Mikah bumped into his back and Spade yelped, talons scrambling to keep hold of the rocky ground. He flapped his wings and fell away from the pit, knocking Mikah down as well.\n\nAs he stood, Delilah-Rose rushed to Mikah's side to help him to his talons, asking, \"are you alright?\"\n\nMikah nodded and cleared his throat, regaining his stance and ruffling his wings. Cheeks red, he smiled at Rose and gave a small \"thank you,\" before awkwardly shuffling away.\n\nShe stared after him with a wistful sigh. \"He's so cute when he's embarrassed, isn't he?\" she murmured to Spade, who had to cough to keep himself from laughing.\n\nThunder crashed overhead and a flash of lightning illuminated the cloudy sky. Tigerlily huddled against the stone wall of the small cave they had found, trying to stop shivering. Only she and Rose actually fit into the cave; the boys were sitting at the opening, only half-sheltered. Lukai stood watch out in the open, seemingly unbothered by the downpour.\n\nTigerlily pulled the Book of Light out of her satchel, and delicately opened it to a random page, careful not to rip the wet paper. Lightflare immediately appeared in front of her, quickly summarizing the contents of the page Tigerlily had flipped to. \"The Golden Sages were a group of highly skilled warriors. Under their protection the temples were kept safe from thieves and raiders. As a protective maneuver, they locked down all the temples. No one was allowed in, and no relics were allowed out.\"\n\n\"Relics?\" Tigerlily repeated.\n\n\"Ancient tools and such created by the past Guardians. The Compass of Light, the Golden Saber, the Demonslayer, the Ice Gauntlets\u2026 To name a few.\"\n\n\"What happened to the Sages?\" Rose asked, joining the conversation.\n\n\"Nobody knows. They may still be alive, locked away with the secrets of the temples.\"\n\n\"But there weren't any at the northern temple,\" Tigerlily noted.\n\n\"Yes, that temple was abandoned long ago. The baygas did their best to keep it orderly but they are only animals, after all. Nonetheless, the doors remained sealed until Spade opened them, which is all that matters.\"\n\nTigerlily found her gaze focusing on Spade. <What had Lukai and him been arguing about? Why are they all the sudden avoiding each other?>\n\n\"Get out of the cave!\" Lukai suddenly yelled, making Rose and her jump. The dragonets hurried to file out into the rain, confused by the warrior's order. \"Head towards Silverwood, quickly. We are not alone.\" When no one moved he roared, \"Now! Go!\"\n\nBut it was too late. Tigerlily felt a chill run down her spine as a thud sounded behind them. She dared a glance back and saw a hound through the sheet of rain, fur dripping wet and fangs bared. It pounced on the dragonets and they scattered. The beast targeted Tigerlily, snapping its jaws at her. She screamed and fell back, flailing her talons in front of her. One claw nicked the hound's nose and it let out a squeal of pain. Its paws fell upon Tigerlily's wing, trapping her on the ground.\n\nLukai tackled the beast. As it fell away its claws caught the skin of Tigerlily's wing, and she shrieked at the tearing pain. She sucked in a sharp breath as she tucked the wing close to her side, blood running down her scales. Lukai now had his jaws locked on the beast's neck, while the creature's paws pounded against his stomach.\n\nTigerlily backed away from the two when her back talons suddenly slipped, the ground disappearing behind her. She dug her claws into the ground as she felt herself slip down. It was the hole they had found upon landing at the bluff. She opened her wings to fly out but the stinging pain of the slice wound made her quickly fold them back in. \"Help!\" she called, but her cry was overpowered by a crack of thunder. \"Lukai! Help!\"\n\nThe warrior glanced away from the fight and shoved the creature onto its back. He ran to grab her talon but the beast sprung back onto its paws and leapt onto Lukai. The two slid across the wet ground to the edge of the hole, and the warrior released a blast of energy. The strike missed the beast and instead hit a tower of stone, which cracked at the force of the blow and sent chunks of rock tumbling down. One landed so close to Tigerlily's talons that she released her grip, tumbling down into the hole. Lukai also fell not long after, one of the boulders crashing into him and the beast and knocking them over the edge.\n\nTigerlily could vaguely hear the other dragonets crying out, over the rumble of the stones crashing down the hole after her and the shrieking of the hound. She finally hit flat ground and felt something wack against her head, so hard she barely had time to feel the pain before she slipped into unconsciousness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Pain was the first thing Tigerlily woke to: A throbbing in the back of her head, aching bruises all over her body, and a prickling pang from her torn wing. She couldn't see anything, and blinked to make sure she wasn't just closing her eyes. The air around her was thick and chalky.\n\nWhen she turned, she noticed that the darkness was interrupted by a faint green glow. Lukai, she realized, limping over to the warrior. She saw the warm light of her own chest as she beckoned a soft fire to burn in the back of her throat, allowing only a little more clarity in the gloom. From what she could tell, Lukai's back legs were stuck under a large boulder\u2026 a large boulder that was stuck under a pile of large boulders.\n\n<Well this is convenient,> she thought with a snort. <Oh, stop it, you sound like Mikah.> Unsure what else to do, she grabbed Lukai's armored talons in her own and gave an experimental tug. Nothing happened. She tried again, harder this time. Her attempts only disturbed a few pebbles, which clattered onto the floor, their noise echoing through the dark space.\n\nAs if at the sound, Lukai began to stir. He groaned and let out a strained breath, slowly moving his body. Tigerlily stepped away as he set his front talons under him and tried to twist his body around, only to realize he was stuck. He opened his eyes, yellow fires causing heavy shadows on his face. At that moment Tigerlily realized he did not have his helmet on.\n\n\"Tigerlily?\" the warrior said hoarsely, then coughed. \"I'm surprised you're still alive.\" She wasn't sure if meant that as a compliment or not. He tried again to free himself, but to no avail. His chest lit up and at first Tigerlily thought he was going to try and blast himself out, but then the glowing spread through his veins and he illuminated his scales, revealing that the two dragons were in a small cave, a tunnel on the far end.\n\nIn the new light, Tigerlily spotted a thick tuft of brown fur sticking out from under the pile of stones, and she quickly looked away when she realized the crimson liquid surrounding it was blood. Her eyes then fell upon Lukai's helmet which, like the hound, had been crushed, only a twisted end sticking out from its rocky grave.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" Lukai announced, returning her attention to him. He pointed to the assortment of smaller rock chunks laying around. \"Take those and stack them in this space between my legs and that boulder.\"\n\nTigerlily grabbed one of the rocks, wincing at the dull ache from a bruise in her arm, and obeyed, shoving it into the space Lukai had directed. Only four of them fit in, leaving a small gap at the top.\n\n\"Now,\" Lukai continued, \"Since you are not strong enough to lift the boulders, we are going to see if we can't obtain a little more force. Take another stone and place it in the space that is left. On my signal, push it in as hard as you can. We may be able to move the boulder just enough to wedge me free.\"\n\nTigerlily hesitated before grabbing the rock. \"But Lukai, isn't that boulder crushing you?\"\n\n\"No, it is merely stuck right against my legs. See here, it is resting on top of this boulder the rocks are stacked beside. But only by a little bit. Which means, when you shove that rock in, it will apply upwards pressure to the boulder on my legs and outward pressure to the boulder supporting it, so we have to do this fast before the boulder moves too far and this one up here actually does crush me. Does that make sense?\"\n\nTigerlily gulped and nodded, suddenly feeling her body begin to tremble. Don't panic now or this will never work, she told herself.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" Lukai asked slowly.\n\nShe nodded and picked up the rock, placing it atop her pile and bracing to begin.\n\nThere was a pause, and then the warrior ordered, \"Now.\"\n\nTigerlily pushed the stone into the small space as hard as she could, thrusting her whole body weight against it. She heard Lukai moan and noticed him straining to help with his legs, and she wished he hadn't ended up in such an awkward position. There was a sound like chalk on a blackboard and Tigerlily pinned her ears back, noticing the boulders just barely move. She sucked in a sharp breath and pushed even harder, and when her muscles felt like giving in she let out a wail and forced herself to keep going.\n\nFinally the boulders moved again, just another centimeter, and Lukai, with a thunderous cry, tore himself from his captivity, armor screeching against the stone, and grabbed Tigerlily, pulling her away. The boulders shifted and tumbled, crashing deeper into the cave. They settled and Tigerlily coughed in the newly formed cloud of dust. There had been a faint hope in her that the disturbance would cause a gap in the pile of rubble leading to the surface, but the dragons were granted no such means of escape.\n\n\"Now what?\" Tigerlily asked after catching her breath.\n\n\"I could try to blast through the rocks, though the stone beneath the lands of Silverwood is infamous for being infused with diamond minerals, making it extremely difficult to break, one of the reasons why the treaty with Diamondpeak was so significant; Diamondpeak is renowned for their abundant quarries.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you make a portal?\"\n\n\"I never studied transportational spells, so I am afraid that is not an option.\"\n\n\"Well, Spade has made a portal before.\"\n\n\"There are two issues with that, however. First, Koro would be able to pinpoint our exact location, and second, I am not sure if the young Guardian would even be able to generate enough power to perform the spell.\"\n\nTigerlily frowned and gazed at the rubble entrapping them. Meanwhile, Lukai wandered to the tunnel at the opposite end of the cave. If only there was a way to communicate with the others, she thought. Wait a minute! She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. <Spade,> she called in her mind. <Spade, can you hear me?>\n\nAbout a minute passed of her calling before she received an answer. <Tigerlily, is that you?> came Spade's voice in her head.\n\n<Yes! Lukai and I are stuck down in a cave.>\n\n<Are you alright?>\n\n<We're okay, but we can't get out. Oh, and Lukai doesn't want you to use any spells to help us because of Koro tracking your energy.>\n\n<Then what are we supposed to do?>\n\nTigerlily turned to the warrior, who was peering into the dark shaft. \"Lukai, do you have any ideas on how we're going to get out of here?\"\n\n\"I suspect we may be trapped in a long-abandoned mineshaft, from back when Silverwood dragons struggled to do their own mining. I can sense a faint draft coming from this tunnel, which means somewhere it opens up to the surface. It might be a risk, but I think it's the best option.\"\n\n<Spade, are you still there?> She called.\n\n<Yes,> came her brother's reply.\n\n<Okay, there's a tunnel that we're pretty sure leads to the surface, so I guess we'll just head down there and\u2026 Meet you guys in Silverwood?>\n\n<Alright. But be careful. When we reach the kingdom gates we'll wait until you guys show. Or vice versa, whoever gets there first.>\n\n<Okay, see you soon hopefully.>\n\n<Let's try and keep in touch\u2026 I don't know how far our mind link will work but we should still try and keep each other updated.>\n\n<But it's dangerous to use your magic. Aren't mind links magic?>\n\n<I don't care. All that matters right now is that I know you're safe.>\n\nThere was a buzz that rushed up Tigerlily's spine and the link broke off. Spade's words brought a comforting warmth to her. She shook away the tingling in her head and went to report to Lukai. \"Spade and the others are going to meet us at Silverwood.\"\n\n\"What? How do you know?\"\n\n\"I made a mental link with him.\"\n\nLukai seemed genuinely surprised. \"Interesting. I did not know you were that far along in your magic training.\"\n\n\"Well, that's kind of the only thing I know how to do. Chief Starblaze taught me.\"\n\nLukai shrugged. \"Life is full of unexpected teachers. In any case, we should get moving. The air down here is not good for you.\" The warrior took the lead, his glow lighting the way. \"You can tell this is Silverwood rock,\" he commented. \"It sparkles when the light touches it.\"\n\nTigerlily walked beside him and stared in awe at the glittering walls surrounding them. It was like a starry sky. She then glanced down at her own bruised and cut body and studied Lukai. Aside from his helmet, bits of armor from his arms and back had also been broken off. \"If you're a spirit, do you still feel pain?\" she asked, thinking of the way he had seemed virtually unscathed upon waking.\n\n\"I do,\" he replied. \"But only\u2026 a shadow of the pain normal dragons feel, I suppose you could say. The only thing that can truly hurt me, or kill me for that matter, is magic.\"\n\n\"What happens if you die as a spirit?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, though I would guess I might cease to exist not only in this physical realm but also in the Maker's realm, the realm of spirits.\"\n\n\"So you want to go back to your body?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How would you do that?\"\n\n\"I am not fully aware of the spell, but I know the physical body must be present and that it takes a great amount of energy from the dragon being returned and the dragon returning them.\"\n\n\"You can't return yourself to your body?\"\n\n\"No, another dragon must perform the actual spell.\"\n\n\"So Spade could do it?\"\n\nLukai hesitated. \"In theory, yes.\"\n\nTigerlily wanted to keep asking him questions but wasn't sure he was getting annoyed. Considering that he wasn't really trying to carry the conversation, she ceased her inquiries. She was comfortable in silence, even with the warrior.\n\nThey walked further into the narrow cave, and Tigerlily let out a quiet sigh. She watched the diamond veins glitter like stars, and bit her cheek in thought. She watched Lukai for a moment before looking ahead. Something had definitely happened between him and Spade, but she figured it wasn't a good time to ask about it. <Maybe later,> she thought. <One way or another I'll get to the bottom of this.>\n\nSpade's claws clicked anxiously on the slippery stone undertalon. He glanced from the collapsed cave to the distant treeline. Why had Tigerlily insisted they keep going? What if something happened to her and Lukai while they were down there? What if they couldn't find a way out?\n\n\"Are you sure she said to keep going?\" Mikah's question pulled Spade away from the worried trail of thoughts.\n\nSpade gathered himself, shaking the rain off of his scales only to be soaked again in seconds. \"Yeah, that's what she said.\"\n\n\"Then I propose we get moving soon,\" Rose commented. \"Where there is one hound, there are always more. If we leave now, they will not be able to track us through the rain.\"\n\nMikah nodded. \"I agree, we'll be safe once we reach Silverwood.\"\n\n<Okay,> Spade thought.< Everything is going to be okay. Tigerlily and Lukai are going to make it.> He looked up at the others, who seemed to be waiting for a signal of sorts to move. <Are they waiting for me to say something?> He thought with a sudden burst of pride. <Are they looking to me to lead them now? I> am <the Golden Guardian, which means I need to take initiative. But what do I say? Don't worry, the words will come to you. Alright, here go-.>\n\n\"Well then,\" Zao huffed. \"What are we waiting for? Let's go!\"\n\nSpade felt his wings droop. So much for taking initiative. <Maybe I should just leave it to Zao,> he thought with a frown. <He always knows what to say.>\n\nThunder cracked overhead, making the dragonets jump. The raindrops falling from the sky became sharp and fast as the storm thickened. Their vision of the treeline became shrouded.\n\n\"Hey Spade!\" Zao called over the roaring downpour. \"Can you do the glowy scale thing?!\"\n\nSpade nodded and took a deep breath, trying to ignore the pelting rain that stung at his scales. But before he could gather the energy in his chest he stopped. \"I don't think I should use my magic energy!\" He reminded his friend.\n\n\"Oh right! Okay! I guess we're all just going to have to light the way!\"\n\nSpade felt fire rise up in his throat, so soft and warm compared to the overwhelming surge from his magic. Mikah's throat lit up orange as well. An electric-blue accented Zao's throat and, standing right beside him, Spade could hear the quiet crackle of the restless electric sparks eager to escape from his friend's jaws. Spade was surprised when a green glow joined them, and found himself having expected Tigerlily's fire instead. He turned to Delilah-Rose, who's deep green faded into a vibrant pink, and then back to emerald, and then to brown.\n\n<Her element must be earth,> he realized, and wondered why he hadn't asked her about it earlier.\n\n\"Which way was Silverwood?!\" Zao called.\n\nSpade waited for a crash of thunder to pass and then shouted back, \"I- I don't know! I lost it!\" Panic suddenly overtook him. <We lost the river. The rain is too thick. How will we find our way to Silverwood? Wait a minute\u2026 Lightflare!>\n\nAs if at his thought, she appeared in front of him in a ball of light, her lantern-like glow vivid against the darkness.\n\n\"Everybody follow Lightflare!\" Spade yelled.\n\nThe spriteling was unbothered from the rain, as it simply phased through her celestial body, and eagerly took the lead of the group.\n\nThe storm was relentless, icy drops hammering down on the dragonets. Spade tried to keep his face sheltered from the onslaught by folding his wings above his head, though in the thick downpour it was hardly effective. He shivered furiously, stumbling on his frigid talons. They had descended from the rocky bluffs, miraculously without any injury, and were now sloshing across the muddy, flooded fields that lay between them and the tempting shelter of the Silverwood forests.\n\nFinally, after an hour of miserable trekking, they reached the dark treeline. Although drops of rain still slipped through the spaces in the soft elm branches overhead, the protection was much welcomed. Spade shook off his scales and tried to increase the energy of his flames, hoping to warm himself. Zao looked even more miserable than he did, and Spade felt bad that his friend couldn't produce the same internal heat as him.\n\n\"We should find somewhere to rest, completely sheltered from the rain,\" Spade suggested through chattering teeth. Everyone agreed with hasty nods.\n\nIt wasn't long until they came across an ancient, massive elm whose trunk had split from old age, creating a small hollow nestled amongst its roots. Spade and Zao quickly shuffled inside and began to dig, scooping out chunks of dirt with their claws to create a space big enough for everyone. Once they were finished, the four dragonets piled inside, barely fitting in. They snuggled close, Mikah and Spade on either end to warm the other two.\n\nSpade noticed Mikah tense as Delilah-Rose' scales touched his. Mikah glanced down at the dragoness, who was drifting off into sleep beside him, and swallowed. Careful not to disturb her, he squirmed into a comfortable position and took a deep breath. His cheeks burned bright red, and yet a tender smile crept onto his face.\n\nSpade let out a soft laugh and continued to push his internal flames to burn hotter. Finally he felt Zao stop shivering, and he himself was comfortably warm. Exhausted from the effort, Spade found himself rapidly growing tired, and fell asleep with no trouble.\n\nLight poured through the crack in the old tree, waking the huddle of dragonets. As the others began to stir, Spade crawled out of their shelter and into the warm rays peeking through the leafy branches above. He dug his claws into the moist dirt as he stretched out. A gentle breeze danced across his scales.\n\nHe almost expected to hear Lukai beckon him over for a new lesson, and felt a surprising disappointment mixed with his relief. Thinking of the two stuck in the tunnel, he focused his energy and tried calling out to Tigerlily in his mind. There was no answer. He tried calling again, but couldn't sense her energy anywhere. <I know you want to talk to her, but maybe you should stop using your magic,> he thought.< Even if its a mindlink. It's not worth it. But I have to know if she's alright.>\n\nFaint talonsteps made his head snap up. He twitched his ears, listening. Someone was nearby. Was it Lukai and Tigerlily?\n\nThe others emerged from the shelter of the ancient elm, Delilah-Rose padding over to Spade's side, intrigued by his sudden alertness. \"What's wrong, Guardian?\" she asked.\n\n\"I thought I heard talonsteps. I'm probably just paranoid.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose pricked her ears, and then flew onto the old elm, daintily weaving up through its branches. Spade watched as her sharp eyes scanned the perimeter. When she flew back down, there was concern written all over her face.\n\n\"There is a group of armored dragons swiftly headed this way, traveling on talon.\"\n\n\"Krait,\" Spade realized, a sense of dread falling over him. <Blazes, the mindlink. What was I thinking?> \"We need to go, guys!\"\n\nZao and Mikah seemed to snap awake at the order, and quickly gathered up all of their things.\n\n\"Lightflare,\" Spade called, and the spriteling appeared on his shoulder, smiling up at him. \"How close are we to a town?\"\n\n\"We're almost to the Outskirts of Silverwood, a bustling and friendly community of townsfolk and farmers, renowned for their use of herbal medicines.\"\n\n\"Okay, perfect. We need to get there fast, and without Krait seeing us.\"\n\nLightflare observed their surroundings with squinted eyes, then pointed a claw, chirping, \"The trees thicken this way, meaning you'll have more cover. If you get through there you should be clear to fly the rest of the way. Once you get over the trees, we're close enough that you will be able to see Silverwood in the distance.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Spade breathed, and then gestured for the others to follow. The spriteling giggled and poofed away. The dragonets hurried into the dense trees, none daring to look back. They bounded over the tangle of roots undertalon and weaved through the maze of trunks and heavy undergrowth.\n\n<Lukai was right, I can't fight Krait alone. We need to reach Silverwood soon. I wish Lukai was here. I wish I hadn't yelled at him.>\n\nAs they traveled, Spade noticed the bark of the trees slowly taking on a silver hue, the leaves changing from green to white. \"What's wrong with the trees?\" he asked.\n\n\"Silverwood has silver trees, remember?\" Zao replied with a yawn. \"That's literally why it's called 'Silverwood'.\"\n\n\"We are probably safe to fly now,\" Delilah-Rose noted.\n\nSpade copied the others as they began to climb up the trees to the open air. He ascended a thick branch until he broke through the barrier of leaves, and then jumped, flapping his wings to climb into the sky. His mouth dropped. Before them was a lush sea of snow-white leaves, dotted with crystal ponds. Spade had never been so close to the mountains. They reached up into the sky like mighty towers, their snow capped tops glowing in the sunlight. In the center of the pearly forest sat Silverwood, the whole kingdom seeming to be one huge, marble carving.\n\nZao grinned and nudged Spade. \"We're almost there.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Tigerlily let out a yawn, her talons growing tired. She didn't know how long they had been walking. They had stopped to sleep a while ago, unsure whether or not it was night, but only for a few hours. She had tried to reach Spade through a mind link, but he had never answered. Her lungs were beginning to grow sore from the chalky air, but the draft of air grew stronger with every passing hour, urging her on.\n\nLukai, of course, seemed unphased by the continuous trekking and poor air. However, he did seem to be losing energy. Tigerlily wondered if he was becoming drained from keeping his glow lit for so long, as it had gradually become dimmer.\n\nAs they walked, Tigerlily unfolded her wing, examining the tear in the dim light. It didn't sting as much anymore.\n\nShe pricked her ears at the sudden faint whispering from Lukai, and turned to see if he was talking to her. His eyes were unfocused and his mouth moved only slightly as he mumbled.\n\n\"He was your brother. They were all your brothers. They're all gone. But Nerizza is still alive. No. Nerizza is gone.\" His wings twitched and his breathing quickened. \"He's gone forever. He must die. Please\u2026don't do this-\" He gasped and abruptly looked around, eyes refocusing and letting out slow, shaky breaths. He blinked and glanced down at Tigerlily, then returned his gaze to the tunnel.\n\n<Was he talking to himself?> Tigerlily wondered, baffled by his behavior. <Was he daydreaming, but\u2026 having a nightmare?>\n\nAfter a few long hours of silence, Tigerlily found herself growing bored, and inquired, \"What was it like being a general?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Lukai asked.\n\n\"Was it fun? Did you enjoy it?\"\n\nThe warrior pondered her question. \"Most parts of it, yes. There was a surprising amount of paperwork, though.\"\n\n\"What were some of your favorite parts of being a general?\"\n\n\"The fighting itself was pretty enjoyable, unless we were losing. I also made some good friends\u2026 most of which I lost. I think I found the most joy in training, being able to pass down all that I had learned to other officers moving up in the ranks.\"\n\nTigerlily swallowed, and suddenly blurted out, \"So what happened between you and Spade?\"\n\nThere was a flicker of surprise in Lukai's yellow eyes, and his ear began to twitch. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I just heard you guys yelling during your last training session and you've kind of been avoiding each other and swapping glares and stuff, and everytime I bring him up your ear starts twitching which I think is some sort of nervous twitch or involuntary reaction to anything that makes you uncomfortable.\" She held her breath as the warrior cocked his head to stare down at her.\n\nLukai said slowly, \"Uh, yes, I found that I developed this sort of anxious tic during my time as a general. It's a bit counterproductive when you're trying to be stoic, as you might imagine,\" he added with a small laugh. He took a quick breath. \"Your brother did not respond well to my method of training, to say the least. We had a disagreement, of sorts, and I may have\u2026 lost my temper, and pushed him too far. I have witnessed Koro's strength, and I fear Spade may not be able to reach his full potential in time to battle him.\"\n\n\"Well, he is only a dragonet,\" Tigerlily said. \"And it seems like you're used to training dragons who already have a lot of experience in your field. I don't know much about fighting, but I know better than any dragon that Spade doesn't respond well to aggression, and constantly being forced out of his comfort zone. I get that that's just how you train, and I'm sure it's worked with your past students, but I think you need to realize that Spade isn't like any dragon you've trained before.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"I'm saying you may have to change how you approach his training. Suit the lessons to the dragon, not the dragon to the lessons.\" She quieted when she saw Lukai's surprised face, and hesitantly added, \"If that makes sense.\"\n\nThe warrior raised an eyebrow and his mouth hinted at a smile. \"You\u2026 remind me of someone.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"An old friend. Her name is Midnight.\"\n\n\"Isn't that the name of the queen of Shadow?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's her.\"\n\nTigerlily's mouth gaped slightly. \"You're friends with the queen of Silverwood and the queen of Shadow?\"\n\nLukai seemed amused by her astonishment, and nodded.\n\n\"But why would she marry someone as awful as Nerizza? The way you talk about him, he sounds terrible.\"\n\n\"Well, he wasn't always like that. Before the corruption overtook him, he was actually rather fun to be around. He was ambitious, humorous, and was always doing something crazy.\" He let out a huff of laughter. \"He would always talk about exploring the Four Regions. That was his plan for when he grew up. As time went on, though, as Koro's possession of him grew, he became secluded and violent. His objectives in life changed.\"\n\n\"So you two were friends?\"\n\n\"The best of friends. We were like brothers, really. Inseparable.\" The warrior blinked his eyes quickly. \"But that was a long time ago, and we are both different dragons now.\"\n\nTigerlily wasn't sure if she was going too far, but asked softly, \"Are you sad he's going to die?\"\n\n\"There is a fork up ahead,\" Lukai commented, quickly changing the subject. As the tunnel split into two, the warrior pricked his ears and narrowed his eyes. \"This way.\" He went to the left, and Tigerlily followed. They continued their journey in silence.\n\n\"So, these Mythical Monsters cards, what do you do with them?\" Delilah-Rose asked Mikah, head cocked in interest.\n\n\"You collect and trade them mostly,\" Mikah replied, rubbing the back of his head with a talon.\n\n\"And what is the purpose of that?\"\n\n\"Well, uh, some cards are really valuable, and there's this game you can play, like a fighting game.\"\n\nThere was confusion in Delilah-Rose's eyes. \"I don't understand. How can you fight with cards? Do you throw them at each other?\"\n\n\"No, haha, each of the monsters have different abilities and strengths and, you know, the stronger monster wins.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think I get it. We would play a game like this amongst the dragonets of the village. We would all tackle each other and the last one standing was the winner. It's all a matter of who had the best skills.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026 yeah, that's basically the idea.\"\n\n\"There were no weapons allowed, of course,\" she added with a laugh. Her brow furrowed. \"Yet we still managed to draw excessive amounts of blood.\"\n\n\"So you've basically grown up a warrior.\"\n\n\"Yes, every dragon in the village is raised knowing how to fight.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Mostly tradition. It is a practice passed down from the time of our ancestors. Back then, it was much more necessary, of course. The swamp is more tame now, but it is still a dangerous place. And besides, you never know when you might find yourself tagging along on a quest to destroy an ancient demon lord.\" They both laughed. \"And what about you? You obviously took some sort of combat training. How else would you have known that a lockjaw's weak point is at the back of its skull?\"\n\nMikah hesitated. \"Actually, no, I haven't had any training. I just, um, like to study different creatures. I think they're cool.\" Delilah-Rose looked surprised. \"But I would like to. To know how to fight, that is,\" he added quickly. \"If you'd want to maybe show me a few moves?\"\n\n\"Why, I would love to!\" she beamed, as though she thought he'd never ask.\n\nSpade couldn't help but laugh as he listened to the two of them chat. They had been talking non-stop since they had taken flight, despite the urgency of the situation. He wished he could be as relaxed as they seemed, but he couldn't stop worrying about Krait. As the magnificent kingdom ahead grew closer and closer, he tried to keep his mind focused on Silverwood, and not the general.\n\n\"Help!\" came a sudden, faint cry.\n\nSpade glanced down at the snow-white labrinth beneath them. \"Did anyone else hear that?\" he asked, tilting his wings to slow down.\n\nZao nodded, just as the voice shouted again, \"Help! You up there!\"\n\n\"Right there!\" Zao pointed a claw at a space where the leaves parted, revealing an elderly dragoness below, waving a talon in the air.\n\nSpade glanced behind them, and then dove down to the ground. \"What's wrong?\" he asked as he padded over to the dragoness.\n\n\"Please, my leg is stuck. Can you help me?\" She gestured to her leg, which was caught in a tangle of roots. She had dull, gray scales tinted red, and tired eyes. There was a large pack strapped to her back. Her body was thin and frail.\n\nWhat is a dragon like her doing all the way out here? Spade wondered. He quickly grabbed the white roots in his teeth and pulled. They tore in his grip, freeing her trapped limb.\n\nThe dragoness pulled her leg away and inspected it, then tested it carefully. She smiled up at Spade and the three other dragonets gathered behind him. \"Thank you so much. I've been stuck here for hours.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Spade replied. \"But what are you doing in the wilderness all alone?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm just dropping off some supplies that I collected from Harmony. I've made this trip many times before. I don't suppose you could accompany me to my cottage? I could make you some tea. You look like you've been flying for a while. It's the least I can do to thank you.\"\n\nSpade looked at the others for an answer. Zao shrugged, as though to say, \"I don't see why we couldn't.\" He turned back to the dragoness and said, \"We'd be happy to.\"\n\n\"Here, I can take this,\" Zao offered, reaching for the pack.\n\nThe dragoness gratefully pulled it off and let him take it. \"You're too kind. My name is Haku, by the way.\"\n\n\"I'm Zao. This is Spade, Mikah, and Delilah-Rose.\"\n\nHaku looked over the group again and stopped at Rose, eyes taking on sudden interest. \"Why, your wings. They're beautiful.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose smiled, though Spade could see her discomfort at the comment as she tucked her wings tightly to her sides.\n\n\"My house is this way,\" Haku said, heading off through the trees.\n\nSpade gestured for the others to follow. He noticed Zao's eyes widen as his friend snuck a peek into the bag before strapping it onto his back. \"That looks heavy,\" Spade commented, walking to Zao's side.\n\nHis friend looked at him in concern. \"It's a bunch of swords,\" he hissed quietly.\n\nSpade raised an eyebrow. \"Are you serious?\"\n\nZao nodded and pursed his lips. \"She's crazy.\"\n\n\"Wha-Zao, you can't just say something like that.\"\n\n\"She's a super old dragoness living in the middle of nowhere carrying a pack full of old swords, and apparently she's done this before.\"\n\n\"So what, do you want to just ditch her?\"\n\n\"Actually, I am very interested to see where she lives. But let's be careful. I don't trust her.\"\n\n\"We just met her.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Why would she trust a bunch of dragonets she just met who are clearly physically stronger than her, unless she knew she could take us all? Maybe she has some sort of secret fighting skills.\"\n\n\"I think you're just paranoid.\"\n\n\"I'm being cautious. There's a difference.\"\n\n\"And since when are you cautious?\"\n\n\"Since we've almost been killed like, five times.\"\n\n\"Fair point. Alright, I'll keep my guard up, but I don't think she'll hurt us.\"\n\nThey traveled deep into the forest until they reached a cozy hollow. A small cottage was nestled in thick brush. Haku moved one of the wood panels on the outside, revealing a hidden key, and opened the door.\n\n\"Please, come inside,\" the elderly dragoness offered. \"I apologize if it's a bit snug, it's not made for guests. I'll get some water heated for tea. Make yourselves comfortable.\" She left to the second room as the dragonets filed inside.\n\n\"Snug\" was a bit of an understatement. The little cabin had obviously been built for only a single dragon, but they managed to get comfortable. It was decorated with small succulent plants and antique trinkets. A skylight offered entrance for the sun's warm rays. Delilah-Rose and Mikah settled down on a couple of large cushions in the corner, while Zao and Spade quietly inspected the mysterious pack. Spade peaked under the flap to look at the swords. Despite being rusted from age, he could tell they were beautiful and intricate in design. He grabbed the handle of one and pulled it into the light.\n\n\"Wow, these are really nice,\" Zao whispered. \"Where do you think she got them?\"\n\n\"Better yet,\" Spade said. \"What does she plan on doing with them?\"\n\nLightflare appeared between the dragonets, peering down at the handle in Spade's talon. The smile on her face quickly faded. \"Oh my Maker,\" she breathed.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"These are the swords of the Golden Sages.\"\n\nSpade and Zao exchanged astonished faces. \"What?\" Spade hissed. \"Why does she have them?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't know,\" Lightflare squeaked quietly, her thin tail curling in worry.\n\nSpade pulled the whole sword out of the pack. It was chipped, and stained with blood and rust. He ran his talon along it's dull blade, and an image flashed in his mind: A bloody and beaten dragon in white armor pleading for help. It was from the vision he had seen after the location spell, back at the temple. That dragon was a Sage. He gasped and dropped the sword as a pain filled his chest.\n\n\"Tea is ready!\" Haku announced, entering the room holding a tray.\n\nZao shoved the pack against the wall and kicked the sword on the floor under a nearby table. Lightflare immediately poofed away.\n\nSpade took a deep breath as the pain faded away, and took a cup from Haku's tray. He noticed Zao's questioning face and met eyes with him. His friend mouthed \"poison\" and Spade rolled his eyes, shaking his head. He took a sip of the warm tea and snuck a glance at the sword under the table. Surely Haku wouldn't notice it\u2026 Would she?\n\n\"It's been ages since I've had visitors. So where are you four headed?\" the elderly dragoness inquired as she set the tray down.\n\n\"Silverwood,\" Zao answered. \"For, um, a family reunion.\"\n\n\"So you're all related?\" there was a hint of suspicion in her eyes.\n\n\"Yes, we are.\" Zao followed her gaze to Delilah-Rose. \"She's adopted,\" he said with a forced smile.\n\nHaku gave a convinced nod. \"It must be nice, the four of you being together. I had a sister, but I lost her a long time ago. We were very close when we were young.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that,\" Spade said. \"Can I ask what happened to her?\"\n\nThe dragoness shrugged. \"We went separate ways and would send letters back and forth to keep in touch. She started talking in her letters about someone\u2026 stalking her, and after a while the letters just stopped coming.\" She let out a hoarse laugh. \"You know, I still send one every once and a while, to see if she'll write back.\"\n\nSpade exchanged a confused glance with Zao. \"That's\u2026 horrible. Do you have any other family?\"\n\n\"No, not that I know of, at least. My sister had a son, but I fear he may have fallen to the same fate as her. She named him Spider, because he had four thin, little spikes on either side of his face. I wish I had been able to meet him. Perhaps in the afterlife.\" Her eyes fell to the ground, next to the table. They widened slightly.\n\nShe saw the sword, Spade realized with a feeling of terror.\n\nThey watched as the elderly dragoness reached down and picked up the blade, looking over it's detailed beauty. \"I see you have found me out,\" she said.\n\nSpade gulped. What was she going to do to them?\n\n\"Alright, I'll admit it,\" she laughed. \"I'm a collector. Old relics like these are my favorites.\"\n\nSpade released a tense breath. \"Sorry, we didn't mean to snoop.\"\n\nShe waved a dismissive talon. \"No worries, a stranger walking around with a pack full of swords would spark curiosity from anyone.\"\n\n\"Where did you find them?\" he asked tentatively.\n\nHaku seemed to hesitate at the question. \"Well, I go all sorts of places to find these treasures. Ruins, mostly, if you must know.\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard of the Golden Sages?\" Zao asked, and Spade jabbed him in the arm.\n\nHaku's eyes flashed. \"Yes, yes I have.\"\n\n\"I bet they had some pretty fancy stuff. What, with them being protectors of the temples.\"\n\nA scoff. \"Protectors is a bit too gracious, young one. The Sages were monsters, not the glorious heroes that historians portray them to be.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Spade asked, surprised by her comment. \"They helped track down traces of Koro after the Guardians left.\"\n\n\"The Sages were not formed to track down Koro. They were formed to track down the Golden Guardians\u2026 and kill them.\"\n\nSpade found himself taking a nervous step back. \"H-how do you know that?\"\n\nHaku's eyes became narrow slits. \"Because they killed my sister, and my precious little nephew,\" she hissed.\n\n\"You-you're sister was Marble,\" Spade breathed.\n\n\"What did you just say?\" Haku snarled. \"How do you know her name? You were one of them, weren't you?\"\n\n\"No, I wasn't a Sage, I just-\"\n\n\"They hunted her like an animal and slaughtered her, and no doubt did the same to her dragonet, only two years old!\" Haku stabbed the sword into the ground and fixed her fiery eyes on its damaged blade. In a shaky voice she hissed, \"So I hunted down every last one of them.\" She met eyes with Spade. \"But it seems I missed one.\"\n\n\"Run!\" Zao yelled, pulling Spade towards the door. Mikah shot a flame at Haku, and the dragoness stumbled back with a furious roar. The four dragonets stumbled out of the little cottage and leapt for the trees.\n\n\"I will find you!\" Haku shrieked as the flames began to eat away at her cottage walls. \"And when I do, I will have my revenge!\"\n\nSpade's talons were shaking as he leapt into the air, beating his wings to rise high above the treetops.\n\n\"Tails and talons, what is wrong with her?\" Mikah yelped. \"She's absolutely insane.\"\n\n\"Loss can drive even the noblest of dragons into the dark,\" Delilah-Rose said sadly.\n\n\"I can't believe the Sages killed Marble,\" Spade whispered. \"I thought they were good. This doesn't make any sense.\" He glanced back down at the cottage, and thought back to when Marble had visited him in his dream. Her words echoed in his head. <I turned from the Maker and the power he had granted me to pursue a different love, even though I knew that in the end I would be betrayed. And I paid the price.>\n\n<Is that what she meant by \"paid the price\"?> He wondered. <Did she know the Sages were really killers? What if Haku was lying? But she had the Sages' swords. Did she really kill all of them?>\n\n\"Okay, no more helping to stop random dragons,\" Zao declared, casting a distressed look at Spade. \"No matter how sad and helpless they may look. We are literally so close to Silverwood, and I don't want to run into anymore psychopaths.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" Mikah huffed.\n\nThey were close to Silverwood. So close that Spade could make out dragons shuffling along the stone streets. His heart leapt with joy. <I wonder if Tigerlily and Lukai will be waiting for us. I can't wait to see them again\u2026 even Lukai. I wonder if he's still mad at me.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "\"Are you still mad at Spade?\" Tigerlily asked Lukai, who was examining the shortsword Starblaze had gifted him. They had stopped to rest again in a space where the tunnel widened. Tigerlily's throat was dry with thirst and she was absolutely exhausted, and she feared if she didn't start talking she may pass out. Lukai also seemed worn out. His glow was becoming dim, and she noticed his breathing becoming heavier. It was as if the glow was slowly eating away all his energy. They had to make it out of the cave soon.\n\nThe warrior sheathed his sword and turned his attention to her. \"No, I don't think so. I see where I made a mistake. Do\u2026you think he's still mad at me?\"\n\nShe coughed and rubbed her arm dully, brushing away the thin layer of dust that had settled on her peach scales. \"Knowing Spade, he's probably forgiven you by now. He's not one to hold a grudge. Hey, I've got an idea.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I can tell it's becoming hard to keep your glow up, so why don't you teach me how to do it?\"\n\nLukai frowned. \"In your state, you are too weak. I do not want to put any extra strain on you.\"\n\nTigerlily frowned back. \"I think I can take it.\"\n\nThe warrior gave in with a sigh. \"Very well. Start by gathering up the energy in your chest, like you do with any spell.\" Tigerlily hopped up, eager for the lesson. She took a deep breath and felt the magic energy slowly build. \"For this spell, you disperse the energy throughout your entire body. You have to keep pushing to make sure it has reached all areas, or else it will not work. Give it a try.\"\n\nTigerlily closed her eyes and grunted as she worked the energy, sending it coursing through her. Everything began to tingle. She pushed until the feeling reached the tips of her talons, tail and wings. When she opened her eyes, a new orange glow lit the space around them. She held up her arm to examine it, and marveled at the warm luminescence emanating from her scales. \"This is so cool!\" she laughed.\n\nLukai smiled. \"Indeed. Very\u2026 cool.\" The warrior stood. \"We should be going now, if you are ready.\" Tigerlily nodded. \"I believe we are almost to the surface.\"\n\nThey continued their trek, Tigerlily forcing her weary legs to move. The tunnel began to zig zag side to side, seeming to be an endless pathway of turns. It wasn't long until Tigerlily became dizzy with the constant weaving, shaking her head to try and regain focus.\n\nWhen they came around what felt like the hundredth bend, there was a light far off in the distance. Tigerlily squinted her eyes, confused at first. \"Wait a minute,\" she gasped. \"Is that-- Lukai, look!\"\n\nRelief spread across the warrior's face. \"We made it,\" he breathed.\n\nIt was as if all ache and exhaustion suddenly drained from Tigerlily's muscles. She dashed up the last stretch of the cave, emerging onto a grassy hillside, and sprang into the air. As she twirled and spun the wind seemed to dance along with her, rushing over her scales, bringing with it wonderful, fresh scents. The sun's rays were soothing on her face, and she closed her eyes to take in the moment. Even the dull ache in her torn wing seemed to fade away.\n\nShe landed in the soft grass next to Lukai, a new spring in her step, wings fluttering in bliss. \"I can't believe we actually did it!\" she cheered.\n\n\"I never had a doubt,\" the warrior claimed, his breaths still heavy and labored. \"Now, we mustn't waste time. We need to reach Silverwood. The others will be waiting for us, and you require nourishment. We may have to hunt something on the way.\"\n\nTigerlily's stomach rumbled at the comment. \"Ooh, I've never hunted before.\"\n\nLukai smiled and began to descend the hill but abruptly stumbled over his talons, legs giving out underneath him. Tigerlily gasped and ran to his side as he regained his footing. \"I am just a bit tired, that's all,\" he insisted.\n\n\"Are you sure? You kept your glow up for a pretty long time. Do you want to rest?\"\n\n\"No. We must keep going.\" With a growl, he spread his wings and took flight.\n\nTigerlily joined him, trying to push the concerned lump in her throat back down. He's going to be fine, she thought, watching as Lukai wavered in the air before regaining balance. \u2026Probably.\n\nStone streets, bustling markets, the smell of cooked meat drifting through the warm air, Spade had never been so relieved in all his life. His stomach began to ache at all the wonderful smells. The Outskirts were a welcome comfort from their days of traveling in the wilderness, and the walls of the upper kingdom stood in waiting.\n\n\"It wouldn't hurt to do a little exploring before we head to the castle, right?\" Zao asked excitedly.\n\n\"I don't see a problem with that,\" Spade agreed, checking Mikah and Delilah-Rose for any disagreement. They seemed as eager as the rest to tour the streets, and so they headed down into the lively marketplace.\n\n\"Do we have any money?\" Mikah asked.\n\nSpade bit his lip. \"I don't think so.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose gave an apologetic shrug. \"We don't have currency in the swamp.\" Spade noticed her wings again tucked close to her sides, her tail curling next to her body.\n\nHer feathers, he realized. Everyone here will be curious. Nightshade dragons don't really travel to the kingdoms, I guess.\n\n\"Do you want a cloak?\" he offered, and then remembered the money situation.\n\n\"I appreciate the offer, but we have no way of obtaining one,\" she replied with an uneasy smile. A dragon gazed down at her in passing, not looking away until he was lost in the crowd. She lowered her head and took a step closer to Mikah.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" Mikah offered. He rummaged through his pack, pulling out a compass and a coil of rope. \"Can I have one of your necklaces?\" he asked Delilah-Rose.\n\nShe nodded and pulled off one of her beaded strands, setting it in his talon.\n\nMikah took a deep breath. \"Alright, here goes nothing.\" He puffed out his chest and strutted up to a stand, at which the owner was selling a collection of cloth items.\n\n\"Excuse me, good sir,\" Mikah began, placing the collection of items on the table. \"I'd like one of your finest cloaks.\"\n\nThe dragon, who had ruby-red scales stippled with black marks, returned his request with a blank stare. \"Sorry, but I'm not in the business of bartering.\"\n\nMikah looked taken aback. \"But you're in a market. That's what you guys do.\"\n\n\"Well, in Silverwood we're a bit more refined than that. Beat it.\" The dragon began to turn away.\n\n\"Wait! You didn't even look at what I'm offering!\"\n\nThe dragon hissed an exasperated sigh and turned back, glaring down at the rope, compass and necklace. \"This is a bunch of junk.\"\n\nMikah held up the necklace and scoffed. \"You dare insult such fine jewelry? I'll have you know these beads come all the way from the Kingdom of Hightide in the Western Region. They've been infused with the pristine waters of Sundazzle Lake and are carried as a token of purity and long life. They're said to bring good fortune to any dragon who holds them.\"\n\nAt the last comment, the dragon raised an eyebrow. \"You don't say.\"\n\nMikah gave a curt nod. \"But I guess you've already made up your mind. Looks like some other dragon will be the lucky owner of this occult treasure.\"\n\n\"Wait, wait,\" the dragon said as Mikah began to saunter away. The dragonet gave a haughty, brief look back. \"Alright, I'll give you the cloak. Which one do you want?\"\n\nMikah grinned and nodded to one of the racks, indicating a cloak the color of the night sky with silver leaf-prints woven onto the edges. The dragon hesitantly handed over the fine cover in exchange for the necklace, asking, \"It'll really bring you good fortune?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, my good fellow. Put it on, and just wait for the sales to pour in. This is going to be a very good day for you.\"\n\nSpade watched in surprise as Mikah trotted back, the cloak tucked under a talon.\n\n\"Well fly me sideways,\" Zao laughed. \"That actually worked.\"\n\n\"See? That was so easy,\" Mikah said, casually shaking his trembling talons. \"Didn't even break a sweat.\" He handed the beautiful cloak to Delilah-Rose and she swung it over her back, tying the strings at her neck.\n\n\"It's so lovely,\" she marveled, running a claw along the fine design.\n\n\"I thought you might like it because of the leaves and stuff,\" Mikah said with a nervous laugh. \"Might remind you of home.\"\n\nDelilah-Rose gave him an affectionate smile and replied, \"I love it. Thank you. How did you know he would fall for that?\"\n\n\"He had a dreamcatcher hanging in the back of his stand, so I figured he was into that kind of stuff,\" he snickered.\n\n\"Well then,\" Zao said. \"Let's get to it, there's a lot to explore.\"\n\nThe four dragonets started off down the fine streets, admiring assortments of trinkets and foods for sale. Beautiful arches towered over the route, and the surrounding houses were neat and elegant, carved from marble. They entered a large plaza, and the stone undertalon turned to tiles, arranged to create the image of a branchy, silver tree. In the center of the square was a statue of iron, glinting in the sun. Spade cocked his head in interest, recognizing the wolf-like helmet of the carved dragon.\n\nAs he approached, he read aloud the nameplate attached at the base. \"The Iron Wolf. In honor of Grand General Lukai DeTaris, who lost his life in combat during the War of Ashes. He died a friend, a soldier, and a hero.\" The carving was dressed in sharp armor, a sword in its talon and jaws open in a roar. \"Lukai,\" Spade whispered, staring at the blank eyes of the statue. A sudden pang of loss filled his heart. \"I'm sorry. I wish I could live up to your expectations. I'll try harder, I promise. I just hope you and Tigerlily are alright.\"\n\n\"Well, well, well,\" a familiar voice drawled.\n\nSpade gasped and stumbled back.\n\n\"How sweet, the little Guardian misses his master,\" Krait sneered with a pouting face, stalking around the base of the statue. \"It's so tragic, he won't even be here to watch you die.\" His fangs extended and shot forth a stream of venom at the dragonet.\n\nSpade rolled out of the way, blindly firing a bolt of magic at the general. The dragons that were crowded into the plaza began to scream and run, panicking at the sudden brawl. Krait leapt at Spade and caught his shoulder with his claws. Spade yelped and fell back. He heard Zao yell his name, and turned to glimpse Krait's guards surrounding the dragonets.\n\nSoon the plaza was empty, leaving only Krait and Spade, curious dragons standing far back to watch the outcome of the fight. The two circled each other, Spade limping at the pain in his shoulder. Blood trailed down his golden scales.\n\n\"You're helpless without Lukai here to protect you,\" Krait cackled. \"Where is he, anyways?\"\n\n<Don't freak out, don't freak out,> Spade thought. <I can't believe he caught up to us so soon! You can take him. No you can't. Yes you can, just stop freaking out. Remember your training.>\n\nThe general released another shot of venom, and Spade rolled, but it caught the end of his tail. He gritted his teeth at the stinging pain and blasted Krait. The general jumped back to his talons and charged. Spade was able to block his attack, and then whipped his tail around to smack Krait in the face.\n\nEnraged, Krait tackled Spade and reared onto his hind legs, pinning him against the statue. \"Enough playing around, you little pest,\" he hissed, opening his jaws to reveal the two knife-like fangs.\n\nSpade dangled his legs in the air, struggling to escape from the general's grip. He kicked Krait's stomach but he seemed unphased. Elemental chamber, Spade suddenly thought. He grabbed the tail of the statue with his back talons and then pushed off, striking Krait right under his ribcage. The general coughed and sputtered, dropping the dragonet. Spade scrambled to his talons and ran, but Krait was quick to recover. He caught Spade by the tail and again opened his jaws to attack, but only a drip of venom escaped from his fangs.\n\n\"What did you do to me?!\" Krait snarled.\n\n\"I paralyzed your elemental chamber,\" Spade laughed, amused by his distress. \"Guess who taught me that?\"\n\n\"Your's truly,\" a deep voice sneered.\n\nKrait's wings drooped, and his grip on Spade loosened. \"DeTaris,\" he hissed as Lukai entered the plaza from the crowd.\n\nSpade's heart leapt and he turned his head to see the warrior. \"Lukai! You're okay!\" he gasped in relief.\n\n\"Let the dragonet go,\" Lukai said dryly. Spade noticed that he looked weak, leaning his weight on his left side and breathing heavily. He was missing his helmet, revealing his scarred face.\n\n\"The Guardian is coming with me,\" Krait replied.\n\n\"Please?\" the warrior tried with a half-smile. \"I'm really not in the mood to fight right now. Besides, we both know you're going to lose, so why don't you just save yourself the humiliation.\"\n\n\"You talk too much, DeTaris.\"\n\n\"I know, I've been working on it.\"\n\nKrait gave a mischievous smile. \"Let's make a deal, you old fool.\"\n\nLukai flicked his ears back. \"That's hurtful. But alright, what are your terms?\"\n\n\"A fight. If I win, then you stop meddling in my affairs. If you win, I'll let you and the Guardian be.\"\n\n\"Sounds fair enough. Except for one thing.\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"I already told you, I don't feel like fighting,\" he huffed, rolling his eyes like an irritated dragonet. Spade snorted in laughter.\n\n\"Well I don't want to sit here listening to you babble on any longer, so let's get on with it.\"\n\nLukai sighed. \"That sounds like a personal problem. What I was going to say was, I think you should fight the young Guardian.\"\n\nSpade raised an eyebrow at the warrior, looking for an explanation to his proposal.\n\nKrait scoffed. \"Really? Very well, I think I can handle this pathetic dragonet.\" He released Spade's tail.\n\n\"Your confidence is so amusing,\" Lukai chuckled with a tired sigh.\n\n\"And your chattering is extremely infuriating,\" Krait snarled. \"Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let us begin.\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Spade whispered.\n\nLukai set a talon on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. \"I'm trusting you. This isn't a test, or a lesson. I believe you can take him down\u2026 Your way. Without me getting under your scales.\"\n\nSpade studied the warrior. \"What happened in that tunnel?\" he asked with a laugh.\n\nLukai smiled. \"I had a lot of time to think. Now,\" He clapped his talons together. \"You've seen me with Krait; his weakness is his aggression. All you have to do is push enough buttons and he'll become his own enemy.\"\n\n\"Hurry up, we haven't got all day,\" Krait growled.\n\nSpade mustered up his courage and nodded to Lukai. The warrior nodded back and stepped away. The dragonet turned to Krait and tried to stand taller, glaring at the general.\n\n\"What, the little Guardian needed inspiration from his mentor?\" Krait jeered in a mocking tone.\n\n\"Lukai says you're looking fat today,\" Spade replied with an innocent shrug. He heard the warrior choke back a laugh as Krait curled his lips back in a snarl.\n\n\"I'm going to tear you apart limb by limb!\" The general roared as he charged.\n\nThe two dragons struggled, Spade fighting to keep the general's claws off him.\n\nHe felt his chest grow warm as a fire began to build inside. Krait didn't know about his second element.\n\nHe released the flame into the general's face and Krait screamed in rage, falling away from him.\n\nRipping his sword from its sheath, Krait advanced once again.\n\n\"Spade!\" Lukai called, pulling out his own blade and tossing it in the air.\n\nSpade caught the shortsword just in time to block Krait's strike. As they began to spar, he tried to gather enough energy in his chest to recreate the surge from his first encounter with the general. He felt a sparking sensation rush through his veins as he blocked another attack.\n\nHe released the energy, and screamed at the painful, tearing feeling as a dome of magic and fire exploded from his body. That hadn't happened the first time. He collapsed to the ground and gritted his teeth as pain convulsed through his body. Blood pounded in his ears. What did I just do?! He thought.\n\nTalons were grabbing at him, and he panicked, weakly attempting to swat them away. When his eyes focused on the dragon above him, though, he relaxed. It was only Lukai. The warrior helped him stand, and his mouth was moving as though he was trying to speak, but Spade couldn't hear what he was saying.\n\nAll of a sudden his senses seemed to rush back. The pounding in his ears was replaced with the noise of hundreds of talking dragons and Lukai yelling at him.\n\n\"Spade, can you hear me?\" the warrior was calling over the commotion from the crowd.\n\nSpade nodded, flinching at the overwhelming noise. The other dragonets pushed their way through the mass, and he was relieved when he saw Tigerlily with them.\n\n\"Dude, that was so cool!\" Zao said, letting Spade rest his weight against him.\n\n\"But I don't understand,\" Spade rasped. \"What did I do?\"\n\n\"You pulsed,\" Lukai explained as he warily eyed the curious, advancing crowd. \"Which I was not aware you were capable of doing. It is a higher level spell, and very effective but also very draining. You may be experiencing elemental deficiency.\"\n\nA roar bellowed from the far end of the plaza and the crowd immediately began to disperse. A young, armored dragon stalked across the tiled ground, escorted by a group of soldiers. Spade noticed a royal insignia plated to his shoulder blade.\n\n\"So you must be the troublemakers,\" the new dragon hissed, glaring down at the group. \"I received a message about a disruption in Elm Plaza. Would you like to explain to me what exactly is going on, and why there is a giant scorch mark on the ground?\" Lukai stood to face the dragon, and the newcomer narrowed his eyes. He looked up to the statue and then back down at the warrior. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I am The Iron Wolf,\" Lukai said. \"Grand General Lukai DeTaris.\" He gave a quick bow.\n\nThe newcomer frowned at him, and again glanced at the statue. \"Very amusing, but General DeTaris perished a long time ago.\"\n\n\"My soul was cursed to reside in an ancient structure until I was freed by the Golden Guardian.\" He gave a quick flick of his tail, gesturing to Spade.\n\n\"And you expect me to believe that this puny dragonet is part of the line of ancient, mythical saviors blessed with the Maker's power? The Golden Guardians left this world ages ago. Now quit your excuses and tell me what is going on here.\"\n\n\"Puny dragonet?\" Zao growled. \"You're one to talk.\"\n\nThe soldiers drew their swords and Lukai opened his wing to shield the dragonets.\n\n\"We wish for an audience with the lord and queen,\" the warrior demanded. \"Lord Sagesse will recognize me.\"\n\nThe newcomer raised an eyebrow, exchanging a look with one of the soldiers. When he turned back to Lukai, his expression was somber. \"Lord Sagesse and Queen Everglade are dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The castle was a glittering stronghold dotted with rows of large, shining windows. Pillars and towers accented it's elegant structure, and bordering its grounds stood a vast wall patrolled by guards. Outside the gate of this wall trailed a line of dragons patiently waiting to be summoned inside.\n\nThe young armored dragon from the plaza, whom they had discovered to be Pinesoar, prince of Silverwood, led the group past the line of dragons and through a massive set of doors. Once inside the castle, they passed through another doorway and entered the royal hall.\n\nSpade watched Lukai, interested to see his reaction. The warrior's face was stoic, as usual, but a quiet sigh escaped his mouth and he gazed around the magnificent hall.\n\nAt the far end seated atop a throne was a stunning dragoness, her scales silver with violet highlights. Her wings were a silky purple, her figure thin and delicate. Jewelry made from diamonds and pearls decorated her body. There was confidence and maturity that Spade could see in her face, her tired eyes hinting at years of hardship.\n\n\"Who are these dragons you have brought before me?\" the queen inquired, and Spade was surprised at how young her voice sounded.\n\n\"Queen Lavender,\" Pinesoar began, offering a small bow. \"Dear sister. These strangers were causing trouble in Elm Plaza. One of them requested an audience with you.\"\n\n\"I requested an audience with the true lord and queen of this kingdom,\" Lukai hissed. \"Though I seem to have found myself in the company of a mere dragonet.\"\n\n\"Silence!\" Pinesoar snapped, glowering at the warrior.\n\nLavender raised an eyebrow. \"Be wise with your words, foreigner. I am the true ruler, firstborn to Lord Sagesse and Queen Everglade. My parents passed many years ago, taken to the Maker's realm by a terrible sickness, one that killed many of my subjects.\"\n\n\"This one claims to be The Iron Wolf,\" Pinesoar commented with a roll of his eyes.\n\nThe queen looked amused. \"How interesting. He must not be aware that General DeTaris passed even before my parents, in the-\"\n\n\"Battle of the Mountaintop, during the War of Ashes,\" Lukai finished with a low growl.\n\n\"Do not interrupt the queen,\" Pinesoar snarled, drawing his sword.\n\nLavender held up a talon and the sword was returned to its sheath. \"Is there anyone who might be able to support your claim?\" she inquired, eyes glinting with interest.\n\n\"I served with a number of officers,\" Lukai said. \"Surely some of them are still here\u2026 Captain Shilah? General Kuvah?\"\n\nLavender shook her head. \"Both have perished.\"\n\nLukai's ear began to twitch. He muttered under his breath, eyes scanning the floor as though searching for answers in the tile designs. He suddenly looked up. \"Figure. Special operatives.\"\n\nThe queen narrowed her eyes in curiosity and waved a talon to a blue-scaled dragon standing nearby, who immediately took off down a corridor. \"While my messenger fetches Figure, I must ask you to leave me. I have dragons waiting for an audience. I will join you once he has arrived. I am very interested to see what he has to say.\" She gave a nod to Pinesoar.\n\nThe prince flicked his tail, signaling for Spade and the rest to follow him. He led them to a large room with three tall windows leading out to a balcony. Sofas and cushions offered comfortable seating, and a table was set with food.\n\n\"Wait here, and don't get any ideas,\" Pinesoar ordered. \"I'll be outside.\" He glared at the group before leaving, shutting the door behind him with a loud thud.\n\nWhen he was gone Lukai blew an annoyed huff of wind out his nose, causing the carpet below to flap up. He stalked over to one of the windows and stared out.\n\nSpade went to stand beside him. \"How does it feel to be home?\" he asked hesitantly.\n\nLukai's gaze fell to the floor. \"When I was trapped in that fortress, I never thought I would see Silverwood again. Now that I'm here, I just don't know what to think. It has changed so much since I left. And Sagesse and Everglade\u2026\" He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a heavy breath before continuing. \"I can't believe they're dead. It just feels like I've lost everything that ever mattered.\" He returned his gaze to the window, eyes misty in the sunlight.\n\nAll Spade could think to say was, \"I'm sorry,\" and they stood in silence for many heartbeats before the warrior changed the subject.\n\n\"I want to apologize for the other day,\" he said.\n\nSpade sighed. \"Me too.\"\n\nLukai looked down at him. \"You have nothing to apologize for, Spade. I was the one who was at fault. I pushed you too hard. My expectations were too high, and I promise from now on I will be a better teacher.\"\n\nSpade was surprised by his confession. Before he could respond, there was a knock at the door. Pinesoar entered. \"You're lucky,\" the prince said. \"Figure was just down the hall in his office. Now we can get this over with and you can stop wasting the queen's time.\"\n\nLukai seemed to brighten at the news.\n\nIn a few moments Lavender entered the lounge area with a new dragon trailing behind her. He had polished vermillion scales and thin silver spikes, two of which were cracked. Dark, curious eyes scanned the room as he entered, and he had a noticeable limp in one front leg.\n\nThe dragon froze upon seeing Lukai, jaw dropping open. He stood speechless for a moment, and then breathed out, \"Lukai? What\u2026 Is that you?\"\n\nA smile spread across Lukai's face and into his sad eyes. \"It's good to see you, old friend.\"\n\nFigure hurried over to Lukai and looked him up and down, bewildered at the sight of him, touching his armor as though to convince himself of the warrior's presence. \"It's really you? But that's impossible! It's been so long! Everybody said you died.\"\n\nLavender looked amazed at Figure's reaction and stepped forwards. \"Figure, you truly think this dragon could be Lukai DeTaris?\"\n\nFigure looked Lukai over again and nodded. \"My queen, he looks just like him.\" He then excitedly asked Lukai, \"Why don't you tell me something? Something only you would know?\"\n\nLukai furrowed his brow in thought. His eyes fell on Figure's two broken spikes. \"You broke those during a training session, but you told everyone it happened during Operation Blackout because you were embarrassed.\"\n\nFigure let out a laugh and smacked Lukai's shoulder. \"It's him, alright.\" He embraced the warrior, and Lukai stiffened at the gesture. \"Oh, come on you grouch, it's okay to relax and hug an old pal.\" With some hesitation, Lukai returned the embrace. When Figure stepped away, he was grinning from ear to ear. \"Welcome back.\"\n\nSpade noticed Zao shoot Pinesoar a \"how does it feel to be wrong\" face, and quickly nudged his friend, careful not to make eye contact with the scowling prince.\n\n\"I apologize for my hesitation towards your claim,\" Lavender said to Lukai with some skepticism, approaching the warrior. \"Figure is one of my most trusted officers. If he is confident that you are truly General DeTaris, then it must be true. What was it you wished to speak to me about?\"\n\n\"A cloaking spell, you highness,\" Lukai replied. He gestured to Spade. \"The young Guardian requires it for his mission. Koro is tracking his magic energy. I assume, with you being an Aldreda, you are familiar with this spell?\"\n\nLavender nodded. \"Indeed. And I will teach the Guardian on one condition: Once he knows it, you must leave.\"\n\nLukai looked slightly taken aback. \"I'm afraid I don't understand.\"\n\n\"My kingdom has just come out of a war, one that brought great damage to our military. I am familiar with the legend of the Golden Guardian, and if this Koro is anything like that legend says, then I will not allow you to be associated with my kingdom. We are not strong enough to sustain another attack this soon.\"\n\nThere was a pause, and then Lukai gave a small bow. \"As you wish, your highness.\"\n\nSpade watched as Lavender removed her glistening crown and set it on a silk pillow, held in the talons of a guard. She walked with a gentle flow to her step, her claws barely clicking on the hard floor. They had relocated to a training room, and the rest of the dragonets, along with Lukai and Figure, watched patiently from the sidelines.\n\n\"I assume you have a decent background of formal training?\" Lavender inquired.\n\nSpade gave a shrug. \"Not really. Lukai has only been teaching me for a few days.\"\n\nThe unimpressed expression on Lavender's face made Spade fold his wings close to his body. \"Well then, we will see how this goes. You know how to start. Gather your energy.\"\n\nSpade did as instructed, watching Lavender intently. Her eyes looked black from a distance, like most dragons, but, standing close to her, he could see that they were actually a deep violet, weary but still gleaming with strength.\n\n\"In order to keep your energy hidden from Koro, you must perform this spell every twenty-four hours. When you have gathered the energy, you must release it from your body but still keep hold of it, long enough to form a protective dome around your body. Once it has formed you can release your grip on the energy. The dome will still be there, but you won't be able to see it. Understood?\"\n\nSpade nodded and worked the energy gathering in his chest. He allowed it to escape from his body, and grunted as he held it back from completely dispersing. A dome of golden mist began to form around him, slowly taking form. The energy pulled against his grasp, eager to disperse into the air. When the dome was completed, he let the energy go. It sparked and sizzled before disappearing.\n\n\"Well done, Guardian,\" Lavender praised, her manner remaining indifferent.\n\n\"Thanks. You can just call me Spade,\" he offered.\n\nShe seemed to ignore him, and continued, \"My servants have prepared some supplies for you so that you can be on your way as soon as possible. You may stay the night, but I expect you to depart in the morning.\"\n\nSpade nodded in thanks and returned to the others. Pinesoar escorted them to a new room, one which consisted of two separate bedrooms that all opened to a shared lounge. Inside the lounge were their new supplies.\n\nBefore Pinesoar left them, Spade asked him, \"What happened to Hellfire?\"\n\n\"The general from Shadow?\" Pinesoar said. \"We let him go, of course. Silverwood is not interested in making any new enemies, especially not with Shadow.\"\n\n\"You let him go? But he's been hunting us for days.\"\n\n\"That's your own problem. As second-born to the throne, I take it upon myself to protect my kingdom, and that's what I did.\" With a glare, Pinesoar walked out the door.\n\nSpade sighed and walked over to the group, who had all settled in the lounge room.\n\n\"This castle is so beautiful,\" Delilah-Rose was commenting, snuggling into one of the soft cushions. \"It's a shame we have to leave so soon.\"\n\n\"Well I for one can't wait to leave,\" Mikah hissed. \"Everyone here is so rude. They're treating us like we're the bad guys.\"\n\n\"The queen's concerns are aggravating, but also understandable,\" Lukai said.\n\nZao, who had been sorting through the assortment of supplies, joined Spade as he walked over. His friend spread their map out on a glass table and dragged a claw from Silverwood to Shadow. \"Looks like it's a straight shot from here to Shadow. It will take us about three days to reach it if we can fly for the majority of the journey, but with the rain we've been getting I doubt that will be the case, so I would plan on four days. Once we reach Shadow we can just plan from there.\"\n\n\"Where is your spriteling?\" Lukai inquired, and Lightflare appeared instantly. \"I need you to start teaching Spade the spell for Koro. I'm guessing there is a chant required for this one.\"\n\n\"I'm on it,\" Lightflare squeaked. \"I'll prepare a lesson for tonight.\"\n\n\"I suggest you all prepare the supplies and eat,\" Lukai said to the rest of the dragonets. \"We will depart first thing tomorrow morning.\"\n\nSpade sat on one of the lounge chairs watching as Lightflare went over the steps of the purification spell for the sixth time, hopping across the pages of the Book of Light. It was late in the evening and the others had gone to bed, the dragoness' taking one of the rooms and the boys the other one. Lukai sat outside on the balcony, his faint, green glow visible against the dark night sky.\n\n\"And now, explain phase three of the spell,\" Lightflare instructed.\n\n\"Phase three, I use my magic to counteract Koro's and drain his powers,\" Spade said with a yawn.\n\n\"And phase four?\"\n\n\"The final phase. I redirect Koro's power into the sky which both releases and destroys the physical host. Koro is then unable to reenter the world until he possesses his next host, whoever that may be.\"\n\n\"And what's the chant again?\"\n\n\"'Begone the dark into the night, let rise the sun and bring its light.'\"\n\n\"Very good. Now, back to phase one.\"\n\nSpade groaned. \"Lightflare don't you think we've studied enough for tonight? I'm exhausted.\"\n\nThe spriteling frowned. \"Alright, I guess you should go to sleep. You'll need to rest up for tomorrow's trip.\" She poofed away and the Book of Light flipped shut.\n\nSpade rubbed his temples, wanting to fall asleep but unable to settle his mind. In less than a week he would face Koro. <Will I die?> He wondered. <No, don't think that. You'll be fine\u2026 But if I had to die to save everyone else, would I?> He stood and shook out his wings. <Of course I would, that's a stupid question. I would do anything to protect them.>\n\nHe exited the lounge room into a hall, wondering if a walk would help calm his thoughts. Making his way down the corridor, he stopped at a window, staring out at the lights of the kingdom.\n\n\"You'll need to rest if you are going to leave tomorrow,\" a voice said, making him jump. He turned to see Lavender pad up to him, and his cheeks suddenly became hot.\n\n\"You startled me,\" he said with a small laugh. \"I didn't wake you, did I?\"\n\n\"No. I haven't been able to sleep through the night since my parents died.\"\n\n\"What's it like? Ruling so young, I mean.\"\n\nShe didn't answer for a moment. \"It's challenging, but not terrible. I love each and every one of my subjects, even though I haven't met many. I suppose that only makes it more stressful to rule them. Everything I do, I do to make them happy. But I have found that it is impossible to please everyone. The dragons of Silverwood loved my mother and father. It is difficult to amount to their reputation, and sometimes I wonder if my subjects hate me simply because I am not them.\"\n\n\"I know how that feels, trying to live up to someones seemingly impossible expectations. One day you think they're the problem, that they just need to lower their expectations, and the next day you think you're the problem, and that you're just\u2026 a failure.\"\n\nShe gazed up at him in surprise, her eyes glittering in the moonlight streaming through the window. \"Yes, that's exactly what it feels like.\" There was a pause. \"I have to ask, what is it like being the Golden Guardian?\"\n\n\"Well, at first I didn't think any of it was real, it just felt like some crazy dream. It's still hard to wrap my head around it all. I've never really been anything special, so it was kind of scary but also really\u2026 exciting, you know? I had a chance to be something other than an ordinary dragonet. But now I'm about to kill someone, and\u2026\" he paused and sighed. \"And I don't know if I want to be special anymore.\"\n\nThey stood in silence, their quiet breaths the only sound.\n\n\"Well, you should probably try and get some sleep, Spade,\" Lavender finally said softly.\n\nHe smiled. \"You too\u2026 your highness.\"\n\nShe smiled back and left him, strolling away to her dorm. Spade found himself wishing she would stay and talk to him; he liked her voice. Once she disappeared down the hall, he urged himself to return to his own room.\n\nHe laid down in the large, silk bed beside Zao and Mikah, careful not to wake them. As he shut his eyes, he wondered, <What if there was a way to negotiate with Koro? Maybe I could find a way to save Nerizza. Everyone seems fine with killing him, but\u2026 could I do it? Could I take the life of an innocent dragon, even if it's the only way to save the world? The other Guardians were able to do it. What about Nerizza's family? Does he have any family? What if he has dragonets? I couldn't kill their father, that'd be awful. I miss my parents. I wonder if they still think we're at the Academy. No, they probably know we're gone by now. I hope they're not too worried\u2026> His thoughts faded as he drifted off into sleep.\n\n\"Welcome, Golden Guardian,\" a deep voice hissed.\n\nSpade's eyes flew open, and he quickly scrambled to his talons. He was standing in front of a massive, dark fortress. A black dragon towered over him, face shielded behind a veil of fire.\n\n\"So you really are just a little dragonet,\" the figure continued, and Spade recognized Koro's voice.\n\n<Where am I?> He wondered in panic. <How did I get here? How did Koro find me?>\n\n\"Well, this will make things easy. Once you perish at my talons, I will destroy everything and everyone you love.\" Koro let out a cackle of laughter. \"I will burn this world to ash with the fires of my dark kingdom. Nothing will be left but shadow and chaos, all because you were too weak to stop me.\" He opened his jaws and a stream of liquid fire spewed out. Spade screamed as it stuck to his scales like glue, and writhed in agony at the searing pain, Koro's laugh ringing in his ear.\n\nHe woke with a gasp, sweat dripping from his scales. His whole body was trembling in terror as he looked around in confusion. Mikah and Zao were still sleeping peacefully beside him.\n\n<It was just a dream,> he realized, trying to relax. He closed his eyes and let out a shaky breath.\n\n<It was just a dream, it was just a dream, it was just a dream.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Tigerlily blinked her eyes open and spread her wings as she stretched. Despite her movement, Delilah-Rose stayed fast asleep, arms cuddling a giant, fluffy pillow. The night before, the dragoness couldn't stop talking about how fabulous the bed was. \"Bursting cattails, I can't believe I've been sleeping on leaves my whole life when feather-stuffed mattresses exist!\" Rose had exclaimed as she had squeezed the bed in her talons, marveling at its downy filling. \"Feather. Stuffed. Mattress!\"\n\nUpon entering the lounge room, Tigerlily found breakfast already laid out for the group. Scones, muffins, and slices of ham decked the glass table, along with two large kettles of hot water for tea. Drawn by the inviting smells, she quickly settled down on one of the cushions and grabbed the nearest treat. As she bit into a delicious blueberry muffin, she thought, <I'm never eating another ration bar ever again. I want to stay here forever. This is the best thing I've ever tasted in my life.>\n\nThe room was silent as Tigerlily chewed, and she soon realized that she was the only one up. <More for me,> she thought with a laugh, grabbing another muffin and selecting a bag of tea from a small, silver tray. She poured water into a cup and set the bag into the steaming liquid, sniffing the enticing aroma that immediately drifted into the air. <So this is what it feels like to be royalty. I could get used to this.>\n\nThe clicking of talons made her look up from her feast. Lukai had come in from the balcony. Tigerlily swallowed a mouthful of scone as the warrior stalked up to the assemblage of cushions and couches, lying down on one of the sofas. When he made eye contact with her, Tigerlily gave a small wave, taking a bite out of another treat. The warrior seemed exhausted, eyes puffy and slightly unfocused, looking dry in the morning light.\n\nHe seemed to regain his senses and asked, \"Oh, I'm sorry, should I leave you to\u2026 uh\u2026 dine alone? I didn't mean to intrude.\"\n\nTigerlily swallowed again and replied, \"No\u2026 You're fine.\" She took another look at his face and asked, \"Were you crying?\"\n\nLukai frowned. \"I don't cry.\"\n\n<You also don't frown,> she thought sarcastically. \"It's because you're back home, isn't it?\" she guessed. The twitching of his ear was all she needed for an answer. \"It's okay to be sad. I'm sure a lot of things have changed since you left.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not discuss this right now,\" Lukai said quietly.\n\n\"Right, sorry. Do you want a scone?\"\n\n\"I can't eat. I appreciate the gesture, though.\"\n\nThere was a knock on the door, and Figure slipped inside the lounge room. \"Morning, everyone!\" he said with a smile. \"Oh, looks like it's just you two. Lukai, you're the dragon I wanted to see.\" The dragon limped over to take a seat beside the warrior and looked at him expectantly. When Lukai didn't say anything, Figure urged, \"Well, come on, catch me up. What happened to you? I was told Lord Nerizza killed you.\"\n\n\"It's a long story, old friend,\" Lukai replied.\n\n\"I've got all morning.\"\n\n\"Well, Nerizza did kill me, but then he cursed my soul, so I was locked away in an ancient temple until Spade found me.\"\n\nFigure's eyes widened. \"You're kidding. That's crazy! I thought his element was plasma.\"\n\nLukai's eyes narrowed. \"Wait a minute, you're right. By the Maker, Nerizza has magic. Koro's power, of course. How come I never connected that?\"\n\n\"So wait, what else happened? Is that all?\" Figure prodded.\n\nLukai stood and began to pace.\n\n\"Is it bad that Nerizza has magic?\" Tigerlily asked, taking a sip of tea.\n\n\"Maybe. It depends on how Koro utilizes his magic through Nerizza. He's probably smart enough to not use it in public--dragons would grow suspicious at the sudden change of elements. But this does mean that Spade could have a much harder time fighting him. I've only trained him in physical defense. He has no idea how to block a magic strike\u2026\"\n\n\"Wait, who's Koro?\" Figure asked.\n\n\"I have to find a way to get Spade close to Nerizza without Koro knowing,\" Lukai continued. \"Maybe that's what we've been missing all this time. A head-on attack may not be the way to defeat him. It could be possible to avoid fighting Koro at all. If there was a way we could sneak through the castle undetected\u2026 and maybe catch him in his sleep-\"\n\n\"Operation Blackout,\" Figure blurted, and smiled at Lukai.\n\nTigerlily and Lukai turned to him in confusion.\n\n\"During the War of Ashes, remember? You were still around when I was on that mission.\"\n\nThere was a spark in Lukai's eyes. \"Your team infiltrated the Shadow castle.\"\n\n\"And we uncovered a series of tunnels that led all throughout the castle. Our theory was that they were some sort of escape passages for the royal family in case of an emergency.\"\n\n\"One of those tunnels could lead us right to Nerizza's chambers.\"\n\n\"You'd be right under their snouts and they wouldn't even know it. Ha! I love being a spy.\"\n\n\"You're a spy?\" Tigerlily asked excitedly.\n\n\"The best of the best, young dragoness.\" He cracked his talons and stepped off the sofa. His scales suddenly began to ripple, changing from vermillion to a soft peach. His silver spikes thinned and turned orange. The spikes on his cheeks disappeared, and two horns formed on the back of his head. His body became small and thin, and before she knew it, Tigerlily saw herself standing before her.\n\nHer jaw dropped. \"What did you just do?\"\n\n\"And that is why they call me 'Figure'.\"\n\n\"You're a shapeshifter,\" she breathed in awe. \"So your element is magic?\"\n\nThe spy nodded, changing back to his normal form.\n\n\"Does that mean you could\u2026 I mean, maybe if you have the time\u2026 Could you teach me?\"\n\nFigure seemed excited at the request. \"Why, of course! I'd love to!\"\n\n\"She's a quick learner,\" Lukai commented with a smirk.\n\n\"OH. MY. MAKER.\" Roared Mikah's voice. \"That smells amazing!\" He burst from the bedroom and hurried over to the table, looking over its contents before gathering a large assortment of foods onto a plate. Spade and Zao emerged from the bedroom shortly after him, both blinking sleep out of their eyes and glaring after the blue dragonet.\n\n\"Well, I should probably get going,\" Figure said, patting Lukai on the shoulder. \"I've got work to do. But tonight, I would love to talk more. We should hit the Black Diamond Tavern, like in the old days. What do you say?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, the queen wishes for us to depart as soon as possible,\" Lukai replied with a sigh.\n\nThe spy drooped his wings in disappointment. \"Right, I had forgotten.\" His eyes suddenly brightened. \"There's an inn, just down the street. Real nice place. I know the owner, I bet I could get her to free up a couple of rooms for you all just for just a day or two.\"\n\nTigerlily looked to Lukai for his answer. Although she knew it was urgent that they reach Koro, she wasn't ready to leave Silverwood just yet. She wanted to explore and learn more about their culture.\n\n\"I think we would all appreciate a little more time to prepare for the journey,\" Lukai replied with a grateful smile. \"It would mean a lot if you could do that for us, old friend.\"\n\nFigure grinned and gave a nod. \"I'll go there right away. When you're ready, just head over and ask for Sagira. She'll get you set up. I've got some paperwork to fill out, and then a meeting with the senators, but after that I'll meet up with you and we can hit the Tavern.\" He turned his attention to Tigerlily. \"And if you like, tomorrow I can teach you some shapeshifting.\"\n\nTigerlily nodded enthusiastically.\n\n\"Sounds like a plan,\" Lukai laughed as Figure headed towards the door.\n\n\"Oh, it's called Shady Grove,\" the spy added before he slipped out of the room. With a wave goodbye, he left them.\n\n\"I like him,\" Tigerlily said once he had departed. \"He's nice.\"\n\n\"Yes, I always enjoyed missions with Figure,\" Lukai replied with a quiet, reminiscent chuckle. His voice became soft. \"I'm just glad he's still here.\"\n\n\"We're here to see Sagira,\" Lukai explained to the dragon sitting behind the front desk at Shady Grove. \"The owner, I believe.\"\n\nThe dragon gave a nod before shuffling off down a corridor, reappearing a few moments later trailed by a black-scaled dragoness with rose-colored wings and spikes, and a silver chest. She had sharp eyes and a welcoming smile. \"You must be the folks Figure was talking about.\" She gazed at Lukai upon reaching the group. \"My goodness, it really is The Iron Wolf. It's an honor, sir, to host you in my humble inn.\"\n\nLukai dipped his head. \"And we cannot thank you enough for your kind gesture, Sagira.\"\n\n\"And you must be the Golden Guardian,\" Sagira said, smiling down at Spade. \"Wait until everybody hears that you're staying here at Shady Grove. Why, there'll be dragons swarming down here.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Lukai said, lowering his voice, \"I would like to keep his identity undisclosed to the public.\"\n\n\"He means keep it classified,\" Mikah commented, narrowing his eyes. \"Incognito style, covert, hush-hush-\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I think she gets it,\" Delilah-Rose whispered.\n\nMikah cleared his throat and took a step back, nodding up at Lukai.\n\nThe warrior rolled his eyes and said to Sagira, \"I'm sure you understand why.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she replied. \"Please, follow me to your rooms. I've reserved the best suites just for you.\" As she led them away, she inquired, \"So if you're the Golden Guardian, you're really going to defeat Koro? Do you know where he is? Is he in Shadow? That would be the perfect place to start a dark empire, it's already so ominous.\"\n\n\"We cannot share any of that information, I'm afraid,\" Lukai replied. \"It may put the mission at risk.\"\n\nSagira flicked her ears back apologetically. \"Right, I'm sorry for prodding. It's just crazy that there's another Guardian, after everyone thought they were finally gone.\" They went up a staircase and took a left. The inn was built around a semicircle of massive elms, whose trunks served as pillar-like structures running down the main hall of the building. \"Well, here we are. You have the last two doors on the at the end. Is there anything I can get you folks?\"\n\nMikah opened his mouth to speak, but Tigerlily nudged him and hissed, \"You just ate back at the castle. You do not need more food.\"\n\n\"No, you have done more than enough,\" Lukai replied, ignoring the dragonets. \"We will go over our mission to figure out just how long we plan on staying, and communicate the information with you shortly.\"\n\nOnce Sagira left, the group filed into one of the rooms and Lukai turned to address the group. \"I don't think we will be staying here very long, perhaps just for today. Spade, you need to be training, focusing on your magic. Don't forget to perform the concealment spell. The rest of you, if you want to explore, don't go too far, and try not to cause any trouble. If you do get lost, head to the castle gates and find your way back to the inn from there. Also, try to stay in groups. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Sir, yes sir, General DeTaris sir,\" Mikah replied with a dramatic salute, earning him another glare from the warrior, but a laugh from Delilah-Rose.\n\nAs the dragonets began discussing what to do, Zao reached for his bag, only to realize he didn't have it.\n\n\"Dang it, I think I left my bag back at the castle,\" he hissed. \"I must have been too busy packing everything else.\"\n\n\"So?\" Mikah asked, inspecting the multiple shelves and cabinets of the suite.\n\n\"So my bag had the map in it.\"\n\n\"Just get a new map, no big deal.\"\n\n\"But I had drawn out our whole route on my map; it had time frames, rest stops, shortcuts, it will take forever for me to replan everything!\"\n\n\"I could go with you to grab it while the others go explore,\" Spade offered. \"Then we could meet up with them somewhere.\"\n\nZao nodded. \"Alright, thanks. Where are you all gonna go?\"\n\n\"Well, we already toured a lot of the area around Elm Plaza when we first got here,\" Delilah-Rose explained. \"So we were thinking of heading to the other side of the kingdom. There's another road of street shops that I saw on our way to the castle, and there's supposed to be an old bell tower in that area. We could meet you there.\"\n\n\"That'll work,\" Spade replied. \"It should be a quick run, if we can find Figure.\"\n\nZao headed to the balcony, Spade following close behind. They leapt into the air and took off towards the castle. They reached the courtyard inside the castle and landed, and were quickly approached by a set of guards.\n\n\"What is your business here?\" the first guard inquired.\n\n\"We were staying here last night,\" Spade explained. \"I'm the Golden Guardian. We just left something inside that we need to grab.\"\n\n\"You'll need permission from the queen to enter the castle. She's currently in a meeting with the senators, you'll have to wait.\"\n\n\"All we need to do is run into one of the suites, we'll be in and out before you even know it,\" Zao urged.\n\nJust then, Spade spotted a familiar dragon walking out of the castle doors and down the polished steps. \"Pinesoar!\" he called.\n\nThe prince, upon seeing the duo, let out a groan and stalked over. \"Why are you two here?\" he growled.\n\n\"Zao left his bag.\"\n\n\"Of course he did.\" The prince nodded to the guards and they left with small bows, and then he groaned, \"Follow me.\" He went back through the tall doors of the castle and led them to the lounge room where they had stayed. \"Hurry up,\" he ordered with a glare, standing at the doorway.\n\nZao entered one of the bedrooms and emerged with his pack slung around his shoulder. \"This is all we needed, thanks,\" he declared.\n\n\"Don't mention it. Now get out.\" He nodded his head to the door and escorted them from the room.\n\nAs they entered the throne hall, Lavender was just coming in, storming up to her throne with six dragons trailing behind her. \"I already told you, I am accepting the invitation whether you like it or not,\" she snarled to her company. \"You may be the senatorial council but I am still queen. If Lord Nerizza wishes to unite, then by all means we should accept. Shadow would be a powerful ally.\"\n\n\"But your highness,\" one of the dragons interjected. \"Do you not find it suspicious that he is inviting an ambassador from every kingdom to this gathering?\"\n\nLavender opened her mouth to reply, but her eyes fell upon Spade and Zao. \"Pinesoar, why in The Maker's name are they still here?\" she shouted.\n\n\"They were just retrieving a forgotten item, dear sister,\" the prince explained. \"I am taking them away now.\"\n\n\"Did Lord Nerizza offer a peace treaty?\" Spade asked, curious of her conversation with the senators.\n\n\"You were not given permission to speak to the queen,\" Pinesoar hissed. \"Besides, that's none of your concern.\"\n\n\"Escort them out immediately,\" Lavender snapped to her brother, rubbing her temples. \"And you six,\" She pointed a talon at the senators. \"Please leave, I wish to be alone. Discuss which of you would be willing to travel to Shadow.\"\n\nThe senators, with reluctant faces, all bowed and hesitantly departed, whispering amongst themselves.\n\n<That invitation would have been from Koro, not Nerizza,> Spade thought, as Pinesoar led them to the castle gate.< Nerizza doesn't have control over himself right now. Why would Koro want a treaty with Silverwood? That one senator said Nerizza had invited an ambassador from every kingdom\u2026 What is Koro planning?>\n\nAs Zao and Spade glided down to the tall bell tower, Spade couldn't keep his mind off of what Lavender had said.\n\n<Koro doesn't want peace,> he thought. <It has to be some sort of trick. What would having ambassadors from every kingdom in one place do for him? Would he hold them as hostages?>\n\n\"You guys made it!\" Tigerlily's voice cut through his train of thought.\n\nShe was standing at the base of the bell tower beside Delilah-Rose, who's dark blue cloak was pulled over her feathered wings. Mikah was boredly reading a sign nailed to the exterior of the tower.\n\n\"Did you know this was one of the first structures built in Silverwood?\" he said as Spade and Zao landed. \"It was built to warn the settlers of a hound attack. Apparently they were a big problem, before they were hunted to near extinction in this area.\"\n\n\"Where's Lukai?\" Spade asked.\n\n\"He stayed back at the inn,\" Tigerlily replied. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"No, I just need to talk to him.\"\n\n\"Are you not going to stay and explore with us?\"\n\nHe hesitated, seeing a glimpse of disappointment in her eyes. \"I\u2026 I guess it can wait.\"\n\n\"Great! Let's go!\" She padded off down a street, the rest of the dragonets filing behind her.\n\nSpade hurried after the group as they turned down a road, joining the bustling crowd of dragons going about their daily errands. He sighed. Maybe this was good; he could use the time to think over Koro's plot. <Lord Nerizza wants to unite>; he repeated Lavender's words in his head. <If the kingdoms were united with Shadow\u2026 It would make it easier for him to take control of them all. But how? What is his plan?>\n\nThe dragonets returned to their suites at Shady Grove when the sun was already near setting. Spade rushed inside and looked around, finding no trace of Lukai. <Where did he go?>\n\n\"I don't see Lukai anywhere,\" he said as the others walked inside.\n\n\"He's probably with Figure,\" Tigerlily replied casually.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Figure mentioned something about going to the Black Diamond Tavern when he got off work to catch up or something.\"\n\n\"Do you know which way that is?\"\n\nTigerlily raised an eyebrow, probably alerted by his anxious manner. \"No, but I would ask Sagira.\"\n\nSpade dashed down the hall to the front desk and asked for the dragoness. <I have to tell Lukai. He'll know what to do. We have to stop the senator before he leaves for Shadow. I hope I'm not too late. Will Queen Lavender even believe me?>\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Sagira asked upon reaching him.\n\n\"I need to get to the Black Diamond Tavern. Do you know how to get there?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah it's just down the road, you can't miss it. Turn right when you leave the building. But it's not really the kind of place dragonets hang out\u2026\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Spade said before running out the door.\n\nHe flew down the street, eyes scanning the buildings, until he reached a large, wooden lodge. He could hear shouts, crashes, and blaring music coming from inside. A sign hung above the entrance with a polished black diamond.\n\nSpade wrinkled his snout. <This is the place? I'm surprised you could even find somewhere like this in Silverwood. Everything else seems much more\u2026 clean.> He felt nerves fill his chest and swallowed as he approached the door. <What if they're not in here? What if everyone looks at you weird?> He breathed out a tense cloud of smoke. <Just calm down. You're the Golden Guardian. You can do this.>\n\nThe inside of the tavern was filled with large tables, each one packed with dragons, all shouting, cursing and singing in slurred voices. Items mostly consisting of daggers and glass cups flew across the room. The floor was sticky with spilled drinks and the air was humid, reeking with the stench of sweat and alcohol. Any other dragonet would have found the experience exhilarating, but more than anything Spade just wanted to run away.\n\n<Find Lukai and Figure, and then you can get out of here.> He scanned the riotous crowd, eyes landing upon the two dragons, who were sitting on the other side of the room. Wings tight to his side, Spade carefully picked his way over to them. As he approached, he could hear their conversation.\n\n\"So Lavender is sixteen?\" Lukai was asking. Figure nodded. \"How old was she when she became queen?\"\n\n\"Twelve, it was a year after the war had ended,\" the spy replied.\n\n\"So the War of Ashes lasted fifteen years after I died,\" Lukai sighed. \"If only I had been around, I could have-\"\n\n\"Don't go there, old friend,\" Figure said softly. \"It wasn't your choice to leave when you did. No one can be sure of The Maker's plans for us. We must simply work with the cards we were dealt. Besides, if you hadn't been cursed, that little Guardian would have never found you. Who better to train the Golden Guardian than the great General DeTaris, eh?\"\n\nThe warrior frowned. \"I suppose you're right.\"\n\n\"Lukai!\" Spade called as he reached their table.\n\nLukai practically jumped out of his seat. \"Spade, what in The Maker's name are you doing here?\" he hissed. \"This is no place for a dragonet.\"\n\n\"Hey, we came here as dragonets, remember?\" Figure said with a laugh.\n\n\"I have to tell you something,\" Spade urged. \"I think Koro's planning to take over the Four Regions like, really really soon. I overheard Lavender talking about a treaty or something, and one of the senators said Lord Nerizza has sent out invitations to all the kingdoms for ambassadors for some sort of gathering, and I think he wants to unite all the kingdoms to make it easier to take them over or something and we need to warn Lavender before she sends somebody, because like she said Silverwood is still weak from the last war so we need to help them prepare before Koro comes and destroys it, and\u2026 and I don't know what to do.\"\n\nLukai bit his lip, eyes narrowed in concern. \"If this is true, then we have no time to waste. If Koro is planning on taking over the kingdoms, then Silverwood may be the first to fall.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The sun began to disappear behind the mountains, its warmth fading from the world, the shadow of night taking its place. Lights began to turn on all across the kingdom, a reflection of the sheet of stars above. The air became cool and peaceful. Dragons entered their homes, sleeping amid the tranquility, unaware of the threat that loomed over them.\n\nSpade landed beside Lukai as the warrior ran to the closed, metal gate of the castle, the flames of a set of torches casting dark shadows across his face.\n\nA guard called for him to stop and approached.\n\n\"We must see the queen immediately,\" the warrior growled.\n\n\"It's past visiting hours,\" the guard replied. \"You'll have to wait until tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Figure, special operatives,\" the spy announced as he came into the light. \"This is a code-ten emergency. Let us through now.\"\n\nThe guard immediately apologized and called for the gates to be opened. The metal screeched as it slowly began to rise. Figure led Spade and Lukai into the throne room, where a servant was cleaning. \"Fetch the queen,\" Figure ordered. \"Tell her that Figure requires an audience with her.\"\n\nThe servant nodded and rushed away. When he returned, he announced, \"The queen said she will only see the Guardian.\"\n\nSpade looked up at Lukai, and the warrior nodded. The servant gestured for the dragonet to follow him, and led Spade to the queen's dorm. A pit formed in his stomach as the door was opened. He took a hesitant step inside, and once he was through the door shut with a thud, making him jump.\n\nLavender stood at a window, her back to Spade. She did not have any jewelry on, and her crown was resting on a satin pillow beside her bed.\n\nSpade shuffled his talons, unsure what to do.\n\n\"Now would be the proper time to bow,\" Lavender said quietly, turning to face him. As he began to do so, she continued, \"But since you are the embodiment of the divine one's power, I suppose we can set that gesture aside.\"\n\nHe righted himself. Was she mocking him? \"Why did you ask to just see me?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Because I can,\" was her reply. \"Have you performed the concealment spell today?\"\n\n\"... No, I forgot.\"\n\n\"Forgetfulness is a terrible trait to have in your situation.\"\n\n\"I-\"\n\n\"Perform the spell. What, do you want to lead Koro right to us?\"\n\nSpade frowned and felt the energy cluster in his chest, cheeks burning red. With a deep breath, he let it disperse, closing his eyes as he held it back. It was easier than when he had first done it. The dome formed around him and he released the magic, letting it fizz away.\n\n\"Very good,\" Lavender said. \"Now why are you here?\"\n\n\"When Zao and I were at the castle earlier today, I heard you talking about a treaty with Shadow.\"\n\n\"Lord Nerizza wishes for a unified trade route with all the kingdoms. Any opportunity to befriend our enemies must be taken.\"\n\n\"Especially since you're too weak to defend yourselves from them,\" Spade added.\n\nLavender frowned. \"Precisely. Why are you so interested in Lord Nerizza's proposal?\"\n\n\"Lord Nerizza is the host of Koro, the demon lord,\" he explained. There was surprise in her eyes, but she quickly blinked it away. \"Nerizza doesn't have control of his body. Which means this treaty is Koro's idea. I think he's trying to use this to lure the kingdoms into a trap.\"\n\n\"Do you have any proof?\"\n\n\"What proof do you need? You know the history of Koro, all he wants is to rule our world.\" Blazes, why is she being so difficult? Doesn't she understand what I'm saying?\n\n\"I have already told you, I wish for no part in your little quest to save the world. I will heed your warning, but that is all.\"\n\n\"That's all?\" Spade found himself raising his voice in dismay. \"Koro is coming for your kingdom. He's coming for all the kingdoms. You won't stand a chance against him, you have to prepare!\"\n\nLavender stared at him with raised eyebrows. \"It is bold of you to speak the way you do. It would do you well to remember that I am a queen.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. But as Golden Guardian it's my job to protect this world. That's all I'm trying to do.\"\n\n\"I understand that, but-\"\n\n\"But what? You're afraid of putting your kingdom in danger, but there's no way you're not in danger in this situation. If we don't band together now and stop Koro, then it will be too late.\"\n\n\"Then why aren't you out there warning Harmony?\" Lavender snapped, wings flaring.\n\n\"Because we don't have time,\" Spade snarled. \"I'm on my way to defeat Koro, but in case\u2026 in case I fail, there has to be someone who knows about Shadow.\"\n\n\"So if the mighty Golden Guardian fails, then what would be the point of knowing at all? We would all be doomed.\"\n\n\"There's always another Guardian. It won't stop with me. If Koro kills me, there'll be some other dragon to come take my place and defeat him.\" <If Koro kills me,> he repeated in his head, shivering.\n\nLavender glared at him before turning back to the window. \"Before my parents died, they told me to do whatever it takes to protect Silverwood.\"\n\n\"And the best thing you can do for your kingdom right now is to-\"\n\n\"To what? What do you suggest we do, oh wise Guardian, to protect ourselves from Koro?\"\n\nHer question made him stop. \"I.. uh\u2026 I don't know.\"\n\nShe dropped her wings when she turned to him again, face straining to be stoic. \"Then why did you even bother coming here?\"\n\nSpade looked down at the floor, wincing at the sting of her words. \"Because\u2026 even though I have no idea what I'm doing, I have to do something. I didn't want to be the Golden Guardian, but then I realized it doesn't matter what I want, because whether I like it or not these are the cards I was dealt, it's my destiny. And now I have a responsibility to protect everyone, and most of the time I don't even know if I'm ready for that. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do, because I've learned I can't take the safe route all the time. Unwanted responsibility is a part of life, but The Maker chooses us to carry that responsibility for a reason.\"\n\nLavender narrowed her eyes at him but didn't speak.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" Spade asked, once again meeting her gaze. \"Are you ready to accept your destiny?\"\n\n\"You are wise for a dragonet your age,\" she replied with a hint of a smile.\n\n\"I could say the same thing about you.\"\n\n\"It really pains me to admit it\u2026 but\u2026 I suppose you're right. I would rather defend this world than stand on the sidelines and watch it fall.\" She let out a reluctant sigh. \"Silverwood is by your side, Spade. But if this is some sort of trick, whether you aren't who you say you are or you're trying to harm my kingdom, believe me, I will personally rip out your throat.\"\n\n\"This pass is the quickest route to Shadow,\" Pinesoar explained, pointing to a spot on Zao's map, which was spread out on a wide glass table. The dragonets had been relocated back to the castle upon Lavender's command, and they had spent the morning planning their strike.\n\n\"It will also allow you to approach the kingdom without being detected,\" the prince continued. \"It leads to a tunnel under the mountains that lets out near the North side of the castle. How many soldiers do you think you will need, General DeTaris?\"\n\n\"Only a handful,\" Lukai replied, talon resting thoughtfully against his chin. \"This is going to be a stealth mission, not a full on attack. All we have to do is get Spade inside, close enough for him to do the spell.\"\n\n\"Here are the schematics from Operation Blackout that Figure showed me,\" Lavender joined in, spreading a parchment over the map. \"This tunnel leads straight to the royal dorm, where our sources say Nerizza is. Once Spade completes the spell, you can use it to get out, as well. It opens to the outside here, near the back of the castle, so you will be more shielded.\"\n\n\"What if something goes wrong?\" Zao asked.\n\n\"Nothing will go wrong,\" Lukai said through gritted teeth. The dragonet had been bugging him all morning about a backup plan.\n\n\"Okay, but what if it does? What if, say, Koro finds out you're coming? What do you do then?\"\n\n\"If we do this right, Koro will have no idea.\"\n\n\"Well, sure but-\"\n\n\"Alright, I get your point. If something like that happens, we retreat and prepare a battalion for a counter strike. Pinesoar, would you start gathering my troops? Only the best will do.\"\n\nPinesoar nodded and swiftly exited the lounge room.\n\n\"How do you plan on finding the secret entrance to the tunnel?\" Delilah-Rose asked.\n\n\"Figure will be our way in,\" the warrior explained. \"I deployed him last night. At a set time, he will be at the entrance. Based on the size of the Shadow castle and average patrol guard count, we should have a two minute window to find him and get inside without being seen. We leave tomorrow morning so as to make it in time. We will stick to Zao's mapped-out route. In the meantime, I will go organize our supplies.\" Lukai turned his attention to Spade. \"Go practice. Once I am finished with preparations we will review your training, and then you have an armor fitting. For the remainder of the evening you will study with Lightflare.\"\n\nSpade nodded and held back a sigh. He left to the royal courtyard in the back of the castle, which Lavender had shown him earlier. It was a wide, tiled clearing encircled by tall trees, with an exit leading to the royal gardens. Talonsteps followed him out and he glanced back to see Tigerlily walk up beside him.\n\n\"Can I come with you?\" she asked.\n\nSpade gave a shrug. \"Sure.\"\n\nSpade stood in the center of the courtyard and took up his fighting stance while Tigerlily sat watching. He took a step forward and swooped in a circle, his tail lashing the air, then shot a bolt of energy at the ground.\n\nHe looked up at Tigerlily, laughing. \"I look like an idiot, don't I?\"\n\nShe pursed her lips to hold back a laugh, and then replied, \"No, not at all. It just might look better if you had a partner, is all.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it's hard to fight an imaginary dragon and take it seriously.\"\n\n\"Why don't you fight me?\" she offered.\n\n\"I don't know\u2026\" He didn't want to hurt her. And besides, she didn't know how to fight.\n\n\"They say you don't truly understand anything unless you can teach it. It'll be a good test of your skills.\" She hopped to her talons and walked in front of him. \"Where do we start?\"\n\nSpade smiled. He had always admired Tigerlily's willingness; she was never afraid to try something new. \"I guess we start with basic defense. Take up your stance, like this.\" Spade demonstrated, and Tigerlily copied his posture. \"Now, when I hit you, you have to be able to bend the force through your body and not get knocked down.\" Spade lashed his tail around and struck her leg.\n\nShe jerked back and yelped, \"Ouch!\"\n\nSpade winced. \"Sorry, sorry! I'll start softer.\"\n\n\"No, it's alright,\" Tigerlily said, rubbing her leg. \"Let's try again.\"\n\nThey continued for hours, training until the sun reached its peak. All the while, Tigerlily insisted they kept going, even though Spade could tell she was tired. By the time she finally gave in to his offer for a break, they were both covered in sweat and breathing heavy.\n\n\"So this is what it's like\u2026 training with Lukai?\" She asked between breaths.\n\nSpade nodded. \"Yeah, except a lot more intense.\"\n\nTigerlily let out an exhausted gasp and sat down with a thump. \"Wow, no wonder you're so good.\"\n\nSpade gave a weak laugh. \"Thanks.\"\n\nTigerlily wiped sweat off her forehead and then suggested, \"Hey, why don't we practice our mind link?\"\n\nThey moved to either side of the courtyard and took a moment to calm their racing hearts.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" Spade called. Tigerlily nodded and closed her eyes.\n\nSpade took a deep breath and focused his mind. It had been a while since they had tried the link, but both of their magic had gotten stronger. For a moment he sat in silence, taking in the darkness before his shut eyes.\n\n<Spade,> Tigerlily's voice echoed in his mind.\n\nHe smiled. <I can hear you.>\n\n<Are you worried about tomorrow?> She asked.\n\nSpade had been asking himself that question all day, and even he didn't know the answer. <I'm not sure. I think I will be, once we actually leave.> There was a pause. <If I kill Nerizza, will I be\u2026 bad? Will you, you know, see me differently?>\n\n<No. You're my brother, and I know how kind and honest you are, and that's all I'll ever see you as, no matter what you do. I know killing him isn't really your choice.>\n\nSpade felt his heart begin to swell with emotion. <Thanks. Like, really, that means the world to me. How have you been doing? With the journey and everything?>\n\n<I miss home sometimes, but I'm also so excited to be out in the world, seeing different kingdoms. We've met so many different dragons, it's crazy. What about you? Koro and dramatic destiny aside.>\n\n<I've grown in a lot of ways that I never really thought I would, so that's been good\u2026 I think. It's overwhelming sometimes, but I agree, it's very exciting.>\n\n<So do you feel like you're ready to take on Koro?>\n\nSpade hesitated. <I\u2026 don't know. I have no idea what I'm going up against. I've felt his power before, but only in the location spell, really. I think with Lukai's training I'll be alright. Besides, how hard can it be? I just have to go in, do the spell, and then it's all over.>\n\nHe felt a surge rush up his spine and he opened his eyes. Tigerlily was walking over to him. The mind link had ended.\n\nWhen she reached him, she extended her wing to touch his. \"For what it's worth, I think you'll be able to do it.\"\n\nTalonsteps made them both glance up. Pinesoar approached, giving a small bow in greeting. \"Spade, Lukai is looking for you. I suggest you return to the lounge.\"\n\nThe warrior was waiting for them as Spade and Tigerlily entered the room. \"Spade, we need to go over blocking magic strikes. Follow me to the training room.\"\n\nTigerlily smiled and waved goodbye as Spade followed the warrior out. Once in the training room, Spade took up his stance. <What was it like for Lukai the first time he killed someone?> He wondered.\n\n\"Remember, when you block a magic strike, or any elemental strike for that matter, you must counter it with equal or greater force\" Lukai instructed. \"We will start small. Prepare to block my attack.\"\n\n<Was he nervous too?> Spade began to gather his energy. <I wonder how many dragons he's killed.>\n\nLukai released a bolt of magic. Spade yelped, unprepared for the attack, and grunted as it hit his chest, knocking him back.\n\n\"Try again,\" Lukai said.\n\n<Focus,> Spade thought, shaking his wings out. <Focus.>\n\nLukai attacked again. This time Spade countered, but his blast wasn't strong enough. Again he was knocked down.\n\nThe warrior frowned and helped him to his talons. \"You're distracted. What's on your mind?\"\n\n\"You're not going to just yell at me to focus?\" Spade asked with a laugh. \"I'm sorry, I just can't stop thinking about Nerizza.\"\n\n\"You don't want to kill him,\" Lukai deduced with a sigh.\n\n\"It wouldn't be possible to maybe just talk to Koro, would it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, not talk, necessarily, but discuss or something. Maybe he could be reasoned with.\"\n\n\"Spade-\"\n\n\"But what if there was a way I could get through to Nerizza?\"\n\n\"I know having to kill Nerizza is not the answer you want Spade, but sometimes violence is the only way we can solve an issue. Koro is a demon. All he knows is destruction, and death, and chaos. He will not listen to reason, and the only way to stop him is to destroy him.\"\n\n\"I just wish there was some way to save Nerizza,\" Spade said quietly.\n\nLukai's eyes became sad, his jaw tightening. \"Me too, Spade. Me too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Tigerlily stared out the window of the lounge, her eyes fixed on the dark horizon. Zao, Mikah and Delilah-Rose stood beside her. The sun was just rising, casting long shadows across the land. A sinking feeling overtook her as she stared at the distant, black mountains that bordered the kingdom of Shadow. There was a terrible thought circling in her head; it had emerged minutes after Spade, Lukai and the soldiers had departed. It echoed in her mind, relentless and eerie. She let out a shaky breath. <What if he doesn't come back?>\n\nSpade paced impatiently in the corner of the tunnel. His armor clanked with each step. They had reached the mountains bordering Shadow in just three days, and had made their way through the pass that Pinesoar had pointed out back in Silverwood. The castle was in their sights, sitting in the distance, ominous and dark.\n\nThe blacksmith had forged his armor to fit comfortably around his body, yet Spade still found it stiff and heavy. It was painted gold to match his scales, with a green crest running down the back.\n\nHe peeked out of the exit of the tunnel, which opened to a small ledge granting them a view of the whole kingdom of Shadow. The kingdom itself was nestled in a thickly-forested dip, surrounded by jagged hills and mountains. Lights began to flicker as darkness swallowed the land.\n\nA noise made Spade jump, but it was only Lukai coming up behind him. The stoic dragon had a new set of armor, and it was almost strange to see a helmet once again covering his face.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" the warrior asked. Spade nodded, but swallowed nervously. \"You're tense.\"\n\n\"I'm just focused,\" was Spade's excuse.\n\nThe soldiers moved about in the tunnel, making Spade turn. Among the five stoic troops were two with the element earth, a water, an ice and a poison. He felt insignificant next to the tall, muscular soldiers. It was amazing how calm they all looked.\n\n<They've probably done this before,> he thought.< This is no big deal for them.>\n\n\"We make our move when the last light of the sun is gone,\" Lukai ordered. The soldiers silently prepared their weapons, glancing outside.\n\nSoon it was pitch black. The stars began to appear. Spade blinked as his eyes adjusted to the new light. He saw Lukai give the signal and fell into step behind the soldiers. They traveled swiftly down the side of the mountain, approaching the castle from behind. A lump began moving up in Spade's throat and he stumbled over his own talon.\n\n<Keep it together. Now is seriously not the time to freak out.>\n\nIt was a stressful trek across the open, rocky land between the base of the mountain and the castle. They traveled in single file, Spade hurrying to keep up. His legs were shaking with nerves but he forced himself to keep moving at a steady pace, keeping his eyes focused on Lukai. They finally reached a section of the bordering wall that was sheltered by a large pine tree.\n\nLukai gave a signal and one of the soldiers, suited with black armor, climbed the side of the wall and peaked over. He quickly ducked his head and Spade sensed Lukai tense. After a pause the soldier motioned for the others to move. Spade followed, digging his claws into ridges of the stone wall to pull himself up. They hurried across the walkway and silently flew down to the castle wall, taking shelter in the shadows of a corner.\n\n\"A guard is approaching,\" one of the soldiers whispered. \"Are you sure this is the spot?\"\n\nLukai narrowed his eyes, scanning the walkway. There was movement in the distance. The guard was coming closer. Spade breathing began to quicken until Lukai set a talon on his shoulder. Spade looked up into the warrior's eyes, barely able to make them out in the darkness.\n\n\"General,\" another guard hissed.\n\nThe warrior held up a talon and he quieted. \"Wait\u2026\"\n\nSpade could now make out the guard stalking along the walkway. There was a creak, and a section of the wall swung open. Figure crouched inside, quickly urging them through. \"Quickly, be quiet. Let's move. Come on.\"\n\nOnce they were all inside and the door was shut, Lukai asked quietly, \"Where is Nerizza?\"\n\nThey traveled down the dark tunnels for a painfully long, silent period. The walls seemed to get closer and closer, pressing down on Spade. His wings were aching from being tucked tightly to his sides. He wondered if the soldiers were as anxious as he was.\n\nHe took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. <You've got this, Spade. You've been practicing for days. You spent the whole trip going over the spell. You can do this. Just don't panic. The fate of the world is in your talons.> His muscles began to relax, and he felt his breathing become less shaky.\n\n\"We're close,\" Figure whispered from the front of the line.\n\nThe choking fear again rose in Spade's throat. It felt impossible to swallow. With each step it felt like his legs were becoming weaker. <Stop it,> he hissed in his head. <Keep it together. Come one, come on, just calm down. You're okay.>\n\nThey came to a stop. There was no sound but the breathing of the soldiers.\n\nFigure looked back at them. His voice was so hushed that Spade could barely hear it. \"This is the spot. This door opens to Lord Nerizza's chambers. He will be inside, sleeping. Make as little noise as possible. We mustn't wake him. We will not attack unless we have to. Guards will be suspicious if the spell makes too much noise, so once it's done hurry back to the passage. Spade you will go to the bed and do the purification spell, understood?\"\n\nSpade nodded, making his way to the front of the group.\n\n<This is it,> he thought. <Don't panic now. It will be super easy. Just go up there and do the spell, and then Koro's defeated.>\n\nA new thought entered his mind. <Will it hurt Nerizza? I don't want him to suffer\u2026>\n\nHe shook his head. <Don't think about that.>\n\n\"Move in on three,\" Figure whispered. \"One\u2026Two\u2026Three.\"\n\nHe carefully pushed open the door. It gave a small creak and he froze.\n\nAfter a pause, the spy continued.\n\nSpade gently set a talon down to test the wooden floor of the room. He felt Lukai's eyes burning into his back.\n\nBefore he knew it his whole body was out in the open. He felt terribly exposed and strangely cold. The room was dark, faintly lit by moonlight leaking in through a window. There was a desk, two large chests, a closet door, and the bed. From what Spade could see it was elaborately decorated with scarlet curtains and glinting silver trinkets.\n\nHe set another talon in front of him and felt jagged ridges in the floor. He peered down and got a sickening feeling in his stomach. The ridges were claw marks, slashed deep into the fine wood. He spotted dark stains around them, and immediately knew what it was. Blood. He could suddenly make out slash marks all over the room, covering the furniture and the walls.\n\nHis body began to tremble as he moved towards the bed. A chill went down his spine as he got a strange sensation, like he was being watched. He glanced back to see Lukai waiting in the secret doorway. The warrior's talon rested on his sword hilt.\n\n<You can do this,> Spade told himself. <You're almost there.> He reached the bed. Cautiously, he peeked up at the covers.\n\nSpade stumbled back. A million thoughts began racing through his head. Panic overtook him as he glanced around the room. <This can't be happening,> he thought. The bed was empty. He looked wildly at Lukai, and the warrior rushed to his side, signaling for the others to stay back.\n\n\"What?\" Lukai gasped quietly, looking at the bed. He looked at the door to the room, as if expecting it to open. Then, his eyes widened and Spade felt a sudden sense of terror pouring off of him. \"Spade, get back into the tunnel.\"\n\nSpade was already moving. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Koro--\"\n\nThere was a dull thud, and they both froze. \"Knew you were coming?\" A deep, rumbling voice finished the sentence.\n\n\"Get to the tunnel,\" Lukai whispered through gritted teeth. He signaled with his talons and the soldiers ran forward.\n\nSpade felt sick as he bolted to the passage, not looking back. The exit was coming closer and closer. He was almost there when he suddenly felt the floor give way. There was a portal underneath him. His stomach lurched as he tumbled through.\n\n\"Lukai!\" He called, but in an instant the portal shut.\n\n\"Spade!\" Lukai gasped. He turned with a snarl to face Koro. The soldiers had the dark lord surrounded.\n\n\"Well hello, General,\" Koro hissed. \"Long time, no see.\"\n\n\"Let the dragonet go,\" Lukai growled.\n\n\"That dragonet is the least of your concerns right now,\" the dark lord drawled with a menacing smirk. He pulled a spear from his back. \"You're not getting away this time.\"\n\nSpade hit the stone floor with a thump. He didn't know where he had been teleported, but it was dark and musty. As his eyes focused he could make out the walls of a large cellar. He stood on shaking legs and called out Lukai's name, only to be answered by his own echo. His breathing came out in panicked gasps. Tears were welling up in his eyes. He called Lukai's name again.\n\nHe forced himself to close his eyes and calm down. He took a deep breath and then lit his scales. The glow allowed him to see clearly in the cellar.\n\n<Focus on the task at hand,> he thought.< I have to get out of here and defeat Koro. Koro knew we were coming, but that's okay. I can still do the spell and take him down.>\n\nHe searched all four walls of the cellar but found no door.\n\nThere was a whirring noise and Spade turned to see a portal open. A massive, dark figure walked through. Spade gulped, his whole body beginning to tremble. He had never looked back to see what Koro looked like. Now, illuminated by the glow of Spade's scales, he finally saw the dark lord.\n\nKoro's scales were a sleek black, his jagged spikes a dark silver. His eyes were like blazing pits of fire that could tear a dragon apart with a single glance. He was heavily muscled with large, tattered wings and three distinct scars across his snout.\n\nAs Koro walked closer, Spade could make out the scarlet stains of fresh blood spattered all over his scales. The blood of the soldiers.\n\n\"Lukai..?\" Spade breathed out, his legs becoming weak.\n\n\"So you are the Golden Guardian,\" Koro hissed. Then, he laughed, bending over with a maniacal cackle. \"You're just a dragonet! I've taken down Guardians twice your age and size. You came all this way thinking you could actually beat me? Let me guess, you've been training for only a couple of weeks but you've got the power of 'friendship and love' on your side, and you think that'll be enough, because no matter the odds the good guys always win.\"\n\nKoro was stalking closer to Spade, towering over him. He lashed out a talon and knocked Spade to the floor. \"I've been playing this game for hundreds of years, and plotting for when that accursed restraining spell would end. Now I can finally reach my full power and destroy this world, building my own glorious kingdom upon its ashes.\"\n\nSpade stumbled to his talons but Koro shoved him back down, raking his claws across his cheek. The dragonet clutched his bleeding face, staring up at the dark lord with huge, terrified eyes.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry,\" Koro hissed. \"Am I scaring you?\" He grabbed Spade by the neck and lifted him into the air. \"You poor dragonet.\" He drew the bloody spear and held it to Spade's chest.\n\nSpade writhed in his grip and tried to push himself away. Then, a thought screamed in his mind.\n\n<Do the spell!>\n\nHe grabbed Koro's arm and his talons began to glow. Koro squeezed his neck harder and Spade choked, the energy in his talons fading.\n\n\"Blessed with incredible powers but unable to use them,\" Koro went on. \"If you are all that stands between me and the Four Regions, then consider this a fallen world.\"\n\nSpade regained his energy, his talons now blazing. He opened his mouth to say the spell but only a scream escaped as Koro drove the spear into his stomach. Blood spilled onto the ground. Spade's breathing turned into forceful wheezes and dark spots formed at the edge of his vision.\n\nHe could barely hear Koro's last words.\n\n\"You never stood a chance.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "A Dragon's Fate",
        "author": "Robert Vane",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "The Remembered War"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "I left chaos in my wake.\n\nBehind me was the rust, a dangerous wizard, a land in turmoil, and the last of the free dragons in the world. Inexplicably, I flew away from those things, with a human on my back and uncertainty in every beat of my wings. My sister, Kiata, was among those who I'd abandoned. Yet I didn't stop.\n\nFor days I flew across the skies, resting and hunting only when I needed, as Harlan and I traversed the vastness of Ni-Yota. We had crossed the Pillar Mountains two days past, crossing into the former domain of Elasu, she who had torn this land asunder. Beneath me was the late dragon queen's legacy: great keeps of stone blackened by fire, fields and villages reduced to ash, massive pyres of dead humans that looked and smelled as if they each held hundreds of corpses. Not all the blame was Elasu's, of course. Gia had not been gentle to the inhabitants of this land. Of his mysterious enemy, the fiendish tigris, there was no sign from my vantage, but I didn't doubt they lurked in the shadows. I wondered if Legao would have any more success dealing with this foe than the prior protector. More likely, her desperate attempt to halt the rust's advance across eastern Ni-Yota would consume her energies. The fighting on this side of the mountains would fester, but even that tragedy would not matter in the end if I didn't find a way to defeat the rust.\n\nI flew into the night, the broken form of the moon, Rima, dangling in the sky just beyond my mortal reach. A dearth of clouds made the cracked moon appear even more ominous than usual. A chill wind blew beneath the muddled glow of Rima's strange light. It seemed impossible to believe this object was the source of magic, yet that was what Oracle claimed. How was a creation of such power made? Even more remarkable, what power had damaged it so? The Cataclysm must have been an unimaginably terrible conflict. A conflict caused by humans, I had no doubt.\n\nHarlan shared my brooding mood. \"There is an ill omen in the air. We children of the sea call it a wafting\u2014a sign that fate seeks an opportunity to turn for the worse.\"\n\nI scoffed. \"I don't believe in such superstition.\"\n\n\"You should.\"\n\nDespite my protests of indifference to the strange gusts sweeping across the dark sky, I didn't argue with Harlan when he suggested we find a place to land for the night, nor did I object the unnecessarily large fire the human lit, claiming it would keep the chill off of us. He had conjured the blaze using only his hands and two sticks of wood. It was suitably warm, but the comfort of the fire didn't dispel the doubts gnawing within me.\n\n\"I should not have left Kiata,\" I said. \"Or Rinxia. The rust is dangerous. Legao may be dangerous. This land is tearing itself apart as its doom advances. I've only to look down from the sky to see the truth of that.\"\n\nHarlan didn't look up as he pecked at a haunch of charred rabbit as if he was a bird rather than a man (I had eaten mine some time ago in a single gulp). \"Your sister made her desires clear. Don't underestimate her. The time when she needed your protection has passed. And without Kiata and Rinxia, there will be no Ni-Yota to save. Legao and her human magic isn't enough. Together may they win us time to find a way to defeat the rust.\"\n\nHarlan seeming nonchalant at my turmoil irked me. It wasn't that I doubted Kiata's abilities. It was just that I could handle Legao's machination better than she\u2014which sounded similar to doubting my sister, but was altogether different. I'd spent more time with humans than Kiata. I knew how devious and dangerous they were. Harlan was annoying me by telling me otherwise.\n\n\"You are formed of contradictions. How is that you are able to regard a threat to all the world with the same indifference with which you eat that rabbit, yet still you devote a lifetime at sea on a near-endless quest?\" Harlan kept picking at his food, pretending my question didn't bother him. \"You must have visited many fine lands to retire, to relax, and enjoy whatever it is you enjoy.\" It certainly wasn't food.\n\n\"Home is a ship and crew and my wife. I've lost the first two, and perhaps even the last as well, it's been so long.\" Harlan looked up to stare again at Rima. \"Failure makes you numb on the outside, the way a blacksmith's hands thicken with callouses. But that does not mean that fire he works is any less dangerous for him. I live for my quest for aurathorn and the pledge I've made, but I've had more time to grow calluses around my heart, for I've experienced much more disappointment than you.\"\n\nFor Harlan's sake, I hoped he was exaggerating. I'd known plenty of disappointment.\n\nI slept that night, but not as well as I would've hoped. I kept thinking about the rust seeping onto the ground beneath me. I woke several times to find Harlan tossing about nearby, instead of his usual snoring. Perhaps he shared my uneasy dreams. We set off before dawn in near silence.\n\nIn the days that followed, we traversed the turmoil of the vast land of Ni-Yota. Its expanse would've been unimaginable to an inhabitant of Rolm, where the greatest island was little more than a grand farm in Ni-Yota. Little wonder the dragons who ruled this land thought it (and themselves) the divine center of the world. The problem with such a vast space meant there were countless places for the tigris to hide. I bid Ni-Yota a final, silent farewell as the eastern sea finally neared.\n\nIt had been many long weeks since I'd arrived in Ni-Yota, flying across the same open sea that now beckoned before me, but it seemed like I'd lived an entire lifetime here\u2014and in some sense that was true. Much of my free existence had been spent in Ni-Yota. In Rolm I'd been a slave, a warrior, and briefly, a son who had found his mother. In Ni-Yota I'd lived so much more: the lure of Elasu, the warmth (and enigma) of Rinxia, the maturing of Kiata, the hate of Gia. I was a very different dragon than I'd been when I had last crossed the Wall of Fire.\n\nIf Harlan felt any lingering ties to Ni-Yota, his tone of indifference hid the sentiments. \"I can see the ash of the burning mountains. I can smell it.\" He spoke as if he knew the wall of infernos, but as far I knew, only the waveships of Ni-Yota could pass through the boundary. Still, when it came to the sea, I didn't put anything past Harlan.\n\n\"It is the journey to Rolm after we cross that will be the most difficult,\" I said. \"Best to fill our bellies and rest before then.\"\n\nI sensed an unusual impatience in Harlan as he gazed eastward, but he didn't protest my decision to eat and rest. Of course, I was only one of us with wings, so there wasn't anything to discuss.\n\nI woke before dawn and helped myself to a penned sheep. It was hardly fair to the sheep, but I was in a hurry to eat and get going. The sun was still new in the sky when I left Ni-Yota behind. The land faded in my wake like a distant memory.\n\nSoon, waves appeared beneath me. \"That is where you found me, making my last stand on that very shoal as ghastrays sought their next meal,\" Harlan said. \"My crew met their end in that place. May the sea embrace them.\"\n\nI gazed down at the jagged rocks poking out of the water. One shoal looked the same as any other to me, but I had no doubt Harlan knew well the sight of his last stand against the ghastrays on the day we had first met. \"Never have I seen a human fight with such determination in a situation so utterly hopeless,\" I told him.\n\n\"There is always hope.\"\n\nI gurgled my skepticism. \"You were alone, the water at your knees, surrounded by ghastrays, yet you claim to have had hope. As those venomous stingers swirled at you, did you actually expect a dragon to take pity on you and swoop out of the air to rescue you?\"\n\n\"Well, not a dragon, no. That was unexpected. But I hadn't traveled so far, for so long, to end my days in a ghastray's belly. Each time I swung my sword, I became more convinced of that. I could feel my wife's presence beside me. I know she is waiting for me still, impatient for me to complete my quest. Then, like destiny, there you were, snatching me from the sky, aiding me on the next stage of my journey. I never imagined our course from that day till today, but it seems like fate now.\"\n\nI mulled his words, quickly deciding Harlan's interpretation was ridiculous. \"I snatched you up because I wanted your assistance. You were convenient.\"\n\n\"You could've found another human on land.\"\n\n\"Not one as desperate as you.\" I beat my wings faster. \"Perhaps I felt a little pity as well\u2014for the ghastrays I mean. I'm sure you taste terrible.\"\n\nHarlan chuckled warmly. I turned my attention to what lay ahead. Although still impossibly distant, the smoke from the perpetually-erupting mountains grew quickly. At this great distance, it appeared like a blanket of billowing soot pulled from the water below by some great force from the sky\u2014the greatest wall ever created on all of Inkra. Its uncanny expanse extended in both directions, beyond even the ability of my dragon eyes to peer to the end. Perhaps there was none.\n\nI summoned a tailwind, manipulating the Latticework to produce steady gusts that would allow me to fly ever faster with less physical effort. Harlan sang some old sailor songs along the way. His voice grated, but I didn't force him to stop. What Harlan lacked in tone, melody, and grace, he somehow made up for in raw emotion. When he sang of a lonely sea, I had no doubt that he didn't merely babble the words to some old melody, but instead had lived in the moments of which the song spoke. When Harlan unleashed a ballad of love lost to distance, I could feel a small measure of his despair escape his lips.\n\n\"You are a long time from those you care about,\" I said to him.\n\n\"Aye, dragon. Aye.\"\n\nIt unnerved me when Harlan turned serious. I let the subject drop.\n\nThe sun was about to leave the sky when we came upon the shattered remains of the raft-island on which I had landed after my initial crossing into this part of the world. Somehow, it was in even worse condition when I'd last seen it. I would have expected Elasu or Aragor to have repaired the place, but instead it looked as if it had been through a terrible storm, its hull shattered on two sides. No life stirred aboard it. So much the better for me\u2014no humans to speak to when I landed to rest. It was a terrible distance to Rolm once I crossed the Wall of Fire. I'd barely made it the last time, although I'd been flying straight from battle then, and I didn't have magic to aid me.\n\nI dropped closer to the floating island, angling my wings to catch the air and slow my descent. Harlan seemed surprised. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Landing. I will rest my wings. I suggest you rest while you can as well.\"\n\nHarlan shifted on my back, uneasy. \"Look at that floating platform. It looks to have been made of direwood, same as the ships of my people. It's tough stuff, but it has been torn to shreds.\"\n\nI made a closer inspection. The thick wood was cracked, the edges frayed by massive teeth. Only the jaws of a leviathan could've inflicted such damage. Those marks were new. It wasn't that this place had never been repaired since I had last seen it. Rather, it had been attacked again, perhaps recently.\n\n\"I see the damage,\" I assured Harlan, even though I hadn't until after he'd spoken. \"Still, I sense no danger at the moment. We need not linger through the night, but it is worth the risk to give my wings some rest.\" It might have been my imagination, but I still sensed disapproval from the human on my back. I growled at him. \"I made this journey without a human on my back last time. If you can carry me across the Wall of Fire, then you can complain.\"\n\nHarlan didn't cower at my petulance. \"There is still blood lingering in the waves.\" I looked, but saw nothing; I sniffed, but smelled nothing. However, Harlan seemed sure of himself. \"Whatever happened here occurred within the last shift of the tide. Danger may still lurk.\"\n\nHe might've been correct, but he didn't have wings burning with fatigue. I had no patience for dissent. \"Doesn't danger always find us?\" I set down on the damaged barge, but far more warily than I would've without Harlan's warning. I sniffed the wrecked platform thoroughly. \"Humans were here recently. Their scent is still fresh.\" That explained the blood. \"Eat what supplies we have, stretch your legs and do whatever else you must. We won't linger.\"\n\nI ate the paltry fare that remained from our journey over land in several giant gulps, saving but a few morsels for when we crossed the Wall of Fire. There was little to savor about old animal flesh and brackish water, but I now had enough in my stomach to sustain me for days if necessary. I folded my wings, grateful for a respite, even an uneasy one.\n\nThe ominous, smoky plumes from the Wall of Fire loomed ahead of me. The sight commanded my gaze\u2014a jagged array of sinister mountains peeking above the water line, arising with the seemingly singular purpose of spewing putrid smoke toward Haven above. The rocky beasts did their deeds in unnatural silence, rumbling only occasionally despite the continuous eruptions polluting the sky, as if they were nothing more than an elaborate tapestry hung from the sky. I wondered at the origins of the bizarre wall of mountain and fire and smoke, for I had come to recognize that this was no natural phenomena. The Wall was a work of tremendous magic, one with the deliberate purpose to separate Ni-Yota from the islands in the east (or was it Rolm that had been separated?).\n\nWhen I'd last flown beyond this place, I had known nothing of the Latticework of power that enabled magic to influence the mundane world. Equipped with this knowledge, I could now at least imagine how a work such as this might be formed, although it was far beyond anything I, or any contemporary master of magic, might even dream of accomplishing. A creation of such awesome power could only have been the work of those humans who had lived before the Cataclysm, those artificers who could shape the very fabric of the world (and, being human, had used such power to destroy that same world.) Yet, I could not guess their purpose in conjuring the Wall of Fire, apart from the obvious goal of preventing the crossing of the boundary. I wondered if it had something to do with the rust. Or had the inhabitants on one land feared some other threat that might come by sea?\n\nAs I rested my wings and contemplated the imposing fire of the horizon, Harlan prowled the edges of the floating platform, pausing to sniff and studying the murky water lapping beneath us. I had better vision, but Harlan knew the sea. I left him to his musings while I closed my eyes to rest, my thoughts lingering on unpleasant memories of the putrid smoke of the Wall of Fire. I sat contentedly in the late light of the day, until Harlan interrupted me.\n\n\"The sea stirs.\" His voice made it clear this wasn't a good thing.\n\nI forced open an eye with which I focused crossly at Harlan. \"The sea always moves. It is as ceaseless as your pacing and chattering.\"\n\n\"This the stirring of battle\u2014a great battle, nearby.\"\n\nThat got both my eyes to open wide. I craned my neck upward, surveying the expanse in all directions. \"I see not a single ship riding the waves, not in any direction.\"\n\n\"It is not a battle of men and ships,\" Harlan said. \"Creatures of the sea fight each other. The water rumbles, the tide hesitates.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nHarlan stared toward the inferno beyond us. Slowly, he raised a hand, a single finger extended to the east. \"Far, but not too far. Leviathans\u2014a large number.\"\n\n\"Leviathans don't hunt in packs. Nor do they fight each other\u2014except over a bit of prey perhaps.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of normal leviathan behavior,\" Harlan replied in a chillingly mild voice. \"Yet there are indeed many out there if I can feel the effect on the sea from so far.\"\n\nI released a long breath from my snout. I'd intended to rest my wings only a short while, but having started my break, I wasn't anxious to end it. Indeed, I had been considering waiting until the morning to continue onward. Harlan was ruining my drowsy plans.\n\n\"Leviathans are beasts of the sea. I fly in the air. Does it really matter if they chose to squabble?\"\n\nHarlan's brows furrowed in disapproval. \"Leviathans engage in battle here, beside the Wall of Fire, as the rust invades Ni-Yota to the west. As you said, leviathans don't usually fight each other. The ghastray warned you that the leviathan that attacked us as Silla was different from others. You cannot truly believe that this has nothing to do with us?\"\n\nI answered by stretching my wings. \"I hope you fed yourself. It is a long, desolate way to Rolm. Nor will passing through the gas spewed by those mountains be easy. The air will be poison.\"\n\n\"Now you are worried about me?\" Harlan barked a skeptical laugh.\n\nI lowered myself enough so he might climb onto my back with a minimum of difficulty. Once the human was with me, I extended my wings, letting the breeze surge beneath me as I felt for the currents of the sky. I launched upwards with a push of my hind legs and a beat of my wings. The wind swirled in an unruly torrent\u2014the sea and the Wall of Fire made for unique flying conditions. I headed in the direction Harlan had indicated for the supposed leviathan battle. It didn't take long to find. Once airborne, I quickly spotted the tumult of white water erupting upwards, punctuated occasionally by a dorsal fin. Even the sea air couldn't cloak the stink of blood as I drew near. A brutal melee of giants.\n\nAn area of the sea the size of a mid-sized Ni-Yota farm had become a cauldron of carnage. Chunks of mutilated leviathan floated away from the center of the battle, while massive dorsal fins rose and fell, often entangled with wicked tentacles of adversaries.\n\n\"Ghastrays,\" Harlan said unnecessarily.\n\nI had reached the same conclusion, because the remains of dozens of the creatures intermingled with the erratic waves and leviathan debris on the surface of the battle area. Swarms of ghastrays appeared fleetingly on the surface, their nearly translucent bodies glinting in the exhausted daylight, before vanishing again into the chaotic waves.\n\nI swept into a slow circle around the infected area. We were close enough to the wall that I felt the heat from the mountain furnaces and the burning stink of the noxious gas they belched. \"So many leviathans \u2026 it's a stew of killers.\"\n\n\"They shouldn't be here.\" Harlan sounded dismayed. \"I've never seen so many leviathans in one place. Nor so many ghastrays either. They've been drawn here by something.\"\n\nI kept circling, also shocked at the sheer number of aquatic predators in such a small area. From the events at the Tayo, I knew the ghastrays to be intelligent creatures, capable of acting with purpose. If many had gathered here, there was indeed a reason. Most of the battle was invisible to me from above, and the blood-infested water stirred chaotically, but the formations of ghastrays betrayed a deeper pattern amid the fighting and carnage. At sea or land, armies behaved in a similar manner.\n\n\"There is not anything particular that draws both the leviathans and ghastray to this place,\" I told Harlan. \"They each have their own purposes. For the ghastrays it is obvious in the way they move\u2014charging into the battle like cavalry harrying an army on the march. They have come to kill leviathans.\"\n\nHarlan didn't answer for a while. We both merely gaped at the glimpses of deadly battle unfolding in an erratic dance of sudden carnage and deceptive peacefulness. One moment, there would be nothing but waves, in the next a tentacle or jaw would flash to the surface; a white cresting wave would suddenly discolor with creeping red; a smooth patch of water would be polluted by dismembered corpses from below.\n\n\"I think these leviathans seek to cross the Wall. The ghastrays fight to stop them,\" I concluded.\n\n\"Aye, I think you have the right of it. The ghastrays are trying to defend the barrier. That is their purpose. It's always been their purpose. Just like they did at the river, the ghastrays are fighting where they must. Because those leviathans\u2014they are hollowings.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The pattern became obvious.\n\nThe melee in the sea wasn't a clash of opposing armies. It was an attempt to stop the advancing leviathans before they could cross the Wall of Fire. Presumably they were headed toward Rolm, as we were. That could not be a coincidence.\n\nFrom what I could make out from the air, the ghastrays came in packs of three, at least near the surface. When a leviathan poked above the waves, the ghastrays struck, attaching themselves to their massive adversaries. There would be more fighting below. Harlan had come to the same conclusion.\n\n\"There must be ghastrays deeper in the sea. They are targeting individual leviathans, driving them to the surface, where their fellows attack.\"\n\nJudging by the mutilated leviathan corpses, the tactic seemed to be working. \"They kill well, but how many leviathans are there?\"\n\nHarlan didn't answer, because there was no way for either of us to know. Those creatures weren't the leviathans we knew; They were hollowings, their behavior driven by some dark purpose that I didn't fully understand. \"The hollowing must have used those ships we saw in Illium. They need only infect one leviathan, who could spread the taint to others. They must have managed to infect a significant number before the ghastrays could attack.\"\n\nI stretched my claws, wishing for sai to make my strikes even deadlier. Still, I would make do. I spotted a leviathan breaking the surface and angled myself accordingly.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Harlan shouted, alarm ringing in his voice.\n\nAnnoyed at the interruption, I broke out of my dive. \"Killing hollowings.\"\n\n\"This isn't our fight. The ghastrays will stop them. Or they won't. In any case, you have told me repeatedly of the long distance to land once we cross that inferno. Save your strength. We can't have you injured in combat now.\"\n\nI snarled my disapproval at Harlan's sound logic. Ghastrays were vastly superior sea fighters, and they could go where I could not. They didn't need my assistance, and I doubted they desired it. I didn't like ditching a fight, but that wasn't the problem, either. The notion of hollowing leviathans prowling the waters of Rolm rankled. The humans who dwelled there were slavers of the worst sort, yet it was also my home. While not as vast or grandiose as Ni-Yota, the rust didn't threaten it, and I wanted to keep it that way. But I couldn't do that from the air. I banked into a turn, heading toward the Wall of Fire.\n\nThe dense plumes of noxious gas pumped upwards, surging from the open peaks in a seemingly endless flow. If shaojiu poured forth in such quantities, the world would be a happier place. Instead, we were stuck with putrid soot from the bowels of the world. I filled my lungs with an infusion of relatively clean air, and advised Harlan to do the same before I increased my speed. Best to get the crossing over with as quickly as I dared.\n\nThe dizzying fumes came for me. Even without inhaling, the gas clawed at my eyes and burned at the edges of my nostrils. I beat my wings with purpose. As a dragon, I remembered precisely where I'd previously emerged from the wall on my last trip, even if the smoke plumes had inevitably shifted. In that place the gas wasn't real. In that place, I could cross, just as the Mizu waveships did.\n\nThe next flap of my wings propelled me into the midst of the fumes. Even as I told myself that the gas around me was an illusion, my head shook violently. The sky vanished; I forgot from where I'd come and what direction I sought. For a creature of the air, accustomed to almost constant assurance of my location, it was a frightening feeling. I had lost control. I was like a human, fumbling in fog. I willed my hearts to slow their beating and I commanded my wings to keep me moving. My course had been correct when I'd entered the smoke. I just needed to keep going. The other side had to be near.\n\nThe smoke thickened, or at least I perceived that. There was no point in even opening my eyes\u2014I was in a void. Harlan gasped for breath on my back. There wasn't anything I could do for him except keep going. I forced another hesitant flap of my wings. Each motion was a struggle, as if I'd forgotten even the instinct of flight. The power that created this phenomenon was beyond anything I could even speculate duplicating. Those who deluded themselves, luxuriating in their supposed power, were ants compared to those who came before us.\n\nMy chest burned from lack of air. My instinct was to refill my lungs, but I didn't want to do that unless I had no other choice. Harlan could breathe the contaminated air if he had to\u2014he wasn't the one flying. I needed to keep my wits. So I flew on, wings extended. I imagined a giant roasted goat waiting ahead of me. It was the one thing I missed about Rolm. And perhaps my former ryder Bethy Rann as well, if she still lived.\n\nA blast of comparatively fresh air tickled my nostrils. I sucked greedily before I stopped myself, unsure if it was an illusion. But the sweet breeze gliding through my snout into my chest didn't lie. I peered ahead. There was light. My head steadied. I beat my wings toward more welcoming skies. I had successfully traversed the Wall of Fire, again. Harlan was still alive as well, so definitely a success.\n\nBeyond the inferno, endless seas beckoned under starlit sky, betraying no hint that land might lurk far to the east. The sound of the waves mixed with the low grumbling of the volcanos in an odd symphony. I had the sky to myself apart from the lingering smoke from the infernos in my wake.\n\n\"Here is the Sea of the Lost Serpent,\" Harlan whispered from my back. \"Here I am in this place where none before me have gone.\" I wasn't sure if he realized I could hear him.\n\n\"What's that you're saying?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\nI would've questioned him further, but an unexpected tumult in the waters ahead drew my attention. Among the waves, I spotted what might have been a leviathan's tail break the surface. I swooped down to investigate, ready to attack if necessary, but the creature had disappeared by the time I arrived. I banked into a circle, gliding gingerly above the water's surface searching, but it didn't reappear. There was no sign of ghastrays either. If the leviathan had been one of those I'd seen in Ni-Yota, it appeared to have eluded its pursuers.\n\n\"It might've been a regular leviathan,\" Harlan offered.\n\n\"Perhaps, but these aren't their usual waters. They prefer the warmer areas south, as well as the channels between the great islands of Rolm that are laden with sea traffic and tasty morsels such as humans.\"\n\n\"Searching the sea for a leviathan that doesn't want to be found is like trying to sail across a desert\u2014both will leave us unhappy, dead, or both.\"\n\nI snorted. \"A poetic way of telling me to get moving.\" I lifted us away from the water, hunting for a suitable gust to ride eastward. We had a long flight ahead. The currents didn't cooperate of course, so I relied more on my own sweat than I'd wanted. When I tired, I arranged a few gusts using the power of the Latticework. I hadn't flown a hundred leagues before Harlan asked his first annoying question.\n\n\"Where are we going?\"\n\nThe sudden and offhand manner in which he asked it implied I didn't know our destination, or at least hadn't given it sufficient thought. I had given it plenty of thought\u2014I just hadn't reached a decision. It was a question of gut versus mind. The reasoned portion of me advised me to return to the island of Maricopa\u2014that was where my mother had made her temporary refuge, where she had birthed Kiata. I had learned precious little about the humans who inhabited that place from Bethy Rann in the short time we had together. The secrets I sought might well be there, or at least it was a logical place to start looking. My gut didn't care about these things\u2014my hearts just wanted to return to Rolm. There awaited my brethren, enslaved and broken. Bethy Rann might even be there. Although if she still lived, she had probably long since fled. Visions of sending the inhabitants of the King Mendakas' citadel fleeing danced in my head. My blood heated as I pictured that righteous battle.\n\n\"You aren't answering,\" Harlan pointed out, drawing me away from my tempting delusions.\n\n\"We go to Maricopa,\" I said with dismissive certainty. \"My mother was there; She chose to give birth to my sister there. It is an \u2026 unusual place. That's where we may find answers.\"\n\nMy mother had gone to that island with a purpose. I was relatively certain it had to do with destroying the rust. I was connected to that as well. I just needed to understand why she was there. But that wasn't my only task. Even though I had chosen to fly to Maricopa, I had not forgotten my promise to my brothers and sisters living as slaves on DragonPeak. Somehow, I would find a way to free them. Before I returned to Ni-Yota, no dragon would remain a slave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The safest route to Maricopa wasn't the shortest.\n\nI opted to fly along the coasts of the Rolman islands of Uder and Hilo, rather than pass too close to the great island of Harcourt. While I was still in Rolman waters, I decided that even if I was spotted by some humans on land or a ship at sea, they would likely think me one of King Mendakas's slave dragons and leave me alone. The king's dragons went wherever they wanted and no one questioned them.\n\nI flew beyond the long sandy beaches of Uder's south shore before heading northwest, traversing the great channel north of Hilo's soaring black-faced cliffs. Harlan noticed the great watchtower of Kell on Hilo's north tip as we approached.\n\n\"That looks to be the highest point for leagues in any direction. We are certain to be seen by the sentries posted in that soaring spire.\"\n\nI didn't bother to look. It had seen the tower often enough. I knew there were supposed to be humans on post inside its upper chambers, supposedly alert for raiders or others approaching the southern underbelly of Rolm. I tried to put Harlan's concern to rest. \"Dragons in this part of the world serve the king. There are no others. Those soldiers aren't going to waste a precious messenger pigeon to report a loyal ryder out on patrol.\"\n\n\"I don't look like a ryder of Rolm,\" Harlan reminded me.\n\n\"We're too distant for anyone to realize that. I doubt they'd look carefully anyway. The winds rip over those cliffs with a cold, angry fury. The soldiers inside the tower most likely took note of my passage then returned to their fire and their ale.\"\n\n\"Even if that is so, why fly so close to the shore?\"\n\n\"Better to be closer to Hilo's deserted cliffs, with its lonely tower, than the busy shipping lane filled with merchants that ply the waters of Ulibon's coast. Royal ships patrol those seas, and sailors love to gossip and boast, as you know. They are more likely to spread word of a dragon in the sky than a few isolated soldiers in a desolate tower huddled around a brazier. This is the best route. Once we are beyond Hilo, there is little but open sea between us and Maricopa\u2014no inhabited islands, no busy shipping lanes.\"\n\nHarlan kept quiet until Hilo was far enough behind us that even my dragon eyes could no longer make out the shape of the spire at Kell in our wake. I congratulated myself for my wise choice of flight path several moments before I spotted a ship\u2014a lone three-mast clipper out where it had no reason to be. The wind was brisk, but the vessel barely moved in the sea. Indeed, it looked to be drifting more than sailing. I didn't think Harlan had spotted it yet. I considered merely raising our altitude toward the clouds to avoid possible detection, before I saw a leviathan break the surface behind the vessel.\n\nI snorted in annoyance as the distinctive fin of a killer closed in on the ship. The leviathan wasn't coming to visit, but even if I'd been inclined to intervene, there was no way I could reach the ill-fated vessel in time to do any good. The sound of a hull cracking echoed loud enough to draw Harlan's attention to the melee beneath us. He offered a choice sailor's curse. No seaman liked to see others suffer.\n\n\"That sounded like her keel,\" Harlan said. \"That monster knew exactly where to hit.\"\n\nTo Harlan, the cracking of a keel sounded different than other wood being snapped. To me it was the sound of a lost ship. To the leviathan, it must've been a dinner bell. \"I spotted the ship just a moment ago. It didn't even try to escape.\"\n\nHarlan leaned over my side, trying to get a better look. \"Her masts are still intact, albeit with untethered sails, but her rudder might've been destroyed. If her kneel has snapped, there's no hope of escape.\"\n\nAs if to put a point to Harlan's morbid conclusion, the leviathan reemerged from the sea's depths, leaping jaws first into the stern of the doomed ship. With a single snap of its teeth, half of the ship disappeared.\n\n\"Dive now, Bayloo,\" Harlan pleaded.\n\n\"I can't save that ship. Earlier you urged me to keep clear of unnecessary leviathan battles. We don't even know if that creature is one of the tainted from Ni-Yota.\"\n\n\"This isn't about leviathans.\" His voice was pained. \"Men will die in the water if we do nothing.\"\n\nI scanned the scene below, dubious of getting involved. The sea was well on its way to consuming that portion of the ship that hadn't already been claimed by the leviathan's jaws. I saw no activity on deck, heard no frantic screams of doomed humans. Harlan was being too emotional. \"If there are still any survivors, they are as good as dead already.\"\n\nHis next words had the uncomfortable sound of prophecy to them. \"Withhold your hand for a drowning man, and fate shall pull you under in turn.\"\n\nDispleasure rumbled in my throat. \"Dragons don't have hands. Your threat doesn't apply to us.\" I said the words, but I still tucked my head down and dove toward the sea. I didn't need to give fate any excuse to rally against me.\n\nI came down fast, but as I predicted, not fast enough. The leviathan made a final assault, ramming its head into what remained of the ship's hull. The wood shattered like glass dropped from a tower. The beast swam through the debris, hurling the remnants of its masts into the air. There wasn't going to be anyone to save from this slaughter.\n\nHarlan disagreed. \"There! Floating by that bit of the bow. Grab him!\"\n\nThe 'him' that Harlan referred to was a corpse; the unfortunate sailor was face down in the waves. Unless this variety of human had gills, there was no way that the man still lived.\n\n\"He's dead, Harlan. They all are.\"\n\nThe leviathan surfaced north of the wreck, sliding across the surface as it scooped inert bodies from the waves before disappearing again under the surface. For the moment, it stayed below, invisible and dangerous. I slowed my dive and prepared to level myself off rather than plunge too close to the water. Harlan barked, but I wasn't going to listen. I had a healthy respect for the wrath of fate, but I absolutely knew a leviathan's teeth would be lethal if I came too close. Though, if it was bothering to eat the humans, this leviathan probably wasn't a hollowing.\n\nI angled my wings, ending our descent, but just before I started to change direction for more altitude, I heard a splash. A little one, not made by a hungry leviathan. One of the sailors still lived, at least enough to kick a leg. I spotted him to my left, grabbing onto a piece of debris. He clutched another of his fellow sailors by the arm, desperately yanking the other human toward his precarious raft. Such comradery. Unfortunately, trying to save the probably-dead crewman had been noisy and therefore stupid. The leviathan could hear as well as I, if not better. I twisted awkwardly, diving through wind even as I struggled to get a decent angle to try to snatch the survivor with my claws.\n\nI was fast, but so was the leviathan. We reached the survivor simultaneously; I got the top half of him, the leviathan got the bottom half. My portion might've been slightly bigger. I'm not claiming that it mattered though.\n\nHarlan gasped in agony, as if he'd been the one torn into sections. To make him feel a bit better (and not take any chances with fate), I snatched up another face-down floater along my flight path so I held one and a half humans in my clutches. Let no human or deity claim I hadn't tried to save those I could.\n\nI beat my wings to take us away from the leviathan and the sea of death. Only once I was satisfied I was far out of reach of any sea creature did I refocus on the human parts that I held in my claws.\n\nThe half-person was unmistakably dead. The other was intact, but didn't seem to be moving or breathing.\n\n\"How are they?\" Harlan called from my back. He didn't have the benefit of a decent view of my foreclaws.\n\n\"I hope your gods of the sea appreciate effort.\"\n\nGloom clouded Harlan's voice. \"They are dead?\"\n\n\"Almost definitely.\"\n\n\"Almost?\" The false hope was palpable.\n\n\"I'm not healer and it's a bit hard to be certain with the whole human clutched in my claw. The other is certainly dead, as I was able to save only half of him.\"\n\n\"If there is a chance we can save a life, we should land.\"\n\nI stifled a groan of displeasure. Just because I'd flown away from that leviathan didn't mean there wasn't other danger lurking. I didn't like the sea. I couldn't see or smell what was beneath its waves. \"Land where?\"\n\nHarlan paused only for a moment. We were close enough to the water that his human eyes still had an expansive view of the surrounding sea. \"It looks like there are a pair of atolls ahead of us.\"\n\nThe first time I looked, I didn't see anything. Maybe I didn't want to see the grubby collection of black rocks poking through the waves around them. They looked like a leviathan had swallowed the battlements of an entire castle then emptied its rock-clogged bowels out in the middle of the sea. Landing there would be no treat, but more than that it would be useless. The humans I carried were dead as dead could be. Harlan sensed my reluctance.\n\n\"Please, Bayloo.\" His pleas somehow rose over the howl of the wind. \"You are not a sailor. In the lore of my people, to be swallowed by the water is the worst of all possible deaths, but to save a fellow from such a fate is the greatest of blessings, a portent of good fortune. And we have need of some good fortune.\"\n\nHis words didn't persuade me. The fatigue in my wings did. I was tired. I'd leave Harlan's humans on those rocks if it made him and any gods happier. At the same time, I would get rest. Let all be satisfied. I changed course again, targeting the lonely collection of rocks. As I neared, I spotted three more of the so-called islands. If I imagined a line between them, it would've formed part of a circle. I realized that the isolated atolls were not really islands.\n\n\"We are about to set down on the very top of an underwater inferno mountain,\" I informed Harlan, calmly. \"The rest of its bulk is hidden beneath the waves. There is no telling how far down it goes. It's probably not active. Probably.\"\n\nHarlan paid me no mind. I laid the corpses onto the rocks as gently as I could manage, which wasn't particularly gentle. Neither twitched. A wave splashed through the rocks of the atoll, collapsing cold water atop both bodies. Again, nothing from the dead. At least some carnivorous fish would soon be happy at its good fortune. Harlan slid from my back anyway, wisely keeping one hand on my torso for balance, as the water waded through this collection of rocks.\n\n\"I don't like it here,\" I growled, meaning it. This place made me feel like I was standing in the middle of the sea. Dragons weren't meant for water. I kept my wings spread, up as high as they could go, lest they get soaked. \"A great wave may appear at any moment. We've done our best for those men. More than any other human or dragon would've done in our place. I'm grateful for a bit of rest, but this place is more dangerous than restful. We must go.\"\n\nInstead, Harlan waded onto the precarious rock of the atoll. Seeing the ship destroyed must have temporarily damaged his mind. My anger flashed and I gave my wings a flap\u2014I didn't need to stay here if I didn't want. I presumed Harlan realized another dragon wouldn't be flying past to fetch him anytime soon.\n\nHe yelled over the din of the sea. \"Fortune may yet smile upon us for our deed.\"\n\nI almost lifted off, just to teach Harlan a lesson. I might have, but for what he said next.\n\n\"This one wears a sealed messenger's pouch.\" He knelt down beside the more intact of the two corpses. The man did have a leather strap slung around his chest over a bit of what had once been finely-embroidered jerkin.\n\nHarlan yanked the bag's strap, pulling it from the corpse to show me. An oiled leather cylinder was attached. Markings had been carved into the container. \"Those would be the sigils of the lord he served,\" I confirmed. \"Perhaps we may learn of some noble's future marriage plans. Or maybe that cylinder contains fish bones. In any case, we should not open it here. I'm leaving. You are invited to accompany me.\"\n\nHarlan scrambled onto my back. I flapped my wings as a wave burst on the rocks beside me, spraying Harlan and I with freezing, salty water that burned in my nostrils. With a snorting exhale, I left the rock and the corpses. I could hear Harlan fiddling with the pouch on my back. I kept my altitude steady.\n\n\"A sealed missive,\" Harlan proclaimed. \"The symbol on the wax looks a bit like a giant fish.\"\n\n\"Humans love their little pictures on their messages. I know that only King Mendakas uses the dragon symbol. I never paid attention to the rest, although the little lords always seemed to enjoy carrying their flags and painting their armor. A bunch of them have fish on them. I promise I won't tell anyone you opened it. Just grip the parchment tightly with those useful fingers you have, so the wind doesn't take it from you.\"\n\nThe sounds of paper rustling followed, then silence.\n\nI got annoyed at the delay. I'd risked my life for that message. \"Well?\"\n\n\"It's gibberish.\"\n\nI snorted a good, long snort. \"You don't understand Rolmish.\"\n\n\"Aye, you have it. The letters are the same as Korithian, where I spent a year long ago. I can read the sounds, but I've no idea what the words mean.\"\n\nThis made me more pleased than it should have. It seemed I liked being the first to know things. I was still finding things out about my free self. \"Do your best. I'll translate.\"\n\nHarlan read out some mangled sounds. Very mangled.\n\n\"You sound like you are imitating a rooster. Try again. Go slower.\"\n\nHe tried again. It still sounded mostly like nonsense, like a single garbled word. Something like: \"Tarhas-return.\"\n\n\"Try again. Slow. I believe you are supposed to pause when you see a space between the letters.\"\n\nHarlan grumbled, but he did as I asked.\n\nThis time I got the meaning. \"It says 'the heir has returned'\" I proclaimed in Avian.\n\n\"What does that mean to you?\"\n\nI considered the implications of the cryptic message. Perhaps it had been part of an ongoing correspondence. It was also strange that it was sent by ship rather than pigeon. Humans sent message by sea when the writing was too voluminous for bird, or when the skies weren't safe for their messenger birds. It must be the latter case here. I was far from an expert on the politics of Rolm. But I had heard of the heir previously.\n\n\"I think it means trouble in Ulibon. That fish symbol may belong to the Lord of the Twisted Keep, the great citadel that dominates that island,\" I said. \"That message means that Rolm is at war.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "We reached Maricopa.\n\nFrom a distance, the island appeared an inconsequential speck in a vast sea. Its stature improved little as I neared. Maricopa was a landscape of devastated sand and rock, windswept and inhospitable even to most vegetation. Its overseer was stern, towering inferno mountain known as the Kraken that loomed over its tiny domain. This goliath was the only place on the island where greenery flourished. The rest of the rock was desolate, but for me the barren shores were laden with memories of the harshest sort. The pain I had experienced in this place pushed all else from my thoughts. I reduced my speed as I approached. I told myself it was fatigue that kept me from pushing harder to my destination. I did need rest, but that wasn't what caused me to slow. I was wary.\n\nI circled the island, tracing its shoreline from above, searching both the sea for danger and the land for any sign of human activity. I found nothing.\n\n\"This place is as empty as a docked ship after the seahands get paid.\" Harlan sounded disappointed.\n\nI scanned the island, my eyes passing over rocky hills and lifeless plains. Only around the great peak of the Kraken did thick growth disrupt my scouting. \"It is empty because this isn't a place most humans would want to live. It has nothing, it is near nothing. The only source of freshwater is the rain and the lake atop the mountain.\"\n\n\"But some chose to live here anyway.\" Harlan said it as if he knew more than I did about the villagers who once dwelled here. The people had been slaughtered by the Mizu who had hunted my sister\u2014the Mizu and the magi, Drasu.\n\nThe fishing village seemed the right place to begin my search. I wasn't ready to return to the crater, to that place where my mother had died. My memories of that day were black, cold, and painful. I would go there only when I must.\n\nI set us down beside the restless waves of the sea, near Maricopa's only navigable harbor. I stood not far from the spot I'd occupied when I'd last visited this isle. Back then, the brutal mind of Brindisi had sought to command me. I shuddered at the memory, my mane prickling up with anger. I practically shook Harlan off my back. He deftly obliged, sliding onto the ground and immediately gliding into what remained of the village that had once stood in this place.\n\nI tucked in my weary wings as I examined the ruins. There had been so much here to begin with, but now no structure was left standing. The wooden dwellings that had been ransacked by the Mizu had been burned.\n\n\"Very thorough,\" Harlan remarked of the damage. \"Even the blood raiders of Orn are not so complete in their destruction.\"\n\nI wasn't interested in Harlan's stories. \"This was done by dragon fire. The scorch marks on the gravel give it away.\"\n\nHarlan bent down, rubbing the blackened grains through his fingers. He sniffed at the debris. \"This happened weeks ago, at least.\"\n\n\"Around the time I fled Rolm.\" I thought back to the conversation in my cave on DragonPeak with King Mendakas and his minions. \"This place was already a ruin the last time I was here. After I was brought back to Rolm near death, King Mendakas sent ryders to investigate this island. Some among his advisors suspected the heir of Ulibon might have been hiding here. I didn't think so. But ryders searched this place on the king's orders. Whatever they found, the king decided to get rid of the remains afterward.\"\n\nHarlan tilted his head. \"Ulibon?\" He placed a hand on the messenger's pouch that he'd slung over his shoulder. \"This is the same heir that is spoken about on the parchment we found?\"\n\n\"I thought you were the most worldly human on Inkra. You do not know the conquest of the Ulibon and the lingering whispers of the lost heir?\"\n\nHarlan sniffed. \"Few have ever heard of Rolm, both because of its distance from other great lands and because its inaccessibility. Most of what is known is gleaned secondhand from Ni-Yota, for only their waveships ply these waters\u2014and as you know, my people are not welcome in the land of dragons. So as far as I've traveled, as many strange conversations as I've had, I do not know of Ulibon, much less of its fall. But you clearly do know the story quite well. Were you a part of it, perhaps?\"\n\n\"In Rolm, humans celebrate victories, but it was dragons who actually earned them. The capture of the Twisted Keep of Ulibon was no different in that regard.\" I let go of a sigh laden with memories of the fallen. \"In Ulibon, there were humans known as enchanters\u2014in Ni-Yota perhaps they would've been called magi, although their powers were more specialized.\" I closed my eyes, remembering the haze of my past life, recalling experiences that were only partially my own. \"I didn't understand magic then. I think the enchanters were humans who had learned enough to manipulate magic in a very particular, specialized way. In any case, they were deadly. Their ruler, the so-called highstar, even more so.\"\n\n\"A great, glorious victory when they were defeated then, eh?\" Harlan prodded.\n\nI recalled the humans of King Mendakas' army embracing, celebrating after the great keep had fallen. I saw a young king luxuriating in the triumph, I remembered the joyous shouts and boisterous laughing. We dragons took no part in celebrations. We merely obeyed, although there was satisfaction in having pleased our masters. \"Men died on both sides in the battle. Dragons died as well. All over control of large tracts of dirt on a mid-sized island. All so some humans could have more grain, more metal, more of whatever made them feel big and important.\"\n\nHarlan sensed my changing mood. His own tone turned somber. \"The past can look very different when seen by those living in the present.\" He hesitated, his lips pursed, before pressing on. \"I surmise that the ruler of Ulibon\u2014the highstar, as you say he was known\u2014was killed in the battle. Why did your king think this heir survived, and why would he believe that this escaped son would come to a barren island like this?\"\n\n\"The boy who was the only son the Hightstar\u2014Alon\u2014his body was never found. Well, a body was found, but none could be sure if it was the boy. But that isn't surprising, given that he and his mother supposedly leapt into the sea to avoid capture. That always seemed to me to be a strange way to attempt an escape for a species without wings, but humans are strange. As to why Mendakas later suspected this boy might've come to Maricopa\u2014I can only guess as to the twisted logic of men. I supposed the first is fear\u2014a king like Mendakas always fears the loss of his precious power. More simply, Mendakas knew the old Highstar could wield magic. Mendakas didn't understand the nature of the magic of enchantment, but his human advisors with their small heads and hairless ears came to suspect that the seemingly backward villagers of Maricopa had also secretly possessed the same power. A logical link for a simple mind to make\u2014the Highstar could do magic, the villagers of Maricopa could do magic. Besides, Mendakas is the kind of human who believes that everything that happens is about him. Perhaps you know the type.\"\n\nHarlan's voice bristled. \"Would I?\"\n\nI ignored his protest of the obvious. \"A man like Mendakas would assume anything so grandly unexpected such as finding enchanters on a backwater isle was some kind of conspiracy against him.\"\n\n\"But that is not what you believe?\"\n\nI flicked my tail at the dust of the destroyed settlement. \"There were enchanters here, sure enough. Refugees from Ni-Yota who fled to Ulibon, then this place. Brindisi and I searched the scarred remains of the village. I was more ignorant than a new babe then, my free will still fresh. Yet I remember what we found\u2014ingots of gold, a white sand so fine it was nearly dust, precision tools like none ever seen in Rolm. But I also knew two of the inhabitants of that village well. Indeed, they freed me. Bethy Rann saved my life.\" She saved it and I left her behind to die at Mendakas' hand. \"She never spoke of the Highstar, or of some secret heir hiding among her people.\"\n\n\"Did you ask her?\" Harlan asked. \"It's not the kind of thing one mentions unbidden.\"\n\nI let a low growl rumble up my neck. \"The story of the Heir of Ulibon hiding here is a king's paranoia.\" I paused for a moment. \"And if it was otherwise \u2026 Drasu and his raiders were thorough in their slaughter. Everyone in this village is dead. Even if the mysterious heir somehow escaped the Mizu raiders, there was no way off the island. Mendakas' ryders would've found any survivor and finished what Drasu started.\"\n\nHarlan nodded slowly, as if reluctant to accept the clear facts I presented to him. \"What did these refugees of Ni-Yota\u2014these enchanters\u2014want with aurathorn?\"\n\n\"They helped my mother use aurathorn to free me.\" At least that's what Bethy Rann had told me. And that there was no more of that precious vine. No more I could use to free the other dragons.\n\n\"How?\" Harlan pressed. \"How was it used to break the runes that bound you?\"\n\nThese were details I had not been focused upon at the time. All that had mattered was that I was free. I had known nothing of magic. Once Bethy Rann told me there was no more, it didn't matter. Embarrassed, I realized that I knew only the barest details. \"My old ryder apparently fed it to me in a potion of some kind, specially treated with my mother's magic. But I also drank quite a bit of ale.\"\n\n\"Ale?\" The sailor's eyes surged open. \"And you ate aurathorn?\"\n\n\"Apparently. It is a vine, is it not? Humans eat lots of stuff that grows from the ground. Do not alchemists use flowers and herbs in their medicines?\"\n\nHarlan merely shook his head in disbelief. \"A group of human magic users\u2014these so-called enchanters\u2014somehow obtained the rarest of substances, something I and my people have been searching for through generations, and they fed it to you.\" The judgment in his voice was harsh.\n\n\"I am an ember dragon,\" I reminded him, my voice deepening. \"I am worth it.\"\n\nHarlan huffed indignantly. \"And you dare say that I am the type who believes everything is about me.\"\n\nI snarled at Harlan's doubts about how my freedom had been achieved, but at the same time, uncertainty about the full plans my mother and the dead inhabitants of this island remained. I had assumed the purpose of aurathorn was to help me and my kind. I assumed that was why my mother had come to this place. Maybe it was true. But Bethy Rann's people could have obtained aurathorn for other reasons as well.\n\nA hardening concern had come to Harlan's eyes. \"How did they get it? Where did it come from?\" He looked around the barren scruff of the island. \"It could not have merely been growing in this place, despite the history you shared with me.\"\n\n\"Bethy Rann told me that the inhabitants traded for it.\"\n\n\"Traded?\" Harlan pressed. \"Who would trade aurathorn?\" Harlan seemed to be having trouble breathing due to his shock.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Even Bethy Rann hadn't known\u2014or at least she had not shared the information with me. Harlan digested my answer like it was stone. For once, he stopped talking.\n\nI began to pick my way through the burnt ground of the village. I sniffed and prodded and scratched through the top layer of hardened ash with my claws. I had not searched long before Harlan found his tongue again.\n\n\"Aurathorn isn't in the burnt village. It is time to look elsewhere,\"\n\nI kept ignoring his whining, moving deliberately to the spot where the storeroom for the village's most precious materials had once stood. There no obvious sign of the gold or specialized sand or other instruments that had once been hidden here, of course. Anything Rolm's ryders hadn't burned had been sent back to Eladrell. Still, I dug at the ravaged ground. Human eyes might miss something that could be located by a dragon's nose.\n\nThe potent scent of ash born from dragon fire wafted into my nostrils as my claws disturbed its resting place. I pushed the dust around, slow and careful, my eyes and nose searching. The longer I took, the closer Harlan came to the location where I dug. I tapped the tip of my claw against hard bits that lay beneath the surface.\n\n\"What have you found?\"\n\n\"Come see for yourself. You'll have to get those pretty fingers dirty though.\"\n\nHarlan didn't hesitate. He sank to his knees and dug out the small shards I'd discovered from the packed ground far better than my giant claws could've managed. \"Glass,\" he concluded, holding a fragment of dubious treasure between two of his fleshy digits. I said nothing; Harlan kept peering at his find. \"It glows \u2026 violet, like a fine burgundy held up against the sun on a summer day.\" The sailor licked his lips. \"The taste of new summer.\"\n\nI got the meaning, even if I didn't understand all the words. \"Violet sand makes violet glass when heated in a furnace. Or if blasted by dragon fire, which is similar to a furnace.\"\n\n\"I have heard of such a thing. The red sand of Doloon is much the same.\" Harlan placed the shard between his teeth as if he intended to bite, then jerked it out, surprised. \"It is still warm.\"\n\n\"Some sands are always warm.\"\n\nHarlan arched both brows. \"That is something I haven't experienced, and I've laid on plenty of beaches.\"\n\n\"The sands of Proving Shore on the Isle of Oster are said to never cool. Each time the cold sea waves wash over them they heat themselves anew, as if each contained a small furnace. Nothing can live on that beach. To spend too much time in the sand is to invite a horrid sickness that often leads to death.\"\n\nHarlan's eyes grew wide. \"The people here had contact with Oster then?\"\n\n\"Or at least they acquired the sand from the Proving Shore to use in their enchantments.\"\n\n\"What does it do?\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Harlan looked disappointed at my answer. \"The art of enchantment is more alchemy than true magic. It is done by instruments, from what I gather. It is a human discipline, unknown to me.\"\n\nHarlan dipped his chin as if he understood. \"Is there anything else unusual you smell here?\"\n\nI made one more cursory sniff. \"You need a bath.\"\n\nHarlan turned his gaze away from me, his chin pointed upwards at the Kraken. \"Then we must look elsewhere for answers.\"\n\nI didn't look. I knew all about the Kraken. The memories of that place were a sharp blade in my belly, cutting everywhere.\n\nHarlan didn't have sympathy. \"There is nothing else on this island but what awaits up there.\" When I didn't move, he added, \"You've traveled a great distance to be here. Why hesitate now?\"\n\n\"Evil spawned in that place,\" I said, ashamed at the childish fear of my own words.\n\nI expected a mocking reply, but to my surprise, Harlan grunted with understanding. \"A marked place.\"\n\nIt wasn't a term I'd heard before. \"Marked?\"\n\n\"Where the blackest of deeds have been done. A happening so terrible, it impresses itself on the fabric of the world. Aye, and to return to it is to dance on the edge of the Abyss.\"\n\nI locked my gaze on the mountain. Something inside me quivered. \"A marked place indeed.\"\n\nHarlan showed his teeth, the humorless smile of a snarling wolf. It was a look I'd not seen on him before. \"Then we are in agreement on both the danger and what must be done.\" That ugly grin widened. \"In the darkness hides the greatest secrets.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "I didn't fly quickly.\n\nIt wasn't just the fatigue of the flight from Ni-Yota that still burdened me. The closer I came to returning to the site of my mother's death, the tighter my hearts beat inside me. If I didn't know better, I would've thought that I was (a bit) afraid.\n\nI spiraled upward toward the summit, flying in elongated circles that gave me a view of every side of the mountain. Koa trees clung to the steep sides, their dense leaves clustering together as if they embraced. Based on my past experience fighting the Mizu, the trees made for effective cover, even from the peering eyes of a dragon. I detected no movement beneath the canopy, but on the far side of the Kraken, on the sloping face that gazed out over the sea, there was the unmistakable sign of clear-cutting. The trail was wide enough that even Harlan spotted the hacked vegetation.\n\n\"Someone ascended from there,\" Harlan said with mastery of the obvious. \"The trail begins near the mountain base, at the edge of the sea.\"\n\nI adjusted my flight path, gliding over the site of fallen trees and underbrush.\n\nHarlan leaned to the side to give himself a better view of the sea that lapped against the mountain's base. \"There's no harbor on this side of the mountain. No seafaring ship could dock next to that shoreline.\"\n\n\"This island has but one harbor for ships,\" I confirmed.\n\n\"Can you get me closer?\"\n\nI swooped downward, tickling the top of the cresting waves with my hindlegs as the water rolled against the hard face of the Kraken's base. I let the water splash on my claws before pulling into a gentle ascent.\n\n\"That water is no deeper than my knees,\" Harlan said. \"With jagged rock beneath that would slice through a hull like a blade through tender flesh.\"\n\nI caught a gust and let it lift me toward the summit. \"So, someone swam ashore?\"\n\nHarlan leaned over to take another look at the sea. \"Those are rough, cold waters. Even a hearty swimmer couldn't get far with those currents. Look at that trail through the trees\u2014it took more than one person cut it: a group more concerned with speed than stealth. To even access the mountain, a large vessel must've moored offshore, then a smaller craft had to row ashore to pass through those shallow, dangerous waters. Not something to be attempted lightly.\"\n\nSharp gusts began to whip out from the east as I flew above the mountain top. I could've peered into the crater, but I didn't for some reason that I didn't want to examine. Not yet. \"Rolmans wouldn't have bothered with such inconveniences as boats and climbing\u2014they'd have come by dragon.\"\n\nHarlan agreed. \"Whoever did this came for the specific purposes of scaling the peak. I want to know why.\"\n\nI knew I had to return to the crater. I forced myself to turn, toward the lush interior of the hollowed mountain, to the place of my haunting defeat and the grave of my mother. I pushed a breath of air from my chest before flapping my wings for speed. I crossed the threshold of the crater's top ring. Reluctantly, I gazed down. My neck tightened with dread at what I saw.\n\nThe lake was gone.\n\nOr more precisely, it had been maimed into merely a collection of puddles interspersed with mudflats. The once-pristine shoreline had receded like the hair of middle-aged human; the remaining water of the lake was choked with the fog of debris. Seemingly-random chunks of the blackened beach jutted into what remained of the lake like spears.\n\nI landed near the water, but not too close. I'd involuntarily learned to swim in that lake\u2014if you could call it learning\u2014and I remained instinctively wary of it. I'd also dragged my mother's corpse there. Did her bones lie somewhere in mud? I pushed the image from my mind. Dead was dead. \"If the water was a juicy haunch of meat, this looks as if some predator tore at the choicest ends before being driven off by a still more formidable contender.\"\n\nHarlan slid off my back. \"Let us hope any more formidable contender has departed.\"\n\nI sniffed my agreement. Devastation had been visited upon this place; I remembered it as lush, a secret garden hidden on an island of barren desolation. That wasn't the case anymore. Trees and other vegetation had been brutally hacked; the ground ripped asunder as if a behemoth had run rampant. Even the rock of the crater walls hadn't been spared. Deep gashes marked the crater's stone. Misshapen chunks of dislodged rock lay on the ground, where something far more vicious than a pickaxe had pounded with vengeance. A trio of wolf-eagles watched us from high above, each one perched on a cliff tree that clung to the rock beyond where the interlopers had managed to venture. I wondered if they were the same birds who had witnessed my mother's death. Probably.\n\nLooking at the ugly mess, I pronounced the obvious conclusion. \"No single human did this. I'm not even sure how many it would have taken to tear up the shore like that, and rip the rock from the mountain. Even with magic, I'm not sure a lake that size could be depleted in such a manner.\"\n\nHarlan had already made his way to the muddy edge of the water. I followed, picking my steps carefully on violently-trodden ground. Harlan placed a hand in the water, feeling around the bottom with no obvious result. \"It's shallow. Much of the water is gone. Somehow.\" He strode to different parts of the lake repeating the process, while I watched with my teeth clenched. I kept expecting him to yank up one of my mother's bones. Perhaps that was better than her remains having been defiled by whoever had destroyed the lake.\n\nOn the fourth attempt, Harlan kneeled beside a sandbar-like salient that extended into the polluted water, and stuck his arm further down until only his shoulder was visible. When his hand emerged, he clutched a chunk of aquatic vegetation that resembled a cross between seaweed and a leafless bramble. It seemed unremarkable to me, but Harlan's eyes widened, then narrowed. As we both looked at the fragment, it withered like a burning ember in the sun's light. In three blinks of my eyes, it was gone but for a bit ash drifting in the wind.\n\n\"What was that?\" I asked.\n\nHarlan rubbed his fingers against the palm of his hand, smearing the last residue of the strange bramble. \"It think it is \u2026 was hrakar.\"\n\n\"So you've heard of seaweed bushes that turn to ash in the air?\" I huffed. \"Even in Ni-Yota there isn't such a thing.\"\n\nHe dipped his hand in the water, presumably to wash off the residue. \"Even if you flew far and wide, it's rare enough to find.\"\n\n\"What does it do?\"\n\nHarlan stood and indicated the lake, to the violently-altered shoreline and the pockets of water that once been a lake deep enough for me to nearly drown in. \"Well, I think someone used it to do that.\"\n\n\"That scrawny little bramble that couldn't survive in the open air ravaged this lake?\" I flared my nostrils.\n\n\"Hraker can be used as a kind of living sea wall. There are dozens of settlements, and even entire nations that battle the encroaching seas. To them, hrakar is more precious than gold. It can absorb vast amounts of water, altering it using a process that is far beyond my understanding. As long as it remains submerged, the plant grows quickly, feasting on the water, then converting itself to a thick sludge that sticks together as if was mortar. But unlike conventional mortar, hraker can be laid beneath the sea, forming a barrier to hold the waves at bay. At least for a while.\" He pointed at the mud formations that cut into the lake. \"See the damage to the shoreline? That's what the hrakar did.\"\n\nI studied the remains of the lake's shore. \"Why use it here on this lake?\"\n\nHarlan surveyed the inside of the crater, and I noticed tension around his eyes as he did so. \"There was no settlement to save here, true enough. No rising tides.\" He pursed his lips. \"But hraker might have been useful to someone who wanted to search the lake quickly. Someone who was looking for something that might grow deep in its waters.\"\n\nThe conclusion was obvious. \"Aurathorn then. You believe someone came for it.\"\n\nHarlan's gaze continued to flicker to the walls of the mountain that surrounded us. \"The people that did this didn't know where the aurathorn might be hidden. They searched the water, they searched the rocks, everywhere. Speed. Thoroughness.\" More quietly he added, \"Someone else wants aurathorn very badly.\"\n\n\"They drained much of the lake using this hraker. Would that not destroy it?\"\n\n\"Hraker wouldn't harm aurathorn, even if it disturbed the bed on which it nested.\" Harlan surveyed the muddied waters. \"I wonder if they found it.\"\n\nI snapped my tail. \"As I said before, Bethy Rann told me it was gone. She wouldn't lie to me.\" I said it with certainty.\n\n\"So trusting of humans, Bayloo. Not like you at all.\"\n\nI snorted, but the words stung. Unlike my other ryders, I had no magical bond with Bethy Rann. I couldn't truly know her mind the way I did the others. I trusted her because she was Jona's sister. And she had saved my life. Was that naive? It wasn't so long ago, but that version of me was fresh to the world. I tried to imagine myself being wrong. It was hard, of course. I didn't think I was wrong about Rann. I didn't believe aurathorn was here, only a clue where to find it. \"The people who did this spent a great deal of effort ransacking this place. They wouldn't have bothered if they had found it.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Harlan conceded, finally. \"There was no aurathorn here.\"\n\n\"Tell me then, why has no one in Ni-Yota heard of this hrakar?\"\n\nHarlan shrugged without a care. \"Ni-Yota is a vast continent, perhaps the largest landmass on Inkra. Its cities are mostly unthreatened by rising tides, unlike many other places. But hraker is bred in dark caves or in special barrels and traded to those places that desperately desire it. Some in Ni-Yota may know it, but has little use there, and no one has a reason to pay the high price to obtain it.\"\n\n\"But it could have been bought by some lord in Ni-Yota?\" I pressed. \"A resourceful man like Jinu, the Master of Shadows, perhaps?\" I suggested.\n\nHarlan arched a brow. \"He might know of hraker, if any in that land would.\"\n\n\"Yet you still sound doubtful.\"\n\n\"We have been across Ni-Yota. The most powerful living wizard there is Legao, and she knows nothing of the potential of aurathorn. Even the Protector, Aragor, seemed ignorant of its potential. I do not think that whoever did this was from Ni-Yota.\"\n\n\"Then who?\"\n\nHarlan walked away from me, toward the ravaged walls of the crater. As he took his third step he said, \"I don't know.\"\n\nThere was something off in his voice. \"But you have your suspicions. Strong ones.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Harlan whispered, but I still heard his displeasure clearly. He kept walking away. That wasn't really a problem. I had no trouble projecting my voice.\n\n\"Stop there, little human,\" I commanded. \"I brought you here, carried you on my back across this world so you might aid me and continue your own quest. You will answer my questions as I've answered yours, or you'll remain on this island.\"\n\nWisely, Harlan turned to face me. He wore as troubled an expression as I'd seen on his face, his lips curled in a tense line. Harlan's distress jarred something inside me. This was more than a mystery he was trying to solve, more than a quest. He'd learned something new and unexpected when he discovered this hraker. My mane pricked up with suspicion.\n\n\"This plant, this hraker, it is a rather remarkable thing,\" I mused with suspicion. \"Something like that, it reminds me of the glasswings of Ni-Yota\u2014a living thing that has been shaped by outside forces. The kind of power possessed by people who are long since dead and gone.\"\n\nHarlan chin dipped and rose. \"Aye.\"\n\nI asked the question to which I'd already guessed the answer. \"Who created the hraker, Harlan?\"\n\n\"What people wanted to hold back the sea more than any other?\" He replied. \"The children of islands. The seas around Farlight were rising well before the Cataclysm. My ancestors were resourceful and powerful, and they could change things, as they did themselves. So yes, according to our lore, it was my people who created hraker.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"Your people are here?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that.\" Harlan sounded like he was trying to convince himself of his own words. \"Remember, my people are few, scattered throughout the world, and not many even know of Rolm. Even in Ni-Yota, the islands beyond the Wall of Fire is mostly myth. To reach these waters from elsewhere, to avoid the infernos, is near impossible. As I said, hraker was created centuries ago. Many other people now possess it. Some merchants have learned the secrets of growing it themselves. As you suggest, it could've been a waveship from Ni-Yota in service of Jinu that came here, or even one of Rolm's rival kingdoms of which you have spoken, who traded for the hraker.\"\n\n\"But we do know someone else is searching for aurathorn,\" I observed. \"Who would even know about it, but even more, who would know to value it?\"\n\nHarlan seemed surprised at the question. \"In the legends, aurathorn has many uses. I do not pretend to know them all. Different people have different stories about it.\" He pointed at my maimed chest. \"It freed you when nothing else could. I've chased countless legends of aurathorn in my searches, along with more tales of its uses than you have scales: aphrodisiac, messenger of Haven, restorer of life. Some of them may even be true. I have learned enough of aurathorn to know that a unique power is infused within it.\"\n\n\"Power,\" I grumbled. \"Humans will hunger for it then.\"\n\nHarlan's eyes swept back toward the rock walls enclosing us. \"Your mother too came here for a reason. Perhaps the now-dead enchanters of this island helped her, but I think she too came for aurathorn. Finding it is the key to my quest, but it's also essential to understanding what your mother sought to do here.\"\n\n\"She died here.\" The words seem to tumble from me without conscious will. \"I dragged her remains into the lake.\"\n\nHarlan looked sharply at the muddy pools. There was no sign of my mother's bones.\n\n\"We could search,\" Harlan offered. \"Build her a proper pyre this time.\"\n\nI appreciated the offer. \"She wouldn't care about what happened to her bones. She was a follower of the Way. She would not want me to waste time on such a task. Her jing is already with me. No body needs to be burned.\"\n\n\"Then let us search the rest of this place for whatever else we might learn.\"\n\nI didn't move. Dragons don't really do searching the way humans do. Harlan prowled about the place, through cut foliage, scanning the rocks. He found the cave where my sister had hatched, although nothing had been left there. I searched by smelling, by watching, and thinking. Whoever had come here had been very thorough. They'd drained the lake. There was little chance they had missed anything accessible to them. But they were humans, and not all of this place could be reached, even by the most resourceful.\n\nThe wolf-eagles gave me the idea. They had been present when I was here last, when my mother had died. They were here now, watching warily; perhaps they hungered for meat but were far too intelligent to take on a dragon. The lake was also the only source of fresh water on the island. Likely, the wolf-eagle's nest was within this valley. I studied the birds. My stare seemed to unnerve them. They took flight, circling in the sky above, unwilling to engage, but also not wanting to leave.\n\n\"What are you protecting?\" I mumbled quietly.\n\nHarlan turned, mistakenly believing I'd said something to him. Humans always thought they should be the supreme object of attention even though they couldn't fly without help.\n\nI lifted myself into the air, flying in a gentle arc that kept me within the bowels of the mountain crater. I inspected the walls of rock and their innumerable crevices and nooks, slapping the rock occasionally with my tail. I found nothing of interest the first time around. Fatigue and impatience might have made me give up on my hunch, except for the wolf-eagles. They'd dropped their altitude, coming far closer to me than they should. I now counted five birds, all of them making low, squawking threats in my direction. That meant desperation. They knew I searched for their nest.\n\nI found it on the second pass. A sprawling, multi-level collection of sticks assembled over two natural rock shelves hidden within a nearly-invisible pocket in the crater wall. The nest was accessible only through a crevice no wider than two of my foreclaws. I locked myself precariously onto the stone outside the entrance to peer through an opening that was far too narrow for my head. The wolf-eagles' den reminded me of one of the elaborate four-story serving platters that the great chefs of Ni-Yota used to display some of their most delectable creations. Except this dish was made up entirely of eggs\u2014probably a dozen.\n\nI twisted my neck up and down, trying to get a better look within. I had no real idea what living aurathorn looked like, but I presumed I would know it when I saw it. But inside the nest was nothing that resembled any vine or flower. I scratched at the crevice opening with a claw as I tried to shove my snout closer to the interior. A glint of something that didn't come from a tree caught my eyes. A dagger perhaps? Something like that could be easily mistaken as a stick by nesting birds. I pushed my claw against the opening. That didn't quite work. I grabbed the opening with a second claw and applied dragon strength. The rock of the crater wall cracked, then a chunk broke away, falling to the ground. The sound echoed through the crater. I shoved my neck through the enhanced opening.\n\nThe first thing I noticed was that wolf-eagle eggs were different colors. The top portion facing the sun is off-white, while the bottom is a deep black. I'd never eaten a multi-color egg, but that wasn't what I had come here to find. Peering uncomfortably through the gap I'd made, I found the piece of metal that had caught my eye earlier, but it was located on the far side of the nest. My claws couldn't reach so far into the opening. I was considering how to solve that little problem when the wolf-eagles struck.\n\nTheir talons gouged at my eyes\u2014at least six of them, which seemed like a lot until I realized more than one bird attacked me. The bird pack must've realized the danger in going after a dragon, but the urge to protect their eggs was stronger even than the self-preservation instinct. I flailed my neck and tail, trying to drive off the harrying birds. It was annoying to have to fight over a misunderstanding. I probably wouldn't have eaten their little double-color morsels. Probably.\n\nI heard Harlan's excited voice shouting from down in the valley. I couldn't make out the words, but I assumed he was telling me what I already knew: The wolf-eagles that weren't attacking my face were slicing at my back. I smashed my tail into the rock face of the crater twice. More stone crumbled, creating a larger opening. I shoved my neck inside, taking a bite of the nest. My teeth grabbed the metal object as well as some sticks and a couple of eggs (the eggs were mostly by accident).\n\nThe wolf-eagles went into a frenzy of screeching, scratching, and biting. A talon plunged into my face, not far from a nostril; another landed on the thin scale between my eyes. I wriggled my head as I curled my neck downward, trying to shield my eyes and nostrils as I shoved off the water wall with the nest chunk in my mouth. The birds pressed their attack. They were stronger than blood raptors, their talons sharper. The pointed ends of the talons made a horrid screeching sound as they scraped on my scale armor. The vibration shook my bones. I twisted in the air, spreading my wings as I made my way away from the nest. I hoped that my retreat would satisfy the wolf-eagles. They'd defended their home after all. But these birds didn't abandon prey\u2014and they were too stupid to realize that I wasn't prey. Two of the wolf-eagles clung dangerously to my head, while another latched onto my belly.\n\nI flew straight upwards, spinning in a violent spiral even as I swung my neck wildly. The birds weren't impressed. One of them found a ripped scale on my neck, already bloody from pulling myself too recklessly from the nest, and sunk its long, thin teeth into me. The pain surged through me like liquid iron being poured down my throat. I almost swallowed the nest piece held in my jaw. Instead, I spat the contents of my mouth into the air, expelling nest debris, a small chunk of metal, and two intact wolf-eagle eggs. The birds reacted more swiftly than I dared hope. The entire flock broke off their pursuit, every one of them soaring after the eggs as they plunged toward the ground. The feathered predators moved with blurring speed, and even more impressive precision. They snatched the eggs out of the air one after the other, grabbing the falling globes with talons ill-suited for the task. As near as I could tell, the eggs were still unbroken, but I stayed well clear so I couldn't be sure. I swept down toward Harlan. He was sprinting on his little legs, making his way from one end of the valley to the other. It took me a moment before I spotted his quarry: the shiny object I'd vomited out with the eggs was laying on the upturned dirt. I flew over Harlan's head low enough to graze the top of his head with my tail before landing at the place he was huffing toward. I craned my achy neck down to examine the trinket I'd gone through so much trouble to obtain. Disappointment kicked my teeth. It was just a coin. The round little circles of shiny metal that humans traded with each other.\n\nHarlan finally caught up to me. His face was flush and he was sucking in wind with considerable distress. I searched the sky for the wolf-eagles as I waited for Harlan to calm himself. The birds seemed to have retreated back to their lair, but I didn't trust that this respite would last.\n\n\"It is time to leave,\" I said to Harlan. \"I'm bigger than those birds, but the pack now believes that I'm a threat to them. They'll be back, whatever the cost to them. I could kill them, but I prefer not to.\"\n\n\"Compassion, Bayloo?\"\n\n\"I'm being sensible. Their talons are extremely sharp.\"\n\nHarlan barked a laugh. \"You stirred up a hornet's nest of trouble up there. What were you doing?\"\n\n\"The humans that came to this island searched everywhere that humans could. I thought we might find something useful\u2014maybe even aurathorn\u2014hiding where they could not go. But all I ended up with were some angry birds and a single silver coin.\"\n\nHarlan picked up the trinket. It was filthy, but he spat on it and rubbed, revealing a bit more detail. \"It looks to have been there quite a while. It's battered and faded, but there is enough silver in this coin that it didn't rust.\"\n\nHe held it out in his open palm. I wasn't an expert, but I'd seen humans trade often enough during my slave years. \"It isn't a coin of Rolm. They all have dragons on them. This one doesn't. I can't tell what it is actually.\"\n\n\"It's been damaged.\" Harlan flipped the coin to the other side. \"This looks like a star rising over a mountain.\"\n\nI looked back again at the wolf-eagle nest. Two of the birds had emerged from the shattered crevice of their lair. For now, they only watched. \"The symbol of Ulibon, perhaps. Given what we know of the connection between the villagers and that place, it makes sense such a thing might be here.\"\n\nHarlan grunted in agreement. \"A lost coin picked up by a mommy eagle building her nest. It was a fine thought searching where others could not.\" He squeezed the coin. \"Does it mean anything?\"\n\n\"It's a human coin.\" I was annoyed. I'd gotten real wounds for that thing. \"More pain, for nothing.\"\n\n\"Aurathorn has eluded me for more years than I care to count. Every time I thought it was close, it has left only with tears and emptiness. It did not want to be found. But I have a feeling that this time, at last, aurathorn wants to be found.\"\n\nI didn't want to hear more about fate. I had come to this place to find a way to free the dragons and to understand my mother's plan to defeat the rust. Harlan was too accustomed to failure.\n\nHe unclenched his hand and flipped this coin. \"You mother used aurathorn to free you, yes?\"\n\n\"That's what I was told. I have no reason to doubt it.\"\n\n\"Aurathorn can do what nothing else in this world can. That is why my people have sought it for centuries. Your mother sought it to do what no other magic could. Its power is not in doubt.\" Harlan rubbed a finger under his chin as he thought. \"You told me the dead ruler of Ulibon, he was a powerful enchanter.\"\n\n\"Yes, the enchanted artifacts of Ulibon had no equal.\" I would never forget the brutality of the battle for the Twisted Keep. \"Even now, with my knowledge of magic, I do not fully understand how these items were made. Few artifacts survived the battle. The enchanters destroyed many of their own creations rather than have them fall to their enemy in Rolm.\"\n\n\"Do you not find it strange that this long-rumored lost Heir of Ulibon apparently returns as the island of Maricopa is ransacked by someone looking for aurathorn?\" Harlan didn't wait for me to answer. \"If his father was a powerful enchanter, it seems logical that this heir would be as well.\"\n\n\"You believe that the Heir of Ulibon did this? That he is using aurathorn for his revolt?\"\n\nHarlan flipped the coin again. \"It does fit. Maybe this coin is not so useless. It lets us know that there is a connection between Ulibon and the people who lived on this island. Money means trade. Ulibon traded here.\"\n\nI considered Harlan's theory. \"The people here came from Ulibon. They were the same tribe. You believe we should go to Ulibon?\"\n\n\"Where else?\" He shrugged unhappily. \"Perhaps the heir seeks to turn Rolm's dragons against their slave master. That would be a compelling reason to hunt for aurathorn. I confess I prefer the theory that aurathorn is in Ulibon\u2014or connected to that place\u2014over the possibility that Farlighters did this. If my people were here, they are long gone with whatever they found. If it is in Ulibon, it gives us someplace to search.\"\n\n\"Ulibon may hold some answers,\" I agreed. \"And I can think of no better place to look. The way is not far.\"\n\nThe decision to leave became even easier when the first of the wolf-eagles launched itself into the air, wings fluttering. Harlan didn't need to be told what to do. He was on my back in an instant.\n\nI launched myself out of the crater. The rest of the wolf-eagles emerged from their hidden nest, spreading themselves out across the sky in a wide arc. If a bird can be said to snarl, these were making really nasty snarls. I didn't think they had cause to be so vindictive. I'd already spat their eggs back at them. Still, diplomacy wasn't going to work. The birds came at me at varying speeds, the eagles on the end moving fastest, attempting to encircle me. I was impressed with their speed, but feathered fliers couldn't match me. I pushed on my wings, gaining altitude as I headed west, five wolf-eagles in my wake. Let them think I fled. I knew I gave them mercy.\n\nI rode the wind, and the world shifted around me. Maricopa faded in the distance and I said a silent goodbye to my mother once again.\n\nI flew toward Ulibon to discover the secret of a mysterious lost heir, and hopefully finally find aurathorn."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The wolf-eagles wisely ended the chase.\n\nWhatever hateful instinct drove them, it didn't sustain the birds across the long expanse of open sea between Maricopa and Ulibon. By the time the sky turned dark, I had sole dominance of the sky, save for a collection of stars poking through the velvet sheeting of Haven above. The return of relative calm reminded me that I was hungry. I should've eaten those eggs. I wondered if the top part tasted different than the darker bottom. I'd never know, but that didn't mean I couldn't fill my belly and rest. I changed my course slightly to account for my new desires.\n\nHarlan, ever the navigator, noticed. \"Why do you shift to the south?\"\n\n\"Unlike you, I haven't slept or eaten since we left Ni-Yota \u2026 Food will help to heal this gash in my neck.\"\n\n\"Why is south better than north for that?\" As if he could feel my annoyance, Harlan hastily added, \"I agree we should rest and eat. I'm just curious.\"\n\n\"Ulibon is heavily populated, including along its southern coast, and I don't want to be seen,\" I huffed, as if Harlan could have known that before I told him. \"Hilo's coast is sparsely populated, but mountain elk still roam the highlands. I can hunt and sleep with a fully belly without being disturbed if we take the southern route.\" Just saying the words gave me the strength to increase my speed. \"I'll keep well clear of the great watchtower. And even if they see me, we'll be gone by morning.\"\n\nI thought Harlan was going to say something else, but he thought better of it at the last moment. Somehow, that annoyed me even more.\n\nI shot through the night, riding a steady tailwind until I could make out the shape of Hilo's coastline in the far distance. I dropped down close enough to feel the cool breeze coming of the wave of the dark sea below, far too low to be spotted by any human eyes no matter how high their watchtower. Unless there was magic involved, of course.\n\nSix powerful flaps of my wings brought us over the coast. I swept up over the soaring cliff face that formed something like a wall on Hilo's coast, before turning on the windswept plateau. I actually had no idea if there were mountain elk in this area. I'd heard some humans speaking about the elk of Hilo many years ago, but I had no notion of where they lived. I just didn't like the way Harlan was questioning me earlier.\n\nI hugged the flat terrain, peering into the occasional ravine. I could feel Harlan's twitching with some innocent question about the supposed elk herds. He kept his mouth shut for longer than I anticipated, but inevitably his tongue wagged out its noises.\n\n\"I think I saw some rabbits,\" he offered. \"Their coats caught a bit of the starlight. If I missed the elk, it's because my eyes aren't as keen as yours.\"\n\nI flew a few more futile circles across the barren landscape before giving up. Tired beat hungry; at least the emptiness of this area offered an opportunity to sleep. When Harlan had the nerve to try to slide next to my huge, warm body to escape plateau's continuous winds, I made a point blowing some wet snorts in his direction. Honor sufficiently satisfied, I slept deeply. In the morning I woke to find two dead rabbits laid out on the ground next to me. Harlan had his back to me, pretending to admire the sunrise.\n\nMy belly rumbled at even the modest offering. \"Are these mine?\"\n\nHarlan turned toward me innocently. \"They're both yours. I don't want to risk a fire on the plateau. Even though you chose a spot with a small bit of cover, a keen watchman might spot the smoke even at this distance.\"\n\nI ate his rabbits without feeling guilty. It wasn't my fault if humans insisted on cooking their meat. The rabbits were scrawny, but I savored every morsel, bones and all. Unfortunately, the morning got worse from there.\n\nWe left with the sun still new in the sky. I chose an elongated route to avoid the great watchtower at Kell, retracing my flight from the previous night to east, before making a long loop to the northwest, toward the east coast of Ulibon. The first sign of trouble was on the water below\u2014ships. Too many had set off into the seas for no obvious purpose. I counted four craft of varying sizes on disparate eastbound routes, none of which obviously led to any desirable destination.\n\n\"One of those is a coastal fishing boat,\" Harlan noted. \"It has no business on the open sea.\"\n\n\"Where are they going?\" I wondered aloud.\n\nHarlan was quick to the heart of the matter. \"Away from Ulibon.\"\n\nI flew on to find smoke rising from the landmass ahead of me. It was the brown-tinted smoke of fields on fire. I'd seen it often enough.\n\n\"I don't know about this heir, but war has come to Ulibon.\" Harlan's tone became solemn. \"From one side of Inkra to the other, whatever the cause, there are always fires to go along with the killing.\"\n\nI flew onward. Harlan was correct about both the fires and the killing. Only the amount of each was in question. I rose higher for a better view. Ulibon was claw-shaped, with several narrow choke points as one moved on land from the southern reaches to its northern tip, where its once-proud capital stood. I should've been able to see clear across the island, but there was enough slow-rising smoke hanging above the land to obstruct my view. I could see that several uncontrolled fires raged, one scorching the wheat fields on the south of the island, and another further north.\n\nHarlan summed up the view. \"There is no shortage of destruction to watch. Destroying a lake is barely worth mentioned compared to ravaging an island the size of this one.\"\n\nWithout answering, I began our descent. The Twisted Keep was far to the north. Ultimately, any rebellion would end there, but I wanted to know more before I flew toward the formidable fortress of the dead enchanters who once ruled here. I flew over the smoldering fields of south Ulibon and over seemingly deserted coastal villages. A few had been burned, but most merely looked empty.\n\n\"The freshest smoke rises further west,\" Harlan told me, as if I didn't know.\n\n\"To the west, sitting on a lonely hill, we will find the keep at Ular. The humans call it Iron Warden, because it guards the passage to the ore mines of the Lartra Hills.\"\n\n\"No army wants to leave a fortress at their back as they march. I suspect the fate of this keep will let us know how successful this rebellion has been.\"\n\nI inhaled more smoke than I ever wanted while flying across southern Ulibon. Along the way, caravans of refugees clogged the roads, mostly moving toward coastal ports. If their intention was to flee the island, I suspected they would be disappointed when they finally reached their destination\u2014I spotted no boats still at dock. Those who could leave already had done so, at least in the south.\n\nI sensed Harlan's mind at work as he surveyed the torn land below. \"Do the people of this island truly long for the return of the lost ruler's dominion?\"\n\n\"One of my human ryders once commented that commoner people\u2014dirtfolk, as he called them\u2014were basically sheep, except it was much more trouble to shave their hides. Human lords often had the same attitude. There is nothing like the Burden of Haven among the rulers of Rolm, particularly those that serve King Mendakas. Perhaps Ulibon was different, but I never heard such a thing spoken about. I suspect the people here just want to live their lives.\"\n\nHarlan gave a knowing grunt. \"It is much the same elsewhere, with only a few fleeting exceptions. It seems the dragon protectors of Rolm did a better service to their subject than any human ruler.\"\n\n\"You speak as if that surprises you. I would expect nothing less. Dragons follow the Way. We dragons have two hearts, your kind has but one.\"\n\nHarlan kept quiet after that, until we reached the keep of Iron Warden. The castle didn't compare to the imposing size of the Fist of Eladrell, nor could it compare in proud elegance to the Twisted Keep. Instead, Iron Warden was a decidedly functional fortress, consisting of a double square curtain wall capped by imposing towers at each corner. The inner perimeter was built higher than the outer wall to allow bowmen to cut down any attacker brave enough to assault the fortress. It had no moat, but needed none, given its placement atop a steep hilltop. None of those defensive measures mattered against dragons, but I'd never contemplated that a human army could successfully overrun Iron Warden. I was wrong.\n\nA gaping hole had been smashed through the southern section of the outer curtain. The corresponding section of the inner wall had been partially toppled. Broken siege ladders lay scattered on the ground between the two barriers. I expected that the battle had been bloody, but no bodies littered the ground. In the central courtyard, the structure which had been the great hall of the resident lord still spewed tendrils of grey smoke.\n\n\"That was vindictive,\" Harlan said of the burning building. \"The walls had been breached. They didn't touch the towers, except to tear down the banners. Only the great hall was put to the flame.\"\n\nI flew closer, sniffing the filthy air, my eyes searching. \"There is a head hoisted atop one of the towers, flying in place of those colored cloths you humans enjoy so much. Perhaps it is the former lord himself.\"\n\n\"An apt symbol for a rebel to leave behind.\"\n\nI flew several slow circles, but the disembodied head was the closest I found to any sign of life in the keep. Warily, I set down within the inner yard.\n\n\"What do you hope to find here?\" Harlan asked.\n\n\"Mendakas built this keep after he conquered Ulibon. Three hundred soldiers held these walls. It would've taken ten times that number to successfully assault this place. The outer wall was thicker than the length of a human arm. It's been smashed to pieces. I want to know how.\"\n\n\"What clues do you hope to find in this ruin?\"\n\nI answered with my own question. \"Where are the other bodies?\" Harlan went to dismount, but I stopped him. \"Stay seated and safe. We may need to leave quickly.\"\n\nI ambled warily over to the blackened husk that had been the largest structure in the inner ward. A m\u00e9lange of terrible smells poured from the smolder, stinging my nostrils. The roof had mostly collapsed, but a layer of blackened tiles still prevented me from seeing clearly inside. The ruin looked precarious. Rather than picking apart the roof, I poked at the blackened stone wall that faced the courtyard with a claw. The entire building groaned in protest.\n\n\"Opening the door seems more prudent than pushing down the wall.\" Harlan leapt from my back despite my prior admonishment to stay put. The entryway to the structure was a pair of oversized (by human standards) wooden doors wrapped in so many strips of iron the portals were practically coated in metal. Each had a large ring of the same iron attached to its center. Harlan yanked at each door with futility. Then he shoved his shoulder into them. He winced in pain and still the doors didn't move.\n\nHe rubbed his shoulder. \"I think they've been barred from the inside.\"\n\nI snorted. \"Stand aside.\"\n\nWithout waiting for him to move, I whipped my tail against the twin portals. To my surprise, they didn't collapse inward. I hit them again. They held, but one fell off its hinges. Harlan pried an opening wide enough for him to fit through. He only stuck himself halfway inside before returning to the courtyard. My nostrils suspected what he confirmed.\n\n\"It's filled with people, many in still armor. The doors were barred from the inside. Perhaps they made a last stand here.\" The corner of Harlan's mouth turned downward. \"The attackers burned them alive.\"\n\n\"The Heir of Ulibon isn't one for mercy.\" I gazed up at the head propped up on the tower above. \"This is the human who seeks aurathorn.\"\n\nHarlan looked back at the devastation of the great hall. \"Aye, someone who would do this would also seek even more effective ways to kill. Aurathorn offers that. We'll be sailing with a careful eye out.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "I flew to find a killer.\n\nDestroying Iron Warden was a grand achievement for any rebel, but no would-be conqueror controlled Ulibon until they could gaze out from the pinnacle of the Twisted Keep on the north tip of the island. From the deep, protected harbor outside that castle, the sea lanes at the heart of Rolm's commerce would be vulnerable. I had little doubt the paramount fortress of Ulibon was the rebel's ultimate goal. I was less certain why King Mendakas had not yet responded to the threat. Whatever kind of military leader this heir might be, he was a human. He had to march places using feet, since there were no horses in this part of the world. Even if the heir was an enchanter, I didn't see how he could match Rolm's slave dragons on his own. Unless he already had aurathorn. The empty skies over Ulibon told me that I was missing crucial information.\n\nIt was afternoon by the time we reached the Clutch, so named because it was the narrowest point on Ulibon. Here, the landmass of the island was squeezed between the seas on either side. A series of forts had been erected across the expanse, each connected to the other by a disjointed series of barriers that ranged from stone walls near the center to poorly-maintained wooden palisades toward the edges. The great road of Ulibon ran through the center of the Clutch. I saw that the vassal lords of Ulibon had neglected the defenses during the years since I had last been here. Likely, none had believed that the forts would ever be necessary during the reign of Mendakas and his slave dragons. The result of their complacency was a crumbling ruin of a wall, dilapidated forts, and inevitable defeat. Toppled stones and the plentiful stink of human waste wafting into the air provided me with pungent evidence that the rebel army had made camp here.\n\n\"Most of the forts are untouched,\" Harlan commented as I dropped closer to investigate.\n\n\"The army marched up the main road, attacking where the physical defenses were strongest.\" I spotted a fallen tower, but no sign of siege equipment that might've brought it down. Another other spire displayed a typically grisly message from the rebellion: a hanging corpse.\n\nI flew just a bit closer to the hanging body to make certain of what I saw. \"It is unclear where the head went.\"\n\nFlies, maggots, and other tiny scavengers ravaged the decapitated remains. A banner had been shoved through the man's chest\u2014the dragon banner of the King of Rolm.\n\nI flew off. I'd seen and smelled enough.\n\n\"That is a crude display. The Heir of Ulibon is either a particularly cruel sort, or he is daring the king to come,\" Harlan reasoned.\n\n\"That is the oddest part of this war. There have been uprisings on Ulibon before\u2014mostly in the years following the conquest. They were all put down, quickly and brutally. Any village where a rebel came from was burned as well. Mendakas is not a man of mercy. The rebellions stopped once people realized that fighting dragons was hopeless.\"\n\n\"Apparently they are no longer hopeless. This rebel seems to be doing quite well.\"\n\n\"This uprising isn't new. Humans don't move quickly on their feet. The fighting must've been going on for weeks at least. Word must've reached the king in Eladrell by now\u2014either by pigeon or ship. There is too much commerce between Ulibon and the rest of the kingdom for this to stay a secret. Yet something has kept King Mendakas from responding to this particular uprising.\"\n\n\"Is it possible this rebel so is powerful that the king bides his time on his own island?\" Harlan wondered. \"Or that he realizes he must come with an army. Dragon and ryders can fly, but a large force must travel by ship, which takes far longer.\"\n\nI grunted. None of those possibilities sounded correct. Yet I didn't have a better answer. Why didn't the king's slave dragons fly here to turn this heir and his followers to ash?\n\n\"Shall we look further?\" Harlan asked.\n\nI peered as far as my eyes would let me, scanning the Clutch from sea to sea. Any soldiers who had been garrisoned here had likely fled days ago, or longer. It was the smoke to the north that caught and held my interest. The plumes had grown since this morning. The battles at Iron Warden and the Clutch had been decided days ago, but to the north, war still raged fresh.\n\nI made a last circle in the sky. \"There is nothing more to be learned in this place. If we are to make the site of the next battle before darkness comes, we should depart.\"\n\nI flew across the northern portion of Ulibon under clouds tinged by darkness. When I flew low enough to survey the land below, I saw people, but not many. Only a few stragglers braved the roads; villages looked empty; fields were mostly burnt to ash. The food situation throughout Rolm hadn't been pleasant before I left. I couldn't imagine it was better now, certainly not for the people of Ulibon. Herd animals were scarcer than people.\n\nThe afternoon wore on. I searched for danger, but also for food. The rabbit from this morning wasn't exactly filling. I found no living creature worth eating (I wasn't nearly desperate enough to snack on a human), but on the ledge of a small, rocky hill that seemed to rise without reason beside a muddy stream, I spied the bones of already-devoured sheep. That was a veritable treasure in this desolate land. I wondered who had enjoyed it.\n\n\"Even if we find the Heir of Ulibon, what does that accomplish?\" Harlan asked as the day faded and the smoke of battle grew nearer. \"Do you think he's really going welcome the chance to speak to you and me\u2014a dragon and foreigner\u2014in the middle of his rebellion?\"\n\n\"I can be very pervasive,\" I assured Harlan as I displayed my teeth.\n\n\"You plan to pluck him out from the midst of his army to have a chat?\" He laughed at the thought, but I didn't think it was funny. Indeed, that was basically my plan. \"He'll think you are a slave dragon. One of the king's servants. It could get ugly.\"\n\n\"I can pluck him if I wish. That's the tradeoff of wings over fingers\u2014dragons can't pick our noses, but we can fly.\"\n\n\"The rebel has managed to conquer most of this island and somehow keep the king's dragons away. Don't underestimate what you don't fully understand, Bayloo. He is likely a wielder of magic. Perhaps he even has the power of aurathorn to call upon.\"\n\nI heard the warning, but in all of this world, the only human who had bested me was Drasu. But that had been before I knew my own nature. I understood magic now. I feared no human. If this Heir of Ulibon had answers that I needed, then I would get those answers from him, one way or another. If he had aurathorn, I would get that from him as well. This heir seemed to enjoy killing. I, too, understood death, and fear as well. The rebels had done well against their fellow humans, but contending with a dragon would be another matter.\n\nThe stink of massed humanity became awful just before the sun dropped below the western horizon. The smell was similar to that of a human city, but far more intense. In cities, the humans at least made an effort to dispose of their waste and keep themselves clean. I knew I smelled the odor of an army encampment.\n\n\"They are near,\" I said. \"A short flight and we shall be upon the rebel host. The Twisted Keep lies on the other side of the Cut Hills, directly north.\"\n\n\"Then why are you flying in a circle?\"\n\n\"Because it's a lot harder to spot me at night. By waiting, I can scout their army and perhaps avoid being seen, which, as you pointed out, will likely set off a panic, because they will all assume I'm one of King Mendakas's dragons sent to roast them all alive. We need to be subtle.\"\n\nHarlan chuckled softly.\n\n\"What is funny?\"\n\n\"I can't recall a single instance of you being subtle, Bayloo.\"\n\nI chose a charred field where we could rest while I waited for the last of the day's light to fade. It wasn't an ideal defensive location, but there was no cover in the vicinity. If anyone approached, I'd have plenty of warning.\n\nHarlan used the respite to do more musing. \"I've seen my share of fighting, of killing. War between kingdoms are brutal, but revolts are the bloodiest. Nothing is so deadly as a fight with your family.\"\n\nI wouldn't know much about family, but his words reminded me of Rinxia. What was she to me? I didn't answer, so Harlan eventually got around to his point.\n\n\"Even by those standards, this revolt is ugly.\"\n\n\"How is that?\" I wondered.\n\n\"The burning. Castles, those I understand. But setting fields alight is senseless. Win or lose, people need to eat. Destroying what you have when food is already scarce \u2026\"\n\nI had no answer for him other than my usual refrain. \"I've not always seen humans behave rationally.\"\n\nI was impatient for the night to deepen, urging the clouds to blot out the starlight. For once, the conditions cooperated with my desires. Harlan and I took to the air against a backdrop of near black. I flew over the Cut Hills\u2014mounds that had once been grander in height but now were little more than a collection of bizarre lumps and interspersed chasms that had been extensively quarried and mined over centuries. Soon, I was flying onto the plains that led to the Twisted Keep itself. Once across the hills, I gazed down upon the rebel army. I wasn't impressed.\n\nJudging by the campfires, the host was large, but disorganized. The tight lines and evenly spaced distribution of troops that I expected from a Mizu army were absent. Instead, this host had formed itself into uneven clusters. Its perimeter looked largely undefended, making them vulnerable to ambush or rapid strike. Even with my dragon eyes, details of what their few supply wagons contained were difficult to discern, but there seemed far too little food for a force so large. I couldn't locate an obvious command tent, but a huge bonfire exposed the army in the darkness. It appeared to be the source of the smoke I'd seen lingering in the sky earlier in the day. Creating such a fire seemed a stupid thing for an army to do, unless they wanted the defenders of the Twisted Keep to know how close they were.\n\n\"How did they ever get this far?\" Harlan wondered. \"A dozen well-trained horsemen would slice them to bits and burn their supplies.\"\n\n\"Except Rolm lacks horses,\" I reminded him.\n\n\"Do you see any siege equipment?\"\n\n\"No,\" I confirmed.\n\n\"Yet that rabble broke through the stone wall at Iron Warden.\"\n\nHarlan didn't say that the rebels had to have some sort of magic at their command, but we both thought that. I wanted to have a conversation with the Heir of Ulibon, but it wasn't clear where might be keeping himself. There wasn't even an organized center to the sprawling host.\n\nI had seen enough for now. \"Let's take a look at how the defenders intend to deal with the assault to come.\"\n\nI didn't have to fly far beyond the rebel host to find their enemy. To the north, no more than half a day of casual marching from the rebel host's encampment stood the imposing form of the Twisted Keep. When I'd last fought here as a slave dragon, it had just been another castle to conquer; I'd not appreciated its terrible magnificence. Now, I gazed upon the fortress with more seasoned eyes, and I understood the danger of this place. Maybe I even feared it.\n\nFires burned atop the citadel's towers and along its battlements, providing enough of an outline of the structure to elicit a grasp from Harlan. \"By the Waves of Ula, what is that?\"\n\nThe keep deserved his awe.\n\nThe fortress resembled a coiled snake squeezing its prey as its walls, towers, and edifices wrapped around a misshaped mountain that rose from the ground seemingly without purpose other than to serve as the spine of the citadel. Upon a closer inspection, the peak's deformities resembled those of the Cut Hills to the south, except starker, with grander proportions. According to the stories, before the Cataclysm, these mountains had held precious ores. The ancients had mined it thoroughly, leaving only the misshaped skeletal remains, but the ridges of the remaining rock provided an excellent framework for the spiraling fortress.\n\n\"The early rulers of Ulibon found this mountain and recognized its potential as a symbol of power. The enchanters forged its marble walls and towers and turned it into a fortress meant to deter any attack. The harbor on the far side is deep and sheltered from all but the greatest storms. From here, a small navy can command the most important sea lanes in Rolm.\"\n\n\"Even in the darkness, it dazzles.\" Harlan, as jaded as he was by his journey to countless lands, was impressed.\n\n\"It is the work of enchanters,\" I reminded him, knowingly. \"Only the Shard of Oster is more formidable.\"\n\n\"I cannot gauge its proportion in the darkness. How many soldiers defend its walls?\"\n\nI thought back to my last battle here. \"Easily a thousand. The interior of the mountain is hollow, the caves inside cool and ideal for storage. Water is captured on the pinnacle of the mountain above the fortress and stored in a reservoir within. If the provisions have been properly maintained, the keep cannot be taken by siege. Even for my brethren and I, it was a difficult and desperate battle to capture this place.\"\n\nI heard Harlan chew on his lip as he thought. \"It takes no master tactician to see this castle is near-impenetrable. Attacking here is like a captain sailing his ship into a cliff. What is this heir planning to do with his host against it?\"\n\n\"That army appears motley. It must be that he commands some form of magic, although the walls of this place too are riddled with enchantment. If I plucked the heir from the midst of his army, I may be doing him a favor if he intends to attack the Twisted Keep with that ragged force. Thousands of lives may be saved.\" It pleased me to think of my forthcoming act of abduction as a benevolent service. \"I've seen enough. Let's return to the host to see if we might locate the leader of the rebels.\"\n\nI dipped a wing toward the ground, changing my direction with a wide-arc turn, confident the darkness cloaked my flight. The wind had just a hint of chill. My neck still stung, but my scales were well on their way to being fully healed. I was ready to fight if I must.\n\nAs I punched through the night back toward the Cut Hills and the rebel host, I considered a strategy for finding the heir and extracting him without causing panic in his army. I needed to understand what magic he possessed. The enchanters in Ulibon before the conquest had been formidable opponents, but they were not wizards like Legao. They weren't capable of powerful spells, or manipulating the forces of the world. The enchanters of Ulibon were mostly glorified blacksmiths, the forgers of artifacts of power. That would not have been enough to capture Iron Pass and the Clutch so easily. The heir must be more than a mere forger of magic instruments.\n\nI flew over the sprawling rebel army, searching for some sign of its leadership, but there was nothing. It was little more than a boisterous mob, driven by its past victories. Just as I resigned myself to waiting until the morning to try to spot the host's leader, a greater problem emerged out of the deformed hills.\n\nIt came fast. This was a fight I'd been dreading since I returned to Rolm.\n\nI had time only to warn Harlan. \"Prepare yourself for battle.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"A dragon comes.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "I didn't want to kill my own kind.\n\nThere were too few of us left in the world. But the other dragons of Rolm were slaves, and they would obey their masters.\n\nThe other dragon moved quickly. With two blurring beats of its wings, it flew from its hiding place behind one of the Cut Hills through the night sky, then disappeared into the thick clouds. Did the dragon think to ambush me from above? Or did it even recognize me as an enemy? A ryder of Rolm would probably think that I was another of Mendakas's servants, although he might have warned his ryders to be wary of me.\n\n\"I could barely see it,\" Harlan hissed at me.\n\n\"Keep quiet.\"\n\nI accelerated, my wings spread to their full span to catch as much wind as I could without making unnecessary motions to reveal my position. I swung upward into the misty clouds, listening and sniffing. Which of my brethren did I face? The other dragon had moved so quickly through the darkness I hadn't gotten more than a surprised glance. It was on the smaller side. Gandar? No, the color was wrong. This dragon's scales were the color of sand and silver. None of my brethren had mixed coloring, yet there was something familiar about the newcomer. The dragon's ryder had been a slender figure\u2014that was all I saw.\n\nI flew in an arc through the misty low clouds, ever alert, yet I heard nothing, smelled nothing, found nothing. But the other dragon was no phantom. This wasn't the behavior of a friendly cousin. Somewhere nearby, a predator lurked. If I could not find the other dragon, I would bring it to me.\n\nI flapped my wings, deliberately letting my left span shake ever so slightly. Another dragon would hear the sound, however faint. Bait offered, I dove without waiting for a reaction. Even with a head start, I was too slow. The sky whistled. The sweet scent of my kin filled my nostrils. Pain erupted along my rear, just above my hind leg.\n\n<Those weren't claws.>\n\nMy scales had been sliced apart. Not smashed or shattered, but cut through with something sharper than any steel blade. Only sai could slice like that. Yet there were no sai in Rolm.\n\nI tucked my wings back, accelerating into my dive. I needed to create space. And I needed magic. I dared to shut my eyes as I reached for the Latticework. The air was already thick with power born from the stirring of a building storm. I merely had to hasten the process. My enemy might have sai, or something like them, but I had a formidable weapon of my own. I intended to make the first strike count, yet I didn't want to kill the other dragon. Not unless I must. A human ryder was a different matter.\n\nThe dragon pursued me even as I raced toward a deep valley that twisted through the Cut Hills. I readied myself to break out of my dive, attempting to simultaneously hold my concentration on the Latticework and not get myself killed as I executed my aerial maneuvers. I expected my pursuer would continue to follow my flight path. I only intended to kill the dragon's ryder, but lightning wasn't easy to direct. I might miss.\n\nI reached out to command the Latticework even as I plunged, directing Chords of Power to do my bidding. Soon, the storm was ready. So was I. My vision of the mundane world returned. A flip of my wings caught the air, changing my trajectory with violent speed. I sensed the smaller dragon behind me mimic my course. <Come down, glorious storm.>\n\nA brilliant, silent flash shattered the night's curtain. A mangled noise of shock and pain followed, something uttered not by a single creature but two distinct ones, with the combined sound being distinctly unsatisfying. Without craning my neck to look, I knew I'd only grazed my target. I'd been too timid with the strike. I'd sacrificed the element of surprise for no advantage.\n\nI swung around, intent on closing with the other dragon. Forget magic. I was bigger and stronger. I could better deal with the ryder in a melee. Maybe Harlan could put one of his daggers in him if I got him close enough. As I came about in a full circle, I expected to find my opponent executing some other maneuver for superior position. Instead, the other dragon seemed intent to close upon me as well. Flames would not stop me. I would have to be wary of Harlan getting scorched, but if a direct confrontation was desired, so be it.\n\nWe came at each other. Finally, I got a full, hard look at my fellow dragon. I caught a full whiff of dragon-scent on the wind as well. A female horned dragon, which explained the smaller stature, and also made me unafraid of any fire. There was something else I hadn't expected: I had never before seen this particular dragon. None of my sisters on DragonPeak possessed such unique coloring. And how would any slave dragon be fitted with sai?\n\nWe were close enough to hear the beating of each other's hearts when I realized that the horned dragon didn't actually have mixed scale shades. Her torso was discolored\u2014she'd been horribly maimed, so badly that even a dragon's healing ability hadn't been enough to make her whole again; entire scales had been deformed and destroyed, with plates of metal placed over the gaps. She didn't wear sai, but rather parts of her legs and claws had been replaced by forged metal. The revelation shook me, but the workings of my head couldn't match the speed of my body. The dragon was upon me.\n\n\"Bayloo!\"\n\nIt was the ryder's shout.\n\nI swerved, dipping my wing into a sharp turn and pulling my claws toward my body. I twisted into a sharp circle, slowing as I did it. If this was a trick, if I was wrong about this dragon, I'd left myself and Harlan terribly vulnerable. But I wasn't wrong.\n\nSomehow, this maimed dragon was Crema.\n\nI'd seen her fall from the sky, impaled by a griffin. True, I hadn't seen her corpse on the ground, but even Bethy Rann had thought her gone. Rann had told me she couldn't sense the bond between them. But Crema must've survived those wounds and the fall. She must've been near death. Her body had been mended with metal, and possibly magic. The work of a powerful enchanter at the very least. The runes of control had been scraped from her, and a horrible mess of scarring and metal remained.\n\n\"Crema?\" I asked, speaking with my eyes and my mouth, my emotion thick. Hope surged through me that I wouldn't have to kill a dragon today.\n\nWe circled around each other in the air, gliding gently in the wind as we assessed each other. So close, I noticed that one of Crema's eyes had been damaged, and for this there could be no replacement. She was blind in her left eye. With the other eye, she spoke to me, but not as I hoped. There was such a mix of emotion within my fellow dragon. It was like a human trying to speak so many things at once nothing came out clearly. Among Crema's jumbled thoughts was unmistakable confusion.\n\nI tried again. \"Crema, it is I, Bayloo. I have returned.\"\n\nCrema's single functioning eye flashed blue in pleasure, but then faded into a m\u00e9lange of chaos.\n\nHer ryder, whom I'd ignored until now, spoke instead. \"She doesn't remember you. Much of who she was has been lost. Still, she is Crema.\"\n\nThe voice was familiar as well, even though it was muffled by a full-face helm of golden alloy, a single blazing star engraved on its front. The ryder's body was attired in matching armor, a dazzling suit of gold inlaid with silver trimming. Taking one hand from the dragon saddle, she pulled off the helm to reveal herself. I barely saw the woman atop Crema's back, but I did recognize her. The ryder's face was harder than I remembered, with cheekbones as lean as a well-bred horse from Ni-Yota; Her hair had been dyed silver since we were last together, and a partially-healed gash marred the bottom of her chin. Yet the eyes were the same, hard and unyielding.\n\nI stared at Bethy Rann."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "I followed Crema toward the western range of the Cut Hills.\n\nDespite her past injuries, the horned dragon moved swiftly through the sky. But as fast as Crema flew, I wished she was faster. I ached for answers.\n\n\"You know her?\" Harlan marveled as we followed Crema.\n\n\"I know them both. Crema is one of my horned cousins. Her ryder is Bethy Rann, my former ryder. Well, not quite a ryder in the Rolman sense, because we were never bonded and we were together only a short time. But she sacrificed herself to save me. I'm not sure how either of them are still alive.\" And I still owed her. I'd made a promise. I was sure she hadn't forgotten.\n\nCrema set down at the mouth of a scarred cavern that had been chiseled into a hillside by vicious unknown powers. The cavern was easily large enough for two dragons, as well as offering protection from prying eyes and cold wind. Too bad there was nothing to eat there.\n\nBethy Rann climbed off Crema's back with an ease that belied the garish ornamental armor that covered her body. Harlan joined her on the ground. Her eyes appraised him as if he were a bull at auction in Eladrell's marketplace. Her verdict was a frown.\n\nRann's hand slid the hilt of a curved blade at her side. \"An Islander?\" Her tone turned wary as she regarded Harlan. \"What trickery is this? Your kind hate dragons.\"\n\nHarlan executed his most elegant bow, rolling his hand elaborately as he bent from the waist. \"Harlan Dor, captain of no particular ship at the moment, at your service. And, while I don't speak for 'my kind,' I like dragons just fine. Most of them anyway.\"\n\nRann's hand didn't stray from the hilt. I thought it was time for me to put in a word for Harlan. \"Harlan and I have been through a lot together. I carry him on my back willingly.\" She fixed a questioning look at me. \"He is as worthy as ryder as I could ask for. An ally.\"\n\nBethy Rann relaxed ever so slightly. \"I would like to hear your story, Harlan Dor, and how an Islander found his way to Rolm on the back of a dragon.\"\n\nI answered before Harlan spewed more flourishing platitudes. \"You shall be wrinkled with silver hair growing from your nose and ears if you ask to hear one of Harlan's stories. I pledge he shall do you and Crema no harm.\"\n\nRann acknowledge that with a curt nod. \"I'm surprised to find you back in Rolm so soon, Bayloo. Did you find your sister?\"\n\n\"She is well and safe, in Ni-Yota, the great land beyond the Wall of Fire.\"\n\nRann took half a step closer to me. \"You made it across the Wall of Fire then. Your story of bargaining for information from a ghastray was a bit fantastic, but here you are.\"\n\nI could tell Rann had many questions, but I desired a more important answer. To Crema I asked, \"How did you survive?\" A wave of guilt surged through me. \"I saw the griffin that attacked you, but there was nothing I could do \u2026 you fell from the sky. It was so far, even for one of us.\"\n\nThe once-beautiful dragon regarded me with her single functioning eye. I could see the horrific collection of scars, badly reformed scales, and metallic patches that covered her body more clearly now. It was grisly, but she was alive, and one more dragon in the world was a good thing.\n\n\"You are not \u2026 understood,\" Crema answered in Avian, her words halting and difficult to comprehend. She sounded nothing like the Crema I remembered.\n\nBethy Rann's face scrunched in pain as if she'd been struck. She replied to me in a voice just above a whisper. \"The crash and the wounds \u2026 she should have died.\" Rann took a hard breath. \"After you left, I forced Triton to search for her, my blade at Mendakas' neck. When I finally found Crema, she was shattered and I thought her dead. But, as I came near, I saw a flutter in her chest. When I listened, she had barely a beat left in one of her hearts. Yet she had the will to continue. I did what I could for her.\" Bethy ran a gentle hand over Crema's damaged scales. \"The healing was unlike any other. It was the only way to save her. It took the knowledge of my people, as well as the help of an old friend from \u2026 a lost childhood friend.\" Rann's lips pursed in hesitation for a moment. \"But Crema was saved, even if she isn't whole. In mind, or in body.\"\n\nI still didn't quite understand. Or I didn't want to understand. \"You mean, she \u2026\" I struggled for the words.\n\n\"Crema is still in there,\" Rann assured me. \"But confused. Her skull was damaged. She remembers me, but not much else. I can barely make sense of her thoughts.\" With a deep breath Rann added, \"Perhaps that is not all for ill. She is still bound to me, the runes of control still active, despite the wounds that eased them from her body. Those carvings are far more than markings on scales. If she was whole, I don't know what would happen. We communicate mostly with feeling and images.\"\n\n\"You mean she might not serve you if she knew you fought against Rolm and King Mendakas?\"\n\nBethy Rann barked a singular, triumphant, laugh. It was unlike anything I'd heard from Rann before. \"You must be newly returned. King Mendakas is dead. How else do you think I am standing here? Do you think he wished me well after I held him at knife point so you might escape? I have had vengeance, for myself and my kin.\"\n\nHarlan clicked his tongue in surprise upon hearing this.\n\nRann looked at the smuggler. \"You didn't know quite what your dragon companion got you into?\"\n\nHarlan merely shrugged. \"I trust the sea to take me where it wills. It appears it has done the same for you.\"\n\nI reeled from the revelation that Mendakas was dead. I had no love for the human, quite the opposite. But I'd never known a time without him. He was as constant as the glare of the sun. \"If King Mendakas is dead, who rules Rolm?\"\n\n\"Someone of your acquaintance,\" Rann's voice was almost teasing. \"None other than the former Prince of Sapphires himself. Some misfortune related to falling off a tower befell his elder brother. The throne is now held by King Dayne. Or the Sapphire King, as he prefers to be called.\" She scoffed a laugh again.\n\nIf I'd anything left in my stomach, I'd have puked it out. My old ryder, Mendakas' petulant seed, was now king of Rolm. Just as the hateful boy had desired. It was hard to imagine a worse fate for Rolm. Dayne and I had been linked by the control runes, so I knew the contents of his mind nearly as well as I knew my own. Inside that human there was almost nothing of merit. Not even the insatiable desire to rule an empire that drove his father. Within the boy-king there was only blackness. That wasn't what I'd intended when I had spared Dayne. King Mendakas had been Bethy Rann's hostage. Naively, I hadn't expected that she'd kill him in cold blood. But the truth was I hadn't given any thought to Mendakas's fate or even much to Bethy Rann's. I had cared only for myself. There was also another that I had forgotten.\n\n\"What of Triton?\" I asked.\n\nThe flicker of Bethy Rann's eyes to the ground told me all I needed to know even before she spoke. \"There was no way to kill King Mendakas and not his bonded dragon. I took no joy in it. There was no other way.\"\n\nThe death of any dragon saddened me, but this outcome shocked me as well. \"You killed Triton?\"\n\n\"You sound so surprised,\" Rann's voice was cold. \"There were a few moments, just after I pulled my blade across Mendakas' throat, while his life poured out of him, that the rune link rendered Triton near helpless. I did the deed of killing a king without warning, directly in front of Triton's face. The shock of his master's death, the anguish, it paralyzed him. I struck then. Dragon skulls are not invulnerable, and my blade is special.\" She patted the hilt. \"Triton was noble, even if his master was evil. But he would've killed me had I not slain him.\"\n\nI knew Rann spoke the truth of that. She had found herself in that precarious place by saving my life. I had let this all happen. I could not blame Rann for Triton's death, but I wanted to understand Rann's hate of King Mendakas. \"That day, you said Mendakas deserved to die,\" I remembered.\n\n\"I did,\" Rann confirmed, a sharp gleam in her eye.\n\n\"You weren't the first to hate him. He had many enemies. But it was more, wasn't it?\"\n\nBethy Rann flashed a bitter smirk on the left side of her mouth. \"Oh yes, it was more to me. The late king's ambition to rule and control all that he could set his greedy eyes upon was an insatiable hunger. He fed his hunger with murders.\"\n\n\"That is the nature of kings, is it not?\" Harlan asked. \"At least most of them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you speak the way of things. But Mendakas was not satisfied with mere victories. He didn't want to merely defeat soldiers, or even capture new lands. When he won a victory, he intended it to be forever.\"\n\nI didn't understand at first, but Harlan did. His voice was quiet when he spoke. \"To truly conquer a land, to make it yours utterly and completely, those that might challenge your dynasty would have to be extinguished.\"\n\nRann's eyes narrowed in on Harlan. There was a brutal chill in her expression. This was a different Bethy Rann than the person I'd known. \"You know something of these matters, do you?\" She nodded bitterly at her own words. \"He didn't just kill my father. That wasn't enough. He slaughtered my mother and my brother.\"\n\nMy hearts raced. My mind was slower. \"Your \u2026 mother \u2026\"\n\n\"He was coming for her, for all of us. My mother knew he would kill her and kill my brother. Or worse. But most of all, she feared he would learn her secret.\"\n\nI flicked my tail as I realized where this was going.\n\n\"To save my younger brother and I from Mendakas, my mother sacrificed herself, waiting by the window of her tower with an empty bundle in her arms. When the king's soldiers arrived, she spoke her famous words, that her family would die by her will not Mendakas's, before she jumped. I watched it from a secret bolt-hole behind my mother's wardrobe. I knew, and I remember.\"\n\n\"Your brother is the Heir of Ulibon?\" I asked.\n\n\"My younger brother is dead.\" Rann's lips curled. \"You should know that better than anyone else, Bayloo. He died to free you.\"\n\nMy insides went cold. \"You mean Jona.\" I gurgled unhappily. \"Jona was my ryder. Our minds bound. Once my mind awoke, I could sense his thoughts. He carried no such hate for King Mendakas, no memory of any of this.\"\n\n\"He was a toddler when it happened. We humans don't retain childhood memories when we are so young. He never knew who he was. To be the Heir of Ulibon meant to be hunted. It meant death. I would've told him when the time was right. There was no reason for him to know, for up until your mother arrived on Maricopa, we had no hope of ever reclaiming our birthright. We were safer blending in with the exiles there.\"\n\n\"You and your brother fled to Maricopa after Ulibon fell?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes, that was the only place I knew would be safe. I knew that the people there would keep my secret, because they hid an even bigger one.\"\n\nIt was all so much, but it all fit as well. Except one thing. \"Why did no one know about you? In every story, it is always the male heir who survived. I've never heard it spoken that the Highstar had a daughter, much less one that survived the conquest of Ulibon.\"\n\n\"Among my people, there are a precious few who are born with a terrible sign. They emerge from the womb of their mothers blue and still. Dead to the casual observer. But among those tragic births, one in a thousand revive. Those babes are considered cursed\u2014the Returned. To have such a child was a sign of an alliance with the dark, of the displeasure of Haven. Such children are destined to fulfill some evil destiny. They are to be thrown to sea to appease Haven.\n\n\"My mother would not allow such a thing; she would not sacrifice the life of her firstborn daughter, and she was a woman of will. So, the world was told I died at birth, as was my father. Stillbirths are common and unpleasant enough that they are never spoken of. My birth was soon forgotten, particularly once my mother became pregnant with my brother, the male heir my father and all of Ulibon desired. While Jona was feted and spoiled, I was raised by a trusted servant of my mother's, close to her but always apart. Only in the depths of the night could she come to hold me, to tell me I mattered as much as my brother. Because I was special.\" Bethy Rann raised her chin. \"Always, she loved me. Even if my father never knew me. One day, I swore I would make them both proud. I swore that my mother would know she had made the right decision to save me, and my father would rejoice in the daughter he never knew he had.\"\n\nA cold wind swept into the cavern. Even I shivered. \"It is you.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is me.\" Bethy Rann confirmed, sweeping an arm toward the Twisted Keep. \"My parents are dead, but somewhere I hope they watch and see me avenging them. I am the true Heir of Ulibon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"It was you who burned those men.\"\n\nI said it without judgment, mostly. Dragons burned people all the time. I had taken more lives than I cared to remember. War wasn't pretty. But those burnings didn't seem an action that the Bethy Rann I remembered would condone. This gold-armored dragon ryder was a different person inhabiting a similar body.\n\nRann looked confused at my question for a moment, before a hard clarity seeped back into her eyes. \"Those were Dayne's men at Iron Warden.\" She said it as if it explained everything. \"Neither of you understand what is happening here.\"\n\n\"I'm just a foreigner,\" Harlan interjected in a mild, near-mocking tone. \"I don't understand much.\"\n\n\"Can you not see, then?\" Rann's voice screeched. \"The fires? The burned fields? The empty villages?\"\n\n\"We saw them,\" I assured her.\n\n\"Those men in Iron Warden did that. They burned this whole island. People were already short of food, and they burned what was left.\" Rann's voice trembled with rage. \"I gave them back what they dealt. To those who gave the orders to ensure the deaths of thousands of innocents from starvation\u2014those men you saw hanging in their keeps\u2014what I did was not enough. They deserved worse.\"\n\nI knew Harlan's eyes well enough to know he wasn't convinced by the justification he heard. I chose not to judge Rann now that I knew she was the Heir of Ulibon. She was fighting for her people. \"What was their purpose in setting fires in fields and villages?\"\n\nRann sneered with disgust. \"They've lost Ulibon and they know it. The Rolman puppet lords tried to make a stand at Iron Warden, and we showed them our power. Crema showed them she could punch through their walls and kill their archers. So, the boy king told his little lords to stop fighting, to run and hide themselves away in the Twisted Keep with their soldiers and most of the island's food stores. In their wake, they burned\u2014fields, villages, fishing boats, anything people might use to keep themselves alive.\"\n\n\"The stomach is a powerful weapon,\" I said. \"Why didn't Dayne send his dragons? You have only Crema.\" I shot a sheepish glance at my cousin afraid I'd insulted her, but her good eye remained vacant. This wasn't the same dragon I had once known.\n\n\"The Sapphire King has no dragons to spare.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I pressed.\n\nRann's lips tightened. \"Oster.\"\n\nI understood immediately, but Harlan didn't. He shook his head. \"For an ignorant foreigner, please explain\u2014\"\n\nRann cut him off. \"That is that land of the frightful beasts, of griffin and furies, and whatever else the Pale Wrights cook up in their labyrinth in the Pits of Gargen. But all creatures need to eat, and Oster is experiencing another year of terrible famine. Before Bayloo left, they tried to invade and were soundly defeated, many of their griffins along with their best soldiers slain. When he ascended the throne, King Dayne saw the chance for revenge, to distract from his brother's inexplicable death, and the opportunity to step out of his father's shadow by crushing Rolm's ancient enemy when they were at their weakest. He gathered his fleet, stripped the garrisons of the outlying lords, including those of Ulibon, and sent an armada as well as his dragons to attack Oster and the Shard.\"\n\n\"When was that?\" I asked.\n\n\"It has been weeks since the fleet departed. Dayne though his victory would be quick and easy.\"\n\n\"Only a fool would underestimate Oster\u2014a fool who had never seen the Shard.\"\n\nRann inclined her head. \"As you say. Only a fool. I might add some other words.\" The corner of her mouth twitched with grim pleasure. \"Dayne's arrogance is Ulibon's opportunity.\"\n\nI didn't share Rann's delight at news of war. \"Every dragon is engaged against Oster?\"\n\n\"King Dayne sent two ryders here, when Iron Warden was besieged. Amos rode Vincible while Joren came with his horned dragon, Killi.\"\n\nI knew both of my fellow dragons, of course. Vincible was an ash dragon. He was nearly twice my age, slower, but still formidable. Killi was only a horned dragon, but together I would've expected they were more than a match for Crema. \"You beat two dragons?\" I asked, impressed.\n\n\"It brought me no pleasure. But, despite her injuries, Crema is in some ways more dangerous now.\"\n\n\"The sai,\" I concluded.\n\nRann tilted her in question.\n\n\"The metal on your dragon's claws,\" I explained. \"Across the Wall, they are known as sai. Or at least something similar to them.\"\n\n\"My people in Ulibon kept alive our unique art\u2014that which the elders brought with them from their home across the Wall of Fire. That same power that made the first Highstar of Ulibon a ruler also forged the metal that patched Crema's wounds.\" Rann looked at herself. \"And this gaudy armor.\"\n\n\"You never told me you were an enchanter,\" I said, trying not to sound betrayed at the admission.\n\n\"I wasn't,\" Rann said. \"As a Returned, it was assumed I would have the gift, but I never had the chance to be trained. On Maricopa, they too knew the magic of enchantment, but the elders of Maricopa never taught me their craft. They took Jona and I in, but they didn't know who we were. They thought us refugees from Ulibon, children of tragically killed parents who had kept to the old ways in the remote seaside village of Durn, where none of them had even traveled. But that didn't stop me from learning.\" Rann's voice softened ever so slightly. \"The island was a small place, and I had talent. I saw enough to understand the craft, although not the final secret that made it possible to speak to the objects, to infuse them with power. That they kept carefully hidden.\"\n\nI glanced at Crema. \"Then how?\"\n\n\"It was your mother who gave me the secret to finally unlocking my power. She allowed me to become what I am.\"\n\nBoth my hearts jumped. \"My mother?\"\n\n\"That was part of my price. She showed me the real secret at the heart of enchantment, of magic.\" She indicated toward Crema. \"My work is crude. Doubtless the elders wouldn't have approved. But what I lacked in precision, I made up for in talent.\" There was no mistaking the pride in her voice. \"Now, the elders of Maricopa and their ways of isolation are dead, and I am alive. I am about to conquer Ulibon and avenge my family by ascending to my father's seat. I need just one more thing.\"\n\nRann sounded too pleased for my taste. \"What is it that you need then?\"\n\n\"I need to take the Twisted Keep before King Dayne and his dragons return from Oster.\"\n\nI grunted my skepticism. \"Why?\" Rann's face flashed with annoyance, but I didn't care. \"Sooner or later Dayne's slave dragons will return. You will still have to face them. While being inside the citadel is far better than being out in the open, the simple fact is that walls are of far less use against dragons. Your host is large, but apparently ill-disciplined. Dragons took the keep before, and it was more ably defended then.\"\n\nRann ground her jaw. \"As you know, Bayloo, there are far fewer dragons than there once were. The great horde that once conquered Ulibon is no more. If the rumors are true, the campaign against Oster extracts an ever-greater toll.\"\n\nMy blood heated at Rann's words, even though I knew this was no fault of hers. \"Humans waste what is precious because they can. Still, a single ash dragon could reduce this army of yours to dust.\"\n\n\"Vincible would tell you differently. And I do not only count on the reduced numbers of dragons. The fortress is more than walls. It has \u2026 advantages that only I can utilize. As to my host, as you see, many are simple folk who are merely angry. But they are desperate. Inside the keep is the largest stockpile of food on the island, perhaps in all of Rolm. And at the core of my force are the original soldiers that formed this rebellion. I can hold the keep, if I first take it.\" She said the last with such certainty I almost believed her.\n\nI thought back to the battle of the Twisted Keep. Those weren't pleasant memories. \"It is a formidable fortress. Impervious to siege, its wall fused together by magic. When Mendakas captured it so many years ago, it took dozens of dragons, both to hold the defenders at bay and to deliver soldiers inside the walls, because destroying the fortification was impossible, even for us.\"\n\n\"You fought against the might of Ulibon. Inside the keep were men desperate to fight for their freedom and identity. You fought enchanters. Inside the Twisted Keep today is the barest of garrisons made up of old men and boys. King Dayne took most of his best soldiers to war with Oster. They will crumble at the sight of two dragons.\" She gazed at me with intensity. \"We will have surprise. They don't know about you.\"\n\nShe might not be wrong about the outcome of the battle. I really had no idea how many soldiers were in the keep or their morale. It didn't matter though. \"Why should I take sides in the wars of men? What does it matter to me who rules Ulibon?\"\n\nRann eyes widened in surprise before hardening once again. \"You owe me. You said you would deliver me anywhere if I killed Mendakas to allow you to escape. That was our deal. I held up my end. You got out of Rolm. Mendakas is dead at my hand.\"\n\n\"I will indeed carry you anywhere within Rolm you wish to go.\"\n\n\"I want to go inside of the Twisted Keep. Aid us now.\" The hint of a grin played on Rann's lips. \"I know what you want.\" My hearts moved faster. \"You want to free your fellow dragons, as always. I can help with that. I will pledge the support of Ulibon to your cause.\" I waited for her to speak of aurathorn as well, but there was nothing. Did she have it? Did she now play one of Harlan's card games with me?\n\nI growled in displeasure. \"That wasn't the bargain. I never promised to take a castle for you or your rebellion. I never promised to kill for you. What you offer is not enough.\"\n\nRann's eyes honed in on me. Realization flashed in her eyes. \"Of course, you did not come here to find me.\" She loosed an ugly bark. \"You did not come here to help me or check on my well-being. You came for your own quest.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I admitted. \"Help me free my brothers and sisters. Help me find aurathorn.\"\n\nI watched her face carefully, but Rann betrayed nothing. \"Aid me and I will,\" she promised readily. \"I can help you.\"\n\nMy hearts pumped hard. Did she have aurathorn? Had it been Crema and Rann on Maricopa?\n\nFor once, Harlan spoke anxiously. \"Do you have aurathorn?\"\n\nBethy Rann's mouth opened ever so slightly, then closed again, her chin hard. She looked at me, then back to Harlan. A mischievous sparkle appeared in her eyes, a new revelation. \"You seek the vine as well, Islander?\"\n\nHarlan took a step toward her. Crema's functional eye flashed to a wary red when Harlan neared her master. \"Maricopa was devastated searching for it. Did you find it when you ripped the island to shreds? Do you have it?\"\n\n\"Is that what you think?\" Rann didn't flinch. \"I have no idea what you are talking about. I have not returned to Maricopa since I left it, years ago. I don't have aurathorn with me, Islander. You fools have flown around the world for nothing.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Bethy Rann did not have aurathorn.\n\nShe had not destroyed Maricopa looking for it. She didn't even care about that vine. I wondered for a moment if she might be lying, but her heartbeat was steady, her eyes more amused than concerned. Judging by the pained look in Harlan's eyes, he believed her as well. Aurathorn always eluded him, despite his claims it wanted to be found.\n\n\"My mother told me she used aurathorn to free me.\" I recalled the precious last moments with her. She'd hesitated when it came time to tell me of aurathorn. She had been afraid of something. \"My mother did not lie.\"\n\n\"Great Dawn would not lie to you,\" Rann agreed. \"I told you that she and the elders traded for the vine. They did something to it.\"\n\n\"So aurathorn was there, on that island?\" Harlan pressed, his voice suddenly tinged with hope.\n\nRann's eyes flicked between us. \"It was there. That much I can say. Your mother and the elders attended to the vine more attentively than a mother would a newborn. They did something with it, something to do with magic. I'm not sure what was done, for no one else was allowed near. But I once heard them say, 'Without a fount, the thorns will soon die. The vine alone is not enough.'\"\n\n\"My mother said something similar.\" I considered Rann's words. \"It was brought to Maricopa. From where?\"\n\nBethy placed her hands together, her lips in a tight line. \"I seem to be answering a lot of questions.\" She pursed her lips before turning to Harlan. \"Why does an Islander seek this?\"\n\nHarlan's chin twitched unhappily, so I answered for him. \"His people believe that it can help them turn back the sea so they can return to their lost island home.\" Rann squinted at me, as if to see if I jested with her. My eyes made it clear I didn't. I sensed Harlan's displeasure, but he'd eventually learn I did him a favor. Bethy Rann was more stubborn than him. I needed to give her something like the truth to get to the bargain I knew she wanted to offer. She might not care about aurathorn, but she cared about ruling Ulibon.\n\nRann offered a bitter chuckle. \"Is this aurathorn part of the mysterious quest of the Islanders?\" She shook her head. \"I cannot help you.\"\n\nTo his credit, Harlan kept his body absolutely still instead of allowing the fury I knew was inside him to explode.\n\nRann wasn't finished. \"But Ulibon may be able to help you. If there is an Ulibon after all this is done.\"\n\nHarlan and I both digested the meaning of Rann's words, and her offer. I flicked my tail back and forth across the ground. I could still taste the stink of death from the last time I conquered the Twisted Keep. \"I need more than that.\"\n\n\"More than the promise of the true Highstar of Ulibon?\" Rann asked, almost mocking now. She knew she had something I desperately wanted, that Harlan wanted.\n\n\"Where did the aurathorn on Maricopa come from?\" I asked again, knowing I wouldn't get an answer this time either. \"Give me what I seek and I shall find a way to aid you.\"\n\nRann shrugged. \"That is not enough. You will not take my promises as payment. Why should I trust you to keep your word?\"\n\nI snorted with derision. \"You do not trust me, Bethy Rann?\"\n\n\"I've never known a free dragon before.\" Her eyes flicked to Harlan. \"There is no telling what company you have kept. You may have picked up some undesirable human habits.\" She sighed. \"More than that, Bayloo, I sense you have changed. Something drives you, but it is not your fellow dragons. What has happened to you?\"\n\nHad I changed as much as she said? I didn't like her accusation. \"You ride dragons, but that does not mean you understand us. I will do what I must.\"\n\nBethy Rann crossed her arms, unmoved.\n\n\"Tell us more of aurathorn,\" Harlan suggested. \"Tell us about how you came to your knowledge.\"\n\n\"You want a story, sea captain?\" She smirked. \"I'm no sailor with yarns to spin.\"\n\n\"Trust must begin somewhere. With us, I had hoped the past was enough.\" I considered my options and didn't like them. I wanted aurathorn, for my kind, but also because I believed it led to a solution for the rust. \"Do as Harlan asks, win the trust of my companion, and I will win your keep.\"\n\nRann's eyes widened with pleasure. \"Very well, Bayloo.\" But instead of speaking to us, she turned away and gazed at Crema, running a finger along the dragon's patchwork scales. It was a gesture of affection, but the movement bothered me. It was the behavior of ryder\u2014someone who thought of dragons affectionately as a pet, not an equal. After an eternity of stroking scales, Rann spoke, her voice distant. \"I hadn't fully considered the significance of this strange vine. But your being here \u2026 I now realize it was the reason your mother came to Maricopa. She knew the people there were exiles from Ni-Yota, so they would be receptive to a dragon in their midst in a way natives of Rolm never would; but I think she was ultimately searching for aurathorn.\"\n\nHarlan hung on every word. \"Aurathorn wasn't on Maricopa before Bayloo's mother arrived at the island?\"\n\n\"No, I lived there for much of my life. I know every speck of that place.\" Rann rubbed her forehead as she remembered. \"As I said, I was an outsider, and the elders confided in no one but themselves, but it was only after speaking to Great Dawn that their behavior changed.\"\n\nHarlan remained suspicious. \"How did it change?\"\n\n\"The elders huddled for two days, nonstop, which they had never done before, consulting with Great Dawn. And other things ... the more I look back, the more certain I am about what happened.\" She turned to stare at Harlan with a look that dared him to call her a liar. \"I know where your aurathorn came from. I know where it is now.\"\n\nHarlan wasn't intimidated. \"Now, you are sure? That is quite convenient.\"\n\n\"The answer has revealed itself, because all other possibilities are impossible. So while I've not gazed upon the source of the precious vine you seek, I know.\" She huffed at Harlan, looking to me instead. \"Enough of this, Bayloo. On my honor, I tell you that I know where this aurathorn came from. I pledge the assistance of Ulibon in obtaining it, for you will not be able to do it on your own, just as your mother could not.\" Rann drew herself up, purposefully not looking at Harlan. \"You help us capture the Twisted Keep in exchange for our help finding aurathorn. Do we have a deal?\"\n\nI'd gotten better at bluffing in the time I'd known Harlan. The truth was, I would've agreed even without Rann's explanation. I wanted to find aurathorn, but I also had my own reasons to help this rebellion. Foremost, I knew the Sapphire Prince all too well. His malicious mind had been entwined with my own. He was dangerous to his fellow humans, but even more dangerous to my kind. The continued war with Oster\u2014attempting to attack the Shard of Oster\u2014was merely more evidence of his recklessly homicidal tendencies. Dayne had to die. The fall of Ulibon would draw him to me. That alone would have been a sufficient reason to help take the Twisted Keep. Another was that I did owe Bethy Rann. She had saved my life, and I'd made a promise to her. Still, I tried to do what Harlan would've done: I kept playing a game. I answered with fake reluctance.\n\n\"I will trust you, Bethy Rann, Highstar of Ulibon.\" I released a long exhale of hot air through my nostrils. \"We have a deal. The Twisted Keep shall fall.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The dubious attack started with a meeting.\n\nWorse, it was meeting with a human, and no drink was served. Not quite what I anticipated from the Heir to Ulibon, but Bethy Rann insisted upon it. Her army had already made camp to give the men time to rest and train. Any notion of surprise had long-since been lost. So instead of promptly flying off to devastate the Twisted Keep, I spent the night in a chiseled cave in the Cut Hills, away from the prying eyes of Rolman spies, while Bethy Rann flew back to her army to fetch a human. That part was fine\u2014she sent food to us. Rabbits, some nuts, and hardtack. I offered to share a rabbit with Harlan (insincerely), but fortunately he satisfied himself with a few nuts. We ate and slept. In the morning, Rann and Crema returned with the important human I needed to meet.\n\nThe person before me towered over Bethy Rann by a full two human-sized heads. The rest of his body was similarly stretched\u2014his face extended downward like a horse's and his arms grew like tree limbs. I'd have judged this height and reach to be an advantage for a human warrior, except this man had only four fingers on his right hand, and none at all on his left. Despite his missing digits, the stranger dismounted from Crema nimbly enough. I greeted my fellow dragon, but she didn't acknowledge me.\n\n\"This is Xedric Gile,\" Bethy Rann announced of the human, as if the name mattered to me.\n\nThe tall man did not bow, nod, or give any other indication that he'd been introduced, which I had thought was a human custom. Perhaps his ears were also mangled. He did have a full head of long, hair braided to resemble giant eels. He smelled of something like rotten fish, so I guessed he must be a seaman like Harlan. Perhaps they would get along better than he and Bethy Rann.\n\n\"How will Xedric Gile help me take the Twisted Keep?\" I asked, trying to be polite despite my skepticism. \"It does not even have a moat. I don't need any more sailors.\"\n\nI didn't understand Rann's puzzled look. Xedric showed me his teeth, dragon style in response, or at least he tried. He had only pinkish gums. I wondered how he ate.\n\n\"Without Xedric Gile, there would be no revolt, and I'd likely be dead,\" Rann declared. Xedric stopped showing his empty gums. \"He was a loyal retainer to my father, serving as the commander of the central fortress of the Clutch. When Mendakas and his dragons captured the Twisted Keep, almost all the lords and soldiers of Ulibon surrendered, hoping for mercy, exchanging their lands and castles for their lives. But not Xedric Gile. He, and the few men willing to follow him, stayed loyal.\"\n\n\"Every revolt on Ulibon was smashed by dragons.\" I tried not to sound proud. The dragons who had periodically burned Ulibon in the years following the conquest had merely been obeying their ryders' commands. But they had been effective.\n\nGile finally opened his mouth to speak. His words were no prettier than his empty gums. \"Only fools try to fight dragons.\"\n\nThis human was smarter than he looked.\n\nRann took up the narrative again, because speaking obviously wasn't Xedric's primary talent. \"Xedric and his men returned to the land, biding their time. When the first wave of doomed revolts subsided, they offered their services to the new lords of Ulibon that had been installed by Mendakas. Using their positions, slowly over time, they stole what a future uprising would need: swords, axes, and armor, at first. Eventually, as their finale neared, they took other supplies, including grain, dried nuts, and hardtack. Years of stockpiles, waiting for the right time. Without their foresight, this host I lead would have neither weapons nor supplies. And it was Gile's men that helped us take our first keep in the south, opening the gates and surprising the garrisons from the inside.\"\n\nI watched the big human as Rann recounted his exploits. He might as well have been a statue.\n\n\"Only when the war with Oster heated and drew the king away did the true revolt reveal itself,\" Rann explained.\n\nI now understood her gratitude toward this man. \"You didn't start the uprising.\"\n\n\"Xedric and his men were fighting well before I returned to Ulibon. But they were betrayed. Xedric was taken alive to be hanged from the walls of Iron Warden. But not before they tortured him before the crowds of onlookers. They took his fingers, one by one. And his teeth. The torture was to stop only once he declared the Heir of Ulibon dead and his revolt a fraud. Only then would his public suffering end\u2014with his death. I went on for weeks, but he never broke.\" Rann looked at the Xedric with admiration. I did as well. \"Crema and I had our opportunity in the moment of his last torment. We rescued him, snatching him from the clutches of the Rolman soldiers as hundreds watched.\" She smiled. \"They saw hope. The impossible became probable. The uprising was reborn.\"\n\n\"You couldn't have made a better entrance,\" Harlan said appreciatively. \"The armor is a nice touch as well.\"\n\n\"To inspire farmers to face armored soldiers and the threat of dragons, one needs to capture the heart and the imagination. I needed to look the part. In this, Crema's injuries also served us well. They call her the Reborn. The occupiers had no fight in them without dragons to support them. Only a few of the Rolman lords still fought. But imagination will only take us so far. Of the two thousand men and women\u2014yes, there are women among my fighters\u2014in my host, most of the true soldiers are Xedric's men or late defectors from the Rolman's lords, but his men are the only trained warriors that have shown their loyalty. And they are the ones we need to win the Twisted Keep.\"\n\n\"Getting inside the keep isn't difficult,\" I told them. \"One has merely to fly over and land. That is when it becomes difficult. I can carry four, perhaps five soldiers with armor on my back. Perhaps one or two more if I need to fly only a short distance. Crema can carry three at most, yes?\"\n\nBethy Rann nodded. \"She is a swift flier, and injuries haven't changed that. Three, with armor and weapons, if one is me.\"\n\n\"Let us say eight humans then, plus Crema and I. Dragons are formidable, but not indestructible. The Twisted Keep was well-equipped with ballistae and other enchanted weapons when I fought here the last time. Do the current occupants have magic artifacts?\"\n\n\"Unlikely. If any survived the conquest, Mendakas pillaged them for his own use long ago.\"\n\nThat sounded like Mendakas, and it was welcome news. But I still wasn't satisfied. \"Two dragons and some humans could wreak havoc. But I don't think we could take and hold a sprawling fortress like the Twisted Keep.\"\n\nXedric's spat out his awkward words. \"You speak as if you face the true warriors of Ulibon once again, dragon. Inside the keep now are only huddling cowards.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Rann assured me. \"The Rolmans have spent the past weeks running. They've lost every engagement they've dared to fight. Those men that remain are terrified of the heir, that they will suffer the fate of the others who resisted. This morning I've put my army on the march, but I've also sent a runner ahead to offer amnesty to any soldier that lays down their arms and leaves the keep.\"\n\n\"Your plan is to hope they surrender quickly?\" I said it with disapproval, but they might be right. The defenders might be as weak-spirited as Rann and Xedric claimed. The problem was, I had no idea if that was the case, because this was my first time in Ulibon in many years. I didn't like relying on human intuition.\n\n\"They will break,\" Rann said again, apparently believing it. I studied her carefully. She was an able ryder, an adept fighter, but the only thing she'd ever commanded was her slave dragon. I didn't know Xedric Giles at all. I wasn't ready to fly against a thousand soldiers and a hundred ballistae based on the hunch of these two.\n\n\"Who leads the defenders?\"\n\n\"Egan Drehan, Warden of Ulibon,\" Rann answered in a nasal, contemptuous tone that left no doubt of her feelings toward the man.\n\nI had heard ryders speak of this human, and never fondly. He was a loyal hand of King Mendakas, but known as a schemer rather than a fighter. However, he certainly was not a fool like some of the others.\n\nI flicked my tail about. \"Tell me your plans, then.\"\n\nThey did, and it didn't take long. I wasn't impressed, but nor was I willing to share with Bethy Rann the full extent of my own power. She knew of ember dragons, but not what I could do with magic. For now, I intended to keep it that way.\n\n\"How long will it take your host to reach the keep?\" I asked.\n\n\"No earlier than midday,\" Rann conceded. \"They move slowly.\"\n\n\"Fetch me then.\" I had more sleeping to do.\n\nThe battle came quicker than Rann anticipated.\n\nAs I had suspected back in the cave, Egan Drehan was not a fool. He understood the enemy he faced (except me, of course), and he anticipated their weaknesses. One was overconfidence.\n\nDespite my declaration of intent to take a nap, prudence beat out laziness, and I didn't sleep away the morning (in part because the cave was horribly uncomfortable during the day, with dust blowing constantly). Instead, I found a perch on the highest hill with enough cover to conceal myself from any Rolman watchman, while I watched the advance of Bethy Rann's army\u2014if you wanted to call it an army\u2014and the reaction of the Twisted Keep's garrison. The march of the sprawling host bore no resemblance to the movement of a disciplined Mizu force, except that both involved a lot of feet. Rann's host shuffled along nearly aimlessly, like a parade, except totally devoid of joy or amusement. A funeral parade, in more ways than one.\n\nUndulating plains of burnt crops and charred grasses extended from the Cut Hills to the Twisted Keep, with a single well-trodden road of cobbled stone running the distance. Once, this thoroughfare had been the major link between the north and south of Ulibon. Now the feet of two thousand humans shuffling north were its only traffic. The host mindlessly hugged the road, as if the plains of blackened grass on either side were the cold sea where it dared not tread for fear of drowning. Perhaps lured by the flat, open terrain, Rann had sent out only a few scouts ahead of the main host, thinking an ambush in such terrain to be impossible. But nothing was impossible. Bethy Rann thought with an attacker's mindset, a leader who hadn't yet experienced defeat.\n\nI didn't realize what was happening at first. The activity on the walls of Twisted Keep kept my interest as I counted ballistae and soldiers. Watching humans walk along a road seemed rather useless. Harlan noticed something was amiss before I did.\n\n\"They seemed to have slowed,\" he noted of the army below.\n\n\"It's possible for humans to walk even slower?\" I wondered. \"I would've thought they had rocks in their shoes, but half aren't even wearing shoes.\"\n\nHarlan wasn't amused. \"Something's wrong.\"\n\nThe leading elements of the marching host did indeed appear to have slowed their advance. I saw several humans stop, while others continued onward. There was some shouting. Crema flew above the army, scouting the vicinity far more effectively than any human scout, but that also meant that Bethy Rann wasn't among her troops. Xedric Gile had direct command on the ground. A fighter, tough and ruthless, that one. But that wasn't the same thing as being an able commander.\n\nCrema broke out of her flight pattern, circling to her left, dropping toward the ground. I thought that perhaps she intended to land, but that wasn't the dragon's intent. My eyes tracked Crema's flight path as she closed rapidly on her target somewhere on the east flank of the marching host. I saw the movement\u2014the rustling of something concealed in the charred underbrush, lying flat on the devastated ground.\n\nI roared a warning, a booming noise that carried across the plains. Crema's wing dipped instinctively, swerving her to the left. An arrow found her hide anyway. A moment of horror followed. She was only a horned dragon, her scales far less sturdy than my own\u2014I didn't want to lose her. Fortunately, the projectile deflected off Crema's scales. Her angry cry answered my own. I was in the air a moment later, Harlan grasping onto my saddle.\n\nOther Rolman archers arose from their hiding places on the plains. I counted six, wearing only leather jerkins smeared with dirt to match the terrain. They'd buried themselves in the ground of the burnt fields. Neither Crema nor I had spotted them, so they must've been under there since at least the previous night, waiting for the army to march on the road. An ambush against a disorganized host could be devastating. But humans trying to ambush dragons wasn't wise.\n\nI beat my wings, closing the distance to the Rolman archers. I expected more to appear. How many soldiers would Egan Drehan risk outside the protection of his walls?\n\nAs I flew to assist, Crema swooped down on a second pass. Bethy Rann had her own bow ready as well. She released an arrow, the tip flying straight and true into the neck of a previously-concealed archer. Crema climbed again, away from any answer from the other archers. But there was none. No one else fired at Crema. Nor did any more attackers appear beyond the original six\u2014now five\u2014I'd seen earlier. That made no sense. What was the point in attacking an army this size with six humans with bows?\n\nParts of Rann's army began to disperse, moving away from the road. Someone had given an order to get moving, but like everything with the unruly host, there was mostly chaos, as humans scattered in multiple directions\u2014some marching, some running. I wondered at the military logic of such an order. Then I saw the arrows.\n\nThree of the five surviving archers had fired their bows. The arrows flew in high arcs. Each had been lit on fire with flint carried by the attackers. The burning arrows plunged toward the army. I didn't have the time to do anything about it.\n\nThree arrows should've posed no danger to a host the size of this one. Unless that army had done something really stupid, like march directly into fire oil that had been poured on the road and fields around them. The Rolmans had been burning the whole of this island for weeks. It shouldn't have been a surprise they still had more fire oil and would use it. Except Rann and Xedric hadn't considered that danger. Neither had I.\n\nBethy Rann's army was about to burn."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The flaming arrows dropped out of the sky in a gradual, gentle, arc.\n\nThe reaction that followed wasn't gentle. After the first arrow hit the ground, nothing happened. I hoped I had been wrong, that Drehan had something else planned. A horrified scream followed the second arrow's impact, and a fearsome inferno followed.\n\nFire erupted first on the left flank of the Bethy Rann's host, then on the road in front of it, and finally in the heart of the army, as the other projectiles fell and ignited. Rann's fighters scrambled in every direction, some fleeing hysterically into even worse flames as the surrounding fields ignited.\n\nCrema was closer than I to the chaos. She dove into the flames at Rann's urging, plucking humans from their doom as best as she was able, but she could carry only one at time in her claws. I flew faster, but not faster enough. As I neared, I thought I heard Xedric Gile barking in his strange speech. It didn't matter what he said. His army disintegrated around him into a mass of horrific casualties.\n\nI hadn't wanted to further reveal my power to Rann, but there was no longer a choice. My mind went to the Latticework. My need was great, my desire urgent, yet I knew I needed calm to tap my power. I filled my lungs as I shifted my focus to the wind flowing beneath my wings. I sensed the currents of air, the heat of the ground. The Latticework revealed itself easily. I still did not comprehend much of the twisted maze of woven Chords, but I knew enough. I called, rearranging the Chords that connected with and controlled the forces of this world. In response, the sky did my bidding with alacrity.\n\nA wind as cold as that which might be mustered by storm in the depths of winter howled its presence. Tinged with ice crystals born of the air's moisture and quickly frozen, the unseasonable torrent swept across the plains in violent spasms that threw men from their feet, but also saved their lives. The oil-fueled flames bowed to my conjured gusts like a candle flame to a human child's waiting breath, defiantly flickering before being extinguished in a maelstrom of ice. I glided above the storm, my vision fading and returning as my mind entered and returned from directing the Latticework. I maintained the ice gusts until I beat the last of the flames.\n\nI wobbled in the air when my magic was finally done, the mundane world spinning uncontrollably. I willed myself to remain calm, my wings steady. Soon, the tumult in my head subsided. I broke into a gentle arc around the decimated host to survey the damage that Lord Drehan had wrought. Despite my intervention, it was a grim sight.\n\nRann's army was shattered. Soldiers had scattered in every direction. A group of perhaps a hundred remained clustered together, almost all those on the ground\u2014some on their backs, others on their knees praying to Haven. More humans wandered in confusion. Hundreds of Rann's followers simply ran, heading south, back the way they had come, to their homes or whatever was left of them. I wondered if Xedric was among the survivors. I didn't see him among the tumult.\n\nCrema made a low pass over the chaos, then beat her wings in pursuit of the fleeing archers from the Twisted Keep. I joined the pursuit. I didn't want Lord Drehan to get word of what had happened here. Let him believe this plan worked. At the very least, I didn't want him knowing that magic was at work.\n\nThe Rolman archers died easily: I skewered three with my claws, Crema bit the head off another. I took the final one in my jaws. His bow string snapped before I sank my teeth through his torso. The blood dripped into my mouth, hot and fresh, but I spat him out. It wasn't just that humans tasted awful. I also felt guilty about eating one in front of Harlan and Bethy. Never let it be said I wasn't considerate of human feelings.\n\nOnce the Rolman archers had been dealt with, Rann urged Crema back toward her army. They landed in the midst of the shattered host, close to the road. Scorched humans littered the ground. Dozens more stood aimlessly, staring at the sky. Rann stayed on Crema's back rather than dismount. She rose to her feet, using the dragon as a great, living podium to address her remaining followers.\n\n\"By the grace of Haven, we have been tested,\" she shouted as loud as a human voice could manage. \"We have been tested and found worthy!\"\n\n<Worthy of what?> I wondered. <Worthy of being dinner? Did roasted human taste better than the raw variety?>\n\nI was about to land beside her, but Harlan urged otherwise in an urgent whisper. \"A good leader seizes every opportunity, even an opportunity born from a horrible defeat. Let us land well behind Crema, close enough to be seen, but not so much as to distract from Rann's words. That is, if you want her to succeed in saving what remains of her army.\"\n\nI didn't quite get Harlan's point, but he was emphatic. If I intended to assault the Twisted Keep it was better to have an army\u2014any army\u2014to aid me than not have one, so I did as Harlan suggested, carefully picking a clear spot that was devoid of crisp human flesh. Rann noticed me, but she pretended she hadn't.\n\n\"We knew our enemy had a heart as black as the darkest depths of the Abyss. We knew they are desperate as their inevitable defeat draws near. But we didn't anticipate the depth of depraved desperation until this day.\"\n\nRann's voice carried well across the plains. Stragglers in all directions stopped to listen at least. They were probably too shocked to realize their leader was wrong. Drehan's tactics had been inspired, a sign of tactical intelligence against a large, mismanaged army. There was nothing desperate about it. Still, I minded my manners, sitting attentively as Bethy Rann shouted and gestured all about.\n\n\"Yet, here, they have given us their best, struck at us when we were vulnerable, and what have we shown them instead?\"\n\nThe true answer: Human flesh burns easily. But that wasn't the reply Rann went with.\n\n\"We have shown them we cannot be beaten!\" She hollered the words, as if making them loud also made them true. \"As we stood on the edge of annihilation, we were saved.\" Rann expanded her arms wide as though they were wings. \"This was not a defeat. It was a lesson that so long as we remain true to the cause, we will be protected and guided to victory by the greatest of allies.\"\n\nUgh, now she intended to drag me into this. I didn't want her gratitude or that of\u2014\n\n\"Haven shines down upon us; divine judgment has declared our cause just! The power of Haven is with us. And underneath its great light, our cause cannot be defeated!\"\n\nAh, so it was Haven that had extinguished the inferno. Not me, but the unseen powers above who favored one bunch of humans over another. Did anyone really believe this stuff?\n\nThe ragged host actually mustered a cheer at the drivel. The first shouts of approval were scattered and hesitant, but the next wave had far more enthusiasm. Initially led on by a few fervent followers interspersed among the rest, the cheer gained momentum with each repetition. It was charming that the survivors could be happy about what had happened. I still didn't see Xedric Gile.\n\nNot yet satisfied with the adulation shouted at her, Rann whispered to Crema. The horned dragon stood on her hind legs while Rann adeptly used her dragon saddle to keep on her feet. \"To our victory!\"\n\nThe cries of ecstatic humans shook the ground at this miraculous performance. Stragglers from the distance began to return\u2014some of them, anyway. A few deranged followers even ran toward Crema and their savior, the Heir of Ulibon.\n\nToasted fools.\n\nI twisted my neck to speak quietly to Harlan. \"It seems I wasn't part of her\u2014\"\n\nRann didn't let me finish before she shouted yet again. \"Even dragons flock to our cause.\" She gestured toward me. My eyes turned the color of night. Rann had been a ryder more than long enough to read what I told her. \"This is our new ally, Bayloo. A free dragon, to fight by our side. The mightiest dragon in all of Inkra.\"\n\nI appreciated flattery, but not in this instance.\n\n\"Let us regroup and prepare for our final victory!\" Rann proclaimed, finally allowing Crema to sink back down out of her humiliating stance. Dragons weren't statues for humans to use to proclaim their own greatness.\n\nBethy Rann slid out of the saddle, wading immediately into the mass of suffering humanity that surrounded her. She barked orders to various humans I didn't know. Some answered her, some didn't. As a semblance of order gradually returned over the course of the morning, I estimated that half of Bethy Rann's army was dead, injured, or had deserted. Apparently, the host had only a few village healers among them.\n\nHarlan helped as well. \"A bad way to die,\" he said of the burned humans. \"Some are worse, but fire is a bad way to die.\"\n\n\"How would you like to die?\" I asked him.\n\nHe didn't hesitate. \"Quickly.\"\n\nThat was a good answer.\n\nRann split her time among the injured and the able-bodied, trying her best to restore order to the terrible chaos. At least she seemed to care about these people. I hunted for a bit of food for the army, with limited success, and called forth a bit of rain so they might have water. There was nothing else I could do. When she finally approached me, she carried a burnt human in her arms. I recognized him: Xedric Gile.\n\nAs she held his barely-recognizable form before me, my eyes confirmed what my nose had already told me. \"I cannot heal the dead. Or even the living. That is power denied to dragons, it seems.\"\n\nRann didn't answer at first; she merely dropped her head down to look once more at the blackened corpse of a man. \"He put this uprising together.\"\n\nI was weary of the death around me, the death I'd seen so much of since becoming free. My head pounded from the foul fumes, so I may have spoken more harshly to Rann than I intended. \"You spin a fine tale for which to cheer.\"\n\nIf Bethy Rann took offense, she didn't show it. \"I am the symbol. People need something tangible to fight for, something to inspire them. The Rolmans tortured and mutilated Xedric. His words couldn't inspire the masses, the sight of him stirred no hearts, but his blood was more noble than mine, whatever our lineage.\"\n\n\"That is a failing of your kind. You believe blood confers status.\"\n\nShe jerked her head up sharply. I didn't mean to be cruel. It was merely the truth.\n\nInstead of answering, Rann laid Xedric's body at my feet. \"We shall bury him inside the walls of the Twisted Keep.\"\n\n\"You have to take it first,\" I pointed out.\n\nRann stared at me with a dragon's gaze. \"You have learned magic during your time across the Wall. That storm, the lightning on the night I found you, it was you. Can you not just \u2026\" She smashed one fist into another.\n\n\"I have done battle at the Twisted Keep once before. Dozens of dragons unleashed their fire and strength against those gleaming walls, all for nothing. The keep was forged by enchanters, the structure held together by more than limestone mortar.\" I flicked my tail as I glanced out to the north. \"Even if I understood the magic involved, I'm not sure I could bring down those walls. To stake all of your battle plan on my uncertain magic is unwise.\"\n\nRann made a grumbling noise. My nostrils flared.\n\n\"All power has a cost, Bethy Rann. I did what I could to save as much of your army as I was able. There is a limit to all things. The walls of Twisted Keep will not be easily breached.\" I moved closer. \"Believing otherwise leads to disaster.\"\n\nIf the rebuke stung, Rann gave no sign. She bit off each word of her reply. \"However, it must be done, it will be done. My vengeance is not yet complete.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "We came at night.\n\nThere were a multitude of reasons for choosing the cover of darkness. The most obvious was that we dragons see a lot better than humans in absence of light, further increasing our combat advantage. Another was that even a battered remnant of an army looked far more fearsome if you were gazing at its camp fires from the walls above. Rann's host might be totally lacking in siege equipment and next to useless against the Twisted Keep's formidable fortifications, but they were noisy, smelly, and still relatively numerous. Their arrival would provide some distraction to the watchmen of the Twisted Keep, although I wasn't relying upon that. If Lord Drehan had been clever enough to plan the ambush that decimated Rann's host, he would also be wary enough to keep a sharp watch for dragons. He knew about Crema. But fighting a single horned dragon was quite a bit different than trying to find a way to deal with me. There wasn't any way to do that.\n\nCrema and I chose a roundabout flightpath to the keep, flying east to the sea, then following Ulibon's coast north. When we neared the keep, we separated. Crema flew directly for the castle, while I took a circuitous route so that I might attack the fortress from the seaward side. The defenders would be watching for Crema, so she went first, carrying Bethy Rann as well as another soldier. I'd drawn on magic to summon more clouds to fill the sky, commanding them to hover thick and low to cover our assault.\n\nI moved through the night at a prowling pace, floating above the dark waves. In addition to Harlan, I had three other humans on my back. It had been many moons since I'd carried such a load. I could handle the weight, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. Worse than their bulk was the unpleasantness of having strangers on my back. Their terror of flying made them sweat\u2014and stink.\n\nBethy Rann had reluctantly accepted that the gates of the Twisted Keep needed to be opened from the inside, using swords, claws, and wits rather than some imagined magic I might conjure. The humans I carried had their swords, and I knew Rann was adept with a blade. I had claws and magic.\n\nRann had left a former companion of dead Xedric in charge of the host\u2014a trunk of a human named Gorge. I met him only briefly\u2014he appeared to have been built with no neck but an extra helping of chin. Rann said he was capable. She didn't sound convincing though. But it wasn't the human army that worried me the most. Crema claimed my angst. Although she was a dragon, and therefore far more capable than human, her injuries left her fate almost entirely in Bethy Rann's five-fingered hands. My trepidation was prescient.\n\nI watched Crema from afar as she streaked in from the east shoreline, flying high through the cloud cover I'd created before diving toward the twisting spiral of the great citadel. Fires blazed on the three levels of winding walls like tiny infernos, making the fortress look like a burning snake wrapped around its victim. I'd never seen so much light lofted onto the walls of a castle (except when my brothers and sisters set one blaze). The high dancing flames let off a steady stream of black soot that did more to cloud my vision than any darkness. Being surrounded by the crackling light of so many braziers might have made the defenders feel better in the night, but I doubted it truly improved their vision. It certainly didn't stop Crema.\n\nThe horned dragon kept her wings tucked back as she flew in to attack, headed for the lower reaches of the fortress where the main gate beckoned. The defenders must've seen her, but no bells rang, no horns sounded, no ballistae hurled projectiles at her. She crossed over the outer wall, above the ground-level ring wall, but beneath the second tier of battlements that were situated on the mountain's jutting cliffs. Heavy smoke clung around the mountain there. When I lost sight of Crema, I didn't panic. Not until I heard the dragon's roaring plea for help.\n\nI pushed hard toward that desperate sound. It took all my self-control not to knock the useless human strangers on my back off to gain extra speed. I beat my wing with great thrusts. The keep grew large before me. The smog of black soot was even thicker than it had been moments before, as if a cloud of black had passed over the castle. I could see only the glimmering light of the fires on the other side. Crema roared again, in pain. I went faster.\n\n\"It's a fisherman's net!\" Harlan hollered, his warning so loud I felt in my bones.\n\n<A fisherman?>\n\nThen I got it, belatedly understanding what had happened to Crema. I dipped a wing, twirling into a dangerous turn that I only attempted because my life depended on it. Several humans screamed on my back. One or two might've wretched. I snarled at the stink. Never again with the idiot humans.\n\nHarlan shouted again. \"From above.\"\n\nI flicked my eyes upward but couldn't risk moving my neck for a full look. I plunged downward, my direction shifting violently, my angles all wrong for proper flight. In the dark, I finally saw what I should've anticipated\u2014a great spider's web of black netting extending from the upper tier of the fortress down to the lower wall beneath, the soot of the brazier fires cloaking it in the blackness. There were dozens of nets hanging, a maze of deadly traps. Crema had been snared in one. I had come within a neck's length of being caught in another. I hadn't, but the price had been a terrible maneuver that forced me to unnaturally contort and finally flip my belly upward. Two desperate beats of my wings righted me, but the force of my maneuvers was too much for one of the human passengers. The makeshift saddle straps that held him gave away, and he fell from my back, his screams lingering until the ground silenced them.\n\nLighter, I swept back around toward the keep. A hail of ballistae arc bolts greeted me. Too many to dodge completely. Instead, I tucked my vulnerable wings back against my body and pulled in my neck to make myself as small a target as possible. For all that I did, two projectiles still found me. One hit the hard scales of my belly, leaving a nasty sting but no lasting damage. The other caught me in the foreleg, just above my claw. The tip of the bolt found the crease between my armor plates, wedging itself inside. An angry roar escaped my jaw, echoed by the panic yelps of the novice passengers on my backside.\n\nThe ground raced at me. I risked spreading my wings again, deciding that the danger of more arc bolts was exceeded by an uncontrolled crash. I caught the air and got a half-flap out of my wings before striking the rocky soil beyond the keep's outer wall. I was in the dangerous zone between the fortress and the army surrounding it. It wasn't the worst crash I ever experienced\u2014not even close. But I landed on my injured foreleg, sending the impaled bolt further through my scales and into my leg. I thrashed my tail at the pain, my eyes white in rage. More humans fell or jumped off my back. I didn't have time to care, since I was certain Harlan would manage to hold on. I launched myself back into the air as another volley of arc bolts launched from the keep's battlements. This time I was more prepared, and the operators underestimated my speed; they had probably never fired on a dragon before. Every bolt missed. They'd need to reload. I had an opportunity.\n\nI soared into the air, gaining speed. There was one human still on my back\u2014by his scent it was Harlan. I was fleetingly relieved.\n\n\"Get a solid grip and be prepared for anything.\"\n\nHarlan acknowledged me with a guttural noise of battle rather than words.\n\nI came directly at the keep, jaws dripping with angry bile. Shouts\u2014some of alarm, but most of utter terror\u2014came from the walls of the Twisted Keep. I surveyed the wall above as well as the battlement below. The giant nets that had ensnared Crema had been hung from the ledge upon which the upper tier of the citadel had been built as it twisted around the central peak. Several tunnels had been cut through the jutting cliff's bottom, from which ballistae could fire downward. Those were the most dangerous. This place had been built by enchanters to withstand even dragon attack.\n\nAs we neared the fortress, my eyes locked on Crema. She'd actually been caught in two different nets. One had snapped off, falling over her, covering her wings. There was no way she could fly, stuck in that entanglement. But the trap hadn't been completely successful. Crema managed to grab onto the rocky wall of the mountain half-way between the ground and the ledge above. This kept her from falling into the massive inner yard at the base of the fortress, and it also made her a difficult target, since the fortress' war machines were mostly designed to fire outward, not toward the mountain spire that served as the keep's spine. Unfortunately, I saw at least one arc bolt embedded within her torso. Still, I'd expected worse. When I flew over the keep, I'd drawn the fire of the other ballistae, saving her life, but only temporarily.\n\nI had to free Crema. The humans of this place were diabolical. I had no intention of letting them rob the world of another of my kind. My wings propelled me ever faster.\n\nHarlan guessed my intention. \"Don't come in directly. The other traps are still dangerous, Bayloo. I'll jump onto the net that holds Crema and Rann. I'm not wearing armor, I can climb and maneuver easily. You keep us safe, keep the ballistae from firing at her.\"\n\nI didn't change my course. \"Too slow.\"\n\n\"You don't have time to try to pull her free with claws. The defenders may have more nets, other surprises. As you said, this place was built by enchanters\u2014\"\n\nHe didn't get a chance to finish his thought. I appreciated the warning, and it had given me an idea. But I didn't have time to explain myself. I didn't fly to Crema immediately, as badly as I wanted to save her. Instead, I swept down toward the sprawling wall that encircled the citadel, a barrier as tall as twenty humans standing atop one another, with battlements wide enough that four soldiers could march along its length with their shoulders touching. It was littered with ballistae, catapults, soldiers, and smoking braziers emitting blacken soot. The fires were interspersed along the wall walk at regular intervals.\n\nI came in low and fast. A few humans launched arrows, and a single ballista managed to reload and fire, but most of the defenders were too shocked by the nearly-invisible dragon sweeping through the night to do much more than duck. They weren't my targets though. Instead, I toppled the braziers.\n\nIt was almost easy. I just sailed along the wall walk, my hind legs scrapping the stone. One after another, the tall braziers fell, spilling the smokey mixture of fire oil and water inside onto the wall. But even that was only the beginning. The burning liquid soon covered the entirety of the eastern portion of wall walk and began dripping down into the yard below. Like most keeps, many of the inner buildings of the Twisted Keep had been constructed against the great wall to save time and material\u2014and all of them had roofs that burned. Satisfying screams erupted in my wake as I ascended to save Crema. An arc bolt grazed my neck as I came out of a turn. I was too close to the second tier, an easy target for the ballistae firing from above. Destroying the machines would take too much time. I needed to free Crema.\n\nWith a great beat of my wings, I flew to her. The once-beautiful dragon was a bloody, mangled mess. The soldier Crema had carried hung from his neck within the netting that ensnared Crema, but Bethy Rann had kept her head (in all ways), struggling from the saddle to try to cut the bonds that held Crema. Despite the fine metal dagger in her hand, she hadn't had any success.\n\nI attempted to latch myself to the mountainside beside Crema, digging into the rock as best I could with my claws while flapping my wings awkwardly to keep myself from falling. My injured foreclaw was nearly useless, but even my hind claws were failing me. The stone was wickedly firm. I was all too aware how vulnerable I was in this spot even before Harlan shouted, \"Bolts from above!\"\n\nI twisted my neck around to see a single arc bolt hurled at me. My eyes narrowed in on the approaching projectile. I pulled up my tail, swiping it into the bolt as it hurled toward me. I wacked the shaft, sending the projectile into a wild spin that bumped harmlessly into the rock wall. That trick wouldn't work with more than one or two bolts at the most. I didn't have much time.\n\nMy hind claws squeezed into the mountain face. Some rock dibbled away. With my foreclaws and teeth I made an awkward grab at the net that held Crema. Once I had a grip, I pushed back off the rock wall, hovering beside Crema as I chewed the net with my teeth and pulled with my claws. The trap's coils didn't break\u2014it wasn't made of rope. This had to be something left over from the enchanters who'd once occupied the Twisted Keep. I could try my own magic, but that would take concentration, and I knew nothing of enchantment. This wasn't my domain.\n\n\"The nets are anchored on the rock above,\" Harlan shouted at me.\n\nI was still wrestling with the net as I answered. \"How does that help?\"\n\n\"Don't break the net. Fly the whole net and her out of here. We'll get it off her elsewhere.\"\n\nHarlan's idea was the only chance we had. I flew upward immediately, surging toward the ledge above me. It sloped outward from the central mountain with enough girth to support the walls and towers that had been built atop of it. The humans had run chains down from the wall on the upper side of the ledge, and then across the rock. Those chains served as a type of rafters to which the nets had been attached. Unlike the enchanted nets, the chains looked to be castle-forged metal.\n\nI flipped sideways as I flew along the ledge, reaching out to snare the chains with my hind legs. I missed with my left leg, but the claws of my right scraped along the stone surface until they found the links I needed. With the chain secured, I beat my wings, picking up speed, but only for a moment. The metal stiffened, groaned, then snapped.\n\nI twisted in a tight circle back to Crema. \"Release your claws from the mountainside, Crema.\"\n\nConfused and agitated, she didn't move. Being trapped was too much for her damaged mind.\n\nI tried again. \"Rann, speak to her! We must leave!\"\n\nWith Bethy Rann on her back shouting commands, Crema finally released her claws from the mountain just as I grabbed hold of the links of the net that trapped them. \"Push off!\" I ordered.\n\nPropelled by Crema's shove and the heavy flapping of my wings, I pulled my fellow dragon through the air still wrapped in the net. She was smaller than an ash dragon, but still terrifically heavy. I struggled to keep us aloft. Landing wasn't a choice\u2014not while we were in the range of the castle ballistae. Rann's army was too far for me to reach. Instead, I yanked us out to the sea just beyond the north wall of the keep.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" It was Bethy Rann shouting at me. She didn't sound very grateful that I saved her life for a second time in a single day, so I didn't reply.\n\nOnce over the cold waves, I gave in to my exhaustion, letting the net with Crema and Bethy inside dip into the water. The sea would be cold, but dragons are hearty, and Rann could handle a few splashes. I pulled them the rest of the way on the water until we were well out of the range of the Twisted Keep's war engines. Someone in the high towers would be able to see us, but I didn't care about being seen for now. We were far enough away that they weren't going to run out at night to pursue.\n\nGrateful to be done with the worst of the evening's events (hopefully), I dragged Crema and Rann from the sea onto a sandy beach. I landed beside her, sniffing at her wounds.\n\n\"Pain?\" I asked.\n\nCrema answered me with a flash of her eyes. There was such pain in her, I felt her hurt.\n\n\"She is weak, near delirious,\" Bethy Rann told me as she struggled to pull herself from Crema's saddle. She succeeded only in getting further entangled in the enchanted web.\n\nI worried at Crema's condition. She had two bolts lodged into her torso, blood surrounding both. They needed to come out, but I had to free her from the net that imprisoned her first.\n\nHarlan was already at work on the net, pacing around its twisted length with sharp eyes that peered through the night. \"It's tricky and tangled, but we'll get it off. A net is no use if you can't get the fish out. It'll just take some patience.\"\n\nPlaying with enchanted nets was a task better suited to human fingers than dragon's teeth. I left Harlan and Bethy Rann to try to cut through the jumbles of coils and suffer the frustrations that went along with that. I focused on Crema's wounds. She had two arc bolts in her, and I could hear her hearts pounding in her chest as they struggled to keep everything inside working. A normal dragon\u2014even a horned dragon\u2014would recover from these wounds with food and rest once the bolts were out, but Crema wasn't normal. She had already been badly damaged before this latest battle.\n\nHarlan and Rann hacked furiously with their daggers, but the net held. Rann cursed, yanking her sword from its scabbard. The blade glinted with a soft azure hue against the night.\n\n\"Get that rock,\" she told Harlan. He obeyed without comment, helping Rann position the net chord on top of the hard surface. When all was ready, Rann swung her sword. A screech almost akin to a human scream pieced the night as the blade struck and net's chord broke into two pieces. After that, it was easy. In a few more moments, Harlan's skilled hands freed Crema from the netting. Rann immediately turned her attention to the bolts in the dragon's flesh.\n\n\"This one broke through her scale,\" Rann pointed out what I already saw. \"I patched the worst damage in her armor after her near-death fall with enchanted metal, but some of the scales never fully healed.\" Rann sounded wistful for a moment, but only a moment. \"The other bolt cracked a scale and lodged itself inside, but it didn't reach Crema's flesh. I think I can just pull that one out.\"\n\nI studied the more superficial of Crema's injuries. I had suffered no small number of impalements myself, and as best I could tell Rann was correct. \"Pull out the bolt if you can do so without harming her.\"\n\nRann placed a gentle palm on Crema \"Are you ready?\"\n\nThe horned dragon assured her ryder of her strength with a flash of her good eye. Rann didn't hesitate. She yanked hard. The bolt came away in her hand. Rann flung it toward the sea with a disgusted sneer. There was still the other projectile to deal with.\n\n\"You can do nothing for her?\" She seemed to plead with me. \"You cannot even heal a fellow dragon.\"\n\nThe answer frustrated me as much as it did Bethy Rann. \"Healing is a different art, and living beings are infinitely complex in their weavings. I do not even know where to begin. To change something that is alive using the power of Chords is another order of power entirely.\"\n\nRann stared at the second bolt, its shaft deep within Crema. \"It must come out.\"\n\nWhile Rann and I had been talking, Harlan had already torn off his shirt and soaked it in sea water. He held out the damp cloth. \"Pull it out and I will cover the wound.\"\n\n\"She will make it through this,\" I said, but my words were hope, not certainty.\n\nRann did what we all knew she had to do. At least she was quick. Blood gushed from the wound. Harlan covered it, but his paltry cloth was soon a mass of blood, and the flow continued unabated. Rann's eyes widened. \"It's not stopping.\" She turned to me accusingly. \"It should stop. She is a dragon!\"\n\nRann was correct. Dragon didn't bleed that way, certainly not from a mere bolt wound. What had happened to her after she had fallen from the sky near Eladrell? There wasn't time to discuss it. I reached for the Latticework. I could not heal flesh, but perhaps there was still something I could do for Crema.\n\nI gazed at the wounded dragon in the deeper reality of the Latticework. She was magnificent, a dazzling array of forces, weaves, and particles beyond my comprehension. I didn't understand life, and I never would. I narrowed my focus on her wound, to the blood flowing. Within the Latticework, the fluid was a swirling storm of energy, and other forces that I didn't try to sort out. But I could discern that something greater was wrong within Crema than this hole in her flesh. The patchwork of repaired scales was just on the outside. Inside and out, she was no longer like other dragons. Blotches of darkness appeared in the chaotic vortex of her life. She was injured in a manner that went beyond an arc bolt wound.\n\nI couldn't fix Crema. I needed to do what Bethy Rann had done previously\u2014patch the holes that needed immediate attention. With little to work with, I summoned the cold again, but instead of seeding the clouds, I drew it from the air around us and concentrated it. Then, I summoned the wind, swirling the gust in a tight ring, adding cold until I had a stream of super chilled air that could turn liquid to ice in a single blast. \"Everyone, stand away.\"\n\nOnce the humans obeyed, I sent my magic at Crema's open wound.\n\nThe effect was violent. A blast of iced air ripped through the sky, forming itself into a funnel no wider than a human arm. Crema roared as it struck her, more in shock than pain, I hoped. Bethy Rann gasped in horror.\n\nIn a moment, it was over. The magic had dissipated and the blood of Crema's wound had frozen. The flow of ugly red had been staunched.\n\nRann took a step closer, her eyes narrowly focused on the bandage of crimson ice that coated Crema's wound. \"Is that what you call healing?\"\n\n\"That's a patch to keep her alive, so her life's fluid does not leak out. She'll have to do the rest of the healing herself. If she can.\"\n\n\"You mean she may die?\"\n\nI grunted unhappily. \"Parts of her already are dead, I think. Let us hope we can save the rest of her before Lord Drehan attacks again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "I kept vigil for my fellow dragon.\n\nDarkness surrounded us, but at least Crema was not alone. Bethy Rann, too, knelt beside the horned dragon, her hand never breaking contact with Crema's scales. Crema slept, but fitfully. Ordinarily, her wounds be the equivalent of a human cut, a trifle to be soon forgotten. But something worse than arc bolts afflicted Crema. It was as if something inside her had died, weakening that which remained. The price of the near-freedom of her mind had been higher than Rann or I suspected.\n\nHarlan interrupted our silent observance, his voice uncharacteristically hesitant. He spoke to Bethy Rann. \"Do you not have an army to attend to?\"\n\nRann sucked in a sharp breath, but did not budge from Crema's side. \"I left Heffen Gorge in command.\" Her tone made it unclear if that was a good thing or not. \"He had orders to attack only if we were able to capture the gate. Otherwise he would maintain the siege\u2014at a safe distance beyond the range of the Rolman war engines.\"\n\n\"But you do not give orders to Lord Drehan or his garrison, do you?\" Harlan prodded. \"He does not seem a man to sit idly on his advantage.\"\n\nThe words had their desired effect. Rann pulled her hand from Crema's scales, rising to her feet. She took several hurried steps peering in the direction of her army, her eye squinting. We were too far away for her eyes to see anything but darkness.\n\nHarlan kept speaking to her. \"I'm just a ship's captain, but if I were Drehan, I think I would risk opening the gates to send out a mounted sortie against my demoralized enemy. Fortunately, he lacks horses. So, what does a Rolman commander do in this case?\"\n\n\"Harriers.\" Rann whispered the word in the darkness. \"Men chosen for the ability to run long distances at speed and still fight effectively.\" She glanced back at Crema before returning her attention to the darkness. \"Bayloo, can you \u2026\"\n\nI had already craned my neck in the direction of the Twisted Keep. \"It is too far for me to see at this distance, and there are hills blocking my line of sight.\" Reluctant to leave Crema, I grudgingly conceded, \"I would be able to see more from the air.\"\n\n\"I need to return to my army. I should've done so before now.\" She sounded guilty. \"Crema and I not returning \u2026 they were already on the edge.\" The tension became thicker in her voice the more she spoke.\n\nIt was a long trek on foot in the dark. She knew it and so did I, but there was Crema to think about. She meant far more to me than a thousand humans. If these armies wanted to hack each other to death, should I care?\n\nRann sensed my reluctance. \"I love Crema too.\"\n\nLove? Did Dragons love? The dragons I knew \u2026 whose love I might seek, followed the Way, not the whims of human love. It seemed that Rinxia was not a creature of love. The Way told me to be responsible for Crema. That must be what I felt. Except I wasn't like other dragons. \"I must stay with her in case the wound ruptures.\"\n\n\"You have already saved us both this night, Bayloo,\" Rann said. \"I will keep my word to you, but I must beg you, please fly me back to my army. Then return here to be with Crema. It will not take long for you, but in the night \u2026 I don't know if I could make it at all, much less in time to do anything helpful.\"\n\nI sniffed Crema, studying the strange wound and her labored breathing. If something happened when I was absent, that was a sin I wouldn't forgive myself for, but Rann was correct that it wouldn't take me long to fly her back to her fellow humans\u2014assuming nothing else went wrong.\n\nHarlan stepped into the hesitation. \"I will stay with Crema. I'll send a flaming arrow into the air should I need you, Bayloo.\"\n\nRann bestowed a grateful look upon Harlan. \"You will take me, then?\"\n\n\"If she could speak, I know Crema would beg me to take you, even at the expense of her own life. And although her will is not entirely her own, I believe her affection for you, and yours for her, to be real.\" I couldn't bring myself to say love. \"For that reason, I will carry you to your army. But that is all. Are we agreed?\"\n\nRann's answer was to hurry over to me. She hesitated for a moment before climbing onto the saddle on my back. She was lighter than Harlan, but kept her seat in the practiced, familiar fashion to which I had become accustomed during much of my life. This was a ryder, and it felt comfortable having her there. That annoyed me.\n\nTo Harlan I said, \"Signal if you need me.\"\n\nI soared into the dark sky. The wind howled and the air stank. Beyond the walls of the keep, where Bethy Rann's army had encamped, there was nothing. Well, almost nothing. As I flew closer, I saw the bodies of the dead, the embers of broken campfires, the remains of what had perhaps been supply wagons and tents. Rann had something uncomfortable in her throat. The noises that squeaked out of her were mere unintelligible sounds of despair.\n\nI went closer, flying lower. The hosts, barely held together after the disaster on the road that morning, had broken apart once again. Humans scattered like sand in the wind in every southerly direction, a trail of dead and injured in their wake.\n\n\"Darkness of the Abyss \u2026\" Bethy Rann murmured, her voice nearly breaking.\n\n\"At least there is no pursuit. They must've broken the army then retreated to the keep.\"\n\n\"Drehan is diabolical, but also cautious,\" Rann said, bitterness in every word. \"He wants his precious harriers back behind the great walls of his fortress.\"\n\nI understood Rann's distress. She had not only lost her army; she had lost a dream at the precipice of achieving it. I understood being denied that which you wanted badly, that which you, deep down, believe you were destined for. Like me, Rann did not relinquish her dreams easily.\n\n\"Take me to them,\" she urged. \"I can salvage this once again.\"\n\n\"Twice in a day these men have been routed, Bethy Rann. Defeat is a bitter morsel, but it must be swallowed at times.\"\n\n\"We've lost a battle, that is all. But as you pointed out, that army was mostly useless against the Twisted Keep. It is more about forging a story, the legend that would let me reclaim my rule. With your help, I need only a hundred soldiers to capture the keep. Your presence alone through the night will be enough for me to rally that many.\"\n\nI grunted unhappily. \"I must return to Crema, should I be needed. Although the distance is long on foot, those harriers that smashed your army might dare to march out to her in the morning to finish her if I am not present and vigilant.\"\n\nMy hearing was acute enough to know Rann ground her teeth in frustration. \"Ulibon will rise again.\" She said it with the certainty that the sun would rise in the morning. \"I just need a little more help, Bayloo. Once, I helped you.\"\n\nI wasn't swayed. There were humans scattered, and this wouldn't just be scooping them up. Rann would have to talk to them. That meant I'd have to listen to her. It would all take too much time for a cause that wasn't my own. \"This is more than you have a right to ask of me.\"\n\nMy wing dipped as I began an arcing turn back to the north, back to Crema.\n\n\"Our arrangement was for your assistance capturing the keep. We cannot do that without some soldiers. I will tell you where to find aurathorn. I'll tell you that and more. But only after we've captured the Twisted Keep.\"\n\nI hissed with annoyance. \"Capture it with what? I see no soldiers, no army, not even that mess of a host you had gathered before. I see only farmers, some dead and the rest terrified. If you will not help us, we shall continue our quest. I will not fail. I might remind you that I already saved your life this night. Any debt I owed you for your help leaving Rolm has been repaid.\"\n\n\"You speak with the arrogance of power. Be careful with something so fleeting,\" Rann warned, her voice hot with emotion. I kept flying northward.\n\n\"A bargain,\" Rann said hastily. \"I will assist this quest you and your companion are on. I promised you the location of aurathorn and that Ulibon will be at your disposal to help get it.\"\n\n\"You already promised that,\" I agreed. \"You can only give that once. Anyway, Ulibon seems like it has other issues.\"\n\nTo my surprise, Rann didn't disagree. \"It's true, we are in a desperate place. A precarious remnant against that mighty keep. That is why you should help us. Don't give up on us. We shall be a new nation, forever grateful.\" She reminded me of her brother Jona when she talked like that\u2014naively hopeful. Jona hadn't deserved to die.\n\n\"There is nothing to save,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"Almost nothing!\" She said it as if I had proven her point. \"Lord Drehan sees all that you do of our defeat. He's in there luxuriating in his own genius, beating an army that outnumbered him, besting not one but two dragons. He is probably toasting his great victory with his soldiers on this night.\"\n\nDrinking. I missed that. I didn't get the rest of her babble, but I did miss a good drink.\n\nRann wasn't done. \"His arrogance gives us the opening we need. His belief in his utter victory will save us. This can all be salvaged.\"\n\nShe told me her plan. It was utterly reckless, so very human. It also wasn't totally insane. It might even work\u2014if I went along.\n\nIt wasn't enough. I kept flying toward Crema.\n\nRann played her last card. \"Within the keep, there are vaults\u2014secret vaults\u2014that I doubt even Mendakas and his pillagers ever found.\"\n\n\"I do not need human riches. Coins cannot be eaten, freedom for dragons cannot be bought.\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about gold. I'm talking about items of enchantment. Artifacts that will help you on your quest. Items impervious to magic, devices to enhance strength. These are things that will help you that you can get nowhere else.\"\n\nI didn't know whether to believe her or not. \"I need nothing from you.\" It wasn't true, but I enjoyed saying it.\n\nRann's teeth clenched. \"Then let me down at least. Crema and I will do this without you.\"\n\n\"Crema is injured,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"She will recover. When she does, we will attack.\"\n\nMore than any bribe, any bauble of magic, I didn't want Crema attacking the Twisted Keep again. Even once she was healed, a single horned dragon against the keep's enchanted defenses made my stomach feel like I'd swallowed a pot of vegetables. But how could I stop that when Rann was so intent on having her prize? Crema was loyal to Rann. The runes of slavery remained. I knew well the power of the link.\n\nI turned, sweeping into a circular arc that would allow me to return back southward if I chose. Rann knew that as well.\n\n\"Does this mean you will help me rally my forces?\" She sounded hopeful and mistrustful at the same time.\n\nI twisted my neck to gaze through the night at the pitiful, scattered humans. Could Rann really re-form this rabble into an army? I didn't like it. But if I refused, she would most certainly withhold her secrets from me. Crema would heal and Rann would use the horned dragon to raise another army and attack again anyway. This was her quest; it burned inside her as surely as aurathorn did for Harlan and I. Faced with this unhappy choice, I chose the lesser of the unpalatable dishes before me.\n\n\"I shall help you capture the Twisted Keep using this plan you have concocted.\"\n\n\"This time we will not fail.\" Rann assured me.\n\n\"If you betray any of your promises to me, I will crunch your bones in my mouth no matter how awful you taste.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "I felt like a dog herding sheep.\n\nRann used me shamelessly as her prop in cajoling the stragglers of her former army to return, although I had to admit her showmanship was impressive. With my help, Rann chased down any group of survivors numbering over three. They were many such clusters, all headed south. Rann had a story for them all. Resplendent in her gold and silver armor, she was a masterful orator. Having me with her helped a lot.\n\nTo the dispirited, she ensured that I would prevail in any battle (probably not true). To those few of her followers that were still dreamers, she whispered that I was a sign from above. To the many skeptics, Rann said they were being tested by Haven, that a victory without cost would lack meaning. To the hopeless (the largest group), she pointed out they had no place left to go. The fields were burned, the ships mostly gone to the south, far away by foot. Only the vast food stores of the Twisted Keep could save them.\n\nAided by words, lies, and my presence, Rann rallied almost two hundred humans back to her cause. They were a pitiful bunch, braver or stupider than the rest, or maybe both. Three times that number continued south to an even more uncertain future.\n\nRann gathered her remnant army about her, immediately putting them to work establishing a new camp. She assigned new commanders, seemingly at random. She made sure everyone had something to keep themselves occupied. When dawn broke, I flew off to return to Crema. On my way, I spotted a hill cat stalking a goat up a steep cliff. I snared them both in my claws, but in an act of insane generosity, I left both kills with Rann before flying off to attend to Crema, placing my faith that Harlan had been attentive to Crema and still managed to snare a few fish. He didn't disappoint on either count.\n\nFour huge king fish were waiting, cooked over driftwood collected from the beach that gave the specimens a nice smoky-salt flavor. I ate two, bones and all, and saved the rest for Crema.\n\n\"She hasn't opened her eyes,\" Harlan told me. \"She jerked about fitfully through the night, but seems now to have entered a more gentle sleep.\"\n\nI examined Crema's wound, both with my eyes then through the lens of the Latticework. My freeze bandage had melted away over the course of the night, but it had achieved its purpose in staunching the bleeding. The damage to Crema's flesh had improved, but the healing was far slower than I would've expected. The strange void within her remained. I didn't understand her injury fully, only that it went deeper than any conventional wound. The core of her existence had been damaged.\n\n\"There is little else I can do for her,\" I said to myself more than my companion. \"Except be by her side.\"\n\nHarlan didn't disagree with me. \"Rann's army is smashed, I presume.\"\n\nI recounted what Bethy Rann and I had done; then I told him the plan.\n\n\"Bold.\" This pleased me. \"Dangerous.\" This didn't bother me. He paused. \"Too generous.\"\n\nThat made the spikes of my mane stand on end. \"Speak your meaning.\"\n\n\"She will fail without you. But we may still find aurathorn without her information.\"\n\n\"You believe she knows where it is?\"\n\nHarlan rubbed his chin. \"Aye, she knows something. She isn't a good enough liar to fib all that. But that isn't really why you are helping her, is it?\"\n\nI snorted unhappily. \"I got her brother killed. It was my fault. I was being foolish with my newfound freewill, picking a fight for no reason.\"\n\n\"Guilt?\" Harlan arched a brow. \"That is not the Way, I would think.\"\n\n\"I have no Way.\" I looked away toward Crema. \"There are other reasons, as well.\"\n\n\"Your fellow dragon\u2014you stay for her. This, I understand. I had a crew. It isn't the same, but it is a similar idea. But Bethy Rann is a dragon ryder\u2014one who lied to you about her identity and motives in the past. You should be wary.\"\n\nI hadn't considered that. Had she lied? I'd certainly never asked if she was the Heir of Ulibon, so not exactly a lie. But that wasn't Harlan's point.\n\n\"I can think of other, better ways to keep Crema out of combat,\" he said. \"And winning a war will not restore the life of Bethy Rann's brother. He is gone.\"\n\n\"Let me set your mind at ease. It is not out of mere generosity or guilt or fear for Crema that I put my life at risk.\" Was that true? \"I will have need of Bethy Rann and Ulibon before all this is over. I seek to free the dragons of this land as well as defeat the rust. To do that, I may need Ulibon's help.\"\n\nHarlan looked at me askance, as if I had bunny ears, but only for a moment. He shrugged with fake nonchalance. \"As you say. Let us hope she brings us closer to aurathorn as well.\"\n\nThe next morning, Crema opened her eyes. She didn't have the strength to eat for another day after that (I ate her fish so they wouldn't go to waste, but Harlan got us more). I wondered how he lured such large specimens in so close to shore without obvious bait. He waded into the sea barefoot, so I supposed his toes must've been tasty to fish. To my nose, they merely smelled like rotten skunk.\n\nI flew Bethy Rann back and forth to Crema several times under the cover of night, each time bringing some fish and whatever wild game I managed to hunt with me. It wasn't much, but Rann's paltry force had come to rejoice at my arrival, which I didn't mind. It seemed a few former soldiers had survived the earlier rout, and she'd put these to work drilling her remaining farmers in some rudimentary tactics. Rann's concern for Crema was obvious in her eyes and movements, yet I wondered how much of that was triggered by desperation. She needed the dragon. Unfortunately, Crema was equally attached.\n\nBy the third day, Crema was well enough to stand, stretch her wings, and speak\u2014such as she did these days. Bethy Rann was able to communicate with her through their rune link and explain what was required. Crema, as ever, was eager to please and be used as her ryder willed. But she still wasn't strong enough to fly, to the frustration of both dragon and ryder.\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\" Bethy Rann asked as I flew her back to her camp under the cover of night, hugging the Ulibon coast to ensure we weren't seen from the Twisted Keep.\n\n\"I don't really know,\" I confessed. \"It is as if part of her is dead, which also keeps her from healing fully.\"\n\n\"Can someone be part dead?\"\n\n\"I'm not a healer. I don't know. Perhaps dragons can. We are different than other creatures of this world.\"\n\nRann was silent for some time, the rhythm of her breaths revealing tension. Finally, she sighed heavily. \"I think I know why.\" I switched into a glide to hear better. \"I gave her my mother's last gift.\"\n\n\"Something enchanted?\" I prodded.\n\n\"The bracelet. We spoke of it in your cave on DragonPeak, in what seems a different life. You asked what your mother had promised me in exchange for my assistance.\"\n\n\"I remember it,\" It hadn't looked quite right to me, even back then, before I understood magic. \"You said it helped steady your blade. Then evaded my question.\"\n\n\"You were not ready to know about the Heir of Ulibon then,\" Rann said. \"On the eve of her death, my mother told me that every bit of her life beyond that day was infused within that bracelet. But she didn't tell me how to unlock the power before she died\u2014there wasn't time for that. Your mother understood magic\u2014she told me the rest: how the artifact functioned, and how to tap into my own power. She was a wise teacher, and I am grateful to her. Great Dawn told me that by shattering a crystal inlaid within the metal, that power would be released. Enough to save my life, should I ever be in peril. Crema needed it before I did. I placed it on her and shattered the crystal. That melted the metal, but it also made Crema open her eyes.\" Rann's voice grew thick. \"I mixed the remainder of the bracelet's enchanted metal with iron to form the armored scales and false claws you see on her today.\"\n\nI considered Rann's words, what she had intentionally and unintentionally accomplished. \"There is an incomprehensible power in the Chords of life.\" I tried to sound knowledgeable, but beyond that tidbit I had no idea what I was talking about. I certainly had no idea how such an artifact as Rann described would be forged. \"Perhaps that was enough to anchor what remained of Crema's life and bring her back from the Abyss. But not without cost.\"\n\n\"She is alive.\" Rann said it as if that explained everything.\n\n\"You possess her life,\" I said. \"She could not even function without your guidance. You are more than a ryder to her now. Do you ever feel guilty about it?\"\n\n\"Guilty about what?\" Rann asked it as if she had no idea to what sin I referred.\n\n\"About commanding Crema to do as you will.\"\n\nRann's reply was sharp. \"It's not like that!\"\n\nMy body tensed. \"What is it like then?\"\n\n\"I share my thoughts with her, we speak. When we take action, she understands.\"\n\nMy reply was more roar than words. \"Her will is enslaved by runes. Even damaged as they are, even after what she went through, the link to your mind is one-way. It imposes your will upon her. You saved her life, but for her ends or your own?\"\n\n\"How dare you!\" Rann's words flamed.\n\n\"Did you not notice Crema never disagrees with you?\"\n\nRann's retort caught in her throat. \"I \u2026 I wouldn't hurt her. I care about her,\" Rann protested.\n\n\"Care? As an equal? An intelligent being? Or as those human hunters care about their hounds?\"\n\n\"You're distorting this.\" Rann shouted at me. \"I don't want her to be a slave.\"\n\n\"Really?\" My eyes glowed hot as I flew through the night. \"Would a free dragon help with your plan to take the Twisted Keep? What would she get out of it?\"\n\n\"Hopefully, a chance to free her kind. Just like you.\"\n\n\"You claim you do this for my kind?\" I snorted.\n\n\"Look at those people down there, Bayloo. Why do you think they still follow me?\"\n\nI really had no idea. I wouldn't have followed Rann after all that had happened. But humans made my head hurt. They had strange minds filled with ridiculous thoughts.\n\n\"They want to be free,\" Rann insisted.\n\nI grunted my disagreement. \"They have no runes, no chains around their neck. They are already free.\"\n\n\"Look with more than your eyes. They live under the dominion of the King of Rolm. These people and their families, most are either farmers who barely grow enough to feed their families, or if they have no land to till, they must work mining the metals of Ulibon, venturing in deep tunnels into the mountains. When the mines collapse, or the passages are too small, children are sent to pull out the ore. That which is mined is never used in Ulibon, but instead taken by ship to the smelters at Eladrell, to make weapons for Rolm's wars.\"\n\n\"They can refuse to work,\" I insisted. \"They can go elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Where can they go?\" Rann shot back. \"What choice do they have? Almost no native man of Ulibon holds his own land. Those that are freeholders can barely subsist. None are lords. None ascend beyond the rank of footman in a village watch. They have no future.\"\n\n\"Their minds are free,\" I insisted.\n\n\"We of Ulibon hunger to control our own destiny, the same thing you want for your fellow dragons. Are we really so different?\"\n\n\"We are, Bethy Rann. Only when your mind\u2014your entire mind\u2014is subservient to another can you understand. Only when you have been betrayed as my kind was betrayed by humans can you understand.\" A great gust of wind came in from the east as I spoke, as if Haven gave force to my words. I waited for it to subside before I spoke again. As it blew, a bit of the heat in my blood faded. \"But I do understand the desire to control one's own destiny. That, I assure you.\"\n\n\"Help us, Bayloo, and we will help you. That is what we are doing.\n\n\"I am helping you.\" I reminded her. \"More than helping.\"\n\n\"Humans may have wronged you, but not these humans. And not I, nor Jona. He risked his life to free you.\" She cut me with the last reminder. \"Perhaps I don't know Crema's true mind. But also allow the possibility that I can see into her hearts as Jona could know yours. She is loyal and brave. I believe she would stand with us even without a rune link.\"\n\nThe wind gusted again, forcing me to consider my next words before I spoke. \"It will be a number of days yet before Crema is healed enough to risk fighting. You had best use the time wisely. Harlan might be of use helping to train your army as well.\"\n\n\"The Islander?\" I heard Rann's suspicion.\n\n\"He has seen many battles and is decent with a blade.\"\n\n\"I'm pleased to accept any help.\" There was still reluctance. \"But food and water are the more critical needs.\"\n\n\"I can help with water,\" I told her, knowing I could summon rain. \"Game is scarce. I was lucky the first day. I cannot hunt for so many, nor can Harlan catch enough fish on his own.\"\n\n\"We found a few of our supplies. I am sending out foragers. In the south, beyond the Clutch, there are still stores, places to find supplies. I will show you if you carry me.\"\n\nMore work for me. I snorted with displeasure.\n\nRann took my lack of direct refusal as acquiescence. \"Thank you again, Bayloo. My brother was right about your nature. You have kind hearts.\"\n\n\"There is no need to be rude.\"\n\nWe approached the haphazard camp of Rann's rump of an army. \"These men will reclaim Ulibon for their children,\" she declared.\n\nWe saw two very different hosts. \"Lord Drehan's harriers will come again. Will they stand this time?\"\n\n\"We'll be ready.\"\n\nRann was more confident than I. She still had faith in humans. I only had faith that I would find a way to set dragons free\u2014including Crema. That was going to require killing a lot more humans."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Waiting.\n\nNights and days passed, until it had been a full week of nursing Crema. She progressed slowly, but it was progress. I knew the humans in Twisted Keep watched, but they did not dare attack me. The Rolmans thought they were safe behind the enchanted walls of their fortress while the remnant of the rebel army outside starved (which they would have but for my efforts).\n\nFinally came the night when we were ready to put Rann's plan into motion. Crema had almost fully recovered several days earlier, but Harlan insisted on having a few extra days to train Bethy Rann's farmer-soldiers. It turned out the sea captain had a knack for command. Even Bethy Rann was grudgingly impressed between bouts of petulance.\n\n\"The men hang on his words like dogs waiting for a treat,\" she said of Harlan. \"They seem to long for more training, but that is because he mostly tells stories instead of making them sweat.\"\n\nFor Harlan's part, he had developed an affection for the famers among Rann's ranks, and a dislike for her so-called soldiers. \"The ones who think they know something are a lot harder to train than those who have never held a sword before. The rest are miners or farmers who know how to keep quiet and use their backs to get things done.\"\n\nAs we gathered around a fire at the edge of the camp on the final night before the attack, Harlan pronounced the men to be barely fit to hold a farmhouse against a flock of angry chickens. \"But that's an improvement. When we started, I'd have bet the chickens would've overrun the place.\"\n\n\"We don't need them to storm the walls,\" Rann pointed out. \"These men have stout hearts. All those who stayed despite what we have faced have the bravery to match any Rolman soldier.\"\n\n\"They have bravery,\" Harlan conceded. \"The rest all fled. If we need some rock crushed or shit spread across newly plowed soil, victory would be assured. Unfortunately, their lives depend on using a sword. I've taught them the most rudimentary formations and some basic thrusts. Many don't even have proper weapons, much less armor or shields.\"\n\n\"They will hold,\" Rann declared with unconcealed annoyance in her voice. \"You spin many fine tales\u2014indeed you have my soldiers listening more of your stories than swinging weapons. But they seem to like it. A number of them would sign aboard for your next voyage, I have no doubt. They all admire you. They'll hold to line as long as you do.\"\n\nHarlan smirked. \"Many a sailor will toast your name so loud and so often the gulls start to squawk to you as they fly past, but you don't know if that same seahand will keep steady in a squall until the water is puking in their eyes.\"\n\nRann stared at him, confused. \"What is your babble about?\"\n\n\"I'm saying I don't know if those farmers will run away again, and neither do you. They may not even know themselves.\"\n\nRann put her hand on the hilt of her blade. For a moment I thought she might pull it out of its scabbard, but instead she pronounced, \"We shall find out. I will order them to march tonight.\"\n\nI could've contradicted her. I could've reminded Bethy Rann that none of this would happen if I didn't want it to happen, but I didn't for two simple reasons: The first was that I've learned that humans get upset when reminded of their obvious need for a dragon's help. The other was I suspected Rann would've attacked without me, now that Crema was sufficiently healed, and she would certainly lose.\n\nI flew back to Crema with Bethy Rann on my back. Harlan stayed with the army. While Rann had left Gorge in ostensible command, Harlan had the ear of the troops. I didn't like Rann on my back, but it was temporary. Not having Harlan with me for the attack would also leave me better-able to maneuver when trouble inevitably arose again. I hoped Harlan didn't get himself killed while we were separated.\n\nHarlan and Gorge began to march their troops north in the darkness, using torches to light their path along the main road. It would be a slow, deliberate march, which was fortunate, since that was about all that group could handle. The hard part fell to Crema and me, of course. But I preferred it that way. Better to handle things myself than rely on others.\n\nWe waited for the deep depths of the night to arrive, the time when even the second watch in the keep's towers would be numbed by the monotony of staring at the darkness. I'd ensured an appropriate amount of cloud cover, denying the sentries any natural light to ease their task. Many days and nights had come and gone without incident since our last failed attack on the Twisted Keep. The defenders behind the wall of the fortress thought the army sent against them had been annihilated. Based on Crema's lack of movement, they probably thought at least one dragon was dead. Although Lord Drehan had doubtless told his soldiers to remain wary, humans were lazy creatures (not that there was anything wrong with that).\n\nRann's new plan was daring. I liked that part. I didn't like the part about it relying so much on predicting humans. Still, I'd spent a week trying to come up with a better alternative, and I hadn't, so I flew once again toward the Twisted Keep.\n\nThis time there would be no chance to be ensnared in any enchanted net. The arc bolts would not fly at us. We were barely even attacking the place. More like an unfriendly visit, made possibly by Bethy Rann and her childhood knowledge of the secrets of the great citadel.\n\nI dipped out of the clouds first, coming down directly above the keep. Crema and Bethy Rann followed my instructions to stay well in my wake. If Lord Drehan had somehow anticipated this tactic, I wanted to be the one to face his defenses, not Crema with her damaged insides. Below me was the central axis of the Twisted Peak, a horribly-mauled carcass of rock that had once been a mountain. On its sloping summit was a lone observation post that was dreadfully inhospitable to human habitation due to wind, temperature, and sheer difficulty to access. There were no fires inside the structure. That was as expected. Even Lord Drehan wouldn't have anticipated what was coming\u2014perhaps because he was too sensible.\n\nI landed atop the peak, the surface of which reminded me of a partially-melted candle, except this place was icy cold. Wind whipped with a fury, constantly shifting directions as if frustrated that the peak still stood. The mountain face below was sheer on all sides, with the only apparent way to access the peak a precarious winding staircase that wrapped around the ever-narrowing mountain. If I was as wingless as a human, I would have found an excuse not to use those stairs.\n\nI searched about for the structures and enchantments that Bethy Rann claimed would exist in this forlorn place, but saw no sign of any man-made devices except the squat stone outpost that barely looked large enough to fit two very friendly humans. Frustrated, I gazed up to look for Crema. The patchwork dragon appeared a moment later. She had more trouble dealing with the shifting winds than she should have. Rann was bundled in several layers of worn rags over her armor for warmth. Crema landed beside me.\n\n\"Where is it?\" I asked, impatient. Rann relied on her childhood memories for this plan. I didn't like that.\n\nRann directed Crema to two different spots on the mountain. The dragon sniffed and clawed at the frosty surface, but didn't find anything.\n\nI growled unhappily. I wanted no more human mistakes. \"If you are wrong, let us leave now.\"\n\nRann slid from Crema's back, careful to keep a hand on the dragon's leg for balance on the uneven peak. \"They are here. Do you notice there is no ice up here despite the temperature? This place collects ice, snow, moisture. But the rocks have shifted after decades of neglect by the Rolman occupiers.\"\n\nWith Crema's help, Rann took a few more uneasy steps, bending over to inspect rocks that she claimed were enchanted to melt snow and ice but just looked like rock to me.\n\n\"See the slope?\" Rann pronounced excitedly. \"It's a drainage system.\"\n\nShe scraped at the frigid rock with her foot, without moving a stone. I reached out with a claw, clearing a decade of debris.\n\n\"That's it!\" Rann proclaimed with relief.\n\nIt wasn't much to look at\u2014about a dozen metal bars covering a square access shaft that led into the heart of the mountain. If Rann's memories were correct.\n\n\"It doesn't seem very large,\" I observed.\n\n\"There are several others, here and further below. But this is the highest shaft, and it is unguarded. They all lead to the same place. We've done it.\"\n\nShe was too excited. \"We've done nothing yet besides find some metal on top of a cold mountain that you claim leads to the keep's water cistern.\"\n\n\"It was the only flaw in choosing this location for a fortress,\" Rann babbled. \"They had everything else\u2014an excellent harbor, wide views, bedrock below, this shell of a mountain on which to build\u2014but there wasn't a natural water supply. The designers repurposed some of the shafts used here from the time before the Cataclysm, when this mountain was first mined. They found some tunnels that led to a huge, burrowed-out chamber. It became the great cistern. The rock is enchanted here just enough to ensure that the ice melts, providing a constant flow of water to the citadel.\" Rann laughed with satisfaction. \"Drehan probably doesn't even realize these are up here.\" She pulled a satchel from around her neck, emptying the powdery contents down the shaft. It drifted down like falling sand, disappearing into the bowels of the mountain.\n\n\"That's it?\" I asked. \"Just some poison sand?\"\n\n\"That will be enough to foul the keep's water supply. This was all the dried melis we had in camp. The healers use it to treat infections, but if you drink enough, it'll kill you.\"\n\n\"All humans need to drink, eventually,\" I agreed. \"If your poison works, we don't need to go any further. We can just wait.\"\n\n\"I told you, this isn't enough to be lethal\u2014I don't think. The cistern is very large. Enough for a thousand people. But people will get sick\u2014very sick. Lord Drehan will notice and he'll figure out the cistern has been contaminated. There will still be some other water supplies, plus barrels of ale in storage. This won't be enough to defeat the garrison. We must continue.\"\n\nI already knew that, but I didn't completely trust this plan, so I had prodded one more time.\n\nI stretched my neck to peer down from the summit. The heart of the citadel was beneath us, nestled against the rock of the mountain, ensconced behind the layers of walls and towers. It was an impressive sight, but none of it mattered without food and water.\n\nI thought I detected the faint shimmying of hidden netting around the walls, although it might've been paranoia born of my previous encounter. In any case, I wasn't going to fly near the wall tonight. This plan required a less dignified form of movement. Reluctantly, I began my crawl down the battered mountain, pausing with each step to dig my claws into the mountain face. The rock was coarse and strong. Debris rolled down the peak. Rann hadn't considered that\u2014it might alert those below. Too late now. I pressed on, with Crema behind me. My claws ached after a short distance. I wondered how Crema, with her damaged body, fared against the rock. She was following, but sluggishly.\n\nWe worked through much of the remaining night to reach a perch above the uppermost tier of the Twisted Keep, a ring of wall mostly built onto two large ledges on opposite sides of the mountain that were linked by arching stone bridges that spanned the gaps. According to Rann, much of the keep's food supplies were stored in caves within the mountain itself. I doubted even the clever Lord Drehan imagined that we would attack the food supplies as we intended.\n\nThere were soldiers on the wall, even in the depth of the night. The towers had fires lit and sentries within. Massive catapults rested silently on the battlements, interspaced at regular intervals with ballistae, but none of the siege engines were attended. As I neared, I detected a bit of commotion among the soldiers\u2014talking and running. It was more activity than I would've expected at this time of the evening. The falling rocks may have given some warning of danger, or at least made the watch concerned. All the more reason to press our attack quickly.\n\nSuppressing a surge of dread, I released my grip on the mountain, allowing myself a fleeting moment of freefall before twisting around and spreading my wings as silently as I could manage. It wasn't quite enough. Several of the soldiers had the sense to look up. There was a stretch of fateful silence on the wall as the human eyes processed what they saw, even though they wished they didn't.\n\n<I'm here and I'm real, little crunchies.>\n\nBells rang excitedly as I tossed the first ballistae off the wall, sending the contraption plummeting to the ground far below. The noise of the impact would do far more to awaken the keep's defenders than any clanking metal. It didn't matter anymore. The climb to the top tier was a long, hard slog for a biped, and we'd have done what we came to do before any reinforcements arrived.\n\nOn my second pass over the battlement, I scooped up a human soldier in my left foreclaw and tore him in half using my right. I threw both pieces onto the wall. That seemed to sap the bravery from the few other fighters who had gathered. They fled, running along the wall, a winding retreat down to the next tier of the keep. They wouldn't be coming back up again. Crema swooped in behind me, landing on the ledge near a great wooden door that was nearly large enough for me to squeeze through comfortably. For Crema's smaller frame, the portal was an easy fit. She bashed down the door with two flicks of her tail. Rann slid down and ran inside, sword drawn, although she had said that she was certain there wouldn't be anyone inside the cavern. I continued my assault on the wall, driving the defenders around the mountain, across the arching stone bridge, toward the next protruding ledge. Authoritative shouts from far below told me that at least one responsible human commander was awake and trying to organize some sort of defense. Still, the defenders retreated, running as fast as their stubby legs would carry them. I could've caught and killed them all, but I didn't see the point. A few more soldiers would make no difference to Rann's plan. I contented myself with being a herder of the terrified.\n\nRann re-emerged from the cavern. \"This is it. The storage cavern. There will be another chamber accessible from the other side of the mountain.\" She scrambled onto Crema as she shouted at me.\n\nIf the defenders were aware they were retreating from critical positions, they showed no sign of it. The short-term human instinct for self-preservation was keen. I hurried them along with several low passes and loud roars. The cries of terror were amusing until an arc bolt smashed into the mountainside just as I flew past. Several ballistae on the wall beneath me had been readied and crewed. Two more bolts hurled into the air, but I had enough forewarning to soar away, putting myself into an arcing loop that took me far enough away from the keep to get a thorough look at the state of the defense below. I was pretty sure I also got my first gaze at Lord Drehan. I had never seen him before, so I had no idea what he looked like, but I can recognize a pack leader. This particular human was an island walking through a stream of soldiers, the men hurrying to stand aside, then falling into line behind as he barked unhappy noises. Drehan was also a head taller than the rest of the soldiers. My study of my adversary was cut short by an arc bolt that came so close it rubbed against my tail spikes.\n\nCrema had reached the next ledge\u2014it was empty of defenders. I flew above her, wary of the situation below. I swung around the mountain, following the path of the citadel's wall. I didn't have to go far before I saw Lord Drehan again. This time he was moving steadily up the keep's wall, a tail of soldiers at his back, all clutching swords and crossbows as if they would help. They saw me, but there wasn't much they could do about it. I flew to the upper tier, yanked the largest catapult I could find, then returned, dropping it in the midst of advancing soldiers. The machine landed hard, exploding into shards of wood and metal. One soldier was crushed beneath the wreck. I thought that would be enough to halt the advance, but I was wrong. Drehan pressed on, moving as fast as his legs would carry him. A bunch of intrepid soldiers kept pace with him. I fetched another large catapult. This time I swept in lower, intending to drop it directly on Lord Drehan's head.\n\nThe soldiers were ready for my attack. A swarm of crossbow bolts greeted me as I swung around the mountain. Unless they were enchanted, the projectiles weren't overly dangerous to any part of me except my eyes. Still, with Drehan I took no chances. I swerved, throwing off my aim. My catapult bomb hit the wall. A shouted command to retreat echoed in my ears as I went to retrieve another siege machine to drop on the stubborn defenders.\n\nWhen I returned with a final present for the retreating soldiers, I spotted two large ballistae being pushed up the wall by teams of men with large shields on their backs, their efforts assisted by several unfortunate oxen. The metal of the deadly machines glinted as the first rays of the newly emerging sun climbed above the horizon. I looked to the south as the new daylight spread across the ruined ground that led to the keep. In the distance I could see Harlan and the rest of Bethy Rann's army marching toward us. The defenders could see them as well. Anxious horn blasts followed, one after another, as if blowing ever louder could somehow improve the defenders' increasingly desperate position.\n\nThe ballistae stopped moving upwards. I landed on the wall above Drehan's troops, my wings stretched. Lord Drehan gazed up at me. He had long, flowing white hair and eyes like burnt leather. We looked at each other. He would not get past me. The wall could accommodate only four humans standing shoulder-to-shoulder. I could wipe out the little lord's entire army four at time if he tried to assault my position. Drehan was smart enough to know that. He had probably also realized by now that his enemies controlled most of the keep's food stocks. Drehan snarled as he turned away from me, shouting. His voice echoed through the night, still controlled and confident. He went to rally his troops against the approaching threat on the ground.\n\nIt was time to find out if Harlan's pretend soldiers would prove their mettle in battle."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The Rolmans attacked at midday.\n\nIt wasn't a surprise to me or to Harlan. Bethy Rann's host had marched up the single road at a languid pace all through the morning. It was like waiting for a turtle to cross a bridge.\n\nFrom my vantage point on his wall, I could see Lord Drehan watching Rann's small army approach. The tenuous master of the Twisted Keep surrounded himself with soldiers and every ballistae in the keep's arsenal, although none of those would've kept me from killing him had I wanted. But it wasn't time for that. Not yet.\n\nLord Drehan had to have been hoping that whoever had command of the remaining host was stupid enough to come as close to wall as they had last time. That would maximize the opportunity for his harriers to reach their lines in a raid, but Harlan wasn't stupid. The host stopped marching well beyond the range of any war machine. The harriers would have to exhaust themselves just to reach those distant lines. This was to be a siege, and Harlan made that obvious. His first orders were to have his troops start digging trenches to protect their new camp. Digging was one of the few activities his army had significant experience performing.\n\n\"Drehan is frustrated,\" Rann said to me, as we watched events unfold below. She was a little too happy with how well her plan had worked out so far. I didn't like seeing her so pleased. Happy humans were reckless.\n\nDrehan took the only course of action available to him. After night fell, he opened the gates of the Twisted Keep, sending out his harriers. He probably knew enough about King Mendakas's dragons to know we had excellent vision\u2014including excellent night vision. I watched the long-legged runners dash out. There were few enough that Harlan's farmers might've been able to fight them off without my help, but I wasn't going to take that chance.\n\n\"Stay wary.\"\n\nI was speaking to Crema, but Rann answered. \"We will hold. No matter what comes, we will hold.\"\n\nShe held her bow in her hand as she spoke. I still didn't like it. Crema wasn't herself, and Rann was still a human, even if she shot a fine arrow.\n\nWith a huff of breath, I took off to deal with the harriers. They had broken into three groups as soon as they left the gate. I supposed they moved fast for humans, but their legs moved them pathetically slowly compared to me. Once I was in the air, a fourth group of humans departed out of a side gate, taking a circuitous route toward Harlan's men. I ignored them for now. Each group of harriers was just large enough to pose a legitimate threat to a hungry, untrained host that had already suffered two crushing defeats.\n\nDrehan had calculated well. I decided I couldn't afford to ignore any of the attackers. I'd have to kill them all, which, as efficient as I am, would take time. I had no doubt that Drehan would send everything he had at Crema and Rann while I was doing that. I recognized Lord Drehan's plan, but there wasn't any clear way to stop it. My speed, armor, and killing power were superior to Crema's, and my insides weren't part dead, so I was the logical choice to chase the attackers. All she and Bethy Rann had to do was hold the narrow passage through the battlements against a bunch of humans while I was gone. I intended to make my absence short.\n\nTwo groups of harriers were well ahead of others. I picked one of the faster groups at random and dove at them. They expected me, each armed with short bows or crossbows. The humans scattered as I came at them, some diving for the barren ground while others fumbled with their weapons. I impaled one with a claw. When I circled back around, the harriers were back on their feet, running in two different directions\u2014one group back toward the keep, while the others continued toward Bethy Rann's host. I flew at the attacking group, but they split themselves again. I killed two with my claws and a third with my tail, then had to turn to chase the other group. I dealt with them as well, leaving a bloody mess on the ground. I soared back to an observation altitude, surveying the position of the various harrier formations. They had split into eight groupings and were moving across as wide a front as the land allowed. Two formations had turned back toward the keep then stopped at seemingly random locations out in the open. Too easy, but also too many.\n\nAnnoyed, I selected a cluster of about two-dozen advancing harriers. I pulled my wings back and dove, intending to make quick work of the group before they hugged the ground like the others. Instead of hiding, this group formed into defensive ranks as soon as they spotted me coming for them. I was unsure if I should be impressed by their courage or appalled at their temerity for thinking they could stop me. These harriers all had short bows. I didn't fear their arrows, but I didn't want to get hit either. I changed my course slightly, taking a less direct approach that would give me more time to maneuver around their arrows.\n\nUnlike the other soldiers I had attacked, these humans held in tight ranks even as I came toward them. They must've been the elite of Drehan's soldiers. Why waste them on what was probably a suicide mission?\n\nA fusillade of arrows came at me. I turned my torso, and with a single beat of my wings, pulled myself out of the projectiles' path. A second wave of arrows came. I turned again, but as I maneuvered, I saw these launches were different than the others. Their tips weren't metal, but some kind of dark material that resembled burnt wood, but wasn't. Several seemed to be leaving a train of ash behind them as they shot through the air toward me, as if turning to ash in flight. I didn't have time to study them further. I just tried to get out of the way. As close as I'd come to the archers, I was still able to mostly to avoid their shots.\n\nOne whizzed past my nose, its tip crumbling as it traveled. It missed me, but it had come too close for me to avoid its dust trail. I flew through the small cloud. The smell was putrid\u2014something terribly foul and acidic. The smell was also familiar. Another of the strange projectiles collided with my chest, sending a larger, more intense blast of powder into the air. I kept flying, straight and low, or at least I thought that was my course. Some humans were beneath me. I passed them, soaring through the sky, because that was what dragons did. I really didn't know where I was going for a few moments; the world was fuzzy, as were my thoughts. I turned to see a strange, slender mountain in the distance, a great twisting wall scaling its heights. I knew that place. I struggled to remember something else. Something about why I was here. Something I had to do.\n\nA pair of arrows flew across my path. My vision clouded then cleared. My head cleared enough for me to recall the last place that I'd smelled the scent lingering in my nostrils \u2026 It had been rather hot there, the air so clogged that I could see nothing\u2014just a dark fog. The full memory came suddenly with an unpleasant aftertaste: the Wall of Fire. This was the smell of the gas of the inferno mountains. Maybe the properties in the dust weren't precisely the same, but it was close enough. The substance led to confusion, at least temporarily. Fortunately, whatever Drehan had used to make his arrows was far less potent that the noxious gases constantly pumped out by the infernos that made up the Wall of Fire. Still, I hadn't enjoyed the experience.\n\nI flew into the sky, sucking cold wind to clear my thoughts. My sight returned to its full vigor. Anger came next. Part of my suppressed rage was directed at that devious crunchie, Drehan, but I saved more than a little enmity for myself. I'd assumed his trap would be the obvious one. I should've known better after those nets.\n\nFrom above, I scanned the terrain around me. My instinct was to dive, to rip the heads off the humans who dared fire the arrows. To kill the rest of the harriers for good measure as well. I made a tight circle, watching, preparing. As I watched, I realized that something else was wrong. The harriers were no longer advancing.\n\nThis hadn't been a raid, it had been a ruse.\n\nDrehan had spared only a small group of his best soldiers\u2014probably the ones who'd stood their ground to shoot at me. The rest were throw-away soldiers, not specially trained like the real harriers. They were supposed to make this look like a real assault, to force at least one dragon to come to the aid of the host. That meant Crema and Bethy Rann were taking the brunt of the real attack.\n\nI beat my wings as I dipped into a sharp turn, heading back to the keep at my best speed. The ballistae ringing the main wall were ready for me. The arc bolts rose at speed, hungry. I soared upward, wary that another dust-like projectile like those possessed by the harriers would come at me, but these arc bolts appeared to be mundane. The projectiles shot into the sky, but not high enough to reach me. In a moment, I'd passed the initial wave, on my way back to Crema. I dove straight down and found a disaster."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "It was the dust.\n\nLord Drehan had risked a few elite soldiers and some his inferno dust on me, because he had to delay me. The rest he deployed against Crema.\n\nI hadn't seen it happen. Maybe they used an arrow, maybe the delivery had been as simple as tossing an open sack at her as the soldiers approached. Whatever Drehan and his men had done, it had worked. Crema thrashed about on the keep battlements, her neck twisting wildly in a desperate attempt to find something that wasn't there. She was panicked. I was sure Rann had tried to sooth her, but even with their link, it hadn't been enough. Or maybe Rann never had the chance, because she was fighting for both her life and Crema's.\n\nBefore I left, we'd fortified the approach to upper tier storage areas using the debris of scattered war engines that I'd gathered from the citadel walls. They weren't much as far as barriers went\u2014Drehan's soldiers could climb over them if their armor wasn't too heavy\u2014but they had slowed the advance. Rann had given ground, but she wasn't beaten yet.\n\nBethy Rann squatted on the last of the barriers, using its height to help her launch her arrows at the attackers coming at her along the wall. Crema was behind her, useless in the fight, but safe for the time being as long as she didn't fall off the wall. There were at least two dozen dead Rolman soldiers with arrows in their necks, eyes, and chests. Nobody had ever criticized Bethy Rann's aim with a bow. Even with that toll, at least a hundred more Rolman soldiers snaked along the wall, waiting for Rann to kill them as they came at her four at a time. Among the soldiers was Lord Drehan himself. He barked at his men as soon as he spotted me. The soldiers surged forward with renewed urgency as Rann put an arrow in another neck. I wondered how many more arrows she had in her quiver. It couldn't be many.\n\nDrehan should've known when he saw me that his last gambit to retake the bulk of his food supplies had failed. Enough of his men were probably sick from the tainted water cistern that he also knew that his situation was desperate. Rann said any sensible commander would surrender once he realized the situation, but she hadn't counted on a man like Drehan. A human too accustomed to victory found it difficult to admit defeat.\n\nThe Rolman attackers came at Bethy Rann with long pikes, their bodies mostly hidden behind high-tipped shields. Rann muttered a battle cry, throwing her bow aside. Her quiver was empty. She met the assault, blade in hand. She had the high ground. The first of Drehan's soldiers stabbed at Rann's feet; she danced away, slashing down at the long pike shaft, shattering it with her sword. The soldier jammed the broken stub at her thigh. Rann rewarded his determination with a well-placed kick to the man's forehead, sending him backward into two other soldiers.\n\nAnother fighter used the opportunity to scramble up the pile of overturned catapults on which Rann stood. He jabbed a pike tip at her neck. Rann leaned away, swiping at his weapon, but the attacker jerked backward at the right moment, catching her blade on the jagged head of his pike and turning it aside. More soldiers came at her. While Rann regained her balance, her enemies had a chance to surge forward. She now faced two soldiers atop her hill, both wielding weapons with longer reach than her blade. Rann slashed in a broad arc, then jumped backward, surrendering the high ground as more soldiers surged at her.\n\nI could've entered the melee, killing with my jaws and claws, but I preferred to end this battle more efficiently. Killing foot soldiers took too long. Instead, I released a mighty roar of challenge as I flew directly at Lord Drehan.\n\nHe'd been busy shouting at his men, exhorting them to overwhelm Bethy Rann. I imagine in that wonderful moment before he heard my roar, before he turned to see my open jaws shooting toward him, he'd been feeling like his usual clever self. Despite the odds against him, Drehan and his men were on the brink of recapturing at least one of their food storage caves. With those supplies, plus rain water and whatever else they could find to drink, he probably thought he could save his keep. All that might've happened if I had been a little bit slower. Too bad for him.\n\nDrehan's men ducked behind the battlements as I closed. For some reason I didn't understand, the man himself didn't try to run. Perhaps the lord considered cowering to be beneath his station. I'd often heard human lords say things like that\u2014death before dishonor. It was like the Way for dragons, except humans mostly only pretended to be honorable. Or maybe Drehan just knew he was going to die. Standing alone on the battlements, the wily lord had just enough time to turn toward me. Three heartbeats remained in his lifetime. Fear creeped into his eyes at the end, but he started to raise his sword anyway. I bit his head off. All that honor didn't make his skull taste any better.\n\nAfter spitting out the remains of Lord Drehan, I circled back to deal with the soldiers facing Bethy Rann. I needn't have bothered. They saw their lord die, and they saw how he died. The soldiers retreated, running back down the wall. I buzzed their heads once as they fled, but didn't bother to kill any. I was done for the day. A quick reconnoiter to the south reassured me that Harlan and the host had held to their positions. The harriers had retreated once their ruse failed. I returned to Crema.\n\nWith Rann able to devote her full attention to the confused dragon through their rune link, Crema calmed. Her vision had already returned, although the shifting shade of her eyes told me that she was still disoriented. But she was alive.\n\n\"It worked,\" Rann pronounced triumphantly. \"Just as I said it would.\"\n\nI could've reminded her how close she'd come to being killed. I also could've pointed out that I'd saved her life, again, but what would that get me? It wasn't like I wanted a kiss.\n\n\"Is there meat in those caves?\" I asked.\n\n\"Your first concern is dinner?\" Rann pointed to the vast citadel below us. \"There are still hundreds of soldiers down there.\"\n\n\"All the more reason to eat now. Crema needs it more than me. If there is salt meat bring it.\"\n\nRann's back stiffened, her chin hard and unhappy. My stomach grumbled. Rann disappeared into the mountainside shaking her head. She emerged a short time later with an armful of dried, salted meat. It tasted slightly better than beach sand, but that was good enough for me at that moment.\n\n\"They had a lot of fight in them,\" Rann conceded. \"Drehan was a stubborn man.\"\n\n\"But not a tasty one, although he died very honorably. And he didn't have time to piss himself. That would make him happy, I suppose.\"\n\nRann smiled a cold smile. \"The rest won't last much longer. They have no water, little food, and no place to retreat.\"\n\n\"What will you offer them?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Then we should be ready for more fighting.\"\n\n\"No, they'll come to us before nightfall. Only then will I give my terms.\"\n\n\"Nightfall?\" I snorted. \"Fine. You have first watch. Wake me when the humans start climbing the wall again.\"\n\nRann was wrong about the timing.\n\nNight came and went, but no human came groveling up to us. Crema had recovered from the strange dust sprayed on her, but I still insisted that she rest while I kept watch. Rann should've slept as well, but instead she spent much of the night pacing about uselessly.\n\n\"Any change below?\" Rann asked me shortly before dawn. It was the third time she'd asked over the course of the night.\n\nI gave her the same answer as I had the other times she'd spoken. \"They are still gathered in the great hall.\"\n\nRann pursed her lips in frustration. I knew she wanted to ask more, but she also knew I wasn't going to answer. I didn't know what the Rolman soldiers discussed either. I could make out the occasional shout, but the building's walls were thick stone.\n\nThe morning came, but no messenger arrived. Apparently, the defenders had enough to eat and drink for the time being. Rann finally drifted off to sleep in late morning. Shortly afterward, three humans began their trek upward along the wall. I let Rann snooze until they were almost upon us.\n\nI poked her with my tail. Her face contorted into an annoyed scowl but she didn't open her eyes until I said, \"They come.\"\n\nThat got her onto her feet.\n\nI've noticed that humans tend to place more clothing and decoration on their body as their insecurity about a particular situation increases. These soldiers had encased themselves in full plate armor complete with face helm. One of them carried a fluttering dragon banner, and one wore a red cape that reminded me of a giant tongue. Rann and I met them on the wall, Crema a short distance behind us.\n\nThe human in the center removed his metal helm to reveal an ugly face decorated with a short grey beard with occasional specks of black. Sweat covered his brow and I could hear his lone heart pounding with fear. It was a long walk up in heavy armor.\n\n\"We come to speak under the peace of Haven. We shall do you no harm during parley.\" The soldier had to huff out his words. I hoped he didn't die of natural causes before he had a chance to surrender to us. Not because I cared what happened to him, but because I couldn't endure another night of Rann pacing back and forth while the Rolmans selected another spokesman.\n\n\"You couldn't do me any harm if you wanted to,\" I told him.\n\nRann shot me an annoyed look. \"No harm shall come to you so long as you honor the Truce of Haven. Come forth and speak.\"\n\nFor a moment, none of the humans moved. I smiled encouragingly, showing my teeth, but that only caused the men to glance nervously at each other.\n\n\"Speak your words or leave,\" Rann barked.\n\nThe first soldier took a step toward me, then another. His companions reluctantly followed. They stopped at two tail lengths. The others took off their helmets to show me their eyes, as if I cared. I didn't. Both had broken faces\u2014one had a patch instead of a left eye, the other's nose looked like it had been reshaped by a pig's hoof. They were all sweating.\n\nThe one with the grey beard spoke first. \"I am Utter Horn, Acting Lord of the Rolman Province of Ulibon and Master of the Twisted Keep.\"\n\nRann's face went flat. \"Your words are lost in the wind, Utter Horn. Ulibon is a nation unto itself. And you are master only of a band of thirsty soldiers in a land that is not your own.\"\n\nHorn huffed so hard the red of his cheek nearly glowed. \"You are a rebel. A renegade. A traitor!\"\n\n\"I am the Heir to Ulibon.\" Those words must've tasted sweet on her lips. She had been waiting to deliver that declaration for most of her life.\n\nActing Lord Horn's jowls trembled. \"I didn't come here to listen to insolence!\"\n\n\"Why did you come here?\" Rann asked mildly. \"It was a long trek up.\"\n\nHorn mashed his teeth. Whatever words he had intended to speak, he swallowed them. What came out sounded desperate. \"Pigeons were sent when you crossed the Clutch.\" He looked at me with loathing. \"King Dayne knows all that is happening here. You may hold some caves high above the citadel, but even with these pet dragons, you cannot stand against the king and his ryders.\"\n\nThe mention of other dragons did draw my attention. \"And where is the King of Rolm and these other dragons?\" The whiteness around Horn's pupils grew when I spoke. \"My kind move at great speed. They should be here by now, should they not?\"\n\nA twitch at the corner of Horn's eye told me I'd hit a sore place, a place of worry. Why had his king not come? Still, he tried to keep his bravado. \"He shall come soon, when you least expect it, if you continue with this doomed rebellion.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the war with Oster doesn't go well?\" Rann prodded. \"I've heard that Rolm is beaten, but too prideful to admit it.\"\n\n\"You lie! Oster is on its knees,\" Horn insisted. \"They are surrounded and starving as the king and his dragons pound the Shard. The Pale Wrights cower in fear in their pits. Soon, the king will return to deal with you.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Rann laughed. \"That's what you came here to offer? A retreat?\"\n\nFor the first time, Horn turned to look at the men who had accompanied him. They one-eyed man nodded unhappily, while the one with the bashed-nose scowled. \"The offer is this: Leave the citadel with your dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not anyone's dragon,\" I pointed out.\n\nLord Horn gaped at being interrupted. This place was so different than Ni-Yota. He swallowed a bit more pride before continuing. \"Yes, ah, well \u2026 if this host and all dragons depart, and you swear allegiance to the crown, you would be granted title, and right to govern all the lands south of the Clutch.\"\n\nRann's brow raised high. It was a more generous offer than she had expected. \"The king sanctions this offer?\"\n\n\"The notion of this offer came from Lord Drehan \u2026 before he was slain.\" Horn looked at me as if I'd done something wrong. I smiled my human-style smile at him again. \"The offer is made in the name of peace in the kingdom. It is most generous, and will not be made again.\"\n\nI trusted no offer from a dead lord, who offered that which wasn't his. It didn't matter anyway. I knew Bethy Rann already had made up her mind.\n\n\"Your offer is rejected.\"\n\nAll three men blinked at the same time. \"This is our land and our keep. We built it. You are the trespassers.\"\n\nHorn lips puckered as if Rann had shoved a sour lemon down his throat. \"You'll \u2026\" He trailed off. He really had nothing else. They probably didn't have many more supplies.\n\n\"Here is my offer. My only offer.\" Rann smiled. \"There are still ships in the harbor\u2014some of the last on Ulibon. I will give you and your men three. Those among your soldiers who wish to leave in peace may leave their weapons here and depart on tomorrow's tide. Those among your men who wish to declare their allegiance to Ulibon are welcome to do so. I will accept the service of those who pledge their loyalty to me.\" Horn started an outraged stammer, but Rann held up a hand to silence him. \"Those among you who take neither option will stay here to die of thirst, or if it rains in the next few days, you may starve instead.\"\n\nHorn opened his mouth, but no sound came out. I could hear his heart trying to escape his chest with its angry beats. Finally, he managed to emit a croaking sound vaguely reminiscent of a dog's bark as he turned on his heels so hard that he nearly tripped. Long strides carried him back down the wall. The others left as well, but Smashed-Nose dipped his head politely in Rann's direction before he departed.\n\n\"At least one of them will tell the other soldiers about my offer. They'll have a mutiny on their hands soon enough.\" Rann sounded too confident.\n\n\"Not to offend you, but your offer doesn't sound tempting: Sail to Eladrell, where they may be hung as traitors, or swear allegiance to a rebel monarch and her ragged army.\"\n\nRann pointed behind her, toward the storage caves. \"Better than starving. Hard decisions become easier for men with empty bellies.\"\n\nBy late afternoon the human defenders still hadn't given any indication of surrendering. I was impatient. The rust was spreading in Ni-Yota and my brethren could be dying in Oster, despite Horn's claim of impending victory.\n\n\"Rann, this must be brought to an end.\"\n\nShe had resumed her pacing already. \"One more demonstration may be required.\"\n\nI didn't like the sound of that. \"You have exhausted your favors.\"\n\n\"All you need to do is sit here and continue to look fearsome. Crema and I can deal with the rest.\"\n\nI liked the idea of sitting, but not of Crema putting herself in danger. But as it turned out, Rann's idea was maliciously practical. She fetched several barrels filled with dried fruit from storage and had Crema begin to fly them out to her army to the south. This served the purpose of getting supplies to her own hungry troops, as well as showing any Rolman holdout that their food supplies were being consumed by others. Seeing a dragon overhead while your own king and his dragon ryders was absent probably damaged morale as well. After Crema's third trip, two humans left the great hall to trek upward to speak again. When they arrived, it was the Smashed-Nose and a new companion with wide shoulders and stubby legs.\n\n\"Where's Horn?\" Rann asked.\n\n\"He didn't like your offer,\" Smashed-Nose replied as he tossed a canvas bag onto the ground. Horn's head rolled out. The eyes were still open. \"Always a suck up to Drehan, that one.\" He shrugged.\n\nRann barely looked at the severed head. \"And what are your allegiances?\"\n\nAn ugly smile of blackened teeth appeared on Smashed-Nose's face. \"I'm called Rupel, my lady. I mean, Your Highness.\" He dropped onto one knee. \"I'll be the first to be your man, if you'll have me.\" When Rann hesitated, he added, \"I'm the master-at-arms. I'll know the best of the men and who you can trust.\"\n\nThe obvious question seemed to be whether this Rupel could be trusted, as he'd just delivered the head of his previous commander. I was sure Bethy Rann shared my doubts, but she wanted possession of the keep far more than she cared about the sincerity of fleeting allegiances.\n\n\"I am grateful for your service.\" She looked expectantly at Rupel's companion who also now dropped down in front of us. I snorted louder than I should have.\n\n\"Rise, both of you. Carry word to the other soldiers: They must choose quickly.\" Rann made a fist. \"And open the gate.\"\n\nBethy Rann's new retainers hurried off to carry out her bidding. I guessed that King Dayne's temper would make most of the soldiers reluctant to take to the ships. This battle was over, but there were many more perilous engagements left to fight.\n\n\"The Twisted Keep has fallen,\" I reminded Rann.\n\n\"Finally.\" She spoke in a reverent whisper. \"Destiny has been fulfilled. My parents are avenged, and my brother can rest in peace.\"\n\nI was less sentimental. \"That's wonderful. Time to pay up, Bethy Rann. Tell me where to find aurathorn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Wait and wait some more.\n\nI pretended to have patience, while Bethy Rann secured her control of the Twisted Keep, unwilling to get distracted by such trifles as keeping her word to me. She claimed that the story she had to tell me required sufficient time. More likely she feared her long-sought victory evaporating if Harlan and I flew off to get aurathorn while the Rolman soldiers still lurked with their weapons within the keep.\n\nThe sun had started to dip toward the horizon when Rann's host of pretend-soldiers marched through the gates, almost as nervous as the Rolman defenders who watched it happen. Discipline within Rann's force broke down quickly as the hungry victors raided the keep's food stores. Water still had to be rationed\u2014it would take time for the great cistern to regenerate after it had been drained. The soldiers didn't care, because there was more than sufficient ale for a lot of humans to get drunk. Harlan struggled to retain some semblance of discipline among the farmer-fighters of Ulibon. Finally, Rann had Crema terrify a few people to get the revelry under control. Almost two days were wasted on such nonsense. At least I got some ale.\n\nAfter a nearly eternal wait, Bethy Rann's installation as Highstar of Ulibon was set for the next morning. I didn't plan on attending. I wanted her knowledge of aurathorn and I wanted to be gone. There was also the matter of the enchanted items Rann had promised, but that could wait until I knew where to find aurathorn. I summoned a noisy thunder cloud to remind Bethy Rann that she was out of excuses.\n\nAs night fell, I carried Harlan with me to the highest tier of the Twisted Keep. Bethy Rann flew on Crema to join us. Shouts and sounds of revelry still emanated from the citadel below, but far less than when victory had been fresh.\n\nRann slid off Crema with something like a smile on her face. She moved with ease in her motions, free of the tension of the prior days. She had put aside her gaudy costume armor in favor of a cotton robe of unblemished white trimmed with ebony on the edges.\n\n\"May with winds be kind to you tomorrow,\" Harlan said a bit formally as he and Rann eyed each other awkwardly.\n\n\"Patience defeats the storm,\" she relied, a slight twinkle in her eye.\n\n\"How many in the garrison will take to ships tomorrow?\" Harlan asked.\n\nRann shrugged. \"More than half, which is for the better. It will take time to trust those who chose to swear to me. For now, they are more mouths to feed. I don't dare give them weapons back yet, either.\"\n\n\"There are many fishermen among your own troops. You might outfit them with small craft.\"\n\nI growled at the banter of these details. Ruling Ulibon was not my problem. \"We are here to speak of aurathorn,\" I reminded everyone. \"Where did it come from?\"\n\nRunn dipped her head, gathering herself. \"The elders traded for it, with your mother's help.\"\n\nHarlan was quick to reply. \"What does one trade for aurathorn? And with who?\"\n\n\"I don't know the price, but it was high\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Harlan asked.\n\n\"It was obvious by the attitudes of the elders, their looks, their secrecy. Even your mother \u2026 I just got the feeling in the pit of my stomach that something terrible had been done.\"\n\nThis banter was beside the point. It was history. \"Enough with the details and speculation. Where did they get it?\" I demanded. \"Where is the source of aurathorn?\"\n\nRann fixed me with a hard stare, her eyes intense for a reason I didn't quite understand. \"Oster. It is in Oster, I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"Oster,\" I repeated, not liking the taste of the word.\n\n\"Worse than that.\" Rann crossed her arms. \"They traded with the Pale Wrights.\"\n\nSomething I'd eaten earlier turned sour in my stomach. \"Why would anyone in Oster\u2014especially the Pale Wrights\u2014trade with a few refugees on Maricopa at all, much less for aurathorn?\"\n\n\"I believe the trading relationship between Oster and Maricopa wasn't new. The enchantments of the elders required raw materials that weren't readily available on that desolate island, yet they always seemed suspiciously well-supplied.\" I thought of the barrels and boxes that Brindisi and I had discovered, many stuffed with valuable items. And there was the fine, warm sand from Proving Beach of Oster to consider as well. That had definitely come from Oster.\n\nI thought aloud, not liking the dark places my thoughts led. \"Trade with Oster was banned. Those items that your elders possessed hidden in their village were rare and expensive. The exchanges must've been made for precious payment.\"\n\n\"I would think that part is obvious\u2014they must've traded enchanted items. Probably for years, even before I came there. There was one old, odd fisherman who always took particular long voyages\u2014Hellix was his name. He delivered the goods and likely returned with Osteran supplies.\"\n\nParts of what Rann said made sense, but others did not. \"I fought Oster many times over the years. Apart from the odd artifact, they didn't have enchanted weapons. Certainly nothing like the armaments of Ulibon.\"\n\n\"As I said, the elders didn't trade with King Galt of Oster. They traded directly with the Pale Wrights. There is a big difference. Galt may not even have known about the illicit trade.\"\n\nHarlan shuffled with unease. \"Who are these Pale Wrights?\"\n\n\"They are the masters of the beasts of Oster\u2014they bred the griffins and furies that guard that island, even against dragons.\"\n\nI flicked my tail unhappily. \"But the Pale Wrights serve King Galt. They are servants of Oster.\"\n\nRann moved her head in two directions, as if weighing my declaration. \"I have only an outsider's understanding, but from what I know, Oster is a complicated place. I had the benefit of being raised in the Twisted Keep and listening to snippets from the powerful. The Pale Wrights are a power unto themselves, far more so than even the Sculptors of Rolm. The keepers of DragonPeak spoke of the power of the Pale Wrights with envy as much as fright or disgust. None had ever actually seen or met one of course. No one from Rolm has.\"\n\nHarlan's gaze bore into Bethy Rann as she spoke. \"But you think that the enchanters on Maricopa traded with these Pale Wrights without the knowledge of their ruler?\"\n\n\"Having now had time to consider everything, for several reasons, I do believe this,\" Rann told us. \"First, as you said, I never saw the elders produce an enchanted weapon. Not for their own use, and not for anyone else, either. The few times I spied one of their creations, it was always some strange device with no obvious purpose\u2014a hand-sized sphere, a strange leash, gauntlets too thin to be worn by the hands of an adult. But even more were the words of old Hellix. He wasn't a talker. In a village of dozens, he kept to himself more than any other, which is perhaps why the elders relied on him to run their errands. In all my time on the island, he was either out on his sloop or walking the barrens of the isle.\" Rann paused in memory. \"He was never sick \u2026\" She said as if it was a revelation. \"At least I can't remember a single instance, not in winter, not in summer, not so much as a cold. Except once--after your mother came, after a voyage that took him away for longer than any other.\"\n\n\"You think that was when he brought the aurathorn back with him?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"There is nothing in the annals of my people to indicate that aurathorn leads to illness,\" Harlan said too defensively.\n\n\"Perhaps meeting the Pale Wrights was what made him sick,\" Rann replied. \"When I brought Hellix a bit of broth that Jilla the herbalist had prepared for him, he had a dark look in his eyes that I'd never seen before. When he gazed at me, he was barely himself for a fleeting moment. Then he told me 'Beware creatures who cannot abide the light of Haven, child. Nothing that comes from them will bring goodness.'\"\n\nThose words felt ominous.\n\n\"But they are men, are they not?\" Harlan pressed. \"The Pale Wrights are still men, like me, if lacking in my particular charms.\"\n\nRann shrugged. \"The Pale Wrights are whispered about like ghosts in the night, almost the stuff of children's tales. The masters of the mysterious beasts of Oster. It is said their eyes cannot abide the light, because they spend their whole lives underground working their dark arts. Others say their skin will blaze in the day, like fresh tinder in a fire. The stories do not speak to their humanity. Perhaps none ever thought to even ask the question before you. If they are not human, what would they be, Harlan Dor?\"\n\n\"This world is habited by innumerable creations,\" Harlan replied in his deep, storyteller's voice. \"Humans are most apt to make their presence felt, dragons among the most visible and majestic, but do not discount the creatures of the darkness. You should not forget about the rest, for that is what they want: To be overlooked. But they exist, and they hunger and want, even as you and I.\"\n\nBethy Rann scoffed. \"You spin a fine fireside tale. The Pale Wrights are recluses, although maybe not more so than the Sculptors of Rolm. As outsiders and enemies, it stands to reason our tales are darker. In Oster they may be viewed less fearsomely.\"\n\n\"You speak as someone who hasn't yet seen true darkness.\" Harlan warned.\n\n\"Dark or light, if you wish to find aurathorn, you must go to the Pale Wrights. Of that I am certain.\"\n\nHarlan nodded slowly, determined. We knew where to go. But I wanted something else. \"Your elders paid the Wrights with enchanted artifacts, but that was for gold dust, for rare sand, and other precious materials needed for enchantment. What did aurathorn cost them? You must at least have a guess.\"\n\nRann's face darkened. \"I think we should be grateful that we don't know.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "We ended up staying longer than planned.\n\nIt wasn't that I cared about witnessing Bethy Rann become Highstar of Ulibon. I stayed because Rann had more promises to deliver\u2014those enchanted items in the hidden vaults of the Twisted Keep. If I was going to fly to Oster in the midst of a war, I needed all the assistance I could get my claws on. While part of me chafed with impatience, the extra night and day of waiting yielded worthwhile benefits.\n\nBethy Rann had not lied about the storeroom of artifacts; items that had remained hidden since the fall of Ulibon decades ago. The storeroom wasn't within the keep proper. Instead, it was accessible only by following a precarious staircase on the highest reaches of the mountain. The enchantment laid upon the strange steps made them visible only during the last gasps of twilight, when the sun's fading light struck the stone in a particular manner, illuminating a path only for a very careful observer. The way was challenging for a human: the steps led up a daunting slope, then into the mountain itself.\n\n\"How do you know about these stairs and this cache of artifacts?\" Harlan asked as Bethy Rann led him along the strange path, while I flew nearby. \"Even if you grew up here, it's hardly the sort of place someone would bring a supposed servant.\"\n\n\"My mother wanted me to know all the secrets of Ulibon,\" Rann said, a hint of pride lingering in her voice. \"She told me how to get here.\"\n\nHarlan wasn't satisfied. \"You seemed to know so much more about it than mere stories or instructions would warrant.\"\n\nRann stopped on the precarious steps to look back at Harlan. As a dragon ryder, she had no fear of heights. Her balance was impeccable. \"There were others whom my mother trusted who knew about me,\" she said before resuming the trek. \"Not all of them are dead.\"\n\nThat answer seemed to satisfy Harlan for the moment. He shut up until Rann reached the chamber of artifacts. The passage was too small to allow me to enter, so I had to rely on Harlan's description of its precious contents. For himself, he chose a hooded tunic that looked to have been forged of a thin metal-like cloth.\n\n\"It is as light as leather, but nearly as strong as mail, with the hood almost as useful as a battle helm,\" Rann assured him. \"A fine choice for a dragon ryder.\"\n\nHarlan looked embarrassed at her words. \"Or at least someone who is fortunate to be on friendly terms with a dragon.\"\n\nI wasn't as fortunate as my human companion in terms of selection of treasure. The items within the vault were of no obvious use to a dragon. The weapons and armor had been forged for humans. There were also several of the deadly nets that had been used to snare Crema, as well others strange baubles with uses that escaped even Bethy Rann's knowledge\u2014or so she claimed. I claimed nothing of the ancient treasure.\n\n\"I gave a promise, and I intend to keep it,\" Rann declared. \"Tell me then what would be of use to you?\"\n\nThere was something I wanted. \"I go to Oster, and likely to battle once again. Sai would be valuable against those griffins and whatever other horrors the Pale Wrights breed.\"\n\nRann looked puzzled. \"Sai?\" Then she remembered our earlier conversation. \"Yes, the armored gauntlets for your claws, similar to those of Crema, but you require only coverings.\"\n\n\"Enough for my hind claws would be sufficient.\"\n\nBethy Rann pursed her lips. \"My people didn't keep dragons, so we will find nothing like your sai waiting for us inside the chamber, but there is one who can help. It can be forged.\"\n\n\"Forged?\" I asked.\n\nRann's lips made a satisfied line. \"The art of shaping enchanted devices has not been lost. More than just my crude knowledge remains in the world.\"\n\nI already knew that had to be the case based on the metal that adorned Crema's body. Rann hadn't made all of those fine pieces of armor. \"There is someone here who can forge me sai?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Rann said, her lips turned downward. \"Although she isn't likely to be pleased about it.\"\n\nBethy Rann allowed Harlan and I to meet the master forger. She was a crinkled human female with a tightly-wrapped tail of hair the color of weathered steel. When she first arrived at the tower where we stood with Rann, her worn cloth dress made her look like a sack with legs and arms. None of the soldiers and self-important counselors who now clustered around Bethy Rann even noticed the woman. Not until the future Highstar of Ulibon sent the rest of the sycophants away, except the old woman.\n\n\"This is Mildred.\"\n\nI expected a title to follow, because most humans really liked titles, but Mildred appeared to have none.\n\nHarlan introduced himself to Mildred with a flourished bow, as if the title-less old woman was nobility.\n\nMildred's brows were as wrinkled as the rest of her face, but her eyes were alert, studying Harlan and me while the drooping skin on her face remained absolutely still. After an odd silence, Mildred turned to Bethy Rann, \"You have brought some unusual specimens into your service.\"\n\nRann didn't correct her servant's misstatement about my status. \"It has been a difficult journey to get here. I needed unusual assistance.\"\n\n\"A long, twisted journey to restore your throne,\" the old woman agreed. \"I've been waiting long years, but the last weeks took the longest. I would've thought a commander with not one, but two dragons to aid her could've made faster progress. I've grown weary of washing clothes these many years.\"\n\n\"You served the Rolmans!\" Harlan said to Mildred. \"That is how Rann knew so much about the keep's provisions and other supplies. Not from childhood memories. You are a spy.\"\n\nThe old woman wasn't flattered. \"I am a servant in the keep. No one notices servants, particularly one as old as me.\"\n\nRann took in a long breath. \"Mildred served my mother, as an advisor and a friend.\"\n\nThe old woman scoffed. \"Your mother didn't have friends. She was too clever to trust strangers.\" The woman named Mildred glared at Harlan as she said the last. \"She didn't even trust her husband. That's why you are alive. And it is why Ulibon once again has a highstar on its throne. You would be wise to heed your mother's wisdom.\"\n\n\"A ruler must keep her promises, and I made promises to Bayloo. He saved my life and he saved Ulibon.\"\n\nMildred appraised me as if I were a hog and she a chef choosing the choicest cut of meat for a meal. \"Your father was never able to recruit dragons into his service. Perhaps you are wise in that.\"\n\nI understood why Rann hadn't corrected this ill-disposed woman's earlier misstatement about my being a follower, but I was long-since done pretending to be anyone's slave, or even their servant. \"I owe allegiance to none. A debt is owed.\"\n\nRann gritted her teeth as Mildred furrowed her steely brows. \"I \u2026 see \u2026 You are a free dragon.\" She made a clicking sound with her tongue. Apparently, this caused her to repeat herself in an even more morose tone. \"A free dragon.\"\n\nI drew my neck upward, staring down at this strange woman from even higher above. I remembered humans said wine tasted better after it had aged. Was the same true of their own flesh? \"I am a free dragon, woman. And this rabble of an army would be scattered or dead had I not lent my aid.\"\n\nMildred wasn't impressed. \"Indeed. If a dragon says so, it must be so.\"\n\nBethy Rann spoke into the tension between us. \"Mildred, I have promised Bayloo a set of claw covers similar to those you made for Crema\u2014sai, as they are called in the ancient homeland of my ancestors.\"\n\nThe old woman stared at her liege as if she were a talking goat.\n\nI decided to be helpful by lifting a leg so that Mildred could get an accurate sense of the size of my claws. She only looked for a moment before turning back to Bethy Rann. I put my leg down.\n\n\"And what are these devices to be forged from? There is no more ore, none alive here can create the sisolic primer, unless you, Bethy Rann, have somehow found divine inspiration in the art of enchantment?\"\n\nRann kept her voice steady. \"You can melt down blades from the cavern.\"\n\n\"The last artifacts from the time of your father!\" she gasped. \"They are irreplaceable.\"\n\nRann looked at me, then back to her frustrated servant. \"The honor of my word is worth even more than an enchanted blade.\" She spoke with slow-boiling anger. \"Do it, Mildred. This is my command.\"\n\nMildred grunted at me, as if this was all my fault. \"Stick out your claws again, dragon.\"\n\nI obliged, displaying my magnificent appendages once again. If the old woman was intimidated by me in any way, she hid it well.\n\n\"Who do you plan to kill with these, dragon?\" she asked casually.\n\n\"Any I must.\"\n\nA skeptical huff followed. \"If a dragon wants magical claws, it can only be to pierce dragon scales. You intend to kill your own kind?\"\n\nI didn't answer her because I didn't like what I would've had to say, and because it was none of her business.\n\n\"I remember when your kind came here the last time,\" Mildred said as she ran a hand along one of my claws. \"Dragons are excellent killers.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are,\" I said, trying to sound menacing.\n\nMildred shrugged. \"It was not a compliment. Kill away, then. Each time one of Rolm's dragons die, Ulibon grows stronger. And when your kind are all dead, there will still be Ulibon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "I sought the Pale Wrights of Oster.\n\nThe enchanted sai that Mildred had forged from the artifacts of the Twisted Keep fit snugly on the claws of my hind legs. The tips were deadly sharp and the metal deceptively light, but they didn't compare with the originals I had worn in Ni-Yota. True sai felt like part of me\u2014these were equipment, like the saddle on my back. Mildred might have been a skilled enchantress (perhaps even the last true enchanter) but she was unaccustomed to making items for dragons. Or she'd intentionally left something lacking in her work. I wouldn't have put it past the crone. We had also rushed her\u2014she'd wanted a week, but I could stay for only an additional two days, during which time I'd watched Bethy Rann get a crown placed on her head by some overdressed humans, babble out speeches, and give people who'd done nothing to help win the war elaborate titles. I slept and ate a lot as well, so time hadn't been completely wasted.\n\nWhen we departed Ulibon, Harlan and I had supplies and enchanted equipment, as well as the promise from its new ruler that her new-born domain would aid us in our time of need. Rann's victory also helped me in another way: The Sapphire King of Rolm had been humiliated. I knew King Dayne couldn't abide being seen as a fool. Anything that hurt him had to help me.\n\nMy regret was leaving Crema. Neither free nor slave, neither healed nor ill, she existed in a middle state. She and I were kin, but she remained linked to Bethy Rann. Before I left, I privately promised Crema that I would return to set her free. Then she could make her own choice to stay or leave. The maimed dragon gave no sign of having understood me, but I felt better.\n\n\"Where exactly are we going?\" Harlan asked as the Twisted Keep became a memory behind us.\n\n\"To Oster, of course. To find the Pale Wrights.\"\n\n\"Aye, that much I gathered, but \u2026 do you even know where to find these Wrights? The way you and Rann spoke, they are almost as much myth as flesh.\"\n\n\"They are real,\" I assured him. \"It is said they live under the ground with the creatures they breed.\"\n\nHarlan sounded skeptical. \"Underground?\"\n\n\"I don't plan to go into their pits,\" I assured Harlan. \"I think they will come to us.\"\n\nThat wasn't good enough for Harlan, so he made me explain more. I was actually glad when I spotted a Rolman warship plying the waves off the coast of Oster. Better to face the Rolmans than keep talking.\n\nI saw the vessels first, but Harlan knew ships, so I continued to approach, keeping within the cloud cover as best I could manage.\n\nHarlan impressed me with his vision. \"Four large vessels in the open sea, three masts apiece, all flying the Rolman dragon. They move in a tight squadron, daring any other ship to challenge them. Their captain must be confident that he has command of these seas.\"\n\n\"We are well inside Osteran waters, but Oster took heavy losses in their last attack on Rolm before I left. Many of their deadly flying beasts were slain, and I have little doubt that a good number of their warships were destroyed. There isn't anyone else to challenge Rolm on the seas. Even the pirate king wouldn't dare to attack four Rolman warships.\"\n\n\"The ships run heavy in the water,\" Harlan observed. \"Plenty of cargo or soldiers in those holds.\"\n\nI considered what Dayne would need to conquer Oster that would have to come by sea. \"My brothers and sisters can burn castles, but to actually rule all of Oster requires human soldiers. Or they may carry provisions to the soldiers already there, since there will be little else to take from the land. Oster was starving when I left\u2014that's what prompted them to attack Rolm.\"\n\n\"I still see no landmass. How much farther to Oster?\"\n\n\"It will take those ships at least another day of sailing with the wind at their back to reach the outlying isle. For us, we could be gazing upon the mighty Shard before the sun sets, if I wish it, but it would seem prudent to do a bit of scouting first. I don't want to be detected by my fellow dragons.\"\n\n\"Are you certain the Rolmans will besiege this Shard?\" Harlan asked. \"You've told me Oster is larger than Ulibon. There must be many castles.\"\n\n\"There are other great fortresses in Oster,\" I agreed. \"But to truly win the isles, one must capture the Shard. The great fortress rises from the sea in the midst of a narrow channel that cuts through the three islands that comprise Oster. When the tide is low, land bridges appear within the Shifting Straits that allow ground travel between the great isles of Oster, but only by passing under the shadow of the mighty Shard. It is the seat of King Galt, and it is there that any battle for Oster will be fought.\"\n\nI could almost hear the thoughts in Harlan's head clicking as he considered countless additional questions to ask me I knew I wouldn't feel like answering. \"It is rather amazing that any fortress could stand against so many dragons for so long.\"\n\n\"You haven't seen the Shard,\" I assured him. \"It is like no other stronghold in all of Inkra. Even in Ni-Yota, nothing compares.\"\n\n\"If we fly to that place, will not both sides see us as a threat?\" Harlan asked. \"You are a dangerous renegade dragon to the Rolmans, and an apparent enemy to Osterans.\"\n\n\"Dayne will be at the Shard, his dragons fighting against the remaining might of Oster. The Shard has never fallen. But that isn't where we are going.\" I beat my wings faster. Better to arrive at Oster sooner than keep answering questions. \"We need to go someplace even more dangerous.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "I awaited twilight.\n\nDragons can peer through night almost as well as day, but it was during the half-light between, when our sight was deprived of the contrast, that our vision was most limited. At that time, we were merely well-sighted. Twilight would offer the best chance to approach our destination without being seen by Dayne's slave dragons.\n\nOnce I reached the barrier islands on the outskirts of Oster's home waters, I swept south, taking a circular course to reach the far side of the island. As I flew, the sun dipped ever-lower to the horizon, until finally only the fading vestiges of its light seeped into the sky.\n\n\"Once again\u2014where are we going?\" Harlan asked, his voice a whisper.\n\n\"The Pits of Gargen.\"\n\n\"That sounds ominous.\"\n\nHe wasn't wrong. \"The Pits are where the beasts of Oster are bred and trained.\"\n\n\"Their beasts are not at the Shard? I would think with a war going on \u2026\"\n\nI grunted my impatience. \"The Shard hasn't the space\u2014you'll understand when you see it. The griffins and other creatures there are already trained and grown. The Pits of Gargen are for breeding and rearing and who knows what else. It is a labyrinth of underground tunnels that link the great breeding pits, some so deep and lightless than even a dragon cannot see to the bottom.\"\n\n\"You've been here before?\"\n\n\"No, no one from Rolm\u2014no human and no dragon\u2014has ever gone into the pits. They are near the Shard, but surrounded by a poisonous waste that is infested with furies and bore worms. The pits themselves are underground, impervious to fire, but more importantly, they have no strategic value. There was never any reason to go there.\"\n\nHarlan released a low breath. \"Then why go now?\"\n\n\"We know the Shard will be besieged by Rolman dragons. The air around it will be carefully watched by eyes as sharp as mine. I will be seen if I approach, twilight or not. And even if I could get to the Shard, the defenders would think me a slave dragon, and their griffins and furies would try to kill me. Also, going there is unnecessary. We are here for aurathorn, are we not?\n\n\"Yes,\" Harlan agreed quickly, sounding relieved at my logic. \"You believe aurathorn is in these pits?\"\n\n\"I have no idea where the aurathorn may be, beyond what Rann told us. But she said that they obtained it from the Pale Wrights. The Wrights are masters of Oster's beasts, and legend has it they have an aversion to sunlight. They dwell in the Pits, only rarely venturing out. If we wish to speak to them, we must go to the Pits of Gargen.\"\n\n\"I'm in favor of avoiding unnecessary storms. Let us go directly to our objective. How do we get to these pits?\"\n\n\"They exist in the shadow of the Shard, across the watery causeway, far enough that we might have a chance to slip past both Rolman patrols and Oster's own forces.\"\n\n\"But you said the Pits are surrounded by poison lands and fearsome beasts,\" Harlan reminded me.\n\n\"Yes, but at least there won't be dragons to fight.\"\n\nHarlan groaned, which annoyed me. It was just another example of why I disliked explaining myself to humans. Their moods shifted quicker than the wind and with even less reason. Did Harlan think this was going to be easy?\n\nI bided my time out at sea, beyond the sight of any dragon that might be flying around the Osteran coast, until I judged the light to be most advantageous. When I was satisfied, I dove toward the waves, hugging the water so closely I could taste the salt. Oster's coastline came into view soon afterwards.\n\nThis wasn't the first time I'd approached Oster prepared for battle. I flew along the southern tip, where I knew of no great castles or valuable ports, where I hoped there would be less fighting. I beat my wings, increasing my speed. It was the first time I'd noticed the beauty of Oster's coastline. Beaches of fine white sand extended far off the shore, gently dipping into the sea. Small boats were pushed up onto the sand beyond the reach of the highest tides. Small villages clustered together not far from the water. The land rolled gently, mostly uncut by roads or other human works. Even the farms, brown and withered, had an empty, tragic beauty. The slave dragon I once was couldn't see or understand such things. I wasn't sure if it was a good thing these feelings struck me now. With a free mind came complications.\n\nThe sights of war weren't absent, of course. Oster was a small place, and the smoke of war hung in the distance. I knew that dragon fire was likely responsible for the burning. The dark clouds clustered to the north, near the heart of Oster, where its three islands were closest. Rising from the narrow channel that bisected Oster stood the Shard, grand with defiance. Lurking in its shadow to the south lay the Pits of Gargen.\n\nTo reach the Pits, I had to traverse much of southern Oster. I raised my altitude as I flew, skirting the bottom of the clouds. Eventually, I would be seen, but I wanted to postpone that as long as possible. In the chaos of war there was always a chance I would be overlooked by Rolman dragons as long as I didn't fly too close to the Shard itself. Furies protected the Pits, but I wondered how many. Surely, the Shard had the greater need for precious furies if the situation was truly desperate. Even Dayne wouldn't dare attack the Pits of Gargen.\n\nThe quiet landscape of the southern reaches of Oster faded quickly as I flew. Gone were quiet, seemingly empty villages and fields. In their place was scorched ground and scattered ash. In many places there were fresh burial pits, in others the dead had been left to rot, picked over by scavengers. The few humans living amidst the devastation fled in utter terror as I passed overhead. There was no doubt my kind had done this. I didn't understand why they\u2014or rather, the humans who commanded them\u2014had bothered. Food was already scarce. I saw few keeps or castles on my journey, and certainly none of any military significance.\n\n\"I've not seen anything like this before,\" Harlan said in a whisper. \"Even in Ulibon the burning was not so complete.\"\n\n\"King Dayne.\" I hissed out the name, knowing I was right. The destruction wrought on these lands was vindictive. And no one did vindictive like my former ryder. Even though the link between us was severed, I remember the twisted, hate-filled mind of Rolm's king. I knew this was done at his command. That he'd forced my kind to do this made it worse still.\n\n\"Why?\" Harlan wondered.\n\n\"Human children lash out at that which they cannot control. I know this child well, and this is how Dayne lashes out.\" I pushed myself ever faster. because this needed to be dealt with, and because I had no wish to gaze upon scars left by dragon breath longer than necessary.\n\n\"In its way, this is worse than the rust,\" Harlan said. \"Here there is no purpose, just destruction.\"\n\nThe landscape turned even more grim as we flew north, drawing closer to the Shard and the Pits. There wasn't a single village that had been spared its own inferno. Of the once-proud castles of Oster, I saw not one still intact. Only blackened stones remained. In past wars, Oster's fearsome beasts had kept the worst of Rolm's destruction at bay, the furies contesting our attempt to control the skies. That no longer appeared the case. King Galt's desperate gamble to attack Rolm had failed terribly and his people were paying the price. A tragedy for the inhabitants of Rolm, but an opportunity for me. The furies would be needed at the Shard.\n\nNight was almost upon us as the ground below faded from farms and villages on rolling plains to flatlands of gray.\n\n\"It's a sea of nothing,\" Harlan remarked of the bleak land. \"Dragons did this?\"\n\n\"No, this isn't the work of my kind. These are the clay flats of Oster. It is unlike any other place that I know of on Inkra. The ground is hard and smooth, like plaster. Nothing grows here, nothing lives here. In most places, it is like rock. But for a land walker it can be deadly as well. There are places where the surface is as thin as parchment and a single wrong step will send you plummeting into a crevasse or maybe to the Abyss itself. And there are bore worms. We are close to the Pits. I must watch for furies\u2014stop distracting me.\"\n\nWe had come so far without being challenged. My eyes scoured the strange grey land below, watching for danger. Any lurking furies would be partially buried, still and waiting. I covered the distance quickly, uneasy at the ease at which traveled across hostile land.\n\nI knew the peace in the sky could not last, and it didn't. Our position was now close enough to the Shard that I could see it across the dark waters of Shifting Channel. Surrounding the fortress on its landward sides was the army of Rolm. They were few. Indeed, the host wasn't larger than Bethy Rann's army when I first found it, although these soldiers would be the elite of the Dayne's fighting force\u2014the men who merited precious space on a dragon's back or berth on a ship. A large army wasn't necessary when there were dragons. My winged brothers and sisters crowded the peninsula, behind the lines of soldiers and their dirt-walled encampment. My hearts pumped as my eyes focused on them, searching for those I remembered and trying to count how many were already lost. The dragons were so few \u2026\n\nMy attention was in the wrong place. Harlan spotted the threat before I did. \"They come,\" was the only warning I got.\n\nEven without seeing the danger, I knew my prior distraction was potentially deadly. I couldn't do things like that, not when flying over Oster, not when Dayne lurked nearby. I didn't have time to make my own decision about how to react. I just heard Harlan's words and moved. I yanked myself into a sharp turn, twisting my neck and sweeping my tail with a hint of mad desperation\u2014just hoping that something I did would save our lives. I needed some luck, but I wasn't lucky.\n\nI felt my enemy before I saw it. I knew the sensation\u2014pain. But a particular kind of pain; the distinctive sensation of a fury's stinger lodging itself into the scales of my rear quarter. Oster may have sustained heavy losses, but clearly they hadn't been beaten. Not yet.\n\n\"By the cook's ass!\" Harlan hollered. It was as shocked as I'd ever heard him. A first encounter with a fury could do that. \"What in the Abyss is that?\"\n\nI didn't have time for lessons. I was beating my wings for altitude, heading into nearly vertical ascent in case there were others, but that would also mean a brutally long crash if the fury burrowed deep enough for its stinger's poison to work. \"Can you see it? You must cut the stinger out of me.\"\n\n\"If I leave this saddle now, I'll be flying without wings.\"\n\nI leveled my course. Hopefully, I was high and far enough from ground to avoid any other attacks. Harlan unstrapped himself and scrambled out of the saddle, grabbing my mane as he crawled along my spine. \"I see nothing.\"\n\nThe fury continued to burrow into me, its saw-like mandibles making chillingly quick progress through my armor. The poisonous stinger would follow the instant the creature's jaws found my flesh. I hadn't much time. \"On the left of my tail, just above my hind leg. The creature cannot be knocked off\u2014its claws are designed to lock onto things\u2014but the stinger can be severed. Once that happens, it dies.\"\n\nI assumed Harlan heard me, but he gave no further acknowledgement. I felt him move further along my body. I kept my flight path slow and steady so he could work. I told myself Harlan was handy with his daggers. He'd get the fury off in time. He was close. Then everything got worse.\n\nFrom the north, flying at speed, came dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Two great ash dragons flew at me.\n\nI knew them\u2014Cornethius and Blaris. Of course, those were the names humans had given them. They had no true dragon names.\n\nI remembered each of them, their scent, their roar, the way they moved through the air. I had no doubt they remembered me as well, although their sentiments wouldn't matter. They were slaves, and their ryders came for my blood. I had only moments before they would lay their fire upon Harlan and me.\n\n\"Dragons come,\" I roared. \"Fire breathers.\" Harlan didn't acknowledge me. He was concentrating on trying to reach the fury digging through my armor to poison me.\n\nNeither Cornethius or Blaris were as large as Gia, but they were large enough. I could sense their thirst for battle, their desire to kill. That was strange to me, for I cared for these dragons. I wanted to save them from their shackles, yet I knew they would show no such mercy. To them\u2014or rather, to the ryders who controlled them\u2014I was worse than a mere enemy. I was the fear that must lurk somewhere in the recesses of the human mind each time a ryder mounted one of my kin; The fear that the slave would consume its master.\n\nIn normal times, I could outfly either Cornethius, with her uneven left wing, or Blaris, with her stubby tail. But to do much more than fly steady risked losing Harlan. The fury still chewed, its stinger ever-closer to my vulnerable flesh. Harlan still struggled along my back at his agonizingly slow pace. He had almost reached the fury, but it was too late. Cornethius had arrived. My brother unleashed his fire at my backside.\n\nI rolled in the sky. It was that or let Harlan roast in my brother's flames. Perhaps the enchanted armor would protect him, but I couldn't take that chance. Cornethius's breath struck my underside instead, bathing me in heat. My scales absorbed it. I looked for Harlan's falling body. I saw a dagger fall instead, followed by noise that sounded like a choice sailor's curse.\n\nThe burrowing fury's stinger finally reached my soft flesh.\n\nI've never had molten metal poured into my body, but I suspected that the bite of a fury sting was similar\u2014an instant of pain so intense it blinded me. A flood of lesser agony followed the initial shock, as the fury's poison pumped into me. The creature itself fell away as soon as its stinger was in place. Its mission was done.\n\nThe poison paralyzed me as it moved through my blood. The sensation was uniquely unpleasant\u2014a wave of searing pain that left disconcerting numbness in its wake, as it moved up my body. I was large, and the fury had attached to me far away from my hearts, but the stinger would keep pumping, fueling the poison's advance. The real race was now whether I'd die from falling out of the sky due to paralysis, or if the liquid death inside me would stop my hearts first. I preferred the latter. Dying in a splattering crash lacked dignity.\n\nHarlan's voice interrupted my musings on death. \"I cut it out!\"\n\nThe numbness of my hind quarters was such that I couldn't feel the stinger. I could only take his word for it. The poison waves pushing through me seemed to slow, but didn't stop. Maybe I hadn't gotten a lethal dose, but with two dragons pursuing me, it didn't matter.\n\nA mass of scales and claws slammed into me. By her scent, I knew it was Blaris. She'd hit me at speed, propelling her foreclaws into my exposed chest. Instinctively, I whipped my head around toward the attack. An arrow from Blaris's ryder greeted my careless action, the projectile's tip coming within the length of a human finger from blinding me. Cornethius was already on his way back toward me for another pass. I was in no condition to take on these two dragons.\n\nI let loose a definite roar as Blaris smacked my chest with her tail, twirling away from me. I beat my wings, intending to flee. I was faster than any dragon except Rinxia, but that was before the fury's poison had found its way into me. I managed to move my wings, but I felt as if I was flying with a couple of horses strapped to me. Still, I pushed on. I didn't see any choice. The pounding in my head matched that of the hearts in my chest. Air swirled behind me as Cornethius cut through the wind. He'd be on me soon.\n\n\"I'll have to fight,\" I warned Harlan. I barely choked the words out. I sucked for air, my body protesting every movement I ordered it to make. There was no chance of using magic. I could barely keep myself in the sky.\n\n\"Dive,\" Harlan shouted at me. He'd almost made it back to his saddle.\n\nI did, because I couldn't think clearly enough to do much else, and dropping was easy. Cornethius' claws passed over me in the near darkness. Like a madman, Harlan stood on my back, holding onto nothing as I barely managed to pull out my dive and steadied myself. A moment later, a blade of metal twirled through the air. A grunt from Cornethius' direction told me that Harlan had somehow managed to hurl one of his daggers into his ryder's back. Impressive and reckless. It wasn't enough.\n\nAs Cornethius hollered with rage and concern, Blaris came at me. It was infuriating how easily the slower dragon overtook me in the sky. Back at DragonPeak, she was a slug to my hare, or something like that. Blaris attacked from below, hurling fire as she closed the distance separating us. I think she intended to try to latch onto me, to force me from the air so she and Cornethius could tear me to pieces on the ground. I preferred a different outcome. Blaris expected me to try to maneuver away from her. She probably didn't know about the fury stinger and how badly I'd been hurt. Also, like all the fire breathers, she had contempt for my own lack of breath. I flew directly into Blaris's fire, raising my neck to help protect Harlan from the flames. The heat washed over my face. My nostrils curled, even though I held my breath. In an instant, my jaw was on Blaris's neck. Her fire stopped as the grey-scaled brute twisted her tail to try to strike me. She hit hard, but not hard enough to force me to release her. Blaris stopped beating her wings, and I could barely move mine, so we plummeted toward the ground. Harlan shouted something, but I really didn't have time to focus on him.\n\nI bit harder, cracking some scales. Blaris got a claw on my chest. I dug two into her belly scales, but even with the sai fitted on me, I lacked the strength in my legs to do any real damage. Cornethius gave me a bloodthirsty roar as he chased us down toward the ground.\n\nI could've shattered the scales on Blaris' neck. I could've plunged my jaws into her flesh. Even in my crippled condition, I think I could've killed my sister, but I didn't. If I did that, I lost, because I had killed more dragons. And I probably would die in the crash that would have followed. I needed to escape, but I couldn't outfly this pair with a numb hindquarter and poison weakening the rest of my body. I needed another escape route, and there was only one.\n\nI unlatched my jaws from Blaris. \"We are meant to fight together as kin. One day you'll understand.\" I summoned what strength I had in my legs and wings, launching myself away from Blaris.\n\nI overestimated my remaining stamina, as well as the speed of my descent. I got scant push off from my diminished legs. I gasped for air as I spread my wings. That slowed my fall, but didn't stop it. The ground still came at me, as did Cornethius. I growled as I pushed my wings, forcing them to move. Cornethius adjusted his course, intending to block my retreat back to the south. There was no escape in that direction, but I already knew that. I headed north instead, toward the Shard. Cornethius followed, but warily, expecting me to change direction suddenly, as he knew I could. Blaris finally steadied herself and joined her brother in stalking me. They still didn't understand my plan.\n\nI pushed on with everything I had left, catching a fortuitous blast of wind to aid me in my flight. The two dragons pursued, but they couldn't believe where I was going. They through it had to be a trick of some kind, but it wasn't. I was really that desperate. By the time my pursuers realized my destination, it was too late to catch me, even if they had wanted to continue.\n\nDarkness beckoned, a certain doom that any dragon would be mad to willingly pursue, but that is what I did because I had no choice. I was dying, and I needed what I might find deep below the surface of this world. I located a large gap in the ground. It might have been the final passage to the Abyss for all I could see. My wings failed me just as I turned, sending me into an uncontrolled plunge into the depths of the Pits of Gargen."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "I woke to voices that weren't human.\n\nThe noise was too deep, too sharp, and I couldn't understand the words. My body was mostly numb, except for my left foreleg, which burned as my blood seeped out from a gash through my scales. I didn't remember that injury happening. I did remember my wings striking something hard as I fell in a dark tunnel, but nothing after that. Presumably, I hadn't landed well. I didn't know where I was precisely, but I knew I was in trouble.\n\nI opened my eyes reluctantly. I should have kept them shut.\n\nA quartet of oversized wolves stood in the passage, their eyes glowing a sinister amber. Each was easily twice the size of their normal ilk, even bigger than the war wolves Oster deployed in battle. There were other small differences as well\u2014their snouts were shorter and their fur curled like a coarse sheep's wool. Also, they talked.\n\n\"En-hanted,\" the largest of the pack said. The creature sounded like it had consumed a human and the unfortunate fellow was speaking from inside its belly, sans a tongue.\n\nThe other wolves emitted more traditionally vicious growls. They were really unhappy about something.\n\nMy wit returned slowly. First, I noticed that one of smaller wolves was leaking blood from the part of its skull where there should have been an ear. Another had an open cut on its nostril. Then I noticed Harlan, a dagger in each hand, looking very distressed. Blood smattered his enchanted tunic armor, but it wasn't his\u2014it was the wolves'.\n\nI realized the pack had probably tried to kill me while I slumbered, but hadn't succeeded. I had Harlan to thank for that, it seemed.\n\nThen, I realized the giant beast had said enchanted. Wolf jaws apparently had trouble with certain human sounds, just like dragons.\n\n\"It w-akes,\" another of the wolves said, its speech even rougher than the alpha.\n\nI intended to tell the pack that I eat wolves (or I would if given the opportunity), but I found my jaw balky and uncooperative. The unintelligible slobbering that emerged drew a quizzical head tilt from the alpha, followed by a contemptuous bark that I think was a wolf version of a scoff.\n\n\"You are bro-ken,\" the alpha said with satisfaction.\n\nI managed to draw myself up slightly and even move a wing\u2014enough to know there was no chance of my flying out of here. My hearts seemed to be working too hard. Even after Harlan had removed the fury stinger, there was still poison in my blood.\n\n\"Trapped,\" the alpha purred.\n\nI was still having trouble getting my jaw to work properly, but I managed a few intelligible words. \"No need to fight.\"\n\nThis sent the pack in a tizzy of barking scoffs. They quieted only when the alpha spoke again. \"You let us kill you now?\" His eyes glinted. \"Big meal to end the hunger.\"\n\nThe pack crooned at that idea. Even the wolves were starving.\n\n\"I came here to tal \u2026\" I could barely understand myself. I tried again. \"Talk not fight.\"\n\nThe alpha's glowing eye bulged. \"Talk to who, meaty drag-in?\"\n\nI took a calculated risk with my reply. \"Your masters.\"\n\nI wondered if these wolves had any self-esteem, or if they accepted their status as slaves willingly. No magic held them. They followed commands that they had been trained to obey since birth.\n\nThe alpha gave me a saliva-dripping snarl. \"The masters do not bother with the likes of you. The masters say investigate, kill, eat whatever you wish, then report back. Says nothing about talk.\" The alpha seemed to consider its own words. \"Too much talk already. The hunger calls.\" The wolf sprang toward Harlan, who stood between the pack and me. The alpha was fast, but Harlan was equal to the challenge. In a blur of arms and feet, he repositioned his body sideways to present a narrower target for the alpha, while keeping alert for the inevitable arrival of the rest of the pack.\n\nThe alpha pulled up just short of the tip of Harlan's dagger, yanking itself backward, hoping to draw its victim off balance. Two other wolves came at Harlan from his left, while one sulked forward from the other side. Each of the creatures must've weighed more than Harlan; a single bite would mean his death. It was remarkable he'd been able to keep them off of me at all. Maybe that was due to the armor he'd gotten from Bethy Rann. How long had I been unconscious?\n\nThe predators first came slowly, then quickly. Harlan spun like a dancer, slicing a wolf's muzzle while elegantly twirling toward the attacking pair's flank side. The alpha jumped forward again, his ugly jaws open to reveal two rows of fang-like teeth the color of steel. Even without feeling a bite, I knew those jaws had been bred to shatter dragon scales. I summoned the last of my fading strength to swing my tail at it. I missed badly, but a large dragon tail was enough to make any wolf wary, no matter how big and bad. My failed attack left the alpha unscathed, but allowed Harlan to scamper to a better fighting position. He also backed up closer to me, another wise move. Unfortunately, I was going to be less than helpful in this fight.\n\n\"All part of your plan, I suppose,\" he muttered to me.\n\nI saved my strength rather than struggle with a reply.\n\nThe wolves reformed in a semi-circular formation. This time they advanced more warily, each footfall made in unison, their spacing worthy of a well-drilled regiment of Mizu soldiers. I could barely keep my neck up. If the wolves realized the full extent of my weakness, they would slaughter us. I needed to end this melee while there was a chance for an outcome that didn't involve me becoming a meal for a bunch of glorified dogs.\n\nMy body was numb, my jaw locked, my head addled, but I knew what I needed to do.\n\n\"Get me a moment,\" I said to Harlan.\n\nHe understood what I meant. Before the wolves could react, Harlan slashed to his left, before launching a spinning attack to his right. The wolves were shocked at the audacity of their purported victim. They growled at each other. Harlan twirled a dagger in his hand, the wolves' eyes tracking the glinting metal of the blade. They thought he had some purpose. I knew better. Harlan was part genius, part madman, and it wasn't worth trying to decide which was which.\n\nI took the opportunity to close my eyes, plunging myself into darkness as I marshalled my will. I sought the Latticework. It was elusive at first, a mirage forever at the end of the horizon. But I needed it, and somehow that need pushed me where I must go. My grasp of the magic was as tenuous as it had been since I'd first learned what I was, but I didn't need to work any great binding of the Latticework. I merely needed the wind. I called it.\n\nThe cavern cooled. The wolves' acute senses noticed immediately. Their fur stood, their eyes searching about for the unexpected.\n\nI spoke my name\u2014my real name. As dragons choose their own names based on their deeds, my own had grown. The wolves might not have understood the meaning, but on an instinctive level they understood that which I wished to convey. \"I am He Who Crossed the Wall; I am the Dragon Without Chains.\"\n\nThe wind came at precisely the right moment, the sound of the torrential gust echoing off the walls of the pit, into the cavern into which I lay nearly incapacitated. The fearsome call of wind belied my own dwindling strength. The torrent yanked debris from the ground, pulling it upward in a swirling funnel. It was too weak to do any damage, but it looked impressive. I had certainly captured the attention of the alpha.\n\n\"What are you, drag-in?\"\n\nThe wind ended, with particles falling like heavy rain on the wolves. They scampered about, annoyed, but too wary to do anything about it for the moment.\n\nI clenched my jaw together until it ached. The pain gave me back enough control to say what I needed to say. \"I am the answer to your masters' desperate need. All of Oster is about to fall to your enemy, and even if you survive, you face starvation. Take my name to your masters\u2014I can save their lives and yours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "The alpha wolf left us.\n\nHis companions remained. I named them Anxious, Pacing, and Dangerous.\n\nI wasn't sure how long passed after the alpha disappeared into the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel behind him. My limbs trembled from fever and my addled mind kept drifting off into hallucinations. I had to keep reminding myself that the three impossibly large wolves, pacing impatiently a short distance away, were real, while the enormous roasted pigs that I saw dancing in air were not. Reality was desperately unfair.\n\nHarlan paced almost as impatiently as the wolves. He inspected my wound cautiously, trying not to reveal too much concern. He couldn't help me anyway. Harlan's energy was better spent watching the predators hovering nearby. The wolves sniffed at the air constantly, their eyes always on us.\n\n\"They suspect,\" Harlan whispered to me.\n\nI knew what he meant\u2014the wolves sensed my injuries. They just didn't know how badly I had been wounded. Fury poison was intended to kill dragons, but I might live because I hadn't gotten a full dose. And dragons don't die easily.\n\nThe wolves made low, growling noises to each other as they paced. Six amber eyes stared, but it was the wolf with the missing ear, who I'd named Dangerous, who took the first step toward me. Then he took another.\n\nDaggers appeared in Harlan's hands. \"Keep your distance.\"\n\nDangerous didn't listen. He came closer, followed by Anxious and Pacing.\n\nMy blood surged. I tested my tail to see if I could even move it. I could, but it was stiff. \"Be good pups and wait for your captain to return.\"\n\nSaliva dripped from the muzzles of each of the beasts. Their lean bellies heaved. Hate filled Dangerous' ugly eyes. The alpha had ordered them to wait, but I supposed there was a limit on how long a wolf held an order inside its furry head.\n\nThe pack continued to close, each step deliberate. Harlan spun his daggers dangerously The wolves didn't care. Their eyes were on me\u2014Harlan was just some meat in the way.\n\nDangerous sprang forward at Harlan. His trajectory would've put his paws on the human's chest and his jaw on his neck.\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nNo human voice gave that command. The alpha had returned. Dangerous tried to obey even as he traveled through the air. He twisted his body and snapped his jaw shut.\n\n\"Don't kill it,\" I said to Harlan.\n\nI wasn't sure how much the Pale Wrights cared about their vicious creations, but I doubted killing one now was going to be helpful.\n\nHarlan exhibited remarkable self-control. He couldn't completely avoid the massive projectile of teeth, claw, and fur about to land on him, but he did lower his dagger and turn at the last moment, letting his shoulder absorb most of the weight that struck him. He fell backward, momentarily helpless. The wolf could've torn him to pieces, but it didn't. Harlan scrambled back to his feet faster than a fallen cat, daggers poised, but not bloodied.\n\nDangerous backed away, but not fast enough for the alpha's satisfaction. The pack leader grabbed the top of Dangerous' neck in his jaw, flinging him away from Harlan as I might toss a bone from my jaw. The scolded wolf regained its feet slowly, head hung low. The alpha flashed a teeth-filled growl at the other two complicit wolves who had already sulked back toward the tunnel, both pretending to be interested in the tiny rocks that littered the cavern floor.\n\nThe alpha shifted its attention to me. \"You follow. You will not be harmed. This is the pledge of the masters.\"\n\n\"You want us to go in there?\" Harlan asked. He pointed to the great tunnel behind the wolves. It was large enough that I could fit with my wings folded, but I certainly had no desire to do so. I also wasn't sure if my hind legs were ready to cooperate.\n\n\"Not you, hu-man. Drag-in only.\"\n\nI wasn't anxious to enter the darkness with a wolf. \"Tell your masters that we will speak to them here.\"\n\nThe alpha opened its jaw, growled, then closed it again. \"These are the masters' orders.\" It seemed equal parts confused and upset at my reluctance.\n\n\"We stay,\" I repeated.\n\nThe alpha's glowing eyes bored into me. He gave a sharp bark then wheeled himself back into the tunnel at his back. This time the other wolves trailed after. Dangerous flashed a look of hate in our direction before following.\n\n\"I guess we'll find out how badly they want to meet you,\" Harlan muttered when they were gone.\n\nIt turned out, the wolves' masters did indeed want something from me, just as I'd hoped. Not long after the wolves disappeared, an ivory-robed human-ish form ambled through the dark tunnel, hood drawn down so far that no part of its face was visible. I doubted a normal human could see in the blackness of that tunnel, but I wasn't expecting to meet a normal human.\n\nThe hooded figure stopped at the precipice of the tunnel. The wolf pack hovered around him in a protective cordon. There was no extraneous chafing from the creatures now; They were obedient servants in the presence of their master. I would've felt sorry for them, except they were foul-tempered wolves who had tried to eat me, so I didn't waste my sympathy. I waited for the hooded figure to speak. He stood there for so long, his features hidden, that I was beginning to think he didn't talk. Maybe these things communicated some other way, without words. Or maybe the new arrival wasn't impressed by what he saw. I forced my forelegs to move, pulling myself into a more intimidating position, stretching my neck upward. The effort hurt, but I was also encouraged I could manage it at all.\n\nA sharp intake of breath came from within the layers of thick cloth. It didn't sound like a sound a human would make\u2014more like a leviathan sucking air through its blowhole. The voice that followed was a dry whisper that grated like rusted hinges.\n\n\"So, it is true. A dragon, unbound by the runes of the Sculptors.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" I replied, trying to sound like my usual calm and powerful self, but unfortunately my legs were trembling from the effort of holding my body upright. I was running out of time.\n\nThe creature beneath the hood still didn't reveal itself. \"You insisted on speaking to us. Say that which you wish to speak.\"\n\nI didn't have time for idle chatter. A wave of dizziness assaulted me. I think I managed to keep my head steady. \"Oster is on the verge of destruction. King Galt can no longer protect his own people.\"\n\n\"This is not the first time Rolm has attacked. Mendakas once thought he could defeat us, but he was wrong. The son will fail. The dragons are much fewer this time.\"\n\n\"Your beasts are decimated. Otherwise, I would never have gotten to this place. Dozens of griffins would've ripped me apart. The Shard is surrounded, while you rely on a few little pups to protect you as you cower in your underground maze.\"\n\nFour wolves growled, while the human-thing made an intense sucking breath sound. I'd hit a sore spot or whatever this creature had. \"You have no idea what is inside these tunnels, dragon. I assure you that you will not leave here alive unless you offer us something worth sparing your life.\"\n\nI ignored the threat. I wanted to get this over with. \"Even if Galt managed to fend off the dragons of Rolm, your people face famine and starvation worse than anything else they have ever experienced.\"\n\n\"State your point, dragon.\"\n\n\"I can save Oster.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" The sound dripped of derision, but it was also forced. \"Even if you are free, you are one dragon against many.\"\n\n\"I am an ember dragon. I command the sky, the wind, and much else.\" I wanted to impress my power upon these creatures, but didn't want to give too much away. \"The magic I showed your pup was a minor trick compared with all I could do.\"\n\nThe robed creature was silent again for a discomforting amount of time. I suspected it was communicating with others in some other way.\n\n\"What is that you wish from us?\"\n\nThis was it. He wanted my offer. I was too weary to be anything but direct. Either these creatures needed me, or they didn't. \"I want aurathorn.\"\n\nThe figure's head jerked up as if he'd been poked with a branding iron fresh from the fire. His hood fell back. The face that stared at me wasn't human\u2014at least it wasn't like any human I'd laid eyes upon. Eyes with three pupils apiece stared at me from deep sockets carved into the creature's flesh. The skin of its face was wrinkled like a prune, its pallor that of a corpse. Scant wisps of silver hair clung to the creature blot-stained skull. I had no doubt I had met my first Pale Wright. It didn't seem pleased.\n\nA mouth devoid of teeth opened ever so slightly, the words chilling but clear: \"Kill the dragon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Four huge wolves bounded forward.\n\nThey didn't get far. Not close enough to be within the reach of Harlan's daggers. My numbed body and mind hadn't even reacted when a second voice erupted from the dark tunnel behind the wolves. Another Pale Wright.\n\n\"Halt,\" The second voice was as barren and terrible as the first, but it came with such vehemence that it cut like steel. \"Back.\"\n\nThe wolves retreated instantly, as if they'd been yanked on an invisible string. The creature emerged from the impenetrable darkness, where it had somehow managed to remain invisible before that moment. The Wright seemed to form out of melted blackness, advancing without audible footsteps. This new arrival's hood was already pulled back. I could barely tell one Pale Wright form the other. The only discernible difference seemed to be that the new arrival had a narrower face, although it was equally horrible to look upon. It glared at the first Wright and something unspoken passed between them. The original creature walked back into the darkness without a glance back at me. At least they didn't bicker like humans.\n\n\"Perhaps a bargain can be made,\" the remaining Pale Wright said to me, the edge of what had once been its mouth twitching as he spoke. \"Only our Conclave can decide. You must come with me. The others cannot come so far into the light as I.\"\n\nThe light? We were at the bottom of the pit and it was night. \"You can pass my words onto your Conclave,\" I told him, still unwilling to venture into the tunnel.\n\n\"You do not trust, and that is understandable,\" the creature said, the corner of its mouth twitching again, as if it didn't quite control its own lips. \"Yet come you must. There is no choice. It is clear that you cannot fly out of here even if you wished it. You are suffering from fury poison.\"\n\nTwitch was right. My legs couldn't hold my body upright much longer. \"Dragons heal quickly.\"\n\n\"Not from the stinger of a fury. We made them that way. But I can fix that, because trust must start with one of us if we are each to get what we need.\" The Wright turned halfway back toward the tunnel behind him, revealing a hand that was more bone than flesh. A single finger flicked up, then he turned back to me. More uncomfortable silence followed, until another creature that looked like a crab appeared. It was no bigger than a human hand, with a green shell and four legs on each side. It scurried toward me.\n\n\"This creation secretes a substance that will neutralize the poison in your blood,\" the Pale Wright claimed. \"Allow it onto your body, and you will be mended.\"\n\n\"Why should I believe that?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you shouldn't. But you really don't have any choice other than to let the poison kill you. You obviously didn't get a full dose from the fury stinger, but you got enough to kill you. Unless I save you. No one else is going to help you here.\"\n\nTwitch might have been lying about the poison as well, but I don't think so. I was getting worse, not better.\n\nHarlan turned to me and spoke in a whisper. \"They want something badly from you.\"\n\nI agreed with that. And there really wasn't any other choice.\n\n\"Proceed.\"\n\nThe crab-like creature climbed onto me as if it knew exactly where to go, its claws sharp enough to allow it to scale my body without difficulty. It latched onto the area of the stinger wound. I shook as it went to work digging into my exposed flesh first with pincers, then with something wet.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Harlan asked.\n\n\"It tickles.\"\n\nA wave of heat surged through me, but it wasn't unpleasant. If this thing intended to finish me off, I assumed it would happen quickly. The Pale Wright stood and stared as its creation worked. Abruptly, the crab-thing stopped moving. It made a short hissing sound before it fell off of me, tumbling to the ground. It didn't move again.\n\nHarlan pushed the crab with his boot. \"It's dead.\"\n\n\"It has fulfilled its purpose,\" the Pale Wright croaked.\n\nMore quickly than I dared to hope, feeling was returning to my body. I moved my tail back and forth to test it, then performed a similar exercise with my wings and legs. I wasn't sure if I could fly yet, but I had little doubt that my strength was returning.\n\nThe Pale Wright dipped its chin almost imperceptive downward. \"The Conclave awaits.\" He turned back to the tunnel. The wolves ran ahead of their master. All of them disappeared into a blackness that even my eyes couldn't penetrate.\n\nI exchange a meaningful look with Harlan. His sentiments echoed my own. \"I see no other way.\"\n\nI pulled myself onto my legs. My joints were stiff, but I had no trouble moving now. I still wore the sai, which made walking awkward, but I wasn't about to take them off, given where I was about to go. I gave a silent thanks to the little crab who'd died to heal me before I walked into the tunnel, Harlan beside me, his hand touching my side.\n\nThe passage was cold, far more so than would've been natural even for a sunless, underground cavern, but apart from that, it seemed innocuous. There were no other creatures within, no apparent threats\u2014just rock. Another dragon could've squeezed beside me, which made me think of Rinxia. Did she still live? Had I made the correct choice leaving her and Kiata behind in Ni-Yota? It wasn't time to dwell on those choices. I just need to make sure that the chance I had taken proved worth the cost.\n\nWe hadn't walked far when we came to a curtain of mist. It dropped from the ceiling, like a waterfall of miniscule droplets. I couldn't see to the other side.\n\n\"This explains the impenetrable darkness of the passage,\" I said.\n\n\"Is it water?\"\n\nI sniffed at the mist. There was no odor. I didn't know what fell from the ceiling.\n\n\"The fluid will not harm you,\" said a not-very-reassuring voice from the other side of the curtain. I couldn't tell which of the Wrights spoke. \"It is for us.\"\n\nWe walked through. The mist\u2014whatever it was\u2014seemed to have no immediate ill effect, but the other side of the curtain was a different world.\n\nIt was terribly cold beyond the mist, a deep chill of the ominous. I could handle the temperature better than a human, but that didn't mean I enjoyed it. \"Now we are truly in the Pits of Gargen.\"\n\n\"It feels like sailing the northern sea during the short days of the year,\" Harlan said. \"Except in those waters, I know to wear my thickest coat on deck.\"\n\nThe passage opened into a cavern of near impossible size. Ahead of us were the pits. Dozens of them. They were square shafts of darkness, organized into semi-neat rows that spanned the entirety of the massive space, each pit separated by narrow paths of smoothed rock wide enough for two humans to walk side-by-side, but not a dragon. I could've flown over, but the ceiling was too low for flight, and the stalactites would be dangerous to my wings. I didn't like this place at all.\n\nThe wolves had disappeared, but the Pale Wright (I assume it was the same one who had brought me here), waited a short distance ahead. \"Dragon, if you keep to the edges of the cavern, you may more easily pass through. But stray no further than this cavern, or it is your peril. Human, it is not much further, but be careful with your steps. There will be no return should you fall into one of the pits.\" With that, the creature turned away from us, moving at a cautious pace toward a doorless passage where another wall of mist shielded whatever lay behind the portal.\n\nI proceeded along the outer edge of the cavern, expecting Harlan to choose that route as well, but he didn't. Instead, he followed in the steps of the Pale Wright, carefully peering into several of the great pits as he walked. I did the same as I made my way across the chamber's edges, but I saw nothing and heard nothing. The smells that assaulted my nostrils told me that many creatures, including griffins, once dwelled here, but at the moment the pits were mostly empty. Across the massive cavern, on the far end from where we traveled, there was a massive archway, as wide as several dragons, silent and ominous. The Wright noticed my noticing.\n\n\"Keep to your path,\" it reminded me. \"There is nothing for you down there.\"\n\nWe followed the Pale Wright through another mist barrier, then through a sloping passage that led still deeper into the bowels of the world, until finally we emerged into an elegant chamber of smooth walls of thoroughly-polished obsidian stone, upon which disconcerting azure shadows seemed to dance, appearing and disappearing at a frantic pace. It took me a moment to realize that the source of the strange light tricks\u2014a pair of large braziers that contained no fire, but rather flickered mysterious, blue-tinged light onto the walls and ceiling. A raised semi-circular platform made of the same polished obsidian at the rest of the chamber dominated the far end of the space. The chamber was cold and empty. The Pale Wright that had led us here had also vanished.\n\n\"It certainly isn't the lake palace of Trishan,\" I noted.\n\nAs if upset by my words, the strange, heatless light from the braziers dimmed to almost nothing. That shouldn't have mattered to my dragon eyes, but somehow it did. For a moment, I could barely see anything. When the light returned to its prior (still dim) intensity, the dais was occupied by six Pale Wrights, all attired in identical heavy robes, although none had bothered with their hoods in here. If I was them, I would've stuck with the hood. Eight giant wolves sauntered into the chamber behind us. I didn't like my position if this came to a fight, although I was relatively sure I could kill every one of the Pale Wrights before their wolves could inflict much damage. I hoped it didn't come to that.\n\nThe almost-human figures stared at me without expression, their deep-set eyes and pale, wrinkled skin making them appear like upright corpses. I was relatively certain that two of the Pale Wrights were the creatures I'd already met\u2014they were less shriveled than the others, who closely resembled sticks with some old flesh haphazardly attached to the rickety frames.\n\n\"We represent the Conclave.\" I was pretty sure the speaker was Twitch. I wondered if his words meant this was all the Pale Wrights or if there were still more shambling about the dark tunnels.\n\nI wanted to get this over with. I skipped the grand introduction. \"You may call me Bayloo.\"\n\nAnother Wright spoke, its mouth shriveled to the size of a big grape. \"Bayloo the free dragon, who travels with a human of Farlight. These are unusual times. Desperate times.\"\n\n\"More desperate for some than others,\" I reminded them. Their island was starving after all, although none of this group looked like they were big eaters.\n\n\"Indeed, some are quite desperate.\" The Wright held out its boney hand toward me. \"You have ventured deep into the Pits of Gargen and placed yourself at our mercy to trade for something which you must know can be obtained nowhere else but here. Both of us have great need.\"\n\nHarlan tensed ever so slightly when the Pale Wright confirmed that they had aurathorn in their possession. It seemed Bethy Rann had spoken true as to where my mother had obtained it. The Pale Wrights were the keepers of this precious secret. But what did they use it for?\n\n\"You know what I want,\" I told the Wrights. \"I told you what I offer.\"\n\nThe Pale Wrights all stared at me in disconcerting silence. Those strange eyes of theirs didn't blink. They just stared. On and on. Harlan caught my glance, and I could tell he shared my unease. I grew even more certain that the Wrights were communicating with each other in some way. Finally, a different Pale Wright spoke, one near the center of their line\u2014the most shriveled of them all. That Wright was so gaunt that I suspected a strong fart could've toppled him.\n\n\"You were once bound by the control runes as were the rest of your kind?\"\n\nWhy did it care? \"Yes.\"\n\nAnother pause followed, but not as long as the previous one. \"It was another dragon that freed you, using the very same cultivation\u2014that which you call aurathorn\u2014that you now seek.\"\n\nI wasn't sure if it had asked a question, but I answered anyway. I wanted to get out of this chamber, away from grizzly creatures and strange light. This wasn't a place for dragons, or any being that thrived in the sun. \"This is what I was told.\"\n\n\"By your mother?\" It pressed.\n\nThe spikes of my mane pricked up with discomfort. I didn't understand the reason for these questions, although I supposed it shouldn't have surprised me completely that the Pale Wright knew exactly whom they had traded with. Once again, I wondered what these creatures had received from my mother the last time they offered aurathorn, but I didn't dare ask.\n\n\"Yes,\" I told it. \"Do we have a \u2026 trade?\"\n\n\"Trade, yes,\" It said, opening its toothless mouth a bit wider than before. I got the impression that it was \u2026 if not happy, then pleased. It worried me that these creatures agreed so readily.\n\n\"We need to see aurathorn, first,\" Harlan interjected. \"It is of no use if it has not been properly cared for.\"\n\nWas that true? My mother had spoken of a fount, and a vine. I had no idea. Or did Harlan intend to merely try to steal his heart's desire once these Pale Wrights showed it to him?\n\nAny tenuous indication of pleasure vanished from the Pale Wright. \"We possess what you seek, human.\" The creature spoke the last with such contempt that I realized that it did not consider itself part of that race. \"The dragon Bayloo is free because of what we exchanged\u2014the cultivation you call aurathorn. We kept our end of that trade.\"\n\nHarlan shifted anxiously and I decided to trust whatever he had in mind. The smuggler made his desire plain. \"I must see the aurathorn with my own eyes. I must know that Bayloo and I do not risk our lives for nothing.\"\n\nThe creatures went silent again, still and terrible, while Harlan and I waited. Finally, the most shriveled one spoke once again. \"We will send a white raven with a message for King Galt. He must agree to this bargain as well. If there is to be a trade, then you will be allowed to see that which you covet. We kept our promise before, we shall do so again.\"\n\nI would've been satisfied with that, but Harlan wasn't. He was the better card player as he liked to say\u2014so I didn't intervene.\n\n\"We. Must. See. It.\" Harlan repeated, his voice as cold as I'd ever heard it. \"I must hold it in my hand.\"\n\nFor a moment there was actually some spark in the creature's dead eyes. Anger? \"What you seek lies below in the forge, beneath the breeding pits, a dark place, but one that is larger than all the pits combined. It is an ancient place, and is not a place for humans, nor dragons. You cannot venture there.\" Harlan was about to object, but the Wright kept speaking. \"But we shall bring a token of proof. First, though, Galt must be satisfied, and he is not a man easily dealt with. No, not easy at all. But these are desperate times.\"\n\nHarlan snarled. \"Then get on with it.\"\n\nThis time Twitch spoke. He stared at me, then Harlan. His head moved ever so slightly. \"We will send word. Galt must come.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "The Pale Wright brought us back to the original pit where I'd crashed.\n\n\"We all await King Galt,\" were its only words before departing.\n\nNo food or drink was offered. Food was too precious in Oster, but I wouldn't have eaten anything provided by a Pale Wright in any case\u2014who knew what they fed the creatures in this place? We still had some provisions from Bethy Rann, although it was salt meat and hardtack. Even though he didn't eat much, the salt meat didn't sit well in Harlan's stomach, which meant both of us suffered.\n\n\"This is a forsaken place,\" I said. \"It's like sitting on the precipice of the Abyss.\"\n\nHarlan glanced upward, trying to see the sky. \"Aye to that. Once we captured a slave ship sailing toward Ionia. Standing on that deck, knowing what was below \u2026\" He shook his head in disgust. \"I didn't even have to see the holds to feel the evil within. This place is like that ship, except worse.\"\n\n\"It is worse on a deeper level than that. I can sense the void within the Latticework. There is something deep below, a blackness. I have sensed something like it only in one other place.\"\n\n\"Where was that?\"\n\n\"The Forest of Fallen Night.\"\n\nHarlan frowned unhappily. \"Let us hope this King Galt comes sooner rather than later.\"\n\nI had my doubts. \"The Shard is near, but travel will depend on the tides of the Shifting Straits, as ever. But Galt somehow needs to get here without being roasted by my brothers as well. I wonder how that happens.\"\n\n\"It does seem a great risk for a king, but perhaps there is no choice.\"\n\nIt turned out that King Galt did have a choice.\n\nIn the darkness just before dawn, a Pale Wright arrived\u2014I think it was Twitch again. I hadn't slept; I couldn't in this place. Harlan had dozed, but was awake with daggers in hand within a moment of Twitch's stepping from the passage.\n\n\"Go above,\" Twitch said. \"A man awaits there.\"\n\n\"King Galt?\" I asked.\n\n\"A man.\" It repeated, as if they were all the same. \"Speak with him as if he is Galt.\"\n\n\"The tunnel is too tight to fly,\" I observed. \"Crashing is easier than taking off.\"\n\n\"You are a dragon. With claws. You can climb until the pit widens.\"\n\nTwitch looked upward to the surface as if imagining my ascent before fading back into his tunnel.\n\n\"I guess we go,\" I said to Harlan. \"Hold fast to the saddle.\"\n\n\"You don't have to carry me. I can climb myself.\"\n\nThat was bravado. \"You can't climb these walls unless you've been growing claws. Get into the saddle and strap yourself in.\"\n\nI managed the ascent. It wasn't nearly as easy as the Pale Wright claimed, particularly because I still hadn't fully recovered from the fury's poison. This pit wasn't intended to be an exit for dragons or any other creature. Only the sai made the climb possible. The enchanted metal tore into the rocks, giving my hind legs at least a steady grip all the way up. Eventually, the pit widened enough that I was able to half-leap, half-fly into the air for the remaining distance. I didn't go far, just to the desolate ground beside the opening above. There might be dragon patrols watching still.\n\nA man waited as the Wright had claimed. He knelt on one knee at the precipice of the pit from which I emerged. My sudden appearance jolted him to his feet, a hand on his golden sword hilt, as if his blade could help him against me.\n\nWe stared at each other. The man forced himself to relax his grip on his blade. \"So, it is as the message claimed. A dragon has come.\" Harlan slid from the saddle, causing the man to add unhappily, \"And an Islander too.\"\n\nHarlan flashed his teeth in a mocking smile.\n\n\"You are not King Galt,\" I surmised. I had never met the ruler of Oster, but I knew that kings didn't travel alone through the night as this human must've done to be here. Also, Galt was supposedly a large man with broad shoulders, with a famously thick beard, while this human was built like an arrow, his face all angles, unblemished by any hair except a single red-tinted knot of thin strands tied together at the back of his head.\n\nThe man inhaled a sudden breath when I spoke, his eyes widening. \"Do you \u2026\" He looked at Harlan. \"Does the dragon obey you?\"\n\nHarlan's only reply was a sad shake of his head at his fellow human's stupidity.\n\n\"You may call me, Bayloo,\" I told the ignorant human.\n\nGalt's man gaped, but only for a moment. He drew himself up straight like the soldier he was. \"I meant no offense. Our contact with your kind is limited and one-sided. There is often fire and death involved.\"\n\n\"My contact with your kind has been similarly unhappy,\" I pointed out.\n\nHe nodded his understanding. \"To answer your question, I speak with the voice of King Galt. I am Kemet, First Advisor.\"\n\n\"You run swiftly to have arrived from the Shard in such short time,\" I observed.\n\nKemet cringed as he moved a hand almost involuntarily to his neck. Below his square chin was what appeared to be another little crab like the one that had healed the poison of the fury stinger, except this creature had eight pointed tentacles. \"The Wrights \u2026 provided this.\" His tone left no doubt as about how he felt about that necessity. \"It gives stamina.\"\n\n\"You did run here,\" I mused. Kemet didn't confirm that, but he didn't correct me.\n\nThe distance would've been a challenge for the very best harrier in Rolm, and near impossible for an ordinary human. My mind raced. They had bred crab-creatures that could heal poison and offer endurance. The Pale Wrights had been busy indeed. I had fought Oster for much of my life, and the new creations of the Pale Wright were always something to be dreaded. But a new weapon was rare\u2014it had been many years since the furies started appearing. The Pale Wright had seemingly become profligate in their breeding programs. Did the desperation of war prompt this new development? Or was it something else?\n\n\"I endure what I must for Oster,\" Kemet declared self-righteously, even as his brows narrowed. \"King Galt was promised many things to send me here.\"\n\n\"I made no promises. I offered a trade to obtain what I want.\"\n\n\"The Pale Wrights made the promises,\" Kemet said. His eyes flicked toward the pits around us, then toward the sky, which had only just begun to suggest the imminent arrival of dawn.\n\n\"They didn't seem to want to come out to join our discussion,\" Harlan said.\n\n\"Yes, they dislike the light, as you may know. The first light of dawn is a particular poison, however.\" By the hint of satisfaction in Kemet's voice, I guessed that his arrival at just the time that would make listening to our conversation most difficult had been a deliberate choice. Quite interesting. \"But their beasts are another matter.\"\n\nI heard the warning: We were probably being spied upon. Why did he care? I sniffed at the air. \"No wolves, no humans other than Harlan and you.\"\n\nKemet ignored my assurance. \"I've been told that you are free \u2026 a rebel who has escaped the magical shackles that enslaves other dragons.\"\n\n\"I am free.\"\n\n\"And \u2026 you can \u2026 that is you ...\" Kemet's hands twirled, but he didn't seem to be able to complete his thoughts. \"You are a \u2026\" I decided to help him, but answered in my deepest power-dragon tone.\n\n\"I can command the greatest forces of the world: the wind, the sky, even the rock. You may call it magic.\"\n\n\"Magic.\" Kemet rolled his jaw in a circular motion as if tasting the word. Judging by the frown that followed, it tasted sour. \"Not sculpting, not even enchantment, but the magic of legend, of commanding the forces of Haven? Forgive me, but a dragon can do this?\"\n\n\"If I choose, yes, and I do not forgive your ignorance. You know only of the slave dragons of Rolm, but that is not what my kind was meant to be. It is not what I am.\"\n\n\"And you believe that with this \u2026 this strange flower that the Pale Wrights have, you can free the other dragons?\" Kemet didn't hide his skepticism. I also thought it interesting that he seemed to know nothing of aurathorn. It was just a flower to him. The Pale Wrights hoarded secrets, keeping them even from their king.\n\nI didn't know how much the Wrights had told him about my mother and the previous trade, but I guessed they hadn't shared the knowledge of their illicit trading so I kept my answer simple. \"The flower as you call it has unique properties to users of magic, and perhaps to others. I do believe it can be used to free my fellow dragons, thus I am willing to offer my assistance to your liege in exchange for it.\"\n\n\"The other dragons would no longer serve Rolm if they were free?\"\n\nI thought about my brother and sisters. I didn't know their minds, but I wasn't going to show doubt to this man. \"They will turn on their former tormentors, just like any slave.\"\n\nKemet rubbed his chin, thoughtful. \"One dragon cannot defeat many. The boy king has over a dozen dragons, even if most are the smaller ones that do not breathe fire. Surely you cannot beat them all as well as the Rolman army on your own?\"\n\nI'd anticipated that question. \"I don't need to defeat my brothers and sisters\u2014indeed, I will not kill a fellow dragon unless there is no other choice. I only need to kill Dayne.\"\n\n\"The boy king?\" Kemet seemed surprised. \"Even if you could reach him, that alone will not ensure the departure of his army and the dragons. Nor does it free the other dragons, if I understand correctly. At most, it might buy us time while Rolm is thrown into confusion.\"\n\n\"I know Dayne well. This war was his doing. Others will not be so keen on it, given certain other developments that threaten Eladrell. Rolm and their dragons will leave to protect their homes and fields once the person holding them here is dead.\"\n\nKemet's head shook. \"I don't understand. How is Eladrell under threat?\"\n\n\"Because Ulibon will invade.\" I tried to make it sound like a certainty, even though Bethy Rann's position was still very precarious.\n\n\"Ulibon?\" The human looked concerned. He might have thought me crazy.\n\n\"There was a revolt there.\"\n\n\"Yes, we know. The supposed Heir of Ulibon returned, but \u2026\"\n\n\"The Twisted Keep has fallen,\" I told him, not without a bit of pride. \"I did that.\"\n\nBig eyes looked at me. \"Why would you help rebels in Ulibon?\"\n\n\"I have my reasons. And now they owe me. They have ships\u2014part of the Rolman fleet was captured, and many soldiers of Rolm went over to swear allegiance to the new Highstar.\"\n\n\"Ulibon is no match for Rolm,\" Kimet declared with the self-importance of a human soldier who fancies himself a fine tactician as well. \"An attack on Eladrell would be madness, no matter what they owe you. I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"Ulibon doesn't really need to attack to draw back Rolm's forces from Oster, do they? Rolm's garrisons are stripped bare. They could show their fleet, sail around the harbor of Eladrell, burn a few fields along the coast. That would be enough to draw the dragons back. The Highstar of Ulibon will keep her word to me.\"\n\nHarlan chimed in, speaking in the tone of a trader with goods on offer, \"You are getting the magic of the most powerful dragon on Inkra and the aid of Ulibon in this trade. A rare opportunity. Maybe your last opportunity, I think.\"\n\n\"For a flower?\" There was no mistaking Kemet's disbelief.\n\nI made my human-style smile. \"It is a very tasty flower.\"\n\nKemet tried to stop himself from cringing, but didn't quite succeed.\n\n\"King Galt is a cautious man, particularly in matters which seem too good to be true. He does not believe in miracle saviors. Even if you can deliver all you say, Galt will have to commit the last of our reserves for you to have any chance of reaching King Dayne. That would be the last of our surviving griffins and furies, the last of our able-bodied soldiers. Rolm's dragons are on constant patrol, their army at our gates. Even after Dayne is dead, the dragons may retaliate.\"\n\n\"I can kill Dayne, I can help to keep the Rolman dragons at bay, but your beasts and soldiers must fight too,\" I said.\n\n\"This isn't supposed to be easy,\" Harlan added. \"How bad is your situation?\"\n\nKemet's brows furrowed. He didn't answer immediately, as he considered how much it was safe to say to us. He must've decided it didn't matter or he had little choice. \"They probably outnumber us twenty-to-one in fighters. We have only a handful of griffins who can still fly. Barely enough furies to keep contesting the skies for a few more days. Only because of the Shard have we survived this long. We are on the verge of utter defeat\u2014otherwise I wouldn't be here and Galt wouldn't consider such a dangerous plan.\"\n\nHarlan arched a brow. \"What soldier would leave the walls to fight against such odds?\"\n\nKemet's chest puffed. \"Oster's soldiers are brave and loyal.\"\n\nHarlan shrugged. \"They are still men.\"\n\nKemet gave an unhappy grunt. He placed a hand next to the crab-like creature attached to his neck. \"These are new symbionts. The Pale Wrights have bred a hundred or more. With these, one man could fight like three, without tiring. They may even work on griffins.\"\n\nThis was a surprise to me. \"Why have you not used them before?\"\n\nKemet's eyes moved ever so slightly toward the pits, to the domain of the Pale Wrights. It was subtle, but I was sure he did it. There was distrust between Galt and his strange servants, I was sure, but Kemet only said, \"They are newly bred. New beasts can be \u2026 unpredictable.\" He touched the creature on his neck, but not with affection. It was how one touched a scab that couldn't be scratched. \"Although this one seems to have worked. But they live only a short time before dropping away. We will only have one chance at this.\"\n\n\"Then you should take your chance,\" I told him. \"It sounds as if there is little left to lose. Without my help, Oster will be no more.\"\n\nKemet was silent, thinking on this decision I knew he didn't want to make. Yet he really had no other choice. \"Perhaps I would recommend this. But Galt \u2026 As I said, he does not believe in miracles. He does not trust easily. He will not believe in a dragon that can do magic. Not unless he sees it.\"\n\nI snorted my derision, but I had expected no less. I looked at the sky. The sun had risen and the sky was clear. \"A beautiful day. How long will it take you to return to the Shard?\"\n\n\"With this symbiont, I can sprint like a man in his prime all the way though, and make it by midday. Alone, I'm unlikely to be seen by a dragon patrol. The tide will be high, so no land bridge, but I swim quite well.\"\n\n\"Just before nightfall, a single cloud will float through the sky. It shall be alone, coming toward the Shard from where we now stand. My cloud will be unusual in shape, with wings on either side. To a man with imagination it will look like a dragon with its wings extended. When this cloud reaches the sea around the Shard, it will drop thick ice hail, as one may have in winter, onto the mountain, then it shall disappear before it reaches the land to the north of the Shard. Will this be sufficient demonstration that the skies answer to my command?\"\n\n\"I believe it may be.\" Kemet admitted, with an almost regretful tone.\n\nI spread my wings, but not because I intended to fly anywhere. I just wanted this human to see the majesty of a dragon up close, to have my shadow fall over him as the sun shone behind me. I wanted him to fear, and despite his best efforts, Kemet's eyes told me that I had succeeded. \"Be off then. Run your fastest. Ulibon already is preparing for this, but it will take days for their fleet to sail once I give the word. Oster has precious little time left from what you have told me, so you had best prepare now.\"\n\nKemet took a step backward, then another. \"What do you intend to do?\"\n\nI let loose a roar\u2014just loud enough to turn Kemet's face to milky white. \"Run to the Shard. Tell him there is a battle to be won, a prize to be claimed, and a pitiful little man to kill.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "The King of Oster wanted my help.\n\nI had sent my special cloud off to the Shard just as the sun faded. Putting on my magic demonstration wasn't an easy task. The mist had to be woven in just the right way, the moisture timed with precision, the cold hail primed so that it would fall when the cloud reached the sea. I had done it all. Control was becoming easier for me. I was rather pleased with myself. Others were more critical.\n\n\"That doesn't look anything like a dragon,\" Harlan had commented about my cloud. \"More like a crooked finger.\"\n\nThe cloud definitely looked like a dragon. Maybe its wings were a bit short and crooked.\n\nEven without the magic cloud, Galt didn't really have a choice. He needed my help. Oster wouldn't survive much longer, even if the symbionts did all that the Pale Wrights promised. Their losses were too great and couldn't be replaced in time.\n\nWord of King Galt's decision arrived at the pits by a white raven messenger later that night. I saw the bird fly into one of the pits. My pale host Twitch appeared not long afterward.\n\n\"King Galt prepares his forces.\" The Wright sounded almost excited. It was a disconcerting sound. \"He orders us to make our preparations. He decrees that, should the Rolmans be driven form Oster, we are to deliver to you aurathorn and whatever else you ask of us.\"\n\n\"I want to see and hold aurathorn first,\" I reminded him.\n\n\"We anticipated that.\" The words hung between us.\n\nCould it be true?\n\nThe Pale Wright raised a boney fist. I could hear Harlan's heart beating. The skeletal fingers unclenched ever so slowly. Somehow, Harlan must've seen it even before I did, because he sucked down a breath like he was a suffocating fish; Inside the palm of the Pale Wright's outstretched had was a single thorn, no bigger than a human's smallest finger, shining like a silver fire had been lit inside. The thorn's light was dim, yet it seemed to distort the darkness around it, like a mirage on a scalding day.\n\nHarlan stepped forward, oblivious to the Wright, his eyes fixed only on the tiny glowing thorn. His voice trembled. \"By the seas and stars, it's real.\"\n\n\"Take it in your hand, human,\" the Wright said. \"And know we can deliver what we say.\"\n\nHarlan snatched the thorn from the palm of the Pale Wright like a greedy child. Its light illuminated Harlan's face. A single, solitary tear fell from his right eye. \"Norta, it is here,\" he whispered to the thorn.\n\nI reached for the Latticework, for I want to understand this object, which might look like a thorn, but I doubted could be a mere growth from a mundane plant. What I found when I tried to study it from that deeper reality was \u2026 nothing. Only an impenetrable void. The thorn didn't exist within the Latticework, or I lacked the skill to sense it. The mystery deepened. Then, the light was gone.\n\nAs Harlan and I gazed upon the thorn, its glow surged for a precious moment, then faded to blackness, like a firefly on its last flight. In the unexpected darkness, Harlan gazed, crestfallen, at the lightless thorn.\n\n\"Separated from the pisa\u2014essentially the mother fount\u2014the thorns soon lose their luster. But this one has served its purpose, I trust.\" The Pale Wright fixed a stare at each of us. \"There are many preparations to make, and the days left to us are few.\"\n\nI tore my gaze from the faded thorn. Some part of me hoped to see it alight once more, although I knew that wouldn't happen. Whatever I had felt while it was alight was gone. It was time to deal with Dayne. \"I shall be ready, as promised.\"\n\nWhen the Pale Wright had gone. and Harlan and I were as alone as we could be in a pit beside the lair of some of the most terrible creatures on this world, he approached me, coming so close I momentarily feared he intended to plant one of those wet human lip kisses they give to each other on me. Instead, Harlan whispered, his words so quiet only a dragon could hear them.\n\n\"Too easy,\" he told me. \"These creatures want something. They want it worse than any gambler, worse than any addict. But I don't think it is the victory you promised that they covet. It's something else.\"\n\nI vowed to remember Harlan's warning as I prepared for battle once again.\n\nThis fight would be different than the ones before it\u2014this time I wished to kill a man. But to do that, I needed my (dubious) allies in Oster.\n\nTo prepare for the forthcoming battle, I flew first to Ulibon, returning to the Twisted Keep to meet the newly-installed Highstar. Bethy Rann wasn't glad to see me again, particularly so soon, but she wasn't surprised at my arrival. I had warned her it would happen quickly. The hag, Mildred, was even less pleased by my return than Bethy Rann.\n\n\"Do my sai not fit?\" she asked me bitterly as we stood with Rann on the northernmost tower of the Twisted Keep. \"You prefer something softer for your precious claws\u2014wool socks, perhaps?\"\n\n\"I come to ask the Highstar to fulfill her promises.\"\n\nMildred didn't quit and Rann didn't silence her. \"Is the Highstar now your servant, to answer the beck and call of a dragon?\"\n\nI tried to ignore the old woman's grating complaints, instead staring at Bethy Rann. \"In your moment of greatest need, when your human followers scattered to the wind abandoning you, I stayed true. I am certain you, the Hightstar of Ulibon, will do no less for me.\"\n\nActually, I wasn't quite certain. Bethy Rann's rule was only days old and she had a nation to rebuild, but she didn't falter. A rare human\u2014perhaps her link with Crema had a positive influence on her.\n\n\"I will keep my word. The honor of Ulibon shall never be compromised while I occupy the high seat.\"\n\nSo, I had my fleet, even if they would never actually attack Eladrell. That wasn't necessary. I just need a credible threat, and the fear of Ulibon raids would provide that. Imagining Dayne's rage when he heard the news almost brought a smile to my eyes.\n\nMildred grumbled at her liege's promise, but Rann was acting in her own self-interest\u2014which I suspected was the real reason for the ease with which she kept her promise. Tactically, it was always worthwhile to keep your enemy off balance. But even more compelling was the simple fact that Ulibon would never be safe so long as Dayne held the throne and could command slave dragons to attack her. A new king of Rolm might be willing to make peace, but for Ulibon to truly be free, the dragons had to be free as well. I would've liked to believe that Rann's love for Crema swayed her as well. She wanted to help my cause.\n\nI left Rann to prepare her fleet, flying back the Pits of Gargen that same day. While hardly cozy, the pits were perhaps the only place in Oster that I could be assured of avoiding detection and attack by King Dayne and his dragons. Even if Dayne thought I was still alive in the pits, it would've been madness to risk his remaining dragons to attack this place. In addition to the furies lurking in the clay flats surrounding the pits, dragons were near useless in narrow, underground tunnels.\n\nThe Pale Wrights kept away from us, but I heard activity deep in the pits during the night and even when the sun shone. Twice, I saw griffins fly from their deep lair beneath the ground headed toward the Shard. They always flew at twilight to try to avoid detection. It seemed the last of Oster's beasts were being thrown into this effort, as well as whatever else the Pale Wrights had lurking in their subterranean lair.\n\nKemet returned twice more before the attack, each time with a new symbiont on his neck. Each time I saw him, his gaze had become more distant, the shading under his eyes darker. It might have been fatigue. On the last of his visits, Kemet finally shared some of the strategic thinking of Oster's commanders. The plan was a bold one. They didn't merely want to defeat the Rolman army\u2014they wanted to crush it. To do that, they intended to destroy the Rolman supply stockpiles. It sounded like a simple idea, except that Rolmans (aside from their king) weren't fools. They knew they fought on a starving land, and so guarded their supplies\u2014most brought by ship from Rolm\u2014with extreme care. Part of the stockpile remained on board six vessels moored off the coast of Oster. As the Osteran fleet had been almost completely annihilated, the ships were safe from attack, except by griffins, of which the Osterans had only a dozen remaining (no match for even a single ash dragon). The rest of the supplies were held in the ruined keep at Drell, surrounded by the main Rolman host. The castle's broken towers and walls were lined by Rolman war engines, in addition to the dragons who lounged about inside its courtyard. Destroying either stockpile, much less both, had seemed impossible for Oster only days ago. Now they had me.\n\nKing Galt might not want to acknowledge the difference a dragon ally made, but without me, they couldn't even have dreamed of achieving such a decisive blow against the enemy. I offered them superior air power, magic, and most of all, hope. Combined with the Pale Wright's symbionts, Oster now had a chance to survive, even if it was a desperate chance. I, who had once helped try to conquer this land, prepared to save it.\n\n\"You are sure the other dragons will pursue you?\" Kemet asked me. We had some variation of this conversation on each of his visits.\n\n\"If I succeed in killing Dayne, the dragons and ryders will come at me with a vengeance; If I fail to kill him, Dayne will command all his dragons to come at me.\"\n\nKemet continued to look uneasy, his lips curled. \"You seem convinced of his hatred of you.\"\n\n\"There is no fury equal to that of a child scorned,\" I assured the human. \"I humiliated Dayne like no other in his existence. I know his mind painfully well. His hatred will still be burning. He may also blame me for the death of his father. I am certain he will pursue me if he is able. I've told you this many times.\"\n\nKemet dug at the ground with his left foot. He did this frequently when he was uncomfortable, which he usually was when he visited. \"We risk everything on your success.\"\n\n\"You are fortunate to even have the chance,\" Harlan pointed out, not rising from the rock on which he sat. \"It has been days, and we've seen nothing from the Rolmans. Is that quiet typical of them?\"\n\nKamat dug his foot deeper. \"There have been periods of false calm, usually when the Rolmans were waiting for more troops or supplies. We sank one of their ships two days ago. A griffin caught it alone along the coast. Perhaps that has something to do with it.\" He didn't sound convinced.\n\n\"Dayne isn't patient,\" I said. \"Now is the time to attack.\"\n\nKemet's reply was quick. \"That is for King Galt to decide.\"\n\nI shuffled my wings. They got dusty underground. It also made Kemet nervous when I did this. \"Galt should speak to me himself.\"\n\nIt wasn't the first time I'd offered to meet, but this time Kemet's surprised me with his answer. \"It is time for that.\"\n\n\"Does he come here then?\"\n\nKemet huffed as if I'd made a ridiculous suggestion. \"King Galt does not come to the Pits of Gargen.\"\n\nI wondered why that was, but Kemet made it sound as if everyone, even a foreign dragon, should already know this, so instead of asking, I made a low, threatening growl, which I hoped he understood to mean the conversation was over.\n\nThe human kept talking anyway. \"Galt requests that you travel to the Shard. Only there will he meet and speak.\"\n\nI didn't like being ordered around. Or maybe I was grouchy from all the salted meat and tack I'd been forced to eat, to say nothing of the flatulence I'd endured from Harlan. \"I am not a subject of King Galt. Even if I had knees, I wouldn't bend them.\"\n\nKemet surprised me again. \"Please come.\" My eyes must've betrayed my feelings, for he added, \"Galt will not order the attack without looking at you, not without hearing from you directly. As you have said, the Rolmans' unusual hesitation to press their advantage will not last. The Pale Wrights have sent the last of their battle-ready beasts to the Shard. All is prepared to go tomorrow, except for word from Galt. I know you owe me nothing, and you owe Oster nothing. I can only hope that there is a land you love as much as I love Oster, so I beg your help in saving this one. Do that, and you shall always have my gratitude.\" Inexplicably, Kemet fell to a knee before me. He looked ridiculous.\n\n\"Harlan has wretched up his dinner on the very spot on which you kneel several times,\" I pointed out. \"You should get up.\"\n\nKemet's hurt expression made it seem like I'd smacked him with my tail.\n\n\"Don't worry. I want this over with as well. I love no land, not as you do. But I have come to understand I \u2026 love my kin. I understand my place in the fight. I will go to the Shard.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "The Shard.\n\nThe greatest fortress on all of Inkra stood like a lynchpin of rock between the three great islands of Oster. With the tides high, it rose straight from the sea, a dazzling island tower that had defied both the sea's relentless waves as well as the hungry ambitions of the kings of Rolm. Even the fire of dragons couldn't bring down the Shard, for it was like no other place on this world.\n\nThe Shard was a three-sided mountain of translucent crystal\u2014a giant diamond with a surface harder than rock, its sides mostly sheer, except for the great carved steps that had been chiseled by long-dead humans running upwards to a pair of great mouth-like openings in the southern and western faces of the mountain. Within the diamond peak, the humans of Oster had built their fortress-city. I'd flown inside before, braving arc-bolts, griffins, and furies. Many dragons had perished in battle beneath a bizarre light that passed through the mountain, illuminating the palace-city within. I came this time as a purported ally, escorted by four griffins from the Pits of Gargen. The griffins stank, but it didn't seem like the time to share that observation with them.\n\nThe bulk of the Rolman army was encamped in a sprawling arc surrounding the once-formidable keep at Drell, to the west of the Shard. They were too far away for a conventional siege, but the watery defenses of the Shard made normal assault tactics near impossible anyway. A second, smaller, Rolman host had been positioned to the north, enabling land attack from two directions when the tides allowed it. But as always, victory would be won by the power of Rolm's dragons rather than the prowess of their land forces.\n\nDespite the distance from Drell to the Shard, I knew that Dayne and his slave dragons would be watching the fortress, so I flew at speed with my escort to the mountain, having judged that strength was preferable to stealth. Inevitably, a dragon rose from the water's edge to challenge us. She was small\u2014one of my horned cousins. I'd always paid less attention to my smaller brethren, but I was fairly certain the humans called her Ilias. Her left wing was heavily scarred from a recently-healed wound, and her ryder looked a bit unsteady on her back, making me wonder how long the pair had been joined.\n\nI closed on the Shard along with my feathered escorts. Approaching the mountain was dangerous\u2014the crystalline rock had hidden crevices and tunnels where furies lurked, ready to strike. The Rolman dragons knew that as well. If I could get close enough to the Shard, I hoped to avoid a confrontation.\n\n\"Faster, you beasts,\" I said to the griffins. I have no idea if they understood me\u2014if they did, they gave no sign of it. They had been given instructions\u2014something like 'fly to the Shard with a dragon' and did the best that their limited minds could manage. As near as I could tell, griffins were like super-intelligent dogs. Unfortunately, Illias closed the distance between us quickly, even with her newly-healed wing. The griffins responded to her presence as griffins were bred to\u2014they changed course to attack.\n\nI gave a low growl of frustration, not just for an unnecessary fight, but also because of what transpired in the sky behind Illias\u2014ash dragons came in her wake. I needed to deal with this now, preferably without killing Illias.\n\n\"Just hold on,\" I told Harlan as I banked toward Illias. \"Keep your daggers tucked into whatever dark places you keep them.\"\n\nThe horned dragon was already maneuvering for position to engage the griffins, gaining altitude as the griffins struggled to match her agility. I beat my wings, overtaking the griffins as I closed on Illias.\n\nThe horned dragon kept rising. The griffins made angry snarls behind me as they hungered for combat. Ilias' ryder had a bow in hand, an arrow notched. She took aim at me, but didn't fire.\n\n\"Begone from these skies,\" I roared. \"I've no wish to harm you.\"\n\nI was speaking to my fellow dragon, but I suppose her ryder could've decided my warning applied to her as well.\n\nThe arrow stayed on the bow's string. \"Come back to us, Bayloo,\" the ryder shouted. It was a woman's voice I didn't recognize. \"Come home.\"\n\nHome? Was she serious?\n\n\"Slaves have no homes. The dragon you ride is not yours, the war you fight is not of her choosing. It is you who should go home, and let your dragon's will return to her.\"\n\nI knew that wasn't possible, but it felt nice to say it. If only the world could be so easy.\n\n\"You've fallen prey to spells of the Pale Wrights of Oster!\" the ryder shouted back. \"Shake free of their taint and return to us.\"\n\nWas that the story that Dayne was peddling to explain my presence here? I wonder what he'd told my fellow dragons and their ryders. I'd expected something to do with madness, but I supposed the Pale Wrights were an easy tale to weave given that I had initially disappeared during Oster's attack on Eladrell.\n\nIllias didn't change her course as I flew, but nor did her ryder fire at me. She whispered to the horned dragon beneath her\u2014another sign of an inexperienced ryder, since the runes permitted far more efficient communication. Still, I was ready to swerve if needed. I flexed my claws, the sai ready for action. But I wasn't going to kill Illias. I didn't even want to hurt her badly, so going after her wings was my best option. I needed to take her out of the sky so we could get back to the Shard before the ash dragons arrived.\n\nI beat my wings one final time. I'd be on Illias in moments. I roared another, final, warning at the ryder who controlled the horned dragon. \"Be gone or be dead.\"\n\nThe ryder stared at me, then lowered her bow.\n\nTo my shock, Illias banked sharply, turning away from me. I slowed cautiously, changing my course to take me away from the melee. I suspected a trick, but I was willing to take the risk for the opportunity not to fight. Illias kept turning. The griffins had caught us by then, but Illias was faster if she chose to retreat.\n\nI wondered at the strange behavior. The horned dragon was outmatched, but I'd still expected her to try to engage me long enough for the larger dragons to join the fight. Instead, Illias beat her wings, retreating toward the main Rolman camp at Drell. The ash dragons still closed, but I'd have no trouble reaching the Shard before they arrived.\n\nI seized the opportunity to avoid a fight, even if I wasn't completely sure what it meant. With two quick flaps of my wings, I was headed toward the Shard once again. The griffins still hadn't turned back yet. They wanted to hunt dragon. Somehow, they understood I was off limits, but that didn't change their instinct to kill others of my kind. I needed to remind them of what their masters had told them.\n\nI flew within a hair's length of one the griffins, yanking its tail with my hind claw to remind it and its fellows to turn around as well. \"To the Shard!\" I roared.\n\nOne griffin turned, its teeth snapping at me, but it followed. The other fell into line short afterward. Ahead of us, the massive crystal mountain beckoned, its strange surface glittering with light of a hundred different colors. We were almost safe\u2014if flying into a mortal enemy's fortress could be considered safe.\n\n\"Too easy again,\" Harlan muttered as I circled the crystal fortress. Massive iron gates blocked access into the mountain. I'd once helped break through those barriers; now I waited for them to open.\n\n\"Nothing will be easy tomorrow,\" I assured Harlan. \"Enjoy it today.\"\n\nThe grinding of metal punctuated my statement. The way into the Shard opened for me. I sucked in a deep breath before flying into the great cavern to meet the King of Oster."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "The interior of the Shard dazzled.\n\nNot in the way of other grand palaces or castles. There were no statues of gold, no great towers, no inner and outer courtyards, no great hall. None of these were needed. The only walls were those that guarded the two primary entry points into the mountain, and on those battlements bristled dozens of ballistae meant to keep dragons at bay. Except me. I was permitted to fly inside unmolested by the wary defenders of the Shard.\n\nInstead of a central keep with great spires pointing toward the sky, the surface of the Shard's great cavern had been covered with a thin foundation of rock and soil, on which sat a collection of low-slung wooden structures, all constructed in a similar style, with flat roofs (since it never rained or snowed inside the Shard) and open courtyards at their center. The buildings were connected to each other by a series of wooden plank walkways. The entire north end of the cavern was dedicated to a sprawling garden filled with several ponds\u2014the ultimate luxury within the crystal mountain. The flower and plant species here had been specially bred to grow in depleted soil under the diffuse glittering light that came into the Shard. It was within this expanse of greenery that I was to meet King Galt.\n\nThe cavern interior was expansive, its ceiling soaring like a false sky. Stalactites hung from the upper surface, several so large and sharp they could impale a dragon. As I made my way to the garden, I used the opportunity to do some scouting. The Osterans were obviously preparing their attack. Griffins were lined up in pens near the massive portcullis that protected the eastern entrance to the cavern, while infantry and archers drilled in tight formations nearby. I also spotted a pack of giant war wolves, perhaps the same ones that had pestered me in the Pits of Gargen, although there were more of them here. Beside the pack huddled two hooded figures in distinctive robes of ivory that had to be Pale Wrights. The strange light within the Shard didn't seem to bother them.\n\nI glided onto the soft grass of the gardens near a veranda that Kemet had described to me when he told me where to go to meet his king. I sniffed at my surroundings. Much of the fauna was diminutive versions of trees and plants I'd seen in Rolm, with child-sized trees that should've soared past the roof of the cavern along with bushes on which sprouted tiny roses. Narrow, rock-lined streams snaked through the carefully cultivated greenery, where no other person or creature stirred.\n\n\"He'll make us wait a bit,\" Harlan said as he climbed off my back onto the grass. \"It's the nature of kings.\"\n\nHarlan was wrong for once. Almost immediately, the ruler of Oster revealed himself, emerging from a nondescript hut without ceremony or ostentation. He was accompanied by a lone soldier attired in full mail. Had I not been told to expect King Galt, I'd not have suspected the gaunt human who strolled toward me to be someone of import. This was not the man who had been described to me. The King of Oster was supposedly a giant specimen. This person stared at me with wan copper eyes perched beneath a receding line of dusty grey hair. His shoulders were wide, but meatless, causing his silk doublet to hang from him as if the clothes had once belonged to a larger, heavier man. Only a strong, double-barrel chin with the memory of a beard and the circle of gold atop his head marked this human as someone who had once been more than one amongst a crowd. That, and the rocky power of his gaze. Most humans feared dragons up close, but not Galt. He was wary, but not afraid.\n\nGalt wore a sword at his waist, a thin blade with a pommel of what I suspected to be dragon bone. The spikes on my mane stood as I remembered this human was no friend to my kind. Although dragons had given him little reason to call us friend, either.\n\n\"You know who I am?\" was his greeting. Galt's voice reminded me of two jagged stones being rubbed together.\n\nI decided to be polite. \"You are King Adulas Galt of Oster.\"\n\n\"That is what many call me, it is the name given to me. Dragons choose their own names, do they not?\"\n\nI wondered how he knew that. Even the other slave dragons of Rolm wouldn't have known that. \"We do.\"\n\n\"A fine custom we humans should learn from.\" Galt spoke to me with ease, as if conversing with dragons was mundane to him. \"It might make us more conscious of what we have actually accomplished in our lives, rather than what has been given to us.\" He touched the thin crown atop his head. \"This has been in my family for seven generations. We ruled these islands when the first King of Rolm was just an opportunistic raider mysteriously appearing from the north. This crown came to me through blood\u2014for only my blood can truly rule Oster in these times. But if I was to be able choose my own name, I would have it be He Who Survived the Tide.\"\n\nI flashed a dragon smile with my eyes, although I wasn't sure if Galt understood or not. \"An apt name for these times. A new wave of enemies rises against you, but I am here as well. There is a chance you may emerge victorious against the wave from Rolm once again.\"\n\nGalt grunted. He held out a hand indicating that his escort should approach. I belatedly realized the soldier was a human female with thick platinum hair cropped above her ears. \"This is my daughter, Jalena.\"\n\nI wasn't so adept with human ages, but I would've guessed Galt's daughter to be no more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, except for her eyes, which were old and weary like those of her father. And there was something else. On her neck just above the collar of her armor was a splotch of fiery red skin. Humans sometimes had strange conditions on their skin, but this looked more like a barely-healed wound.\n\n\"In troubled times, there are few to trust. I trust only my family, and all that remains of that is my daughter. Only my daughter. I cannot trust a dragon who I do not even know. My counselors such as Kemet tell me I must, but that is not so. There is always a choice.\" Galt's eyes challenged me.\n\nTo my surprise, I found myself liking King Galt. \"I do not ask you to trust me. I, a dragon, do not trust humans.\" I saw Harlan's frown. \"I do not trust most humans. I certainly do not trust your Pale Wrights, whatever they are. I came here to offer a bargain. I will keep my part of it, because it serves my purpose. Trust in that, if you must.\"\n\nJalena looked me up and down, evaluating, although I wasn't sure to what end. \"Kemet says that you seek this aurathorn from the Pale Wrights so that you can make a magic to free your fellow dragons.\" Her voice was almost as graveled as her fathers, but there was no mistaking its skepticism.\n\nI willed myself to be patient with these humans. \"Is that so hard to believe?\"\n\n\"For generations we have fought dragons. Never has one done anything but burn and destroy in Oster. Never have we heard a whisper of this aurathorn being able to free your kin from Rolm's slavery.\"\n\n\"My kind are not born slaves. Indeed, the slave dragons of Rolm do not breed. In this part of the world, only on Veralon are dragons still hatched. The Sculptors of Rolm make us slaves when we are newly born. If runes of dark magic can be carved to enslave a creature, is it so hard believe it can be undone?\"\n\nJalena looked at her father \"And all this time, the Pale Wrights held the secret.\" Her eyes were angry, but I didn't think it was directed at me, or even her father.\n\n\"I know your thoughts, daughter,\" Galt replied. \"I've had them as well. The Wrights say they know no magic, that they had no idea the vine they bred could be used for such a purpose. They claim it was a medicine for beasts. Even more, they claim no one in Oster could use this aurathorn to free dragons.\" His tone was neutral, but his eyes betrayed disdain. \"They say only a dragon can make use of it in that way.\"\n\nI spoke an obvious truth. \"You do not trust the Pale Wrights.\"\n\n\"Slave-keepers.\" Jalena said her word with such venom, I'd have thought she had known shackles herself, rather than been born the daughter of a king.\n\nHarlan noticed as well. \"You hate them so, even though their beasts have helped keep Oster free?\"\n\nSomething unspoken passed between the royals of Oster. I could only guess at it, although it was likely something involving their supposed ally, the Wrights. No one in Rolm had ever suspected such tension between the great powers of Oster.\n\nGalt took control of the discourse once again. \"The Wrights are indeed essential to the survival of Oster. Under constant threat of dragon attack, my family has increasingly relied upon their particular \u2026 talents for breeding griffins and other beasts, without which Oster would've been ground into ash by Rolm long ago.\" He tightened his eyes, a look that merely highlighted the king's fatigue. \"The great beasts they breed have helped us survive, but perhaps in other ways the Pale Wright are not so different than the Sculptors of Rolm. They are necessary, but not desirable.\"\n\nI didn't quite understand Jalena's words. Breeding and training those beasts in the pits\u2014with the harshest of methods\u2014could be akin to slavery, I supposed. But I wasn't here to unravel the politics of Oster.\n\nI gave the royals of Oster a snarl and wing stretch. Neither flinched. These were not cowards. \"You asked me here to see with your eyes and hear with your ears if you could trust a dragon. My magic does not include spells to make you believe that, and I wouldn't bother with such things even if I could. I came here to get this aurathorn because it may help me free my enslaved kin, and even more. I don't have the breath to explain it all, but Dayne is not the only peril to this land or this world. Still, he must die. I will do as I say. I would not have come to the Shard if it were otherwise. I would not make the offer I make to you if I had a better choice.\" I refolded my wings. Neither royal had moved as I spoke. \"Do you still doubt me?\"\n\nGalt met my gaze. \"Much like you, if I had any other choice, you would not be here. All my life I have fought dragons, and paid a heavy price for it.\" He and his daughter exchanged glances. \"I brought you here so that I might know if there is another way, that the war with Rolm's dragons need not go on forever. That is the true knowledge I seek. In your plain talk, I believe I have gotten the truth, and thus the answer I needed. And for that chance, I will risk my life, my family's life, and Oster.\"\n\n\"And at the end of this, aurathorn is mine? You swear it?\"\n\n\"On my blood, and that of my family, I swear it. I shall ensure this aurathorn is delivered to you. Let Oster's victory be yours. We fight a common enemy and seek a common goal.\"\n\nSomehow, I believed him. I could smell Galt's longing for victory, but also for safety for his people. \"When do we go?\"\n\n\"When the sun rises tomorrow.\"\n\nThat made sense for humans, but not dragons. \"Twilight is better. I can get closer without being seen perhaps. We should go today. Your troops look ready.\"\n\n\"The timing is not my choice, but the choice of the Wrights. It will take time for them to lay their symbionts on the soldiers, and on the griffins. We must attack soon afterward, while the effects last.\" Galt released a breath. \"I take no joy in waiting for what must be done. These gardens are yours till the morning. I will have food sent to you, and bedding for your companion. Kemet, too, will come with more plans. You may accept his words as mine. I must go to be with my soldiers. They deserve that much, at least, for the sacrifice they make this night.\"\n\nI didn't like the delay, but I understood. I couldn't beat all of the Rolman army and all their dragons by myself. \"We shall speak again when Dayne is dead.\"\n\nGalt left without replying. Jalena lingered for several laden moments, as if she wanted to say something more, but changed her mind before the words came. She hurried after her father.\n\nI wished she had decided to speak."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "We had a plan.\n\nHuman, griffin, and dragon, all fighting together. The speed of the symbiont-enhanced humans and griffins would take the Rolman force by surprise. Oster's remaining furies would clear a path for me to the heart of the camp\u2014to King Dayne himself. I would kill Dayne, the Rolman supply depots would be captured or destroyed, and word would arrive from Eladrell of the Ulibon fleet threatening their homeland, sending the remains of the demoralized army to flight (via dragon and ship) back to Rolm, while Harlan and I collected aurathorn. It was more of a dream than an actual plan, but it was a pleasant hope while it lasted.\n\nEvening fell within the Shard, the light fading even as the din bouncing off the great cavern's arching ceiling intensified. Beyond the false tranquility of the garden, the remaining soldiers and beasts of Oster were being fitted with symbionts specially bred by the Pale Wrights.\n\nI rested but I didn't sleep. I couldn't even if I had wanted to, because Harlan paced about with an anxiousness I'd not seen before. I cracked open one eye. \"You've danced on the edge of the Abyss enough to know how to balance. It isn't death that troubles you, Harlan Dor. For the sake of this rare grass that grows under the twisted light of the Shard, what is it that keeps you from sitting still for even a few moments?\"\n\n\"Did I keep from your sleep?\"\n\n\"Do you think I'm fool enough to sleep in this place, while armies prepare for battle? I am cautious. Your dancing about the garden is more than caution.\"\n\nHarlan forced his feet to stop moving. \"A good captain can smell a storm coming, even if he doesn't always know the direction.\"\n\n\"You don't think we are the storm?\"\n\nKemet strode into the garden at that moment, cutting off Harlan's answer. His gait was different tonight, his shoulders slouched. For the first time since I'd met him, the soldier wasn't fitted with one of the Wright's leech symbionts. The space on Kemet's neck where the creature had once attached looked horrific\u2014the skin resembling an infected burn, with capillaries of ugly black expanding like a web from the contaminated center.\n\nKemet didn't bother with greetings or pleasantries, which I appreciated. \"The night slips past too quickly. Galt asked me to attend to you, to share details of this plan for the morning. Soon, our army will be ready. He intends to lead the attack personally.\"\n\nHarlan spoke before I could. \"Does it hurt?\"\n\nThere was no need to specify the injury. Kemet moved his hand to his neck before stopping just short. \"Some, but it is a relief to be without it. I will fight with my own strength and wits tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Apparently, the creatures become deadly if overused. I'll be slower, but doesn't mean I'll be less dangerous. A few other soldiers have refused the symbionts as well, much to the consternation of the Pale Wrights.\" He managed a sickly smile.\n\n\"The berserker warriors of Tal consume giant leeches from the swamps near their home before battle. They say it gives them the ability to share their gods' strength. Yet, nothing compares with these symbionts.\" Harlan sounded concerned, but also impressed.\n\n\"The Pale Wrights are unrivaled breeders of the most fantastic beasts.\" Kemet offered the praise laced with obvious disdain. It occurred to me this was the first time I'd spoken to Kemet away from the Pits of Gargen. Here, he made no effort to hide his feelings for the strange creatures.\n\nHarlan continued to appraise Kemet's lingering scar from the symbiont. \"Bayloo has told me that the healing symbionts of the Wrights were known in Rolm, that they were sometimes given to injured soldiers or griffins in prior engagements, but there had never been anything that could strengthen a soldier. Nothing that could grant a man the endurance to run such distance as you ran, at speed and without stopping. These are new.\"\n\n\"It happens like that with the Wrights.\" Kemet replied. \"They lurk underground in their pits, emerging rarely. To speak to them, one must go to their lair, and few wish to dwell in that place. Otherwise, years can pass where those \u2026 things seem to accomplish nothing, then all of a sudden, they will breed a beast that changes everything: The furies. An improved griffin breed. The new symbionts.\"\n\nI decided to take advantage of Kemet's candor. \"Where did the Wrights come from?\"\n\nKemet opened his mouth then closed it again as he thought better of his initial answer. \"Only Galt and the royal family know the origins of the Pale Wrights.\"\n\n\"Why trust such creatures?\" Harlan pressed.\n\nKemet shrugged uneasily. \"They are connected to the ruling family. More than that I cannot say, but know \u2026 they shall always be together. Like the hilt and blade, one is part of the other, linked as a single whole.\"\n\nHarlan nodded curtly. \"Will Galt keep his promise to us?\"\n\nKemet looked offended. \"Galt is many things, and a hard man is one of them. But I have known him all of my life, and I've never known him to break his word. Never. He will do as he says. Of that I am sure.\"\n\nAfter that, Kemet told us about Oster's armies. I tried to pay attention, but soldiers' formations and terrain details meant little to me. I knew what I had to do tomorrow. Instead, my mind kept wandering to other matters, to the memories of Dayne that lingered inside me. He was the last human who had tried to command me, an ugly taint that couldn't be fully cleansed.\n\nEventually, Kemet departed to be with his own men. Harlan stopped walking the garden incessantly for a time. We both pretended to rest in the comparative quiet, although neither of us did. But it was enough of a peaceful lull that ended with the echo of clashing steel ripping through the cavern.\n\n\"Not swords,\" Harlan declared, daggers already in hand, as if they'd sprouted. \"Wrong sound. Too heavy. Something bigger.\"\n\nBigger indeed. Harlan hadn't been inside the Shard before, but I had. I knew the sound. \"It's the gate.\"\n\nEven from the garden, I could see all the way to the massive portcullis that protected the main portal of the Shard. The eastern gate had lifted suddenly, jerking upwards. Not enough to be completely open, but enough for humans to enter or exit. It could've been opened to permit a scouting party to depart, but that seemed less likely. I knew from past battles that there were other passages out of the Shard, often used by furies, single griffins, or scouts. My suspicion that something was amiss was confirmed by bells of alarm that followed. The din within the great cavern became a chaotic roar. The sound of metal striking metal echoed again. This time it was swords. Shouts followed, but something else was wrong.\n\nHarlan noticed as well. \"The area around us is strangely quiet. We are near the heart of this place. Everything is happening near the gate.\"\n\nI didn't have time to ponder that particular mystery. The huge portcullis moved again, this time with deliberate purpose: it opened. Outside, dawn had not yet broken. Even over the chaos echoing off the cavern's walls, I heard the distinctive sounds of what was coming. I realized I'd been terribly mistaken about the situation I'd placed myself in. Into the Shard flew the consequences of my error.\n\nEmerging from the curtain of black beyond, a massive dragon flew through the open gate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "No one had ever conquered the Shard.\n\nKing Mendakas had come closest, with the fortress saved only by the unexpected deployment of the never-before-seen furies, as well as a generous heaping of luck. This time, Dayne's dragons entered the Shard without any answer by the defenders who should've been on the wall. I was still missing something vital, even as the battle lurched toward me.\n\nI counted four ash dragons, along with over half a dozen horned dragons. This was likely the last of my enslaved brethren. That meant King Dayne was here as well. I guessed he'd be riding Arutel, the largest of the ash dragons among his dwindling stock. Dayne liked big things.\n\n\"If Dayne is here, perhaps there is a chance,\" I said, as much to myself as Harlan. \"I can still kill him.\" Of course, I would have to contend with many dragons in a confined space.\n\nHarlan watched it unfold. \"Why do the Osterans do nothing?\"\n\nA partial answer came bounding through the well-manicured shrubbery: war wolves. The protectors of the Pale Wrights. Not just protectors, I realized. Their servants. All the beasts of Oster had been raised by the Wrights. The shivering dread of my grievous mistake swept through me as the giant wolves consumed the distance between us. The alpha was in the lead. There wasn't going to be an opportunity to talk this time. They had come to kill.\n\nThe alpha reached us first, but he was also the savviest of the pack. He feigned a leap, flexing his haunches, but not putting himself into the air. The wolf I had named Dangerous back at the pits\u2014the beast with the missing ear\u2014was beside him and showed less caution. Dangerous jumped at me, mouth open, as if his teeth could match mine. Harlan put a dagger into the lupine's throat. The creature yelped in pain until I smashed its skull in mid-air with a foreclaw.\n\nThe surviving pack surrounded us. They were six, all hungry and ugly. I didn't want to fight them on the ground; unfortunately, the cavern was filling with hostile dragons. I also couldn't leave Harlan here\u2014doing so would mean his death, no matter how many daggers he had hidden in his clothing. I had magic, but its usefulness was limited by the Shard. I could summon no lightning without a sky. There wasn't enough space to use wind effectively as a weapon. The alpha wolf sensed my indecision.\n\n\"The pack grows, dragon.\" Saliva dripped from its mouth. \"No one to save you this time.\"\n\nThe giant wolf bounded forward, another feint. I didn't fall for it, but four other wolves came at me. I smacked one back with my tail, but two others managed to get their jaws onto my left foreleg. The teeth were sharp, but their jaws weren't strong enough to penetrate my scales. I hurled them off, sending the beasts spinning through the air. To their credit, they both landed on their legs, dashing back to the fight. I heard dragon wings. I smelled fire.\n\n\"Get out of here,\" Harlan said. \"I can handle these.\"\n\nHe really couldn't. Each of the wolves was larger than Harlan, as well as being faster and more vicious. I beat my wings just hard enough to send garden debris flying and lift myself off the ground. I didn't go much higher than Harlan's head. Instead of flying away, I came at the alpha, claws twitching. The wolf darted backward so quickly that I ended up with dirt and a few scrubs in my claws. Three wolves jumped on me\u2014one on my tail, two on my rear haunch. That was just stupid. I lifted back into the air, using my tail to smash the wolf riding there into its nearest companion. Both tumbled to the ground with a pair of satisfying whelps.\n\nThe last wolf scrambled onto my back, its claws desperate for purchase on my scales. I landed hard on all fours, shaking back and forth like a wet dog. It was an indignity, but it did the trick\u2014the last wolf leapt to the ground, scurrying away to join its chastised fellows. Dragon roars echoed all around me, the cavern amplifying the cries of a few into the sound of a hundred.\n\nEverything was about to get worse, and I had no idea what to do. Saving Harlan and myself was the best place to start.\n\nI feigned another attack, lurching at the alpha, then pulling back quickly, my body pressed close to the ground. Despite Harlan's earlier bravado, he wasn't fool enough to miss the opportunity to climb onto my back. The cavern's tight sky might be filled with hostile dragons, but it was still better than playing with killer wolves in the garden.\n\nThe alpha's eyes shifted as he realized we wanted to escape rather than continue the fight. He growled something to his pack as he came at us. I was certain there wouldn't be any feint this time. The alpha wanted a piece of dragon meat, but he'd also seen the failure of his fellow wolves. That made me suspect he'd go for my wings, so I spread them like bait for a hungry fish, beating them as the wolves came again, their leader in the vanguard.\n\nI guessed correctly. As the alpha leaped at my left wing, I swung my neck around, snatching the giant wolf in my jaws mid-flight. His fur was tougher than I expected, as hard as armor, and I almost dropped him as he squirmed in my grip, claws and teeth thrashing. I lifted off the ground before the rest of the pack reached me. They jumped futilely, with only the sound of their howls able to follow me into the air. When I'd reach sufficient height, I dropped my four-legged passenger. There wasn't time to look at what became of him.\n\nDragons and their ryders closed in on me. The two ash dragons who had chased me into the Pits of Gargen, Cornethius and Blaris, came first, but there were other dragons in the area as well, although most of my brethren seemed busy strafing the ground in support of the Rolman soldiers that the horned dragons had carried inside the Shard. Blaris wagged his stub of a tail like an excited dog as he closed on me, but it was Cornethius who released his fire first.\n\nThe grey dragon's fire reached only the fringe of my senses, doing no harm, not even to the fragile human on my back. Blaris saved his breath until he could draw closer. I maneuvered to keep my distance as best I could within the cavern. I couldn't beat every Rolman dragon simultaneously, particularly inside this diamond mountain where much of my magic was blunted. I needed to escape, not fight.\n\nBlaris and Cornethius also expected me to flee, perhaps because that was what they thought I did last time they'd attempted to kill me. To prevent my escape, they spaced themselves generously, cutting off any route to fly around them as they attacked from above. I didn't try to go around them\u2014I accelerated into the gap between them. My wings propelled me upwards with desperate speed while the two dragons dove at me. They didn't expect my speed or my tactic. I was between them before they could react. Neither dragon could unleash its fire while the other dragon was on the far side of me for fear of hitting their precious mind-linked ryder. I sped above my errant kindred, turning immediately toward the Shard's eastern gate. The portal remained open, the glimmers of a new dawn inviting me to escape into the light. I flew as fast as I was able toward my only hope of survival.\n\nDragon roars ripped through the cavern. My brothers and sisters began breaking off their attacks on the remains of the Osteran loyalists to try to kill me. Ahead, a formation of four clustered horned dragons blocked my path. I sped through the chaotic gauntlet of smaller dragons, colliding with one, which sent me slightly off my intended course. Every dragon and every ryder now turned their attention to me. I had no doubt King Dayne was among those who sought me now. The exit neared, but it was shrinking; The gate was being lowered.\n\n\"We aren't going to make it,\" Harlan warned.\n\nI beat my wings twice more. \"We are.\"\n\nI could see the scratched metal of the portcullis as it descended from a recess in the cavern wall above. Beyond the opening beckoned a new morning. I could see ships in the sea outside. A lot of ships, but I didn't have time to take in any more details. Harlan must've seen them as well.\n\n\"May the True Light Shine,\" he muttered.\n\nThere wasn't time to discuss it further. I passed over fighting between human armies just inside the gate. I didn't have time to sort it out. The opening narrowed desperately.\n\n\"Bayloo, you can't.\"\n\nHarlan sounded worried. I didn't want him to be right about our predicament, but he was.\n\nThe massive steel gate slammed shut."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "There was no way out.\n\nBoth gates of the Shard were shut. Perhaps, given time and magic, I could've blasted an opening, but Rolm's dragon army closed on me.\n\nMy brethren came in waves. At the leading edge were the dragons Blaris and Cornethius, determined as ever to finally catch me. But another had joined them, a larger dragon encased in crimson scales tinged with gold: Arutel. I already knew the ryder before I saw him. The human wore a helm that matched the glittering metallic shade of his dragon, the top ringed by an ebony circle that resembled a painted crown. Among ryders, only Dayne would bother with such a showpiece. I could still feel the touch of my old ryder's mind\u2014dark and twisted. The runes were gone from my chest, but somehow the residual binding of the link was still there. It seemed one of us had to be dead for us to be truly separate. I intended to arrange that.\n\nThere was no magic that could defeat could so many of my kin, but I didn't have to die right now either. I willed my mind to relax, to find the Latticework. I reached for the Chord that controlled the sky far beyond the diamond walls of the Shard. The mountain surrounding me made it more difficult to manipulate the Latticework, but I still had enough control to call lightning. There was no way to get the bolts into the cavern, but I did the next best thing\u2014I directed the strikes into the mountain itself.\n\nWith a suddenness that I hoped caused King Dayne to wet his pants, flashes of brilliant light smashed into the Shard's outer shell. The rumble of thunder echoed, reverberating inside the mountain. The unexpected eruption of light and fury sent blinding flashes cascading along the walls and ceiling of the cavern. The dragons swerved at the unexpected eruption; humans gasped. For a few precious moments, no one focused on me. I made the most of the brief window of confusion: I flew at King Dayne.\n\nI knew his dragon, Arutel. My brother was quick, strong, and temperamental. Even when linked to a poised and experienced ryder, Arutel was prone to erratic actions. With Dayne on his back, he was unpredictable. Ryders were selected for their poise, but Dayne wasn't a true ryder. When the soft gloom of the cavern abruptly transformed to an exploding sun of brightness, Dayne panicked. His emotion fed to Arutel, who instinctively climbed for clouds and safety, but those didn't exist in the confined cavern. The other dragons behaved more sensibly, slowing themselves or taking evasive action that didn't put their ryders at risk. Arutel and Dayne briefly separated themselves from the larger formation. I flexed my sai as I closed the distance.\n\nArutel sensed me coming. I wanted to get above him, to strike at Dayne, but the big dragon reared up and away as I approached. I didn't have enough room to get into position without hitting the stalactites that lined the top of the cavern. Instead, I pressed in ever closer, close enough to get a claw on Dayne. The king shrieked with concerned rage even before I reached him and his dragon. Arutel twisted his neck to block my attack, leaving himself unnecessarily vulnerable to protect his ryder. I could've killed my brother with the sai at that moment, but I didn't come here to kill dragons. Unfortunately, leaving Arutel in prime fighting condition while he was linked to Dayne would've been stupidly naive as well. I compromised, sweeping across Arutel, gashing his chest with my tipped hind claws. He roared in fury as the sai cut into his scales.\n\nKing Dayne had some words as well, his shout as penetrating as a dragon's roar. \"Bayloo the traitor! Die, now!\"\n\nMy former ryder's voice dripped with the arrogance of triumph. I flew past Arutel, my chance for an easy kill gone. Harlan flicked a dagger as we flew, the blade spinning end over end in the air, curving at just the right moment to avoid Arutel's huge form while it sought his ryder. For a precious moment, I had hope, but Arutel saw the danger. The nimble dragon responded by whipping his tail into the dagger's path. Close, but not enough. I was back to avoiding and fleeing.\n\nDragons came at me once again. I moved too desperately to take note of their identities. I recognized the fire of Cornethius, the claws from Oton, and the ugly snout of a horned dragon I once knew as Ren. I wove and dodged, executing a precarious dance in the restricted sky of the cavern. Soon my body ached with the burn of exhaustion, and a dozen nicks marred my scales. All the time, I was pursued by Dayne's cackling voice, exhorting others to kill me, mutilate me, and engage in other unpleasantries. Eventually, the dragons were going to catch me. I couldn't keep this up.\n\n\"By the Guiding Star, there is hope,\" Harlan shouted at me as the mixed quartet of horned and ash dragons came at us once again. His optimism at this moment grated. I didn't have time to answer. A horned dragon flew up at me, its ryder sending arrows at my belly. I turned in one direction, then spun away from the Blaris's fire as she flew past me.\n\nHarlan kept shouting. \"Back toward the gate.\"\n\nI just did it. There wasn't anything to lose. Maybe Harlan had seen something, but I couldn't really fathom how we were going to escape this mess. More dragons came at me. At least one\u2014maybe Oton\u2014got a claw onto one of my wings, but it wasn't enough to slow me down, at least not yet. I drove toward the ground to avoid Cornethius once again. He turned tightly behind me to pursue, two other horned dragons joining the pursuit. I flew over the interior fortifications of the Shard, where there had been fighting earlier, intending to reach the edge of the cavern and hug its wall back upwards to escape my current batch of pursuers.\n\nThe distinctive sounds of arc bolts being hurled into the sky erupted beneath me. I swerved instinctively, but the projectiles weren't intended for me. A dozen bolts rose simultaneously. A horned dragon cried out in pain as a projectile hit, while Cornethius took two direct hits to his armored belly.\n\nIt took a moment for my frantic mind to puzzle out what had happened, but once I spotted Kemet among the ballistae I understood. It seemed a group of Osteran soldiers had won back control of a portion of the Shard's fortification. Rolman troops were arrayed below. There were only thirty or forty human soldiers around Kemet\u2014hardly enough to hold back the Rolman army, much less all the dragons.\n\n\"Kemet cannot help us,\" I growled at Harlan.\n\n\"We should help him.\"\n\nHe'd urged me here for that?\n\nI twisted my neck around for one more look at Kemet and his little salient of Osteran loyalists. They had a decent position, seemingly in control of a fortified tower housing several ballistae. The immediate problem wasn't the Rolman soldiers on both sides of their position (although that was going to be an issue); More urgent was Blaris, who was on course to incinerate the Osterans with a belch of fire. I twisted my body into a sharp turn, heading back toward Kemet. He'd tried to help me, so I should return the favor, even if we'd both end up in the Abyss soon enough.\n\n\"Bayloo \u2026 back at Maricopa \u2026\" Harlan's words failed him. \"I was wrong. I\u2014\"\n\nHe didn't finish, and I didn't have time to listen to a story.\n\nBlaris was going to reach Kemet before I did, so I let out a mighty roar to draw her attention. One glance at me flying directly toward her was enough to draw the dragon's ire. I'd escaped her claws too many times for Blaris to miss the opportunity.\n\n<You're welcome, Kemet.>\n\nI'd gotten too close to avoid Blaris. She didn't bother with fire. It was to be jaws and claws. I switched directions at the last moment, feigning a turn, but diving instead. It didn't work. Blaris got a claw on my back, followed by a jaw on my neck. I smashed my tail into Blaris's underbelly. She didn't budge. We were both still using our wings, but our deadly embrace was sending us toward the ground anyway. I whipped my tail again, this time trying to hit Blaris's ryder, but he was too far out of range. Harlan might've thrown a dagger\u2014I couldn't quite see.\n\nThe ground was coming. I hoped Harlan had the good sense to hold on. I beat my wings to try to cushion the impact, as did Blaris. The ground called.\n\nWe came down atop one of the square wooden buildings. The structure's thin roof collapsed under our weight. Despite my efforts to cushion the fall, Harlan fell from my back at impact, but the crash also enabled me to rip my neck free from the jaws holding me. I swiped a sai across Blaris's leg, hit her in the neck with my tail, then jammed another sai-tipped claw into her wing, punching a hole that would make flying difficult. Blaris's jaws snatched at me again, but I danced backward and she ate some air instead. I needed to get back into the sky. If I stayed here, all the dragons would be on me.\n\nWhere was Harlan?\n\nI saw only debris and Blaris in the vicinity, and I didn't have time to search. He'd be safer on the ground anyway. Maybe a single human could escape in the confusion of the battle. At least he'd have a chance. I beat my wings, but I couldn't get away in time.\n\nA wave of dragons came from both sides, clogging the air above me. There were so many. There was no point. No one could fly though what awaited, not even me.\n\nDayne flew to the forefront, gazing down at me with malevolence as Arutel circled above. I felt his hate as clearly as I saw it. \"You've learned some tricks, but it is not enough. You die with the last defenders of Oster.\"\n\nI pushed my will at him, a will countless times stronger than when he once tried to master me. \"You are a slave keeper with a heart of black. Every ryder here is a slaver. Yet I am more, and they shall all be like me.\"\n\nThe King of Rolm shrieked with rage, inside and out. \"Die!\"\n\nHarlan chose that inopportune moment to appear, popping up from a pile of rubble, a gash of his head, as if he'd been waiting for just this chance to get himself killed. \"Wait!\"\n\nThe fool was looking right at me, waving his hands in the air, as if trying to get my attention. Harlan seemed intent on denying me even a dignified death.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" Harlan's screams were frantic as he ran in my direction. It occurred to me he might not have been speaking to me, but rather someone behind me.\n\nI turned so that I could see what Harlan was seeing.\n\nIt made no sense. A group of humans advanced in tight lines from the eastern gate. It wasn't Kemet or his men. These newcomers had skin of gold-tinted ebony like Harlan, and all held long staffs, the tips pointed toward us. Behind them, the eastern gate was open. What\u2014\n\nExplosions as loud as an erupting inferno mountain ripped through the cavern. The Shard flashed white. Putrid smoke inundated the air. The world stopped in the wake of violent concussions.\n\nDragons started falling from the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Inferno staffs weren't just a legend.\n\nNor were the great ships of the Farlighters, which could ply even the shallowest waters, such as the Shifting Straits of Oster. Nor was the Farlighters' hatred of dragons. It was a lot of truth to learn in a few devastating moments.\n\nThe Farlighter fleet must've sailed in from some location off the coast of Oster as the battle began, trailing the Rolman dragons. It would've been easy to spot the assault as dragons swarmed the sky, then to exploit the singularly unique vulnerability of both the Osterans and the Rolman dragons. At no other time could the Farlighters have ambushed all of the dragons together in such a confined space. It was the perfect opportunity for slaughter.\n\nThe inferno staffs were devastating weapons, tools of death like no other human creation. Although they looked superficially like a regular iron staff, their innards were hollow. When triggered, the tubes emitted a sharpened metal projectile that flew with such extreme force that it could pass through dragon scale as if our armor was mere cloth. Seeing the weapons' awesome power, I would have assumed they were creations of some powerful enchantment, but the Latticework told me otherwise\u2014nothing about the inferno staffs had been altered by any magical means I could detect. The terrifying explosions, as well as the deadly force of the staff projectiles, seemed to be the product of human ingenuity. Their so-called dark light might be lost, but the Farlighters still knew how to kill.\n\nThe first, shocking fusillade had knocked nearly half of my brethren from the sky, the projectiles blasting holes in their wings and flesh. Those of my brethren still able to fly rallied against the new arrivals. I wanted to join them. I intended to join them. That was my instinct; The Farlighters were slaughtering us. We were all dragons. Harlan restrained me with screams, then by wrapping himself around my hind leg.\n\n\"Bayloo, you must not. There is another way. Don't go against them!\"\n\nI hesitated, my wings spread, but I stayed on the ground. That saved my life.\n\nThe attacking dragons, many of them already wounded by hits from the inferno staffs, flew at the Farlighter formation. I anticipated more explosions, but there were none. Apparently, the inferno staffs needed to be reloaded in some way. It was an opportunity for the dragon ryders. My kin were disorganized from the initial devastation, but it would take only one ash dragon to end the battle. King Dayne still rode Arutel, flying above the fray, shouting to kill, although he himself didn't seem anxious to be in the vanguard.\n\nCornethius had survived the initial assault. He came in a steep angle at the Farlighter line. Flame erupted from his mouth. The Farlighters scattered. Whatever the power of their weapons, they were humans, and humans burned. But the haphazard dragon counter-attack didn't anticipate that the Farlighter had a reserve. A second line of inferno-armed fighters scrambled into position behind the first line, knelt, then fired their weapons in unison.\n\nThe cavern shook from the reverberating explosion. My bones trembled. The scent of fire and poison infested the air. When the smoke cleared, there was still more horror to behold. Never had so many dragons fallen in so short a time. It was an unfathomable tragedy, one that shredded me inside. I couldn't dwell upon the loss. Even faced with such horror, my kin didn't quit.\n\nAs he fell from the sky, Cornethius stretched his neck toward the Farlighters, spreading his bloodied wings to direct the path of his fall. He came fast and with fury. A great wave of fire spread across the land beneath him, engulfing dozens of Farlighters in burning death. I had no pity for them. Cornethius hit the ground hard, but I had survived worse falls. That was what I had to tell myself.\n\nCowardice kept King Dayne unscathed. Arutel was one of only three dragons still in the sky, and the others were horned dragons who couldn't breathe fire (not that there was anything wrong with that). The Farlighters had suffered grievously. Only a handful were still upright. One of them was a woman\u2014a striking one, with shoulders as broad as any male soldier. She had tight, braided hair, highlighted by silver streaks as brilliant as Rinxia's scales. Harlan's eyes fixed upon her. There seemed to be something wrong with him as he gaped, his heart beating erratically. Arutel saw the woman as well\u2014she had a presence that drew eyes toward her, even at a distance, although her own attention was on the carnage of her people. Arutel dipped his wing, his crimson-tinted eyes hungry for vengeance. The Farlighter woman held no weapon that I could see.\n\n\"Go!\" Harlan spoke in a whisper that was somehow as loud as any dragon's roar in my mind. He was on my back so quickly he might have been there all along. I was in the air a moment later. I came at Dayne. Whatever had happened here, as much as I still didn't understand, I knew that killing Dayne still mattered.\n\nI soared upwards, but it was quicker going down than up, so Arutel had the advantage. Dayne's dragon opened his jaw, the muscles in his chest and neck contracting as he readied his fire. The silver-streaked woman saw the dragon above her. She could've tried to run, or dove out of harm's way\u2014it probably wouldn't have worked, but most humans would've made the effort. She didn't. Instead, she fell onto the ground, placing her body over one of the wounded Farlighters beside her, choosing to be a sacrificial shield.\n\nHarlan saw it too. \"Bayloo, save her!\"\n\nI did, and it hurt.\n\nWith a beat of my wings, I flew right at the human, toward the remaining Farlighters armed with their inferno staffs. That was crazy stupid, but there was something in Harlan's voice that made me do it anyway\u2014desperation. I think I had to do it. Arutel released his fiery spit before I could arrive, but the tiny fraction of time it took for the flames to move from him to his victim was enough for me to insert myself into the fire's path. I took the heat on my head initially, then rolled to let the thicker scales on my belly absorb the rest. My position and Harlan's enchanted cloak protected him.\n\nWhen Arutel's breath had ended, he roared his displeasure. However, my desperate tactic had put me directly in his flightpath. Arutel had momentum and speed. I tried to yank myself out of the way, but there were limits to even my ability to maneuver. Arutel's hind claws wrapped around my neck as the great dragon accelerated past me. He didn't penetrate my scales, but he didn't need to do that. We both flew at high speeds in different directions, but he had a tight grip around my neck.\n\nIn a desperate moment, I tried to slow myself. My partial success was the difference between a snapped bone and mere agony, as my neck was contorted in a most undesirable manner. Arutel dragged me through the cavern. It was terrible position to be in\u2014if I tried to break free, I would end up severing my own neck; to keep myself alive, I had to use my own wings to keep pace with Arutel, matching every maneuver, every turn and dive, as he flew around the Shard, trying to get me to help kill myself. Dayne cackled like a deranged hyena as we flew our lethal dance.\n\nArutel had a firm grasp on me, and I couldn't reach him, not with my tail or my foreclaws. Nor could I concentrate sufficiently to reach the Latticework while flying for my life\u2014and I couldn't really think of a way magic could get me out of this in any case. It would've been so easy if I'd been a fire breather. As adept a flier as I was, Arutel was eventually going to kill me. Sooner than that.\n\nArutel executed a sharp turn. I contorted my body to match both his speed and direction as best I could. Quickly, the other dragon dove toward the ground. Again, I followed. Dayne glanced at me, laughing, as if my death pushed the destruction of much of his army from his memory. My impotence at being unable to end this farce hurt almost as much as my neck. Arutel pulled out his dive, doubtlessly preparing another maneuver. For a brief moment, Arutel and Dayne passed beneath me. My hearts thundered. Harlan leapt from my back, falling head first. He dove along my neck line, aiming for the dragon and ryder as they passed below. It was crazy and desperate, but so were we.\n\nDayne saw him\u2014his head jerked upwards\u2014but I don't think he really believed what he saw. That was understandable, because as a rule, humans don't fly. Dayne didn't react in time, and that allowed Harlan to crash into the King of Rolm. Harlan's strong arms wrapped around Dayne in an unfriendly embrace before the king was able to get a weapon in hand. Harlan twisted Dayne from his saddle, breaking the straps. Dayne cried out, enraged and terrified. With a great heave, Harlan hauled the struggling King of Rolm to the precipice of death.\n\nArutel felt his master's distress. The dragon released me as we swerved violently, but Harlan kept his balance. Arutel's tail snapped around; the tip reached Harlan's waist, toppling him. The smuggler didn't release Dayne as they fell onto Arutel's backside, but the unexpected attack allowed the boy-king to climb on top of Harlan. With characteristic brutality, Dayne smashed the base of his palm into Harlan's face. It was a solid hit. Harlan was momentarily stunned. Dayne's right hand flashed to his side, to the hilt of a curved dagger at his waist. Glinting steel came out, but by that time I was ready. My neck bones throbbed in agony, but without Arutel's claws on me, I could outfly him or any other dragon (except maybe Rinxia). I'd been accelerating behind Arutel as Harlan and Dayne fought. As Dayne's dagger moved in his hand, so did my foreclaw.\n\nJust as I was about to skewer the King of Rolm, Arutel sensed the danger and twirled his body. I missed Dayne, and he missed stabbing Harlan. Instead, Arutel's desperate maneuver sent his ryder flying from his back and into a precipitous fall. Somehow, Harlan held onto Arutel's saddle.\n\nDayne's linked dragon whelped in panic, diving to save his human. I was faster and more ruthless, grabbing Arutel on his back with one sai-tipped claw, then two. The enchanted tips dug into him, giving me a firm hold. I could've hurt Arutel, but there was no need. Instead, I used my leg to shove him off course. At the same time, I used his weight to propel myself ahead to reach Dayne, who'd gone unconscious with terror as he fell toward his end. I didn't let the King of Rolm splatter. I wanted something before he died.\n\nI grabbed my former ryder out of the air almost gently, cradling him between my foreclaws. With Dayne secure, I flew upwards, fast enough to keep Arutel from closing the distance between us, Harlan clinging to the hostile dragon's saddle. As I hoped, King Dayne's eyes fluttered open. He was dazed at first, but quickly his eyes bulged as his mind awakened. Fear surged through him, a fever so intense I felt it as well. I let him marinate in his fright as I soared through the air.\n\n\"How did you get here?\" I asked him. \"How did you enter the Shard?\"\n\nDayne's indignity returned, his entitlement and the delusion that went along with it. \"They wanted me here. They recognized me as a true king, not like that doddering old man, Galt.\"\n\n\"Who wanted you here?\" I demanded.\n\nDayne seemed confused. \"All of them. All the people of Oster except those few sycophants around their dying ruler. They wanted me.\"\n\nArutel's desperate wings neared. Harlan's shout rang from nearby. Something about destiny. I swept into a tight circle. I wanted more time. \"Who told you about the people of Oster's sudden love for you?\"\n\nDayne's jaw hardened. I released my grip on him, allowing him to fall\u2014just a little\u2014before grabbing him again.\n\nHe screamed out his answer. \"The Pale Wrights. The true power in Oster. They sent an emissary. They told me.\"\n\nThat made more sense. I had what I wanted. This human was useless. \"You have brought all of Rolm to ruin. Everything your ancestors built, gone in a day.\"\n\nKing Dayne knew no remorse. \"I had the right!\"\n\nI dropped him. Arutel roared, diving, desperate to save his master. My brother's cries were so heartfelt that I had pity for him. As fast as he was, Arutel wasn't quick enough. I'd made sure of that. All it took was a thud; King Dayne entered the Abyss and the world was a slightly better place. An uncomfortable splinter in my mind to which I'd become unwittingly accustomed died with Dayne. I was completely free of the runes that once bound me. No creature, no human or dragon, was my master.\n\nI enjoyed that fleeting moment, until the violent percussion of an inferno staff cut through my bliss. Arutel shuddered in flight.\n\nThe projectile grazed his ribs, then passed through his wing. The hit might not have been catastrophic if the dragon hadn't already been diving, desperate to try to save his doomed ryder. Wounded, Arutel lost whatever remaining control he still had over his flight path. His low altitude probably saved two lives\u2014his and Harlan's.\n\nArutel tumbled into the side of a wooden building, taking down a wall in the process. As I flew above him, his flailing tail told me he was alive. Harlan had been thrown, but was blessed with the luck of fools\u2014landing in a small, artificial lake located in the interior courtyard of the grand building he'd crashed into. He was already pulling himself ashore when I landed beside the water.\n\nI was relieved to see him. \"Fortunately, you swim better than you fly.\"\n\nWater dripped from his hair, past his eyes. \"Bayloo, my people are here. I suspected it might be them back in Maricopa. The signs were there. I just \u2026\" He trailed off as he stared at the new arrivals entering the courtyard. There were five Farlighters with inferno staffs. The woman with the silver-streaked hair was among them. Harlan stared at her and she stared back. It was a heavy, elongated moment of disbelief shared between the pair.\n\nThen, as if an invisible wall collapsed, Harlan galloped out of the water toward her. So many emotions flashed on the woman's face as Harlan dashed toward her, splashing and dripping, that I couldn't begin to discern them all. Certainly there was joy, but also other, more complicated things that I, a non-human, didn't fully understand. Maybe sadness.\n\nThe pair embraced, breaking the tension. Harlan broke away, stared at the woman's face, then pressed his lips onto hers. It appeared as though he was trying to suck the contents of her skull out through her mouth, but she didn't seem to mind. The woman's companions grinned and hooted with laughter.\n\nWhen Harlan was finally finished, the woman appeared unharmed, if a bit flushed. He turned to me, then back to the woman.\n\n\"Bayloo, this is my wife.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Harlan's wife was named Norta.\n\nShe was the leader of the Farlighters. Not just these Farlighters who had come to Oster to kill my kin, but all of them, everywhere. Or at least those who still acknowledged the authority of the so-called First Voice, as they called Norta. And it turned out that Harlan hadn't tried to suck the inside of her skull into his mouth. They had been kissing because they missed each other, or something like that. Harlan told me it was complicated; I was happy to abandon the subject of human mating rituals.\n\nI didn't like Norta. First and foremost, she had intended to kill me. Harlan had stood in front of me, arms extended, swearing every curse a sailor could muster as the Farlighters pointed their inferno staffs at me. As shields went, Harlan was lousy, being far too small and far too soft, but his words temporarily stayed the humans' killing instinct.\n\n\"Bayloo is the reason I'm here. He is an ally, true of heart, true of purpose.\"\n\n\"He. Is. A. Dragon,\" Norta pointed out, as if her husband was bereft of his senses. Harlan's fellow Farlighters showed none of his playful banter, none of his merriment, at least not as far as I could detect. Maybe Norta was more fun at other times, but she took killing dragons very seriously, so I wasn't seeing that better side of her.\n\n\"He saved my life many times over. I owe him a life debt.\"\n\nNorta wasn't swayed. \"That is between you and the dragon. I have a duty to our people. Dragons are of the Change. They destroyed our homes, laid a curse on our people. They are our enemies.\"\n\nI wasn't sure what the Change was, but there was no mistaking the hate in Norta's voice when she proclaimed my kind the enemy of her people.\n\n\"Bayloo is different from the others. He is free.\" No one moved. Harlan tried a different approach. \"Without him, you will never get aurathorn.\"\n\nThat got their attention. Norta held up a hand and the warriors at her back relaxed ever so slightly. They didn't lower their weapons, however.\n\n\"We took these.\" Norta reached into a weathered leather satchel she wore across her chest and withdrew two dry needles\u2014pieces of aurathorn that had once glowed, but were now inert like the one the Pale Wright had shown us. \"For generations we have searched. Finally, it is here.\" Norta's voice had a fervent tremble that always meant trouble.\n\nMy understanding of the situations came frustratingly slowly, but it was coming. The Farlighters had sailed here for aurathorn. That wasn't hard to guess, even before Norta held out her spoiled prize. By now I knew enough of Harlan's people to know the importance they placed on this item. Harlan hadn't been the only captain looking. When it became nearly certain that they had located the source, the Farlighters must have come with their ships. They had been to Maricopa searching for it. We had looked too hard for an alternate explanation.\n\nLike Harlan and I, the Farlighters must have found clues about aurathorn on Maricopa. Those had sent them elsewhere. Maybe to Ulibon, or Rolm, but eventually led them here to Oster. They had seen the dragons of Rolm, their siege of the Shard. Perhaps they could sense aurathorn in some way. The battle, with all of Rolm's dragons in one confined space, had been the perfect opportunity to achieve a slaughter. Norta was a killer, and I was having my doubts about Harlan as well, even though he seemed to be trying his best to save me. But I wasn't going to rely on him.\n\n\"You took those depleted thorns from the Pale Wrights,\" I told her. The Wright's must've had some use for them here. \"I saw two robed creatures in the Shard earlier.\"\n\nNorta's lips parted in surprise as I spoke, but only for a moment. \"The dragon speaks.\" She said it mostly to herself. \"And what is this you say? Pale Wights?\" She huffed out a single chuckle, as if the creatures were some kind of bitter joke. \"Is that what they are called here, then? I suppose it is as good a description as any.\"\n\nEven if she hadn't wanted to kill me, I would've been annoyed at her snooty, superior tone. I blew some wet drizzle out my snout as well. \"What name would you prefer?\"\n\n\"If I had to name those creatures, I would call them the dead, for that is what they should be, but they cheated that fate. We know their kind as Shades, but the name does not matter. We didn't know any still existed. Indeed, it is puzzling they still survive \u2026\" Norta's voice trailed off for a moment, before her hard gaze locked again upon me. \"In any case, you are correct, dragon. We delivered the creatures the true death they had avoided, and found these. Now, if you want to tell me something useful, you can tell me where the source is? Where are the founts from which these thorns grew?\"\n\nI knew where aurathorn was, of course (unless the Wrights had lied, which wasn't impossible, because they had clearly lied about important things like intending to betray their king). Harlan knew as well, but he didn't speak. But he also clearly hadn't told me everything about his people. He told stories, but the hunger in these people to kill dragons and find aurathorn was far more intense than his words conveyed. Giving the Farlighters aurathorn had been such a distant prospect, an ancient quest that seemed to have nothing to do with my own noble goals of freeing my fellow dragons and destroying the rust. Now, having met the Farlighters, who were considerably less pleasant humans than Harlan, I wasn't inclined to let them have it.\n\n\"Why do you want aurathorn so badly?\" I stretched my neck forward, to see if Norta would flinch as my jaws came closer. She didn't move. Her fellow Farlighters kept pointing their weapons, however. \"Why sail across Inkra, why use these weapons that had become distant legends \u2026 all for a flower?\"\n\nNorta's face actually softened, although I wondered if that was a deliberate decision on her part. I suspected that she was a far better card player even than Harlan. \"I'm surprised my husband has not already told you. He does enjoy telling a story.\" She smirked, a gesture I thought genuine. \"My people hold to a dream that we may one day reclaim our home and lift the curse that afflicts our people. We know that quest may seem silly to others, but it is a dream that unites us, moves us forward. It is at the core of who we are. And, yes, dragon, for that I was willing to sail our last, greatest fleet to this desolate place that is almost unknown to the rest of the world, and use weapons that we would've preferred the world forget.\"\n\nThe inferno staffs.\n\n\"Weapons meant to kill dragons,\" I said. The other Farlighters tensed at my words. I knew Harlan wanted to kick me for making the accusation in this situation, but there was no point in delaying this confrontation. If I was to die (or be forced to kill these people) let it happen now.\n\n\"That is not their original purpose. The weapons \u2026 and other items we once possessed, were created to help us survive in the darkest days, when my people were hunted, when Sci-Ance failed, and our existence was threatened. Our ancestors created these things with the last of their strength, so that their children might survive in the twisted world that we came to know as Inkra. We are refugees, a people without a home, who live on ships. These inferno staffs, as they now called, the legend of them has helped keep our people safe.\" Norta stared at Harlan for a long moment, and I had no doubt a great deal was communicated in those brief glances. \"I, and I alone, gave the order for the remaining inferno staffs to be used. You may hate me for that, dragon. I see that my husband thinks it a grievous mistake. If so, it will not be my first. You may even wish to kill me. But I ask you, was there any other way to defeat the mad king of Rolm and defeat his dragons?\"\n\nWe both already knew the answer, so I didn't reply.\n\n\"My order saved your life, and it saved Harlan's life. Some dragons were killed, yes, but many will live. The inferno staffs fire a powerful projectile called a piercer at high speed that can penetrate armor, or even a dragon's scale. It damages, but by itself, it is not usually lethal, given the healing prowess of your kind. Indeed, as we speak, our time here runs short. Decisions must be made quickly.\"\n\nShe lost me on that. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Even with the death of their king, the Rolman survivors begin to rally, their dragons stir and recover their senses. There are also the beasts bred by the Shades to contend with, and even soldiers of Oster, all within this mountain. My people are comparatively few, our weapons all but exhausted. I have gambled all of our strength to finally get aurathorn, but it is not here, except for a pair of depleted thorns. We must retreat or start killing.\" In a fleeting instant, Norta dropped her mask of control to show me a deep weariness in her eyes. Or at least she pretended to show me her feelings. \"I would see an end to killing, if I can. But I will not leave here without aurathorn.\"\n\nI mulled Norta's unpleasant words. She was right that there would be casualties among the dragons, and each of those was a wound to my soul, but many would survive. With Dayne dead, someone eventually would take command. Yet, I wasn't ready to help this woman either. Harlan knew me well enough to realize that. He found his voice, although he didn't sound quite himself as he spoke.\n\n\"Bayloo, there is much that Norta knows that I do not. She is the keeper of the lore of our people. I can only say this: I married a woman of pure heart. She will not lie to you, and she will always make the decisions that she believes are right.\"\n\n\"You named me a friend, but you are a human of Farlight before everything else,\" I accused him bitterly.\n\nHarlan signed heavily with regret. \"Bayloo, I am your friend. You have my oath on it. I don't need you to trust me completely. I just need you to trust me enough to give Norta more time.\"\n\n\"How much time?\" I demanded.\n\nNorta spoke again. \"Let us retreat from this place, this Shard of theirs. The impregnable fortress can also become a prison. We will leave, closing those mighty portcullis behind us, but depart no further. We will hold the gates only, trapping all within this cavern, at least for a time. So that we may decide how best to act.\"\n\nIt was an interesting idea, and one that appealed to me. It would keep the dragons in one place, safe to heal\u2014until I could get to aurathorn. And I intended to get it, one way or another. No human was going to stop me. But there was an obvious flaw in Norta's plan.\n\n\"Your few Farlighters can't hold the gates against dragons, against a Rolman army, against whatever else the Osterans have left. Not even for a short time, not if your inferno staffs are as limited as you say.\"\n\nNorta smiled. \"Not just us. I've been offered an alliance. And a tantalizing promise as well.\"\n\nGalt's daughter Jalena stepped out from the rubble of a building behind the Farlighters. \"I rule Oster now. These people have helped us defeat the army of Rolm, even if they did so for their own purposes. Now there is a chance to save Oster as well. My father's promise to you still stands, Bayloo. Help us win this war, and we will get you aurathorn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Jalena explained what had happened.\n\nWe spoke outside the Shard, with the waters of the Shifting Straits around us, our feet and claws planted on one of the tenuous causeways of coarse sea rock upon which humans had laid brick and mortar, so that when the tides cooperated, they could travel by land to and from the Shard. Norta's Farlighter ships, seven in all, hovered on the sea nearby. They were sleek vessels, long and low in the water, with triangular masts and sharp bows that apparently enabled them to traverse great distances and shallow waters at speed. Harlan kept glancing toward the vessels, longing in his eyes. Norta's attention remained fixed upon me, while I kept glancing with trepidation at the closed gates of the Shard, which was now a prison for my fellow dragons.\n\n\"The Pale Wrights did it.\" Jalena spat at the end of her declaration. She stood with her back to the Shard, facing Norta, Harlan and I. Kemet and his surviving men remained within the Shard, holding the now-closed gates. \"They betrayed us. Their marvelous symbionts were a trick. When placed upon our soldiers or our remaining loyal griffins or furies, they didn't enhance anything\u2014they paralyzed us, leaving our army helpless against the Rolmans. The Pale Wrights then arranged to open the gate to allow our enemies inside the fortress.\"\n\n\"The symbiont worked for Kemet,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"That was a demonstration of proof for my father. He never trusted the Pale Wrights. One was real, the rest were false, intended to leave us at the mercy of the Wrights and their new allies from Rolm.\"\n\n\"Why would they betray you to King Dayne?\" I wondered. \"He is worse than a butcher. Whatever your difference with the Pale Wrights, they assisted you for centuries, since even before I graced this world.\"\n\nNorta nodded at my words. \"Those creatures \u2026 they are loyal to nothing but themselves. They cared for nothing but their own survival. So it has been for centuries.\"\n\nJalena rubbed one arm with her hand, making no effort to hide her discomfort. Once again, I was struck at her pallor, despite her youth. \"We \u2026 our family, we have that which they most desire. That which they cannot live without.\" She shuddered. There were dark tidings here. \"For those long years, the Wrights were satisfied with the arrangement. But the victories of Rolm, and our own increasing desperation, finally changed their minds.\"\n\nThe chill of dread hung in the air as Jalena spoke. Harlan asked what we were all wondering: \"What is it creatures such as those value?\"\n\nJalena pulled down her high collar to reveal ugly red wounds along her neck and upper chest\u2014holes and gashes. She revealed similar markings when she pushed up her sleeves. Some of the wounds were bruised and purple, others angry red with infection. I remember the marks I'd seen in the garden, and the fatigue that hung about Jalena and her father. \"The blood of our family has something special in it. Only our family. It is sustenance for the Pale Wrights\u2014their only food. It sustains them. As they age, they decay, they grow ever more sensitive to the light of day, but so long as they have our blood, the Pale Wrights endure. Perhaps forever, perhaps not, but at least for many human life spans. My great grandfather's diary describes certain of the Wrights whom it seems we still deal with today. As time passes, some of them can't even leave the pits in which they dwell, so sensitive have they become to sunlight. In exchange for our blood, they breed their creatures, raise them, and give them to us. To keep Oster safe. That is the sacrifice of my family, for our people.\"\n\nHarlan's lips turned downward in disgust. \"Those creatures must truly value their pathetic lives if that was all they fed upon.\"\n\n\"Human blood tastes bland and sour,\" I agreed. Everyone gaped at me.\n\nNorta frowned. \"These Wrights, they are doubtless descendants of beings our lore speaks of. Their type is even older than the Cataclysm. Once they were human, like us. Some even dwelled on our island of Farlight for a time, which is how we know them. They were obsessed with one thing: immortality. All of their energies were devoted to it. It was their religion, their god. The Shades, as we call them, lived only to live more, using all manner of devices and powers to achieve this. But when the Cataclysm came, their efforts became useless. The immortality-seekers perished without the great light, without their manufactured implements to sustain their frail bodies.\" Norta paused, reflecting. \"But there were stories that some among them adapted to the new world after the Change, turning to ever-darker methods to keep themselves alive. If you call what they have life. It seems they were not all stories.\" She peered at Jalena. \"Your family must have an interesting history to explain the potency of your blood. Quite interesting.\"\n\nJalena's jaw hardened in a manner that made me suspect that there were secrets she wasn't inclined to share, with Norta or anyone else.\n\n\"If Rolm won this battle, how did that help the Wrights?\" I wondered. \"Dayne isn't the type to share his blood, and it sounds as if it would be useless anyway.\"\n\nJalena scoffed bitterly. \"To keep Oster safe, my family had to offer their blood to the Wrights. With each new threat, the Pale Wrights demanded more. They said more blood meant more creatures. These past weeks, they have been sucking us near dry. Sometimes they came themselves, one who would suck along with minions to carry the blood back for others. Other times, they brought their special leeches to drain us. They were stockpiling, I think. But even that wasn't enough. They must've feared we would lose and die in the battle. So, their attention turned from protecting us as their food source to making a new deal. I surmise that they offered to immobilize our soldiers and our remaining beasts and help deliver the Shard to King Dayne. In exchange, my father and I were to be given to them, to be slaves in their Pits. Presumably to be bred like their other creatures, to become a permanent source of sustenance.\" I was impressed how steady Jalena kept her voice. \"Before the battle, my father refused their false symbiont, as did I. That threw off their plans. The Wrights sent their wolves for us. My father died fighting so I might escape.\" She swallowed hard. \"And so that I might avenge him.\"\n\nNorta seized the sentiment. \"The Shades are vile creatures, and the world will be better when the last of them is gone. If they are using aurathorn in some way, perhaps to help themselves to survive, it will be with pleasure that we help you exact your revenge.\"\n\nJalena cautioned her. \"To even reach the Pits of Gargen is near impossible. The distance is not far, but the land around it is littered with hidden dangers\u2014bottomless chasms, quicksand, and most dangerous of all, the boreworms.\"\n\nNorta arched a brow. \"Boreworms?\"\n\n\"Bigger than even the greatest eel, the ground of the clay flats surrounding the Pits is their water. They can chew through it. We have always suspected they were creatures of the Pale Wrights, guardians they refused to share, even though they denied it. The worms might allow a lone messenger through, but they attack any groups, anything that might be a threat to the Pale Wrights.\"\n\nI was the solution here. \"Easy enough to avoid a worm\u2014for a dragon. And whoever I might choose to carry.\"\n\nNorta gazed at me unhappily. \"My warriors can manage the journey on foot in any case, I'm sure.\"\n\nThey couldn't, but I didn't bother to say it. Let her try if she must.\n\nJalena shook her head at Norta's misplaced bravado. \"Even if you can reach the Pits, then what? They are an endless warren of narrow tunnels. They extend forever. Within are the beasts of the Pale Wrights.\" Jalena sized me up. \"Bayloo, some tunnels are large enough for dragons, for they bred many large and powerful beasts there. But if you entered, that would be a difficult place to fight, even for a dragon.\"\n\nI had spent enough time in the Pits to know Jalena spoke the truth.\n\n\"Aurathorn shall be mine,\" Norta declared. \"I have crossed this world in search of it. It is the key to the future. There is a way.\"\n\n\"Indeed, there is,\" Jalena assured us. \"Each of you want this vine more than anything else. I can deliver it. And I want Oster back. There is a deal to be made. But only I can deliver it.\"\n\n\"You have only a few dozen soldiers,\" Norta said. \"How can you find your way through these terrible Pits you describe, if we cannot?\"\n\nJalena's lips offered a thin, grim smile. \"The Pale Wrights are hungry. My father was no fool. He never trusted the Wrights. They demanded so much blood in the days before the battle. We delivered it, letting their giant leeches suck us till our skin turned near white. But before they came, we each drank a special drink\u2014a tea of luster root, bitter and awful.\"\n\n\"And poisonous,\" Harlan commented. \"If you chew luster root, you die. Painfully.\"\n\n\"When boiled first, it is used by our healers to cure infection. Although the effect can be \u2026 painful. But the pain was worthwhile. The only blood the Wright have received recently has been tainted. They have no other food, so they will be getting hungry. Maybe they are already. Certainly, they will be panicking.\" Jalena held up a disfigured arm covered with the legacy of her dark bargain with the Pale Wrights. \"I will offer to feed them.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "I returned to the Pits of Gargen.\n\nRemarkably, I did this of my own free will, carrying Jalena, Norta, and Harlan on my back. I worried about furies, flying as high as I thought my mostly novice passengers could endure, before descending in a series of tight spirals to the Pits. The Pale Wrights sent no trouble at us. I hoped that meant that they too wanted to make a deal.\n\nThe landscape seemed even more desolate than when I'd been here only a day earlier. Even when we entered the pit where I'd last resided, nothing stirred, not even the wind. My dragon senses could detect no sound from beyond the darkness of the tunnel that I knew led deep into the warrens of the Pits of Gargen.\n\n\"We did not have time to fully search the Shard,\" Norta said. \"The Shades could all be dead.\"\n\n\"No.\" Jalena was adamant as she spoke. \"Two and only two Pale Wights entered the Shard. We watched them carefully. The rest haven't left these catacombs in decades, or maybe even longer. They are here.\"\n\nNorta looked into the darkness of the tunnel. She didn't seem afraid, even though she should have been. \"Do we go deeper, then?\"\n\nJalena shook her head. \"To venture into the Pits unbidden is death.\" She pulled a dagger from her belt and sliced her hand. Crimson filled her palm. With nonchalance, Jalena jerked her bleeding hand toward the dark tunnel, sending several droplets flying into the void. \"They will know I am here. They will understand the offer. We wait.\"\n\nNight fell, but the Wrights did not come. That surprised us.\n\n\"They know we are here,\" Jalena insisted. \"They are cowards, unsure if this is a trick. Unable to reach a decision. Give them time. Let the hunger grow.\"\n\nShe was proven correct, but only after much of the night had passed. Finally, the disembodied voice of a Pale Wright spoke from the darkness. It carried a simple, unappealing message:\n\n\"Enter, Jalena of the House of Geneles. Enter alone.\"\n\nShe laughed as if addressing a wayward pet. \"Hungry, are you?\"\n\nSilence followed, and I knew that the Wrights were conversing in their strange, soundless manner. The creatures didn't waste time with useless denials. \"Name your price.\"\n\nJalena looked first to Norta, who answered with a curt dip of her chin. Then she looked to me, more meaningfully. Jalena barely knew me, yet she had to trust her life to me if any of us were to live through this night. I flashed my eyes white in acknowledgement. Jalena accepted my assurance. She had to trust me to save the land her family had sacrificed for so long to protect. \"We only demand that which was promised. Deliver to us the founts of aurathorn that were to be given to this dragon and my other companions when Rolm was defeated.\"\n\nIt was ready for that demand. \"In exchange, you must stay in the Pits, child of Geneles. You will be provided for.\"\n\nJalena didn't hesitate. \"Without me, there is no Oster. We will resume our past arrangement\u2014send your leeches on every third day and I shall fill the creatures with my blood.\"\n\nAnother pause followed, although I suspected it was for our benefit. They must've anticipated this answer as well. Just as we guessed their next demand.\n\n\"It is agreed, but on this night, you must enter. All of the other blood is spoiled. The contamination \u2026 harmed us. We must feed from the source to cleanse ourselves. There is no other way.\"\n\n\"Then come out with what you have promised and I shall deliver my body and blood.\" She said it more bravely than I would have.\n\nNorta spoke before the Wright could answer again. \"The founts of aurathorn must be transported correctly, or they will wither just as the thorns do. The fount must be able to survive a voyage at sea, or it is useless. I have the knowledge. I must transplant it. We demand this.\"\n\nJalena's mouth hardened in annoyance at the interruption, but she held her tongue.\n\nSilence followed from the Wrights, but it was a short one. \"We cannot leave these pits. Jalena of Geneles must come. You, stranger of Farlight, may come as well. Let the dragon and its companion remain here.\"\n\n\"Bayloo is with us,\" Jalena demanded this, her voice leaving no hint that negotiation was possible. \"I do not trust you. You betrayed my family. The dragon ensures that you will keep your word. I will not enter your lair without him.\"\n\nThere was no pause from the Wrights this time. \"We agree.\"\n\nThat was it. The Wrights had their plan, which would be unpleasant for us. They thought we played into their trap. Of course, they had no intention of ever letting Jalena leave this place. But we had our plan as well.\n\n\"Follow the wolf,\" said the ugly voice of the Wright. \"It will show you the way.\"\n\nI sensed the Pale Wright sink further away. In its place plodded a war wolf\u2014an adolescent that was little more than a pup, but still quite large compared to the mundane variety. I took the lone creature as a reassuring sign that much of the Wright's strength had been expended.\n\nThe wolf led us through the winding passage, through the strange mist curtain. I exchanged a quick glance with Harlan, who carried a new satchel provided by his wife. From it he removed an unusual item\u2014one unknown in Rolm, but common enough among the Farlighters. As long as a human forearm and metal, he laid it on the ground as we walked. The wolf paid no mind, too far ahead.\n\nWhen we exited the tunnel, the first of the great chambers was even more empty than on my last visit, but even in the quiet, the breeding pits below felt ominous. Hidden eyes watched us. I caught movement on the top of the ceiling, but when I turned my head to look closer, I found only dark basalt.\n\nEven stoic Norta showed agitation, her eyes darting about with unease. Only Jalena seemed unbothered. Perhaps she had come to terms with fate. Or maybe she didn't expect to live through this in any case. The certainty of death can bring a certain kind of peace, although not the kind I personally enjoyed.\n\nThe voice of a Pale Wright echoed through the darkness. \"For what you seek, you must go deep. To the great cavern, that place carved long ago, from a time long forgotten\u2014the great forge.\"\n\n\"Not forgotten by all,\" Norta whispered under breath, her tone so low she probably thought no one heard her. She didn't know dragons as well as she thought.\n\nThe wolf pup scampered across the row of pits fearlessly, as if this was its playground. It knew no better. Its wiser pack mates were dead.\n\nWe were brought to the massive arched portal that I'd seen when we were last in the bowels of the Wrights' lair. Here the young wolf paused for the first time, as if uncertain. A sharp sound from below that reminded me grating metal ended the wolf's reticence. It pushed through the entryway and we followed.\n\nBeyond was not another passage, but a staircase, or something resembling one. It was huge, wide enough for two dragons to fit comfortably, with steps meant for giant feet. The stairs spiraled gradually downward without offering any hint at how deep it went. This most obviously wasn't a natural formation. The walls and stairs weren't even rock like the rest of the cavern network, but something closer to ceramic. Despite decades of apparent use, there were no cracks on the surface. The wolf pup plodded downward, occasionally looking over its shoulder, as if surprised that we kept following. I walked in the rear of the group, cautious of my grip on the strange surface, and wary. Unfamiliar sounds reminiscent of a giant rumbling belly came from below, but I detected no heat. If we walked toward a forge, it wasn't of the conventional sort, or it wasn't in use.\n\nThe trip down was longer than I expected\u2014worryingly so. The stairway twisted in three full circles before it ended. My mind drifted in and out of the Latticework as I assessed this place and what I might have to do if the worst transpired. I hadn't anticipated stairs.\n\nThe wolf brought us to another cavern, not as large or sprawling as the great chamber above, but a place even more disconcerting, because it had so obviously been constructed from a time before the Cataclysm. The chamber was a perfect rectangle, its angles as precise as any castle wall, every surface perfectly smooth. The floor looked polished, with unfamiliar symbols inlaid upon it. The markings came in a variety of colors and shapes, many of them with unknown symbols that might have been the runes of the ancients. It reminded me of one of the human churches back in Eladrell, particularly because at the end of the room, on a raised dais, stood an assembly of metal and crystal unlike anything crafted for centuries. The largest section of the creation resembled twelve interconnected glass cups, each large enough to hold a small human child. Two were filled with a thick, translucent liquid, while nine others were cracked and empty. And the very last one held an egg, suspended in the same, thick substance as the other two intact containers. It was a large egg, too large to belong to any species but one. Seeing it, my stomach lurched, as a black chill whipped through me. I realized the terrible price my mother had paid to the Pale Wrights for aurathorn: I gazed upon a dragon egg. My mother's egg.\n\nShe followed her Way, I reminded myself. No price was too high.\n\nThe bizarre cups were held in place by jaws of metal, upon which rested dozens of crystal tubes that fed into large disks of metal attached to the walls of the chamber. Long benches of mundane wood that looked like far more recent constructions lined the floor before the dais, much like pews in a church, except there were several small, empty cages resting atop the benches. All of this would've been remarkable, and the sole focus of our attention, had it not been for the twisting vines that flanked either side of the dais: aurathorn.\n\nThe so-called founts of aurathorn resembled tree stumps that seemed to be imbedded into the ground, growing upward through ugly, jagged holes in otherwise pristine ceramic of the chamber. Tangled lines of interconnect vines twirled along beams that framed either side of the dais, creating an outline of glowing and glittering thorns that grew over the dais itself, like a living roof. The glow of the thorns bathed the metal and glass monstrosity below in its light. I thought it a remarkable sight, impressive in its glory and frightening in its unfamiliarity. The effect on Norta was far more profound.\n\nShe ran three strides forward, nearly leaping to reach the dais, while the rest of us hung sensibly back closer to the portal through which we had entered. A Pale Wright appeared before Norta as she advanced, emerging from the shadows that I hadn't even noticed before it appeared. Two more came after it, their features buried within their thick robes. I sniffed the air. Other creatures were near as well. Something unfamiliar, but I had no doubt it would be dangerous. Upon seeing this place, any lingering doubt that the Wrights intended to kill us was banished.\n\nNorta stopped before the creatures, her gaze drawn upward upon the thorns.\n\n\"Do you understand what you see, child of Farlight?\" asked the first of the Wrights.\n\nFor a moment, Norta couldn't speak. Tears streamed down her face as she looked back and forth between the vines of aurathorn. \"Mother .. oh, mother, I found it \u2026\"\n\nI doubted that her mother could hear her down in the depths of the Pits of Gargen. I was less emotional than the human (and certainly wasn't going to cry out water from my eyes), but I too felt something profound. Here was the key to freedom for my kind. All the time, it had been in Oster, hidden even from this land's own king. I slipped into the Latticework to look deeper at my prize. Like with the thorns earlier, I sensed nothing from vines of aurathorn. There was only void. Indeed, all of the dais was a void. An idea crept into my mind about the significance of that void\u2014a hole of black in the Latticework: Here was something beyond the reach of magic.\n\n\"Yes, the precious aurathorn is here,\" the Wright confirmed. \"Here it thrives, under our care, as ever it has.\"\n\nNorta pulled herself together. Harlan moved forward to be by his wife's side. Jalena stayed beside me, her hand on the pommel of her blade. She was the wiser. Aurathorn meant nothing to her. It was just a means to an end.\n\n\"How \u2026 how is it here after all these centuries?\" Norta asked the Pale Wright.\n\nTo my surprise, the creature answered. \"We brought it here, of course. It has been here since just after the beginning.\"\n\nNorta looked at the mass of disjointed metal and glass behind the creature. \"Shades,\" she said it to herself, as if it were a curse. \"You are truly the Shades.\"\n\n\"So your ancestors named us,\" the creature replied. It didn't seem offended. \"But they have been dust for more than five hundred years. And we remain.\"\n\nNorta's eyes widened. \"You can't be \u2026 you can't be that old.\"\n\n\"No, alas even the Founders could not survive what was done to the world. We are the first generation, after the Fall,\" it said. \"The Change, as your kind call it.\"\n\nNorta absorbed all this. Harlan shot me a glance over his shoulder to let me know he had virtually no idea what his wife and the Wright were talking about.\n\n\"This was your machine,\" Norta said. \"This is where you came from. And now you use it to create the beasts you traded to Jalena's family to sustain you. This thing \u2026\" She pointed toward the dais. \"It is a creation forge of some kind?\"\n\nThe Wright had a silent pause. \"You are \u2026 knowledgeable. We had not expected so much lore to have survived, even among the descendants of Farlight. You are correct that we survived the Cataclysm within the machine, and it can be used to form other beasts, given time, effort and proper \u2026 materials.\" It lifted its head, and the creature's chilling eyes stared meaningfully at me. It was mocking me over the egg.\n\n\"You've been down in these catacombs since the Cataclysm with your machine. With aurathorn, to allow it to still function despite the Change. All that time, sucking blood.\" Norta said it with distaste. I was a relief to know she shared my disgust toward the creatures.\n\nThe revelation struck at Jalena as well. With her hand still on her sword, she moved closer to the Wrights. I heard their hidden protectors shift in the shadows as Jalena approached. Something hid within the walls and along the ceiling; perhaps in the stairway behind us, as well. Soon this conversation would end. I, too, moved forward.\n\n\"Who was my great ancestor, Abitor Geneles, to you?\" Jenela asked. \"Our records begin with him, but only a scrap of old writing remains on the stone of his crypt. Why does the blood of my family sustain you?\"\n\nAll of the Wrights moved their hooded heads toward Jalena as if they were puppets on a common string. One hissed audibly in displeasure. Was this the equivalent of a cow demanding to know why someone ate it?\n\nYet after a pause, the Pale Wrights answered. Somewhere within these once-human creatures was that same dark place that existed in Dayne\u2014the corner where both superiority and pride resided comfortably.\n\n\"We have agreed to share our knowledge with you, Jalena Geneles,\" the Wright told her. \"A new relationship between us begins today.\"\n\nA different Wright took up the narrative. \"You should know that the ultimate father of your line was one of us\u2014the original generation of immortals from before the Cataclysm. When the Fall happened, his wife was with a child. That child survived with unique traits in its blood that are essential to us. It way a boy: Abitor Fredrice Geneles, the founder of your house.\" With obvious bitterness the creature added, \"A most stubborn and clever man, he turned out to be. But he needed us and we needed him. So, we were left with the arrangement between our kind that you have known, daughter of House Geneles.\"\n\nNorta didn't care about Oster's history. Her voice trembled. \"The machine still functions \u2026\" I knew she cared only about the future of her people, no matter how dark it was for others. \"A creation of the old world, of the ancient Sci-Ance, of the Great Light. Yet it still functions. Even after the great Change of the Cataclysm, it still functions.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the Wright confirmed with satisfaction. \"As your ancestors learned, the last creation of our peoples\u2014those of us that fought against this new, uncivilized age\u2014allows it to work as it once did. Within the dais, the curse of Rima is held at bay by the power of aurathorn. The negation flow is absorbed, allowing the old laws from before the Change to function. Here and only here, these ancient machines of Sci-Ance retain their power.\"\n\nNorta looked at Harlan, mad joy in her eyes. \"That means it can be done. It can actually be done.\" She wrapped her arms around Harlan, who looked more confused than elated. \"Farlight can actually be saved!\"\n\nJalena stared at the two Farlighters, husband and wife, who had only now broken their embrace. \"Can you really raise an island that has been swallowed by the sea?\"\n\nNorta pretended she didn't hear the question. Instead, she turned back toward the dais, toward aurathorn. I had no doubt that in that moment, Norta could not have cared less about her promises to Jalena. She would deliver the woman to the Wrights tied and gagged if it would get her aurathorn.\n\nThe Pale Wright answered Jalena's question when Norta didn't. \"They do not intend to raise an island. To 'Return to Farlight' does not mean go back to a place that has been swallowed by the sea. Not really.\"\n\nNorta still said nothing.\n\n\"What does it mean, then?\" Jalena asked.\n\n\"Do you even know the answer, Farlighter?\" the Wright asked Norta mockingly. \"Do the descendants of Farlight even know what their ancestors sought to achieve with their folly?\"\n\nNorta glared but didn't speak.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Jalena demanded of her purported ally. \"I've offered my blood, the future of my land and my people. Tell me the truth!\"\n\nThe Wrights made a low-pitched hiss\u2014all of them in unison like a grizzly chorus. It could've been their version of laughter. They were pleased. I already knew the Wrights weren't going to give Norta aurathorn, at least not willingly. This had all been a show for Jalena's benefit.\n\nThe Wrights resumed speaking over Norta's shamed silence. \"Before the Cataclysm, as the world fought against itself and plagues stalked the land, the people of Farlight considered themselves the most brilliant and most perfect of all beings.\" The Wright made a sound like a snicker. \"They changed their skin so that they could feed from the sun like a plant, they changed their lungs so they could breathe the poisonous air of the old world, they even changed their minds so that they could hear the echo of each other's thoughts. They gathered the world's knowledge and stored it in machines linked to their minds. With all that knowledge and power, but lacking wisdom, they concluded they should rule all of the world.\"\n\nNorta didn't deny it. \"As opposed to your kind, who merely want to live forever. As if dwelling underground and drinking blood is living. Our ancestors wanted to restore order to chaos.\"\n\nThe retort was angry, as if this had all happened yesterday. \"A chaos your people helped create. The collapse was caused by the plagues the Farlighters unleashed as they lost control of their own Sci-Ance.\"\n\n\"At least our kind tried to save the world,\" Norta insisted. \"Instead accepting the end and retreating to live forever in the underground's lairs of luxury, as your ancestors intended.\"\n\nThe Wright let its hood fall, revealing its skeletal form. With these revelations I now saw clearly that the Pale Wrights were human\u2014or close to it. They had merely lived far too long.\n\nThe Wright fixed its terrible eyes on Jalena, who was the only audience that mattered to it. The rest of us were mere amusement to be had before they killed us. \"Daughter of Geneles, the people you have allied yourselves with are far worse than any other creatures on this world. Their ancestors sought to rule the world, but of course, the other humans did not want to be ruled by them and their machines. So, the Farlighters used a forge of their own, far larger and more powerful than this machine behind me. With it, they created a plague to end all plagues, a disease so potent and unstoppable it would wipe out those who dared defy their self-declared superiority. They set this horror loose, then retreated to their fortified island to wait while their creation made its havoc upon the rest of the world. While it consumed all life.\"\n\nJalena shook her head. \"Too much \u2026 I don't understand.\"\n\nShe might not have followed the Wright's explanation, but I did. I, who had been to Ni-Yota, I who had seen the plague of which the Pale Wrights spoke. I knew what Harlan's ancestors had unleashed.\n\n\"The Farlighters created the rust.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"Is it true?\"\n\nThere was hurt in Harlan's voice as he asked his wife the question. I believed his pain. Harlan was a fine card player, but he couldn't fake that kind of shock, nor the look in his eyes as he stared at Norta.\n\n\"The rust?\" She answered, as if searching a memory. \"The Mumblers sometimes called the great Cleansing by that name. Others called it the Ravage.\" Norta noticed Harlan's chin drop as she mused. \"Yes, our ancestors wanted to cleanse the world, to unify it. Harlan, it was hundreds of years ago, a decision made by men and women not only dead, but nearly forgotten. And they failed, obviously.\" Harlan's stare turned angry. His wife noticed. \"What does it matter now what they did so long ago? What is done is done.\"\n\nHarlan's mouth moved, but he didn't actually speak. I answered for him. \"Because the rust still exists. It has grown. It is poisoning lands and killing everything in its path. The curse of your ancestors is still with us. Indeed, it threatens to consume us. Their wish to destroy the world may still come to pass, unless I can stop it.\"\n\nIt was Norta's turn to be shocked. She blinked a dozen times before gathering her silky words once again. \"It has been so long. You must be mistaken, dragon.\" She fixed on Harlan. \"Surely, this is a sick jest?\"\n\nHarlan shook his head. \"No jest. Ni-Yota has fought against the rust, with countless deaths. The land once known as Illium has already been consumed. And it spreads.\"\n\nNorta shivered ever so slightly as she tried to absorb this new revelation. But almost as quickly as the shock had come, she pushed it from her face. Norta's jaw hardened. \"It cannot cross the water. Even if it could, there is the Wall of Fire.\" She held up a finger as her mind rallied. \"That this rust still exists makes our mission even more important, Harlan. Once Farlight is restored, everything will once again be possible.\"\n\nI didn't like her ominous promise. \"How does raising an island, or saving it, or whatever you intend, fit into this?\"\n\nA new discomfort came into Norta's eyes. I knew I was right to be suspicious of her. But I'd also been painfully na\u00efve before this moment. I'd never considered what raising Farlight truly meant. The Pale Wright made its ugly, pig-like snicker again.\n\n\"She does not wish to speak of that to you, dragon, and for good reason.\"\n\nNorta's unease turned to hatred as her glare bore into the Pale Wright. \"You know nothing, Shade.\"\n\nThe creature's mouth twitched. If it was capable of smiling, I think it would've flashed its most contemptuous one in that moment. \"It is true we do not know how you intend to do it, but the goal of your people has always been the same: Since the time of your fall, your goal has always been the same: to end the Age of Magic. To restore yourselves as gods and to bring back primacy of almighty Sci-Ance, of your great light.\" Each of the Pale Wright aimed their strange eyes in my direction. \"That, of course, will result in the end of creatures of magic. It will mean the death of all dragons.\"\n\nIt felt like daggers in my heart\u2014Harlan's daggers. He turned his back to his wife and walked to me. \"I swear to you, Bayloo, on my honor, on my life, I did not know this was my quest.\"\n\nNorta spoke harshly to her husband's back. \"Your quest was to find aurathorn. To fulfill the destiny of our people. To save the world, to break the curse. Farlight is more than an island, it is an idea. A distant beacon to guide us. If we can save Farlight, we can save the dream of the better world. We do not need the island to rise above the sea for that. The forge on Farlight can fix this world. Everything we have sacrificed has been for that. The curse our people have endured can be fixed once Sci-Ance is restored. We merely need bring the founts of aurathorn to the site of Farlight. The thorns block out Rima's power, allowing Sci-Ance to function. With that, even submerged beneath the waves, the forge will awaken, and anything we command will be possible.\" Norta tapped her head. \"We still carry the enhancements of our ancestors to command the forge\u2014that is why we do not breed with those not of our kind. We have kept ourselves pure, so that we can once again be what we were intended to be.\"\n\nJalena spoke the truth to Norta in a harsh whisper. \"You are as mad as the Pale Wrights.\"\n\nThe Wrights gathered closer together, edging back toward the shadow at the edges of the chamber. \"Jalena, the Farlighters brought about the Cataclysm. Even now, the taint of their kind remains upon them. They cannot be trusted, nor can the dragons who laid waste to Oster can be trusted. Now you see and hear what they are. The world is a better place without these creatures. For generations the House of Geneles has existed symbiotically with us.\" It sounded pleased, hungry. \"We can grow even closer. You have no need of these others.\"\n\nDespite all she had heard, Jalena didn't flinch, didn't waiver. \"I made a promise to them, and my word shall remain my bond. Give to them what you promised, and I shall keep my word to you and yours as well.\"\n\n\"You would still give the aurathorn to beings such as these?\" The creature sounded like it was choking. \"Knowing that the Farlighters would seek to use it to break the world once again? Knowing that the dragon intends to unleash his kind upon Oster and all the other lands of men, as they once did ages ago?\"\n\n\"I have heard much on this night. Much of it I still do not understand, but nothing I have heard has been enough to make me surrender my honor.\" Jalena tugged at her sword's pommel, drawing it ever so slightly. What of you, Wright?\"\n\nIt hissed back. \"You have much to learn. Much. But there shall be plenty of time to learn it here, with us. And if you do not learn, your offspring shall.\"\n\nThe unseen danger that surrounded us in the darkness moved. Even without seeing them, I knew there would be too many to fight. We were deep in the lair of the Pale Wrights. As weakened as they were, they were the masters of this place. They would never have let us come into their sanctum if they hadn't been supremely confident in their ability to kill us and take Jalena captive. Our only hope was the Latticework. I reached for it, extending my mind into the place of magic that the Farlighters sought to destroy.\n\nAs I did, the boreworms came at us. Through dark holes in the ceiling they slithered out. Dozens of them, each with fifty eyes and mouths lined by a thousand spiked teeth. More came from sliding doors in the sides of the room. Jalena had her blade in hand as she advanced on the Wrights, but the worms were quicker. She split the head of one and the front section off another, but it didn't matter. There were a hundred in the chamber, some as long as a human was tall, others smaller than a pup, all hideous. Their numbers grew. Harlan had his daggers and Norta wielded a wicked cutlass. They could slash and kill, but soon they would tire. Two worms dropped on top of me. I whipped them off with my tail, but fighting them was useless. We faced a sea of slithering killers. It would be magic or death.\n\nI regarded the magnificence of the Latticework\u2014a place that I now understood to have been created by long-dead humans to replace the world of Sci-Ance in which the Farlighters had once existed. In that world, Norta's ancestors had wielded supreme power. It was the world that had created the rust. But in this world of magic, ember dragons commanded the greatest of forces. Now, to save myself and my companions, I would need to do something I had never done before. I only vaguely suspected it was possible, and there would be no second chance.\n\nMy mind searched outside the darkness of the Pits of Gargen. Above the tunnels and chambers where the Pale Wrights existed, dawn had broken into the sky. I found the light of the sun, bright and powerful. I focused on a ray of daylight newly penetrating the horizon. I studied it, then I commanded it, forcing it to bend downward, into the very same pit I had flown the previous day. The light followed the path I directed, falling downward through the twisting tunnel at angles it never would've traversed without my intervention. From there, I bent it again, drawing light into the tunnel that led into the pit. But within the tunnel was an obstacle that I could not move or avoid: the mist. The strange substance prevented any outside light from entering the catacombs.\n\nIt was Harlan who had the idea of how to breach the Wrights' barrier of darkness. He had spoken in the past of his lost spyglass, the device of the Farlighters that brought distant objects near with their magic lenses. Only they weren't magic. It was a secret of Sci-Ance. Like the inferno staffs, they were evidence that the Farlighters still possessed some of the legacy of their ancestors' knowledge. The lens of the spyglass reflected light. Carefully placed, a spyglass could allow the sunlight I'd guided into the pits through the barrier of mist. Norta had supplied the spyglass from one of her ships, Harlan had placed it at the barrier on the way inside, and the Pale Wrights never suspected moving sunlight in this manner was remotely possible, or that we would gamble our lives upon this scheme.\n\nI pushed light toward the floor of the tunnel, drawing it into a concentrated beam that struck one end of the spyglass. Remarkably, it passed through to the other end without difficulty, using the glass as a bridge to bypass the light-consuming mist. Once I'd guided the sunlight inside the pits, the rest was almost easy, except for the spiraling stairs. That took more concentration, more bending, but I did it.\n\nThe sunlight arrived. I roared in triumph when the morning's blaze finally shone into the chamber far beneath the pits, where the enigmatic minds of the Pale Wrights had never imagined their doom could reach.\n\nThey howled with an agony that sounded all too human. Over the centuries, the Wrights had existed in the dark, feeding on the blood of Jalena's family. During that time, they had become a species apart, losing much of what was decent in humans. But they hadn't completely lost all emotion. The Wrights clung to life like a baby clung to its mother. The moment the sunlight came, they knew it would all end. Their cries were harrowing, echoing through the chamber. The sound was mercifully brief. The blazing light smothered them, setting their pale skin bubbling into boils of mucus. The Wrights collapsed, writhing, dissolving in a stinking mess on the floor.\n\nWith their masters annihilated, most of the boreworms left. This hadn't been their fight\u2014they served, ordered by some unseen link bred into them by the Wrights. They were pleased to have nothing to do with swords and dragons. Not all of them, of course. The boreworms were vicious creatures, because that was the way they had been created. So there was still blood to shed, even once the Wrights were gone.\n\nJalena was a killing machine. I'd never seen a human so adept with a blade. It was part of her, or perhaps she was a part of it. She danced among the worms, slicing, stabbing, and gutting until every part of her body was covered in gore. Norta and Harlan fought as well. They did battle back to back, dispatching their tormentors each time the worm came within range. Part of me envied the trust they had, despite all that had happened. But only a very small part of me felt that way\u2014human bonding seemed very complicated.\n\nI killed the rest of the worms with jaw, claw, and tail\u2014a few dozen worms were no match for me. Mostly, I chafed at the inconvenience of the deed. I was relieved when it was done.\n\nTo be sure the extermination of the Pale Wright was complete, I flooded the rest of the catacombs in glorious light. I sent the sun's rays into every pit and nook and room that I could reach. Soon, it was done. The Pale Wrights had been destroyed, but I dreaded what came next. Some terrible killing remained.\n\nMy mother would have done whatever must be done without hesitation. She followed the ancient Way of my kind. It made no room for sentiment or pity, or even love, but I was different. I now recognized and accepted that I wasn't like other dragons. My time as a slave dragon, linked to a human mind during my formative years, had changed me forever. I also realized that I had become who my mother desired. It had been deliberate. She planned for me to be a slave, because that's what she thought the world needed\u2014a dragon with the emotions of a human. The hurt of that ran through me, because I did not share my mother's Way. Also, I liked humans, at least some of them. Although he was a human, Harlan was my friend. I cared about him. I think he felt the same way about me.\n\nI felt terrible that I was going to have to kill his wife."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "\"You will not take aurathorn.\"\n\nI said it, but Norta already had an inferno staff in her hand even before I finished speaking. It was smaller than the others I'd seen, not much longer than a dagger, but no less dangerous. I presumed she'd had it concealed up a sleeve for an event such as this. She hadn't used it against the boreworms or the Pale Wrights. She'd saved it, knowing that a confrontation with me was a possibility, because she had known her success meant genocide for my kind. I reminded myself not to underestimate this woman. She led the Farlighters, and she possessed knowledge that few others on this world still retained.\n\n\"Stop!\" Harlan screamed, as panicked as I'd ever seen him. He put his body between us, as if he could really stop me from doing what I must. I didn't want to see him come to harm, but nor could I allow my race to end.\n\n\"We had a deal,\" Norta reminded me, shamelessly. As if I was one doing the betraying here.\n\n\"That was before I knew you intended to use aurathorn to kill me, and every other dragon. That was before I knew your kind created the rust and that its spread pleases you as it once pleased your ancestors.\"\n\nNorta flicked her free hand with nonchalance, as if the fate of my species and the world was an insect to be battered away. \"The Shades are liars, their minds are twisted. The final destruction of Rima will not kill you or anyone else. It will restore the natural laws of the world. Yes, magic will disappear. But you are not magic, you are flesh and blood, even as I. Magic does not allow you to fly\u2014flesh, bone, and muscle do that. In the time before the Cataclysm, countless creatures were created for different uses. Even the special creation forge that made your kind was originally constructed using Sci-Ance.\"\n\nShe was wrong about my kind surviving in a world without magic. Norta couldn't see the Latticework. She didn't understand how dragons were connected by Chords of magic to the new reality and to each other. We were more than flesh, blood, and bone. We were magic. I didn't bother to try to tell her that. It wouldn't make a difference to her calculations. \"What of the rust, which even now consumes Ni-Yota, killing countless beings?\"\n\nWith this, Norta furrowed her face with displeasure. \"The rust disappeared hundreds of years ago. Confined to land by the ghastrays, the rust was finally destroyed by the balefire of the dragons\u2014the ultimate power of the magical world. Yet, you claim this rust still exists? I think you are mistaken. There are many other blights. Dig a trench. Burn it.\"\n\nNorta did not want to face inconvenient facts. \"It is the rust. It cannot be burned. The ghastrays sense what it is.\" I snorted at her feeble excuses. \"It spreads across the whole continent. It seeks to build ships and infect other creatures so it can defeat the ghastrays and spread across the sea. It thinks. This is no mere blight.\"\n\nHer frown deepened. \"Thinks, you say?\"\n\nHarlan found his voice, although it was strained. \"The rust adapts, my wife. Each time we found a way to stop it, it changed. And it spawns not just itself, but takes the shells of other creatures to do its bidding. The hollowings, they are called by the inhabitants of Ni-Yota, for inside there is nothing of their old selves\u2014the things exist only to serve the purpose of the rust.\"\n\nSomething like concern crept slowly into Norta's eyes. \"It raises the dead?\"\n\nHarlan and I exchange a glance, but it was I who answered. \"I do not know if the hollowings are alive. It seems that their forms are repurposed. There is little left of what they once were. The shell is joined to that strange intellect that drives the rust.\"\n\nNorta's gaze was so sharp it could've drawn blood. \"You are sure?\" she demanded of her husband. \"With your own eyes you have seen this?\"\n\n\"With my blood I have faced it. I've flown over it on Bayloo's back. I've seen him nearly lose his life to it on countless occasions. I've seen the rust claim the lives of men and dragon alike. It is a lethal enemy. The most dangerous thing ever created. It is evil, Norta.\"\n\nFor a fleeting instant, I thought we might have gotten through to her, that words would be enough. But that was na\u00efve. She'd been on a quest her whole life\u2014one much deeper and different than Harlan's. Norta was charged with fulfilling the dark dream of a people long-since dead. It was not something to be easily relinquished.\n\n\"All the more reason to finish what we have begun,\" Norta proclaimed at last. \"This was not what our ancestors intended. Perhaps after its first near-annihilation, the rust adapted in unforeseen ways. But once Sci-Ance has been restored, our people can deal with it. Even submerged for hundreds of years, the great forge at Farlight survives. We can use it to beat this rust. Your magic has failed. Let us try now to save the world in a different way.\"\n\n\"Your Sci-Ance failed long ago,\" I reminded her. \"That is why those who created my kind had to change the world. Because there was no other way to save the world from the rust, except to change it.\"\n\n\"The rust will end itself,\" Norta snapped. \"When it has nothing left to consume, it will die out, leaving the world for us to re-populate. The energy of everything that it has absorbed will be left behind after its termination for those who inherit the world. That was always the plan. On Farlight, we will survive, just as our ancestors intended. There are great storage facilities at Farlight; within them is everything the new world needs. Sci-Ance can bring them back.\" She must've seen the look of horror in Harlan's eyes, for she added quickly to me, \"Join us there with your fellow dragons, Bayloo. There is room in the new world for all. You don't need magic anymore, once the rust is gone. Dragons and humans can find a way to live together.\"\n\nI drew myself up. We were reaching the limits of words and discussion. \"You wish virtually every human on this world to die? Every horse or pig, every bird, perhaps even the ghastrays and other creatures. All so you can take a chance that the rust may just disappear and allow you to remake the world in the image of a people who died hundreds of years ago, and left you with their mission and their curse. To this I say: never.\"\n\nNorta had not become the leader of her people by accident. She knew that a confrontation was inevitable. Her finger twitched on the inferno staff. I expected that. She aimed at my neck. I yanked myself to the side. Unfortunately, Norta was also a cunning warrior. She'd baited me. I moved, but she didn't fire. Not until I'd shown her my maneuver. I was exposed; a large, relatively easy target in this confined space.\n\nShe fired the weapon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Harlan struck his wife's arm.\n\nThat was something she hadn't expected. Even after years apart, she must've thought their trust ran deeper. Harlan had known me for only a few months. I didn't have time to be flattered, but I was glad that my caring for Harlan was reciprocated. My mother would not have forged such a bond. The Way was not always the answer.\n\nHarlan's blow disrupted Norta's aim just enough to send the projectile off course. The iron slug hissed angrily as it shot past my neck. I whipped my tail at Norta's head. It would've been a lethal blow, but Harlan jumped in front of her. That surprised me. Humans were just so fickle. I pulled my strike as best I could, but I still struck with enough force to send Harlan and his wife to ground, but better there than into the Abyss (at least for Harlan).\n\nI advanced to stand over them, my head craning forward. I let the saliva from my open jaw rain onto Norta. I had offered her a choice and she had made it: She tried to kill me. That rest was easy. Except for Harlan interfering again.\n\n\"Bayloo, don't do this,\" Harlan was still on his back, his body mostly on top of his wife, but it would still be easy for me to put a claw into her without harming him.\n\n\"I can kill her. I will kill her. I am sorry for that, my friend.\"\n\n\"Do as you must then, dragon.\" Norta's voice betrayed no fear of death. \"I did as I must. This is the right path for my people, and eventually, all peoples. Your kind was created to be a tool, nothing more. I don't expect you to understand. You were made without true emotion. You were made to destroy.\"\n\n\"A very convenient belief.\"\n\n\"But know that with my death, your fellow dragons die too.\"\n\nMy nostrils flared. \"What fresh betrayal do you plot now?\"\n\n\"If I do not return, my seahands will turn their inferno staffs on the remaining dragons. You have not seen all our weapons. There is more in our arsenal. Enough for one last task.\"\n\nJalena came closer to us, bloody sword still in her grip. \"I swear I know nothing of this, Bayloo. On my honor. If there is a betrayal, it shall not be from Oster.\"\n\nI didn't move my eyes from the treacherous Norta. Harlan really had terrible taste in mates. Norta might be lying, but I didn't think she was. \"Will your Osteran soldiers fight to protect my kind if the Farlighters go to slaughter them?\"\n\nJalena's heavy sigh confirmed my fears even before she spoke. \"There is no love for Rolman dragons among my soldiers. I doubt they would intervene without an order for me. Perhaps Kemet \u2026\"\n\nPerhaps, but perhaps wasn't enough.\n\n\"Bayloo, there is another way,\" Harlan promised.\n\nI wasn't in the mood for compromises. I placed a claw next to Norta's neck. \"As you say, I was made to destroy.\"\n\nHarlan put a hand on my claw and shoved it away. \"You know that to be untrue. Both of you stop this.\" Harlan scrambled to his feet even as I kept Norta pressed on the ground. He kept staring at my claw. \"Bayloo, I need a truce for you to hear what must be heard by you and Norta both.\"\n\nI didn't let his wife up, but I didn't kill her either.\n\nHarlan put a hand on my side. \"Is it agreed?\"\n\nI still wasn't in the mood for anything but a clean kill. \"Harlan, in this battle you must choose a side. You have tried to choose both sides, and this will not do.\"\n\nHarlan surprised me with his reply. \"I chose the side of saving this world, my friend. There is no other choice that can be made. Norta will soon see that as well. And she will help us. Let her up.\"\n\nNorta's fierce eyes told me she didn't agree with anything that her husband had just said. Nevertheless, I released a long, reluctant snarl, then moved my claw away from her so that she might drag herself from the ground.\n\n\"Norta, for six years I have plied the seas, traveling from place to place, visiting nearly every surviving land within reach of the great seas that cover this world. I've met kings and princes, farmers and beggars, whores and holy men, children and the nearly-immortal, and everything in between. I've even spoken to ghastrays and dragons.\" Norta's face was hard, but Harlan's eyes were soft. \"Some of these meetings were joyous, others tragic. I've known evil and shocking kindness. Through it all, I stayed true to you and the mission I had been set upon. I will tell you the simple truth: This world that exists is flawed, but it does not deserve to die for a fever dream of the past.\"\n\n\"It's more than some ancient dream,\" Norta shot back, the fury in her eyes flowing into her voice. \"It's about our people surviving. The curse can only be ended by restoring Farlight. Sci-Ance can cure us. Other mothers and fathers don't need to end up like us. Ana and Hora will not have died for nothing.\"\n\nA quiet, heavy with emotion, followed. Harlan's eyes stared downward as if he'd been kicked in the heart. Perhaps he had. He had told me he had escaped the curse of his people, the curse of losing one of his twins; Harlan had told me he was without children. I now realized the terrible truth of his words and what he had really meant: He and Norta had lost both their offspring before he'd left on his long voyage, rather than just one. The comfortable solitude of an endless quest made sense now.\n\nHarlan forced his head up, forced himself to meet his wife's trembling eyes. \"The curse of our people will not be broken by Sci-Ance. We have the power to end it now.\"\n\nNorta hissed with anger. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"We can mix with the other peoples of this world. We can marry any who we desire! We can give up our existence as nomads of the sea. We can find a place to settle, invite others. The curse afflicts us because we have children only with each other, on pain of exile or death. All for a dark quest. End that custom and we can end the curse.\"\n\nI waited for Norta to explode with anger, but she didn't. Instead, she deflated. \"And end ourselves as a people. We are so few. It would be extinction for us in two generations. I won't be the leader that ends us.\"\n\n\"You don't have to. I will.\"\n\n\"You?\" She huffed angrily. \"You're a ship's captain \u2026\" But even as she said, her voice hitched with doubt.\n\n\"I'm Lord Fish.\" There was self-mockery in Harlan's voice, but it was tinged with something harder. \"Every captain knows my name. More importantly, every seahand knows it. What they don't know is that the great secret of the Mumblers and the First Voice is some quest, not to save our old home, but to help unmake the only world they have ever known. The ships are already rife with discontent. Our people tire of only the sea and of always being alone. Most of all, they are weary of knowing that finding love also means the curse of a dead child. How many captains or crew went rogue in the past year? Three? Four? Before that, even more. Every new dawn is the same.\"\n\nNorta didn't answer, but her silence was enough confirmation.\n\nWith reluctance, Harlan added a final, verbal dagger. \"It will be easy to end this, Norta. Particularly with a dragon to help me spread the word among the remaining ships. You will be First Voice of no one but a few fervent stragglers who will be gone in less than a generation.\"\n\nNorta knew Harlan spoke the truth. She had lost, but she was also a leader. She wanted to salvage what she could, wanted to save as much of Farlight as she could. I understood that. \"What do you want me to do?\"\n\nThey were painful words to speak. Harlan knew it as well. I could feel him inching to embrace the woman who he still loved. But he restrained himself. Harlan, too, was a leader in his own, unique way. He looked toward me. \"What must be done, Bayloo?\"\n\nThe sun knew how to shine, and Harlan knew humans. I was grateful for his help and his friendship. \"Show me how to cut down the aurathorn without killing it. It is finally time for all dragons to be free.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Aurathorn.\n\nI finally had it. My mother had given one of her eggs for this. In exchange for her horrific sacrifice, she'd obtained a single cut vine of the thorns, but without the precious fount from which it grew. It had been a brilliant and desperate idea\u2014using the unique thorns to disrupt the magic runes that enslaved my mind. That's what aurathorn was\u2014a magic blocker. Or more precisely, as Norta explained it, aurathorn absorbed residual energy using the fount, concentrated it within the thorns, which used that stored energy to negate the all-encompassing blanket of force that Rima continually rained down upon the world, cancelling Sci-Ance and replacing it with the magic of the Latticework. My mother probably hadn't understood all that, and she hadn't known enough to obtain the fount that kept the thorns' power alive. But she knew enough. She had only a vine of aurathorn, which wouldn't survive on its own. Maybe the Pale Wrights had tricked her with that. In the end, she'd used enchantment to try to coax the vine to work, then she'd had to use Jona to get the thorns to me, to ingest them, hoping that the residual power would still be enough to break my invisible chains.\n\nI wondered when my mother had first devised her plan. When she had allowed me to become a slave, had she already known the price for freeing me? I told myself it didn't matter. She had done it, although the price had been high for both of us. At least now I understood why she had thought it had been necessary. My mother understood magic. She knew the Latticework was damaged. For her plan, she needed me to be a slave. She needed me to be linked with a human, my mind forever altered by that experience. She needed me to have emotion, which was why she had told me the Way wasn't for me. A human would say she was cold and heartless, but she merely followed the Way of our kind. My dragon mind understood why she had done all these things. My human-like emotions ached at the betrayal.\n\nFor all my mother's brilliance, she understood less of the nature of aurathorn than I. She also did not command the Latticework as I could. No one did. My mother had given me that. Through my passage from enslavement to freedom I had earned that power. I was a dragon mage like no other. I intended to use my power. There would be no need to coax my fellow dragons into drinking some concoction against the will of their linked ryders. I didn't have the time for that anyway.\n\nNorta showed us how to safely cut on the aurathorn founts without killing them. The key was dirt. Aurathorn had to be connected with ground from which it drew its particular form of sustenance at all times, or the unseen force of Rima that surrounded us would quickly destroy its nemesis. For that, we brought in dirt and gravel from the pits and the area outside, using one of the thick robes of the eternally-departed Pale Wrights to hold it all. Soon we had a small, moveable vineyard. We left one fount in place.\n\n\"I shall ensure this place is well protected,\" Jalena promised. \"After this is done, I hope we shall have no more need of the breeding pits. But, should the world need aurathorn again, it shall be here. I pledge it.\"\n\nI liked Jalena. She was young enough to still believe that she would always be able to hold true to the words she spoke. The world would eventually teach her differently, but for now, I enjoyed the effort she made.\n\n\"The Shades created aurathorn?\" I asked Norta when we finally returned to the surface with our prize.\n\n\"Yes, with the help of my people, as we both searched for a way to continue to use Sci-Ance.\" I had noticed that the glittering thorns continuously drew Norta's gaze. She was a moth to its flame. \"We thought it lost forever in when Farlight was destroyed. But there was always a hope that the Shades or someone still had it hidden somewhere, which is why we had to search for it.\"\n\n\"You should know that when this is done, if there is a way that magic can help the curse of your people, I offer it to you.\" I caught Harlan looking approvingly at me as I offered my peace to his wife.\n\nNorta took in a long breath. I expected a refusal, but Norta managed to croak out something a bit more pleasant: \"Thank you for the offer, Bayloo.\"\n\nAt least she didn't call me 'dragon.' I still didn't trust her at all, but it's nicer when someone remembers to use your name.\n\nTogether we flew back to the Shard. Norta offered to go by herself, on foot. Maybe she was wary of climbing onto my back after having tried to kill me. Harlan insisted she accompany us, and so did I, although for different reasons. I had no intention of letting Norta out of my sight until I had what I needed from her. Some of what I wanted from the Farlighter ruler included helping with aurathorn and not trying to kill any dragons (including me), but not all. She still had knowledge I needed. My offer to help her people hadn't been benevolence. I could play games too.\n\nWhile still beneath the Pits of Gargen, I had spent considerable effort trying to glean more about the mysterious aurathorn, its properties, how it interacted with the Latticework. I got nowhere. Knowing that aurathorn negated magic, that outcome made sense. I was trying to gaze into a void. I had also done some brief tests on myself to help me determine the intensity and duration of the thorn's magic suppression. This was as simple as holding and dropping thorns as I attempted to work magic. I learned that aurathorn acted instantly, and its effect dissipated with the same alacrity once out of the vicinity of the thorns. That gave me a stupid idea. Harlan confirmed the stupidity of the idea, but time was scarce, and we didn't have a better plan.\n\nIn a rare demonstration that fate was not at all times against us, we arrived back at the Shard before my fellow dragons had counter-attacked to destroy the gates of their impromptu prison. I had feared we'd been too long in the Pits, but with King Dayne dead, the surviving ryders had acted with prudence, giving their dragons a chance to heal and the human soldiers an opportunity to regroup before the inevitable assault to try to free themselves from the Shard. The shocking appearance of the Farlighters and their inferno staffs probably played a significant role in that reticence. Still, I was grateful to find no fatalities among my brethren beyond what had been suffered in the initial surprise attack.\n\n\"I know better than to try to persuade you to reconsider,\" Harlan said to me when all was ready. \"But I wish there was a less risky way to do this.\"\n\n\"We always wish that.\"\n\n\"What of the Rolman soldiers?\" Jalena asked.\n\nI wanted to be generous. \"I would ask you to do all you can to avoid a fight with them for as long as you can.\"\n\nThe ruler of Oster didn't hide her surprise at the sentiment. \"They serve the same king that enslaved you. They would kill you if given the chance. They have killed thousands of Osterans.\"\n\n\"They outnumber you, but your soldiers have vastly better positions. If I am successful, I hope to broker a peace.\"\n\nJalena's face stiffened at that. I guessed Kemet and the other Osterans would share those hard feelings toward their ancient foes. There had too much blood spilled for this to be easy.\n\n\"It is not for me to solve every human conflict,\" I said wearily. \"If you want to have a lasting peace with Rolm, I suggest you start here. And send a message to Ulibon, for they may be of some use to you, whichever path you choose. You may tell the Highstar that I vouch for your unparalleled honor.\"\n\nJalena didn't smile, but I still think she was pleased by my praise. I was getting better at this.\n\nThere wasn't any more time to dwell in the moment, however. \"Time to open the gate.\"\n\nWith everything as ready as it could be, Jalena gave the order to her soldiers to raise the portcullis that protected the eastern portal of the Shard. The heavy metal of the gate scratched and groaned as it moved, pulled upwards by teams of humans who pushed two huge wheels attached to an elaborate pulley system. After the rumbling of the gate opening, I knew every dragon and every ryder inside the Shard would be alert, ready for battle. I flew inside the mountain the moment the opening was large enough to accommodate me. The gate would open no further than it must\u2014at least as long as Jalena's Osteran soldiers held the passage.\n\nI pushed my wings for speed, but ventured no further into the giant cavern than necessary to make my presence obvious to all within. Dragons roared and humans shouted. I roared back, loud enough to be heard by every creature within the Shard.\n\n\"Today shall be the last day the dragons are slaves. From this day forward, we shall all be free!\"\n\nThe dragons wouldn't believe me\u2014they couldn't. The human ryders would be angered. Still, it felt good to say it. The Farlighters had held onto their dark dream for generations; my hope was a mere babe in those terms, but the intensity of my mission was greater, clearer. I could make it happen. My mother knew I could\u2014I was an ember dragon. We had been made to lead our kind.\n\nThe dragons and their ryders came for me. I counted them as they rose. Each of my brethren came to do me harm, but I silently rejoiced in their flight. Even Blaris coming at me was a welcome sight, for it confirmed she lived. Arutel, too, took to the air\u2014ryderless, vengeance in his eyes. I had worried for him. The horned dragons came as well. I counted seven in all. I circled the formation, trying to keep away from my pursuers as long as I could. I knew I needed to leave. But I didn't see Cornethius yet. My eyes scoured the ground. I found him quickly, his crumbled form alone beside a building. His ryder wasn't with him. I risked a low pass over him, but it only confirmed that he was dead. As was another of the horned dragons. The inferno staffs had taken their toll.\n\nWith my hearts like lead in my chest, I turned to do what I had to do. I beat my wings, flying hard and fast for the lone open portal\u2014the narrow opening to the sky that I'd entered through. I'd intended to stay close to my escape route, but I'd gone further into the cavern to check on Cornethius. Somehow, Arutel had guessed I'd try to fly back through the open portcullis. He was flying toward it even before my course was obvious. I tried to increase my speed, but it was no use. Arutel would get there first. But he had no interest in escaping this place. Ryderless, and driven by his own twisted memories of Dayne, Arutel swept around in front of the gate and came at me.\n\nWith Harlan and Jalena's assistance, I had re-fitted myself with only a single set of sai on my left foreclaw, and I didn't wear it for the purposes of hurting my brother. I'd come to save dragons, not slice them to pieces, but I was tempted to use it against Arutel. He was vicious, with a strong, thick neck. Still, I restrained myself. I came within range of his fire, but Arutel didn't bother with flame\u2014he wanted to kill me with tooth and claw. I kept on course toward him, still coming at my best speed. Arutel probably expected me to try to pull some maneuver at the last instant, because that's what I ordinarily would've done. He knew there were too many other dragons chasing me to risk getting trapped in close combat where I'd lose the advantage of superior flying abilities. So, I did the opposite of what Arutel expected; I rammed him.\n\nIt wasn't until my claws were almost on him that Arutel fully accepted that I meant to give him what he wanted. Only at the very last moment did he focus fully on positioning himself for the melee that would ensue once our bodies were locked. Arutel twisted his neck away from my advancing jaws, attempting to lift himself above my foreclaws. I was faster.\n\nMy outstretched claws found the scales of Arutel's underbelly, even as he beat his wings to avoid my grasp. The base of his neck also came into reach of my jaws as I extended myself fully. But locking myself onto Arutel wasn't my intention. I needed to be close, but I had no desire to engage in a deadly sky dance. Instead, I pushed him eastward. Normally, pushing doesn't work well when two dragons are flying, but in this case, Arutel was trying to change his direction to avoid me. He'd lost most of his momentum in the interim, while I was moving with speedy purpose. Surprised by my tactic, Arutel was forced toward the Shard's metal portcullis.\n\nI flew with too much speed and force for Arutel to stop us, no matter how hard he beat his wings. He released a desperate roar. A moment later, I slammed him into thick metal bars of the Shard's gate, wings hitting the metal barrier first. The collision probably hurt him, but that wasn't my intention, either. I pressed Arutel against the metal. Just above him, on a ledge that the Osterans used to control the gate mechanism, stood Harlan. In his hand he held glowing thorns that had been dipped in sticky sap. He sprinkled them on Arutel, as if pouring grains of sand on the beach. The dragon didn't notice\u2014aurathorn didn't hurt. Once that was done, I shoved Arutel away from me, toward the ground. Suddenly, he was free of my attack. That surprised him as well. If I'd intended to kill him, I had surrendered a decisive advantage, but of course I wasn't going to kill him. I escaped out the narrow opening that had been left in the Shard's gate.\n\nAs I expected, Arutel chased me, as did the rest of the dragons and their ryders. As each passed through the narrow gap, tiny thorns fell onto their heads, wings and bodies. The debris was tiny, near invisible, seemingly harmless, and very sticky. I suspected that the ryders would sense something was wrong with their link to their dragon's mind, but they wouldn't know why or what to do about it.\n\nThe dragons departed the Shard into the densest patch of fog ever to grace the surface of Inkra. I'd conjured it just for my brethren. The air was just a touch less thick than soup, inundated with misty rain and unnatural waves of intermittent wind. The idea was to disrupt sight as well as hearing and smell. I suffered from those same hindrances, but I had the advantage of my link to the Latticework to guide me. It was enough to give me the advantage of surprise, which was what I needed.\n\nI pounced on Blaris first. I'd always had a feeling about her, some innate sense that, more than any other dragon on the Peak, she resented her ryder. Concealed by the fog and rain, I was able to strike at her without any initial resistance. By the time Blaris knew another dragon was near, it was too late for her to do anything about it. I was on her, a foreclaw holding the base of her neck, while I swiped at her chest with my other, sai-tipped claw. I struck her as gently as I could, telling myself I was acting like a healer rather than an enemy. With two quick, decisive swipes, I brutally defaced the sickening runes that had been carved onto my sister's body since she was a hatchling. Owing to the aurathorn, her link to her ryder was severed, and the magic of the rune rendered powerless. For good measure, I had now destroyed it.\n\n\"You are free, sister.\" I told her, still holding onto Blaris. \"Your chain is gone. You have merely to shake off the last of the yolk within you, and you shall be free like me.\"\n\nBlaris' answer was to smash her jaw into my foreclaw. I'd feared this. It was one thing to destroy the magic of the link. It was another for my sister to realize her mind was free. If she even wanted to be free. Slavery was a poison that lingered.\n\n\"I know you, Blaris. You want this. You always have. Don't be afraid.\" Then I smashed her in the head with my tail.\n\nI returned to the cover of the fog, flying on a twisting, erratic course, in case Blaris intended to follow. She'd work things out. I had more to do before my fog dissipated. I went for Arutel next. He sensed my coming somehow, and bathed me in a blanket of fire. It hurt, and I cut his chest scales more deeply than I intended, drawing blood. I could feel his anger as I escaped back into my conjured mist.\n\n\"When you are free, you shall realize our bond is far stronger than the rune that the Sculptors carved into your mind, Brother.\"\n\nI turned my attention to the horned dragons. They were easier, because I didn't need to worry about fire, and I was far stronger than my smaller cousins. I defaced the ruins of two more dragons before Blaris found me. The fog had thinned, and I was distracted. She grabbed a hindleg in his jaws. Before I could fully react, a tail smashed into my underside. Blaris was damnably strong\u2014it felt like the contents of my torso were forced involuntarily through my neck and out my mouth in a single instant. Besides that, her bite hurt. A foreclaw gripped onto my scales, followed by an arrow from Blaris' pesty ryder. There was an embarrassing lack of gratitude here.\n\nI answered the attack with an embrace of my own. I grabbed at Blaris with my foreclaws (and the one with sai probably stung when it sank through her scales), and answered her with several strikes from my tail. I roared at her as we twisted and tumbled through the air. The mist dissipated. More dragons would be coming.\n\n\"Look inside yourself, Sister. I am not your enemy.\"\n\nHer answer was to try to rip out a portion of my neck with her teeth.\n\nI tried to reach out to her another way\u2014the dragon way\u2014through the Chords of the Latticework that connected us all. I sent my power into her, hoping she could sense my consciousness as well, that I was with her.\n\nIt didn't seem to have any effect. Blaris writhed and attacked with the vigor of a slave dragon instructed to kill. We were falling toward the Shifting Straits rapidly. She beat her wings harder to stay aloft\u2014she could survive a fall into the sea, but her precious ryder might not. I didn't really care about the human, though. I pushed our flightpath downward even as Blaris turned more and more of her effort into keeping us aloft. She tried to separate, but I held firm.\n\nI kept trying. \"That human in your head isn't you. Find yourself, sister.\"\n\nThe sea didn't care about our struggle. We crashed into the waves, the cold of the water surging through me. I kept my hold on Blaris\u2014dragons didn't swim. Luckily, the tide was low and we dragons were large. My legs touched the sand bottom of the waters near the Shard. I felt some of the fight leave my sister. Perhaps she was searching for the human who had ridden on her back. I pulled Blaris toward the nearest shore. We were close. The crash could've been far worse. Dragons roared furiously at me from above. I looked up to see Arutel coming at us. I left Blaris in the shallows, leaping toward the shore. I couldn't fight Arutel while I was in the water. I needed to get back into the sky.\n\nI reached the rocky shore just as Arutel reached me. His claws raked across my head. One of them sunk deep, tearing a scale. Blood poured into my right eye. I needed to get out of this position or he was going to tear me to pieces. I spread my wings to fly as Arutel made a tight circle in the sky. He'd be back in a moment, but my wings were soaked in salt water. I shook them, but it wasn't going to be enough. I was stuck on the beach. Arutel dove at me. He opened his mouth. Fire came forth, leading the attack. He'd follow with claw and jaw, tearing my wings if he could.\n\nI crouched low to the ground, bracing for more hurt.\n\nAnother blast of fire came, but it wasn't aimed at me. These flames rose from the ground, answering Arutel's fire. The new blaze was thick, strong, and unexpected\u2014enough to keep any dragon from flying directly into the inferno. Arutel broke off his dive, turning into an arc in the sky, as he circled around. Blaris was at my side. Her words were sweeter than biting into the flesh of a newly-roasted black pig (probably).\n\n\"I am with you,\" my newfound kin told me. \"I can finally see, and I am with you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Once Blaris was free, I knew the rest would follow.\n\nArutel broke out next. I think the shock of seeing another dragon turn against him did it. After Blaris came to my aid, Arutel's anger melted away. Confused, he disengaged, flying off into the clouds.\n\nBlaris intended to fly after him, but I counseled otherwise. \"Give him time. You were chafing to be free. The others may need time to find their will.\" I didn't mention that we didn't have the luxury of time. I wanted to give my sister a chance to revel in her new identity\u2014I'd save explanations about the forthcoming end of the world for the morning. We could afford that, I hoped, although I knew that each day that I delayed meant another day of peril for Rinxia and Kiata.\n\nThe horned dragons broke free almost as one after Blaris joined me. They had been made to follow the lead of the ash dragons. It wasn't all roars of celebration. Revolutions weren't pretty. Many ryders died\u2014some in the jaws of their former slave dragons, others because they refused to accept what had happened. Those who surrendered, I allowed to go free. With Dayne dead and the dragons free, my fight was no longer with Rolm.\n\nArutel came back to us as the sun began to fall into the horizon, just as the rest of us were flying back to the Shard. I was exhausted, but elated. Arutel came to us from the north, darting out of the cloud like an apparition. His eyes set me at ease even before he flew to me.\n\n\"I'm sorry, my brother,\" were the first words he said to me.\n\n\"There is nothing to be sorry for. It was not you I fought. It was the poison of Dayne in your mind.\"\n\nArutel grunted. \"I knew what he was. I was \u2026 in that fog, I didn't care. I just wanted to \u2026\" He searched for the words for a moment, before roaring in frustration instead.\n\n\"That particular nightmare is over.\"\n\nMy newly-freed kin followed me without question. This was all new to them, and I was the one who'd freed them. To be surrounded by so many dragons, all of them flying together by choice, seemed unreal. I wished my mother could have seen it. Even more, I hoped what I'd done would be enough to save the rest of us, and this world, as she intended.\n\nAn armada of dragons delivered quick victories. After Arutel burned half a dozen Rolman warships, the Rolman army surrendered and agreed to leave Oster, abandoning their supplies, save what they needed for the journey back to Rolm. Every Rolman soldier in the Shard quickly surrendered as well. Still, that left the Farlighters.\n\nDespite the gratitude of my fellow dragons, it took all of my efforts of persuasion to keep my kin from killing every Farlighter (and possibly the Rolmans and Osterans as well) when we returned to the Shard. Arutel was particularly keen on blood vengeance. Perhaps it was a legacy of Dayne's influence, perhaps he was still furious about almost being killed himself. Either would be understandable.\n\n\"The war between humans and dragons must end,\" I told him.\n\nThere were many unhappy dragons, but my authority held. We had returned to the Shard for a higher purpose\u2014to find those who had not flown out to pursue me. While I searched the Shard with Arutel, Blaris and the horned dragons remained outside\u2014I still didn't trust Norta or her people. We found only one of our kin still alive inside the Shard\u2014a horned dragon known as Arla. I freed her mind, but she was in too much pain to notice. She had holes in her wing and her body\u2014too much for even dragon healing to easily overcome.\n\n\"Our healers will do all they can for her,\" Jalena assured me. \"When she is ready, she will be free to go, I swear it.\"\n\n\"More human promises,\" Arutel sneered.\n\n\"Our kind killed thousands of hers,\" I reminded my brother. \"And you would still be a slave without her help.\"\n\nArutel made an unhappy rumble in his throat. \"What now?\"\n\n\"Tonight, we feast as free dragons. We shall take our pick of the Rolman food stores, and much more. You really need to try ale.\" Arutel's eyes glowed with approval. \"And then I must tell you of the history of our race. Afterwards, we must save this world.\"\n\nThere was considerably less approval in his eyes after that last bit.\n\nI wished their first meal as free dragons could've been more impressive.\n\nThere was no fresh meat in the captured camps of the Rolman soldiers, but there was plenty of the dried variety. Blaris and the horned dragon, Saba, brought back some small game from Oster's arid plains to liven things up. But what we lacked in fine food, we made up for in comradery. There was also ale. I realized after the first barrel was consumed that I needed to ration the supply, or no one was going to remember anything I said.\n\nWe chose an open landscape within sight of the Shard for our first-ever dragon council. We numbered ten. It was both a remarkable number, and a tragedy. There were but two fire-breathing ash dragons. I worried if that was enough to beat the rust, even with Rinxia and Kiata to help.\n\nMy kin had questions, but fewer than I expected given the momentous change in our collective circumstances. I think that was due to the particularly diabolical nature of the control runes\u2014they enslaved us without our truly realizing we were slaves. The mind-slavery provided a kind of false contentment, because pleasing our masters was our single overriding concern. It would take some time for my brothers and sisters to fully realize that. Better to let them get there on their own. Also, I didn't want to talk that much. It turned out that chatting with too many dragons was exhausting. Mostly, they were concerned with the war and the fate of Rolm, because that was what had mattered to them before this day.\n\n\"Will Oster attack Eladrell?\" Saba wondered.\n\n\"It no longer matters to us,\" was the answer of Arutel.\n\n\"Is Oster now our friend?\" Blaris wanted to know.\n\nI told my kin about my favorable opinions of Jalena, and that she had risked her life to help me obtain aurathorn, the strange vine that had helped to free them all. That seemed to have the desired effect. Linked dragons all understood the human concept of gratitude well enough. The consensus was that the Osterans themselves would decide their future relationship with our kind. Dragons were far less bloodthirsty with full bellies and a barrel of ale.\n\n\"Why shouldn't we punish the humans?\" asked Arutel, who was one of the few who hadn't touched the drink. \"They took us from our nests and made us slaves.\"\n\nDragon eyes flashed with approval. Arutel spoke like he would be willing to burn Eladrell that very night. I didn't want that. I had changed.\n\n\"The Sculptors of Eladrell should indeed be dealt with. And they will be,\" I assured him.\n\n\"Let us do it now, while they are unaware of what has happened here,\" Arutel pressed. \"I will burn their temple and watch them scream as they turn to ash.\"\n\nMost of my brethren seemed to think that was an excellent plan. The burden of being an ember dragon had revealed itself already. I didn't relish the role or what I must now do. I had given this moment considerable thought, but I still didn't feel ready. \"There will be time for everything, but we have a higher calling. There is something we, as a race, must now do.\"\n\nA lot of surprised dragons looked at me. At least one snorted with derision\u2014I think it was Arutel.\n\nI had to tell them more, but how much? I glanced longingly at the ale barrels before returning my attention to the inevitable. \"Long ago, we dragons came into being when the world was in peril. We destroyed the threat, but it has now returned. Our enemy is stronger than ever before, while we are depleted and robbed of much of our power as well as the lore of our race. But we are dragons, and we have been through worse.\"\n\nBlaris captured the mood of the gathering. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Our true enemy is known as the rust.\"\n\nI spoke deep into the night. I spoke about our history, at least what I knew about it. The notion that humans, even long-dead ones, had created us, wasn't popular. I moved on, telling my kin to believe whatever they wished for now, that there was much I still didn't know. I told them of the rust, and the past, when dragons had cleansed the land with the power of balefire. Then I told them about Ni-Yota, the land beyond the Wall of Fire, a vast land of plenty, ruled until recently by dragons.\n\n\"There are others of our kind beyond the Wall of Fire?\" asked Saba in wonderment, even though I had just told her and the others exactly that. I understood her reaction. It was a comfort to know we weren't alone, even though few dragons remained in Ni-Yota. And I desperately missed and worried about those same dragons. I wanted to be there, not here in a jabberfest.\n\n\"In Ni-Yota, our kind once thrived,\" I told them, trying to muster some of Harlan's dramatic flair. He used his voice, his face, and his hand to create mood and images. I compensated with the emotion in my eyes, but also by trying to push imagery from my memory into my brethren's severed rune links. I could manage only the roughest communication for the moment, but I knew the potential was there. \"Few of us now remain in Ni-Yota. Those that do are fighting desperately in an impossible battle against the rust \u2026 and other enemies. It falls to us to put things right, as our ancestors did centuries ago.\"\n\nThat got them. Harlan would've been proud, I think. The idea of saving the land of dragons, even if lots of humans also happened to live there, struck at the newly-awakened imaginations of my brethren. Also, the legacy of what we were remained in these dragons. We had been created to destroy the rust, and that instinct returned easily.\n\n\"We still have plenty of fire,\" Arutel declared naively.\n\n\"Fire is not enough, as our ancestors learned. Only the balefire can cleanse the world of the rust.\"\n\n\"But you said balefire was lost to us when Rima cracked,\" Blaris pointed out. I was grateful someone had been listening.\n\n\"There is a way to bring it back. My mother found that path, and she died to give us the chance. But her death was not in vain. We can do this, but it shall not be easy. The rust is not some passive growth waiting for us to find a way to destroy it. It adapts, and it and its minions will doubtless be ready for battle. Only once the rust is defeated can we be truly free.\"\n\n\"What can possibly stand against the might of all of us?\" Arutel boasted.\n\nIf ignorant confidence could deliver our salvation, we would be victorious with Arutel alone, but I knew it would be harder than that. At every turn, with every stratagem, the rust and its hollowings had found some way to answer. It had survived the centuries, it had somehow survived balefire once in the past. I needed to find a way to destroy it completely this time, or there would be no more dragons left. And I still didn't know quite how. Still, there was no need to share my fears on this night. Let them think victory was certain. At least my brothers and sisters would get some sleep\u2014I would not."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "While the others slumbered, I prepared to fly.\n\nI walked as silently as I could, moving away from the thicket of sleeping dragons, so that I might lift myself into the sky without waking any of my kin. It turned out that dragons do, in fact, snore. Also, I didn't move as quietly as I thought, or else not all my brethren slept.\n\nBlaris hurried to my side. \"Where are you off to, my brother?\"\n\nI didn't want to tell her but I didn't want to lie either. \"Veralon. To see if there are any more of us.\"\n\nBlaris's eyes darkened to near black. She had something to tell me, but couldn't bring herself to say it.\n\n\"On Veralon \u2026 we did things.\" She hung her head as words failed.\n\n\"You were not in control of yourself. Tell me.\"\n\n\"When Dayne became king \u2026 he wanted more dragons. He was warned adult dragons cannot be taken, that the dragons on Veralon were without sound minds anyway. He would not listen.\" Blaris looked away from me, as if ashamed. \"You will not like what you find there.\"\n\n\"Still, I will go,\" I told her.\n\nBlaris forced herself to look at me again. \"I will fly with you. We should face that place together.\"\n\nI loved my sister for the offer. Already, she showed remorse and kindness. I hoped we would be a better kind of dragon. Yet, I didn't want any company.\n\n\"I must go alone. I will be back in the early morning for our journey.\" She seemed on the verge of protesting, so I added, \"Watch over the others while I am gone.\"\n\nBefore Blaris could change her mind, I lifted myself into the air, headed for the once-forbidden island of Veralon.\n\nIts precise location in the shoal-infested Dagger Sea northwest of Rolm was the most closely-held secret of Rolm, whose warships plied the waters for intruders while (before today) dragon patrols ensured the exclusivity of Rolm's most-prized asset.\n\nSince my mind had been freed, Veralon had held a special allure, but I didn't undertake this journey for curiosity's sake. I heard Blaris' bitter words, but I still hadn't abandoned all hope. I couldn't, because I feared that three ash dragons would not be enough against the nemesis we faced. Supposedly, there were no more ash dragons on Veralon anyway, but Kiata's father as well as mine had been of that island, based on what my mother had told me before she died. I pressed onward, and dread flew with me.\n\nDespite its reputation for security and secrecy, I encountered few difficulties on my journey. I saw no sign of Rolman warships, nor of any dragon patrols. The last of Rolm's strength had been committed to Osteran campaign. I found Veralon quickly enough.\n\nAt a distance, the island appeared smaller than I expected. Shaped like a cracked egg, it was many times the size of Maricopa, but still a speck compared with the vastness of Ni-Yota. The island was dotted with teeth-like peaks that seemed to rise from nowhere. The stories told of a lush place, filled with jungle beneath its peaks, the sea lanes leading to its stony beaches made perilous by hidden shoals in the water on every side. The island I gazed upon was so different than what I expected that I hoped I had come to the wrong place.\n\nI hadn't. Veralon had been burned to cinders.\n\nI made a long, slow arc over the devastated island, disgusted at the petty rage of the man who had ordered this\u2014and I had no doubt it had been Dayne. There was not a tree still standing. Even the rocks of mountains were scorched. It was so senseless. What had happened here?\n\nMy knowledge of Dayne made the fate of Veralon obvious. The dragons that still remained here must've defied King Dayne's wishes. My mother had told me they were a lost offshoot of our kind, driven from their senses by the shattering of Rima. Yet, my mother had still come here to mate. Surely, that meant the dragons retained something of their former selves. I felt sure that one of my mother's hopes had been that I'd find a way to bring the dragons of this place back to their rightful place. I had hoped that too. It seemed I had failed before I had even started.\n\nI landed on Veralon, even though I already knew there would be nothing to find, no dragon to save. There was only one last thing I could do for my dead brothers and sisters, and that was to mourn their passing.\n\nI let loose a grievous roar, letting it turn into a desperate howl of mourning, just as I'd done for my mother. I didn't know these dragons, but they were my kin. My father might well lie dead on this forsaken island. I bid them all a last farewell, but I dared not tarry for long. The sun would return soon.\n\nI headed back to Oster, not to my dragon encampment, though. First, I needed to collect Harlan. Bringing a human with us wouldn't be popular with Arutel and the others, but they would have to learn sooner or later that we were stuck with the humans. They had knowledge that we dragons needed if we were going to save this world.\n\nI arrived back at the Shard in the back half of the night. I was expected. The gate of the diamond mountain was open, although there were plenty of Osteran guards inside and the ballistae were ready. Harlan waited dressed in his enchanted armor, pacing in the same garden where we'd first met Jalena. Norta was with him, as I'd asked.\n\n\"Do dragons not sleep?\" Norta asked as I set down on the grass.\n\n\"Not on nights when fate is deciding which way it will fall.\"\n\n\"My husband has told me much about you,\" she flashed a cross glance at Harlan, implying his status as her mate was very much in doubt. \"Even allowing for his embellishment, his stories about you are remarkable. Far different than any dragon known in our history.\"\n\nI wondered what about me Harlan had thought important enough to share with this woman. \"Do your people keep records of many dragons?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Your kind were created to thwart the designs of our ancestors. They tried to learn all they could about you.\"\n\nThis wasn't what I'd come to discuss, but the knowledge of Norta's people was important. Indeed, they might know well more about my own race than I did. \"And what do the ancestors of Farlight have to say about us?\"\n\n\"That you are a warrior race, created to defeat the rust, then die. The humans that made you intended to create fierce fighters, so they imbued into your race the traits to further those ends: strength, fearlessness, loyalty to each other, a sense of duty, and a hunger to accomplish your goals. But they didn't intend for your race to survive forever. They didn't bother with other traits that humans consider essential\u2014compassion, friendship, the ability to love. The dragons we have a record of are consistent with all that.\"\n\n\"That was centuries ago. No matter how we were once created, we have grown.\"\n\nNorta allowed herself a slight nod. \"You have, at least. But you are not like the others, are you?\" She held her chin as she looked at me. \"You've done more than grow.\"\n\n\"I was a slave to a human mind. I understand your kind.\"\n\n\"From what Harlan has said, it is more than understanding. You are more human than the rest of your kind.\"\n\nI showed her my very large teeth. \"I did not come here to eat insults.\"\n\nHarlan interrupted. \"Bayloo, it was a compliment.\"\n\nNorta didn't care about my implied threats anyway. She was curious ... and more. She smelled opportunity. \"You need more from me,\" she surmised, looking at me and then Harlan. \"What is it that you are missing?\"\n\n\"You recognized that \u2026 thing that the Pale Wrights possessed. Those glass cups, the dragon egg \u2026 you know what it is. How it works?\"\n\n\"It is a machine \u2026 a creation forge, as I told you. The ancestors used them to create things. There were many different forges. It is not surprising that the Shades had one. Some forges were used to create specialized beings\u2014living creatures that performed tasks that people needed: worms to fertilize soil, fish that bred ten thousand of their kind in a single spawning, birds that spoke. Other forges existed for different purposes. Some even created other machines.\"\n\n\"Your people had one of these forges as well,\" I surmised. \"It can be used as a weapon as well, I would think. Is that how Rima was almost destroyed?\"\n\n\"Farlight has \u2026 had many treasures. Yes, a forge was among them, one that could create fabulous things. But our forges stopped functioning when Rima became active in the sky. We did not damage Rima. We lacked that power. Your own creators did that, as they fought against your kind.\"\n\n\"Rima, too, was made in a forge, then?\"\n\n\"Indeed, but we didn't make Rima,\" Norta reminded me unnecessarily. \"Its power undoes all we strove for.\"\n\n\"But you understand the process of forge-creation. You possess more of the history of the Cataclysm than any other person on this world, or so it seems.\"\n\nNorta sighed, as if resigned, but I didn't believe she was conceding anything. She was still searching for my true purpose, and to understand if she could use my need to her advantage. Our creators were wise to not make dragons like humans. \"Rima was created in a forge, and lifted above the world to do its work.\"\n\nTo even say such a thing seemed incredible. I understood the lure of Sci-Ance if it could do such a thing. \"Rima blocks your Sci-Ance, and replaces it with different laws, a different order.\"\n\n\"That is essentially correct.\"\n\n\"We dragons were created in one of these forges as well?\"\n\nNorta nodded slowly. \"I wasn't there, but that is how things were done before the Cataclysm. Hundreds or thousands of dragons were created at the same time Rima was sent into the sky. As I understand it, the rust had been running rampant for decades, unstoppable, its roots in the ground deep. It took the balefire of many dragons to finally defeat it everywhere.\"\n\nThat worried me. We dragons were so few now. \"Where was this special forge that created dragons located?\"\n\nNorta shrugged. \"Your progenitors were understandably secretive. If the other ancients of their time knew how or where they worked, your creators would've been destroyed long before you came to exist. The utter destruction of Sci-Ance was not a popular event.\"\n\n\"Was it in Ni-Yota? Is that why the Wall of Fire existed? Is it the legacy of a protection of some kind for that land?\"\n\n\"I honestly don't know. As much as we Farlighters still know, we too only have fragments of history.\"\n\n\"How did the Archivists\u2014that is what I've come to call the humans that created us\u2014when we refused to meekly die, how did they fight against dragons without their Sci-Ance?\"\n\n\"They turned to the weapon that was available, of course. They created magic, they knew how to use it, even if that wasn't the original intent. Your war with your creators was a battle of magic. They did their best, but you know the result.\"\n\nI thought of the Grafts that Legao used to command the Latticework\u2014dull things, not properly of the Latticework. They were more like a hastily constructed repair\u2014like a slab of wood placed on a wagon axle at the last moment to keep it running. Human magic was rough. Brutal. The Ar-Shadow was merely a distorted reflection of the actual Latticework, created to allow their limited senses to manipulate magic. Human power lacked the elegance of dragon magic, but that made sense if it had been born out of necessity, during war. This was what the Archivists had created so that they might defeat the dragons they had created. \"Even with magic, how could something such as Rima be damaged?\"\n\n\"I don't know that. Your creators \u2026 the Archivists, as you call them, were a resourceful people. Maybe even more so than my own.\" I saw a glimmer of something sinister in Norta's eye. \"Why are you so curious about this bit of history? About forges and Sci-Ance?\"\n\nThere was no way I was going to tell her the truth, but I was afraid she might guess anyway. \"So much has been lost. We need to understand how we came to be if we are to avoid our past mistakes.\"\n\nIt wasn't enough of an answer. I could see Norta's mind racing behind her dark eyes. Finally, she laughed a triumphant laugh. \"You don't know how to destroy it. You were bluffing like my dear husband. You can't destroy the rust.\"\n\nI huffed. \"I am an ember dragon. I understand the hidden secrets of the Latticework.\"\n\nNorta wasn't impressed. \"Fire and magic wasn't enough against the rust. Only balefire finally destroyed it the first time. But that was before you turned on your creators and killed them. That was before Rima was shattered in the war that followed.\" Finally, she understood. \"Balefire is lost to you. And you are so few now, anyway. You cannot win. The Archivists are dead, as are their secrets. Your kind ensured that.\"\n\n\"My ancestors protected themselves, protected their right to live,\" I said defensively. \"And I do indeed know the secret of balefire.\" I hoped I wasn't bluffing.\n\n\"Then why are we talking\" Norta asked. \"What do you need me for?\"\n\nI had grown too weary to lie, and I think she already knew anyway. \"Because you are correct that balefire has not been summoned to this world since Rima was shattered. Because it is not enough to understand how balefire is created. I also need to be sure that I can summon it with enough power to destroy the rust once and for all. Our balefire must be even greater than that used by my ancestors. The rust adapts. There will not be another chance.\"\n\nNorta's gaze was hard and determined. \"The ancient Farlighters may indeed have underestimated their creation when they made the rust. Certainly, they didn't anticipate the lengths other humans would go to avoid the fate my ancestors intended for them. But your creators made the same mistake. Dragons became far more than they imagined, adapting, and yes, stealing power that your creators never meant for you to have. The dragons themselves became rulers, as happened in Ni-Yota. You destroyed the humans, then you took over their land.\" Norta stared at her husband. \"Humans are prone to making terrible mistakes.\"\n\nI let a low, rumbling roar echo through my throat. \"Dragons do not seek to destroy all life. We kill when we must. We do not lust for more than we need\u2014we are not like you and your rust. We shall not repeat the hubris of the humans and become slaves to our own power.\"\n\n\"There may yet come a time when you need humans, Bayloo. You may even need the Farlighters.\" Norta stretched her lips into something that was supposed to be a smile, but brought chills rather than warmth. \"I shall be waiting for that day.\"\n\nI was anxious to return to Ni-Yota.\n\nI spent the morning with my fellow dragons eating Rolman supplies and discussing the hollowings. It was difficult to describe the enemy to them, for I didn't know precisely what we would find when we returned to Ni-Yota. When I left, the rust was advancing, while the tigris still fought a brutal campaign in the east. A human wizard had taken command of Ni-Yota, perhaps with the intent of raising an army of fellow magi. But whatever my feelings toward Legao, she was powerful, and she had Rinxia and Kiata with her. I hoped that they had managed to hold the worst of the threat at bay. Perhaps they had even come up with a plan to worked. I was anxious for Arutel and Blaris to meet Rinxia as well. Together, their fire would have to cleanse the world. Three ash dragons assisted by two ember dragons to do a task that had once been accomplished by hundreds of my kind, and that had been before Rima had been damaged.\n\n\"How do you know that the balefire will come to us?\" Blaris asked me for the third time that morning.\n\nI gave her the same answer again. \"I know it. The Latticework is part of me, just as the balefire is part of you, even if you don't realize it. Rima has been damaged, but the power is still there. I know it can be done. Trust me in this.\"\n\n\"Should we not attempt to call balefire now, before we cross the Wall of Fire?\"\n\n\"The magic necessary is \u2026 difficult. I fear I will be able to do it only once and I need my sister as well. We do not have the time. But I know it can be done.\"\n\nThat was all a lie, which pained me to tell, but I couldn't share my true reasons for not wanting to bring forth the balefire. Not yet.\n\nAfter everyone had eaten and I'd silenced all the grumbling about the human I carried on my back, we took to the air\u2014all the remaining dragons. I tried to enjoy the moment, but could not. There was too much that could go wrong.\n\n\"You did not need to come,\" I said to Harlan. \"You can be with your people.\"\n\n\"I made my choice, Bayloo.\"\n\n\"You turned against them. Against your own mate. Back in the Shard \u2026 her eyes had no kindness for you.\" Then I added some additional words because Harlan had earned them. \"I am sorry for what has happened to you. Your bond of friendship has great meaning to me. You are my first and only friend.\"\n\nHe looked at me, pain and resignation in his features. \"Aye, dragon, we've been chosen for each other, it seems. I've been too long away from the rest of my people \u2026 I've seen too much, and I know what is in your hearts. My people's beliefs about dragons were wrong. Once I understood that, I knew that other things could be wrong as well. As for my wife \u2026 well, that's complicated. Women are complicated.\"\n\nI thought of Rinxia. \"Indeed, they are.\"\n\n\"But we are a part of something, we two friends. Your quest is now mine. Our bond will see us through this. I will not abandon you, just as I know you would do the same for me.\"\n\nSomething clogged in my throat for a moment. Some stray meat? I thought it best to stop talking.\n\nI flew soon after that. The great armada of dragons first went to Ulibon. The arrival of a swarm of dragons set off more than a minor panic in the Twisted Keep, but the tidings we brought about the defeat of the Rolman army quickly improved the mood. I tried to coax another set of sai out of Bethy Rann and her enchantress, but she was having none of it. I had brought a bit of aurathorn for Crema, severing what remained of her rune link. It didn't seem to make any difference to her damaged mind, though. The injury that had been done to Crema wasn't easily cured. Some of what she had once been was lost, apparently forever. I mourned for her, but at least she was alive. Crema would be safer in Ulibon than any dragon who flew with me to Ni-Yota.\n\nAfter taxing the Twisted Keep's food stores, we flew again, this time passing over the open seas until we finally reached the smoldering mountains of the Wall of Fire.\n\n\"Follow my route,\" I told them all as we neared and putrid odor began to permeate the air. \"Do not falter. Do not slow.\"\n\nI flew for the secret mountain that Vengeance had told me about months ago\u2014months that now seemed like an eternity. I wondered how the strange ghastray and his kind had fared against the hollowing leviathans. Somehow, I was certain the ghastrays would find a way to deal with any threat in their domain, just as they had done since the Cataclysm. If we could stop the rust in Ni-Yota, we could be rid of the hollowings everywhere. But first came the Wall of Fire.\n\nIt wasn't pleasant. Even though it was my third time flying this route, there was still that moment of panic, when I feared the disorientation of the fog. For a dragon, to lose our sense of direction and place was among the most disconcerting experiences. I worried for my fellow dragons. I willed them through, roaring encouragement and giving them a beacon that I had never had. With the sound to guide them, they knew they were not lost and they weren't alone. On the other side would be Ni-Yota, and Rinxia and Kiata. It would be a relief to be back, to see them again, and let them know that I had a plan to defeat the rust. I returned to Ni-Yota with hope.\n\nI passed through the smoke of the mountain, relieved as the air sweetened and the sky began to brighten. Then it stopped. It should've been shining daylight on the other side of the wall, but it wasn't. Something terrible had happened here.\n\nMy hearts thundered as I struggled to understand the strange sights around me, but it was already too late. A curtain of black came for me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Swirling darkness surged toward me.\n\nThe black sheet in the sky was large and dense enough to blot out the light behind it, casting a dark shadow over everything behind it. As my initial surprise passed, I recognized the threat: blood raptors. Thousands of them. The rust had replenished its forces. But how did the rust know I'd be here? All the possible answers were ominous.\n\nMy immediate problem was that the birds were going to tear Harlan to shreds in moments, and my fellow dragons were flying into a storm of harm they were totally unprepared to confront. I dove, heading nearly straight to the sea, intending to get below the black wave coming at me. As expected, the birds adjusted course. I turned swiftly, beating my wings. I moved quickly, but not at my best speed. I wanted to draw the raptors off before the next dragon came through. It didn't work.\n\nI roared a warning to Arutel as he struggled through the Wall of Fire, disoriented. The raptors had closed the distance to the smoking mountains, and my fellow dragon had even less time to react than I to a threat they had not faced before.\n\n\"Those birds serve the rust. Protect your eyes.\" I knew Harlan would do the same. He had his enchanted covering to protect him as well.\n\nArutel responded to my warning with fire\u2014the first instinct of an ash dragon. He roasted dozens of birds even as he flew directly into the feathery wave. Hundreds more blood raptors latched onto him, but my brother didn't panic. He executed a sharp turn, holding his pace, spraying more fire as tried to clear a path for our fellow dragons as they emerged from the inferno smoke. His courage attracted even more ravens to me. I called upon the Latticework, summoning wind and cold, even as I kept enough speed to elude the hundreds of blood raptors trailing me. I ascended higher into the sky, letting the birds draw closer, then I dove again, sweeping beneath the swarm.\n\nMy conjured mist of cold was ready. I pushed it at the great mass of birds that harried the sky around Arutel and my other kin. A satisfying sound distinctly similar to glass shattering followed, as raven feathers froze into brittle icicles, then snapped as the birds attempted to use their wings. As dragon fire erupted across the sky, the heat rapidly reversed the birds' temperature change, with deadly effect. Soon, a rain of avian parts tumbled into the sea. Still, hundreds of hollowing birds remained. The sheer numbers were such that I couldn't see clearly enough to be sure all my kin had made it through the Wall of Fire. Dragon roars shook the sky; Chaos reigned among us. For that I was responsible\u2014I had brought them here, and I was the ember dragon, meant to lead.\n\n\"To me!\" I roared.\n\nThey came, with the blood raptors following. Many of my kin had birds clinging to their bodies, while the raptors' razor beaks pecked at their dragon scales.\n\n\"Fly strong, I will cleanse you,\" I told them.\n\nOnce we had put sufficient distance between us and the larger bird horde, I sent another blast of freezing mist at my brethren. Unlike blood raptors, dragon blood flows hot, and we're made of sturdier stuff than any little bird. The cold wouldn't damage a dragon wing the way it froze raptor feathers.\n\nArutel and Blaris assisted my cleaning efforts with carefully-calibrated blasts of fire. Those efforts rid us of the vast majority of raptors, although a few tenacious stragglers had to be removed with claws.\n\nWe had overcome our first obstacle. When I finally slowed the pace of our flight, I knew that every dragon shared my fatigue. Even with the stop in Ulibon, it had been a long flight to the Wall of Fire. Another daunting journey lay ahead to Ni-Yota itself. I'd rested at the floating way station the last time I was here, but there was no chance of rest now, not with the blood raptors still in pursuit.\n\n\"We make for land at speed,\" I told my brethren.\n\nFor a large ash dragon, the flight to Ni-Yota was long and hard, but doable. For our smaller kin, I feared the distance was too great after the trauma they had just traversed. While the occasional atoll poking out of the sea could have provided a respite for some, I didn't want to stop with the blood raptors trailing us. If we left one of our number behind\u2014particularly a horned dragon\u2014they would be swarmed and killed. That wasn't an option.\n\nI summoned a mighty wind from behind us, bringing the gust down from above and directing it at our tails. The gales weren't enough to let us glide the whole distance to Ni-Yota, but they provided additional speed, as well as a respite from constant use of our wings. As the day wore on, several of the horned dragons neared exhaustion despite the helping wind, but Arutel, Blaris, and I alternated essentially carrying our kin through the air for brief intervals to give them a respite. Together, we flew to within sight of the coast of Ni-Yota without the loss of a single one of our number. The blood raptors had disappeared behind us. Hollowings didn't need sleep or sustenance like living creatures, but nor did they have unlimited stamina. The bodies of their captured hosts broke just like ours did. We had made it. But the sight of land offered no glad tidings; Ni-Yota burned.\n\nAs far as my dragon eyes could see, there was smoke. Villages and fields, castles and cities, everywhere some kind of fire either seemed to rage or had showed signs of being recently extinguished. A thick smog hung low across the landscape, like a roof catching the sooty refuse of the flames raging beneath it.\n\n\"Who did this?\" Blaris asked me. \"Not those vicious birds. They are not fire breathers, at least.\"\n\nI didn't know the source of the mayhem, but I had a decent guess. \"When I left, battles still raged in the eastern domain of Ni-Yota, the embers of a rebellion led by giant cat-like creature known as the tigris, along with some opportunistic human allies.\"\n\nBlaris was surprised. \"Purring felines did this? The ones that vomit hairballs?\"\n\n\"The tigris aren't cute. They are giant cat-like monsters that talk and deceive as well as any human,\" I said. \"Perhaps it was them, but it could be more, for the damage is so widespread. Clearly, things have not gone well for Ni-Yota since I have been gone.\"\n\n\"Where are the other dragons you spoke of?\"\n\nI wanted to know that too. Given the devastation in the far east, they must be occupied with even greater crises elsewhere, or they would be here. \"This land is vast\u2014a hundred times the size of Rolm. It is likely they fight against the rust in the far west, across the mountains that divide Ni-Yota, but I do not know. We will find them quickly enough.\"\n\nArutel snorted with impatience. \"We came here to destroy this rust, to exhale balefire like our ancestors. Shall we burn these giant cats\u2014the tigris\u2014instead?\"\n\n\"If only it would be so easy. I shall go closer.\"\n\n\"I will accompany you.\"\n\nI didn't relish having Arutel along for any task that didn't involve burning or killing, but I didn't have time for a battle for primacy now. \"Let Blaris stay with the horned dragons then, keeping high above the land. Seeing so many of us will scare the locals.\"\n\n\"I thought you said dragons ruled here, that we were revered.\"\n\n\"That was before we started fighting each other. Before we started acting like humans.\"\n\nI flew to Ni-Yota with Arutel in my wake. I could sense my companion's fascination with what he was seeing\u2014this vast land which seemed to go on forever, a place where dragons were never slaves. That had been me once. How quickly things change. Now, this was a place that sat on the precipice of doom, where dragons plotted for power just like humans had before the Cataclysm.\n\nMy brother and I landed in a fishing village. It hadn't burned\u2014barns and simple dwellings still stood. Small boats lined the rocky beach. It smelled of dead fish, but there was no living creature to be found. Harlan slid from my back to investigate the dwellings. He too found nothing.\n\n\"The humans have left,\" Arutel said unnecessarily.\n\n\"They took their livestock and supplies. From the look of this place, they left quickly, but not in a panic,\" Harlan said.\n\nFinding no answers in the empty village, we soon departed. I led us next to the nearest plume of smoke, which turned out to be the remains of a town consisting of perhaps half of a hundred buildings built around two rutted roads and a ruined palisade. I didn't like what I found there.\n\nThe north side of the town's wall had been badly burned, as had most of the structures inside the wall. It was the pattern of the fire that disturbed me: the tops of buildings had been charred and there were no other signs of fighting. Several of the largest wooden structures still had a slow smolder. If the tigris or their allies had attacked, I would've expected more obvious signs of fighting\u2014bodies, broken weapons, spent arrows. There was none here.\n\n\"Just more burning,\" Arutel said, sniffing the air. \"Although there is meat nearby.\"\n\nI saw more than my brother in the wreckage. \"A dragon did this. The buildings have all been scorched from above.\"\n\nArutel wasn't concerned. \"Perhaps they deserved their fate then.\"\n\nMy brother didn't know Ni-Yota, but I did. The only fire breather that survived in Ni-Yota was Rinxia. Why would she burn an insignificant town in the east? Harlan probably had his guesses, but he kept his silence, reluctant to discuss anything while Arutel was near. I didn't press him.\n\nAs I contemplated my dark thoughts on what had happened here, Arutel spoke more practically. \"We have been flying non-stop. Our brothers and sisters need rest. There is food here as well. Not fresh, perhaps, but I hunger.\"\n\nI gazed westward, where the Pillar Mountains stood high in the distance, separating the great domains of Ni-Yota. Despite the ache in my wings and the emptiness in my stomach, I wanted to fly now, but Arutel had the right of this. \"Gather our brethren. Let them eat and sleep. It is another long flight tomorrow, even if we have the wind to aid us.\"\n\nIt's never difficult to get dragons to eat. The meat that Arutel located was partially-roasted cattle and chickens that had been dead or dying for too many days to tempt me. It didn't dissuade my kin, who were still accustomed to human scraps far worse than this. Life hadn't always been easy since I'd become me, but I had gotten to taste some of the finer things in life. Fortunately for me, some of the livestock of the town had fled when the human inhabitants ran away, but they still stuck close to the area where they had been raised. It just took a bit more effort to hunt them. Of course, it turned out to be chickens on the prowl. I was cursed. Still, I forced two birds down my throat, feathers and all, then I managed to sleep, for I'd had none the previous night. With the dawn, I awoke with my brethren to fly.\n\nMostly, we kept above the clouds, traversing the great landscape of Ni-Yota. I called upon the wind at several instances to speed our journey. The speed at which we traveled made conversation uncomfortable, though not impossible. Arutel and Blaris worried about balefire.\n\n\"How will we breathe that which we have never commanded before?\" They wanted to know. \"We know fire.\"\n\n\"It is within us when we work together; the breath of ash dragons and the magic of ember dragons.\" I told them with more confidence than I felt. \"We are linked by the Latticework. Its energy makes us more, together. We were born to destroy the rust, and we shall.\"\n\nThey were brave words. I hope they gave the other dragons some comfort as we flew over burnt keeps and blackened fields. Not all the land had been scorched, certainly\u2014Ni-Yota was far too vast a place for that. But the damage was extensive, and there was no sign of marching armies. By the end of a day of flying, I had no doubt a dragon had done this. The Pillar Mountains loomed ahead.\n\nMy brother and sisters slept in an open field, each pressed up against the other, although the night was warm. I stayed apart. Even among my own kind, I was different, and I carried a heavier burden. Harlan understood some of that.\n\n\"Your mind is on Rinxia.\"\n\nRima had crept into the sky, her strange light shining upon us as we spoke, adding the feeling of fate in the night.\n\nI didn't bother to deny Harlan's guess. \"She is the only fire breather in Ni-Yota.\"\n\nThere were plenty of reassurances or platitudes that Harlan could have offered me in the night. He chose none. He merely looked at me through the eerie light. There was nothing more to be said. It would be worthwhile to rest, not to worry.\n\nThe dying echo of a distant roar woke me before dawn. None of my brethren stirred. Even Harlan still slept, curled in a ball nearby, still wearing his enchanted cloak from Ulibon in his sleep. I struggled to remember the sound I'd heard when half-awake, but its memory was faint and unfamiliar. I listened carefully for any other sounds. I expected to hear more, perhaps the beating of wings, but I did not. There was nothing. Not even the chirping of birds that would usually accompany the approach of morning. I pulled myself to my feet. That brought Harlan out his slumber. He crawled over to me.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"A dragon awaits us in the mountains. A dragon I have never met before.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "I could wait no longer.\n\nI had waited for dawn to come. I had waited for my brothers and sisters to bestir themselves. I had waited as my fellow dragons plied the sky at their languid pace. I wanted to be at the mountains. What I had heard had been no dream. A dragon was there\u2014or had been there.\n\nAs the great peaks neared, I pushed further ahead of the rest of my kin. Even Blaris and Arutel couldn't match my speed. I needed to be at the mountains.\n\n\"Have a care,\" Harlan cautioned.\n\nI knew he was correct, but I didn't slow. It was a relief to move through the air, to push myself for speed. It kept the anxious fear that had been building up inside me at bay, at least temporarily. From high above, I spotted the keep at Hundra Pass. At least it hadn't been burned. Its banners still flew, pushed eastward by the winds whipping through the canyon it guarded. Yet, I saw no life there, no soldiers on its walls; no heat or smoke rose from its bakeries or hearths. I could think of no reason why a fortress of such strategic value would be abandoned. The mountains came closer, until finally I passed over the foothills. I circled the mouth of the Hundra Pass from high above. In that moment, the horror revealed itself: The rust had come.\n\nThe western wall of the keep was infested, as were the mountains of the pass itself. I understood why the occupant had fled. Swords and arrows were useless against the rust. Only balefire could turn it back. That was why I had come, bringing Arutel and Blaris. Soon it would be time for us to discover if the great plague could be destroyed. Except the rust wasn't the worst of it.\n\nEven as my eyes fixated on the spreading contamination, a dragon rose from hiding in one of the valleys to the northwest. The morning sun reflected off of its scales, the glint nearly blinding. The form was familiar yet foreign, the movement of its wings strangely halting, but it came with power and speed. I turned about, cautious at first, until I recognized the silvery scales and elegant mane. My hearts screamed for my wings to move faster, and they did. It was Rinxia. Finally, she was here. Alive. She was alive. The rest I would fix.\n\n\"Bayloo \u2026\" Part of me heard the cold dread in Harlan's voice, but I didn't want to acknowledge it.\n\nI could see the elegant curves of Rinxia form as she cut through the air. My eyes locked on hers. I glowed with excitement. In return, she stared back from an empty void.\n\nI recognized what I faced, but I couldn't bring myself to turn, to stop. I couldn't accept it. This was one horror too many, one loss that I couldn't bear.\n\nHarlan told me what I already knew. \"She's a hollowing.\"\n\nI roared with a mad rage. My body trembled with anguish. A single thought dominated my mind: save her. There had to be a way to save her. That was the reason I kept flying toward her. The hollowing-Rinxia was almost as fast as the living one. She came at me, bathing me in her flames. My face, my neck, and Harlan too.\n\nHe screamed in pain, writhing on my back as he desperately hid beneath his enchanted cloak of magic. That may have saved his life, but it didn't protect my vision. The flames had seared one of my eyes, the soft fluid inside bubbled and burned. I was half-blind. Rinxia would be on me again in a moment. I had no idea where she was, but I knew what she was: a hollowing. She would sink her claws into me, her teeth. I had come so close to ending this, but the rust must've known that. Somehow, it knew whatever Rinxia had known.\n\nI sensed her a moment before she struck. She came from my blind side, rising from below, her jaws already open. There was no roar, no sound, no pity. I prepared to absorb the blow as best I could. I was numb to the peril. Part of me wanted Rinxia to come, to kill me. There was nothing to do. I accepted death, until magic intervened. But not my magic.\n\nLightning flashed\u2014the bolt appeared so close to me that the spikes on my mane curled in the heat. Rinxia was hit, but she didn't cry out. Only the cracking of her scales confirmed that the summoned strike had struck its target. She still reached for me\u2014a foreclaw stretched out in malice even as Rinxia's strength failed her. She fell toward the ground as I looked away, searching the sky for my savior with my one functioning eye.\n\nKiata flew toward us out of the west. As painful as it was to confront Rinxia, my relief at seeing my sister whole in her flesh took half the weight of a mountain off my wings. She had grown, not just in size, but in strength. That bolt had both power and precision. My sister had come into her legacy as an ember dragon\u2014just as our mother had hoped and planned. I hoped she understood control as well.\n\n\"Don't kill her!\" I roared to Kiata. \"We can save her.\"\n\nKiata flew close. The flashes of her eyes told a saga of emotion in moments. There was too much even for a fellow dragon to absorb, but one message came through clear. Just so there was no mistake, Kiata spoke it as well. \"She is gone. She is hollow.\"\n\nThere wasn't time for any more discussion. Rinxia was climbing back into the sky toward us. The black hole in her neck scale would've been agony for a regular dragon, but a hollowing felt no pain. What was left of Rinxia would fight until her body failed her.\n\nShe did not return alone. A flood of blood raptors rose up from mountain valleys and down from high peaks. They swarmed up from the Hundra Pass and even from hidden crags in the rocky mountainside. They flew at Kiata and I, but also at the wave of dragons who had followed me here from the east. I had no doubt that the intellect of the rust knew why I had returned. It mustered all of its forces to stop us. I roared a warning to my brethren, but trusted that Blaris and Arutel would be ready with their fire. I had to deal with Rinxia.\n\nShe came again, flying at me like an arrow with all that remained of her speed. There was no subtlety in the attack\u2014not Rinxia's style at all. This was the rust, its urgency driving her shell.\n\nThe rust knows I am key, because Rinxia knew.\n\nI needed to immobilize her; wound her, stop her, but not kill her. No hollowing had ever been saved or healed, but did that mean it was impossible?\n\nI had enough time to call upon the sky's fury. So did Kiata. \"Don't, sister. Please.\"\n\nKiata growled her displeasure. \"Your hearts rule your head like a human.\"\n\nI had a lot of human in me. That would help me beat the rust, in the end. But it also meant I needed to find a way to save Rinxia, even if that wasn't the Way for other dragons. I called the cold, rather than the flashing fire. Streams of hail formed, coming toward us from the north and east. I flew upward, knowing Rinxia would follow. I beat my wings, creating distance to give my conjuring time to increase in power. Despite her injuries, Rinxia somehow quickened in the air. I turned and dove, but she matched my maneuvers, closing.\n\n\"Rinxia, stop this.\"\n\nDead eyes fixed on me without reaction.\n\nThe hailstorm I called from the Latticework struck her, twin funnels of hard ice battering Rinxia's scales and wings. She struggled, beating her wings, twisting at the unexpected obstacle. I called upon more power. I need to slow her, to exhaust her. The icy particles directed at Rinxia would have frozen and cracked a human's skin. It barely slowed Rinxia. I called more wind, urging a vortex into existence. I twisted into another sharp turn, diving and climbing desperately through the sky to get more time. The shell of Rinxia knew my tactic. It knew me, and sensed my maneuvers.\n\nI put more of my will into my summoning, creating a concentrated whirlwind to yank at every creature in the sky. The blood raptors were caught first, their wings too weak to keep them away once caught in the grip of the vortex. I directed the force of my creation at Rinxia, willing it to pull her into its embrace. She slowed, her strength finally dwindling. I forced even more of my energy into the summoning, directing the glowing Chords of the Latticework like a master musician plucking strings. Rinxia still came toward me, but slower. There was a chance.\n\n\"Rinxia, quit now. Enough. I shall bring you back.\"\n\nBlack eyes from the Abyss stared at me. Rinxia's head tilted, in a gesture that almost reminded me of her. Meanwhile, her wings continued to move. I was so close to succeeding. Or that was the illusion the creature let me believe.\n\n\"It's not her!\" Harlan shouted at me.\n\nWith a burst of strength I did not suspect she still possessed, Rinxia broke from the vortex's grasp. In that singular, terrifying moment, I realized my magic summoning had never really held her. It had all been a ruse. To get closer. To tire me. I beat my wings, but Rinxia had bided her time until just the right moment, catching me in a turn. She had also been hoarding her strength. Her wings moved unnaturally fast, all of her energy directed at catching me. She did, first with a foreclaw, then with her tail. Her grip was cold, so unlike Rinxia. Because this wasn't Rinxia.\n\nThe hollowing creature went for my throat with desperate jaws. I got a foreclaw in front of her at the last moment. Her claws grappled onto me mid-flight. We tumbled as she scratched and snapped at me. Her tail struck my body, then hit the foreclaw I used to protect my throat, batting it away. Rinxia had a clear opening at my neck. She took it.\n\nThe sky screamed. The world flashed. A searing heat passed through me, scorching me.\n\nRinxia's claws dropped away, and so did the rest of her. Limp, she fell toward the sharp mountain rocks below.\n\nI went for her, diving with all my speed. Harlan grasped onto me desperately, the saddle straps straining, but in that moment I didn't care. Rinxia had a smoking hole in her back, but I could still save her, if I was fast enough. I beat my wings, my trajectory nearly straight down. Rinxia's inert form spun as it fell. With strength and angle, I gained. The rocks closed faster. Pulling out of this dive with her weight was going to be ugly. I didn't care. My claws reached for Rinxia. I almost had her; then, I didn't.\n\nKiata slammed herself into me, knocking Rinxia from my grasp. Another claw grabbed at me, yanking, even as wind surged from beneath me. The jagged rocks faded away from me, but not from Rinxia.\n\nShe smashed into a peak. She was gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "\"You killed her.\"\n\nPain I couldn't control bubbled to the surface, transforming my words to accusation. This was one loss too many. It couldn't be real. It couldn't be over.\n\nMy sister's hard eyes softened ever so slightly. \"I did not kill Rinxia. The rust killed her, three days ago. I gave her peace.\"\n\nWe perched on the ledge of a peak, Rinxia's remains scattered below us. A great host of blood raptors swirled around my brethren in the distance, but the incoming birds had not yet reached us. I couldn't look away from the body, even though the sight churned the void of hurt inside me.\n\n\"I could've saved her,\" I growled with a mix of anger and agony.\n\nKiata spoke with neither compassion nor cruelty, as a normal dragon would. \"Not unless you have become the master of the Abyss while you were away, nothing could have saved her. That thing was a shell that looked like Rinxia, but it was part of the rust.\"\n\nMy sister's truth was still too painful to endure. I didn't want to face this. The sorrow inside me grew, so I reached for my anger to quell it. I would have revenge for this. Inside, my agony fueled a burning desire to kill that was worthy of the late King Dayne himself. Kiata knew me well enough to see that emotion in me. I knew she didn't approve. I was different than other dragons.\n\n\"Rinxia is great loss for us all,\" Kiata said. \"I know that you cared for her. She knew it as well.\"\n\nI merely growled. I didn't need to be told what I already knew.\n\n\"There is little time for mourning now, my brother. The hollowings and the rust went berserk, five days ago. The pestilence began to spread differently, directing itself in narrow pincers jutting deep into Ni-Yota, while its hollowing servants marshalled. Legao and her acolytes called her human magic to tear the ground asunder, to bring forth rain and water from the bay, using all of their magic to try to protect Trishan and the millions of souls huddled inside. But time is short. She may have failed already. Did you find what you sought?\"\n\nI forced my mind to refocus. Rinxia had died for this; to fail would be to fail her as well. \"I can destroy the rust.\"\n\n\"Let us do it, then.\" Kiata replied, turning her head toward the hideous spread through the mountains. \"This is what Rinxia would want from us. Let us act while there are still people and lands to save. But how?\"\n\n\"As our ancestors did: balefire.\"\n\nKiata deflated with disappointment. \"It is a legend of the past. No dragon can produce balefire.\"\n\n\"No dragon can do it alone. That is what our creators intended. We ember dragons are the bridge to make it. We can shift the power of the Latticework to our brethren, restoring the power of balefire to them.\"\n\nKiata's eyes told me she doubted me. Maybe she doubted my sanity. Perhaps she thought the pain of losing Rinxia addled my mind. Perhaps she was partially correct. \"Brother, even I don't know how this might be done, and I feel all of the Latticework.\"\n\n\"You cannot feel the Gap,\" I reminded her. \"That damaged place, the place of the eternal void. The Gap is where the power of balefire is to be found.\"\n\n\"There is nothing in the Gap,\" Kiata insisted, speaking as a dragon who relied on instinct for magic. \"In that place, the Latticework is gone, destroyed.\"\n\n\"The destruction of Rima damaged the Latticework, robbing us of part of both its function and its power. That was when balefire was lost. But it can come back. I will make it come back.\"\n\n\"How?\" Kiata asked. \"There is nothing to manipulate in that place. The Chords are gone or useless. It would be like a human wielding a sword with no pommel.\"\n\n\"But what you cannot see\u2014what no other ember dragon could ever see\u2014is that there is a way to bridge across the Gap. To go through it, to access the Latticework and the power of balefire once again. Human magic is the key. Their Grafts are not part of the Latticework. Humans can create new connections, while we dragons must rely on those Chords that flow from the original Latticework as it was created. The Grafts created by the humans can cross the breach.\"\n\n\"Human magic?\" Kiata said with contempt. \"It is a brutal thing that eventually drives them mad. It is nothing like our power.\"\n\n\"Human and dragon magic are two sides of the Latticework. We sense the Chords as the Latticework's creators originally intended. But later, to fight us, the Archivists also created another mechanism of control for the Latticework\u2014the Graft as I call them. These are the human magic.\"\n\n\"So, humans must help us?\"\n\n\"Humans can cross the Gap, but no human can command the dragon Chords that are also necessary for balefire. They are not linked to our fellow dragons as we are. Certainly, I would never trust Legao enough to ask. But I too can use the human Grafts. I finally understand that is why mother sent me into slavery. It was deliberate.\" I still had trouble saying it. Kiata didn't understand my pain. She knew the Way of dragons, like our mother. I carried the burden of being different, and I carried the burden of losing Rinxia. \"To make me what I am, our mother did this. Only a mind like a human mind, an emotional mind of love and hate and passion, can access the Grafts as they do. The only way to make a dragon feel human emotion was through prolonged mingling with a human mind\u2014slavery. But now I can use both instruments of magic. That is how I will call the magic that will grant balefire to our fellow dragons. But I will need your help as well.\"\n\n\"Somehow the rust knows what you can do,\" Kiata concluded. \"That is the reason it has done what it has done. More will be coming. We know its cunning. If balefire can be summoned, let us do it now. The blood raptors have descended upon the few ash dragons that accompanied you. I will handle the birds. Do what you must.\"\n\n\"I cannot\u2014not yet.\" I felt Kiata's disappointment flash at me. \"I told you that Rima\u2014the source of magic\u2014was damaged. Magic itself was damaged. There isn't enough magic\u2014enough power within the Latticework\u2014to produce balefire as we need it. The last time we had hundreds of dragons, now we have only two firebreathers. We cannot use balefire the way our ancestors once did. But there may be another way. There is another creation forge in this land that still functions.\"\n\n\"A what?\" Kiata was impatient. \"Bayloo, much of what you say makes no sense.\"\n\n\"It is a machine of unimaginable power. I don't have the time to explain now. You merely need to trust me. There is one last thing that must be done, Kiata. I must do it. Our creators left one last legacy behind. That which they used to attempt to destroy us may help save us. It is you who must guide our remaining brothers. You must transfer the magic of balefire to them, as is your destiny as an ember dragon.\"\n\n\"What will you do?\"\n\n\"I shall give you the power to do it. You must channel that magic to them. We are all connected\"\n\nI spread my wings.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"I fly to the place where we dragons were created. The place where the last forge on this world exists\u2014the one that created us, and there our creators used it to try to destroy us. A place hidden from the eyes of the ancient world of humans, and all the beings of this new world as well.\"\n\n\"Tell me where are you doing,\" Kiata demanded.\n\n\"I fly to the Forest of Fallen Night.\"\n\n\"How do you know it will be there?\" Harlan asked as I flew, drawing upon a magical tailwind for more speed. \"A working creation forge?\"\n\n\"Your wife all but revealed it, although she could not know the value of her lore to me or she wouldn't have said it.\"\n\nHarlan was briefly quiet as he thought. \"She merely told you that your creators had to hide their work.\"\n\nI spotted a formation of black coming from the east. The rust knew what I sought. I turned, headed southwest, accelerating even further. No bird would catch me. The forest was well-protected, against birds and dragons and whatever else the rust had to send against me. I merely need to reach it without getting killed trying to get inside.\n\n\"Oracle told us the Archivists had a creation forge. It makes sense that dragons rose to dominance in the land of our creation. The stories of the Forest of Fallen Night tell of an oasis, or some call it a lake, where a being could drink and become immortal. Supposedly, this elixir turned men into the tigris, who became its guardians. But it turns out the tigris are real. They were creations of the humans who once lived there, as are dragons. All these stories lead back to the Forest of Fallen Night.\"\n\n\"Those are mostly stories,\" Harlan protested. \"I could tell you better ones.\"\n\n\"The rust never made it to the Forest of Fallen Night. Consider that astounding thing. Nor could any dragon venture there. Only a few even desire to try to reach that place, which may be a function of the immense power that protects that place. You don't want to go there, or remember what you saw if you attempt the journey. Think of the power necessary to accomplish all that.\"\n\n\"Why do you believe this forge is still there? And that you can somehow use it after all this time?\"\n\n\"I have no idea how to operate the machines of the ancients. Nor were they meant for dragons. But we know that the Archivists tried to destroy all the dragons. They tried to undo their creation. In desperation, they even tried to undo the magic world they'd forged by shattering Rima. But how? Rima's power blocks all Sci-Ance, all of the old dark light, even theirs. Except, I do not believe Rima was their sole source of power. They kept something for themselves. The so-called last ember within the void\u2014a last source of power unaffected by Rima. Enough to bring balefire back into the world in a form even greater than that once wielded by my ancestors.\"\n\n\"May all your guesses be true,\" Harlan wished.\n\nI flew until darkness fell and then flew more, aided by the winds of magic. Rima appeared and disappeared several times throughout my journey, as if trying to speak to me. If it did, I had no idea what the mysterious machine-moon wanted. Did it wish my quest good or ill?\n\nI wanted to fly through without stopping, but that would've been foolish. The Forest of Fallen Night had protected its secret from all comers for centuries. Even though I had some idea of what protected it, I was equally certain that I didn't know everything. I finally set down on a hilltop during the late night to rest. I think Harlan slept as well, but I wasn't certain. I wasn't awake long enough to find out. The next day I flew again, resting only a portion of the night. Until, finally, I saw the forest once again.\n\nThe world had changed since I'd followed Elasu to the edge of this place, but the island forest had not. The rust had advanced to the far shores, but it had not crossed the black river water that flowed around the Forest of Fallen Night\u2014it could not. The trees of the island were as dense, impenetrable, and forbidding as ever. The canopy was dark despite the sun's light battering it from above. The leaves shifted\u2014perhaps from wind\u2014but the movements were unlike any other trees I'd seen. The massive boles linked their branches and pushed at each other like an unruly mob. Sharp edges glistened on the leaves. I had no doubt those edges would be laced with poison.\n\n\"It makes the Pits of Gargen seem welcoming,\" Harlan remarked.\n\nHe wasn't wrong. Only this time I better understood the place upon which I gazed. Through the Latticework, I recognized the work of master craftsmen of magic. The master craftsmen. The creators of Rima, the creators of dragons. The people who had somehow created the Latticework and magic itself. They built this place as a sanctuary, for themselves and their secrets. This was where my kind had been created, but the creators did not want their children to visit. The vegetation had been made unwelcoming to us\u2014poisonous. They set the tigris to guard it. Yet Elasu had entered, because that suited the tigris, I suspected. The malevolent cats might still be within.\n\nI examined the sentinel trees through the Latticework. There was no question that the massive boles had been set in this place to keep away prying eyes and undesirable visitors\u2014these were creations of magic, like dragons. Chords of the Latticework wove through the forest\u2014a magical shield against light, and perhaps other things as well. Nowhere else on Inkra was there a weaving like that which protected the island. I pushed at the sentinels, probing the strength of the magical defense. The shield tightened as it sensed me. Dragons came here at their peril\u2014unless invited by the tigris.\n\nUsing dragon Chords would avail me nothing here. This sanctuary had withstood the great war between men and dragons. But I was unlike any ember dragon that had come before. I looked inside myself, releasing that part of my mind that had been linked to humans. Indeed, in a way, my mind was human\u2014I was filled with conflict, guilt, and heavy with sorrow. That part of me could see the magic of humans. I plucked at the Grafts of humanity roughly made onto the Ar-Shadow, which I now knew to be a reflection of the Latticework. I spoke to the living barrier as a human magi would, as those long-dead humans who had created this place must've once done. I asked the sentinel trees to part as humans would have, and they did, the branches moving as if a hundred arms unclasped. I flew inside the opening, descending into a clearing completely concealed until that moment. The passage downward was surprisingly long\u2014the trees were as tall as a small mountain.\n\nWithin the hidden valley of the forest there was a gloom, but not darkness. Apparently, the canopy did also allow some filtered light through. The air smelled and felt no different than that beyond the tree shield, yet I found myself sucking in a deep breath as soon as I passed the forest perimeter, as if fatigued.\n\nA small village, remarkably similar in design to the buildings within the Shard, stood on the ground below, silent and seemingly frozen in time. The fired clay roof tiles looked as though they had been recently cleaned, the lacquered exterior walls of the buildings shone as if they had been newly raised. Manicured gardens grew in the courtyards around ponds of clear water. Only the inhabitants were missing\u2014I saw neither humans nor tigris as I cautiously descended. Beside the pristine village was a great lake, its shores perfectly circular, as if someone had used a giant cup to trace its boundaries. The water within was so clear it might as well have been polished glass, but when I peered into the depths, I could see no bottom, just an eternity of water. In the center of the lake, like a glittering pupil in the perfect watery eye, was a dome-shaped hole, its surface made of some kind of enamel that glowed softly with azure light.\n\nI put us onto the ground beside the village, on the shore of the lake of strange water. It was a relief to land, even though the distance hadn't been great. I sucked more huge breaths. What was wrong with me?\n\n\"This is the home of the humans who created dragons?\" Harlan asked in wonder as he looked around, staring from lake to village to spire-like trees that surrounded it all.\n\n\"Those buildings seem fit for humans,\" I said, forcing my fatigue aside. \"Indeed, they are not so different than homes of humans of Ni-Yota and elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they expected to be here a long time,\" Harlan suggested. \"A long journey is made easier with something familiar close by. Although those structures do not look hundreds of years old.\"\n\n\"The creators could do many things. Or perhaps some of the tigris are still here, maintaining the buildings of their creators.\" I sniffed the air. \"Although I can neither hear nor smell them.\"\n\n\"And what about that lake?\" Harlan asked as he slid off my back to stand at the shore. \"I've never seen water so clear.\"\n\nI focused my mind, returning my perception to the Latticework and its near-infinite connections. I expected this place to explode with Chords of Making. If the Latticework had been created here, surely it must have a special place in the fabric of the unseen world. But the opposite was true. Within the boundary of the forest canopy, the Latticework stopped. No Chords, no Grafts, not even the mundane connections between physical objects, existed here. I suddenly became aware that my own connection to my fellow dragons had been severed. I realized why I was finding it hard to breathe inside the canopy. Magic didn't function inside the forest as it did elsewhere, and dragons were creatures of magic, at least in part.\n\n\"Bayloo, what is wrong?\" Harlan asked. \"You look as if you are about to topple over.\"\n\nI hadn't realized I was swaying. I continued to suck in air, but that wasn't the problem. My body needed something that it was no longer getting.\n\n\"There is no magic in this place,\" I managed to say. \"No Chords connect me with anything. This place is like the world your wife wanted to create.\"\n\nI was a fish out of water, except the water was my connection to the magic of the Latticework. It didn't matter how much air I got.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Harlan replied, with rising concern. \"Isn't that why we came? Because there was magic in this place to aid us?\"\n\nI didn't answer. It wasn't worth using the last of my strength to explain. It wasn't just that I couldn't survive in this place\u2014I'd come here for a magic source sufficient to summon balefire. But the forest was an island in more ways than one. It was cut off from the rest of the Latticework, and I'd lost the connections to my fellow dragons. Without Chords linking me to my brethren, there could be no balefire.\n\n\"Bayloo, the lake!\" Harlan shouted. \"The lake isn't water.\"\n\nDid he really think I cared?\n\n\"A regular hot forge of a smith would have its fuel nearby, to keep the fire going. If the parallel holds for these so-called creation forges, the makers would've kept whatever it was that ran them near as well. That dome in the center of the lake is the forge. The lake is the fuel\u2014the energy for the forge. Bayloo, I think we are next to the source of magic you seek.\"\n\nIf I'd been able to breathe better, I would've been more excited about the revelation. I forced myself to focus on the strange lake. It was just as devoid of Chord connections as everyplace else within the forest. At least connections leading outward. I probed deeper into the water-that-wasn't-water. Finally, I understood. The liquid was a Chord. All of it. Whatever this substance was, it was the material of the Latticework itself. The lake was the storehouse of magic that I sought. This was the material that had created dragons and later created the Ar-Shadow and the Grafts of human magic. I couldn't focus enough to use it. I could barely keep my eye open.\n\nI did the only thing I could; I fell into the lake of magic.\n\nThere was no splash. It was like falling into mud. Except this mud was magical energy. Almost instantly, my faculties returned. Power like I'd never experienced before surged through me. It was sweeter than honey, a nectar that called to me. I indulged too much, and pain shot through the whole of my body. I grabbed the shore with a foreleg, pulling myself out of the reservoir.\n\n\"With this, I can bring forth balefire. A balefire like none the world has ever seen. With this I can destroy the rust. Or anything else. It is the ultimate power of making or unmaking.\"\n\nAt least my delirious mind thought that I could do it.\n\nThe magic in the reservoir coursed through me. It was elation like no other. If I combined the best of my nights with Rinxia and the giddy buzz of guzzling a barrel of fine shaojiu, raw magic felt a bit better than that. The fog that had clung to my mind disappeared. I sensed the connection between the Chords with utter clarity for the first time. At the edge of my consciousness, there was even some understanding of the larger design that had gone into creating the Latticework. I luxuriated in the power, until the pain came again like a claw inside my body, the sharp ends grasping at me. I clamped my jaws together.\n\nWe were not meant for such power.\n\nI realized that I could not continue to tap the reservoir. It had not been intended for dragons or any single creature. This was the raw power of a creation forge. I need to act before it tore me apart.\n\nWith nearly unlimited energy surging through me, I commanded a new series of Chords to form. From me, these new veins of energy grew, expanding upwards, past the canopy of trees that surrounded this forest, back into the world where the Latticework dominated. Once there, I sought Kiata. My sister was the lodestone. Her links to me stronger than any other dragon. It was to her I channeled the reservoir of magical energy. Carefully.\n\nBlaris and Arutel were near as well. I connected all of us, pulling together the elements necessary for balefire. From each part of the world I drew part of what would make this possible. I breached the Gap with the Grafts of the humans, temporarily repairing the Latticework links to allow for balefire to be summoned. Through these repaired channels came a power that had no place in the natural world. It was the force of unmaking. That was the true nature of balefire\u2014it was chaos itself. The primal substance from which all else sprang. For these precious moments, it was mine to direct. I gave it to Kiata, and through her, to my kin.\n\n\"Brothers and Sisters, it goes to you now. Call forth your fire and cleanse the world.\"\n\nI felt my fellow dragons as they flew, Blaris and Arutel at the lead, Kiata a short distance behind, directing the power I sent to her. My brethren had already crossed the Pillar Mountains. They awaited on the peaks, watching as the rust spread below.\n\nArutel unleashed his breath first, a silver and black blast that resembled flame on the outside, but within it was the power of pure chaos. The balefire struck the rust, subjecting it the supreme power of unmaking. Against this, there would be adaptation, no clever strategy of survival. The rust unformed, breaking into the pieces that had once made it what it was. Once begun, the inferno of unmaking spread, the complex structure of the rust providing kindling to the spreading flame. It was a chaos fire. For so long as Kiata fed the balefire energy, it would continue to grow. I sensed the rust reacting. It had no fear, but it had will. It wanted to survive. It broke itself into pieces. It pulled power from the ground to maintain its structure. It tried to hide. I would allow none of that to succeed.\n\nI channeled power to Kiata and she kept feeding it to my kin. Blaris joined the attack, adding to the pockets of dazzling destruction spreading across the land. My brethren flew quickly, igniting new infernos of balefire across Ni-Yota. Kiata urged them westward. The effect spread rapidly, cleansing the land wherever it touched. It was an inferno of chaos and the rust was the fuel\n\nFor much of the day and into the night, Kiata and our brothers flew, spreading the blaze. It spread more rapidly than any fire, unmaking the rust. I lost myself in the process. I was a conduit of power, but a necessary consequence was that I was constantly flooded with magical energy. So long as I didn't absorb too much at any one time, the pain remained manageable. As my brother and sisters flew across Ni-Yota and into Illium, I lost all sense of time, and eventually I lost all sense of myself.\n\nAt some point, reality became a dream, and the dream was rather pleasant. There was a period when I had no desire to leave the strange world of the Latticework. That was followed by not even knowing that there was any place other than an eternal void of power, where I could sense everything but I was nothing \u2026\n\nIf this was death, I would take it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Reality returned suddenly and unpleasantly.\n\nIt began with pain, because what better way to signify life? The sensation of fire, of muscles torn and insides shredded, assaulted me at one, reminding me that I did possess a physical body and it would retaliate if mistreated. This particular punishment was singularly brutal. I whirled and bucked, and I might even have roared out in pain. That was just the start.\n\nThere was another level to the pain. A deeper level, provided by the emotional part of my being. It was that part of me that had helped me turn aside the rust, but it also was traitorous. Memories stalked me, thoughts of my mother. I re-lived her death, this time with a better understanding of the things she had done. She was a follower of the Way. To her, giving her offspring to slavery, sacrificing an egg to the Pale Wrights, enduring exile and finally a painful death, would've all been on her path. To me, many of those same actions hurt. I had been part of duty to her. Yet, the ache of my mother's passing was distant compared with the stabbing wound of losing Rinxia. She was as close as I had ever come to another dragon. I had hoped for so much more from her. The future I fought to create had been for her as much as anyone else. She would never share it. Worse, she died not understanding the depth of what I felt.\n\nI opened my eyes, filled with pain.\n\nKiata was there, as was Harlan, Arutel, Blaris, and Saba. More dragons flew overhead or hovered behind the rest. I lay on a grassy field. The sky was clear, the sun no longer new in the sky. In the distance were trees.\n\nTrees. Normal trees.\n\nAnd I lay on grass.\n\nI drew a long breath into my nostrils. On it was the scent of blooms and flowers and my companions.\n\n\"You all smell horrible,\" I told them.\n\nHarlan graced me with a warm smile even though he did indeed smell worse than usual. \"You did it.\"\n\nHis words didn't quite register.\n\n\"The rust has been eradicated,\" Kiata told me. \"The balefire worked.\"\n\n\"More than worked!\" Arutel proclaimed. \"Never before has there been a fire such as that\u2014more golden than the sun and dark as the night, blinding, but without heat. It traveled like light itself, not even burning. It was something else.\"\n\n\"Cleansing,\" Kiata offered. \"The land has been cleansed. The grass and trees and birds and weeds return. It has been only a few days, but from the ruins of destroyed rust, true life again reveals itself as that which was stolen is released. When you are strong enough to fly, you shall see if for yourself. Once again, dragons have saved the land.\"\n\nI should have been more pleased at that news than how I felt. \"Where is this place?\"\n\n\"The southwestern tip of Ni-Yota,\" Harlan told me. \"You fell into some kind of trance within the forest. I couldn't wake you, no matter what I did. Eventually, the lake drained and the liquid that remained became clouded. After that, the canopy of trees parted. Kiata and the other dragons came and lifted you out.\"\n\nSomehow, his words were another blow to me, although I didn't quite understand the reason. \"The lake \u2026 the reservoir of magic \u2026 is it gone?\"\n\n\"It is certainly less.\" Harlan's brows furrowed. \"You wish to return?\"\n\nThe truth was, I did\u2014not to the forest, but to the dreaming void where I was the part of the Latticework, when I was power. A place without the pain of this world. But that wasn't what these people who had gathered about me wanted to hear. \"No, but perhaps it might be needed again. Once before, the rust came back. It could happen again.\"\n\nArutel gave a low roar. \"We burned every bit of it. Kiata had us fly from one end of this continent to another. We scoured mountains and valleys, islands and fields. I am told that the rust grew, always attached to the greater whole. It killed itself, except on a few scattered islands in the far west where the sea separated it. There we burned relentlessly. It is gone.\"\n\n\"It was the creators themselves who saved it the last time, I think,\" Harlan said.\n\n\"How do you know that?\" I wondered.\n\n\"You were in your trance for a long time\u2014days.\" Harlan shrugged. \"I could not merely stare at you all that time and do nothing. I searched the forest village for something to help you. The buildings contained both the mundane items of everyday life\u2014bed and baths, paintings and wash clothes\u2014as well as the fantastic: devices of metal, globes of light, as well as items I do not even have the words to describe. But in one room, a place \u2026 well it seemed larger on the inside than the outside. In that place were walls and walls of plants and flowers contained in spheres of crystal. The flowers looked alive, as if they had just been picked, the plants, green and thriving, although they all were frozen, like the village itself. I walked that room for all of a morning and the afternoon that followed. Not a single sphere was empty, not a single one out of order, except one. There was one that had been shattered, and its contents removed.\"\n\n\"You think some of the rust was in there,\" I concluded. \"Why would they do that? It was they who created dragons to destroy the rust.\"\n\nHarlan rubbed his chin. \"Humans are curious creatures. One of the oddities of our kind is that the more we know, the more we yearn to know even more. It is the more learned among us who collected countless volumes of books, it is the scholars who spend their whole lives at study. My ancestors tried to accumulate all the knowledge of this world on their island, but always they wanted more. Well, this lot of humans who created that forest and the Archive at Silla, they were as knowledgeable as any. The rust must've fascinated them. They would've wanted to learn more, to study more. And if I know humans, they were probably arrogant enough to think they could control it.\"\n\n\"But somehow it got free?\" Kiata asked.\n\n\"Perhaps they released it in spite, when the war against the dragons seemed lost,\" Harlan offered. \"That pettiness can be found in humans too.\"\n\nHarlan's theory was possible, but I had another. One I had suspected since I'd learned that Jinu had sent expeditions to the Forest of Fallen Night. \"I think it was the tigris. Those griffins that attacked Trishan may have come from this place as well. More guardians of the vanished Archivists that served the tigris.\"\n\nKiata snorted with indignation. \"The giant cats have fled. Even before the first of balefire, they went silent. Their raids stopped. They abandoned their allies, slipping into the night from which they came. They are cowards. It would not surprise me if the rust was their weapon, as well as the griffins.\"\n\n\"Hundreds of years passed from the time of the first rust and when it reappeared once again. All that time, the tigris merely waited?\"\n\n\"Their human masters died or disappeared. Or dragons killed them. I think the tigris, too, slumbered during those long years. Perhaps they, too, were held in spheres of glass, frozen in time. Maybe in the village somewhere, maybe elsewhere in the Forest of Fallen Night. Until something disturbed them, awaking them from their long slumber. It could have been Jinu and his meddling. He came here, with Aragor, if the stories are to be believed.\"\n\n\"And they somehow awakened the tigris, who decided to kill everyone once they were again aware of the world?\" Harlan asked. \"You really don't like cats, do you?\"\n\n\"The tigris were close to their human masters. They would've fought in the war against the dragons. They would've shared the vision of their creators. When the tigris emerged from the forest, they found Ni-Yota, a land ruled by the dragons, the enemy who had vanquished their masters. They would have thought it their duty to continue to fight. The machinations of humans \u2026 and dragons, provided them every opportunity to do so.\" My blood heated as I thought again of the selfishness that had brought the world to the edge of ruin. There was plenty of blame to go around for all the races. \"Jinu the spymaster, he said none who ventured to this place returned, but is he a man to be believed? Here was the repository of human power. Jinu hungers for it, I have no doubt. Aragor longed to be Skyking. Perhaps a deal was made with Jinu that enabled Aragor to defeat his sister to become ruler of Ni-Yota. But there was a dark price to the bargain. The tigris were devious. Elasu was, by all accounts, as ambitious as any human. Somehow, she was enslaved by the tigris, used by them to sow rebellion in Ni-Yota, while all the time the rust grew and gained strength in the west.\"\n\n\"Then we shall hunt them,\" Kiata promised. \"Without the rust to contend with, there is nothing to stop us.\"\n\n\"And what of Legao?\" I asked. \"What has the Protector to say about all this?\"\n\nArutel's eyes flashed with displeasure at the mention of Ni-Yota's human protector. If Kiata noticed his reaction, she chose to ignore it. \"Legao fought bravely against the rust. Her magic saved Trishan\u2014she carved a great chasm and filled it with water from the bay as the rust surrounded the city. One of her own magi died building it. That was the battle where Rinxia fell as well, contending with a behemoth. Legao tried to save her. The wizard collapsed and nearly died from the effort; she was lying unconscious for a full day afterward. Legao has acted as a Protector should. At least for now.\"\n\nHearing of Rinxia only opened my wound again. Arutel had never known her, so he didn't care. But he knew how to hate humans.\n\n\"This Legao is a human, a wielder of magic like the Sculptors of Rolm.\" Arutel said. \"Such humans are dangerous.\"\n\nI snorted with displeasure, even if I didn't disagree. My body ached as well as my head. Already, conflict smoldered between human and dragon.\n\nHarlan held out two open palms. \"Let us not search for dangerous shoals when we are already in a storm.\" Everyone stared at him. \"That means that there is no need to look for new enemies when we have plenty already. The tigris remain dangerous. They came from the Forest of Fallen Night, and doubtless possess tremendous knowledge. We should not underestimate them.\" More quietly he added, \"Or the other dangers to this land. Peace is fragile.\"\n\nI suspected Harlan's thoughts lingered on Norta and the remains of the Farlighters as well as the tigris threat. Despite their losses, there were still Farlighter ships out plying the seas, some of them with captains who shared Norta's vision of a world without magic or dragons. We had won the great battle, but there were still enemies among us, within and without. But that was not an issue that I could deal with on this day.\n\nIf I had to live in this world, I might as well make the best of it. \"It has been many days since my stomach was filled. Please tell me you had foresight to bring food and drink with you.\"\n\nFinally, those humans got something right. They brought plenty of shaojiu. I drank it all, hoping to forget."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Eventually, I returned to Trishan.\n\nThere, Legao awaited. The palace was still a ruined hulk. The area around the city was even worse. It was as if the ground itself had erupted, but I knew that was the result of the chasm Legao had created to save the city from the approaching rust. The remains of her magic summoning was a mud-streaked canyon collapsing in on itself as I flew overhead, and a battlefield still littered with pyres for the dead. But the city and its inhabitants had survived. Legao had done well.\n\nThe cost of her magic was obvious the moment I saw her. I barely recognized the wizard. Deep lines of age had carved themselves into her face, while loose skin seemed to drip from her throat. We met in the gardens, just the two of us. She walked slowly, as if struggling for balance.\n\n\"Tell me about Rinxia,\" I asked.\n\nLegao turned her head slowly, her eyes haunted. \"Rinxia.\" She said the name with pursed lips. My hearts ached at the memory still. \"The chasm I managed to make was too narrow. The hollowings tried to cross by filling it with their own bodies, along with whatever debris they could muster. The battle was a horrid quagmire of blood and mud. We concentrated on stopping the behemoths, but one breached our lines. Orli, of my own guard, died there, as did Ega, my most promising pupil, who drained herself trying to stop the onslaught. In the end, Rinxia saved us with fire and claw and bravery. She saved hundreds of thousands who live in Trishan, but at a terrible cost. I am sorry to have failed her. And you.\" Legao did sound genuinely remorseful, although she could've also just been exhausted.\n\n\"You did well to save the city,\" I offered, but the words were hollow. They were what I was supposed to say. I wanted Rinxia back. I would have traded all of Trishan for her, although I knew that was unworthy of me. Rinxia would not have approved.\n\n\"It seems I was wrong about your mother's quest, and balefire,\" Legao admitted. \"Such power. I never could have imagined.\" Her last words animated her\u2014the prospect of such magic reawakened a fire inside her. Suddenly, she sounded like her old, dangerous self.\n\nI replied cautiously. \"Only the unimaginable could defeat the rust. All else would have failed.\"\n\n\"Can balefire be brought forth again, whenever you wish it?\" Legao asked pointedly.\n\n\"If the rust survives, we will be ready.\"\n\n\"How is it done?\" Legao pressed. I appreciated her bluntness at least. She understood and desired power. \"No ember dragon in five centuries could unlock this secret. Many did not believe that balefire ever existed.\"\n\nI could've been coy about this great conjuring, but letting Legao know the truth served my purpose better. \"I can command the magic of both the Latticework and the Ar-Shadow, Legao. I can use the Cords and create Grafts. All magic is mine to command.\" Legao's face went pale, as if she'd eaten some bad fish. I got closer to her as my words sank in. \"And I can sever any magic binding. No wizard, no ember dragon, can match my power. I am the master of the Latticework.\"\n\nIt wasn't quite truth, but I wanted Legao to understand that she could never be my equal.\n\nLegao's jaw pulsed, her supposed fatigue vanished. \"You brought more dragons here. Former slaves from Rolm who will hate humans. I did not wish that.\"\n\nI thought of Arutel. Already the tension between dragon and human grew. \"They came to destroy the rust.\"\n\n\"They will leave now?\"\n\nI didn't know. \"You are the Protector of Ni-Yota. I suppose that is your decision to make. But you would be wise to allow them to help you should the tigris reappear.\"\n\nLegao's eyes narrowed on me. \"Do you insist on that?\"\n\nHer question was not an easy one. I did not want to become Protector. I did not envy Legao's place. But nor was her authority going to be absolute. I would not tolerate a new Conclave of human wizards that would make war on the remaining dragons. I hoped she took the lesson to heart. \"I do not know,\" was my answer. \"You would be wise not to force me to make such a decision.\"\n\nLegao stared at me for a long time before dipping her chin in acknowledgement. Legao was too smart to fight a battle she could not win. \"I have named Kiata as head of my council of advisors.\"\n\nThat gave a bit of hope. \"What of Jinu?\"\n\n\"He disappeared as the rust closed in on the city. It seems he doubted me.\" Legao gave a wry grin. \"I am not blind to what Jinu is, you should know. I will be no one's puppet.\"\n\n\"That is a relief to hear. I hope you will hear Kiata's counsel as well. She is young, but she has a desire to protect this place. It is her Way.\"\n\nLegao's eyes managed to show a bit of warmth. Whatever her feelings toward me and the other dragons, I did believe she had a genuine respect for Kiata after their shared experiences.\n\n\"What are your plans?\" Legao asked me.\n\n\"The chefs of Changsha prepared an excellent black pig, a variety bred from Elasu's stock. I have a hankering for it.\"\n\nLegao made a noise from her throat that resembled a laugh. \"Then what?\"\n\n\"After that, I shall be watching. Even if you do not see me, I will be watching.\"\n\nI left Legao alone in the garden after that. I wasn't joking about the meal, but it was not my reason for departing Trishan. On my way to Changsha, my journey took me back to the place where Rinxia had died, but there was no sign of her remains. The wind or scavengers or something else had wiped the mountain clear in the days I had been away. Still, I hoped her jing lingered.\n\nI circled the sky, roaring another farewell at Haven, my hearts heavy. Rinxia would've said her death was merely part of the Way. She wouldn't have approved of my sadness at her loss, but I hoped she would have understood, at least.\n\nSoon after I reached Changsha, I received a glasswing from Harlan to inform me that Legao had offered him the charge of supervising rebuilding the fleet of Ni-Yota\u2014this time without waveships. The Protector had been listening to Harlan's stories, it seemed. Already she planned great trading expeditions to the far-off isles of Harlan's memory. My friend had committed only to building ships, with the promise that one of the new craft would be his own. I was glad for him, even though I would miss him.\n\nAfter I had eaten my fill in Changsha, I spent several days flying across Ni-Yota, traveling across the vast rice fields of the east toward the fishing villages that lined the far coast. The land healed quickly. The roads were bustling, fields were again being tilled.\n\nThere was no sign of the tigris. Like the rust centuries ago, they seemed to have vanished. I had hope to find at least one of them, not to kill, but to speak with. I had to settle for speaking to the human lords\u2014those who had once fought alongside them. They all claimed to know nothing of the whereabouts of their allies. They all claimed to have been deceived. They all professed their undying loyalty to the current protector. I had no idea what Legao planned to do with these, but I still gave them all the same message.\n\n\"Tell the tigris that this is their world, too.\"\n\nI hoped the tigris would get the message, if not from the lips of these lords then the whispers of the courtiers who overheard me deliver it to them. For once, let the whispers carry an offer of peace.\n\nAfter that, I returned to the sky. I flew east, back toward the Wall of Fire, toward the land of my birth. I flew knowing that my fellow dragons were free, and the world was safe from the rust. I told myself that I had done my part in this. Let Legao and Kiata deal with the problems of Ni-Yota. Let Blaris and Arutel help nurture our race back from the brink of extinction. Finally, I could do as I wished. Or so I wanted to believe.\n\nI knew that somewhere in Trishan, Harlan was laughing at me. If he was here, I knew what he would tell me: The wind chooses your destination\u2014you merely decide how long it is going to take to get there.\n\nI beat my wings, letting the wind take me.\n\nHere ends Book 5. My gratitude to you for coming along on this adventure with Bayloo and I is beyond words. Thank you. If you haven't already done so, please sign up for my newsletter where I will announce new releases among other news (and you get A Dragon's Doom, a free prequel novella too!). Join at www.robertvanenovels.com. All is not done either. Even greater stories await, and you'll hear about them first if you sign up!\n\nWe are all dragons.\n\n--RGV"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Scrolls of Fire 1) The Dragon Librarian",
        "author": "Marc Secchia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2002In the Year of the Four Kings, I entered the Island-World an accursed creature. It was the day of the summer solstice, the hottest since record-keeping began five centuries ago. Some said Fra'anior's throat had opened. Others feared that the volcano would surely erupt and scatter the ashes of its denizens across the Island-World.\n\n\u2002Of course, I remember nothing of that frenzied season of political upheaval, nor would I learn the circumstances by which King Chalcion came to seize the Onyx Throne until much, much later. The repercussions, like my own unfortunate birth, reverberated through the ambit of our lifespans like the thundering of a monstrous Dragon's paw upon the drum-skein of unknowable fate.\n\n\u2002This is the paean of my pain, spilled upon the scrolleaf.\n\n\u2002From the womb I emerged sightless and deformed, my eyes obscured by thick membranes and insensitive even to the direct glare of suns-light. Amongst my earliest memories was my father's gasp, 'By the Great Dragon, what is that thing?' Even the stillness grieved. Then came the burbling of soft sobs I have always imagined were my mother's response to the wretched creature she had whelped; to the severe disfigurement of my mouth and lips and jaw, which a kindly soul once described as shaping a permanent smile, but my hands inform me is more a lopsided, perpetually open sneer.\n\n\u2002'My poor pykol-jewel girl,' my mother wept. 'How cruel fate's talon \u2026'\n\n\u2002How might memory begin so young?\n\n\u2002By what fate should a benighted creature play part in the destinies of Kings and Dragons alike?\n\n\u2002Once, I was shadow. Doomed to be forgotten; unwanted and unwelcome. I was Auli owl-eyes, a girl who knew only darkness, and whose life was a shadow subsumed in darkness. Yet the place of desolation waxed verdant with joy, and the darkness \u2013 even the bleakest soul-affliction would yield at last, to glory.\n\n\u2002Aye. Truly, I have dwelled in darkness and I, even I, have seen the light.\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 1\n\n*Swish-Crack!* Auli twisted sharply, biting her tongue to stifle a howl of pain. Twin whip-weals seared her right flank like the rajal's bite she had suffered just three months before, during the height of storm season. To her horror, as the bucket bumped against her scar-knurled left knee, cool water slopped down her bare legs and pooled around her paralysed feet.\n\nFear set her body a-tremble. She prayed it would not. She willed stillness to infect her hands, but her muscles knew no restraint.\n\n\"Useless blind girl, you spilled the water,\" Master Mi'elgan hissed.\n\nHis voice was the susurration of a snake's scales through dry grass, parched by the strange herbs he loved to smoke. That smell, like a sour, yeasty kind of sweat, hung heavy over his small stone dwelling at the edge of Ya'arriol Village. The Master \u2013 who was never to be addressed as Uncle, despite their family relation \u2013 tapped his fingertips against the wooden doorjamb, a staccato patter of pure menace.\n\nShe blurted out, \"Master, I'll clean \u2013\"\n\n\"Every last drop,\" he snarled. \"Clumsy fool.\"\n\nHis breathing rasped sluggishly, a capricious wind that toyed with the shreds of any poise she might have claimed. His unseen gaze, auger-like, bored twin holes into her bent neck. Auli-Ambar tried to steady the wooden bucket against her leg, but she might as well have tried to contain one of the mighty thunderstorms that regularly shook the caldera she had never seen. Most eight year-old girls might be forgiven fearing the booming wrath of the Great Dragon. The breeze brought a metallic tang to her nostrils. There was a pressure growing within her skull. She knew the hurt would come, for thunder always stabbed knives into her sensitive eardrums despite her stuffing her head beneath every ralti-wool blanket she possessed.\n\nAuli's small hands jerked. The water chuckled a merry counterpoint to her dread as it plashed and tinkled into the puddle creeping around her curled-up toes.\n\nShe wished nothing more than to leach away though the stone floor, but the water was trapped more surely than she. Travesty. It should surge up and engulf her being with liquescent, seamless menace, just like the syllables that poured down upon her now.\n\n\"Useless.\" *Swish-crack!* \"Unfortunate child! Wretched fool!\"\n\nThe hand-crafted whip's bite and his outcry were indistinguishable, their consequence a violation of her flesh. Pain tore through her shoulder and neck as Auli stumbled onto her hands and knees, fetching the bridge of her nose a bruising blow against the seat of one of the kitchen stools.\n\nThrough the roaring furnace of her pain, she heard his desiccated throat intone the words Master Mi'elgan always seemed to advance as a shield against his own inner turmoil. \"You're nothing but a useless blind girl whose mother abandoned her at birth. Your father? Too busy to bother. Sairana and I shouldered the burden of your care, and have you one grateful bone in your curst body? Have you?\"\n\nShe uttered no word of assent nor denial, not even a whimper. That, Mi'elgan had long since taught her, would only exacerbate the punishment.\n\n\"Go fetch the water! Fill the cistern right to the top this time!\" His eerily protracted, brutish commands galvanised her feet at last. She whirled. \"Then see to this mess!\"\n\nAuli-Ambar fled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Her bare feet pattered through a thick layer of scattered leaves and squelched lightly in the cooler, mossier places as she took the shortcut past Master Ga'athar's house, where his throaty tones rose into a wild bark of laughter that sent the peripols and finches fluttering in a fine panic. The unexpected whirring of wings past her head shook Auli's thoughts like a volcanic tremor, yet unexpectedly, landed them in a better place. Why could she not have a happy Master? She had overheard murmurs that Ga'athar was about to kidnap his bride-to-be, the mysterious Yualiana from the hamlet on the far side of Ya'arriol Island. That side faced the open Cloudlands. Screwing up her pinched face, Auli tried to imagine a realm of death far below the Islands. Treacherous. Blasted. Plenty of monsters down there, and open fumaroles and cracks just waiting to swallow up an unwary blind girl.\n\n*Hssst!* Sizzling death.\n\nQualms sped her footsteps. She knew the path well.\n\nFather paid Master Mi'elgan plenty in gold drals for her care, she wanted to object. Xa'an Ta'afaya had muttered as much on his last visit, before the storm season. But what use were the thoughts of a young girl? Father was unable to cope with her special needs. His job demanded much travel, eating up months and even seasons at a time. He was an important man, a soldier in the Fra'aniorian Royal Guard. King Chalcion relied upon him. Not a day passed that the Master made certain she understood how much of an inconvenience she was to everyone, but most especially to her illustrious father; a mouth not worth feeding, a wretched life better cast off the cliffs.\n\nWhat was a cliff? She knew only of a place at the end of the village where warm, fragrant thermals played pollen-games in her nostrils and tousled her long brown hair with invisible fingers \u2013 and that she must never stray farther. Nothingness awaited. Death's downfall, Islanders called the cliffs, chuckling at a pun that frequently yawned its ghastly maw in her nightmares. As for the colour brown? Auli imagined brown was like the tongues of loamy earth, damp from last night's pelting rainfall, slurping between her toes as she returned quickly to the village well. It was warm and peaty, a slightly weighty but reliable sort of colour.\n\nHer shoulders slumped. Why would a King steal her only parent? Was he as bad a ruler as they whispered?\n\nThe nearby chirruping of a dragonet filched her sadness with the speed and skill of a pickpocket. A glissade of sweet, piping notes pierced the early afternoon's stifling heat like cool water dripping upon her brow. Those dulcet, harp-like notes pierced the somnolent background buzzing of overheated insects with pinpoint purity. After a moment, Auli essayed a small skip. She had no right to be cheerful. No, her lot was a plenitude of tasks, as her guardians did not believe in idle hands \u2013 only their own. Master Mi'elgan was a perfumer and trader who said he worked long hours in his subterranean laboratory behind the house. During the daytime, his snores often shook the rafters. Mistress Sairana's business took her daily between the villages and hamlets, if gossip could be called business.\n\nA blind girl overheard much, even if she did not understand all.\n\n\"Islands' greetings, Auli owl-eyes,\" a child catcalled from beyond the bushes. That must be Yathoria, pinching tart sunberries from her neighbour's garden as usual.\n\n\"Islands' greetings,\" she called back.\n\nAs she trudged by, an unripe berry pinged off the side of her head. Auli sighed. Did she have a target inked on her headscarf? She adjusted the filmy material self-consciously, ensuring it masked her lower face right up to her eyes. Maybe she should take to wearing a sack. What difference would it make? People gaped either at her mouth or her strange eyes \u2013 the exclamations, silences or poorly-disguised coughs were proof enough of that. May she never behold their disgust! Yet, how desperately she wished to comprehend what it meant to see, above and beyond the richness of hearing and touch, taste and smell! She could only dream of such a privilege.\n\nThe Island-World must be wondrous indeed. There were stars and birds and waterfalls and \u2013 she sighed \u2013 Dragons.\n\nPreoccupied with imagining something like a hairy spider with wings but inflating it into a beast at least the size of a house, Auli-Ambar thumped headlong into a woman's midriff.\n\n\"Oof!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! Please \u2026\"\n\n\"Child, I'm not going to hurt you.\" The woman sounded puzzled, even alarmed. A hand steadied her shoulder. \"Here. You must be Mi'elgan's ward? What's your name?\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Mistress? I am no Mistress. Not yet.\" Suddenly, the stern tones mellowed into rich laughter. \"Shh. Can you keep a secret? For I confess, I must bolt my shutters every nightfall lest a scurrilous pirate raid my bedchamber.\"\n\nAuli giggled dutifully. The woman's perfume was exotic, perhaps fireflower with a base of tasku oil and notes of honeyed neroli, climbing rose and \u2013 was that a drop of peppery, expensive shimtuzi essence, which she had once accidentally knocked over in Master Mi'elgan's workshop? The beating she had earned that day! She shuddered.\n\n\"I am Yualiana,\" said the woman. \"Do you often carry crimson-spotted monarch butterflies in your hair? Four stowaways, I believe. No, five.\"\n\nShe wet her skewed lips uneasily. Another transgression?\n\n\"No mind. They must like you. Now pray tell, have you seen Ga'athar \u2013 Islands' sakes, what stupidity drips off my lips this day! Forgive my overwrought state. Would you \u2026 you came that way, unless I misjudge the path?\"\n\nAuli confided shyly, \"Aye. Master Ga'athar's laughter just now shook his beard as he made merry in his kitchen, lady, and I hear his footsteps approaching upon the path. You should hide lest the good Master \u2026 well, he might lay desirous hands upon your \u2026 your person?\"\n\nYualiana laughed again, a sound so carefree it tickled the skin of Auli's neck. \"Let me guess. The Ballad of the Isles, third stanza?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026\" Auli's thoughts reeled. Had she spoken ill? Made an improper suggestion? She was not sure what 'desirous' implied. Was it an adult secret?\n\nWithout warning, the woman's arm slipped about Auli's shoulders and she found herself being hugged against a thick, braided cloth belt, which scratched her nose, while the hem of her silky skirts crinkled against the girl's shins. So motherly and overwhelming was her presence, Auli knew she would dream about this woman. She would dream she had a real mother who smelled as fragrant as a Yualiana, who was strong yet soft inside, like pliable steel.\n\nThe heavy tread on the path halted. A man breathed, \"Yualiana.\"\n\nShe replied, \"Ga'athar.\"\n\nThe very air trembled between them. Was this what love felt like? Expectation, wordless longing and a thumping drumbeat inside Yualiana's chest?\n\nAfter a long pause, the man said, \"Girl, allow me to draw water for you. What was your name \u2013 remind me?\"\n\nHe sounded as if he had swallowed a bullfrog. How peculiar. Did love have the power to steal people's voices? It must be dangerous. Maybe people caught it like the fire-fever.\n\nYualiana said, \"It was \u2026 she just \u2026. roaring rajals, I can't have forgotten already, can I?\"\n\nCold talons stole her happiness. \"Auli-Ambar,\" she whispered.\n\nA hand tugged at her bucket's handle; work-roughened knuckles brushed the inside of her wrist briefly. The Master said, \"Here, Auli. Forgive my pollen-brained mind. Stunning afternoon, isn't it? Nary a cloud in the sky.\"\n\n\"Nor a Dragon,\" said the woman. The bucket clonked gently against the well's rim of cool granite, where Auli had rested many times during her tasks. \"Thank you for helping us draw water, good Master.\"\n\n\"My pleasure, o lily of the pond,\" he replied, sounding as if he might just pluck a few stars from the sky for the sheer joy of it.\n\nSurely a well served the far side of the Island? Aye, Auli-Ambar remembered. Courtship was a strange game played by adults, where deception was somehow deemed acceptable. How come? Lies earned her beatings. That equation was long impressed in her mind. The truth earned the rod or the whip in equal measure \u2013 indeed, anything at all that passed her lips was worthy of a thrashing. Any note a blind girl plucked upon the thirty-stringed handharp, Mistress Sairana's chosen instrument for her ward's education in matters musical, was fit to earn a sharp rap or three over the knuckles with a wooden rod.\n\nSuddenly, a lightning-strike of insight burned her mind. Be it fair or be it false, her guardians did not care! They beat her merely for the sake of it. Her sadness was like the unknowable, dank depths of this well, only it seemed to have no need of a bucket. Her well filled and overflowed of its own accord.\n\nThe long metal handle creaked upon its joints as Ga'athar began to work the pump rhythmically, up and down, and water gurgled in the pipe as it rose from the humid depths. A spicy whiff of his beard-oil did make Auli grin beneath her face veil, however, even if that spark of illicit exhilaration made for a grim and brief affair altogether. Their scents spoke far more eloquently than the words they exchanged. Perhaps love infiltrated hearts like pollen inhaled upon a balmy volcanic breeze? The girl considered this notion soberly. Love was infectious, dangerous and according to the balladeers, drove people right off the Isle of Sanity.\n\nShe most certainly resolved never to fall in love.\n\nBy a minute variation in the timbre of his voice, Auli realised Ga'athar must be gazing skyward as he said, \"Hmm, do I spy a Dragonship flying the fire-orange pennant of Gi'ishior? You are to be honoured by a visit from the Chief Scrollkeeper.\"\n\nHer? Or Yualiana? Yet Auli had the distinct impression that he was not referring to his fragrant companion, who chuckled lightly and then \u2013 shock upon shock \u2013 dropped a kiss upon Auli-Ambar's unbound hair, upon the parting she had fastidiously perfected at the hour of suns-rise, when the dawn chorus reached its raucous peak and she brushed her long hair out with the prescribed two hundred strokes. Mistress Sairana permitted not a single stroke less.\n\nHugs? Kisses? She felt faint!\n\nHer fingers crept to her pocket. Inside was a miniature metalwork figurine, finely detailed right down to the pinprick talons and the secondary and tertiary wing-joints that shaped back-swept wings, as though the Dragon stretched himself ready for his next flight-stroke. The whorls of her thumb rubbed his bristly skull-spikes pensively. Father liked to buy her costly gifts. The jewellery had vanished somewhere in the house \u2013 into the Mistress' locked dresser, she fancied \u2013 but Auli had been allowed to keep this little treasure, because Father always asked after it. Two inches long. Surprisingly hefty. A frown creased her brow as she tried to remember its name. A Red Cinizzara Miniature, aye. Very rare; a faithful replication of the mighty Dragons of the air, Father had said. Xa'an seemed to know a lot about precious things.\n\nAuli tucked the Dragon away a little deeper, hoping this Mistress would not want to steal him too. She seemed nice.\n\nShe flinched when slim fingers touched the fresh weal upon her neck.\n\nYualiana said, \"You have gorgeous hair, Auli-Ambar, as beautiful as this day is long. Take your water now, and return with two buckets on your next trip.\"\n\n\"Two?\" Auli whispered.\n\nGa'athar explained, \"Two buckets balance better, so you won't spill as much while walking, child. We'll wait here for you.\"\n\nSuddenly, her heart pounded like a maddened rajal beneath her ribcage, shaking her limbs like an earth-tremor. What did she mean? Why were these adults breathing as if they had shared a confidence no eight year-old could not possibly grasp? Were they sharing snide glances over the blemished girl's head? But no, despite the molten terror pumping through her veins, she knew instinctively that the couple meant well.\n\nWho was on that Dragonship? What did this portend?\n\nAs Auli-Ambar trudged back and forth on her cistern-filling duty all that afternoon, she could not help but feel as if she were growing smaller and smaller, and that incoming Dragonship looming larger and larger in her imagination, until it seemed poised like a boulder in the darkness ready to crush the life of a useless blind girl.\n\nNo! She must not believe those falsehoods! But she did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Before the afternoon's steamy heat began to diminish at last, Auli-Ambar had long since forgotten the Dragonship. Her focus was the blisters splitting on her fingers as she trudged along with the rough-handled buckets, hour after hour, long after Ga'athar and Yualiana had regretfully made their apologies and departed. Each trip to the well she cooled her fingers in the water, but that solace only seemed to make the skin softer. Back and forth. The miniature Dragon bumped along in her pocket. She fancied he was breathing fire along her thighs, because that was how her muscles felt. Fire-shot. Springy. Exhausted yet tireless, if that made the slightest speck of Isles sense whatsoever. Seventy-three trips through the variegated fragrances and tangy berry bushes, collecting nine fresh berry splatters which would stain her clothing and force her to clean them with boiling water, before her outstretched fingertips could even touch the water's level in the underground cistern, accessed via a small wooden trapdoor in the kitchen floor. Her shoulders stung.\n\nBy the hundred and thirtieth trip, her arms desperately wanted to fall off, but she pressed on. 'No slacking!' Mi'elgan had roared an hour ago, clumsily cuffing her elbow in passing. When she returned, he was snoring again.\n\n\"Stertorously,\" Auli whispered when she was well out of earshot, carefully pronouncing each syllable. She loved that word, gleaned from the Lay of Muziri the Grey, a ballad in the high dracotonic musical style. It described the Master perfectly.\n\n\"Chattering fool!\"\n\nMistress Sairana's heavy hand slapped down on Auli's shoulder, drawing a stifled yelp. Had the woman been waiting to waylay her en route to the house?\n\n\"What are you saying? What, eh?\" Her grip eased, then shifted to pinch Auli's pointy left ear beneath the headscarf. \"I'll have none of your backchat, girl! Now shift your lazy hide or I'll beat you over the next Isle with my ladle! You've a nasty disposition, do you know that? Always mouthing off when you think no-one is listening. Seditious, that's what it is. Seditious and unacceptable. Why are you not strumming at your handharp lessons, even if your clumsiness hurts every ear?\"\n\nAuli clenched her swollen knuckles, unable to admit that her fingers would never flow over the strings like rippling water. They were just too sore.\n\nShe began, \"Well, I \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't answer me back, child! Even that tuneless babble is better than listening to your constant whining and snivelling. I'll have none of that attitude in my household, you disgusting lump of toad spawn, and I'll tell you something else. Listen when I'm talking to you! I'm so sick of your ungrateful bleating. \u2026\"\n\nThe Mistress chuntered along in this vein as she hauled Auli-Ambar along, careless of the way the girl was forced to mince along on her tiptoes, or the squeals of pain her rough handling provoked. The full buckets bumped and sloshed against her lower calves as she staggered along, exacerbating the tearing pain in her ear. The large woman manhandled her charge effortlessly between the fragrant flower gardens fronting the traditional Fra'aniorian slate roof cottage, causing her to skin her toes on the flagstones before she shoved her bodily through the main door, which opened upon the kitchen according to the traditional layout.\n\n\"Caught her whinging and calling you names, I did, Master Mi'elgan!\" she announced at a volume which could likely be heard on the next Island. \"Starfickerous, she said \u2013 oh!\"\n\nThere was a strained silence.\n\nAuli-Ambar, frozen in a ball on the flagstone floor where she had fallen, listened as hard as she could. She heard unfamiliar breathing above her own panting, short and sharp, almost explosive. A scent like \u2026 charred lilies and musty old scrolleaf \u2026 a visitor! Could it be the man from the Dragonship? Oh heavens, what horrors might befall her now?\n\n\"The worthless chit was insulting the Master, she was,\" insisted the Mistress, but her voice seemed to grow smaller as the visitor's silence deepened. \"Stuffulious, she called him. Clear as suns-light over the caldera, I heard it.\"\n\n\"Mistress Sairana, I believe?\"\n\nThe man's voice was rich, grave with an ageless dignity, like nuggets of gold rolling in a barrel.\n\n\"Aye, I am she,\" simpered the Mistress. \"May I kiss thy hand, noble \u2013\"\n\n\"Most certainly not.\"\n\nAuli gasped. His tone was equable, but the dismissal bit like the Master's favourite whip. She could only imagine the Mistress' face swelling like a puffer flower before her rage shredded those petals in the blink of a rajal's eye \u2013 but instead of scalding the girl like the explosion of a boiling-hot geyser, Sairana produced a noise more like a hound's whine.\n\n\"What you may do,\" the man continued, \"is pack the girl's effects. I will be leaving with her. Tonight. Before suns-set.\"\n\nThe Mistress began to splutter, \"B-B-But \u2013 you can't. You can't!\"\n\nMaster Mi'elgan growled, \"Now see here, Chamzu \u2026\"\n\nPerplexingly, his voice also strangled away to nothingness. Auli could not believe her pointy little ears. This man must have Dragon powers!\n\nIn cultured tones which failed to conceal his withering fury, Master Chamzu said, \"I believe I have seen all I ever wish to see of the pair of you. I would not sully a child's mind by advancing my opinion of your conduct in her hearing, nor, to be perfectly frank, would I waste my breath in the doing. Now, the bags, if you please!\"\n\n\"There are papers, guardianship papers,\" Mi'elgan blustered. \"You have no right to snatch this girl from those who are, after all, her loving relatives.\" His fingers clawed about Auli's upper arm. \"There should be adequate compensation.\"\n\n\"I thought she was a 'useless blind girl?' \" inquired Chamzu. Auli imagined he could wither the foliage of entire Islands with such acidic sarcasm.\n\n\"But she is family. Xa'an Ta'afaya entrusted her to our care.\"\n\n\"It is upon Xa'an's word I have come.\"\n\n\"You've no jurisdiction here,\" snapped Sairana. \"On Gi'ishior you might rule as Chief Scrollkeeper, but on Ya'arriol soil you are just another Fra'aniorian Islander.\"\n\n\"I am a man who serves in the Halls of the Dragons,\" the other returned, his volume lowering to a dire rumble. \"Daily, I whisper into the ear canals of the Dragon Elders. The Dragonkind are dangerously unpredictable. I've heard it alleged, on occasion, that they might for sport drop boulders from a league above upon those who earn their disfavour. It would be regrettable if your fine home were to accidentally become \u2026 target practice.\"\n\nMaster Mi'elgan wheezed as if he had been punched in the gut.\n\nNow, this strange Master was Saggaz Thunderdoom riding rampant across the skies of her imagination. He was huge! A giant! Auli's ears seemed to distinguish his words as the blast of a mighty trumpet, as a Dragon's resonant battle-cry, and its voice was the clarion song of hope. Wild, inexpressible optimism bubbled in her breast. Mi'elgan's grip had long since stopped the blood supply in her arm, but she was buzzing from head to toe as the men faced off above her, no longer speaking, just breathing.\n\nThe miniature Red seemed about to burn a hole through her tunic pocket. She caressed his talons, just the tiniest fingertip touch. Could she finally believe? Maybe Dragons had luck-magic, for nothing else could explain these billows of fire detonating so sweetly in her soul.\n\nVery clearly, Chamzu added, \"As for your Dragonships, trader \u2026\"\n\nAuli-Ambar had never imagined a Human mouth could spit verbal fireballs, but the palpable flinch in the hand that held her fast, communicated much. Mi'elgan spat, \"You wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I won't need to, will I?\"\n\nThe hand released her as if her Uncle had grabbed a red-hot coal from the fire. She did not understand what exactly had passed between the adults, but the Mistress bustled into the back room to throw Auli's paltry effects into a bag, while the Master's breath wheezed like leaky bellows, in and out. Defeated. Chamzu wore his dignity as if it were a thick robe \u2013 she had never known anyone to remain so unspeaking and so motionless, she could barely detect his presence. Yet she smelled him still, and wondered if that baffling, evocative odour might not be the scent of Dragons.\n\nThoughts tumbled about in her mind like playful dragonflies buzzing inside a crysglass lantern. Where would they go? What did he intend to do with her?\n\nDazed, Auli-Ambar responded to the pressure of a stranger's hand as he walked her to the doorway. In truth, she staggered, for her knees had quite forgotten how to hinge properly and she still held one quarter-full bucket in her right hand. In mild tones Chamzu bade her set it by the threshold, and then he straightened abruptly to address her Uncle and Aunt over her head.\n\nHe said, \"We will find use for this girl, trust me.\"\n\nThey made no reply.\n\nWith that, Auli departed the place which had been her home since infancy."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Gift of Dragonets",
                "text": "\u2002Useless blind girl. That was my uncle's refrain, one I have never in my life been able to forget. Occasionally he would broaden his range with a few choice adjectives, his favourites being accursed, ghastly, disfigured and abhorrent. I have never been able to hear or read those words since without being consumed by cold fury. Whence did such a man garner his unrelenting hatred? What cold, vile deficiency of character accorded him such manifest pleasure in inflicting pain upon others?\n\n\u2002It is only as we hold the mirror to our own souls, and consider what we believe to be worthless or vile or unlovable, that we might truly see the nature of evil. Prejudice fruits from the vine of every life. We only need look for it, and oftentimes, find it thrives closest to our door.\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Reflections\n\nBy the time they reached the Master's Dragonship, anchored in a small meadow beyond Master Ga'athar's house, Auli-Ambar had convinced herself that she would be severely thrashed for so much as daring to breathe wrongly upon the hallowed vessel. Any man who could beat down Master Mi'elgan without lifting so much as a finger, in her view, was beyond awesome. He was terrifying. He could rearrange the five Moons with a casual word, and doubtless commanded legion Dragons into battle against formidable foes. She hunched her shoulders, half-expecting her doom to descend any second in the guise of a shrieking whistle followed by a low detonation.\n\nOne less blind girl to trouble the Island-World.\n\nThe meadow grasses and wildflowers had recently been beaten flat by a late-season hailstorm, but now tufts had begun to spring upright so Auli had to heron-step to make sure she did not fall flat on her ugly face. That would have been unforgiveable. But the Master clasped her hand to guide her. The skin of his fingers felt strangely crinkly, like the edge of an ancient scroll. Shortly, she heard the musical creaking and squealing of ropes straining through pulleys and the muted rumbling of the fires that she understood heated air for the huge balloon that now cooled the place where she stood, trembling. She must be right beneath his Dragonship.\n\nAuli shooed a perky dragonfly away from her headscarf. Not now. They always gravitated to the cool, shady places beside pools or brooks, or clearly, beneath handy Dragonships. Butterflies preferred to flit over the dense, flower-laden shrubbery. She loved to listen for the faint whisper of their wings, that according to the ballads, stirred golden trails amidst Fra'anior's balmy zephyrs. But to her gold seemed heavy and cold, as impersonal as the touch of her Master's hand. Why then did Dragons hoard gold? Was that because their fires would melt it to furnace temperatures before moulding the riches to their enormous, scaly bellies?\n\nAbruptly, Chamzu said, \"Shall I have them lower the vessel for you to board, Auli-Ambar?\"\n\n\"No, Master,\" she breathed.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I can climb \u2013 I don't want to make any trouble \u2013 please, Master!\" Panic brought words forth in a babbling brook. \"I'm a girl of no account. Even \u2013 you travelled all this way, across the Islands \u2026 oh! We forgot my handharp. Forgive me, Master.\"\n\n\"The Halls have many instruments of far superior quality.\"\n\n\"I \u2026\"\n\nHow could she explain? She hated the simple instrument at which she worked two hours every afternoon, but it was what she knew. Every hiding, every wrong note, every scolding at her unmusical bumbling \u2013 somehow, it made the Mistress happy. Practice pleased her. Obedience pleased her more. How would she hope to please this new Master without a handharp?\n\nToo ashamed to speak, she wrung her hands in despair.\n\n\"All the children take music lessons,\" he added, confirming her fears. She could expect another Mistress or teacher to thrash her blundering fingers until they bled. \"You can climb?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nHe must have looked quizzically at her, perhaps sensing the doldrums of her heart. The Master said, \"Very well then, we shall climb.\"\n\n\"But, a storm app \u2013\"\n\nShe bit off the words earlier this time, humiliated by the fearful squeak in her voice.\n\n\"There's no storm, child.\" Auli could not help flinching, even though his tone was gruff, almost kindly. She could not believe in kindness. Any moment, he would snatch up a strap or a belt and paint stripes on her worthless hide. \"I've an experienced Steersman aboard \u2013 explain yourself.\"\n\nAuli hung her head. \"I am impertinent, Master.\"\n\n\"Never was a word fuller of Isles truth!\" Yet even as he spoke he tickled her fondly beneath the chin, making the girl wriggle and giggle \u2013 a most unexpected and discomfiting reaction. \"Ha. Riddlesome rapscallion.\"\n\nNow, as he rolled his Rs extravagantly, he ruffled her hair!\n\nAuli yelped, \"M-M-Master \u2026\"\n\nHow Chamzu guffawed! Then, he said, \"I am not angered, child. Far from it. I am curious and, to be frank, slightly bewildered. What eight year-old uses the word 'impertinent' in casual conversation? Or the archaic phrase, 'of no account'? How came a blind girl to be so well versed in scroll lore, and her speech to follow adult patterns, even poetic metre?\"\n\nTwisting her hands together to try to arrest their quivering, Auli said, \"I \u2013 I listen to the ballads.\"\n\n\"And storms \u2013 do you make predictions?\"\n\nTwice, her throat made senseless warbling noises before she managed to force words out. \"I smell changes in the weather, Master.\"\n\n\"You \u2026 smell?\" His fingernails rasped against his beard. Suddenly, the man was bending over her. So close. His breath, redolent of a crushed sprig of mint, wafted against her forehead. \"You are more than what you seem, Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya. Do not be alarmed \u2013 how you quiver and quaver, child! I came at your father's behest. Well, it is more complicated than that. A trusted contact informed me, as your father's closest friend of many years, of your plight. Your father has not yet been informed of my decision. He is travelling afar.\"\n\n\"My plight?\" she echoed. Who was the informant \u2013 Ga'athar? Or Yualiana? Who had caused this trouble for the Master, bringing him on a long journey around the rim-Islands? \"It's too much. Master, for a man of your station to \u2013 to fly the Isles for me \u2013 I'm happy where I am. Was. Truly. Please don't \u2013\"\n\n\"Do not lie!\" he snapped, but even as she cringed, his tone gentled again. Catching her hands in his, Master Chamzu said, \"You may not understand yet, child, but there are those in this Island-World who believe that rights belong not only to those who can afford them, but should apply equally from the greatest to the least among us. I was once mistreated by a trusted mentor. I could not stand to see the same happen to you.\"\n\nAs she stood mutely by, unable to process what was happening, his fingers gently traced the skin near her new wound, and then he said, \"May I?\" Auli dipped her head slightly, and felt him tug at the coarse linen of her tunic top at the nape of her neck, atop her left shoulder blade where a patch of skin was exposed. A word she had never heard before, most probably a curse, surged from his lips.\n\nHe said, \"Mi'elgan did this?\"\n\nAuli-Ambar feared to twist away lest she earn more of a beating. She nodded miserably as the Master lifted her tunic top briefly, perhaps running his eyes over her back.\n\nThe hand gripping the material, jerked. He breathed, \"I wish I'd known before. How many times?\"\n\n\"Very many, Master.\"\n\n\"These should be treated. And your hands. What's that smell on you, girl?\"\n\n\"Smell? Oh, the Master likes to smoke his bowl pipe, Master \u2026 ah, Chamzu,\" she said. Since her guardians always demanded full answers even though they typically cut her off before she could finish speaking, she clarified, \"It's a kind of tobacco called sankuweed, Master. I believe it is imported from Merxx.\"\n\n\"Bah, Merxxian peddlers of scum and scut! Repugnant spittle sliming Dramagon's own tongue!\" He snorted forcefully through his nose, before gentling his voice in explanation. \"Sankuweed is a powerful narcotic. Psychotropic effects. Prolonged use drives the addict insane \u2013 do you understand?\"\n\nShe nodded, even though she did not.\n\nHe said, \"Sankuweed damages the mind, Auli.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Your Uncle will go mad.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\nDid she wish such a fate upon him? Bad wishes had a way of twisting about to bite people, but Auli knew her heart. Her hand stole to her Red Dragon once more. <Keep me. Protect me, mighty Dragon.> Maybe she had deserved that rajal attack. The elderly, almost toothless beast had attacked her just beyond the well and mauled her knee before several villagers, hearing her screams and the snarls of the feral feline, had come running and beaten it away with swords and staves. Two days later, a hunter had tracked the huge rajal back to its lair and finished the beast.\n\nShe still had nightmares about the heat of its mouth savaging her knee. The throbbing, ravenous snarls. Rajals were powerful felines that stood the height of a man's shoulder. They were supposed to be black, a colour that was not a colour, and Auli understood that was the only colour her brain had ever perceived. She dwelled in blackness. Maybe rajals sprang from nightmares?\n\nStill, this Island had been her home.\n\nThe Master's hand guided hers to a smooth wooden dowel hanging from ropes at her shoulder height. \"Take it one rung at a time. I'll hold the base steady.\"\n\n\"Will I ever return to Ya'arriol, Master Chamzu?\" she blurted out.\n\nHe inhaled, and then quipped dryly, \"Since I cannot envisage any Dragon in the fabled Halls \u2013 or any Dragon at all \u2013 would want to crack a fang upon the woefully scrawny rack of bones widely identified as one Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, lately of Ya'arriol Island, let's just consider Gi'ishior your new home, shall we? As for the future, which Man or Dragon may know the lay of life's Isles?\"\n\nAuli wrinkled her nose. This Master was funny."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "After climbing steadily some seventy feet up the swaying rope ladder, a strong hand from above lifted her the final couple of feet. Auli's bare soles investigated the thin-seeming planks of a light gantry that led to the main navigation cabin. From behind and below, Chamzu explained the layout of the Dragonship in succinct detail, seeming to understand that she needed orientation \u2013 although he quickly hustled her inside the main cabin.\n\nThe main hot air sack measured one hundred and fifty feet in length and was a portly forty feet in diameter, providing sufficient lifting power to tote twenty adults and a medium-sized cargo, plus stacks of ooliti wood for fuel. The cabin, suspended by strong but lightweight hawsers from maintenance netting which encapsulated the air sack, was also constructed of flimsy-seeming wood braced by a hollow-bar metal frame. Chamzu pointed out the Steersman's station before sheepishly approximating its location in paces for her. He noted that the gantry circumscribed the trapezoid main cabin, adjuring her to hold onto the guardrail at all times, and began to describe the steerage wings, sails and manual turbines set alongside the balloon which gave the vessel its characteristic similarity to a Dragon's shape, before he broke off, muttering, \"But that isn't interesting to a girl. No. Zimtyna!\"\n\n\"Master, it surely is!\" she enthused.\n\nShe wondered if his gaze narrowed upon her, for the Steersman laughed gruffly, and said, \"I'll instruct the child, Chamzu. Come take a turn at the wheel, petal. Ah, can you find the way? Careful.\"\n\n\"Huh. Zimtyna's fast asleep, the lazy chit,\" muttered Chamzu. \"That's my daughter \u2013 my only daughter. Nineteen summers. All she talks about is boys.\"\n\nThat was a verbal eye roll if ever she had heard one. Auli knew the phrase because the ballads were full of roving and rolling, covetous and coy, bright and beautiful eyes, but sadly, her own eyes seemed to do nothing of the sort. They stuck fast like ugly rocks mounted in the plinth of her skull.\n\nHe added, \"Now, I shall need to work in this cabin behind you, Auli. I do not wish to be disturbed until we reach our destination. Chayku, the girl assures me there's a storm in the offing. Set course for Ha'athior and keep a weather eye on the horizon.\"\n\n\"Always do, Chief,\" he grunted. Auli quailed. Oh no. She had offended the Steersman! The man bellowed unexpectedly, his voice suddenly sounding tinny, as if he yelled into a pipe, \"Cast off! Stoke the fires! Girl, to me. What's your name? You got some questions stored in that brain, or are you just going to stand there imitating a frightened mouse?\"\n\nA frightened mouse perfectly described her feelings. Auli felt compelled to respond, \"But aren't you \u2013 won't you put me to hard labour, Master? Shall I clean your cabin? Fetch you something? Polish your boots? May I coil the ropes, or help the crew \u2013\"\n\n\"Islands' sakes, you'll do nothing of the sort!\" Chamzu's voice floated through the partition. \"Your job is to learn, girl. Go pick that man's brain until he weeps.\"\n\nThe Steersman hawked and spat on the floor, not far from her foot judging by the warm flecks that instantly decorated her toes. \"Huh.\"\n\nHe was not a bad man. Steersman Chayku had three daughters and five sons, he told her, settling her hands in the proper position on the wide rim of the wheel, which operated the wings and ailerons set laterally on the ship's flanks. Twin grooves at thirty degrees from the vertical, port and starboard, were her guides. He talked her through the take-off process, soon waxing as garrulous as a parakeet as he discovered in Auli an eager audience \u2013 anything to avoid the rod or the lash or whatever this new Master employed on his servants! The vessel creaked and whirred and groaned, sounding like an asthmatic old man as they lifted a half-mile into the air, setting their course two points north of westward according to the compass he now allowed her to feel, set on a plinth alongside the wheel.\n\n\"The binnacle,\" he said. \"Moreover, this is not a wheel; the proper term is 'helm'. Now, do you think you can remember all of the pedals and manual hand settings I'll show you?\"\n\nAuli promised, \"I'll do my very best, Master.\"\n\n\"Hmm. You're a serious-minded little dragonet, aren't you?\"\n\nThe acrid tang of long-burning, dense ooliti wood drifted to her nostrils as a door opened and closed behind Auli-Ambar's left shoulder, and despite the gain in altitude which she could feel in her ears, the pollens, flower fragrances and sulphurous, gritty tangs of the volcanic air did not lessen in her perception. It was said that Fra'anior was a jewel among Islands, the crowning creative achievement of the Great Onyx, Fra'anior. His fabled breath heated the massive central caldera, an active pool of lava some eighteen leagues across \u2013 leagues! Auli could not imagine such breadth. A person might walk for days to reach the far side, not that walking was recommended. Toxic gases and a lake of molten lava made the caldera impassable. All travel between the rim wall Islands was necessarily undertaken by air; Dragons winged where they pleased, while Humans puttered about in their Dragonships.\n\nAfter an hour aloft according to the half-hourly pinging of the sand clock located beneath the compass, facing his position, the Steersman grunted, \"Stinking breath of a feral Dragon, there comes that very storm you forecast! Strength to your paw, girl. 'Twas hid behind Ha'athior's massif.\"\n\nOh! Perhaps she had avoided a beating after all. Auli bopped her figurine surreptitiously on the nose. <You're good luck, Mister Red. Nice work.>\n\nAloud, she said, \"Master, I thought Ha'athior Island was \u2026 forbidden? To Humans, I mean?\"\n\n\"Indeed so, my young Steerswoman. We shall \u2013\" he hesitated just long enough for Auli to conclude he was considering telling an untruth \"\u2013 we shall make landing at a monastery offshore of the main massif which, it is truly said, is death to set foot upon. One of the monasteries that adhere to the Way of the Dragon.\"\n\nShe bounced on her toes. \"Ooooooh!\"\n\n\"Ooh indeed,\" Chayku chuckled drily. \"But you'd best bury knowledge deep, girl. King Chalcion has little patience with Islands and monasteries that spurn his yoke, it seems. Now, brace the helm like I taught you and set the stops. Dinner is served.\"\n\nAnd so, from a moment's joy to the world of her pain. Auli had always been banished to a back room whenever Mi'elgan and Sairana ate or had guests over. They said that to watch her consume her meals was a nauseating and repulsive experience. She had to tilt her head backward to keep food inside her mouth, and cover her split, skewed lips with her hands to prevent the inevitable spillage. Auli excused herself and apologised and burned in humiliation as her new companions ostensibly took no notice of her difficulties, but she knew they were observing, pitying, judging. Everyone did.\n\nHalfway through dinner, taken at the Navigator's table in the forward cabin, Zimtyna made her appearance \u2013 sounding very muzzy indeed \u2013 and joined them by way of plopping herself down in the fourth place with an exaggerated groan. She tucked liberally into the berries, fruits and nut breads common to the Isles before even noticing Auli's presence. Then came the inevitable awkward introductions, the silent staring, the forced cheer and cover-up of her reaction.\n\nHow she hated her deformities!\n\nSometimes, she wished she had been born without a face.\n\nThe Dragonship overnighted at a small Island offshore of Ha'athior, as promised, where Master Chamzu had consultations with a monk called Master Jo'el. Auli's ears thrilled to the constant song of dragonets around a small crater lake beside which the monastery building was apparently very well-hidden, and Zimtyna took her down to a quiet nook along the lake shore to bathe. The sharp click-clack of monks training at weapons carried clearly upon the still night air, and echoed off the cliffs surrounding the lake. Auli giggled as the warm volcanic beach sand tickled her toes. Dancing dragonets, this was so different to anything she had experienced at home.\n\nAs they waded in to the depth of Auli's waist, before sinking down to their necks, Zimtyna sighed, \"I've never been more grateful for cool water! All those muscly monks clad in nothing but loincloths \u2013 you have no idea what that does to a girl.\"\n\nShe had a few notions gleaned from ribald ballads that mentioned fainting attacks, heart palpitations and generally inane behaviour whenever boys met girls. Auli thought it all quite ridiculous. She knew plenty of boys. They liked to trip her up or lay snares for her unwary feet, and on four or five occasions had held her down and tickled her until she begged for mercy, but their favourite torture was to use her head for slingshot practice. Rotten fruit was the weapon of choice, plucked from the Island's dense foliage. They did not even need to hide, for as long as they kept quiet \u2026 *whirr \u2013 splat!* She knew that feeling far too well. Boys were horrid beasts, one and all.\n\nAuli commented, \"The dragonets sound very musical.\"\n\n\"Ooh, dragonets love to sing! Listen. All we need to do is to start \u2013 and we'll give those gorgeous men something to remember us by. I couldn't imagine a worse fate than being celibate.\"\n\nAnother new word. Auli-Ambar tucked it away in her memory. Celebrate? No \u2026 celibate. Close, but almost certainly not the same.\n\nWithout further ado, Zimtyna launched into a capable rendition of When all was Fire, a creation epic that recounted the world-shaping exploits of Fra'anior, the mighty seven-headed Onyx Dragon of yore. He was said to be the father of all Dragons and the creator of the Human race. She had a versatile, slightly burry alto voice that had clearly received classical training, as was common upon the Isles. Auli loved to sing, but only when she was far away from her guardians. The Mistress had once compared her singing voice to a samuki chaffinch's whistle, a slur she had been unable to forget.\n\nPausing before the second stanza, Zimtyna said, \"Join me?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 couldn't.\"\n\n\"Grow a backbone, would you? You're far too diffident. Besides, there's just the two of us.\"\n\n\"Plus fifty monks and Fra'anior alone knows how many dragonets,\" Auli-Ambar blurted out, her face heating up to a fine suns-set glow. After a further dint of arm twisting, she opened her mouth half-heartedly and joined in.\n\nWhen she sang, something strange always happened in her throat. It was as if another chamber opened or a flap of cartilage moved aside above her larynx, and a resonance unlike any of the other children's voices issued forth. A hitch in Zimtyna's singing betrayed her puzzlement, but she held her melodic line with aplomb as Auli sang an octave above in unison, in what for her was her lowest register. Their voices blended as though they had sung together many times before. On the final line of that second stanza, Auli realised that the chattering and chirruping around the lake had stilled, and then a dragonet's voice rang out in exuberant descant. As if this constituted a secret signal, a chorus from the girls' left flank began a seven-part humming harmony to the main melody line, then from the right and across the lake, she heard a great flock of dragonets break into melodious song.\n\nAuli knew little of dragonet song, for she had never been allowed to attend music classes with the other, more fortunate children \u2013 far too busy with her chores \u2013 so she had only heard tales of how dragonets sometimes joined in, and a few times, had enjoyed a dragonet carolling along together with her singing. This was a chorus of hundreds, perhaps thousands. Effortlessly, the tiny Dragonkind wove melody and counter-melody, keeping to Zimtyna's choice of music but embellishing it beyond belief. Joyous trills! Tumbling cascades of notes! Piping quarter-and half-note additions to Zimtyna's swelling song accompanied their bravura display of musicianship.\n\nSuperb!\n\nHer voice cracked in wonder, but her continued blushes did nothing to prevent the massed chorus from launching into the fourth stanza with all the zest of the hyperactive little pests they were. Auli-Ambar wished she could have seen this, for the extraordinary quality of the dragonets' song-making made every hair on her neck and arms quiver, and the thrill in her heart was as if she had swallowed the twin suns, for a radiant heat scorched her throat and crawled across her scalp, and her hands fluttered before her body in aimless astonishment.\n\n\"Sing,\" Zimtyna laughed. \"Sing, Auli!\"\n\nAn echo of her laughter swirled, it seemed, from the skies above as the dragonets copied even that vocal embellishment. Auli laughed too. She could not help herself.\n\nThat laughter cracked open her soul.\n\nRising from the water, careless of her ugliness or inhibitions or the cool evening breeze now riffling the lake waters against her concave belly, Auli reached within and found her voice. Her song swelled in an unconscious emulation of Zimtyna's tone and expertise, a fragile, nascent effort, yet wondrous to her. Her voice rose and rose, her notes piping with the clarion beauty of dragonet song, like crystals plinking into the waters in lieu of the tears she could never shed, for she grieved and laughed with one voice, her emotions torn asunder. She faced only the darkness, but it seemed that if she sang skilfully enough, and in gratitude for the matchless gift of the dragonets, that surely colour and light and beauty must break through into her own Isle, and set it aflame. So the blind girl sang with every fibre of her being, swirling through the tremulous, poignant middle passages of When all was Fire, and on into the triumphal finale.\n\nBeside her, she heard Zimtyna whisper, \"Extraordinary! I only wish you could watch. The dragonets are dancing for you, my sweet pollen puff. Don't stop singing.\"\n\nShe dared not. She could not. This was a taste of something beyond herself, a divine touch of Fra'anior's paw, and Auli knew in her heart of hearts she might never experience it again. At last, she touched a D-sharp nearly five octaves above Zimtyna's range, and allowed the note to whisper exquisitely into the air above the waters.\n\nA reverential silence gripped the caldera.\n\nAuli wished to weep, despairing. She was bereft. Robbed of the song, spent of all emotion.\n\nThe older girl said, \"They're \u2026 they're doing some sort of wriggly wing-thanks toward us. Bow back, Auli.\"\n\nShe dipped forward until her nose touched the water.\n\nThe unexpected cold caused her to sneeze delicately. As one, all the dragonets of the caldera exploded into paroxysms of untrammelled glee."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "An ebullient but short-lived lightning storm struck overnight, leaving Auli feeling battered on all levels, for she awoke to a strange world of hailstones quickly melting in the day's volcanic heat and monks chanting in the distance, an eerie plainsong that hearkened to great wings brushing against the stony roots of Islands. How cautiously she descended the Dragonship's rope ladder and felt for the frigid ground with her bare toes that morning!\n\nMaster Chamzu had met all night long with the monks, but now joined them at a simple repast, passing a snide comment about two nude girls carolling in a holy lake that had Zimtyna choking on her sweetbread dipped in janzaberry jam, and Auli breaking out in a cold sweat.\n\nA moment later, however, he was all seriousness. \"Master Jo'el approaches.\"\n\nAuli did not know how to greet a holy man. She feared even to touch him \u2013 did the Onyx Dragon's notorious power of lightning dwell in him, too? How grateful she had been to curl up head to toe with Zimtyna on their shared pallet during last night's storm. The lips which brushed her knuckles in formal greeting seemed disappointingly ordinary, however, even if they did seem to descend from a great height.\n\nThe monk's vocal timbre was a cavernous bass that made her startle. He said, \"So, this is the girl who sings with dragonets?\"\n\nAuli sensed a strange prickling against her mind, like a cat's soft paw tapping at a windowpane. Her ears burned deep inside. Every sense tingled most peculiarly, yet as quickly as she thought upon it, the sense of discomfort eased. Slipping a hand into her front tunic pocket, which was so deep or the tunic so oversized it hung to an inch above her kneecaps, she rubbed the Dragon's muzzle furtively, catching her fingernail on his tiny garnet-fragment fangs. What did Dragons fear in all the Island-World? Nothing. If only she could have half a Dragon's courage. A hundredth, even.\n\nShe breathed, \"Forgive me, Master.\"\n\nAuli heard a verbal shrug in Chamzu's tone as he said, \"The girl's like that \u2013 voices her opinions like a mouse, and she's a slight soul withal, easily overlooked.\"\n\nJo'el said, \"Clearly, there's magic in her voice.\"\n\nChamzu inquired in a tone that left no doubt as to his scepticism, \"Are we proposing a branch of sung magic? Such has never been known beneath the suns.\"\n\n\"The Great Dragon's breath bloweth as it pleases,\" rumbled the other, apparently unoffended by this rebuff. Then, his long fingers bridged her temples using the thumb and third finger, while with his forefinger, the monk traced a jagged sign upon her forehead. He stopped just before the fresh cut on the bridge of her nose. \"Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, daughter of Xa'an, wilt thou receive the benediction of the Dragons of Yore?\"\n\nHis words could have been plucked straight out of an ancient scrolleaf, arrayed as for battle, and they executed a flawless ambush upon her frazzled mind. It was all she could do to wheeze, \"Aye, Master. I will.\"\n\n\"Therefore, honouring the freewill offering of this precious soul, and in the presence of these witnesses, I seal thy life in the mighty name of Fra'anior, true guardian of all who shelter upon this Cluster. May his illimitable favour attend thy deeds, Auli-Ambar, now and forevermore.\"\n\nAuli had the impression that something profound passed between the two men, hinted at by the movement of Master Jo'el's free hand, which she could feel but not see. For just a fraction of one of her panicked semi-breaths, as she stood rooted upon the sward with the finger pressing against her forehead, it seemed that an abnormally scorching outbreath might have ruffled her hair, flipping it mischievously over the monk's forearm. Or was that merely her imagination?\n\nFavour? Upon a precious soul? Never had she conceived of words such as these. What manner of favour blighted a person's life as severely as hers had been?\n\nAll she wanted to do was to run and hide and never be found again."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Father's Wish",
                "text": "\u2002King Chalcion's way came too late to be recognised for what it was, ruthless force applied with diabolical cunning. He seemed to hold the rod of Kingship effortlessly, even amidst great turmoil. Many lauded his strength of character. In public he was a devoted husband to his second wife Queen Shyana, and a loving father. He took much private counsel from trusted advisors and dealt open-handedly with the Dragon Council over matters political, territorial and economic.\n\n\u2002Belatedly, we Dragonkind discovered his brother Zalcion to be the dagger sinister, the key individual whose cloak of diplomacy concealed a mind of fiendish ambition. He was the instrument through which Chalcion executed his purposes as with an invisible paw. We saw in them worthy opponents, no more. This was draconic hubris, soon consumed in the white-fires of truth.\n\n\u2014Sapphurion of Gi'ishior, Notes to the Council, Scrolleaf 25, Third Talon, Paragraph 4\n\nAs the Dragonship swished and creaked aloft, Auli pondered the strange words spoken over her that morn, when her feet had melted ice and even the birds and dragonets, for once, had been mute. She could not remember a dawn to compare. Pure, perfect, petrifying silence. A surrounding tranquillity as though, with the almighty disdain of an Ancient Dragon, the Island-World scrutinized the doings of the insignificant creatures that crawled over its massifs and fortresses like swarming insects, and found them wanting.\n\nChewing the incomprehensible was akin to chewing gristle, the balladeers famously opined; an activity as distasteful as it was dissatisfying. Shortly, the girl gave up her puzzling. She must not think. She needed to serve, to humble herself, to \u2026 return to normalcy.\n\nSince Chamzu had taken to his pallet in the tiny cabin aft of the main navigation cabin, Auli located Zimtyna by the silky rustling the long, steady strokes of the brush took through her hair, and the slight swishing of her very fine garments, and said, \"How may I serve you, Mistress?\"\n\n\"Sit. Let's talk awhile.\"\n\n\"Can I scrub the decks? Clean the windows? Burn the trash? Bring you water?\" The rising desperation in her voice made her curl up inside, tighter than any butterfly inside its chrysalis.\n\n\"Auli, you don't need to work today.\"\n\n\"I \u2026\"\n\nThe older girl clucked her tongue. \"You overheard our conversation last night. 'What does one do with a blind girl?' Aye?\" Before she could so much as nod, Zimtyna blurted out, \"I'm so sorry. I just \u2026 I don't have any experience with lack of sight. At all. I'm supposed to be studying to take over as Head of Services and I'm just overwhelmed by it all and to pitch you into that lumpy pot of soup \u2013 it's unfair.\"\n\nA burden. What else would she ever be? Mistress Sairana said people as ugly as her had it 'coming to them.'\n\nShe ventured, \"I can clean.\"\n\n\"How?\" the other returned bluntly. \"With respect \u2013 oh, how I chatter like a stupid parakeet! Now I'm respecting a girl less than half my age. No, don't you give me that woebegone look! Please. I'm trying \u2013 show me. Teach me. I know windroc spit about blind people.\"\n\nWithout a word, Auli knelt and demonstrated how she felt for dirt. How she learned her way around spaces. Indeed, she was always on the alert for sounds, echoes and clues that would shape her environment. She tidied up a fallen scroll near the Steersman's feet, plucked hairs from cracks between the floorboards, and righted a gourd on the desk that doubled as their eating table. Auli straightened a stack of loose scrolleaves by aligning their corners with each other and then setting them parallel with the table's edge, exactly as Master Mi'elgan liked his work documents to be left. She unearthed Zimtyna's spare tunic top from beneath the desk, folded it and arranged it perfectly upon the girl's lap.\n\nOn the way, she barked her toes twice on unexpected obstacles and stumbled over a three-inch step up to the Steersman's station. Still, crawling about on her hands and knees did restore a sense of balance to her heart. This type of work, she knew. Flying aboard a Dragonship? Not so much. Her toes itched for solid ground. She preferred not to think about how very far away the next Island might be, or what myriad horrors slithered far below in the gulfs between the Islands.\n\n\"Where should this water gourd go?\" she asked.\n\nThe Steersman chuckled in his beard. \"She's got you there, pollen puff. Got you proper. Polish my boots next, she will \u2013 nay, girl, that was no invitation!\"\n\nSounding irked, Zimtyna said, \"Come over here, Auli.\"\n\nIn a moment, she perched upon a skirt-covered knee and felt the hairbrush tugging lightly at her hair. The Mistress had always insisted upon faultless coiffure and cleanliness, even if her clothes were rough in comparison to Zimtyna's chic attire, as she realised now. Zimtyna smelled of lilies. Yet as her expert brushing teased out a small knot in the waist-length waterfall of her hair, she grasped that others perhaps needed space to think, to process, to decide what to do with a worthless scrap of flotsam.\n\nShyly, Auli said, \"I can help. I'll scrub every floor in your Halls, Mistress. Every day.\"\n\nThere was no cruelty in the merry laughter that her words provoked. Zimtyna said, \"I believe you might just, given the chance. Aye, Auli. Even the smallest of our number are assigned chores at the Halls of the Dragons. I believe you would perform your tasks diligently.\"\n\n\"I'm a hard worker.\"\n\n\"I noticed your work-roughened palms.\"\n\nHer voice became smaller, if that were possible. \"Please.\"\n\n\"You insist on being a cleaner?\"\n\n\"I'd do anything \u2013 in your big house.\"\n\nGently, Zimtyna said, \"Auli, what if I told you that the Halls of the Dragons is actually a dormant volcano? Inside are four hundred and sixty permanent roosts, ninety-two visitor roosts, fourteen old dwellings being refurbished as we speak, and forty-one roosts under construction \u2013 that is besides Human accommodation for over two thousand souls. A team of one hundred and three Roost Keepers serves the Dragon roosts, cleaning, tidying, supplying water and meat to ever-ravenous maws, and suchlike. You have questions?\"\n\n\"What does dormant mean?\"\n\n\"It's like sleeping. My innocent little chaffinch, the Dragons make their roosts inside the old volcanic pipe above the bluest lake you ever saw. The cliffs are dotted with roost windows of the finest crysglass, the better to let in the light \u2013 a magical, crystalline radiance, more sparkling and beautiful than a girl wearing the very crown jewels of Fra'anior. Behind and below the roosts, carved within the mountain itself, are many halls housing laboratories, stores, meeting chambers, training rooms, nurseries, great bathing chambers heated by real lava, which has always puzzled me since the volcano is meant to be dormant, facilities for buffing scales and all manner of Dragon care and recuperation, and beneath the lake, a library such as you have never imagined \u2013 library built for Dragons, many great caverns wide and deep and long. Legend holds that not even the Dragon Librarian himself knows all its secrets.\"\n\nAuli sighed. How magical.\n\n\"Dragons are highly intelligent creatures,\" Zimtyna reproved, clearly misunderstanding the spine-tingling wonder that her words evoked. \"You must never disrespect a Dragon, for they are noble and fiercely proud, far wiser than you or I.\"\n\nShe nodded quickly.\n\n\"We'll have to find a way to teach you Dragonish.\"\n\n\"Dragonish? Dragons speak another language?\"\n\nZimtyna chortled, \"And I thought I was the pollen brain! Of course they do. Every Human at Gi'ishior learns to speak Dragonish. What are your other skills?\"\n\n\"Skills?\"\n\n\"Apart from astonishing unbelievers with your aptitude at cleaning Dragonships, and singing like a fire-crested warbler?\"\n\nAuli blushed furiously.\n\nA finger prodded her left flank, drawing a squeal. \"Confess. Now.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 well, I don't know if it's a skill as such \u2026\"\n\nHow could she demand these things? Zimtyna seemed to think that skills grew like berries on every bush. A sightless girl did not command skills. She had no real learning, just a handful of worthless epic ballads and poems memorised, and a few snippets of lore picked up from the balladeers. People needed eyes to learn. Eyes gave a person all they needed in the Island-World.\n\n\"Shall I have Dragon Elder Sapphurion nudge you instead? He's only \u2026 well, maybe fifty or sixty tonnes of Dragon. He'd roll you flat for his scrolleaf.\"\n\n\"Ew!\"\n\n\"Don't make me turn that threat into a promise.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar thought upon her figurine. Maybe red was the colour of strength. Red Dragons were meant to be big bruisers who enjoyed nothing more than a good brawl. Blues were the brainy ones with the best magic, and the Yellow and Orange spectrum Dragonkind loved nothing more than spouting fireballs all over the skies. She had even heard of White Dragons. They must be so beautiful, because their colour was the very opposite to the darkness in which she lived. White-fires were sacred to the Dragonkind, symbolising truth and purity and the balance of all living things.\n\nA truth Dragon! Dared she ask her father for a White Cinizzara Miniature?\n\nZimtyna's finger-snap brought Auli back to the present. \"Well, if someone tells me a story several times over, I can usually repeat it,\" she admitted. \"Or a song. But that's not special \u2013\"\n\n\"Ha! Double ha with sugar bamboo syrup dripped on top! So that's why you speak so quaintly. Father was trying to puzzle it out last night.\" Zimtyna applied the brush vigorously. \"Well, I'm not sure what we'd do with your singing either. Maybe I'll put you on the cleaning roster first. You might finish sweeping the Halls in about three years' time. Think you can manage that?\"\n\nAuli's hands twisted in her lap. Why were they being so nice to her? She wanted to weep, but crying made a snivelling mess down the cleft of her disfigured nose, and that was difficult to clean without dunking her entire head in a bucket of water. Her calloused fingers itched to play harp scales, over and over and over, until they were perfect \u2013 until the Mistress sighed and remembered to thwack her a few times to aid her education. She focussed on the sounds of the flying Dragonship in the hope of calming her frayed nerves.\n\nA prodigious belch from the Steersman's station nigh made her leap out of her hide. \"Excellent breakfast,\" he opined.\n\n\"Barbarian,\" sniffed Zimtyna. \"We don't all hail from Franxx.\"\n\n\"Huh! I'll teach you about Dragons, girl \u2013 clean gone forgotten your name, now. Never mind.\" *Pang.* Auli flinched. \"Dragons have at least five stomachs and one of them is stuffed full of fire at all times. Some Dragons manufacture their own lava, you know. Nasty form of combat, quite besides the artful rock sculptures they tend to make out of their enemies. Now, rule number one is this: if you rile a Dragon, get out of their firing line quicker than the flip of a dragonet's wings, or you'll be fried in your own juices. Secondly, never stand behind a Dragon. Do you know why?\"\n\n\"A stray tail will thrash you into prekki pulp?\" suggested Zimtyna.\n\n\"No, they fart fireballs.\"\n\n\"Not true!\" the girls chorused.\n\nChayku chortled, \"If you don't believe me, go ask one.\" When Zimtyna remonstrated crossly with him for tugging their wings so crudely, an expression that fell strangely upon Auli's ears, he added, \"In truth, both ends are dangerous. Fire, ice, poison, glue, acid, gas \u2013 you never know what's going to come out of a Dragon's \u2013\" he paused dramatically.\n\n\"Throat,\" Zimtyna finished pointedly.\n\n\"You're no fun,\" said the Steersman. \"Now, girl, do you remember yesterday's lesson? How shall we trim the sails for a steady wind coming in off the starboard quarter, abaft?\"\n\nAbaft? Auli-Ambar turned the delightfully anachronistic word over in her mind. These Dragonship Steersmen used the very best words, possessing a unique language of their own to describe navigation, flying, the tying of knots and the multitudinous parts and workings of their vessels. They sailed or made headway above the depthless Cloudlands, tacked against the wind, unpicked knots with marlinspikes, and their enemies were called pirates or corsairs. Who even knew what a marlin was? Or when or where the terms bowline, cleat hitch or double reef knot had originated? Perhaps the Dragons could shed light on these questions.\n\nA blind girl should never use that expression.\n\nWhen she failed to reply swiftly enough, Chayku added, \"Fra'anior's about to break wind, girl. Quick-wings!\"\n\nAuli leaped to her task, stumbled over Zimtyna's foot and tumbled into the back of the Steersman's legs. A heavy hand upon her shoulder stayed her remorseful tongue. He said, \"There now, girl, better the leg than the binnacle, eh? On your feet. No dragonet eats a ralti sheep faster than one bite at a time. That said, it only takes them a few bites. Big mouths.\"\n\n\"Capacious gullets,\" Zimtyna added.\n\n\"And extraordinary gas producing capabilities,\" the Steersman riposted. \"Shall I demonstrate?\"\n\nThe older girl snorted, \"Franxxians! No concept of manners, Auli. Don't you listen to that big lug. Now, whilst you attend to your lessons, I shall go fluff my pillow roll. Wake me if something exciting happens. Which \u2026 oh, never mind.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "After another hour's intensive tutelage in Dragonship operations, Zimtyna emerged from her dragonet-swift nap to take Auli-Ambar aside. She bathed and dressed the girl's wounds with herbal poultices. Then, feeling stiff due to the bandages wrapping her upper body and nursing her sore, bruised hands, Auli joined the sailors on the gantry at the front of the vessel, and listened to their chatter as they coursed along the league-tall cliffs of Ha'athior Island towards its northerly peninsula.\n\nPeople usually forgot she was present after a few minutes, and so it was with the sailors. Auli learned a few disquieting details, such as that their favourite brew was called Xinidian Lightning, the right words to ward off hairy warts between the toes \u2013 she would never think of a Dragonship sailor's feet in the same way again \u2013 and the meaning of the term 'wenching' and which taverns near the Palace in Fra'anior City were best suited to this noble pursuit. Auli sniffed privately. All this silly talk, and rowdy behaviour, moreover!\n\nWhen she piped up with a question, however, the all-male crew quickly switched topics and one of the sailors volunteered to be her eyes. Two miles beneath was a tan carpet of toxic Cloudlands, unusually white for this time of year, he told her. The vegetation layer ended three-quarters of a mile beneath their current altitude due to the volcano's heat and gaseous output, but natural air barriers called inversion layers protected the inhabited Islands of the rim from danger. A girl would want to know that those layers also trapped many pollens and fragrances in the air, he added, making Fra'anior Cluster the best-smelling Human habitat in the Island-World.\n\nAuli gravely thanked him for this important detail.\n\nHa'athior Island rose a further two miles overhead, meaning that their entire starboard beam was overshadowed by an enormous cliff covered in trailing vines and huge, tumbling rivers of lush tropical vegetation. Snatches of cheerful dragonet song drifted over the near-vertical cliffs of Holy Ha'athior, the Island sacred to the Dragonkind. Ahead lay a rim wall gap four miles in depth, one of many between the Isles, where smoking orange lava poured from the caldera down the dark side of the Cluster, building its foundations day by day. Sensing questions in the man's tone, Auli diffidently informed him that orange was like warmth, the colour that she felt upon her skin and in her heart when the suns shone. It was cosy, like a blanket.\n\nHe acted surprised she could not see anything at all. Were people not able to imagine blindness for themselves? She found it equally difficult to imagine what sight must be like \u2013 but not for want of trying, and aching, and failing.\n\nAfter a moment, the man's hand touched her shoulder. \"I'm sorry. Want to hear more?\"\n\n\"Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"I'm just a deck hand, girl. Let me describe our flight path to you.\"\n\nThe pocket Dragon received a comforting pat. Had she expected the Dragonship to plummet out of the sky? Silly Auli-Ambar. Fingering the tiny wing struts through her linen tunic material, Auli listened to the thrumming of the ropes and the constant creaking of the air balloon as the wind pressure changed subtly. Then there was the wuthering of the sail edges and the stretchy-groaning of the ropes as the Dragonship rocked along with stately mien. It was comforting \u2013 if one ignored the fact that a few thin strips of wood separated her from a zillion leagues of nothingness!\n\nBeyond this gap, the sailor told her, lay Janbiss Island with its colony of Red Dragons, some forty-four beasts strong, and still farther ahead, the Human-inhabited Isles of Churgra and Sa'athior. On another occasion, they might have tarried at one Island or another, but the Chief Scrollkeeper had ordered they should make the best of the following breeze and strike straight for Gi'ishior, a decent five to eight hours' run. In the early afternoon, the sailor returned to the bow to tell her the tale of Frendior Island. It had once been Human-inhabited, but about twenty-four years before, a tragic plague had struck the village and wiped out every man, woman and child. In the year of the Four Kings, the Dragons had retaken the Island, claiming an ancient right of resettlement.\n\n\"Of course, none of those Humans believed the treaty. 'Twas nine hundred years old, found mouldering in an old Records room underneath the main library,\" said the sailor, called Taltax. \"But when you're changing kings every other week, you may be forgiven for losing focus on territorial matters on the other side of the caldera. By the time King Chalcion took his grip on power, the deed was accomplished. Fifteen Dragon roosts built, no sign that a Human village ever stood upon that Isle. Some sneaky Dragon business, that was.\"\n\n\"Master, why were there four kings?\"\n\nHe hawked and spat overboard \u2013 at least, she hoped so! Auli curled up her toes and stood still, not wishing to discover a cold, wet glob of spit somewhere nearby. \"Not a tale for sensitive ears,\" he grunted. \"Suffice it to say, good King Amorion passed away at a ripe old age \u2013 well, he must have still been alive around when you were born, just a teeny sprig. His brother Gurion took up the kingship, but many said he was sickly in the mind and too closely allied with the Dragons. He lasted three days upon the throne before he was found dangling off his balcony, hanged. Then came Tayfurion, a strong King and Chalcion's older half-brother. The official story is that after one season in power, he abdicated the Onyx Throne in favour of Chalcion before taking his own life. I'd say if you believe that, you'd believe the Mystic Moon's a goblet filled with purple Dragonwine.\"\n\n\"No,\" Auli said doubtfully.\n\n\"The truth is an evil beast, girl. Ask no more details of me!\"\n\n\"I \u2026\" He left abruptly, his bare feet slapping on the wooden gantry. \"I wasn't going to pry, Taltax,\" she said quietly. Adults could be so illogical. Why was he so angry about the fate of those Kings?\n\nAuli faced the fore stoically, the better to breathe in exotic hints of jiista berry flowers, ripe landas gourds and the piquant scents of tinker banana plants on the breeze. Apparently tinker bananas were an age-old import from the south, but they had taken favourably to Fra'anior's balmy climate. They were best served fried in spicy sugar-bamboo sap. Yum! Her mouth watered.\n\nAfter a while spent daydreaming, Auli sighed and shuffled her feet.\n\nSo, a job cleaning the endless roosts in the fabled Halls of the Dragons. This girl felt as if an earthquake called Master Chamzu had just blasted her life apart \u2013 and she missed blistering her hands carrying water? She must have a skull stuffed with prekki mush! Still, how long could this newfound freedom last? If she knew Master Mi'elgan, he would have her back cleaning his cottage before the week was out. Her journey had already served to confirm one inconvenient fact \u2013 people forgot who she was. Everyone. Zimtyna had forgotten her name just after lunchtime.\n\nWhat, by any sane measure common to the Isles, should she make of this peculiar curse? If she possessed any magic under the suns, it appeared to be the magic of slipping out of people's minds and memories as if she were a bar of soap clutched in a wet hand.\n\nAnd they were meant to be the sighted ones."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "The relative cool of the evening breeze plucked at Auli-Ambar's hair as she faced forward resolutely, as if confronting her future with poise that in no way matched the melting of her very marrow. Gi'ishior's great terrace lake, richly described in so many ballads that she could picture it in her mind, stretched ahead. She tasted the humidity rising off the surface with delight, and inhaled deeply though her nose, sorting out the pungent scents of berries and flowers \u2013 so many unfamiliar aromas, it was like drinking a heady brew. They had descended to a mere two hundred feet above the waters, and the crew had gathered at the fore once more to gawp at the view.\n\nSoftly, Zimtyna said, \"There's a Dragonwing of five Greens patrolling the skies directly above the volcano, and another Dragonwing of three hulking Reds and two Blues farther afield, northeast of our position, watching the caldera and the approaches via the rim wall. Ahead it's all lake, hundreds of feet deep and as clear as the skies above, so that you can see a mated pair of giant carp sporting right below. They prefer to hide in the reed beds along the inner bank, where they think they're less likely to fall prey to Dragons. Fish aren't renowned for their brains. Now, the outer edge is terrace lake wall, a grey-speckled granite bulwark hundreds of feet thick yet engineered so perfectly by the Ancient Dragons, not a drop of that great lake leaks through. From right amidst the lake waters, it seems, the volcano vaults skyward, clad in a seamless green carpet, so close and dense is the vegetation, mostly berry bushes, I believe. Our flight path will bend a little ways to the North in accord with the lake's natural curvature \u2013 the lake hugs the volcano all the way around, past what the eye can see. There, we'll steer through the entrance, a grotto bored through to the central, flooded caldera lake by Majoox the Brown some seven hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"I believe the encircling lake was first conceived as a defensive measure against overland invasion,\" Master Chamzu clarified. \"The ancient term is a moat.\"\n\n\"A moat, Master?\" asked Auli.\n\n\"Common in some Eastern societies,\" he said. \"They have large, flat Islands devoid of natural protections such as we enjoy, so a surrounding body of water restricting access to a fortress via a narrow bridge, for example, is an effective defensive measure.\"\n\n\"Oh. Not against Dragons though, Master.\"\n\nHe chuckled, \"Indeed not, Auli. Here comes Yulgaz, also a Brown. Not a Dragon to cross. Touchy. He's a draconihilist. Loosely speaking, that term refers to Dragons who deplore all other races and actively seek their downfall.\"\n\n\"Aye, that's a true word, Chief,\" said one of the sailors.\n\n\"Is that the Dragon equivalent of adraconistic philosophy?\" asked another man. \"I heard that view is growing in popularity around the Isles. Y'know, Humans who want to eradicate all lizard \u2013\"\n\n\"Shut yer gop-stopper!\"\n\nAnother cried, \"Freakin' ralti brain, don't use the L-word!\"\n\nThe Steersman bellowed over the commotion, \"I'll have hands a-trimmin' me sails, ye scurvy, snaggletoothed laggards! Step lively, if bandy-legged pirates ye be!\"\n\nAuli giggled. Straight out of the oldest ballads! Language was so strange. Suddenly, she seemed to hear water lapping in her mind \u2013 what? Why?\n\nAs the crew trooped away, their combined weight making the gantry and the safety railing rock alarmingly, Auli felt the Master step forward. He said, \"Having cast one glance in our direction, Yulgaz is majestically ignoring us.\"\n\nWas he covering his mouth with one hand as he spoke? Now she knew for certain that all was not smooth working relations and trust between the Humans and Dragons of Gi'ishior. For a time, they stood facing the breeze, and no-one spoke as the Dragonship tacked around the volcano. Auli sensed the change in direction via the wind, and the last rays of suns-shine from the West heating the left side of her body and especially her left ear, now.\n\nZimtyna said, \"Auli, I once read that blind people see faces by touching them. Would you like to do that with us?\"\n\nAuli spluttered, \"I \u2026 well, I never \u2026\"\n\n\"Don't you fear Yulgaz,\" said the Master. \"We have Sapphurion and his Council of Dragon Elders to keep his ilk in check. Would you like to try touching my \u2013 fie, girl. You're trembling like a reed!\"\n\nHow could she admit that what she feared was \u2026 everything? Dragons. People. Another reversal in her capricious fortunes. Beatings. Pity. The very wind that blew from Gi'ishior now, redolent with tangs and fragrances she had never encountered before, certainly not in such rich, dizzying vortexes of peppers and cinnamon, sulphur and vanilla pods and charred metallic essences that her brain wanted to whimper, scream and turn joyous somersaults all at once \u2026 it was too much! Too terrifying! Her fingers clenched the railing white-knuckled, and she heard them talking to her as if the sounds echoed down a long, dark tunnel.\n\nChamzu said, \"Auli? Auli, are you feeling alright? Zimtyna, she's \u2013\"\n\nA voice cried, \"Inhale!\"\n\nAuli-Ambar gasped and choked, but the dreadful stench slapped her brain back from the brink of insensibility.\n\n\"Better,\" said Zimtyna.\n\n\"Fra'anior's beard, what is that vile concoction?\" growled Master Chamzu.\n\n\"A sample of something we're working on to combat tunnelworm and green-fanged rats,\" said his daughter, sounding very smug indeed. A cork squeaked back into the neck of a gourd. \"Crushed giant southern cockroach, a particularly noxious variety of slug from the Western Isles, black-banded skunk essence from the Crescent Isles jungles and a few secret ingredients of my own. I'm reliably informed that the mere hint of its smell suffices to stun or slay most creeping creatures.\"\n\nThe Master snapped, \"And most bipeds too \u2013 unholy smoking fumaroles, daughter! You keep that gunge out of our roost, do you hear me? One spillage and it'll gnaw a hole through the floor!\"\n\n\"Exactly. You're learning, father Dragon.\"\n\n\"And how,\" he said feelingly. \"Teenage daughters are a new education every minute, I tell you.\"\n\nAt the speed of a hunting Dragon, mirth ambushed Auli-Ambar. Her father's wish had been that she should be taken to Gi'ishior by these two crazy people? She had no idea what to do with such a feeling, no experience of laughter so overwhelming that every guffaw cramped her belly muscles to the point of agony, but she laughed until she wanted to cry, only her defective eyes would never shed any tear. She pulled her headscarf close to disguise the strange whooping noises her misshapen mouth made, but they did not seem to mind.\n\nA short while later she found herself tracing Zimtyna's angular cheekbones with her fingertips and feeling her flaxen hair, whatever colour flaxen meant, and acquiring an education of her own in the ways of generous lips and a mouth slightly upturned at the corners, which dimpled as she inadvertently tickled the older girl's skin. She discovered a truly aquiline Fra'aniorian nose, a high brow and ears much pointier than her own. Then came the surprise of Master Chamzu's beard \u2013 so full, it reached his chest!\n\nNever had she imagined such an abundance of facial hair.\n\n\"Where does your mouth hide beneath this bush?\" she gasped, trying to untangle her fingers from an unexpectedly wiry whisker trap with alacrity. \"How do you eat, Master?\"\n\n\"I am wont to employ my beard as an additional storage facility for victuals,\" he replied drily, \"thereby avoiding outright starvation.\"\n\n\"What \u2013 you couldn't \u2013 but, Master \u2013 oh!\"\n\nHeat rushed up Auli-Ambar's neck so fast, she thought her ears might just start shooting miniature fireballs off their tips. All felt surreal, as though she were reaching out with her hands for a future that was so exquisite and unattainable, it would break her heart if she could not grasp it. Their delighted laughter resounded in her ears in a tiny echo of thunder. She wanted to dissolve through the floorboards. Always, people laughed at her. Never with her.\n\nThen, as the Dragonship surged through coolness \u2013 the volcano's shadow, she realised \u2013 there came to her ears a most glorious peal of music. Dragonsong.\n\nWith enormous gravitas, the Master announced, \"Welcome to the home of Dragons, Auli-Ambar.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In the Halls of the Dragons",
                "text": "\u2002From the very first, I knew the beauty of magic in the voices of Dragons. It should come as no surprise that creatures of fire and enchantment should speak in mellifluous canto; only, of the millions of lines of scroll lore inked concerning fainting maidens and exceedingly glorious draconic poetry, no single quill stroke succeeds in encapsulating one pivotal truth: Dragons speak magic. They do not believe they do. Were the paw of truth to slap the average Dragoness sideways across ten Isles, still she would not believe it.\n\n\u2002Dragons are also marvellously stubborn. That, they proudly admit.\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Of Magic's Quirks and Illusions\n\nAuli could not drink in enough of her surrounds. The sounds thrilling her ears were of persons and Dragons chatting, snatches of song and the fluttering of wings so mighty they set off small whirlwinds that buffeted the Dragonship hither and thither. Men shouted and the crew hollered greetings to all quarters as the Dragonship sailed onward, making for the landing stage \u2013 she knew this detail from the ballads. A huge body swished by overhead, calling out what sounded like an apology in a foreign language. Dragonish? Her heart stood still in her throat. That beast was huge, the swish-*thump* of its passage as if someone had pounded her eardrums with huge, soft-headed drumsticks.\n\n*Ting, ting, plink!* Hammers and chisels tapped busily away to her left hand. Workmen preparing stone for building, Auli concluded. She heard sounds like leather scraping across rock accompanied by monstrously heavy footfalls \u2013 could that be Dragons walking? They must shake the ground! Somewhere, a younger-sounding draconic voice complained bitterly amidst fluttering and splashing sounds. A smile quirked her ruined lips. Perhaps hatchlings did not enjoy bath times?\n\n*GRRRARRRGH!* The air reverberated and Auli ducked, but nobody else seemed to take notice of a massive roar that rolled over her like adjacent thunder.\n\nShe touched her left ear. Ouch.\n\nShortly, the hawsers sang out and the Dragonship sank slowly as squealing winches took up the strain. Zimtyna helped Auli to disembark; with one hand she drew her headscarf close to her face and the other clutched her Dragon so hard it dug painful indentations into her palm. Auli stuck like a shadow to the older girl's side. How would she remember everything in this cavernous space? How would she ever find her way amidst such a bustle and kafuffle? Yet there was a hand to help and a voice to guide her up stairways and into the Human-inhabited levels, while Zimtyna explained how Human-sized tunnels served the Dragon roosts, intertwining with the larger living spaces demanded by the Dragonkind. Entrance to those tunnels was restricted, of course, and much more so to the higher roosts \u2013 apparently, the higher up the volcano a Dragon or Human lived, the more important they were deemed to be.\n\n\"Sapphurion and his mate Qualiana balked at that trend, admittedly,\" Zimtyna said. \"Sapphurion is the leader of all Dragons, a Sapphire Dragon of mighty stature. He and his mate live about three-quarters of the way up the volcano on the West side, or in our reckoning, on the fifth level. Levels are counted from the top. You'll need to remember that when we introduce you to the cleaning schedule, or \u2026 now I'm muddled up. You know which Island I mean. Tomorrow.\"\n\nAuli nodded.\n\n\"I have to go already,\" the Master sighed. The thumping of his heavy boots echoed in a narrowing space. A tunnel? \"A million matters that absolutely cannot wait for the morning, ostensibly \u2013 what does that flock of brainless parakeets take me for, the Hatchling Mother? Do take Auli up to the roost and settle her in, there's a sweet little daughter.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" the daughter gritted between her teeth.\n\n\"I'm to stay with you?\" Auli inquired shyly.\n\n\"We weren't very well prepared \u2026 you see \u2013\" the older girl fell silent as they navigated a curving flight of steps and Auli's mouth watered at the delicious scent of sweetbread a-bake wafting through the tunnel \"\u2013 Dad's been lost since my mother died five years ago. She was pregnant, but perished aboard a Dragonship on the way back from Seg Island. If she had been here, the healers might have been able to save her.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Zimtyna.\"\n\n\"I would've had a little sister. Mom haemorrhaged \u2013 I'm \u2013 just let me \u2026\" Cloth rustled as the older girl apparently wiped her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was tight and harsh. \"Auli, please don't take this the wrong way. We debated having you in with us, if we needed to take you from your Aunt and Uncle as we suspected. Your father and mine have been great friends for many years, but their friendship has become more strained since King Chalcion's rise to power. All manner of affairs are tense around the Isles and especially here at Gi'ishior \u2026 but I'm doing my parakeet tricks again. It felt too painful to have you live with us, so instead we planned to have you stay literally outside our front door, which will always be open to you.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026\"\n\n\"Day or night, Auli. That's an order.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nAuli grimaced. No, she did not, and never could.\n\n\"I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us, my sweet pollen puff.\" Zimtyna squeezed her hand. \"Here we are. So, you'll have three chambers. They're petite but sweet, in my opinion, and decorated in colours that \u2026 well \u2026 never mind.\"\n\n\"All for me?\"\n\n\"A \u2013 Aye. They look nice.\"\n\nAgain, that catch in her voice. Auli-Ambar's knees trembled as Zimtyna guided her through a doorway. It was too much. There was a bedchamber that barely fit a basket bed large enough for four of her, a separate toilet and washing chamber, and then a living area which was essentially a sunken 'cushion bowl' with small raised plinths for holding drinks or food, and a portable lap desk, none of which struck her as very comfortable. Mistress Sairana was a firm believer in hard, upright chairs and straight backs at all times. Auli found her hands stroking the fine fabrics of the floor cushions, decorated with expensive Fra'aniorian lace edgings, with a fierceness that took her quite by surprise. Hers. A tiny echo of the draconic possessiveness enshrined in the ballads and lore she knew.\n\n\"This will be my space? All of it?\"\n\nHonestly. A squawk like a surprised dragonet!\n\n\"If you prefer, I could offer you space in the broom closet, complete with a bed constructed from spare buckets and sponges,\" Zimtyna teased. \"Now, pictures \u2013 shall I choose something for you? Or would you prefer sculptures you can touch? What else will you need? Just say the word.\"\n\nAuli just stood amidst the cushions, paralysed.\n\n\"Come over to the big roost when you're ready, Auli. Out the door, left. I'll show you my room and we can dig through my closet for clothes I wore when I was your age. We need to dress you like a girl, not some ragamuffin from the back streets of Fra'anior.\" After a minute, Zimtyna added softly, \"This isn't a dream, despite all you might think or dread. Tonight, we'll craft a message to your father and tomorrow, I'll start introducing you to the secrets of this little mountain.\"\n\nWhen the other girl's slippers had whispered away into the hallway, Auli slowly sank down amongst the soft cushions. She stroked a raised thread pattern absently, slowly working out that it was a stylised Dragon, yet one depicted with four wings, if her fingertips did not deceive her. This wasn't a dream, was it? Nor a cruel joke. Nobody would dare to send the Chief Scrollkeeper of all Gi'ishior plus a Dragonship crew across the Isles on a mere whim, but neither could Auli grasp why they had purposed to salvage a child of such wretched genesis as her.\n\nSave \u2026 the kindness of their hearts?\n\nEven should she work her fingers to the bone, she could never thank Master Chamzu and his daughter enough.\n\nAfter a minute, she fished the Red Dragon out of her pocket and felt around for a place to put him. She settled upon a small shelf above her basket-weave bed. Softly, she said, \"I'll need a brave watch-Dragon to guard my room. Stay alert, Red.\"\n\nFra'anior grant her courage!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Early the following morning, washed, breakfasted, dressed and so terrified she feared her very living pith might boil and abscond out of her ears in bubbling, steaming streams, Auli-Ambar tiptoed beside Zimtyna down to the Roost Keepers' office on the sixth underground level. Level minus six. Most levels they passed felt and smelled the same to her, but several had distinctive scents or features on the entrances reached off the main spiral staircase \u2013 one of seven arranged at the points of an irregular heptagon around the volcano's circumference \u2013 that served as a thoroughfare for the volcano's denizens. Every seventh level there were horizontal tunnels that eventually connected the stairwells, but not all linked through. Additional sections had been added over the centuries and many modifications or repairs completed, making the layout a veritable dragonet's warren. She focussed on memorising everything Zimtyna was telling her, but the flow of information was too fast and the details too scant at the same time. She would have to go over everything again.\n\nSeveral times. This place was no village. It was a Dragon city.\n\nAuli wore a sky-blue, knee-length tunic top of quite the finest weave she had ever donned. Beneath that, the ties of the plain, dark grey linen leggings had to be wrapped twice around her diminutive waist lest the garment slip off her hips. 'Huh, nothing for Dragons to gnaw on here,' Zimtyna had said, poking her left hip bone before tapping her ribs playfully. 'Shameful. Like a Western Isles xylophone.' Mental scroll mark: find out why Western Islanders played music on peoples' ribs. Were they cannibals? A pair of second-hand blue slippers shod her feet. Zimtyna had seemed much preoccupied with making her look presentable and matching the colour of her headscarf to the tunic and shoes, and describing her outfit in ways that were of little practical use to a blind girl. Auli wrinkled her nose. She supposed it made sense that the co-ordination of colours mattered to sighted people.\n\nSix days a week, she should report to the office by the second hour according to crystal timepieces kept magically synchronised in all the roosts. They played a different bar of plinking music for every half hour of the day in a progression Zimtyna had dismissed as something to learn later. 'Three on, one off, four on, one off,' Auli repeated to herself. What did one do with rest days in the nine? Oh, those were to be filled with catch-up work on learning the Dragonish language. Perfect. The very notion of indolence made her skin itch.\n\nStill, children apparently merited the concession of working only seven hours a day. Auli-Ambar would attend additional schooling with the youngsters and hatchlings in the afternoons under the direction of Inxulia the Hatchling Mother, a Grey Dragoness of formidable reputation.\n\nA rising hubbub of voices proclaimed their advent at the office, where duties and rosters would be handed out. Most of the men and women already knew their schedules, but there were always exceptions \u2013 visiting Dragons and Humans, special requests, the odd infestation of tunnelworm or vermin, flooded bathing chambers or blocked pipework, grumpy Dragons who needed to be appeased \u2026 Zimtyna had many lists and they were all apparently endless; the cause of much sighing and bottomless terrace lakes of anguish. Auli covered her throbbing ears as the commotion reached a frenzied peak, but then Mistress Frantia \u2013 called 'frantic' behind her back but never to her face, Zimtyna confided \u2013 started barking orders with the air of an angry hound. The workforce scattered to the winds.\n\n\"I am not happy!\" snarled the Mistress, over and over. \"Find the cause of that stench on level seventeen tertiary segment, would you? Aye, I mean you! I am not happy!\"\n\nThis, too, was standard behaviour.\n\nAuli was supposed to ignore the snap-and-snarl routine. Predictably, what happened instead was that she started to tremble so violently that Zimtyna had to physically restrain her shoulders before forcing her to advance to meet the Mistress.\n\n\"Auli? What an unusual name \u2013 heavens weeping fires, girl, what's the matter with your eyes?\"\n\nZimtyna said, \"She's the one I told you about last night, Mistress.\"\n\n\"I'm a busy woman. So I'm to have a blind girl foisted upon me, eh? I am not happy!\"\n\n\"You wisely suggested we might pair her with Tarshina in the lower roosts,\" Zimtyna reminded her, so politely that Auli knew this for another deception.\n\n\"Tarshina? Aye, that could work. I am full of excellent ideas, as usual,\" opined the Mistress. \"She can clean?\"\n\n\"I tested her myself, Mistress.\"\n\n\"I am not happy, but I suppose she can have a trial just like everyone else. Tarshina! Where are you hiding, you wretched ankle gnawer?\" The Mistress leaned down so far that her strident tones ruffled the wisps of Auli's fringe back from her forehead. \"My expectations are high, girl. Very high. What do you have to say for yourself?\"\n\n\"I'll do my best?\" Auli just about managed.\n\n\"I despise squeaky little girls! Firm answers in the future, please. Now, be off with you and mind you do not make my mood any worse.\"\n\nA new voice, burry with a definite lisp, said, \"I am here, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Zimtyna! Brief them!\"\n\nThe Mistress drew away, rounding upon her next victim with a low growl, leaving Auli-Ambar to the mercies of her new work companion.\n\nTarshina was a gentle soul, sweet and apparently possessed of Islands of patience. She smelled strongly of lavender oil, which she had lavished in her dark curls because the smell of caustic, ammonia-based soap apparently made her sneeze uncontrollably. Tarshina was also astonishingly clumsy. She spilled the entire contents of her bucket three times during the course of the morning and broke a vase in the first roost they cleaned, and then rushed off for a replacement leaving Auli lost as to what to do.\n\nThankfully, most Dragon roosts followed the same basic layout. A wide, Dragon-sized tunnel or entryway led to the 'portal', usually a double set of doors set seventy to one hundred feet apart, which guarded the inner roost. The main living space was a chamber of a size that beggared belief, boasting flat Dragon couches with a remarkably hard rush filling, usually upholstered in animal leather or pungent ralti furs. Floor-to-ceiling crysglass windows lined the caldera side, similarly to the modest window in the living room of her own chamber. These were cleaned every second month, and in the Dragon roosts could only be fully reached by tall ladders. Some roosts boasted a granite, sandstone or even gemstone perch for the male Dragon, which set him above his mate or his visitors, depending on nuances of protocol Tarshina began to explain before becoming muddled.\n\n\"Ask someone else,\" she giggled. \"Dragon culture confuses me. I've only lived here all my life, you know.\"\n\n\"Less than a day for me,\" Auli-Ambar returned.\n\nThe Humans, one of whom was beginning to feel more and more minuscule in these great spaces, entered the roosts from behind, usually through the servants' entrance located in the kitchen area. Here were cupboards, gourd and basket containers for spices, and great chopping blocks for the eye-popping quantities of fresh meat or fish Dragons consumed. Most of the Dragonkind ate communally in the great dining hall with its upraised feeding bowls set upon stylised Dragons' paws forged of solid brass, also laughably called 'The Place of Meating' \u2013 Tarshina found this so hilarious it took her ten minutes to explain the joke through hiccoughs of laughter and another spillage, this time of a tall, upright basket of purple fire peppers \u2013 but some Dragons preferred to dine alone, or with close friends. Then, they might have a team of four or five cooks prepare their repast in bowls twice as wide as Auli's arms could reach.\n\nGreat leaping Islands! How big were these Dragons?\n\nAfter scrubbing the kitchen, they whipped around the open living chamber, which looked out over the caldera that Auli would never see, and then brushed down and tidied the cosier bedchamber, where an entire Dragon family might curl upon furs or mounded cushions. Here, the aroma of Dragon was far stronger, like crushed charcoal mingled with exotic spices and tangy oils, and the bedding so heavy that Auli-Ambar worked up a sweat dragging around the huge pieces.\n\n\"Not that way. Cushions below and furs on top,\" Tarshina corrected. And in the next roost, \"No, Islaythior prefers these soft bolsters piled along the wall on top of the furs. You'll learn. Every Dragon has their particularities. Go change the aromatic spices in her brazier, please. She prefers blend seven, the chamomile-dragonroot-santhis blend. Make a note of that.\"\n\nGreat. More confusion!\n\nFour roosts later, their morning's work was deemed done and Auli's back and arms ached, not to mention that two of the blisters on her palms had split open.\n\nAt lunch, taken on long benches in a hall set aside for the Roost Keepers' use, she fell asleep next to her bowl of spicy ralti stew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"Inxulia, this is \u2026 uh \u2026\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar.\"\n\n\"The correct form of address is 'noble Dragoness,' \" Tarshina whispered into her ear, sounding scandalised.\n\nAuli bit her lip and made to correct her mistake, but a convivial, smoky-fragrant breeze blew ruffled her clothing as a wondrous voice intoned, from well overhead, \"Hatchlings come here to learn, Tarshina. Thank you. Welcome to my class, Auli-Ambar. Class, let's greet our new stu \u2013 this student.\"\n\nEven the Dragoness failed to disguise her shock.\n\nMassive nostrils snuffled nearby, sucking her hair about her body, and then Auli felt several sensations at once \u2013 a prickling, another touch about her thoughts similar to what she had experienced with Master Jo'el, and then immediately, a surprisingly warm digit curled about her waist. Two \u2013 three \u2013 five! The Dragoness' talons were each as thick as substantial logs, and Auli found herself pressed briefly against a palm that felt both metallic and organic, the Dragon hide surprisingly pliable even though she knew it to be the hardest armour in the Island-World.\n\nThis was a cage like no other, wherein she quivered like a purple-crested lovebird she had once gently caught in the palm of her hand and ejected from her tiny bedchamber.\n\nThe Dragoness purred, \"I am Inxulia the Hatchling Mother, a Grey Dragoness whose fires blaze most tenderly for the youngest among us.\" Auli decided she smelled like charred tumbling roses. Strangely, at another touch of the Dragoness' mind, her welter of terror seemed to ease. Could she comfort with magic? \"Class, Auli is blind. Do we know what this means?\"\n\n\"She's defective?\" sneered a voice from near the back.\n\n\"I'll have an intelligent answer, Hazzalion,\" reproved the beautiful voice. Such musical power! Every nerve in Auli's body buzzed in response. \"Perhaps you know a famous blind Dragon from history?\"\n\nWhile the hatchling cleared his throat and made little purr-growling noises of dissatisfaction, another voice called, \"Hazzalion couldn't find his own paws on a sunny day, noble Inxulia.\"\n\nAmusement, of both rich Dragonish voices and higher-pitched Human voices, battered Auli's ears. Amidst the clamour she clearly heard someone snap, 'I hate Humans!'\n\nMeantime, pitching her voice to carry, Inxulia said, \"One infraction, Zaxxion, for the slight to your shell-brother. Class, we'll sing the welcome song for Auli-Ambar. Then, I'll recount for you the annals of a Dragon called Azulior. Facts about Azulior?\"\n\n\"Blue Dragon!\" called a sonorous voice.\n\n\"Founder of the Halls.\" This from a young boy, Auli fancied.\n\n\"Leader of the First Paw, originally a mercenary Dragonwing,\" added another student directly in front of Auli, most probably a Dragoness. Her voice was like the notes of a deep and mysterious flute, with breathy overtones.\n\n\"Azulior codified our earliest Dragon lore and drew the Dragon Clans together under one rule of law,\" added an even deeper, more refined tenor \u2013 only a Dragon's voice possessed such a heart-melting timbre, Auli was learning. Was that an older Dragon, a fledgling? \"The mighty Azulior also founded the Halls of the Dragons here at Gi'ishior. He was the first Dragon Elder.\"\n\n\"Very good, Garatoxx the Blue,\" the Hatchling Mother approved. \"Famously, Azulior was blinded in the third battle of Franxx in the year 1,349. That was how long ago exactly \u2013 Emburion?\"\n\nAfter a little ragging from his peers, Emburion ventured, \"2,257 years, noble Inxulia?\"\n\n\"2,258. You failed to allow for the calendar correction following the comet of 498,\" Inxulia replied, making a movement of her wings Auli heard and felt, a leathery creaking and a resulting quiver in the muscles still entrapping her in one mighty paw \u2013 it covered the Human girl from knees to neck! \"Your calculation was otherwise perfect. You haven't covered that material as yet, Emburion the Orange, so that's fine work on your part, unlike your shell-brother Hazzalion. Now, we will all need to work together to help Auli catch up on Dragonish. Therefore for today's lesson, we will translate everything into Island Standard.\"\n\nMany of the class groaned or made rasping sounds as if they had ralti sheep bones stuck in their throats. Auli assumed that was the Dragons. She tried to categorise the pitch and tonal qualities of their voices, and also the extraordinarily nuanced way they spoke. Additionally, the rumbling of the fabled belly fires in each Dragon rose and fell with their responses \u2013 did Dragons truly carry furnaces about with them at all times?\n\nShe was a stranger in a beguiling new world.\n\nThe warm cage around her body suddenly released. The paw guided her to the Dragoness' flank as Inxulia said, \"Sit with me awhile, Auli-Ambar. I'll introduce you to the class. But first, a song and a tale.\"\n\nSo Auli sat cross-legged at the mighty flank of a Dragoness as she led the class in a song of welcome. Despite the thuggish belligerence of several of the contributions around the chamber, the hatchlings sang sweetly indeed. Auli felt a tickling like musical feathers brushing her spine repeatedly, giving her the chills from the base of her skull to the tips of her twitching toes, but she swallowed the eerie melodic compulsion back. No. She was peculiar enough already without introducing the class to her unusual voice on the very first day. Perhaps a little humming. Deeply. That would satisfy the inquisitive, surely, and turn their eyes and thoughts to other paths?\n\nDragon check. Her heart turned upside down. Oh no. She had forgotten her Red in her chambers. How glad Auli was for her face veil to hide the trembling of her lower lip.\n\nYet after the singing, the equally musical voice of Inxulia spirited the hatchlings and fledglings away with a rousing tale of the Dragons of yore, recounting a time after the vacuum left by the departure of the Ancient Dragons had given rise to Dragon Clans that warred and strived against each other for rulership of territory, riches and slaves \u2013 on a smaller but hardly less destructive scale than the powers which had preceded them. Azulior was the leader of a mercenary Dragonwing based out of Fra'anior Cluster. He warred with kith and kindred for many years, slowly becoming disillusioned with the rule of paw and fang, and longing for a better way.\n\nInxulia spent some considerable time elaborating on Azulior the Blue's many exploits in battle, evoking the explosive roar and clash of Dragon combat until Auli-Ambar began to feel decidedly queasy at all the blood being splattered through the annals of history. She startled when Inxulia produced a mighty battle challenge that left a ringing in her left ear for many long minutes afterward, and the Dragoness' illustrative paw gestures made her bounce about against that increasingly febrile surface. It was like leaning against a wall of flexible metal knowing there was a fire raging right behind \u2013 both comforting and alarming at the same time! Yet she understood why Inxulia did this when the Hatchling Mother explained the nuances of praise-honour due to the Dragon's legendary status in antiquity; so notable was he, even Gi'ishior's calendar-keeping measured its first year from the Founding of the Halls, the Year of Azulior, in the major calendar year of 1,355.\n\nAzulior's tale turned on a talon stroke with his betrayal at the battle of 1,349, as the allied Franxxian Clans had paid off two of the Blue Dragon's closest allies to ambush him mid-battle. They tore out his eye orbs and cast him down upon an outer Isle, where he was rescued by an exile named Fra'kubar.\n\n\"Fra'kubar?\" called a Dragon from the back. \"The Fra'kubar, as in Fra'kubar the Furious? Wasn't he a Dragon?\"\n\n\"No, Garothiar the Yellow,\" Inxulia said. \"He was called 'the Furious' because of his famous temper, which many likened to that of a feral Dragon. That's another story. He was exiled because he killed a rajal on his native Island of Fra'anior \u2013 only, the rajal had been released in the Palace in an attempt to assassinate the then-King, whose name escapes me right now.\"\n\n\"Jarkurion the left-handed,\" Auli blurted out, before snapping her jaw shut. Oh, flying ralti sheep \u2026\n\nThe Hatchling Mother crowed, \"Excellent knowledge, Auli! Class, we have a young scholar in our midst.\"\n\nJudging by the snarls and a smattering of sarcastic finger clicking, being a scholar was not a status to be treasured. Auli concluded she had probably just earned herself more than a pawful of teasing. A sly talon in the neck, in all probability. She shrank back against Inxulia's flank, wishing she could waft away like pollen on a breeze.\n\nThe Dragoness said, \"Fearing Fra'kubar's valour and growing popularity amongst the people, King Jarkurion immediately determined to send him on a long and perilous expedition to the East, from which he was never meant to return. That incident gives rise to the Isles saying, 'Better a rajal's claw than a King's paw.'\"\n\nOh! Proverbs had real origins? Suddenly, Auli felt as if a window stood open in her mind, letting in a fresh breeze of new ideas. She squirmed upright, listening with her very soul.\n\n\"His healing took two years due to the severity of the great Dragon's battle wounds, but Fra'kubar patiently nursed Azulior and helped him by hunting small animals for meat. For this service, he received the honour of flying in a basket borne in Azulior's left paw back to his native Fra'anior, for a blind Dragon needed a pair of eyes to guide him safely across the Island-World.\"\n\n\"Forged in the baleful fires of tragedy, their friendship became adamantine. It is unclear from the records when exactly Azulior and Fra'kubar determined to found the Halls of the Dragons, but the result of their work has been an ages-long home for Dragons, and the rise of the greatest power of Dragon governance North of the Rift. It is impossible to quantify the contributions of this hub to the arenas of culture, medicine, research in the many sciences, the preservation and development of Dragon lore, and the pursuit of the excellence of all things Dragonish. That is the purpose of these Halls. Not to rule the Island-World, but to be outward-looking in our service to Dragonkind and Humankind alike. And you \u2013 each one of you \u2013 are part of this great tradition founded upon the bond between a mighty Dragon and a noble Human, just as the Seven-Headed Onyx Dragon famously loved the peoples of his paw.\"\n\nInxulia added, \"It is for Fra'anior's sake that we Dragons of Gi'ishior keep our Human allies close to the whitest fires of our hearts. Thus, we bless the mighty fires of His eternal name.\"\n\nAnd she squeezed Auli-Ambar's knee delicately between fore-talon and first-thumb."
            },
            {
                "title": "Green-Fanged Rat",
                "text": "\u2002The Gi'ishior rat is a beast of legend, the scuttling spawn of ten thousand myths. Growing up to one and a half feet in body length, with four distinctive inch-long green fangs in the upper jaw and two in the lower, the largest adults have been known to fearlessly face down hounds or even small rajals, and to attack Human infants in their cribs. The presence of this fierce rodent, it is said, is the basis of the Isles practice of carrying a dagger 'long enough to skewer a rat.'\n\n\u2002Needless to say, the green-fanged rat has achieved considerably less success against Dragons, being the main entertainment in the hatchling game known as, 'Baste the Beast.' This game has the salubrious side effect of culling the rat population, and therefore should be greatly encouraged by the Dragon Elders.\n\n\u2014Narkurion the Brown, Beasts of the Isles, Fourth Compilation (Unabridged)\n\nFor Auli-AmBAR, her first month in the Halls passed in a whirl of exhaustion, hunger for learning and spasmodic episodes of embarrassment.\n\n\"You're tired because your brain is working so hard, I can hear it sizzling from over here,\" Zimtyna told her at least ten times. \"Aye, those are the correct verb forms in Dragonish. Now, do you remember the emotional nuances?\"\n\n\"I must have learned at least fifty,\" Auli groaned.\n\n\"Technically, there are over eleven thousand possible combinations. The subject is hotly debated \u2013\"\n\n\"Whaa-aaat?\"\n\n\"Indeed. Imagine an impassioned debate between Dragon linguists \u2013 fireballs and fangs hardly cover the basics. And that's just the emotional nuances.\" Over Auli's heartfelt growl, Zimtyna cooed, \"Did we get lost again today?\"\n\n\"No, I only cleaned the wrong roost. Twice.\"\n\n\"And you earned the immortal badge of honour: 'I am not happy!' \" Zimtyna hooted.\n\n\"Fourth time this week.\"\n\nThat had not been a pretty interview with Mistress Frantia, who grew frantic under the burden of an unseasonal rash of visitors.\n\n\"You didn't notice there was no dirt?\"\n\nAuli-Ambar wished her tongue did not end up imitating a petrified plank whenever someone teased her. Shyly, she admitted, \"The Dragon made that fact clear as he booted me out. I \u2013\"\n\n\"May I point out that Dragons don't wear \u2013\" She broke off as a young boy knocked on the doorpost. Zimtyna walked over to receive the message scroll. \"Ralti poo, it's another lava leak on level nineteen sector four. Have to dash, Auli. Take a break from studying, will you? Do you ever take a break?\"\n\nAnother quiet evening in the roost. Auli-Ambar scowled at the walls. She had no idea what her scowl looked like, nor walls for that matter, but it felt satisfying; a necessary reaction to the invisibility that surrounded her every waking moment. Fact: Zimtyna and Master Chamzu had affixed a name plaque to Auli's door to remind them of who she was. Dragons seemed to resist the forgetting more effectively than Humans, but she had been welcomed afresh to her class at least once a week, usually after a rest day. Zimtyna's speaking to the Hatchling Mother had improved her memory, Auli deduced, for she had not been forgotten for ten days running now \u2013 a new record. Marvellous.\n\nAuli stood purposefully. She was stubborn. She would learn her way around these Halls if it killed her.\n\nFor this mission, she should find the library. Zimtyna had shown her the way twice; she ought to be able to make it on her own.\n\nThirty minutes, three stubbed toes, two embarrassing collisions and umpteen wrong turns later, Auli thanked her helper \u2013 a girl from her class called Su'izyan \u2013 and sloped sheepishly into the Dragon Library. The girl's parting words rang in her mind, 'Why would you want to go to a library? You're blind, no disrespect.'\n\nAye, but did that fact lessen her hunger? Or exacerbate it?\n\nAuli turned these bitter, uncomfortable thoughts about in her mind as she slowly walked through the great entryway to the Dragon Library, breathing deep of its hushed, sacrosanct atmosphere as she moved to her left hand, along a walkway that brushed the first great racks of scrolls that towered to a height of some three hundred feet overhead, she had learned. Each level could be reached by additional ladders and gantries. Her fingers lightly brushed the worn wooden guardrail as she walked steadily along the heavy jalkwood timbers, listening carefully for anyone who might be approaching, Human or \u2026 Dragon! Auli-Ambar stood aside politely, but the Dragon moved past with the care of a huge beast whose tonnage creaked every timber, minding his wings and tail. If he found her presence unusual, he gave no sign.\n\nShe caught the Dragon's pungent scent as the massive beast moved past, his right flank brushing against a couple of poorly stowed scrolls. Was this the surly Orange Dragon who had met with Master Chamzu several weeks before? She must give greeting, for Zimtyna had impressed upon her that to not acknowledge a passing Dragon was a sin of epic proportions.\n\nAuli ventured, \"Sulphurous greetings, noble \u2026 Razzior?\"\n\nHe paused. \"Child? Ah \u2013 you are \u2026 you're the girl from Chamzu's roost, aye?\" Almost, he had misremembered \u2013 but even as she bowed formally, the Dragon said, \"Dragons never forget a detail.\"\n\nLiar. She could prove otherwise.\n\nThen, in a tone dissimilar to anything she had heard rumbling from the Master's chambers that night, he hissed, \"You'd do well not to stray beneath my paws, little blind girl.\" Suddenly, an awareness of simmering, unseen peril smothered her soul. \"An accident would be messy indeed. You should watch your step \u2013 not that you can, ha-ha-harrrggghh!\"\n\nWith a bloodthirsty, horrific chortle he lumbered on, leaving a block of ice in his wake. Well, a thinking block of ice, but her only knowledge was that of an abiding terror like Razzior's frozen talon speared into her gut, then slowly twisted until her entrails locked up in an agonising knot. It seemed to take forever before Auli remembered how to breathe again, and even then she could not quell her trembling. She clutched her stomach, praying she would not vomit. Not here.\n\nWhy pick a child to threaten? She was nothing to a mighty Dragon. Less than nothing.\n\nAuli stumbled on, peripherally aware of passing through the second archway to the left, one of five arranged in an engineer's neat hexagon around that first central chamber \u2013 the main entrance being one side of the hexagon \u2013 and on into the linked galleries of Dragon-sized books, as Zimtyna had described the layout to her. Blindly, ruing the import of that word as she fled, Auli walked along the great rows of shelving, touching them with her fingertips. Counting. Memorising. Even in her inner pain, remembering she must not become lost. Her mind catalogued scents by the dozen. The pungent leather binding of the books, mingled with a confusing tang of minerals. Gold? Silver? The drier, mustier odour of the scrolls and a tarter tincture which increased in intensity as she rapidly walked the length of five galleries, barking her knees four times against poorly-shelved volumes, before she recalled the warning about stairwells serving higher and lower library levels.\n\nIt was so peaceful here. Auli slowed. Her head turned slowly as she listened. Was someone watching her? Something? Razzior was gone, but she could not shake the feeling. Quickly, she ducked away down one of the scroll aisles, deftly touching the regular, box-shaped racks with her fingertips. There was no reason for anyone or anything to stalk her down here.\n\nAye, it was so. So tranquil was the space in which she found herself, Auli began to listen to her heartbeat. She fancied she could almost hear the scrolls talking to each other, overhead and all around, like winds of knowledge whispering through nearby trees. The stillness seemed inexplicably infectious. It whispered peace to her soul. <Here is knowledge. Here is passion. Here is lore that will set you free.> Free from what? Essaying another few steps, Auli-Ambar found herself nose-to-spine with an island of huge Dragon books. These were not traditional scrolls, but actual sheets of scrolleaf bound together as single tomes, although she could not possibly have lifted one. Even standing on her tiptoes she could not reach the top of the hard leather spine of a single one of these books, and this was just the bottom shelf, Zimtyna had said.\n\nHow many sheep must it take to leather-bind all of these volumes? Or, was the binding leather? She was not certain. Animal hide for certain, plus metallic and gemstone insets \u2013 but some covers were wholly metal, she discovered, as if their enticing inner realms must perforce be treated as treasure chests, kept under lock and key.\n\n<Here lie secrets. Keys to the beyond. Here is home.>\n\nShe bit her lip, unable to understand how deep and visceral was her response to this place. Books did not talk \u2013 did they? Dragging her feet with trancelike lassitude, she appraised that central island of tomes for what seemed to her must have been hours, soaking in the wonder of her surrounds. She caressed the spines, some two or even three feet thick, and traced the runes graven or embossed into their lengths with her sensitive fingertips, imagining what must lie inside. Words. Knowledge. New worlds. Magical portals to places she had never been, ideas she had never known, bright shining dreams that might possess the power to drive back the darkness that shrouded her every waking moment.\n\nAuli tiptoed, and dreamed.\n\nAfter a very long time, she unexpectedly found a gap between two gigantic tomes. She did not hesitate. Auli crept inside and curled up into a foetal ball. Her left hand clasped her miniature Dragon. All she wanted was to enter into that which life had denied her most cruelly.\n\nShe hummed a sad little tune in her dragonet's piping tones."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "In the infinitesimal grey lands between sleeping and wakefulness, Auli found a presence waiting for her. Vast, primeval, brooding, it watched her with the patience of a being old beyond knowing, and with the ardour of a flame-hearted creature brooding over its young.\n\nThey were wrong. There was a presence here in the Library. There was a soul hidden somewhere amidst these heaped-up massifs of knowledge, amidst the serried tales and lore which had been collected by the labours of countless scholars over the course of two and a half thousand years. Here was a terrace lake that if she could only dive into it, would prove boundless.\n\nHere she would sleep, and dream of Dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Falling asleep in the library earned her a firm scolding from Zimtyna. For the first time, she sounded like Mistress Frantia as she barked, \"I am not happy! You cannot wander off on your own and fall asleep down some hole in the Dragon Library without letting someone know!\"\n\nAuli wanted to object. She had not fallen down a hole. What had happened was that the Head Librarian himself, the venerable Green Dragon Sazutharr, had overheard gentle snores emanating from between his treasured books. He had instructed his Under-Librarian Ornath, who happened to be Human and most vocally put out to bend his already aching back to the task, to fetch her out in the morning. Auli-Ambar had woken when he shook her foot determinedly; this occasioned a scream and the loss of at least ten years of her unfortunate life.\n\n\"Hardly your finest moment!\" snorted Zimtyna. \"For a walking mouse you've been quite the troublemaker of late. Make sure you don't find any more mischief to fall into today \u2013 alright? Straight to work, straight to classes, straight back to the roost again.\"\n\n\"As you command, Mistress Zimtyna.\"\n\n\"Command? Be grateful you haven't heard my commanding tone as yet!\"\n\nDown below, it was, \"I'm not happy! Fancy disturbing the Head Librarian, the cheek! You're on the visitor roosts today, girl! Shake a leg and don't get lost this time! I can't afford any spare hands to show you around.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar bobbed her head meekly. \"I'll start on the twenty-sixth level, third-seventh sector, fourth roost of the Eastern aspect, Mistress Frantia.\"\n\n\"Aye, start there. Then you've another four jobs on your list \u2013 Tarshina will read them off for you. Memorise them properly this time. And no tardiness! You'll need to work like Fra'anior's own stormtide this morning, or my visitors will not be happy, and you know what that means. Now, scram!\"\n\nFrantia's unhappiness came as no surprise. She would find the visitor roosts without mishap. No problem. What startled her was the mild sting of a swat on her backside that accompanied the Mistress' final admonition, 'scram!' Always, she had been hit in anger \u2013 but this did not feel like anger. She did not understand the difference. Not meant to hurt? Could people hit without harming, just as words could be cast to hurt or to heal, to surprise or to steal away happiness?\n\nAs promised, after sprawling headlong over an ill-behaved bucket which must most assuredly have jumped out to bark her shins, and finding her route to the correct level courtesy of a kindly old man taking her by the elbow, Auli worked diligently all that morning. She had plenty of opportunity to puzzle over the Mistress' gesture, and huge, empty Dragon roosts in which to sing a few songs she had learned in High Dragonish, the poetic-formal expression of their language. Her one attempt at a dance step landed her splat on her backside in a puddle of soapsuds, so after that she eschewed dancing in favour of plying her mop with some decidedly non-standard, flowing movements that would have had the Mistress yelling in her ears. No mind. She fluffed Dragon pillows with all the strength in her skinny arms, rooted out a couple of stinky bones from beneath pile of ralti fur in another roost \u2013 no trouble finding them by the nostril-searing stench \u2013 and generally made herself as messy as usual. When one had to crawl around feeling for dirt, clothes were destined for a hard time.\n\nMaybe she should start wearing cleaning pads on her knees and elbows? Auli giggled \u2013 and skate around on the thick, palm-sized chunks of soap? Not likely. She'd fetch herself a nasty blow on an unseen plinth or tumble down a set of Dragon-sized stairs into a seating area.\n\nExiting the fourth roost of her working morning, Auli-Ambar heard an unexpected noise in the tunnel just behind her. A stifled chortle.\n\n\"Tarshina?\" she called, touching the doorframe to orient herself. \"Is that you?\"\n\nNo reply, just a fluttering sound, like cloth snapping in a breeze.\n\n\"Please don't sneak up on me, whoever you are. It isn't funny. Please \u2026 wait! Let me go!\" Her small shriek echoed in the Human tunnel that ran behind the roosts on each level.\n\n\"Quick paws now,\" purred a voice.\n\n\"Hazzalion? Is that you? Please, what are you \u2013 no!\"\n\nThe assault was too rapid; too well thought-out. Paws seized her arms. Were these Dragons small enough to slip up into these tunnels? A rope looped around her neck and snugged tight. Auli screamed and struggled, but even hatchling Dragons were far stronger than she would ever be. Her head smacked something very hard.\n\nSomeone said in Dragonish, <Are you sure \u2013>\n\n<Shut your fangs, Emburion, you null-fires idiot,> snarled another voice. Hazzalion's brutish tones.\n\n<Give me that rope,> ordered Zaxxion, the third shell-brother of the trio. Auli yelled as rough hanks of cord drew tight around her torso, trapping her already bound arms. \"Shut it, girl. This is just a little welcome to our Halls. A draconic hazing.\"\n\nHazing? She had heard briefly about this tradition, but that was meant to be Dragon on Dragon. Not three hatchlings ganging up on a blind Human girl. She fought with all of her strength, sending her bucket and mop flying as she kicked out, but a trio of paws subdued her easily. They did not even bother to unsheathe their retractable talons. No need. Meantime, her heart hammered terror up into her throat, like blows already bloodying her body from the inside. What was this? What would they do to her? Why? Despite her fighting, they soon had her trussed like a fowl for the spit.\n\nHazzalion laughed nastily, \"Weak as a bird, isn't she? Girl, do you know the green-fanged rats of Gi'ishior? Well, guess what's on your back?\"\n\nAuli-Ambar froze.\n\nThere was weight. She felt a scrabbling movement behind her shoulders as the foot-long rodent protested its captivity. Then, the tethered rat bit her in the meat of her left shoulder.\n\n*Squeee!*\n\nThe hatchlings laughed nastily.\n\nShe bolted. Pain and terror lent her feet wings. Sprinting. Sliding. Skidding off stone. Slamming into an unseen wall; the rat's panicked struggles caused its talons to sink with sharp pricks into her shoulders and back, and it kept biting her around the neck, shoulders and ears. Screaming a thin wail of the uttermost terror, Auli fled for longer than she would have believed possible, had she paused to think about it. The poorly-tied ropes at her torso slackened and drooped toward her ankles, tripping her up. She tumbled down a short flight of stairs, narrowly avoiding a nasty fall as she flopped against and then slid down a metal guardrail. Another bite, then gnawing at her left ear! Pain! There were shouts nearby, cries of alarm; Auli-Ambar barrelled past whoever might have tried to help her in a breakaway of absolute madness. Loathsome rats! She had oftentimes heard their scratching little claws in Master Mi'elgan's house. She had dreamed they would enter her room at night and gnaw on her toes.\n\nNow, the creature thrashed its paws and slashed with its characteristic long green fangs. Auli screamed again and again. She half-freed one wrist and tried to beat the creature off her, but the rope-tether held it fast and drew tighter around her neck as she struggled and ran, strangulating her. The rasping of her laboured breathing was the only sound she heard apart from the rat's sharp, high-pitched squealing right behind her head. The ghastly weight kept jouncing about.\n\n*Blam!* Auli-Ambar cannoned through a half-open doorway. Grease! Splinters in her shoulder! Clouds of hot steam! Stumbling over a thick hosepipe, the crazed girl shrieked as the ground disappeared beneath her feet. She landed hard just a couple of feet lower down, skinning her knees thoroughly. One more step forward and she plummeted down a long, thin chute, banging and bumping about like a dried bean in a gourd shaker. Auli's left arm snagged on a ledge and snapped upward uncontrollably.\n\nShe fell endlessly. Then, darkness clouted her with the force of a Dragon's fisticuff."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The girl awoke to a world of throbbing pain. Gradually, she tried to take stock of where she was. What had happened? Her legs seemed twisted beneath her body. Her left arm yammered in agony. The rat! No, there was nothing on her shoulders anymore. No giveaway movement or smell, save for the acrid stench of urine on her clothing that was not her own; Auli's questing right hand touched the rope, still coiled tightly about her neck. She was fortunate not to have been garrotted during the fall. Her skin burned in multiple places. Dully, she recalled learning that rat urine was one of the most corrosive substances in the Island-World.\n\nThen, Auli became aware of two persons talking, seemingly from beneath the floor of the narrow space she had lodged within. Their voices were heavily muffled, but understandable.\n\n\"I'll give you the lore when you deliver \u2013\" the roaring in her ears muddled their speech \"\u2013 Razzior, and not \u2026\"\n\n\"You first.\"\n\n\"Then \u2026 impasse, you loathsome lizard.\"\n\nA man's voice, she recognised dully. Icy-cold. Greedy. Like an unseen snake, it sent chills slithering up and down her spine. Her ears tingled as she focussed more closely.\n\n\"Look, Ra'aba \u2026 choose to trust each other \u2026\" snarled the draconic voice. Her brain finally made the connection \u2013 that Razzior, the same callous Orange who had amused himself threatening a blind girl! He continued, \"We enter this together because we each have what the other wants and we share the same great ambition, but we must proceed with due vigilance \u2026. months, perhaps next storm season \u2026 source enough akkar\u00e9-h\u00fbbram \u2013 the serum isn't exactly common around the Isles \u2013 what was that?\"\n\nAuli realised that the cloth of her tunic top had scraped against an exposed metal ledge as the pain overwhelmed her resolution to lie still.\n\n\"Rats \u2013\"\n\n\"Rats nothing, you shrivelling imbecile! Shut the fangs and let me listen.\" Clearly, the conspirators held little love for one another.\n\nAuli-Ambar held her breath. Nostrils huffed right beneath her, a huge snuffling of air that convinced her that Razzior was a monstrous beast, an adult male Dragon in the prime of his growth. Suddenly, rescue did not seem an attractive prospect.\n\nThe Dragon snarled, \"Aye, I smell you, spy. I hear your craven little heartbeat! Don't think you can fool Razzior the Orange!\"\n\nShe had no strength left for terror, but the incalculable violence promised in the Dragon's voice brought her within an inch of voiding her bowels. Scorching breath soughed around her body like an ill storm wind summoning its utmost destructive power, before the man snapped, \"Stop, Razzior! We'll question the luckless caraboki! If someone knows, or is watching, we'll torture him slowly until every scrap of truth is wrung from his gelid bones!\"\n\nThe Dragon chortled appreciatively.\n\nAuli realised she had come within an inch of being fricasseed. Oh, the blasting agony \u2026 Dragon, Human, they were the same, so similar in tone and malevolence. She must have blacked out. Next she knew, a talon pierced the metal beside her legs with a protesting shriek. The Orange Dragon growled a low, throbbing roll of thunder as he ripped the air vent asunder and dropped her bodily into his paw. A raw scream tore from Auli's throat.\n\nThere was a shocked silence in which all she knew was warmth seeping down her neck and arm.\n\n\"Why, it's the blind child!\" snorted the Dragon.\n\nRa'aba said, \"She's injured. Probably fell down the air vent, the withering fool. You'd best stamp out her life, Razzior.\"\n\n\"No. Be not hasty. I scent opportunity. Consider the increase of trust if you were, say, to rescue this child from a terrible fate \u2013 look. Rope looped about her scrawny little fowl-neck. Animal bites. Someone's done her an evil turn.\"\n\nRazzior twisted the word 'evil', Auli imagined, into a smile upon his huge lips. Despite her fading consciousness, she sensed an answering smile from the man Ra'aba as he first snickered, and then replied, \"You're a fiend, Razzior. That's what I like about you \u2013 we think alike. Good. I'll message you in the same way as before. I've heard this hapless whelpling is the Chief Scrollkeeper's new favourite. With one simple performance, I'll make my welcome at these Halls Dragon proof.\"\n\nRazzior laughed horribly. \"Now you're thinking like a Dragon.\"\n\nPowerful arms plucked her out of the Dragon's paw, yet Ra'aba handled her person with a gentleness she could not fathom. Auli lolled helplessly in the terrible man's arms, recognising that he was wicked to the core, yet he had determined to help her. Why? For some unclear advantage? If only she understood. Never had she felt more the foolish child, sunk in waters beyond her depth.\n\n\"Leave your sword; I'll set up a decoy,\" hissed the Dragon.\n\n*Tzing!* His sword? What did that mean?\n\nThen Auli knew only footsteps receding into a long, echoing tunnel, and Ra'aba's voice calling, \"Help! There's been an accident! Somebody help me find the infirmary!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "For a month, Auli's lower left arm and the right leg from ankle to hip were immobilised in shaped wooden casts secured by strong ralti-leather straps, for her arm had been broken in one place and her leg in four. The most able of the draconic healers, Qualiana, mate to Sapphurion the mighty Dragon Elder, had travelled to the South on official business, and so the healers set Auli's limbs as best they were able. They even summoned a surgeon from the Palace staff, she understood, during the six days she was kept sedated after the 'accident', but he could offer little additional advice. They treated her with Dragon magic, fed her broth by spoon, and a nurse carried her to a toilet when needed.\n\nThen came the well-wishers, and the dreaded questions.\n\nAt first, she could not even speak. Perhaps her lingering terror was understandable, but Auli felt so deeply ashamed of falling down an air vent, words would not come. Very soon Master Chamzu arrived with Master Jo'el and a Healer from the monastery in tow, and her dear Master upon hearing her whispered greeting broke into tears. His tears shattered her reserve. She told him all.\n\nThe road to recovery was an ordeal. Magic and herbs eased her pain, but it was an endless month before the badly broken leg healed well enough for her to set any weight at all upon it. In that time, she learned that Andarraz the Dragon Elder had punished the shell-brothers Zaxxion, Emburion and Hazzalion by engaging them in a bout of Dragon fisticuffs that left the hatchlings in need of their own infirmary on the level above. When she was allowed, members of her class came each in turn to read to her from a book or a scroll, and after her initial embarrassment, she came to enjoy their contributions immensely \u2013 even the less willing ones.\n\nYet her strangeness earned her few friends.\n\nAuli-Ambar soon took to walking with a stick. She bathed her emaciated limbs and exercised steadily, following a regimen prescribed by Qualiana who tarried yet in the far Southern Archipelago, but had taken time to write a scroll of detailed instructions for the healers. Auli should be grateful, Master Chamzu sniffed. And why had Auli not yet composed a message scroll of thanks? She was thankful \u2013 just in pain. Always in pain.\n\nDutifully, Auli dictated a response via Zimtyna.\n\nWhen she returned to work, Mistress Frantia wept upon her shoulder. \"I'm so happy!\" she sobbed. Zimtyna simply could not believe this when Auli told her.\n\nThe laughter her response provoked felt torn from her soul by a Dragon's talons.\n\nAs she slowly returned to her duties and a fuller schedule, Auli-Ambar wished for nothing more than to become invisible, and it seemed that her wish must be granted. Life became normal. Dull, even. She cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, crisscrossing more Dragon roosts than it seemed possible could exist in all the Island-World. Not a peep of song crossed her lips. She made no word of complaint when her limp refused to ease or she became lost in the endless tunnels for the hundredth time. Even the terrible trio of hatchlings seemed to have forgotten her existence, and if Inxulia needed daily reminding of her name, neither person nor Dragon seemed to notice. No-one cared.\n\nWas this not exactly as she wished?\n\nHer soul seemed shadowed, both by inner storms and by a developing awareness of a presence that seemed to pursue her, roaring inchoately in her dreams and whispering behind her feet in the caverns and byways of Gi'ishior. She came to think of her mind as a shining bulwark. Always, she was able to evade its seeking. Was it evil? She did not think so, but it was mighty. A dozen feral Dragons could not have dragged her forth to face its prowling majesty.\n\nTwo storm seasons chuntered by and left. Few aspects of her work or schooling changed, save that Auli became more proficient at her daily tasks, and developed a better-than-passable command of Dragonish. Her command of the handharp graduated from tolerable, according to Music Master Ga'affur, to 'actually bordering upon respectable.' Victory, of a sort! And not once had she been beaten for a misplaced fingering or a less-than-immaculate scale.\n\nIf only every memory of the instrument would not make her scarred back ache as if the Master's whip burned her flesh once more. Could she find no joy in this learning?\n\nHow did one escape the past's shadows?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Another season of unusually heavy storms pounded the Isles called Fra'anior's Crown late in the eleventh year of Auli's life, damaging the observatory above Gi'ishior's volcano and even driving the Dragonkind indoors at times. A slew of hailstones the size of Human fists could shred a Dragon's wing membranes in seconds. After that? Well, few creatures in the Island-World could match cooped-up Dragons for sheer, bloody-minded cantankerousness. The Halls were full of snappish Dragonkind, and the Library overrun with the bored and the curious, who drove the serious scholars to distraction.\n\nEvery couple of months, it seemed, Zimtyna had to raid her closet for longer trousers and lengthier tunic tops. These were working clothes; very different to the fabled lace gowns of the Fra'aniorian elite! Her father came to visit Master Chamzu, and by the bye looked in upon his daughter, cleared his throat, and commented upon how tall and reed-slender she had grown.\n\nHe gave her another Cinizzara Miniature. \"No white ones,\" he said uncomfortably. \"This is an Orange Dragoness. Wings flared.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Father.\"\n\n\"I'll place an order for you, if you'd like. Any particular posture?\"\n\n\"Umm \u2026\" said Auli.\n\n\"A White Dragoness emerging from the shell? Cinizzara does create the most beautiful eggs,\" he suggested. \"Next time I travel over to Rolodia \u2013 such breathtaking terrace lakes you have never seen \u2013 uh, sorry \u2013 I'll order one for you. Aye.\"\n\n\"Aye. Thank you, father.\"\n\nHe seemed to lack words, as she did, to frame the gulf that yawned between them. Xa'an made polite and formal conversation such as might have satisfied the most foppish courtiers of Fra'anior, Auli thought uncharitably, delicately fencing with their verbal daggers. He departed with palpable relief.\n\nHe had done his duty. She, hers.\n\nOnly Auli-Ambar's heart wept, and its rivers could never flow from her eyes. Never.\n\nShe placed the cool metallic Orange Dragon next to her Red on the shelf. Now she would have one for each pocket, left and right.\n\nOne thing remained unchanged. The Dragon Library continued to inveigle her soul with subtle, hypnotic persistence. It seemed nary an evening would pass when her steps did not bend to those hushed halls, to the great forests of books and scrolls that whispered to her of the deep secrets and tantalising riddles hid within their leaves. She murmured in her heart, That I could know thee, alas, alas. At these times a longing would swell in her breast that almost made her sick to think upon it, and she might stand and touch the spine of a single book for an hour or more, yearning for the treasures which lay within, teasing her with their nearness, yet she must forever remain bereft.\n\nThough she explored the Library's avenues and chambers for hours beyond enumeration, Auli never did come to the end of them. That seemed impossible, and the presence she thought she detected, remained frustratingly inscrutable to her senses or to her understanding.\n\nTruly, she felt soul-blind."
            },
            {
                "title": "For the Love of Scrolls",
                "text": "One hot season day two months after the season's last storm pummelled Gi'ishior with thunder like unto the legendary voice of Fra'anior himself, a sweltering day indistinguishable from many before it, Auli entered the Dragon Library at the first hour after suns-set. The bread-baking temperatures of daytime, which had made even the Dragonkind indolent as they sunbathed or at length in the communal pools and the deeper caldera lake, eased slightly as she entered, noting the humming of the volcano-based heat exchange pumps working overtime, keeping the Library's ambient temperature as constant as possible. She sighed at the stirring of cool air. Delectable \u2013 her new favourite word. She used it for everything.\n\n<Good eventide, Auli-Ambar,> a voice greeted her as she entered.\n\nThe Librarian Sazutharr, who was becoming blind due to a draconic form of febrile glaucoma related to great age, was among the few Dragons who unfailingly remembered her name. She oriented toward the sound of his voice, so evoking fallen leaves rustling beneath a carefree footstep, she almost imagined he had tinder-dry shrubbery \u2013 or scrolleaves \u2013 stuck in his throat.\n\n<The most sulphurous greetings of Fra'anior spank thee and thy kin, noble Sazutharr,> Auli returned brightly, in her best Dragonish.\n\n<Be upon thee,> he corrected patiently.\n\n\"Oh, what did I say?\"\n\n\"You suggested Fra'anior spank me and my kin,\" he returned in Island Standard, chortling appreciatively. Returning to Dragonish, he explained, <Spank \u2013 be upon. Do you hear the difference now, little flame?>\n\nAuli-Ambar felt her ears heat up until they resembled twin flags waving alongside her head. <My humblest apologies, noble Dragon.>\n\nShe pictured his deadly, many-fanged smile as he said drily, <May every Dragon learn the forgiveness that nowadays comes so easily to this gnarly-fanged old-timer. Perhaps age hath tempered mine youthful hubris. Ahem. Taking a walk through my Library again, Auli?>\n\n<As always.>\n\n<May you find here all that you seek.>\n\nHe must have uttered that phrase, oh, five hundred times or more, but Auli always thought the aged Dragon meant it with his every fire. Odd. If only yearning and wishes could change the immutable. That would be a trick, one in which Sazutharr seemed to believe.\n\nShe did not understand.\n\nBowing to the Dragon, Auli walked on briskly, knowing this part of the Library by heart, for she had walked its byways for nigh on three years. She had asked whether the books and scrolls ever needed cleaning, only to be curtly refused by Mistress Frantia. 'Enough roosts for a lifetime, girl. Don't you be putting ideas into Sazutharr's head. I am not happy!'\n\nMaybe so, but Auli would have been over the five Moons.\n\nVery soon, familiar scents surrounded her. The muted, shuffling footfall of draconic and Human patrons faded into the distance, and she wandered alone amidst unarguably the greatest trove of knowledge North of the Rift. The girl filled her lungs appreciatively. Leather, leaf and ink, all this was music most mesmeric to a solitary soul. Like a star's spark roaming the ever-dark of night was the radiance of her being within these caverns, and today the Library's unknowable presence, dark yet comforting, seemed especially close as she climbed a narrow spiral staircase, strolled along two long galleries housing the lore of art and culture, and then descended a sharply twisting staircase that turned left-handed rather than right, strangely.\n\nDid she remember this route? Perhaps not. Soon, Auli found herself deeper than she had ever delved in the Library before. So profound was the silence, so deep and expectant the mood of the books surrounding her, that she simply had to sing. She did not know why. Whim and impulse piloted her wanderings through the Dragon Library, and she was delighted nowadays if she might lose herself for a time, for then the moment of rediscovery would come, and the spatial awareness she was developing in her mind would fill in another blank part of the puzzle that was this expansive Library.\n\nAs she vocalised quietly, her unusual voice burbling like a chuckling brook, Auli's hands searched the air ahead of her. Suddenly, she felt a sharp tingle ripple up to her elbows. \"What?\" she yelped. Momentum carried her through into a noticeably warmer space where the dust particles tickled her nose quite peculiarly.\n\nHer sneeze vanished amidst the shelves as though ingested. No echo whatsoever.\n\nOdd.\n\nShe found herself tiptoeing into this new area, and the song died upon her lips. Here the stillness felt deeper and completer, as if satiated by its own presence, no longer needing to be filled by a Human voice. Noise might sully the ambiance. Instead, she found herself drawn to touch the spines of the books once more, and as she reached out, that inexplicable craving smote her so hard she stumbled to her knees. Auli felt her forehead kiss the coolness of an embossed rune. Oh please, great Fra'anior, might she not just once enjoy\u2014\n\n\"By my wings, charming one! What are you doing here?\"\n\nAuli screamed!\n\nPerhaps disconcerted, or worse, encouraged by the effect his over-the-shoulder susurration exerted upon its victim, the Dragon purred in terrifyingly hypnotic tones, \"Girl, how did you even come to enter this section? It's reserved for \u2013\"\n\nShe yelped again, and then flung a hand up to silence her already covered mouth. She mumbled, \"Dragon? Dragon, I'm sorry \u2026 I'm so sorry, I'll just \u2013 I'll go \u2026\"\n\n\"No need,\" he began, but the terrors had seized her feet and she was already sprinting back the way she had come. By a miracle, her fingers found the Human-sized stairwell's railing and she charged upward three steps at a time, somehow managing neither to stumble nor to slam herself into any unseen barrier, despite her unseemly haste.\n\nThe Dragon called after with evident puzzlement, \"Girl? Human girl, wait. I won't harm you. I just wanted to pose a question \u2026\"\n\nShe fled until the scrolls swallowed his voice.\n\n\"Silly dragonet,\" she hissed between her teeth. \"Enough.\" Slowing her headlong rush before she did something memorably stupid, Auli stalked out of the Dragon Library. With every step, she berated herself. What under the suns was that? Or any of the Moons, for that matter? Why run? Why was she such a shrivelling little coward? There was no transgression in taking a stroll of an evening through the Library. She had done so on hundreds of occasions, and she had both the tacit and the spoken permission of Sazutharr himself to do so.\n\nSoon, she fell to puzzling over the Dragon's accent. Young, perhaps a few years beyond fledgling years, but not many. Foreign-sounding. He was neither of Gi'ishior nor even from Fra'anior Cluster, or she missed her mark. Some inexplicable quality or fascination in the remembrance of his cultured, overzealous tones, caused the hair to spring to attention upon her arms. She smoothed it down with irritated swipes of her hands. Islands' sakes, Auli the fowl-hearted had an attack of the old wobbles over the recollection of a Dragon's voice? Bah, with lashings of Zimtyna's anti-rat sauce slathered on top! She had just been startled. He had sneaked up, a male Dragon practicing his stalking skills on a blind, oblivious girl \u2013 very impressive. Bah, bah and double-bah \u2026\n\n<By my wings, charming one.>\n\nAuli shivered. Rather violently, she shook some Isles sense into herself. No Dragon had ever called her charming. She was most certainly not charming. Far, far from it. She was ugly, a misfit, an indistinguishable insect labouring in a very large hive.\n\nThe realisation saddened her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Three days later, Auli-Ambar was back on the cleaning rota, assigned to the visitors' roosts, and firmly back in the leaves of Mistress Frantia's bad scrolls. Right along with everyone else.\n\n\"I am not happy!\" screeched the Mistress, apparently waving her hands so dramatically that she swiped a pile of important scrolls to the floor. A wooden scroll handle struck Auli's foot a sharp blow. Suck in the lips. No sound. \"Seventy-three visiting Dragons and me with half the workforce laid abed with the summer tummy wobbles, whatever they call this \u2013 this rotten excuse for a schedule wrecker!\" She had seen to Zimtyna just that morning, and the illness had made her utterly wretched. Auli, on the other paw, seemed blessed with a stomach of cast iron. How fortunate.\n\n\"Girl \u2013 aye you, the one whose name I can never remember! Think you can beat all records and handle eight roosts this morning?\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar, Mistress. I'll work through lunch.\"\n\n\"I am not happy! Thank you. Scoot, and take your underfed, undernourished little rump with you!\"\n\nAuli scooted, and chuckled as the Mistress' hand struck its departing target unerringly. Some things did not require memory. They were instinctive. She whipped through the supplies room, gathering soaps, mops, brooms and two buckets with the ease of long practice, running the schedule through her head. These were the in-use roosts, so the Dragons would have been requested \u2013 very politely, she assumed, although in truth she had no idea how the protocol worked \u2013 to vacate their chambers during the hours required by the cleaning staff. Most Dragonkind needed no second invitation, although on occasion one did find a late riser still snoozing up a minor thunderstorm in their inner bedchamber, or scorching their impenetrable hide under a nice flow of fresh, piping hot lava. She scowled. Not the first idea how that functioned, either.\n\nImpervious hides and impenetrable brains, Master Chamzu claimed. Auli grinned.\n\nShe dashed off at top speed.\n\nAuli mopped, swept, dusted and tidied the living pith out of four roosts by rote, aware of the passage of time and anxious that she must not earn the dreaded, 'I am not happy!' Her hands skimmed surfaces and her hand broom sped as never before. Auli had settled on her own methods of sweeping, for with a long-handled broom she had no idea where the dirt was, but with a short one, she could investigate one-handed while the other hand swept. Phew. Back-breaker. Pause for a quick swig of deliciously cool water from the Human-sized basin in the kitchen. Check off number five.\n\nShe slipped out of the service door and oriented herself upon the next mission.\n\nStubbed toe! Grimacing like a Dragonship sailor with a bellyache, Auli realised that Su'izyan had placed a spice and incense package in the doorway exactly where a blind girl could not miss it. Aye. Gifts of delightful smells for visiting Dragons, who after a long flight across the Isles, probably required a blend ten times more potent than this. She raced back inside, placing four small bowls of fresh spices around the roost \u2013 two in the main lounge, one in the bedchamber and one in the bathing area. Incense ready to be fired in the brazier. She assumed Dragons lit those using their natural fire-lighting capabilities.\n\nRight. Down two levels, across one vertical staircase, circumvent the oddly large storage facility in that area, and find the sixth roost along. Go! Lugging her equipment, bucket bumping her knees, Auli tottered along whilst chortling to herself at how very glamorous her job was. A far cry from being beaten with Mistress Sairana's soup ladle, however.\n\nMight she one day even admit to enjoying music classes?\n\nAssault these despicable Dragon roosts with thy brush and bucket, o intrepid adventurer!\n\nAuli-Ambar did just so, chuckling wickedly as she entered the next roost. Hmm. She lifted her nose. A bookish Dragon, if she was not mistaken. The oily tang of ebony ink tickled her nostrils \u2013 the longest-lasting ink, she had learned from Sazutharr \u2013 as well as the sharper scent of blotting sand impregnated with orikolibisi herb, which had the handy property of breaking fresh ink down into a powder that could be carefully brushed off the scrolleaf. Useful trick. Dry ink was of course a rajal of a different stripe; not one with which she need ever concern herself. Nor did rajals have stripes, as best she knew. What an odd Isles saying.\n\nStill, she should take care not to disturb this scholar's work. There would be a Dragon desk \u2013 her ruined nose snuffled painfully as she checked the air, dratted cold apparently unrelated to this other bane of Mistress Frantia's life \u2013 over near the crysglass window, probably positioned to take advantage of the renowned view while he worked. Lucky lizard.\n\n\"Ha, I shall spy out thy secrets, beast!\" she sang out.\n\nWhat? Her head snapped around. Auli listened attentively. Perhaps just a green-fanged rat in the ventilation shaft. Echoes of that experience caused her heart to slam up against her ribcage as though she housed a vicious beast in there. Calm thyself, o swashbuckling mistress of all savage moppery!\n\nUmm \u2026 not actually a word. Fun wordplay, though!\n\nAuli touched the twin notches on her left ear ruefully. Aye, she was even less seemly as a result of her last entanglement with a rodent. That fiend had escaped with a couple of pieces of Auli-Ambar lodged in its fat, hairy belly.\n\n\"Is someone there?\"\n\nSilence.\n\nA blind girl, especially one who had been burned before, could listen with preternatural sensitivity. Almost Dragon-like, Master Chamzu had called her hearing. Her itching auricles detected vast amounts of nothingness.\n\nLong habit made her touch the miniature Dragons weighing down her tunic pockets. Great, another of her feeble insecurity attacks. Kicking those thoughts way over the caldera, Auli marched over to the inner portal with confidence she felt in no iota of her being, worked the mechanism to the right side, and slipped into the entryway. Cleaning. Brushing diligently. Checking the windows as high as she could reach, her nimble hands swishing across surfaces and finding their way almost as if drawn to three leaves and an old dried jiista-berry lodged in the slight crack between the window and the decorative mosaic edging \u2013 artfully fashioned of semiprecious stones, if her fingers did not deceive her \u2013 of the flooring. She mopped the hallway efficiently, hopping over the handle on some of her wider sweeps, a circumscribed step that she had learned from Emoric, a boy in her class whom everyone said had a gift for dance.\n\nShe could never watch another person dance, but she had learned to move with him. Emoric was sweet and shy like her, so she felt safe in his arms. He had not even complained about the dozen times or more she had stepped on his toes, nor when she had crunched his nose with her forehead. Horrid feeling. Apparently, Emoric suffered from a rare disease that meant he bled for two days afterward \u2013 in Dragonish, sanguihaema. She was not sure Standard even had a word for his condition.\n\nWith the outer hallway completed, Auli fell upon the main roost like a storm rumbling over the caldera. Rapidly, she found the desk and set everything there in order. Ink brushes, calligraphy pens, holders and writing glasses of decidedly draconic proportions, and a few knickknacks of which she could not divine their purpose \u2013 perhaps a loupe for a Dragon's fire eye, she concluded of one instrument, cleaning its lens of three stray specks of dirt, and setting it in position beside a scroll the Dragon had been writing. She touched the scrolleaf's very slightly serrulated edge timidly. Forlornly. It represented the border of a realm she would never experience save through the eyes and voices of others.\n\nTo the caldera with sadness!\n\nReleased, Auli spun away from the desk, and stepped *splat!* in a puddle of ebony ink. \"Oh, Dragon!\" she chuckled, and declaimed in Dragonish, <Thou art a beast most \u2026 uh, grubby?>\n\nOn hands and knees, blotting up the spillage with a fresh sponge sourced from the supplies in the kitchen, Auli sang in lilting mock-verse:\n\n<Dragon o Dragon thou canst never be,>\n\n<Half as grubby as blind little me!>\n\nThere! Surely, a stifled snigger?\n\nNo, just a chaffinch chirruping outside the broad crysglass window, tapping at its own reflection in the glass. Vain little creature. Did eyes allow vanity to invade the soul?\n\nThen, she knew. Paralysis gripped her chest so sorely, she could not breathe. She just knew. Auli backed up slowly, searching her surrounds with every sense screaming at the ultra-alert. Something about this space did not strike her as right. There was neither the sulphurous smoke-char scent of Dragon in the air, nor the sound of respiration, nor anything that should ostensibly alarm her \u2026 save the stillness of a kind she trusted about as far she could throw a \u2026 well, a very chunky adult Dragon.\n\nHer backside touched the cool flank of a Dragon perch, a small one which stood waist high to her at its lowest point. Auli-Ambar checked it quickly with her hands. Empty. Feeling her way along the surprisingly warm gemstone surface, perhaps garnet judging by the delicately stellated rhombicosidodecahedron-based architecture of the magic-assisted faceting, she overheard a very faint rustle behind her shoulder. Her right hand froze in an outstretched position. Horror!\n\nA talon clamped down upon her wrist.\n\nScreeching at an utterly humiliating pitch of hysteria, Auli fought to free herself, but her arm might as well have been set in mortar for all her efforts availed her. The Dragon armour of the beast's digit seemed unaccountably pliable, like a hot metal shackle conforming just enough to her wrist that her bones, frail and bird-like in comparison to his Dragon bones, were not pulverised.\n\n\"How did you know?\" demanded the Dragon.\n\n\"I \u2013 Dragon! Please! Don't \u2013 I beg you, please \u2026 I'm sorry! I'm really, really \u2013\"\n\nHe did not release an ounce of his terrifying grip. <HOW?>\n\n\"You're \u2013 in the Library \u2013 oh Dragon, please \u2026\"\n\n\"Impudent dragonet!\" purred the beast, making Auli cough in a cloud of acrid smoke. She waved her free hand uselessly in the air, still tugging away like mad. He said, \"You recognise me? How? I heard your heartbeat change before you could possibly have perceived \u2013\"\n\n\"Let me go. You're hurting me!\"\n\nHe snarled, \"You aren't \u2013\"\n\nThe roaring in her ears drowned out everything. Revenge! This Dragon sought revenge, and a bilious memory of fleeing through darkness surged through her mind, and next Auli knew, she was lying prone on one of the floor cushions. She was alive, but her panicked wheezing made her airways sound like a musician wielding a heavy metal rasp on his favourite instrument.\n\nHad she just fainted? Worse and worse!\n\nWithout an iota of warning, water cascaded over her face and upper torso. Shock \u2013 soapy water! Auli sat bolt upright, spluttering loudly and yelling a few choice phrases. The Dragon had just doused her with the contents of her cleaning bucket!\n\n\"Awake now?\"\n\n\"That water was filthy floor gunge!\" Auli gasped, not knowing whether to be enraged, mortified or just start laughing and never stop. She must look a sight.\n\n\"Huh. You appear much revived,\" remarked His Flaming Obnoxiousness, clearly looming over her with an overbearing air. His paw rested upon her ankles, communicating that dinner was not about to escape from his menu. Not yet. \"I am not much accustomed to having any creature faint before the advent of my indubitable magnificence. By my wings, I hadn't marked you for a vapid Isles maiden. Did I misjudge?\"\n\n\"Misjudge? Mis \u2013 you let me go, beast! I've work to do.\"\n\n\"Oh, now you've work to do?\"\n\n\"Aye, real work.\" How his mimicry riled her! Mopping her face with her sopping headscarf, Auli rearranged her disguise. \"Cleaning your roost, more to the point. It's on my list.\"\n\n\"Fancy that.\"\n\nHe had manipulated the cleaning rota? Auli heard the sarcastic insinuation as clearly as a fine bell chiming in her mind, but she feared to further anger this already volatile walking incinerator. Instead, she muttered furiously, \"Release me this instant, Dragon. This is quite \u2026 improper.\" He sniggered. \"Islands' sakes, go practice your indubitable magnificence on someone who cares!\"\n\nHer tongue! Rainbows over Islands, what had slipped out of her mouth now? Burning, shaking, and feeling decidedly uncomfortable at the Stalking Freak's attitude, Auli slipped off the floor cushion and felt about for her implements.\n\n\"See, I am not holding you, Human girl.\"\n\nAuli mentally slapped the smirk off his leering reptilian face.\n\n\"Now, that wasn't very friendly,\" he added, leaving her unsure as to whether or not her thought had communicated to him. Or, did he mean his nasty surprise? \"I could keep holding you. But you are free to walk wherever in the Island-World you wish.\"\n\nSarcastic magnanimity?\n\nThat decided her. Clutching the bucket to her chest and dropping the hand brush within it, Auli-Ambar marched determinedly toward the doorway to the kitchen area. A whirring rush of air buffeted her about. She stopped. In a moment she lurched off again, hoping against hope that this was the right direction. She was too discombobulated to tell. A localised windstorm gushed about her slender frame, turning her right about and propelling her back toward the cantankerous quadruped \u2013 who was guffawing openly at her now! Blast him! She tottered forward three or four steps before arresting the motion. Auli whirled and bent into a gale. Right. Flailing at a storm was just humiliating.\n\nThe instant she turned, the storm halted as though a Dragon's jaws had snapped it up like a mosquito. Auli glared at something or other, hopefully the Dragon, and brushed back her windswept hairstyle in a gesture of high dudgeon. \"Stop that.\"\n\n\"Stop what?\"\n\nVery funny. In a much smaller voice, she said, \"I don't like this game.\"\n\nThe silence bristled.\n\n*Ah-rrrrr.* The bullying brute cleared his throat awkwardly. \"Clearly, I have erred in my intended approach. Perhaps as I should have done before \u2013 but as you were too busy running off in the opposite direction \u2013\"\n\n\"Ahem,\" she interjected.\n\n\"Indeed.\" The Dragon coughed, clearly desperate to exit awkward ground post-haste. He spluttered, \"To which conduct I also regret pressing you! Grr! Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Arkurion, Mercury Blue Dragon hailing from Tanstoy Dragon Roost in the South, near Remoy. I'm a Researcher.\"\n\n\"And I am Auli-Ambar of Ya'arriol Island, humble Roost Keeper, at your service, noble Dragon.\" She managed sarcasm fit to stun said Dragon.\n\n\"I wished only to speak with you, Human girl.\"\n\n\"There are better opportunities. When I am not working, for example.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Aye. I concur.\"\n\n\"And better ways.\" Auli slapped fitfully at her sopping clothes. Rather pointless, since they needed to be wrung out, but the idea of stripping off anywhere near this blistering blockhead \u2013 further humiliation, anyone? However, did she smell half an apology from Mister Tyrannical Lizard-Halitosis? If so, quite undraconic. Aye, but she trusted him about as far as she could throw \u2013\n\n\"May I watch you work?\"\n\nThis request arrested her thoughts even more firmly than his airy trickery. \"Ah \u2026\"\n\n\"I'm curious.\"\n\nShe'd curious his neck onto his shoulders a different way! Freaking \u2013 well, she knew what she meant. Treacherous lizard. What was he bent upon now? In a voice so tremulous she pictured slapping herself immediately, Auli inquired, \"Curious about what?\"\n\n\"How you find dirt.\"\n\nTake his finding her in the Library and add to it this peculiar ambush, throw in a dash of watching her crawl about on the floor cleaning his roost, and \u2026 Auli came up with the sum total of zero. Dirt? Dragons despised dirt. She started toward the kitchen to fetch more water, and this time there was no more trickery. Flee? No, she had Mistress Frantia to please or displease. To complain would only draw unwanted attention. 'Oh save me, Mistress, a Dragon bullied me in his roost.' Cartloads of ralti droppings to that!\n\nAs Auli ran more water into the bucket, she tried to rearrange the straggling threads of her hair. She had to admit, she was intrigued. No, not by that infuriating, buzzing slap-paw trying to snoop on her doings without being detected. Nor by his resuscitating her with a bucket of nasty, well-used water.\n\n\"Dirt?\"\n\nShe only realised she had spoken aloud when the Dragon's rich, beautiful voice purred across the roost, \"Aye, dirt. Common dirt, my fine peripatetic biped, found around and inside most Dragon roosts \u2013 or so, I am reliably informed.\"\n\nIndeed. She shook her head in bemusement.\n\nHe did possess a quirky sense of humour, which clearly communicated in the tenor of his speech. A salting of self-deprecation and a pinch of understated reticence; again, most unusual qualities in a Dragon. Arkurion. He hailed from the South, from many Islands farther than a humble cleaner would ever travel in her life. A Dragon of most unusual colour, whatever Mercury Blue might mean, which meant he might also claim higher magical powers, such as the ability to bend the very air to his will, and Human girls \u2026 no. No? Not this one. This discovery of a thread of inner boldness surprised her. She was not about to let another Dragon persecute her, not without a modicum of resistance!\n\nSo, Auli scrubbed. Arkurion watched. He respired like a semi-contained storm over in the corner while she tidied and dusted, brushed and mopped diligently. He trailed her to the bedchamber and observed her putting his bed to rights. Mostly, Arkurion was a neat Dragon \u2013 save for the ink spillage. Patently suspicious, she decided, wriggling her blackened foot in annoyance. Nothing for it but to seek Zimtyna's help with the matter of removing ink from flesh and clothing, judging by the damp patch of cloth brushing her ankle bone. When a particularly large cushion defeated her strength and her bad leg caved in unexpectedly, his paw rustled beneath the furs and helped her raise the heavy bedding and move it aside.\n\nAuli struggled to her feet. \"Thanks.\"\n\nFra'anior paw-slap that assiduous beast, observing her every weakness!\n\nHaving whizzed through the kitchen, since there were no separate bathing facilities in a visitor's roost on this level, which accommodated guests of lesser prestige, and having placed handfuls of aromatic spices in the bowls and spice sconces around his roost, her work was complete. Auli announced as much \u2013 not without, admittedly, a challenging snap to her statement. Aye! Mistreated girl wishes to smack Dragon over the head with \u2026 hmm, what would be large enough?\n\nAs if reading her mood straight off the scrolleaf of her face, the Dragon murmured, \"Did you know that when you search for dirt with your hands, Auli-Ambar, you do not even touch the surfaces?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 don't?\"\n\n\"I've had sufficient opportunity to make this observation with absolute certainty. And when a Dragon says he's absolutely certain, he means absolutely certain. Not a shell-sliver of doubt.\"\n\nAnd when he was being insufferable, he was being insufferable indeed. Auli hid her aggravation behind a granite-slab face. \"And just where are you going with this \u2013\"\n\n\"Come to the Dragon Library!\" He seized her wrist with his paw \u2013 well, most of her arm, it was that massive. And he was no full-grown adult \u2026 holy Fra'anior! The Dragon growled, \"Right now.\"\n\nAuli dug in her heels, not that it made the slightest difference. She would just skid across the floor and hurt her feet, or he could twirl her in the air with a twitch of his smallest talon, which he did now. \"No!\" she cried. \"Unhand me \u2013 I mean, un-paw me \u2013 this instant!\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"When a girl says no, she \u2026 ah \u2026\" Auli faltered, pushing ineffectually at his grip. She might as well have been manacled to a ten-tonne block of quartz. A deep breath; a summons to her frail courage. \"You promised.\"\n\n\"You dare to refuse a Dragon?\"\n\n\"You \u2013 I \u2013 look, I have my duties,\" she stammered, contrarily maddened to be returned to her feet. \"I've a Mistress to please. You would not flout an Elder's orders, would you, Arkurion?\"\n\nFor the first time, the rising growl of the Mercury Blue Dragon's belly fires betrayed his fiery indignation. \"I could drag you hence!\"\n\n\"You are so strong and I am so very weak, aye, and blind.\"\n\nShe had the impression that the Dragon looked at her very oddly indeed, then, for she heard and felt him shaking his muzzle and ruffling his wings before he responded with measured formality, \"But to disgrace thee is a matter very far from my mind, Auli-Ambar. Rest assured, I do not intend thee or thy person any manner of harm. When will you meet me in the Library?\"\n\nNever had she been so sorely tempted to hit a Dragon. Still, she suspected his vexation levels would not stand for much more defiance.\n\n\"Ah \u2026 lunch? Afterward. I can be free after lunch.\"\n\n\"By your word,\" he agreed. \"Now, you may effect your escape.\"\n\nHow mournful he sounded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "What a peculiar encounter. It bothered Auli on many levels. Firstly, a Dragon taking an avowed interest in her affairs. Secondly, his gauche ambush and the lingering impression that Arkurion of Tanstoy knew not the first iota regarding Human girls, especially not how to converse with one. His chosen manner of approach? Absurd. Thirdly, his manipulation of the cleaning rota in order to perform said ambush. Fourthly, his grotesquely ironic manner of greeting \u2013 charming girl. How long had he been pursuing her before that incident in the Dragon Library? Dragons did not think of girls as charming. Mostly, they surveyed them for frailties, for opportunities to verbally or otherwise wipe their paws upon their hapless victims. Fifthly, there was his acute and disturbingly accurate observation about her hands. She did not need to touch surfaces to find dirt. She skimmed the air a half-inch or so above, and felt dirt. With her mind?\n\nAuli dearly wanted to shout something shockingly rude at this realisation.\n\nAll of which meant that she spent most of a late lunch pacing about in circles outside of the Dragon Library, trying to drag her courage out of her proverbial boots and put it to use.\n\n<Auli-Ambar. A trifling Dragon hoard for your thoughts?>\n\nThe intrusion of a draconic voice almost made her leap out of her hide. <Noble Sazutharr, I \u2026 I am disturbed.> Without any preamble, a little of her encounter with Arkurion spilled out of her mouth. Just the detail about her hands, and the incident in the Library.\n\n<A scale-itching conundrum indeed,> Sazutharr rumbled at length. So powerful was the aged Dragon, the vibration of his inner furnaces conducted through the talon-scored granite flagstones to her bare feet \u2013 she found it easier to clean barefoot than having to constantly worry about slopping water over her slippers. <Have you magic in your lineage, Auli-Ambar?>\n\nShe shook her head, before doubt intruded. <Well, maybe my father?>\n\n<Indeed, his uncommon skills suggest so,> said the Dragon. All of the senior Dragons seemed to know far more about her father than she did! <Where did you say you first met this young Arkurion? He's not even an under-Librarian, just a fledgling Researcher who has not laboured long at his profession. I mislike his intent.>\n\nWhen she told him, however, the elderly Dragon went very quiet indeed.\n\n<Master \u2026 I mean, noble \u2013>\n\n<Meet him. Discern this juvenile Dragon's intent. I will observe you covertly,> he said, with sly-protective linguistic indicators shading his Dragonish.\n\n<Thank you, noble Sazutharr.>\n\nThus strengthened by the old Dragon's unexpected support, she sallied forth to the fray.\n\nThe slight draught swishing through the main doors of the huge Dragon Library entryway carried every scent before her, so Auli was forced to wander, and then to wait, for Arkurion to find her. It took him less than a minute.\n\nThe Dragon cleared his throat a decorous distance from her right shoulder, and said, \"You know Head Librarian Sazutharr?\"\n\n\"We have an understanding,\" she replied, orienting toward his position even though she could not observe his behaviour. Before she could think the better of her words, Auli added, \"He allows a blind girl to wander the Dragon Library unmolested.\"\n\n\"I do not molest \u2013\" Arkurion bit off his snarl with an evident effort. \"I inquired, and you bolted as if I had caught you thieving jewels from your precious Human Palace! You are \u2026 you're unexpectedly vexatious and distrustful regarding the Dragonkind, Human girl.\"\n\nConsidering his tone, a sin of prodigious proportions. A swift unveiling of his purposes might diminish her unintentional vexatiousness, Auli wanted to snipe back, but inner surprise twisted her tongue into a fine knot. She was pleased. Pleased to displease a Dragon, so to speak. Being called vexatious was somehow, mysteriously, an altogether invigorating notion that made her blood buzz in her ears and her feet feel ten times lighter upon the ground. She felt giddy.\n\nAuli was not, as a rule, a giddy sort of girl. Giddy girls were the fodder of ballads, most especially the silly and inappropriate ones. She regarded this new Auli with distaste. Away!\n\nWhen she made no reply, Arkurion vented an especially testy snort of pungent smoke from his nostrils, and said, \"I wish to essay an experiment with a blind girl that can easily be conducted right here in a public setting, where any alleged molestation might earn even a Dragon a swift flight from a great height. With me, now. Come to this book stand.\"\n\nA firm paw upon her shoulder stifled any possible protest.\n\nShortly, Arkurion had her halt beneath one of the Dragon-sized reading stands, which were monstrous jalkwood or ooliti wood affairs towering eight to ten feet off the ground, and capable of holding books in excess of fifteen feet wide. The Mercury Blue Dragon dragged up a stepladder for her, and considerately placed his paw beneath her elbow to help her ascend \u2013 a gesture not out of place in at least ten courtly ballads Auli could trip off her tongue. Quite undraconic. Razzior would have politely kept his paws behind his back and allowed her to fall flat on her face. Preferably allowing her to crack her skull upon a handy boulder, she supposed.\n\nPerhaps Arkurion was merely socially inept, not unlike a person she could have prodded with a very short stick at this juncture? Nonetheless, he guided her hands to the edge and bade her 'scramble aboard', which meant, climb up onto the shelf upon which the huge volume rested, much like a Human lectern, she supposed.\n\n\"Wait,\" Arkurion said tersely. \"I must close the book.\"\n\nA book-wind blew her hair back from her forehead. *Thud.* By now, Auli was as baffled as a Dragon flying backward around the suns, but since she had effectively invited the Head Librarian himself to chaperone this encounter, she found herself trapped. She could not back out now, could she?\n\nIn a moment, Arkurion grasped her left hand between first-thumb and fore-talon, as if it were as fragile as a reed, and guided it to the book's thick spine. \"Here. Feel this rune. Do you know what it means?\"\n\n<No, you null-brained dunderdragon! Funnily enough, nobody's ever taught a blind girl how to read.>\n\nAuli said, \"Runes defeat me, noble Dragon.\"\n\nWith the air of an undaunted buccaneer freshly returned from a raid upon the stanzas of a rollicking ballad, Arkurion declared, \"Of course. I did not want to assume. Attend. These are embossed runes, as is a common stylistic practice pertaining to the covers of Dragon books. Here, feel this rune carefully with your paws. This is the 'Wa' symbol. The book's title is, A Wandering of Stars.\"\n\n\"Duly felt,\" she jested tentatively, after a minute, drawing gruff laughter from the Dragon. Wow. Bold Auli. Novel indeed! \"What's next?\"\n\n\"You have it memorised?\"\n\nScorn so dearly wanted to trip off her tongue. Instead, she said soberly, \"I do. Four lines, a jagged crossbar and what felt like spikes on the sides of the vertical bars at particular, graduated heights. I assumed at first those might be decorative elements, but now I'm wondering if they might not represent linguistic nuances?\"\n\n\"Bravo.\"\n\nA mellifluous word, but it rocked Auli's world. Arkurion wanted her to succeed! He was on her side; he was the wind buoying her wings, as the Dragons would say. Her throat suddenly became as dry as desiccated volcanic sand. Forthwith, the Mercury Blue bade her examine the main jacket, a huge spread of intricately tooled leather inlaid with what she took for gemstone insets, and to find the rune's match. Having a weird Dragon breathing over her shoulder was no aid to concentration, but Auli of trembling hand succeeded after a breathy hint to search higher.\n\n\"Excellent!\" Plucking her away with his paw, the excitable young Dragon flipped the pages open, and then set Auli down with exaggerated care on the edge of the inclined stand once more.\n\nShe bit her lower lip. Hard.\n\nArkurion said, \"I will not handle your person again. Find me the 'Wa!'\"\n\n\"On a page? But, the text isn't embossed, is it?\"\n\nHis muzzle was close, so close that the rich, spicy scent of his breath was dizzyingly intense. The Dragon whispered, \"Remember how you find dirt without touching it? Feel the ink, Auli. Here. Rub this part. Let the blackness and the pigments invade your fingertips and your senses and everything that you are. Then, find the rune upon the leaf. I know you can do it.\"\n\nHer heart crammed up into her throat and stuck there, throbbing with a sensation that threatened to asphyxiate her; that wanted to tear away and run out through the Library's doors, screaming without ever ceasing: 'Impossible!'\n\nShe could not move.\n\nWith surprising gentleness, one of his thick talons slipped beneath Auli's right wrist and raised it to the height of her shoulder. He said, \"Start here. The line of text is smaller than you might imagine. Touch it. Sense the ink with your deepest magic.\"\n\nDemanding Dragon.\n\nShe shifted hands to the left, her stronger hand. Auli touched the coolness of vellum, and tried to identify the very slight difference where the ink started. An unaccustomed feeling tingled up her arm, as if the page were begging to be read; the words to be unfurled like the tenderest of buds tasting the beauty and imperative of suns-shine for the very first time, and blossoming outward before her awareness. She moved gradually. Wonderingly. Lost in the miracle.\n\n\"Here,\" she said at last.\n\nSomebody was making a wailing sound; someone was crooning. The Dragon and the Human girl stopped abruptly, at exactly the same time.\n\n\"I-I-I \u2026\" Arkurion stuttered, for the first time, sounding young and unsure and therefore, far more likeable for his reaction. \"Another. Try another rune. Lean back against my paw.\" With a sharp waft of wind and a dull thump that shook her entire body, the book closed again. \"Give me your hand. Higher. Here, this is the 'Sta', and its immediate neighbour is 'bar-R', distinguished from the rolled-R by \u2013 oh, forget that. Together, these two runes spell 'Star'. Obviously. Memorised? Quick wings now!\"\n\nAuli's left hand trembled so badly, she had to brace it with her right. \"Ready.\"\n\nArkurion whisked the tome open again, almost brushing her off the edge with a ferocious gust of air. Zimtyna would have been having baby dragonets over the damage to her hairstyle. Auli could not have cared less. \"Now, let's find ourselves a star. Not there, that's an illustration. You'll find a block of text further over to your left paw \u2013 hand, I mean.\"\n\nSo long had she yearned for this, Auli felt as if a treasure chest had been flung open in her mind, and dazzling rainbows danced all about. Her fingers would not obey. She floundered amidst dull, indistinct seas of runic lettering. Desperately, she searched higher. Wider. Reaching with sweeps of her hands. Confusing pigment with un-inked spaces. She was painfully aware of Arkurion's shallow, rapid breathing by her side, of his paw's edge lightly touching her back lest she tumble off the book stand. Rising onto her tiptoes. Eager. Petrified. Awash with a thousand emotions. Her hands traversed the pages, needing, learning, hoping against hope.\n\n\"Here! Is this \u2026 no, this one seems different,\" she said at last, frowning in annoyance. \"I think it must be a longer word with star-something written inside it \u2026 is that possible?\"\n\n\"Aye, of course! That spells 'Istariela', who was the fabled love of Fra'anior himself,\" Arkurion responded, his delight surfacing in sonorous, crooning notes Auli had never heard in a Dragon's voice before. Shivers! \"Run your fingers further along the line \u2013\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"Yes!\" the Dragon echoed breathlessly. \"You found 'Star', as in, Star Dragoness.\"\n\n\"Oh, Arkurion \u2026\"\n\n\"You just read your very first word, Auli-Ambar, and what a jewel it is.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Unfurling Scroll-Worlds",
                "text": "No Moons madness had ever burned brighter. Such a frenzied state seized me, I feared the onset of a dry season fever, and that should I succumb, all hope should desert my soul, and I should pine away unto death. Feral Dragons could not have barred me from the Library, nor Fra'anior's fabled thundering over the Islands distract from the prospect of those first tentative yet glorious steps into the scroll-worlds Arkurion did unfurl to my mind. The Mercury Blue proved himself a patient teacher. Aye, he was demanding, as is the tenor of draconic instruction, but insistent in perfect measure. He pushed me beyond my boundaries.\n\nTruly, Arkurion taught my intellect to soar.\n\nWe kept our liaison secret, a tiny dance essayed right there in the public space of the Dragon Library. Of all creatures who beheld such a mismatched pair at work, perhaps only the Head Librarian Sazutharr understood what a miracle consumed us. With bated breath and untrammelled joy did we toil all the hours Arkurion and I could spare from our many duties. Nightly, we colluded like crazed Dragon scientists poised upon the brink of some Island-shattering discovery. We planned when and where next to meet; like secret lovers consumed in a madness of purely cerebral passion, we excluded all others from our private world. Ah! It was a beautiful period altogether, yet destined to end far too soon.\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 53\n\nShe should have guessed how little of draconic linguistics would be straightforward. Late one evening, three weeks after Arkurion had first twisted her arm into meeting him at the Dragon Library, Auli-Ambar raised her hands from the scrolleaf, and glared over her shoulder at the place from which the Mercury Blue Dragon's breath rasped.\n\n\"You've been teaching me only one script? How many are there?\"\n\nHer voice struck a piping pitch of astonishment that cut through the late-night silence. Arkurion ruffled his wingtips in a way she had learned signified a temperate deprecation of humour experienced in adversity.\n\nThe Dragon rumbled, \"I felt that if we could master an efficient technique using a simple runic script \u2013\"\n\n\"Simple! You call this \u2013 whoops!\"\n\nAuli wobbled on the edge of the reading stand, but a deft touch of Arkurion's paw restored her balance. \"Careful, one would not wish to be slain by a book,\" he quipped. \"Not when there are dozens of more creative ways to perish. Now, student Auli, I must inform you that there are many scripts and regional variations of spelling, nuance indicators and even key runic symbols. Three separate, conflicting alphabets exist that variously attempt to codify and systematise these scripts, which have been applied with varying degrees of success to the five basic Island Standard languages, including Ancient Southern with its unique features such as bird trills, clicks and whistles. Furthermore, one must not discount the three draconic scholarly scripts each possessing its particular merits or disadvantages, plus ancient draconic which is no longer spoken, and is itself predated by proto-draconic writing systems. Beyond this windroc's breakfast lie the northern and eastern branches of \u2026\"\n\nAuli's steady tongue clicking halted his lecture. She said, \"Arkurion, why are you telling me all this?\"\n\nThe Dragon sighed, and Auli knew he saw through her query just as certainly as she \u2013 existentially speaking \u2013 had seen through him. He said, \"You are perceptive. I must very soon return to my duties at Tanstoy Dragon Roost.\"\n\n\"How soon?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow afternoon.\"\n\nShe sighed very softly before turning with a teetering step to lay her head against his muzzle. \"Arkurion \u2026\"\n\nThey had explored worlds together. How could she desist now?\n\nStrange how iron-hard scales could seem soft, made tender by the emotions she imagined in his heart. The longer she pressed against him, the deeper the throbbing of his fires seemed to resound through her body. The opulent scent of his breath muddled her every thought into a fine soup. She had to push herself away. Had to. Yet she was unable; when the Dragon gently broke the connection, a sound like a soft sob issued from the gap between her twisted teeth.\n\n\"Be not dismayed,\" he whispered. \"You can build on what you've learned. This magic is also a skill, Auli. There's magic in your hands and true-fires in your mind; you can and must hone this aptitude every chance you can grasp. Ask Sazutharr to assign a Reader or Archivist to advise you. I know he'll be more than willing.\"\n\nNo, she wanted to cry. The Mercury Blue would forget she ever existed.\n\n\"I'll return in six months with a larger delegation from Tanstoy \u2013 keep that information secret, Auli. Do you understand?\" She nodded as if she feared her neck might snap at so simple a gesture. Everything within her cried, 'beautiful Dragon!' And she knew peril, but her heart's drumming only swelled in her ears until it roared like a Cloudlands-bound torrent, like all the Dragons of Gi'ishior thundering their battle challenges at once. \"You say you agree, but \u2026 girl, ill winds blow over the Isles and the times are fraught with peril. You are no longer a child, for you are growing into a young woman in Human reckoning, and you need to understand the scents of events and the lay of the Isles. You need to be as wise as a greybeard.\"\n\nDrawing back in sharp realisation of how close she trod to the edge of taboo, Auli folded her arms across her chest. Chastened, aye, yet defiantly, she said, <I thank thee for the gift of reading, noble Dragon. If this be flywell, know that I wish thee all strength to fly to all the Isles of thy life.>\n\nThe sigh that quivered his body could have written entire volumes to be lodged in the Dragon Library. Deadly, beautiful peril. Auli wanted to combust then and there. A sweeter, fierier connection she had never imagined. He felt this irrational fervency, too \u2013 and they must bury it, delve deep and cast this feeling away forever, from thought and word and deed, or face the ultimate consequences.\n\nShe would sooner die than doom a Dragon. Folding her arms tightly across her chest as though she could squeeze all of her teenage angst back inside, Auli presented her back to him.\n\nDraconic negation. Message delivered.\n\nAt length, Arkurion said, <Before I depart, I wish to accord my most excellent student one further gift. Meet me outside the Library at dawn tomorrow. We've an appointment to keep.>\n\n<An appointment?>\n\n<Promise me that you will present your ideas for improvement of the Roost Keepers' daily work schedule to Master Chamzu,> he added. This was no request. Command indicators peppered his statement throughout.\n\n<I \u2026>\n\n<Promise!> His growl pulverised the very pith of her bones.\n\nAuli yelped, <I promise! Quibbling quadru-pawed \u2026 fire-dribbling \u2026 whatever!>\n\nArkurion only chuckled in response, knowing his will had prevailed. <You fear too much, girl. All you require is the occasional paw slap applied to the backside to spur you into motion.>\n\n<Ha!>\n\nIn a soft rasp of breath, as if he had not intended to speak aloud, the Dragon fluted, <Until the morrow, o Dragoness fair \u2026>\n\n<When dawn's own melody gilds every bough and leaf,> Auli continued the poem. Arkurion's wingtips rustled, betraying startle-agitation. After what seemed an eternity, he whispered:\n\n<Then must thou emerge from the chrysalis of thine lair \u2026>\n\n<For the suns own fires shall burn away all grief,> she finished in a breathless rush.\n\nO, her terror, soaring in wing\u00e9d glory!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "No amount of puzzling and fretting yielded further clues as to what the Mercury Blue intended by making her attend a break-of-dawn appointment. Even dawn was hardly cool in this season, but a slight dewy freshness to the morn lifted her spirits as Auli departed her chambers. Her sensitive ears delighted in the tuneful chirruping of finches and peripols that had no qualms about nesting upon and around the great gemstone spars that decorated the interior of the volcanic pipe, and perceived the rising hum of life around the caldera as Dragons and Humans slowly awoke to a suns-rise, no doubt the sort of daybreak enshrined in epic ballads. Magnificent. Breathtaking. Colours liberally splashed across creation's limitless palette.\n\nBah!\n\nOn a whim she took the path leading past the great Hall of Meeting, down near the lake shore, where the Dragon Elders held their formal, public meetings and debates \u2013 which oftentimes descended into fists-and-talons brawls that shook the Halls \u2013 and then on up the winding footpath toward the Dragon Library. A footfall \u2026 aye, and Arkurion's special scent, like an aromatic wood smoke, although she wished she could identify exactly which one. Tantaku? Mahogany? Jalkwood?\n\nAuli inhaled deeply, making the cloth of her headscarf press briefly against her ruined nose. <Sulphurous greetings, noble Dragon.>\n\n<Nothing sulphurous around here,> he returned with a brusqueness that did nothing to hide his tension. Even a Human girl could detect the accelerated drumbeat of his complex triple-heart physiology, and his tang carried a metallic odour mingled with the fresh zest of ozone, which supposedly denoted battle-readiness. Phew. One bundle of nerves on paws!\n\n<Whom are we meeting?>\n\n<The Dragoness is late, but she'll be here.>\n\nAuli-Ambar's head snapped about as concussive Dragon thunder boomed inside the Hall of Meeting. She covered her ears, but too late to avoid hurt. Could that be Sapphurion's signature battle blast? He was meant to be a gigantic male, a bruiser standing well over twenty feet tall at the shoulder. Merely five times her height. Take her slight sackweight and multiply it by a few dozen tonnes! In a moment, the Dragon council apparently broke up because several monstrous bodies launched into the air from several hundred feet away, the wind generated by their lift-offs causing Auli to stagger. Then, the ground trembled beneath her soles. <Thud. Thud-thud.> Dragons, walking right toward them. Big ones.\n\n<Remember your manners,> Arkurion whispered, with an audible gulp-back of his fires.\n\n<Don't you go fainting on me either, noble Dragon,> she responded, chuckling timidly. The Mercury Blue did not appreciate her teasing! He stiffened up until Auli concluded that they might just find use for him in the Dragon Library as a decorative statue.\n\n<Ah, the young scholar from Tanstoy. Arkurion, I believe?>\n\nThe approaching Dragoness' voice was honeyed gravel, a torrent of aural resonances that played havoc with Auli's composure. What? She locked her knees crossly and found her left hand clamped painfully around the Orange statuette in her pocket. Three years in the Halls, and a Dragon could unnerve her with a word?\n\n<Fiery greetings, youngling,> rumbled a second voice, unutterably majestic.\n\nFor the first time in her life, she perfectly understood the balladeers' use of the word 'swoon-worthy.' Sapphurion spoke in the powerful basso rumble of a male Dragon, like muted thunder, but his voice was also beautiful, a verbal savour of the headiest of berry wine. She wanted to giggle helplessly. Auli bit her lip, finding the urge to avoid indignity trumped all else.\n\nArkurion said, with deepest respect, <Mighty Sapphurion, may the most sulphurous blessings of the Onyx ignite thee and thy mate, and dwell upon the eggs swelling thine august belly, o peerless Qualiana.>\n\nQualiana must be pregnant. Auli fumbled her way through a bow, speechless.\n\n<And this youngster?> inquired the Dragoness. <I know thee by sight, little flame, but not by name. Thou art kin to Master Chamzu, am I correct?>\n\n<May I introduce the honourable Miss Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, noble Dragoness?> said Arkurion, bruising her ribs with his talon.\n\n<Ah \u2026 not quite, mighty Dragoness,> the girl stammered, dismayed at being forced to speak. <Fra'anior's most sulphurous blast \u2026 uh, sorry. May I extend his most sulphurous greetings to thee, and noble Sapphurion? Um, I'm his fosterling. My father is Xa'an Ta'afaya, a soldier in the employ of the Palace; my mother, I knew not.>\n\nWhy exactly she volunteered this additional information, Auli would never know, but Qualiana echoed her father's name with an air that intimated he was once again a known quantity, even at the upper levels of the Dragon hierarchy. Was her father that much more important than she had imagined? Or more dangerous, or even untrustworthy?\n\nThen, Sapphurion spoke in what for him must have been measured tones, but his voice fell upon her ear like a velvety thunderstorm, <Fra'anior's Talon hath mark\u00e9d thee most sorely, little one! May the blessing and fiery boon of Amaryllion the Onyx enfold thy life's fires accordingly!>\n\nMagic! That was the only explanation Auli had for the soundless, formless implosion of power his words conveyed into her being. A Dragon roared in her darkness! Her knees crumpled; Arkurion's paw whipped her up with astonishing reaction speed, setting her upright before she was even half prepared to be deposited upon her feet. Her bad knee promptly crumpled a second time. Arkurion performed the honours with aplomb. Amidst this kafuffle, her mind arrived at the incredible conclusion that the Dragon Elder somehow referred to her deformed mouth; her hands flew up to shield her face. Through three layers of opaque cloth? How?\n\nOh, the humiliation, the incandescent shame that seared her being like waves of liquid fire!\n\n<Thy future-prophetic utterance hath nigh struck this little one senseless, o Sapphurion,> exclaimed the Dragoness. <What is this reference to 'Fra'anior's Talon,' o glad conflagration of mine third heart?>\n\nAuli-Ambar was still trying to sort out the impossibly profound depth of nuances and implications in their exchange, which stretched her fledgling knowledge of Dragonish to its uttermost, when Sapphurion said:\n\n<This gallant Dragon of Tanstoy will attest to the truth \u2013 steady the mite, Arkurion. She is most unsteady of limb.>\n\n<The strength of Dragons invest thine paw, little one,> purred the Red Dragoness.\n\nIt must have been her that touched Auli's shoulder, for she did at once feel revitalised and ready to run, to leap, to fly off cliffs! Well, perhaps she was unprepared for the mighty Dragon Elder and his mate discussing her greatest shame right out in the open, and not even breakfast inside her stomach. Now she fretted about her belly? Auli felt lightheaded and diminished in the presence of these mighty Dragon Elders, both of whom must have been double or triple Arkurion's stature. Trust a Dragon to leave her utterly unprepared for this encounter!\n\nArkurion said, <I bow to thy peerless knowledge, o Sapphurion.>\n\n<Nay, not I,> said he, <but that the fabled Onyx of Ha'athior hath somehow spoken through me.>\n\nThere was another black Dragon apart from Fra'anior himself? An Ancient Dragon? Auli could not understand why Sapphurion referred to 'him' in the present-evocative-embodied tense with the overtones of immense veneration usually reserved for poetic reference to the Great Onyx, and there seemed to be a distant roaring like the full-throated thunder of a waterfall in her ears as she listened to Arkurion's swift explanation.\n\nThe young Dragon said, <Thou hast seen through her face veil to what lies beneath? I first apprehended this malformation when I cast water upon her person \u2013 a misjudgement on my part, for the girl had fainted in mine roost and I thought only to restore her to consciousness. Aye, in the South we Dragons are prone to this very disfigurement of the facial features, which we call the touch of Fra'anior's Talon, and it appears that such an affliction is as socially scarring in Human cultures as it is in the draconic world. Our physicians have, however, been pioneering methods of treatment of the cleft palette, which is oftentimes accompanied by structural issues and fang mis-development, as I observed in Auli-Ambar here, and so I purposed to seek counsel with thee, o Qualiana, and to entreat thee despite my most lowly station to consider treating this worthy girl, whom I have been teaching \u2013>\n\n<Teaching? How came this to pass?> Sapphurion interjected in a basso rumble.\n\nArkurion had babbled what was meant to remain secret, Auli realised. She knew both Sapphurion and Qualiana to be highly intelligent creatures. They could not have missed his slip-up, nor overlook the implications of a foreign Dragon acting out of place and even out of the ordinary character of Dragons, to help her thus. Oh no! Poor Arkurion, for the younger Dragon began to speak but failed to force words past the evidently wretched lump in his throat.\n\nShe must speak for him.\n\nIn a welter of frail and ever-diminishing courage, Auli-Ambar said, <Noble Dragon Elders, Arkurion has demonstrated kindness beyond description in helping me \u2013 in teaching me to read with my hands. It appears I have some small magic, you see \u2026 but I was born blind.>\n\n<Go on, Auli-Ambar,> Qualiana encouraged.\n\nThe younger Dragon's fires howled his humiliation.\n\n<I am nothing, noble Dragoness,> Auli stumbled. <I'm an ugly blind girl of no merit or skill but that I clean roosts for you Dragons, and I could not stand it if such majestic personages were to waste precious time \u2013 upon such \u2013 upon \u2013 I don't want Arkurion to get into trouble! Please, noble Elders. Just let me go now, and don't punish Arkurion for what is \u2026 for the outpouring of his compassionate white-fires \u2026>\n\nBumbling and burbling her way through the tricky Dragonish, Auli lost the thread of what she had been trying to explain. Failure rankled. Her tongue would never wag with the confidence of a balladeer. Now, what punishment would befall the Mercury Blue?\n\n<Oh, bravely spoken!> cried Sapphurion, his fires resonating with high emotion.\n\nSomething unspoken seemed to pass between the Dragons.\n\nThen, Qualiana said, <I accept this charge in the white-fires spirit of its foundation. Arkurion, teaching a blind girl to read is a momentous achievement. I shall personally send a scroll of commendation with you upon your return. And as for you, Auli-Ambar \u2013> the Dragoness touched her delicately upon the forehead with what the girl realised was the tip of a sheathed talon \u2013 <I love nothing better than a challenge. Little experience do I claim of treating Human medical conditions, but I do possess notable healing power. I promise to do my utmost to restore all that can be restored. Accompany me now to the Dragon infirmary, little one. I wish to examine thee.>\n\nArkurion! O, the designs of Dragons!\n\nShe could only gasp and stumble after Qualiana, numb with gratitude."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Well was it said that Dragons did not easily suffer 'no' for an answer. Qualiana the Red Dragoness did not speak a word as she led Auli-Ambar up the stone-carved ramps to the Dragon infirmary on the thirty-fifth level, but it took neither sight nor the slightest sniff of genius to work out that she was very, very curious about this Human girl's doings.\n\nAuli wanted to weep. Arkurion had taken his leave already, stating that his Dragonwing had determined to leave early due to a storm sweeping in over the Cluster. All that she so wanted to say remained unspoken, replaced by a stiff, formal flywell straight out of draconic tradition.\n\n<Flywell, Arkurion. Fly out of my life and forget you ever knew a girl called Auli-Ambar, who shall be forever indebted to you. Inducing others to forget is my real magical power.>\n\nWhoever said Dragons knew no kindness, was a fool thrice over.\n\nShe attended to every echo and novel scent in this new place, but still tumbled hand-outstretched into a sunken Dragon bed, thankfully unoccupied. Oh. Of course they did not use ordinary beds for thirty-to-fifty tonne patients. To her intense surprise Auli automatically curled up into a ball and rolled back up onto her feet, having bruised both elbows and knees, but she suffered no further damage.\n\n\"Come, girl,\" Qualiana said gently. \"Take my talon.\"\n\nShortly, she bade Auli lie upon her back on an examination table which could likely have accommodated Qualiana herself with ease; the Dragoness provided a stepladder for her to scramble up onto the cool metal surface. Ah yes, the familiar feeling of being no larger than a mouse crawling about these Dragons' ankle bones. Perhaps she should be comforted?\n\n\"Good. Now, I'll adjust some equipment above you,\" said Qualiana. \"You'll hear clicking and whirring noises \u2013 my, what unusual cranial structures you have. Don't be afraid. Please remove your veil and allow me to examine you fully.\"\n\nAuli lifted the low headscarf she had begun to wear over her eyes. She did not know which was better \u2013 a masked face, or unmasked eyes? Both seemed to discomfit very many people and Dragons.\n\nShe felt horribly unprotected.\n\n\"Ouch, that's warm,\" she blurted out a moment later.\n\n\"Away!\" Something creaked; the heat abated to a bearable temperature. The Dragoness explained, \"My usual patients enjoy the temperature of magical lights. Did you see anything at all, my little fire?\"\n\nA soft, burry note entered Qualiana's voice as she spoke the quintessentially draconic endearment. Auli wondered if she was looking forward to \u2013 well, she was not entirely sure how the draconic birth process worked. Laying her eggs? Speaking to them? How long did a Dragoness nurture eggs in her own body before laying them and brooding over them?\n\n\"I am completely sightless, noble Dragoness,\" Auli replied politely. \"I see not even the faintest pinprick of light or colour.\"\n\n*Grrr-gnnaarrr.*\n\nIf the Dragoness was shocked or dismayed by her patient's disfigurement, she gave no outward sign. Perhaps she was used to working on much larger wounds, such as rents and holes in hides occasioned by bloody Dragon battles.\n\nQualiana drew a huge lens out above Auli, muttering meantime that the ovoid lens was considerably larger than the girl was tall. The Dragoness began to hum with evident enjoyment as she set about the examination process. A goodly half-hour must have passed before Auli heard the scratching of Dragon ink-reed upon scrolleaf; Qualiana recorded a range of different measurements before bidding the girl open her mouth, close it, move the split lip flaps outward and back again, and waggle her jaw as far as it could move in any direction. She checked the tongue with the most delicate instruments she possessed, and probed deep in Auli's mouth \u2013 checking the oral structures, she assumed.\n\n\"Hmm.\" *Skrr, skrr,* her writing implement scratched busily. Qualiana said, \"You live in a world of darkness, so you see with your hands?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"Arkurion taught you this magic?\"\n\nDiffidently, Auli-Ambar described how he had observed her feeling for dirt without touching surfaces. She said, \"Arkurion was the key. Truly, he did open to me all \u2026 all the world, o Qualiana.\" Her voice trailed off in embarrassment. What must the Red Dragoness think of this bashful, helpless gratitude shading her statements regarding the Mercury Blue? Did she think her a feckless teen; did she see how much this meant to her?\n\n\"A most worthy achievement,\" Qualiana said blandly. \"Can you read this?\"\n\nThe Dragoness' paw-written notes were in a very different runic script to that which she was accustomed, but Auli did manage to find a few common words. So mighty was the Dragoness' purr of satisfaction at this juncture, she almost vibrated her patient right off the examination table.\n\nTwo bony knuckles pressed Auli back into the desired position.\n\nWithout further ado, Qualiana proceeded to question her in detail about her origins. Her Fra'aniorian ears came in for close examination \u2013 and a dint of acidic, fire-bubble ire when the tale behind their nipped-at edges was revealed \u2013 as well as her poorly healed leg and her curious eyes. Throughout, the Dragoness' gentle and efficient manner set her at ease. The only sticky moment came when Auli briefly summarised her childhood with Mi'elgan and Sairana; at this point the Dragoness' lashing tail knocked over some equipment behind her, and her belly fires bubbled like a cauldron neglected upon the fire.\n\nPerhaps the Master's house might be endangered by a stray flying boulder after all? Auli was convinced she ought not to feel quite so entertained by the prospect!\n\nQualiana inquired, \"Why the Dragon Library, Auli-Ambar? What first drew you there?\"\n\n\"The black \u2026 uh \u2026\" The Dragoness' silence captured her tongue. Auli's mind went completely blank and stubbornly remained that way. At length, she sputtered like a fractured lava pipe coughing up its contents, \"At first I thought it was the books and scrolls that called to me, and I still feel that way, noble Dragoness, really I do, but there's something \u2026 else \u2026 there's a presence! I felt it again today when Sapphurion spoke. A roaring. I can only describe it as a kind of Dragon \u2013 a spectral Dragon present in the Library.\"\n\nThe Dragoness inhaled sharply.\n\n\"I know!\" Auli rasped, her throat thickening with frustration. \"I knew you'd think I'm crazy but I'm almost certain I hear a Dragon, sometimes, but I've never found it and I've never even told anybody about him because it's all so stupid and pathetic, don't you agree, a blind girl just wandering around the Dragon Library for three years? Three benighted years pining over books and scrolls I could never read, before Arkurion found me \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion again?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Auli wanted to shrink away, but there was nowhere for her to hide on that bare examination table. \"He found me deep down where he was conducting research, he said \u2013\"\n\n\"His research?\"\n\nWhy the repetition? Through the forge-like roaring in her ears, Auli-Ambar said, \"I'm so very sorry if I did something wrong, noble Qualiana. I never intended the mighty Mercury Blue any harm. He sought only to help me. Please, please \u2013\"\n\n\"Girl, still your flapping tongue. Baseless pleading itches my scales. This has nothing to do with the Remoyan Dragon. Well, much but little, if you follow my meaning.\"\n\nAuli giggled despite her painful awareness of the situation. Why was the Dragoness breathing so heavily? What was she not understanding about the powerful fire currents churning in that belly now; the rich, scorching scents wafting to her nostrils, the way the Dragoness' paw trembled palpably against the table? When Dragons grew agitated, the awareness of their presence became so overwhelming to Auli, it was as if their very existence crowded against her mind; she likened the sensation to the resistance experienced by a fortress under siege. Same with that presence in the Library. Could she explain it another way? Nay, save that at moments like these she felt so alive and engulfed and fearful, she was surprised sparks did not start skittering off her toes.\n\nEventually, Qualiana leaned so close that the smaller scales of her muzzle briefly pressed against Auli's legs, and she whispered, <Does the name Amaryllion mean anything to thee, little one?>\n\nIt took seemingly forever for words to tickle the tip of her tongue, for the Red Dragoness' presence mesmerised her until Auli ventured, <Nay, save that \u2013 Sapphurion spoke that name earlier, did he not? I thought he meant Fra'anior the Onyx. Who is Amaryllion? What \u2026 is Amaryllion?>\n\nA massive digit prodded her ribs. <And, by my talons, what does he want with thee?>\n\n<Want? Me?>\n\nQualiana laughed rather grimly at her squeaky amazement, it seemed. She said, <When a Dragon roars, the wise do well to listen. Auli, do you remember exactly where you met Arkurion that very first time in the Library? Would you show me that place?>\n\nAuli rubbed her sweaty palms on her leggings, convinced she was mired in deep, deep trouble, and sinking fast. <Aye, mighty Dragoness. I do.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "*Krrr-krack!*\n\n\"Stinking windrocs!\" Auli-Ambar snatched back her hand.\n\n\"Precisely. Now, would you kindly elucidate how by Fra'anior's own paws you managed to sashay through all these demonstrably unbreakable magical ward-constructs into the forbidden section of the Dragon Library?\" Qualiana's throaty growl conveyed more than a hint of threat, but a moment later mellowed into laughter. \"Hearken to the broodiness of a pregnant Dragoness.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar mopped her brow. Phew. She had just been imagining dancing upon Qualiana's tongue and down her gullet. \"Well, noble Dragoness, I simply \u2026 Fra'anior's truth, I just sort of walked \u2026 in.\"\n\n*Grrrr.* \"I'm learning that nothing about you is simple, girl. How many summers have you?\"\n\n\"I'm eleven, soon to be twelve.\"\n\n\"Hmm. You seem remarkably advanced for a girl of your Human age, emotionally and intellectually speaking.\" Auli made a noncommittal noise. \"Perhaps this ward-breaking talent is related to incipient adolescence?\"\n\nAuli blushed richly. Zimtyna had started to prepare her with the odd comment before, but last week, had launched into a two-hour lecture that convinced her charge that she never wanted to grow up. Ever. She was quite happy being a gangly sack of bones, all elbows and awkward height. She was half a head shorter than Zimtyna already \u2013 no stripling herself \u2013 and sprouting like a weed, according to Mistress Frantia. Maybe there was merit to this odd observation, which married with Master Chamzu's opinion of her 'mental age'. Might this provide a clue to her maternal heritage?\n\nQualiana pressed, \"Ah, the sweet fires of youthful chagrin. Now, cast your mind back. What exactly were you doing when you found Arkurion that first time?\"\n\n\"I descended the other stairs \u2013\"\n\n*Gnarrrr!* \"The coverage of the portal wards is seamless, as I confirmed with Head Librarian Sazutharr ten minutes ago!\"\n\nWho was now alerted to her \u2026 trespassing? Snooping? Roaring rajals! Cast the mind back, quick-wings now. She had been wandering, thinking, imbibing books and railings and the rounded edges of scrolls with her yearning fingertips, counting steps and \u2026\n\n\"Singing.\" The truth settled in Auli's bones the instant the word popped out of her mouth. Despite Qualiana's snort of amazement, she repeated, \"I was singing because this place makes me happy, and the magic did not bite me that time. It \u2013 for want of a better word \u2013 tingled.\"\n\nHer tiny shrug provoked a massive yet impressively restrained snarl from the beast beside her. Auli told her legs, very forcefully indeed, that charging away and hiding under a rack of scrolls would not be tolerated right now.\n\nSwitching to Dragonish, Qualiana's response whisked her hair back from her face as the Dragoness hissed dangerously, <Quadruple layers of portal magic which have seen seventeen hundred years of draconic scientific advancement by arguably the finest intellects in all of Dragondom, simply tingled in delight as you sashayed through their never-before-breached protections, full of the pollens of springtide?>\n\nSulkily, Auli folded her arms. <I do not lie.>\n\n<But today, there's biting?>\n\nDraconic sarcasm came infused with billows of smoke and real fire. Qualiana's pun clearly conveyed that she meant both real and magical forms of biting.\n\n<Um, I suppose,> she managed. Ooh, brave. The stirring stuff of ballads!\n\n<THEN SING!>\n\nGulp. Wobble. Grow a spine, girl! Squaring up her shoulders, the Human girl opened her mouth and croaked like a bullfrog fleeing the snap of a heron's beak. Qualiana did not laugh, but neither did the muted, throbbing thunderstorm of her presence meander one inch from practically perching upon Auli's left shoulder.\n\nShe swallowed back an urge to titter hysterically. Talk about a demanding audience! Sing, or collect a salutary fireball between the teeth. Well, no great loss there. Judging by the length and quality of her examination, Qualiana must be planning bone-to-enamel dental remodelling on the contents of her mouth.\n\nOn the third attempt, her voice just about functioned as voices ought to. She warbled like a hungry baby bird trilling for treats, quavered like a Dragonship juddering beneath the press of storm wings, and then settled into a verse about Saggaz Thunderdoom unchaining the unbreakable Rock of Jamaaku, whatever on the Islands that was. In a moment, the girl wobbled forward and passed, without any drama whatsoever, through the tingling zone into a slightly cooler and muskier-smelling area beyond.\n\nAuli had the impression that the very walls and scrolls were staring at her, never mind Qualiana. The Dragoness breathed, \"Heavens raining fireballs, girl, you command the most extraordinary vocal gift! And, let me check \u2026 aye! Blow me down with a bunch of firebird feathers, the wards remain arrayed in their perfectly contiguous structures but there you stand on the other side, fresh as a dewy petal!\"\n\nAuli could not restrain a wicked chortle. Ha! Take that, Dragoness!\n\nQualiana snorted, \"Oh, far be it from Auli-Ambar to obey the immutable laws of magic \u2013 the supposedly immutable laws, one must concede. I bow before thine mastery.\" The Red Dragoness unleashed a mighty bellow of laughter. Switching abruptly to Dragonish, she added, <And, why not? Why should the Great Onyx not articulate his creative zest in the most unexpected manner, in a vessel most faultlessly suited to such an expression of magic?>\n\nHelp! How could she begin to respond to that?\n\nWith a stridulous creaking of scale armour, the Dragoness poured forward to nuzzle Auli with the tip of her almighty muzzle \u2013 her jawbone scraped the ground, while her nostrils touched the height of the girl's shoulder! Her paw gently clasped a wisp-slender body. Shiver!\n\nThe Dragoness said, \"Blasphemous as it may sound to every earhole and ear canal, I do believe the Ancient Dragons possessed a fine sense of humour.\"\n\n\"Well \u2026\"\n\nShe supposed the draconic penchant for entirely swallowing people in their mighty forepaws did rather upset the balance of an argument, didn't it? Not that they were arguing. Nor did Qualiana appear to be evaluating her edible properties. Comforting? Perhaps.\n\nThe Dragoness cried, <By Fra'anior's own spirit hath Arkurion's fires gladdened to the bright-fires of thine soul, little one, and faithfully hath he opened the scroll-worlds to thy seeking mind. This fine deed is unpunishable. We have much work to do; much to consider.>\n\n<First-talon, there is the matter of Amaryllion. Few even among the Dragonkind know that Amaryllion Fireborn yet lives, the last of the Ancient Dragons to tarry upon our Island-World. Even I know not where he resides or why he tarried when the others departed, but legend holds that Amaryllion waits for one Dragon into whom he will breathe his immortal fires. He is vastly aged, this younger shell-brother of Fra'anior.>\n\nAn Ancient Dragon! Was that the predacious yet spellbinding presence which had been pursuing her for so long? Auli's very practical mind had more immediate and mundane concerns swimming upon its surface, however.\n\n\"But, I cannot let Mistress Frantia down.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, little flame. Misplaced sense of duty. Commendable, all the same. Second-talon, I believe your gifts are entirely wasted cleaning roosts. We need to change your schedule.\"\n\n\"No \u2026 ah, respectfully, noble Dragoness, may we discuss \u2013\"\n\n\"You wish to keep cleaning?\"\n\n\"I'll study in the evenings. Every evening,\" Auli promised.\n\n\"Most scholars work only in the daytime.\"\n\nOpen jaw. Shut wonky jaw. Auli sensed this was one argument she was not about to win. Could she argue the Dragoness around to a compromise?\n\nQualiana pressed, \"Third-talon, I need time to study your particular case and design a good solution for your mouth and jaw. The leg I believe is straightforward \u2013 a few minor adjustments to the lie of the bones shall suffice \u2013 but the work on your face and oral cavity will be a considerably more delicate operation. Pleasingly complex, I'll warrant. I've already sent instructions with Arkurion to retrieve the latest research from Tanstoy. They are well advanced in the medical studies, I believe; definitely more so than us. We should receive a reply within a month. Then, the design work can commence.\"\n\nDisappointment. What a crushing anti-climax. Why, o why, had she allowed her hopes to swell as the moons created tidal forces in terrace lakes? What did a few 'adjustments' to her bones entail? Auli pictured draconic paws massaging her bones into powder, or tying her limbs into unbreakable knots before they served up freshly toasted Auli-Ambar in a brass dining bowl. With spicy peppers and a sprinkling of the tarragon spice Dragons so loved.\n\nAnd how or when had Qualiana communicated with Arkurion, who must already have flown?\n\nHere lay the nub of a new mystery.\n\nShe had wanted nothing more than to remain unnoticed for the rest of her life. Maybe. Perhaps she would always have lived in unknowing misery, save for Arkurion's incisive intervention. Yet his warning echoed in her mind, indorsing the slow, simmering sense of discontent she had begun to experience around the Halls of the Dragons. Auli-Ambar realised that she stood upon a watershed between the world she had known, and a very different future.\n\nBut would a delicate bud be crushed, or allowed to flourish?\n\nDecision time.\n\nShovelling aside the inner wailing of a girl whose devastating fears and phobias she was beginning to truly despise, Auli oriented upon the sound of Qualiana's breathing. \"It shall be as you command, noble Dragoness.\"\n\nShe purred in response, \"At last, in perceiving the matchless flame of your heart's courage, Auli-Ambar, I do begin to grasp an iota of why Fra'anior called Humans the people of his right paw.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "A Labour of Lore",
                "text": "As the Embers faded upon Auli's eleventh year of life, a mysterious envoy arrived from the East. By message scroll she had requested opportunity to treat with the Dragon Elders and access to the Dragon Library. Auli first met Azziala in the Human infirmary, when a weak voice from the next bed over inquired where she was and what day it might be. Azziala had arrived desperately sick \u2013 poisoned by her enemies, she said \u2013 but if that was true Auli soon learned the doctors could find no evidence to support her claim.\n\nAn attempt at poisoning? She had to wonder.\n\n\"A good morn-tide to you.\"\n\nAuli shifted her head upon her pillow roll. Gracious Islands, what an old-fashioned greeting! \"And to you,\" she responded politely.\n\nShe had just been daydreaming in runic script. Typical Auli. But it seemed that cascades of images seethed through the darkness of her mind, troubling her with imaginings she knew might bear a form of reality, yet of which she could never be certain. Shapeless shapes. Formless form. Colour realised by metaphorical comparison and poetic axioms, yet never experienced.\n\n\"That's quite the frame you have attached to your leg, girl.\" The woman's melodious accent was very hard to follow, but most pleasing to the ear. \"How did you earn such treatment?\"\n\n\"A bad fall.\"\n\n\"Aye? What happened?\"\n\nShe voiced the partial truth that always made her squirm just a touch. Auli had never revealed the entirety of the story to anyone. \"Some Dragon hatchlings decided a hazing was in order. They tied a rat to my back and set me loose; I fell down a ventilation shaft. A soldier from Fra'anior found me.\"\n\n\"Oh! I'm sorry. What was the soldier's name?\"\n\nDistrust seeped into Auli's awareness. The woman thought she was being inscrutable, but a blind person's ears had to be finely attuned to every nuance of conversation \u2013 even more so, the endless nuances of the draconic language she had been studying so relentlessly of late. A feather-light touch seemed to tantalise her mind, but then disappeared before she could think upon it.\n\n\"Ra'aba,\" she replied, trying to sound innocent.\n\n\"A good man, your rescuer. Isn't that so?\"\n\nAuli almost choked. \"He \u2026 uh, well, I hear he's a sub-Captain, and soon to be promoted to Captain of the Royal Guard.\" There, that information was public enough. \"Where do you hail from, noble lady?\"\n\n\"From a very remote location North of Kerdani Town,\" she replied. \"Is it always so stiflingly hot here?\"\n\n\"Volcanoes are seldom cold.\"\n\nNot that she knew any volcano but this one, the greatest in the Island-World. Nor had she travelled farther than a handful of Islands in a few square leagues. One day \u2026\n\n\"My home Islands lie so far North, even the volcanoes are frozen,\" Azziala said in her strange, intense fashion. Then, after wishing Auli a full recovery and relief from the pain of clamps affixed through her flesh into the bones themselves, she proceeded to question her until the girl, entirely truthfully, claimed exhaustion. She did not appreciate being squeezed for information, but Auli also felt too unversed in the art of discourse to deflect questions effectively.\n\nThat evening, it was, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Reading.\"\n\n\"With your hand?\"\n\nWincing at the pain slowly grinding away in her leg, Auli said, \"It's a skill I've developed. You'll be surprised how perceptive blind people can be.\"\n\n\"Ah, the legendary magic of Fra'anior that wafts around this caldera like pollen on a breeze,\" said the woman, managing to sound at once envious and moderately amused. \"Why do you wear the formal face veil? Are you religious?\"\n\n\"No, just ugly.\" She groaned. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for asking. It is a hard fate for a woman to be so different from others.\"\n\nAzziala understood? This much was clear from the tenor of her response. Perhaps that was why she was so formidable in conversation, as if speech were swordplay to her. Tentatively, Auli advanced, \"I was born with a deformed face \u2013 the mouth and jaw. And \u2013\"\n\n\"Me? It's my stomach. I'm afraid my stigma is much more easily hidden than yours, Auli.\" After a long, reflective moment, Azziala added, \"You do have beautiful hair, though \u2013 a deep, rich brown mingled with streaks of gold. Has anyone ever told you how striking it is?\"\n\n<The better to hide my face,> Auli thought.\n\n\"No,\" she said aloud.\n\nPensively, the woman said, \"As for me, I'm told I am beautiful of form and feature, but little do they know what lies beneath \u2013 and isn't that just a truth to savage the soul? I'm going to sleep now. May you soar in your dreams, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\n\"You too.\"\n\nEvery alarm gong in her body was crashing, but Auli gave no sign of the reverberations that traumatised her being. Something about that woman! Something \u2026 fey, and foul, an inchoate sense of danger she did not understand in any measure whatsoever \u2026 she had to speak to Master Chamzu. Soon. She had to tell him about Azziala and Ra'aba and Razzior and the whispers she occasionally heard about the roosts as she continued to attend to her occupation three mornings a week \u2013 well, not since the operation to straighten her leg. But Sapphurion and Qualiana had requested her special assistance twice a week, to freshen their roost to the standards of an inordinately fussy pregnant Dragoness.\n\nSubterfuge hung thick in the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "The following morning, the envoy was released from the infirmary and Master Chamzu arrived with a scroll \u2013 from her father! Had she not been bolted to the bedframe, Auli might just have toppled off the bed then and there. It blew her concerns about Azziala right out of her mind.\n\nWhen the Master had departed with his usual best wishes for her recovery and a directive to request any books or scrolls she needed from the Library, Auli unfurled the scroll with a trembling hand. Chamzu had warned it might well have seen the censor's scissors \u2013 that the wax seal appeared whole was absolutely no indication that what lay within had not been perused by greedy eyes.\n\nSlowly, struggling with the unfamiliar forms of her father's flowing script, Auli read:\n\n<My dearest daughter,>\n\n<Well may you catch your breath at my presumption in addressing you in this fashion. I hope you have a sympathetic reader to deliver its contents. My note is necessarily short, but also necessarily laden with apology. I have been the poorest father in the Island-World to you. I would not be surprised if you wanted to burn this scroll immediately, for you must loathe me with every fibre of your being, but I beg you please to hear the burden upon my heart.>\n\nShe had to breathe. Just breathe! Oh mighty Onyx, why this; why now?\n\n<It is of late that I have finally begun to truly consider the values in my life, what I have chased with what vain effort, and what is dearest to me. I came to the realisation of how deeply and terribly I have failed you. I must have loved your mother dearly, but I have forgotten all about her \u2013 her name, her face, our relationship. It seems perverse. Impossible, even, yet it is so, and no other person I have found remembers her in the slightest detail either. And now? I sense and fear the same happenstance and this truth sears my heart as with Dragon acid. The memory of you fades from my cognizance like a flower withering beneath volcanic heat; thoughts of my daughter are like scorching sand trickling between my fingers, and I am powerless to prevent it. I even fashioned a small name plaque \u2013>\n\nAuli's gasp sounded as if she had swallowed a black wasp and was trying to cough it out of the back of her throat. Exactly what Master Chamzu did! Some mornings, she heard his fingers brushing the plaque on her doorway as he left early for his office \u2013 as if he needed a fresh reminder, daily, of who lived in those modest chambers alongside his! Her hand trembled upon the scrolleaf. Lower down, someone had neatly excised an entire section with a knife.\n\n<\u2013 that I might daily keep the memory of you before me,> she continued to read.\n\n<Truthfully, the act of giving you up to Mi'elgan and Sairana was the most cowardly of my life. What regret overshadowed my Island when Chamzu wrote of all you had suffered there. Oh my daughter! What a fool I was! No caldera's overflowing of apologies could ever suffice. My honour is ruined. My avoidance of you since has been nought but the outworking of that same cowardice.>\n\n<I can never beg enough forgiveness, Auli-Ambar. I am too wretched a man to deserve anything but your utmost contempt for the many ways in which I have mistreated you over the years. I am no father. I never have been. But I hope \u2013>\n\nHere, another piece of the letter, jagged and poorly cut, was missing. She felt carefully around the gap.\n\n<\u2013 soon change my job, as I have explained.>\n\nHiss! What change?\n\n<Auli-Ambar, my heartfelt plea is that you might someway come not to hate me one day. If you could find it within yourself, please write to me \u2013 however briefly \u2013 that I might have hope when I return to Fra'anior Cluster in \u2013>\n\nAuli's mismatched teeth gritted painfully together. This gap was far too predictable. So much for the hope of key details.\n\n<Your heart-broken father.>\n\n<Xa'an Ta'afaya.>\n\nShe wanted to scream. She wanted to tear up the scroll and crisp it in the nearest lava pit, of which there were many around Gi'ishior \u2013 oddly, for a supposedly dormant volcano, piping hot lava seemed in plentiful supply. The anger that churned in her breast was a malign force, a reaction that craved to hurt him as badly as he had hurt her. That was darkness beyond anything she had ever lived in, Auli recognised, fighting to fend it away. She tried, but her heart was weak, and the feelings her father had exposed, as raw as an open wound.\n\n<You hated me because I was ugly.>\n\nQualiana had not even begun to work upon her face.\n\nVery slowly, like a flower curling up at the onset of nightfall, she hunched over the scroll. Auli sobbed as she had never sobbed before."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"You're bored?\"\n\nA Dragon's testy snort had a way of plucking at bedclothes as if a gale had momentarily whipped about her infirmary bed. Auli-Ambar awoke from a tangled, endless nightmare with a feeling as if a cunning paw had just plucked her heart clean out of chest, jolted it into wakefulness with a powerful electrical discharge, and thrust it back inside without a care for life or limb. Horrid!\n\n\"Why, my administrators have been sending Apprentices up here by the cartload with scroll upon scroll of lore to satisfy Her Bedridden Majesty's every whim, and you have the gumption to be bored?\"\n\n\"Head \u2013 oh, noble Sazutharr! How \u2013\"\n\n\"BORED?\" he roared. \"MY SCHOLARS ARE NEVER BORED!\"\n\nThunderbolts and peeved Dragons!\n\n\"Uh \u2026\" Auli was far from certain as to whether or not this was a joke. Sazutharr, it was whispered, was ever a Dragon of wit and mischievous paw, despite his greatly advanced age. She inquired carefully, \"But, how \u2013\"\n\nHis broad snigger wafted heated-vanilla smoke over her bed.\n\n\"Did they \u2013 who moved my bed? But \u2013\"\n\nA mighty chortle rattled the bedframe. \"But you are!\"\n\nWithering windrocs! Someone must have shifted her while she was sleeping. The Human-sized infirmary chambers were too small for Dragons. But why the possessive-imperative command structure he had incongruously inserted into Island Standard speech, emphasizing 'my scholars?' She was no scholar. Hardly a fledgling in these Halls!\n\nAuli said, \"Is there something you are not telling \u2013\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\nFolding her arms across her chest, she inquired sarcastically, \"Noble Dragon, could you kindly allow me to finish \u2013\"\n\n\"No chance!\" he boomed. \"You are mine now, Auli-Ambar. Mine!\" Apparently his paw clamped across the bed, because the metal side rails squeaked emphatically in protest. \"No time to waste! Despite that they bolted you into this frame \u2013 you see, you lost thirteen sixteenths of an inch in your leg, the way the bones first healed, and therefore a touch of stretching was called for \u2013 I have taken the liberty of making a few arrangements behind your teensy tail, if I may so describe the woefully scant diminutiveness of your rump.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Auli just about managed, convinced that this reference to her behind, never mind the implication of a Dragon actually looking at her hindquarters, was deeply inappropriate.\n\n\"We will not be upstaged by that audacious Southern youngling, no, we will not!\" declared Sazutharr. \"And aye, I am green-eyed with jealousy! Fancy him identifying your talent when I, the mighty Dragon Librarian, have known you for far longer than he, and conversed with you many more times. You are fortunate that you chose my Library for your historic discovery. Thus, I am mollified. Very slightly mollified.\"\n\n\"Noble Sazutharr, I'm sorry \u2013\"\n\n\"You are not sorry! You are a gifted young Human! Despite your undeniable talents with mop and broom, you demonstrate the makings of more, so much more! And I, the mighty Dragon Librarian, shall tease forth these many talents with zestful delight.\"\n\nBoom and bluster. The old Dragon was secretly enjoying himself, Auli realised, warming to his fond jealousy. \"Aye, Sazutharr?\" she breathed diffidently.\n\n\"I have spoken to Master Chamzu. We agreed that you will be assigned to my service forthwith! What say you to that, eh?\"\n\n\"I am profoundly honoured.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I shall endeavour my utmost to ensure your total mollification, o mighty Head Librarian.\"\n\nAfter a slight pause, his laughter belled out. \"HA HA HA! You are pert, little flame! So sassy of scale! There's so much to relish about your attitude.\" Despite that the merest flash of brashness left her feeling nauseous and shaking? \"I love bold questions, unanswerable conundrums, sweeping philosophical considerations and most especially, apprentices and scholars who do not simply accept my every caprice or directive without applying the lambent brain pathways! Now, the negotiations with Master Chamzu and Mistress Frantia, and indeed the noble Qualiana herself, did not proceed as straightforwardly as I had foreseen. It seems you possess in inordinate measure this most troublesome Human characteristic called 'work ethic,' and they did not wish to release you completely from their service. How they favour you! As for me, I fail to see any merit whatsoever in that decision.\"\n\nAuli made a face he could not miss.\n\nApparently encouraged by her response, he said, \"The way they behaved, I might liken to a cavern full of gold-fevered, squabbling Dragons.\"\n\n\"Now you're just tugging my wings.\"\n\nSazutharr purred, \"So, my fine young scholar, we shall have to solve this quandary of many competing demands upon your schedule. Meantime, whilst you remain bed-bound, I shall be despatching further Dragonship-loads of scholars in your direction to instruct you in the necessary arts of Library work \u2013 indexing, shelving, archiving, copying, calligraphy, repair and restoration techniques both physical and magical, the mysteries of inks, lacquers and scrolleaf production, the gilding and illumination of manuscripts, reading the many scripts of our Island-World, cataloguing the lore, and even identifying places where lack of lore might exist \u2026 my scholars are never bored!\"\n\n\"Never, o Sazutharr.\"\n\n\"Don't you whisper into my old ear canals like a warm season zephyr. You may be a shy little flame, but flame you are! And I intend to mould you into a scholar who will outshine the brightest stars in the firmament above!\"\n\nPhew.\n\nAnd thus, Auli realised, her life had taken another swerve in a most unexpected direction. Scholar of the Dragon Library. A few less bolts through her bones, and she would have leaped off her bed and danced for joy!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "From her initial immersion in the wisdom and traditions of the Dragon Library, Auli-Ambar very rapidly gathered ink on her fingers and scroll dust between her toes. Her first days were spent shadowing the Apprentices as they in turn shadowed the Masters \u2013 all entitled Archivists and Researchers, even though their tasks varied from preparing archival inks to trotting about the Island-World in search of new and arcane lore \u2013 as she stumped around with her cane, posing queries like a persistent parakeet.\n\n\"Why do we need a blacksmith's workshop in the Library, Master Ornath?\"\n\n\"Because Dragon books are so immense, they need to be bound with specially treated metal hinges, and the covers are often the confluence of the jeweller's and the fine metalworker's art,\" the Under-Librarian replied patiently, in his dry whisper of a voice. Auli thought he must be very tall, for his voice seemed to descend with colossal gravitas from the very rafters. \"We also employ five Scrollmasters to prepare all the vellum, particular leathers and scrolleaf we require. You'll find them hard at work in the next chamber. By the end of this week, I expect you to be able to list in detail the responsibilities of each of these crafts.\"\n\n\"Aye, Master.\"\n\nHard at work seemed to be a motto around here, but there was more. Auli had been sniffing about for days \u2013 and years before \u2013 but it suddenly dawned upon her what she had missed from the first. This place was redolent with the love of lore. Reeking of it! How had she ever missed the most obvious characteristic of all?\n\nThe Under-Librarian continued, \"Now, here we have the Chamber of Runes, and the Masters of Letters and their eleven Apprentices. These are our specialists in the written and spoken forms of the ancient languages and proto-languages. They are also responsible for the physical preservation of old lore. As you know, even scrolleaf which has been both chemically and magically treated does eventually deteriorate.\"\n\nAuli rubbed her arms as magic prickled her skin. She whispered, \"Why the magic, Master?\"\n\n\"Because there are systems of draconic script which attempt to codify the forms and nuances of the magical arts,\" he replied. \"It's an academic field on the forefront of our research. Auli, don't speak \u2013\"\n\nAt the same time, Auli said brightly, <Oh, noble Dragon, what are you \u2013>\n\n<SILENCE, HATCHLING!>\n\nThe Dragon's irascible blast smacked Auli off her feet, thankfully depositing her in what felt like a vat of archival oil. She sloughed through the viscous, aromatic fluid, but her newly healed but still weak leg gave away. She slapped an arm out. \"Glub!\"\n\nUgh! Floundering about, she heard the Under-Librarian begin, rather icily, <Noble Taskaturion \u2013>\n\n<How many times must I make it clear that my work is NEVER to be disturbed?> The elderly male Dragon's voice rasped so wrathfully, Auli was surprised he did not ignite the room. Foot-and paw-steps rushed toward her, while Taskaturion growled, <I am surrounded by fools and rank amateurs! Mine is a delicate art, far too lofty for most Dragons, never mind some disrespectful, blind chit of Humanity who will never amount to anything in the labours of this Library!>\n\nOrnath said, <Do you disagree with the Head Librarian's assessment, o Taskaturion?>\n\nAuli appreciated both the inflexibility of his support and an arm which gripped her own. She wriggled to the vat's side, where another Human Apprentice \u2013 Makugor, judging by his nervous cough \u2013 helped lug her out, sheeting glutinous weight from her dragging limbs. At least she smelled decent, an aroma doubtless exacerbated by the inferno of humiliation boiling in her belly.\n\nTaskaturion muttered, <Even the mighty Sazutharr knows better than to break my concentration. Enough idle chatter. The child may pose her empty-headed inquiries to these others here. Discreetly.>\n\n<Very good,> said Ornath. <Auli-Ambar, your arm?>\n\nSquelchy girl exits Dragon Library, stage right. Guess who would be mopping up all the oil runnels later?\n\nOn the way out they bumped into the Mercury Blue, who took a surprised sniff toward Auli's hair and declared, \"How droll! Oh, are we preserving Library Apprentices as well now, Under-Librarian Ornath?\"\n\n\"Ha!\" he laughed. \"It's a new protocol.\"\n\n\"Extends the work into eternity, I'm sure. Use plenty of soap, Auli, or you'll be pickled for the next thousand years,\" teased the Dragon. \"A sweet-smelling pickle.\"\n\nAs she stalked off in a minor huff, she heard the Under-Librarian chortle, \"And she shouldn't stand near any open flames for a few weeks, right?\"\n\nHa. Funny, but probably true."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Two months passed by quickly in Sazutharr's scrolliverse, as he fondly named his Library. For him it was indeed the centre of the Universe, and it was Auli's daily joy to absorb his enormous passion for the written word and lore. She made friends amongst the Apprentices, especially Emoric, the dancing Apprentice who checked in and checked out books, scrolls and scrolleaf bundles at the main desk, and undertook shelving in his spare moments, Asmatazz the Grey, a jovial fledgling with a flair for restoration of texts and ancient languages, and the painfully shy Essini, a Gemalkan girl who worked in the inks and writing implements specialty. Her hearing was very poor, so her speech was difficult to follow. Auli-Ambar learned that her family had been cast out soon after the community discovered her disability, for it was seen as a curse brought upon them by her parents' wickedness.\n\nEssini's parents had fled South to Yorbik Island where they were set upon by bandits and murdered for their paltry possessions. The bandits abandoned Essini in the rajal-infested interior forests, but an old Brown Dragon had found her and brought her to a Human enclave. They promptly about-faced and peddled the child to slave traders, who passed her from hand to hand until eventually a married couple from Gi'ishior, rug merchants who had no child of their own, purchased her out of pity. Now, she was as loved as any person could wish.\n\nAuli-Ambar sighed. At least Essini's story had turned out well, but it could have been much worse. Bandits and slavers were not known for their kindness to children, and Sazutharr had told her darkly, the fate of some children was so terrible, it made a Dragon shudder to think upon it.\n\nThis, too, was part of the Dragon Library's mission \u2013 to promote the spread of beneficial lore and education across the Islands, the Dragon Librarian told her. He said, \"A simplistic goal, of course. But a noble ambition of many dimensions.\"\n\nAuli worked diligently in the shelving team with Emoric and old Farrazzar the Red, learning the lay of rack and shelf all around the Library. Soon, whispers began to circulate of an Apprentice competition being prepared by Sazutharr. Sure enough, the big day arrived and Sazutharr closed the doors for a morning, while he explained the game.\n\n\"There are thirty references, clues or passages each team will need to find. Some are harder and some easier, while some will require all of your cunning to decipher. They are obscure enough to torment the most dedicated scholar! My choosing, of course. The scoring of clues is rated as easy, medium, challenging or impossible. One point for easy, then two, five and ten respectively. There will be eleven teams picked at random from a Dragon's goblet. The teams will each work through the clues in a different, randomised order so that we do not have forty Dragons jammed together in the entrance to Biology, for example.\"\n\nEveryone laughed, from the basso tones of the older Dragons to the piping laughter of three new fledglings, Apprentice Cartographers working with their shell-father Muzukor the Blue.\n\n\"Each member of the winning team shall receive an honour on the plaque outside the Library \u2013\" since Auli had never seen it, she did not know it existed \"\u2013 and a single talon's weight ingot of pure gold from my personal hoard.\"\n\nNow, that fired up the Dragons! Auli grinned at the immediate murmuring and swaggering.\n\nShortly, the teams were drawn from Sazutharr's paw by the ever-dour Inzugith the Yellow, an Under-Librarian of mighty stature and famously abstemious ways. To her surprise, when Auli's allotment fell to join Asmatazz, Essimi and Tranchubor the Orange, a Researcher Apprentice, the two Dragons roared, \"Yes! We drew Auli!\" and indulged in a round of celebratory wing slapping.\n\nReally?\n\nSazutharr growled, \"Teams at the ready? Remember that you have one opportunity to omit a clue, but that will be counted against you in the final reckoning! Each incorrectly attempted answer also deducts half of the points value of your clue. Speed, completeness and overall score shall determine our winner! Right, you may open your first scroll!\"\n\nWith that, a kind of happy scholarly pandemonium descended upon the Library. Shouts and groans were quickly followed by the trampling of paws and cries, \"Don't you dare follow us!\" \"Hey, you can't hang our Human off that shelf!\" and \"Don't let them see, but I know where we'll find \u2026\"\n\nAsmatazz said, \"We have a medium clue, which says:\n\n<Follow my tail to the trail of light,>\n\n<Whence my insectoid rump burns bright.>\n\n<My shell is green, my light is blue,>\n\n<But my mode of incubation is your first clue.>\n\n\"And here we are required to furnish tome, reference and shelf number. Obviously, some kind of firefly.\"\n\n\"Urr-arr un,\" slurred Essimi.\n\n\"A rare one? Good point,\" said Tranchubor. \"That puts it beyond the general Entomology reference materials. I think Azkurbassai is our key author-Dragon. Or Myanturion \u2013 by my wings, could it be a fruit fly?\"\n\n\"The Western Isles armoured class of stinging fruit flies?\" Auli suggested.\n\nA paw thumped her back. \"Told you we needed this girl,\" Tranchubor boomed. \"Quietly. Let's cut through four and thirteen to throw them off the scent. Follow me.\"\n\nAuli's team started brightly, but then they fell foul of three challenging clues in a row. Each time they returned, Sazutharr sung out the scores. \"Ninth of eleven?\" she groaned. \"Should we omit one?\"\n\n\"No, we have you,\" said Asmatazz.\n\n\"Shkp buth um ack to eeth,\" said Essimi, shyly.\n\n\"Aye, skipping once is allowed,\" said Tranchubor. \"That'll allow us to run two clues at once, but a double penalty later if we don't solve the one we skipped. Keep thinking, team. Which Island 'doth gleam effulgent of poet's praise, the beauty bright of Dragons and knaves?' Poet, reference, year. Alright. Noble Sazutharr?\"\n\n\"Oh, tough draw,\" purred the Head Librarian, sounding very self-satisfied indeed. \"This one's a personal favourite of mine, however. The best of Dragonish good fortune speed your wings, younglings.\"\n\n\"Now an impossible?\" groaned Astamazz. \"No! I refuse to come last!\"\n\nTranchubor said, \"Read the clue. We might as well all look like blithering ralti sheep right away.\"\n\nSazutharr growled, \"Never judge a clue by its cover. Best paws and feet forward, Apprentices.\"\n\nDragons could be so monumentally smug. Auli grinned beneath her face veil. This was fun. Sure, other Dragons around the Halls might disparage this event as 'worming for scrollworms,' but Sazutharr knew how to bring his staff together. The older Scholars and Researchers sat about variously smoking long Gi'ishiorian Dragon pipes, sharing nibbles, discussing the finer points of their crafts and placing bets of decidedly underwhelming expectation upon their various Apprentices. Jokes flew thicker than the smoke rising toward the vents at the top of this massive entry chamber to the Dragon Library. Auli's ears burned at a few of the implied insults. All in good humour!\n\nAstamazz read:\n\nI am tiny, a Dragon in miniature,\n\nBut I will never be part of the furniture.\n\nWho is my maker?\n\nHer teammates groaned, but Auli just chuckled, \"Easy!\"\n\n\"Easy?\" snapped her two draconic teammates.\n\n\"EASY? MY CLUES ARE NEVER EASY!\" thundered Sazutharr. \"Oh. Softly now, Miss Architect of Anarchy, there's another team approaching. Remember, a false answer deducts five points. That definitely would place you last. And last is a very special prize indeed.\"\n\nAuli hated to imagine \u2013 starting with being the butt of every joke around the Halls for months to come, she suspected. Much humiliation to come.\n\n\"You'd better be sure,\" Astamazz hissed in her ear, while Essimi just squeezed her hand from the other side by way of encouragement.\n\nAuli gulped. \"Actually, I have one in my pocket. Here, noble Sazutharr, is your answer.\"\n\nThe ensuing silence made her heart spring into her throat like a frightened dragonet. Then, Sazutharr breathed, \"A Cinizzara Miniature. I had no idea you owned one.\"\n\n\"I've two,\" Auli whispered back.\n\n\"A magnificent example of Cinizzara's craft, this Orange Dragoness,\" he said. \"Simply magnificent! Cinizzara always excels herself. That's ten points in the feeding bowl! Now, to your next clue.\"\n\nAuli read it with her hands, and said at once, \"Oh, easy again. This will be the epic ballad The Barbican of Merx, page fourteen, shelf reference nineteen-forty-C-dash-eleven.\" Fangs gnashed somewhere nearby. Her team stood silently beside her. Very silently. \"I \u2026 uh, well \u2026 I happened to shelve it just two weeks ago. I thought the scroll \u2026 um, fascinating.\"\n\nRather more testily than a moment before, Sazutharr said, \"Correct again! Here's your third clue.\"\n\nA hand scan later, Auli handed it back.\n\n*Gnarrr!* Sazutharr rasped in irritation. \"Speak.\"\n\nAuli chirped, \"I believe this would be The Ballad of Sankizzor Stonehide, fourteenth stanza, eighth couplet but hidden in the poetic metre; the concealed reference to his legendary Dragon power aptly named stone hide.\"\n\nThe Dragon Librarian's snort almost blew her off her feet. \"Auli! That's a challenging clue \u2013 I considered rating it impossible!\"\n\n\"If you say so, noble Sazutharr,\" she replied reticently.\n\n<I DO SAY\u2026> *GGNNAAAARRRR!!*"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Auli lugged her talon weight of gold up to Master Chamzu's chambers, humming happily to herself. A win! Aye, their earlier setbacks and two wrong guesses had almost cost them the prize, but in the end the reference to Sankizzor Stonehide defeated every other team, and that was the clincher. Wow. This ingot was small but ferociously heavy. It had to weigh a good fifth of her bodyweight, which was not saying a great deal for a reed like her, admittedly.\n\nZimtyna nudged her shoulder. \"I can help carry your prize, you know.\"\n\n\"What does a Human do with Dragon gold anyways?\" Auli said. \"Say, did you know it's technically illegal for Humans to learn to speak Dragonish? I found that out during our competition today.\"\n\n\"Stupid laws abound. Did you know that you are not allowed to fly a Dragonship around Gi'ishior's volcano? Into it, aye, but you cannot circumvent the cone?\"\n\n\"Sheep will not be permitted to eat grass, next,\" Auli laughed. \"But seriously, this beast will probably tear my shelf off the wall. I don't have a hoard. What do I do, give it to a friendly Dragon for safekeeping \u2013 Arkurion, for example?\"\n\n\"Auli, you can't do that!\"\n\n\"Why not? Unlock my door, would you?\"\n\nAfter the lock clicked and turned over squeakily \u2013 she should oil it again \u2013 Auli said, \"Why, don't you trust him?\"\n\n\"Auli, an ingot is a traditional nuptial present from a Dragoness to her mate.\"\n\n\"Islands' sakes, the lack of wings is a bit of a giveaway, wouldn't you say? Arkurion wouldn't think \u2026\" Still, her cheeks chose this moment to grow radiant. \"Fine. I'll find another Dragon.\"\n\nZimtyna groaned, \"You're a funny old stick, aren't you? All shy and blushy here, there and everywhere, but one whiff of an illegal notion and you're all over it like a Dragoness gorging her dinner.\"\n\n\"I am so \u2026 not! Zimtyna!\"\n\nHer friend chuckled loudly. \"I know. Doesn't an Isles truth just hurt? Now, should I find you a little plinth to recline upon in your chamber, o Dragoness?\"\n\nAuli said, <Grrr, I bite \u2013 illegal or not!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Assassin",
                "text": "\u2002There exists no creature beneath the suns for whom waiting is not the hardest discipline. \u2014Ianthine the Draco-Mystic, Collected Wisdom Sayings\n\nTo Auli, the Halls of the Dragons resembled an ant nest disturbed by a stick all that hot season \u2013 the most blistering on record \u2013 as she waited, and waited, for something to happen. For news. For her father to respond to the message she had dictated for him; for Arkurion to return from his southerly sojourn with vital information about her possible course of treatment; for Azziala to reveal whatever terrible purpose had brought her to Gi'ishior.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nDeclaring that she grew as impatient as she was egg-heavy, Qualiana four times attempted healing Auli's eyes, without success. \"Your eyes are not like any Human eyes I have seen, nor do they respond to any techniques described in the medical texts,\" complained the Dragoness, as they met one stifling morning during Auli's usual 'cleaning' visit. These had become a pleasant break from her Library duties, which were akin to climbing a mountain of knowledge toward a summit of experience that might take her many Human lifetimes to attain.\n\n\"However, my leg is much better thanks to your efforts, Qualiana.\"\n\n\"Healed with a couple of hairline scars to show for all that trouble, and even those are fading. I was most impressed by the way you handled the pain of that frame.\"\n\nAuli shuddered at the recollection. Never again, if life allowed. Never.\n\nThe Dragoness' wings rustled as she shifted uncomfortably in the nest she had built for herself in the 'inner roost', or bedchamber. \"Was ever a creature as gravid as I? My spine aches. Could you arrange for four or five more pillows? And oil of Sosturbaszi for my joints? Auli, does that bowl of offal smell quite right to you?\"\n\nQualiana sounded terse, and there was an odd note in her voice. Sapphurion was the blusterous one; his mate was usually much sweeter, as a cheering blaze sweetened the ambiance of a room, the girl supposed.\n\n\"It reeks like an open sewer pipe,\" Auli said primly.\n\n<Gnarr-grr-gnawyourlegbone-grrr,> came the response.\n\n\"Very well.\" She gave the huge feeding bowl a cursory sniff, recoiled, and then truly put her snout to the trough. \"Um \u2026 now that you mention it, it does smell quite peculiar. It has a slight tincture of lavender about it, plenty of herbs in quantities ordered by Her Magnificence, but there's something else \u2026\" Her voice trailed off as Qualiana's stomach produced a perfectly monstrous, lingering series of gurgles. Auli chuckled, \"Holy leaping Islands \u2013 you'll shake the crysglass windows out of their frames in a minute! Are you in labour? Egg-laying?\"\n\n\"No but I do feel very queer of a wingflip \u2013 Auli?\" The Dragoness' stomach-heaves sounded like a Dragonship's cargo tumbling out of its hold. <Auli, oh! Oh no \u2026>\n\nHorror seared through her gut like the thrust of a red-hot dagger. \"Qualiana!\"\n\nWithout warning, the Dragoness vomited what must have been a huge spray across the room, for the splatter swatted the girl clean off her feet. Auli just lay still for a moment, shocked. Now she definitely smelled something foreign; a strange, yeasty tang, masked by something else present in the food. A spice she had not expected to be present. Poison? Could Dragons be poisoned?\n\nScrambling to her feet, Auli cried, \"Qualiana, tell me what to do!\"\n\n<Sapph \u2013> the Dragoness' groan sounded as if someone were sawing her belly in half. Her breath rattled horribly in her throat and lungs, while Auli could actually hear the gut-wrenching sound of her muscles knotting up. <Get my \u2026 please \u2026 oh, Sapphurion! I die!>\n\nAuli ran. She ran with the keening of her healer's agony in her ears; she ran with the exposed portions of her skin burning unbearably and in the knowledge that had she not been blind already, the spray of the Dragoness' powerful stomach acid might have permanently damaged her eyes. She had to jump to reach the emergency interior door release, and then she pelted through the outer hallway, screaming, \"Help! Someone, please help!\"\n\nWhere was the outer door? Surely, it should not be op \u2013\n\n<Aaaaaiiiiieee!>\n\nAuli screamed as she plummeted for what seemed an eternity through space, but only insofar as to plop down on a soft, leathery surface. A Dragoness' voice cried, <Auli? What?>\n\nAuli clutched instinctively for the leading edge of the wingbone. Her fingers gripped a strut, slipped upward and latched upon the leather-like hardness of the tertiary joint, the equivalent of the Human wrist. Auli gripped her handhold as if it were a lifeline thrown to snag a man fallen from a Dragonship, a true event recorded in one of the ballads.\n\nThe door had been ajar? Open? She must have missed the groove for the runners and charged straight off the ledge outside of their roost, whereupon a Dragoness had caught her with what felt like the outer couple of feet of her wingtip.\n\nUrgency smote her between the eyes. <Inxulia! It's Qualiana. She's sick!>\n\n<WHAT?>\n\n<Call Sapphurion, oh please, hurry!>\n\nAt once the Hatchling Mother bellowed, <SAPPHURION, ALARM! TO YOUR ROOST!!>\n\nAuli winced as something clearly popped in her sensitive ears, the Dragoness' battle roar was that powerful. What could have happened to Qualiana? Even as the thought crossed her mind, she wailed again as Inxulia powered upward; her grip tore loose and Auli tumbled sideways along the wing membrane. She fell through space for less than a breath before a huge paw snaffled her up.\n\nAuli puffed out her cheeks in relief.\n\n<QUALIANA!>\n\nAuli's hearing took another pummelling as Sapphurion's gargantuan bellow shook the caldera. Events began to rush toward her, to collide; she realised something was askew with her perceptions, too. There was shouting, thundering, the crazed flapping of wings in her darkness and the howls of a Dragoness in mortal pain; her cries and Qualiana's seemed to mingle, one indistinguishable from the other \u2013 she could not breathe, her chest hurt, her fire eyes burned as though someone had poured acid into them. At some point Sapphurion's paw shook Auli violently, the Dragon almost feral in his grief-rage as he demanded to know what had she done to his mate?\n\nInxulia cut in, yanking Auli away to safety. Now the healers arrived and fussed over Qualiana, pouring their great magic into her in an attempt to provide relief, and she heard the Dragoness sobbing for her egglings, a wild lamentation that cut through every other noise in the packed roost.\n\n<OUT! OUT!> Sapphurion thundered.\n\nHer mind faded to blackness, and then immediately, as if by some external bidding, her thoughts strengthened and clarified once more. Auli listened, but the astringent medicinal smell hit her awareness first. She was in the infirmary? What time was it? How much of the day had been lost? She had to find help!\n\nAuli sat up with a pained groan.\n\n\"Down! Lie down! Don't you move out of that bed, child, or I swear I shall sit Inxulia on you myself!\"\n\n\"Nurse \u2026 Imzulkia, I need to \u2013 I must \u2013\"\n\n\"Must what?\" Hands pushed her downward.\n\nAuli lashed out blindly. \"Stop that! Tell me what's happening. Does Qualiana live?\"\n\n\"She's in her roost, but they don't know what the poison was,\" the Nurse reported brusquely. \"Sapphurion won't let a single creature through the door until they have answers. The Healer Dragons are beside themselves.\"\n\n\"Qualiana's afraid she'll lose her eggs,\" Auli whispered. \"Nurse Imzulkia, I smelled something in that food, in the last meal she ate, but I don't know what it was. Please let me go help. Or, summon a Healer. I \u2013\"\n\n\"They wouldn't fit, child. These are Human-sized rooms and beds.\"\n\n\"Then let me go! I have to help!\"\n\nAfter a shouting match with the healers and a second shouting match with Sapphurion \u2013 one way to feel utterly overmatched was to try yelling through a closed door at a grief-stricken Blue Dragon \u2013 Auli-Ambar staggered back down through the Human tunnels, feeling defeated. Her ears throbbed. Her stomach was imitating a milk churn and threatening to erupt any second. She had nothing. No Dragon or Human knew that smell. All the medical personnel had assumed it was just vomit and dismissed her assessment, but Auli knew that meal had been poisoned. What could she do? What now?\n\nThe Library. There would be information in the medical sciences section!\n\nSkipping a few steps before she thought better of that idea, Auli made her best speed down to the Library. Everyone was tearing about in crisis mode, so she was jostled badly on the way and took a bruising fall down four steps. In the Dragon Library she had no help but her own memory to find the correct section \u2013 a deep cavern right beneath the lake, apparently boasting an armoured crysglass ceiling that allowed an unparalleled underwater view. She had memorised its dimensions as one hundred and ninety-eight paces long and fifty-two wide, and the shelves stood seventy feet tall in places. Now Auli was just looking for the proverbial firebird in a flaming bush. No mind. She would start at one end and work her way through, searching for any and all information she could find on poisons.\n\nDragons came and went. Hours passed. Auli read every book and scroll she could actually lift, and three times, had help from Dragons to open huge volumes right there between the aisles. It took both hands and some fancy footwork, but she succeeded in lifting and turning the heavy pages without falling over in a heap. Mostly.\n\nA paw tapped her left shoulder. <Still working, child?>\n\n<Head Librarian? I \u2026 oh?> Her nostrils flared and her stomach turned over enthusiastically in response. Yummy smells! <You brought food?>\n\n<It's dawn. You've been reading all night,> he rumbled. <Here's a little nourishment to sustain you, and aid. Help in the form of many, many sets of hands and paws. Yours to command.>\n\nSuddenly, Auli-Ambar became aware of a hubbub nearby. Voices. Breathing. The shuffling of feet and paws. <I don't understand, noble Sazutharr. What do you mean, mine? How's Qualiana? Why have they stopped helping her? What's happening? Why \u2013>\n\nSazutharr rumbled, <Because you were there. You smelled something. It would've been perfect if you could have seen a foreign substance in Qualiana's food, but we have what we have \u2013 we have no better ideas, Apprentice Auli. Now, will you help us? Science wants samples from your hair, while Medical wants to examine your injuries and to work out why exactly you seem to be mildly burned but otherwise fine, whereas Qualiana is ailing dramatically. I have rounded up every Archivist and Researcher and in fact, every warm body I could lay paw on between here and Sylakia Island, be they Dragon or Human \u2026 we must find answers!>\n\n<She's dying?>\n\n<She is. Now, will you instruct these, or nay?>\n\nShe rose then, easing the cramped muscles in her back and shoulders, yet she felt relieved. Auli-Ambar said, <I can't raise my voice enough to address everyone. Please relay my words, mighty Sazutharr. Now, from my perspective, this is what happened \u2026>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "That evening, news filtered down to the dispirited denizens of the Dragon Library that Qualiana had delivered her eggs. Only one of the three still showed signs of inner fire-life, but the Dragoness guarded her clutch zealously. Great was the groaning and roaring that this news triggered! Sapphurion still raged endlessly, the bellows of his grief so mighty that he had cracked the armoured crysglass panels of his roost.\n\nFive hours after midnight, Auli-Ambar's hands stilled upon a passage. <Osmium. It's osmium poisoning.>\n\nAt once, Sazutharr was by her side, reading over her shoulder. <If that's all true and osmium is also absorbed through the skin, why aren't you dead?>\n\n<I \u2026>\n\n<Indeed,> said another Dragon.\n\n<I \u2013 I am hardly the issue here!> Exhaustion made Auli's response raw. <Who cares about me? It's Qualiana we have to save. Look at what the text notes, 'The effect on Dragons is tenfold compared to Human physiology.' Her symptoms and most especially the smell match. 'The main treatment is decontamination and the administration of common oil of mahuri, which breaks the compound down into non-toxic forms.' That's what we need to do. Forget me.>\n\n<It's a vanishingly rare compound,> argued another Dragon. <Which of us would know it for poison? The laboratory did not even test for this substance. No wonder they missed it, but they did identify sakurobi spice, a noted masking agent. This is a clear attempt at the assassination of our treasured fire-sister, an Elder of our kind!>\n\n<I concur. And we will hunt that craven slug to the ends of the Island-World!> Sazutharr's low growl silenced the babble all around. <Will Sapphurion attend to shouts from without?>\n\n<No, nothing,> called a Human voice. <They're still trying to calm him, but he might be feral. He tries to attack any creature who dares approach, but has cast such a protective warding about his roost that even he cannot break through from within. We surmise he's trapped both himself and Qualiana inside. The Blues concur that any attempt to breach the shield by force might bring down half of the mountain.>\n\n<Then, we must find another way.> Sazutharr talon tapped her shoulder lightly. <Walk with me, Auli-Ambar. HEAR MY COMMANDS!>\n\nThe bellowing of the Head Librarian's directives quickly set everyone into motion. They had not even begun to search for the assassin, Auli realised in despair. They could be halfway to Sylakia by now, for all anyone knew. But she refused to shrink away from the challenge, this time. How desperately she wanted to become more; how deeply she feared for Qualiana's fate!\n\nWhen Sazutharr had dispatched the crowd to different points of the compass, he leaned down to whisper, <But you and I both know you can burgle that roost, don't we, Auli-Ambar?>\n\nShe sighed, <Aye, mighty Dragon.>\n\n<And would you be \u2013>\n\n<More than willing, Master \u2013 uh, Dragon. I'll do anything. Even bait the proverbial Dragon in his den.>\n\n<Indeed so, but that's a very real Dragon in there and you stand a very real chance of ending up a bloody smear on an interior wall,> the Head Librarian returned bluntly.\n\n<Then, I will at least have tried.> Auli's knees, however, had conflicting ideas and summarily tried to collapse in two different directions at once.\n\nPropping her up lightly with a talon-tip, the Dragon snorted drily, <Aye? Even if you have to crawl inside?>\n\nShe found no answering laughter within herself.\n\nTwenty minutes later, Auli was armed to the teeth with a goat-skin of oil so massive that she could barely drag it across the ground, her native wits \u2013 which surely must have deserted her the instant she agreed to this crazy notion \u2013 and not an ounce of bravado, courage or anything helpful whatsoever. Mistress Frantia had just been dragged off by three of her staff, wailing that 'her baby' was going to die. Unsurprisingly, she was not happy.\n\nPerfect. Dragging the skin behind her, Auli shuffled down the passageway behind the fifth level, touching the wall with her fingertips to keep oriented. The normal tunnel wards had long since been keyed to her signature, whatever in the magical world that meant, but she was acutely aware that Sapphurion's distress-powered conjuring might just have turned powerful protections into deadly ones. *Skiss!* One Auli, served extra-crispy.\n\nThe other issue was that he would doubtless hear and react to her singing.\n\nAuli slowed as she reached the familiar territory of the kitchen's outer door. How did one even detect the presence of magic? She had just sung and walked through the portal wards in the Library \u2013 not exactly treading the dizzy heights of mastery and sophistication in the magical realms, was she?\n\nMaybe she could lull a feral Dragon to sleep?\n\nPitching her voice as sensitively as she could, Auli-Ambar began to sing. At once a restless stirring began within the roost, but after a minute or two as she worked to push the song at the barrier she sensed just within the kitchen doorway, the sounds subsided. Ambush? Or sleep? Maybe a different approach. Drawing a deep breath, she sang again by instinct, a gentle, soothing lullaby Dragons crooned over their hatchlings. Rather than pushing and struggling, Auli sought to cajole the music. It responded by gliding reluctantly into new forms as her throat worked harder than ever before, pitching notes so high they were almost inaudible even to her own hearing \u2013 but not to that of a Dragon.\n\nThen, she tried the door latch with the utmost care. The immediate sensation was of invisible thorns tearing at her skin, but Auli did nothing to alarm the fearfully powerful magic. She was no intruder. She was a white-fire-hearted friend, who desired only good for the Dragons within. Sing. Inveigle. Blend. Cloying stickiness trapped her all around, as though she pushed through thick, ancient cobwebs that burned her skin with their invisible tendrils before she passed within, tiptoeing into the kitchen area with her burden in tow. Listening to the tempo of draconic breathing. Trying to hear anything sensible at all above the desperate, fluttering rasp of her own too-shallow, panicky breaths. Sapphurion was asleep? Dragons could hear many times better than Humans; she must sound like a pots-and-pans catastrophe in a kitchen to him!\n\nThe roost smelled very strange \u2013 the rancid, acidic smell of a feral beast, she wondered?\n\nSidling forward, Auli bumped into a wall in an unexpected place. Oh, windroc spit! Sapphurion's rear flank \u2013 he must have slumped across the doorway!\n\nShe had to breathe. Crouching down, Auli put her head between her legs and waited for the dizziness to abate. Anger swelled in her breast. Sapphurion and most especially Qualiana did not deserve this faint-hearted excuse for a friend. They deserved someone who would leap to their aid, not one who could barely drag herself to cross a kitchen floor to bring aid to a dying Dragoness. She might be forced to crawl \u2026 of course! Sapphurion was so massive, the natural curvature of his flank left an Auli-sized gap beneath him, to her left hand as she faced the doorway. She could squeeze along the kitchen wall toward the crysglass windows, but she'd still have to find a way beneath his head to reach the roost proper.\n\nShe crept beneath a Dragon.\n\nFreaking feral windrocs, he was huge! It took her the better part of three or four minutes just to scuttle around to his head, where she had to lie flat on her stomach to wriggle beneath his mighty skull spikes \u2013 she had never before touched those on a Dragon \u2013 praying meantime that she did not puncture the oil skein on one of his dagger-sharp scales, or that he didn't decide to scratch an itch or roll over. His chin rested against one remaining panel of crysglass, she surmised, sightseeing again with her hands. A raffish ruff of skull spikes created enough of a gap for a skinny bag of bones like her. Gripping the floor with fingers and toes, Auli levered herself forward like a cave explorer, dragging the skein of oil along beside her outstretched legs. Deeper. Squeezing her head sideways to fit, feeling his scales like a rasp working at her ear and cheek. Sapphurion's body heat was as warm as an open fireplace. No return, now. She explored the openness with a forward-reaching left hand.\n\n<Mnarrr-rrr,> groaned the Dragon, shifting position.\n\nAuli bit her lip as one of his spikes speared several inches deep into the back of her right thigh. Sing. Soothe him. Oh please, let her courage not fail now! Whisper-soft, she beguiled the Dragon back to sleep. Then, she pulled herself free and hobbled over to the inner chamber. Doubtless she had just left Sapphurion a blood trail that would lead him straight to her perfidy when he woke up.\n\n<Sapphurion, why do I smell \u2013 you?> Qualiana's voice ebbed, then she rallied with a soft cry, <Oh, Auli, you've placed yourself in mortal danger. To me, quickly!>\n\n<O Qualiana, I've brought oil for \u2013>\n\n<Who? Who's that \u2013 someone's inside our roost!> The male Dragon reacted like an uncoiled spring, rebounding off the ceiling with a bone-rattling thud as instinct launched his body into the air. He landed almost as hard, the impact of his paws shaking the roost. <How dare you intrude!> *GRRRAARRRGGHH!*\n\nHeat rocketed across her back as Auli pitched forward instinctively, but Qualiana was quicker still. Her huge paw curved about the girl's shoulders and then slammed down in a cupping motion, snuffing out the fire already smouldering upon her tunic top. She smelled the acrid-sweet scent of burned hair, but that was all.\n\nStomp. Inch-thin Auli. Aye, that might yet come.\n\n<I'll kill the little Human!> Sapphurion bellowed. *BOOM!* Auli's body juddered as his massive shoulder apparently collided with the doorway.\n\n<Get away from my egglings!> howled the Dragoness, and there was in her voice a note of such maternal ferocity, Auli sensed even an adult male Dragon take pause.\n\nA touch querulously, he rumbled, <But, my fire-hearted treasure \u2013>\n\n<Why did you risk entry, girl?> snarled Qualiana, before coughing bitterly and long. She sounded as if she might choke on the fluid filling her lungs at any moment. <Why would you, of all Humans the closest to draconic thought patterns, seek to besmirch our already darkest fires?>\n\nAuli whispered, <I think I've found the answer, Qualiana.>\n\n<THE ANSWER?> both Dragons roared.\n\n<Ahh!> Even beneath the Dragoness' paw, there was little protection for her ears. <Please \u2026 o Qualiana, you were poisoned with an osmium compound concealed in sakurobi spice, and I'm so, so sorry it's too late for your egglings \u2013 but this oil will save you at least. It's a remedy. That's why I dared. Because I \u2026 uh \u2026 friendship-love you. And friends do what's needful when it's \u2026 well, you know.>\n\nThere was a shocked silence.\n\nHow she rued her imperfect command of Dragonish! Her words sounded so inane, so inadequate to express what truly moved her heart. When the Dragoness' paw did not descend to smudge her out of existence, she added ruefully, <I'm not terribly good at avoiding taboos and forbidden places, am I? Now would you be a good little \u2013 uh, Dragons, forgive me!>\n\n<Drink your medicine, Qualiana,> Sapphurion rasped."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Auli-Ambar slept in a sprawl of enervation most of the following day, but stirred restlessly as the afternoon's stickiness began to reverberate with the sounds of faraway thunder. The familiar storm pressure began to build between her temples.\n\nShe dreamed in great, thick cascades of water, in torrents that strangely did not crash down upon her, but instead poured upward into the sky. She dreamed in intense bursts of narrative, as droplets condensed and then refracted the purity of prose into every one of the fabled millions of colours she had never seen. Her skin crawled and itched as though something writhed beneath, longing for escape.\n\nAt some point, Auli realised that the storm was beyond the merely natural. She grew afraid, most terribly afraid, and with her chest's panic-driven wheezing it seemed to her that should she perish within her bedchamber, none would ever know. The fear mounted with the storm's presence. It was coming for her. Crushing. Overwhelming. Roaring like an Ancient Dragon. It would tear through the waters of her soul, leaving only devastation in its wake!\n\nMaster Chamzu's papery hand touched her forehead. She had learned he had a strange, perhaps magic-based skin condition that dried and cracked the skin of his hands and feet. \"She's burning up.\"\n\n\"I'll get water and cool cloths,\" said Zimtyna. \"It's not the fire fever, is it?\"\n\n\"I hope not.\"\n\nFire fever could be lethal. Auli struggled to drink from a cool glass; it seemed the liquid entered her being only to exacerbate the itching. She scratched furiously, slept, dreamed of those upward-flowing cascades rending her skin, for they turned into Dragons' talons, and she scratched again. And again. More, deeper, harder \u2026\n\n\"Don't, sweet petal. You're making yourself bleed.\" Zimtyna pushed her hands down.\n\n\"Ahhh, I must \u2026\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nThe dreams returned with the pounding of drenching rain. Immense. A deluge beyond imagination. The prickling beneath her skin was like acidic trails worming up and down her limbs and beneath her flanks; even up into her armpits. Unbearable! She scratched like a madwomen, gouging long trails along her skin as though she needed to tear out whatever was rising within her, coalescing and squirming and growing in its power, and the strength of the magic rising within her redoubled in the face of her terror and pain. There was a battle rising within her flesh, one in which her sanity would be the loser. Scrape! Rub! Scrabble, grate, bite \u2026 she used the basket-weave bedframe like a Dragon with a scale mite infestation, now, wanting nothing more than to flay her own skin.\n\n\"Can we summon Qualiana?\" Chamzu worried.\n\n\"No chance,\" said another voice. Nurse Imzulkia? \"It's some kind of fearsome rash, I think. We'll have to lash her to the bedframe. Get me ropes. Quickly.\"\n\nTorrential rains swept her away. Thunder crashed above the caldera; fat tropical raindrops drummed against the crysglass, the beating suddenly changing into a clattering sound as hail lashed the Halls of the Dragons. Upward she strived. Outward. The immense craving to flower compressed back down within her soul as the ward-protections flared darkly, rebuffing her need and crushing her beneath the force of their immutable denial.\n\nThe magic writhed.\n\nHands gripped her wrists. \"Tie her. Quickly, the poor mite \u2013 I wish I knew what ailed \u2026\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Hold her, Master Chamzu!\"\n\n\"Too \u2026 strong!\"\n\nSomebody sat upon her thin chest. Rope scalded her flesh, trapping her arms. Auli-Ambar reacted as if she had been burned. All the roaring. A cloudburst of pain and fear. The excruciation of her flesh as magic battled within her; she heard a voice bellowing with a sound that never should have emerged from a Human throat, \"GET OFF ME!\"\n\nShe threw the person off with the strength of insanity.\n\nRising, she tore a rope off her right wrist as if it were the thinnest of reeds, and stumbled through the hands. None could hold her now. Out into the corridor. Needing the water. The inundation of her soul's inmost desire.\n\n*KAAABOOM!!*\n\nA crack of thunder twisted up her limbs. Auli fell. She heard voices crying out behind and before, but she thrust to her feet and scrambled away blindly, racing for the outer doors. It felt as if her pumping arms and legs were sheathed in fine filaments of heated metal. With the last shred of reason left to her, she skidded to a halt out there in the downpour.\n\nCoolness.\n\nShe turned her face to the sky. Liquid gushed over her head and into her ears and down her upraised hands. Yet whatever she had expected, or whatever pinnacle of destiny the magic had aspired to, did not happen. There was a yawning space within her and a sense of grievous loss.\n\nAuli wept.\n\nIf only that awareness of the watery dream, or her affinity with a destiny of which she had only the faintest inkling, could have been realised. Instead, fear had locked it all away. Why was she cursed like this? Could the enchantment of water not have cleansed her blindness, just washed it away with the simplicity of that most miraculous and life-giving of substances?\n\nHands clasped her shoulders. Chamzu said gently, \"Away from the edge, Auli. Come, girl. You're mad with the fever.\"\n\n\"Look!\" Zimtyna cried in wonderment. \"Look, the scratches are already healing up \u2026 it's the rain!\"\n\n\"This is a magical affliction, isn't it, Nurse?\" said the Master.\n\n\"Something passing strange,\" she said, sounding as if a feral Dragon's breath had just tickled her spine.\n\nDarkness pressed in against her mind. Auli breathed, \"Passing? Aye, it passed on \u2026\"\n\nAnd would this magic ever return? How could it exist when chains bound the waters of her soul; how could she even think in these terms? Water held no special terrors, did it? And the storm was just a storm, its downpour not performing any crazy, gravity-defying somersaults. Yet she could not help but imagine she had been snatched away from the cusp of something extraordinary.\n\nNothing to fear, save herself."
            },
            {
                "title": "An Unholy Liaison",
                "text": "\u2002Surrounded as I was by the colour-crammed world of sighted people, and with the blithe observations of those who enjoyed tint and shadow, texture and hue in every aspect of their lives, it took me forever to learn that grief was the emotion of no colour. Even my perpetual darkness seemed present, whereas grief denoted absence. It was blacker than blackness itself. Like a subtle disease, it leached all colour out of emotions and moments, out of the very marrow of life itself, until I came to recognise that grief was the greatest thief of all.\n\n\u2002None can resist its cruel paw; none are spared. I wish I had never learned this lesson. \u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 78\n\nWithin a week Qualiana was back a-paw, but she guarded her single remaining egg with an air of near-madness that put even Sapphurion on edge. Auli-Ambar alone could enter their roost because she was female, Human and trusted. She cared for the Dragoness, cleaned up behind her and replaced furs and cushions where necessary, and laid out a temporary bed for Sapphurion in the main living chamber. He would not suffer workmen to touch the ruined crysglass windows, seeming to feel the urge to be on guard twenty-seven hours per day.\n\nTheir heartache was immeasurable. It could only be given space and allowed to run its course, Master Chamzu advised, and in this situation, a girl with the gift of invisibility was the perfect channel.\n\nIn silence, she carried out her routine tasks. Auli removed choice cuts of meat uneaten and changed the fresh spring water daily, finding many willing hands outside the roost to make light her work \u2013 but woe betide the unwary foot that might step beyond that threshold! The single time this happened, Sapphurion flew into such a mighty rage that he injured himself on the broken crysglass.\n\nAuli-Ambar wept for them both, for the rift that yawned between lifelong mates and the sorrow that nigh extinguished their fires; aye, even the fires of Dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The third week after Qualiana's recovery, Master Chamzu advised, \"See if Sapphurion will hear a little news of the Dragon Council, Auli. Matters are reaching a critical state. I will not provide details unless he asks, but please urge him.\"\n\nBack in the roost, Auli said, \"O Sapphurion, would you hear word \u2013\"\n\n\"NO!\"\n\nHis thunder plucked Auli up and slammed her to the ground. <Ooooh \u2026>\n\nDragon paws stood over her; the girl lay prone with a shattering headache and heard, for the first time, Qualiana shift away from her egg. Scales rasped against the inner doorframe. There was a silence laden with communication she could neither see nor hear, but Auli was convinced something important passed between the Dragoness poised at the edge of that uncrossable divide and the male Dragon standing over her. Spitting a curse in Dragonish laced with self-shame indicators, Sapphurion stumped over to the far side of the roost chamber and threw himself down with a thump that must have been heard across the caldera.\n\nAuli limped off to have a deep cut on her skull seen to.\n\nThe following week, Chamzu said, \"Please, Auli-Ambar, you must prevail upon Sapphurion to listen, to at least attend the Council!\"\n\nUnspeaking, she touched the bandage covering her head. Sixteen stitches behind the right ear, Master Chamzu. Sixteen.\n\n\"Tell him that Razzior, that smooth-tongued fiend, is inciting Andarraz to open rebellion. And Captain Ra'aba is gathering power and popularity across Fra'anior. Matters between him and Chalcion will come to a head, I'm warning you!\"\n\nHow came she alone to hold the ear canals of a mighty Dragon Elder? Winds strange and fey blew across this caldera, these days.\n\nNonetheless, she bowed in his direction and said, \"Master, I shall so endeavour.\"\n\n\"Endeavour not to have him swat you like a bug,\" Chamzu wisecracked.\n\nAuli considered this. With great dignity, she said, \"Master, what I'll more likely die from is tedium resulting from your terrible jokes.\"\n\nLeaving him gasping in her wake \u2013 what a wicked feeling \u2013 Auli embarked on her doomed mission. She arrived at the Dragon Elders' roost precisely on time, as usual, at the strike of the third hour after suns-rise. Receiving a fresh load of meat from Su'izyan's hand, she entered via the protected rear entrance, having only to hum a brief ditty to evade the portal magic by now. Perhaps Sapphurion had eased his strictures?\n\nShe would dare. Today, she was a new girl. Brave, bold, brassy Auli.\n\nObtrusive Auli.\n\nHumming as if to herself, she prepared two of the huge bowls these Dragons ate from and then dragged them out on mats, one by one \u2013 a technique she had learned from, rather sadly, studying a scroll on the proper cleaning of Dragon roosts in two hundred and sixty-seven easy steps. Literally. Auli smirked. And she thought she could scrollworm with the best of them? Gently, she sang about Sapphurion's limp paws as she removed the nibbled-upon end of a ralti haunch from his unheeding grasp and pulled a fresh bowl beneath his nose.\n\nShe said, <Arise, mighty Dragon, and fill thy belly, for thy foes grow no less in number, and thy days no younger.>\n\n<Is this the hour for Sankizzor Stonehide?> he grumbled. <You try my patience, girl.>\n\n<And you, mine.>\n\nNo! Flustered tongue-idiocy! Auli-Ambar shuddered as his fire eyes lit upon her. She imagined them filling with baleful flame; certainly, his ire was an emotion that heated her skin from a disturbingly close range. She clutched the Red Dragon so violently, its talons drew blood from her palm. Beg forgiveness \u2026 for this was no way for any Human to speak to a Dragon Elder, least of all a blind cleaning girl. The difference in hierarchy and power was incalculable. She knew she had overstepped the mark long before his response arrived.\n\nThe huge Sapphire snarled, <You are no Dragoness to bait me, little flame. Doubtless Master Chamzu has his fawning little lackey running his errands for him. Spit out his message before you run along. What does your Master wish I knew?>\n\nShe swallowed hard. That was downright nasty, and the Dragon Elder knew it. Steadily, she recounted Chamzu's exact words, including the bug-swatting comment.\n\nThere was a creaking sound nearby \u2013 the sound of his massive knuckles clenching dangerously, she realised. Then, the bellows-like panting of an incensed Dragon. His fires roared higher. Higher. The Sapphire Dragon paced away with ponderous, ground-shaking steps, but she knew his regard was upon her. The keen attention, the madness, of a supreme predator. Crunching, crushing sounds ground against her ears. He was tearing up the specially magic-hardened stone flooring, his ire swelling as prodigiously as the heat simmering over her now, as though someone had opened a forge door \u2026 the Dragon groaned, loudly and long, and suddenly, Qualiana's cry rang out with a trumpet-like blast:\n\n\"Get out!\" And again in Dragonish, <Sapphurion, she's not to blame! Auli \u2013 RUN!>\n\n<GET OOOOOOUUTTT!!> Sapphurion's roar \u2013 his famously Storm-powered battle challenge \u2013 picked her up bodily and flung her through the kitchen door, but thankfully Auli smacked into a sackful of heavy slabs of ralti rump steak, left there for removal.\n\n<Ah,> she moaned, picking herself up with due regard for any limbs that might have been left behind. <Sapphurion, I'm so sorry \u2026>\n\nAcrid smoke seared her nostrils. Auli heard the furnace of his belly fires strike a pitch of insane fury; the cushions and bedding she had left for him popping and crackling as, she deduced, the Dragon slowly spun about on his paws, incinerating everything in his roost as he cried in a great, throbbing voice, <What do they want of me? What does it matter? They're dead. Dead, MY EGGLINGS! DEAD!>\n\n<RUN, CHILD!!> Qualiana screamed.\n\n<GET OUT!> he crashed. <GET OUT AND NEVER COME BACK!!>\n\nHer scream was the wail of song she needed to pass through his barrier. Auli-Ambar found herself sprawling in the corridor outside, panting and trembling violently; gentle hands drew her away from the Elders' roost, and the voice and arms of Zimtyna comforted her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Early the second morning following her disastrous attempt to stand up to Sapphurion, Auli-Ambar returned from the Dragon Library, slowly wringing out her aching hands. Reading was hard on the wrists, especially those very wide Dragon tomes. She had spent two nights and a day reading about draconic grief and the feral state. Now she was armed with knowledge which she had no idea how to use. Nor did she know if it would work.\n\nSapphurion had kicked her out. Rightly. His final bellow rang in her ears, <And never come back!>\n\nNo other could.\n\nThat was, in a nutshell, a rather inconvenient turn of events. She might sing another person or Dragon through. In the doing, she'd doom them. Auli counted levels carefully as she meandered back to her chambers, but the path was very familiar to her now. Ablutions. A little fruit. An hour spent sitting cross-legged on her bed, thinking about what it must be to see flowers be born, grow, swell into a bud, unfurl to the blazing suns and finally die. How a blind person could see much, yet see nothing at all. There were no answers.\n\nHer steps turned to the corridors.\n\nDown to the kitchens. \"One freshly slaughtered cliff goat, preferably a kid, please.\"\n\nThey must bring animals in by the Dragonship-load to feed the capacious maws of this community. Where did all the bones go? For that matter, what about all the waste?\n\nGamely sailing off the Isle of Sanity, she lugged the freshly garotted young beast up one thousand four hundred and fifteen steps to the fifth level. Partway, Auli had to rest. Even a smallish goat dragged at her arms and shoulders as though it had breakfasted on lead for all the days of its life under the suns.\n\nCraning her neck slightly, Auli sniffed the air. This was not the twelfth level as she had assumed. She must have lost count. She was not lost, but neither was she found \u2013 not yet. Sighted people had no need of level counters, but she could sorely have done with a simple plaque or chisel mark at each level to touch with her fingertips. Instead, she had to rely upon memory and instinct. Tiny clues. Chips in steps and smells and typical sounds \u2026 ha!\n\nAuli frowned. What had she just heard?\n\nShe was just about to shake her head and move on when her perceptive ears caught for a second time, a woman's cry \u2013 pain, not passion. No. Not right! Toting the flaccid goat, she trotted down a passageway, trying to orient herself and track the cry at the same time. The sound was oddly muffled.\n\nOh no. She ran. *Blam!*\n\nWards! Thankfully the goat more than her outstretched elbow took the worst of the electrical discharge, but she buzzed as if she had been struck by lightning. Her teeth smarted. These must be visitor roosts or rooms, she was not sure which, but Auli-Ambar swiftly hummed several bars from her favourite chain-breaking ballad and raced on through. Her fingers trailed the unfamiliar walls urgently. Pray nothing lay on the ground to trip her up. A man must be beating a woman, she thought, and remembering all the blows she had suffered, she could not bear it. Never again! Sick bastard! Maybe if she shouted at him, he'd take fright and stop.\n\nA sharp burst of song won her through a doorway. Auli slammed headlong into a storage shelf. Mohili flour and dried flambas herb gushed over her head. Her teeth gashed her lip. The Human visitor rooms had a different layout to what she was used to! Feeling about her for the door that would open onto the main chamber, Auli yelled, \"Leave her alone!\"\n\nStunned silence.\n\nEncouraged by the stillness; maddened as the woman's sobbing rose afresh, Auli stampeded through the kitchen area like a rampaging Dragon and promptly measured her length over a tubular bin, probably used for storage, and half-rolled half-scrambled through into what she took for a lounge area, for her hands and shoulders brushed closely-fitted fur rugs on her way to a bruising encounter with the leg of a heavy table.\n\n\"You!\" hissed a man.\n\n\"Get out!\" Auli shouted. \"You get out of this place!\"\n\nSteel hissed silkily against leather. Then, chilling laughter congealed her very marrow. She knew that voice. Ra'aba. She knew his scent; the stench of his malice, but to her confusion it was mingled with a powerful hint of the Orange Dragon's burned-umber presence. A fully-grown Dragon could not possibly fit within the confines of this chamber. It was far too compact. The smell was wrong, like damp, mildewed carpets smouldering beneath the attack of cupric flame.\n\nAuli-Ambar cocked her head, trying desperately to pinpoint Ra'aba's position, but his feet were utterly noiseless upon the soft fur carpeting.\n\nHe sneered, \"Let's see. Fra'anior Cluster's premier swordsman pitted against a blind girl. Who will win?\"\n\nNow, it was Auli who heard herself whimper. Whispers of Ra'aba's reputation had reached even her ears. He was a dueller. A killer. A man quicker with the blade, no-one had ever seen. Rumours could never have frightened her, though, as much as this man's aura. It infused the entire room, making dark, fiery tongues of flame flicker through her mind. Effortlessly, the timbre of his voice flayed the courage from her bones, leaving just the core of Auli quivering in the open, as if all she was lay naked to his gaze, and she recognised a different kind of magic coiling about her now. His magic.\n\nHe was far more than a mere soldier.\n\nInstinct kicking in long before thought, she pitched her voice at the Fra'aniorian man:\n\n<Pirate foul, thou darkest foe,>\n\n<Blade rise up and strike with woe!>\n\n\"Whaaa \u2013\" Ra'aba bellowed. *Tzoig!* *Ting! Clang!*\n\nAt the same time, the woman cried out sharply in a tongue unlike any Auli had ever heard before, full of gutturals heavily mangled in the throat.\n\nThe man roared, \"What the \u2013 freaking volcanic hells!\"\n\nAuli-Ambar had no idea what had happened, but it sounded to her as if his own blade had turned around and attacked the Captain. He grunted as though he had fallen against furniture. A pottery vase smashed on the stone floor. Then a volley of animalistic snarls erupted nearby as a full-scale battle broke out, a clash of hissing power and heavy blows and the stench of pungent smoke mingled with ozone filled her nostrils, of man and woman laying into each other with unbelievable animosity. She tried to sing again, anything to break the man's concentration.\n\nSuddenly, Ra'aba began to laugh. Deep, powerful belly laughter shook the room, as though a Dragon's voice thundered out of a Human throat. His power plucked Auli up as if she were a toy, snuffing out her voice and slamming her against cool crysglass. Her heels kicked haplessly against the cool, slick surface.\n\n\"Attack me, would you?\" he thundered. \"Feel my power, child. Choke on my power!\"\n\nAuli's body juddered as a band of nothingness tightened about her throat. Her hands scrabbled and scratched at the throttling sensation, but it was as though invisible, slippery vines entangled her windpipe. She could not breathe! She dangled as if from a clamp affixed around her neck, which twisted her jaw and cut off the blood supply.\n\nBlood pounded through her ears, creating stabbing pains. Through the mayhem, she heard the woman screech in Eastern tones, \"Taste this, Ra'aba!\"\n\n\"Aaarggh, you vixen!\"\n\nThe battle exploded afresh, shaking her body like a green-fanged rat dangling from a rajal's lethally playful jaws. The sounds were indescribable. Bestial roaring. Crackling energies striking between battle cries, both male and female. Concussive blasts, as if the pair smashed each other with Dragons' paws rather than Human fists. Now came a demented shrieking that threatened to drive talons of magic through her head. Agony gripped her temples! Auli struck back! She must help the woman \u2013 Azziala. Of course, it was the mysterious visitor, Azziala! Where had she disappeared?\n\nYet, she was helpless. Her pathetic little voice lilted only about her own ears. Ra'aba's magic had cut off her air and she felt herself fading even as she reached out in desperation, farther than ever before, crying, <Help me!>\n\nThe roaring in her ears intensified, becoming overwhelming. Billows of Island-shaking thundering consumed her, yet somehow did not destroy the vessel. Instead, they restored her sanity. For an unknowable space, the mighty, faraway roaring seemed to buoy her along as a body carried through storm waves lashing a terrace lake, yet her soul was inviolable.\n\nA thunderous voice shook her soul. <At last what was hidden hath been revealed. Who art thou?>\n\n<Auli \u2026 Auli-Ambar \u2026>\n\nShe could not have resisted. With all of her being, Auli hearkened to the almighty presence looming like what she imagined thunderclouds must be, harbinger of the storm. His consuming fires were, conversely, comfort. Surcease. Protection from the conflicting magical powers ravaging the chamber.\n\nMinutes passed. Auli sensed the time was short, even though her consciousness wanted to shriek that she had been battered for hours. She must surely long since have been strangulated by Ra'aba's puissant attack. Without warning, the power released its grip. Auli dropped. Her knees collapsed and the girl found herself sprawled against the rough metal-tipped toe of a soldier's boot.\n\n\"Ah-ha-haaarrrgh!\" Ra'aba chortled, sounding so much like Razzior in that moment that Auli's mind tricked her into believing that it was a Dragon's paw that stomped across the back of her neck now, grinding her cheek against rank boot leather. \"Grovel, child. You with your wretched spark of magic \u2013 you can never stand against the likes of me.\" Leaning over her, he snarled brutishly, \"I have torn all I needed from this Eastern Enchantress, despite your interference, and if you ever speak of this, girl \u2026\"\n\nThe sole of his boot ground harder and harder, rolling across the nerve point behind her ear. Auli almost blacked out, but again, the inner roaring seemed to sustain her. A hand twisted into the back of her tunic and swept her into the air with strength born of unbelievable malevolence, while a second gripped her hair to tilt her face upward. She realised he must be glaring at her, but that was pointless to a blind girl.\n\nHot spittle flecked her face as he hissed, \"You saw nothing. Heard nothing. You are dirt, girl, less than the dirt beneath my boot. But if I ever hear one breath \u2013\" he shook her violently from side to side \"\u2013 so much as one breath out of you, I will hurt you in ways you could not begin to imagine. I will tear you apart, slowly and to my great satisfaction. Understood?\"\n\nShe believed him with all of her heart. Auli thought she had whined a reply, but what lived in her mind was dark, beautiful flame.\n\n\"Good!\"\n\nA casual flick of his hands flung her toward where Azziala lay, sobbing. Auli landed in a heap, too shocked even to cry. She just lay there like a discarded cleaning rag. Alive, and she did not know how.\n\nBoots stomped out of the room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "A long time later, Auli-Ambar suddenly realised that the woman was laughing. Laughing! Rolling on the floor by the sounds she made, cackling hysterically.\n\nIf she had been shocked and traumatised by what went before, this was a hundred times worse.\n\nShe groaned, \"Azziala \u2026\"\n\n\"Fools, the both of you!\" she shrieked, her voice cutting like a whetted blade. \"You thought to help me? You're a reed, girl, weaker than a storm-bruised reed, and your magic is nothing. It's pitiable. I robbed that foolish, Dragon-touched Enchanter of all that I wanted. I took it! I won! Despite your interference, you shrivelling cretin, I ripped the magic from the very nadir of his wicked soul \u2013 and he will pay for this. He, and all of you, will pay for what I have suffered \u2026 how I suffered \u2026\"\n\nAgain, her triumphal voice fell away to sobbing. Despairing. Azziala whispered, \"Look at what you've made me do. Will it never be enough?\"\n\nAnd as if replying to herself, a shrill, sickly tone snickered back, \"I have done what is necessary to raise our flame to prominence. You are a vessel both feeble and unworthy. You must deal with the child, now.\"\n\n\"She has an impervious mind,\" said Azziala.\n\nAuli-Ambar felt as if she had swallowed a vial of poison, such was the malefic fire that spread through her limbs now as she realised there were two voices speaking from within one woman. Which was Azziala? She must have a mental illness. Her research had only scratched the surface of Human and draconic mental illnesses, grounded in complex physical or magical imbalance, but she knew of conditions which might manifest different personalities and even be unaware of each other's existence. Some magical disorders presented in a cyclical or seasonal expression of symptoms, but the rationale loosely referred to as 'Moons madness' was thus far poorly investigated.\n\nToo much. She wanted to scream, to break down, to flee, but she was unable. All she could do was quiver as the powerful Enchantress bent over her, gripping Auli's malformed jaw with her hand. Azziala stripped the cloth away, snarling, \"If you had seen, child, I would have killed you \u2013 crushed you like the bug you are. You almost spoiled everything, all my months of painstaking plotting and scheming. But I am stronger than you can ever imagine, bending even the likes of Ra'aba's awesome power to my thrall, and now I have the lore of sanguistarn-mortha'a in my grasp. Remember the name of Azziala, child! Remember it well, for I shall live on the stage of history forever!\"\n\nCruel fingers dug into the girl's cheeks. \"I use my beauty to triumph. But you \u2013 you were born an accursed creature. How ghastly you are, child, how accursed by birth and form and existence. Yet this outer ugliness is only a marker of the twisted, deformed soul within.\"\n\n\"No,\" Auli-Ambar gasped. How could she be so pitiless?\n\nPain bored into her temples as an unseen force tried to burrow into her mind. The roaring swelled again, somehow negating the attack. \"You will forget all that transpired, save the abiding awareness that you are accursed. Wretched girl. Run. Flee. My curse will sink its talons into your immortal soul, and nothing you can do will save you, for your name will be forgotten upon all Isles and live only as a profanity spawned of darkness, a scourge upon the fears and nightmares of children everywhere!\"\n\nAzziala shoved her away. \"Run. Run away, and never bother me again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Auli-Ambar fled, chased it seemed by the abhorrent mirth of Azziala's intertwined persons, that burned ears now bereft of rational thought. Never had she felt blinder. Littler. Ravaged by all she had experienced, she fled headlong into familiar arms almost outside of the roost, it seemed, or in that very tunnel.\n\n\"Girl, what's the matter?\" Hands shook her shoulders.\n\n\"Su \u2013 uh, Su'izyan?\"\n\n\"Unholy \u2026 what's the matter? What happened to \u2013 what was your name again?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" Auli shifted the goat, that stupid dead beast Azziala had thrust into her arms, to better cover her mucus-leaking nostrils. \"I \u2013 fifth level. Have to \u2026 work.\"\n\n\"Can I help you, Auli?\"\n\nWhy was she even here? Su'izyan always covered the more illustrious Dragon Roosts, the lower numbers higher up \u2026 or did she even remember correctly? Her thoughts were fogged. All she heard was roaring and screaming and vile words shrivelling her soul. Everything felt unclean. Azziala's touch. Ra'aba's threats. His power clamping her neck to the window, the sickening stench of his sweat in her nostrils. She could never erase these impressions from her mind. Even her blindness had not protected her, for she had felt, heard and smelled so much, and then the woman \u2013 that hateful, perverse woman \u2013 had touched her mouth and cursed her afresh \u2026\n\n\"Fifth level.\"\n\n\"Oh, are you lost?\"\n\nAuli wanted to scream. The twisted concern in Su'izyan's voice! Was she in league with Ra'aba or Azziala? Both? \"Please \u2026 just fifth \u2026\"\n\nBeasts, all of them!\n\n\"Islands' sakes, wipe your nose and cover up. Here. We're on ninth. I'll help you, Auli.\"\n\nShe could not escape this snake in Human clothing fast enough. Everything about Su'izyan's manner rang false. Auli's legs pumped up the stairs, but her feet were so numb she kept stumbling and apologising. She left the girl with unseemly haste, her unwelcome platitudes falling upon deaf ears as she rushed along the tunnel. Her fingertips burned against the hard, inclusion-stippled granite. Auli found herself welcoming the pain. Anything was better than having to think or process or feel. Anything at all.\n\nShe charged recklessly into the roost and slammed into Sapphurion's paw. Auli swayed. The goat fell at her feet. Now \u2026 this? His knuckles barred the way, fury radiating from the Dragon like heat from a cooking bonfire. Perhaps it was her sheer effrontery that saved her hide.\n\nIn a voice burry with disbelief, Sapphurion snarled, \"Girl, are you deaf as well as blind? What \u2013 whatever has possessed you \u2026\"\n\nAuli wished she were an ant to scuttle away beneath his notice. She rasped, \"Something terrible has happened.\" He must understand. He must see.\n\n\"I expressly forbade you entry!\"\n\nThe combination of his fisted paws slamming down either side of her shivering body and a thundering blast from ten feet overhead smashed her to her knees. Auli-Ambar burst into tears. Her crying was not a pretty thing. It was thin sobs bubbling from her ruined mouth and rivers of mucus that wet her face veil, but she could not hold back anymore. There was too much bottled up in her heart.\n\nSobbing brokenly, she folded up over the carcass of the goat, her forehead bunting against his lowest knuckle. \"Share \u2026 fresh kill \u2026 noble Dragon?\"\n\n\"Fresh kill?\"\n\nHer shared-grief offering. Her apology. This was how the scrolls said it must be done, and the high-pitched squeal of the huge Dragon's surprise might have, on another day, been hilarious.\n\nSapphurion demanded, \"You're offering me fresh kill? You?\"\n\nThe ugly, broken girl just bawled.\n\n<SPEAK!>\n\nWords finally tore free from her heart. Auli babbled, \"Someone has to care for you, noble Sapphurion. Someone has to clean up your droppings and bind your wounds when you cannot \u2013 there's no other, don't you see? You've driven everyone else away! And I'm sorry for you, so sorry for you and your precious egglings, and I know you hate everyone and everything under the suns right now, and you can't see past your own muzzle for the blindness of grief, but when I needed you \u2013 when I screamed for you in the darkest hour of my need \u2013 you were never there for me! You've never \u2026 been \u2026 there. Never!\"\n\nBloody, raw silence.\n\nThe steely touch of his fore-talon to her bent neck made Auli flinch. It quivered with the vehemence of Sapphurion's emotions as he said, evidently trying to gentle his grief-madness, \"A Dragon should be true to his word, little fire, but \u2026 whoever are you talking about?\"\n\nHow could she begin to articulate the pustulent spillage of her deepest anguish?\n\n<Auli-Ambar,> crooned Qualiana's voice.\n\nShe sensed the great Sapphire Dragon turning his muzzle to regard his mate, for his breath ceased broiling the back of her neck. <Mine \u2026 thou canst not \u2026 aaaah!>\n\nA susurration of scales crossed the roost, a pure, liquid sound of scale rubbing against scale with a sound like soft windsong stirring mysterious waters. As that sound neared them, the furnace roar of Sapphurion's fires mellowed and changed character to an astonishing degree, transforming into a melody of ardent desire-of-love \u2013 making a girl blush with their import. Phew! Was this what Dragons called fire love? So many notes contained in one, sensual, beautiful, prodigiously expansive expression of affection \u2026 the pressure of Sapphurion's talon lifted off her neck.\n\nQualiana fluted, <Go tend our egg, o fire of my fires.>\n\nFrom all she knew of Dragon lore, this offer was unprecedented. Unthinkable, even. Although tales of feral females abandoning their clutches were not uncommon, a brooding female of right-fires would never leave her clutch. Not for a second.\n\nSapphurion seemed to have forgotten how to work his legs. The silence between the two Dragons was a suns-dappled pool, a place of profundity and reflection and tranquillity, and Auli shivered at the echoes playing within her soul. Even amidst the most shattering grief and loss, a talon tap of beauty had just tiptoed into their lives, and its freshness was exquisite.\n\nHe breathed, <Thou \u2026>\n\n<Our shell-son needs thee, thou dazzling flame of mine third heart.> Qualiana's voice held a smile like dawn's own fires. <His shell-spoken name is Grandion.>\n\n<He is Grandion?> Sapphurion burbled in wonder.\n\nScales creaked and rubbed against each other with a leathery-metallic rustling sound. Auli pictured a draconic caress. Then, the male Dragon's paw beats receded and a mothering paw curled about the foetal ball of the shattered girl's body, drawing her to a Dragoness' bosom.\n\nQualiana said, <Tell me everything.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Awaken the Dawn",
                "text": "Awakening between two mighty Dragons was an experience Auli-Ambar knew she would never forget. To one side, the cadenced booming of Sapphurion's hearts-beat set her entire body throbbing; to the other, the subtler, more intricate beat she recognised as Qualiana's signature rhythm played its intricate, never-ceasing song. Dragon scholars had proposed that every Dragon had a unique hearts-signature, and this theory remained unchallenged even with respect to the closest of egg siblings. She realised that the Dragons must have been talking about her, for the song of their fires and the pulsating of their hearts modulated the very instant she shifted slightly, coming fully awake.\n\nAs if she were continuing a conversation to which Auli had not been party, Qualiana said, <Perhaps it is truly said that the smallest fires are also the whitest. We Dragons value greatness of heart fires. I wonder if Fra'anior might not have included Humans in that ancient lore. It is said that Humans were created as delicate fire blossoms swirling amongst the world-shaping fires of his breath, that the artistry of his mighty talons painted souls in that greatest of conflagrations.>\n\n<Oh,> Sapphurion rumbled. <I thought Humans were forged from the dust between his talons.>\n\n<No, I definitely understood modified frogs' legs,> suggested the Dragoness.\n\n<Spit and pollen.>\n\n<Clay baked together with terrace lake weed for the hair and a glaze of pure mischief.>\n\nA talon tip prodded Auli's flank gently. <Trouble evidently comes in the daintiest packages. Arise with the dawn, Auli Trouble-Paws.>\n\n<Dragon \u2013 Sapphurion!> the girl gasped, giggling sleepily. <Uh, I'm awake now.>\n\nThe Dragoness said, <He's just excited about becoming a shell-father soon, aren't you, Sapphurion?>\n\nThe way she crooned his name made Auli blush all over again. True-fires love. Did she detect a special nuance relating to roost love, that form of love expressed in the bond between two mated Dragons? The heat in their inner chamber had just jumped appreciably. Draconic spices swirled about her in thick waves of cinnamon, rose, tarragon, saccharine incense and seared jalkwood.\n\nShe supposed Human marriage must be similar.\n\nSapphurion said, <I need to \u2026 to return to the living fires, and to the Council, but I'm not sure how. O radiance of mine whitest fires, open to me the wisdom of your hearts.>\n\nThe Dragons tossed the problem back and forth for an appreciable length of time. Sapphurion was concerned about an immediate challenge to his authority, an act the influential Green Andarraz had evidently been contemplating for seasons, if not years. It was draconic to attack in a moment of weakness. This behaviour was acceptable, even expected. The huge Sapphire was in no condition to enter the required single combat, for he was severely weakened following his weeks of self-imposed isolation and poor eating. He did not know the tenor of the Council's fires \u2013 who might stand for him, and who against. If many stood against, his return could prove deadly, and his eggling might be left without a shell-father.\n\n\"That's barbaric,\" Auli said, then clapped a hand to her mouth as she realised she had spoken aloud.\n\n\"We're Dragons,\" said Sapphurion, as if that constituted sufficient explanation. \"Well, you've heard our opinions. What would you advise, Auli?\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"You offered a grief treaty of fresh kill. That means you intended to speak wisdom into my life.\" She began to wriggle and protest, but Sapphurion snorted, \"Oh, hush! I did not mean the type of wisdom that allows you to point out that you have swept up even my droppings of late. Your life seems steeped in Dragon lore, o flame-hearted Auli, so much so that my mate assures me you experience lucid visions of the Fireborn, and furthermore, you alone exhibit the audacity to quote Sankizzor Stonehide at me in an attempt to move my paws!\"\n\nShe spluttered incoherently.\n\n\"We Dragons have a saying,\" Sapphurion chuckled massively. <The quieter the fires, the deeper a Dragon should listen.> \"So, tell me about these subtle, most mysterious fires. This is my inner Council. Speak.\"\n\n\"But, mighty Dragon, what shall I do about \u2013\"\n\n\"One paw before the next!\"\n\nAuli slumped against Qualiana's flank with a tiny, most unexpected chortle of laughter at his censure. Maybe Sapphurion was right. She did not want to see the great Sapphire killed. Frowning as if she contemplated an invisible assassin's talon spearing toward Sapphurion's hearts \u2013 which it already had, she realised, given the cowardly attack on his mate and his egglings \u2013 she tried to listen within herself for any wisdom she might offer to help he who ruled the Island-World's Dragons.\n\nThe same Dragon who had just expressed trepidation about stepping outside of his own roost; who had lost so much.\n\nDid she sense that uncanny surveillance again? Near or far? Protection or portent? No, all she heard was a distant thundering in her ears. It must be Auli's own special brand of shrinking Isles-violet, she decided. Nothing gave her the right to speak into this Dragon's life, save that he had demanded it. Maybe she should just impale her worthless self upon his talon now, and save everyone the bother.\n\nAshamed of her demoralised thoughts, she searched deeper.\n\nThe Dragons waited with that inscrutable patience that seemed to come so easily to their kind. She wondered if they were communicating in some strange Dragon way, for their patterns of breathing, fires, scent and hearts-beat modulated from moment to moment as if responding to an unheard tempo of conversation. At length an idea settled into her mind, and before her so-called nerve could execute its usual trick of fleeing to hide beneath a bush in a useless, quivering lump of mush, she let it pop out.\n\nAuli said, \"Were you aware that Saggaz Thunderdoom's personal writings reveal that he struggled with dark-fires of depression and even psychosis, all the days of his life under the suns?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Qualiana.\n\n\"No \u2026\" Sapphurion purred.\n\nUnsure if she was heading in the right direction, Auli expounded, \"I found reference in Saggaz's writings when we were searching for your cure, noble Qualiana. Then, I set the idea aside, but it intrigued me because in the ballads he's always portrayed as so mighty in battle. Almost invincible. That reference noted he wrote much about dark-fires of grief and depression, and quoted from his writings several sayings comparing the two emotions in ways I, at least, found helpful \u2013 for I have struggled against my inner doubts and darkness \u2026 well, for as long as I can remember.\"\n\nQualiana's purring deepened appreciably.\n\n\"Last week, Head Librarian Sazutharr found a very ancient copy of those writings in one of the archives. I've been helping him preserve and recopy the text because I can read without needing to touch crumbling scrolleaf, and even ink which has faded away completely as his record has, leaves stains on the leaf which I am able to detect.\"\n\n\"Anyways, forgive me for presenting details which must be of little interest to mighty Dragon Elders. Pressing on to the actual point I was trying to make \u2013\" Auli sensed the Dragons exchanging amused glances overhead \"\u2013 after Saggaz lost his mate Thylariss to the attack of a feral Dragon, he mourned most acutely. He found himself unable to move from her deathbed for two weeks. He realised that his Dragonwing had scattered meantime, following other leaders and abandoning him to the rajals and the windrocs. Do you know what happened next?\"\n\nSapphurion made a dissenting noise.\n\n\"Well, the ballads put it like this.\" Auli-Ambar sang quietly:\n\n<Bestriding boiling thunderheads, the Thunderdoom arose,>\n\n<His roar a trump of thunder,>\n\n<Like wing\u00e9d lightning his mighty paw,>\n\n<Struck the skies asunder!>\n\n\"My little flame, that was a battle,\" Qualiana objected.\n\n\"So it was, noble Qualiana,\" Auli agreed. \"But Saggaz's personal record reveals upon what emotions his seminal conquest was founded, the triumph by which he united every Dragon who flew against him or cast them to their doom. He rose in the power of his grief, and none could stand against.\"\n\nSapphurion's breath soughed around her in a spicy windstorm, before he whispered, <She's saying \u2026 o, what white-fires insight dwells in such thoughts! Where shall I \u2013>\n\n<Upon the rim wall,> suggested Qualiana.\n\n<On the far side from the celestial observatory,> Auli put in hastily.\n\nThe huge Sapphire and his Red mate's laughter detonated upon her ears in concert. <Why?>\n\nShe suggested, <Because I've heard it said that a certain Dragon Elder of Gi'ishior commands the mightiest thunder beneath the five Moons, and that his voice, when roused, rivals that of Fra'anior himself. I should not want you to cause too much damage when you proclaim who is Lord of Gi'ishior.> Auli inclined her head diffidently, burning pleasantly at the combined laughter of the Dragons. <My Lord Dragon, let every Dragon quiver and bend the wing before the raging infernos of thy grief!>\n\n<Auli \u2026> his talon knuckle stroked her cheek ever so tenderly, as if she were a fragile vase he were afraid of cracking with one false move. <Verily, Ra'aba mistook thee. What he saw for dirt, art treasure beyond price or ken.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "When Sapphurion winged aloft, it was with belaboured strokes but majestic mien \u2013 Auli knew it for a fact. No eyes were needed to see the transformation in that Dragon's heart. She need only hearken to the astonished refrain of those who beheld him; to the soft, musical exclamations of the many Dragonkind gathered upon the porches and ledges outside of their roosts to exchange the traditional chorus of morning greetings.\n\n<Behold! Alert, Dragons!> came the cries. <Behold, it's Sapphurion! Such splendour!>\n\nShe knew when he took his regal stance upon the rim wall, for the hush he provoked was immediate. His gesture was symbolic, evoking the draconic spirit of dominance of the Island-World's high places. Now, there was only a muted rustling of wings and hides as myriad Dragonkind congregated as if drawn forth by an invisible, inaudible signal. They waited.\n\nAt the touch of Qualiana's paw, she processed to the cliff's edge together with the Red Dragoness. Auli-Ambar's scalp crawled with trepidation and wonder and knowing and grief. This was his defining moment.\n\n<MMOOOUURRRRNNNIINNGG!!>\n\nSapphurion's majestic, mournful bellowing shook the morning air as though thunder pealed within the caldera. Again and again, his long throat reverberated with the notes of his lamentation as the mighty Dragon poured forth the agony of his hearts' loss; and the gathered Dragons began to respond with a soft, harmonious keening on minor notes and diminishing runs, creating a tonal quality so profoundly elegiac that every hair jolted erect on the nape of Auli's neck. She stood amongst the fragrant zephyrs of dawn, and trembled for the sorrowing that resounded around the Halls of the Dragons. A shuddering of fires waxed within her soul, and she knew that Amaryllion's regard turned once more upon her tiny life. She was afraid.\n\nOn and on went their song, and Qualiana raised her voice in a heartrending descant above her mate's dolorous booming and the accompaniment of the Dragon chorus, and when her song ended, still Sapphurion stood aloft, unable or unwilling to end it. His voice was so raw, she thought her own heart must surely cease beating for the weight of sadness it endured.\n\n<Help him \u2026 help us, Auli,> Qualiana whispered.\n\nShe quailed, but the Black Dragon's presence was strong within her now. Perhaps Qualiana sensed that too. Auli said, <Shield me from their sight, noble Qualiana. I mean, hide my song.>\n\nThe Dragoness would understand. A grief-singing was a sacred moment for the Dragonkind. Nothing should be allowed to disturb it, least of all the piping notes of a Human girl.\n\n<I'll do better than that,> she promised.\n\nHer clear melody tinkled like rain upon the draconic refrain as Auli-Ambar began to vocalise the tumultuous opening passage from the Ballad of Saggaz Thunderdoom:\n\n<'Twas a morn unlike any other,>\n\n<'Twas a morn a Dragon's heart to sunder,>\n\n<The suns stood black upon crowning mount,>\n\n<The waters froze in every fount.>\n\n<Aaaa \u2026 ooo, the wind did moan \u2026>\n\n<MY GRIEF DOTH RAGE!> The Sapphire Dragon shook every heart present with a thunderclap that momentarily drowned out her exhortation, which the attending Dragons had begun to pick up. The sound of their chorus was changing, Auli realised. Expectation, swelling. Talons, curling. Dragon hearts, pounding.\n\nBeside Auli, Qualiana's response was a thrilling purr of laughter. <My mate flares his wings \u2013 o assuredly shalt the dawn awaken!> And she urged the girl to sing with all of her heart. <Sing him aloft, Auli. Sing him high!>\n\nLifting her suddenly amplified voice, the girl launched into the second verse with strength she did not know she possessed:\n\n<Ah, Dragon Lord, the clouds thy splendid panoply,>\n\n<Caustic winds of scarring war bestirr\u00e9d,>\n\n<The aeons-old bulwark did quake to verimost root.>\n\n<With Dragons' thunder shalt dawn's portals be parted,>\n\n<To the darkest, grieving rage of a fire-soul thwarted,>\n\n<And he shall arise! Aye, he shall arise!>\n\nWith a shock that made her heart zing to the stars and back, the Dragons responded in perfect refrain:\n\n<Thunderdoom! THUNDERDOOM!>\n\n<Be the warp and weft of every loom,>\n\n<Ascend with the suns, aye, ascend in majesty of yore,>\n\n<Resplendent of scale and wing,>\n\n<O Thunderdoom, our Thunderdoom!>\n\nAs the Dragons continued to sing, Auli-Ambar realised that the vocal thunder of Sapphurion approached, belling out the third stanza together with the Dragons he ruled. He roared past, the wash of his passage like a punch to her gut.\n\nSapphurion thundered, <DRAGON ELDERS! TO ME!>\n\nWithout warning, Qualiana's paw clamped down on her back and shoulders, trapping the girl's head immovably in the armoured folds of her palm. With shuddering voice, she cried, <Now is the hour, Auli-Ambar. I see \u2026 I see healing \u2013 o Onyx, strengthen mine paw!>\n\nAnd the very tips of her talons seemed to scratch the hard-shelled skin above Auli-Ambar's eyes, but the pain that lanced deep was as though she had poured tendrils of liquid suns-light into the girl's being. The pain was exquisite. It was unbearable and consuming and eerily beautiful.\n\nAll Auli remembered was thinking, <I see colour!> For the pain was white. She fell endlessly into mountains as white as the celebrated snow-capped tips of Immadia Island.\n\nThen, even the whiteness faded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "\"Auli. Auli?\" <Auli, Auli, Auli \u2026>\n\nShe tried to swat the pesky voice. <Go away, you stupid dragonet.> At least, she imagined she spoke, but nothing emerged from her throat. That was one big dragonet. A massive dragonet. It was laughing so hard her world turned upside down, before righting itself with a horrid lurch.\n\n\"Auli, easy. Drink this.\"\n\n\"Whaaaa \u2026 thwibble?\" She sounded awful! Her words emerged, \"Whath, a thtwaw?\"\n\n\"Aye, a drinking pipette,\" said the familiar voice. \"Gently, now. Gently! I'll tip water in. You say when.\"\n\n\"Thwen fwot?\" she managed. Oh, liquid! That was gorgeous. It might be spring water from beneath the Gi'ishior volcano, but it was cool nectar to a parched throat. \"Uh \u2026 Thashkwion?\"\n\nThe Dragon coughed indelicately. \"Nurse Arkurion at your service, my lady.\"\n\n\"Nuurth? Ha-ha \u2026 aaah!\"\n\n\"You should stop trying to laugh at me. Nor should you speak. Whilst I appreciate that may be like trying to stop a waterfall from beneath with one's paws \u2013\" Auli made a rude bubbling noise at him, for she was anything but talkative \"\u2013 it really would be for the better, you see, because we performed the first operation on your mouth last night while you were unconscious.\"\n\nOh. What? Without her permission, or say-so, or \u2013 flying ralti sheep, when had Arkurion arrived? Auli made a querying gesture with her forefinger.\n\n\"You've been unconscious for four days,\" Arkurion explained at once. \"After Qualiana performed a hasty and ill-advised \u2013 those are her words, Auli \u2013 magic-assisted operation on your eyes, which appears to have done more harm than good \u2026 ah, let's roll back the scrolleaf. You are trouble!\" She had the impression a very large fore-talon wagged beneath her ugly nose. Or had that changed, too? \"I return from Tanstoy to discover some disrespectful dragonet apparently has the entire staff of the Dragon Library hopping to the tune of every twitch of her exceedingly tiny little finger! Furthermore, Qualiana assures me that you saved her life from poisoning. As if that were not sufficient mischief-making for one lifetime, you broke the hold of grief's dark-fires upon none other than the Dragon Elder himself, and restored his authority \u2013 indeed, greater and more absolute authority than he ever enjoyed before! What do you have to say for yourself, young lady?\"\n\n\"Nrugruth?\"\n\n\"Nothing? By my wings, I should think so!\"\n\nAbruptly, Arkurion began to chuckle with a freedom that assured her he was very likely the only person in \u2026 her room? What? She listened very carefully. She tried to sniff the air, but there were bandages or something medicinal and astringent stuffed up her nose and all around its base. No hope. Her mouth tasted like a horrid combination of dry fungal rot and last week's ralti stew which had been left to putrefy and brew up a fly-ridden stench of epic nastiness.\n\nYummy. Even that thought made her hungry.\n\n\"Weth mih?\"\n\nShe had to try four times before he understood. \"You're in your bed, Auli-Ambar, located in the north-eastern corner of the main chamber of Master Chamzu's roost, exactly two inches from either wall.\" Brisk. Scholarly precision. Arkurion cleared his throat self-importantly. \"His quarters are just about large enough for you to receive both draconic and Human visitors. I assure you there's been quite a line. Young researchers from Tanstoy do not rate very highly in the draconic pecking order, unlike rascally Human teenagers, so I am reliably informed.\"\n\n*Murr-murr-murr,* she chuckled, a draconic expression of droll amusement she had learned recently.\n\n\"Hilarious. I'm rolling my eyes, in case you're wondering. Not that we Dragons can, technically, roll our eyes. It's the fires within that roll.\"\n\nOh. Details she would never have thought to ask, which must be so obvious \u2013 blindingly obvious, for want of a useless expression \u2013 to a sighted person. She shifted her left hand gingerly. Roaring rajals, her face was one big bandage. Her upper mouth was swathed in all sorts of bits of soft medical wool and padding, and her eyes had been bandaged over too. No point in worrying about her appearance in that case. She could move right to wearing a sack over her head and spend the rest of her days mouldering away in a hermitage. Well, as long as it had a nice big library!\n\n\"Now, I am permitted to inform you of the following. One, your mouth operation proceeded passably well. With Qualiana's magical help, the surgeon rebuilt part of the bridge of the upper gum, repositioned your teeth and closed your upper lip. That will feel very strange for a while, I suspect. The nose reconstruction is not complete, nor is the lay of the palette and the attendant skeletal structures entirely resolved, most especially not the lower jaw. We have not touched that as yet. We shall see how this heals first, and then undertake further operations if you are willing.\"\n\nAuli pointed at her eyes.\n\n\"Two. Qualiana opened your eyelids to reveal your eyes beneath. Now, I understand that it is Human tradition to receive good news first. That acts as a palliative for what may follow, am I correct?\"\n\nFor once, she wished he were not such a pain-in-the-proverbial Dragon. Auli nodded, feeling vertiginous. Here it came.\n\n\"Very good,\" the Mercury Blue said, with forced jollity. \"You have eyes. Excellent news. They are remarkably attractive orbs, being a smoky topaz colour with hints of gold within, almost as if a dark gem-bearing ore were flecked with \u2013\" the Dragon cleared his throat noisily, making Auli wonder why he seemed discomfited \"\u2013 Dragon gold.\"\n\nAnd the bad news?\n\n\"Less encouraging is the fact that your ocular features and structures do not appear, as such, to match any known \u2026 ah, Human eyes \u2013 inasmuch as their fundamental substance and their principal workings strike us as wholly \u2026 unique. Aye, a fine descriptor. Unique.\"\n\nHe coughed a fireball somewhere away from her bed. Hopefully Master Chamzu's expensive Immadian paintings survived the experience.\n\nIt took Auli-Ambar a distressingly long age to work out what poor Arkurion meant, with his odd 'inasmuch' and 'as such' tossed in here and there amidst a stumbling speech. Bluntly, her eyes were inhuman. Or non-Human. Not recognisably Human, as such.\n\nAt least her sarcasm was in fine working order.\n\nSounding more and more miserable by the second, Arkurion added, \"Your eyes are approximately twice the diameter of ordinary Human eyes in a girl of your age, and appear to consist of a magi-gemlike or organo-crystalline substance presently unidentified by draconic science. They lack pupil, iris, retinae, lenses and interior blood supply, but are served by a relatively enormous optic nerve bundle \u2013 suggesting a power of sight which may be orders of magnitude beyond ordinary Human capability. Only, the nerves do not presently evince any detectable function. So you don't actually have any sight.\"\n\n\"Ath thutch?\" she joked feebly.\n\nHis warm paw rested soothingly upon her chest. \"You jest? Auli-Ambar surely \u2026 you must grasp what this means? Your parentage \u2013\"\n\n\"Phwathah!\"\n\n\"Aye, your father Xa'an appears to be well known,\" Arkurion snorted, again making her wonder why it was that so many Dragons were apparently so very knowledgeable about Xa'an Ta'afaya. How dearly she wished to quiz \u2013 make that interrogate \u2013 her father! \"Less so, your mother. Unless we are deeply mistaken, we believe she might represent some undiscovered Human subspecies located in the Crescent Isles Jungles, the Southern Archipelago, or \u2026 Herimor.\"\n\nOr, just about any unexplored corner of the Island-World! Still, she appreciated his explanation.\n\n\"Hewimuth? Nonthunth!\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" he ordered. \"While I'm certain you have very many questions, you must focus all your apparently indomitable will upon healing first.\"\n\nAye, and here was one more conundrum: how, when everyone else forgot her existence within two or three days, had Arkurion the Mercury Blue contrived to remember a useless blind girl of Gi'ishior?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Life around the volcano returned to normal, if a life lived amongst Dragons could be called normal, Auli-Ambar was beginning to learn. In no other part of the Island-World did Humans and Dragons coexist in such close proximity, nor did they cooperate as intimately as at Gi'ishior. Advantages? Plenty of those. Then came Dragonship-loads of problems that drove Sapphurion or Master Chamzu, or both, up the proverbial cliff at regular intervals.\n\nProblems that kept her strange ocular features firmly ensconced beneath bandages. Since her eyes lacked tear ducts and the magically-cut eyelids did not possess muscles to help them open and close, Auli learned to bathe her eyes twice a day, or five or six times a day in the dry season, to prevent them from developing an infection or having the eyelids stick to the eyeball, making them even itchier and more painful than usual. Qualiana apologised so many times that Sapphurion jokingly suggested she was planning to don Human guise, for apologies were seen as undraconic. Auli-Ambar assured the Dragoness that she knew her intentions had been for the best, but failure clearly rankled like scale mites prickling a Dragon to madness.\n\nQualiana brooded obsessively over her egg. How did she speak to him, to that miracle of draconic fire life who called himself Grandion? Auli puzzled over this mystery.\n\nMany a long and pleasurable hour did she spend with Arkurion and Sazutharr in the Dragon Library, learning the ways of scroll lore, preservation of ancient texts, indexing, cataloguing, and reading the different scripts. She and the Mercury Blue pored over texts together, exchanged notes and tried to work out what do with a jaw so badly deformed, the bones did not even join up on the right side, besides which the muscles and tendons were all askew and even twisted into useless knots.\n\nOne very early morning a month after his arrival, with Auli-Ambar mostly recovered from a third operation intended to restore her palette and further affix her skewed teeth to the upper jawbone, Sazutharr stopped by their habitual study plinth two hours before dawn and said, <Ah, if it isn't the studious conspirators, Auli and Arkurion. The early Dragon snaffles the choice portion, they say.>\n\n<Sulphurous greetings, noble Sazutharr,> said Arkurion, infusing his Dragonish with notes of age-veneration.\n\n<Scrollish felicitations, boss-paws,> Auli chuckled.\n\nThe Mercury Blue almost choked at the greeting Auli had worked out the previous day. It was laden with very correct linguistic indicators of deep deference, but decidedly inappropriate all the same.\n\nThe Head Librarian's neck vertebrae protested as he evidently inclined his head. <May all de-script-ive delights be thine, o nettlesome nestling.> Evidently, his clever pun deserved a smoky laugh, but it descended into hoarse coughing. He added, <My age troubles me more than thee, my fine prot\u00e9g\u00e9s.>\n\nArkurion's fires purred as the esteemed elder Dragon included him in this statement.\n\nSazutharr said, <Two matters of paw. One, your request for use of the Council Hall is granted. It's unusual, but with Sapphurion and Andarraz treating with King Chalcion this week, you shall enjoy full use of the space. The Mercury Blue convinced me. Secondly, Arkurion, I've a number of scrolls and messages which I'd value your assistance in conveying back to Tanstoy Dragon Roost.>\n\n<I am thy humble hind paw,> said the younger Dragon.\n\nWhen the elder Dragon had moved on, with his joints protesting audibly, Auli said, \"The Hall? Why, Arkurion?\"\n\n\"Because you failed to keep your promise,\" he said.\n\n\"I \u2013 what? What have I done now?\"\n\nHer new lips still vibrated strangely at times. It was a wonder to put hand to mouth and discover no open cleft just beneath her nose. The ballads always extolled the virtues of kissable lips. Not that she wanted any of that \u2026 yuck! But she did wonder, exploring the newly conjoined flesh with her fingers, what they might look like \u2013 if they might one day at least earn a smallish peck or two from some boy who loved her for more than her looks. He'd have to be brave!\n\n\"What haven't you done,\" the Dragon sniffed, steadying the stepladder for her as Auli clambered down from the volume on Dragon anatomy they had been perusing. \"Don't sound so sombre. We are about to draw all over the Hall's floor.\"\n\n\"What? We \u2026 how? I can't do that, Arkurion.\"\n\n\"I'll have silence from the chirruping dragonet. You can and you will,\" he retorted, and would say no more upon the subject as they walked from the Library to the meeting cave, which had a sandy but smooth floor set upon basal gravel. Deeper inside, there was a tall quartz plinth designed to allow a Human envoy or potentate to ascend to the height of the Dragon Council when they spoke. It must counteract the problem of sore necks during their inordinately lengthy summits, Auli supposed, not that Sapphurion did not weekly complain about stiff-necked pride amongst both Dragonkind and Humankind around the Cluster and beyond!\n\n\"Attend,\" said Arkurion, and proceeded to chew Auli out at length for not delivering upon her promise to improve the layout of the Halls.\n\nWhen he was done, a decidedly sulky Human girl debated beating the Dragon over the tail with the rake he pressed into her hand.\n\nA young Dragoness named Kayturia then helped him drag in sacks of specially treated sand. Arkurion's skittish behaviour around her made Auli-Ambar's desire for a horrible revenge graduate to the dizzying heights and richly imaginative undertaking of poking him in the eye with the rake handle. Did he have to purr and sigh and fulminate around that female? Whatever was the matter with him?\n\nTwo hours later, they had prepared a perfectly smoothed area of inked sand some forty of her paces wide and twenty high, and Auli finally understood what Arkurion intended.\n\n\"You expect me to draw \u2013 a blind girl, to draw? A map of the entire Halls, at that?\" She waved a stylus dangerously in his direction. \"Arkurion, I \u2013\"\n\n\"You are far more capable than you imagine.\"\n\nKayturia snickered nearby.\n\nEvidently encouraged by her coy flirtation, the Mercury Blue added in preposterously condescending tones, \"Now, none of your kicking and screaming like last time I helped you prove you could do what you claimed was impossible, Auli-Ambar! Learn from the ways of Dragons!\"\n\n\"What, so I can cuff you around the ear canals as you deserve?\" she snorted.\n\n\"Do not talk back to a Dragon.\"\n\nThe Dragoness purred approvingly. <My sentiments exactly, noble Arkurion. I fail to understand why you allow this scrap of humanity to disrespect you so!>\n\nThat was it. Yelling a nonsensical phrase, Auli hurled the drawing stylus at where she thought Arkurion must be. The movement dislodged her loosely tied eye bandages, which slid down over her nose.\n\n*Skiss!*\n\nShe smelled the stench of smoke and ozone, undoubtedly the stylus having met more than its match in the lightning-strike of an annoyed Blue Dragon, but she was mesmerised by something completely unexpected. A new experience. Very slowly, Auli-Ambar raised her fingertips to her left eyeball, or gemstone-eye as Arkurion and Qualiana had dubbed her strange organs, wanting to rub it but fearing to hurt herself in the process.\n\n<Umm \u2026 Arkurion?> she quavered.\n\n<Aye? Ready to apologise?>\n\n<No. I mean, is there something on my eye? In it? Something's wrong, I think.>\n\n<What \u2013 why?> he blurted out.\n\n<I think \u2026 well, it's like there's something smeared \u2026 on the inside. It's bright. Yellow, I think. The problem is \u2026 well, I don't know what yellow is. I've only ever imagined colours.>\n\nArkurion's wingtips began to flutter at once, very rapidly. <What kind of yellow? Auli, what are you saying?> And when she did not speak, for she could not, he cried, <Did you see something? A streak upon your vision? Auli? Is it clear? Can you see this?>\n\n<Skiss!> Her hair stood away from her head, so close was that lightning strike.\n\n<Ouch \u2013 wow! I think \u2026 I don't know. It can't be, can it? It's very \u2026 uh, what's the word you use?>\n\n<Blurry? Not sharp?> Arkurion's voice struck a note of utter, joyous abandon. Auli was not sure why she was so elated, but she knew exactly how he felt. Her stomach churned with the terrors of unspeakable hope. <Oh, Auli \u2026>\n\n<Arkurion, I'm scared.>\n\n<I know! Me too!> He was bellowing now, all fire and exhilaration. Claws clamped painfully about her lower torso and legs, the Dragon losing perspective on his great strength in the heat of the moment. <Kayturia, summon Qualiana! Auli, fly with me!>\n\nLeather snapped above her head. Arkurion's muscles tensed, and then the young Dragon launched himself into the air right there within the cavern. She would never know how he did not brain himself on a stalactite nor tangle his wings within the ajar doorway, but the truth hit her literally in the eyes even as he cleared the cavern and powered upward, his massive wingbeats pounding up joyous sprays of water from the lake before he shot skyward, leaving her poor stomach languishing hundreds of feet behind.\n\nThe brightness behind her eyes, just touches here and there like firelight dancing afar in a dark cavern, glimmered and guttered slightly as the Dragon's wings cut between her and the light above them. Auli turned her ruined face to the sky.\n\nShe knew where the sky was.\n\nAn endless, wind-rushing, gut churning, helpless minute later, Arkurion landed three-pawed upon a hard surface with a shock that rattled the girl's body despite that he cradled her carefully against his chest. <LOOK!!> he thundered, uncurling his paw. <Look to the dawn!>\n\nAuli-Ambar looked, and then crumpled over the crook of the Dragon's digits, weeping for the brokenness of indescribable joy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Our Right Paw",
                "text": "That day, suns' dawning burnished my perception for the first time in my life, and I knew how long a journey faced me, for it was like squinting at a firefly's faint glow through darkened crysglass. My knowledge of scroll lore allowed me to rejoice in many previously unimaginable similes and metaphors. Yet also, I knew a miracle. There was light in my darkness.\n\nThis was my introduction to the joys and frustrations of that priceless gift called hope. \u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 174\n\nFlying by Dragon's paw rated a poor second to being held in her father's arms.\n\nAuli surreptitiously pinched the skin on her left hand with her right. Aye. Not dreaming. She pinched again just to be certain. Harder, enough to really hurt. Then, she buried her head against his broad chest, finding it unexpectedly muscular and his Guard's uniform to be redolent with many unfamiliar scents. Auli wished to inhale him forever.\n\nEventually, her father laughed softly, and wiped his eyes. She had already known he was crying, because his tears had leaked down onto her head and splashed upon her arms. \"Fra'anior's beard, had I known your hugs were that good, Auli-Ambar, I would never have given them up all those years ago. I'm so stupid! The prize ralti sheep of this entire Cluster! You don't hate me?\"\n\n\"I'm getting used to the not-hating,\" she admitted. \"I \u2026 well, I sort of debated having Sapphurion sit upon your head, fa \u2013 uh, father \u2026\"\n\n\"This same Dragon Elder who calls you 'his right paw?' We've some catching up to do, my \u2013 ouch!\"\n\nWith a small scream, Auli-Ambar pushed herself away from the tall Fra'aniorian soldier, and then on second thoughts, pummelled his chest again, with both fists this time. Those dull thuds against his uniformed chest felt good. Too good, despite that she could never hurt him with her weak, spindly arms. Panting with fury and embarrassment, she faced where her father ought to be standing in her small cushion bowl.\n\nShe changed her mind. Auli hissed raggedly, \"Catching up. Aye. You first, Xa'an Ta'afaya. Tell me what you do \u2013 exactly what you do. No half-truths meant for children's ears, this time.\"\n\nPerhaps he glanced quickly about the room before he laughed curtly. \"I suppose the Dragons told you all about me?\"\n\n\"No, they didn't.\"\n\nShe read shock in the intake of his breath. \"Truly?\"\n\nAuli said, \"Draconic thought processes are complex and deeply nuanced. Perhaps they did not wish to prejudice a youngling against her father?\"\n\n\"I'm not evil.\" With another of his curt, discomfited half-chuckles, he added, \"But I am no soldier either, that is the truth. I'm a spy. A glorified thief, if you prefer. I am a man who is gifted at sneaking, skulking, blending in and filching secrets from whichever hands may be clutching them \u2013\"\n\n\"Or paws?\"\n\n\"Or paws,\" he admitted.\n\n\"Dead or \u2013\"\n\n\"Auli! I am no assassin!\"\n\nDespite the truthful yelp she wrung out of him, Auli was not yet willing to offer quarter. She had been reading up on the mores of Dragonship pirates \u2013 but her father was hardly the enemy, was he? Still, her kindness hid behind an exterior of which any spiny vine-thicket could justly have been proud. Icily, she said, \"The Dragons are watching you here in the Halls?\"\n\n\"Every step, every breath,\" he said.\n\n\"Who do you work for \u2013 the King? How is that, father?\"\n\n\"About as complex and nuanced as your draconic minds,\" he said wryly. \"Are you quite certain you're almost thirteen summers, daughter? These are serious questions with serious answers. You suggested in your letter that I consider working here at the Halls. I think I might better sketch a large target between my shoulders purposed for Dragonkind and Humankind alike. I'm not trusted, Auli, and that truth too is an arrow shot perfectly into its mark. But I promise you, I am working very hard on changing that situation. It just hasn't happened yet. Apparently I'm too valuable to lose \u2013 painted another way, the loss of my job carries a high likelihood of entailing the loss of my head.\"\n\nDancing dragonets! That was more than close to the bone. This was marrow spilled from the fissures of reality.\n\n\"Auli-Ambar!\"\n\nShe startled as the door rattled to the tempo of Master Chamzu's firm, distinctive knocking, five sharp raps followed by a treble tap of the fingertips.\n\nShe startled, \"Master?\"\n\nHis voice floated beneath the door, \"Noble Sapphurion demands his hall back \u2013 and bids me make inquiries with you as to any forecast of its availability! What mischief have you and that Mercury Blue been fomenting this time?\"\n\nAuli could practically hear her father's eyebrows crawling up toward his hairline.\n\n\"I guess the Dragon's out of the shell now,\" she whispered aside to him. Xa'an chuckled discreetly, yet with clear uneasiness. She had not had opportunity to explain her working relationship with Arkurion as yet.\n\nDear father, my best friend is a Dragon? Shaky ground!\n\nShe called, \"Very well, Master Chamzu. Please bring scrolleaf and pens, and I shall elucidate for you how we intend to remodel your Halls.\"\n\nThe door rattled again, this time at the force of the Master's roar. \"WHAT?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Apparently, Xa'an felt it was discourteous and unbecoming of Auli-Ambar to unnerve a man of Master Chamzu's station so discourteously, but that was exactly what she had achieved \u2013 with much help from Arkurion, she pointed out. Still, it was she who had mapped most of the access tunnels around the Halls of the Dragons and then reproduced the entirety of its structure, from memory, in ink-infused sand on the floor of Sapphurion's Hall in four straight days' work.\n\n\"Heavens raining fireballs, girl!\" the Master barked, before rounding on Xa'an. \"You had better forget all of this information, my friend, or promise me you'll take up ralti farming on a remote outer Island as your next profession! I need \u2026 a few people. Aye. Fetch me a few \u2026 people. And Dragons.\"\n\n\"Daughter \u2013\"\n\n\"She's meant to be blind. Blind! Fra'anior's holy beard hairs!\" floated back from outside the doorway.\n\nAfter a long, long pause, her father said, \"You're reconfiguring tunnels and access points, swapping roosts all over the place, systematically relabeling every chamber in the Halls and proposing four hundred and seventy-three individual improvements besides \u2026\"\n\nAuli-Ambar let out a huge gust of air, and sat down with a bump. She wanted to be sick, her stomach was so twisted up. Nerves. The weather was ridiculously hot and humid. Even the Dragon Library struggled to maintain its figurative cool in this unbearable period before storm season truly kicked off. Would she be able to see proper lightning for the very first time? Oh! She bit her knuckles, wondering if she might just expire from a fit of hysterical inner giggling. This could be so much fun, if it didn't terrify the living pith out of her.\n\nUnsteadily, she explained, \"Once we started to document everything, the project sort of mushroomed. It's a big volcano. Besides, Arkurion made me do it and as you know, Dragons are hard to dissuade once they have their minds set on something.\"\n\n\"Arkurion started this? Or you?\"\n\n\"Me, actually.\"\n\n\"Auli \u2026\"\n\n\"That's my name.\"\n\n\"I know!\" He seemed exasperated, but Xa'an puffed out his cheeks and inquired, \"From memory?\"\n\nShe had always felt small in his reckoning, the unwanted, repulsive offspring he had chosen to hide on remote Ya'arriol Island. Now, his incredulity wounded her in ways she could not have imagined.\n\n\"Aye, it seems nobody ever attempted to compile a complete picture,\" Auli explained through the constriction in her throat. It seemed easier to stick to facts than to acknowledge her caustic emotions. \"There are literally thousands of bits and pieces of architectural diagrams and sections in the relevant reference sections of the Dragon Library, but \u2013 well, it's easier once you see the entirety of the structure in one place. Then it becomes logical.\"\n\nHis reaction clearly suggested that her version of logical was somebody else's insanity.\n\nHunkering down before her, Xa'an took her hands in his work-calloused palms and whispered, \"My daughter, I suppose it goes without saying that I think you're absolutely, unequivocally and stunningly rainbows-over-Islands, doesn't it? It only took me the best part of thirteen years to figure that out.\"\n\nAuli wished he had never made her feel like this.\n\nWere she rainbows, then clouds could never be far behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Tapping her fingers dangerously on the rim of her crysglass water goblet, Auli said, \"Arkurion, are you lying to me?\"\n\n\"No.\" The Dragon's purr was at once molten and beautiful, yet rife with nuances a girl who was accustomed to living with the Dragonkind was learning to interpret. He added, \"To bald-facedly accuse a Dragon of dishonesty is perilous territory, Auli-Ambar. You should know better.\"\n\nAye? The Mercury Blue was hardly more than a fledgling himself, a thirty-one foot youngster who in draconic terms was not regarded as much older than her. The difference in natural rates of development was substantial, however, with Dragons moving much faster through the Human equivalent of childhood and teenage years. Being told off by a Dragon who was effectively her peer, rankled more than Auli cared to admit.\n\nCarefully, she said, \"I apologise for offending you, Arkurion. I am merely curious about certain features of the design that we drew. More accurately, the lack of certain features and the gaps that I just now pointed out to you.\"\n\n<A hatchling must grow into her paws,> he averred.\n\nAuli drew a breath. On second thoughts, she drew another, much deeper than the first. Implying what, exactly, mister Dragon? Her immaturity? Her sightless gaze searched the walls of her chamber. A Dragon could not fit through her doorway, but Arkurion had slipped his head inside and twisted it slightly to confer with her as she sat cross-legged in her compact cushion bowl.\n\nShe considered stuffing a cushion down his stuffy gullet, but that would be a waste of good material.\n\nThe hall where she had drawn her design lay still now, abandoned while her elders made merry with the implications. Holding their councils. Consulting with architects and designers and debating the merits of this additional tunnel or that remodelled access or roost enlargement, and peevishly decrying the way she had restructured entire storage levels to ensure a far easier flow and accounting for goods and supplies. There would be copious grumpiness before the dust settled!\n\nSucking in her lower lip, Auli turned the plans about in her head one more time, especially those peculiar structural elements of the Dragon Library which she had cobbled together from various incomplete architectural sections. Almost as if information had been omitted. The additional thickness of walls beside the doorways nearest the underside of the caldera lake, which she had checked with her own hands. The sense of quiet, expectant magic, tingling beneath her untutored touch like tiny ant trails walking the whorls of her fingerprints. Aye, she was certain.\n\nCertain of the draconic adoration of multi-layered subterfuge. Perfectly their Island of philosophy.\n\nA foil within a foil.\n\nAuli said, <If these be paws, then I am a Dragoness; if I were a Dragoness, then a Mercury Blue of white-fires would hearken even to my smallest flame. I remind you of how very acute a blind person's senses can be. I know thee, Arkurion of Remoy, far too well for thy dissembling to pass unnoticed.>\n\n<Is this the tenor of thine burning?>\n\n<Aye, I burn and I bite!> Inspiration seized her mind, now, and words forced their way out despite the increasingly violent trembling of her person. <Arkurion, I first met you behind the Dragon Library's wards. Now deny, if you can, my charge. That place is not the true forbidden section. It is a mask, a deception, designed to disguise what lies beneath.>\n\n<Do Dragons not say, 'What is more forbidden than forbidden?' Well, I will answer thee that conundrum, and more. Deny this truth, Arkurion.>\n\nHe laughed smokily, but essayed no denial. Auli could not detect any change to his complex pulse, nor any agitated vibration of the wingtips; yet certainty burned throughout her being. That, or she was about to plummet in a blaze of foolishness.\n\nAuli insisted, <I bid you, deny it to my face.>\n\nA paw ruffled her hair. <Fangs and talons at the ready, Human girl?>\n\n<Arkurion!>\n\nHe said, <A Dragon who is obedient to prevailing dogmas could not possibly venture any opinion on such a hypothesis.>\n\n<Oh? And a Mercury Blue of pure white-fires?>\n\nArkurion nudged her shoulder with his muzzle. <He'd just have to snack on that overworked brain of yours, wouldn't he? What's for dinner? How's the weather?> He chuckled softly, and Auli knew she would have not a single straight word out of him on the subject. <Any news of your father? Well, I need to be going.>\n\n<Huh? You're leaving me just like that?>\n\n<I am.> She heard his bulk shift as the Dragon withdrew his head carefully. Auli leaped to her feet and followed him so determinedly, the Mercury Blue paused to take stock. <What? What is it now?>\n\nHow she wished she could glance both ways down the corridor outside her chambers! Taking her courage into her hands, Auli-Ambar reached upward to feel for the scales near his jaw. She said, <Is this your cheek?>\n\n<Aye. Why \u2013>\n\n*Whack!* She slapped his hide, open-handed, just as hard as she could, crying, <Well then deny that, you drivelling dunderdragon!>\n\nArkurion had not finished gasping when she slammed the door in his face and slumped against the thick jalkwood panels. Roaring rajals, her hand hurt! Yet somehow it had never felt better."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "That same evening, Auli opened a surprise package from her father. He must have smuggled it into her chambers before departing by fast Dragonship for Horness. Work called.\n\nInside all the wrapping and padding, she found something for which she had waited whole seasons. \"The White Dragoness!\" Her father's brief note, with an apology for the long delay, confirmed her joy.\n\nThe sculpture was once more executed in the signature Cinizzara style, highly detailed and compact, the unique metal alloy retaining a silky warmth noticeably higher than the ambient temperature. She explored the composition at length, with growing delight. It was all she could have wished for, except that she could never appreciate its colours. An inch-long Dragoness broke free of the eggshell, her tiny paws gripping the shattered shards right near the emergent muzzle as if she were upon the brink of ripping the eggshell right apart; when Auli-Ambar delicately inserted an exploratory finger inside the shell, she found it perfect in every detail, right down to the miniscule hatchling wings and talons.\n\nThe base seemed to be gemstones set about the tilted eggshell, giving the whole piece stability when she placed it upon her shelf, beside its two companions.\n\n<Istariela,> she said quietly. <Star Dragoness.>\n\nAuli paused. No, that didn't sound quite right. <Ista \u2013 Itha \u2013 Iza \u2026 aye \u2026> what peculiar mood was this that had come upon her? She could only describe it as a settling of her soul. A kind of peace, of knowing what was true.\n\n<Izariela. Thy name shalt be Izariela, forevermore.>\n\nRoaring! She jumped and then shivered, for the Island-World seemed to have, just for a moment, sprouted wings and a mighty maw, and thundered its approbation to the stars and beyond \u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "The day after Arkurion departed once more for Tanstoy, the heavens opened above Gi'ishior and dumped terrace lakes upon the terrace lakes \u2013 Arkurion's parting joke as he and two Dragon Researcher colleagues from Gi'ishior flitted away before the storms struck. She wanted to gnaw out her liver with jealousy. He was so lucky! Ruddy Dragons, able to fly anywhere they wished in the Island-World at the flip of a wingtip. Life was so unfair. She could not even trot around the nearest worktable without causing mayhem. Just imagine flying to faraway Remoy \u2026 but she must stay behind, a petite packet of botheration according to the harried Master Chamzu, who was just coming to full realisation of the magnitude of the works she and Arkurion had proposed. Poor Master. She had just quintupled his stress, according to the latest blast which had chased her out of his office.\n\nAuli scratched her arms pensively. What was it about the rain that made her imagine swimming into the sky? Did other people feel this peculiar, subliminal vibration in their bones when the floodgates of the heavens opened upon the jewel of Fra'anior's crown, and dampened but never quenched his ever-simmering throne? It set her teeth upon edge. The humming played havoc with the mastoid bones and upset her inner ear, making her feel as if the ground bucked and frisked beneath her feet.\n\nYet that feeling of magical repression persisted. Muted. Faraway. Bound in treasure chests of iron and locked away deep within her soul, inviolable.\n\nAuli sloped into the Library with care for her unreliable sense of balance, but her footsteps stuttered immediately as a growl reverberated from the area of the Head Librarian's habitual desk station. <Auli-Ambar! Attend at once!>\n\n<Noble Saz \u2013>\n\n<Girl. Roost Keeper!> another, familiar draconic voice drowned her out. Sapphurion! Even above the rising roar of the torrential rains, she heard moisture steaming off his hide. <Listen closely.>\n\n<At your service, noble \u2013>\n\nHe boomed, <Qualiana has a list of requirements. You will deliver them to our roost at once! Three sackweight of liver spiced with carraweed and chiski root.> He seemed edgy, his manner rough and demanding, but Auli realised she heard something more. Anticipation? Anger? <A sack of firecracker pepper pods, the purple ones. Sufficient of her favourite incense \u2013 you know the type?>\n\n<Of course, noble Dragon. Special blend, type sixteen. I've a stock set aside especially for \u2013>\n\n<Don't forget fuel for the brazier! Quick-wings, girl. Are you still here?>\n\nHer jaw sagged. As if she'd forget! His brusque brush-off rankled her brain into action \u2013 if that expression was even proper Island Standard. Put a prickly pregnant Dragoness together with an unsettled mate and what did she conclude? Cracking eggshells! Maybe. Auli charged through the huge chamber, angling for a little-used rear exit, from which she could cut through a complex set of twists and turns up to the kitchens on eighteen, the nearest place she could source the exact foods Qualiana enjoyed. No time to enjoy the scent of fresh ink or the hushed babble of Dragon Archivists working in the second chamber, their most urgent current project being rebinding twenty-two volumes damaged in a tunnelworm break-in down on the third Library level.\n\nHer ears itched. A stranger's voice in the chamber? In a voice that sounded like flame consuming kindling, a Dragoness declaimed:\n\nOf foulness fouler none have imagined,\n\nOf power twisted, inmost meaning entangled,\n\nResurrected form of Dramagon's breath,\n\nRuzal its name, presaging death!\n\nA weird, prickling chill played like a spider's tarsal claws skittering up and down her back, for the Dragoness' words seemed to trigger dark flames in her mind \u2013 and in the Dragons all around, judging by their exclamations. Finding herself disoriented, Auli-Ambar began to swivel with her hands outstretched, searching for a reference point in the huge room with its scattered Dragon working tables. She promptly stepped upon a wriggling tail tip and pitched headlong into a pile of freshly prepared scrolleaf.\n\n<Ha, attacked by a walking scale mite,> chuckled the Dragoness, evidently the owner of the unruly tail.\n\nBefore Auli could finish swimming through the messy, undulating sea of scrolleaf, a pair of huge claws plucked her up by the scruff of her neck. Rat. Dangling. She was unimpressed, but even less so when scorching nostrils pressed firmly against her torso. The Dragoness inhaled massively, shuddering from talon tip to wingtip.\n\nAt once, she rumbled, <Intriguing. What scented-tingling mine nostrils doth bestir! I must consider its beguiling force, inhuman taint or triumphant inflammation, what mighty magic it dost claim \u2013 it stinks of magic most arcane, a scale-crawling scent, a ruzal-bane! O little flame, we shall speak anon!>\n\nWhat Moons madness was this?\n\n<Huh. Inzugith, attend. I have not finished my incantation.>\n\nWith that, the Dragoness casually tossed Auli over her shoulder!\n\nInzugith the Yellow, the most senior of three Under-Librarians and second in command to Sazutharr himself, was a phlegmatic, no-nonsense sort of Dragon who had never given a blind girl one second of his valuable time. Nonetheless, he bellowed in outrage and splintered an alarming quantity of furniture as he clearly flung himself partway across the chamber to speedily snaffle a flying girl into his paw. His landing shattered another desk or two.\n\nAnother Dragon snapped, <Ianthine! How dare you treat Auli-Ambar so maliciously?>\n\nIanthine growled:\n\n<The foresight most heated, the subject must be treated,>\n\n<Faecal felicitations to the female flotsam!>\n\n<Suffering fumaroles,> snorted Inzugith, setting Auli down with a bump. <The Draco-Mystic's in one of her mad phases, girl. Take no notice. The exit lies directly ahead.>\n\nThat was Ianthine, the notorious Draco-Mystic? Evidently her reputation for irrational behaviour was richly deserved.\n\nAs she departed, the Maroon Dragoness began to declaim another stanza of baffling poetry. Unnerved, Auli ran her fingertips along a friendly shelf and picked up the pace. She should be thankful books did not treat her so high-handedly \u2013 uh, pawedly? In a high-pawed fashion? Although, why was Ianthine droning on about Dramagon the Dragon Scientist, the villain who stood head and shoulders above every other in history? And what had ruzal to do with death? That reminded her, she would require permission from the Head Librarian to research the magical terms she had heard from Razzior, Ra'aba and Azziala \u2013 terms unfamiliar to Sapphurion and Qualiana, but they had adjured her to research them secretly. Akkar\u00e9-h\u00fbbram, she mouthed without a sound. Sanguistarn-mortha'a, words clearly related to blood and death. She suspected she would find their meanings perfectly horrid.\n\nDramagon, she mused, quick-stepping up a spiral staircase that would take her out of the Library levels and up to level twenty-two. She knew little about him, save that he was meant to have been the shell-brother of Fra'anior himself, and evil to the core.\n\nMystery.\n\nShe brightened. Sapphurion's hasty communiqu\u00e9 made for a much more appetising mystery. It was not every day the Dragon Elder chewed out his roost help in public!\n\nHaving raided the kitchens, Auli staggered upstairs under the burden of three sackweight of piquant, spiced and diced liver, and a spare pack of incense blend sixteen tucked under her left arm. This level had been the first to be labelled according to her specifications, so a swift touch of her fingers to the embossed metal rune plaque assured her she was on level five. The renewed portal wards allowed her passage with a sensation not unlike swimming through warm water \u2013 no need to sing anymore \u2013 and now Auli broke into a jog, knowing the corridor to be straight and always kept clear of obstacles.\n\nNaturally, she then managed to lose her grip on the third spice meat sack, drop it on her foot and skin her right knee as she stumbled over it. Perfect. Stupid rain!\n\nAuli-Ambar limped quickly into the kitchen. <One meat dish coming up!> she called.\n\n<Forget that dracodrivel and get your paws inside,> snorted Sapphurion. <The eggshell's about to crack. You wouldn't want to miss this.>\n\nHer ears placed his agitated voice inside the inner bedchamber. Auli skipped out of the kitchen, curving her path to meet the great sitting plinth favoured by Sapphurion, although he had been talking about carving his own. When she had touched it she knew that nineteen medium length steps should take her to the inner chamber's arched entryway, framed nowadays in turquoise and green tourmaline crystal, she understood. Sapphurion's personal touch of his own design and manufacture \u2013 apparently, his first love had been gemstone-working. It felt amazing. She had used a ladder to explore the carvings right up to the stylised keystone twenty-five feet above her head. The artwork told the story of how Fra'anior had raised the great volcano that bore his name, calling it the crowning glory of his creation, in a single unbroken sculpture-tale that flowed seamlessly around the complete archway, from east to west \u2013 again, symbolic of the twin suns' rising in the East.\n\nAuli crept over the threshold with impetuous trepidation. <I came as quickly as I was able, noble Dragons.>\n\n<Tap. Tap-tap-tappity \u2026 SKRRR!>\n\nShe inclined her head to listen better. <Oh!>\n\n<I know. Grandion's using the egg fang on the end of his nose to break out,> Qualiana said proudly. <Courage, my shell-son. Soon shall we meet, of wing and paw and neck to greet, and thou shall know the fires of thine shell-parents and we, thine fire life nascent.>\n\nSapphurion said, <Forgive the subterfuge. Some Dragons might take offence were thy presence at such an event to crackle upon their ear canals.>\n\n<Thank you.>\n\nAfter all, the flutter of gossip around the Halls was of Andarraz's gathering of power to himself, of suspicion of Human intent and Dragons poking their muzzles about the Kingdom of Fra'anior with mistrust and even malefic intent. Auli wondered again if Sapphurion read thoughts \u2013 despite Azziala's mention of an 'impervious mind' \u2013 for the instant her concerns about the increasingly fraught political situation leaped to the forefront of her mind, he growled:\n\n<Any self-respecting thundercloud would gladly purchase your expression for a sackweight of fine Dragon gold, Auli-Ambar. Away with dark-fires thoughts! Today is a momentous occasion. Later, I shall brief you privately, and Sazutharr shall assist your research, for despite his increasing frailty, he remains my right paw in matters of lore.>\n\n<How old is the Librarian?>\n\nHow Sapphurion guffawed at the note of wonder in her voice! <Two hundred summers and nine, my little fire.> The eggling stilled at the torrent of his shell-father's mirth, but then the great Sapphire Dragon crooned, <Come forth, shell-son, and laugh and celebrate and love and fly and pounce with me!>\n\nAnd then Auli had no more opportunity for thundercloud thoughts, for the tapping and scuffling set off again in earnest. She had read that due to their innate magic, Dragon eggshells were invulnerable from the outside to any known force or magic. But from the inside it was clearly a different story. The eggling smashed about with increasing fury, making cute little growling sounds of anger that his shell-parents actively encouraged.\n\n<He's a strong one,> Sapphurion purred.\n\n<Rouse those fires, my shell-son!> crowed Qualiana.\n\nThere was a theory that abandoned eggs seldom hatched. Auli wondered what happened to those febrile souls; bereft of shell-mother-love, did they die? What happened to Dragons after they died? How big was a newborn Dragon? And were they as helpless as Human babes?\n\nSuddenly, the tapping took on a different sound. A fragile, permeable sound. In seconds, the hatchling broke free of the fault line he had cracked, splitting the eggshell with a sharp report. The parents bugled their joy with a force that rattled the crysglass windows in the main chamber without, never mind deafening Auli within!\n\n<Oh, my heartling!> cried the Dragoness. <You're perfect!>\n\n<A perfect little Tourmaline!> Sapphurion spluttered happily. <What a noble colour! He's a rare one, my hearts' fire. Isn't he singular? A touch of my own sapphire, I do declare, but he has your sleek beauty about him, Qualiana \u2013 and what a raffish ruff of skull spikes, too! Quite the deadly little beast!>\n\n<Mamafire?> peeped the hatchling. <Dadafire? Who-fire?>\n\n<That's Auli-Ambar, my flame, and she's a Human girl,> said Qualiana.\n\n<Meat? Eat?>\n\n<No, we don't eat our Human friends,> Sapphurion corrected hastily. <You may scent her. This is a Human, and they are a different species to the Dragonkind.>\n\nAfter snuffling around her legs, the hatchling sneezed. <Smells funny. Hungry.>\n\nAuli laughed as he pressed her hand impatiently with his muzzle, clearly deciding that hers was the hand that should feed him \u2013 well, very likely she smelled of the liver she had just prepared and lugged up to their roost. How she wished she could behold him!\n\nSoftly, Sapphurion and Qualiana sang in thrilling dracotonic harmony:\n\n<He breathes! He burns!>\n\n<The Dragonsong of living fire,>\n\n<Blessed eggling, born to fly.>\n\nThe Human girl shivered for the treasure of new birth, but then had to laugh as Grandion bunted her left hand imperiously, mewling, <Hungry! Hungry!>\n\n<Aye, keep your scales on, my treasure,> she chuckled, daring to run her hands over his baby soft, albumen covered muzzle. <Let me see you.>\n\nThe hatchling stood stock-still in quivering amazement, and then began to growl warningly in the back of his throat as she investigated his softly creased wings and muscular flanks. He already stood taller than her waist level, but he would grow at a fantastic rate, topping her height within two weeks and putting on his first tonne before storm season finished. Hatchlings had famously insatiable appetites.\n\nShe found Grandion to be sleek and proportionate in every sense of the word, a predator from the tips of his bendable hatchling talons to his questing nose, but being fresh from the egg, he still had a curled-up babyishness about him. He shrank against Qualiana's flank, quivering.\n\n<Ah, what a beauty you are,> Auli approved. Immediately, the growl changed to a purr.\n\n<Auli sees with her hands,> Qualiana explained, nuzzling him with her great muzzle until the hatchling squealed with delight. <I'll teach you more about that soon, my shell-son. Auli, would you kindly fetch the meat? And, Sapphurion \u2026>\n\n<Aye.> His massive paw tread moved away, and then Auli-Ambar heard the outer doors of the roost slide open on their runners. The great Dragon pressed on into the open, onto the landing and suns-resting ledge outside the roost, and she sensed him taking a moment to compose himself.\n\nThen, the jubilant bugling of a proud shell-father set the Halls of the Dragons ringing. Congratulatory cries and bugles began to resound from all about.\n\nGreat were the celebrations!\n\nQualiana said, <Now there will be feasting, Dragon games and aerial dancing, and days of contentment in our roost, Auli-Ambar. We thank you for playing a key part in bringing our Grandion safely into the Island-World. Grandion, we have much to tell you about this Human girl, and much praise-honour shall be sung about her name. You and I both owe her our fire lives.>\n\n<Her?> Grandion's mystified squeak brought a trill of laughter to Auli's lips.\n\nAye, he was born!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The following day, Auli-Ambar spoke privately with the Head Librarian.\n\n<No,> Sazutharr demurred with a fiery snort. With ever-increasing gravitas shading his tones, he expounded, <This is a level of access not lightly granted. Curb your impatience. Whilst I understand the noble Elder's wishes, we must proceed with due wisdom, for you are a fledgling in the ways of magic. To the initiated, these are perilous fires.>\n\nWisdom apparently entailed being barricaded inside Sazutharr's private study for a four-hour harangue on the dangers of Dragon lore, many of which Auli had not the faintest notion. There were branches of magic that ranged from immoral to hazardous to outright lethal, forbidden scientific endeavour in a dizzyingly wide variety of subjects, lore related to poisons, medicines and magic-assisted assassination, and even lore related to the warding and protection of books and scrolls themselves!\n\n<Books can literally kill?> Auli gasped.\n\n<'The word hath greater power than any Dragon's fire,'> Sazutharr quoted sagely. With ever-deepening irony, he continued, <Books or scrolls can kill in a variety of ways limited only by the creativity of the draconic imagination, which as you well know, is not at all encouraged by lore and culture, nor is it violently unsubtle nor monstrously cunning by any reckoning of paw. To run through a few common examples, there are poison-impregnated inks and leathers, incantations that when read will slay, incapacitate or injure the unwary reader; there is formal and informal warding of contents; there exist locking spells and magical locks which constitute an entire field of study in their own right, and insidious spells that very slowly seep up through nuances written into the text which might only be known to the author. Are you following me so far?>\n\n<With deadly intent,> she joked.\n\nShe heard his brows draw down; his belly fires struck a basso note of profound portent. <AULI-AMBAR!>\n\n<Noble Dragon.> She hung her head.\n\nThis was the first time she had entered his study, a hallowed ground reserved for the Under-Librarians and the Head Librarian only. Auli wished she could have seen half of the wonders it purportedly held, but she had to be content with the dim glow of his desk lamp, the enticing smells of musty lore, book leather and mouldering scrolleaf, and then the distinctive scent of the old Dragon himself, just as fusty and ancient as his beloved books.\n\nAfter a long, heated silence, Sazutharr ground out, <Good. This is no joking matter for any creature under the suns, nor is this the habitual province of Human girls of but thirteen summers! Yet, I understand the need and you have demonstrated maturity and capability beyond your years, not least in conceptualising the remodelling programme of these Halls which is projected to last five years!>\n\n<Five?> Auli echoed, amazed.\n\n<Five years, and there are very many Dragons discomfited by your machinations, and a greater number impressed and gratified by the symmetry, efficacy and completeness of the vision.>\n\nHe paused significantly. Whatever could the old Dragon mean? Five years, too, she had lived at the Halls of the Dragons. She was educated in many aspects of Dragon lore and library work, a proficient harpist, and even a designer of interior spaces. Auli had learned to see with her hands and minimally with her eyes \u2013 still, just a frustratingly slight glow that teased her darkness, but she imagined it was growing better. She'd be able to see by her seventh decade of life, no doubt. Just in time to be able to find her cane for her arthritic old knees.\n\nOh, as dense as Dragon hide, Auli! That hint of challenge, particularly in his stressors upon the words 'completeness' and 'symmetry'. Naturally, with draconic indirectness, the Librarian was hinting at those corridor-and cavern-sized gaps in her memorised layouts.\n\nVindicated! Arkurion could just stuff that up his left nostril.\n\nMentally paw slapping smug-Auli over the Moons, she said, <Noble Sazutharr, during my investigations underpinning that project, it did strike me that there appears to be a suspiciously unused central space between the Historical Reference section and the Additional Archives caverns numbered fifteen-two, fifteen-four and nineteen-one. Does the Library delve any deeper than four levels, perchance? Below that area, in particular?>\n\n<Good,> he purred monstrously. <Master what I will teach you over this forthcoming season, and you shall have the opportunity to find out.>\n\nAuli opened her mouth.\n\n<Be silent, little flame. I knew you would have worked it out.>\n\nGi'ishior's giant carp were said to sieve the water for delectables with idiotically agape jaws. This girl snapped hers shut with an audible and painful click.\n\n<Hear me clearly.> He talon tapped her shoulder by way of emphasis, which was rather like being struck by a hammer. <I'll not tolerate any 'accidental' wanderings in my Library. I shall be, if I might put it this way, ferociously unimpressed. And you do not ever want to encounter a Dragon Librarian who is unimpressed.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "The season Sazutharr had promised never did seem to come to fruition. A virulent sickness arrived in the Halls that laid many Dragons and Apprentices low, including the venerable Librarian, and there were many inexplicable attacks upon Dragons \u2013 by rogue Dragons or mixed Human-Dragon mercenary forces \u2013 that led to Sapphurion having to engage in battle at Archion, Sylakia, Yaya Loop, beyond Jeradia and up North toward Jendor, Ferial and Yorbik, with depleted and oftentimes overstretched forces. He returned battered but victorious, and Auli-Ambar found her duties revolving more around cleaning infirmaries and bandaging Dragons than dusting \u2026 well, anything at all.\n\nWhen even Inxulia flew out to battle, Auli was drafted in as a part-time teacher of hatchlings and Human children. Dragons did not, as a rule, ask for volunteers. Inxulia simply congratulated her on her new role.\n\nHer brief was to keep her fellow youngsters occupied for several hours a day, recounting stories, singing the lore ballads and covering topics as diverse as Library use, reading different scripts, herb and spice usages, medical care, and composing praise songs of the mighty deeds of Dragons. Her first lessons were an unmitigated disaster. Auli was a sweating heap of nerves; the hatchlings and fledglings played many pranks on a blind girl, including slipping a rancid fish down her tunic top and using different voices or switching positions in an attempt to confuse her. She stuck at it for a month before Captain Ra'aba, of all people, reported the simmering chaos to Razzior the Orange, who spoke to Haaja the Yellow Dragoness, who decided this was the moment to exercise her newfound authority as the latest addition to Sapphurion's Council of Dragon Elders.\n\nHaaja's idea of a tongue lashing involved fireballs, fisticuffs, wing pulling and at least one broken limb of a fledgling who did not instantly offer her an acceptable measure of respect \u2013 all this delivered to the tune of thundering fulminations that cracked the nursery ceiling and necessitated hasty repair work. She deafened Auli for an entire week \u2013 just in time for her latest handharp exam. Thankfully, the Music Master Ga'affur was also sick, but it was later discovered he had eloped with an Apprentice Dragon Nurse and was never seen on Gi'ishior again.\n\n\"Ooh, how romantic,\" sighed Zimtyna.\n\n\"You'll think nothing of the sort, young lady!\" snapped her father.\n\n\"But, Dad \u2013\"\n\nMaster Chamzu yelled, \"Romantic? I will hunt you down like a feral rajal! Elope? I will have Dragons scouring the skies for a thousand leagues about for sight of your sorry hide! Run away? I will chain you in this roost and force you to eat nothing but dry mohili bread crusts and drink Dragons' bath water for a month, so help me!\"\n\n\"Why Dad, I'm glad you care,\" snickered Zimtyna. Apparently she was not alarmed by her father's bombastic bombardment. \"Auli \u2013\"\n\n\"You will not give impressionable youngsters any ideas!\"\n\n\"Hardly impressionable. Apparently, she's incorruptible \u2013 all the Dragons say so.\" Auli yelped as a boot connected with her shin beneath the dinner table. \"Besides, never mind boys, our Auli-Ambar's turning the heads even of Dragons nowadays! I say, when's that Mercury Blue prowler due in \u2013\"\n\n\"Zimtyna!\"\n\nThe Master's fist slammed the table so hard, Auli's plate of cheese-stuffed purple fire peppers dropped into her lap. Saffron bean pods splattered onto her toes, along with cool prekki-fruit juice. She froze in remembered terror. Mi'elgan used to do just that.\n\n\"Dad \u2013 it was a joke \u2026\"\n\nChamzu's teeth made a nasty grinding sound. \"The kind of joke that earns one a swift flight from a great height! Zimtyna, please \u2013 try to understand the situation. It's delicate. We must not give the traditionalists and draconihilists a talon-hold anywhere, or they will seize it and make Sapphurion's life more of a misery than it already is. Auli, you prick up those pointy Fra'aniorian ears as well. You've earned a privileged position with the Dragonkind, although how one tallies that with your tipping their entire precious volcano on its ear, the Great Onyx alone can fathom! You must not, under any circumstances, act in such a way as to jeopardise that privilege.\"\n\nHe did not name Arkurion, but Auli-Ambar heard the implied rebuke clearly enough. Hanging her head, she ducked beneath the table to try to help clear up.\n\nThe following morning, she slipped into Master Chamzu's roost to recover her hairbrush, which she had forgotten in the bathroom. Zimtyna was bathing, but that was no problem.\n\n\"Islands' greetings, Zimba!\" she called over the sound of splashing water.\n\nScreech. Splash! Auli wobbled on the slick tiles, grabbed for something that crashed to the floor, and as she regained her balance, heard, \"Do I know you? Oh, you're blind. Are you lost, girl?\"\n\n\"Zimtyna, it's me.\"\n\n\"Well, that helps,\" came a wet-sounding sniff. She pictured her friend standing hands on hips, but then the older girl said, \"It would help if I knew who on the Isles you might be, however. Do I \u2026 you do look familiar, come to think of it. Do I know you?\"\n\nAuli's heart crashed into pieces on the floor, along with whatever she had smashed. Roaring rajals! Zimtyna's bafflement seemed genuine. The forgetting magic had struck, and this time, it was severe.\n\nShe whispered, \"I live behind the next door down the hall on the right, exactly where you put me five years ago. I'm Auli-Ambar. Blind girl. I'm a Roost Keeper \u2026 and I had dinner with you last night, don't you remember \u2026 anything? I dropped my plate on the floor when your father pounded the table with his fists.\"\n\n\"Oh, windroc spit,\" said her friend. \"That certainly rings the Dragon's gong. You live \u2026 oh no. It's impossible \u2013 I'm so sorry! Auli \u2013 can I call you Auli? Or do you prefer your full name, Auli-Ambar?\"\n\nShe fled, sobbing.\n\nHer morning showed no hint of improvement. Sazutharr, still laid abed in the infirmary and weak but lucid, clearly had even less of a clue who she was than Zimtyna had managed. The new Human guards on the level five entrances to the Dragon roosts needed to be convinced as to her identity. Sapphurion and Qualiana snarled when she entered their roost, but Grandion thought she was there to play, and seemed to accept her immediately. Auli could not fathom it. She had to cling to the truth that she was not just some passing notion in these Human and draconic minds. However, Inxulia the Grey did step into her teaching session to compliment the brand new apprentice on her vocalisation skills as she imitated a Dragonship's rigging creaking, various Dragon voices and the sounds of battle.\n\nIt was as if they had never met.\n\nAye, an ill wind blew through the Halls of the Dragons this day. If Auli-Ambar was to be regarded as anyone's right paw, she was the paw sinister, made powerful by her anonymity yet conversely, rendered powerless too.\n\nLeaping Lore!\n\n<There is a Human youngling called Auli-Ambar, note her name well. In all my nineteen decades in professional academia, I have never encountered one who possesses such an incendiary abundance of gifts in all manner of scholarly endeavour. The key to her character is her unparalleled love for lore. Below, I attempt to document a growing list of her abilities.>\n\n<Yet you will find your mind sliding off of her, and becoming forgetful in the most undraconic ways regarding her very existence. Although it has never been proven, I believe that the young woman possesses a form of magic as unprecedented as that of her voice. Most importantly, I set a ward of reminding on my roost's exit to daily recall Auli's presence and strategic attributes to mind. Do the same, and her integrity and boundless endeavour will doubtless inflame your third heart, as it has mine.>\n\n<Dragons never forget. Yet of her, all do. Auli is a mystery most beguiling, which I entrust to your capable paw. May your flame burn brighter than mine to divine the essence of her secrets. Highest recommendation.>\n\nHead Librarian Sazutharr, <Instructions to my Successor: Key Personnel>\n\nThief. Nasty, icky, horrid little thief. Auli-Ambar fingered the clutch of training scrolls she had filched from Sazutharr's private study with no little guilt and paranoia. He had expressly forbidden her from continuing this line of study without his input. The mystery of her disappearance from minds and memories daily grew worse. She may as well take to wearing a name plaque strung around her scrawny, useless neck:\n\nAULI-AMBAR. HERE TODAY,\n\nFORGOTTEN TOMORROW.\n\nOr better still:\n\nIF MISLAID IN YOUR MEMORY,\n\nRESET TO ZERO. RESTART FRIENDSHIP.\n\nInsane. The more time she spent with people trying to help them remember her, the more absentminded they seemed to become! This week alone, Master Chamzu had three times discovered himself breaking his fast with someone he mistook for a perfect stranger. It might have been funny if it had not been so dratted inconvenient. Perhaps she should not be so mean-spirited as to laugh at the Master half-choking on his ripe tinker banana.\n\nEarlier this morning she had dictated a brief scroll to Chamzu and left it on the breakfast table. He snorted in annoyance and pushed it back past the flaming pepper gruel to touch her outstretched fingertips. \"I don't need that, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\n\"What's my family name, Master?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026\"\n\nIn a rush of breath, she inquired, \"Does this make me the most forgettable girl in history?\"\n\n\"I bet two brass drals to Yulgaz's personal hoard of Dragon gold, Arkurion will remember you at first sight.\"\n\nAuli crooked an eyebrow at him before she remembered she was wearing bandages this morning. Qualiana had been working on the musculature, trying to develop the ability to open and shut her eyelids at will. Arkurion was late in arriving from Tanstoy on his scheduled trip, and while she outwardly tried for calm, inwardly she felt as if she had swallowed a nest of crimson fire ants. She wished she knew what crimson was. But the description was apt. The Mercury Blue was one of those who claimed he would never forget her.\n\nSuddenly, she inclined her head. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"What was what?\" inquired Chamzu, apparently reading her gesture.\n\n<Sigh.> \"Nothing, apparently.\"\n\nHe said, \"In other news, I received a briefing scroll this week noting that Ianthine the Draco-Mystic was spotted causing trouble in the Kingdom of Kaolili several months back. Everyone was wondering where she had disappeared to, especially after roundly insulting every one of the Council of Dragon Elders together with their respective lineages. That Maroon Dragoness certainly has a way of riling \u2013\"\n\n\"That!\"\n\n\"Pipe down, squeaky monster,\" said Zimtyna, as usual, emerging from her bedchamber sounding as if a year-long hibernation had passed peaceably. \"That's the fledgling Garatoxx the Blue practising his lightning attacks on \u2013 Fra'anior's scraggly beard! You saw \u2013 how \u2013 what? Auli?\"\n\nThat was how she knew her eyes had changed. Previously, Auli had only been able to see direct suns-light. Now, she had seen the flicker of light which must have been created by his lightning strike. She leaped to her feet excitedly, sending her chair crashing to the floor. Then, Auli remembered how heavily her eyes were bandaged. It was impossible.\n\nYet, something was changing.\n\nBack in the present, she rubbed her eyes thoughtfully. An itch? An awareness? That was why she held a handful of training scrolls. They were meant to be simple to solve. Non-lethal traps. Maybe sticky spider threads or a scroll that heckled the student with increasingly inappropriate insults until they solved the problem. The issue was that a blind person could not distinguish the level of challenge by colour-coding, which the Librarian had given away during his briefing.\n\n<No dabbling without competent supervision, Auli-Ambar,> he had sniffed.\n\nDraconic inhalations or expressive snorts and growls had a way of regularly changing her hairstyle. She wished they would not do that. Zimtyna said she brushed her hair obsessively, but who could stand knots in their hair? Ugh! Maybe she was a little neurotic.\n\nMaybe a lot!\n\nHa. Having smuggled the scrolls into her own little chambers, Auli was not about to let some geriatric Dragon's fussing stop her. She had been studying this for weeks before he had been laid low. Besides, what could possibly go \u2026 ah, best not to complete that thought. Picking a scroll at random, Auli set to work.\n\nThree minutes later \u2026 *pssssshhhtt!*\n\nAuli-Ambar screeched like an angry parakeet, rolled off her light ralti wool covers and landed in a heap on her neat, circular carpet which apparently sported a fetching design that was completely lost on a blind person. She scrabbled at her damp face. Ink. Only ink. Then, she smelled the fluid and spat, \"Roaring rajals!\"\n\nIndelible ink."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "People already thought she was as peculiar as the proverbial purple-spotted rajal, so to see Auli wandering about the Halls wearing a full head covering was perhaps only slightly more eccentric than usual. The ink would not scrub off. Period. She had sandpapered off a reasonable amount of skin in the attempt, but her fingertips informed her that her nose was still splotched with whatever lovely colour that stupid scroll had squirted all over her stupid face.\n\nNow she could be thankful for all her bandages!\n\nAuli did have a stubborn streak as thick as an Island's own foundations. It went right along with her compulsive cleanliness and phobic behaviours, she supposed. Like buffing every speck of dirt off every surface of every book and scroll she read. Washing her hands thirty times a day because dirt had a way of sneaking in beneath her fingernails. Arranging the purloined scrolls upon her compact desk to within a one thirty-second inch's exactitude for oh, perhaps the fiftieth time. Maybe more. And then popping them back in the drawer for safety.\n\nThree days later, she could not stand it anymore, and attempted another scroll. She singed her fingers. \"Ouch! Rotten clod of Dragon droppings!\" Auli hurled the offending scroll across her bedchamber where it singularly failed to make a satisfying crash, or any sort of respectable noise whatsoever. After a sulky spot of finger-cooling in the laver in her bathroom, she considered her options. Sensible? Bah. That was for wimpy scrollworms who would not have known a Dragon battle if one sneaked up and bit them in the backside; simpering maidens straight out of a bad ballad who turned into Noxian fruit jelly at the first sign of thunder, be it natural or draconic.\n\nThe problem was that Dragon portal magic \u2013 the general term for this field of study \u2013 was turning out to be as fiendishly complex as their fiery little reptilian brains. Auli wanted to imagine she was as intelligent as any Dragon. Intelligence and guile, however, were Dragons of different colours. Nor was she convinced on the brainpower front. She was having zero success singing her way into protected scrolls, as her inky face sadly proclaimed.\n\nSucking on her fingers, Auli turned the scroll over again to read the inscription:\n\n<I netted me a little rock dove,>\n\n<Coo, my student, the colours of love.>\n\nCoo? She knew she was missing something, but the smooth lettering gave little away. If she was supposed to read in colours, then she was flying off the Isle without a Dragonship. No chance unless she developed her magic a great deal \u2013 what? the scroll vibrated in her grip. Great leaping Islands, was that a warning? Auli spluttered something incoherent. Another vibration! She sang desperately, but the scroll seemed to grow infuriated and buzzed violently, sticking to her shaking hands.\n\n*Keerrrr-WHAP!*\n\n\"Ten thousand stinking windroc eggs!\" she grunted.\n\nAs best she could tell, Auli-Ambar was nicely tangled up in a net and dangling from her ceiling. Her voice sounded \u2026 dead. Muffled. Oh dear. This was not proceeding well.\n\nOver the course of the next three hours, Auli tried everything. She was not too proud to chew on the net's fibres, but those shocked her tongue with increasingly unbearable zaps of electricity. Add one scalded tongue to her collection of injuries. Singing only seemed to resound around her ears and had no apparent effect on the trap. Due to a sad lack of talons, she could not simply slice her way out, nor did she even have use of the dagger-sharp talons of one of her miniatures. They were right there on the shelf. Those few feet might as well have been a thousand leagues.\n\nRight \u2026 and the ridiculously tough netting resisted all attempts to untie anything, although she worked until her poor, abused fingertips bled. Maybe these threads were designed to stop young Dragons. She tried swinging and reaching, but her arms were not long enough. How was she even hanging off the ceiling? A magical grapnel? A magical, rock-biting Dragon's paw? She had no idea under the suns.\n\nAuli swallowed past what felt like a lump of iron ore in her throat. \"Help? Help me!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "The issue with being forgotten was that people did literally forget. Auli screamed herself hoarse. She had an embarrassing fit of panic that left rope burns all over her body. She wished desperately for food or water, and soon, rather more urgently, for use of a toilet. She slept twice, and by the third day, dreamed that she was hearing a workman hammering down her door. In the dream he turned into Ra'aba and reached for her throat with fiery orange claws. She tried to scream, but his power cut off any sound she could possibly make, and he would \u2026 she awoke choking on bile.\n\n\"She's in there. Auli!\" She knew that voice. Female. Sweet. Who could it \u2013\n\n<AULI-AMBAR!> Her solid jalkwood door protested a Dragon's anxious growl. Arkurion said, \"Utter silence. Are you definitely \u2013\"\n\n\"Break the door down, Dragon!\" Master Ga'athar roared.\n\n*KABLAM!*\n\nThe woman chuckled, \"Alright. And destroy the doorframe too. Auli! There she \u2013 whaaaaat?\"\n\n\"Stand back, my love! But a single stroke of my trusty sword shalt this peril-beset young maiden succour!\"\n\nOh, it was Master Ga'athar and Mistress Yualiana! What were they doing here? The Master seemed to have been infected by one too many piratical ballads, for the net jerked violently under an unseen attack, and then she fell into a Dragon's paw with people exclaiming all around her.\n\nGroaning, Auli twisted her way free of the ropes. \"Toilet \u2026\"\n\n\"What's she saying?\" Arkurion worried from the hallway. The young Dragon could not entirely fit inside her chambers, but he sounded as if he had been trying, or at least had squeezed a shoulder through the doorway in order to catch her with his outstretched paw. \"Is she dying? Who trapped her here?\"\n\n\"Toilet \u2026 please!\"\n\nMistress Yualiana slipped a shoulder beneath Auli's left arm and practically carried her around the end of her bed. Auli groaned at the cramping and uncramping of abused muscles. Yualiana said, \"Shouldn't wonder you can't walk, petal. How long have you been dangling?\"\n\n\"Two nights.\"\n\nAuli was supremely grateful for a woman's fingers to untie the lacings of her leggings, and for a foot that evidently kicked the door shut behind them. She was also touched that Ga'athar and Yualiana seemed to remember her. They had exchanged a few scrolls over the years since she remembered leaving Ya'arriol Island, and she understood that the Master had become influential in Island politics \u2013 at least, conversations of Master Chamzu's that she had overheard suggested so. Now, she wondered what brought them hence, and her heart tripped along like a playful kitten at the realisation that once more, Arkurion had apparently defeated her memory-stealing power.\n\nGa'athar called, \"When you've pummelled the wretched girl into shape, Yualiana, will you join us next door for breakfast? Chamzu's famous table is calling straight to my stomach.\"\n\n\"Ah, my bearded pirate groweth stout about the mid-regions,\" Yualiana called back playfully.\n\n\"As does mine fetching wife!\"\n\n\"Pummelled?\" asked Auli.\n\nWhen Yualiana was done restoring the blood flow to her limbs and Auli had finished yelling at the pain or at the pregnant Mistress, who had surprisingly strong hands and the knowledge to put them to work, she walked to the breakfast table upon legs that wobbled like wet scrolleaf.\n\nMaster Ga'athar opened fire by inquiring, \"You were left to work on training scrolls on your own, Auli-Ambar?\"\n\nMumble-mumble, she replied around a mouthful of still-warm sweetbread. Oh, heavens raining Dragon gold! Food had never tasted so scrumptious.\n\n\"Don't stuff your face like a starving hound,\" Ga'athar snorted, but then he clearly did a double-take before blurting out, \"Holy Ha'athior, they've fixed your mouth? Oh, Auli, that's wonderful! Look, Yualiana! Perfect upper lip. But the jaw \u2026\"\n\nArkurion put in, \"We rebuilt most of the upper jaw and oral cavity in a series of planned surgeries, Master Ga'athar, but the issue of the lower jaw has thus far defeated our efforts. Several issues persist. One, an acceptable and long-lasting bone substitute, and two, a means of attaching ligaments, muscles and teeth to the appropriate locations without doing major damage. Or having teeth that turn black and fall out. Failure would mean she'd be sipping liquids for the rest of her life.\"\n\nSuddenly, Auli was not so very hungry after all. Did she chew strangely? Did they stare at the jerky motion of her jaw?\n\n\"Yet, the progress is remarkable,\" Yualiana interjected quietly. \"There's hardly a trace of scarring and her nose also looks perfectly natural. I understand that there's been progress on your eyes as well, Auli? May I see?\"\n\n\"At the breakfast table, my dearest heart?\" Master Ga'athar inquired, and then apologised. He sounded so embarrassed Auli wondered what had passed between husband and wife.\n\nAfter the obligatory stare-and-comment show, Auli was relieved when the conversation turned to other matters. Masters Chamzu and Ga'athar were old friends, and there was jollity and laughter around the well-stocked table, along with an infant's wailing \u2013 their fifth child, which made four in the five years since their marriage and a further pair of 'sweetbreads in the oven', the Master exclaimed proudly \u2013 and then she heard the serious voice of young Master Ja'al, a three year-old toddler who arrived with their nurse apparently in his tow, judging by her longsuffering air. Auli shook his pudgy hand gravely. And Master Hua'gon, four years of age. And Miss Shayilia, also four years old.\n\nQuite the busy family!\n\nWhen she had eaten to the point of bursting, Master Chamzu requested a story for the children from his 'budding young loremaster,' and so Auli of burning cheeks told them the traditional tale of a rajal kitten called Graxur, who wanted to be a Dragon. Auli embellished the basic tale by adding humorous adventures along the way, until even the adults were chuckling at the rajal's antics as he petitioned the King of Fra'anior for wings to call his own, and how he tried to crawl inside a Dragon's eggshell so that he could be accidentally raised by a Dragoness. Soon she growled as viciously as a rajal \u2013 startling Ja'al so much that he promptly burst into tears and Yualiana had to intervene \u2013 and then she supplied the bubbling song of quadruple overlapping rainbows as the rajal pounced aloft, so full of joy and yearning that the Great Onyx at last granted his wish and drew him into the mighty heights above the Islands.\n\n\"And there he plays still,\" Auli finished. \"If ever you hear thunder prowling about the Isles but nary a cloud shades the skies, then you will know that Graxur is abroad, running over suns-beams and pawing at the pollen on the breezes. And may the courage of your hearts grow from a kitten's yearnings to the true-fires power of a Dragon's heart.\"\n\n\"Bravo!\" cried her audience, slapping their knees heartily.\n\nArkurion voiced a bugling note of approval. \"That was storytelling with true heart, Auli!\"\n\nYualiana elbowed her slyly. \"Ooh, would you look at this blush! May I warm my hands? Mmm, pass me sweetbread for toasting, Ga'athar.\"\n\n\"Mistress!\" she protested, but it was no use of course.\n\nAfter Auli had her wings tugged a few more times for her failure with the training scrolls, Ga'athar pressed a scroll of his own into her fingers. He said, \"Master Jo'el sent this with his compliments. I trust you'll have less trouble with his message than with noble Sazutharr's capers. He does love playing pranks on his apprentices \u2013 did you know that, Auli?\"\n\n\"Well, I never \u2026\"\n\nHer disbelief triggered a hearty roar of laughter. \"Believe it now?\"\n\nShe turned the scroll over in her hands, wondering what the message portended. She had never forgotten the experience of singing with dragonets around that monastery lake.\n\nWhen she took her leave, however, Arkurion walked with her to her door. He said, \"I can't imagine why the Head Librarian left you alone with those scrolls, Auli! Several are white-banded, signifying lethal consequences.\" She coughed uncomfortably. \"Oh! Your response and your heartbeat assure me of the negative \u2013 whatever were you thinking?\"\n\nThe Dragon waited.\n\n\"Or were you not thinking? Desperate? Confused? Suicidal?\"\n\nEventually, Auli-Ambar whispered, \"I was hoping to learn why I am so easily forgotten. Why some friends forget me from one day to the next, whilst others do not. You \u2013 you don't forget. I don't understand, Arkurion, and I'm so afraid \u2026\"\n\nThe tenderness of his fires staggered her as he purred, \"Afraid? Of what?\"\n\n\"Afraid of fading into nothingness,\" she admitted at length. \"Of never having any real friends. Of never being able to draw close enough to love another, because \u2026 intimacy seems to exacerbate the \u2026 problem. I'm cursed, Arkurion. Azziala was right. So was Ianthine \u2013 she called it an inhuman taint! Is there any greater curse in this life than loneliness? Is there?\"\n\nPerhaps he checked the corridor for onlookers, but in a moment the Dragon's paw clasped her shoulders gently and he said, \"I am lonely, but not like this. Our cooperation and co-working accords me much pleasure. I can hardly imagine how you must feel. Master Chamzu tells me he forgets you daily. This is a terrible misfortune, Auli-Ambar, and a burden I wish with all my hearts I could lift from your soul. I shall meditate upon a solution.\"\n\n\"Now, chin up,\" he said, touching her throat with the tilted edge of a talon, to ensure there was no chance of cutting her skin. \"Two things. One, I promise to speak to Sazutharr about allowing you access to the sections of perilous and forbidden lore, or at least, request that he allow me to train you myself. Secondly, I brought a scroll of my own for you.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" He drew a deep breath, releasing her from his grasp. \"The celebrated Dragonharpist Zanthrillior accompanied us on this journey, and he is indeed the primary reason we were delayed, because he wished to investigate ancient Pygmy musical forms in the Crescent Islands. Did you know he cracked the eggshell here at Gi'ishior? Anyhow, he plans to give a special concert next week on the ancient Dragonharp in the Concert Cavern, and so I wished to request that you consider \u2026 ah, this. Must go. I'm late for a meeting on Ancient Southern lore research.\"\n\nOn that unexpectedly gruff note, the Dragon rushed off!\n\nAuli fingered his scroll message pensively. What was this? First the warrior monk and now the Dragon? Most peculiar.\n\nTruth be told, she was rather more wary of unfurling any scroll after her recent experiences. She would never have suspected Sazutharr of being a prankster, but being wrapped in a net suspended from a grapnel fired at the ceiling of her chamber was admittedly a fairly Dragonesque clue. One she had fallen for like the greenest and most gullible of maidens that had ever fainted her way through a sappy ballad.\n\nUgh!\n\nVery well. First, Arkurion.\n\nHis scroll came clasped in a seal-circlet of the finest artistry, its clawed talons grasping the scroll with perfect aplomb and unbreakable zest, unless one spoke a code word or phrase. Her fingers crept from the curved metal seal to the outer address, which said, <Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya of Gi'ishior, Assistant Lore Specialist.> She dropped the scroll as if burned, and then had to crawl beneath her basket weave bed in utter indignity to retrieve it. She had a title? How did he know? Why had she not been told?\n\nHa. Since she was blind, she would ruddy well read underneath the bed, in darkness. Why not?\n\nFiery yet furtive matched the mood of her heart.\n\nAt least the answer to opening this type of scroll was formally recognised. Aloud in Dragonish, she said, <Open thee for Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya.> The claws clicked and hinged apart, allowing the cool vellum to fall into her hand. She touched the text. Ink, scripted in a gorgeous, elegant draconic hand unlike any other she had ever read. Her hands roamed sinuous characters and curlicue nuance markers. Great leaping Islands, this was High Dragonish, the most formal scholarly language used by Dragon poets and literary artists!\n\nSteadily, she puzzled out the text, which read:\n\n<It is with the fiery honour of everlasting Fra'anior Himself that I, Arkurion the Mercury Blue, Roving Researcher of Tanstoy Dragon Roost \u2013>\n\nHmm. Rather raffish, his title. Roving Researcher.\n\n<\u2013 do cordially and in accordance with the custom and tradition of the Dragonkind, enshrined in lore since the epoch in which the Onyx Paw didst tread our homely Isles, request the esteemed company of the honourable Miss Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, ward of Master Chamzu, Chief Scrollkeeper of Gi'ishior, to attend with me a most worthy concert to be presented by the distinguished instrumentalist, composer and artist, the matchless Zanthrillior; the hour being the ninth after noon upon this forthcoming seventh day of the Harvest Month; the place being the main Concert Cavern of Gi'ishior's Halls of the Dragons; the purpose being the mutual, congenial enjoyment of unarguably the finest musicianship North of the Rift.>\n\n<I await your gracious response.>\n\nThere was a representation or signature of his name and title beneath the invitation in a type of ink she had never encountered before. She brushed it wonderingly with her hands. Fireflower and tanniss blossom scents rose to her nostrils as if freed by that touch, and the ink was slightly crenelated \u2013 she puzzled over its texture for a long while before concluding that it must be ink infused with chips or beads of a soft metal such as gold.\n\nAuli exhaled a breath she had not known she was holding. Wow. Her very first invitation to walk out, as they said upon the Isles, and it came from a boy Dragon. Private, precious and probably as explosive as a Yellow Dragon's lava-infused fireball. Quickly, she replaced the scroll in its claws and wriggled up toward the top of the bed, whereupon she tucked the whole piece toward the back of the lowest of the three drawers by her bedside. She would attend, of course. Zimtyna would know what she should wear. Something fancy, no doubt. She had never attended a concert before!\n\nNow, she reached for the second scroll. Hopefully it was something quite mundane, although she could not imagine why Master Jo'el would wish to write to her. There were no clasps or seals, so Auli-Ambar unfurled the piece and \u2026 found nothing.\n\n\"Nothing?\"\n\nShe puzzled at it for a moment, thinking that this was a very peculiar joke to play on a blind girl. The type of jest that did not suit the character of an austere monk. Her immediate resentment mellowed. Aye, the entire scroll was blank on both sides, but she did sense it might yet serve to communicate something. It smelled \u2026 well, for want of a better word, tricky. Infused with potential.\n\nShe wriggled out from beneath the bedframe, fanning her cheeks with the short segment of scrolleaf. Silly girl, growing all hot and bothered over a scroll from a Dragon! Frivolous nonsense, quite unsuitable for an Assistant Lore Specialist.\n\nLaying the scroll on her bedcovers, and flattening the palms of her hands upon the blank vellum, she said, <Reveal thyself to me.> Nothing. Again, she commanded, <Unfurl thy secrets!> Her hands touched only blankness. Auli bit her lip. Very well, she knew one more trick. Raising her voice, she sang, <All that is thine, be mine; all that is hidden, by mine will be bidden \u2013 be revealed!>\n\nSoft laughter seemed to rise around her like ethereal smoke.\n\nAuli screamed, but her voice drowned in a sea of sable. Then she felt a sense of moment, of pitching forward on to the scroll upon her bed, but she did not strike anything. Instead, she fell and fell and fell for an everlasting time, until she knew she was dreaming.\n\nBillows of gushing black fire snatched her away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "A girl walked amongst flowers. Cerulean flowers. Endless fields of sky-become-petals stretched before her and around her, gently mounded to every horizon, their colour so vibrant and alive, her toes itched to dance.\n\nA girl looked, and saw many widely spaced thin trees with perfectly white bark and tiny, serrulated green leaves standing amongst the myriad blossoms, and knew that she dreamed. How else could she see? The picture was stunning. Every aspect of her vision displayed edges, definition, texture and colour. The skies were the deep indigo of a person's soul. The colours were so flamboyant, she longed to rake her fingers through the fields as if the blossoms were a maiden's hair flowing across the low hills.\n\nA girl wanted to weep for the beauty of seeing, but realisation pierced her emotions. She knew that what she beheld must originate from outside of her, for it was too beautiful. Too perfect. Too unimaginably detailed to even contemplate.\n\nFaintly, she pleaded with her dream, <Don't do this to me, please. Please \u2026>\n\n<I grieve for thy pain,> said the dream, and even its voice was richer and far profounder than any she had ever heard before, surpassing her wildest conceptions of what language might even begin to communicate. It was a heady bouquet of linguistic aromas, so overwhelming it threatened her very sanity. At once, velvety darkness surrounded her. Soothing. The voice whispered, <This was to be mine gift to thee, little hatchling, for I have waited long years of thine lifetime for thee to heed mine summons, but thou hast naively eluded and disregarded all mine endeavours to reach thee \u2013 yet not of thine own will, be assured \u2013 until I, even I, was forced to undertake this subterfuge in order to break through the incredibly powerful protections that hide thee from mine far-reaching cognizance.>\n\nAuli bowed her head to that darkness. Its forms of Dragonish were incredibly archaic, but she must try her best to respond in kind. She said, <Art I not a blind creature, useless and above all, forgotten?>\n\n<Paradoxical thou art,> said her dream. <How dost thou wish, then, to behold me?>\n\n<Only in that darkness which is real to me.>\n\n<Very well.>\n\nWhen the darkness lingered without speaking further, she advanced fearfully, <Art thou product of mine dreams? Thou art not. Too much of life seethes within thee. What dost thou wish to wrest of mine existence, o spirit who \u2013> she hesitated before her voice dropped to a terrified zephyr \u2013 <who stealeth into mine very thoughts?>\n\n<Nay, 'tis not so.>\n\n<What \u2026 uh, 'tis it \u2026 in that case?>\n\nThe disembodied voice, miraculously authoritative and belonging to a being that she was beginning to realise was vaster, older and wiser than anything in her experience, said, <I have need of one who will record mine stories and Dragon lore in a secondary location, for the first shall become endangered. And many of these tales shalt be new, never before recorded by Human hand nor by draconic paw. Pray, reveal thy given name to mine cognizance? For thy magic has long concealed thy inner nature.>\n\n<O Great One, I am called Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya.>\n\n<Then know that I need thee, Auli-Ambar, to function as mine right paw. To be the quiet voice of mine fires to the Island-World.>\n\nShe sucked in a huge breath. <Thou art Dragonkind?>\n\n<Shouldst thou have need of inquiry?>\n\nThe truth burned in her soul. Perhaps it always had and she had simply not recognised it, but despite the mind-blowing sumptuousness of his presence, she knew this Dragon stood for goodness; for true-fires. His presence burned with purity, and his compassionate fires bent upon her in ways she belatedly recognised were the diametric opposite of Razzior the Orange's fires. There was beauty in his darkness. Form and order and love and truth and fire and \u2026 vertigo shattered the flow of her thoughts.\n\nWow, wow \u2026 wow!\n\nMaking obeisance in her mind, Auli-Ambar quavered, <Nay. Thou art Amaryllion Fireborn, art thou not? How might I serve thee, Great One? I cannot easily write. I am but a poor vessel \u2013>\n\n<Thou art mine vessel,> he said warmly. <I choose thee, Auli-Ambar. Come, tarry awhile upon mine knee \u2013> he chuckled massively, yet with a gentle humour that reminded her of none other than Arkurion, to her rising alarm \u2013 <as it were, and let me spin thee spirited ballads and audacious sagas of yore. And then thou shalt repeat them to the younglings in thy care, and they to their shell-parents, and their shell-parents shall trumpet this lore across the Isles! Canst thou not remember? Do they not whisper 'loremaster' behind thine tiny back? Canst thou truly not write in ink-impregnated sand?>\n\nShe nodded, sensing faintness rushing upon her. <I am able.>\n\nThe Island-World spun. Dark-fires rose from the roots of her soul, wild and ardent, terrifying and true. Her mind wavered.\n\nHe said, <Be at peace and I shall teach thee, and thou shalt grow in grace and beauty and in much knowledge \u2026 little hatchling \u2026 o Dragonsong over mine Isles \u2026 Auli?>\n\n<Mine ordeal, o Great Flame \u2026 shattered \u2026>\n\n<Auli! Auli \u2026>\n\nDarkness enfolded her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Musical Magic",
                "text": "\u2002Mighty was he; in the aftermath of first meeting Amaryllion Fireborn, my soul knew a sense of shattering and reformation, of wondrous upliftment toward a glorious grasp of my world I had never imagined. Legends lived! The Ancient Dragons were neither dusty lore nor history recounted by epic ballad and tale. They were tangible. Prodigious. Precocious. To be regarded by such a draconic intelligence was akin to feeling the brunt of the suns' innermost fires.\n\n\u2002There commenced one of the strangest periods of my life, wherein intense happiness commingled with deep sadness. My closest friends and mentors forgot me daily. Arkurion struggled mightily and somehow, prevailed. My father remembered me perfectly. My days were steeped in teaching and learning. By night or before morning birdsong, I sojourned long with Amaryllion Fireborn, though I frequently had to remind him of who I was and why I could contact his mind via his blank scroll, or delicately correct his errant memory when he repeated a tale I already knew.\n\n\u2002To bemuse an Ancient Dragon is apparently no trivial task \u2013 one at which I abhorred to excel. Truly, I grew daily more invisible, until I feared the magical theft of my very soul.\n\nAh, and then, let me reveal the matter of Zanthrillior \u2026\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 224\n\nZimtyna Smacked her own thigh in evident satisfaction. \"Auli-Ambar, if you could only see yourself \u2013\"\n\n\"Did you sew me into this dress?\"\n\nThe other girl chortled happily. \"Not really.\"\n\n\"And the heels \u2013\"\n\n\"A modest three inches. You tower over me.\"\n\n\"These bracelets are, uh \u2026\"\n\n\"Beautiful. Father picked them out himself.\" Auli opened her mouth to protest. \"Shush, I know you can't afford them. Few could \u2013 well, unless you melt down your pretty ingot. Where did you secrete that petite fortune, anyways? These bracelets are part of a gift made to the Queen of Fra'anior three hundred years ago by the Dragon Artisans of Gemalka.\"\n\n\"Oh! The Ruby Collection? You have me wearing a museum piece?\"\n\nNot a gift for her? A tiny pang of disappointment left an acid wake in her stomach. Oh, Auli. Had she not received gifts enough in these Halls that she must pine over baubles which could never be hers?\n\n\"Indeed.\" Zimtyna refused to drop the smug attitude. \"The traditional mask, designed for a formal royal ball, is a masterpiece if I do say so myself \u2013 and, wearing that weight of jewellery, you can't possibly blow away on a breeze like you're wishing to, my sweet pollen puff.\"\n\n\"I must look like I robbed a royal vault.\"\n\n\"Never was a robber so splendidly arrayed. Stop twisting that priceless, delicate necklet! Honestly. Be off with you \u2013 no, let's see what my father says first. Out. Out!\"\n\nJingling discreetly, Auli-Ambar suffered herself to be coaxed out of Zimtyna's bedchamber. With multiple bracelets and anklets, a matching jewelled belt and jewelled clasps on the upper arms that together bore a King's ransom in the finest rubies and diamonds set in a white, luminous horiatite frosting, she could not help the clinking and tinkling. The off-the-shoulder, full length dress had been described to her as bearing a design of orange and crimson flames twined about her left flank, upon a background of deep brown, almost black, Helyon silk. The fabulous material felt whisper-thin and cool against her skin, but Zimtyna assured her the silk would keep her person at the perfect temperature. It was like wearing spider silk, she imagined, although she understood that in reality this thread was produced from caterpillars' bottoms. Imagine that? Royalty fell over themselves to spend heaps of fine gold upon exudate excreted from an insect's rear end.\n\nHer tumbling hair had been washed three times, treated with hot aromatic oils and then brushed out to within an inch of its life, and was fancifully braided around an elaborate diamond-sprinkled hairnet. Auli had no idea what this creation entailed or looked like, but her friend seemed satisfied and therefore, so was she.\n\n\"Father,\" called Zimtyna.\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"Nose out of the scroll. Behold!\"\n\n\"You look pretty, petal.\"\n\n\"Dad! Not me \u2013 Auli-Ambar \u2013 honestly, you men! Impossible.\"\n\nPages rustled over on the comfortable couch, Master Chamzu's favourite spot to curl up with a good book or a scrolleaf or three. The Master gasped, \"Holy \u2013 who's that \u2013 Auli!\" Glass clinked upon the rug by his feet, knocked over but unbroken, she concluded with rising alarm. \"Ahem! Ahem! Lock the roost! Alarm the doors. No, we cannot let her out looking like that \u2013 she'll cause a riot! A positive sort of riot \u2026 oh, listen to me babbling like a drunken dragonet. Girl \u2026 you look amazing. One word. A-ma-zing.\"\n\nDisbelief made her jaw dangle. Truly?\n\nZimtyna said, \"Thanks, Dad. Off with you, Auli-Ambar, before he does something memorably foolish.\"\n\n\"Was that good?\" Auli whispered.\n\n\"Oh, I think you'll pass,\" Zimtyna said knowingly. \"Now, I'll walk you down to the Concert Cavern, and I'll describe Arkurion's reaction to you later. It was his invite, correct? Lucky lizard!\"\n\n\"Aye \u2026\"\n\nSo the Master yelled at his daughter for cracking inappropriate jokes about Dragons, but this jest was somehow allowed, even though it made her blush down to her toes? It was not a date. Not as such. It was co-workers enjoying an evening's entertainment together. Aye. No sly winks; no rebellious or unreasonable behaviour. Not so much as a whiff of scandal. Auli would be decorous and demure \u2013 and, what? Faltering on the steps in her unfamiliar heels, she mentally dunked that last adjective in the aforementioned hair oil and lobbed it furiously into the path of a draconic fireball. *Kaa-pooof!* The older hatchlings had started fireball practice with flying targets yesterday \u2013 apparently, the idea was to let a few windrocs loose over the volcano's central lake and see which Dragon could grill a bird first. Crude, but judging by the hullabaloo and the *thump! whoosh! krack!* emanating from the overexcited youngsters, she would be hearing all about it at story time tomorrow.\n\nDragons were Dragons, Humans were Humans, and ne'er the twain should engage in whatever Zimtyna had been hinting at doing with that Fra'aniorian Dragonship pilot \u2013 what was his name again? Tusk? No, Ta'asku. Exceedingly toothsome, allegedly. She reminded herself to recheck the definition of 'dallying,' because whereas Auli had thought it meant lingering or being lazy, Zimtyna made her dallying sound rather wicked.\n\nAn appalled face twisted her lips beneath her mask.\n\nThe Concert Cavern was also used for larger meetings of Dragons, a great oval space deep beneath the volcano's northern wall, so there was a huge descent to make. They walked around to the North wall and then took the Human chain lift down to the subterranean chamber, endowed with \u2013 Auli sniffed pointedly \u2013 an array of magnificent and unique crystal formations which boasted such breathtaking luminescence and form that at least four poets of legend had indeed forgotten to breathe upon first viewing the phenomenon and thus perished. Silly poets.\n\nWhat electrified her awareness was the extraordinary aural qualities of the room. Her ears marvelled. Every sound, every rasp of a Dragon's fires or breath, the slightest clicking of talon or tail upon the floor, carried to her sensitive hearing. A rising babble of commentary from the Dragons nearby alerted her that her entrance had been noted. She heard:\n\n<Who's this mite?>\n\n<What wing-shiveringly striking attire, I declare! My eye orbs do brighten as to a feast.>\n\n<\u2026 Lore Specialist, Sazutharr's prot\u00e9g\u00e9.>\n\n<By my wings, I'd have those rubies for my hoard!>\n\n<My hatchling Firrugazz says she's the most extraordinary raconteur. I wonder \u2013>\n\n<Mmm, who invited this morsel, Yulgaz?> Razzior's habitual sneer cut clearly through the murmur.\n\n<That scrawny hank of sinew from Tanstoy, Arkurion the Midget Blue.> The Brown Dragon's voice was cultured, but infinitely condescending even as the pang of his insult pierced Auli through and through. Poor Arkurion! <I believe that Southerner keeps monkeys for pets. Bipeds, you know. All the same to me. The meat's foul and the brain matter is hardly worth the effort of cracking open their thin skulls.>\n\nRazzior sniggered cruelly.\n\nDragons thought of Humans as evolved apes? Charming.\n\n<Auli-Ambar,> Qualiana said warmly, steadying her with a slight talon tap on the small of her back. How Auli appreciated the sentiment! <Welcome to the concert. I think you might be the only Human present. I didn't take you for an aficionado of the Dragonharp?>\n\n<Not yet,> she replied, taut with bitter humiliation. <One must educate the bipeds, I suppose.>\n\nWas this what Arkurion had purposed?\n\nThe Red Dragoness' talons scratched restively against the floor, betraying her annoyance. <Don't you take their idle chatter to heart, little flame. Behold, Arkurion approaches. He is compact of build as is common in Southern Dragons, but in form is a dashing beast of nonpareil colouration nonetheless.>\n\nEven Qualiana failed to disguise a slight hitch in her voice, making Auli-Ambar wonder what it was of the Mercury Blue Dragon's reaction that a blind girl could not apprehend. Had Zimtyna's efforts to create a suitable impression leaped an Island too far? Was she embarrassing every Dragon present with her museum-worthy outfit and its outrageous surfeit of rubies and precious horiatite, apparently once mined on the holy Isle of Ha'athior on the southern rim of Fra'anior's great caldera?\n\nWith slightly forced gallantry, Arkurion said, <My lady of Gi'ishior, all Dragonesses who grace this chamber tonight, do gnash their fangs in helpless jealousy at thine splendour.>\n\n<I do?> Qualiana breathed, for Auli's ears alone. A jaunty nuance in her tone catapulted the girl's heart into her throat. No! The Dragoness could not think there was something \u2026 between them, could she?\n\nTrying valiantly to disguise her discomfit, Auli-Ambar swooped into a full formal genuflection, slipping her right leg behind the left to aid a graceful flexion of the knees, while her head dipped forward and her arms stretched outward and behind, the hands fluttering at the wrists in imitation of a Dragon's wing's in flight. How gauche she felt! Yet a nugget of draconic courage lodged heatedly in her heart. She was tired of invisibility. Weary of a spate of recent dreams where she sensed herself fading into the night, sinking slowly into inescapable terror. Sick of bullies like Razzior and Yulgaz who preyed upon those they regarded as lesser creatures.\n\nIn a small but clear voice, she declaimed a speech she had prepared beforehand from a legend recounted by Amaryllion Fireborn:\n\n<I acknowledge thee, O Dragon whose gracious fires,>\n\n<Art arpeggios played upon fervid moonbeams,>\n\n<Of Mystic Mercury thy scales liquescent,>\n\n<O most radiant, bejewelled fire-treasure of Tanstoy,>\n\n<Mine instructor in all draconic lore and fire-life,>\n\n<In fullness of gratitude doth this heart receive thee.>\n\nAstonished whispers susurrated amongst the Dragons nearby, those who heard and perhaps observed their encounter. Arkurion seemed speechless. Auli heard him gulp, and then clearly amidst the rising buzz of many belly fires, she hearkened to his fires warbling like faraway dragonet song carried upon a fragrant volcanic breeze. Had her comparison of his mercury colour to the Mystic Moon been poorly drawn? Or was the articulation of their teacher-student relationship, unfitting in this context? Was the Dragon overcome with rage or mortification?\n\nAnother, clearly elderly draconic voice cried, <From the muzzles of egglings and hatchlings! Most excellently does she recite the Lay of Cazutaria, which I first heard from my grandsire's grandsire! I had not thought it cast upon scrolleaf; indeed, I have not heard it since my hatchling days. And the obeisance she essayed is none other than the ancient Wing\u00e9d Glory, that with which the Pygmy Peoples were said to greet Fra'anior himself \u2013 may the sulphurous fires of the Great Onyx burn forever!>\n\n<How she honours the Mercury Blue,> another Dragoness put in smoothly. Haaja the Yellow, Auli's increasingly overwhelmed senses identified. <Most evocatively spoken, Auli-Ambar.>\n\nWith the distinct air of an emphatic talon stroke to the chest, another voice rapped, <And that very excellence, o Razzior, is why this girl was invited.>\n\nAuli cast about in the halls of her memory, but she did not know that gravelly purr.\n\n<Andarraz plays at politics,> Qualiana supplied, again the tiniest whisper seemingly made right inside Auli's left ear. <Don't become his pawn.>\n\nArkurion said, <Behold, the entrance flags are raised! We should take our places upon the ledges.>\n\nHis sonorous pronouncement was designed to carry. At once Auli heard the shuffling and thumping of Dragon paws as the animated crowd set into motion; amidst this rising tumult Zimtyna took her leave, and Qualiana's footsteps trembled the ground to her right flank. At Haaja's enquiry, Qualiana replied that Sapphurion would be returning with the Dragonwings within three days, but it was unfortunate indeed that her mate had to miss this event. Much had transpired abroad. There was rumour of great disturbance in the East, and Andarraz the Green was preparing a Dragonwing to fly out on the morrow to rescue the denizens of Elidia Island in the South from a marauding band of feral Dragons.\n\nMeantime, her elbow found its rest upon Arkurion's upraised talon as always, and so Auli-Ambar followed his lead to an appropriate ledge, stumbling only twice en route. The Dragon guided her to a wooden chair which had evidently been provided for her use.\n\nHe whispered, <The very stars were never more radiant than thee, Auli-Ambar. Did I not speak as with the whitest of fires upon our first meeting?>\n\nShe shivered as he withdrew slightly. <A-Aye, Arkurion.>\n\nThe foot or so that separated them, Auli imagined, felt at once far too near, and as wide as the void that separated Men and Dragons from the far reaches of the universe. Charming one? Should a girl ever charm a Dragon, that were ground most perilous. Humans held neither sway over the Dragons of the airy spaces, nor could they claim any magical dominion. History was littered with examples of wars started for these very reasons, although it was whispered around the Halls that night began to fall upon the era of outright draconic dominion of the Island-World. Humankind slowly ascended from their long-ago position of enslavement to Dragons, being organised and self-governing and daily growing in numbers and power. Over the last seven decades, Auli had learned, the spheres of draconic influence had steadily reduced. Elidia. Erigar. Horness. Mighty Yorbik Island in the mid-North. Cherlar, Amxo and Lyrx lying far to the East of the important trading post of Sylakia, and the area around Jaoli in the Far East. All had once been ruled by Dragons, but now fell increasingly or completely under Human rulership.\n\nFew Dragons warmed to the prospect of this rising of Human power.\n\nHer hand reached for her tunic pocket. Oh. The eggling statuette was safely ensconced in her tiny clutch bag. Izariela. Might she be related to Istariela? There had been only one Star Dragoness in history. Why only one? Was she unique, like Auli-Ambar?\n\nShe must remember to ask Amaryllion about this detail.\n\n<Arkurion, may I request \u2013>\n\n<I shall be your eyes,> he whispered at once, managing to sound even more nervous than she. <Grr! If any Dragon may presume to brave such a challenge?>\n\nAuli produced a bright chuckle. <I made up puerile poetry for the occasion.>\n\nIn actuality, for you, she thought, but did not hazard the admission. Many attentive fire eyes and ear canals lurked on the surrounding ledges, some maliciously attuned to whatever might pass between a pair of scrollworms. She had recently read about magical methods of spying. Reading lips was nothing compared to the ability of more powerful Dragons in the Blue spectrum, who could reportedly read minds. Not that any Dragon would admit such an ability! Could she rely on an impervious mind to shield a straying heart?\n\nShe said, <Tell me about this venue, noble Dragon.>\n\n<Very good,> he replied. She judged that he bowed, for his wingtip scraped rock slightly. <The Concert Cavern measures 3,614 feet long by 1,823 feet wide and 1,119 feet high at its apex. The stage faces the breadth of the cavern at the exact midpoint, ensuring an even spread of sound. One hundred feet from the raised, onyx-paved platform, tiers of dressed pink granite rise by fifteen feet at a time, over forty-three levels to the very back of the cavern in a semicircle which is segmented into seven equal parts to facilitate the ingress and egress of Dragons. The Human steps you ascended were originally purposed for cleaners, and not for concert-goers.>\n\nShe appreciated the subtle shading of remorse which accompanied this final statement.\n\nAuli said, <And in relation to the stage \u2026>\n\n<We are seated on the seventh tier back in the third segment, so slightly left of middle. Qualiana, Andarraz and Haaja occupy the Dragon Elders' perches of honour in the fourth or central segment, directly facing the stage. I estimate there are over four hundred Dragons in the audience, and one nervous scrap of humanity.>\n\n<Hilarious.> Auli wanted to sit on her hands. Stop the ridiculous trembling! She said, <Perfect. What of this fabled harp, o Dragon?>\n\nArkurion, who had clearly been hitting the scrolls in preparation for the occasion, replied, <The Dragonharp, in antiquity called the Dracoharp, is critically regarded as the premier musical instrument in the draconic repertoire. It is the hardest to master, but offers unparalleled reward. Naturally the instruments vary in size, number of strings and capabilities. But the one down on the stage stands twenty-two feet tall and fifteen wide, and commands some 1,376 strings arranged upon two 'wings' which are artfully carved from darkly polished ooliti wood, set with garnets, carnelians and emeralds in patterns symbolising the scales of Estathya the Pearlescent, younger shell-sister to Fra'anior himself, who is famously the Dragoness of Many Colours. I digress. To picture a Dragonharp you might imagine a butterfly's outspread wings \u2026 oh. Perhaps a different image. If you interlaced your outstretched fingers and held them before you at a thirty degree angle, you'd be depicting the basic structure. The strings do not touch each other as they intermesh \u2013 well, some instruments do so in order to produce additional special effects. With me so far?>\n\nAuli nodded. She had read about butterflies. They must be marvellous, so very colourful and unique. Angrily, she pushed that note of sadness away. <Please continue.>\n\n<Verily,> he hummed upon an intriguing note. Had the Dragon detected her unvoiced sadness? If so, he was even more perceptive than she might have credited. <The harpist leans over the instrument and plays either one wing or the other, or plays 'doubles', which means that the three forward-facing and two rear-facing talons play both wings simultaneously, along where they intersect in the middle-upper region of the instrument. I make that at about three times your tiny height.> He gurgled out a draconic laugh before continuing, <The orientation of the paws matters greatly. The ideal is to produce a loose-wristed, rippling motion that glides along the string-wings. The metal of the strings is usually argentonium, a gold-lustered compound produced by a secret process known to a select, widely scattered guild of Dragon Artisans, and is believed to imbue the musician with magical powers. But the real genius lies in the paw pedals, which can radically change the tone, voice and range of the instrument, producing some quite remarkable musical or sound effects, such as drums, horns or even battle roars. The pedals are worked by the Dragon's rear paws, for the musician curves his or her body around the instrument in order to play it. In addition to all this, Zanthrillior will add his peerless voice to the production, which is unquestionably a complex instrument in its own right.>\n\nAround her, the Dragons rustled excitedly, before a low humming of anticipation spread across the gathering.\n\n<Zanthrillior,> Arkurion whispered, so close to her now that Auli felt his neck scales brush her right arm. <He's a distinctive beast, being a deep burgundy in the upper parts with striking azure and yellow detailing upon the wing struts, leading wing edges, talon sheaths and broadly across his underbelly. He lacks the skull spikes and spine spikes of the Gi'ishior Lesser Draconic subtype, so he's as sleek as a rainbow trout \u2026 here he comes. The consummate performer. An ostentatious ruffle of the wings, displaying their unique colouration to its fullest extent. Even the wing membranes glisten with colours as though painted by an artist. Now, he's strutting over to his instrument. Utterly focussed and serene. Almost unaware of any watchers. Few Dragons could behave like that without censure, but certain allowances must be made for genius \u2026>\n\nThe Mercury Blue's voice trailed off as the audience hushed dramatically. Auli-Ambar had never heard hundreds of Dragons, so closely packed in that great cavern that the temperature was already balmy verging on sweltering, become so silent. Magic? Belly fires quietened. Normally expressive wingtips lay perfectly still. Nary a rustle of paw nor tail marred the breathless, exquisite silence.\n\nThen, a voice like a concerto of flutes ranging from a quadruple-bass monster to a tootling piccolo announced, <PRELUDE IN C-SHARP MINOR!!>\n\nAuli-Ambar almost tumbled off her seat.\n\n<Zanthrillior,> Arkurion dared to breathe, as if the Dragon's name should explain the astonishing \u2013 and thrilling, in keeping with his name \u2013 impact of his voice.\n\nEvery microscopic iota of her body seemed to catch fire at once. Suddenly she knew what these Dragons had been waiting for. It was the deftest touch of talon to string. It was the perfection of his opening stanzas that seized every hair follicle of her body and tuned it to the bravura magnificence of his artistry; that drew her helplessly to the edge of her seat and every Dragon effortlessly to the edge of his or her perch, captive to beauty.\n\nAfter building up over many long minutes to a crescendo of crashing wave upon wave of delights that left the Human girl feeling as if she had been thoroughly kneaded by the Dragon of Bliss, the music trailed off into exquisite eternity.\n\nNow she knew what those breathless poets must have grasped. Fire seized her throat. Music conjoined with her soul. If she died tonight it would only serve to extend this ecstatic state into eternity.\n\nZanthrillior trumpeted, <CREATION'S BALLAD!!>\n\nHe bared his musical soul, sweeping them away on an enchanted, wrenching, unforgettable journey."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "At some point during the evening, Auli realised she was weeping. Her new nose did a better job than the old, which was to say it leaked just as much, just in a more manageable way. She checked her tiny clutch and found a scrap of cloth tissue. Thank you Zimtyna! Clearly her friend had anticipated this eventuality \u2013 although how such intimate knowledge had evaded her amnesia-inducing aura, she could not fathom.\n\nThen, Zanthrillior's Lullaby for the Lost in D-flat Major surrounded her with the tender insistence of sleep, and whisked her away on aural billows. Warm. Foetal. Infinitely infolding and enfolding and caressing, like a mother's love for her unborn child.\n\nAuli sank deeper and deeper through layers of music, as though she passed through the shackles of memory and being and at last, mortality itself, into a place she could not possibly remember. Here, there was no need to breathe, for fluid surrounded her and filled her lungs. A soft beat pulsed against her belly, the umbilical connection of life itself, and throbbed inside her acutely delicate ears. The drumbeat was quickening. Soft, peristaltic movements began to ripple against her unborn body, and Auli felt the urge to change her orientation. Kicking out lustily, she raised a subdued laugh from somewhere without, and a kneading motion began in response to her kicking.\n\n\"Ooh, right under my ribs.\"\n\nAuli wriggled again. Then, she dreamed.\n\nSlick and wailing weakly, she slipped into waiting hands that cupped her little body. She turned, and fell against a plush surface. The material stuck to her limbs. Now the hands seemed to fumble about her before growing more certain, and she rose an unknowable distance into darkness.\n\nThe music caressed her.\n\nA soft sob tore the veil from her soul, but not from her eyes.\n\n\"By the Great Dragon, what is that thing?\" She wanted to weep, but the sound emerged from her tiny throat like popping bubbles. Xa'an murmured, \"It's unable even to cry. How will it \u2026 live?\"\n\n\"My \u2013 my Lord \u2026\"\n\n\"How could I have whelped such an accursed monster? How?\" Footsteps receded. A door slammed on its hinges, rocking her world and making her cry harder. \"Stupid foreign skarrigor! It's all your fault!\"\n\nMusic soothed her distress.\n\nAuli vocalised alongside Zanthrillior's distant score, tiny, pinprick notes of her soul's uttermost affliction.\n\n\"Pass her to me, Myrkira. It's a girl, isn't it?\"\n\n\"She is.\" The aged voice sounded defeated.\n\n\"What's the matter with her?\"\n\n\"It's a deformity of the mouth, my Lady, one that I've not often seen. I've heard these children do not \u2026 do not live long. You should prepare yourself \u2013 Fra'anior bless thee, little mite.\"\n\nTender were the hands that embraced her now, soothing with touch and a rocking motion. \"My poor pykol-jewel girl,\" the woman wept. Her accent was peculiar, all lilting vowels and half-voiced, warbling consonants, as if she owned a songbird's fluttering tongue and a throat rather different to most. \"How cruel fate's talon \u2026\"\n\nIt seemed she flew upon lyrical wings beyond the bounds of the universe, to a place where all was darkness, and that darkness shuttered what light must have played upon even infant eyelids.\n\nGrief. Who could sustain such father wounds, and live?\n\n<Oh, my soul shall die \u2026>\n\nA voice intruded. \"Auli.\"\n\n<I perish!>\n\n\"Auli-Ambar, please. Where did you go?\"\n\nArkurion's whisper seemed to issue from a place far beyond reality. She realised he spoke beneath a cannonade of draconic approbation, his left fore-talon clasping her knee. Had he shaken her awake? No, she hadn't fallen asleep, had she? Or, had she entered a waking dream? The Dragons bugled and roared and chanted in an utter pandemonium \u2013 had the concert ended? She supposed so. Her ears certainly hurt. Auli leaped guiltily to her feet, applauding in the Human fashion. No-one would hear, but she knew Zanthrillior's virtuosity had broken though to a place that was, to her knowledge, unprecedented. How could he cause her to so vividly remember and even experience her birth and its immediate aftermath?\n\nWhat was a pykol jewel? Could that, or the midwife's name, be a clue as to her mother's identity? <Skarrigor,> she knew. It was a curse purposed for a seductress or enchantress.\n\nHer poor mother. Had she fled Xa'an's wrath? When had she disappeared from her daughter's life, and why? Did she not care? Auli touched her mouth beneath the mask in an attempt to still her welling sobs, and then returned to applause.\n\n<It was so wonderful, Arkurion. Indescribable \u2026 I \u2026 thank you, thank you, thank \u2013>\n\n<Auli,> Arkurion growled. <Qualiana needs you \u2013 us?>\n\nSo urgent! What was the problem?\n\n<Um \u2026>\n\n<Come quickly. We are summoned to her roost.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "After departing from the Concert Cavern with indecent haste, Auli-Ambar was able to take to the back routes used by the cleaning staff. She quickly unlaced the satiny ankle straps of her shoes and took off at a run that soon proved injudicious.\n\nFour minutes, one bleeding nose and a severely banged big toe later, she limped into Sapphurion and Qualiana's roost through the Roost Keepers' entrance. Arkurion was already present, she sensed, carefully catching the bloody drips from her nose inside the mask. No point in advertising her presence here! Snatching up a cleaning cloth from the kitchen, she joined the Dragons.\n\n\"What?\" growled Arkurion.\n\n\"Thtupid blindneth,\" she replied unhappily. \"Whathit?\"\n\n\"Am I allowed to laugh?\" the Mercury Blue pressed.\n\n\"Only ith you whanth a thwift kick uff the fire sthnorter,\" Auli responded with great testiness and rather less dignity.\n\nQualiana chuckled briefly, but then turned serious. \"Here. Be healed.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Dancing dragonets, that really did help. Her nose felt a hundred times better, but the blood did not stop trickling. She pinched her nose just below the bridge, thinking how that would not have been possible just a few months before.\n\nMeantime, the Dragoness continued, \"I just received word from Sapphurion's command that he is chasing none other than that crazy Maroon Dragoness, Ianthine, about the Islands \u2013 and, she has a hostage in her paw! He thinks, from the East. I need you to tell me everything you know and I've undoubtedly been made to forget \u2013\" *gnarr!* \"\u2013 about that strange envoy from the East, and what she said about a peculiar magic. What was it called?\"\n\nAuli sucked in a deep breath. Right. Try not to sound sulky. \"As I have not yet been allowed access to the forbidden parts of the Library \u2013\"\n\n\"What you know!\"\n\nRapidly, Auli summarised in a quavering voice, \"Her name was Azziala. She said she had bent Ra'aba to her thrall and stolen from him the knowledge of sanguistarn-mortha'a. Ra'aba also claimed he had torn what he needed from her, and as you're aware, I once heard him colluding with Razzior over a serum they both seemed to desperately want \u2013\"\n\n\"HOW DO YOU MAKE A DRAGON FORGET!\"\n\nExplosive anger detonated between them as an overstressed Dragoness lost what little cool she had never truly possessed.\n\nAuli moaned, but somehow, Arkurion had turned aside the Dragoness' spit-fire anger. A huge body thumped down nearby. The Mercury Blue groaned and mumbled something; Qualiana must have lifted him with her paw, and a not entirely apologetic word. A fingertip touch to her left ear returned slick with blood. Then Qualiana touched Auli again with her healing power, and immediately she felt that signature sense of wellbeing infuse her body. The blood flow slowed to a trickle.\n\nQualiana said, <Dragons are so wont to flare in anger, we injure even those close to our third hearts. Speak.>\n\nUnaccountably, her anger at Qualiana's mistreatment of her good intentions steadied her. After gathering her thoughts, Auli continued, \"It seems clear that sanguine or sanguis are terms built on an ancient proto-draconic root that, in part, refers to blood. So we can safely conclude it's a lore related to blood. What mortha'a means I could not say, but every time I speak the word I think upon death. And so I posit a lore linking blood and death, or the bleeding of creatures leading to death, which is not unknown in cabalistic or necromantic rituals generally related to worship of Dramagon the Red \u2013 or other similarly forbidden lore that builds upon his research. He was famously concerned with breeding creatures with particular magical properties of interest to him or, forgive me, I suspect Dramagon of trying to cross draconic with Human traits, or to transfer magic from one species to the other.\"\n\n\"Impossible,\" said Arkurion.\n\n\"Then you know little of Dramagon's foul heritage,\" Qualiana dismissed him bluntly. \"Tell me what else you know of this Azziala.\"\n\nRa'aba's terrible threat still lived in her fears, Auli realised, choosing her words with care as she related Azziala's mental powers, the weird secondary voice that had seemed to speak out from the same mouth, and the sense that the woman possessed formidable mental strength \u2013 enough to squeeze a person's mind for thoughts as a person might squeeze fruit for juice, she recalled.\n\nThe Mercury Blue noted, \"Insanity can accord Man or Dragon unusual powers, Qualiana. Fly with care against Ianthine. She is extremely dangerous.\"\n\nThe Dragoness snarled and snapped again at the younger Dragon, making Auli flinch so hard she tumbled backward, but it appeared Arkurion had the presence of mind yet to whip out his tail and arrest what could have been a bad fall.\n\nApparently unconcerned by the clash, the Red said, \"I will fly directly to Ianthine's hideout. I know it; I once observed her entering her roost by a chance reflection in the waters of a lake \u2013\"\n\n\"How will you break her portal magic?\" said the Mercury Blue. His turn for snappish honesty.\n\nAuli-Ambar spoke between the panting of the two Dragons, \"If the Draco-Mystic is half as powerful as everyone says, her wards will be strong indeed. Could Sapphurion's life be endangered? From everything I've learned \u2026\"\n\nA sinking feeling accompanied her words. Oh no. Had she just sold herself to Sylakian slavers, so to speak? No. The Dragons would never breach protocol so severely, would they?\n\n<Freaking fireballs!> Qualiana snapped, apparently missing the implications that so terrified Auli. Only she could break the wards. Yet would an Elder be persuaded to risk the volcanic censure of her peers to convey a Human in her paw? <Can I do nothing to aid my mate?>\n\n<You're certain she'll make for her roost?> asked the Mercury Blue.\n\n<Aye.>\n\n<Then you should take the right tool with you. She has flown before.>\n\n<Arkur \u2013 no!> Auli howled as the Dragoness' paw clamped about her waist. She felt betrayed by Arkurion \u2013 even though hers had been the tongue to flap imprudently. <I don't want to die! Put me down. Please, Qualiana. Please, you're not \u2026 it's forbidden!>\n\nIn a purr that was far more menacing than comforting, the Dragoness retorted, <Dropping a friend into the Cloudlands is considered the pinnacle of rudeness in draconic society. That said, one more screech out of you that implies I'll take less than perfect care with your insolent little life, and I'll consider juggling you between my paws en route. Do we understand each other?>\n\n<Indeed!> sniggered Arkurion.\n\n<How supportive of you,> Auli growled. Fra'anior's beard, she had not meant to voice her aggravation!\n\nHowever, both Dragons just laughed as if a hatchling had dared to bare her fangs at an old-timer. With a parting admonition to Arkurion to see that Grandion attended his battle strategy class after suns-rise, Qualiana's grip tightened around Auli-Ambar's waist. <Ready to fly, little one?>\n\n<Nooooo!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Authorised Thief",
                "text": "\u2002Had I ever wondered which traits ran as straight as Dragonflight from father to daughter, I soon discovered \u2013 to my absolute horror \u2013 that sticky fingers, sneaking and snitching definitely constituted the Ta'afaya half of my legacy. How ashamed was I? I scorn that prim, hidebound girl nowadays.\n\n\u2002Is life ever as unsullied as we would wish it?\n\n\u2002Perhaps blindness and thievery are hand-in-glove partners. I was expected to use my hands in many ways, after all. Little did anyone suspect a sightless scrollmouse of nefarious sleight-of-fingers \u2026\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Reflections\n\nThree-pawed, Qualiana charged out of her roost and launched into the cool night. Her massive wings cupped the air briefly, steadying their flight, before the great flight muscles surged, the wing surfaces, struts and multi-joined primary, secondary and tertiary wing bones creaked under the enormous pressure. She shot skyward as though launched from a catapult. Although this was her second Dragonflight, Auli-Ambar gasped at the Dragoness' furious outpouring of power. Arkurion was just a fledgling growing into draconic adulthood. Qualiana was a fully-grown female in the prime of her strength, and she was magnificent.\n\nWithin seconds, Qualiana surmounted the bugles of the watch Dragons upon the rim wall and banked to her port flank, accelerating to what would have been an eye-watering speed for someone bothered by useful eyes. However the wind pressure eased and her grip loosened while she kept her left forepaw cupped, allowing Auli to clamber into a more comfortable sitting position in her thickly calloused right palm.\n\nShe said, <I've shielded your presence from the sight and mental perception of the Watch. I'll keep a shield active and supply pneumatic elements to ease the blast. Are you warm enough, little one?>\n\n<It's colder than I expected.>\n\n<We're leaving the volcano's thermal paw print behind us as we head two compass points North of West,> Qualiana noted. <I'll add thermo-insulating shield elements. It's a beautiful, starry night; a night fit to make one's soul fires sing just as we heard in Zanthrillior's concert \u2013 wouldn't you agree?>\n\n<Aye. He was spellbinding.>\n\nAuli ground her knuckles into her eyes. They had regularly troubled her ever since that botched attempt at healing, but now they hurt as if a Dragon's talons were slowly drilling into the sockets. Had the music changed something yet again? She dared not hope, for that disappointment had proved bitter indeed.\n\nThe Dragoness whispered, <Moons-shine upon the whitest of Cloudlands, rolling unbroken toward every horizon as if careless of the toxicity they obscure. Thick bands of stars gild the darkling welkin, so heavily sprinkled that they are just like white dust in places, and in others, we see shining beauties of single stars and constellations, and the great nebulae and galaxies farther afield. The tranquillity of night beyond the Isles, in the great airy spaces frequented only by Dragons \u2013 oh Auli, how I wish I could show you all! By my wings, you must yearn for this also.>\n\n<It is hard to wish for what one has never known.>\n\n<Wishes are free, not so?>\n\nAuli considered her statement. <Are they, noble Qualiana? For wishes rely upon hope, and hope must perforce rest one paw within reality. Some wishes carry a great price, o Dragoness; a price that would crush a soul.>\n\nThey flew on in silence for many a wingbeat.\n\nA three-hour flight of some fifty-seven leagues distance by Qualiana's reckoning, led them swiftly to the end of a fruitless quest. <Rancid cliff goats!> snarled the Dragoness. <Looks like her Islet turned into an active volcano, Auli. I've taken you on a useless excursion.>\n\n<It's gone?>\n\n<It's a heap of glowing slag seeping down into the Cloudlands from whence it sprang.> Qualiana sounded as if she wished to kick whatever remained into its final oblivion. The Red Dragoness banked steadily, bringing them back to what Auli took for a return heading. <How's about my offer of flying lessons?>\n\n<Umm \u2026> The Dragoness laughed at her uncertain tone. Auli scowled.\n\nQualiana said, <More medical lore, then?>\n\nShe voiced her offer ever so drolly, but Auli accepted eagerly. The Dragoness was a font of knowledge. A library in her own right! They chatted amiably all the many leagues of the return flight, although she wondered if people and Dragons ever grew weary of her insatiable thirst for knowledge. Did they not understand that knowledge was colour and sight to her; both a window to a world unseen and the song of a journey which only another's account or description might illuminate?\n\nAfter a slightly quicker return trip \u2013 Qualiana admitted to annoyance fuelling her efforts \u2013 and a lengthy digression on the mechanics and means of Dragonflight, which mostly boiled down to magic, Auli decided, she began to smell the particular tangs and fragrances of the Fra'anior Cluster, the pollens and slightly minty and musky aromas of the tropical vegetation, and a throat-grabbing humidity. Her backside hurt. Stretching gingerly, she tried not to think about that old method of execution, called a 'swift flight from a great height' \u2013 exactly her fate if the Dragoness chose to open her paw. What lay beneath the Cloudlands? Most scholars and poets symbolised the Cloudlands as the ultimate death. A nothingness in which the end did not matter because one died within a few minutes upon entering its noxious fumes, yet there must be a bottom, mustn't there?\n\nAmaryllion would know.\n\n<Whap!> Rising air buffeted them. Was that the terrace lake wall? Aye, for now the long stroke of Qualiana's wings sounded very different and Auli coughed as a few droplets of moisture stung her face. The Dragoness adjusted her shielding, keeping her passenger dry. Wow. She felt that magic, like a prickling inside her bones.\n\nWithout warning, Qualiana spat, <Ianthine! She's roaring: 'I have the Child of the Dragon! She's in my grasp! And the third great race will rise, you fools! Do you not understand the prophecy as I delivered it?' What's happening in there? There's fire, a Dragon's challenge! A child endangered \u2026>\n\nA monstrous battle roar erupted somewhere ahead of their flight path, reverberating through the tunnel leading into the central volcano lake with a pugnacious thunderclap of sound that buffeted Qualiana in the air, but she recovered with a deft flick of her wings and the steerage of her tail. She growled angrily. Who dared attack the very Halls? Where was this child? Could it be a real child or was that prophetic obfuscation?\n\nPressure popped in Auli's ears. Had the Dragoness protected her from the sonic boom?\n\nThe Red Dragoness gasped, <She's \u2013 she's struck half of them unconscious! Scattered the Council like a flight of blue-crested terns \u2013 SAPPHURION!!>\n\n<Stop her!> Auli heard a male Dragon cry out. Sapphurion? He had never sounded so ragged! <What magic \u2026>\n\nQualiana snarled, <Where's that stinking windroc? I'll shred her from wingtip to wingtip!>\n\nHaaja's usually mellow voice turned into a wild bellow. <Coming out! Alert!>\n\n<Where the hells \u2013> Qualiana began.\n\n*WHOMP!!*\n\nThis time, Auli-Ambar felt as if her teeth had just hit the back of her skull. She groaned as a massive body bulled past in the air; by Qualiana's furious bellows, unanticipated and completely undetected. *BOOM!* They crashed into the water and slewed sideways. Almost simultaneously, a bruising impact struck from somewhere around the Dragoness' right shoulder. Water slapped Auli's cheek so hard she saw lights behind her eyes \u2013 lights! Human and Dragoness groaned as one.\n\nThen, Qualiana heaved free of the water and ran three-pawed up around the tunnel in a clatter of talons and rapid stabilising wing-stutters, as best Auli could tell, for she was twice turned upside down and almost blacked out from the surging gravitational forces before the Dragoness righted herself and blasted away again, hissing, <Where is she? Where \u2013 curse it! She cannot hide so completely over open water. It's impossible!>\n\nShe and Auli both listened, and heard nothing but the wind's wuthering over scales and the flapping of Auli's garments.\n\n<Impossible,> Qualiana repeated, grinding her fangs in frustration. <We should have something to track \u2013 a slight disturbance against the background of stars, a trace in the visual or aural spectra, even a magical trail, called the aurora of Dragons. She's \u2026 vanished.>\n\n<She teleported, noble Dragoness?>\n\n<Don't blaspheme \u2013 you wouldn't know the lore! Hush, child. I'm hunting.>\n\nSmarting at Qualiana's dismissive tone, Auli turned her blind eyes to where the sky must surely be, and cursed her fate. She knew the lore. She knew how Dramagon's minions, the fabled Red Lords of Haozi \u2013 a race reputed to be giants \u2013 had built magical amplifiers and disruptors and torn apart whole populations of Dragons and Humans in their quest for an elusive and ultimately disproven science. It was a tale she had not yet written; certainly, one she not dared share with her hatchling class!\n\nThe vibration of the Dragoness' inner fires and magic communicated subtly down Qualiana's limb and into the curve of her paw. Audible. Tangible. This was the pulse and fire song of her inner life, so different to the expression of Human life. Intrigued, Auli-Ambar placed her hands upon the Dragoness' warm fore-talon and listened with far more than her ears. She had often been around Dragons, but opportunities to touch them were rare; just the odd contact of claw or talon. So impersonal compared to that wondrous hug she had shared with her father \u2013 when would he visit again? Had the memory slipped from his mind like mists from the Isles were said to?\n\nStrange how some laws had no need to be written.\n\nAuli rocked back and forth in the Dragoness' paw, disregarding another annoyed spit of fire as she searched deeper. Zanthrillior's creativity had unfolded to her insights of unexpected piquancy. He had pierced time and possibility to offer insight. What was a pickle \u2013 a pikil? Pykol? She had never heard of that type of gemstone.\n\nIf music could pierce time \u2026\n\nImpossible.\n\nIf she sang magic as Master Jo'el had accused her \u2026\n\nEven more impossible.\n\nAuli laughed inside herself. Perhaps some things were more impossible than others. Perhaps Qualiana was right. Wishes might be free; they might unchain the very portals of the stars. They might become miracles.\n\nUlulating her song softly about the wuthering of wind across the Dragoness' scales and wings, she vocalised:\n\n<O songs of night I bid thee waken,>\n\n<And reveal to us the secrets,>\n\n<Of a Dragoness hid beneath thy starlight.>\n\n\"Auli, did I not tell you \u2013 what \u2013 a reflection?\" spluttered Qualiana. \"Do that again!\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 I'm sorry \u2013\"\n\n\"Shut the fangs! I mean, stop apologising and sing, you beautiful fire thief.\"\n\nAuli gulped, opened her mouth, and croaked like a warty bush toad. \"Sorry, Qualiana \u2026 I just \u2013\"\n\n<Shh. Easy on the winds, hatchling. Quiet your heart whilst I rise upon this thermal.> She waited for what seemed an inordinately long time, but could only have been a few seconds as the Dragoness flexed her wings to catch the warm, rising night breeze. <How do I keep forgetting all you are? It is not right. Sing now.>\n\nAs the notes flowed softly from her breath, like starlight string plucked by ethereal hands, Auli-Ambar wondered if she saw what the Dragoness saw, just a faint glimmering in the darkness, as if a moth's wings stirred the darkness with almost imperceptible, or unfocussed, radiance.\n\nWhy did her sight refuse to heal?\n\n<There. We have her in our sights. Softly \u2026 softer \u2026 keep singing \u2026>\n\nThe Dragoness banked smoothly, her massively powerful body rippling as she glided along with infeasible ease. So many tonnes in the air and she seemed lighter than a feather, predatory, never more at home in her element. Auli whispered her song and felt the Dragoness linking with her mind, deadly intent.\n\n<She slips away over the Isle's Western periphery,> Qualiana breathed. <Cunning, her magic. Extraordinary technique. Always, magic surprises.>\n\nAuli did not know whether she referred to Ianthine, or to her passenger.\n\nNow the Red Dragoness sideslipped, wafting Auli's hair over her face. She brushed it back from her face, but what did that matter? What if a person could learn to see by magic?\n\nQualiana hunted.\n\nThey whipped past foliage, and the sudden cool spray of a roaring waterfall, before Qualiana suddenly slowed, seeming to peer ahead. <Where did you go, irksome Maroon? Come to shell-mommy and we'll have a sweet little chitchat.>\n\nAuli's music gurgled with her laughter and then settled, obeying the willpower of her seeking.\n\n<Perfect,> said Qualiana. <See that? There under the outcropping, a very old abandoned roost from the earliest days of us Lesser Dragons settling upon Gi'ishior. The entrance is very narrow. They say we Dragonkind used to be smaller in stature \u2013 ah, the entrance is warded just inside, and what the reeking hells is that stench?>\n\n<A sewage outlet pipe from the collection tanks,> Auli realised, blenching as a particularly potent whiff assaulted her nostrils. She supposed it made sense. What better garbage dump than the bottomless Cloudlands? The air was unutterably foul, despite Qualiana's shielding. She pulled her face veil up to her nose. Sometimes she might wish for a little less acuteness of the senses!\n\n<Can you help me see Ianthine's \u2013 oh.>\n\nAuli laughed hollowly. <Just point me in the right direction, o Dragoness.>\n\nShe clucked, <I just assume, don't I? Right. Plucks up weapon. Points weapon.> Had she not already been sitting a-paw, Auli would have collapsed with laughter. <Fire away!>\n\nHer chirruping noises were almost drowned out by the rushing wind as Qualiana accelerated, jinking slightly to mirror the lay of the cliff, before she suddenly flared and braked, tossing Auli from the palm of her paw to her talons. Thankfully, her rear-inward talon hooked on Auli's bracelet. The girl felt herself swinging in the air from her right wrist, but she still managed a few peeping notes before Qualiana furled her wings with a sharp rustling sound and landed hard.\n\nClearly, the Dragoness had no idea what the slingshot power of her landing would do to a small Human body. The impact snapped the bracelet like thin thread. Auli hurtled head over heels down a sandy tunnel, sensing the ripping protest of portal magic as she and Qualiana tore through. She flung out arms, legs, everything she had, and barely managed to slow herself. The footing was covered in a thin layer of pebbles \u2013 a trap in its own right, she realised belatedly, skidding and tumbling helplessly down the smooth slope. Behind her the Dragoness was forced to proceed more slowly because of her bulk.\n\nAuli ricocheted off a boulder, yelped loudly, and slammed in a tight ball directly against a shifting target. Ianthine's rump!\n\n\"Oof!\" she gasped.\n\n<Attacker! How did you \u2013 Dragon \u2013 huh?>\n\nAuli had the impression that a tumbling blind girl smacking into her backside was rather a different form of assault than the Maroon Dragoness had been prepared for, but still, the immediate impact that flicked her sideways as Ianthine whirled on a brass dral, knocked the breath right out of her. She plowed a furrow through bones and filth and thumped into a pile of rotting meat that slowly avalanched over her head and shoulders, but even that stench was overpowered by another realisation. She heard a thin wailing nearby. Muffled. An infant's cry! She'd suffocate in this gunge!\n\n\"Ianthine, you didn't!\" Auli-Ambar yelled, feeling frantically about her with both hands \u2013 that cry was so weak and tiny! Maggots wriggled and squashed greasily between her fingers, but she flicked them off. The babe could hardly be a week old. She had to find it. Rescue it.\n\n\"It's you again, you \u2013\"\n\n*GNARRRR!!*\n\nIanthine whirled a second time. <QUALIANA! Leave this place before I destroy thee!>\n\nThe cave's reek was beyond foetid. Auli did not know or even want to think about what might have died here, nor how recently, but her nostrils detected the acid-fruity reek of Human excreta amongst it all. She knew that stink, because her cleaning work had recently taken her into a few Human chambers as a substitute dirt bagger, as the job was called. Garbage collection service. When she had exclaimed at the contents of one sack, the young mother had explained \u2013 in flat, unfriendly tones \u2013 the exact source of her nostrils' discontent. Baby sick mingled with the results of a badly upset infant's digestion.\n\nWhile the Dragonesses faced off, Auli's exploration pushed aside rancid meat, and touched slick bones and sodden cloths. Acid fury churned in her gut. Sick, sick, sick Dragoness!\n\n<Ianthine, how dare you?> snarled Qualiana.\n\n<It's the child! The child of ruzal, the bearer of mighty enigmas,> howled the Maroon, in a voice clearly roaming beyond the realms of reason. <It bore the Scroll of Binding, it did \u2013 this swamp-spawned nightmare \u2013 this repulsive effluent of a beast's belly!>\n\n<Back down, Ianthine! Auli be careful \u2026>\n\nAt last! Movement amongst the layers of soiled cloths! The infant's mewling cries seized her willpower, rousing an instinct she had never experienced so keenly before. Protect this little life! Deep instinct ruled.\n\n<I'll kill you!> roared Ianthine. Talons rent rock. A paw crushed bones right alongside her prone body. Yet the Maroon paused. Had her presence somehow stayed the wrath of Ianthine's paw, preventing her from executing the baby?\n\nQualiana snickered, <Not before I tear your entrails out of your spavined, sagging belly!>\n\nThat encounter was going one way \u2013 downhill. Auli fell to grabbing armfuls of whatever she could find. The crying was inside this stuff, somewhere. Piles of urine-soaked cloth. Skulls. Stringy bits of damp, unknowable origins. Somewhere there was a tiny infant hurting, longing, needing \u2026 needing someone with eyes! Curse her disability!\n\n*GNNARRRRGGHHH!!* Thundering simultaneously, the Dragonesses clashed inside the cosy roost. Scrabbling. Draconic fisticuffs falling like the blows of five hundred-pound hammers. Tearing with fang and claw, their altercation shook the very foundations of Gi'ishior. Between the paws pounding down from all directions, Auli scrabbled her way through filth to find a precious life stolen from Fra'anior only knew where. Rock cracked from the ceiling and gashed open her skull \u2013 but she collapsed in just the right place, for a miniscule hand bunted her cheek, and then seized her nose with a surprisingly firm grip.\n\n<Whaaaaaa \u2026> yowled the child.\n\n\"Got her!\" Auli snaffled up the pile and rolled away, clutching it to her chest.\n\nHer body juddered off the trash heap as a paw smashed down so close by, the unsheathed talons tangled in her hair. Auli tore herself loose. Slide-dash-scrambling, away!\n\n*KAABOOOMM!!* The grappling Dragons smacked into rock above her. Qualiana bellowed in pain. Heat rolled over her back in stultifying waves. The mess smouldered now, making the reek even worse \u2013 if that were possible. Auli coughed and slithered along, desperate not to crush the babe but knowing one misplaced draconic step or the lashing of a tail could end it \u2013 end them both \u2013 forever.\n\n<Fool!> roared Ianthine. <I am the Maroon, and you know not my power!>\n\n<Auli, flee!>\n\n<Stop! I will have the child \u2026>\n\nThe girl screamed back, <What would you do with a child? Aaaaaiiieeee \u2026>\n\nAs she fled blindly from the sound of the Dragoness' voices, one hand outstretched in the hope that she'd somehow protect herself from an unseen boulder or wall, her scream suddenly modulated into a piercing, savage wail. Qualiana and Ianthine both roared, but the Maroon Dragoness by far the greater \u2013 in pain and confusion and distress!\n\nIanthine howled, <You've stripped my power!>\n\n<FIEND!!> Qualiana must have the upper paw, now, for the concussion that blew Auli off her feet had to be the Red Dragoness body-slamming her opponent against solid rock. Her ears clearly identified a sharp cracking of bone. <YOU'LL PAY FOR THIS!>\n\nIanthine moaned a long, blood-bubbling sound of anguish.\n\nAuli stumbled across ripped-up animal carcasses once more, but this part of the cavern was at least sandy underfoot and none too dangerous. She skinned her elbow royally trying to shield the babe, however.\n\nA deathly silence enveloped the roost.\n\nFreeze. Oh, do remember to breathe. What was happening? The girl counted her limbs. Mostly present, it seemed. Minus plenty of skinned and scorched skin, and a decent hank of hair torn out of her scalp.\n\nShe clutched the baby to her breast. \"I've got you, little one.\"\n\nQualiana snarled, <Sapphurion comes. I will not need him, will I?> The other Dragoness' breath rasped as though a paw stood upon her throat. Both beasts panted heavily, but to Auli's ear, one Dragoness sounded triumphant and the other, troubled.\n\nAuli blurted out, <Qualiana! Quick-wings, take her surrender.>\n\nIanthine gasped, <Never!>\n\n<Ianthine, what's the babe's name? Why did you bring her here? Where were you planning to keep her?>\n\nHer reasonable questions seemed to calm both beasts. Auli rocked the babe gently. She faced Ianthine with what she hoped was a self-assured posture. <We can take her, if you agree. What's she called? Does she have a name?>\n\nThe Maroon Dragoness babbled something nonsensical, but when Qualiana repeated the question, she screeched suddenly, <Hualiama! She's called Hualiama \u2013 you must protect her. Keep her from them all.>\n\n<Who's 'them'?> snarled Qualiana, but the other Dragoness descended again into wordless gabbling, as though sanity had receded from her Isle.\n\n\"Hualiama,\" Auli breathed, trying to loosen the ghastly cloths. Such a tiny bundle, wailing with surprising fortitude, not to mention volume. \"There now, Hualiama. You're safe now. All will be well.\"\n\n\"Safe? Well?\" Qualiana echoed. \"The Elders will probe and question Ianthine with all the powers of their magic, and when they wrest the truth free of her skull, that scrap of Humanity will be hurled into the Cloudlands. Nothing can keep her from death.\"\n\n\"Kill her, you kill the prophecy,\" Ianthine cackled horribly. She seemed to be perfectly lucid when she wanted to be, Auli fumed. Perhaps it was another game. Draconic subterfuge. \"Clutch the filthy whelp to your bosom, my precious ruzal-bane. Keep her well. You know it not, for the future is veiled to blind fools such as thee, but if this child should perish, so too destruction all Dragonkind shall cherish.\"\n\nSuddenly, her words rang with a terrible knell of doom.\n\nAuli-Ambar shuddered. Inescapable truth dwelled in her strange statements, and it seemed to her that behind the Maroon Dragoness' speech, the distant roaring of the great Onyx Dragon reverberated like thunder over the Islands.\n\nAlthough it seemed blasphemy to speak, she asked, \"What do we do? We can't just let her die. She's hurt. Hualiama needs help.\"\n\nDid she hope that naming an infant could somehow keep the marauding windrocs from her door? Or Dragons? Why were all these powers converging upon one tiny life, as if she were scraps thrown to feral felines to fight over?\n\nQualiana said, \"Sapphurion's seconds away, followed by a whole Dragonwing. Probably half of Gi'ishior wants to kill Ianthine right now. They'll tear this roost apart and the babe \u2013 little Hualiama \u2026\" <Oh, Auli! I could not bear to lose another!>\n\nGrief linked them. Searing. Gripping. Trusting.\n\nSlowly, Auli said, \"I have a plan. I think.\"\n\n\"A plan?\"\n\n\"I'll just need to jump inside your mouth.\"\n\n\"What?\" Fire sizzled overhead as Qualiana lost control of her stomach's sphincter muscles, she was so shocked. \"Have you gone completely Moons mad, girl?\"\n\nAuli said absently, \"I sort of read this in a scroll. Actually, bigger is better. What about Sapphurion? Do you think we can convince him to devour me?\"\n\n<Crunch, crunch, crunch, tiny little bones,> Ianthine cackled evilly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Sapphurion spat Auli-Ambar out onto a cushion. <Faugh! That's foul! I have to rinse out my mouth. Twenty times. Back in a wingflip.>\n\nAuli knew exactly what he meant. Hualiama's stench had practically cauterised her nostrils from the inside, and she was not convinced her sense of smell would ever recover. <I'll get a laver of warm water. We need to get her clean. Where can I put her, Qualiana?>\n\n<Here. I'll dig out a tiny nest.>\n\nSapphurion rumbled, <Grandion \u2013>\n\n<Arkurion took him, my third heart,> said Qualiana. <Even he must not know what transpired this day. Go fetch warm water, soft cloths and the mildest soap you can find, Auli. Hurry.>\n\nShe had zero experience with babies. Auli nearly drowned the poor thing twice as the tiny body, ridiculously slick once she managed to get soap through the encrusted dirt to the skin, slipped out of her grasp. The second time she herself skidded on the wet bathroom floor, dunked her upper body in the laver and managed to tip out most of its contents, leaving her somehow juggling a squalling babe into her arms and onto her lap. Hualiama apparently possessed an excellent set of lungs and the outrage of a mishandled Dragoness \u2013 well, close enough. Her wailing hit a pitch that pained Auli's ears.\n\nThis was much, much harder than she had imagined.\n\n\"Shh, little one,\" Qualiana whispered. \"You splashed soap in her eyes. Rinse them. Gently, girl! You're not handling a mop.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Auli bit her lip. Soap had never troubled her eyes, she supposed.\n\n\"Here, wrap her body. These are the softest cloths we have.\"\n\nAuli sighed as she fumbled with the cloths. Bath time? Disaster narrowly averted. Clothing Hualiama was a humiliating exercise in trying to snugly wrap a fowl-sized being of skinny, flailing arms and legs. So delicate, she feared to break the baby. Feeding? Auli understood from the rotting bits of food caught in her soiled wrappings that Ianthine had sustained the child on a diet of raw meat and fruit during her journey from afar \u2013 likely from Kaolili, Sapphurion noted somewhat dazedly \u2013 to Fra'anior, keeping her alive, but only barely. Poor mite!\n\n\"She needs milk,\" she blurted out.\n\n\"Then put her to your breast, child,\" said Qualiana. \"Quick wings, now.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 me?\" Auli squeaked.\n\n\"Aye. You're both mammals, aren't you?\"\n\nShe blushed up a perfect firestorm. \"I don't \u2013 but, I'm too young!\"\n\n\"You haven't developed yet?\"\n\nAuli thought she might just combust. \"I \u2026 I \u2026 Islands' sakes, Qualiana! I'd need to be \u2026 with egg, so to speak! I think.\"\n\n\"My mistake,\" chortled the Dragoness. \"Look, her skin's been badly burned. Ianthine didn't change those filthy wrappings \u2013 do they smell acidic to you? I should \u2026 but I'm afraid to touch her. Too much power? Do you think it's safe?\"\n\n\"What about salve?\" Auli said. Hualiama's wailing showed no sign of abating. \"Maybe the soap wasn't the wisest choice.\"\n\n\"It hurt her more?\"\n\n\"Aye. I feel so stupid!\"\n\n\"Fra'anior only knows what nasty infections she'll have contracted from Ianthine's lair.\" Qualiana spat fire aside; Auli felt the heat flare against the skin of her arms. \"Foolish faeces-obsessed crazy-Dragon!\"\n\n<Kaolili's a two-week straight flight, minimum,> Sapphurion's voice boomed from the next chamber. He kept gargling water vigorously up and down his long throat and between his fangs, before spitting it forcibly down the waste chute. Auli heard the sprung cover snap back into place, keeping bad odours out of the roost. <I'd estimate that scrap's no more than a couple of weeks old. Probably torn from her dead mother's arms, if I know Ianthine's wings in any shape or form! We'll to have to deal with her. The Council want nothing but blood after she dared to attack us; they'll certainly enquire about the Maroon's hostage. Tell me again \u2013 what are we supposed to do with a Human babe?>\n\n<Keep her,> Qualiana and Auli-Ambar chorused.\n\nThe silence in the other chamber became fearfully deep.\n\nAuli asked, <Was she seen? Hualiama, I mean?>\n\nSapphurion said, <I don't believe so. All the pursuing Dragons sighted was a wad of \u2026 garbage. My third heart, do you truly mean \u2026>\n\n<Just for a bit,> Auli temporised. Beside her ear, the Dragoness sighed. She knew she must speak for them both. <Keep her someplace until we can figure out a solution, I mean. Care for her. She's just a babe.>\n\nSapphurion's answering rumble was far from comforting.\n\nVery well. She would advocate for one who could not speak for herself. <My Lord Dragon, even the Draco-Mystic does not speak without reason,> Auli argued formally in the draconic fashion. <We must discern her meaning and purpose in conveying this infant to Gi'ishior \u2013 hush, my petal. She won't stop crying! What do I do, Qualiana? Shh, darling one. I'm here.> The child's bath-fresh scent almost undid her composure. Thick and taut of voice, she continued, <Please let us not murder Hualiama without knowledge, I beg you. I need time to access the forbidden lore. And \u2013>\n\n<MURDER?>\n\n<I misspoke, noble Dragon. Hear my intent \u2013>\n\n<Where exactly do you plan to keep her?> he pressed.\n\nThere could be only one answer. The news would be all over the Halls within a day, unless they could divine a sacrosanct location, and hide her there. This pair of Dragons had suffered, and lost. No visitors came to their roost. Yet how could she presume to ask such a thing of them? Even for the sake of a foundling, a sweet, helpless scrap of life swept up by mad Ianthine?\n\nAt last, Auli cough-squeaked, <Here?>\n\nSapphurion growled, <Here? In my roost? Impossible! Dragons do not raise Human children; it is expressly forbidden under draconic law! Do you know the penalty\u2013 especially if I, the leader of all Dragons, should commit such a heinous act?>\n\nAuli gulped. Catastrophe.\n\n<Who would feed her?> he added, but Auli thought she detected a moderation in his tone. <Human babes this young need care twenty-seven hours a day.>\n\n<I \u2013 I can help.>\n\nQualiana said, <It's not that easy, child. We'd need clothes. Food. Medicines. Ianthine mistreated Hualiama most sorely. And \u2013 what do you Humans call them \u2013 the cloths and padding used for infant waste?>\n\n<Wrappings,> said Auli.\n\nThese Dragons thought the unthinkable. Hope fluttered in her breast.\n\nSapphurion's paws thump-thump-thumped across the roost. She knew from his breathing that he stood just beside the door of the inner chamber, clearly considering his mate and her two charges. What were his thoughts, his qualms and reflexions? Did his fire orbs flick between the infant, the blind girl and his beloved? Aye, perhaps, for Hualiama seemed to quieten in awareness of his keen regard.\n\nThe constant turmoil of Sapphurion's fires suddenly struck her as so eerily melodic, every hair on the back of her neck bristled at once. He would, wouldn't he? She knew his decision without need to see, nor for him to speak it.\n\nQualiana said, <She's looking up at you, Auli. Just a slit of the eyes \u2013 they're green, I think. A smoky green. And now over at you, Sapphurion.>\n\nAuli touched the babe gently, moved to tears as tiny fingers wrapped about her questing forefinger. If only the bond she felt were not so fearfully deep, born of her own need and desire, and the imperatives scorched upon her awareness by Ianthine's strange utterances, this would be so much easier.\n\n\"Aye?\" she whispered. \"Is that how it is?\"\n\nHualiama gurgled faintly.\n\n<I could not \u2013> Sapphurion's voice was all syrupy gravel, at least three octaves lower than normal. After a deafening attempt to clear his throat, he tried again, <O treasure of mine third heart, this Dragon should perish for grief should \u2013 I cannot condemn her. I cannot! Who am I to pass judgement upon a life plucked from the mire of Ianthine's madness? Ah, mine fires, they do gutter \u2026 mine egglings wert lost! LOST!>\n\nThe keening note of Dragonsong wrung a sob from the depths of Auli's heart. Her eyes burned; she rubbed them fiercely.\n\n<O how fierily I love thee, thou the beloved blaze of mine hearts' ardour,> Qualiana crooned.\n\nThe mighty Sapphire intoned, <O Hualiama, none may know from what fate thou wert snatched, but my scales prickle at its great terror; nor to what enigmatic destiny we have succoured thee, but we do promise, with the thrice-fold certainty of these souls gathered about thee, to cherish thee as best we are able in this life, until that dark day cometh when thou must perforce depart from this roost. This shall be thy hiding place. Thou art safe. Thou art home, Hualiama.>\n\nA miracle.\n\nPicking her up, Auli snuggled Hualiama close. A moment later, Qualiana's warm paw enclosed them both, and Sapphurion stepped over and the girl knew from the rustling sound and a very slight occlusion of her darkness that he had covered them with his mighty wings.\n\nThe male Dragon murmured, <For expediting infant supplies, we'd need a capable thief. Know anyone willing?>\n\n<Me! Uh \u2026 am I permitted, o Sapphurion?>\n\nHe drew a perfectly monstrous breath and pronounced with false gravitas, <Permitted indeed! My wings do shiver as I consider letting the likes of thee loose in mine own home, Auli-Ambar. Nonetheless I, Sapphurion, Dragon Elder of Gi'shior, do bestow upon thee the title, 'Authorised Thief.'>\n\nQualiana chortled away like an amused blast furnace.\n\nAuli chuckled, <You're hardly bigger than a chunk of sweetbread, Hualiama. Home amongst Dragons, eh? What do you think of that, little one?>\n\nThe babe gurgled as if imitating their laughter. Then her chubby baby fingers found a hank of Auli's hair and yanked it. Hard.\n\n<Ouch! You rascally dragonet!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Hidden Acclaim",
                "text": "Pandemonium! Bleary-eyed and aching in every bone of her body, Auli-Ambar awoke to shouting in the next chamber. When Master Chamzu's decorum cracked, a regular occurrence of late, his temper was impressive. This sounded like a wrathful Dragon, and he was giving no quarter.\n\n\"I know what I heard!\" asserted the Dragon, in sonorous yet scathing tones. \"Dissembling is beneath a man of your high virtue, Chief Scrollkeeper Chamzu. You will not conceal this prodigy from the great Zanthrillior! It is beyond the pale! Those other Dragons thought it was I who plucked their very scales with quite the most sensational vocalisations of woe I have heard in all my eighty-seven years beneath the suns, but my ear canals know better, for my auditory gifts are among the finest \u2013\"\n\n\"Noble Dragon,\" Master Chamzu put in, with his customary dignity.\n\nUh-oh.\n\n\"\u2013 and I declare, I will have that creature brought to this roost, right here, right now! There was no dragonet in my concert. The voice was not purely draconic. Well, it was close, and that only makes it trebly, quadruply magnificent, and I wouldst pluck it as a delicate bud and acclaim its beauty as it ought to be acclaimed \u2013 you cannot hide this treasure! Oh, I am bereft! You wound me, Chief Scrollkeeper. Thou piercest mine breast as with the monumental fore-talon of Fra'anior himself, and I should pine; nay, I should perish for lack of knowing the truth. The truth, man! Is it too much to ask?\"\n\nRoaring rajals, he sounded as if he were weeping!\n\nAuli-Ambar found she had leaped out of bed, her heart thumping triple-time. This was terrible. She didn't want to be admired! She had been a fool to start singing along with Zanthrillior, but she realised also, she could not have stopped herself. The music had overwhelmed her, heightening her emotions to an unbearable pitch.\n\n\"Very well, I shall seek it myself!\"\n\n\"Mighty Zanthrillior, I beg you, if you grant me just a minute \u2013\"\n\n\"It's close? That close?\" the Dragon challenged. Master Chamzu protested, but Zanthrillior raised his voice in an echoing croon, <I know thou art near, mine muse, mine sensational songbird \u2026 wilt thou not attend?>\n\nAuli considered bolting, but her knees chose that moment to execute a most unwelcome betrayal and she tumbled backward upon her bed. How \u2026\n\nUtilising the full ambit of his extraordinary voice, Zanthrillior sang with a most peculiar set of inflections shading his Dragonish, <Arise! Arise, mine magic, for this presence doth flutter its tiny wings upon the seventh sense \u2026 arise, o music of a matchless soul, arise!>\n\nTo her astonishment, Auli-Ambar felt something respond deep in her chest. It felt like a baby bird stirring at its mother's call \u2013 *peep.* Just that.\n\nRevealed!\n\nAt once, he roared, <I have thee now! Sing to mine music!>\n\nHumming so loudly the sound made Auli's teeth vibrate in her jawbone, the Dragon charged up the corridor past her door. *Peep,* chirped her magic, a single note of the uttermost purity.\n\n*SCREEECCHH!!*\n\nZanthrillior's talons shrieked against stone before there came a loud crash and a curse. He had run headlong into the corridor's sharp bend, Auli supposed, trying and failing to stifle a naughty urge to laugh. The Dragon promptly reverse-course-charged with much the same abandon. Fearing for her newly repaired door, she managed to leap off the bed. She tottered off in mostly the right direction, bruising her right elbow on her dresser on the way past, before heading for the endangered wood panels.\n\n<SING!!>\n\n<Whaaa \u2013 mmm!> Auli clapped a hand over her mouth as the plangent blast took possession of her vocal cords, but it was far too late. How was he doing that?\n\nChamzu yelled, \"Auli, get \u2013\"\n\nShe ducked. *KERBLAM!!* Splinters exploded over her bowed head and shoulders.\n\nZanthrillior paused in the doorway, his fluttering wings and unsteady fires conveying a state of great agitation. Auli-Ambar gingerly found her feet, wishing inanely that she wore more than a thin night shift as she turned to face the Dragon's furnace-like breath.\n\n<A girl?> he spluttered. <What is this? Was it thee \u2013 the girl in the mask, before the concert! The Dragons spoke of thee, but I do not remember seeing you in my audience. Was it thee? Sing a note for me!>\n\nWell, Dragons were nothing if not demanding.\n\n<Noble Dragon, I \u2013>\n\nHe carolled joyously, <Thou wilt sing for me. O music, be known!>\n\n<Peep \u2013 grr! Will you stop that? Uh \u2026 it's embarrassing, I meant. Sorry, noble Dragon \u2026>\n\n\"Ha!\" he exclaimed. \"I knew it! My nose for talent is unsurpassed! I am the great Zanthrillior, after all, and you, o maiden most fair, appear to have a most captivating penchant for masks. Might I not see thine eyes?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Auli touched the bandages.\n\n\"She's blind,\" said Master Chamzu, stepping into calm-the-situation mode. \"Noble Zanthrillior, might I introduce our Assistant Lore Specialist, Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya? She works with Chief Librarian Sazutharr in the Dragon Library, and works as a Roost Keeper on her days off.\"\n\n\"This gifted singer is a cleaner? How romantic! Just the stuff balladeers drivel on about \u2013 quixotic nonsense-spinners, they are, but these clich\u00e9d storylines certainly draw in the audiences,\" burbled Zanthrillior. At close range, his rich, fluting tones made Auli feel quite dizzy. She stilled an urge to flap her hands in an attempt to drive off the cinnamon overtones of his breath. \"Ha. Fra'aniorian ears with perfect little points. She'll have a musical education second to none. And the blindness is certainly a hidden gift \u2013 the ears become unusually acute, don't you know, which for Human musicians is more than a boon. Their hearing is terribly limited otherwise.\"\n\n\"What's going on here?\"\n\n\"Arkurion,\" Auli squeaked. \"Uh, I think I'm in some sort of trouble \u2013\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" he enthused.\n\n\"What? Arkurion!\" This time, a rajal-worthy screech.\n\nThe Mercury Blue said, \"Well, in my experience, this isn't exactly unusual for you. Another broken door? Another Dragon growling without? Why does all this seem familiar?\"\n\nBy the sounds of things, Zanthrillior took a hefty snap at Arkurion's shoulder, which was a draconic way of expressing annoyance \u2013 politely, she supposed. She appreciated his contribution to Arkurion's chastisement. A five-foot-eleven girl trying to tell off a multi-tonne Dragon was just not the same.\n\nThe musician snorted, \"Ha! And you dared to conceal this Human's talent from me; I, who am none other than the matchless Zanthrillior?\"\n\nArkurion growled, \"I did not \u2013\"\n\n\"Feckless hatchling of feeble, fizzling fires! No mind, you contrived to perform a noble service in exposing her to my towering eminence. I suppose that'll have to do for your miniscule contribution to this equation. Now, run along and play with your scrolls, there's a good youngling.\"\n\nAuli distinctly heard Arkurion's jaw strike the floor at his paws. Hers was not far off.\n\nEvidently thrusting his muzzle into her doorway as far as it would fit \u2013 which was not very far at all \u2013 Zanthrillior boomed, \"Attend! I will have an hour of your time, young Auli-Ambar, and no more unworthy obfuscations will I tolerate. Answer my questions. How many summers have you, girl \u2013 seventeen? Eighteen? How do you sing coloratura notes of such purity? Is that your normal vocal range or your whistle voice? Which instruments can you play? To what standard? Do you play by ear or read off a score purposed for the blind? And why, by Fra'anior's own fangs, did you venture to provoke me by singing during my concert? Mine! You seem quite the shrinking little Isles-violet otherwise. Not that I mind, for how evocatively you sang, I have never \u2013 I'm just overwhelmed, you must understand, and quite blown off my paws by this euphonious enchantment, this magic most melodious which warbles from your throat as though the finest songbird of Fra'anior were clasped within!\"\n\nAuli gulped, \"Erm \u2026\"\n\nWith surprising delicacy, Zanthrillior seized her left wrist with the tips of his claw-sheathed talons. \"At once!\"\n\n\"Can I get dressed first?\"\n\n\"Dracodrivel!\" he snorted. \"Must genius wait upon the mundane? One minute, girl! One! Oh, what joy thrills my verimost fires! I shall pluck the strings of your gift and polish it until it shines like the stars above!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "A certain flair for theft apparently ran in the family, Auli-Ambar discovered, as she helped herself to various stores and needs. Every waking hour, which far outweighed the hours of sleep, was consumed by demands. Arkurion and Sazutharr for studies. Zanthrillior to work her relentlessly at harp and voice lessons. And Hualiama, always Hualiama, needing goat's milk or changing or burping or putting to sleep \u2026 she had never imagined a weeks-old infant could be more demanding than an angry Dragoness, but so she was. Every night she collapsed into bed and slept like a stunned ralti sheep, before waking before dawn to resume her duties. How did mothers do it? Did they ever sleep?\n\nTo cap it all off, she had another run-in with Razzior two weeks after Zanthrillior's concert performance. Just his general bullying for no particular reason, it seemed, although her father's name flew into the conversation with shocking venom. The Orange Dragon did not explain why. He just pinned her against a wall with one unsheathed talon holding her throat ransom, and blew smoke, threats and a particularly nasty case of halitosis over her for two minutes non-stop before he apparently heard someone coming and left a sweating, shaking lump of nerves in his wake as he stalked off.\n\nWhy her father? She did not understand. Must there weekly be some storm brewing between Dragon and Human around the Cluster?\n\nStill, she was a decent thief. Far lighter fingers in the storerooms than upon strings.\n\nThis evening would be her last lesson with Zanthrillior. Her version of tears, an acidic burning of the eyes that produced no fluid whatsoever, maddened her unreasonably as Auli-Ambar mooched down to the Concert Chamber. Why had the Dragon changed location from their usual meeting place in the music chambers? Was this to be another chastening session in discovering just how woodenly and unmusically a Human girl could play?\n\nTwo days ago, Zanthrillior had thrown a very fiery fit and stormed off mid-lesson, thundering, \"Find some passion from somewhere, child! Come see me when you do!\"\n\nNever a Dragon of half-measures!\n\nYesterday, a pithy scroll note laced with toasty nuances of authority and command had arrived at her rooms, which Auli discovered courtesy of an accidental kick as she entered. Zanthrillior's curt summons. Did he not realise that she had a cleaning schedule, lessons and a baby to care for besides?\n\nToday \u2026 one humiliation, fast incoming.\n\nShe had not found passion. What she knew was exhaustion, frustration and a soul-deep darkness that she could not seem to shift no matter how much she fought it.\n\nBlind girl flails at darkness. Sickening irony.\n\nFeeling rather unwell, she descended fourteen levels and joined the main, large corridor leading to the deep cavern where Zanthrillior had made soul soup with all that was Auli-Ambar. She realised how terrified she was of experiencing more of the same. She gritted her teeth. No. This time, this girl would enter with her head held high, and for once in her benighted life, she would show a Dragon she had what it took. Passion. Fight. Auli flexed her fingers as if readying herself for a bout of draconic fisticuffs. She would beat every dark cloud, be it Dragon, Human, emotional or physical, until it fled screaming out of her life.\n\nStarting right now.\n\nAccordingly, she padded into the Concert Cavern with a firestorm of phobias churning in her belly, but an outwardly confident mien.\n\nZanthrillior said, \"Thank you for attending, Auli-Ambar. Come down to the stage. Can you find the way?\"\n\nHis regretful tone ambushed her. \"I \u2026 think so.\"\n\n\"Not that way. More to your left.\" In a moment, the Dragon flipped into the air, wafted overhead and landed with a rush of wind right behind her. \"Walk with me.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar accompanied the Dragon down to the stage; he was deft, but clearly not accustomed to any mode of helping a blind person. She barked her toes sharply on the steps leading up to the stage, then discovered Zanthrillior had neglected to inform her that they were not designed for Human use. Her stomach met the top edge next. Thump.\n\n\"Ha!\" barked the Dragon, plucked her up, and deposited her on the stage.\n\nHow peculiar. Beneath her habitually bare feet the onyx stone felt as warm as if it were alive. Onyx was supposed to be like shiny darkness. Yet this stone stank of magic of a kind she had never encountered before. Auli desperately wanted to itch at her eyes beneath the thick bandages, but desisted \u2013 always surprises with Dragonkind. Always.\n\nZanthrillior announced, \"The master has failed the student.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I am supposed to be a master musician.\"\n\n\"Noble Dragon, you are.\"\n\n\"Then the great Zanthrillior is far from a master teacher.\" Auli made a dissenting noise, but when she immediately apologised, he said, \"It is not for a master teacher to blow fireballs at your vanishingly tiny rump and fulminate fruitless threats. It is for me to educe, to elicit, to coax forth the timid talent within. Put another way, the faculty exists. Clearly! The student merely lacks the means and the knowledge to employ it. My job is to supply said means and knowledge. Your voice, Auli-Ambar, is an astounding instrument. These two weeks have taught us both the truth of that. Your fingers want to be astounding. They pine. Prickle. Palpitate!\"\n\n\"Aye, Master?\"\n\nEven his laughter was melodious. Clearly, this Dragon was beside himself with excitement. He murmured, \"Reach out, Auli-Ambar. Just a foot ahead of your nose.\"\n\nShe waved her hands charily ahead of her, and found wood. Oh, and metal. She traced leafy tendrils picked out in gemstones ensconced in cool metal settings, and stroked a cool, polished surface that ran to a level below her knees. Whatever it was, the apparatus had a slightly musty odour, as if stored for years, before being taken out and cleaned and polished by the most loving hands \u2013 or paws. There was nary a trace of dust nor dirt in any of the detailed metalwork; the artisanship was flawless.\n\n*Tzzzzz-inggg!*\n\nAuli-Ambar's hands jumped as her long tunic sleeve inadvertently brushed the strings, and she realised what she was handling. She felt along the neck to the join nearest to her body. \"A Dragonharp?\"\n\n\"A one-eighth size Dragonharp, to be precise.\"\n\nAuli said wonderingly, \"What's it doing here, noble Zanthrillior? I didn't know they made harps this small. I mean, I could almost \u2026\"\n\n\"Almost what?\" the Dragon drawled.\n\nThe breath snagged in her throat.\n\nAfter a moment, he added, \"I understand, truly I do, little one. Place your hands upon the strings but do not play them yet. Just listen; forget what has been before. Ready?\" Auli shuffled forward, clobbered her shins on a stool evidently meant for the musician, and sat with alacrity. Zanthrillior said, \"A nod will do. Good. Right, I want you to cast your mind back to that concert, and remember what you were thinking about when you began to sing. How did you feel?\"\n\n\"Sad.\"\n\n\"Sad is good.\"\n\nNo, that was the pain. That was where she hurt most, and she knew that if he tried to compel her with his gift one more time, she would bolt out of that door and never return. Her hands began to shake like leaves in a wind.\n\n\"This instrument is 1,215 years old,\" the Dragon said soothingly, laying just one talon upon each of her hands to still their involuntary trembling. \"It was created by a master Craftsdragon whose name I do not know, for the purpose of teaching an exceptional hatchling, but the artisanship \u2013 as you were thinking just now, this Dragonharp originates in a different era, from a time when the instrument was the art. That it was designed to produce fine music was just another facet of that art. Sadly, this beauty has not been played for 1,200 of the intervening years! After Sankira the Grey outgrew its use, she had it interred in her roost behind a false wall, and that room subsequently became part of the level thirty-one museum as you, I believe, are aware \u2013 it was only rediscovered several months ago when the refurbishment work began according to your plan. Thankfully, the workmen took great care. They contacted me at once and this, this \u2026 priceless relic \u2026 I've been restoring it, see? Piece by rat-chewed piece.\"\n\n\"Marvellous,\" said Auli, meaning every syllable.\n\n\"Aye,\" Zanthrillior agreed. \"Now, here is my story in brief. When I was a hatchling, my shell-mother died in battle with a feral Dragoness. My shell-father desperately wanted a warrior son. A bruiser, a Dragon as big and tough as his shell-brothers \u2013 but there I was, an undersized runt. A sensitive soul. One who treasured music above battle lore. A reader. A thinker.\"\n\n\"He beat me bloody most days for twenty years. I still carry the scars \u2013 well, if you could see me, you'd know. My wings are riven. My knee joints are stiff and rheumatic, like a Dragon twice my age. Aye, I know they say I strut but it is for the agony of misshapen joints, and you \u2026 you of all creatures, Auli-Ambar, know what it is to carry pain, and whatever pain it was that you dwelled upon that evening, that is the primary fuel of your art. Art is pain. Pain is art. It does not need to be that way, but sometimes, pain is where it all starts. When you learn to tear from your soul's depths that most grievous hurting and wave it before the crass, unfeeling hordes in the name of art, that will be the moment your soul truly comes alive. The crucial thing to remember is that you control what happens afterward. Pain will shape your art, but the beauty of life, o precious jewel of Gi'ishior \u2013\"\n\nAuli flinched.\n\n\"Aaaaaaaahhh,\" cried Zanthrillior, as if her visceral reaction had wounded him, too. \"The beauty of life is that you can choose to shape your pain, or let it shape you. Yet here is its secret. That which mars most deeply can be transformed to greatness. The most heinous injury can become beauty! This is the secret of art as I know it. Most times I play, I sense echoes of my shell-father's paws thrashing my pathetic, weak body \u2013 but nowadays, I sometimes imagine that he used to hold me tenderly, and that brings a wrenching no soul can deny. That is what my lullaby was about.\"\n\nSilence dwelled between them. Hearts beating. Breath soughing.\n\nHe said, \"Would you honour me with your story, Auli-Ambar? Then, I wish that you would play that story from your heart. And I will weep with thee, for to assist in some way to shoulder this burden \u2013 that is a true teacher's service. I could ask no greater honour.\"\n\nShe bowed until her right cheek touched the cool gemstones and aromatic wood \u2013 oh, how beautiful it smelled, a subtle, evocative fragrance that she imagined was something exotic she had only ever read about, like sandalwood or fiskarada or mahogany \u2013 and at last, found a way to permit his kind words to percolate into her consciousness, and from there, to touch the core of all she was.\n\n\"He called me a useless blind girl, and I've always believed it,\" Auli began. And once she opened the floodgates, there was no stanching the spillage.\n\nThen, after a time beyond knowing, she found music indwelled her soul.\n\nPain's melody."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Auli tickled Hualiama's tummy. \"Who's a little Dragoness, then? Who is?\"\n\nThe infant gurgled happily, just the start of a laugh, but it was clear that she was trying. Qualiana said she often looked quizzically at Auli, perhaps searching for that connection of the eyes that both Human and Dragon younglings seemed to seek. Soul connection. Love connection. She could manage love. Auli pressed her lips to what Fra'aniorian Islanders called the 'Dragon's kiss', the depression where the umbilical cord had been cut and tied off. Remoyans called it the 'mother's eye' and Sylakians preferred 'the font.' According to Zimtyna, Auli's font had the shape of a five-petalled flower and looked not at all normal.\n\nNormal? Who under the suns knew what that meant?\n\nShe snuffled that gorgeous baby smell and giggled when the babe managed to swat her cheek with a warm palm. \"You're far too gorgeous for your own good.\" Feeling for Hualiama's tiny toes, Auli tweaked them in order from biggest to smallest as she sang:\n\n<This little Dragon went to Island,>\n\n<This little Dragon loved to fly,>\n\n<This little Dragon ate roast sheep,>\n\n<And this little Dragon told a lie.>\n\n<And this little Dragon \u2026>\n\n<She flew \u2013 tappity flappity wappity \u2013up to the sky!>\n\n<Waaa! Waaa!> Hualiama wailed.\n\n\"Oh, my little pollen fluff \u2013 Islands' sakes, I've sliced you open with my fingernail! Stupid blind girl!\"\n\nAuli-Ambar froze. She sounded exactly like Master Mi'elgan. Oh, heavens. When would she ever expunge his influence from her life?\n\nQuietly, she said, \"Don't ever let anyone talk you down, little one. Don't listen to their lies. You be like that last little Dragon and fly; fly to all the Islands of your life. Dream high. Fly far. What have you to fear? You're perfect.\"\n\nAye, and how envious was she of this perfection? Auli bit off a sob. No. She must chop off that root before ever it began to take hold in her life."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "<I need to be quick today, Amaryllion.>\n\n<I shall miss thee, little mouse. What keeps thine mind so preoccupied these days?> Amaryllion chuckled softly. <Trust is seldom straightforward, is it?>\n\nEven in her dream space, Auli coloured.\n\nShe no longer needed the scroll to find the Ancient Dragon. He seemed just a thought away, but only when her mind was relaxed and open. When she was stressed, it was noticeably harder to reach out to him; there were days when the forgetfulness seemed so omnipotent, her skull became the bulwarks of her universe, and though she coveted beyond knowing for what lay beyond, it remained unreachable.\n\nEventually, she said, <I wish I could see thee just once. It's my failing. A failure of heart.>\n\n<So do I. But mine power is not that of healing, but of lingering long in this Island-World until the needful time arrives, and hidden I must remain. Thy courage shines, Auli-Ambar. Do not be afraid. Speak.>\n\n<It's about a baby \u2013 nay, not mine, Great One!>\n\nAuli related what she knew of Hualiama's story; he listened patiently, but seemed to grow terribly agitated at certain key points. Auli-Ambar grew afraid of the storms she sensed emanating from the Ancient Dragon's monstrous mind, but he soothed her with a soft, wordless humming, and it seemed to her that the raging black fires receded, or at least muted before her psyche expired in the crucible of their almighty conflagration.\n\nEventually he responded, <These are indeed portentous tidings, little mouse. I had not foreseen that the prophecy of the Child of the Dragon might relate to a Human child! Yet you relate Ianthine's beliefs most lucidly, and to mine mind that restlessly seeks across the leagues and the ages, her ranting doth convey truth.>\n\nHe believed the Draco-Mystic?\n\nAmaryllion thundered, <PROTECT THE CHILD!>\n\n<Aye, my Lord.> She bowed before his storm.\n\n<Of ruzal I know woefully little. That lore may be recorded in your Dragon Library, but it might also exist abroad in the Island-World, and it shall call to itself those imitators of Dramagon's mind and ilk, those creatures of malevolent bent who gravitate toward the mastery of profane lore. It is undoubtedly Dramagon-spawn. I mislike its connotations; indeed, I mislike much of what thou hast shared. Mine meditations shall penetrate these matters, be assured. And I shall protect thee and thy doings with what strength is mine. Dire times come, Auli-Ambar. More than ever, thou shalt be needed.>\n\n<Command me.>\n\nShe sounded exactly like a Dragon.\n\n<Rightly dost thou fear the knowledge of such lore, but great is the mental fortress of thine intellect,> said Amaryllion, sternly yet with notes of kinship-warmth and encouragement shading his Dragonish. Still, Auli's misshapen jaw sieved air. <Few possess the natural tools thou wert granted. Few would not be corrupted by the merest sniff of Dramagon the Red's secrets. A dark power stirs in the East, methinks. A power even I cannot yet apprehend. Seek out the lore, Auli. Thy skills shall be sorely tested, but art indispensable. And, protect the child. You are wise not to trust this Razzior. It seems his fires burn darkly \u2013>\n\n<But noble Amaryllion \u2026 thine fires manifest as darkness. I don't understand.>\n\nHe chuckled with the fondness of an awesome creature for a tiny one sheltering, as it were, beneath his wings. <Auli, mine fires art of Onyx, which is mine heritage. The manifestation of draconic fires is a vast subject, as wide and magnificent as the very fabric of our universe. In draconic parlance, white-fires are a cognate of truth. Correctly thou dost discern that many times when Lesser Dragons speak of truth or purity or beauty, they refer to the whitening of fires, but that is because they spring from a broad class of fires known as Sky-Fires. There are other classes and subclasses, and oftentimes, their converses \u2013 for example, Cold-Fires, the Earthen-Fires of the Rift-storm that are fundamentally opposed to Sky-Fires, and elemental forms of Dragon fires called Dark-fires and Star-Fires and Suns-Fires. Not all are embodied in our Island-World. It is different again for Ancient Dragons. Mine darkest fires art also their purest \u2013 that is mine truth and thy soul knoweth it for truth.>\n\n<Oh.> She felt very tiny indeed in the face of the concepts Amaryllion impressed upon her mind!\n\nHe said, <Did mine ear canals hearken to the praises of Fra'anior this day?>\n\n<Uh \u2026>\n\n<Thine music, child. It is solace and joy to this ancient soul, who contemplates the final chapters of his journey toward the eternal fires. I must one day pass on, Auli-Ambar. And those fires are to mine perception like thy concept of an eternal home.>\n\nThey spoke little more, for every word seemed laden with fiery melancholy. Amaryllion shared with her what he remembered of Dramagon's ways, but in truth it had always been his older and greater shell-brother, Fra'anior, whose rivalry with the two-headed Red had wracked the Island-World.\n\n<He was my protector,> Amaryllion concluded gently. <My lonely vigil here allowed him to depart. And thus, the Island-World itself remains hid for a precious epoch from greater and more malignant powers than thou or I could imagine. Sleep safe in this knowledge, little one. Sleep in fire enfolded.>\n\n<Thou,> she replied softly, fading.\n\n<Thou paradox in flesh enclothed \u2026> his vast fires lifted her like a leaf borne by a gale, but true to his word, in their darkness was nought but benison.\n\nWhat insights might a blind girl learn from his observations?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "After four hours spent with Hualiama \u2013 five changes of her wrappings, four feeds from a cloth teat soaked in milk and with ears hurting from the infant's constant squalling which eventually resolved to the tune of a milky eruption shot straight down the neck of her tunic top \u2013 Auli finally succeeded in 'flying' her to sleep, a gentle floating movement of the arms that Hualiama seemed to prefer. Auli slipped off to her chambers, bathed and changed, and headed off to find Arkurion. She was two hours late.\n\nArkurion was not present in the Dragon Library, but she was delighted to find Sazutharr at his customary workstation. She heard him from far outside the doors. Poor Archives apprentices. The four new fledglings had apparently managed to wreck an important recopying project in his absence.\n\nSazutharr's wrath shook every shelf for thirty library caverns about.\n\nHe did adore his books and scrolls. Woe betide anyone who returned a creased scroll or, Fra'anior forbid, a book with berry wine spilled across its pages. Famously, that particular incident had ended with a person being hurled so hard across the lake that he skipped fourteen times \u2013 Sapphurion's count \u2013 before crashing near the entrance tunnel in a shower of spray.\n\n<Auli!> bellowed the Librarian. <Observatory! You're late \u2013 shake a paw, girl, or may the wrath of Dragons fall upon your neck!>\n\n<Aye, noble Drag \u2013>\n\n<BE OFF WITH YOU!>\n\nWow. He was in a stinky mood. Usually with Dragons, that was a literal observation. Char, sulphur and acrid metallic odours often accompanied anger, while sweeter fragrances such as vanilla, jasmine and fireflower accompanied better moods. Vanilla was said to be the scent of love.\n\nAuli accordingly coughed her way through the billows of Sazutharr's pyretic pique and hurried upstairs from the Library, following the new level markers with her hands. Nice. Each was embossed so that a blind person could feel the runes with her fingers. Ooh, a mistake on this one \u2013 swift mental note. Auli knew her thoroughness drove some Dragons up the proverbial Island cliff, but she loved to finish a job properly. No short cuts. Ever.\n\nGrinning so inanely at herself she decided she was being a complete pollen-head, Auli found her way to the cable lift and called it using the ringer that would alert the Lift Keeper to which level required his service. Shortly, the lift arrived and whisked her hundreds of feet upward to the height of the rim wall. Shakar the Lift Keeper was deaf-mute and she was blind, so Auli had taught him a touch language greeting that suited them both. Shakar could lip-read excellently, but she could not often tell if someone was looking at her unless they gave a good verbal signal, which also depended on a chamber or area's acoustics. He was not able to write, so Zimtyna's trick of scribbling runes upon Auli's palm while they were holding hands could not work with him.\n\nTherefore, she was shocked when Shakar pressed a very small message scroll into her hand. She could not ask him who it came from, nor was the outside signed as was customary for most messages apart from private or clandestine communications.\n\nAuli unfurled it and read with her fingertips:\n\n<Orange is the colour that watches your neck,>\n\n<Worthless blind prey.>\n\nShe gasped, and gasped again when the man put his arms about her shaking shoulders! His hug was meant kindly, she sensed, despite the roughage of his beard doing damage to the sensitive skin of her right ear and jaw; his distress that he should have passed her such a message certainly seemed genuine. After a moment, she felt his fingers trace a mark against her left shoulder blade. A dagger?\n\nTurning her face upward so that Shakar could read her lips, she said, \"Dagger?\" <No,> he tapped.\n\n\"Sword?\" <No.>\n\n\"Talon?\" <Yes.>\n\n\"Razz \u2013\" *Tap-tap-tap!* Auli bit her lip so hard, she tasted blood.\n\nVery quickly, his fingers traced the talon symbol on her back \u2013 ten times. Maybe a dozen. Then he stepped back and thus, broke their communication.\n\nAuli-Ambar rode upward in queasy silence.\n\nWhen the ratchet-and-spindle driven lift ground to a halt at the observatory level, she stumbled out and reached automatically for the handrail. She missed and fell hard on her elbows. The scroll popped out of her fingers, rolling across a stone floor which had been scored by many Dragon talons over the course of decades and centuries.\n\n\"Auli? Auli, what's the matter?\" Arkurion's voice switched mid-sentence from ire to concern. Scrolleaf rustled slightly against one of his talons. \"What's this?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Minification",
                "text": "\u2002The Way of the Talon. The Sign of the Talon. The Talon-Tip of Terror. Dramagon's Talon. Many were its forms and purposes: single-minded were their goals. The connections were too inchoate even for the most cunning of draconic minds to piece together in a single pattern \u2013 for even they operated as a loose coalition, neither the right paw knowing what the left purposed, while the tail steered in a wholly opposing direction. Yet regardless, there was no part of Human or Dragon society which escaped the reach of their influence. None were safe. Do I not know this full well?\n\n\u2014Sapphurion of Gi'ishior, Notes to the Council, Scrolleaf 58, First Talon, Paragraph 2\n\nHaving ONLY TWICE visited the observatory, for stargazing had few joys to offer a blind person, Auli was nonplussed to discover a far larger space than she recalled. Many Dragons worked here. The echoes of their voices travelled oddly to her ears, until she realised that at least part of the roof of what she had taken for a cavern stood open to the sky. She wanted to swat her forehead in annoyance. Of course. Only a blind girl would think stars could be observed from indoors!\n\nAlready discomfited and annoyed, she added mortification to her catalogue as she crawled across the floor in search of the scroll.\n\nArkurion talon tapped her shoulder gently. <Here.>\n\nDragon talons were apparently deft and fast enough to pluck wasps from the air at high speed. The Mercury Blue, however, had managed to crush the scrolleaf, in consternation perhaps at her mode of arrival. She rather wished some Dragon would do the same to Razzior. Due to age-dominance hierarchy that task would not likely fall to Arkurion. Auli knew enough about Dragon battle lore to understand the likely disparity between the strength of a massive hundred-foot Gi'ishior Orange warrior and a scrollish youngster from Tanstoy now grown to thirty-four feet in length.\n\nMildly put, Razzior would wipe the floor with his carcass. Therefore, she must not place him in danger.\n\nAuli said, <Sorry. Took a funny turn there. I'm alright. What's all the excitement?>\n\nShe tried to slip the scroll casually into her front tunic pocket, knowing that Arkurion could not possibly miss the movement.\n\n<A comet,> he said.\n\n<Heaps of comets lolloping about the Isles these days,> she said drolly, accepting his proffered digit as he escorted her deeper into the bustling observatory. Auli quickly realised she had been wrong on two fronts \u2013 the roof, and the size of the main working floor. In a second, her toes curled into a groove and she realised that the Dragons must have opened further chambers or segments previously hidden behind interior partitioning.\n\nFurther annoyance flushed her cheeks. Honestly! What else might she have missed?\n\nMeantime, the Dragon continued, <Few comets this bright and as directly upon a collision course with our Island-World as this one.>\n\nAuli said, <Is that a problem? I thought the five Moons mostly protected us from meteorites and comets. I mean, my knowledge of astronomy is fairly basic, but it's not like we've been blasted out of existence recently, is it?>\n\n<If that had happened, I really wouldn't know,> he quipped back. <But you recall the histories, Auli-Ambar. You know this circumscribed world of ours was created by a comet strike containing the First Eggs of the Ancient Dragons, and that titanic blast threw up mountains twenty-five leagues tall \u2013 who can imagine such cliffs? Or such devastation? Our high dwelling places are essentially talon-like massifs rooted somewhere in the floor of that original impact crater; these Islands are perches created by Fra'anior for the nurturing of life. If another comet were to strike \u2013>\n\n<Soon?>\n\nHe chuckled, <We estimate that this one is fifteen to twenty years out.>\n\n<Oh! You can see that far?>\n\n<Must be magic,> Arkurion deadpanned, with a smoky chuckle. <Isn't that so, Fazshathi?>\n\n<Thankfully, the latest calculations show the coment should miss us by a mere few million leagues,> replied the other Dragon, a male judging by the earthquake-deep timbre of his voice. <Those parameters will change depending on which gravitational fields the comet intersects as it nears our planet, however. Yet every hatchling must walk upon their paws before learning to fly. I'm Fazshathi the Blue, a Magiscope Technician hailing from Pla'arna Cluster in the North. I'm pleased to meet you at last, Auli-Ambar, called the little flame by the Dragons of Gi'ishior.>\n\nThe notion of a reputation preceding her shook her every Isle. Auli gulped.\n\n<He happens to be the foremost authority on optics in the Island-World, Auli,> the Mercury Blue put in quickly. <Take his talon, o little flame.>\n\nShe bowed over the lowered fore-talon. <Noble Dragon. May I inquire what you are working on?>\n\n<Indeed you may!> he said jovially. <Arkurion requested a few minutes of my time to test you, but we've been most enjoyably swapping notes for a few hours. The Southern observatories have made some intriguing discoveries of late. Now, you may not recall this detail, but Qualiana the Red previously consulted with me about the conundrum of your optical equipment \u2013> he vented a booming laugh that rattled the ceiling, and caused Auli to clap her hands over her ears \u2013 <I mean, your curious gemstone lenses. Yours is a fascinating case. Most fascinating. However, I understand that the conundrum has now been peeled back, if I might so address the issue at paw?>\n\n<Um \u2026 I don't quite follow, noble Dragon?> Auli said respectfully.\n\n<The coverings of your optical equipment may now be drawn aside like the covers of our stargazers,> he returned.\n\n<Oh, I see. I mean I don't, but I do.>\n\nHis laughter belled out over the working Dragons; they seemed content one and all to ignore him. Fazshathi chortled, <Ah, how charming the quaint humour of Humans! A delight, Auli-Ambar. Truly a delight. I would clap you upon the back but that would flatten you for scrolleaf, not so, not so?>\n\n<Um \u2026>\n\n<Just say 'aye' and ignore the rest,> Arkurion advised.\n\nAuli was appalled at his tone, but Fazshathi seemed to relish having his wings tugged. The Mercury Blue did earn himself a brotherly buffet that sounded like a draconic fist detonating against a rock; she thought she detected pain in Arkurion's playful rejoinder, <Oh, was that your best?>\n\n<So good it burns!> thundered the other Blue. <Observe before your tiny nose, my dear ambulatory petal, the unique instrument I am working on. Aye, that's right \u2013 wait!> he interrupted as Arkurion began to explain that she was blind and needed to see with her hands. <I have worked with the blind before, o Arkurion, having seen ten times your summers of life and more. Auli, this young rogue keeps me supplied with the latest astronomical data and discoveries from the South. Very faithful.>\n\nThe Mercury Blue snorted at this droll sally.\n\nFazshathi sang out, <Paws up! Stepladder!>\n\n<Three feet ahead,> said Arkurion, as she heard a mild screech of wood against the stone flooring. Shortly, Auli ascended some thirty-nine rungs to a precarious platform at the top.\n\n<Perfectly smashing!> roared Fazshathi, at a volume that threatened to do exactly that to Auli's eardrums. <Onward and upward, little flame, for the very stars are our destination! Now, I have devised an experimental piece of equipment and I shall be happy to explain its devious workings to you at a less exciting time, but it is eggling-fresh! Hot from my paws! Think of this as a magiscope or celestial stargazer, if you prefer the term used by Loremasters and Scholars, with special modifications in the viewing apparatuses \u2013 my modifications, of course.>\n\n<The main reflector measures 1,200 feet in diameter, which is by some margin the largest in the Island-World. Now, since we are viewing objects at vast distances across the cosmos, stability and visual acuity are key. Therefore, I have designed many delicate adjustment mechanisms in both the physical and magical spheres of engineering. Plus, we live upon a volcano which is constantly shaking its paw and clearing its maw of lava, so to speak. Therefore, this beauty is stabilised by no less than one hundred actuators located around the mirror's rim and in the housing and motion apparatuses, which dwarf any Dragon, never mind such a titchy scrap as you. Fra'anior tug my wings, what Dragon would bother tossing you into his stewpot \u2013 HA HA HA!!>\n\nAuli sensed that conversation with Fazshathi was likely to consist of many winces and a few brief interjections. She tried to imagine a viewing apparatus over two hundred times wider than her arms could reach, and failed at the brain-frazzling stage. Holy Fra'anior, that was huge!\n\n<Now, since the Mercury Blue has been ceaselessly gnawing at my wings for a mere five seasons, I have finally found time to dislodge his fangs and created \u2013 this!>\n\nArkurion had been planning this test for over a year? Holy dancing Islands!\n\n<Lovely,> said Auli, reaching out with her hands. She found a smooth metallic cylinder perhaps ten inches in diameter, but paused when a Dragon's talon tapped her elbow.\n\n<It's a Human-sized eyepiece,> Arkurion explained. <One of a kind. A fearsomely taxing engineering conundrum to reduce and resolve the mighty inputs of this magiscope into two eyepieces meant for Human eyes. Don't you dare wipe your greasy fingertips on the lenses.>\n\n<Well, I \u2013>\n\n<No time for that, Auli flame-heart. Do unpeel your oculars and glue them to my masterpiece,> Fazshathi encouraged, with the utmost draconic immodesty.\n\nAuli unwrapped her bandages, feeling unreasonably miffed at Arkurion's high-pawed treatment. She hated it when Dragons belittled her in speech or behaviour. Understandable? Aye, but infuriating all the same.\n\nShe gripped the magiscope's Human-purposed handles and touched her eyebrows to the eyepiece, making a few small adjustments as directed. Auli looked, and saw only blackness. The Dragons chuntered and conferred and made numerous adjustments. A marginally brighter haze greeted her, bringing a tiny, short-lived fillip of hope to her heart. Occasionally the haze shifted about in the viewing field, but the differential, she fed back glumly to the Dragons, was perhaps one-thousandth of one percent. Apparently she was supposed to be observing a beautiful spiral galaxy, a relatively bright object in the sky.\n\nShe only knew the idea of a spiral from touching Zimtyna's locks after she used conditioning oils. A coiling galaxy? Wow. Auli was fairly certain the ballads did not describe stars as filaments, but she felt too ashamed to query her understanding.\n\nMutter, mutter. <Recheck everything,> Fazshathi ordered. <I have been surprised before. Not in the last five decades, mind. I'm that good. Arkurion, pay attention to the outputs.>\n\nTen minutes later they had established that the instrument was perfect \u2013 as if there had ever been a shell-sliver of doubt \u2013 and the Dragons could easily see what she could not. No surprises there.\n\n<Raise the magnification to maximum!> growled Arkurion.\n\nAfter a period of not inconsiderable fiddling coupled with constant promoting for feedback from the Dragons, Auli-Ambar ventured, <I'm afraid that's only becoming worse. No flickering at all, now.>\n\nWith the air of decidedly miffed genius, Fazshathi grunted, <Well the only good news, by my wings, is that we have identified certain parameters within which minimal function appears \u2026 conceivable. Your eyes are processing some data, we just don't know what. I don't understand. It became worse with greater magnification? And our magical constructs to maximise the picture's brightness achieved little to no effect?>\n\n<I see lightning, sort of,> Auli put in. <Direct suns-light does the same, yielding a fractional change to the darkness. I'm sorry if I \u2013>\n\n<Impossible. My eyepieces \u2013 all five we've tried \u2013 are perfectly designed for the Human eye!>\n\n<Qualiana said \u2013>\n\n<And for the draconic eye,> Fazshathi insisted, cutting Auli off tetchily.\n\nArkurion said, <We could not find precedent for her ocular structures in any scientific text, Fazshathi. We are truly flying to an uncharted Island, here. Perhaps if we reverted to fundamentals \u2026>\n\nThere was a very prolonged scratching sound from either side as the Dragons rubbed their scaly chins and itched at a few scale mites, Auli supposed. She sighed. Stupid eyes. Every time she allowed hope to bud, something hacked away at its roots. She was not meant to see. If she could not see at the extreme end of whatever insane level of magnification this magiscope was capable of, then Fazshathi's equipment was not at fault. The problem lay rather closer to home. Hmm. Closer \u2026 farther. More magnification? Ridiculous, surely.\n\n\"Noble Fazshathi,\" Auli said aloud, switching languages to gain his attention. \"How much magnification was that, exactly?\"\n\nA paw swished angrily through the air. \"What does it matter? Too much. Viewing objects at such a high level of magnification is impractical anyways, especially given the limitations of Human and Dragon eyesight.\"\n\n\"How much?\"\n\n<Gnarrr!> \"Why, you little Dragoness \u2013 let me calculate. Fine. 36,745.4 times. Given our clearing routines which are beamed along the path of sight to minimise atmospheric turbulence and disruption, and the magical enhancements of picture quality, contrast and lighting, you should be able to see a wart on a Sylakian toad's backside a million leagues away!\"\n\nThat was nothing if not descriptive. Chuckling dutifully, Auli debated whether she might not give her right arm to see a toad's wart.\n\nStill, her neck tingled in that way she sometimes experienced when she was on the nub of solving a problem. Her eyes had that abominable itchy ache developing behind them, as if a wicked paw had poured hot sand into her sockets. There were days she just wanted to scratch them out and throw them away.\n\nPersistence paid in prekki-fruit, was the Isles proverb.\n\nDoggedly, Auli probed, \"But it's impractical, you said? Why \u2013\"\n\n\"Aye!\" The Dragon was developing a decent frenzy of indignation. Boiling belly fires. Audibly clenching talons. Scents of acrid sulphur wafted from his champing jaw. \"Because your lenses are dysfunctional and I swear I'll pummel this problem until it weeps! I AM NOT A DRAGON WHO TAKES KINDLY TO FAILURE!\"\n\n<Whaa \u2026> Dragon reflexes saved her from a nasty fall. \"Thanks, Arkurion.\"\n\nHe hissed, \"Auli, don't provoke Fazshathi. It's not as if he hasn't spent much of his valuable time on this problem already.\"\n\nOh aye, the very Human problem! Sarcasm sharped her tongue to a waspish sting. \"Well then, can some Dragon kindly explain to the pollen-brained Human \u2013\"\n\nThe Mercury Blue snorted, \"Your eyes? Beautiful purveyors of nothingness.\"\n\n\"The magnification problem!\"\n\nNow they were all growing excitable, even Auli \u2013 and more so as Arkurion let slip a compliment that should never have been aired. Dangerous ground, even for a Dragon!\n\nFazshathi snarled, \"Regarding magnification, to simplify the issue, there's a law of physics that equates to this: When magnification is doubled, a celestial object grows approximately four times dimmer when viewed through our magiscopes. Hence our enhancement routines. Practically, we never push the limits of this instrument because the object will appear sharper and brighter at lower magnifications and will not overrun the viewing field. Do you understand? We're spitting fireballs at the wrong target.\"\n\nAuli lurched as a warm, talon-like sense of realisation sliced into her bowels, but a warm paw again corrected her balance. Arkurion said, \"Careful.\"\n\nShe said, \"What's the opposite of magnification, o mighty Fazshathi?\"\n\n\"Minification, of course. But why would \u2026 you \u2026\"\n\nThe Mercury Blue sniffed, \"Aye. This is a fruitless line of inquiry. The problem is \u2013\"\n\n\"The opposite,\" she whispered.\n\n<AULI! YOU'VE GOT IT!> roared Arkurion.\n\nA chorus of annoyed snarls rose from the scientist Dragons all around as both Fazshathi and Arkurion raised delighted bugles to the heavens. Fazshathi was even doing a paw-stamping dance routine that shook the entire chamber. He stopped abruptly.\n\nHer heart thundered like a runaway waterfall.\n\nAuli heard the Dragons babbling, <Two problems \u2013 dimming \u2013 optical nerve input problematic \u2013 magnification \u2013 not enough brightness \u2013 but even if we invert the magical construct-containment fields we cannot test \u2013 scope wasn't designed for this vector of investigation \u2013 by my wings, but if we tweak the focal length \u2013 the aperture \u2013 maximal radius \u2013 combined with her unusual optical diameter \u2026 of course!>\n\nFazshathi said, <Told you I'm a flaming genius. Hold this for a moment, youngling.>\n\n<Excuse me!> Auli folded her arms as a Dragon's crooked talons plucked her aside and popped her into Arkurion's paw.\n\nWhat was it with these Dragons and their monumental egos? Take Zanthrillior. Strut, pose, boast. Scale-packaged awesomeness, to borrow the musician's description of himself! Unleashed now, she could literally overhear the fires of Fazshathi's brilliance rising to the occasion, and his flames matched the irresistible expansion of her heart. Rustling wings. Quick paw-taps upon instruments and the squeaking of manual controls. Somewhere above her, the magiscope began to hum as mirrors and lenses changed orientations, while the Dragon literally re-spun his magical constructs on the fly, like a the blind master weaver Auli had met last season, who did not even need to see to send his shuttle whirring between the strings. Just like the apprentice weaver's calling of the thread weights and colours, so Arkurion bustled about in a state of high excitement, blurting out readings and temperatures and scrawling calculations upon scrolleaf so fast that he broke three Dragon styluses in a row and had to beg a replacement from an amused female astronomer \u2013 Ochryla the Yellow, who was Fazshathi's mate, Auli learned a moment later, clutching her perch as Fazshathi thumped past.\n\nThe Dragoness bustled over. <You galumphing thunder-pawed pirates! I'll hold the ladder.>\n\n<Thanks,> said Auli, grimacing.\n\nOchryla had a grand-shell-motherly word for the young Human. <No long faces and null-fires in my observatory, fledgling. Your nerves betray you. Only, hearken to the fires of mine third heart, and that sharp-witted youngster from Tanstoy. Reminds me of a suns-flare, he does. Such a ravishing colour, of Fra'anior's own paintbrush it wert beloved and burnished, as the old saying goes.>\n\nDancing dragonets! Where did that come from?\n\nAuli wished she could stare at the aged Dragoness in order to read the fabled orb fires of her expression, for such linguistic mystification indwelled her speech, she did not think she would ever understand half of what Ochryla had implied. She was not sure she wanted to, for her scalp crawled with the awareness of impending peril.\n\nThe Yellow Dragoness rustled closer. Auli ducked her head. No \u2026\n\nAfter a moment, the Dragoness touched her chin with the tip of her fore-talon. Lowering her voice, she breathed beside the girl's left ear, <Here is a Word of Onyx for thee. A prophetic utterance. While I understand some Dragonkind regard it blasphemy to speak in this fashion, I will say what burns in my old heart, and into the caldera with the consequences. Will you hear this Word?>\n\nCaptivated, Auli was swept back in her memories to that day at the monastery. She could not speak. All that was within her, was a raging tempest of flame.\n\nAt once, the Dragoness said in an eerie voice not dissimilar to one of Ianthine's proclamations, <Dragons do not call thee 'little flame' without reason, Auli-Ambar. Flame indwells your heart. We Dragons all know it. We bask in its glow, and no creature of white-fires would deny this truth. You are like us, and if you follow the purest of flame that burns within your heart of hearts, the thrice-born Human heart of which Ancient Fra'anior did speak, then his unimaginable blessing will enflame all your days beneath the suns.>\n\nHer heart leaped. Could she take this second word as confirmation of a grand destiny? To her paw would fall a task so mighty it could make the greatest of Dragons break out in a sevenfold smile, and the thunder of His pleasure to smite the very heavens until they rang for joy!\n\nIncongruously, the odour of Hualiama's wrappings invaded her nostrils. Auli chuckled aloud, despite shivering like a reed in a storm. Not that. Destiny did not change stinky wrappings.\n\nDestiny was fire!\n\nOh. And the paw was Arkurion's, guiding her once more to the eyepiece.\n\nAuli-Ambar had to press her reluctant eyelids apart with her fingertips, for they were already growing sticky in the close atmosphere. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead and stung her left eye. She wiped it gingerly with her tunic sleeve. Her fingers touched the eyepiece and sprang back.\n\n\"It's hot.\"\n\n\"Maximal illumination confirmed,\" Fazshathi whispered. \"We'll melt metal in a moment.\"\n\n\"Approximating 3,600 times minification,\" Arkurion noted.\n\nDrawing a spare bandage out of her tunic pocket, Auli wrapped it once about her forehead and then impulsively moved forward, pressing her brow against the ridged edge of the eyepiece. Her fingers knotted painfully into her tunic hem. This was it. The heat radiating against her face was painful, but surprisingly comforting to her strange, stony eyes.\n\nA glow swam before her. Auli could almost feel her brain sizzling at the unaccustomed input to her senses. Then the glow retracted, performing a manoeuvre she had not even dared to dream about.\n\nFocus.\n\nAuli began to laugh for the cataclysms of joy exploding in her breast. The waterfalls gushing in her ears. Movement and light and imperfection \u2026 her laughter switched immediately to sobbing, then to breathless hiccoughs, before a thin, piercing wailing emanated from her mouth, arresting the movement of every Dragon in the celestial observatory.\n\n\"Auli? Auli, what is it?\" Arkurion worried. \"Are you alright? Come away before you burn yourself. Auli \u2026\"\n\n\"Don't pull me away!\"\n\nOchryla held the ladder firm.\n\nIt took the Mercury Blue a very, very long hiatus before comprehension sucked a great gust of wind through his fangs and down into the alveoli, making his ribs creak like monstrous bellows. He thundered, *AULI!!*\n\n\"I know!\" she cried, waving her hands in vaguely circular motions. \"I see a fuzzy \u2026 I see a blob-thing! With arms!\"\n\nThe observatory exploded with the delight of Dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "Sapphurion halted Arkurion's meandering explanation with a vast, *GNARRR!!*\n\n\"Ouch,\" said Auli. Pointedly. Her ears had just suffered the abuse of twenty jubilant astronomer Dragons, the Watch descending en masse upon the observatory in mighty, exuberant chorus, and then half of the Halls complaining vociferously about the other half's celebrations. She should really take to wearing ear protection. Add that to eye bandages and a prekki-fruit glued to her nose for disguise? Delightful.\n\nThe Sapphire said, \"So, noble Arkurion, you're saying that Auli-Ambar isn't blind?\"\n\n\"No, she's still blind,\" said the young Researcher.\n\n\"But she can see?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 aye, mighty Elder. That's about the sum of \u2013 our best conclusion. Aye. She's so farsighted, she's blind.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar said, \"I think I understand him, noble Sapphurion.\"\n\nThe huge Elder chuckled agreeably; meantime Grandion piped up, \"Well, I don't. What's all the magnificent mini-kar \u2026 um, well, all these big words make my wings itch! Humans speak funny.\"\n\n\"Magnification,\" Qualiana corrected the hatchling.\n\n\"Minification,\" said the girl, illustrating with her fingers.\n\nThey sat or perched, Auli supposed the correct saying should be, in Sazutharr's office. To her left side were Sapphurion, Qualiana and Grandion; Sazutharr occupied his customary perch in front of her with Arkurion lying in a lesser position to his right flank, and Master Chamzu had pulled up a chair beside her, within touching distance of her left hand. Fazshathi loomed somewhere behind the chairs, not far judging by the temperature at the back of her neck!\n\nThe aged Head Librarian creaked, \"Have I the right paw of this? Essentially, the Mercury Blue claims that Auli carries in her head a pair of the most outrageously powerful magiscopes in history, so powerful that anything she does actually perceive is hopelessly blurred out of existence? Secondly, he contends that her optical structures do not process or detect light sources properly, meaning that any inputs she does enjoy from her motile magiscopes are translated to the brain as darkness. Correct?\"\n\n\"Correct. We estimate her capability to approximate or exceed one million times magnification,\" Fazshathi rumbled. \"At that range, measurement becomes impractical given the limitations of current draconic science and instrumentation.\"\n\nAuli had the impression that everyone in the chamber \u2013 everyone else \u2013 looked at each other in consternation.\n\nThe Magiscope Technician added, \"By way of approximate but hopefully valuable explication for the youngest fires amongst us, that means Auli could probably count a grey loom-spinner spider's eyes across Fra'anior's caldera, or read text one ten-thousandth of an inch tall across the breadth of this room.\"\n\n\"As if,\" she grumbled.\n\n\"If it were illuminated as brightly as the suns,\" Arkurion put in.\n\nShe groaned.\n\n\"The spider mightn't enjoy that,\" quipped Chamzu.\n\n\"Blessing, or curse? Blind, or simply farsighted?\" Sazutharr put in, sounding very formal.\n\nAuli groaned louder.\n\n\"Perhaps the onset of that Human business \u2013 by my wings, what's it called? Puberty! Aye, might a rush of pubescent hormones resolve these issues?\" Sapphurion suggested.\n\nClearly the Sapphire Blue had no inkling. Nonetheless, Auli's cheeks set off on their usual warming routine. Her addition to the conversation constituted a vague splutter.\n\n\"No signs of development in our little flame as yet,\" Qualiana added warmly.\n\n\"Qua-aaarrrrgh!\" And a girl might wish to melt into a puddle and seep away beneath the door! Apparently adolescence was another field of endeavour in which she was doomed to be different. Clapping her hands to her forehead, Auli muttered, \"I wish \u2013freaking feral windrocs! What do I wish for? Anyone?\"\n\n\"A new assignment,\" Sapphurion said abruptly. \"Enough of this minification mystery. Noble Sazutharr, you have the floor.\"\n\nA new what? Wasn't she busy enough already? Popping her head up again, Auli oriented herself toward the Head Librarian, who cleared his throat noisily and said, \"Aye. Well, the day has arrived much faster than I anticipated, and I heartily approve of noble Sapphurion's proposal. Hear me, Auli-Ambar. There is a position traditionally held by an Under-Librarian of Gi'ishior, which helps us relate to the Human royal family of Fra'anior and to the scholars of their excellent library. Four days per month, Under-Librarian Ornath has been tutoring young Ka'allion, the son of King Chalcion and the sadly deceased Queen Si'ilmira, during the mornings together with many of his peers, and working with the Palace Library in matters such as the exchange of knowledge and suchlike. It is a post of much prestige and no small political import. We would like you to consider taking on this position.\"\n\n\"Uh, but \u2026\" she began.\n\nSazutharr overrode her effortlessly. \"Unfortunately, Under-Librarian Ornath's diagnosis of samtanyosis, a magi-physical degenerative disease that very rarely manifests in the elderly of Dragon and Human alike, means that he will no longer be able to undertake his duties abroad. The motion of a Dragonship makes him dangerously ill; last week's trip almost killed him.\"\n\nAuli breathed, \"No! Poor Ornath! I hadn't \u2026\"\n\n\"It's not public knowledge yet,\" Sazutharr said sternly. \"Ornath doesn't want the commiserations. Now, since we wrote to inform the Palace that he is indisposed, they're asking for a replacement. To everyone's amusement, the post is entitled, 'Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish.'\"\n\nAuli burst out laughing. \"Me? Venerable?\"\n\n\"Twin canes and long white hair come as part and parcel of the appointment,\" Arkurion chuckled smokily.\n\nSomebody kick that Dragon!\n\n\"More like a Dragon-sized migraine and never-ending backache,\" said Chamzu.\n\nPerhaps the Master could do with a swift kick too. Auli was feeling in a decidedly Dragonish mood!\n\nSapphurion said, \"Auli-Ambar, and Arkurion, hear me well. This position is a vital channel of communication between the Palace and my Council. A less official channel, by my wings, but the choice of candidate has always attracted our keenest consideration. Whilst it is unlikely King Chalcion will take an active interest in Ka'allion's education, the position allows one unprecedented access to the Palace and in particular, to his new Queen, Shyana, and the royal family which all hope will soon expand with further heirs.\"\n\n\"Am I not too \u2026\"\n\n\"Young? Blind? Untraveled?\" Master Chamzu read her thoughts with distressing accuracy.\n\nShe waved a hand, crying in a low, angry voice, \"Well, who wants to call a Dragon a Dragon?\"\n\nThe Master said, \"Do not misunderstand me, Auli-Ambar. You are mature beyond your years, demonstrably capable, a great builder of trust across species and cultures, and there is one simple way to fix your lack of experience in the wider world. Ornath will brief you beforehand, as will Sapphurion. You will ask them any and every question you may have, even the ostensibly foolish ones. Now, what say you?\"\n\nClearly, these elders expected only one answer, Auli thought furiously. It was clear that Hualiama needed her less and less by the day, for Qualiana could by magic and by talon take care of all of her needs, and her declaration of shell-depression had been accepted by all. Retreating to her roost was expected. The Red Dragoness did vocally appreciate Auli's hands around the roost, however, and everyone doted quite shamelessly upon the tiny, gurgling, ever-bright scrap of life that was Hualiama. Her burns had healed. She was even developing a touch of proper infant chubbiness. Daily, she opened her eyes more and cried less, but many nights it was still only Auli's arms that could rock her to sleep. Just yesterday, she had caught the babe starting to vocalise to the melody she had been practising on her Dragonharp in the roost. Was that not unusual for a Human babe of two or three months' age?\n\nWhat would Hualiama do without her?\n\nAuli opened her mouth.\n\n\"Zimtyna will be beside herself picking out suitable dresses and slippers and suchlike,\" pressed Master Chamzu. \"You could not possibly deny her the pleasure.\"\n\nQualiana said, \"In addition, I believe there's an outstanding music tutor at the Palace, Master Ga'allio, whom we could ask to help with your Dragonharp training until Zanthrillior visits again.\"\n\n\"You could pass for eighteen years of age,\" Sazutharr put in. \"Twenty, even.\"\n\n\"That's simply not true,\" Auli whispered.\n\n\"You'll be truly venerable,\" Arkurion teased at once.\n\n\"A Master of Dragonish designs and deviousness,\" Sapphurion purr-gurgled.\n\nGrandion chirped, \"Auli can't be a Master, Mamafire. She doesn't have any chin whiskers.\"\n\nThrough their laughter, Auli snorted, \"Bah! So this is what it means to have one's arm twisted by Dragons?\"\n\nMaster Chamzu squeezed her knee. \"Better get used to it.\"\n\nIslands' sakes! Auli said, \"But, how will they remember me from one visit to the next?\"\n\nArkurion chortled, \"Hmm. It appears we have another minor mystery to minify, my miniscule mammalian mite.\"\n\nEnough of this wing tugging. With great dignity, Auli said, \"Don't forget, noble Dragon, that with my extraordinary eyesight, you'll never look bigger than a misplaced flea on a sheep's backside!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Venerable Instructor",
                "text": "\u2002Dragonkind and Humankind possess similar mental faculties, but different strengths. Humans excel at speed of recall and creativity, whilst the Dragons excel in the methodology and practise of the sciences. It is said that Dragons never forget, but neither has any Dragon to my knowledge mastered the eidetic recall most pronounced in studies conducted upon the Pygmy peoples of the Crescent Islands jungles. Perhaps it is the shorter lifespan of Humans that necessitates this marvellous capacity and hunger for growth, rebirth and innovation.\n\n\u2002Dragons are the holders of lore. Humans create it.\n\n\u2014Sapphurion of Gi'ishior, Notes to the Council, Scrolleaf 973, Fifteenth Talon, Paragraph 1\n\nA week later, Auli-Ambar took the second Dragonship journey she recalled in her life. Departing at the first blush of dawn, the Dragonship swished aloft under the manual propulsion of turbines worked by teams of chanting sailors pedalling the fondly-hated 'backbreaker' drive apparatus, before spreading her wings to catch a warm dawn breeze that sent them soaring above the northern rim wall. Steersmen did not pilot directly across Fra'anior's caldera. It was regarded as akin to suicide, given the fast-moving, variable weather conditions around the volcano.\n\nSteersman Chayku did not remember her, nor did his crew.\n\nAuli stood at the prow where she could enjoy the warmth of the rising suns upon her cheek, and imagined that one day she would need to shield her eyes from Firstsun and Secondsun, the great sky brothers. She communed with Amaryllion. He seemed in a pensive mood, which matched hers.\n\n<You should be guarding the child,> he said bluntly.\n\n<Hualiama is well sheltered with Qualiana, mighty Dragon,> Auli replied politely. <None enter the roost, nor are Sapphurion's wards violable.>\n\n<One thoughtless chirp from the hatchling and all is lost.>\n\n<Aye. There was a note \u2013>\n\nAmaryllion snarled at once, <See? Foolish child who dwells in a darkness of wilful ignorance! Greater is the bite of the prophetic than ever was the Island-devouring maw of the mighty Westurdion, whose back didst bow and raise the Western Isles.>\n\nAuli gaped. The Isles perched upon a Dragon's back? Holy \u2026 what lore was this?\n\n<Razzior and Ra'aba! Ra'aba and Razzior; mirrors of potent evil that collude against thee. Find thee the scrolls of ruzal and keep them from that pair of Dramagon's paws by any and all means, Auli-Ambar! Learn to be ruthless! Thou art too much the petal and too little of Dragon fire, despite the fine words Ochryla presumed to speak over thee!> His mental voice cuffed her about the figurative earhole, making Auli wince as she clutched the railing tightly. Did he not know his strength? <What does she understand of the ebb and flow of millennia? Or of the brutal tides of events that converge upon the nearest of futures \u2013 ah, Fra'anior, where is thine paw? Why didst thou leave this Island-World to suffer the absence of thine incomparable fires?>\n\nIt seemed that chastisement rather than storytelling was to be the order of the day, although Auli had to wonder if she detected hints of jealousy in Amaryllion's tone when he spoke of Ochryla. How long had he lived? Had he hibernated like the flightless terhal birds of the North? Qualiana believed that Amaryllion Fireborn was truly alive, but Auli wondered if that life might not be expressed in undying soul fires rather than physical form.\n\nAfter all, where did one hide an Ancient Dragon of Island-juggling proportions?\n\nNonetheless, she decided to pre-empt any further bouts of Auli-swatting by recounting the latest shenanigans related to her sight.\n\n<A wing-shivering exercise in the impossible!> he commented at length, in a tone of more reason and less acid. <It seems we must strike a talon to the heart of this issue regarding thine maternal heritage, Auli-Ambar. Perhaps 'pykol' or 'Pykolese' doth indeed refer to this suspected undocumented Human subspecies \u2013 note thy delayed physical development juxtaposed with thy clearly augmented and accelerated mental development; thine unusual height amongst thine peers and significant facility for musical and magical pursuits; note these unprecedented optical enhancements \u2026 ah!>\n\nHe fell silent.\n\nAuli-Ambar listened with all of her heart, but fear overruled. <Amaryllion, you don't think \u2013>\n\n<No!>\n\n<I'm not some sort of failed experiment, am I?> She shuddered as a peal of thunder shook the caldera; it came from afar, from the direction she thought of as Ya'arriol, to the Southwest. <Amaryllion, was that you? I don't \u2026 I'm so scared. Please, please, please tell me \u2026 the truth?>\n\nNow, the sadness of his thoughts was infinite and crushing, yet a paternal warmth flowed through their connection. <Little one, wouldst thou prefer lies to pass mine lips?>\n\n<From where else might such an awful, insane and unknown magic arise? You yourself taught me the lore of juxtaposition of elemental Dragon fire types, and I have read of corrupt forms, not so much this ruzal, but another purportedly belonging to beasts of the underworld, called urzul \u2026>\n\nThe Onyx Dragon groaned resoundingly, as though her question pained him in ways she could not imagine. <Aye, this might be experimentation based upon Dramagon's work. But your memories of your birth mother are pure, your magic seems uncorrupted, if passing strange, and it seems more likely to me that in the balance of probabilities \u2013 aye, allow me this bluntness. Thou art no Dramagon-spawn beast of evil. Thou art a true soul in whom Fra'anior's own fires do stir. And I will help thee as best I am able. Mine senses do sift the far and airy places of this Island-World for many signs of the times to come; verily, they delight in thy presence. So shall we abide together in the patience of seasons, to the furtherance of our duties and the pleasurable accord of sharing knowledge.>\n\nAmaryllion spoke many more words besides, but it was these that stuck with Auli. She knew she would need them as a shield against darker times ahead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "After an uneventful five-hour trip around the caldera to its south-eastern abutment, where stood the largest Isle of twenty-seven in the Cluster, the Dragonship landed at the port just outside the city upon the rolling hills of its eastern flank. Master Chamzu recited with the driest of humour:\n\n<I'd give a prekki from my tree and the fireflower from my garden,>\n\n<To know what was a-cookin' in the old Great Dragon's noggin,>\n\n<When he called my Island Fra'anior \u2013 isn't that his name?>\n\n<O Fra'anior, of sevenfold brain and mighty fame,>\n\n<Yea, and if that were not enough, twenty-seven Isles in muster,>\n\n<Did he call Fra'anior Cluster!>\n\nThe fabled beauty of Fra'anior's garden city might be lost on her outrageous farsightedness, but Auli-Ambar thrilled to the sounds and smells and bustle as she tripped lightly along at the Master's side on the slight downhill into the main thoroughfare. She worried about her priceless Dragonharp, but the Master had assured her it would be packed in a special padded crate and handled like a baby \u2013 or Zanthrillior would twist his guts for cinnamon sweetbread pretzels. And hers! Furthermore, Chamzu had a small crew from the Library bringing other crates of books, scrolls and supplies manufactured at Gi'ishior, such as specialist archival inks, scrolleaf, binders and calligraphy pens, quills and stencils. There were packs of scented scrolleaf for various Princesses of the realm and a small stargazer for young Prince Ka'allion.\n\n\"Your gift to the royals,\" said the Master. \"Walk less sprightly, my young sprig. You're supposed to be venerable.\"\n\n\"Learned, but never decrepit,\" Auli returned, with a fake sage air.\n\n\"Huh. You've your father's height about you. Don't slouch \u2013 Islands' sakes! I'll be calling you Zimtyna next.\" His hand rested briefly upon her shoulder. \"You've become a daughter to me, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\nThe grief of loss. Every so often it gripped the Master sorely, and she wondered if a man as busy as he would ever find another wife. Auli wanted to slump her shoulders and duck to hide her grief, but instead, she walked tall and wondered what people thought of her artfully designed mask, the better to conceal the freakish eyes, my dear Isles maiden.\n\nVenerable loremasters ought to be able to play matchmaker. Auli brightened. She should be on the lookout \u2013 scowl \u2013 for the good Master, since she was so very experienced at this line of work.\n\nAuli coughed wryly.\n\nThe town housed some seventeen thousand souls, she understood. A good size. Not as populous as Sylakia Town's massive sixty thousand or Remoy's forty, for certain, but it felt far busier than the Halls. One could simply not pack Dragons so closely together. What if one tried? Dragon slabs. Dragon sandwiches. All that heat stuffed together, they'd be self-toasting sandwiches! Smothering a giggle, she tuned in to Master Chamzu's meandering description of the bustling main thoroughfare, where tall, slender Fra'aniorian ladies of note paraded slowly along shady walkways or tarried in arbours festooned with climbing roses, jasmine and takataki flower, twirling their colourful silk parasols against the bright suns-shine and perching upon benches with care for their long, elegant lace gowns. A five-foot train was regarded as modest. Even in the city the foliage was dense and tropical, the Master noted, and rife with songbirds and the odd mischievous dragonet pinching scraps from a kitchen window.\n\nThere was a current fad in keeping parakeets, and so as they passed by the colonnaded houses and cool, welcoming merchants' establishments, she heard bird voices calling out silly phrases they had been taught, 'Who's a pretty boy,' and 'Islands' greetings, maiden,' or, rather more blushingly, 'Come to my chamber. Pillow roll! Pillow roll!'\n\nAfter a fish seller wandered by screeching, \"Feeeeesh! Helyon trout and lake carp \u2013 feeeeesh! Who wants my luverly freeeeesh feeeeeesh!\" at the top of his lungs, Auli squeezed the Master's arm slightly to gain his attention.\n\n\"My father's tall?\"\n\n\"Xa'an's six feet, six and a whisker more,\" Chamzu returned, \"yet he manages to blend in effortlessly. It's a gift. We Fra'aniorians are regarded as taller and more slender than most peoples. The Immadians of the North are said to be similarly built but much paler of skin than us, but it is the Jeradians who are the true giants. I've heard of mercenaries as tall as eight feet \u2013 can you imagine?\"\n\n\"Awkward for lintels,\" she chuckled.\n\n\"Mind the cart,\" he said, steering her a short ways to her left. \"Farther South the peoples are generally smaller \u2013 or wider, I'll grant, in the case of Mejia or the Archipelago. Remoyans or the Eastern peoples seldom top five and five, while the Pygmies are said to measure a mere three to four feet in stature. But they hide in their jungles.\"\n\n\"What's my skin tone like, Master? Recognisably Fra'aniorian?\"\n\n\"Mostly \u2026\"\n\nAuli processed his dreamy tone before yelping, \"Mostly? What do you mean, mostly?\"\n\n\"Well, it's probably nothing. Look, the Palace lies directly ahead.\"\n\n\"Master!\"\n\n\"Alright, I'll describe it to you.\" She pinched his arm, and not gently either. He chuckled, \"Oh, stow the claws and loosen up. I mean, we stroll into palaces every other day, don't we? Auli, your ears, your general features and physique, your skin tone and long, gleaming tresses \u2013 everything about you says, 'Fra'aniorian.'\"\n\n\"Except the eyes.\"\n\n\"Aye. And your voice.\"\n\n\"My \u2013 oh.\"\n\n\"Two things about your voice.\" His shoulder and upper arm jolted, cluing Auli in to the gesture of his free hand, the one not gallantly braced to provide her guidance. \"One, your vocal timbre exhibits a remarkable clarity and resonance. Zanthrillior, bless his paws, calls it your 'thrill factor' and claims it is entirely due to his virtuoso teachings; he says you make Dragons' fires burn more richly when you sing, and Humans sigh and shiver. I can certainly corroborate that claim.\"\n\nHad she not been wearing a face veil that extended beyond her chin, Auli might just have swallowed a few flies, or whatever buzzing thing was investigating her perfume just now. Dragonfly? Wasp? Ordinary fly of the 'persistently annoying' variety?\n\n\"Two, more obviously, is the vocal range which you are capable of attaining. There's more of a dragonet and less of a standard singing voice about you, especially in lyric coloratura passages. Step lively now. Don't want to be late for a King.\"\n\nThey walked on more briskly, Auli's soft slippers whispering over the granite flagstones, while Chamzu's boots thudded steadily beside her.\n\n\"You skipped a detail, Master.\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"My skin. You were \u2013\"\n\n\"Arrggh! Your brain! I swear nothing passes you by, Auli.\" He sucked in a breath. \"Well, just recently I've been starting to think that I'm seeing something \u2013 in the suns-light. Usually. It's similar to the gleam in your hair, like a hint of \u2013 ahem \u2013 golden light, or gold thread with a hint of sapphire about it, or something \u2026 well, I asked Zimtyna if you girls were using some special oil preparation on your \u2026 ha.\"\n\n\"Golden whatsit and sapphire how much?\" Poor Chamzu, he sounded most discomfited. Auli could not imagine it was over a matter of female beautification; he had been a married man, after all!\n\n\"Luminescent threads. It's hard to describe. Or swirls, I'd say. It's like when light refracts off a gemstone in a particular way and teases the eye. Arms, neck, cheeks \u2026 it's there one moment and then it vanishes, leaving you wondering if you ever saw it. I should ask \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion? He'd have noticed,\" she said thoughtlessly. Ruddy Isles, and her blush roared off into the proverbial suns-set!\n\n\"Auli \u2026\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"Please \u2026 be careful. Promise me.\"\n\nHe knew. He saw what she dared not admit to herself. Auli pulled a face beneath her disguise, feeling her jawbone click and shift uncomfortably as she did so. Aye. Had she only been born with scales and hide, or Arkurion with two legs and a manly grin, the rainbows she had never seen would truly have intersected over their Isles. He had his love interest in Kayturia. And she must live with her strangeness, and this ghastly facility for disremembrance that chased away all hope of long term intimacy.\n\nFra'anior fire Sazutharr's soul, the old Dragon had promised to devise a magical solution for her difficulty \u2013 at worst a means of making people or Dragons think they remembered her, and at best, a way of jogging memories that were not, hopefully, annihilated by her curse.\n\nShe whispered, \"I promise.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "Bowing deeply with a series of formal Fra'aniorian hand twirls and a light dance step at which she had been painstakingly drilled, Auli-Ambar made obeisance before the royals of Fra'anior in an informal greeting chamber just off the main throne room. All the finery was lost on her, but it smelled enticing. The fabled lace dresses of the women rustled discreetly as they moved, sounding as expensive as the handcrafted masterpieces were reputed to be. The floors were flawless marble and the slightly musty, heavy odour of tapestries tickled her nostrils with unknown delights \u2013 what legends might they recount? What battles or events? The Palace was said to be famously wealthy. There was much commerce between the Human and Dragon denizens of Fra'anior Cluster, and few dared to attack a society so deeply intertwined with the Dragonish presence without serious forethought.\n\nThe herald announced, \"His Majesty Chalcion, King upon the Onyx Throne, True Guardian of the Verdant Isles of great Fra'anior, and his radiant Queen, Shyana of Si'itubiar, Bearer of the Dragonstone and Patroness of Arts and Culture! Prince Zalcion, Head Councillor of the Circle of the Wise \u2013\" the King's younger brother, Auli reminded herself, an enigmatic player in royal circles \"\u2013 and presenting with the greatest honour, the Princess Bri'inna and the Princes Ja'allanor and Ka'allion; and in attendance the most laudable Captain Ra'aba, Verimost Blade of the King's Will!\"\n\nAuli resisted an urge to spit at this last introduction; that would likely result in the shortest appointment to the position of Venerable Instructor in history. Ornath's briefing had been thorough. Zalcion, Bri'inna and Ja'allanor were Chalcion's siblings, but the succession would pass through Ka'allion should he survive to manhood \u2013 so blandly noted by the Master that Auli wondered what the likelihood of that might be \u2013and then further, to any further siblings born to Queen Shyana. Zalcion was unmarried but there were other royal children from Chalcion's surviving siblings, his deceased Queen Si'ilmira's brother and sister, and their cousins.\n\nNoticeably less pompously, the herald now reacted to a signal presumably from the King, and announced, \"Your Majesties, may I present for the pleasure of your acquaintance the most estimable Master Chamzu, Chief Scrollkeeper of Gi'ishior, and the honourable Miss Auli-Ambar, Lore Specialist, who is candidate for the position of Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish.\"\n\nOh, she was no longer an assistant? Marvellous how the Gi'ishior powers kept her up to date with her titles. Now was not the moment for a fit of the giggles.\n\n\"Approach the throne.\"\n\nProper etiquette demanded the formal bows accorded to a man of Chamzu's not inconsiderable station. He was not royalty, but to Auli's mind he was treated as such. Everyone began bowing to everyone else \u2013 starting with the King, of course. This was a back-wrenching exercise of multiple genuflections accompanied by pronouncing the copious blessings of Fra'anior upon all and sundry, accompanied by a mind-numbing menagerie of formal felicitations and inquiries as to good health, relatives, prosperity, wishes of ever-increasing wisdom, and the like. All, according to custom, just a tad preposterous.\n\nChalcion came across as stern and aloof, as did Ka'allion, but Auli liked Shyana's voice. She sounded sweet and a touch na\u00efve beneath that veneer of perfect royal elocution.\n\nAt length everyone, by dint of heroic, poetic and even farcical endeavour, managed to arrive at the business at hand. Chamzu proposed her for the position and deferred to King Chalcion, whose robes rustled and crackled metallically \u2013 that would be stiff gold brocade, Auli realised \u2013 as if he gesticulated broadly. \"If she's your best, Chief Scrollkeeper Chamzu, then the position is hers after my Shyana hears her audition.\"\n\nAuli-Ambar realised she had just been decisively dismissed. Roaring rajals! A kingly protocol-slap, no less.\n\nShyana said, \"I wish to see the face of the one who is to teach the royal family.\"\n\nNot unexpected. Still, Auli's heart slammed against the back of her throat as Chamzu said smoothly, \"Auli was born blind, o Queen.\"\n\n\"I am not unsympathetic. My younger brother lived but four years upon the Isles, and they were hard years withal.\"\n\nDespite the Queen's soft tones, Auli realised her words were phrased to communicate this was no request. Not so na\u00efve after all! Bowing slightly, she said, \"I am willing.\"\n\nHer fingers seemed to take forever to unlace the ties of her face veil; the fabric sawed slightly against the top groove of her ears as she drew it away. Then she lifted away Zimtyna's creation, the light lacework mask backed with opaque blue cloth that covered her eyes. She had prepared for this by having pressed the eyelids closed. The damaged eyelids, lacking shape and definition or ordinary eyelashes, were least offensive presented in this way.\n\nSuch a silence ensued, it charred her very bones.\n\nLightly, Chalcion said, \"None too hideous. Take the malformed maiden away, Shyana, and communicate to me the result of her audition. Settle our guests and see to it that they have everything they require, according to the matchless hospitality of this Court. Zalcion, gather the Councillors. We have the matter of Xinidia's tardy tribute to discuss. Chief Scrollkeeper, will you join us for lunch on the Receiving Balcony?\"\n\nThe Master bowed. \"I shall await your good pleasure, o King. Auli, Queen Shyana approaches.\"\n\nWith a subtle rustle of cloth and a luxurious waft of dorlis flower perfume, the Queen stopped just ahead of Auli. Cool fingers touched her hand. \"Walk with me. So, you would teach my Ka'allion? I must warn you, for a lad of his years he is a most serious-minded scholar. And there are other children here in the Palace, from both staff and royalty, who would benefit from your instruction. Your class will be sizeable.\"\n\nRelinquishing her hold upon the Master \u2013 reluctantly, for it left her feeling insecure \u2013 Auli fell into step with the tall Queen. She moved with an understated fluidity, as though with a rippling like water that caused a strangely sympathetic sensation deep within her person, and Auli wondered if the reports of her exceptional skill at dancing were true. She appreciated the Queen's facility for movement as they traversed a long corridor and ascended three flights of stairs. Meantime, Shyana described the layout of the inner hall around which were arranged the wings and balconies \u2013 both interior and exterior \u2013 of the rectangular, four-story Palace building. Auli wondered what information had reached the Queen, for she described her surrounds with care for a blind person's needs.\n\nAuli, being Auli, had raided the Library for every existing schematic of the Palace and its gardens in preparation for this trip, and from her diligent study knew that there were five levels below ground as well, dedicated to serving all the functions of royal life, as well as barracks for five hundred Royal Guards, extensive storage for everything ranging from the King's private cellar of berry wines to a year's food supply of non-perishables against siege, and a dungeon complex that extended out beneath the pretty gardens and to a cliff-side location. That was also strategic, meant to mitigate against assault from the South and East quarters of the Palace grounds.\n\nApparently, Kind Chalcion liked to keep his dungeons well-tenanted.\n\nShyana chuckled musically when Auli-Ambar queried the size of her chambers and explained that her personal maidservant, Si'ishi, would show her where everything was and would care for her effects. Auli promptly tripped over the fringe of a startlingly plush rug and stumbled to her knees.\n\nPerfect.\n\nChanged and refreshed, with a few nourishing snacks and a glass of cool berry juice in protest of her nervousness practically fermenting her innards, and with all her effects suitably placed or packed away, Auli-Ambar slipped her White Dragoness \u2013 her Izariela, a name that apparently belonged to no known Dragoness in any record she had been able to obtain \u2013 into her belt pouch, and accompanied Si'ishi down to the Royal Nursery. That would be the entire second floor of the north wing of the palace building, as she had seen upon the scrolls but now experienced for herself. Nineteen chambers. Twenty-five full time staff. A contingent of a dozen guards. An on-call doctor and nurse. A dedicated kitchen. Three bathing chambers, a music room, two schoolrooms and a martial arts training room.\n\nAll for one Prince?\n\nHer jaw already benefitted from a permanent state of dislocation.\n\nShortly, she found Queen Shyana in the music chambers. Si'ishi withdrew, leaving Auli standing helplessly in a room of unknown dimensions, facing a Queen who said at once:\n\n\"Let's drop any pretence. You are considerably less venerable than the last tutor. While I understand that the Dragons would have given this post their usual consideration, an assessment upon which I place due weight, you appear much more a vulnerable teenager than the greybeard I expected. How many summers have you?\"\n\nHonesty must rule. \"Fourteen, my Queen.\"\n\n\"Four \u2013 what! I mean, what?\" Her gasp rang clearly throughout the chamber. It was surprisingly airy; Auli remembered that the design was a portico leading onto an outside balcony. Fragrances swirled in and out on a slight breeze as the silence between them deepened. After a pause of terrifying proportions, the Queen said, \"Fra'anior's beard, I don't know whether to be insulted or impressed. Chalcion would blow the lid off his volcano. Still, the idea of a young tutor for children is not a bad one, I suppose. Remind me of your title?\"\n\n\"Lore Specialist.\"\n\n\"You work with Sazutharr in the Dragon Library?\" Fingers drummed upon an unseen table. \"Aye. I'd trust Sazutharr to make a sound choice. Recite the Kings of Fra'anior for me.\"\n\nAuli gave her twenty generations at rattletrap speed, and then began to expound their families, relatives and children systematically. Ha. Her mind was a filing rack and the Queen would soon see it. Did scholars who wished to shortcut the byzantine indexing system not approach her directly for references? Hmm. There was another matter she could improve \u2013\n\nShyana said, \"Alright, I can see you've an excellent memory for facts. Can you recite The Oracle of Sunakxi?\"\n\n\"Which version, o Queen?\"\n\n\"The version I am likely to have on this table. Can you read, Auli?\"\n\n\"O Queen, there are four recognised versions of The Oracle. One is attributed to a minor textual error and has no bearing on the main three variants. In the Helyon text, Sunakxi the Green is eventually executed for treason as a moral lesson teaching that any rebellion against the Dragon Elders will receive its just reward. In the Kaolili version, Sunakxi is called Sunakiki. She is a Green Dragon with powers to nurture all living things, and functions therefore as a goddess figure, similar in stature to the Ancient Dragons. She triumphs over those who would spread Dramagon's destructive philosophies amongst her people and eventually transforms them into jinsumo trees, which are holy trees believed to house the souls of the dead. Finally, there is the Jeradian version, a much rougher and bloodier saga altogether, which extols the physical prowess of Sunakxi the Green, but she is eventually brought low by the Dragon Elder Samukor the Blue, of Gi'ishior.\"\n\nFor the first time, Shyana chuckled softly, and the sound tinkled between them like droplets of delight. \"And which version might I have here?\"\n\n\"If the reports describing your personality are accurate, I believe you would favour the Kaolili legend, o Queen.\"\n\n\"And \u2026\" A scroll touched her knuckles.\n\nAuli read the outer address with her fingertips. \"I am correct. Eastern.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Shyana. \"You read just like that? You feel ink upon scrolleaf?\"\n\nAuli nodded.\n\nA slight exhalation betrayed the Queen's astonishment. The girl wondered if she knew this knack for magic, or if she took it for a skill. \"Would you kindly recite the tale?\"\n\n\"The Oracle of Sunakiki is unusually sung to the accompaniment of the thirty-stringed zither and tubular bells, noble Queen. But if you can stand for it, I would be honoured if you could check my recitation against your text.\"\n\nA slight rustling of scrolleaf implied that the Queen of Fra'anior was following closely as Auli-Ambar, having no need to shut her eyes to gather her concentration, simply began to recite the epic poem. After five lengthy stanzas a soft word halted her. The Queen inquired as to her prior teaching experience. Auli pointed to her involvement in teaching hatchlings, fledglings and Human youngsters under Inxulia's supervision, and then added her scholarly experience in Sazutharr's employ.\n\nAt length the Queen said, \"Auli, blow me down with a volcanic zephyr! You play the Dragonharp as your chosen accompaniment to the ballads and epics? You speak Dragonish fluently?\"\n\nShe bobbed her head. \"Aye, o Queen.\"\n\n\"What's this nuance?\" <You pesky dragonet!>\n\nAuli laughed merrily. So, the Queen played at the ostensibly illegal matter of speaking Dragonish? Intriguing. \"If I may presume to correct your Dragonish, I would say that you elided the flame-aggravation indicator in favour of, forgive me o Queen, a somewhat garbled roost-dominance marker perhaps corrupted by a temporal indicator noting early evening, just an hour after suns-set.\" <Pesky \u2026 pesky \u2026 pesky \u2013 quite different meanings, correct?> \"The key is how the medial modifier acts upon the second syllable, 'kee.'\n\nIt seemed the Queen threw up her hands. \"Clearly, my Dragonish requires polishing. But I know music. My favourite dance opera is the Flame Cycle. Would you play a movement for me?\"\n\n\"I'm far from an expert on the Dragonharp,\" Auli said, \"but I'll do my best.\"\n\n\"Well, who taught you?\"\n\n\"Zanthrillior, the \u2013\"\n\n\"Zanthrillior! The Zanthrillior? Well, my expectations have leaped from the skies to the stars.\"\n\nAuli chuckled at the Queen's artless enthusiasm. \"Well, if you expect the Dragonet's Dance then I am sorry to inform you that I might as well just tie my fingers in knots right now. But I could manage a passable Morrow Dawns the Dragonstar, o Queen. Would that be suitable? Where's my instrument?\"\n\n\"Oh. I forgot. Over this way.\" With a self-conscious cough, Shyana took her left elbow. \"Hmm, Islands' greetings, little one \u2013 we've a red dragonet peeking through the flowering chis-chis vines, Auli. That rascal's often here. We call this part of the music room the outer chamber. From here, one may enjoy an uninterrupted view over Fra'anior City's meandering gardens to the caldera \u2026 oh, that was thoughtless of me.\"\n\n\"Not so, my Queen,\" Auli returned. \"I love hearing imagery.\"\n\n\"Here. I assume you require a small stool? I've actually never heard the Dragonharp played, so I'm looking forward to this very much. Aren't full-size instruments meant to be the size of an Isles house?\"\n\n\"Quite,\" said Auli, \"and they're worth a King's ransom.\"\n\n\"Just what Chalcion paid for me.\"\n\n\"He \u2026 uh, did?\"\n\nA verbal smile accompanied the humorous rejoinder, \"That's what my Island negotiated for me before the formal kidnapping. You would not believe the palaver. Courtiers swooning in shock, message scrolls fluttering about in clumps thicker than migrating butterflies, older relatives pretending to summarily perish of apoplexy \u2026 exciting times, all told. So, the Royal House of Onyx demands of their Venerable Instructors nothing short of \u2013\"\n\n\"Senescence?\"\n\n\"How fetchingly your dotage becomes you, o ancient Auli!\" laughed the Queen.\n\nBreathe. Just remember to breathe. Finding the very slight guide points on the key strings, Auli plucked a clumsy D melodic minor seventh chord, before removing her hands and shaking out her wrists. Wow. Brave as always!\n\n<Onyx?> chirped the dragonet.\n\nAuli nearly fell off her stool. Then, she pressed her cheek against the instrument and thought upon the White Dragoness in her pouch. Maybe she'd use the long musical introduction to this piece to tell Amaryllion Fireborn all about her strange fixation upon an imaginary shell-daughter of a mythical Dragoness. He'd be tickled.\n\nEnvisaging tickling a Dragon the size of a small Island beneath the chin \u2013 probably need a whole tree for that \u2013 Auli tried to forget about the Queen, auditions and politics, and let the music flow. She remembered those first moments of her entering the Island-World, and let anguish richly shade the long, lyrical phrases that preceded the joyous advent of dawn. Her own darkness, a darkness in which her hands weaved by sensation alone, always unseen. She knew it so well. Melodies of obscurity, of gloom wherein soul-shadows of stately mien roved the never-light plains of life.\n\nA girl wept soundlessly over her instrument.\n\nShe yearned for the Onyx.\n\nShe played until the trill-embellished runs of the composition's roseate dawning painted her soul with shades akin to that one near-image of a galaxy, the only image she had ever seen apart from what Amaryllion had implanted into her mind, and the suns became shapeless blobs with limbs and talons and mighty maws roaring, <ARISE!!>\n\nHer voice filled the chamber with rippling glissades of suns-light, as tempestuous as the hope that scorched her very soul. Let the Dragonstar arise!\n\nThen, she heard the slight scuff of slippers as Shyana stood. The Queen began to dance."
            },
            {
                "title": "To Spy Upon a Spy",
                "text": "\"Auli-AMBAR!\" Hrr father wheezed. \"I \u2026 my Queen! Forgive me.\"\n\n\"Ah, Xa'an,\" said the Queen, halting her dance mid-step, it seemed. Auli's fingertips died upon the strings with a discordant twanging. She felt violated by the interruption \u2013 shocked and pleased by her father's presence, but grieving her lost music. \"I believe you are familiar with our new Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish?\"\n\n\"Well, I \u2026 aye, but \u2026 Auli?\"\n\n\"You don't approve?\"\n\nAuli had never imagined her suave father could be ambushed in conversation, but here he was, gasping like the guards who had been sent to run steps \u2013 all the way up and down the volcano \u2013 last week at Gi'ishior. Brutal training.\n\n\"M-M-My Queen,\" he spluttered. \"I most assuredly \u2026 do! I was simply taken aback. To see Auli here, with you. Aye.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said the Queen. Grudging admiration bloomed in Auli's chest. This woman could hold her territory and a few Isles besides. \"I was just delighting in the worthy efforts of Zanthrillior's student.\"\n\nShe distinctly heard her father mouth, 'Zanthrillior?' Then he bowed to blow across her knuckles and kissed her palm in the formal fashion. \"My daughter. Delightful surprise, of course.\" Back into courtly mode, Auli thought sourly, his manner making her return greeting somewhat fierier than intended. \"You will be instructing the royal brood in this little roost? I could not imagine a more apposite appointment.\"\n\n\"Thank you, father.\"\n\n\"Nor a more dangerous one,\" the Queen replied almost inaudibly, jolting Auli in yet another direction. \"Join me.\"\n\nShe led the pair aside to a table set beneath a cool pergola of climbing roses; to Auli's distinct startlement, a warm nose pressed against her hand almost the moment she sat down. Not a hound. A rather more scaly fellow. <Well, Islands' greetings \u2013 help!> With a lithe, rippling bound and a peremptory volley of chirps, the dragonet had just installed himself upon her lap! <Uh \u2026 sorry, don't be startled, little one.> A purr vibrated against her stomach.\n\n\"They're tame, but not usually that tame,\" the Queen remarked. \"Berry or fruit juice?\"\n\nAuli sniffed the air discreetly. \"I think I'd enjoy the jiista-berry and fireberry cordial with a teensy pinch of that thassalus spice, thank you.\"\n\nXa'an and the Queen laughed simultaneously. Her father said, \"She's like that. Don't be surprised if she names the dragonet in a minute.\"\n\nCrystal glasses clinked \u2013 was the Queen serving drinks? Auli wondered if the Island-World had just stood upon its head. Who was surprising whom, now? She took the opportunity to inquire, <Alright, mister insistent, what's your name?>\n\n<Cheep.>\n\n<I didn't get that. You're cheap?> Auli thought that was a clever pun in Dragonish, but a set of five talons immediately pricked her bare right arm, near the pulse in her elbow. She yelped, <Sorry! Say your name again?>\n\n<Cheep-cheep.>\n\nShe blinked. Something very odd was tickling the edge of her \u2026 mind? She could only liken the sensation to Amaryllion's mighty claws stroking the edge of her consciousness, and she distinctly felt something inside of her react. Barriers slammed up. Mental darkness descended \u2013 roaring rajals! Was this her protective magic, what Arkurion had called her instinctual wards or bastion wards to use the more technical descriptor, reacting to the dragonet's assertiveness? A \u2026 psychic response? No. Wait just a stinking second! Dragons did not communicate with their minds, did they? Nothing she had ever read in any text suggested as much, but the prickling sensation did not abate. Nor did the fear-power-protection that burned in the interior of her skull like a conflagration rather than a headache.\n\nThis was no time to take one of her funny turns. She shivered lightly. <I'm sorry I don't understand. I'm only Human, you know.>\n\n<Hoo? Hoo-hoo hee hee hee \u2026 hoo-min!> Great. Now the pernicious pest was laughing at her. She had the distinct impression he had concluded she was deficient in the brains chamber. The tiny, hot muzzle prodded her bicep; she responded by finding a sweetbread on her plate and breaking off a piece.\n\n<Nice dragonet \u2013 ouch. Stow the talons, you scaly pirate.> Cautiously, she touched his back, and snatched her hand back at once. <Don't you growl at me. I'm feeding you.>\n\nRascal! He summarily snitched her sweetbread and vacated his perch.\n\n\"Disappeared into the trailing vines with quite the raffish smirk in your direction,\" Xa'an said. \"I believe you've made a conquest there, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\nAuli the all-conquering scroll mouse? Aye.\n\nShe said, \"I've never understood why dragonets don't seem to speak intelligibly, father. Do you know why that is?\" When he made an indulgent noise, she added, \"They're so smart and capable in all other spheres of life \u2013 supremely musical, building and dwelling in complex communal warrens, deft with the paws as that miniature thief just showed us \u2013 I mean, can you imagine that Dragons of Sapphurion-esque enormity are actually called Lesser Dragons in the lore? Blows you right off the Isle of Sanity to consider that, doesn't it?\"\n\nAuli identified a few slices of tara fruit on her plate by touch and tucked into one, but almost choked as Xa'an said, \"I guess that's why the Dragonkind call you 'Loremaster,' eh daughter?\"\n\n\"That's just a blot of ink on my nose, father.\"\n\nHow strange it was to be laughing with a Queen and the man said to be her chief spy. In the ballads, Islanders pinched themselves. Auli was wide awake, make no mistake!\n\nAfter briefly discussing the season, a trade dispute brewing with Remoy over medicinal oils and glass craft, and inquiring as to the state of affairs at Gi'ishior and the Dragon Elders' health, Queen Shyana said, \"Thank you for coming this morning, Xa'an. I wanted to give you both a word of warning, and then Auli will need to jump straight into lessons with the children. I would very much like to see her in action, for I suspect I'll enjoy it tremendously. You'll need to find time to work out the implications of what I say yourselves. Discreetly, of course \u2013 and aye, I know you're a master of discretion, Xa'an, but believe me when I say this: it is different with your own family. Vastly different.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" he said, and quaffed a mouthful of juice awkwardly.\n\nShyana said, \"The family connection is known and noted with interest in certain quarters. So is the level of access to key personnel on both Isles. The combination of positions held by yourselves has never occurred in known history and therefore \u2013 this is my conviction \u2013 presents both opportunity and peril. How do you catch a spy?\"\n\nAnother conversational switch. Shyana was on fire this morning.\n\n\"You send a spy to spy upon a spy,\" Xa'an responded humorously, but Auli heard his throat work a second time.\n\n\"Then we understand each other,\" Shyana said. \"Xa'an, please brief the Venerable Instructor about our expectations regarding the royal family.\"\n\nHe said, \"Freedom to speak, o Queen?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar, the royal family takes security extremely seriously,\" he said briskly, suddenly assuming a professional mode she had imagined but never heard in her father before. \"You will not have seen, but the grounds below, the windows, the ledges above, the roof and the Palace's innards are all guarded according to variable schedules which ensure watertight coverage.\"\n\nNot so watertight as to have escaped her prior briefing, Auli thought, keeping her lips sealed. How did the Dragonkind come to possess such detailed information about Palace life? A dragonet chirping from the inside?\n\n\"Your person and effects will ordinarily be searched whenever you enter the Royal Nursery. I trust that shall not inconvenience you?\"\n\n\"Not in the slightest,\" she replied. Did that search cover some of the magical means of assassination, influence, capture or ingress she had been studying recently? She would not be surprised if the Palace employed specialists in certain disciplines.\n\nXa'an added, \"King Chalcion is keen that events such as those which transpired during the Year of the Four Kings, a decade and a half ago, are not repeated.\" Chalcion was said to have masterminded those very events, although proof was scant. Suspiciously scant. One more detail her new job entailed she must look into \u2026 \"Furthermore, he is keen to ensure that his heir and hopefully, future heirs, remain in the best of health. These are delicate times, you will understand.\"\n\nThat slight catch in his voice. Auli said, \"Warmest congratulations, o Queen!\"\n\nShyana laughed self-consciously. \"I am not \u2026 oh, Islands' sakes! The Dragon's cracked the eggshell now. Auli, how \u2026 Xa'an \u2013\"\n\n\"Not I!\" he returned defensively.\n\n\"You can't possibly have seen anything?\" the Queen queried.\n\n\"Intuition,\" said Auli. \"I apologise. This was not in any way part of my briefing, nor shall I share the joyous news with the Dragons until you expressly grant me permission.\"\n\n\"Please don't. I'm actually twenty-five weeks pregnant, but Chalcion doesn't want the news bandied about. The bump is yet petite and well-hidden \u2013 I thought, well-hidden \u2013 by my attire. You see, there have been threats \u2013 some originating from my own home Island, it seems!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, o Queen.\"\n\n\"Nothing unusual,\" she returned, but her voice was fearfully taut.\n\n\"Auli, what was that?\" growled her father.\n\n\"Dad, I'm a blind \u2013\" great leaping Islands! She had just called him Dad? When had that sneaked up and ensnared her? A faint clumping of boots in the corridor without, however, caught her attention. Auli tilted her head. \"Someone's coming. Oh no.\"\n\n\"Oh no?\" Queen Shyana queried mildly.\n\nAuli bit her lip. Second mistake. Who was piling them up now? Miserably, she said, \"It's Captain Ra'aba, I meant to say.\"\n\nThe silence around their small table spoke many scrolls-worth. Auli-Ambar wondered what the Queen thought of her slip-up; certainly, the slight but definite hiss of breath between her father's teeth communicated his annoyance and curiosity. How much should she admit? Should she state outright that she despised and distrusted the man? He was a key figure in Chalcion's chain of command. The recently promoted Captain had a good reputation with most of the Dragonkind as well, especially with the faction tacitly led by Andarraz, she understood. Razzior's paw work. They even thought he had saved her life from that blasted incident when the hatchlings and their green-fanged rat had effectively left her for dead down a ventilation shaft. She limped even now as a result.\n\nWorse, she still knew nothing about the lore he and Razzior had been seeking. Beneath the table, the girl twisted her fingers together until they hurt. Too slow. Remiss, Auli-Ambar. Most remiss.\n\n\"O Queen, I am sorry to disturb, but \u2013\" Ra'aba called upon entering the music chamber. He paused, a markedly false hesitation. \"Oh, Xa'an Ta'afaya, I didn't know you were here with \u2026 your daughter \u2026\"\n\nA nasty Dragonish swear word popped into her mind, one which she banished instantly to the remotest volcano North of the Rift. Barely half a sentence, and she knew Ra'aba's vile brain was working at the speed of a Dragon swooping into battle. This could not escape him. Implications. Opportunities. Hopefully, it introduced a gargantuan snarl into whatever fiendish plans circulated in that cesspit atop his shoulders.\n\nAuli distinctly heard her father's jaw click as he clenched his teeth. \"Captain Ra'aba. What a pleasure,\" he said. Courtly formal. Cold as the frigid breath of Sapphurion's ice stomach.\n\nShyana said, \"I see you are already acquainted with Auli-Ambar, Captain? Good. The Dragon Elders have proposed her for the position of Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish, and I was about to confirm that appointment. Would you concur?\"\n\nWithout missing a beat, the man replied, \"Absolutely. The girl has developed a formidable reputation amongst the Dragonkind, my Queen. Quite formidable.\" Smoother than any snake, Auli told herself. A beautiful, convincing baritone that must be one of his primary weapons in the politics his station necessitated. \"Sazutharr has openly expressed his high opinion of her scholarly abilities, and as you know, the Head Librarian is not a Dragon given to effusive praise. He rules his staff with a firm paw. Secondly, she is said to whisper into the ear canals of the mighty Sapphire himself. This certainly raises interesting possibilities for our administration to consider, and I shall be reporting as much to King Chalcion. You're conducting the security briefing, Xa'an?\"\n\n\"By no means is Auli above the rule of our law,\" said her father.\n\n\"No,\" Ra'aba agreed.\n\nHeavens raining fireballs, this was like listening to a verbal duel with daggers. She could not fathom how they managed it, but the antipathy between the men was far clearer than her vision would likely be.\n\n\"Isn't that so, Auli-Ambar?\" the Captain pressed.\n\nShe tried to incline her head graciously. \"I shall observe every protocol, Captain Ra'aba.\"\n\nStupid quiver in her stupid voice!\n\n\"Very good.\" A hint of smugness. Aye, he knew she remembered his threats. Ra'aba said, \"I must apologise, o Queen, but a matter of the utmost urgency has arisen which requires Xa'an's special talents. Permission to excuse \u2013\"\n\n\"Granted,\" said Shyana.\n\n\"My Queen?\" Xa'an inquired.\n\n\"You may brief your daughter later. Will you \u2013\"\n\n\"I shall.\" Xa'an's chair scraped backward as he rose, probably bowing judging by the way his speech lilted slightly.\n\nHe and Ra'aba departed.\n\nAfter a very long pause, the Queen said, \"So \u2026 the dance begins.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "Auli need not have worried about the royal brood, as the Queen humorously styled the collection of students she would teach. Seven Princes and four Princesses of the realm, besides a gaggle of thirteen children belonging to senior court functionaries. Auli knew of another Prince and twin year-old Princesses besides, still in wrappings, who would not attend classes for several years yet. Wow. Oh aye, and the large tadpole wriggling in her belly, Shyana added. The class was very serious. Very formal. Perfect behaviour, perfect manners and immaculate attention.\n\nFlattering herself that she could be as bold as any Dragon, Auli-Ambar shook the starch out of their shirts with her storytelling exploits, and then took her student choir through five ballads they knew and taught them two new ones. Delightful voices made the music chamber ring with seven-part harmony, and the dragonets without chirrup in delight! These were the historical epics, originally written to help illiterate students memorise the salient points of major events, battles, territorial disputes and the like. Most were fearsomely dull. Mixing up her paws once more, Auli decided to teach them an accelerating round she had learned from Inxulia the Hatchling Mother, which had two teams competing to see who could sing and dance the fastest without falling over, running out of breath or making a mistake.\n\nMmm. Sweaty royalty. She had a private giggle once they were done, suspecting that the Palace had never seen a class to compare.\n\nThe eldest Prince in attendance, Prince Hi'ixion, who at nineteen was also the only surviving member of the late King Amorion's unfortunately abridged family line, came over to thank her enthusiastically afterward. \"A most spirited introduction to your teaching style, Venerable Instructor,\" he said, blowing upon her knuckles with faultless formality. Auli warmed to the gentle note of mischief in his tone. \"I shall look forward to the morrow's Dragonish delights.\"\n\n\"Prince Hi'ixion,\" she dipped her head.\n\n\"Anon,\" said he, and left her with the faintest hint of his spicy fragrance in her nostrils. Piquant sable peppers and a dash of lemony sakathiflower, she noted. A very masculine choice.\n\nAt once, a completely tenth-Island thought intruded. Scents. Aye, this had been part of her briefing. Apparently scents were signals in the Human court \u2013 not so at the Halls of the Dragons, or, not in the same way. A perfumer had spent an enjoyable hour with Auli explaining the nuances, before souring the experience by admitting Uncle Mi'elgan was her main supplier. As for Dragons, they each produced a particular natural scent that Auli had begun to suspect might reveal the main bent of their thoughts \u2013 aggressive Dragons smelling of sulphur and char, evil Dragons of sourer, oiler notes and so on \u2013 but they did not wear scent or fragrance as a rule. This had not always been the case. Recently, she had helped Sazutharr salvage the contents of a very rare scroll damaged by water seepage into Archives cavern ninety-four, fourth shelf south orientation, tenth rack, segment four-point-two.\n\nAuli clucked chastisement to herself as the index reference presented itself perfectly to her memory. Scrollworm extraordinaire!\n\nThe scroll had, in passing, recounted how in the original days of Gi'ishior the Dragons had taken fragrance baths in addition to their usual water, hot oil, boiling lava and scrubbing routines. The practice had fallen into disuse nearly two thousand years before due to fragrance shortages, and the chambers turned over to other uses. Nowadays there was no such restriction upon imports of fragrance \u2013 although, the quantities of essence or aromatic oils required for seasoning a hundred-foot, forty-tonne Dragon must be staggering indeed. Particularly beasts as rank as a Razzior or as acidic as an Andarraz. She trusted both Dragons about as far as she could see.\n\nPicturing a mighty paw turning Dragons on a spit as chunky spigots liberally doused them with a nose-numbing cornucopia of fragrances, Auli wondered if she could hijack the development plans for Gi'ishior. Surreptitiously. Rope Master Chamzu into her scheme, perhaps employing Master Ga'athar's particular skills in trade and negotiations to secure the necessary ingredients without the Dragons discovering anything \u2026 it might be a wonderful surprise for Sapphurion and Qualiana, if she could plan and execute her heist properly \u2013 styled as reintroducing an ancient custom, of course. Tradition always received a favourable nod from the hoary Elders. Now, to find the right traders and guilds \u2026\n\nIslands' greetings, spy-Dad!\n\nShe grinned. Nothing like family, was there?\n\n\"Venerable Instructor,\" Si'ishi said, in her usual unobtrusive manner, \"Xa'an Ta'afaya awaits without. After his briefing, I will show you back to your chambers to help you change for the formal dinner tonight.\"\n\nAuli straightened her lips. Inane grin. Oh, of course the maidservant could not possibly have spotted that beneath her face veil. Right. Onward to battle, Dragoness!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "Folded of arm and drawn of brow, Auli scowled toward the vicinity of her maidservant. \"I did not request a bodyguard. Nor an observer in my chambers.\"\n\n\"How's the water temperature?\"\n\nThe warble of amusement in Si'ishi's voice neither escaped Auli's notice, nor did it allay her annoyance. Nonetheless, she sank deeper into this heavenly marvel called a bubble bath, and wondered how this custom had contrived to escape Gi'ishior's notice. People had no idea how deliciously a bed of fragranced bubbles could soothe an overwrought, aching body. Hmm. Steaming Dragon bubble baths. Perhaps a huge, sunken pool warmed by jets of boiling steam \u2026 from beneath. Aye! With the right preparation, that could create a roiling lake of bubbles. Grandion would give his best scales to rollick through that bath! Apparently he was growing into a nonpareil beast of tourmaline colouration, which Auli did not understand in the slightest. Mental note, find out what colour tourmaline gemstone was, because she had an odd recollection of variants from pink to orange to blue or even black. He was a funny hatchling, a mixture of starchy correctness broken by bursts of playfulness. A young rebel, Sapphurion announced proudly at least once a day. A questioner of mores and accepted wisdom, and most certainly the strongest hatchling of his year.\n\nHis shell-fatherly pride tickled Auli's fancy.\n\nAfter a delicious pause Auli-Ambar said, \"It's perfect, Si'ishi.\"\n\n\"The perfect antidote to an evening full of politics?\"\n\nNo way Auli was about to open up to this perfumed Royal Elite soldier masquerading as her maidservant. Not until she knew her better. She sighed. Aye, the sumptuous formal dinner had been a tedious round of introductions and probing questions, interrupted by one alarmingly blissful dance with Prince Hiccoughs.\n\nRoaring rajals. She must never let that private nickname cross her lips!\n\nUmm. Prince Hi'ixion. He had whisked her away for a very decorous, protocol-aware dance between the course of delicately grilled Gemalka trout and the magnificently tongue blistering Syros pickled crimson-peppers served on the traditional bed of fluffy saffron rice \u2026 and, Auli was still not convinced her feet quite remembered where the ground was. She stretched out her toes, wriggling them contentedly. Ah, my dear Princely petal. If only he were not such a royal bore, regaling her with tale after tale of his rajal-hunting exploits, whilst she clung to his broad, uniformed shoulders and implored the Great Onyx that she would not make a complete fool of herself. Meantime, her heartbeat contended with the percussion section of the twenty piece orchestra.\n\nHa. Auli and the Prince of the Dragon Isles. Now that would make a worthy title for an operatic\u2014\n\nMovement? In the water?\n\nDespite the just-bearable temperature of the sunken bathing pool in her chambers, which apparently overlooked another magnificent view to the North of Fra'anior City, Auli froze. Something \u2026 brushed her right calf muscle.\n\nA piercing scream split the tranquil late evening.\n\nAuli erupted out of her bath like a Dragoness launching herself into battle, the scream still raw in her throat as she leaped away, skidded on the polished marble tiles, and demolished an innocent bystander \u2013 namely a hand-carved ornamental side table she had discovered earlier, on her way to a bruising hip-first impact with one of the Palace's fluted marble columns that supported its beautiful, airy architecture. That much was fine, if humiliating.\n\nLess comfortable was the slipper that trampled her outflung left hand with Si'ishi's full weight bearing down upon it as she rushed into the fray. *Krack!*\n\nAuli lay there trying not to screech something regrettable as pain seared her hand and wrist like Dragon acid. She knew broken bones. In that same instant of realisation, she heard the maidservant descending upon the bathtub with wrathful intent. Splash! Crash! Someone groaned \u2013 oh no! What was happening?\n\n\"You \u2026 you little \u2013 curse it!\" Si'ishi spat. \"Fra'anior forgive me, I've gone and killed a \u2013 ah, maybe not. It's bleeding \u2013 a dragonet. Stupid! Too quick with my daggers.\"\n\nSi'ishi's distress! Forgetting her frustration with the woman, Auli pressed carefully to her knees and then to her feet. She walked toward the sound of the dragonet's laboured breathing, trying not to jolt her throbbing fingers. \"Is it the red one? It borrowed my bathtub?\" Well, that sealed the question of her improvement for the Halls. Auli shoved that notion aside. \"Pass him to me.\" Shh, little one, I'm not \u2013 oh very well, hold my arm ransom, then.\n\nAuli winced as the creature hissed and spat at her. She had no protection from those talons this time, and they were like miniature daggers. <Easy. Easy, sweet petal.>\n\n*Sss!*\n\n<Aye, I'm hurt too.> The dragonet stilled as if by magic. <I'm sorry, that was a terrible mistake, but you just \u2013 you frightened us, see? We were scared silly, both of us stupid Humans.>\n\n\"What? Did you just call me a stupid Human in Dragonish?\" growled Si'ishi.\n\nNow was the moment for belligerence? Auli ordered, \"Find me a peace offering.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"Food, preferably meat.\" <Dear one, please. We fire love the Dragonkind. Where are you hurt?>\n\nAs the maidservant padded away in search of treats, there came a hammering at the door. \"Open up! What's the matter? Report! Who's hurt? Where's the assassin? Report, NOW!\"\n\nMarvellous. Captain Ra'aba and a troop of his men. Si'ishi was explaining, calling through the door. An outburst of laughter from a group of at least ten soldiers was stifled by a gruff bark. Unlike his men, the Captain was apparently unamused at not having anything for his sword to eviscerate in a glorious spray of blood, and he made his opinion of the two women within the chamber explicitly clear. That was a first for Auli. Even Uncle Mi'elgan had never stooped to that nadir of gutter language. He preferred what he regarded as more erudite barbs.\n\nThe next hour passed in a blur of different sounds and helpers. A nurse to set Auli's fingers in splints. A small bowl of fowl meat arrived for the dragonet and a bathrobe which she tried to draw over him who had apparently taken incontestable possession of her lap, but she received a swift talon prick of dissuasion; Si'ishi gloomily contemplated the ragging she would receive back in the barracks, never mind the punishment for vexing her hot-blooded Captain.\n\nSi'ishi's dagger strike had pierced the red dragonet in the meat of the right upper flight muscle, the quaternary anterior deltoid bundle. Because no other could touch him, Auli pasted into the deep puncture wound a salve of mixed midnight wort herb, antiseptic churberry and prekki root extract, but the dragonet would not tolerate any dressings. Nor did he do ought but turn up his muzzle at meat. He wanted fruit, after which the dragonet summarily installed himself amongst the plush pillow rolls upon her gorgeous bed, thank you kindly, and was soon snoring up a minor thunderstorm.\n\nAuli shook her head. Scoundrel!\n\nWhy would a dragonet adopt her? Did she smell like Dragons? What a mystery. He was so very clearly intentional and intelligent and bursting with the joyous fires of life, yet he could not speak.\n\n<Mystery,> she whispered. <Is that your name?>\n\nThe dragonet snored louder. Deliberately? Auli wished she could narrow her eyes as people and Dragons did in the ballads. She had to settle for drumming her fingers on her arm. Well. One-handed harping on the morrow. And she'd share a bed with a mischievous, dozy bath stealer.\n\nDid people ever just pause with bated breath and marvel at the twists and turns of life?\n\n*Tap-tap-tap.*\n\nDespite the discreet volume of the knocking at her door, Auli jerked as though she had stepped on a thorn. \"Um \u2026 who is it?\"\n\n\"One despicable father requests entrance.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\nFeeling her way over to the door, Auli worked the massive iron key \u2013 thrice the size of her palm \u2013 and hauled it open. Wow. Solid jalkwood. Must weigh a ton.\n\nLightly, Xa'an said, \"Heard you've had a busy day? Congratulations upon your official appointment.\"\n\nShe shook his hand gravely. \"Thank you, noble father.\"\n\nHis voice jumped half an octave in amusement as he replied, \"I heard the class was a raging success despite the eyebrow-twitching your teaching methods occasioned. You appear to have bewitched and bedazzled the powers that be, in addition \u2013 apart from the odd gnashing of teeth heard around town. How's the hand?\"\n\nWow. Jovial Dad. Was he tipsy; a hint of berry wine upon his breath?\n\nAshamed of her instant suspicion, Auli bobbed her head. \"Sore, but fine. Come in.\" As she began to draw the door shut, she paused. Odd. That was a very familiar smell and quite out of place in this Palace. In a moment, she heard boots receding with a female gait, she imagined, down the hallway without. \"Who was that?\"\n\n\"Guard patrol checking up on me, I suspect,\" said he.\n\nShe took one more whiff of the air, but that evocative scent had faded. Very peculiar. Dismissing the matter from her febrile mind, Auli turned to her father. \"Drink? There's only water, I suspect. For what dark and dire purpose hath the fatherly spy descended upon his daughter's abode?\"\n\n\"I cannot simply come to enjoy an occasion to speak with said daughter?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\n\"For even Prince Hi'ixion is afforded a dance, but Xa'an Ta'afaya is not?\"\n\n\"Father, don't you even \u2013\"\n\n\"Even what?\"\n\n\"Suggest \u2026 things. He's not in my league. Not even in the same Cluster.\"\n\n\"Ha. I hereby banish that falsehood to the realms of the ice fields beyond Immadia!\" When Auli chuckled at his invocation of an ancient legend, he added, \"I'm biased, of course, but in this I am also right. So, what makes your devious little mind suggest that I appear with sinister motive?\"\n\nReturning the squeeze of his fingers with her right hand, Auli said, \"I am far too sensible to consider romancing a Prince. I've a better chance of flapping my arms and flying like a Dragon.\"\n\n\"Is the heart so easily governed, Auli-Ambar?\"\n\nRotten dad! That blunt a truth was most certainly not welcome. Brusquely, she retorted, \"One, you finished your very thorough security briefing earlier. Two, it is late. Three, you arrive with quick step and elevated pulse rate. Four, I hear the slight crackling of scrolleaf in your belt pouch. Five, trouble usually stinks, and my dear forbearer, your pong is most troublesome.\"\n\nWhat she actually smelled now \u2013 if that was the correct sense \u2013 was a hint of magic about him? Might one of those scrolls be booby-trapped?\n\n\"Very good,\" said Xa'an, spy-bland. \"The Dragons have taught you well.\"\n\nAuli quoted drily:\n\n<Speak to mine heart, o pirate fair,>\n\n<Thy mien art wicked, a Dragon's lair!>\n\nHe snorted, \"That is most inappropriate, young lady! Right. I am formally requesting your help with two message scrolls. One remains untouched; the second we opened, but the breach of its seals instantly erased every rune that might have been written within.\"\n\n\"Hmm. You didn't check the wards beforehand?\"\n\nWith a verbal grimace, he replied, \"Our loremaster made a mistake. It very nearly killed him.\"\n\n\"I can imagine,\" said Auli, remembering her two nights and three days spent hanging from her ceiling. She thrust out her hand. \"So it's to be murder by scroll, is it? Love you, too.\"\n\n\"What's that \u2026 snoring?\"\n\n\"Dragonet in my bed. Relax.\"\n\nXa'an's neck creaked slightly as he glanced about the chamber, doubtless, doing the habitual reconnoitring of a seasoned royal agent. \"Hiding any Dragons in here, perchance?\"\n\n\"Hopefully not.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Familial Clash",
                "text": "The message Scroll which Xa'an's colleague had already opened proved an easy read, for the erasure left a very slight ink residue embedded in the scrolleaf. With a dint of migraine-inducing concentration and only a few pauses to piece together places where the runes had disappeared entirely, Auli-Ambar read the contents to her father.\n\n\"A report of Dragons and Fra'aniorian children born within the last ten calendar years upon three Islands of our Cluster, commissioned by Captain Ra'aba?\" her father echoed. \"Curious. Why the interest in births? Can you shed any light on this, Auli?\"\n\nWould Xa'an and his colleagues already know about the prophecy?\n\nThey relaxed on comfortable seats just beside her balcony, but despite the warmth of a fragrant volcanic zephyr, which tingled with the exotic citrusy spices of solisiya and flambard flowers from Remoy and jinsumo blossoms from the East, Xa'an had taken the precaution of drawing the crysglass panels shut. Each window was a unique artwork in its own right, Auli understood, a combination of finely tooled woodwork and then the colour-infused, hand-finished crysglass insets. Plenty of foliage. Plenty of intrigue and intent ears about this Palace, she sensed.\n\nReaching for the crystal decanter, Auli paused at her father's touch. \"I can pour for myself.\"\n\n\"And I marvel,\" he returned. \"You require neither lamp nor candle, and I marvel the more. You have knowledge. Please trust me, Auli. Share what you know.\"\n\n\"How much do you trust Ra'aba?\"\n\nHer father voiced a curt bark of laughter. \"There's little love lost between us. A snake of a man. How he came by his powers, Fra'anior only knows.\"\n\n\"Razzior only knows,\" Auli said. \"Shall I spin you a tale, father?\"\n\nShe wished she could have told him all, but Amaryllion's instructions regarding the terrible ruzal and blood-lore had to be obeyed. At several points Xa'an made strangled noises as though he dearly wanted Ra'aba's neck to feel the bite of a tightly wound garrotte, and she loved him for that feedback. It said more than words, or his letter, ever could have.\n\nAfterward, she heard his stiff formal collar, the season's style for men being a collar so tall above the shoulders that it might brush the base of the ears, rustle as he shook his head. \"I always knew I mistrusted the man, and now I know why. What you suffered, you poor, poor girl \u2013 thank you for sharing all this.\" Auli blenched inwardly. Not all, father. Some secrets must never be shared \u2026 \"My heart and hand for thine! So, he and Razzior are collaborators delving into some unknown aspect of Dramagon's lore, eh? I wonder if that is where he gains his remarkable speed, strength and mental acuity?\"\n\n\"He has magic,\" Auli confirmed, shuddering involuntarily.\n\nPower enough to battle an Eastern Enchantress and emerge somewhat the victor \u2026 who knew which of them had won? Or what? They were both loathsome. Toads!\n\nXa'an said, \"These are the blessed Isles of Fra'anior's paw. Magic's oozing everywhere and our enemies hate that about us. Still \u2026\"\n\n\"Do you have magic, Dad?\"\n\n\"Of course. I'm a spy of many gifts. Stick to the subject, dearest petal, and I promise I shall tell you more about my magic at an opportune time.\"\n\nSlowly, she said, \"Are you aware of a prophecy relating to the Child of the Dragon?\" Pray this was no blunder on her part!\n\nXa'an sucked in his lips. \"Aye. Ianthine the Draco-Mystic is said to have proclaimed that prophecy in her youth. There's parts about a comet, myriad stars falling from the skies \u2026 I forget the exact wording. We only have second-hand information \u2013 why, do you have better? Do you believe Ra'aba is seeking this so-called child?\"\n\nAuli tried to release her pent-up breath soundlessly. \"Aye.\"\n\n\"Fact?\"\n\n\"Speculation \u2026 but a sound one.\" Amaryllion's link. He had sounded convinced, but Auli wondered now if the Ancient Dragon knew more about Ra'aba than he had revealed. \"I know that 'child' is a prophetic-obscurant grammatical case in Dragonish, which usually denotes a figurative usage, but this search for literal children matches Ra'aba's way of thinking all too well \u2013 and must be regarded as a possibility, but a lesser one.\"\n\nAuli bit her lip, wishing she were not bare-faced, ready for bed. Xa'an would read the gesture, but there was no way he could read the pang of mortal fear that stabbed into her belly as she made connections. Hualiama was in terrible danger. How did Ra'aba know? Ianthine had been bellowing about a Child of the Dragon that evening when she assaulted Sapphurion's entire Dragon Council! Ianthine had even roared, 'She's in my grasp.' Everyone knew that Ianthine had brought something from the East; they just did not know what kind of child it was. The feminine form, again, suggested a real child, but in Dragonish it also doubled as a cute-diminutive unrelated to gender. The 'child' could equally be a scroll or a small magical artefact. Ra'aba and Razzior clearly favoured the literal meaning.\n\nFor her part, Auli-Ambar had held and fed and loved the little one of whom Ianthine believed she was the child of the prophecy. Literal enough?\n\nHow could they ever release Hualiama, anywhere in the Isles, without the appropriate birth and genealogical records? The note confirmed that with granite-clad certainty \u2013 Ra'aba's 'comprehensive study' combined with the briefings Ornath, Sapphurion and Sazutharr had given her. He was meticulous to the point of obsession. No stone upon any Isle would be left unturned. The only blessing in all this was that some Islands would be less than amenable to 'foreigners' \u2013 meaning Chalcion's administration \u2013 poking their talons into what they regarded as private business.\n\nDraconic insinuation most certainly intended.\n\nBut Xa'an said, \"Ianthine came from the East. Why not an Eastern child?\"\n\nAye. Who knew where she had unearthed Hualiama?\n\nNo. The girl's ears were distinctly Fra'aniorian. The Maroon Dragoness must have pinched her from some Isle around Fra'anior Cluster and Ra'aba was trying to work out which one.\n\nFor once in her life, Auli-Ambar found herself grateful to possess eyes that could not be read by a close observer. However, her facial expressions must be an open scroll to her highly capable father. She resisted an urge to paste on a monkish face \u2013 after all, she had no idea under the suns what that saying actually looked like in practice.\n\nHe said, \"A word to the wise, Auli. In the interactions we've had so far, you evince a very high level of trust in Sapphurion.\"\n\nThat earned him a dangerously quirked eyebrow.\n\n\"Do you know what became of Ianthine after that disastrous Council Meeting?\"\n\n\"No, father.\"\n\n\"Sapphurion dispatched a Dragonwing to retrieve Ianthine from whatever foetid bolt-hole she had chosen around Gi'ishior or the Isles,\" he said. Auli firmed her lips. \"Then, Sapphurion and thirty Blues spent a week breaking her mind, Auli-Ambar. That's what Dragons do. They have mind powers \u2013 the most powerful Dragons, anyways. After they found out all they needed, they banished her to The Spits.\"\n\n\"The Spits!\" She did not need to feign shock. \"But there's \u2026 nothing there.\"\n\n\"Windrocs and foul weather, that's what's there,\" he spat. \"And they set upon her new territory an unbreakable magical ward to prevent her from ever returning. That's because it's undraconic to kill an insane Dragon. Feral? Aye, fair game. But a Dragon you've pushed over the cliff-edge of insanity? Oh no. That would be against the law. Better to put them far, far away from mind and paw \u2013 a perfectly draconic solution to an embarrassing problem, wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nHis acerbity bit deep; indeed, it gnawed into her living pith like said feral Dragon.\n\n\"No,\" Auli whispered.\n\n\"Aye. I need you to understand something, daughter. Dragons are not and never will be like us. Deep down they are beasts; beasts with animal instincts and animal morals \u2013 oh, wipe that look off your face! Very well, different morals. Better? This is where I need to shoot a straight arrow, daughter, and you had better receive it. You need to grow up. Innocence and ignorance are unacceptable and even ruinous excuses for one who aspires to your station. You are Human. Learn to think like a Human, and understand the differences between our species. None of this could have escaped a person of your considerable intellect. And think about this \u2013 when it comes down to that single, crucial choice: whom will you serve, paw or hand?\"\n\nShe felt as if she had been poisoned. Perhaps he dressed this rebuke up as fatherly concern, but it smacked of far more. Knockdown. Frustration. Assertion. Auli knew he was right, at least in part. In life as in love, in war as in peacetime, Dragons were truly rajals of a different stripe, to mangle an Isles proverb that escaped her right now.\n\nWas he suggesting that the Dragons had manipulated her mind? He could not know differently. He must not.\n\nIt took all her courage to reply, \"Aye, father.\"\n\nHe said, \"Good. There remains much to consider, but that's enough recent history for one evening. Here. What about this scroll?\"\n\nAuli rotated the proffered scroll with her fingertips. A courier scroll, ensconced in a light metal tube for safekeeping. There was at least a double layer of magical protection set upon this one, the first addressing the initial opening of the container, and a secondary ward construct protecting the contents. A complex one, she judged. She smacked her lips appreciatively. \"Most certainly a fruity example of draconic neuroses regarding ward composition. This rune here is the hallmark of Jaoli in the East.\"\n\n\"We know that,\" said Xa'an.\n\n\"The contents are also draconic in origin,\" said Auli, resisting the bait. \"Did you know that?\"\n\n\"We guessed.\"\n\n\"Did you guess at the twin spring vials within the lid \u2013 one poison, one Dragon acid?\"\n\n\"Are you testing me, child?\"\n\n\"I am no child.\"\n\nConflict always brought the physiological reactions \u2013 shaking hands, dry throat, pulse leaping. She had to overcome this. Bite back the fear. Summon to the fight a mental ally \u2026 Arkurion? To her surprise, one thought of the Mercury Blue and her mental pusillanimity faded into an unfamiliar feeling \u2013 that of spoiling for a fight! Did she even know this girl? Did little flames become bigger ones?\n\n\"And the kitten dares to bare her canines?\"\n\nAuli decided that a show of petulance was not about to convince Xa'an. Instead, she said, \"It seems I need to remind you I am the daughter, and you are the fossil. I mean, father.\"\n\n\"Funny.\" He laughed, and something unspoken seemed to ease between them. \"How's that scroll looking?\"\n\n\"Blacker than the deepest night,\" Auli replied. \"Right. Let's see what we can do with this, shall we?\" For the fifteen minutes it took her to crack open the lid, Xa'an waited in utter silence. A spy's patience. Delicately, Auli extracted the contents with her fingernails. \"The secondary wards are worse than the first.\"\n\n\"Worse?\"\n\n\"The poison would kill you quickly. These are more devious by far, and deactivated by a code word. Did you retrieve the code word, spy-sire?\"\n\nXa'an might be giving her his most inscrutably professional expression, but Auli read the slight tremor of his hands through the tabletop, conducted against her elbows. She levelled an eyebrow at him for a second time. This one said, 'Lie to me and I'll never speak to you again.'\n\nHe said tensely, \"We have a clue. Freaking feral Dragons, girl \u2013 how perceptive are you?\"\n\nAuli tried for her own version of an enigmatic smile, but her jaw chose that moment to unhinge more than usual and she had to reset its position with her hands. Ruined the effect, of course. Grr!\n\n\"Auli, does, 'Of crimson magic the derivative form,' mean anything to you? We've been puzzling over it for \u2013\"\n\nRuzal! The scroll dropped from her nerveless fingers.\n\nHe gasped, \"Auli, you've gone as pale as prekki fluff! What's the matter?\"\n\nAuli stammered, \"F-F-Faaaa \u2026 smoke!\"\n\nSnatching up the scrap, she passed her right hand hastily through the flames that had ignited the scrolleaf. Flames so dazzling, even her eyesight flickered a fraction. Letters. Numbers! She yelped as the message combusted with a muted, *woof!* Singed eyebrows, a hank of hair smouldering upon her forehead \u2013 but once more, she had survived relatively unscathed.\n\n\"I'm blind!\"\n\nDisoriented, Auli-Ambar wondered why her voice sounded masculine. No-one else said that. Then, realisation struck. \"Father? Dad? Are you \u2013\"\n\n\"Just suns-spots, I think \u2013 Fra'anior's beard, I flung up an arm in a rajal's whisker of time. I'm \u2026 it's \u2026 quite a burn, Auli. Eyes aren't good.\" He swore softly, then apologised.\n\nHad she spoken the word ruzal aloud, triggering the trap? Now, Auli was unsure. \"Gaah, far from my finest moment,\" she groaned. \"If I wanted to burn you, I'd have Sapphurion do the job properly. Sorry. Dad, are you sure you're alright? Really, truly sorry.\"\n\n\"Not your fault. What did you retrieve from that scroll?\"\n\n\"I \u2013\"\n\n\"You picked it up. I know you read with your fingers.\"\n\nAye, because everyone was apparently spying on everyone else around this benighted Cluster! Frostily \u2013 as if any Fra'aniorian even knew the meaning of frost \u2013 she said, \"And if I did?\"\n\n\"You will share its import with me.\"\n\n\"Father \u2026\"\n\n\"Auli.\" Almost inaudible, yet the implicit warning was so harsh it grated her every sense.\n\nWith the utmost conviction she could muster, Auli said, \"Father, there was a single line of code written upon the leaf. I suspect it is a library reference.\"\n\n\"Then find it for \u2013\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's in the forbidden section? Aye, we know all about the special segregation of the Dragon Library,\" Xa'an said earnestly, taking her hands in his warm, calloused palms. The fake section, or did he know about the double bluff? She held her snappish tongue. \"Auli, it is of the utmost import that you find your way in there and retrieve that scroll for us.\"\n\n\"You asked me to trust you; now I must ask you to trust me.\"\n\nHis grip tightened agonisingly. \"Paw or hand?\" When she just hissed between her teeth, he said, \"Sorry. The broken fingers?\"\n\nHe did not sound at all apologetic. Had her own father just thought to torture the truth out of her? As composedly as she could manage through the smoking fury in her throat, Auli said, \"In my capacity of Venerable Instructor, I wish Xa'an Ta'afaya and his colleagues not to remain uninformed about the extreme danger posed by this inquiry. I cannot overstate the threat. I need to take counsel with the Dragons first, and before you ask \u2013 this is me choosing hand. I am taking the Human side here, father, and I will not be moved.\"\n\n\"I see how it is,\" he said stiffly. \"What type of threat?\"\n\nAuli considered Amaryllion's account of Dramagon the two-headed Ancient Red, and swallowed back bile. What was ruzal to him? Nothing good or wholesome! \"Magical. I believe this scroll references a branch of deadly forbidden lore; the last thing anyone would want is the likes of Ra'aba getting his paws on this type of knowledge.\"\n\nShe felt her father's piercing gaze upon her, then. What colour were his eyes? She had never asked him. How did she know ruzal was deadly? How could she explain without introducing her father to very many concepts that she was hesitant about sharing with anyone else \u2013 could a Razzior or a Ra'aba filch this type of knowledge straight out of minds? She needed to consult Amaryllion Fireborn. Urgently. For certain, any lore related to Dramagon had to be treated with the utmost respect.\n\n\"Father, how long had that scroll been in your possession?\"\n\nHe drew a sharp breath. \"Too long. Twenty \u2026 twenty-three days.\"\n\nCould she curtail her trip and rush back to Gi'ishior? Must she? Ra'aba and Razzior must suspect something at the very least, or could she hope that the message had gone astray? Or could that pair and whatever cronies or network they might command, have traced the scroll back to its point of disappearance? Clearly, her father must have gone to some effort to see it purloined; now, the question was one of timing. Sazutharr. Aye. He would know what to do. Then the question would become, could they recover the scroll before someone else did? And, where did one hide such volatile lore? Not just down a random ventilation shaft. Dramagon's legacy was famously acknowledged to possess a kind of inner fire or charisma that attracted evil to itself, that survived the most fearsome odds.\n\nDelightful.\n\nAuli said, \"So, trust or no trust?\"\n\nReaching across the table, Xa'an took her hand and shook it gravely. \"I'm sorry I hurt you earlier. Forgiven?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nA smile entered his voice. \"A pleasure doing business with you, o Most Venerable Crone.\"\n\n\"The pleasure is all mine, o \u2026 Sneaky Spy King.\"\n\n\"Don't even joke! That kind of talk is as unstable as an erupting volcano around here. Now, would you show your three-quarters blind Dad to the door?\"\n\nJust outside, Xa'an called for the Watch. Here came that same tread; the female soldier could not have been stationed more than ten paces down the corridor outside Auli's chambers. What else might these Fra'aniorians do by way of monitoring their guests? She had to wonder.\n\nThen, as Xa'an explained in a low voice that he required a pair of eyes to help him back to the barracks, Auli caught a whiff of the woman's scent on a slight breeze stirring in the corridor. \"Kay \u2026\" she began to splutter. Stupid blind girl! Curb the tongue. \"Okay, then,\" she temporised. \"I'll see you on the morrow, father. Rest well.\"\n\nWith his leave-taking, she wilted against her side of the door. Her hands automatically rotated the massive key. Exhaustion. Shock. She was overstressed, and only a night's determined snuggling with those sumptuous lacework covers would restore sanity to her ridiculous mind.\n\nYet could her nostrils tell a lie? That woman had exactly the same scent as the Dragoness Kayturia.\n\nSome said a woman's jealousy was the acutest sense of all.\n\nToday, she felt it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "Upon returning to Gi'ishior, Auli found an urgent summons from Qualiana awaiting her. Excellent. No rest for the wicked. She dashed away to find Qualiana coddling a frantic, colicky baby.\n\n<She just won't stop,> the Dragoness explained. Auli had never heard such a defeated note in her voice. <Nothing helps. Three days of \u2013 your hand!>\n\n<Long story. Pass her to me.>\n\n<Hurts my ear canals, she does,> Grandion complained, nosing Auli's arm. <Where's my cuddle?>\n\nShe scratched his skull-spikes where he liked it, teasing, <What powerful beauty!> The little Tourmaline flexed his muscles so ferociously, she thought he might just pop with the effort.\n\nTen seconds later, Auli was bouncing a contentedly cooing infant upon her arm, Qualiana was livid with jealousy, and Grandion just kept butting her shoulder, growling, <Me. Me!>\n\n<You are far too muscly to actually cuddle,> Auli protested. <But you are my favourite hatchling in all of Dragondom and beyond.>\n\n<What's Dragondom?> the hatchling purred suspiciously.\n\n<The entire Island-World from East to West, and from Immadia beyond the Rift to the farthest South one can ever imagine,> she explained, delving automatically into the detail for a draconic mind. His purring, like an enormous rajal, gathered volume. <Tell me, o Grandion, how fared your deer hunting training this week? Who won the prize?>\n\nSulkily, he said, <Hazzalion, with four kills.>\n\n<Sneaking little cheat!>\n\nQualiana growled, <Don't you say that outside this roost, Auli-Ambar.>\n\nSnuggling the tiny bundle of Hualiama into the crook of her neck, Auli rubbed her back and received a stream of warmth down her tunic top \u2013 together with a dainty burp \u2013 for her trouble. \"There. See, Qualiana? Just a touch of sore tummy, wasn't it, my pretty spool of pollen fluff \u2013\"\n\n<GNARR! It's because you weren't here!>\n\nGrandion's paw clamped down on her shoulder, making Auli wince. <Ha. You're just trying to appease me. Hazzalion was the better hunter \u2013 this time.>\n\nAuli said, <Hazzalion is a horrid little thug-paws and twice your size, for the moment anyways. You've ten times his intellect. Next time, you need to be more astute.> When he made a throaty growl of disagreement, she said, <Grandion, you just play too fair sometimes. You always stick to the rules \u2013>\n\n<And why not?> he snapped.\n\n<There's such a thing as sticking too strictly to accepted norms.>\n\n<I am a noble Dragon!> His roar was nothing on Sapphurion's thunder, but it was developing snap and growl enough to hurt Auli's ears. The hatchling said, <Integrity and honour above all else. That's my motto.>\n\nHow did one explain that honour without mercy, or high-minded integrity that ignored the complexities and so-called grey areas of fire life \u2026 she sighed. His kind of unquestioning obedience to draconic law would have cast Hualiama out for the windrocs to peck over. Auli wondered if he might yet pose a danger to their tiny charge. What would happen when a hatchling began to test his parents' authority? One careless word could cast them down forever.\n\nNothing about this was easy. Right now, Hualiama was gumming on her collarbone, making hungry mewling sounds.\n\nKeep edging across the tightrope, blind girl.\n\nTurning to Qualiana, she said, \"I've an important briefing to deliver, noble Dragoness. Much is afoot, or a-paw if you prefer, in Fra'anior Cluster. Shall I feed the baby first?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "Late that evening, Auli met with Head Librarian Sazutharr. There was something awesome and distinctly minifying about having to climb a fifteen-foot ladder up to the seating area where he received Human guests in his office \u2013 not a common occurrence, he rumbled gently. The Dragon thumped forward, settling his muzzle on the first level of the platform, eight feet lower than Auli's chair, which she understood brought his fire eyes to a level with hers.\n\nAuli corralled her butterfly-flitting thoughts. Oh, just once, to see a real butterfly and admire those colours so richly described in the zoological lore \u2026\n\n<The wards are set,> Sazutharr rumbled. <How fared our Venerable Instructor in Dragonish Derring-Do?>\n\nEvidently, she would be the recipient of silly jokes about her title for the rest of eternity. Perfect. Auli began, <Thank you for the opportunity to grow new scales, Master \u2026 ah, noble Sazutharr.> Dratted emotions, where did those spring from? <Thank you for that chance you first took upon a blind girl! I'm so \u2026 grateful \u2026>\n\nBah! Ambushed!\n\nHis talon came to rest upon her knees. <The honour has always been mine, o tiny shell-daughter of mine third heart.>\n\nHe sounded so choked up! Auli's heart raced out to embrace the old Dragon as her outstretched arms never could. She considered the indignity of hugging his nose. Perhaps not. Yet the warmth of his caring was unmistakable. This was where her father was wrong. Dragons were not animals, not in the marvellous complexity of their hearts.\n\nSazutharr said, <I have news of my own. If I may?> At her brief nod, he continued, <I have developed a first pass at a remarkably complex magical construct which allows the jogging of memory, as Humans might style it. I've written up the structures in a simplified rune language that I believe is within your grasp at this point \u2013 magic is a vastly nuanced language, so much so that no written script has yet been devised which is able to adequately represent it.>\n\n<That's Taskaturion the Grey-Blue's pet project, isn't it?> Auli said.\n\n<Aye. Progress is slow,> said the Librarian. <Memory is a curiously fragile yet potent faculty, Auli-Ambar. Never underestimate its power.>\n\nShe leaned forward. <I'm intrigued.>\n\n<The basic approach is twofold; one, to stimulate memories perhaps adjusted by your innate magic \u2013 putting it delicately \u2013 or to create additional memory-like prompts, such as your name, your purpose and existence, your appearance, scent and so forth. The additional prompts can be supplemented with material that you might conceive of for individuals who hold very particular or dear memories of you. It would help if I could interview your birth father to supply materials for this project, as I most certainly cannot source materials from your mind. It remains inviolable \u2013 like a granite boulder in all aspects.>\n\n<How you wound me,> she chuckled.\n\n<Vivacious little flame!> His warm talon remained crooked about her knee, and his breath was sweet, like seared anise. <Study this scroll diligently and prepare your questions. There will be many, if I know the ways of Auli-Ambar in the slightest measure. Now, let us speak of Royal Fra'anior's delights.>\n\nAuli said, <Well, I believe that the time has come for me to gain access to the Dragon Library's forbidden sections, but far more than that, I need your wisdom, great Dragon.>\n\n<Fra'anior is the only Great Dragon,> he chided gently.\n\n<Yet you are his right paw,> she returned, warmth for warmth. <Now, the darker flames of my thoughts concern ruzal, and the prophecy uttered by the Maroon Dragoness which references the Child of the Dragon \u2026>\n\nShe must speak with great regard for Hualiama. How could she learn about the birth and genealogical record-keeping around the Isles without referring to her? Perhaps she should inquire about her own records? Aye. Maybe they mentioned her mother \u2026 although she doubted it. Xa'an would have discovered that information long before. No, she must concoct an excuse to read those records and perhaps modify some, but how could she possibly proceed without granting either Master Chamzu or Master Ga'athar access to knowledge that might betray Hualiama?\n\nIf memories could be created \u2026 they could conceivably be destroyed.\n\nRoaring rajals! Did she dare to meddle in the minds of Men and Dragons? All for the sake of one scrap of humanity, whose arrival in Gi'ishior might or might not presage a terrible cometary strike and the end of the Island-World as people knew it? Or might the comet bring more Ancient Dragon eggs? Nothing and no-one would survive such an impact, surely \u2013 no, she remembered one more detail Qualiana had picked out as key. The prophecy foretold that a 'third great race' would rise in the Island-World. Portentous indeed! Dragons, Humans, and \u2026 what? Some other creatures as majestic and magical as the Dragons themselves? Might the world survive the cometary impact, only to cue in an inter-species war as terrible as anything recorded in the earliest histories, when Ancient Dragons rampaged across the Isles, and Humankind clung to its existence by the merest whisker?\n\nThose days lived long in the memories of Dragons like Razzior.\n\nShe and Sazutharr spoke late into the night. The Head Librarian was intrigued by her request to consider opening up some of those old, unused bathing chambers without exactly specifying how she intended to use the space; they debated it awhile, and agreed to put an 'Auli special' proposal to the Dragon Elders.\n\n\"They'll just have to trust your good intentions,\" sniffed the Librarian. \"You won't tell me any detail at all? Not so much as a scale, nor the smallest point of the smallest scale of a hatchling?\"\n\nTrust. It hung thicker than volcanic smoke about the Isles these days.\n\n\"No \u2026\"\n\n\"Good! You've the makings of a fine Dragoness!\" Sazutharr complimented her resolve. \"I see that this trip has been a maturing experience for you, Auli-Ambar. I knew you would be perfect for the role despite the attendant dangers our Queen has correctly and most perceptively laid out. Chalcion has no conception of her inner strength, has he?\"\n\nAuli pursed her lips, struck by the Dragon Librarian's acumen. \"No, he doesn't. She will outlive his reign.\"\n\n<What?> growled Sazutharr. The blushes attacked her with force. <Why did you say that?>\n\n<I, uh \u2026>\n\nThe roaring of his belly fires consumed her world. What had she said? Why? That wasn't prophetic, was it? She didn't have a prophetic hair on her head! But in a moment, the Dragon stilled his reaction and joked instead, \"So, how shall we refer to this project \u2013 the building of Auli's Empire?\"\n\n\"Aye, my hubris is a raging epidemic across the Isles,\" she replied demurely.\n\nThe old Dragon snorted, \"Ha. You're up to something \u2013 reference remodelling the entire Halls!\"\n\n\"This is a more modest project.\"\n\n\"I plan to find out what it is.\"\n\n\"Are we ready to crack open the \u2013\" She switched to Dragonish to find the right nuances \u2013 <doubly forbidden inner lore domain?>\n\nHow odd that most times she opened her mouth around the Isles, she was technically speaking a language outlawed to Humans. When he passed his laws, Chalcion made no distinction for Humans based at Gi'ishior nor the secret monasteries following the Way of the Dragon, of which she seemed to discover more by the season. The reality was a knotty ode to complexity.\n\nSazutharr's heated laughter blew her hair into a fine tangle. \"So, my fine Venerable Instructor, you think you can tweak an old Dragon's wings, do you? The very best of Dragonish luck to you! Follow me.\"\n\nChuckling so raucously that it set him coughing, the aged Dragon moved away. Auli followed easily. She knew the Dragon Library as well as any of these scholars or researchers these days, and the only times she stumbled were when someone did not shelve a book or scroll properly, or once, when they had abandoned their shoes in her path \u2013 for a positively blush-worthy reason that had seen the Apprentice Researcher and his older lady friend banned from the Library forever.\n\nSazutharr led her deeper into the Dragon Library. At this late hour, the aisles and chambers with their towering shelves lay so still, Auli imagined she could hear the books themselves breathing. He did not take her where she expected, however. Descending four levels and then turning northward, he led her straight up to what Auli knew for a fact was a wall of solid rock, with the lake fifty feet behind it. She had examined the architectural measurements with her own hands.\n\nHe said, \"Get this wrong and you'll end up swimming under the lake for eternity. So, essentially we are standing in a fake room \u2013 filled with useful scrolls, of course, but nothing the Library could not stand to lose. The procedure is as follows. First talon, alert the wards. Second, close all exits. Third, arm the inner wards. Fourth, state your name and station, and if the magic is not primed to accept you, you get to swim with the fishes. Then we trigger the transfer mechanism using a secret passphrase and the Dragon Library will roar to your presence \u2026 hmm, I'll need to teach you how to protect your sensitive hearing. Remind me. Then, if all is well, we descend. Understood?\"\n\n\"Um,\" said Auli.\n\n\"Life without risk is not a life worth living at all,\" averred the Dragon. \"One paw at a time. Listen closely and repeat after me.\"\n\nHe taught her the alert and closure sequences. At once, Auli heard and felt huge stone doors rumbling across the four entryways, and then the pressure squeaked in her ears as further hermetic seals shifted into place. She worked her jaw, and winced as a misplaced tendon twanged painfully. Sazutharr spelled out the inner wards, taking her over the sequence five times before he was satisfied with every aspect of her pronunciation. Apparently the primer had been set to accept her for over a season! After affirming her name and station, he taught her the passphrase, which changed regularly.\n\n<The busy dragonet hunts the dragonfly,> Auli stated clearly.\n\n<Huh,> Sazutharr grunted after a pregnant yet unexceptional moment. <It appears we shall have to let you in after all.>\n\n<Noble Drag \u2013>\n\nWith that, a sound that put the 'thunder' into 'thunderclap' simultaneously pummelled her ears and punched her diaphragm, but Auli realised this was through Sazutharr's protection. The open section of flooring upon which they stood began to vibrate; it twisted downward in a corkscrewing motion, while the Librarian casually crooked a talon about her waist, preserving Auli-Ambar from what could have been a nasty fall.\n\n<Always stand in the middle,> he said. <It's a ways down and your arms aren't wholly built for flying.>\n\nWas that even worth a weak laugh?\n\nWonderful odours wafted up to her nostrils as they descended into the forbidden caverns. Fusty scrolleaf. Rich, redolent leathers. Cover oils and the most aged of metallic and plant-based archival inks, and everywhere, tantalising hints of magic. Auli dizzily identified notes of cardamom, pragaspice, neroli, jasmine, myrrh, askumizi herb and vanilla, Merx peppers and jinsumo blossoms and many more besides. Yet amidst the bouquet of scents, she pinpointed a very different savour, one that upon examination left a very different impression upon her mind to what she had expected. Peril. Secrets long, long buried and for excellent reason. The thrill of greater, deeper and more awesome lore than she had ever imagined! It seemed the very waters of her soul shivered to contemplate the potentials of such a place.\n\nSazutharr said, \"Smells thrilling, doesn't it?\"\n\nHer skin crawled. \"Hazardous.\"\n\n\"Never a wiser word hath passed thine lips. You'll open no scroll in these caverns without significant forethought.\" After a grave pause, the Librarian confided, \"And, here's a project I've been putting off for over a decade.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"I am nothing if not a presumptuous Dragon,\" said he, not exactly apologising as was typical of draconic culture. \"Attend. Seen from our vantage point, banks of magical crysto-lights sparkle across an artificial cavern some 4,000 feet long and 2,478 wide, which is the first of twelve such caverns in this complex. If you had eyes \u2013 ahem \u2013 you would observe that the place is a tad disorganised. We've cleared a few paths through the wreckage \u2013\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Three seasons ago, we had a feral Dragon entrapped down here for a week \u2013\"\n\nAuli's nape crawled. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Razzior the Orange.\"\n\nSazutharr could no better have cuffed her across the earhole with all the power of his right paw. \"Razzior!\"\n\n<Aye, by my wings,> the Head Librarian said blandly. She knew he was discomfited; Master Chamzu had explained that some of the Dragonkind were infuriated by what they saw as their failure to protect Auli-Ambar in their own Halls. Others could not have cared less for the fate of one Human louse. Charming creatures. <Curiously, he did not burn the place down. All of the damage was done by talon and fang.>\n\n<He was truly feral?>\n\nThe linguistic shades of Auli's query clearly startled Sazutharr. <He \u2026 appeared so. It took five males to subdue him. You disagree \u2013 how would a Dragon be cast into the feral state by any known protection on any scroll or book?>\n\nSlowly, Auli replied, <Such lore would certainly be beyond my ken. Yet the possibility must exist. Place a Dragon under sufficient duress, be that mental, physical or situational \u2013 such as battle stress \u2013 and he stands a chance of slipping into the feral state. Could you not conceive of a psychic attack ward demonstrating such properties?>\n\nThe talon squeezed her hips uncomfortably. <Dragoness!>\n\nAuli said, <I take it there isn't any such possibility recorded in literature or research?>\n\n<No, I hadn't even imagined it until five seconds ago!> Sazutharr cleared his throat awkwardly. <Every so often, little fire, I find myself regarding you as I would any Dragoness. It is quite extraordinary, this quality of soul-presence you possess \u2013 I wish we knew your maternal heritage! Dragons would call it the cut of your wings across the five moons, or a true sight of the quintessential fires of your being \u2026>\n\nHe sounded baffled, which made her deeply uncomfortable in turn.\n\nShe said, <So, sector thirteen \u2013>\n\n<Is in cave four. Over to our right. It was hard-hit, Auli. I've occasionally had the Apprentices coming in to tidy and shelve, but that sort of work is seen as a form of punishment.>\n\nShe could imagine. Pensively, Auli allowed Sazutharr to lead her deeper into the forbidden section, threading his way between mounds of scrolleaf, ripped-up books and tipped-over, crushed shelving. Her slipper-shod feet kicked through piles of splinters and crackling fragments or parts of scrolls. She knew much had been coming upstairs for repair or recopying, but the scale of the destruction staggered her. Whatever had possessed Razzior to commit such a heinous act \u2013 if not the very ruzal he and Ra'aba sought? Could it have driven him temporarily insane, as the feral state was said to do to a Dragon?\n\nCould the ruzal have been protecting itself?\n\nCould something in these caverns of deepest, murkiest Dragon lore have seized Razzior and twisted the Orange Dragon to its bidding \u2013 as Amaryllion had hinted but Auli-Ambar could not bring herself to believe? Could she sense Dramagon's paw yet at work in the Island-World? The crawling sensation at her neck climbed up beneath her skull like a set of draconic talons delicately teasing her scalp off the bone. Auli shuddered!\n\nEven if she found one scroll or book amongst the tens of thousands, what would she do with it? Sit upon it and hope for the best?\n\nToo many questions.\n\nSlowly, she said, \"What if we made it a competition, Sazutharr? Say, first access to my surprise?\"\n\nA curl of brimstone-laden smoke wafted across her face. \"Then it had better be an astounding surprise, or I foresee that there shall be an Auli-gnawing frenzy in the offing!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Single-Minded",
                "text": "\u2002My best advice for keeping secrets? Don't. It's exhausting.\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Reflections\n\nMaster Chamzu SET down the scroll he was reading with a determined rustle Auli knew was meant to communicate surprise. He began to speak, but he was soundly beaten by Zimtyna, who swished over and wrapped the girl up in a hug of rib-bending proportions. \"You! What are we going to do with this one, Dad?\"\n\n\"Roast her toes in a fumarole,\" suggested Chamzu.\n\n\"Seriously?\" said Zimtyna, not releasing Auli even when she wriggled in protest.\n\n\"Oh, you'd rather I revived some other ancient draconic practice that involves tossing Humans over erupting volcanoes?\" he added, quite reasonably judging by his tone.\n\nAuli said, \"Put me down.\"\n\n\"Far too dangerous,\" Zimtyna chuckled.\n\n\"She's taller than you,\" the Master pointed out, occasioning immediate protests from his daughter! \"Right. Back to back, the pair of you parakeets.\"\n\nIn a moment, the older girl was prodding Auli in the ribs. \"Oh, my Islands! Can't you slouch? Please \u2013 no! That's \u2013 when did you do this? Look here, my head's \u2013\" The hard edge of a hand bopped the bridge of Auli's nose exactly where it was still slightly scarred, courtesy of Master Mi'elgan. She flinched at the unexpected contact. \"Three inches! Four! Judge, I object. I demand a rematch. Is she secretly wearing heels?\"\n\nFeeling upward from her friend's ears, Auli patted the top of her head as condescendingly as she was able. \"Hah. Is the shrinkage an over-twenties problem?\"\n\n\"Auli!\"\n\n\"None of that screeching, daughter, or I'll put you out with the indigo-crested ravens,\" Chamzu said with mock sternness. \"So, Auli, I trust you've thought through what you'll need?\"\n\n\"It's an immodest list,\" she noted, wishing her ears would stop acting like crimson flags, \"starting with he who dares to consider kidnapping my friend. Bazukior \u2013 I can't get enough of that name, by the way \u2013 is an architect and designer, isn't he? No experience in caverns, mind, but a dab hand with the ladies. So I hear.\"\n\nZimtyna evidently threw up her hands. \"The abuse I suffer. I am not short!\"\n\nAuli drew a scroll out of her sleeve. \"Here's a high level plan I took the liberty of preparing earlier, Master, together with a first pass at estimated costings. I'd need an architect's input to finalise details, and a few good water engineers and construction experts, a perfumer or three, and licence to quietly source everything I'll require. That'll necessitate \u2013\"\n\n\"Holy Fra'anior!\" gasped Chamzu. Trust him to jump straight to the bottom line. \"This must be an error in calculation!\"\n\nZimtyna said, \"Oh no, the Auli-Ambar doth not maketh \u2026 uh, whatever. It's probably pretty accurate, Dad.\"\n\n\"As if I don't know that! Dragonets dancing on the Moons, girl, you plan to implant crystals and real gold veins in the walls and ceiling to create unique lighting effects?\"\n\n\"No half measures for the Auli.\"\n\nAuli made a face in her friend's direction. \"It's called being thorough.\"\n\n\"Stubborn is what I was thinking,\" said Zimtyna.\n\n\"Meticulous,\" Chamzu put in. \"And beautiful! What a fabulous idea! Right. I'll craft a message to the Palace. We will have their very best architect without delay \u2013\"\n\n\"Rainbows over Islands!\" The whooping came accompanied by a brief but dizzying jig. Zimtyna dropped a loud smacker on Auli's nose. \"I'm so happy!\"\n\n\"Ugh! Can we eschew damp kisses, please?\"\n\nHer friend added, \"Your contribution to my little Isle of Love is nothing if not appreciated! I was just wondering how I'd get Bazukior to come visit again \u2013 and as for you, Dad \u2026\"\n\nPerhaps her venerable matchmaking skills were starting to develop?\n\n\"Aye, I'm the best father in the Island-World, bar none. Hands off! You can kiss me later, because Miss Single-Minded Volcano Shaker over here will not let me rest until everything necessary is put into process. So, what else will you require, Auli?\"\n\n\"I would like personal use of your Dragonship, Master.\"\n\n\"You want what and how much?\"\n\n\"Please?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "She was keeping secrets from just about everyone, these days. Chamzu thought she wanted to understand how her own birth records were kept, and to read them herself. Sazutharr had sourced a pot of the special archival ink used for records; he did not know Auli had, after some twenty hours research into the subject and a dash of instruction from Essimi, discovered and tested how to erase the supposedly indelible substance without leaving any residue that could be read even by a blind person with magical hands. The Dragons knew neither hide nor scale of her intentions, but Auli's Empire appeared to provide an excellent cover for a range of nefarious activities. The Humans thought she was procuring materials with a wallet the size of Sapphurion's treasury. Cue queues of happy merchants knocking at her door! Figuratively speaking. Little did they know that she was also working out how to insert a person into the unbreakable system of record-keeping around the Isles.\n\nShe could guess how; she just did not know when, nor on what pretext. It was not widely publicized knowledge that the midwives that attended every birth were required to keep records as well. Ra'aba knew that detail, for she had learned it from his orders. A Fra'aniorian baby could not just fall from the heavens. The net was closing with dismaying speed.\n\nSoon, Hualiama would need to be shipped to Remoy \u2026 or worse. Hidden behind the Mystic Moon?\n\nAuli discovered that all shipping around Fra'anior Cluster was being watched either by agents of the Palace or by Dragons close to Razzior and Andarraz \u2013 Sapphurion suspected they were part of the secret society which had threatened her.\n\n\"Draconihilists!\" he spat. \"These wings will not rest, little one.\"\n\nNo bolt-holes around the Islands, the Sapphire advised. Caution and treble-caution! They spoke long, and finally, concurred that she must speak with Master Ga'athar. He was an ally. Her trading activities \u2013 the Dragon's speech was peppered with command-query-amusement indicators at this point \u2013 would provide the perfect cover.\n\nPerhaps she was years early, but one day, Hualiama the foundling would need to find her way in the world and Ra'aba must know nothing about the strange circumstances regarding her arrival in Gi'ishior, or a ruthless sword point would cut short her story even more efficiently than the censor's knife that carved up her father's scroll messages. Who could her parents have been? How long could they keep a child hidden beneath the paw, so to speak; must she like Auli be doomed, only for very different reason, never to see the suns?\n\nShe despaired.\n\nThe balmy thermals of a Fra'aniorian dawn ruffled her hair as Auli faced southward, mimicking the Dragonship's heading as it flew southward along the rim, before they would turn and strike out for Ya'arriol. Her home Island, she supposed. She hoped not to see her Aunt and Uncle there.\n\nCourage, o little flame! The draconic moniker brought a slight smile to her lips. What might Mi'elgan make of that?\n\nIf she tilted her head and slipped down her eye mask, as she did now, she could see the faint, utterly shapeless glow occasioned by Firstsun and Secondsun. Who else in her Island-World could look directly at the suns, and not go blind? Who else had such crazy eyesight? So amazingly effective it was completely defective. Arkurion had written to inform her that he was working on bone replacement materials together with Human doctors at Remoy, and also on a secret project of his own!\n\nMystery was evidently catching.\n\nChuckling like an amused dragonet, Auli-Ambar hugged herself tightly. Quite the pair she made with the Mercury Blue. So similar in some ways, yet as far apart as creatures of different species could possibly be. Work had a way of swallowing them both up. Most of her last month, since her first visit to the Palace, had been devoted to design work and planning for her Dragon Fragrance Baths, her usual duties, bouncing the ever-growing, delightful Hualiama upon her knee and singing the ballads to her for hours, recording Amaryllion's histories, and discreetly trying to find out what the evil colluders, Ra'aba and Razzior, were up to. If they plotted, she could discover no sign.\n\nOh! Auli gasped softly in realisation. Ianthine had not betrayed the babe, not even under the utmost duress of a draconic psychic blast interrogation! Her motives must be far more complex than she had supposed, were that the case. Even Amaryllion had straightforwardly accused the Maroon Dragoness of wanting to control the ruzal herself \u2013 therefore, villain or heroine? Both? Neither? It would not surprise anyone were the Maroon to style herself the protector of the draconic race whilst angling to wangle Sapphurion's perch from beneath his belly.\n\nDraconic indeed!\n\nHer basking beneath the suns' dawning warmth seemed hardly the moment to be entertaining such a slew of melancholy thoughts. Auli felt the old fears curling in her belly, and despised herself. Stupid blind girl. Who did she think she was, speaking with imaginary Ancient Dragons and dancing with Princes, whilst desperately trying to avoid being sucked under by the powers that gathered about the Isles like a mythical Cloudlands maelstrom during this leaf in the Island-World's history?\n\nThe morning's travel was balmy; the afternoon much less so, but Steersman Chayku of the eight children and only the faintest memory of a blind girl until Auli had 'zapped' him again with her special memory tweaker, chose to run before a frisky squall rather than make port. His choice was wise. They swept across to Ya'arriol Island safely and in record time.\n\n\"Bah. Storm-caller you are, girl.\" He spat near her foot.\n\nAuli said, \"I detect storms, Master Steersman. I don't call them.\"\n\nHe spat again. \"I know what I know, girl.\"\n\nThe memory stimulation routines must have created an unexpected side-effect! \"Fra'anior was the great storm-bringer of yore, Master. I shall petition him on our behalf for our return journey. Does he not protect all the peoples of his paw?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nAuli imagined dark eyes boring into her neck as she negotiated the descent of the swaying rope ladder to the Island below. Ouch. The prick of failure.\n\nFamiliar scents and sounds surrounded her. The humid odour of storm-lashed foliage and damp mulch. The chirruping and singing of many birds intermingled with the unseen laughter of a nearby dragonet. Water dripping from leaves and chuckling over rocks. She smelled the vegetable fields that lay south of her old home, and memories came crashing back into her mind: the beatings and bullying, her terror of losing the path and becoming lost in the thick bushes, and the constant work. Was that why she was so driven as a person? How much had her childhood here shaped who she had become? If she disliked herself, could she change?\n\nJust deploy one of Sazutharr's snappy little routines and she'd be happy, brave, dancing-over-the-Isles Auli forevermore! Right.\n\nOne matter rankled most sorely. Arkurion's most recent message scroll had mentioned his intent to speak the ascending draconic fire promises with Kayturia. Petulantly, Auli had hurled the scroll across her room; then it had taken her a good twenty minutes to find it, lodged low down between her pillow roll and the bedframe. She had written to congratulate the Mercury Blue. Hypocrite. Could fine words conceal the shadowed purposes of her heart?\n\n\"Auli-Ambar!\"\n\n\"Mistress Yualiana.\"\n\nThe woman drew her into a warm hug. Gracious Islands, was she pregnant again? \"Why, I do declare you've an inch on me, now \u2013 and I thought bamboo only grew in the East.\"\n\n\"Oh no, Mistress, it grows in the Southern Isles also \u2013\"\n\n\"Oh, Auli! You haven't changed a bit. So earnest. Laugh a little! We invited a hunting party here just a few weeks back to deal with a feral rajal in the eastern jungle, and guess who would not stop out-talking the parakeets about you?\" Auli reddened instantly. Yualiana giggled like a young girl. \"I know! A Prince! He's a tasty catch, might I add. Those eyes \u2026\"\n\n\"Humph,\" Auli just about managed. \"Don't let Master Ga \u2013 aargh!\"\n\nA heavy yet familiar hand spun her about. \"Petal! Can't call you child anymore, can I? Just look at you, all grown up so as we can look each other \u2013\" he gulped \"\u2013 in the eye. So to speak. Ah, Auli-Ambar, I understand you will overnight with us?\"\n\nGa'athar hugged her awkwardly. He smelled of fresh sawdust over slightly rank man-sweat. She had not picked the Master for a man accustomed to working with his hands, but she should have deduced that from the calluses that slightly scratched her upper arms now as he seemed to look her over. What did people see in each other? Were the eyelids truly shutters over the soul? Could a heart's purposes be disclosed by an unveiled glance, as the ballads would style it?\n\n\"Enchanting,\" he approved.\n\nThe object of his gaze failed to prevent a touch of rose blooming up a small betrayal in her cheeks.\n\n\"Two nights,\" said Yualiana. \"The men have their break and there is much unloading, loading and sorting of goods to be done. Those Dragons hardly starve, do they?\"\n\n\"No,\" Auli laughed. Who could be unhappy around this wonderful pair? Joy bubbled in their voices, and now the Master's hand sneaked behind Auli's back to tweak his wife's behind, judging by her squeak of protest.\n\n\"Ga'athar! What are you teaching the younglings?\"\n\n\"That be the beast Man or be they Dragon, they must treat her honourably, or I swear, I shall summon Fra'anior's own paw to protect my precious daughter!\"\n\nRoaring rajals!\n\nAuli swayed, but the Mistress immediately seized her arm, saying, \"O my husband!\"\n\n\"What?\" he growled.\n\n\"Just, it is unlike you to speak so forcefully.\"\n\nAuli said, rather more faintly of voice than but a moment ago, \"Mistress, how is it that such speech might move the magical realms? I felt \u2013 did you?\"\n\nTaking the girl's arm rather possessively in her own, as though to protect her from the uncanny strength of her husband's response, Yualiana said, \"Aye. Islanders say that the Great Dragon's breath blows as it pleases, but it does seem that from time to time, we who live our lives in fit manner might summon the realm of elemental white-fires and cause it to break through into our Isle-to-Isle existence, such as Ga'athar achieved. May a person utter the unutterable, and speak forth from the future, the most desirable outcome?\"\n\nNot wanting to sound as tedious and scrollwormish as she had just been accused of, Auli said lightly, \"Ha, the dragonet chirpings of philosophy \u2013 oh!\"\n\n\"Gently,\" Ga'athar admonished, breathily.\n\n\"What is it?\" Auli asked.\n\n\"A greater fine-winged mauve Intruder butterfly,\" said Yualiana. \"I think she fancies your scent \u2013 oh! Shoo! Stupid dragonet! That pesky pilferer just ate the butterfly right off your headscarf! Shoo!\"\n\nAuli straightened up again. She felt foolish, ducking away from an unseen assault.\n\nDragonets were growing so bold around her.\n\nNot at all certain she should read anything into this odd behaviour, Auli gratefully accepted the crook of Yualiana's arm squeezing hers as they linked elbows. The Mistress was soon prattling happily about her ever-expanding brood and the Island's affairs, and when she inquired about her relatives, there was apparently much to-do about Uncle Mi'elgan, who had taken a fancy to doing gardening in nothing more than a monkish loincloth, and sometimes \u2026 less.\n\n\"Never was a man's orchard or vegetable patch so beloved,\" Yualiana expounded. \"He protects his crop zealously, and it has to be admitted, grows some of the finest tinker bananas, landas gourds and exotic fruits anywhere on the Cluster. But he sold his business. Done all the travelling he wants to do in his lifetime, he said. He has become greatly afeared of Dragons. A few nights, Islanders have heard him screaming about boulders raining from the skies.\"\n\nAuli started most disagreeably.\n\n\"Now, dearest petal, welcome to the building project that is our house. You'll have to mind those pretty slippers on the rubble. Master Chamzu's evidently attending to your finery nowadays, and Fra'anior's talon of blessing upon him for it. You've a wonderfully becoming figure for the Fra'aniorian lace dress and that glorious mane of hair, but you're just a tad on the reed-slender side for my fancy. No mind, I'll be feeding you up. No starving waifs around this house!\"\n\nIndeed not. The Mistress' hospitality was fast becoming legend. \"Zimtyna's doing,\" Auli confessed, sniffing the air appreciatively. Something smelled mouth-watering. Sweetbread? Berry pie? \"I have to look the part nowadays, since I \u2013\"\n\n\"Since you're courting that nice Prince!\" enthused Yualiana.\n\n\"No \u2026\"\n\nGa'athar said jovially, \"Righto! Pirates and scamps, to me! The father-Dragon hath roar\u00e9d! We have six children, Auli, as you may remember. Who do we have here? Ah, Master Ja'al. Three summers and a whisker.\"\n\nA firm, serious handshake accompanied a grave little greeting. \"Is she going to spin us tales of Dragon lore, Mother?\"\n\n\"If you ask her nicely,\" said Yualiana.\n\n\"Hua'gon and Shayilia, the twins, seven years old.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mama, she's beautiful!\" enthused Shayilia.\n\n\"Why are you wearing a mask?\" demanded Hua'gon. \"You should take it off. That's not very polite, is it, father?\"\n\n\"It's so pretty,\" Shayilia said enviously. \"Can I have a mask too, mama? Can I? Look, how it matches her dress, and oh! Are those real diamonds? Can I feel her hair? It's so long! Can I brush it, pleeeeaassse, oh please say aye, mama!\"\n\nAuli chuckled. \"If you're patient \u2013\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar is blind, darlings,\" Yualiana explained meantime. \"You'll need to help her around the house, and Fra'anior save you if any of you rascals trips her up or leaves your toys in the corridor!\"\n\n\"Bah,\" said Hua'gon, sounding more like a peevish octogenarian than his actual age. \"I'm the tidiest person in this house. It's Bash and Smash who'll trip her up. Call me when it's storytime, will you?\"\n\nWas it right to take an instant dislike to a child? Auli shook herself and quickly squeezed a pair of chubby infant hands belonging to the second set of twins, Ba'akar and Santurion, boys of eighteen months' age. Bash and Smash. She had to laugh. Here was Inniora, a shy four year-old girl who clung to her mother's skirts, who could not be persuaded to speak a word to Auli.\n\nGa'athar said, \"Our fosterling Samukar is asleep. He's two years old and blind like you, Auli.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\n\"Abandoned at birth, and a fecacci curse upon the parents who \u2013\"\n\n\"Ga'athar!\"\n\n\"Sorry, my love.\" Auli pressed her lips into a straight line as a back-alleyways curse slipped from the erudite Master's lips. \"Teaching the children such awful words. Anyways, everyone knows who they are but they will not have the child back. They say Fra'anior cursed her, the ignorant \u2013 uh, people.\"\n\nAuli shook her head slowly. \"The old Isles belief in disability's curse?\"\n\nThe Master said, \"It's more widespread than you might imagine, Auli-Ambar, I'm very sorry to report. Inexperience, I do not mind. Wilful ignorance, bigotry and plain cussed-mindedness, I do mind in Man as well as Dragon! Are there not trials enough in life without fools such as these?\"\n\n\"Ga'athar, you are in a positively volcanic mood today,\" his wife observed.\n\n\"Ha! I am cheerful, so there! Now, will you stop monopolising this elegant young lady? We have business to talk, aye, and deep lore and philosophy besides, and I will \u2013\"\n\nYualiana cut in, firmly but ever so fondly, \"You will allow our Auli a moment's grace to splash water upon a tired face, to put her feet up in a comfortable corner and eat a slice of my best jiista-berry and skoachi fruit pie! Just warming in the oven, petal. Don't you mind that boorish lout's dearth of manners. He's terrible.\"\n\n\"Can I have a big slice?\" Ga'athar pleaded. \"Sweetbread pleases with janzaberry kisses on top?\"\n\n\"Gluttonous pirate,\" protested his wife.\n\n\"Ah, mine ravishing beauty \u2013 let me to Isle with thee!\"\n\n\"Ga'athar!\"\n\nAuli giggled as the sound of a swift kiss was followed even more swiftly by a slap, perhaps the palm of a wifely hand applied to the Master's broad chest. Yualiana squeaked again, the Master growled, someone unexpectedly hugged her leg, and a feline came purring around the fray, getting between everyone's feet, judging by the high-spirited squeals of the children. Phew. This house was chaos!\n\nHappy chaos."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "Auli-Ambar stared at her entry in the massive genealogical book, if ever a person could be said to stare with their hands.\n\nMistress Yualiana said gently, \"It's rare to have an endorsement put to record, Auli-Ambar, but in a case where the mother is unknown, the midwife may do as you see here.\"\n\nAuli read again: I, Myrkira of Fra'anior, do hereby aver this child's mother was a Pykolese female of scarcely fifteen summers, according to my birth records, who remained anonymous to my knowledge and that of the father, Xa'an Ta'afaya, a verified citizen of Fra'anior Cluster.\n\n\"Fifteen!\" she spluttered. \"My father \u2026 that's \u2026\"\n\n\"Illegal,\" snorted Yualiana.\n\n\"She was no older than I am! But I \u2013\" Her voice hitched in mortification. \"I'm not ready for children, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Scarcely fifteen, the record says,\" growled the Mistress, sounding so rajal-like in her indignation that Auli shivered. \"The scandal! I'll have words with that cradle-raiding father of yours, royal spy or none. Fancy pillow rolling with a child! Worse, she would have been younger still when they \u2026 you know. Scarcely fifteen, Fra'anior's holy fires do roar!\"\n\nAuli fanned her face with one hand. \"I know! I mean I don't, Mistress \u2026 please, can we change the subject from my philandering father? That was far more detail than I needed to know. Mistress Yualiana, he remembers nothing of this girl.\" Never had she pictured her mother as anything less than, well, motherly. Never as a teenager. \"Nothing! And people forget me at the breath of a Dragon, too \u2013 I might just as well have been born of pollen floating about these ill-starred Isles!\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar!\"\n\n\"Sorry, Mistress.\"\n\nArms slipped about her shoulders. \"She loved you. The memory you related makes that fact clear. Abundantly clear. But something scared or chased her away.\"\n\n\"My father.\"\n\nHer bitterness could never be measured.\n\n\"People are born of a womb, and that which loved thee was the haven of a Pykolese girl \u2013 she must have been so frightened, Auli. To fall rainbows over Isles in love with your father, who is not hard on the eyes, one might be persuaded to admit, and then to birth a child of \u2026\" Say it, Auli wanted to shout. Say, 'deformed!' \"Imagine then your father's enraged reaction. Utter rejection. He crushed her. He was only a youth himself, mind, not that I'm defending him. I make Xa'an thirty-two summers now, which puts him at seventeen or eighteen at the time of these events \u2013 a very callow, reckless seventeen \u2013 what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Well, this is something I've always wondered about,\" said Auli, pausing with her hands on her tunic top.\n\n\"This is a public building!\"\n\n\"No-one's here. Please, just a quick look at my Dragon's kiss. This is something I need to ask.\"\n\n\"Auli \u2026\" Yualiana sounded appalled. \"Alright, a quick peek \u2013 oh! I see.\"\n\nHer reaction told Auli all. The Mistress would have seen a few stomachs in her time. \"It's unusual, right?\"\n\n\"Unusual? It's beautiful.\" The Mistress chuckled uneasily. \"Cover up. Quick.\"\n\n\"Mistress?\"\n\n\"Well, it's \u2026 flowery.\"\n\nWhen Yualiana said no more, Auli pressed her hands to her too-lean stomach and snapped, \"Oh, could someone please enlighten the blind girl \u2013\"\n\n\"Child, you are not blind. Not to me. Not when you see so much with the beauteous compass of your mind.\" The Mistress sucked in a ragged breath. \"Listen. Your Dragon's kiss is only slightly puckered, and displays a five-petalled flower design with a centre like a golden sun, each petal being \u2026 well, like a droplet of water is the best I can describe it, and the artistry is exquisite. The colours are of sapphire as rich as any jewel, traced with gleaming gold, and while I was looking I could have sworn I saw the petals rippling. And now \u2013 oh, forgive me! I cannot anymore remember your name!\"\n\nTo Auli's further shock, the Mistress burst into tears!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "\"Magic most fearsome,\" growled Ga'athar.\n\n\"Dismay most fearsome,\" said Yualiana. She had been full of hugs since yesterday's debacle at the Records House, and she held Auli again now. \"Thank you for your patience with us, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\n\"I \u2026\"\n\nShe had no words to describe her desolation. Forgotten. Everyone, down to the smallest child of Ga'athar's household, had instantly forgotten who she was. Were her disfigurement a curse, this was a hundred times worse. Some magic both fierce and mighty had a grip upon her life, and it was steadily wrecking everything she knew and stood for. Aye, she had repeated her life story for the Master and the Mistress, including the way Ga'athar had intervened to succour her from the brutality of Mi'elgan and Sairana's house, but she knew no power under the suns could replace stolen memories.\n\nIn her dreams last night, Amaryllion had forgotten her. He did not respond to her increasingly desperate calls.\n\nShe feared to return to the Halls.\n\nIt was another perfect volcanic dawn over Fra'anior, with many birds piping and chirruping energetically in the bushes and dragonet song drifting over the Isle, yet her heart had never been darker. A storm loomed unusually to the South, she sensed, and it would overtake their Dragonship en route to Gi'ishior, first supplying helping winds but later turning malignant.\n\nGa'athar said, \"We will find a path. Courage, Isles girl.\"\n\nHe meant regarding Hualiama, whom he did not know except as a young woman of Gi'ishior who was in trouble; if the Master suspected more, which Auli was convinced he did, he betrayed sign to neither man nor beast. He held a long list of procurement requirements to be financed by the treasuries of the Dragons.\n\nAuli decided she quite enjoyed having licence to shop halfway across the Island-World!\n\nYet it seemed to a girl of eerie powers and decidedly anomalous stomach design, that Fra'anior prowled and growled about his caldera all that day long. The winds blew fey and fickle, necessitating lengthy and increasingly tricky tacking manoeuvers before they even reached the rim of the volcano, whereupon a powerful thermal promptly picked them up and hurled the vessel high, high into the sky. There was nothing the sailors could do. There, a storm struck. Swirling winds slewed the vessel wholly about several times and hailstones hit hard but mercifully briefly, damaging the hot air sack, snapping three hawsers and cracking two of the forward crysglass panels.\n\n\"Repair time,\" said the Steersman, placing Auli-Ambar carefully back on the sloping deck. \"To the lines, thou skanky bilge rats!\"\n\n\"What's a bilge?\" she inquired.\n\n\"Bah, don't rightly know,\" said Chayku, spitting somewhere. \"I remember you now. The little girl with all the questions, right?\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026\"\n\n\"See, it can be done if you're as stubborn and curmudgeonly as a sailor.\"\n\nStubborn. Hard-minded. Maybe that was the key to helping friends protect themselves from \u2026 her.\n\nAuli, the half-Pykolese memory assassin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 79",
                "text": "That halcyon period was joy tinged by horror, relieved only by the kind of numbness that came from hard labour. Auli-Ambar slaved at her many projects \u2013 music, forbidden lore, fragrance chambers and instruction of the Human royals, who forgot her upon every visit. Every month. Prince Hiccoughs forgot her and decided she was worth getting to know better seven times running, which was flattering, but restarting a doomed romance became stale all too quickly.\n\nAuli persevered.\n\nQueen Shyana was safely delivered five weeks early of her babe, called Fyria'aliola or Fyria for short, for the unusual flame colouration of her shock of hair. Qualiana attended several hours after the birth to heal and strengthen the babe with her magical powers, an event which sent King Chalcion into a towering rage. A rash of new laws followed. Restrictions on trade. Restrictions on Dragons' flying rights. The speaking or learning of Dragonish was outlawed for real this time, and Auli was expressly forbidden from speaking the draconic tongue anywhere on Human-controlled soil.\n\nShe startled Amaryllion at least five times in calling upon him mentally, and each time the Ancient Dragon promised to try to help her sniff out her heritage, bade her to find the ruzal and the strange Scroll of Binding, and to protect Hualiama \u2013 and promptly forgot everything straight afterward! Even faithful Arkurion almost succumbed to Auli-augmented amnesia, but with typical male draconic arrogance tried to cover up with a lie. Auli-Ambar very quickly set him straight on that score!\n\nOn her fifteenth birthing-day, instead of starting with celebration, she had the joy of reintroducing herself to her own father.\n\nAuli's misery spawned a nightmare of killing herself.\n\nShe refused to give Razzior or Ra'aba the pleasure. No. All was far too quiet about the Isles, and in Dragon speak, that meant trouble. Even Sapphurion had taken to speaking in whispers. Auli had the impression that even the volcano held its breath, awaiting what must inevitably come. Storms must burst. Winds must rage. Dragons \u2013 they must fly to war."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 80",
                "text": "Halfway into her fifteenth summer of life, Auli escaped Qualiana's wrathful paw in her roost by the width of a rajal's whisker. She wept, and the mighty Red Dragoness crooned over her.\n\nThen, she played her Dragonharp for Hualiama.\n\n<See? She dances,> said Qualiana. <What Human child does not ever learn to toddle, as it is called, but always \u2026 dances? She truly has draconic fires inside of her.>\n\n<I'm sure she's very beautiful,> said Auli.\n\n<Who dat?> Hualiama chirped.\n\n<That's Auli-Ambar, dear little fire,> said the Dragoness. <She's our friend.>\n\n<Fweindit?>\n\n<Friend,> said Auli.\n\nQualiana said, <Sapphurion tells me that someone tried to breach our wards twice last week, and once this week. What do you make of this, Auli-Ambar?>\n\nThe harpstrings twanged discordantly as her fingers cramped. <I \u2026>\n\n<I know, my flame-heart. Sapphurion has written additional notes in a private encoded system only he and I know how to access. I shall share the code with you. How's your project coming on?>\n\n<Ah, well, we've run into issues with Chalcion's control of the trade routes to \u2013>\n\n<Not that project.>\n\nAuli nodded grimly. <I have failed to uncover the ruzal reference despite clearing the whole of cavern thirteen. We have begun on fourteen, eleven and nine. And as for this little one's fate \u2026 I despair, o Qualiana.>\n\n<Ask Queen Shyana.>\n\n<Fra'anior's beard!> Auli gasped.\n\nHualiama clutched her hand. <Auli dance? Who Shy? Who?>\n\nTwirling the mite about until her giggling filled the inner chamber of the Dragons' roost, the Human girl thought long and hard upon what the Dragoness had suggested. She said, <You mean to hide her in plain sight? No, you mean the royal family to \u2026 adopt her? How?>\n\n<Oh!> cried Qualiana. <Well, my fires had not burned as far as yours, but Auli \u2026>\n\n<Impossible.>\n\nThe Dragoness purred, <Merely improbable.>\n\n<We can't hide her amongst the most prominent family in all Fra'anior!>\n\n<A child born in strange circumstances. Imagine. What is impossible, or unthinkable even? And what place would be more unlikely than the Palace itself? Getting Chalcion and Shyana to agree would be somewhat problematic, but if we could cross to that Isle \u2026>\n\nAn idea of positively draconic boldness!\n\n<An indiscreet royal. A travelling soldier. No \u2013 up and away, little dragonet,> Auli chuckled, swinging Hualiama off her feet. The child was breathless, but demanding more. Always more. <A monk!>\n\n<Ooh, I like it so much, my fire orbs are practically sparking,> Qualiana purred, tickling Hualiama until she screamed with laughter. <A religious man. Who would have thought? But it needs better shape. A double layer of draconic obfuscation. What about this \u2013 a monk who is covering for, as we merely hint at but don't actually say outright, an indiscreet royal or merchant? We misdirect with a rumour or three.>\n\n<A slight irregularity in the genealogical entry \u2026> Auli elaborated.\n\n<On Jo'el's Island.>\n\n<No \u2013 he wouldn't have the records, would he?>\n\n<Some records,> argued the Dragoness. <You concoct a reason to go peruse them \u2013 some aspect of draconic lore or practice related to the Way of the Dragon, for example. You slip something in there. Then, we have to create matching entries, or slightly different or conflicting ones, somewhere that Ra'aba's inquiries have not yet reached. Ya'arriol.>\n\n<We get my father to plant the rumours.>\n\n<Ooh, perfectly wicked!> Qualiana approved. <We have a scheme. A plan.>\n\n<Which sort of depends on \u2013>\n\n<Islands' greetings, scheming Dragonesses!>\n\nAuli screeched, <Sapphurion! Oh \u2026 how did you sneak up on me, you despicable beast?>\n\n<Ah, not a Dragoness, but a \u2013 do I know you?> asked the Sapphire Dragon, his voice thickening with menace and suspicion. <Is this a trusted person, Qualiana? Why is she so familiar with our child? And why do I sense the strains of a plot heavy in the air? Dragons never forget a face \u2026 save that I have forgotten yours, girl.>\n\nQualiana and Auli sighed as one.\n\nThe Dragoness said, <We're just discussing Hualiama's future, Sapphurion. Would you take your perch?>\n\nHe said quietly, <Aye, we must discuss this matter most urgently. For your roost-bound behaviour was the subject of discussion in our Council this day, o breath of mine very fire-soul, and more than hinted at as weakness. Andarraz made much fire with the matter. Much fire indeed. Now, who is this insider and what is her part this chicanery?>\n\nThe Red Dragoness said, <She is our key, and our best ally.>\n\nThe great Elder made a sound as though he were rubbing his forepaws together. <Excellent. After you introduce us, let's get down to some fire-stoking intrigue!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "A Mite of Fate",
                "text": "As fate would have it, the day that Auli-Ambar spoke privately with Queen Shyana was a day of thunderous rain showers and blusterous winds. Huge lightning storms created a corona of flashes all around the volcano, some so large that even Auli's eyes flashed slightly. When she donned Arkurion's surprise, a set of portable minifiers that he called 'eyeglasses', she could almost see something through the occasional gaps in the storm \u2013 say, when a titanic lightning bolt struck forty miles away near Ha'athior or Gi'ishior. White smears. Streaks of fuzzy light fingers smeared across the glutinous, unreliable landscape of her sight.\n\nAuli could not wait to try them on the suns.\n\n\"Ha, that's an amazing piece of technology,\" said Queen Shyana.\n\n\"I know! They provide up to five hundred times minification,\" she replied. Discreetly, she fingered her 'trust Auli' scroll and then triggered the magic. \"I probably need something more in the order of 50,000 times, but Arkurion the Mercury Blue \u2013 a Roving Researcher from Tanstoy Dragon Roost \u2013 believes that if I can train my eyes with these, my eyesight might improve.\"\n\n\"Can I try?\"\n\nThe Queen played with trying to see across the caldera \u2013 everything was too tiny, of course \u2013 and then she chuckled when, with an imperious chirrup, the dragonet Auli-Ambar had dubbed 'Mystery' appeared on the balcony and made himself right at home with her late evening snack.\n\n\"Ha, it's your little rascal,\" said Shyana. \"He likes you.\"\n\n\"I suspect it's more that he smells the opportunity to stuff his stomach,\" laughed Auli. \"Scamp!\" <How are we?>\n\n\"Don't speak Dragonish here,\" the Queen reproved her.\n\n<Bah. Silly laws,> Auli thought. How did Chalcion ever propose to enforce that one? At once, the dragonet apparently abandoned his guzzling and flitted over to perch upon her shoulder. She had only the slight warning of a wing membrane's flutter before a solid, muscly little bundle took up residence on her right shoulder and a paw tickled her beneath the chin!\n\n\"Well, by the fires of this caldera, you've a way with dragonets,\" Shyana commented.\n\nHad the dragonet overheard her thought? Auli pondered this as she disguised her surprise by trying to stroke the dragonet. He nipped at her finger, a clear dissuasion. It struck her suddenly \u2013 how did Amaryllion speak to her, if not mind-to-mind? If that was true, then why had she never heard any other Dragon speak in this manner? No. Telepathy was a proven impossibility.\n\nYet she was speaking to an Ancient Dragon in her daydreams. Hmm!\n\nSoftly, she said, \"O Queen, I wanted to put a proposal to you on behalf of a friend. Would you hear me?\"\n\n\"How mysterious. The friend shall not be named?\"\n\n\"They shall not.\" Wet the lips. Take a long, long dive off the cliffs and hope the deathly Cloudlands did not beckon \u2026 \"Queen Shyana, I wondered if you'd ever considered adopting a child into your family? A girl child, perhaps? There's a bit of a delicate situation over at \u2026 I'm sorry, have I said something awry?\"\n\n\"No. It's not you.\"\n\nAuli's heart took a dive toward the Cloudlands. Shyana's breathing hitched as though her words had been a resounding slap! \"Have I hurt you?\"\n\n\"No, girl. Just \u2026 give me a moment.\" The Queen sniffed discreetly. Then, in a voice roughened by anxiety, she said, \"I have a daughter, Fyria, and she is beautiful. But I have had four miscarriages since and I fear \u2026 you see, Chalcion wants a son to secure the succession. He demands a boy. His words have not been kind.\"\n\nThe ozone-sharpened tang of rain blew in through her open balcony doors. When Auli bowed, her unbound hair slid forward, and she unexpectedly felt it tug as she dipped it in water. Oh. The ornamental brass laver beside the door had filled with rainwater? Now who felt a fool for developing this plot? It seemed that the person who flung back that wealth of hair to slap heavily against the upper curve of her buttocks, stood trapped between the taut electrical charge of that storm and the inflexibility of grief lodged with flinty intractability in her throat, and regretted her words. How many times had she wished she were not born? Yet these four lives had never even been lived.\n\n\"My sole duty is to bear another male heir.\"\n\nAuli felt sick. How could she not have clung to life, even celebrated it, with every fibre of her being? What would one of these not have given to cheat the fires of death?\n\nHow had she failed to anticipate the enormous pressures bearing down on the Queen's life?\n\nThe Queen said, \"Aye, this would help.\" Words that shocked like lightning conducted through the torrential rains to Auli's person.\n\n\"Uh, help?\"\n\nShyana took Auli's hands in hers so fervidly that she felt her previously broken digit twinge. \"Auli. Tell me more! I \u2026 let me explain. I'm sorry, I've made you tremble so. Peace! That's a royal command.\"\n\nThey chuckled uneasily, each perhaps wondering what the other thought or meant. In a moment, Auli bowed again. \"My Queen?\"\n\n\"Hear me well. Chalcion believes it's my desire for another girl-child which has brought this malady upon me. He's had Zalcion seek advice from an Enchanter \u2013 blunt as a broken old sword, he was \u2013 who said, 'Excise the desire for a girl, and boys shall follow.' He also told me that if I mourn the four I lost, I'll risk becoming barren.\" Auli made a disgusted noise in her throat. \"Aye. The King is not \u2026 he's not terribly interested in female children.\" Shyana swallowed hard, and then, seeming to rise onto her toes, whispered into Auli's ear, \"He has become harsh of late, but this might mollify him, do you understand?\"\n\nSome inane part of Auli's brain was wondering when exactly she had outgrown an already tall Queen. The rest of her was paralysed with dread. No! Might she lose Hualiama after all? Might they actually want her? No \u2026\n\nApparently misunderstanding Auli's silence, Shyana pleaded, \"Please. Tell me \u2026 she's pretty? Well-formed? How old \u2013 is there a chance I could see her? Oh, I'm asking the stupidest questions! Forgive me, but I never imagined there might be a chance of turning Chalcion's mind, don't you see? This is vital. I get a girl. I'd be over the rainbows with happiness. Then I wouldn't need to birth any more girls, and I can honestly tell my husband my mind is only set upon boys, because it would be! And his Enchanter could make it so!\"\n\nAuli bit the inside of her cheek until blood curdled upon her tongue.\n\n\"Chalcion may be harsh in public, but he is a solid and dependable father. A female child would be primarily brought up in the nursery and not see much of him. He'd enjoy the publicity. Magnanimous King saves Isles waif from uncertain fate \u2026 you do understand, don't you? Tell me of her.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth. Closed it. Words welled within her, words she knew would seal Hualiama's fate \u2013 for good or for ill, no person could predict. Following a small truth, her words would be one long fabrication. Her mind was consumed with a rushing torrent of destiny.\n\nAll she wanted was to stand in the rain and be cleansed of the lies she must tell. Was this integrity? Was this the cost of a life?\n\n<Great Onyx please, if this be thy will, grant me a Dragon's forked tongue of eloquence.>\n\nShe said, \"O Queen, this little girl's name is Hualiama, and I believe she will become a dancer like you \u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 82",
                "text": "Would the Queen not summarily forget their conversation? Auli-Ambar left her a small scroll of salient details. She briefed her father and bade him scribe their conversation upon his private records in her presence, for she had already been the cause of too much loss. To lose this opportunity would be unbearable.\n\nTwo days later, she flew by Dragonship to Ya'arriol Island.\n\nMaster Ga'athar scratched his beard as though it had recently become infested by fire ants. \"You would like me to falsify records, both on my own Island and Jo'el's, and indeed, foster a raid upon my good friend's monastery in the doing?\"\n\n\"A scrollish raid,\" Auli clarified, in falsely moralistic tones.\n\n\"Very good.\" The Master cracked his knuckles sharply. \"After all, it is in service of my King.\"\n\nWhen they laughed, Auli wondered that they did not sound rather too much like Razzior and Ra'aba. She shivered.\n\nThe plot swung into motion."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "Over the course of the following two months, Auli-Ambar exchanged a rash of dour scrolls with the Palace Library regarding certain \u2026 delicate lore. The matter of producing dynasties of the male gender, one might intimate. She learned rather more about the practices and folklore surrounding this subject, and indeed about Human anatomy, than a fifteen year-old Loremaster would ever have deemed to pertain to her Isle of Comfort. Some of the scrolls were simply outrageous. Others made her blench.\n\nQualiana snidely recommended she consult Prince Hi'ixion on the subject.\n\nAuli suggested the Dragoness consult a granite cliff at high speed.\n\nQualiana wafted choking smoke into her face.\n\nAuli sang her a wicked little stanza involving infeasible numbers of scale mites infesting a Dragoness' wingpits. Forthwith.\n\nThe Dragoness dug a scale mite out of her left wingpit and flicked it into Auli's hair.\n\nAfter a horrified yelp, the half-Pykol girl recovered the insectoid critter \u2013 as large as her palm and definitely less than impressed at being ousted from a sultry and presumably congenial abode \u2013 and assured Qualiana she would discover the extra nourishment in her next dinner.\n\nThen, they both fell over laughing like a pair of drunken parakeets.\n\nThat was how Sapphurion and Grandion found them, hooting and cackling and roaring, and Hualiama freshly woken from her afternoon nap, demanding in strident tones to know what 'the funnies' were all about.\n\nShe was so endearing.\n\nWhy then, did Auli feel as if she were selling the girl to Sylakian slavers?\n\nShe gave Hualiama an extra-especially long hug that had the toddler wriggling and demanding <out, out> in her piping Dragonish. Oops. That might be a problem in the Palace!\n\nSapphurion said, <Doth the plot thicken?>\n\n<Indeed it doth,> said Auli, wincing at her defective grammar. <I have verbal agreement from Queen Shyana, but she holds out on approaching Chalcion until she is able to meet Hualiama. To facilitate that, we are fabricating a reason for her to consult the Dragon Library's extensive lore.>\n\n<On what subject?> Sapphurion purred.\n\n<Having boys.>\n\n<There's a one in three chance \u2026 oh,> said the Dragon Elder. <She's had but one babe, a girl, right?>\n\n<And four \u2026 uh, failures after,> Auli said faintly. Failure? Miscarriage? Words too simple to convey the weight of grief they implied. She wanted to scream, 'a life was lost!' Precious life! Instead, she clarified, <Two were early-gestation miscarriages, but two babes passed on late enough to be gender-identified as female. Human reproductive studies show \u2013 well, the data is limited. Partial and scientifically flimsy investigations undertaken here at Gi'ishior, and at Remoy and Rolodia, indicate that the greater number of babies of a particular gender a woman has, whether in strict series or by preponderance of births, and whether carried to term or not, the greater the chance of having another child of the same family-or heritage-dominant gender. This axiom also holds true across wider family groups.>\n\n<So you have a passing acquaintance with the subject?> Qualiana teased.\n\n<With her Prince?> Sapphurion had the grace to sound startled. <Not our Auli, surely.>\n\n<Besides the political imperative,> Auli returned tetchily. Another blush! Heavens, could they change the subject yesterday already! <Therefore, Master Chamzu and I plan an unofficial visit of the Queen for reasons of confidentiality, wherein we might find opportunity for you to touch her, o Qualiana \u2013>\n\n<And make her miraculously spout male heirs?> Sapphurion snorted.\n\n<Chalcion would be pleased,> his mate noted.\n\n<Male hairs?> Auli laughed. The Dragons appeared befuddled by her joke.\n\n<King Chalcion is displeased by the whole notion,> she added. <And Chamzu doesn't know the full reasoning behind this trip, of course. The Queen believes Chalcion will be persuaded by his wife's devotion to the matter of producing another male heir.>\n\nElbowing the girl slyly, the Red Dragoness said, <Only you would make this act sound like reading a scroll, Auli-Ambar. Mating is \u2013>\n\n<Hardly a fit subject for young ear canals!> growled Sapphurion, but his massive chortling made Auli grow very flustered indeed.\n\nThe Dragoness purred, <It's fun.>\n\n<QUALIANA!> Sapphurion sounded more desirous than annoyed.\n\nFanning her face, Auli snorted, <Oh, get a private roost, you two! Quite enough flame around here for two dozen Dragons.>\n\nSapphurion chortled gleefully, <All in good time, my little flame. Now, we have also been consulting Sazutharr and we want you to make a promise to us. When Hualiama departs to her new home \u2013>\n\n<I gets mommy?> inquired Hualiama.\n\n<A real mommy,> said Qualiana.\n\n<Auli mommy?>\n\n<Auli's not your mommy, my little flame. Nobody knows who your mommy is. You'd have a new mommy.>\n\n<You mommy! Lia's mommy is \u2026 is \u2026>\n\nAuli heard Hualiama's lower lip trembling. Qualiana said she pouted often; this must be a humdinger. Oh, Auli \u2013 what a pang emanated from the past, for what would she not have given to know her real mother? To hold her? This was Hualiama's family, right here in this roost, and they were planning to tear her from all that she knew. Which was worse? How could a child of not-yet three summers comprehend the scale of the cataclysm that was about to engulf her life? How could they do this to her?\n\nOnly, because her survival demanded it.\n\n<Auli! I want my Auli!> yelled Hualiama.\n\nGreat Islands, this tiny girl could bawl up a storm when she wanted to. So demanding! Auli swept her up awkwardly in arms suddenly bereft of strength or deftness. Who trembled more; her, or Hualiama? This bundle of joys and fears, who knew nothing about the fell and fey powers circling windroc-like about her life. She clutched the perfect little body to her chest, and smelled the smoky jasmine fragrance of her shock of hair Qualiana fondly called a white-blonde tuffet, and thus she was undone.\n\nShe knew she would cry a thousand terrace lakes of tears.\n\nImmediately, a massive fist pounded upon the roost's outer door. \"Open up! We demand audience!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 84",
                "text": "<Andarraz! He grows too bold!> snarled Sapphurion. <Quick-wings, everyone. Execute our plan, the soundproof box. Go! Grandion, tidy the baby materials. Auli, inside with Hualiama. Qualiana, sweep the roost.>\n\nThey had practised this. Still, the danger was extreme. Over a period of seven months, Sapphurion had with his own paw built a false wall behind the inner bedchamber, taking fifteen feet from what had been solid rock. He had slowly scattered the powder and gravel upon each trip outside of the roost. The wall was a marvel, constructed of both rock and magic, meant to entirely deaden and deflect examination using any branch of magic known to draconic magi-science. Behind was a ninety-foot thickness of solid granite backing onto the Human service corridor Auli-Ambar knew so well.\n\nHualiama's clothing was always kept in a cupboard discreetly tucked away in the corner of the bedchamber, but Auli knew the greatest danger was a forgotten or overlooked trinket or toy, or the smell of baby wrappings inside the roost. A Dragon's nose was a fantastically sensitive instrument.\n\nTriggering the complex code phrase together with its associated hand gestures, Auli walked quickly through into that hidden chamber. <Quiet now, Hualiama. We're going to play the mouse game.>\n\nShe wailed louder, squeezing Auli's neck with the strength of desperation. Her pulse pounded frantically against the constriction. Danger! Danger!\n\nSoftly, Auli said, <I know, my pollen-fluff, I know. You're safe with me.>\n\n<Bad, bad Dragon! Auli \u2026 don't leave!>\n\nShe knew Andarraz was bent upon malicious intent? Fra'anior's scraggly beard! <Pretend to be a mouse.>\n\n<No. Won't!>\n\n<Dragons can't see mice. They can't find them,> said Auli. <Back in a wingflip.>\n\n<Noooo!>\n\nShe had to leave her. Thankfully, once she was back in the roost, Auli realised that not an iota of Hualiama's screaming penetrated that barrier. Receiving an armful of bedding and clothing thrown into her face by Grandion, the girl made her return \u2013 not without a fumble, for making graceful gestures was not a simple matter when one held an armful of whiffy laundry.\n\nIn that instant, she heard draconic voices demanding Qualiana; demanding medical care for a battle-damaged Dragon who was dying on the doorstep. It sounded as if Andarraz were trying to force his way inside. Sapphurion, as the hierarchy-dominant male, held his ground while urgently calling to Qualiana to awaken. He enquired what the urgency was \u2013 a second heart pumping golden Dragon blood all over the portico, the Green Elder roared back.\n\nExit Auli!\n\nThrowing a few blankets over Hualiama's head, she forced out a giggle. <Hide now, little mouse. No Dragon will find you if you keep still.>\n\nAn uncertain snivel-giggle was her reply. <Want Auli.>\n\nOut again. Collect toys, stray clothes, snaffle up a plate of half-finished lunch which she had neglected to pack away.\n\n<Inside! They're coming,> hissed Grandion.\n\nTwo more loads and they were done. Dragons piled inside the roost, making a kafuffle that Auli felt was forced. Andarraz and his cronies wanted to take a sniff around this roost, to glance inside the bedchamber, and \u2013 heavens raining fireballs! The kitchen! There had to be a tonne of food in there, both Human and Dragon, and Hualiama's plate \u2026\n\n<Grandion. Kitchen.>\n\n<Get inside!> he hissed. <I'll take care of it, you foolish \u2013 uh \u2026 right away!>\n\nFoolish Human? He had been about to call her \u2013 well, she had taken the young fledgling for one who regarded Humans as better than that. Was some beast whispering into his ear canals?\n\nSuddenly, she saw a different side to the Tourmaline youngster. He often expressed draconic jealousy concerning his shell-mother's fire love for a Human mite, but could it be that those quintessentially 'good' draconic emotions were shadowed within his three hearts? Could jealous fires turn to dark-fires of revenge seeking \u2026 Islands' sakes, could this intrusion have been instigated by Grandion? He would not be the first fledgling to betray his shell-parents! Which way did his integrity cut? Was this Tourmaline Dragon more conflicted than they had imagined?\n\nAuli resolved to speak to him privately just as soon as she could. He had to know Sapphurion, Qualiana and Auli-Ambar were trying to restore honour. Aye. Grandion would understand this argument better than any gibberish regarding prophecies. Yet, as Islanders would say, his terrace lakes ran deep \u2013 that youngster was already a surprisingly nuanced thinker behind his bluster about honour and suchlike. Trust. Who could know the fires of a draconic heart?\n\nVoices penetrated the barrier in her direction, Auli realised. Sapphurion must have designed the special auditory wards using uni-directional constructs \u2013 simplifying that aspect of the lore, at least.\n\nHere she was worrying about abstract points of lore when Hualiama was in terrible danger. Stupid scrollmouse!\n\nAuli poked the bundle of bedclothes. <Hmm. Interesting. Could this be a dragonet?>\n\n<Hee hee,> giggled Hualiama.\n\nHow would they ever, ever smuggle her out of Gi'ishior? If her origin in the Halls was discovered, Ra'aba and Razzior would connect the Isles of Truth in an instant. Of course, there were the Orange Dragon's gruff tones without, demanding bindings for the wounded Dragon, a comfortable cushion for her head \u2013 for Kayturia's head! What had happened to her?\n\nSoon, the kafuffle eased. Auli listened to large bodies moving without, poking their noses into different corners of the roost, she supposed, while Qualiana took charge of the medical work. She despatched Razzior to fetch supplies from the infirmary while temporarily stopping up the wound with her own favourite neck cushion.\n\n<Bandit Dragonwing,> she heard. <Battle off Yaya Loop.>\n\nKayturia! Auli's envy reared its ugly head and roared inside of her. Bah! She hated this helpless resentment; the feeling that her best friend was about to be lost to \u2026 to a Dragoness she was convinced she had smelled right inside the Palace! Ridiculous.\n\n<Oho, what's this?> Razzior rumbled.\n\n<Ah, a Cinizzara miniature.> Sapphurion matched him rumble for rumble, while Auli's fears hit such a pitch she could not move a muscle. The Dragon Elder added smoothly, <Our Roost Keeper likes to carry these trinkets around with her. She must have dropped it. This one was a gift from her father, I believe.>\n\n<Huh, the Fra'aniorian spy?> said the Orange.\n\n<If they collude then the advantageous paw turns to us,> came the reply. <Chamzu keeps his charge on a tight leash. It remains an interesting vector of influence that strikes directly to the heart of the Throne of Onyx. Always, we seize advantage when it presents itself.>\n\n<The girl seems loyal to the Council,> Razzior conceded.\n\n<And incorruptible,> said another Dragon, one Auli did not recognise. Or was that Kayturia's pain-ravaged whisper?\n\nThe Dragons spoke at length in low tones. Then Qualiana kicked most of the beasts out, including Arkurion, and continued to treat a bite so terrible it had penetrated to the second heart, deep inside Kayturia's chest. A terrible wound. Auli played with Hualiama and tried not to worry about when she might need water or food. Suddenly, her ears tuned in again.\n\nThe Red Dragoness was saying, <So, I hear fire promises may soon be spoken?>\n\n<Aye?> Kayturia responded.\n\n<That's the rumour upon the breeze, isn't it? Have I misspoken? Is the Mercury Blue not a raffish beast, held in high esteem by his peers?>\n\nAfter a long pause in which Auli's heart throbbed furiously in her throat, the Dragoness said casually, <I see him more as a little Southern weasel, hopelessly out of his depth here at Gi'ishior. What is he in battle? A liability. In size? A stunted beast already ten feet smaller than me. Better the scroll for that one than deeds of paw and fang. He offends me with his suit.>\n\nThe contempt dripping from the younger Dragoness' statements transformed Auli's stomach into a bilious maelstrom of fury. How dare she speak so callously of Arkurion?\n\nWith studied flatness that hid every emotion, Qualiana replied, <Shall I speak your mind to him?>\n\nKayturia said, <The charge is already laid. Razzior the Orange has challenged the youngster in order to assuage my dishonour.>\n\n<A grave ploy.>\n\n<Did Sapphurion himself not aver that the Southern Roosts must be kept in their place? The honour of these Halls is greater than that of any Dragon.>\n\n<What a dismally convoluted interpretation of the truth!> Qualiana's snarl betrayed her rising anger. <I see I shall have more fools to repair this day. You choose your allies ill and your battles worse, youngling \u2013 or do you not understand how different Tanstoy is to any other Southern Dragon Roost, and how close have been the bonds of alliance these seven hundred years? Much golden blood will be spilled over the rock of one Dragoness' hubris! You seek to aggrandize the Orange, who is fire bound to Haaja, who will by turn of paw perceive you as the most pertinent threat to their incipient speaking of the third ascending fire promise, and act accordingly!>\n\nKayturia made a strangled sound Auli interpreted as disbelief.\n\n<Aye. Expect a visit from the Yellow Elder very shortly, youngling. I cannot say it shall be courteous or filled with wing-sisterly compliments. Ripples within ripples. I don't know how I can protect you from this fate you have invited upon yourself. Let's fly you down to the infirmary. At least Haaja will not attack you there.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 85",
                "text": "How Auli-Ambar rued her lack of sight. How she grieved the accuracy of her hearing as she attended her first real Dragon battle, 'viewed' from the balcony outside of Sapphurion and Qualiana's roost on an afternoon of broiling temperatures barely relieved by a pollen-thick breeze. She listened to the speech of Dragons nearby, and found them neatly divided between disgust at Kayturia's chosen course of action and, when Razzior announced the challenge in ringing tones using the Dragoness' very wording, an equal measure of disgust directed at the Orange.\n\n<How can this be right?> complained one voice.\n\n<This reeks of dishonour. Our wing-brother of Tanstoy is wronged 'ere he rises to the challenge!>\n\n<He should spit upon it!>\n\n<Yet fight they must, according to draconic lore. I will have no regard for such a travesty.>\n\n<I shall petition the Council for honour's restitution.>\n\nAuli listened, and knew Sapphurion listened ten times more closely than she. His talon was ever upon the pulse of the Dragonkind, and she knew he was regarded as a master of wing curvature \u2013 in Island Standard, Dragon politics.\n\nNearby, she heard Yulgaz declaim in ringing, perfectly articulated Dragonish, <Aye, a travesty and more! O Dragonkind, the Mercury Blue's star rises even as the Orange sun sinks!>\n\n<Never misses the chance,> Auli heard Qualiana whisper to Sapphurion.\n\n<Wouldn't be Yulgaz if he were not playing every string upon the Dragonharp,> the Sapphire returned. <Grandion, pay heed. What is your reading of the approach?>\n\n<The Tanstoyan will strike first and fastest,> he replied at once. <He will surprise and antagonise the Orange, perhaps striking with a Blue power he has kept hidden from all. After that, greater strength and experience will tell. The Mercury Blue will fall.>\n\n<Fall into what?> Auli squeaked.\n\nSapphurion returned, <The lake, or a net. These bouts are not about killing, mostly.>\n\n<M-M-Mostly?> she spluttered.\n\nGrandion added, <Razzior will heed the fires of these Dragons and not slay the Tanstoy Dragon.>\n\n<Very good, shell-son,> his parents approved.\n\nFine for those who were not about to be slaughtered like a sacrificial ralti sheep! Auli wanted to shout, to scream, to stop this ridiculous charade, but she knew she must bury her emotions for her friend's sake. Oh Arkurion! Oh, the shame he must endure at Kayturia's slur!\n\n<O Fra'anior, must it be?>\n\nAuli did not realise she had formed a thought until Amaryllion returned, <We are Dragonkind. This has ever been the way. Go to him afterward, little mouse.>\n\n<Why would I not?>\n\n<There is healthy distance, and healthy closeness. Tread the trails with care.>\n\nHis nuances communicated advantageous-positional-maintenance, a curious draconic idea founded in the action of hovering \u2013 sometimes in battle, Auli understood, one gained strategic advantage simply by staying still.\n\nThen, she had no more time for thought.\n\n*Gnarr!!* roared Arkurion.\n\n*GGRROAARRRGGHH!!* responded Razzior, a more thunderous voice by far, highlighting the differences in their stature. Arkurion would be a third of his size and perhaps a quarter of his tonnage. In most Dragon battles, that was an insurmountable disparity.\n\n<Arkurion attacks!> cried Qualiana.\n\nA sharp, rasping hiss accompanied the first flare against Auli's minifier glasses. There was a roar of pain \u2013 real pain \u2013 that Auli realised with a wild thrill stemmed from Razzior, and then a rising chorus of approbation from the Dragonkind:\n\n<Oh, a fine strike by the youngster!>\n\n<What was that, liquescent lighting? So blinding \u2013 look, Razzior's sieving fresh air!>\n\n<Like a gape-jawed flying trout,> sneered Andarraz.\n\n<Aye, but how can he do damage to that bruiser?>\n\nYulgaz bellowed, <Ten gold ingots on the Southern Dragon!>\n\nWings beat furiously against the air, creating massive, leathery sounds like a Roost Keeper slapping a ralti fur rug to clean it. Now, Razzior responded with a volley of curses and an explosion of molten lava that he sprayed wildly about him, damaging Arkurion's wings and momentarily blinding the youngster, but a second, even harsher hiss announced a follow-up attack.\n\n<Oh, strike! Right in the belly!>\n\n*WWAARRR-ARRRGHH!!* snarled Razzior. Flame hissed and crackled through the air, so powerfully that Auli felt the heat against her exposed nose and cheekbones, and then came a concussive *THUD!*\n\n<Ooh, Arkurion felt that!>\n\nHoly smoking fumaroles, Auli had collected the backlash of that blow in the pit of her stomach, and she stood perhaps a quarter-mile away. Arkurion reeled in the air, the shouts told her, but held his form to evade the Orange Dragon's lightning-quick grasp \u2013 and a third time, his signature power struck out, but with a more desperate edge. The Dragons bellowed in approbation. Oh, Razzior would wear those scars to his dying day!\n\nThe freshening breeze conveyed the scents of draconic battle to her nostrils \u2013 sulphur and molten rock and the ozone of Arkurion's lightning attacks, mingled with the curiously fresh, sweet scent of vanilla. Auli swayed as unaccustomed sensations played not inside her belly, but around her Dragon's kiss. Her strange birthmark was reacting to a Dragon battle?\n\nBarely had this realisation flashed into her awareness, when the Orange Dragon unleashed an immense firestorm peppered with exploding slugs of white-hot lava. Auli could not believe the din. The ravenousness of their fires immolated the air, sucking away the oxygen. Draconic fists pounded as they traded blow for blow, the Mercury Blue apparently having exhausted his much smaller, fledgling-sized reserves of magic in an audacious opening gambit that had Razzior limping through the air like a spavined sheep, was one particularly flattering description.\n\nAuli clenched her fists. <ARK \u2013>\n\n<Hush, little flame.> Qualiana shushed her by the expedient of trapping Auli within her paw. <You must not interfere, not even with your magical power.>\n\n*Whadda-blam-blam-BLAM!*\n\nThe blows whistled past almost as fast as the wings of fighting, grappling, tussling Dragons! Their roaring and snarling had a bestial, hair-raising quality Auli had never before heard in a Dragon's voice save Sapphurion's, when he was feral with grief. Talons screeched across metallic hide. Fangs clashed and clashed again.\n\nQualiana groaned, <Oh, the Mercury \u2013 oh, a cunning blow! Razzior's \u2026>\n\n*THRAAABOOM!!*\n\nWithout Qualiana's paw, she would have been flung to her knees by the bone-rattling power of that strike. Auli-Ambar bit her knuckles so hard, she felt her jaw dislocate. <Nooo, oh nooo \u2026>\n\n<The explosive fist,> Sapphurion noted quietly. Dejectedly. <He should have studied Razzior's style beforehand.>\n\n<He's not a warrior! He's just \u2026 not \u2026>\n\n<Hush, little flame,> Qualiana said sternly. <They've caught him below; he's unconscious but alive. That was a battering worthy of the name. Join me in the infirmary? We might as well go patch up those two ralti sheep. Don't say or do anything to disgrace him.>\n\nAuli hit the Dragoness, then. Actually hit her! It hurt her fist, but she could not believe how satisfying that reaction felt.\n\nQualiana said, <I know, little flame. I know.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Liar, Liar, Scrolls Afire",
                "text": "The balladeer would style Dragon battle as a majestic conflict of clashing fang and savage talon; an aerial arena of glorious deeds, fine words and straightforward outcomes. They do not major on the recovery process, for when two monstrous beasts tear into each other with those fangs, the damage is terrible indeed. Plate-sized holes stitched in hide. Torn and broken wings. Flayed, burned, cauterised patches of hide. Broken limbs, crushed bones, displaced fire orbs \u2026 need I continue?\n\nArkurion's wounds, I am informed, were typical of a youngster pitted against a much larger foe. He had six broken ribs, a splintered wing-secondary on the left side, a slew of internal injuries and burns so severe, his hide was melted in stripes three feet wide. For his part, Razzior lost a length of intestines that were charred to a crisp by that Mercury Blue power thereafter called Liquescent Lightning, a foot lopped off his hind left fore-digit, three ripped-off talons besides, and burns five feet deep to his right major flight muscle bundles, which would keep him grounded for a month after the battle."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 87",
                "text": "<Worse still, Razzior lost his honour, and the regard of Haaja the Yellow.>\n\n<I had never esteemed Arkurion more.> -Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 257\n\nSeven hours after his defeat, Arkurion opened his eyes. Auli had drifted off to sleep beside his prone head, but she shifted and half-awoke to investigate an itch that turned out to be an indigo-shelled bombardier beetle which evidently felt her hair might make a suitable nest. While untangling the three-inch insect from her tresses, she heard the Dragon's eyelid scrape open.\n\n<Ouch,> he said.\n\n<Sore, are we?> Auli said, and decided her lip needed to be bitten. Great leaping Islands!\n\nHe said, <Sorer than I had thought, yet perhaps not sore enough.>\n\nHis meaning took even more untangling than the stubborn bug, which she did not want to irk because of its fabled ultra-hot chemical attack, but eventually Auli said, <I've heard the opinion advanced that it is considerably more fun being alive than the converse.>\n\n<Easy for you to say.>\n\n<I have wished \u2026> Auli pursed her lips, and sighed. Wished to die, aye.\n\nThe Dragon surely knew her meaning, for Arkurion shifted with a pained groan. He said, <Alive and alone. How did I fare in your estimation? Sufficiently humiliated?>\n\n<Actually \u2013>\n\n<Shall I drag my sorry tail back to Tanstoy, too disgraced to ever show hide or scale around these Halls again?>\n\n<Arkurion \u2026>\n\nAuli raised herself onto her right elbow. She had made herself a nest of blankets just a couple of feet away from the unconscious Dragon, intending to enjoy a diverting scroll examining rare variants of ward magic \u2013 <Advanced Obfuscation for the Loremaster,> anyone? Having fallen asleep waiting for him to wake, she had probably drooled all over the priceless text.\n\nElegance personified.\n\nThe Dragon laughed bleakly. \"May my tongue speak only truth. It may surprise you to learn that I never fire loved Kayturia the Citrine Yellow, Auli-Ambar. Not with true fires. It took a great stinking farce and these injuries to help me face that reality. I \u2026 I don't know what I thought, null-fires idiot that I am. Numbwit! Feckless fledgling! I let others pressure me into pursuing the relationship. What a laughingstock I must be, the fodder of every joke around these Halls for the next \u2026 oh, hundred years or thereabouts.\"\n\nShe echoed, \"It may surprise you, Arkurion, to learn that the exact opposite is true.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare jest! Auli, you wound me. You, of all Drag \u2013 uh. Please. My mortification already knows no bounds.\"\n\n\"Arkurion, were I a Dragoness \u2013\"\n\n\"Silence!\"\n\nShe repeated doggedly, \"If I were \u2013\"\n\n\"But you are not.\"\n\nThe agonised rasp of Arkurion's voice faded into laboured breathing. In and out. The sensations of pressure equalising in her ears and a prickling of shielding magic set her nerves on edge. Why mute the sounds of an empty infirmary? Auli could not fathom his fires. Razzior had left to lick his wounds hours before; the Orange must now navigate the consequences of his arrogance. Why now the surging of scents and magic; the rising thunder of the Mercury Blue's belly fires never a sweeter background music, and a blind girl who wished beyond all yearning that she could have seen into his eyes at this moment?\n\nAuli must listen; it seemed she listened with the entirety of her living soul.\n\nThe Dragon exhaled. \"I never fire-adored her.\"\n\nScream! Sing! Wail in terror and cast herself off the nearest cliff! For the expression in his fire eyes must be perilous beyond imagination, and the fires of his Dragon hearts, a blaze so taboo it must never be granted expression. Movement and breath deserted her being. Thought paid homage to the terrifying glory of the impossible granted existence only by its lack of utterance.\n\nWas existence the most perilous fact of all?\n\nHe whispered, \"That is what I learned, Fra'anior forgive my eternal fire-soul. Tell me \u2026\"\n\nAll must be despair. Aye, were she born of wing and flame, different promises may have been made. Would have. Unsteadily, Auli said:\n\n<Of kindred souls, o may we speak,>\n\n<Of kindred fires congenial,>\n\n<Of mind-fires, heart fires, soul-fires deep,>\n\n<No promise is enough to keep.>\n\n<This treasure chest of souls must be,>\n\n<Locked away, eternally.>\n\nHis warmth was so near. Ardour enflamed. Yet it could never have been more distant, either. He would know all that must be known from the unconsciously expressed nuances of her short poem; remorse and sorrow shrouding truth unspeakable.\n\nAfter the longest time, the Dragon said, <Thou art Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya.>\n\nShe said, <Thou art Arkurion the Mercury Blue, of Tanstoy.>\n\n<I \u2026 I honour thee.>\n\n<And I, thee.>\n\nNot quite a promise. Simply, an acknowledgement of what could never be. Auli sensed that very treasure chest locking within her breast, yet she felt unaccountably peaceful. Suddenly, it dawned upon her how Amaryllion Fireborn might put it. She said, <So shall it be sealed unto a time.>\n\n<Unto a time?> Now it was he could not fathom her fires.\n\nAuli said, <Arkurion, did you know that some Dragons can speak by telepathy?>\n\nThe great body beside her heaved a sigh that apparently laboured beneath the weight of half of the world's Islands, plus the skies above \u2013 skies she had described or heard extolled a thousand times during her teaching, singing and reading, yet had never seen for herself.\n\n<Is that so?>\n\n<Aye, and I would like you to confirm that I am correct in my allegation.> When he made no reply, she added, <As you know, a blind person senses much that may not be obvious to other persons \u2013 or Dragons \u2013 and I have many times noted infinitesimal hitches and minutiae in conversation \u2013>\n\n<Telepathic gaps? You do have an overactive imagination, Lore Specialist.>\n\nShe loved his droll humour. It deserved a resounding, open-pawed, Dragon-sized slap. Suddenly, she giggled within. Auli felt reckless. Running blind. Flying without sight. It was time for this girl to cause some serious trouble with a Dragon, and to a handy volcanic vent with the consequences.\n\nFirst, misdirection. <How are you feeling, noble Dragon?>\n\n<Passably flattened by that exploding fist manoeuvre I'd read about, saw coming from a league off and could not avoid \u2013 thank you for asking, Auli-Ambar. Why do you ask?>\n\n<All hearts present and functioning?>\n\n<Aye, evincing adequate compression and circulation to inform me of the exact nature of the pain bracketing my ribcage, the severity of the bruising to my tertiary and quaternary stomachs, liver, sykodium and syncha glands, and I can feel every stitch holding together my lightning gonad-assembly and concentration tubes \u2026 I suppose I am well enough, considering the circumstances.>\n\nAuli said, <What if I could prove the existence of draconic telepathy?>\n\n<Huh, the old theory about dragonets \u2013>\n\n<No. Something a little \u2026 bigger.>\n\n<Bigger?>\n\nAfter the lethal ground they had just skirted, she needed to dance across Islands. <Positively huge. Are you sure you can handle \u2026 immense?>\n\n<I can handle \u2026> Arkurion broke off as he realised how avid he sounded. <You are tugging my wings, little flame. I'm a wounded Dragon who fought an Orange behemoth for his honour. Show a modicum of respect.>\n\n<Oh, it's you who'll be showing respect in a minute.>\n\nThe Mercury Blue sounded as if he were choking on his dinner. Auli began to scramble to her feet before she realised his coughing had turned to agonising laughter. His fore-talon curled about her left knee. <Sit with me awhile, my fire friend. Let us speak of what troubles thee.>\n\nAuli scowled in his direction. Then pouting, even though she knew the slight movement might be lost behind her face veil, she said, <I had not yet finished blowing your puny little mind, o languorous lizard.>\n\nArkurion spluttered, <Phwwath \u2026 what?>\n\n<Ready?>\n\n<Impertinent hatchling!> he seethed. <Do I know this scrollmouse-turned-Dragoness? Do your worst!>\n\nOoh, an edge of challenge! Exactly as intended, Auli had riffled the Mercury Blue's scales backward \u2013 and the wicked thought crossed her mind that she did enjoy keeping her Dragons hopping. Her Dragons? Phew, Auli. She must not leap an Isle too far. What was this disturbing predilection to play with flame?\n\n<Amaryllion? Are you there?>\n\nA voice returned, faraway and rather crankily, <Who disturbs mine eggling dreams?> Immediately, the enormity of his mental presence clarified and attuned to her, as if the greater part of his mind had been sleeping. He said, <Of the Pykolese question I know not. I have searched of the winds of memory and song, and across the breadth of our Island-World North of the Rift, and detected not the slightest redolence that should aid inquiry. Now, why wouldst a little mouse bend a mighty Ancient Dragon to her frivolous games with yon Mercury Blue Dragon?>\n\n<Only, because nothing of a Dragon's honour is frivolous to me, o Amaryllion.>\n\nTo her surprise, his voice softened even as his inner fires seemed to swell to encompass more than her world. He said, <I understand. I shall do it because thou art mine mouse, and in the doings of thine tiny paws, I do begin to detect the naissance of fires unsuspected; of possibilities undreamt-of; of powers potent beyond mine fieriest dreams. I must meditate upon this bloom I do perceive in thine heart.>\n\nFire from the blue! Staggering.\n\nThen like a Cloudlands tide receding, his presence ebbed. He was old beyond belief, Auli-Ambar knew, from her calculations over twenty-five centuries old. Minimum. She did not know much of what passed for senescence in Dragons, but there were definitely times his recounting of the legends was foggier than other times.\n\nShe said, <Amaryllion, please. Just a smidgen of help \u2013>\n\n<HA HA HA!!> boomed the mental voice.\n\nTo put it mildly, Arkurion nearly shed his scales in shock. When the Mercury Blue had subsided in a pained, quivering and decidedly petulant heap, the Ancient Dragon intoned:\n\n<May the fiery blessings of the mighty Onyx ever enflame the peerless valour of thine Dragon hearts, o Arkurion the Mercury Blue.> Auli thought she heard the Lesser Dragon's fangs clacking together in awe. Excellent! He said, <Auli-Ambar needs to know, youngling. She also needs a firm paw of instruction \u2026 and protection. Will you be that Dragon?>\n\n<A-A-Aye, Mighty One!> Arkurion stammered.\n\nAs the Ancient Dragon's presence withdrew completely, this time, Auli had the impression that her best friend was staring at her as if she had indeed sprouted wings and grown scales. She willed her heart to cease its ridiculous palpitations. Forthwith.\n\nNot possible!\n\nEventually, Arkurion purred, \"Every time I think I know you, Human girl, I find myself the victim of severe underestimation! How do you do it? Allow me to summarise.\" His fore-talon tapped her knee. \"Firstly, you have detected and even personally demonstrated draconic telepathy, arguably the best-kept secret of the Dragonkind since the dawn of history. Secondly, you happen to have an Ancient Dragon up your sleeve, with let's say, a fiery spot for your \u2026 I can't say that in Standard.\" <Your impertinent-inspirational-starlight-flaring fire life!> Auli's jaw sagged like a dysfunctional hinge. Arkurion sniggered happily at the effect of his words. \"Thirdly, he summarily assigns me as your hatchling-sitter! Do I have the bare talons of this?\"\n\nToo many fires. Too much. All of her audacity seemed to have burned out like a candle left to burn too long. She whispered, \"Aye.\"\n\n\"Fourthly, since no Human in history has demonstrated telepathic faculties, we can conclude \u2026 well, perhaps save that gem for later?\"\n\n\"Arkurion!\"\n\nHe tickled her beneath the chin. \"Hence, 'little flame,' right? Fifthly, may I conclude that your communion with Amaryllion Fireborn is at least partly responsible for your astonishing aptitude for draconic lore, and this guileful revival of ancient ballads, legends and stories you have initiated?\"\n\nShe inclined her head. \"Indirectly, Auli's Empire stems from his ideas.\"\n\n\"Huh. You're not going to tell me what you're brewing \u2013\"\n\n\"No. You'll just have to be a good friend and stop asking me.\" Auli grinned in his direction; the Dragon's fires growled like an unsatiated fifty-tonne appetite. \"What I do need your help with is the forbidden lore \u2013 and since I hear you are to be stuck with us for at least one month more, if not two, may I just say that I intend to take full advantage of your hatchling-sitting obligations? After all, you are commanded by an Ancient Dragon.\"\n\nArkurion's laugh was a roguish smoulder of fragrant fires. \"A firm paw of instruction? Prepare to be summarily floored, beautiful girl.\"\n\nAuli shivered. \"Don't say that.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 88",
                "text": "During her next visit to the Palace, where everyone had \u2013 sigh \u2013 once again forgotten she even existed, and to her hapless annoyance Prince Hi'ixion had found himself a predictably gorgeous girlfriend \u2013 double sigh \u2013 and Queen Shyana needed considerable prompting to move forward their adoption plot \u2013 quadruple sighs with windroc spit on top \u2013 Auli-Ambar found herself grounded for three days. Storms. The very stuff of Fra'aniorian legend. After all, the Onyx Dragon was supposed to appear cloaked in storm, as if being large enough to entirely fill his caldera were not mind-boggling enough. He was a Storm Dragon. Storm winds, lightning-mantled muzzles, Island-ravaging tornadoes, hailstones the size of houses \u2026 just listen to that rain lashing the Palace building!\n\nAuli chuckled to herself. That primordial fire breather didn't half define the word, 'impressive.'\n\nHer awful magic was at work again, and this time she was stumped. It appeared to have completely sabotaged the functions of Sazutharr's scrolls of remembrance.\n\nAuli could have put up with being sabotaged by an external force or party. Sabotaging herself was just galling.\n\nPensively, she fingered her Dragon's kiss. Another secret she had yet to reveal to Arkurion, for it seemed that enough had been spoken between them to last several lifetimes. Cross-species feelings. Ugh! She recoiled at the thought. Harbour regard for a beast of scales, claws, fangs, and a hundred times her tonnage? She must be sick. Except, life was never uncomplicated. She harboured regard for Mystery, a regular visitor in her chambers these days. Nobody thought cuddling a dragonet was perverse or deviant or downright creepy. So where exactly did one stretch the line between acceptable friendship or care and, frankly, a notion that turned any sane person's stomach?\n\nThat old fear resurfaced. Could she, of all Humans a partial telepath, be some kind of ghastly experiment of Dramagon's disciples? Had her mother been part of the plot? Perhaps a draconic part had been ingrafted. Right there, inside her weird belly. Her magical eyes betrayed it. Her abilities told the same. Her voice. Her ink-reading fingers. Her deeply offensive memory-wiping, romance-stealing, insanity-inducing magic \u2026\n\n<Mother, who were you? Just a girl like me, or the poisonous font of my debility?>\n\nAuli strode forward, out into the torrential rain.\n\nHammering upon her upturned brow. Cleansing. Reviving. Driving thought deeper, as though the purifying qualities of water stripped away all the non-essentials and left only beauty and transparency. For the first time, as Auli simply allowed the fat tropical raindrops to lash her body, clad only in a linen tunic and silken leggings, and she realised that the roaring of torrential rain was not at all dissimilar to the fires she heard inside of Dragons all the time. Waterfalls of fire or waterfalls of rain \u2013 so alike. That low, ululating roaring played delicious havoc within her being. She could not get enough of it. Whipping aside her face mask, Auli opened her misshapen mouth and let the water gush inside.\n\nPeople hardly ever saw her unveiled anymore.\n\nFire and water. Water quenched fire. Fire blew water into steam. If her father's fire was of Fra'anior, then had her mother somehow been \u2026 attuned to water?\n\nHer being thrummed to the power of this insight. Auli did not know whence it had arisen, but she sensed that herein was an elemental, unsuspected truth. Could her strange core magic somehow have arisen from a conflict between two irretrievably juxtaposed branches of magic \u2013 or even, the elemental forces that underpinned them? She had never read of water magic. Understandably, Dragons were obsessed with all the forms and manifestations of their elemental fires.\n\nSome people wished for new beginnings. Auli wished she never had to begin again. Over and over again.\n\nImagining that the rains were the Great Dragon's fire hurtling down from the heavens, Auli began to sing of the wonder that engulfed her being."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 89",
                "text": "\"Auli?\"\n\nHer voice played with the lightning. It soared amidst turmoil \u2026\n\n\"Auli-Ambar!\"\n\n\"Oh \u2026uh, Dad? Sorry, I was \u2013\"\n\n\"Waking up half the Palace with your warbling,\" he snorted. \"Come inside before you catch your death.\"\n\n\"The rain isn't cold.\"\n\nDespite her words, she shivered. Had she unwittingly touched something of her past? Yet the Island-World was the province of creatures of fire and magic. Where could her mother have come from \u2013 or like a legend of Istariela Amaryllion had recounted for her just last night, could she simply have dropped from the sky, like starlight embodied into draconic life? How wondrous the Star Dragoness must have been!\n\nXa'an said, \"Towel off, daughter, and for the Islands' sakes, will you robe yourself decently?\"\n\n\"I'm dressed, aren't I?\"\n\nHis hollow laugh blew that notion off the Isle. \"My dearest petal, water can make thin cloth, especially of light colouration, virtually see-through.\"\n\n\"Oh no. No!\"\n\nShe felt so stupid. So blind. How had she never known? Because no-one had told her. Xa'an threw his own cloak about her shoulders, and held her gently for a moment. \"Aye. I was never there for you, was I? So, I'd like to discuss the details of the Queen's forthcoming visit to Gi'ishior one more time.\"\n\n\"She has agreed?\"\n\n\"Light the fire for you?\"\n\n\"Please,\" she nodded. Sometimes Xa'an felt like her father. Sometimes he felt like a complete stranger. Better him than any other man, she supposed, wanting to howl with embarrassment.\n\n\"Shyana has approached Chalcion,\" he confirmed. \"The King expressed his cautious pleasure at this course of action. Under Fra'aniorian law the girl would not be fully adopted, but in legal status she would be termed a royal ward \u2013 the Princess Hualiama of Fra'anior. The only difference practically being she could not be counted in any succession.\"\n\nAccepting a strip of towelling cloth from her father's hand, Auli dried her face while a frisson of delight pooled right beneath her Dragon's kiss. Aye! Princess Hualiama.\n\nAuli said, \"The girl must be seen?\"\n\n\"King Chalcion expressly stipulated she must be free of \u2013 for this I apologise, my daughter \u2013 defect, sound of mind and body, and Fra'aniorian by birth.\"\n\nShe heard herself gritting her teeth, and desisted. Oh, the Child of the Dragon would have it all. She was so fortunate! Hualiama was everything Chalcion insisted upon, and so much more. She danced her way through life with extraordinary zest and delight, as if the fires of Fra'anior himself blazed within her \u2013 that was what Qualiana said. Yet this was the destiny Auli herself crafted for her; a destiny that would see them not completely separated, not as long as she held the position of Venerable Instructor. She could continue to watch over the child, as it were, from a distance. A safe distance.\n\nAuli bowed her head. \"So shall it be, father.\"\n\nHe said, \"I also would like you to start martial arts training with Si'ishi.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"You never know when those skills might come in useful,\" he said blandly, and Auli realised Xa'an had already made all the arrangements. \"While I'm certain you are perfectly deadly with a scroll and quill in hand, you never know when a scholar might be called upon to fight.\"\n\nArkurion! He referred to the Mercury Blue!\n\nTherefore, he cared. Deeply. Reaching out, Auli caught her tall father in her arms, and tried to hug the breath out of him. \"Spy-Dad, you're rainbows over Islands!\"\n\nXa'an deadpanned, \"Usefully, Captain Ra'aba happens to be travelling abroad for a month.\"\n\n\"You're a wicked old rajal.\"\n\n\"What did I do to deserve that accolade?\"\n\n\"Well, according to records I've recently perused, you got Mom pregnant when she was younger than I am.\" Xa'an produced a rattling gasp. \"Shall we talk about your distasteful past, father dearest?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 90",
                "text": "Two days later, Auli set foot upon monastery soil on what had to be the hottest, most humid day of the year. She smelled moisture steaming off the vegetation all around the small crater lake, and breathed deeply of the gorgeous, unique scents of this Island, which almost abutted the holy Dragon Isle of Ha'athior. She was not sweating. No. She was just glowing, hopefully delicately \u2013 maidens in the ballads were never sweaty, as a rule. Nor were they real.\n\nMaster Ga'athar said, \"I will speak to Jo'el to confirm our arrangements are in place.\" Air wafted beneath her nose, a wagging finger, she realised. \"No half-naked carolling with dragonets in the lake this time. You quite disturbed some of these poor old monks.\"\n\n\"I was but a child.\"\n\n\"And \u2013 what? You brought a dragonet?\"\n\n\"Mystery goes where he pleases,\" she said. \"He stowed away on our Dragonship from the Palace as I believe dragonets often do. They enjoy seeing the sights, don't you, my little flame?\"\n\nTo her surprise, not to say the Master's, the dragonet landed lithely upon Auli's right shoulder, and briefly rubbed his muzzle against her cheek before flitting off just as quickly. She touched the spot wonderingly. \"Oh.\" A dragonet's embrace?\n\nGa'athar said, \"It would be best if you kept your face completely covered. At least you are lean and none too womanly of form \u2013 no insult meant.\" He clucked his tongue angrily. \"I misspeak.\"\n\nAuli said lightly, \"Mistress Yualiana despairs. Every time I leave your house I feel as if she has stuffed me like a gourd in the hope that a few curves might miraculously pop out.\" Yet, when would she grow into a woman? She was well advanced of her fifteenth summer of life. Every other girl of her age \u2026 she cleared her throat. \"Come. I am here as Lore Specialist and nothing more. Cloak on.\"\n\n\"Dagger sharpened,\" he returned. \"I like that your father's seeing to your training. I like that a lot.\"\n\n\"It has most certainly been educational,\" Auli laughed self-effacingly. \"I now know three ways to disarm an assailant, common strikes to five main nerve junctions, how to apply a garrotte, and the basics of picking mechanical locks. My shoulder aches from Si'shi's beastly machinations.\"\n\n\"Poor you.\"\n\nChuckling dryly, the pair walked up to the ancient stone building, where Jo'el met them in the shade of an outdoor arbour.\n\nAuli's discreet inquiries had revealed several notable facts about the monastery. A cleverly hidden situation. An ancient, rambling upper building that appeared to serve little real function save to disguise what lay at its roots, the caverns adapted over many hundreds of years to the monks' particular requirements. Most intriguingly, her father noted the extremely unofficial visits of certain nameless royals to the monastery where they might pray or petition Fra'anior for boons, or engage in the famous open-handed and staves martial arts forms of the monks. A kind of spiritual retreat, he noted, to which Chalcion turned a wilfully blind eye.\n\nPerfect grounds for the double bluff, and an unexpected aid to her plan's success.\n\nMaster Jo'el was his usual forbidding self. \"While I understand the need to look into this deep draconic lore as the Dragon Elder has requested, I would bid you keep movement and voice to a minimum in this monastery,\" he said in a voice that unconsciously echoed an approaching thunderstorm. \"We are not enamoured of the presence of women here, as it disturbs our single-minded devotion to the Way of the Dragon. You will take your meals and perform your duties strictly sequestered from the monks. Our Records Keeper will be at hand to answer any questions.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Auli said.\n\nThat Records Keeper would need to be duped.\n\n\"The incident by the lake must not be repeated.\" She was quite certain she heard the monk rolling his eyes as he added wryly, \"Months of griping. You would not believe the seething caldera of bellyaching and chuntering I had to endure.\"\n\nHe remembered! How?\n\n\"It shall not be repeated, Master Jo'el.\"\n\n<I shall only attempt to erase and insert certain records, Master, casting a fictitious historical slur upon your monastery. Nothing to concern yourself about.>\n\nWith an audible smile, he added, \"You have matured into a remarkable young woman these seven years, Auli-Ambar, far removed from that mouse who would barely raise a squeak to a fusty old monk. I understand your duties take you far around the Cluster these days?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" she agreed demurely.\n\n\"Read for me the temperature of the Halls. What pollens blow in the breezes around the caldera? This Island is so isolated off the shores of holy Ha'athior, we hear little of the important happenings around Gi'ishior or indeed of the Onyx Throne. May I inquire as to Queen Shyana's health? Has Head Librarian Sazutharr recovered from his infirmity?\"\n\nTruly? The monk knew far more than he allowed. Auli made a graceful gesture of assent. \"Of course, Master. Yet as they say, even the foundations of the Isles have ear canals.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" She could almost hear his eyebrows beetling at her.\n\n\"Oh aye, Master. Yet, I wish to repay you for the kindness and blessing you once freely bestowed upon an unfortunate child. There is much war, and rumour of powers rising in the East \u2026 and news of the organising of tribes from Sylakia to Jeradia, and Yorbik has declared a Free Federation, their first Island-wide attempt at governance. Permission to speak freely, Master?\"\n\n\"Need I be afraid, Ga'athar?\" said Jo'el.\n\n\"This one is more trouble than a whole warren full of dragonets, my friend,\" Ga'athar advised. \"Did you know she's redesigning the Halls?\"\n\n\"Ha!\" laughed the monk. \"How did you slip that one past that Council of hidebound fire snorters, Auli-Ambar?\"\n\nThe same way she intended to slip a few things past certain heads of monasteries?\n\nAuli said, \"Completely by accident, Master. It's true, I swear.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 91",
                "text": "Working an unbroken eighteen-hour stint each day for three days running, Auli researched the ancient lore in search of references to ruzal or sanguistarn-mortha'a. The monastery had excellent records, if she could only find them in the chaos of some parakeet-brained numbwit's catastrophe of a cataloguing system. Scrolls and books organised by year of recopying rather than subject area or even, year of origin? Nonsense! Everything had to be laboriously looked up in cross-indexes nearly as complicated as a library itself.\n\n\"Master Ha'aggara, this is a deplorable mess,\" Auli grimaced, at least the fiftieth time she had to ask him where she might find a particular scroll.\n\nThe harried-sounding young monk protested, \"This is how we have always organised our records. See, since we follow this method, not a single one of the ancient scrolls has been lost to decay or vermin. We follow a regular, dependable schedule of lore preservation.\"\n\n\"In which one cannot find the proverbial rajal in an open field?\"\n\n\"It is a good system!\"\n\n\"Does anybody actually attempt to use this library? Or is this merely an eternal, ennui-inducing exercise of ink and scrolleaf?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 I'll summon Master Jo'el, shall I?\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Auli.\n\nThe moment the young monk's footsteps faded in the hallway outside of their Archives Cavern, she snatched up a volume she had laid aside, and riffled through it rapidly. The Annals of the Holy, she sniffed privately. These monks probably thought they owned a monopoly on Fra'aniorian religion. No mind. She rather wished Amaryllion would emerge from his place of hiding, wherever that was in the Island-World, and stuff a bit of common Isles-sense down certain stuffy earholes.\n\nAt least this volume was regularly used and written in Master Jo'el's neatly sloping hand, which she had privately practised on spare scraps of scrolleaf back in her chambers, and subsequently burned, singeing her fingers in the process. Page, page \u2026 here. Sand. Chemical gourds and pots ready. Working with controlled haste, she located the relevant short entry and began to erase it with a trembling hand. That would not do. Drat! She had splashed eraser down the page. Blot. Sand. Fix it. Thankfully, Auli had thought ahead to memorise the entire page. Her fingers scanned the runes as quickly as she was able. Good. Easily rectified. Biting her lip firmly, she checked the page once more and then set about creating an entirely new, fictitious entry about Master Ga'ando, her chosen victim \u2013 the Master of Weapons, whom Ga'athar assured her was incapable of siring children due to a tangle with a feral rajal in which the cat had escaped with a goodly chunk of the Master's bowels, some parts below, and ruined his voice in the bargain.\n\nRumour suggested that Ga'ando made sure he wiped his feet on the beast's skinned pelt at least ten times a day.\n\nAuli tried not to let rampaging guilt spoil her concentration. <Sorry, Master Ga'ando. This way, readers will know it's a fabrication. Hualiama needs you.>\n\nHalfway through her tale about a 'monk' who supposedly hid a pregnant woman around the other side of the lake for months on end, she heard footsteps in the corridor. Oh no! Blot! Dry! Make a mess \u2026 hurriedly, Auli selected a page at random and flipped there.\n\n\"So, you would reorganise our library, girl?\" A gruff whisper from the doorway set every hair on the nape of her neck a-tingle. \"I am Master Yiiba, the Master of Secrets \u2026 or the Master of Shadows, if you prefer. Either title is appropriate.\"\n\n\"M-Master,\" Auli stammered. \"I \u2026\"\n\nHe sniffed the air. \"If your work is so sloppy as to need this amount of erasing, Lore Specialist, how shall we evaluate your plans for this cavern?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026\"\n\n\"No mind. I shall refrain from treading in my leader's footprints. Attend. Since I am the Master of Secrets, I function in a manner similar to your noble father, o Auli-Ambar, she of mysterious birth and rumoured magical powers. Taking advantage of your visit, I have brought you a satchel of scrolls which you will distribute for me. Two are intended for your father's hand alone. I understand that despite your ostensible blindness, you can read scroll sign?\"\n\n\"Fluently,\" said she, between gritted teeth.\n\n\"Excellent. Then may your obedience to my instructions proceed just as fluently. Swear you will not open any scroll without my express permission?\"\n\nIslands' sakes! Auli growled, \"Neither by will nor by accident shall they be opened by my hand. I so swear.\"\n\n\"Bah. I see why the Dragons trust you.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Aye, because your integrity shines \u2013 a most unpromising quality in one inclined to my speciality of work.\" Auli decided he was sneering at her. Very flattering, Master. Half a sniff more around her work would cure him of that notion forever! He said, \"Good. The balance should go to noble Sapphurion, his Council and Master Chamzu, and several are destined for further abroad. I wish them to be despatched without delay.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Master Yiiba.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Forget I was here. And remember, girl \u2013 I'm watching you. Eyes like a Dragon.\"\n\nIf that threat came accompanied by a hand gesture, Auli had no idea of it. Picking up the satchel, she set it aside where she would remember it. On second thoughts, she slipped a hand beneath the flap and rummaged about. Hmm. The Master of Secrets was no slouch when it came to scroll wards. She immediately sensed three that were unfamiliar to her, and another unusual combination ward intended to desiccate the container's contents, rendering a rare ink unreadable. Intriguing.\n\nNot half as nefarious as the girl who now returned to her subterfuge. Master Ga'ando confessed his guilt; the child was taken to Ya'arriol and fostered by none other than Ga'athar himself. Sorry, Inniora. There was about to be a regrettable mix-up in the birth records.\n\nHaving finalised her fabulations and corrections, Auli uncapped another, very special gourd prepared by her friend Essini. The tiny vessel contained a blend of samodas root, tinker banana sap, prekki essence and fazincha, a powerful paralytic poison. She must not touch it with her fingertips or she would lose all feeling in her hand \u2013 permanently.\n\n\"Venerable Instructor ages ink,\" she whispered to herself, and set about treating the newly scribed section with a blotting cloth. It must look exactly the same as the old.\n\nAt that instant, Mystery flitted into the room. Auli had half a second to apprehend the slight hissing of air across his wing membranes before the dragonet smacked hard against her left shoulder! She teetered on her small stool. Never had her hands moved quicker to catch and invert the tumbling gourd. Just a droplet of liquid landed atop her slipper-clad right foot, upon the soft inner-slipper material above the arch of her foot. As her flailing legs upended the desk upon which she had been working, the hefty records tome toppled onto her stomach. *Swish-thunk!* The book vibrated.\n\nFeet thudded without. \"For the Dragon!\"\n\n\"Master Jo'el?\"\n\nShe was too shocked to apprehend what had happened.\n\n\"Stop him!\"\n\nMetal crashed against metal. A male voice grunted harshly. Panting, thumping, a man rushed into the room with others right at his back. Auli raised the only weapon she had, the gourd, but Mystery seemed to flop-leap to her protection, even as she sensed a body hurtling toward her. The dragonet made a peculiar rattling-hissing sound. She tried to smack her hand against whatever came at her; her palm slapped a bearded mouth, then a knee came through and crunched her in the lower left side. As she collapsed beneath an avalanche of weight, Auli felt a second impact against the abused records book, closely followed by a chorus of angry shouts.\n\n\"Pull him back!\"\n\n\"The girl!\"\n\n\"You, speak! Who the hells are you? Speak!\"\n\n\"Draco \u2026 paw-licker. Die \u2026\" A ravaged whisper, followed by a ghastly, lingering gurgle Auli knew she would never forget.\n\n\"Dead. Took his own life,\" said Master Jo'el, apparently the Islet of calm amidst mayhem. \"Inside my monastery! An infiltrator, even here? Search the wretch! Auli \u2013 are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Fine. I'm fine, Master.\"\n\nHad she inadvertently shovelled poison down a man's throat?\n\n\"She's not fine. Get her a glass of sweet berry juice. Quickly. Sit, girl. You're shaking something awful; you've had a bad shock.\"\n\n\"I'm \u2026 no \u2026 n-n-nooo \u2026\"\n\nAuli felt the Master's arms gently surround her. He held her tightly against his lean, hard-muscled chest as tearless sobs tore out of her throat. Someone took away the book, commenting that it had protected her life. A short sword stood embedded in its hard leather cover. Poisoned, undoubtedly. She felt so cold. Would she ever be warm again?\n\n\"Draconihilist,\" spat another man \u2013 Master Yiiba. \"Here's the double-pointed talon tattooed on his thigh. Dramagon's Talon.\"\n\n\"Assessment?\" asked Jo'el.\n\nYiiba said, \"Embedded for upward of four years, Master. Saw a girl from Gi'ishior here and took his chance. Possibly activated by some recent, secret missive.\"\n\nThe world seemed to be fading in and out around her, seething with malice. Auli swallowed back vomit. She could not think. Could not process this \u2026 misdeed. This wanton waste of life. Even those hatchlings had not been trying to rid the world of a Human girl. Theirs had been foolishness. Here was a calculated attack, a talon aimed directly at her jugular.\n\nThe dragonet! \"Mystery? Where's Mystery?\" Auli cried. \"Is he alright?\"\n\n\"I \u2013 well, will you look at that?\" someone blurted out; a young monk by the sound of his just-breaking adolescent voice. \"He's untouched, but \u2026 not breathing. He died?\"\n\nAuli wailed, \"No! He can't be!\"\n\n\"Rallon, examine the dragonet, would you?\" said Master Jo'el.\n\n\"No injuries, Master.\"\n\n\"Here, allow me.\" This voice, Auli did not know. Yet he had the assured manner of a medical professional. \"Poor little fellow,\" he said at last, so regretfully that she thought for a furious second he was feigning grief. \"I'm fairly certain this is sanguisaku-mortha'a.\"\n\n\"What?\" Auli gasped.\n\n\"A fire-centred blood cancer,\" explained the monk. \"It's a degenerative disease that unfortunately, in the Dragonkind, is untreatable. It ate away at the walls of his hearts and major arteries until \u2013 well, I suspect the stress ripped his \u2026 aye. I'm very sorry, girl. Don't be distraught. He was only a dragonet.\"\n\nHollowly, she said, \"Mystery flew in here and knocked me over, just before \u2013 oh Master, is there no hope?\"\n\nThe monk placed a hand upon her shoulder. \"Any impact might have done the damage. This brave dragonet saved your life, but now his fires have flown.\"\n\nThat was when the darkness roared up, and claimed Auli for its own."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Thought as in Deed",
                "text": "\u2002I became obsessed with the workings \u2013 or lack thereof \u2013 of Human and Dragonish minds. Despite their vastly differentiated physiologies, there appear to be distinct similarities of both function and dysfunction which intrigue the naturalist and the existentialist philosopher alike. Briefly stated, academic debate rages over how strongly, if at all, the mind or soul is rooted in a creature's physical substance and therefore what strictures the physical fundament, chemical makeup, the pathways of mental process, and so forth, exert upon the brain.\n\n\u2002My memory was functional. Only, some fey stimulus exerted by my presence seemed to render the memory recall process of almost every creature around me, utterly dysfunctional. Dramagon's lore calls this type of influence, 'a tainted aura.' I cannot describe the bitter root of despair the discovery of this reference planted within my heart. Bitterly did I grieve my curse. -Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Personal Diary, Leaf 457\n\nThe Leader of the dragonet warrens came to take Mystery away. To her great surprise, this female, the largest dragonet of her warren at some four feet in wingspan, spoke simplified but intelligible Dragonish. There! Dragonets could speak. Then why had Mystery never spoken properly? Did dragonets develop this faculty later on, or according to the 'higher' colours such as Blues or Greys, or was speech a rarity amongst their kind? Why was lore about the dragonet-kind so very scant? How did they live? Or organise themselves in apparently highly complex, stratified societies?\n\nQuietly, she told the dragonets what little she knew about him, about Mystery's spirit, curiosity, mischief-making and extraordinary courage.\n\nNow was not the hour for academic inquiry.\n\nMaster Chamzu's Dragonship arrived that same afternoon to whisk a disconsolate passenger over to Ya'arriol Island, together with a load of special spices and essences she had learned were prepared at the monastery, secretly, and then routed through merchants on Ya'arriol. Even a monastery had its costs, she supposed, and she was glad to cover their charges. No quibbles.\n\nThere, while Mistress Yualiana entertained a midwife in her kitchen, Auli judiciously performed a highly illegal act with her private records in the bedroom, and had Master Ga'athar return the tightly-furled bundle of scrolleaf before anyone became suspicious.\n\nStage two accomplished.\n\nStage three involved another visit to the Records House and eight distinct modifications to records \u2013 the genealogy book, of course, where Ga'athar had identified an Isles maiden who had sadly passed away a year before to be the purported mother. This tallied with the counterfeit monastery record, a fake shipping manifest that noted 'precious, unspecified' cargo, a registration for future schooling, and a few selected inserts into the Island's medical chronology which corresponded with a contained plague of fire fever two years before, and so the deceptions sprawled. Ga'athar had even prepared a named, wood-carved toy to be conveniently 'lost' if the need ever arose.\n\nA spider's web of lies.\n\nAuli could not stop flinching at every sound around her as she worked. How far would the plot have spread? Could Razzior or Ra'aba have been behind the attempt on her life? Could she expect another dagger to slip between her ribs at the earliest opportunity, or had the treacherous monk been acting in isolation?\n\nShe wished she could have taken her father's advice.\n\nIt seemed an eight year-old's feet trod the path back to Master Ga'athar's house. Would a stone not ping off her head any second? A child not catcall or trip her up?\n\nNot worrying to knock, Auli walked straight into Mistress Yualiana's kitchen.\n\n\"Ah, young lady, are you lost?\"\n\nAuli opened her mouth to respond, when she heard another, much less-loved voice hiss, \"How dare you walk in unannounced? Isles maid or none \u2013 holy Fra'anior, what's the matter with your face?\"\n\n\"Mistress Sairana! Mistress Yualiana \u2026\"\n\nSairana sneered, \"You seem to know us. We don't know you. Well, don't just stand there shaking like a reed, girl! Have you lost your tongue as well as your looks?\" She cackled unpleasantly, \"Have you? Nasty accident, I'll warrant.\"\n\nFor a terrible second, Auli felt as if she had fallen into the caldera. Heat seared her cheeks while thunder crashed inside her head. She thought she would combust from shame. All that she had ever endured at this woman's hand echoed in her memory, the shame and humiliation and bullying. That was all Mistress Sairana knew. She had not changed one iota.\n\nThen, vicious words flared. \"Why does your husband fear boulders raining from the sky, Mistress?\"\n\n\"Well, he \u2013\"\n\n\"Who fetches the water these days? Not that little blind girl you once fostered?\"\n\n\"Now, see here! Who do you think \u2013\"\n\n\"I can't.\" Auli's rage was such a vicious, twisted thing, it frightened even her. \"You're the one who's blind, Sairana, if you can't see how pustulent and revolting a slug-heart writhes inside of that chest of yours. You all forget me! You forget who I am!\"\n\nAt last, she had silenced the woman, and Auli wanted to weep.\n\nUgliness took many forms.\n\nFleeing that kitchen where she had received so much love and returned an appalling measure of bitterness, Auli-Ambar absconded into the gathering evening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 93",
                "text": "An hour later, a blind girl stood on the edge of the abyss, empty. Aye, she was thrilled and terrified in equal measure. She had never walked to this side of the Island. She had little idea of the way back. The sheer cliffs were said to be four miles tall \u2013 over a league \u2013 all around Ya'arriol Island. Perhaps only fools stood atop this promontory, fools blind to the abyss toward which the warm, capricious breeze buffeted her person? No mind. Her imagination supplied detail enough.\n\nThe last suns-light of evening penetrated her face mask and warmed her lips, which she had dared to keep uncovered this day. Perhaps a boy might notice. Perhaps he might like what he saw.\n\nPerhaps Sairana might remind her how deformed her jaw still was.\n\nShe hated herself. She hated that screeching, embittered girl in the kitchen. Sazutharr would have talon tapped her upon the shoulder and said, \"Try to do better, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\nSuddenly, trembling violently, she raised her hands and tore the mask from her face. Tore it! The bands behind her head snapped with a recoil that stung the tip of her left ear as if a cunning wasp had taken his best shot. Auli stared at the suns. Right at them. They were out there, millions of leagues distant across an Island-World and Cloudlands and a legendary Rim-Wall and through the towering atmosphere into the unknowable reaches of darkest space, but they appeared like shining round ingots to her eyes. Like the twin fire orbs of a Dragon as magnificent as Fra'anior himself.\n\nAuli could not have said what quality it was of the evening that allowed her this instant's clear sight. How her gaze must have been refracted along atmospheric layers, or the evening must have been extraordinarily clear, here tucked away from the constant gaseous output of the main caldera; she could not think or process this vision save that she knew she saw the twin suns cut through their lower third by jagged teeth. Teeth!\n\nHer teeth chattered. \"No, Auli. Mountains. Those \u2026 are \u2026\"\n\nShe collapsed to her knees. Felt the rock crumble at the shock. Auli slid forward soundlessly, too stunned even to scream. She flung out her hands, trying to find a grip but finding only grit upon rock, which caused her fingers to skid \u2026\n\nSomething plucked her tunic, and held her fast. A hand! \"Oh, Master Ga'athar \u2013\"\n\n*Mrrr?*\n\nA massive purring against the small of her back informed Auli-Ambar that she was wrong. Very wrong indeed. Rajal! With an abrupt jerk of its thick neck, strangling the scream rising in her throat, the feline swung her off her feet and padded off with her swinging from its jaw \u2026 well, like a cub! At least, she had read about the huge cats doing this with their young. She dangled like a sack of mohili flour from its powerful jaws. Was she about to make a rajal family a nice dinner? Hopefully a stringy, tasteless, decidedly unwilling dinner!\n\nWhat followed was one of the most peculiar episodes in Auli's life. The feline carried her along for a few hundred feet, away from the cliff, before depositing her in a heap on a tufty patch of grass. Then, before she could consider getting her feet beneath her and bolting for the proverbial hearth and home, the cat proceeded to clean her with its warm tongue \u2013 thoroughly and raspingly! Her hair came in for a firm 'brushing'. Her face was abraded six different ways and then her arms suffered more of the same. Zimtyna often extolled the benefits of exfoliation for skin issues that Auli was convinced were nine-tenths imaginary and one-tenth real. This was worse. It was a like having a rasp-cross-lash applied to her sensitive skin.\n\nShe tried not to yelp. She tried not to make any sudden movements at all, not even when she heard feet on the path. Men? Hunters? Master Ga'athar?\n\nThe rajal growled deep in its chest.\n\nIt darted away.\n\n\"Don't shoot!\" Auli yelled. \"It's \u2026 uh, friendly.\"\n\nApart from making her bleed in twenty places, friendly. Moments later, she found herself surrounded by a group of laughing, exclaiming, celebrating women and girls.\n\n\"Oh, we were so worried about you. It's Auli, right? Mistress Yualiana sent us all over the Isle in search of you.\"\n\n\"When we saw you here being licked to death \u2026\"\n\n\"Terrified out of my wits, thank you kindly,\" Auli snorted.\n\n\"Slurp slurp \u2026 slllurrrrrppp!\"\n\n\"Ooh, that must have tickled! Well \u2013 maybe a bit sore. Skin looks suns-burned.\"\n\nSomeone prodded Auli in the ribs. \"You were so brave, sitting there being licked by the biggest rajal any of us ever saw.\"\n\n\"Truth be told, it pulled me off the cliff,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Oh! Well, give the girl some space,\" said Mistress Yualiana, taking charge of a situation in which Auli increasingly felt like the proverbial purple rajal. All this unwanted attention. \"Four limbs accounted for, Auli-Ambar? Very good. That must have been the legendary Ma'armza. Isn't she supposed to have saved a baby from a feral male rajal?\"\n\nThe women and girls generally agreed that this was the story.\n\nEventually, through the laughter and teasing, Auli spluttered, \"So you weren't going to shoot it? Legendary rajal and all that? You knew it wasn't going to eat me?\"\n\nYualiana said, \"Oh no, pollen-fluff. That story's just a legend.\"\n\n\"Just a \u2026 Yualiana!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 94",
                "text": "Back home at her chambers in the Halls of the Dragons, Zimtyna said, \"Wow, Auli, did a beauty treatment go wrong there?\"\n\n*Gnarr.*\n\n\"I see. Well, I'll do my laughing in private later. Salve?\"\n\n\"Bah. When's Bazukior kidnapping you?\"\n\n\"Not soon enough.\"\n\nMaster Chamzu, who was apparently just passing by in the corridor, growled, \"Over my burning body, he isn't!\"\n\nLater that evening, after a tasty dinner taken with Master Chamzu and Zimtyna, Auli donned her light hooded cloak against an unseasonal chill in the air \u2013 Yualiana would have blamed the lack of meat on her bones for providing poor insulation \u2013 and trotted down to the infirmary levels to find Arkurion. He was in good spirits, already champing at boulders to be back on his paws again. Dragons healed at a fantastic rate.\n\nNaturally, Mister Mercury was nose-deep in a tome, and even sounded slightly grumpy to be disturbed. This irked Auli like a hive of hornets pelted with stones.\n\n\"What are we studying?\" she inquired, in a tone like the unpleasant end of said hornet.\n\n\"Kindly remove the paws from yon rare volume,\" bristled the Dragon, puffing warm air at her. It smelled like vanilla pods and a rich, almost overpowering essence of cream climbing rose mingled with tangy fireflower. \"Where've you been \u2013 skiver?\"\n\nWow. Fighting talk. \"Busier than some layabout I know.\"\n\n\"Enforced.\"\n\n\"Working girl.\"\n\n\"Fiery brain matter fully operational.\"\n\n\"While I, of course, was swanning about the Isles giddily singing love arias to the dragonets,\" Auli averred airily. \"Any progress on that conundrum I sent you?\"\n\n\"Of course. I am the brains in this partnership, of course.\"\n\n\"I see. Shall I summon a trumpet fanfare for His Lofty Highness, Lord of Tanstoy, or shall I just let you tootle your own praises until I fall asleep upon this rare \u2026 hmm. Interesting. What does harmonic balance have to do with anything?\"\n\n\"Attend, my lowly student,\" the Dragon pontificated. \"The three pillars of complex magical constructs are?\"\n\n\"Detail, symmetry and power,\" said Auli, haughtily.\n\n\"That is the common view, which is accurate but also woefully insufficient, Achikizzi the Silver Blue argues here in his seminal tome, By Mystery, By Magic Astonish\u00e9d, page \u2013\"\n\n\"Astonish\u00e9d? He's not content to be merely astonished?\"\n\n\"He is Dragonkind,\" Arkurion riposted with the air of a reptilian leviathan dissecting flies with his razor-sharp talons, \"which should make the matter perfectly lucid to any life-form of equal or greater intelligence than the common lichen. Harmonic balance is a fascinating concept. Achikizzi spends seven chapters explaining that the Lesser Dragons actually have no idea whence it arose or why it works the way it does. Since the idea made him so deeply uncomfortable \u2013 seven chapters, mostly caveats. Moving on to the actual substance of his argument \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion? I probably need to read it for myself. Lichen head, apparently.\"\n\n\"A talon-swift summary?\"\n\n\"Aye \u2026\"\n\n\"Go sing up your scrolls in the Library.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\nThe Dragon purred, \"Shall I spell it for you? Go \u2013 sing \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion! What does that have to do with harmonic imbalance? I mean \u2013 you're a really, really, really annoying beast, do you know that?\"\n\n\"Walk with me,\" he chortled, \"and I shall attempt to scrape a few lichens off of your understanding.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 95",
                "text": "Arkurion, being recovered enough to walk, albeit rather gingerly, accompanied Auli down to the Dragon Library. En route, he explained how he theorised that Zanthrillior's magic had been able to act upon hers by a special property of matter noted but never fully explained in the most ancient of draconic lore called 'atomic resonance', and indeed, that all matter as she knew it was not actually solid, but was comprised of waveforms which resonated so very rapidly that matter acted as if it were solid. Ergo, by discovering the right resonance or harmonic properties of what she sought, she could detect it.\n\nThis was the essence of a theory which Achikizzi had applied to complex magical constructs with dazzling results. Auli was unconvinced.\n\n\"Umm \u2026\" she mumbled at this point, having visions of Dragons swimming through Islands.\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" snorted the Mercury Blue. \"To you and I, rock is rock. Almost as impervious as your cranium.\"\n\n\"Oh, haaaa \u2026 haaaa.\" She turned the sound into a mournful groan.\n\nFor the first time, as she activated the wards protecting the doubly-forbidden Library section, Auli-Ambar realised she would be making the descent with Arkurion. How odd. In all their hours of co-working, they had never entered these caverns together?\n\nA date for scrollworms.\n\nMuch nicer if he had been the impeccably mannered Prince Hiccoughs, of course. A blind girl could pretend \u2013 pretend not to hear the monstrous lungs soughing above her left shoulder, or the fires sizzling merrily in a beastly belly?\n\nEnough. Auli said, \"So far, we have successfully cleaned and restored the contents of five caverns. It's the proverbial dragonet's nest of crazy, unbelievable, precious and downright deadly lore. We did reclassify 1,453 scrolls and seventy-nine books, but that's a droplet in this terrace lake. The Apprentices do not much enjoy this work, but having Sazutharr breathe down their necks every so often does appear to encourage the reticent. Furthermore, I took the opportunity of streamlining the storage and indexing protocols in order to improve \u2013\"\n\n<HO HO HO!> he roared.\n\n\"Honestly. Deafen a girl, why don't you?\"\n\nArkurion's wingtip brushed her shoulder. \"You wouldn't be Auli-Ambar otherwise, would you? So, where shall we start?\"\n\n\"My old favourite. Thirteen.\"\n\nSinging here, singing there, Auli sang songs everywhere \u2013 to borrow an ancient children's rhyme. Results were disappointingly absent, despite the treasure trove of simmering lethality that surrounded them. She imagined Fra'anior, inquired of Amaryllion who seemed to be properly asleep or at least absent on this occasion, as he sometimes was, and tried to concoct and vocalise a call to Dramagon's magic. Having scared herself into staggering against Arkurion's flank, Auli still had nothing to show for her efforts.\n\nHe said, \"Perhaps the wrong approach?\"\n\nThey had discussed forty-three different approaches by now, and Auli-Ambar thought she detected pain in his voice. She said, \"Shall we take a break, Arkurion? We've been at it for \u2013\"\n\n<NO!>\n\n\"\u2013 three hours. A wise Dragon rests in order to increase his reputation.\"\n\n\"By my wings, you're right.\" A searing breeze flipped her hair over her shoulder. \"How do you read Dragons so well, Human girl?\"\n\n\"You're just so hot, Arkurion.\"\n\nAuli giggled. She could say that about a Dragon and make perfect sense. About her Prince? Well, it meant something rather different.\n\n\"Huh. And now we're playacting the ingenuous Isles maiden?\"\n\nRather than a smart rejoinder, what popped out of her mouth was, \"More accurately, you're a flaming genius!\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" he agreed with all possible conceit. \"Pray elucidate.\"\n\n\"The key is simplicity. Listen, er \u2026\"\n\nAuli sang:\n\n\u2002Whatever be mine for the day,\n\n\u2002Whatever must be revealed,\n\n\u2002Wilt thou not rise to mine paw,\n\n\u2002Be thou scroll or book or leaf?\n\nHer voice faded into the immensity of cavern five. \"Any \u2026\" Auli's voice cracked. \"This way!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Ouch!\"\n\n\"Walking through the shelving is not recommended,\" snorted the Mercury Blue, catching Auli as she stumbled backward clutching her face. \"Nor is damaging that nose I helped reconstruct for you, quite brilliantly, might I point out?\"\n\n\"Shut the fangs. Concentrating.\"\n\nTo his credit, Arkurion knew her well enough by now not to summarily snap off her insolent head like a Human cracking a nut. Not to say his fires did not surge! A smoking, fulminating beast shadowed her cautious travels around wrecked shelves and heaped-up, fire-singed books, correcting her path here and there or whisking her over particularly large barriers. Auli repeated her song every so often, with increasing confidence, and that eerie echo seemed to grow stronger as they progressed haphazardly through the disaster of cavern five into six, and from there meandered right to the back wall, where her nattily renovated nose came within touching distance of a solid vein of gold gleaming in the igneous rock, Arkurion told her.\n\nAuli explored the vein with her hands. \"Extraordinary.\"\n\n\"So glittery,\" Arkurion crooned.\n\nShe shuddered at the naked avarice revealed in his voice. <Arkurion of Tanstoy, report!> she snapped.\n\n<I \u2026 uh \u2026> he stumbled. Now she had second thoughts about the decorations of her fragrance chambers! Heavens raining fireballs, if other Dragons reacted like this, what further trouble could she instigate? <I decry my dishonourable behaviour, Auli-Ambar. I was caught unawares by the unusual purity of that vein.>\n\n<Unusual purity?>\n\n<Why \u2013 Human girl, you are passing strange. You've arrived at an insight?>\n\nPressing her hands against the smooth, cool vein of metal, Auli sang again, and felt her fingers buzz so sharply, she snatched her hands back. \"Spitting windrocs!\"\n\n\"Now who's the flaming genius?\" Arkurion fluted at once. \"Allow me.\"\n\n\"Gently!\"\n\n\"What, as if I'd damage what you think is cleverly hidden within?\"\n\nA shrill scrape of the talons, and Arkurion was quarrying away like a green-fanged rat sensing edible treats, when Auli reached out and slapped his talon. \"Wait!\"\n\n\"Oh, come \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion, stop!\"\n\nOuch. That raw a shriek could probably be heard seven caverns away. Taking a ragged breath, Auli said, \"Don't touch it with your talons. I have a feeling.\"\n\n\"A feeling?\"\n\n\"Sarcasm not appreciated. Dig around the cylinder and whatever you do, don't touch it. Please. Trust me, Arkurion.\"\n\nAuli could feel the withering glare that burned the top of her head. Then, the scraping sound resumed, but at a far less enthusiastic rate than before. Five minutes later, the Mercury Blue breathed, <What byzantine, freakish Dragon-fire-snuffer of a ward is this, Auli-Ambar? It's \u2026 some kind of lethal \u2026 fire spirit entrapment? What have you found here?>\n\n<Me? I haven't the first clue. But you're right to be concerned. That's one nasty piece of ward work.>\n\nJust then, both Dragon and Human heard a heavy body moving slowly through the next cavern. A voice called, \"Alright there, Human girl?\"\n\nRazzior! Only he could make sound as if 'alright' involved slowly grinding her bones into dust beneath his heel, before he chargrilled any remains at his leisure. How did he remember her so well when no-one else could, save Arkurion? What uncanny skill did they share that denied her disremembrance power? Arkurion called it sheer stubbornness, alias draconic pride. But what of the Orange Dragon? Could his strength boast the simplicity of unadulterated hatred?\n\nWas her power triggered by fear or anger or animosity? The idea was too one-dimensional to hold up to scrutiny.\n\nTo her shock, Arkurion casually slipped the large nugget hiding its scroll-treasure into the deep hood of her cloak. The weight almost yanked her over backward, but Auli managed to stagger into an upright position despite the choking pressure on her neck. Then, judging by the scraping sound, the Mercury Blue palmed a book.\n\nFrom the entrance to the cavern, Razzior purred, \"Ah, if it isn't the weasel from Tanstoy and his paw-licking lackey, Auli Owl-Eyes.\"\n\nHow she shuddered! How had he discovered that detail about her past? Menace and horror pooled like a coiling snake in her stomach. What else did this Dragon know about her?\n\nArkurion said, \"We were just discussing the lore of sanguisaku-mortha'a, o Razzior. Are you familiar with it?\"\n\nThe Human girl came within a rajal's whisker of fainting. How bold, o Mercury Blue?\n\n<What do you know about sanguistarn \u2013> the Orange Dragon hiccoughed slightly, then growled \u2013 <never mind the lore! I came to tell you, Arkurion, that I am not finished with you yet. You are a marked Dragon, youngling. I'd fly a thousand leagues clear of my wingtips, mark my words well!>\n\n<Oh, Razzior,> Arkurion produced a derisive gurgle. <Did Kayturia play you for a null-fires fool?>\n\n*WOOOOORRRMM!!*\n\nRazzior's thunder came accompanied by a surprised cough of pain. Auli refrained from punching the air in joy, so shocked was she at the vindictive pleasure churning in her breast.\n\nWhen the Orange spoke again, his voice burbled as though blood seeped into his throat, but the sound only made his words more terrible. <I swear upon my mother's egg that I will finish the both of you! But my paws shall not sink to dishonour. I am Dragonkind, protector and upholder of our fiery ways! I shall break you slowly, making the ruin of your every labour and your reputation; aye, even your miserable lives, until I suck the flavoursome pith from your bones. And you, o hideously accursed, obnoxious little blind girl, whoring with that Prince just like your ignoble father! Know that we are sworn enemies from this day forth!>\n\n<I didn't \u2026> Heat exploded throughout Auli's being at the accusation; like father, like daughter. Razzior must have read her genealogical record or have knowledge of it.\n\nThe Dragon's appalling laughter overrode her protest with ease. <Anon, little ones. Anon.>\n\nAs Razzior stumped away, limping on three paws by the sounds Auli heard, she slumped against Arkurion's foreleg, and he against the wall. Surprisingly slowly, they sank into a heap beside each other.\n\n<Arkurion \u2026>\n\n<Give me a moment.> The Mercury Blue's breath whistled through his nostrils.\n\n<Arkurion I never \u2026 with the Prince, I mean. I'm a good girl.>\n\nGood? She cringed inwardly.\n\nWarm laughter greeted the hitch in her voice. <Far be it from me to deny you opportunity for romance, Auli-Ambar, but I also fear I know your fires too well. You are more than good. You are noble and upright, yet as astute as any Dragoness. As for me, I am a Dragon who is so dark-fires petrified, his knees almost collapsed in the Orange Dragon's presence.>\n\n\"Oh, Arkurion.\" She patted his flank absently with her left hand. \"He was afraid you'd make grilled ralti steaks out of him this time.\"\n\n\"Chargrilled,\" the Dragon corrected wryly.\n\n\"We should cover up our handiwork \u2013 our pawiwork,\" she laughed. \"New word. I'll pop it in the dictionaries when we get upstairs.\"\n\n\"Oh, now we're just making up Island Standard on the fly?\" he cried, bristling with mock outrage.\n\n\"Loremaster's prerogative. Ready to go?\"\n\nHe rumbled, \"Wait until we hear Razzior head up the lift. Then, I'll need you to fetch Qualiana for me.\" Before she could voice a syllable of protest, he added, \"It's not life-threatening. But I do feel as if something of her repairs have become displaced. My tertiary heat-dissipation liver, most likely.\"\n\n\"Arkurion, she'll roast your liver! Why didn't you say something? Anything?\"\n\n\"Erm \u2026 may I advance a few choice words such as 'masculine', 'unwise' and 'volcano-sized vanity?'\"\n\n\"Dragons! Honestly!\"\n\n\"Aye, you're talking to one, or hadn't you noticed?\"\n\nWhen had their relationship turned from easy-going to mock-biting closeness, Auli wondered with a sense of growing alarm? Nonetheless, she riposted, \"Aye, one who just effectively classified himself amongst the most rudimentary life-forms of this Island.\"\n\n\"Mine Dragonly pride doth protest!\" he growled, curving his surprisingly flexible neck upon itself until Auli found herself surrounded. <Whaa \u2026> \"Sit still, little snack! And quiver with fear at the advent of the omnipotent Dragon!\"\n\nAuli giggled, \"What you are, is a prodigious pirate petal.\"\n\n\"Tell me, little flame, how exactly did you know that the scroll was lethal?\" Pensive. Irked. Admiring. So many emotions communicated by a Dragon's words. \"It's embedded in solid gold. Little of magic seeps through the heavier metals \u2013 gold, antimony, platinum and so on. I would have dug it out quite happily and, it seems, instantly perished with that very happy feeling warming my third heart.\"\n\n\"I had a feeling.\"\n\n\"Dangerous affairs, feelings.\"\n\nEntirely too close to the Isle of Truth! Auli scrambled to her feet, intending to berate the Dragon, and promptly fell over backward as the nugget in her hood made its heft felt. \"Urk!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 96",
                "text": "For the twenty-three days it took before the Queen's visit to Gi'ishior was approved, Auli, Arkurion and Amaryllion fought with that narrow tube she had extracted from a large lump of pure gold, which now occupied a lidded rush basket beneath her bed with the ingot \u2013 her private hoard, Auli chuckled \u2013 and failed to make any progress at all. Arkurion fulminated. Auli developed daily migraines. Amaryllion stormed off in dozens of fascinating directions, figuratively, but even his vast knowledge seemed stumped on this key subject; that brand of lore kept nearest and dearest to the breast of Dramagon and his many sycophants.\n\nAuli did progress with His Highness, minus girlfriend whose family apparently had different ideas about a potentially toxic romance with an out-of-favour branch of royalty. Her scroll of remembrance worked for once and Prince Hi'ixion picked up where they had left off a year before. 'Magic, magic in my scroll, make my Prince swoon and \u2026' What? Lose his soul? Auli blenched. How could she ever be sure someone would fall rainbows over Islands for her if she manipulated them into love?\n\nImmense, Island-shaking, hopelessly tainted power. She could not do it.\n\nWeeping would avail her nothing.\n\nThat final evening of her monthly visit to the Palace, when the night birds sang and the dragonets chirruped peaceably in the foliage outside her window, reminding her painfully of Mystery, Auli played her Dragonharp until her fingers ached. Melancholy ballads. Lays. Songs of lost love. She meditated upon the problem of Hualiama. When it came time to launch her Dragonship into the Island-World, how could they possibly make that transition from Gi'ishior to the Palace? The Queen's vessel would be subject to the utmost scrutiny. Should a Dragon make the transfer? Or Auli herself? How could she hide an active, very vocal little girl from discovery? She travelled home with the weight of Islands crushing her heart. Fail, and Ianthine predicted the fate of all Dragons would be sealed.\n\nBack in the Halls, from three corridors away, she heard Master Chamzu having a stand-up argument with none other than her father! The Auli of old might have slunk into her room and hidden under her pillow roll. This Auli stormed inside, only to run straight into Si'ishi's outstretched arm.\n\n\"Auli,\" Xa'an coughed in surprise.\n\nSi'ishi said, \"Now, young lady, let's not get ourselves riled.\"\n\n\"See this sweetbread?\" Auli grunted. Swinging aside from Si'ishi's playfully grappling arms, she hurled it at where she thought her father was.\n\n*Ting! Clonk.* Master Chamzu spluttered, \"Bread?\"\n\nAs it turned out, comedy was not an awful way to break up an argument. Apparently Auli's throw had pinged off a priceless antique Renidian Oblique Vase, which her father stooped to catch before the unthinkable happened, and the crust ricocheted off his body armour to smack Chamzu in the neck.\n\nProbably the first time in her life she had hit anything with a throw.\n\nWrestling Si'ishi into something approaching an arm-lock, which the martial artist could probably have escaped from in half a second, Auli said brightly, \"Master Chamzu, whilst I have this vicious fiend subdued, won't you do me a favour and invite her to dinner?\"\n\n\"Eh?\" spluttered the Master.\n\n\"Master, before this despicable bandit effects her escape!\"\n\n\"Ban \u2026 oh, what?\" said Chamzu, apparently having trouble un-steaming after his argument, before growing steamed for a wholly different reason. \"Well, I \u2026 well! Auli \u2013 what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Auli!\" growled Si'ishi.\n\nHer heart lolloped along in her chest, but Auli was bent upon her course now. Feral Dragons could not have wrestled her away from this stewpot of mischief she had so long contemplated brewing. There were enough sparks flying in the Master's chambers to assure her that her intuition had been perfectly on target.\n\nShe drawled, \"It's just an invite \u2026\"\n\n\"Auli!\" All three adults cried out at once.\n\nAuli made a peaceable hand gesture. \"What are you all thinking? I just want to sit with my Dad. That leaves you, Master Chamzu \u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013 to fight my own battles, thank you kindly!\"\n\n\"Well, suit yourself, Master. But I assure you, this one's actually quite agreeable if you'd just consider speaking to her yourself.\"\n\nApparently, protocol did not permit a man of Chamzu's rank to casually dine with a woman of Si'ishi's age, profession or station, or \u2026 well, she did not understand the muddled explanation advanced by her father, who threatened to haul her off by her pointy ears and knock some Isles sense into his daughter with a Sylakian war-hammer. How did that square with her seeing a Prince? Different. Royalty had rules all of their own. Or Zimtyna, who was off visiting Bazukior's family for suspiciously unspecified reasons? Different again. Auli-Ambar was a meddler, a tyrant, a purveyor of shame and dishonour.\n\nShe refrained from suggesting her father find a few even juicier adjectives, nodded dutifully, and kicked any thought of regret into the caldera. Ha!\n\nSit adults together over a tasty meal brought up from the kitchens, and they could apparently discuss security arrangements without need to tear each other's throats out. Auli wished she could play hostess, but having to feel her way about each plate of tasty, spicy nibbles \u2013 delicate buttered rainbow trout from Gemalka, spice pods and piquant landas gourds, a course of mixed exotic fruits sourced from as far afield as the Crescent Isles, a selection of crackers and nutty breads, and the inevitable twenty varieties of local berries \u2013 would likely be frowned upon. She poured the vanilla-infused minziberry wine instead, and even tried a sip herself to her father's horror, but set her crystal goblet aside discreetly. Had the alcohol just made her tongue go completely numb? There was nothing else amiss with the meal, surely?\n\nMemories of a poisoned repast. She felt queasy.\n\nStill, from Auli's perspective the evening was a roaring success. Her father and Chamzu agreed on all matters security. Xa'an kicked her beneath the table no less than six times \u2013 perhaps she might have been accused of a few arch inflections of speech here and there \u2013 the good Master acted as skittishly as a feline hopping across a lava flow around Si'ishi, whilst the young Royal Elite twice fumbled food onto her lap and seemed unaccountably bashful withal.\n\nPerfect.\n\nAfterward back in Auli's chamber, Si'ishi bent her ear at considerable length.\n\nExcellent result!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 97",
                "text": "Later again, at an hour most scrollworms regarded as their own, Auli gnashed her teeth over the mysterious scroll for far longer than was sensible, before giving up with a sigh.\n\n<Amaryllion, are you there?>\n\n<It is not right that I should fail at this task, little mouse!> the Ancient Dragon snarled by way of greeting, making her startle crossly. <Whosoever possessed the cunning to construct such a knotty thornbush of a magical conundrum, must have possessed the seven brains of Fra'anior himself. All at once!>\n\nEven a millennia-old leviathan grew tetchy.\n\nAuli touched the scroll case with a delicate fingertip. This much was not dangerous. The magic that concealed its contents was a shifting nightmare, like an ever-changing cocktail of lethality. Dazzling. Deathly. She did not understand one-tenth of the lore that made these constructs work.\n\n<Perhaps it was Fra'anior himself, mighty Amaryllion?>\n\nShe had the impression the Ancient Dragon shook his head. <Not his signature, little mouse. Every utterance of magic communicates a subtle signature of its creator, which is manifest to one who knows how to look for it but does fade over time. I have this aptitude, but this \u2013 I can only imagine that its designer deliberately added obfuscatory elements in order to deceive upon examination, employing a mutable multiphasic approach I can only liken to, forgive the allusion, light rippling through clear terrace lake water.>\n\n<Light?>\n\n<Aye, I believe you now know something of light, as you shared with me previously.>\n\nShe appreciated his apologetic approach to what he knew to be a sensitive subject. Still, his words seemed to trigger her thoughts into rippling outward, like dreams yearning to fly to the stars. <Faraway light \u2026>\n\n<Little mouse, have you fallen asleep over there?>\n\nThe dream coalesced. At once, Auli yelped, <Istariela!>\n\nThe scroll spat like an angry feline against her fingertips. <Yeow!> Her instinctive flinch flung it across the bedchamber. Amaryllion was roaring at her so powerfully that Auli feared he would wake the entire Halls. Or was that a tremor? They were as common as pollen around this monstrous caldera. When she flashed back at him that she was fine, and unhurt, the Dragon's storm of concern subsided. Auli crawled about for a couple of minutes searching for the small metallic tube, some nine inches long by one in diameter, and found it had rolled into her compact bath chamber.\n\n<I was surprised, that's all,> she told him. Picking up the cool metal cylinder, she took a deep breath. On second thoughts, another breath, until her ribcage creaked. <Istariela, the Star Dragoness.>\n\nNothing.\n\n<Uh, Istariela the White Dragoness? Istariela of starlight? Istariela star-born?>\n\nAmaryllion said, <Fra'anior called her his Flower of Light.>\n\n<Oh! That's beautiful!>\n\n<Romantic he was, mine shell-brother,> Amaryllion said sadly. <Much of his creation was regarded as whimsical by his detractors, Dramagon and Numistar and Westurdion, frivolous embellishments serving no purpose but to beautify what they wished were more functional, sturdy and timeless structures. But that is how Fra'anior purposed our Island-World.>\n\n<Beauty is for the sighted,> Auli said bitterly.\n\n<Oh, little mouse \u2026>\n\n<I know. I'm sorry, Amaryllion, you didn't deserve that.> She paused, struck by an idea. Turning over the scroll, she breathed upon it \u2013 no idea why, but the face veil fluttered about her lips as she exhaled \u2013 and she said, <Istariela, Flower of Light.>\n\nNo, but she was so close! Heart thudding inside her throat like a crazed carpenter flailing at nails. What could it be?\n\nAuli whispered, <Istariela, Flower of Light, beloved breath of Fra'anior's fire-soul.>\n\nWith a sharp click, the scroll case fell apart into two halves. It contained absolutely nothing.\n\n\"What the \u2013\" Auli explored the shells with her fingers. Oh! There was something etched inside, a map inside one half by the sense of it, and instructions within the opposing shell. Only, this was no inked scroll. She could barely differentiate the engravings from the surrounding metal, and Auli realised that the 'scroll' might have been purposed to be read only by the naked eye \u2026 and the pieces were growing hotter. Blisteringly hot!\n\n<No, no, no \u2026 Amaryllion, help me! It's etchings inside the container, nothing more \u2013>\n\n<Your gold!> he shouted. <Hammer it into the shells!>\n\nShe scrabbled beneath the bed Grabbing the basket, she fished out several nuggets of gold. Back to the scroll case! Auli snatched up one fragment and howled as it seared her palm. Then, she gasped in realisation. The indentations came through to the outside! Why had she not noticed before? Had the innate magic triggered the etching of its message into the metal, to be read in the brief moment of time before it melted into nothingness?\n\nSnatching up a half-cylinder in each hand, Auli rolled them quickly across the open pages of her personal diary, before making another attempt at reading one half. Insurance. A picture for the mind, at least, a map that she recognised as being located somewhere within the Halls. The stage of the Concert Cavern! Bursting with excitement despite her pain, Auli tried to check the other fragment, but it was already a twisted, molten mess smouldering through her rug! Acrid smoke! Now the other was ruined too, scorching her fingertips before she even touched it.\n\nNo! A rising shriek burst from those half-cylinders, a terrible dissonance that cut through any rational thought save, 'Danger!' Heaping up the whole mess with a convulsive sweep of her arms, Auli heaved it into her bath chamber. Thankfully, she did not miss.\n\nThe Ancient Dragon roared, <DOOR \u2013>\n\nLunge. *Bang!*\n\n*BOOM!!*"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 98",
                "text": "Not for the first time in her life, Auli found herself lying in the infirmary with a sore head, a rather sketchy memory of how she had come to be there, and a Dragon telling her off at a volume that only exacerbated the throbbing between her temples.\n\n<Uhh \u2026 tone it down, will you?>\n\nThe voice gained volume and ire. <I am whispering! Well, I was. Report.>\n\nAuli groaned, <Amaryllion? Uh \u2026 what hit me?>\n\n<Half of a wall plus your dresser, according to Arkurion,> snorted the Ancient Dragon. <Rather failed to reassure me in the slightest. Apparently your diary survived the experience better than you did. Master Chamzu has it safely stowed away, unread, and you \u2013 WHATEVER WERE YOU THINKING?>\n\n<Oooh, I'm going to \u2013> Auli's stomach made a leap for freedom.\n\nHmm. She felt better after depositing its contents over the edge of her bed. Strangely, no creature stirred in the infirmary. Was no-one looking after her? Lying back gingerly on her pillow roll, she collected her thoughts.\n\n<Arkurion \u2013>\n\n<Amaryllion. There's a difference, little mouse.> Now he was laughing a discomfited hiccough of laughter. Her head hurt abominably. <What did you discover?>\n\n<A map. A portal, I think, marking a route between here and another library.>\n\n<Oh?>\n\n<A library called 'The Sacred Library.'> The Ancient Dragon went very silent indeed at this information, but Auli had never been more aware of the immediacy of his presence in her mind. He was agog! <It's a type of link I can't really explain, like a magical energy transfer between two places. I'd say a cousin to teleportation.> Skirting a disproven branch of draconic lore \u2026 <And its contents are strictly protected by timeless beings called the Guardian Spirits, which I can only imagine are the elemental fire spirits of Dragons. Do you know this Sacred Library, Amaryllion?>\n\n<I know of its probable existence,> he said carefully. <Was a location noted?>\n\n<Aye, but I've no idea why access is initiated from here, within these Halls.>\n\n<Well?>\n\nAuli said, <Sorry, I was jumping ahead to speculation. Brief though it was, the message clearly stated that there's a library located somewhere beneath Holy Ha'athior, and it contains much priceless lore of the Ancient Dragons. Your kind, Amaryllion. It must be a very wonderful library indeed \u2013 what?>\n\nDistractedly, he said, <But surely, I would have detected it aeons before! Unless it is protected by horiatite or meriatonium strata. Large deposits of horiatite are able to shield magic passing well, Auli-Ambar, but such a wealth of magical lore as would be contained in a Sacred Library \u2013 I would know!>\n\nAuli froze.\n\nSomething Sapphurion had said. Something Amaryllion's slightly careless rambling had just betrayed, by the merest suggestion of nuance.\n\nShe said softly, <Thou art the Onyx of Ha'athior. Thou, Amaryllion.>\n\nBeing Dragonkind, the belief-insight-conviction indicators of her Dragonish did not pass him by. For a breathless eternity, Amaryllion's presence seemed to wax terribly, like a mountain's weight pressing down upon her mind as he reacted to his secret having been breached. At once, the barriers slammed up; Auli fought them with all of her waning strength, but the overshadowing power of her protective wards surged against the Ancient Dragon with at least equal strength, if not more. She wondered dizzily if she responded to threats \u2013 the greater the threat or fear, the greater the response, as if these intrinsic and extrinsic forces nourished her ill-starred magic?\n\nQuick. She must speak. Mentally, Auli gritted out, <Art thou near, o noble Dragon, last of thy kind?> There. Did that not grant him one last opportunity to dissemble?\n\nHe sighed hugely. <Very near, Auli-Ambar. I rest beneath Ha'athior, but this is a great sec \u2013>\n\nShe faded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragnet",
                "text": "Queen Shyana arrived with neither pomp nor ceremony late one hot season afternoon, when even the insects had given up their buzzing and the birds their chirruping, and Dragons and Humans alike either lazed in the sun or rested in their chambers. It was such a day. A stifling heat smouldered over the caldera as if, superstitious Islanders might opine, Fra'anior had cupped his paws over the Isles to create a living, breathing oven. An unobservant onlooker might have been forgiven for imagining that the denizens of Gi'ishior slept.\n\nNot so. Normal routine was subtly different. Closer examination might have noted many, many Fra'aniorian Royal Elites lurking in corridors, or the compactness of the group that moved stealthily past Auli as she reviewed a cargo manifest with the Steersman with one hand, whilst fanning herself with a reed fan. Hand fans were the latest rage, imported from the artisans of Rolodia, and all the royals had their special designs and outfits co-ordinated with their fans, to Zimtyna's great excitement. This one was a gift from Shyana herself. Auli's quick ear detected the lighter dance step of the Queen amidst the heavier, military-measured beat of her posse.\n\nLet the plot simmer. Just like the afternoon.\n\nAuli said, \"Fifty bales of premium grade duck down from Archion, seventy sackweight of nardis-nardis, and twenty sackweight of Kaolili glitter powder each in the colours of aquamarine, jade, gold and carmine?\"\n\n\"Aye, lady,\" the Steersman said gruffly, not sparing the amazement.\n\n\"The feldspar and platinum crystals?\"\n\n\"Weighed a ton, noble \u2026 ah, Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish. Lady.\"\n\nHmm. He must have been briefed. Auli brushed the scroll with her fingertips. \"We're short fifty Dragon-sized paw towels?\"\n\n\"Weight problem. The merchant almost popped his eyeballs at the size and quantity of your order, ma'am, but he asked me to express his deepest appreciation. He subtracted seventeen percent off the final price as a token of his gratitude.\"\n\nAs his paw on the future purse-strings, Auli chuckled to herself. Transparent. \"When will they arrive, Master Steersman?\"\n\n\"On the next available Dragonship. His word of promise.\"\n\n\"Good. Everything appears to be in order.\"\n\nThe opening of the fragrance baths could proceed on schedule. Auli did like to run a tight Dragonship, but this project had been an absolute beast to keep on track.\n\nShe knew an even bigger beast, the Onyx of Ha'athior! No wonder the jolly Island was holy ground. Any Human who dared set foot there \u2026 she shivered lightly. Toast, Dragon style. That barely described the mayhem that would follow. She was surprised Master Jo'el was allowed to live within spitting distance of the Island massif, but she supposed that narrow chasm between Ha'athior and its tiny offspring cone meant everything to a strictly rule-abiding Dragon.\n\n\"Who will sign the manifest, lady?\" he inquired gruffly.\n\n\"I shall sign the initial acceptance upon your good word, and then my Storemaster shall be required to counter-sign it once he's made the final accounting.\"\n\n\"You can write \u2013 ah, no offence meant, lady.\"\n\nSigh. Why did people always think blindness equated to infantile dependence? She wished she could beat that notion out of a few noggins, be they Human or Dragon, with the business end of a thick stick! Arkurion called this her 'fierce drive for independence.' She was convinced the Mercury Blue regularly rolled his fire orbs behind her back \u2013 alright, or right in front of her nose, she would never know the difference.\n\nAuli-Ambar presented her left hand. \"Quill?\"\n\nWith a flourish, she disbursed another eye-popping sum in the best Fra'aniorian gold royals, also known as onyx drals, gold drals \u2026 or even more colloquially as 'the King's marbles,' which she had learned from those loose-lipped sailors. Naughty, naughty!\n\nWhat point, all these Dragons just sitting atop their personal hoards? A few of the youngsters had taken to building hoard-perches within their roosts, a trend she believed was actively encouraged by none other than her old nemesis, Razzior, who seemed to be an increasingly frequent visitor to the forbidden vaults, as Auli had dubbed the secret underbelly of the Dragon Library.\n\nThen, she walked up to her chambers, checking the schedule in her mind. Queen Shyana would shortly meet with Sapphurion and Qualiana, then the full Dragon Council. Then came a tour of the Halls, followed by a meeting with Sazutharr. After that, her programme would alternate periods of study with periods of rest; at an apposite time Xa'an would call Auli to bring Hualiama over. She would do so inside her harp case under the pretext of playing for the Queen, accompanied by a team of Royal Elites to ensure safe arrival of that most precious cargo.\n\nAt her door, Auli paused to sniff the air in surprise. Had something died in the corridor?\n\nNot at her place. Feeling sicker and sicker with anticipation of the unknown, she strode quickly up toward Chamzu's chambers. \"Master \u2026\" No. Reaching out to feel the doorway, Auli's hand touched something soft. *Plop.*\n\nWarm, slimy maggots burst over her feet.\n\n<Yeeeeeeaaaaahh!>\n\nWhen Auli had partway recovered from the shock of losing at least ten years of her life, she had the gruesome task of checking what was left of the present apparently left for Master Chamzu \u2013 a scrap of scrolleaf pinned to the door with a dagger, together with what she took for the rotting remains of a green-fanged rat.\n\nThe note said:\n\n<Shake a tree and monkeys fall out. Shake an Island \u2026>\n\nA threat? How strange. Then, Auli realised what it could mean. Her misaligned jaw's gritting motion sent a jangling shock up the right side of her face.\n\nShe sprinted to find her father."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 100",
                "text": "To Auli's immense annoyance, Xa'an's response was phlegmatic. \"Ah, one a week, my dear pollen-fluff. I shall review our security. Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention.\"\n\nNow she had an intense, un-daughterly urge to slap her father.\n\nAuli sloped off to play with Hualiama. She was so bright. Such a joy. Apparently Grandion's talons were her trapeze today and his flank a fine slide. <Gwandi! Gwandi play!> she cried. <Auli!>\n\n<Hey, scrapling. We're speaking Island Standard, remember?>\n\n*Grr!* Grandion apparently mock-pounced across the room with Hualiama clasped in one paw. The child giggled breathlessly, a wild waterfall of hilarity that always infected anyone in range with smiles or answering chuckles. \"I'm going to eat you up!\"\n\nHualiama cried, \"I'm not scared of you, Gwandi, you big, bad Dwagon.\"\n\nWow! Her Island standard was progressing beautifully. The child had a gift for languages, and the cutest lisp ever. Zimtyna had informed Auli recently that she used to lisp her words, sending Sazutharr into paroxysms of curiosity over the peculiar workings of memory. 'Why did that recollection persist?' the Dragon Librarian had mused. 'I must study this!'\n\n\"Can't catch me,\" goaded the girl.\n\n\"Auli can catch you. I'm bored,\" said Grandion. Apparently, he was already hitting the Dragon equivalent of teenage ennui. He yawned extravagantly as if to underscore his point.\n\n\"Auli no fun.\"\n\n\"What?\" snorted Auli.\n\n\"Gwandi scary-scales. Auli can't see nothing. She can't catch \u2013\"\n\n\"You want to wager a rusty old dral on that?\" Auli mock-roared. \"I can hear you, you chirruping chaffinch, and since your cheek has just transformed me into Auli Blackface, dreadful pirate-Lord of, ah \u2026\"\n\n\"Kaolili,\" Grandion suggested, scratching an itch vigorously with a squeaking sound like a cricket serenading the night, only a hundred times bigger.\n\n\"They don't have pirates, I'm told. Farther South.\"\n\n\"An Eastern giant,\" said the young Dragon.\n\n\"Myth.\"\n\nGrandion shot back, \"That's why you're no fun, Auli-Ambar. Let your \u2013 what's the expression \u2013 let your dress down, for once?\"\n\n\"Grandion!\"\n\nHe purred with glee. \"Talon tapped you there!\"\n\n\"Grandion, that phrase has an entirely different meaning in Human circles, I'll have you know. It's quite \u2026 ribald.\"\n\n\"Something you'd never do with your Prince?\"\n\nWishing her eyes could flash with rage as they were supposed to in the slushiest poetic doggerel, Auli-Ambar marched over to the Dragon and stormed, \"Is that why they call you the Tourmaline Terror? Because your tongue wags like a drunken parakeet?\"\n\n<Ho ho ho,> Grandion laughed in his deepest voice. Then, he said more softly, <Do we have to do this, Auli? Will Hualiama be \u2026 alright? With them?>\n\nAuli's breath snagged in her throat. That was the reason for his discourtesy.\n\n\"Lia fine. Lia play catch Auli,\" chuckled Hualiama, tripping across the roost. She fell, and immediately started wailing.\n\nQualiana shifted from her cushions in an instant. \"Oh, dear petal, look. You've gone and grazed your little knee. Let's go fix it, shall we?\"\n\nAuli heard the Dragoness pick Hualiama up in her forepaw.\n\nGrandion voiced a breathy growl. Jealousy? Dark-fires, for certain. As his shell-mother departed, Auli heard him whisper \u2013 perhaps in a voice never meant to be overheard, but the Human ears that listened were sensitive indeed, <She loves the girl more than she loves me.>\n\nAt the same instant, she recognised the exact tenor of her own jealousy. Hualiama inspired love. She had about her an indefinable quality that drew others close, like the glory of stars in ballads was said to inspire awe and veneration. This little girl would one day be great, Auli apprehended dizzily. Her star would shine brighter and more beautifully than a blind girl could ever imagine; all that was needed was a hand to tenderly set that star upon its course. Would that be her hand?\n\nShe would have loved to shine, too.\n\nYet her own love must be contained. It must be contained and denied and forgotten; her life must be lived in unrelenting darkness. If her gift was but to be guide or shield, may she perform those tasks faithfully, without dark-fires remorse or resentment. For was it not given to some to be higher and some lower, some greater and some lesser, some lives to live long and others to be foreshortened, some to be good and some wicked, and a time and a place accorded for all beings and doings beneath the suns? Who could know the fates that blew as destiny's dust across the caldera this day?\n\nOnly, in the secret places of her soul, Auli knew the truth. <Thou shalt shine,> she said softly. <O Fra'anior, help me set Hualiama upon a course true and right.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 101",
                "text": "Two days passed in quietness, study and diligent work. Auli made final inspections of her Dragon baths, supervised the Apprentices and Researchers working on the restoration of the forbidden lore, and fretted about Hualiama twenty-seven hours a day. Normality.\n\nThe following morning, a soft tap on Auli's door alerted her. \"Father.\"\n\n\"Ready? We're clear. Path's from roost corridor level five quadrant one, correct?\"\n\n\"Correct.\"\n\n\"I make that near Sapphurion's \u2013\"\n\n\"Father, we discussed this. That's where my conveyance is located.\"\n\nDressed as usual for the day, Auli padded soft-slippered along beside her father. If he was surprised at her intimate knowledge of the way, he did not show it. She was learning that glimpses through his professional exterior were few and far between. They must be treasured. Was this merely because he was as serious-minded as his daughter?\n\nAfter precisely nine minutes walking, Auli paused. \"The wards. Men \u2013 and lady \u2013 you will do your checks here.\"\n\nSomeone murmured, \"How does she \u2013\"\n\nXa'an's clothing rustled slightly as he made a hushing gesture.\n\nAuli grinned beneath her face mask. The Fra'aniorian soldiers used magical concealment, but that inevitably manifested to her as a prickling upon the skin. Check the breathing patterns, and she knew Si'ishi was amongst their number.\n\nShe sang through the wards, and made her escape.\n\nAlthough the corridor curved out of their sight behind the Dragon roosts, Auli knew that her father had his suspicions. This location was a deliberate choice \u2013 indeed, one of very few choices. Let the royals deduce the child's importance; the hint already seeded that Hualiama might be the secret offspring of an indiscreet royal, whose identity was veiled by a planted story about a monk. Let them think the Sapphire Elder was exercising his discretion to safeguard any royal blushes, so to speak.\n\nA few moments later, Auli exited the Elder's roost wheeling her harp on a small handcart locally called a tumbrel, since it could usually be mechanically tilted to discharge a heavy load. Inside? One overexcited toddler warded more ways than there were days in a week.\n\nCheckpoint. Her father peeked inside. \"Oh, she's darling. Ready for our little game, pollen-fluff?\"\n\nHualiama must have nodded, for her father carefully replaced the false bottom of the Dragonharp bag, and then laced up the outside.\n\n\"Move out.\"\n\nCue the most nerve-wracking journey of Auli's life. Far worse than when she had first flown to these Halls. Then, she had known so little. Now she knew the stakes, and they were as high as this child's very life.\n\nThe tumbrel rattled along steadily on its padded wooden wheels. Hualiama kept silent. Auli found herself invoking Fra'anior's protection over her little life again and again. Nothing must disturb this journey \u2013 and nothing did.\n\nReaching Shyana's chambers, she slipped in through the heavily guarded service entrance, and then took an action which was the very one Chamzu and Xa'an had been arguing over. Using a small scroll she extracted from her sleeve, she triggered a powerful ward construct over Shyana's chambers. Xa'an had thought the measure extreme and dangerous. Chamzu could not understand why it had been privately specified by Sapphurion, but he was never going to stray from the line drawn by a Dragon's talon.\n\nThen, she unzipped the bag and out popped a little bundle of nerves, namely Hualiama.\n\n\"Oh, she's precious!\" Shyana exclaimed.\n\nHualiama buried her face in Auli's tunic collar. Trembling.\n\n\"There now, won't you say your Islands' greetings? This is Shyana,\" Auli encouraged. \"She's very nice.\"\n\n\"No,\" the little girl muttered, burrowing as if she wished to return to her shell-mother's egg pouch. Her tiny arms squeezed Auli's neck.\n\n\"What beautiful curls you have, Hualiama,\" said the Queen. \"And what's this sweet little dress you're wearing? I brought something for you. Won't you have a peek?\"\n\nAuli said, \"Ooh, a present, Hualiama \u2026\"\n\n\"Can't make me.\"\n\nShyana said, \"Such an unusual name, Auli-Ambar. Did you ever find out where it came from?\"\n\n\"Only the sketchiest reference, my Queen. There's meant to be a mythical star that rises in the East at times of great portent, as recorded in Sakuzaki, Private Memoirs, Page 948. Sakuzaki herself appears to have been a rather mysterious Dragoness most likely originating in the East, for the primary references I could find in her very extensive works indicated a life lived far to the South of the Kingdom of Kaolili, perhaps as far South as Remoy's latitude. Haozi is the closest Isle of note \u2013 and that's a matter of some academic speculation.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"Anyways, I'm sure those details \u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013 are vital to me,\" said the Queen.\n\n\"Oh. Of course, o Queen. Forgive my presumption. Well, Sakuzaki was regarded as a Draco-Mystic similar to our own Ianthine \u2013\" Auli bit her tongue as she realised what shaky ground she trod \" \u2013 the Dragoness who went mad. Anyways, Sakuzaki makes a poetic reference to the 'bluest star of the dawn,' but it's the runic play of the script that hints at her actual meaning. In the original, uncopied version, she slightly refashions the 'blue' rune to say, effectively, 'blu-wa-star,' or in short, Blue-Star. Ah, sorry. I meant to clarify that it's the first two syllables of Hualiama's name where this specific rune play is made in the text. Hoo-ah-lee-yah-ma becomes 'blu-wa-star-ama' \u2026 in so doing, the writer names this special star, Hualiama, Blue-Star.\"\n\nThe Queen chuckled appreciatively. \"Thank you, Venerable Instructor. Most informative.\"\n\nAuli just stood there glowering and blushing.\n\nHualiama chirped, \"Auli funny.\"\n\n\"Auli is categorically awesome,\" said Shyana. \"And funny, too, but in the sweetest way.\"\n\nShe wished she could have dunked her burning head in a bucket of frigid water.\n\nStill, no time could have been as bittersweet nor as beautiful as the hour that she and her little star spent with the Queen of Fra'anior in her chambers that morn. Once Hualiama warmed up to the Queen, she could have charmed the scales off of any Dragon. She was cute, sweet and amusing, and even danced for Shyana, who after the manner of the mushiest ballads, clearly fell in love at first sight and kept tumbling over rainbows after that.\n\nOnly one consolation, Auli thought as she slipped the child back into her hiding place. If she continued to teach the royal brood, Hualiama would be among them. She could watch her grow up. She could still teach her and play with her. Only, she would be forgotten. All that she was, all the love she had lavished upon this life, would be as pollen tossed into a thunderstorm.\n\nHow could that be fair?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 102",
                "text": "The distance between Shyana's royally appointed chambers and Sapphurion's roost was the better part of two and a half sectors, or just over two sevenths of a theoretical heptagon drawn around the volcano, but amongst the uneven design these sectors were also the most closely spaced. Auli walked insouciantly along the corridor wheeling her Dragonharp and its priceless load. Outward calm. Inner mess. Her heart must surely pop its cork if it beat any harder.\n\nShe was just passing the first vertical connecting passage when she heard a fracas break out behind her. Someone shouted, \"Intruders! Royal bastards \u2013 in our Halls!\"\n\nXa'an's hand clapped her shoulder. \"Go. Not unexpected; Sapphurion warned us.\"\n\nHe'd warned them but not her? Grr! No time for recriminations over her unpreparedness. Auli stretched her legs, counting paces and touching the wall with her right hand as she tried to steer one-handed with the left. *Thud. Bump. Rattle.* Too much noise.\n\n\"Down here!\" a male voice called roughly.\n\nA frantic, panicked few seconds later, she smelled him. Razzior. Who else? Oily-char scent upon the slight breeze coming toward her in the corridor; it could not be mistaken. Auli skidded to a halt.\n\n\"Men ahead?\" Xa'an said. \"I hear unfamiliar armour.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Auli hated it when her voice shook. \"Follow me!\"\n\nShe intended to take a branching corridor into the cloth stores behind levels five through seven, which had a separate stairwell that would have led to safety, but it seemed even that route was closed off. Xa'an bundled her past a knot of suddenly fighting men and women; Auli flinched as with a *whap-skizz!* an arrow whipped past her right ear and ricocheted off the tunnel wall. She heard a sword swish so close behind her it tugged her braid. A surprised gurgle. Had her father just pierced a person through?\n\nThe ballads were not like this.\n\nShake the Island \u2013 threat. Promise. Harbinger of terror. Auli ran in response to her father's commands. A quick carry down a flight of seven steps she had forgotten. Her plan did not include smoothing out steps! The case rattled as they set it down too hastily. Off at a sprint. Was Hualiama alright inside? Did she think this was part of the game?\n\nAhead, the service tunnel would break out into a Dragon-sized tunnel that turned sharply to her left hand, and ran straight to the right. If Razzior sighted her with the Dragonharp in tow, they were done. Dead-done.\n\nAuli hissed, \"Stop.\"\n\n\"Daughter \u2013\"\n\n\"Quiet. Listening.\" She cocked her head, intent. Just a hint \u2026 something was out there. The most miniscule thread of magic. Auli palmed her scroll and invoked its command words, before adding, \"Total silence, Dad.\"\n\nNever too careful.\n\n\"Dragon?\" he whispered at once. \"No time; men behind \u2026\"\n\n\"Shut the fangs!\"\n\nThey tarried against that wall for what seemed an eternity, but in reality could have been no more than a handful of seconds. A slight tremor belied the monstrosity of the beast that slipped by them up that major corridor. What a predator! Auli could not believe how silently he moved. How he stalked so lithely from paw to paw, tens of tonnes of Orange Dragon, and the only tell-tale element was the very slight trembling his paw steps conducted through the stone floor. The scent, gone. No breathing. Nary a rustle of wing nor a susurrus of scale. Razzior prowled by, while from the shouts behind Auli realised that Xa'an's team must have created a clever diversion.\n\nThe whole Island-World seemed to be crammed inside her skull, roaring incessantly. She said, \"W-W-W \u2026 uh \u2026\"\n\n\"Easy, petal.\" His hand squeezed her shoulder. \"We'll make this.\"\n\nAuli gathered herself. She felt woozy. \"On my signal, go. We hit the roost opposite, it's unoccupied. You get Arkurion the Mercury Blue to retrieve my harp from there later. I'll take Hualiama and vanish.\"\n\n\"How?\" he said tersely.\n\n\"I'll think of something. A cleaning bucket.\"\n\nSeconds later, they were across the corridor. Auli worked frantically at the door wards, hoping against hope they had not been changed. No need if the visitor roost was unoccupied.\n\nFour minutes and a great deal of cuddling later, a Roost Keeper limped back out of the roost's service entrance toting a heavy bucket, a mop, a broom, and a bundle of cleaning cloths. Thank the stars for Su'izyan's laziness leaving all this behind! Xa'an rushed away to help his troops. Poor Dad. He had taken some convincing to allow her to escape solo, with the child.\n\n<I'm scared, Auli.> The voice from the bucket nearly cost her several more years. At this rate she'd run out of life before the hour was up.\n\n<Shh, darling, we will be fine.>\n\n<Bad Dwagon.>\n\n<Uhh \u2026>\n\n<Baddie Dwagon, Auli. He bad, bad, baddie.> That was Hualiama's way of saying something was awful indeed. <Bad men?>\n\n<Some bad men \u2013 darling, shh \u2026 oh no \u2026>\n\nMore boots in the corridor! Nearing the corner moment by moment. Closer. What to do? Reviewing level five's layout in her mind, Auli realised only one option remained. She needed to make another burglary, and this time, it was critical. She needed to access Andarraz's roost, through an unused third entrance few people would know about. It opened into a maintenance area behind his bathing chamber.\n\nCould her situation be any worse? If the Green Elder was home and heard something, the entire plot was sunk. No other choice.\n\nSequence? She did not remember the accesses for his roost. Nor should she. Nobody ever entered this way unless something was amiss with the lava and hot and cold water plumbing.\n\n<Bad Dwagon,> Hualiama whispered. <Auli \u2026>\n\nRazzior returned! As urgently and quietly as she could, Auli-Ambar sang her ward-breaking song, and almost fainted with relief as she heard a faint squeal of little-used tumblers settling into the open position. Grab the handle. *Squeeeee!* Auli leaped inside, cradling bucket plus Hualiama in the crook of her left arm, and eased the door shut behind her. Dratted squeaky piece of trash! She should not have expected differently.\n\nThe first thing Auli noticed was the heat. Dank, fusty heat swaddled them like a clinging blanket, making Hualiama wriggle in complaint. She just began to shush the child when she heard Andarraz, through what had to be a crack or access in the roost's inner wall, snoring \u2026 stertorously. She grimaced as her old favourite word popped to the forefront of her mind. Echoes of a painful past! Instead of speaking, Auli pressed her finger gently to Hualiama's lips. Then, she began to hum as she very quietly refastened the access doorway. Razzior lurked out there somewhere. Andarraz slept within, shaking the pipework with his rumble-snoring. They needed to remain undetected.\n\nA paw tested the handle.\n\nAuli's heart stop-started harshly. Hualiama grabbed her neck and clung to it like lichen to a tree trunk; she realised she was holding the child almost as closely. She must hide them both.\n\nHer song changed.\n\nNo more than a whisper on the wind, Auli moved through the maintenance room, shrinking back from the radiant heat of what must be a lava pipe, and ducking beneath another bundle of foot-thick pipes. She hummed protection. Could it work? Could Arkurion's theory hold water, so to speak, allowing her to manipulate a magical resonance of sorts into concealing their presence?\n\n<Auli left,> the child whispered. <No trip, Auli.> She was helping her. Directing! Auli could not believe it. How clever was this mite? <Duckie, quick.> Duck, yes. Step by step, they navigated an unfamiliar maze. Hualiama giggled when Auli whanged her forehead on a cross-beam. <Auli funny.> Aye. And sore. <End soon,> the girl whispered. Reaching out to explore with her hands, she discovered a metal access panel above her head. Of course. Judging by the sounds seeping around its edges, it must provide a Human engineer access to Andarraz's Dragon sink, where he might rinse his fangs or wash his paws. Oh, the underside of the sink! A plumbing repair access. Aye!\n\nShe pressed upward.\n\n<No,> Hualiama breathed.\n\n<Find safe spot,> Auli-Ambar said. <Far from bad Dragons.>\n\nThose arms were like vines strangulating her neck as Auli scaled a short metal ladder and entered Andarraz's roost. Four granite plinths raised his sink so high, she could easily stand upright beneath it. His breathing did not seem to change. Could she believe she might be able to sneak past his nose, and \u2013 what, Auli? Return to the service corridors where a running battle was taking place? Be safe, father! Options? Exit the front of his roost and immediately enter the full view of the entire volcano with the Child of the Dragon on her arm? She could think of better ways of committing suicide.\n\nOne answer. The garbage chute!\n\nShe had never in her life tiptoed more daintily. The wards must hold. She judged Andarraz's muzzle must be facing away from her position as he took an evidently most congenial snooze in his lava bath. How far would the hatch be? The basic roost designs were all the same, but there were variants depending on when a particular level had been built. This one would be positioned up above her height in a sloped support to the basin \u2013 oh no, above the full stretch of her arms! She must climb. Thankfully, the edging was some kind of decorative metalwork affair, its stylised leaves almost as good as any ladder.\n\nStruggle. Please, don't scrabble with her feet and alert the Dragon. She boosted Hualiama first and then clambered up herself, freezing for a long minute as Andarraz stirred. Hualiama was as good as Dragon gold. She did not make a peep, even though she must be gazing over the huge mound of that beast's hindquarters as he lazed in his fifteen-foot deep pool, baking his majestic rump to a crisp. The heat was stultifying, causing her palms to grow damp. Auli stole up beside the girl-child, found the edge of the hatch, and tried to budge it. The thing had to weigh a tonne, but she slowly wedged it open, thrust her left foot beneath, and used the strength of her legs to lever it upward. Pathetic, Auli. After this she was going to start lifting weights like those want-to-be-muscly Princes she taught. Or boulders and iron ingots weighing five tonnes, such as strutting male Dragons used for their battle training.\n\nAuli grinned as she gathered Hualiama into her arms. Right. These chutes were supposed to slope reasonably gently. Only, she knew first-hand how schematics could lie.\n\nShe had just begun to slide when Auli remembered her waist-length braid. Holy Fra'anior! She whipped it out of the way, skidding from darkness down into darkness \u2013 she imagined \u2013 and the metal hatch clanged shut behind. Close one. Only, the impact slammed against her oversensitive ears like a Dragon's battle roar.\n\n*GGGNNNARRRRGGHHH!!!*\n\nAndarraz's thunder crashed above, but Auli and Hualiama were already accelerating away down a sticky, mossy slope, flinching in unison as damp globs slapped against their heads, bodies and tucked-in limbs. Yuck! Dragon mouthwash! Sputum! Scale oil and soap residue. Who would want to imagine what they slid through? Everything went down the hatch.\n\n*Boom!* A ravaging blast of hot air chased after them. Auli realised that the Green Dragon must have fired a fireball down the shaft, but a four or five-second advantage gave just enough of a head start to wing them ahead of the blast. Moss and gunge sizzled somewhere behind. Just as she was beginning to congratulate herself on a decent escape, the floor unexpectedly fell away.\n\nThey plummeted through space, howling."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 103",
                "text": "*Splot!* An unknown fall later, Auli bruised her rump on something large, relatively soft and unmentionably slimy, before breaking free in a shower of malodorous sludge and sliding away again. Darkness rushed against her face. Wind. Stench. She feared to strike her head against an unseen outcropping or corner, and so she tucked down as far as she could, and clamped her elbows tightly to her sides, making a safe pocket for Hualiama in her lap. But soon, the precipitous slope gentled, slowing their headlong rush. This pipe or crevice was narrower than the first and very smooth, allowing her to stretch out her legs and further slow the pace of their slide. It seemed to lead away in an unexpected direction. There was also not nearly so much organic muck, so that Auli soon began to feel the heat of abrasion against her tunic bottom. Oh dear. From the gross to the ridiculous. This escape was not proceeding well.\n\nWhere were they? How deep? She felt as if they had been sliding for a long time; her ears had popped a few times, and Hualiama had gone very quiet. She was just a tiny, trembling bundle cradled in Auli's arms.\n\n<Little mouse, we'll be fine.> Liar, liar, scrolls afire \u2026 Auli drew breath. <This is like the biggest slide ever, right?>\n\n<Stinky,> Hualiama complained.\n\n<Very stinky. Disgusting.>\n\n<Auli stinky like toilet.> She seemed to think this hilarious. Auli wondered if all children of her age found toilet humour irresistible. <Auli toilet head.>\n\nShe had to laugh. Never more true!\n\nPressing more strongly with her feet, she reduced their speed until they eventually ground to a halt. Hmm. All extremities intact? <Can you see anything, Hualiama?>\n\n<Like Auli? Auli see dark? Scared.>\n\nThat was the first time the child had admitted she was scared. Auli hugged her tightly, wondering who was comforting whom. She slid forward carefully. The air seemed so stagnant down here. The tunnel had narrowed until she could reach out with either hand and touch the sides. All was deathly still. Not a whisper of sound from the usually alive Halls, bustling with draconic and Human life. Was this a side tunnel? A dead end? Surely, she would not have to climb all the way back up there again?\n\nHer skin prickled.\n\nThe Dragon Library!\n\nNo. Deeper than the main library. Spider-crawling carefully onward with a soft song playing about her lips, after several hundred feet, Auli came to what she took for the end of the sloping tunnel. It must fetch right up against the forbidden vaults! Yet how could the reek of this aeons-old slop not have filtered through? Shortly, she had her answer. The end was blocked, of course, creating a backup pool of Dragon-swill she had to wade through, chest deep. Someone must have boarded the tunnel over, twice, for she was able to kick through the layers of rotten boarding with ease. From here, however, the last of the gunge solidified and she had to start digging in earnest.\n\n<'Theen place? 'Theen place?> Hualiama asked worriedly.\n\nIt took Auli an age to work out what she meant. <Oh, petal! No, it's not Ianthine's lair!> She remembered? How did she even know the Maroon Dragoness' name? <I think this is the Library, where we keep scrolls and books.>\n\nMaybe more people remembered their early experiences than she had supposed.\n\nCould there be a forgotten section or cavern beyond those parts of the forbidden vaults that she already knew? No. At last, after a long, long stint of shovelling dirt and encouraging Hualiama, Auli found a third layer of boarding. This was more intact and had been plastered over from the far side. There was the answer. Essentially, a false back door into a place Sazutharr had claimed was inviolable.\n\nEvery time Dragons became their most pompous, she discovered flaws in their reasoning, Auli thought uncharitably. Sazutharr was better than most. Only a fool insulted him as crassly as she just had in her thoughts. <Sorry, Sazutharr.>\n\n<Hualiama, can you help me find a rock?> Or should she use her Izariela miniature? Auli could not commit such an act of sacrilege.\n\n<Lee-lee tired.> Even though she sounded shattered, the child did not cry. Again, Auli found herself wondering at her courage. Hualiama must be made of stern stuff to be stuck down here with a crazy blind girl, and not simply burst into tears. Now she would have to be brave too!\n\n<Thank you, Hualiama, for being who you are.>\n\n<Auli sing song?>\n\nThat cute voice! Far too irresistible. <Auli wants to just kiss you to bits!>\n\n<Bits? Auli stinky bits?> asked Hualiama, and then collapsed laughing over her own joke."
            },
            {
                "title": "Scrolls of Fire",
                "text": "\u2002It is said every Scholar dreams of mighty deeds of paw. Yet should such a day dawn, thick with terror, is not necessity the greatest driver of the spirit? The deed essayed upon reflection seems simple, when the ballads would enrobe it in all poesy, glory and honour. Is our glorification of the mundane a reflection of the striving and flourishing of Human existence; does this quality ennoble the soul, or is it merely risible?\n\n\u2014Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Reflections\n\nThe SCholar SMASHED through the foot-thick mortar with an old metal bar which had also somehow found its way down this tunnel, or been abandoned by a careless workman. She had found it by dint of a misstep. Ha, satisfying destruction! She pictured crushing Razzior's skull with her blows. Even better. Summarised her day so far. That orange slug had a great deal to answer for. For the first time, Auli felt she understood why Dragons enjoyed war. This sense of savage pleasure was as disquieting as it was intoxicating.\n\nHow could their enemies have known? Or did they not actually know, but had simply been trying to create enough mayhem to shake the proverbial rat out of its nest?\n\nThat success rankled.\n\nThankfully, the mortar was old and brittle, or she would have been climbing that tunnel again. Auli discovered she had emerged beneath and behind a massive mound of debris. Reaching into the hole she had broken open, she found Hualiama already crawling through. The opportunity to explore new places evidently provided more than enough revitalisation for a child. Auli, on the other paw, felt as if an angry Dragon had dragged her backward through a lava flow at high speed. No mind. Now she just had to think her way out of this mess.\n\nHualiama said, <Funny smelly.>\n\n<Aye, pollen-fluff.> Pongy lore. Dramagon's best. <Try not to touch the books, please. Some are very dangerous.>\n\n<Funny-funny smelly,> she insisted.\n\n<Please don't fret, Aunty Auli's here.> She gulped. That was the first time she had ever dared to call herself Hualiama's Aunt. <Look, this is where the Dragons store all of their stories about magic and olden times. It's like a great big treasure chest \u2013>\n\n<Scary. Auli, scared. Up. Up me!>\n\nThe stark note of terror in Hualiama's voice made the hairs stand to attention on the back of Auli's neck. At once, she stooped to gather the quivering child into her arms. <What is it? I'm here, sweet \u2013>\n\n<It \u2026 singing. Horrid. Horrid. Make it stop, Auli!>\n\n<Shh. There now.> Humming softly, she tried to break the mood upon Hualiama, but was instead struck by a different remembrance. Another of Ianthine's crazed rants had called her 'child of ruzal.' If the lore was down here, still undiscovered, could it be trying to regain a hold over her? No child could be the progeny of magic. The meaning had to be figurative, such as a purpose of Dramagon's foulness-breathed magic to inhabit that which was lovely and hale and perhaps potent in ways Auli did not yet understand, and corrupt it? For that was the kind of taint she sensed. Here was danger beyond anything she had discovered in these forbidden vaults so far, stuffed as they were with the perilous and arcane lore of the Dragons of yore. Knowledge perverse beyond comprehension. Scrolls afire with a pestilence of lore that should never have been allowed to see the suns-light.\n\n<Hualiama, if you could help me find \u2026>\n\n<Noooo!>\n\n<Precious little flame, Auli would want to put it beyond any Dragon's finding, that's all.>\n\n<Auli mean, mean, meanie. Love Auli.>\n\nShe played Auli's heartstrings effortlessly. Nobody else did that. <Love you too, scrapling. I'll find that bad magic and take it far, far away.>\n\nHer heart stood still in her throat. How? Could she beg Amaryllion's help in this? She might try to convince the child, but what would she do with ruzal? Where could one hide the lore of Dramagon the Red, where it might never be found again? Burn it? Even that seemed no proof against a type of magic that seeped forth from the leaves of a book, as little grounded in physical substance or word as the Human soul might be regarded as substantiated in its vessel.\n\nSlowly, she sank back against a pile of shredded books. How could she ask this of herself, let alone a child of nigh three summers? She was an innocent.\n\nThe innocent crux of such forces \u2026 she clutched Hualiama to her bosom. <I'll make it safe for you, little one. I swear.>\n\nBut Auli's lower lip was the one that trembled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 105",
                "text": "Oddly, they must have slept. Auli did not remember giving in. They simply held each other, a gangly teenager with impossible magic and a brain apparently older than her natural age, and a child perched upon the cusp of becoming a little girl. Sometimes Hualiama was all light and laughter. Yet she evinced an unexpectedly serious mien upon occasion, and a measure of insight Auli-Ambar imagined could not be shared by too many children of her brief lifespan. She was enigmatic. Almost \u2026 ageless.\n\nNow she was just being maudlin.\n\nStretching her aching back gingerly, Auli tried to shift her position without waking her charge. That felt cruel. So too the books' spines that had spent untold hours quarrying toward the pith of her spine. Well, wasn't that supposed to be nerves that conducted her discomfort all around her body, rather than her love of lore?\n\nSince Hualiama seemed to be sound asleep with that utter flaccidity that came so easily to children, Auli carefully snuggled her against her shoulder and began to pick her way over the debris. She had to feel for every step. No shortcuts. A blind girl could not foresee problems ahead.\n\nAfter an estimated hour Auli found her way into space, and from there finally identified familiar ground. Cave twelve-A, or twelve-ancillary. This was why she did not know this place. The Researchers had not considered this annex of any particular importance and so it had slipped down Auli's priority list. Now, she shivered as she turned about in a space she recalled noting as being some seventy feet wide and forty-three deep. A good few weeks' work in here, for Razzior in rampaging through the caverns had done a spectacularly thorough job of obliteration.\n\nWhy not sing it up?\n\nArkurion's harmonic notion could be put to the test. Hualiama slept. Pensively, Auli sang love and protection over her. Whatever she could manage. Ruzal would exert no hegemony over this child's life, not so long as her protector drew breath. She must separate Hualiama from the ruzal lore, forever. That was the only way to safeguard her life.\n\nThen, she began to hum for that trace she had detected earlier. The response came with such disquieting haste, Auli imagined the magic leaping up with a cry, <I am here! Find me!>\n\nHorror!\n\nShe tracked her mark step by step.\n\nAuli was so embroiled in the subtle dance, she almost did not hear the huge lift starting its descent, but when she did, all the blood drained from her face. No! Who would this be? Please let it be a researcher. Please let it be Arkurion. But her heart knew the truth long before any rational reason could present itself to her awareness.\n\nRazzior. He alone would consider this place. He felt a strange sense of affinity with this lore, as though the evil within him sang to all that was Dramagon-spawn, although Auli understood that much of the original lore related to the two-headed Ancient Red Dragon had aeons before been destroyed or stolen by a group of Human 'zealots' dedicated to his causes. The na\u00efve viewpoint, Sazutharr had told her, was that the lore had all been lost or destroyed. It had a strange way of returning, like whatever it was that resonated to Auli now from a foot or two below her outstretched right hand. A book. Not a scroll. It was so close, so inveigling, so fascinating and achingly sweet that her hand juddered as if all her muscles cramped up at once. Fra'anior's beard, could she even touch the thing? Would the taint transfer to her immediately?\n\nAuli did not want to guess. She had dangled from her roof for the price of a guess.\n\nOnly, she was not wearing much by way of extra clothing. This was a volcano, not the fabled snow-capped mountains of Immadia in the far North. The tunic top or the working girl leggings? No fancy Fra'aniorian frills for her daily job! The top was long enough. Mid-thigh. And, she rather doubted Razzior would pause to consider so much as the edible properties of her woefully scrawny thighs. How Zimtyna had chewed out Xa'an for daring to advance that opinion.\n\nDragoness!\n\nWorking rapidly but as silently as she could, Auli-Ambar balanced first on one foot and then the other as she juggled child, leggings and the act of undressing. Acrobatic tricks. Si'ishi had accused her of being so flexible, she actually lacked joints. Handy trick for those who could do it. In seconds, she had stripped down and then she thrust her arm through the leggings. Remember to keep the hand covered. Now, how deep did that tome lie, and how big was it?\n\n<Oh, my darlings, how I've missed thee,> Razzior mumbled.\n\nAuli's hand froze an inch or so above the book. What the blazing volcanoes?\n\n<Come, my precious scrolls. Speak to thy master. Breathe into me the life stolen by that fool Ra'aba and his insane schemes. Whatever were you thinking?>\n\n<Thinking to gain status,> the Orange Dragon answered himself.\n\n<The blood lore \u2013>\n\n<\u2013 did it share the power, or link it? I'm so confused. So tired. Is my mind my own anymore?>\n\nShare the power? What power? What was the Dragon chuntering on about?\n\nVery gently, Auli laid a hand on the book to check it. Holy Fra'anior! Ward-malevolence with a few Dragonships'-worth of old-fashioned bloody murder thrown in. Despite the cloth covering, a thrilling buzz conducted through her body and into her mind. Her fingers traced the embossed title involuntarily. <Of Crimson Lore Resplendent.> Oh. Should she not open it? Just a small peek inside?\n\nHualiama said, <Bad Dwag \u2013 mmm!>\n\n<Quiet, little mouse.> Auli tugged at the book's spine. Measured with her hand. Two by three and a half feet, she made it. Easy enough to tuck under one of her long arms, but it had to be four inches thick. Easily. She tried to ease it out. Just a little more \u2026\n\nThat was when a piece of wood, unseen by Auli, toppled to the floor. *Klonk!*\n\nThe sound echoed throughout the caverns, despite the weight of scrolleaf, leather and wood that lay scattered about.\n\n<Oh, I sense thee!> Razzior crooned, in a sweet paean to menace. <Come, little flame \u2013 it is thee, is it not? Where art thou? Art thou affrighted, unable to see thy doom? Art thy limbs paralysed? Silent-pawed, I come \u2026>\n\nHe vanished from her perception.\n\nAuli touched Hualiama's mouth. <Shh.> Then, placing each slipper-clad foot with the utmost care \u2013 her spy father must do this daily \u2013 she sidled along the pathways cleared by the Library Apprentices. Thank them for not leaving so much as grit upon the floor. The soft leather soles made no sound. She toted the book beneath her right arm and held Hualiama in the left.\n\nRazzior evidently changed his mind, for he began to speak as he approached through the caverns, and his unmasked tread shook the place with each measured step. He meant to enjoy this pursuit. To terrify her to the maximum. Each sound was calculated to increase the pitch of her agitation. Her racing heartbeat. Sweating hands. Treacherously weak knees. And, the child's squeak of fear against her hand. The Dragon stalked her relentlessly.\n\n<Just a game of find the dragonet,> Auli whispered, but she convinced no-one with the quaver in her voice. Away. Down the aisle and double back toward fourteen, which was bigger and offered many more hiding places.\n\nRazzior thump-thumped arrogantly after.\n\nGracious Islands, she had not really memorised the layout of the pathways. This was harder than she had thought. Thrice, Auli scuffled or pulled scrolleaf down after her unintentionally. Each time Razzior oriented upon the sound. No need to rush.\n\n<Oh, Auli-Ambar, where are you? What are you hiding from me?>\n\nHe must not see Hualiama. Auli tiptoed away behind a freshly reorganised island of scroll racks and exited toward eleven. *Crunch.* Drat it! As he slithered forward rapidly, Auli fled faster. Panicked, stuttering steps. Mistake! Piled-up scrolls slewed across the floor at her glancing blow. Slow it down, breathe, calm Hualiama, re-grip the ridiculously heavy book that was still trying to mine its way into her brain \u2013 or so she imagined. She ducked behind the piles of tomes waiting for the carpenters to fashion new shelving, and struck out at an angle once more. Could she take the lift? Surely, hearing it swing into operation, Razzior would be over in a flash to clean the slow-moving platform of Auli and her charge. Could there be a service tunnel somewhere in case the lift failed? Sazutharr had not mentioned anything; no schematic showed such a feature. Yet even these caverns boasted fresh air.\n\nDragons loved to be methodical.\n\nShe should find a service access behind the lift, in that case. The only question was how strongly it would be protected.\n\nDuck. Sneak. Shift away from the oncoming Dragon, keeping another heap of debris between them. The lift ground into motion!\n\nSuddenly, Razzior lost his enthusiasm for the game. He went rampaging through fourteen and thirteen like a feral beast, his berserk, strangely choppy pouncing and half-flying movements smashing debris hither and thither. Auli hustled through ten down to cavern nine at double speed, crouched over, ruing the weight of this stupid book. Dragon scholars! Never content with one word when fifty would do! Every word conveying the weight of their massively weighty considerations in a way that was making her arm wish it could fall off her shoulder.\n\n<Where are you hiding? Come on out.>\n\nWhat, did that granite-brained excuse for a lizard expect her to actually answer? At least he didn't have one of Zanthrillior's tricks to help him. But \u2013 she sniffed \u2013 what he did have was a different trick. Smoke. Thick, acrid smoke billowed away out there somewhere, and Auli knew that if she ran into the cloud, she or Hualiama would start coughing immediately. Or, was he firing the scrolls?\n\nAs the lift paused, she found cover once more. Think, Auli! How could she keep Razzior at bay long enough? Who would be on that lift \u2013 only a select number of people and Dragons had access to this level. Hualiama held her neck calmly now, as if aware Auli was doing her best. Razzior thunder-thumped along, doing his utmost to scare her out of hiding, but this girl was no longer for scaring. Well, she was petrified down to her living pith, but in a good way, she supposed. Her brain buzzed. Thoughts swirled, as thick with strategy and technique and possibility as the Orange Dragon's smoke. As Razzior charged into her cavern, Auli picked up a torn-off book cover and whirled it low, back along the path they had taken.\n\n<Whap-whap klonk!>\n\n*AAAA-HARRR!!* Razzior thundered, hurtling off in the wrong direction.\n\nShe dashed the other way.\n\n<Jump,> Hualiama said. <Hop. Auli hop-hop? Silly?>\n\n<Help, Hualiama. Tell me which way's clear.>\n\nThree false starts later \u2013 mostly due to Razzior's raging about \u2013 they had run out of time and cover provided by his charge and subsequent discovery that she was not, indeed, down that end of the cavern. By then, she heard more Dragons incoming.\n\n<Oh, Razzior,> called Qualiana. <Looking for something?>\n\nAuli skulked along behind a line of new shelves. Due to the natural curvature of the underground grotto of cavern nine, which met the far end of two and from which she could access one, they had been placed straight along a wavy wall. She crept behind and squeezed through gaps where Hualiama directed her. Soon, the little girl sneaked ahead of her, taking Auli's hand to guide her through the difficult parts. Twice they had to force books aside, but very carefully \u2013 Hualiama joined in the pushing. Auli had to stop her giggling at this new game.\n\n<Like Auli's job,> Hualiama claimed. <I'm libwi \u2026 libawawi?>\n\n<Librarian,> Auli breathed into her ear. She still smelled like a child, with a vanilla fragrance not unlike Dragon magic upon her skin and hair. How she wished she could gaze upon Hualiama just once. <We push lore around all day long.>\n\nThe Dragons were arguing energetically \u2013 Razzior, Qualiana and Arkurion. Razzior claimed she must have become lost or wounded, and that he smelled a vital secret the girl was withholding from all Dragons. A secret nothing short of Island-shaking. The Mercury Blue countered that Auli had been with her father during the fracas, now ended, but had most probably just returned to work. She was like that. Oblivious to all but her beloved scrolls.\n\nAuli did not know whether to slap or kiss \u2013 ahem. Inappropriate! Could she not keep that chest they had agreed upon, locked for more than half a second?\n\n<Bad Dwagon not eat my Auli!>\n\n<No, dearest petal. Nor you. We shall escape upon the song of Fra'anior this day.>\n\nWhy that phrasing? She did not know, but she knew the adamantine spark that had settled in her breast. Never give up. Never!\n\nSoon, the fractious Dragons agreed to divide the search for the caverns between them. If they found Auli down here, they would see what was to be seen.\n\nAs the Dragons spread out, Auli silently willed Arkurion to turn in her direction. <This way, o Mercury Marauder. Feel my presence.>\n\nHmm. Amaryllion had the awesomely brooding presence business perfected. Auli? Less so.\n\nAt first the smaller Dragon moved at ninety degrees to her position near the entrance to cavern two, but then he seemed to pause to take stock, before his lighter tread began to move in her direction. Qualiana must be following Razzior. Their heavier tread receded. Did the Dragons know she was down here? Guess it? She must reek. How come Razzior had not simply sniffed her out?\n\nShe hunkered down. How to do this? If Arkurion spied her, he would immediately know about the child and the ruzal lore. Then, his secrets might be forced from him by older, more powerful Dragons. They had destroyed Ianthine's fragile sanity in their search for the truth. If there was a way Arkurion could help her to escape unseen \u2026\n\nThe entrance to two was wide open, she remembered. No cover. She had to wait.\n\nEventually, Razzior moved off much deeper into the caverns and Arkurion's wandering, sniffing and pawing at the wreckage brought him closer to her hiding place.\n\nAuli whispered, <Hualiama, not a word now. This is a good Dragon, but we don't want him to know about you. Not yet. Only shell-mommy Qualiana knows about you, and she's chasing the bad Dragon away.> Close enough to the truth? <Promise me.>\n\n<Why good Dwagon?>\n\n<Arkurion's good but he can't know about you yet. Remember the hiding game?>\n\n<Aye.>\n\n<We need to hide a bit more. Just a little longer.>\n\n<Auli stay?>\n\n<Auli will stay with you all the time,> she promised.\n\nThen, Arkurion's flank brushed against that back entrance to cavern two. Did he sense her? Was there something to his harmonic idea, which she had discovered in Dragon lore, and stretched from friendship-connection all the way to the most abstruse philosophical musings arising from the fabled soul connection fostered by the ascending fire promises Dragons made to each other during the courtship seasons?\n\nAuli called faintly, <Arkurion.>\n\nTo his credit, the Dragon stiffened but made no other sign or sound of surprise. <Auli-Ambar. Are you \u2013>\n\n<I'm fine. I need you to listen.>\n\nHe said, <What're you doing down here?>\n\n<Noble Arkurion, I need you to listen and make a promise. You cannot see me. You must not. It is absolutely essential that you do not know or see or even scent what I am doing here in the forbidden section today.>\n\n<Essential?> he chuckled smokily. <You intrigue me, Human girl \u2013>\n\n<I swear it upon Fra'anior's love for Istariela. This is life and death, Arkurion. Promise me!>\n\nHe paused but a moment. <You're protecting me? Oh, Auli \u2026 very well. I promise, but only so as not to give that Orange the satisfaction!>\n\nHe dissembled, in part at least. Razzior was not his real reason; Auli hoped instead that he acted out of unspoken esteem for her. Arkurion was not the type of Dragon to break a promise. Once he had sworn, they arranged their little cavalcade and its target. Then, Auli tracked him by walking behind his left rear leg, while Arkurion kept his fire orb closed upon that side and unhurriedly, with a little meandering, conducted her back toward the lift. She wondered what willpower he must exercise not to peek. The word of a Dragon was culturally unbreakable upon many levels; far more so even than a Human promise. It was what a Human promise ought to be.\n\nHualiama's grip tightened.\n\nAt once, Auli reached out to touch the Dragon's warm scales. <Razzior?>\n\n<Returning this way,> the Mercury Blue breathed. <Walk faster; keep in step with me. Where's that access?>\n\nThe Orange Dragon and the Red Dragoness approached steadily, discussing the day's events in combative tones. Razzior knew nothing about the attack on the Queen's forces, but like every Dragon, he was unsurprised. Just as there were draconihilists, there were anti-royalists in the Human world, and elements in Gi'ishior who were disloyal to Sapphurion, or felt that the Dragon Elder had done wrong in inviting the Queen to the Halls.\n\nThe Mercury Blue paused. <There's wide open space ahead, Auli. What to do?>\n\n<Uh, I'll \u2026 ride your paw. Your leg, I mean,> Auli stammered. Could that work? <I'll try to.>\n\nHis ankle bone stuck out enough that she might be able to stand atop it, but holding child, book and herself with only two arms was not likely to succeed. Belt! Yes! Quickly removing the thin and admittedly mostly decorative leather belt from her waist, Auli slung it around the Dragon's leg. Three tries later, she managed to snag the other end with the arm that held Hualiama. He was already this massive? His knee was bigger than her torso, and his hind leg already so thick, she could not have encompassed it with her arms. Twisting her wrists, she wound the belt several times either side to secure her grip.\n\nShe must seem like a flea to him.\n\n<What are you holding?> he asked curiously.\n\n<A book,> she said. Which was about to slip out of her hand. After another good wriggle, she breathed, <Gently forward, Dragon. And please don't \u2026 I know this is a lot of trust to ask of you, Arkurion.>\n\n<For thee, a Dragon should fly beyond the skies,> he replied.\n\n<I'll settle for a clean escape,> Auli joked back, discomfited. This \u2013 whatever it was between them, it had to end. Why keep playing with fire?\n\nHe sidled forward, clearly trying not to jolt the leg.\n\n<Oh ho, making our escape already, Mercury Blue?> Razzior jeered from at least a cavern away.\n\n<Just checking for tracks over here by the lift,> he replied, walking on steadily. Auli felt his muzzle swaying from side to side as he apparently scanned the floor. Some of his scales were frightfully sharp. She had sliced her knees open in a few places already. He said, <Not wearing half of your clothing, Auli-Ambar? Is that what you don't want me to see?>\n\n<I am embarrassed by my fowl-ish legs,> she breathed back. He must know this for hedging. Her Dragonish betrayed this nuance even to her ears.\n\n<Rough day?>\n\n<You've no idea.> He did not recoil at the rank stench upon her? Or had those wards masked more than she thought \u2013 perhaps olfactory elements supplemented Sazutharr's clever work? As she well knew, magic was often surprising.\n\n<Here's something. Five feet from your back. Be careful, Auli.>\n\n<Thanks.>\n\nShe slipped down and backpedalled until she felt a wall against her back. Handle. Locked or unlocked? Well, the access was probably made from the secret room above, which was warded dozens of different ways. No need for lock and key.\n\nThe handle squeaked piercingly as she depressed it.\n\nTo his credit \u2013 and her horror \u2013 Arkurion whirled about in a flash. <Let's check this door!> he boomed.\n\nHe saw! He must \u2026\n\nBile seared the back of her throat as Auli just stood there trembling in the doorway, and the Dragon's paw pushed open the access. The door protested loudly and long upon rusty hinges.\n\n<Go,> he said.\n\n<Arkurion, you promised \u2026>\n\n<My eyes are practically welded shut, you idio \u2013 ahem! Nothing here!> he growled, apparently wiping the floor with his paw! <No tracks.>\n\n<Good thinking on checking the engineering access, Arkurion!> Qualiana fluted from farther afield. <Satisfied, Razzior?>\n\nA firm shove, and Auli was across that portal. Arkurion banged the access door shut. <Shall we check three through eight, then? If she's here we're bound to find some tracks in the dust made by your previous work, Razzior.>\n\nA muffled voice said, <Shut the fangs, hatchling! Someone was here, I am certain of it! I heard movement.>\n\n<You heard a rat,> Arkurion said, managing to twist his Dragonish until the object of his statement became the rodent.\n\n<I HEARD \u2026 maybe,> Razzior conceded.\n\nBehind a thin metal door that was absolutely no proof against any Dragon, Auli stood in what had to be utter darkness with a long, long climb ahead of her. Sighing soundlessly, she set to work fashioning a sling for her precious cargo. One way or another, she had to see this fiasco through."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 106",
                "text": "Lifting scrolls was definitely no help when it came to ascending a ladder some two thousand feet tall, bolted every two feet into the access shaft. Auli counted an even dozen times she had to hook on an elbow and rest. By the time she reached the top, Hualiama had shed her first tears from sheer exhaustion, and Auli found herself in an unexpected place \u2013 she reckoned she must be above the Library chamber beside the terrace lake, in a room packed with power such as she had never imagined.\n\n\"Must be horiatite,\" she muttered to herself, touching the unfamiliar stone deposits lining the room. They radiated so much magical power, her teeth buzzed in her jaw, and her strangely crystalline eyes ached.\n\nSuddenly, Amaryllion was inside her head, and he sounded as clear as the very crystals she had just been thinking about.\n\n<Auli-Ambar, where have you been?>\n\n<Causing trouble,> she retorted, but rather shakily. <More accurately I'm in trouble, o Amaryllion, and I need your help. Please.>\n\nAfter she had sketched the day's events and her idea that she might hide the tome of ruzal in the Sacred Library, Amaryllion warned her once more to look first to Hualiama's wellbeing. He very quickly fell to describing the dangers posed by the Sacred Library's Guardian Spirits. They could not be commanded by any Dragon, and they were fearfully powerful, possessed of elemental forms of Dragon magic that could snuff out fire life quicker than the snap of a Dragon's talons. More usefully, their very nature rendered them incorruptible from their original purpose. The Onyx of Ha'athior theorised that it was Fra'anior himself who had set them to guard such a treasure; any creature who entered did so at peril of their life, but purity of heart fires should win through.\n\nComforting? Hardly!\n\nAuli decided she must under no circumstances take a child to that place. She would rather risk her own life.\n\nVery good. Just the tiny matter of getting Hualiama home, then. Undetected. Through Halls that must be crawling with security.\n\nIf only she had told Arkurion or Qualiana to call off the search. Or would they? Dragons were incredibly smart, masters of lateral thinking \u2013 well, thinking in any strategic direction around the compass, and a few directions no compass would ever show. Might she imagine they would divine a solution for her outside this very room or access? How would Qualiana think? Might she involve Arkurion in a ruse or three, have done so already, or \u2026 Xa'an. No, she was being so stupid.\n\n<Amaryllion, is there a chance you could communicate with the Mercury Blue on my behalf?>\n\nThe Ancient Dragon's laughter boomed like a thunderstorm in her mind. <Oh, now you're thinking like any Dragoness. Of course. Such a simple solution to your conundrum. I can connect the two of you at once.>\n\nFreaking loathsome book, it was calling to her again \u2026 if she exited this chamber, would Razzior not detect it immediately? He had been studying the subject. He must be attuned to Dramagon's vile magic. Therefore, she must leave the book here. She must leave it, and go hide it later.\n\nHualiama first. Aye. She was the true prize.\n\nThe Child of the Dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Sacred Library",
                "text": "Arkurion yelled at Auli for at least ten minutes before finding his way around to congratulating her upon an ingenious escape from Razzior's ill intent. Auli modestly accepted this praise, whereupon the Mercury Blue yelled at her at greater length and considerably more blistering mental volume. She was busy laughing privately at his stereotypically draconic fulminations when her amusement apparently communicated to him through the telepathic link Amaryllion had setup, and that of course was akin to tossing a skein of fuel oil upon the Dragon's pyretic temper.\n\nEven more characteristically, Amaryllion did not step in to soothe or protect at this point. Apparently rude Human girls needed to learn their lessons. Thumping migraine-monsters of lessons.\n\nAuli might have told them she would only be emboldened to greater levels of vexatiousness in the future. This was fun, although she did worry that she was becoming some sort of strange attention seeker, enjoying having Dragons vent their spleen upon her like a Cloudlands-bound waterfall smashing down upon a particularly stubborn boulder \u2013 alias, her head.\n\nAfter that, Xa'an mounted a classic spy rescue operation.\n\nHaving dressed as a Fra'aniorian soldier \u2013 which made her feel as if she had a target inked upon her forehead \u2013 Auli interred the tome as cleverly as she could in that peculiar power room above the great lift. Amaryllion assured her that the horiatite ought to shield even ruzal from Razzior's perception, and she desperately wanted to believe the Ancient Dragon, but there was still something very singular about that magic that made her most uncomfortable. The quicker she buried it far, far from certain Orange paws, the better. And what was Ra'aba's part in all this? Was it his hand that had lifted against the Queen and her soldiers, or a paw?\n\nShe had suggested that they toss the accursed thing into the Cloudlands, but Amaryllion warned her immediately. Even this course of action was doomed, for foul magic had a way of resurfacing. Who knew what else it might corrupt down there? Pernicious lore!\n\nAmaryllion had to be taken to task on the subject of what lay beneath the Cloudlands later. She did not appreciate the Ancient Dragon-sized fob off. Right now, her job was to act soldierly and convey the sleepy bundle beneath her robe safely back to Sapphurion's roost. It was the deepest hour of night.\n\nA tight wedge of Fra'aniorian Royal Elites slipped through the back tunnels of Gi'ishior.\n\nThree dodges and two breathless pauses for reconnoitring later, they reached the relative safety of level five.\n\nClasping her upper left arm briefly, Xa'an said, <Take her to safety, Auli. Well done on all you did today. Be careful, alright?>\n\nAuli sidled toward the wards, rounding a corner that took her out of Xa'an's sight. Just before she reached the magical barrier, when she was primed to feel that tingling shooting through her person, her advancing left foot struck something soft and she stumbled to one knee. A \u2026 foot. Female slipper? Aye, someone was sleeping here.\n\nShe shook them. \"Islands' sakes, what are you \u2013\"\n\nA strangled wheeze shook Auli's frame as the person slumped onto their side. The skull struck rock with a sickening, wet-sounding blow. No. No! She had to check. Her trembling fingers knew horror as they touched the legs, the hip, and shook the flaccid arm gently. Su'izyan was dead.\n\nBiting the inside of her mouth to keep from gagging, Auli forced herself to search further. Someone \u2013 or some Dragon \u2013 had ripped out her throat.\n\n\"Dad. Oh no. Dad, help!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 108",
                "text": "Auli cried upon Qualiana's paw for a long time afterward.\n\nThen, she debriefed with the Dragons while Hualiama and Grandion slept nearby. When she could not stop shaking, Qualiana passed her a new type of treat, a sugar-bamboo sap sweet from the South.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Auli.\n\nThe Red Dragoness said, \"Your bravery shone today, little one. You showed resourcefulness and maturity beyond your years \u2013 as did Arkurion, for that matter. He's a fiery soul. We could do with more Dragons of his ilk here at Gi'ishior.\"\n\nSapphurion added, \"You must understand, Auli-Ambar, that from this day forth we must prepare Hualiama for her onward journey. As for Qualiana, Grandion and I, we have come to a major decision. One, we must take Masters Chamzu and Ga'athar into our confidence for this period of time. We cannot create enough layers of subterfuge without them. Two, you must be the one to take her to Fra'anior. No other is as capable or dedicated as you. Three, on that fateful day, you will speak over us a prepared scroll of disremembrance.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Aye,\" he said quietly. \"I could lie, but I must not. I want to be utterly clear of conscience, heart and soul, if I am ever asked that question. I must be blameless. You will therefore wipe most memories of Hualiama from our minds. Draconic magic has this capacity, as you well know. You will prepare the appropriate constructs and replacement memories with help from Sazutharr, whose expertise in this field is unparalleled.\"\n\nShe wanted to weep all over again, but the terrace lakes of her soul seemed to have run dry. All she could do was nod her acquiescence. From all she knew of draconic law and lore, this conclusion was inescapable.\n\nThe Sapphire continued, \"We must protect her \u2013 nay, protect all Dragonkind \u2013 as best we are able. That means subjecting ourselves to this treatment, which is not devoid of risk, and moreover, leaving you as the sole vessel holding this secret. While we trust the bastion wards apparently etched upon your mind, it is you, Auli, and your character, that we trust most of all. This secret could destroy us. Me, Qualiana, everything we have built and laboured for. Do not underestimate the hegemony you will exert over our fire lives.\"\n\n\"I don't \u2026 I would never,\" Auli replied miserably.\n\n\"We know,\" Qualiana purred.\n\n\"Must I?\"\n\nSapphurion nuzzled her with just the point of his muzzle. \"Must you ask?\"\n\n\"Aye, I must.\"\n\nQualiana purred from Auli's other flank, \"We ascertain no other flight path save this most grievous course. We shall miss Hualiama in our third hearts in spirit at least, for the flesh and the mind shall be forever changed. And therefore you must be the wind to buoy her wings evermore. Similarly, you must be released to fly. Man or woman cannot live by scroll alone.\"\n\n\"But by a princely word?\" she retorted, a touch bitterly.\n\n\"You have \u2026\"\n\nAuli shrugged hopelessly. \"We have parted,\" she emphasized softly, knowing the Dragons could not mistake her meaning. \"The Human heart is as treacherous as the most untamed wilderness, but my helm is lashed to its course. If a royal life is to be mine, then know that one day, the suns will illume what is to be known.\"\n\n\"O sage Loremaster,\" Qualiana chuckled.\n\n\"He should be so lucky,\" snorted Sapphurion. \"I claim the right to interrogate this young popinjay at the point of my talon before any potential kidnapping. Understood?\"\n\nAs Auli chortled with a merriment that bubbled only on the very surface, the Red Dragoness teased her mate about how very inappropriate his suggestion was.\n\nThen, the girl promised to return to her chambers.\n\nJust one small detour."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 109",
                "text": "So still and deep was the hour, the brain played tricks on a listener. Auli knew she had a major disadvantage over any observer who might see her from afar or spy her crossing through a lit space, but she had a different advantage. She was at home in darkness. That very brooding silence was so profound that the mind almost wanted to create something \u2013 anything \u2013 to fill it, to assure a frightened girl that she was hearing correctly. Perhaps the call of a night bird, the tread of a Dragon or Human guard, or low voices conferring somewhere within the tunnels.\n\nNot this aching emptiness.\n\nAuli was acutely aware of her extreme state of enervation. She had been on her feet, running and fearing for her life and Hualiama's, for over twenty-five hours straight. Minus one snooze. She would make mistakes. She second-guessed each move she made.\n\nCould she rely upon fear, the great motivator of her mental defences?\n\nBy a circuitous route, Auli-Ambar returned to the Dragon Library. This was the place where it had all started for her. Where she had yearned for the lore and stumbled upon a Dragon \u2013 two Dragons, to be fair \u2013 one mighty, and one lowly but noble. This was the place of beautiful, leathery scents and ageless lore, the collected thoughts and knowledge of the Dragonkind that somehow seemed to have opened its paws wide and gathered a blind girl to its bosom.\n\nHere, she had come alive.\n\nAs she reversed her footsteps of that fateful day Ianthine had tossed her casually over her shoulder, Auli entered the Dragon Library through a rarely-used rear entrance that led immediately to the main gallery where the Dragon Archivists worked. She paused upon entering the room, her hand resting lightly upon the bannister of the Human stairwell leading downward to the floor. Of course, Dragons worked at desks set between twelve and fifteen feet tall, depending on personal preference, so she was a minnow tiddling through a lake of great magnitude, so to speak.\n\nScent the air. Inks, preservation chemicals, and \u2026 Sazutharr?\n\n<Good eventide, Auli-Ambar. Working late?>\n\nHe sounded pleasantly surprised. She said, <I couldn't sleep. I was fretting over my project and so I came down here to look up a few details, noble Head Librarian.>\n\n<Ah, then walk with me,> he boomed. Too jolly? Not Sazutharr's normal, dignified tones. <You won't tell me the secrets of Auli's Empire?>\n\n<Not yet, o Sazutharr.> She descended lithely, knowing these steps well. <Ask again once it is opened. How shall we choose our winning Apprentice? Do you have any ideas? Let me just step aside to pick up my work smock. I forgot it here this afternoon.>\n\n<Aye, this afternoon!> agreed the Dragon, but Auli heard something else. Warning. Sazutharr knew something was amiss!\n\nAfter collecting her smock from her station in the neighbouring room and donning it, Auli tagged along with Sazutharr as he chatted to her about finishing options for the flooring. She had never imagined so many varieties, colourations and patterns of marble, for example, existed in the Island-World, and that was only the first of an exhaustive list of materials that the Head Librarian rattled off the top of his head. How could she concentrate when her every sense was blaring on high alert for what she knew was coming?\n\nEventually, he said in more hushed tones, as though surprised, <Oh look, young Loremaster, it's Razzior sleeping beside my office. Hush now. Don't disturb the noble Orange. He spent many an hour searching for you this afternoon.>\n\nAmazing how Dragons could say one thing and communicate ten more without a word.\n\n<Oh,> Auli responded, all smothered in fake surprise. <How kind of the mighty Razzior. I must thank him at a better time. Having been so deeply disturbed by this morning's attack by those renegade elements, I took refuge in my work, but forgot to tell anyone where I was \u2013 down in Inks with Essini working on that problem with Northern texts fading due to cold decay, noble Dragon. I'm just a scholar. Maybe I should take some battle training? I mean, I was such a cow \u2013>\n\n<You are no coward, Auli-Ambar,> Sazutharr cut in smoothly, cutting off her lie before it tripped her up. Ouch. Close! <Now, let's pull out a couple of tomes for you to consult. I've a few favourites down near the back of twenty-two. This way, Loremaster.>\n\nThe venerable Dragon Librarian might be suffering the physical effects of his great age, for Dragons could live over twice a Human lifespan, but there were no issues in the brains department. Sharp as whetted talon, Auli thought ruefully, and then a terrible pang pierced her gut as she realised Arkurion would likely outlive her by a century. She'd be doddering along on sticks while he enjoyed the prime of his life. How sad.\n\nWould Razzior follow? Or feel his watch was ended?\n\nAfter they had left the Orange Dragon three Library caverns in their wake, Auli said, <I'll take a few books back to my room, Head Librarian. May I stop here for a tumbrel?>\n\nWryly, the aged Green titan crooned, <Shall I turn a blind eye to your doings, as did the Mercury Blue?>\n\n<Aye. Please.> She gulped hard. <I'm sorry.>\n\nHe laughed softly, <Sorry? Did not the Sapphire Elder bespeak the presence of Fra'anior's paw upon your life's fires from the very first?>\n\nClose, Auli thought. His little shell-brother.\n\n<LITTLE?>\n\nOh. Sometimes Amaryllion startled her with his listening \u2013 usually when she was unaware, as if her mind's apparent defences had taken a brief holiday. Reset? That could be problematic.\n\n<Relatively speaking, o noble leviathan,> Auli said, mock-respectfully.\n\nAmaryllion's response suggested he was cheerfully flaming cheeky Human girls in his mind's eye.\n\nSazutharr added, <I am too old for intrigue, anyways. But that does not mean I do not enjoy smacking that belligerent Orange across the ear canals from time to time. Hunk of putrescent lizard flesh.> Auli's eyebrows peaked behind her mask at the open insult. <Nay. Consider me thy servant, Auli-Ambar!>\n\nThe Dragon chortled gruffly at her gasp of shock, and then clapped her upon the back, propelling her headfirst into a scroll rack.\n\n<Oh!> he snorted. <Oh, forgot you weren't one of my Apprentices. Alright?>\n\n<Just about,> she wheezed.\n\nSo gallant. Auli reached out, found his paw, and wrapped her arms around his fore talon. Sazutharr gurgled in astonishment. <And this?>\n\nShe said, <If I can attain one hundredth of your eminence, noble Sazutharr, I should die content.>\n\n<Away with dejection, away!>\n\nShortly, armed with seven architectural sections, four music scrolls, two books on construction techniques and one on the tiny matter of ruzal \u2013 or at the very least, repugnant lore that kept nibbling around the edges of her mind, Auli-Ambar exited the Dragon Library front and centre, and rattled steadily along the path that curved like one of the foot-long fishhooks they used to haul giant carp out of Gi'ishior's terrace lake, and returned to the tunnels as though headed for her roost. She hummed gently, a timbre that she thought might evoke Razzior's presence, should he be stalking her. Nothing.\n\nHer father's team would not be sleeping, but they were in a different section of the volcano. Auli snuck between the old entry level armouries again as if heading for a lift shaft, but she ducked behind it instead and took a Human-sized, archaic side route that so far had evaded her attempts to restructure it. It served no real purpose, but neither could it easily be repurposed.\n\nAuli clicked her tongue in exasperation. She hated it when small details evaded her.\n\n\"Ouch.\" Not good for her tangled jaw tendons, apparently. Just this week, Hualiama had inadvertently screamed when her lower face mask slipped out of place.\n\nThat hurt.\n\nThe deepest silences always had a sense of completeness about them, she thought. Nothing could be quieter than utter stillness, except when there was menace. As she walked steadily along that passageway which would shortly connect her into the deep section that held the Concert Cavern, Auli's sense of unease grew. What was it? Not Dragons. She smelled or sensed nothing of Dragon magic, but what did enter her nostrils was a heavy, memory-evoking odour. Rank sankuweed.\n\nAuli froze.\n\n\"Master \u2026 Mi'elgan?\" she quavered.\n\nThere was movement in an alcove to her left. A stirring, that of a large man, she thought, wrinkling her nose at his stale, unwashed smell.\n\n\"Ah, petal,\" he slurred, evidently having to prop himself against a wall. Wine-soaked sot, she thought. Ugh. \"Whassa pretty petal \u2026 doing down here, sshhooo \u2026 late?\"\n\n\"Just passing by,\" she said primly.\n\n\"You shhh \u2026 shhtayy,\" he managed. \"Petal.\"\n\nA heavy hand pawed at her arm; Auli shrugged the man off. \"Don't touch me.\"\n\n\"Now, doan' be unfriendly. Come, petal. One kissshhh.\"\n\nHe threw an arm about her shoulders. She was a tall girl, but this man must be a few inches taller still and probably four or five times her slight weight. His unsteady bulk trapped her against the tunnel wall. Hands pawed at her neck.\n\nAuli had suffered too much this long, long day. She reacted as Si'ishi had taught her. Hard, straight up, the base of her palm smacked into the underside of the lout's jaw. At the same time, she hooked her foot behind his ankle \u2013 nothing exacting or elegant about her execution, but he was very drunk indeed. The man went over like a felled tree. *Smack.*\n\nRoaring rajals, she had done it! Auli wrung her left hand. \"Ugh, probably sprained.\"\n\nWith a soft and very naughty chuckle, she fumbled for his pulse. Alive, aye. He would feel that windroc's egg on his stupid skull tomorrow. And hopefully remember nothing. Thank the heavens that had not been Captain Ra'aba. She would have been diced up like root vegetables for the stewpot.\n\nGripping the tumbrel's handle, she snuck away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 110",
                "text": "Down in the Concert Chamber, Auli had the unexpected problem of reaching the door handle to press open the finely-balanced but Dragon-proportioned doors. She tried stacking three books, but the height still was not enough. She rearranged the ruzal tome on its end and clambered atop carefully, imagining her slipper was Fra'anior's paw trampling upon the ancient Red scientist's unworthy necks. Dangling her full weight off the very end of the massive paw handle in order to maximise leverage, Auli managed to turn the mechanism and the door swung open half a foot. Leap down, put shoulder to door. Whoever had designed those counterweights had done an amazing job. Silently open, silently shut.\n\nThe deserted chamber made her feel entombed.\n\nLeaving the tumbrel right beside the door so that the sound of its scraping wheels might alert her, Auli-Ambar lugged <Of Crimson Lore Resplendent> down to the stage area, grateful for the long-sleeved smock to protect her hand and arm. Even another skin-to-scrolleaf touch seemed too great a risk to take. Down on the stage, she moved to the back and felt her way along the wall. Nothing. That might be expected. How many thousands of pairs of Dragon eyes had stared at the stage's backdrop, never suspecting what it concealed?\n\nThe fake metal scroll had described a meriatonium archway inset in the wall. Be that the case, Auli could not find it, or its anti-magic properties masked the location too well.\n\nNo problem. The lore which had been burned onto her hands and subsequently charred into her personal diary was straightforward, but couched in a stark warning. <Fear for thy immortal soul, thou who durst enter.> She must activate further deposits secreted in the wall of an unspecified nature, which would open a portal of an unspecified nature, which would transport her to the Sacred Library in \u2013 no surprise \u2013 an unspecified manner, whereupon she might perish in ways Amaryllion Fireborn had been perfectly specific about. Marvellous. As in, they might rip her soul from her body and devour it.\n\nHorror stories to ensnare the squeamish? Auli was less than keen to become a test subject.\n\nHualiama had better be worth this!\n\nSteadily, she spoke the access sequences. Five specific ward activation phrases each triggered a further aspect of the portal's operation. Each must be precisely enunciated in flawless Higher Dragonish, which was even more archaic and tongue-twistingly shaded than ordinary Dragonish. She had been required to consult numerous tomes before she grasped all of the linguistic nuances. If the portal appeared, it was utterly soundless \u2013 only, the bolt-upright stature of every hair on Auli's body, including her long braid which rippled away from her head as though whipped by an invisible breeze, informed her of the tempestuous power of the magic that faced her. Sensing a slight radiance, Auli raised her eye mask and was rewarded with a slight orangey glow that resolved into what she took for a very long tunnel.\n\nDespite the horrible blurriness, Auli whooped softly in delight and fluttered her hands together in a draconic gesture of triumph that symbolised flying around the Yellow Moon. Her eyes! They had actually done something that vaguely resembled usefulness. Scribe that on a handy scroll!\n\nSo \u2026 walk into the wall? Enter the Dragon's lair?\n\nStepping forward was like pressing into a warm windstorm that conversely did not blow \u2013 perhaps not physically, nor in any way Auli understood. 'Magic' was no real answer for a scholar! Nor was Taskaturion, the subject expert, the most approachable creature either. A wry sigh escaped her as she tucked the book beneath her left arm. Probing away with her mind and feeling ahead with her outstretched left arm, she edged forward reluctantly. Her fingertips touched something that rippled like water. Then, cold impaled her skin. Having lived all of her life around a volcano, Auli had never imagined such a glacial chill, it seemed to bite into her nerves before ripping along them like a ravenous Dragon tossing back a length of intestines. Her terrified yell was engulfed by an onslaught of pain, then she was through, sweating and shivering and panting all at once, kneeling on some sort of platform that she knew, just by the antiquated, fusty-magical smell of her surrounds, was nowhere near home.\n\n<Welcome, Dragonkin.>\n\nAuli swallowed what felt like a pumice mountain. <Ah, noble Dragon?>\n\n<No, just a library,> said the \u2026 voice. <What is thy wish?>\n\n<I \u2026 well, I wish to deposit a new volume.>\n\n<Describe the contents, please,> said the Library, for all the world like an efficient Dragon staffing the front desk back at Gi'ishior.\n\n<Where am I?> asked Auli. <How did I get \u2013 yeeeeaaaah!>\n\nChills wracked her spine as she whirled, sensing a mighty presence behind her. Of course she saw nothing, not even the portal she had just passed through, but its presence was visceral, an awareness of her own mortality coupled with a keen, alien intelligence that seemed to examine her very bones and congeal them with ice in the doing. Auli could not move. Talons seemed to stroke her flesh.\n\n<Curious form, for a Dragoness.>\n\nShe unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth and whispered, <I am a Human who serves the Dragonkind at Gi'ishior. I am a Loremaster, noble Spirit.>\n\n<Master you are not,> hissed the creature. Its voice was a terrifying paean to the deathly ambiance of its presence. <You bring the gift of lore? Tasty lore? Tell me why I should not summarily slay you where you stand! I despise trespassers!>\n\n<I \u2026 I am but a humble scholar,> Auli quavered, all too aware that the Guardian Spirits probably supped upon her kind for entertainment.\n\n<Oh?> Icy breath seared her face and throat, spreading the chill of death across her flesh.\n\nFight, Auli! Tell the phantasm about Dramagon! Tell it \u2026 <You know not whence I came,> she said through chattering teeth. What?\n\n<HUMAN INTRUDER!>\n\nBarely had the beast's bellow washed over her, knocking Auli backward to the edge of a platform of unknown dimensions or height off the ground, when the creature appeared to recoil. At least, its fearsome chill eased, and it said, <Ah, what manner of bastion ward doth this quaking lump of Humanity carry in its flesh? How very unique! A fascinating case.>\n\nSpecimen number one, Auli-Ambar.\n\nThe presence breathed frostily, <I sense two opposing magics knit into one flesh \u2026 magic of the farthest air-ocean, is this not? Far hast thou wandered from thine aqueous demesne, little enigma. Intriguing. Such fusion or coexistence of antithetical magical classes defies all law; it should be torn apart by forces as elemental as gravity or fire-life itself, yet there it stands, infused with such quickening of the soul as mortal creatures enjoy in this plane of existence.>\n\nThe creature fell silent. Did it withdraw?\n\nStaggered, Auli could only query the unfamiliar terminology. <Air \u2026 ocean? What's an ocean?>\n\nWith lyrical cadence, the Guardian Spirit said, <Across the elemental barrier of Earthen Fires and beyond the third sun lies a fabled realm of tempestuous airborne storms wherein do dwell the people of ocean fair, where waterfalls rush upward to salute the suns' beneficent gaze, and the ever-welling torrents encompass a liquescent ocean of life suspended in the welkin.>\n\nPoetic mumbo-jumbo, but altogether fascinating, the girl decided, trying to make muzzle or tail out of these claims. Could the spirit mean that her mother's realm lay beyond the fabled Rift Storms? Beyond a third Sun? What a bizarre reference! She had never read such a legend. Yet to have this peculiar connection she had always felt with water confirmed, in some part, rocked the foundations of her every Isle.\n\n<My memories suggest that my mother was Pykolese,> Auli noted, hoping she might learn more.\n\n<Pykolese? The air-ocean dwellers are so named?> At last, the spirit's voice seemed to diminish. <I always value new information. Deposit the volume with care, then begone.>\n\n<May I one day return?> she ventured. Bold Auli! Wow!\n\nAfter a terrible pause broken only by the butterfly-like fluttering of icy, ethereal talons about her neck, as though the exact point or manner of execution must be considered, the Guardian Spirit hissed, <I sense in thee a kindred spirit, a fundamental regard of lore analogous to mine own. You alone will I permit entry, upon this condition. Bring me sufficient word, o scholarly scale mite, of this mythical realm of impossibilities given form \u2013 this air-ocean of thine heritage \u2013 and we Spirits shall be content. Fail, and perish.>\n\nAuli bowed. <Upon my word as upon thine, let it be, o Guardian Spirit.>\n\n<We are avowed.>\n\nAnd in another peculiar turn of events, she remained alive. Talking to a Library about realms beyond imagination and secret, lethal lore. Oh well. With a sigh, Auli verbally summarised what she thought the volume Of Crimson Lore Resplendent contained, and outlined its dangers.\n\nSpectral tendrils prickled Auli's flesh as they spirited the tome away into what she realised had to be an enormous space. She flexed her fingers charily, feeling both relief and loss. If only she could have seen this place. Yet she must be content but to have tarried upon the threshold of a library perhaps never trod by Human foot, and having conversed with the mortiferous fires of the Guardian Spirits, to escape with her life.\n\nFor this night, it was enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 111",
                "text": "Day rolled into day, and month into month, and the fear of repercussions began to fade into the background of Auli-Ambar's life. It seemed she might have succeeded. Auli had her work, the opening of her fragrance baths to anticipate \u2013 annoyingly delayed by the minor catastrophe of Sylakia's attempted invasion of Jeradia \u2013 and preparations to make for Hualiama's transfer to the Palace. Matters proceeded at the speed of royal law, which was to say, marginally faster than a fossilised land snail.\n\nAt least half a dozen times, Auli prepared 'rainbows forever' scrolls to cause the Prince to fall desperately in love with her, and then ceremonially burned them in her chambers. She could not have carried it through. The fourth time she managed to set her face mask alight, which also singed off her left eyebrow. This caused Zimtyna and Arkurion, upon his next visit to Gi'ishior, no end of merriment.\n\nZimtyna and Bazukior broke up, re-engaged, and broke up again. Four episodes within two months. Poor girl. She had to be more downcast and pessimistic than Auli, which was an impressive achievement. They toasted eternal singleness together with great solemnity.\n\nIn the soothing rhythm of time, Prince Hi'ixion did of his own accord renew his interest in matters Auli-Ambar, and having failed to forget her for three visits running, became her swain, her gallant Prince, her every rainbow over every Isle. Perhaps she might have been forgiven a smidgen of giddiness. His kisses were the stuff of ballads; tender, swoon-worthy affairs that occupied rather more of her waking hours than Auli would ever disclose, and appeared to ignore the trickiness of a jaw that regularly became dislocated for reasons of \u2026 well, enthusiasm. There was a good word.\n\nHer greatest joy, however, was to play or just spend time with Hualiama, who was becoming quite the little scamp. She lisped joyously, danced incessantly, and began to learn the words of the child-friendly ballads Auli taught her. Hualiama began to speak of her new life at the Palace and her new Mommy-to-be, and gradually made the switch to Island Standard rather than speaking Dragonish. For his part, Grandion's jealousy appeared to ease as matters ground inevitably in one direction. The Masters Chamzu and Ga'athar revelled playing their part in the plot, flying children and fledglings all over the Cluster almost on a weekly basis as schooling turned 'practical.' Outings ranged from observing feral Dragons to taking a census of dragonets, and from making studies of fauna and flora of the various Islands, to shopping in the markets near the Palace for the Human children. More than once Chamzu reported Ra'aba and Xa'an tearing out their respective beards as schedules and cargo and passenger manifests were flagrantly violated or modified literally on the fly.\n\nEight months after she had safeguarded Hualiama that fateful day and concealed the ruzal from Razzior's greedy paw, the news arrived in one innocuous, Island-shaking scroll written in the Queen's hand and personally delivered by her father. Hualiama's adoption had been approved. The girl must be delivered to the Palace forthwith.\n\nAuli wept her strangely tearless, heaving sobs. She was inconsolable."
            },
            {
                "title": "Flight or Fright",
                "text": "\u2002Hope is that emotion most riven with glorious terror, a unique, intensely personal expression of suffering. May hope's promise never play you false. \u2014Ianthine the Draco-Mystic, Collected Wisdom Sayings\n\nEarly that storm season morning, very close to her sixteenth birthday and her age of majority under Fra'aniorian lore, Auli supervised the loading of her Dragonharp into Master Chamzu's vessel, as usual. None would know that inside the false bottom of her case lay one tiny, sleeping child, of white-blonde hair and effervescent laughter, in whom all the fire-life of the Dragons themselves seemed to burn so brightly. Auli had administered a herbal drink in the early hours before suns-rise, ensuring that Hualiama would not wake for the five hours their flight should take. She quadruple-checked the fastenings and the air holes before leaving her chambers with the instrument.\n\nShortly, the Dragonship swayed upward into the still dawn air, hissing and creaking at the joints as the sailors steered her out through the tunnel access and over the great terrace lake, before setting her nose toward the East. With the suns-rise came the warm volcanic breezes, rocking the vessel as they crossed heat inversions and negotiated the tricky thermals around the rim Islands. Auli deliberately stilled her soul as she took her stance toward the port bow. She drew out the new minifying oculars Arkurion had built for her, and put them to the test.\n\nMinoculars, anyone?\n\nStrange how she resented the thought that she might, one day, not be able to be called blind anymore. For she saw afar toward a pair of fuzzy blobs that must display that colour they called orange, one very slightly higher than the other, and puzzled over the narrowness of her field of vision that achieved such a result. It was as if she looked upon the world through a tube many tens of miles long, but had the capacity to see what lay right at the end. Utterly impractical. The need to magnify her sight would have made much more sense.\n\nDespite her rampant fears, the flight proceeded smoothly. No Dragons. No unusual checks. She was just the Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish on her way to teach the royal children, as she did every month.\n\nAfter landing, as the unloading progressed at the Dragonship docks, a soldier called her aside. \"What's in the bag, lady?\" he said roughly.\n\n\"My Dragonharp.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"A musical instrument.\"\n\n\"Dragon stuff, eh? I'll have to take a look. Open the bag.\" Clamping down on an urge to scream, Auli began to comply. The man said at once, \"Captain Ra'aba. Look at this.\"\n\n\"What is it, soldier?\" came that much-hated voice. Smooth as oil. Nasty as a Green Dragon's most bilious acid attack.\n\n\"Look, Captain, the base is too thick,\" he said, most probably pointing at the offending part. Exactly where Hualiama lay!\n\nAuli was speechless. Mentally prepared, aye, but terrified out of her wits.\n\n\"Well, Auli-Ambar? Can you explain to our zealous new recruit?\" sneered Ra'aba. Oddly, the note of sarcastic boredom in his voice settled her.\n\n\"Just my music scrolls, Captain Ra'aba,\" she replied lightly, managing not to squeak or sound at all breathless. \"The case opens here, see, beneath the base of the instrument. It's a storage section where I keep all my Palace-approved musical scrolls for teaching the \u2013\"\n\n\"Bah, scholars,\" said Ra'aba. \"Carry on.\"\n\nThe soldier clearly heard the implied threat in his Captain's voice, because he barked, \"Captain says carry on, girl.\"\n\n\"That's the Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish, soldier,\" the Captain growled, apparently not even bothering to turn before venting his spleen on his unfortunate target. \"She works at the Palace. Remember this one well, for she worships Sapphurion's every scale. Dragons' paw-licker if ever you met one.\"\n\nUgh. Shaking and nauseous, Auli followed the dock labourers wheeling her instrument and carrying her bags toward the Palace. So far, so safe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 113",
                "text": "The standard second check at the doors to the royal nursery was more cursory. Check inside the harp bag. Finding neither pythons nor Dragons nor an army of anti-royalists being smuggled about the Isles, in she went with her priceless cargo. She tried not to sag with relief, but Auli's weak knees promptly threw a decidedly inelegant wobble into the mix that had her clutching for the bag and very nearly toppling the entire instrument on the floor. That would have been inexcusable.\n\nAuli had thought the Queen would be first in line to greet her new charge, but apparently there were protocols and measures galore which Xa'an had not been entirely forthright about. Essentially, once Auli had unpacked her instrument and the more valuable cargo sleeping beneath it, the child should be inspected minutely for defects by a doctor and then thoroughly disinfected.\n\nPoliteness rather failed her at this juncture.\n\nNonetheless, a steamed-up Auli and sleepy-annoyed Hualiama attended to all that was demanded of them, including the return or destruction of all clothing sourced from Gi'ishior. The doctor probed her ears and checked her throat while Hualiama sang him a ditty about dragonets playing with a ball of string. Perhaps something of Auli's foul mood communicated to him, for he completed the examination with almost indecent alacrity.\n\n\"A bouncing, healthy young girl, perfect in every respect,\" he pronounced, and exited Auli's chamber post-haste.\n\nXa'an quipped, \"Channelling our inner Dragoness, daughter?\"\n\n\"Keep count of your fingers, father.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"I don't. I singularly fail to see the point of this charade,\" Auli glowered, growing angry at her own pun. Marvellous. Then Hualiama demanded a cuddle, which was impossible to resist, as usual. \"There, darling, we're here now. Mommy Shyana will be along in a minute.\"\n\nHualiama bit her ear.\n\n\"Ouch!\"\n\n\"Dwagoness Hualiama,\" she chuckled merrily.\n\n\"Rascally pipsqueak! The rat already took a piece of that one. Don't you start.\"\n\n\"Down. Hualiama dance.\"\n\nAuli sighed. Maybe focussing on harp strings for a few minutes would soothe her frazzled nerves. That, or she'd do or say something regrettable and summarily end her input into this little girl's life. Hualiama still needed her \u2013 didn't she?\n\nAs she played and Hualiama's feathery footsteps twirled about her like the rising winds of a tiny storm, she considered the fate of a girl snatched from Master Mi'elgan and Mistress Sairana's house and brought up amongst Dragons. This girl had enjoyed a most unusual privilege. For Auli, it was Chamzu's rescue and Sazutharr's warm welcome to his Dragon Library which had changed her life's course, even before Arkurion's deft insight had brought it all into focus. She winced. Figuratively speaking. Then, her involvement with Sapphurion and Qualiana.\n\nWho would Hualiama's benefactors be? Could she hope that her small actions might somehow abet and inspire a great future? With the ruzal securely hidden, aye, she could hope. As Amaryllion loved to opine, one never knew when a Dragon's wingbeat might trigger a tempest. Unintentional aftereffects. When Auli had put that point of view to Sazutharr, the Dragon librarian had been most tickled. 'Aye, Auli. Aye indeed!'\n\nThen came a gentle knocking at the door, and Hualiama darted for the safety of Auli's arms. She buried her head against her shoulder. \"No mommy. Wowwied. Go home?\"\n\n\"Dearest pollen-fluff, this will be your new home. Remember?\"\n\n\"No. Lee-lee don't want home. Where home?\"\n\nPoor mite. No small wonder she was confused. Auli squeezed her tight, making to stand.\n\n\"No need,\" Queen Shyana said, entering with a muted rustling of what must be a long lace gown. Bah. Since when did one not rise for royalty? Auli struggled to her feet regardless. Or was disobedience worse? Help! \"Islands' greetings, Auli-Ambar. And \u2026 do I remember this little dragonet? Cheep, cheep.\"\n\nHualiama wriggled as a finger tickled her ribs. \"No.\"\n\n\"She's in a bit of a 'no' phase, o Queen,\" Auli advised, startled to receive a fond kiss upon her cheek from Shyana.\n\n\"I'd imagine so,\" said the Queen. \"Have you grown taller again, o reed most slender? Welcome to your new home, Hualiama \u2013 and Auli, how can I ever thank you enough?\" Auli wanted to say, 'By letting me take Hualiama back again.' \"There's your service to the throne, but also to me personally. I'll be forever grateful.\"\n\nIf she remembered. If anyone did. Sighing within, Auli dredged a gracious word or two up from the darkness of her heart.\n\nShyana must have known or at least suspected the lie of her feelings, because she was very kind to Auli as she questioned her for over two hours about all things Hualiama. Every detail, nuance and foible had to be known. Her joy in dancing and singing. The words and phrases she preferred. It did not take her long to conclude that Shyana would make a wonderful, devoted mother to this orphan. The kind of mother she had never enjoyed.\n\nWould she ever find her mother? Or Hualiama, hers?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 114",
                "text": "That afternoon, an elegant scroll arrived from Prince Hi'ixion inviting her to accompany him on a day trip, for which Auli had to seek special permission. Rainbows dancing over Islands! \"Do you think he'll want to talk about the future, Shyana? Our future?\" she asked excitedly.\n\n\"His was a very traditional family,\" she said, chuckling at Auli's fervour. \"He might want you to meet a special mentor or friend.\"\n\nRather to Auli's disappointment, the purpose of the trip was rajal hunting.\n\nShe supposed she had one small advantage. Wearing a face mask, the good Prince could not see the faces she pulled behind his back as they flew up to the mid-North of Fra'anior's main Island, found a suitable patch of wilderness where a particularly troublesome beast was said to have made his lair, and set off into the tropical jungle accompanied by a troop of soldiers, five of whom were assigned the sole task of protecting Auli from assorted nastiness \u2013 feral monkeys, rajals, pythons, fourteen varieties of deadly spitting cobras, and other jungle delights. She rather wished they could mop her brow and feed her cool prekki-fruit juice. The jungle was sweaty, loamy and as humid as a Sylakian soldier's well-used socks, and all sorts of bushes and vines and fallen logs kept attacking her knees and ankles. Not her favourite sort of adventure.\n\nThe Prince had thoughtfully provided a maidservant who helped her bathe at a small pool afterward, out of sight of the troops, and then it was on to a picnic dinner upon a flat-topped boulder overlooking the caldera, and Auli began to nurse a flame of expectation that all her skirmishing with bushes might have been worth it. The Prince seemed in a jolly mood following his successful hunt. If listening to men crashing through bushes, growling, shouting and having absolutely no idea what was going on counted for anything, then Auli had been part of her first rajal hunt.\n\nMuch easier just to send in a Dragon!\n\nA soft rush mat to recline upon. Delicious nibbles. Bubbly berry-wine raised to a cheerful backdrop of chirruping birds saluting the gathering evening. Undivided royal attention. Life, my dear scholar, could be worse.\n\nTo her surprise, just as she began to relax and enjoy herself, she heard the turbine beat of another Dragonship approaching. A trader, perhaps?\n\nThat was when Prince Hi'ixion seized her left wrist and clamped cold metal around it.\n\nA manacle! \"Hi'ixion!\" she squeaked. \"Are you kidnapping me?\"\n\nShe tried half-heartedly to beat him off, but the Prince was a strong young man and very determined. A few token kicks later, and he had her wrists secured behind her back.\n\nAuli growled furiously. \"If this is a kidnapping, mister, it's supposed to be done from my home. And, I'm not yet sixteen. I will not stand for \u2013\"\n\n\"This is not a kidnapping,\" he said coldly. \"Now, settle down.\"\n\n\"It's \u2026 not? What?\"\n\n\"Captain Ra'aba will arrive any moment.\"\n\n\"Ra'aba!\" Auli struggled furiously against the manacles, trying to twist up to her knees, but the Prince's hard-muscled arm prevented her from rising. When he did not speak, she cried, \"What the hells is this, Hi'ixion?\"\n\nHe said, \"I'm sorry, Auli. He'll explain.\"\n\nWhat Auli-Ambar understood was the bottomless well of betrayal's bitterness. Humiliation, too, but mostly the knowledge of the Prince's treachery. Him? She had a terrible feeling she knew exactly who might be behind this. For how long had he been playing her for a fool? Months? Had he actually remembered her, or had he been prompted by another agent?\n\nShe said, \"Well, this is one way to rile the Dragonkind, Hi'ixion. I can't say I'd want to show my head above the parapet once Sapphurion hears about this.\"\n\n\"When he hears about your treachery, do you mean?\"\n\n\"My treachery? Mine?\"\n\nAwkwardly, the Prince returned, \"You're party to vital information you're concealing; information that could destroy the draconic race. I'd imagine most Dragons would look kindly upon one who abetted \u2013\"\n\n\"Ra'aba put you up to this! You lying, conniving slug!\"\n\nWrenching away from the protesting Prince, Auli gained her feet. She heard the soldiers spreading out and the rattle of weapons, but in truth, they had little to fear from a chained scholar. Or did they?\n\n<Amaryllion! Amaryllion, I'm in trouble!>\n\nNo reply.\n\nNow was the time for him to be absent? Could this be about Hualiama? Definitely, it concerned the prophecy advanced by Ianthine. The child or the ruzal \u2026 or, Auli cleared her bone-dry throat painfully, both? What did Ra'aba and his undoubted collaborator, Razzior, know? Xa'an had assured her that Ra'aba knew nothing about the child. The plan was for Hualiama's presence to remain unremarked for several months by the busy Captain of the Guard, who had many other responsibilities \u2013 for example, destroying Auli's plans and rallying the Dragons against her \u2026\n\nAs Hi'ixion approached, speaking soothingly, she focussed narrowly upon his voice. Which way was the Prince facing? Directly toward her? She realised she had no idea what he might be wearing. It was unlikely he would still be wearing his body armour once the hunt was finished, wasn't it?\n\n\"Auli, all you have to do is tell the Captain what he wants to know,\" argued the Prince. Closer. \"Come on, it's not as bad as all that.\"\n\nShe raised her chin. \"Oh? Then why the manacles?\"\n\n\"Orders.\"\n\nCoward. Ra'aba's boot-kissing lackey! So much for a royal romance. Dreams, *kerpoof.* Auli's muscles drew taut, and her fury felt like the bottomless pit of a volcanic hell, set to detonate at the slightest pretext. When he spoke again \u2026\n\nThe Prince said, \"Auli, you have to understand \u2013\"\n\n\"I do!\" With a wild yell, she launched her left foot in a scything arc that aimed to dis-orbit whichever Moon might be abroad this day. She struck something soft.\n\nThe Prince made a noise like a punctured Dragonship balloon, and collapsed against her knees.\n\nNo time to celebrate. Auli bolted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 115",
                "text": "Her flight lasted all of perhaps seven seconds. Having remembered to negotiate the drop from the boulder to a stretch of grassy meadow below, Auli stumbled through the wildflowers before tripping over what felt like a soldier's spear and measuring her length upon what she had taken for soft grass. She tried to fling out her hands. Trapped.\n\n*Krack!*\n\nHer chin rebounded off a small rock. For a second she just lay there, watching for one of the very few occasions of her life, the play of lights behind her eyes. Pretty.\n\nThen, pain ignited like fire all about her jaw and seared up into her head. Auli cried out, smothered in the agony, in the burning, in the place of knowing nothing but pain. Chips burst from her mouth with each cough. Bits of teeth. Blood. Bone.\n\n\"Fools!\" roared the Prince.\n\nPeople were talking above her. Around her. The voices said things about haemorrhaging and broken jawbones, but she knew only excruciation. She must not move her mouth. Hands turned her onto her side to stop the choking, although there was not much bleeding, someone said. The pain clamped her head like a vice and slowly ratcheted up the pressure.\n\nThen, the acid tones of Ra'aba passed over her, searing. Condemning. Calloused fingers checked her mouth. His fingers, with the grip-strength of a swordsman. \"Broken. At least four or five places. Idiots! I needed the girl able to talk!\"\n\nHer tongue felt so thick. Swollen unto bursting, like her heart.\n\n\"Get me a cursed doctor from town. Now! And give her something to stop the pain. All I need is speech, nothing else. The damage can be fixed later, if needs be.\"\n\nIn a low, agonised voice Hi'ixion mumbled, \"Can it? Hurting Auli-Ambar wasn't part of the deal, Ra'aba.\"\n\n\"Oh, go mewl somewhere else, kitten!\" snarled the Captain, before he set about cursing the Prince with the lurid facility of a professional soldier. \"If you'd just bothered to hold her, you wouldn't be limping about like she unmanned you!\"\n\nThe Prince whined, \"Mouldering son of a windroc, I'll see you \u2013\"\n\n\"Interred? Decent kick for a blind, manacled scholar, wasn't it? Damaged the family hoard down there? You can't even stand upright \u2013 idiot Princeling!\"\n\nAuli hurt too much to enjoy their interaction. What now, o bruiser of princes' manly egos?\n\nSomeone rolled up their cloak to pillow her head; a gentler hand tried to clear some of the mess out of her mouth so that her airway would not be obstructed. As the man's movements inadvertently jolted her jaw, she passed out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 116",
                "text": "She regained consciousness to sense the unmistakable rocking motion of a Dragonship in flight. She felt strangely good. The pain had passed through her being, leaving just a dull, faraway aching in its wake. Auli remembered that she had been badly hurt, but she was too busy watching colourful phantasms flitting behind her eyes, and enjoying a sensation far more soaring than Dragonship flight. She cartwheeled like a dragonet through the night skies. Nothing mattered anymore. All of her cares floated away upon warm, luxurious duck down from Archion Island, the stuff of royal pillow rolls.\n\nWhere was she?\n\nWaterfalls thundered behind her ears. Great torrents of life, powering upward into the skies \u2013 what were the skies like, anyhow? Or the moons? What was the colour blue, the colour strangely splashed upon her Dragon's kiss? She imagined her mother as a fragrant flower, the touch of her puckered petals infusing rippling, mellifluent life into her being, where water mingled with fire and created something \u2026 unique. Infeasible. Delicate as starlight yet as strong as the striving, thriving, ever-changing power of life itself. Were she comprised of such pith, it were wondrous indeed.\n\nPerhaps such as she should never have been, yet she was.\n\nFirewater.\n\nWaterfire.\n\nDizzying, spinning, tumbling ecstatically through pain into sorrow and from sorrow to joy, she soared upon the roaring billows. All was elemental, majestic, the sporting of wildfires within the tranquil pond of her being.\n\nAuli settled. Her brows furrowed. Where had she been?\n\nA voice said, \"Who the freaking fumaroles do you think you are?\"\n\nShe struggled to speak.\n\nXa'an said, \"The truth is as I have told you. We know not her mother. I have amnesia \u2013 magically induced amnesia. Your informants told the truth.\"\n\nOh no. They had her father too?\n\n\"That must have been a memorable relationship,\" sneered a draconic voice. No surprises there. Who other than Razzior? \"Ra'aba, focus your thoughts. Look, the girl's awake. We can question her \u2013 if you haven't broken her jaw too thoroughly, you dumb rajal.\"\n\n\"It was the boy \u2013\"\n\n\"Oh, shut the fangs,\" Razzior snapped. \"Auli, if you can hear me, speak.\"\n\nHer mouth and tongue were so bruised and puffy, all she could produce was a sound like, *awwwgghh.*\n\n\"Good,\" said the Dragon. \"So, here we are. Girl, we've brought you to a little-known Islet just off the northernmost peninsula of Fra'anior Cluster. Your father graces us with his presence \u2013 begrudgingly. We want information. I would strongly suggest that you discover ways to communicate clearly, or we'll be forced to encourage you.\"\n\nXa'an called, \"Razzior, please, speak to me \u2013\"\n\n\"Someone shut that fool up.\"\n\nAuli winced as the sound of a heavy blow fell dully upon her ears. Her father groaned. Ways indeed.\n\nRazzior sneered, \"I can be very persuasive. Imagine my fore-talon sliding into your father's bowels, like this \u2013\" A creature screamed. For a moment, she mistook the sound for that of a windroc's ferocious shriek, but then it lingered horribly into a bubbling, agonised cry that was unmistakably that of a man. The Dragon snickered, \"Or we might start twisting off limbs, like this \u2026\"\n\n*Nuuurrrrrggghhh!* Auli shouted. Her entire face felt as if it would throb off her shoulders any second. Judging by the hot rasp of her breath past her tongue, she feared the swelling would constrict her airway any moment.\n\n\"Ah, suddenly so motivated,\" Razzior snickered. \"You can have so much fun with a blind girl. I wasn't even torturing your father, little one. Just some random villager, unlucky to be abroad tonight. So, how's your capacity for speech coming along?\"\n\n\"Don't tell him anything!\" yelled Xa'an. *Thud!* \"Aargh!\"\n\n\"One leg broken,\" the Orange Dragon said callously. \"I don't even need a hammer. I'll just stand on him and slowly, very slowly, crush the life out of your precious daddy.\"\n\n\"Father!\"\n\nHorribly slurred, but recognisable speech it was.\n\n\"Better and better,\" purred Razzior.\n\n\"Oh, Xa'an's still alive,\" the Captain put in. \"So, we've wasted more than enough time on that popinjay Princeling and your worthless sire. Situational briefing. Hear my demands. You will tell us what you know about this secret of the Child of the Dragon, and exactly where you hid it that day, Miss Clever Scholar. Aye, we know you found something. You see, men like to talk, especially drunks.\"\n\nAuli hissed.\n\n\"Aye. That soldier, that's the one. Took us a cursed long time to find the sot, but he mouthed off in a tavern one night \u2013 in Sylakia Town of all places.\" The Captain sounded as if he were pacing past her prone body as he continued to expound, \"You were carrying books that night, but to where? That is the question, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Music,\" she managed to slur, but it came out more as 'moo-thick.'\n\n\"Oh, but we know better.\" Ra'aba resorted to his habitual sneering. \"Put together a Dragon Library reference in the forbidden section, stolen by someone's father, connect that to the daughter's presence in the Library that very day, and add a scent trace found upon leggings abandoned in the garbage midden and a soldier's testimony \u2026 aye, we have looked far, girl. Far and deep. So you will tell what you have hidden and where it is. You will reveal all.\"\n\nDespite the fogging effect of the herbs or drugs on her mind, Auli was thinking very rapidly now. The kind of thinking motivated, as Razzior had correctly pointed out, by that incredible desire to see herself and her father survive this fell pass.\n\nShe goaded them, \"Unfortunately, Razzior destroyed the Lib \u2013\"\n\nHuman and Dragon bellowed simultaneously. Through the fading and returning billows of her consciousness the expressions of their fury sounded eerily in tune with each other, as if one single voice spoke at two different timbres, and one issued from a rough Human throat while the other boomed from a Dragon's vocal resonators, chords and articulation structures. Linked. Strangely, their mental accord reminded her of Azziala and her disparate voices. A work of magic had been wreaked in their lives, fey and binding and fearfully powerful magic, and it drove them to perilous extremes \u2013 beyond the bounds of ordinary Human or even draconic hubris. She wondered dully what consequences would visit this uncanny duo; what travails and torments they would doubtless inflict upon the Island-World \u2026\n\n\"Speak!\" Razzior and Ra'aba snarled in concert.\n\nThe beginnings of a desperate, crazy plan began to formulate inside of Auli's pain-and drug-pickled mind. She too could make connections. Many connections. The uncanny link between Razzior and Ra'aba. Lore based on the magical properties of Dragon blood. They had exchanged blood and perhaps more, the two of them, coupled with incantations of vile lore. Perhaps Ra'aba had something of a Dragon about him, now. Something borrowed or stolen from the Orange, and vice versa. Would it not kill them? Was this type of magic even stable, or was this the reason that they sought the power of ruzal, to seal or deepen their pact?\n\nThe key was to deflect their attention away from Hualiama. To protect those dearest to her.\n\n\"Father life?\" she whispered.\n\n\"You want his life?\" growled the Orange. \"No problem \u2013 depending on how helpful we deem you to be.\"\n\n\"Both our lives in exchange \u2026\" Auli slurred.\n\nXa'an groaned.\n\nDid she know what she was doing? No. Most definitely not. This was a matter of deep Dragon lore, deeper than the Cloudlands could ever be. She had seized upon a glimmering of an idea. Maybe if she played it with the mastery of a Zanthrillior upon his Dragonharp, she might stand a gnat's chance of landing on the caldera floor and living.\n\n\"We agree to spare your miserable lives once we get what we want,\" Captain Ra'aba said, with a disgusting smacking sound of his lips. \"Promise.\"\n\n\"Same,\" grunted the Dragon.\n\nShe was shaking now, shaking so hard and trying not to vomit because she knew it would likely just become stuck behind the swelling in her mouth and choke her. What would become of her distorted jaw now? Would she ever be able to eat again? Corral the crazed-windroc thoughts flapping about inside her skull. Concentrate. Play the harp-strings of fate.\n\nAs clearly as she could, Auli stated, \"The child is not a literal child. It is a figurative usage, as in, the brainchild of Dramagon. It is his essence, his magical core, the stuff of who Dramagon is \u2026 or was \u2026. and it is called ruzal.\"\n\n<Yeeeeesssss,> Razzior crowed. <More. Give us more!>\n\nBoth of them must be looming over her now, for Razzior's foetid breath warmed her face and Ra'aba, disturbingly, panted in exact time with the Dragon just nearby.\n\nAuli said, \"It is a living type of magic. Ruzal assumes its own forms and ways, and so in this sense too, the magic is the Child of the Dragon. It is passed down as some form of extract from the original essence of Dramagon's fearful fire-life, but is no mere copy \u2013\"\n\n\"We don't need some stupid scholarly lesson!\" snapped Ra'aba. \"Where is it?\"\n\n\"I hid it.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Both man and Dragon growled simultaneously now.\n\n\"That night, I hid it. You're right.\" She forced out the words, hoping by some miracle that they would take the bait. \"I buried the book of its lore where you will never find it. It's describes a magic so foul, a perversion so \u2013\"\n\n<WHERE?>\n\nRazzior's blast struck her so hard, Auli distinctly felt the broken bones of her jaw rattling together. Yet the painkillers must be very strong, or dangerous, for the pain was still as dull as a blunt knife quarrying holes in her skull. She swallowed a few more bits of bone or tooth, she could not tell. Don't cough! Please \u2026\n\nShe must give this pair just enough information to hang themselves \u2026 oh, she was so mixed up. Did any of this even make sense?\n\n<The thread of your father's life lies tenuously upon my talons,> Razzior purred.\n\nNo! \"Concert \u2026\" she moaned.\n\nRa'aba hissed, \"What? What concert? That one you told me Zanthrillior gave? Is it a musical key? Speak, girl!\"\n\n\"Silence, you withering numbskull,\" snorted the Orange. \"Let the girl speak.\"\n\n\"Concert Hall.\"\n\n\"What? What's in the Concert Hall?\" The huge Dragon stamped his foot, jolting her head. That was too much for Auli.\n\nBlack waterfalls crashed over her awareness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 117",
                "text": "She pleaded with Amaryllion. Over and over.\n\n<I am with you, little mouse,> he insisted. When she continued to beg mindlessly, he added, <I cannot intervene. I must not, or the consequences will likely not be as you would imagine.>\n\n<Conse \u2026>\n\n<Worse,> he said simply. <Far, far worse.>\n\nWorse than what she had already suffered? Despair settled like molten lead within her heart. She could not help but feel abandoned at the hour of her greatest need.\n\nHe said, <You must be brave. Stay the course, precious Auli. Stay \u2026 I abide with the \u2026>\n\nHow could she? How, when she felt so crushed?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 118",
                "text": "Fragments.\n\nA paw clasping her body. Low, urgent voices. Movement. Silence. Stone cooling her back. Fresh water daubed her face.\n\n\"Auli?\" said her father. \"Auli, you need to wake up.\"\n\n\"Daaaa \u2026 uhhh.\"\n\n\"Easy, little dragonet. You took some heavy damage. Look, we have the word of a Dragon, if you will just show them where you hid the book that night \u2026\"\n\n\"Be \u2026 behind the \u2026 stage.\"\n\nHer speech was so bad now, just a whisper issuing from amidst the wreckage, that it took five attempts before they worked out her meaning.\n\nRazzior snarled, \"Behind? There is no behind. That's hundreds of feet of solid igneous stone!\"\n\nThreats. Groans. Wailing. Eventually everyone found the same scrolleaf and the soldiers carried her to the rear middle part of the stage. There, Auli began to speak the wards in slow, much-repeated phrases until she managed not to mangle them, and the magic flowered before her mind with clarion, therapeutic power. Razzior and Ra'aba groused about hurrying. They cursed and railed bitterly at each other, and occasionally at her. A guard was set upon the doors. Meantime, she felt her father's presence just nearby. His hands, manacled to chains fastened about his waist, it seemed, touched her face or shoulder occasionally, as if he willed his strength into her.\n\nXa'an could not know what a risk she took. He must not.\n\nAt one point, he whispered, \"Had I known you had become such an Enchantress \u2026\"\n\nNo. They tossed Enchantresses off cliffs!\n\nEventually, Auli succeeded in speaking the code phrases correctly. Exhausted, she sank back against her father's arm and breathed, \"The portal is ready. Shall I fetch the tome for you, Ra'aba?\"\n\n\"The portal's too small,\" Razzior growled in annoyance. \"Only Human-sized? Who was it purposed for? Where does it lead?\"\n\n\"To the Sacred Library,\" Auli replied.\n\n\"This is mighty magic indeed,\" said the Orange, sounding as if he were rubbing his paws, a gesture in draconic circles carrying the additional nuance of gold-lust. \"There will be treasures within, Ra'aba. Treasures I can't wait to plumb.\"\n\nA boot paused beside her head. \"Wait,\" said Auli, trying to lift her left hand in warning.\n\n\"Wait? What's the matter?\" said Ra'aba.\n\n\"It's dangerous. I should go.\"\n\n\"What kind of dangerous?\" As she had hoped, more than a hint of challenge entered the Captain's voice at her claim. No mere girl walked ahead of him into danger! When Auli began to explain haltingly that there were guardians set in place by Fra'anior himself, the man snapped, \"Then I'll destroy them! There's no way we can trust this fey child with that lore, Razzior! She'll simply abscond again and we'll be back to chasing shadows.\"\n\n\"Couldn't walk ten feet in her state,\" Razzior opined.\n\n\"Seems resilient enough \u2013 perhaps she'd find the strength if you started peeling her father's hide?\" Ra'aba suggested, with a spiteful laugh.\n\nXa'an said, \"Auli, dearest petal, don't you worry about my life. You're still young \u2013\"\n\n\"Shut it!\" Ra'aba must have swung his boot, but Auli heard it hit something perhaps other than its aim, for although her father fell heavily, he did not cry out. \"Silence, you fool. You and your daughter have been colluding exactly as King Chalcion feared. Now I, Ra'aba, shall secure this perilous lore. Stand aside \u2013 not that you can. Ha ha!\"\n\nAll that overweening pomposity and arrogance had a grip upon the man. Auli tried not to hold her breath. She tried to act normal, even a little concerned, but the fierce pounding of her heart had to be a dead giveaway. Each throb forced blood agonisingly through the tissues of her grossly swollen face. Would the trick work?\n\nRazzior hissed, <Heartbeat's mincing along like a scared spiral-horn deer.>\n\n<I know. She doesn't want me to take the lore.> Ra'aba stepped over her. <Foolish child! You've done enough damage already. It's time for the adults to take over.>\n\nEven through her ostensibly opaque mask, Auli saw something come alight. A very hazy door with an arched lintel. The immense power of magic sucked her breath away.\n\nLess than a quarter-breath later, Razzior screamed. She had never heard a Dragon make such a sound. It cut right through her in a rising, keening wail of the uttermost terror, as if Razzior had experienced the death of his own immortal fire-soul, and lived to voice the paean of his woe to the very heavens. The Halls shook beneath her back. Xa'an threw himself over her body to protect her, for a moment later the great Orange began to convulse.\n\nSomeone shouted, \"Back! He's having a fit!\"\n\nDid Dragons even have epileptic fits? His juddering shook the Concert Hall, and it was such a boon that the Dragonharp must have been put in storage until it was needed again, for the thumping and growling and gnashing of fangs was as if a bestial animal \u2013 fifty tonnes of insane fury \u2013 had been unleashed inside that chamber.\n\nThe portal's magic flared a second time. All Auli saw was the outline of a man impressed upon her vision, a negative of his shape, as though he had somehow been cut out of reality in the instant of passing between the Sacred Library and this space. Then a weight collapsed over Xa'an's back and legs, rolled down upon the stage, and all became still.\n\nShe smelled burned flesh. Was she supposed to feel sorry for Ra'aba, now?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Choices",
                "text": "Two weeks later, Arkurion arrived like a miniature squall riding the back of a gorgeously warm volcanic zephyr. <Auli-Ambar!> he boomed.\n\nShe raised a hand from her bed, and rasped, <Arkurion.>\n\nWell, that was the best she could manage through the metal frame strapped about her face, which kept her jaw utterly immobile. Qualiana's orders. Speech was possible, it just wasn't a very pretty or intelligible affair.\n\nHe said, <Can't fit inside that tiny space. Any chance they'd move you to wider quarters? Can't spank your backside from here, you know.>\n\n<They messaged you fast!>\n\nHe said, <Kayturia flew to Tanstoy Dragon Roost at top speed.>\n\n<Oh.>\n\nWhat a pang! However, the Mercury Blue noted sardonically, <Still on punishment duty. She's been demoted to a messenger Dragoness. Oddly enough, Sapphurion seems very keen to put her to work. Much extensive and demeaning work. I just can't fathom why.>\n\nAuli had to laugh at his tone, even though it hurt. Badly. Having twenty-four screws drilled into her facial and maxillary bones to hold everything in place, before being immobilised in bed for two weeks, had that sort of effect on a person.\n\nHe said, <Glad to see you alive. Ghastly contraption, though. Can't imagine that's very comfortable.>\n\n<No.>\n\n<Ah, and your Prince \u2026>\n\nShe sighed. <He betrayed me. He was man enough to come and make profuse apologies, however.> When Arkurion gave this statement the abrasive-snort-of-disgust treatment, which Auli received with warm appreciation, she added, <I did, sort of \u2026 well, I had Qualiana toss him out on his ear. She can be terrifying when roused.>\n\n<Aye,> the Mercury Blue said ruefully.\n\n<Orders?>\n\nHe chuckled again. <How is it that you know so much of a Dragon's thinking, girl? Now, what does one have to do to have a girl delivered to a Dragon's paw in order to receive a present?>\n\n<A present?>\n\n<One asks nicely,> Qualiana purred massively without, so proximately that Auli realised she had been lurking there all along. <You Southern Dragons can talk a kingdom out of falling into ruin, o Arkurion the Rascally Blue! Nurse!>\n\nAuli knew she must not laugh at this blatantly staged interaction. What mischief were the Dragons fomenting now?\n\n<Two presents,> Arkurion added archly, stressing the number.\n\nHow much had they told him about that farce? To her and Xa'an's crushing disappointment, both King Chalcion and many of the Dragon Elders had argued strongly in support of Razzior and Ra'aba's actions \u2013 Captain Ra'aba was commended for his zeal in protecting their noble allies, while the Dragons bickered over the purported reasoning behind his and Razzior's attempt to secure Dramagon's lore. Everyone regretted the Loremaster's unfortunate 'accident,' of course. To her chagrin, Auli's actions had received castigation and praise in almost equal measure, slightly weighed to the latter side. Marvellous. Even if they did understand that the conspirators had very different intentions for the lore of ruzal, this was how the official position settled.\n\nHow politics rankled!\n\nYet, for the sake of succouring Hualiama, Auli had decided, she would endure the stigma. She, too, had fought to protect the Dragonkind from the corrupting power of Dramagon's evil influence \u2013 so Sapphurion had advanced her case to the Council. Which side weighed more? In the end, it did not matter, for with both the Orange and the Captain of the Royal Guard laid low by the magical backlash and neither having recovered consciousness even two weeks later \u2013 nor was it clear if they would ever recover \u2013 the matter was declared moot. Neither Man nor Dragon dared to enter the portal and confront the Guardian Spirits.\n\nBest to forget the entire affair.\n\nWith indecent haste, the huge Sapphire had shared wryly just yesterday, every paw and hand summarily swept the matter into the proverbial Cloudlands.\n\nNever happened.\n\nSoon, the nurse wheeled Auli far enough that a Dragoness' paw could grip the bed and wheel it further into what was called the 'Receiving Area', or the public space where Human patients might meet either draconic or smaller visitors. From there, Qualiana wheeled her further along an echoing stone corridor into another chamber, and the pressure equalised in Auli's ears as huge doors slid smoothly shut behind them. The girl was accustomed to this procedure, having been moved four times in three days. One should not blab about ruzal before all and sundry.\n\nThen, Arkurion's paw pressed a formal scroll case into her left hand. <I believe it is Human custom to wish one a joyful sixteenth birthingday?>\n\n<Ha. How did you \u2013 Qualiana?> she spluttered. <Thank you, Arkurion. You are most thoughtful. And kind.>\n\n<Guilty as charged,> chortled the Dragoness. <Go on. Read your scroll.>\n\nAuli turned the surprisingly heavy container over in her fingers. Reaching carefully across her body with her right hand, she perused the address with growing surprise. <From the Dragon Elders of Tanstoy?> she queried.\n\nTwo colossally inscrutable draconic purrs greeted this observation. Very well. Unfurling the scroll with trembling hand, Auli read:\n\n<It is with the fiery honour of everlasting Fra'anior Himself that we, the mighty Dozen Elect representing the Dragon Council of Tanstoy Dragon Roost \u2013>\n\nWow. The calligraphic paw was exquisite; the writing medium most likely liquid gold!\n\n<\u2013 do cordially and in divergence from twenty-four centuries of draconic tradition, hereby invite the most honourable Miss Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, Loremaster of Gi'ishior and Venerable Instructor in Matters Dragonish, ward of Master Chamzu, Chief Scrollkeeper of Gi'ishior, at her convenience and upon the warmly wished-for occasion of her restoration to sufficient good health to permit travel, to attend a medical examination under the auspices of the noble Dragon Maximaxathior, Head Doctor, at the excellent medical premises of Tanstoy \u2013>\n\n\"But that's forbidden,\" Auli-Ambar blurted out.\n\n\"Apparently the word 'forbidden' poses zero issues for certain law-flouting citizens of these Halls,\" Arkurion said drily.\n\n\"It's lamentable that the understanding of this concept appears to have entirely escaped an ostensibly intelligent creature's notice,\" Qualiana agreed, sounding as if her chuckles snuffled smoke out through her nostrils. \"Now, need I tell you what an almighty honour this is, Auli?\"\n\nHer laughter hit a high-pitched note of disbelief. \"No. But I'd love to hear a little explanation, just for the sake of the occasion. I want to soak it in.\"\n\nArkurion said, \"Very well. As you know, Loremaster, the famously iconoclastic Dragonkind of Tanstoy Dragon Roost have never, in the 2,402 years since the Roost's official founding, permitted any Human foot to tread upon their soil. This is not for religious reasons, such as the strictures pertaining to Ha'athior Island here at Fra'anior Cluster, but merely became a tradition passed from generation to generation. It became a point of pride. Therefore, having ascertained both your peerless reputation in matters of lore and now more latterly, the need for reconstructive surgery, o Auli, the Elected Elders unanimously decided to make a notable exception to that tradition and to invite you \u2013\"\n\n\"With all pomp and ceremony,\" Qualiana interjected gleefully.\n\n\"\u2013 aye, with all draconic pomp and ceremony, exceeding this formal invitation and even my inordinately protracted and pretentious speech,\" Arkurion deadpanned, making Auli hoot softly with laughter, \"to accord one extraordinary Human being the incalculable privilege \u2026 blah, blather, yawn, snooze \u2026 wake me up, somebody! Aye. I think the picture must be clear?\"\n\n\"You failed to employ sufficient sesquipedalian anachronisms to satiate the galumphing maw of our local igneous egress,\" Auli suggested. Ha! She could toss silly and archaic words about with the best of them!\n\nArkurion made an approving noise. \"Indeed! So?\"\n\n\"I am \u2026\" she gulped. \"I am indescribably honoured, Arkurion. How many Islands did you have to move \u2013\"\n\n\"None,\" he lied, immodestly.\n\nQualiana rested her fore-talon, the equivalent of the Human forefinger, upon Auli's abdomen for a moment, before saying, \"Good. We should have the frame off by next week, I believe. I'm not sure when you'll be chewing food, however.\"\n\n\"A lot of teeth missing or broken,\" Auli whispered. \"It's the straw for me.\"\n\n\"Noth tha thwawh,\" Arkurion teased.\n\n\"Thumbody thmack that Dwagon,\" she retorted. Dignity? Apparently, fled to the farthest Isle beneath the suns.\n\nSoon Qualiana departed, leaving the Mercury Blue alone with Auli. At once, he said, \"Are you truly as upbeat as you sound? I could not imagine what you must have been through.\"\n\n\"Arkurion \u2026\"\n\n\"Don't explain right now, Auli. It's not the right time. Some secrets are best concealed inside of impermeable craniums, so while I understand that you might wish to unburden yourself, I must obey Sapphurion and insist that you do not. Leave me with the official version, and my most certain belief that you are blameless in all this chicanery, and even the injured party. You see, my conjecture is that you knew Ra'aba would be injured or killed upon entering that portal to the Sacred Library. Amaryllion Fireborn told me to inform you that you made, in his estimation, the right choice. The noble choice. You took the higher path despite your personal sacrifice. For that, he is so proud of you, his third heart aches.\"\n\nHer throat constricted. For the longest time, all she could do was lie there with her breath rasping through the apparatus. Eventually, Auli said, \"He's gone?\"\n\n\"Travelling, he said, but where to or for how long, a Dragon cannot say,\" replied the Mercury Blue. \"He wishes you a speedy recovery. Now, you have not yet inquired about your second present.\"\n\n\"You've been talking.\"\n\n\"Aye. In case you're wondering, I can hear the smile in your voice. Please don't try to move your mouth. It still looks painful.\"\n\nAuli patted his proffered talon. \"Alright, I am asking.\"\n\nAt once, the Dragon said, \"These are for you. Hands cupped, please. Precious cargo.\" He placed three warm, palm-sized ovoids in her hands. \"Let's play the guessing game. What are they?\"\n\nHer sensitive fingers traced the intricate patterns and crenulations of the objects. She had taken them at first for finely shaped and polished gemstones, but Auli thrust that hasty conclusion aside. Too warm. Too ornate in an organic fashion, too beautiful to be anything but living, and she thought she sensed a kind of magic about them which she had never sensed before. Arkurion waited patiently.\n\nAt length, Auli said, \"If I didn't know better, I'd say that this is a clutch of dragonet eggs. Is that right, Arkurion?\"\n\nHe replied obliquely, as was common practice amongst the Dragonkind, \"When one parent of a dragonet clutch dies, the other always takes over. A male will brood over his mate's clutch. But if both parents die, then the clutch is usually abandoned. The egglings perish for lack of warmth and love. Gestation amongst dragonets is very long \u2013 around five seasons. The mother of this clutch, when her mate died, chose to attack at the source. She killed four men, infiltrators and spies that we believe were somehow in the pay of elements closely linked with King Chalcion's administration, before she herself was killed. Her mate was the dragonet you called Mystery.\"\n\n\"Mystery! These are his \u2026 children?\" She stroked the eggs pensively. Dragonets could kill? She had always thought of them as, well, minor Dragonkind. Decorative rather than dangerous. \"Arkurion, I don't understand.\"\n\n\"In an incident quite out of character for their hidebound kind, the dragonets contacted me upon my arrival at Fra'anior Cluster this morning, and asked me to bring these egglings to you rather than see them abandoned. They suggested you would be the best shell-mother for them.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Believe it.\"\n\nShe was stunned. \"I \u2026 but, how? It's impossible.\"\n\n\"Body temperature is one obvious factor,\" said the Mercury Blue, \"and the general niceties of egg-nurture are easily described. The deepest shell-lore of the Dragonkind maintains that the shell-parents' love is the greatest and most influential factor of all in draconic success rates related to cracking the eggshell. I know you have the heart for this task. You'll do wonderfully.\"\n\nWhy this? Why now? She didn't want more responsibility, but here it sat clasped in her hands, and she knew what was right with every fibre of her being. She understood why Arkurion was giving her this gift, and what it meant \u2013 oh, was there a svelte paw which had caught his eye? Clearly, this was an acknowledgement that what lay between them must be buried forever, and a gift which was somehow surrogate for \u2026 she dared not even think the word. For what they shared?\n\nIt was a flywell. A leave-taking.\n\nArkurion said, \"Do not think of this as any kind of flywell, Auli-Ambar.\"\n\nWould he always read her mind? O fire-soul, treacherously enthralling! Auli pressed the trifold treasure to her heart, whispering, \"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Are you crying?\"\n\n\"Not much.\"\n\nThe unsheathed point of what must have been his smallest talon, which still rivalled any Human sword for size, touched her cheek delicately. \"I don't recall ever seeing this physiological reaction before. There's moisture in the corner of your eye. Although, aren't Human tears meant to be colourless?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know.\"\n\nIt seemed words must be pared away to but the simplest containers of the tidal emotions that coursed through her being now. She could not stop shivering.\n\nArkurion whispered, \"I would know. These are liquescent sapphires. Remarkable.\" Like her Dragon's kiss, Auli wondered dazedly? This numbness could never be assuaged. \"I would say this in lieu of any kind of flywell. Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, I find with every passing day that I have more and more trouble forgetting a girl whose very power lies in her extraordinary ability to resonate between and through events as though she were a golden mote frolicking in the suns-beams of Fra'anior's most brilliant gladness. For if you consider your greatest power and most terrible fear to be disremembrance, then mine is the converse power, that of remembrance. Somehow, as the fates would fly, that links our destinies in ways neither of us can yet imagine.\"\n\nShe clutched his fore-talon with her free hand, hurting. Everything just \u2026 hurt.\n\nWhy could life not be different?\n\nAfter a very long time, the talon shifted to touch the fingers curled with maternal protectiveness about the clutch of eggs, and the Mercury Blue breathed, \"Now, there's a third present \u2013\"\n\n\"Arkurion? You rascally, overgrown dragonet!\"\n\n\"This one might or might not be a present, depending on how you view it,\" he said mysteriously.\n\n\"Ah \u2026\"\n\n\"Shall I fetch the presenter of said present?\"\n\nWhen she made an assenting gesture with her hand, the Dragon walked to the doorway and drew it open with a low rumbling of the heavy rollers. Auli heard another Dragon enter. Sapphurion? No, the mighty Elder moved with a far more supple tread. This was \u2026 \"Noble Sazutharr?\"\n\n\"Bah, knows us by our tread, does she?\" snorted the aged Head Librarian. \"How are we today, little flame?\"\n\n\"Better than yesterday, thank you for brightening my flame by your presence,\" Auli replied.\n\n\"And better again tomorrow, I declare by my fires,\" rumbled the Dragon, before clearing his throat awkwardly. He sounded infirm again, Auli thought. \"So, Arkurion told you what this is about?\"\n\nSazutharr came to stand by the left side of her bed, while Arkurion moved around to the right.\n\n\"He told me nothing.\"\n\nThe Head Librarian coughed again. \"Ahem! Well, as you know, Auli-Ambar, the fires of every draconic life must one day dim before the glory of the eternal fires. Don't you gasp and huff at me, you insolent chit! I have much fire and pep and strength left in me yet; aye, and vigour enough to cuff my Apprentices about the ear canals and earholes when they require it, which happens to be disturbingly often, nowadays. Nay. I am neither decrepit nor downcast! But it behoves a Dragon to ponder the past and never to be unmindful of the future. For this reason, last week, I called a meeting of my senior Research staff and Under-Librarians. Together with Sapphurion and Qualiana, we deliberated this very matter.\"\n\nHmm. So why all the mysterious-scales, o Sazutharr? She moved her right hand carefully. \"And?\"\n\nHe said, \"What do you think we look for in a Head Librarian, Auli?\"\n\n\"Well,\" she considered carefully, \"I think we have some very fine candidates on the staff, noble Sazutharr. Shall I list the notable Researchers by their academic qualifications and achievements? They are outstanding.\" He made a noncommittal noise deep in his chest. Perhaps not \u2013 a different tack, then. \"I would not bring in an outsider, I suppose. They'd need to have one astute paw in the politics of these Halls, but also possess strong administrative skills, and they'd need to know every aspect of Library work inside and out. Yours are a very large quartet of paws to fill, noble Sazutharr. To find your successor will be no easy task.\"\n\nTo her shock, the Green Dragon threw back his muzzle and boomed out a great laugh. \"Oh, Auli-Ambar, this is the first test I have ever known you to fail!\"\n\nHow her cheeks burned! Auli could not fathom his mirth. What? Hers was a reasonable, logical answer. The right answer!\n\nHe said, \"You are right, but also wrong.\"\n\nNow he was just being a Dragon! Auli growled back, deep in her throat. \"I \u2013\"\n\n\"We have already chosen our candidate. Tell her, Arkurion.\"\n\nAuli asked, \"Who is it?\"\n\n\"You,\" said the Mercury Blue.\n\n\"Me? Me?\"\n\n\"Tell her properly,\" said Sazutharr, over Auli's pained, spluttering protests. \"What, little one? Why are you amazed?\"\n\nArkurion put in, \"Good thing she was lying down \u2013\"\n\n\"The post is Dragon Librarian. Ergo, you need a Dragon!\" Ugh. Strident-Auli squeaked up a minor storm, and the Dragons both chortled gleefully over their victim.\n\nArkurion said, \"Shut the fangs and open the earholes, Miss Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya. As noble Sazutharr noted, the senior staff met with the Elders before putting the matter to the entire Library Staff. The vote was one hundred percent, of course, or Sazutharr would have beaten the living pith out of their ear canals, but \u2013 key fact, take note \u2013 it was also unanimous.\"\n\nAuli began to complain, \"Stop tugging a sick girl's wings, please. Taskaturion would never \u2013\"\n\n\"Youngsters!\" snapped the Head Librarian, evidently clashing his fangs against Arkurion's shoulders. \"I said, tell her properly.\"\n\nHer ears heard their words, but her brain was busy melting down into something approximating the consistency of sweet tuber soup. They were serious! If Taskaturion concurred, then the Moons must have fallen out of the sky! All she could peep was, \"When?\"\n\nThe Mercury Blue purred, \"When noble Sazutharr's fire-soul flies to the eternal fires, which is definitely not this week! Nor anytime in the foreseeable future, Fra'anior preserve him!\"\n\n\"Go on. Say, 'Because he's a curmudgeonly old Dragon,' you slack-pawed excuse for a subversive Southerner!\"\n\nAuli was trying not to move her head much, but she had to try to gape at Arkurion. \"This was your suggestion? Yours?\"\n\nHis neck creaked.\n\n\"That's a nod of acknowledgement,\" Sazutharr confirmed.\n\n\"Mighty Sazutharr, when can I hit the Mercury Blue, and how hard?\"\n\n\"As hard and often as you deem necessary,\" gurgled the Green, \"for, come that day, you shall outrank him by some considerable margin.\" Chagrined smoke boiled audibly out of Arkurion's throat! \"Hatchlings grow into their paws soon enough, little flame. Soon enough.\"\n\nAuli wagged her forefinger at Arkurion. \"You're in so much trouble, words fail me!\"\n\n\"Does that mean you'll accept?\" he retorted.\n\n\"No. Maybe. I \u2026 don't understand. Why me? What were you looking for? I've caused so much mayhem, the Dragon Elders would surely baulk \u2026\"\n\nA massive paw, hoary and gnarled with great age, came to rest lightly upon her torso and legs. So warm! \"The preeminent, and indeed the only reason, beats right here, Auli-Ambar. What we search for above all else, is heart.\"\n\n\"Heart?\"\n\nThe older Dragon explained, \"Researchers and Apprentices we have aplenty. Administrators are a dozen a dral \u2013 I could name you ten suitable candidates, and I will advise this: You are as detailed and as thorough as any Dragon, but a purely administrative job would stifle your joy. Delegate. Delegate it all, lest it filch your zest for the task. Your true heart's strength lies in your love of the lore. You are a visionary. A thinker. A soul possessed of a gradually flowering magic that I promise will one day bloom to delight, yea, to astonish us all. Fra'anior's own paw overshadows your life. You will be an outstanding Dragon Librarian. Trust me. I've nosed about this Island-World long enough to know treasure when I find it!\"\n\nTo that, she had no reply. Eventually, Auli spluttered, \"I'd continue teaching at the Palace?\"\n\n\"For as long as they need a Venerable Instructor,\" Sazutharr agreed.\n\n\"I'd be some sort of Apprentice?\"\n\n\"Sazutharr's chief lackey and doormat,\" Arkurion put in. \"I'm sure we can fabricate a suitably demeaning title.\"\n\n\"Loremaster is enough for now,\" said the Head Librarian. \"But I shall prepare you thoroughly, for the powers of this age are rising, mark my words well, and in this labour the integrity of your very soul shall be tested as in the crucible of Fra'anior's own fires. Now, what say you?\"\n\nAuli pressed her head back against the pillow roll. Be still, o leaping heart. Rest, o hurting body. Know that the Child of the Dragon was safe and secure, at least for a season, and that a new vision opened before the eyes of her unchained soul.\n\nShe sighed. \"Most humbly and gratefully, I accept.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 120",
                "text": "That same evening, Xa'an stumped up to Auli's bedside upon his canes to make a minor but Island-shaking announcement. \"I have just received word that I am released from my duties at the Palace.\"\n\n\"Wha \u2026 what? When?\"\n\nHe said wryly, \"As of three days ago. The official reason is given as an honourable discharge from the King's service on account of injuries suffered in the line of duty. My retirement commands a very fine pension indeed.\"\n\nAuli snorted, \"Retired at your age, eh, Dad?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"Well, since you started so young with my mother \u2013\"\n\n\"Auli-Ambar!\" he exhaled self-consciously. \"Will you ever forgive me?\"\n\nShe returned, \"Forgiveness is hardly the issue. Teasing you is fun. I suppose the real reason is that Chalcion doesn't trust you anymore? So we have another political cover-up \u2013\"\n\n\"Sound familiar?\" he deadpanned. His fingers found her left hand; he squeezed gently. \"As thick as twenty ralti fleeces piled atop each other?\"\n\n\"And just as smelly,\" Auli agreed.\n\n\"What I wanted to ask you was, I don't suppose you'd mind if I sort of moved \u2026 well, here \u2026 and started working for Master Chamzu? Discreetly.\" That was worth a reassuring giggle, Auli decided. Wow! Yes! \"Aye. I've many skills I could put to use. Terrible injuries, too. I limp so badly on the leg, I must take a desk job.\"\n\n\"Rajals would more likely fly circles around the five Moons,\" Auli suggested. \"Are you asking my permission, Xa'an Ta'afaya?\"\n\n\"That is the instruction I have received from a certain Council of Dragon Elders. I'm nothing if not an obedient ex-spy.\"\n\n\"Obedient?\"\n\n\"Faultless in all matters of conduct,\" he averred. \"Almost as much as \u2013 cough, cough \u2013 my daughter.\"\n\nShe laughed merrily. \"Two conditions.\"\n\n\"Oh, now there are conditions?\"\n\n\"Aye. One, you bring Si'ishi over to Gi'ishior to work for you. Not a single ulterior motive on my part, of course.\"\n\nHe patted her hand. \"Doable. Indeed, a pleasure. Do you think she and \u2013\"\n\n\"As surely as Dragons have scales, I do think. Second condition, we take chambers together. I'll need to keep an eye \u2013 a figurative eye \u2013 upon you in your dotage, old man.\"\n\nHer father's laughter, unchained at last, shook her infirmary bed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 121",
                "text": "A further two weeks passed before Auli-Ambar was adjudged well enough to leave her bed and to stand for the short period required of her. At the appointed time, Master Chamzu took her arm and Xa'an her right to support her as she rose from her chair and walked out onto the Dragonship landing pad down near the entrance of the Meeting Hall.\n\nIt was a perfect volcanic evening, warm and fragrant with pollens, rife with birdsong and dragonet song, and within the conical confines of the Halls of the Dragons, above and around the caldera lake, a substantial crowd had gathered. Hundreds of Dragons. Thousands of dragonets, who had swarmed like migrating chaffinches from all about the Islands of the caldera to Gi'ishior; an unprecedented event for their species. There were hundreds of people in attendance, including all the staff of the Dragon Library down to the lowliest Apprentice.\n\nAuli-Ambar wore formal attire for the occasion. A burgundy Fra'aniorian lace gown of five layers and a ten-foot train, which was regarded as medium length these days, adorned her slender figure. Over that, she wore a robe of samite Helyon silk emblazoned with the traditional symbol of the Dragon Library, a scroll afire with the breath of Fra'anior. Soft slippers clad her feet, and at her waist, she wore a pouch containing her treasures \u2013 three perfect dragonet eggs, and the Cinizzara Miniature of the White Dragoness emerging from her shell. Perhaps she was like that Dragoness. Emergent, a butterfly just peeking out of its chrysalis, yet her transformation was still in process. A hairnet of stylised fireflowers picked out in perfect rubies clasped her hair and the long tresses that tumbled down her back, and also anchored her jewelled face mask. For this occasion, Auli had chosen to reveal her eyes but to conceal the healing ruin of her mouth.\n\nWhen would she ever be whole?\n\nThe crowd hushed as Sapphurion stepped forward, no doubt striking a majestic pose as only the imposing, physically awesome Sapphire Dragon, the acknowledged leader of the Island-World's Dragons, could achieve. Beside him were Qualiana the Red and Grandion, with his remarkable Tourmaline colouration undoubtedly admired by all who enjoyed sight.\n\nPitching his voice to fill the caldera, the Dragon Elder boomed, <May the sulphurous blessings of the Great Onyx overwhelm thee and thy loved ones with Fra'anior's own fires, my friends! This evening, we have a straightforward task ahead of us. An announcement. Yet this is also a powerful statement of the true heart of our Halls. Gi'ishior Island is the one location in the entire Island-World where Dragonkind and Humankind work together in harmony. We have our differences, aye, and our difficulties and occasional strife, but nowhere else do we find the original vision of Fra'anior's first creation to be honoured and upheld as here, at our precious Halls \u2013 and every creature gathered within the great walls of this volcano can attest to my words. You are the future of our respective species, and upon your noble efforts and the fires of your hearts, shall our stars rise or fall.>\n\nAfter a long pause in which it seemed no creature dared to breathe, he said, <After many decades of fiery and honourable service, our own Dragon Librarian, the matchless Sazutharr the Green, has felt the winds of Fra'anior calling him home. This evening, he wishes to announce his successor. This will commence a period of intense training for our future Dragon Librarian. Sazutharr?>\n\nAuli's very skin thrilled to the thunder of approbation that assaulted the skies as the Head Librarian stepped up to take his stance beside Sapphurion. On and on. Unending.\n\nBeneath the roaring, Auli felt through her feet another, far greater thundering shake the caldera. Earthquake? No. Amaryllion's laughter! He chortled, <Not to disturb the celebrations, but it is deeply gratifying to see that they have finally grasped what I, naturally, recognised from the very first.>\n\nNothing as overwhelming as the smugness of a living mountain!\n\nEbulliently, she snipped back, <How large are you, anyways?>\n\n<Approximately three-quarters of one of your miles,> Amaryllion noted. <Therefore, you remain my mouse. Enjoy your evening, Auli-Ambar.>\n\nGreat leaping Islands!\n\nEventually, when a measure of calm descended, Sazutharr cried, <With the power of Fra'anior that boils in my aged veins, I salute and bless thee, o Dragonkin and Humankin!>\n\nHoly Fra'anior! The magical power of his words tingled in their very souls!\n\nHe said, <It has been and continues to be the greatest honour of my long life to protect, develop and aye, to third-heart-love the lore of the mighty Dragonkind. For my successor I have chosen one in whom I have discerned this same fiery, fierce and unrelenting brand of lore-love. She came to us a child, little regarded, and served faithfully for years as a Roost Keeper before her extraordinary talents came to light.>\n\n<Since that fateful day, she has been forged as in the fires of battle, and been found worthy. She has grown in grace and integrity. She has lived as one of the Dragonkind, and every one of us present can attest to the dazzling purity of her soul's white-fires. Indeed, in recognition of this quality, she has long since earned the moniker, 'little fire' amongst the Dragonkind.>\n\nInside, she still saw that timorous girl who had arrived at the Halls eight years before, afraid of everyone and everything. Yet a life's fires never stopped flowing, like the ever-welling, almighty flows of Fra'anior's own caldera, sweeping her toward Islands beyond her imagination.\n\nSazutharr thundered, <I give you my successor, Auli-Ambar Ta'afaya, the Dragon Librarian!>\n\nThe roaring and cheering detonated within her soul, and all within Auli-Ambar burned with liquid fury."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Planet 1) Kraamlok",
        "author": "Sharon Plumb",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "On the Plains",
                "text": "Characters:\n\nBoona \u2013 female Bone, Tondoor's nest-mate\n\nElder Daroop \u2013 female Leaf\n\nDorla \u2013 female Sun, mentor to Kalooka\n\nFolfro \u2013 male Sun, storyteller of Worgoob's herding group\n\nHoodon \u2013 male Sky, Tondoor's nest-mate\n\nKalooka \u2013 female Sun, apprenticed in the Ravine\n\nElder Mala \u2013 female Fire, Most Ancient of the Plains dragons\n\nNaloosa \u2013 female Fire, member of Worgoob's herding group\n\nRooba \u2013 female Fire, Tondoor's nest-mate\n\nTondoor \u2013 male Snow, seer of the Plains\n\nWorgoob \u2013 male Bone, Most Ancient of a herding group\n\nYarb \u2013 male Sky, Tondoor's nest-mate"
            },
            {
                "title": "In the Rocks",
                "text": "Characters:\n\nElders \u2013 male Blood, female Sky, male Fire, female Sun\n\nBracelet \u2013 male Blood, head guard\n\nCrooked Neck \u2013 male Blood, guard\n\nStocky \u2013 female Blood, guard"
            },
            {
                "title": "At the Bog",
                "text": "Characters:\n\nBorloo \u2013 female Snow, head seer of the Bog\n\nYolooda \u2013 female Leaf"
            },
            {
                "title": "On the Coast",
                "text": "Characters:\n\nBlort \u2013 male Snow, student of Glomfa\n\nGlomfa \u2013 female Snow thinker\n\nKroob \u2013 male Snow thinker\n\nNoot \u2013 male Fire, head of flying formation and klook game\n\nPooka \u2013 female Leaf, student of Kroob\n\nTrok \u2013 young male Sky"
            },
            {
                "title": "On the Rainy Island",
                "text": "Characters:\n\nDooloo \u2013 female Snow, Zloomba's daughter\n\nFroom \u2013 male Fire, Dooloo's brother\n\nMorda \u2013 female Ash, recently transformed\n\nVlod \u2013 male Blood, Dooloo's mate\n\nWambool \u2013 male Snow, formerly of the Plains\n\nZloomba \u2013 female Bone\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Kalooka ]\n\n\u2003It Comes!\n\n\u2003It comes! It comes!\n\n\u2003The kraamlok comes!\n\n\u2003With claws of ice it sweeps the stars;\n\n\u2003With fangs of night it hunts us.\n\n\u2003Wreathed in flame it falls,\n\n\u2003And rock shall flow like water at its falling.\n\n\u2003Ice and flame consume the world;\n\n\u2003Flame and ice devour it.\n\n\u2003It comes! It comes!\n\n\u2003The kraamlok comes!\n\n\u2003Fire shall be quenched and Leaf shall fall,\n\n\u2003And Snow lie silent on the ground.\n\n\u2003Sky shall turn to desert at its fury,\n\n\u2003And Sun shall fade to black.\n\n\u2003The Eye shall be Blood,\n\n\u2003The sun shall be Bone,\n\n\u2003And dragons shall pass from the world.\n\n\u2003For it comes! It comes!\n\n\u2003The kraamlok comes!\n\n\u2003It comes! It comes!\n\n\u2003It comes!\n\n\u2014 Prophecy of Wambool, Seer of the Plains, in the time of Elder Gromp Most Ancient"
            },
            {
                "title": "Raiders",
                "text": "Tondoor only had time to pound the drum six times before the Dragons of the Rocks swooped down to steal the eggs. They were Bloods and Fires, and they wore the same glinting stripes and unnaturally long claws he'd seen in the dream.\n\nA true dream. This proved it.\n\nAn apprentice Fire dragon guarding Egg Hollow, the cavern below his cave, launched herself over the lake. She was only halfway across when the diving invaders shredded her wings and raked long, bloody gashes right through her scales. Cold yellow fear stung Tondoor's eyes. He pulled his wings in tight and shrank into the shadows of his cave\u2014his own year-old claws couldn't even tear through a moolok's tangled fur. Through the logs that barred his exit, he watched the Fire fall screaming into the water.\n\nAcross the lake, Bloods from his own tribe\u2014the Dragons of the Plains\u2014swirled into the air like autumn leaves, while the first of the striped raiders flapped back up with eggs cradled gently inside his bloody, too-long claws.\n\nFlames flashed and smoke obscured Tondoor's view as the Bloods from the Plains challenged the Bloods from the Rocks. His dream had been full of smoke too\u2014first a gray haze that blurred the visible world, then thick black battle smoke that made it impossible to tell who was killing whom. The sounds\u2014the roars and screams and snapping bones, the bellowing of the tribute beasts in the distance\u2014were new.\n\nTondoor sagged against the cool stone wall. He had seen the attack before it happened. Finally, he had done what a seer should do. Next time Elder Mala came to grill him about his dreams, she wouldn't cuff him for not having the right kind. He closed his eyes to savor the new feelings swelling in his chest: hope that he would finally be allowed to leave the cave when he wanted to, not just when the minders took him out for lessons with the other hatchlings; and excitement that he would have a story to tell Kalooka, instead of the other way around.\n\nThe battle sounds stopped but now the mourning began. Wails of grief sliced through the layer of smoke that still hovered outside, as more dragons darted across the lake toward Egg Hollow. Tondoor shuddered. What had the Dragons of the Rocks done to the apprentice Leafs tending the eggs inside? As the haze thinned, he saw the Bloods and Fires of the Plains trickle back from the mountains, dangling the wounded from their own inadequate claws. Above them soared the Skies, blue specks in the hazy white sky, watching for enemies that had already left.\n\nAnger sparked in his mind. Why hadn't the Skies been watching the mountains during the graduation ceremony? That was their job. Was the ceremony more important than protecting the eggs? Why should it fall to a hatchling seer to warn his tribe when just by looking, the Skies could have seen the raiders coming?\n\nHe pressed his snout between the logs that blocked the cave's opening, and peered down at the wooden platform floating outside Egg Hollow. It was heaped with the bright green bodies of apprentice Leafs.\n\nHorror arced thorough him. There was a Sun in the pile.\n\n\"Kalooka?\" It couldn't be her. It couldn't.\n\nA large Leaf thumped onto the rocky ledge just below his cave. He was one of several minders who came periodically to fetch Tondoor. \"Elder Mala wants to see you,\" the minder growled.\n\nNone of them ever told him more than they needed to. He didn't know if they were following the elders' orders or if they just couldn't be bothered to speak. Tondoor hopped back to the cave floor while the minder lifted one of the logs away.\n\nHope dared to whisper inside him. Had Elder Mala heard his drum beats and guessed that he'd dreamed? He squeezed through the new space between the logs and fanned his wings in the hot sun. The smoky breeze tasted like freedom.\n\n\"I'm to fly you around the Nest,\" the minder snapped, replacing the log in its brackets in the cliff wall. His eyes were an angry red. \"You are in serious trouble.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Aftermath",
                "text": "Tondoor was always in trouble with Elder Mala. From what he could tell, everyone was. But this time he had news for her.\n\nThe minder launched himself off the cliff, and Tondoor leapt after him. He loved this first moment of flight, when the air caught his wings and lifted him on its invisible back. He followed the minder across the lake and toward the river that marked the southern edge of the Nest. Young Skies flew back and forth from the river to\u2014oh, no.\n\nThe smoke in the air wasn't only from the battle.\n\nAcross the river, the fence around the tribute pen holding the mooloks was on fire. Terrified mooloks crowded against the riverbank, bellowing. The Skies were stamping out embers in the grass and dumping water out of dripping grass baskets. Other Skies flew out over the Plains, chasing mooloks that had escaped.\n\nWould there be enough mooloks for everyone to eat at the graduation feast tonight? Would there still be a feast?\n\nNot for the Bone dragons that tended the wounded. Across the river from the burning pen, Leafs and Suns dragged injured dragons into rows among the trees, where they moaned and thrashed or lay ominously still. Bones crawled among them, inspecting their mangled bodies. Other Bones yanked at patches of herbs growing along the river.\n\nThe injured were mostly Bloods, Fires, and Leafs. No Suns.\n\nNo Kalooka, but so many hurt.\n\nTondoor ground his teeth. Yes, it was impossible to fend off a dragon diving from a height with its claws out, but there hadn't been that many Rock dragons. Why were there so many wounded? He gulped. Because of those horrible claws.\n\nThe minder flew further up the river toward the pile of boulders that marked the Teaching Place, where Tondoor went when he wasn't confined to his cave. His nest mates were there now, cowering in the shelter of the nearby trees with their apprentice minders. Or maybe some were no longer apprentices, depending when the raiders had interrupted their graduation ceremony.\n\nThese minders were the lucky ones, not assigned to Egg Hollow.\n\nTondoor pretended not to notice Hoodon, one of his Sky nest mates, make a rude gesture with his blue tail as he flew over. Soon the first-years would be out on the Plains with their new mentors, and Tondoor wouldn't have to put up with any of them. He would remain here in the Nest, without any mentor at all. That was another thing no one had explained. Why, among the thousands of dragons in all the vast Plains, was he the only Snow?\n\nThe minder banked away from the river and flew over the Gathering Place, where dragons from all over the Plains had assembled for the ceremony. Most of them were still standing there. There were some Suns, but no Kalooka.\n\nTwo elders strode back and forth below them, keeping the crowds back from\u2026 Tondoor's heart lurched. From a crowd of Bloods ripping the deadly claws off two enemy carcasses. The Rock dragons' crisscrossing stripes still glinted through their fire-crisped scales.\n\n\"Only two of them dead,\" the minder spat back at him through clenched teeth.\n\nGrey sadness made Tondoor's eyes droop. There were many more than two dead Plains dragons on the platform outside Egg Hollow, not even counting the ones in the Healing Place who wouldn't survive.\n\nThe minder swooped over the Elders' Clearing. It was empty, so Elder Mala was somewhere else. They followed the shadowy Ravine along the north edge of the Nest and back toward the lake. The Ravine's steep cliff walls widened and fell toward into a flat, watery delta where the Changing Pools were. Tondoor twisted his neck backwards to get a better look.\n\nThe minder hissed. \"Have you seen the dead and injured? All the damage and confusion?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Tondoor wasn't blind. But why did it matter what he saw?\n\nThe minder swung back across the lake. \"Then it's time to count our dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Elder Mala",
                "text": "Tondoor shivered as he banked his wings. Oh please, let Kalooka not be among them. The words she had given him all those months ago, after the minders pulled him away from the other hatchlings to his cave in the cliff, ran through his mind.\n\nI, the Great Dragon Morwaka, will send to live among you Snow dragons, with scales the color of my Eye. They shall be small in body but large in spirit. I shall speak to them in dreams when I choose to speak, and they shall speak to you with my voice.\n\nHe needed to tell Kalooka about his dream, not just Elder Mala. To tell her his discovery that the Great Dragon Morwaka spoke in pictures.\n\nIf only Morwaka had spoken sooner.\n\nThe guard's ledge above Egg Hollow was empty but a few Skies still circled uselessly over the lake. Their reflections darted like blue fish on the water's surface. The minder thumped onto the side of the floating platform. \"Wait.\" He strode into cavern's dim opening.\n\nTondoor landed as far as he could from the pile of bodies and their dead black eyes. The pile was taller than the minder and rank with the dizzying scent of blood. Tiny dragonets lay on top, slick with egg liquid. He dared glance at the Sun tail hanging limply down one side. Relief flooded him. It was far too long to be Kalooka's. But he still didn't want to wait beside all of these dead bodies.\n\nThe platform rocked as he crept along the edge and into the cavern. All he remembered of Egg Hollow from his hatching a year ago was the cold, stabbing light and the feeling of panic as his eggshell slid away. Now he saw the mounds of dry grass meant to be covering this year's eggs, and Leafs and Ashes scurrying about while Elder Daroop, the Leaf elder, barked orders somewhere inside. In the center of the cavern was Elder Mala, scattering grass like a dusty orange whirlwind. Instinctively, Tondoor shrank down.\n\nBeside him, a matted clump of grass half covered a smashed egg. Turquoise. A female. The dragonet was still curled up inside as if asleep, shards of shell stuck to her translucent scales. Her moist scent, thick with blood, made Tondoor's mouth water. Anger burned his eyes. How many tiny, helpless Plains dragons had the Rock dragons killed? He picked up the dragonet with her flattened egg and turned toward the platform.\n\n\"Tondoor, wait!\" Kalooka's golden form flopped down out of the shadows.\n\nTondoor squealed. She was alive!\n\nShe waved at the dead dragonet in his arms, her golden hands full of orange and turquoise eggshell. \"I need to take off the eggshells before you move the bodies.\"\n\nBefore he could ask why, Elder Mala thumped down between them, her eyes a livid red. Tondoor was so startled he forgot to assume the posture of respect. She towered above him, her scuffed Fire scales smeared with glossy blood. The choking scent of ashes surged over him as she lowered her gigantic head.\n\n\"You were supposed to do your job. You were supposed to warn us.\" Her voice was like teeth grating on stones. \"You were supposed to do better than that useless Snow who called himself a prophet before you!\"\n\nElder Mala was big enough to bite off his whole head with a single snap of her yellow teeth. Tondoor forced himself not to pull away from her cindery breath. \"I tried to warn you. I pounded the drum when I saw them, like you said. But the guard\u2014\"\n\nElder Mala wheezed. \"You saw the Dragons of the Rocks coming? Before they got here?\"\n\n\"Yes. I beat the drum six times. But\u2014\"\n\nElder Mala stood up. Tondoor took a gulp of fresh air. \"Elder Daroop!\" she croaked.\n\nElder Daroop barked something at a pair of minders. Her long green legs scuffed a trail into the grass as she hurried toward them.\n\n\"The egg,\" Kalooka whispered, and Tondoor set it down.\n\n\"He dreamed,\" said Elder Mala, her eyes bulging violet with astonishment. \"He saw the raiders before they arrived.\" She scowled at Tondoor, and red sparked in the violet. \"Barely before.\"\n\nTondoor dared to defend himself. \"I was listening! Morwaka didn't tell me sooner.\"\n\nThe elders ignored him. \"It's much better than the silly things he usually dreams,\" said Elder Daroop.\n\n\"Granted. It means there is hope we might escape the kraamlok.\"\n\nThe kraamlok? Tondoor glanced at Kalooka, but she was watching the elders.\n\n\"He'll have to double his efforts,\" said Elder Daroop.\n\n\"Shall we send him to the desert?\" asked Elder Mala. \"Now that his nest mates are moving on to their apprenticeships and his lessons are over?\"\n\nTondoor gasped. \"I can't go to the desert!\"\n\nElder Mala yanked him up by his shoulders. \"We decide what you can or can't. Your job is to have dreams. Early enough to do some good, next time.\" She dropped him onto the dead dragonet. Kalooka winced.\n\nHe skittered out of the way of Elder Mala's tapping toe-claws. Wasn't the desert days away? How could he warn anyone from there?\n\n\"Pardon my intrusion, Elders, but may I speak?\" Kalooka was bowed in the posture of respect, except for the eggshells in her hand-claws.\n\n\"Speak,\" grunted Elder Mala.\n\nTondoor stood up.\n\nKalooka looked directly up at Elder Mala with a red challenge in her eyes. \"It seems to me that the seer still has much to learn. He has not been taught, for example, the proper protocols for warning.\"\n\nKalooka was as brave as she was beautiful.\n\nElder Mala growled. She narrowed her eyes at Tondoor, then at Kalooka, who had respectfully bowed her head again. \"Your opinion has been noted.\" She stamped her foot, further crushing the broken egg. Kalooka winced again.\n\nElder Daroop nodded. \"I agree with Kalooka. He needs to be taught.\"\n\n\"I have learned the lore of the Ravine,\" said Kalooka, her gaze now a confident blue. \"I can show him what his predecessors did.\"\n\nThe lore? All Tondoor knew about the Ravine was to stay away from the edge.\n\n\"That series of idiots!\" Elder Mala ruffled her wings irritably. She glanced at Elder Daroop, who shrugged her own wings. Elder Mala snapped her teeth. \"Go, then. Take him to the Ravine. Make sure he learns exactly what is expected of him. And most important, keep him out of my sight!\" She aimed herself at a group of Ashes on the other side of the hollow.\n\nElder Daroop nodded curtly and followed.\n\nTondoor could hardly believe his ears. Kalooka had stood up to the elders and freed him from his prison, and the desert, and he had permission to spend time with her. Maybe he was dreaming again.\n\n\"You heard her,\" said Kalooka, turning toward the light. \"Let's go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Pictures",
                "text": "Tondoor spread his wings and leapt into the air after Kalooka. Her gold scales sparkled in the sunlight as she soared across the lake. A pair of apprentice Suns was chasing three Leafs out from the rocky mouth of the Ravine and toward the Changing Pools. They must have run inside to hide when the Rock dragons came.\n\nSeveral partially-transformed Ash dragons sprawled with their too-short tails in the scummy pools and their heads on the ground. Tondoor guessed these ones were being made from forloks the Leafs had caught on the Plains. Already, their front legs had shortened into arms, their middle legs were half twisted up behind their shoulders to become wings, and gray scales were pushing out the patchy fur on their thickening hind legs.\n\nInstead of flying into the Ravine's winding throat, Kalooka traced its jagged path from above. The afternoon sun lit the cliffs' undulating bands of color as they passed over: gray, tan, sand and scuffed orange like Elder Mala's scales.\n\nJust ahead of the pile of boulders that filled the end of the Ravine, Kalooka pulled in her wings and dropped. Tondoor did the same. His feet struck hard ground in the shadowy depths. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw smooth rock surrounding them on three sides, mottled and dark compared to the striped, sunlit rock above. The fourth side melted into shadow.\n\nKalooka clucked and whisked pebbles toward the walls. \"The Ashes are supposed to keep the ground swept in here. Someone could break a claw with all these stones lying about.\" She stepped back and spread her arms. \"But take a look.\"\n\nTondoor opened his eyes wide to take in as much light as possible. He gaped at what he saw. The mottled colors weren't part of the cliff at all. They were stones, dragon scales, and shards of eggshell like the ones still in Kalooka's hand-claws, somehow clinging to the rock. All at once, the colors turned into a dragon, his arms raised in the posture of blessing. Tondoor laughed. The stones made pictures on the cliff wall, just like Kalooka's stories did in his mind.\n\nKalooka watched him eagerly. \"These mosaics tell the complete history of the Dragons of the Plains. They're beautiful, aren't they?\"\n\nThey were more than beautiful. Tondoor's eyes traced the outline of the dragon, made of scales in all the dragon colors\u2014including his own white\u2014carved into pointed stars. He touched a white scale reverently with his claw. There had been another like him. A tiny piece of his loneliness, the size of the scale, fell away.\n\nHe tore his gaze from the dead Snow's scale and studied the whole picture. The large, many-colored dragon was surrounded by six smaller ones, flying away in six directions: Fire, Leaf, Sky, Blood, Bone and Sun.\n\n\"That's the Great Dragon Morwaka! And the Quest of the First Dragons!\" Kalooka had told him that story over and over in his cave.\n\n\"This is where I learned it.\" Kalooka stabbed the point of her tail at a shadowed picture on the opposite cliff, then opened her golden wings and raised her arms in the posture of storytelling.\n\n\"Morwaka, the Great Star Dragon, came from the heavens and made the People in his own image. He sculpted them from the clouds of the sky and the rocks of the hills. He fanned spirits into their bodies with the beating of his wings. He burned speech onto their tongues with the fire of his breath.\"\n\nTondoor shivered with delight as her melodious voice chanted the familiar words.\n\n\"Then Morwaka devised a quest, that he might know what manner of creature he had made. He looked upon the six dragons, and said to them, 'Fly out across this world that I have given you, and bring back to me, each one of you, the greatest treasure you find.' And the dragons went forth.\"\n\nTondoor followed Kalooka between the cliffs, watching the dragons choose their various treasures from the six corners of the world: a shiny rock, branches from a supple tree, a twisty seashell full of sand, a piece of solid ground. Sky's treasure, a shaggy moolok, was made of lumpy brown pebbles on the cliff wall. It looked just like the ones the dragons out on the Plains brought as tribute to the Nest. He knew that part of the legend by heart: Sky seized a shaggy beast in her claws, so the dragons would never be hungry.\n\nThe mosaics continued on and on. Tondoor recognized all the stories: Bone Steals Morwaka's Littlest Toe-Star, The Battle for the Star, Morwaka's Judgment, The Blessing of the Colors. A little further along, there was a series of pictures showing a Sky catching a moolok, the moolok splashing in water, then a moolok with small gray wings and a long tail. The last picture showed the Sky looking down at an Ash dragon.\n\nTondoor studied the pictures. \"I thought only Leafs could make Ashes.\"\n\n\"Any adult can, but only the Leafs are allowed to.\"\n\nThat made sense. Ashes were like hatchlings. But Kalooka had moved on.\n\n\"Is this where you go with your mentor when you leave the Nest?\" he asked, scurrying after her.\n\n\"That's right. We repair broken pictures and add new ones at the far end.\"\n\n\"Will you make a picture of the Dragons of the Rocks stealing our eggs?\"\n\n\"If the elders tell us to.\"\n\nTondoor stopped. Here was a picture of Morwaka's Eye shining fully open in the dark sky, and a tiny Snow dragon gazing up at it. He assumed the posture of storytelling, just as Kalooka had.\n\n\"Morwaka spoke one last time, saying, 'Since you did not honor me when I flew among you, but stole from me and tried to hide, I will no longer fly among you. Instead, I will send to live among you Snow dragons, with scales the color of my Eye.'\"\n\nKalooka clapped her tail against his. \"Well told.\" Tondoor's heart swelled.\n\nThe next pictures showed Morwaka giving the whole Plains to the first Sky for all her descendants to live in, then those descendants hatching in all the colors of the People. Tondoor studied them. \"There are three Snows up there. So why I am the only one here?\"\n\n\"I'll show you shortly,\" said Kalooka. \"But first, look at the picture on the other side.\"\n\nTondoor looked. Fires and Bloods flew down from the mountains toward a clutch of orange and turquoise eggs. \"The Dragons of the Rocks? They've raided our eggs before?\"\n\n\"Since the beginning of time.\"\n\nKalooka slapped her tail against the cliff\u2014hard this time. A few eggshell pieces slipped out of her hand, and Tondoor picked them up. \"That's what makes me so furious! The Dragons of the Rocks raid our eggs whenever they please. Anyone who's walked the Ravine knows that, even if the elders choose to forget.\"\n\nTondoor had never heard anyone speak against the elders before. Kalooka was brave indeed, even if they were at the bottom of the Ravine where no one could hear. He traced the Snow's open mouth and flapping wings with his claw. \"He's warning the tribe about the raid, isn't he? Like my drum was supposed to.\"\n\nA low growl sounded in Kalooka's throat. \"If they had left you at the Nest with everyone else instead of hiding you away in that cave, you would have been able to shout a warning right away when you saw the vision, and none of those young dragons in Egg Hollow would have died.\"\n\nTondoor thought of the horrible long claws again, and the two dead Rock dragons, and the large pile of their own dead on the dock. Kalooka might not be right this time. \"Why did Morwaka give the Dragons of the Rocks those long claws?\"\n\n\"He didn't. See? Here, they're just like ours. The long claws don't show up until much later.\"\n\n\"Why are they so long now?\"\n\n\"They're tipped with metal.\" Kalooka glanced down at him. \"Oh, you don't know that either. Metals are a kind of rock that can be melted and shaped. Our Fires pick a metal called 'gold' out of one of the rivers in the hills when the Rock dragons aren't looking.\" She pointed at a picture of a Sky flying so high that the lake was only a small pool below. \"See this? The sun's rays are made with gold metal.\"\n\n\"Your Sun scales are shinier,\" said Tondoor. And prettier.\n\n\"And almost as strong. The gray metal the Rock dragons put on their claws is a much harder than gold. Our Fires have tried to melt it off the claws of the occasional ones they kill, but they can't.\"\n\nTondoor ruffled his wings. \"If the Rock dragons raid the Plains so often, why do they need me to warn them? Why can't the scouts just keep watch?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Kalooka. She peered around the corner into the deepening shadows. \"Let's fly outside in the light. There's something else I want to show you a little further away.\"\n\nTondoor flew up after her. Above the cliffs, he squinted into the low sun. \"Why did Morwaka send me the dream too late to help?\" he asked.\n\nShe glanced back. \"Who knows? Maybe he wanted to see if you were listening.\"\n\nTondoor felt very small. Would Morwaka do that?\n\nThey flew across several bends in the Ravine, then dropped back inside to land where the ground was wide and facing west so the light still shone in. Here, the pebbles and scales on the walls still glistened in the low rays of the sun. Kalooka trotted past a picture of dragons rolling boulders into a river above a waterfall. Other dragons were digging a channel toward the lake. In the next picture, the waterfall was gone. The river turned at the boulders and flowed toward the lake. He didn't have time to ask about it because Kalooka was already far ahead. He half ran, half flew to catch up.\n\nShe stood beside a picture showing a row of Snows facing an assembly of dragons. Tondoor breathed out slowly. So many Snows! And in all the assemblies he'd seen\u2014 the naming ceremony, the choosing ceremony, and the graduation ceremony\u2014the six colored elders stood at the front.\n\n\"With their special knowledge, the Snows became very powerful,\" Kalooka explained. \"They started making up all sorts of ridiculous rules, just like the elders do now.\"\n\nTondoor shivered in admiration. Did other dragons speak this way when the elders couldn't hear?\n\nHe followed Kalooka to another picture. \"Not again!\" Sure enough, it showed the Dragons of the Rocks flying away over the hills with their claws full of eggs.\n\n\"Over and over and over,\" said Kalooka. \"But look here.\"\n\nTondoor gasped. The Snows in the picture were standing in a circle with their heads under their wings.\n\nKalooka wrapped her wing over Tondoor's back and turned him toward the next picture.\n\nTondoor buried his head in her side so he didn't have to look. \"Did they eat all the Snows?\" he asked in a tiny voice.\n\n\"It appears so.\" She led him away from the horrific image. \"For a while afterwards, no Snows were allowed to hatch. But when the Rock dragons continued to come, the elders decided to hatch just one.\"\n\nWhat happened to the Snow eggs that weren't allowed to hatch? Tondoor thought of the dead Sky dragonet and decided he didn't want to know.\n\nKalooka pulled her wing away. Her voice became shrill. \"So now the elders are in charge of everything, and we aren't even allowed to choose our own mates, and my first choosing ceremony is this fall and who knows who they'll give me.\" She dropped another piece of eggshell. Tondoor picked it up, but Kalooka was so upset she didn't notice. \"What if it's someone I can't stand? What if it's\u2014ugh\u2014a bossy elder? I've been told they give Suns as rewards\u2014just so Remarkable dragons can get a gold scale on their trophy necklace. That is so wrong!\"\n\nTondoor had no idea what she was talking about, except that the adults did wear necklaces with scales on them\u2014as well as bondok teeth and what he now recognized as the metal-tipped claws of a Rock dragon. All he could think was that Kalooka's eyes were so beautiful framed by her glistening gold brow-scales, even when they were this desperate yellow.\n\nKalooka curved her neck down. \"The lesson for you, little seer,\" she said sternly, \"is that you must always listen for Morwaka's voice, and only speak in his name what you are certain you hear. Otherwise...\" Her tail smacked hard on the cliff again.\n\nTondoor jumped. \"I promise,\" he squeaked.\n\nKalooka's eyes turned a soft green. \"Today Morwaka spoke to you, and you heard his voice. Remember that, even if Elder Mala and the others don't. They don't understand what a seer is for, because they don't walk the Ravine and don't ask those of us who do.\"\n\n\"The Sun elder must know.\"\n\n\"Maybe the others don't listen to him.\" Kalooka sighed and spread her wings again. \"I wish Morwaka would tell you to abolish that awful choosing ceremony, but I think he has something bigger on his mind, and Elder Mala will eat me if I don't tell you what it is. Come on.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Prophecy",
                "text": "Tondoor trotted after Kalooka along the dark path between the cliffs. She stopped in the long, straight stretch that led outside to the delta with the changing pools. The last of the sun's rays shone straight in. He looked back into the shadows that hid the way they had come. How many Suns had it taken to make all those mosaics on all of those winding cliffs?\n\n\"Watch where you step,\" Kalooka said. Just before a mess of stones and sticks and forlok hooves, the pictures ended. Pebbles, eggshell pieces and dragon scales edged the bottom of the cliff walls, all sorted into colors and shades of colors. Kalooka sorted the eggshell pieces she was still holding into the appropriate piles. Tondoor dropped the eggshell pieces he was holding onto a turquoise pile. Kalooka picked two of them out and moved them.\n\nTondoor gaped. Even the white pieces came in shades of gray and blue and yellow. He wanted to pick some of them up and compare them to his scales, but Kalooka was pointing at the last picture on the cliff.\n\n\"This one is mine. I had to make it to graduate as a story keeper.\" Her eyes flashed red. \"But I didn't graduate, or get to try eating fire root, because of that raid.\"\n\n\"Fire root is one of Morwaka's curses.\"\n\nKalooka herself had told him that. After the first dragons burned the Bountiful Land into a desert, Morwaka decreed they could only make fire by eating fire root, so it would be harder to destroy each other and the world. \"Eating it can make your stomach explode,\" Tondoor reminded her. And make her stink like an elder.\n\n\"Only if you're still a hatchling.\"\n\nLike him. He turned to the picture. Even in the dimming light, he could see that the eggs inside Egg Hollow were made of real eggshell, carved into long ovals, while the minders' gentle eyes gazed down as pale green dragonet scales, like the ones he had seen this afternoon in Egg Hollow. The orange egg in the middle of the picture held a white pebble dragonet, outlined in gold.\n\nHis jaw dropped. \"Is that me?\"\n\n\"That's you, inside a piece of your own shell.\" Kalooka blew a speck of dirt off the egg. \"The elders asked me to record that we keep the eggs in the cavern now, instead of behind the boulders by the Ravine. Showing your egg was my idea.\"\n\nHe breathed out slowly. Never had he imagined such a thing.\n\nKalooka glanced at the gold sun half sunk behind the mountains. \"Quick, before it gets dark. The story you really need to hear starts earlier, with your predecessor.\" She pulled him back several steps. \"Here he is, making his first prophecy.\"\n\nThe previous seer looked just like Tondoor. He was talking to the elders with his arms raised and a haze of gray-white dots swirling around his head. \"How do you make the sky look like smoke?\" Tondoor asked.\n\n\"Storyteller's secret,\" Kalooka replied smugly. \"He's supposed to look like he's having a dream.\"\n\n\"He does. What are those white dots supposed to be?\"\n\n\"Ice. That's when water freezes and turns hard. It happens a lot in the mountains; not so often here.\"\n\nThe world was full of wonders.\n\nKalooka continued. \"The seer prophesied that ice-rocks would fall from the sky and smash the eggs. He said the minders needed to take them to the cavern under the cliff\u2014what we now call Egg Hollow\u2014to keep them safe.\"\n\nThat made sense. But the elders in the picture were walking away and leaving the eggs among the boulders. In the next picture, the Snow was carrying the eggs across the lake at night, by himself. \"Why didn't the elders believe him?\"\n\nKalooka shrugged her wings. \"It would be a lot of work, and up to then, he hadn't made any successful prophecies.\"\n\nTondoor giggled when he saw the next picture. Egg Hollow was stuffed full of eggs and the fearful yellow eyes of dragons. Everything else was white\u2014even the lake. A Fire dragon\u2014Elder Mala?\u2014was sprawled on top of it.\n\n\"It got so cold that the whole lake turned to ice,\" said Kalooka. \"The seer was proved right and the eggs were saved.\"\n\n\"What happened to the seer?\"\n\n\"He dreamed again. This time, he prophesied that the\u2026\" Her voice faltered. \"That the kraamlok would fall from the sky.\"\n\n\"What's the kraamlok?\" Elder Mala had used that word. The strange taste of it sent prickles right down to his tail.\n\nKalooka steered him to the next picture. \"Look.\"\n\nThe seer stood as before with his wings open and his arms raised to the sky. But this time he was in front of the whole assembly, which was shown as colored dots arrayed like a rainbow around the elders. The hazy colors around the seer's head made Tondoor's scales crawl: an ice rock monster with furious red eyes, fiery orange fangs and two trailing, burning tails.\n\nKalooka's voice quavered. \"I was a hatchling when he made the prophecy. I'll never forget it.\" Her eyes misted like the pictures on the cliff. \"It comes, it comes, the kraamlok comes!\" she recited in an eerie chant. \"With claws of ice it sweeps the stars; with fangs of night it hunts us. Wreathed in flame it falls, and rock shall flow like water at its falling. Ice and flame consume the world; flame and ice devour it.\"\n\nTondoor shrank against the cold stone. In the waning light, with that mournful voice that didn't sound like Kalooka's ringing out, it seemed the seer himself was proclaiming doom from his image on the rock.\n\n\"Fire shall be quenched and Leaf shall fall, and Snow lie frozen on the ground. Sky shall turn to Ash at its fury, and stars shall fade to black. The Eye shall be Blood, Sun shall be Bone, and dragons shall pass from the world. For it comes, it comes\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop!\" shouted Tondoor. \"Stop!\" He was one breath away from flying right out of there.\n\n\"I know,\" Kalooka whispered. \"That's exactly how I felt. How we all felt.\"\n\n\"Did the kraamlok come?\" Tondoor asked in a tiny voice. He didn't dare look at the next picture.\n\nKalooka wrapped her wing around his trembling ones. \"Look,\" she said softly.\n\nTondoor raised his eyes to the mosaic. Even in this fading light, he could see that the shells and scales were precisely carved and perfectly assembled. But the picture made no sense: the seer flying over the mountains in the center of a group of Bloods, and only Bloods returning.\n\n\"Where did he go? Why didn't he come back?\"\n\n\"The elders sent him to consult with the seers in the other four corners of the world, to find a way to escape the kraamlok.\"\n\n\"Not to the Dragons of the Rocks!\"\n\n\"The Bloods and the Blood elder went with him, as an official delegation. They returned, but he didn't. That was when I began my apprenticeship. I helped Dorla\u2014my mentor\u2014make this picture. The next summer, when he still hadn't returned, the elders decided to hatch you.\"\n\nTondoor's stomach lurched. \"So the kraamlok is still coming?\" The Eye shall be Blood, Sun shall be Bone, and dragons shall pass from the world...\n\n\"You tell us, little seer. The ice-rocks came just as he predicted. The rest is up to Morwaka\u2014and, according to Elder Mala, up to you.\"\n\n\"Me! What can I do?\"\n\n\"Elder Mala wants you to change the prophecy, to dream us a way out, to change the curse into a blessing.\" She looked up at the gray and yellow evening clouds. \"She thinks you can make Morwaka stop the kraamlok from coming.\"\n\n\"I can't tell Morwaka what to do!\"\n\n\"I told you the elders don't understand what seers do.\" Kalooka stroked his snout with one hand-claw. \"All I can tell you is to remember who you are. Today, you heard Morwaka's voice. Keep listening in case he chooses to speak again.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. A lump in his throat kept him from answering.\n\nSharp wing beats made them look up."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mentor",
                "text": "A large Sun descended onto a boulder in the unused part of the Ravine. It was Kalooka's mentor, Dorla. Angry red was sprinkled into the sad gray in her eyes.\n\nKalooka's yellow eyes looked panicked. \"Elder Mala told me to show Tondoor the Ravine.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Dorla. \"But they're ready to finish the graduation ceremony now. You need to come.\"\n\nKalooka's eyes flooded with bright blue. \"You mean I still get to try fire root?\"\n\n\"Yes, you get to try fire root.\" Dorla sounded tired.\n\nKalooka skipped away from Tondoor and spread her wings. \"I get to breathe fire!\"\n\n\"I hope it doesn't ruin your story voice,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Don't worry; it won't,\" said Dorla. The red dots in her eyes grew bigger.\n\nKalooka saw them too. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nDorla stifled a growl. \"Elder Jaral is dead.\"\n\nKalooka gasped. \"Your mentor.\"\n\nThat large Sun tail in the pile of bodies must have been Jaral's. It was hard to picture Dorla having a mentor, but she must have been young once. The ache of not having a mentor of his own twisted inside him. \"Why was he at Egg Hollow?\" Tondoor whispered.\n\n\"He flew there when the Rock dragons came\u2014who can tell why?\" Dorla wasn't quite controlling the tremor in her voice. \"One of their Fires flamed him.\" She took a deep breath. \"That is why I have agreed to Elder Mala's request to mentor you. So next time, you will warn us sooner.\"\n\n\"Mentor me?\"\n\nYes, Dorla was looking at him. The angry red in her eyes was shifting to concerned green.\n\n\"I can't teach you to dream,\" she said, \"but you've already figured that out. I can teach you the things recorded in the Ravine: a seer's posture, the protocols for warning, how the seers used the sharing star, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" whispered Tondoor. He marveled again how this horrible day could turn so wonderful. Not only had he dreamed, finally, but he was free of the cave prison, surrounded by Kalooka, and stories, and he had a mentor. His future was bright\u2014even if he had an impossible task ahead of him.\n\nDorla averted her eyes. \"It's better if you don't come to the graduation ceremony. I don't want to have to protect you from those who might\u2026 blame you.\"\n\nTondoor gulped. The raid wasn't his fault; Kalooka had just taught him that. But not everyone knew, or perhaps, wanted to know.\n\nKalooka flapped up onto another boulder. \"What shall I bring you, Tondoor? A foreleg, blackened with flame?\"\n\nTondoor shrugged his wings. He had too much to think about to worry about food.\n\nThe two Suns flew away, leaving him between the shadowed cliffs. For a brief moment he considered waiting here, wrapped in Kalooka's lingering presence. But her rendition of the seer's eerie prophecy still rang in the hollows of the stone, making the shadows too sinister to endure alone. He could return to his cave, but that was almost as bad. Instead, he walked into the unused mouth of the Ravine, picking his way among fallen rocks. Into a future as blank as his own."
            },
            {
                "title": "Inspiration",
                "text": "Tondoor crouched among the colored piles on the floor of the Ravine, a jumble of unsorted eggshell pieces in front of him. It had taken a full summer of patient instruction, but he was finally getting good at discerning the various shades. Nearby, Dorla scowled while Kalooka tested a pattern of scale pieces in a smear of sticky tree sap on the rock.\n\nKalooka jammed a piece of blue into the line. \"I'm not going to the choosing ceremony.\"\n\nTondoor winced. She had taken so much care carving the scales into their perfect shapes. It would be awful if she cracked one now.\n\nDorla slapped her tail against the cliff, making the scales on her necklace rattle. \"All adult females have a duty to lay eggs.\"\n\nKalooka had a necklace now too, a cord made of bondok leather. It lay on the floor where she had thrown it. She pried the scale off the wall and re-positioned it. \"I'm happy to lay an egg. I just want to choose my own mate.\"\n\n\"Mating is for making eggs, not friends,\" Dorla retorted. Kalooka bared her teeth.\n\nTondoor pulled his wings in tighter and bent closer to his eggshells. The eggs the Rock dragons spared had hatched, and Egg Hollow was empty. Which meant they wouldn't be attacked again until more eggs were laid in the spring. He glanced at his drum, which was now sitting at the top of the Ravine, above where the Suns were working. If Morwaka wanted to tell him otherwise, it was in easy reach Right now, he was busy helping Kalooka with her picture. And listening to find out what she would do.\n\nDorla sighed. \"Someday you'll do something remarkable and the elders will let you choose. But in the meantime, why does it matter who your mate is? You don't have to talk to him.\"\n\n\"It makes me feel like an Ash. Do this. Do that. Have a Bone. Or a Leaf.\"\n\nDorla rolled her increasingly red eyes. \"If it makes you feel better, you'll probably get chosen by one of the Remarkables and not have to stand in the pairing line. Beautiful Suns usually are.\"\n\nKalooka spat on the ground\u2014but carefully, not on a color pile. \"To get a golden scale for his necklace. I want to be chosen because someone likes me, not just my color.\"\n\n\"I'd like you in any color,\" said Tondoor, handing her the next carved scale. He felt his eyes cool to an embarrassed yellow. Oops. That wasn't what he meant.\n\nKalooka didn't seem bothered. \"Thanks, Tondoor. But unfortunately it doesn't help.\" She pressed the scale into the sap, more gently this time.\n\nDorla ruffled her wings. \"You're the only one who doesn't want to participate. Other dragons look forward to the choosing.\"\n\n\"I want to choose for myself.\"\n\n\"Well, unless you fly away and form your own tribe, you can't!\" Dorla sucked in her breath, as if she'd said something she shouldn't. Kalooka's eyes darted toward her. Dorla cleared her throat. \"Don't annoy the elders. That's my best advice.\" She flew up and out of the Ravine.\n\nTondoor held out another carved scale. \"I tried to dream a way that you won't have to go tomorrow, but so far it hasn't worked.\"\n\nKalooka watched Dorla disappear. \"Thanks for the attempt, but I already have a plan. Come on.\" She turned and ran down the Ravine.\n\n\"Why aren't we flying?\" asked Tondoor as he dodged another Sun repairing a different picture.\n\n\"So Dorla doesn't see where we're going,\" Kalooka hissed when they were out of earshot.\n\nShe skidded to a stop and looked both ways to make sure they were alone. \"Here it is. A story I never paid much attention to before. But it's quite instructive.\" Tondoor examined the pictures while Kalooka recited the tale.\n\n\"Before the elders invented the choosing ceremony, a Leaf and a Sky both wanted the same Sun for their mate. Instead of fighting over her, as was the custom, they decided to ask the Sun which one she wanted to mate with.\" She glanced at Tondoor. \"You see? Some dragons used to be sensible.\"\n\nTondoor nodded and moved to the next picture.\n\n\"The Sun said that since she wished her mate to be strong, the two dragons should fly into the mountains and each fetch her the largest bondok they could find. So they did. The Leaf returned with a bigger bondok, but also an injured leg.\"\n\nIn the picture, the two suitors dragged bondoks much bigger than they were. The Leaf's leg bent sideways at a painful looking angle.\n\n\"Next, the Sun said that since she wished her mate to be swift, they should fly to the mountain with the three peaks and return before morning. So they did. The Sky returned first, but he had sprained his wing by flapping so hard.\"\n\nThe picture showed the two suitors splayed out on the ground. The Leaf had a crooked leg; the Sky a crooked wing. Tondoor chuckled.\n\n\"Finally, the Sun said that since they had each won one contest, she would set them one more task before she made her decision. Since she wished her mate to be adoring, they should both dive into the lake and bring her the prettiest rock they could find. So the two suitors dove in.\"\n\n\"Uh-oh.\" Very few dragons in the Nest knew how to swim. Tondoor certainly didn't. In the next picture, the green and blue tiles that depicted their drowned bodies were interspersed with chunky gray bits of water. \"You could make better water than that,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"Maybe; maybe not,\" Kalooka said. \"But look over here, above the picture of the lake.\"\n\nA tiny Sun was flying away with an even tinier Ash.\n\n\"Who is that?\" asked Tondoor. \"He isn't in the earlier pictures.\"\n\n\"The story says that because she sent her two big, strong suitors to their deaths, she was forced to take an Ash as punishment. But I think this Ash is the dragon she really wanted.\"\n\nTondoor snorted. \"Who would want an Ash? They aren't even real dragons.\"\n\nKalooka gave him a sharp look. \"Never judge by appearances, Tondoor. Have you ever even talked to an Ash?\"\n\n\"They can talk?\" They couldn't when they were beasts.\n\n\"Try it one day and find out.\"\n\nTondoor blinked while Kalooka cleaned the picture of the Ash with the tip of her claw. It had never occurred to him to speak to an Ash. He hardly noticed them sweeping the grounds and darting out behind him to clean up his turds.\n\n\"The Sun would never have been allowed to choose an Ash mate,\" said Kalooka, \"so she found another way to get him.\"\n\nTondoor blew out his breath. She was clever, if that was what she wanted.\n\nKalooka continued. \"I was taught that this story shows why the elders set up the choosing ceremony: so dragons don't do foolish things in pursuit of a mate. But I see a different lesson. Two, in fact.\"\n\n\"One is not to do something stupid just because someone tells you to,\" said Tondoor. Even he knew not to jump into the lake.\n\n\"Correct. And the other one is that if you want something, sometimes you have to be tricky.\" Kalooka folded her arms.\n\nTondoor gasped. \"You're going to trick your way out of the choosing ceremony?\"\n\n\"And you are going to help me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Deceit",
                "text": "The next afternoon, Tondoor sat on the top edge of the Ravine with Kalooka sprawled beside him, watching dragons from all over the Plains preen themselves for the choosing. Between their shouting and the bellowing of the tribute beasts, Tondoor could hardly hear himself think. But he could watch for Dorla. \"She's coming,\" he hissed in Kalooka's ear, \"with flaal bark to polish your scales.\"\n\nKalooka moaned. Vomit and excrement spattered the rocks below her snout. Tondoor ducked his head to hide the tricky orange prickling his eyes. There was no way Kalooka could mate tonight.\n\nDorla thumped down beside Kalooka. Her eyes narrowed to slits as they moved over the stinking mess. \"Just how did you manage that?\"\n\nKalooka moaned and threw up again. Tondoor wiped her snout with a leaf and tossed it to the side.\n\nDorla stamped her foot, and toe-claws clinked against the rock. \"If you were still my apprentice, I'd make you polish every picture in the Ravine.\"\n\nTriumphant violet showed through the slits that were Kalooka's eyes. She gagged again, and slimy drool spilled out the side of her golden mouth.\n\n\"You are begging for trouble.\" Dorla flew away, taking the flaal bark with her.\n\nKalooka's head sank to the ground.\n\n\"How did you know those flowers would make you sick?\" Tondoor whispered. He glanced at the rest of the bouquet he had picked for her, lying between the roots of a nearby tree.\n\nKalooka closed her eyes. \"When I was a hatchling I caught and ate a poisonous fish. This is what the Bones gave me to clean out my stomach.\"\n\nTondoor froze in mid chuckle. A large Fire hurtled toward them. \"Elder Mala!\"\n\nKalooka's eyes snapped open. \"Hide the flowers.\"\n\nTondoor snatched up the bouquet and dropped into the Ravine. There wasn't time to bury the flowers in the egg-shells; Elder Mala was already barking at Kalooka. Hugging the cliff wall beneath the overhanging rock, he ran.\n\nPictures jerked past him. He should have run toward the changing pools, because there would be places to stash the flowers among the lake debris. Too late now. Racing around a bend, he decided he'd gone far enough. He crouched down to stuff the flowers into a crack in the stone just as Elder Mala's creaky orange body thudded down behind him.\n\nShe seemed even bigger down here in the narrow space between the rock walls. Even with her wings closed, she almost filled the Ravine from side to side. Her necklace bristled with bondok teeth and claws from a Rock dragons and scales of all colors, even a Snow. Tondoor wiggled the flowers backwards with his toes. Who could possibly want to mate with her unless they had to? He remembered suddenly to assume the posture of respect.\n\n\"It appears you are learning the wrong lessons from your mentors, seer.\" Elder Mala's hot spittle spattered his horns. Her enormous toe-claw reached around his leg and slid the flowers into view.\n\nHe was in deep trouble, and so was Kalooka. But maybe she didn't have to be. He switched to his seer's posture\u2014it kept his eyes conveniently down so Elder Mala wouldn't see their deceitful orange. \"I picked the flowers because I wanted to see a dream,\" he said in a small voice. Dirt puffed into his nostrils from her jagged yellow toe-claws tapping in front of his snout. \"Just like on the picture.\"\n\nElder Mala sputtered. \"There is no picture where a flower makes you dream.\"\n\n\"Yes there is. I'll show you.\" Before she could answer, he snatched up one of the flowers and raced away. He knew which picture he wanted; it was one of the first ones Dorla had shown him. Elder Mala stalked behind, easily keeping pace.\n\nThere it was: a group of Snows standing in a circle with their heads together and their long tongues sticking out, touching a piece of white scale. He lifted his flower up beside the picture, and keeping his eyes very respectfully averted, waited for Elder Mala to lower her head. \"See? The seers are eating a white flower and seeing the same dream.\"\n\n\"That's not a flower. That's the sharing star.\"\n\nHow did she know that? Maybe her white mate had told her. But she didn't know that he knew. \"Oh,\" he said, hoping he sounded surprised. \"I thought if Kalooka ate the flower I might be able to see her dream.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't you eat it too?\" Elder Mala yanked up his snout and glared into his lying eyes. \"I thought so.\" Her huge yellow teeth and slimy blue tongue filled his vision. \"You are not to concern yourself with the choosing ceremony. You are not to concern yourself with the childish whims of a particular female Sun.\"\n\nTondoor glanced up to the top of the cliff. How could he not be concerned about Kalooka?\n\nElder Mala slapped his snout back down. \"And most of all, you are not to lie to me! The only thing that concerns you is dreaming us out of danger\u2014especially out of the kraamlok's curse. Did your Sun mentor think to mention that?\"\n\nTondoor nodded.\n\nElder Mala snarled. \"In any case, your apprenticeship with the Suns is over.\"\n\nTondoor's heart tumbled into his tail.\n\nElder Mala grabbed him by the neck and tossed him into the air so forcefully that he hardly had to flap to reach the top of the Ravine. She climbed out after him. Her scuffed belly-scales swam in front of his eyes. \"When the herding groups return to the Plains tomorrow, you will go with them.\" Her eyes roved over the dragons milling about in the Gathering Place. \"Worgoob, Most Ancient of his group, will take you. His territory borders your new home: the desert.\"\n\n\"I can't live in the desert,\" squeaked Tondoor. \"It's in the story of Morwaka's Judgement. 'Those who venture there bring the curse of Bone's death upon themselves.'\"\n\nElder Mala shrugged her wings. \"You'll figure it out. Or die. But right now, I have a choosing ceremony to conduct. So fly!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Worgoob",
                "text": "Tondoor did his best to keep ahead of her hot, clammy breath. The desert was hot, dry, and deadly. The wasteland. He did not want to go there. But it didn't matter what he wanted. It didn't matter what Kalooka wanted either. She couldn't make herself sick every year. Sooner or later she would have to let the elders give her a mate.\n\nThey landed in the Elders' Clearing, and Elder Mala pointed to a tree. \"Stay there.\"\n\nTondoor made himself small beside it and watched Elder Mala turn toward the Bone elder and a smaller Bone with proud violet eyes.\n\n\"What?\" snapped Elder Mala.\n\n\"Horba has discovered a root that can be used to extend claws,\" said the Bone elder. \"I recommend her as a Remarkable.\"\n\nThe female Bone held up her hand. Dried, white roots stuck off the ends of her claws. But they weren't nearly as long as the claws on the Dragons of the Rocks. And the tips of the roots were already curling.\n\nElder Mala glanced at them as she brushed past. \"Put her at the back of the line.\"\n\nThe three dragons flew off, leaving Tondoor alone except for four gleaming females whispering together at the far end of the Elders' Clearing. They must be the four male elders' mates, already chosen and waiting. Didn't Elder Mala and Elder Daroop have mates? No, they must be far too old to lay eggs.\n\nThrough the trees, he saw the male dragons assembling into color groups on one side of the Elders' Platform, the females on the other. Loud drum beats split the air. Three Suns Tondoor didn't recognize stood behind a collection of oversized drums not far from his tree, beating out a complex rhythm that rumbled in his chest and made all the parts of his body want to bob in time to it. If Morwaka sent a warning now, no one could hear Tondoor's drum. He would have to shout like the Snows in the pictures. How could he possibly warn them from the desert?\n\nSix small Ashes huddled behind the drums looked as scared as he felt. They must be the forloks he had seen half-transformed the day of the raid. He never had found out if they could talk. He could sneak over now and ask them, but he was in enough trouble already.\n\nThe drumming stopped, and the drummers joined the other Suns in the assembly while the Ashes huddled even closer together. The Sky elder stepped onto the Elders' platform and began to speak. Tondoor couldn't make out the words, but the dragons in each color group, male and female, rose into their ceremonial postures in turn and answered back. Then Elder Mala stepped up, and the dragons that must be the Remarkables flew off one by one with their mates. Dorla was right\u2014most of them chose Suns. But not Kalooka, because he had helped her escape. And lost her because of it. The Leaf elder replaced Elder Mala at the front, and then the rest of the dragons started to fly away in pairs.\n\nTondoor peered back through the trees toward the Ravine, but he couldn't see if Kalooka was still on the edge. Would he ever see her again? Would she be punished too? How would he survive without her? How would he survive in the desert? What if Worgoob Most Ancient was horrible like Elder Mala, or worse?\n\nCould he be worse?\n\nFinally the ceremony was over and the elders returned to the clearing. The four males flew away with their mates, while Elder Mala and Elder Daroop lowered themselves heavily to the ground. Elder Mala seemed to have forgotten about him. He lay down too and tried to dissolve into the darkness under his tree so none of the other elders would notice him when they came back. Sleep was out of the question with the worries in his head and the elders' wheezy snoring in his ears.\n\nShortly before dawn, Elder Mala got up and left the clearing. She returned with a large, heavyset Bone. But if she had hoped to kick Tondoor awake, she was disappointed. He was up on his feet as soon as he heard them coming.\n\nElder Mala flicked her tail toward him. \"That's the one.\"\n\nWorgoob lowered his head. It was not quite as large as Elder Mala's, but still big enough to bite his snout off. Tondoor assumed his best posture of respect.\n\n\"So you're the young fellow who wants to go to the desert to find dreams,\" said Worgoob.\n\nTondoor did not want to go to the desert at all. But Worgoob's eyes were a friendly blue, unlike Elder Mala's, so he nodded.\n\nWorgoob patted him on the horns. \"We'll take good care of you. Don't worry.\"\n\nThe cool yellow in Tondoor's eyes warmed slightly even as Elder Mala snorted behind him. He followed Worgoob out of the clearing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Folfro",
                "text": "By the time the sun rose behind him, Tondoor was already flapping across the golden plains in the center of Worgoob's blaze of dragons. The minders' insistence on flying those endless circles around the Nest made sense now.\n\nHow vast and alive the plains were, outside the rolling hills of the Nest! Other herding groups, returning to their own territories, dotted the horizons like flocks of birds. Furry little glarfs darted into hiding, startled by the dragons' shadows. Forloks leapt in great bounds\u2014almost flying themselves\u2014and disappeared in tall, waving grass. Birds of all sizes collected on the broad rivers that meandered in lazy loops through wide, rolling valleys. The steady sound of dragon wings beating the air was matched by the squawking of birds and the humming of high-flying insects.\n\nWhen the afternoon wore into dusk, the dragons stopped to hunt. Tondoor chased one forlok, then another, but his claws caught only grass. What did he expect? He'd missed most of the hunting lessons by sitting in his cave. Finally a Fire took pity on him and chased a small forlok in his direction. He caught the end of its tail between his hand-claws just before it swerved away. It was enough. He flipped it over, clumsily broke its neck, and carried it to the riverbank, where the other dragons were already eating. He tore the beast's side open and picked out the sweet parts he was never given at the Nest.\n\nA wiry Sun with long, slender horns like Kalooka's watched him eat. \"So you're the young Snow going to the desert,\" he said in a rumbling voice too large and deep for his slight body.\n\nTondoor nodded through his mouthful. The Sun didn't have a beast. Maybe he was a poor hunter too. Maybe that's why he was so thin.\n\n\"Did you know the desert wasn't always a wasteland?\" the Sun continued.\n\nTondoor swallowed. \"Before the battle for Morwaka's star, it was full of beasts, and trees so big dragons could nest in them like birds.\"\n\n\"You know your stories well.\" The Sun stretched his neck out and sniffed the forlok as Tondoor slurped out one of its kidneys.\n\nWas he hoping Tondoor would share? Was he supposed to?\n\nThe Sun pulled his head back. \"Do you know the story of the Quest of the First Dragons?\"\n\n\"I love that story!\"\n\n\"Bet you've never heard it like this.\" The Sun stood up, his scales flashing in the sun's low rays. \"Storytime!\" he bellowed. \"Name's Folfro, by the way,\" he said to Tondoor, eyeing the dead beast again. \"Storyteller extraordinaire.\"\n\n\"I'm Tondoor.\" He pulled his beast closer.\n\nThe other dragons adjusted their positions to face Folfro. He raised his wings in the posture of storytelling\u2014just like Kalooka\u2014and began.\n\n\"Morwaka, the Great Star Dragon, came from the heavens and made the People in his own image. He sculpted them from the clouds of the sky and the rocks of the hills. He fanned spirits into their bodies with the beating of his wings. He burned speech onto their tongues with the fire of his breath.\"\n\nTondoor's tense wing muscles relaxed as the familiar words washed over him.\n\n\"Then Morwaka devised a quest, that he might know what manner of creature he had made. He looked upon the six dragons, and said to them, 'Fly out across this world that I have given you, and bring back to me, each one of you, the greatest treasure you find.' And the dragons went forth.\"\n\nFolfro folded his wings. \"Who will play Sky?\"\n\n\"I will!\" Someone shuffled behind him, and Tondoor turned to see a willowy Sky rise to her feet. \"Sky flew over the Plains and saw multitudes of beasts grazing the grasslands,\" she cried out.\n\nThe other Sky dragons cheered.\n\n\"She was hungry, so she seized a shaggy beast in her claws to take to the Great Dragon.\" The Sky picked up the half-eaten beast at her feet and raised it high.\n\nNow all the dragons cheered, including Tondoor.\n\n\"And so?\" asked Folfro.\n\n\"And so we will never be hungry,\" they intoned together, and tossed pieces of their beasts at Folfro.\n\nSo that was how it worked. Tondoor nodded. A story was worth some of his food. He pulled out a clump of his forlok's intestines and tossed them.\n\nThe Sky sat down while Folfro scraped the offerings together with his foot. His eyes twinkled a merry blue. \"Fire?\" he called.\n\nAn ancient Fire got to her feet. \"Fire flew into the mountains and felt metals pulsing through rocks like blood in her veins.\" She thumped her hand-claws on her chest in time with her words. \"It was shiny and beautiful, so she scraped some out with her sharp claws and melted it with her hot breath to take to the Great Dragon.\"\n\nThe dragons booed. Tondoor joined in. Take that, Dragons of the Rocks!\n\n\"And so?\" Folfro nodded at the Fire, who sat down.\n\n\"And so we make use of the world's gifts,\" the dragons chanted. Tondoor repeated the words to himself. If he ever got back home, he would tell them to Kalooka.\n\n\"Leaf?\" called Folfro.\n\nA bright-eyed Fire jumped up. \"I'll do it.\"\n\nOf course they didn't have any Leafs here. The Leafs all stayed at the Nest to look after the eggs and hatchlings and to make Ashes.\n\nThe Fire pranced among the dragons, darting her head in and out. \"Leaf flew over the forests and sniffed the dampness of wood and moss.\"\n\nThe dragons made snuffling noises, imitating her. One of them nosed his snout into Tondoor's side. When Tondoor giggled and squirmed away, he took a nibble out of Tondoor's beast.\n\nThe Fire pulled clumps of long grass out of the ground and spread them into a circle on the ground. \"The saplings were springy and supple, so she pulled off some branches and wove a nest-basket to take to the Great Dragon.\" Without warning, she picked up Tondoor and plunked him onto the grass.\n\n\"And so we keep our hatchlings safe,\" chanted the rest of the dragons, not waiting for Folfro's prompt.\n\nTondoor scurried back to his beast. That's why he needed to learn to dream well, to keep his people safe. Suddenly he wanted to go to the desert. Sort of.\n\nInstead of announcing the next color, Folfro unfurled his wings and mimed flying, bending low to one side and then the other. \"Sun flew along the coast and saw the shifting sand changing shape beneath the pounding rhythm of the waves, the way her thoughts changed shape inside her.\"\n\nThe dragons pounded their feet like the waves. Tondoor did too, imagining sand forming itself into shapes like trees, birds, and clouds beneath his feet. Sand never did that at the Nest. Would it in the desert?\n\nFolfro swerved in circles, tottering as if it made him dizzy. \"She scooped some sand into a curly seashell and carried it off for the Great Dragon.\"\n\nTondoor laughed. \"And so we shape the world to our needs,\" recited the dragons.\n\nFolfro lowered his head toward Tondoor. \"Can you do Blood?\"\n\nThere were two Bloods in the group, but if they didn't mind\u2026 Tondoor jumped to his feet. \"Blood flew over the sea until her wings gave out,\" he cried. He flapped his wings vigorously, then let them droop.\n\n\"Oooooooh,\" moaned the dragons. A large Sky caught Tondoor's eye and spread his wings onto the ground.\n\nTondoor hopped onto his back. \"She would have droooooooowwwned if she hadn't seen the island,\" he wailed. Blood's eyes would have been yellow with fear, but he could feel his shining blue. The Sky beneath him handed him a stone. Tondoor thrust it above his head. \"After she was rested, she picked up a solid rock to take to the Great Dragon.\"\n\nThe dragons, including the one underneath him, clapped their tails together. The Sky bucked Tondoor into the air, and he landed on his feet next to his beast. It looked smaller. Had Folfro taken a bite while he wasn't looking? The collection of beast parts at Folfro's feet was now quite large.\n\n\"And so?\" asked Folfro.\n\n\"And so we depend on the land,\" chanted the dragons.\n\nFolfro waved his arms. \"Everyone up to do Bone.\"\n\nTondoor swayed back and forth with the others. \"Bone flew over water and land, but she saw no treasure great enough,\" they said in weary voices.\n\nTondoor shivered in anticipation. The next part was his favorite\u2014where Bone saw the great star dragon Morwaka sleeping on a rock and was so overcome by his beauty that she stole the smallest star from his littlest toe-claw. The other five dragons became sick with jealousy because next to the beauty of the star, their own treasures looked like mud.\n\nBut instead of telling the story, Folfro only asked, \"But what?\"\n\n\"But unlike Bone, we are content with the treasures of this world,\" chanted the dragons. They sat down.\n\nOh. Tondoor sat down too. He'd never thought about that before. Was he content with this world? Not when he was in the cave, for sure, but staying with Kalooka had been wonderful. He hadn't been content to leave the Nest, but so far being here was better than he'd expected. Maybe the desert would turn out all right as well. Or maybe not.\n\nFolfro gave his wings a flourish to show that the story was done, and the dragons tossed him more pieces of their beasts. Tondoor hesitated, then relented. After a story like that, Folfro deserved something exceptional. He bit through the forlok's spine and tossed its head at Folfro. \"Are you going to tell the next part later?\" he asked.\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Folfro answered, slurping in some intestines dangling out the side of his snout. \"Now we need to sleep.\"\n\nThe next day, Tondoor re-lived Folfro's story over and over in his mind as they flew on. What fun it had been to act out the roles of the first six dragons, especially Blood! Why couldn't they tell stories like this at the Nest?\n\nAn idea struck him like a tail-slap. If Kalooka came out here to learn to tell stories like Folfro did, she could avoid the choosing ceremony by not flying back. If she found a mate she wanted out here, the two of them would never have to return. What if\u2014no, it wasn't possible. His eyes shivered with embarrassed yellow just thinking about it. But what if, what if, she wanted to live with him in the desert? No one would dare look for them in the cursed wasteland."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fire Root",
                "text": "Tondoor didn't even notice the storm blowing in until Worgoob shouted at him to descend. While the dragons huddled together in the pelting rain with lightning flashing all around, Folfro told the story of Bone stealing Morwaka's littlest toe-star. The booming thunder could have been Morwaka's own angry voice. When the rain stopped, Tondoor caught Folfro a glarf.\n\nThat evening, Folfro told the sad tale of how the dragons fought Bone for the star, and how she fell into the dark waters of the Bog after her sisters killed her, and even though Blood dove in and brought her body up again, the star from Morwaka's littlest toe-claw was forever lost. Tondoor got to play the part of the star. The other dragons tossed him back and forth until he fell into the Bog and disappeared by crawling out from under their feet.\n\nMid-afternoon on the third day, the dusty horizon changed from a gray blur to an uneven gray line. Straight ahead, a bump on the line grew until it became a reddish-brown hill with a flattened top and steep, furrowed sides.\n\n\"That's the Butte,\" said Folfro, flying beside him. \"The mark of our group's territory, the edge of the Plains, and the start of the desert.\"\n\nBone's Wasteland. Tondoor's stomach clenched. The hot, dusty wind flowing from the land ahead was already making him thirsty. What did Worgoob's dragons drink?\n\n\"Stragglers!\" shouted a voice. Folfro's wings brushed his as he plunged past with two other Fires and six Skies.\n\n\"The rest of you, watch for others on the way,\" Worgoob bellowed.\n\nTondoor pulled his eyes from the horizon. A moolok was grazing on the short grass just ahead. Behind it were three more. The beasts galloped away as the dragons swooped toward them, and then Tondoor understood. The mooloks had escaped from Worgoob's herd. He flew higher to stay out of the way of the dragons trying to round them up.\n\nMore clumps of escaped mooloks appeared below them. One of the beasts was dead and surrounded by a pack of snapping coyloks. The Skies hustled the slower mooloks into a herd while the Fires darted after the ones trying to escape.\n\nAhead, the Butte grew taller and wider, and finally Tondoor saw what remained of Worgoob's herd surrounded by a few small, fluttering dragons that sank to the ground as the larger dragons flew in. They must be the apprentices, who weren't old enough to go to the Choosing Ceremony. They hadn't done a very careful job of guarding the beasts.\n\nJust this side of the Butte, a narrow, meandering creek and a square pond with mounds of dirt around it glistened in the sunshine. Tondoor flopped down to an open spot on the bank and sucked in all the water he could through the insects and green scum floating at the edges.\n\nThe apprentice dragons that had let the mooloks escape slunk to the water to drink as well. They cast nervous glances at Worgoob and startled ones at Tondoor. He recognized his former nest mates: a Bone named Boona, a Sky named Yarb, a Fire named Rooba, and\u2014ugh\u2014Hoodon. He hadn't seen them since that awful day of the raid. And the second-years had never seen a Snow. The year they were hatchlings, the elders were still hoping the previous seer would return.\n\nFolfro and the rest of the Fires arrived, herding the sweaty, recovered mooloks to the creek to drink as well. Mud churned around their hoofs as they swarmed into the water. It was a good thing Tondoor had already had his drink.\n\nWorgoob lifted his dripping Bone snout from the muddy water and glared at the apprentices. \"Young ones,\" he barked, \"come with me.\"\n\nTondoor trotted behind him through the short, poky grass, hoping Worgoob Most Ancient wouldn't turn out to be like Elder Mala after all. He couldn't be thinking that Tondoor should have warned him about the escaped beasts. Could he?\n\nWorgoob stopped where it was quiet enough to talk. The apprentices lined up in front of him, first-years on one side, second-years on the other.\n\nHoodon pointed at Tondoor. \"What is he doing here?\" His voice was crackly, as if he had a piece of a bone lodged in in his throat.\n\n\"Tondoor is part of our group now,\" said Worgoob. He nudged Tondoor toward the line. Tondoor scurried toward the first-years and took his place at the end, next to Rooba. \"Now,\" Worgoob said, \"tell me how the mooloks got scattered.\"\n\nThe first-years shuffled their toe-claws in the grass. One of the second-year Fires lifted her hand. \"The first-years flew off to play in the desert yesterday. I had to go and bring them back.\"\n\nThe second-year Sky raised her hand too. \"Norloof and I stayed with the herd. We swooped and shouted like we were supposed to, but the beasts ran all over.\"\n\n\"Did you forget the Three-Tailed Gather?\" asked Worgoob. \"You were taught that technique before we left.\"\n\n\"There were only two of us left!\"\n\nWorgoob's chest rumbled. \"First-years, why were you in the desert when you were told to stay here?\"\n\nFeet shuffled. Tondoor's feet shuffled too, even though he couldn't possibly know the answer.\n\nBoona spoke up. \"We went there to play the Battle for the Star. Because that's where the battle was.\"\n\nThe Battle for the Star, the story that Folfro had told. It had happened in the desert. Tondoor shivered to be so close to it. He would have gone to play the story too.\n\n\"Hoodon,\" Worgoob's voice rumbled. Tondoor craned his neck around Rooba so he could see. It was no surprise that Hoodon was the troublemaker.\n\n\"Why was it necessary for a second-year to bring you back?\"\n\nHoodon's hand-claws opened and closed, opened and closed. \"The game took a long time and\u2014\" He coughed. \"We didn't notice it was dark.\"\n\nHow could anyone not notice it was dark?\n\nWorgoob's huge nostrils twitched. \"There was no other reason?\"\n\nHoodon shook his head, keeping his eyes averted. Tondoor recognized the trick he had tried to use on Elder Mala. It was such an obvious deception it almost made him laugh.\n\n\"Why did you eat the fire root?\" Worgoob growled.\n\nTondoor gasped, but Hoodon didn't deny it. Was it not true then, that a fire root's explosion would tear a hatchling's stomach apart?\n\nNow Hoodon looked up. The orange in his eyes was fading to yellow, so this part of his story must be true. \"We started a new game of trying to step on each other's shadow heads,\" he said in his crackly voice. \"It got better as the sun went down, because the shadows got longer and longer.\"\n\nThe game sounded like a lot of fun. Maybe out here, the others would let him play too\u2014when he wasn't in the desert. Tondoor waited for Hoodon to stop coughing.\n\n\"My shadow got so long it went way across the sand into some rocks, and Yarb stepped on it.\" Now there was a happy blue mixed in with the yellow fear, making his eyes look greenish. \"Yarb yelled, because there was a scorp in the rocks, and it clamped onto his tail.\"\n\nA scorp?\n\nWorgoob pulled Yarb out of the front line and turned him around. Tondoor gasped. Yarb's tail scales were blackened and curled, right up to his blue back.\n\nHoodon hid his head under his wing. \"I blasted it with fire so it wouldn't sting him.\" His voice came out muffled.\n\nWorgoob lifted Hoodon's wing. \"I'm pretty sure you killed it. Next time use one claw to hold down its tail, another to pry open its pincer, then toss it away.\"\n\nHe inspected Yarb's blackened scales. \"Have you been keeping your tail in the water as much as you can?\"\n\nYarb nodded. \"At night. When I wasn't guarding the beasts.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Worgoob patted him on the head. \"Your scales will grow back. Don't worry.\" He turned to Hoodon and sighed. \"Ashes in your throat and the cinders in your belly are enough punishment for a first-year who can't wait to try fire root. Drink plenty of water, and no eating bones until your throat heals.\"\n\nHoodon gave a tiny nod.\n\n\"However!\" Worgoob's sudden shout made all of them jump. His eyes blazed red again. \"Next time you think to deceive me, remember what Morwaka's star did after Bone stole it. Who can tell me?\"\n\nTondoor pushed his hand straight up. But Worgoob pointed at Yarb.\n\n\"Whenever one of the dragons tried to trick Bone, the star turned orange.\"\n\n\"Correct,\" said Worgoob. \"It also turned blue when they spoke wisely, red when they spoke in rage, and yellow when they spoke in jealousy. So Morwaka said to them, 'Since you have so desired the power of the smallest star from my littlest toe-claw, enough to kill your sister Bone for it, it shall be yours. Henceforth the myriad colors of my star shall live in the eyes of every dragon. But so that you do not think yourself glorious, know that the colors of your eyes now reflect the colors of your hearts, and you shall not be able to hide your intentions.'\"\n\nHoodon flung himself down in the posture of regret at Worgoob's feet. Worgoob pulled him to his feet. \"Deceiving a Most Ancient is a serious act of rebellion. Sky Hoodon, your punishment shall be turd duty for six days, and sleeping in the desert for six nights.\"\n\nThe other first-years snickered. Tondoor didn't. If sleeping in the desert was a punishment, would they really make him do it too?\n\n\"The rest of you first-years are forbidden to leave the group.\"\n\nShouting and snarling sounds erupted near the dug-out. Worgoob twisted his neck over his shoulder, and Tondoor craned his neck to see. In the Nest, the adults did their fighting away from the hatchlings. Worgoob jerked his head back to the young dragons. \"Return to your duties.\" He paused. \"Tondoor, for now, help Hoodon.\" He loped toward the dugout."
            },
            {
                "title": "Turd Duty",
                "text": "\"But\u2014\" Tondoor protested, too late. Turd duty. How was that fair?\n\n\"Thanks!\" said Rooba. \"It was supposed to be my turn.\"\n\n\"Have fun, Hoodon,\" Yarb snickered as he limped toward the creek.\n\nThe other apprentices flew toward the herd of mooloks. The beasts had finished drinking and were heading out to graze again, escorted by two older Bloods. Hoodon trudged in the opposite direction toward a dark pile jutting out of the grass. The turd pile. Tondoor could tell by the stink.\n\nHoodon looked over his shoulder. \"Are you coming?\"\n\nTondoor blinked. Back at the Nest, no one ever waited for him to catch up. He tried not to look eager as he fell into step. This was turd duty, after all. And Hoodon. \"Why don't the Ashes pick the turds?\" he asked. He figured out the answer before Hoodon told him. All the Ashes stayed in the Nest.\n\nThey reached the steaming, smelly pile. Tondoor copied Hoodon and picked up basket and a bark scoop. They must have come from the Nest, because here there were no trees to make baskets with. \"What did it feel like to breathe fire?\" he asked.\n\nHoodon's voice croaked, but his eyes turned blue. \"Amazing. I'm going to do it again as soon as I can. I'm not afraid to sleep in the desert.\"\n\nTondoor didn't say that he was.\n\nYarb was sitting in the still-muddy creek. When he saw them coming, he stood up and planted a turd on the grass. Then he moved away. It didn't make much difference. The trampled grass around the water was already thick with turds, brown ropy ones from the dragons and flat, soggy plops with grass in them from the mooloks.\n\n\"Leave the moolok plops,\" Hoodon said. \"When they dry, we burn them.\"\n\nTondoor tried not to breathe as he scraped up a ropy turd. \"I wonder if the Ashes hate this job too.\"\n\nHoodon shrugged. \"That's what they're for.\"\n\nTondoor shook the plop into his basket. \"The legends don't say anything about Ashes picking turds. They say Morwaka gave us the ability to turn other beasts to dragons in case we fight too much, so we don't kill ourselves off.\"\n\nHoodon's eyes slid over Tondoor's smaller body. Tondoor tensed. In a fight, Hoodon would win. \"I forgot that part of the legend,\" Hoodon said. \"I've only heard it once.\"\n\n\"Kalooka told all the legends to me lots of times.\"\n\nHoodon's eyes turned vivid, jealous yellow. \"You are so lucky! Kalooka is the most beautiful female in the entire Plains.\"\n\nAn unfamiliar warmth filled Tondoor's chest. No one had ever been jealous of him for anything. He kept his tone casual. \"She's a very good teacher.\"\n\nHoodon scraped up a ropy turd, taking some of the grass with it. \"When I graduate, I'm going to choose her as my mate.\"\n\nTondoor stiffened. That was not going to happen. \"The elders choose for you. Except for Kalooka. She's going to choose for herself.\" He felt his eyes swell with proud violet. \"I helped her trick Elder Mala so she didn't have to go to the choosing ceremony.\"\n\nHoodon smirked. \"Is that why they sent you out here?\"\n\nOops. \"She might come and live with me in the desert,\" he mumbled. \"Then she won't ever have to be chosen.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nTondoor turned away. He hadn't exactly lied, but it sounded ridiculous said out loud. On the other hand, so did her mating with Hoodon. Who was still laughing.\n\nTondoor adjusted his grip on the scoop. \"It's not that funny.\"\n\n\"Yes it is. You're standing in a moolok turd.\"\n\nTondoor lifted his foot. Grassy mush dripped from his toe-claws.\n\n\"What did you mean, live with you in the desert?\" Hoodon asked. \"You don't live in the desert.\"\n\nTondoor wiped his foot on a bit of almost-clean grass. \"That's where seers go to find dreams.\" He tried to make it sound like a good thing.\n\n\"I wish I were a seer,\" said Hoodon. \"You get to do all the fun things.\"\n\n\"Like pick turds?\"\n\nHoodon laughed again, but this time it was friendly. \"Hey! Look out!\" Hoodon's turd splattered his chest.\n\nSo that was the game. Hoodon was ready for him, and ducked. But now he was ready too. The contest was surprisingly even. Hoodon could throw further, but Tondoor was quicker. He hurled a big one and reached down for more.\n\nA deep growl made him freeze.\n\nWorgoob wiped the dark brown spatter off his sand-colored belly. \"It looks like two young dragons will be sleeping in the desert tonight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Preparation",
                "text": "The desert was so hot during the day that if you sat on a rock, your scales would melt. Hoodon had a scar to prove it. But flying over it in the dark between Folfro and Hoodon, Tondoor felt cold. At least they could see. Morwaka's glowing Eye looked down half-lidded from the sky, making the rocks that littered the ground shine silver.\n\n\"There's no water here, but you'll be home in the morning,\" said Folfro as he led them down. \"Or you can lick off the bottom of the rocks if you're up early enough. But watch out for snoofs and scorps. They hide under rocks.\"\n\nTondoor's feet clumped against the ground. His scales were clamped down tightly, and the cold made him clumsy.\n\n\"Find some soft sand and burrow down. The sand holds the heat of the day longer than the air.\" Folfro demonstrated by wiggling his arms and legs.\n\nTondoor burrowed in beside him and folded his wings on top. The residual heat from the sand caressed him until Folfro stood up and the cold air rushed in. Hoodon jumped into his spot, and the warmth returned. For once Hoodon didn't look like he wanted to cause trouble.\n\n\"In the morning, head straight for the Butte,\" said Folfro, unfurling his wings. \"See you then.\" He flew away.\n\nThe desert was quiet except for the odd scratching sound. Tondoor wondered sleepily how fast he could get out of the sand if he had to. He decided not to worry about it and snuggled toward the warmth on Hoodon's side. When he was in the desert on his own, he would have to remember this sand trick.\n\nHoodon wiggled closer to him. Above them their wings pressed together. \"Why do seers have to go to the desert to have dreams? You already dreamed about the Dragons of the Rocks in the Nest, didn't you? Even if you didn't bother to tell anyone.\"\n\n\"I did so tell. I pounded the drum like Elder Mala told me to.\"\n\n\"Everyone said you didn't.\"\n\n\"I was across the lake in the cave. They couldn't hear me.\"\n\nHoodon was quiet for a while. \"If you see the Dragons of the Rocks coming when you're out here, how will you warn anyone?\"\n\nTondoor nosed aside a pebble that was pressing into his chin. \"They don't need me to warn them. They have Skies to keep watch.\"\n\n\"Then what are you a seer for?\"\n\nTondoor pointed his snout at the sky. \"Because it comes, it comes, the kraamlok coooooomes!\" he wailed like Kalooka. \"With claws of ice it sweeps the stars; with fangs of night it hunts us! Wreathed in flame it falls, and\u2014\"\n\nTondoor's side was suddenly cold again. \"Stop!\" shouted Hoodon. \"What are you talking about?\" He was up on his feet, his wings open as if to take off. That answered his question: he could get out very fast if he had to.\n\n\"Just answering your question,\" said Tondoor, not quite succeeding in keeping the tremor out of his voice too. \"That was my predecessor's prophecy. I'm supposed to dream us a way to escape it.\" The sand sifted around him as he shuddered.\n\nHoodon closed his wings. \"Well, don't say it again.\" He burrowed back in beside Tondoor. \"Do you know what the kraamlok is?\" he whispered after a moment. \"No one will tell me.\"\n\n\"A monster from the sky.\" Tonight's sky looked very normal, spattered with stars making all the constellations Kalooka had traced for him: a tree, a bird, a winding river.\n\n\"And you're going to save us.\" Hoodon snorted and closed his eyes.\n\nTondoor kept his eyes open. He gazed up at the starts and the lighter part of the sky around Morwaka's Eye, where the stars stayed out of sight. When the kraamlok did come, would it come fast like a rushing wind? Or would it start small and grow every night so everyone could see it and tremble with fear? And what could he possibly do to stop it? \"I hope you know what to do,\" he whispered to the Eye.\n\nThe low sun was orange in a pale yellow sky when Hoodon nosed him awake. \"Let's get going.\"\n\nTondoor stood up and shook the sand out of his scales. Folfro had said there was water under the rocks. He flipped one over with his toe-claw.\n\nA hard-shelled creature scurried away. It had long, sharp-looking pincers and a tail curled high over its back.\n\n\"That's a scorp,\" croaked Hoodon. \"Don't let it sting you with its tail.\"\n\nTondoor watched it disappear into another cluster of rocks as he licked off the tiny water droplets on the first rock. They barely cooled his scratchy tongue. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Hoodon nosed a stubby plant growing between two rocks. \"Look, a fire root.\"\n\nTondoor bent close. He'd seen plenty of fire root's star-shaped leaves at the Nest, but this was where Morwaka had first planted it. Long ago, the first dragons had fought their epic battle above where he was standing now, and spilled Bone's blood right where this fire root was growing.\n\nHoodon nudged him. \"You could eat it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHoodon wiggled his toe-claws between the rocks where the scorp had gone to hide. It skittered onto his foot. \"Rescue me. Quick, before it stings.\"\n\nWas he kidding? \"Never do something stupid just because someone tells you to.\" Tondoor flicked the scorp away with his toe-claw.\n\nHoodon ruffled his wings. \"Fine. If you're too scared.\" He leapt into the air.\n\nTondoor flapped after him. \"I'm not scared. I'm just not stupid.\" But his throat was still dry and shouting made it hurt. He flapped harder. He had kept up with the big dragons all the way from the Nest\u2014surely he could keep up with Hoodon. But Hoodon had long Sky wings, and he couldn't.\n\nWhen he landed by the dug-out, Hoodon ignored him. Fine. Tondoor didn't want to pick turds anyway. He went to find Worgoob. \"What should I do today, Most Ancient?\"\n\nWorgoob stroked his neck scales. \"You'll need some training before you go out to live in the desert, but Folfro is busy right now. Why don't you go out to the herd with the other first-years? They'll show you how to help here, and I'll have Folfro take you to the desert again this evening.\"\n\nTondoor felt himself relax. Worgoob wasn't like Elder Mala at all.\n\nThere was a lot to learn about mooloks. For example, the reason their eggs didn't get trampled was that the females laid them inside pouches on their bellies, not on the ground. The hatchlings stayed inside and ate the soft eggshells and drank body fluid from their mothers, and only emerged when they were big enough to stand and move around.\n\nBut that didn't mean they were safe. There were the toks, flat armored insects that hid under the grass and crawled up the mooloks' furry legs and into their pouches, where they could suck out a hatchling's blood. If there was no hatchling, they sucked blood from the mother. Boona showed Tondoor how to slide his hand-claws into the mooloks' pouches, pinch a tok's head to break its grip, then slide it out of the pouch. The good part was that toks were very tasty, especially if they had already filled up with blood.\n\nTondoor learned how to catch hoppers, insects with long back legs that leapt high into the air. They tasted like sand, and he would have ignored them altogether if Folfro hadn't told him that that after one of the grassland's rare rainstorms, the hoppers could multiply into huge swarms and eat all the grass as far as the horizon, leaving the mooloks to starve. So Tondoor pounced on them and crunched up as many as he could catch.\n\nThere were other dangers too. Coyloks and other small furry predators crept around the fringes of the herd on their six padded feet, watching for strays. \"If you can catch one, you can eat it,\" Tondoor was told. So he tried until he did.\n\nThe mooloks also needed grooming to clean off the seed-pods that stuck in their thick fur, as well as any toks that managed to burrow through to their skin. Grooming also calmed them. The day went quickly, and by evening he was so full of toks and hoppers and coylok that he had no room for moolok.\n\nHoodon seemed happy enough to see Tondoor again after a day of picking turds. He was also happy to listen to him tell some of Kalooka's stories under the starry desert sky after Folfro left.\n\nSix nights later, when Hoodon's punishment was up, Folfro took Tondoor out during the days as well. Tondoor learned to hunt snoofs and find shelter from the cold and heat, and how to hide his head in a pocket inside his wing so he could breathe in a sandstorm. The desert began to feel, if not friendly, at least not necessarily deadly.\n\nStill, it was a shock when Worgoob met them at the creek one morning with the words, \"It's time. Tomorrow you leave.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Shadow Dragons",
                "text": "Tondoor spent his last night with Worgoob's group lying beside a dried dung fire, watching the now-familiar dragon faces flicker in the firelight. The stars behind the smoke seemed to shiver and dance. What made the desert so special that he had to go there to hear Morwaka's voice? What made it better than here?\n\nOnce the fire had settled into its embers, Folfro stood up, spread his wings, and began to speak in his low, sonorous voice. \"You may wonder why seers go to the desert to dream.\"\n\nTondoor lifted his head, and Folfro winked at him.\n\n\"It's because of the first Snow and the Shadow Dragons.\"\n\nAll of a sudden Tondoor missed Kalooka terribly. What was she doing right now, and did she ever think about him, so far away? He wanted to tell her he was going out to the desert tomorrow and see her eyes turn to sympathetic green. He wanted her to hear Folfro's new story. He turned his head away from the smoke so he could see the stars while Folfro's resonant voice filled the air with pictures. He would save the story in his heart and tell it to her when he went back.\n\nFolfro began.\n\n\"In the days when Sky first settled on the Plains and laid eggs in all the colors of the People, one of her eggs hatched into the first Snow. Snow wanted to listen for Morwaka's voice, but her ears were clogged with all the noise and bother of the other dragons, who cared nothing for silence. The only quiet place she could find was the desert, so she went there.\n\n\"The desert was hot and dry, and Snow became thirsty. Morwaka revealed to her that there was water under the ground, but as deep as she dug, and as far as she ventured into the twisty caves, all she found was sand and rock. So she asked Desert to send some of the water to the surface so she could drink. But Desert was still angry with the dragons for burning her up when she'd been the Bountiful Land, and she didn't want them to come back. So she decided to play a trick to make Snow go away.\n\n\"'I have made you a lake,' she said the next morning. 'Go and drink your fill.' Snow looked into the distance and saw a shimmering lake. But when she reached it, the water disappeared before her eyes and turned to sand. Snow saw that Desert had tricked her. She hid her anger and said, 'Thank you, Desert, for your gift of water. Now I am also hungry. Would you also provide beasts for me to eat?'\n\n\"Desert was surprised that Snow was had not gone away and decided to trick her again. \"I will send beasts into the tall rocks in the morning,\" she said to Snow. As the sun rose, Snow saw many strange beasts hiding among the tall rocks. But as soon as she reached them, they turned into shadows and melted away between her claws. Snow realized that Desert had tricked her again. So she decided to play a trick on Desert.\"\n\nTondoor's own belly was still comfortably full, but he could imagine how hungry and thirsty Snow would be after days in the Barren Wasteland. What trick could Snow possibly play to make Desert give her beasts and water?\n\n\"'Oh, Desert,' said Snow. 'Thank you for your fine gifts of water and beasts. I have only one more favor to ask. Your land is very large, and it takes me a long time to fly between the beasts and the lake. Could you move the lake so it lies among the tall rocks where the beasts live?'\n\n\"Desert thought Snow must be very stupid, but in the morning she moved the shimmering lake to the tall rocks where the shadow beasts lived. Snow crept up to one of the shadow beasts. Quickly, she pounced on it and plunged it into the lake, as Morwaka had given dragons the power to do. The water turned to sand, but the beast turned into a shadow dragon. Soon Snow had turned many of Desert's shadow beasts into shadow dragons.\"\n\nTondoor howled with laughter along with the others. How clever!\n\n\"When Desert saw what Snow had done, she was very angry. She moved the lake to the horizon, so that as long as Snow flew, she could never reach it. 'You have filled my land with dragons,' Desert accused her, 'and now it will be filled with noise and bother and I will have no peace.'\n\n\"Snow said, 'If you release some of the water that is locked under the ground so I can drink it, and allow plants to grow and beasts to live there for me to eat, I will get rid of these shadow dragons and restore your peace and quiet.'\n\n\"Desert saw that she had no choice. She released some of the water and made the oasis. Trees and plants grew up around it, and small beasts came to live there. The next day, after she had filled herself with water and beasts, Snow led the shadow dragons so deep into the twisty caves beneath the desert sands that they could not find their way out.\n\n\"From that day on, Snows have lived at the oasis in peace and quiet, listening for Morwaka's dreams, and shadow dragons wander the deep and twisty caves, waiting for Snow to return and lead them out.\"\n\nTondoor's eyes almost burst with pride at the cleverness of his ancestor Snow. He would have to be clever too, when he met Desert. \"Is there still an oasis in the desert?\" he asked Folfro.\n\n\"Yes. That is where you will live, starting tomorrow.\"\n\nTondoor shivered at the thought while the first-years looked at him with awe.\n\n\"Are there still shadow dragons in the caves?\" asked Hoodon.\n\n\"So they say,\" said Folfro. \"But if you ever see one, don't follow it. They are still angry at Snow for trapping them down there and like to lead other dragons down to their deaths.\"\n\nFolfro patted Tondoor on the horns. \"But don't worry. You'll do fine. You're a Snow, aren't you?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Oasis",
                "text": "The next morning, before dawn, Worgoob came to see him off. \"Our future depends on you, Tondoor. Listen well, and may you hear Morwaka's voice.\"\n\nTondoor shivered. Morwaka better know about the future, because he didn't. Water sloshed in his stomach as he flew out beside Folfro into the pale sky. \"Did you take the other seers out to the oasis too?\" he asked.\n\n\"I took the last one. He was a strange fellow. Always looked like he was up to something.\"\n\n\"Did he dream out there?\"\n\nFolfro glanced at him. \"You know the answer to that question.\"\n\nTondoor gulped. It must have been terrifying to dream of the evil kraamlok all alone in the desert, with Morwaka's glowing Eye staring down at him. \"How far to the oasis?\" he asked to change the subject.\n\n\"Too far. It's better if you don't talk. It dries out your mouth. Instead, memorize the landmarks so you can find your own way next time.\"\n\nTondoor closed his snout. Who would he talk to in the desert? He might not speak again until he went back to the group. What if he forgot how? Worgoob had said he could return when he needed to, but that was not the same as when he wanted to. How would he know when was the right time?\n\nHe looked for landmarks, but all he saw as the sun rose was scattered plants among the rocks. Soon they all but disappeared, and only rocks shimmered in the hot sun. Suddenly, in the distance, he saw a great, shining lake.\n\n\"Is that the oasis?\" His throat caught in the dry air.\n\n\"Desert's trick lake.\"\n\nTondoor stared. As they flew, the lake receded. Where the water had been was only dry sand. The story was true.\n\nThe day warmed. Tondoor's scales loosened to let the heat out of his body. He wished he'd taken a bigger drink. Folfro led them higher, to where the air was thinner but still cool. Except for the trick water that wasn't really there and a few flurries of dust, they were the only things that moved.\n\nIf Bone hadn't stolen Morwaka's star and the other dragons hadn't fought her for it, what would he see below him in the Bountiful Land? Giant trees, beasts, water, and Bone's descendants living here in their own tribe. Then where would seers go to find dreams? Would they even have seers, or would Morwaka still fly among them?\n\nThe sun beat onto Tondoor's back. The day wore on. Folfro took him down beside a cluster of spiky plants, tall and bulbous with weird projections like limbs. He broke off two of the arms and handed one to Tondoor. \"Drink.\" Tondoor sucked out the pulpy liquid, being careful not to get the spines in his eyes. Refreshed, they flew up again.\n\nThe rocks beneath them became boulders, then bigger boulders. The trick lake shrank and split into trick puddles between fantastic rocky ridges with lumpy outlines. Some stood tall like giant leg bones. Others flowed in curves like solid water. Still others looked like eye sockets in a skull, or giant teeth still attached to a cracked jawbone. They made shadowy valleys and lopsided ridges, and as the sun began to sink toward the horizon, grew beast-like shadows with weirdly shaped limbs.\n\nTondoor forgot he was flying, lost in the wonder of it. Only when Folfro rasped, \"Almost there,\" did he notice that his throat was dry again. Below them, trees with fronded tops appeared between two ridges shaped like moolok horns. Between the trees, he saw real, rippling water, surrounded by thick green grass and short, leafy bushes. The miraculous scent of living things wafted up as they sank down.\n\nTondoor splashed into the water and took great gulps. So did Folfro. Then they crept into the cool undergrowth and lay very still, watching the small beasts that also came to drink. There were many: slithering snoofs, and some that could swim, glarfs that bounded beside the water, insects that walked on top of it, darting fish, a kind of miniature coylok, long-necked birds with longer legs, and soft-bodied swimming loogahs. They rested in the shade until the sun set and the air began to cool. Tondoor caught a glarf and two snoofs. They drank again, then he and Folfro burrowed into the still warm sand.\n\nA cluster of stars above them was shaped sort of like a dragon's head. Those lines below it could be legs, and on the side, a wing. Maybe there were night dragons too, Tondoor thought as he fell into sleep.\n\nHe woke when the sun was low and the air was still cool. After eating and drinking again, he and Folfro flew in a large circle around the oasis so Tondoor would learn to recognize it from any direction. Then Folfro took another long drink and flapped west, tossing a final \"Dream well,\" over his shoulder.\n\nTondoor watched him disappear into the bright morning sky. He sat for a long time, memorizing the direction back to the Plains, feeling very tiny and alone.\n\nAfter a while, a scorp scurried under the rock he was sitting on. Tondoor pulled his toe-claws out of the way of its curled tail and crept back into the undergrowth to take shelter. What else was there to do? Other creatures had the same idea, and they lay in the shadows together while the sun heated up the air. Later, after waking from a lengthy nap, he caught another snoof. When darkness fell and the air cooled down, he ventured out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Secrets",
                "text": "The sky was aflame.\n\nAll the stars he had seen before were sparks compared to these. As Tondoor stared, more stars appeared, and more, and more, until the sky was blazing with blue fire. Now and then a shining star slashed the sky. He wondered if he could catch one.\n\nThe stars danced themselves into shapes of beasts and plants and things he didn't know, shifting and re-forming and shifting again, whispering to him in their silent voices, opening up deep places inside of him he didn't know he had. He stared up until his neck hurt, then rested with his head on a rock so he could gaze some more.\n\nThis was why seers came to the desert to find dreams\u2014although truly, what he was seeing was stories. If Kalooka ever caught a glimpse of this sky, she would never go back. There were so many stars, so many stories, that before one finished forming, another caught his eye. Then he realized why. Morwaka's Eye was asleep, and the stars had the sky to themselves.\n\nThe sun woke him by beating on his tightly clamped scales, and once again he found shelter and food in the leaves. But he didn't feel like spending the whole day there, since this time he wasn't sleepy. Instead, he flew through the heat to the shadowed ridges with their bizarrely sculpted rock in shades of orange and yellow and gray.\n\nSnow's shadow beasts played among the curves and angles of the rocks, hiding and re-emerging as the sun crawled toward the west. Sometimes he heard them whisper, or was it only the teasing wind? Then the wind blew his thoughts away, and the shadow beasts began to tell stories too.\n\nThat night, with Morwaka's Eye just barely open, the stars twinkled so thick and close that he tried to fly up and touch them. But he never got any closer and he fainted when the air got too thin to fill his lungs. A rush of wind tumbled him about just in time for him to arch his wings and land on his feet.\n\nAs Morwaka's Eye opened and the stars backed away, Tondoor tried again to listen. He stared at the Eye until its light made his eyes water, keeping the Ravine's image of the kraamlok in his mind even though it frightened him. \"I'm here, Great Dragon Morwaka\" he whispered. \"Please speak to me.\" But Morwaka didn't answer. The nights he lived for were the ones when the Eye was closed and he could lose himself in the stars.\n\nDuring the cool of the morning, Tondoor searched for fallen stars. He never found one, but he did discover that the desert was riddled with caves. Some were mere holes with just enough shade for him to curl up and nap in, if a snoof or scorp hadn't crawled in first. Others led into dark tunnels full of rough pillars and spikes like bumpy stone teeth, and cool water to drink. Once he scraped his arm against a pillar, and when he went back out into the light, found purple crystals wedged between his scales. He stashed them in a hole near the oasis, to give to Kalooka if he ever returned to the Nest.\n\nOne day, as he followed the scent of water down a dark passage deep underground, he heard a whisper. He froze in place to listen. Nothing. But when he resumed walking, it came again, this time with words.\n\n\"Come.\"\n\nA shadow dragon.\n\nFolfro's warning clanged in his mind. He fled back the way he had come. But his feet didn't remember the turns, and the water called, and the whispers played around his head. In the end he found the water, and drank, and covered his ears. By the time he found his way back to the light the sun was high and he was in a cave he'd never seen before.\n\nThe cave had pictures on the wall. Of dragons.\n\nThey weren't made of beautiful colors like the ones the Suns made; they were just marks made by scraping a soft stone over the rock. But they had been put there by someone, and since the only dragons in the desert, besides the shadow dragons, were seers\u2026\n\nA shiver trickled down Tondoor's tail even as the day's heat flowed in. Here was a message from a seer, intended, obviously, for another seer. Intended for him. His breaths sounded loud in the silent air. He felt like part of a picture himself, a flowing mosaic depicting a line of seers as long as time.\n\nThe top dragon was stretched out like a snoof with legs. It had an open snout full of sharp teeth. But the tail forked into three parts, and if the dragon had wings they weren't in the picture.\n\nThe lower dragon had four wings and two legs, all folded up to make little peaks above its back, like the legs of a hopper. Its tail tapered straight away from its body and ended in a hump instead of a wedge. The dragon's head lay flat on the ground as if it were sleeping, but the hole in the rock that marked its eye made it look not asleep, but blind.\n\nWhy a blind dragon? And why had the artist dug out the eye hole instead of just making a mark? Hmm. He was used to helping Kalooka find just the right pebble to fit into a hole. He raked his toe-claws through the pebbly sand beneath the picture, found a likely one, licked it clean, and turned it until it fit.\n\nNow the dragon looked so awake that Tondoor half expected it to blink. The pebble was a crystal. An orange one. Deceit, he thought automatically. Don't trust it. But when Tondoor moved, the eye's gaze turned yellow. Fear. Uneasiness. He moved again. Now it was the empty white of seeking dreams.\n\nHis heart soared at the beauty of it but sank at the mystery. What could this cryptic message on a cave wall mean? Once again he felt the heaviness of being a seer who didn't know how to be one. He backed out of the cave into the daylight, with the eye watching him all the way. Violet now. Triumph at keeping its secret.\n\n\"Help me, Morwaka,\" he croaked to the sky, even though it was day and the Eye was hiding. \"Show me what it means.\"\n\nThe only answer he got was the hot sun beating on his head.\n\nFine. If Morwaka wouldn't help, he would just forget about it. But the mystery kept drawing him back to the cave until the drawings were etched as clearly in his mind as on the rock wall. Maybe Worgoob or Folfro could help him. Needing to ask an older and wiser dragon for advice must be a good enough reason to return to the Plains.\n\nWorgoob's group wasn't near the Butte when Tondoor got back, so he flew along the creek, inhaling the sweet grass scent, until he came to another dug-out pond. He could see the dragons with the herd of mooloks out in the grass. Dragons clustered around him when he landed. Hoodon had grown. Everyone had. He must have too.\n\nThat evening, after a moolok meal and a good long drink at the pond, everyone crowded around the dung fire to hear what he had seen and done. Tondoor told them some of the stories the star creatures had whispered to him, tracing constellations in the sky as he spoke. He'd forgotten how still the stars were outside the desert. To his surprise, the dragons clapped their tails with each other when he finished, the same as they did for Folfro.\n\nIn the morning, he told Worgoob and Folfro about the cave drawings. Worgoob sat for a while, nodding. \"Neither of the seers I hosted mentioned this, though they saw many of the other mysterious things you spoke of last night. If this drawing is real, you may be the first to find it.\"\n\nOf course it was real. He had studied it for days. But he had also seen the trick lake, and shadow beasts, and followed a shadow dragon. So many of his desert experiences seemed dreamlike now that he was back in the stark reality of the Plains.\n\nWorgoob patted him on the horns. \"If Morwaka led you to it, he will reveal the meaning.\"\n\nActually, the shadow dragons had led him to it, but he didn't think he should say that.\n\nWorgoob cleared his throat. \"Since you are our seer, I need to ask you on behalf of Elder Mala: have you received any dreams about the kraamlok?\"\n\nTondoor hung his head. \"No. But I do listen, especially when Morwaka's Eye is wide.\"\n\n\"Then you mean not yet.\" Worgoob patted his horns again. \"Dreams come in their own time. Perhaps the kraamlok is still too far away to worry about.\"\n\nTondoor spent the next days out with the herd. He dug for toks and chased hoppers and coyloks and combed moolok fur. At night he stared into the dung-fire instead of the stars. But when he closed his eyes, the mysterious pictures hung there, calling him back. So he returned to the desert and the cave. The pictures were still there, still guarding their secret."
            },
            {
                "title": "Trial By Ordeal",
                "text": "Morwaka's Eye opened and closed in its silent, timeless cycle. Tondoor returned to the group occasionally to tell his stories, hear the news from the Nest, and learn who had died from injury or illness or fighting. When a new group of apprentices arrived, he knew it was almost summer again, and he was two years old. In the fall, the adults flew away for the choosing ceremony while he flew back to the desert.\n\nThe next spring, Hoodon told him that Kalooka had laid a turquoise egg. A female. Tondoor wondered if she had been chosen by a Remarkable, as Dorla had predicted, and how she felt about it.\n\nThree Eye-blinks later, Tondoor's now three-year-old nest mates returned to the Nest to graduate. Tondoor was out in the desert at the time and missed both the ceremony and his opportunity to see Kalooka. When they returned, a new set of timid, very small first year apprentices came with them.\n\nIn the fall, a different need called Tondoor back to the herders. Kalooka may have dreaded the choosing, but new feelings were rising inside Tondoor's body, creating a strange urgency that made it difficult to concentrate on anything else. He gathered the crystals he had collected for Kalooka inside a folded leaf.\n\n\"I want to go to the choosing ceremony,\" he announced when he arrived at the herding group. Worgoob looked him up and down and nodded.\n\nThe Nest looked much less impressive to Tondoor than when it had been his whole world. It was little more than a few clearings by the side of the lake. Clutching his squirming tribute beast, he flew with Hoodon and Yarb toward the crowd of male dragons on the far side of the river, beside the tribute pen. The females angled off to their own tribute pen on the other side of the Ravine.\n\nKalooka would be likely be down inside the Ravine, since residents of the Nest received tribute; they didn't bring it. As soon as he was done here, he would find her and give her the crystals.\n\nHe set his beast down on the ground, keeping one hand twined in its fur so it wouldn't bolt. After the quiet of the desert and the open plains, the din of bellowing beasts and shouting dragons made his head spin. The tribute counters were still checking the offerings of the herders ahead of them, so there was nothing else to do but look around.\n\nSome of the older dragons passed the time by comparing their trophy necklaces. Worgoob's bristled with scales of many colors, bright against his Bone body. If he counted them, he would know how old Worgoob was, minus three years. Folfro had a smaller cluster.\n\nJealousy stabbed Tondoor's heart. Was one of his Sun scales Kalooka's? He swallowed the growl in his throat. Kalooka had to mate with someone; he didn't want to know who. The elders wouldn't give Kalooka to him for sure. But as Dorla said, mating was for making eggs, not friends.\n\nThe sticky smells of sweat and moolok dung stung his nostrils and the din of shouting dragons and bellowing beasts hurt his head. If this wasn't the only way to get a mate and still the pounding in his body, he would just leave. More males poured in behind him as he shuffled ahead in the line.\n\nFinally, an ancient Bone butted her head between Tondoor and his moolok. \"Name and color?\" she croaked. Her eyes were full of clouds, and Tondoor realized she couldn't see.\n\n\"Tondoor. Snow.\"\n\nThe old Bone sniffed him. \"Grown up already? How the years fly.\" She picked up his moolok by its neck, then sniffed each of its six hoofs and listened to its chest. \"This one's good. You can put it in the pen.\" She bit off the tip of its ear. The beast squealed, and Tondoor grabbed its fur.\n\nThe Bone looked past him with her cloudy eyes. \"You can go now, dear, and get ready to receive your lovely mate.\"\n\nA rush of warmth filled Tondoor's body. \"Do you know if Kalooka is at the Ravine?\"\n\nThe Bone pulled herself upright. \"Males are not permitted to mingle with the females before the choosing.\" She pointed up at several ancient females flying circles overhead. \"If the matrons catch you, you go to the back of your color line.\"\n\nHe'd be the only one in his color line, but he didn't say it. The Bone sniffed her way toward the next beast, and Tondoor pulled his to the pen and left it to mill about with the others, also squealing about their bloody ears.\n\nNot permitted to mingle. Ha. They were if they were sneaky enough. But first, he needed to find Elder Mala and tell her he was here and ready\u2014eager\u2014to do his duty and mate.\n\nThere were dragons in the main part of the Nest, so he assumed he was allowed to go in as long as he had legitimate business there. The Teaching Place was full of tiny hatchlings and their bright green Leaf minders\u2014startling after the dusty green-gold of grass on the plains. Ashes were busy sweeping the Gathering Place for the ceremony. Four bored-looking Bloods guarded the triangular grid of pebbles the elders used for matching up colors during the choosing.\n\nElder Mala wasn't in the Elders' Clearing, but separate male and female crowds had gathered on the edge of the bank overlooking the lake, watching something splashing in the water. He joined Hoodon beside the river. \"Did someone fall in?\"\n\n\"It's a trial by ordeal,\" said Hoodon, not taking his eyes off the spectacle. \"She either gets herself out or she doesn't.\"\n\nTondoor's breath caught. Kalooka had told him that once your wings were wet, it was impossible to lift them out high enough to take flight. Through the splashes, he saw a glint of gold. Could it be Kalooka in the lake? Could she have angered the elders to the point of being ordered a trial by ordeal? Yes. But surely she was too smart for that. \"What did she do?\" he asked Hoodon.\n\nHoodon shook his head impatiently.\n\nThe splashing in the lake was slowing. The dragon\u2014please, Morwaka, not Kalooka\u2014was tiring. Tondoor imagined the terror of trying to breathe but getting only water, of trying to leap into the air but being dragged down by the weight of your wings, of trying to stand but knowing there was only water going down and down and down. He gulped. In the desert you could die of thirst, but you could always stand and breathe.\n\n\"She's going down!\" someone shouted.\n\nThe Sun made a last desperate effort to pull herself out of the water. There was a final splash, then only spreading ripples that melted into the smooth surface of the lake. \"I wonder who it was,\" Tondoor whispered. Dreading the answer.\n\nHoodon's eyes were as gray and sorrowful as his felt. \"Kalooka.\"\n\nTondoor's chest felt tight. It couldn't be. How could the elders do this to her? \"Why?\" he shouted into Hoodon's snout. \"What happened?\"\n\nHoodon shoved him away. \"Leave me alone.\" He flapped into the air.\n\nTondoor snapped his teeth after him. What right did Hoodon have to grieve like him?\n\nThe other dragons began to fly away, some silent, some muttering, some gossiping about necklaces and past mates. Tondoor listened with growing despair. Didn't they know the world had just ended?\n\nHe leapt up and over the lake. Birds paddled on the surface, oblivious to the horror beneath them. He circled the spot where Kalooka went down. She had left no trace. Not even a smudge of gold on the lake bottom."
            },
            {
                "title": "Truth",
                "text": "Someone nipped his tail. It was Dorla.\n\n\"Keep flying,\" she hissed. \"If anyone helps her, she has to do it again.\"\n\n\"Helps her!\" Then he saw it. A gold dot bobbed out of the water in the direction of the Ravine, then disappeared again. He banked hard. \"Why did they dump her in the lake?\"\n\nDorla tried to cut him off, but he dodged and propelled himself toward the mouth of the Ravine. \"She made a picture the elders didn't like,\" Dorla snapped. She dove in front of him, but he darted up and over her. The changing pools were empty. Of course: this spring's Ashes were fully transformed, and they wouldn't make new ones until next year.\n\nDorla followed him into the mouth of the Ravine. \"You're not allowed to be here. But if you won't follow the rules, at least stay out of sight.\"\n\nTondoor thumped down and crouched under a rocky overhang. \"What kind of picture?\"\n\nDorla's eyes flashed red, but it was mixed with triumphant violet that made them bulge for a moment before they turned worried yellow again. \"A picture of you.\" She turned and stalked back toward the lake.\n\n\"Me?\" Tondoor peered around a boulder at the lake. The gold dot that was Kalooka bobbed and disappeared again, then appeared again near the rocky shore. She angled her folded wings out of the water and dragged herself onto the shore. His heart ached to see her so bedraggled.\n\nDorla turned sideways to keep him from rushing toward her. \"Let her recover. She'll find us when she dries out.\" She pointed with her snout. \"Come with me and I'll show you the picture she made.\"\n\nTondoor inhaled the familiar scents as they trotted between the rocks: scales and pebble dust and tree sap and the stunted trees that hung by their roots from the cracks in the cliff. But there was a new one, the odor of something burnt.\n\nWhen they reached the work area, Tondoor stepped away from the wall, careful not to muss the colored piles. He was still clutching his package of crystals for Kalooka. Good thing he hadn't remembered it earlier\u2014he might have dropped it into the lake as a memorial.\n\nDorla slapped her tail against the cliff. \"Look.\"\n\nThere had been a picture here. Now, most of it was just charred scales, curled and peeling off the rock. Dorla scraped away loose ash, revealing crisscrossed stripes made of dark, glinting metal\u2014probably flaked off the bodies of the dead raiders.\n\n\"The Dragons of the Rocks,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"Correct. And this\u2026\" Dorla scraped off more ash. \"This was an apprentice Fire falling to her death. Here, eggs. Notice that the eggshell doesn't char as easily as scales do.\" She wrinkled her snout at him. \"Why am I telling you that?\" Dorla blew away more loose ash, and three rows of thin pebbles appeared. \"Here are the logs in front of your cave.\"\n\nThe one across the lake. \"This is the day of my dream.\"\n\n\"Yes. And this patch of ash behind them used to be you, beating your drum while no one across the lake paid any attention.\" She flicked her hand-claw across his chest. \"Those were our last white scales, so if you lose any, kindly save them for us.\"\n\nTondoor's heart swelled. \"Of course.\" While he'd been watching stars in the desert, missing Kalooka, she had been making a picture of him. \"But why would this picture make the elders angry?\" he said. \"That's what happened.\"\n\nThere was a thump behind them. There was Kalooka, glistening wet, and so lovely he nearly swooned. She was bigger too, but so was he, so really, nothing had changed. Except for everything.\n\n\"Hi, Tondoor,\" she said in her lilting voice, somewhat weaker than usual. The sound of it made him want to protect her from all harm forever. She spread her arms. \"Welcome home.\"\n\nHe did the same, feeling every fiber of his body tense in anticipation of her touch. In all of those days close to her, and thinking of her every day in the desert, never had he felt such intense, burning desire.\n\nDorla stepped between them. \"It is against the rules to mingle before the choosing.\"\n\nTondoor stifled an urge to shove her into the wall. He took a deep breath and lowered his arms.\n\nKalooka lowered hers too. \"Oh, right. Sorry.\"\n\n\"I was just explaining to Tondoor what your trial was for,\" said Dorla.\n\nKalooka's eyes blazed red. \"I showed the truth: that the disaster was their fault, not yours.\"\n\nTondoor's jaw dropped. \"You almost died over that?\"\n\nKalooka snorted. \"I would never have demanded trial by ordeal if I thought I'd die.\" She waved her wing toward the lake. \"I practiced swimming every night after I decided to make that picture.\"\n\nDorla ruffled her wings, but Tondoor noted that her eyes were a proud violet, unmixed with red this time. He could feel his bulging violet too. Kalooka was so wonderfully smart.\n\n\"What were they going to do to you?\" Tondoor asked. \"If you hadn't chosen to swim?\"\n\n\"I would have been banished to a herding group and told never to make another picture.\"\n\nTondoor gulped. So there was no hope of her coming to the desert.\n\n\"But don't you see?\" Kalooka continued. \"If you drown, you're guilty and if you live, you're not. I just proved I'm innocent, so they can't banish me.\" She swung her head toward Tondoor's necklace. \"Tondoor! Are you in the choosing this year?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She wasn't wearing her necklace, he noticed, with its one scale. Maybe she'd lost it in the lake, or maybe not wearing it was another form of protest. Still burning from their near embrace, he didn't know whether to be thrilled that she was now thinking about him being at the choosing, or disappointed because it seemed to be a new thought for her.\n\nDorla pushed Tondoor toward the deep part of the Ravine. \"Time to go. We've been lucky up to now, but Miss Trouble here doesn't need to risk any more.\" She pointed. \"Everyone is outside getting polished up for the ceremony, so you can sneak to the male side through there.\"\n\nKalooka yawned. \"I'm going to have a nap in the sun.\" She peered around Dorla. \"We'll talk tomorrow, Tondoor.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. He would give Kalooka her gift tomorrow in private, after. He felt like a hatchling all over again. After one of the Remarkables chose Kalooka. And that's fine, he told himself again as he stashed his package in a crack above the pictures at the end of the Ravine. Mating is for making eggs, not friends. But he didn't believe it. No matter what Dorla said, the one he wanted was Kalooka."
            },
            {
                "title": "Graduation",
                "text": "Elder Mala was waiting for him beside the pile of boulders when he flew out, her hand-claws on her hips in the posture of annoyance. Worgoob stood beside her, looking worried.\n\n\"The seer returns,\" she rasped. \"And once again he breaks the rules.\"\n\nTondoor assumed the posture of regret. \"I didn't mean to mingle. I thought Kalooka was dead\u2014I just wanted to talk to Dorla.\"\n\n\"Dorla is also female.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" The thought of her as his mate seemed ludicrous. Elder Mala was also female, he remembered with horror, and her necklace had a white scale. But she was too old to take a mate. He relaxed.\n\nElder Mala's eyes flashed red. \"I am certain I ordered you not to concern yourself with the fate of a particular Sun dragon. But that is not the rule I was referring to.\"\n\nTondoor looked up at her, baffled. What else had he done?\n\nElder Mala sighed wearily. \"The first duty of a seer, upon returning to the Nest, is to report to the Most Ancient elder, which is now me.\"\n\nOh. He had missed the news of the previous Most Ancient's death. Was it worth congratulating her, or telling her he had looked for her earlier? Probably not. He switched to the posture of respect. \"I am here, Most Ancient.\"\n\n\"Yes. Finally. First order of business: you failed to show up for your graduation.\"\n\nWorgoob cut in. \"He was in the desert seeking dreams, Most Ancient, and didn't know it was time to leave. Also, since he has no mentor, it wasn't clear whether he was eligible to graduate.\"\n\nThank you, Worgoob.\n\nElder Mala sniffed. \"Yes, well, seeking dreams is what he should be doing. We will graduate him now.\" She turned to Worgoob. \"You will act as mentor for this purpose.\" She assumed the posture of authority. \"Has this apprentice served the group faithfully and learned all the skills required of adult Snows?\" she intoned in a bored voice.\n\n\"To the best of my knowledge, he has,\" Worgoob replied.\n\nElder Mala shoved Tondoor's head down. He peered between her cracked, yellow hand-claws, so unlike Kalooka's smooth, ivory ones. \"Then I hereby proclaim you an adult Dragon of the Plains, with all the associated privileges and responsibilities.\" Elder Mala pulled her hand away. \"You'll have to find your own necklace and fire root. I don't have any with me.\"\n\n\"Ah, but I do,\" said Worgoob. He slid a leather cord over Tondoor's head, then pulled a small, red ball off his ankle spur. He handed it to Tondoor. \"Aim over the Ravine.\"\n\nAshes and cinders, here I come! Tondoor placed the fire root in his mouth while Elder Mala looked on impatiently. He chomped down and swallowed. His stomach tightened, then ballooned out so quickly he almost fell backwards. He did the only thing his churning stomach allowed: opening his mouth to belch out the smoke and gritty flames. Coughing and spitting out the acrid taste, he sank forward onto all fours.\n\nWorgoob patted him on the horns. \"Not bad for a first try. Next time take a breath before you swallow so you can blow the smoke away.\"\n\nElder Mala tapped her toe-claws. \"Second item.\"\n\nTondoor got to his feet and formed his dizzy body into the posture of respect. He spit out more grit.\n\n\"Do you have any dreams to report?\"\n\nTondoor tried to think what to say. \"I saw\u2014\" He coughed to clear the scratchiness from his voice. It didn't work. \"I saw stories in the stars, and shadow creatures in the rocks.\" He thought of telling her about the cave picture, but it wasn't a dream.\n\n\"Nothing about the kraamlok?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" he said, glancing at Worgoob, who gave a small nod. He coughed again. His voice would recover. Kalooka's had.\n\n\"Very well. That's the end of the business. Dismissed.\" Elder Mala turned away.\n\n\"Wonderful!\" exclaimed Worgoob. \"Now you can prepare yourself for the choosing.\"\n\nElder Mala glanced back. \"Only those graduates who came for the ceremony were considered by the committee. This one's not in the line-up this year.\"\n\nWorgoob cut in again. \"But surely this is a special case.\"\n\n\"Special or not, the pairings have been decided, and the Snow was not included. Come back next year.\"\n\nTondoor felt like his wings had just been snapped. He already knew he wouldn't get beautiful, perfect Kalooka; it hadn't occurred to him he might not get anyone.\n\n\"Too bad,\" said Worgoob, watching Elder Mala flap heavily away. \"I would have decided differently. Remember though, you're an adult now. While you must abide by the decisions of the elders, you are also free to come and go as you wish.\"\n\nHe meant that Tondoor could head back to the desert now, instead of waiting for the rest of the group. But he couldn't. He needed to give Kalooka her gift and ask her about the cave picture. Something he absolutely could not do while the desire for a mate\u2014for her\u2014still thrummed through his body.\n\nHe did not stay to watch Kalooka fly away with this year's mate or see what colors of dragon Hoodon and Yarb received at their first choosing. He did not wait to see if there were others like him, who were simply out of luck. Instead, he flew fast and hard across the lake and into the mountains\u2014if any Dragons of the Rocks were lurking about, they would have to take their chances.\n\nThe mountains were the opposite of the desert: filled with water in all of its guises and teeming with living things. He relished the cold, savage wind and the claw-like edges of the rocks. At the top of a steep valley between two jagged, crumbling peaks, he spied a crawling bondok.\n\nIt was not an easy kill, especially for someone used to hunting snoofs and glarfs. But Tondoor fought like a Blood, picturing Elder Mala's smug stance while he ripped through the bondok's hairy hide. When he had devoured all he could hold, he ground the remaining bones to splinters between his teeth and spat them out. Exhausted, he fell to the ground.\n\nHe woke shivering, covered with fresh snow, his scales clamped tightly shut and so cold he had a hard time standing up. He no longer felt the need to mate. The sky showed only the barest glimmer of dawn, but Worgoob would want to head out early. And first, he needed to talk to Kalooka.\n\nRemembering Dorla's request, he clawed through the snow to retrieve the scales he'd lost to the bondok's claws. There were quite a few, and probably more he missed since they were white on white. Some had snapped off right where they attached to his body. That would hurt when he warmed up.\n\nHe forced his stiff wings open and stumbled off the side of the mountain. By the time he neared the bottom of the valley, his wings were flapping with enough strength to carry him back up. He passed the remains of three more bondoks with snow-covered dragons sprawled nearby. In one place there were two bloodied dragons instead.\n\nHe flew to the Ravine and retrieved his package, hoping Kalooka was inside and her mate wasn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rebels",
                "text": "Kalooka was curled up alone beneath the charred picture she had made of him. Alighting quietly in the shadows, he tried not to think about the egg that was even now growing inside her. She still wasn't wearing her trophy necklace, so he couldn't tell the color of her mate. He realized he was still wearing the empty one Worgoob had slung around his neck. Lucky the bondok hadn't choked him with it. He dropped his broken white scales onto a bare patch of ground.\n\nKalooka's eyes opened. \"Good morning.\"\n\n\"How was the choosing?\" The words spurted out on their own. He dropped his gaze, embarrassed.\n\nKalooka laughed. \"I was the first one chosen. It seems I'm notorious.\"\n\nOne of the golden scales on her side was cracked off. \"What color was your mate?\" Another inappropriate question. Why was he doing this?\n\nKalooka grimaced. \"I didn't notice.\" She looked at his empty necklace. \"Oh. I'm sorry.\" Green compassion replaced the orange from her obvious lie.\n\nTondoor shrugged his wings.\n\nKalooka rose gracefully to her feet. \"But that's over and now we can talk about more interesting things. Tell me about the desert.\"\n\nHe handed her the leaf packet. \"Some caves have beautiful stones.\"\n\nKalooka unfolded it. Her eyes flooded with astonished blue. She lifted each crystal in turn above her head to catch the sun's rays. \"These are much too beautiful to put in a mosaic for the elders,\" she breathed. \"I wish I could make holes in them and put them on my necklace instead of those silly scales.\"\n\nWould that mean she loved him? Or that she loved the crystals?\n\nKalooka nuzzled her snout against his. \"Thank you for thinking of me.\"\n\nHe wanted to tell her that he never thought of anything else, but instead he told her about the desert stars, and the shadow creatures, and the stories that grew inside his head when he was out there all alone.\n\nShe gazed up the cliff walls in the direction of the desert. \"Do you ever go exploring, just to see what you might find?\"\n\n\"All the time!\" His new life sounded so exciting when he told Kalooka about it. He lowered his voice. \"I even discovered a mystery.\" He described the cave pictures, and the crystal that changed color like eyes.\n\nAstonished violet flooded Kalooka's eyes. \"Not like eyes, Tondoor.\" She clutched his arm. \"Like Morwaka's littlest toe-star. Maybe you found the sharing star.\"\n\nReally? \"It's not white like the one in the picture,\" he objected.\n\nKalooka shook her head. \"It might not be white. All we really know is that the seers used it to share dreams. They used to have it and now they don't.\" She clutched his arm with both sets of hand-claws. \"I have an idea what those pictures might mean.\"\n\nKalooka scurried off in one direction and then the other to peer around the bends, then arched her neck up. She whispered in his ear, \"I know a secret, and I've been bursting to tell you.\"\n\nShivers tickled Tondoor's tail.\n\n\"I can only tell you if you promise not to tell anyone. Trial by ordeal will be trivial compared to what will happen if you tell.\"\n\nDid she know he couldn't refuse her anything? \"I promise.\"\n\nKalooka leaned in even closer. \"There is a rumor that there is more in the desert than sand and stars and shadows. There's an oasis.\"\n\nWas that all? \"Everyone knows that. I live there.\"\n\n\"Not your little oasis. A big one, much further away.\"\n\nTondoor cast around for a response. \"So what?\"\n\n\"So what, is that maybe the ancient seers didn't all die. Maybe some of them escaped to the secret oasis and lived there. Maybe your cave pictures contain directions so other seers can find it.\"\n\nHe never would have thought of that in a hundred years. Could there really be a secret society of seers still living in the desert? That was a lot to get out of a few scratches on a cave wall. He shook his head. \"They're just pictures.\"\n\n\"Very unusual pictures. Why draw them like that? And why put that crystal in the dragon's eye? If the crystal isn't the sharing star, maybe the seers hid the real one in the hidden oasis, and the picture is a clue telling you how to find it.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Could he find it, if it was there? What would he do with it if he did, without any dreams to share? Could he use it to see the ancient seers' dreams? Or maybe there were seers still living there, and they could teach him how to dream.\n\nKalooka looked around again and pulled his head close. \"If you found the hidden oasis, then dragons who are tired of living inside the elders' metal jaws could fly into the desert and live there. They could start a new society. They could make pictures of true events, without fear.\" She touched her snout to his again. \"And choose their own mates.\"\n\nIf she didn't have his total attention before, she had it now.\n\n\"It makes sense, doesn't it? The sharing star has to be somewhere. The secret oasis isn't shown in the Ravine, so whoever found it didn't tell the elders. Wouldn't she\u2014or he\u2014put the directions somewhere? Why not inside a desert cave, for another Snow to discover?\"\n\nTondoor's mind raced. What kind of directions could be hidden in the pictures? Was he smart enough to figure them out?\n\nKalooka's eyes turned deep blue as she gazed down into his. \"If you find it, Tondoor, and lead us there, I will be your mate forever. If you want me, that is.\" She looked away, but not before Tondoor saw the embarrassed yellow in her eyes.\n\n\"If! I promise you, if it is there, I'll find it.\"\n\nKalooka snuggled against him, so his neck rested against her shoulder. He dared to drape one of his wings lightly over her. She shifted to look in the direction of the desert again. \"There are others who will come too, but I'm not saying who. If the elders hear about the rebels, the less you know the better.\"\n\nRebels! He gulped. \"I won't tell them.\"\n\n\"And when you find it, and we leave, they won't know where we've gone.\"\n\n\"The desert can't go on forever,\" Tondoor mused. \"Once we're at the oasis, we can explore beyond it, and make a permanent home on the other side. Then if they do find the oasis, they still won't find us.\"\n\n\"Maybe there will be another coast,\" she whispered, \"with enormous sea beasts and shifting sand. That would suit a Sun like me.\"\n\nHe pictured the two of them flying along the shifting sand at the edge of the sea. It might be an even better place for hearing dreams than the desert. Uh-oh. \"Hold on,\" he said. \"If I'm that far away and Morwaka finally tells me how to escape the kraamlok, how will I tell the dragons here?\"\n\nKalooka pulled away. \"The best thing would be to dream it before we go. Because,\" she continued, her voice rising, \"maybe it won't come for years and years. Maybe your predecessor was just crazy, and it's not coming at all. Lots of people think that, you know.\"\n\n\"Elder Mala believed him.\"\n\n\"I know. So did I.\" She bent down and tidied the pile of his white scales. \"But we can't just sit here and rot, waiting for it. We need to act now, before we get old and it's too late.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. \"If I find the sharing star, maybe it will help me have the dream.\"\n\nKalooka twisted to look at him. \"Yes! Maybe it will!\"\n\n\"So finding the oasis might be the exact thing I need to do.\" Tondoor looked into her eyes shining the color of the sky, and felt his own mirror back the same blue. For her, he would do the impossible.\n\nKalooka flung her wings around him. \"I know who you are,\" she said, \"and I am yours.\" Then she was back at her picture, scraping charred scales off the rock.\n\nTondoor flew out of the Ravine with Kalooka's words singing in his mind and new hope singing inside his heart. Worgoob was still saying his farewells to the other Most Ancients, and the rest of his group was comparing the new scales on their necklaces and re-telling the tale of how the dead Kalooka had re-appeared at the choosing. Hoodon was hooting because Yarb had only received an Ash, while he had been given a Sky. Tondoor sat apart. Let them think he was brooding about not being given any mate at all. He had all he wanted, and more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Clues",
                "text": "Four evenings later, he watched the shadow beasts in the desert straining toward him as if to welcome him home. Stars winked into sight above the deep blue horizon.\n\nIn the next moment, he recognized their shape: a toothy dragon with no wings and a three-pointed tail.\n\nAs he stared, scarcely daring to breathe, the distant ridges beneath the star wavered like Desert's trick lake. Before his eyes, they turned into a second dragon, stretched out on its belly with its legs and four wings folded up to make little peaks above its back. Its tail tapered away from its body and ended in a hump. The rock dragon's head lay flat on the ground as if it were sleeping, and maybe it was, because the only thing missing from the picture was the crystal eye.\n\nHe knew where he had to go next.\n\nMorwaka's Eye stared down, half-open above him. \"Morwaka!\" he shouted. \"I'm going on a quest to find the sharing star. If I do, will you tell me what to do about the kraamlok?\"\n\nThe only answer was the sighing of the wind as the star dragon twinkled and the rock dragon slept.\n\nBut Tondoor's hunch was correct. There was a cave right where the sleeping dragon's eye should have been. It didn't hide an oasis, but it did contain a drawing of two snoofs coiled in opposite directions. One of them had a crystal in its mouth.\n\nAfter another turn of Morwaka's Eye, he found the matching stars and ridge, and the next cave drawing. If the drawings were indeed directions to the secret oasis, they could not be followed quickly. As each cycle of Morwaka's Eye changed the sky and brought new combinations of stars and landforms into juxtaposition, he followed the clues one by one.\n\nNow, nearly a year later, he stood on top of a far-off ridge (shaped, from the right vantage point and in the right light, like a swimming bird), gazing down at the place where Kalooka would become his mate. Forever. Heat flushed through him. The building urgency in his body reminded him that this year's choosing was coming up soon.\n\nThe rock he stood on was part of a great circular ridge with a deep blue lake in the middle. It was higher on the side he had flown in from, so he hadn't seen the oasis until he was almost on top of it. In the center of the lake was a single, cone-shaped island. And on the shallower slopes opposite, a wide swath of lush green.\n\nHe unfurled his wings and glided over the water. Fish darted beneath the surface. On the far shore, small beasts scattered at his approach. He splashed down to drink, then, giddy with success, chased a whole tribe of glarf-like beasts up the hill. There were bigger beasts too, and he caught and ate a long, scaly loogah as it crawled out of the lake. There was no sign of other Snows, but he hadn't expected any.\n\nThe next thing was to search for places a seer might hide a sharing star. The ridge itself didn't seem to have caves, but the rocky hills around it had plenty, as if they were islands in a sea of cracks. He could smell the water inside them. The teasing shadow dragons might lead him to the sharing star if he dared follow them. But that would have to wait. Now he had to get back to the Nest, tell Kalooka of his success, and receive the elders' choice of mate.\n\nThe directions for finding the hidden oasis settled like constellations in his mind as he followed them in reverse, scarcely noticing when day turned to night. He had done what Kalooka asked. The next time his body burned with desire, he would have her. Forever.\n\nIf only Morwaka would send him the dream he needed to get that kraamlok business out of the way. If he had to search all the cracks and caves around the oasis for the sharing star, it could take him another whole year. But the dreams that came that night at the small oasis, although vivid, had more to do with imminent mating than the kraamlok."
            },
            {
                "title": "Vools",
                "text": "Late the next afternoon, Tondoor watched the Butte rise against the shimmering yellow grassland. Before leaving the small oasis, he had caught a creeping snoof in the bushes, and in a hurry, swallowed it whole. Now he wished he hadn't. He could feel it coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. If it didn't settle by the time he reached Worgoob's group, he'd have to find a fire root and scorch it.\n\nTufts of desert sage appeared among the rocks below, then ripe, golden grass. No dragons flew out to meet him, so he turned to fly along the creek.\n\nNot too far along, he smelled death.\n\nThe half-eaten body parts of a dead Sky\u2014head, limbs, wings, tail, body\u2014were strewn across the grass. Several vools made whirring, grating noises as they thrust their bald heads in and out of the pieces. They had already picked out the eyes with their hooked beaks, leaving black, gaping holes.\n\nTondoor rushed at them with a furious roar. They flapped a short distance away. By the size, the dead Sky was one of his nest mates. He swallowed hard as the snoof threatened to slither back up his throat. Was it Yarb? The head was so mangled he couldn't tell. Who or what would do this to Yarb?\n\nNot the Dragons of the Rocks, all the way out here. And no Plains dragon, surely\u2014it was a serious insult not to eat a fallen comrade. Unless\u2026 The wind felt cold. What had Kalooka said? If a rebel was caught, they would receive much worse than trial by ordeal. Was Yarb one of the rebels?\n\nPanic and horror made him leap away, leaving the carcass to the vools. Yarb had received an Ash at the last choosing. Hoodon had taunted him. Would that have made him join the rebels?\n\nHis wings would hardly fly straight. Did they know he was involved too? Was Worgoob waiting to sentence him on his return? He almost turned and flew back to the desert. But no. He was only guessing what had happened, and why, and that the dismembered Sky was Yarb. And if Worgoob was on the lookout for rebels, the worst thing Tondoor could do was flee.\n\nWambool's group was three more dug-outs away. Brightly colored dragons sparked in the low sun as they herded the mooloks in for their evening drink.\n\nIt was Hoodon who flapped out to meet him. \"Did you see the Sky back there? It was Yarb.\" His voice was eager, excited.\n\nTondoor's voice croaked. \"What happened to him?\" It was all right that his eyes were yellow. Fear was appropriate.\n\n\"He was a dissident,\" said Hoodon.\n\nWhy were Hoodon's eyes violet? How was this a triumph? \"What kind of dissident?\"\n\n\"We don't know. He refused to talk, even after we tore his wings off.\"\n\nWe? Tondoor almost threw up his snoof.\n\n\"He wanted to overthrow the elders or something,\" Hoodon continued. \"The elders' punishment is to tear dissidents apart so other dragons will be afraid to join the plot.\"\n\nIt was working. \"Are there other dissidents?\" Tondoor asked. He hoped Kalooka had kept their involvement secret\u2014although if Hoodon thought the plot was to overthrow the elders, he didn't know too much. He relaxed slightly as they landed beside the creek. A dragon who lived alone in the desert would not be a likely suspect.\n\n\"Probably, but we don't know who.\" Hoodon stuck out his chest. \"And guess what?\"\n\nHe didn't get to say, because an ancient Fire approached them. It was Naloosa, the one who had acted the part of Fire during Folfro's story on his first flight here. Now she reminded him of Elder Mala. Hoodon sidled to the creek to drink, and Tondoor assumed the posture of respect.\n\n\"Welcome back, Seer Tondoor,\" said Naloosa. \"I greet you as Most Ancient of this herding group.\"\n\nTondoor looked up. \"Then Worgoob\u2026\"\n\n\"Worgoob Most Ancient was killed at the graduation ceremony, in another disastrous raid by the Dragons of the Rocks.\" Tondoor felt his eyes droop with gray, even as Naloosa's were fast turning red. \"Elder Mala is annoyed that you did not think to send a warning.\"\n\n\"I was in the desert,\" stammered Tondoor. \"How could I send a warning?\"\n\n\"Did you receive a warning?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then you could not have sent one.\" Naloosa's eyes faded to yellow again as she turned to Hoodon. \"Hoodon, come with me. Tondoor, we will speak further after we eat.\"\n\nNobody spoke during the meal. Afterwards, the dragons gathered silently around the dung-fire, avoiding each other's gaze. Tondoor glanced around. Some eyes were sorrowful gray; others, like his, were uneasy yellow. The youngest dragons huddled close together with their eyes closed. Only Hoodon's were still blue.\n\nNaloosa stood and cleared her throat. \"Many of you are upset by the actions we were obliged to take this afternoon. Yarb was a friend to many here, and were it not for Hoodon's good sense in coming to me when Yarb told him of the plot, we might never have discovered it.\"\n\nHoodon's eyes bulged violet. Tondoor didn't know what galled him more, that Hoodon had turned in his own nest mate, or that he was proud of it.\n\n\"As much as we might regret the specifics,\" Naloosa continued, \"the elders are clear that no act of rebellion can be tolerated. An example must be made of those who dissent. Only when we all submit to proper authority does our society function smoothly.\"\n\nA small voice piped up from the huddle of first-years. \"We don't know what Yarb did wrong.\" A miserable looking Sky peered up at Naloosa.\n\n\"He plotted against the elders. That is all you need to know.\"\n\nNaloosa was like Elder Mala in more than appearance. The first-year looked back at her feet, and Tondoor glanced around again. His weren't the only eyes seething with red. There could well be other dissidents here, or at least others who didn't like the elders' tactics.\n\n\"The elders must be informed immediately,\" Naloosa continued, \"in case ours was not an isolated incident. Hoodon will relay the message and receive the reward for his remarkable deed. We will bring his tribute beast to the choosing so he can fly ahead unhindered.\"\n\nHoodon raised his arms and danced in a circle in the posture of triumph. Tondoor froze. Hoodon would be a Remarkable. He would choose Kalooka as his reward. He had said so. Now the hot red flooded Tondoor's eyes, and it was all he could do to keep from sinking his teeth into Hoodon's leg, glinting blue as he danced in the firelight. Tondoor concentrated on his own toe-claws, grinding holes through the tangled grass into the dirt below.\n\nTondoor's thoughts raced while Naloosa continued speaking. Maybe the herding group would bring his tribute beast too, so he could fly ahead and warn Kalooka. But what reason could he give? And realistically, what could he do? If he tried to interfere, the elders might suspect him too. Besides, once Kalooka found out what Hoodon had done, she wouldn't want him as her mate. She could find a way out of it, if anyone could. His eyes cooled back to yellow.\n\n\"Seer Tondoor?\"\n\nHe looked up. Naloosa was staring at him. \"I said, 'what news from the desert, seer?'\"\n\nIf only you knew! But all he said was, \"The desert is shadowed as always, and lidded with stars.\" Folfro nodded at him and settled back onto his haunches.\n\n\"Did the stars give you a story?\" asked Naloosa.\n\nThe exchange had become a formula with Worgoob. Naloosa wanted to continue it. Tondoor gave the answer, glad the recited words gave him time to calm his mind. \"They did.\"\n\n\"Speak your story.\"\n\nThe dragons shuffled as Tondoor stood up. He rolled his head back and gazed up at the glittering bowl of the sky, and the dragons around him did the same. As the stars flickered and seemed to form themselves once again into the familiar story characters, the desert calm filled his mind. He took a deep breath.\n\n\"In the days when the star beasts roamed freely in the sky, before Morwaka had yet created dragons to live on the world, a long-winged star-bird named Sooska grew weary of the dark, endless night.\"\n\nAround him, Tondoor heard whispers of \"Sooska\", as the dragons tried out the strange new name. If he did well, next year there might be a hatchling with that name. He continued.\n\n\"She looked down at the world, with its regular pattern of light and darkness, and wondered what it would be like to live there. So Sooska hatched a plan to go down to the world. The other star beasts laughed at her, for they were lazy and preferred to fly in circles around the sky rather than venture out in new directions.\" A lot like the Dragons of the Plains. He hoped Naloosa wouldn't be insulted. She didn't appear to be. Maybe even ancient dragons liked to dream of adventure.\n\nThe dragons listened raptly as Tondoor moved his characters through the story, swaying when Tondoor did and gasping in all the right places. In his mind, it was Kalooka's voice speaking, and he mimicked the rising and falling of her voice, the cadence of her words, the motions of her body.\n\nWhen he finished, everyone clinked their tails together. Folfro stood up and bowed in the posture of respect. Now Tondoor felt violet triumph flow into his eyes. It was followed by yellow fear as he remembered. If only becoming remarkable was as easy as making up stories.\n\nThe next morning, the group separated the mooloks for the tribute from the larger herd and left the remaining ones behind in the care of the apprentices. Hoodon flew off alone. Tondoor clenched his teeth and followed the group."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rival",
                "text": "The rule against mingling was already in effect when they arrived at the Nest. It didn't matter; by now, Kalooka would know all about Yarb's death, and Hoodon's role in it. He hoped for the millionth time she had been careful, because just thinking about what they could do to her made his knees go weak. He would be so glad when this whole thing was over and they were safe together in the hidden oasis.\n\nBut first things first. Right after his tribute beast was approved, he crossed the river and positioned himself outside the Elders' Clearing. It wasn't long before Elder Mala flumped down with two Skies he didn't know. The Skies bowed in the posture of greeting when they saw him, and he bowed back.\n\nElder Mala didn't bother. \"Well?\" she wheezed.\n\n\"Naloosa Most Ancient sends greetings,\" Tondoor said, switching to the posture of respect. \"Her herds are large and the mooloks' egg-pouches are full.\"\n\n\"Good. Anything else?\"\n\nHe lowered himself into the posture of regret. \"Not yet, Most Ancient.\"\n\n\"Too bad,\" she replied. \"I would have liked to give you a certain Sun dragon.\"\n\nTondoor's head jerked up. Did she think he knew something more about Yarb? No. She was asking about the kraamlok, of course.\n\n\"If you think of anything remarkable before tomorrow, be sure to let me know.\" She turned away and dropped a long turd to let him know he was dismissed, then swung toward the Skies. \"Continue your reports.\"\n\nTondoor watched an Ash scuttle in with a bark scoop. She didn't appear to like cleaning up turds any more than he had. But that wasn't his problem.\n\nHe flew to the edge of the lake, where he took a long, calming drink. What did Elder Mala think he was hiding? Information? A dream? The kraamlok obviously worried her greatly. Whenever he recalled Kalooka's spooky voice echoing down the Ravine, it worried him too. The hidden oasis, exciting as it was, wouldn't save anyone from that.\n\nOh well\u2014the kraamlok wasn't likely coming to destroy them tonight, and Morwaka still had time to send him a dream before the rebels acted on his news about the oasis. And telling Kalooka about his discovery would make up for his failure, at least for the time being. He flew out over the lake. The matrons circling the Nest eyed him but didn't interfere. Kalooka was sunning herself on the beach with Dorla and several other Sun females. He flew circles until she looked up, then pointed into the Ravine. She gave a quick nod and lay her head down.\n\nTondoor flew back to the male side of the river to wait. The hatchlings in the Teaching Place crossed the river with their male minders and crowded around him curiously\u2014it was the first time they'd seen a Snow. So he amused them with stories about the desert until the minders took them away and the sun sank behind the mountains. Then he dropped between the cliffs.\n\nThe Ravine was dark, and he had to feel his way along the edge, listening, as his eyes adjusted. He heard Kalooka before he saw her. Trembling with excitement\u2014and more\u2014he burst out, \"Kalooka! Oh, I've missed you.\" He hadn't meant to say that, at least not as the first thing, but there it was.\n\nA snarl answered him. \"She's not here. Go away.\"\n\nHe knew that voice. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nHoodon's hot breath gusted over his snout. \"I should ask you the same thing. I'm the one who reports to the elders, remember?\"\n\nTondoor planted his feet. \"Then go report how I found you in the Ravine.\"\n\nA gold-tinged shadow appeared behind Hoodon. \"This is a surprise.\"\n\nIt was Kalooka's voice. He pushed past Hoodon. \"I need to talk to you.\"\n\n\"I want to tell you something,\" Hoodon said at the same time.\n\nKalooka's shadow looked back and forth between them. \"Mingling is not allowed before the choosing. Both of you will have to wait.\" She jumped up and flew away.\n\nTondoor imagined grabbing Hoodon's blue head and bashing it against the cliff. \"So leave.\"\n\nHoodon shoved him aside and walked toward the unused part of the Ravine. \"I'm not done yet.\"\n\nTondoor followed the crunching of his footsteps. \"Done what?\" Ouch. Stupid rock.\n\n\"Finding a good spot.\" As if he could see to find anything. \"This will work.\" His tail made swishing sounds against the ground. Clearing away the debris.\n\n\"Work for what?\" If it was what he suspected...\n\nThe scale on Hoodon's necklace clinked. \"You'll find out.\" He flew up and away.\n\nTondoor shook with rage. He felt like flying after him and tearing him to bits. He felt like leaping into the Elders' Clearing and screaming, \"I found a hidden oasis!\" Then he would be even more remarkable than Hoodon.\n\nBut then Kalooka would hate him, and that would be even worse than\u2014he ground his teeth\u2014her mating with Hoodon. She had no choice, he reminded himself. She would never choose Hoodon herself, after what he did. She probably left just now because of Hoodon, not him. Tondoor took a deep breath. If he just stayed calm and proceeded with Kalooka's' plan, she would be his soon enough. Forever.\n\nHe used his tail and claws to drag back all the debris Hoodon had cleared away, and more. Then he flew out of the boulder end of the Ravine and far enough into the trees across the river to be alone for the night. From where he lay his head, he could see hundreds of Morwaka's Eyes gazing at him from the rippled surface of the lake.\n\nAll those eyes and no voice."
            },
            {
                "title": "Admiration",
                "text": "In spite of flying for three days, Tondoor hardly slept. He kept dreaming that he was trying to escape with a golden treasure, but a blue snoof, or a blue bondok, or a blue shadow dragon, or something else blue, snatched it out of his claws, and he woke in a panic. He didn't get away until nearly dawn.\n\nHe woke to bright sunlight streaming through the trees, surprised to be back at the Nest. He clambered to his feet and took to the air to clear his mind. The choosing was this afternoon. Was there still time to talk to Kalooka?\n\nApparently there was. The Ravine was full of Suns looking at pictures, but from his vantage point in the sky, he could also see a Sun and a smaller Sky standing close together in the trees across the river. Very close together. He should report them, but what was the use? Elder Mala didn't want tattle-tales; she wanted dreams. He returned to his spot in the trees to sulk. Didn't Kalooka care that he had news for her? Why did she put up with that opportunistic Sky anyway? Why didn't she tell him to go chase an Ash?\n\nKalooka came to him while he was scraping a torlok out of its hard shell. There was precious little flesh inside it, so he was gnawing on the shell like a glarf. He watched her climb out of the lake and shake herself off. That was a clever way to get here, but he didn't let his admiration show. \"Oh, you,\" he said around a shell fragment.\n\n\"I couldn't get away earlier,\" said Kalooka.\n\n\"I saw.\" He kept eating.\n\n\"Stop it, Tondoor.\" She lowered her voice. \"I think he suspects.\"\n\n\"About the re\u2014?\"\n\n\"Don't say that word. Hoodon already turned in a Sky who let something slip.\"\n\nIf she knew that, why did she let him hang around her? But she was wearing her trophy necklace, and instead of scales, it dangled a metal circle embedded with the crystals he'd brought her last year. His heart softened. \"I know. We have to be careful.\"\n\n\"He had a meeting with Elder Mala. That's how I got away.\"\n\nTondoor's scales clenched. \"Did you say anything?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Then why do you think he suspects?\"\n\n\"Why else would he keep hanging around?\"\n\n\"Figure it out,\" he wanted to say, but if she didn't already know, he didn't want to be the one to give her the idea. He closed his snout. Didn't she realize that Hoodon was in love with her?\n\n\"Anyway, it's useful that he's interested in me,\" she continued, \"because it keeps him away from the others. I can set him up to snoop in the wrong places.\"\n\n\"You must have set him up enough by now. So when he comes back, tell him you'd rather spend time with me.\"\n\nKalooka slapped her tail against a tree. \"Be sensible, Tondoor! This is serious.\" She ruffled her wings. \"And aside from being an informer he's not so awful. He only did what the elders wanted him to.\"\n\nSo that's how it was. Tondoor picked up the shell again and crunched it, imagining it was Hoodon's neck.\n\nShe glanced around. \"Quickly then. What did you want to tell me?\"\n\n\"I found the hidden oasis.\"\n\nKalooka's eyes flooded with violet, just as he'd imagined. But somehow it didn't feel as wonderful as he'd expected.\n\n\"Oh, Tondoor! What is it like?\" She leaned close to listen. That was a bit better.\n\nTondoor sat up. \"There's a deep lake in the bottom of a round valley, surrounded by cliffs. It has a wide shore and lots of plants for grazing, and deep caves to hide in, but only small beasts. I'd say it's big enough for maybe twenty of us.\"\n\nKalooka nodded, her eyes shining. \"We'll have to take some mooloks, or maybe forloks. They're lighter to carry.\" She bent over and nuzzled his snout. \"Just think, Tondoor. Soon we'll be free!\"\n\nThis was more like it! Tondoor felt his eyes widen to blue too. If he did get a dream about escaping the kraamlok, he'd figure out what to do about it then.\n\n\"Free from what?\" Hoodon pushed between them out of the trees."
            },
            {
                "title": "Promises",
                "text": "Kalooka jerked away from Tondoor. \"Free to mingle without hiding in the trees, of course. Once the choosing is over.\"\n\nHoodon looked between them. He started to say something, then closed his snout and kicked the torlok's gnawed shell. \"I'll leave you to your meal. I guess if you live in the wasteland you get used to eating scraps.\"\n\nTondoor realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out while Hoodon turned to Kalooka and ran his slimy blue hand over her arm.\n\n\"I have good news, Golden Sunshine.\"\n\nTondoor cringed on Kalooka's behalf.\n\nHoodon puffed out his chest. \"Elder Mala has just appointed me to the Scout Committee. So I'll be spending a lot of time here at The Nest.\"\n\n\"You're so young to be on a committee,\" cooed Kalooka. She placed her thumb-claws on her jaw in the posture of admiration.\n\nTondoor peered at her around Hoodon. Really? Was she truly glad, or was the blue in her eyes just left over from their conversation about the oasis?\n\n\"Actually, I was just leaving,\" said Kalooka. \"The choosing ceremony is starting soon and I still need to polish my scales.\"\n\nShe didn't usually bother. Maybe it was her excuse to get away. Good.\n\n\"Allow me to walk you to the lake,\" said Hoodon. He slipped into the posture of admiration as well.\n\nTondoor had always considered that posture silly, but Kalooka, incredibly, looked flattered. He felt like throwing up his shell scraps. \"You're not allowed to mingle before the ceremony,\" he growled.\n\n\"Thank you for choosing such a remote location for your own mingling,\" said Hoodon. He turned back to Kalooka. \"Farewell for now, lovely one. I'll see you tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, really?\" said Kalooka. She glanced back at Tondoor. \"Thank you for the conversation. I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nTondoor watched them walk away together. Hoodon was attempting to stroke Kalooka's tail with his. Kalooka was batting it away, but not nearly as vigorously as she could have. He watched Kalooka dive into the lake, and Hoodon fly away.\n\nAnger, humiliation and fear roiled in his mind. Hoodon thought he was so clever, but two could play this game. Hoodon's selfish act of \"obedience\" couldn't compete with his finding the solution to the kraamlok. After he told Elder Mala his remarkable dream about how to escape it, he would get Kalooka. Elder Mala had said so. And Hoodon would have to choose someone else.\n\nThen they would find out who was smarter. Because he was Seer of the Plains, and he didn't have to go back to the desert either. Until he was ready.\n\nHe found a flaal tree and polished his scales, working out the details of his \"dream\" as he scrubbed. He knew what the oasis looked like; that part was easy. Lots of dragons could hide in the caves around it and be safe from any attack. But of course, he would need to go there and learn more with his delegation of helpers: Kalooka and the rebels she would recruit to go with them.\n\nAnd yes, he would say, he had dreamed about it before, but he didn't know for sure it was a real dream until he dreamed the directions to it just last night, gazing at the many reflections of Morwaka's Eye in the lake. Directions that wouldn't lead there if the elders tried to follow them.\n\nOnce his scales were glittering like the stars, he flew into the Elders' Clearing. Elder Mala wasn't there, so he planted himself in the center of it where she would see him when she returned.\n\nThe other elders were already starting to line up. The new Leaf Elder, who had replaced Elder Daroop, gave him a quizzical look. He bowed in the posture of respect until she looked away. Through the trees, he could see the dragons assembling: the males arrayed around one side of the elders' platform like a fragmented rainbow, the females opposite. The females too old to lay eggs stood guard between the two groups\u2014as if anyone would dare to mingle now. The three Sun drummers stood behind their drums, holding their sticks. The Ashes crouched around the edges, holding their scoops. Craning his neck, he caught a glimpse of Kalooka lined up with the other female Suns.\n\n\"What now?\" barked Elder Mala, thumping down beside him.\n\n\"I dreamed,\" said Tondoor, assuming his best storytelling posture. He heard the other elders stop talking and shuffle around to watch.\n\n\"Speak your dream.\"\n\nElder Mala's belly sagged in front of him, hastily polished on one side only. In his mind, Kalooka's perfect tail stroked his. \"I dreamed of\u2014\"\n\nHis mind-Kalooka snarled. \"Tondoor! You promised.\"\n\nNot to tell\u2014and not to make up dreams. What was he thinking? His plan swirled like desert sand. He didn't know he would be given Kalooka. What if Elder Mala made him take Bloods to the secret oasis, and kept Kalooka prisoner until they returned? What if he had to take Hoodon?\n\n\"You dreamed.\" prompted Elder Mala. Her cracked hand-claws drummed on her flank.\n\nHe swallowed. What could he tell her? He remembered this morning's dream, where something blue tried to steal his gold treasure. Hoodon and Kalooka, obviously. But the kraamlok on the cliff had some blue pieces too. \"I dreamed of fleeing the kraamlok through whirling stars,\" he stammered, \"to a place with a yellow sun, and air too heavy to breathe, with Kalooka\u2014\" Oops.\n\nElder Mala snorted. \"That is a fantasy of the unremarkable, not the vision of a seer.\" Her tail cuffed him on the side of his head as she turned to the other elders. \"Come back when you have a real dream to report. Now get out of here. We have a ceremony to conduct.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Ceremony",
                "text": "Tondoor backed out of the clearing with yellow humiliation chilling his eyes and the elders' derisive laughter stinging his ears. He half ran, half flew toward the assembly.\n\nCommittee members inside the color groups shuffled dragons into place. The Snow's place was in front of the Suns, right next to the platform. He skidded into place. At least he didn't have to worry about finding his position in line. The Sun females were directly across from him. He tried to catch Kalooka's eye, but she was talking to someone.\n\nThe pebble grid that would decide his fate was not quite visible behind the platform, even though the guards had left to take their places with the other Bloods. He wished he could see. He wished he'd told Elder Mala that Hoodon had broken the rules and deserved an Ash. Or no one.\n\nThe drums started their rhythmic pounding, and Tondoor closed his eyes and felt the throbbing reverberate through his body, lifting his tension to new heights.\n\n\"The elders. Finally,\" the Sun next to him muttered.\n\nTondoor stole another glance at Kalooka as the elders marched past. Who wouldn't want to choose her? He felt lightheaded just looking at her glistening scales, spiral horns, the smooth curve of her wings. Next year, he told himself. This year, whoever I get.\n\nThe elders shuffled onto the platform. The drummers stopped drumming and joined the Suns.\n\nElder Mala's voice rasped over the Gathering Place. \"Welcome to all who have come from across the Plains for this year's choosing. We will begin by invoking Morwaka's blessing.\" Her voice took on a raspy sing-song tone. \"Oh Great Morwaka, look on us with favor and see how rigorously we follow the rules laid down by our ancestors. Give us the colors we need in our eggs, and please remember that we already have a Snow.\"\n\nThe crowd murmured, holding in laughter. Was that always part of the ceremony, or had she added it for his benefit? He fumed until he realized that Elder Mala's words meant she was giving him another chance.\n\nElder Mala crept back, and the Sun elder took his place at the front.\n\n\"After Morwaka formed the People from the clouds of the sky and the rocks of the hills, he devised a quest, that he might know what manner of creature he had made. After the quest was complete, he gave gifts to each color of dragon, gifts that continue to this day. Fires, stand forth!\"\n\nThe large masses of Fires at the end of the assembly crouched as one into their posture of readiness, alert to snatch their prize. Tondoor mouthed the next words along with the Sun elder.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Fire, 'I give you short wings for darting among the jutting mountain crags, and hot breath for forging metals. But so that you shall not bury yourself in baubles and settle yourself like a boulder, I give you blood that thrums to the treasure beyond the next peak.'\"\n\nDid the Fires of the Plains also long to seek treasure in the mountains? If so, they didn't say so. They replied together: \"I accept the gift, and use it for my tribe.\" They relaxed their postures.\n\n\"Leafs, stand forth!\"\n\nTondoor watched the minders bend forward and beckon with their arms in the posture of instruction. He felt nostalgic for his few happy moments as a hatchling.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Leaf, 'I give you dexterous claws for working with your treasures, and imagination for seeing what does not yet exist. But so that you shall not forget the duties of the day, I give you ears tuned to the cries of your hatchlings.'\"\n\nThey had that. Hatchlings rarely got away with anything.\n\nThe Leafs replied, \"I accept the gift, and use it for my tribe.\"\n\n\"Skies, stand forth.\"\n\nTondoor watched Hoodon rise with the other Skies into the posture of watchfulness with their wings outstretched and their heads looking back and forth. It was a silly posture, because many of them got whacked in the head when they all opened their wings at once. He cheered quietly when Hoodon lost his balance and had to make his posture all over again.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Sky, 'I give you long wings for soaring, and keen eyes for herding beasts. But so that you shall not roam ceaselessly like the wind, I give you the heart of a whirlwind, which circles about its home.'\"\n\nSo that was why Hoodon was so blindly loyal. Well, good. He wouldn't be joining the new, free society, especially after what he did to Yarb.\n\nThe Skies droned their response: \"I accept the gift and use it for my tribe.\" They pulled in their wings, once again knocking each other around.\n\nNow it was the Bloods' turn. There were surprisingly few. The Dragons of the Rocks must have killed a lot in that raid he hadn't warned them about. They lunged into their posture of defiance, snarling and ready to strike down all attackers, or die trying.\n\nHe stopped his gasp before it burst out and embarrassed him. Maybe the elders didn't post scouts to warn of raids because they didn't want to lose even more dragons. Maybe blaming him was just a way to hide their helplessness. It was sad to think so, but it made sense. But the Gold elder was speaking.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Blood, 'I give you strength of tooth and claw and wing. But so that you shall not use your might for tyranny, I give you the double love of freedom and solitude.'\"\n\nAfter the Bloods, it was the Bones' turn. Their stooped posture of compassion suited them; Tondoor had seen them stand like that to tend the injured.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Bone's lifeless body, \"To those who will come in your likeness I give keen ears to hear cries of distress, and flared nostrils to smell the poisons that harm and heal. But so that they will not drown in compassion, I give them sturdy hearts to inflict the saving wounds.'\"\n\nHow could a wound save anyone? Maybe it was like killing a dissident to protect the unity of the group. Tondoor shuddered.\n\n\"Suns, stand forth.\"\n\nTondoor watched Kalooka open her arms and spread her wings in the familiar posture of storytelling. The Suns were more graceful than the Skies; they turned sideways in unison so none of their wings collided.\n\n\"Morwaka said to Sun, 'I give you a deep mind for remembering, and speech made of hues and riddles. But so that you shall not think yourself brighter than the sun, I give you a strong heart for truth.'\"\n\nMorwaka must have had Kalooka in mind when he spoke those words. Except for the speaking in riddles\u2014although she seemed to be doing that with Hoodon. He tried to catch her eye as she dropped her posture, but she was looking at the ground.\n\nSnow, stand forth!\"\n\nTondoor dropped onto all fours and stretched his neck onto the ground in the seer's posture of submission. His tail pointed up to the sky, where Morwaka was. He marked the humiliating requirements in his head: tail straight, neck on the ground, mind empty and receptive. It was a good thing they couldn't see his mind.\n\n\"Morwaka said, 'The Snows shall be small in body but large in spirit. I, the Great Dragon Morwaka, shall speak to them in dreams when I choose to speak, and they shall speak to you with my voice. Honor them, and they shall not fail to hear me.'\" The Sun elder assumed the posture of respect. \"Seer Tondoor, we honor you. May you hear the voice of the Great Dragon Morwaka.\"\n\nTondoor spoke as clearly as he could with his snout pressed against the ground. \"I accept the gift and use it for my tribe.\" In the measure Morwaka gave it to him. He felt ashamed of even thinking about rebellion. And glad he hadn't lied to Elder Mala. There must be some way to please Kalooka and save everyone else too. Please, Morwaka, show me how.\n\nHe got to his feet, and the Sun elder raised his arms in the posture of blessing. This time Kalooka caught his gaze and they mouthed the words together. \"Dragons of the Plains, hear Morwaka's good purpose. His colors shall take shape within you, and you shall lay eggs and produce offspring in all the colors of the People. Be wise in the use of your gifts so that you shall live well in the land.\"\n\nThe Sun elder lowered his wings. \"Let the choosing begin!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Remarkable",
                "text": "Desire throbbed inside Tondoor as the new Leaf elder stepped forward to explain the choosing procedure. First, the Remarkables would come to the front to choose their mates. Kalooka stiffened, and Tondoor clenched his hand-claws. One more year.\n\n\"After the Remarkables have chosen,\" the elder continued, \"the remaining dragons will be paired. An elder will announce the colors, female first, and the dragons from the front of the appropriate rows will step forward. Please fly away from the Nest immediately with your mate to avoid delaying the ceremony.\"\n\nElder Mala returned and summoned the Remarkables in her raspy voice. The first few had done the usual noteworthy things: fighting off Rock dragons (sometimes losing limbs), stealing back eggs from the Rock dragons, or taking nuggets of gold from mountain creeks without the Rock dragons finding out.\n\n\"Choose Kalooka,\" Tondoor whispered as the Remarkables paraded past. Any of them would be better than Hoodon. But Kalooka's notoriety must have worn off, because none of them did.\n\n\"Next Remarkable: Hoodon.\"\n\nTondoor dug his toe-claws into the ground.\n\n\"We recognize Hoodon for bravely exposing dissident elements in his herding group.\"\n\nTondoor coughed. What was brave about snitching to your Most Ancient after someone who thought you were a friend confided in you?\n\nHoodon danced in his sick circle of triumph. \"I choose Kalooka.\"\n\nEven though Tondoor had known this would happen, rage flooded his eyes. It was all he could do not to race out and rip his teeth through Hoodon's blue wing. He squeezed his eyes closed so he wouldn't have to watch them fly away together. Kalooka's words echoed in his mind. \"He's not so awful. He only did what the elders wanted him to.\" And her playful blue eyes as Hoodon walked away with her yesterday, stroking her tail.\n\nBy the time his head cleared enough to hear again, the Bone elder was at the front and the regular choosing was underway. \"Fire-Leaf,\" he called. \"Fire-Sky.\" \"Gold-Blood.\"\n\nTondoor hung desperately on the elder's words as the pairs flew off. The ranks were shrinking, but the choosing was not over. Nineteen females still stood waiting. There were at least thirty males.\n\nEighteen, seventeen, sixteen.\n\n\"Ash-Blood, Ash-Fire. Ash-Blood.\"\n\nTondoor felt his knees wobble. Ash-Snow would produce a Snow, and they didn't want another one.\n\nHe was not chosen. Again.\n\n\"The choosing is complete,\" rasped Elder Mala.\n\nThe elders turned sideways and marched off. The unchosen males lurched toward the hills to fight bondoks or each other, as Tondoor knew from last year. He stared at the matrons attempting to lead away the unchosen females. A young Sky broke away and leapt toward the mountains. Two of the matrons caught her by the tail and threw her to the ground.\n\nWhy? Why would they leave anyone unchosen when there were still dragons left to make pairs? Curse those elders and their stupid quotas and punishments!\n\nFear and anger churned with his dashed hope. He half ran, half flew toward the elders and flopped on his belly in the posture of appeal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rage",
                "text": "Elder Mala's toe-claws, twisted and yellowed with age, loomed in front of him. Behind her, the legs of the other elders, dulled with age and dusky light, stood like a forest of ancient trees.\n\n\"Speak,\" Elder Mala rasped.\n\n\"I should be chosen!\" Tondoor spat into the dirt.\n\n\"You did not do your job.\"\n\nTondoor lifted his head and glared at Elder Mala. His eyes were red, but he didn't care. Her yellow eyes betrayed the unease behind her anger.\n\nShe spoke slowly, as if to a thick-skulled hatchling. \"Your predecessor dreamed our deaths at the coming of the kraamlok. It is your task to dream away its curse.\" She swiped his rudely extended neck with her foot. \"Dream us life, or be forever not chosen.\" The elders shuffled away.\n\nHot blood welled up between his broken neck scales. Forever not chosen? Morwaka, why won't you speak to me?\n\nOf course he wanted to save the dragons! He listened and listened and listened under Morwaka's oblivious Eye. Did Elder Mala think pulling a blessing out of a dream was like dunking a forlok into a pool to create an Ash, or mating Ash and Fire to produce a Fire egg? There was no technique, no protocol, for pulling Morwaka's voice from the sky.\n\nDespair and rage battled in his mind. It was obvious why he had not dreamed. The dragons had no future. No future and no hope. He pulled off his necklace and flung it away.\n\nHe stormed into the dusk. Flames spurted intermittently into the deep blue sky from all directions as the chosen celebrated their joining. Even from the Ravine, bursts of flame shot upwards, turning the pale rock to gore. The image of Kalooka trapped in Hoodon's greedy embrace spattered like vomit in Tondoor's mind. He flew to the edge of the Ravine where Hoodon had prepared his love-nest yesterday.\n\nIt was not a bondok he would kill tonight.\n\nHe found them easily. Hoodon's blue wings were wrapped around her like a snoof around its prey.\n\nDeath by fireball was too good for him. He would die the way he'd killed Yarb.\n\nTondoor roared.\n\nHoodon spun away from Kalooka with lightning speed and blood in his eyes. Tondoor did not think; he fought by his own red anger and exploding pain. He was no warrior, and neither was Hoodon, but Hoodon was larger and his claws were sharpened by his right to enjoy Kalooka.\n\nIt was not long before his feet were flattening Tondoor's wings and his hand-claws were squeezing Tondoor's neck, drawing fresh blood from Elder Mala's claw-stripes. Tondoor tried even then to cry murder, but his voice made only a choking gasp.\n\nKalooka's eyes brimmed green as she peered down at him. \"Poor Tondoor,\" she said in her lilting voice. \"It is already a great defeat not to be chosen.\"\n\n\"Tondoor means to steal you,\" grunted Hoodon, squeezing harder.\n\n\"Yes, you opportunistic snoof,\" Tondoor tried to grunt as his head swam.\n\nKalooka nuzzled her snout against Hoodon's. \"I was given to you,\" she said. The pressure on Tondoor's throat eased slightly. He watched her eyes go large and blue as she lifted Hoodon's head and gazed into his red ones, and he felt his own heart wither.\n\nSlowly, Hoodon stepped off Tondoor's wings and released his grip on Tondoor's throat.\n\nTondoor choked in air.\n\nKalooka pulled Hoodon toward her and rubbed her neck against his. The red in Hoodon's eyes paled as Tondoor sputtered and coughed at his feet. Tondoor pushed up to all fours, keeping his neck extended in the posture of defeat. The fact that it was the same as his ceremonial seer's posture seemed fitting.\n\n\"I know who you are,\" murmured Kalooka, \"and I am yours.\"\n\nTondoor choked again. Did she use that line on everyone? He backed away, staying in his crouch.\n\nHoodon sucked in a satisfied breath. \"You heard her. Leave us alone.\"\n\nTondoor glanced up. Kalooka had both wings wrapped around him now.\n\nHoodon reached one hand out and flexed his claws. He squinted above her wings. \"Leave now, dreamer. Forever. Or I tell Elder Mala you're leading the rebellion.\" He snorted. \"As if. And if she doesn't kill you, I will.\"\n\nKalooka looked at him, Tondoor, now, with a strange color in her eyes, as brown as lake mud. Maybe it was a trick of the dim light. In any case, he couldn't read it\u2014unless it was pity. His heart withered the rest of the way to nothing. Pity was not what he wanted from her. He turned and leapt toward the hills.\n\nHe flew for a long time under Morwaka's round, merciless Eye. Hoodon hadn't pierced his wing membranes or broken his bones, but his neck stung where the scales had cracked. The icy wind and the rhythm of his beating wings numbed the pain in his body, but not the anguish in his mind.\n\nHe could never go back.\n\nThere was no reason to go back. Kalooka didn't want him. She wanted that arrogant, traitorous, elder-licking Hoodon. Emptiness swelled in the hollow where his heart used to be. She would probably forget all about the oasis now. She would have to. He hadn't given her the directions.\n\nSuddenly he knew what to do. He would return to the hidden oasis and live there. He would make himself an Ash. A whole tribe of Ashes and Snows. His own new society, where they would pick their own mates\u2014and their own turds. If Kalooka changed her mind about Hoodon, well, she knew about the cave painting. She could find him. And Elder Mala could hatch another Snow to torment.\n\nHe had just started to swing around when the Dragons of the Rocks materialized around him as if they'd hatched from starlight. Two on his left and two on his right. Striped Skies with glinting, too-long claws.\n\nThere was nothing to do but go with them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dream Quest",
                "text": "[ The Rocks ]\n\nThe four Rock scouts herded Tondoor deeper into the mountains while Morwaka's Eye slid indifferently past, and the same stars that embraced him in the desert now hung stiff and cold. He was hungry, hurting and exhausted, but the cold wind buffeting his wings somehow held him up.\n\nHis predecessor had flown into these mountains too: one Snow among Bloods, and only Bloods returning. Now it was his turn. The Dragons of the Rocks would see his wounds and know he was a fugitive, and either take him in or kill him. At this moment, he couldn't say which option he preferred.\n\nFinally, as the sun rose behind them and lit the gray mountaintops jutting out of the clouds, the scouts angled down into a steep-sided valley and left him on the pebbles beside a shallow lake. Drinking the icy water jarred him awake and sharpened his despair. Morwaka didn't speak to him. He was an exile and a prisoner. Kalooka wanted Hoodon. He huddled on the chilly stones, feeling his scales clamp together as the heat of exertion seeped away.\n\nThere was nowhere to hide, even if he had the will to try. The valley bottom was flat and covered with gravel. Only a few brave, stunted plants dared to grow, even though trickles of water flowed in narrow rivulets down the cliffs and across the valley to the lake. No trees clung to the stark cliffs.\n\nPiles of fallen stones lined the bottoms of the cliffs. In one place, the red rock was gouged out as if the dragons had taken some of it on purpose, like the first Fire taking her gift to Morwaka. Tondoor turned away. It had nothing to do with him.\n\nA jumble of broken boulders blocked his view of the end of the valley. He traced their trail of destruction up the side of the mountain. On the ground, two enormous boulders propped each other up, leaving an opening a dragon could walk through. Next to them was a stack of immense tree trunks broken into short lengths. How far had the Rock dragons carried them to this desolate place?\n\nFootsteps crunched in the pebbles. Two muscular Bloods marched through the gap in the boulders. Their chests bulged between their crisscrossed stripes, and both carried fire root on their horns as well as their ankle spurs. The male also wore a wide metal bracelet around one wrist, while the female carried two metal rods.\n\nTondoor shrank back. Were they going to beat him?\n\nMaybe he could leap up, grab some fire root off their horns, flame them and escape. But no. He was exhausted, injured, and small. Even a large Snow couldn't defeat a Blood, never mind two with metal claws. If he foolishly tried to fight them, his claws would catch in their stripes. And theirs would rip right through his scales.\n\nThe Bloods put the rods down beside the pile of logs and dragged two of the logs toward Tondoor. There was a hollow gouged into the middle of each log. What were they for?\n\n\"Lie down,\" Bracelet commanded. Tondoor flopped forward, and Bracelet pushed his neck into the gouge on the top of one of the logs. Tondoor winced as the wood rubbed against the claw marks. Then they heaved the other log on top of the first, trapping him between. They retrieved the rods and pounded them through the logs and into the ground with a rock.\n\nTondoor scrabbled his four limbs on the stones behind the logs, trying to find a position that wasn't painful, and fighting down panic and humiliation. Anger was easier. At Hoodon, for stealing Kalooka, smashing his plans, and sending him here to be tortured. At Kalooka, for turning her loving blue eyes on Hoodon and leaving him only her mud-eyed pity.\n\nThe female Blood picked up a fire root that had fallen off her horn and slid it back on. Those fire roots must be for intimidation, because horns couldn't clamp onto them like ankle spurs. Well, it worked. He was intimidated.\n\nThe two Bloods stood motionless beside him. Had they held his predecessor like this too?\n\nAfter an indeterminate time, two more silent Bloods marched between the looming boulders and joined them, followed by three large dragons: a Fire, a Blood and a Sky. The elders. Their feet marched in time: left, right, left, right.\n\nThe Blood elder was covered all over with stripes like the ones on his guards. His scales bulged between them. The Fire elder had only two stripes, but also wore a necklace of thick silver circles. The Sky elder had no stripes, but her chest scales were edged with a metal like gold, but more orange. How did they get the metal on their bodies? Kalooka had said something about melting the metals. How hot did it get? Did it hurt when it went on?\n\nAll three were studded with fire root on their horns and spurs. None was as old as the Plains elders. It must be true that Rock dragons did not live long.\n\nAll Tondoor could do in his enforced posture of submission was listen to the elders' toe-claws clink through the stones as they paraded around him. He lay very still, wondering when the Blood Elder's long metal claws would do their work and end his misery.\n\nInstead, one of them huffed. \"Why do the Dragons of the Plains send us another Snow?\"\n\nTondoor sucked in his breath. They remembered his predecessor. Maybe they would allow him to ask questions before they killed him.\n\nAnother one sniffed the oozing blood on Tondoor's neck. \"The Dragons of the Plains are not patient with their seers.\" Her voice was surprisingly light.\n\n\"Nor did he live long among them,\" said the third in a deep powerful voice like Folfro's. \"He is young.\"\n\nTondoor cowered in his prison as the Rock elders completed their circle and lined up again in front of him. \"Why have you come to us?\" demanded the Sky in her light voice. \"Do you bring another dire prophecy of doom from the sky?\" The others laughed.\n\nTondoor's head swam. \"I was ordered to leave,\" he replied, hoping they would not ask for details. \"I failed to dream the solution to my predecessor's prophecy.\" Both statements were true, if not related.\n\nThe elders laughed again. \"But the solution is already at hand,\" said the Fire. \"The Dragons of the Plains must have noticed that the\u2014what was it\u2014the kraamlok? That the kraamlok has failed to appear.\"\n\n\"Our Most Ancient elder believes it is still coming,\" Tondoor said. \"Although there are those who do not.\"\n\n\"Do you believe it?\" demanded the Blood. The deep voice was his.\n\nDid he? \"I was given the task of dreaming the way of escape from it, but so far I just dream stories.\"\n\n\"At least this one is honest,\" said the Fire in a gruff voice. \"He doesn't claim to see things he doesn't.\"\n\n\"We used to have a seer,\" explained the Sky. \"He prophesied a mild winter. The winter that came was colder than any in memory and caught us unprepared. Many died.\"\n\nTondoor remembered the picture of the frozen lake.\n\n\"We ate him,\" said the Fire.\n\n\"Winter is coming and food will be hard to find,\" the Blood mused.\n\nThe cold water churned in Tondoor's stomach.\n\n\"But since you are so honest,\" interrupted the Fire, \"we will allow you to help us.\" He lowered his pale orange snout to Tondoor's. The scent of freshly killed beast on his breath made Tondoor's mouth water. \"Too many of our females have died,\" the Fire said, \"and it is too late in the season to make Ashes. Next spring we will be short of eggs.\"\n\nTondoor felt lightheaded. They wanted him to help them steal eggs?\n\n\"Tell us what we want to know and you will live,\" said the Fire. \"When do the Plains females lay their eggs?\"\n\nI can't, thought Tondoor desperately. I'm not a traitor. He pressed his snout shut.\n\n\"Guards,\" barked the Blood.\n\nStones slammed into Tondoor's side. Ow\u2014did some of his scales just crack? He smelled turds, and realized they were his. \"In early spring!\" he shouted.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Wherever they are. But they take them to the cavern under the cliff across from the Nest.\" He felt his scales open to let out heat. Didn't they already know this?\n\nOne by one Tondoor revealed the secrets of the Plains while the elders nodded and the Bloods stamped their feet in approval. Tondoor felt sick. He was an exile, a prisoner, and now a traitor. But strangely enough, he now knew that he did not want to die.\n\nThe elders and the guards roared with laughter when he was done. \"He is indeed honest,\" said the Sky.\n\nThe Blood elder tapped him on the horns. \"Surely you know we make regular raids on the Plains.\"\n\nThey're playing with me, Tondoor realized. Shame and anger surged inside him. He raised his head as high as he could and looked at the Fire. \"What do you really want?\"\n\nThe Fire squinted into Tondoor's eyes. \"Why did you really come here?\"\n\nTondoor wished he could hide. \"I lost a fight over a female and the winner will kill me if I go back.\"\n\nThe Blood hooted. \"That explains your injuries.\"\n\n\"Will you kill me?\" asked Tondoor.\n\n\"We do not kill without need,\" said the Sky. \"Of all the dragon tribes, we in the mountains best understand the value and fragility of life.\"\n\nHer eyes weren't even orange. Was telling lies without betraying yourself another talent of the Dragons of the Rocks?\n\n\"You are thinking about the young dragons guarding your eggs,\" said the Fire, holding his gaze. \"I assure you their deaths are necessary. Our raiders can't defend themselves while their claws are full of your precious eggs.\"\n\n\"Why can't your females lay their own eggs?\" He was being reckless, but he couldn't help himself.\n\n\"We lose many dragons each winter,\" said the Sky, \"and in cold mountain lakes it is not easy to make Ashes.\"\n\n\"The youngster is not convinced,\" observed the Blood. \"If he knew the story of our beginnings, he would know that when the first Bone hoarded her treasure, the others fought to take it from her. It is ever the way with dragons.\"\n\n\"Morwaka then gave the quest to determine what manner of creature he had made,\" added the Fire, \"not to change them into something they are not.\"\n\nSo dragons were supposed to fight? Even after Morwaka grieved over Bone's death and made fire harder to make? On the other hand, he didn't take away their claws or teeth, and he gave them Ashes to replace the dragons they killed.\n\n\"Or do you think the Plains dragons would give us their eggs?\" The Sky interrupted his thoughts.\n\n\"Never!\"\n\nThe Sky nodded. \"We are proud of our strength.\"\n\n\"And now we will test yours, the same as we did your predecessor's,\" said the Fire. \"We will give you the stripe of the Dragons of the Rocks.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Stripe",
                "text": "The guards yanked out the metal rods and lifted the top log off his neck. Tondoor stifled a yelp as his neck wound opened again. \"Will I have to help you steal eggs?\"\n\nThe Blood elder snorted. \"Fighting is obviously not your best skill. We have a different task for you.\" The elders strode away through the opening in the rock.\n\nWhat could they possibly want from him?\n\nThe female guard slid a rope made of linked metal circles around Tondoor's neck and pulled it tight. He trotted after her. If he matched her pace, the metal rope didn't choke him or dig into his wound. The other Bloods followed.\n\nShe led him away from the lake to a waterfall that filled the air with cold spray and hooked the end of his rope to a metal spur at the base of the rock. Bracelet disappeared into an opening in the cliff. He returned a moment later with two Fires, a male and a female.\n\nTondoor had never seen dragons so haggard-looking. Their sunken eyes oozed black pus, their scales were curled and cracked, and their claws were jagged and charred. By their size, they were younger than he was, but by the wear on their bodies, they were older than Elder Mala. Instead of stripes, they had spatters of metal on their blistered arms. The Fires measured his torso with their arms, then went back inside.\n\nThe Bloods positioned themselves two in front and two behind Tondoor. \"Spread your wings,\" Bracelet ordered.\n\nHe did. They lifted him by his arms and legs, flipped him over head first, and held him against the ground with his limbs splayed. As helpless as he had felt locked between the logs, being upside down was six times worse. Bracelet tightened the metal rope. It slid up under Tondoor's jaw and pulled his head back. He could just see the opening in the cliff.\n\nThe Fires returned with dripping beast skins tied over their heads. Their yellow eyes peered through narrow slits. The male carried a long metal stick with a rock on the end shaped like half an eggshell. It rattled when he placed it on the ground. The female carried a basket brimming with fire root.\n\nThe male Fire swallowed one and shot a concentrated burst of flame at the rock on the stick. The flames burst back out, licking his snout. As his breath waned, the female took a fire root. They alternated breathing and puffing out flames.\n\nEven from a tail-length away, Tondoor's scales felt like they were melting. He'd never felt anything this hot. No wonder the Fires looked half dead.\n\nThe Bloods tightened their grip. The female Fire appeared above him holding the metal stick. Her mask steamed. She tilted the rock and poured out a shining liquid. How beautiful, Tondoor thought, in the instant before it hit his chest. Burning pain seared him from shoulder to hip.\n\nHe screamed.\n\nThe Bloods loosened the metal rope holding his head and lifted him, still upside down, into the waterfall. He choked as the water filled his nostrils, but they held him there until the icy water numbed the burning and he went limp. Then they set him gasping on his feet and dragged him by the metal rope back toward the lake, while the two Fires jostled for his place under the water.\n\nTondoor peered down at his chest as he stumbled along. He had a dull silver stripe. The mark of his enemies. He couldn't ever go home now.\n\nBracelet removed the metal rope from his neck. \"Rest in the lake.\"\n\nTondoor flopped into the water. Agony flared again as the Bloods marched away. They didn't need to guard him; he could hardly breathe, let alone fly. And he had nowhere to go. Hoodon's triumph was complete."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mission",
                "text": "Tondoor lay in the lake for two days. A Leaf dragon brought him food, and a Bone pressed dripping clay into his neck wounds and around the stripe. That evening the elders returned. Tondoor hauled himself out of the lake and arched his body into the posture of respect. The pain on his chest was just bearable.\n\n\"Tondoor, seer of the Rocks, we have a job for you,\" said the Blood.\n\n\"I'm not good at making fire.\" Tondoor croaked.\n\n\"Hot breath belongs to the Fires,\" said the Sky. \"We want you to seek us a star.\"\n\nTondoor dropped his posture. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Do you know the story of the star that Bone stole from Morwaka's littlest toe-claw, and how it fell into the bog after the dragons pursued Bone across all six corners of the world?\" asked the Fire.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nThe Sky huffed. \"That is not the star we want. That one is dangerous and foul-tempered, and we gladly leave it to the Dragons of the Bog.\"\n\nWhat did she mean by that? Had the Dragons of the Bog retrieved it from the water?\n\nThe Sky continued. \"The star we seek came to our world of its own accord seven winters ago. All of us here saw it slash the sky.\"\n\n\"I have seen many stars slash the sky,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"We see many as well,\" said the Fire elder, \"but this one was so large and bright that it turned night to day and shook rocks off the cliffs.\"\n\nEven in the desert, he had never seen a star do that. But he had tried to fly up to their world. Maybe the stars wondered at this world the same way he wondered at theirs, and one had decided to come down.\n\n\"Forging metals is costly to us,\" said the Blood. \"Our stripes and claws cost many of our Fires their lives. If this hot star would help us, more of our Fires would live.\"\n\nThe gaunt Fires from yesterday. Yes. \"And then you wouldn't need to raid the Plains,\" Tondoor added.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" agreed the Fire.\n\nThe Blood bared his teeth. \"But of course, we still would.\"\n\nTondoor swallowed. \"Where do you think I will find this star?\" Excitement tingled at the edges of his mind. How many uncountable nights had he longed to touch one?\n\n\"It flew to the northwest,\" said the Sky.\n\n\"If it landed in the bog, the Bog dragons will have stolen it,\" muttered the Fire. The others shuffled their feet.\n\n\"Or maybe not,\" said the Sky. \"They have enough trouble with the star they already have.\"\n\nWhat did Morwaka's star do to them? \"Do you raid the Dragons of the Bog as well?\" Tondoor asked.\n\n\"The Bog dragons don't lay eggs,\" snapped the Fire. \"They steal our stones and hatch them.\"\n\n\"If you learn that secret,\" added the Sky, \"we will be even more pleased.\"\n\nTruly, the world was full of wonders. \"If I find this star, how shall I convince it to return with me?\" Tondoor asked.\n\nThe Sky ruffled her wings. \"Seers are the ones who know stars. A storytelling seer must have considerable powers of persuasion.\"\n\nTondoor almost laughed. When had he ever persuaded anyone?\n\n\"You must do better than your predecessor,\" barked the Fire. \"He was given the same quest but failed. At least, he failed to return.\"\n\n\"I will search for both of them,\" Tondoor said. For this first time since his exile, his thoughts raced instead of dragged. The old seer could be dead. But if not, he could be found. And he could teach Tondoor how to find the dream that would save everyone from the kraamlok. If he did, Elder Mala would not only take him back, but give him Kalooka as well. He felt his eyes widen with blue hope.\n\nThe Blood snorted. \"Once a seer, always a seer. All they want is to get together and dream.\"\n\n\"I will search for both of them,\" Tondoor repeated.\n\n\"He also flew northwest, toward the Bog,\" said the Sky. \"But if you will take advice, it is better not to dream at all than to dream destruction.\"\n\n\"It is my hope to dream escape from the kraamlok,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"If you also bring other dragons with you when you return,\" said the Fire, \"you will be well rewarded.\"\n\nWith more stripes? No chance of that, then. He nodded anyway.\n\n\"Our only other charge is that you must never return to the Dragons of the Plains,\" said the Sky.\n\n\"We will know if you do,\" growled the Blood.\n\n\"I already told you I cannot,\" Tondoor said, not quite hiding the ache in his voice.\n\n\"Then we send you out with high hopes,\" said the Sky elder, clasping her hand-claws together in the posture of farewell. \"May you find swift success.\"\n\nThe elders turned and marched away through the opening in the rock. Tondoor sank back into the soothing waters of the lake. Swift success. Was it possible?\n\nWhen dusk fell, Bracelet returned and dropped a bondok leg on the shore. Another Blood stood beside the pile of logs. They watched in silence while Tondoor ate. The shadows deepened, and Tondoor lay down. The gravel underneath him was cold enough that it also eased the pain in his chest-scales.\n\nHe was nearly asleep when a voice murmured, so quietly he could barely hear, \"If you dream the way of escape from the kraamlok's curse, I hope you return to tell us.\"\n\nTondoor opened his eyes. Bracelet's head was dark against the starry sky. \"You believe my predecessor's dream?\" he whispered.\n\nBracelet glanced at the rock archway before answering. \"The winter after the harsh one was unusually mild, as prophesied.\" He closed his snout and said no more.\n\nIf Tondoor did learn to dream properly, he could save at least one dragon. From the Rocks instead of the Plains, but it was something.\n\nWhen Tondoor awoke, four guards were standing motionless to the southeast, blocking the way to the Plains. They did not move when Tondoor spread his wings. Wincing at the pull of the stripe on his chest scales, he jumped into the chill morning air and headed northwest."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Bog",
                "text": "Tondoor flew past jagged peaks dusted with fresh snow and over turquoise lakes nestled like eggs in silent mountain cirques. He soothed his wounds in the icy water and hunted on the craggy slopes. Everything seemed like a dream\u2014these dense, mysterious woods; his new identity that hadn't yet penetrated past the metal on his chest; his new quest to find a star\u2014a star!\u2014and a mentor and the possible fulfilment of his lifelong goal.\n\nHe glided through shadowed valleys above gushing rivers, taking strength from their powerful churning. This must be an enchantment of the shadow dragons, and he would open his eyes to find himself in a cave in the desert. But he didn't, and as he rested among fragrant trees, and his wounds healed, he also tended the raw ache from Kalooka and Hoodon and Elder Mala. Maybe time would heal it too.\n\nFurther northwest, the craggy heights softened into flowing, tree-covered hills. Steam wafted out of dark cracks in the ground.\n\nFurther yet, the hills opened into a vast meadow dotted with islands of scrubby trees and channels of still, red water. Something slithered snoof-like through the channels, spouting intermittent puffs of water.\n\nTondoor's pulse quickened. This was the Bog, where the first Bone had sunk into the depths of the murky water, taking Morwaka's littlest toe-star with her. And where the star might now have been found.\n\nHe flew low over the expanse. Bubbles gurgled in a wide-open pool below him. He spotted dragons among the further clumps of trees, but no one flew up to intercept him.\n\nHot water did.\n\nA scalding jet seized his wings and tumbled him about. Water like fire surged into his eyes, his nostrils, under his scales.\n\nHe landed with a splat on his belly.\n\nHot rain pounded him into the soggy, squelchy ground. He tried to stand, but the ground pitched and flung him down. He concentrated on keeping his head up and gulping air instead of water.\n\nThe rain thinned. The rocking slowed.\n\nIt was over. He was lying on a floating mat of stiff, tangled moss.\n\nSnorting out water, he watched the last of the rain trickle down and the steam float away to the hills. He pushed up onto all fours. The dark puddle sloshing around his feet was the only sign that anything had happened. That and the burning under his scales. Holding his wings out for balance, he kicked off into the air and flapped toward the islands.\n\nWhat kind of beast lived in a pool and spouted scalding water? If it was Morwaka's star, no wonder the Rock dragons called it bad-tempered.\n\nKalooka would have enjoyed making a picture of him bouncing around on top of a jet of water. But she'd lost her chance to hear about it. Even if he could go back to the Plains, he wouldn't tell her anything.\n\nThe dragons on the islands still hadn't noticed him, or else they were choosing to ignore his presence. But he was sore, and he needed to rest. And ask some questions. Just ahead, a female Leaf was eating something. She was quite large, but Leafs weren't usually violent, even if they were hunkered down like this one, tearing apart a beast. Tondoor angled down and called out a greeting.\n\nThe next instant, he was hanging upside down by his feet with his head dangling just above the moss."
            },
            {
                "title": "Thief",
                "text": "The ground under Tondoor's snout was made of scrubby moss, just like the mat he had landed on earlier. He looked up and saw that his ankles were caught in a twisted vine suspended between two trees.\n\nThe Leaf chortled, and something crunched beneath him. He yanked his head away just before two beaked tentacles clipped off the clumps of moss right underneath him. A round, shiny head with two black bulbous eyes and one flapping nostril opened its mouth to receive the moss. The head slid past, followed by a long trail of spikes as long as Elder Mala. They were attached to the body of a giant snoof.\n\nThe Leaf scowled down at him. \"You thought you could steal my stones. Ha! I'll show you what happens to thieves on my island.\"\n\nShe had egg-stones, just like the Rock dragons said. \"I'm not a thief.\"\n\n\"Only because you failed.\" She snarled, even though he was certain there was only fear in his eyes.\n\nHe shook his feet, but the vines wouldn't let go. \"Why would I want to steal your stones?\"\n\nThe Leaf narrowed her eyes. \"For your mate, of course. She must need them if she ended up with a little Snow like you.\"\n\n\"I don't have a mate.\" The bitterness in his voice must have convinced her, because she stopped and tilted her head. He added more while he had the chance. \"I come from the Plains, er, and the Rocks, and I'm looking for another Snow like me, who flew here some years ago.\" And a star, but that could wait.\n\n\"Snows are bad news from any direction.\" The Leaf snarled again, but she crossed her arms in the posture of deliberation. \"A Plains Snow with the stripe of a Rock dragon. I may have heard of another one like that.\"\n\nTondoor stopped wiggling his feet.\n\nThe Leaf didn't budge, but the red in her eyes faded to yellow. \"If you even glance at my stones I'll drown you in the bog.\"\n\n\"I don't want your stones.\"\n\n\"If you had some, you might get a mate.\"\n\nNot likely. His kind of dragon laid their eggs. \"Why do you need a mate if you can hatch stones?\" he asked.\n\nInstead of answering, she assumed the posture of authority. Another Elder Mala. He stifled a groan.\n\n\"I have some questions for you about that other Snow's ridiculous prophecy. It nearly scared the wings off me.\"\n\nTondoor shuddered. \"About the kraamlok. Me too.\"\n\n\"What is it then? Another star? An evil star beast?\" She hung her tongue out of the side of her mouth and waggled her hand claws in the posture of ridicule.\n\n\"Star beasts are only in stories,\" said Tondoor. How was he supposed to know what the kraamlok was? He couldn't think upside down. And his toes were going to sleep. \"Whatever it is, it's going to do more than just spit hot water at people,\" he muttered.\n\nThe Leaf snickered. \"Did you get caught in that?\"\n\n\"It knocked me out of the sky.\"\n\n\"You never fly over Morwaka's star until after the sacrifice. Everyone knows that.\"\n\nSo that spouting thing was Morwaka's star. \"What sacrifice?\" he asked. He wiggled his feet again, but the rope just got tighter.\n\nThe Leaf shredded a chunk of moss with her toe-claws. \"I'm asking the questions. Is the kraamlok another outraged star?\"\n\nIce and flame consume the world. \"It's hot like a star, but also cold like ice.\"\n\n\"Fire and ice. Both at once.\"\n\nShe was right. It was confusing. \"I think better with my feet untied,\" he said, twisting his ankles inside the rope. That was a mistake. The rope caught on his ankle spur and spun him in a circle.\n\n\"No chance of that,\" she said, taking a bite of her meal. \"I think that Snow just made the whole thing up.\"\n\n\"No, he didn't!\" Kalooka's eerie voice, those terrifying words\u2026could someone make up something like that? Why would they?\n\nThe Leaf's eyes opened wide as she looked past his feet. \"Oh no. Our head seer is coming. Unfortunately, her prophecies always make sense.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Colleague",
                "text": "Another Snow. The first one he had ever seen.\n\nTondoor twisted his neck and stared at the shining form outlined like a solid cloud against the blue sky. Did he also look so dazzling in the sunlight? The Leaf now had her head buried under her wing. What was she afraid of?\n\n\"The voices of the Loollabies rise double from the bog,\" the seer wailed in a forlorn voice that filled him with dread even though he had no idea what she was talking about. She flew closer. \"They spill their colors like tears. Console yourselves in your suffering, mournful Loollabies, for you return to your source and your doom, your maker and your end.\"\n\n\"That was hideously clear,\" the Leaf moaned from underneath her wing. \"If your Snow talked like that, we'd all know what he meant.\"\n\nBefore Tondoor could disagree, the Snow plunked down in front of him. Her white scales glistened against the moss and trees.\n\nThe tip of the Leaf's snout poked out from her wing. Next to the Snow, her green body blended right in with the island. \"Welcome to my island, Borloo,\" she squeaked. \"Help yourself to the rest of my loogah.\"\n\nBorloo glanced at the Leaf's half-eaten beast. \"No thank you, Yolooda. I merely wish to confer with my colleague.\"\n\nColleague! Tondoor tried to assume the posture of greeting while hanging upside down.\n\n\"Release him,\" Borloo snapped.\n\nYolooda scrambled into the trees above him, braced her feet, and did something he couldn't quite see.\n\nThe vines holding his feet went slack and he crashed onto the soggy ground. Clouds of insects swarmed out of the moss: long yellow ones with triple wings and huge, faceted eyes, and smaller ones in various sizes and colors. He spit out sprigs of moss. From the water's edge, sprawling plants with gaping mouths leaned toward him and snapped shut on the insects. He jerked his tail away from them and pushed himself to his feet.\n\n\"Name?\" demanded Borloo.\n\n\"Tondoor, seer of the Plains\u2026and the Rocks.\"\n\nBorloo's yellow eyes lingered on his stripe. \"You come from the Plains via the Rocks, just like the last Snow. Do you bring further tidings of the destroyer from the sky?\" Her voice sounded as worried as her eyes looked.\n\nTondoor sighed. \"I come seeking the seer who made the prophecy. I have been given the task of dreaming an escape from it, and I need him to teach me how. Unless\u2026\" He dared to hope. \"Could you teach me?\"\n\nBorloo shook her head. \"Bog seers do not dream the same kind of visions as Plains seers. You are right to seek the other Snow, for Morwaka's star grows restless, as if it knows something is about to happen.\"\n\nTondoor felt blue excitement burst into his eyes. \"Our legends say the star was lost. But you seem to have found it.\" Kalooka would be so excited\u2026but he couldn't\u2014and wouldn't\u2014tell her. He closed his eyes to squeeze away drooping gray.\n\n\"Not lost, but still out of reach. We know where it lives because we see it breathe.\" Borloo motioned back the way he had come.\n\nYolooda snickered. \"It knocked him out of the sky.\"\n\nBorloo shushed her. \"You may also have seen wisps of its breaths in the hills.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. \"I saw steam. But I had no idea it was the breath of Morwaka's star!\"\n\n\"How would you, coming from the Plains?\" asked Borloo. \"We know because we have lived here from the time it fell. We also know the star is still angry at Bone for stealing it and dropping it here.\"\n\nIt was intoxicating to be in a place where the legends were so alive. He had questions Kalooka had never even thought of. Were the stars in the sky hot like this one, or only the angry ones? How hot was the one the Rock dragons wanted? If it was hot enough to melt metals, how would he carry it? What would make a star angry besides being trapped in a bog? If a star could feel anger, what else could it feel?\n\n\"That's why most of us choose islands a good distance away from it,\" Borloo was saying with a stern look at Yolooda.\n\n\"No island is safe,\" muttered Yolooda.\n\nBorloo nodded. \"The star becomes more furious every day. I fear it will soon be angry enough to destroy us all. If your seer's kraamlok does not come and set it free, we will have to make a double sacrifice.\"\n\nYolooda cringed.\n\n\"But when the kraamlok comes, we will all die,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"That is why you are right to seek the other seer,\" said Borloo. \"Our path is not clear.\" She faced Yolooda and assumed the posture of authority. \"Start Tondoor on his journey to the Coast. See that he knows the way.\"\n\nYolooda's eyes narrowed, but she gave a curt nod.\n\n\"May you find the answer quickly,\" Borloo said to Tondoor. \"Then return and tell us what you have learned.\"\n\n\"I will,\" said Tondoor.\n\nBorloo flew up over the island and resumed her wailing.\n\nYolooda glared at Tondoor. \"Now look what you've done. My stones will all be stolen by the time I get back.\"\n\n\"I can find the Coast myself if you tell me the direction,\" said Tondoor.\n\nYolooda's glare turned even redder. \"Borloo said to start you. So I'm starting you.\" She turned toward the trees. \"But first I'm going to set the death trap on my nest. Stay close and follow me exactly. Ignore everything else. I don't want to have to untie you again. Or worse.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Traps",
                "text": "Tondoor kept his snout at the tip of Yolooda's tail and did his best to ignore the insects that swarmed him as they went deeper into the trees. He followed her over a vine stretched behind a cluster of hungry-looking yellow flowers. \"Can't the other dragons find their own stones? Why do they need yours?\"\n\n\"My mate found a secret stash of egg stones. Even the Rock dragons don't know about it.\"\n\n\"The Rock dragons don't want them. They don't know how to make them hatch.\"\n\nYolooda gave him an are you stupid? look. \"You can't hatch rocks. When you find that other Snow, he'll have a lot to teach you beside dreaming.\" She tip-toed along a path of flat rocks. \"Don't step on the third one.\"\n\nTondoor stepped over it. \"Then what are the stones for?\"\n\n\"Other dragons come to steal my egg,\" Yolooda explained in a voice that made him feel like an ignorant hatchling. \"If have a lot of egg-shaped stones in my nest, they'll most likely get a stone instead. Especially when I decorate them so they can't tell which one is real.\"\n\n\"Oh, they're decoys.\" Tondoor dodged a bundle of hanging moss.\n\nYolooda whacked his snout with her tail. \"I said follow me exactly. If you even brush that orchid, we'll both be caught in my net. Then there'll be trouble.\"\n\nSure enough, a net hung, barely visible, in the branches above them. \"I don't think anyone could get through these traps,\" he said, winding his wings around a branch exactly like Yolooda did. \"They're brilliant.\"\n\n\"Most of them are pretty standard.\" But Yolooda sounded pleased. She let her wings droop and slithered between two mossy tree trunks. \"I'm working on some new designs with ideas I picked up on other islands.\" She grunted as she nosed a large mouth-plant out of the way and motioned Tondoor to step through the gap.\n\nThe mouth plant snapped shut behind his flank. He still didn't understand. \"If you share designs, you'll all know how to get through them. So who are you trying to trap?\"\n\nYolooda blew aside a cluster of leaves. \"You don't know much about life outside the grasslands, do you? I steal their designs, so I can protect my egg after the sacrifice. And so I'll know how to get through their traps if I need to steal one of their eggs.\"\n\nHe was lucky he hadn't fallen into something worse than an ankle-grabbing vine.\n\nYolooda chuckled. \"I almost got caught last time, except the trigger vine snagged the other dragon's wing when she was trying to lasso me. I'm making a snare just like hers, but I'm going to add a screen so it's invisible.\"\n\n\"It must be a relief when the eggs hatch and everyone stops trying to steal them.\" He sniffed. Rotting beast?\n\n\"Ha! Then we steal hatchlings. If it's a double sacrifice this year, even the males will get involved.\" She stopped abruptly with a low growl. \"This is my nest. Stay where you are and don't touch anything.\"\n\nTondoor pulled all the parts of him in close.\n\nYolooda stepped aside to reveal a flank-high dome of vines woven through a frame of curved sticks. On the top, insects and wilting mouth plants skewered on twigs circled the head of an enormous water snoof. Its dark eyes and its one nostril had collapsed into three oozing craters. That explained the smell. Spikes taken from the water snoof's back bristled around the dome.\n\n\"That would be terrifying to run into in the dark.\" Although the smell would warn thieves away\u2014or help them find it.\n\nYolooda waved her arm dismissively. \"Everyone has one of those now. These days you need a dragon head to scare off thieves.\"\n\nTondoor gulped. He was lucky Borloo had come along when she did.\n\nYolooda twisted a mat of spiky branches and pulled it away to reveal an opening in the dome. Inside the nest, speckles of light revealed colored lumps covered with bits of eggshell like the mosaics in the Ravine. \"Don't even think about stealing one,\" she muttered. \"Cover your eyes.\"\n\nTondoor did. He heard rustling and a snapping sound.\n\n\"There. It's set.\" She sighed. \"Probably no one will die; it's pretty standard too. But it will slow them down a bit.\" She pulled his hands off his eyes. \"What are you waiting for? Come on.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Loolabies",
                "text": "Tondoor threaded himself through the opening between the trees behind Yolooda. Jerking his partly-open wings got him up, and then he was able to stretch them out fully and pick up speed. Yolooda kept up easily. The vast field of islands in the red water stretched to the horizon. He thought again of Morwaka's star, seething beneath the Bog. Maybe its anger made the water red.\n\n\"The other Snow went northwest to the Coast,\" Yolooda said. \"Although he won't have stayed there. The Dragons of the Coast don't like strangers.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I can find my way now.\"\n\nHe expected her to leave him then, but she stayed at his side. The egg-lump in her belly swayed with the rising and falling of her wings. \"I'm worried about that kraamlok,\" she said after a while. \"If it comes, how will we keep our hatchlings safe?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"If I find the answer, I'll come back and tell you.\"\n\n\"Come before the sacrifice. I don't want my egg to be a Loollaby.\"\n\n\"What is a Loollaby? And what is the sacrifice?\"\n\n\"It's an egg we feed Morwaka's star to put it to sleep.\"\n\nTondoor choked. \"You drown your own eggs?\"\n\n\"We drown other dragons' eggs,\" Yolooda snapped. \"That's why we steal them, of course. It's all in the legend of the Bog, but you Plains dragons wouldn't know it.\"\n\n\"There are no Loollabies in our legends. Or sacrifices.\"\n\n\"It's right after the part where Morwaka sends the first Leaf to live in the Bog. She laid eggs and got hatchlings in all six colors, like Morwaka said to, and Snows too, unfortunately, and they all mated and made nests, and dragons filled the Bog.\"\n\nTondoor chose to ignore the insult. \"The same as Sky did on the Plains.\"\n\n\"Right. But there is no star buried under the Plains, so Sky's story just ends. Leaf's continues. The star in the Bog got angrier and angrier at being left there, until one day it shook the whole Bog apart. The islands collapsed into the water, taking the nests with them. The dragons who didn't drown escaped to the hills.\"\n\nGreen islands and their inhabitants flowed past beneath them. \"So how did the islands come back?\"\n\n\"The survivors asked the Snows what to do, and the Snows dreamed the answer. They took six eggs, one for each color of dragon except their own, and dropped them into the water where the star was still huffing and puffing. The star ate them. It fell asleep, and Morwaka sent the water snoofs to rebuild our islands. Now we have a sacrifice every year, so the star won't destroy us again.\"\n\nTondoor didn't know which question to ask first. \"How long does the star sleep?\"\n\n\"It depends on how pleased it is with the Loollabies. Sometimes it sleeps for several blinks of Morwaka's Eye; other times it doesn't sleep at all. But it's always calmer after being fed.\"\n\nTondoor caught an air current and let himself glide. \"How do you choose the Loollabies?\"\n\nYolooda shuddered. \"That's the awful part. We gather on the Island of Tears with our eggs. We tap them and plead with them and listen for the little ones to answer.\"\n\n\"How can they answer if they're still inside their eggs?\"\n\n\"They purr. They vibrate. They tremble at the sound of our voices, because they know what will happen if they don't. As soon as a dragonet answers, we put its egg back in the nest. Then we guard it with our lives.\"\n\n\"And the eggs that don't answer go into the Bog.\"\n\n\"The last six. Borloo says they're the ones that want to be with the star. But I don't believe it. Why would a dragonet want to die? Last time,\" Yolooda said in a flat voice, \"my egg was a Loollaby. I got this scar from trying to steal another egg afterwards.\"\n\nShe angled sideways so Tondoor could see a large, scabby gash in her side. After most of a year, the scales above it had only grown enough to half cover the wound.\n\n\"I should have let my mate steal for me,\" Yolooda said. \"I was too upset to be careful. He got me an egg later, but its mother stole it back the next day. I wasn't strong enough to fight her.\"\n\nTondoor's head swam. The sacrifice was horrible enough, but even worse was that it came from a seer's vision. Did Morwaka really tell the Bog dragons to give their own eggs to be eaten, after he was so sad when they killed Bone? Or did the Snows just think it up by themselves? But if they did, why did it work? How could a seer know for sure if dream came from Morwaka? What would he do if he dreamed something as horrific as sacrificing Loollabies?\n\n\"If I were you,\" he said, \"I'd feed stones to the star instead of eggs.\"\n\nYolooda gasped. She pressed her hand-claws against the egg place in her belly, then turned and raced toward home.\n\nTondoor checked the position of the sun and found the place on the horizon where it would set. He angled northwest."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Coast",
                "text": "The scouts from the Coast met Tondoor over the leafy trees that grew beyond the soggy Bog. They flew in a pointed formation with a large Fire in the front. There were about twenty of them, in all colors\u2014even a Snow, who looked just as startling against the sky as Borloo. A small Sky with long, narrow wings flew out of line behind. Tondoor steeled himself to expect the worst.\n\nThe Fire called out to him as soon as he was in range. \"Hello, stranger. What brings you to our balmy skies?\"\n\nThat didn't sound threatening. But before he could answer, the scouts fanned out, still in perfect formation except for the young Sky, and swung around to fly around him. The Fire flew to his left, a Blood on the right and the rest above and below. If they attacked, he had no way out.\n\nHe kept his voice even. \"I'm searching for a Snow who came this way some years ago. He had a stripe like mine.\"\n\nThe Fire twisted his neck. \"Anyone know of a striped Snow that flew over a while back?\"\n\nNo one did. Maybe the old Snow had died on his way here.\n\n\"Where do you come from?\" asked the Blood on his right.\n\n\"I'm from the Plains. And the Rocks.\" He still wasn't used to that. \"And I came through the Bog.\"\n\n\"Impressive,\" said a Leaf above him to his left. \"We don't get many visitors from that far away.\"\n\n\"We don't get many from the Bog either,\" added the young Sky, flapping hard above the Blood. \"They're too lazy.\"\n\n\"More like paranoid,\" snorted the Blood. \"They think if they leave home, someone will steal their eggs.\"\n\n\"Someone will,\" said Tondoor. The Blood snorted again, this time with laughter.\n\n\"If you're from the Plains, why do you have a stripe like a Rock dragon?\" asked the Fire.\n\nThis dragon knew things. \"They gave it to me when I went through.\" True, if incomplete.\n\n\"We like visitors,\" said the young Sky, \"but we don't give them gifts.\"\n\nTondoor chuckled. Up to now, he hadn't thought of the stripe as a gift. If these Coast dragons were trying to make him let down his guard, they were succeeding. \"You don't happen to know about a star wandering around here, do you?\" he asked. \"The Rock dragons asked me to look for one.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of one,\" said the Fire.\n\n\"No one ever comes here,\" sighed the Blood.\n\n\"Then what do you scout for?\" asked Tondoor.\n\nThere was a short silence. \"We like to fly,\" said the Fire. The others murmured agreement.\n\n\"I like to fly too,\" said Tondoor, \"but after this long I wouldn't mind a rest.\"\n\n\"Soon. It's not far now,\" said the Fire.\n\nThe wide, leafy trees beneath them gave way to thin, corrugated trunks with leafy fronds at the top, and the ground had turned even more golden than ripe grass. In the distance, sparkling blue water stretched away to meet the sky. \"This must be the Coast,\" said Tondoor reverently, \"where the shifting sand changes shape beneath the pounding rhythm of the waves.\"\n\nKalooka would love to see this, the land of the first Sun. In spite of how she'd hurt him, he still wished she was here. He pushed away the ache.\n\n\"The thinkers will like you,\" said the Fire. \"I'll take you to them.\"\n\nThe thinkers? Were they Suns, with thoughts made of hues and riddles? Or Coast elders?\n\n\"Approach formation!\" bellowed the Fire. \"You fly to my left,\" he told Tondoor. \"Line up your wingtip with the end of my tail. Keep your snout in line with the tip of my wing.\"\n\nTondoor positioned himself as ordered, and the other dragons flowed into their spots. Just like that, he was part of a team, even if his wing wobbled around the lead Fire's tail. Once he got distracted watching the glinting of the Snow's scales ahead of him, and the dragon behind him nipped his tail. He was more or less in his proper place when they landed on a wide expanse of hot sand beside the water. Most of the dragons wandered off as soon as they stopped, including the other Snow.\n\n\"Thanks, everyone,\" the Fire called after them.\n\nThe little Sky tugged on Tondoor's arm. \"Will you fly with us again tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Tondoor. \"I don't know if I'll still be here.\"\n\n\"Fly along, Trok,\" said the Fire. \"Our visitor needs to go and meet the thinkers.\"\n\n\"Bye. See you at klook, maybe.\" Trok flapped away and joined a young Blood poking at something in the water.\n\nBefore Tondoor could ask what klook was, the Fire extended his arm and spread his hand-claws. \"I'm Noot.\"\n\n\"Tondoor.\" He started to assume the posture of greeting, but Noot seemed to be expecting something else. He spread his claws like Noot.\n\n\"That's it!\" Noot clinked his claws against Tondoor's. \"Now you know our Coast greeting, Tondoor.\" He arched a wing. \"The thinkers are over there. I'll take you to them.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Thinkers",
                "text": "They flapped low along the beach and stopped beside a circle of dragons. In the center, two ancient Snows were shouting at each other. The female was stick thin, but the male was rounder than any dragon Tondoor had ever seen. Still another Snow, this one about his size, stood in the circle, frowning at them.\n\n\"You are misinterpreting the legend!\" the thinner Snow shrieked. \"Morwaka gave the dragons fire root for the explicit purpose of making fire.\"\n\nYes\u2026 What else could it be for?\n\nThe other Snow shook his head ponderously, making his fleshy neck jiggle. \"Morwaka was hugely saddened by Bone's death\u2014sad enough, remember, to make the rain fall as ice.\" His voice trembled as if he too were unbearably sad. \"This clearly illustrates the unspeakable tragedy of using violence against our own kind.\"\n\nNoot led Tondoor toward the serious young Snow in the audience. He yanked on the Snow's tail.\n\nTondoor jerked aside as the Snow stumbled backwards. \"Sorry.\"\n\nThe Snow looked confused.\n\n\"This is Blort,\" said Noot. Tondoor spread his hand claws as Noot had showed him, but Blort turned his head back toward the debate.\n\n\"Catch you later,\" said Noot. \"I have klook practice.\" He flapped away.\n\nKlook again. \"What is klook?\" Tondoor whispered to Blort.\n\n\"I have to watch the debate,\" Blort whispered back. \"Glomfa is going to test me later.\"\n\n\"Is she your mentor?\"\n\n\"My guide.\" Blort shuffled back into the circle, and Tondoor squeezed in beside him. Glomfa must be the thin Snow in the middle.\n\nGlomfa bounced on her toes and glared at the round male. \"Once again you twist the legend. As Sooloppa the Sensible rightly taught, Morwaka bids us be wise in the use of our treasures, not outlaw their use.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear!\" shouted a dragon in the crowd.\n\nTondoor nodded. That did sound sensible, whoever Sooloppa was.\n\n\"On the contrary,\" the round Snow retorted,\" as Drobood the Cogitator clearly taught, the only wise use of fire is not to use it at all.\"\n\nA few dragons called out, \"Well said!\"\n\nWhat about defending against the Dragons of the Rocks? But they didn't steal the Coast dragons' eggs.\n\nGlomfa's bounces turned to hops. \"If we outlaw fire as you propose, we must ban fire root. But to enforce the ban, we need enforcers, who require fire root to do the enforcing. So you put yourself in a logically inconsistent position. Ha!\" The crowd cheered. She raised her arms and danced in the posture of triumph, her eyes bulging violet above her pale snout.\n\nDragons clapped their tails together until the round Snow shook his head ponderously, making his neck wobble again.\n\nHis tone was icy. \"It is consistent with good sense that those who are properly trained should use fire for lawful purposes, without letting it fall into the hands of those who would misuse it for evil.\" Spittle sprayed from his mouth, and Glomfa yanked her thin snout back.\n\n\"By setting the desires of some dragons above the desires of others,\" she hissed, \"you negate Sooloppa's dictum that each dragon should choose her own treasure, and by implication, her own good!\"\n\nThe crowd shouted back\u2014some for, some against. On the Plains, the elders wouldn't allow anything like this. Tondoor glanced at Blort, who looked like he was repeating the arguments to himself.\n\nThe round Snow bared his teeth. \"You commit the fallacy of calling evil good. I remind you of the tragic events of three days ago, where one untrained hatchling killed, nay, slaughtered another in cold blood, using this very fire root you so recklessly champion.\"\n\n\"Protect our hatchlings!\" cried a Blood who was attempting to keep several squirming, various-colored hatchlings under her wings.\n\n\"Teach them how to use it safely,\" cried a young Bone. Two of the Blood's hatchlings escaped from under her wing and cheered.\n\n\"Those were no hatchlings,\" Glomfa snarled. \"Nor was it slaughter, as you well know. They were both well over two years old and playing games of the kind dragons have played since the beginning of time!\" Blue tinged her red eyes. Interesting\u2014she was enjoying this. \"As Aroomp rightly taught Sooloppa, 'Death is sometimes the price of freedom.'\"\n\n\"'Better cautious and alive than reckless and dead'\u2014 third dictum of Drobood.\"\n\n\"Seventh saying of Sooloppa: 'Fire root grew from the blood of the wounded Bone.' It clearly follows that Morwaka intended fire to be used, even if some uses lead to tragedy.\"\n\nThe Rock elders said the same thing.\n\nThe other Snow curled his lip. \"'All weapons contain the seeds of evil.' Drobood.\"\n\nTondoor looked between them in awe. These Snows surely had the first Sun's gift of speaking in hues and riddles.\n\nThe two Snows rose onto their toes, glaring at each other, their red eyes menacing against their white scales. Glomfa lifted her foot.\n\nShe had fire root on her ankle spurs.\n\nThey both did. \"But he just said\u2026\" protested Tondoor.\n\n\"Stand back.\" Blort yanked on Tondoor's arm. The dragons around them backed away too, dragging the hatchlings with them.\n\n\"You want fire?\" the round Snow snarled. \"I'll give you fire!\" He tossed his fire root into his mouth and chomped down.\n\n\"Look out, Glomfa!\" shouted Blort.\n\nFlames licked the sand. The hatchlings cheered.\n\n\"Hypocrite!\" Glomfa shouted, leaping sideways. As she landed, she aimed her own fire at her opponent. But not too carefully\u2014or else very carefully\u2014because it missed him. He sank down as the flames dissipated.\n\nThe crowd cheered and slapped their tails together. Tondoor looked over at Blort, but he was already slapping tails with the young Leaf on his other side.\n\nThe two Snows glared at each other while their audience wandered off, laughing and replaying the arguments. Then the round one's eyes changed to blue. \"That was fun,\" he said.\n\nGlomfa pulled him to his feet. \"Let's do it again soon.\"\n\nThey turned toward Blort and the Leaf. And Tondoor. \"A new Snow!\" they exclaimed together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Supper",
                "text": "Tondoor shut his snout, which was hanging open, and assumed the posture of respect.\n\nThe round Snow waddled toward him. \"Where did you fly in from?\"\n\n\"From the Plains,\" said Tondoor. \"Through the Rocks and the Bog.\"\n\nGlomfa eyed his stripe. \"We had a visitor from the Plains a few years ago. A most distasteful fellow. We sent him to the Rainy Island,\" she growled.\n\n\"Now, now, Glomfa. Don't be hasty. Let the young fellow speak before we throw him out.\"\n\n\"Right you are, Kroob,\" said Glomfa, lowering her head to peer at Tondoor. \"Mustn't fly to conclusions.\"\n\nKroob chuckled. \"He has good manners at least.\" He tapped Tondoor on the horns with one of his hand-claws. \"Relax your posture. Around here, respect is earned. Next time you take that posture for me, I want it to be because you think I am worthy of it. Got that?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Tondoor shook his head. \"The Coast is very different from the Plains.\"\n\n\"We should all hope so,\" said Glomfa. She turned to Blort, who was twisting his hand-claws together. \"Did you follow our arguments?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Yes, Guide Thinker, most of them,\" he squeaked.\n\n\"Good. We will review them after we eat.\"\n\nBlort nodded. His groan was masked by loud churning noises from Kroob's stomach.\n\n\"As shall we,\" Kroob said to the Leaf. He patted his belly. \"'Conversation always goes better with food.' Drobood. Come and join us, young\u2026\"\n\n\"Tondoor.\" He fell into step beside Kroob.\n\n\"Young Tondoor.\" Kroob puffed as he waddled toward a large mat woven from dry tree fronds. The other Snows and the Leaf flew ahead and lay down, all facing the center. In spite of the talk of food, the mat was bare.\n\n\"Make yourself comfortable, Tondoor,\" said Kroob as he lowered himself onto the mat, \"and meet Pooka. She is also a student of thinking.\"\n\nThe Leaf spread her hand-claws, and Tondoor clinked them. Pooka was younger than Blort, but her gaze was direct and she looked confident. So these Snows taught thinking. He would have to ask if they taught dreaming too.\n\nWingbeats sounded above them. Two Fires and a Blood swooped down and dropped several large fish onto the mat. Kroob pushed one toward Tondoor.\n\nHe bowed his thanks. The fish was different from the ones he'd seen in lakes. It was pale, full of slivery bones, and so soft it fell apart in his mouth. But it was filling and not unpleasant. After they were done, two Leafs flew over and dumped baskets of flat shells. Pooka showed Tondoor how to break the shells with his teeth and slurp out the rubbery beasts inside.\n\n\"You must be greatly respected among your tribe,\" Tondoor said, \"for the others to serve you like this.\"\n\nKroob sighed. \"Once we were, young Tondoor. Once we were. All the young dragons came to us to be educated in wisdom and right modes of thought. But now, I fear, they revere us because we make them laugh.\"\n\n\"I am searching for a teacher,\" said Tondoor. \"I need to learn to dream.\" And find a star, if that was possible.\n\nBlort and Pooka gasped. Glomfa choked on a shell.\n\n\"Do all Plains Snows dream?\" asked Kroob, his shell paused halfway to his mouth.\n\nUh-oh. Coast Snows didn't? \"I'm the only Plains Snow now,\" said Tondoor carefully, \"and I don't seem to know how.\" Anymore. \"But my predecessor did. He dreamed of great destruction to come, and I have been given the task of dreaming the way of escape.\"\n\nGlomfa spit out her shell with a noisy pfft. \"As I said,\" she muttered.\n\nKroob swished his tail one way, then the other, along the sand. \"Before you can learn anything, young Tondoor,\" he said in a sombre voice, \"it will be necessary for you to unlearn some serious misconceptions. First among these is the mistaken notion that Morwaka speaks to Snows, and second is that Morwaka exists at all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Roles",
                "text": "Tondoor gaped at the scowling Snows. \"I don't understand,\" he stammered. \"That's what Snows do, listen for Morwaka's voice.\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard him?\" Glomfa's words were like fangs.\n\n\"Once, when I was a hatchling.\" But he couldn't remember the incident itself any more. All he could recall was trying to remember every detail to figure out how he'd done it. He told them what he thought had happened.\n\nTo his surprise, Kroob's eyes twinkled blue. \"That is a classic example of hatchling suggestion-imprint,\" he said. \"You had been told you were supposed to be a seer, hadn't you? And encouraged to dream?\"\n\nTondoor nodded. \"Ordered to.\"\n\n\"Well then. What happened was that you saw something or heard something, or possibly sensed the thoughts of the raiding dragons\u2014hatchlings can sometimes do that, you know\u2014and then your mind manufactured what you thought you were supposed to dream.\"\n\nTondoor studied the empty shells on the blanket. Had he already known about the stripes and claws before he dreamed them? Could he have heard the invaders' thoughts and imagined he was dreaming? Is that why the dream was so hazy? \"If that's what I did, why did I never hear anyone's thoughts again?\"\n\n\"There could be many reasons,\" said Glomfa. \"Maybe in trying too hard to repeat the incident, you blocked the instincts that made it happen. Maybe you got interested in other things.\"\n\nLike helping Kalooka and deciphering cave pictures. Tondoor felt a sudden rush of freedom. If Morwaka didn't speak to Snows, the kraamlok wasn't coming and he could stop listening for a way to escape it. If by some miracle he got back to the Plains, he could lead the rebels to freedom without worrying. And then maybe Kalooka would want him again. \"So\u2026what do Snows do, if they don't dream?\" he asked in a small voice.\n\n\"They think!\" shouted Kroob.\n\n\"Whatever they want,\" shouted Glomfa at the same time.\n\nThe two Snows glared at each other. Blort and Pooka resumed slurping out shells.\n\n\"You see,\" said Kroob, stretching his flabby neck toward Tondoor, \"In the legend, Morwaka gave each of the first dragons a gift. Do you know the legend?\"\n\n\"I know it well,\" said Tondoor. \"But if Morwaka doesn't exist, then why does it matter?\"\n\n\"The legend was created long ago by the first true thinkers, for our instruction,\" explained Glomfa. \"That is why, in the legend, Morwaka bids us be wise.\"\n\n\"The ancient stories contain much wisdom, if they are rightly interpreted,\" added Kroob. \"Which is what we excel at.\"\n\nRight or wrong, these Snows were very confident. \"In the legend,\" Tondoor said, \"Skies got long wings for soaring, Fires got short wings for darting around the sharp mountain crags, Snows got\u2014\"\n\n\"Right you are!\" interrupted Kroob. \"But as Drobood the Cogitator clearly taught, you must never think those gifts were intended only for certain colors of dragons. No indeed, for those same dragons had offspring in all the colors of the People.\"\n\nTondoor frowned. \"Fires do have short wings.\"\n\nKroob interrupted him. \"The shape of your body does not dictate what you must do. It is at best a guide. You, for example, have just flown further than any Sky.\"\n\nHe hadn't thought of it like that before. \"Maybe it's because I'm a Plains dragon, so I'm descended from the first Sky.\"\n\n\"It is because you had need to fly,\" said Glomfa. \"You see, Sooloppa, building on Drobood's insights, clearly taught that gifts do not follow colors. A particular Fire might be best suited to be a minder, or a Sun a warrior. Otherwise, all Bones would be compassionate, which is clearly not the case.\" She frowned at a nearby Bone who was pelting a smaller Sky with sand.\n\nTondoor considered. He was good at flying and at telling stories, even though he wasn't a Sky or a Sun. If Morwaka didn't exist, it was no wonder he couldn't dream. Maybe his predecessor just had a nasty imagination.\n\nKroob gave a rumbling belch. \"Aah. 'Good food and good conversation make for good digestion.' Aroomp, I believe.\"\n\nGlomfa cast him an icy look. \"Where were we? Oh yes. Gifts. So, since each gift was potentially given to all, as Sooloppa clearly taught, each dragon has the responsibility to discover his own best gift, and nurture it.\"\n\n\"Yes indeed, by all means,\" agreed Kroob. \"Although I can say unequivocally, with my many years of experience, that most Snows are especially gifted at thinking.\"\n\nGlomfa leaned forward on her hand-claws. \"As usual, you overlook the most important point. Before Morwaka gave gifts, he gave the quest, as even your beloved Aroomp observed. In the quest, each dragon brings back the greatest treasure he can find.\" Her eyes shot a challenge at Tondoor. \"What did they bring back?\"\n\n\"They all brought different things,\" Tondoor stammered.\n\n\"Exactly! This tells us that we are all to choose our own treasure. If thinking is not it, we are to find a different one.\" She glared at Kroob.\n\nMy greatest treasure is the stories in the stars, thought Tondoor. And Kalooka\u2014or she used to be. He closed his eyes until the wave of pain passed.\n\n\"As usual, you are partially correct,\" Kroob snapped. \"You forget that youngsters rarely have the wisdom to know their own minds. They can benefit immensely from the received wisdom of one with more experience, and my experience tells me that most Snows are good at thinking!\"\n\nPooka lifted her hand. \"Some Leafs are also good at thinking.\"\n\n\"Precisely!\" cried Glomfa. \"And they are free to think about what they want to do.\"\n\nKroob shifted his position on the mat. \"For most young Snows, that would not necessarily be wise.\"\n\nGlomfa ruffled her wings. \"If Snows are good at thinking, why shouldn't they think about what they want to do? To follow their dreams, as it were.\"\n\nBlort hiccupped. He looked panicked again. Would he be quizzed on this argument as well?\n\n\"As you can see, young Tondoor,\" said Kroob, ignoring Glomfa's question, \"thinking is more difficult for some Snows than others.\" Glomfa snorted. \"But it can be learned from an experienced guide,\" he went on, \"and I offer my services to teach you how to do it. But wait!\" He held up his hand-claws. \"Don't accept yet\u2014sleep on it, and we will speak further in the morning.\"\n\nSo they weren't going to throw him out. Yet.\n\n\"Perhaps Tondoor will choose me to be his guide,\" huffed Glomfa. \"Or no one. Because he does have options.\"\n\n\"That kind of thinking,\" said Kroob, \"is why we have so few students.\"\n\nGlomfa stood up. \"'The truth leads where it leads.' Sooloppa.\"\n\nBlort and Pooka scrambled off the mat just as Glomfa yanked it away, scattering empty shells. She gave a satisfied sniff when Kroob slid backwards. Tondoor slid off too, but managed to scramble to his feet.\n\n\"Rinse the mat,\" Glomfa said to Blort and Pooka. \"Then show Tondoor all the interesting and varied things dragons do on the coast.\" She flew away.\n\nBlort and Pooka helped Kroob to his feet. \"Until tomorrow, then, youngsters,\" Kroob said as he waddled off in the opposite direction from Glomfa.\n\nTondoor looked between them as they left. \"Do they always argue like that?\"\n\n\"Always,\" said Blort. \"Sometimes it makes Glomfa forget to quiz me.\" He looked happier than he had all afternoon.\n\n\"Who are Sooloppa and Aroomp and Drobood?\"\n\nBlort groaned.\n\n\"Dead Snow thinkers,\" said Pooka. \"You're only allowed to quote thinkers if they're dead. Otherwise you have to argue with them.\"\n\n\"That's what keeps Kroob and Glomfa from killing each other,\" added Blort cheerfully. \"They couldn't bear to hear someone quoting the other one.\" He glanced at a crowd of dragons clustering beside the water. \"Klook's about to start. Want to play?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" If everyone was so eager to play, it must be fun.\n\nPooka picked up one corner of the mat. \"Right after we rinse this off.\"\n\nTondoor helped them drag the mat to the water. The wet part of the beach was wide and littered with shells, wood and dried brown water-vines. It was also dotted with half dissolved turds.\n\n\"The Ashes need to clean your beach,\" said Tondoor as he stepped over one.\n\n\"What's an Ash?\" asked Pooka. She pushed her part of the mat under the water.\n\n\"A slave dragon,\" said Blort. He jumped on the mat to push more of it under. \"We don't have Ashes. It's barbaric. We're only allowed to make an Ash if a beast wants to become a dragon.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\" asked Tondoor.\n\nBlort looked puzzled. \"I guess that's why we don't make them.\" Drum beats thumped through the air.\n\n\"Hurry up,\" said Pooka. \"The game's about to start.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Pastimes",
                "text": "Tondoor went with Blort and Pooka to join the crowd a little way down the beach. Several of the scout dragons he'd met earlier were there, including Noot and Trok.\n\nNoot appeared to be in charge here too. He draped sea-vines around Tondoor's and Blort's necks. \"You two can be whackers.\"\n\nTrok, also wearing a vine, bounced toward them. \"I'm going to whack Noot.\" He shook the end of his vine.\n\nPooka flew off to join a pair of young female Leafs. Tondoor squeezed the rubbery vine around his neck. \"Uh\u2026what do I do?\"\n\nA loud, unearthly wail drowned out Trok's answer. It came from Noot, who was blowing fiercely into a large coiled shell. Dragons rose like a rainbow into the air. Tondoor leapt up behind Blort and Trok.\n\n\"Pull the vine off your neck,\" shouted Trok. \"Then whack!\" He dodged a whistling vine swinging from above. Blort darted away.\n\nTrok was still nearby, so Tondoor swung his vine at him.\n\n\"Got me!\" cried Trok. He grabbed the vine from Tondoor. His own vine was already gone.\n\nTondoor flapped out of range. Trok turned to chase another dragon, but a different vine caught Tondoor's foot, so he took that vine and became a whacker again. Vines changed hands continually. When a vine broke, the whacked dragon grabbed the broken part and both became whackers.\n\nNoot swooshed overhead. Tondoor swung his vine up, but Noot was already beneath him, darting like lightning with his short Fire wings. Tondoor aimed at a Sky instead. She tried to dodge, but Tondoor's vine easily hooked her long wings. Maybe Morwaka's gifts were significant after all. On the other hand, Tondoor's practice at flying long distances kept him from tiring when the other dragons were slowing down. Talent and training both mattered, he decided as a vine coiled itself around his snout. And not getting distracted.\n\nThe game continued until every dragon was holding a piece of sea-vine and there was no one left to whack.\n\nBack on the ground, Tondoor headed to the water. \"I'm getting a drink.\"\n\n\"Don't!\" Blort pulled him back. \"You can't drink seawater. It's salty and it makes you more thirsty.\"\n\nBlort led him to a stream that ran into the sea. Someone had placed strips of wood in it. \"The wood keeps the sand out,\" said Blort. That was clever. The water was good. Tondoor realized he hadn't had a drink since he got here.\n\nPooka found them again, and insisted on taking Tondoor to see the dancing.\n\nThey heard the drums long before they reached them. There were four of them, even larger than the ones on the Plains, and their wooden frames were ornately carved and hung with rattling shells. Seven drummers, one of each color including a Snow, beat on them with their hand-claws, toe-claws, wingtips, tails, snouts, twirling and darting between and around each other and the drums. A handful of other dragons danced around them. Noot and Trok were here, shaking clusters of shells and tossing sand with their feet. Pooka joined in with a complex mixture of flaps, leaps and twirls while Blort hopped from foot to foot, jerking his wings and almost matching the lowest, thumping beat.\n\nDragons danced in the sky as well, making shifting patterns against the pink and orange clouds. A group of eight flew continuous circles out of a double line, with the front two fanning out and around to join the line again at the back. A group of six flew in a diamond shape that stretched long, then wide, then long again. What appeared to be a lone dragon became a twirling spiral of different colored wings.\n\nWhy didn't the Plains dragons dance to their drums? If he ever did get to start a new society, they would. But that wasn't going to happen. He joined the dance, stamping out his sorrow through the jerking of his limbs.\n\nBefore he was ready to stop, Pooka caught his arm. \"We need to go,\" she shouted into his ear. \"Blort has had enough.\"\n\nFurther down the beach where the drum sounds were faint, a Sun was pointing at the sky and telling a story to a group of hatchlings. Just like Kalooka.\n\nStill further along, a Blood and a Sky took turns lifting fallen trees beside rows of green fronds spread out to dry next to a stack of mats. The Blood was stronger, but the Sky was close. Beyond them, a Leaf and a Fire herded more hatchlings toward the shelter of the trees. Further yet, a Bone was sleeping on the sand inside an enormous rib cage. Tondoor almost didn't see him because he was the same color as the bones. And the sun had set a while ago, so it was dark.\n\n\"They're from a sea beast,\" said Blort as they flew past.\n\nKalooka thought there might be sea beasts on the other side of the desert. Must everything he saw remind him of her?\n\nBlort snatched up three stray chunks of giant bone for them to gnaw on as they flew to an isolated grove of trees. He and Pooka curled up underneath and fell right to sleep, but Tondoor lay awake on the soft sand, thinking. As a Snow should, apparently. What a remarkable place this was, where anyone could do anything they wanted. And where they wanted him to stay. Two of them even wanted to be his mentors.\n\nBut there were those strange new ideas. Could it be true that Morwaka didn't exist? Could the legends just be stories? What if the stars didn't speak either, and the stories just came from his own imagination? The blue twinkles above him seemed tinged with orange. How unbearably sad. What were they there for, if not to tell him stories? And if they didn't speak, how would he talk to the star the Rock dragons wanted, if he ever found it? What if it didn't exist either?\n\nAnd what about the prophecies? If the kraamlok was only his predecessor's vivid nightmare, it explained why he couldn't dream the solution. His predecessor's first prophecy, though, about the ice-rocks, had come true. Was that just a coincidence? The kraamlok was an ice-rock too. Had he just made it up, building on his earlier success? That would explain why it didn't make much sense. Or could he hear the thoughts of ice-rocks like Tondoor might have heard the thoughts of the Dragons of the Rocks?\n\nHe closed his eyes and tried to hear Kalooka's thoughts. None came, of course. He sighed. Did she miss him, even a little bit? Would he ever be happy again without her?\n\nAnd if he stayed here, even for a while, did he want to learn thinking from either of those two contrary Snows? Or would he rather learn to beat fantastic rhythms on drums, or fly formations in the sky? Or should he continue to search for his predecessor, and dreams, and the star for the Dragons of the Rocks? Choosing was harder than being told what to do\u2014although he had failed at the first job he was given and might well fail at finding a star too. If he chose for himself, he might find some success.\n\nHe must have drifted to sleep, because he woke in the darkness to a strangled cry. When he sat up and remembered where he was, he realized it was coming from Blort. He was sitting up and staring into Morwaka's half-open Eye.\n\nPooka sat holding his shoulders, her eyes a silvery green in the Eye-light. \"You're safe. Go back to sleep,\" she murmured to Blort.\" She glanced at Tondoor. \"Don't worry. He does this sometimes.\"\n\nBlort continued to whimper, until he sighed and fell to the ground with a thump.\n\nPooka flopped down next to him. \"It's over. Now we can go back to sleep.\"\n\n\"What does he dream about that's so scary?\"\n\n\"He never remembers.\"\n\nTondoor lay down. Blort was a Snow. If Morwaka did send dreams, Blort could be having one. But what use was a dream you couldn't recall? He closed his eyes. Dreaming was so complicated. It would be a relief not to have to worry about it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Choice",
                "text": "In the morning, Blort was his usual self. As Pooka said, he didn't remember waking in the night. He took Tondoor to the shore to show him how to catch fish. The water was higher on the beach than last night, and most of the turds had disappeared. Blort explained that the tide came up the beach twice a day to clean the sand, so they didn't need Ashes.\n\nTondoor snagged a long floppy fish that reminded him of the spiky water-snoof in the bog. He ate it chunk by chunk so it would stay put in his stomach. He didn't need any distractions while he thought about what to do. He was halfway done his meal when three dragons alighted in front of him: a Sun, a Leaf, and yet another Snow. He recognized them as three of the drummers from last night.\n\nBlort splashed away toward Pooka.\n\n\"Greetings, Tondoor of the Plains and the Rocks,\" said the Sun. \"We have heard that you wish to hear the voice of Morwaka, and we have come to teach you how.\"\n\nNews traveled quickly here. Tondoor took another bite of his fish. \"I was told yesterday that Morwaka doesn't speak to Snows because he doesn't exist.\"\n\n\"The thinkers do not know as much as they think they do,\" replied the Leaf.\n\nThe Snow held up a twisty white shell. \"With this, we can hear Morwaka's voice whenever we choose.\"\n\nWas the sharing star shown in the Ravine a seashell from the Coast? \"So you can choose to dream?\" Tondoor asked. They could choose to do everything else here, so why not? Were the thinkers wrong about Morwaka? Or did he only speak to those who chose to listen?\n\nThe Sun shook her head. \"We didn't say we dream. We said we hear Morwaka's voice.\"\n\n\"And we have done more than that,\" the Leaf added. \"We have learned how to hear each other's thoughts.\"\n\n\"I might have done that once,\" Tondoor said. \"Show me.\"\n\nThe Snow closed her eyes and made soft grunting noises into the shell. The other two closed their eyes and grunted with her. Finally, she thrust the shell into the air. \"It is done!\"\n\nThe Sun took the shell and held it to her ear. \"I hear!\"\n\nInteresting. In the picture in the Ravine, the seers had touched the sharing star with their tongues. Here they used their ears. That made sense for listening, but it meant that the sharing star in the Ravine was probably something else.\n\nThe Leaf took the shell and held it to Tondoor's ear. Whispers ebbed and flowed inside. \"I hear something too,\" he said. But if there were words, he couldn't make them out.\n\n\"He hears your thoughts!\" cried the Leaf.\n\n\"He has the gift!\" cried the Snow.\n\n\"He is one of us!\" cried the Sun.\n\nDid they always speak in the same order? \"I said I heard something,\" said Tondoor. \"I have no idea what it means.\"\n\nSure enough, the Leaf spoke next. \"Thoughts as exalted and sublime as a sunrise.\"\n\nThe Snow took back the shell. She looked back and forth between the other two. \"No, I was thinking that I should be the first to speak because Snow was the one that first heard Morwaka's voice.\"\n\nThe Sun recoiled. \"We agreed that I should be first because we live on Sun's coast.\"\n\nThe Leaf snatched the shell. \"A circle has no end or beginning. I should speak first next time.\"\n\nTondoor backed out of the water. He hoped the sharing star on the Plains hadn't been a shell like this\u2014but if the whole idea of Morwaka speaking to Snows was wrong, maybe it was. He grimaced and rejoined Blort and Pooka.\n\n\"I've made my choice,\" he said. \"Not them!\" Behind him, the three dragons snarled and snapped at each other.\n\nBlort laughed. \"I thought you wanted to learn to dream.\"\n\n\"Not that kind of dream. Not the terrifying kind you had last night, either.\"\n\nBlort looked away.\n\n\"What kind, then?\" said Pooka.\n\nTondoor sighed. \"The kind that will show us how to survive the kraamlok.\"\n\n\"How can you dream something on purpose?\" asked Pooka.\n\n\"I don't know. That's why I was looking for a teacher. But if Kroob and Glomfa are right, I don't have to worry about it.\"\n\nBlort snagged another fish, but just held it in his hand. \"If you did have that kind of dream, how would you know if it was from Morwaka?\"\n\n\"I don't know that either,\" said Tondoor, \"except that if what you dream happens, it was. Or maybe if more than one dragon has the same dream. Or if you have the same dream over and over. But maybe not. Your thoughts could just be stuck.\"\n\nBlort bit his fish's head off. He had his perplexed look on again. \"The Rock dragons invaded the Plains after you dreamed about them.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nBlort shrugged his wings. \"Then your dream was real.\"\n\n\"That's what I always thought,\" Tondoor said. He cocked his head. \"Don't you believe Kroob and Glomfa?\"\n\nBlort swallowed another piece of fish. \"Mostly. But I figure that since they're teaching me to think, I should be allowed to do it.\"\n\n\"Speaking of our guides,\" said Pooka, \"here they come.\"\n\nThe old Snows walked across the sand toward them. Glomfa fluttered her wings as if she would rather fly, and Kroob bounced on his toes as if he thought he was flying. \"Glomfa and I have thought deeply,\" he shouted as soon as they were within earshot.\n\n\"Since the situation is somewhat unusual,\" called Glomfa, leaping into the air to get ahead of Kroob, \"we have discussed our options, and\u2014\"\n\n\"We officially invite you to become our joint student,\" Kroob shouted.\n\nGlomfa landed in a flurry of sand in front of him. \"If you agree to our terms.\"\n\nThe sight of them rushing toward him made Tondoor's eyes flood with cheerful, promising blue. Now he knew. He wanted to stay and learn, at least for now. \"Terms?\"\n\n\"If you are obedient and learn well, we will teach you,\" said Glomfa. \"If you cannot learn, or choose not to, we stop.\"\n\n\"I accept,\" said Tondoor.\n\nGlomfa tapped her hand-claws together in the posture of rebuke. \"I am not finished.\" Tondoor drooped into the posture of regret. Glomfa went on. \"If you insist on following any of the barbaric customs of your past, you must leave the Coast and never return.\"\n\n\"Now, now, Glomfa,\" Kroob cut in as he wobbled to a stop beside her. \"You know that is not required. He can always inquire at one of the other coast settlements, where the requirements may be different. I quote your own dear Sooloppa's rules of citizenship.\"\n\n\"As I said earlier,\" Glomfa said, turning to Kroob, \"this is an unusual circumstance and requires special rules. The skills we teach are powerful, and we cannot risk him using them to spread his barbaric beliefs.\"\n\nTondoor straightened up. \"I will do my best to learn,\" he said quickly, to keep the argument from accelerating. \"And I will follow your rules.\"\n\n\"You see?\" said Kroob. \"He is reasonable.\"\n\n\"All the barbarisms,\" insisted Glomfa, \"including and especially trying to dream.\"\n\n\"I told you I don't know how,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"You must not even think of it,\" said Glomfa fiercely, \"because reason, not superstition, is central to our philosophical system, and without that foundation, it will be impossible for us to teach you. Even Kroob agrees with that.\"\n\nKroob nodded. \"Of course. Of course.\"\n\n\"Do you accept the terms, Tondoor of the Plains?\"\n\nTondoor considered one last time. He could give up trying to dream, which would be easy because he couldn't do it anyway. Or he could continue to search for his predecessor, who might be dead, and might have made up the kraamlok, and might not know how to teach him anyway. \"I accept,\" he said, and silenced the tiny voice inside him whispering that he had just given up something precious."
            },
            {
                "title": "Waves",
                "text": "Tondoor joined Blort and Pooka at their lessons. He learned the teachings of Sooloppa and Drobood and Aroomp. He learned the structure of arguments, how to recognize and counter faulty ones, and how to think on his feet. When he wasn't learning, he fished, played klook, studied the new constellations, and tried out the drums and various other activities with dragons of all colors, including a few Snows who had chosen not to become thinkers.\n\nWhen he asked why, they replied, \"because I want to learn healing,\" or \"because I prefer flying,\" or \"because I don't like to argue.\"\n\nMorwaka's Eye closed, and opened, and began to close again. Tondoor made friends, he became reasonably good at what he did, and felt accepted by his new community. A few females even flirted with him. At least he thought they were flirting; he didn't know how mating worked on the Coast. But his prospects of getting a mate next fall were better here than on the Plains. His new life would have been perfect except for three things.\n\nThe first was that in spite of everything, he couldn't forget Kalooka. Every new discovery either reminded him of her or made him want to tell her about it. He wanted to discuss with her how their new society could be like this one. He wanted to show her what dragons could do if they were free to do anything, and ask her opinion of his guides' outrageous beliefs.\n\nHer eyes shone blue while he imagined this, but then they turned that pitying mud color. He saw Hoodon wrapped in her wings, and he remembered that she wasn't here, and he would never be there, and that his heart was a hole.\n\nThe second thing that bothered him was feeling useless. Yes, he learned things, and his progress gave great joy to Kroob and mild surprise to Glomfa. But what was the purpose in any of it? He missed his time in the desert, communing with the stars and shadows, listening. He missed searching for the hidden oasis so the rebels could be free. And he missed knowing that his dream would matter if he ever had it.\n\nThe last thing was that almost every night, Blort woke up screaming. Tondoor and Pooka patted him until he fell back asleep, then tried to do the same. In the morning, Blort didn't remember the incident.\n\nBut one very windy night, Blort didn't fall back to sleep. Instead, his eyes still glazed with sleep, he got up and stumbled toward the water. Tondoor and Pooka raced after him. Blort stopped where the waves crashed against the sand, wetting him up to his neck and leaving a wavy line of white foam along the silvery beach. Tondoor skidded to a stop behind him. His scales clamped shut in the salty spray.\n\nBlort stared at Morwaka's Eye, just starting to close, reflected in the churning water. \"It eats us,\" he said finally, just above the sound of the waves.\n\nThe futility of living? The tediousness of arguing over nothing? The pressure to learn what he obviously couldn't? \"What eats us?\" Tondoor asked.\n\nBlort scrunched his wings in tight. \"The sea. It rises up like a giant\u2026something.\" He looked around at the flat beach and the flat, rolling sea. \"Not as high as the stars, but higher than the trees.\"\n\n\"As high as a hill?\" Tondoor prodded.\n\nBlort looked blank. \"High as a hill. Then this giant water hill opens its mouth and swallows the Coast. When it pulls back, there's nothing left. No trees, no sand, no mats, no bones. No dragons.\"\n\nTondoor's gut clenched. Blort did remember his dreams. He'd just averted his eyes when they asked.\n\nBlort stared at the waves pounding the shore as if he didn't know what they were. Then he said in a tiny voice, \"I think Morwaka is sending me a dream.\"\n\nThe words felt like a kick. This insignificant pip-squeak who didn't even want dreams was hearing Morwaka's voice, while he, who spent years listening and enduring and hoping, got only silence? Morwaka, he wanted to scream, how could you? He felt his eyes blaze a furious red.\n\nBlort curled up like a wounded hatchling. \"What am I supposed to do?\" he whimpered.\n\n\"I've spent my whole life being condemned because I can't dream. How can I possibly know what you should do?\" The strength of his fury took his breath away.\n\nBlort curled up tighter. \"I can't tell Kroob and Glomfa. You're the only one, besides Pooka.\"\n\n\"I thought if he told someone else, the dreams might go away,\" said Pooka. \"Because that's what they're for, isn't it? So you'll tell people?\"\n\nTondoor fought down his urge to scream. Why did Blort having a dream upset him so much? He knew the answer: because dreams were real. Because he knew he had to have one. \"That's what they're for,\" he said once he could control his voice. \"So the ones who hear you will do something.\" Dread and excitement mingled in his chest.\n\n\"I feel like if I don't tell someone, I'll explode!\" Blort took a deep breath.\n\n\"Maybe that's how you know it's real,\" said Tondoor. Had he felt that way when he pounded the drum in his cave? He couldn't remember. Blort shivered in the cold spray. Pooka snuggled close beside and draped her wing over him. \"If he tells the guides, they'll disown him. They'll send him away.\"\n\n\"They can't. Sooloppa's rules of citizenship.\" Tondoor waited until the next words wouldn't stay inside. \"But they'll exile me.\"\n\nPooka's eyes grew round. \"Because you have to dream the way of escape from the kraamlok,\" she whispered. \"And then tell everyone.\"\n\nTondoor shivered. He would have to go to the Rainy Island to find his predecessor. Or maybe not. He turned to Blort. \"We can fly down the Coast together, and you can teach me to dream. You can be my guide.\"\n\nBlort shook his head. \"I don't how it happens. I don't even want to dream.\"\n\nWas that the secret: you could only dream if you didn't want to? How could he not want what he now knew he so desperately wanted? \"If I have my dream, I'll come back and tell you what it was,\" he said.\n\nIn the morning, he drank as much water as he could hold. With Pooka and Blort beside him, he met the guides on the shore.\n\n\"I've come to say good-bye,\" Tondoor said. \"I am going to search for my predecessor so he can teach me to dream.\"\n\nGlomfa snorted and Kroob gasped. Out of the corner of his eye, Tondoor could see Blort trembling.\n\n\"My dear Tondoor!\" said Kroob. \"Haven't we taught you anything in all these many days?\"\n\nTondoor assumed the posture of respect. \"You have, and I thank you. But I choose to seek the way of escape from the kraamlok.\"\n\nKroob stiffened and looked away.\n\nGlomfa was trembling too, but with anger. \"I knew we should never have taught you to think. Now your lies about the kraamlok will be ever more persuasive.\" Her eyes shifted to a sad gray. \"After all we taught you, how can you return to the backwards customs of the Plains?\"\n\n\"Dreaming isn't a custom. It's a gift,\" said Tondoor.\n\nThe two Snows stood before him like boulders.\n\n\"Can you tell me how to get to the Rainy Island?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Barbarians of the Island live to the northwest,\" said Glomfa.\n\n\"You will have to fly for a day and a night and a day. Don't drink the water,\" added Kroob.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Tondoor. He bowed once more to each of them, then leapt toward the sea. When he glanced back, Blort and Pooka were standing alone on the sand in the posture of farewell."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Island",
                "text": "The sea had no landmarks, so it was hard for Tondoor to stay on course, especially with the north wind gusting as it did. After the first day he was thirsty. He tried drinking the water in spite of Blort's warning, but it was bitter and he spat it out. When night fell, he corrected his direction by the stars that flickered between the swimming clouds. By the next morning, he wondered if his predecessor had made it to the island or drowned en route. By noon, his wings were so weary he expected to drown.\n\nAt dusk on the second day he glimpsed a dim shape over his right wing. At first he didn't turn because it meant backtracking, but then the fog in his mind lifted, and he did. He landed on a wet, empty beach and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the sand. His last thought was how right the first Blood had been to choose the treasure of solid ground.\n\nHe woke to pattering rain and the tickle of a skittery Ash sniffing his outstretched wing. \"Water,\" he managed to croak. She took a few steps toward the half-dead trees beyond the beach, looked over her shoulder at him, and scurried away. He dragged himself to his feet, shook out his wet wings, and followed. The Rainy Island was a desolate place. Where the tree branches weren't bare, they held only a few crinkly yellow leaves. Scraggly yellow grass and wet leaf corpses tangled in his toe-claws.\n\nThe Ash stopped beside a small pool with clots of fur floating on its scummy surface. It was a changing pool, where some beast had recently been transformed. The Ash that had led him here stared at the water. Her eyes flickered between blue and gray as if she couldn't decide what to think about it. It must be hers, even though it was late in the season to be making Ashes.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he croaked, then nosed aside the damp fur on the water's surface and drank.\n\nA roar came from the bushes. \"I made her and she's mine. Keep yer wings off.\"\n\nTondoor blinked water out of his eyes. A shabby Sun, eyes red and teeth bared, lunged toward him. \"I'm not\u2014\" Tondoor stuttered, backing away.\n\nThe Sun skidded to a stop. \"Oh, it's just you.\" He eyed Tondoor's stripe while picking at something between his teeth. \"Zloomba's looking fer ya. Said to meet her at the cave.\"\n\nTondoor's thoughts raced. He thinks I'm my predecessor. Who is Zloomba? What cave?\n\nThe Sun pulled a small bone out of his mouth and tossed it toward the Ash, who jerked away. \"I done mated her already, but you can't be too careful.\" He squinted at Tondoor. \"You's looking unusual good today. Can't find no gloob?\" He chuckled.\n\nTondoor made himself chuckle back. If he looked good, the other Snow must be a mess. He better not ask what gloob was.\n\nThe Sun turned toward the little Ash. She was staring gray-eyed at two furry glarfs gnawing on tree cones under a yellow-leafed bush.\n\n\"You just grabs one, like this,\" sputtered the Sun. He plucked one of the glarfs off the ground, bit its head off, and shoved the bloody lower half at the Ash. \"Now you eats it.\" Tondoor's stomach rumbled at the scent, but the Ash just stared.\n\nThe Sun heaved a tired sigh. \"Fine, I'll eat it. We'll find you something else.\" He tossed the glarf's body into the air and snapped it up. He turned to Tondoor. \"Does you find them Ashes is a bit dim fer the first while?\"\n\n\"I've never made one. Oh, you were a glarf before...\" he said to the Ash, feeling a bit dim himself. The glarf's fur matched the fur floating on the water.\n\nThe Ash didn't reply. Maybe glarf-dragons couldn't talk, or maybe she was too new and hadn't learned yet.\n\n\"Yup,\" the Sun answered for her. \"I used a glarf 'cause they's easy to catch, but now it's way more work feeding her since she won't eat her old kind. But she'll come 'round. By spring she won't be thinking of nothing but her egg. C'mon, Morda. Let's go.\"\n\nMorda understood speech, because she scurried over to him. He lumbered toward the beach, paused, and looked back. \"You's lucky, y'know, having Zloomba. Can't tell what she sees in you, but you doesn't have to go chasing females or making Ashes. I done used to chase them, but I's tired of fighting. It's hard to hibernate when you's all cut up.\" They vanished in the trees.\n\nWhat was hibernate? There was a lot he didn't know here on the Rainy Island, other than that it appeared to be well named. It sounded like his fight with Hoodon would have been routine here. Maybe there was some wisdom in the Plains' choosing ceremony after all. But the Sun had told him something useful: if he found the cave, he would find the dragon named Zloomba, and probably, his predecessor.\n\nHe bent to drink again, sifting clumps of fur through his teeth. He caught and ate a glarf, then walked back to the beach.\n\nMorda and the Sun were gone, but a female Bone was sniffing the imprint of his body in the damp sand. She was old and wiry, and rain glistened on the mud that streaked her scales. She jerked her head around when he stepped out of the trees. At his second step, she assumed a warrior stance, like a Blood. Tondoor stopped where he was.\n\nHer yellow eyes traced his metal stripe. \"You can't have him,\" she growled. \"He's not going back.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Heartbreak",
                "text": "This Bone knew who he was looking for. She had to be Zloomba. He swallowed. \"I don't want to take him back\u2026 Zloomba. I want to join him in his exile, to learn from him.\"\n\nShe poked at one of her teeth with her claw. \"They done sent you away too, eh?\"\n\nTondoor chose to ignore the question. \"I am the new seer of the Plains, but I don't know how to dream. I need him to teach me.\"\n\n\"Fool. You be better off not dreaming if you ask me.\"\n\n\"Will you take me to him?\"\n\nShe snarled.\n\n\"I've come so far,\" begged Tondoor. He thought of assuming the posture of authority, then decided there was no use. What could he offer her? The only thing he had. \"I will do anything you ask.\"\n\nThe strange mud color flitted across Zloomba's eyes, exactly like Kalooka's on that awful night. So Zloomba pitied him too.\n\n\"Anything,\" he repeated.\n\nZloomba tilted her head one way, then the other. \"There might be something you can do fer me at that. We can start by looking fer him. I guess you knows what he looks like.\"\n\nTondoor spread his weary wings and followed her into the air. Zloomba led them in an erratic pattern over a landscape of dying trees dotted with small pools. All he saw was trees and water, and as the clouds blew across the sky and his wing muscles screamed, he began to wonder if this Zloomba was testing him in some way he didn't understand.\n\nThen he saw it. A sliver of white. \"What's that?\" He pointed with his snout.\n\n\"Hasn't you got good young eyes,\" said Zloomba. \"That's him fer sure.\"\n\nTondoor landed in a crunch of yellow leaves. His stomach fluttered and he brushed his arms over his scales in a hasty attempt to polish them. What would the older Snow think of him? Should he assume the posture of respect or of greeting? He peered around Zloomba's folded wings.\n\nThe Snow lay sprawled around several trees with his wings and tail floating in a rain-speckled pool. Leaves and twigs stuck between scales so dirty they were indistinguishable from the forest floor. The dragon's claws were ragged, his tongue hung out the side of his mouth, and his empty eyes rolled in opposite directions. Hacking snores wheezed out of his mouth, revealing yellowed teeth and gaps where there should have been more.\n\nTondoor couldn't help coughing from the stench. He had never in his worst nightmares imagined his predecessor\u2014or any dragon\u2014like this. Even the wasted Fires who had applied his stripe in the mountains didn't look so derelict.\n\nZloomba dragged him toward the pool. \"That's what come of dreaming. But this aren't so bad. He done slept most of it off by now.\"\n\n\"Slept what off?\" asked Tondoor, once he recovered his voice.\n\n\"The gloob. It keeps away them dreams you's wishing fer. But it don't never last. They keeps coming back.\"\n\nChills ran down Tondoor's tail. Maybe Zloomba was mistaken and this wasn't his predecessor at all\u2014he hadn't yet seen if this one had a metal stripe.\n\nBut Zloomba crouched next to the Snow, yanking twigs from between his scales and rinsing away the blood. Even as the Snow moaned and flailed, her yellow eyes gentled into a compassionate green. Maybe this was the Bones' gift of a sturdy heart to inflict the saving wounds. That and not gagging at the stench.\n\nTondoor waded into the pool far enough from the Snow to find clear water and gulped it down. The end of the Snow's white tail sparkled in the light filtering through the trees. That must be what he had seen from above. No other part of him was white.\n\nZloomba picked a thorn from the Snow's wing with her teeth and spat it out. \"You's probably wondering why I looks after him.\"\n\n\"So you don't have to fight off other males because they know you already have a mate?\" Tondoor blurted out, remembering the unhappy Sun's words. He realized too late that the statement might be impolite.\n\nZloomba's eyes reddened into slits. \"I can fight off anyone, male or female, who gits in my way,\" she snarled. Tondoor dropped into the posture of regret.\n\nZloomba gave him a sharp look. \"I looks after him because he done showed me that some dragons has a heart. Mostly them males is all about filling their bellies and chasing females and proving how tough they is. But this one don't do none of that. Just worries hisself sick about that kraamlok and all them dying dragons.\" She yanked at a large twig, and the Snow snarled and bucked. He had a metal stripe on one shoulder.\n\nTondoor's stomach twisted.\n\n\"Problem with having a heart is it breaks,\" Zloomba continued. \"I tries to patch it up, but them cracks just keeps getting bigger.\" She stood up. \"Come stand on his other side. We has to wake him and get him to the cave before dark. The nights is cold now.\"\n\nTondoor slogged through the water. If he understood correctly, this helpless, stinking, disgrace of a dragon was in this horrid condition precisely because he was unable to stop doing the very thing that Tondoor wanted desperately to learn. And he was doing it because he had a heart. I used to have a heart, thought Tondoor. Maybe I still do\u2014I want to save the dragons from the kraamlok too. But do I want it enough to be like that?\n\n\"On the count of three, heave!\" said Zloomba. \"One, two...\"\n\nTondoor dug his toe-claws into the pond silt and thrust his arms under his prospective mentor's side. The old dragon's filthy scales slid loosely over his wasted body.\n\n\"Three!\"\n\nTondoor swallowed his nausea and pulled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Trio",
                "text": "Zloomba and Tondoor got the old Snow up on his feet and awake enough to fly between them, though not awake enough to notice Tondoor or his stripe. Tondoor's job was to nip him back to alertness when he dozed off, while Zloomba did the same from the other side.\n\nShortly after the old Snow fell asleep in the air for the fourth time, a gray-orange outcrop appeared through the tree branches like a miniature version of a desert ridge. \"Going down!\" Zloomba shouted.\n\nTondoor let himself glide. A cave in a rocky ridge would feel just like home.\n\nThe Snow landed on the ridge and flopped over, asleep again. Tondoor landed beside him. The rock was smooth, rounded, and gouged by rain channels that ended in puddles full of dead leaves.\n\nZloomba lifted a mat of brush to reveal a wide crevice in the top of the ridge. \"This here's my cave,\" she said, her violet eyes bulging proudly. \"My ma lived in it, and her ma before that. Now it's mine.\"\n\nTondoor peered into the dark hole. \"Do your hatchlings live here too?\"\n\nZloomba's eyes flickered red. \"Not once they's growed, they doesn't.\"\n\nTondoor helped her shove the old Snow into the narrow opening. He landed below amid a string of curses.\n\n\"Now move over 'n make room,\" Zloomba hollered down. \"I best go first,\" she told Tondoor, lining up her body in the direction of the crack. \"I'll yell when he's ready. Might be a while, though. Why doesn't you gather some dry wood so we can make us a warm fire? Some beasts'd be nice too.\" She let herself fall in.\n\nTondoor stood listening to the indistinct voices inside the hole. His wings felt shaky from fatigue and his scales were clamped tight against the cold evening drizzle. Making a fire to keep warm sounded like a very good idea, even if he'd never heard of doing it before. So did finding beasts. He slid down the side of the ridge and followed a path into the trees.\n\nThe ground was thick with dead or dying plants, soggy leaves, and mushy bulbous things that squashed when he stepped on them, releasing pungent odors. Bony branches jutted across the trail. The trees weren't dead, in spite of appearances, because the branches bowed when he tried to snap them off. It wasn't at all clear where he could find dry wood in this damp forest.\n\nHe turned off the trail into the rough woods, clenching his wings as he twisted among the branches. Twigs and leaves poked between his scales; he was starting to look like his predecessor already, even without dreaming.\n\nAhead was a sad-looking tree with droopy branches. Beneath them, a pair of knee-high birds stirred the soggy ground with their front claws and pecked at the undergrowth. Their wings looked too small to fly well, but their four legs looked strong enough to kick and run. He would only get one chance. He sprang and snapped both their necks at the same time, along with several branches.\n\nThe fresh blood made him salivate, but he didn't allow himself even a lick. These were for Zloomba, to forestall any doubts she still might have about him, and for his predecessor. His resolve wobbled as he pictured the old dragon, but he picked up one bird in each hand and turned toward the cave.\n\nThree scruffy dragons blocked his way. There was a skinny Fire, a filthy Blood, and a female so smeared with mud he could hardly tell she was a Snow. The Fire and the Snow had V-shaped scars where several of their chest scales must have been ripped right off. The Fire's had just been done, judging by the trail of blood on his chest.\n\nTondoor tried to think which posture to assume, but his brain didn't seem to be working.\n\n\"It's the wacko seer,\" sneered the Fire, propping his jaw on a branch.\n\nThe Blood thrust his neck between branches and nipped at one of the birds. \"Whatza matter\u2014hafta do yer own hunting fer a change?\"\n\nThe Snow snorted. \"He done good fer a gloob-head.\" She wound between the trees beside him and licked off the blood dripping from the other bird's broken neck.\n\nTondoor thought quickly. He could dash away in a different direction. But the dragons would chase him\u2014and they knew the woods. The branches were too thick to leap up through. And fighting? Nope. He made his voice gruff. \"Let me pass. These are for Zloomba.\"\n\nBefore he could blink, the Snow's head bent forward and slammed him in the chest. Tondoor lost his breath but kept hold of his birds. \"Hey! That's not the old wacko,\" she said.\n\n\"Then how come he has a stripe?\" asked the Fire.\n\nThe Blood sniffed in Tondoor's direction. \"You's right. He's too young. And too clean.\" He scooped up something from the forest floor.\n\nTondoor shut his eyes just in time. Something cold and slimy plopped onto his snout. He shook it off.\n\n\"And he's stealing our birds,\" growled the Blood. He snapped a branch off a tree. How come he could find dry wood in this wet forest?\n\nTondoor tried to back away, but only wedged himself between two trees. If he pushed any harder, he's tear his wings. \"The birds are for Zloomba,\" he repeated. \"She asked me to get them.\"\n\n\"Don't he talk pretty,\" said the Snow. \"Zloomba asked him fer some birds. Maybe she didn't tell him they's our birds.\"\n\nThe Blood grabbed Tondoor's horns and yanked him to the side. Here was the dry wood. One of the trees cracked and toppled under Tondoor's weight. A branch caught his wing. He felt a stabbing pain in his wing.\n\nThe Blood hooked a claw under one of Tondoor's chest scales. \"Now I marks yer fancy white scales with my mark, and then you has to do what I says.\"\n\nGlomfa was right. The Island dragons were barbarians. The Fire and the Snow held Tondoor's arms and pinned his neck while the birds shook in his hands. The Blood dug his filthy claw into Tondoor's chest and ripped out one of his scales. The pain was like hot metal all over again.\n\n\"No, please no,\" Tondoor sobbed, ashamed to be begging but unable to stop.\n\nRoaring filled his ears. Heat engulfed him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Never",
                "text": "Zloomba stood over him with smoke wafting between her teeth. \"I shoulda guessed them louts'd be after you,\" she said. \"But you done good. Found us a dry tree and some good-sized birds.\" She pulled Tondoor off the broken tree.\n\nHe gasped as the pain flared. \"They broke my wing bone.\"\n\nFor some reason, she looked cheerful. \"Don't you worry none. Zloomba'll fix you up good.\" She pulled him to his feet and started to drag the tree away. \"Can you carry them birds?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Tondoor followed her to the cave with his wing dragging. He dropped into the narrow hole after her, stifling a yelp of pain when his broken bone caught on the edge.\n\nThe Snow's stench filled the clammy cave. When Tondoor's eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw that the cave was egg-shaped and big enough for three dragons, maybe four, to lie down comfortably. He put down the birds and crouched next to a wall, shivering from cold and the pain in his wing and chest. His predecessor huddled at the far end, rocking.\n\nZloomba crouched under the hole, scraping bark and dry twigs from the tree. \"Stay where you is,\" she muttered without turning around. \"We can eat soon as I get this fire going. I'll fix you both up later.\" She lit the kindling with a long, slow flame, then blew on the fire until, with much steam, the end of the log caught. She adjusted it so the smoke went out one end of the ceiling crack, then pulled the brush mat over the other end.\n\nFlickering firelight danced over the smooth walls. Another diagonal crack with water dripping through it split the back wall\u2014as if they were inside an egg about to hatch. A pile of fire root and several bundles of bones lashed together with ropes lay on the floor near Zloomba, along with a pile of dragon scales in all colors. Tondoor had a momentary urge to sort them. One of his birds still lay on the floor. The old Snow was devouring the other one with much slurping and crunching.\n\nZloomba crept back from the burning log, her flickering shadow large and menacing on the ceiling.\n\n\"Who were those dragons?\" asked Tondoor. \"They said I wasn't allowed to hunt their birds.\"\n\nZloomba snorted. \"That bunch 'o ninnies? They was probably chased away by some other dragons fer hunting their birds. Which is all nonsense. Doesn't no beasts belong to nobody but what catches them.\" She twisted the two hind legs off the bird on the floor and tossed them to Tondoor.\n\nTondoor could have eaten a whole bird, or both of them. But to get another one, he'd have to go out and hunt again. At the other end of the cave, the Snow made smacking noises.\n\n\"Didn't never imagine I'd be inviting another dragon down into my cave,\" said Zloomba when she was done eating. She adjusted the log with one hind foot. \"Gotta keep the fire under the hole, so we doesn't end up breathing smoke.\"\n\nTondoor checked to see if she had saved any of the bird's bones for her collection, but they were all gone. Then he realized: the bones in the neat packets were dragon bones. Alarm shot through him. He was trapped inside a cave with a dragon so fierce that three other dragons had fled from her. She collected dragon bones and dragon scales. And his broken wing had cheered her up.\n\nZloomba chuckled, watching. \"No need fer alarm. Yer bones isn't the kind I need.\"\n\nTondoor tried to relax. His tight scales were unclamping in the fire's warmth, but the raw skin where his scale had been was dry and cracking, and his broken bone stabbed with every movement.\n\nZloomba motioned toward the old Snow. \"Looks like Wambool's ready fer you.\"\n\nWambool. Tondoor hadn't known his predecessor's name. Holding his wing as taut as he could, he stood up. A glob of slime dropped onto his arm, and he wiped his snout on his arm in case there was more. Wambool had finished eating and was looking more alert than before, even if the bird's blood now was spattered all over the rest of the dirt on his body.\n\nTondoor stopped wiping off his own dirt. Maybe it was better that he was filthy too.\n\nZloomba. \"Wambool, this is yer apprentice. He come all the way from the Plains just to meet you.\"\n\n\"I have an apprentice?\" Wambool asked, peering at Tondoor as if he had just now noticed him.\n\n\"He hatched after they done throwed you out,\" said Zloomba. \"Remember? I told you about him when you woke up. He's the one caught you the bird.\"\n\n\"He does look like me,\" said Wambool. His snout twitched as if he was trying to focus his eyes. \"He even has a stripe.\"\n\nTondoor assumed the posture of respect as well as he could with his injured wing. \"My name is Tondoor. I am honored to meet you, Wambool.\"\n\nWambool guffawed. \"How long has it been since I've seen that?\"\n\nTondoor summoned his courage. \"I've come to learn how to dream.\"\n\n\"Dream?\" Wambool barked. His eyes narrowed. \"What do you want to dream for?\"\n\n\"I was told to dream the way of escape from the kraamlok,\" said Tondoor.\n\nWambool coughed so hard that Zloomba had to pound him between his wings to make him stop. \"Never!\" he thundered when he caught his breath. His eyes flamed red. \"That's the one thing I's not gonna\u2014I will not teach you. Dreaming's no good. No one listens and you end up like me. If you don't know how to dream, thank your lucky stars and live with it.\" He turned his tail to Tondoor and sat trembling with his face to the wall.\n\nTondoor couldn't believe his ears. After the distance he had travelled, the hardship and humiliations, was it all to end with an abrupt \"No\" from the only dragon who could help him? He raised his arms and one wing in the posture of authority. \"The elders gave me the task of dreaming how to save the dragons from the kraamlok,\" he said, doing his best to mimic Elder Mala's tone. \"It is your duty as seer of the Plains to mentor me.\"\n\nWambool glared over his shoulder. \"The elders gave you that task, did they? The ones who think everything is theirs to control? That shows what they know.\" He turned to face Tondoor and rose on his toes until his wing-claws brushed the top of the cave. \"There is no way to save the dragons. That's what my dreams show me, night after night: dragons dying, beasts dying, the whole world dying.\" The log flared up, turning Wambool for a moment into a smoldering Fire. \"It comes! It comes! The kraamlok comes!\"\n\nTondoor shrank against the wall. Wambool's seer voice was even more terrifying than Kalooka's.\n\nWambool slumped to the floor. \"What's the use of me dreaming my woeful catastrophes?\" His voice wobbled. \"No one listens. No one believes me.\"\n\n\"The elders believe you,\" said Tondoor, but if Wambool heard, he ignored it.\n\n\"I wouldn't listen to me either,\" he moaned. \"Even if anyone did, there's nothing to be done. It's a curse, dreaming is. A savage curse.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\" If Wambool would not help him, who would? Or was he right and there was no hope?\n\nZloomba smoothed Wambool's wings and adjusted his legs. \"Rest,\" she soothed. \"Enough talk. Time to sleep.\"\n\nWambool thrashed his arms. \"No sleep,\" he mumbled. \"No dreams. I need gloob. Do you have gloob?\" He tried to sit up, but Zloomba pushed him back down.\n\n\"I'll find you some. Lie down and rest, and I'll find you some gloob.\"\n\nWambool lay back down, mumbling, \"I never asked to be a seer. I never wanted dreams.\" His head flopped to the ground.\n\nZloomba turned back to Tondoor. \"He's asleep. Now we needs to sleep while we can.\"\n\n\"What about the gloob? What is gloob?\"\n\n\"You finds it in the forest. He don't need none now.\" She lay down beside her piles of bones. \"Go to sleep. I'll fix you up good in the morning.\"\n\nRain pattered on the mat over the cave opening. Now and then a raindrop fell through the open part and hissed in the fire. Tondoor lay down on the hard floor. He did his best to lie quiet and still, even though something hurt no matter which position he tried.\n\nWhat would happen now that Wambool had refused to help him? Would Zloomba throw him out? What if he met those bullies again? And if there was nothing to dream, what was he supposed to do? Beg Kroob and Glomfa to take him back? Find the star for the Rock dragons?\n\nHe tried to settle his churning thoughts by imagining Kalooka waiting for him on the edge of the Ravine. But all he saw was the impossible distance between them, and that he could never go back, and even if he did, she would be holding Hoodon when the kraamlok fell.\n\nWambool's snores ricocheted around the cave; Zloomba's joined them in a cacophonous rhythm. Tondoor gave up even trying to sleep. He shifted his position and yelped at the stabs of pain. Zloomba's snoring paused, then resumed.\n\nNo, he decided. He had come here to save the dragons, and he wasn't going to let a stubborn, noisy old seer stop him. Wambool still had dreams, couldn't stop them, was tormented by them. So all Tondoor had to do was observe and do whatever he did. Except take gloob, fortunately, since that kept the dreams away. Maybe he could learn to snore. He closed his eyes and concentrated on imitating the rhythm of Wambool's jagged breaths."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dodging",
                "text": "Tondoor woke to a sharp jab in his chest. Gasping, he opened his eyes. Zloomba's hot tongue was licking the raw flesh under his missing scale.\n\n\"Stop yer squirming,\" she muttered. \"I's sticking a new scale on fer protection 'til we gets some healing sap.\"\n\nHealing sap sounded good. Tondoor made himself lie still. Light poured through the opening in the roof, but the air was cold, so the fire must have burned out. When she was done, the sore spot did feel better.\n\nZloomba glanced into the shadows where Wambool was still snoring. \"We needs to get outside quick while he's still sleeping,\" she whispered. \"After he wakes I won't have time fer nothing. C'mon.\" She tip-toed toward the hole.\n\nTondoor sat up and stifled a yelp when his broken wing flopped open.\n\nZloomba pressed it against his side. \"We'll bind it nice and tight once we's outside. Can you hold it steady 'til then?\"\n\nTondoor gritted his teeth and nodded. How would he ever climb out of the hole? But Zloomba crouched underneath it and motioned for Tondoor to climb onto her back. From there, he could reach up with his hand-claws, push the mat aside, and pull himself out. She must have done this many times with her hatchlings.\n\nGray clouds sagged over the forest, dripping cold rain. Tondoor's scales clamped shut.\n\nZloomba climbed out of the hole after him, clutching a packet of dragon bones. \"Wambool were right,\" she said. \"You doesn't need to learn dreaming. You needs to learn fighting.\" Her already-blue eyes brightened.\n\n\"Fighting! I'm not a Blood.\"\n\nZloomba chuckled. \"That's telling it like it is. Still, you can't go nowhere with yer wing broke. And around here, you won't last a day if you can't fight.\" She put down her bones and trotted along the top of the rock ridge. \"Soon as yer wing's tied up good, we'll start. Can't no one teach fighting like me.\"\n\nTondoor followed her over the smooth rock, using his claws for grip and his good wing for balance. He was too small to fight. But he was in no position to argue. His injured wing drooped open again when they jumped off the other side of the ridge.\n\nInstead of folding it back up for him, Zloomba trotted to a tangle of waxy green leaves smothering a stand of bare-limbed trees and trailing over the rock. \"This is what we needs.\"\n\nTondoor helped her untangle one of the long, supple vines. \"Strip off them leaves and toss them in a pile,\" Zlomba instructed. \"They's good fer aches in yer stomach.\" It was his wing that needed help, not his stomach, but he did as he was told.\n\nWhile he stripped leaves, she laid two straight sticks against his broken bone, folded his wing around them, and secured the wing by wrapping the vine around and around his body. She bounced backwards a few steps. \"Can you move yer wing?\" Her eyes twinkled bright blue.\n\nTondoor tried. \"Not a bit.\" The next moment, he was pressed sideways against the rock. Tiny bits of white from his scales flecked the surface.\n\n\"You's supposed to dodge me,\" explained Zloomba. \"That's the first thing to learn about fighting. We'll get to attacking later. And since you can't fly, we's sticking to ground fighting.\" She backed up a few steps. \"Again!\"\n\nThis time Tondoor managed to hop to the side just ahead of her, and only got his arm pinned.\n\nZloomba backed up for the next attack. \"Hold them arms in so I can't crush them.\" She kept at him while the clouds thickened and thinned and the rain became a torrent and a trickle.\n\nTondoor's mind emptied of everything but Zloomba's flashing tan body. He ducked and sidestepped and learned to anticipate where she would be, so he could time his escape and send her crashing into a tree or a puddle. He didn't even hear the bullies until Zloomba stopped and hissed into the shadows.\n\n\"We knows you twits is there, so don't try nothing stupid.\"\n\n\"We's just watching,\" whined a voice that Tondoor recognized as coming from the smaller male, the Fire. Tondoor resisted the urge to duck behind Zloomba.\n\n\"We don't need no watchers,\" snarled Zloomba. \"Now git!\"\n\nTondoor could see two of them now in the shadows of the trees: the Fire and the Snow. The rain must have cleaned them off. The big Blood wasn't with them.\n\n\"Is you collecting he-Snows?\" asked the Snow in the trees. \"As if one aren't enough trouble.\"\n\n\"I said git!\" Zloomba repeated.\n\n\"But we's hungry,\" said the Fire. \"Yer pretty new Snow done stole our birds.\"\n\n\"I caught them!\" sputtered Tondoor, brave with Zloomba beside him.\n\n\"And we done ate them,\" said Zloomba. \"Whatza matter? The three of you done forgot how to hunt?\"\n\n\"It's too cold,\" pouted the Fire. \"We hasn't got no warm cave to sleep in.\"\n\n\"Then go make yerselfs a shelter like I done showed you, with logs and a pile of leafy brush,\" snapped Zloomba. \"Don't come bothering me, because I got other things to do. Now git!\" She stomped toward them.\n\nThe Fire turned and slinked into the trees. The Snow started to turn, then stopped. \"I fergot to tell you, yer gloob-head Snow's smashing up trees outside yer cave, acting even wackier'n usual.\" She disappeared after the Fire.\n\nZloomba glared after them until they were out of sight. Then she sighed. \"Sounds like our fun's up fer today. How's yer wing holding up?\" She inspected the vine and tugged it in a few places. \"You done real good fer yer first time. Had me right befuddled a few times with all yer ducking and dodging.\" She turned toward the cave. \"Bring them leaves.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Leaves",
                "text": "Zloomba flapped ahead. Tondoor gathered up the leaves and ran after her as fast as he dared on the slippery rock. The bullies stayed away. He found Zloomba shaking her head outside her cave. Wambool was butting a tree with his head, stumbling backwards, and doing it again. Blood flecked his head, and bark and branches littered the ground.\n\nTondoor slid down the ridge after Zloomba and watched her advance, hissing, at Wambool. Wambool curled his lip and aimed himself at the tree. She lashed her tail across his legs. He landed on his chest and skidded to a halt.\n\nThen he saw Tondoor. Snarling and spitting, he leapt to his feet with claws spread and teeth bared. Tondoor prepared to use his new skill of dodging. But Wambool's unsteady feet tangled in the branches on the ground. Tondoor stepped aside out of courtesy as the old Snow toppled onto his belly at his feet.\n\nWambool squinted up through eyes red with hate. \"I hoped you were a gloob-dream.\"\n\n\"You're my worst nightmare.\" The words came out before he could stop them.\n\nZloomba tugged Wambool's arm to help him stand up. \"What is you thinking?\" she scolded. She turned her gray-green eyes on Tondoor. \"You got them leaves? We's going to the pool near the ridge, that way.\" She guided Wambool across the slick ground with one arm, her packet of bones tucked under the other.\n\n\"I was chasing the kraamlok out of the trees,\" Wambool whimpered.\n\n\"You been sleep-fighting,\" Zloomba told him, \"from eating a whole bird so soon after yer gloob. But don't you worry none. You's awake now and we'll get yer insides all cleaned out.\"\n\n\"I's awake now and we'll get my insides all cleaned out,\" repeated Wambool. But when Zloomba was looking the other way, he bared his teeth at Tondoor. When they reached the pool, he lowered himself in with a groan and rested his head on the far shore. He lay there muttering while the raindrops danced on his floating wings.\n\nZloomba crouched on the near shore and dropped in her packet of bones. While Tondoor watched, she slid her head and neck deep under the water. He tried to remember how long Kalooka had stayed under the water during her trial by ordeal and was just wondering if he should pull Zloomba out when she dipped in even further. Then she emerged, dripping, with the bones in her hands.\n\nShe put them on the bank and turned to Tondoor. \"Bring me them leaves.\"\n\nWhat was that all about?\n\n\"These leaves calms the stomach after too much gloob,\" Zloomba said. \"Now we needs to find a nice smooth couple of rocks. These'll do fine.\"\n\nShe showed him how to grind the leaves into a soggy paste between the rocks. Even though the green mess smelled like the flowers he'd picked to make Kalooka sick, Wambool opened his mouth and let her scrape it in.\n\nNext, Zloomba took Tondoor to a tree with smooth bark and sap that oozed out when she pierced the bark with a stick. He inhaled its minty scent. Zloomba peeled off the scale she had put on him earlier and spread sap all over his raw skin. It felt warm and soothing.\n\n\"Now it'll heal right quick. I'd put it on yer bone too if it wasn't inside you. She poked the stick into the tree again. \"Now come'n fix up Wambool.\"\n\nShe showed Tondoor how to apply the sap to the scrapes on Wambool's head. Wambool squeezed his eyes shut and let Tondoor do it, although his body twitched and shuddered. Mashed leaves floated on the water around him. It wasn't clear if they'd made it to his stomach first or not.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" a voice shrieked above them. A small Ash flapped hard just above the treetops. It was Morda, the Ash who had found him on the beach. She could speak at least one word now. In each claw she held a squirming glarf of the kind she had refused to eat yesterday.\n\nHer mottled Sun mate was right behind. \"They's yer food, not yer family!\" he shouted.\n\n\"It's not none of my business,\" said Zloomba, watching them fly over, \"but he could try feeding her something different.\"\n\n\"Something that eats glarfs,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"Now you's thinking!\" exclaimed Zloomba. \"If you makes an Ash, you'll do just fine with her.\"\n\n\"I don't want to make an Ash,\" said Tondoor.\n\nWambool's teeth snapped. The stick he was holding broke in two. He yanked his hand back and wiped off the slobber. Did Wambool think he was trying to steal Zloomba?\n\n\"I'm not here to find a mate. I'm here to learn to dream.\" He glared straight at Wambool to show his lack of deceit.\n\nWambool curled his lip.\n\nA roar came through the trees, followed by a yelp.\n\nZloomba huffed. \"Now he's trying to force her to eat. I best go set him straight.\" She glared at each of them in turn. \"You two behave yerselfs.\"\n\nWambool rose from the water as soon as she was out of sight. He jabbed his hand-claw into Tondoor's snout. \"You. Go away and never come back.\"\n\nTondoor reached up and jabbed his chin. \"You. Teach me how to dream.\"\n\n\"You broke your wing on purpose so she'd look after you. I'll give you that\u2014you catch on fast.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous! I would never\u2014\" Tondoor stopped short. \"If you don't teach me to dream, I'll tell Zloomba you spit out those leaves.\"\n\nWambool snorted. \"I always spit them out. You will too if she ever makes you eat them.\"\n\n\"You're acting like a hatchling.\"\n\n\"Why do you think she keeps me?\"\n\nOh. That was his game. \"What about saving the dragons?\" Tondoor asked. \"Zloomba told me how much you worry about them. Or is that just a trick too?\"\n\n\"All I want, Dreamless, is for you to leave.\"\n\n\"All I want is to save the dragons from the kraamlok,\" said Tondoor. \"Unless, of course, you made the whole prophecy up.\"\n\nWambool roared. He grabbed Tondoor's head and threw him into the pool, then pushed his head down. Through the stirred-up silt, Tondoor found Wambool's ankle and yanked. Wambool toppled sideways, and Tondoor splashed out of the pool.\n\nWambool stormed after him in a trail of water. Tondoor laughed. After dodging Zloomba, wobbly old Wambool was easy, even with his bound wing throwing him off balance. He made a game of it, trotting from side to side and watching Wambool teeter as he followed. The old dragon was persistent though. He fell, got up and staggered back, ever more feebly. Finally he stayed where he fell.\n\nTondoor checked the strips holding his wing. They were still tight.\n\nZloomba ambled out of the trees and picked up her packet of bones. \"You needs to work on yer strategy, Tondoor. The zig-zagging were good, but next time try going in circles to make him dizzy.\"\n\nShe nudged Wambool's neck with her snout. Wambool groaned.\n\n\"Still, you done good. I hasn't never seen him so spunky.\" She gripped Wambool under one arm. \"Help me drag him to the cave.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Bones",
                "text": "Two females, a Sky and Fire, were waiting for them beside the ridge, each holding a freshly killed beast.\n\n\"We come fer a conference,\" said the Sky. Her eyes darted back and forth between Tondoor and Wambool, who had fallen asleep again\u2014or was pretending he had.\n\n\"Your he-Snow done split hisself into two,\" said the Fire. \"Maybe the young one'll be more frisky fer ya.\"\n\nFrisky?\n\n\"Can't be any less,\" said the Sky. They both tittered.\n\nZloomba gave Wambool a hard yank up the ridge. \"This here's Tondoor,\" she said in a tight voice. \"He done flew all the way from the Plains just to help me with Wambool.\"\n\nWambool flopped onto the stone.\n\n\"Wambool, hold in yer wings,\" Zloomba barked. \"Tondoor, shove him in the cave. Then go in and get him settled.\"\n\nGreen slime trickled out of Wambool's snout. The faker. Tondoor didn't even try to be gentle as he yanked the mat off the cave opening and shoved him into the hole. \"Now move over so I don't land on top of you,\" he called down as Zloomba walked away with the two females, still carrying her bones. He grimaced. If he hadn't promised to do whatever Zloomba said\u2026\n\nWambool looked up at him, then curled up under the hole. Tondoor considered dropping rocks on him, but instead just pulled the mat over the hole to leave him in the dark. He didn't want to go in there anyway.\n\nThe females had left their two beasts behind. He guessed they were for Zloomba, so once Wambool was snoring, he wandered a short distance off to look for one more. After several failures, he found a dead tree and dragged that back instead. Fortunately, the bullies didn't appear.\n\nZloomba arrived back at the cave, carrying a third beast, at the same time Tondoor did. Her eyes were an annoyed yellow, but she brightened when she saw him. \"You done found us a log!\"\n\n\"What did those two mean that I should be frisky?\" asked Tondoor.\n\nZloomba huffed. \"Don't you fret yerself none about them two. They's just pestering me because Wambool hasn't never given me an egg. It's not none of their business anyway.\"\n\nThey wanted him to mate with Zloomba? He hid a shudder. She was younger than Elder Mala, but still. Tondoor picked up the log again to drag it up the ridge, but Zloomba had more to say.\n\n\"Them two comes regular and asks me what color their hatchlings is gonna be and if they'll be a he or a she. I tells them what they wants to hear, but I knows they really comes to find out if I's been mated yet.\" She picked up the other two beasts. \"Still, if they does my hunting fer me, why should I complain?\"\n\n\"How do you know those things about their eggs?\"\n\n\"My bones tells me.\"\n\nOh no. Was she like those Coast dragons who listened to their shell? \"Can't they talk to their own bones?\"\n\nZloomba fixed him with her violet gaze. \"Only Bones can listen to bones. That's why we's called Bones. And only us Bones as knows how.\" She climbed the ridge and peered into the cave. \"Move yer filthy carcass, Wambool!\" She tossed in the three beasts and dropped in after them.\n\nTondoor pushed the log in after her. The first Bone had drowned, so it made a sort of sense that some Bones could hear things underwater. Maybe she could only hear the bones of other Bones, and that's why his were the wrong kind.\n\nBut the conversation made him wonder. What had her bones said to her in the pool? What did she really want from him? Help looking after Wambool, or a mate?\n\nHe'd better learn to dream fast."
            },
            {
                "title": "Advice",
                "text": "That night, Tondoor imitated Wambool's sleeping position, even though it hurt his wing. Still, he was so tired he fell asleep quickly, and stayed that way until Zloomba woke him, her eyes shining blue in the sunbeams filtering through the cave hole.\n\n\"We's doing fighting again. Did you see what it done fer him?\" she whispered, flicking her tail at Wambool. He was sleeping on his side with his wings flopped open against the cave walls. \"This were the first night ever he done slept with no dreams 'n no gloob.\"\n\nFighting kept dreams away too? Oh no!\n\nOnce again, Zloomba selected a parcel of bones. \"These ones is from my mother. I likes talking to her. Now climb up on my back and outside.\"\n\nThis time they trained right outside the cave. Zloomba showed Tondoor how to head butt, since Wambool had already practiced that on the trees yesterday, and how to use his tail as a whip. Tondoor practiced flicking dead leaves off trees with his tail.\n\n\"You has to practice over and over and over,\" Zloomba told him. \"Keep a picture of the branch in yer mind so you can find the leaf with yer tail when yer back's turned. Like this.\" A leaf shot off the tree behind her. A few others fell with it. The trees were dying fast now; most were already bare. It was surprising that nobody seemed upset.\n\nWambool scrambled out of the cave. Without pausing, he fixed his red eyes on Tondoor and lurched toward him.\n\n\"Use yer tail, Tondoor!\" Zloomba shouted, backing out of the way. \"Hit him below the knees 'n he'll go right down!\"\n\nTondoor's tail flew too low and caught Wambool across the ankle. But it still pushed him over. Wambool growled and got to his feet.\n\n\"Use yer tail too, Wambool!\" Zloomba shouted. \"Hit him back!\"\n\nThe fighting lesson raged all morning, with Zloomba coaching them in turn. Wambool was steadier on his feet than the day before, so Tondoor had to work harder to stay out of his way. Twice, Wambool nicked his leg and made him hop. They kept at it until Wambool lay sprawled on the churned-up mud.\n\nZloomba straightened the vines around Tondoor's wing. \"I doesn't want you flying in circles because yer wing done healed crooked.\" She chuckled. \"I hasn't had so much fun since I had twin hatchlings. Now both of you come cool yerselfs in the pool.\" She tucked her parcel of bones under her arm.\n\nWambool, of course, had to be half-carried. It was like dragging a dead bondok, but harder because Wambool kept catching the end of his tail on roots and whining until one of them pulled it free. At the pool, he flopped into the water and lay there gasping as if he had done all the work.\n\nZloomba nudged Tondoor into the water too. Taking a deep breath, he sank in up to his neck on the opposite side from Wambool. He worried that the water might loosen the sap on his chest, but it held tightly. She was a skilled healer, and he was lucky she had taken him in.\n\nZloomba dropped her mother's bones into the water and submerged her head the same as the day before.\n\n\"What do your bones tell you?\" Tondoor asked when she was shaking herself dry afterwards.\n\n\"They gives me advice. Bones' bones is very wise, especially my mother's.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Maybe they could give me some advice too.\"\n\nZloomba glanced at Wambool, who was snoring with his head on the bank. \"Come with me. Not you, yer apprentice,\" she added when Wambool half-opened one eye. \"You stay put 'n guard them bones.\" Wambool's eye slid closed again.\n\n\"What sort of advice is you wanting?\" Zloomba asked as they walked into the woods. \"How to escape that kraamlok?\"\n\n\"How to get Wambool to teach me.\"\n\nZloomba sighed. She snuffled in the leaves at the base of a tree. \"Does you see the way them roots makes a small cave under them dead leaves? Glarfs and such'll sleep under such roots, sometimes whole families all curled up together.\"\n\nTondoor looked. Good to know. But how did it answer his question?\n\nZloomba walked to another tree. \"Some trees has holes in their trunks, and glarfs 'n birds goes to sleep in there. Same with hollow logs,\" she added.\n\nHe peered into a half-collapsed one buried in leaves. He couldn't see anything, but he did smell glarf.\n\n\"And if you can't find nothing else, look fer trails through the trees with turds on them, and lumps in the snow. Sometimes lumps is beasts.\"\n\nLumps in what Snow? Oh\u2014she meant snow like on the tops of mountains. If winter here was like that, he better pay close attention. He concentrated while she showed him how to search for fire root when its leaves fell off. So it was dying too. When they came upon a tumbledown heap of branches and leaves, she described how to make a shelter to sleep in. It was worrying that she thought he needed to know this.\n\n\"Oh. Look here,\" she exclaimed. She scraped leaves away from tree-roots with her toe-claws. Underneath them was a cluster of small purple mushrooms. \"These is gloob. They always grows under this kind of tree.\" She watched him look up and down. \"Now listen up real good, because this here is real important. One mushroom will keep him asleep fer a night 'n a day. Watch him real careful so he don't eat more.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. Why did he need to know this?\n\nZloomba continued. \"Three gloob mushrooms can kill a fully growed dragon. Or two big gloobs, if you finds any that big. The dragons goes to sleep and never wakes up. So watch him real close. It's best if you gets the gloob fer him, so you knows how much he eats.\"\n\nTondoor nodded again. He had no intention of feeding gloob to Wambool.\n\nZloomba brushed the leaves back over the mushrooms. \"But we won't take him any tonight. He's wore out from fighting, so I's hoping he'll sleep good again.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the good advice,\" he said. \"I didn't know any of that. But can your bones tell me what to do about Wambool?\"\n\nZloomba sighed. \"I's done spent years now asking them that same question: how does I get Wambool to do what I wants? But my bones doesn't seem to know.\" She brightened. \"But since you done come, things is picking up. So my best advice is just to keep on trying. Sooner or later he'll get wore down, or maybe someone will come along to help you too.\"\n\nShe turned back toward the pool.\n\nHer bones might be wise, but that wasn't much help."
            },
            {
                "title": "Winter",
                "text": "Fighting wasn't the whole answer to Wambool's sleep problem, or maybe he had napped too long in the pool, because that night, he dreamed. Tondoor leapt to his feet, still half asleep, as the old seer's eerie wail echoed through the cave. He could just see Wambool's thrashing body in the light from the log's last embers.\n\n\"Destruction speeds toward us!\" Wambool wailed. \"Hide yourselves in the rocks, oh unlucky dragons, because your time is short. It comes, it comes, oh it comes!\" His body stiffened, then crumpled. He rocked on the floor, his shrieks and sobs punctuated with cries of \"Death!\" and \"Doom!\" and \"Ha!\"\n\nTondoor wanted to stuff his ears and run. He turned around and saw Zloomba clutching her mother's bones.\n\nHow many nights had she sat like this, listening to Wambool's nightmare ravings and begging wisdom from those who came before? He would give Wambool gloob too, in her place. But why was Wambool protecting Tondoor from dreaming, if he despised him so fiercely? And why wouldn't he help Tondoor save the dragons from the horrible fate that he couldn't stop seeing?\n\nNone of them woke early the next day, but Zloomba took Tondoor outside to practice fighting as soon as she did. Like the day before, Wambool climbed out of the hole later and charged at Tondoor until he was exhausted.\n\nTondoor tried to remember if Wambool had done anything unusual the night before the dream. It was hard to tell, because Wambool did a lot of crazy things. One night he howled at Morwaka's Eye. Tondoor sneaked behind the ridge and howled quietly so no one would hear\u2014except Morwaka, if that was the way to call him. It wasn't.\n\nAnother night, Wambool spun around six times before he lay down to sleep. Imitating him made Tondoor dizzy enough to fall against the cave wall and hurt his wing, but it didn't make him dream. Neither did snorting pond water out of his nostrils or spitting out his half-chewed beast before slurping it up again.\n\nDays passed. Each morning, the sight of Tondoor threw Wambool into a fighting rage. Zloomba cheered them both on in the chilly air, and taught them kicking, dodging kicks, punching, and blocking punches. The bullies cheered and jeered from the edge of the trees until Zloomba chased them away. Wambool got stronger and steadier until Tondoor had to work to keep out of his reach.\n\nMost afternoons, dragons came to buy advice from Zloomba and her bones, so the three of them ate well. Some nights Wambool dreamed; some nights he didn't, and Tondoor didn't figure out why.\n\nThe days turned cold and the nights colder, and the last of the trees died. The other dragons disappeared inside their winter shelters, so Tondoor resumed hunting for beasts and dry logs. He didn't have to worry about running into the bullies, but he did have to be careful not to wake sleeping dragons.\n\nLate one afternoon when he returned to the cave dragging a log, Wambool and Zloomba stood waiting for him in the icy drizzle. Wambool was hopping from foot to foot, and Zloomba seemed strangely buoyant. Both of their eyes shone a deep, triumphant violet.\n\nZloomba beckoned to him. \"Time to check that ailing wing.\" She unwound the vine, unfolded his wing and felt the injured bone. \"It's done healed good,\" she exclaimed. \"But yer wing muscles is gone all weak, so you'll hafta learn to fly all over again. Start real slow and eat lots of bones. Bones is good fer helping you fly.\"\n\nTondoor looked over to see if Wambool was listening. \"I'll eat lots, so as soon as I learn to dream, I can go home.\"\n\nWambool looked at him with slitted, red eyes.\n\n\"I won't be needing the log tonight,\" Zloomba told Tondoor. \"You can keep it if you likes.\"\n\nTondoor looked at the log lying at his feet. \"I don't understand. Why would I want it if you don't?\"\n\n\"You aren't going back into the cave, egg-brain,\" snapped Wambool. \"Zloomba doesn't want you anymore.\"\n\nTondoor blinked.\n\nZloomba's eyes shone even more brightly. \"Wambool done mated me,\" she said. \"Now I has to hibernate so my egg can grow.\"\n\n\"Hibernate?\" asked Tondoor. That word again. \"You mean rest?\"\n\n\"She means sleep, you dreamless twit,\" said Wambool. \"Don't you know anything?\"\n\n\"It means sleeping right on through the cold time,\" corrected Zloomba. \"Until spring, when everything done bursts back to life.\" She patted her belly. \"Including my new hatchling, here.\"\n\nSo the trees and everything weren't dead. Just sleeping.\n\nShe nuzzled Wambool. \"I hasn't hibernated since you come 'cause you done needed me, and you Plains dragons doesn't know how to sleep so long. But you never done mated me before.\" She beamed at Tondoor again. \"Lucky fer me yer apprentice done come and made you feel all frisky. Them bones was right about him.\"\n\nWhat had they said about him? That he would get Wambool moving again?\n\nWambool danced in the posture of triumph. \"Got that, twit? We're going to go inside now, and you're going to stay out here and get me what I need. I'll call when I need you. Nighty-night.\" He turned toward the cave hole.\n\nZloomba's tail whipped around. Wambool tumbled down the side of the ridge. \"I's done with you too,\" she hissed. \"You and all yer caterwauling. You wakes her that's hibernating and she dies. And I's not gonna die. Not me, not my egg. So you two is gonna go somewhere far away from here and look after yerselfs 'til I wakes up in the spring.\"\n\n\"What!\" sputtered Wambool. \"But it's cold out here! Who will find food? Who will bring me gloob?\"\n\n\"Yer apprentice,\" said Zloomba. \"That's what I done trained him fer.\" She bared her teeth. \"Now both of you, git!\"\n\nTondoor backed away, then scurried forward to pick up the log and retreat again. Wambool stood staring at her with his jaw hanging open.\n\n\"Git!\" Zloomba hurled a stone.\n\nWambool jumped away, rubbing his head.\n\nZloomba slid down her hole. Her hand-claws reached up and pulled the cover over it.\n\nWambool and Tondoor stood scowling at each other in the fading light while around them, the rain turned to snow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Shelter",
                "text": "\"Well? What are you waiting for?\" asked Wambool, clasping his arms around his shivering chest. \"Light the log!\"\n\nTondoor dragged it toward the trees. \"You heard Zloomba. We have to find some place where you won't wake her with your caterwauling.\"\n\nWambool stomped behind him. \"This was your plan all along, wasn't it? You wanted to get me away from her right from the start.\"\n\n\"I wanted you to teach me to dream.\"\n\n\"You tricked me!\"\n\n\"I never told you to mate with her.\"\n\n\"If you hadn't come trying to steal my place, I wouldn't have thought of it. Zloomba would still be\u2014\"\n\n\"Looking after you instead of a real hatchling,\" Tondoor walked into the trees. With both wings free, walking was easier. Especially bent over dragging the log between his feet.\n\n\"You're just jealous because I can dream and you can't. You think if you look after me you'll find out how. Well, you won't.\"\n\nTondoor scowled. \"Fine. Look after yourself then.\"\n\nThe log was too heavy to carry. He turned around. Wambool was sitting on it.\n\n\"I've lived here a lot longer than you. You need me to...\" He paused. \"To\u2026\"\n\n\"I only need one thing and you won't give it to me. So good-bye.\" Tondoor twisted the log to dump Wambool off. But it slipped out of his claws again and splattered the wet snow.\n\n\"Ha!\" shouted Wambool. \"You need me to help you carry our log!\" He picked up the back end of the log. \"And I see a fire root. We'll need that too.\" He plucked the fire root and stuck it onto his ankle spur.\n\n\"Fine,\" Tondoor muttered. He retrieved his end of the log. \"Now be quiet and let me think.\"\n\nThe first thing was shelter. Night was almost here, and he didn't want to spend it outside. After walking far enough away from Zloomba's cave, they came to a stand of medium-sized trees without too many branches. Tondoor was about to tell Wambool to help him knock some over when he noticed that several of them were already pushed together and lashed at the top, and covered all around with branches and tattered skins.\n\nHe yanked on the log and kept walking. They couldn't shelter near any other dragons in case Wambool woke them too. Similar shelters dotted the forest, as well as some that reminded him of the Bog Leaf's nest. As good as Zloomba was at fighting, other dragons knew more about building shelters. That made sense; she lived in a cave.\n\nDusk deepened and the storm thickened, and soon they were trudging through snow up to their ankles. Tondoor worried. Walking kept them warm, except for their feet, but as soon as they stopped moving, the snow would freeze on their wet bodies. Finally they came to a deserted part of the woods.\n\nHe dropped the log, then snorted in disgust as he saw how many dead trees surrounded them. How stupid to carry the log all this way! He kicked it, but his foot was so cold he didn't feel anything. Wambool sank down on it, panting.\n\nTondoor studied the trees with their stiff branches and thin, spiky leaves that hadn't died with the rest. He yanked one back and forth until it broke off at the bottom, then cracked off its branches and threw them into a pile. It felt good to destroy something. For tonight, he would just pile up logs and crawl underneath, then think of a better solution tomorrow. He broke off another tree, and another, until he had a large pile of logs and another one of spiky branches. But how to get under them?\n\n\"Lean the tops together,\" Wambool's voice croaked through the darkness.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Lean the tops together,\" Wambool repeated. He sounded like Elder Mala. \"Then there will be space underneath for us.\"\n\nWas Wambool, the complete incompetent, now deigning to give him advice? \"Then help me!\" Tondoor blustered.\n\n\"It's too dark. I can't see.\"\n\n\"You can see I'm doing it wrong.\"\n\n\"I can see that in the dark.\" Wambool yawned. \"I suppose I could make us a fire.\"\n\nMoments later, the end of the log was burning. When had he ever done that for Zloomba? In the flickering light, they balanced two of the trunks against each other.\n\n\"Jam the bottom into the ground to make it stick,\" instructed Wambool. Finally, he stood up. He held the first two trees steady while Tondoor picked up a third. \"Place it right so we'll have a circle when we're done.\"\n\nTondoor leaned the trunk against the others. \"How do you know all this? I thought you couldn't do anything.\"\n\nWambool snorted. \"I wasn't born yesterday. I've done everything you've ever done\u2014and more.\" He puffed out his chest. \"You weren't even an egg yet when I mated Mala, the most fearsome female on the Plains.\"\n\nTondoor froze. That was an accomplishment? Still, there had to be something Wambool hadn't done. \"Have you found the star the Rock dragons want?\"\n\nWambool snorted again. \"When was the last time you saw a star walking around?\"\n\n\"There's the one that moves around under the bog.\" Tondoor dragged over another log.\n\n\"Do you believe everything you hear? Stars don't breathe water. Or eat eggs.\"\n\n\"I saw it breathe.\" No need to describe how.\n\n\"Gently!\" roared Wambool as Tondoor dropped his log against the others. \"It's a giant water snoof, nitwit. You must have seen them spout water. Use your head. Now move!\" he barked. \"Fetch another log so we can get out of this snow.\"\n\nTondoor grunted as he pulled another log off his pile. How could a water snoof make the water steaming hot? Or blow steam in the hills? It had to be Morwaka's star. But obviously Wambool hadn't found the other star.\n\nThe fire was glimmering embers by the time they finished the cone of logs. \"Now we cover the gaps with branches,\" Tondoor said quickly, before Wambool could give him any more orders. He felt his way to the brush pile.\n\n\"Lay them upside down so the rain will run off,\" Wambool ordered anyway, warming himself at the embers.\n\n\"What rain?\" Tondoor muttered. But it made sense, so he did it.\n\nAs soon as the shelter was almost covered, Wambool crawled in. Tondoor crouched by the remaining embers, delaying the time he would have to join him. When all was quiet, he crawled inside and blocked the entrance with leftover brush. Wambool, of course, was sprawled across the entire space, snoring. At least he had warmed it up and melted the snow. Tondoor shoved Wambool's various limbs to one side and fitted himself in."
            },
            {
                "title": "Sharing",
                "text": "He woke to a sharp kick in the snout. He was warm, and it took a moment for him to remember that he wasn't in the cave. Dim morning light stole through the snow-covered chinks in the brush and lit up Wambool's foot, now wedged against his head. It was rough and dry from walking through the snow, but polished white, and some of the foot-scales had cracked. Tondoor caught his breath.\n\nIn the legend, the smallest star from Morwaka's littlest toe had revealed the dragons' secret thoughts. What if the sharing star was a white scale from another seer's foot? Carefully, he snapped off the loose part of the scale closest to Wambool's smallest toe. Wambool's toes flared, but he didn't wake up. It must be exhaustion, not fighting, that kept dreams away, because Wambool hadn't made a peep all night. Tondoor wedged the scale underneath one of the scales on his side and wiggled outside to find food.\n\nThe forest was thick with snow, which masked scents as well as sight. His scales clamped shut, securing Wambool's scale under his own. Guessing which mounds might hide winter dens under trees, he dug out and killed two sleeping beasts. He ate one and left the other on the snow for Wambool. Then he set to work breaking down more trees to make a separate shelter for himself. He built it next to Wambool's, not sure how close he would have to be to catch a dream, if the white scale did what he hoped.\n\nWambool woke up late and watched him work. He ate the beast and complained that Tondoor's new shelter was straighter than his and had fewer bare spots. Tondoor gave him the new shelter to make him quiet and found more brush to fix up the first one. Then he hunted again for both of them and filled his ankle spurs with fire root while he could still see the star-shaped leaves poking through the snow.\n\nWambool roused himself long enough to gather several large rocks and set them close to the fire. \"To warm my shelter,\" he said. \"You should find yourself some too.\" Tondoor did, and when they were hot, arranged them inside his shelter with the tips of his hand-claws. Wambool snagged a few of Tondoor's as well as his own, but that was fine. The warmer Wambool was, the better he would sleep\u2014and dream. Tondoor curled himself around his blissfully hot rocks, tucked Wambool's foot-scale under his tongue so he wouldn't swallow it in his sleep, and closed his eyes.\n\nMany nights passed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Terrible Joy",
                "text": "A shining white rock streaks across the stars, grows a long streaming tail, gleams with icy fire. Slashes the sky like a thousand suns. Smashes the ground. Tosses boulders like sparks. Land ripples; air burns; seas boil. Scales melt; bones crack; dragons flee from flame into flame. Noon fades to dusk, the sun to bone, the Eye to blood. Ice covers everything. And silence is all that remains.\n\nTondoor woke screaming.\n\nHis throat was raw. How long had he been shouting? Where was Kalooka? Brush scattered as he burst outside. Cold snow spattered his snout.\n\nIt was a dream.\n\nHe felt relief, then wonder, then horror. He had dreamed\u2014that dream! The vision still throbbed behind his eyes.\n\nBut the air was still and cold. The kraamlok was far away. Kalooka was safe, and so was he. He spat out Wambool's scale and ground it into the snow with his foot. Reality\u2014the pale, frosty light, Wambool's wonderful grumbling\u2014displaced the horrific images in his half-awake mind.\n\nWambool emerged and stood swaying beside his shelter. \"You got your wish.\"\n\nTondoor struggled to keep from screaming again as the kraamlok streaked back across his mind. \"Flying rocks and melting scales and...\"\n\nWambool arched his wings and lifted his arms to the sky. \"With claws of ice it sweeps the stars; with fangs of night it hunts us,\" he wailed. \"Wreathed in flame it falls, and rock shall flow like water at its falling.\"\n\nTondoor cowered against his shelter, pressing his hands over his ears.\n\n\"Ice and flame consume the world; flame and ice devour it. It comes! It comes! The kraamlok comes!\"\n\n\"Stop!\" cried Tondoor. \"Please, stop!\"\n\nWambool grunted and strode into the trees. Tondoor scrambled to his feet and raced after him, stepping in his footprints to make walking easier. \"What are we going to do? We have to warn people!\"\n\n\"Tried that. Didn't work,\" said Wambool. He flicked his tail. \"They don't want to know. Most of them don't even listen.\"\n\n\"But we have to do something or they'll all die!\"\n\nWambool flung himself around, his eyes flashing red. Spittle flew out of his mouth. \"Just what are we supposed to do?\" He waited while Tondoor gaped. \"There is nothing to do! We're all doomed, whether we tell them so or not. So let it lie.\"\n\n\"But didn't you see all those dragons with their scales melting off?\" How could Wambool not care?\n\n\"I saw.\" Wambool turned and strode away again.\n\n\"Then why won't you teach me?\" shouted Tondoor. \"I need to learn to dream. I need to stop it.\" Wambool kept walking. Tondoor raced past him around a tree. He roared into Wambool's snout. \"Teach me!\"\n\nWambool didn't flinch. \"No.\"\n\nTondoor seethed with the urge to pound sense into this stubborn, arrogant dragon who refused to teach him, to do anything that might help.\n\nHis blood froze.\n\nHe knew why.\n\nHe jerked backwards as if Wambool had pounded him instead. \"You want the kraamlok to come.\"\n\nDeep, triumphant violet washed away the furious red in Wambool's eyes. \"They call me a fool,\" he said softly. \"Wacko. Gloob-head. Out of his mind. I hear them; don't think I don't.\" He smacked a tree with his tail, and snow flumped down.\n\n\"But when the kraamlok comes, I will fly over every blasted nesting site on this wretched island and shout to the sky: 'It is here! It is here! The kraamlok is here!'\" He shook with fury and terrible joy. \"Then they will know that they are the fools, and that I spoke the truth.\"\n\nHis eyes froze Tondoor in place. \"And then they will die.\"\n\nTondoor backed away. \"It won't matter what they think if they're dead. If you're dead.\" What could he say to change Wambool's mind? \"I know you're no fool. Zloomba knows it too, and the Plains elders.\" He thought of Blort and Pooka, and Yolooda, and the whispered message from the guard in the mountains. \"Others believe you too. They begged me to come back and tell them how to escape.\"\n\nWambool snorted. \"There is no escape.\"\n\n\"Or think about Zloomba. She looked after you all those years because she thinks you have a heart!\" Tondoor took a deep breath to calm his voice. \"Teach me how to dream so I can at least try to save her.\"\n\nWambool laughed bitterly. \"The joke's on you, Dreamless. You can't learn to dream. Did you forget Morwaka's words? 'I will speak to them in dreams when I choose to speak.' If you aren't hearing, it's because he isn't choosing to speak to you. I thought you'd figure that out for yourself, but I guess you're too stupid.\"\n\nTondoor felt like something was squeezing his chest. \"But\u2014but Elder Mala told me to dream the way of escape,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Elder Mala now, is it?\" Wambool snorted. \"She thinks a seer's job is to dream the things she wants to see. She thinks Morwaka himself should come down from the sky to do her bidding if only I command him.\"\n\n\"But there has to be a way out. Why else would Morwaka have sent you the vision?\"\n\n\"Who can understand the mind of a god?\" Wambool ruffled his wings. \"My best advice to you is to go back to your\u2014what was that name you were shrieking in your sleep\u2014Kalooka? Go back to your Kalooka and die together. There's nothing else to do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Dooloo",
                "text": "[ Stars ]\n\nTondoor watched Wambool disappear into the trees. Wambool was a bitter old fool, exactly like everyone said. Tondoor would save the dragons if he could, no matter what anyone thought of him. But how could he if Morwaka didn't choose to tell him how?\n\nIn any case, he could stop wearing himself out trying to dream. And promise or no promise, he wasn't staying with Wambool one more day. Zloomba had what she wanted, and Wambool was fully capable of looking after himself. As soon as his wing was strong enough, he would leave the island. Blort and Pooka would welcome him back to the Coast, even if Glomfa and Kroob wouldn't. Maybe Morwaka would choose to tell Blort how to escape the kraamlok.\n\nHe shook the snow off his body. Before flying across the ocean, he needed to rest and build up his strength by eating lots of bones and flying around the island. He set about digging into snow-covered mounds of brush and soggy leaves, but when he found a single, sleeping bird, it was scrawny and tough and so cold it sat like a lump of ice in his stomach. The snow he ate because there was no water made him even colder.\n\nTo warm himself up, he flew. His newly-healed wing moved as it should, but by the time he reached the beach where he had first arrived, it needed a rest. Sea water still lapped at a strip of sand and the air smelled like salt, but he didn't want to get wet to fish. He found a family of sleeping glarfs and some fire root under the gnarly roots of a dead tree. Though cold, the glarfs were filling.\n\nBy then it was late afternoon. A cluster of saplings lashed together with a sea-vine and surrounded with loose brush made an adequate shelter, and there were plenty of rocks on the beach to warm up beside his nicely burning log.\n\nIt was a rare, cloudless evening, so he didn't go inside right away. Reflected streaks of thin sunset clouds, white and gold, rippled on the gray water. He felt oddly calm; since there was nothing he could do, there was no need to do anything.\n\nThe worry and striving that had weighed on him ever since Kalooka first showed him the kraamlok floated away with the steam of his breath. He didn't have to do the impossible and save the world. He didn't have to protect Kalooka, or Zloomba, or Blort and Pooka, or Yolooda's eggs. He didn't even have to listen. If Morwaka wanted to tell him something, that was up to Morwaka. And tonight, Morwaka was asleep.\n\nTondoor turned his tail to the sunset. Above the trees, the stars were waking up. How long since he had seen stars, living in a cave and under nearly constant cloud! He traced the familiar constellations with his snout: a curve like the top of a mushroom, six points like the corners of a crystal, a flying bird. The shapes hadn't changed, although he could now see a new one further down in the north.\n\nHe settled onto the warm sand beside his log. The stars began to whisper, as they had in the desert.\n\nHis whole being swelled with the beauty of the night, and he realized with a start that his lost heart had returned. How strange that by losing everything\u2014Kalooka, home, mentors, purpose\u2014he had regained his heart. And how tragic it would be if the kraamlok came now, and this gift of wonder were snuffed out in one fiery blast. He might not hear Morwaka, but if Morwaka could hear him, he knew that Tondoor loved the night, and was grateful.\n\nThrough the smoke drifting above him, the air seemed to ripple. If he looked through the ripples and let his eyes go out of focus, the stars made\u2026 a dragon? A head, a spindly body with two arms and two legs and what could be claws, if he squinted. But only darkness where the wings and tail should be.\n\nThe constellation brightened. Now he didn't need to squint. It was a dragon, even stranger than the ones in the cave paintings. This sky dragon had five twinkling claws on each hand, instead of the usual six. Tondoor laughed aloud. How odd it would be like to go through life with only five. The dragon's mouth seemed to open, and he knew\u2014somehow\u2014that it was enjoying his enjoyment.\n\nHe stood up and held out his arms in the posture of greeting. It was odd to be greeting a constellation, but just now it felt like the most natural thing in the vast universe heavens spread out before him.\n\nThe faint star that was the dragon's heart began to pulse. Brighter and brighter, as if it were a sun egg about to hatch. Tondoor's heart thudded. Was this the kraamlok? But no. It had no tail, just soft yellow light that made his own newly returned heart beat brightly in return. It made him think of the yellow sun in his dream of so long ago, just before that last, fateful choosing.\n\nHe'd never seen a star hatch before. Wouldn't it be wonderful if this newly hatched sun grew as big as theirs, and Morwaka made dragons like the one in the sky to live beneath it?\n\nStory pictures filled his mind. Dragons with no wings or tails walked their new world on five-toed feet, unable to flap their missing wings and take to the air. Would they wish they could fly, or would they not even think of it? Would they watch the stars at night like he was doing? What if one of them looked up and imagined Tondoor's world beneath his sun, also shining like a newly hatched star?\n\nNow that he thought about it, why should this world be the only one? Why couldn't there be as many worlds as stars, with dragons in all shapes and any number of claws? He laughed again, and the star dragon's eyes twinkled blue in response. If only he could fly up to it\u2014but it was too high. \"If I could, though, I would,\" he said.\n\nWords dropped into his mind. A name. A strange, un-dragon-like name, but for the wingless star creature in the sky, just right. Tondoor spoke it aloud. \"Star Beast.\" A surge of something\u2014a tingling rainbow of connectedness\u2014rippled through his body. He hopped with delight, flapping his wings at the sky like a goofy hatchling.\n\n\"I see you, Star Beast!\"\n\nFar above, Star Beast cocked its starry head.\n\nIt couldn't really, of course, but it did. The connecting energy knocked Tondoor's breath away.\n\nStar Beast spread its four spindly limbs.\n\nAnd jumped.\n\nOut of the sky.\n\nIt landed with a hiss of steam on the snow in front of him.\n\nAnd assumed the posture of greeting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Greetings",
                "text": "Tondoor's eyes felt two sizes bigger. Star Beast was small, only up to his chest, and stood upright like a tree\u2014but of course, it didn't have a tail to keep it balanced if it tilted properly forward.\n\nIts twinkling face was flat with only a small, pointed snout for its nostrils, and its feet were flat too, with all it its toes in front. It was hard to pick out the details, because if he looked too closely, all he saw was sparkles.\n\nThe lights that formed Star Beast's body were deliciously hot. Through the spaces between them, the snowy beach wavered the way the air did when he looked across his burning log. The snow around its feet, and now his own, was steaming away.\n\nSuddenly Tondoor remembered his manners. He shut his gaping mouth and formed his limbs into the posture of greeting too, then wondered if that was appropriate and if he should use the full posture of respect in front of this being who glittered like Morwaka himself. But it wasn't respect he had felt when he called to it. It was joy.\n\nBefore he could do anything, a picture dropped into his mind. \"Dropped\" was the right word. The picture was nothing like his childhood vision, or Wambool's dream, or the stories he imagined. He could look at it the way he looked at the world, focusing on one part and then moving his eyes to the next. The beach and the sea were still visible behind it.\n\nHe laughed again when he realized what the picture showed. It was him, Tondoor, waving from beside his fire, but seen from so high up that he was a tiny speck in a tiny glow in a dark space beside a bright crescent like Morwaka's sleepy Eye. His world: part night, part day, and him on the edge of the night. All around was a backdrop of stars. How had Star Beast even seen him there?\n\nAs he looked, the speck that was him grew larger, while the rest of the image flew outward and faded away. Now he could see himself clearly, wings flapping and feet bouncing and all of him flickering in the fire's light. And somehow in the picture he could see himself calling out Star Beast's name and feel again the joyous ripple that joined them together.\n\nHe blinked and looked past the image at Star Beast, who was now standing with its long arms dangling at its sides and its eyes twinkling blue. The picture in his head dissolved and a new one appeared. This time it was just Tondoor calling Star Beast's name, but the colors wouldn't stay put. Tondoor was white, then blue, then pink, and the fire was yellow, then orange, then green, all pulsing in time to Tondoor's words: Star Beast, Star Beast, Star Beast.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" he said, although Star Beast couldn't possibly understand his speech. \"What are you trying to tell me?\" And then he did understand. Star Beast was asking him why he had called it down to his world.\n\nThe image cleared, as if Star Beast could tell that he understood.\n\n\"I don't think I meant to call you at all,\" Tondoor stammered, trying to figure out what kind of picture might illustrate his non-answer. He imagined himself relaxing on the beach and looking up at the sky, in case Star Beast could read pictures in his mind as well as put them there. \"I didn't know I was summoning you. I was just daydreaming. I\u2014\"\n\nDaydreaming. Dreaming. Had he just seen a kind of vision? Was Morwaka choosing to talk to him through a star creature?\n\nHe looked up. The stars were all where they had been, including the ones that formed Star Beast. But now they were just scattered lights, and the yellow star in the middle was so faint he could hardly see it. Tondoor dug his toes into the warm sand.\n\n\"We need help,\" he said out loud, because speaking made it easier to think. \"Morwaka has showed us that our world is going to be destroyed by a kraamlok.\" He closed his eyes and summoned the images from Wambool's terrifying dream.\n\nA shining white rock streaks across the stars. Star Beast lived up there. It would know what the kraamlok was. Tondoor felt a surge of hope. Smashes the ground; dragons flee from flame into flame \u2014\n\nColors skittered across the images. He opened his eyes. Star Beast pointed at the burning log, then at Tondoor.\n\nTondoor nodded and re-focused on the horrible image in his mind. A flaming dragon collapsing into a heap of glowing cinders. Dead.\n\nYes. Dragons aren't like you. We burn. Star Beast's question-colors disappeared.\n\nTondoor took a deep breath and closed his eyes again. Ice covers everything. Silence is all that remains.\n\nNow he did not feel cold at all. His scales were flapping open from the heat. He opened his eyes and saw Star Beast blazing furiously. Tondoor backed away.\n\nA picture slammed into his mind. The kraamlok's fire extinguished. The burning dragons not burning. Dragons\u2014hordes of dragons, flying and eating and fighting, so many that he couldn't see the ground or the sky.\n\n\"Yes!\" he exclaimed. \"That's what we want!\"\n\nFor an instant, Tondoor saw a dragon made of stars. It disappeared. Tondoor backed away further as Star Beast's lights blazed hotter and brighter and became a whirling column of light. The column shot into the sky, leaving a sparkling trail that faded as he watched.\n\n\"Star Beast?\"\n\nThere was no connecting ripple, just a cold wind that blew his scales shut again. He might have imagined the whole thing, except that the sand around him was still summer hot on his feet, and his entire log was in flames. He lay down and burrowed into warm sand.\n\nWhat had just happened?\n\nHe had talked to a star creature, and it had come down, here, and shared mind pictures with him. When he showed it the prophecy of the kraamlok, it got angry. It wanted there to be many dragons, just like he did. Just like Morwaka did. Then it whirled back into the sky.\n\nHe gulped. Was Star Beast going to try to stop the kraamlok? Could it? If it succeeded, would it come back to tell him?\n\nHad that been Morwaka it had showed him at the end?\n\nAnd what was he supposed to do with a vision like this?\n\nNo one would believe him\u2014except maybe Zloomba, and he had a feeling she wouldn't be much interested in either of her Snows once she had a hatchling. No one else here believed the kraamlok was coming, so why would they care if it was stopped? He felt sudden sympathy for Wambool, then alarm.\n\nWambool might believe him. And Wambool did not want him to dream away the kraamlok. But that was no problem. He didn't have to tell Wambool. But he shouldn't leave the island either, in case Star Beast did come back.\n\nHe lay his snout on the warm sand. It felt unreal that he might have found the way to escape the kraamlok, after despairing over it for his entire life. He didn't know for sure that Star Beast would try to stop it, or succeed. But it might. It might!\n\nIf it did, and he somehow got back home past the Rock dragons, Elder Mala would give him Kalooka for sure\u2014Hoodon or no Hoodon. And then the rebels could sneak away to the oasis. Everything he had lost could be his again.\n\nAll he had to do now was bide his time and hope Star Beast came back with good news. If not, nothing was worse than before. As long as no one knew about Star Beast's visit, no one would know he'd failed. He felt his eyes bulge a secret, heart-bursting violet.\n\nHe wiggled closer to the remains of the log. The fire was just embers now, and even though the sand was still warm, it wouldn't be for long. He got up into the cold air and carried his hot rocks into his new, makeshift shelter. He curled up around them and closed his eyes.\n\nOutside, something groaned.\n\nTondoor lifted his head. Whatever it was came closer. He heard footsteps, then panting breaths.\n\nA voice croaked, \"What in the name of spitting were that glowing thing you was talking to?\" The speaker collapsed with a long, anguished moan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Awake",
                "text": "Tondoor crawled out of his shelter. The dragon shivering in the wind was the female Snow from the trio of bullies.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he demanded. \"Why aren't you hibernating?\"\n\n\"I d-done woke up.\"\n\n\"You can't wake up. You'll die.\" He nudged her with his snout to see how cold she was. If she did die, he could eat her and he wouldn't have to hunt for a while.\n\n\"I d-didn't m-m-mean to. I seen\u2026\" Her teeth were chattering so hard she couldn't continue.\n\nSo much for keeping Star Beast a secret. He sighed and pulled her to her feet. Eating her would just make him cranky like her. \"Go inside where it's warm.\"\n\n\"That light were like the wind on fire.\" She curled up around the warm stones.\n\nThere wasn't room inside for both of them, so Tondoor settled as close to the remains of the log as he could. \"Just rest.\" Maybe if she went back to sleep she'd think it was a dream.\n\n\"I hasn't eaten nothing since the snow...\" Her eyes closed.\n\n\"I'll find you some food,\" he said. \"Er, I don't know your name.\"\n\n\"Dooloo. And you's Tondoor.\"\n\nHe plodded into the woods. By the light of the stars he dug out a nest of prickly gorbocks. He tossed the beasts onto the sand, found another log, and lit it from the embers of the old one. Dooloo hadn't touched the beasts. \"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"You hasn't cooked them yet.\" He must have looked blank, because she added, \"in the fire. To burn off them prickles.\"\n\nWhy hadn't he thought of that? They burned right off, along with the fur, and the hot beast he kept for himself warmed his insides too.\n\n\"You know what that glowing thing done made me think of?\" Dooloo asked between bites. Her eyes flickered like blue flames inside the shelter's opening. \"That monster the old gloob-eater's always wailing about in his sleep, that's gonna come down here and git us.\"\n\n\"The kraamlok?\" Tondoor wiggled closer to the fire. \"It was nothing like that.\"\n\n\"It come from the sky.\"\n\n\"This sky creature is going to help us.\" Because it was joyful and wanted a world full of dragons.\n\nDooloo stretched her wings, and a piece of brush slid off the shelter. \"Why would a sky creature be wanting to help us?\"\n\nTondoor got up to cover the hole. \"I don't know. But it's going to stop the kraamlok.\" Or try to. At least he hoped it was. Why was he telling her all this? He lay back down so his cold side was facing the fire.\n\n\"Now you's shivering,\" Dooloo said. \"If we squeezes tight, both of us could fit in here.\" She nosed the warm stones into the middle of the small space and squeezed herself against one side with her tail lying across the opening.\n\nThey would be like hatchlings, sleeping so close together. Or else\u2026but no, mating season was over until next fall. He pushed the log closer before stepping over Dooloo's tail and wedging himself into the other side of the shelter. She better not kick in her sleep like Wambool. But even so, it would be better than freezing. Or making another shelter this late at night. \"Thank you,\" he said as he draped his tail over hers so it would lie close to the fire.\n\n\"Thank you first.\" She adjusted her legs. \"I always thought the old wacko were just having night terrors, but now I's not so sure.\" She raised her head, and the fire glowed in her yellow eyes. \"Does you believe him?\"\n\nTondoor grimaced. \"It's as he says.\"\n\n\"You been dreaming it too?\"\n\nHe nodded. Dooloo was very different on her own than with her two friends.\n\n\"I told you I done woke up,\" she said after a while.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, you Plains dragons doesn't know nothing about hibernating, but when you goes to sleep fer the winter, you doesn't never wake up. Never.\"\n\n\"Zloomba said waking up would kill you.\"\n\n\"I'd be dead now if you wasn't here with yer fire 'n beasts.\" She nudged his snout with hers. \"So I owes you.\"\n\nAn interesting thought. \"What woke you up?\"\n\nDooloo stared out at the fire. \"A dream.\" She added hastily, \"I's not saying it were one of them dreams, 'cause I hasn't never had one before. Least not that I knows of. But no dream never woke me up from hibernating before.\"\n\n\"That kind of dream can wake you.\" Tondoor swallowed. \"What did you dream about?\"\n\n\"Zloomba. She were in her cave with her egg fresh laid at the back by the big crack where the water leaks down\u2014\"\n\n\"How do you know about that crack?\"\n\nDooloo paused. \"I seen it when I were a hatchling, of course.\"\n\nTondoor stared. \"Zloomba is your mother?\"\n\n\"Like you doesn't know that already. Mine and Froom's too. We done lived down there 'til the old wacko come and Zloomba throwed us out.\"\n\n\"I never guessed.\" It made sense though, since she lived in Zloomba's part of the woods. \"Is Froom one of your two friends?\"\n\n\"He's the Fire. Vlod's my mate. Listen, does you wanna hear the rest of my dream or not?\"\n\n\"I does\u2014do!\"\n\nDooloo nodded. \"So in my dream, Zloomba done laid her egg. She were about to go out and find some food, 'cause when yer egg pops out, all you can think about is eating. But in my dream I just knowed clear as eye colors that if she done went outside, it would be the end of all the dragons forever.\"\n\n\"Wait. If she came out of her cave, all the dragons would die? How?\"\n\n\"The dream didn't say how. I just knowed that Zloomba had to stay in that cave no matter what. Or else.\" Dooloo ran a claw across his throat. \"Fer all of us.\"\n\nTondoor gulped. Wambool, Blort, and now Dooloo, all dreaming disasters. And Borloo had said Morwaka's star was restless. \"What happened next?\"\n\n\"In my dream I were trying to go to Zloomba to tell her, but I couldn't because I were asleep, but I had to, but I were asleep, but I had to, and then I just done woke up.\"\n\n\"Did you tell her?\"\n\n\"I flew direct to her cave. But she were hibernating, and I sure weren't gonna wake her up to tell her to stay where she already were. So I just kept flying, riding whatever wind there was, 'til I saw that light. And there was you.\" Her wing bumped his above the warm stones. \"Lucky thing too, 'cause if I done died, who woulda told Zloomba?\"\n\n\"Now two of us know,\" said Tondoor. He blew out a long breath.\n\n\"So you think it were one of them dreams?\" Dooloo asked. Her voice trembled.\n\n\"If it is,\" said Tondoor, \"it could mean the kraamlok will come right after Zloomba lays her egg.\" Then Wambool would get his demented wish\u2014unless Star Beast intervened.\n\nDooloo chuckled. \"If the kraamlok do come, that old gloob-eater'll never know about it, after all his blathering.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I seen him staggering around in the snow when I were flying. He musta found some gloob. When the sleep hits him, he'll fall down where he is 'til he's froze solid.\"\n\nTondoor groaned. He'd said he was done with Wambool, but\u2026 \"I promised Zloomba I'd look after him.\"\n\n\"If she don't come outta her cave, she won't never know,\" said Dooloo. \"And isn't no one else gonna miss him.\"\n\nTondoor tried to memorize the feeling of warmth against his scales as he slid out of the shelter. \"I'll come back as soon as I can.\" If Star Beast came back\u2014but he didn't know what Star Beast was going to do, and Wambool was outside freezing.\n\nHe dragged over another dry log that was lying nearby. \"Make sure you light this one before the old one burns out.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes flickered blue before she closed them. \"I weren't hatched yesterday.\"\n\nNeither was Wambool, yet he was looking after both of them. He unfurled his wings. \"If Star Beast comes back, tell it to wait for me.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes snapped open. Tondoor flew away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Minder",
                "text": "It was palest dawn when he located Wambool partly buried in snow not far from their original camp, stiff but still breathing. He didn't wake when Tondoor shook him, so Tondoor dragged him to the shelter. He started a log burning, retrieved the rocks from both shelters and set them heating, shoved Wambool inside, distributed the warm rocks, and flopped inside the other shelter to sleep.\n\nHe woke, cold and ravenous, around midday. His newly healed wing ached.\n\nWambool was warming himself over the last of the embers. \"I'm hungry,\" he whined.\n\nTondoor sat down. He was not playing minder to this useless Snow. \"Then go hunt.\"\n\nWambool crumpled onto the snow. \"I can't. I'm not well.\"\n\nTondoor snorted.\n\nWambool scowled. \"You'd take gloob too if you had to see that dream every night.\"\n\n\"When we first got here and you were exhausted, you didn't dream for days,\" Tondoor reminded him. Same when they were learning to fight, but he wasn't going to give Wambool ideas. \"So wear yourself out and you won't need gloob.\"\n\nWambool spat in the snow. \"It's easy to catch beasts when they're all sleeping. How will that wear me out?\"\n\nHow much of Wambool's incompetence was real, and how much did he put on when it was convenient? \"Then fly around after you eat.\"\n\n\"Zloomba trained you to look after me, remember?\"\n\n\"You weren't born yesterday, remember?\"\n\n\"My head hurts.\" Wambool flopped onto the snow.\n\nTondoor got to his feet. \"Fine. But after this, you are on your own.\"\n\nThere was no sign of Star Beast when Tondoor returned to the beach, but Dooloo was lying half inside the shelter, staring at something on the sand beside her smoldering log. \"My egg done died,\" she said when he got close. She nosed a shiny orange blob in the sand.\n\n\"Oh. I'm sorry.\" Tondoor leaned closer to see in the waning light. A tiny dragonet with an oversized, stubby head lay curled up inside a translucent orange shell.\n\n\"He woulda been red like Vlod.\"\n\nTondoor had no wish for another Vlod, but he couldn't say that to Dooloo. \"He sure is small,\" he said instead.\n\n\"Guess I'll have another one next year, if that kraamlok don't come.\" She licked the shell, then slurped it up. She laid her head on the sand and looked up at him. \"Too small fer a good meal.\"\n\nNo wonder minders got irritable. Their charges were always hungry.\n\n\"Did Star Beast come back?\" he asked before setting out to hunt once again. Dooloo shook her head and slid back into the shelter. Tondoor flew into the darkening woods.\n\nDooloo was asleep when he returned, so he lit a new log, warmed the beasts he'd found and ate half of them, then crawled in beside her. The next day, he built a larger shelter. He'd planned to build a second small one, but Dooloo insisted that a shared one would be warmer.\n\nDays flowed past. It was peaceful looking after Dooloo and waiting for Star Beast to return. She slept a lot, and at first he thought she might slip back into hibernation. But after a few days she began to hunt with him, and even made a pile of dead trees for their fires, with brush over top to keep the snow off. The trees with the dead, spiky leaves burned the best.\n\nDooloo looked no worse for waking up early. Tondoor took the advice he had given Wambool and went for long flights every day. Over time, his wing stopped aching.\n\nMost nights, the sky was covered with clouds. When it wasn't, he tried calling Star Beast again, but either Star Beast wasn't listening, or couldn't hear, or didn't have anything to say. Neither did Morwaka. So he crawled inside where Dooloo was usually already asleep, and surrendered to the darkness.\n\n\"It comes, it comes, the kraamlok co-o-o-o-o-omes!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Old Wacko",
                "text": "At first Tondoor thought the wailing was part of a dream. But it continued, louder and more insistent.\n\nDooloo lifted her head. \"What's that old wacko doing here?\" She pushed past Tondoor to peer outside.\n\nHe followed her out. The noise was coming from the first small shelter he'd made. Their log, now mostly ash, smoldered in front of the entrance.\n\nDooloo kicked it aside and dove inside. \"Wake up, you miserable gloob-head!\" Twigs and spiky leaves rained onto the snow around her tail.\n\nWambool stopped wailing and began to shriek. Dooloo backed out into the snow, pulling him by the neck. She flung him to the ground. \"Soon as it's light, you's gonna go into them woods and find some gloob. And then you is gonna eat it, continual. You got that?\"\n\n\"Fine with me,\" squeaked Wambool. \"It's hatchling here who said flying around would keep away dreams.\"\n\n\"Just fly away and leave us alone,\" said Tondoor. \"You have two other shelters to do your squawking in.\" He yanked a piece of brush off the one Wambool had slept in.\n\nWambool chuckled. \"And leave my apprentice in the middle of his training?\"\n\n\"You never trained me.\"\n\n\"I did so. I taught you everything you need to know.\"\n\n\"We could go use them other shelters,\" said Dooloo, \"long as he stays here.\"\n\n\"But what about\u2026\" Tondoor motioned at the sky.\n\nDooloo huffed. \"Yer shiny Star Beast don't seem to be coming back anyhow. And if old wacko here's still dreaming, then his kraamlok's still coming.\"\n\n\"Shush!\" whispered Tondoor. \"He doesn't know.\"\n\n\"Star Beast!\" Dooloo shouted. \"Tondoor's Star Beast is gonna stop the kraamlok!\" She glared at him. \"Only it's not, so I say just shut his snout any way that's gonna work.\"\n\nWambool's eyes flooded with red as he glared at Tondoor. \"So you have been dreaming.\" He flexed his claws.\n\nDooloo stepped out of the way. Whose side was she on, anyway?\n\nTondoor circled Wambool, keeping his knees bent, wings folded, arms ready and neck loose like Zloomba had taught him. \"Yes, in a way you never even imagined. Morwaka has a plan to stop your precious killer.\"\n\nWambool's eyes narrowed to red slits. He lunged. Tondoor dodged. Wambool was quick, and steady on his feet. \"You can't stop the kraamlok,\" he growled.\n\n\"Star Beast can,\" said Tondoor, circling. Enjoying the hot anger burning in his own.\n\n\"Or maybe not,\" Dooloo interjected.\n\n\"It can't,\" shouted Wambool. \"Nothing can. It's coming, just like I saw.\" He lunged again. \"You have no right to interfere. It's my prophecy.\"\n\n\"It's Morwaka's prophecy.\" Tondoor ignored Dooloo's chuckle and kept his eyes fixed on Wambool. But suddenly, all he could see was flickering colors.\n\nWambool's tail slammed into Tondoor's side, cracking his scales and knocking him off his feet. He managed to break his fall with his arm instead of his recently healed wing before the older dragon's feet thumped onto his leg and his tail. Wambool's fangs scraped his neck\u2014then he was gone.\n\nTondoor righted himself.\n\nDooloo plunked onto Wambool's back, pressing his wings into the snow with her feet. She yanked his neck up with her elbow and twisted his arm behind his back with her other hand. \"Say I's the leader,\" she growled, \"or I rips yer arm off.\"\n\n\"You is!\" squealed Wambool.\n\nDooloo tightened her grip. \"I is what?\"\n\n\"Leader! You is the leader!\"\n\n\"Don't forget it,\" she snarled. \"Now, when I lets go, this is what you's gonna do. First, you's gonna get me some food and a fresh log. Not from our pile here, but from out in them trees. Then you's gonna light it from this one, to make up fer waking us up. Then you's gonna make yerself a new shelter way off in them woods where we can't hear you and stay there 'til I say. You gots that?\" She yanked on his neck one more time.\n\n\"I gots it,\" Wambool croaked. He slunk into the woods, rubbing his neck.\n\nTondoor got to his feet, rubbing his own neck. Neither of his wings was broken. \"He was going to kill me.\"\n\n\"Now we's even,\" said Dooloo. \"So watch yerself.\" She watched Wambool stagger out of sight. \"What do that wacko care if you dream too?\" She cocked her head. \"Why don't he want you to stop the kraamlok?\"\n\n\"Because he's wacko,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"And you is hopeless at fighting, for all that teaching Zloomba done gave you. Why'd you let him get you with his tail? I seen you block that kind of attack before.\"\n\n\"I was thinking about something else,\" said Tondoor. All those colors...\n\nDooloo shook her head. \"You's not gonna last a day on yer own once everyone wakes up. Good thing I knows what to do. Remember that.\" She crawled back into their shelter.\n\nTondoor gazed at the white, featureless sky. Star Beast, are you there? He pictured it plunking down in front of him.\n\nIt didn't.\n\nWambool returned in a surprisingly short time, dragging a log and two beasts. Dooloo watched him light the log and chose the beast she wanted. Tondoor went to take the other one, but Dooloo pushed it back at Wambool. \"He who hunts it gets to eat it. Except fer me.\"\n\nAfter all the food he'd given her. Muttering, he flew off to hunt. When he got back, Dooloo was lecturing Wambool. He landed quietly to roast the prickles off his beast.\n\nDooloo glanced at him, then back at Wambool. \"You gots to realize you's not the only seer around.\"\n\nWambool curled his lip but said nothing.\n\n\"I done dreamed about that kraamlok too,\" Dooloo continued. \"I seen that Zloomba gotta stay in her cave 'cause it's gonna splat down right after she lays her egg.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Wambool leapt to his feet. \"Hear that, Useless? Give up now.\"\n\nHurry, Star Beast!\n\nWambool's eyes bulged with a lurid, gloating violet. \"Why would Morwaka tell you to keep Zloomba in the cave if she was just going to die? It must mean that somehow, the kraamlok won't find her in there.\" He whooped. \"Zloomba and my egg are going to survive!\" His tail bobbed as his feet made little dancing hops. \"Morwaka is rewarding me for my faithful service! Just think, after the kraamlok is gone, every single living dragon will be my offspring!\"\n\nTondoor groaned.\n\n\"Hmmph. Well, maybe,\" said Dooloo. \"The dream weren't clear about what happens after. Maybe it... hmmph.\"\n\nTondoor blinked. If Zloomba was going to survive, maybe other dragons could too. Maybe the kraamlok didn't have to be stopped, just avoided. Somehow.\n\nDooloo snapped her teeth at Wambool. \"Now get yerself outta here and make yerself a shelter. Or if you's too lazy, go back to the one Tondoor done made you in the other place.\"\n\n\"I think, instead, I'll take a nap,\" said Wambool. He lay down on the sand next to the log.\n\nA picture slammed into Tondoor's mind.\n\nThree glowing objects, two faint and one bright, hurtled toward him. He knew what he would see before it happened: the bright one became a glowing ice-rock. It didn't have a tail yet, but it was clear what it was. The other two grew into blazing star creatures. One was Star Beast. The other was the star dragon he had seen before. Excitement shivered inside him.\n\nThe two star creatures strained against the monstrous kraamlok. It flew relentlessly on, dragging the two others along like specks of dust. Star Beast's image grayed, speaking exhaustion, sadness, and futility.\n\nTondoor's excitement congealed to dread. Star Beast and the star dragon had failed. It wasn't Morwaka, then. Just a creature, like him and Star Beast.\n\nThe image faded. Star Beast flickered dimly in a snowy tree beside the shelter. Water dripped off the spiky branches under its feet.\n\nDooloo and Wambool gasped.\n\nTondoor spoke. \"You're right, mentor. The kraamlok is on its way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Stone",
                "text": "For a moment, no one said anything. Then Wambool and Dooloo both spoke at once.\n\n\"I told you. Nothing can stop the kraamlok.\"\n\n\"Like I done said\u2014it's gonna come after the laying.\"\n\n\"That star thing's feet are melting the snow.\"\n\n\"If it sticks around, we won't have to burn no more logs.\"\n\nTondoor stared at Star Beast staring back at him. What should they do now? The only thing he could think of was to find a way to hide everyone from the kraamlok, so they would survive like Zloomba. Before he could think of a suitable image, Wambool elbowed his left side. \"How come I didn't hear it talking to you?\"\n\nDooloo pushed past him on his right. \"Hey, Star Beast, does you have something to tell me? I's a seer too, you know.\"\n\nWambool yanked her back by the tail. \"I'm the elder seer. It should be talking to me.\"\n\nDooloo pulled free. \"I seen it before you. It should be talking to me.\"\n\nThis was ridiculous! If only there was a nice, peaceful patch of forest with just him and Star Beast in it, so they could think. The image brightened in his mind. Star Beast floated out of the tree and right over top of the other two dragons' swiveling necks.\n\nTondoor expected Star Beast's touch to burn him, but instead he felt dizzy, as if he were spinning in a tornado of colors. Dooloo's and Wambool's cries stopped abruptly. He was standing in another part of the forest, alone with Star Beast.\n\n\"How did you do that?\"\n\nBut Star Beast was busy walking in circles. Tondoor watched the snow melt and green shoots of grass sprout under its feet. Where it brushed the branches, leaf-buds swelled and burst open. Warm scents of bark and moss filled his nostrils. What power this star creature had! He couldn't remember now\u2014had he pictured a summer forest?\n\nStar Beast bent over and inspected a fallen log. Large red beetles, just waking up, skittered along cracks in the deeply grooved bark. The tip of Star Beast's finger blazed. Tondoor felt the heat as Star Beast jabbed it against one of the beetles. It shriveled up. The other beetles scurried away.\n\nThe image of the burning hot kraamlok appeared in his mind. It slammed into a dragon, which shriveled up like the beetle. The colors flickered.\n\n\"Yes. Just like that.\" If this was a joke, it wasn't funny.\n\nThe image vanished. Star Beast pointed its hot finger at a second beetle. This beetle didn't burn. Instead, its back turned more and more gray until it almost disappeared against the bark.\n\n\"What did you just do?\" Tondoor bent closer to see. He tried to picture flickering colors. He couldn't imagine as many as Star Beast had shown him, so he settled for sky snow sky snow sky snow.\n\nStar Beast's mouth stars curved upward like a snoof lifting its head and tail. The picture that dropped into Tondoor's mind showed a gray pebble and a large red beetle, so close that Tondoor could see dust on the pebble and flaky scales on the beetle's closed wings. As he watched, the pebble and the beetle merged, leaving a gray beetle like the one on the log.\n\nStar Beast had turned the beetle to stone.\n\nTondoor tapped his claw on its back. It skittered forward. So the legs weren't stone, just the shell.\n\nStar Beast did a little dance. The new picture showed Tondoor standing beside a boulder. The rock slid over and merged with him. Now he was speckled gray like the rock. Now a huge fire engulfed him, and he stood unharmed in the flames.\n\nStar Beast reached out its arm.\n\nTondoor jumped away. \"Wait. Let me think about this.\" He imagined his body made of stone\u2014white stone, not gray. How could he move? Maybe if his scales were made of stone and could still slide over each other the way they did now, they would shield the inside of his body against the flames. But what about the soft parts, like his eyes and nostrils and foot-pads? What about his wings?\n\n\"Can the beetle fly?\" he asked. He pictured the stone beetle flapping its stone wings, surrounded by flickering colors.\n\nStar Beast waved its arms in circles above the furrows in the bark. Beetles flew up in a small whirlwind of red wings. The stone beetle stayed on the log.\n\nStar Beast's lights dimmed further.\n\n\"Rocks are too stiff.\" Tondoor pictured his stone self, trying to walk with his stiff legs. The colors flickered. He tried again: his stone self, straining to lift his wings. Instead of unfurling, they cracked into shards and broke off. He opened his stone mouth, and his lower jaw fell off.\n\nA new picture appeared, of the pebble sliding off the beetle and the beetle turning red again.\n\nA voice chortled above the trees. \"There you is!\" Dooloo's white body circled overhead.\n\nStar Beast flitted away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hiding",
                "text": "Dooloo shot after it, shouting. \"Come back! I wants to talk to you!\"\n\nTondoor opened his wings and leapt back up into winter. His scales clamped together again as he raced after Dooloo. In the far distance, Wambool was also flying.\n\nDooloo pointed with her snout. \"Look. Its lights is flickering through them trees.\"\n\nHe beat the air to catch up to her. \"If you hadn't scared it, we wouldn't have to chase it.\"\n\n\"I gots something important to tell it. I has an idea how we can save the dragons from the kraamlok.\"\n\n\"Really? How?\"\n\n\"I's not telling you. I's telling Star Beast direct.\" Dooloo looked at him sideways. \"Tell me how you talks to Star Beast, and you'll find out.\" She picked up speed. \"But we hafta get there before the old wacko, so he don't tell Star Beast first.\"\n\n\"You told him but you won't tell me?\"\n\n\"He kinda figured it out hisself from things I said.\" She narrowed her eyes. \"But I's not telling him nothing more.\"\n\nTondoor sighed. \"You make pictures in your head, and Star Beast sees them. It talks to you by putting pictures in your head.\"\n\nDooloo considered. \"Hmm. I have a picture of my idea.\" She waited a few moments, watching Star Beast flit through the trees. \"How come it's still flittering?\"\n\n\"Maybe it only listens to me.\" He felt a smug triumph.\n\n\"You call it, then. Make a picture of it stopping and me talking to it.\"\n\nTondoor put himself in the picture too, standing between them. For a moment nothing happened. Then down in the trees, Star Beast stopped. Tondoor's mind picture became clearer and brighter. \"Star Beast says to come down.\"\n\nTondoor and Dooloo crowded into Star Beast's warmth. Colors flickered in Tondoor's mind.\n\nHe pointed at Dooloo. \"It's her idea; you have to ask her.\"\n\nDooloo shut her eyes tightly. A picture began to form in Tondoor's mind. His eyes warmed to blue. Star Beast wanted him to see Dooloo's thoughts too.\n\nHer image showed dragons crowded inside Zloomba's cave. That was it? No wonder Wambool had figured out her idea.\n\nIn the image, the cave's crack smoothed over and disappeared. A different cave, then? Fire raged outside, but the dragons stayed safe and cool below. A stack of dead beasts plunked into the picture. A bigger stack. Now a hole in the cave floor, full of water. Some of the dragons disappeared.\n\nDooloo hadn't worked out all the details ahead of time.\n\nShe opened her eyes. \"There. I done showed you. \"Whaddya think?\"\n\nStar Beast stood still. New pictures flooded Tondoor's mind. Dooloo's eyes grew round\u2014she must be seeing them too. Deep caves full of dragons. Flames crackling above, but dragons cool and safe inside.\n\nDooloo clutched Tondoor's arm. \"I think it likes my idea.\"\n\nAn avalanche of snow flopped onto their heads. Dooloo shrieked.\n\nThe snow stabbed like gorbock spines under Tondoor's scales, which had wafted open in Star Beast's heat. He shook snow out of his eyes and nostrils and off his shoulders and wings, and Dooloo shook hers all over him, and by the time he could see again, Star Beast was gone.\n\nBranches cracked above them. Tondoor yanked Dooloo aside just in time as Wambool crashed through the trees and landed with a splash in the slushy snow at their feet.\n\n\"You was spying on us,\" Dooloo accused. \"Sitting up there listening!\"\n\nWambool shrugged his wings. \"I misjudged my landing.\" Triumphant violet mixed with deceitful orange in his eyes as he brushed himself off.\n\n\"You aren't that clumsy,\" Tondoor growled. \"You shook snow on us on purpose to stop us talking to Star Beast.\"\n\nWambool's eyes narrowed. He kicked aside a broken branch, splashing water on their feet. \"I am the elder seer! The kraamlok is my prophecy. You and that star creature have no right to interfere!\"\n\nDooloo snarled. \"It's Morwaka's prophecy and Morwaka's star beast, and we can talk to it anytime we wants!\"\n\n\"You don't need a star beast to tell dragons to hide in caves.\" Blue seeped into the red in Wambool's eyes.\n\nUh oh. He was planning something.\n\nDooloo glanced at Tondoor. \"My plan is hiding dragons in caves. There. I done told you.\"\n\nWambool smirked. \"You try telling them to hide. They won't listen. Even if they do, it won't help. There's only one cave on the entire island, and Zloomba is already in it.\"\n\n\"Who says there's not more of them?\" asked Dooloo. \"We hasn't poked our snouts into every crack in this whole island. I bets there's plenty more caves just waiting to be found.\"\n\nWambool snorted. \"If there were, someone would be in them.\"\n\nDooloo snorted back. \"Most dragons isn't interested in living in holes.\"\n\nWambool shrugged. \"Maybe they'll listen to you. But don't count on it.\" He flapped up and away.\n\n\"You's a miserable glarfing wacko gloob-eater!\" Dooloo shouted after him. She turned to Tondoor. \"I says let's you and me ignore him and go find them caves. Even if them others doesn't believe us now, they'll know what to do when they needs to.\"\n\n\"Good plan,\" Tondoor said. But he kept his eyes on Wambool as they flapped out of the trees. The old seer was going to be trouble."
            },
            {
                "title": "Spring",
                "text": "\"First place to look is that long ridge where Zloomba has her cave,\" Dooloo announced as they flew. \"Where there's one cave there's likely more.\"\n\nIf there were, it soon became clear that there was no hope of finding them until the snow melted. They couldn't even agree where Zloomba's cave lay under the thick snow. So they flew back to their shelter to wait for spring. Wambool didn't return, and neither did Star Beast.\n\nA few days later, thick white clouds settled in like pond ice. Drizzle turned the snow to daytime slush and nighttime ice, and woke the scents of sweet sap and damp brown leaves. Birds celebrated in dripping trees. Footprints of all sizes started to leave trails in the soft snow and Tondoor and Dooloo had to start chasing their meals. Sometimes newly-wakened dragons chased the same ones\u2014or them.\n\nThe rain turned to snow again, then back to rain, then back to snow. Tondoor spent a lot of time crouched in wet, dirty snow, grateful for the camouflaging dirt on his white scales. Dooloo did the same; although she could best Tondoor or Wambool in a fight any day, she was no match for most of the Rainy Island dragons.\n\nOne snowy evening, Tondoor happened across a splay-legged bird lying red in the new snow\u2014so fresh that its intestines were still steaming. He crouched in the bushes with his empty stomach rumbling for some time, but no one came to claim it. Hardly daring to believe his luck, he crept out.\n\nThe first bite was still hot between his teeth when someone slammed his head to the side. The meat shot from his mouth. Claws pressed into his back. He prepared to die, but instead, Dooloo's voice rasped in his ear, \"It's poisoned.\" She climbed off him and stretched apart the beast's torn abdomen. Small, purple lumps oozed up out of the bloody mess.\n\nTondoor sniffed. Hot, sticky heart, chewy lungs, and\u2026 \"Gloob?\"\n\nDooloo stirred the beast's intestines with one finger-claw. \"Yup. There's pieces of it mixed in all through here. After you done ate all that, you woulda never woke up.\"\n\nTondoor's hunger vanished. Now that he knew it was there, the gloob was obvious. \"Who did this?\"\n\nDooloo shot him an exasperated look. \"The old wacko, is who.\"\n\nTondoor stepped backward. He didn't like Wambool either. But poison?\n\nTwigs crackled as another white dragon rose out of the dirty snow in the trees. The old wacko himself. Tondoor growled and Dooloo bristled into attack position.\n\nWambool snarled. \"This is only the beginning, hatchlings.\" He leapt into the air and circled the clearing. \"The kraamlok comes on fiery wings of ice! Heed my words, oh unlucky dragons: your doom is near! While you slept in peaceful trust, two treacherous seers summoned the flaming star beast, which even now stalks among us!\"\n\n\"Who's he calling treacherous?\" grumbled Dooloo. Tondoor waved at her to be quiet.\n\nWambool's voice continued. \"The star beast guides the kraamlok like a flaming torch. It whispers calming pictures into our minds while it plans our destruction. Do not listen to the star beast! Do not listen to the two false seers! They seek only to trick us into dying without a fight!\"\n\nTondoor seethed. \"That scheming liar. Which of us is being tricky?\"\n\n\"Who's not gonna fight?\" asked Dooloo. She kicked the beast's carcass hard. Blood, guts, and gloob spattered the snow.\n\nWambool's silhouette slid across the darkening sky. \"Do not despair!\" he shrieked. \"Morwaka has sent me, your true seer, a vision of hope. These are the words of Morwaka: find yourselves holes in the ground. Dig them if you must, with claws and sticks and tails.\"\n\n\"Thief!\" shouted Dooloo. \"That were my idea!\" She grabbed a piece of gloob and hurled it after him.\n\nWambool waggled his hand-claws by his head in the posture of ridicule, then flew off. \"I, Wambool, seer of the Rainy Island, deliver the words of Morwaka. When you see the kraamlok shining in the sky, following the traitors' star beast, hide yourselves underground, and live!\"\n\n\"Seer of the Rainy Island?\" Dooloo sputtered. \"That be me, not no lying Plains idiot.\"\n\n\"Thus will you save yourselves from the kraamlok, unlucky dragons. For it comes, it comes, the kraamlok co-o-o-o-omes!\" Wambool's cries faded as he flew out of sight.\n\nThe scent of bloody gloob rose from the poisoned carcass. Now it didn't make Tondoor hungry; it made him nauseous. \"That evil liar. He's twisting everything.\"\n\n\"And he done stole my idea, after saying how stupid it was. Now everyone'll think it was his, and he gets to be the hero instead of me.\"\n\n\"I guess we don't have to look for caves,\" said Tondoor. \"Now everyone will be looking for them and digging holes if they can't find one.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes flashed red. \"You know what else they'll be looking for? Us. He said Star Beast's guiding the kraamlok, and we's the ones who called it.\"\n\n\"If they believe him,\" said Tondoor. \"They didn't before.\"\n\n\"If they sees Star Beast, they will.\"\n\nTondoor picked a dead leaf out of a scale on his arm. He kept his eyes down. \"It's time for me to leave the island. You can look after yourself, but if I stay, I'm dead. And now I know what to tell the dragons.\"\n\nDooloo stirred the snow with her foot-claws. \"But what about\u2014what if Star Beast come back to talk to you again?\"\n\nTondoor ruffled his wings. \"You already told it your plan.\"\n\nDooloo shuffled closer. \"If you leaves, I's gonna miss you.\" She touched her snout to his. \"If you done stayed, and we done found a cave together, you'd make me a fine mate next fall.\"\n\nWarmth cascaded through Tondoor. Dooloo was breathing on him and he couldn't think what else to do, so he put his hand-claws gently around her elbows. \"I'll miss you too.\" he said, realizing with surprise that it was true. Dooloo's eyes turned blue.\n\nA savage roar broke the moment. Vlod crashed toward them, blood red eyes in blood red scales, with Froom like an orange flame right behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Proof",
                "text": "Dooloo jumped in front of Tondoor. \"We's just having a conference,\" she squeaked.\n\nVlod growled. \"You wasn't in the shelter when I woke up.\" He flexed his claws. \"The old wacko didn't say you was playing around, but I kinda guessed.\" Froom nodded.\n\nOnce again, Tondoor didn't know what to do. He felt like a ninny hiding behind Dooloo, but on the other hand, she was the only thing standing between him and a bloody death.\n\n\"We's trying to save the dragons from the kraamlok,\" Dooloo said. She rose to her full height, which was still shorter than either of the two bullies.\n\n\"Wacko said you two done called a star beast from the sky to show the kraamlok where to blast us.\" Vlod growled.\n\n\"Star beast,\" snickered Froom. \"As if.\"\n\nTondoor cringed.\n\n\"Star Beast is real,\" said Dooloo, stamping her foot and spattering bits of gloob. \"It's helping us get away from the wacko's kraamlok. Why would you believe anything that old gloob-eater says anyway?\" She lowered her voice. \"You better not mess with Star Beast, or with us, because a star beast is very powerful.\"\n\nTondoor poked his head around her side. He made his voice low too. \"It can turn things to stone if it doesn't like them.\"\n\n\"I doesn't think so,\" said Vlod, but he pulled back his claws and his eyes faded to a cautious yellow. Dooloo looked over her shoulder at Tondoor, her eyes wide.\n\n\"It turned a beetle to stone,\" said Tondoor. \"It was going to turn a dragon too but I stopped it.\" It couldn't hurt to sound powerful, even if his knees were quaking.\n\n\"Tondoor can prove it,\" Dooloo said. She stepped away and unfurled her wings. \"Go ahead. Show us.\"\n\nTondoor opened his wings too. If the beetle was still on the log, and if he could find it. At least the excursion would buy them time.\n\n\"Come, see, and tremble,\" said Dooloo.\n\nShe leapt into the gray evening sky. Tondoor leapt up after her. Vlod and Froom leapt up on either side of him. Dooloo led them confidently above the dark trees and dropped into the little grove. Tondoor touched down beside her, and Vlod and Froom squeezed in.\n\n\"Is them fresh leaves?\" Froom asked, peering at a branch.\n\n\"Star Beast made spring come early here,\" said Tondoor. \"But it froze again.\"\n\n\"You gots six breaths to show us yer beetle,\" growled Vlod. He took a deep breath and blew it out. \"One.\"\n\nTondoor's feet skidded on a frozen puddle as he bent to blow the fresh snow out of the bark. In the dim light, even the red beetles were hard to pick out.\n\nVlod breathed out another noisy breath. \"Two.\"\n\n\"Tondoor'll find it,\" said Dooloo. Her voice quavered slightly.\n\n\"I wish there was more light,\" Tondoor muttered. He tried not to think about how a stone beetle would look a lot like a pebble.\n\nVlod breathed out again. \"Three. I'll give you light.\" A moment later, flames spewed out between the long teeth in his wide open jaw.\n\nTondoor jerked aside as the fire licked the log. Aha! A flash of gray! He pinched the beetle between two claws and held it up. \"Here it is!\"\n\nVlod's fire faded into smoke. \"Four,\" he growled.\n\n\"I don't see nothing,\" said Froom. His head slid like a snoof through the thinning smoke.\n\n\"I don't see nothing neither,\" said Vlod. His arm struck Tondoor's, knocking the beetle away. \"Five.\"\n\n\"You's not even trying,\" accused Dooloo.\n\n\"I done tried, and all I done seen is a ninny,\" growled Vlod. \"Six.\" He shoved Dooloo against the log."
            },
            {
                "title": "Eggs",
                "text": "Saliva spattered Tondoor's belly. \"Star Beast\u2014help!\" he squeaked.\n\nStar Beast stood blazing between them.\n\n\"Woo-hoo! I done told you Star Beast were real!\" shouted Dooloo.\n\nVlod gurgled. He skittered backward and bumped into Froom. Both of them turned and fled into the dark woods.\n\nStar Beast's lights dimmed. It hopped onto the log and stood flickering at them. Colors danced in Tondoor's mind. Was Star Beast laughing?\n\n\"You done come just in time,\" Dooloo said. She closed her eyes and concentrated.\n\nTondoor caught an image of Vlod knocking Tondoor flat, bones snapping and scales flying. Star Beast's lights blinked and the image was replaced by one of Vlod sizzling.\n\n\"Right,\" said Dooloo. \"Um, right. Thanks.\" She fixed Star Beast with her gaze. \"Does you know what the old wacko been saying about us?\" She closed her eyes to come up with another image.\n\nSomething brushed Tondoor's foot as Dooloo's mind-pictures paraded through his mind. A dazed-looking glarf crept onto the frozen puddle. Tondoor watched it blink its eyes, shiny in Star Beast's glow. It nosed one of the fresh grass shoots under the ice, slipped onto its belly, and skidded into Tondoor's foot again. It squeaked and scrambled back under the bushes.\n\n\"But going into caves weren't the old wacko's idea\u2014it were mine!\" Dooloo finished her story with an image of herself dreaming about Zloomba.\n\nTondoor felt uneasy, as if something was about to pounce. On the log, the beetles lay motionless in the bark. Under the ice at his feet lay a small bird with its wings frozen open and its legs curled up. One twiggy claw protruded through the ice. He remembered it chirping in Star Beast's warmth. Song, now silence; water, now ice.\n\nHis heart beat an alarm.\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\" Dooloo asked.\n\nStar Beast's question-colors flickered in his mind.\n\nTondoor pressed himself against a tree to still the shaking in his body. \"The kraamlok doesn't just bring fire. We forgot...\" He stopped to get his breathing under control.\n\n\"Forgot what?\" demanded Dooloo.\n\n\"The ice,\" he whispered. \"Over everything, once the kraamlok's fire is gone. When it's cold, dark winter for a long, long time. When silence is all that remains.\" The dream image glistened in his mind.\n\nStar Beast's colors flickered over it, more urgently than before.\n\nTondoor squeezed his eyes shut and pictured dragons encased in ice. \"It won't work to hide in caves.\"\n\n\"But dragons sleep through winter.\" Dooloo tugged on his arm. \"You knows that. You done seen us.\"\n\nTondoor opened his eyes, now heavy with gray. \"For how long?\"\n\nDooloo ruffled her wings. \"Until spring, of course.\"\n\n\"What if spring never comes?\"\n\nDooloo shrugged. \"If they wakes up early, they can dig out beasts like we been doing.\"\n\n\"Until they eat them all. Because if there's no spring, there won't be any more beasts.\" He jabbed his toe-claw at the bird in the ice.\n\nDooloo jabbed her toe-claw at him. \"But what about my dream, with Zloomba in the cave? Why'd Morwaka show me that if she's not gonna make it?\"\n\nA rough voice came from the trees behind Star Beast. \"What's that there light?\"\n\nTondoor squinted but couldn't see anyone in the darkness. \"Maybe it means something else. Maybe we were wrong.\"\n\nNeither Star Beast nor Dooloo appeared to have noticed the voice.\n\n\"I knows why!\" shouted Dooloo. \"It's fer the egg. Eggs keep fer years if they's kept cold. One time Zloomba's egg come quicker'n she thought, and it rolled under a deep snarl of tree roots and hid there fer six whole summers. When the tree done fell over, there were the egg. She put it in her warm cave and it done hatched just fine.\" She turned to Star Beast. \"Like this. See?\"\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut, and Tondoor saw the whole story again in pictures while the invisible someone rustled in the trees.\n\n\"That were Froom,\" she added. \"We's the same age even though Zloomba done laid him six years before.\"\n\n\"It's that star beast,\" growled the voice, louder now. \"And them two traitors.\"\n\nNow Dooloo heard. Her head swiveled toward the voice.\n\n\"So if the dragons bury their eggs deeply,\" Tondoor said quickly, making a mind picture as he spoke, \"the eggs could stay frozen as long as they need to, then hatch when they warm up, even years later.\"\n\n\"Yup,\" said Dooloo. She squinted in the direction of the grunts behind Star Beast, who was just standing there, flickering. \"But they does better if they's frozen right when they's laid. I knowed another dragon lost her egg in a creek just before hatching. She done found it later, and dosed it with fire to warm it up, but it never hatched. So she ate it.\"\n\nBranches snapped while Dooloo talked, but Star Beast still didn't move. Colors swirled inside Tondoor's mind.\n\n\"So the eggs will have to be buried soon after they're laid,\" Tondoor said, sidling closer to Star Beast and pulling Dooloo closer too. He silenced the thought that stashing eggs wouldn't save the dragons living now.\n\n\"Nice and deep to keep them from roasting in the fire,\" said Dooloo. She glared at Star Beast as a picture formed in their minds. \"No, you can't just bury them in dirt like a fire root. They needs a place to climb out when they's hatched, like the opening in a cave.\"\n\nStar Beast's mind picture shifted to show large, muddy eggs half buried in the ground.\n\nDooloo stiffened. \"No!\" she gasped. \"Not there!\"\n\nThere was no more time. Superimposed on Star Beast's image was the one Tondoor was seeing with his eyes: a shadowy silhouette of a large dragon lifting a basket of slushy snow over Star Beast's head. \"Look out!\" he shouted.\n\nStar Beast's starry hands gripped them. Dizziness engulfed Tondoor as icy water spattered his snout.\n\nWhen his head cleared, the three of them were standing in a sparsely treed part of the island he had never been in before. In Star Beast's light he saw the muddy eggs from its mind image, half-buried in the ground. Some were his height, some shorter, some much taller.\n\nIf these lumps had spaces underground and could block flames, they could keep the eggs safe. Relief filled him until he looked at Dooloo.\n\nShe stood horror-struck, her yellow eyes as round as Morwaka's wide-awake Eye.\n\nShe dug her claws into his arm. \"We's gonna be alone here fer sure,\" she whispered. \"Don't no one go near the Mounds.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Mounds",
                "text": "\"What are the Mounds?\" Tondoor whispered. If Dooloo was afraid, they must be truly horrible.\n\nStar Beast hurled images at them. The Mounds, wreathed in towering flames. The Mounds, covered in ice higher than the trees. The Mounds, unchanged. Star Beast wrapped itself around a mid-sized mud lump and blazed hotly to emphasize its point. The shadows of the other mounds leapt among the dark trees.\n\n\"Stop!\" screamed Dooloo, leaping toward Star Beast. \"Get off! You'll wake the shuzlobs!\" She jerked to a stop.\n\nFrantic pictures crowded Tondoor's mind: spiny beasts the shape of tree-cones, the color of dried blood, swarming out of a mound. On their feet, long serrated claws. On their shoulders, vicious clacking pincers. On their foreheads, one glittering eye the color of death. The clacking things swarming a screaming Snow, ripping off its scales, devouring its flesh.\n\nStar Beast floated to the ground and stood with its hands on its starry hips. The rough mud texture of the mound behind it flickered behind its stars. A new picture edged out Dooloo's: Star Beast inside the mound. The shiny shuzlobs puffing up, their eyes popping, their dead bodies falling like ash. The mound again, stuffed with dragon eggs. On the outside: fire, then ice. Dragonets asleep inside their eggs, waiting.\n\nTondoor felt his eyes warm to a tentative blue in spite of Dooloo's terror. Star Beast had figured out how to preserve the eggs, at least the ones on the island. Only\u2014this time he couldn't ignore it\u2014the Mounds wouldn't save the dragons living now.\n\nDooloo didn't seem at all impressed by Star Beast's plan. \"So you explodes them shuzlobs,\" she spat. \"How is them hatchlings gonna dig theirselfs out with them bendy little baby claws?\"\n\nTondoor edged up close beside her. He had an uneasy feeling he knew what was coming. Sure enough, Star Beast's lights danced in its laughing colors. Its next picture showed two white dragons digging a tunnel from the forest to the underside of the mound.\n\n\"No-no-no-no-no!\" shouted Dooloo. \"I's not gonna be eaten alive by them monsters. I's not going into them mounds. Not even to save the eggs. I's not!\" She tucked her head under her wing. Then she made a sound Tondoor hadn't made since Elder Mala forced him to live in a cave in the cliff.\n\nDooloo was crying.\n\nTondoor wrapped his wing tightly around her shaking body. He made his voice sound like Elder Mala's. \"You have to get rid of the shuzlobs before we dig. Every last one.\" He pictured shiny clean, empty mounds. Inside his wing, Dooloo hiccupped. They might be going to die, but not like that.\n\nStar Beast's lights dimmed. No pictures came.\n\n\"Another thing,\" said Tondoor. \"It's night and we need to sleep. We also need to eat.\" He took a deep breath before forming the next image. \"Tomorrow, if you get rid of the shuzlobs, I'll dig to save the eggs.\" Dooloo's horns wobbled under his wing, and he patted the side of her neck. \"Dooloo doesn't have to.\"\n\nDooloo poked her head up. \"If you gets rid of them shuzlobs, really gets rid of them so there's none left, I'll dig too. If. And only if.\"\n\nShe tucked her head back inside Tondoor's wing. He felt her body twist until her head was resting on his shoulder. Inside his wing, he rubbed her back. Her wing shifted so he could reach behind it. His heart pounded. He willed his attention back to Star Beast.\n\nStar Beast watched them for a long moment. Then it flitted toward three trees growing a short distance from the nearest mound and twirled between them. In the soft light from its stars, the icy ground turned brown. The fresh scent of damp forest drifted toward them.\n\nTondoor had seen this before, but Dooloo hadn't. He pulled back his wing. \"Look.\"\n\n\"Oooooh,\" she breathed as the grass burst through the dead leaves and the trees filled with buds.\n\nTondoor lay down beside Dooloo on the soft grass. Star Beast's cloud of stars floated onto a branch above them, their own private starry night. Dooloo lay her head next to his, and he turned his so their horns wouldn't catch.\n\nDooloo draped her wing across his back. \"Don't know if I can sleep with so much light,\" she murmured. Above them, Star Beast dimmed its stars. Her wing settled heavily on Tondoor's back as she relaxed.\n\nFor some reason, Tondoor's thoughts turned to Kalooka, in that faraway place he hadn't thought about for so long. Would she drape her wing over him like this and sleep at his side? Was she sleeping right now? Was she sleeping next to Hoodon? If the kraamlok was hurtling toward them and Hoodon wasn't there, would she want to be wrapped in his wing like Dooloo had? Did it even matter now? He nuzzled the top of Dooloo's head.\n\nThe gray darkness outside Star Beast's small circle of warmth seemed to swell. Enormous sadness swept over him. With Star Beast's help, he and Dooloo might save the eggs for some remote future. But he had hoped to save the living too. The world was full to bursting with life and possibilities; he didn't want to die. He didn't want Dooloo to die. Or Kalooka. Or Zloomba, or even Froom and Vlod. Wambool and Hoodon, maybe.\n\nPlease, Morwaka, if you can hear me, and if there is some possible way to save the living dragons, can't you show me how? He tried to empty his mind in case Morwaka chose to drop a vision into it, but none came.\n\nDooloo startled in her sleep and pulled her wing back. Tondoor stretched out his tail in the soft grass and adjusted his hind leg.\n\nHe looked up at Star Beast in its halo of leaf buds. The night I called you, and you came, was so magical. That we could communicate across such an unimaginable distance. That you could hear me, and answer, and come. That even after you came, your star shape hung in the sky.\n\nWarmth rained down from Star Beast, but if it heard, it didn't respond. Maybe it was sleeping too.\n\nI thought you came to save us. But you don't know how, do you?\n\nStar Beast sat unmoving in the tree. What are you? And why did you come here? Why do you care about us at all? Star Beast's lights made orange and green patterns on the insides of his eyelids. He searched them for shapes in case Star Beast was sending a reply, but they just faded away.\n\nDooloo began to snore. He lay still, feeling her warm breaths flow over his outstretched arm. For a while he matched his breaths to hers. Then he tried the opposite, breathing out when she breathed in. Morwaka couldn't want all of this to end just like that, could he?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Bickering",
                "text": "When he woke in the morning, he was alone. His scales were once again clamped tight against the cold drizzle, and when he sat up, the grass around him was crisp with ice. A freshly killed beast lay steaming at his side.\n\nDooloo crouched several trees away, devouring her own beast. \"I done killed you some food 'cause you was tired,\" she said, \"but don't expect me to do yer hunting fer you all the time.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" said Tondoor. What made her think he did?\n\n\"And I doesn't need you to hunt fer me neither,\" she said, more loudly. \"I doesn't need no help with nothing. I knows how to look after myself.\"\n\n\"Um, fine.\" Tondoor ripped open the beast's chest and slurped in the warm heart. Of course he'd help her if she asked him, but\u2026\n\n\"One more thing.\" Dooloo was almost shouting now. \"Don't go thinking you needs to do my digging fer me neither. Anywhere you can dig, I can dig too.\" She turned her tail.\n\nTondoor watched her, perplexed. What could he have done between sleeping and waking to upset her?\n\nA hissing sound made him turn to see Star Beast blazing next to one of the larger mounds, melting the snow and steaming away the puddles. That must be where they were going to dig. He went back to eating, watching Dooloo out of the corner of his eye.\n\nDooloo crunched her last bone and stood up facing Star Beast. \"Is you done popping them shuzlobs yet?\" She flexed her claws. \"If you is, I's ready.\"\n\nStar Beast's mind-image showed an empty mound with a white dragon tunneling at a shallow angle down underneath it, then sharply up into the bottom.\n\n\"The dirt's not gonna just vanish like that,\" Dooloo sneered. \"We's gonna hafta carry it out.\" She glanced at Tondoor. \"Or kick it out.\"\n\nWhat was wrong with her? Kalooka never behaved like that. He brushed a small insect off his wet foot.\n\nStar Beast ignored Dooloo's objection. The tunneling dragon in its image reached the bottom of the mound, pushed inside, and flailed its arms and shoulders to break a maze of little mud compartments inside. It shot back out. Star Beast took its place, blazing furiously and surrounded by small explosions.\n\n\"Hold on.\" Dooloo's voice was sharp. \"You has to get rid of them shuzlobs before we digs.\"\n\nTondoor saw an image of Star Beast inside an empty mound, with flakes of exploded shuzlobs spattering the little compartments. It was replaced by one of Star Beast stuck in the bottom of the mound, its heat not getting through the mud.\n\n\"Then you can just forget it,\" Dooloo snapped. \"I's not digging in there just to die.\" She stalked into the woods.\n\nTondoor was about to go after her when he felt something tickle his foot. More little white insects were crawling on him, tapping his wet scales with their tiny antennae. Around him, still more crawled out of the ground. Except for their color, they looked like the little black crawlers that built tunnels in the sandy soil of the Plains. Maybe the shuzlobs ate these insects when they couldn't get dragons.\n\n\"Tondoor, tell it!\" ordered Dooloo from the edge of the trees. \"Tell it we's done.\"\n\n\"In a moment.\" He brushed the tiny creatures of his foot. Then he noticed: where they had walked, his scales looked wrong.\n\nRough. Pocked. And they itched.\n\nYellow fear froze his eyes. \"Shuzlobs!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Armor",
                "text": "The tickles on Tondoor's feet turned to itchy prickles as he fled through the trees. He jumped into a deep, snowy puddle and splashed water over his legs to wash the tiny attackers off. The icy water soothed the itching, and he swirled his foot to keep the floating shuzlobs from climbing back on.\n\nStar Beast appeared beside him in the rain. Its eyes shrank to points as it inspected his foot. The shuzlobs had pocked his toe-claws too.\n\nDooloo raced up behind them. He glared at her while he rubbed the itchy foot with the other one. \"The shuzlobs look nothing like your picture.\"\n\n\"Well it's not like I ever seen one. I told you don't no one go near the Mounds.\" Dooloo peered at his foot. \"I were right about them eating yer scales though.\"\n\nShe seemed to have forgotten her anger. \"You were right about how dangerous those mounds are too,\" Tondoor said. \"Even if Star Beast empties some of them before we go in, what's to stop the shuzlobs from the other mounds attacking us when we come out again? Or eating the dragon eggs we put inside?\" Tondoor filled his mind with graphic images.\n\nStar Beast's lights flickered for a moment. Then its stars blazed up and a picture of shuzlobs popping all over the ground appeared in his mind.\n\nThe shuzlobs on the water exploded in a hiss of steam. So did the hot prickling in Tondoor's feet. He jumped back out of the puddle.\n\n\"Won't work: they's too many,\" said Dooloo. \"Time fer a new plan. Besides, I needs to fix Tondoor's feet.\" She opened her wings. \"Come with me.\"\n\nFix them how? Tondoor rubbed his feet together as he flew up after her, but it only made the itching worse. Star Beast flitted along wet tree branches beneath them until Dooloo took them down beside a tree with wide branches and smooth bark.\n\nTondoor inhaled the minty scent. \"That's one of those healing trees. Zloomba used it to heal my scale where Vlod ripped it off.\"\n\nDooloo raked her hand-claws across the trunk. Thick, clear sap oozed out, and she slathered it over Tondoor's feet, along with a good helping of soggy black leaves from the ground. \"Now we waits,\" she said, wiping her claws off on the snow. \"Make yerself comfortable, 'cause it's gonna take a while.\"\n\nTondoor crouched beside the tree. Dooloo stalked around the tree and crouched on the other side.\n\nTondoor stretched his neck to see her. \"Why are you upset with me?\"\n\nDooloo assumed the posture of sulking, and then he couldn't ask more because Star Beast stepped between them. It ran its starry hands above the sticky mess on Tondoor's foot. His foot grew uncomfortably warm. The sap and leaves somehow dissolved into each other, and when Star Beast sat back, his foot wore a smooth, black coating. Star Beast winked out.\n\nTondoor stood up and pranced around the tree to Dooloo. He felt like his foot was walking on soft moss. \"Look, Dooloo.\"\n\nDooloo poked at the dark sap. \"How do it feel? Can you wiggle yer toe-claws?\"\n\nThey wiggled like black snoofs doing a slow dance. Inside the coating, his foot still itched. When he tried to scratch, the sap only stretched, then snapped back when he stopped.\n\nStar Beast reappeared beside them, holding a stick crawling with shuzlobs. It wiped the stick on his sap-covered foot.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Tondoor shouted. He swatted frantically.\n\nDooloo grabbed his arm. \"It's wondering if they can eat through that sap.\" She scowled at Star Beast. \"Even though it's not gonna help long as they can crawl up yer legs.\"\n\nTondoor forced himself not to brush off the shuzlobs. He almost squashed one that crawled up near the top of the sap, but a raindrop slid it back down. \"I can't feel anything,\" he said after a while.\n\nStar Beast blazed in happy colors. The image that came with them showed shuzlobs crawling all over a dragon completely coated in black sap.\n\nDooloo's eyes turned red. \"You's not gonna let it turn you black like some dead fish.\"\n\nTondoor shrugged his wings. The shuzlobs hadn't even marked the sap on his foot, and the itching was finally fading too. He squished the remaining shuzlobs with the tips of his hand-claws. \"If we can save the eggs\u2026\"\n\nStar Beast sent a picture of a white dragon wallowing in a pit of black goo.\n\n\"Fine!\" Dooloo shouted. She attacked the ground beside the sap tree with her foot, sending leaves and dirt flying. \"I's digging. Is you happy now?\"\n\nTondoor helped her scrape out a wide hole and fill it with soggy leaves. His sap-coated foot-claws were too dull to dig, so he had to use the other foot. Then they mixed sap into the leaves with their feet while Star Beast hovered over top, warming everything. When the mixture was thick and smooth and their foot covers were dry, Dooloo plucked a handful of dry grass, swished it through the sap, and whacked it hard against Tondoor's leg.\n\nTondoor laughed. He knew this game; it was just a messy version of klook. He plucked his own clump of grass and whacked her back. Dooloo squealed as they chased each other around the trees, Star Beast flitting around both of them drying the sap before the rain could wash it away. Partway through they had to stop and mix more sap, but before Tondoor was ready to stop the game, both of their bodies were almost fully covered.\n\nIn mid-chase, Dooloo stopped short. Tondoor couldn't stop and crashed into her. Dooloo tossed away her grass and peeled off a strip of sap that was holding the side of her mouth shut. \"This isn't gonna work. How is we gonna breathe if our nostrils is full of sap and our mouths is closed?\"\n\nIt was a good question. Tondoor considered. \"We'll paint around our mouths\u2014we can close them inside the mound. Maybe we just leave our nostrils uncovered.\"\n\n\"And our ears, and our eyes, and our turd-holes. So them shuzlobs'll eat us deaf and blind and turdless.\" Dooloo tugged at the sap on her neck.\n\n\"Don't!\" Tondoor tried to grab her arm, but Dooloo squirmed away and peeled off another strip of sap. \"It was your idea to hide the eggs,\" he said.\n\nDooloo turned her tail and resumed the posture of sulking. Star Beast picked up the stick and stirred the puddle.\n\nTondoor looked around for inspiration. \"What if...\" He peeled a drip of black sap off a branch and held it over his nostril. \"What if we make flaps over the tops of our nostrils but keep the bottoms open? The shuzlobs will crawl over top of them, and we'll still be able to breathe.\"\n\nDooloo sniffed. \"How's we gonna keep them from crawling underneath?\"\n\n\"We'll take a deep breath before we enter the mound and breathe out while we're inside. It won't take long to break the mud inside.\" Probably. He handed Dooloo his stalk of grass. \"Here. Try it on me.\"\n\nDooloo slopped sap around Tondoor's nostrils and pressed on two black drips from a branch. Tondoor closed his mouth and breathed in and out. \"It works.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Dooloo snapped. \"But I has another idea fer our eyes, even better'n yers.\" Tondoor watched her rake the ground with her toe-claws. She found two stones about the same size, swished them through a puddle to get the leaf bits off, then smeared the top halves with clear sap. She held them out to Star Beast. \"Dry these.\" She peeled off the dry, sort of clear disks and handed them to Tondoor. \"Get it?\"\n\n\"Clever.\" If it worked. He held the discs over his eyes.\n\nThrough the hard sap lenses, her head was lopsided and speckled with bits of dry leaves. Her snout bulged to one side and when he looked down, Dooloo and the ground seemed to have risen to his knees. Closer things, like the tip of his snout when he went cross-eyed, were clearer.\n\nThrough the lenses, he watched Dooloo dab her grass around his eyes and spread more sap over the rest of his head. The sounds of the forest faded as Star Beast dried the sap over his ears.\n\nDooloo held up her hand and mumbled something. When he shook his head, the tree beside her seemed to wiggle like a snoof. He squinted. That helped. Now he could see enough to know what she wanted. \"You're holding up three claws.\" His own voice sounded very loud inside his head.\n\nDooloo whooped, then mumbled something else.\n\n\"Speak up!\"\n\nShe jutted her neck forward and shouted in his ear. \"I said, I'll need to make two more of them discs before you paints me.\"\n\n\"Not that loud!\" He wasn't completely deaf.\n\n\"Make up yer mind,\" she shouted again from further away. \"But when you paints me, put them flaps over my ears too. One of us has to be able to hear.\"\n\nWhile she cleaned the stones again and spread on another layer of clear sap, he found a sharp stick and managed to poke a tiny hole in the dark sap covering one of his ears. Sound burst back in, not as loud as usual, but better.\n\nTondoor painted Dooloo's head around her eye covers, added flaps over her nostrils and ears, and touched up the bare spots on her body. He was about to paint under her tail, but she must have already sat in the sap puddle.\n\n\"I done decided it's better to be plugged up fer a bit than let shuzlobs go crawling around in there.\"\n\nGood thought. After Tondoor did the same and Dooloo filled in his bare spots, they dipped their hand-claws and their horns and stood looking at each other while Star Beast flitted away. Dooloo's eyes showed large and gray through the sap lenses. Now she was sad, not angry. Would she tell him why if he asked, or would she just get angry again? Maybe later.\n\n\"No one will know,\" he began. His voice still sounded too loud. \"That we're Snows,\" he finished more quietly.\n\n\"We looks like we's dead.\"\n\n\"We look like the shadow dragons I told you about. The ones in the desert caves.\" Uh-oh. That made her sap eyes snap to red.\n\n\"I hasn't seen none of them wonders you knows all about,\" Dooloo hissed, \"so just quit yer blabbering! All I knows is this boring old island.\"\n\nThat was her problem? \"If you want to see them so badly, come with me when I leave.\" Fear chilled his eyes. What was he saying? What would Kalooka think if he came home with Dooloo? On the other hand, she didn't care what he thought of Hoodon.\n\nDooloo squealed as her lenses flooded with magnificent blue. \"You wants me to come with you? Really?\"\n\nTondoor nodded. Now that he thought about it, why not? He liked Dooloo, he wasn't allowed go back to the Plains anyway, and the Rock dragons wanted him to bring dragons. His eyes warmed to a tentative blue. \"We can find a cave together in the mountains.\" And wait to die. But he didn't say that.\n\nDooloo pulled his snout close and nuzzled his neck. Their sap coats squeaked as they rubbed together. \"I thought you was just feeling sorry fer me last night 'cause I was blubbering. I thought you was just waiting to leave me behind.\"\n\n\"I'd love it if you came,\" he said, feeling her bounce against his neck. It felt so nice. As nice as being near Kalooka? He groaned inside. That was over. Why did he keep thinking about her?\n\n\"Oooh.\" Dooloo's voice trailed off. She pulled away. \"But I has to stay here and keep Zloomba inside her cave.\"\n\nIn the excitement of the shuzlobs, he'd forgotten. And now that he'd thought of it, he didn't want to leave without her. Star Beast's pulsing mind picture of two black dragons digging tunnels under shuzlob mounds didn't help him think.\n\nDooloo paced in front of him, wobbly through the wavy lenses and Star Beast's demand. \"Tell you what,\" she said. \"Zloomba oughta be awake by now. After we's done digging out them mounds, we'll go tell her my dream. If she promises to stay put, I can go with you!\" She hopped up and down. \"Oh, I hope she do. I hope, I hope, I hope!\"\n\nStar Beast jumped between them. Starry hands reached out, and after a moment of dizziness, they were back at the Mounds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Digging",
                "text": "White shuzlobs swarmed out of the soggy ground and over their black feet. Dooloo stomped on the ones nearest her. Star Beast moved away from the slushy splashes.\n\nDooloo stomped harder. \"No use digging into the mounds they's crawling out of. Star Beast can pop all the ones inside, but them others will just come back later.\" She made an image of a mound full of sleeping shuzlobs.\n\nStar Beast flitted among the mounds and found one still in shadow and surrounded by snow. Tondoor began to dig with his blunted claws.\n\nThere were no shuzlobs in the dirt Tondoor scraped out and kicked behind him. He had to dig the tunnel big enough around that his wings would fit, and shallow enough that he could crouch under the bottom edge of the mound and push up. Whenever he reached frozen ground on the way down, Star Beast thawed it.\n\nFinally, he was there. He filled his lungs with the dusty air and pushed his head through a soft layer of dirt into the mound's inner structure. Mud walls shattered around him as he stood up. Shuzlobs tumbled away in his steady breath. With flailing arms, he smashed the inside of the shuzlobs' home. He worried that he might smash the outside wall too, but it was hard and solid.\n\nReady, Star Beast!\n\nGlinting light and exploding shuzlobs hit him from all sides. He slid back outside and flopped into a puddle, where he gulped mouthfuls of fresh, cool air.\n\nDooloo's tail snaked out of the tunnel she was digging, followed by her mud-covered legs and body. \"Woohoo! That were so much fun!\" She jumped into a puddle with both feet, sending water flying. \"Did you notice the best thing?\"\n\n\"Breaking through the floor and smashing everything inside?\"\n\n\"Even better. We's fireproof. Star Beast done made itself hot as dragon fire, and I done felt cuddly warm.\" She aimed a splash at Tondoor. \"Vlod and them others won't be able to flame us now.\"\n\nWhooping, Tondoor splashed her back.\n\nStar Beast re-appeared and flitted in front of another mound. Tondoor and Dooloo resumed digging. By dusk, they had emptied out eight mounds. Backing out of his fourth tunnel, Tondoor didn't even look to see if Star Beast wanted him to dig any more. The sap that protected him also made him hot, fire shield or not, and his scales couldn't open to let out the heat. He slogged into the woods with Dooloo close behind.\n\nThey lay panting in the slush. Then they had to search for beasts with their heavy wings, chase them in their hot armor, and attack with their thick claws. Tondoor finally managed to grab a single small glarf in his stiff jaws.\n\nHe swallowed it whole and collapsed where he was. The last thought that ran though his dazed mind was to wonder how they would convince the dragons to deposit their newly laid eggs in the cleaned-out mounds. He fell asleep so fast he barely noticed Dooloo flop down next to him, or Star Beast flit away through the trees."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mourning",
                "text": "Stars whirl about them, a great, rolling tunnel of red and green and orange and blue, mingled with Kalooka's flashing gold and Tondoor's own snow-polished white. They hit ground where the sun shines impossibly yellow and the air is heavy with keening wails of betrayal and loss. Tondoor hears Kalooka call his name. He forces his heavy legs to stand so he can to go to her. But it isn't Kalooka's voice; it's Dooloo's, and he wonders why she is now a Sun and where Kalooka is, and Dooloo's voice is more insistent, and someone is shaking him by the horns, and the wailing grows louder.\n\n\"Tondoor, wake up!\"\n\nTondoor's head bounced on the wet leaves. Through rain-spattered lenses, he saw a black, distorted Dooloo bending over him. The dream still echoed in his mind, and he over-balanced as he stood up, expecting the air to be heavy. It was almost the same dream he'd had before the choosing ceremony, the day he'd fought with Hoodon and left the Plains. He shook his head to clear the raindrops from his eye covers. More fell in their place.\n\n\"Listen. Someone's doing mourning.\"\n\nNow he heard what Dooloo had been saying, and the voices calling back and forth across the gray sky with the harsh edges of raw grief. \"I thought I dreamed that sound.\"\n\n\"Did you dream me trying to wake you too? You was so deep asleep I thought I'd hafta jump on you.\" She scanned the sky. \"Whoever they is, they's getting closer.\"\n\nTondoor's gut clenched, expecting\u2026what? The sound triggered a long-ago memory: hiding in his cave, the day the dragons of the Rocks had stolen the eggs. \"Oh no. You don't suppose Star Beast...\"\n\n\"Who's them down there?\" A voice called, and a large female Sky swooped toward them, her red eyes turning to confused yellow as she got closer. Through Tondoor's lenses, her body writhed and warped.\n\nHis first instinct was to flee into the trees, but Dooloo grabbed his arm. \"They won't dare land this close to the Mounds, 'specially not with us looking like we's walking dead. Just stand firm and look confident.\" Beside her, he half-crouched in the posture of readiness.\n\nSure enough, the Sky pulled up her feet and landed in a wobbly tree. An angry Fire found a perch in a tree beside her. Tondoor recognized them as two of the females that bought advice from Zloomba. More wailing dragons approached.\n\n\"Is that them Snows?\" asked the Sky, peering between branches.\n\n\"Why does they look like they's covered in flies?\" asked the Fire.\n\nDooloo snickered. \"It's better'n flies!\" she shouted.\n\n\"They's disguising theirselfs,\" the Sky hissed. \"But we done found them.\"\n\nThe Fire stretched her neck forward. Her tree branch wobbled, and she grabbed onto the trunk. \"Why hasn't they been shredded by them shuzlobs?\"\n\n\"That star monster done worked its evil on them.\" The Sky snarled again but made no move to leave her dripping perch.\n\n\"What does you want from us?\" Dooloo shouted up.\n\n\"We wants our eggs back,\" snarled the Fire, \"from wherever that star monster done hid them.\"\n\nTondoor groaned. Star Beast did not understand dragons.\n\nMore dragons circled above them, and two more alighted in trees. A branch snapped off under one of them, and she returned to circling.\n\nDooloo poked him in the ribs. \"Now's yer chance to do some seering. Tell them why they has to leave them eggs here.\" She pushed him forward.\n\nTondoor cleared his throat as yet more females joined the wailing crowd above them. \"The kraamlok is coming soon!\" he cried. Ugh. He sounded like Wambool. He tried again. \"We have to bury our eggs, or dragons will disappear from the world!\" That wasn't much better.\n\nThe Fire snapped a branch off her tree and hurled it at him. Another stick bounced off Dooloo.\n\n\"Star Beast is trying to save yer blasted eggs from burning up when the kraamlok comes!\" Dooloo yelled.\n\n\"So your hatchlings can survive even if we don't,\" Tondoor shouted. \"Once the ice is gone, they will rebuild the world.\"\n\n\"Is them hatchlings gonna teach theirselfs to hunt?\" called a Leaf.\n\n\"If that kraamlok do show up, I'll fight it off myself,\" called another Fire.\n\n\"We wants our eggs!\" Sticks pummelled them from all sides.\n\nDooloo ducked a large, forked one. \"We has to give them back.\"\n\n\"After all that digging?\" Tondoor raised his arms in the posture of authority Elder Mala used, except that he kept his wings closed against the sticks. \"One last chance,\" he shouted. \"You can save your hatchlings' lives and keep dragons in the world forever, or you can take your eggs back and all die together.\" A stick stuck in his horns.\n\nThe cries grew until the air was filled with the chanting of a hundred dragons. \"We wants our eggs. We wants our eggs. We wants our eggs.\"\n\nFine, then.\n\n\"This way,\" Dooloo shouted. She stomped through the trees in the direction of the Mounds. The chanting cloud of dragons followed. Some perched in trees ahead of them while the others circled above.\n\nThe ground around the Mounds was dusted with snow again, except this time the snow was crawling. As the sea of white oozed up his black body and Dooloo's, the chanting faded away.\n\nDooloo dove into the nearest tunnel. Tondoor chose another. It was slick with shuzlobs. Star Beast's plan had failed. His gut clenched. What if the little monsters dissolved egg shells like scales?\n\nHe slithered into the dark mound and felt the eggs piled high on what was left of the floor. He grabbed two and slid back outside. They squeaked when they rubbed together. Had Star Beast\u2026 Yes. When he got outside, he saw that they were coated with dark sap. He sighed. How could a hatchling break out of that? He swished the eggs through a puddle and hurled them into the air.\n\n\"How will they know whose egg is whose?\" he asked as dragons swooped, screeching, through the rain and caught the eggs in their claws.\n\nDooloo flung up her two eggs. \"That's their problem.\"\n\nTondoor and Dooloo emptied all the mounds they had cleared the day before. Now and then one of the eggs got missed, or dropped, and Tondoor or Dooloo had to retrieve it and toss it up again. Tondoor hoped he was only imagining that they felt squishy inside the sap.\n\nBit by bit, the crowd thinned and disappeared. Dooloo pulled out one last egg and stood looking up into the empty sky.\n\n\"One dragonet left to save the world,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"Won't work, unless it makes an Ash mate. But won't no one be there to tell it how.\"\n\n\"Look,\" said Tondoor, pointing. There was one more dragon, a small gray one barely visible against the gray bark. She looked familiar.\n\n\"Hey, Morda!\" he called. \"Is this your egg?\" He flew up and dropped the egg into Morda's arms, then found a perch on a thick branch on the next tree. Shuzlobs swarmed off his feet onto the bark.\n\nMorda studied the black egg. \"Might be,\" she said. \"It's hard to tell.\" Her eyes filled with yellow fear as she glanced over his head. \"Gotta go. Thanks fer the egg.\" She adjusted it in her claws and leapt away.\n\nTondoor twisted his neck and looked up. Five more dragons were zooming toward them. But quietly, and in formation.\n\n\"Get down here now!\" Dooloo yelled. \"They's coming to attack!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Revenge",
                "text": "Tondoor lurched down beside her and assumed the posture of readiness again. \"What do they want? We don't have any more eggs.\"\n\n\"We already done gave back yer eggs.\" Dooloo shouted up.\n\n\"And washed off the shuzlobs,\" Tondoor added.\n\n\"We's not here fer eggs,\" spat a Fire. \"We's revenging Zloomba.\" He tossed something into his mouth and dove. The others copied him.\n\n\"Fire root,\" breathed Tondoor.\n\n\"Hold yer breath!\"\n\nTondoor sucked in hard and clamped his mouth shut. Five waves of flame cascaded over his body. But even though shuzlobs sizzled and popped all over him, he only felt warm. Or cool, considering.\n\nDooloo danced in the posture of triumph. \"You's can't hurt us. We's fireproof!\" she shouted.\n\nThe dragons circled around and dove again. Once again waves of flames licked at Tondoor's body, and once again he felt warm. This time he danced with Dooloo.\n\nThe dragons flapped away in a jumble of wings, looking back over their shoulders as if they couldn't believe what they had just seen.\n\nTondoor watched them fade into the clouds. The fire might not have heated him up, but the dancing sure had. \"What did they mean by revenging Zloomba?\"\n\n\"Star Beast musta done something to her.\"\n\n\"Maybe she wouldn't hand over her egg.\"\n\n\"Zloomba don't have her egg yet,\" said Dooloo. \"You told me she weren't mated till winter, remember? Maybe the old wacko done something. We hasn't seen him fer two days now.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't hurt Zloomba,\" protested Tondoor. \"Not after all she did for him.\"\n\n\"I's too hot to think inside this sap,\" said Dooloo.\n\nTondoor nodded. Being fireproof had saved their scales, but now he needed to make plans to leave. And he needed to hunt something bigger than a glarf.\n\nDooloo led him back to the healing tree. The remnant of Star Beast's pit of sap was solid and slick with rain, but no shuzlobs. Tondoor sank down next to it, panting, while Dooloo rummaged in the woods. He felt hotter after flying a short distance than after being doused with fire. And he needed to drop a turd.\n\n\"Aha!\" Dooloo appeared holding two piece of pink shelf fungus. \"I hopes this works the same on black sap as it do on clear.\" She swished the fungus through a puddle and scrubbed a spot on Tondoor's head. The sap popped open, and cool air flowed in. The rest of him felt unbearably cramped in comparison.\n\n\"Give me the other one. I'll do yours.\" He dipped the other piece of fungus in the water and they set to work scrubbing each other and peeling off strips of their black armor. Their freed scales glistened.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Tondoor said, peeling a wide strip off Dooloo's chest. \"Your scales are starting to grow in.\" He touched the place where Vlod's mark used to be.\n\nDooloo twisted her neck to look. \"Yers is mostly all growed back.\"\n\n\"It's had more time. Zloomba put sap on it right after Vlod ripped the scale off.\"\n\nAs they pulled of the rest of the sap, they planned their visit to Zloomba. They would fly low and hide at any sign of dragons. Dooloo would approach Zloomba's cave in the dark, with a gift of beasts. If Zloomba was still alive, she would find out what had happened, and give her the dream message. If she listened to Dooloo's message, or was dead, they would flee to the coast.\n\nTondoor didn't want to speak the other option out loud.\n\nDooloo did. \"If she don't believe me, you has to leave alone.\" Her nostrils quivered. \"How does I find you if I has to go later by myself? I hasn't never been off the Island.\"\n\n\"Fly southeast. It's a day and a night and a day to the Coast. Drink lots of water before you go, because you can't drink from the sea. Then keep going southeast to the Bog and the Rocks.\" Tondoor paused peeling sap to nuzzle her snout. \"But I think she'll believe you.\"\n\n\"Why would she? You saw how she done shouted at me.\"\n\n\"She believed Wambool about the kraamlok when no one else did. Who knows\u2014maybe Wambool stole that prophecy too and already told her. Maybe those dragons were upset because she's refusing to come out.\"\n\n\"I doubts it,\" said Dooloo. But her eyes were turning blue again.\" She gripped Tondoor's shoulders. \"The only thing I gots to say is if things gets ugly at the cave, you gotta stay hid and wait till it's safe to leave. Don't even think about trying to help.\"\n\n\"What if those other dragons attack you? You're not fireproof anymore.\" Tondoor nuzzled her shoulder. \"If you get injured, you can't come with me.\"\n\n\"First off,\" Dooloo murmured into his neck, \"you fights about as good as a glarf.\"\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\n\"Well it's true. Second, anyone there's gonna let me talk to Zloomba 'cause I's her daughter. You's not. And third, if you gets hurt, you can't tell them others about hiding their eggs. So just stay hid.\" She pushed the end of her snout hard into his. \"Promise.\"\n\nHow could he not try to help if she was in trouble? But she was right. He sighed. \"I promise. I might call Star Beast to come though.\"\n\n\"You do that.\" Dooloo pulled away. \"But now, we best go if we wants to meet Zloomba tonight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Zloomba",
                "text": "Tondoor and Dooloo set out right away, listening and watching for dragons, hiding when necessary and altering their course as needed. It was late dusk when they landed not far from Zloomba's cave, carrying two beasts for her. Dark clouds had gathered, and rain was starting to fall.\n\nDooloo pushed him into a tight gap between trees. \"Now remember, you stays right here no matter what. I's coming back to this exact spot, so don't go wandering.\"\n\nThere was something familiar about this small clearing: a low branch, a broken off tree. He grimaced. \"This is where you and your buddies broke my wing.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes darted around. \"You's right.\" She paused. \"Sorry 'bout that.\"\n\nTondoor shrugged his wings, both healthy and strong again. \"It's all fine now.\" He slid further into the shadows. \"Just be sure to come back if the other two come looking for me.\"\n\n\"If I hears anything, I'll come flapping.\" Dooloo laid her snout against his neck for one long, fleeting moment before she slipped away.\n\nHe heard footsteps. A pause. Dooloo's soft voice: \"Zloomba?\"\n\nA chorus of shrieks.\n\nTondoor clutched the tree while his heart pounded. Zloomba was not alone.\n\n\"The egg thief come back.\"\n\nThe voice belonged to the Fire who'd first found them at the Mounds.\n\n\"I never done told Star Beast to take yer eggs.\"\n\n\"Liar! You telled it to make you fireproof in case we was mad after. But you's not fireproof any more, is you?\"\n\n\"I just come to talk to Zloomba.\"\n\nAnother voice broke in. \"Come to see her dear old ma, did she? Come to watch her die?\" More snarls.\n\nTondoor forced himself to hold onto the tree. He'd promised.\n\n\"Zloomba didn't have no egg to steal, so you telled yer star friend to bury her instead. Is that what done happened?\"\n\nBury Zloomba? What did that mean?\n\n\"I never\u2014\" Dooloo's protest was cut short by a chorus of snarls.\n\n\"Look here on the cave hole!\"\n\nTondoor heard a puffing sound, and red light flickered through the trees.\n\nA pause. Dooloo's gasp. \"It looks like brush, but it feels like stone.\"\n\n\"It looks like brush, but it feels like bones,\" said another voice.\n\n\"Feels like bones, but looks like a cage. And she that's caged soon gonna be bones.\"\n\n\"I never knowed nothing about this,\" Dooloo cried. \"I come to see her 'cause I gotta tell her something.\"\n\nTondoor pounded his head against the tree. Star Beast had made Zloomba's cave cover part of the ridge to keep her inside. Star Beast! You have to think before you do things to people.\n\nBut really, in its own clumsy way, Star Beast had done Dooloo's task for her. Zloomba would be inside her cave when the kraamlok came. So Dooloo was free to come with him\u2014if she could get away. Zloomba's friends were still there, wailing.\n\n\"Can't hunt if she can't get out. Can't eat if she can't hunt. Can't lay her egg if she can't eat.\"\n\n\"Woe to Zloomba and to the egg that won't never be laid! Woe! Woe! Woe!\" The wails rose again, the same grating, mournful sound that Tondoor had heard this morning.\n\nDooloo's voice sliced through the din. \"Zloomba's not gonna die!\"\n\nThe wailing stopped. Lightning flashed in the distance.\n\n\"Zloomba's not gonna die, 'cause I's gonna hunt fer her.\"\n\nShe was what? For how long?\n\nThere was a pause. \"Fer her, and yerself too?\"\n\n\"Yup. I already done started. These beasts is fer her.\" Tondoor pictured her holding them high.\n\n\"What about yer snowy friend? You think he's gonna stick around if you's hunting fer someone else?\"\n\n\"He already done flew away.\" Dooloo's voice quavered, just slightly.\n\nTondoor's eyes drooped with despairing gray. If Dooloo stayed to keep Zloomba alive until the kraamlok came, she wouldn't have time to come after him.\n\n\"Just like Zloomba's old wacko,\" came a raspy voice. \"He coulda hunted fer her too, after all she done fer him. But no. Be at the Coast now if he's not drowned.\"\n\nThat Wambool. Always one wingbeat ahead. What poisonous lies would he be spreading at the Coast?\n\nA cackle. \"Good riddance to both of them. We don't need no foreign seers.\"\n\n\"We got our own seer, and she's gonna hunt fer her mama.\" Cheers now. More rustling.\n\n\"Good daughter. Gonna stay and keep her mama alive.\" He heard wing flaps, mixed with thunder.\n\nSilhouettes rose into the dark sky above the cave. Cries of \"Good daughter,\" \"Good hunting,\" and \"Good riddance\" floated in the air. Then silence.\n\nTondoor had promised to stay put. But the other dragons were gone now. If he went to the cave, he could say good-bye to Zloomba. And see Dooloo one last time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Vlod",
                "text": "Tondoor crept from shadow to shadow until he saw Dooloo's pale shape crouched beside what used to be the hole into the cave. In the darkness and the rain he couldn't see the stone mat. He was about to climb the ridge when Zloomba's angry voice sliced the air.\n\n\"Liar. You done told that star monster to shut me in here. Wambool done said.\"\n\nDooloo's tail smacked against stone just as lightning flashed again. \"He's the liar. I knowed nothing about it till I come just now. I never did!\"\n\nMaybe he could make Zloomba believe her. He took a deep breath and ran up the side of the ridge. He had to use his toe-claws for grip because the rain was now pelting down.\n\n\"Who's there?\" came Zloomba's sharp voice.\n\n\"It's me, Tondoor.\" In a flash of lightning he saw the gray, stone branches almost covering the black cave hole. A young arm could fit beside it, or bits of a beast, but not much else.\n\nZloomba snarled. \"After all I done fer you.\"\n\n\"We didn't do this,\" he insisted. \"Dooloo is telling the truth. I just came to say I'm leaving the island now. Thank you for helping me.\"\n\nDooloo pulled his head close to hers. \"I can't go with you.\" Her voice cracked.\n\n\"I know.\" Leaving Zloomba here to die was hard enough. But leaving Dooloo too was tearing his heart into pieces.\n\nThunder crashed.\n\nShe pulled his head beside hers. \"I loves you.\"\n\nHe couldn't leave. Kraamlok or not.\n\nTwo dragons splashed onto the ridge beside them. Snarling.\n\n\"You loves him, does you?\" said the bigger one.\n\nThe gravelly voice was Vlod's.\n\nDooloo yanked back her arms. \"You shoulda stayed put like I done said,\" she whispered.\n\nVlod's hot breath gusted over them. \"I's yer mate, if you remembers.\"\n\nDooloo pushed Tondoor behind her. \"Tondoor's leaving the island right away, and I's staying. Just let him be.\"\n\n\"What's gonna stop you chasing after him?\" asked Vlod.\n\n\"Or him coming back?\" added Froom.\n\nSomething clunked against the stone mat. Zloomba's voice barked out, \"The kraamlok is what. It's coming after that star beast and can't no one stop it. Tondoor has to go warn his kin. He's not coming back, just like I's not getting outta this cave.\" She snarled. \"So you two do as Dooloo done said and let him be.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Tondoor breathed. Inside the cave, Zloomba grunted. Lightning flashed again.\n\n\"I has a better idea,\" said Vlod. \"Froom and I is gonna escort yer little white friend to the seashore to make sure he don't get lost.\"\n\n\"Better yet,\" said Dooloo, \"is if you two stays here and looks after Froom's ma while I takes Tondoor to the sea.\"\n\n\"I's going with you,\" said Vlod. \"Froom can stay.\"\n\n\"All by myself?\" squeaked Froom.\n\n\"No, you ninny. You's gonna be with Zloomba.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\" Froom tapped the stone brush with his toe-claws.\n\nA roar from inside the cave made Tondoor jump. \"I can go a night without nobody hunting,\" growled Zloomba. \"Dooloo done give me a couple of beasts already. So all of you git and leave me some peace. When you gets back, all of you can hunt.\"\n\nVlod butted Tondoor with his head. \"You heard her. So git.\"\n\nTondoor did as he was told and leapt up into the storm. He felt the drag as Dooloo leapt up right behind him.\n\n\"Leave us some space,\" she snapped into the wind. \"Tondoor and me got seering things to discuss.\"\n\nVlod grumbled, but Tondoor heard his wing flaps on his side and Vroom's on Dooloo's. In the intermittent lightning flashes, he saw the trees tossing below. He had to fight to keep a straight course.\n\nNow that their time together was almost over, or maybe because of their two escorts, he couldn't think of anything to say. Dooloo's shiny white scales lit up like Morwaka's Eye whenever the lightning flashed, but it didn't seem worth telling her.\n\n\"I thinks,\" Dooloo said after a while, \"we's safer with them two along.\" She must have seen how bright he looked too.\n\nTondoor tried to think of something to say to her, words of comfort she could think back on when he was gone, or to make his leaving seem like a good thing. But words couldn't make a miserable situation happy. None that he knew, anyway.\n\nFroom flapped closer. \"Since you two isn't discussing, I has a question. How is Tondoor gonna help them other dragons? He's not helped much here.\"\n\nIt was true. None of the Island dragons was going to survive the kraamlok. \"I'm going to tell them to bury their eggs someplace deep so they can hatch after the kraamlok is gone.\"\n\nFroom grunted. \"Is them dragons in them other places gonna do that?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" said Vlod, right beside Tondoor. \"Won't no one bury their eggs too deep to hatch. Even Zloomba, except now she gots no choice.\"\n\n\"All I can do is try,\" Tondoor said wearily. But Vlod was right. Why should he even bother? They were more likely to listen to Wambool's message of hiding themselves, even though that wouldn't save anyone either. His eyes drooped to heavier gray. Not only had he failed in his quest, now he was losing Dooloo too. He wished he could just stay here and die with her. But with Vlod breathing on his tail, he couldn't even do that.\n\n\"I guess my message were just for Zloomba then,\" Dooloo said. Her words were cut short by a deep rumble of thunder that sounded as sad as he felt.\n\n\"It's still important,\" Tondoor said when it was done. \"Her egg is going to keep the future dragons alive.\" And all future dragons would be Bones, or Snows like Wambool.\n\nBeneath them, the trees flung themselves around. Finally Dooloo spoke again. \"Morwaka's legend do say that one of us Island dragons is gonna save all the rest.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Tondoor asked. \"I don't know that part.\" Another story the Ravine would never show.\n\n\"I knows it,\" Froom said.\n\n\"Of course you knows it. Zloomba done told both of us it at the same time.\" Dooloo huffed. \"It's right after the part where Morwaka done told Blood to live on the Rainy Island, 'cause that were where she found her treasure of being able to fight.\"\n\nThat wasn't the treasure Tondoor remembered the first Blood finding, but fine.\n\n\"So Morwaka done looked straight at Blood, and he says to her, \"One of yer descendants is gonna save the dragons in the time of greatest disaster.\"\n\nTondoor waited. \"That's it?\"\n\n\"Isn't that enough?\"\n\n\"That's a lot,\" Tondoor agreed. \"And the kraamlok destroying the world is definitely a time of greatest disaster.\"\n\nAnd then in no time they were at the shore. The pieces of the shelter he had shared with Dooloo were still scattered across the sand, beside what was left of their pile of logs. The familiar scent of salty water and damp wood brought a flood of memories. It was the scent of relief when Tondoor first arrived at the island, of hope when he saw Zloomba, of surprise and wonder when Star Beast came, and of getting to know Dooloo. Now, it was the bitter scent of loss.\n\n\"Tondoor can't leave 'til morning,\" Dooloo announced when they landed, \"so I's sleeping here.\"\n\n\"We all is, then,\" said Vlod.\n\nThe rain had slowed to a steady patter, and the lightning flashes and rumbles were now behind them. They moved into the shelter of the dark trees. Tondoor was about to lie down on a clump of leaves when Dooloo plunked onto his space.\n\nVlod rushed in after her. The leaves splatted. \"Not here. You sleeps over there by me.\"\n\nDooloo stood up while Tondoor bit back his protests. Of course Dooloo would go back to Vlod. He turned away so he didn't have to watch, a second time, his love going away with someone else.\n\n\"I's staying here with Tondoor,\" Dooloo said in a small but clear voice.\n\nTondoor turned back around.\n\nA low growl rumbled in Vlod's chest.\n\n\"I's staying with Tondoor,\" Dooloo repeated. \"I won't never see him again and tonight I's going to sleep beside him.\"\n\n\"You's my mate,\" said Vlod. \"That means you sleeps beside me.\"\n\n\"I's not nobody's nothing.\" Dooloo stamped her foot. \"Unless I wants to be.\"\n\nFroom popped his head between the branches. A torrent of raindrops fluttered onto Tondoor's head. \"You's my sister.\"\n\n\"That's different.\" Dooloo was shouting now. \"You can't decide if you's somebody's sister. You just is.\" Her head thwacked against Vlod. \"But you doesn't own me and I can glarfing sleep anywhere I wants.\"\n\nVlod's growl got louder. \"You's too much trouble. Next mating time I's gonna find someone else.\"\n\nDooloo shrank back against Tondoor. \"Next mating time the kraamlok'll be here and we's all gonna be dead.\"\n\n\"Hiding eggs isn't gonna help us, then,\" said Froom.\n\nHe was right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Despair",
                "text": "Vlod and Froom lumbered off. Crunching sounds came from a few trees away as they settled to the ground.\n\nTondoor shook the water off his wings and lay down next to Dooloo, feeling grateful but numb. \"Froom's right,\" he said. \"Hiding eggs is no answer at all\u2014except for Zloomba.\" He thrust his head under his wing. \"I never asked to be a seer,\" he mumbled. \"I never asked to deliver useless messages. I should just give up now for all the good I'm going to do.\" Yes, he felt sorry for himself. Yes, he sounded like Wambool. So what?\n\nDooloo nosed her snout in beside his neck. \"You has to tell them. Otherwise there won't be no dragons except Zloomba's.\"\n\nTondoor pushed his head in as far as he could. \"Hiding eggs isn't even my prophecy,\" he mumbled into his wing. \"It came from your dream. You tell them.\"\n\n\"I has to feed Zloomba.\"\n\n\"At least that's useful. All I want to do is fly away to some place where none of this is happening, like that place in my dream.\"\n\n\"You hasn't told me about no dream.\"\n\n\"It's not one of those dreams,\" Tondoor said. \"I've only had it twice, and it was different both times.\"\n\n\"Only twice.\" Dooloo pulled his head out and smacked hers against it. \"I only done had mine once. How does you know it's not one of them dreams?\"\n\n\"Elder Mala said so.\" It sounded silly when he said it.\n\n\"Who's Elder Mala?\"\n\n\"Our Most Ancient.\"\n\nDooloo groaned. \"Tondoor, you is so thick-headed. Tell me what you done dreamed. The parts that was the same.\"\n\nHe described the whirling colors, the tunnel of stars, the landing in a new place with the heavy air and the sun shining yellow. It still made him shiver, even when he left out Kalooka.\n\nMaybe it was a true dream.\n\n\"If it was one of those dreams, maybe the yellow sun was telling me to call Star Beast.\" His thoughts raced. \"Because there was a bright yellow star in the middle of Star Beast's constellation.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Maybe.\"\n\nTondoor considered for a moment. \"No. I dreamed it at the Plains, and we can't see Star Beast's constellation from there. So that can't be it.\"\n\nDooloo gripped his arm. \"That's why you had to come here.\"\n\nTondoor opened his eyes wide in the darkness. Could it be that all his humiliations and failures were the means of getting him to the Rainy Island so he could call Star Beast? How could Morwaka have arranged all that? But didn't he, Tondoor, do the same sort of things to the characters in the stories he made up?\n\nHe shook his head. \"Morwaka could just tell you to call Star Beast, since you're already here.\" He scowled. \"Or Wambool.\"\n\n\"That old wacko been too busy chewing gloob to look at stars.\" Dooloo paused. \"And if Morwaka done told me, I wouldn't never think to leave the Island to tell them other dragons.\"\n\nTondoor let the idea bubble through his mind. If that was true, he wasn't a failure after all. Maybe, however unwittingly, he had done what he was supposed to. \"But if that was Morwaka's plan,\" he said, \"why hasn't Star Beast been more help? We didn't even need Star Beast to think of hiding in caves or burying eggs.\"\n\n\"Maybe you's right.\" Her wing draped lightly over his back. \"I sure is going to miss you when you's gone. Nobody else here done talks about those things.\"\n\nTondoor glanced at the trees where the other two were snoring. \"If Vlod wasn't here to make me leave,\" he whispered, \"I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I meant what I done said to him,\" Dooloo whispered back. \"Even if the kraamlok weren't never coming, I wouldn't never mate with him again.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yup. The only one I wants is you.\" She snuggled closer. \"We could've had a whole tribe of cute little Snow hatchlings.\"\n\n\"I wish.\" He slid his tail alongside hers. Had he ever wanted to be with Kalooka this much, even on that last horrible night? He couldn't remember. But he remembered something else. Something he could give Dooloo. \"I know a way to share my dream with you.\" he said.\n\nDooloo pulled back her wing. \"How?\"\n\n\"You need a piece of one of my scales.\" He pulled up his leg and ran his tongue over his foot. After being covered with Star Beast's sap, none of his scales was even scuffed. He chose a small one near his littlest toe-claw\u2014it seemed fitting\u2014and cracked the bottom half off with his teeth, wincing at the jolt of pain. Pain also seemed fitting right now.\n\nHe felt for her snout and transferred it to her. \"Hold it under your tongue so you don't swallow it.\" He stretched out again. \"If I have the dream again tonight, maybe you can tell me what it means.\" She murmured and leaned against him. Once again, joy and sorrow flooded his heart. \"Dooloo?\"\n\n\"Mmm-hmm?\"\n\n\"I love you too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Hussy",
                "text": "Stars whirl about them, a great, rolling tunnel of red and green and orange and blue, mingled with Kalooka's distant gold and his own rain-streaked white. They hit ground where the sun shines a dazzling yellow and the air is heavy with the urgency of hope. Tondoor looks at the dragons sprawled across the ground, and at last he understands.\n\nTondoor lay still for a few moments in the early dawn light, holding the dream image in his mind, and filled with a wondrous, terrifying joy. He leaned over Dooloo and whispered in her ear. \"I know what it means!\"\n\nShe raised her head, blinking.\n\n\"Star Beast is going to take us to the place with the yellow sun.\"\n\nDooloo stared at him with blue wonder flecking her eyes. She spit out the scale. \"I seen it,\" she breathed, \"Star Beast is gonna take us away where the kraamlok can't do us no harm.\"\n\n\"I saw it hatch,\" Tondoor cried, leaping to his feet and pacing around Dooloo because he couldn't bear to be still. \"The night I called Star Beast. The yellow star in its chest burst open\u2014it was hatching a yellow sun. Why didn't I see it before?\"\n\nDooloo breathed out slowly. \"Stars is sun eggs. I never knowed that before.\"\n\nTondoor kept circling. \"Star Beast pops us instantly to different parts of the island. It came here from way up in the sky. Why couldn't it take us there?\" He stopped, stunned at the enormity of the idea.\n\nDooloo stood up and bounced on her toes. \"I wonder where that world is, with the yellow sun.\"\n\n\"Somewhere in the sky.\" He caught his breath. \"I need to tell Star Beast.\"\n\n\"Call it,\" said Dooloo. \"In the brightest colors you know. I'll call too.\" She clutched his hand-claws.\n\nTondoor squeezed his eyes shut. Star Beast! He formed a picture of Star Beast talking to him and Dooloo. He made the yellow star in its chest glow as brightly as the sun would glow if it were yellow instead of gold. He pictured the three of them rising into the sky together. When he opened his eyes, Vlod and Froom were watching them.\n\nDooloo dropped his hand. \"Morwaka done sent Tondoor a seer dream.\"\n\n\"We done heard.\" Vlod turned away and relieved himself in the bushes.\n\n\"Yer Star Beast don't seem to be listening,\" said Froom.\n\n\"It will,\" said Tondoor. \"Morwaka wouldn't send the dream if it couldn't happen.\" He trembled with awe that the dream had come to him, and with fear at the implications.\n\n\"How is we all gonna get there?\" asked Froom. \"I mean, we's here, you's leaving, and yer star beast is who knows where.\"\n\n\"I knows how,\" said Dooloo. \"Tondoor has to bring the dragons all together to where Star Beast can touch them. Because that's how it done moved us before.\"\n\nTondoor let her words float across the dream image. \"I have to go the Plains,\" he said.\n\n\"After they done throwed you out?\" Dooloo assumed the posture of challenge. \"There wasn't no Plains in yer dream.\"\n\nOh dear. He had hoped to avoid this. \"It's because of the\u2026gold stars,\" he said. \"I can tell that they belong to a Sun dragon on the Plains.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes turned a vivid jealous yellow. \"You has another female on the Plains,\" she hissed. \"I done felt it in yer dream, the way you worships them gold sparkles.\" Her wings crumpled. \"You never wanted me to come with you. It were all a lie.\"\n\nVlod flexed his hand-claws. \"You wants me to take care of him fer you?\"\n\nDooloo turned on him. \"Just you back off! Don't everything call fer fighting.\" She narrowed her eyes at Tondoor. \"If he needs taking care of, I can do it myself.\"\n\nWhy did he ever show her the dream? \"I do want you to come with me,\" he said. \"I do.\" He looked directly at her so she could see the complete absence of orange in his eyes.\n\nDooloo folded her arms. \"What about that Sun hussy? Were she yer mate?\"\n\n\"She didn't want me. She wanted an arrogant Sky named Hoodon.\" He wished his voice didn't turn into a snarl when he said that name.\n\nDooloo's eyes faded slightly. \"Hmmm. I suppose I done had Vlod before you.\"\n\nVlod growled.\n\nDooloo's eyes turned bright yellow again. \"But you still loves her. I can tell.\" She turned her tail.\n\nWhat could he say? He couldn't stop loving Kalooka just because he also loved Dooloo. \"It's different,\" he said. \"She's older than me. She took care of me when I was a hatchling, when nobody else would. And she never did anything she didn't want to, not even when the elders told her she had to. So why would she mate with Hoodon if she really wanted me?\" And why did it still hurt to think of it?\n\nDooloo peered over her shoulder. \"But when you goes back, and you's a hero\u2026\"\n\n\"It don't matter none anyhow,\" said Froom, patting her on the horns. \"He's going off to save the world, and you's not.\"\n\nDooloo's eyes mirrored the gray clouds. \"Couldn't you go hunting fer Zloomba so I can go with Tondoor? She's yer ma too.\"\n\n\"You wants to fly off to a new world and be safe while I does yer work and then dies?\" Froom shook his head. \"That don't sound fair.\"\n\nVlod scratched his armpit. \"No reason why I should hunt fer Zloomba.\"\n\n\"Fine!\" shouted Dooloo. \"That's just fine.\" She jerked open her wings. \"Let's get hunting, then. We gots things to do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Here",
                "text": "Dooloo bolted out of the trees. Vlod and Froom flew out too. Tondoor's stomach was too jumbled to want food, but he had a long flight ahead of him. He had to eat. Zloomba was right. The trouble with having a heart was that it breaks.\n\nBut excitement kept edging into his misery. Now the dragons didn't need to stash their eggs for a future they would never see. Star Beast would snatch the living dragons, and their eggs, right out of the kraamlok's icy, flaming jaws. All he had to do was take all the dragons who would listen to the Plains. Past Wambool and the Dragons of the Rocks. And find Star Beast and tell it the plan.\n\nDooloo found him drinking from a puddle on the beach and dropped her catch beside his. Vlod and Froom landed some distance away. She slit open her beast's chest, but left it steaming in front of her. \"You has good news fer them other dragons, now you done had yer important dream.\"\n\nTondoor cracked his bird's skull and slurped up an eyeball. \"They just might listen to this one, because it saves us too.\" The eyeball lodged in his throat. \"Some of us,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I hopes you finds Star Beast soon,\" Dooloo whispered back.\n\nThe bird's remaining eye stared at him. \"If it's in the dream, it will happen.\"\n\nHis next bite landed on empty air as Dooloo bumped his snout. She glanced at Vlod, who had his snout buried in his own meal, then whispered, \"Star Beast don't have to leave from the Plains. It only has to leave from the same place as that Sun hussy!\"\n\n\"But that's where she is.\" And she's not a hussy.\n\n\"You can bring her here, along with all them other dragons you's gonna tell. The Island is plenty big.\" Dooloo bounced on her toes. \"Then Star Beast can take us all, and I gets to go too!\"\n\nBring them here? \"If they'd come\u2026\"\n\n\"You's the one telling them where to go. If you says here's the place to leave from, they's gonna come. Star Beast knows where here is too. And I'll tell everyone here so they's all ready and waiting.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. He could send the other dragons this way as he passed through with his message. He didn't have to fly everyone here himself. \"It could work.\"\n\nDooloo stopped bouncing. She stirred the sand with her toe-claw. \"'Cause I been going over 'n over that dream in my mind, and I just can't tell. Tondoor, is I in it? Does you see me going to the new world?\"\n\nTondoor tried to recall the exact dream image of the dragons sprawling on the ground, but it was too indistinct. \"I can't tell either,\" he said. He caressed the side of her snout with his hand claws. \"But you have to.\"\n\n\"Hurry up 'n eat.\" Vlod's voice rumbled across the sand. \"You needs to git seering.\" He scowled at them while they finished gulping down their beasts. Tondoor was still crunching his last bone when Vlod pulled Dooloo up by the arm. \"Done. Let's go.\"\n\nDooloo twisted out of his grasp. \"Zloomba's not gonna starve if we has a few more words.\" She snuggled her neck against Tondoor's. Vlod grunted.\n\nNow that the time was here, Tondoor didn't know what to say. He closed his eyes, memorizing Dooloo's scent, how her scales clinked against his, the warmth of her breath on his shoulder\u2014and did his best to ignore the sound of air whistling between Vlod's teeth.\n\n\"I still has yer scale,\" Dooloo murmured in his ear. \"I's gonna sleep with it every night in case you dreams again.\"\n\n\"I'll dream of you for sure, whether you see it or not.\"\n\n\"Come back quick,\" Dooloo murmured, not moving.\n\nTondoor nodded, also not moving.\n\n\"Enough!\" Vlod pulled them apart. \"Git,\" he growled.\n\nTondoor took a last slurp of water from the puddle and unfurled his wings.\n\n\"Come back soon.\" Dooloo's voice followed him as he flapped toward the sea.\n\nHe twisted his neck to watch the three of them fly up and over the trees, Dooloo flying erratically because she was looking back over her shoulder too. He circled until she was out of sight.\n\nAs he turned away, another dragon flew out of the trees toward him. It was Morda, carrying a crude basket with a cover of woven twigs. She must have made it for her egg. \"I done heard you's leaving,\" she called, pumping her short Ash wings. \"So I's going with you.\"\n\n\"I'm coming back,\" said Tondoor. He slowed down to let her catch up. \"You could just wait here.\"\n\nShe clutched her basket to her chest. \"Nope. I doesn't belong to nobody, just like Dooloo.\"\n\nAh. She was escaping from her Sun mate. \"It takes a day and a night and a day to get over the sea, without stopping to rest,\" he told her.\n\nMorda flapped harder. \"I done practiced flying. I done ate a fish. And I drunk lots of water.\"\n\nIf she was determined to come, he wouldn't stop her. \"Fine, then. Let's go.\" Together, they headed into the bright morning sun."
            },
            {
                "title": "Seer",
                "text": "\u2003Disaster!\n\n\u2003Disaster! Disaster!\n\n\u2003Unheard-of disaster!\n\n\u2003The depths awake\n\n\u2003And hunger rages free.\n\n\u2003The Egg of Doom has hatched!\n\n\u2003The seas leap up\n\n\u2003And water spreads its wings.\n\n\u2003Tides roll over you\n\n\u2003Who dwell on the shifting sands.\n\n\u2003Death opens its jaws\n\n\u2003To swallow the land of Sun.\n\n\u2003Waves roar like thunder\n\n\u2003To drown the ancient words.\n\n\u2003Calamity rises!\n\n\u2003Fire shall not burn it,\n\n\u2003Nor strength defeat it,\n\n\u2003Nor words dissuade it,\n\n\u2003Nor choice avoid it.\n\n\u2003For all shall be washed away.\n\n\u2014Prophecy of Blort, Seer of the Coast, in the time of the Kraamlok. Also by Pooka, Helper of the Seer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Assumptions",
                "text": "The flight back to the Coast was as long and strenuous as Tondoor remembered, except that this time he didn't have to worry about eventually bumping into land. And his shoulder scales felt warm where Dooloo had rested her head, even in the cold air. His exciting message and the hope of returning in triumph to her island kept his heart buoyant even when his wings grew heavy. Morda flew doggedly beside him with her little basket.\n\nPlans bubbled in his mind as he called to Star Beast. Showing it his dream was top priority. He should also try to come up with a dramatic way to describe what he had seen, like Wambool had. He played with words.\n\n\u2003Do not fear the falling terror;\n\n\u2003Star Beast saves us from the horror.\n\n\u2003Through the tunnel we are hurled,\n\n\u2003soon to land in a new world.\n\nUmm\u2026no. Pooka was good with words; maybe she could help. Maybe he could even leave Blort and Pooka to spread the word at the Coast while he flew on to the Bog\u2014if they had enough courage to cross the old thinkers. Borloo could do the same at the Bog while he went on to convince the Dragons of the Rocks. Then on to the Plains, and Kalooka.\n\nNow apprehension twisted inside him. Would he have to fight Hoodon again? He was better prepared to fight this time. But it was Elder Mala, not Kalooka or Hoodon, he had to convince. And it was hard even for him to imagine all the Dragons of the Plains flying to the farthest corner of the world.\n\nStar Beast? Can you hear me?\n\nMorwaka had sent the dream; Morwaka would make it happen.\n\nWell after noon on the second day, the clouds broke up. But even though the evening sunlight had to be reflecting off their scales, no scouts intercepted them when they flew onto a deserted beach. They gulped water from a nearby stream, collapsed where they were, and slept.\n\nVoices hammered at Tondoor's sleep, loud and insistent.\n\n\"This is most unexpected.\"\n\n\"It's disgusting, that's what it is.\"\n\nTondoor cracked open an eye. He groaned. It was the old thinkers, Kroob and Glomfa, the two dragons he least wanted to see. They stood ogling Morda in the early dawn light. She had her claws spread in the posture of defiance and was growling low in her chest.\n\n\"You fly to conclusions, as usual,\" Kroob hissed. \"We have no idea how it came to be.\"\n\nGlomfa waved a bony arm at Tondoor. \"Isn't it obvious? Once a barbarian, always a barbarian.\"\n\nTondoor's half-awake mind cringed, but his exhausted body stayed where it was.\n\n\"But think what we could learn from it.\" Kroob stepped closer to Morda. She growled louder. Kroob's neck jiggled as he pulled back. \"We've never seen one before, much less spoken to one.\"\n\n\"If it even knows how to speak,\" said Glomfa, her nostrils twitching. \"Which is highly unlikely. Maybe if we see what it's carrying in\u2014\"\n\nMorda's shriek woke Tondoor completely. Snarling and snapping, she lunged at Glomfa, who leapt backwards into Kroob. Tondoor scrambled out of the way as Kroob tottered toward him. Clutching her basket to her chest, Morda tossed something into her mouth. Uh-oh.\n\nGlomfa ducked Morda's fire. \"Savages! Savages!\" Her fangs glinted behind the smoke.\n\nTondoor rushed between them. \"Morda was protecting her egg. You scared her.\"\n\nGlomfa spat at his feet.\n\nKroob brushed sand off his belly. \"Remember, Glomfa, such a creature is half beast. You cannot expect it to behave like a true dragon.\"\n\nGlomfa turned on Tondoor. \"How dare you return here to flaunt your Ash mate when you know our prohibitions against slavery?\"\n\n\"Tondoor's not my mate.\" Morda's voice was scratchy from the smoke. Keeping one eye fixed on Glomfa, and still clutching her basket, she lapped water from the stream.\n\nThe two old Snows stared into each other's astonished blue eyes. \"It speaks,\" whispered Kroob.\n\nWater dripped from Morda's snout as she straightened up. \"I done left my mate behind, same as Tondoor. And I's not no slave neither.\" Her eyes turned a proud violet.\n\nKroob found his voice first. \"'It is consistent with hospitality to welcome our own when they return from a long journey.' Sooloppa, of course.\"\n\nGlomfa snorted. Her narrowed eyes followed Morda as she snuffled from the stream toward a tide pool.\n\n\"Especially when they bring tidings of great interest,\" Kroob added.\n\n\"Quite right,\" said Glomfa, snapping into her guide's posture of authority. \"What do you know of the star beast that ordered us to bury our eggs?\"\n\nTondoor gasped. \"Star Beast is here? I need to\u2014talk to it.\" He had almost said he needed to tell it his dream. That would have been a mistake.\n\n\"So you are allied with the creature,\" Glomfa hissed. \"The crazy Snow was speaking truth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Blort",
                "text": "\"Disaster!\" cried a voice overhead. \"Unheard-of disaster! The depths awake, and hunger rages free!\"\n\nIt was Blort, and Pooka behind.\n\nGlomfa waggled her hand claws in the posture of ridicule. \"The whole world has gone mad!\"\n\n\"Tides roll over you who dwell on the shifting sands,\" cried Blort. \"Death opens its jaws to swallow the Land of Sun!\" His eyes went wide when he saw Kroob and Glomfa. \"Oops. Sorry.\" He banked his wings.\n\n\"Wait! Blort!\" Tondoor waved his wings.\n\nBlort twisted his neck and promptly fell into a spiral. He plowed into the sand in the most ungraceful landing Tondoor had seen since he was a hatchling. Pooka alighted beside him.\n\n\"I'm doing it, Tondoor. I'm telling my dream,\" Blort blurted out, leaping to his feet.\n\n\"And I made it sound scary,\" added Pooka.\n\n\"It does. Have your nightmares stopped?\" Tondoor asked Blort.\n\nBlort nodded. \"Mostly. If I don't keep telling people, they come back.\"\n\nInteresting. Had Wambool's dreams stopped too, now that he was proclaiming dreams again? Would it matter if he was telling lies and a made-up plan?\n\nGlomfa pressed her snout hard into his. \"I knew you were trouble from the moment you got here. We should have tossed you out then.\"\n\n\"Now, now, Glomfa.\" Kroob wormed his bulk between them. \"Remember, we are in need of information. 'Honey attracts flies,' and all that. Drobood.\"\n\nTondoor twitched his nostrils back into shape.\n\nKroob drooped into the posture of regret. \"Please pardon my colleague's discourteous outburst. As you are aware, she tends to speak before she thinks.\" Glomfa snorted. Kroob continued. \"The other striped Snow, your comrade I believe, claimed that you called the star beast to our world. If that is so, it is a remarkable deed. How exactly did you accomplish it?\"\n\nBlort cocked his head. \"The old Snow said you called it here to destroy us.\"\n\n\"That kind of talk is most unhelpful,\" said Kroob, shaking his head. \"Remember your Aroomp.\"\n\n\"Wambool is a snoof and a liar,\" said Tondoor. \"Star Beast is going to help us.\"\n\n\"I knew it!\" said Blort. \"If it wanted to destroy us, why would it show us how to save our eggs?\"\n\n\"Burying eggs is the opposite of saving them,\" Glomfa pointed out.\n\n\"Not if the kraamlok is coming,\" said Blort.\n\n\"Will the star beast save us from the kraamlok too?\" asked Pooka. \"Or just our eggs?\"\n\nTondoor opened his mouth to speak, but Morda poked her head around his wing. \"It's gonna take us to a new world. Where the kraamlok can't come.\"\n\nPooka's jaw dropped. \"Tondoor. Did you make an Ash slave to be your mate?\"\n\nMorda's eyes darted around the group. \"He's not my mate and he's not the one changed me and I's not no slave.\" She clutched her basket close. \"Why do everyone keep saying that?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" sputtered Pooka. \"I just assumed\u2026\"\n\n\"Star Beast didn't tell us it was taking us to a new world,\" interrupted Blort.\n\n\"It's from my dream,\" Tondoor blurted out. There. He'd said it.\n\nBlort clapped his tail against Tondoor's. \"You had your dream! That's great!\"\n\nGlomfa rolled her eyes. \"Why do I waste my time with these fools?\" She turned to Morda. \"Except you, dear. None of this sorry business is your fault.\"\n\n\"I'll be leaving shortly,\" said Tondoor. \"Before then, though, I have to invite everyone to fly to the Rainy Island. Star Beast will take us away from there.\"\n\nGlomfa opened her mouth, then closed it. Kroob patted her arm. Pooka patted Tondoor's.\n\nBlort ruffled his wings. \"If Star Beast is going to take us away, why did it tell us to bury our eggs? Can't it take eggs too? And why did the other Snow say to hide in caves?\"\n\n\"They doesn't know about Tondoor's dream yet,\" said Morda. \"That's why we's looking fer Star Beast.\"\n\n\"What?\" exclaimed Pooka. \"Then how do you know Star Beast will do it?\"\n\nBlort's eyes shone violet. \"Because he's a seer. Morwaka gave him a dream.\"\n\nTondoor gave a sharp nod as Glomfa threw her arms in the air and stalked away.\n\nKroob coughed politely. \"Putting aside the more, ah, speculative portions of this narrative, it does bring us back to one of our more intriguing questions. Assuming you do find the star beast, how will you go about communicating with it?\"\n\n\"Just so,\" added Glomfa, turning back to them. \"It was able to place images into our minds, to speak in colors, as it were. But we were unable to make it respond to us.\"\n\n\"On the island, it only listened to me and Dooloo,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"Dooloo is Tondoor's mate,\" put in Morda, scratching her leg with a toe-claw. \"The one he done left behind.\"\n\n\"Ooh,\" said Pooka. \"How sad.\" She wrapped her hand-claws around Blort's arm.\n\n\"Stay on topic,\" snapped Glomfa. \"Do you speak audibly to the star beast? Or do you simply visualize your message in your mind?\"\n\n\"I do both,\" said Tondoor, \"but I believe it responds to the pictures.\" He looked around at the circle of dragons. Answering questions was fine, but he had some of his own. \"Is Star Beast still here? Or do you know where it went?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Fish",
                "text": "\"The star beast didn't stay here long,\" said Blort.\n\n\"Only long enough to pilfer our eggs and take them who knows where,\" Glomfa added. \"Sending more than a few dragons into a panic, searching for them.\"\n\n\"The ones that stayed behind look to us to salvage the situation,\" said Kroob.\n\n\"Hence our need to learn how to communicate with it,\" added Glomfa in an icy tone. \"So we can retrieve our eggs and salvage what remains of our fine Coast civilization.\"\n\n\"Not to mention our reputations,\" said Kroob. \"Of what benefit is knowledge if it avails not in a time of crisis?\"\n\n\"Star Beast done stole eggs on the Island too,\" said Morda. She patted her basket. \"But Tondoor got them back.\"\n\n\"Then you need to go and find it right now!\" Glomfa exclaimed. \"And put a stop to this nonsense.\"\n\n\"But I have more questions,\" cried Kroob.\n\n\"We'll help you look.\" Blort cut in. \"Come on.\" He and Pooka spread their wings.\n\nTondoor spread his too. \"Let's go, Morda.\"\n\nThe guides' cantankerous voices faded as they flew off. It didn't take long to see that the Coast had far fewer dragons than before. The first ones they found were two Fires and a Bone digging holes in the sandy soil. It wasn't going well: the sand slipped back into the holes as fast as they threw it out.\n\n\"Come on, Morda,\" said Pooka. \"Let's go ask them if they've seen Star Beast.\"\n\n\"Don't forget to tell them my dream,\" Tondoor called after them as they flew down. Maybe Pooka would make it sound fancy.\n\nA little further on, a Fire and a small Sky were re-assembling the skeleton of a giant sea beast.\n\n\"Noot! Trok!\" called Tondoor.\n\nTrok peered up between the giant ribs. \"Tondoor! You're back!\"\n\n\"You're too close to the water,\" Blort called down. \"The giant wave will pull all of this into the sea.\"\n\nNoot glanced up from wedging the end of a curved rib bone into the sand. \"We know. We want to watch the big water mouth eat it.\"\n\n\"You only see a wave that big once in your life,\" added Trok.\n\n\"But it will kill you,\" protested Blort, circling.\n\n\"We'll be in the air,\" said Noot. \"And that old Snow said we're all going to die soon anyway.\"\n\n\"No, you aren't!\" Tondoor said. \"Star Beast is going to take us to a new world where the kraamlok can't reach.\"\n\nNoot looked up. \"Oh yeah? Then why did it leave?\"\n\n\"This is the message of Morwaka,\" Blort called down. \"Meet us at the north boundary stream tomorrow morning if you want to survive the shining menace from the sky. Be prepared to fly for two days.\" He swooped up again, and Tondoor followed. \"It's no use sticking around to answer questions,\" Blort said. \"They want to know all kinds of things that aren't in your dream. You just tell them what you know and move on.\"\n\n\"You're pretty good at this.\"\n\nBlort nodded, pleased. \"I've been up and down the coast telling my dream at least a dozen times. I guess I've learned a few things.\"\n\n\"I should have told them they need to go to the Rainy Island,\" Tondoor said.\n\n\"Tell them tomorrow at the stream,\" said Blort. \"Then you only have to say it once, and the ones who'd laugh won't be there.\"\n\nThat made sense. He had a lot to learn about telling dreams. Beneath them, a stiff breeze tumbled a fragment of a woven mat across fading footprints in the sand. \"A lot of dragons must have listened to your warning,\" he told Blort.\n\nBlort sighed. \"Glomfa flew right behind me, shouting not to listen because dreams aren't real. The dragons that left flew away with your old seer, or after Star Beast.\"\n\nDelivering Tondoor's message on the Coast also seemed to be a thankless task. Many of the dragons they spoke to were scornful, others indifferent. A few were amused. None had seen Star Beast since the eggs disappeared.\n\nOver the long stretches of empty beach, Tondoor answered Blort's questions about the Island, his dream and Star Beast. When they returned to the stream in the evening, Pooka and Morda were gliding low over the water, fishing. A pile of fish waited for them next to the water. Tondoor sank gratefully down beside them.\n\n\"There's just one thing I don't understand,\" he said as they relaxed on the sand in the light of Morwaka's rising Eye. \"When I was last here, no one had the slightest interest in the kraamlok. I understand why dragons would listen to Star Beast. But why did some of them follow Wambool, after they ran him off the coast the first time?\"\n\nBlort and Pooka stared at him.\n\n\"You don't know?\" asked Pooka.\n\nThe breeze felt cold on his scales. \"Know what?\"\n\nBlort pointed at the sea. \"Look.\"\n\nTondoor squinted over the water. The first stars were out, and the deep blue of the sky was fading to black.\n\n\"Look up.\"\n\nIn the darkening sky, like a white fish leaping toward the sea, hung the kraamlok."
            },
            {
                "title": "Gathering",
                "text": "The kraamlok didn't look like the picture on the cliff. It had no angry red eyes, no fangs, and it was white like a star. Its tail was only a wisp, and it only had one. But it was coming. It was real.\n\n\"How long has it been there?\" Tondoor croaked.\n\n\"Ten days since we were sure,\" said Blort. \"Its tail keeps getting longer.\"\n\nTen days. Had Wambool seen it between the clouds from the Island? Was that why he left when he did?\n\nThe other three lay down to sleep, but Tondoor's eyes kept popping back open to look at the shining apparition in the sky. It was beautiful, in its terrifying way. If he didn't know what it was, he might ask it to tell him a story. But the story it carried, he didn't want to hear.\n\nNo wonder so many dragons had flown off with Wambool. They wanted to live. Tondoor lay awake long after the kraamlok followed the sun down behind the horizon, calling to Star Beast and thinking of Dooloo.\n\nThe dragons arrived before dawn. When Tondoor opened his eyes, they were crowded beside the stream, waiting. Noot and Trok were there, and the three diggers, and many more who had laughed at him yesterday. It didn't take long to tell them the plan and the directions to the Rainy Island, and then to Zloomba's cave and Dooloo.\n\nNoot, as head of the flying group, volunteered to lead. Trok opted to go on the long trip with Tondoor and Morda. Blort and Pooka did too, to help persuade any straggling Coast dragons that had gone after Wambool or Star Beast.\n\nTondoor chuckled with relief as he watched the cloud of dragons take off for the Island. If the Coast was any indication, convincing the dragons in the other corners of the world wouldn't take long at all. He would still make it back to Dooloo in time.\n\n\"More fine Coast dragons gone to the barbarians,\" clucked a voice behind him. Glomfa.\n\nKroob panted as he hurried to keep up. \"As you never tire of pointing out, they are free to go where they choose.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Glomfa cried. \"As I now choose to go with Tondoor.\"\n\nTondoor froze in mid turn. Had he heard her correctly? \"But you don't believe my dream is real,\" he stammered.\n\n\"Of course not.\" Glomfa bobbed her head. \"But Kroob and I have a strong need to communicate with your star beast, and it appears we shall not have that opportunity here.\"\n\nThis would certainly make the trip more interesting.\n\nKroob patted his rotund belly. \"Given that I am not much inclined to flying these days, Glomfa has elected to go on our behalf. Should your star beast return here, I shall attempt further communication.\"\n\nGlomfa's eyes twinkled an uncharacteristic blue. \"When do we leave?\"\n\nBlort and Pooka were drinking from the stream, and Morda was inspecting the inside of her basket. \"Right away,\" Tondoor said. He unfurled his wings. \"Ready?\" The others nodded.\n\n\"I shall be back before you know it,\" Glomfa called down as they flew away.\n\nWith luck and Morwaka's help, she would. Along with many others.\n\nThey flew southeast over the fronded trees, then over the forest that replaced them. Its leaves were the bright, fresh green of new growth. Tondoor flew quickly, anxious to make good time. The others didn't. Every time he looked back they were further behind. Was he that much better at flying? Or were they distracted by sights none of them had seen before? They were too far back to hear him shout, so he turned around. They were all flying in a cluster around Morda.\n\n\"Were you not terrified when your attacker violated your species integrity with no prior explanation and no attempt to secure your permission?\" Glomfa was asking her.\n\nMorda looked at Pooka.\n\n\"Were you scared when the dragon held you in the changing pool?\" Pooka translated. \"Should he have asked you first if you wanted to be a dragon?\"\n\nTondoor had to admit that was an interesting question. He hadn't thought to ask her.\n\nMorda turned back to Glomfa. \"It were better than being eaten. And I doesn't see how he coulda asked. Dragons doesn't speak glarf.\"\n\nGlarfs had a language? Tondoor banked around to fly with the group.\n\n\"I don't think Sooloppa thought of that when she said we had to ask permission,\" said Blort. \"If it isn't possible, we can't do it.\"\n\n\"That's a good point,\" said Tondoor.\n\n\"It changes nothing!\" snapped Glomfa. \"Such trauma cannot in good conscience be forced on any living creature.\"\n\n\"There's someone down there,\" Trok interrupted. He pointed his head at the trees.\n\nTondoor squinted. \"Probably Coast dragons. We better go down.\"\n\nThe dragons in the forest were glad to see them. They hadn't seen Star Beast since it took their eggs and were wondering what they should do next. Some took Blort and Tondoor's advice and flew toward the Island; some opted to keep searching. Two of them decided to fly with Tondoor.\n\nThe rest of his group was clustered around Morda. \"She's from the Rainy Island. But she's not my mate and she's not a slave,\" he told the newcomers to keep them from asking.\n\n\"How did it feel to become a dragon?\" Pooka was asking her.\n\nMorda gazed at her solemnly. \"It felt like being turned inside out.\"\n\nTrok winced. \"That must have been awful.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" said Morda. \"I always done felt like I had a dragon inside of me. Changing were like letting it out.\" She flexed her toe-claws.\n\nTrok and Pooka laughed.\n\n\"Don't tell me you're glad you were forced to become a dragon!\" exclaimed Glomfa.\n\nMorda bobbed her head. \"Like I done said, it were better than being eaten. Besides, glarfs can't breathe fire.\"\n\nMorda was fascinating, but\u2026 Tondoor unfurled his wings. \"Time to leave. And we need to fly faster this time.\"\n\nThey took off at a good speed, but it wasn't long before Trok spotted another group of dragons. By afternoon, after several such encounters, they were still over the same forest. But his group had grown to twenty. The sun was sinking when Trok spotted yet another group.\n\nTondoor glanced down. \"Go and hunt,\" he called to the others. \"We'll stop here for the night.\" Under the trees and out of sight of the kraamlok. He flew down and pushed through the branches. This was the biggest group of wanderers yet\u2014close to a dozen. \"Greetings.\"\n\nThe dragons craned their necks in his direction. A familiar-looking Leaf scrabbled to her feet.\n\nTondoor held out his arms in the posture of greeting. \"Yolooda! What are you doing here?\"\n\nYolooda eyed him up and down. \"That's the one I told you about.\" Her eyes burned red. \"Get him!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "It Hatched",
                "text": "Yolooda lunged toward Tondoor. The other Bog dragons looked at each other.\n\nTondoor backed away. \"What did I do?\"\n\nYolooda hissed. \"You told me to feed stones to the star.\"\n\nTondoor backed between the trees. That was just an offhand comment. He never thought she would do it. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The star stopped breathing. At first I thought I'd killed it, and saved the Loollabies. But no.\" She pounced. Tondoor dodged.\n\n\"What happened?\" he asked again, backing around another tree. Behind Yolooda, the other Bog dragons watched. Behind him, he could hear some of his companions. Could Coast dragons fight off Bog dragons? Could they even fight?\n\n\"The star hatched.\" Yolooda swiped at Tondoor's head, but her claws caught on a branch. \"Now it's roaming all over the Bog, right through our traps, stealing our eggs. Including mine.\" She swiped again.\n\n\"That's not Morwaka's star,\" Tondoor shouted. He ducked behind a tree as her claws scraped the bark. \"It's a star beast from the sky. And if you take me to it, I can make it stop.\"\n\nMorda peeked out from behind a tree. \"He done got my egg back.\"\n\nYolooda froze. \"You mean I killed Morwaka's star after all?\"\n\nSo Tondoor told his story, with Yolooda pressing him for details about Zloomba and Dooloo and the black sap armor as well as Star Beast. Pooka and Glomfa and the other Coast dragons who hadn't heard the story before also crowded close to listen. When he was done, the dragons sat and nodded at each other, their eyes the satisfied blue of hearing a story well told.\n\nGlomfa spoke into the silence. \"It seems that our young adventurer was forced to deal with many novel situations to which the appropriate responses were not clear, and I say he did remarkably well given his limited resources and training.\"\n\nThe others murmured assent while Tondoor blinked. Had Glomfa just paid him a compliment? This trip was going better and better. Tomorrow, he would find Star Beast, and before he knew it, everyone would be back at the Island, ready to go to the new world. Thank you, Morwaka. That night, Tondoor slept well.\n\nAt dawn the next morning, the Bog dragons who still had their eggs flew toward the Rainy Island while the others flew with Tondoor toward the Bog. By noon they were flying over the islands that dotted the red waters, scanning for flickering lights. The Bog air felt thick and damp, and all that moved beneath them was the occasional spiky water snoof nipping the edges of the deserted islands.\n\nBy late afternoon they could see the place where Morwaka's gurgling star had blown Tondoor out of the air. The water lay still and silent.\n\nStar Beast! If a mind could become hoarse from shouting, Tondoor's was.\n\nYolooda whooped. \"There. On the hill with that Fire.\"\n\nTondoor could just see the sparkles against the spring green of the hillside. He picked up his pace, conjuring vivid colors into the worn image of the two of them talking. Star Beast, stay where you are until I get there.\n\n\"Remember,\" called Glomfa, flapping after him, \"I need to inquire about the Coast eggs. It would be helpful if you told me step by step how to proceed.\"\n\nTondoor touched down on the hillside beside Star Beast, with Glomfa close beside. Blort, Pooka, Morda and Trok landed below him while Yolooda circled above.\n\nStar Beast's hands clutched an egg. The Fire danced back and forth, trying to snatch it back. Star Beast's laughing colors rippled in Tondoor's mind as it passed the egg through its body and held it behind its back.\n\nDays of frustration exploded in Tondoor's mind. Give it back! He made a sharp image. Star Beast turned its head but kept the egg.\n\nThe egg could wait. Tondoor summoned the images from his dream.\n\nStars whirl about them, a great, rolling tunnel of red and green and orange and blue, mingled with Kalooka's shining gold and his own travel-worn white. They hit ground where the sun shines an unmistakable yellow and the air is heavy with the promise of refuge. Dragons\u2014all sizes from hatchlings to elders\u2014sprawl over the ground.\n\nAll around, the other dragons gasped. Star Beast must be letting everyone see. Tondoor dropped Star Beast into the picture. You need to take us there.\n\nStar Beast's lights shrank to points so tiny they almost disappeared against the sunlit green of the hillside. Once again Tondoor saw an image of the star dragon, soaring across a dark sky. Then Star Beast blazed into a whirlwind of light and shot into the air, taking the image with it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Three Days",
                "text": "The Fire moved first, snatching up her egg as it fell to the ground. She raced toward the islands.\n\nYolooda did a victory loop in the air, then flapped toward the hills, shouting, \"The star is gone!\"\n\nGlomfa assumed the posture of rebuke. \"You neglected to ask about our Coast eggs.\"\n\n\"I didn't have a chance.\" Tondoor gazed up to where Star Beast had disappeared. Why did it leave so quickly? Why had it showed him the star dragon again? Did it understand what he wanted, or was it going to do something else unhelpful like sealing Zloomba in her cave?\n\nThere was silence for a moment. Then Pooka spoke up in a small voice. \"Is Star Beast coming back for us? Will it take us to the new world?\"\n\nTondoor was spared having to confess his ignorance by another Snow thumping onto the hill. It was Borloo, the Bog seer. \"What happened?\" she cried. \"Did Morwaka's star just return to the sky?\"\n\nTondoor shook his head. \"That wasn't Morwaka's star. It was a star beast.\"\n\n\"The other striped Snow said it was the star.\"\n\n\"He was wrong. I've been chasing that star beast all the way from the Rainy Island.\"\n\nBorloo looked baffled. \"Then where is Morwaka's star?\"\n\nBorloo must not know what Yolooda had done.\n\nNow Glomfa rescued him by hopping up the side of the hill and bowing in the posture of greeting. \"I am Glomfa, head thinker of the Coast. And these are my students, Blort, Pooka and Trok of the Coast, and Morda of the Rainy Island.\"\n\nBlort and Pooka bowed in the posture of respect. Morda and Trok looked at each other, then bowed as well.\n\nBorloo bowed back. \"I am Borloo, head seer of the Bog. It is a great pleasure to meet my colleagues from far away.\"\n\n\"I would be most interested to hear your interpretation of recent events,\" said Glomfa.\n\n\"I welcome the opportunity to discuss these matters as well,\" said Borloo. \"Shall we continue our conversation over a meal?\"\n\n\"Excellent idea,\" said Glomfa. \"As my esteemed colleague Kroob is fond of saying, 'Conversation always goes better with food.'\" She turned to Tondoor. \"You will come, of course, with Blort.\"\n\nHer opinion of them had certainly changed.\n\n\"And Pooka,\" said Blort, looking panicked.\n\n\"As you wish,\" said Borloo. She led them to her island and sent other dragons to find food. Around the meal, the Snows shared their stories. To Glomfa's obvious annoyance, Borloo was most interested in Tondoor's. \"How many more days will you need to complete your quest and return to the Rainy Island?\"\n\nTondoor counted on his hand-claws. \"One day to the Dragons of the Rocks, another one to the Plains, and another three at the Plains to give time for the herding groups to fly in.\"\n\n\"Then add three more to send them word,\" said Glomfa. \"That makes eight days until you are ready to return.\"\n\nBorloo nodded slowly. \"And how many more days back to the Island?\"\n\n\"Two to the Bog, two to the Coast, and two to the Island, flying overnight.\"\n\nBorloo leaned back. \"Fourteen days, with no setbacks or rest, for dragons who fly your speed. More for the young and their minders, if they can reach the Island at all. So at least nineteen or twenty.\"\n\nTondoor shrugged his wings. \"If that's what it takes to save everyone, we'll do it.\" To save Dooloo and Kalooka, he would fly twice that long. Three times. Ten.\n\nBorloo regarded them around the circle. \"Morwaka's star has left its usual resting place in the Bog, and we do not know where it has gone. My Bog colleagues and I believe it is waiting for the kraamlok to return it to Morwaka.\" She turned her head to the west. \"For that reason, I have been observing the kraamlok closely since it appeared in the sky.\"\n\nTondoor had deliberately lain down facing east. Now he twisted his head to look west. The invader hung higher in the sky than two nights ago. Its tail had grown. Tails. There were now two of them: a wide, white one flaring into the sky, and a dim blue one pointing directly away from the horizon's orange glow.\n\n\"It's growing fast,\" whispered Pooka.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Borloo. \"I've been measuring its length against that row of stars beside it. It's twice as long as it was three days ago.\"\n\nThe beast parts Tondoor had eaten felt like rocks in his stomach. He felt his eyes chill. \"What are you saying?\"\n\nBorloo gazed at him with heavy gray eyes. \"You don't have twenty days.\"\n\nThey had to. They had to get back to the Island.\n\n\"Do we have fourteen?\" asked Blort.\n\nBorloo pressed her snout together for a moment before she spoke. \"If the kraamlok keeps the same speed, I expect Morwaka's star to depart three days from now.\"\n\nTondoor stood up, trembling. \"No. We have to get to the Island.\" He blinked at Borloo. \"Morwaka wouldn't send a dream if it wasn't possible to follow it.\"\n\nBorloo blinked back. \"I recommend you make all haste to the Plains. Perhaps you can save your people there.\"\n\nTondoor assumed the posture of defiance. His voice came out harsh. \"You're wrong. You didn't know what Star Beast was, you don't know where your star is, and you don't know this either. Morwaka will help us return to the Rainy Island.\"\n\nGlomfa reached over and gave Tondoor's snout a sharp rap. He closed it and pulled back his claws.\n\n\"There is no need for such acrimony,\" she said. \"Of course you will return to the Rainy Island, just as I will return to the Coast. Strange apparitions in the sky and the water do not mean the world is about to end. They merely mean our knowledge of the world is incomplete.\"\n\nBorloo snorted. \"We understand more of the world than you think.\"\n\nTondoor couldn't listen to any more. He fled into the dark evening. He found a crevice in the foothills, where he couldn't see the sky, and huddled in the silence and the dark. Three days. The end couldn't come so soon. He clenched his jaw. What did Borloo know anyway? Bog Snows didn't dream like the others; she had told him so herself. \"Don't worry, Dooloo,\" he whispered. \"I'm coming for you.\" And all the other dragons too."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rock Dust",
                "text": "Tondoor rose early to hunt not once, but twice. He would need all the energy he could get to confront the Dragons of the Rocks.\n\nBlort found him when he was finishing his second beast. \"We need to talk.\"\n\nTondoor swallowed. \"I'm listening.\"\n\n\"We can't go to the Dragons of the Rocks.\"\n\n\"We have to,\" Tondoor said. \"I told Bracelet\u2014he's one of the guards\u2014that I would come back for him if I had my dream.\"\n\nBlort shook his head. \"The Bog dragons believe Borloo and they want to go with you, not to the Island. But they won't go to the Rocks. From what they told us about the Rock dragons, I don't want to either.\"\n\n\"I understand that. But\u2026\" Tondoor motioned with his snout. \"The Plains are on the other side of the mountains. We can't avoid them.\"\n\n\"We'll go through the mountains, but not to the Dragons of the Rocks.\" Blort clinked his hand claws together. \"Yolooda has a plan.\"\n\nTondoor considered. It couldn't hurt to listen. \"All right. If it's a good plan. We'll tell the Rock dragons on the way back to the Island.\"\n\nBlort nodded. \"If we're still here by then, fine.\"\n\nActually, Tondoor thought as he followed Blort, this plan was better than his. Having the entire clan of Plains dragons with him at the Rocks would not only be good protection but would bolster his case for going to the Island. And if Borloo happened to be right\u2026well, she wasn't, so there was no need to think about it.\n\nYolooda's plan was to cover the dragons with rock dust and fly at night so the Rock dragons couldn't see them. There was a stripe of black rock running through the hills, soft enough to scrape out with claws. They could wipe it all over each other, and as long as it didn't rain, it would stay on.\n\nTondoor chuckled when he heard it. Rock dust would be cooler to fly in than black tree sap. Dooloo would laugh too when he told her about it.\n\nWhile his cohorts flew off to tell the Bog dragons his dream and the new plan, he and Yolooda planned out their route. First she drew a line in the dirt and placed a stone at each end. \"This rock is the Bog. This one is where the Dragons of the Rocks live, to the southeast.\"\n\nTondoor placed another stone beyond the second one. \"This is the Nest, where we need to go.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Yolooda drew parallel lines between the stones. \"These are the mountains. The valleys run east to west, as far as we can see from the hills.\"\n\n\"It's the same all the way. The lake that separates the Plains from the mountains also runs east to west.\"\n\nYolooda pointed. \"We know the Rock scouts patrol these valleys.\"\n\n\"And those ones, near the Nest.\"\n\nShe slid her claws over. \"But what if we fly to the east? They won't expect us to go out there, and in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\"We'll have to cross the mountains from valley to valley to get to the Plains. But if we cross at night, it could work.\"\n\nYolooda brushed the rocks and marks away with her foot. \"Better not leave any hints, in case the Rock dragons come snooping.\"\n\nBy early evening, the hills with the crumbly black rocks were dotted with dragons covering themselves with dust. They were also covering the baskets that held the eggs retrieved from Star Beast's hiding places.\n\nTondoor picked up a black rock and rubbed it on his scales. It was a lot like polishing them with flaal bark. The rock dust had a sharp odor that made him sneeze; they would just have to hope the Rock dragons couldn't find them by smell. As Pooka dusted his back and wings, he tried to identify the other dragons on the hill. Those small ones might be Morda and Trok. Glomfa was the very tall one with the still-white tail. There were two other Snows from the Bog, but not Borloo.\n\nBy the time everyone was ready, the kraamlok was high in the sky. Its two tails were noticeably longer than the night before. Clouds scudded in front of it, so they might be spared having to watch it all night. He and Trok lined the blackened dragons up in a V-shape, the way the Coast dragons liked to fly, and Blort and Pooka traveled along the two rows with pieces of black rock, touching up any colors that still showed. When they were done, Tondoor positioned himself with Yolooda at the front.\n\n\"Once it's fully dark, you won't be able to see anyone,\" Tondoor called out, \"so pay attention to the air currents flowing back from the dragon in front and listen for the sound of their wings. We don't want the Rock Dragons to see or hear us, so if you do collide, don't shout.\"\n\nOn impulse, he lifted his arms in the posture of blessing. \"May Morwaka guide us safely through the mountains and to the new world.\"\n\nThey rose into the air with Tondoor at the front, Trok to his left and Yolooda to his right. The strong wind pushing the clouds also pushed them, so they made good time over the hills and the first mountain range. Inside the valley, they had to flap harder to make speed. The intermittent light from the nearly round Eye and the taunting kraamlok made the trees fade in and out of sight, but when Tondoor glanced back over his shoulder, the dragons were next to invisible. He hardly heard them breathing behind him as they crossed into the second valley.\n\nAs the sky began to pale around the edges, he pulled in deep, calming breaths, daring to let his mind relax. They had to be most of the way to the Nest by now and might even arrive before Wambool if he was delayed by the Rock dragons. Soon he would see Kalooka, and Elder Mala, and give them his triumphant message. Then before long they would be off again, great clouds of them, back to where Dooloo was waiting. He still hadn't figured out how to manage Kalooka and Dooloo meeting, but there was plenty of time to figure that out.\n\nSoft raindrops pinged his scales and brought the fresh scent of damp forest. \"Let's go down and take shelter,\" he called to Yolooda, \"so the rain doesn't wash away our disguise.\" That was a good idea anyway, because by now many of the dragons would need to rest.\n\nHe was answered by a flurry of wings.\n\nStriped Skies surrounded their dusky group as if they had fallen with the rain. Above them gleamed the ruddy scales of many Fires and Bloods.\n\n\"We have been watching for you, Tondoor,\" the head Sky growled. \"We declare you a traitor to the Dragons of the Rocks.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Trial",
                "text": "The Dragons of the Rocks kept them flying until late into the morning, and many of Tondoor's dragons were one wingbeat from falling out of the sky when they finally descended into the valley. Tondoor was tethered as soon as he landed, without being allowed to drink from the lake and without being given food. The wooden blocks were as humiliating and uncomfortable as before.\n\nThe larger dragons in his group were also secured in wooden blocks. When the blocks ran out, the Rock dragons wound metal ropes around the necks of the remaining prisoners and secured them to long metal stakes pounded into the ground. They ran out of stakes too, so the two smallest dragons, Trok and Morda, were tied together without one. Somehow they managed to lie down together and sleep, with Morda's Ash neck crossed over Trok's Sky one and her basket clutched under one wing.\n\nExhaustion and shock pushed Tondoor into sleep. When he opened his eyes, stinging rock dust trickled in with the rain. His arms were trapped behind the block, so all he could do was try to blink it out. He guessed it was now midday, although he couldn't see the sun through the heavy clouds. Around him, the natural colors of his followers glistened against the wet gravel now turned black beneath them.\n\nA lump grew in Tondoor's throat. So many dragons had believed his dream. And now? Most of the prisoners had turned their heads away. Yolooda couldn't because she was secured with her head facing his. Her eyes seethed with accusation, even though sneaking past the Rock dragons was her idea. Glomfa faced the other way, but he could see her head straining above the top of her block, observing.\n\nHe lapped water from the shallow puddle he was lying in. It tasted of black rock dust, but he was so thirsty he didn't care. He pushed gravel into a small pile with his snout to rest his head on. The steep sides of the valley glistened behind white, smoke-like clouds that hovered under the thick gray sky. Dirty snow still hung from the upper slopes, while streams of meltwater gushed down to the swollen lake.\n\nThe Blood guards Tondoor remembered from last time stood motionless around the prisoners as the rain beat down, their stripes glinting and their metal claws dark against the stones. Bracelet was there, but he had not so much as glanced at Tondoor. Was he thinking about their whispered conversation, where he had asked Tondoor to come back and tell them if he had his dream? How betrayed he must feel.\n\nTondoor looked away. Had Wambool's Coast dragons also been imprisoned, and if so, where were they now? Or had they been welcomed, because Wambool had brought them to join the Rock dragons and hide in their caves?\n\nThree large dragons emerged out of the hanging clouds. The Sky and Blood elders were the same ones as last time, but the Fire was replaced by a Sun with swirling stripes on her chest and something that looked like a metal snoof twined around her horns.\n\nThe elders landed on the other side of the boulders and marched through the archway to line up in front of Tondoor\u2014although he saw them hesitate, checking all the Snows before settling on him. With his belly down behind the blocks, they couldn't see his stripe. Yolooda pulled her head out of the way of their feet. Four guards flanked Tondoor; four sets of toe-claws pressed into his sides. Tondoor couldn't even pretend to assume the posture of respect, so he just looked up.\n\nThe Blood elder fixed him with serious red eyes. \"Tondoor of the Rocks, you are accused of attempting to return to the Plains, which we expressly forbade you to do. We are your tribe now.\"\n\nWith a sweep of his tail, the Sky elder encompassed the tethered dragons. \"You collected many dragons, as we requested, but you did not bring them here\u2014even though the Plains tribe has no need of more. Explain this.\"\n\nTondoor had no excuse but the truth. \"I was not taking them as a gift. I have dreamed the way of escape from the kraamlok, which comes closer by the day, and I was taking them to be rescued.\" Behind the elders' feet, Yolooda watched him, unblinking. It had been her plan, but he had decided to follow it.\n\n\"We have also seen the kraamlok,\" said the Sky elder, \"and you wear our stripe. How is it that you did not think to deliver your message of hope to us?\"\n\nTondoor cringed as the Blood elder's toe-claws kneaded the gravel. \"I was going to tell you on the way back to the Rainy Island,\" he whispered. \"I was afraid if I came here first, you wouldn't let me go to the Plains.\" He hoped there was no orange in his eyes. He would have come back. There had to be time.\n\n\"Our other Snow had more faith in our generosity,\" growled the Sky elder, \"even though he knew, as you do, that we already live in caves and have no need to hear his message. Even so, he came to us first.\"\n\nFirst? Had they let Wambool go to the Plains then? Tondoor took a deep breath. Around him, his dragons were watching. \"Hiding in caves will not save you from the endless winter the kraamlok brings. Wambool made that up.\"\n\nThe elders exchanged glances. \"Then how is it that dragons will be safe on the Plains?\" asked the Sun.\n\n\"We won't stay on the Plains,\" said Tondoor. \"A star beast will take us to a new world where the kraamlok can't come.\"\n\nA toe-claw nudged his flank: one, two, three times. He couldn't see which guard had done it. Was Bracelet trying to tell him that he wanted to go with them? Or did some other guard just have a twitch?\n\nThe Sun elder was smirking. \"Star creatures. The stuff of hatchlings' tales.\"\n\nGlomfa spoke up. \"This one is real. It was on the Coast stealing our eggs.\" The elders turned their heads to see who had spoken.\n\n\"It was in the Bog too,\" said Yolooda. \"Until Tondoor made it leave.\"\n\nThe elders swiveled their necks down.\n\n\"Bog dragons, in our territory,\" growled the Blood.\n\n\"We didn't intend to come here,\" muttered Yolooda.\n\n\"Bog dragons would not come here willingly,\" agreed the Sky. \"The first Snow's companions came from the Coast and do not know us. Perhaps there was more to this Snow's betrayal than his own fear.\"\n\nTondoor felt a flush of hope. Last time too, the Rock dragons had been more generous than he expected.\n\n\"Plains dragons would not fly here either,\" said the Sun elder. \"So I find it difficult to believe he meant to return.\"\n\n\"It would have been easier to convince us to fly to the Plains,\" said the Blood, \"since we are so familiar with the route.\"\n\nThe Sky elder chuckled. \"The Plains dragons would hardly welcome us with open wings.\"\n\nThey most certainly would not. \"But surely we can put aside our differences when our survival depends on it,\" Tondoor said. \"Because Star Beast will take everyone. Everyone who goes to the Rainy Island.\"\n\nThe Sky elder narrowed his eyes. \"Then why are you taking all these dragons to the Plains? Why aren't they flying to the Island?\"\n\n\"There isn't time to go to the Island, so we think Star Beast is going to take us away from the Plains,\" said Yolooda. \"Or was, before you brought us here.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said the Sun elder. \"We have also been observing the kraamlok, and we have told our dragons to retreat inside their caves by tomorrow night. You would barely have time to fly to the Plains and back here.\"\n\nTondoor's eyes chilled. Could they be right after all? Oh Dooloo. Have I failed you? Maybe you never were in my dream. And if I die here, I've failed Kalooka too.\n\n\"We are a practical clan, and not inclined to believe in dreams anyway,\" said the Blood. \"We will survive the kraamlok in our caves, as we have survived everything from the time of the first Fire. That is the treasure of the Rocks.\"\n\nThe Sun elder cleared her throat. \"Leaving aside the dreaming, we did instruct him to bring back a star. And he did find one.\"\n\n\"He has not brought it to us,\" the Blood pointed out. \"Yet another sign of his ungratefulness and deceit.\"\n\n\"I cannot command the star beast,\" said Tondoor. Although it often listened if it was nearby.\n\nThe Sun elder flicked her tail. \"If you cannot command it, what good is it to us?\"\n\n\"He's lying,\" said the Blood, peering into his eyes. \"He cannot be trusted, and if the star is no use it will be a waste of food to keep him. I say we kill him now.\" Around Tondoor, the guards' toe-claws churned the gravel.\n\nThe Sky rocked on his feet. \"Not yet. His lie tells us he has influence with the star beast, if not command. Let us test him to see how far that influence stretches.\" He assumed the posture of authority. \"Tondoor of the Rocks, call the star beast here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Summons",
                "text": "Tondoor groaned. How many countless times had Star Beast not answered his call? He closed his eyes and made an image of Star Beast standing between him and the elders. Blazing hot, to make the elders jump. Desperate colors flowed in of their own accord. \"Star Beast, please, please come,\" he muttered, so the elders would think he was doing something. If I ever needed you, it's now.\n\nThe elders waited. Dragons shifted in the gravel. Someone coughed. Tondoor concentrated.\n\n\"He cannot summon it,\" said the Blood.\n\n\"We don't know how long it takes the star to travel here,\" said the Sun. \"I suggest we turn to more urgent business and have the guards summon us if it arrives.\"\n\n\"If it isn't here by the time we return from tomorrow's raid on the Plains, he dies,\" growled the Blood.\n\nTondoor's eyes flew open. A raid? With the kraamlok almost upon them?\n\n\"That's right,\" said the Blood. \"We have our own survival plan, and it includes eggs.\"\n\n\"You have heard the verdict,\" said the Sky. \"Tomorrow evening, we decide whether you are friend or food. Do what you can to ensure your survival, and the survival of these others.\"\n\nThe elders wound their way among the prisoners and back toward the rock archway. The guards around Tondoor marched back to their posts. If Bracelet had tried to give Tondoor a message earlier, he gave no sign of it now.\n\nTondoor's thoughts raced. If they stayed here, everyone was dead. But Star Beast couldn't be stopped by blocks and metal ropes. It could take him and his dragons to the Plains, the way it had taken him and Dooloo to the Mounds. He closed his eyes tightly. Star Beast!\n\nGentle heat enveloped him.\n\nMurmurs rose all around.\n\nStar Beast crouched beside him, glittering against the wet gravel.\n\nEnergy surged into Tondoor's weary body as the whirling stars from his dream image surged into his mind, flickering. Asking a question. The stars shrank into a small vortex. Zloomba's cave appeared beneath them, then the hill beside the Bog, then the Rock dragons' prison valley.\n\nAround him, dragons gasped and shuffled. The Rock elders turned back.\n\nTondoor nodded at Star Beast. You want to know where we leave from, to go to the new world. He pictured a huge crowd of dragons around Zloomba's cave on the Island. Then slowly, with his heart tearing in two, he changed the image to the Gathering Place at the Nest. He plunked in all the dragons that had flown here with him, then a shining Kalooka in the center, and placed the whirling vortex above it all.\n\nThe colors grew strong and bold, and then the image winked out. Star Beast understood. Tondoor felt giddy with relief and sorrow, but he tamped down his emotions. There was one more image needed. Quickly.\n\nHe held his breath while he conjured an image of himself, and all of his dragons, disappearing from their blocks and metal ropes and re-appearing at the Nest. Take us out of here, Star Beast, just like you took Dooloo and me to the Mounds. The elders muttered. He added urgent colors. Now.\n\nThe gravel crunched. The Blood Elder roared.\n\nTondoor's picture was replaced by one of Dooloo standing between the mossy island trees. More question colors. Tondoor's heart lurched. You don't know why she isn't here? Well, I'll show you.\n\nHe painted a sharp picture of weary, heartsick Dooloo poking bloody pieces of beast under Zloomba's stone mat. Below her, angry red eyes.\n\n\"Who are they?\" came the Sun elder's voice.\n\nThe Blood elder snarled. \"Who cares? He's trying to escape!\"\n\n\"Now, Star Beast!\" Tondoor cried. Out loud.\n\nStar Beast disappeared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hostage",
                "text": "Tondoor beat his snout against the ground. Fool! Fool! Fool! Star Beast was gone, and his dragons were still prisoners. And now he really was a traitor.\n\nThe elders didn't bother to walk back to him. He squeezed his eyes shut and dug his claws into the wet stones to keep from wailing as their voices sliced the air.\n\n\"Did our Snow just instruct the star to rescue the Plains dragons?\" asked the Sky elder.\n\n\"I saw no Rock dragons in his instructions,\" said the Blood.\n\nHe hadn't even thought of putting them in. How could he have been so stupid? And so heartless?\n\nThe Sun's voice was icy. \"The star beast has demonstrated how little regard he has for the wishes of this fickle Snow. Neither of them will be any use to us.\"\n\nThe Blood growled. \"He has declared his loyalty. I say we kill him now. And all of these with him.\"\n\n\"No!\" Tondoor jerked his head up so hard that his neck slammed into the block. \"Kill me, but let the others go to the Plains!\"\n\nThe elders fixed him with disdainful red eyes. Tondoor shrank against the ground. This is what it came to then. He would die in disgrace, without ever knowing if Star Beast took anyone to the new world. But the Sun elder was saying something.\n\n\"...hostage for the other Snow. If we kill him now, we have no leverage to bring the other one back. He may well also betray us.\"\n\nThe Sky elder twitched his tail. \"That's true. And if he creates a diversion on the Plains as he promised, we agreed to let this one live.\"\n\nWhat did that mean? Wambool had promised to do what the Rock dragons wanted at the Plains if they didn't kill Tondoor? That made no sense. He blinked. Suddenly it did. \"Wambool tricked you!\" he shouted. \"He hates me. He wants you to kill me!\"\n\nOops. That was really stupid. Now they had no reason to wait.\n\nAll three elders snarled. \"ENOUGH!\" The Sky's bellow echoed across the valley, sending rocks clattering down the sides. Tondoor flattened his neck against the gravel.\n\nThe Blood elder flexed his horrible claws. \"If the other Snow does not do as he promised, we kill them all.\"\n\nTondoor watched them disappear in the mist. He had failed. They were all doomed. Star Beast would go to the Plains and no one would know why. Not even Wambool.\n\nWhat was the old wacko even telling the Plains dragons to do? There were no caves in the grasslands, and the desert had hardly any food. Maybe he was planning to fly them all here to the mountains and overwhelm the Dragons of the Rocks with sheer numbers. If the kraamlok really was coming so soon, there would be nothing to lose by trying. Except that they would all die anyway\u2014by fighting or by ice.\n\nStar Beast, please come back! We need you to rescue us so we can stop Wambool! But maybe he wasn't calling loudly enough, or maybe Star Beast was busy with business of its own, because it didn't return."
            },
            {
                "title": "Morda",
                "text": "The afternoon stretched on, cold and dreary. Tondoor gave up calling Star Beast and dozed. The rain slowed, then stopped, and his scales clamped shut as the air cooled even more. He opened his eyes to the dim light of late evening. Fortunately, the clouds hid the kraamlok so he didn't have to see how much it had grown.\n\nThe Blood guards crouched in a circle around a fire, making conversation and laughing. The eyes of the other prisoners watched them, gray and hopeless. Their empty stomachs must be clenching like his at the scent of the guards' killed beasts, piled beyond the flames.\n\nA stocky female guard stood up and sauntered among the prisoners, her tail waving from side to side as her head bobbed up and down. \"Let's see what the dragons from the north carry with them when they travel,\" she said, reaching behind a block that held a yellow-eyed Sky. \"Give it here.\"\n\nThe Sky snarled and leaned onto her side to kick at the guard. In front of Tondoor, Yolooda hissed.\n\nAnother guard with crooked neck, maybe once broken and healed wrong, joined her. \"What's in these baskets, eh? Maybe a pretty treasure for our caves?\" He strode toward the Sky, making the gravel crunch. On purpose.\n\nStocky reached for the basket, but the Sky was faster. Raising her back end, she whipped her tail into Stocky's chest, knocking her to the ground. The Sky settled her body back down behind her block. Yolooda cheered quietly.\n\n\"Impressive,\" murmured Tondoor. This was only a delaying of the inevitable, but it was a distraction from his dark, weary thoughts.\n\nStocky staggered back onto to her feet. She snarled at the Sky, but Crooked Neck grabbed her arm and motioned toward the other guards. Bracelet was shaking his head in the posture of rebuke. The two guards backed away. So Bracelet was in charge.\n\n\"What about this one, then?\" asked Crooked Neck, poking his snout at a Leaf tethered with a metal rope. \"Let's see what she has.\" The firelight reflected off the mix of red and yellow in her eyes, turning them an incongruous orange. She stuffed her basket under her wing.\n\nAs the two guards closed in, a different dragon's voice erupted in a high-pitched wail. \"No, no no! Don't you go stealing my treasure! Please, please, no!\"\n\nTondoor craned his head to see as the guards turned from the Leaf. The cries came from little Morda, dancing with her basket clutched to her chest. What was she thinking, calling attention to herself like that? Trok, his neck still tied to Morda's, struggled to stay on his feet as she pulled him away from the guards. How could she do that? Oh, right\u2014these two were attached to each other, not to a stake.\n\nCrooked Neck laughed darkly. \"Treasure, eh?\"\n\nStocky lunged. \"Show us what you got.\" There was no contest. After a short scuffle, the basket dangled from her too-long hand-claws. Crooked Neck turned his tail to Morda, who was now shrieking, while Stocky bent over the basket and opened the lid.\n\nThe Bog dragons hissed as she pulled out a large, black egg. Morda hadn't peeled off Star Beast's sap.\n\n\"Ever seen an egg like this?\" Stocky tossed it to her companions, who passed it around their circle. One of the guards tried to puncture the sap with his fangs while Morda's shrieks turned to sobs. \"No, no, no, no!\"\n\nCrooked Neck poked his claws into the basket. \"There's more. A huge tree fungus, half nibbled, and hey! Fire root. Way bigger than the ones we have here.\"\n\nStocky pulled out a clawful of the red balls. \"Good thing we found these. Can't have prisoners with fire root.\" She tossed them toward the other guards, who scrambled for them and poked them onto their ankle spurs while the prisoners watched with seething red eyes.\n\nExcept Morda. Was it the firelight, or were hers the orange of deceit?\n\nCrooked Neck pulled the basket toward himself, chuckling. \"What else is in here? Oh, look. A package.\" He held up a thick bundle of leaves.\n\nMorda launched herself toward Crooked Neck's tail.\n\n\"Ack!\" Trok yanked her back, then grabbed the metal rope between them.\n\n\"No!\" Morda shrieked again, straining against him. \"Take the egg, but give me my leaves! Please! Give me my leaves!\"\n\nThe guards ignored her. Behind their backs, Morda's eyes were definitely orange. Crooked Neck put down the basket and huddled next to Stocky with the packet of leaves. Tondoor craned his neck to see, but only succeeded in catching his neck scales on the wood.\n\n\"Don't!\" Morda sobbed. \"Don't take it! It's mine!\"\n\nYolooda raised her brow ridges in a question. He shrugged his wings behind the block. Whatever it was, she wanted them to find it.\n\nCrooked Neck's arms stopped moving. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"I've never seen one before,\" said Stocky. The other guards shook their heads.\n\n\"Give it back!\" shrieked Morda. She lunged, but Trok planted his feet and jerked her back. Stocky pushed her to the ground, sending Trok down too. Sobbing, Morda buried her head\u2014and Trok's\u2014under her wing. They would have neck scars, if they survived.\n\nCrooked Neck pinched a mysterious object in his hand-claws and strode among the prisoners. \"What is this? Tell me and I won't take your basket.\"\n\nNo one answered. He reached Tondoor. In his claws was a small, purple mushroom. \"It's gloob,\" Tondoor exclaimed. He hadn't known Morda ate gloob. Then he understood. She didn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Gloob",
                "text": "Crooked Neck examined the mushroom in his claws. \"What's gloob?\"\n\n\"Dragons eat it on the Rainy Island,\" Tondoor said. \"It makes them feel\u2026 happy.\"\n\n\"It's Rainy Island cromf!\" Crooked Neck turned to his companions. \"Exotic stuff, and one for each of us.\" He picked his way back to the guard circle. Stocky joined them, carrying the packet with the rest of the gloob.\n\n\"Give me just one? A little one?\" Morda begged, peering over Trok's wings. Trok took one hand off the metal rope and tentatively patted her horns.\n\nStocky dropped the egg and the pink fungus back in the basket and kicked it toward her. \"Here, whiner. Have these.\" Trok caught it in his toe-claws, and Morda yanked it close. Trok sagged to the ground.\n\nYolooda snarled quietly. \"What can you expect from an Ash?\"\n\n\"Wait and see,\" Tondoor murmured. The hope he'd thought killed and eaten raised its head.\n\nThe guards passed the leaf packet around their circle. While the other guards were inspecting the gloob, Bracelet turned ever so slightly and looked straight at Tondoor.\n\nHis eyes were the same mud-brown color as Kalooka's.\n\nBracelet's hand-claw tapped the gloob three times. So he had been giving Tondoor a signal earlier.\n\nTondoor blinked three times to show he'd understood\u2014that there was a signal, even if he didn't know what it meant. But wait. Shouldn't Bracelet's eyes be showing orange, if he was being sneaky?\n\nBracelet held up his gloob and looked side to side for a brief moment in the posture of secrecy. He wanted to know what the gloob would do. What if he stopped the guards from taking it and ruined Morda's plan? But he was up to something. And he would know if Tondoor lied. Tondoor mimed snapping the mushroom into his snout, then closed his eyes and lay down his head as if he were asleep.\n\nBracelet turned back to his companions. \"Time for a gloob party!\" The guards cheered and popped the gloob into their mouths.\n\nBracelet was definitely deceiving the guards, so there had to be orange his eyes, mixed into that mud brown. Which meant there had been orange in Kalooka's too. What other color was mixed with the orange, to make that color? Not blue. Bracelet couldn't be happy about deceiving his own people, and in any case, that would make a kind of gray. Worried yellow? No, that would just make the orange brighter. Green compassion? Yes. That would do it. Deceit for the guards and compassion for the prisoners.\n\nIf that was correct, Kalooka must have been feeling compassion for him, after he was beaten by Hoodon in every way. Not exactly pity. But deceit? It had to be toward Hoodon, whom she was pretending to love.\n\nTondoor gulped in delirious breaths, felt the blue explode in his eyes. A laugh burst out before he could stop it.\n\nYolooda jerked her head up. \"Ssssss. The guards!\"\n\nTondoor turned the laugh into a cough. Kalooka didn't love Hoodon. She had been protecting him, Tondoor, so Hoodon wouldn't kill him. Her parting words were for him. His heart exploded with love for Kalooka\u2014and gratitude for Bracelet, who was giving them a chance to escape. Even now, he was teetering where he crouched by the fire, along with the other guards. He would look like a victim of Morda's trickery like the rest, and he would fly after them on the egg raid tomorrow. But he was giving them a head start.\n\nTomorrow, Tondoor would see Kalooka, who didn't love Hoodon. Who might still love him. And he loved\u2026 Dooloo. Who was lost. Dear, good-hearted Dooloo, loyal to the end, while he, having failed her, was going to the new world with his other love. He squeezed his eyes shut as gray sadness overwhelmed the blue.\n\nHad she realized he wasn't coming? Or was she still hoping?\n\nThe guards were sprawled and snoring now. Morda and Trok got to their feet and carried their metal rope toward the nearest Bog dragon with free arms. The dragon fiddled with it and it clanked to the ground. Tondoor winced, but the guards didn't even twitch. Soon metal ropes were falling, pins were being twisted out of holes in wood, and heavy blocks raised enough for dragons to slide out their heads.\n\nThey were free."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ashes",
                "text": "Tondoor joined the others in gulping cool water from the lake. Morda and Trok and some others had finished drinking and were busy pulling fire root off the guards' ankle spurs. Glomfa and Yolooda were tearing apart the guards' uneaten beasts and handing around the pieces. Tondoor gulped down his portion. In spite of the cold, his muscles burned to be on their way.\n\nThe sky was dark now, with only the odd star and the kraamlok's ghastly white glow slinking in and out of view through breaks in the clouds. It didn't matter; he knew which way to go. The guards would sleep for some hours before they began their chase, but he kept his senses on alert anyway. No scouts appeared. Perhaps the elders had decided they didn't need any, with Wambool already diverting the Plains dragons from their Nest. Perhaps they were busy stocking caves before the kraamlok smashed into their world.\n\nThe great flock of Plains dragons Tondoor thought Wambool might be bringing to challenge the Dragons of the Rocks didn't appear either. Was Wambool waiting for daylight? Was he still trying to convince Elder Mala to come? Was he flying the dragons to a different part of the mountains hoping to find unoccupied caves? Or was he creating the promised diversion, securing his own survival by betraying his original tribe?\n\nAs they neared the Plains, the sky on the eastern horizon lightened to an anxious yellow. The dark clouds behind them glimmered blood red in front of the kraamlok's tail.\n\nIt was obvious as soon as they reached the lake that the Nest was empty. Egg Hollow too. Wambool had intended him to die, as he had guessed.\n\n\"Take a quick break,\" he called to the others as they reached the Nest. They needed to be long gone before the Rock Dragons arrived, but in the right direction. Where would Wambool have taken the dragons? Where would Elder Mala have agreed to go?\n\nHe flew a circle around the Nest, looking for clues. The drums were there, and the grid of pebbles for the choosing ceremony. There were no clues, but oh so many memories. Where the trees ended beyond the Ravine, Kalooka had first told him stories of the star creatures. Here, at the Ravine's edge, he had helped her avoid her first choosing ceremony, and over there on the shore he had watched her trial by ordeal in the lake. Hoodon had walked away with her through those trees, stroking her tail with his. How she must have struggled to make herself like him so her eyes wouldn't give her away.\n\n\"Tondoor!\" Blort flapped toward him from the mouth of the Ravine. \"Come see!\"\n\nTondoor followed him down to the changing pools. Morda and Pooka were there, surrounded by a dozen or so Ashes who looked like they had just woken up. Pooka called up as they approached. \"They say Wambool took everyone to the Butte. Do you know where that is?\"\n\n\"At the edge of the desert.\" Tondoor touched down beside Blort. \"He must be taking them to the caves.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you go with them?\" Morda asked the Ashes.\n\nOne of the larger ones spoke in a small voice, keeping her eyes down. \"We were told to keep the Nest clean for when they returned.\"\n\n\"But they aren't returning,\" said Blort. He glared at Tondoor. \"Your Plains dragons lied to them.\"\n\n\"Or Wambool lied to the Plains dragons.\"\n\nPooka looked between him and Blort, then back to the Ashes. \"It don't matter. You can come with us.\"\n\nTondoor glanced across the lake. No Rock dragons\u2014yet. \"Eat something quickly, and then we have to leave.\" He had told Star Beast to meet him at the Nest, he realized as he gulped down his second glarf. But Star Beast would find them. The dream said so.\n\nThey lifted off in a storm of wingbeats, a blaze of dragons from four corners of the world. The Plains spread out before them in its springtime glory, and Tondoor drank in the sights: forloks bounding away from their racing shadows, the river a winding shimmer, last year's yellow grass flecked with new green as far as the horizon, where it melted into the layered clouds.\n\nHis heart clenched. He had missed this place; he would miss it again. Once they got to the new world, he would help Kalooka find new cliffs to make pictures on, so their descendants would always remember the beautiful world they came from. He would tell her about Morda's cleverness, and Zloomba's egg, destined somehow to be the seed of their world's re-birth. And Dooloo's sacrifice.\n\nPartway through the morning, the kraamlok's head rose like a pale white sun in front of them. It pulled its tail after it like a foaming wave. Tondoor picked up speed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Showdown",
                "text": "They flew through the afternoon, while their shadows gradually stretched out long and thin before them like shadow beasts. The kraamlok climbed across the sky, arching over their heads and overtaking the sun as sunset drew near. Still there was no sign of the Plains dragons, even though they would be flying slowly so the young ones could keep up. No sign of the Rock dragons either.\n\nLittle Trok sailed up beside him and pointed his head. \"What's that?\"\n\nTrok had Morwaka's gift of a Sky's keen eyes; Tondoor's could barely make out the distant smudge. As they flew closer, the smudge dissolved into a multitude of colored specks. \"That's them!\" And in the distance, two more smudges. Herding groups flying to join them.\n\nIt didn't take his group long to catch up. Already he could pick out the dragons he wanted to see. He thought quickly. Who would be the most useful to have with him when he confronted them? Glomfa and Yolooda, he decided. They were the biggest. Should he take Morda as well, to represent the Rainy Island? No. Neither Wambool nor Elder Mala would listen to an Ash.\n\n\"Keep everyone back until I've had a chance to explain who you are,\" he told Blort. \"I'll signal you when it's safe to come.\"\n\nTondoor flew between the other two toward the front of the dragon cloud. \"I am Tondoor, seer of the Plains! I bring delegates from the Coast and the Bog. Elder Mala Most Ancient, hear me speak!\"\n\nThe scouts didn't challenge him. He'd hadn't even been gone a year, after all. They knew who he was. Elder Mala didn't notice him. Maybe she was going deaf. On her other side, Wambool's eyes filled with red.\n\n\"Respectful greetings, Elder Mala,\" Tondoor called as he flew in beside her.\n\nElder Mala's eyes popped blue. \"Tondoor!\" she said in her gravelly voice. \"Wambool said you drowned.\"\n\n\"He lied.\"\n\n\"How did you get past the Dragons of the Rocks?\" Wambool hissed over her head.\n\nElder Mala eyed Tondoor's stripe. \"The same way you did, apparently.\"\n\nThere was no time for this. Tondoor hung back so Elder Mala could see past him. \"I have with me Glomfa, esteemed thinker of the Coast, and Yolooda, trickster of the Bog.\" Yolooda nodded, pleased.\n\nElder Mala turned her neck, winced, and put it straight again. \"The hatchlings have flown long enough for today,\" she barked. \"Tell everyone it's time to rest.\"\n\nSeveral Fires flying above them banked backwards, shouting her message. The dragons clustered into groups, each with an ancient towering above. Several larger dragons carried mooloks away for the evening kill. Tondoor's own hunger would have to wait.\n\nHe pointed to a group of Leafs arranging eggs in a mound on the grass. \"The Rock elders will be disappointed,\" he called to Wambool. Wambool growled. He was as filthy as ever, his scales bristling with yellow grass and smeared with remnants of his last meal.\n\nA deep voice cried, \"Tondoor!\" It was Folfro, waving from inside his herding group. Naloosa was nowhere to be seen. Tondoor waved back. Other Suns were scattered throughout the crowd, but he couldn't spot Kalooka.\n\nElder Mala squinted at Tondoor's traveling group, also alighting some distance away. \"Who are they?\"\n\n\"Dragons from the Coast and the Bog and the Rainy Island, who came with me. And our Ashes.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Elder Mala arched her wings and thumped down behind the other dragons. Tondoor had forgotten how old she was. Her wings flopped as if they were too heavy to hold up, and one of her eyelids drooped shut. Still, she regarded him with her usual intense suspicion out of the other one.\n\nOnce again Tondoor felt very small. \"Glomfa,\" he repeated, \"head thinker of the Coast, and Yolooda, trickster of the Bog.\"\n\nGlomfa bowed gracefully into the posture of respect. \"I am honored to make your acquaintance, Elder Mala Most Ancient of the Plains.\"\n\nYolooda assumed the same posture. \"I am also honored.\"\n\n\"As I am to meet you both,\" replied Elder Mala, twisting her bulk into the posture of greeting. \"To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?\"\n\nGlomfa shook off her posture. \"We have come at the invitation of your seer, Tondoor.\"\n\n\"He dreamed how to save us all from the kraamlok,\" said Yolooda.\n\nElder Mala glanced up. The kraamlok's head had dipped below the horizon, but its shining tail filled the sky, thin and filmy like fair-weather clouds.\n\n\"Too late, hatchling,\" said Wambool, on her other side. \"I'm already doing that, and we're going to be short of cave space as it is. You'll have to send those foreigners away.\"\n\nElder Mala snapped her teeth to silence him.\n\nTondoor didn't wait for permission to speak. \"If Wambool remembered his own prophecy, he would know that hiding in caves won't help.\"\n\n\"Hiding is the only thing that will help,\" retorted Wambool. \"The deadly fires\u2014\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" snapped Elder Mala. \"Let Tondoor speak.\"\n\n\"The deadly fires come first,\" said Tondoor, \"then the ice. There'll be nothing to eat in those frozen caves.\"\n\nWambool laughed. \"It never freezes in the desert, brainless. We'll eat the fish that swim in the cave pools.\" He scratched his belly with a yellow claw.\n\nTondoor waved his arm at the countless dragons standing in front of them. \"You'll eat them up in a day. And the deeper pools don't have fish.\" He waggled his hands in the posture of ridicule. \"The dream about the cave wasn't even Wambool's. That's why he doesn't understand it.\"\n\n\"I don't need a dream to save the dragons.\" Wambool spat. A slimy gob landed on Tondoor's belly.\n\nElder Mala wiped it off with her claw and flicked it back at Wambool. \"Did you steal Tondoor's dream?\"\n\n\"Hatchling here doesn't know how to dream,\" sneered Wambool.\n\nTondoor was about to retort when Kalooka stepped out of the crowd. She stood gazing at him with her shining blue eyes, her gold scales glittering. All the love he had ever felt for her burst over him like a waterfall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fools",
                "text": "Elder Mala's tail knocked Tondoor back to the conversation. \"If hiding in caves won't save us from the kraamlok, seer, tell us your plan. What has Morwaka revealed to you?\" She positioned herself between him and Kalooka.\n\nTondoor summoned the glorious colors of his dream and spread his wings in the posture of authority. \"Morwaka has revealed the way of escape from the kraamlok whose tail even now blazes above us!\" he cried. \"He has shown me a new world where the sun shines yellow, where the kraamlok cannot come, and he has sent a star beast to take all of us there.\"\n\nWambool burst out laughing.\n\nElder Mala gaped. \"A new world. A star beast. Why not the original six dragons?\" She stamped her foot. \"Why, oh why does Morwaka persist in giving us these fool seers?\"\n\n\"But I dreamed it over and over,\" Tondoor insisted. \"Even before I left here. I just didn't understand it then.\"\n\nWambool snarled. \"Your star beast came to destroy us, to show the kraamlok where to strike.\"\n\nElder Mala's wings slumped further. \"Fools! Both of you. As I am a fool to put up with your jabbering.\"\n\nYolooda raised her hand. \"Actually, there is a star beast. It was stealing our eggs in the Bog until Tondoor stopped it.\"\n\nGlomfa nodded. \"As incredible as it seems, and I am not one to be taken in by fables, I have seen this star beast myself. It is a most unusual phenomenon, with the ability to create pictures in the minds of others.\"\n\nElder Mala looked dumbfounded. \"Star beasts are from hatchlings' tales.\"\n\nTondoor considered assuming the posture of authority again, then decided just to speak. \"Morwaka sent the star beast to me. It has agreed to take us to the new world. Wambool has seen it too.\" Elder Mala turned away. Her huge head swayed from side to side.\n\nKalooka was still there behind her, watching him. Tondoor stepped toward her. He felt like he was melting in the intense blue of her gaze. He took her hand-claws in his. \"Kalooka, come with me to the new world with the yellow sun. We will make a new society where we can choose our own paths.\" He trembled. \"And our own mates.\"\n\n\"Oh my,\" said Yolooda.\n\nSomething bumped Tondoor's flank. Kalooka's hands fell away. Ugh. It was Hoodon, and he was tugging Kalooka by the arm. \"I thought you were coming with my group.\"\n\nTondoor batted Hoodon's hand away. \"She's coming with me. And you're not.\"\n\nWambool slid his filthy hand along her arm. \"Actually, she's in my group.\" He flicked his hand-claws at Tondoor and Hoodon. \"So get lost, losers.\"\n\nBehind them, Elder Mala groaned.\n\nKalooka shook herself free. \"Let go of me, all three of you! I will go where I choose.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" said Glomfa.\n\n\"You tell them,\" said Yolooda. \"Make each of them build you a nest, then decide.\"\n\nTondoor felt faint. Kalooka had to go with him. It was in the dream. \"You're choosing to come to the new world, right? Where we'll be free, like we planned.\"\n\n\"She doesn't need you to find freedom, hatchling. I have a new world of my own to take her to.\" Wambool glanced back over his shoulder.\n\nThe dragons clustering behind Kalooka came into focus: Dorla, two small males from his herding group, and others he didn't know. His gut clenched as he realized who they were. The rebels. \"You're going to the hidden oasis,\" he hissed. \"You found it too.\"\n\nElder Mala whirled toward them. \"A second oasis? Why wasn't I informed?\"\n\n\"Tondoor!\" Kalooka breathed. \"You promised not to tell!\"\n\nWambool stuck his chest out so far it bulged around his stripe. \"You're even stupider than you look, hatchling. Of course I found the hidden oasis. Of course I'm taking my dragons there.\"\n\nThe traitor. If Tondoor had a fire root, he would use it now without regret. Instead, he jabbed one hand at Elder Mala and the other toward the group behind Kalooka. \"Wambool is deceiving you about more than that. His plan is to take his supporters to the deep caves of the hidden oasis, and leave the rest of you to starve in the shallow caves by the oasis you know about.\"\n\nElder Mala's good eye roved over the rebel dragons. Then her long neck darted toward Wambool like a snoof. \"I should have guessed you were involved in that mischief.\"\n\nWambool guffawed. \"Of course I'm involved. I started the rebellion.\"\n\nTondoor's jaw dropped. Kalooka hadn't told him that. He tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the ground. The tip of her golden tail twitched back and forth.\n\nElder Mala squinted at Tondoor. \"And how do you know about the rebellion?\"\n\nTondoor gaped at her. What could he say? For once, Hoodon did something helpful. He pushed in front of Tondoor to blink at Kalooka. \"You're in the rebellion? Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\nKalooka's tail stopped twitching. \"Because you were turning in the rebels and getting them killed.\"\n\n\"I'm done with that. If you're in, I'm in,\" said Hoodon. He turned to Wambool. \"New rebel reporting. When do we leave?\"\n\n\"It's too late for that.\" Kalooka shoved him away.\n\n\"Useless twit,\" Elder Mala snarled at him. \"Get back to your group.\"\n\nHoodon ducked his head and slunk away.\n\nElder Mala lowered her head to Kalooka with fire in her eye. \"I should have had you killed, not dunked in the lake.\"\n\nKalooka's eyes were violet, as if this was a triumph. \"Threats like that are why there is a rebellion.\"\n\nElder Mala snarled.\n\nTondoor looked at the sky. The kraamlok's tail was even wider and wispier now than when they had landed. Its head had dropped below the horizon. Any time now, it would\u2026 \"You know the prophecy, Kalooka,\" he pleaded. \"You know about the long winter. Do you want to die out there?\"\n\nKalooka's eyes turned a sorrowful gray. \"Of course I don't, and your dream is lovely, Tondoor. But a star beast from the stories? A new world where the sun shines yellow?\" She looked at him helplessly. \"The hidden oasis is real. There, we have a chance.\" She clutched his hand-claws in hers. \"You come with us.\"\n\nThe jewels on her necklace, the ones he had given her, beckoned him.\n\n\"I can't.\" The words grated in his throat.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tondoor,\" she whispered. Then she turned and ran into the crowd of rebels.\n\nStunned, Tondoor watched her go. How could Kalooka believe that filthy, arrogant liar instead of him? Dooloo had believed in the star beast from the beginning. And in his dream. He trembled with frustration. Why was Star Beast always somewhere else?\n\nViolet triumph glowed in Wambool's eyes. He turned toward the rebels and raised his wings in the posture of authority. \"The white hatchling is a fool!\" he shouted. \"He dreams nothing but stories, whereas I will lead you to safety in the desert.\"\n\nTondoor flung open his wings too. Wambool might have Kalooka, but he was not going to take the others. Folfro could take her place in the dream image. He wailed just like Wambool. \"Wambool is a liar and a traitor. He only intends to save a few, and even that will fail. Star Beast will come very soon and take us to true safety.\" Star Beast!\n\nElder Mala stepped between them, slapped their wings down, and hurled a jet of fire into the air. All eyes turned toward her. Smoke curled out of her nostrils. \"I, Elder Mala Most Ancient of the Plains, decide who goes where, not these two fools! We will rest here for the night and carry on to the Butte in the morning. When we get there, Wambool will lead all of us to the deep caves in the far-off oasis.\"\n\nWambool curled his lip but said nothing while the Fires echoed her words across the group. Behind him, in the rebel group, Dorla wrapped a shaking Kalooka in her wing.\n\nYolooda batted Tondoor's arm.\n\nHe glanced at her as Elder Mala continued speaking.\n\n\"Tondoor will wait at the Butte for the rest of the herding groups. Then he will lead them to the far-off oasis as well.\" She squinted at Tondoor with red warning in her eyes. \"Since he also knows where it is.\"\n\nTondoor's heart tumbled into his stomach. How could Star Beast save the dragons if they were all flying around in different places? Yolooda batted his arm again. This time he looked where she pointed. His group of dragons was flying toward the main group, flapping hard as if someone was after them. Uh oh.\n\nElder Mala raised her wings in the posture of authority. \"All has been said. The end!\"\n\nWambool didn't even wait for the echoes to stop. \"No it isn't. Come on, rebels. Time to fly!\" He ran forward and leapt into the air.\n\n\"Wait!\" shouted Tondoor, as Elder Mala gaped and the rebels prepared to take off. \"The Dragons of the Rocks!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Negotiation",
                "text": "Wambool flipped in the air, plunged to the ground, and crouched behind Elder Mala. \"Protect me!\"\n\nElder Mala's eyes blazed red. \"You dare ask me that now?\"\n\nWambool pointed at Tondoor. \"He brought the Rock dragons.\"\n\n\"I only escaped from them. He betrayed them.\"\n\n\"Only to avoid betraying my own tribe.\"\n\n\"Only so you could betray them later.\"\n\n\"Quiet, both of you,\" snapped Elder Mala.\n\nThe Rock dragons were dusky spots against the kraamlok's bright cloud-tail, except where the late afternoon sunlight glinted off their metal stripes and claws. Tondoor shuddered, knowing exactly who those claws were intending to claim.\n\nOr were they? Were these raiders coming for eggs, guards coming to reclaim their prisoners, or Bracelet and his friends coming to meet Star Beast? There were plenty of Fires and a Bloods in the group, so it could be an attack. But there were dragons of other colors too. Lots of them, and not all of them had stripes.\n\nHe squinted into the low light. Bracelet was there. The gloob hadn't kept him asleep very long\u2014or else he had only pretended to eat it. He hadn't given his prisoners much of a head start either. Tondoor felt dizzy. If the Rock dragons had come a little bit earlier, they would have caught him on the Plains. Any later, and Kalooka would have been gone.\n\nTondoor's dragons thumped to the ground beside him. He waved to them to move back, and they pressed themselves into the crowd. Wambool's rebels also raced back.\n\n\"Guards!\" Elder Mala shouted. \"Prepare to defend!\"\n\nThe Plains Bloods rose out of the crowd and landed again in the posture of defiance, making a curved shield between the Plains dragons and the invaders. The three Bloods in Tondoor's group joined them. How brave they all were to stand there so steadily, ready to face those terrible claws.\n\nThe invaders were almost upon them. But they were slowing, not speeding up or preparing to dive. Now that they were closer, Tondoor could see them clearly. \"Those are elders at the front,\" he shouted at Elder Mala, realizing that she might not know.\n\n\"It's not an attack; it's a delegation,\" Elder Mala said. \"Summon our elders!\" she rasped over her shoulder. She stabbed her hand-claws toward the ground. \"Seers, next to me.\"\n\nTondoor leapt to Elder Mala's left side, Wambool to her right. The Bone elder flapped down beside Tondoor, and the other elders joined the line. The Blood shield moved to the sides.\n\n\"You would let them attack us unopposed?\" shouted Wambool. He flapped his wings at the guards. \"Defend us!\"\n\nElder Mala cuffed him. He shrank back to her side. The Rock dragons landed in precise rows, with the three elders at the front. If they did attack, they would have the advantage of the sun at their backs. But they didn't. As one, the Rock elders assumed the posture of respect.\n\n\"Greetings, Elders of the Plains,\" said the Sky Rock elder. \"We have come for our Snows.\" The three shadowed heads with their dark, unreadable eyes turned toward Wambool, then Tondoor.\n\nLook brave, Dooloo had told him when the angry females came to retrieve their stolen eggs. He drew a deep breath and did his best. Wambool didn't; Tondoor could hear his teeth rattling.\n\n\"The Snows are mine,\" rasped Elder Mala, \"but I will hear your claim.\"\n\n\"Both of them came to us,\" said the Sky elder. \"Both accepted our protection, our terms, and our stripes.\"\n\n\"I didn't agree to the stripe,\" shouted Wambool. \"They forced it on me before I knew what was happening.\"\n\nElder Mala glanced down at Tondoor. He nodded once.\n\nThe Blood elder growled. \"Both of them agreed never to return to the Plains. The younger broke the agreement. The older had our permission but broke the terms.\"\n\nElder Mala shoved Wambool forward. \"You can have this one.\"\n\n\"No they can't,\" blubbered Wambool, digging his toe-claws into the ground. \"You need me to lead you to safety from the kraamlok.\" He pointed up at the kraamlok's spreading tail.\n\n\"Tondoor can lead us,\" said Elder Mala. She nipped Wambool's tail. \"Go!\"\n\nWambool danced out of her reach. \"You do need me. I know the secret of the Rock dragons' long claws.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Duty",
                "text": "The Rock elders roared while the Plains elders gasped. So did Tondoor. If the Plains dragons could make those claws too, the Dragons of the Rocks would no longer be a threat.\n\nBut none of that mattered any more. \"Long claws won't save anyone from the kraamlok,\" Tondoor cried.\n\nNo one paid him any attention. The Rock elders stepped forward. The Plains Bloods rose onto their toe-claws.\n\n\"Wambool is ours,\" said the Blood elder. \"You have said so.\"\n\nElder Mala yanked Wambool back by the tail. \"He is mine. I said that first.\"\n\nThe Sun Rock elder spread her wings to halt her companions. \"We will return to that claim later.\" She turned toward Tondoor. \"We also lay claim to the younger seer. But not for justice, as with the first. Although the younger one also betrayed us, our head guard has told us of his great power, and if he returns willingly, we have agreed to forgo his punishment.\"\n\nElder Mala looked down at Tondoor. \"What great power do you have?\"\n\nWhat power did the Rock dragons think he had? Bracelet must not have told them exactly how the prisoners had managed to escape. He assumed the posture of blessing. \"The power of Morwaka's true seer, to summon a star beast to help us.\"\n\n\"We offer him and all of his companions safe refuge in our mountain caves,\" said the Sky elder, \"and if he comes, we will leave the rest of you in peace.\"\n\n\"Otherwise,\" said the Blood elder, \"we offer this.\" He raised his arms and spread his over-long claws in the waning sunlight. Behind him, the Rock Bloods and Fires did the same.\n\nElder Mala lowered her head to Tondoor's. \"Tondoor, you must go, to save us from the Dragons of the Rocks.\"\n\n\"I came to save you from the kraamlok,\" he protested.\n\n\"You have given us your message. Do you have anything more to add?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then your duty is to your tribe. You and your companions must go with the Dragons of the Rocks.\"\n\nSomeone pushed between him and the Bone elder. Kalooka. \"If you go to the mountains, Tondoor, I'll go with you. We'll be together.\"\n\n\"We'll die together.\" The words came out harshly. This was how she wanted him. Away from his quest, away from his purpose.\n\nKalooka shook her head. \"Not to die. To be alive with you.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Elder Mala. \"Both of you, all of you, go.\"\n\nKalooka's blue eyes gazed into his. How he had longed for this moment. But not like this. He pulled his eyes from hers. Dooloo had stayed behind to die, doing her duty so he could do his.\n\n\"I will go with the Dragons of the Rocks,\" he said loudly, so the elders on both sides could hear, \"if everyone who hopes Star Beast will take them to the new world can come too.\" Kalooka would be there, to fulfill the prophecy in his dream. Star Beast would find them. After all, as others had pointed out too often, the dream didn't show the Plains.\n\n\"They must all agree to live perpetually in our mountains as Dragons of the Rocks.\" said the Rock's Sky elder.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Kalooka.\n\n\"How do we know we can we trust you?\" Yolooda's voice called from the crowd.\n\n\"We give our word as the descendants of the first Fire,\" said the Rock elder. \"If you come willingly, you will not be harmed.\"\n\n\"The Dragons of the Rocks always treated me honorably,\" said Tondoor.\n\nMuttering came from the crowd.\n\n\"I have one more request before we leave,\" said Tondoor, \"I returned here as seer of the Plains, bringing the dream Morwaka sent me\u2014the dream I was instructed by the Plains elders to seek from the day I was hatched. Before I go, I need to tell it to all of the Dragons of the Plains.\"\n\nElder Mala sighed. \"Do you agree?\" she asked the Rock elders in a tired voice.\n\n\"You have until the sun dips below the horizon,\" said the Fire elder.\n\nIt was almost touching now.\n\n\"In the meantime,\" the Sky Rock elder added as Tondoor backed out of the line, \"we return to our demand for the older seer.\"\n\n\"Wambool, show yourself\" barked Elder Mala. She turned about. \"Where is he?\"\n\nYolooda pointed. \"Up there!\" Wambool was a white spot flying in the direction of the desert.\n\n\"After him!\" the Blood Rock elder shouted. Several Rock Fires took to the sky.\n\nTondoor didn't see any more because someone grabbed his neck. Hoodon's voice snarled in his ear. A moment later, his head exploded with blinding light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Reunion",
                "text": "A fireball slashes the sky, brighter than the sun. The air turns to fire. Everything burns\u2026\n\n\"It were horrible, Tondoor. So hot!\"\n\nDooloo clung to Tondoor's arm. Joy and relief washed over him. \"You're here,\" he stammered. \"You're alive.\"\n\nHer sobs cut off her words. The air was cool.\n\nTondoor pulled her close and inhaled the scent of her charred scales. Dooloo was alive! So were many, many others. Some were from the Island, some, like Noot, from the Coast. Some held baskets like Yolooda's. A familiar-looking Fire\u2014Froom\u2014was sprawled on top of Hoodon. All looked stunned. Above the crowd, the Rock Fires sank toward the ground.\n\nDooloo's gasping breaths were hot on Tondoor's neck. \"Star Beast done fetched us just in time. So we's safe.\" The violet in her eyes mixed with gray. \"Lots of us is safe.\"\n\nTondoor nodded. \"You brought so many.\" But the ones left behind...\n\n\"Zloomba done finished laying her egg just before that sky monster started burning up.\" Dooloo gulped. \"I done tried to reach my tail into the cave so she could grab on like all them others.\" She sobbed again. \"It were so searing hot, Tondoor. And so bright you couldn't see nothing.\"\n\nTondoor nuzzled her head. Zloomba was gone. But Dooloo was here. And so many others. Beside them, Hoodon was wrestling with Froom. And Vlod beside him. Tondoor's brain started working again. He pulled away from Dooloo and looked up.\n\nStar Beast hung twinkling above the crowd, clearly visible against the wisps of the kraamlok's tail. Thank you, thank you, thank you!\n\nHis mind filled with vivid images of lightning as thick as rain, forests engulfed in flame, tornadoes swarming over a boiling sea. He saw the world, round in the distance. A great splash of glowing rock was rising above the sky, spreading outward from where the Rainy Island had been. And rock shall flow like water at its falling\u2026\n\nA new image appeared, showing dragons popping into sight all over the hills of a new world with a bright yellow sun. Then that image disappeared too. Star Beast's lights swirled around the yellow star in its chest, faster and faster, until Star Beast was a whirling circle of light.\n\nExactly like the tunnel in Tondoor's dream.\n\nDooloo squealed. \"We's going to the new world!\"\n\nKalooka raced toward them. \"It's real,\" she breathed. She took Tondoor's arm in her hand-claws. \"Tondoor, I'm so sorry.\"\n\nNow she believed him, now that she'd seen it.\n\nDooloo's lip curled. \"You's that Sun hussy from Tondoor's dream!\" She clutched Tondoor's other arm.\n\nKalooka's eyes darted back and forth between Dooloo and Tondoor. Red astonishment and yellow jealousy battled in her eyes. Then she arched her neck down and nuzzled Tondoor's snout. \"You didn't tell me you were dreaming of me, Tondoor.\"\n\nHe pulled his arm free. \"You didn't give me a chance.\"\n\n\"He don't need to tell me his dreams,\" said Dooloo, tossing her head. \"I can see them fer myself.\"\n\nKalooka's eyes opened wide. \"Tondoor! Did you find the sharing star?\"\n\nHe had no idea what to do. But Star Beast was waiting. All around them, dragons were pointing up and shouting. \"Later,\" he said. He lifted his head and cried, \"Star Beast has come to take us to safety! The tunnel to the new world is open!\"\n\nNo one moved. Should he fly through first to show them what to do?\n\nThen Morda crept past him. Clutching her basket in both hands, she leapt straight into Star Beast's swirling lights. And disappeared from head to tail."
            },
            {
                "title": "Teeth",
                "text": "Tondoor's tail prickled. Dooloo and Kalooka gasped. Morda was there, then she wasn't. He had seen this, foretold it. But seeing Morda disappear like that\u2014into nothing\u2014was eerie. How could anyone know for sure what lay on the other side?\n\n\"Where'd she go?\" asked Froom in a husky voice. He released Hoodon.\n\n\"To the new world, you lout,\" said Vlod. \"Come on.\" He flapped up. Froom followed, craning his neck to look back as the tunnel claimed him and he too disappeared. Trok went next while Hoodon watched with his snout hanging open.\n\nMore Island dragons flew through. Glomfa circled the swirling disk, twisting her neck trying to see both sides at once. \"A most fascinating phenomenon.\"\n\nTondoor waved his wing. \"Go!\"\n\n\"I believe I will,\" breathed Glomfa. \"Imagine, a new world!\"\n\nTondoor watched her disappear. Did Star Beast's stars look fainter? Or was it just because so many dragons were now following Glomfa through?\n\nKalooka nuzzled Tondoor's snout one more time. \"See you in the new world, Tondoor.\" Dooloo and Hoodon both scowled while she leapt into the light, her gold scales flashing one last time. Just like in the dream.\n\nHoodon snarled. \"You're not getting her. I'll kill you first.\"\n\n\"It's not my fault she doesn't want you.\" Tondoor crouched into Zloomba's ready position.\n\nHoodon's attack never came. Dooloo yanked his blue feet off the ground, slammed him onto his belly, and jumped onto his back. Hoodon's tail twitched. \"You's welcome,\" she said to Tondoor.\n\n\"This is Hoodon,\" said Tondoor. \"He was one of Kalooka's mates.\"\n\n\"I done guessed.\" Dooloo yanked Hoodon's tail up. Hoodon yelped. \"You tries that again and I breaks you,\" she growled. She stood up and stepped over his wings. \"Now get up real slow.\"\n\nHoodon lumbered to his feet, red still flashing in his lowered eyes.\n\nDooloo pointed at the star tunnel. \"Now git up there before I throws you in.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Tondoor protested.\n\nDooloo kicked Hoodon's leg. \"Git!\"\n\nHoodon lurched into the air and tumbled through the whirling stars, just behind a Blood from the Bog. Tondoor groaned.\n\nDooloo took Tondoor's arm again. \"You doesn't have to worry about nothing,\" she said sweetly. \"Long as you sticks with me.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Dooloo and Kalooka would work things out themselves. \"Let's send the rest of these dragons through,\" he said, as Blort and Pooka leapt up.\n\nDooloo's bright scales faded. Around them, dragons gasped. The tunnel was gone.\n\nBlort and Pooka flopped back down beside Tondoor. \"Where did the tunnel go?\" asked Blort.\n\nStar Beast hung in the air, flickering dimly.\n\nWhat's wrong, Star Beast?\n\nStar Beast kept flickering but didn't answer. Slowly, its stars grew brighter again and began to twirl.\n\n\"It was resting,\" said Pooka. \"It must be tiring, taking dragons to a new world.\"\n\nThe tunnel didn't look as bright as before. Tondoor waved his wing. \"Hurry, then.\"\n\nBlort and Pooka leapt up with their group of Ashes, then Yolooda. Tondoor helped a Plains minder calm his group of hatchlings while Dooloo helped another group through. Bracelet went through with a collection of striped dragons, including the Sun elder with her shining headdress. Elder Mala hustled a group of minders carrying eggs toward Tondoor, then turned back for more. Folfro flew through.\n\nThe tunnel collapsed again, then re-formed even dimmer than before. Dragons raced toward it.\n\nBeside Tondoor, Dooloo shivered. \"I hopes there's trees in the new world. This place is so empty. And windy.\"\n\nTondoor wrapped his wing around her. The flow of dragons toward Star Beast was thinning. Out on the grass, some were settling down for the night. A few were flying after Wambool. In the sky, the kraamlok's tail-glow was thinning out. If he hadn't seen the dream, he might think the danger was over too. But Star Beast's tunnel was fading fast. There was no time left to convince anyone else. He pulled back his wing. \"We better go through.\"\n\nTwo more Rock Bloods, heavy with stripes, dove into the tunnel. Somewhere, someone roared.\n\nStar Beast winked out. A pale image appeared in Tondoor's mind: Star Beast, exhausted, floating in a dark sky.\n\n\"It done wore itself out,\" Dooloo whispered.\n\nIn the sudden darkness, three young dragons thumped to the ground. \"Are we too late?\"\n\nWere they?\n\nStars dotted in the sky. Not Star Beast's, but it had to be up there somewhere. He clenched his eyes shut. Star Beast, please? We need to go too. Dooloo and me. And these three young ones.\n\nSomething clamped around his neck. His mind image vanished. He was held fast by the long metal hand-claws of the Blood elder from the Rocks. \"The sun is set. It's time to leave.\"\n\nDooloo looked up at his towering bulk. \"What do he mean, time to leave? We has to go to the new world.\"\n\nHer image of them flying through the tunnel plopped faintly into his mind. Star Beast. You heard!\n\nThe Fire elder must have seen it too. He tightened his grip on Tondoor's neck.\n\n\"If I go with them to the Rocks, they won't hurt the Plains dragons,\" croaked Tondoor. The pressure on his neck eased.\n\n\"But if you does that, you dies,\" protested Dooloo.\n\n\"Dragons will survive in our caves,\" said the Blood elder. \"Always have; always will.\"\n\nThe tunnel formed again, slowly and faintly. \"You go,\" Tondoor said to Dooloo. His eyes drooped gray.\n\nThe three young dragons sprang into the sky and through the tunnel. Dooloo shook her head. \"I's staying with you. If you's going to the Rocks, I is too.\"\n\nIt was strange comfort, mingled with despair.\n\nThe Blood elder roared. His hand-claws sprang open.\n\n\"Go!\" croaked a raspy old voice. Blood glistened on Elder Mala's teeth.\n\nTondoor leapt into the fading wisps of Star Beast's tunnel with Dooloo at his side. Whoever it was that grabbed onto his tail at the last moment didn't slow him down one bit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Violet",
                "text": "Stars whirled about them, a great rolling tunnel of red and green and orange and blue, sparkling with echoes of the hatchlings' youthful gold and Dooloo's exuberant white. Tondoor laughed. Dooloo had been in his dream all the time. He just hadn't recognized her because her white was all mingled with his.\n\nThe tunnel ended in yellow light. He flumped onto soft, damp grass.\n\nWhen he tried to stand, something pressed him against the ground. He laughed again. It was the air, heavy as a true dream, and rich with the scents of growing and splashing and small scurrying beasts.\n\nHe pushed himself up to all fours. His mind was still full of spinning stars but he could see he was in a land of rolling green hills. There were oddly shaped trees with intensely green leaves, and bright flowers with exotic shapes. Dooloo lay nearby, blinking at a blue, twig-like insect darting about her snout.\n\nThank you, Star Beast. He let the new sights settle into his mind in case Star Beast could see them. Faint ripples tickled the edges of the image. They felt relieved. Exhausted. Or maybe the emotions were his own.\n\nCarefully, he stood up and turned in a circle. The three young dragons on the next hill were sorting out their feet and tails. Dragon snorting sounds came from just below the edge of the hill he and Dooloo were on. Beyond these, no one. Not on the near hills, not on the farther ones. All the colors he tried to turn into dragons were flowers or trees. Where were Blort and Pooka and Morda and Trok and Glomfa and Yolooda? Where was Kalooka?\n\nMore ripples tickled his mind\u2014somehow different from the ones he knew. Star Beast? Is that you? He closed his eyes. Faintly, he saw.\n\nKalooka, dazzling in the sun's yellow light, standing on a steep hillside next to a short, twisted tree. Glomfa stretching her wings nearby. Hoodon, further away, looking panicked. Tondoor shrugged his heavy wings. He would find her. He had all the time in the new world.\n\nDooloo got to her feet, slow and heavy. Another picture formed.\n\nMorda in a forest with tall, spike-leafed trees, tossing her sap-covered egg out of her basket, then shaking the basket upside down. Out roll fire roots, tree fungus, and several sleepy glarfs, stretching their six tiny legs.\n\nTondoor chuckled. It wasn't only dragons that were saved from the kraamlok.\n\nThe image changed again with a flash. Blort, Pooka and Yolooda sniffing the air under snow-flecked, rocky peaks. Many Leafs with them, holding eggs. Bracelet and the Sun Rock elder inspecting a ledge above.\n\nThe image flashed again. Now Tondoor saw Star Beast draped across the back of the star dragon, home again and resting in the sky. There was happiness in those colors. And oddly, hope. The star dragon turned its head and looked directly at Tondoor, just like Star Beast had on that oh-so-far-away beach. A not-quite-familiar ripple of connectedness coursed through his body. So that's who was talking to him now.\n\nTondoor inserted his own happy colors. Thank you for showing me.\n\nThe star dragon flickered, and the pictures disappeared.\n\n\"Tondoor?\" rasped a very familiar voice. Behind him, Elder Mala pulled herself up the side of the hill with her cracked yellow hand-claws. She collapsed at the top, gasping for breath. A fire root settled on the grass by her ankle.\n\nTondoor waded through the air toward her. \"Yes, Mala?\" Elders belonged to the old world. He waited for her breathing to steady. It didn't. Further down the hill, behind her, another large dragon struggled to rise. The big Rock Blood, his arm still bleeding.\n\nMala clutched Tondoor's foot. \"Are we safe now?\"\n\nTondoor surveyed their new home, inhaled the intriguing new scents. A creek sparkled in the valley below. On either side of the water, the land was divided into sharp-edged patches of green by rows of rocks and plants. Herds of lumpy white beasts with four legs and no wings milled around large flat-sided mounds topped with dry grass. A four-legged forlok pulled something like a wooden shelter across the ground. Thin beasts shaped like Star Beast walked upright beside it.\n\nThe new world had plenty of food.\n\n\"Tondoor,\" Mala's voice rasped again. \"Are we going to be all right?\"\n\nThe Rock Blood behind her had risen onto all fours and was gazing at distant purple mountains. On the next hill, the three youngsters chased each other, tripping over their heavy feet. Beside him, Dooloo lifted her head and gazed around with laughing blue eyes.\n\nAbove them, Morwaka's smiling Eye gazed down from the bright blue sky. Tondoor nodded up in silent thanks.\n\n\"Yes, Mala,\" he said. \"Everything is going to be fine.\"\n\nWhat Tondoor remembered, always, was the proud violet in her eyes as she breathed out for the very last time."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Scales and Honor",
        "author": "Justin A. Lee",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Skywing flapped his broad wings against the cold night air that drifted all around him. The snow colored, black striped gryphon angled his wings as his keen amber eyes caught sight of the goal he had to accomplish during this pitch-black evening. Among the darkened trees of the forest was the collection of lights that signaled to the party of mortals that someone was watching out for them. They were like spotlights among the darkness that seemed to get worse with every moment they remained within the Forest of Despair. A terrible name for a terrible place, to be sure. A location where no soul could thread, unless they were given permission by the forest's mysterious ruler. Skywing had heard the rumors, of course. All the gryphons in his flock had, only he never thought his wings would take him to this dreadful place. Not before this night.\n\nFor when the king himself asked you to protect him, no matter the rank, no matter the pride, no matter the wealth\u2026you had no other option but to obey.\n\nThe gryphon tilted his wings downwards, following the currents that moved beneath his feathers until he was gliding towards the ground that stretched below his limbs. Onyx claws protruded from the tips, sharpened for deadly purpose. Skywing might have not been a dragon, blessed with an armored hide or a fierce breath weapon, but he was more than capable of fending for himself.\n\nThe gryphon glanced to his left and right, more as a reminder to himself that his flight mates were still around. To his left flew a female gryphon going by the name of Cetaz. Her feathers were an earthen brown, tipped with bright reds that were very pleasing to the eye. Her stern gaze was one of determination, as she spoke not a word the entire time they had been keeping watch. Skywing figured that was her way of keeping her calm. To his right was another snowy white gryphon. Although Skywing's fur and feathers had the stripes of a tiger on them, this other gryphon had spots very much like a cheetah. His radiant blue eyes kept scanning the ground below, following each of the mortal soldiers that walked the earth. His name was Petat, and since he was always worried and watchful, he made the perfect spotter. Skywing looked to his own fur, where leathers covered up the vital areas like his chest. Painted in gold, there was the great rampant gryphon of Lumara, its inspiring presence potent enough to spread a smirk over the gryphon's black beak.\n\nSkywing back-winged as he led his flight through an opening in the twisted dark branches of the ominous forest. He tried to not pay the gnarled wood any mind as he landed softly among a collection of ten mortal knights, all of different races, clad in full plate armor. They had shields with golden gryphons slung around their backs, swords stowed in scabbards of worn leather made from cured hide, and crossbows that were adorned with runes and metal vents. From each one of these weapons came a dull resonating hum that always caused the gryphon's ears to splay and twitch. Skywing grumbled under his breath as humans, elves, and dwarves eagerly told him how they could not hear the noise that plagued him so. He strode past a few of the knights, who seemed to pay him no mind as a lone wind rustled their earth-brown tabards. Those too bore the familiar golden gryphon present in every banner, shield, or armor made in Lumara.\n\nSkywing tucked his wings to his sides as he proudly puffed out his chest and scanned the tree line for any movement. His ears perked up when he heard the twin sounds of his flight mates taking position around him.\n\n\"Keep your eyes peeled.\" He said calmly to his fellow gryphons. With a swish of his tiger tail, he strode over to the man that led this expedition, for this entire operation relied on protecting the most valuable person in all of Lumara. They were here to protect its king, Cornelius. With a slight chirp, the white gryphon dropped to a bow before the onyx haired man, who was clad in dark red leathers that had pictures of golden gryphons stitched into the edges. His warm eyes looked to the gryphon with fondness, and in a few moments a smile came to his face.\n\n\"Your majesty. The skies are clear. It appears as though the seer had not sent anything in the way of ambushers to surprise us.\"\n\n\"I am grateful for your service, Skywing. Your loyalty to the crown shall not go unnoticed.\" Cornelius spoke softly. \"You may rise now, friend. This forest cares not about our rank. Under its dark canopy, we are all of the same flock.\"\n\nThe king paused for a moment, closing his eyes. \"Listen to the murmur of the trees. Breathe from this chilly air. Do you feel it? The hint of darkness that plagues this place? It's almost like a shroud, wrapping its tendrils tighter around us the more we linger here.\" Cornelius shivered slightly. \"Let us meet with the Emerald Lady and be done with this mission before the shadows claim us all.\"\n\nSkywing rose up to all fours and offered the king a nod of acknowledgment. He had remembered the conversation earlier as they spoke of this plan. This\u2026entity they were here to see called itself the Emerald Lady. Of course, nobody really knew what she was. Some said an immortal sorceress. Others whispered of something a lot more grotesque.\n\nSkywing merely knew her as the ruler of this forest, a position she held for many, many years, going further back than the current king or his great, great, great, grandfather. She had apparently helped the crown in the past by offering whispers of the future or knowledge of power.\n\nSuch knowledge made the gryphon uneasy, filling his paws with doubt at what could be waiting for them. He hardly knew of creatures that could live this long. All of the ideas that came to mind were growing more devilish by the minute, with the worst of them taking the form of a great dragon, or a horrible blood sucking Vampire. It was she that had requested the king come to her forest by night, with only two guards at his side.\n\nThe same idea that made Skywing scoff in the face of such ridiculous request. He thought back to earlier that day, when he shared a piece of his mind with Cornelius.\n\n\"Two guards?\" he had said with a few squawks and a click of his beak. \"Does she think you struck by madness? If I may speak plainly, sire, she insults you by spewing such a ridiculous request. Deny her your visit.\"\n\nThe king had just held his tongue and listened to the gryphon's words with a series of quick nods. \"You are right, my loyal gryphon. It is a most.... unusual request, that I should only bring two of my guards in a place of such peril...However, I have no need to remind you who stands to gain most from this audience.\"\n\n\"Surely you will bring more guards then!\" Skywing had squawked out in surprise. The thought of this seer somehow disposing of his beloved king made his heart turn cold. \"Promise me you will bring a greater-\"\n\nThe king had held up his hand and silenced him. \"I shall. Of course I will. I am growing old, not stupid. I want you to accompany me to the forest of despair...Bring your other wing-mates. They will be most valuable at spotting any danger from afar.\"\n\n\"I don't see anything.\" Petat said nervously. His voice pulled Skywing's attention back to the present, and away from the ever-watchful king.\n\nHe padded carefully over to the rest of the group as they continued to their intended destination at a snail's pace. Normally, he would have complained about the inadequate speed. Skywing was always one to get a job done quickly and efficiently. To have to wait now sent an itch through his bones that made him twitch in irritation. \"Take heart, Petat.\" He said with a courageous voice, walking past the other gryphon with a graceful stride. He noticed that some of the knights had even removed their helmets to lend him their ears. \"We are here only for a simple conversation with the ruler of this forest. I am sure we will be fine as long as things remain peaceful between us.\"\n\nHe watched the others start to relax. The steel-like grip on their weapons loosened for a moment before they returned to sweep the dark trees with their lights attached to their crossbows. With a sigh, Skywing strode next to his wing-mates, and joined the others in their watch.\n\nThey continued along the path that carved its way through the cluster of sinister looking trees. The way the bark curled and twisted made it look like there were hundreds of eyes watching them as they slowly made their deeper into the tenebrous forest. Skywing looked to the ground, scratching the dirt with one of his talons. This dirt thing made him feel uneasy. He could not shake the feeling of nervousness about this path that dwelled within this untamed area of the forest. It just seemed too convenient.\n\n\"Well, well, well.\" A deep, loud, amused voice seemed to radiate from every direction of the woods.\n\nAll the soldiers suddenly stopped with the sound of clinking metal, raising their weapons to point them nervously at different sections of the forest. Several of the men whispered questions as to where the voice was coming from, who it was, and how to defend against malevolent charms if this was indeed a sorceress.\n\nSkywing tensed his own body up, kneading the ground with his claws. He readied his wings for flight in case he needed to jump out of the way of anything that came his way, his eyes looking to the canopy above. How he wished to be in the sky right now, instead of a captive on the ground. It made him feel so trapped, especially in this moment where disembodied voices rang around him.\n\n\"I believe I only allowed you TWO guards, little human.\" The voice continued, ending with a chuckle. There was suddenly a rustling from a nearby bush that drew the fire of several crossbows.\n\nThey lit the area with great red pulses of magical energy, impacting the small poor bush that was incinerated in moments from the combined fire, until the king held up his hands and shouted at them.\n\n\"Cease your firing, you silly monkeys! Have we become so paranoid that we attack bushes now? We risk setting this whole forest ablaze. Weapons down. All of you!\"\n\n\"Wise words. You are all so unnecessarily nervous around these trees. What can they do to you? Uproot and crush your feeble forms under their roots?\" The voice chuckled again. \"Now, human king, riddle me this. Why did you bring more guards than I gave you permission to?\" The voice started to sound aggressive, as it punctuated its words with a growl. \"You requested this meeting, and now dare to insult me? This lack of manners might prove more damaging than you believe.\"\n\n\"No!\" Cornelius replied, turning his head from side to side. It seemed he was unsure where to direct his voice. \"I do not seek to insult you, but to protect myself. You wanted to meet me in the dark woods with only two guards?\" The king crossed his arms and wrinkled his brow. \"What if I was ambushed by thugs or bloodthirsty creatures? I am a wanted man by those who seek vengeance against my kingdom. There are millions of things that could have denied this meeting.\"\n\n\"Accidents are not likely to happen in MY forest, human. I think you are all in need of a lesson on what happens when you disrespect your betters.\"\n\nSkywing felt his blood run cold. He backed into a circle formation with his wing-mates. The soldiers around them started to do the same thing, the hum of their nervous chatter only adding to the rising anxiety.\n\n\"Do you see anything?\" asked a female knight, her crossbow held tight.\n\n\"Nothing yet. Keep ya eyes peeled.\" replied a shorter armored clad warrior that sounded like a dwarf.\n\n\"There!\" Another person yelled out, firing their crossbow repeatedly. Their red shots illuminated the dark trees around their intended target, which appeared to be a slithering pile of green snakes.\n\nThe collected knights let out cries as they suddenly fired into the tree line. Those green snakes were revealed to be vines of all sizes that shot from the forest like arrows. They slithered along the ground, avoiding most of the energy bolts before finding two of the knights. The vines suddenly wrapped around their legs, quickly binding them together as the two let out cries of terror.\n\n\"Save them!\" Skywing bounded towards the two knights as the others were too busy trying to hold off more of the vines that attacked them from all directions. Skywing dove after the knights that were being dragged along the ground by the green slithering vines. He lashed out with one of his claws and managed to separate one knight from their attacker. The other one was not so lucky. They were dragged into the depths of the forest, screaming for dear life, and in a few moments, dark, chilling silence.\n\n\"Bless ya, gryphon!\" The female knight replied swiftly, her voice full of gratitude. She pushed herself up, and pulled out her sword. \"Looks like this might be the better option in here.\"\n\nSkywing nodded, looking around to see if anyone else needed his help. His eyes widened as it appeared anyone meant everybody. He bound from knight to knight with the learned agility he nurtured over many years of sprints and grueling exercises. Always pushing himself to the limit. Always striving to be better, to do more. His talons tasted many vines, freeing knight after knight from the grasping vines intent on dragging them to their doom.\n\n\"Take that!\" He cheered out, slashing another vine in two.\n\n\"Hail Skywing!\" A knight shouted. \"The very gods blessed ya feathers when dey gave you yer wings! I owe ye a drink, mate!'\n\n\"Maybe more than that!\" Skywing screeched, ripping another vine in two. It looked like with the help from the gryphon squad, the vines had stopped their advance on the collection of mortal knights. In the confusion, only three of the knights had been dragged off into the woods. Thankfully, the king was still within the center of their formation. He had pulled out a small version of the energy crossbow, one that could be held with only one hand so he could pour some of his own shots into the clusters of vines.\n\n\"You continue to struggle against the inevitable, little rabbits. You have entered MY forest without my permission. What is the punishment for such insolent trespassing, I wonder?\"\n\nSuddenly, the ground opened up beneath Petat like a vast, grotesque mouth. The gryphon and the two knights he was protecting fell into the pit with a collected groan of pain.\n\n\"Petat!\" Skywing screeched, turning to his wing-mate. He bound to them with a push of his mighty hinds. However, the ground closed almost instantly, silencing the terrified screams and screeches of the victims. \"PETAT!\" Skywing shrieked out, his claws digging into the ground, as if all he had to do was remove the top, and they would still be there. Scared of course, but still there. However, it soon became apparent there was still tons of gravel in the way and absolutely no sign of his fellow soldiers.\n\n\"Wh-what in the blazes happened? The ground can open up now?\" Screamed one of the knights, crossing his sword with a vine.\n\n\"Anton, watch out!\" screamed another female, moments before a large vine sprouted from the ground, wrapped around her armored body, and with a violent yank, pulled the knight into the tenebrous depths of the menacing dark forest.\n\nSkywing ripped several more vines in two, even slicing one that had wrapped itself around his hind leg before it could tug on him.\n\n\"Your highness, we have to leave!\" The gryphon screeched out, bounding over towards the king who had a look of horror on his usually cheerful face. Skywing did not wait for his words, simply wrapping his scaly forelimbs around the king. \"Sorry about this, your majesty.\" He opened up his wings and readied himself to fly, trying to push back the wailing cries of the other knights that were being picked off one by one. He knew the battle was lost. All that mattered now was getting the king to safety. All of their lives -even his own-were less important compared to the great and wise king of Lumara.\n\nSkywing jumped into the air, feeling a dagger plunge into his heart as he heard the screech of Cetaz erupt into his sensitive ears. It was full of pain, fury, even a bit of fear.\n\nHe looked down to see that the female had attempted to leap after him. She had even grabbed two knights with her talons to save them from the encroaching vines. However, the brave gryphon had only managed to get several feet into the air before vines grabbed hold of her hinds.\n\n\"No. No! Skraaaawk!\" The female gryphon desperately pounded her wings against the air to no avail as the vines slowly pulled her closer and closer to the ground. \"NO! Rawwkaaaaak!\" She screamed out, before eventually being pulled into the forest with another screech of fear.\n\nSkywing looked away again. \"Don't worry, sire. I got you. At least we'll get out of this mess\u2026together.\" He beat his wings against the air, carrying them to the canopy when, much to his horror, he felt the same wicked vines latch around his hinds, tighten around his limbs, and yank him down violently. NO! He pounded his wings against the air, unable to slash at the vines while he clutched the king within his grasp. NO! He internally screamed once more, as with each flap, he was pulled closer and closer to the forest below. His mind dreaded to think of what awaited him past the tree line, but it appeared as though he was going to find out soon enough.\n\n\"We surrender!\" Cornelius shouted out. Skywing crashed into the ground, pain flaring up in his side. \"We surrender!\" the king screamed again. Skywing was dragged against the ground by clusters of vines.\n\n\"An expected result, tiny human.\" The voice chuckled. The vines released Skywing much to the gryphon's relief.\n\nSkywing groaned, letting the king fall from his grasp as he pushed himself to all fours. His eyes glanced around to the empty clearing, where moments ago, a whole squad of guards had stood vigilant. He narrowed his eyes as he felt his blood begin to boil, and his breathing quicken. If he ever got a chance to tear into the source of that voice, he would gladly introduce them to his claws. With a flick of his tail, the gryphon refolded his wings behind his back and turned his attention back to the present.\n\n\"Now bow before your better.... brave king. Cement your defeat with something stronger than words. Show me how much you want to preserve your life, at that of your gryphon.\" The voice said that last part in a laugh, almost like the very word was laughable.\n\nSkywing looked over to his king. Surely Cornelius would ignore this voice. He would stand tall and defy their wishes. However, to his amazement, the king immediately went down onto one knee with his head held low.\n\n\"Submit. It is\u2026the only way,\" Cornelius looked over to the gryphon, his eyes hollow, his voice, defeated.\n\nThe gryphon lowered himself to the ground and pressed his beak against the same earth that stole so many of his squad\u2026companions\u2026even friends.\n\n\"Very good.\" the voice said. Skywing noticed a large green scaled limb step into the clearing. \"Keep your eyes down, gryphon.\" the voice focused on him, and he felt his blood run cold. \"You would not want me to consider this an act of defiance so shortly after you cast down your pride at my feet.\"\n\nSkywing lowered his eyes as the owner of the voice walked past them. They were large, at least three times the size of Skywing himself. He could make out the emerald green scales strewn over the creature's hide, and the large winding tail that swished behind the imposing body. His eyes widened as he realized he was looking at the long form of none other than a dragon.\n\n\"It pleases me to see reason finally dawn upon your primitive mind. Tell me, wise king, why you wished this meeting with me. For now, you have my undivided attention.\"\n\nThe dragon flicked their tail so that the webbed spines slid across Skywing's beak. He could have snapped at it, offered one last bit of resistance against this towering beast. However, he found his body unable to respond, as if his mind, his instincts, the very core of his being surrendered completely to this dragon.\n\n\"We came to find the red dragon you spoke of in prophecy.\" Cornelius blurted out. \"We have searched high and low within the borders of our nation, yet managed to grasp no sign of them. I fear that, without your help, this herald you speak of will come, and we will find ourselves pinned under the weight of this threat before we even get the chance to retaliate.\"\n\n\"Oh, you speak of that.\" The dragon chuckled, settling down onto their haunches, as if they wanted to make sure the black onyx talons on their hinds were pressed right up against Skywing's beak.\n\nSuch a humiliating thing to endure. Skywing kept his eyes closed, if only to numb part of the shame that coursed beneath his feathers.\n\n\"Oh, my sweet, little gryphon\u2026do you not like the curves of my claws settled so close to your beak?\" The dragon lowered their head so that Skywing could see their lighter green frills twitch in anticipation at his response. Their glowing purple eyes made his feathers stand out in terror, and the dragon opened their maw in a tooth filled smile of glistening white fangs. \"I could make you lick my talons right now if I wanted to.\"\n\nSkywing offered no response, causing the dragon to chuckle deep in their throat. He just lowered his eyes and let them gloat; let them win this already failed battle in order to fight another day.\n\n\"That's right, little gryphon.\" The dragon snapped their snout to Cornelius once again. \"You will need the red orb of dragon kind.\" It spoke clearly, and Skywing thought the voice sounded feminine for a moment.\n\n\"And where is this red orb you speak of?\" Cornelius asked. \"More importantly, will it help us find this herald that threatens the future of my people?\"\n\n\"The red orb will help you locate the dragon, human, but it will not remove the threat on its own. Use your wits for once. Despite you being a lesser being, I know you possess some measure of wisdom, otherwise your armored form would not be gracing the throne of your kingdom.\" The dragon looked up to the trees, almost like it was looking at something they could not see. \"As for the orb\u2026it will soon be found by a wizard called Vargus, located to the west in Lumarian lands, past the dragon neck mountains. There will be a temple close to his house that resides near the hovel you call Gladenhill.\"\n\n\"That\u2026that is excellent news!\" the king's eyes brightened. \"I shall send a group of knights to retrieve it at once!\"\n\n\"NO!\" The dragon snapped their maw inches from the king's head, causing the man to let out a small whimper. \"You will send a group of knights two weeks from now to find it, and I shall make a request of you, wise, powerful king.\"\n\n\"Why two weeks? And what is this request you speak of?\" Cornelius asked, not raising his head for an instance as he continued to shiver.\n\nSkywing heard the dragoness give a loud, drawn out sigh as she tapped her tail on the earth softly. \"You will mind my words, or the retrieval of this item will be at risk of failure. My request is that you place the human dragon hunter Arcturus Lund at the head of your squad.\"\n\n\"Arcturus Lund?\" The king's voice filled with surprise. \"He is an excellent knight on the field of battle, to be sure. But why send him?\"\n\n\"Because this is the best way for the plan to succeed, puny human. Now rise, take your gryphon before his spine starts to bend from all this kneeling, and leave my forest before I decide to amuse myself further. Now BEGONE!\" The dragon roared into the night, shaking the very trees and making Skywing's limbs shiver.\n\nDespite his fear, he found himself able to rise to all fours. \"What\u2026what about the other guards?\"\n\n\"They are mine now, gryphon.\" The dragon whirled around, placing their snout close to his head. \"Consider them payment for breaking our initial agreement. And if your friends refuse to be mine, I will use them as stone statues around my forest to deter anyone else from making the same mistake.\" The dragon bared its teeth at him with a growl, making the gryphon feel ever the smaller. \"Now begone from my presence. I will only tolerate your insolence for so long.\"\n\nSkywing gulped, nodded, and turned back to the king, who was waving him over silently. He turned back to the grinning dragon and cursed himself. To think that lone beast had disposed of his squad so easily\u2026\n\nThe gryphon flicked his tail and padded his way over to the king, where he wrapped a wing around the human's shivering form.\n\n\"Come on, Skywing. The night's getting colder. Take me away from this place before my boots stick to the ground.\" Cornelius said softly.\n\n\"Right away, your majesty.\" The gryphon touched the ground with his belly to allow the king to settle upon his back.\n\nWith a spreading of his wings, the gryphon bounded into the sky, not even looking back towards the smug looking dragon that watched their departure. He hoped that, one day, he would get a chance to strike back at this monster. To avenge the sacrifice of his fellow soldiers, and if they survived, rescue them from this forest's accursed grasp.\n\n[ Dread Flame ]\n\nOur story begins in the kingdom of Lumara, a rather large nation located on the continent of Sethera. Lumara was well known for its cold winters, said to chill a person to the very bone, even while hugging their fire for warmth. It also bore some of the wettest summers where rain soaked the countryside for months. Some outsiders that lived in such climate spoke of Lumara as the worst place for anyone to live. However, in spite of the ill rumors, Lumara was not without its bounty. Several races inhabited these lands, and even though the majority of them were human, the other species were not treated any lesser.\n\nTo the other kingdoms of Man, Elf, and Dwarf. Lumara appeared a violent nation, never satisfied with its borders. Many years ago, the forefathers of present day Lumara found ruins that contained knowledge of mana crystals, and -most important of them all-their creation. These crystals had been used eons ago by the Dragons -one of the oldest races of the world-to fuel vast magics in their empire, and keep the mortal races tethered under their claws. By making use of the knowledge they uncovered, Lumara entered a new age of prosperity where evolution knew a pace unlike any other race discovered before. They were able to build marvels like flying ships, castles that could fly amongst the clouds. They were even able to project beams of concentrated magical energy. With the help of these deadly devices, Lumara took upon itself to spread this newfound prosperity to the rest of Sethera.\n\nNow, far away from Lumara's capital city of Entis, far away from even its ruling king, past the Dragon Neck mountains to the west, even further than the forest of dreams, there was a village called Garricksville. An old wizard lived there, and Vargus was his name. Vargus had recently returned from an expedition into one of the ruins of the dragon empire where he was able to walk away with a treasure unseen before by his kin. He had found a red orb, perfect in shape, weighting almost nothing, and if one stared at it long enough the night sky appeared in the orb's bosom.\n\nVargus had put many of his years into studying the ruins of old. He now resided in the study of his large house, personally crafted to suit the wizard's needs by the best masons in the land.\n\nIn the confines of his trusted home, Vargus, wielder of the orb, found himself blissfully unaware of the knights sent to retrieve the treasure from him, by any means necessary."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "An airship sailed across the dark night sky, hardly making a noise louder than the creaking of the wooden boards upon its deck. In the space where a mast would stand, there was a large balloon-like structure that was tethered to the hull of the grand ship. Two large propellers -powered of course by mana crystals hiding deep in the hull of the ship-stood in place of a rudder to guide the ship through the darkened sky. It was made of a dark brown wood with scratches and signs of wear acquired over the years of her service. On her balloon was painted the symbol of Lumara, a gold roaring gryphon painted over a brown shield. At her front of the ship stood a wooden carved woman with her arms outstretched, as if welcoming the sky's embrace. Painted below this statue was the name of the vessel \"RLA Destiny\" which stood for Royal Lumara Airship, a vessel commissioned only at the orders of the king of this great nation.\n\nOn the Destiny's deck, her crew preformed last checks on the three beam cannons. These formidable weapons stood large enough for a person to sit in, and although bulky in form, they could turn on a dime if situation demanded. Other crewmen checked the heat oozing from the engines below, and navigators calculated the distance to their destination. Standing out from the rest of the crew was a group of knights clad in gray and silver armor, ten in total, all of various heights and genders. Each one, however, bore features filled with experience, grim determination plastered over their faces to denote the urgency of the task at hand.\n\nOne man walked around, inspecting the troops to ensure that tabards were in order, longswords stowed, shields strapped to their backs, and energy crossbows slung in proper place. This man was their leader, and his name was Arcturus Lund. He was a man of twenty three years and had already achieved the rank of Paladin in Lumara's military. Arcturus stopped at another knight whose crossbow was slung around the wrong shoulder. His green eyes narrowed at the man whose gear was out of order.\n\n\"Harrison!\" he barked to the man, \"tend to your weapon or see danger bite you in the ass.\"\n\n\"S-sir?\"\n\n\"Other shoulder, soldier.\" Arcturus said firmly.\n\nThe man called Harrison quickly switched the position of his weapon. The large crossbow looked like a normal one at first glance, but a critical eye could notice exhausts to vent the heat from the mana crystal used to power up the weapon.\n\nArcturus swept his short brown hair as he looked to the remaining nine knights. Experienced, they may have been, but worry still managed to creep its tendrils across their faces.\n\n\"Steady your hearts, my warriors!\" Arcturus spoke loudly, \"I have seen you all perform on the battlefield with honor and skill unmatched by any other knight. Today will be no different. Focus, and we shall see this mission to its end.\"\n\nHe turned to walk the other way as he continued his inspiring words. \"Though our foe might be a wizard of experience, with men like you at my side, I know we will emerge victorious.\"\n\nHe held up his gauntlet clad hand. \"Look to your fellow knights, keep your shields up, and don't give the spell slinger an opportunity to conjure anything.\"\n\nArcturus smiled. He saw the worry drain from their faces, replaced with courage. Satisfied with himself, he dismissed the men for preparation as he looked to his own gear one last time.\n\nAt his right hip was a smaller version of the energy crossbow, designed to be used in only one hand. He felt for the grip, thinking back to the day when he received the weapon at his promotion. On its side, he had marked with ink all the lives the crossbow had taken. Around his waist, to the left, was his trusty longsword, still in use since he joined the ranks of the Lumarian army when he was but a boy, at the frail age of fifteen. The blacksmith kept on telling him to replace the weathered sword, but Arcturus never listened, always reforging the same blade over and over again. He laughed inside as he remembered teaching his son Geoffery on how to hold his training sword, and how the first swing's momentum had the boy tumble to the ground. Arcturus then thought to his wife, Selina. Of how her brown eyes shined with anger that day. The paladin reached into one of his pouches to check if they were still tied properly, then pulled out a handkerchief, light blue in color, given to him by Selina before he boarded this ship on the king's orders. Arcturus gripped it tightly. Some people thought him superstitious, yet in spite of what they believed, he always prayed to the gods in a whisper for the safe return back to the arms of his beloved wife.\n\nThe Paladin smirked and pocketed his precious family treasure. Tonight was not going to be an exception. He flipped the visor of his helmet down as the ship started to descend. He fastened the helmet's leather strap, noticing how the other Knights followed his example.\n\nAhead of them rose a dark castle illuminated by moonlight, nestled between rolling hills. The structure had many towers, but in spite of its impressive arsenal, the stone crumbled in places, giving the castle a disheveled appearance. Its windows were dark, the light of the moon still too weak to pierce through their veil of shadows.\n\n\"No one mentioned a castle.\" Arcturus heard a knight whisper.\n\n\"Well, it's fitting, don't you think?\" he said. \"The wizard we seek is just as old. It makes sense he'd inhabit a place that matches the man. Perhaps he's trying to give us a message. What kind of knights would we be, to strike down an old man in his crumbling home? Best turn around, eh?\"\n\nThe others chuckled nervously in the night air.\n\nArcturus scanned the castle's battlements. No weapons of any kind could be seen upon its ramparts. However, wizards always had a trick up their sleeves, or a few fireballs to throw your way when not paying attention.\n\nAlthough, the Paladin told himself, at least I'm not facing a dragon in there. A beast of that magnitude would be a different challenge altogether. Despite being trained to fight them, even Arcturus wasn't sure if his knights would be up to the task if a dragon showed up.\n\n\"Do not fall back into the clutch of despair,\" Arcturus patted the wooden railing of the ship. \"Even if fate turns against us, we have the Destiny here for support. Between our crossbows and the beam canons, the only way our friend is getting away is on the back of a dragon.\"\n\n\"Like there's a man in this world crazy enough to ride a dragon!\" one of the men said, and laughter quickly followed.\n\nPerhaps this wizard is just that kind of crazy, Arcturus thought. Guess we're going to find what hides in the depths of his castle in a bit.\n\nArcturus watched intently as the Destiny descended towards one of the makeshift walls. He spied small cracks in the wall, a sign of arcane crafting. Was it possible that the wizard knew of their arrival? His fingers brushed over the slung hand-crossbow at his side. If that were true, they might have been in for a nasty surprise when they pierced the wizard's domain. He signaled to the others to move out as the ship's plank touched down. As his boots hit the stone, his knights drew their weapons, filling the night air with a small hum. Arcturus felt a gust of wind from behind, a sign that the Destiny had left just as the last one of them made it off the ship. Arcturus pressed a small rune on the side of his helm, allowing him to send a message to the ship.\n\n\"Retrieve us if I send out a flare.\"\n\n\"As you command, Paladin,\" came a reply from the captain, his voice sounding as if the man were inches from Arcturus' ear.\n\nWith his escape secured, the troops mobilized. Arcturus followed the knights through the courtyard. What looked like a normal castle from far away turned into a much stranger show on the inside. The walls were jutting out at odd angles, and carried growths of stone on them, looking like some sort of warts. It was obvious whoever participated in the crafting of this castle held time in much higher regard than aesthetics.\n\n\"I don't like the looks of this.\" A knight had spoken.\n\n\"Like your face looks any better.\" Another replied, chuckling.\n\n\"Keep focused.\" Arcturus approached the two men. \"We don't fully know what secrets hide between these walls, marred as they may look.\"\n\nThe group kept on walking until they arrived in front of a sizable house, an odd thing to see in the middle of this collection of arcane-bound stone. The structure seemed to be attached to a large stone tower growing out of the building's side, stone fusing with the wood to form a grotesque whole. Its front door was distorted by magic, making it much bigger than any door crafted by men. Arcturus guessed it would have to be at least thirty feet tall, and just as wide, and like the walls, the door too carried the small cracks characteristic to arcane tampering.\n\nArcturus signaled with a hand to the others to open the door, a heavy thing that took five of the knights to crack open. In silence, the men flowed inside, weapons drawn. Arcturus' view was filled with a bizarre hallway, so long it hardly matched the size of the house he saw from the outside. The hallway's walls were lined with what appeared to be knickknacks and odd pieces of what Arcturus might call metal garbage that didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason. Among the refuse were torches powered by magic to light the way.\n\nIt really looks like he's been expecting somebody. Perhaps this wizard has company in the depths of his crazy mind\u2026\n\n\"Alright men spread out!\" he told to the knights as their boots sullied the orange rug lining the floor. His eyes found themselves drawn to several paintings of an old man. Possibly Vargus himself. His hazel eyes almost seemed to follow Arcturus at every step as he walked down the hallway. Arcturus shrugged and kept going. In this strange place, even the rug beneath his feet could twist at moment's notice.\n\n\"You lot. With me!\" Came a woman's voice, a knight garbed in armor scratched by swords and dented by hundreds of powerful blows. Arcturus walked past the half orc knight who had proven herself over the years to be his most trusted follower. Half of the others followed her through a door they came across, including Harrison. She busted it down with a single shove and a loud cheer. \"Knock Knock! Your delivery has just arrived!\"\n\nSeveral shots from her crossbow bathed the knights in flashes of red light.\n\n\"Room's clear boys.\" she casually walked out, a puff of exhaust coming from her crossbow's vents. \"Seems our prey is hiding in another room.\"\n\n\"Or another castle.\" Someone laughed.\n\nThe knights continued down the hallway, keeping a close look on their surroundings. Though they tried to keep a positive attitude, the ominous nature of this place put even the most seasoned men on guard. Arcturus scanned every cobwebbed stone, every, crevice, every creepy self-painting in search of any hidden traps.\n\nFortunately, the wizard had none in store for them thus far, and the knights stopped at a cross intersection of doors, each one a different shade of brown with a handle that failed to match its color. These colors were gold, silver, and bronze. Arcturus pulled out his hand-sized crossbow and flipped the activation rune, the rising hum of its power music to his ears.\n\n\"Form squads. Two men.\" He signaled the knights to enter in pairs. He turned towards the bronze door, the one he planned to go through with the knight Erin. Erin was relatively new to the squad, selected for her expertise in lock picking and trap disarmament.\n\n\"Are you sure about this, sir? Shouldn't you have someone more skilled at your side?\" she spoke on a soft, worried voice.\n\n\"You happen to be a fine shot, Erin. Put mind to purpose. If I didn't think you could handle yourself, you would have remained on the deck of the ship, far removed from any sort of danger.\"\n\nHe pushed open the door after she gave him a thumbs-up to find the inside safe to walk in. The room was made of stone, with a singular pedestal containing a small palm sized red orb resting on a purple cushion. The dim light cast dark shadows that crept up like beasts along the walls, sending a sense of dread up the paladin's spine.\n\n\"Looks like the perfect den of horrors in here.\" He turned to back towards the others. \"What did you find?\"\n\nSpit froze in his throat when, instead of his knights, stood a wall of stone. Arcturus found himself alone with no sign of the others or the door he came through. He raised his crossbow at a moment's notice, then scanned the dim light for any sign of movement, any hint at what had just happened. His steps were slow and placed with care, as if he was treading on very thin ice. Slowly, Arcturus made his way to the opposite side of the room, finding no exit, as expected.\n\n\"Damn it. There has to be a-\"\n\nHe spun around when a faint noise buried itself in his ear. It sounded like a great roar, coming from behind him and very far away. His finger hugged the trigger of the crossbow almost instantly. The once dim room shone with brilliant red light and the wall hissed with three energy impacts on the stone surface. Arcturus stood in silence, listening to his own thumping heartbeat, trying to focus on the source of the strange roar. His eyes hovered over to the orb that sat there, the most single mysterious object in this entire chamber. An itch prodded him in the back of his mind, drawing him to the orb. Slowly, the paladin stretched his hand towards the object, sheathing his crossbow. The orb was what drew him to this forsaken place, right? That was his task. To retrieve the orb and return it to the king.\n\nArcturus took one more step. Then another. He was but a hand away from the orb now, trapped in the agonizing moment when his mind all but screamed for the danger that lurked ahead.\n\nHowever, despite his rising anxiety, Arcturus grabbed the orb and gritted his teeth.\n\nBut no spell came out. No trap. The orb was perfectly safe in his hand, cold to the touch like any other metal.\n\n\"Well, that was easy,\" Arcturus let out a long sigh, then smiled. \"Guess I'm going home after all.\"\n\n\"Don't judge a book by its cover!\" a voice suddenly said, as if from every wall.\n\n\"Blast it,\" Arcturus looked around as Vargus seemed to emerge from one of the many walls around him. Arcturus' first instinct was to grab hold of his crossbow, yet he found himself unable to move a single muscle.\n\n\"I don't know what shallow twist of fate allowed you to bypass my defenses and get into this room.\"\n\nVargus made his way over to Arcturus until he stood several feet in front of the paladin, his hand stretching towards the orb. \"Regardless, I would have you return the orb to its rightful place.\"\n\n\"You\u2026forgot to\u2026say please\u2026\" Arcturus strained as he felt his body compelled against his will to walk towards Vargus.\n\n\"Would it make any difference? The orb is mine either way. You but have to place it in my palm.\"\n\n\"Nghhhh.\" Arcturus grunted. Every step felt like pulling against thousands of thorn-vines, a fight against himself. \"What's this red pebble to a man who can build a castle out of nothing anyway?\"\n\n\"The feeble mind of an iron-clad brute could not possibly comprehend my intentions,\" Vargus said.\n\n\"Try me.\" Arcturus hissed. He knew the wizard was a proud sort from the way he expected the orb to be handed to him. While the bastard filled the air with his boasting voice, Arcturus moved his trembling hand towards his crossbow, almost touching the activation rune.\n\n\"Rah!\" With a sneer of the wizard's mouth and a twitch of his wrist, the crossbow flew from the knight's grasp.\n\n\"That was a clever trick, but useless still.\" Vargus chuckled. \"When a wizard speaks to you, you would do well to listen. But ah. I am afraid we are getting ahead of ourselves. We have yet to be introduced! Now what should I call you, knight of Lumara? Enforcer of our Dictator's will?\"\n\n\"My name is Arcturus\u2026and I am no mere knight!\" he said, pride resonating in his voice \"I am a Paladin. I suggest you don't forget my name, nor the title attached to it\u2026when you contemplate the choices you've made in chains.\"\n\n\"Paladin, you say? Now that is a title forged by skill, and prestige. Perhaps fate planned to bring us together this night,\" Vargus said, amused. He placed a hand on his chin, then walked around Arcturus, no words filling the void chamber until the mage stopped but a few steps away from the Paladin's face.\n\n\"But alas, I stand unimpressed. Paladins used to wield so much more than steel in the past. I speak of magic, a power that might rival my very own!\" Vargus sighed. \"Ah\u2026it is a pity the glory days have faded. There was one time where your order used to stand for something more than a crumpled piece of history. Now, you are but a flea straddling the fur of a beast beyond your understanding.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to disappoint you, wizard.\" Arcturus said. \"I shall pass your wisdom to our king, after I see you bound in chains.\"\n\n\"Oh, but I don't think you shall have that opportunity, paladin.\" Vargus chuckled again. \"You see, I have you in chains now. Your whole body is at my command, and soon enough your mind shall eagerly follow.\"\n\nArcturus disregarded the wizard's poisonous words. Instead, he focused on the faint pounding sound starting behind the wizard. The voices\u2026they had to be those of Thraka and the knights.\n\n\"Throw your backs into it, or the paladin will have you clean latrines for a week!\"\n\nVargus immediately spun towards the source of the voices. The door bust down to reveal all the knights and Thraka holding her crossbow at the ready. A blue shimmering energy shield appeared before the wizard as shots slammed against his magic barrier, only to rebound and hit harmlessly on the stone walls. The other knights filed in adding their own shots as Vargus backed up, blocking each shot with his energy shield but having little opportunity to do much else.\n\n\"Enough of this nonsense!\" Vargus cried out.\n\nA wave of magic spread out towards the knights, causing their weapons to suddenly smoke and fall from their grasp. However, Erin managed to pull a knife out just as Vargus casted his spell and threw it at the wizard.\n\n\"Grrraaaaaahhh!\" Vargus screamed as the knife sunk into his shoulder. Arcturus felt control return to his body. He ducked as Vargus threw several rays of fire around the room in retribution. Harrison groaned as the knight hit the ground. Arcturus had no time to even look at the damage. he grabbed his crossbow from the ground and quickly hit a second switch on the crossbow. He raised it and fired. Instead of a red energy blast, a blue projectile fired at Vargus, taking the wizard squarely in the back while he was distracted by the other knights.\n\n\"Damn the\u2026luck.\" The man mumbled before he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.\n\nThe thump announced an end to the crazed wizard's threat. Arcturus lifted his helmet's visor to wipe the sweat from his brow. The other knights rushed towards him, bombarding him with questions, all background noise to him as he gazed into the orb held within his hand. It seemed to call to him. A whisper, far different than the spell Vargus used on him.\n\nA pat to the shoulder shook him out of his trance.\n\n\"Are you alright, Arcturus?\" Thraka said, her tusks slightly to the left, a sign of worry as Arcturus came to know from the time they spent together on various missions.\n\nHe straightened up and laughed \"I'm great! This is what we came for, after all.\" He held up the orb for the others to see.\n\n\"That small thing?\"\n\n\"What's that do?\"\n\n\"It's what the King wanted. We couldn't let this stay in the hands of this rebel filth.\" Arcturus gestured to Vargus. \"The fact that he was also a talkative bastard takes second place.\"\n\n\"Uh sir, we only fought summons, not rebels.\" Harrison added.\n\n\"Yeah I thought that was odd. This mage must not have trusted his compatriots enough guard his treasured ball.\"\n\n\"Well, what should we do with the spell slinger?\" Thraka lightly shoved the unconscious Vargus with her boot.\n\n\"Carry him back to the ship, shackle his hands, cover his mouth, and throw him in a cell. I'm sure the interrogators will love to break some words out of his mouth.\"\n\nThe others chuckled, picking up the drooling wizard and dragging him back towards the entrance. Arcturus holstered his crossbow and followed the others out.\n\nThe knights gathered outside in the quiet courtyard as Arcturus reached for a thin piece of wood on his belt. He gripped the worn wood engraved with various runes, then raised it above his head. Three yellow lights burst into the skies. A few moments after, the flare gave away the position of the troops, the airship appeared, landing a few feet from them. The knights boarded with a collective sigh of relief, dragging Vargus up the plank. Arcturus stopped midway to look back to the castle, his ears still troubled by the faint roar in the distance. He remembered the stories he told Geoffery about a dark shadow beast that stalked the night in search of little boys to devour.\n\n\"Are you coming sir?\" one of the deck hands asked from above.\n\n\"Yes. I just\u2026it's really good to be out of that place.\" Arcturus turned back to the ship and walked on its deck, his mouth devoid of any other words past what was customary after a mission. He felt the engines roar to life, and a slight lurch as the ship ascended back into the dark skies.\n\nWhen they gained cruising altitude, Arcturus strode across the deck towards his quarters. His mind could definitely use rest from Vargus' incessant blabber. If he spent more time with the wizard, Arcturus feared he would've collapsed under the mage's unending spree.\n\nWhy did you need that orb, Vargus? It must be of importance to seclude yourself in the castle, more so when you came to punish me yourself. Arcturus thought for a few minutes on how easily they breached the castle. Could it be that the mage wanted them to find the orb?\n\nPossibly. Then again, many seers claimed to have untangled the strings of the future.\n\nArcturus purged his mind of the wizard. The mission was done. For now, that was all that mattered when they had hours left before they reached the capital and his men were more than capable of watching the subdued wizard. He nodded to another crew member as he opened the oak door to his quarters.\n\nHis quarters were nothing too extravagant. A bed with tan sheets sprawled over to the left, big enough for a single man to rest in. There was a stand for his armaments a few feet away, followed by a desk and a sizable storage chest for his clothes. Arcturus detached his armor, letting the plates softly hit the bed., each piece removed accompanied by a sigh. He then fell onto the bed, his eyes closing softly at the comforting warmth of the cushion. With such a long night under his belt, sleep came to him before he even knew what hit him.\n\nArcturus opened his eyes to find himself on the cobbled path of a street. He looked up into the dark sky to see clouds gathering overhead. They were moving around as if thousands of insects crawled beneath their surface.\n\nA drop fell from the sky. Then another, and another. Arcturus soon felt the rain starting to soak his dark gray clothes. A streak of lightning arced across the night sky, followed by thunder soon after. Arcturus turned his head, looking for anything in this black void, not seeing the ship, his knights, or his family.\n\nAnother lightning bolt flashed in the sky, the booming thunder forcing Arcturus cover his ears as he collapsed in pain.\n\nFrom all directions echoed a mighty roar of no earthly origins. Arcturus jumped on his feet, immediately falling into a combat position.\n\n\"What are you?\" he shouted into the storm above. The clouds parted before him, pierced by a great scaled head that descended like a great meteor. Following suit, its mighty platinum wings opened up as the great dragon circled the lone knight briefly before landing on its claws. The great beast's eyes stared at him, fluid, as if filled with liquid mercury. The Paladin stood his ground as he looked up at the dragon that easily towered over him several times over. He noted the smooth scaled head with less pronounced horns belonged to a female, a boon owed to years of studying these majestic beasts. The dragoness opened her maw, each inch lined with sharp teeth gleaming even in the muted light. She raised her head, and let loose another thunderous roar that shook Arcturus to the very core of his being.\n\n\"GAH!\" Arcturus woke with a start only to find himself in the bed of his quarters. He grasped the sheets tightly in his hands, sweat starting to drip from his forehead.\n\n\"Just a dream,\" he muttered, sighing in relief. \"It was just a blasted dream not even half as crazy as that blabbering mage.\"\n\nA strong knock rattled his door.\n\n\"Yes! I'm well awake.\"\n\n\"Sir, the prisoner wishes to speak with you.\" Harrison's voice echoed through the door.\n\n\"I'll be there in a moment.\" Arcturus grumbled. He got out of the bed, hastily donning his belt and longsword. He opened the door to find Harrison, his face pale. Arcturus ignored this as Harrison started leading him through the ship.\n\n\"He just started talking\u2026 different.\"\n\n\"Different?\" Acrturus frowned. \"What do you mean, different?\"\n\n\"In another language or-or something akin to organized gibberish, so we tightened his bindings to prevent him from weaving one of his spells. Then a moment ago he asked for you, and put up quite a stir.\"\n\nArcturus was brought to the lower parts of the ship, where iron bars were bolted into the wooden floor. Besides that, there was a small enclosure with a tiny porthole, barred by a door. Vargus sat on the lone bench, still tied up with ropes. His face was stern, mouth straight, head unmoving, and his eyes staring straight at Arcturus, following him as he walked, similarly to how the paintings on the castle's walls reacted to the men that trespassed within its walls.\n\nOne of Arcturus' knights sat next to the cell, reading a book with the title 'A Bard's tale' written by some halfling that Arcturus had no knowledge of.\n\n\"Vargus,\" Arcturus said coldly. \"I hope you realize that causing a stir will just make your stay with us all the more difficult.\"\n\n\"You just had a dream. Did you not?\" He smiled as recognition appeared on the paladin's face. \"It was of a dragon descending from the heavens.\"\n\nArcturus did not say a word as he stepped closer to the bars and whispered, \"how did you know that?\"\n\nVargus smirked, \"You touched the orb, paladin. Only one other man managed such a feat, and he is standing right before you.\"\n\n\"Cut the nonsense! You can peer into my head now? How's that possible?\"\n\n\"It's not me who does the peering.\"\n\nArcturus gritted his jaws. \"Don't play with me, Vargus. You will find my mood sharp and cold, just like the edge of a blade. Now tell me straight. How did you know what I dreamed of?\"\n\nThe mage seemed to ponder for a bit. \"Send your peons away and we can discuss this matter further.\" Vargus gestured to the knights. \"They make poor company for men such as us.\"\n\n\"You are no elven ray of light yourself, old man.\" Harrison snapped back.\n\nArcturus put out his hand, signaling to the others to be silent. \"Leave us.\"\n\n\"S-sir, is that wise? Bound or not he's still a-\"\n\n\"I said leave us,\" Arcturus hissed. \"I wish to find out what he knows. Stay close though. If you hear any sort of commotion, come to my aid at once.\"\n\n\"You heard the paladin!\" said the book reading knight. \"Leave them alone lads!\" He stood up and left the room along with Harrison. As silence filled the air, Arcturus pulled up a chair, dragging it across the floor with a loud scrape. He sat down and stared at the wizard.\n\n\"I have done as you asked, old man. Now explain yourself.\"\n\n\"Why, it's magic of course!\" Vargus laughed. \"Honestly, my good iron-clad jailer, you should know better than to trust the words of a wizard.\" Vargus' voice grew deeper.\n\n\"Impossible. We have you tied up right now!\" Arcturus shot back.\n\n\"There are some magics that require no hand gestures, or words of power.\" Vargus sighed. \"But what can really be expected of a whelp like you?\"\n\nArcturus scowled at Vargus. \"Call me that again, and you shall find out how sharp this whelp's fangs can pierce when provoked.\"\n\nVargus smiled. \"Stroke a chord, have I? The mighty paladin's ears find themselves sensitive to anything lesser than praise.\"\n\n\"You know nothing of duty, of honor!\" Arcturus said. \"You'd use your powers to achieve selfish goals, a man who believes in nothing but himself.\"\n\n\"As should you.\" Vargus said. \"We come in this world alone. Why should the rest be any different?\"\n\nArcturus grew tired of his babbling. \"Straighten your tongue, mage. I asked you a question and demand an answer.\"\n\nVargus let out a long sigh. \"Veeery well. What you felt was only the residual energy of the orb playing tricks on your mind. Remember the voices? No? The roar, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Residual,\" Arcturus put his hand on his chin, \"Where has the rest of the magic gone, then?\"\n\nVargus straightened his back, smiling as if he just achieved some great goal. \"You understand speech! That is good, my dear paladin. Keen mind. Sharp as your sword!\" Vargus then chuckled in his throat. \"Could it be that I have already harnessed the orb's power, perhaps? Or that, when you stand before your beloved king, all you'll have is a broken trinket to show for your valiant efforts?\"\n\n\"For your sake wizard, I hope you have not done what you've just said.\" Arcturus spat out. He was starting to tire of Vargus. The man's laughter was like a thorn on his side. His words, spikes driven into his chest. Even the wizard's face started to become more offending the longer Arcturus stared at it.\n\n\"Of course, there's the matter of ever arriving to your king's court. I haven't forgotten to mention that, have I?\" Vargus' eyes narrowed.\n\n\"What does that imply, exactly?\" Arcturus replied sternly.\n\nVargus raised his eyes, adopting the same cocky grin that made his face a hard thing to look at.\n\n\"I am only trapped in this stinky cell because I allow it, and you, paladin\u2026 you are only alive because you entertain me more than the other fools that came after me. To believe you'd be the only one to actually manage to touch my orb\u2026well, that is a reason in itself to prolong your existence.\"\n\nArcturus balled his hands into fists. \"If you try anything even resembling a spell, you will find yourself executed quicker than you can blink. If memory fails you, dear wizard, recall how you fell on the ground when my stunning bolt struck you in the back. You drooled on the ground as the rest of my men carried you into this stinking cell, as you so fondly named it.\" Arcturus boasted, his own grin finding its way to his face.\n\n\"Ah, here it comes. The cockiness of youth. You know, I've been wondering how long you'd resist the temptation to show off. Knights are so predictable. Haven't you wondered why your journey through my castle went so smooth? How Vargus, the greatest mage in Lumara, perhaps in the whole world, fell at the hands of a ragtag band of idiots? It is because I allowed it!\" Vargus rasped. \"I wanted to be trapped here with you so I could share these very words right now!\" Vargus' voice kept getting deeper with every word he uttered. Arcturus had to admit the situation started to get strange really fast.\n\n\"Have you lost your wits, old man?\"\n\nVargus opened his mouth to form a toothy smile. His bright white teeth seemed to be sharpened to points. His eyes had also changed from hazel to orange and the slits that replaced his round pupils sharpened into slits, much like a reptile's eyes. Arcturus tried to stand up, but found himself unable to, the dull noises of the ship fading away, leaving nothing but Vargus chanting in his deep creepy voice. Arcturus did not know what the words were, but the way they hissed upon the mage's breath couldn't be good.\n\nArcturus watched in utter bewilderment as the room slowly began to melt slowly. Its droplets collected beneath him, vanishing as if getting sucked down a drain. Arcturus' eyes never strayed from Vargus as he was plunged into darkness. The wizard's ropes seemed to uncoil from around his limbs, then faded into nothingness.\n\n\"No, paladin. You did not face me when you captured my pitiful vessel!\" Vargus approached, outstretching his hand. The flesh on it seemed to slowly peel off out of its own accord, managing to touch Arcturus on the chin. Arcturus could see four black talons ripping their way slowly from Vargus' flesh. If the wizard was in pain, he did not show it at all.\n\n\"Now let's see what kind of man you truly are!\" Vargus sneered. The blackness around them slowly became a fuzzy vision of Arcturus' house in the capital of Entis. Despite the darkness looming all around him, he could still recognize his wife cooking stew on the fireplace. As the vision cleared, he could see her straight brown hair, draped behind her and adorned with beads. She wasn't cooking now, her brown eyes filled with worry over her frozen face.\n\n\"Ah, so you left your mate and child alone to heed the command of your king. Hunt Vargus down, as you would a stag!\" the wizard paused to tilt his head as he inspected the frozen woman. \"You chose me over her\u2026in spite of your wife's protests.\"\n\nArcturus struggled to move even a single finger. Whatever magic Vargus had over him was much stronger than it had been inside the orb's chamber. He made the mistake of looking into Selina's eyes. He didn't abandon her\u2026did he? He just heeded his duty, as would any other man in his place. Despite of wave of guilt washing over him, Arcturus swore to the gods that he would make it back to her.\n\n\"S-Selina?\" Vargus said. \"The name barely wants to part with the tongue.\" He stopped again and raised an eyebrow \"Selina and\u2026Geoffery!\" The wizard wrinkled his brow. \"It pains you to have me gain knowledge of their names, does it not?\"\n\nA grunt was all Arcturus could muster.\n\n\"There is no point in struggling, whelp! My magic has you bound tighter than my vessel had ever been on the deck of your filthy ship! But alas, we must not let ourselves carried away,\" Vargus spun around once again to face Arcturus. \"There's more I would know about the great iron-clad man that captured me. Arcturus, the shining paladin.\" Vargus waved his hand, the flesh dropping away in large meaty chunks that slapped wetly onto the floor. All that remained was a red blood covered claw covered in scales.\n\nArcturus' house melted away, leaving nothing but utter darkness. With another wave of Vargus' claw, Arcturus found himself in a field outside of Entis, where his father used to train him.\n\n\"Oh, this is intriguing. You are a Lund, after all!\" Vargus shouted as his slitted eyes widened. \"A Lund!\" He jumped for a moment, moving close to Arcturus' face. \"Dragon slayers, are you not? Men with tradition!\" Vargus laughed deeply as cracks appeared on his face. \"Such misery your family has brought upon dragon kind, and such good fortune that we have met together at this point in time. It's like fate wished to pit us against each other!\"\n\nArcturus renewed his struggle and got rewarded for his efforts. The scene before him faded away. He once again found himself back in the cell of the ship. He had his sword in hand with Vargus in the other. The man's eyes had not returned to normal. He shook his head once and quickly noticed that Harrison and the other guard were currently tugging on his sword arm, causing him to fall backwards onto the floor. Vargus just cackled as he collapsed onto the bench once more.\n\nArcturus rubbed his head in circular motions. \"What happened?\" he muttered, turning to the others. \"The bastard must've casted a spell on me. I'd never\u2026raise sword against a defenseless man like that\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't know, sir,\" stammered Harrison. \"You just entered the cell, weapon drawn. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"But\u2026we shared words. I ordered you out, and-\" Arcturus stopped when the confusion only grew on Harrison's face.\n\n\"Mages and their kin, ugh!\" Arcturus rose from the ground, shooting daggers with his eyes at the wizard. He grabbed a piece of cloth and tied it roughly around Vargus' mouth once more.\n\n\"There will be no more trickery coming out of your mouth tonight, wizard. My blood but warms at the thought of handing you over to the king himself. You'll meet true justice in the dungeons of our glorious capital.\" Arcturus turned and slammed the door to the cell shut.\n\nHours seem to shuffle past on the deck of the Destiny, never seeming to end. Arcturus watched soldiers shuffle by, performing the needed checks with looks of worry present on their faces. He was amazed to see the story of his private time with Vargus in the cell spread so quickly throughout the crew. All their eyes were filled with worry, uncertainty, and even fear. He didn't blame the men for their reaction. You didn't see many powerful wizards just roaming the streets or halls of Lumara. Only the High Wizard seemed to have that quality. However, if you really wanted to see powerful mages, you had to go west, to the nation of Rothdell. The wizards there ruled over the populous in a council made up of three elders wise beyond their years. Each territory was divided to a different wizard, much similar to how Lumara did it with lords. Arcturus stopped in the middle of his thoughts to look over balcony of the Destiny, onto the endless horizon. He could already see familiar mountains growing in the moonlight. He knew the landmarks well. In spite of everything that happened tonight, he was close to his home, soon to be in the loving arms of his wife and child.\n\nA smile graced his face at the thoughts of his family. Geoffery was most likely asleep, holding fast to a stuffed gryphon Arcturus made for him last year. He pictured his face buried snugly in the cushy body of the toy without a worry to trouble his sleep. He imagined Selina waiting, looking up into the night sky for any sign of his airship, her eyes longing to gaze upon him once more. He felt the ship start to descend slowly, yet another sign they were close to home.\n\nArcturus made his way to the bow of the ship to see the city of Entis, his home, truly a sight to behold for those who have not yet set eyes upon such a marvel. Spread way below the bulk of the airship flickered lights from the city lamps, illuminating every alley, bearing the semblance of little fireflies from this distance. Closer, stone and wooden houses awaited with fine roofs routinely inspected by the city for damage. Banners of every color hung off street corners and windows for various noble houses, guilds, or announcements. Yet despite such striking sights, Arcturus looked to the two wonders that towered above all others.\n\nFloating above the city were two large fortresses. Stone guardians held aloft by large mana crystals. The brown banners of Lumara hung atop them, billowing down to the base. Behind them was the castle, standing high above the city with many gargoyles and towers. Arcturus remembered that, even when he was much younger, he realized how long these structures endured, before elves graced the kingdom with their presence. It was even rumored that dragons would have attacked its walls, fended off by heroic knights of old. He remembered passing the gates to the castle as a child, seeing large claw marks across the surface of the stone walls. His father had pointed them out, reminding him that his great, great, great ancestor had slew the beast in his final moments. He remembered smiling at the story, imagining himself as the great, great, great ancestor, a man garbed in glorious plate armor fending off the great wrym that threatened his marvelous city with a giant, two handed sword held in his burly hands.\n\nArcturus pulled himself out of the memory and made his way back to his quarters. He was going to be home soon, and he wouldn't even dare to greet his wife without the proper gear. He donned his armor carefully over his gambeson. With each strap. he remembered how the armor had saved his life from countless blades over the years. He stopped, grabbing the helm with his gloved hands. He ran his hand over a scratch down the center, over the vision slit, when, suddenly the ship lurched. The helmet dropped from his hands and clattered to the floor, the sound drowned out by thunderous explosions that raged within the bowels of the ship.\n\nArcturus sheathed his weapons and swung the shield around his back. Armed this way, the metal-clad paladin walked out of his chamber. As he walked along the hall, his thoughts turned to the prisoner in the hold, and another explosion rocked the ship. Screams came from ahead, piercing through the splintering wood to fill Arcturus' heart with dread at the sound of his crewman being shredded into nothingness. He feared the worst when he passed a knight in the hall, his armor torn to ribbons and blood leaking from each deep gash on his body. Arcturus tried to look away but found himself unable. The knight was an elf named Croecear, he could tell by the elven rune on his blood covered gauntlet. He hadn't been the most talkative of the group, but he didn't deserve such gruesome end.\n\n\"Paladin!\" a voice gurgled out. A quick scan of the hallway revealed two things. Smoke was beginning to billow down the hallway, and Harrison, lying on the floor several feet ahead. His limbs seemed to have been bent at odd angles, his mouth saturated with blood, and his eyes tearing up from the excruciating pain that undoubtedly coursed through the man's broken body. Arcturus noted the rising and falling of his chest; Harrison was alive, if just for the moment.\n\n\"Harrison,\" Arcturus knelt beside his broken comrade, his face grim. He had lost soldiers before, but even after years of fighting, he hardly got used to it.\n\n\"Hang on, soldier.\" Arcturus grasped Harrison's' hand. \"I need you to hold on for just a moment longer. Tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"B-Big,\" Harrison spat.\n\nArcturus grimaced at the droplets of blood that painted his chest plate in a sickly layer of crimson. \"The wizard, h-h-he turned into some sort of b-b-beast. B-big. With\u2026.wh\u2026with\u2026\" Harrison clenched his teeth, gasping in pain.\n\nArcturus looked left and right for maybe a cleric that could help, but not even the gods themselves could have saved the fallen knight even if they poured down from the heavens.\n\n\"Crocecear. Harrison.\" Arcturus said, rising up from the fallen knight. \"I will be sure to honor your fall once we deal with this blasted wizard.\"\n\nThat said, Arcturus broke into a run down the hallway, following the trail of blood and corpses that made the Destiny look like a flying cemetery. Each door he passed was cracked or destroyed outright, the splinters of them thrown across the floor. Bodies of those who manned the ship could be hardly recognized from the pieces that remained, but with each fallen comrade. Arcturus was filled with a greater determination to put an end to Vargus' machinations. It didn't matter that he was wanted alive by the king. The man was clearly too dangerous for any other course of action, and if the king disagreed with his methods, Arcturus would find a way to enter his good graces once more.\n\nArcturus burst through the shambles that used to be the engine room door to find several more of his knights, all dead. Thraka, his trusted orc commander, was suspended in the air by three black talons impaled in her chest.\n\n\"N-no,\" Arcturus's throat tightened at the sight. \"Not you too\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes looked past the fallen orc. Through the smoke curtain of smoke that was coming from the engine emerged a great beast that towered over Arcturus, its ominous eyes glowing like fire in the dark. It was adorned with worn red scales all over its long body, tail poised around, with great wings spread to cover the great hole in the ceiling. The beast's head was equipped with two long black horns and its maw was open to reveal its teeth dripping with fresh blood in almost grin fashion.\n\n\"The esteemed paladin comes at last. For a moment I thought you perished in the bowels of your pathetic little ship.\" said the dragon in a loud booming voice, gesturing to the dead knights. \"Please excuse the dreary company. I would've kept some of your knights alive\u2026if only to watch you suffer as I tore the hearts from their chests. Your feeble kin thought their lesser minds could rival my genius! That their steel sticks and mismatched crafts could match the power of a dragon. Oh, I enjoyed seeing them crumble around me as I tore their ship asunder. I assume you have the same delusion, to stand before me when the only place a human has before a dragon is on his knees.\"\n\nThe engine started to sputter and howl, its screeching groans more painful than the dreaded dragon's roar. Arcturus was no expert in engineering, but clearly the ship's heart could hardly endure more than a few moments. He looked back to the menacing red dragon and swelled up his chest.\n\n\"I am a man\u2026and I am still standing, beast! You put on a charade this entire time, but you will not catch me unprepared like you did with the others.\" His hand brushed his crossbow as he stared into the piercing eyes of the dragon. \"Whatever fancy polymorph potion you ingested will not-\"\n\n\"I AM NOT THE WRETCH YOU SPEAK OF!!\" the dragon roared, smoke flaring from its twitching nostrils. \"Do NOT compare me to that pitiful excuse of a creature.\" The dragon thrashed its tail against the ground with a loud thwack. Arcturus' hand touched the crossbow in his holster.\n\n\"If you're not Vargus\u2026then how should I call you, you mean scaled beast?\" Arcturus smiled with the corner of his mouth as he started to back away from the dragon who had taken a step towards him on four limbs. Arcturus had to admit he had never felt so small before.\n\n\"Grah!\" The dragon growled. \"You prolong your pitiful existence with a few more minutes, but I shall entertain you for amusing me thus far, even if I doubt your stupid mouth could even form the words.\" The dragon sneered. \"Dread Flame. Does this name satisfy your curiosity?\"\n\nArcturus carefully watched the dragon's eyes move to the crossbow as Arcturus hit the activation rune. \"Fondling your little toy so soon? I'm surprised to see you throw yourself into the jaws of death so eagerly, but alas, everything that has a beginning bears an end.\" The dragon snarled, smashing his tail into a piece of machinery and crushing it to pieces.\n\n\"I hope you'll put up a more valiant effort than the pile of dented steel and broken bones you call knights!\"\n\nArcturus saw the dragon's nostrils flare, already starting to kindle the flame that was sure to be unleashed. He dove to the side, pulling out the crossbow in midair and firing three times in rapid succession. His bolts bit into the dragon's neck, just below the head. The destroyed room flared to life in a shower of blue light that emerged from his crossbow. At the same time, Dread Flame opened his maw to unleash his own devastating attack.\n\nBut what greeted Arcturus was not the sea of flames one would expect. Dread flame shook his head in irritation as only a small plume of black smoke sprung forth from his maw.\n\n\"How do you like that, beast? Not so powerful now, are we?\" Arcturus stood up as Dread Flame gasped in surprise.\n\n\"Oh, you clever little whelp.\" Dread flame chuckled. \"So, you know where my fire glands reside! I commend your efforts, although they do little to protect you against my CLAWS!\" Dread Flame pounced towards the paladin, black talons poised to rip him to shreds.\n\nArcturus had only a split second to react. On the dragon's upper portion was a scorch mark, most likely from his comrades attempts of bringing Dread Flame down. Arcturus took aim and fired quickly into the exposed spot, then tried to roll out of the dragon's way. His shots hit home, causing Dread Flame to roar out in pain, but a claw still found its mark, slicing into Arcturus in a haze of sharp, seething agony.\n\n\"Nrraaaahhh!\" The paladin hit the floor, wincing in pain as the dragon skidded past him. His crossbow was pulled from his grasp and shattered onto the wooden floor with a golden flash.\n\n\"That was a fine shot, paladin.\" The dragon hissed. \"You do live up to that family name of yours. I am impressed you managed to wound me.\" Dread flame spun around, claws ready to deliver a second blow, but Arcturus pulled off his shield and slammed it hard against the slashing talons. His shield screeched as the dragon's humongous claws scraped against the steep incline of his metal barrier briefly before Arcturus was thrown back several feet.\n\n\"See how you crumple before me?\" Dread Flame advanced slowly, with an audible deep growl rumbling within the depths of his maw. \"You're lucky I am holding my rage back, paladin, or that metal scale of yours would not have saved you.\"\n\n\"One of the last mistakes you'll ever make.\" Arcturus gritted his teeth as he got up, unsheathing his sword with a sharp hiss. His crossbow was all but mangled scraps, yet there was another way to strike back at the beast. Arcturus blocked another slash from Dread Flames' claws, then nimbly avoided the dripping teeth that lurched forth to claim his life. The dragon snapped at the air where his head would've been. Arcturus felt his adrenaline pumping as shield met teeth, sword parried claws, until Arcturus saw an opening in the dragon's attack. Pouring all his strength into a single counterattack, Arcturus struck an unarmored portion of the dragon, his blade shoving deep into the creature's flesh to taste warm, dripping blood.\n\n\"Hrraaaaaahhhh!\" Dread Flame backed away from him. \"This is preposterous! How can a wretch like you muster such strength?\" The dragon's eyes looked to his own blood as it dripped and splattered onto the floor. Dread Flame snarled and backed towards the sputtering engine. \"I have underestimated you, paladin. Perhaps you are worthy to soar above the mediocrity displayed by the knights I've killed, but your life will still end at the tips of my claws. It is a rule, you see. Like the sun that rises in the sky, or the ivory moon that takes its place at night. Humans are made to kneel before their betters. It simply boils down to our superiority as a species, and in the end, you too will bend the knee.\"\n\nArcturus shook a few drops of viscous blood from his sword. \"False words that mask true intent. You don't seem so superior, retreating from a mere human. If you make a god bleed, people will stop believing in him, and you, dear dragon, bleed all over the floor of my ship.\" Arcturus advanced towards the dragon, arms at the ready.\n\n\"You would think that, despite the answer that's staring you blatantly in the face. All this ingrained cockiness clouded your eyes to the obvious,\" snarled Dread Flame. The dragon grabbed the engine tight with both of his claws and spread his wings. \"I can FLY, and you CAN NOT!\" Dread flame gave a mighty flap of his wings and with a great rip, he tore the engine from its resting place and flew out the hole in the ship.\n\nThe broken ship shuddered one last time before it started to plunge towards the ground below.\n\nArcturus had only time to sheathe his sword as his hands desperately grasped for anything to hold onto. He found his salvation in a chain that dangled from one of the walls. His arms strained from his own weight as the chain pulled taut. The whistling winds screeched at his ears from the sizable hole where the engine should've been, the night sky getting further and further away by the second. Arcturus took a deep breath, then scanned his surroundings for a way out of this deathtrap.\n\nThe escape boats! his mind screamed at him, as he remembered the emergency boats that came along with every ship. These miniatures flying crafts fit six to eight people. He found pointing to one such craft on the wall along with a lever to release it away from the Destiny. The only snag in this plan was that the emergency boat was located a fair distance away from him. It would require a great swing from the chain he was holding onto, and if he missed the jump\u2026\n\nArcturus shook his head. He had to try, otherwise he was going to perish with the rest of the ship anyway.\n\nHe started to swing on the chain to get momentum before he flung himself at the lifeboat. The armored paladin landed with a thud and scrambled to find a good hold as he started to slip. His arms felt like they were on fire as he pulled himself to grasp the activation lever.\n\nPlease work\u2026by all the gods above...please get me back to my family\u2026but not before I kill this blasted dragon.\n\nArcturus closed his eyes and pushed the lever with all the strength he could muster. It slammed into place with a loud clunk as the gears and mechanical parts sprung to life. With a small explosion, the lifeboat shot itself out of the doomed ship and gently sailed into the night air, its propellers unfolded to keep the little craft aloft. Arcturus breathed a sigh of relief as the life boat came to a hovering stop in midair. He watched the Destiny collide with the cobblestone streets of Entis with a thunderous crash. Wood beams split at the contact, machinery ripped and flew in all directions from the Destiny's crumbling carcass, and windows shattered in the wake of the shockwave created by the rough impact.\n\n\"Nice trick!\" boomed the dragon's familiar voice.\n\nArcturus had no desire to quarrel verbally with the deranged beast. He quickly grabbed the controls of his little ship and descended along with the lifeboat. He had to at least give the dragon a moving target, not one that simply waited to be killed. He turned the lifeboat around to see Dread Flame following him with a wicked smile of delight on his snout, which quickly opened to release a great cone of orange fire that spread in the darkness of the night. Arcturus swerved the boat hastily to barely avoid the brunt of the flames, the heat still licking at his neck.\n\n\"You cannot flee from my wrath, little wretch!\" roared the dragon with another flap of its mighty wings. \"We share a bond of pain, you and I, and I shall wound you deeper than you've ever wounded me!\"\n\nArcturus hated to admit it, but the dragon was right in both regards. He would not rest until he saw the beast dead for the massacre on the ship. However, Arcturus was well aware he could not fulfill his task if he perished prematurely. With every passing moment, the dragon was gaining on him thanks to his mighty wings.\n\nArcturus needed advantage, and fast. He brought the boat around 180 degrees, then reached for an unstrapped spear that clattered to the floor of the boat. With the lifeboat facing Dread Flame, he pulled the spear up and held it pointed at the beast, controls veered to maximum speed.\n\nIf the dragon was concerned, Arcturus could not tell, for Dread Flame just flew straight towards him, looking as malevolent as ever. At the last moment the dragon tilted his wings, as to avoid the spear meant for his chest, but Arcturus used the controls to change direction. With a thunderous crack the spear's head found purchase in the upper right of the dragon's chest. Carried by unearthly momentum, its iron head pierced through the beast's mighty crimson scales. Arcturus was flung forward towards the dragon as Dread Flame roared out in agony. The paladin crashed hard onto the dragon's chest even as his own was filled with a dull pain. He started to fall, but quickly grabbed his knife and stabbed it as well into the dragon, hard and fast, until the blade found purchase into an unarmored spot. Arcturus plunged the dagger deeper, then twisted it hard.\n\nDread Flame screeched out into the night as he struggled to remain in the air. The dragon's sharp claws immediately came in the defense of their owner, trying to tear the pesky human off, but the paladin clung onto the dragon with all he had. He thanked the gods for his armor as the otherwise deadly claws scrapped against the hardened steel instead of his own flesh. The dragon shuttered below him as they impacted a chimney, scattering the brick everywhere before the debris littered the street below. With a loud thud and a groan from the dragon, the two crashed into the street.\n\nArcturus lay on the ground, his body aching all over from the tough impact. He could feel the cold wind licking through the cracked parts of his armor. With a breath that felt like a thousand little needles pressed firmly into his lungs, he propped himself up. Several feet away from his position, Dread Flame slowly picked himself up with the same difficulty. With a tight grip of his claws, the dragon ripped the spear out from his chest. Dread Flame's eyes narrowed as the blood covered spear clattered to the street, but not for long, a smile replacing irritation when the orange eyes noticed the blood starting to drip from his approaching enemy.\n\n\"You are a tenacious little wretch\u2026I give you that. But your heroics are about to come to an end.\" Dread Flame growled mockingly as the two of them slowly approached each other.\n\nArcturus groaned in pain. He had to keep moving, or the dragon would surely kill him. Dread Flame realized this as well, pouncing to Arcturus with his claws outstretched. With a herculean effort Arcturus rolled away from the deadly dragon, its claws striking the stone hard enough to send sparks along the cobbles of the street. With adrenaline filling his body, Arcturus stood back up, grabbing his sword and shield, trying hard to keep his trembling arms still, and his weakened legs from collapsing under his own weight.\n\n\"How intimidating.\" Dread Flame growled. \"No words left to mock me, paladin? I've killed your squad, destroyed your ship, landed straight in the heart of your city\u2026yet you say nothing! I bet you used the last of your energy to stand up and draw those pitiful weapons of yours.\" Dread Flame started to limp around him. \"So, how's this going to go from now? Will you strike me again? Or finally accept your place before your betters?\"\n\n\"I think you are trying to hide your wounds through talk.\" said Arcturus through gritted teeth, trying to ignore the pain coursing through his veins.\n\n\"Rrraahh.\" The dragon shook his head as his lips curled with obvious pain. \"It comes hard for a dragon to admit its flaws, but I believe compliments are in order. As inferior as you humans are, you\u2026Arcturus Lund\u2026 wounded me far greater than anyone had ever managed before.\" Dread Flame sneered.\n\n\"However\u2026\" The dragon stopped in his tracks. \"Your quest for retribution comes to an end. I will not be giving you the satisfaction to finish me off in the same way your ancestors killed my kin!\" Dread Flame turned to spread his wings, and Arcturus willed himself to sprint at him, so focused on the sinking feeling rising from his gut that he didn't notice the threat in time. With a sharp whip of the dragon's tail slammed into his side, Arcturus tumbled to the ground with a pained grunt.\n\n\"Your family stole more lives from dragon kind than you can ever comprehend, so it is only fair of me to return the favor.\"\n\n\"Straighten tongue, you blasted dragon!\" Arcturus roared. \"Tell me your plans before you die!\"\n\n\"You already know, paladin, for nothing was hidden in your mind when I peered into it.\"\n\nArcturus' heart skipped a beat. His blood turned to ice as his thoughts quickly turned to his family.\n\n\"N-no. No, you can't!\"\n\n\"Can't I?\" the dragon sneered. \"I still have enough life in me to pay them a visit.\"\n\n\"NOOOO!\" Arcturus shouted. \"Stand and face me you vile wyrm! My family has done nothing! I've pierced the gates of your castle. I captured you. I wounded you! Your quarrels are with me, not with them!\n\n\"Do you mistake me for a fool, human?\" The dragon spoke. \"Another bout with you might very well claim my life,\" said Dread Flame, a devilish grin spreading on his snout. \"But I will hurt you, in a way that my claws and fangs never can. Stand there. Writhe in agony. Cry in despair as your retribution crumbles into dust!\"\n\nDread Flame flapped his great wings, leaving Arcturus to slice empty air with his sword.\n\n\"Selina! Geoffery!\" he screamed at the top of his lungs. Arcturus looked around in a panic, but what could he do against such a beast? The ship was in tatters. His lifeboat, gone. He had no horse, and to top things off his own body barely allowed him to take a few steps without a burst of crackling pain shooting through his muscles.\n\nI must\u2026protect them. Must\u2026defend\u2026my family. Arcturus looked to all the houses, finding he recognized them. Through sheer adrenaline he started to sprint towards his home. He was only a few blocks away from his family. With each footstep, he feared that he would be too late.\n\n\"No,\" the paladin shook his head and prayed to the gods the dragon would take time to gloat, buying him enough time to catch up.\n\nArcturus dashed down the street as parts of his armor started to fall off. The leather straps snapped one by one from the strain. His limbs arched, his lungs struggled to draw breath, but he still pushed his body to his limits in order to protect his most beloved of treasures: his family.\n\nHe heard screams from nearby houses. Possibly from the fire that stared to spread after his ship fell from the sky. Or more likely because of the dragon. His steps fell back into pattern with the bells ringing from the roof tops, signaling an attack on the city. Arcturus rounded the last corner of the street, to find his house enveloped in flames. Its front seemed to have been crushed in with a mighty strike of a claw, or even a tail. Definitely Dread Flame's work.\n\nArcturus' eyes focused on the red beast. The dragon lay collapsed on the street, blood oozing out from the numerous wounds inflicted by the fall, as well as the paladin's frenzied attempts to end his life. On its pebbly snout rested the same grin that became characteristic to this dreadful beast. Arcturus could see that the dragon still drew breath as he approached. He noticed there was another spear piercing its chest, close to where Arcturus had stabbed. Dread Flame chuckled as Arcturus tried to run by to his house. When he tripped in his haste, the dragon had reached out and grabbed his leg. He landed with a painful thud, and a hoarse laugh from Dread Flame.\n\n\"Not so fast, human\u2026\" growled the dragon.\n\nArcturus struggled to pull himself free. His eyes found the dead form of a man clad in chain mail, obviously one of the guards. It looked like the dragon had sliced through his armor, inscribed in the red lines of blood that marred the man's broken chest. Arcturus pulled again on his leg but no matter how hard he pulled, Dread Flame had no desire to let go.\n\n\"Linger a while. I don't want you to be alone when your family gives their last breath. We shall watch them die together.\" Dread Flame taunted.\n\n\"Not today\u2026you vile monster!\" Arcturus unsheathed his sword in reply and whirled around. \"I owe you pain!\" he gritted his teeth, then rammed his blade with both hands through the dragon's skull, right through his eye and into his brain, silencing his taunting forever.\n\nArcturus gave another pull of his leg. Even in death the dragon held firm. He tugged again, then again, and finally the reptile's dead limb gave way. Arcturus scrambled to stand, stumbling through the first attempt, then rushed to the burning frame of his home.\n\nPieces of debris started to collapse among the flames, nearly hitting Arcturus as he searched in desperation for a way through the debris. Like an enraged bull, he pushed through fire and smoke, passing rooms filled with memories, now engulfed in the flames that threatened to consume them forever. The paladin valiantly pushed aside debris and burning wood. He shouted his wife's, then his son's name.\n\nCoughing from the thick smoke, he quickly covered his mouth with part of his ragged clothes and kept on searching, straining his ears, hoping for anything other than the sound of burning wood, collapsing house, and the pounding of his heart. He started to feel the shimmer of hope in him starting to die when a sudden cry made his eyes bulge out.\n\n\"Daddy!\"\n\nFilled by a second wind, Arcturus rushed towards the voice of his son. Arcturus found him among the wrecked items of the house. Geoffery was covered in cuts and bruises, gasping for air. Arcturus quickly picked up his son with care. He tried not think about the dried blood on his son's face, how or why it was so pale. When the little boy smiled up at him even through all that pain, Arcturus all but felt his heart break. He looked around for Selina, only spotting her burned body under a collapsed beam that trapped her forever.\n\n\"N-no,\" Arcturus stammered. \"Gods, why\u2026why did you\u2026?\"\n\n\"Daddy\u2026pl-please\u2026\"\n\n\"It's alright,\" Arcturus caressed through the hair of his boy. \"You'll be alright, Geoffery.\"\n\nWith a heavy heart, he turned away from his once-beautiful wife. He couldn't mourn her fate. Right now, he had to get his son out of there. He clutched Geoffery tightly to his chest and pushed his way through the debris. It was all a blur as he struggled to get out of the burning wreckage of his home, but somehow, he made it.\n\nArcturus found himself in the panic filled streets of his city. He passed the dragon's corpse in haste, as even in death Dread Flame had that wicked smile about his snout, taunting him from the grave.\n\n\"Cleric!\" he cried out with tears forming on the edge of his eyes. His steps were now filled with stabs of pain, and they collapsed from under him a second later. \"Hold on Geoffery. I got you, son. I got you\u2026\"\n\n\"D-dad, I saw a dragon.\" Geoffery said, his voice barely a whisper. Arcturus watched in horror as the last color on his son's face drained away.\n\n\"N-no! No no no no no!\" Arcturus clutched Geoffery tighter than ever. \"Just stay with me, son. You have to be strong for me, Geoffery. Fight through this, the same way I fought for you. Cleric!\" he cried out. \"My boy. My boy is\u2026CLEEERIIIIIC!\"\n\nA soft tug on his chin pushed Arcturus' head down to his son.\n\n\"She was-she was so pretty, dad\u2026 all silver\u2026with eyes like\u2026mer-mercu\u2026mmmercury\u2026\"\n\nGeoffery sighed for a final time, his tarnished body going limp in Arcturus' arms. His hands went to his son's face, smacking him softly.\n\n\"Son. Please don't\u2026please don't do this to me. Fight through this, son. Don't let that monster take you too!\"\n\nBut Geoffery had no fight left in him. After a few failed attempts at resuscitating his son, Arcturus collapsed his head into Geoffery's chest as he sobbed and screamed into the night.\n\n[ A Dragon's Day ]\n\nTwo years had passed over Lumara, although those who did not inhabit a city or found themselves breaching Lumara's lands during times of strife would not have noticed the time pass by. The country kept expanding, and slowly, its enemies had no option but to fall back further into their territory. Our story takes us to the north-western border of Lumara, into a wild mountainous area where a dragon soared freely through the skies.\n\nVeledar spread his wings, gliding upon the gentle currents of the wind, basking in the warmth of the sun falling upon his crimson scales. Few things felt as exhilarating for a dragon as flying. The dragon tilted his tan wing membranes and did a spin, closing his eyes in happiness. He loved every little thing about flying. The foreign smells carried by the breeze, the gusts brushing against his wings, even the way his tail swung back and forth. With another flap and a slight tilt of his wings, the red dragon descended toward the tree covered mountain top below. His blue eyes narrowed on a stream he usually visited during warm days. He landed as softly as a dragon of decent size could, but even so, the animals took notice of his presence, which produced a low rumble within the dragon's throat. He didn't mind the reception. Such reaction was warranted when you happened to be an apex predator. Veledar walked towards the river, then opened his maw and slurped in the water with his dark pink tongue, sighing in relief as the coolness of the water washed over his weary body. His front claws twitched slightly to anchor him in the rock bed of the river, and Veledar paused for a quick moment to gaze upon his own magnificent reflection.\n\nThe dragon considered himself in better shape than the scrawny body presented upon the water's surface. He stood at roughly 28 hands high, and 22 feet long from nose to tail, a presence that already intimidated every animal around.\n\nProbably not humans though. Veledar snorted. He wasn't exactly small by even dragon standards, but there was no drawback for a larger size, especially with dragons. The larger wyrms controlled vast territories, with wisdom to match their legendary deeds. Veledar had a mind to become a legend himself one day. It was amusing, to think of humans reciting tales of his deeds to their children.\n\nThe dragon immersed himself into thoughts of self-grandeur until an ungainly rumbling from his stomach drew his attention back to the present.\n\nHow annoying! Veledar hissed as he brushed his belly with a wet front paw. He had no mood to chase his prey through thick trees and trip on their gnarled roots, but alas, even dragons had to submit to the basic needs of every living being. Veledar sniffed the air, looking for a trail that he could follow for an easy meal. He moved his snout from side to side until his eyes sprang open. He recognized the smell of deer, one of his favorite prey to feast upon. The dragon took flight from the river's shore and chased his prey from the air until he isolated a single doe. The frills lining his snout twitched in anticipation as she made him work for it, so in return, Veledar planned to give her an honorable death. The dragon crashed back on the ground and chased with great speed after the creature. With a great pounce and slice of his claws the doe crumbled to the ground, giving her life to prolong Veledar's own.\n\nThe dragon burned whatever remained of the doe to honor the female's sacrifice, then returned to the stream to clean the blood from his claws and teeth. Although he liked the intimidating image of himself all covered in viscous blood, he rather disliked being dirty.\n\n\"Why not do something about this?\" The dragon growled happily before he jumped into the stream with a great splash. He swam around for a bit, then hopped out onto the shore to shake the water off his dripping scales. How he hated the cold water! The stuff poked through his scales like daggers, although a hot bath every now and again lessened that hatred. Veledar relaxed on the river's shore for a bit to soak in more sun. He spread out his tail frill, twitching it slightly, then looked at the sky to notice that the white clouds sailed away from the blue sky while he was feasting. Time passed quicker than he had expected.\n\nThe dragon rose on his fours, then unfurled his wings to take to the skies when a faint cry reached his ears. Veledar turned his head towards the sound and quickly found the source behind a small bush. The culprit was small, perhaps not even the size of a little house cat.\n\nCurious as he was to check on the source of the disturbance, Veledar remember his mother scolding him once for trying to peek on the elves near his old home. He scrunched his snout up at the ridiculous notion he was forced to swallow that day. It had something to do with privacy or some man-made nonsense like that. The red dragon pushed it from his mind and moved the bush with his front claw, yet the thing was persistent. Hard to gaze through. Veledar ripped it from the earth rather harshly, scattering dirt all over.\n\n\"Yaaaaawwwwhhh!\" The fairy screamed and darted out of his reach. She was a small humanoid in appearance, with wings sprouting from her back. She began to flutter in front of him roughly at the same height of his head, pointing and cursing his lack of decency. \"Have you no respect for a fairy's privacy, you big, lumbering scale-head?!\"\n\n\"Scale what?\" Veledar's snout curled with irritation. \"You don't get to call me names, little thing!\"\n\n\"Fairy. I am a fairy in case you are not familiar with my kin, which your lack of manners clearly suggests!\"\n\nVeledar found himself quite amused by the creature's courage. She wore a green dress to go with her short brown hair. Her blue eyes dripped with half cried tears not from the brief exchange they had, but for some other reason that Veledar could not understand. The fairy looked at him, unsure of what to do.\n\n\"Sorry about the outburst. I might've gotten a bit ahead of myself, but just so you know, it's rather rude to rip up a girl's hiding place from her!\" she shouted at him.\n\n\"Outburst, again.\" Veledar growled slightly. He often hated when a lesser creature addressed him with such a lack of respect, but the fairy was right in one regard. He did intrude upon her.\n\n\"You're not making it easy, you crimson-scaled brute.\"\n\n\"Brute now, am I? Well, excuse my lack of patience, gentle creature, but I had to find where that annoying noise was coming from. From what I know you could've been in danger!\" He shot back, sounding perhaps more aggressive than he meant to.\n\n\"No, you!\" The fairy slapped him on the snout with her tiny hand. \"You are the danger, sticking this oversized snout into somebody else's business!\" The fairy flew back several feet to avoid Veledar's pokes. \"First those nasty humans, and now a dragon? What else can possibly go wrong today? I feel like the world is playing a joke on me, after\u2026after\u2026.yaaah I can't even say it!\" she cried out in frustration.\n\n\"Lady, you need to calm down,\" Veledar said calmly.\n\n\"I'll calm down when you give me back my bush!\" The fairy sounded even more irritated now.\n\nVeledar sighed and pieced back the bush as well as he could with his ungainly claws. \"There. Your shrub is back. Feeling more protected from the crimson scaled, big nosed brute now?\"\n\n\"Slightly.\" The fairy rubbed the last remaining tears from her eyes. \"But\u2026 it doesn't fix the damage that's already been done.\"\n\nVeledar strained not to growl at her. Her persistence to seek justice was unwavering, but he remembered his mother's advice regarding the lesser creatures. She had said that, in situations like the one Veledar found himself in right now, there was a far greater reward than coin or gems to be earned with little effort.\n\n\"Fine,\" Veledar rolled his eyes and sat down on his belly, paws crossed. \"Nasty humans you say?\" he cocked his head. \"How did they grieve a small-no, a gentle creature such as you?\"\n\nThe fairy seemed irritated at first, but then she crossed her arms, as if considering her reply. \"Why should you care about my problems, dragon? Don't you have a village to burn, or a maiden to capture for ransom? I heard what your kind is capable of.\"\n\nVeledar fought the instinct to bare his teeth, and simply smiled instead. \"Oh, you are mistaken, my good fairy. I do try to lend my skills, my wings, and my paws to lesser creatures whenever I find myself\u2026available.\" He emphasized lesser louder than the rest. \"For the right price, I might be able to do something about this\u2026situation you find yourself in,\" he finished.\n\n\"I don't have any coin or shiny gems that can ever match the size of your ego,\" the fairy grumbled. \"But the humans I speak of are even nastier than you, dragon. They trampled over my grove with no regards for my flowers, which they plucked one by one until there was nothing left. Even my favorite fell prey to their fat, greedy fingers!\"\n\n\"What kind of flower are you speaking about, fair fairy?\"\n\n\"I don't reaaaaaally remember what name it bears in human or dragon tongue\u2026 but we call it the sun's tears on account of its orange color.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Veledar rolled his eyes. \"When in doubt, go with the obvious. Now, where did the humans run off to? Perhaps you can illuminate me on their whereabouts.\"\n\n\"Illuminate you?\" the fairy looked at him as if he suddenly spoke a different language. \"You want me to turn your scales white?\"\n\n\"No!\" Veledar jumped on his feet. \"I mean\u2026graaarrr, I mean\u2026.\"\n\n\"I can show you then!\" The fairy zipped around his head. \"I promise not to use any spells on you\u2026unless you ask for it!\" she started to fly away, then turned back towards him, \"I'm curious about your name though!\"\n\n\"I did not give it. I request you give yours instead.\" Veledar started swelling his chest as he usually did when he would proclaim his title.\n\n\"Trixie,\" the fairy said, a smiling forming on her face. \"It rolls like a river on the tongue, does it not?\"\n\nVeledar wasn't really going to provide his real name to a lesser creature, be they fairies or otherwise. Titles were what dragons used for such encounters, and even though she proved herself somewhat reliable, Trixie wasn't that special yet.\n\n\"You may call me\u2026\" Veledar paused and grinned, \"Crimson Sky. Easy to pronounce and obvious on the eye.\"\n\n\"Well, Crimson Sky, can you follow me please?\" Trixie turned to fly off, going upstream with the dragon following close behind.\n\nTrixie led him to a clearing not too far from the spot she had been crying in. The bushes and local flora were sliced into pieces, with orange petals scattered all over the ground. Trixie immediately burst into tears.\n\n\"Nyyyaaaaaaaaah! I can't bear to look upon this\u2026devious devastation! See what they have done? See?\" she zipped erratically around the dragon's snout before she pointed in horror to a particularly large growth of leaves and bisected vines. \"Most humans come here in peace, but those smelly, two legged, pelt-wearing bastards took all my flowers!\"\n\nThough the tragedy hardly had the same impact on him, Veledar felt a sliver of remorse for the fairy. He paced back and forth, disappointed by the carnage that had been wrought through this once-peaceful grove.\n\n\"Why did they harvest your flowers, Trixie? Have they said anything to you before\u2026well, before this happened?\"\n\n\"They didn't give a reason,\" Trixie sniffled. \"They just\u2026 stomped around in their stupid boots and ripped my flowers with their fat, sausage fingers!\"\n\nIf you were as sharp with your spells as you are with your tongue, perhaps they wouldn't have had the chance, Veledar thought, but even a proud dragon like him realized that was the wrong thing to say in this situation. Instead, he looked around and searched for tracks with Trixie sobbing behind him. She would occasionally point out more damage the humans had caused, until at last he found boot prints leaving the clearing.\n\n\"Worry not, Trixie friend. I, Crimson Sky, will return your flowers back where they belong, and as a bonus for your unique form of hospitality, I will also make sure these humans never set foot near your grove again.\" Veledar dipped his head to her with pride.\n\n\"Thank you! Oh, thank you so much. You are a good dragon, Crimson Sky. Very good dragon!\" Trixie hugged a scale on his snout with her little arms.\n\nWhen she retreated, Veledar moved quickly after the trail of boots. He raced through the underbrush, following a combination of boot prints and smells of what he remembered to be human in origin. He barely avoided a head-on encounter with a tree as his mind planned for what he was going to say when those two oafs gazed upon his magnificence. Perhaps he would make a threat or two or open the short-lived dialogue with a great roar. He would knock them around a bit to put them in their place, then take back the flowers. He grinned, already celebrating his victory in his mind when he was pulled out of his pleasant daydreams by the sound of two voices talking.\n\n\"Quiet, Jenn! I think I heard something nearby.\" A male voice said, bristling with concern.\n\n\"I was quiet until you opened your mouth again! I would be concerned if this was not the twelfth blasted time you warned me of nonexistent threats!\" an angry woman's voice yelled back.\n\nVeledar stalked around the two. One was a rather large man dressed in furs of various kinds with a large pack hoisted upon on his back. Beside him was a woman with long brown hair, resting on her studded leather armor covered in tribal markings. She held a bow at the ready, scanning the foliage with her brown eyes.\n\n\"Listen here,\" she began, \"you can't be jumping at every sound while we make our way back to town. That's not what a man does! That fairy we met will not be coming to retrieve her lifeless plants. Besides, think of the children. We need these herbs to brew healing teas and cure their ailments.\"\n\nThe man sighed. \"I know, I know\u2026I just\u2026I find myself wishing to have a tenth of your bravery, lass.\" Morca replied, and Jenn smirked. Then Veledar made his move and pounced in.\n\nHe collided with Jenn, knocking the girl off her feet. She slammed into the hard ground with a thud, the bow falling from her grasp. Morca went to pull out his quarter staff tied to his back, but quickly found his legs dislodged from the ground by a quick swipe of Veledar's tail which sent Morca in the ground's embrace in the same way as his woman.\n\n\"Why hello there, humans!\" Veledar swept the bow from the ground, snapping it in pieces between his jaws. \"Now that weapons are taken care of, we can share words in peace. What brings you out to this dangerous part of the forest? After the encounter with that fairy, you never know what kind of beast you could run into. It might've been a bear that got you, but today, you have the luck to stand in the presence of a bigger, and much better-looking predator.\"\n\n\"You forgot to mention your pride,\" Jenn managed to squirm her way out of his grasp, jumping back to stand beside Morca. Veledar's eyes locked on them as he began to circle the terrified man and his much more confident woman.\n\n\"T-that's a D-Dragon!\" Morca exclaimed, clutching Jenn tightly. \"How can you address his Brightness in such a crude way? What in the blazes we gonna do if he feels insulted?\"\n\n\"Well, it seems your mate here is a master of stating the obvious.\" Veledar chuckled. \"My fairy friend would like him\u2026if he put his mouth to use instead of his hands! She likes to hear tales, that is, when she is not screaming at you.\"\n\n\"Cut to the point, dragon. What is it you want from us? Money? Steel? We carry nothing of worth on our bodies or bags,\" Jenn said sternly.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Veledar puffed his chest. \"I believe you happened to steal some rather unique flowers from an acquaintance of mine. Small of size, carried upon the air by gentle wings. Oh, and you might've heard her rant at me if you happened to be in the vicinity.\"\n\n\"See? See?! I told you that fairy would find a blasted way to get her revenge on us!\" Morca cried out, color all but draining from his face. \"We are dead, woman! We are dead dead DEAD!\"\n\n\"Shut your cryin' mouth for scale's sake!\" Jenn hissed, her defiant eyes fixing on Veledar. \"We did take those flowers, but not to make coin from them. The children in our village are ill. They need tea brewed from these flowers. I promised the wee lads that I'll return to them with hope in my bags, an' you're not getting in me way.\"\n\n\"Fascinating,\" Veledar said. \"You say that with such bravery. Or as some others would say, foolishness.\" he grinned, \"You are aware of the repercussions that can fall upon you if you fall on the wrong side of a dragon?\"\n\n\"I focken do, red scales, but these plants are worth the risk! Didn' ye hear a word I said? Our young 'uns are sick in their beds.\"\n\n\"Can you provide proof of that?\"\n\nThe woman shrugged.\n\n\"Hard for me to trust the words of a thief. Produce proof, or-\"\n\nHer sword poured from its sheath with a hiss, so Veledar offered a threat of his own, fangs barred.\n\n\"You are about to make a huge mistake, human. You can swing that feeble spike at me, curse my name, or punch my scales until you scrape your knuckles bare, but that is not going to change anything. Place the flowers on the ground and leave, or you will find out how deep a dragon's retribution can cut.\" Veledar growled, flexing his claws into the dirt.\n\nJenn's eyes darted to Morca, huddled over with fear. \"I will not get any help from my man, nor justice from the pain you've just caused, you heartless thing,\" she exclaimed. She reached into her pack to throw a group of flowers onto the ground. \"Take your plants back, but know that retribution will find you one day. You mark my words, beast.\"\n\nVeledar laughed. \"A thief telling me I'm in the wrong! That's beyond precious,\" he thrashed his tail and roared. Jenn and Morca sprinted for their lives away from him. Veledar grinned to himself and looked to the small flowers. They were far too fragile for his paws, too gentle to be carried in his mouth. He sighed and performed a quick gesture with his claws, muttering a quick phrase in draconic. A small disk just large enough to fit the flowers appeared underneath the bundle of plants and lifted them three feet into the air. Veledar turned and made his way back towards Trixie's grove.\n\n\"Cry no more, gentle Trixie, for I, Crimson Sky, have returned with your flowers.\" he boasted with his chest swelling with pride.\n\nTrixie flew over, barely able to stop her cries of joy as she hugged the dragon's snout in whatever ways she could.\n\n\"Hey, I gave you no permission to get all teary-eyed again!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Crimson Sky.\" The fairy wiped her eyes. \"I am just so relieved to have my flowers returned, damaged as they may be.\" She floated over to the disk to retrieve the flowers, then reattached the cut stems to the flowers, making her garden whole again before Veledar's own eyes.\n\n\"See how beautiful they look? Tell me, tell me!\"\n\n\"Yes, they are positively radiant!\" Veledar tried to keep a straight face.\n\n\"All because of you!\" The fairy added. \"There has been no braver dragon strolling through my forest until you happened along.\"\n\nVeledar pushed out his chest again. \"What can I say, Trixie? I really am the best!\"\n\n\"Owwwh, you really are,\" the fairy hugged him again. \"I would offer you something else in return apart from words and hugs, Crimson Sky. You see, my grove is connected to my sister's, far, far away.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\" he asked, cocking his head to the side.\n\n\"With the right words, a passage forms, which allows the user to be transported there!\" she beamed. \"Whenever you are in need, come here and I will allow you to use its power.\"\n\nVeledar sighed. A reward was a reward, after all. Certainly, better than nothing.\n\n\"Very well, Trixie. I will contact you if the urge to experience the wonders of fairy magic strikes me one day.\" Veledar turned towards a mountain that overlooked the forest and pointed with a claw. \" And if you ever need my help again, my lair can be found up there near the top of that mountain.\"\n\nThe fairy smiled warmly. \"Thank you again, Crimson Sky, for your valiant victory. You truly are the bravest dragon around!\"\n\nVeledar smirked at the honest praise. He always loved the sound of praise no matter where it came from. With a flap of his mighty wings he left the forest far below and returned to the sky.\n\nVeledar flew towards the mountain that had been his home for the last two years. On his way there, he admired the forest rolling below him, the river that snaked its way down the slant, and the vast mountainside that encompassed his domain. His territory was truly a gift; one that Veledar would protect with his very life if it ever came to that.\n\nThe dragon dove down swiftly, startling a flock of birds as he passed by them. The cave that was his home was nestled near the top of the mountain at the perfect altitude for a dragon to look over his territory. It was hard to get to without wings, and deep enough to shelter a sizable amount of treasure. The dragon landed at the mouth of the cave, inspecting the slashes carved into the top center. This crude symbol would tell any dragon that this cave was claimed. With a smile, Veledar strode past the entrance, lighting the torches lining the walls with his breath, his flame funneled into a small strip that would not damage the frail things.\n\nThe rear of his cave was filled with piles of gold pieces and various gems. As he approached the pile, the dragon let out a satisfied sigh. His hoard was large enough for him to sleep on, but paled in comparison to his mother's mountains of treasure. Though Veledar was somewhat happy with his possessions, he still longed for more riches, just like any respecting dragon would.\n\nIn time, he would get there, but for now the red male strode over to his collection of soft furs and laid in them. How could he multiply his fortune? Through deceit and destruction like other members of his kind? The prospect of something so distasteful turned his stomach. His mother had raised him to respect the lesser creatures, not frighten or hurt them beyond the necessary amount, like he did with the two humans that messed up Trixie's garden. They deserved a scare, not to lose their lives over some healing tea flowers.\n\nVeledar wondered if another dragon would've showed the same mercy. He picked up one of his golden goblets and tossed it across the stone floor, watching it until it collided with a tower of books and other objects.\n\nOn top of the tower lay his favorite item, a collection of stories depicting the dragons that inhabited the various places of the world. He walked over to the pile of books and picked up the top book. The cover was orange with the title Knights and Knaves scribbled in the middle. He quickly tossed it aside to grab onto the next book from the pile. This wasn't the right book either! The dragon stifled his frustration and pulled book after book harshly from the stack, tossing them from the rapidly shrinking pile. When he had gone through all his books he started to remove gold and search beneath that as well. He was certain the item he searched for was there in the morning, right before he went on his hunt.\n\nHis hunt. Humans! Veledar took a deep breath, growling as he noticed a scent that evaded him when he entered the cave. It smelled like fear, sweat, and horse. His green eyes widened at the realization.\n\n\"You little thieves!\" he shouted aloud. He searched around, and soon enough found a faint trail of boot prints.\n\n\"How dare you come into MY HOME, and STEAL my POSSESSIONS?\" he roared. Oh, he would do a lot more than scare them this time around. Blood burning hot, Veledar followed the tracks outside, but their lead came to a premature end. Veledar sniffed around. There was another smell along the human stench. Something he hadn't smelled in over two years. It was the smell of a gryphon, heading eastward, towards a village bearing a name he had long forgotten.\n\nVeledar paced around, claws clicking on the stone of the cave's ledge, his tight jaws trying to hold control of the anger that now boiled in his blood. He tried to breath in and out to calm himself but all he could see as he closed his eyes was a human male holding his book and laughing with glee. A wretch without manners, just like the flower thieves.\n\n\"I will teach you what befalls those who steal from a dragon!\" Veledar took off into the sky with haste, ignoring the words of his mother as they rang in his ears. Rage must be tempered. Instincts too can lead you astray. The quickest decision is rarely the wisest.\n\nVeledar ignored every word of his mother's wisdom, following the trail of that vile scent all the way to the village, to a humble house on the outskirts. The small house was made of wood, with a golden gryphon painted on its door. Shadows covered the building from some nearby trees, giving it a false sense of protection.\n\nThe dragon landed softly and slowly crept to the building, making sure there were no others around. He made sure that with each paw placed on the ground he made as little noise as he could. The smell he followed led right inside.\n\nVeledar flared his nostrils and slammed his bulk into the door, causing the thing to splinter and collapse inward. His momentum carried him over a wooden table that broke itself upon his body as well. Veledar flared his wings and roared out for all to hear.\n\n\"Little thieves! How DARE you sneak into my lair and--\" he began, only to be cut off by the scream of a little girl dressed in a simple brown dress. A man stood in front of her, cold fear in his eyes as he held a broken chair. Veledar paused to see the kitchen he had destroyed with small pots tossed over, their contents leaking onto the floor.\n\n\"W-what do you want from us, monster?\" the man stuttered as the child clung on to him, with tears rolling down her terrified cheeks.\n\nVeledar held his maw agape for a second before cocking his head to the side. Was this really what he wanted? To unleash his vengeance upon a defenseless girl? \"I\u2026\" his eyes narrowed. No. He couldn't appear weak. Humans were known to be adept liars. \"You have stolen something of importance from me, human! Did you not think I'd notice your stench laying around my cave? That my vengeance would not find you, no matter how far you ran?\" he asked aggressively.\n\n\"I-I am a simple carpenter, dragon! I swear I have not left this house since morn!\" The man's hands started to tremble along with the broken chair he held. \"Ppp-please\u2026my daughter\u2026let me take her to a safe place, an-and then we'll talk, alright? We'll talk about this.\"\n\n\"Hraarrrr\u2026\" Veledar hissed. \"The culprit is here. I know it for a fact. Unless you are suggesting your whelp grew wings, entered my lair, and snatched away my possession, I will hold you accountable.\" Veledar said, strutting in the cramped house still eyeing the family. \"Where is your mate? I would have words with her as well.\"\n\n\"My w-wife works for the king, dragon. If you are to kill me, please\u2026 spare my daughter, for she is young and innocent. Truly the purest soul you can find. My-my greatest treasure of all! Spare her. Please, forgive us!\" the man cried, dropping to his knees before Veledar to grab and kiss at his toes.\n\nVeledar was almost insulted to have his paw touched by the human's trembling fingers. He took a step back, holding his paw aloft. \"I wouldn't kill your whelp, human, nor I appreciate you throwing your life at my feet.\" said Veledar, gently guiding the man around to a chair that was still standing. \"Take a seat and tell me where your mate is.\"\n\n\"Wife.\" the man replied, a bit calmer now that his trembling body found purchase on the chair. \"She'll be here at sundown.\"\n\nTo wait almost an entire day on this man's promise? Veledar did not feel fully convinced. \"Where can I find her? I said it before. The item in question holds significant value to me, and the more I wait, the higher the chances are that your wife will pass it into another pair of hands.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026do you\u2026are you referring to the book me mum had?\" the little girl asked softly.\n\nVeledar turned his head towards the little whelp, who was currently wiping tears from her eyes.\n\n\"I've\u2026seen it. Had pretty pictures of dragons in it. You would be pretty too, if you weren't so angry.\"\n\nVeledar approached her, his neck and head low. His eyes were locked on her, and as he neared, the father raised from his seat.\n\n\"What do you intend to do, dragon? She but complimented your-\"\n\nVeledar hissed at him, but the man already grabbed his makeshift weapon and swung, though the hit missed its mark. Veledar tripped him with his tail, causing the man to collapse lightly onto the floor with a groan.\n\n\"Gah, you and your infuriatingly long tails. Don't lay a claw on her, dragon, or I swear by the Gods above that\u2026\"\n\nVeledar ignored the man's empty threats and focused on the girl. \"Let us make a deal, little one. You tell me where your mother took my book, and I will allow you to touch any scale of mine you like.\"\n\n\"She didn't say\u2026\" the girl looked down. \"I'm sorry. I really wish to help you, dragon. I really do.\"\n\nVeledar rumbled softly. \"Can you tell me where she is then?\"\n\nThe girl nodded a few times. \"But only if you promise not to hurt her.\"\n\n\"I promise.\" Veledar said.\n\n\"You swear?\"\n\nVeledar held up a paw to his chest, \"I vow upon the very scales of my body.\"\n\n\"That's good enough for me,\" the girl smiled, extending a hand towards his snout. \"So red\u2026so pretty! Can I\u2026touch?\"\n\nVeledar closed his eyes, bowed his head, then waited for that petite hand to make contact with his snout.\n\n\"Don't trust him!\"\n\nThe girl drew back, Veledar opened his eyes to the shout that came from the outside.\n\n\"Vern!\" the voice was the first among the chatter of at least twelve other voices. \"What manner of misfortune befell your house? You alright in there?\"\n\n\"I got a focken dragon in here.\" The girl's father rasped. \"Raise weapons. Sound the alarm. He's just about to eat my little daughter!\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry about this,\" Veledar whispered. He had all the intentions to smile when he watched that girl's eyes widen as his snout made contact with her curious hand, but unfortunately, he had no time to fulfill that bargain anymore, thanks to loud mouthed Vern. Veledar knocked him down again with his tail, then bounded out of the house into the twelve men wearing chain mail, carrying a combination of long spears and crossbows.\n\n\"By the gods above. Vern spoke the truth!\" one of the men gasped aloud.\n\n\"Dragon! Focken dragon!\"\n\n\"It's red like fire. He gonna burn us!\"\n\n\"Can we even fight something so big? We'll all die!\"\n\nVeledar had no time to deal with this nonsense. He spread his wings and charged them, tossing the men aside like pebbles. Two bolts glanced harmlessly off his scales, but by the time the men gathered their bearings, Veledar already pierced through their ranks, his wings taking him into a realm where they could not hope to follow.\n\nHe looked back to see most of the guards back on their feet, firing uselessly as the distance between them grew larger with each wing beat.\n\nThat could've gone so much better if I didn't barge in like a tempest. The dragon shook his head and scolded himself at how reckless and stupid that was. His sister would've made the humans comfortable with her presence. Maybe even bring them gifts to pave her way through to their hearts, while Veledar brought with him only rants and destruction. The red dragon flew through a curtain of rain clouds to cool off his blood, then landed outside his lair once more, looking to the far-away dot that was the village. It had already started to disappear as the sun sank beneath the mountains. He would probably spend the night looking into the stars. Veledar laid down in his usual spot, a patch of earth that had left an imprint of his form. He looked up as the stars started to reclaim the sky and sighed. Tomorrow would give him another chance to right today's wrongs.\n\n[ Back to Duty ]\n\nA pounding knock rattled the simple wooden door of a seemingly empty house. The only furniture inside the home was made up of a small table with the plates and utensils of previous meals scattered about, and an aging bookcase covered in dust with tomes of various sizes and colors. Atop of that bookcase stood two painted frames, one of Selina Lund, and the other of Geoffrey Lund.\n\nKnock! The sound rumbled again from the door, startling a nearby alley cat who let out a rather loud yelp. However, despite the ruckus, the simple house's black curtains remained drawn. In one room of the house rested a suit of plate mail, all dented, scarred, and a sword held aloft next to a damaged shield engraved with the symbol of a gryphon. The knock came again, this time accompanied by a shout. \"Rise up already! The ninth bell had just rang, which just about marks you as the laziest bastard in this town!\"\n\nArcturus slowly opened his eyes, instantly shutting them from the radiant light streaking in from one of the missing blinds. \"I'm up. I'm up!\" he shouted, his voice coarse as he tried to stifle a morbid cough that had been with him for the past days.\n\n\"You alright in there, sir? Your voice threatens to descend into a dragon's growl if you keep that up.\" came the voice.\n\n\"Oh, leave me bloody alone, Gus.\" Arcturus yelled, his voice already sounding better. \"It's just a minor annoyance. Happens every morning.\"\n\nArcturus rose from the small bed, scattering the sheets all over the place. He quickly threw on his customary brown uniform, then released a drawn-out sigh as he looked into the body-length mirror on his wall to find a grizzled looking man with pain filled eyes staring back at him. He admired the tan cloak he tossed over his shoulders, and placed a golden broach of an eagle on it. The symbol that belonged to the captain of the guards. Arcturus had been honored with this position shortly after the incident with the dragon. He scowled whenever he thought of the grisly details he endured through that day, yet more so at the implications of it. This position was supposed to be much easier. Alas, fate had a way of twisting up every now and again. Arcturus almost imagined himself home that night, in the loving embrace of his wife. And then\u2026\n\nArcturus snatched up his leather belt and stowed his long sword. No time to think about that now.\n\n\"Any disturbances to report?\" he asked Gus.\n\n\"We had a small theft from Petunia's, but nothing else that's worth mentioning. The king told us to retrieve you.\"\n\n\"Retrieve me? What, am I unable to find my way to him now?\"\n\n\"You know that's not what he meant, mate.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026I know.\" Arcturus shoved on his black boots, then grabbed a piece of stale bread off of his table before opening his front door. \"So the king wants to see me, you say? What would he have of me this time?\"\n\nThe man standing in front of him was a portly looking guard, with chain mail one size too small. Though Arcturus kept his tongue reigned, he always felt that the man's girth threatened to burst out of the armor at any moment.\n\n\"You look deceptively better than you sound, sir. Though I can still tell you had a rough night. Are the nightmares getting any easier?\"\n\nArcturus' frown was answer enough.\n\n\"Never mind that. We should turn our attention to more pressing matters. No time like the present, eh?\"\n\n\"Quite so.\" Arcturus grabbed a bite from the tough hunk of bread he carried. \"Did the king say what he wanted?\"\n\nGus scratched his beard. \"He didn't mention that much, with your ears so far removed from his mouth. But he did make it sound urgent. Figured he must have something grand in mind for the slayer of Dread Flame.\"\n\n\"You know better than to utter that creature's name.\" Arcturus grumbled, and that put an end to the discussion for now. To distract himself from the dark thoughts that prodded at his mind, Arcturus started to look to the streets, bustling with people of different races. They were all conversing or haggling with merchants in the street. The air smelled of cooking meat roasting in a menagerie of spices. Arcturus' stomach tightened as a horse-drawn carriage strode past them. It was driven by a stern-faced human in a well-kept purple suit. On the carriage was painted a black raven symbolizing the house of Raverst. Odd. They usually kept away from public roads.\n\nArcturus and Gus rounded a few corners, passing a number of armored guards. Each one of them pulled off a quick and crisp salute as they walked past them, to which Arcturus either bowed his head or saluted in response. He had to admit. The guard force was more efficient than ever before. Over the last two years he had the mayor retrain the guards, see them better equipped with both armor and weapons, and he even hired a couple of elven rangers to tutor the lookouts and archers on the weak spots of many beasts that could pose a threat to the town, dragons most of all. The first two weeks of that training had been amusing, as the ranger he knew whipped the soft men into shape. Arcturus' mind focused on her stern discipline until he was pulled out of thought by a familiar voice.\n\n\"Hey Arcturus! Care for a few rounds with a friend?\" shouted a man clad in dark half-plate, only lightened by the scars the armor bore. He was leaning against a stone wall adjacent to a training ring full of fledgling swordsmen. The figure appeared to be in his late twenties, with shaggy black hair that reached to his shoulders, lightened up somewhat by bright blue eyes. The man was also tall, standing at about two meters.\n\n\"Garroth!\" Arcturus shouted, a small smile growing on his face. He extended his hand for a shake. \"I did not think to see you here so soon. Is the whole band with you?\"\n\nGarroth grasped his hand firmly. \"Hah! The tombs were not as harrowing as those lost mines.\"\n\n\"The ones plagued by ghasts?\"\n\n\"The very same.\" Garroth beamed.\n\n\"What in God's sweet name is a ghast?\" Gus asked, scratching his head. \"Some sort of ghost made of poisonous gas?\"\n\n\"A fearsome undead creature that can paralyze people with but a single touch.\" Arcturus quickly replied.\n\n\"I always admire men who know their craft!\" Garroth pointed at Arcturus. \"Stay a while. I would share many tales of adventures with a man I'm proud to call friend!\"\n\n\"Ah, I am afraid pressing matters must keep my legs moving.\" Arcturus frowned. \"Wish I could linger, but the king is requesting my presence. We will catch up another time.\"\n\n\"Hmmph.\" Garroth laughed, putting his hands on his waist. \"Don't want to get in your way then, lordship!\" He laughed. \"Hopefully you have time later to get your accomplishments bested by an experienced adventurer.\"\n\n\"Bested? When did that ever happen?\"\n\n\"Hush.\" Garroth whispered. \"I don't want the others to know I'm beaten by a bloody captain of the guards every time. I've got a reputation to uphold, after all!\"\n\n\"Well, if whatever the king wants is not too time consuming, I would definitely be up to hearing about your latest adventure.\"\n\nBoth men wished each other the best and went off in different directions. Arcturus made his way with Gus toward the castle, while Garroth remained behind with his band of adventurers.\n\n\"Sir, who was that man?\" Gus asked the moment they were out of earshot.\n\n\"Garroth? He is an adventurer that stops in from time to time. He and his lot tend to live between towns, fulfilling all sorts of quests, collecting bounties, adventuring, most of all. I spar with him every time they return to Entis.\" Arcturus chuckled. \"You should have seen our last contest. Garroth stumbled backwards into a Siigonis woman, I have never seen a man battered so thoroughly by one of those lizardfolk!\"\n\nMinutes passed in silence as they passed several more streets with wares and goods. Out of the corner of Arcturus' eye, he spotted a sign in the shape of a large gear. It was a shop run by a gnome woman named Matilda, who always loved to tinker with things. She was one of the best crafters ever to create swords, armor, basically everything a guard, knight, or adventurer would ever need. Gus filled the time talking about the weather, then politics with nobles, and even corraled Arcturus to the right side of the road, for in the center of this street was a stuffed head of Dread Flame thrust on a spike for all to see. Arcturus scowled at the grisly memento. He remembered the King and various others trying to convince him the dead dragon was a symbol of hope; of a brave man's victory against unfathomable odds.\n\nBut all Arcturus saw was the constant reminder of his empty house. Thankfully, they walked rather quickly away from this dull red eyesore, heading into the docks.\n\nThe docks were located close to the floating fortresses that watched over the city. It was busy this time of day, with several vessels docked and crews unloading cargo, most likely from the eastern coast. Arcturus waved to the men he passed by, knowing many of the ship's crews. It wasn't until they passed the aviary that they stopped once again.\n\nGus had just started a conversation about his favorite airship to enter port. No surprise it was the RLA Destiny B, reported as the fastest ship of them all. Arcturus spotted a trio of gryphons gliding gracefully overhead with their golden wings outstretched. Entis had teams of them patrolling the city to aid the guard. Today they were being led by a woman named Elizabeth. Arcturus saw her wave a hand as the team circled back around one more time to offer him a warm and vocal greeting. The gryphons landed on their paws softly on the stone streets. Elizabeth was in the center of the others with a large smile on her face, her blonde hair tucked neatly in a bun.\n\n\"How goes the patrol, Elizabeth? I trust Swift Wing there hasn't been up to his usual mischief,\" Arcturus said, gesturing to the gryphon.\n\n\"Your wounds hurt me such, human,\" protested the gryphon, his voice a tad high pitched.\n\n\"Oh, don't furrow your feathers over his words, Swifty.\" Elizabeth said, petting the gryphon on his head. \"The captain's jokes are known to miss their mark more than they find it.\" Elizabeth returned her green eyes to Arcturus who couldn't help but smile at the jape. \"New ship came in this morning, quite a big thing. What was the name again George?\" she turned to a strong built human guard atop an earthy brown furred gryphon that had teal tipped wings. The man raised a brown leather gauntlet to his chin in thought.\n\n\"There's none bigger and stronger than the Indomitous!\" he said with a grin. \"Lots of soldiers on board of that hulking beast. If I didn't know any better, I'd say someone is gearing up for an important task.\"\n\n\"Maybe Rothdell finally got the guts to push us back?\" asked the third guard, who was easily smaller than George and hd the face of a young recruit.\n\n\"I don't think those silk-wearing, finger twiddling spell-weavers will make any meaningful progress while we are around.\" laughed Elizabeth. \"Our ships are powerful enough on their own, and the gryphons only reinforce our strength. We are blessed to have such stalwart allies at our side.\" she added as Swift Wing looked to start a fuss. \"Well Arcturus, as nice as it is speaking to you, it's time we returned to the sky. Fare you well.\" The group gave a quick salute before their gryphons spread their wings and swiftly returned to the busy air above.\n\n\"They're quite something when you see them take to formations.\" Arcturus observed.\n\n\"Did you ever consider joining the air patrol, sir?\" Gus asked as the two men resumed their walk towards the castle. \"It might do you good to have a partner by your side. Or under you. When you're in the air, that is. Because the saddle-gods I'm just getting deeper in my own pit, aren't I?\"\n\n\"Tends to happen when the tongue gets ahead of the head.\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"I would be in your debt if you don't mention this to Garroth. That man looks perilous.\"\n\nArcturus laid a hand on Gus' shoulder. \"Worry not, my friend. What we talk remains between us. As for riding a gryphon...the appeal is lost to me when I have so many years of experience leading troops. I am used to have land under my feet, not bare, empty air. If you are interested, I can put in a good word for you. Get you trained by the best, only that you have to loosen a bit of that girth you don't want your gryphon to fall out of the sky.\"\n\n\"That would be fantastic!\" Gus exclaimed. \"I'll do anything you ask of me, sir. Train harder. Move more. And\u2026try to take it easier with the meals. Graaaah! The hardest mission of all, eh? With so many quality inns around I'm surprised the king himself isn't a tad portlier.\"\n\nArcturus smiled. \"You have an exciting future ahead of you, Gus. Though I am afraid you won't be so grateful when the time comes to get acquainted with your gryphon. They are as picky as they look, and quite needy if my memory serves.\"\n\n\"I don't care what it takes to bond with a gryphon. I just want to soar upon the winds, free like a bird.\" Gus closed his eyes. \"Would be the experience of a life time sir. And-and of course my appreciation will extend to the gryphon. I don't just want to borrow its wings, you know. A partner. That's all I ever wanted. To have someone to share my happiness with. I was always a bit jealous of your squads, sir. The men look up to you. Respect you. Obey you without question, while I'm\u2026I'm just a simple guardsman\u2026\"\n\n\"Not for much longer.\" Arcturus draped his arm over the man's neck. \"I might've not been able to help everybody, but I will see you ascend to the skies, Gus. You have my word.\"\n\nThe man could barely keep his eyes from tearing up, so he kept on discussing gryphons as they walked past many stores, inns, bars, and brothels, until they finally stood outside the great stone gates of the castle. The walls had been carved by the most skilled dwarves ages ago. They also engraved runes every few feet as a mark of their craftsmanship, along with scratches. Arcturus recalled the stories that spoke of dragons that laid waste to the city. In its darkest hour, the city summoned its bravest heroes, who stood up against the tide of darkness and protected these very walls with their lives. Between the walls was a very large wooden gate painted with a mural of a mountainside, where a large snowy gryphon spread its broad wings. On the gate's top, Arcturus could make out six guards standing at attention, ready to give alarm if anything out of the ordinary threatened the city.\n\n\"Hail, paladin!\" shouted one of the guards clad in polished half plate mail. The man wore a barbute helmet adorned with gold that marked him as part of the king's royal guard.\n\nArcturus had only been to the castle a few times in his lifetime. Once when he was still a child, during his knighthood, when he obtained the position of a knight, when he ascended to the paladin rank, then finally after he had slain Dread Flame, the biggest menace known to the city at that point. Each time, he remembered the small dose of pride he carried within his soul, although the same exhilarating feeling eluded him on the fateful days after the dragon's fall. Arcturus had nothing pleasant to think about. Even now he struggled to keep the dragon's smirk out of his mind, the dead bodies, his son's whispers as he gave out his very last breath.\n\nArcturus shook his head and focused on the guards as a smaller door in the gate cracked open, right below the painted gryphon.\n\n\"Come on, you blasted thing!\" came a struggled shout from behind the door. \"Put your backs into it, men, and haul this bastard up before the paladin has words with you!\"\n\nWith a struggled grunt, the door swung open and two guards fell through, onto the ground.\n\n\"There we go, paladin,\" said one of the humans, dusting himself off. \"That damn thing gets stuck from time to time. Apologies you had to see us like this.\"\n\n\"A thing of no consequence.\" Arcturus replied quickly. He remembered that each time he had visited the castle, the door always posed a problem or two. If there was ever a symbol for the things royalty did not care about, this was clearly below their notice.\n\nFrom the opened door emerged an old man clad in orange robes adorned with runes. The robes easily draped over his body to cover his feet, and dragged behind him on the stone. Upon the man's waist circled a brown leather belt with many bottles held by straps, spaced carefully so they did not rattle together as he walked. His hair was grey and cut thin to hide his receding hairline. He smiled with bright white teeth in the middle of a grey beard that seemed to devour his face, though even amongst all that hair his eyes remained clear and full of kindness.\n\n\"Arcturus!\" said the man. \"I can see you took your sweet time coming here. Luckily, the king has been very busy this morning and barely noticed your tardiness.\"\n\n\"Fortune finally hears my prayers, Father Devlin.\" Arcturus sighed in relief, in spite of the joke. The last thing he needed was an angry royal, especially the king.\n\nArcturus had many dealings with father Devlin during his time as the leader of the order of knights and paladins that served Lumara. He also acted as one of the king's advisors in spiritual matters.\n\n\"Come, come. We must see Cornelius at once. You are of course well aware that the matters we have to discuss are of great importance.\n\nHowever...ummmm.\" He gestured to Gus. \"Guard.....ummmm..\"\n\n\"You sent me to find him.\" Gus said, \"By the light, has my name eluded you again?\"\n\nDevlin put up his hand to silence Gus. \"Hmm, don't give up on this enlightened mind just yet. Mhhhmmm\u2026something with a K, right?\"\n\nGus shook his head, then Devlin's eyes lit up. \"Ken\u2026Kenvar\u2026no, Peter!!\" he exclaimed. \"Ah yes. Peter! Well, the maters at hand are only for our ears only, so you will have to excuse us.\"\n\n\"Very well, although my name is not Peter.\" Gus insisted.\n\n\"Wh-what?\" Devlin stroke his beard, as if lost in thought. \"I could've sworn I knew your name better than I know my own beard. Hmm, how curious. It just slipped away from my mind. Might you refresh my memory, please?\" asked Devlin, crossing his arms.\n\n\"It's Gus!\"\n\n\"Well that is a terrible name!\" the old man said. \"No wonder I forgot it. Now, if your parents had named you something simple, like Peter, I'd have remembered it, of course.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026I bet.\" Gus just sighed and rolled his eyes. With a quick goodbye Gus, walked off back to the town.\n\n\"Alright now, where were we?\" Devlin turned to Arcturus, placing his two palms together. \"Oh yes, I was telling Griff there that king Cornelius wanted to talk to you about a little town on our North Western border.\"\n\nArcturus sighed. He was led from the main gate to the castle's inner halls. Father Devlin kept getting lost in his own conversation, often forgetting who had told him what and half remembering tales. Arcturus feigned attention as they made their way through the well decorated halls. They had been adorned with rugs of various colors, artwork from different ages and kings, and antique armor and weapons. The halls were much cooler inside, much different than the last time he had been here. Noticing the paladin's expression, Devlin mentioned a cooling spell took effect ever since the king complained about the heat. Arcturus sniffed the air and found a very pleasing aroma laying about. The air smelled of roasted ham, probably being prepared for the upcoming meal. His stomach rumbled as he remembered the exquisite meal he had at his paladin promotion. His mouth began to water as it had been the best meal of his life. It had a bed of vegetables that put any other dish to shame, coupled with wines from all over the continent. Arcturus tried to keep a stern face even as his stomach rumbled like a dragon's throat. He didn't want Devlin to think him unshackled, acting upon instincts like those beasts.\n\n\"Hungry, are we?\" laughed Devlin, \"I'll suggest the cook to whip you up something before you go. We can't have our mighty paladin fall prey to starvation, can we?\"\n\n\"Much appreciated.\" Arcturus nodded quickly. He found the walk to the king's audience chamber much shorter than it had ever been. He was brought through a well-made sturdy oak door that looked like it never gathered a speck of dust on it. Past the door stretched a long hall with two large windows that allowed the viewer to look down upon the city. Various other doors that led to different wings of the castle spread like a spider's web along the hall. Two thrones sat in the center of the hall, raised up on a section of stone steps. Behind the thrones was a large brown flag with the symbol of Lumara on it. King Cornelius sat on the right throne, a small crown with jewels atop his raven black hair that reached his shoulders. He was currently wearing navy blue silk clothes, and stared with his emerald eyes towards a kneeling soldier in plate mail. Cornelius picked up a sword and placed it on each of the soldier's shoulders, one slowly after the other. There was a collection of onlookers that looked at the ceremony with pride on their faces.\n\n\"Now recite the paladin's oath.\" The king said to the woman before him.\n\n\"As a paladin, I am sworn to valor. My heart will know only virtue, my blade will defend the helpless, my might will uphold the weak, my word will speak only truth, and my wrath will undo the wicked.\" the woman said a smile growing on her face.\n\n\"Then rise, lady Elwin, and take your place alongside Lumara's paladins.\" said Cornelius as he sheathed his gleaming sword.\n\nElwin stood proudly with the smile that occupied most of her face. Arctutus got to shake her hand as the other group of guests bombarded her with praises and cheers. Arcturus was reminded of his own ceremony, of Selina running over to him, hugging him deeply as tears of happiness cascaded down her perfect cheeks. Now he felt all alone, staring emptily ahead as the guests drained out of the room.\n\nCornelius made his way over to Arcturus. \"If it isn't my favorite paladin!\" he clapped a hand on Arcturus' shoulder. \"My heart soars to see you again, Arcturus. Tales of your valor are not enough to explain what you've done for our city. The way you've plunged your blade through that monster's eye\u2026tell me again how it felt to end the beast's life.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nThe king shrugged at the lifeless reply he got. \"Good? That's all? Hardly inspires the same courage I hear in the taverns!\"\n\nArcturus had nothing to say. Even the king noticed his brooding mood, so he looked past Arcturus to the departing guests. \"You know what I love most about these celebrations? Each one is a chance to get another one like you! Now imagine what we can achieve if I have a full squad of heroes like you; men who fell from the sky, who overcame crippling injuries, who ended dragons ten times bigger than them!\"\n\nNoticing Arcturus' silence, the king quickly shifted his feet and led Arcturus over to the window overlooking Entis. \"Alas, mere talk of better times is not why you are here.\" Cornelius turned toward Arcturus as his face grew stern. \"We received word of a dragon that's flying loose around one of our villages.\" Cornelius sighed. \"The beast has destroyed a house, kidnapped a little girl, and burned our valiant guards to cinders.\" he waved his hand. \"The beast's foul deeds are all written in the report if you want to glance over it.\"\n\nArcturus felt his hands tighten up. \"Why me, sire? Surely you can find another slayer who can go after the beast.\"\n\n\"Ah, but that's the problem. Arcturus is but one man.\"\n\n\"A man who's had his fill of dragons!\" Arcturus immediately lowered his voice. \"Apologies. I have overstepped.\"\n\nThe king's eyes filled with pity. Arcturus remembered those eyes from the night Dread Flame attacked. \"I am aware of what that monster took from you Arcturus. I would not wish this fate to befall anyone. It is a cruel, cruel thing to watch your own family wither before your eyes\u2026\" The king looked back to the city. \"But for this task I would have no other man. Your legacy lives in you! Your family is the best at hunting down the vile monsters that darken our world and steal the smiles off our children's faces. I shudder to think of what else we can lose if another dragon happens upon the city.\"\n\nThe king turned back towards Arcturus. \"Please. Before you make your decision, think of the families that live in that village, robbed off their guards, crippled by fear. Would they deserve a second-rate hunter to deliver them from the terror of the monster that haunts their nights?\" The king tilted his head to the side, causing Arcturus to shake his head. \"If our man fails to accomplish his task, everyone in that village will die. Dragons are not merciful like we are, and when provoked\u2026well, you've seen first hand the gruesome things they are capable of.\"\n\nDespite knowing the king as a friend, Arcturus admired how well Cornelius understood him. He was a man that saw the spirit, not the armor and flesh that made a man who he was.\n\n\"What kind of dragon are we talking about? I would have more than vague mentions.\" Arcturus said.\n\n\"The beast is said to have scales of fire, with piercing eyes of sapphire.\"\n\n\"A fire-breathing dragon, then?\" Arcturus said coolly. \"This cannot be a mere coincidence.\"\n\n\"Exactly what I'm afraid of. This whelp can belong to DreadFlame's clutch, seeking vengeance in the name of his father.\"\n\nArcturus gritted his jaws so hard they hurt, focusing to try and wipe his mind of the image of Dread Flame looming menacingly over him. \"That is a risk we cannot take. What resources will I have to bring the beast down?\"\n\n\"I want you to assemble a team of apt men.\" Cornelius waved a hand. \"Do not even think about the price, I want only the best to accompany you in this task. We will be assigning a vessel to you as well. The Indomitous carries a dozen men and has enough firepower to slay dozens of these beasts. I shall have it placed in your command, to do as you see fit.\"\n\nArcturus nodded. The ship would definitely come in handy, especially with its beam cannons. \"As for the men, I will need a team of shieldguards, or a party of adventurers who know at least the basics of dragon slaying, fire resistant armors and ropes, energy crossbows, and traps.\"\n\nCornelius clapped his hands together. \"Done! Although there is something else I would ask of you. Something that might make your task a bit more difficult.\"\n\n\"What?\" Arcturus asked.\n\n\"I want the beast brought back alive.\"\n\n\"Alive?!\" Arcturus exclaimed in shock, a little angrier than he intended. \"It was hard enough to slay Dread Flame, and now you want me to bring his offspring all the way here?\"\n\nCornelius raised a hand. \"I merely wish for my citizens to see that even a dragon cannot stand up to the might of our army. They have lived in fear of dragons long enough for superstitions to run rampant through the taverns. We need to quench the rumors that dragons are stronger than us, Arcturus.\"\n\n\"Didn't they get a taste of a dragon's pain when I slew Dread Flame two years ago?\"\n\n\"Ah yes, of course they did,\" Cornelis spoke quickly. \"But between you and I.\" the king placed a hand over his mouth and spoke in a whisper, \"Morale has been wavering lately, and we need to reinforce the belief that our city stands strong no matter what creature smashes itself against our walls. I believe this vile beast's capture, and eventual humiliation, will provide us exactly what we need, not to mention we will make it answer for the hundreds of crimes it and its vile kin committed against our people. We shall hold trial, then perhaps\u2026a public gathering to witness the beast's helplessness first hand. I would look into its teary eyes as it squirms for freedom, and deny it, over and over again, until every flicker of fight leaves its body.\"\n\n\"Your word, my hands.\" Arcturus nodded sternly.\n\n\"Excellent!\" The king cheered. \"I will pick the best men for the job. I suggest you pack with haste, for you will leave immediately. Now let Delvin and I discuss your supplies.\"\n\n\"As you wish, sire.\"\n\n\"Hunt well, Arcturus. We'll shake hands when the beast stands on our soil!\"\n\nArcturus began to leave, but was stopped by a firm hand from father Devlin, who thrust a scroll into his hands.\n\n\"All of the information you will need, Arcturus.\" He smiled. \"I know you won't let us down.\"\n\nArcturus nodded, and wished the two farewell as he made his way out of the castle and back to the city below. As he walked, he unwrapped the manila colored scroll, avoiding the other people, careful to side step around the numerous obstructions that arose in his path. His eyes were drawn to the name of the village in question, Deet. Arcturus stopped and tried to remember why the village sounded so familiar to him. He thought for a moment before it came to him. A while ago, he had swayed the village leaders at the time to join Lumara rather than stand in their way. Arcturus frowned as he remembered the clang of steel and the smell of death that the conflict with Rothdell had brought. He placed the grisly war back into his mind as he continued to read the scroll in his hands. He noticed that the report revealed the testimonies of the present guards and the rough description of the red dragon. The image of a great dragon with sharp teeth, razor like claws, and terrible fire filled his mind. He looked up to get that image out of his head, barely avoiding a sign that was shaped like a gear. Arcturus quickly rolled up the parchment and opened the bronze covered door of the building.\n\nImmediately, his nose was assaulted with the smell of oil, burning fumes, and something he did not recognize but of an equally gruesome tint. The room was filled with knickknacks and devices whose purposes were lost on a man like him; a mere warrior who wore the armor crafted by wiser hands. Some were small in all various shapes roughly the size of his palm, while some dangled from the ceiling with multiple limbs that looked more like a giant spider than any metal thing he had ever seen. With his first step into the cluttered place, a bell chimed rather loudly, even louder than the sound of gears that filled the room.\n\n\"I'll be with you in a moment!\" came a high-pitched voice that definitely belonged to a female, which he instantly recognized as Matilda's.\n\nWith a small explosion from the back room, a burst of smoke, and toppling of what was most likely a stool, a small woman entered covered in soot, cursing silently under her breath. She was a gnome, goggles strapped to her onyx hair. Her face was not too old, but had lines of late nights and signs of experience. What started as a neutral expression on her face turned into a warm smile at the sight of the man that entered her shop.\n\n\"Arcturus my dear! You should have said it was you!\" she exclaimed, \"I mistook you for dear ole Fergus that came to remind me to fix his darn glasses.\" She turned to a cylinder-like device on the wall, and pulled its brass handle. \"Care for some tea?\" she said, grabbing two cups. There were small wisps of steam rolling up from the surface of the liquid.\n\n\"Some other time, perhaps. I came to check on the armor you were making for me. The mission I am embarking upon requires your exquisite craft.\"\n\nMatilda had a frown flash across her face for a second before placing the tea cups back and clapping her hands together with a smile. \"You know\u2026 I totally forgot to send word about that. Can't tell you how many things I tend to forget these days.\" She laughed, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him towards the back room. \"Come oooon! You've got to see it! The armor is all finished and in pristine condition. Come, come!\"\n\nArcturus followed Matilda as she tugged him into the next room. He was always surprised by the strength she always showed, much greater than her size led to believe. She led him down a hallway, down some wooden steps, into a well-lit basement. Arcturus had to look twice to the torches that lit the place to observe that, instead of fire, stood small mana crystals. Matilda stopped before the suit of armor, a white sheet draped over it. She let go of his hands and clasped the sheet with her small fingers. \"Presenting, one of a kind, Matilda's Marvelous Mechanical Production!\" she then pulled free the sheet, letting it fall to the ground to reveal her marvelous creation.\n\nIt was a set of full plate bearing no marks of a particular house or even a crafter. It was metallic silver that perfectly reflected the room around them, with a barbute helm that had its visor down.\n\n\"Well, what do you think?\" Matilda asked, her voice shuddering with pride. \"Is she not the most beautiful suit of armor your eyes have ever seen?\"\n\n\"It looks\u2026outstanding! But doesn't it look exactly like my suit of armor back at home? The similarities are quite\u2026how to put it? Rather\u2026striking, one would say.\"\n\n\"NO! No, they're neither this or that!\" Matilda shouted, her brow scrunching up in anger. \"That's an insult if I ever heard one so vile. Armor is not like a dress, to judge with eyes alone! Pick up a piece and feel it before you start babbling about!\" She crossed her arms and began to mutter to herself.\n\nArcturus took the armguards off the suit and felt them in his hand. They were smooth to the touch, slightly cold, and missing buckles for the black leather straps. He noticed a small gear engraving near the elbow. \"Why didn't you include any buckles? How could it possibly fit me? And what makes it so light?\"\n\n\"The paladin finally realizes the armor's intricate beauty.\" Matilda said, the smile returning to her face. \"Infused the metal with mithril. Makes it light as a feather but harder than steel. As for your straps problem,\" she laughed, \"try pressing the gear and see what happens.\"\n\nArcturus did what Matilda said, and found the leather straps hanging loose. He looked to Matilda who held up a hand and waved for him to continue. His fingers grazed the engraving to find blue runes light up all over the armor as it started to segment and shape itself to his arm. The leather straps receded until they fit firm, but not too tight to feel uncomfortable. The hand portion conformed to the exact fit of his hand, with segmented plates forming over his fingers much like the scales of a dragon. Arcturus clenched his hand into a fist, amazed that he could hardly feel the armor at all. \"This is amazing!\" he said, turning to his friend. \"How could you achieve something like this?\"\n\n\"Just a special order from a friend. Who wouldn't want a self-fitting armor that hardly weighs a thing? Plus, it's also resistant to fire, which makes it the most desired item against dragons and what not.\" Matilda blurted out so fast Arcturus barely understood what she said.\n\n\"Whoa\u2026this must have cost way more than I paid.\" he said softly.\n\n\"Think nothing of it. Or better, consider it a gift from a friend.\" said Matilda.\n\n\"Thank you.\" he smiled. \"I\u2026don't know what else to say other than how amazing you are when you put your tools to the right purpose.\"\n\n\"I knoooow!\" Matilda giggled. \"But I'm curious about one thing. What will you be using it for?\" she asked, raising an eyebrow. \"It's dragons, right? Actually, I really hope it's something else, but y'know, fire breathing and all\u2026\"\n\nArcturus' smile vanished from his face. \"The king wants me to hunt down a dragon that might or might not be one of Dread Flame's offspring.\"\n\nMatilda let out a small gasp.\n\n\"Alive.\"\n\nShe gasped again.\n\n\"Yeah\u2026I had the same reaction, minus the gasping. Cornelius wants to make an example out of the beast. To remind the city that we are more than scared rats waiting for a dragon to swoop down upon us.\"\n\n\"He isn't wrong. Many people still talk about the night when\u2026you know\u2026anyway, where is this vile creature?\" she asked. \"Have any whereabouts of its location?\"\n\nArcturus sighed. \"A small village to the north-western border. It's a red, just like\u2026you know. Probably male, though I don't know for certain until I find it.\"\n\n\"What if it's not?\"\n\n\"What, male?\"\n\n\"Mhm!\" Matilda nodded her head. \"Females are worse at fighting, right? Easier to catch.\"\n\n\"Hardly,\" Arcturus found himself chuckle. \"Male or female, it will be a struggle to subdue it without making full use of our arsenal. Our king would not have the beast expire before he has the chance to parade it through the city as a symbol of human endurance in the face of their greatest enemy, so we have to be gentle in how we capture it.\"\n\n\"That's twisted.\" Matilda scrunched her face.\n\n\"I know, but in a weird way, I believe Cornelius is right,\" Arcturus said. \"These beasts prey on fear and deceit. If we show the people of this city that we can stand up to them, maybe\u2026we can win this war.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nArcturus had to admit, for a person that was shocked to learn about another dragon attack, Matilda recovered rather quickly. The witty gnome put her hands on her hips and started bossing him around. For several minutes, she showed him how to put each piece of his armor on until she soon found herself smacking his armored back plate out the door.\n\n\"Be careful now! You best not let that dragon scratch you too much, or kill you!\" she shouted to him. \"I have a reputation to keep!\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I don't intend to do any dying anytime soon!\" He laughed back to her, placing the helmet on his head.\n\nArcturus returned to his house to gather his belongings. He figured the king would supply what he requested, so Arcturus picked up his leather pack, a black belt with a small pack of marbles, a brown cloak with the symbol of a paladin stitched into it -an eagle holding a sword in one claw and a book in the other, then his scabbard. He latched that one to his belt before gathering up his trusty sword. Arcturus gave it a few practice swings, feeling the familiar grip and warmth spread to his fingertips.\n\nI can't believe I'm doing this again, he thought, then grabbed his energy crossbow, placing it in a holster strapped to his right side.\n\nWith that done, Arcturus walked over to his cabinet. He looked quickly through the cupboards to find two vials of semi-clear red liquid inside of them. He closed his eyes and thought to Selina and Geoffrey. How he wished he had one of these when he had returned home. He gave a small sigh before he placed the potions carefully in a pouch on his belt labeled with a small red caduceus. The last thing he grabbed before shoving a hundred feet of rope into his pack was his sacred shield, swinging the thing over his shoulder by the leather strap before buckling it.\n\nWith his gear in place, Arcturus prepared to head out, then stopped when he saw a picture of Selina, looking as if to wish him farewell, like she had always done in the past.\n\n\"Oh, my dear, beloved wife\u2026what has the world come to?\" He sighed, picking up the picture carefully. He could feel his heart begin to ache painfully, so he gently set the memento down and looked away.\n\n\"Why do I keep these things when they only serve to torment me?\" He said to himself aloud. \"The past is already written. There's nothing I can do to change it\u2026except look towards the future.\" A stern frown took hold of the paladin's face. \"Don't worry, my heart,\" he said softly as he turned walk out of his home, \"I will hunt that dragon down and make sure he gets exactly what he deserves for his heinous crimes.\"\n\nArcturus grabbed the knob of his door, finding that it felt a tad different than what he got used to. He felt a small tingle start at the base of his feet, slowly working its way up his leg, along his spine, and finally to his head. He turned his head back to look at the place he called home, wondering if this would be the last time he would ever set eyes upon it.\n\n\"Farewell.\" Arcturus said, then took upon the road with brisk steps.\n\nHis walk to the docks was anything but slow. Though a few people called his name or saluted him, nobody got in his way. Arcturus looked to the sky. The sun started to fall over the western mountains, casting a long shadow over anything it touched. Orange and red clouds stretched across the sky. Arcturus remembered his mother had told him that these were a sign of tough roads ahead. He had argued with her so fiercely. After all, how could something so beautiful bring trouble and strife? She just chuckled and picked his brain further. Arcturus had replied without missing a beat that it meant good luck, fortune, and anything your heart longed for.\n\nHow quickly those times had passed. It almost felt like yesterday, when he ate a warm meal together with his wife, when he heard the joyous laughter of his child\u2026\n\nArcturus was brought out of his memory when the clamor intensified around him. He was already at the docks, and the ship laying in front of his eyes was one of the largest vessels that he had ever seen. She stretched out at least twice as large as the first Destiny had been, with large propellers hanging off her, unmoving slabs of metal standing vigilant until they were called to spring her aloft into the sky.\n\nThe Indomitous was painted brown like all vessels of Lumara, with a mural of a gryphon at the front of her port and starboard sides. Atop her deck stood at least twelve shining energy cannons with numerous crew members shuffling about in dark brown uniforms. The ship had a ramp stretching down from her midsection to the dock below. From the ramp came a group of humans clad in dark red leathers, swords strapped to their belts, crossbows at the hip, and shields around their backs.\n\nAfter a quick introduction, the soldiers picked up their collective things and boarded the vessel in silence. Arcturus was the last one to climb the ramp, knowing the worry he spotted on their faces. No matter the supplies, no matter the experience a soldier had, few things could prepare you for the encounter with a dragon. Arcturus had been lucky in that regard. He grew up learning about dragons, even if most of those teachings focused on the various ways to end a dragon's life. When it came his turn to face a beast like that, Arcturus was far from afraid. He thought to the long grueling days of training filled with many aches, cuts, and bruises, a journey that led him to this day, when he would put another dent in Dread Flame's legacy.\n\n\"Excuse me.\"\n\nArcturus turned to an aged man with a scant amount of hair on his head. To him, it looked as if the hair had simply migrated to the man's mustache. The man twirled the bushy thing that seemed to take up the majority of his face.\n\nThe man held out his rough hand, easily dwarfing Arcturus' hand. \"It is truly an honor to be in your presence, sir. And to work with you, of course.\"\n\n\"Likewise...Captain,\" Arcturus looked for the man's rank on his collar.\n\n\"Fredrick Ruthgar.\" The man said, his barrel of a chest swelling with pride. \"Captain of the Indomitous, with over a dozen victories over Rothdell at the helm.\"\n\nA silence filled the air, as he expected Arcturus to be clapping or cheering. He soon coughed into his fist.\n\n\"Anyway, let me show you to your quarters, paladin. We have quite the journey ahead of us, eh?\"\n\n\"It's not the first time I'm sent to hunt down a dragon.\"\n\n\"And probably not the last,\" Frederick added. \"Rest. I would have your mind sharp for when the time comes to face the beast.\"\n\nArcturus allowed the captain to lead him below the deck, his mind as silent as his lips. The engines of the ship started purring. A strange sense of serenity washed over him. With Frederick in charge of an experienced crew, Arcturus felt liberated of the burden of choice. As he lay in his bed, his mind ventured not to the beast, but to the vast skies his ship threaded upon, a realm far removed from the torment he suffered in the city that became smaller with each passing moment.\n\n[ Draconic Heroics ]\n\nVeledar's wings carried him swiftly through the air. He pierced the fluffy clouds that stuck to him in the form of watery beads, startling any bird that dared to get too close to him. Ahead of him stretched the small human village he visited before, during his quest to recover his lost book. It had taken him a few days to work up the strength to return to the place where he made a fool of himself, but to Veledar, the book was far more important than his pride, even if he'd never admit that to anybody.\n\nVeledar felt his muscles tighten when he replayed the events in his mind. He could've slain all the guards and wreck the entire village, an option that remained available even now, but Veledar knew better than to give in to such basic impulses. He had to resist the urge to smash buildings for just a simple theft. He thought back to the days he spent around his lair, hunting, swimming, and even flying, while his mind focused on that human woman that had dared steal from him. It had taken several attempts of looking into his mirror to strike up a pose that, he figured, would not inspire fear in the humans. Veledar found such simple task deceptively difficult, especially for such a great dragon like himself. Why, every feature on his body looked like a potential weapon: the spikes on his back, his broad tail that ended with a leaf-shaped tip, even his horns could impale somebody! Veledar had no mind for killing though. No. He deserved something far better. He imagined a gathering of humans, with their soft, fat faces praising him for being so polite, sympathizing for the loss of his beloved book. He thought that, perhaps, they would even bring that woman to justice. This line of thought brought a smirk to the red dragon's face, although he reminded himself not get too deep into his own fantasies. More often than not, reality turned out to be completely different.\n\nThe dragon tilted his wings to make a slight turn down towards the village. The small buildings grew larger with each wing flap. Small houses made of wood, of various shapes and rough sizes, made the village look like a collection of half cut stumps to Veledar. The amalgamation of human dens was spread out in random directions and only connected by a dirt road that was beaten down with the passing of too many hooves. He started to correct his flight as the center of this mess came into view. The dragon stretched his hind legs first, then landed with a spray of dirt and rocks, quickly followed by the most annoying sound a creature could conjure:human screams.\n\n\"Dragon! There's a focken dragon!\"\n\n\"It's the red bastard again! He's back-back to finish what he started!\"\n\nVeledar's snout scrunched as more men joined in to point fingers at him and shout derogatory terms. This was definitely not the sort of reception he expected. Not when he landed so properly in their midst.\n\nSo Veledar drew his head back and unleashed a deafening roar to silence the unruly crowd. What a mistake, to think the humans had more than rocks in their hollow heads. As he looked around, his disappointment only grew further as the cowards sprinted to hide behind piles of hay, water troughs, wooden poles, and just about anything that would fit. The brave ones stood their ground, loud and red with fury.\n\n\"Leave us, Gods be damned!\"\n\n\"We don't wan' ya here!\"\n\n\"Aye! Don't need your kind causing any more problems, ye wretched scaled beast!\"\n\n\"Wait. Hold on. I-\" Veledar covered himself with a wing as the mob dwarfed his voice. \"I don't mean you any harm, you rowdy simpletons!\" he growled again, then sat upright on his haunches. \"I actually came here to-\" one of his horns caught a banner hanging overhead as he turned his head.\n\n\"Grarrrr,\" Veledar tugged the blue banner in frustration, breaking off the frail thing from the building it was attached to.\n\nAnd it still remained locked around his horn.\n\n\"Let go, accursed piece of inanimate cloth!\" Veledar sucked up his hiss of frustration as he flailed his head around.\n\nBut the banner was stubborn, stronger than he realized. The dragon couldn't stop himself this time. He hissed loudly in frustration as he bowed down his head and scraped the blasted thing off with a forepaw. The banner crumpled under his claws into the pile of crap it deserved to be. Veledar breathed in and out as he looked with satisfaction to the shredded remains of the banner before he stomped them into oblivion.\n\n\"As I was saying, I don't mean any harm, humans. I simply think we got off on the wrong claw the other day-\"\n\n\"Oy! Red scales!\" A new voice joined the mumbling crowd. \"That was me mum's banner you just trashed! What she ever do to you, to disrespect her work like that?\"\n\nVeledar narrowed his eyes at the peasant, a simple farmer dressed in a brown tunic and frayed leather leggings. \"That banner attacked me first! You've seen it. You've all seen how viciously it refused to let go even when I asked!\"\n\nThe mumbling picked up. Some humans looked at him like he lost his mind, while others smiled and chuckled to themselves.\n\n\"As I was saying, before the banner got in the way of things, I came here to discuss the theft that happened at my lair a few days ago.\"\n\n\"Did you hear that? The dragon says he hates Gerald's mum!\" shouted a woman hiding behind a wooden post.\n\n\"Heard'im too, spouting hatred and callin' it honey!\" another man answered.\n\n\"Oh, shut it Voskren. I never really liked the crone, always naggin' about me debts! I'd rather hug the focken dragon than work with that old hag again!\" replied another man.\n\n\"Aye! I can attest to that too! She never gave anyone fair prices. Y'know, mayhap this be a sign from the gods, to bring dragon here an' rid us of the crone's greedy fingers!\"\n\n\"Are you hit in the head? This beast isn't here to help us. He's here to pillage and destroy until there's nothing left but dust!\"\n\n\"Focus and listen, you chatty monkeys!\" Veledar hissed in irritation. \"I'm not here to fulfill your weird prophecies, and I am even less qualified to act like a mediator for whatever menial issues you have between yourselves. I wanted to talk about the theft that happened in my cave a few days ago! That's all.\"\n\n\"How warm you speak,\" an old woman walked slowly towards him, aiming her cane at his head. \"You destroyed a house for no reason. Attacked a girl in her home. Harmed her father while she watched. Oh, if you would see her crying\u2026her cheeks still wet from all the tears she shed even after you left.\"\n\n\"Attacked? I did no such thing, you ill-speaking fossil!\" Veledar turned to lock eyes with the old woman, his nostrils flaring with irritation. \"The wall simply got in the way. Maybe you should make your homes bigger, so that a polite dragon doesn't have face such problems again.\"\n\n\"Aye? An' who pays for all the work? You?\"\n\n\"I don't mind, as long as you rename the village in my name.\" A toothy smile spread along Veledar's snout. \"And maybe build a gate engraved with my likeness. Or should it be a statue? I think a statue fits me much better. Right here in the center, where everybody can marvel at the fine looks of Crimson Sky, slayer of poverty, beloved of the people!\"\n\nThe crowd burst into the loudest, longest fit of laughter Veledar had the misfortune of hearing. He didn't stop them this time. Instead, he looked around at the growing crowd of people that was starting to get far too close for his liking.\n\n\"I do love a cult, but you're all starting to get a bit too close for my liking.\"\n\n\"Only to see ya betta!\"\n\nCheers accompanied the brave fool's words.\n\nVeledar didn't buy that. \"Aren't you afraid of what damage I can inflict to your feeble little bodies if you anger me?\"\n\n\"Na we're not!\"\n\n\"Because,\" a man clad in a guard's uniform continued. \"We all heard the tales of how this Crimson whatever you call yourself turned tail and ran from our mighty guard force.\"\n\nVeledar closed his eyes as yet another collection of laughter filtered through the crowd.\n\n\"Crimson Sky! Hah, more like the fearful strawberry!\"\n\n\"Shiverin' Raspberry sounds betta cause the scales look like a-\"\n\nVeledar had enough of this barbaric nonsense. He flared his wings, then bounded towards the guard who instigated this feast of insults.\n\n\"Listen here, you pink little worm. I restrained myself from turning your valiant defense into armored steaks, but my patience wears thin, and your lack of respect slowly makes me reconsider the wisdom of my choices.\"\n\n\"Oh G-god,\" The man started sobbing. \"Pppp-please, don't kill me, oh mighty dragon. I'll-I'll clean your scales. Polish your claws! Just please don't kill meeeeeee!\"\n\n\"I might hold onto your promises,\" Veledar got off the man, then helped him onto his feet. \"See?\" he turned towards the townsfolk as the man dusted himself off with a blessed smile on his face. \"I can be reasonable to those who behave themselves.\"\n\n\"He's bloody right!\" The guard stammered. \"This dragon is good!\"\n\n\"Bull's piss!\"\n\n\"I don' believe tha'!\"\n\n\"Don't listen to them.\" The guard hugged one of Veledar's forepaws. \"Talk to me. Anything you need, anything you want, I'm the man for the job.\"\n\nAn obedient pet was not what he had in mind, so Veledar gently pushed the man away. \"I'm searching for the vile woman that stole my book! She's the mother of the girl I allegedly attacked, though I swear by my fine scales I did no such thing.\"\n\n\"The woman whose house you destroyed?\" a man shouted.\n\n\"Damaged!\" Veledar growled, \"That thieving, manner-less female stole a possession of mine and I demand it returned at once.\"\n\nNo suitable answers came until an older man joined the fray. \"You there! Why are you tormenting my guards like that?\"\n\nVeledar turned his snout to see a man walk towards him in a suit of clanky, shining metal armor. He carried a sword and shield, and he was flanked by at least a dozen more guards with spears and crossbows. \"I say again, dragon whatever your name is, what manner of ill curses have you inflicted upon my guard there?\"\n\nVeledar hissed with amusement. \"I was telling your minion here that my property was stolen by a woman that lives here, in your village.\"\n\n\"Which woman is that?\" the man asked, raising one of his large grey eyebrows.\n\n\"The one that lives near the edge of town, in the house I\u2026allegedly damaged, though it was nothing more than a slight dent. Barely noticeable.\"\n\n\"You mean Jizrah?\" The captain scratched through his beard. \"She has been gone long before her house got smashed to pieces. Left poor Vern here 'lone with his daughter. You accuse her of thievery?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Veledar groaned. \"I assure you that human woman is a mischievous, selfish thief that got on the wrong side of a dragon. Now, would you kindly point me in the direction she went? I would like to talk to her privately.\"\n\n\"I won't obey your instructions, dragon. You come here to our peaceful town in a rampage, destroying houses, wrecking banners, threatening guards! Makes me believe you have nothing but ill intentions hidin' beneath your those shiny scales of yours!\"\n\nVeledar strolled towards the man. People parted before him like water, muttering praise and insults alike. He had been polite, and though some smarter individuals appreciated his arrival, most of the mob still saw him like pestilence incarnated. How thick were they? Haven't they understood he could burn them all to cinders?\n\n\"Now you listen here, white beard.\" Veledar stuck his snout into the valiant captain's face. \"I have been nothing but polite and infinitely patient with your angry mob, while your people have responded with only with rudeness and intolerance. That aggravates me, but no more than safeguarding a thief who stole from me!\"\n\nVeledar snorted angrily as the captain stood his ground. \"Do you forget that a dragon stands before you? That I can, with but a simple yawn, unleash true devastation upon this village?\" His eyes narrowed on the man who gulped emptily, his blue eyes filling with genuine worries. Veledar knew he overstepped again by using fear to persuade these people, but there was simply no other way to get past their inferior intellect.\n\n\"Now humans, all I seek is a thief. Provide me with her whereabouts and I shall take my leave in peace, just like I did when I first arrived here.\" he shouted, flaring wings and thrashing his tail, smashing a water trough in two.\n\n\"She went s-south, towards the capital! Please stop destroying my mum's store!\" shouted the mumbling man others referred to as Gerald.\n\nVeledar turned towards the man. \"Where can I find this capital? How far is it from here?\"\n\n\"I dunno, I dunno!\" the man gulped, \"Best I figure it's about two weeks travel by horse. Just follow the road south! You can't miss it!\"\n\n\"Ya! Has floating castles and such!\" shouted another person from the crowd. \"Hard to miss for a dragon.\"\n\n\"See? Was this any harder than throwing petty insults at me?\" With a flap of his wings, Veledar once more found himself back into the tranquil realm of the high skies, thankful to be away from that boisterous group of miscreants. He was also grateful for the amount of self-control he exhibited under duress. A few days ago, he would've surely unleashed his wrath upon the village.\n\nWhile he flew, Veledar wondered how big this capital was. He had never ventured deep into human controlled lands, but he figured anything man-made couldn't be much bigger than that village. Still, the floating castles posed a few problems.\n\nIf they are even real, Veledar shook his snout and laughed at that simple joke, for not even dragons had floating castles, and he was certain one of his kind would've built such a thing.\n\nIt wasn't long before his eyes spotted the rough dirt path the man had spoken about. It stretched as far as his eyes could see, winding the earth like a serpent. Veledar felt bad for the humans that had to take the long and slow path, but he quickly shrugged it off with another beat of his wings.\n\nMinutes later he found himself miles along the path stretched out before him. His eyes fell to a rather large green hill covered in a sea of flowers. However, what stood apart from the multicolored flora drew his attention. From the tree line came a figure running for its life. Arrows zipped past her, barely missing the flowing brown cloak that flew behind her back. The figure made it several hundred feet before at least two dozen other humanoids came in fast pursuit. They were hooting and cheering as they bounded through fields after their prey. They soon had the brown cloaked person surrounded with weapons drawn. Veledar could see that they were talking, but he knew not of what. He circled overhead as the cloaked figure removed their hood to reveal a brown-haired female.\n\nThe woman found herself beset on by all sides as the crowd closed in with sharp blades and even sharper grins on their faces. The woman seemed to be holding her own with a series of flips and kicks to the jaw that caused some thug to collapse to the ground a bloody mess. She pulled out a rapier to cross blades with the few that would have struck her, then laughed loudly as her rapier found its mark, to hide the fear that Veledar could smell. He honestly was surprised that nobody spotted him.\n\nHowever, the woman's victory streak seemed to be coming to a close as a blade nicked her shoulder. A solid fist collided with her gut, knocking the wind out of her with a gasp, then another took her on the side of the head. She collapsed to the ground as the men closed in to mock her in their usual sneering voices.\n\n\"Awwww, what's the matter, Lyndis? Where is that smart mouth now? Bleeding all over the place?\" one of the men laughed, spraying his spittle all over the ground.\n\n\"You're the ones who'll bleed!\" The woman grunted. Lyndis sprung up to stab the man through the chest with her rapier. She flipped over his dumbstruck face, but when her feet hit the ground now stood four of her copies. They all moved hair from their faces to reveal small pointed ears.\n\n\"Fock's sake! Nobody told me the bloody half elf was a mage!\" another man shouted as they rushed the four standing half elves. Veledar chuckled to himself as the warrioress sprung from man to man. Her attackers seemed unable to spot the real half elf amongst the copies, but Veledar of course had spotted the real one right off the bat. It was all a matter of close examination, for the copies of the half elf could not land a blow, lest it caused them to vanish, so Lyndis was having them duck, dodge, and jump around the frustrated thugs. Through all the chaos, she would get in a good stab, and a man would collapse to the ground in a pile of screams and blood.\n\n\"I got her!\" came a cry from a thug as his sword struck her shoulder. Lyndis gasped aloud as her illusions vanished under her lack of concentration. The man followed with a punch to her face, causing her to fall to the ground.\n\n\"You're a feisty bitch, lass, but your games end now,\" the man breathed heavily at the bleeding Lyndis. He turned his head to the side to spit out some blood.\n\n\"Well, ye can go get yerself bent,\" Lyndis groaned back. \"Only took twenty four of ya to get me, ya bloody small cocked basterds-\"\n\nThe man slapped her in the face to silence her vile tongue.\n\n\"You know, before we be getting this one to the boss, I figure we should have a little bit of fun.\" One person hissed, to which the others chuckled and nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Don't worry, princess,\" the man said, putting a rough hand to her chin. \"We won't go too hard on ya. Gotta preserve whatever prettiness we can for the boss.\"\n\nVeledar had enough. Fighting to the death was fine as long as the person deserved it. However, to violate the other person was simply crossing a line. With a flare of his nostrils and a swell of heroic pride, he swooped in and landed behind the man. Veledar smiled as the collected survivors of Lyndis backed away in terror as he spread his wings and unleashed a loud, angry roar. They stood before him like cowering rats, their faces draining of color, their hands tightening over their weapons, and dread filling their eyes.\n\n\"Well boys, seems your moment of fun has come to an end. Maybe if you wouldn't have laughed like snorting pigs, my partner wouldn't have heard your squeals.\" Lyndis laughed in a series of coughs, then, with the other men distracted, she twisted of her captive's grasp and in one fluid motion she pulled a hidden dagger and sunk it deep into the leader's skull. With a dull thud, and a quick gasp of pain, the man collapsed dead onto the ground.\n\nVeledar watched as the men barely cared for their leader's fall. Instead of running, like common humans, they charged him in a feeble display of bravery. They carried their weapons high as they shouted cries of false bravery. With a flick of his red tail, Veledar let loose a deep breath of orange and red flame that enveloped six of the charging men in its fury. They collapsed in screams as the fires consumed their burning bodies. Veledar bounded from the rest, brushing them aside with his scales.\n\n\"Retreat!\" one of the men cried. Veledar had to admit. This might have been the smartest thing one of them said so far. The man looked around to find that he was the last one there, as his compatriots had left him the moment Veledar had incinerated the stupid six. \"Wait for me, you focking cunts!\" The man shouted as he sprinted for the trees. Veledar considered chasing the man down and ending him, but in a way, it was better to let him spread word of his greatness. He turned back towards Lyndis, for despite this show of force, she was still standing before him.\n\nShe did not move as her messy hair waved with the wind and her eyes of amber locked onto his movements. \"Nice work. Wha'd you want?\" She asked.\n\n\"A simple thank you would be enough,\" he said, striking a rather regal pose. \"I did rescue you from a real bind, have I not?\"\n\n\"I think I dispatched more of them than you, dragon.\" She smirked, limping over to one of the dead men and rifling through his pouches. \"Name's Lyndis Kuxion. What should I call my valiant rescuer?\"\n\n\"Crimson Sky, terror of thugs and slayer of unwashed men.\" Valiant beamed with his great white teeth.\n\n\"Very well.\" Lyndis spoke curtly.\n\nVeledar moved closer to her. \"Hey, would you be able to satisfy a curiosity of mine? Why were those thugs after you?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" she started to say, cutting a pouch from another man. \"Beat this group's boss to a job, took his share of the treasure when I learned what exact kind of man he was, then kinda pissed on his name. You can imagine he wasn't very happy to have his reputation smeared through filth. He's lucky to get latrine duties now.\"\n\n\"And what kind of job would this be? You don't see many mages doing back flips like you showed back there.\"\n\n\"Nope. Maybe not,\" Lyndis said. \"I like to think of myself as an adventurer, thrill seeker, sometimes a sword for hire. If you need something gotten, I can also do that.\"\n\nVeledar noted the swell of pride in her voice.\n\n\"You sound like a thief!\" he snorted.\n\n\"I am very well not.\" Lyndis laughed. \"Where were you off to anyway, oh brave and beautiful Crimson Sky? We don't see many dragons around these parts.\"\n\n\"I'm-\" Veledar stumbled over his words for a moment. \"Yeah, I'm off to retrieve a thief that has stolen something of great importance to me.\"\n\n\"Do you know where they headed? Maybe I can help you find them. For a price of course.\" Lyndis moved over to loot another dead scoundrel.\n\n\"They say she went to the capital of this land, located somewhere in the south.\" said Veledar as he shifted a paw through the flowers. For all the bravery and majesty he inspired in Lyndis, exposing such a blatant lack of knowledge made him feel exposed. Lesser, somewhat.\n\n\"Entis?\" the woman's eyes widened briefly before they narrowed down to the same confident look. \"You can count me focking out then, dragon. Unless you want to live the rest of your life in chains or get your head parted from your body, I would suggest you count whatever was stolen gone.\" Lyndis wiped her blade clean of blood, then sheathed it back at her hip.\n\n\"And let them get away with stealing from me? Do you realize how that sounds? To a dragon?\" he said as he moved his tail, ready to thrash the ground. \"Might as well tell me to cut off my own wings.\"\n\n\"Aye. I imagine how bitter defeat sounds on that big boastful tongue. However, I am talking about real danger here, not whatever distorted scenarios you created in your mind. This is not a quest that ends in victory, but then again I guess you haven't even heard what happened to the last dragon that went against Lumara.\" Lyndis said, pulling out a brush and running it through her hair.\n\n\"Lumara? Where is this thing you speak of?\" Veledar asked, puzzled.\n\nLyndis rolled her eyes at the dragon's ignorance. \"This land is called Lumara, and the last dragon was killed by some veteran going by the name of Arcturus Lund. Word on the street says he's quite the dragon slayer.\"\n\n\"One mortal doesn't scare me.\" Veledar snorted in dismissal.\n\nLyndis gritted her jaws. \"This one should. Didn't you just hear what I said? Dragon slayer.\"\n\n\"Can you see me trembling?\" Veledar snorted again.\n\n\"Fine. What about millions of trained humans? And flying machines? And gryphons that can hunt you down no matter where you flee? I suggest you return home and count yourself lucky the king didn't put a bounty on your head.\" She looked towards the forest. \"We've spoken enough about this matter. If you're as smart as you look, you will consider my words before you do anything foolish.\" she stated. \"It was pleasant to meet you, Crimson Sky. I honestly hope you will quit this silly crusade. It would be a shame to lose a dragon so quick to jump to a lady's rescue,\" she smirked, \"even if she doesn't really need it.\"\n\nVeledar watched the lady leave as he settled comfortably on his belly to contemplate his next move. Flying castles? Dragon slayers? Gryphons? Flying Machines? This place was sounding worse every time he learned something new about it. Worst of all, it was starting to sound like this place actually existed, and was not just a simple story from a peasant told to mislead him.\n\nVeledar closed his eyes and tried to imagine what his mother would say at a time like this. She had always been the best at dealing with the lesser races, although she always interacted more with elves than with humanity, or this place called Lumara. The dragon frowned. He knew exactly what she would have said to him. His thoughts turned instead to the dragon slayer. This Lund character sounded familiar. Not the person, of course, but the name. He was certain he had heard it before, maybe in a story or two when he was but a hatchling.\n\nThe dragon shook his head. The sun moved a bit in the sky, and Lyndis was nowhere to be seen. Realizing he spent too long on this hill surrounded by corpses, Veledar spread his wings and returned home, the only environment where he felt confident to make the right decision.\n\n[ To Capture a Dragon ]\n\nArcturus stood on the deck of the Indomitous, watching the men assigned by the king -his men now-train for the upcoming task. He had demanded their best to ensure that minimum mistakes were made. He drilled them in a dragon's weak spots, reminded them how to disable the beast's fearsome breath, as well as how to best spread out if the dragon had the chance to unleash its fiery fury. This rigorous training made the sixty-hour journey pass in a blur for him. By the end of the fifty fifth hour, Arcturus was sure they would at least hold up against the dragon. He had instructed the men specifically on using the stun setting on the crossbow to avoid hurting the beast more than necessary. The bolas they brought, the weighted fire proof nets, flash bombs, and the other various gear he requested also had its part to play. Even so, the soldiers seemed to keep to themselves, away from the paladin, as if he bore some curse that could rub off on them. Arcturus didn't mind the extra distance. If anything, it allowed him to mentally prepare for the encounter with the dragon. He pictured the beast's movements, the lunges it was bound to make, preemptively plotting out his tumbles and dodges to best avoid the creature's inferno of a breath.\n\nDread Flame\u2026it's been two years since I've stained my name and my blade with your unworthy life. Why do I feel your claws squeeze me ever tighter. Will I ever be rid of you? Am I even deserving of peace, when I failed my family?\n\nArcturus stared into the cloudy sky, the drifting clouds, the perfect picture of serenity. Thankfully, there had been no sign of storms on the way to the village, even if his mind felt like one. No matter where he ran, what he did, the memory of Dread Flame latched onto him at every turn. From time to time, he would hear what he would describe as the faint roar of a dragon in the distance, Arcturus knew it was not real. Each time he would shake his head, to convince himself the sound was a product of his tired mind, for no one else made any mention of it. Arcturus tossed it up to his nerves and went through various sword stances on the ship's deck. He stepped to each movement in tune with his heartbeat, letting his arms flow gracefully with each swing.\n\n\"Town in view!\" a crew member shouted out, interrupting his rhythm. \"Keep an eye out for the beast, men! Prepare for the fight of your lives!\"\n\n\"This is what we've been training for!\" Arcturus sheathed his sword into his scabbard and strode over to the wooden railing at the ship's front.\n\n\"Aye aye, sir.\"\n\n\"We'll show this dragon what happens when they mess with us!\"\n\nArcturus put a faint smile on his face as he made his way through the soldiers that gathered by the railing. He patted their shoulders, shook hands, emboldened them with a few words to calm their undoubtedly racing hearts. Some of these men had never seen a village from above before, their honest fascination and glee reminding Arcturus of what it meant to live. To truly live.\n\nThe town was small from the air, relatively tiny compared to Entis, a sea of masterfully crafted buildings that seemed to stretch on for miles. The small roofs could already be seen like tiny pebbles on a clear floor of green. He only lingered on the sight for a moment before looking to the surrounding skyline, almost expecting to see the dragon descend upon the ship with its teeth bared.\n\n\"Ready up, men! The dragon doesn't care who inhabits this ship. In its eyes, we're all kindling for its flames. Prey to sink its deadly teeth into, So quit your staring, pack up your gear, and be ready to disembark at a moment's notice!\"\n\nArcturus smiled as the men gave him a sharp salute before scrambling for their gear. He descended below deck with them to fetch a clipboard that had a list of questions he had prepared for the townsfolk who saw the dragon. He wondered how terrible of a beast this one would be, only to see Selina looking at him in his mind. Her eyes stared at him with the same familiarity Arcturus got used to whenever he his left home. He remembered how she had made him recite the paladin's oath before he left each time. It must have brought her comfort, he thought, to hear himself center his mind, his actions, and his beliefs.\n\nSo, as he picked up the pieces of his armor that Matilda had made for him, Arcturus began to recite his oath once more like he had always done for Selina.\n\n\"As a paladin, I am sworn to valor.\" He placed his leg armor one at a time, left, and then right.\n\n\"My heart will know only virtue.\" Next, he set the greaves, then tassels.\n\n\"My blade will defend the helpless.\" He placed on his chest-plate and back-plate.\n\n\"My might will uphold the weak.\" He attached the pauldrons next, hearing them click into place.\n\n\"My words will speak only truth.\" His armguards completed him, his form already turned into a metal soldier. \"And my wrath shall undo the wicked.\"\n\nArcturus held up his helmet in his gloved hands before donning it softly, letting the straps tighten around his chin to perfection. Through the visor, he gathered his longsword and crossbow, before returning to the ship's deck. Along the way, several soldiers joined him some wearing smiles on their faces, others worry. Arcturus knew the feeling well, and offered them some words of encouragement. He spoke of their training too, praising the men for their unmatched skill. The soldiers thanked him with large smiles, almost forgetting that mere hours separated them from a clash with a potentially deadly dragon.\n\nThe Indomitous drifted into the small town, settling in a clearing not too far from the center of the town. From her plank filed out the soldiers clad in heavy armor, each carrying a different weapon, all equipped with packs of gear upon their backs and spirits of determination on their faces. Arcturus gave each an assignment, from rounding up the witnesses, to questioning the other townsfolk about the dragon. They all scrambled off, ready to please the paladin. He had not ventured far into the town before he was approached by the guard captain, with a retinue of four other guards. Arcturus remembered the bald man from the reports, but could not place the name just yet. He knew it started with a B though, for whatever it was worth.\n\n\"Welcome, Paladin Arcturus. Tis truly an honor to have you and your men aid us in the hunt for the wicked beast.\" the blue-eyed captain said. \"Your presence already put our fair town at ease.\" he gestured to the buildings around them. \"If we can be of any assistance whatsoever, please don't hesitate to ask.\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you, captain Borbaneous--\" nodded Arcturus.\n\n\"It's Sirius.\" The captain interrupted, making Arcturus mentally kick himself.\n\n\"Apologies. My mind is focused on the dragon. Captain Sirius, you should be commended for your unrelenting bravery. You and your men survived an encounter with a dragon! That is no small feat, considering the list of things the beast has done to your cozy town.\" Arcturus gestured to the town center, which, despite the missing banner, looked rather pristine.\n\n\"Well, we had the best carpenters on the job to fix up all the damage caused by that rampaging monster. If you would've arrived after the cowardly beast fled, you would've gazed upon one of Devastation's many faces.\" said the captain as he smiled nervously. \"Anyway, for the value of the damages, you would have to ask the councilman Troy Gestaurin. He handles all the book keeping affairs. Will the king send us money to cover the extensive repairs? My men worked day and night to-\"\n\n\"I have every reason to think he will,\" said Arcturus, eyeing Sirius with suspicion. It was not unheard of for towns to exaggerate threats so they would receive compensation for supposed damage. While they had been talking, a crowd began to gather, each person trying to thank Arcturus for arriving to finally free them from the dragon's tyranny. Arcturus held his clipboard at the ready, asking anyone who had a story for details, and strangely enough, everyone had their own version of things.\n\n\"See, the big scaly bastard came down, spoutin' fire, and when he popped his jaws open, I saw teeth so many I lost count! He tore through my mum's poor banner, he did!\" a man sobbed, holding up pieces of a thoroughly shredded banner. \"But thanks to the brave guards, the beast fled before he had the chance to gobble me in revenge. Should he return, I fear for my safety, good sir. You need to catch it before he destroys anything else!\"\n\n\"He?\" Arcturus raised an eyebrow. \"So the dragon's male?\"\n\nThe man scrunched his face. \"I dunno!\" he spouted. \"Not like I had the chance to glance 'tween his legs when he rampaged aroun' our town, sir!\"\n\n\"Alright, I'll just take that as a vague no.\" Arcturus rolled his eyes, doubting a dragon would take the time to shred a banner, less likely in any villainous form. Thankfully, his soldiers had brought him other people to question, more importantly, townsfolk who had seen the dragon firsthand.\n\nArcturus settled comfortably at a table brought over by one of the many inns. The wood was rather thin, and covered in signs of wear. Across from him sat the little girl and her father that had seen the dragon during its first arrival.\n\n\"So, this dragon burst through your door, just like that? Had he no reason to target your house specifically?\" Arcturus asked, looking up from the testimonial he had from the man.\n\n\"Not out of random, papa!\" came the little girl's voice. \"He was after something like\u2026something like a book of sorts!\" the girl's eyes lit up with realization. \"Yes, he was searching for a book stolen by-\"\n\n\"Hush now, Abigail. The paladin was talking to me.\" The father quickly grabbed his child and bounced her on his leg. \"Sorry to confuse you, my lord. The girl, she's just shocked by this dreadful act of vandalism. Truly, she means nothing by it. The book, that's just something she conjured to cope up with all the confusion and fear our town has been put through.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Arcturus said. \"However, there is a reason why you both stand here. I heard your version. Now I want to hear hers,\" the paladin smiled back at the girl. \"Abigail, you said the dragon was after a book? Why would you imagine a big, angry lizard like that would be after something so\u2026ordinary?\"\n\nAbigail's lips threatened to cover her face with the size of the smile that had sprung forth. She took a deep breath before answering.\n\n\"T'wasn't a normal book! He was looking for this one, with pretty pictures of dragons in it! Told me so himself!\"\n\n\"Oh, oh, h-hold on!\" Arcturus chuckled as he struggled to keep up with the little girl. \"You have to slow down there. I simply cannot write that fast.\"\n\nAbigail blushed and apologized before repeating herself at a slower pace.\n\n\"Me mum came home with a pretty book, full of pictures. It looked like a fairy tale, and\u2026I love these kind of books, sir. They make me happy!\" she said, putting her hands together.\n\n\"What kind of pictures did it have in it?\" Arcturus asked as he wrote the description on his paper.\n\n\"Of dragons! All different colors! They were so pretty, sir paladin. I want a dragon of my own!\"\n\nArcturus chuckled. \"Well, Abbi, if I find an abandoned egg, I'll know exactly what to do with it. Now, did the book say anything that can help our investigation? Who the dragon is? Perhaps why he was after this particular item?\"\n\n\"Me mum dunno. It had strange scratch marks that could be letters, I suppose. Then, after she left, the dragon came into me home with a big boom like thunder!\" Abigail held up her hands and mimed the wall crashing down.\n\n\"Were you not afraid of the dragon, Abigail? You tell the story with such excitement.\" Arcturus chuckled. \"Why' you're almost leading me to believe this dragon and you are best friends!\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" the little girl cocked her head back a bit. \"I was a bit afraid, you know, when he barged in like the storm. The dragon was very angry.\"\n\n\"Why was the dragon angry?\" Arcturus raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"He said mum stole his book, and he wanted it back.\" She started to lean back in her chair. \"Are you going to kill the dragon, sir paladin?\" she asked.\n\nArcturus stopped writing to look into her eyes, which started to fill with tears.\n\n\"You can't kill 'im. Please! He promised not to hurt me mum!\" her little hand grabbed onto one of Arcturus' fingers.\n\nThe paladin's gaze softened. \"Oh, sweet child. The dragon probably meant that he would kill her painlessly. You cannot trust the words of a such a deceitful creature.\"\n\n\"Nuh-uh! I don't believe you!\" said Abigail, placing her hands on her hips. \"You weren't there to see him! He's not evil, just pissed because his book got lost, but he only wants it back, I swear. He never hurt anybody!\"\n\n\"How can you be so sure of that, dear?\" Arcturus frowned. \"Dragons mastered the art of weaving lies. That's why they live so long. They lounge in their caves, plotting from the top of their treasure hoards. No matter what this one told you, dragons can be very deceptive at times.\"\n\n\"Abbi,\" said the father. \"Trust the paladin. He is more experienced in dealing with dragons.\" he placed his hand on Abigail's shoulder. \"She's just a child, sir. You know how creative young'uns are. I've been there to look into the eyes of real terror. Believe me, this beast is nowhere half as accommodating as she makes it sound.\"\n\n\"But I saw it in his eyes!\" Abigail continued, turning her head to her father. \"Papa, he wasn't a killer! Please, please, please, don't make him the bad guy!\"\n\nFor a moment, Arcturus believed what she said. The devotion she held onto the dragon's sincerity was remarkable.\n\nThen Dread Flame roared in his mind, reminding Arcturus of all that he lost at the claws of a dragon.\n\n\"You were fooled, my dear.\" He released a long, drawn out sigh. \"Listen to your father this time. I believe this dragon would have harmed your mother grievously for stealing his item. I suggest you count yourself lucky he didn't want to extract his revenge on you or your father.\"\n\n\"But that's not-\"\n\nArcturus heard enough by that point. He thanked the two for their time and had a guard escort the family out of the room.\n\nThe next person to enter was a guard who had been with captain Sirius on that day, in the man's words own words \"the dragon attacked the village.\" Arcturus endured through a tale of heroics that the man listed off as performed by many of his fellow guardsman, This valiant defender had just finished telling how he had struck the dragon with an arrow, when a half-elven woman strode into the room with her face full of anger.\n\n\"That's a load of goblin spittle you's bein' fed!\" the woman pointed a finger at the paladin, brushing her brown hair out of her face.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" One of the guards said.\n\nShe crossed her arms over her studded leather armor, worn from use by scrapes and patches.\n\n\"Let her speak!\" Arcturus said to the two men that moved to restrain the woman.\n\n\"I met the dragon all these liars claim to have attacked the town, and he just doesn't seem the type to do something so nonsensical.\"\n\n\"Lady, forgive me for being blunt, but who are you to throw such claims?\" Arcturus narrowed his eyes.\n\nThe woman must've been an adventurer, judging by all the gear she was carrying. She had a bedroll strapped to her back, torches, rope, and a backpack. Arcturus was ready to bet his week's salary she was definitely one of those traveler types, or a mercenary.\n\n\"Name's Lyndis Kuxion.\" she said, \"and that dragon you're all ready take revenge on saved my life from a band of fockin' bandits.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Arcturus replied, his voice thick with skepticism. \"Please, expand. No. Enlighten us on how this supposedly benevolent dragon saved your life.\"\n\n\"Glady, you Lumarian brute.\" Lyndis said. She dragged her own chair over to the table, quickly turning it around so the backing was facing the table. She sat down, then started to tell her version of the story.\n\nArcturus listened to her tale of events. It all started on a nearby hill along the road. He figured she was exaggerating her abilities. What else was new with the adventurer types? They all slayed dragons single handedly, stood against dozens of enemies, and somehow always found a priceless artifact, all on the virtue of their own singular skill.\n\nOne thing stuck out, though. Arcturus considered himself generally good at picking up when someone was lying, but when the woman spoke of the dragon saving her, she certainly sounded like this was the truth. When her mouth ceased forming words, she just looked to him with a great big smile on her face.\n\n\"How does that sound? More believable than\u2026murdering dragon descends upon a town to destroy buildings from the thrill of it, aye? They're strong and full of themselves sometime, but dragons ain't stupid. You should know that better than these cryin' oafs.\"\n\nArcturus frowned as he moved his fingers over to the report. He had two accounts of the dragon now that did not paint him in the same light as the rest of the town had shone on him. Most importantly, it certainly didn't match the official report the king had given him to study.\n\n\"Well, you can believe it if you want, paladin. I've no reason whatsoever to lie to you. Buuuuuut if you'd prefer to hunt monsters and blindly swing your sword at things, be my guest, of course.\" She shrugged, stood up and brushed past a guard on her way out. \"Best not waste your time with the others. They'll just trickle the same squirt of urine and call it wine!\" she yelled back to him.\n\nArcturus rubbed his forehead. This day seemed to drag on forever. \"Alright, who's next?\"\n\nNext to enter the room was captain Sirius with his usual guards around him. In his hands rested a brown cloth, clutched tightly, as if this bag was of the utmost importance. Arcturus noted that the guards were giving the captain a wider birth than they had previously.\n\n\"My lord,\" the captain bowed as much as his back allowed, \"I have returned with an item that may prove fruitful in your endeavor to capture the beast.\"\n\nHe held up the cloth bag and undid the string that held the thing together. When the mouth of the bag parted, a single crimson scale was revealed, clearly belonging to the dragon Arcturus was sent to hunt.\n\n\"When the dragon burst into the house the first time, he must have scratched himself on a beam. Left this crucial piece of evidence behind without checking, like the proud fool he is.\"\n\nArcturus reached out to grasp the scale in his left hand. It was smooth to the touch, like he figured it would be. He looked up to the captain with a slight smile of relief on his tired face.\n\n\"This will actually be of great help, captain. You have my gratitude for your contributions.\" He gestured to a soldier that had just walked in, then handed the scale to the man, gently. The last thing he wanted was to damage the scale too much. \"Make your way back to the ship and tell the captain to get ready for lift-off. Once that's done, head to the gryphon keeper. I believe we have a way to find the beast's lair.\"\n\nIt had only taken an hour to round up all the soldiers and take off in the indomitous. The ship rose into the sky gracefully, being led as if on an invisible wire by the tawny gryphon leading it towards the mountains. Arcturus stood on the deck, eyes scanning the forest below, occasionally drifting to the sunflower-colored wing of the gryphon gryphon. He held up the scale, then smiled to the gryphon, still amazed at their tracking ability.\n\nThis is good. We'll wrap this unpleasant story, and in a few hours, and after that, I guess I'll go back to my usual life. What remains of it, at least.\n\nArcturus turned back towards the group of men that gathered on the deck. The squad fidgeted with the same anticipation that stirred within Arcturus' breast. Despite being a force of destruction, he had to admit to himself. Seeing a dragon in flesh was a special feeling.\n\nThey flew for quite some time before the gryphon screeched back towards the ship as they reached the top of the largest mountain. The gryphon circled as Arcturus ordered the men to the lifeboats. Arcturus took the lead with his lifeboat as the four other boats followed him down towards the cave. He noted it was a tad small, for someone he considered the offspring of Dread Flame.\n\nArcturus jumped over the side of the boat as they touched down gently. He gave hand signals to the men to follow as he slowly advanced into the cave's mouth. He saw some of his soldiers hovering their fingers over the trigger of their weapons, or gripping the grip tight.\n\n\"Set up the traps,\" he whispered to the others. They grabbed and set up several launchers for the nets, just in case the dragon decided to fly away from his lair. \"You stay outside with the launchers,\" he pointed out towards the sharpshooters. \"Get ready to stun him if he tries anything funny.\"\n\nArcturus turned back to his hunting party. \"As for the rest of you, keep your weapons up and your eyes peeled. We don't know what manner of beast we're dealing with here.\"\n\n\"What if he's friendly?\" A man suddenly asked.\n\n\"Are you ready to take that risk?\" Arcturus hissed.\n\nThe stern look in the paladin's eyes allowed for no comebacks. Once his men nodded, he made his way into the cave, the steps of their boots akin to the click clack of a centipede. The air smelled of stale cooked meat, and something specific to the scent of a dragon. Arcturus crouched along the cave wall, the others right behind him. They hugged it as if the wall could very well be the thing that would save them from what lay ahead.\n\nThe torch-lit hall led deeper into the cave, wide enough to fit at least two dragons. He found himself eyeing the tracks on the floor, along with scratch marks from what were no doubt horns on the ceiling.\n\n\"Why's the dragon havin' a focken-?\"\n\nArcturus held up a finger to silence the man, cursing to himself. Although the man had a point, dragons could very well see in the dark. However, maybe this one just liked the illumination of the pleasant torchlight. He moved the thought away from his mind as he peeked around the corner ahead of him, barely stifling a gasp.\n\nForty feet away the dragon was lying on makeshift blankets and mattresses next to a pile of gold and books. His eyes were closed shut, and his chest was moving up and down with the deep breaths characteristic to deep sleep. Between the dragon's front limbs was some kind of toy, that, upon careful inspection, revealed itself to be a stuffed dragon of some kind.\n\nThe Gods are with me today, Arcturus' heart quickened as he grabbed hold of his crossbow. Let us see if you are indeed the-\n\n\"You know, it's somewhat rude to sneak up on a dragon at the height of his laziness.\" The red beast yawned, opening one eye lazily. He stood up on his four limbs and stretched very much how a cat might. \"To what do I owe the displeasure of being roused from-\"\n\n\"Aim at his throat!\" Arcturus shouted, interrupting the dragon mid speech. Bolts of energy sailed past his gleaming armor as he fired his own crossbow at the dragon. Veledar yelped in surprise and tried to leap out of the way, but the barrage was much too thick to avoid every missile.\n\n\"Fan out! Trap him in the corner!\"\n\n\"You insolent slugs!\" Veledar growled as he inhaled a deep breath, only to have small sparks of useless fire escape through his jaws.\n\n\"Hah! Missing something?\" Arcturus pointed a finger at the dragon. \"Guess you'll have to stretch your limbs after all! Men, advance!\"\n\n\"How dare you?\" Veledar hissed as he bounded past several men. With a whip of his tail he slammed them against the cave wall.\n\n\"FIRE!\" the paladin's voice washed over the scrapes of steel and claws.\n\nArcturus' men fired another volley, then he quickly tossed a flashbang towards the dragon. It exploded with a brilliant light that forced the dragon to leap behind his pile of treasure.\n\n\"Trap him!\"\n\nThe men took positions around the cave, weapons at the ready, hearts thundering in their chests.\n\n\"Sir, we have him cornered. Shouldn't we bring the nets?\"\n\n\"Not yet!\"\n\nVeledar then burst out from behind the gold, wings spread wide. He swooped around the men as they fired, before suddenly turning towards the exit. The soldiers followed him with their energy shots, one man even tossing a bola. However, none of the attacks seemed to have an effect on the dragon, who spread his wings to fly out of the cave unmolested.\n\n\"What in the blazes happened?\"\n\nArcturus took aim with his own crossbow at the departing dragon. He spied a slight glitter in the dragon's form, followed by more bolts from his men impacting the scales.\n\n\"It's an illusion!\" he cried out to his men in shock. He turned back towards the gold, but it was too late. Veledar had already pounced out onto several soldiers, flailing his limbs and tail, carving his way through the wall of steel-clad men that stood between him and freedom. The dislodged men landed on the ground with hard thuds, not rising when the dragon moved onto their comrades. The remaining soldiers and Arcturus fired volley after volley into Veledar's wings and torso, causing the dragon to recoil in pain.\n\n\"Rraaaah, what an annoying itch!\" he roared out, smashing two soldiers together with his paws.\n\n\"You come to my home!\" He smashed another soldier into the ground. \"And attack me!\" He toppled over soldier after soldier, the bolts of energy only a slight inconvenience to the red beast. He deflected nets that were tossed at his wings, bolas that would've rendered his legs useless, and even hitting back a flashbang thrown his way. He stopped only when the other soldiers were all scattered on the ground before him, with only Arcturus and a handful of soldiers left to stare him down.\n\n\"Take your leave, you ill-mannered monkeys, before I push you out myself!\" Veledar hissed through ragged breaths.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Arcturus raised his crossbow and shot another bolt into the dragon's torso, followed by more from his soldiers.\n\n\"Nrrr\u2026nraaaawarrhhh\u2026\"\n\nArcturus smirked as Veledar's limbs splayed uselessly around his collapsing form. On his way to greet the floor, he still flailed his tail at several soldiers foolish enough to get close. They flew through the air with little grace, hitting the floor hard. Arcturus watched Veledar try to stand, the dragon's limbs unresponsive, dragged down by invisible weight. Although he managed to keep his head up as his shaking limbs collapsed beneath him, the dragon stared at Arcturus' visor with his blue eyes full of spite.\n\n\"You filthy cowards! Not even daring to face me in a fair fight!\" he gasped out in pain. \"I guess\u2026that steel dress suits you well\u2026woman.\"\n\n\"Fair?\" Arcturus chuckled. \"Take a look at yourself, beastie. You tower over me, weight more than all of us combined, bear scales that put even my own armor to shame, and to top that off, you can take wing whenever you please. I can hardly imagine how a fight would play out fairly between us, so please, illuminate me with your esteemed wisdom. You are, after all, much better than us, right? Isn't that how your kind sees us? Playthings to combat boredom? Perhaps even prey to fill their bellies with?\"\n\n\"If only you fought the same way you talk... You're putting me to sleep just by talking,\" the dragon snorted tiredly.\n\n\"Aye. But I'm the one who stands, while you're the one to greet the ground. Sleep well, beastie.\"\n\nArcturus didn't even restrain himself this time. He just laughed in the dragon's face, then ordered his remaining men to bring shackles.\n\nHe took off his helmet and set it down close to Veledar, who collapsed his head on the ground, his breath becoming increasingly steadier. The beast looked deceptively pleasing to the eye when incapacitated. A small itch even flared the words spoken by the two girls, Abigail and Lyndis. What did they see, when they looked upon this beast? A monster? Perhaps something else?\n\nArcturus almost felt pity for the creature. His hand twitched above his sword, not to grab the weapon, but to stop the men from carrying his orders. Perhaps it was wise, to have a few moments alone with the dragon. Just to consider his options.\n\nThen Dread Flame roared inside the depths of his mind. Arcturus saw the ship going down. His desperate escape which led him to the very streets of his home, where the beast locked his claws around his leg to prevent him from giving aid to his terrified family.\n\nThe fear, the pain, the anguish\u2026it all reflected off the scales of what Abigail and Lyndis branded as a friend and savior.\n\nArcturus rested his hand on the pommel of his sword, then approached the beast's fallen head. The dragon's moist breath stained his armor, but Arcturus felt anything but warm. His cold eyes bore straight into the beast's blue gaze, hard as the steel he wore. \"I am Arcturus Lund, dragon. Remember my name well, along with the day when you fell at my feet.\"\n\n\"Y-You did not best me,\" Veledar hissed, his voice growing quieter. \"You brought an army into my home\u2026ambushed me just as I fell asleep... and worse of all, you think your actions are justified.\"\n\n\"Gah. I cannot waste anymore time with this nonsense.\" He waved to his men. \"I've had enough of this unpleasant tongue. Shackle him.\"\n\nThe soldiers clasped large iron shackles onto the dragon, pinning his rear and front limbs together.\n\n\"Steel suits you, beast.\" Arcturus said, feeling a strange, almost cruel manner of satisfaction from besting his second dragon since Dread Flame.\n\n\"Like false justice suits you.\" The dragon shot back. \"Why are you doing this? I only damaged a house and crumpled a stupid cloth on a stick called banner.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that what you truly believe?\" Arcturus pressed.\n\n\"It's\u2026the truth. Ask anyone around.\" The dragon answered.\n\n\"Sir, is it wise to-\"\n\nArcturus raised a hand. \"I've already interrogated the town you terrorized. I am not doing this because I like it, dragon. I do it because it's just. For crimes against our land, our king, and our citizens, you are going to be brought to our capital and made an example of.\" Arcturus finished that off by picking his helmet.\n\n\"A trial for a wooden wall and a cheap banner\u2026that doesn't\u2026sound right\u2026\" The beast managed to say before fatigue overwhelmed his senses.\n\nArcturus walked away from the dragon in silence. He was certainly a tad smaller than Dread Flame had been, but that made sense in a way, for the offspring to always be smaller than the father. Arcturus waved to the survivors to start moving the dragon out of the cave. They tied up some ropes around him and dragged the dragon down the hallway and out to the ship. Arcturus stayed behind with a group to recover the soldiers the dragon had attacked. He noticed something while they came to the first body. The man was still alive. He quickly gave a look to the others brought down by Veledar to notice with utter surprise that all of them were alive as well. It looked like the dragon had simply knocked them out instead of killing them. He called over a soldier with healing herbs and potions, praising the Gods for their intervention.\n\n\"Pah! The Gods. Are you asking for their aid, or mine?\" The healer shook off his belt of vials.\n\n\"I'm asking both. Do what you can for my men please. We must depart immediately.\"\n\n\"Hah. Bruises and simple scrapes are all the afflictions I can count. Either your dragon doesn't know how to fight.\" laughed the man, \"or he didn't attack with the intention to kill anybody.\"\n\nArcturus walked outside to where the dragon now laid unconscious. Veledar was held tight by the ropes that now bound his wings together. Arcturus certainly didn't expect the dragon to spare anyone. Perhaps he really was as lazy as he described himself before the attack began.\n\n\"Collect his treasure before we leave.\" he called out to some of the men. \"It will be good to rid this beast from his ill-gotten gains.\"\n\n\"What shall we do with it, sir?\"\n\n\"Give back to those he stole from.\" Arcturus said confidently, even if the same creeping feeling of doubt resurfaced beneath his confident smile. He dropped down between the dragon's legs to rest his back against the beast's scaly belly, warm, in spite of the hard scales that protected it.\n\nWho am I really dealing with here? The paladin wondered as he looked upon the dragon's sleeping form. Am I making the right choice, to condemn this creature based on shady evidence? To take his hoard without justification? What if\u2026\n\nArcturus grabbed one of the dragon's talons, a sharp, wicked thing he knew too well from his encounters with Dread Flame. He couldn't allow himself to be pinned a second time. To be helpless. To stand idly and watch others suffer at the claws of a dragon.\n\nWith a grim look about his face, Arcturus stood up, took one last look at the dragon, then ordered him hauled onto the ship for the trial that awaited in in the capital city of Entis.\n\n[ Restrained Questions ]\n\nThe morning sun slowly pierced through the overwhelming amount of gray clouds cluttering the distant sky. Its warm rays descended from the heavens briefly, illuminating the green treetops that swayed every so often in the cool spring breeze. These verdant giants were alive this morning, during the first day of spring. Birds with vibrant plumage flew quickly through the curtain of leaves, darting from branch to branch like little thrill seekers determined to test their mettle. They seemed exhilarated, to bask in the embrace of blessed warmth, now that winter relinquished the frigid grasp it had over the land. Mammals of all species and sizes also seemed to spring from their dens like little flowers, helping turn the forest that had been crippled by the winter's frozen blanket into a verdant realm that was bursting with life.\n\nOn this particular morning, a young doe grazed in a nearby field, her brown and white fur cast in the shadow of the nearby trees. Though her ears flicked this way and that, she was blissfully unaware of the crimson scaled hatchling that stared at her from the tall grass.\n\nThe little dragon prowled on all fours, trying to keep his red body from showing through the foliage. His haunches stood tense, ready to spring, like the limbs of a cat on the verge of pouncing its prey, with his tail swaying from one side to the other. His front claws fidgeted for a moment, digging into the soft earth with excitement from the prey yet uncaught. Though he felt the urge to pounce, his wings remained close to his body, biding their time to flare.\n\nThe hatchling opened and closed his snout, displaying rows of sharp teeth. Oh, how much he would've loved to terrify his prey. Show it what a powerful dragon he was!\n\nUnfortunately, such approach would surely lead to failure, so the dragon shook his head and closed his blue eyes, trying to focus on the current hunt, not the taste of what was to come. As he advanced towards his prey, he breathed carefully, not smelling the usual stench of fear erupting from an animal on the brink of death. He grinned to himself, proud that he had snuck this close to her undetected. He was almost poised to strike when he heard a crack from what sounded like a nearby tree branch, causing the doe to lift her head. She sniffed and bolted into the trees, its legs almost slipping in haste.\n\nThe wrymling pounced from his hiding spot to find his claws grasping at thin air instead of the succulent flesh he imagined in his mind.\n\n\"Manticore's bottom!\" The wrymling snarled angrily, smacking his tail on the ground with a dull thump. \"I was this close to catching it!\"\n\nWhile his claws tore through the earth in frustration, his mind raced with what could have gone wrong. By all accounts, he made sure to be downwind, kept hidden from sight, and remained as silent as a dragon could be. His eyes squinted as he thought to the twig snapping. The dragon's nostrils shuddered as he drew in a deep breath. A familiar smell he knew far too well was the source of all his pains.\n\n\"Veledar!\" A feminine voice shouted. A silver wrymling pounced from the grass, tackling the red one.\n\nThey rolled around, smacking and clawing playfully at each other, following up with a bite to the shoulder.\n\n\"Get off, pest! Get off I said!\" Veledar protested, pushing the annoyingly clingy silver wrymling off him. \"That wasn't funny, Adalina. You ruined my hunt is what you did.\"\n\n\"You hunt?\" Adalina laughed, rising up onto all four paws and smirking with a wide grin. \"What hunt is that? I don't see any prey laying around.\"\n\n\"That's because you soured it with your clumsy paws and your\u2026your stench! Your stench is what drove my prey away!\" Veledar stuck his tongue out at her.\n\n\"Why did you even go out?\" Adalina brushed the insults off without a care in the world, her amber eyes filled with curiosity instead of anger. \"You know momma doesn't like it when you wander off on your own.\"\n\n\"Grah! She's silly, to think I'm helpless as a squirrel. I was going to show her what a great hunter I am.\" He strode over to her. \"I'm ahead of any dragon my age. Probably the best that ever lived!\"\n\n\"That's not true.\" Adalina stuck her tongue out in mockery of him. \"Momma is a way better hunter than you. She kept us fed. What did you do? Scare a deer like a clumsy little hatchling.\"\n\n\"Shut up.\"\n\n\"Not until you admit you're still a hatchling instead of this great dragon overlord.\"\n\n\"Well, obviously.\" Veledar rolled his eyes and stomped his paws. \"But that's not fair. Momma is all grown up! When I'll be her age, I will have a gigantic cave filled with treasure and-and humans to do my bidding! I'll be their new king!\"\n\n\"Somehow, I doubt they will listen to any word you say. Besides, they love their current king.\" Adalina remarked. She darted away into the grass and crouched into a similar stance that Veledar had. \"Besides, while you will be proclaiming yourself the king of humans, I will be busy ruling the whole world. You have such simple views, Veledar. Still a hatchling in both body and mind.\"\n\n\"Am not!\" He shot back, sniffing the ground where the doe had been.\n\nHe could probably track the damn prey to wherever she had gotten off to. Prove to his sister he was the better offspring, and make his mother radiate pure pride in the process.\n\n\"Hey, Adalina...Hey!\" He shouted as, once again, his sister tackled him to the ground. After another round of play biting and scratches, Veledar had his sister pinned to the ground, smugly looking down on her.\n\n\"Stop these stupid games! I need to hunt.\" He let her go as she sighed.\n\n\"When will you be back from this extremely important task?\" she asked. \"It's been boring without you around. Momma's been making her usual trips. That leaves the cave silent. And cold\u2026\" Her head dipped slightly.\n\nVeledar almost felt bad for mistreating his sister. With his head bowed in shame, he moved closer and nuzzled her scaly neck. \"Once I catch this doe, we can have the rest of the day for ourselves. What do you say?\"\n\n\"Deal!\" Adalina smiled back. \"You know\u2026it's male dragons who usually provide for their mates. Bring me something good!\"\n\nVeledar blushed slightly as her warm tongue rolled over his cheek. What did she mean by that? He shook his head off the strange butterflies that caught hold of his scales, but Adalina was already gone, off toward the mountain top they called home.\n\nLeft alone, Veledar quickly dashed after his missing doe, quietly as a young dragon could be, careful not to crush a twig under his paws or tangle his horns in a bush. The doe was easy to follow for a hunter with keen senses. His mother had told him once how elves hunted without relying so much on their instinct of smell, which made him wonder how they caught any sort of prey. The doe's path took Veledar up the river that ran down his mother's mountain, snaking its way up patches of loose rocks that looked like they could dislodge themselves at only the slightest of nudges.\n\nThe dragon stopped when he caught sight of the doe once again. She was standing in a ring of trees, oblivious to the threat hiding in the shadows.\n\nVeledar crouched low into his hunting stance, his tail once again twitching in anticipation, He wriggled his haunches, and when the doe went down for another bite of succulent grass, he pushed the ground with all he had and latched himself onto his prey. His claws found new purchase into the doe's hide, and his teeth quickly followed. Veledar fell along with his prey, blood spraying everywhere around him. In a moment, the anticipation, the thrill, the concentration, all of it dispelled once he picked up his prey by its dead, clammy neck.\n\nVeledar would've celebrated his victory if his eyes didn't catch two fawns staring back at him from the river's bank. They were brown in color, naturally smaller than their dead mother. They scampered off into the underbrush, still watching with dread-filled eyes from the new hiding spot.\n\n\"I\u2026I'm sorry,\" Veledar muttered to himself. He was well aware of the fact that simple animals could not comprehend his words, but still, he felt like he had a duty towards the two orphans. \"I will honor her. She did not die in vain.\"\n\nThat said, he grabbed the doe by the scruff of the neck and started to drag the corpse back home, to share it with his sister. Every once in a while, he'd throw a look back to the blood-stained spot where he ended the promising life of a mother. How could he tell Adalina something like this?\n\nThe answer was simple. He wouldn't. Instead, he was going to spin this into a tale of bravery that would surely make his sister proud -and perhaps even envious-of his skill."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "\"Wake up!\"\n\nVeledar didn't really want to, despite the voice's desires. It was a distinctive male one, quiet at first, as if the sound was muffled through a piece of cloth. Veledar tried to ignore it, but the voice returned with renewed fury. The scenery around Veledar started to blur and fade away. His limbs seemed to lock up with the ground, and with a growl of panic, Veledar merged with the earth, darkness filling up his eyes in an instant.\n\nVeledar opened an eye and tried to move his limbs, only to find that he could not. He was currently strapped to the floor of a wooden room, with leather straps that felt slightly too tight. The room was lit by a single lantern hanging by a large dark red door, and somehow, the dragon realized could open his mouth. Veledar did the first thing that came to mind. He took a deep breath, letting his glands flare open to let out the molten fire brewing within them. He was going to show those foolish humans how stupid it was to keep him contained in an environment predominantly made of wood. Veledar growled. Hissed. Spat. Yet no matter how much he struggled, fire refused to spring forth, and he was only left with an unpleasant burning sensation in the back of his throat. It was then that he noticed another belt, tight around his neck, right where his fire glands were, its purpose to keep them tight enough to render him unable to breathe out his blazing fury.\n\n\"Wicked pink-skinned rats!\" Veledar unleashed a hiss of frustration. He tried to thrash around in hopes to loosen up the bindings. There had to be a weakness somewhere. Had to.\n\n\"Try as hard as you like, dragon. All this growly effort of yours serves to make you tired,\" laughed a man's voice.\n\nVeledar's eyes squinted. \"Why don't you come closer, and see what else I can do?\" He hissed. \"I would be surprised if you managed to keep your breeches clean more than a few seconds.\"\n\n\"Ah, as much as I'd enjoy proving you wrong, I find myself quite content to observe you from here. Besides, the paladin wanted to have words with you. Preserve whatever strength you have. Why, it's your only chance to explain yourself.\"\n\nThe paladin? Was that the man in the fancy metal suit? Veledar wasn't completely certain. He had the eyes of a hunter though, unafraid as Veledar leaped to his men and knocked them out one by one.\n\n\"By all means, bring this paladin thing in here,\" the dragon said. \"I would like to talk to the coward that sneaks into the lairs of innocent dragons to ambush them in their sleep with his little army of metal-clad ants.\"\n\nThe man laughed again. \"Mighty words robbed of their meaning considering your current position. You still believe you're innocent?\"\n\n\"I know I am! Bring your leader here so I can tell it to his face. What was his name, by the way? The one with the fierce eyes and silver armor.\"\n\n\"Forgot already?\"\n\n\"Human names are like the birds that relieve themselves on the roofs of your homes. Only you care about the stench they leave behind. Me? I'm hardly ever hit by their\u2026\" the dragon smirked. \"Is it considered rude if I make an ungainly comparison between their droppings and the fur you wear on top of your head?\"\n\n\"My. He was right, after all. You've got a way with words, beastie. They pour out of your mouth like a waterfall. Haven't you accused the paladin of talking better than he fights?\" the human chuckled. \"It's\u2026it's just amusing, with you all tied up and everything.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Veledar narrowed his eyes. \"It definitely looks like the droppings of a-\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, don't go there,\" the human brushed Veledar off. \"His name's Arcturus Lund, dragon slayer and Paladin of Lumara. You ought to feel lucky he didn't drive his sword through your eye as you lay broken at his feet. Heard that's what he did with the last red that got on his angry side. Heh. For all your size and scales, you die just as easily as the birds you prattle about.\"\n\n\"Delude yourself all you want, human. I was hardly broken by your foul trickery.\" Veledar jerked in his restraints a little. \"Do I seem weak to you? Helpless? You would not have done such a thorough job with these restraints if you thought me broken. Now go. Fetch that paladin of yours, I dry my throat uselessly by talking with one so filled with fear that he will not even show his face to me.\"\n\nSilence filled the next few seconds before Veledar heard the man leave the chamber. A soft sigh left his maw. It was obvious they did not want him dead, otherwise he would have had his guts opened up in his lair by that annoying, loud-mouthed, self righteous paladin.\n\n\"I'll show him when he gets here.\" The dragon strained against the leather once more. \"He's just a human, after all.\"\n\nOne that managed to capture him. What would Adalina think of him? He, the mighty Veledar, captured by humans for who knew what reason. Veledar truly had no idea why Arcturus ambushed him like that. Could be an order from a deluded higher-up, or maybe he acted as the hand of vengeance for the flower thieves that stole from Trixie's garden. What if that fierce healer-woman spoke the truth? An entire village of children might've perished because he decided to brush off the pleadings of a desperate woman.\n\nNo. That can't be it. Her mate almost pissed his pants. He would've fought if the stakes were that high.\n\nNevertheless, Veledar emptied his mind of theories as his eyes shifted to stare at the door, waiting for the sound of the guard's steps. There was no need to think so hard when answers were going to grace his ears soon.\n\nHe did not have to wait long, as only a couple minutes passed before he heard steps heavier than the man that had left. What he would say to the paladin crossed his mind. Would he start with an insult? Or perhaps a boast? That was a bit too crude. Maybe the best course of action was to taunt him again and find out what the humans truly wanted with him.\n\nVeledar was still in thought when a soft slick and turn of the knob opened the door in front of him. Standing there was accursed man that captured him -Arcturus-still wearing the same shiny armor, only this time his helmet was off and he carried no weapons Veledar could see.\n\n\"You know\u2026 coming in here to lay eyes on a trapped dragon with no weapons to protect yourself with is not exactly a sound decision.\" Veledar couldn't help himself even if his mind rebelled at the unwise choice to start off this dialogue.\n\nEven Arcturus agreed it was stupid through a soft, disappointed sigh. \"I see old habits die hard with you dragons.\" The human's eyes quickly scanned the straps before stepping closer towards his captive.\n\n\"You can leave us now.\" Arcturus said to the guard behind him.\n\n\"As you wish, sir.\" The man said as he shut the door softly. \"Be careful with the\u2026beast.\"\n\n\"Yes, leave us so you don't die of boredom when I walk your precious paladin in endless loops of dialogue.\" Veledar said drily, his blue eyes moving onto the main event. \"How do you feel, Arcturus? Knowing that you only came here to have your time wasted? You can bark orders to your minions, eat something fancy, perhaps even rest. And out of all these more enticing options, your first choice is to come here, to me.\" Veledar smiled as a wicked thought crossed his mind. \"Maybe the reason you've come here is to admire my radiant scales. Who knows? Given the way you look at me now, you've probably watched me through all the hours I slept, crippled by a late sense of guilt. After all, how could you, a man with a sense of morality, with honor, restrain such a noble dragon? You feel bad. Admit it.\"\n\nVeledar had hoped to get a reaction out of the paladin, but there was barely any to speak of. This man stood like a mountain, straight, confident, and completely emotionless.\n\n\"This is going to turn into a very drab affair if you keep looking at me like that. I have been known to kill humans with boredom before.\" Veledar grinned.\n\nArcturus said nothing. Instead, he pulled out a scroll from his pouch and rolled it out until it was held tight in his hands.\n\n\"What you say bears no significance to me, unless spoken with purpose. I will be asking you a series of questions, and if you truly care about your future, you better do your best to answer truthfully, dragon.\"\n\nVeledar was taken back for a moment. The human said the last word with such disdain, such anger. He guessed it was no surprise coming from a man who literally earned his living by claiming the lives of dragons.\n\n\"Engage in whatever fruitless endeavor you see fit, paladin. Though I must warn you. This crusade of yours is nothing like the stories of old.\"\n\n\"Why do you believe such?\" Arcturus asked, poking his head out from the scroll. \"Loosen tongue and see the veil behind your words lifted.\"\n\n\"Why am I not dead, for one? The heroes of your stories believe only in blind justice. They do not give dragons like me second chances. All they care about is returning home with a dragon's head in their cart, to be cheered and admired by the gloating crowd of simpletons. The king, mayor or whatever grants them land, title, then our hero finds a woman, falls in love, mates, lives happily ever after off the blood spilled. You find such tales heroic. I find them disgusting to the last.\"\n\n\"Amusing, but far removed from the truth.\" The paladin said. \"My king wanted you alive so you can face justice for your crimes against our kingdom.\"\n\n\"Crimes? What crimes?\" Veledar hissed. \"You keep babbling about these crimes as if you found me bathed in blood amidst hundreds of corpses!\" Veledar's claws scraped against the floor in anger. \"You're no better than the rest of your guild, fattening your pouches with gold bought with the lives of innocent dragons.\"\n\n\"That word again. Innocent. Why should I believe a word you say?\"\n\n\"Because...because of the facts!\" Veledar snarled again. \"How did you find me? Tell me! Say the truth for once instead of demonizing me!\"\n\nVeledar noticed a tense in the human's jaws before he spoke. \"Asleep.\"\n\n\"Asleep how?\" Veledar pressed on. \"Did I hold a captive in my paws? A dying knight? The pitiful remains of my last meal?\"\n\n\"No, You had a\u2026something akin to what we give to our children.\"\n\nThe words felt heavy on the man's tongue, and Veledar extracted much joy from his clever ploy. As embarrassing as it was to admit, a mighty predator like him slept with an inanimate gryphon. Veledar was slowly, but surely, cutting his way into the human's frail heart.\n\n\"A toy. Out of all the things I listed, all the dreadful weapons those simpletons are afraid of, it had to be a toy. Tell me, paladin. Was my gryphon so threatening that you had to wrestle him away from me along with the entirety of my hoard? You said you want to judge me for my actions, but I would like to hear again of the charges brought against me. I admit to damaging a man's house and one woman's banner, but this hardly matches the crimes you've committed against me!\" Veledar snarled.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Arcturus brought the scroll up again. \"Let's see if a wall and a banner are what is listed here.\"\n\nThe paladin listed what Veledar already knew, but the similarities ended after his first couple of words. What followed after was a cacophony of nonsense, including murder, kidnapping of children, and stealing from merchants on the king's roads.\n\nVeledar's maw went agape with disgust. He heard nonsense before, but this amalgamation of filth felt like hedgehogs burying into his ears. How vile was this human king? To fabricate such lies in order to get an innocent dragon captured?\n\n\"That\u2026\" Veledar let his fierce growl sink into a depressed sigh. He had to play his part, even if that meant striking a blow to his pride. \"That cannot be what you truly believe, is it? You are a dragon slayer, yes, but I have to hope the paladin in you is stronger than that. My mother\u2026she told me tales of resplendent men that carried the light of the sun upon their armor. Men who are sworn to valor. Men who are just.\" His eyes slowly rose from the ground to look at Arcturus. \"Are you one of these men, Arcturus?\"\n\nThe paladin's gaze faltered, but only for a moment. \"I\u2026there have been some who see things differently. I trust word of mouth to a degree, but the written word holds much more power.\" Arcturus answered, to which Veledar snorted in disgust.\n\n\"Fine. Trust that pile of stinking horse crap if it makes you feel any better.\" He turned his eyes as much as he could away from this joke of a paladin. \"All I know is that your people stole from my treasure and accuse me of things that make even my stomach revolt at the thought of d-doing such things!\" He strained against the leather, making Arcturus back away from him for a moment. Veledar slumped to the ground when the straps refuse to budge, pleased to see the human breathe a sigh of relief as he stepped back to his previous spot.\n\n\"I admire your fighting spirit, dragon. Perhaps you even hide some chaffed scales beneath those bindings. Do you truly believe that all these charges are simply lies fabricated to implicate you?\" he said, his hand moving to stroke his chin. \"That does not make any sense no matter from which angle you look at it.\"\n\n\"Just like your title, paladin.\" Veledar spat that word, eyes narrowing at the distasteful human.\n\n\"What?\" Arcturus eyes widened for a brief moment. \"How dare you accuse me like he did?\"\n\n\"He? You've gone and captured another dragon, have you?\" Veledar pressed on, driven by an innate urge to see this human implode on himself. \"Are you reading him the same lies? How many are there in the bowels of the ship besides me? I'm just curious, to know how many lives are enough to sate your thirst for innocent blood, dragon slayer.\"\n\n\"No!\" Arcturus stomped the ground. \"I haven't captured more. You are my only mission.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" Veledar said, making the human clench his fists.\n\n\"Stop it. If you're trying to use my anger to your advantage, know that I am trained well against the poison that courses through your tongue with every word you speak.\"\n\nVeledar had to give at least a brief smile. He might not have managed to persuade the human of his innocence, yet seeing him simmer felt just as satisfying. \"Stings, does it not? To be accused of falsehoods. If not me, who else were you speaking about?\"\n\nArcturus sighed. Arms crossed, he paced around the room, lost in thought for a bit. \"It was another dragon, bearing crimson scales not very different from yours, and no, it isn't my desire to expand that topic further. Instead, I'd like to hear why you tarnished my title.\"\n\n\"You know why, human.\" Veledar said. \"In the tales I've been told, paladins had a sense of honor and virtue. They could wield impressive magic, inspired bravery in their allies, and fought against the agents of evil across all world. Whatever you are is nothing like that. What you wield is an empty name, a mockery of what my mother's tales spoke of.\"\n\nVeledar noticed the human stop and study his response. Good. He had gotten under his skin at least. \"Tell me, slayer. How many dragons have found their end at the tip of your blade? Rumors say you come from a family with a particularly vicious taste for dragon blood. That you have this urge, this drive to kill that only ceases when you take a dragon's life.\"\n\nA dark frown creased Arcturus' face. Within two long strides he was upon the cage, armored hands wrapping themselves tight against the bars. Veledar could choose to maim the human, but the pain inflicted by his words felt more satisfying than any physical wound.\n\n\"What you heard is no truer than the claims you deny!\" Arcturus spoke. \"I've only ended one dragon, and I can assure you, it was quite an effort to put him down. I also did not murder him in his sleep or anything ridiculous of that sort. Merely brought the light of justice down upon that\u2026that monster.\"\n\n\"Is that how you live with yourself?\" He mocked the human by poking his fingers with the top of his snout. Arcturus pulled back immediately from the dragon's moist breath. \"Admit you are a dragon murderer. Say something true just this once.\"\n\nArcturus put his right hand to his nose and squeezed gently at its length with his eyes shut briefly.\n\nVeledar accepted the gesture for the time being.\n\n\"In exchange, I also wanted to know why you did not kill any of the soldiers I sent into your cave,\" he said, reopening his eyes and looking into the dragon's eyes. \"That was something I did not expect to see.\"\n\n\"You already know that answer. I am not the monster you or all of the oafs in that village paint me out to be. Are we not talking without raking at each other's hides right now? Imagine how fruitful our encounter would have been if you would have talked with me instead of charging me like a dumb orc.\"\n\n\"I couldn't take any chances,\" Arcturus said flatly.\n\n\"Spare me the lecture. Just because another red dragon fractured your heart, that doesn't make me guilty of the same sins. Now, if you don't mind, I would like to know what your plans with me are. My limbs are starting to feel really stiff.\" Veledar would have thrashed his tail, but the leather strap on it stopped that, of course.\n\n\"We are several days away from the capital. Unfortunately, that means we'll be holding you tied up until the time comes to face justice for all that's written in this scroll.\" Arcturus replied, placing his quill at the top of his clipboard. \"May the Gods forgive me if I'm wrong. Like I said before, I cannot take the risk.\"\n\nVeledar's snout crashed back on the ground. This human paladin was disappointing him further and further. \"Not that pile of dung again. For the sake of the paladins of old, can you at least pretend I'm speaking the truth? Does this sound like justice to you? A trial based on lies and your people's hatred for dragons?\" Veledar replied harshly. He noticed Arcturus would not meet his gaze, clearly the human was conflicted about this issue.\n\n\"It does not.\" he admitted as he looked into Veledar's eyes. \"But it is my king's will you defy. The words of dozens of villagers that claimed to have seen you perform these very crimes. I\u2026\" the human faltered. \"Tell me again you did not do those things. Slowly.\"\n\nWhat the human was up to,Veledar did not know, but without hesitating, the red dragon picked his head up, his unwavering gaze staring straight into the human's eyes.\n\n\"I swear by my integrity as a dragon that I have not done any of those things. I only damaged the house accidentally in pursuit of my\u2026well that's private, but again, I did not harm anyone physically. Might have called them pink-skinned rats a few times, but that's just a truth your species has to live with. You have a myriad of jokes about us too, right? Tell me one. Go on. Amuse me. I know I will not get any justice here, so might as well try to have a bit of fun, before\u2026\"\n\nVeledar let his words wither. Arcturus sat in silence, looking at nothing in particular, as if contemplating Veledar's reply. He waited for the human to say something about deceit. Honestly, he had no idea why he even put up with this ridiculous charade. One way or the other, he was going to end up roasted in the capital city of Entis, surrounded by the biggest, meanest group of pink-skinned rats a dragon could ever see.\n\n\"I believe you.\" Arcturus said, much to Veledar's amazement. \"Now tell me what happened, in your words, and leave nothing to assumption.\" Arcturus settled down near Veledar's head and put the quill to the paper. \"Also, for the purpose of this note, I will need a name to refer you by. I can simply write dragon if you don't want to tell me.\"\n\n\"Write Crimson Sky on your paper, human. I want your king to know the dragon he has wronged this day. Although mark my words, I do not believe he will listen to anything I have to say.\"\n\nArcturus started writing down the moment Veledar started speaking. Crimson Sky spoke about the theft, the little girl's house, his trip to town, and finally the fight with the bandits. The dragon of course spoke with much flattery about his actions. Although he insisted that someone threw the banner he had ripped at him. Crimson Sky mentioned how he heroically swooped in to save the half-elf Lyndis and how the half-elf woman had been in awe of his greatness.\n\nArcturus doubted, of course, that the strong, spirited half-elf had really bowed before the dragon's greatness, but he humored the dragon anyway. Veledar snorted when he finished, causing Arcturus to flinch slightly.\n\n\"Is that satisfying for you, dragon slayer?\" he asked, raising a scaly eyebrow.\n\n\"I prefer you not call me that.\"\n\n\"It is what you are though.\"\n\n\"As you are a dragon. I will say again that I did not murder the other red wyrm out of cold blood. He was a monster that had done plenty of killing before he tried to end my life. Then\u2026just before he faded into the depths of death, he took something very precious from me. Some things can't be replaced, Crimson Sky\u2026no matter how much we struggle.\" Arcturus replied. Veledar noticed he reached into the pouch on his belt and seemed to be feeling for something within when he said that last part.\n\n\"So he took back a gem, coin, or possibly a piece of art as a memento of your confrontation. I imagine you deserved whatever happened. Your people seem very skilled at twisting stories according to their needs.\" He hissed.\n\nHe watched the human's response for the moment. Arcturus sighed and seemed to grip whatever was in his pocket tighter, then wrote more on the paper, but the human now looked drained. Veledar guessed whatever he said had hurt the human deeper than intended.\n\n\"Perhaps you are telling the truth as well, and I am wrong to assume vile things of you.\" Veledar said, causing Arcturus to look at him once again. \"However, I am curious as to what is going to happen to me now. What is Crimson Sky's fate? Will he be sentenced to death? Perhaps tortured?\"\n\nHe saw what could be described as confusion in the paladin's eyes, so he pressed the point harder. Perhaps he would even be able to manipulate the man now that he gained a small measure of lenience.\n\n\"Would that be the just or noble thing for a knight to do?\" he said, watching Arcturus return the gaze.\n\n\"I will make sure the king hears your side of the story,\" the man stood up, putting his clipboard to his side, much to Veledar's disappointment. \"Do you require anything? I can have food brought to you if you want. It's not the best we have, but should keep you satisfied until\u2026well, you know.\" Arcturus said.\n\n\"I wish to be set free, not feast on whatever scraps you find on your tables. Now send me my armored jailer back. I have a few words to share with him.\"\n\n\"Will do. Fare you well, Crimson Sky,\" Arcturus said before walking out of the room, letting the guard from before slip into his shadowy corner.\n\n\"Well if it isn't the mysterious armored monk, coming to marvel at my ferocious beauty. What's the matter? Are my scales so dazzling they tangled your tongue?\"\n\n\"Aye. You are a sight to behold, tied up like a juicy ham eager for the fire's licks,\" the guard chuckled. \"Reminds me of this roasted lizard I ate once. Kinda looked like you, minus the wings.\"\n\n\"I weep for your faulty sight, human.\" Veledar snorted, blowing some dust over the floor. How dare this guard insult him by calling him a common lizard.\n\n\"You a winged lizard then. No, a serpent, like the trickster from my mother's tales. D'you happen to hear the story of Lenrogor the Muffin Thief?\"\n\n\"I might tell you if you call me by my name, title, or species, you pink skinned brute.\"\n\n\"Lizard wants to play games now?\"\n\n\"Grah but you're thick! I am a dragon you metal-clad, urine drenched urchin! Is the king so drowned in debts that he snatches illiterate orphans from the streets to serve as his knights now?\" He grinned at the last bit, thinking he had the human backed to the wall.\n\n\"Oh, hahaha! Good one, good one! Can't have a discussion with a dragon without resorting to petty, thoughtless insults. Just you wait until the rest of Lumara gets a piece of the great comedian. Then we'll see who's laughing, serpent.\"\n\nVeledar stuck his tongue out at the man before tugging on his leathers one last time, then slumped to the ground defeated. He closed his eyelids and tried to think back to the dream he was having before he was so rudely awakened by the brute's shouts inconvenient shouts."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Arcturus swiftly ran back to his quarters with the manuscript from the dragon rolled up under his arm. He was currently holding his hand to the ridge of his nose. He had just received a message from one of the king's wizards consisting of an unexpected change in his orders. Instead of bringing the dragon back to the capital, he was charged with killing him while he was still firmly bound in the hold of the ship. The news struck him particularly hard after the unpleasant discussion he had with the dragon.\n\nWhat if Crimson Sky is right? That nagging voice in the back of his mind kept whispering thoughts Arcturus would have considered treasonous under normal circumstances. However, the more he pondered, the more he realized how rotten this course of action was. In serving his king, he could very well send an innocent creature to a premature death. Arcturus didn't know if he could read dragons as well as he did people. He tried not to think about what Crimson Sky had said about justice, honor, and doing what was right. Clearly the dragon had a silver tongue. With its life at stake, he'd not leave any stone unturned, no matter what terrors lurked underneath. As he closed his eyes for a faltering moment, the image of his burning house sprung to his mind.\n\nSelena\u2026Geoffrey\u2026 Dread Flame's talons locked around his useless leg, forcing Arcturus to watch as his family withered before his very eyes\u2026\n\nThe paladin placed a hand on the sturdy door that led to his quarters. He took a moment to regain his bearings, then opened the door and collapsed onto the cot with a thump. Despite everything his gut was telling him, a big part of him still believed the dragon. There had been some stretching of the truth involved, but he could still not shake the truthfulness in the creature's cerulean eyes. They had not wavered, nor were they filled with malice when he spoke. He imagined how it would have looked if the dragon was any other species. Would there even be a debate on this matter?\n\n\"Selina\u2026\" He whispered, pulling a small locket from his pouch. He flipped open the silver case to reveal a picture of his wife and son, side by side. \"If only you were here to soothe my troubled mind. What would you do, hmm? Is a dragon's life worth going against my kingdom? Betraying a king that trusted me to\u2026\"\n\nArcturus' words faltered. He came here to capture the dragon, not end his life based on an order sent through a mage.\n\n\"Gods be good, what am I getting into?\" He sat up with his hands on his face. He knew what Selena would have said. She would have reminded him about his oath, strengthen his wavering beliefs with her sweet, calming voice. She would have also pointed out that none of those words referred only to humans. Was not every life precious in its own, intricate way?\n\nArcturus sighed. He imagined her face all scrunched up, annoyed that she had to renew his faith yet again, but in her eyes hid love too, not just concern.\n\nHe stood up, stashing the locket back into his pocket. If he was to kill the dragon like his king commanded him to, an innocent life would be lost forever, and that, he could not allow. Not as a paladin.\n\nArcturus grabbed his pack from his table and started packing his belongings.\n\n\"If any of you are watching, now would be a good time to grant me your favor,\" he whispered to the skies as he slung his shield around his back. He did not yet know how he would go about this task, but one thing was certain. Today, Arcturus, paladin of Lumara, was going to save a dragon from the clutches of impending death.\n\n[ Next Time Let's Just Fly ]\n\nArcturus returned to Crimson Sky's cell after the crew had their dinner. With a casual order from his lips, the guard was relieved of his duty, and no one would be the wiser. He turned the knob to the room and opened the door slowly. The plan was simple. Let the dragon escape and take the full blame for the mishap. Of course, it sounded easy when you put it like that. The lies that followed after said deed put Arcturus on edge. He didn't want to stick to his oath by betraying his people, so he tried to focus on the immediate future for now. More precisely, on how to convince his men -and even the king-that he had no involvement in the dragon's escape.\n\nArcturus imagined himself standing before the foot of Cornelius' throne, with a grave look about his face. I've seen the cage give way before the dragon's might with my own eyes, m'lord. We got lucky to escape unscathed. Yes, the dragon's gone, but what matters here is that we're all alive. The beast didn't kill anyone.\n\nHe kicked himself at how stupid that sounded. A full squad of the king's best men, outsmarted by a captive dragon? It was a hard sell, but Arcturus still remained determined. Whatever justice the king would bestow upon him was better than the regret of having an innocent creature killed. Man or dragon, red or black, male or female. It was a living, sentient creature that deserved better than to be put down like a sick dog.\n\nArcturus shut the door behind him with a soft click, then turned to the dragon. Crimson Sky had not moved, and his eyelids were closed. Was that snoring he heard? He internally laughed at the thought.\n\n\"My favorite inquisitor just can't get enough of me.\" The dragon yawned, his tongue curling like a feline's before it returned back inside its toothy cage. \"What brings you back here, paladin? Surely it's not only my charming looks or irresistible humor.\"\n\nArcturus chuckled. This dragon had quite the mouth on him.\n\n\"That brooding look again? Does this mean I will be subjected to another round of questions?\" Crimson Sky crossed his paws, one on top of the other, a curious look in his cerulean eyes. \"Or is it that reason finally dawned upon that furred head of yours?\"\n\nThe dragon tried to bite at his straps in vain, \"Despite how stylish these bonds are, they start to feel really uncomfortable, especially around my hind legs, and I'm not even speaking about what's tucked between them. Did it ever occur to you, at any point in this journey, that your captive might need to unburden himself?\"\n\n\"Shut your nonsense, dragon.\" Arcturus whispered. \"I've got a set of explanations in my head, but there's no way I can tell my guards the dragon crapped himself with a straight face.\"\n\n\"As if I ever would.\" The dragon snorted. \"So why are you-\"\n\nArcturus hissed again. He approached the dragon slowly and carefully, a hand extended ahead to test the beast's reflexes.\n\n\"You were not really sleeping, were you?\" he whispered.\n\n\"As if I ever could.\" The dragon snorted. \"How can you lot even sleep in this contraption is beyond me. Entertain me for a second.\"\n\n\"No. I'm not talking about dragon-sized outhouses when I'm about to-\"\n\nThe dragon probably sensed something was amiss. \"About to what?\" he tilted his head. \"You're thinking of something good, aren't you?\"\n\nArcturus rolled his eyes at how chatty the dragon was today. He fought evil beasts, lazy beasts, but he rarely had the misfortune to face off against chatty ones. The paladin made his way to the strap at the dragon's neck, then hesitated. What he was about to do next was going to set a whole lot of weird events into motion. Was it really worth it? A dragon's life for\u2014\n\nThe human shook his head. He couldn't think such thoughts. Not when the dragon looked at him with such peaceful eyes.\n\n\"I've noticed that twitch, you know. You are thinking of setting me free, after all.\" said Crimson Sky with a grin. \"Oh, you can't tell me you got cold feet now when you've already come all the way here. Approach. I might even offer you my wet appreciation in return.\"\n\n\"Ugh, I'm better off without dragon drool on my clothes.\" Arcturus said. He kneeled and looked Crimson Sky in the eye, \"I'll set you free, but in exchange, I need your word that no one else is to be harmed.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course. When did I ever lie to you anyway?\" replied Crimson Sky, his eyes not straying in the slightest. \"Besides, even if I had this silver tongue you seem so wary of, I'm not stupid to attack a warship. You have my word on that.\"\n\nThat was the final push Arcturus needed. After brief pause to gather himself mentally, he loosened that strap around Crimson Sky's neck, and immediately, the dragon pushed his head up, letting out a long sigh of relief.\n\n\"Much better.\"\n\nArcturus tensed for a brief moment, but there was no deep breath, no intense flame coming out of the dragon's mouth.\n\n\"You're looking at me as if I grew another pair of horns.\"\n\n\"Nah, it's just-no, no, don't even think of-\"The dragon's snout descended upon him, and if that sea of scales wasn't bad enough, his slimy eel of a tongue poked out, along with the dragon's less-than-likable breath. Arcturus' fears came true. Crimson Sky was definitely going to slobber and drift his tongue all over his fine clothes.\n\n\"Gods\u2026\" he grimaced as he flung off ropes of translucent goo from his vestments while the dragon stared at him with a very pleased look on his face. \"You know what? I'm not even going to bother talking.\"\n\n\"Good. Because I will.\" Crimson Sky went into a pompous lecture about his features, starting with his silky wings, then following up with his tough scales, even talking about the perfect curves of his claws. For a brief moment, his words made Arcturus feel as if he was actually releasing a deity from hundreds of years of imprisonment. That's how convincing the dragon's words were. After he finished with the front half, he moved to the dragon's bottom to unstrap his legs one at a time. The creature's swishing tail tip reminded Arcturus of the slap he got back in the cave, and if the circumstances were better, he would've gotten his revenge right here and now.\n\nBut this was not the right time. \"Alright. You're done.\"\n\nCrimson Sky threw a quick look behind, then propped himself up on his fours to stretch his limbs.\n\n\"Grrrraaaaatitude,\" he said as he turned around to face Arcturus. \"I owe you more than a few licks, human.\"\n\n\"Consider us even.\"\n\n\"Oh. Even you say? Even?\" the dragon paced closer, clearly trying to intimidate him with his size. Then, in a flash, that bothersome tail whirled around, sending Arcturus slamming against the wall, hard enough to hurt. He collapsed on the ground with a cough, then groaned as the dragon trapped him underneath a clawed forepaw.\n\n\"B-bastard,\" he grabbed onto his scaly fingers to pry them apart, only to find them strong and sturdy.\n\n\"Do you feel even now, human? Imagine how I feel.\" The dragon snarled. \"First, you roused me from my sleep, then attacked me with your mob of angry peasants, stole my treasure, brought me here, forced me to sit for hours with the most annoying sound buzzing in my ears, and to you, we are even?\" he growled. \"Don't think I will forget what you've put me through.\"\n\nArcturus felt his pulse quicken. Out of all the scenarios he conjured in his mind, finding himself pinned and helpless was not on the list. He cursed himself for letting his guard down. This bastard was probably just like the other red he faced. A lying, manipulative sod who\u2014\n\nThe prison of toes receded, and with a deep breath Arcturus' fears went away.\n\n\"Still, you have freed me. This has to count for something, right? Now show me the way out of this place before I really lose my temper.\"\n\n\"That's rich,\" Arcturus picked himself up. \"You should see how it feels to be rammed to the wall when you put your trust in a blabbering Red.\"\n\n\"I hope you're not speaking about me.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'm not.\" Arcturus lied to avoid another word warfare with the dragon. \"Follow me, and heed my instructions if you want to leave this place on your own paws. All I have to do is pull a lever to open the hatch and you can fly away.\" Arcturus replied as he turned and opened the large door for the dragon. \"Yes, it's that easy, unless my guards get suspicious.\"\n\nHopefully, that was not the case. Together with the dragon, Arcturus made his way into the empty hanger just as he planned. Crimson Sky was quickly behind him, squeezing his way through the hallways. Luckily, the staff was on a lunch break, so the two of them had a clear way through.\n\n\"What convinced you to let me go? Was it my greatness? Or was I able to masterfully manipulate you into doing my bidding?\" Crimson Sky whispered from behind.\n\n\"Believe it or not, that loud maw of yours told me things I didn't expect. I... decided to put my trust in someone.\" Arcturus sighed. His thoughts went to Selina.\n\n\"So, what you're saying is I was able to manipulate you.\" the dragon grinned, causing Arcturus to sigh a second time.\n\nArcturus walked to a metallic console with different buttons and levers, clearly labeled for their uses. He grasped the one that opened the hangar, then looked back at Crimson Sky.\n\n\"Once I open this, you fly away. No questions asked, no farewells given,\" he said. \"Make sure you get far away to a place where my king cannot find you. I will sort out this nonsense with the false charges on my own.\" He turned to Crimson Sky who had narrowed eyes. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"I cannot do that.\" Crimson Sky shook his horned head. \"Your king demanded my capture, you grieved me in more than one way, and you expect me to just leave?\" Crimson Sky cocked his head to the side. \"I am going to find your king and make him give back everything he's taken from me over a pleasant chat about how he thinks it is within his right to steal from a perfectly peaceful citizen of his realm.\"\n\nArcturus could not believe the dragon's bravery, or ignorance. \"Gods. You\u2026this is the biggest nonsense I heard yet. Do you realize how many soldiers we have? How many airships, how many men, and teams of gryphons? You couldn't possibly get anywhere near our king without a cage to house you or fetters to bind your limbs.\" He said calmly, gripping the lever tighter in his hand. \"Now, I did my part and freed your scaly bottom, so how about you do yours?\"\n\n\"You had contact with your king?\" Crimson Sky asked as he raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Yes, I have met with him on occasions.\" said Arcturus as he peeked to make sure no one was coming. The hangar was still empty. All that remained for him to do was convince this stubborn dragon to leave.\n\n\"And you know the layout of the castle?\" continued Crimson Sky, and Arcturus noticed the growing grin on his snout. Crimson Sky pounced on him before he could respond. The dragon had him wrapped tight under a scaled limb, then his other paw reached for the lever. The floor of the ship opened up to reveal the ground far below.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Arcturus struggled against the dragon's grip, but the red beast was too strong, and he was pulled firm against the dragon's chest. He slammed his fists against the dragon's scales, his efforts as useless as everything he previously tried.\n\n\"Put me down, you deluded beast!\" Arcturus shouted over the howling wind.\n\n\"That's not a smart thing to say.\" The dragon chuckled.\n\nOver on the other side of the hangar, the door opened with one of the guards holding a wooden tankard.\n\n\"Hey Arcturus, the lads upstairs are having this-by the gods he's got you!\" he dropped the tankard to the floor with a thud, ale spilling over the wooden boards. \"The dragon has escaped!\" he cried to the hallway. \"Beast's loose! He has the Paladin! To arms, men, to arms! Beast's loose!\" The man sprinted back the way he came to most likely grab a weapon.\n\n\"Alright. Alright.\" Arcturus spoke quickly. \"You had your fun now, but they're never going to let you leave, so put me aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!\"\n\nHe felt his stomach lurch as the dragon dove headfirst out the hatch with the paladin tightly held in his claws. Arcturus felt the other forepaw grip him tightly as they descended rapidly from the shrinking ship. Despite not really wanting to be kidnapped in this embarrassing sort of way, Arcturus held onto the dragon as tight as he possibly could. His mind went numb with fright, and his throat never stopped vocalizing said panic.\n\n\"What's the matter, Arcturus? I thought a man that travels in flying machines wouldn't be afraid of heights!\" Crimson Sky laughed deeply. \"Or is it just for dragons that you scream like a banshee?\"\n\n\"Do you know what you've done?!\" Arcturus shouted, his nerves starting to ease as the dragon steadied his flight.\n\n\"I have escaped your flying machine, captured a valuable resource that will help me, oh, and I get to hear you sing.\" Crimson Sky said, his voice oozing with narcissism.\n\n\"All you've done is getting us neck-deep into stupid, scaly dragon crap! They'll hunt us down to the end of the earth for this. Gods be damned, I was giving you a chance, you arsehole of a dragon, and you've messed everything!\" Arcturus shouted as he still gripped his captor. \"Put me down, already. PUT ME DOWN!\"\n\n\"Not a very good choice of words for a wingless human.\" Arcturus felt the dragon's grip tighten on him. \"Would be a very long drop for you.\"\n\n\"Where are you taking me?\" He asked. Surely the dragon wasn't going back to his lair. That would have to be the most stupid plan, and hopefully even this blabber-mouth was smarter than that.\n\n\"I have a plan, and I have my ways.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Your devious, careless ways. Excuse me if I'm not feeling overly optimistic about your plan.\"\n\n\"All you need to know is that we are going somewhere safe.\" Crimson Sky replied.\n\nThe rest of the flight went in silence as Arcturus tried to not focus on the ground, so very far removed from his feet. It made his stomach queasy, and his head ache, to even look at the wobbling skies. He instead focused on the scales that adorned the dragon's chest and forepaws. They were smooth and segmented as to allow fine movements, but possibly even stronger than the armor that Arcturus was wearing. He felt Crimson Sky's wing beats with every flap, and inhaled the dragon's scent with every breath. Arcturus had to admit, he smelled dogs a lot more displeasing than this dragon. If it were not for the fear of falling, the flight might have even been relaxing.\n\n\"Hold tight. We're going down.\"\n\nArcturus wrapped his fingers around the dragon's limbs and felt his stomach churn one last time as Crimson Sky started his decent towards the ground.\n\nHe landed with a thud, the cracking of wood following shortly after. From the darkness, Arcturus spotted the form of his crossbow splintered in pieces across the dark ground. He stood up and pulled out his sword, holding the gleaming metal between Crimson Sky and himself.\n\n\"I get it, you vile, overly loud beast! You lie to me, kidnap me, take me to a secluded spot and eat me.\" He looked for an opening, but with Crimson Sky now standing in front of him, he did not see a way out. He most likely could not out-fight the dragon like this, with hardly any equipment. So Arcturus reached into his pouch to pull out a small yellow stone, that, with a simple touch, illuminated the area like a torch.\n\n\"Come. Fight me. I assure you, I won't go down that easily,\" he said sternly, gripping his sword tightly. The dragon became all the more intimidating in the stone's light that reflected off his scales.\n\n\"Really?\" The dragon just stared at him for a moment before he rolled his cerulean eyes. \"Are we going to do this now?\"\n\n\"What else is left?\" Arcturus hissed.\n\n\"Oh please. If I wanted to kill you, I would have just dropped you the moment I dove out of your machine.\"\n\nArcturus hated to admit as much, but Crimson Sky had a point. He hesitated a moment before stowing his sword. \"So where does this put me? I am your captive? Or maybe\u2026a friend?\"\n\nA small smirk appeared on Crimson Sky's snout. \"That can be arranged if you help me recover all what I've lost. You owe me a lot of things, friend,\" the dragon empathized that last word with a hiss.\n\nCrimson Sky started to circle him slowly, with each paw hardly making a noise on the ground.\n\n\"Now that's rich. Why should I be helping you? You kidnapped me!\" He shouted, but despite this, Crimson Sky just grinned with his pointed teeth. He settled onto his haunches with his tail flicking back and forth.\n\n\"That's all? I expected a better rant from the mighty Arcturus Lund, paladin of Lumara, vanquisher of scaly evildoers.\"\n\n\"And I expected an honest dragon!\"\n\n\"Well, I did save your life, so there's that.\"\n\nArcturus narrowed his eyes. \"This is even better. Out of all the possible things you could say, this is the worst. Please, enlighten me. How in the world did you come to such rational conclusion?\"\n\n\"It's easy. By freeing me, you turned your back against your king's orders. Oh. You probably thought he's going to fall prey to your simple lies, is that it? This might be hard to hear, but you are not a good liar at all, paladin. The king would've seen right through you, then what? Torture? What punishment do you humans have for freeing a dragon?\"\n\nThe dragon had a point. Curses, it had to come to this, stranded in the middle of nowhere with the same dragon he was supposed to deliver back to Lumara.\n\n\"Why are you still thinking? Just admit the truth. Right now, I am the best chance you have.\"\n\n\"Thank you\u2026Crimson Sky,\" Arcturus replied, much to the dragon's surprise. He even looked another way to avoid showing too many emotions.\n\n\"That\u2026that came a bit faster than I expected from a pompous paladin.\"\n\nArcturus let the snide remark go for now. \"I have to admit, you don't sound half as stupid as I imagined. Lay out the rest of your plans for me.\"\n\n\"No. You share first.\" The dragon said.\n\nArcturus sighed. \"I thought that's obvious.\" Arcturus looked back at the sky. \"I figure they already came up with the obvious course of action. There will be several gryphons coming after you that will track us both down and attempt to recapture you.\"\n\n\"Hmmmphhh, well, luckily, we won't be here for long,\" grumbled Crimson Sky as he was yet to look away from the trees. \"I have an acquaintance in this forest that owes me a favor, and I'm sure she would be glad to see that debt paid.\"\n\n\"Another dragon? How far are they?\"\n\nThe dragon snorted. \"Never mentioned the species to keep you guessing. Besides, I quite enjoyed the clattering feel of your armor rattling over that shivering body of yours. Leaves quite the impression of a brave knight.\" Crimson Sky snickered as he stretched his wings wide before turning his snout to a collection of bushes.\n\n\"What do you think of our brave knight, Trixie? Quite a sight to behold, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Oh yes I did! How loud did he cry?\" came the sound of a small female voice. Arcturus turned to see a little fairy emerging from the bushes with a small flash of blue light.\n\n\"Oh, you should have been there. He screeched like a proper banshee. Almost hurt me to see him squeal like that,\" said Crimson Sky as he stood up and stretched like a cat.\n\n\"You're speaking vile things, dragon.\" Arcturus said. \"And as the sole being without wings here, I think it is fairly reasonable to be scared of falling to my death when a certain dragon kidnaps me out of nowhere.\" He crossed his arms defensibly, a gesture that made the fairy and dragon laugh even harder.\n\n\"Crimson Sky, have you returned to collect your favor?\"\n\nCrimson Sky nodded at the fairy. \"This human and I need to use your portal. He claims that his companions will dispatch gryphons and capture me again. I, of course, intend to lose them before they make any progress.\"\n\n\"Of course you may use the portal, Crimson Sky, but be wary. Fairy magic has a way of messing around with non-fairies.\"\n\nTruthfully, Arcturus had never studied or heard too much about fairy magic. \"Could you tell us more please?\" He walked closer to the fairy with an eyebrow raised.\n\n\"There's not much to say. You need to have a clear head during the process of gate-hopping, otherwise you may be pulled to whoever knows where.\" Trixie said while flying around Arcturus' head.\n\n\"Where would that be?\" asked Crimson Sky as he tilted his head to the side.\n\n\"No one knows!\" she cried. \"That's what I just said!\"\n\nCrimson Sky laughed at her little outburst.\n\n\"I wouldn't laugh if I were you. The other realm affects dragons in the same way it enfeebles other mortals. Even if said dragon is full of hot air.\" Trixie scolded the dragon by waving her tiny little index finger.\n\n\"Watch your little tongue, Trixie. Friend or not, I do not take kindly to anyone besmirching my name.\" Crimson Sky growled, \"Let's just get this over with so I don't have to listen to more of this be careful it's so dangerous nonsense. I can handle myself just fine.\"\n\nDespite trying to hold it in, Arcturus let out a small laugh. He tried to stop as Crimson Sky turned to him with unblinking eyes.\n\n\"You have something to say, paladin?\" Crimson Sky asked. He approached slowly, his tail curling around him. \"Something you found funny, perhaps?\"\n\n\"It's nothing. Just that\u2026I've got firsthand experience with this hot air she speaks of.\" He burst out, causing Crimson Sky to turn to the fairy.\n\n\"See what you've done? Now my human is snickering at me!\"\n\n\"I'm not YOUR human, dragon!\" Arcturus pointed out, to which the dragon let out a gust of hot air.\n\n\"Didn't seem so when you held on to me for dear life.\"\n\n\"Maybe I wouldn't have if you didn't kidnap me!\"\n\n\"Ok, ok ok ok!\" Trixie held up her small arms to split the two arguing males apart. \"You guys are making my head spin. If you are serious about using the gate, you need to be a lot closer. Much safer to travel with a buddy if you're a non-fairy.\" She gestured towards them to get closer. Arcturus moved slightly towards Crimson Sky, who did the same.\n\n\"Closer. Has to be much closer than that.\" she put her arms on her hips.\n\n\"Ah, blast it. A few steps closer and you'll ask me to kiss him!\" Arcturus scoffed.\n\nCrimson Sky puffed out his chest. \"Oh, Arcturus, I know I look good, but you don't have to-\"\n\n\"Shut it, you gnarly lizard.\"\n\nCrimson Sky stuck his tongue out at him much to Trixie's disappointment, who zapped them both with a touch of fairy magic.\n\n\"If you two keep arguing, I'll leave you here to sort this conflict out with your chasers.\"\n\nThe two males shared an angry glance before they nodded at her.\n\nHow did I get here? Arcturus inched closer little by little towards Crimson Sky. I had a good thing going on that ship. I had my squad, my honor, all traded for a gorram blabber-mouth with an ego the size of Lumara.\n\nArcturus was still pondering his misfortune until Trixie pushed him into Crimson Sky, who dragged the paladin against his chest with a scaly forepaw.\n\n\"There, there. Wasn't that hard, was it? My little human pet\u2026\"\n\nArcturus didn't even bother speaking with this\u2026 distasteful dragon.\n\n\"Now, Crimson Sky, put your claws on his shoulders. You have to have physical contact with your buddy.\"\n\n\"What, this hug isn't good enough?\"\n\n\"It's better the way I say it. Just do it.\"\n\nArcturus figured the fairy's advice wasn't completely selfless. The dragon probably did too, only he enjoyed extracting amusement from this unfortunate situation. Arcturus felt the dragon's fingers give way. The beast looked down on him not with malice, but with amusement, and maybe\u2026something else. He certainly was much gentler than Arcturus imagined, his sharp, curved claws barely making a sound as they fell onto the metal shoulderpads.\n\n\"Is this good enough for you Trixie?\" he glanced over the fairy to obtain a quick nod from her. \"Praise the Gods. Any closer and we'd be smacking our lips together.\"\n\nArcturus rolled his eyes, still as a statue. The dragon probably noticed the discomfort showing on his face, for he broke the silence shortly after with a simple question. \"What happens now?\"\n\n\"You will feel a small numbing sensation, then feel as if the ground wants to swallow you whole. A faint path will appear in front of you. One you must follow no matter what happens.\" Trixie explained as she clapped her hands together. Then Arcturus and Crimson Sky nodded in unison.\n\n\"Now stay still. Both of you. We'll part ways in just a moment. Try to have fun, alright?\" Trixie gleefully cried as she started to circle them, chanting in a language Arcturus did not understand. It sounded soft and easy on the ears, with numerous oooo sounds. As she spoke, the surrounding trees started to blur, as if he was falling to sleep. The night sky started to darken, as if the moon and stars just vanished into nothingness. Even the bright crystal Arcturus held in his hand started to fade away, until the only thing he could see was the dragon clasping his shoulders. The last thing to fade away were Trixie's words as they started to drift away until they became mute, uncomfortable silence.\n\nArcturus turned his head away from Crimson Sky. He saw a blurred forest around him, in dull colors of blue and purple. The once pleasant murmur of the forest was replaced by a soft humming every few minutes, but not loud enough to be annoying.\n\n\"Should we let go now?\"\n\nArcturus slowly nodded to the dragon. He let go of Crimson Sky to feel the ground. Soft just like the forest they had left behind. He breathed in deeply, yet strangely enough, only Crimson Sky's scent lingered upon the air.\n\n\"Eerie place we've gotten ourselves into,\" said Crimson Sky as he tested the ground with one of his claws. \"Do you suppose this ugly earth will swallow us if we stray off the path? I don't like things that try to eat me.\"\n\nArcturus couldn't help but chuckle at the irony of that. \"Indeed. Not like you have a perfectly fine pair of wings to wrestle yourself out of trouble.\" Arcturus started to inspect his surroundings. \"This forest feels the same, but something is amiss. There's no sound, no smells\u2026\" he trailed off to look around.\n\n\"There it is.\" The dragon started walking towards what looked like a small worn path through the blurry trees. That must have been the trail that Trixie spoke of.\n\nAs they approached the path, Arcturus noticed that the trees seemed to bend away from them. The corridor was large enough for Crimson Sky and himself to walk alongside each other, without either one feeling cramped. Arcturus reached out to touch a purple leaf, only to have the plant recoil its branch before his hand even made contact. Startled, he pulled his hand back.\n\n\"What an odd place,\" he gasped, turning towards Crimson Sky. The dragon apparently had been watching what he was doing intently.\n\n\"I agree. Most bizarre. I have not seen anything like it before. I suggest we follow the path like Trixie suggested. She can be a bit of a joker sometimes, but that piece of advice didn't strike me as random.\" Crimson Sky gestured to the path with his neck. \"At the front, paladin. Pretend you're leading your valiant dragon-slaying knights into battle, only this time you seek to please the dragon, not slay him.\" Crimson Sky grinned.\n\n\"The more time I spend around you, the more I start to realize what an odd creature you are.\"\n\n\"Oh, there it is. A compliment after a downpour of ill-intentioned japes.\"\n\n\"You're not supposed to take it that way.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless, I will, because I am painfully aware of how striking I am.\"\n\nArcturus eyed the dragon's teeth with a slight hint of worry, then quickly realized he had better chances to drown on his mead than get harmed by this joker of a dragon.\n\n\"So? Who leads if I refuse to please the dragon, as you put it?\"\n\nThe dragon's claws tapped Arcturus' backside.\n\n\"Oh, fine then\u2026I suppose if Crimson Sky is scared, a paladin will of course have to lead the way until the fearsome dragon's bravery returns.\" He smirked at the dragon.\n\n\"You're so full of yourself.\"\n\n\"Hah! Get a good look at who's talking, your strikingness.\" Arcturus took the lead and they both started walking on the strange path laid before them.\n\nThey walked for hours, the path never seeming to change direction or turn. Several times they stopped at the sound of a slight roar. Crimson Sky confirmed that it was indeed the sound of a dragon. A quick discussion was held about the possibility of lost dragons in the woods, followed quickly by arguments against such nonsense. Arcturus stopped for a moment as his feet had begun to ache, at which Crimson Sky causally bumped into him.\n\n\"Why did you stop?\" the dragon asked, sitting down on his haunches.\n\nArcturus had to sit. It felt like they had been walking for days. When his rear touched the soft ground, an utter wave of exhaustion washed over him. Like days upon days of exercise had suddenly caught up with his weary body. All his limbs felt as though they were weighted down by armor five times heavier. He slumped down backwards as his eyelids threatened to close. They shut only for a few seconds before he opened them again. He saw Crimson Sky was fighting to stay awake as well, as the dragon's head was slowly descending towards the ground. It rested softly beside him with a small groan.\n\n\"I rrrrreally need to rest for a bit\u2026\" The dragon mumbled as his words slowly descended into snoring.\n\nArcturus felt his eyelids once again insist on closing. He found them even heavier than before, and this time he did not think he had the strength to keep on fighting. He remembered slumping over and laying down beside the dragon before his dreams took him.\n\nHours later, Arcturus awoke with a deep yawn, sitting upright and feeling completely refreshed. Beside him still lay the sleeping Crimson Sky. His wings were draped over him like a veiny, semi-transparent blanket. Arcturus looked around. The once dull colors of the night had been replaced with very vibrant greens and browns lit by a very bright blue sky. However, as he looked around, he could still make out a slight blurriness, a sign that they were still in the faerie's realm. He quickly checked his gear, finding everything was where he left it, except the crossbow that got smashed by the dragon.\n\nHe felt his stomach grumble, so he started digging through his pockets. After minutes of pulling out every gadget he had, Arcturus held a small brown bag in his hand, containing a stash of trail rations. He greedily grasped the dried fruit and nuts, stuffing them into his mouth. While he was chewing, in the back of his mind, he realized he was way hungrier than he thought he would be. It felt as though he had not eaten in days. He pulled the water skin from his pack and took a swig from it. The water was cool to his tongue as he gulped it down. He gasped before wiping his mouth. When he was done he turned back towards Crimson Sky, who, by the sign of his deep breaths, was still very much asleep.\n\nHe rolled his eyes as he sighed. Out of all the possible dragons he could get paired with\u2026\n\nHe moved over and placed his hands on the dragon's head, ready to shove him awake. He stopped of course, to think about what Crimson Sky would do if he was -again-rudely awoken.\n\n\"Now, Arcturus,\" he said aloud to himself, \"this is either the worst decision of your career, or just one of many. Eh. What's an extra boulder on top of a mountain?\"\n\nArcturus dragged his voice, then moved his hands down the dragon's scaly neck. He knew just what this lazy lizard needed.\n\n\"Wake up!!\" he slapped the dragon's tan belly. \"We can't be resting the day away!\"\n\n\"Well maybe YOU can't do that, but I certainly intend to.\" Crimson Sky yawned lazily before opening one of his eyes. \"Hold on. Are we still in Trixie's realm?\"\n\n\"Take a look around, your highness.\" Arcturus waved sarcastically.\n\n\"You're a crap servant.\"\n\n\"Why thank you, my liege.\" Arcturus gave a mocking bow. \"Please, pardon me for not cleaning your claws or polishing your scales during your rest.\"\n\n\"That's an idea.\" The dragon stood up and stretched his spine, following with his wings, and then slamming his tail onto the earth.\n\n\"How long have we been asleep?\" Crimson Sky asked as he flung off patches of dirt from his belly with the help of his claws.\n\n\"Just slept the night. Gods, I have never been so tired before. I didn't think we were walking for THAT long.\" Arcturus said.\n\n\"I noticed that as well.\" Crimson Sky started to scowl, \"I imagine that in this place, time moves at a different pace.\" Suddenly, Crimson Sky grabbed his stomach as it gave a loud growl, which was a very terrifying noise to Arcturus.\n\nArcturus met Crimson Sky's eyes briefly. \"Oh, don't be frightened,\" laughed the dragon. \"I am not so hungry as to eat you. Although....\" The dragon looked into the blurred woods. \"I fear I must go hungry, for I have not seen a speck of wildlife, and even I'm not stupid enough to venture off the path just to sate my hunger.\"\n\n\"How about some nuts?\" Arcturus stretched out whatever remained of his rations.\n\n\"No.\" The dragon said sternly. \"The quicker we're out of this place, the better. Move your armored ass now,\" said Crimson Sky as he pushed Arcturus along with his snout.\n\nThey started on the path again, with Arcturus still in the front and Crimson Sky very close behind him. They would both stop to stare at the myriad of different bizarre plant life they encountered, some with many branches that ended with eyeballs, or flowers they spotted that gave off a purr like a cat. As they walked, the path seemed to be less and less verdant. They even saw what possibly could have been birds overhead, but Crimson Sky cited Trixie and decided to not take a closer look. They stopped at the next clearing for a rest, Arcturus looked up to find no sun, so he was unsure of what time it was supposed to be.\n\nCrimson Sky laid down onto the grass and sprawled out as he stretched. \"You know, I realized something.\"\n\n\"Oh my. I stand in awe before your intellect. Please. Amaze me.\"\n\n\"I hate all this walking.\" Crimson Sky said as he sat up and stretched his neck into an S shape.\n\n\"Yeah. I can see that on your snout as you look to the sky throughout the day, praying for it to end. Still,\" Arcturus groaned as he stretched out his arms, \"you'll find no disagreement from me here.\"\n\n\"Never felt this way since I was a hatchling. Suddenly find myself unable to take to the skies, that is.\" The dragon paused. \"Grarr, how annoying. Imagine how quick this journey would've been if your dwarfish legs didn't slow us down.\"\n\nArcturus let out a dry laugh. \"Try harder, Crimson Sky. I'm sure you can do better.\"\n\n\"I don't want to!\" the dragon complained. \"Thinking takes energy, and time. I just want to fly.\"\n\nWell, that was something he did not learn from his studying of dragons. \"You can't fly as a hatchling? I thought dragons came out chirping and darting every which way through the air.\" He mimed his arms to be like wings, to which Crimson Sky frowned.\n\n\"No, our wings are not strong enough to carry us at that age. It falls to our parents to carry us around.\" Crimson Sky said as he closed his eyes, \"I almost pity you for not experiencing that blissful safety of soaring over the world in the claws of a loving parent.\"\n\nArcturus figured the dragon was picturing himself flying once more in the sky.\n\n\"Hmm\u2026I imagine it is more enjoyable when you are not plucked suddenly from the ground against your will.\"\n\nCrimson Sky just grinned, \"That scream you gave was pretty hilarious. Maybe we should do it again when I need a laugh.\"\n\n\"Don't even try.\" Arcturus said, pointing a finger at the dragon. \"Or I will make sure you are missing one of your claws next time you wake up.\" He brandished his sword around.\n\nCrimson sky just replied with a smug look. Then a moment of silence. \"I don't think you are capable of harming me.\"\n\n\"Why would you think that?\" he asked. \"I was trained to kill dragons, you know.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you have a different heart than the men I speak of. You are\u2026frail. In a good way. Gentle is the word I seek, yes.\"\n\nArcturus smiled. \"Crimson Sky just gave me a compliment!\"\n\nThe dragon snarled, but couldn't find anything to say in his defense, so he just draped that annoyingly slimy eel of a tongue over Arcturus' hands as the human struggled to protect his face.\n\n\"Stop that!\"\n\nThe dragon pulled his snout back. \"What? I'm expressing my affection!\"\n\n\"Express it somewhere else,\" Arcturus grumbled. \"You know how I feel about dragon drool.\"\n\n\"Get over yourself.\" Crimson Sky playfully shoved the human back. \"Speaking of which, now that we have the time. I wanted to know why you freed me.\"\n\nArcturus put the licking behind him. Silly or not, the dragon had enough mockery for now. \"I believed your words, dragon. Everything you said about me as a man and a paladin\u2026 it made me realize I could not put an innocent life to death.\"\n\nCrimson sky laughed, \"Innocent, am I now?\" he rolled in the grass, \"Yes yes yes! An innocent hatchling free of any sins!\"\n\n\"Well innocent of those crimes.\" Arcturus chuckled at the dragon's playfulness. \"My king changed his mind and ordered me to kill you.\"\n\nVeledar rolled back onto his belly. \"And the person you mentioned that you put your trust in, what was that about?\"\n\nArcturus paused when Crimson Sky asked about Selina. \"Let's just say the person would have given you a chance. I reminded myself that my oaths were not to just humanoids, and could extend to any living creature, including dragons.\"\n\nThis just made Crimson Sky grin again. \"This person sounds very wise.\"\n\n\"She was.\" Arcturus went to feel the locket in his pouch.\n\n\"What's there? More little nuts?\" Crimson Sky approached with his head tilted to the side. \"I saw you reach in there when we were talking on the ship.\"\n\nArcturus pulled out the locket, opened it, and showed it to the dragon. \"These were my son and wife. They were the ones taken from me by the\u2026other red dragon I mentioned.\"\n\nThe dragon stared at the pictures of the paladin's dead family for a moment in silence. \"I did not know. That is certainly more valuable than a coin, gem, or piece of art.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Arcturus placed the locked back into the pocket. \"Yes it is.\"\n\n\"I cannot claim to know the dragon you've killed, but to rob the lives of your family\u2026it takes a monster to do that, you know?\"\n\n\"Indeed. Thank you for\u2026you know.\" Arcturus mumbled, stroking the dragon over his snout more as a reflex. Crimson Sky gave no signs of discomfort. Quite the opposite. He started purring like a cat, only in a much deeper way.\n\n\"You don't mind this?\"\n\n\"Nraarrr.\" The dragon growled in a rather cute way. \"Not many humans touched me like this. Believe it or not, you are the first human to not be a complete arse to me, in spite of the incident at my cave.\" He finished speaking with a growl.\n\n\"I'm sorry about that. Truly.\" Arcturus grabbed both sides of the dragon's jaws. \"I will make sure every coin is returned and that your name is cleared of any false accusations.\"\n\n\"And my books? What about those?\" the dragon mumbled.\n\n\"New ones if I can get them.\"\n\n\"New ones?\" Crimson Sky said, getting his snout closer to Arcturus' face. \"I want old books, not fresh ones.\"\n\nArcturus nodded, \"Of course. Old ones it is. Valuable at that.\"\n\nThis seemed to please Crimson Sky as he sat back down next to him. His attention was drawn to what appeared to be a silver wrymling running out towards the clearing. The wyrmling was female. Arcturus could tell by the less pronounced horns and spines. She stood as half as tall as Crimson Sky and eyed him with a look of playfulness. She opened her mouth and seemed to speak in a language of hisses and growls.\n\nCrimson Sky turned his head in an instant, his face frozen in terror. The little wrymling darted away from them into the forest away from the path.\n\n\"Who was that?\" Arcturus placed his hand over the shocked dragon's leg.\n\n\"T-that,\" Crimson Sky began, \"That can't be her. She is much older than that!\"\n\nCrimson Sky stood up to pace in front of Arcturus, \"It has to be an illusion.\" He started to ramble nonsense in the same growls and hisses the silver dragon had talked in.\n\n\"Crimson, who was that!\" exclaimed Arcturus. This seemed to snap Crimson Sky out of it as he turned towards him. \"I think what I witnessed -what we both saw in fact-was an illusion of my younger sister, and when did you start calling me Crimson?\"\n\n\"Just now. I decided it was easier than Crimson Sky all the time, and somewhat better than dragon.\"\n\n\"I don't like how it feels, bare and insignificant.\" Crimson Sky replied as his muzzle scrunched up. \"Use the full title. Don't be lazy.\"\n\n\"Fine, Crimson Sky.\" said Arcturus in a monotone voice.\n\n\"That's much better!\" Crimson Sky beamed.\n\n\"I shouldn't be surprised you have a family, but in a way, I find myself\u2026mystified.\" Arcturus said. Although now that he thought of it, it seemed natural for dragons to have families. It was just something he never thought of.\n\n\"Go on. I'll tell you in a moment.\"\n\nThey started walking once again, although Crimson Sky was walking more slowly than he did.\n\n\"I had a sister. That was her, back when she was still a hatchling. We both had a mother as well, in case you're wondering.\"\n\n\"Well I figured that, unless you dragons just sprout out from the ground\u2026\" he stopped as Crimson Sky turned to him with his teeth barred.\n\n\"Bad joke. Sorry,\" he said quickly, then decided to ask him another question. \"So, what were their names?\" He quickened his pace to now match the dragon that was leading.\n\n\"I see what you are trying to do.\" chuckled Crimson Sky. \"But you will not get their names from me. You will have to earn their names from them. You can of course have their titles. My sister was known as the Radiant Gem of the East, and my mother's favorite title was the Indomitable Aegis. She was quite fond of that one. Said an elven caravan gave it to her when she fought off a large group of bandits that had beset them.\"\n\n\"She had the best stories.\" Crimson Sky sighed, \"Not like your human stories at all, where dragons capture maidens, pick on humans, or wreck devastation on the countryside.\"\n\n\"You are kind of picking on me.\" Arcturus pet the dragon's side to keep him from growling. \"And I am sure we have a good dragon in one of the stories. Definitely. We know you're not all that bad,\" he protested, but with a quick stare and the dare, \"prove it\" he was wracking his brain for one. After a moment of thinking, he sighed and admitted defeat to the dragon that thrilled at having bested him.\n\n\"I can't think of one right now, but I will let you know when my memory returns.\"\n\n\"Sure. Something tells me I will be waiting till your death bed until you remember one.\" Crimson Sky chuckled.\n\nThe two of them suddenly stopped. The road they were walking on had been bright and colorful, while the road ahead looked dark, dreary, and covered with clouds. Arcturus looked to the path that was littered with worn stones and gnarled roots. A crack of thunder later, and the downpour started. It was a strange sight to see, as if an invisible wall separated the bright trail from its much darker counterpart.\n\n\"I am starting to hate this fairy magic.\" Arcturus said with a stern face.\n\n\"A sentiment well shared.\" The dragon agreed.\n\nThey both took a step onto the dark path, finding it was not a trap, but it did make them wet. As they walked, the sound of the rain hitting Arcturus' metal armor suddenly came to a stop after a few hundred feet. Looking up, he saw what had happened. There was a tan membrane of a wing overhead, sheltering him from the rain like an umbrella.\n\n\"Much obliged, dragon,\" he said with a smile, pointing to the wing.\n\n\"I only did it to stop that annoying sound your scales make when the rain hits them,\" grumbled Crimson Sky. He then turned his snout to the path ahead, as if to ignore Arcturus. Although Arcturus swore he saw a smirk on the dragon's snout.\n\n\"Sure dragon, sure.\" He poked the dragon's chin, then continued walking down the path in the company of the only worthy dragon he knew. Perhaps in a few years, there would be a story of a good dragon out there. The tale of Crimson Sky the Bold. Arcturus merely had to witness such heroic acts\u2026and hope both of them lived to see the tales spread throughout the taverns of the world.\n\n[ Escaping Sorrows ]\n\nVeledar closely followed Arcturus down the wet path of earth. His wings still covered the human to at least keep him dry from the rain that pattered upon his tan membrane. He breathed in deep into the smell of fresh rain, then opened his maw to catch a few droplets of water onto his tongue. The liquid certainly tasted like normal rain. There was nothing odd about it. The dragon stared at the dark clouds that filled the sky, where he would see the occasional flash of lighting spear through the heavy curtain. However, every time that happened, there was no bang. Veledar was sure he never heard the deafening roar of thunder ever since he entered Trixie's realm.\n\nThe two of them kept on walking, paws and boots splashing through the mud. His joints would occasionally ache during the drip, a dull pain that he could manage, but he still let out a loud groan to startle the human. This amused the dragon as Arcturus would then apologize for capturing the dragon and throwing him in the bowels of the Lumarian airship.\n\nThey had come to a gnarled tree in the middle of their path, easily dwarfing Veledar in size. He stared up at the trunk that had two large knots at a split that looked suspiciously like eyes.\n\n\"Well, nothing wrong with a bit of creepiness as long as I can sit on it.\" The human found a dry bit of earth and sat against the tree, letting out a sigh of relaxation.\n\n\"Aren't you feeling watched?\"\n\nArcturus waved dismissively at the eyes, comparing them to a weird type of fairy flower.\n\n\"Grrr, fine.\" Veledar sat beside him. He started poking and licking at his wing joints to ease the tension while he flexed his limbs slowly to keep the blood from pouring through his weary muscles. They sat there in silence for a while. Veledar noted that the rain had not exactly stopped, but simply did not fall beneath this tree or its branches. He tilted his neck in curiosity, as the tree had no leaves at all to protect them from the water droplets.\n\n\"How long do you think we have been walking?\" Arcturus rested his back more comfortably against one of the roots.\n\n\"Can't tell in a place where there's no sun or moon to speak of...\" Veledar replied as he dashed his tongue over a hind paw. He could already feel the ache in his joints starting to go away, in spite of the human's silly comments about the taste of dirt and what not. He called this practice barbaric. As if he knew anything about being a dragon.\n\n\"Fine. Lick them all away. I don't know why we're arguing about grooming habits when you yawn like a cat, stretch like a cat, eat like a cat and probably even mate like one.\"\n\nVeledar had a few answers prepared, but the grooming felt far too relaxing. Besides, he didn't want to give the human the satisfaction of another silly debate.\n\nWhen Veledar finished with his paws, he continued with his tail. Arcturus mumbled something about continuing the journey. Veledar, however, loved his tail too much to leave it cold and damp.\n\n\"I am more interested in why the rain does not fall beneath this tree, adding that to the list of other things we have seen.\" He answered to one of the human's many concerns.\n\n\"Maybe you're right. Perhaps we shouldn't look a dragon in the mouth.\" Arcturus chuckled.\n\n\"Horse. It's horse. I have heard this human saying before, so please don't compare me with those things.\"\n\n\"I've seen plenty of horses in my life, and at the risk of inflating your immense ego, I do have to admit you look much better than a horse.\"\n\nVeledar stopped mid-lick. \"Thank you.\" He quickly continued to distract himself from the hot blood rushing into his cheeks. It wasn't the first time he heard a compliment from this human's mouth. Why was his heart beating so quick? The dragon nibbled onto his scales, figuring it must've been some weird fairy magic that made him feel awkward.\n\n\"Stretch your wing in my direction. I can use a bit of warmth over here.\"\n\nVeledar did. He stifled a weird growl when the human started caressing along his sensitive membrane.\n\n\"Strange, how soft your wings are when your entire body is made for battle.\" Arcturus traced his finger along a thick blood vessel. \"When we get to a village, I'll speak with one of the blacksmiths to fashion you something for the wings. It only takes a single claw to rob you off the ability to fly.\"\n\n\"I won't get hit.\" Veledar said. He tried to pull his wing back, only to find himself unable as the human held onto two of his phalanges.\n\n\"It's mine now. You offered it, remember?\"\n\nThe dragon mumbled something about rudeness, then continued with his grooming.\n\nThankfully Arcturus was too tired to poke fun at him. The human put his hands beneath his head and reclined onto the ground. \"Figure it would a good time to rest for a while.\" the human opened one eye to look at the dragon. \"Unless you have something else to lick, Crimson Sky.\"\n\nVeledar groaned. Even with all the licking, his muscles still felt fatigued. He snorted before he coiled around himself, resting his head on top of a hind paw. He hated how bare, cold and hard the ground felt. If only he had materials to build himself a proper nest...\n\n\"I only disagree because this place lacks any soft beds for us to sleep on. Since SOMEONE decided to take mine.\" He looked to Arcturus to see a wave of regret wash over the human's face before he apologized yet again. Veledar smiled and closed his eyes.\n\n\"How old are you anyway? I figure you're in the hundreds. Somewhere close to that figure anyway.\"\n\n\"That's an odd, sudden question. Do you really want to know?\"\n\nThe human mumbled a quick yes.\n\nVeledar remained silent for a moment. Age was something he never really thought about when he simply existed without any worries about the changing seasons or the passing of time.\n\n\"Alright. If I had to say, I would guess five hundred and twenty seasons?\" Veledar cocked his head, seemingly unsure of himself. \"Wait. That's not right. Or is it? Human years are so odd!\" Veledar frowned slightly, knowing he wasn't as old as other dragons, but he hoped Arcturus would not notice that.\n\n\"Five hundred and twenty seasons?\" Arcturus said, sitting up and opening his eyes. It took him a moment before he replied. \"Oh, that means a hundred thirty something. Still, rather young for an adult dragon. You've got so many more years to go, my scaly friend. Good health to you.\"\n\nVeledar sighed. He felt rather embarrassed by the human's deductive skills. It made sense for the paladin to know that. He had studied dragons, after all.\n\n\"So, dragons measure their ages in seasons. That's something books never mention, probably because how redundant that is. Much easier to count years than seasons.\"\n\n\"Well honestly, it is only a rough guess, I honestly don't care about my age too much.\"\n\nArcturus looked to him as if he might have something to say before shutting his mouth quickly. Well, since the human had asked him, Veledar figured he might as well return the favor.\n\n\"What about you, paladin?\"\n\n\"Twenty-five. That's a hundred seasons in dragon age.\"\n\n\"Is that old for humans?\"\n\nArcturus chuckled.\n\nVeledar had to admit to himself, he was not too sure about the life span of humans. He had heard they were not long as long lived as the elves or even their trusty gryphons. He sighed in pity for their race. Almost a drop of water in the bucket that was Veledar's life span.\n\n\"Humans can live for eighty or up to one hundred with the right spells. Past that...I'm not even sure it's worth living.\"\n\n\"Only one hundred? Then the tales I have heard are true!\" Veledar replied, \"You have such a short time in this world. How can you manage to achieve anything of worth?\"\n\n\"Simple. We strive to do the most with the time we are given.\" Arcturus beamed, \"Live for the day. Absorb as much knowledge as we can from our surroundings. We are kind of forced to do it faster than the other races. Trust me, you're not the only one to ask me this question. You should hear some of the stories of elves in our city. Sometimes, they can be cold, heartless bastards.\" Arcturus then paused for a moment as Veledar just looked at him during the silence.\n\n\"How about your stories, dragon? Is this the first time you have a meaningful interaction with a human?\"\n\n\"I met two scavengers when I encountered Trixie, then made acquaintance with hundreds when I blundered into that man's house. Before that, I had only heard of you in stories from the wood elves.\"\n\n\"You knew wood elves?\"\n\n\"But of course,\" The dragon said. \"Hard not to when you live next to their great forest.\"\n\n\"That must have been hard, you know, being a fire breathing dragon in a forest full of flammable elves.\" the human smirked.\n\nVeledar just chuckled. \"Yes, that would be a very big problem for an irresponsible hatchling, but mother kept us away from them for the most part. They gave her plenty of leeway in raising us.\"\n\n\"Did you have any other siblings besides the one you mentioned before?\"\n\nVeledar frowned. He usually enjoyed his talks about the past. However, that was a topic he never enjoyed. \"Yes, I had a brother who was older than I,\" he said slowly and more quietly than he usually talked.\n\n\"Have you stayed in contact with him? I have heard dragons live very much in solitude.\"\n\n\"That is not a hard rule. We generally like to live alone, but we enjoy companionship as much as any other living being.\"\n\nHe thought to the day that he and Adalina had decided to leave the nest and fly away from his mother. She had been relieved they were heading out, but he had always remembered how she looked a little sad.\n\n\"Although we are separated, we do keep tabs on where the other ones keep their lairs.\" He thought to his sister's lair that resided over the sea in another country.\n\n\"Well, how long ago did you separate from your family?\"\n\n\"Twenty-five years ago, in human time.\" he let out a mighty sigh. Sometimes, it felt as though it were just yesterday that they were all one big happy clutch. He frowned again as he thought back to his brother, imagining how he would have looked now, all grown and strong. Veledar turned his head as they both heard the snapping of a twig behind them. What he saw made his blood run cold, and a shiver of dread tingle up his spine. In the span of that lone moment, Veledar found himself completely helpless.\n\nStanding about one hundred feet from the tree was a silver hatchling on the verge of adulthood. He stood half as tall as Veledar on all four limbs, with armored scales bearing the color of silver. He had two white horns, with one of them severed around the middle. The hatchling had frills along his back all the way from head to his tail, and even under his chin. His gray wings were drooped, dragging against the earth as he moved around.\n\nVeledar shot up when he noticed a sickly red streak slashed around the hatchling's hind leg. When the hatchling turned, more gashes came into view; nauseating things that dripped with crimson goo.\n\n\"No. No, not again. Rrraaaaaaahhhh!\" Veledar found himself bounding over to the wrymling as the form of his dying brother collapsed onto the ground. He heard Arcturus shout something to him, but he ignored the human as he desperately reached for his brother. He collapsed as he caressed the dragon's snout. There was no air coming out of his nostrils, no warmth in his cold body. Veledar placed his head on the dead dragon's back, already feeling the tears that plagued him during the moments of depression that followed his brother's death many years ago.\n\n\"How can this be?\" He cried out. \"You were dead for so many ages! Why must you return to torment me so?\" he asked as he softly ran his claws over the cuts in his brother's scales.\n\n\"If I had......\" he trailed off as the tears began to fall down his cheeks now, translucent trickles that splashed onto the ground below. \"If only I had been stronger to\u2026to protect you\u2026\"\n\n\"Dragon. Dragon\u2026\" A faint voice called to him. \"Crimson Sky!\"\n\nConfused, Veledar turned his head around as something warm touched his shoulder.\n\n\"Your brother?\" The human asked, his voice but a whisper.\n\n\"Yes.\" Veledar's breath shuddered. The dragon closed his teary eyes. He thought back to when his brother began to fall from the sky, spiraling down towards the ground. He shook his snout to clear the memory from his mind.\n\n\"How did he perish?\"\n\n\"That.\" Veledar sniffed, \"That will be a tale for another time.\" He then wiped his eyes, then opened them to find that his brother's corpse had vanished. He felt his anger grow at the realization this was all an illusion brought on about by this accursed place.\n\n\"Graaaaarrr! I hate you!\" Veledar smashed his tail into the ground. \"This mud that sticks to my feet, the cold air, the oppressive clouds that never stop weeping. I hate everything!\" Veledar roared out at the blurred forest, using all his four feet to rake gashes into the ground while his tail left gape after gape until he found his rampage blocked by the human's defiant form.\n\n\"Get out of my way.\"\n\n\"No!\" Arcturus stretched a hand towards his snout. \"This place\u2026it pulses with our memories, unveiling deepest secrets. The more we linger here, the harder it will be to leave. We should get some rest, then get out as quick as we can, especially after\u2026 that.\" Arcturus said.\n\nVeledar threw his snout into the human's arms. He didn't care how ungainly it was, but right now, he needed something warm to banish the cold dread pulsing within his veins. After he got a healthy dose of scratches and a tight sympathy hug from the human, Veledar was ready to leave. He thanked Arcturus for his support, then returned back to the tree, where he acted as a makeshift bed for the tired human.\n\nIt must've been a while since they dozed off. Veledar had been having such a wonderful dream. He remembered dragons, and Arcturus too, although anything beyond that out of his grasp. He looked around while his jaws parted in a healthy yawn to find Arcturus missing from his resting place.\n\n\"Arcturus?\" The dragon lifted each wing at a time to make sure he wasn't missing anything.\n\nThere was a trail of boot prints leading towards the blurry forest.\n\n\"Arcturus!\" he shouted, practically jumping to all fours. Damn that human! Veledar cursed to himself. He should have tied him to his tail to stop this from happening, or maybe sleep on top of him. Nevertheless, there was nothing to be done now. Veledar quickly followed the tracks to the trail's edge. He inspected the boot prints, still fresh. That was at least some good news, if the human had not left long ago, he could not have possibly gotten that far. Veledar hesitated before placing a paw into the woods off the beaten path. He remembered Trixie's words, but leaving Arcturus alone in this world of lost memories was just not the right thing to do. Veledar thought back on his own experience, when he tore the ground in grief over his brother's demise. It was Arcturus that calmed his rage. Arcturus that offered him comfort when the coldness of the skies closed down on him.\n\nAfter a moment of mental preparation, Veledar bounded into the forest. Creepy trees surrounded him from all sides, their gnarled branches almost reaching out to him. Veledar kept away from any roots, avoiding every form of vegetation until he found Arcturus not that far from the path. Arcturus was crouched over what appeared to be two burned corpses. One was the size of an adult, and the other was the size of a small child. The human was holding one in each arm, sobbing quietly into their seared flesh.\n\nVeledar had an idea about who those humans could be. He approached the human, poking him hard in the back.\n\n\"Leave me, you vile beast!\" Arcturus shouted with animalistic fury, almost catching Veledar on the snout with his sword. \"Can't you see that they need me?!\" He pointed the sharp tip at Veledar's eyes. \"I need to tend to their wounds, and you are not getting in my way!\"\n\n\"They're not real, Arcturus. What you are seeing now is a lie.\"\n\n\"Wh-what?\" The human shook his head. \"No. No, they're here. Can't you see them?\"\n\n\"Only the roots of the trees. You're staring at roots, Arcturus.\"\n\nThe human dropped on his knees to grab onto the other two figures. \"No, they're here. I can smell their seared flesh. Touch their\u2026their\u2026\"\n\nVeledar grabbed onto Arcturus. \"It's all in your mind, human. The forest is feeding on you. Let go. Let go now!\"\n\nHe could almost feel the forest's grip tighten around their forms. Urging them to remain here. Give themselves to the phantasms of the past.\n\n\"I know you're in pain. I know they need you. But so do I!\" Veledar snarled as he began to drag Arcturus away from the two corpses.\n\n\"Nooooo! Don't do this! Please don't take them away from me again!\"\n\nVeledar ignored Arcturus as the human punched and kicked like a wild, caged beast.\n\n\"Let go. Le'go!\" The human wailed, grabbing onto a branch and holding firm. \"Noooooo!\"\n\nWith a final tug, the human's grip slipped, and Veledar pulled him all the way back to the tree. He plopped Arcturus down, who now seemed to be calm, with no fight left in him. The human just slouched, hugged his knees, and continued sobbing silently to himself.\n\n\"I lied.\"\n\nArcturus looked at the dragon, so much pain welling in his eyes. It almost hurt Veledar, to see the once stern paladin so\u2026broken.\n\n\"I saw the burned corpses\u2026what remained of your family. But I couldn't leave you there alone, because I need you here, with me.\"\n\n\"Why did you do that, dragon?\" Arcturus whispered, drool coming out of his mouth to join the streams of tears that fell down the sides of his pained face. \"They needed me\u2026without me by their side, they'll be lost again.\" Arcturus said softly. \"I can't do this\u2026I cannot abandon them again.\"\n\n\"That was not your family. Only an illusion meant to lure you off the path. Just\u2026just like my brother.\" Veledar stated calmly, although he felt a pang of pity for the deceased dragon. He sat quietly as Arcturus continued to sob silently to himself.\n\n\"What were their names?\" Veledar asked as he slowly eased the human against his scaly chest.\n\nArcturus sniffed and wiped a hand across his face to clear his tears. \"My wife's name was Selina, and my son was named Geoffery. Two years ago, a red dragon going by the name Dread Flame killed them in revenge after I bloodied his scales. For that deed, and all the suffering he caused, I plunged my sword so deep into his eye that his hot blood washed over my knuckles. Dread Flame\u2026if there ever was a beast more deserving of my blade. My only regret is that I hadn't killed him slower.\" Arcturus hissed. \"He should've suffered just as much as my family did!\"\n\nHaving vented out his inner demons, Arcturus slowly regained his calmer state.\n\n\"I held my son in my arms when he gave his final breath. I screamed for a cleric until my voice gave out but\u2026it was too late. I failed them. I failed my squad, my king\u2026I failed everyone.\" Arcturus looked up at the dragon, \"You're the only left, Crimson. The only one I managed to save.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Veledar placed his head in the human's lap, ignoring the fact Arcturus had referred to him simply as \"Crimson\" twice now. \"We cannot think about the past now. Let us get some rest before our bodies collapse.\"\n\nHe grabbed the human and pulled him tightly against his scaled chest. He was surprised to find him so soft. In many ways, he reminded Veledar of the stuffed animal he used to hug every night in the comfort of his lair.\n\n\"I will be holding you close to me so you don't wander off again\u2026if that's alright with you.\"\n\nArcturus nodded and replied with a simple \"Good.\"\n\n\"Rest now. When we both rise, we shall see this path to completion.\" Veledar yawned, curling his head and draping his wings over them both. He closed his eyes as he felt the human fall asleep, hoping that tomorrow he would greet the real world once more.\n\nVeledar awoke the next morning when he felt Arcturus' trying to wiggle free from his grasp. He opened his eyes and yawned a healthy ten seconds tongue-curling yawn before smirking at the human's futile struggles.\n\n\"Did you sleep well?\" he said coyly.\n\n\"How could I not, when your big scaly bum kept me warm as a baby?\"\n\n\"Bum? Do you really want to see how it feels to sleep at my other end?\"\n\n\"No! Gods no! Fair, mighty, crimson dragon, I beseech you, never try something so wicked with me.\"\n\n\"Grawr, fine.\" Veledar relaxed his front limbs. Though he wanted to have a bit more fun with the human, he couldn't antagonize him when he spoke such honest, beautiful words.\n\nVeledar slowly stood up. He sprawled his wings on either side, his joints trembling as they stretched to their limits. The dragon flapped them lightly a few times to wear off the stiffness, then continued with the usual stretching motions of his other pairs of limbs.\n\n\"Do you have to moan like that when you stretch?\"\n\nVeledar was well aware of the rumbles coming out of his throat. Of course, an inferior creature like the human could not possibly understand how good it felt to stretch after a long night of resting.\n\n\"I don't know. Can you stop scratching your face-fur?\"\n\n\"It's called a beard,\" Arcturus felt around the brown bush that started to cover his whole jaw. \"And if your scales itch for an answer, know that I plan to get rid of it as soon as we return to civilization.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\" Veledar lifted a forepaw to poke at his obviously sharp claws. \"I have everything I need right here.\"\n\nArcturus unsheathed his sword. \"This is a lot sharper.\"\n\n\"Then use it.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he pointed towards the dragon's tail. \"Kind of like you use your claws to scratch your ass, eh?\"\n\nThe little mink was getting the hang of this game of teasing, a revelation for which Veledar hadn't planned ahead. For a dragon, losing at anything felt like a dull throbbing headache that persisted for days.\n\n\"That was a joke, in case you couldn't tell.\" The dragon waved a paw around, his voice dripping with sarcasm. \"I'm not as cruel as to sit on your tiny, crumbly body when we rest. Besides, you barely even stirred.\"\n\n\"Indeed. I just love being held like a babe when I sleep. Why, I should've married a dragon instead of a woman!\" Arcturus rolled his eyes. \"You are good at many things, dragon, but even you have your limits.\"\n\n\"So what you are saying is that you would rather sleep out in the cold?\"\n\nArcturus nodded. \"Why did you even do that? I would have been fine without getting the special treatment. Knights are trained to endure much worse than a bit of cold, and I am a-\"\n\n\"Paladin.\" It was the dragon's time to growl. \"Heard that enough times already.\"\n\nHe was a bit annoyed that Arcturus did not realize he had done him a great service. \"Excuse me for trying too hard. All I did was make sure you did not wander off in the middle of the night again. I found you holding the forms of your dead wife and child in case that memory eludes you.\"\n\nArcturus froze in place and looked to Veledar as if the dragon suddenly sprouted additional heads. \"I did what?\" He asked in disbelief.\n\nVeledar tilted his head. Was it possible, that the human did not remember the night before? Just in case, he explained everything that had happened, especially enjoying the part when he told Arcturus about how he had bravely rescued the paladin from wandering the forest for all eternity. He ended with the tale with how Arcturus crawled into his embrace all by himself after a heart-touching moment shared prior to that.\n\n\"Whoa. Well\u2026I almost feel like a different person did all that, but I'm here, you're there, it happened, so thanks.\" Arcturus shook his head. \"Are you absolutely sure it wasn't a dream?\"\n\n\"You are now both testing my patience and insulting my acuity, dear human.\" Veledar smiled, \"I am a dragon. Doubt is like the wind that comes out of my other end when-\"\n\n\"Alright, I heard enough. Thanks again for warming me like a campfire. You're a lot warmer and comfortable than I initially believed, alright? Is your scaly ego satisfied now?\"\n\nVeledar beamed at the human's words, then looked quickly around and noticed something was off. They were not in the same place they had fallen asleep in. Instead, they were in the middle of a field of bright green grass. There was a tree where the previous one had been, but instead of a creepy leafless monster, leaves of all different colors sprouted from this one's branches. The trunk too looked to be vibrant and full of life.\n\n\"Uh, do you suppose we wandered off some more?\" Arcturus asked, scratching his head in confusion.\n\nIf they had, Veledar did not know, but he spied the path again, parting the grass and leading off deeper into the forest.\n\n\"Crimson Sky!\" Arcturus shouted.\n\nVeledar turned to Arcturus, who was busy scooping what looked like berries out of his pack. His belt pouches were similarly loaded, and the paladin quickly formed small piles of fruits on the ground.\n\n\"Looks like someone filled my pouches and pack with berries while we slept. I don't know whether to be terrified something snuck in on us or thank them.\"\n\n\"Who cares?\" Veledar shrugged and speared one of the purple berries with his claw. He inspected its soft surface and the juice that slowly dripped down his claw, then quickly popped it into his maw, much to the disapproval of his human companion.\n\n\"Wait! We don't even know where those came from.\"\n\n\"Mrawrm, who cares??\" Veledar mumbled as he took another. He felt the hunger that had been growing over their journey fade away almost instantly. He remembered that druids shared some of these berries when he was a hatchling, so he was well aware of what happened.\n\n\"Are they safe?\" Arcturus asked, placing one next to his eye.\n\n\"Not for humans.\" Veledar lied. \"Quickly, give me yours.\" He laughed.\n\nArcturus quickly snatched up three or four of the berries, eyeing them with suspicion. \"You greedy bastard! They're perfectly safe, aren't they?\"\n\nVeledar rolled his eyes in amusement. \"Yes, Arcturus. Trixie's friends won't suddenly poison us just to see what kind of faces we make before we die. Actually, I'm pretty sure every last one of her friends has heard of my heroic exploits, which explains these berries, obviously a tribute to my greatness.\"\n\n\"Oh, shut that prideful mouth before it infects me.\" Arcturus laughed. Both of them ate about half of the berries. Arcturus put the rest back into his pouch and patted his belly.\n\n\"Well, that really hit the spot. What are these things again? Dragon berries, dragon balls, dragon-\"\n\n\"I'll show you balls.\" Veledar bared his teeth, then suddenly burped loudly. \"Night's essence or something of that sort. One of them can sustain a human for an entire day.\"\n\nHe expected some sort of praise from the human for knowing such a fact, but Arcturus kept staring at him. \"Do I have some juice on my snout or something?\"\n\n\"You burped!\" Arcturus said in disbelief.\n\n\"So?\" Veledar shrugged.\n\n\"I didn't think dragons to be capable of that!\" Arcturus started to laugh.\n\n\"Of course we burp!\" Veledar cried, \"What did you think we did, blow flames out of our nostrils?\"\n\n\"Ah, it's just something that never occurred to me.\" Arcturus mumbled as his face turned red. \"Wonder what else you dragons can do.\"\n\nVeledar stood up and started walking towards the path. \"I can show you how I blow gas from my other end, but we should go before you annoy me to the point where I'll really do that.\"\n\nHe didn't have to look back to hear Arcturus swiftly trying to catch up to him.\n\n\"What's with the rush, Crimson Sky? This path just seems to keep going and going.\"\n\nVeledar could feel a sensation running through his bones, a hunch some might call it, or a premonition.\n\n\"I feel as though this path nears its end, and we shall soon find ourselves returning to our world. \"He said, slowing his pace slightly so that Arcturus caught up next to him.\n\n\"Good. Fairy world has its fair share of surprises, but honestly I think we've both seen enough.\" Arcturus replied.\n\n\"Is it the place, or the company?\" Veledar asked, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"The place, you silly dragon. The company hasn't been too unpleasant. Although there is this really annoying dragon who keeps making fart jokes.\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"Annoying?\" Veledar asked. \"That's the best you could come up with? Not dreadful, honorable, handsome, or wise?\"\n\n\"Nope, just annoying.\"\n\nVeledar playfully smacked Arcturus with a paw. \"Be careful, human, I am much bigger than you.\"\n\n\"Well that just means you have a bigger ego to bruise when you are swiftly outsmarted.\"\n\nUsually, Veledar would get annoyed with the playful insults, but he instead found himself arguing with the human playfully as they walked until they had made their way out of the forest, out towards another green field. It seemed to stretch as far as Veledar could see in all directions. He and Arcturus were currently talking about magic and who was better at casting it. They stopped only when they looked to what seemed to be a clearing in the middle of the field.\n\nWithin the clearing of grass was a symbol in the shape of a tree made out of small, worn gray stones. The symbol was ten feet in size, with many branches, kind of like a portal to another world.\n\n\"Well, it looks like we are finally at the end of this journey.\" Veledar smiled, \"We can talk about how dragons are better at magic in every other way than humans later.\"\n\n\"And I'll pretend to listen. Now, wise dragon, maybe you can divine us a method of using this portal.\" Arcturus said while kneeling beside one of the stones, running his hand along it. Veleder decided to do the same with another stone and found them very smooth to the touch. He felt a small aura oozing out of the stone, something that happened with every magic-imbued object.\"\n\n\"Well, the stones are magical,\" Veledar said aloud, \"but I have no idea on how to activate them.\"\n\n\"Great! We're stuck.\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" Veledar scratched at the stone surface slowly, careful not to leave any lasting marks. It was a shame they had to leave this place. Dark things it did have, but the other things were rather fascinating. Veledar decided he would have to question Trixie about this fascinating realm when this was all said and done. After he was done yelling at her, that is.\n\nThey spent the next hour prodding, scratching, and Veledar tried some can-trip spells. Despite this, nothing happened. Nott even a single rock moved out of place. Veledar roared loudly in frustration, smashing his tail into the rock strong enough to recoil in pain.\n\n\"Raaarrhhhh, This stone taunts me!\" Veledar hissed. He turned towards Arcturus, who was busy drawing the symbol on a pad of parchment. He walked over slowly, trying to take a peek at the drawing.\n\n\"Why are you drawing that?\" Veledar snarled, placing his snout inches from the parchment. From the looks of it, Arcturus had done a fairly decent job of duplicating the symbol on the ground.\n\n\"Figured an actual representation of our conundrum here would help me think of a different way to solve this thing, instead of thrashing my tail, baring my teeth and snarling like a beast.\" Arcturus replied with a smirk.\n\n\"You don't have any-hey, that's part of a dragon's thinking process!\" Veledar put his snout up high, \"If something doesn't require a baring of teeth and a good tail smack, then it clearly wasn't worth our time.\" He opened one eye to peer down at the human, who was looking at him with an amused grin.\n\n\"Why are you making that face? You're not supposed to be amused! Besides, it's better than that smudge you barfed on your crumpled little piece of-\"\n\nSomething suddenly moved in the corner of Veledar's eye, causing him to stop talking mid-sentence. He spun around to see something mightily peculiar. Eight figures seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like trees. They stood at roughly eight feet tall and seemed to be made completely of shadows. Where humans would have had hands, they instead seemed to have large claws, and instead of a face all they had was a blank space with no features. Veledar flared his wings as his tail flicked back and forth behind him. He heard the metallic hiss of Arcturus' unsheathing sword, and a quick glance revealed four more had appeared around Arcturus. The figures in front of Veledar started to move, seemingly gliding along the ground.\n\nVeledar fought the urge to take flight and let his fire breath burn the lot of them. He lashed out with his claws instead as the silhouettes moved in to strike at his scales. He bit at one with his teeth only to have it dissipate inside his jaws. He felt some claws dig into his flesh, his blood smearing against his scales. The dragon growled in pain and lashed out at the shadows as he cursed his inability to leave the human behind. As a dragon, Veledar was not used to protecting someone during a fight. To Veledar's shock, each time his claws sliced through one of the shadows, it would burst into two other copies instead.\n\nDespite his success at ripping and biting them asunder, the dragon soon found himself surrounded on all sides. However, his scales could not protect him forever as he roared out in pain when a beast struck his hind leg.\n\nVeledar swiped the human close to him with his tail, took a deep breath, then unleashed a jet of fire that washed over the shadows like the river pouring through rocks. The shadows melted like wax, giving way to nothingness without any sort of sound.\n\n\"That does it.\" The dragon stood proud, breathing heavy and aching as he looked over where his foes once were.\n\nThe sounds of grunts and shouts reminded him of the human, who had a sizable amount of shadows around him as well. Veledar quickly dove over the human and crashed the bulk of his body into the shadows before him. However, as he turned his snout to look around, he found the ones he had melted with his fire reforming before his eyes. He pushed the shadows back and started to draw a circle on the ground around himself and Arcturus. \"Protection!\" he yelled out.\n\nThe circle shone bright white before forming a wall of light between them and the shadows. Veledar winced from the pain in his side. It was a minor wound by dragon standards, but it still hurt. He stared at the shadows as they raked the shimmering wall with their claws like a pack of rabid wolves. He knew the shield would not last for very long if they kept striking it.\n\n\"We need to find a way out of here!\" The dragon hissed.\n\n\"Did you notice the symbol on their backs?\" Arcturus asked, his breath just as labored.\n\n\"No, I was too busy destroying them.\" Veledar hissed. \"Why do you even care what is on their backs?\"\n\n\"It is the same symbol as the stones on the ground. They must be a puzzle on how to escape. It must be one last test of endurance for you to leave.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\" Veledar cocked his head to the side.\n\n\"Trixie said to focus, and that's why she sent both of us. I think we need to ignore the shadows and focus on leaving.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Veledar growled when a dark claw started to pierce through the wall.\n\n\"No, course not, but what in god's name are we supposed to do?!\"\n\n\"Well, aren't you just a great fountain of inspiration, my dear paladin?\"\n\n\"Crimson Sky, do what I tell you just this once!\"\n\n\"Graawwrh.\" Veledar turned towards Arcturus, \"Fine. But if we die here, I will haunt you throughout the entirety of afterlife with the worse jokes I can think of.\"\n\n\"Deal! Now do it!\"\n\nVeledar closed his eyes and tried to picture his escape from this place. He imagined himself once again in the sky, flying alongside other dragons. He smiled, thinking about the morning dew between his toes and finding a decent meal. He felt the barrier collapse, but he pushed the grim reality of the present situation far from his mind. He imagined a large ornate door made of mahogany, engraved with grand dragon carvings. He turned to his right to see Arcturus smiling back at him.\n\n\"This is incredible, Veledar.\" He said, and the dragon didn't even notice he used his name. They both turned to a faint roar from the other side of the door. \"Ready, my friend?\" the human said, drawing his sword. Veledar nodded as he felt something shake him.\n\n\"Wake up, you lazy son of a lizard!\"\n\nVeledar's eyes opened, followed by a deep yawn. Had he been sleeping? He thought he had closed his eyes to avoid the shadows. He looked around at the clearing they were in. It looked like the one they had been in when Trixie performed the ritual. Although, when Veledar looked around, he realized there was no mountain. The sun was high above in the sky, hinting at noon. He stretched out on the grass, letting his claws dig into the earth. He peered down at Arcturus, who was on his feet, checking his pockets.\n\n\"I am not familiar with your lands. Do you know where we ended up?\" Veledar asked.\n\n\"Don't know yet.\" Arcturus replied. \"We first need to see what's out of this clearing.\" The human crossed his arms when he seemed satisfied his gear was in order. \"Ready for another journey?\"\n\n\"I was thinking the same thing.\" Veledar grinned as mischief sprung to his mind.\n\n\"So which direction should we inspect first? I think north makes the most seeeeeenssss. Gods, not agaaaaaaaaaain!\" Arcturus cried as Veledar snatched him up into the vastness of the skies.\n\nThe dragon shot into the air like an arrow loosed from a mighty bow. Veledar felt the sun cascade upon his scales. The rushing air traveling all around his wings in the form of favorable currents. Everything was so perfect.\n\n\"Oh, cheer up already. You know I won't drop you.\" He looked down at the less than thrilled human as he began to beat his wings to steady his flight path.\n\n\"You bastard!!\" Arcturus shouted as he pounded against the dragon's scales.\n\n\"Sorry, I forgot how much you enjoy flying,\" he replied, stifling down a laugh. \"Besides, I need to look around. Figure out our position.\"\n\nHe heard Arcturus gulp as he gazed out to the rolling hills that were covered in patches of green, yellow, and brown. Every so often, there seemed to be buildings that had sprouted from the ground, dotting the hills with the obvious sign of human habitation.\n\n\"She sent us far south!\" Arcturus shouted in disbelief. \"We are close to Drenedar! I recognize these hills from the time when I was still a wee boy!\"\n\n\"Hits me right in the heart. So where do we go next?\" Veledar asked. He had never ventured so far into these lands before. \"Grawwr,\" the dragon complained over the vocal rumble of his belly. \"I think we may want to find something to eat. Are you as hungry as I am?\" Veledar chuckled.\n\n\"Hungry like a wyrm! Haven't you heard my stomach rumble almost at the same time?\" Arcturus laughed. \"There is a village not far from here where we can find a much better meal than the unsalted, stringy deer you're thinking of right now.\"\n\n\"You make a fair point, human. Would they mind a dragon suddenly showing up in their midst?\"\n\n\"I am sure they have seen stranger things in that village. Put me down first. There is no way I am being carried like a package to the village.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't think you have a choice in the matter,\" laughed Veledar as he decided to dive, only to stop after a couple of seconds.\n\n\"What is the name of this village that treats dragons with the respect they deserve?\" He asked to a pale faced Arcturus.\n\n\"T-T-T-T-T\u2014rost\" Arcturus stammered, \"Please, do NOT do that again.\"\n\n\"As you say, captain of knights, paladin of whatever,\" Veledar grinned, letting the currents carry them eastward.\n\n[ Town of Trost ]\n\nArcturus had never been as grateful as he was in that blissful moment when the dragon placed him softly on the grass hill overlooking the village of Trost.\n\n\"Thanks\u2026for the ghloooaaaaahk, \" he immediately fell to his knees and vomited all over the ground over the dragon's throaty chuckle.\n\n\"I really hope you can avoid doing that while I am carrying you.\"\n\n\"Didn't it strike you that this happens exactly because your inability to ask before swooping me up? Stop picking me up without warning!\" Arcturus coughed, spat a few more times, then ripped a fistful of grass to wipe himself off the disgusting sludge. He stood up with a groan and joined the dragon, looking down to the village. It looked just like it had when he was just a boy. In a way, it seemed the passage of time hardly had an effect on the place. There were about three dozen wooden cottages huddled together on the rolling hills, bathed in the light of the afternoon sun. Arcturus could make out the tiny specks of people from the distance, hurrying to deliver all sorts of goods back to their homes.\n\n\"Are you sure these people will be more accepting of a dragon? This village looks pretty much like every human settlement I've seen.\"\n\n\"And how far does that number reach, wise, centered Crimson Sky?\"\n\n\"One?\" Veledar tilted his head, scrunching up his snout. \"Or is it\u2026two?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" the human chuckled. \"Two out of hundreds. You see, Trost is amiable to dragons beca-\"\n\nArcturus was interrupted by a loud screech and a sudden blur of feathers. Three gold and white gryphons landed in a triangle pattern around them. They wore specially crafted, brown leather armor to cover their vulnerable joints, and each had a small tabard hanging around their necks by golden chains. Crimson Sky immediately bared his teeth and flared his wings. Arcturus only rolled his eyes at that. The dragon moved closer to no doubt protect him, even if he would most likely not admit such a thing.\n\nArcturus calmly stood his ground as the gryphons stared at them with unmoving brown eyes.\n\n\"A scaly? I've never had the pleasure to gaze upon a dragon around these parts.\" said the gryphon closest to Arcturus. Arcturus could see the gryphon's chest getting bigger, obviously in an attempt to appear more threatening.\n\nArcturus sighed, closed his eyes, then spoke calmly. \"Because they have the most gryphons compared to any other village in Lumara,\" Arcturus finished saying to Crimson Sky.\n\nThe gryphons gave a collection of confused looks to this. \"That wasn't an answer to my...\" one of the other gryphons started to say.\n\n\"Sorry 'bout that.\" Arcturus intervened. \"Please, allow me to explain myself. I was just telling Crimson Sky here that Trost is defended by more gryphons than any other town in Lumara.\" Arcturus gestured to Crimson Sky, who still was showing his teeth.\n\n\"Oh, of course you were,\" the gryphon said. Arcturus noticed he started to strut. Crimson Sky closed his maw and rolled his eyes.\n\n\"I speak the truth. This dragon happens to be my official escort, erm, sorry. That doesn't sound right.\" Arcturus calmly rephrased. \"He's both a guard and a method of transportation. You see, we are conducting official business in the name of the king. Information I sadly cannot disclose to a patrol. I'm sure you understand the nature of these tasks.\" Arcturus said calmly to the gryphon that was now strutting around him. It appeared none of them noticed how Crimson Sky rolled his eyes in irritation.\n\n\"Official business?\" the strutting gryphon asked. \"Never heard of official business with a dragon involved. Your story smells worse than that one's wings.\" The gryphon pointed a claw at Veledar's scrunched snout.\n\n\"Oh please, you should take a whiff from that broom you call fur before-\"\n\nArcturus slapped the dragon's neck and placed himself between the gryphon and the dragon. \"This is starting to get bothersome. I am Arcturus Lund, dragon slayer and paladin of Lumara. If you haven't heard my name, then you probably hatched from rocks.\" Arcturus said, trying to not sound a little smug.\n\nThe gryphon ruffled his feathers as he clacked his beak a few times. \"Perhaps we did. What value does a name bring to our town?\" The gryphon's eyes looked away, just like Crimson Sky did when he was trying to hide his curiosity.\n\n\"I have orders to bring him to the king.\" Arcturus slapped Veledar's foreleg a few more times. \"Got some big plans involving this big scale bum here.\"\n\n\"If you call me that again, I swear you won't have a hand to-\"\n\nThe air rang with the screech of gryphons, who flared their wings in an instant.\n\n\"Stand down!\" Arcturus barked. \"Dragon's of no value to me or the king if you three start a fight over bad jokes. My scaly friend here\u2026he's special, you know.\" Arcturus smiled, patting Crimson Sky on his scales again. He felt the dragon's hide tense for a moment before it relaxed. He was a tad taken back as the strutting gryphon suddenly moved in close and put his beak very close to his face. Although, after he found himself face to face with a dragon not very long ago, moments like these had very little effect on Arcturus. The gryphon breathed in deep as he stared at him square in the eyes, as if searching for the slightest flinch.\n\n\"Will you let us proceed?\" Arcturus asked.\n\nThe gryphon whirled with a satisfied squawk and let his lion tail smack Arcturus on his leg armor.\n\n\"Checks out. The name's Mek, and my companions are DuskTalon and Miraka.\" Mek gestured to the other gryphons one at a time. \"As much as I would like to continue our conversation, we have a patrol to finish. I advise you both to stay out of trouble while you are in our village. Paladin, dragon, or whatever you are matters little to us as long as you behave properly.\"\n\n\"Of course we will, you pampered bird.\" Crimson Sky said, putting a paw to his chest. \"I will be an example of harmony. Who knows, your town might love me so much that next time we come around we'll see dragons flying around instead of gryphons.\"\n\n\"Dream on, scale-wings.\" Mek said curtly before spreading his golden wings wide. With a puff of dirt from their wings, all three gryphons launched themselves high into the skies.\n\n\"Well that was certainly a delightful experience.\" Crimson Sky said sarcastically as the human led him down the hill. \"Walking feels good. The earth's soft under my paws and the grass tickles my feet in lovely ways. However, I cannot help but observe we are making the wrong choice here. Why burden our legs when we can fly?\"\n\n\"You want to fly after that delightful talk we just had?\" Arcturus narrowed his eyes. \"You insulted Mek in front of his squad. Do you realize how deep this sting goes?\"\n\nVeledar snorted dismissively. \"My scales suffered worse.\"\n\n\"Good for you. Now keep on walking. We'll be there in just a bit.\"\n\n\"Graaarrr! I so wish I could fly. Imagine how fast we'd get there. Ten wing beats and we are done.\"\n\n\"No.\" Arcturus said.\n\n\"Choice is an illusion. You know I can pick you up any time I want.\"\n\n\"And I thought I might ride on your back for a change!\" The human shot back, much to the dragon's surprise. \"Yeah. I'm not afraid of heights or flying. It's your\u2026method of transportation that brought out the banshee in me.\"\n\nArcturus cringed at the growly laughter that came out of the dragon's throat. He waited for him to calm down, then continued. \"I can handle straight flying. It's only diving that gets me. Same goes for the ascension, so if you can smoothen those for me, we can be flying partners.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The dragon cocked his head, blinking a couple of times. \"You're serious?\"\n\n\"Why not? Flying can be quite refreshing, and certainly feels much better than being caged in the wailing bowels of a flying machine.\"\n\n\"I think I might just feel insulted by your request.\" Crimson Sky replied, Arcturus was not sure if the dragon was being serious or not. \"You wish to ride upon my back like I'm some common animal. Method of transportation, am I? Or one of those horse things you rest your arses on whenever you feel too lazy to move on your own legs?\"\n\n\"Ah, but you'd be a noble and dignified steed. A dragon worthy of a paladin!\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"A fancy title to obscure the nasty weight of your armored ass.\" The dragon snorted, then paused for a bit before speaking. \"Let me think about it, Arcturus. It might be easier to swallow my pride than to watch you retch every time we land.\"\n\n\"Ah, so you dragons are able to choose reason over pride. I'm thrilled. This way, everybody wins!\"\n\n\"You're an awful paladin, know that?\" Crimson Sky replied, squinting his eyes. \"There would be one more thing to say though. I never got the chance to say your idea of escaping the fairy realm had a spark of draconic brilliance in it. Sounds almost like something I'd think of!\"\n\nArcturus smiled at the dragon's words. \"My dear dragon, I do believe you're trying to leech my merits, because I haven't heard you come up with this exact plan before me.\"\n\nCrimson Sky scrunched up his snout in slight disgust. \"I was trying to pay you a compliment, you thick armored buffoon! You could do better than poke at my shortcomings. If I didn't erect that magic shield, there would be no brave paladin to save us from those shadows, so I win!\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, Crimson Sky, I said that in jest. I had no idea a strong dragon like you could be so easily wounded.\" Arcturus said, playfully shoving the dragon in the shoulder even if Crimson Sky showed no signs of feeling the nudge. Moments later, while they were walking towards the village, Crimson Sky returned the favor and shoved Arcturus onto the grass with one scaly paw.\n\n\"Down your armored ass goes! Now you can consider us even.\" Crimson sky growled with glee.\n\nArcturus spit out some grass that had gotten into his mouth and dusted himself off. The dragon was nothing but amused, even pleased with his juvenile way of thinking.\n\n\"My fault! It's my fault?\" The paladin pointed a finger at the silly dragon. \"I severely overestimated your intellect. Beneath these fancy scales and big, pompous words, you're nothing but a child!\"\n\n\"Hatchling.\" The dragon swished his tail playfully. \"Go on. I am intrigued by what comes next.\"\n\nArcturus chuckled. \"Hah. I take it we are starting to be friends now?\"\n\nThe dragon settled onto his haunches to look at the human with what could be described as an amused look. \"You are indeed growing on me, paladin Arcturus.\" He then looked away with the same silly smile, \"Like damp, stinky cave mold that clings onto everything it touches.\"\n\n\"Ugh. Where did you get that from?\"\n\n\"I can always make another joke about my backside.\"\n\n\"No, Gods no! We can be friends without sharing these types of jokes, can't we?\"\n\n\"I don't know, human. Dragons don't have friends besides other dragons.\"\n\n\"Really? What about Trixie? She certainly thought of you as a friend,\" he said, but felt instantly guilty as he saw a look of remorse grow on Crimson Sky's snout.\n\n\"I knew a female dragon once, so full of life, always up to mischief, but her light had dimmed. She's...gone.\"\n\nWell, that was certainly something he did not plan on doing to the dragon. \"Apologies. It was not my intention to remind you of your loss.\"\n\n\"I did not say she was dead, Arcturus. She went east to explore a continent far away. Unfortunately for the both of us, I decided to stay here, and a precious bond we forged over the years crumbled to dust. Do not pity me. It is the way of the dragon, to live a life of solitude.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but\u2026I can't help but feel bad about it.\"\n\nThe dragon said nothing. Instead, he allowed the human to touch him, and Arcturus walked with a hand on Crimson Sky's side in silence until they reached the village at the base of the hill.\n\nArcturus made his way onto the bustling streets, avoiding the gawking faces made by the various people. The red dragon seemed to bask in the attention he received. Paper cutouts of gryphons hung between each wooden building that dotted the small village. Despite the stares, gryphons were passing over frequently to get a good look at the dragon. Arcturus noted that things were going well so far. No one was rushing over to instigate a conflict on purpose. If anything, they were curious about this unlikely pair. Arcturus had to send the insistent birds away despite Crimson Sky's protests, whose only desire was to stop and tell anyone that would listen about his magnificence. After the third such instance, Arcturus had no option but to grab the dragon by his pompous snout.\n\n\"Listen here, you pampered mink! We are supposed to avoid drawing too much attention to ourselves. A dragon is already big news without you stopping to make idle chit chat with every passing person!\"\n\nCrimson sky just smirked with his teeth and growled quietly. \"Mrawr, awwr, Arcturus. I was simply making these townsfolk feel more confident about my benevolence. I imagined would be proud of what I am trying to achieve here; cooperation between our two very different races.\"\n\nArcturus bit his lip. The dragon did have a point. The last time Crimson Sky landed in a human village, he not only angered the people, but messed up their village, albeit in much minor ways than another dragon would.\n\n\"Alright, alright!\" Arcturus said. \"You're doing much better than last time, but that doesn't change the fact that you are going against the very thing we try to achieve here.\" He sighed, \"I thought you'd be satisfied with a full stomach and a soft place to rest.\"\n\nCrimson Sky quickly nodded. \"Honestly, I would have made more of a fuss if not for the curiosity of these people. Why can't the rest of your race act like normal people, instead of petty little things with corn up their arses?\"\n\n\"I won't even try to debate that.\" The paladin said. Crimson Sky started following Arcturus, who had started leading him to a rather large wooden building that seemed to be built with purpose in mind. Everything about the inn was twice the size of anything else in the village, from its clear glass windows to its great wooden door. The sign outside was pristine and hardly looked a day old. In gold lettering, it read The Gallant Gryphon, and beneath the letters was a mural of a golden gryphon standing proudly in front of pair of rolling hills.\n\n\"So why this place and not the inn we passed five minutes ago?\" Crimson Sky asked. His snout sneaked inches from Arcturus' head, making him jump in surprise. Arcturus caught his breath and narrowed his eyes at the chuckling dragon.\n\n\"Do I startle you so easily, Arcturus?\"\n\nArcturus ignored him, \"This place is more suited for a creature of your stature.\" He gestured with his arms to Crimson Sky's body. \"You might have felt a tad cramped in the other places I had in mind.\"\n\nHe watched Crimson Sky turn back towards the previous inns they passed, and Arcturus thought he saw a hint of disappointment on his snout when his words were proven true.\n\n\"You're right. They're smaller than my\u2026you know, what I have between my legs.\"\n\n\"That's your tail.\" Arcturus said quickly. \"Come now, before somebody else hears you.\"\n\nCrimson Sky turned back towards The Gallant Gryphon, quickly barging through the front door with a smirk. Arcturus quickly heard a crash and the cracking of wood from inside.\n\n\"Don't worry, good people! My human friend will pay for all the damages I cause.\" he heard Crimson Sky say loudly.\n\nArcturus opened the door to find Crimson Sky sitting in the middle of a cracked table with a group of laughing gryphons and humans.\n\n\"There he is. The finest in all the land. Quite a looker too, am I right?\" Crimson Sky said, pointing at Arcturus.\n\nArcturus made his way past the patrons. On his way to the bar, he heard Crimson Sky already ordering what sounded like a banquet of food. Behind the bar stood a bald man cleaning an iron mug with a frown plastered over his hard, pockmarked face.\n\n\"Damages for the table will be fifty silver pieces,\" he said in a gruff voice.\n\n\"My word is my bond,\" Arcturus sighed, reaching into his pouch to find the coins for the man. \"Need two rooms as well.\"\n\n\"Only got one. Tis' a busy day to be wantin' a room, friend,\" the barkeep stated.\n\n\"Fine, we will take the one room you have. Hope it's big enough to house a dragon.\" Arcturus sighed. He turned back to the sound of a waitress in a blue uniform holding what looked like a stack of food rather than an order.\n\n\"That dragon ordered everything on the menu!\" she exclaimed in surprise. \"Not even the gryphons ever order this much! I hope you're all hungry!\"\n\nThe barkeep just eyed Arcturus with a grin as he forked over more coin to the man. \"Very well,\" Arcturus placed a small bag of twenty gold pieces. \"That should cover everything my scaly friend has ordered.\"\n\nAfter he paid, Arcturus took a seat next to the dragon, who was sitting at an oversized table, talking with a group of three gryphons. They seemed to be one upping each other in tales of courage and skill.\n\n\"Then I pounced on the shadow creatures, claws ripping at their throat, flames coating everything! I could have flown away, of course. Incinerate them all from above, but that would have meant abandoning a helpless human to a most gruesome fate, and I, Crimson Sky, defender of the realm, vowed to protect those who cannot defend themselves.\" Crimson Sky said, swelling his chest in pride.\n\n\"How did you save him?\" a gryphon asked.\n\n\"Well, it started like this.\" Veledar narrated the incident, only this time he made himself the hero who came up with the brilliant idea to leave the fairy's realm.\n\nThe gryphons gave a collected gasp at the story, with one turning towards Arcturus, \"Is this true, human? Did Crimson Sky here really save you from thirty shadow creatures?\"\n\nThe others looked to him with eagerness while Crimson Sky's snout seemed to say, \"tell them\".\n\nHe smirked. This wasn't a bad place to craft a little telltale in Crimson Sky's name.\n\n\"Ah, but my scaly friend here is too humble to recount the true danger of our predicament. I reckon it must've been at least fifty shades, one more wicked looking than the other.\" Arcturus said. \"Those dreadful creatures had us surrounded. Our weary bodies were covered in wounds, our magic, fading. I had no hope of victory. And if not for my brave dragon savior, I would surely not be here telling you this tale.\"\n\nHe folded his arms while the gryphons turned back to Crimson Sky and bombarded the dragon with questions and praises. Arcturus was glad for the steaming food as several of the cook's assistants brought it over in the middle of another tale of unmatched bravery from Crimson Sky. Arcturus dug into a roasted goose. Its taste was sweeter than anything he ate recently. He washed it down with a mug of bitter, but not bad tasting ale.\n\nIt was when a song started up from the others that Arcturus joined in the revelry. He looked to Crimson Sky, who had a large smile and was singing along with the rest, looking utterly ridiculous.\n\n\"What's the matter, Arcturus?\" Crimson Sky slurred, his tongue hanging from his mouth, eyes cloudy from the amount of ale he ingested.\n\n\"Crimson Sky, you're\u2026Gods, this is better than any tale I've heard today. You\u2026you're drunker than guard on his free day!\" Arcturus exclaimed in surprised.\n\n\"Nonsense!\" The dragon growled, almost losing his balance as he wobbled around the inn much to the fright of the staff that scampered out of his way. \"I am a m-mighty dragon, and it takes a lot\u2026a lot more than that to get me properly drunk!\" Crimson Sky shouted, his voice filling the inn.\n\nArcturus gestured to the two empty kegs at the dragon's side. \"Like those?\"\n\nCrimson Sky stuck his nose into them. \"They're empty!\" he snarled angrily. \"Servants! More drink!\"\n\n\"No no no,\" Arcturus ran over to the unsteady dragon. \"You've had more than enough, my friend. Let's get you out of here before you wreck the whole inn.\"\n\nArcturus helped the dragon to a door labeled room seven. It matched the key the barkeep had given him while he had enjoyed his meal. Inside, the room was lit by a single mana crystal that bathed the walls in a pleasant shade of orange that could be mistaken for candle light. There was a simple dresser for their clothes, as well as a bed large enough for a gryphon in the shape of a nest. Crimson Sky collapsed onto the bed as Arcturus removed his suit of armor piece by piece, sighing in relief.\n\n\"Are you going to bed me?\" Crimson Sky hiccuped from behind.\n\n\"W-what?\" the paladin's eyes constricted with panic.\n\n\"Are you going to come to bed with me?\" the dragon repeated in an eerily calm voice.\n\n\"No! I have my own bed, right\u2026here.\" Arcturus whirled on his feet. \"Alright, nowhere.\" The human sighed after he checked the room twice. \"A single bed for two people? Who does that?\"\n\n\"It is not uncommon for friends to share.\" The dragon spread his wings invitingly. \"Come now. Don't pretend there's a choice involved.\"\n\n\"You're bloody annoying even when you're drunk.\" Arcturus grumbled as he walked over to the dragon.\n\n\"You afraid someone might get some ideas between the two of us?\" the dragon continued with a sly grin. \"I've seen the way you look at me.\"\n\n\"You stay on your bloody side, and try to keep that babbling maw shut.\" The human replied, pushing the bulk of the dragon to the other side of the nest bed. He was soon drifting to sleep, even with the dragon poking about his naked body, chuckling in that growly, drunky way of his."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Arcturus found himself in the sky. More accurately, on top of Crimson Sky's back, with his arse rested upon a saddle. Arcturus was holding tight onto the makeshift thing as the dragon's wings carried them both through the blue expanse. Every wing beat from the dragon filled him with excitement as he looked to the horizon, finding he liked the feeling of wind flowing through his hair. Strangely enough, the paladin felt a smile come to his face as he realized he was much calmer than usual. Somehow, he knew there was no danger involved. More than that.\n\nHe knew this was a dream. Surely in the waking world the dragon would detest this to the end of time, but within his mind, Arcturus enjoyed the dive, the turns, and somewhat scary barrel rolls. Despite being this high up in the sky, Arcturus felt warm, the heat radiating from the dragon ensuring he suffered no grievance from the biting gusts of the shifting winds.\n\nIn a few moments the sky warped around them, changing until Arcturus found himself free-falling without the dragon. He screamed out as fear found its way into him. He held his eyes shut, telling himself it was just a dream, until he fell hard not onto a grassy field, but a cold, stone floor.\n\nHe opened his eyes to find himself in his father's old study. The chamber was adorned with dragon bones of all sizes hanging ominously by thin wires. Books lined the walls, filled with techniques studying these beasts, various ways to subdue and kill them. Arcturus stood up, finding his joints all ached with a dull pain that made him wince. He turned towards a fireplace, already lit and bathing the room with a flickering light. In front of the fire place rested a couple of pale, green chairs. One of them turned to face him, revealing no one else than his father, a stern look upon his aged, bearded face. His short hair was lined with gray hairs, and his piercing blue eyes stared at Arcturus as if they could pierce the man's very flesh.\n\n\"My son\u2026\" the man said with a voice full of disappointment.\n\nArcturus soon heard whispers around him. Words such as tricked, traitor, dishonor, each one of these words making Arcturus slowly fall to his knees. Part of him wanted nothing more than to drop to his hands and beg forgiveness before he heard a faint roar that made him pull his attention away from his father to find Crimson Sky towering over him, looking ferocious. His teeth were bared, and his eyes focused solely on him, with his tail twitching from side to side.\n\nArcturus reacted by trying to reach for his sword. Instead, his hands found cold, empty air. Somewhere in the darkness, he heard his father's ominous laughter.\n\n\"This is what you get for bargaining with monsters instead of killing them.\"\n\nArcturus ducked as Crimson Sky tried to snap his jaws on him, so close that he could feel a spray of saliva coat his neck. He fell backwards as Crimson Sky shoved and pinned him underneath a sharp claw. Arcturus grasped the paw that was holding him down, trying to force it off him. He gasped in pain as Crimson Sky let his claws dig into his chest, drawing blood.\n\nHe sensed pity from his father as Crimson Sky bared down at him, and he opened his maw wide. Arcturus watched a glow start in the back of the dragon's pink throat before the flame exploded outwards. Although, instead of intense heat, he felt a warming sensation. He felt the dragon's weight lift off him, and he sprang to his feet. Arcturus darted towards the door of his home. He had to get out of here and end this nightmare. He grasped the handle of the large door that was covered in dragons of every color. Their little gem eyes stared at him as he pressed down on the metal handle. The eyes seemed to follow him as he sprinted down an endless hallway. He could hear his father's voice calling for him, urging him back to his home, but Arcturus pushed it from his mind.\n\nHe gasped when a silver dragon sprung from one of the walls, wrapping itself around him as he struggled in its tight scaled grip. Arcturus cried out as he fell onto the floor with the dragon. His heartbeat quickened as his struggles continued against the thing. When his foot sank into the floor, he went to cry out, but found he was unable to voice anything.\n\nWrapped in complete silence, Arcturus sank entirely into the floor, his eyes filling up with nothing but darkness. He could still, however, feel the tight grip of the dragon holding him in this abyss. He tried to speak, but like before, he found his words lost to the air, making no noise.\n\nFrom within, he felt sorrow on a level he could not have imagined before. It filled him quickly, and he felt tears well up in his eyes. Like hundreds of pieces of him had been scattered all around, and he was holding onto this world by a thread. The feeling passed as quickly as it had entered, and Arcturus once again felt warmness return to his body. He felt his chest grow tight, almost too hard to breath. He could feel what felt like breathing on his neck and sighed in relief rather than fear. That was the sound of the Crimson Sky he knew. His friend.\n\nHis eyes bolted awake instantly.\n\nHe was being held by Crimson Sky, who was clearly still asleep. The dragon must have snatched him in his sleep and held him close against his frame like a child might do to a stuffed animal. Arcturus was angry at first, but sighed as he relaxed in the dragon's warm embrace. He admitted that, with a source of warmth draped over him, it was much nicer to sleep than in the embrace of the usual cold air that was common in Trost. He felt the dragon kick his left leg, causing Arcturus to wonder what the dragon could possibly be dreaming about. Could it be drinking? Flying? Female dragons? A conquest? Or simply winning an argument? Arcturus squirmed his way slowly out of the dragon's grip. He came free several minutes later, and instantly regretted his choice as he felt the chill of the air wrap its tendrils around him. As he looked back to the slumbering Crimson Sky, he fought the urge to crawl back into the dragon's embrace and fall asleep once more.\n\nMaybe later, Arcturus shook his head and dismissed the idea. His stomach rumbled a most enticing counter offer.\n\nHe made his way to the bathing room and washed himself thoroughly in a comfortable iron tub. He found the warmth of the crystal-heated water appetizing, just like the smell of eggs and bacon that filled the room. He chuckled at the thought of gryphons eating eggs, but his thoughts changed when he rounded the corner and found a whole party of gryphons digging into a heaping pile of scrambled eggs. Arcturus sat down and asked for a cup of coffee from one of the elven waitresses, who looked to him with amusement in her green eyes.\n\n\"I know you. Paladin, right? You have that red dragon following you around, am I right?\" she asked, while scrambling some more eggs.\n\n\"That's me,\" Arcturus gave her a quick nod as he took a sip from the coffee mug placed in front of him. He sighed as the liquid warmed and did its intended effect of waking him up.\n\n\"Quite an odd pair you two make. That says a lot when we get a bunch of feathers like them.\" She gestured to the gryphons. Two of the birds squawked at her, she waved them back, then shifted her eyes back to Arcturus. \"Didn't know dragons still fly around these parts. I only ever heard stories 'bout them, including the one in Entis,\" she said before sighing, \"do you two ever go on grand adventurers, or is your position keeping you tied behind the walls of your city?\"\n\nArcturus chuckled as she looked to him with those curious eyes. She must have been at least one hundred years old, although she was looking at him as if she were a kid.\n\n\"I'm on a journey right now, as fate would have it, filled with a tad too much excitement for me to stomach,\" he said, taking another sip from his mug. \"Though your coffee surely helps. Listen. Do you have anything to help with the nausea when he takes me up there?\"\n\nThe waitress smiled. \"We've got plenty of herbs for airsick lowlanders. Want me to bring you some?\"\n\nAirsick? Lowlander? Somehow, feeling nauseous suddenly became the smallest concern when pitted against an eternity of teasing.\n\n\"Nah. Only way to stay sharp is to fight that which you fear.\"\n\n\"Or fly.\" The woman pointed out.\n\n\"Yes. Exactly that.\" Arcturus took another sip from his mug.\n\nThe waitress excused herself back to the kitchen. Arcturus sat in a few moments of silence before he found another person sitting beside him, a familiar looking half elf wearing a grin.\n\n\"So, if it isn't the stubborn, metal-clad jester who wasted his time prosecuting an innocent dragon,\" she said, picking up a mug of coffee handed to by a kind, smiling waitress. \"Didn't think I'd see you again, your highness.\"\n\n\"Same. And you don't have to call me that. Arcturus will do fine.\"\n\nShe grabbed a fork and knife as a plate of food was placed in front of her. \"I don't really care about it, although now it's more intriguing why an officer of your prestige ran away from his duties.\" She watched him closely with her eyes full of questions. \"What ever did happen with that dragon anyway? Last I heard he swept you off your feet and carried you away. Could be to eat you, could be he took a fancy to you. Or possibly\u2026mayhap it's you who took a fancy to him!\"\n\nArcturus clenched his jaws at the annoying waterfall of prattling sounds that poured from her mouth. \"Maybe it's not your business to know why I'm here.\"\n\nSuddenly, revelation ran through his mind. What wind brought the half-elf here? Trost was very far from the village of Deet. \"Actually, do entertain me for a moment. Say my memory's a bit fuzzy. How many days passed since our last encounter, and how did you find me here? You must've moved on quick feet to-\"\n\n\"Quick?\" she asked in surprise. \"You really must've hit your head or something. I took nearly a month to get here. Been side tracking as I made my way back home.\"\n\n\"A month?!\" Arcturus shot up from his chair, making several patrons gasp. \"But I saw you merely four days ago!\"\n\nHis mind raced with the possibilities of the Fairy's magic. Was it possible he had been walking with Crimson Sky for thirty days they had not noticed because of the realm's weirdness?\n\n\"You might want to lower the tone of your voice a little. The gryphs are starting to get queasy.\"\n\nArcturus sat down, holding his head. He thought to all of his friends, who probably believed him to be a pile of bones abandoned somewhere. \"A whole month?\" he scratched through his beard again. \"Oh, blasted\u2026.\"\n\n\"What happened that you lost a month of time, my friend?\" She laughed. \"Partnered up with your cup a bit too long last night, haven't you? I heard that dragon has a lovely singing voice.\"\n\nArcturus put his hands down and told her everything that had happened up until that point. Not sure why felt the need, to be honest, but as he went along with the story, somehow the words started to pour naturally from his lips, while the half-elf seemed to grow more curious with every passing moment.\n\n\"That's all I have to say.\" Arcturus finished up his recounting of the events. \"We're now trying to find our way to Entis so that my drunk, singing dragon can get his special book back from whoever had the brilliant idea to snatch it from his lair.\"\n\nLyndis just held a sly grin as she finished sipping the last remainders of her coffee. \"I'm in.\"\n\n\"In where?\"\n\n\"In this adventure, madness, nonsensical quest or whatever you two are up to!\"\n\nArcturus frowned. \"Listen, lady. We're not exactly a team, you and I. We barely know each other's names!\"\n\nShe held a hand up to cut him off. \"Perhaps you should listen to me, metal-clad. Your lack of subtlety is legendary, and you will need someone who can get you into Entis without drawing much attention to yourselves.\" She gestured to the broken table. \"Does that look like the work of a master of shadows to you?\"\n\nAt that point Arcturus had to admit the truth. The woman was right. He could not think of a way to get Crimson Sky into the city, least of all the castle without being incarcerated by the city guard.\n\n\"Alright. Say I am considering this mad proposal. How exactly will you be able to help, miss Lyndis?\"\n\n\"Well....\" She pulled out a knife to stab it into the table. \"I'm not only good with illusion magic, but I also have skills in stealth and adventuring. I know this land almost as well as I know my own clothes.\" she smiled.\n\n\"Fine. You can come with us, although we will need to get horses. Crimson Sky is not exactly the type of dragon who would eagerly offer you a ride out of the kindness of his heart\" he laughed, imagining the dragon ranting at the two adventurers that demanded a place upon his back.\n\n\"No problem. I'll go pick two of the best mounts while you tell the big guy the news.\" Lyndis dropped a small bag of coins for the inn, thanked the innkeeper for her meal, and left quickly. Arcturus finished his own scrambled eggs in much needed silence. He needed to think of the proper way to approach his proud partner.\n\n\"You mean we have another person with us?\" Crimson Sky shouted, \"And why haven't I been made aware of this before you took this ridiculous, stupid, careless decision?\"\n\n\"She practically ambushed me.\" Arcturus defended himself.\n\n\"That may be, but you could've stalled her until I woke up. I'm the leader here! Me. Crimson Sky the Brave, savior of humans, beloved of the gryphons, singer of tales and proud owner of Lumara's finest paladin.\"\n\nArcturus scratched his head. \"Yeah, that\u2026that's not going to do so early in the morning. I heard the word paladin, but the rest is gone.\"\n\n\"Gone?\" the dragon growled. \"Oh, human, you insult me so.\"\n\nThat made Arcturus raise an eyebrow. \"Maybe I wouldn't, if we were proper partners for one! What made you think you were the leader?\"\n\n\"Why, I am a dragon, of course! How can I be anything less than the leader? This is my quest, my rules.\" Crimson sky paused and did the thing where he looked away but still had his eyes on him. \"Who did you find anyway that could possibly be of help to me?\"\n\nSo, the dragon did not entirely hate the idea after all. \"A half-elf that is good with illusions. Goes by the name of Lyndis. You should know her from the-\"\n\nCrimson Sky seemed to perk up at the name. \"Lyndis!\" He shouted. \"Lyndis, as in the half elf I saved from certain death?!\"\n\n\"Well, her version of the story is a little different.\"\n\nVeledar beamed at that. \"Kind, selfless Lyndis. She must've increased the number of bandits tenfold.\"\n\n\"Actually, she claimed you just helped.\"\n\n\"Mrrrrrffff,\" Crimson Sky snorted, \"We both know that's not how it happened, metal ass! But still,\" he grinned, \"It will be nice to talk to someone who can actually use magic.\"\n\n\"Magic? Even peasants know what that is.\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"Yes, but I'm not speaking about theoretical magic. You know what it is, but as far as I know, you cannot even create a spark without rubbing two stones together like a primitive.\" Crimson Sky wagged a talon at him with a coy grin.\n\nArcturus missed his energy crossbow. If he had it right now, he would've stunned this joker's prattling tongue.\n\n\"Now that you have been once again made aware of the superior nature of my species, I must leave to attend more pressing matters.\" Crimson Sky shoved him aside and worked his way to the dining room.\n\nYeah. Go and feast, you loud, rude beast. Arcturus thought as he went over to his armor, reciting his oath with each piece he strapped upon himself. When he stowed his sword and slung his shield around his back, the human grinned at the image presented in the mirror; that of a young man ready to take on the whole world.\n\n\"Today is going to be a good day.\" He looked around the room with nostalgic fondness before he left the room, and the memories he formed in this place, forever behind.\n\n[ Dragon's Trust ]\n\nHorses smelled horrible to Veledar. That earthy smell of fur, manure, and whatever else stuck to their mangy coats made the dragon sick to his stomach. Veledar even started hacking when Lyndis brought a bay horse within close distance of his sensitive nose.\n\n\"Please, take\u2026take that horrible thing away.\" He addressed the lady in the most polite way he could given the situation.\n\n\"Tis just a horse. Can't tell me you're getting a queasy stomach from a mere animal. You've no problem slashing your way through bandits, or dropping in the middle of a village unannounced. I'm not even talking about heading to Entis to recover a silly book, a journey that, by the way, can get us all imprisoned, or worse, killed.\" Lyndis frowned as she pulled the horse's reins to lead the animal away from the nauseous dragon.\n\n\"Grahhhr,\" Veledar rubbed his nose with his paw. \"I know why you must get these beasts, but why something so ugly and stinky like horses? Surely you'd be better off traveling upon the back of two gryphons.\" He said, thankful that the half elf put more distance between of them. He had another one to deal with; a beast just as vile as its brethren. If it wasn't for the man astride the horse, Veledar would've flown off long ago.\n\n\"You agree with me, right?\" Veledar shot a quick look in the paladin's direction, only to have Arcturus shake his head with a meek smile. \"Why? How can this wingless creature suit a man of your stature better than a gryphon? Even your banner has them. Why not us?\"\n\n\"Because then, my dear, valiant dragon, we would not see the pretty look you've got on your face right now.\" Lyndis continued to laugh from afar, clutching her sides as she tried to stay in her saddle.\n\nHe squinted his eyes at her, \"I should knock you off your saddle for that.\" he hissed, \"now that would be a funny sight to see.\" Veledar moved his tail, getting ready to strike the half elf off, but stopped when Arcturus moved along his other side.\n\n\"You'd better behave properly around a lady, Crimson Sky, or you will answer to me.\" the human said with a smirk.\n\nOh, so he thought himself funny as well? Veledar walked right next to Arcturus. \"Don't think I won't knock your armored ass into the dirt, paladin. Why, the combination of metal and horse smells even worse than our half breed over there does.\" Veledar moved his tail, gesturing to Arcturus now. The human watched it carefully as he brought his horse past the dragon.\n\n\"You still haven't answered my question,\" he hissed.\n\n\"Do I have to? I thought the answer is obvious.\" Arcturus said.\n\n\"It would be best if we avoid taking to the skies, least we attract unnecessary attention to ourselves.\"\n\n\"And why is that, elf lady?\" The dragon's throat rumbled with irritation. Few things annoyed him more than a two-legs spouting their inferior wisdom at him.\n\n\"Just trust me.\" Lyndis waved him to keep up.\n\nVeledar groaned loudly. He hated the walking part, more so after their recent, month-long journey through the fairy realm. Part of him still couldn't believe it had been that long; he certainly hadn't believed it when Arcturus told him at breakfast. Veledar guessed they lost track of time, when the realm itself did not follow the same rules as the real world. However, Veledar was thankful when Lyndis suggest casting a spell to disguise him. Pass without trace, she had called it. Said it would make him blend in the clouds overhead if he prevented himself from roaring with glee like a fool.\n\n\"Tell me again why this fancy spell doesn't work on all of us.\" Veledar hissed with obvious annoyance.\n\n\"Two words. Gryphon Riders.\"\n\nVeledar cocked his head, which in turn coaxed a sigh out of the half-elf. \"And here I thought dragons were all-knowledgeable. Fine. Let me put this in bare terms. Between Entis and us stand hundreds of lookouts. Mages who are just as proficient as I in the use of spells, and most important, the detection of said spells are going to have an easy time with you. Believe me. We wouldn't be the only ones who'd try to sneak into the capital with a simple invisibility trick. So how about, instead of getting caught on account of your pride, we take the safe option? Wouldn't you agree this is the better plan?\"\n\n\"No. I do not agree. We should analyze our options and come up with an even better plan!\" Veledar growled.\n\nIt was Arcturus' turn to sigh now. \"There is none we haven't already went over a dozen times. What Lyndis is saying is that a lone camouflaged dragon can wriggle himself out of a bind. A dragon with a human deserter and a half-elf on his back?\" the human shook his head. \"No way of getting out of that one.\"\n\nVeledar preferred to win in any kind of contest, be it an argument, flying, or fighting, but this time, his companions had the upper hand. He straightened up as Lyndis placed a hand on his right side, slowly speaking the words Pass without trace in elven. The magic felt like cool drops of water rolling over his spine as the spell slowly took effect. Veledar looked down to find his scales blend in almost perfectly with the grass beneath his feet. He disliked the idea that his scales were no longer red, as he very much loved their fiery radiance when the sun's light reflected off them. The dragon sighed in understanding. He would be able to fly in the sky, at least. Unfurling his wings, the dragon gave one last big grin before he launched himself into the skies, away from the two puny, wingless humans and their stinky horses.\n\n\"I wonder what ill names he's cooking for us.\" Arcturus looked over to Lyndis, who smiled back at him. \"What? You too?\"\n\n\"I'm not about to get beaten by a dragon.\"\n\nVeledar flew higher and higher, leaving his two traveling companions far behind on the ground. He turned, did some barrel rolls, and dove a few times before he once again rejoined the group. The dragon spread his wings wide and started to glide carefully behind them, gazing out onto the path ahead. A path that led them to the capital city of Entis. He thought of another town that he had seen on the map shown to him before they had left. It lay between here and the capital, a settlement going by the name of Drakenburg. Veledar remembered the name from his youth, particularly how much he despised it. His mother had made frequent trips to that place after his brother perished, probably to distract herself from the same pain that kept Veledar crippled for years. He glided for a moment as he shook his head, clearing the dark thoughts of his brother's demise from his head. There was no sense in ruining a perfectly good day by remembering such a sad moment.\n\nThe three of them traveled for the course of several days, stopping to rest and eat along the way. They slept by firelight, as Lyndis had cast an illusion to hide their campfire. Veledar found himself talking to Arcturus more and more each night. Each time they spoke, it usually involved the stories of old, especially dragons.\n\n\"I think our adventure will make for a great story to tell your fellow humans about.\" Veledar smirked. \"Filled with adventure, excitement, and danger, as our brave dragon leads a team of adventurers to retrieve a precious heirloom taken unjustly from his lair.\" He said, very much liking the idea of people cheering for him and offering him numerous praises.\n\nArcturus just reclined on a rock and laughed quietly for a bit. \"Should I leave in the parts about how you wobbled around like a slithering snake after you had one too many barrels to drink? Or perhaps I should tell the tale of Veledar the woodbreaker, who bravely vanquished the tavern's table? Now that is a feat to remember!\"\n\nVeledar held up his snout, but not so much as to lose the human from sight \"You know how to wound me, paladin.\" The dragon let his head fall to the ground softly, closing his eyes. \"You have killed me with your words...you murderer.\" he said with a quick display of his many teeth.\n\nNoticing the half-elf was being silent, Veledar decided to turn his attention to her. \"So. Lady Lyndis. I find myself curious as to what manner of winds or tangled circumstances brought you further south of Drenedar.\" he said, placing his head between his paws. \"Still running from those folks you mentioned last time?\"\n\n\"Oh, gods no.\" the woman flicked her hand dismissively. \"I thought I would be heading home till I ran into you two. My dad used to say...\" she held up a hand and dropped her voice, \"never turn down a chance at adventure, daughter of mine. You only have one life to accomplish everything you wish.\" she said, growing quiet for a moment after spouting that.\n\nVeledar watched how she just stared into the fire intently, letting the light dance across her face before she started up again. \"Besides, how could I say no to you blundering fools? I bet you couldn't stay secretive even if your lives depended on it.\"\n\n\"How rude! I certainly possess the means to conceal myself!\" Veledar growled. \"Why, I have proven myself a great hunter to my sister over a hundred times!\"\n\n\"That may be true, but I heard how you two got drunk and started singing along with some gryphons back there in Trost. That sort of thing can't happen in Entis. There are too many prying eyes, hidden agendas, and ears just desperate for any information worth selling.\" She said, pulling a stick to stoke the fire. \"Imagine the challenge! If I can get you two into the city to pull this book stealing thing off, I will become one of the legendary travelers you hear about in taverns! I'll be a fockin' hero!\"\n\nLyndis held out her hands, as if holding a sign in between them. \"And I will be known as Lyndis, the best illusionist in the land.\"\n\nVeledar admired the fire she spoke with, determined and fierce, not very different from how a dragoness would speak.\n\n\"Besides, any chance to get back at this evil bloated kingdom is worth taking.\" she spat out, voice teeming with hatred.\n\n\"Hey!\" Arcturus chimed in. \"Since when is our kingdom so vile that you have to spit in the fire?\"\n\n\"Hah.\" Lyndis shrugged. \"My tongue itches to unburden itself, but I'll just say this one thing. Since when does a good and just kingdom want an innocent dragon killed, hmm?\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Veledar intervened. \"What's that about?\"\n\n\"You have already turned against your king by letting Crimson Sky here loose. How far will you go to prove your point then?\" Lyndis asked, her eyes never leaving Arcturus.\n\n\"Now hold on a moment! I just decided to help the dragon get his book back, which is no good reason to squabble over!\" the paladin snapped back.\n\nSo he said, although in the human's eyes, Veledar saw fury, and in his voice, heard confusion. It might just have been possible that the human was hanging onto the idea that what he heard must have been some sort of mistake.\n\n\"Well, you best not waver in your conviction to help Crimson Sky once we are closer to Entis. In spite of what I said, if the focken dragon trusts your resolve, I see no reason why I shouldn't.\" Lyndis finished with a slight frown.\n\nThere was a pregnant pause between them as they just stared into the fire. Of course, Veledar couldn't have that. He absolutely had to break the silence. \"Why do you hate the people of this land, Lyndis? I have plenty of reasons to dislike dragon murderers and thieves, present company excluded of course, but what manner of grievance brings out such passion in your voice? Lumara must've done something terrible, to get under your skin like that.\"\n\nLyndis took a long, hard swig from her water skin. Her eyes turned to Arcturus, cold as ice. Although the smell on her breath suggested that her water container was being used to hold wine, she began to talk with a voice full of hatred.\n\n\"His people came to our towns, our villages.\" She spat out, then took another swig, \"they dropped from their flying machines like conquerors, armed to the teeth. They washed over us like a plague of locusts, erasing everything in their path, until they forced our people to surrender.\"\n\nLyndis took a deep breath. \"Sure. They had fair reasons and all. Every human spouted nonsense about spreading their prosperity, but all they gave our people is slavery and death!\" she shouted out before capping her water skin and putting it away. \"Every time I close my eyes, I can still see the light your people bring.\"\n\n\"Watch your tongue, woman. You might aid us in our quest, but that does not give you the right to insult my kingdom!\" Arcturus shot back, his voice raised ever so slightly. \"What you speak of are lies spread by impostors! I personally helped set up academies, barracks, places where your people can sharpen their skills. I brought in food and supplies so that the transition to your new lives was as easy as possible. I don't know what you heard or believed up until now, but I\u2026I've made people's lives better, Lyndis!\"\n\nIf the words moved Lyndis, she did now show it on her face. She continued her stare down of the human in her cold, emotionless way. Veledar was reminded of how his sister looked when hunting down some prey. She would focus just as intently as the half elf was doing now.\n\n\"Hmpf. I suppose that's to be expected from a paladin whose leash is yanked by the brutal hands of his mighty king. Have you ever gone back to those villages after your first arrival? Do you have the faintest idea of how they look now?\"\n\nVeledar watched the color drain from Arcturus' face. He could see the realization dawn on his face in the wake of a possibility the human had never considered.\n\n\"I will show you some of the villages close to Rothdell. Perhaps even around Drenedar. Together, we'll inspect this light your people have brought, and see for ourselves if it shines as bright as they say.\" Lyndis crossed her arms, \"What say you, Paladin? Care to accompany me on this journey of discovery?\"\n\n\"I...I'm\u2026I...\" Arcturus stammered. His own tongue betrayed him, and his face grew incredibly red as he quickly walked away from the campfire.\n\n\"Good. At least some of my words got through his tick skull, otherwise I would have cause of concern.\" Lyndis yawned as she dove into her bedroll. \"Have an enjoyable night, Crimson Sky. Don't let the paladin stab you in the back while you're sleeping. I heard he has the tendency to ambush sleeping dragons in their own lairs.\"\n\n\"Sleep well,\" he replied shortly before he rose on all fours. The dragon looked longingly at Lyndis, wishing he had his soft things to sleep on throughout the night, just like the woman. Snuggle back into his nest and just forget about all the sorrows and the problems of the day.\n\nHe looked to Arcturus. The paladin had taken a seat on the grass about fifty feet away from the camp, on top of the hill. Although it felt mightily uncomfortable, Veledar decided to stride over to the human, his tail swaying lazily behind with every step.\n\nVeledar took a seat beside the human. Arcturus was staring down at the lake overlooked by the hill, its calm waters seeming to twinkle in the moon-lit sky. After the brief moment of silence, he turned his attention to the human. The paladin's face, usually full of purpose, was now filled with worry, doubt, and confusion. Arcturus' eyes were not only staring at the lake, but also at the forest beyond, and he slouched over instead of standing up straight like he usually did. The human picked up a stone and threw it hard over the hill.\n\n\"She wasn't exactly gracious, but it's just words, Arcturus. How deep can they pierce?\" the dragon asked, moving a bit closer to so that he could sit a few feet away from the armored human.\n\n\"It's not her opinion that wounds me, dragon, but the implications that make my stomach tighten with the same pain I felt when my family...\" Arcturus sighed. \"I have striven to do what was right for my family, my nation, for my life. If what Lyndis says is true, then I went against my oath. I've been helping evil flourish instead of plucking it from its roots. To go against the codes I stand for\u2026that's...\" He turned to Veledar, his eyes heavy, and his eyebrows furrowed not with anger, but with pain, All in all, he had the look of a defeated man on his face, very different than the paladin Veledar got used to.\n\n\"I am not worthy to even bear the title of Paladin. Selina would be ashamed if she saw me right now, and my son\u2026how can I ever explain this to him? That his father, the great hero, brought so much suffering?\"\n\n\"You are being too hard on yourself, human. Everyone makes mistakes. You are not a bad person. You say you have gone against your oaths, but need I remind you that when faced with my demise, you chose to free me instead of carrying out the king's orders?\" Veledar yawned and stretched out his wings so that his membrane dwarfed the human. \"I figure the decision you made that day, on that ship, took a whole lot of courage. It would have been easier to live in ignorance. Easier to lie to yourself than to your king, your squad, your country.\" The dragon snorted. \"I am glad you decided to put your faith in me. For better or worse, we are together in this.\"\n\nThe dragon took a shuddering breath. \"If what Lyndis says is true, what will you do?\"\n\nArcturus sat in silence for a moment as he mulled the question over. He then sighed, \" the right thing, as I have always done.\"\n\n\"Even if that means taking arms against the king you serve?\"\n\n\"I see no other way.\" Arcturus said, a spark of the man Veledar came to know returning to those green eyes.\n\nVeledar did not know how to go about comforting the human. He rarely mingled in the affairs of other races, and now here he was, close to a human he started to take a liking to. In his mind, he practiced it several times, not really deciding on how to do it. Should he get close? Look into the human's eyes and say it? Or perhaps, spread his wings, swell his chest and loudly proclaim his piece of mind? Both options seemed fitting for a dragon. Veledar was in the middle of thinking of another great choice when Arcturus interrupted his thoughts. He guessed he had been quiet too long for his own good.\n\n\"What are you thinking about, Crimson Sky? You seem ready to tell me something interesting, if not important,\" the human said with a smile.\n\nVeledar's wings twitched for a moment. The human got the better of him. He, a dragon, figured out so easily? Preposterous!\n\n\"You are starting to know me well Arcturus. Why, you've read me faster than I care to admit,\" the dragon's claws sunk into the earth for a little bit. This feeling of vulnerability did not crawl very often along his scales. Still, it was too late to back down now, so, with a silent growl of affection rumbling in his throat, the dragon crawled closer to the human until he settled down on his belly, eyes looking up at the surprised paladin.\n\n\"Making yourself comfortable, are you?\"\n\nVeledar used his tail to drag the pile of armor against his belly. \"Whoa, hold on a moment!\"\n\n\"Grrrrrr\u2026\"\n\n\"I don't like the sound of that,\" Arcturus said, even as his hands stroke along the dragon's snout. \"What in the blazes got you so thirsty for this\u2026petting?\"\n\nVeledar closed his eyes. The human's touch felt so\u2026calming. If only he could enjoy it in silence for a bit longer\u2026\n\n\"It's that thing, right? The important one.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" the dragon sighed, then the human pressed his face closer.\n\n\"You know, it is a bit odd to see the mighty dragon so confused,\" Arcturus said on a calm voice.\n\n\"I'm not!\" Veledar hissed. \"It's just\u2026I wanted to\u2026awwr, this is deceptively difficult compared to what I had in my head.\"\n\nArcturus crossed his arms when the dragon pulled his snout away. \"I haven't known a single thing that brought you down so far, Crimson Sky. We've escaped from the bowels of the Indomitous together. We've traveled through a fairy's world, almost got captured by gryphons. Then I heard you sing more beautifully than most minstrels in my city, and\u2026 gods! We even slept together! So straighten your tongue and say what you have to say, because you can't honestly tell me that a few words are harder than what we've already lived through!\"\n\nThe dragon smiled, closed his eyes, then opened his maw. \"Veledar. That is my name. My real name. You can still call me dragon or whatever, but since we're alone, I figured you should know,\" he said, slowly and carefully, although he made sure to speak his name louder than usual. No sense in having the human take him by surprise a second time.\n\nArcturus went to speak, although he did not get two words out before he did a double take. \"Whoa\u2026that's\u2026you've held on to such a simple thing for ages. Your name. You told me your name!\" he said loudly, his voice full of excitement.\n\n\"Correct. But I advise against blabbering out in the open. I don't want my name to sink into the wrong pair of ears.\" hissed Veledar. The dragon picked his head up, but made sure to keep his eyes on the human's reaction. He had at least shown joy at learning his name, and that made Veledar feel warmer inside than he usually did in the presence of a puny human.\n\n\"Well, Vel-Velar-Veledar\" Arcturus said, struggling at first, but managing to say the name correctly in the end, \"I thank you sharing this gift with me. I will cherish it well.\" he stood up and hugged Veledar's left forepaw. \"I'm also grateful for keeping me distracted. You're a good\u2026 friend, to have around.\"\n\nVeledar playfully rolled his eyes, \"Don't get all sappy on me, or Lyndis will think we are betrothed.\" he then pushed the human away with a smirk, \"although you are welcome to sleep with me any time you wish.\"\n\nVeledar gestured back towards the campfire with the half-elf neatly wrapped in her sleeping bag.\n\n\"We best get back before she notices our absence, although I suspect she may be a tad passed out to notice that.\" He turned tail and started walking back towards the camp. He coiled around himself, as usual, then draped a wing over the human that snuggled against his belly.\n\n\"This feels almost like a proper bed,\" Arcturus mumbled as he stroked along the warm membrane of the dragon's wing. \"Good night\u2026Veledar.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will be, now that we get to do this embarrassing, seemingly improper thing a second time.\"\n\nA chuckle came from beneath his wing, putting a warm smile on the dragon's face. Veledar stared at the stars for a couple more moments, then joined his companion in the realm of dreams.\n\nVeledar awoke the next morning refreshed and rested. He stretched his spine and limbs, as he usually did after a good night's sleep, yawned, then flew into the sky for a few minutes. The exercise breathed life into his wings, and the dragon pushed himself through a few acrobatics before he dived back for the first meal of the day. He looked around to see Lyndis sitting on a blue cloth, meditating in front of a crumpled piece of parchment scribbled with elven runes. He could hear her muttering under-breath. Incantations in elvish. No doubt she was preparing her spells for later use in the day, like she typically did each morning.\n\nVeledar was thankful that dragons did not have to waste time on such archaic methods of focusing magic. As magical creatures, all dragons could simply will up magic whenever it suit them. He felt pity for the half-elf, thinking it sad that not everyone could hold the grasp of magic that dragons did. Although Veledar had heard of great sorcerers, bards, and warlocks being able to cast spells on demand, just like he did.\n\nVeledar strode around the camp twice, noting the absence of a certain human. Since Lyndis was busy preparing her spells, he decided to follow the human's scent instead. He chuckled at the idea that he was now hunting the hunter. The scent was easy to follow. It led down the verdant hill, in a small glade where the human practiced in his own way. Arcturus had his sword out, performing what looked like strikes against the air. His sword would occasionally look as though a strand of the sun would pass by, each strike swung with purpose.\n\n\"You know, the air makes for a very poor opponent,\" Veledar chuckled as he strode over to the human.\n\n\"Well, it certainly doesn't talk back as loud as you do.\" Arcturus replied with a grin, \"It's a practice technique. Figured I would keep my body in shape while Lyndis was preparing spells and you were off doing whatever dragons do.\"\n\nVeledar noticed that, as Arcturus was striking the air, he would follow a pattern that would repeat every ten strikes. Each one would be a different side or height in relation to his body.\n\nArcturus must have sensed his growing curiosity since he began to explain it. Had he become able to predict all his thoughts now? Veledar thought last night had been an isolated incident. Perhaps it was his eyes, or his snout, or possibly the way he was currently holding his head to the side with an eyebrow raised that tipped the paladin off.\n\n\"You see,\" Arcturus slowed down his swings. \"Each movement represents the flow of energy from my mind to my hand, which then follows up along my blade. Each step is to help focus my body and mind so that they act as one for the day ahead. Usually, while doing this, I would recite my oaths, to remind myself of what is expected of me, and where my loyalties truly stand.\"\n\nThis form of combat meditation had intrigued Veledar. It was at least a tad more interesting than watching the elf ponder in silence, and he was always up for learning something new.\n\n\"May I join you?\"\n\nThe human nodded his head.\n\nVeledar took a spot next to Arcturus, still watching the human. He knew Arcturus to be redeemable over his other, dragon slayer kind, but this reminded him of his mother's self-reflection each day, and the scale she held as to remind herself of who she was.\n\n\"Sure, although I don't know how this will relate to you, Veledar, since you have no sword to swing around.\"\n\n\"Who needs such pitiful craft? I have teeth, a tail, and claws!\" he held them each up as he mentioned them to Arcturus, \"my whole body is a weapon far greater than one mere sword.\"\n\nArcturus took a moment before replying with a, \"so you do\" he chuckled. \"Very well. Start here, with your head held high.\"\n\nVeledar followed his directions, and held his head high as instructed so he could still see the movements made by the paladin.\n\n\"I suppose you should shift to the right and lash out with your right limb.\" Arcturus mimed the action with his sword instead of claws. Veledar mimicked him with a savage slash in the air.\n\n\"Very good! Now shift to the left and use your right paw, or whatever you prefer to call it!\"\n\nOnce again, Veledar followed the paladin's instructions. He felt sort of silly as he slashed the air for a second time, but felt a cool sensation go down his spine.\n\n\"Now close your eyes and breathe deeply through your nostrils, then exhale through your mouth. Do it slowly.\"\n\nVeledar did as he was told, closing his eyes carefully and letting a big breath of air fill his lungs. He let it hang in there for a moment, feeling his chest grow warm, then exhaled, letting a thin stream of fire escape his scaled lips. He opened his eyes in shock at that, as he clearly did not mean to do that.\n\n\"Sorry. Force of habit.\" He looked to Arcturus, imagining the paladin would be wearing naught but irritation on his face. Instead, he found the human amused by the mishap. Satisfied, Veledar repeated his actions and closed his eyes. He went to breathe in, but felt the ground rumble beneath him. It started out as small tremor, something Veledar was sure only he could feel beneath his paws. He looked around through a cracked eye for the source of the commotion, but he did not say anything. He didn't want Arcturus to panic if it was simply nothing.\n\nThere! He spotted among the grass what looked like a shark fin. Veledar had never been to the ocean to see such creatures, but he had read about them before. Although, in a way, it would be a bit strange for a shark to swim through the dirt.\n\nThe dragon pounced on Arcturus and rolled with him, tightly pressing the human's body against his. A large beast leapt from the earth as if it were water. It stood on four legs, and was roughly the size of a horse, armed with large, sharp claws, and a fat head very much like a whale. Where its mouth parted, there were rows upon rows of very sharp teeth.\n\nThe earth-brown creature eyed them with large, black reptilian eyes filled with murderous intent.\n\n\"What did you do that for?\" Arcturus said, raising an eyebrow. He stopped and dropped into a combat stance he readied his armaments. \"Wh-what is that thing?\" he asked as Veledar spread his wings and hissed. If the creature cared for his display of power, it did not show any concern in the slightest, advancing slowly towards them.\n\n\"That's a bulette,\" Veledar said, watching the creature. \"Some call it the land shark. It often travels in packs to hunt its prey.\" Veledar stopped as his eyes widened. That's why it was being patient! It was hunting them with a partner that was moving into position! Veledar went to turn and take off with Arcturus, but it was too late. From the ground burst two more of the creatures. Veledar easily spun out of the way and sliced into the creature's leathery hide with a claw. Arcturus though had not been so lucky. The bulette on his side barreled into him, holding him pinned to the ground underneath its bulk. The paladin currently struggled against the creature's weight, and despite his sword cutting into its leg, the beast failed to relent.\n\nVeleder gave out a battle roar, causing the buelette on Arcturus to raise its head and take notice of him.\n\nDistracted, the beast became easy prey for Veledar, who crashed into the bulette and ripped it from Arcturus as he sunk his teeth deep into its hide. It tasted like dirt and he gagged slightly, but nevertheless, sliced viciously into the bulette's soft underbelly as he wrestled with the creature. It squirmed, kicked, and clawed against his crimson scales to no avail. Veledar continued his attack with pride now that his beautiful scales were holding the bulette's frenzy at bay.\n\nHe heard Arcturus shout out his own battle cry. The human had stabbed his sword through his bulette's head, causing the creature to collapse dead on the ground. However, even in death, it managed to pull the sword from Arcturus' hands and stick it out of its wounded body.\n\nVeledar's attention was pulled back to the one he was fighting as its jaws found home around his neck. The dragon grabbed onto it with both forepaws, then ripped it open. The beast let go of the him with a roar of pain. Veledar managed to throw the creature ten feet away and stood back up to all fours. He watched the buelette eye him as dirt was fell off both of their bodies. Veledar could feel the bite of the creature throb through his muscles. It wasn't deep by dragon standards, but still packed quite the sting. Veledar smirked as the creature breathed in deep, obviously exhausted. Veledar admired its determination as it went to dive underground for an attack, but Veledar was faster. In a flash, the bulette was cut, bit, then roasted alive in a bath of blazing flames until the dragon let the creature's charred remains fall from his grasp.\n\nHe felt a tad bit of regret for eating early. Even though the creature's hide had a mediocre taste at best, its succulent insides were far better. Maybe he could convince the paladin to slice off a piece and preserve it.\n\nThe Paladin!\n\nHe turned quickly to find Arcturus beneath another one of the beasts. Arcturus was shoving the creature with his hands, trying to lift the bulk of the beast off him. However, as Veledar neared the two, it became clear that the creature was already dead from the two rapiers stuck in its back. Lyndis popped up from the other side, her face all red.\n\n\"So heavy! What do these things focking eat?\" Lyndis shouted through grunts of effort.\n\n\"Probably a ton of rocks!\" gasped Arcturus, before sighing in defeat. \"Vele-Crimson Sky, could you perhaps lend me your strength?\"\n\nVeledar was pleased to see that the human had remembered the promise to keep his name secret. He smirked as he placed two paws on the corpse. With a great shove, a grunt, and thanks from his companions, Veledar pushed the creature off Arcturus, quite surprised that the little man held his own without him.\n\n\"So now that you two are done nearly getting killed by what is clearly bulette territory.\" Lyndis pointed towards a patch of dirt out in the field that looked upturned, most likely from the previous beasts. \"We should be off to Entis.\"\n\nVeledar agreed. He decided to watch as his two companions picked up their things. When they were ready, they mounted their horses, and Veledar shot into the air like an arrow. \"I feel sorry for you two, having to tolerate such smelly creatures!\" he shouted down at them.\n\n\"Well, it is a nice change of pace from your scaly arse!\" Lyndis shouted back, making Veledar pout. That had been an excellent comeback, although he would NEVER tell her that.\n\n\"I shall name Arcturus' beast Smelly, and yours is going to bear the fit name of Stinky!\" he replied loudly, watching the two laugh on their newly named horses. Both Arcturus and Lyndis seemed to be petting the horses, as if to comfort them on the nature of their new names.\n\nVeledar pushed his wings higher and higher, until his companions looked like tiny ants below him. He flew into a cloud, letting the vapors condense on his snout before passing through with his next flap of wings. The dragon looked down far to the edge of his vision, past the rolling hills and the small mountains, past the forests sprinkled around the land. He saw a village, for that is all what those tiny specks could be. He thought about flying ahead, greeting his mother far before his companions could get there. He imagined his mother nuzzling him as she always did, grateful that he had stopped by. The dragon ultimately decided against it as he swooped down around to circle the two horse riders. No. It was better to stick together with them. Especially if he had to protect them from more monsters. He soared over their heads as they gave a quick wave to the cheerful dragon.\n\nVeledar kept himself busy as the two riders made their way to the village as fast as Stinky and Smelly could carry them. Across the winding paths, it took them days compared to what Veledar could fly in a fraction of that time. Every night, he would watch them as if he were a mother protecting her hatchlings. He would keep the fire going and position himself to block the cold night wind. Veledar made a mental note to remind them how much he sacrificed himself for their comfort throughout this journey. That would surely add up to a suitable reward worthy of a dragon. The dragon did his duty every night, chuckling in silence as the bill kept rising and rising in his satisfied head.\n\nWhen he was not busy, the dragon would watch the serene stars, with only the sound of the crackling fire to keep him company. On the fourth night of this leg of the journey, Veledar was once again stargazing, watching what dragons called Bahamut's tears.\n\n\"I've watched you these past few nights. What are you searching for, up there?\" came the voice of Arcturus. The human walked over to him with a kind smile on his face. The pleasant sound of his voice did not startle Veledar, only surprised him. The dragon pointed a claw towards another one of Bahamut's tears.\n\n\"I always loved looking into the stars and seeing the souls of dragons shine down on us. I especially like the Bahamut's tears that go across the sky.\" he said slowly.\n\n\"You mean a shooting star. Some of the wizards say the stars up there are small portals to the realm of fire.\" the human said, sitting down beside him.\n\nVeledar simply snorted at that idea. \"That is a really mundane theory, I like mine better.\"\n\n\"I suppose yours is perfectly crafted for your views.\" Arcturus paused for several seconds. \"Why do you call them Bahamut's tears? Must be an important figure, to name stars after.\"\n\nVeledar's toothy smile completely dominated his snout. He LOVED telling that story, but not in a way that would scare the human off. With his smile shrinking to a more manageable size, the dragon got closer to Arcturus and curled his tail around him. The human looked to him with big eyes. They were so inviting, so curious, he simply could not resist.\n\n\"Long ago, there was a great dragon called Bahamut. She would travel across all realms, bringing life to the dragons of old. She was one of the first dragons, who taught her hatchlings that life was important, and specifically insisted on how much it should be cherished. It is said that she left this plane of existence when her children took to enslaving the other races and destroyed the life she held dear.\" said Veledar as he hung his head for dramatic effect, then continued slowly on a calm, silent voice.\n\n\"It was in those days of strife when she changed from a life giver into a creature of justice, good, and protection. Those tears in the sky represent her sorrow; the burden of having to take the lives of her misguided children, and the state of dragons today.\"\n\nHe watched the human sit in silence, contemplating the story. \"I've never heard of her before today. I guess we humans know next to nothing of the dragons of old,\" Arcturus said with a shrug. Then his eyes lit up at having realized something. \"Veledar, what was the color of her scales?\"\n\nThat was a good question. Not surprising, considering what kind of man Arcturus was. \"Her scales were a great silver in color, and her eyes were fluid, like liquid mercury. It is said she waits in the great beyond to help dragons reach their place in the heavens.\"\n\n\"My son mentioned a silver dragon right before he died, despite neither of us having any knowledge of this Bahamut.\" Arcturus said again after a moment of silence. His voice was once again filled with the pain of that memory.\n\n\"It is most peculiar, that she would appear to him instead of another dragon.\" Veledar replied, cocking his head to the side as he usually did. He had never known the goddess to appear to anyone, especially a human.\n\nThe two of them pondered in silence for some time before Veledar interrupted serenity of the night. \"There is a town called Drakenburg nearby. I am going to go there.\" He turned to Arcturus, \"and I am not asking for permission.\"\n\n\"I could tell.\" Arcturus coughed, \"But still, a question is the right thing to do in a group. It's not like we would have said no to you. Why do you want to visit there anyway? You typically know next to nothing of my nation or its people.\"\n\nVeledar thought back to the day his mother left, never to return. She had simply asked them to be strong before she went to the town of Drakenburg to fulfill a promise. Veledar frowned, remembering the reason for that promise\u2026his brother.\n\n\"My mother resides there. She made a deal with the people of that town.\"\n\n\"Veledar, I have been across all of our villages and towns in Lumara. The town you speak of may have the symbol of a dragon stitched onto every building, but we have never seen a dragon around those parts for years.\" Arcturus said, his eyes filled with pity.\n\n\"Well, she was always good with magic. Perhaps she simply did not want to be found by your people.\" Veleder shot back with a grin.\n\n\"Perhaps....\" Arcturus replied, putting a hand to his chin. \"I will tell Lyndis of your plan in the morning then. I envy you, Veledar. You're going to soon have a touching reunion with your mother.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Veledar said, scratching his head with a wingtip talon. \"You should get some rest before the sun rises. We need you in fresh shape to ride your trusty steed, the valiant horse called Smelly.\"\n\nArcturus nodded and returned to his bedroll, leaving Veledar alone once more. Veledar sighed. Arcturus and Lyndis were better company than he gave them credit for. Maybe, when this was all said and done, he could convince them to visit him every once and awhile.\n\nAs the dragon settled to sleep, he closed his eyes for a second, imagining the tales they would tell him during such exciting occasions.\n\n[ Drakenburg ]\n\nThe town of Drakenburg lay a few miles down the cobblestone road. The sun was starting to rise above the mountains in such a magnificent way that a single ray of light seemed to pierce through the permeating darkness, touching the sun with its radiance. You could say it was a busy town from the amount of foot traffic it received, both by carriage, and the occasional airship flying overhead.\n\nNot that our travelers minded the crowd. Arcturus looked back to his two companions to see Lyndis busy creating a disguise for Veledar.\n\n\"Alright, enough prattling. My head is starting to ache worse than it did when this steel-head ambushed me in my lair.\" The dragon pointed at the human who feigned ignorance by scratching through his hair. \"Just so we're clear, I will become small just to stop your nagging. Dragons are perfect the way they are. None should be forced to endure such humiliation, even for a good cause,\" Veledar hissed, than stuck his tongue out at Lyndis. \"What are you smiling at? I just said-\"\n\n\"Do you want to be focken spotted?\" Lyndis whispered back. Arcturus just shook his head. The two had been fighting way before they arrived at this point.\n\n\"Well, be my guest then. Let the sun bathe your glorious scales. I'm curious how long till the guards have you in irons and shipped off to their grand, merciful king. Maybe he'll even prepare a feast in your honor!\"\n\n\"Mrrrr, well, for your information, lady Lyndis, that's the same king that wants me dead. Secondly, I doubt the effectiveness of their entrapment team without their prized paladin there to inspire them. I give these fools about a month to find me, if they even manage that,\" Veledar chuckled, then jumped back as he avoided a playful smack by Lyndis.\n\n\"Just do your focken thing and spare us the rest of this lecture. Haven't joined your merry squad to listen to your babbling. We have a task to accomplish, and we shouldn't waver on account of something as silly as pride.\"\n\n\"I think you just insulted our dragon, Lyndis.\"\n\nThe half-elf scoffed, Arcturus chuckled, and Veledar just rolled his eyes at them both. The dragon moved his claws in a triangle fashion before ending it with what looked like a slap at the air with his claw. He then started to shrink, bit by bit, until he was no bigger than the average horse.\n\n\"Do I look pleasing now, your highness?\" Veledar bowed his head mockingly before the frowning half-elf.\n\n\"Could be better. Oh, and pack your wings. One glance is enough to give away your secret.\"\n\nVeledar frowned as he pushed his wings close. He made another incantation, then the two beautiful appendages melded into his scales before disappearing altogether.\n\n\"I'm hideous,\" Veledar slumped to the ground, snout in his paws.\n\n\"Oh, don't look so miserable, Crimson Sky. You're still a dragon, wings or no wings,\" Arcturus said, trying to cheer the dragon up.\n\n\"Easy for you to say.\" The dragon said. \"You didn't just become smaller than your two companions and lost the ability to fly on top of that. How do I look?\" Veledar turned this way and that. \"I want an honest answer. Better. A thorough one. Is my tail fine? What about my hinds?\" he lifted one paw after the other, curling and spreading his toes to make sure there were no strange deformities.\n\n\"Everything's as beautiful as ever.\"\n\nThe dragon picked himself up. \"Another lie to sweeten the bitter truth.\"\n\n\"That's true, but it is the best I can provide for the time being. We'd better hurry up or we will lose the day.\" Arcturus replied as he led Smelly down the road. Lyndis followed shortly behind with Stinky, and a grumbling Veledar.\n\nThey reached Drakenburg within the course of the hour, passing several merchants bound southward on the way. They seemed curious about Veledar, about what he was and where he came from. Arcturus threw them off the trail by suggesting he was from Rothdell, used to hunt dragons. To his amusement, Veledar stared at him with irritated eyes as the merchants had been amazed, even offered to purchase him. When they were out of ear shot, Veledar had started up a string of insults so long Arcturus lost count as the dragon shifted the blame to him for exposing his pride to such indignities. He watched the dragon's attitude change the moment they reached the town, for hanging from every building was a blue banner with a silver dragon stitched into the cloth.\n\n\"Look!\" Veledar exclaimed with a grin, \"they have dragon banners, just like you said!\"\n\nArcturus and Lyndis tied up Stinky and Smelly outside a tavern painted in gray scales. It bore a great wooden shield with a silver dragon in flight.\n\n\"Loves dragons, this town does.\" Lyndis remarked as a peasant walked passed, gawking at Veledar.\n\n\"This place is wonderful!\" Veledar whispered, as the dragon's head practically did not stop moving around, finding some new dragon decoration to look at. He quickly bounded to a cart littered with dragon shaped trinkets. \"No wonder mother wanted to come here. These people adore her!\"\n\n\"Ah, your little drake seems to like the banners.\" A wrinkled woman emerged from the cart's other side. She wore a dark green dress that seemed conspicuously clean. The woman ran an old hand through her gray hair as she looked to them with her amber eyes. Arcturus felt the hairs on his neck stand on end for some reason.\n\n\"Oh yes, the drakes from Rothdell are quite intelligent.\" Lyndis smiled through her teeth, \"they can even recognize the picture of the creature they hunt.\"\n\nArcturus saw Veledar frown at her words before darting past her legs and nipping her hand. Though she mainly kept her composure, the half-elf did give a slight twitch as she shooed the dragon away.\n\n\"Is that what brought you here? Are you in search of a dragon as benevolent travelers, or after its tail as hunters? the old lady said with a grin, her hand moving to clasp a silver dragon amulet hanging around her neck. \"Such a dangerous job, dragon hunting. Pointless. Unneeded. The dragoness has been our protector for years. What reason have you to take arms against her?\"\n\nArcturus noticed several peasants stop to gawk at them, dirty looks being thrown especially at him and Lyndis.\n\n\"We are not hunters. Tell me. When was the last time you saw this guardian of yours?\" He said, taking his eyes off the peasants and fixing them back on the woman.\n\n\"We have not seen her in five years, but that does not mean she isn't around. Dragons perceive time differently than you or l. However, dragon slayer-\" The woman's eyes narrowed, \"you will find not a single soul in this town that will help you find and slay our protector.\"\n\n\"I told you, we're not here to-\"\n\nArcturus suddenly stopped when several guards dressed in chain mail walked over with spears in hand, their brown tabards a stark contrast to the blue banners that hung from virtually every building in the town.\n\n\"What do you need, dearies? Came here to hear a story of the great protector?\" the old lady asked sweetly to the guards. She held out a hand to them with a silver brooch in the shape of a dragon. The gruff looking guard she held it out to swiftly smacked the lady's hand away.\n\n\"Listen here, you crumpled hag. You villagers talk about this dragon left and right, but none of me focken men or even the captain ever seen a glimpse of it. You should cease telling such lies to travelers and stop trying to get us to wear those things!\"\n\nThe guards returned to their routine as they laughed to themselves as they left, like they pulled some great prank. The old woman sighed and picked up the brooch.\n\n\"My name is Lida, and I apologize for my harsh words. I forget sometimes that our true enemies walk among us.\" She gestured to Arcturus' ragged tabard that was torn almost to rags at this point. \"Despite your allegiance to the kingdom of Lumara, I have judged you like our guards. Tell me, truly now, what do you intend to do when you find our protector?\"\n\n\"We have a friend that would want to meet her and have a long talk.\" Lyndis said.\n\n\"Would this friend of yours be a dragon, dearies?\" said Lida, gesturing to Veledar, who was busy eyeing a cart full of cooked lamb.\n\n\"How did you-\"\n\n\"Old, I might be, but I can spot a spell, especially a crude craft such as this.\" The hag chuckled. \"It's most fortunate the guards here don't seem able to spot such things. You best continue on your journey, but be warned. To find this town's protector will only bring about hardship and misery.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Arcturus said, turning back to find that both the cart and Lida had vanished. He looked to Lyndis, who was staring as if struck by lightning, just like he was.\n\nVeledar on the other hand was all growls and clicking claws. \"Well, that just happened. Nothing to be done about an old lady and her vanishing cart now when my stomach rumbles like a war drum. I need to eat, now!\" the dragon grabbed his belly with both paws. Arcturus just shook his head in disbelief. How could a ragged woman with no visible magic crystals vanish out of nowhere? The cost of that spell must have been-\n\n\"Thinking about an inn?\" Veledar's poking snout drew the paladin's attention back to the present.\n\n\"Yeah, alright, alright! Just give me a moment.\" He nodded to the red dragon. That woman was an illusion the entire time? Or was she a spell caster like Lyndis?\n\n\"What do you think?\" he moved towards Lyndis and watched the half-elf think hard for a moment as they walked back towards the inn. \"I know illusions, and if that's the case, it must be some pretty focken good one. She was breathing an' talking as if she really was alive!\"\n\nArcturus and Lyndis had to eat their lunch outside, as the innkeeper was insistent about the establishment's regulations. No quadrupeds were allowed. Not even intelligent ones. And especially\u2026\n\n\"No pets!\" the elven man had shouted with a vein popping out on his forehead. The meal wasn't too satisfying either. Just some meat that Arcturus could barely chew on, cheap fountain water, and a purple vegetable that was crunchy and in the shape of the letter L. Veledar seemed hateful of his meal too, but he ate with minimal complaints as they discussed their plan. They decided to split up and ask around about the lady, and more importantly, the protector's lair.\n\nThe party split up not a moment after lunch, with Veledar heading with Arcturus. Lyndis insisted they needed each other if they got into trouble. However, when asked about what sort of trouble, she just laughed, and said with a big grin that she was a people person. Over the first few hours, they only got repeated versions of the information they already knew. Arcturus was glad that no one recognized him. Even if they did, nobody connected him to the disappearing dragon incident. It confirmed one thing to him though. That his disappearance was not as wide spread as he originally thought.\n\nThe last two hours proved more productive than the previous. They got valuable information from a child all eager to tell them where the protector's lair was. The child said it was deep in the north western mountains, guarded by a raging snowstorm that kept everything away. Veledar rewarded the young child with a story about a brave dragon that naturally saved a maiden from a group of evil knights, and Arcturus watched with amazement. The child was not even phased that Veledar could talk. She just scampered back to her house with a great smile on her face.\n\nThey started to make their way back to the inn when the sun descended beneath the horizon. Veledar suddenly stopped. Arcturus watched him tense up, his head looking around quickly.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" He asked, looking around as well. He did not see anything that looked out of the ordinary in the practically empty streets.\n\nThen, they came. Men poured from the alleys, one after the other, all clad in a mixture of leathers and chain armor. They had short hairs, all clearly human, with eyes full of mischievous intent.\n\n\"Why hello there,\" he found himself saying. \"Pleasant night for a stroll, eh?\"\n\nThe gathered men sneered at his politeness. His gut told already had an idea on how this was going to end. Yet as a man of virtue, Arcturus had to give them a chance to prove their intentions.\n\n\"Fancy drake, that.\" One man pointed to Veledar with a club he was holding. \"Figure he'd feel right at home in our group. What do you say, lads?\"\n\nThe rest of the men grumbled, nodded, and chuckled when the one who spoke pulled out a net from his pack with his massively muscled arms.\n\nOne of the other men, taller than the rest, carried a bag that was tossed at Arcturus' feet. \"Fifty plat says you walk away and we get that drake. Choose otherwise, and ma boys here will put a beat down on ya!\"\n\n\"Wait wait wait. I have a better idea!\" Veledar laughed, much to the surprise of the party, \"We take the money you have given us, and you get to leave with your lives. How's that?\"\n\nArcturus drew his sword as the dragon bared his teeth at the men. \"Deal's more than fair. I'd listen to the drake, people. After all, we don't want to stain the streets of this fine town on our first visit.\"\n\nArcturus watched the group of thugs nervously grip their weapons as they looked to him, then to Veledar, who had started hissing at them.\n\n\"Anyone here can choose to flee, but if you decide to cross blades with us, consider this is your only warning.\" Arcturus continued. He took his shield off his back and held it firmly in front of him.\n\n\"Aye. We hear ya, lad. But you be missin' one thing.\" the bag tosser flicked his fingers to the men that poured from the alleys behind Arcturus. \"We've got the numbers to topple ye over. Get 'em, lads!\"\n\nArcturus whirled on his feet to indeed spy five more men with short swords and leather rags that seemed to be stitched together into a grotesque whole. He smirked as the men charged at them in disorganized fashion, with their weapons ready to bludgeon the two of them to death. Arcturus blocked the first club and shoved the man backwards as his sword tasted another one's flesh. The arc slash painted the cobblestone a dark crimson substance. The man collapsed on his knees to hold onto the ooze that kept pouring from his slashed throat.\n\nTwo more came at him. Arcturus ducked under a swing, then his blade sneaked under the opponent's and, with a brutal slash, the paladin took that man's hand as payment for his crimes.\n\n\"Hraaaaah!\" the now handless man fell on his back with a mighty groan, trying hopelessly to stop the blood that gushed out of his stump.\n\nArcturus heard Veledar give a screech, a tiny roar that was more adorable than threatening. He would of course never tell the dragon such things in this moment, as he figured he would roar even louder just to prove something. The dragon sunk his teeth into a thug's arm, ripping a solid chunk of flesh along with whatever else clung to the limb. The paladin scrunched his face in disgust and charged at another man. He shoved his enemy to the ground with such force he thought he heard something crack. His triumph was short lived though. In less than a second, he felt a blade nick his side.\n\n\"Khh-\" he whirled around for a counterattack, only to see a club smash into his side.\n\n\"See? He isn't such a hard-ass!\" the bag-man kicked Arcturus' plated chest.\n\n\"Wrong words!\" the paladin rose with an upper swing that sliced the bag-man from balls to chin. The man gurgled and collapsed to the ground, clutching desperately at his escaping insides.\n\nArcturus turned to the others. He looked to the once confident thugs, who now had sweat dripping down their brows and eyes filled with doubt. He saw another shudder and fall, an arrow with green feathers sticking out of his back.\n\n\"Fock this!\"\n\n\"I'm not dying tonight.\"\n\nThe four remaining men backed away as Arcturus advanced on them with his bloodied sword.\n\n\"Screw this! Let the bastard keep the drake! No amount of money is worth being gutted for!\" one shouted as the sound of his boots disappeared into the night. The others soon followed suit, leaving Veledar and Arcturus standing among the fallen, looking rather proud of themselves.\n\n\"Well, at least some of them had the sense to do the right thing.\" Veledar grinned as he cut one of the man's purses to see what was inside. \"I mean, they attacked us, so they were not entirely thinking straight, but mraawr, look! Ten gold pieces!\"\n\nAdorable, Arcturus smiled at Veledar, then went to each of the fallen men to retrieve whatever useful belongings they had. The entire time his eyes kept being drawn to the arrow sticking out of that thug's back. Arcturus walked over to it and pulled it out with a sickening noise.\n\n\"Veledar. Take a look at this.\" He stuck out the arrow to the dragon, who quickly scampered over. \"I think someone saw the ruckus. Decided to lend a helping hand,\" he said, his eyes scanning the dark windows, empty alleyways, and wooden boxes around the street. \"Although it looks like our mysterious friend prefers to remain hidden for now.\"\n\n\"Who cares? More loot for us,\" Veledar growled. \"Hold it straight. I still want to find out who this person is.\" Veledar took in a deep breath near the arrow head. \"I don't recognize the smell of who actually shot this thing, but there's an earthy tinge about it, very different from how you humans smell.\"\n\n\"Earthy?\" Arcturus was impressed by the dragon's nose. For a moment, he wondered who was better at tracking. The gryphons of his kingdom, or the dragon before him?\n\n\"We'd better be careful on our way back to the inn. Maybe Lyndis has better information for us.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Arcturus. If anything remotely dangerous crosses our path, I will be more than a match for it.\" The little dragon swelled up his chest and took a regal pose.\n\n\"You are such a cute thing tonight.\"\n\nVeledar's happy snout scrunched when the paladin rubbed his gloved hand along his head. \"You are aware that my cute claws and these adorable teeth can still pierce through your armor, right?\"\n\n\"Normal steel, maybe. This one though had been crafted by the most skilled pair of hands I know. Even a sword would have a hard time piercing it.\" The paladin slapped his plate, then kneeled to Veledar's eye level. \"But we both know you like me too much to even think such barbaric thoughts.\"\n\n\"I like you?\" The dragon hissed. \"You have it all wrong, paladin who crawls to my belly every night to whisper words of comfort to my ears. If anything, you're in love with me!\"\n\n\"And what if I am?\"\n\nVeledar snorted, bits of mucus splashing on the human's face.\n\n\"Seems this joke has two sides, after all.\" Arcturus chuckled, wiping the distasteful goo off his face. \"I'd ask you to lick it, but-\"\n\n\"Don't even think about it.\"\n\nArcturus cleaned himself with a thug's rag, then walked side by side with the dragon, feeling Veledar's scales shift under his gloved hand with every step the dragon took.\n\n\"See, if you acted like that all the time, we would get along much better!\" Veledar turned to head his way down the street. \"Words for a dragon are ephemeral. True affection lays in the touch, although your personality is an improvement over most humans.\"\n\n\"I can see how, \"Arcturus picked up his hand. \"You really are enjoying this as much as I think?\"\n\nVeledar scowled for a moment before shaking his snout, \"Oh yes, extremely. Now put that hand back to work.\"\n\nThey continued down the dark streets of Drakenburg. Arcturus watched as Veledar's snout would move from side to side to check every rooftop and alley. Each time he did so, Arcturus could see his muscles tense underneath his scaled body. No doubt his teeth were eager to bare themselves at the slightest hint of danger. Arcturus wondered if the dragon had taken the ambush as a failure on his part to detect it. Maybe a night of good drink, food, and entertainment would have the dragon back to his relaxed self. However, Veledar wasn't the only thing he noticed. They never encountered one guard, not a single torch bearing man on patrol, and no posts. The streets were completely empty of people. Arcturus kicked a loose stone in irritation. If he would be in charge of the city, he would have the guards of this town whipped into shape in no time. A sigh left his mouth at the thought of Gus and Elizabeth. Arcturus kept wondering if they had stepped up in his absence. Surely Elizabeth would take on the extra responsibility of a captain. It was in her nature, to always strive for excellence.\n\nHe was interrupted as Veledar bounded through the doors of the inn.\n\n\"You again? Get that beast outta my sight!\" Came the shout of the elven man from earlier. \"How deaf must you be? I said no pets near the tables!\"\n\nArcturus entered to see the man picking up a tankard from the ground, while Veledar slunk away, trying to avoid the watchful eyes of the other patrons. The busy inn -despite that little hiccup-went back to their hot meals as the halfling band started playing their melodious tune once again. Their music filled the inn with a happy, toe tapping tune that Arcturus wished to have heard at a better time of the day. It would have made a better impression than the rude guards from earlier, or the vanishing crone.\n\nArcturus made his way to the bar where Lyndis was sitting, holding a mug in one hand and a spoon full of soup in the other. Just as he sat down, he heard Veledar pounce onto a chair next to him, two scaled paws thumping onto the bar. The elven barkeep quickly made his way over, forehead vein still very apparent on his cherry-colored face.\n\n\"Oy! What's he doin' here? Oy! Armor! I'm talkin' to ya!\" the innkeeper pointed an angry finger at Arcturus. \"This is your damned pet, innit?\"\n\n\"Happens that he is.\" The paladin spoke calmly.\n\n\"Then what did I say earlier, eh? You got dropped on your head as a kid or what? Take pet out or see yourselves gone from my establishment!\" the unruly man jabbed a finger in Veledar's direction.\n\nArcturus was about to speak and apologize for Veledar, but the dragon's errant tongue beat him to it.\n\n\"Listen here, you barking dog of an elf. I am not a pet to anyone, especially to this armored, good mannered human. He and I are traveling companions.\" Veledar turned his snout towards Arcturus, \"and if you kick me out, you kick him -and his heavy pouch-back into the streets! Do you want us to find a better in? Fine! We're going.\"\n\nArcturus' mind screamed internally as Veledar looked to him with a grin that seemed to say I got this. He watched the elf, his mouth hung open in disbelief at the talking drake. Arcturus sighed at Veledar's complete inability to lay low, then the elf too sighed before setting his eyes on Arcturus, perhaps too proud to speak to Veledar as an equal.\n\n\"Sorry 'bout earlier. My mouth tends to\u2026you know.\" The elf brushed off the sweat from his concerned face. \"If that thing breaks anything, you will be paying for it. Understand? I'll bring your meals now. 'pologies again for losing my temper. Beasts tend to bring the worst in me.\"\n\nArcturus nodded to the man. \"No problem.\"\n\n\"He's just being polite with an innkeeper that has serious anger issues.\" Veledar added.\n\n\"Fine,\" the elf snapped to Veledar, \"just place an order with the waitress.\" He raised a bony finger to Veledar's snout, \"don't make a mess, ya hear?\"\n\nVeledar's eyes narrowed at the elf, Arcturus thought he might snap at the man's finger, but to his surprise, Veledar simply nodded instead.\n\n\"Good. If you behave accordingly, there will be no trouble between us.\" the man laughed, to which Arcturus nervously joined him in laughter.\n\nArcturus returned his attention to Lyndis as the barkeep walked away. \"So now that your little shout duel is done with, did you find anything useful?\"\n\n\"There's a path used to travel up to the mountains. They don't share it with outsiders or guards because they want to protect the dragon, just as she protects them.\" Lyndis replied, pulling an old looking map from her pack. \"The way is usually safe, but they admitted no one went up there in years. Five, to be exact, just like the crone said, although what focken dragon keeps count? Five years is nothing for them, so I don't know if that means anything.\"\n\n\"My mother probably has better things to do than cater to a village full of rude guards and loud barkeeps.\" Veledar mumbled.\n\n\"What do you think we will find up there?\" Arcturus asked over the steps of a waitress that brought over a bowl of soup for him.\n\n\"Normal stuff, if you can call goblins normal, maybe a troll or two. However, the biggest obstacle is a storm that appears to protect the mountain. Drives unwanted visitors away if you're being optimistic, or kills them, if you want to think that way. Best we leave first thing in the morning. I have this symbol used by the townsfolk to approach the storm safely, and its previous owner would very well like it back.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nLyndis pulled out a small silver metal brooch in the shape of a dragon.\n\n\"You stole it?\" Arcturus gasped.\n\n\"Nah, I only borrowed it, and trust me, the person it belongs to was anything but deserving of such token.\" Lyndis smirked, pocketing the brooch.\n\n\"Suppose I agree with you. Who did you take it from?\n\n\"Don't know him by name, but he runs the thugs here in Drakenburg. He is known around the streets as Knives. As you imagine, this charming fellow is the reason why guards don't roam the streets at night.\"\n\nThe waitress returned to pour a bluish liquid into Lyndis' tankard. It looked like partially frozen mush, with a sweet air about it. While Arcturus was staring at the liquid, Lyndis pointed to it, then took a sip. \"It's elvish frost wine. Great stuff for long nights.\"\n\nThey went on to discuss the ambushes, which only coaxed a sigh from Lyndis' mouth, along with a single word. Typical.\n\nVeledar ordered large plates of food that surprised Arcturus only in price, not in gesture. Like last time, he shelled out the coin to feed the dragon's humongous appetite. They eventually retired for the evening as the music died down, drinks ran dry, and people started to leave. Lyndis strolled down to her door, shutting it quickly to leave Arcturus and Veledar in their own room again.\n\nThe two fought over where to sleep for a brief while before Veledar just stole a side of the bed with a grin. Arcturus got onto the other side as he took off his gear and laid on the floor.\n\n\"You know, you could have talked to the elf some more about the rooms. I could have gotten a proper bed to slumber upon.\" Veledar grumbled into his paws.\n\n\"No pets!\" Arcturus mimicked the bartender. \"Can't have a pet destroy my fine rooms.\" Arcturus laughed as Veledar suddenly placed his snout close to his face.\n\n\"Oh, very funny. Maybe I'll keep reminding you of your lack of tail, or wings, or maybe this useless hide that does nothing to protect your feeble body.\"\n\n\"Take it easy, Veledar, It's just a joke.\"\n\n\"You know what else is a joke?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nArcturus was suddenly shoved off the bed by a scaly leg. He fell onto the floor with a thump, the hissing laughter of the dragon hurting more than the fall. \"Whimsy paladin! Now that's a more proper source of amusement!\"\n\nArcturus started to grumble to himself as he got back onto the bed and collapsed into the pillow. He closed his eyes until he felt a snout rest beside his head. He could practically feel Veledar's grin, \"Not very funny when it's your turn, is it?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for calling you my pet.\" he grumbled, eyes still closed. \"But just so you know, I find you adorable in this form.\"\n\n\"Why thank you, human. Maybe next time I can think of something nice to tell you.\"\n\n\"Not tonight?\"\n\n\"Not tonight.\" Veledar yawned as he curled up, hugging his own tail in the absence of his beloved wings.\n\n[ Crashing Hopes ]\n\nThere was a sudden knocking at Arcturus' door, quick and hard, almost like it happened inside his skull.\n\nThere better be a good reason for this, the paladin begrudgingly pulled himself from the sleepy dragon to look groggily out the window. Morning had not yet arrived. The stars still hung high in the sky twinkling every so often. Veledar snored as the bed strained against his weight. It appeared the dragon had returned to his normal size during sleep, and right now, that big body of his was taking up most of the room. Arcturus removed the dragon's forepaw from his middle, then took a few steps towards the door, shivering in the cold blanket of air that enveloped his body. From the door came the sound of the rapid knocking once more.\n\n\"Arcturus, open the fock up!\" came Lyndis' harsh voice. Arcturus pulled open the door. The woman quickly bolted in and slammed the door shut. She was fully dressed in her armor, weapons, and gear. Her face was full of determination, but her eyes had a tint of worry in them as she turned to look around the chamber.\n\n\"Well aren't you a rude lady, waking a dragon from sweetest slumber,\" Veledar mumbled sleepily.\n\n\"Shut it, dragon. Now is not the time for whatever humor passes through that sleepy head.\" Lyndis snapped back, then lowered her voice. \"Arcturus, get your gear on. We are going to have company in just a few moments.\n\n\"That doesn't sound bad.\" Veledar yawned and stretched out to take up the entire bed. \"I wager the angry elf feels bad for last night, and to make up for his harsh words and complete lack of respect, he had his servants bring us food!\"\n\n\"Unbelievable\u2026\" Lyndis sighed.\n\nArcturus figured whatever she spoke of was serious. \"Lyndis, who exactly are you expecting?\" he asked while he put on his plate armor piece by piece. During this time, Lyndis stayed at the door, cracking it open every now and again to see if anybody approached.\n\n\"Why the sagged face? Maybe these people heard of my exploits last night. I know! They want to pay their respects to the dragon that kept their streets clean of thugs!\" Veledar growled excitedly, slithering out of his bed on four tired paws.\n\n\"Wrong again. Honestly, dragon, you must be the worst guessing partner I've ever had. Here's the situation. The folks that had that brooch I took found out sooner than I would have liked, alright? We best head for your mother's den quickly, before they come to get what is rightfully theirs.\"\n\n\"Hmmph, hardly a challenge.\" The dragon snorted. \"I can handle whatever company you have, dear Lyndis, for I am a dragon after all.\"\n\n\"Well, I remember getting the better of you on quite a few occasions, dear dragon.\" Arcturus pointed out, only for Veledar's snout to scrunch up, \"Well that doesn't count when I'm not talking to you.\" he hissed.\n\n\"Why not? Because you're a mighty dragon and I'm a puny little human?\" Arcturus smirked. A loud crash of shattering glass came from Lyndis' room. Whoever broke into the room made a mess, throwing things around like a storm, undoubtedly searching for the brooch.\n\n\"The half-bitch isn't here!\" a thug just said.\n\n\"Well then, check the whole damn inn, you lazy fuck! Knives wants her brought to him in one piece.\" yelled another voice.\n\n\"Oy, why does it have to be in one piece?\"\n\n\"Cause boss says so. Now do as I say, or I'll carve myself a trophy from your own flesh.\"\n\nArcturus pulled his sword as the door from Lyndis' room slammed open. He heard the window open in his own room and realized Lyndis was no longer next to him. He turned around to find that she was already one foot out the window.\n\n\"The fock you're lookin' at? Thought we'll leave the normal way?\" she hissed through clenched teeth.\n\n\"We can take them.\" Veledar whispered, hunching over and baring his teeth.\n\n\"No, you overgrown lizard. If you fight here, the entire inn will be destroyed.\"\n\n\"Fine!\" Veledar groaned, \"but let it be known I chose to let these fools live a while longer.\" He moved his claws and shrank down to his waist high size.\n\n\"If only you fought as well as you talk...\" Arcturus sighed as he clumsily climbed out the window and onto the street below.\n\n\"Next time you say something like that, I'm going to bite your shiny metal ass.\"\n\nArcturus gritted his teeth when his metal boots clanked on the cobblestone street. He looked up to see Veledar flying out the window.\n\n\"Stupid dragon.\"\n\n\"Shh!\" Lyndis whispered from a nearby alley. She was crouched over, gesturing to Arcturus to come over to her. She then pointed to a large group of men and women of different races gathered at the front of the inn. They were adorned in leathers, chainmails, and a select few even afforded the safety of plate mail. They had crossbows, spears, and all other sorts of weapons. From afar, it looked like a small army had gathered to bring the mean innkeeper to justice, with grim frowns and determined looks upon their faces.\n\nArcturus watched Lyndis sneak carefully from shadow to shadow, until she was well beyond the mercenaries' view. He rose to follow her when a yell pulled his attention; a shout of pain from the elven bartender.\n\n\"I told you, I don't know where your \"princess\" went! She was supposed to be in her room!\" The elven man said before getting tossed through the door. He landed hard on the street, like no man deserved. Even from where he was hiding, Arcturus could see the large red stain on the man's brown tunic.\n\n\"NO! He already told you everything!\" From the inn ran another elf wearing white undergarments. She quickly picked the wounded bartender up, pointing around the gathering of men. \"You bastards. Why don't you believe us? We're a common inn! What would a princess do here?\"\n\nArcturus figured the woman must've been the elf's wife. Then, when the situation already looked grim, two ogres smashed their way out of the inn, busily munching on whatever they could steal from the kitchen. These two brutes stood at nine feet tall, covered in taters of hide. Their faces were rough, with a large underbite of yellow teeth.\n\n\"Half ogres.\" Arcturus whispered quietly to himself.\n\n\"Come on!\" he heard Lyndis say in a harsh whisper. \"We have to get out of here.\"\n\nHis attention turned back towards the man as one of the half-ogre's fist collided with the barkeep's face.\n\n\"P-please, he doesn't know anything else!\" Cried the barkeep's wife as she desperately tried to hold back one of the ogres. The beastly creature simply tossed her aside like a ragdoll.\n\nArcturus looked to Lyndis. She had already began to leave the man to his fate. He looked again to the man and his wife. Could he really leave these two innocent souls into the hands of these rogues? Arcturus felt the familiar tug in the back of his mind.\n\nHis oaths, compelling him to stand against injustice.\n\nWithout another thought, he drew his sword, undid his shield, and marched out towards the group of mercenaries.\n\n\"Hey! Let them go!\" The paladin bellowed confidently, holding his sword high and pointing to the elf with an armored finger.\n\nThe collected group looked dumbfounded for a moment before bursting out laughing, as if Arcturus was a mere squire brandishing a sword.\n\n\"And why should we do that?\" one of the men sneered as he spit onto the street, \"because you want to play hero? Don't you know who we are, boy?\n\n\"No, and frankly I don't care. You let those people go, or this street is going to get messy.\" Arcturus said.\n\nThe group started laughing again as another man stepped forth from the collected group. He was dressed in fancy clothes, bright purple with gold runes stitched into them. He was a tough looking Half-elf, with a scar across his face, long braided hair, and blue eyes.\n\n\"Listen here, boy. Listen well, cause this'll be the only time I speak to a runt like you. Name's Knives. It would best for ya to just put that sword away and walk the other direction. Pretend you didn't see a thing, eh? Make this easy for the both of us.\"\n\n\"So you're Knives, huh? Pretty stupid way to get your hands dirty.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Knives chuckled. \"I own this town.\" he held his arms out wide, \"I own the food, the merchants, the very people in it! No guard would dare to stand against me or my army. I can murder you in the middle of the street and nobody would look twice at your mangled corpse, because they respect Knives more than a random lowlife who stole his daddy's armor.\"\n\n\"Interesting theory, Knives. But I have a different one.\" Arcturus smirked, throwing glances at Knives' minions, who continued to brandish their weapons threateningly. Arcturus counted thirteen people, not including Knives. This would be difficult, but with Lyndis and Veledar. it would be doable.\n\n\"How about you face justice for your crimes, here and now? The city will breathe a sigh of relief once I clear off the kraken that chokes it.\"\n\n\"Kraken\u2026right. Someone kill this fool before he further embarrasses himself,\" laughed Knives.\n\nArcturus could feel Lyndis' eyes on him, scolding him for his actions. He closed his eyes and imagined another pair of familiar eyes. \"Selina,\" he said softly to himself as the two half ogres bounded towards him. In one motion, he sliced deep into the half ogre that reached him first. The swing severed the limb in one clean slice, followed by a sickly smack. The ogre naturally collapsed near his missing limb with a groan of anger and pain.\n\nThe thugs were on him in an instant, with shouts of rage and bursting anger. Arcturus had to adopt a stance of total defense as they attacked him from all sides. Within the storm of swords, spears, and bludgeons, he had to constantly keep moving to stop the group from flanking him, and despite all the blocks ,parries, and glancing blows, he felt some of the weapons hit him square on.\n\nHe silently thanked Matilda for his armor. Without it, he'd be dead several times over.\n\n\"Grah!\" A heavy blow knocked him to the ground before the sea of thugs. He recovered quickly however, punishing the fool that had done this by slicing off his fingers. Arcturus parried another strike before the remaining ogre grabbed his shield and ripped it from his grasp. Their next attack had him disarmed, and finally encircled by the thugs. They looked to him with sneers and grins of victory. He raised his gauntlet clad hands as if to fight them with his fists.\n\n\"Haven't you learned your lesson, boy? This is what you get for playing the hero.\" Knives chuckled from behind the wall of muscle. \"Any last words? Perhaps telling me where that princess of mine is?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I think I may know where she is.\"\n\nKnives slowly revealed his broken -and in some places missing-teeth. Arcturus grinned as he saw the elven man and woman make it to safety. He looked up to the sky, where the sound of wings was quickly followed by a fireball detonating behind the thugs. Several men were incinerated close to the blast, while others fell in the wake of the blazing explosion.\n\n\"There's a-\" one man started to shout before a rapier was plunged into his chest. The man fell to reveal Lyndis.\n\n\"Heard you were searching for me,\" she smirked, crossing swords with another thug.\n\n\"Lyndis! Bless your timing. I almost thought-\"\n\n\"Now's not the time!\" the half-elf hissed over the paladin's words.\n\nArcturus fought his way through the ranks of men and snatched his weapons in the confusion that followed. With several well-placed strikes, he felled three thugs easily. On the fourth strike of his sword, the thug he was aiming for collapsed with an arrow sticking out of him. Arcturus almost froze at the realization. It looked like their mysterious helper was back.\n\nThroughout all the fighting, Lyndis was flipping, stabbing, and weaving her way through the remaining thugs. Knives was backing away from the whole fight as the situation was spiraling out of his control. Lyndis managed to jump her way over to him, holding up her rapier to his nose. \"What's the matter, Knives? You think you can just muscle your way through everything?\"\n\n\"Yeah, about that\u2026just realized it's best for both sides if you can just keep the brooch, princess. You won't hear from me or my people. Just\u2026just get out of here, will ya?\" Knives said as a drop of sweat dripped down his head.\n\n\"Well you see, normally I would let you go, buuuuuutt. You see my friend over there? The one in the silver armor, currently cutting down the last of your thugs? Well, he isn't too keen on letting filth like you propagate further, so I am going to have to refuse your generous offer.\"\n\n\"Bad business, princess. Bad business when knives have to come out!\" Knives said, pulling a hidden dagger from inside his shirt. He twirled it around in his hand before pointing it at Lyndis, \"I am going to cut that smile off your face.\"\n\nArcturus cut down the last thug with a wide slash of his sword, then turned to face Lyndis as she faced off with Knives. The man threw him a quick glance before he focused back on his opponent, his eyes wide with fear. Who wouldn't be? A man in full plate striding over to you, covered in the blood of your minions?\n\nIf Knives was a good fighter, Arcturus would never know, as an arrow pierced him right through the shoulder. The rogue leader gasped in pain as Lyndis leaped in to take advantage of the distraction. In one swift motion, she had him pierced on her rapier, straight through the heart.\n\n\"You should have just let this whole business go, Knives,\" she said, kicking him off her rapier. Knives fell, clutching his chest, hitting the ground with a loud thump.\n\n\"Good to see that bastard come to deserved end. Why did he call you princess?\" Arcturus asked, cleaning his sword with a rag he pulled from one of the dead thugs.\n\n\"It's a long story,\" Lyndis sighed, \"Too complicated for me to go into right now, but at least this bastard is dead.\" She kicked Knives' corpse hard with her boot.\n\n\"Nrraaaaah! Get off my bear, ya big basterd!\" Came a shout further down the street.\n\nWithout a thought, Arcturus moved swiftly towards the source of the voice. Perhaps it belonged to the person that had been helping them from the shadows. He did not have to go far, as -after he rounded a corner-he found seven more thugs attacking a large brown bear and a dwarven woman with braided red hair. In each of her hands rested a well-crafted hand axe, smeared in dried blood. At her feet was a bow, possibly what she had been using before the thugs had closed in on her, to protect herself against close-quarters danger. The dwarf was wearing dark grey studded leather with small golden dwarven runes around the edges. Her white furred leggings were almost in blur as she avoided several weapon strikes with a smirk on her face.\n\nAnd by the looks of it, she knew how to fight. Arcturus quickly realized that when the woman ducked from a sword swing that nearly cut her hair clean off, then returned the strike by crashing her axe into the man's gut.\n\n\"Almost got me right in the 'ead! Ye got guts, ya do!\" She laughed, pulling her axe out, causing the man's insides to spill out onto the street.\n\nArcturus joined her by smashing one man's head in with his shield, then he pulled out his sword and plunged it through the neck of another.\n\n\"Thank ye laddie! Pretty good for a human!\" The dwarf lady cried as the large bear tackled a man and mauled his face. The man flailed with his sword, slicing into the bears muzzle and drawing blood before his neck got torn to shreds. The remaining thugs were cut down in a matter of moments from a combination of rapier, axe, bear, and sword. Once again Arcturus cleaned his sword and sheathed it in his scabbard, while Lyndis started to loot the dead bodies.\n\nOne of these days I have to do something about that habit of hers, Arcturus shook his head, then walked to the dwarf, who was tending to the bear's snout with a rag.\n\n\"Quit yer fussin' ya big baby. I've had bigger cuts to deal with in da past.\" She said, rubbing the rag deep into the cut. The bear let out a pained moan. \"Oh, you'll be alrigh' in a few moments. Human,\" she turned her head to Arcturus. \"Thank ye for helpin me outta that bind back dere. Although it be about time you returned the favor. Ya seem to draw a lotta bad attention.\" She said with a laugh.\n\n\"A most unfortunate consequence spurred from the desire to do good,\" Arcturus chuckled. \"What do you go by? I can't simply call you our hidden friend, now that we've met.\"\n\n\"Ye can call me Merlia Gallowglar! Explorer at heart an' smasher of skulls when needs be. Dis moaning pup here is Ulga.\"\n\n\"Charmed. I'm Lyndis Kuxion,\" Lynidis slid over with a smile, handing Arcturus a bag of gold. \"Your share of the loot, for now,\" she added quickly before resuming her business.\n\n\"I'm Arcturus Lund,\" he said, sticking out a hand to the dwarf who shook it with a big smile.\n\n\"Arcturus, eh? I saw you an' yer lizard friend walkin' around, gettin attacked like righ now. What are ya lot up to that seems to draw so much attention?\"\n\n\"This one is on you,\" Lyndis placed a hand on his shoulder. \"I am going to do a second pass and see if I missed anything worth taking.\" Lyndis patted his shoulder before returning to the field of corpses.\n\n\"I don't want to involve you in our affairs, even if you are as stout as you look. Merlia.\"\n\nThe dwarf didn't seem to take his words lightly. Frowning, she crossed her hands, then unleashed a piece of her mind. \"Ya listen here, ya clankin collection of pots and pans! It sounds like ya three are on an adventure, I like me some adventures. Makes da best stories, an' I can handle trouble just as good as any man, don' you worry about that, laddie.\"\n\nArcturus sighed, \"You have helped us quite a bit, so it wouldn't be fair to deny you a chance at adventure, as risky as it might get. We are heading to the capital to retrieve a book for a friend.\"\n\n\"A book? What's it made from, gold? Cause when ya put it like dat, it don't sound that excitin'.\" She laughed.\n\n\"That's only part of it. I also want to get some answers from my king. Especially why he wished me to end the life of an innocent dragon.\"\n\n\"So ya sayin' that little red scamp of yours is a dragon? Do I look like a fool, laddie? I tink he is a wee bit too small for a dragon.\" She said, her eyes full of skepticism.\n\n\"Oh believe me, that one's more trouble than you can handle, especially if he just heard you,\" Arcturus whispered, then smiled as the dwarf squinted her eyes at him. \"He just changed his size and hid his wings.\"\n\nThere was a sudden scrape of talons on stone that made Arcturus hold up his arms and gesture to the form of Veledar. \"He probably heard me say the word dragon and could not resist swooping down on us.\"\n\n\"Now now, Arcturus, I think you are starting to know me a tad too well.\" Veledar chuckled before strutting over. Arcturus could see he was clearing puffing his chest out. The dragon stopped several feet in front of Merlia before spreading his wings wide.\n\n\"I am Crimson Sky, easy to say and obvious to the eye\u2026Merlia, was it?\"\n\nArcturus watched the dwarf's face. If she was concerned or scared of the dragon's presence, she did not show it in that big, gleeful stare.\n\n\"Well, best keep yer big wings hidden in dis town. Knives there probably has more idiots waitin' in the alleys. Best we head to me camp. It's a couple miles north of here. Once we get dere, ye can tell me wha' else ya lot up ta.\"\n\n\"I find myself confused by your request, Merlia. Do you invite us to your camp out of kindness, to question us, or perhaps join in on our adventure?\" Veledar asked, strutting around her.\n\n\"Why else would ye three be askin' bout da silver dragon? Rumor says lives on dat dere mountain?\" she pointed to the towering mountains overlooking the town. \"I'm comin' with ya, and there's nothin' ye can do ta stop me.\"\n\nArcturus had a quick discussion about traveling to Merlia's camp. Veledar moaned that there was yet another person wanting to travel with them on HIS adventure. Lyndis brought up the point that the more work force they had, the better chances to succeed at getting the dragon's book back. Veledar complained, but gave in to the half-elf's compelling arguments.\n\n\"Fine, Merlia. We shall follow you to your camp. However, if this is a trick, I will do things to you that will make you swear in every dwarvish word known to your kind,\" Veledar squinted his eyes, and snarled at Merlia.\n\n\"Ya don have ta worry bout me stabbin ya in the back. Who do ya think I am, a sneaky goblin? Cause I gotta tell ya, dragon, dose be fighten' words!\"\n\n\"Just lead us to your camp.\" Veledar sighed, looking towards the sky.\n\n\"Good, now da lot of ya get ya horses and follow Ulga and me.\"\n\nThe group quickly left the town on horseback, with Merlia leading the way atop Ulga. Veledar flew overhead, following them closely. They spoke little as the night wind battered them from all sides. Arcturus saw even Veledar struggle against the gale, although he doubted the dragon would ever admit to having such trouble. They arrived at Merlia's camp within the hour. It was made up of a simple tent and a dead campfire tied down to resist the harsh winds. It was next to a tree where, it looked like Merlia had hung several pelts to keep the place dry. Arcturus led Smelly over to the tree and tied him up. He turned around as he heard Veledar land behind him.\n\n\"Gods, can we get a fire going? My focken hands are freezing,\" Lyndis rubbed her hands together.\"\n\n\"Ah, forgot ya elves couldna stand da cold,\" chuckled Merlia, pulling out flint and steel from a pack on the ground. After several failed attempts to light the humid wood, Veledar let out an annoyed groan.\n\n\"That little thing is going to do nothing to this wood. Here. Let me show you how it's done, dear Merlia,\" the dragon snorted, then unleashed a jet of flame from his mouth to light the wood in an instant. Arcturus took a seat beside Veledar, who had settled down by the fire. The others gathered around as the red dragon started telling Merlia of their journey thus far. Although he started the whole tale with the \"Great injustice done to him by Lumara's treacherous paladin.\" He spoke of the trip through the fairy realm, the fight with the bulettes, and smiled fondly of their time in Drakenburg, up until Knives ruined everything.\n\n\"Dats all well an' good, Crimson Sky, but what's yer business with da silver dragon?\" Her eyes went wide, then a coy grin grew on the dwarves face, \"Oh, I get ya! Yer lookin for a she dragon to keep ya big bum warm at night!\"\n\n\"Gods no!\" Veledar replied, scrunching up his snout and sticking out his tongue in disgust. He stopped only to make gagging noises as he turned away from Merlia. After a few more moments, he was able to respond with, \"Nothing of that sort, you perverted dwarf. That dragon is my mother. Is it so strange that I only wish to pay her a visit? It's been years since I last had any contact with her!\"\n\nAs Merlia and Veledar talked back and forth, Arcturus took note that Veledar did not mention the lady Lida. He must not have heard what the old woman said, that the journey to his mother's mountain would only bring hardship and pain upon them.\n\nHe perked up as Veledar started telling a story about how his mother had put on a play with magic for his sister, brother, and himself. When he mentioned his brother, Veledar frowned, but continued with the story. Once it was finished, he was going to ask Merlia what wind brought her around Drakenburg, but Lyndis beat him to the question.\n\nThe cheerful dwarf frowned during a sigh. She looked hurt, somehow. \"I'm on an adventure, of course!\" she said, her face perking up. \"Little Ulga an' I get inta heaps of trouble while we explore da unknown.\"\n\n\"Lumara is the unknown?\" It was Arcturus' turn to frown. Far as he knew, Lumara encompassed most of the continent.\n\n\"Well ta me anyway. I'm from da south of course. Straight past that other place.\" She paused for a moment in thought, scrunching up her brow, \"Drenedar!\" she exclaimed, \"Da one with all da trees and pegasi. Alhough, tha place wasn't a great fit for a dwarf. Everytin' was so tall, bright and clean!\" She laughed, \"Can ye believe I watched a group scrub down da streets ta have dem perfect? Ridiculous!\"\n\nShe leaned up against Ulga and pulled out a knife from her side, then slowly started to carve a piece of wood she found nearby. \"If ya ask me, things need ta get a little dirty, rough, take a few scraps, den ye can tell da difference between what's cheap an' what's important.\"\n\nShe paused again for a moment to cut off a large section of the wooden stick. \"Anyways, I'm from a small village beneath da mountain o stonehammer. Da village has me whole clan. It be called da village of stone in case yer wonderin'.\"\n\n\"A tad bit ironic, is it?\" Veledar smirked, \"It's granite this, steel that, perhaps another village called pebble?\"\n\n\"Well ya scaley git, dere is a town called pebble.\" she replied, locking eyes with the dragon. They stared each other down with unblinking eyes before they both burst out laughing. \"Back to me story den! I had a yearnin' to see da world outside me village, so I set out for da surface. So far, I find humans da best....no offense lass.\" she said, looking to Lyndis. \"I have found da elf folk are a tad slow moving for me tastes.\"\n\nLyndis silently mimed half-elf to herself as she pointed to her ears.\n\n\"Humans though, they always be striving ta move forward, dey always seek ta learn, always eager ta explore. Determination is sometin ta admire in dem.\"\n\n\"I agree as well, even if said determination seems to get them in trouble more than it's worth it.\" Veledar said. Arcturus felt the dragon put a claw on his shoulder. \"Isn't that right, Arcturus?\"\n\n\"Are you talking about yourself again, dragon? Because I sure didn't dive myself out of an airship before I met you!\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"Your words wound me, human. I thought we are kind of simpatico.\" Veledar grinned, placing a paw to his chest.\n\nThe group laughed and spent the last bit of the night talking until they all fell asleep around the fire.\n\nArcturus woke in the morning to the sound of Veledar's rustling. He breathed in the cold morning air before stretching his arms. The morning sun had already peeked through the clouds high in the sky.\n\n\"Arcturus, I am not a convenient table to rest your arm upon.\" Veledar said, bumping into him, nearly causing Arcturus to fall.\n\n\"Maybe if you weren't so darn good at it!\" he said, turning towards the dragon to catch him sticking his long tongue out at him. The dragon took off after his stomach gave a loud rumble, leaving Arcturus in a spray of light snow. He tended to Stinky and Smelly, noticing that the two females -Merlia and Lyndis-were meditating around the fire with a spellbook in front of Lyndis and a scroll in front of the dwarf. He took a spot at least ten feet away and began his own ritual of combat meditation. He swung at the air, slashed and thrust for half an hour before taking out his rations and stuffing the nuts and dried fruit into his mouth. He downed them with a swig of water from his water skin, longing for a hot meal served from an equally warm bowl.\n\nArcturus' mind went from one tasty meal to another until he thought to a steak he had a couple of months ago back in Entis, and his mouth watered as he remembered the succulent flavors that washed over his tongue. He mentally shook his head to rid the image of that delicious treat from his mind, but the following roar was a much better distraction.\n\nVeledar landed in front of him in a spray of snow, after which he shook off the white powder from his scales. Arcturus noticed the look of worry on Veledar's snout, something he had never seen before on the dragon's face.\n\n\"Let me guess. You stepped on someone's toes and now they're coming back here to demand payment for yet another one of your misdeeds.\"\n\nArcturus was almost ready to grab onto his gold pouch when the dragon growled. \"I saw a bunch of gryphons, and on top of them, I'm pretty sure we have riders.\"\n\n\"How many?\" Arcturus immediately frowned.\n\n\"A dozen. Maybe more. I didn't exactly stay there to count them.\"\n\nArcturus gulped, feeling his heart skip a beat. He had a pretty good idea what was coming for them. \"Ah, blasted. You got us in real trouble this time. Why in the world have you gone out there, on a whim, without even thinking of using a protection spell? That's stupid, even by dragon standards.\"\n\nThe dragon snarled, but dared not to say anything. Even someone as proud and mighty as Veledar knew better then to make a fuss in this sort of situation.\n\n\"So what's the plan? Are you going to stand there and dazzle them with your scales?\" Arcturus clenched his jaws.\n\n\"Shut up.\" The dragon hissed as the human paced around, muttering angry things beneath his breath.\n\n\"It don't fockin' matter who messed what. It's done now. Get your things and MOVE. Go! MOVE!\"\n\nArcturus knew gryphons were fast fliers, possibly faster than even Veledar. \"How far away are they?\"\n\n\"Far enough to give us advantage.\" The dragon said.\n\nArcturus nodded and quickly donned his armor. He reminded himself to thank Matilda again for crafting such a wonderful thing. Within the span of five breaths, he was already suited up.\n\nArcturus threw his stuff into his pack and quickly mounted Stinky. He held the reins tight as the others gathered around him, all their things packed into bundles, although by the look on their faces, the females didn't have enough time to fully prepare all their spells. Lyndis pulled out the same map she read at the inn and held it inches from her face.\n\n\"If we follow this path, we will reach the passage point, and with the brooch we have in our possession, we should be able to pass unhindered. Hopefully the gryphon group will lose us in the snowstorm.\" Lyndis said, pointing to a drawing of a mountain pass on the map.\n\n\"It is a good plan. May the Gods show us favor.\" Arcturus said, quickly taking the lead with Lyndis, Merlia, and Veledar flying overhead.\n\nThey rode over the snowy land, not even taking a moment to hide their tracks. Arcturus patted Stinky's head and pushed the horse to keep running past his normal limits. He did not want to see those gryphon knights right now. More than that, he dreaded the thought of claiming responsibility for his actions until he had everything squared away. If these two sides got into a fight, it was going to be difficult pull his swings against people that were just doing their jobs. People that he could have met, talked, and dined with during his years of service.\n\nArcturus' heart quickened when the skies rang with the distant screech of a gryphon. The hunting party was closing in now, and even with all his armor, the paladin felt the hair on the back of his neck straighten, and his blood warm up with anxious anticipation.\n\n\"Lyndis!\" he shouted back to her, eyes scanning the skies for their winged friend. \"How much farther until we reach the pass?\"\n\n\"Not far!\" She cried back, \"Perhaps a mile to go before we get to the spot on the-\"\n\nShe was interrupted by the sound of Veledar's roar, and Arcturus knew that type of roar well. It was the sound of a dragon in pain. Splinters and leaves burst from the forest as Veledar descended towards the ground. He fell in the snow alongside the two gryphons that tried to hold him down.\n\n\"You trespass in the king's lands, dragon!\" One of them screeched with all his might, \"Stand down, or we'll have to subdue you by force!\"\n\n\"Isn't that\u2026what you're already doing, you stinky pair of squawkers?\"\n\n\"Crimson Sky!\" Arcturus called out to him.\n\nThe dragon didn't hear his shout; not with his roar deafening any other sound. Arcturus cursed under his breath as he pulled his horse towards the squabble of scales and feathers.\n\nPlease, Gods. Be merciful. Don't let this turn into another bloodbath.\n\nThe paladin quickly ran over his oaths over the beat of Stinky's hooves. \"Crimson Sky! Crimson Sky, stop!\" Arcturus shouted in vain as the dragon shoved his smaller captors away. His tail smacked one of the gryphons unconscious into the snow, while his forepaw managed to get around the other's neck.\n\nArcturus pushed the horse as hard as he could, shouting from atop his lungs. \"Crimson Sky! Do NOT kill that gryphon!\"\n\nThe dragon seemed to have heard something, turning his angry, spiteful gaze to the rider that dismounted a close distance away.\n\n\"This little wretch would have me delivered back to his king in chains! Isn't that right, birdy?\" Veledar tightened his grip until the gryphon's defiant screech slowly turned into a softer, helpless squawk.\n\n\"Don't.\" Arcturus ran up to the dragon. \"Please....I know how it feels to hold someone's life in your hands, but this is not the way.\"\n\n\"Could you pick a worse moment to lecture me? There is no choice here, paladin. It is either us, or them!\" the dragon smashed his tail into the ground. \"If we do not stand our ground here, they will never stop chasing us. Their king wants me dead, remember? And these gryphons blindly obey him without a shred of remorse. I would have their lives before they chain me again!\"\n\nArcturus approached the angry dragon unarmed. \"I know how it feels to be powerless. I too had my choices stripped away when Dread Flame wrapped his vile claws around me, holding my tattered, exhausted body while my family died in front of my eyes. You are not him, Crimson Sky. You are not a monster, but if you strike this gryphon down now, your claws will forever be stained with the blood of the innocent.\"\n\n\"Listen\u2026to him\u2026\" the gryphon croaked.\n\nVeledar brought his bared teeth closer to the creature's beak. \"Say another word. I dare you.\"\n\n\"Crimson Sky. Crimson Sky! This power you feel\u2026it is not justice, dragon. Please, I beg of you\u2026think what you're about to do\u2026\"\n\nThe dragon's body shivered with pent-up tension. Arcturus noticed a few minor wounds along his sides, undoubtedly inflicted by the two gryphons. This wasn't the Veledar he knew from before, so instead of wasting his time on words, Arcturus quickly checked the unconscious bird. His heart still pumped, even in the slow rhythm of deep rest. Arcturus muttered a silent gratitude to the gods, then looked at Veledar from his knees.\n\n\"You're lucky this human has more mercy than your king, gryphon.\" The dragon let his captive fall on the ground, then leapt over to Lyndis, who quickly put the gryphon to sleep with a quick charm.\n\nArcturus let out a sigh of relief. \"Great job, everyone. Lyndis, try to do what you can to shield us from their eyes. Merlia, shoot them down if they get too close. Aim for the wings. We want them off our tracks, not dead.\"\n\n\"Got a soft heart in ye, laddie. Think they'll show us da same mercy?\"\n\n\"Only the Gods know for certain. We are not Knives, to use fear and intimidation as our weapons, just as we're not cutthroats, to slay our way through those who stand against us. We're better than that!\"\n\n\"I'll remind you these words when you'll be tied up in the bowels of an airship.\" Veledar growled.\n\nArcturus got back on his horse, and the party got moving again, leaving the two gryphon scouts behind. Arcturus knew the hunting party wouldn't go easy on them. That's not how he trained his men.\n\nThe same men who now inched ever closer to his position.\n\nArcturus felt an arrow wiz by his head to strike another gryphon that appeared overhead.\n\n\"We've got a whole flock coming down!\" Lyndis cried out.\n\nArcturus quickly put his party into combat formation, with Merlia and Lyndis striking from afar while Ulga and Veledar held the line on the ground.\n\nSeveral gryphon landed around them, one more surprised than the other.\n\n\"Paladin! You're alive!\" a gryphon said, quickly silenced by a white one with black tiger stripes encased in silver armor.\n\n\"Snap it shut, DuskWind! We have orders to capture the target at all costs!\"\n\n\"Doesn't have to be that way, SkyWing,\" Arcturus approached the flock leader. \"Order your flock to stand down. I will talk to whoever is in charge of this operation.\"\n\n\"The time for words passed the moment you allowed your prisoner to escape. ATTACK!\"\n\nThe gryphons charged or leaped at them from a spearhead formation. Arcturus knew his chances of success would be minimal at best. After all, he fought alongside gryphons like these for years. They were the best Lumara had to offer, specifically requested by him when he believed the king to be a selfless, honorable man.\n\nArcturus threw one last look at Veledar. \"We're better than them,\" he spoke softly, only for the dragon to hear, before he drew his sword and charged forward.\n\nHe aimed to injure the head of the snake, but a screech was all he heard as he was lifted out of his saddle by another gyphon. He felt claws press hard around his torso, and within two heartbeat, Arcturus was dropped hard onto the ground. The gryphon was on top of him in an instant, tearing at the joints of his armor without saying a word.\n\n\"Stop this madness!\" Arcturus hissed before droplets of saliva pelted his face alongside a deafening screech.\n\nArcturus didn't strike back with his voice. He hit with his fist, right on the side of the gryphon's beak, stunning the white gryphon long enough for him to free his sheathed sword and slam it on the back of the creature's head hard enough to put the creature to sleep.\n\n\"Nghhh, heavy bastard.\" With a great shove, the paladin pushed the unconscious gryphon off him. He stood up slowly to see that Stinky had been cut deep into his neck and now lay bleeding in the snow. He did a look around to find that Merlia and Lyndis were nowhere in sight. They must have been separated by another flock. Another screech pulled his mind from his friends, and Arcturus quickly ran to Veledar's side to help him. Three birds lay incapacitated on the ground, leaving four to deal with. The dragon kept them at bay with tail swipes and short bursts of fire, but Arcturus knew the flock would adapt to the situation. He was halfway there before a gryphon got close enough to leap onto his back.\n\nVeledar roared, thrashing about as the others latched on different parts of his body to drag him down.\n\nHang on\u2026just a moment longer\u2026Arcturus unstrapped the shield from his back, the cacophony of growls, hisses and screeches getting louder the closer he got to the heart of the combat.\n\nWhen he finally reached Veledar, Arcturus smashed his shield into the side of the first gryphon he found, a purple male that fell prey to Veledar's tail. The gryphon crumpled to the ground under the heavy smack, never to rise again. With him out of the way, Arcturus pulled onto the tail of another, not to hurt, but annoy the creature, for once it looked back, Veledar shook himself free.\n\n\"BlackPaws, SunWing!\" the flock leader inspected his fallen kin.\n\n\"They yet live.\" Arcturus brushed off the gryphon's concern.\n\n\"Thanks to our mercy,\" Veledar accompanied Arcturus with a tired huff. \"I have to say, you gryphons don't fight half as bad as you look\u2026\"\n\n\"Then you'll find my beak more than a match, scaled one!\"\n\nArcturus cursed as the two of them were forced back on the defense. Gryphon after gryphon came down from the sky to reinforce their leader, and soon enough, Arcturus found himself in total defense as the sea of feathers struck at him with beak and claw.\n\n\"Enough!\" A familiar voice called out from above. The gryphons backed away from Veledar and Arcturus, their keen eyes locked on their quarry.\n\nOne gryphon landed in the snow in front of Veledar, carrying a man in familiar black plate upon its back. It was Garroth, standing before them with a tabard of Lumara draped over his pristine armor. He held a crossbow that pulsed with the familiar hum that Arcturus had gotten used to during his long years in the service of the king's knights. He looked above to find ten more gryphons hovering, with men wielding more of the same crossbows that Garroth held in his hand. They all had them pointed at Veledar.\n\n\"You won't escape our grasp this time, dragon. Tell me what you've done to Arcturus, and I might find a spacious chamber for you to spend the rest of your miserable days in.\" Garroth said, his voice full of hatred. \"You are going to pay for all the grievances you've caused to the Crown.\"\n\n\"Grievances?\" Veledar scoffed. \"The only grievance I'm guilty of is existing in your land! Your dragon slayers came into my home, stole my treasure, accused me of unspeakable deeds, and now you're here, blabbering about imprisonment, when the man you seek is right in front of you!\"\n\n\"Arcturus?!\" Garroth pushed his visor up. \"By the Gods\u2026I thought someone stole your armor. Lift your visor up. Let me get a quick look at you.\"\n\n\"Garroth,\" Arcturus dipped his head, took off his helmet, then looked back at the man. \"This isn't how I imagined we'd meet.\"\n\n\"Same here, lad. You can imagine my surprise. I thought you'd been kidnapped; held for ransom by this band of thieves you're traveling with.\"\n\nArcturus got in front of the dragon when Veledar started to snarl.\n\n\"I'm on an important quest that allows no delays. Garroth, if my name still means something in Lumara, you will allow me to depart.\"\n\nThe man grumbled before he let out a long sigh. \"It is true we have history together, but the king requested your return, along with the quick delivery of the red beast.\"\n\nArcturus knew things were about to blow. He saw it in Garroth's eyes when he moved his hand over to his crossbow. Felt it in Veledar's quickening breath.\n\n\"Garroth-\" he began to speak, but was cut off as Veledar suddenly bounded towards him, grabbed Arcturus, and bolted into the sky.\n\n\"Arcturus! Incapacitate the red beast! Shoot it down from the sky!\" he heard Garroth shout orders as Veledar carried him higher into the sky.\n\n\"What\u2026the fock was that?\"\n\n\"They're going to imprison you, right after they throw me into that spacious jail!\"\n\nHe felt his stomach lurch, but thankfully, his mind was still too focused on Garroth to pay attention to the nausea. Storm clouds had suddenly appeared in the sky, making Veledar's flight more unsteady with every passing moment. They must have been close to the point Lyndis had talked about. Arcturus looked back down to the tiny forms of Garroth, his men, and the gryphons now chasing after them.\n\nVeledar carried him further and higher into the sky. \"Nice friends you've made during your time in Lumara.\" The dragon said between deep breaths, \"Why, my mind bristles with all sorts of exciting scenarios, like my first meal in prison, or my first crap. Do you figure they have crapholes dug into the earth, or they'll slowly let me fill up my own bed with-\"\n\n\"Shut up. Please\u2026stop talking. We're still not safe enough for prattling\u2026\"\n\n\"As if their feeble wings can keep up!\" Veledar roared joyfully. \"I got you out, human! I have you, they don't! You know what this means, right? You owe me!\"\n\n\"Stupid\u2026bumbling fool\u2026 They have gryphons! They can still catch you!\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" Veledar said, \"Those creatures could not hold a candle to me. They are basically oversized kittens!\" the dragon chuckled weakly. Arcturus could feel the dragon's wing beats; they were different than the last time he was carried into the sky. These were slower, and the dragon seemed to be straining. Despite him not saying anything, he was clearly hurt.\n\n\"Besides,\" Veledar said, flapping his wings again. The snow started to whip by Arcturus' face, causing him to shield his eyes with one of his hands. \"They would be foolish to follow us into my mother's snowstorm.\"\n\n\"The same storm that will smash us into a mountain! Lyndis and Merlia have the brooch. We will be lost without it!\"\n\nVeledar did not reply for a few moments, clearly weighing his options on what to do next. \"Well you see-\" Veledar was cut off as the battle screech of a gryphon sounded from behind, followed by at least twelve others.\n\n\"Graaarh, they have the most impeccable timing!\" Veledar said, his voice clearly masking worry. \"You know, I really don't want to be captured by this bunch of feathers. I don't think they will be as rational as you were.\"\n\n\"Arcturus! We're coming for you! Hold fast, paladin! Lumara's light outshines every darkness!\" he heard the voice of Garroth bellow into the sky.\n\nArcturus looked back down to see the form of three gryphons closing in on the red dragon's tail. Their eyes locked onto him, then shifted back to the dragon. \"Don't worry, Paladin!\" one of them squawked. \"We'll get you!\" The gryphon that spoke swerved out of the way as a stream of fire shot towards him.\n\n\"The only thing you need to get is away from this dragon, you fools!\" Arcturus shouted back as he clutched Veledar's forelimbs tighter. He felt Veledar pull him closer as the gryphons inched ever closer.\n\nOne of them flew towards the dragon's wings. Veledar let out a roar of pain, as the gryphon undoubtedly attacked his scale-less membranes. A second one flew towards the dragon's left, and let out a loud screech. This one seemed to dance in the air as Veledar tried to snap at him with his maw, his teeth only clamping onto thin air. The last one flew below the dragon, his eyes locked onto Arcturus. The golden gryphon angled his wings slightly and maneuvered into position below the dragon.\n\nVeledar suddenly thrashed his body as he did a swift turn. The dragon pounded his wings against the air and the gryphons were suddenly left behind. They recovered quickly however, and in another heartbeat, they were right on top of the dragon all over again. Veledar let out another roar, as claws no doubt ripped into his flesh a second time.\n\n\"Fly away, you damned fools!\" Arcturus shouted to the gryphons again, \"I don't need to be rescued! You're going to get us all killed!\"\n\nThe gryphon below moved closer as the one to his left suddenly grabbed onto Veledar's limb with his talons, ripping into the scales with ferocity.\n\n\"You are not safe with him! We'll get you back, sire, no matter the cost.\" The gryphon slashed again quickly, drawing more blood from the dragon.\n\n\"Ngrraaaaawrrrr. You want to play rough?\" Veledar hissed.\n\n\"Crimson Sky!\" Arcturus screamed from the top of his lungs, then the gryphon screeched right over him.\n\n\"He's almost through, sire. Just a few more moments and-\"\n\nArcturus felt his body lurch as Veledar slammed his wings against the air. However, the gryphon holding his limbs made headway, and Veledar's paws found themselves spread apart by the gryphon's stronger talons. Arcturus felt himself drop, with the gryphon below extending his paws, ready to snatch him from the air.\n\n\"Got you sire!\" The gryphon exclaimed.\n\nBut Arcturus felt no talons grab onto him. In his possessive fury, Veledar returned for him, slapping and fighting his way through the gryphons just like the birds said: by any means necessary.\n\n[ Arcturus looked up as the wind howled past his ears. Terror clutched at his heart as he dropped into the void below ]\n\nThis is how I die. In the cold, storming, with nobody to hear my screams, he thought as Veledar was currently lashing out at the three gryphons that surrounded him. The dragon bellowed something, and lightning seemed to arc from the sky to his claws. In a flash of bright blinding light, Arcturus saw lightning bolts fly out in all directions around the dragon. They sprung from him to the gryphons, who erected their own spheres of light just in time to deflect the deadly surge of electricity. The magic must've costed them all a heavy price. The gryphons glided down towards the ground, almost numb, while Veledar too seemed to struggle to remain conscious.\n\nArcturus dared not look down at the ground that rushed to meet him. He closed his eyes and waited for the sudden stop, hoping the dragon had the sense to at least save himself.\n\nDon't come for me, you pile of thoughtless scales. For once in your life, do the selfish thing. Save yourself instead of dying with me\u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Veledar was not like Dread Flame, interested in only protecting his own hide. He dove through the sky, his pain forgotten as his wings pounded at the angry air. It was replaced by the sickening fear as he watched Arcturus grow further away from him. The worst thing was Arcturus' silence as he fell. He had joked around with the human about his screech when he picked him up first, but that armored lump of meat had always been safe in his paws. Well, except now of course, when Veledar watched the human tumble through the air, his front cape flowing through upwards against the wind. He knew why the human was silent. It was the absolute dread of inevitability.\n\nVeledar willed himself to go faster as he saw the human clench his eyes shut, probably to pray in his last seconds; make peace with himself and the rest of the world.\n\nIn turn, Veledar tried avoid thinking about his dying brother...the look of fear the silver dragon had on his own snout when he had plummeted to the ground, never to rise again.\n\n\"Arcturus!\" Veledar gave an ear-splitting roar, the loudest his wounded throat could muster. The human HAD to know he was coming.\n\nI will not let you die. Not in my story! Veledar grit his teeth as he willed himself to go on. He was going to give this damned kingdom the story of a hero. A dragon who saved his human instead of monsters who kidnapped innocent maidens. His name would be spoken across the taverns of every human settlement. Veledar the protector, savior of paladins, conqueror of fiercest storms.\n\nVeledar streaked through the air, silence only broken by the sound of the whistling wind whipping by his snout. Arcturus was falling, and falling, and falling faster, still very much out of his reach.\n\nHe tucked his wings, then his limbs, trying desperately to increase his speed. The air became a stinging menace, and the pain increased tenfold. Veledar tried to focus on Arcturus, and not the ground rushing towards his outstretched talons. Nothing else mattered now.\n\nNothing but Arcturus.\n\nPull up now, or you are going to die, instinct screamed inside his skull.\n\nBut he was so close now. He almost had Arcturus. There was no way he could pull a selfish move now. If he was going to die at this moment, he was going to at least save the human. Let himself be the hero he knew he was. Let his tale be something people remembered in song. Veledar the heroic red dragon. He narrowed his eyes as he closed in on the human. They were going to live together, or die the same.\n\n\"Arcturus!\" he roared again with the same ear-splitting ferocity.\n\nArcturus opened his eyes as Veledar closed in on him. The dragon reached out with one of his paws, and in that terror-filled second, he realized if that if he just grabbed him and opened his wings, the air would break the human's back due to the shift in weight. Possibly even tear his wing membranes to pieces. There was no room for error in this, not with the ground coming so close now. Veledar continued to reach out with a paw as Arcturus rose his arm in return to grab at his talons. He felt the human wrap his gloved hand around a cold, scaled finger, then Veledar pulled him close and clutched him against his chest.\n\nThey fell together.\n\nVeledar slowly opened his wings a nerve wracking fraction at a time. He felt the wind slice through him like thousands of daggers, and though his membrane was being ripped apart, the descent started to slow, but he knew it was not going to be enough. He spread his wings wider, feeling the bones in his joints crackle with mind-numbing pain. He could see the snow dunes approach, the grey stones littering the place, the trees in the distance.\n\nThe world was always so beautiful seconds before death.\n\nVeledar angled his wings down and aimed himself at a possible landing. \"Arcturus. Remember this part of the story.\" He shouted as he tilted his wings and flipped his body, placing himself between the ground and the human he clutched tightly in his limbs.\n\n\"N-no! VELEDAR!\"\n\nVeledar felt his body crash into the snow. Pain shot through his entire body like a flood of electricity. It made his teeth rattle, his spine quake, and his bones shift inside his body. He felt his wings break into thousands of painful fragments, and he gasped out, the air driven from his lungs through a horrendous growl. He clutched Arcturus tighter as they skidded through the soft snow, leaving behind splotches and streaks of red.\n\nNO! I\u2026I must\u2026 Veledar internally screamed as his own body started to wither. He could not move. Not with so many broken things inside his crumpled body. His next gasping breath brought in the taste of blood, and the dragon spat the substance onto the ground, unable to take in the air he sorely needed. Stars danced around his vision as he flopped his head back into the snow, letting out choking breaths as the skies above them grew darker. After a few heartbeats, even the pain died down. Veledar felt nothing.\n\nNothing apart from the darkness that wrapped him in its tenebrous cloak.\n\n[ Paladin of Bahamut ]\n\nArcturus' entire body trembled with pain. He slowly opened his eyes to the swirling snow that spread around him. He sat up, his head still spinning from the shock of the impact he experienced mere moments ago.\n\n\"Aghh\u2026I don't remember the fall being this bad when that bastard Dread Flame brought me down from the sky.\" Arcturus touched his forehead with his hand and grunted in pain. Even something as simple as massaging his throbbing head made him feel sore. He shook his head slowly, and soon enough, the blurry image he saw before his eyes slowly came back into focus. He was in a wild, uninhabited area by the looks of it, and the compressed snow he had tumbled on when he hit the ground made his eyes widen with grim realization.\n\nHe held me\u2026right before\u2014Arcturus' eyes frantically scanned the area around him, desperation lodged in his chest like a nail hammered in too deep. That's when he saw the dragon, and he wished he had not. Lying not that far away in the snow, was the grim spectacle of blood, torn scales and wounds that made up the broken version of a dragon he once knew in a very different form.\n\n\"Oh\u2026oh Gods, don't let this be.\" Arcturus tried to stand. He immediately gasped as a sharp pain stabbed his chest. He struggled. Groaned. Cursed as he forced his weakened limbs to obey.\n\nGods\u2026 it feels like my limbs\u2026 are weighed down by boulders. Arcturus scrunched his face with effort. With another pained murmur, the paladin succeeded to get on his feet.\n\n\"Least my legs aren't broken,\" He quickly looked over his own body. Thankfully, nothing appeared to be broken. Arcturus took a deep breath, sending another wave of painful flames up his chest.\n\n\"Nghhh, aaaaah, that's\u2026fock me, that rib's twisted like a dragon's tail, but I'll live.\" Arcturus muttered. \"That's not important right now. Veledar. I need to\u2026\" His eyes focused back on the bloodied dragon that had yet to move from the dented snow he rested in.\n\n\"Please\u2026Don't be dead\u2026\" Arcturus gathered all the strength he had in his aching body. \"Veledar!\" he shouted out as he painfully limped towards his friend. \"Please...\" He nearly stumbled and fell as his next footstep made him gasp in agony. He caught himself, his eyes never leaving the dragon's broken body. The snow around Veledar was painted in dark crimson streaks, a grim reminder of the gryphons that forced him upon this course of action. Arcturus closed the distance painfully slow. He was now within arm distance of the dragon, and there was yet a movement to notice from his fallen friend.\n\n\"Gra\u2026rrrrraaaahhhh,\"\n\nArcturus' heart but leaped inside his tight chest as he saw the dragon's chest rise.\n\nHe was alive. The Gods had mercy on them both. Even with their blessing, Arcturus tried to not get his hopes up. He knew too well he was in no position to mend a dragon's wounds, not to mention he was a wanted man by the king's chasers.\n\nWe're not safe yet, but at least he's alive. Tears of gratitude fell along the paladin's scratched cheeks as he looked upon his dragon friend. Veledar's wings, once so proud and big when they flapped up there in the skies, were now twisted at odd angles. Slash marks covered the tan scales of his underside, oozing small rivulets of blood. Small pools were already forming in the snow from various places on Veledar's broken body, but he was alive, even if the heart-wrenching breath that oozed out of his throat dared otherwise.\n\n\"Veledar,\" Arcturus dropped beside the dragon's proud head to cup his chin in his cold, trembling hands hands. \"Veledar, look at me. Up here. Look into my eyes.\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026ghlouarugh,\" Veledar coughed suddenly, painting Arcturus' chest with a splash of warm, viscous sludge as red as his scales.\n\n\"N-no. Don't! Breathe, Veledar. Breathe!\" Arcturus tried to warn in vain.\n\n\"I'm fff-fine.\" Proud as ever, the dragon slowly stirred and tried to stand onto all fours. His legs wobbled for a moment, as Arcturus was certain he was going to collapse.\n\n\"Stop. Stop!\" Arcturus tried in vain to keep the dragon down. \"If not for the Gods themselves, do it for me, you stubborn dragon!\"\n\n\"W-w-we can't\u2026 stay here. The gryphons\u2026they'll smell our blood, then\u2026\" Veledar's eyes scrunched in pain, followed by the rasping sound of his voice. Arcturus tore his eyes away from him to look for a place to hide in this snowy area.\n\n\"Nothing\u2026There is nothing!\" He cupped his hand and placed it next to his eyes to protect himself against from the sun's glare.\n\n\"Come on, you bastards! Are you coming for us or not?\"\n\nHe heard the screeching of gryphons from behind, closing in to their position. His eyes strained to see anything within the swirling winds, but all he could make out was the sky above and the sea of white snow beneath, dotted with red blood.\n\nArcturus narrowed his eyes. Kept looking. Then, as if by a miracle, large cave not too far away appeared before him.\n\n\"Veledar, look! A shelter. We have a shelter. It's not far. We just have to make it there.\" Arcturus said. Then in his mind, he figured out the next step.\n\nIf Veledar could set an illusion over the cave's entrance. we might stand a chance at remaining undiscovered. He turned back to his broken friend, trying to not show too much worry on his wounded, aching face. When he reached him, he wrapped his arm around the dragon's neck. \"Come on, Veledar. You can do this, you big scaly bastard. I know how stubborn you are when you put your mind to something, so show me. Show me how strong a dragon really is.\"\n\nArcturus had no idea how Veledar mustered the power to stand on his fours, but together, they limped forward, the snow crunching beneath their steps. \"That cave\u2026it's not an illusion, is it? Your eyes can see it too. Maybe if you set up an illusion of your own, we can hide from the search party.\"\n\n\"N-Not like we have any choices, human.\" The dragon growled in pain. \"Tell you what\u2026it w-w-would be better than bleeding out in the snow.\" Veledar gasped weakly as he moved one limb after the other. The dragon seemed to strain himself with each step, his eyes scrunching practically with each crunch of the snow beneath his paws. Arcturus shuddered when he heard the dragon take a deep breath, followed by an even larger groan of pain. Veledar coughed deeper than before, spraying the snow with a rain of blood.\n\n\"Almost there, Veledar. Just a few more steps.\" Arcturus said calmly even as he fought the urge to try and rush him. He could hear the gryphons getting closer.\n\n\"Come on you big scaly bastard! You're not going to die in this frozen place, do you hear me? If I can ride in your claws, you can take a few more steps!\"\n\n\"Look at these streaks. The beast bled all over the place. Spread around. I want him found within the minute, d'you hear me? Go, go!\" Arcturus heard a man shout from behind.\n\nArcturus slightly turned his head to see only the rush of snowflakes carried by the bitter wind. The snow that whipped his body with relentless lashes was a blessing in disguise, starting to restrict vision to several feet in front of them.\n\nGood. If I'm blind, they're blind.\n\nArcturus had never thought several feet of travel could seem so long. He knew the whole ordeal probably only lasted a few minutes, but with his friend's ragged breath, painful gasps, and crunching wings drilling into his ears, the journey to the cave seemed to last forever.\n\nWhen he finally reached the rock wall, Arcturus finally breathed a sigh of relief and followed Veledar inside.\n\nWe did it! Praise the Gods and their infinite mercy. I have to remember to extend my gratitude to them when we're safe.\n\nArcturus forgot about his broken ribs, the cuts on his face, his weighted limbs. He forgot about everything in the rush of relief that washed over him. He was about to lay a hand on his dragon and offer his heartfelt praise for the titanic effort, but his hand found nothing. Veledar collapsed onto the floor with a pained grunt, his wing drooping over the ground, splattered with yet another dose of blood.\n\n\"I-I can't\u2026make it any further.\" Veledar gasped in pain, his claws tensing on the cavern's floor.\n\n\"No. You're not dying on me here. I will not allow it!\" Arcturus pulled off his pack, emptying its contents onto the cold floor. He swiped his hands through the mess and grabbed a small box with a red caduceus on it. He fumbled with it as he tried to rush, managing to spring it open with a small click. Inside the box was bandages, materials for stitches, and two healing potions.\n\n\"Just\u2026keep your eyes open. Focus on my voice and try to stay awake. You're going to be fine, Veledar. You're going to be just fine.\" He said confidently, trying to hide the worried crack in his voice. He felt an icy grip tighten around his heart as he looked to his friend, unable to shake the feeling of dread that sprung forth whenever he gazed over Veledar's wounds in detail.\n\nArcturus suddenly drew his sword as he heard yet another gryphon screech, too close for comfort.\n\n\"Plan to stab them\u2026with that feeble iron stick?\"\n\nArcturus reluctantly dropped the medical supplies with a soft clatter of wood on stone. The dragon was right. If it came to a fight, there was no way he could defend himself and help Veledar. He held the sword in front of him at the ready as he assumed a battle stance.\n\n\"I will not let these bastards take you.\"\n\n\"Y-you were a good human. Best I know, actually\u2026but you're being foolish.\" Veledar muttered as if in a daze, his voice trailing off as he thumped his tail weakly.\n\nArcturus stared at the cave's entrance to see several shapes start to emerge from the storm, with Garroth at the head. His friend wore a worried expression on his brow, clearly following the tracks left behind in Veledar's wake. He was flanked by several others in red leathers that held energy crossbows slung at the ready. He could see their eyes, desperately trying to see where they had gone.\n\n\"I told you to hold your fire!\" Garroth shouted, turning to one of the men. \"That blasted dragon had Arcturus. You could have killed them both!\" Garroth turned away from the man, placing two hands around his mouth, \"Arcturus!\" he shouted desperately. \"Where are you?\"\n\nThe man's voice cracked with genuine concern. Garroth stood for a few minutes in silence as if waiting for Arcturus to reply. Part of the paladin wanted to call out to his friend and give away their position. Garroth had more than a few gryphons. Maybe even an airship fitted with enough healers to restore the dragon. Arcturus fought with himself as his friend paced around, staring at the blood on several occasions. Garroth held a hand to his chin, and slowly trailed to a stop.\n\n\"The tracks of blood end here. Clearly the beast survived the fall, but for how long? Where could it possibly go?\" Garroth thrust a finger towards the paw prints in the snow. \"Here you can see the boots. Arcturus survived as well.\" Garroth smiled, tracing the path Arcturus had made with a sweep of his arm. \"Arcturus!\" The armored warrior shouted, and once more waited for a response.\n\n\"Were did they go next, Garroth?\" One of the men asked as Garroth looked around. His eyes were narrowed as if he were desperately searching for something. It then dawned on Arcturus. Garroth and his men could not see the cave right in front of their faces.\n\n\"Veledar. Veledar, when in the blazes did you have the time to cast an illusion?\" Arcturus whispered as he turned his head back towards the dragon. Veledar had not moved from where he fell, and his eyes were closed.\n\n\"Oh no\u2026no no no, don't do that!\" Arcturus whispered, scrambling to his medical supplies. He grabbed the two health potions firmly and bounded to his friend's broken body. He grabbed Veledar by the snout and with a forceful thrust upwards, he parted the beast's fearsome jaws. He uncorked the bottles, tossing the cork aside as he dumped them down the dragon's throat.\n\n\"Swallow. C'mon, do it, you sleepy beast.\" Arcturus shut the dragon's maw and rubbed his neck to stimulate his swallowing reflex. Veledar stirred and coughed multiple times, forcing Arcturus to clamp his maw shut, least Garroth heard them. With each cough though, Arcturus watched the dragon's body shiver, shake, and twitch.\n\n\"T-tastes terrible, I would rather have wine.\" Veledar grumbled as he held his head back.\n\n\"You can have wine when you make it through this. We will get the best, and in large quantities to befit a dragon of your stature.\"\n\nArcturus pulled out the materials for stitches after he took off his gauntlets. Next, he got his hands on the mana crystal that gave light and activated it with a hasty touch. He would need the illumination for what followed, although part of him wished his eyes remained in the dark, for in the warm glow of the crystal, he could see his friend's wounds even clearer. The cuts were deep. Part of the dragon's scales were actually torn open to reveal the muscle and sinews that hid beneath. Arcturus stifled a terror induced gasp as he grabbed the cool needle and metal wire. He paused and looked to the dragon, brow wrinkled with pained concern. \"This is going to hurt a fair bit. Try to keep as silent as you can, unless you want our friends to come after your tail again.\"\n\n\"M-more than falling out of the sky? That's-\" Veledar coughed up more blood and gasped with ragged breaths for air.\n\nArcturus moved to the largest wound that was on the dragon's chest, closest to one of his ribs. He moved several smaller scales out of the way to get a better view of the wounded flesh. \"So tell me, wise, powerful dragon. Where are your wings going to carry me once we leave this adventure behind?\"\n\n\"I-I think I'll find a mate\u2026 and mount them till I am Ra-\" Veledar started, then muffled his growl within the depths of his jaws as the cold metal needle pierced his flesh.\n\n\"I thought you said falling from the sky was worse?\" Arcturus chuckled. He went up the dragon's hide with the needle, each additional pierce followed by another wince and gasp of pain from his scaled friend.\n\n\"I take it back. Th-that stings worse than a gryphon's claws! I-If I wasn't so hurt, I'd smack you silly!\" Veledar replied with a groan. Arcturus felt the dragon's tail move slightly in support of his words. \"I take it that it must look pretty bad if you're fussing over me like this.\"\n\nArcturus focused on sealing the wounds and stayed quiet.\n\n\"Silence? That only works for peasants, Arcturus. Act like a paladin for once.\"\n\n\"That I can, but I'm not sure you're gonna like a stern touch given your condition.\"\n\nArcturus finished with the current wound he was working on. The tightened, tattered flesh did not look pretty being pressed together and was slowly oozing blood. He felt one of Veledar's paws move to his side and caressing him gently for a few moments before Arcturus pushed it aside. He let the dragon know of the seriousness of this task, and after Veledar muttered an agreement, the paladin started sealing up the next closest wound located on the dragon's shoulder.\n\n\"So why did that butt-head commander, captain of gryphons whatever, consider you his friend? I have to admit, for all his efforts in trying to capture me, he may have done a better job than you at trying to kill me.\" Veledar laughed weakly, which prompted another one of those raspy coughs.\n\n\"Oh, Garroth? He's a darn fine adventurer. His tools of the trade are vast, just like the methods he employs to get the job done. In this case, he took the very gryphons I handpicked to capture you.\" Arcturus kept his calm, for he knew that, in spite of Veledar's wounds, Garroth held only part of the blame. \"Even though he is an adventurer at heart, Garroth is still a man of honor. A good soldier that follows his king loyally. I wish I had time to introduce you properly. Who knows, even the gryphons might've been persuaded to like you.\"\n\n\"Find that hard to believe\u2026 after what they've done to my scales.\"\n\n\"T'wasn't personal, believe me. The gryphons, including Garroth, were just following the king's orders. Blazes, dragon. The whole of Lumara thinks you killed me that day in the airship.\" Arcturus replied.\n\n\"What do you know about me?\" Veledar cocked his head to the side.\n\n\"That you're a pompous dragon full of hot air for start, but\u2026 Your heart's in the right place. I wouldn't be dipping my fingers in your blood to save your stubborn arse if I felt otherwise.\"\n\n\"What if I were lying to you this entire time? Your fondness for me can very well be an elaborate charm I placed on you from the first moment we met.\"\n\nEven with the dragon's hot blood on his fingers, Arcturus couldn't help but chuckle. \"Why am I using these barbaric tools when his winged highness can amaze me with a display of magic?\" Arcturus said with a mischievous smile. \"What's wrong? Surely a simple charm like mending flesh is not beyond the abilities of Veledar the Amazing.\"\n\n\"Are you mocking me, human?\"\n\n\"A bit,\" Arcturus admitted as he put his needle back to work. \"Sometimes, you need a slap over the bum, like any other child.\"\n\n\"I can slap back.\"\n\n\"After you're better, sure.\" Arcturus laughed again. \"It doesn't take magic to know someone's heart. I can tell if you lie just by looking into your eyes.\"\n\n\"Sure. Try not to fall in love with me please. I have enough sycophants already without adding a disgraced paladin to their ranks,\" Veledar laughed weakly, \"Damn, but you know how to lift a dragon's spirits.\"\n\nArcturus smiled sincerely when the dragon looked down at him as he worked, probably curious to see if his human really did his best. \"By the time you will be done brandishing that needle around, I will look like one of your quilt things, very ill fitting for a hero of my stature.\"\n\n\"Hero, are we?\" Arcturus replied, moving to another wound as he felt Veledar twitch. \"How do you see yourself earning such esteemed rank, dear dragon? Planning on diving on your butt a second time?\"\n\n\"O-of course not, you bumbling sack of rocks. Let's see. Saving his knight from capture, snatching him from certain death, keeping him from fainting while he stitches his first dragon\u2026 This will make a great story, of course.\"\n\n\"Only if you don't scare or annoy your sycophants away.\" Arcturus grinned.\n\n\"You and Lyndis seem very fond of me.\"\n\n\"Aye. We do. However, I think we are different than most people. As you might've noticed from our travels, not many humans are ready to drop and worship at your feet.\"\n\n\"Not yet, but we'll teach them, \" Veledar said in a whisper. \"The valiant dragon and his selfless paladin\u2026This will be a tale for the ages\u2026\" The dragon smiled as his eye lids closed softly.\n\n\"Veledar?\" Arcturus looked over to the dragon. His head was on the ground, eyes closed, seemingly asleep\u2026But the cold dread that rushed along his spine spoke of much graver things.\n\n\"Do I bore ye to the point of sleeping on me? Come on. Wake up.\"\n\nNo reply came from the dragon.\n\n\"Veledar?!\" He knelt beside the dragon's head, his voice cracking. He rushed to place his hand on the drake, feeling around for his pulse. He felt a dull thump against the warm dragon's hide.\n\n\"No, come on! I almost healed you. You're fine. You have to be fine.\" His face darkened as he felt the dragon's heartbeat weaken.\n\nArcturus slowly got onto his feet. He paced around like a caged animal. The stench of Veledar's blood filled his nostrils with every breath. He had no idea what else to do in the wake of such horrid fear. To have the dragon die on him now, after everything they've been through\u2026\n\n\"No!\" Arcturus moved to the dragon's snout and gave it a serious smack. \"Wake up, dragon. This isn't how a hero's quest is supposed to end!\" He slapped his hard scales again and again, each time getting the same silent void in his stomach.\"\n\n\"You got to stay awake, Veledar! You can't go on leaving me or this world just yet. You have adventures to embark upon, humans to amaze, mates to mount in whatever weird ways you dragons do it!\"\n\nIn spite of the humorous approach, Arcturus could feel the pit in his stomach growing, turning into a twisting, painful knot.\n\n\"Don't die\u2026Please don't die on me. I'm begging you, Veledar. I'm begging you\u2026come back to me\u2026\"\n\nWhen the dragon failed to give his answer, Arcturus went back to check the pulse. This time, he scrambled to get there to find that -to his horror-instead of a faint pulsing, there was no tremor at all. No heartbeat.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"Come on, you cheeky bastard!\" Arcturus shouted, placing his arms together and slamming down on the dragon's rib cage with all his might. \"YOU!\" Smack! \"CAN'T\" Smack! \"DIE!\"\n\nAfter several desperate thumps, Arcturus took in a deep, chest-aching breath as the dragon's heart came back to life. He let out an enormous sigh of relief and collapsed against his friend's scaled chest, resting only for a moment before he grabbed some spare torches from his pack and arranged in the form of a campfire. Arcturus pulled out his flint and steel and quickly started a fire. Hopefully, the warmth of the flames would at least warm the wounded dragon. He looked to Veledar. The dragon was still breathing shallow breaths. Arcturus felt the dread once again creep over him. He padded over to the dragon's side, looking over the rest of the cave, dimly illuminated by the crystal and torchlight.\n\nThe cave was larger than he initially noticed, and it seemed to have carvings on the walls. The carvings' writing looked like it was drawn with harsh lines, possibly with a claw. Arcturus made out a picture of a large dragon cradling another one in its paws. It was painted a metallic silver, and the human somehow remembered it was a picture of Bahamut, the goddess of dragons. He was drawn from the image by another one of Veledar's ragged breaths, just like when his heart had stopped. Arcturus collapsed on top of his friend and grabbed one of his scaly paws. He rolled his fingers over the dragon's cold fingers, and placed another hand on top of his paw.\n\n\"You can't die. Not after I brought you back a second time.\" Arcturus sniffled, for he felt the same helplessness now as he did when he held his fading son within his arms. He looked to his broken and dying friend, fighting back a sob. Tears started to well in his eyes as he clutched the dragon's paw even tighter.\n\n\"I've\u2026I've tried all I can, Veledar\u2026But I am running out of ways to save you.\" He said weakly. \"The potions barely healed your gashes, and that's only what my eyes can perceive. I've got a broken rib, but you\u2026\" The human squeezed his eyes shut, remembering the overwhelming shock that spread throughout his body when the dragon crashed into the snow. \"No. I can't think of internal bleeding, broken bones and what not. I can't mend that. All I can do is stitch flesh and sit and watch how you fade\u2026 just like my son did.\"\n\nArcturus felt the tears start to drip down his face now. \"I\u2026Gods. Why does it have to end like this? Why\u2026? You're\u2026 the first friend I have made in a long time. Have I ever told you that? You can't just go and die now...Not when I still have so many unspoken words to share,\" He said, gripping his friend's paw tighter.\n\n\"Veledar\u2026I speak of the Gods often, but truth is\u2026I am not a pious man. Before Dread Flame, I believed in the power of my will and the strength of my arm, and after the monster robbed me of my family, there was nothing left. No faith, no hope. Nothing. \"Arcturus looked to the carvings and the pictures of Bahamut scribbled on the wall. \"But I am going to pray now for you, cause it's the last thing I can think of to save your proud, stubborn arse.\" Arcturus placed his sobbing head onto Veledar's chest and closed his eyes. \"Please\u2026please hear me now,\" his voice trembled in the same manner as his body as a torrent of emotions boiled inside him.\n\n\"If you're really up there\u2026if you can see this broken dragon and hear my whispered pleas, do something.\" Arcturus gritted his teeth, \"DO SOMETHING!\" He screamed, thinking of the dragon goddess Bahamut. If anyone would try to answer his prayer, it had to be her. He knew it sounded selfish, even arrogant, to think a God would suddenly care about an insignificant mortal, but he still had to try.\n\nArcturus focused on his friend, on his pain, his wounds, and the absolute need to see him healed. He sat in that uncomfortable position until his neck went stiff and his joints ached, sobbing softly onto Veledar's scales until he started to feel odd. Just like he did when he had been transported into the realm of the fairies.\n\nArcturus opened his eyes, still puffy and red from all that crying. He wiped the moisture that clouded his vision with a hand to see what lay before him. Where the cave had been mere moments ago now stood a large swirling vortex of dark grey clouds. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot across the sky, illuminating the entire swirling storm for an instant. Arcturus looked down to find that he was floating mid-air, and panic soon raced through his mind at the prospect of being swallowed by the angry clouds that surrounded him on all sides.\n\nIt's a dream. Just a representation of my grief. It's not real\u2026or at least not as real as it seems. Arcturus thought to himself as he sought to calm the primitive signals of panic that shot all across his body -that which Veledar often referred to as instincts. He breathed slowly, in and out, and relief slowly replaced dread as he realized he was not going anyway, least of all plummeting to his death.\n\n\"Hello?\" He shouted out to the clouds, \"Is anyone there?\"\n\nNo answer came.\n\n\"I must be here for a reason. Please, if anyone hears my pleas, help me! My friend is leaning closer to death as we speak. There has to be something I can do to save him. Has to! I won't allow him to just\u2026to-\" Arcturus broke down into sobs for a few emotional seconds. The only reply he got was a large bolt of lightning streaking across the sky. He thought he was alone, abandoned by the Gods themselves.\n\nThen he saw it. In that brief flash of light, he noticed something emerging from the dark clouds. It was enormous, easily dwarfing the puny human that stared with shocked eyes. The creature, if it could be called such, was covered in platinum scales that shone with bright light, wings that seemed to stretch on forever, and eyes like liquid mercury. Then he knew it, deep into the marrow of his bones. Hovering before him stood none other than the massive form of the dragon goddess, Bahamut.\n\nThe dragon glided closer to him, twisting around his form, as if to measure the creature that entered her realm. Her eyes never took a moment away from him. If he did not know better, he would assume they had the intent of murder behind them.\n\n\"I-I know you!\"\n\n\"Do you, mortal?\"\n\nArcturus slowly dipped his head in reverence. \"Veledar told me about you. I've seen\u2026pictures on the cave's walls. Pictures of you. You are the goddess of dragons. As for me, I am nothing but a mere human, here to beseech you for your aid.\" Arcturus gulped nervously, almost convinced that no God, dragon or not, would pay any heed to the soft, broken words of a desperate man.\n\n\"Please\u2026\" Arcturus bowed before the enormous dragon. \"My friend, Veledar, a dragon with the most beautiful red scales I've laid eyes upon, is marred and broken, d-dying as we speak. He is beyond my help, but maybe\u2026maybe you have the power to alter his fate. Perhaps\u2026you can do what I could not and save him!\"\n\nBahamut stopped and looked slightly away, as if to relay the response, \"Why should I care about this Veledar, mortal? All creatures perish, even dragons. It is the way of the world.\"\n\nArcturus felt something akin to hope when he saw her mercury-like eyes peek a glance back at him.\n\n\"I know what you mean, wise, powerful Bahamut, but I am not here, standing before you, to fight against the way of the world. All I need is one chance for one dragon. That's all.\"\n\n\"One, a hundred, perhaps even a thousand. All is the same to me. Intervening into the affairs of the mortal world is impossible.\"\n\n\"That's not what he told me!\" Arcturus shouted out in a flash of anger. \"Nothing is impossible. Not to you!\"\n\nArcs of lightning traveled through the clouds, the light so bright it brought Arcturus to tears. \"You dare defy me, in my own sanctum?\" Bahamut's voice crackled in the dark vortex that once again surrounded Arcturus' diminishing form.\n\n\"I dare to plead mercy for a dragon that-a dragon who's\u2026\" Arcturus choked as the image of Veledar coughing his last words appeared into his mind. In pain, coughing his last, and he still cut through the gloom with jokes not to brighten his own fading spirit, but to keep the embers of hope alive for the paladin that mended his wounds.\n\nThe man that failed him. The man that even now, within the domain of a Goddess, felt just as powerless. Arcturus closed his eyes shut, then tried his best to get onto his knees even as a thin stream of hot tears ran down his contorted face.\n\n\"Speak.\" Bahamut beckoned. \"Release the burden trapped within you, human. Who is this dragon you speak so fondly of?\"\n\n\"An insufferable bastard that I can proudly call friend!\" Arcturus rasped, his chest tight, breath shallow. \"He's the only dragon I ever befriended\u2026the one who filled my void with hope years after I've lost my family to another red. I ask of you\u2026nay. I beseech you for a way to save Veledar's life, just as he saved mine.\"\n\n\"He\u2026saved you?\" The platinum dragoness spoke with a softer voice, and Arcturus nodded several times as flashes of the past rushed through his mind.\n\n\"I was falling fast, so fast that I even made peace with my inevitable demise. Then\u2026 he grabbed me.\" Arcturus winced. \"I felt his paws wrap around me, holding me steady while I shivered like the useless burden that I am. When the ground rushed to meet us, he took the brunt of the fall. He\u2026\"Arcturus sobbed. \"Veledar broke his body to preserve me, and even crippled, wounded, bleedin' from more places than I could count, his only concern remained with me, and my safety.\"\n\nArcturus wiped his tears and looked at the dragoness, searching for any traces of emotion, hoping to see a small result of his words.\n\n\"You spin a memorable tale, but a tale on its own will not persuade me to break one of the most ancient rules of this world.\"\n\n\"But this is no mere tale! This happened. Veledar is truly dying, right now, while we waste our time talking of rules and what cannot be done.\" Arcturus bowed his head as he realized emotions started to cloud his judgment.\n\n\"I mean no offense, great Bahamut. Just please\u2026hear me out. Listen, instead of allowing my voice to simply fly past your ears. This Veledar, my friend\u2026He is the worthiest dragon you'd meet if you but only give him a second chance. Please\u2026he sacrificed himself because of me. I'm the reason he's inching closer to death, so let me bear whatever punishment you see fit. I will do anything it takes to save his life, great, wise Bahamut!\"\n\nBahamut considered his words, then Arcturus shuddered when the female brought her humongous snout inches away from his face. He had seen the look she was giving him on Veledar's snout before. It was a smirk. A clear sign of mischievous satisfaction.\n\n\"That is an intriguing proposal you are laying at my paws, mortal. Anything, you say?\"\n\nArcturus dipped his head. The dragoness stared straight at him, her eyes seeming to pierce the veil of flesh in search of the color of his very soul. Though Arcturus felt bare before such imposing presence, he stared right back, eyes focused, unblinking, as if this were the most important thing in the entire world right now. He knew it, in the back of his mind, that this was a dangerous game he was playing. After all, this was how things went sour in the stories told to children by their mothers, or the ones written in the scrolls of adventurers. Making deals with entities outside the material realm rarely attracted anything good, but as he stood on his knees, with his eyes focused on scales, Arcturus' mind traveled back to Veledar. He pictured his friend laying on that cavern floor, the blood oozing out of his impromptu stitches, his throat convulsing with painful spasms, giving out his last pained breaths. That was all the encouragement he needed. With utter conviction in his voice, Arcturus voiced his decision.\n\n\"I would go to the void and beyond if that's what it takes to save Veledar's life, so yes,\" Arcturus stood up with a stern look about his face. \"I'll do anything you ask of me.\"\n\nBahamut flew around him, flapping her enormous wings before returning with a great gust of wind. In spite of the tempests created in the aftermath of her wingbeats, Arcturus hardly moved from where he was hovering. With her claws, the dragoness formed a pedestal that hovered right in front of him, a thing made of stone as bright as her scales. On the pedestal lay a sword forged of bright gold, encrusted with many gems, and armed with a blade that gave off a faint blue radiance. Bahamut hovered, once again her eyes focusing on the human before her.\n\nArcturus breathed in, and somehow, willed himself to glide towards the pedestal. The entire time he did so, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He came to a stop, and with his right hand, the paladin reached out towards the sword. Each inch that brought him closer towards his prize increased the power radiating towards his hand. The power to conquer the whole world, the power to bring the mightiest evil down to its knees. Arcturus pictured himself returning to his king with this word in hand, ready to deliver holy wrath upon Lumara's enemies.\n\nThen the image of him kneeling before the king flickered, and Arcturus stood upon the throne instead, with an entire squad of paladins offering their swords to him, a good, benevolent king that had the power to-\n\n\"No\u2026\" Arcturus shook his head. \"That's not\u2026this is not what I seek!\" He pulled his hand away from the blade as if bitten and threw Bahamut an angry glance. She was still looking at him, but her eyes seemed to be filled with curiosity. If he had to guess her expression, it would be one of \"Well?\"\n\n\"This is a test for you?\" Arcturus hovered away from the pedestal, not even looking at the accursed blade that stole his eyes for too long already. \"I lay out my heart and my thoughts before you, and this is how you repay me? With games and tests while my friend is-\"\n\n\"We are unbound by time, unshackled by any of the laws you know. Believe me. Your dragon friend is not suffering more than he already had.\"\n\nArcturus thought of a way out of this stupid test. If I don't want the power presented before me, what will I do? All I want is to save my friend, to heal him, to not have yet another soul I care about die in my arms. His thoughts briefly shifted to Geoffery, particularly to the moment when his son gave his last breath. Arcturus shook his head and wiped his eyes.\n\nHe tried to speak and reason with the Goddess. Perhaps it was time for another approach. Something more befit for a dragon. Arcturus willed himself to fly up to Bahamut's snout. He reached out with a hand and placed his palm softly on her snout tip. It was cool to the touch, but not uncomfortably so.\n\n\"You think a mere touch will strengthen your arguments?\"\n\nArcturus said nothing. Instead, he pictured a healed Veledar in his mind, protecting innocents against perils. Then, he thought of his vows, Selena, and his son. \"I know you can feel this. This is the choice I make. I wish not the power for myself, but to heal and protect others.\" he said aloud.\n\nThe dragoness seemed to chuckle, deep in her throat. She then swirled around him in a blur of silver. Her form seemed to shift and change shape until, in a quick motion, the small silver blur flew straight into Arcturus' chest, where his heart was. He clutched at it with his hands as he felt like his chest had caught aflame. He collapsed in pain, white hot, and blinding. His eyes exploded in stars and his ears rang with a deafening roar, just like the one he had heard faintly the entire time.\n\nHuman Arcturus.\" A soft voice spoke. However, he could feel the ancient power that it carried, as it seemed to come from within his very mind. \"The honesty displayed by your words and deeds have moved me\u2026deeply. You shall go back to your world and be my paladin, like I had always intended for you. Go now, human, and bestow my light upon your wounded friend, along with anything else that follows.\"\n\nAround him, the clouds gave way to reveal the stars above, with the shapes of thousands of dragons nestled within their light. They were all swirling around, snouts pointed towards him. He could see the twinkle in their eyes as he felt his chest glow warm once again. He could not help himself as his mouth fell open, at the sheer beauty of the spectacle presented before him.\n\nThen another flash of light came, and everything went dark.\n\n[ Arcturus' vision cleared like the dark clouds in Bahamut's timeless realm, only now, instead of cold platinum scales, he found himself still holding Veledar's crimson snout. It was warm\u2026but so were his hands, giving off a faint radiance similar to the azure blade of Bahamut's sword. It felt strange, like he was pouring his very being into the dragon, though the sensation felt anything but uncomfortable. Like hot water, it was warm and soothing, the soft glow rippling against the dragon's scales like beams of sunlight. Arcturus watched the stitches burst apart as the wounds healed themselves before his shocked eyes. The gashes that had filled him with worry vanished along with the blood oozing out of them ]\n\nAnd then, Veledar opened his eyes once more.\n\nArcturus lost himself in the tide of happiness that washed over him and hugged the dragon as tightly as he could.\n\n\"Veledar, thank the Gods!\" He mashed the side of his face against the dragon's scaly chest.\n\n\"What madness got into you?\"\n\n\"The madness of joy, you stupid scale-head!\" Arcturus sobbed loudly in happiness as he squeezed the base of the dragon's chest tighter. Veledar pressed his paw against his back, offering back his own form of awkward hugging, and Arcturus could not help himself. Hot tears formed once again in his eyes to stream down his grateful face.\n\n\"Well, I obviously missed the hidden stash of wine you gulped down\u2026or whatever paladin magic you worked on me, because clearly, that needle of yours accomplished just about as much as my arse sitting on this stone.\" Veledar said with a grin, pushing the paladin slightly back to nuzzle away the tears that fell down his cheeks.\n\n\"Oh, come on, you silly dragon, you know you don't have to lick me.\"\n\nBut he did, and Arcturus enjoyed every smothering stroke of that silky tongue across his flushed face. \"Alright, that's enough,\" he patted the dragon's silly snout. \"I'm fine with rubs, but no more licking please.\"\n\n\"You loved it! Admit it, or I will rid you of your clothes and give you a proper bath.\"\n\n\"Come on now, you scaly oaf. Nuff about that, unless you want your brave paladin to break down in tears again.\"\n\n\"It's not that bad,\" the dragon flicked his tongue out a few times. \"Apart from the slight bits of grime and the salty taste, crying shows me that you genuinely care about me. I am touched. I may not show my emotion as openly, being a dragon and all, but here. Feel for my heart. See how quickly it beats.\"\n\nArcturus put up with the dragon's request. \"Blazes!\" he chuckled happily. \"Don't tell me a bit of stitching and two potions are all it takes for a mighty dragon to fall in love with a puny human!\"\n\n\"You're not THAT puny. Besides, there's plenty of tales where love begins just in moments like this.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Arcturus arched an eyebrow. \"Quite the reader of stories, are you?\"\n\n\"I do enjoy a good romance once in a while. You humans are\u2026interesting, to say the least.\" Veledar admitted before he quickly looked away, probably too embarrassed to admit his feelings.\n\n\"Tis fine, you crafty dragon. I won't tell anyone, as long as you don't fly from village to village, spoutin' tales of the weepin' paladin. I have a reputation to maintain.\"\n\n\"Excellent idea!\" The dragon straightened his head, chest puffed out. \"I shall leave no details out on how this proud paladin -the elite of Lumara's army-all but succumbed to my greatness. Imagine the songs about me. The tales! It's glorious!\"\n\n\"Aye. Glorious indeed.\" Arcturus patted the dragon's paw. \"If we leave out the part where you crapped yourself during the landing.\"\n\n\"I did not!\" the dragon bared his teeth.\n\n\"Same way I didn't fall for your charms? That's what you're saying.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" the dragon grumbled.\n\nHe was back to his old self, and Arcturus couldn't be happier. He sniffled one last time, as he could not remove the smile that was still spread wide on his face.\n\nPraise the blessed light that brought him back from the grip of death. I'll never forget the kindness you've done me this day, Bahamut. I shall be your champion and carry out your light into the world, just like I promised.\n\n\"Silence, mrrrm? Looks like you're pondering on something.\" The dragon lowered his snout to Arcturus' level, then flashed a quick smile. \"That look in your eyes, that smile\u2026it's happening isn't it? You're falling for me!\"\n\nArcturus slapped the dragon's snout with a quick smack of his palm, but Veledar offered another type of retaliation. He moved in and hugged the paladin just as tightly as he had before.\n\n\"Gaaaah, you're squeezin' the breath out of my lungs!\" Arcturus scrunched his face in theatrical fashion. \"No wonder you need to practice hugs on stuffed animals.\"\n\n\"Quit your sissy fussing, human.\" Arcturus felt Veledar' wrap his neck around him. \"This isn't the first time I held you in my paws.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\" Arcturus smiled as the dragon's wings draped over their heads. \"You have this thing of sleeping with your toys like a big-nosed, winged, tail-carrying child.\"\n\n\"You're quite heavier and much better looking than a human whelp.\" The dragon mumbled.\n\nYou too, Veledar, Arcturus thought in his mind, allowing the dragon's soothing warmth and gentle breath to lull him to sleep.\n\n[ Draconic Bonding ]\n\nVeledar sat relatively quiet as Arcturus told him, in his own words, all of the events that transpired after the crash. He honestly did not remember much through the thick haze of pain inflicted by his wounded condition. Memories were still just a blur to him, so Veledar nodded at the right parts and gave little gasps at others. He would occasionally twitch his tail, lick his healed wounds or scratch the top of his head with one of the talons on his wings whenever Arcturus spoke about thick storm clouds and magic swords imbued with the power to change the whole world. Arcturus ended his story with his return to the waking world, then took a deep, shaky breath. By the sound of it, he needed a bit of time to recover from the tempest of emotions he braved through.\n\n\"Bahamut\u2026I knew our Goddess does more than gawk at her subjects. She listened to you, a human! You know what that means, right? Our Goddess is far better than these silly gods you blabber about when you find yourself in distress.\" His lips lifted to reveal a tooth filled grin across his snout, \"I am astonished she decide to save my life through you. I mean, I've always known I am destined for great things, but to be snatched back from death's grip by a puny human is something that surpasses my wildest expectations!\"\n\n\"Puny, huh? That's how you address your savior, you scaled brute?\"\n\n\"Why, your return from Bahamut's mystical realm certainly hasn't made you any bigger! You might have glowing hands now, but I have mighty wings and a tail that can smack some righteous sense into any human that would cross words with me!\" Veledar tilted his snout up to look as regal as a dragon could, letting his wings spread out magnificently at the sides.\n\n\"Oh. Excuse me, your scaly brightness,\" Arcturus bowed in front of the dragon, then returned with an amused grin. \"It's just difficult for me to believe that the vision gracing my eyes is the same whelp that moaned his heart out when my tiny needle pierced through his bleeding flesh.\"\n\n\"It was just a quick hiss.\" The dragon stuck his tongue at Arcturus, who just chuckled heartily.\n\n\"Aye. A hiss that threatens to eclipse the screams of our women!\"\n\nVeledar pushed his head under a wing to lick one of his healed wounds again.\n\n\"No need to hide, dragon,\" Arcturus patted his chest. \"I'm well aware of how you came to acquire those injuries, and I certainly hope my mirth doesn't bring up enmity. That's one type of pain I cannot easily heal.\"\n\n\"I might be proud\u2026but I'm not thick,\" Veledar surprised Arcturus with a fond nuzzle along his chest. \"I know I owe you a debt that cannot be repaid even if you were to return my stolen belongings to me.\"\n\n\"You mean those rags you slept on?\" Arcturus arched an eyebrow. \"The gryphon\u2026you're thinking of that silly toy you cuddled when we found you!\"\n\n\"Along with my nest, my books, my pots, and the rest of my treasure. I'm curious if your glowing hands have the power to materialize those!\" the dragon snorted, pelting Arcturus with bits of gooey mucus.\n\nEven so, he had no room in his heart for ire, as he probably understood his dismissal of his healing of him was a joke. Or at least he hoped he understood that. Sometimes, it was hard to tell what thoughts roamed through the human's head, considering he lacked a proper muzzle to read at times.\n\n\"I'll see what I can do about that when the time comes.\" Arcturus said. \"Now, is there something significant going to come out of that maw, apart from self-inflicted praise?\"\n\n\"Do allow me to indulge in a bit of self-appreciation, my dear human. I have been touched by Bahamut herself, after all.\" The dragon gestured to Arcturus by waving a paw at him, \"With a little help from you, of course. But make no mistake. You are but a vessel to a much higher power.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you for finally admitting my importance. You are most humble, Veledar. Maybe, just maybe I will remember how utterly skilled you are next time you lay bleeding. I might just avoid interfering altogether so that I can study how a greater species e deals with crippling, life-threatening injuries.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 let's not get too carried away now.\" Veledar replied, scrunching up his snout at the mere thought of being abandoned. \"However, I think we should figure out how we are going to find our half-breed friend and that dwarf we encountered in Drakenburg.\" Veledar tried to stand on all fours, but his limbs shivered with weaknesses.\n\n\"Don't you dare!\" He kept the human away with a sharp hiss. \"I can\u2026do this on my own just fine.\"\n\nAfter a few attempts, he finally collapsed onto the ground with an annoyed growl, causing the human to shoot up in worry.\n\n\"But not now.\" Veledar groaned, \"I'm fine, doe-eyes.\" He brushed Arcturus away with a paw. \"You do not have to worry about me like I am some wee, helpless hatchling.\" Veledar once again tried to stand, his paws shaking during the entire attempt. He tried to avoid the look of dread painted on the paladin's face. After several minutes without falling, he let out a small cackle of glee.\n\n\"See? I knew I could do it!\"\n\nHe turned towards Arcturus. Veledar figured that the human would be impressed by how fast he had recovered some of his mobility. However, his glee quickly festered into disappointment. His friend, the man that moments ago had his hands all over his scales, was busy inspecting the carvings on the cavern's walls.\n\nI did this. I sent him away, Veledar wanted to roar in anger at his stupidity. Once again, pride got the better of him. However, he could not appear weak in front of the human, so Veledar licked his snout, relaxed his lips, then walked over to Arcturus.\n\n\"Fascinating, is it not?\"\n\n\"Aye\u2026This is quite the work.\" The human had the same look of curiosity about his eyes as he did when he asked about Bahamut beneath the star-lit sky. Veledar imagined it must have been a shock for a dragon slayer -even one out of commission like Arcturus-to discover this side of dragons. In fact, it was a lot for Veledar himself to take in.\n\n\"I'm curious about one thing.\" Veledar stuck his snout next to Arcturus.\n\n\"Haven't found any hint of a gender, if that's what you're wondering.\" The paladin worked his fingers carefully over the dragons scratched on the walls.\n\n\"Females? You think my mind's on-\"\n\n\"I know there's all sorts of weirdness locked in this scaly ball of yours.\"\n\nVeledar hated how easily the human brushed his hand over his head, like he was some sort of big, scaly dog.\n\n\"I actually meant to ask a proper question.\"\n\n\"Then ask. Don't expect me to read your mind.\"\n\nVeledar waited for the paladin to move over to another set of drawings, to avoid disturbing him at the wrong time. \"How does it feel to be an actual paladin, instead of a mere pretender?\" He said with a grin.\n\n\"Really? That's your burning question?\" Arcturus shook his head. \"Thought it might have something to do with these drakes scratched on the walls.\" The human traced the outline of a dragon that lounged on the ground, its head pointed towards the stars. \"It feels like\u2026 having a fever, only without the headache or the illness.\"\n\n\"A fever?\" the dragon cocked his head. \"That's the best Bahamut's chosen can come up with?\"\n\n\"It's not exactly easy to describe for a so-called pretender!\" Arcturus sighed. \"It feels warm and weird, hard to describe in a way we could both understand.\"\n\nVeledar shook his head. \"That isn't descriptive at all. I was expecting something more significant, after the swirling vortex of lightning-spewing clouds and the thousands of star-dragons that noticed you.\"\n\n\"Well, then I must humbly apologize for shattering your sky-high expectations.\" Arcturus turned to inspect another set of drawings, though Veledar was sure he did it only to avoid looking at him. \"I have just found out I can cast something most soldiers dream of. All my life I've relied on objects to do that for me. Here, let me try again.\" He placed both hands on the cold stone. \"It feels like that tingling you get when your limb has gone to sleep. First, it's cold, but then you move it, and coldness gives way to warmth. Now imagine the same feeling is all over your body, extending around you like a curtain, going as far as your fingertips, or claws in your case.\"\n\nThe dragon dipped his head in acknowledgment. \"Must be odd for you, to lack something your entire life. I imagine it must feel like seeing for the first time.\"\n\n\"Or maybe like spreading your wings in the wind for the first time. Dragons aren't born fliers, from what you told me.\"\n\nThe dragon once again dipped his head. \"It is just a small step on the road of learning. Even I don't know everything I can do, Arcturus, and I am about four times older than you.\" The dragon smiled in that toothy way of his, then walked over to the makeshift fire that Arcturus had slapped together. It wasn't what Veledar would have liked, but it had to do for now. After he settled himself comfortably on the warm ground, Veledar dragged a claw over his chest, clenching his snout with discomfort. He could almost feel the gape that split his scales apart before Arcturus healed him.\n\nI do owe him more than I ever owed anybody, save for the mother that birthed me and the one that raised me. Veledar pondered. Sure, he was glad the human had been by his side during the most trying moment of his arguably short life, but never in a hundred years had Veledar imagined Arcturus -the same man that stormed into his cave and imprisoned him atop the deck of his ship-would hold his life in his hands. For a long time, he only thought of the human as a toy with benefits. A companion who only recently acquired the noteworthy rank of a friend. Veledar had given him his name out of trust rather than complete fondness, but to have Arcturus submitting himself soul and mind to the sole purpose of healing him? That was something no mere toy or friend could provide.\n\n\"What are you plotting in that horned head of yours?\" Arcturus settled by Veledar's side, with his back against his shoulder and the pack between his legs. The human barely waited before he started to rifle through his pack in search of something.\n\n\"Nothing worth talking about.\"\n\n\"Really? During all the time we've spent together, am I to believe that your thoughts had never strayed to a female of your own?\"\n\nVeledar didn't like the smirk that started to take shape on the human's face. A devious thing, no doubt. \"What reasons have you to believe I cannot control such basic urges?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" the human scratched his beard in jest. \"I might remember the word mounting escaping your lips.\"\n\n\"When pain clouded my senses!\" The dragon hissed. \"What dirty mind you have, to think I'm a mere beast that ruts whenever the season's right. Preposterous!\" the dragon gave a long, growly sigh. \"I can see I won't be rid of your eyes unless I lay my thoughts bare, so have at it. I was just thinking about the journey thus far and the people I have met.\" He said, scratching another phantom wound to distract himself from the flush of embarrassment coursing through his body. \"I did not think friendship could grow so fast as it did, and\u2026I also believe you are starting to corrupt me.\"\n\n\"Yes, Veledar. You best be careful. Before you know it, your fondness for me will turn you into a proper human.\" Arcturus said, holding up a hand and twiddling his fingers.\n\n\"Dreadful thought, to be sure. I have heard transformations like that cause the sort of pain I recently endured,\" He gasped, imagining the cracking bones of werewolves. He looked to Arcturus and only found the human giving him a look of Oh really?\n\n\"Regarding your newfound magical abilities, we do have the rest of the day to explore them, so why not do something more interesting?\" Veledar extended a wing over Arcturus. \"My mother used to have an ancient book from a long-since-dead paladin. She said it was his tome of divine blessings or some human nonsense like that. Perhaps it could contain what you are seeking, or tell us how to get started, at the very least.\"\n\n\"Well, that's awfully convenient. Why would your mother keep one of those tomes?\" Arcturus asked, pulling out a small bag of trail rations to eat.\n\n\"She always had a knack for storing items, dreaming about the days when she needed them most.\" he said, his stomach rumbling rather loudly. Oh right, his eyes squinted. I never had the chance to feast with those gryphons interrupting my morning hunt.\n\nArcturus extended a hand full of rations towards Veledar's snout. \"Care for something to take the edge off?\"\n\nVeledar shook his head slowly, \"No, I will endure this. The amount of gold and belongings that you owe me will sustain my body and mind for generations to come.\n\n\"Owe you?\" Arcturus asked, raising his eyebrow in surprise. \"If I remember correctly, you were the one that conscripted me in this heroic quest of yours. How is it I possibly owe you any money at all? When I indulged you at every tavern you snuck your hungry head into?\"\n\nVeledar gave the human a predatory smile. Oh, he was going to enjoy this. He wiggled his tail in excitement, gave his wings a stretch, then took a deep breath. He could see Arcturus was already regretting his question.\n\n\"Well you see, despite me hiring you to assist me in my quest to get that book back, we have suffered some complications that you need to be billed for.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" The paladin scratched his beard with a playful smile. \"Would you be so kind as to illuminate me on these\u2026complications?\"\n\n\"Let's see,\" the dragon imitated Arcturus by scratching his jaw with his one of his claws. \"Putting up with horses is the biggest annoyance. Dragons have very sensitive noses, as you probably guessed. Then there is that suggestion you made about riding me like a beast, the way you joke around with me as if I was not a fire breathing dragon, how you shove me about when you have a point to prove, and lastly, risking my hide to protect you and the others at every turn due to your humongous inability to avoid attracting trouble.\" He finished, watching Arcturus' reaction as he got closer to the human's face with a grin.\n\n\"That's going to be one heavy bag of coin, isn't it?\" Arcturus asked, giving a playful fake gulp.\n\nVeledar made sure to give Arcturus an eyeful of his numerous rows of very sharp teeth. \"It will be a fortune. Doubt I can even carry such hefty amount,\" He chuckled, \"Now, since a dragon decided to hear your plea and make you her paladin, I imagine it is only fair that a dragon teaches you how to work this magic.\"\n\n\"And what possibly could you teach me?\" Arcturus smirked, \"You're only just a normal dragon compared to Bahamut.\"\n\n\"Arcturus!\" Veledar gave a pained gasp as he held a paw to his chest. \"Such blatant disregard for my abilities pierces me far deeper than any gryphon's claw! I know everything you need to know for the time being. I am a magical creature, after all, while you're still a man who wears a steel dress and glows like a fairy.\"\n\n\"Yea that may be true, but how much will this tutoring cost me once everything's said and done?\" Arcturus asked, standing up and brushing himself off. \"Tis not a bargain, to save your life and put up with whatever you'll throw at me in this cave, only to become destitute.\"\n\n\"I assure you, my fees are more than reasonable.\" Veledar closed his eyes and tried to focus on his first lessons in magic. \"Alright. First, I want you to focus on that feeling you described. Now imagine yourself grabbing that feeling within your claws. Grrr, hands. A term I can never get behind. Now imagine forming the energy into something.\"\n\n\"Like your flame breath?\"\n\nThat's ambitions.\" Veledar growled with amusement. \"I was thinking of something crafted for your abilities. Let us start with a small bolt of fire. Imagine a small orb of red and orange held aloft in your paw....grarrr, hand.\" Veledar opened his eyes to see what he had described being held in his left paw. He tried to not be proud of it, he really did, but it was no use. He gave a big grin at how his innate skill managed to produce a most beautiful flame.\n\nThen he looked over to Arcturus, who did not have a red and orange orb within his outstretched right hand. His hand instead held a glowing, soft white light.\n\n\"That doesn't look like any flame sphere I know. You obviously did something wrong.\" he said flatly. \"Typical of such short-lived race, although what could I expect from a puny human?\" He gave Arcturus a smirk, letting him know he was not being serious. He tapped the human with his tail softly for good measure.\n\n\"Oh, cheer up, that is certainly good for your first try. I honestly expected you to produce smoke, or light. Something very different from fire, like I did on my first tries.\" He turned towards one of the cavern walls, gesturing Arcturus to do the same. \"Now picture yourself throwing it at the wall.\" Veledar moved his paw in a striking motion, and the fire bolt flew from the dragon and exploded on the stone. He turned to Arcturus to see his pupil give it a try.\n\n\"That's child's play.\" With a look of determination, Arcturus punched his hand out, and not one, but three separate white bolts flew from his hand and exploded on the wall. \"I did it!\" Arcturus cried with a big grin on his face, \"It wasn't fire, but who cares? I can use magic!\"\n\nVeledar just watched the human laugh and just be plain excited at something he had mastered long ago. He imagined his mother had the same look when he had cast his fire bolt for the first time.\n\n\"So, when did you learn to cast your spells, master?\" Arcturus said, once again turning towards him with those eyes of curiosity that Veledar could not resist.\n\n\"About ninety-five of your years ago.\" He groaned while he stretched his wings, limbs, and finally his tail. \"Although I ended up setting several of my mother's books on fire. My excitement knew no bounds, and years did so very little to change that,\" he continued with a yawn.\n\nArcturus took this in and grew silent, as if he was thinking about something.\n\n\"Something on your mind, Arcturus?\" Veledar asked, cocking his head to the side.\n\n\"Nay. I mean\u2026aye. Was just thinking about how I came to earn these powers.\"\n\n\"Move on. You've been given a great gift this day. One that will help you just as much as you helped me in my time of need.\" Veledar groaned, \"but continue, I will try to indulge you for now. However, if I ask you to stop.... please obey my request.\"\n\n\"Of course. I just wanted to know if you were afraid up there, with all those gryphons coming at you.\"\n\n\"Of course I wasn't!\" The dragon hissed, \"What coursed through my bones was excitement, for I knew I was going to make it through everything those little birdies put me through. Dragons are strong, after all.\" He said, turning to the statue of Bahamut.\n\nHe tried to avoid thinking of how the ground had been rushing to embrace him, or how the winds tore at his wings. Veledar shook his head as he remembered slamming into the ground. The pain that shot through his body like forked lightning. Truthfully, he was terrified of meeting his end in such a brutal way, but he couldn't tell Arcturus that. He had to keep up the appearance of the strong, independent dragon that he was. Although, judging by the look Arcturus was giving him, Veledar had the sneaking suspicion the human had seen through his little lie.\n\n\"It lifts my heart to hear such bravery, Crimson Sky. Although you didn't seem so convinced while you were bleeding on the very stone we stand on.\"\n\n\"Graaah, the incoherent ramblings of a pain-addled dragon.\" Veledar scoffed. \"Think nothing of them. At least I know I wouldn't take anything I said for a silver.\" He waved a paw dismissively at Arcturus, \"Let's try to discuss something else before you compare me to a frightened kitten.\" He returned his gaze to the man who had taken a stance with his arms stretched wide, like he did when he practiced in the morning. Veledar sat amused as he watched Arcturus go through his combat meditation. He wondered how often others defaulted to something familiar in the process of learning a new skill.\n\nVeledar suddenly smelled something as his attention drifted from the smooth movements of his friend. He sniffed again. Strangely enough, the smell was faint and familiar. He followed the scent with his snout, finding it was coming from the entrance. He looked out to see the raging blizzard outside, but found that the snow seemed unable to enter the cave. It was no doubt a spell, he thought to himself.\n\n\"That friend of yours was unable to see the entrance to the cave, you said? Are you sure that he has good eyesight? For all I know, he could be having one of the many ailments attracted by your kind.\" Veledar chuckled, picturing the dark armored warrior walking straight into a tree.\n\n\"I've never known Garroth to have any difficulties locating his friends -or enemies-from a fair distance. There is an illusion at work at the cave's entrance. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"Yet you did not go outside to test your theory?\" Veledar asked, as he moved to the cave entrance and extended a claw tip towards it, as if to tap an invisible wall.\n\n\"Apologies. Found myself far too busy saving your life, but the thought occurred to me. Although\u2026if this is indeed a temporary sanctuary granted to us by the benevolent Bahamut, is it not wiser to remain here while you completely recover? I would rather rest and wait for Garroth to move on. For all we know, he can have his sentries posted around the cave, waiting for us to fall into his clutch.\"\n\n\"You're far too paranoid.\" Veledar went to tap the wall, but his claw did not strike anything. It simply moved through the empty space. Veledar wrinkled his snout in disappointment.\n\n\"Bah.\" he growled in irritation, smacking where the wall should have been. He sniffed again trying to analyze the smell.\n\n\"Dare I ask what prompted such deep sniffing?\"\n\n\"If you must know, this place smells familiar. I know the scent, but I can't seem to place it.\"\n\n\"Growing senile already? I thought dragons lived for a lot longer than a few hundred feeble years.\" Arcturus chuckled.\n\n\"Grarr! Mraawr. Go ahead. Keep laughing at the forgetful dragon, for all the good it will do.\" Veledar smacked his tail as he sat on his haunches. \"You know as well as I do who is the leader of this party, and if you want to pay your debt while you live, you'd better avoid stepping on my toes.\"\n\n\"Hah! As if my boots can do any damage to your chicken feet!\"\n\nVeledar was about to unleash another one of his growls, but the honest smile on Arcturus' face seemed too much of a decent trade-off to pass. He liked seeing the human in such bright spirits, for he could only imagine what the paladin went through a couple of moments ago. Veledar tried for a moment to think of the reverse situation, then snarled, too afraid to delve too deep into such a gruesome scenario.\n\n\"So\u2026 your friend in the black armor. This Garroth you spoke of. What should I be worried about?\" he turned towards Arcturus. \"Does he have any more friends he can reach to? How about one of those flying contraptions? Should we worry about them on our great quest?\" Veledar mentally patted himself on the back. He liked the sound of that. Veledar the heroic dragon, he grinned wide to himself. That has a nice ring to it. One that many more humans should appreciate.\n\n\"Garroth, eh?\" Arcturus put on his story-telling face. \"I met him on a tour in Rothdell. He and his band helped us secure one of the villages there. Rothdell managed to summon a great earth elemental that gave us a fair amount of trouble.\"\n\n\"You\u2026banged your heads against mud? Really?\"\n\n\"T'wasn't mud we faced. The elemental was almost twice as tall as you. Made out of hardened stone that makes even your scales seem like leather pitted against steel.\"\n\nVeledar licked his snout as he pictured the creature lumbering around, smacking Garroth and some other people around. He liked the image of that\u2026then he wrinkled his nose when Arcturus popped in his mind flying across the battlefield, battered and hurt.\n\n\"T'was a tough fight, but we managed to subdue it with minimal casualties. After Rothdell, Garroth and I became friends. He would spar with me every time he visited Entis. He always had a story to tell, as legs always kept him on the road.\"\n\n\"How come you never went to have adventures of your own? Is that not what you humans do?\" Veledar replied, tilting his head to the side. \"You obviously have some skill with the sword, and you know your way around numerous enemies. Even your personality is agreeable, most of the time at least.\" he smirked.\n\n\"Gratitude, Veledar. You can be a valuable friend too, when your pride doesn't choke the goodness in you.\" Arcturus smiled, then his lips puckered, and his eyes fell to the ground.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"It just occurred to me that Selina and Geoffery were still at home back then, when I last sparred with Garroth.\"\n\nVeledar's eyes went wide. Flames! He had completely forgotten about those two.\n\n\"I\u2026I'm\u2026\" He mentally whipped himself with his tail. \"Envious of this Garroth now. Wish I had the chance to match my claws against your metal stick. Any more friends I should know about?\" the dragon casually asked, trying to divert the conversation from such a sad turn. This seemed to work as Arcturus resumed his stances, his sword now expertly held in his hands. Veledar wiped his head with his wing in relief.\n\n\"I've got Elizabeth and Gus back in Entis, two of my fellow guards. Then there is that bird brain of a gryphon, Elizabeth's Swiftwing. We all play cards every Fireday night, although Swiftwing has a mind for drink rather than cards.\"\n\nVeledar grinned, \"That reminds me of two gryphons I met years ago, traveling west. They stopped by and paid me tribute in respect for my greatness.\" He momentarily paused as Arcturus gave him a concerned look. \"I did not bully them into doing it if that's what you're afraid of,\" the dragon said, holding his snout high. \"It was a few barrels of wine that turned the night into a merry revelry. Their names were Rundak and Vik.\" Veledar made his way closer to Arcturus and put his snout into his paws.\n\n\"Speaking of friends\u2026how is that other dragon that went to explore the east? What was she like?\"\n\n\"Looking to replace me already?\" Veledar raised his head to stick his tongue out at the human. \"Because I have bad news for you, sire. This red dragon is here to stay.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know it takes a lot more than a few words to be rid of your pestering snout,\" Arcturus sighed playfully, \"I am still curious as to her whereabouts.\"\n\n\"Well if you must know, then who am I to keep you bursting with curiosity?\" Veledar replied, the mental image of his friend coming to the forefront of his mind. \"Her scales had the color of the sky at early sunrise, a pleasant shade of dark purple, her eyes were molten amber. Her breath was of red lighting. She had a little chip on her scales, but she always had fun with me. We would fly everywhere together and got into so much trouble you wouldn't believe! She called herself the Pale Lightning.\" concluded Veledar, although he thought to her real name, Zyadel.\n\nVeledar remembered when they had played a game similar to what mortals referred to as king of the hill. They would use their breaths to disqualify the others. His siblings, her, and himself would play to see who had the most skill. He remembered diving down, spinning to avoid her lighting breath and the look of shock on her snout as he tackled and pinned her to the ground. He unfortunately remembered getting thrown off and getting his wings tickled. He looked to his wing membranes as he began to flex them slightly. He hated to admit it, but years did little to harden them against such mischievous attacks.\n\n\"Aha! Would you look at that!\" Arcturus exclaimed, much to Veledar's annoyance. He liked remembering annoying little details.\n\nHe looked to his friend, who fortunately had his attention focused on something else other than his wings. Arcturus had his sword in both hands, swinging it around. However, the blade was glowing a soft blue. \"Look here, Veledar! I have applied some sort of enhancement to the blade!\" The human swung his sword a few more times at the air, a big smile on his face.\n\n\"I am not blind,\" Veledar squinted his eyes, \"Clever trick, though not very useful when trying to stay hidden.\"\n\n\"You don't always need stealth, my perceptive friend. The thugs in Drakenburg certainly couldn't be taken by surprise. Remember how we disposed of those?\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026I'd have more of a challenge smacking my head against the walls.\" Veledar yawned as he felt his limbs grow tired. His eyelids started to grow heavy. \"I think\u2026I will rest for a moment. Keep practicing magic, or do\u2026 whatever you humans do.\" He waved his paw before curling up on the cavern floor.\n\n\"Veledar, wait! I have a question that has been bouncing around my head for ages. Why do you pull me in when you sleep?\" Arcturus' voice was calm, yet excited. Even without looking Veledar, Veledar could feel the smile on his face.\n\n\"Ever have a stuffed animal you used to sleep with before a marauding band of armor-clad pillagers removed it from your embrace?\" Veledar snorted, \"It's pretty much like that.\"\n\n\"So, in this idea of yours, I am the stuffed animal?\"\n\n\"Well, you and your minions stole mine. I figured it's only fair you replace it until I get it back.\" He waved a paw for Arcturus to come over, \"If you feel tired, feel free to come close and assume the position, unless you prefer the company of cold and dampness.\"\n\n\"A generous offer,\" he heard Arcturus mumble before the swish of his sword started to cut through the human's steady breathing. Veledar sighed, breathed in deep, and let the tiredness claim him in its embrace."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "He was flying high into the peaceful sky. Veledar flapped his wings as he gracefully danced above the white blanket of clouds. With a slight tilt of his wing membranes, he started circling upon the gentle gusts, then, when the wind grew fiercer, Veledar unleashed a roar of happiness. He went below the clouds to peer over his domain of green hills, dotted patches of brown earth and grey stone mountain tops. He could just barely make out the tops of little houses where humans had no clue of the mighty creature that flew overhead. At this altitude, even the larger dragons could easily be mistaken for birds, or at least gryphons.\n\n\"Veledar!\" A familiar voice rang out from nearby, making the dragon hover in midair. With each beat of his wings, Veledar turned, looking for the source of the voice. It had sounded like Arcturus, of course, but Veledar was certain that humans lacked the ability to fly. However, now that he thought about it, he wasn't too sure where he had seen him last. He thought hard as he looked to the moving clouds. He remembered a cave, and shivered at the creeping cold he suffered in that place. He roared out to the paladin, hoping for an answer.\n\nBut nothing happened.\n\nVeledar waited in silence for a few minutes before he began flying once again. Perhaps it had been nothing more than his imagination. He had certainly been through a lot lately, like being chased by gryphons, falling towards the ground at blinding speeds, and surviving a close encounter with death. He recalled the howling winds that passed his ears as the ground rushed up to greet him. Suddenly, the peaceful sky around him crackled and thundered, turning cloudy and grey. Veledar blinked in bewilderment at the sudden change in scenery.\n\n\"What is this?\" He said cried out in confusion. It couldn't be Bahamut\u2026could it?\n\nVeledar began to fall.\n\nHe tried beating his wings, but found them of no use against the fierce wind that blasted him from above. The dragon roared in terror at the rapidly approaching earth.\n\n\"Veledar!\" Arcturus' voice came louder this time, practically a scream.\n\nVeledar forgot about his predicament for a moment, looking around as he fell to see the clouds swirling and changing shape and color before his very eyes. He noticed that he could no longer feel or hear the wind anymore. Around him, the swirling clouds started to form into fuzzy shapes, and when they came into focus, the dragon found himself in a very large room.\n\nVeledar looked down first. He was standing on all fours on what felt like a stone floor. Even though he could make out his legs and claws, the area around him was still fuzzy, and appeared to be covered by a thick fog that constantly shifted about. A humanoid shape suddenly approached him from the eerie mist. Veledar squinted his blue eyes to make out the shape of a sword held at the ready. The red dragon swiftly turned and snapped at the figure. He was not going to give it a chance to catch him unaware. The figure ducked as Veledar tried to slice it with his claws, then tried a swipe from his tail next as a surprise. However, the figure raised what looked like a shield to block it. The tail met the shield with a crackling slam, causing the dragon pain, but also pushing the figure on the opposite side.\n\nVeledar roared his victory and leaped onto the figure. His bulk pinned the figure to the ground, but it still struggled beneath him. Veledar tried to snap at him. Put a swift end to this pitiful conflict. His maw opened, moving for the kill, but suddenly, the figure's arms wiggled free and caught his snout between them. Veledar tried to bite down, but somehow, he found himself unable. Either he was growing weaker, or this small figure had more strength than a dragon!\n\n\"Die! Why\u2026won't you\u2026just\u2026fall beneath me?\" He struggled, snapped, and hissed in the figure's grasp as saliva coated its bare, muscular arms.\n\n\"Veledar, s-stop!\" Arcturus' voice rang out again, only this time, it came from the figure itself.\n\nVeledar's struggles ceased as the room suddenly cleared. He was in some kind of throne room, adorned with high marble walls, torches, and paintings. Great pillars lined the room every ten feet or so. He focused on the figure, where his friend was struggling beneath him. The human's face was red, covered in sweat, and scrunched up in pain. His arms were holding Veledar's jaws from closing on him. Veledar obviously tried to lift his snout to prevent himself from eating his best human friend, but just like before, when the skies themselves cast him down, the dragon found himself unable to act on his own volition.\n\n\"I\u2026can't\u2026rraaaauuurrghhh!\" Veledar roared. His body thrashed on its own and panic set in as he found himself taking on the role of an observer; a passenger inside his own body. He tried to focus hard on stopping this madness, but his maw kept getting closer to closing to the one human he really cared about.\n\nFight back, he screamed to himself, do something, or you are going to end the life of the man that saved you!\n\nVeledar couldn't even shake his head from how ludicrous this situation became. How did he get here? He was in the cave, cuddled up against Arcturus\u2026\n\nIt is a dream. Has to be.\n\nFor a dream, it certainly felt frighteningly real. The hard stone beneath his claws, his struggling friend, sweaty and covered in bulging veins that pumped with terrified blood, the dim light of the torches on the walls\u2026 and the feeling of his fire glands starting to open up to unleash devastation upon the pathetic prey that struggled in his grasp.\n\n\"Fight it, damn you! I didn't save your life just to die at the tips of your claws!\" Arcturus shouted as Veledar's snout descended another inch, despite his struggling defense. Veledar felt his throat get hotter, another sign of the impending inferno that was going to roast his friend in front of his very eyes. If was going to save Arcturus, it had to be now, for he knew it deep within the marrow of his bones that he would not get another chance. The dragon focused with all his might to move his maw just a little bit, just enough so the flames would miss the human. He strained internally, roared in his mind as loud as he could, and he would have even thrashed his tail if he was able.\n\n\"No, Veledar, don't!\" Arcturus screamed in terror at the rising flames.\n\nThen came the fire, pouring out like a geyser of red and orange. It flowed out into the air, striking a wall to leave a large scorch mark of blackened stone.\n\n\"By the Gods\u2026you did it,\" Arcturus sighed in relief. \"For a moment, I almost thought you'd\u2026\"\n\nVeledar tried to smile as he felt control return to his body, but before he could speak and comfort his friend, the floor vanished again, and he was falling once more into the swirling clouds.\n\n\"NO! I was victorious!\" Veledar shouted out to the angry clouds that surrounded him from every side.\n\nWhy was this happening? Was it some sort of test? A punishment? Veledar blinked as the air was rushing passed his snout once more. The dark clouds had vanished once again to be replaced with the blue sky and the white fluffy clouds from the beginning of his dream. He was once again diving in the sky, looking down at what the sun had illuminated on this fine, beautiful day. That's when a small silver streak flew past him, causing him to turn around with a stifled gasp. Flying right beside him was his brother, his silver snout open in joy as he unleashed a playful growl.\n\nVeledar continued to dive as his brother circled him quickly, poking his underside with one of his white claws. Veledar looked to him with sorrow. He had forgotten how nimble of a flier he was.\n\n\"That tail is mine!\" His brother sped out of his reach as Veledar tried to catch his cute tail.\n\n\"Only if you catch me! Your lazy wings can never match my speed!\" His brother smiled back, sticking his tongue out at the red dragon. Then the young dragon started to do a loop in the air.\n\nVeledar closed his eyes and covered them with his paws. \"I don't want to relive this dreadful moment,\" He breathed to himself, trying to think of the cave he knew he was sleeping in. He tried to imagine Arcturus doing his little movements. Pictured the human held in his grasp, which became the norm for a while now.\n\nBut none of those warm memories protected him against the dreadful sound that pierced his ears. The roar of pain broke through his feeble concentration like a flaming blast, and he knew what it was. Veledar felt the familiar sting of panic as terror welled up inside his body just as it did all those years ago. The feeling of hopelessness paralyzing his wings as his brother tumbled to the earth. The terror that opened his eyes wide to a most dreadful image. His brother, an agile flier mere moments ago, turned into a choking, moaning pile of misery with a huge protruding through his chest. Veledar shook his snout, trying to not picture the dragon's shocked expression as his body tumbled lifelessly to the ground.\n\n\"Nooooo!\" Veledar found himself roaring, tears welling up in his blue eyes. He shut them tightly, trying to focus on anything else. But that was hard. Too hard, even when that place was one of relief. \"Please\u2026\" he said weakly to himself as he imagined the relief on the paladin's face right after Arcturus returned with Bahamut's light in his hands. \"Please...take me back\u2026take me back to him\u2026\"\n\nVeledar opened his eyes, finding himself in a cave, but not the same one where he fell asleep in. Another silver dragon lay next to him, but instead of his deceased brother now stood his sister, Adalina. He could hear her sniffling as she struggled to stay quiet, and Veledar slowly wiped his own tears from his eyes. He looked up at a large silver dragoness that slunk into this portion of the cave to curl around the two wrymlings. She had frills lining her spine, bone white claws, and large, grey membraned wings. Her scales were smooth and covered her entire body from head to tail. The dragoness carried them with a grace Veledar always had seen her display. Her horns were less pronounced than those of male dragons, and her white claws were smeared in thick, half-dried blood.\n\nVeledar whimpered as she began to stroke him with the upmost care, her paws gliding over him and bringing such gleeful warmth to his shivering form.\n\n\"It will pass. In time, even the gravest of wounds heal,\" she said softly in a calm, soothing voice.\n\nVeledar admired the strength she had always shown around them, but even he could see the heavy pain carried in her green eyes when she looked to him.\n\n\"Time will only make my vengeance burn hotter. I hate them!\" Veledar hissed to her, tears welling up once again in his eyes. \"It isn't fair! We were just flying in the sky like we always-\" he found himself unable to finish the sentence as he collapsed onto his mother's chest, sobbing out his misery.\n\n\"I know it's hard to find mercy in your heart now, little one, but you have to remember to not judge a race based on the actions of a few. Humans too lose wives, husbands, children\u2026\" She rested her head on Veledar and curled her tail around Adalina.\n\n\"Besides, the ones responsible for this atrocity have been taken care of. There's nothing left to worry about now, my little Veledar.\" His mother squinted her eyes, a grim look on her snout. Judging from the blood on her claws, the small dragon knew what she had meant. His mother licked Veledar across his head affectionately as he continued to cry.\n\n\"I...I miss him so much. Are you sure\u2026. there isn't a way to bring him back?\"\n\n\"I treasured him just as much as you do, little one,\" She whispered, \"But sadly, there is no way to bring a dragon back once death has claimed them. It is the way of the world, unfair as you may now think. Try to find comfort in knowing that your brother is in a better place\u2026Where there is no pain. No suffering. Not even hunger.\"\n\n\"He doesn't have to hunt?\"\n\n\"No, my little one. Bahamut will see him provided with everything he needs.\" She laid down her head, and Veledar finally saw large tears roll down her snout.\n\n\"Then why are you crying, mother?\"\n\n\"Because\u2026\" The female's voice cracked for a moment. \"Because I wished to feel his presence under my wing for a few more seasons before\u2026before he-\"\n\nThe young Veledar nuzzled her neck and cuddled close to his mother to shiver and weep together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Veledar awoke with a start. The smell he had sniffed before. He knew what it was!\n\n\"Up! Up! Move your heavy, glowing arse, sir paladin!\"\n\n\"What is that noise?\" Arcturus mumbled. \"Shush your snout for just a while longer. Isn't even morn yet.\"\n\nVeledar had none of that. He tried to get up from his resting spot, ignoring the complete darkness that surrounded him for a moment, a good hint at how long he's been asleep. Still, even in pitch black darkness, he figured that his wing was being held down by the paladin, who had wormed his way between his paws.\n\n\"Comfortable, are we?\" Veledar teased the human with a few strokes along his curled body. He was hugging a forepaw, head rested on a hind one.\n\n\"Aye. Very. Wing's warmer than a stove. So very\u2026soft and pleasant.\"\n\nVeledar quite enjoyed seeing Arcturus make some sort of love to his wing, but unfortunately, he found himself pressed by more important concerns.\n\n\"Arcturus! You have to move now, or I'll get up. Believe me, you won't like it if I do that.\" Veledar chuckled, poking the human with one of his claws.\n\n\"Just give me a few more moments.\" The human mumbled, griping his wing tighter like a blanket. \"What got you in such rush anyway? There's nothing to do here apart from sleeping.\"\n\n\"That's what a sleepy head would say.\" Veledar rolled his eyes as he poked Arcturus a tad harder this time. This left him more frustrated as the human vehemently refused to stir. Veledar grinned to himself as a mischievous idea came to mind. He opened his maw wide, looked in Arcturus' direction, then unleashed his loudest and messiest of roars. Arcturus' eyes bolted suddenly open, and Veledar held him tight as the human tried to bolt up.\n\n\"You didn't have to blast my ears and pelt me with saliva, dragon.\" Arcturus grumbled, \"I would have gotten up if you just gave me a couple more moments like I bargained for!\" Arcturus lifted the dragon's paws off himself. \"So what's so important you decided to wake me up with a near deafening roar?\"\n\n\"I've identified the smell that evaded me before.\" Veledar smiled, showing off his white teeth. \"You're going to like this.\"\n\n\"What, is it a female in heat? Cause they're problem for all species, not just dragons.\" Arcturus replied sarcastically.\n\n\"It's my mother's scent, you clanking bucket of pebbles-for-brains! I am a tad disappointed that I did not recognize it before, I must have been distracted by all the excitement that poured over me once I saw what your glowing hands can do. Imagine if I would've been the one graced to stand in Bahamut's presence. Do you think she would've made me more resplendent than I already am?\" The dragon quickly looked over his features. \"Or maybe she could have fashioned me an iron suit like yours to mraaauuurrghh,\" He was interrupted by his stomach rumbling loud like a lion's roar. Veledar clutched his chest as it felt like a wolf was tearing at his insides.\n\n\"You know, for most people, waking up to that roar, being held tight by a dragon, and hearing his stomach rumbling in hunger would be a nightmare. Me, however? That's just a normal day.\" Arcturus grinned.\n\nVeledar growly chuckled as the human fumbled around in the dark, trying to find his pack. He figured dark vision was something humans did not have.\n\n\"But you're the lucky lad. Chosen of dragons, and champion of Bahamut as it now stands. You get more than the bare privilege of spending time with me. Aren't you grateful you let me out of that cage? Imagine how boring your life would be if you followed your bloated king's plans.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Lucky me,\" Arcturus said, then paused for a moment. \"Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's your mother's scent, does this mean we are now occupying her cave?\n\n\"I don't know,\" The dragon paced around, the sound of his claws clicking on the stone accompanying his steady breaths. \"She has at least been here long enough to impregnate the cave with her scent. Trust me, her home is much bigger and far better looking.\" Veledar yawned, stood up, and stretched from wings to his tail. He ignored yet another growl from his stomach. \"I can tell you're up to something. What are you looking for?\" He asked, moving next to the human.\n\n\"Maybe a torch that I did not burn earlier.\" Arcturus replied. He stopped his hand within his pack and frowned. \"Well, I guess that lake is all dried up. Oh, the things I'd do for something to eat right now...\"\n\n\"I can produce some feeble flames if sight is an issue.\"\n\n\"I guess that could work if we needed it. What would you eat, Veledar, if given the chance?\"\n\nThe dragon cocked his head. \"Are we talking about the kind of prey I hunt or cooked food?\"\n\n\"Gah, is that even a question? I am talking about prepared food of course. I really don't want to picture you ripping through an innocent animal's belly after all the wounds I had to stitch.\"\n\n\"Fine. If you insist, I shall delight you with my desires. Right now\u2026in this present moment\u2026 I would want one of those sheep animals that humans breed in their fenced meadows.\" Veledar licked his snout. \"A good sheep roast with some thick spicy sauce to bring out the flavor. My mouth waters at the thought.\" He laid his head down and folded up his wings. He pictured the food on a silver platter, swallowing often to keep the strands of saliva from fleeing down his jaw.\n\nThere was a sudden clatter sound close by. The dragon stood up, looking around in the dark cave to discover that on the floor suddenly rested a large silver platter with what looked like a roasted sheep coated in the same mesmerizing spicy sauce he thought of earlier.\n\n\"Is there a new smell in this cave, or am I starting to hallucinate?\" Arcturus put a hand on Veledar's flank.\n\n\"Not unless I am too. By an oddity of fate, or perhaps a striking twist of magic, there appears to be a plate of roasted sheep waiting for me right after I pictured it in my mind.\"\n\nVeledar approached the meat slowly. He had no idea his mother had this sort of enchantment in her cave. He knew there were spells that could summon food, but this was more than he had heard it could do. Throwing caution to the wind, the dragon sunk his teeth into the meat, letting the juices sit in his mouth. He savored their flavor, smoky, with a hint of lime.\n\n\"I take it you're stuffing your snout then?\"\n\n\"Wiser words have never been spoken!\" Veledar meant to say, but all that came out was a jumble of sounds and sheep meat.\n\n\"Can you try to picture other things? Perhaps you can summon a fire for us?\"\n\nVeledar stopped his feasting. He had not thought about such insignificant things for the moment. He gulped down his last chunk of food and reluctantly left his meal to grab Arcturus and pull him against his chest.\n\n\"Hey, get your clawed paws off me! I don't want to smell like roasted sheep.\" The paladin ranted, struggling lightly in his grip.\n\n\"You may want to be close for what I picture next.\" Veledar smiled, closing his eyes.\n\nHe pictured a banquet table several feet long, adorned with food fit for kings. He pictured various meats, breads, fruit, and cheese. He focused lastly on a chair.\n\nOnly one though? No, he needed three. Had to have one for Merlia and Lyndis whenever the women stumbled upon this cave. He pictured them adorned with red cushions, and a place at the table for himself. Afterwards, he imagined torches lining the cave walls, complete with a roaring fire in the center to provide an aura of much needed heat.\n\nI'd be surprised if the human doesn't bow before my ingenuity now, the dragon thought proudly. He opened his eyes to gaze upon the magnificence of his mind, given form.\n\n\"It's\u2026perfect.\" His tongue rolled out as he let go of the shocked human.\n\n\"Bloody blazes! I-it came right out of thin air!\" Arcturus exclaimed in shock.\n\n\"Best grab some food before I devour it all, you loud mouthed slug!\" Veledar bounded over to a roasted turkey.\n\n\"I think you may have forgotten something,\" he heard Arcturus say from behind.\n\n\"And what could that possibly be?\" He chuckled, turning to the human who had sat down to start grabbing his own favorite food.\n\n\"The drinks, you silly red snout. What kind of feast would this be without a wide selection of beverages?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Veledar exclaimed, his eyes growing wide. \"Of course. How in the world could I miss those?\" He closed his eyes and thought of several bottles of wine adorning the table. He grinned to himself as he also imagined several barrels of the same liquid next to him.\n\n\"That's more like it!\" Arcturus said, grabbing a bottle swiftly, uncorking it, and taking a deep, hungry sip straight from the bottle.\n\n\"Don't you dare get started without me!\" Veledar hissed loudly as he ripped the lid off one of the many barrels beside him. He dunk his head practically in the wine to take a large gulp of the red liquid. He swished it around in his maw, savoring the bitter flavor before swallowing it and returned to stuffing his snout with meat. Arcturus asked something, but Veledar found himself too lost in the cycle of meat and drink that kept repeating inside his maw. It was on the tenth cycle of feasting when he finally heard the human clearly.\n\n\"If this is your mother's place, where is she hiding?\"\n\nVeledar paused from his eating duties, some of the wine still dripping down onto the cavern floor. That was a great question. Of course, she could always just be out. Flying, hunting, tinkering with spells. Any number of these things sprang to his mind.\n\n\"Probably dragon stuff,\" Veledar replied quickly, grabbing what looked like a roasted hog from the table.\n\n\"Well yeah. What else could a dragon do? Sew clothes and dress up like a human?\" Arcturus replied, and by his tone he was no doubt rolling his eyes. \"But what's your plan with her anyway?\" Arcturus paused for a moment, \"Don't tell me. It's wait here until she gets back, isn't it?\" The human took another sip from a bottle of wine, \"I mean how long could that take? Days? Weeks? Months, perhaps? From what you've told me, dragons aren't holding time in the same regard we humans do.\"\n\n\"My mother's not a dumb hatchling to get lost in her own territory. She will be here in a day or two.\" Veledar lied, hoping that would at least sooth the human's worry. \"I figure we enjoy this feast, delight in the lovely drink\u2026\" Veledar took another gulp of red wine, emptying the barrel, \"Drink again and bask in each other's good company while we wait for Lyndis, Merlia, and my dear mother to show her face.\"\n\nVeledar watched the human mull it over for a moment. \"Solid plan, that. I suppose they do have the brooch, and it will most likely lead them here. It does not sound like too terrible of an idea, considering what happened today.\" Arcturus said, then a smirk sprang onto the human's face, \"Although I shudder to imagine what your mother will think when she finds her proud Veledar passed out drunk in her cave.\"\n\n\"Hey! You stuff those back in your little maw, sir paladin. I fell out of the sky, nearly died for it, and bled over the snow when I dragged my wounded body over to this cave! I think a dragon who gets saved from the brink of death deserves to get as drunk as he wishes!\" Veledar exclaimed, opening another barrel of wine. He finished his words by sticking his wine-dripping tongue out at Arcturus.\n\n\"Do you know what I think she will do?\" Arcturus continued.\n\n\"What, oh, dearest and wisest of humans? What will my mother that you know so fabulously well will do to me?\"\n\nArcturus cleared his throat suddenly, \"GET YOUR SCALY ASS OFF MY CAVERN FLOOR, VELEDAR! YOU'RE EMBARESSING YOURSELF IN FRONT OF THE MORTALS!\" The human raised his hands and smacked them together as if slapping his hand, \"YOU BROUGHT THIS UPON YOURSELF, YOUNG DRAGON.\"\n\nVeledar narrowed his eyes at Arcturus, causing the human to stop and laugh.\n\n\"Is that so? And do tell me, Arcturus... you find such outburst\u2026 funny?\" He asked slowly, trying to let his voice come off threatening as he advanced onto the human. He let his chest swell up too, in good measure.\n\n\"Aye! I think I do!\" laughed Arcturus, crossing his arms, \"What are you going to do about it? Get me drunk too?\"\n\nVeledar grinned at the human's final words, He had asked for it, after all. With a playful shove Arcturus found himself sprawled onto the floor, his voice nothing but laughter.\n\n\"So what do you, oh great dragon, possibly do for fun before we came along?\" Arcturus asked, getting back into his chair. \"I've only seen you hunt, complain, fly, and do your little jokes.\" Arcturus lifted a finger up for each one.\n\n\"Hmmmm,\" Veledar started to say, pondering for far too long. The thought popped into his head that the drink was getting to him and he drowned that thought with another gulp of wine. He then continued with his \"hmm\".\n\nArcturus watched him in disbelief before returning to his laughter. He took another sip from his own bottle. \"Perhaps you had enough for now, my scaly friend. I don't think I will survive the wait on your hmmmms.\"\n\n\"They certainly do not last forever. You're just being impatient, like you were this morning when I woke you up.\" Veledar swung his head up to look more regal, of course. \"We like to hunt each other, which of course ends in wrestling, telling riddles or stories, dancing, one upping each other in magic, and of course, mating.\"\n\nArcturus spit out his drink. \"What was that last one again?\"\n\n\"Dancing?\" Veledar said with a grin.\n\n\"Oh, you very well know which one it was, you perverted dragon. If not before, I certainly think you have had a bit too much wine now.\" The human laughed, taking another sip of wine.\n\nVeledar just had a hissing fit of amusement. The paladin turned several shades of red, and Veledar did not know whether the color came from the wine, or the embarrassment of imagining how dragons mated. He certainly would have to press this further. How could he miss such grand opportunity?\n\n\"Dear skies, you look like a ripe cherry that's about to burst. Should I assume you don't mate on a regular basis just for the pleasure of it?\" He tilted his head to the side and raised a scaly eyebrow.\n\n\"What a human does is between them and their friends, families, acquaintances and what not. Not that I would discuss to you, dragon, or anyone in casual conversation about such uncivilized things.\"\n\n\"Your loss, Arcturus. Just remember you could have learned a few things that no book ever mentions. Besides\u2026I had the opportunity to see many things during my life.\" Veledar replied, taking another gulp of wine. He now could feel the fuzziness around his head, a pleasant warmth that pulsated with a dull throb.\n\n\"Ah, fine. Just so you don't go into describing the particulars of your matings, what is dancing to dragons?\"\n\n\"Do you not have dancing in your culture?\" Veledar laughed,\" Well I guess not, considering the lack of wings and all.\"\n\n\"Since when does dancing require wings?\" Arcturus asked. \"I think the drink has blurred your thinking, my scaly friend.\"\n\n\"Nonsense! Dancing is when two dragons hold one another by the paws and fly high into the sky. They then do maneuvers in the air with one another, which is obviously why you don't have it in human culture.\"\n\n\"Oh, another form then. Our dances don't require wings, and there is typically music attached to the timing of the steps.\"\n\n\"How strange,\" Veledar wrinkled his snout, \"But how do you do aerial maneuvers without wings? Well I suppose you could just strike poses on the ground, but where is the fun in that?\"\n\n\"We don't do maneuvers, you deaf dragon. There is usually a sequence of movements, but nothing too elaborate.\"\n\n\"I shall have to observe what you call dancing after our quest is done. It certainly sounds like something you lot stole from dragons.\" Veledar pouted before finishing off his second barrel of wine with a loud audible burp.\n\n\"And since I have answered all of your pestering inquires, human, I of course have some...*burp*...of my own.\" said Veledar, looking over to the third barrel of wine briefly before turning his attention back Arcturus. \"So, enlighten me. What did you do for fun before I fell into your care? I imagine your life was all tidy before you found yourself stuck with me. How does Arcturus, paladin of Lumara, champion of Bahamut, entertain himself when he's not too busy warming up to a dragon?\"\n\nArcturus gave him one of those amused human faces before taking a swig of wine.\n\n\"When I am not practicing, meditating, or studying dragon anatomy, I fancy painting.\"\n\n\"Dragon anatomy?\" Veledar laughed loudly. He parted his legs, thrust a claw between them, then gestured very close to the slit he had near the base of his tail. \"All dragon anatomy?\"\n\n\"Not that kind of anatomy, you drunk fool! I'm speaking of the fire glands, the wings, weak spots, things of that nature. What good is knowing whether you have a cock or not 'tween your legs when you're trying to kill me?\"\n\n\"So, in all your books, there was never anything about that?\" Veledar grinned, still trying to make the paladin turn red.\n\n\"Alright, fine, yes! There was a book or two that covered that topic. However, it failed to grab my interest, so I only leafed through it.\" Arcturus sighed, \"You happy now?\"\n\n\"But of course. The mental image alone of you staring and learning about our weakest of spots is priceless. Funny, how nobody ever thinks of striking us there, where even an arrow is enough to provoke serious injuries,\" Veledar chuckled, \"Now, about your painting, did you go about painting 'that' as well?\"\n\n\"Of course not! I painted buildings, landscapes, plants, trees, dragons who've got better things to do than flaunt their scaly crack.\" Arcturus coughed at the last one, clearly trying to hide his embarrassment.\n\n\"So, despite training to kill our kind....and looking up our anatomy, you painted us as well?\" he nudged the human playfully.\n\n\"Yes, I see the irony, but there was something about painting dragons\u2026\" Arcturus gestured to all of Veledar with his hands, \"Something is worth painting. At least in my eyes. I cannot speak for the thousands of other humans that prefer to stick to their own kin.\"\n\n\"Ah, how amusing. I suppose I will have to pose for you sometimes. Get a painting or two of my glorious self to adorn the walls of my lair.\" replied Veledar as he pictured himself sprawled out on his cavern floor, with Arcturus painting away with a stern, focused look on his face.\n\n\"Why not just get a mirror if seeing yourself is all you're interested in?\" the human laughed. \"You clearly don't have to force a poor painter to get every last bit of you right.\"\n\n\"Because then, dearest Arcturus, I would have to stand in front of it all the time. Have you any idea of the kind of aches you get from sprawling on solid stone? Course not. You're a human, wearing silly boots and clothes because your body is not good enough for this cold, rugged world,\" he stuck his tongue out once more. \"So, you mentioned you studied a dragon's weak spots. Amaze me with your knowledge. Show me what you know.\"\n\n\"Well, for starters, generally your joints don't have as much scales on them, if any. Your eyes are another prime spot for an arrow or a blade to pass through. Certain parts of the underbelly are also soft to either sword or spear. You have to look for how the scales go. Then there's the wings of course.\"\n\n\"What about my big, beautiful wings?\" Veledar spread them to his side, as if to admire himself.\n\n\"I'm surprised you're asking. They are one of your weakest features, letting even pebbles through if swung with a modest amount of force. Like I mentioned earlier, the joints are hardly armored at all, attracting both archers and gryphons.\" Arcturus stood up and walked over, grabbing one of Veledar's wings. He paid this no mind as he opened the third barrel of wine.\n\n\"All this talk of wounds makes my head ache. How are you feeling?\" he massaged along the hot membrane.\n\n\"Quite good, if not a bit too warm, and don't get me wrong, it's not because you're standing right next to me.\"\n\n\"Too ugly for your scaly brightness?\"\n\n\"All humans are. Perhaps that's why you favor dragons in your paintings. Your eyes simply rebel at the thought of splattering the face of a fat, gassy merchant onto the canvas.\"\n\n\"You're being a rude dragon now.\"\n\n\"I'm being truthful!\" The dragon groaned and rolled his eyes. \"You know\u2026if you keep rubbing me like that, you might just get a peek at what makes me a male.\"\n\n\"So you're enjoying this?\" The human smiled.\n\n\"Of course. You said it yourself. Wings are sensitive to harm, touch\u2026anything, really.\"\n\n\"Good, because I know another weakness of the wings. They are usually very ticklish!\"\n\nSuddenly, Arcturus started tickling his wings like his sister and friends used to. Veledar collapsed to the floor in a bout of laughter, thrashing with his claws and tail, and even amidst that storm of claws and flapping wings, Arcturus kept going. He started to really get aggressive, tickling the dragon around the whole wing, not slowing down for even a moment.\n\n\"That's for shoving me around like your toy!\" the human laughed in drunken cheer. \"Not fair now when the little human gets the better of you, eh dragon?\"\n\n\"Pause. Raaaaarr, please stop!\"\n\nThe human thankfully put a momentary reprieve on his frenzy so that Veledar could regain some of his senses and dignity. He was breathing deeply, staring at the human. Arcturus was still laughing. Oh, how he thought himself so clever. Veledar would certainly have to remind him that he was still very much a scaly, fire-breathing dragon.\n\n\"You might've gotten the upper hand by ambushing me with your fingers\u2026but if you think you can out-wrestle me, you are more mad than I ever gave you credit for.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Arcturus smiled. \"Why don't you give me a try? I am, after all, the chosen champion of your Goddess.\"\n\n\"Not against the GREAT AND POWERFUL VELEDAR!\" The dragon puffed out his chest. \"Why else would you start your assault with the customary wing tickles? Trickery and deceit to mask your human weakness!\" He hissed as he grabbed the human with his claws.\n\n\"I think I can manage something when said dragon is quite inebriated!\" The human laughed. \"Come now. Show me if you fight as well as you talk, great and powerful wyrm!\"\n\nVeledar quickly did a triangle pattern with his paws, then slapped the air. A slight tingle moved through his body. The spell he had just used would make himself lighter. That way, he would avoid crushing the human when the glee of contest washed over him. Of course, it also gave him an excuse if the human somehow managed to best his four agile paws, tail, and wings.\n\n\"That thing you did with your paws\u2026was it magic?\"\n\n\"I'm not cheating, if that's what you're implying.\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I believe, dragon. Admit it. You're afraid of me.\"\n\n\"Never!\" Veledar growled. He grabbed Arcturus by his side and went to flip the human onto his back, then pin him down, just like he had always done with his sister. However, the human was prepared for this. He used the momentum to roll over, together with the dragon. Veledar felt his tail knock over a chair that crashed onto the floor with a loud thump.\n\n\"Well, this may be more interesting than I thought!\" He snorted as both combatants tried to pin the other beneath them. Veledar felt his blood quicken as they tumbled. He could not resist nipping the human with his teeth every now and again.\n\n\"You bastard! I knew you'd be cheatin'!\" Arcturus shouted as he struggled to get a better hold on the situation. \"Got your scaly arse now, dragon!\" Arcturus exclaimed, almost pinning the dragon beneath him. Veledar struggled to break free. He was not going to lose. Not to a human, be he the king of the world himself! He was of course the mighty and powerful Veledar, after all.\n\nHe's not half bad at this game, he frowned as his mind quickly analyzed the human's practiced techniques. He guessed he would have to take it a tad more serious than he originally intended. With a loud growl, the red dragon turned the tables quickly as Arcturus let out a surprised yelp. Veledar managed to finally pin the human with his claws, and this time, it was Arcturus that struggled in his grip. With his blood burning hot, he let out a roar close to the human's face, signifying his victory over him.\n\n\"You know, I did not intend to go deaf in this cave. What would your mother say for stealing the gift of hearing from the man that saved you, right here in her cave?\" Arcturus laughed weakly.\n\n\"Perhaps you should have given up when you had the upper hand!\" replied Veledar before moving his snout mere centimeters away from the human's face. \"It's not wise to challenge a dragon, after all. I admire your courage, but the result is as expected. I am the victor.\"\n\n\"Bahamut's bright arse! It does indeed look like I have been vanquished!\" Arcturus closed his eyes, dropped his head onto the cold stone, then let out one last loud sigh.\n\nVeledar's heart skipped a beat. Arcturus laying dead at his feet\u2026it felt too close to that horrible dream he had. \"Arcturus,\" he nudged the human's head. \"Hey. Steel-head. I don't appreciate my prey going dead on me. Get up. Come on. We have plenty of other games to try.\"\n\nBut Arcturus said nothing. Upon closer inspection, Veledar realized he didn't even breathe. In a fit of instinctual desperation, he pushed his snout against the human's face, opened his mouth to breathe his air into the human's lungs, then suddenly froze as a familiar voice came from the cavern's entrance.\n\n\"Are we missing anything good?\"\n\nVeledar pushed his head back as if struck. \"I-no, I was just checking if he's indeed as drunk as he admitted.\" He turned towards the voice to see Lyndis standing there with Merlia. It looked like they had been in a few scuffles on the way here, as their armor was covered in slash marks. The half elf had brought out a bag of trail rations and was currently munching on a handful. She was holding out the bag for Merlia to take some.\n\n\"You usually have to pay to watch this sort of thing. Please, proceed. We will just\u2026sit here and let nature take its course.\" She said with a mischievous grin.\n\n\"Right you speak, lass! Big scaly bum was practically makin' out with Arcturus!\" Merlia exclaimed as she walked over the table, \"Does dis sort of ting happen all da time wit you boys?\" she asked, grabbing a bottle of wine and taking a swig of it.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Veledar asked, kneading his claws gently into the trapped human beneath him, \"I have vanquished this paladin here, and then I took a closer look at him to see if he's...\"\n\n\"Hot fer yer tail?\"\n\n\"\u2026Passed out drunk.\" Veledar finished with a hiss. \"Go check the barrels if you don't believe me.\"\n\n\"I think they believe you alright,\" Arcturus picked himself up with a groan. \"Dragon, let me go before Lyndis over there springs a leak or something.\"\n\nA geyser of red wine accompanied the next loud laugh from Merlia, spraying all over the floor. \"Dats funny lass, he is talkin' about your bits!\"\n\n\"Don't think I won't!\" Lyndis shot back toward Arcturus with laughter. The half elf strolled over the table to join the dwarf in feasting on the collected food.\n\nVeledar guessed Arcturus had enough, being pinned like common prey and being teased by the girls. He released the human, who sighed and patted the dragon's scales.\n\n\"Thank you for the contest, but next time I won't go so easy on you,\" he said with a grin.\n\n\"You tell yourself whatever you need to mask the bitter truth,\" replied Veledar with a hiss, \"I look forward to besting you once again.\"\n\nThe two of them walked over to join Lyndis and Merlia at the table, who were busy shoving food into their respective mouths.\n\n\"So how did you get here, you two?\" Veledar tilted his head to the side. His eyes strayed to the third barrel of wine.\n\nLyndis held up her pointer finger as she finished swallowing. \"It's an interesting story to tell.\" she started, holding her hands up. \"And this particular adventure started when we got separated in the woods\u2026\"\n\n[ Royal Pain ]\n\nLyndis was savagely thrown to the ground, crashing with a flash of pain in the cold snow. It had happened so fast; fast enough that she could not even have gotten a shout out. She went to stand, her trained eyes looking for the gryphon that had ripped her out of Stinky's saddle. She remembered the horse's pained cry as the gryphon's talons ripped through its tender hide, silencing it forever.\n\nFeathery bastards. I'll show them what happens when you mess with an angry half-elf, she pulled out a rapier and held it aloft in front of her as she twitched one of her sensitive ears. She could feel her heartbeat quicken as her grip on the hilt tightened. Within seconds, she heard the flap of wings, and Lyndis bid her time, waiting for the gryphon to swoop down on her before she rolled out of the avian's outstretched claws. The gryphon landed on the snow with an angry screech. He wasn't an ugly specimen by any means, with golden fur, white pristine feathers, and black, sharp claws.\n\nLyndis felt a slight measure of regret for what she was about to do, but such was the way of war. You either hunted, or you became the prey. She didn't intend to be a hapless doe this day. Her eyes locked to the creature's powerful body, its sharp claws, and more importantly, the keen eyes that fixed her down with a predatory stare. She gave one of her own right back. Being a rogue, she had been naturally trained to look for weak points on any opponent. A usual human needed thrice, even five times more time to find an opening in the opponent's defense, while Lyndis needed a mere moment to capitalize on an opponent's mistake.\n\n\"Your move, little elf.\" The gryphon started circling around her, waiting for her to make a mistake no doubt. She could hear the sounds of Crimson Sky's roar. Clearly the dragon was struggling with several more of this gryphon's flock. This little duel with the gryphon could wait, as right now, getting to her friends was way more important.\n\n\"See, you probably think you have gotten lucky in your little hunt.\" She smiled to the proud bird, \"That you got the elf all for yourself. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't mind sharing a few words over a drink, maybe even gawk at your plumage.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The gryphon cocked his head. \"Because to me, it seems we're very much enemies.\"\n\n\"Temporary adversaries has a better ring to it.\" Lyndis put on a smug smile.\n\n\"Fancy words. Let's see how you speak when I squeeze your frail body under my talons!\" The gryphon parted his beak to unleash a loud, savage squawk.\n\nLyndis shielded her face against the droplets of saliva, then revealed her squinted eyes along with a mischievous smile. \"I have to tell ya, gryphon boy, that could not be furthest from the truth.\"\n\nShe flicked her wrist and whispered Mirror Image. Three copies of herself sprung from her body to stand next to her, matching exactly what she was doing. The gryphon gave a screech as it charged at her, talons ready to slash her to ribbons. She sighed as she dodged out of the way. The gryphon had gone for her over the illusions. She chocked it up to a lucky guess as she stabbed down into the gryphon's side, drawing blood before leaping away from the wounded creature.\n\n\"Skraaaa. You quick little mink!\"\n\n\"The more you move, the faster you bleed. Stand down. My quarrel is not with you.\"\n\n\"Wrong\u2026\" The gryphon shook off his wounded hindpaw, drops of blood pelting the pristine snow like water trickling from a pierced waterskin. \"You defy our king and expect to go unpunished? You'd better finish me off, half-breed, because I will never stop hunting you!\"\n\n\"It's your choice,\" Lyndis readied for a second assault. She saw the gryphon twitch as blood was starting to drip in rivulets down his muscular flank. Good. She had hit one of the main blood vessels, and though it knotted her stomach to see the gryphon's leg spasm with painful jolts, Lyndis drew strength from the rule of any battle. Any advantage you had over your opponent made things a lot easier, for she did not have the brute strength of the dragon, nor the heavy plate of the paladin. All she had was her wit, her rapier, and of course, the ability to weave spells. The gryphon tried to pounce again, this time choosing the wrong copy of her. Its beak snapped at thin air as the bird screeched in anger. She rewarded him with another hit and run, as her rapier struck the other side right under the wing, then she flipped away again to observe the gruesome result of her actions.\n\n\"Raawkraaaakkk,\" The gryphon fell to the ground. \"You're\u2026the fastest prey I encountered. Seems to me\u2026I am destined to die at the end of your blade.\" The gryphon reached towards her with a talon. \"I expect nothing of an honor-less rogue, but\u2026at least grant me the mercy of a quick death.\"\n\nLyndis gritted her teeth. She owed nothing to this bird, yet something kept her from plunging her blade through its feathery neck.\n\n\"You're not dying today, runt.\" Lyndis rummaged through her pack for a quick healing potion and lunged towards the creature's drooping head. \"C'mon, open this up. You had no problems snapping and tearing at me a few moments ago\"\n\nThe bird gasped for breath as even more blood dripped onto the ground. \"No\u2026what are you\u2026\" it struggled in her grasp, still trying to get away\u2026to survive for a few more painful minutes before death took him.\n\n\"Something your merciful king never did for my people,\" Lyndis managed to crack the bird's beak open and poured the liquid into the gryphon's gullet. He started choking, trying to spit the substance out, but Lyndis clamped his beak shut with both hands, watching the bird's throat attentively. When he swallowed, she let him crash in the snow to quickly patch him up with the little strips of bandage she had in her field kit. She kept a close eye on his limbs and wing, as she very well knew the gryphon could strike back at any moment.\n\nFortunately, he was smarter than that.\n\n\"There,\" Lyndis slapped the creature's back once she stopped the brunt of the bleeding. \"Live to fight another day, crow, and when you find yourself in a warm, cozy bed aboard an airship or whatever, let your commander know who spared your life.\"\n\nShe expected a screech of defiance, as gryphons were proud, loyal creatures, yet close encounters with death had a way to change one's perception. The golden gryphon dipped his head, a few soft chirps escaping through his beak instead of the violent screech of a warning call.\n\n\"I cannot promise they'll listen, but I promise to never forget this kindness. Run now, matron of mercy. They're\u2026coming for you.\"\n\nAs if on cue, she heard several more shrieks, followed by the roar of a dragon. Lyndis waved the gryphon a quick farewell and broke into a run in that direction.\n\nCurses. Why couldn't I just plunge my blade through his eye and be done with it? They prey upon my kin, destroy our villages, treat us like animals! She curled up her fists at that. She could help Crimson Sky and Arcturus, and instead, she wasted precious time to heal the enemy. Heal him! What would the dragon or any of her people say of such thoughtless deed? Would they consider her weak? A traitor to her own kin, perhaps?\n\nIt didn't really matter. Not now, when half of her mind raced as she tried to formulate a plan. Step one, regroup with the rest of the party. Step two, flee into the forest while they all use magic to aid in their escape. She did not know what spells Merlia knew as a ranger, but clearly they would be of use. She found Arcturus and Crimson Sky relatively quickly, arriving just as the dragon snatched up the human and flew into the sky.\n\n\"Follow them closely, and avoid attacking at all costs. I need Arcturus alive, hear me? I want him alive!\" Shouted a man clad in black armor that quickly mounted a gryphon and took off. His face was one of surprise and desperation. She knew the expression all too well, as she too was no doubt wearing the exact same one.\n\nLyndis ducked behind a tree, pulling out the map from her field satchel. She just had to remain calm for now. The dragon was clearly trying to lead the gryphons away from the rest of the group, to a place where he'd snatch an advantage. Most likely he was scared as well, for she had never seen him fly away from a fight.\n\nLyndis licked her lips and quickly pulled up the map that they had been following before the gryphons had attacked. Her eyes scanned around the various landmarks. She was very close to the location indicated on the map. All she had to do was make it there and pray the magical defenses would help shield her from the gryphons and their armored allies. She could fight off one gryphon by herself, sure, but the whole flock? That was something she did not think she could pull off if they came at her with murder in their minds.\n\nLyndis hugged a tree once more as she heard the flapping wings. Two gryphons landed nearby, with riders dismounting onto the snow. They wore dark red leathers with gold stitching on the edges. They were both human, towering above the average individual, with muscled, well trained bodies. Their eyes were both brown and squinted as they were turning their heads back and forth, looking for something.\n\nThey're after me, she thought as she traced her thumb along the hilt of her rapier. That damn gryphon she saved must've betrayed her at the first opportunity.\n\n\"Come on out, half-elf!\" One the men called out in a deep voice, \"The boss only wants to talk to you. The dragon is the only one he wants captured.\"\n\nLyndis silently clasped her hands together as if to break an egg. She then placed them on her head and let go as she muttered, \"Vonuzez.\"\n\nIt felt like the yolk of a large egg landed on her head. The lukewarm sludge started to drip down her hair. The feeling worked its way down her head, into her chest, and all the way down to her feet in a matter of moments. She knew that the spell had worked when a cold tinge ran up her spine. She was invisible now. With a grin to herself, she sprinted away from the collected four, towards her destination on the map.\n\nThe spell only lasted for a minute. She knew this when she felt a warming sensation flow through her body. It happened just like the previous one, starting from her head then finishing in her feet. She made sure to hug a tree when the enchantment wore off. Lyndis held a hand to her elven ears, listening for anything that could be the sound of gryphons, or worse, mercs. The half-elf waited for several minutes before moving from her spot, thankful for the blessed silence of the forest. It might have meant her companions were having all the trouble while she sneaked away exactly like a selfish rogue, but in war, this was an advantage she had to exploit.\n\nGather your wits, Lyndis. You're not the bad gal here. Fock sake, you wasted bandage and potions on one of the king's winged killers! She frowned at the thought of that same bird inflicting misery upon her people months later, all thanks to her mercy. No! Lyndis scrunched her eyes shut. Focus. I need to focus on what I hear, what I see, what I smell\u2026\n\nSlowly, her eyes opened up. That's when she noticed a pair of boot prints heading off in the direction she was currently aiming at. She might have dismissed them as anyone's at first, but there were clearly large paw prints next to them. She did not know what kind of animal had such a large foot, but she was pretty sure a bear was the most likely outcome. Good. That meant Merlia had made it as well. Lyndis shrugged herself. She figured the ranger had not been as slowed down as she was, and if there was any chance to reunite with her party, this was it.\n\nLyndis broke into a quickened pace. She followed the path left by Merlia, thinking back to a friend of hers in Drenedar. He would have followed these tracks better than anyone. She scowled as he would wear a smug look on his human face and laugh with those blue eyes of his. How his messy blonde hair would jiggle while he enjoyed his moment of fun. She would punch him in the shoulder for good measure at his teasing, and they would move on. His name was Gerald Wind-chaser, a Pegasus knight of the realm. Oh, how she wished she had his skills right now. It would have saved the whole party the trouble of traveling to Entis, after all.\n\nAs she jumped over a log, Lyndis remembered the day she left Drenedar, fed up with how everything had gone in her home. She simply got tired of constantly chasing her parents' expectations and decided to pursue a life of adventure instead of looking pretty and dancing and wasting her time on art. More than anything, Lyndis craved to go out there and see the world she had only read about in stories. Besides, why should she not? Her parents had gotten the best teachers of the realm, taught her how to fight, how to defend herself, how to weave magic. Wasn't it a pity, to know such skills, and never put them to proper use?\n\nLyndis ducked behind another tree, remembering Gerald's sad, lovingly stupid face as he asked her not to go. Deep down, she figured the man had a crush on her, but he had never admitted it. Instead, he provided her with a sending stone that helped them stay in touch; that way, she could tell him if she ever had gotten herself into trouble. She had laughed at the time, \"Trouble, Gerald? That's what I am looking, for you silly, silly man.\"\n\nLyndis stopped to listen once more. If she had the chance, she would have told her younger self to practice running for the day when her legs would have to outrun a gryphon's wings. She scowled, realizing she knew what her reply would have been, \"That sounds fantastic!\"\n\nThe tracks were getting fresher. Or so it seemed. Although Lyndis wasn't entirely sure, she felt she was making progress. However, something odd had happened with the shapes in the snow. It seemed like Ulga and Merlia had split up. She crouched low for a moment or two, trying to figure out which pair of tracks she should follow. Ulga's tracks seemed to head deeper and deeper into the woods, while Merlia's seemed to have gone towards a clearing.\n\n\"Merlia, what in the world were you up to?\" Lyndis said to herself softly as she started following Merlia's tracks to the clearing.\n\nWhen she got closer, she heard the dwarf suddenly shout out.\n\n\"O, come now, is that the best ye got in yer gut? I 'ave endured harder hits from me mum!\"\n\nLyndis broke into a run towards the duo. Not to dismiss Merlia's fighting ability, but she figured the dwarf would be happy for some type of help. She made it to the clearing, but stuck to the side, remaining concealed in the shadows of the forest, biding her time to strike. She saw two things before her. One was the motionless gryphon lying in the clearing with an axe beside its body, while the other rested under the creature's talons, probably snatched from Merlia's grasp after a bout of close combat. The second thing she saw was the black armored man, his gloved hand dug into Merlia's neck.\n\n\"Oh, come on now, ya can at least put me outta me misery. Tha' breath o'yers could kill a dragon, it can!\" Merlia gasped with a chuckle.\n\n\"Nobody has to die today, dwarf. All I want to know is the red beast's location. Where did it fly off? Tell me!\" The man shouted in anger.\n\n\"What's he to ye?\" Merlia rasped.\n\n\"A thief who stole my best friend, you boulder-headed creature!\" The human's face flushed red with anger. \"Tell me now, or I'll send my chasers all over the forest with an order to capture the enemy no matter the cost. Do you want to get your dragon back in tatters? Hmm?\"\n\n\"Awww, did dey get away from ye, y'said? And all yer doing is sit here an' pout? You's a grown man, lad. Slap dat gryphon o'er the head a few times an' find the dragon instead of pickin' on women!\" Merlia taunted as the man clearly tightened his grip on her throat.\n\n\"I'm interrogating you, lass.\" The human brought his angry face closer to Merlia's scrunched features. \"That means I ask, and you answer.\"\n\n\"Now you're un BEARable,\" Merlia gasped out, her voice barely audible. \"I said you're un BEARable!\" She cried out in a weak voice.\n\n\"That some kind of code?\" The armored man asked as he looked around. \"What's that? TELL ME!\"\n\n\"Gods damn't Ulga, I said the focken word!\" Merlia cried, struggling in the man's grasp.\n\nIt appeared she was going to succumb to the man's brute strength before Ulga emerged from the other side of the clearing to charge right towards the man in armor. The man dropped the dwarf in surprise as he drew an energy crossbow to blast the bear, but she proved too quick for him. In an instant, the crossbow was torn from his grasp, forcing him to back from the angry bear with his sword drawn.\n\n\"That how you wanna do it, lass?\" he grunted. \"Think well before you strike. My blade never misses its mark.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think today's just not your day, metal-ass.\" Lyndis took this moment to walk out as well. With a rapier held out in the left hand, she lifted her right hand up as if to curl a ball. She pictured an orb of fire resting in her hands, then let it fly towards the man. From her hand, she threw a fire bolt that collided into the man's back. He was pushed towards the bear in surprise, as Ulga swatted him to the ground with one of her paws.\n\n\"See, dats dey way, Ulga!\" Merlia cried with a hoarse throat as she grabbed her axes. \"Nice of ye ta join da fight, lass!\" She raised an axe, pointing to the man in armor. \"Help me axe him a few tings.\" With a dwarven cry, Merlia charged the man.\n\nBut he had managed to roll away from Ulga, who was still trying to maul him. Lyndis decided to help as she closed in on the rolling man.\n\nThe armored warrior finally stood up. He swung at her first. Lyndis ducked below the blade as she went to stab for his armpit. The man moved quickly to deflect her blow, and instead of his armpit she nicked his forearm. She felt a boot collide with her hard before she could get away like she usually did. Lyndis was shoved to the ground, landing on her backside. The man moved aside as Ulga went to attack him. He sidestepped the bear, then used the momentum to slice deep into Ulga's neck. His sword severed the brave bear's head from the rest of her body in one clean strike.\n\n\"Ye wee, clankin' basterd! Do ya know how long it'll take Ulga ta get better from this?\" Merlia snarled as she started swinging wildly at the man with her two axes.\n\n\"There's no coming back from a severed head, dwarf,\" The man grunted as he parried Merlia's frenzied attacks.\n\n\"It'll take all afta noon, ya stupid egg suckin, full plate wearin git!\"\n\nLyndis shot up as the two fought. Taking advantage of the situation, she moved in to flank the warrior, who was doing a fine job of holding off the dwarf on his own. In fact, his fighting style sort of reminded her of how Arcturus handled his sword. He was maneuvering well enough that she could never get right behind him.\n\n\"You're going down, lass!\"\n\n\"Not before ye!\" Merlia rasped.\n\nThe man cried out in pain as an axe struck his armor at his left shoulder.\n\n\"Ha! Guess ya can't handle all of dis dwarven fury!\" Merlia shouted in laughter, but it was short lived as he moved his right hand and punched the dwarf square in her face. Merlia fell back dazed onto the ground. Her eyes were closed, but she was still breathing; merely unconscious from the man's thundering punch.\n\nThe man turned towards Lyndis, his face red with irritation.\n\n\"It brought me no pleasure to do that, but you're giving me little choice in the matter.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Lyndis raised an eyebrow. \"Looked to me like you enjoy cutting things.\"\n\n\"Only when they attack me first!\" The man shouted. \"I come to you with questions and orders from my king, and instead of talking, you take off and strike my party back like a bunch of thugs!\"\n\nLyndis scowled at the man. \"That tends to happen when you announce your approach with screeches.\"\n\n\"Gah. I would've gotten what I want from the dwarf, but since you're the only one I have, guess you'll have to do, half-elf.\" He suddenly stopped mid question to stare at her.\n\n\"Wait. Have we met before?\" He casually asked, holding his great sword out in front of himself.\n\nLyndis tried to place the face to anyone she had known in her life, back in Drenedar, even when she was exploring. They paced in front of one another for a moment or two. No. She had never seen this man before. Why would he even say something like that in the middle of a fight? To distract her? Throw her focus off-balance?\n\n\"What's it to you?\"\n\n\"I like to know who I am fighting, miss. And that dwarf over there would not stop yelling at me. \"He said, just as his eyes then went wide. \"Aye. My memory didn't falter. I know you!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Lyndis suddenly stopped telling her tale to the dragon and human who listened with utmost interest. Or at least, she thought they were. Crimson Sky kept on taking gulps of wine every few minutes before returning his inebriated stare to her, which only happened after he wiped his snout. He was gasping at all the times she mentioned the fights.\n\n\"Did he really know you?\" Arcturus asked suddenly. \"How is that possible? He never told me anything about a quest in Drenedar.\"\n\nLyndis thought for a moment, letting the paladin's question sink into her mind. Would she tell them at this moment? Or would it ruin the image as to why she was really helping them get into Entis? She figured it could wait for later.\n\n\"He knew me from your reports on Crimson Sky. Aye. He read them before coming to get us, the literate bastard. Not often I meet a man with a sword who reads out of his own volition,\" She lied, putting on a fake smile and hoping the paladin was drunk enough to fall for it. Perhaps it was because of the wine, but he just nodded.\n\n\"What happened next?\" Crimson Sky asked, cocking his head to the side, \"Did you die? Or wait, that would mean I'm talking to your spirit or worse, an impostor.\" The dragon laughed with little hisses before taking yet again another gulp of wine. \"Carry on, carry on. Do not mind a drunky dragon's silly comments!\"\n\nSo, with a slight laugh, and another swig of wine, Lyndis continued her tale, conveniently skipping over to the good part."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "There was a growing pit in Lyndis' stomach when she stared into the man's eyes. Some silly part of her still hoped he was wrong, and that he only made this up to gain an edge over her, but she had seen those eyes before.\n\n\"I never put much faith in Gods, but they certainly have a sense of humor. You're the princess of Drenedar, are you not?\" The man said with a grin, \"Well princess, my name is Garroth.\"\n\n\"Well then, my kind, confused Garroth, I think you may have me confused with someone else.\" She said, trying to act indifferent, although she could from his stern face that the man was not buying her lie.\n\n\"Nope. I might not trust the Gods to whisper truths in my ears, but my instincts never betrayed me so far. I saw you eight years back, when my crew visited Drenedar.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Lyndis shuddered. \"Let's say I go with this wild tale you spin, and I am indeed the princess you speak of. What was a brute like you doing in my kingdom?\"\n\n\"We are adventurers, dear princess. We go where the stream of coin leads us. Long story short, we were paid quite handsomely for a job.\" Garroth, grinned at his boast. \"My, the Gods do seem to piss their favor out of the heavens. I came out here to capture a dragon, but you can imagine my surprise at how the day has unfolded. I have found not only the dragon, but the knowledge that my friend is, thank the gods, alive. To top it off, I also find the princess that conveniently seemed to have plopped right into my lap! Is this your plan, dear? To get revenge for your kingdom by consorting with that red scaled bastard?\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that, brute? Elaborate!\" She spat out, her face full of hate.\n\n\"Oh my. Have you not heard, princess? Your kingdom signed a non-aggression pact with us. The war between our kingdoms is finally over!\"\n\n\"You mean\u2026 my family just gave up the fight? After everything your marauding soldiers put us through!?\" She shouted, remembering stories of villages being raided and looted by the Lumarian soldiers.\n\n\"Yea, I heard from the king himself that your family decided to see the light of reason, as it were.\" The human rested his hands on his hips. \"War\u2026such an ugly business. I've not a lot of love for either side, but frankly, this pact frees our armies to focus on the real threat, Rothdell.\"\n\nLyndis could not believe the words that came out of that armored bastard's mouth. He was clearly trying to mess with her head. She never had been interested in politics before, hence why she had left to explore in the first place. However, to hear about a pact of peace with Lumara was more than troubling. Clearly her parents were not in the right state of mind, to get into the same bed with the same vile humans that defiled their lands and spat upon their people. They had always advocated standing up to evil, and Lyndis had no reason whatsoever to believe they would give all that up without a fight.\n\n\"My words take roots, do they not? Let me explain myself further. At the beginning of this month, we had to stop a band of Pegasus knights. The bastards were doing hit and runs within our borders. They gave us quite a chase, but the result is the same it's always been. We stand, they fall.\"\n\n\"The gods spit on you, vile creature. Answer me one thing before I have your head. Was there a man named Gerald leading them?\" She suddenly found herself asking.\n\n\"Tall man, blue eyes?\" Garroth stroke his chin before a smile crept up his chaffed lips, \"Yea, I believe it was him. Last I heard, he and his crew came up north, looking for ya. Had to drop him off to some inquisitors, whose payment is\u2026how should I put it? Enough to turn the other cheek at the distasteful outcome of our mission.\"\n\n\"You fockin' bastard!\" Lyndis shouted. With rapier in hand, she charged at the black armored monster, striking towards Garroth with the speed and efficiency of a viper.\n\nThe human grinned at her mistake and dodged out of the way. He sliced down with his great sword in a flash. She tried to dodge, but her reckless attack had extended her stance too far. The sword managed to cut through her leather and into her side. Thankfully, her attempt at a dodge had stopped it from slicing clean through her. She fell to the snow, her rapier falling from her grasp.\n\n\"That was a bad move, princess. I actually don't reaaaally want to hurt you more than I wound my enemies, but if you force me to fight, a fight you'll get.\" Garroth said sternly as he approached her prone form.\n\n\"B-bastard,\" Lyndis rasped. She crawled towards her weapon, trying to grab her rapier as her other arm held the blood from gushing out of her sliced flesh. Little spikes of pain made her cry out as she inched herself towards the sword.\n\n\"No no no.\" Her attempts were cut short. Garroth placed a boot firmly on the hilt of the rapier, denying her the weapon. \"Come now, princess. You know you can't win against an armored opponent. Just come with me and we can set everything right. I promise it'll be easy. You only have to answer some questions about the dragon, and past that, I am sure we can send you home without too much trouble\u2026or the pain you sought by challenging me. Bold move, that, but what can I say? I've fought too many battles to be taken by surprise.\" Garroth smiled smugly.\n\nIf Lyndis could kill him with her stare, she would do it several times over. How she hated that bastard right now. Once she got out of this binding, she would have to check up on everything she learned from his poisonous mouth. It just did not make any sense, for the world to spin in Garroth's direction. First, the deal with her parents, then Gerald coming to find her with a company of knights? She sat in silence, staring daggers at him.\n\n\"This is getting tiresome. Admit defeat. Stop being a sore loser. I am being nice to you right now, which my contract doesn't necessarily require. I could black you out with a punch, tie you up, then haul you over my shoulder If I wish, but instead here we are, talking like two civilized people, so let's make this work, shall we?\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\" Lyndis whispered. \"Let's work something out.\"\n\nGarroth smiled. With her eyes locked onto the human, she grabbed his outstretched hand as she pressed down with her boot firmly against the snow. Hopefully, there was not enough that it would stop it from hitting the ground. What luck! She felt the small click of the four-inch dagger popping out from the front of her boot. Lyndis didn't think. She suddenly kicked up, the dagger plunging into Garroth's stomach right below the breastplate with a schlick noise.\n\n\"Grraaaah!\" His eyes went wide as he felt the blade move inside him, then shortly stumbled back, clutching at the now bleeding wound.\n\n\"You thrice-damned bitch! Wha'd you do that for?\" He screamed out in pain as he wrenched that monstrous sword out of its sheath, holding it high above his head. \"I'm going to slice that pretty body of yours in half!\"\n\n\"Ye know, perhaps you shoulda bought him dinner lass. It's not good ta slip inta someone without doin dat.\" Merlia's sudden voice paralyzed the armored warrior.\n\n\"Wh-what?!\" Garroth's eyes went wide.\n\nLyndis turned her head to see Merlia holding her bow tight, with an arrow at the ready. \"I suggest ya put that sword down, boyo, or I'll send dis arrow here straight inta ya skull.\"\n\n\"You think you scare me with your little bow, dwarf? I dispatched you easily.\" Garroth spat on the ground. \"A single punch was all it took to bring you down, and if you challenge me now, I will make sure the snow turns red with your blood!\"\n\n\"Tis' true ya got da better of me, but ya been fightin both of us now. Armor or not, yer growin tired, just like any otha' man. Also, now ya got a new hole in ya. Me? I am used ta getting pounded in da face, if you tink ya can get ta me before I loose this arrow, then take yer best shot. However, ya best be thinking what dere lass will do with that rapier. I'd be worried meself, is much larger den da dagger she has you squirmin over.\"\n\nGarroth looked to the dwarf with fury lit in his eyes, then to Lyndis, who had reclaimed her rapier. She stood up, wincing as her side ached with burning pain.\n\n\"I will not be dropping this sword, dwarf. You can pry it from my cold dead fingers before I let it go.\"\n\n\"Suit yerself,\" Merlia loosed the arrow straight into Garroth's knee. The man howled in pain as the arrowhead went straight through the metal plate covering his kneecap.\n\n\"How do ya like dat adamantite arrow, ya clankin bucket o'curses?\" Merlia chuckled, \"Stings, don't it?\"\n\nGarroth still stood his ground with a twisted look of pain on his face. Lyndis slowly advanced on him as Merlia readied another arrow. Garroth suddenly pulled a horn from his pouch, pressed it to his lips, then blew as loud and hard as his lungs allowed. The horn gave out a deep vibrating noise that echoed all around them. Lyndis heard the cries of gryphons returning the horn's call.\n\nMerlia let loose another arrow, but this time the wounded human managed to deflect it with the sword before falling over, grimacing in pain.\n\nLyndis limped over to Merlia as the dwarf gave Garroth a sour look. \"Let's see how ya can be an adventurer now, ya blasted git!\"\n\n\"Here lass, dis will help wit da pain\" Merlia held a hand to where Lyndis had been struck with the greatsword. She tried not to think about the area now stained dark red with her blood. It would not take too long to solve, thanks to the spell prestidigitation, but it was still irritating.\n\n\"Vakraas aruune,\" Merlia uttered, her hand starting to glow green. Lyndis gasped as her side started to feel warm. Within moments, the wound started to seal itself. Lyndis stood up once the spell ended, with a smile of relief on her face.\n\n\"There. Nothin' like a cure wounds spell ta set ya straight.\" Merlia chuckled.\n\n\"What about Ulga?\" Lyndis started making their way towards the point labeled on the map at a brisk pace.\n\n\"Don' worry about Ulga. She's fine,\" Merlia pulled out a small white orb of light from her pouch. \"Ulga be a spirit dat takes on da form of an animal. So don worry yer head about 'er.\"\n\nLyndis sighed in relief, \"Well that's handy. Where did you end up finding her?\"\n\n\"Dat be a story for anoder time, lass. Let's just say it be in a, southernmost of Drenedar.\"\n\n\"I look forward to hearing about it.\" Lyndis grinned."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"What forest in Drenedar?\" Crimson Sky interrupted, his words shortly followed by another burp from the great beast's throat. \"I want to hear that story, lassie!\"\n\n\"I am in the middle of a story right now, you drunken dragon. Mind your manners, and maybe I'll satisfy your curiosity,\" Lyndis shot back.\n\n\"I for one would like to hear both stories,\" Hiccupped Arcturus, who was leaning on the dragon for support.\n\n\"See? Arcturus here gets it. We demand two stories! Two! Not one, not three, not five. Two's a perfect match. Like us,\" Crimson Sky dragged the human against his chest with a big grin.\n\n\"Let da lass finish da first story before ye get naughty with each other, ye dolts,\" Melia said, \"Den we can focus on tellin my story, if I want ta.\"\n\n\"Do you want to?\" Crimson Sky turned his head to the dwarf. His tail was starting to twitch.\n\n\"Not righ now dragon!\"\n\n\"Grrawwww!\" Crimson Sky groaned as he looked back to Lyndis.\n\n\"Come now, Veled\u2026Crimson Sky. You just have to be patient. Good things come to those who wait. Didn' your mother teach you that?\" Arcturus patted the dragon on his scaled back.\n\n\"Nice catch paladin. You almost blabbed it out to everyone here!\" Crimson Sky hissed.\n\n\"I am drunk!\" Arcturus cried, throwing his hands up in the air.\n\n\"Maybe I should tell them what you paint in your spare time!\" Crimson Sky started to chuckle.\n\n\"Buildings and landscapes, of course.\" Arcturus defended himself. \"Wha' d' you expect? Naked ladies? I am a paladin of Lumara for light's sake, claiming no responsibility for whatever comes out of this dragon's maw. It's not my fault your mind goes to the gutter, you red pervert!\"\n\n\"LADS, LISTEN TO DA ELF'S STORY OR GODS HELP ME I WILL BATTER YA INTA NEXT WEEK!\" Merlia shouted so loud that Lyndis thought she might be part dragon. There was a pregnant pause as Crimson Sky and Arcturus looked to Merlia, then to Lyndis. It seemed their squabble was done for now.\n\n\"Can I finish the tale then?\" Lyndis asked with a coy smile.\n\n\"Yes, Lyndis lass. I am most excited to hear how your tale of unmatched bravery ends,\" Crimson Sky said, his eyes casually looking to Merlia before he scrunched up his muzzle.\n\n\"You may continue,\" Arcturus added at practically the same time.\n\n\"Good! Glad you two drunks can still see the same road. So, there we were, once again making our way towards the point on the map...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Lyndis and Merlia had been making their way towards their destination for roughly ten minutes before they had come to a rough landscape littered with rocks, where even the trees had started to recede. Thankfully, they had not heard the screech of gryphons, nor felt their wing beats for a while. Lyndis figured even if they did, Garroth would not be able to keep pace with them, considering the arrow he carried in his knee. Merlia was still chuckling about that incident.\n\n\"Imagine what he is gonna say when somebody comes ta him with a contract,\" She laughed, \"I used ta be an adventurer till I took an arrow to da knee!\"\n\n\"He is most likely going to find a cleric and get it healed. Beasts like him are used to such wounds. They'll just stand up, again and again, until you put them down for good\" Lyndis sighed. \"Although it will of course buy us some time. Good shooting, lass.\"\n\n\"Ya spoil it, lass. Ya can't let me enjoy his sufferin', can ye?\"\n\n\"Oh, by all means, keep making the joke, I enjoyed watching him brought down a peg.\" Lyndis became serious. \"So Merlia, how much did you hear back there with Garroth? I forgot to ask after all the action.\"\n\n\"Oh, about how yer actually a princess? I swear on me life I didna hear a word.\" The dwarf smirked.\n\n\"And that doesn't bug you in the slightest?\"\n\n\"Why would dat bug me lass? I be travelin with a god damn fire breathin scaly hatchie an' a paladin outta all the humans in Lumara! Why would ya bein a princess affect me in da slightest?\n\n\"I\u2026don't know. I guess I like staying in the shadows.\" Lyndis sighed in relief. Even if she felt uncomfortable to have someone know her real identity, at least that was a load off her mind. When people had seen her as a princess, they were always trying to impress her, show off. They always acted like they were walking on egg shells around her, and that had always annoyed the eggs out of her. It was different now. As an adventurer, she could be who she wanted; travel unburdened by the needs or opinions of others.\n\n\"I still have a favor to ask. Can you not tell Arcturus or Crimson Sky? I am not ready for them to know the truth just yet.\"\n\n\"Why are ya hidin' it? I figure da best way ta have a friendship is ta get everytin on the table. Hidin things only brings pain down da road.\"\n\n\"I don't want them to treat me like a princess, and knowing Crimson Sky...\"\n\n\"Aye, dragons and princess. Say no more on dat one, but what about the paladin? Seems like a good lad ta me.\"\n\n\"Princess of Drenedar? The land his people were fighting with?\" Lyndis raised her shoulders. \"Benevolent or not, I think he won't trust me to stay my blade when I get close to that rotten king of his.\"\n\n\"Well, are ya goin to cut da stem off dat rotten apple when we get dere?\"\n\nLyndis thought this over for a moment, thinking about Garroth's words and how her kingdom had given up. She then thought to Gerald. Hopefully, he would be alive, but regretfully, in the hands of inquisitors, who would no doubt try to torture him for any sliver of information.\n\n\"If I had the chance, I think I would.\" Lyndis sighed, \"Although I doubt we will get that chance. I need information first. Like the location of a friend of mine, and the details about my parent's surrender. I'd have better luck divining the future in a dragon's dung than trusting the word of that armored git.\"\n\n\"A boyfriend?\" Merlia asked with a coy grin.\n\n\"Just a friend.\" Lyndis hissed. \"Not that it's any of your business.\"\n\n\"Such a shame. Thought I was gonna hear some juicy details for a moment dere.\" Merlia chuckled before holding up her pointer finger at Lyndis, \"Well dont ya worry ya pretty head about it, I won't say a word about ya bein a princess, even if I tink ya should tell em yerself.\" The dwarf crossed her arms, \"Tho' if you ask me, I'd tell dem soon, before tings get outta hand.\"\n\n\"Thank you Merlia. I'm in your debt.\"\n\n\"Fo dis? Dan't worry 'bout it lass. Tis no problem keepin yer secret.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, I still appreciate it,\" Replied Lyndis with a shocked smile. She had almost expected the dwarf to go blabbing to Arcturus and Crimson Sky the moment they were reunited. \"I will think about telling them soon, like you said. Get everything out on the table. Just not right after I've been chased by gryphons and slashed apart by lying mercs.\"\n\nThe two slowed down to a snail's pace as they approached one of the rocks pictured on the map. Lyndis had brought it out once again, holding it tight as cold winds swept over them. Despite the generously thick clothes, the wind still managed to cut into her flesh like a knife, making her shiver in its embrace.\n\n\"How much farther we got?\" Merlia asked, \"Is it dat rock, I wonder?\"\n\n\"Not much, and I figure it sort of looks like that rock.\" Replied Lyndis as they walked over to the prominent landmark. They sat there for a moment in silence as nothing happened.\n\n\"Do we gotta say a magic word or somethin?\" Merlia asked, \"Ah lemme try. Open up, will ya?\" she grinned. When nothing happened, her cheerful smile turned to a frown, \"Well, it was worth a shot.\"\n\nLyndis pulled out the brooch she had stolen from the gang leader, Knives. She rolled it over in her gloved hand, feeling how smooth it was, then walked over to the rock and looked around for a small indentation or something to fit in the brooch. It could be that it activated a hidden door or something. After all, she had seen plenty of hidden doors throughout her many tomb raiding adventures.\n\n\"What ya lookin for? I tink it may jus' be a rock.\"\n\n\"Wondering if there's a space I can fit this brooch into...\" Lyndis sighed in irritation. \"This is a lot harder than it looks like.\"\n\n\"Well I will try it da way passed down onta me by me venerable ancestors.\" Merlia said, \"Stand back lass, yer goin ta see ta legendary dwarvin technique of figurin stuff out.\"\n\n\"If it's so legendary, how comes I never heard of it?\" Lyndis crossed her arms with an amused smile.\n\n\"It's because it was passed down from dwarf ta dwarf. So, stan' back. A half elf such as yerself could not be doin dis.\" Merlia's face grew serious as she suddenly gave the rock a good, hard kick.\n\n\"That was the technique? To just hit something?\" Lyndis shook her head and closed her eyes.\n\n\"Aye, but a wee reminder, lass. I kicked it extra hard.\"\n\n\"Greetings, mortals,\" Came a monotonous voice from the rock that made Lyndis' eyes open wide. She could not believe it; the dwarf's sudden kick must have truly done something, for standing...well, floating before them, was a spectral dragon made of mists. It stood next to them, a transparent blue color that made it hard to make out among the snow, and it looked roughly like Crimson Sky. It had spikes that lined its spectral back, but no wings. Where Crimson Sky had slitted eyes, the spectral dragon had mere holes. The dragon looked to Merlia, then to Lyndis.\n\n\"Told ya it'd work!\" Merlia cried in laughter, \"I could tell by ya face ya didn belie'e me!\"\n\n\"You may call me Auron.\" The dragon said, \"I am the master's magical guide for mortals that wish to visit her lair. What do you call yourselves, and what is your purpose for coming this far up the mountain?\"\n\n\"My name is Lyndis Kuxion,\" Lyndis held out a hand to shake by instinct. Auron just looked at her hand before looking to Merlia. Lyndis put her hand to her side, smiling awkwardly.\n\n\"And you are?\" asked Auron, once again in that monotone voice of its.\n\n\"My name is Merlia Gallowglar, explorer extraordinaire! Merlia shouted out.\n\n\"That is quite a long name to bear, Merlia Gallowglar Explorer Extraordinaire.\" Auron replied.\n\n\"No, ya stupid ting. My name is only the first part.\" Merlia said.\n\n\"That is a weird name, Only the first part. Perhaps you have spoken mistakenly?\" Auron tilted its spectral head to the side, like Crimson Sky usually did when faced with a conundrum.\n\n\"LISTEN CLOSLY YA STUPID, SPOOKY, MONOTONE SPEAKIN, FLOATIN, GHOSTY GIT! MA NAME IS MERLIA GALLOWGLAR!\" Merlia shouted, her face turning all red.\n\nLyndis burst out laughing as Auron just floated in silence for a moment, while the dwarf breathed heavily.\n\n\"You did not have to shout so loud, I am not deaf!\"\n\n\"That's it!\" Merlia shouted, holding up her hands as if to strangle the dragon, but Lyndis held up a hand to hold her back.\n\n\"Kind Auron, we are here to meet the silver dragon that resides on this mountain. We were with her son, but our party got separated.\"\n\n\"I care not for such details, but since you have a brooch, I will bring you to the master's lair.\" The ghostly dragon turned and started to float further along the path. \"I suggest you follow me closely. The snow has been known to play tricks on the eyes.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not like we have any oder choice, ye spectral basterd,\" Merlia shrugged, \"Guess we gotta follow your bloated butt an' hope ye don' lead us astray.\"\n\n\"Cheer up, Merlia. Perhaps there will be wine there when we arrive. This bloated butt, as you so eloquently put it, is most definitely a valet to a respectable host. When we tell the ruler of these mountains how valiantly we fought to defend her son, she'll see us to a most deserving, most proper reward.\" Lyndis laughed.\n\n\"I can only hope we don' get da short end o' da stick, lass. Most dragons I learnt 'bout weren't the friendly sort.\"\n\nLyndis and Merlia followed Auron as he led them around the girth of the mountain, though the ghostly dragon did not speak about his master much unless they asked a direct question. He simply gave out simple answers, that she had lived there for quite some time, and was there to protect the mortals. When asked about her current location, the dragon would not answer. He said something along the lines that his master did not like to give out her location to strangers. Lyndis accepted that much. It made sense, after all. In the back of her mind she hoped her companions were safe and sound, although she had no idea how they would find their way back to the rock. She asked Auron about this, but the dragon instead pointed to a cave that they could see in the distance.\n\n\"They are inside already,\" The dragon said. \"You can find the master's lair in there. I suggest you enjoy your stay until the master can be with you.\" Right after he spoke his piece, Auron suddenly vanished out of thin air with crackling noise akin to thunder.\n\nLyndis and Merlia made their way to the cave with smiles on their faces. It would be nice to see those two again, especially after the hectic time with Garroth and his gryphon riders.\n\n\"Dere!\"\n\nLyndis looked in the direction where Merlia pointed at, and her face filled with dread as she saw the large area of blood in the snow, and the tracks leading to the cave.\n\n\"Come on!\" Lyndis cried, breaking into a run towards the cave. It could not have been that bad, as judging by the tracks, both of them had walked away from whatever happened. Although, with the amount of blood she saw, she did not know how one of them wasn't dead already. A grim image of Veledar appeared in her mind, as only he would have that much blood to smear along the snow on his way to the cave.\n\nLyndis was most relieved when she walked up to the cave to find that the two were playfully rolling around the cavern floor. She did not even take notice of the table, the torches, or the food. She was just happy to see her party members alive and in good health.\n\n[ Treasure of the Aegis ]\n\nLyndis finished the rest of her tale with Arcturus leaning against Veledar's scales. The red had listened well enough, to the point where the dragon didn't even interrupt the story after Merlia scolded them.\n\n\"Wonder what's with all the decorations for this fancy cave of yours. You two could not possibly have gotten all of this in here by yourselves,\" Lyndis raised an eyebrow as she put more food onto her plate.\n\n\"Maybe we did. Not like you were here to keep an eye on me.\" Veledar snorted.\n\n\"Or learn the secrets of dragon magic,\" Arcturus whispered.\n\n\"Or that!\" the dragon brought his head down and nuzzled through the paladin's hair. \"Quick thinking there, partner.\" He said in return before picking his head up, then flashing a toothy smile at Lyndis. \"Oh, it must be inspiring to live with someone as talented as me. Right, half-elf?\"\n\n\"I've seen better,\" Lyndis bit onto a chicken leg and chewed a couple of times before the words sunk in deep enough to make her eyebrows furrow. \"Wot did you call me? I'm a fockin' adventurer, ya whelp! Been travelin' the land while you practiced the art of sleeping like the lazy wyrm you are!\"\n\n\"You caught me, Lyndis,\" Veledar put a paw to his chest. \"It burns to have the truth splattered all over my scales. In fact, we dragons don't even need sleep. Laying down with our eyes closed is merely an enjoyable activity we use to trick the other mortals into believing we're similar.\" Veledar took a quick breath. \"While I'm at it, we also don't require such base necessities like food or drink, and our eggs sprout from the ground after we bathe it in flames!\"\n\nLyndis placed her chicken back in the bowl. Eyes narrowed, with a scowl about her face, she pointed the goblet she grabbed at the dragon's snout. \"You takin' the piss with me, dragon?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. Why would I do that?\" Veledar cocked his head to look not only confused, but also harmed by the half-elf's words. \"Eons ago, our mother Bahamut cursed us to speak only the truth. It's very similar to the words he babbles when he trains,\" Veledar nudged Arcturus again, who just shoved the snout back with both hands.\n\n\"That's not something to make fun of, you little monk. What code do you live by, eh?\" The human lunged to grab onto one of the dragon's wings. \"The code of eating? Or is it TICKLING?\"\n\n\"Rawwraaahh!\" Veledar swiped his paw around, trying to get the human away from his sensitive membranes\u2026only that Arcturus dodged around and vaulted over his limbs with the agility of a fairy. \"Stop. Cease that!\" Veledar snarled. \"Blasted tickling mink! Your dragon overlord orders you to-\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. Can't hear you over all the growling!\" Arcturus' maneuvers took him behind the dragon, where he straddled the dragon's tail in order to tickle both of his wings at the same time.\n\nVeledar found it infuriating, thrashing about like an untamed beast, while Lyndis and Merlia were laughing their hearts out, going as far as placing bets on who'd win. However, in spite of Arcturus' nimbleness, Veledar had to get lucky only once to dislodge the paladin from his back and restrain him underfoot.\n\n\"Not so funny now, is it?\" the dragon approached his snout to the human's flushed face. In spite of his tiredness -and drunkiness-Arcturus still kept a serious face on. \"Maybe I should get you out of these clothes and repay you in kind.\"\n\n\"Oh noes! I denna think I'm drunk enough ta see dat kind 'o ticklin,\" Merlia drained her mug with a long swig to cover her eyes with it. \"Dere. Ye can hug an' kiss an' do wateva' long as ye keep me ears outta it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, please keep your passions in check until you're secluded in your little private chamber. Feasting isn't all that glamorous when I have a dragon and his human smack their drooly lips together.\" Lyndis added.\n\n\"Hey, nobody said we-\"\n\n\"No way!\" Arcturus cut through the dragon's words, pushing him off. \"Get this thing off me, you big, gnarly lizard?\"\n\nVeledar did, though he wrinkled his snout at the paladin's compliment. \"Arcturus saved my life, but I don't like him THAT much. Especially when he besmirches my beauty with his ill-intentioned comments.\"\n\n\"Aye, you insufferable scale-head,\" Arcturus exchanged a quick eye contact with the dragon before he started to dust himself off. \"We're just friends. Not even best friends. Just good ones.\"\n\n\"Who, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, ended up in this cave, alone.\"\n\n\"With him bleeding all over the ground,\" Arcturus pointed over at the dragon, who nodded his head and agreed with everything that came out of the human's mouth. At the end of that awkward amount of explanation, they resumed their seats at the table, and, in Veledar's case, his original string of thought.\n\n\"So you see, my dear master of evasive charms and shadows, we dragons have a secret compartment were we stash food and furniture, among other important items of course.\" He said, holding his snout up. There was a pregnant pause as Arcturus and the others just sat in silence.\n\n\"Does that include presents for your lover?\" Lyndis raised an eyebrow. \"Cause even after that mile-long explanation, I still notice the way you look at him.\"\n\n\"Hmph, I guess you don't get sarcastic humor, or the fact that I'm heavily in his debt after what he did to me after I passed out,\" He closed his eyes. Everyone burst out chuckling and laughing.\n\n\"No. No. No! I didn't mean-That wasn't the joke!\" Veledar shoved the human forward. \"Arcturus, explain to these two harpies that they are laughing at the wrong part of my joke for all the wrong reason!\"\n\n\"Wha' just came outta yer mouth?\" Merlia shouted as Lyndis and Arcturus continued laughing. \"C'mon, say it again. What did ya call me, ye scaly rug?\"\n\nVeledar moved behind Arcturus. \"Well you see, I referred to you as a harpy. You know, one of those screechy ladies with feathery wings.\" He stuck his tongue out at her playfully. Merlia waved a turkey leg at the dragon and gave him the stink eye.\n\n\"Someday, that mouth o'yers is gonna get ya in trouble!\"\n\n\"Never did so far,\" Veledar turned towards Lyndis. \"As for you, dear Lyndis, I believe the cave has a spell cast upon it that creates whatever I want, as long as I visualize the particular object in my mind.\" Veledar stepped around Arcturus. \"Dragon magic is such a marvel, isn't it?\"\n\n\"That is a neat little trick to have. Wonder why it is you that can create things. I honestly wish the places we visited had the charm of this cave.\" Lyndis smiled, then took a bite from her meal.\n\n\"Probably a leftover spell left behind by Mother to accommodate in case her son visited. Or maybe it applies to all dragons. No way to know for sure unless I make you all sprout scales, right?\" Veledar cocked his head to the side like he did whenever he was feeling smart or guilty.\n\n\"Like that's ever going to happen,\" Lyndis said. \"So, you know what happened to us, but what about your romantic story of blood, death, and revival? Last I heard, you were being chased by gryphons. Then there was all the blood splattered outside. I was afraid one of you was going to be stiff as the stone. Which reminds me,\" The rogue stood up to walk over and placed a finger on Arcturus. With a quick flash of purple light, all the blood stains on his clothes were gone. \"Little prestidigitation. Cleans up clothes faster than his tongue.\" She made a quick funny gesture at Veledar.\n\n\"Gratitude,\" Arcturus mumbled. He guessed he did not even notice the messy state of his clothes with everything that followed the discovery of this cave.\n\nArcturus looked over to the dragon, who was busy slurping more wine from a barrel. Lyndis' words made him think back to how his friend had laid so broken before him. Past all the jokes and food. there was real pain to talk about; so Arcturus told Lyndis and Merlia the story of Veledar's flight through the sky. Garroth's pursuit, and the dreaded crash that had almost claimed the dragon's life. He watched Lyndis' eyes light up with worry as he described the extent of the dragon's wounds. Luckily, her concerned gaze quickly shifted to one of curiosity.\n\n\"He doesn't look too worse for wear now. I wonder how his wounds healed so well. Did you kiss him on the snout like that prince charming you humans love to write about?\"\n\n\"I am naturally a fast healer.\" Veledar said, puffing out his chest, \"And that's just one of my many amazing abilities as a dragon.\"\n\n\"Even so.\" Lyndis said, voice full of skepticism.\" It sounds like you should be dead, oh, amazing one.\"\n\n\"Well that is a different story, I-\" began Arcturus.\n\nVeledar then extended a wing to block off Arcturus from Lyndis, \"Pleaded for my life to the dragon goddess Bahamut, who was kind enough to heal my wounds.\" Veledar interrupted.\n\n\"Really?\" he heard Lyndis reply, \"I don't picture you pleading for anything. Some little spark in me tells me that you might be lying, your greatness.\"\n\nArcturus grabbed the dragon's wing and forcibly folded it to once again see the half elf.\n\n\"It was sort of like that, except Bahamut made me her paladin to save this one's life.\"\n\nArcturus held up a hand and thought back to earlier, on how he had healed Veledar's wounds. His focus was rewarded with the white glow he became familiar with.\n\n\"And you doubted me like a bunch of silly harpies,\" Veledar hissed.\n\n\"You did not tell the whole story!\" she shot back.\n\nLyndis then leaped towards Arcturus, grabbed his hand, and held it close to her amber eyes. She bombarded him with questions like how this new power felt, if it made any changes to his body or carried any obvious side effects. He answered each one in turn, watching as each answer simply added to her curiosity.\n\n\"Okay, okay. This story sounds reasonable after you explained everything that happened.\" She took another swig of wine. \"So I figure Crimson Sky's plan is to simply get drunk and wait for his mother to return?\"\n\nArcturus began to nod as Veledar let everyone know his thoughts on the matter. \"Yes, dear Lyndis, that is indeed my master plan...won't mother be surprised after she sees all these barrels?\"\n\n\"I bet she will.\" Lyndis chuckled. \"Course, I think we all need such moments after the days we had. And since you are such a good host, can you think of some more delicious food and wine to dull the mind and raise the spirits? Try to picture up some better wine than what we had so far. Not that it isn't good, but I'm sure a splendorous male like yourself can do better.\"\n\nArcturus watched the dragon sit perfectly still as he was no doubt picturing what Lyndis had asked of him. On the table, instead of empty mugs, breadcrumbs and chewed bones, suddenly appeared another feast. The wine bottles were refilled, and of course Veledar's barrels soared along with them.\n\n\"Are you satisfied with my incredible abilities now?\" He grinned, opening his eyes with a tap of his tail.\n\nLyndis grabbed a bottle, some more food, then replied with a cheerful, \"I could kiss your scaly tail right now!\"\n\nArcturus grabbed some more food for his plate, mashed potatoes, and some peas. \"Tell me, Crimson Sky, what is in this book of yours? I know you explained why it was so important to you, but what's really in it?\"\n\n\"The book that was stolen from me? It has writings in it, of course.\" The dragon turned away, obviously trying to avoid the subject.\n\n\"You didn't answer the question, O', scaly one.\" He said, pushing the dragon a bit.\n\n\"Ah....well\u2026\" Veledar turned to each one of them before sighing and closing his eyes. \"It is a hatchling book. Filled with stories of valiant dragons.\n\n\"You mean ta tell me, yer willin ta go bring yerself ta near death ova a children story?\" Merlia burst out.\n\n\"And let them get away with stealing it? No way that's going to happen. Besides it being a strong memory of my mother and brother, I cannot let him, even if he is a king, to get away with that.\" Veledar growled.\n\n\"Besides, with all of your help, once we get inside and have the king where we want him, I'm sure he will tell us where this precious item of mine is.\"\n\n\"Why would he go about telling us such a silly piece of information?\" Lyndis asked.\n\n\"Oh, dearest Lyndis, you know that I am a dragon. So, by extension, you know I can be quite persuasive when the need strikes.\" Veledar snorted, letting a small plume of black smoke escape his nostrils.\n\n\"Now I'm curious about one thing. What accounts as children stories to a dragon.\" Arcturus asked.\n\n\"Still nagging me? After I have spilled my heart out to you?\"\n\nArcturus stared at the dragon without even blinking. He just took another sip of wine, then downed it in one single gulp.\n\n\"Curse you!\" Veledar cried, throwing his head back in a hiss of laughter. \"It is the story of an evil dragon that had enslaved the whole world in his claws. Then, a heroic dragon rises against him, and being beset upon by all sides by the evil dragon's minions, he emerges victorious through cunning and courage. He takes the villain's magic items and such, locking them away in a place where evil can never use them again,\" Veledar waved his paw dismissively at the last part. \"Are you satisfied?\"\n\n\"I most am now, kind dragon. Thank you for sharing.\" Arcturus replied.\n\n\"Why lock the magic items away instead of destroying them? Seems to me they would simply fall into the wrong hands later.\" Lyndis reclined in her chair with a creaking of the wood.\n\n\"Lyndis\u2026isn't your throat starting to sting after all these questions you ask? It is because dragons don't destroy beautifully created items. Even if they were weapons.\" Veledar turned to her, speaking as if to a child.\n\nLyndis seemed to catch onto this as she narrowed her eyes and shot daggers with them at the dragon. Merlia just let out a loud laugh, followed by a loud burp.\n\n\"Reminds me of home, da bickerin, da drinken, ah, tis good.\"\n\n\"Really? A dragon, human, and half-elf remind you of home?\" Veledar tilted his head to the side.\n\n\"Well\u2026 close is a betta word fer it. Bein da middle child of eighteen brothers an sisters, ya see a lot o dis.\" She then held up a hand, \"Before ye can say anytin, yes, me mum and dad got busy a lot. No dat is not usual for dwarves.\" She took another swig of wine, letting out a satisfied gasp.\n\n\"See, Crimson Sky here reminds me of me brother, Ustis, always full of himself and quick to act. Lyndis dere is like me sister Rita, who always likes ta push buttons and see what she can git away wit.\"\n\n\"And whom does Arcturus remind you of?\" Veledar grinned, \"An uptight uncle? Or a nervous runt of the family?\"\n\nEveryone let out a chuckle as Arcturus simply stared at the dragon.\n\n\"Oh, come now, Arcturus, it was just a jest.\" Veledar said, strolling over and wrapping a wing around the human, then turned back to the others and said in a hushed voice, \"He's a bit sensitive on the ears.\"\n\n\"I heard that,\" He replied, trying to shove the dragon away, but the wing held tight.\n\n\"Oh, I know you did, my bipedal, skinny little hatchling,\" Veledar leaned in with his snout, then suddenly stopped. He sniffed in deeply, then grinned. \"Did you know you smell good?\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Arcturus asked, taken aback by the strange nature of the question. He was not sure how to respond to that as Veledar moved in, and despite his squirming, started sniffing his hair.\n\n\"You don't smell like you did before. You smell more like a dragon.\" Veledar explained, each word accompanied with a sniff.\n\n\"Yea, because I have a dragon that won't stop grabbing at every part of me!\" Arcturus said, still trying to shove the persistent dragon away from him. He turned to the girls, \"Ladies, can you help me get this ornery bastard off?\"\n\nLyndis stifled a laugh, and Merlia just burst out once again. \"I tink you will do a fine job gittin da dragon off.\"\n\nWith a final shove, he was finally able to get the dragon away from him.\n\n\"What was that about?\" he asked. Veledar sat down on his haunches, still looking at him.\n\n\"You just smell different! Why is that so difficult to believe? By Bahamut's light. You would think you'd take that as a well-meant compliment. Figures it's beyond a human to take a compliment from a dragon.\" Veledar replied, but Arcturus noticed he was fidgeting. It looked, by the way his muscles tensed, that he was bracing himself for something. Was he trying to goad him into tackling games? He watched Veledar get up and start to stroll right past him, the dragon's eyes on him the entire time. Arcturus feigned a pounce at the dragon for Veledar to suddenly leap away.\n\n\"Aha! You were trying to start another grapple!\" He shouted as Veledar started hissing in laughter.\n\n\"Well played, Arcturus. You have picked apart the veil of my expertly crafted plans.\" Veledar said, giving a slight bow. The dragon returned to the table and started feasting once again, although he almost knocked Lyndis out of her chair.\n\n\"Watch where you're fockin going!\" the princess barely caught herself from falling.\n\nThe night continued with revelry as the group tried darts from Merlia's pack. The dwarf, of course, was the best at it, nearly getting bull's eyes the entire time. Veledar on the other hand complained about the dart's size for ages. After another round of drinks and a round of giggling laughter, Veledar tried once again to sniff Arcturus, however, this time, the human thankfully remained out of the dragon's grasp.\n\nWhen they were all starting to tire from the revelry, Veledar summoned up some beds for them to sleep on, while the tables, food, and drink vanished into thin air. Arcturus climbed in the bed meant for him, which was very similar to the one he had at home. However, despite how much it looked like it, the bed hardly felt or smelled the same. He looked over to Veledar. The dragon had curled up on a bed of cushions and blankets. He looked peaceful as he clutched the small form of a stuffed purple dragon he had conjured up.\n\nAlthough Arcturus sighed in relief that the dragon finally had a stuffed animal to use, he felt a hint of disappointment in the back of his mind. He missed the warmth of the dragon, along with the soothing sound of his heartbeat. Arcturus shook his head and settled his head into his pillow. There would be time to talk about that tomorrow, so he closed his eyes and let sleep take him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The next morning, Arcturus awoke soundly, stifling a loud yawn as he stretched out within the sheets. He looked around the dimly lit cave. It looked like Lyndis was still asleep in a bed covered in blue and gold; Drenedar's colors. Arcturus sat up, noticing that Merlia could not be found within the cave. He scanned several times with his eyes to confirm this, then pushed the worry from his mind as he figured she was simply out hunting for breakfast or doing her usual dwarf things. Lastly, Arcturus looked over to the sleeping form of Veledar, who was still curled up on his cushions. With each breath, the dragon had bits of smoke escape from his nostrils. Arcturus figured the dragon would have a hangover. The amount of drink he had the night before was a tale in itself.\n\nArcturus rummaged through his pack to find a roll of toilet tissue along with a small shovel. He did not relish the idea of heading out into the snow to do this task, but nevertheless, it needed to be done. With a sigh, he left the cavern to be greeted by the sun just starting to rise over the mountains. Arcturus breathed in deep, his breath letting him know just how cold it was, almost making the moist air that rushed out look like a dragon's smoke. If only he could warm up the air around him with a spell...With a sigh, Arcturus went as quickly as he could about his business, then returned to the toasty comfort of the cave.\n\nHe placed his things back into the pack, noting that Veledar had rolled over so that his belly was facing towards the ceiling. Arcturus grinned at such wondrous sight. He would have to remember this undignified way his friend was sleeping in. It would probably annoy the dragon that his regal attitude would be a tad tarnished, although this was one of the many things Arcturus cooked up on his list of mischief. He snickered, starting his morning stretches with a smile on his face.\n\nWith his eyes closed, the paladin focused on his movements, just like he had done every morning. This time, he also tried to focus on his new powers. Maybe he would gain some insight into the strange power that cured wounds no man ever heard of. He had gotten halfway through his routine when he felt a pair of eyes on him. He opened his own to find Veledar within arm's reach, mimicking his movements. Arcturus did not know how the dragon had been so quiet as to avoid detection. Perhaps he had been too deep in thought to notice.\n\n\"How's the head?\" Arcturus gestured towards a mug of ale. \"Must have been quite a night for your stomach to make sense of all that alcohol.\"\n\n\"Not as bad as you might think. Dragons have a stomach for such things.\" Veledar replied, puffing his chest out, making Arcturus roll his eyes.\n\n\"Will you ever admit your shortcomings? Just a little one, at least? Nobody's perfect, you know.\"\n\n\"Perhaps\u2026\" The dragon lowered his head so that the two of them stared into each other's eyes, \"but that doesn't stop me from trying.\"\n\nArcturus returned to his last set of movements, arms stertched, palms open. If you had told him months ago that he would be in a cave, doing his morning ritual with a dragon right beside him, shadowing every movement, he would not have believed one word of it.\n\n\"Did you see Merlia leave?\" Veledar asked, copying Arcturus perfectly. \"I noticed that she is not to be found within the cave.\"\n\n\"I figured she is out hunting or something, although I can't imagine why, when we can simply summon all the food we need here.\"\n\n\"Take it from a predator of no equal. Nothing beats the thrill of the hunt, or taking pride in your success after a difficult chase.\" Veledar replied with a grin. The dragon's stomach gave a loud grumble, causing him to grab at it and look down. \"Although I think this morning I will go with the conjured food. We don't need your old, crazy, sword-for-hire friend spot me in the sky a second time.\" The last part must've been quite distasteful as Veledar wrinkled his snout.\n\n\"Garroth's gone to explain his failures and honor new contracts. He won't be bothering us unless we're stupid. And we're not stupid, right?\"\n\nThe dragon gave a quick nod of his head. He closed his eyes once again and thought on the morning menu. The tables and chairs from last night reappeared in an instant, although now they had breakfast food upon them, with steaming hot coffee replacing the wine. Arcturus felt his mouth water from the smells of the eggs, toast, waffles, bacon, and other assortments of incredible foods.\n\n\"Well, I figure I can eat as well now that my concentration has been blown to pieces. You do know how to distract me, Veledar.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can distract you?\" The dragon replied, showing off his teeth with a coy grin.\n\n\"Aye.\" Arcturus chuckled, taking a seat beside the dragon, who had settled onto his haunches at the table. Arcturus emulated his example by sitting on a chair. He picked up a fork and dug it into a stack of toast, pulling it over to his plate and taking a bite. He only stopped his eating to sip from his coffee. That's when Lyndis came over and sat into her chair without a word.\n\n\"Have a good night Lyn\u2026\" Veledar went to say, moving his snout lower towards her. She held up a hand and silenced the dragon by placing her hand on his snout.\n\n\"After my coffee, Crimson Sky.\" She grumbled, not even turning her head towards him.\n\n\"Fine, fine.\" Veledar pouted. \"But mark my words. I will have my revenge.\"\n\n\"Yea, whatever you say, wise lord.\" She grabbed a cup of coffee with two hands and took the smell of it with a satisfied sigh.\n\nThey ate in silence after that. Arcturus kept eyeing Veledar, and the dragon kept looking to him and Lyndis as if planning his next move. He was about to ask what it was about when Merlia strolled in from the entrance.\n\n\"Well good ta see ya sleepy heads up! Thought ye were goin to sleep da day away!\"\n\nThe dwarf strolled over to the table and clasped her hands together loudly.\n\n\"Looks like ya got quite da spread dere.\" She said, \"Don' mind if I do,\" she continued, taking a bit of everything onto a plate of her own. \"Ya know, you humans haf ta be given credit fer coffee. It's da best ting ta have in the mornin.\"\n\n\"That's not true. The best thing in the morning is the morning hunt, closely followed by the first breath of fire.\" Veledar announced loudly and proudly.\n\n\"Oh really? Well, some of us arn't fire breathin' scaly birds, are we?\" she laughed, taking a bite of bacon.\n\n\"I am not a bird. Clearly, I am a dragon, and if you are dense like the stone beneath your\u2026\" Veledar said as he started to trail off. \"But of course, you already know who I am, what I am. You're trying to provoke me, Merlia, and that is not a wise decision when I speak from an empty stomach.\" He squinted his eyes as everyone held back a laugh. \"Fine, I guess I will go about finding the REAL entrance to my mother's cave while you eat.\" Veledar stood up and strolled over to the far cavern wall, with his snout held high, and his tail swaying as he walked.\n\nArcturus turned to the others as they continued to eat as if nothing happened. \"I best go see what that silly winged lizard is doing before he brings down the cave or something worse on our heads.\"\n\nThe girls just nodded through mouths full of food as Arcturus stood up. He turned around and made his way swiftly to the dragon who had started pacing along the wall. Veledar had his left paw on it, touching and scraping in locations. The red dragon seemed to ignore him as he stood there, but he did see the dragon's eyes find him once or twice for a moment before he continued with his inspection of the wall.\n\nAt some point in his search, Veledar sat on his haunches and touched a claw to his snout, as if in deep thought.\n\n\"Your mother\u2026she do this kind of stuff before?\" Arcturus finally asked the silent dragon.\n\n\"Of course she did. She would move her entrance around on us when we were but a bunch of underdeveloped scales and tiny, flappy wings.\"\n\n\"Wait. You mean to tell me that\u2026\" the human gave a shake of his head. \"Gods, this sounds just as ridiculous as the infinite food spell, but did she move the entrance to her cave\u2026in another place?\" Arcturus asked. \"Surely she did not hire people to move her treasure afterwards.\"\n\n\"You're thinking just like a human, Arcturus. Mundane. My mother connected her cave to another plane of existence, all for the purpose of hiding her treasure. Think of it like one of those magical bags of holding.\" Veledar gestured to one of Arcturus' coin purses. \"Just think of it like that, on a much, much larger scale.\"\n\n\"Bag of holding?\" Arcturus asked. He figured it was a magical item of sorts, obviously meant to hold things.\n\n\"Yes, they are much bigger on the inside. I had heard stories that adventurers simply love those spacious things. Mother's treasure trove was sort of like that. Too big for any other place to hold it,\" Veledar explained. Suddenly, he stopped as his claw touched the wall. \"Aha!\" he cried out.\n\nArcturus looked to the dragon's sharp claw tip. It simply looked like a normal spot to him. Veledar then traced a line with the claw towards the cavern floor before walking over a few paces and tracing the same line up. Arcturus could see that, as the dragon worked. a large grin spread over his snout, his chest swollen with bursting pride. Veledar finished his work by letting out a harsh growl, but Arcturus figured he had just said something in draconic.\n\nVeledar looked back for a moment as a red glowing light emerged from the place where the dragon had drawn the line with his claw. It looked like the outline of a door, fifteen feet roughly high, and twenty feet wide. Arcturus felt his jaw open and stay agape as the wall then parted into two sections that slowly gave way to a tunnel. The tunnel seemed to go off towards the left, and its floor was made of rough, uneven stone.\n\n\"May want to close your ugly human snout,\" Veledar said with an amused snort. \"Save your awe for when you see my mother's enormous hoard.\"\n\nArcturus looked back towards the girls, who were still eating. They seemed to be unfazed by the fact that a large door had just appeared and opened.\n\n\"Come. Let's go see it for a moment. I am sure they won't mind in the slightest.\"\n\nArcturus thought about the dragon's offer for a moment, then his thoughts began to race at what they were going to see. Surely it could not be that much. He pictured a large room, perhaps filled to the ceiling with coins and gems...\n\n\"Arcturus?\" Veledar snapped Arcturus out of his day dream.\n\nVeledar had moved ahead twenty feet and was gesturing for Arcturus to follow.\n\n\"Going to scout ahead, lasses!\" Arcturus cried out back to his companions.\n\n\"Don't get yourself killed by falling rocks or smothered by that lizard's snout!\" Lyndis replied through a new mouthful of food.\n\nArcturus shrugged off that joke, took a deep breath, and followed his friend into the tunnel. On his way, he picked up a torch that was lining the walls. It was a relief, not to have to walk in the dark and rely on Veledar's eyes the entire time. He planned to ask how far they had to go when he accidentally bumped into Veledar when the dragon suddenly stopped still. Arcturus made his way to his friend's side and gasped at what he saw. What lay before him was something no man could imagine. Not even in his wildest dreams could he picture a hoard like this. Mountains of gold coins as far as his eyes could see. Every so often, there was a small bowl of fire that would illuminate the metallic coins around them with a warm glow. Among the sea of gold, he spied specks of every color, no doubt gems stashed away within the hoard. He could not tear his eyes away from the shiny metals, for the longer he stared, the more and more he could see scattered within the treasure trove.\n\nHe saw bookcases with rows upon rows of books, weapons, art of all sorts, and even suits of armor on stands. Within the vast sea of treasure there was path, a division within the gold, obviously meant to be walked upon. It was roughly fifteen feet wide and seemed to be made of silver coins. From the edge of his vision he saw Veledar's snout get close to his face. So close that he could touch it by simply reaching out.\n\n\"I told you.\" The dragon nuzzled his cheek. \"Behold my mother's hoard! No doubt the greatest treasure trove in the entire land, if not the entire world!\"\n\nArcturus heard Veledar boast before, but this sounded a bit different. Was that jealousy that he heard in his voice? He grinned as he crossed his arms. \"Gods above\u2026you're jealous!\"\n\n\"I am not jealous of my mother, you silly human. That would be RIDICULOUS!\" Veledar replied. However, Arcturus noticed that the dragon would not look at him when he said that.\n\n\"Yet here we are, dragon-jealous-of-his-own-mother's-treasure-trove.\"\n\nVeledar only held up his head for a moment before letting out a large groan. \"Fine. Yes, as a hatchling, and even when I was younger, I yearned to have all of this.\" Veledar held out his paws and gestured to all of the treasure. \"I mean, what dragon wouldn't dream of something so vast? However, I grew up, realigned my priorities, realized life's not only a quest for treasure.\"\n\nArcturus' grin grew larger as Veledar still kept his head away as he spoke.\n\n\"That has to be the worst singular lie I've heard from you. I can practically see that jealousy as you look out at all that bounty of jewels and gold. Admit it, dearest Veledar.\"\n\n\"No.\" Veledar replied, sticking his tongue out.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Fine!\" Veledar hissed, then groaned loudly. \"I am incredibly jealous of my mother's ability to amass such riches. She almost never left us alone for more than a couple of days. How in the world did she get her paws on\u2026on this glimmering mountain of pure beauty?!\"\n\n\"So why not fly ahead and greet her? I'll get the others and follow the path to catch up.\" Arcturus said, patting Veledar's side.\n\n\"I can't do that. Would be rude to abandon my guests.\"\n\n\"Can't a grown dragon go about seeing his mother when he pleases?\"\n\n\"It's a tad more complicated than that.\" Veledar fidgeted, then turned his snout as if to look for his mother. \"I brought you three to her lair, I need to lead you to her. To let you three wander would be rude and foolish,\" Veledar grinned, showing off his teeth. \"Besides, you get the benefit of my company!\"\n\n\"Come on. We both know there's more to that. You don't want to let her know something is wrong. Or that you might be desperate for help.\" Arcturus added, to which Veledar simply answered with a silent growl, although the dragon did look to him out of the corner of his eye. Arcturus figured he had hit it right on the head.\n\n\"What ever gave you the idea that I was desperate?\"\n\n\"The incident with the gryphons is pretty obvious. I figure you might take your time explaining the situation to her. Then ask her for help without actually asking for it.\"\n\n\"Bahamut's platinum scales\u2026you might understand dragons better than I thought.\" Veledar tapped the tip of a claw to a coin on the ground. Then the dragon turned around, his tail passing inches over Arcturus' head. He followed the dragon back through the tunnel. It did not take long to get back to the main cave. Lyndis had packed her things and was meditating on a small rug that she had laid out. The rug was of course blue and gold. Merlia had both hands cupping the little orb of light that was Ulga. She appeared to be whispering to it, if her closeness was any indication.\n\nArcturus made his way to his armor and started to strap the pieces one by one. He paused as he looked to the tabard that had been practically shredded to pieces, now back to a pristine condition. He shifted his gaze up to find Lyndis looking at him.\n\n\"Figured I'd fix it with another prestidigitation. Can't have you running around with a ruined tabard.\" The half-elf smiled.\n\nArcturus offered her a quick thanks and continued putting on his gambeson and armor. He would have to thank Matilda a thousand times every time the armor attached itself at the mere press of a rune. Not only did it save him plenty of time donning the entire suit of his armor, but it allowed him to do it himself. He stopped as it occurred to him he was being watched. He turned to find Veledar sitting on his haunches, staring at him intently.\n\n\"You know, if I had killed you, I would have taken your armor and hung it in my lair.\" The dragon said.\n\n\"Touching, to think you would've held on to a piece of me long past my death.\" He replied, giving Veledar a glare.\n\nRealizing his error, Veledar soon continued further, \"I mean to say that anything magical in nature should be treasured. I was trying to pay your fancy steel suit, and thus you, a compliment.\"\n\nIf Arcturus knew better, he believed he just saw a look of embarrassment on the dragon's snout.\n\n\"Now, continuing about the armor, who made it for you?\" Veledar inched closer and grabbed Arcturus' right arm, his grasp firm, but not to the point of hurting the man inside. Veledar held fast as Arcturus tried to pull his arm away. The dragon held out a claw and traced it over one of the small runes on the vambraces.\n\n\"All of these pieces have fine craftsmanship. It's obvious you didn't make it.\"\n\n\"How did you know that?\" He replied, slightly offended that Veledar simply could not fathom a paladin making anything as grand as a suit of self-attaching plate.\n\n\"I have observed your talents, and trust me I, don't think you would spend your time donning the role of a blacksmith, unless you're hiding that part of yourself from me.\"\n\n\"Well I did mention I like to paint, so I do create when the possibility arises.\"\n\n\"I remember that.\" Veledar smirked, no doubt remembering the night before. \"However, painting is not the same as creating magical armor.\"\n\n\"Fine, you inquisitive beast. A gnome made it for me. One going by the name of Matilda. She was one of my remaining friends back in Entis. You should actually meet her, now that I think about it.\"\n\n\"And just why should I grant this gnome my esteemed presence?\" Veledar replied, letting go and starting to circle him closely. It was obvious he was still inspecting the armor.\n\n\"Why have you not done this before? We have been traveling for a quite some time now.\" Arcturus tried to push Veledar away lightly, but the dragon did not yield and continued his inspection.\n\n\"I figured I was doing more important things. Now back to your gnome friend, and the clever way you avoided my question.\"\n\n\"Thought it's obvious by now. She loves magical things, items, armor, weapons, and even creatures. I think it is kind of a fancy of hers to meet a dragon in person. Well, one not like Dread Flame. You get my meaning.\"\n\n\"I will have to think about it, granted, if she shows the interest you speak of.\"\n\n\"So let me get this right. You only want to meet her if she fawns over you?\" Arcturus smirked as he grabbed his vambraces and attached them. He clenched his gloved hand, testing the feel. Thankfully, he found everything snug. Next up, he swung his pack around his back, stowed his longsword, and picked up his shield. He looked up to see that Merlia and Lyndis had strolled on over. They had all their gear ready as well. Lyndis was the first to talk and asked the same question about Veledar going on ahead to meet his mother. Veledar just sighed and gave her the same answer that he had given him. Arcturus noted the slight hint of confusion on her face.\n\n\"Should we expect trouble then?\" Lyndis asked, looking past the dragon, into the depths of the tunnel.\n\nVeledar seemed slightly taken aback. \"Of course not. My mother would never harm me or my guests. Now, if you were not invited, you might be in trouble because she might think you were thieves.\" With that final word, Veledar turned his eyes to some other place.\n\n\"Well, how big is it?\" Lyndis asked, her eyes seeming to grow in size.\n\n\"It is rather hard to do it justice with mere words, but it's probably the most amount of coin and treasure I have ever seen.\" Arcturus blurted out, causing Veledar to turn his snout to him.\n\nLyndis dismissively waved at Arcturus. \"I'll be the judge of that. I have certainly seen a lot of coin in my time.\"\n\n\"That so?\" Merlia replied with a sly grin.\n\nArcturus was about to ask Merlia why Ulga had not reformed yet, yet instead, he had to rush after Lyndis, who started sprinting down the tunnel. He followed the half-elf down the route Veledar had brought him until he was once again standing before the great hoard of treasure. Lyndis stood unmoving and speechless, Merlia joined them and added, \"By Thor's beard...\"\n\n\"This has to be a trick! No way this is real!\" Shouted Lyndis, spinning around and pointing her finger at Veledar.\n\n\"There isn't even this much treasure in all of Drenedar's vaults. This has got to be an illusion. No dragon can ever gather this amount on its own. What, are you going to tell me your mother can will gold and jewels into existence? It certainly worked with our meal back there.\"\n\nVeledar held a paw up to his chest, \"My dear Lyndis, I assure you, everything your eyes see is real.\" His lips stretched into a toothy smile, \"But I'm glad my mother's hoard got that reaction out of you. It's funny when an experienced adventurer makes that kind of face.\"\n\n\"Alright then, red butt. Why are you so proud of it all of a sudden? It isn't your treasure yet. I figure that a proud dragon like you, who has to state how amazing he is every few minutes you, would be jealous before proud of something greater than his.\"\n\nArcturus held back a laughter filled snort. Somehow, Lyndis had hit the nail right on the head.\n\n\"Not a word unless you want to replace my toy tonight,\" Veledar growled quietly at him.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind that.\" Arcturus chuckled.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nThe dragon's eyes widened a little. With hope or excitement, Arcturus did not know.\n\nVeledar then started leading them along the silver coin-laden path.\n\n\"You see, Lyndis, all of this -as in every coin, sword, book, gear, shield, and scale polishing tool you can find-will be mine in due time.\"\n\nThat surprised Arcturus. He always considered dragons hid everything from their families. Or was it simply possible that Veledar's family was something of an exception in that regard? He had assumed that even in death, a dragon would refuse to part ways with their hard-earned hoard.\n\n\"Why would she do that? Arcturus, is this normal for dragons?\" Lyndis asked.\n\n\"Why would you ask the human about what is normal for a dragon?\" Veledar snorted.\n\n\"I would not know,\" Arcturus replied. \"I have actually heard the opposite is common.\" He then looked up to Veledar. \"Although I find with each passing day that Veledar here is something of a conundrum in many ways. He's...special.\"\n\nVeledar grinned at being called special and returned his gaze to Lyndis, \"If you must know,\" he started inspecting a grandfather clock that was half buried in coins, still ticking away. \"My family left behind the tradition of being buried along with one's treasure. We instead passed it to the next of kin. That way, the hoard would grow and grow, reaching the amazing size you can see right now, before your very eyes.\"\n\n\"Speakin of which.\" Merlia suddenly said, \"I been meanin ta ask ya that, Crimson Sky.\" The dwarf lifted an eyebrow and moved her hands to her hips. \"How is it yer mum is silver and ya happen to be red? Do dragons just turn any color they want?\"\n\n\"Merlia, you wee dwarven lass,\" Veledar replied, continuing down the silver path, occasionally brushing coins back into their piles with his tail. \"I was adopted by the owner of this fine cave. She said she found me in the wilderness, hunting for myself, tougher than most hatchlings she had seen.\"\n\nArcturus saw the look of pride grow on the dragon's crimson snout once again. It seemed that, even when talking about himself as a mere child, it was something the red male took pride in. They moved around something that looked like a royal stage coach. It had banners along its white frame, blue and gold, clearly from Drenadar. Arcturus only gave it a momentary glance before walking past it, only stopping when Lyndis shouted out the obvious.\n\n\"What is your mother doing with a royal carriage!?\"\n\nArcturus turned around to see a look of confusion and rage on her cherry red face.\n\n\"Does she go about stealing my people's things?\"\n\nBefore Arcturus could speak, Veledar sped right past him, his tail brushing against his side before the dragon was right next to Lyndis.\n\n\"Again, you jump to the wrong set of conclusions. I can assure you, from one friend to another, that everything in this hoard was either gift from a benevolent patron, or taken from people of ill repute. My mother was a paragon of goodness and an example to all dragon kind, not just me.\" Veledar said in a soothing voice. \"I saved you all numerous times. We ate together, drank together, adventured together. My mother's better than I. Try to imagine how that looks.\"\n\nThe comparison seemed to calm Lyndis down as she touched the wooden carriage with the palm of her left hand.\n\n\"Alright, I believe you, Crimson Sky. Sorry for the outburst back there. I'm just\u2026adventuring always has you assume the worst, you know? That's how you stay alive.\"\n\n\"Thought ya might have some dwarf blood in ya!\" Merlia laughed, clasping a hand on the half-elf's shoulder.\n\n\"Think nothing of it,\" Veledar replied, turning his attention back towards the path.\n\n\"If you think that is something, you should see the boat of erisaid. It used to belong to a noble or another in some kingdom to the west. Sadly, the name eludes even my great memory.\"\n\n\"Do you mean Rothdell?\" Arcturus asked.\n\n\"Of course, that's the one, yes indeed,\" Veledar pointed to Arcturus, \"Supposedly, my mother flew overhead, scaring off a group of pirates that had boarded the noble's vessel. After everything was said and done, the man was so grateful to my mother's timely act that he gave her the entire vessel, to which\u2026it is slightly embarrassing to say this, but my mother took that literally.\" Veledar chuckled, \"I figured he meant that he was offering his services or something of that nature. After all, no sane human would part with something so valuable. Right, Arcturus?\"\n\nThe paladin brushed off his armor teasingly in front of Veledar. \"Not for sale.\" He patted the grumpy dragon on his chin.\n\nThey passed through what appeared to be a forest of banners and tapestries hanging overhead by flagpoles. Each flag was either in pristine condition or a tattered mess, depending on their origin.\n\n\"Neva ast this, despite bein' in me mind fer a while. How old is yer mother?\" Merlia asked.\n\n\"That's something you can ask her yourself. I won't be coerced into revealing the secrets of another dragon to a mortal, even if she happens to be a friend of mine,\" said Veledar, scratching his head with one of his wing talons.\n\nMerlia just crossed her arms and gave a quick \"Hmmph. Stella' dragon thinkin' dere. Mayhap I shouldna' argue with ya.\"\n\n\"That is a wise decision. There aren't many times when I emerged victorious out of that one,\" the paladin said. \"Have you decided on what form is Ulga going to take once he is restored?\" Arcturus then asked as he let Merlia catch up to him. Lyndis passed ahead to chit chat with Veledar about something.\n\n\"Hav'na figured it yet. I'm thinkin' it best be somethin with wings on account of da dragon.\" She then cupped her hands around her mouth, \"If she evah decides to fly us dere!\"\n\n\"And sully myself with you riffraff? I'd rather eat this hoard than let that happen!\" Veledar responded by sticking his tongue out at them.\n\nArcturus was about to bring up the promise Veledar had made about flying him, when he felt his foot shift. The coins below started to slide all at once, sending the paladin on a ride down a large hill of rolling metal. He tried to grab onto something on his way down, but found nothing for purchase apart from tricky, slippery metal coins. His friends yelled out something as he tumbled down, barely avoiding a rack of armor. He tried his best to avoid all the valuables on the way down. No matter how nice Veledar claimed his mother was, Arcturus did not want to upset the dragoness. Luckily, he managed to grab hold of what looked like a purple looking bar. It was hard to make out in the low light, but with a firm grasp of his metal-clad hand and a tug, he managed to stop his decent down the hill of clattering coins.\n\nWhat in Bahamut's name happened? Arcturus looked around as the coins slowly started to settle. He looked back up to his friends that were now just small specks on the hill of coins.\n\n\"Arcturus! Are you alright there, partner? Must be that armor, dragging your weighty ass down like a boulder. Maybe you should consider borrowing me a few pieces to lighten yourself up.\" Veledar roared out.\n\n\"Yea, I'm fine!\" He shouted back, \"Caught myself on some sort of purple bar! Don't worry about my armor just yet!\"\n\nHe tried to move his hand, grabbing the bar, but found it stuck to the surface of it. He gave one large tug and managed to free himself. The paladin then fell backward into the coins with a thump.\n\n\"Just was stuck is all! Managed to break free!\" he shouted to keep his friends informed of what was happening.\n\nHe stood up, reminding himself to not grab the purple rod, just in case he got stuck again. His eyes strained to make out what it was even attached to. He then noticed that it seemed to be part of a larger network of things that resembled a huge spiderweb.\n\n\"Oh crap\u2026\" he muttered under his breath. Surely Veledar's mother kept away any large spiders from her lair\u2026\n\n\"Hey, just to be sure, your mother didn't have a spider problem, did she?\" He shouted as his hand went for his sword out of instinct. He scanned the area for the smallest amount of movement.\n\n\"What are you even mumbling about? We're on a different plane of existence! There is no way a spider could even get in here!\" Veledar replied, Arcturus pictured that he had tilted his head to the side like he usually did in this sort of situation.\n\n\"It's kind of weird that I'm faced with something that looks exactly like a web! How do you explain that?\"\n\nThere was a rustling of coin that caught his attention. Arcturus forgot all about the party upstairs and spun towards the noise, drawing his sword and shield to find...nothing. Another rustling of coins drew his attention. This time the hairs on his back stood on end as he whirled around. Once again, nothing.\n\nThen, he heard it. A slight clicking sound; the same two mandibles might make. He had a second to react as a large bulk collided with him. Sharp mandibles met his shield. Despite the blow being successfully blocked by his shield, he was tossed back into the pile coins by the sheer momentum of the blow.\n\n\"Gah, what in the world-\" Arcturus looked up to see a spider that stood just as tall as he did. \"Oh, figures. Spiders\u2026why does it always have to be spiders?\"\n\nThe creature had a bluish white carapace and eight blood red eyes that stared menacingly at the human. It went in for another attack as Arcturus lashed out with his sword, his attack managing to slice off two of the creature's legs with a flash of white magic that seemed to burst when his sword met the spider's legs. The spider recoiled in pain, skittering away from him.\n\n\"That's convenient,\" The human smiled and prepared for another assault.\n\nThe spider soon recovered and curled its body on itself. For a moment, Arcturus was fazed by such bizarre behavior, then a flash of memories made him remember hearing about how some of the larger spiders could toss webbing at their enemies. His eyes widened in realization as he remembered the purple web from before. He ducked behind a multicolored rack of clothes as the spider loosened its webbing everywhere.\n\n\"Gah!\" Arcturus gasped. Thankfully, he was protected quite effectively behind the bulwark of clothing, as no bits of webbing latched onto him. He breathed a sigh of relief right before he heard the sound of a large crack. He stood up, sword in hand, to see that the spider was nowhere to be found. His eyes looked in desperation at all the scattered treasure, the mounds certainly large enough to hide the spider. The grip on his sword tightened.\n\n\"Hey, we have some sort of giant spider down here!\" He shouted out to his friends, \"It's big, weird, and white, with the creepiest bunch of eyes I've seen! Red! They're red just like Crimson's scales!\"\n\nAnother loud crack graced his ears as the spider returned to attack him from the left. Arcturus still believed he had the advantage, yet somehow, the creature walked too straight. Too quickly.\n\nIt had regrown its legs, and now the vicious creature pressed on to finish what it started.\n\n\"Crap!\" Arcturus raised his shield to block, but the wall of steel merely deflected the creature's attack so that the mandibles grasped around his armored leg. Thankfully, before the creature could slice his leg clean off, Arcturus stabbed downward with his sword into the creature's head. With another flash of white magic, the sword sunk right through the creature's head, causing it to flail and screech, but Arcturus held firm. The spider then collapsed, a corpse adding to the ground made of coins. Arcturus sighed when he withdrew his sword from the spider's head with a schlurp noise, flicking the ichor off the blade.\n\n\"Ever heard about a teleporting spider?\" He asked, kicking the dead body over to get a good look at its underside. He looked to the legs next, and saw that there was no sign of the sword slice that had taken the creature's legs.\n\n\"Guess you creepy crawlies can regenerate quick enough to fly right back into the action, for all the help it'll do now. So long, spider.\" Arcturus said to himself as he started walking back towards his friends.\n\n\"Well, excitement's over, my friends. I killed the thing like a real hero! You should've seen how-\"\n\n\"Arcturus, behind you!\" Veledar suddenly roared from the hilltop of coins. The dragon then spread his wings wide and dived down the mountain of coin. Lyndis and Merlia could be seen gracefully rushing down the hill towards the stranded paladin as well.\n\n\"Guys, guys it's all fine! I told you, I had it handled!\" Arcturus turned around to see not one, but seven of the large spiders. These ones looked to have thicker carapaces, green oozing mandibles, and those same horrible red eyes. He only managed a \"Bloody hell\" before the swarm of spiders rushed him.\n\nArcturus managed to block one as he heard a sizzling noise from his shield. Whatever was oozing from their pincers was definitely doing some foul things to the metal. With haste, Arcturus parried another set of mandibles, deflecting the attack just enough so it did not hit any of his vital areas. Whatever was in their ooze had no apparent effect on the sword he held, so he uttered a mental thanks to Bahamut as he fought to fend off the many legged monsters. He heard several more cracking noises. The spiders appeared all around him and forced the paladin to back up, duck, block, and parry everything sent at him. The spiders were certainly relentless, coming at him like a pack of rabid beasts, forcing Arcturus to focus everything he had into remaining on his feet. If he got knocked down again, chances are he would meet his end like one of the ancient kings: amidst piles of priceless treasure.\n\nThrough the wall of pincers and legs he finally saw an opening. He lashed out with his sword, quickly slicing into a spider's carapace. His sword exploded with magical energy upon contact. That particular spider let out a screech, jumping back, and with a crack, it disappeared back into thin air.\n\nArcturus mentally patted himself on the back for his achievement, but had little time to savor his small victory, as it seemed the beasts had tripled in number and now moved to surround him from all sides. He felt pincers latch onto his armored left shoulder from behind. One of the spiders got him. It tightened its pincers, ready to make the work for his friends easier. Luckily for Arcturus, the armor Matilda had made held strong even as he felt trickles of vile poison drip onto his exposed gambeson and start to melt the wool there.\n\nArcturus slashed out at the biting spider, but it let go and retreated, his sword only finding empty air. Another took advantage of his attack and caught his right arm. He felt the sharp pincer dig into his skin through the gambeson. Sharp pain took hold of his body\u2026\n\nThen he felt the fluid's hot bite. The same thing that devoured through his gambeson was now coursing under his skin, making him yell out in agony. He smashed that spider over the head with his shield, and with a crack Arcturus managed to dislodge the beast off him.\n\n\"Nraaah!\" Arcturus fell backwards into the coins as his shield fell apart in his hands. The spider that poisoned him predictably disappeared with a crack. However, it seemed to hardly matter as the others closed in and tried to latch onto him just like the previous two did.\n\n\"I know you want me, bastards\u2026but I got a dragon to return to!\" Arcturus rolled out of a spider's reach and tried to use his strength to avoid getting skewered by their pinchers. He ignored the ever-growing pain in his right arm, and he was quite sure he would have to do his best to undo the damage right after he survived this horrific encounter. He moved around, jumped and rolled. On one such roll, a spider finally had him pinned to the ground.\n\n\"Naaaaah!\" Arcturus screamed as he plunged his arm into the mouth of the beast. His sword met the spider's mandibles and held it there, struggling to keep the creature away as it pressed its bulk downwards onto him. His arm started to shudder, and for one moment Arcturus feared for his life. Thankfully, the other spiders seemed to avoid stepping too close, probably to let their web brother have its meal. A grim thought to be sure.\n\nSuddenly the spider that had him so thoroughly pinned was ripped off him by a pair of white claws. The spider was tossed into the others, knocking the ones it hit like a bowling ball.\n\n\"Veledar!\"\n\nThe dragon landed over him and let out an ear-splitting roar of battle.\n\n\"About time you climbed your way down from that mountain! I was beginning to think you love treasure more than me!\"\n\n\"That armor you wear will surely prove a worthy addition to my own hoard.\"\n\n\"Not while I draw breath, you silly dragon.\" Arcturus accepted Veledar's paw, stood up, then resumed his battle stance beside the dragon.\n\nVeledar whipped one aside with his tail while ripping into others with his claws. The one whipped by the tail found its end when Arcturus slashed at its underside with his sword. With the predictable white magic, he easily cleaved the little monstrosity in two. Veledar let out another roar before letting out a large breath of fire that swept over six of the spiders, setting them ablaze. They let out similar screeches of pain before disappearing with cracks.\n\n\"Show off!\" Arcturus shouted out as he took advantage of another spider that was too focused on Veledar. His blade cleanly sliced the thing's head off, spraying him with its ichor.\n\n\"You best believe it!\" Veledar replied with a grin as he continued ripping into the spiders. However, in spite of their progress, Arcturus could hear crack after crack of incoming reinforcements.\n\n\"I don't think they like us very much.\"\n\n\"You might be right about that. Quick now! Climb onto my back before I change my mind!\" Veledar roared as he reared back to avoid the webbing being tossed at him by the literal army of spiders.\n\nArcturus could see Lyndis and Merlia were shouting at them to run as they climbed the hill.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Hissed Veledar in anger. \"I told you to get on!\"\n\nQuickly stowing his sword, Arcturus ran to Veledar and tried to get on him as if he was a horse. However, several spiders seemed to get what they were planning all along. Webbing seized Veledar on his two front paws, pinning him to the mountains of coin.\n\n\"Veledar!\"\n\n\"I got this. Just gimme a\u2026\"\n\nSeveral of the spiders soon found it much easier to fight the dragon as he struggled to pull himself free. \"Grraaaaaawrrrr!\" He roared in pain as several pinchers managed to latch onto unarmored spots of his body. \"Insistent little buggers.\"\n\n\"Enough about that stupid plan!\"\n\nArcturus leaped off his friend to defend him from the spiders. He drew their attention and made them pay if they tried to attack Veledar. The dragon had opened his maw and simply melted the webbing with his fire now that he had the spiders off him. Once free, the dragon spun around, his tail knocking the ones advancing on Arcturus away with a smack. It would have been almost humorous to see all the spiders collapse to the ground, belly up, with their legs kicking at the air if they were not in danger at the moment.\n\n\"Now quick!\" Veledar shouted, lowering himself as to ease the human's mounting. Arcturus dashed to his friend and leaped onto his back, and with a great flap of wings Veledar lifted them both into the air. Arcturus hugged the dragon's neck for dear life as Veledar carried them both back to the top of the hill, leaving the army of spiders behind.\n\n\"See? I told you we can do it. A few icky spiders are nothing compared to me!\" Veledar said after he landed softly with a bump, his soft paws touching the path. Arcturus thankfully leaped onto the ground. It was certainly not as bad as that dreadful moment when dragon had lifted him suddenly into the air. Arcturus imagined that, with a saddle, the ride would be even better. Or at least he would not be grasping the dragon as tightly as he had been doing so far.\n\n\"Why does yer gods damn mother have giant spiders in 'ere?!\" Merlia shouted as she emerged onto the path from the hill. \"It couldn'a be mimics, or rats, but gods damn spiders!\" She continued, but Arcturus noticed she shivered at the thoughts of the spiders. He did not take Merlia to be one unnerved by this sort of creatures.\n\n\"I honestly don't know. She used to have a spell that would remove vermin such as that with a mere request.\" Veledar said calmly as the dragon moved his snout close to inspect Arcturus.\n\n\"See anything you like?\" Arcturus said laughing, his heart still racing from the fight with the spiders.\n\n\"You're not injured, so yes.\" Veledar replied as he nuzzled along the human's armored body. \"You know\u2026for all my praises regarding this armor, I wouldn't imagine anyone else wearing it.\"\n\n\"So you do like me, you scaly bastard!\" Arcturus stroke over the dragon's snout, who closed his eyes and hummed in delight.\n\n\"Just a bit. For saving my life.\"\n\n\"Twice now.\"\n\n\"Show-off.\"\n\nThe dragon continued to nuzzle until he found the paladin's right arm bleeding. \"Is that-\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Arcturus said with a groan. \"They got me. Give me a moment. Need to focus without your breath rolling over me like a hurricane.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" the dragon backed off.\n\nArcturus used the same method he had done with Veledar last night and touched his injured arm. With a flash of light, he felt the wound close and the pain subside.\n\n\"Aaaah, much better. I don't know if you dragons pray\u2026but make sure to thank Bahamut for her blessing every now and again.\"\n\n\"If that puts your mind at is, sure.\" The dragon said, then let out a short hiss.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Arcturus moved along his side.\n\n\"They got me in some places, but one really latched onto my tail\u2026 would you mind using some of those glowy powers on my tail?\" Veledar asked, gesturing to his left flank, and then to his wiggling tail.\n\nArcturus moved to the flank of Veledar and touched the red dragon. From this close distance, he could make out several puncture marks beneath the dragon's scales. He focused on the healing energy once more and let it pour forth into the dragon.\n\n\"You know, it's possible your mother's defenses couldn't weed out the phase spiders.\" said Lyndis as she too now joined them on the path, \"They make their home in the ethereal plane.\"\n\nVeledar shifted slightly as the healing magic sealed his wounds. \"That's better,\" The dragon hissed with relief. \"Thank you, squire.\"\n\n\"With pleasure, my lord,\" Arcturus bowed with a smile on his face. \"Anyone else in need of healing?\" He asked, clasping his hands together.\n\n\"Please, I didna get anywhere near dose critters.\" Merlia replied, pulling out a flask and taking a swig from it. \"Hate de damn tings, wit dere beedy little eyes an' hundreds o'legs!\"\n\n\"Well at least you did not have to taste them.\" Veledar hacked in the air. \"Took two of my fire breaths just to get the taste out of my maw!\"\n\n\"We should probably move along quickly. Phase spiders tend to be very territorial, and your recent actions down there haven't earned you any favor with their brood.\" Lyndis added, holding up a finger.\n\n\"THEY are territorial?\" Veledar snarled, \"This is my MOTHER's lair, you daft elf! Mark me, those VERMIN will be cast out as soon as we find her.\" Veledar turned back along the path and snorted angrily. Arcturus could make out little puffs of black smoke escape the dragon's nostrils. He did notice that Veledar had started walking faster than he had been doing previously. Clearly the dragon was growing more nervous than he was letting on.\n\nThey continued for several minutes, with the only sound coming from the carpet of coins upon which they were walking. Merlia finally broke out into a dwarvish drinking song to break the silence. Her singing voice cut right to Arcturus' core, like nails dragged slowly down a chalk board. He saw Veledar's wings twitch as if he wanted to fly away far as he could from the dwarf. Luckily, the vocal torture lasted only a minute as they came to a large clearing within the plains of unending coin.\n\nOne area was filled with blankets of every different color. Arcturus didn't doubt that they were most likely the finest from all the lands. Beside the dragon's bed was a bookcase at least twenty feet long and fifteen feet high supported by wooden beams to keep it upright. Along its shelves rested thick tomes that looked ancient. There were armor stands, weapons, and a large chandelier bathing everything around them in a bright light. It must have been connected to a ceiling, but Arcturus could not see where it began.\n\n\"Mother!\" Veledar shouted out in joy, \"Your son is here, and he brought guests!\"\n\nThey waited a minute in silence before Veledar resumed talking again.\n\n\"Probably just out hunting.\" Veledar muttered to himself.\n\n\"For an entire day?\" Arcturus raised an eyebrow. \"We've been in her cave for quite a while.\"\n\n\"On a quest then!\" Veledar snorted. \"My mother's always busy with something. How else do you imagine she gathered all of this stuff? Not by sleeping on her hoard like the dragons from your childish human tales!\"\n\nFrom the ground suddenly rose the blue apparition of Auron.\n\n\"Oh look, it's Auron.\" Lyndis said casually to the dragon.\n\nAuron coiled in on itself like a spring as it looked to all of them in turn.\n\n\"Greetings, Veledar. This one welcomes you to your hoard.\" Auron said in its monotone voice.\n\n\"Why did you not appear earlier?\" Veledar snapped, \"And did you know Mother had...\" Veledar turned towards Lyndis. \"What did you call those stupid things again?\"\n\n\"Phase spiders,\" The elf said with conviction.\n\n\"Those.\" Veledar snorted with a flick of his tail.\n\nAuron's ghostly form brightened a bit. \"This one knew of the spider incursion, but was waiting on instruction to eliminate them. Why this one failed to appear earlier? It's because this one was instructed to meet you here, by your mother.\"\n\n\"Good. Whatever, let's just put the past behind us. Where is she anyway? We have come quite the distance to see her, and I bet she wouldn't believe this tale even if it comes from my own glorious maw.\" Veledar said, grinning with his teeth.\n\n\"Not here. This is what this protocol is about.\" Auron replied.\n\n\"Hmph,\" Veledar snorted in irritation as his tail twitched. \"You're about as helpful as all these coins. When my mother returns, I will instruct her to bestow some much-needed enhancements upon you, Auron, because you lack tact. And manners. You're being rude to me right now.\"\n\n\"This one does not understand what rude is,\" Auron said blankly.\n\nArcturus thought back to the old woman's words back in Drakenburg, and an icy chill seemed to grip his heart.\n\n\"Ignore that. Let's focus on the real matter here. Surely you can tell me where has gone to, right?\"\n\nAuron went silent.\n\n\"Great. Auron, consider yourself promoted. You are now officially more annoying than all the nasty humans I met, put together. Honestly, this is why I despise this thing.\" Veledar turned to Arcturus and rolled his eyes. \"He speaks with the voice of a silent lake and thinks with whatever boulder of a head he has in his\u2026his\u2026\"\n\n\"Inanimate head?\" Arcturus waved something around.\n\n\"Precisely!\" Veledar nuzzled into the human's armored chest. \"When my mother's back I will ask her to shape Auron in your image. Maybe then he'll learn to-\"\n\n\"She is gone.\" The ghostly dragon suddenly said.\n\n\"Yeah, we know that, boulder-brained mist-head, but when is she coming back?\" Veledar snarled. \"When when when? Time isn't beyond your ability to understand, you blazing creation!\"\n\n\"She is gone.\" Auron repeated, its voice still unchanged. \"Your mother is not here because she is nowhere. This is your hoard now, Veledar.\"\n\nArcturus' heart sunk when his fears were confirmed. He could see Veledar's snout just stare at the ghostly dragon in disbelief. His snout wrinkled, eyes squinting in anger.\n\n\"Oh, that's rich. This is just exactly the amount of humor I need right now.\" Veledar turned back to the group. \"My mother must've enhanced his sense of humor or-or instructed him to lie to me in case she's tackling an important mission. That's it. She doesn't want me or anyone to make themselves at home in her lair. I should know that better than anyone, for I would be annoyed too, were I in her place. Cleaning somebody else's mess is just\u2026distasteful. Way beyond the patience of a dragon of my mother's ability. You all understand, right? A hoard such as this takes time, dedication, energy, ability, patience\u2026\" The dragon went over most of her mother's virtues.\n\n\"Veledar\u2026\" Arcturus began, only to be cut off by the dragon's fiery stare.\n\n\"Got a better explanation? Go on. Let's hear it!\"\n\n\"Enhancements,\" Lyndis' voice carried through the room, silent, unsure.\n\n\"What about them?\" Veledar turned his eyes to her.\n\n\"The food we ate, the table, chairs\u2026why would she order Auron to keep guests away when she can clean everything with just a single thought?\"\n\nVeledar narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"Lass's righ,\" Merlia joined in, her head bowed, unable to even look at Veledar. \"Somethin's feelin' wrong here.\"\n\n\"Shut up. Silence, all of you!\" Veledar paced back to Auron. \"Tell me again.\"\n\nAuron did, and that only added kindling upon Veledar's blazing rage. \"But that's preposterous, you stupid magical enchantment! My mother is the most amazing dragoness in all the land. Just look\u2026look at all the treasure she's gathered. The friendships she forged, the people she saved, the\u2026the son she raised,\" Veledar's voice started to break. \"She can't be gone, because nothing can kill her, understand? She's too cunning for any human, dwarf, elf or otherwise to play their dirty tricks on her!\" Veledar snorted, black smoke coming from his nostrils.\n\nArcturus watched Veledar fidget as he stretched his wings, then start to pace around as realization slowly seeped its way through his resilient scales. \"No. No, she can't be gone. Can't be trapped. Can't be outsmarted, out geared, or anything of that sort.\" The dragon's eyes were looking to all of them, then out to the mounds of treasure.\n\n\"Veledar\u2026\" Lyndis said quietly to the dragon, her voice but a whisper.\n\nVeledar seemed to ignore the fact that she had just called him by name as he thrashed his tail into the coins, scattering them every which way.\n\n\"Perhaps you would want to see the gifts she has left you?\" Auron asked, only for Veledar to whip his tail through the ghostly dragon.\n\n\"Leave me!\" Veledar roared to Auron, causing the dragon to flicker.\n\n\"As you wish, master.\" Auron vanished into thin air.\n\nArcturus could see the pain in his friend's eyes as he stood there, breathing heavily. The dragon seemed as frozen and stuck like all the objects around him.\n\n\"Veledar.\" He began to say, only for the dragon to cast him a look filled with anger.\n\n\"Leave me! All of you!\" Veledar roared. \"I am the master here now. Haven't you heard? I want you out this instant!\"\n\nHe heard Lyndis and Merlia start to leave, but Arcturus held his ground. He saw Veledar's eyes stare at him as he just lay there, unmoving. He was almost unsure what the dragon would do. In his grief and anger, would he lash at him with words? Or with fangs?\n\n\"Come on, let's leave him alone if that's what he wants.\" Lyndis grabbed Arcturus' arm.\n\n\"Not yet,\" He whispered. Lyndis' concern was more than noticeable, but Arcturus remained steadfast in his decision. With a shrug, he brushed her hand away while he stared the dragon square in his blue eyes. What he saw there made him unable to leave. He saw the pain, the anger, the sadness swirling in those draconic eyes. How could he leave his friend now, when he was hurting the most?\n\n\"You go, I'll make sure he doesn't do anything stupid, like set fire to everything.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Lyndis was visibly concerned. She looked over to Veledar, who stood there, breathing in ragged breaths.\n\n\"His mother might be gone, but her hoard, her gifts, her memory\u2026they will live on, same as my family did\u2026\"\n\n\"Shout if you need anything. No need to have you maimed even with these new powers of yours.\" Lyndis whispered as she patted Arcturus on the back. \"Come on, Merlia, I think I saw a dwarven keg back a little ways. Let's go see what year it's from.\" Lyndis turned, grabbed Merlia, and walked back the way they had come.\n\nArcturus waited for a few minutes to make sure the two had left. Veledar still hadn't moved. He remained in the same place, his eyes locked on him with the same fury they had before. Arcturus started walking towards the furious dragon before him.\n\n\"I ordered you to leave twice already. Have your ears been affected by my roar? Or am I supposed to understand a paladin\u2026no, a commander with years of experience, can't follow simple orders?\"\n\n\"Veledar, I-\"\n\n\"LEAVE!\" Veledar roared, starting to circle the human like a predator might stalk its prey before striking.\n\nArcturus felt his heart quicken. In the back of his mind, he might have actually started to regret his decision to stay here with the angry dragon. However, with Veledar's next step, he saw his friend twitch, his blue eyes bearing the same pain as before. He recognized those eyes, for he saw them every morning he woke up in the mirror during the two years since his family suffered the same tragic, untimely end.\n\n\"I am not leaving you in this state, Veledar.\" He replied, gulping once as the dragon barred his teeth in a snarl. \"Are you going to hurt me, Veledar? Your friend? The man who saved your life?\" His eyes stayed locked on the dragon as he moved, never taking them off for a second.\n\n\"YOU SPEAK TO ME OF FRIENDSHIP? Veledar snapped his teeth, \"WOULD A FRIEND BE SO DISRESPECTFUL AS TO STAY WHEN I DEMAND HIS INSTANT DEPARTURE?!\" Veledar thrashed his tail and let smoke billow out of his nostrils, \"I ENTRUSTED YOU MY NAME. I PROVIDED YOU WITH THE WARMTH AND PROTECTION OF MY BODY\u2026and now you ignore the simplest request I've asked of you? HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN I AM A DRAGON, YOU TINY, FRAGILE HUMAN?\" Veledar then roared and lashed out at Arcturus with his teeth.\n\nArcturus had to fight every nerve in his body that told him to run for his life. This sort of conviction surprised him even as he managed to thrust that feeling into the depths of his mind. For a crazy reason, he trusted the dragon more than he feared him.\n\nVeledar stopped, his snout inches from Arcturus' nose.\n\n\"Even through this bravado and anger, you can't fool me, Veledar,\" Arcturus said, his voice full of sorrow. He placed his hand up onto Veledar's snout and caressed it softly. To his surprise, the dragon did not recoil from the touch. Veledar's eyes were still on him, however, and they had started to well up with large tears.\n\n\"If you truly wanted to be alone\u2026\" He gestured to Veledar's wings, \"You would have flown away from us.\"\n\nIt was sudden, as Veledar moved in and grasped the human in a tight hug. Arcturus only let out a surprised yelp as the dragon's head wrapped around his back. He felt Veledar squeeze him tightly as he heard the dragon sob onto his shoulder. They remained like that for a while as Arcturus just hugged the dragon back and patted him reassuringly.\n\n\"Why did you not leave when I shouted at you?\" Veledar asked, still not yielding his hug.\n\n\"When I looked at you, I did not see the large angry dragon that stood before me. I instead saw myself... I knew you wanted someone to stay here with you. Anyone to help you face the pain.\"\n\n\"She was my hero\u2026my mother, I mean. She deserves to have her tale told and sung in taverns, not me. I'm not worthy of her hoard. I'm not even-\"\n\n\"Shhhh,\" Arcturus caressed the dragon's neck calmly. \"You are the most valiant dragon I know. Remember how you saved me from the gryphons? How you fought the countless bandits in Drakensburg to protect your party? The same greatness that empowered your mother now shines in you, Veledar. And I am convinced that, in due time, you will create your own legend; a tale sung in taverns that would make your mother proud to call you her son.\"\n\nHe finally was released from the dragon's tight grip. Face to snout, they stared into each other's eyes for another two minutes before Arcturus reached up and wiped away the dragon's hot, crystalline tears.\n\n[ Memories ]\n\nVeledar released Arcturus, reluctantly letting the human fall from his grasp. The dragon took a deep breath and stood on all fours to gaze out to the vast sea of coins before him, littered with treasures of all sorts. It was hard to believe that the glittering expanse, all the weapons, armor, and even the Drenedar carriage now belonged to him. In the back of his mind, a silent voice let him know that he no longer had to remain jealous.\n\nEverything happened so quickly. So soon\u2026 Veledar wrinkled his muzzle as he paced around, letting his tail drag along the coins. He stopped to grab a clawful of metal disks, letting them fall through his digits like shiny pebbles.\n\n\"I am going to fly around and clear my head of the dark clouds that took possession of it.\" The red turned to the human who had yet to leave his side.\n\nHe had to admit to himself, standing up to an angry dragon was pretty brave of the human. To face him down when he was most likely so intimidating. Not many could stand their ground like Arcturus did when he neared with his teeth baring and snapping.\n\n\"Are you sure?' Arcturus asked, that same tone of pity still present in his voice.\n\n\"Quite so,\" Veledar sighed, \"You needn't worry about me setting things on fire.\"\n\nVeledar spread his wings wide and wiggled his tail in preparation for the take-off, then leaped from his position and took flight within the grand lair. He looked behind him after a few moments to see that Arcturus had started walking in the direction where Lyndis and Merlia had walked down before his outburst.\n\nI should leave him alone for now. He returned his attention to the sea of gold laden with gems, then took a turn as his eyes fell upon a flag resting neatly on a wooden pole. His eyes narrowed as he remembered that flag and how he always hated it. The flag was a dark green with stitching outlining it. On the material rested a great lion holding a sword and shield. If only he could tear that beast from his mind\u2026\n\nVeledar sharpened his turn as he headed towards it. He remembered the day when that cursed memento arrived. He remembered it all so clearly.\n\nHis mother had come into the lair with the flag held in her mouth, spitting it out in disgust onto the floor. He had asked her why she had kept such a vile memento, the symbol of the hunters that had killed his brother.\n\n\"It is a reminder,\" She had said, \"A trophy that reflects the justice I brought upon those who inflicted harm upon our family.\" She snarled, letting her teeth show and her muzzle wrinkle at the recent thought. Veledar had not questioned her after that, as she finally started to clean the blood dried on her claws. Human blood. Veledar could only imagine the ferocity that his mother had ripped into the humans that had torn her son from her side. She could have used her breath to freeze them in place, but she had taken a more intimate way of dispatching them.\n\n\"Are there any more?\" He had asked her, his eyes at the time still tearing up over the loss of his beloved brother.\n\n\"No,\" She had replied sternly, \"The ones responsible have been permanently eradicated from the face of this earth.\" She stopped her cleaning of her claws and gave him a hard look, \"What if there were some left? What would you do?\"\n\nVeledar had no answer to give her as a wrymling. However, now being grown and flying towards the flag, he knew. Veledar knew his mother would feel deep shame. Still, in his heart, he had always known what needed to be done. With a simple motion of his jaws, Veledar opened his maw and unleashed his flames upon the flag. That grim reminder would not darken his lair any longer.\n\nHe landed to watch the flag burn slowly as the green turned to black and crumbled away to ash. His answer to his mother now was obvious. He would kill any human that sprouted from the legacy of those murderers. He would take from them, just like they stole from him. It did not bring him peace of mind that Arcturus, his mothers, or even the others would approve of his actions. He tried to hear the wisdom of the dragoness' voice, telling him that he should not base a whole on the actions of a few, but he could not hear it right now. She was gone, after all.\n\nVeledar spread his wings again and took flight as the flag slowly vanished from his lair. He spotted the boat he had spoken of earlier with Lyndis, its mighty frame covered in coins, almost like it was going to sink. He landed by it, letting the leathery pads on his paws softly touch the ground. Veledar caressed the frame with one paw, remembering the times he would circle it as a wrymling and pretend he was taking the vessel as his own from pirates. He spied a spot on the underside he had scorched with his breath, claiming the vessel as his own. That's what he had told himself at the time, although he had never told his mother, of course. No need to tell her that the ship was his at the time.\n\nShaking his head out of the memory, Veledar bolted back into the sky of his lair. He remembered how he had been taught to fly very early in his life. His mother had carried him into the sky like any other time, but on that occasion, she had let go much to Veledar's terror. He remembered flapping his little wings desperately in a frenzied effort to stabilize himself as his mother followed down the entire time, with a look of concern on her kind face. However, he remembered the joy, the pride, and most of all, the warmth that was brought upon her snout as his wings caught the air to pull the small red dragon into a glide. Veledar had released a little roar of joy. His tiny victory. If he had to describe it now, it would of course be a mighty one, but he knew at the time some dragon lovers like Arcturus would call it cute.\n\nVeledar flew over a large section of the lair that contained bookcases. Row after row of old tomes from every era were contained on those antique shelves. He remembered the late nights when he would read some of those stories. Some were good, like the stories of brave dragons, knights and other heroes that went on grand adventures. He chuckled as he remembered announcing to his sister that he himself was going to be an adventurer someday. That he would go on a grand quest just like those legendary dragons. Save fair maidens from distress, find glorious piles of abandoned treasure, and possibly save the day if required. He landed by his favorite bookcase that contained all the stories he had just thought about. Veledar looked to the aging spines of the plethora of books, still having a hard time to believe that now they were truly his. He sighed deeply as he sat down on his haunches among the books. He looked up and imagined his little brother leaping from bookcase to bookcase as he had done so many years ago. His heart began to ache as the memories flowed into his mind, accompanied by images of his mother.\n\nI can't\u2026can't think of them right now, Veledar pushed the thoughts down as he quickly walked out of the grand library and took flight once more.\n\nHis next pass along the lair had him pass over Lyndis and Merlia, who were in fact looking over kegs upon kegs of dwarven alcohol. They gave him a wave as he passed overhead. It occurred to him that they now had his name despite the thorough lack of conversation on that topic.\n\nTo flames with that mindless construct. I have to figure out what to do with Auron, now that he too belongs to me, he wrinkled his snout. Once again, there was yet another reason that he despised the thing. Well, it could not be helped now. He figured it was only a matter of time before the two females ended up weaseling his name out of him anyway, so he tilted his wing membranes and circled the two before landing beside them.\n\n\"Wat in da-make sure ye let us know when ye land, scale-burdened rock-headed dragon. Why, yer almost gave me a heart attack!\" Merlia rasped with a hand on her chest.\n\n\"I am most sorry for that unpleasantness.\" Veledar replied, \"but I just flew overhead and I figured your keen dwarvish eyes caught my dazzling scales.\"\n\n\"Not a chance, lad! For when ya were shoutin at Arcturus, we could hear ya across the damn place!\"\n\n\"Oh. That. Well, about that incident\u2026\" Veledar trailed off, remembering the absolute fury he had felt. \"I guess I should apologize for that as well, as undignified as it is for a dragon to admit his mistakes.\"\n\n\"I like it! Betta ast forgiveness den permission!\" Merlia cheered at him.\n\nVeledar managed a weak smile as he sat down on his haunches in front of the two women. He let his tail flick carelessly and tab behind him. \"You know\u2026there is something we need to talk about.\"\n\n\"We know,\" Merlia threw a glance at Lyndi,s who nodded at the same time as the dwarf with the same mischievous smile on her lips.\n\n\"Aye. T'was obvious from how fondly you grabbed each other.\"\n\n\"Sorry. What are we talking about?\" Veledar cocked his head.\n\n\"Dat lone lover ye left behind! Dennae think we haven' noticed ye sneakin' glances an' talkin sweet words ta each other.\"\n\nVeledar opened his mouth, only to close it in shock.\n\n\"Guilty as sin!\" Lyndis pointed at his face. \"You don't have to explain yourself when that face tells the whole story. C'mon. Spill it already. You have a thing for Arcturus.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Veledar took a quick breath. \"I certainly do not!\"\n\n\"Das' no problem, dragon. Tis your lair afta all. Ye can kick us out an warm up all dose bad memories with a bit o' huggin, a wee caress\u2026\" The dwarf started to stroke the air, chuckling in the most annoying of ways.\n\n\"Nothin' better than love to dampen the effects of tragedy,\" Lyndis raised her cup at Veledar. \"To your new wedding. Mateship. Whatever you dragons call it.\"\n\nVeledar's heart skipped a beat. His throat never felt so tight before. Was this how his countless victims felt when he teased the living flames out of them? He wanted to deny it with every ounce of his strength, yet he couldn't ignore the simple fact that the two women had a significant edge over him. Veledar had to do more than argue back. He had to turn the situation on its ass.\n\n\"I love Arcturus!\" He declared, much to the glee of the women.\n\n\"Knew it!\" Lyndis said.\n\n\"Aye. Saw right through ye devious scaly 'ead! Yer not as sharp as ye think, dragon.\"\n\n\"I love him in the same way you love each other,\" Veledar then added as the two exchanged a weird look. \"As friends.\"\n\n\"Dats horse dung!\"\n\n\"I'm not buying it either.\" Lyndis said, then took a quick gulp from her mug. \"This is a cheap way to get out of that bind.\"\n\nVeledar barred his teeth. \"It's the truth.\"\n\n\"Aye. Like yer gropes an' kisses.\" Merlia said.\n\n\"How dare you accuse me of fraternizing with an important member of this party?\" Veledar pointed over to the kegs of wine. \"Clearly the wine numbs whatever remains of your wits, because there is no way a majestic dragon like me can be in love with a wingless, steel-wearing human that looks blatantly ridiculous in that thing he calls armor.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\" Merlia twiddled her fingers. \"Now when ye put it dis way, I s'pose da dragon would have ta be really drunk to fall for a human.\"\n\n\"Or anything that doesn't have scales, wings, or even a tail,\" Lyndis said nonchalantly. \"Your ego wouldn't let you.\"\n\n\"Exactly! So we should talk about real matters here instead of wild fabrications.\" Veledar said happily. Oh, how good it felt to take a proper breath. The tension just melted out of his body after the girls focused back on their thoughts and their drinks. Now he just had to turn the conversation elsewhere. \"Hang on,\" He put up the best suspicious face he could form. \"It occurred to me that, through an act of painful injustice, both of you came into the possession of my real name.\"\n\n\"Ah, that. Just so you know, I was prepared to keep calling you Crimson Sky\" Lyndis said politely, \"I did not get your name after all. Did you, Merlia?\"\n\n\"Aye 'course I did lass! Dinnae hear dat blue basterd blurt it out like-\" Merlia started, then stopped as her eyes went wide in realization, \"Ahhhh of course, of course! I dinna hear a word of it.\"\n\nVeledar grinned at the extent they were willing to go with this little self-inflicted lie. \"I figured you would get my name out of me sooner or later, and even if you like to play games and pretend, we all know it won't be the same now with that piece of foreign knowledge lodged in your heads. I give you both permission to use it. Just don't roam, tossing it around everyone like that good for nothing Auron.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Veledar. You are most kind,\" Lyndis smiled, walking over and patting the dragon on his hide.\n\n\"Great, now I tink I might be getting' teary eyed.\" Merlia pulled out a cloth to wipe her eye.\n\n\"So where did Arcturus get off to? I thought I saw him heading to be with you two earlier?\"\n\n\"Aye. We did see him for a moment, before he headed back to ya mom's\u2026yer area of the cave.\" She pointed back towards the place where his mother used to rest.\n\nVeledar turned his snout towards that particular place. It was a bit odd, that Arcturus would make that trip. He figured the human was checking on the girls before going back to exploring that area of the cave.\n\n\"Veledar?\" Lyndis said, \"You take as much time as you need, alright?\"\n\nHe nodded before he saw himself in the air again. With his wings tucked to his sides, the red dragon swooped towards his mother's sleeping area, or more correctly, his sleeping area now. He frowned. Some things needed to invariably change. He figured he would just have to ask Auron, and the spectral dragon would change the location of all the bedding within the lair. He passed overhead, looking for Arcturus, but found no traces of the human.\n\nI surely hope you haven't unearthed another weird creature, Arcturus. Veledar continued his search, flying towards a body of water within the mounds of coins. It looked like a mini lake within the place, with a fountain at its center shooting up water several feet in the air.\n\nHe landed at the water's edge and settled down on the cold ground. The dragon put his snout on his paws as he gave his tail a thump. More images sprang to mind. This time, he remembered how he had been taught how to swim near one of the lakes around his original home. He remembered splashing his mother with water and falling over, hissing with laughter. She returned the favor, of course, with a large wave of water that had left him drenched from snout to tail. He thought back on all the times that went so quickly past him, and how he would never see her again.\n\nMother\u2026I am so sorry I'll never get to see, or play, or sleep under your wing ever again\u2026 The emotion was much stronger than Veledar anticipated. It felt like a knife jabbed into his heart as tears once again started welling up inside his blue eyes. His vision grew blurry as he imagined the conversations they would never have, the time they would never share, and how she would not see him in the splendorous glory of the present moment.\n\nIt's not fair! His tail lashed at the ground behind him. How had she died? She had always seemed to have a plan, an item, a magic spell that had always seen her through the day. Through the stories she had told to her hatchlings, Veledar and his sister learned of her adventurers and the struggles she had. It seemed so wrong for her to simply not be anymore. He wondered if she had simply found something that even a dragon could not overcome and died too quickly before she could escape. Perhaps she had tampered with a spell, and it had backfired, ending her that way. Not that the thought brought any relief. Veledar still felt anger rising in his chest as he thought on the last possibility; that somehow, his mother was hunted down by a band of dragon slayers and killed. After all, this is exactly what happened to him when Arcturus and his band of wretched knights ambushed him in his home.\n\nVeledar breathed deep as he tried to calm himself. The method worked as he soon settled down from that thought.\n\nThe worse thing about the whole situation was that Avalina had no idea, or at least that's what he figured in the present moment; that his sister had no idea what had happened. He would have to find a way to locate her, or use a spell to tell her about their mother's death. He already recoiled from the thought of having that conversation. He would not enjoy watching his sister's snout fill with sadness as he shared the grim news. It was a shame that dragons were not mortals sometimes, as mortals could be brought back from death if you had the right magic, whereas a dragon, who was already a being of magic, could not be. He guessed it was a way of balancing things out. His kin had already been blessed with scales, claws, wings, breath attacks, magic, and nigh immortality. He figured that some God out there reckoned mortals had to have an advantage of their own.\n\n\"Veledar! Just the dragon I wanted to see. What have you been up for the last few hours?\" came Arcturus' voice as he made his way over to the dragon. He had stripped his armor and was down to his black tunic, belt, sword, and scabbard.\n\nHow did the human find him? Did he have a third sense when the dragon was emotionally compromised? Veledar simply buried his head into his paws and closed his eyes. \"Just been flying through my memories.\"\n\n\"Quite a place this is. Look there! It even has a mini lake!\" Arcturus exclaimed. He opened his eyes as he heard the noise of something plunking into the water. Arcturus had his hand extended like he had thrown something into the water.\n\n\"Did you just throw one of my coins into the water?\"\n\n\"Skipped it, actually,\" The human smiled. \"And technically it's also your water.\"\n\nVeledar had to give it to him, \"Alright. You are free to continue to move my treasure if you wish. Not that it matters anyway.\" Veledar sighed.\n\n\"Auron, are you there?\" Veledar asked aloud, and almost instantly the blue ghostly dragon emerged from the coin in front of him.\n\n\"Always at your service, master. What is it you need of me?\" Auron asked just as Arcturus skipped another gold coin into the water.\n\nWhat he needed? He of course needed plenty of things, especially after today. However, he decided to start with the damn spiders.\n\n\"I would like you to get rid of the phase spiders from my lair. I will not tolerate their presence any longer.\"\n\n\"As you wish, master. I will wipe out every trace of their existence.\"\n\n\"In the future, you do not need my permission anymore. Simply get rid of vermin whenever they sneak in.\" Veledar snorted. Why his mother had not conjured Auron to do that was beyond him, but at least the ghostly dragon listened.\n\n\"As you wish, master.\"\n\n\"You must like that. Having him call you master all the time,\" Arcturus said with a nervous grin.\n\nHe figured the human was doing what people would call testing the waters with some humor.\n\n\"It's not like anyone else is going to do it.\" Veledar held his head up high.\n\n\"Why would you want me to call you master?\" Arcturus picked up another coin and skipped it once more onto the water.\n\n\"Would you?\" Veledar grinned, scratching his head with one of this wing talons. \"I suppose not. You humans do value your freedom, after all.\"\n\nArcturus was silent for a moment as he picked up another coin and moved it through his fingers.\n\n\"Auron, next up, I would like to know about our friends on the mountain.\"\n\n\"Master, I believe your friends are already here within your lair. Unless you mean the people and gryphons flying around the mountain?\"\n\nVeledar frowned. It seemed that Garroth had not given up the hunt, after all. Could the human even track them here? He wondered if the human thought him dead after the fall, or perhaps the knuckle-head figured the dragon lived and watched the skies for his eventual departure. Regardless, he hoped the illusions that hid the whole cave would hide them from the human's persistent gaze a awhile longer.\n\n\"Thanks for the information. I guess we have to lay low for another day at least.\" The dragon looked over to his human companion. \"Your friend is very persistent. Eager to kill me and save you.\"\n\n\"That's friendship for you.\" Arcturus smiled.\n\n\"So you're saying you would go to those lengths for me? For anyone in our little band of adventurers?\"\n\n\"Have I not already?\"\n\nVeledar snorted as he realized this was true of Arcturus. \"Well, I suppose you have, after all that had happened.\"\n\nThe dragon flicked his tail for a few silent moments. \"So, after our little mission to get my book back is completed, what will you do, my dear armored paladin of Bahamut?\"\n\nHe watched the human put a hand to his chin as he thought about his question. \"Now that certainly is a good question. Would you believe I have not thought about it yet?\" Arcturus sat beside the dragon, still clutching his chin. \"Maybe get far away from Entis. Leave all the war behind and go on another adventure.\"\n\n\"Has the adventuring spirit grabbed you, Arcturus?\" Veledar cocked his head to the side as he gave his tail another thump against the coins.\n\n\"I suppose it has! Certainly better than being a guard captain at the least.\" He gestured to the mounds of treasure, \"I can say for sure I never saw anything like this during my days on a Lumarian airship.\"\n\n\"I suppose not,\" Veledar chuckled, \"It must seem pretty droll in comparison.\"\n\n\"And there is no paperwork, no one harping you to keep everyone else in line. It's... it's... what's the word I am looking for...\"\n\n\"Freedom.\" Veledar replied.\n\n\"That's it.\" The human smiled.\n\n\"Would you help me find out what happened to my mother?\" Veledar asked suddenly, \"You are good company, at least.\"\n\nIf Arcturus was taken aback, he did not show it, and hardly skipped a beat to think about it. \"Sounds like a noble cause.\" Arcturus held up his hands as if reading a large sign. \"Troubled dragon seeks aid from human paladin.\" He stopped and gave the dragon a coy grin, \"There would be of course fees to be paid in exchange for my service.\"\n\n\"Fees? I thought we were friends, you sneaky kobold!\" Laughed the dragon, realizing where this was going.\n\n\"Well, yes. In many ways, we are, but fees are fees, even between family. There's one for endangerment, another for upkeep of the weapons and armor, and then I have to listen to Veledar boast every five minutes fee. That's the real expensive one.\"\n\n\"It's going to cost me a fortune, isn't it?\" Veledar wrapped a wing around the human as they looked to the fountain.\n\n\"It might cost you one or two of those.\"\n\nThey sat in silence as they watched the water for quite some time. Truthfully, Veledar lost track of the time. Having Arcturus there with him was a soothing act in of itself. However, with the sound of his stomach grumbling, serenity gave way to other, more pressing concerns.\n\n\"Guess we should head back and get something to eat. The girls might get worried about where we are and figure you ate me.\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly they know by now I don't eat mortals garbed in their silly dresses.\"\n\n\"Garbed? What, are you going to tell me you tried eating a naked one?\" Arcturus asked nervously.\n\n\"Well, only once, and it happened a loooong time ago.\"\n\n\"Veledar! That's not a viable excuse to eat people!\"\n\n\"Oh, believe me, the world's better off without this scoundrel in it. She made a whole village miserable before I put a swift end to her. Besides, I haven't eaten her whole,\" Veledar stuck his tongue out, \"Too gamy. Honestly, I do not understand how some dragons in your stories developed a taste for something so\u2026distasteful.\"\n\n\"Now by eatin an elf you mean like really eatin an elf.\" Merlia suddenly said as she emerged from a hill of coins. \"Cause I have two pictures in me head, one more appeasin den de other.\"\n\n\"I assure you it was the food one, and not whatever strange things roam your inebriated head.\" Veledar responded, sticking his tongue out at Merlia.\n\nLyndis was next as she gave a chuckle at the dwarf's hearty joke. \"So, if I understand this correctly, our next move is to hang low for the rest of the day?\"\n\n\"How did you-\" Arcturus began to ask, but Lyndis pointed to her ears. \"Right.\"\n\nVeledar explained of Garroth's inability to simply give up the chase when his quarry eluded him. He suggested to spend the day relaxing again, reading up on spells, meditating, and staying in good spirits. They would have to simply wait for an opening. More precisely, wait for Garroth to slip before they left the mountain. Veledar hated to admit it, but the superior speed of a gryphon in flight was a worrisome problem. If they saw him leave, Veledar and his party would not get far before the whole chase happened all over again.\n\nThey returned to the area where his bed now stood to spend the day as he suggested. Arcturus was passing time by doing his battle meditation nd trying to cast another spell and such, each time his face would look like a child in amazement of his deeds. He did not do anything too impressive on his own though, and, for both friendship and boasting reasons, Veledar tried to coach him on some spells like mirror image, fire bolt, and charm person. However, Arcturus could not perform the spells for some reason. Veledar snorted and simply wrote it off as human error. Lyndis pointed out that Veledar cast his spells through arcane magic, being a dragon and all. Paladins, on the other hand, cast magic through divine effort. She suggested that the lessons Veledar knew might not cross over into the paladin's repertoire of spells. For that, they would need to find another paladin, a book, or a divine spell caster that would help Arcturus focus on the proper way to cast his spells. Veledar and Arcturus were satisfied with this answer, as they wrapped up spell training for the day.\n\nMerlia practiced with her bow by making makeshift targets to hit and placing them at further and further distances. She was a good shot for a dwarf. Veledar had to admit at least that of the lass. Before knowing her, he had always figured stocky people like dwarves would feel comfortable tossing axes or hammers when they didn't feel like beating or slicing people to death. He never heard any story of dwarves using bows or being rangers for that matter.\n\nThat night, Veledar dimmed the lights on the walls and set up a fire for warmth using the mental imaging spell that still remained active in the other section of the cave. They ate their food by the crackling fire, exchanging jokes and having a good time. Veledar had conjured up whatever his party asked for. Lyndis requested cooked fish with squash and green beans. Arcturus had asked for a steak, potatoes and broccoli, while Merlia just wanted lamb and mead. Veledar himself had some sheep, with the same sauce as he had the night before. After the meal he regaled them with stories of his mother's exploits, and it warmed his heart as they gasped in the right places, cheered or asked simple question like an excellent audience. Finally, he told them the other kind of tales he knew, about what his mother had told in regard to Bahamut's tears.\n\n\"Well, hopefully your mother is looking down on you right now, proud of the mighty dragon her son has become.\" Lyndis said with a smile.\n\n\"Aye, that I can agree on. De wey ya ripped up dose spiders, fed us an' joked an' told tales. Yer already a hero in me book!\" Merlia burped, rubbing her stomach.\n\n\"Honestly, the only dragon I'd kiss instead of sticking him with the sharp end of my sword.\" Arcturus laughed, patting Veledar on his side.\n\n\"Wot?!\" Merlia cocked her head.\n\n\"Knew it! I knew it!\" Lyndis smiled and gestured at the two of them.\n\n\"What? It's just a harmless comparison!\" Arcturus said, even as he moved to hide under Veledar's wings. \"You believe me, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" The dragon nuzzled through his hair, then pointed his snout at the two laughing females. \"Don't pay them too much attention. They're obviously drunk out of their minds.\"\n\n\"Oy! Come back 'ere! I 'ave a tale o' me own ta share!\"\n\nVeledar sat in silence as the others shared their own memorable events. He listened just as intently as they had to his stories, until the fire began to die down and yawns replaced the merry smiles.\n\nThey split off into beds conjured by Veledar, copies of the ones from the previous night. The red dragon curled himself up and hugged the stuffed dragon he created just for himself. It was an almost exact replica of the one that was stolen from his previous lair, although, as he laid there in his soft blankets, his bed still felt lacking. His eyes opened softly as he eyed Arcturus sitting on his own bed, pulling the covers over himself. That's what he was missing. He quietly climbed out of his own bed and padded over to Arcturus'.\n\n\"Mind if I?\" He asked quietly to the human, who had been watching him slink over the entire time.\n\n\"Do you even have to ask? I'm standing in a bed conjured by you, in your own cave, stuffed with food you created,\" Arcturus chuckled. \"The only thing remaining is to give me a set of clothes and ask me to call you master.\"\n\n\"Well then, my dear subject, would it please you to accompany your overlord to his bed?\"\n\n\"As long as he doesn't eat me, sure.\" Arcturus kept on smiling through the affectionate nuzzles that assaulted his chest. \"Alright, alright, you made your point, you scaly adorable thing.\"\n\n\"Thing?\" Veledar narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"Don't be silly. You know what I meant.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nThe dragon laid down and clasped the human within his claws. \"Now you are my plaything, little human.\"\n\n\"Happy to oblige, when I'm getting all this warmth.\"\n\nVeledar rumbled happily, nuzzled his human good night, then slowly lowered his wings over the bed. It was a nice feeling, to have the human's warm body pressed against his chest. Without a second thought, he disregarded the stuffed dragon. He thought he heard Arcturus sigh as he closed his eyes. Veledar listened to the human's heart beat steady until sweet sleep took him in its ethereal embrace.\n\n[ Dragon Rider ]\n\nArcturus woke up to the sound of Veledar's sneeze. The dragon held him firm as his body constricted. His eyes opened to find that he was still snug against the dragon's chest. To wake up, or enjoy the comfort of scales a bit longer? Arcturus smiled. He went to wiggle free, but it was simply so warm and comfortable to be tucked against that sea of warm scales that he shortly decided against it, going slack against the dragon and just enjoying the feeling of those big, protective paws.\n\n\"Did I wake you?\" Veledar asked. Arcturus could feel the dragon's tail swishing gently.\n\n\"With your sneeze. Not with your claws, or with that fearsome elf-devouring mouth. With your sneeze, out of all things.\" The human chuckled at how ridiculous that sounded. \"I contemplated leaving, even went for it actually, only that I found myself unable to free myself.\"\n\n\"I did not think I was holding you so tight.\" Veledar chuckled. The dragon slowly relinquished his grasp.\n\n\"Nah, wasn't your paws, you big winged lizard. It was just so comfortable and warm there, near your chest, that I had an impossible time crawling out into the cold.\" Arcturus stood up, stretching his hands to the ceiling with a yawn.\n\n\"Besides, you had to go and miss me,\" Arcturus smiled, \"thought I was all done acting as a stuffed animal for you.\"\n\nVeledar walked past him, the dragon's frilled tail tip touching his neck softly. \"I found I needed some good company. My bed felt ever so lonely without you in it.\"\n\n\"Gods. You make it sound like we are lovers. You're lucky the girls aren't paying attention,\" Arcturus grinned, stretching to his side.\n\n\"Yes. Hardly so. Can you imagine something more ridiculous than that? Me, a dragon, reducing myself to the level of a mere human?\"\n\n\"A paladin!\" Arcturus pointed out with a finger. \"And an attractive one at that.\"\n\n\"Sure, sure,\" Veledar snorted, then put a grin on his muzzle, \"Although...\"\n\n\"No. Let me. I have to admit one thing about this union. The warmth, your heart beat, I may be getting spoiled.\" Arcturus touched his hands to his boots. \"I may never find sleeping in my own bed enjoyable, and it's all because of you. You are positively ruining my future here, dragon.\"\n\n\"One can only hope.\" Veledar snarked as he stretched his wings wide.\n\n\"You really mean that?\"\n\n\"How good of a future can that be, without a dragon in it?\"\n\nArcturus shoved the dragon playfully as Veledar summoned a table covered with breakfast. Arcturus managed to drink down a cup of coffee and a glass of water, then helped himself to some eggs and sausage before setting his utensils down with a burp. Lyndis and Merlia strolled over, finished with their morning preparations of magic. Lyndis once again covered Veledar's mouth before he could speak.\n\n\"Let me guess. Coffee?\" The dragon smirked with a swish of his tail.\n\nLyndis nodded silently as she sipped from the coffee mug held in her hands.\n\nArcturus watched the dragon chat away, looking more like himself than he had the other day. Although this was a most welcome change, it still surprised him. It was a very hard day for the dragon, after all. To endure so much pain all of a sudden\u2026the thought almost felt as dark as the night when Arcturus lost his own family.\n\n\"Auron!\" Veledar said loudly, his voice filled with purpose. He walked through piles of coin, spreading them around with his claws. \"You mentioned something about a treasure. Come on, come out wherever you are! I need to see the gifts you mentioned!\"\n\nVeledar stopped, then swirled his head towards the others. Arcturus saw a grin spread on the dragon's snout as their eyes met. \"Now for the rest of you, I think I may have some items in this hoard that will be of use for our quest.\" The dragon then turned to Lyndis and held up a claw, \"To borrow!\"\n\nLyndis practically looked like she was jumping for joy.\n\n\"Now don't make me regret my on-the-wing decision. I'm still the master around here,\" Veledar added as he began to pace around, waiting for Auron to appear. Veledar called out again for Auron, irritation growing in his voice. However just as the rumbling of his annoyed growl left the red dragon's throat, Auron appeared before them in a crackle of azure light.\n\n\"Master wished to see this one?\"\n\nVeledar paused for a moment, \"If you would retrieve my mother's...\" Veledar seemed to choke on his next words, \"Last gifts to me.\"\n\n\"As you wish, master,\" Auron vanished with a crack and a thin wisp of smoke.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to share your treasures, Veledar? I mean, I'm not one turn down a magical item when it is given willingly, but this is your hoard we're talking about!\" Arcturus said, arms crossed.\n\n\"Which makes it mine to lend out as I see fit. Although I can see that you are as humble as ever, dearest Arcturus.\" Veledar started to circle the paladin with careful steps. \"Have no worry for the sanctity of my hoard. I will get the magic items back, you see, so there is not really anything lost on my part.\" He snorted, \"It's not like I am giving them to untrustworthy or incapable hands.\"\n\nVeledar stopped dead in his tracks, giving Arcturus a look of pity, \"Arcturus, you should act more like a dragon. Bahamut made you her champion. That is not just a title to boast with. You wield actual magic!\" Veledar, with a wiggle of his tail, bounded behind a mound of coins, and started tossing items from around his body, causing them to rattle coins or occasionally clang. He tossed a goblet here, a jewel there, and the dragon moved several times while doing this.\n\n\"Are we sure he ain' been driven mad by all dis gold? Heard tales of cursed riches dat can make even dragons greedy beyond imaginin',\" Merlia tilted her head to the side with a look of confusion on her brow.\n\n\"Yea, this is certainly new for him, but it makes sense if you think about it. He might actually be taking this more seriously than his other commitments.\" Lyndis said calmly opening her backpack. \"He is on a quest to retrieve a lost family heirloom, and wants it to succeed for the sake of his whole family. Now that he has this wondrous hoard at his disposal, what stops him from using its resources to retrieve his item and more importantly, keep us alive to get to that point?\"\n\n\"Aha!\" Veledar shouted. He turned around to reveal something that looked like a simple gray cloak with a golden leaf clasp. With a flash of his wings and a bounded leap. Veledar landed next to Lyndis, who gave a surprised gasp. Veledar moved around her, holding up the cloak as if to fit it on her.\n\n\"This was one of my favorites as a wrymling.\" He gave a large tooth filled grin to them, \"although I don't think it will fit me now. Not without a spell at least.\" Veledar turned around to look at himself, wiggling his tail back and forth.\n\n\"What's this dusty curtain?\" Lyndis grabbed the cloak quickly from the dragon's grasp. \"Is it for repelling fire spells? Shrinking? Flying?\n\nVeledar went to speak, but she continued on with her barrage of questions.\n\n\"Or maybe it summons puppies? Does it make my skin like metal? Perhaps it can-\"\n\nVeledar put a claw over her mouth to silence her. \"You are way too talkative and bad at guessing. You are a rogue, Lyndis.\"\n\n\"The technical term is adventurer.\"\n\n\"Precisely why I am giving you a cloak of invisibility.\" He chuckled, like a father to a very excited child. \"You simply have to utter \"Houpe\" while holding the clasp. Then you will be invisible. Isn't that why I brought you into my party? To sneak around, steal things, bash people in the head when the need arises?\"\n\n\"Actually, it was to make sure you two bonkheads aren't gracing the walls of a dungeon, yeah,\" Lyndis drawled. \"So this invisibility spell of yours\u2026how long does it last? It'd be far too good to sneak around indefinitely. Why, that'd make me a master rogue,\" Lyndis put a hand to her mouth. \"I could even steal your hoard.\"\n\n\"No chance of that, missy,\" The dragon hissed at her. Lyndis spoke only in jest of course. \"The enchantment on this cloak lasts for an hour or so, three times a day. It used to bug my siblings something awful, as I would use it to perform pranks on them,\" Veledar laughed and looked up as if he were looking at the scene playing out in front of him.\n\n\"Give it here.\" Lyndis hung the cloak on her shoulders before doing a quick twirl. She gave a large smile as she held the clasp and whispered \"Houpe\". Arcturus gasped as she vanished into thin air.\n\n\"Can you see me?\" Lyndis asked, her voice filled with excitement. \"I can't tell if I am invisible. How odd. This feels different than when I cast my own spell.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't be much of an invisibility cloak if we could see ya lass.\" Merlia laughed.\n\n\"Uh Veledar\u2026 how do I stop being invisible?\"\n\n\"I forgot!\" Veledar replied, tapping his claw to his snout. \"You have to say the same word I believe, quite simple really.\" The dragon then bounded back towards his mounds of treasure. Lyndis said the same word over again and appeared before Arcturus.\n\n\"That was incredible! I just love magic items!\" She exclaimed, her smile practically stretching ear to ear.\n\n\"Don't you already have the power to turn invisible?\" Arcturus raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Yea, but it feels nothing like this, and does not last nearly as long! Oh, imagine all the things I can pull with this. Nothing will stop LYNDIS, THE GREATEST ROGUE THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!\" She bellowed, holding her arms wide.\n\n\"Calm down, or we might think you're turning into Veledar over there.\" Arcturus laughed.\n\n\"How is that a bad thing?\" Veledar replied, tossing a silver goblet over his shoulder.\n\n\"I tink we could only eva survive one of ya.\" Merlia chuckled, \"Can ya imagin?\"\n\n\"Well, there is only one of me, so tough luck finding a suitable impostor!\" Veledar replied, no doubt his chest filling with pride like it usually did. \"Now Merlia, what should your item be? An ever-filling flask of ale?\"\n\n\"I wouldna mind that o' course, but how does that help ye quest?\"\n\n\"Good point, good point. The quest comes first, always,\" Veledar rolled his eyes and went back to digging through the treasure. He searched through the piles of items, literally sticking his head in to look around as the rest of the dragon dragon wiggled his hind end back and forth. For a few minutes this process repeated in several spots as the others looked on in amazement. It finally stopped as Veledar had started to thrash his tail and bare his teeth.\n\n\"I found it!\" He exclaimed, bounding back to them with an item held in his claws.\n\n\"What do ye have dere?\" Merlia rubbed her two hands together expectantly.\n\n\"A magic version of that harmless stick-thrower you call a bow. Exciting, isn't it?\" Veledar smiled as he forced the bow into Merlia's hands. \"Take it! Tell me it isn't the finest bow you held in those pudgy dwarven hands!\"\n\nIt looked about the same size of a normal longbow, but seemed to be made of near pristine white wood. Thin golden stripes spread from its golden middle all the way to its ends.\n\n\"It's called the Oath-bow.\"\n\n\"Thank ye,\" Merlia furrowed her eyebrows as she turned the bow around, \"But how does it work, besides the obvious?\"\n\n\"It's even more simple than that cloak over there. You see, all you have to do is focus on a person in front of you, and repeat the words. \"Swift death to you who have wronged me.\" Veledar said the phrase slow, as Merlia started to practice saying it. \"After the oath is spoken, the bow allows your arrows to seek your target easier, even being able to go around cover to hit them. Although mind this. When your bow is locked onto the target, you will find it harder to hit with every other weapon.\"\n\n\"Well dats goin to be a nasty surprise for me next foes. I bet I can hit plenty more knees wit dis!\n\n\"There should be an armory of minor magic weapons shortly over there,\" Veledar pointed over to a dune hundreds of feet away. \"Just go pick out some more weapons you might be interested in.\"\n\nThe girls nodded in unison as they went to leave towards the indicated spot.\n\nVeledar turned around towards Arcturus, his tail dragging along the ground. \"Now for you Arcturus, besides the book I promised you, of course.\" Veledar started to circle the paladin once more. \"What to do, what to do? This is more complicated than it looks like.\"\n\nArcturus held up a hand to tell him he had no need of anything.\n\nAll I need is you. As long as you stand by my side, I am the happiest paladin in Lumara.\n\nThat sounded so silly even inside his own head. No. He couldn't tell Veledar that. If the girls heard him, he'd have no respite from the myriad of those dragon-lover jokes.\n\n\"Veledar, really, I'm-\" Although he did appreciate the offer, Veledar sensed this and cut him off before he could speak.\n\n\"Now don't turn this opportunity down so easily. It's not every day that a kind, striking dragon bestows such gifts to a\u2026 well...passable knight...\"\n\nArcturus heard Lyndis and Merlia suddenly stop in their tracks as they stifled a fit of laughter between the two of them.\n\n\"What do you mean, passable?\" Arcturus laughed, raising an eyebrow. \"Should I also be alarmed that you are rating us on attractiveness?\"\n\n\"Well by dragon standards anyway. I meant no offense to you, of course.\" Veledar continued without missing a beat, \"See, your snout is too small, you have no scales to speak of, no wings, no claws, not even a tail to grab!\"\n\n\"I don't see how that's fair. We're completely different species. You wouldn't rank a weasel lower than a bird, yes.\"\n\n\"Your rules do not apply to dragons.\"\n\nMerlia suddenly burst out laughing, her hands no longer holding it in. \"Looks like dat dragon really fancies ya, Arcturus.\"\n\n\"Well I would not be laughing if I were you Merlia. After all, you are pretty low on dragon standards.\" Veledar smirked, sticking his tongue out at the ever-reddening dwarf.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Merlia said slowly, her voice laced with anger, eyes squinted.\n\n\"Besides that, it's pretty bad of you to discriminate on sexual preference.\"\n\n\"I was makin a joke ya daft dragon, not discriminating!\" Merlia held up a shaking fist.\n\n\"Careful there, Merlia, or you will stay that color of red for days. Although, if I think this through, this would improve your attractiveness on the dragon scale....\" Veledar only reached the last word as Merlia ran after the dragon.\n\n\"That's it!\" The dwarf yelled, \"Get over here, ya great fire breathin git! I'll knock those words outta yer mouth with da very bow ye gave me!\"\n\nVeledar laughed as he bounded out of the reach of the furious female, \"You're far too easy to rile, Merlia, I suggest seeing someone to work on all that anger.\"\n\nThey continued for a minute as Arcturus and Lyndis watched on in amusement. It was clear though the dragon was simply toying with the dwarf, as she never truly got close to catching him during the entire time she was chasing him around.\n\n\"Besides, what if I did find fancy the human? Would you suddenly turn against us?\" Veledar turned as he leaped onto a tall mound of treasure.\n\n\"Yer twisten my words! I'd simply make fun of ya for a different reason. Now get down here so I can catch you!\" Merlia shouted. \"I swear one o' these days I will catch ya, and dere will not be a high enough mound o' treasure to keep me hands from ya tail!\"\n\n\"That may be a while,\" Veledar replied, sticking his tongue out. \"There is always a tree, building or rock to be get in your way, and I kind of trust those obstacles over your stubby dwarfish legs.\"\n\nMerlia pulled out the bow, \"Don't make me turn ya into a pin cushion, ye scaly git.\"\n\n\"Quick, Arcturus!\" Veledar bounded to the paladin, then slunk behind him. \"Save me, Paladin! Fulfill the sacred oath you swore to your master and protect me from the crazy dwarf!\"\n\n\"Oh, I get it now, using human shields. Yer fightin dirty, dragon!\" Merlia laughed, stowing the bow.\n\n\"Not in the way I expected, but true enough.\" The dragon nodded his horned head at Merlia first, then the rest of the party. \"Now that excitement is over, Arcturus, you should follow me to your present. Although I warn you. The face you make might beat all the human standards for surprise. It is something special, after all.\"\n\nArcturus started to follow the dragon. He could feel the excitement building in his chest. How could it not, when Veledar practically radiated with joy?\n\n\"Oh, I will try to not die from praising this item too much.\" Arcturus smiled, patting Veledar on his flank.\n\n\"Careful dere, Arcturus. Dat dragon might want ta give ye a special present.\" Merlia laughed hard as she led Lyndis towards the armory. They only took several steps until both started giggling among themselves.\n\nVeledar just snorted at them, stuck his tongue out, and returned his gaze to Arcturus. The paladin had to admit. That one was kind of funny, so he tried to hold in his laughter.\n\n\"Ignore them.\" Veledar waved a dismissive paw at the two females, \"my gift is special of course, but it's not,\" The dragon then paused to lower his voice to a whisper, \"You know, whatever that dwarf cooked inside her dirty mind.\"\n\nArcturus chuckled at Veledar's quick thinking. \"Oh, I'd never dream you capable of something indecent. Why, your brilliance is an example to us all.\"\n\n\"Do you\u2026mean that figuratively or-\"\n\n\"Both.\" Arcturus rubbed his hand over the dragon's neck, making the scaly creature rumble with joy.\n\nVeledar led him to what appeared to be a shrine nestled within the treasure. This time it was barrels and barrels that were labeled finest silk of Rothdell. On the pedestal of this shrine was an urn of blackened stone. Upon the urn was golden draconic writing if Arcturus had to guess by the harsh lines that looked as if they had been drawn by claw tip.\n\n\"It says, here lies Carpenter the brave,\" Veledar spoke softly as he slowly walked over towards the shrine. He moved his snout side to side, obviously looking for something.\n\n\"Why is this here in your mother's lair?\"\n\n\"Mother liked this human at one point in her life. He was a dashing hero, judging by her words. If memory serves, he helped her so much during his rather short life that he earned a place of honor here in her lair, so that he could always be with her in a very sweet, dragon kind of way.\" Veledar replied quickly as he kept shifting furniture, coats, and other various treasures.\n\n\"Here we are. I figure he doesn't need this anymore. I also can't think of anyone else who would use them better.\" Veledar returned with a dusty brown book equipped with a fine leather binding in one claw. In the other claw he held a grey shield that appeared to be made from a large mirror. \"Always liked this one,\" Veledar gestured to the shield with his snout.\n\n\"Only because it's a mirror,\" Arcturus chuckled, and reached out for the items. He grabbed the leather book first, finding the cover worn with age. He opened it up to see that the pages were filled with instructions in how to cast spells, their names, and draconic runes.\n\n\"Interesting.\" He carefully set the book down as he grabbed the shield. It was of course smooth, but it was also cold to the touch. He traced over with his finger several scratches along the otherwise pristine surface. This item must have been through many battles. The stories this shield could tell\u2026\n\n\"What does it do?\" He turned his head back to the dragon.\n\n\"Well, in addition to being tougher than a normal shield, I heard tales of how this shield could stop even the mightiest spell slung at Carpenter. Although, if I think about this right\u2026 this effect can only happen once or twice per day. I cannot remember which. Just be careful, as in, don't gamble your life on the off chance I might be wrong, alright?\"\n\nArcturus nodded at the dragon's words. \"This certainly is a most helpful item. I figure I should only rely on the one a day, and if trouble persists, I have my trusted scaly steed to rely on!\"\n\n\"Be careful what you say. This steed can lick as well as he bites.\" The dragon mischievously flicked his tongue out to display the length of his 'weapon'.\n\n\"Come on now, Veledar. You don't want to get this ancient tome soaked, or worse, ripped apart.\" He placed the book softly on the shield. \"Thank you. I know these gifts mean a lot to you.\"\n\n\"Maybe enough to\u2026kneel at my paws?\" The dragon cocked his head with the same silly smile, only to grow serious when Arcturus actually crouched to touch his paws.\n\n\"H-hey, I didn't mean that literally!\"\n\n\"I'm not gonna waste this chance to tickle something else than your wings!\" Arcturus picked up his efforts until he found himself in another dragon hug as Veledar held him tight. He could tell from the dragon's shaky breath that this wasn't another playful hug. He wanted this. No\u2026needed to hold someone he cared for in his paws, just like he did last night. For a moment Arcturus was unsure of what to do, so he returned the hug and patted the dragon gently on his scales.\n\n\"It's okay, Veledar, Everything's alright. Your wings and paws are safe from my hungry fingers,\" he said softly as he heard a sniff from the dragon.\n\n\"Hey!\" Veledar suddenly said, turning his head around to look behind him.\n\nThe dragon had to let go of Arcturus so he could see Lyndis and Merlia had found their way over to hug the dragon from behind.\n\n\"Can't I go away without you two following me?\" Veledar groaned, looking like he gave a halfhearted push for them to get off.\n\n\"Never!\" Lyndis said back with a smile, \"I guess you're stuck with this party of miscreants you assembled!\"\n\nVeledar turned back to Arcturus and shook his body hard enough to dislodge the two girls from his hide.\n\n\"Yer feelin mightily ornery today!\" Merlia chuckled.\n\n\"Hey, leave him alone,\" Arcturus pointed a finger at her face. \"He wanted to tell me something important.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" The two girls gasped at each other.\n\n\"Guess dey about to do it,\" Merlia chuckled, then quickly snuck behind a pile of treasure.\n\n\"Quick thinking there, partner,\" Veledar smiled and approached his head to nuzzle Arcturus, who smiled and scratched Veledar under his jaw in return.\n\n\"These jokes about us being lovers are starting to get old.\"\n\n\"Agreed. Ridiculous, how those two can't figure something better. Anyway, in regards to my gift, I figured you needed a shield after you broke the other one over the spider's face.\" Then Veledar gestured to Arcturus' tabard, \"We should also focus on getting you a new frontal cape. I don't think brown is your color.\"\n\n\"It's called a tabard, you hundred years old sage. Honestly Veledar, I thought dragons were supposed to know everything!\" Arcturus held up a finger towards the dragon.\n\n\"Call it whatever you want, but the truth is you need a new one. I'm thinking red, with a silver dragon on it.\" Veledar spread his wings to gesture the fact that said dragon had to be a sizable one.\n\n\"You're only saying that because you want the colors to match your scales, you tricky goblin,\" Arcturus laughed, picturing the red tabard in his mind. He had to admit though. The idea was not bad at all. He figured the red would look rather dashing with the silver.\n\n\"So?\" Veledar replied, grinning wide, \"red is a most attractive color.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Arcturus replied, gently shoving the dragon. Did he just blush when Veledar had said that? He shook his head. Of course he didn't. He was a paladin with over ten years of fighting experience under his belt, fully in control of his emotions.\n\nSuddenly, they both heard a crack from their left side.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Auron suddenly said as he materialized from thin air. \"This one has yet to present the master with the gifts left by his mother.\"\n\nArcturus watched Veledar's snout -previously filled with laughter and joy-suddenly scrunch into a pained expression. He saw Veledar give a gulp before he spoke, \"go ahead, Auron, I am strong enough to at least find this out, right? What is the gift?\"\n\n\"Gifts,\" Auron corrected, holding up a ghostly claw. The ghostly dragon swirled in place to suddenly reveal, with a puff of smoke, a large looking leather harness with numerous pouches meant to stash various items. On top there was clearly a saddle meant for someone.\n\n\"Her riding harness,\" Veledar said softly, picking up the leather in his claws. Auron then clapped his paws together with a puff of blue magic before Veledar could react further. Arcturus watched things slightly shift as a transparent silver dragon stood before them all.\n\n\"Veledar,\" the dragon said, standing tall with the frills on her neck extended. \"I have ordered Auron here to leave you my word on the day that you are fully grown, and I am no longer there with you.\"\n\nThe dragoness swished her tail like Veledar always did, \"I have left my harness for you, along with Carpenter's old weapon. I know you spoke fondly about that one day when you would have the opportunity to become an adventuring dragon, so the harness will allow you to fulfill that purpose.\"\n\nHer eyes seemed to look directly at Veledar, with a softness only a mother could show. \"I know you will grow into a brave, strong dragon. One that will accomplish many great things.\"\n\n\"Really momma?\" Came the voice of a little red dragon that bounded to the silver one and grabbed one of her legs.\n\n\"Of course,\" She smiled, nuzzling the little Veledar with her snout.\n\n\"But\u2026why are you talking to Auron? Even he can't predict the future, right? Right?\"\n\n\"Oh my gods you were so cute!\" Lyndis exclaimed, looking at the tiny Veledar who was transfixed on his mother.\n\n\"Graaarrrr!\" Veledar snapped, holding a claw to his muzzle. \"Be silent please. My mother's still speaking!\"\n\n\"I'm leaving a message for you to see when you are big and strong like I am now.\" She replied, continuing to nuzzle the wrymling.\n\n\"Bigger!\" The small red dragon flared his wings proudly.\n\n\"Yes, yes. Much bigger,\" The silver dragoness gave him a fond lick under his jaw. \"But even heroes have to start off somewhere, so you'd better listen to everything I have to teach!\"\n\n\"Like this message?\" The little dragon cocked his head.\n\n\"No, little one. This message is for later. Way, way later.\"\n\n\"Why would you do that? I'm here right now!\" Little Veledar protested, sticking his tongue out at his mother.\n\n\"So that, when you become a mighty wyrm with a mountain of treasure, you will know how much your mother loved you. I will always be by your side, Veledar, and neither distance, age, nor time will change how much I love you, my dearest red hero,\" She swiped little Veledar off into one of her huge forepaws pressed the boisterous hatchling tightly against her chest, holding him there even as he started to squirm in her grasp.\n\n\"Not in front of future me!\" little Veledar hissed, \"You're embarrassing me, mother!\"\n\nArcturus put a hand over his mouth, both amused and amazed. It was simply so adorable to see the grown dragon that stood next to him in the present so little, cute, and fragile, all at the same time.\n\n\"You're supposed to be napping with your brother and sister instead of complaining about my methods, you know.\"\n\n\"If I go take a nap, will you stop nuzzling me in front of future me? Heroes are supposed to be strong, and\u2026and fearless! They fight evil on their own, or maybe with other adventurers, but not with their mothers!\"\n\n\"Maybe you're right, my dear, wise Veledar,\" The silver dragon nuzzled little Veledar one more time, gave him a short lick along his neck, then relaxed her grip.\n\n\"Yuck. I'm all messy now! You better not let hero me see this!\" Little Veledar quickly scampered away, disappearing from view.\n\nThe silver dragon seemed to follow the small red dragon with her gaze. \"You were quite adorable then, my little Crimson, but don't you ever think that changed. Hero or not, you are still my son. Same as you were all those years ago.\" She then returned her gaze to the grown Veledar, holding claw and almost touching the real one's snout. If Arcturus did not know better, he would have sworn she could actually see her son right now. Veledar gave a loud sniff as tears started to stream down his muzzle.\n\n\"I know it might seem like an insurmountable obstacle right now, but I know you will muster the fortitude to come on the other side better and stronger. I am so proud of you, my son, and I love you with all my heart no matter where your wings carry you.\"\n\nThe image faded away, leaving them all victims to the sound of Veledar's heart-wrenching sobbing. His crimson snout was drenched in tears as he lowered it closer to the ground. Arcturus and the others moved in quick and embraced the depressed dragon.\n\n\"We're here for you, Veledar. All of us\u2026including your mother.\" The paladin said.\n\nVeledar buried his snout into Arcturus' chest as he continued to sob. The human stroked Veledar's head, letting him cry it out.\n\n\"Yer mother has been a mightily fine lass. May she soar wit da rest of her kin in da afterlife.\"\n\n\"I agree with Merlia,\" Lyndis muttered her own words after the dwarf. \"She might be gone now, Veledar, but her love will always remain with you, same as this hoard. Doubt you can spend all of this in twenty dragon lifetimes. Who knows? You might have to get busy and make little dragons of your own!\"\n\n\"Shut up, you silly thief,\" Veledar snorted, throwing a small smile in Lyndis' direction. \"I've still got a few more tears to shed before I'm ready to laugh at your jokes.\"\n\n\"What's going on between the two of you doesn't really look like a-\"\n\n\"Oy! Snap it shut before I snap it for ye!\" Merlia hissed.\n\nVeledar let the playful banter slide past his emotions and thoughts. He cried for a few more minutes, then, with a loud sniff, he wiped his snout clean of the translucent beads. With a thank you, the dragon gave them all a quick nuzzle with his wet snout. Veledar then grabbed the harness, and carefully attached it to himself. Arcturus saw that, at first, the dragon seemed to struggle with the larger size of the harness, but the longer he took in taking it on the easier it became, almost like the harness was enhanced with the ability to reshape itself according to the user's size. The dragon clasped the final belt before striking a pose for all of them. He held his snout up high, unfurled his wings, stood straight, and curled his tail slightly around his magnificent body.\n\n\"How do I look? Marvelous, I presume? Dashing? Breathtaking? Awe inspiring?\" The dragon said each word with increasing pride, the smugness on his snout growing proportionally to the weight of the praise.\n\nArcturus had to admit. The dragon did look good with the harness on. The way it seemed to move with him gave the idea it was not that uncomfortable as he often heard it from the gryphons forced to wear such things. His eyes focused onto the saddle portion of the harness. He imagined himself on top of the red dragon as Veledar flew them both into the vast, blue expanse of the sky. Perhaps the dragon did look dashing. The human put his hand to his chin as the dragon waited for an answer, his eyes wide.\n\n\"Well, now you look like a proper adventurer.\" Lyndis smirked, \"With all those pouches, I bet you can hold plenty of supplies.\"\n\n\"That's one way to put it, thank you very much. Guess I'll just be your winged, smelly horse instead of the hero that swoops in to save the day!\" Veledar replied with a disappointing snout wrinkle as he ran a claw through the coins beneath his paws.\n\n\"So why put on the harness now if you're not looking to carry some things for us?\" Arcturus asked with a meek smile on his face.\n\n\"That's a very good question, human. I am going to stretch these beautiful wings of mine, catch the wind, and let the cold air brush off some bothersome thoughts from my head.\" Veledar sighed, \"Flying high in the sky always made me feel better even when I was a tiny, stupid hatchling.\"\n\n\"What about our friends outside huntin ya?\" Merlia asked, already slinging her pack around her shoulders.\n\n\"If we see them, I'll head back to the cave. The only reason they got to us last time is that they followed us closely through the illusion. Figure they should be far enough away to confuse me for a bird or something.\"\n\n\"We?\" Lyndis gasped, placing a hand over her mouth, \"Who gets to fly with the magnificent Veledar?\" Her eyes then fell to Arcturus knowingly. \"Oh, who ever do we think it could possibly be? Tis a hard choice, is it not? Two sneaky maidens, one valiant man\u2026it's almost like the tales say, yes?\" She grinned.\n\nVeledar faced the tunnel they came from. then curled his head around to look to Arcturus.\n\n\"Paladin of Bahamut. Would you like to accompany me into the skies?\"\n\nArcturus did not even need to think about such request. His mind made the decision before the dragon could even finish his question. \"I'll do it!\" he exclaimed in excitement.\n\n\"It would be a delightful honor to carry your armored ass up there,\" Veledar finished. \"Really?\" The dragon asked, almost sounding as if he was surprised. However, it only lasted before a moment before the dragon charm once again took hold.\n\n\"Well I mean of course you would love to ride with me. My wings definitely beat those ugly sky ships your people use. Grah. Combustible wood everywhere mixed with the stench of metal and cheap alcohol\u2026why, I'd pay somebody like my illustrious self to liberate me from that torture,\" Veledar grinned as he stretched his wings out slowly. \"And Merlia. Could you turn Ulga into an eagle or something else that has the capability of flying?\"\n\n\"Well I sappose I could try dat,\" Merlia replied, stroking her chin softly. \"We gonna be flyin da rest o' de wey?\"\n\n\"You mean Veledar will be flying us there?\" Lyndis said suddenly, clasping her hands together loudly with a clap.\n\n\"Well, I figure it was about time I swallow my pride and got this journey over with as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Finally,\" Lyndis grinned, \"I was waiting for your scaly bottom to cave in.\"\n\n\"Don't tempt me to leave you behind, Lyndis. Treasure might look great, but it is a poor substitute for my enchanting company,\" Veledar growled with a chuckle.\n\nArcturus made his way back to his belongings. It was hard to avoid the temptation to rush packing his things with the dragon's wing beats always on his mind. He put on his gambeson, tabard, and every armor piece one by one. He lastly stowed his sword into its sheath, slung the mirror shield gifted to him by Veledar over his back, and took his place at the red dragon's side.\n\nLyndis pulled a map from her pack as she started walking with Merlia along the silver path back to the entrance. Everyone else followed in step beside her in silence. Arcturus stood on Veledar's left. With each step, he could feel his anticipation growing. After all, he had never been properly introduced to flying on a dragon's back. He had always been picked up like a scared stag in the dragon's claws, or had to hold on for dear life upon the creature's scaly back. This time, things were bound to be different. This time, he would fly properly upon the back of his dragon companion and friend.\n\nArcturus spent most of the time watching the dragon's movements, and hardly noticed when they had gotten back to the cave's entrance. Merlia pulled Ulga from her pocket, unrolled a mat, and keeled upon it gently. She closed her eyes and started chanting in dwarven quietly.\n\n\"Now don't get into trouble you two.\" Lyndis said, pointing a finger at Arcturus' breastplate. She then did the same with Veledar's scaled chest. 'We don't need any more company here so don't come along with any uninvited guests, friendly or not.\" She turned back to the map she had pulled out, her eyes scanning the parchment. \"Still here? Fly, you two, so I can figure out the better route for us to take to Entis. Things are going to be a lot trickier with these thugs on our tails.\"\n\n\"Well you heard her.\" Veledar said, crouching slight with care, to allow Arcturus better access to get on the saddle. \"Shall we?\" The dragon swished his tail invitingly.\n\n\"Don't see why not.\" Arcturus climbed one foot over, just like he would on a horse, although the thought was quickly struck from his mind. He would never compare his friend to a horse outside of a joke, and he would probably get insulted at the very idea by his wife's memory, who'd certainly be able to make the difference between the monster that took her life and the friend Arcturus was about to ride upon.\n\nThe paladin tested his boot, pleased to find it was secure in the saddle. He found a cord latched on with a metal ring that he wrapped around his waist and secured it. He figured it was to help him stay on the dragon during turns and other maneuvers. Next thing he noticed was that the harness had no reins to speak of, which was right. It wasn't like he had to control Veledar like a steed. Despite that oddity with which Arcturus grew accustomed to from the hundreds of horses he'd mounted throughout his life, the saddle felt very much like a normal one.\n\n\"So where did you want to fly?\" He asked, feeling the warm dragon flex his muscles with eager anticipation.\n\n\"I figured we should do a few loops around the mountain, coupled with some banks and turns so that you can get a feel of how my wings take the wind.\"\n\n\"Feel for you? That's what's this is about, eh?\" He grinned. He suddenly realized that possibly the dwarf's humor was starting to rub on him. He just laughed it off, and witnessed the dragon giving him a quick smirk.\n\n\"You are not completely wrong there. If we are to be companions, we should get a feel for flying properly together. So that when we fight, we can do it together...as one.\" Veledar stretched his wings wide. Then, with a flick of his mighty tail, refolded them against his back.\n\nArcturus patted the dragon's scales, \"Alright then, partner. I'm ready for whatever you want to throw at me.\"\n\n\"Are you completely sure that all your gear is stowed correctly?\"\n\nArcturus saw that the dragon's eye had started to inspect him from head to boot. \"Why are you asking?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know. Just case I decide to do some maneuvers that might get this pristine armor of yours loose.\" The dragon said with a hint of innocence, although by the way his eye looked away, Arcturus figured the dragon had a trick or two up his scales, and honestly, he did not mind. In fact, he was a tad curious what Veledar had cooked up inside his scaly head. He looked to shield to find it latched on properly upon his back, his pouches too were all firmly closed, and then finally his sword neatly tucked in its sheath. The issue, as Veledar hinted earlier.\n\n\"Think I found the culprit,\" Arcturus tied the sword's hilt onto the scabbard by a thread. \"All set now, Veledar. Ready for whatever you have planned.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" The dragon smiled, one that made the human a little flattered that he was bringing such joy to the dragon under him. Veledar walked along the tunnel that led them both out of the cave, then stretched his wings as he breathed in the cold air of the morning.\n\n\"Try not to fly too high. Might get a tad cold up there.\"\n\n\"Are you saying your shiny armor can't handle a bit of cold?\" The dragon smirked.\n\n\"Oh, it certainly is capable of that. Can't say the same about the man who wears it.\n\n\"Good thing I'm warm then,\" Veledar's cocky smile grew wider. \"Ready now? Or do I have to warm you up with my tongue?\"\n\n\"I'm fine, I'm fine!\" The human waved off the tongue poking out of Veledar's mouth. \"Spread your wings and take us in the air before you get weirder ideas.\"\n\nHe felt Veledar suddenly bound forward, and with a great flap of his wings, the two of them ascended into the air. Arcturus watched with glee as the snowy ground they passed left them behind. Veledar kept climbing with every wingbeat, and Arcturus scanned the landscape below like a child who traveled by gryphon for the first time. In some ways, it was just like looking off the deck of an airship. He remembered doing this numerous times over his lifetime, but it felt different. This was more personal, more intimate, and it felt glorious. The constant rhythm of Veledar's wingbeats, even the cold wind blowing his face\u2026it all felt different. Like he was safer than he'd ever been. Even the stomach lurching that usually accompanied their flights from before was not present. Perhaps he was destined to fly, after all.\n\n\"How is it going back there?\" Veledar roared, his voice filled with happiness. The dragon then dipped to turn gracefully in the air.\n\nWords failed Arcturus at first. He was simply too caught up in the sensation overload of the flight to focus on a proper reply. After all, he could never imagine such a sight from the ground. How the sun lit landscape could look any more beautiful than it did right now, when he rode upon the back of a real, friendly dragon? It certainly was not the first thing a normal dragon slayer would envision.\n\nHow can I ever go back to a normal life? Arcturus wondered as his hands tightened their grip on the leather collar wrapped around Veledar's neck.\n\nThere is nothing that can compare to this. Not even gryphon riding.\n\nThe human smiled when he imagined how Veledar would react when compared with a gryphon. Although he also realized perhaps he had waited a tad too long to reply to the dragon. He let the excitement out in a loud declaration of his feelings, \"THIS IS AMAZING!\" He shouted from atop his lungs and let that broad, honest smile wash across his bright face, without a hint of resistance or regret.\n\nVeledar roared again in approval as they continued their turn in the sky. They ended it when Veledar tilted his wings back and spread them wide as he entered a steady glide. Arcturus closed his eyes and let the wind batter against his face. He took a deep breath from the crisp air as Veledar gave another flap of his mighty wings. Arcturus tried to picture himself as the dragon, flying right now in the sky. He did not know if it was his imagination at work, but he swore he could almost feel the wind that caressed Veledar's wings, kissing his many red scales.\n\nThe dragon spent the next few minutes in various banks or turns. Arcturus started to lean into them, slowly starting to predict how Veledar would turn by the strong muscles that moved beneath him. A dragon was not only wings, as many common people believed. Lots of muscles worked together to keep these magnificent creatures airborne. Truly, it was an honor to experience flying in such an intimate, indescribable way. Arcturus looked past the dragon as he finished yet another turn. A great forest spread across the land in the distance. Its green mass seemed to stretch on for miles upon miles, and he knew beyond the verdant expanse was the city of Entis. The forest of despair, some people used to call the amalgamation of trees, but Arcturus had never stepped foot in that forest, just as he had never heard of anyone going in it. Although the rumors whispered of monsters that lurked inside the shadows, ready to feast on the blood of foolish adventurers. Arcturus knew Lumara would've purged the forest of such threats decades ago.\n\n\"It's just tales meant to scare children.\" He brushed off the thought from his mind out loud.\n\n\"Did you just compare my flying to your stupid bedtime stories?\"\n\nArcturus waved apologetically when the dragon turned his head to chill him in the saddle with one of his imposing azure eyes. \"No, no. This forest that stretches ahead of us\u2026heard some really interesting things about it.\"\n\nThe dragon checked it out for a few seconds, then blew a gust of black smoke. \"It's just a bunch of trees. Now, are you ready for something a bit more advanced?\" Veledar turned his head to look at the human. Arcturus could see in his eyes that the dragon was simply begging to show off for him. Distracted from his concerns about the weird forest, he found himself nodding to the dragon.\n\n\"You bet! Let's see what you can do, young hero!\"\n\n\"That's the spirit! I knew I liked you!\" Veledar cried, and with a mighty flap of his great wings, the eager dragon started to climb even higher into the sky. With each wingbeat Veledar continued his ascent, until Arcturus found it was starting to get harder to breathe. He was practically leaning forward to hug the dragon as the forces of the earth and sky pushed him against Veledar's back. Arcturus looked for a moment to the ground below, so far removed from his current position.\n\n\"Oh, sweet Gods,\" The human muttered and just hugged Veledar a tad harder. He had never been this high before, not even inside the protective wooden belly of an airship.\n\n\"Ready?\" The dragon cried out.\n\n\"Always!\" He found himself shouting back to him. Despite his slight fear, Arcturus trusted the dragon to see him through to the end of this magnificent journey, and pushed whatever slivers of fear that still existed within him down with the next flap of Veledar's wings.\n\n\"Hold on!\"\n\nArcturus felt Veledar's wings slightly tilt, and the dragon had started flipping over backwards. Arcturus felt himself lift slightly in the harness. The world that was once below him was now above. He found himself cheering, his fear soon turning into excitement once more. Veledar then reoriented himself into a dive bomb. Arcturus could feel gravity pulling down as the wind whistled passed his cherry red ears. This was thrilling, exciting, making him forget that the ground was rushing towards him at a startling pace. Every nerve in his body told him that such fall should be terrifying. However, his next cheer silenced those nerves once more. Veledar even joined in with an ear-splitting roar.\n\n\"Hold on again!\" The dragon yelled, \"It's not over yet!\"\n\nVeledar started spinning round and round. Arcturus could see that everything that was not Veledar or himself was a blur as he hung onto the dragon's frame. He gave a cheer as he clutched those crimson scales for dear life, until the dragon stopped, spread his wings and returned to a gentle glide.\n\nOnce again Arcturus found himself speechless. His smile was still on his face, and he imagined that it would be there for quite some time. That was probably the most fun he had had in quite some time.\n\n\"T-that was...Gods, I've never felt such intense feelings in my life!\" He breathed aloud slowly. \"Thank you Veledar....you can't imagine how grateful I am to taste the true freedom of the skies, just like a dragon.\"\n\n\"You're most welcome my metal-clad partner.\" Veledar replied, turning his head to look at him. \"With the help of these great wings of mine, I shall set you free from the earthly bonds that kept you so horribly chained.\"\n\n\"Chained?\" Arcturus raised a finger. \"We had airships, you know. I could have always flown with a gryphon whose feathers keep warmer than your scales.\"\n\n\"True, but you said you never flew a gryphon,\" The dragon stuck out his tongue. \"Besides, does one of those bloated airships even hold a candle to me? Can they spin or dive like we just did?\"\n\nThe dragon gave him a coy smirk. He knew what Arcturus was going to say. How could he not? This was nothing like any other time he had gone flying. However, the dragon was waiting for his answer, wanting to hear him say it.\n\n\"No, nothing can quite compare to this kind of flying, Veledar. It was like seeing for the first time.... It was something beautiful, beyond what mere words can express.\"\n\n\"Well I have to say, Arcturus. In this light, you look rather good on my back. I think I might like you up there.\"\n\n\"Bah. Dragon compliments. Why do they have to feel so damn sweet?\"\n\n\"Because I'm nothing but sweetness underneath these scales!\"\n\n\"Yeah, I got that from our first encounter. Oh, and just so you know, I think you look good in any light.\" He laughed, rubbing his neck with his hand. He saw Veledar's eyes focus on him for a moment, as another grin found its way to his muzzle. Arcturus wondered what was going through the dragon's mind at that moment. Probably just loving the compliments.\n\n\"Oh, stop that flattering before you turn my wings pink.\"\n\n\"Really? You get that shy when somebody compliments you?\"\n\n\"NO! Proud, magnificent, self-indulging at times, sure. But never embarrassed over a bit of praise!\" Veledar turned his attention back to the mountains below. \"However, I think we should go check in with our companions. See if they are ready for the journey. And Arcturus?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I take it you would not say no to flying like this again?\"\n\nArcturus did not even need time to think. \"There is not a thing in the world that would stop me from flying with you again, Veledar.\" Arcturus held out his arms wide like they too were wings. \"Arcturus and Crimson Sky, the greatest aerial warriors of all time!\"\n\n\"I like it, although let's put my name first. I do not wish to confuse people about who is doing the real work here.\"\n\n\"Pffff. I don't think our adoring fans will mind how we put our names together.\"\n\n\"Adoring fans, you say?\"\n\nBoth man and dragon gave a laugh in unison as Veledar descended towards the snowy entrance of the cave. Arcturus braced himself as Veledar landed on the ground. Although the sudden lurch of their landing never came, the dragon had been incredibly gentle as his leathery pads touched the ground. Arcturus undid all the straps as he dismounted the dragon, his boots landing in the snow. He saw that Lyndis came running over, flinging bits of snow around with each step of her boots.\n\n\"How was it? Were you afraid? Was he gentle? Tell me Arcturus! I need to know!\" Lyndis spoke quickly, her voice almost running together with each question on her excited breath.\n\n\"It was great, no, he was when he needed to be.\" Arcturus chuckled at how fast he managed to answer all of those questions, \"Don't worry though, we will head out soon enough, and you will see for yourself.\"\n\n\"You are volunteering me to carry the half elf?\" Veledar asked, holding his snout up high.\n\n\"How can you deny her desire when she is in awe of your splendor, O' dear dragon? Can't you see she craves the touch of your scales, the sound of your wings taming the savage skies above, the marvelous sights only a dragon can see?\" He figured any way to convince the dragon to let Lyndis fly with them as well would play the exact same tune as his vanity.\n\nVeledar fidgeted for a moment, flicking his tail as he thought it over. With a final swish of his tail, and a roll of his eyes, Veledar replied, \"Well, I suppose she can fly with us when you put it that way\u2026 After all, every group of adoring fans starts with one\u2026\"\n\n\"THANK YOU VELEDAR!\" Lyndis cheered, running over to give his chest a big hug. The dragon simply returned it with one of his paws as he patted her back, \"Yes, yes of course you're welcome. Just make sure to spread the word when this Entis business is all said and done, yes? Speak from the heart, and maybe add a thing or two about my scales. Humans love to praise them.\"\n\nIn spite of the vain tone he seemed to be giving, Arcturus knew the dragon was looking forward to it as well. He could just tell by the look Veledar had in his eyes.\n\n\"Now dear Lyndis, do you have the best path planned out? Entis is no mere village from what you all keep telling me.\" Veledar undid his hold, letting Lyndis go.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" She replied, nodding and pulling out the map. Arcturus walked over just as she started pointing to it. \"You see, it should be a straight shot right over this forest here. I also heard rumors that the Lumarians avoid this forest at all costs. Airships, caravans, patrols, anything you can think of. It's almost like the very source of plague dwells within that big wall of trees.\"\n\n\"And what is the plan when we arrive near the city?\" Arcturus asked.\n\n\"Well, I figure Veledar there turns back to the size of a common drake, then I figure out a disguise for you. Merlia and I are lucky since no one knows who we are, so we can blend into the crowd as travelers. We walk in, find a way to get to the castle, and simply get the book back!\"\n\n\"Oh great yer back!\" Merlia shouted, leading a snowy eagle out of the cave. The eagle was large enough for someone to ride on it, but nowhere near the size of Veledar. Arcturus was thankful that the eagle was presented with the cave behind her. Otherwise he did not think he would be able to see her perfect white body and feathers. \"Bout time ye get back. Ulga here was startin to get impatient!\" The dwarf pulled out a brush and started to stroke the eagle's feathers. \"Did ya at least have a good fly?\"\n\n\"Yes Merlia, it was literally the best flight I ever had with him yet.\" Arcturus said cheerfully.\n\n\"Good, now we can be getting out of here and back to our adventurin'.\"\n\n\"Before we go, let me just present you with something I completely forgot about.\" Veledar said from behind Arcturus.\n\nThe paladin turned to see the dragon rifling through some of the pouches on his harness, until he procured a thin looking silver metallic rod. He gently handed it over to Arcturus, who grasped it softly into his hands. It was roughly eight inches long, and engraved of course with golden dragons.\n\n\"What is it? Some kind of scepter?\" He asked, turning the rod over in his hands, then bringing it closer to his eyes.\n\n\"Be careful and look.\" Veledar replied, pointing to a small section at a gold dragon's eye. \"Now press that button, and make sure you're not near anyone.\"\n\n\"What's it going to do? Shoot flames?\" He chuckled.\n\n\"Just press it you stubborn human. The real fun is in discovering how how these things work!\" Veledar playfully shoved him, then sat softly on his haunches several feet away.\n\n\"Well, here goes nothing,\" Arcturus pressed the dragon's eye firmly with his thumb. The rod expanded up to six feet, causing the paladin to jump back in surprise.\n\nVeledar laughed, and Lyndis ran over with her eyes wide. From the tip of the rod came a blade that seemed to be made of fire.\n\n\"So, what did you and Merlia end up borrowing from my armory?\" Veledar asked as Arcturus noticed the dragon's eyes were firmly locked on the blazing weapon he held.\n\n\"Oh, I grabbed a pair of somewhat ordinary magical rapiers you had in there.\" Lyndis held up a pair of ornate handled rapiers. Each one was black with silver lines running along the hilts. \"Merlia over there picked up a chain shirt you had lying around in a pile of other armor. Once again, it had a minor magical aura which means it's more useful than it looks.\"\n\nArcturus watched the dragon take that bit of information down. He pictured he was making a note of it in his head. Then the dragon nodded, \"Good, now we will be better prepared for whatever lays ahead.\"\n\nArcturus held the blade firmly in his hand. It was light, way lighter than he thought a weapon like this should have been. He swished it a few times, finding it put almost no strain on his arm when swung.\n\n\"Dats a fancy stick ye got dere.\" Merlia said, looking the weapon up and down. \"Course, ye be findin me sticking to dis here bow o' course.\"\n\n\"Well, are you ready to go? Or shall we continue blabbering about weapons?\" Veledar asked them as he spread his wings wide.\n\n\"Always ready ta go.\" Merlia responded, getting ready to mount Ulga.\n\n\"Yeah. Let's put our feet\u2026err, wings to work already. We got lots of ground to cover today,\" said Lyndis.\n\nArcturus hit the button on the weapon, retracting it once more until it returned to its original size. He found a ring to hook it to on his belt for easy reach. With another crouch from Veledar, he slung himself on top of the dragon, once again feeling the same excitement building inside his chest.\n\n\"There's always this much anticipation to fly, Veledar?\"\n\n\"Got a taste for it now?\" Veledar smirked, \"and yes, that's usually a good sign.\" The dragon turned his snout to Lyndis, who seemed to hesitate before mounting the dragon.\n\n\"Come on, I swear he's gentle.\" Arcturus extended a hand to the reluctant rogue. \"There won't be any twists or sudden turns when I'm here.\"\n\n\"Oh Arcturus, don't coddle the girl. She might like surprises.\" Veledar wiggled his tail impatiently.\n\nLyndis grabbed the paladin's proffered hand firmly and pulled herself up until she was sitting behind him.\n\n\"Good Gods, Lyndis! Is it me or have you put on a bit of weight since we got here?\" Veledar's limbs wobbled as soon as the rogue settled on his back. \"I don't think I can carry you after the sumptuous meals I've served!\" The red drake hissed.\n\nArcturus heard a smack as Lyndis struck the dragon with her first. Almost instantly the dragon regained his composure and showed no sign of struggling.\n\n\"I guess I really have lost my fine touch. Fine then. Let's do this flying thing again,\" The dragon grumbled, turning his snout to the sky. Arcturus felt him shift as his wings readied to flap. Behind him, the dragon's tail tip twitched with excitement.\n\nThen Ulga suddenly shot past them into the sky.\n\n\"Hey, I was supposed to be the one in the lead!\" Veledar moaned as he took off after the eagle and the dwarf mounted atop her back.\n\n\"Then ye gotta be fasta den dat!\" Merlia shouted out over her shoulder. Arcturus saw her pat Ulga, though she leaned suspiciously close to the eagle's head, almost like she whispered something into the eagle's ear. If he knew any better, it was an encouragement for the eagle to fly even faster.\n\n\"Come on, Ulga! Make that scaly bastard eat yer feathers!\"\n\n\"As if I'll ever allow that!\" Veledar growled at the challenge.\n\nArcturus felt Lyndis hold his armor tight as Veledar sped up to gain on Ulga.\n\n\"Veledar. For Scales' sake, this doesn't have to be a race!\" Arcturus shouted out, laughing as Veledar continued his pursuit.\n\n\"Oh, brighten up, you clanking bucket of metal! Our adventure has been lacking competitive spirit ever since I've stuffed you with meals in my mother's\u2026in the gracious halls of my lair!\" The dragon replied as they flew within feet of the dwarf. With a proud roar Veledar passed them before he turned back and stuck his tongue out at the dwarf.\n\nThey all flew towards the capital for about an hour, with the forest below them. The race they agreed to enjoy started to fade. Currently, the dragon and the eagle flew side by side over the tops of the clutter of trees that made up the forest. Arcturus shook his head, as it seemed they were flying closer and closer to the sea of green leaves.\n\n\"Dis reminds me of them elven lands. Makes me wonder, what is da name o' da forest dere?\" Merlia shouted.\n\n\"That would be the forest of despair!\" Arcturus replied.\n\n\"Oh great. Dats a wonderful name for a forest. What's wrong wit you humans? Yer mommas read ya one ta many creepy stories?\"\n\n\"She has a point, Arcturus.\" Veledar laughed, causing Arcturus to squint his eyes. He once again found himself watching Veledar as he flew high above the forest. The dragon slightly moved his wings, no doubt to stay with the air currents.\n\n\"So where did you guys end up flying to?\" Lyndis asked in Arcturus' ear.\n\n\"Just gave the mountain a few loops. Veledar was just getting me used to the feel of his wings. It was way better than being picked up like prey for sure.\"\n\n\"He picked you up? You never told me that when you recounted your story!\"\n\n\"He screamed like a banshee queen!\" Veledar laughed, \"No wonder he did not wish to tell you. It would tarnish his reputation as a brave paladin.\"\n\n\"Anyone would have screamed their guts when placed in that situation. We humans aren't made for such kind of thrills! Heights pose a serious danger you know.\" He shot back, pressing his finger on the dragon's back firmly. \"Or if a certain dragon was going to drop him.\"\n\n\"I never planned on doing that, even if we were on much worse terms.\" Veledar snickered.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Arcturus continued, rolling his eyes. \"He did a loop, then some rolls, and ended up with a nose dive towards the ground.\"\n\n\"Amazing!\" said Lyndis in surprise. \"Even the pegasai back home won't do a loop!\"\n\n\"Wait, you have flown before?\" Arcturus asked. He was almost sure that, judging by the excitement she had shown Veledar, that the elf never tasted the exhilarating freedom of the high skies. Perhaps it was Veledar's size that intimidated her.\n\n\"Aye!\"\n\n\"I thought these pegasi were reserved for the royal knights of your country. Am I wrong?\" He asked, certain he had read about that in reports from long ago. The sky knights were quite a force to deal with. They could get in really quick, hit their target, and extract before anyone knew what happened. Pegasi were even faster than gryphons, and it usually took some tricky maneuvering of forces in order to deal with them.\n\n\"That's a misconception. See, they are just knights, not just trained out by the royal guard.\" Lyndis replied, holding up her right finger as she talked. Sadly, Veledar, I think they might be faster than you.\"\n\n\"Most likely the only area in which they excel!\" Veledar shot back with a growl. The dragon turned slightly right and started a decent down towards the forest. Arcturus started to wonder what Veledar could be doing. Did he want to skim the tree tops? He did not mention anything about wanting to rest his wings.\n\n\"Hey Veledar, why are you descending towards the forest? You can't be so tired that you want to rest now!\" He stared as Veledar continued to descend without a word or snarky quip back.\n\n\"Is he alright?\" Lyndis whispered into his ear. Arcturus could feel her hands tightening around his waist.\n\n\"Veledar!\" Arcturus shouted out to the dragon, who was now practically touching the treetops as he flew.\n\n\"What's da matter wit da dragon?\" Merlia shouted from above as Ulga brought her closer towards them.\n\n\"We don't know!\" Lyndis shouted back, \"Veledar just started heading towards the forest and won't answer us!\"\n\nArcturus touched Veledar's neck scales with his gloved hand. He patted them gently, trying to ignore the trees that were almost hitting Veledar's limbs now.\n\n\"What is going on with you, buddy?\" He whispered to himself. He then took a deep breath, \"VELEDAR! Wake up from whatever the hell you're doing!\"\n\nThe dragon shook his head with a savage swipe from left to right. He tilted his wings, and stopped in a hover above the trees. \"Graaawwrrr!\" He continued to shake his head as he let out growls of frustration. Arcturus thankfully managed to stay in the saddle, with Lyndis clutching him tightly from behind.\n\n\"What in the world just happened? Veledar. Lyndis. Are you alright?\"\n\nArcturus didn't wait for an answer. Instead, he looked down at the forest and felt a pit grow in his stomach. Perhaps the rumors about this strange forest were true all along. There had to be some reason why everything from Lumara typically avoided this place.\n\n\"I'm alright, if you can call it that. Gods\u2026I have a bad feeling about this.\" Lyndis said. Arcturus could feel her move one hand to what most likely was the hilt of her rapier. The man thought about doing the same, but he held his hand against the dragon's scales instead. He had to try and wake Veledar up from whatever ailed him. Perhaps he just needed to hear the voice of a friend.\n\n\"Veledar! Brightscales. Crimson head. Are you listening to me? No? Then focus on my voice. Listen to my voice Veledar. Focus.\"\n\nVeledar shook his head for a final time as he let out a deep roar from his throat. He moved his head slowly to look around before turning around to look to Arcturus with one of his blue eyes.\n\n\"Arcturus. Lyndis. Where are we?\" Veledar asked between steady beats of his wings.\n\n\"You tell us, dragon, because I certainly haven't used one of my charms to cloud your mind.\" Lyndis laughed nervously.\n\n\"I don't.... remember much,\" Veledar said, stumbling over his own words.\n\n\"Great. Just\u2026this is a fantastic start to our journey. Is there anything you can remember? Any details on what caused you to bring us so close to these ugly trees?\" Lyndis continued her questioning. Arcturus felt her hand move from her rapier back to his shoulder.\n\n\"I\u2026I remember a voice calling my name from the forest below. Then everything started to get fuzzy and heavy, kind of like when you drink another barrel of ale after you had one too many. My next memory is you shouting my name.\" The dragon said.\n\n\"It sounds like ya fell fer de ole siren's song!\" Merlia shouted from above.\n\n\"Strange, but believable, given the evidence. I might have to take your word for it. I have never met a siren.\" The dragon growled deep in his throat as he barred his teeth, \"I think we should get as far away from this accursed place as we can. Right now!\"\n\nVeledar gave his wings a stronger beat that elevated them above the trees. That's when Arcturus saw something move towards them from beneath the forest's thick canopy. Dark green vines flew up to Veledar, easily wrapping around the dragon's limbs.\n\n\"What are these accursed things?\" The dragon thrashed as he growled and snapped at the vines that seemed to grip tighter and tighter around his scales.\n\n\"I don't know, but I bet they've not just went through all the trouble of crawling up just to give us a welcoming hug!\"\n\n\"Mraaaarrrr!\" Arcturus felt the dragon jerk beneath him. Veledar pulled against constricting vines with a flurry of wing beats, and when that failed, the dragon pulled up a green serpent and brought his muzzle down to chew through a second, freeing his left paw.\n\n\"That's one way to say no to hugs,\" Arcturus pulled out the rod and activated it, letting it extend to its full length before his very eyes.\n\n\"Will you just stop joking about this and kill them?\" Lyndis hissed from behind.\n\nLike a valiant knight obeying the request of a maiden in need, Arcturus did a quick salute gesture, then swung the weightless flaming blade down to slice a cluster of vines off his friend's right paw.\n\n\"Look at them burn!\" Veledar growled excitedly.\n\n\"Yeah! Stay off my dragon you nasty, jealous plants!\" Arcturus too gave a cheer of victory as he slashed through yet another cluster, but it was short lived. From the severed vines, either cut by teeth or burned by sword, several more started to regrow. They sprang up with an inhuman force to start wrapping around the now roaring and snarling red dragon. One of the said vines wrapped around the dragon's neck and pulled hard. Hard enough to pull a fully grown, winged dragon down towards the tree tops that pointed their sharp tips right at his belly.\n\nArcturus sliced through the offending vine almost instantly. He wasn't about to give up his friend to whatever sorcery the forest produced. Veledar had moved his neck and grazed the fire blade on the pole. Thankfully, his mother thought of this scenario. Veledar, being a red dragon, was impervious to fire, magical or otherwise. Arcturus grinned, knowing he could actually slice his way wildly around Veledar and not physically hurt the dragon with the weapon. From behind, he heard Lyndis mutter all sorts of curses. Most of them ended with the word 'focken' with every breath as she too was no doubt working her rapiers against the vines that were now trying to wrap around her lithe body.\n\n\"Looks like ye need a bit o' help. Say hello ta ma big friend, ye crawly green snails!\"\n\nFrom the corner of his eye Arcturus saw that Merlia had pulled out the oath bow and was raining what arrows she could into the vines. However, despite their efforts to grant Veledar that one moment where he could lift himself about the trees, the vines held firm in their assault.\n\n\"Grawr, this is working about as well as a human trying to kill me with his fists!\" The dragon snarled.\n\n\"Use a spell then!\" Arcturus cried out.\n\n\"I've got something better. You might want to shield your eyes a bit, and maybe take a deep breath before the air gets foul!\"\n\n\"Oh, for Bahamut's sake, dragon! This is not the time for fart jokes!\"\n\nVeledar threw a quick smile at Arcturus, breathed in deep, then unleashed a cone of fire down towards his own paws. The orange blaze touched the vines like a rain of pure sizzling destruction, turning their green forms black, drying out their wetness, and reducing the creepy things to ash.\n\n\"How is that for a joke?\" The dragon licked his snout proudly.\n\n\"Great job!\" Lyndis cried as the dragon got a few good wingbeats in to regain the altitude he had lost during the attack of the vines. Even so, Arcturus saw even more fly up towards the dragon, three times faster than before.\n\n\"More! There's more!\"\n\n\"Oh, you gotta be focken kiddin'.\"\n\n\"Not exactly!\" Arcturus grunted in response as he sliced his way through the vines with all the speed he could muster. The vines snapped in half, falling back to the forest like zombie vegetation, but the paladin's fury could not stop the wriggly monsters from wrapping around the dragon, and with a firm pull, dragging him down from the sky.\n\nArcturus was dragged along with Lyndis and Veledar through the canopy of the trees. Veledar struggled the entire time as his entire body tensed up to fight, but it was for naught. The vines simply had too well of a hold on the dragon. The paladin kept on slicing vines away from his friend, until Veledar was able to get another deep breath. Arcturus shielded his face as Veledar let loose a fiery inferno that washed over his underside. Arcturus could feel the heat rise from below as feet upon feet of vines were incinerated before the might of his dragon. With all this destruction raining down upon them, the vines finally let go of them, Veledar ruptured his way through the branches and fell to the forest floor below with a thud. Lyndis -luckily being the nimble one that she was-managed to jump off at nearly the last second and avoid harm.\n\nVeledar groaned from the ground. \"Why did I have to fall from the sky again?\" The dragon then smacked the ground with his tail.\n\n\"Pulled, you mean. You did not fall out of your own volition,\" Arcturus corrected him as he felt his leg pinned beneath the dragon. He gave it a tug, but it would not budge. He hoped it was not broken.\n\n\"Thanks for the correction. I can die happy now that I have such a learned man by my side.\" Veledar rumbled as he got back onto all fours. Arcturus sighed as felt his leg. Thankfully, it did not seem to be broken, although if it was he supposed he could have just healed it with the lay-on-hands ability he now possessed.\n\n\"Well, knowledge doesn't do much good against whatever those were,\" he unlatched himself and dismounted the dragon.\n\n\"The forest has to earn its name from something,\"\n\nArcturus replied with a meek smile and dropped into a combat stance as he stowed the metal rod and drew his sword and shield. Veledar spread his wings wide, thrashed his tail against the ground, and barred his teeth. He heard Lyndis emerge to stand beside him, her rapier held aloft and her eyes alert.\n\nArcturus scanned the trees for any sign of movement, and he could see Lyndis and Veledar doing the same. Despite their waiting, there was no sign of the vines that had dragged them down into this forest. All that he could see were the numerous trees that seemed to litter the area. One oddity was that their current position had scarcer vegetation. It seemed the vines had picked this exact spot to fit them into. There were hardly any sounds from wildlife that Arcturus could hear, although he could easily blame that on Veledar's roars. With no threat presently attacking them, Arcturus breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed like whatever had caused this inopportune stop from their journey was granting them a reprieve.\n\n\"Someone has a funny way of inviting us to a stroll through the forest.\" Lyndis quipped as she stowed her rapier and began dusting off her leather armor. \"They could have simply asked, or charm some plants to do that for them. I heard some mages in Rothdell keep singing sunflowers as pets.\"\n\nVeledar just growled deep, hissed again, and thrashed his tail against the ground, causing a cloud of dirt to fly up around his body.\n\n\"Manticore's gnarly bottom. I'm grounded again!\" The dragon roared, folding his wings up against himself. \"Why do I always have to feel the dirt under my feet?\"\n\nThere was a sudden rustling of trees that caused all of them to stop and focus on that one spot. Arcturus raised his sword, Veledar spread his wings wide, and Lyndis held up a cupped hand filled with an orb of fire.\n\n\"We might not have long before our host decides we need to keep moving.\" Lyndis said, lowering her cupped hand, the fire simply fading away from her relaxing fingers.\n\n\"Get off me ye dirty vines. Unless ya wanna hav some fun wit me! If dat's da case, tis best ta buy a girl dinner first!\" Came the voice of Merlia from above. Arcturus could hear the dwarf continue to swear and yell as he pictured her slicing the things with her axes. When she came into view the vines let her drop from high above. Veledar leaped up and caught the dwarf.\n\n\"Got you!\" Veledar smiled as he landed back on the ground and set the dwarf down gently.\n\n\"Well I sappose ye got yer uses.\" Merlia snarked, \"Thank'ee laddie for da rescue. Ye might be my great hero today.\"\n\n\"Oh Merlia, don't you already know this? I am always great.\" Veledar shot back, swelling his chest up.\n\n\"So not ta sound impatient, but what we doin now dat dese vines dragged us down 'ere?\" Merlia stowed her axes at her side in a single motion. Arcturus noted that she was missing arrows from her quiver, probably from all the shooting she did on the vines. \"Cause it seems like dese vines be keen on keepin us down 'ere. Do we just wander about, whistlin a merry tune?\"\n\n\"It's not like we haven't done that before.\" Veledar snarled, looking to the trees that had dragged him from the sky. Arcturus saw a hate flash through his eyes. The dragon really did not like having his freedom snatched away from him. The paladin stowed his sword as he too felt a tad of what Veledar was going through. They had just flown for real, only to be torn from the sky. When he found whatever person or thing that unleashed those rude vines upon his party, they would get a piece of his mind. He pictured Veledar spouting off threats, baring his teeth, snorting black smoke. He smiled at the thought.\n\n\"Besides, whoever wanted us down here clearly did not want me or the rest of you dead.\" Veledar continued, then stopped with a grin, \"Although I am also inclined to chock it up to the fact that I am a dragon, and that's the only reason we survived. Can a gryphon breathe fire or endure the punishment of those stinky vines as long as I had? Not unless they grow scales on their entire body!\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah. Nothing new there,\" the human grumbled. \"Dragon pride excluded, I think Veledar here has a point.\" Arcturus stowed his weapon back in its scabbard. \"I think we just stay together, keep our eyes peeled, and try to figure out why we are here.\"\n\n\"See? Arcturus here gets it.\" replied Veledar, then rumbled with a deep growl in his throat, \"and when we find whoever DARED to rip us from the sky, we are going to unleash the same retribution upon them in the form of words fitting their station!\"\n\n\"So if they're a stone giant, you are going to praise them?\" Arcturus chuckled.\n\n\"My bet is on a midget. Only they are cowardly enough to let magic do all their work.\" The dragon snorted.\n\nArcturus and Veledar looked through the trees to find what looked like a path winding its way through the forest. It was certainly large enough to fit them, even if they walked side by side, and any direction was good as any if they had no idea where to go. Arcturus started to walk, and Veledar joined him with a swish of his tail.\n\n\"Coming, ladies?\" The dragon asked, curling his neck around to look at them.\n\n\"I most certainly am not going to stare at your butt all the way to Entis.\" Lyndis shrugged the offer down.\n\n\"Da elf speaks sense,\" Merlia agreed. \"Ye gotta be on equal footing wit yer party if ye wanna be a good leader, dragon.\"\n\n\"I haven't actually told you to ogle my tail you know, but I understand if your eyes find it difficult to find anything more captivating amidst this\u2026desolate landscape.\"\n\n\"You do have a nice tail.\" Arcturus commented with a whisper. \"Just\u2026don't let them hear that.\"\n\nVeledar favored him with a quick smile. Arcturus thought to path that lay before them, and what new dangers were awaiting them in this forest. He thought to Veledar, walking ever so vigilantly alongside him, and why the king had wanted such a wonderful dragon dead. He hovered his hand over the hilt of his sword with each foot step that carried him along the winding path.\n\nWhatever lays ahead, we will face it all together.\n\nThe girls soon caught up, and the group of four adventurers soon advanced into the eerie depths of the darkened forest.\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nSkywing walked along the smooth wooden deck of the mightiest ship in Lumara, the Indomitous. It was the same ship that the famous dragon slayer, Arcturus Lund, had set out on to hunt the red dragon that the gryphon found himself perusing as well. What started out as a simple mission of retrieving the red for the king had suddenly turned into a complicated ordeal. The gryphon gazed to the snow-covered mountaintops that were passing far below the ship's hull. They looked like a sea of vast white, with little rough brown rocks jutting out from the seamless blanket of snow. Skywing found himself puzzled by this discovery. When they had found out the dragon was not the flames, teeth, or rage that the paperwork had said he would be, nobody knew what to believe. And the paladin sent to find him? The reports claimed the dragon had killed the man in a fit of rage. That had proven to be false as well. After all, Skywing had seen the man with his own eyes.\n\nHe remembered bounding forth to strike at the man, furious that such a decorated hero would betray his oath to the king and let the beast free. However, when he had awoken from his blackout, Skywing found out that the beast had slain none of his wing-mates. Granted, there were wounds, bruises, and injured egos among the others of his flock, but each gryphon that he had brought into this hunt still drew breath. The only one that had died met his end at the ax of a dwarf, not the claws of the dragon. The snowy gryphon shook his head and closed his eyes as he let the cool mountain breeze ruffle his feathers. When he opened them, he found the cloudy sky was no less different, and his thoughts, no less confusing.\n\nWas this red dragon even guilty of the crimes that had been listed on the paperwork? The ones that Garroth had kept reminding the crew during this hunt?\n\nTruthfully, Skywing knew very little of the man that most were calling one of the best adventurers of the realm. Garroth seemed too ready to please for the gryphon's taste, his honor often swayed by the amount of coin dropped into his pouch. Skywing had heard the rumor that despite the dragon killing his friend, he had actually talked the king into paying him more money than was originally offered to do such a task. Skywing stuffed his angry screech in the back of his throat. If it were any of his gryphons that had been claimed by the dragon, he would have done the damn task for free, but then again, he wasn't the one leading this mission. With a soft clack of his beak that involuntarily ended with a chirp, Skywing resettled his wings against his back. This time, an irritated snort left his parted beak, his breath misting in the air.\n\nHe stood on the wooden deck for quite some time, watching the ship start to make its way towards the vast forest that Skywing had found his way in two years earlier. It even looked like they were actually heading towards the forest of despair; the forest that no soul was allowed to enter, above or below, without the permission of its green dragoness ruler. He stood transfixed, as the place filled with him with a cold sort of terror that grew worse the closer he approached. The red dragon had been nothing like that green monster. She had taken everyone in Skywing's party out with barely any effort, then made him feel like mere prey before her. A tiny thing that was meant to pay worship to her. She had even taken his wing-mates at that time from him. Two gryphons that had been loyal to him more than anyone else. Skywing scowled at the sky. They must have been either statues, or her reluctant slaves, or servants, whatever the dragoness preferred to call them.\n\n\"What's running underneath those feathers of yours?\"\n\nGarroth's voice pulled Skywing's anger-filled thoughts from the forest, and the gryphon spun around without a word, with his striped tail wagging behind him. \"A past that's no longer relevant. Tell me. Are we going to the forest of despair?\" He asked flatly.\n\n\"Straight to the point. That is what I like about you.\" Garroth chuckled. He strolled over to the gryphon with a smile on his face. \"Yes, we are indeed going to venture into that horrid place, for that is where the dragon decided to flee to.\" The man gave a large sigh of relief as he placed his hands on the railing and gazed down to the vast patchwork quilt of green that was the forest.\n\n\"How are you certain he went there, human? He can be in a thousand of other places by now. Dragons might be slower than us, but they're not stupid. He will go into hiding first chance he gets,\" Skywing padded over to the human's side and tilted his head to the left.\n\n\"Well\u2026let's just say I know things.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Skywing clacked his beak. \"What about the sting of my tail? Will you know that too, if I decide to whip some sense into your head?\"\n\n\"Ah, there's hardly need for such barbaric methods when the ruler of this very forest graced us with this,\" Garroth pulled out a small, palm sized red orb from his pouch. It looked to be a perfectly smooth thing, with tiny clouds swirling around within its confines. \"With a mere touch, this item can show me the closest red dragon for miles around.\" He chuckled, pointing to the forest with his other hand. \"So unless there is a second red dragon that just happened to be in a place close to the snowy mountain where we lost our quarry, I believe it is safe to say the dragon we seek is hiding beneath those trees.\"\n\n\"That is sound reasoning human, except I can show you one error in your plan.\"\n\n\"And what error is that, Skywing? I have a vast ship here.\" Garroth turned to gesture to the wooden deck. \"We have energy cannons that can blast a hole the size of your head through the dragon's scales. We have hunters armed to the teeth with equipment, and on top of that, we also have your gryphons.\" The human crossed his arms and gave the gryphon an amused smirk. \"Surely that is enough to subdue one pesky dragon, yes? We already brought him down from the sky once when he bled all over that mountain, if it were not for that strong magic protecting him, we would have had him bound in chains and back in the belly of this vessel in no time!\"\n\nSkywing sighed and looked to the ignorant human with pity. \"Sounds so easy when you put it that way, but you know what? You behave as if you own the land beneath you.\" The gryphon held up his talon and cupped the air. \"One does not simply venture into the forest of despair, not while the Emerald Lady rules over every leaf, every branch, every speck of dust that resides in that dark place.\"\n\n\"Emerald Lady?\" Garroth placed a hand to his chin, and rubbed his rough stubble. \"Can't say I ever heard of anyone going by this title. Is she nobility, by any chance?\"\n\nSkywing told the human everything he had known about that night, two years prior. He mentioned the vines, the dragoness that towered over them, and how in a matter of minutes she had brought down ten armored knights and three gryphons with merely vines. When he was finished, he was amazed by the human's complete lack of concern.\n\n\"I will contact my king about this matter.\" He said with a smile. \"You can rest assured though, Skywing. With everything we have gathered, I am sure we can go in and snatch the red dragon. Heck, maybe we can even deal with that green pest you just described.\"\n\nHe placed a hand onto Skywings shoulder and patted it softly. \"Just you wait, alright? I will contact some people back in Entis. Call in some favors, as you will, and make sure what happened to you back then doesn't repeat now in the present.\" Garroth turned to the forest once more. \"Don't worry, Arcturus. We shall have you freed from that red dragon's claws. Hold on just for a day or two, my friend. Garroth and his merry band of adventurers is coming to rescue you.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the gryphons that yearn for a little payback.\" Skywing chirped, thinking to his lost friends. \"We will stand behind you all the way, Garroth, if you can pull the required strings.\"\n\n\"Don't worry your beak with such details, gryphon. I will get a bloody army of mercs if I have to. Let's see if that green lady of yours can pull the same cheap tricks on an entire army. In the end, she will bend the knee before us, just like everyone else.\"\n\nSkywing had a moment of doubt cross his mind, but with the human's smile of confidence, as well as the sturdy ship beneath his paws, he felt like they could indeed succeed. With a final look to the forest, he steeled himself for what was to come. They would retrieve the dragon, save the paladin, possibly save his long-lost friends, and get rid of that green dragoness for good.\n\n\"She will know the same bitter taste I swallowed all those years back, and when her trees burn and the dragon lays defeated at our feet, stripped of both title and power, the world will call her lady no longer,\" Skywing replied with a confident grin.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ One Good deed ]\n\nArcturus held firm onto the wooden training sword he carried within his hands. The strong, athletic human boy of twelve stood tall, with a grin present on his fair face. Confidence sparkled in his bright green eyes. The golden rays of the sun above bathed his dark-green-shirt-clad chest in its warmth, as well as the rest of his form.\n\nArcturus stood opposite to two other children of roughly the same age and build as himself. One had long flowing blonde hair and bright icy blue eyes, while the other had olive skin with eyes of amber, and hair of mahogany. They too held training swords at the ready as they circled one another, their eyes looking for the first error to capitalize on. Arcturus already knew trouble was coming. He bravely stepped towards them, for he was trained by the best dragon hunter of them all. He was the son of Markis Lund.\n\nHis sword clashed with another as the enemy rose to block the upcoming strike. The rules were simple. Arcturus thought as such as he parried a child's swing, then back stepping and avoiding the other child that came at him. You get three strikes onto you and, you are done. It did not matter where they were, nor how hard the blow hit. The only thing that mattered was the number. Three hits. That's all it took for one of the boys to step outside the dueling area.\n\nArcturus grinned as the first child took a swing, and he stepped under him, letting two hard thwacks of his wooden sword be the boy's reward. Right after his assault, Arcturus nimbly backed away with a laugh of victory. For you see, he had already bested this boy numerous times. That is why he currently had a partner, even if that partner was not doing him much good.\n\n\"Hey, watch it!\" The blonde-haired boy yelled out, bumping into his useless partner.\n\n\"Watch yourself!\" The boy sneered back, \"He's fast.\"\n\nArcturus backed away, keeping his breath in check and his excitement from getting too high. He had not yet won, something his father had always warned him to be mindful of. Keep your eyes up and expect the unexpected.\n\n\"Arcturus!\" Came the shout of a bearded man bearing the same eyes as him. They glared at him inquisitively, as they traced his body up and down. \"Keep your form up and don't get cocky! Focus, remember? The concentration has to be as sure as your feet.\" The man thrust a finger at him. \"Now, to add a slight twist to this challenge. If you fail to answer my questions correctly, I will count it as a hit against you! What say you?\"\n\n\"Try your best, father!\" Arcturus shouted as the two children advanced on him with grins of mischief. Clearly they were thinking they could get the best of him with this little change in plans. With a shrug, Arcturus met their attacks. He would just have to show them how wrong they were the hard way.\n\n\"Name the weak spots of a dragon!\"\n\n\"That one's too easy!\" Arcturus grunted as he shoved the olive-skinned boy back, only to strike the blonde haired one square in the chest during this moment of distraction. \"Those are the eyes, the wings, the underside of the paws, the joints....and...Their genitals!\" Arcturus flustered at that one, backing away from the other snickering children. \"What? They have weaker scales there.\" Arcturus stuck his tongue out. \"You would know if you read the books.\"\n\n\"Read books about their...regions?\" The blonde-haired boy snickered, almost dropping his sword. \"What sort of weirdo are you?\"\n\n\"Right answer m'boy!\" The man shouted. \"He's right you know. Perceptive. More than I can say about the rest of you,\" he gestured towards the children, who no longer snickered once a respected Lund stared them down with the stern gaze of a hunter. \"Good job, Arcturus.\" He turned his eyes upon his boy. \"Good job. Now tell me, what kind of breath is typical for a brass dragon?\" His father shouted out as Arcturus smacked the olive-skinned child, taking him out of the contest.\n\n\"Take that!\" He cheered as the blonde-haired boy swung and struck him on the side. \"Grahhh.\" Arcturus stumbled backwards as the other boy grinned at him.\n\n\"I'm waiting boy! Or do you want two strikes against you?\" Came the demanding voice of his father. Clearly he did not care that he had just been struck so hard in the chest that even breathing came a little hard for him.\n\n\"F-fire!\" Arcturus coughed, his eyes narrowing at the blonde child. If he was going to be swinging hard, he would not have to hold back now. \"You asked for it now, blondie.\" Arcturus mumbled as he recomposed himself, holding his sword aloft to point the wooden tip at his annoying enemy.\n\n\"Good job! Keep it up Arcturus. Don't fall prey to distraction. Pain is your greatest enemy out there in the field. I've known slayers able to withstand wounds so horrifying they'd put a normal man on his ass. Now tell me, where do green dragons like to nest?\"\n\n\"Forests, swamps, marshes!\" Arcturus shouted, charging at the blonde-haired boy, blocking the child's strike, and then twisting his blade so that it struck the boy once on the underside of his leg. It hit just the right spot to make the boy fall backwards onto the dirt. Arcturus did not let up for an instant, as he easily avoided the boy's retaliation, and then struck him in his sword arm.\n\n\"And what do these dragons typically like to hoard?\"\n\n\"Mortals!\" Arcturus swung his sword hard enough that it sent the other boy's sword flying from his grasp to clatter on the dusty ground of the arena. Arcturus finished him off with a solid strike to the torso.\n\n\"Gah!\" The boy exclaimed, falling back to clench at his chest. \"That stings. you dolt!\"\n\n\"Next time you'll know better than to swing with your entire might in a training match.\" Arcturus snapped as the boy rose up to glare at him with hateful eyes. Arcturus simply returned the stare as the clearly embarrassed boy walked out of the white fenced area. He headed back to a collection of pockmarked people in multicolored clothing, head down, like a defeated dog with its tail between the legs.\n\n\"Great answers, great fighting, great spirit! That was a splendid display of keen ability, m'boy!\" His father cheered. The man quickly stepped into the ring, arms stretched wide. \"You did your family proud, son.\"\n\nMarkis then turned towards the large collection of people \"See there, Jenkins? Takes right after his old man!\" His father placed a rough hand to his hair and ruffled it with a chuckle. \"You're going to be the best dragon slayer this world will ever know. Just make sure you don't get lazy like the dragons you've learned about, eh? If they spent half as much time hunting us, well, we'd not be here today talking about a dragon's legendary laziness, would we now?\"\n\n\"But not all of them sit in their nest.\" Arcturus peeped in.\n\n\"They do, boy. They do,\" Markis patted his son on the back. \"There's a couple active ones who can't stay idle, but after you take your first one, you'll start to learn that dragons are just as capable of dying as we are. They just have a hard time learning that, so it is up to us to teach 'em a pair of wings and a few scales do not make them better than us.\"\n\nArcturus cringed. The thought of a life spent hunting the great winged beasts that roamed the country of Sethera did not fill him with the excitement one would expect. It was a darker feeling. Something that made his blood run cold every time his father ever mentioned it, especially when he looked so proud and happy with his boy's combat efficiency. Arcturus did not want to be a dragon slayer like the rest of his family, and he certainly did not want to spend his life hunting the creatures simply because he was told to. It was something his mother would have objected about, if she were still around, after all.\n\n\"Uh\u2026Sure dad.\" He replied sheepishly at the man before him. Markis continued to grin.\n\n\"You know what? You did remarkably well in besting those two kids.\" Markis thumbed behind him. \"I think I owe you a treat after that exquisite show of Lund swordsmanship.\"\n\nA treat?\n\nArcturus' thoughts twisted to what ever his father could mean. Did he bring chocolate? Perhaps my favorite paints? Is it a new horse? Possibly my own set of armor?\n\n\"What do you mean, father?\" Arcturus decided to seek a simpler answer to his dilemmas.\n\n\"Come here and I shall show you.\" The man grinned as he wrapped his strong arm around his son's shoulders.\n\n\"Come on, father. Don't keep me guessing. You look practically ready to burst with excitement as well!\" Arcturus laughed as they strolled through the rows upon rows of brightly colored tents. The air was filled with the scents of hundreds of people massed together, mixed with sweat and the smell of cooking meats.\n\n\"Tis better if I showed you. Words cannot do justice to what I've prepared for you.\" His father held up a finger and pointed it skyward. \"Trust me, Arcturus, you will be glad I did not spill the beans on this surprise.\" Markis chuckled. They passed a band of singing gryphons, who, by the sound of their slurred speech, had already gotten piss-ass drunk despite the sun being straight overhead.\n\nArcturus rolled his eyes at the three stumbling birds that nearly collapsed as the two Lunds, father and son, strolled on by. His eyes traced along the field, to a large green banner that was fluttering in the wind. One that had a golden lion holding a shield and sword. Arcturus knew this flag well, for it was the symbol of the Lunds, the greatest dragon hunters in all of Lumara. According to his father, of course.\n\nThe flag that bore his family crest was gathered with a collection of others. They were all different colors and symbols, each one belonging to a different family that came to this place to compete. Each one an opponent for Arcturus to best. For you see, this large collection of tents, this gathering of peoples from all over his nation was all about one thing to his family. It was a celebration of each family's strength, a chance for each bloodline to show off their latest offspring. There were humans, elves, dwarves, minotaurs. Heck. Arcturus thought he had even seen a gryphon bragging about his skills. It did not matter who you were, where you came from, when one single thing bound all these people together.\n\nEach one of them was a dragon hunter.\n\nArcturus set his eyes on another collection of massed people that parted before his father's stern eyes like water. He thought he spotted his cousin Horace, a portly man who was a simple farmer, a man who had never harmed a dragon in all of his life. He was just one of the many that came to spectate these sorts of things, for it was not just for the dragon hunters themselves. It was something for all their clans to enjoy over song, drink, and cheers of happiness.\n\n\"This walk is starting to bore me. Tell me, where are you taking me, father?\" He asked as it became apparent his father was leading him away from all the noise, the people, the drink, and the drunk gryphon that had just smacked a lady's ass, only to get a swift kick to the groin. Arcturus had stifled a laugh as the creature rolled around to the squawking laughter of his feathered friends.\n\n\"Be patient. What I prepared requires us to get away from all this commotion.\" His father waved around to the collected masses. \"They did not want to disturb the gathering just yet.\" His father pointed to a larger tent apart from the rest. It was a dark brown thing, completely enclosed from all sides. It had one entrance, which was bound up tighter than a vice. \"That is where we are headed.\"\n\nArcturus stared at the tent in wonder. As they strode across the brightly lit field of green, his heart started to beat faster with every careful stride. His thoughts danced around in his head at what could be kept waiting in that tent. He knew there would be challenges during the week for them to overcome. Each contestant would get to best a beast specifically collected and prepared for this moment. The moment that would test their skills to the limit. Although\u2026 what kind of beast would they hold out here, away from all the noise and the people? Would they not want to build anticipation? Get the crowd riled up for the games ahead? It seemed like something Arcturus would do, if he were in charge of these games.\n\n\"Wha-\"\n\nHis father silenced his mouth with a palm. The strong man guided his son around the tent. \"Shhh...\" He held a finger to his mouth as their path carried them to the other side of the tent. His father gestured out with a wide sweep of his hand and said nothing, letting the sight before him speak for itself.\n\nArcturus felt his mouth drop at what his father had gestured to. Bound before them on a large wooden carts were the imposing bodies of dragons. They were bound with heavy brown leathers that seemed to be soaked in some sort of liquid, most likely a flame retardant. Their wings were bound tight against their mighty scaled bodies, and their limbs were shackled in irons. One was scaled in bright golden armor, with underscales of a soft brown. His wings were feathered and bore the color of fresh snow. The black horned male gazed out to the human with his emerald eyes. However, it was not this dragon that drew the boy's gaze, but the other female that robbed his interest.\n\nHer scales were a bright bronze that sparkled in the sun. Atop her back was a frill that extended down from her horned head, all the way to her tail. The base of the membrane was a dark navy, slowly fading until it turned into a light turquoise near the edges. She had talons and horns to match the color of charcoal black, and eyes like molten amber. Their carts were sitting still for the moment, each one of the carts still latched onto a team of large bay horses.\n\n\"D-Dragons?\" Arcturus quickly snapped his attention away from the things he had only read about, and back to his father, who looked down to him with a stern face.\n\n\"Yes...Dragons. They were going to be used for the end of the tournament, but I figured we can extend their purpose to some other things, like an early preview for my worthy son.\" His father looked back to the bound creatures with a slight grin. \"We helped bring in these vile creatures that were plaguing the countryside. It took some effort to overpower and subdue the beasts, but each one, as you can see, fell before our combined might.\"\n\n\"What did they do?\" Arcturus asked, looking to the female that had locked her eyes onto him. They did not seem like the eyes that belonged to a monster. In fact, if Arcturus had to point to what they indeed looked like, he would describe them as rather kind, anxious, and full of fear. \"What crimes did they commit, father?\"\n\n\"Does it matter? They're here now, awaiting a most deserved end!\"\n\nHe must have spoken louder than intended, for he quickly lowered the tone of his voice. \"Theft of property, maiming of helpless farmers, burning of houses that still housed whole families. That bronze there has some heinous activities attached to her head, like the slaughter of hunters who wanted only to provide for their families, and the murder of some of our beloved lords. These beasts have no compassion for the other living beings they share the land with, and as such, they have to be punished. Oh yes, they all have to pay for their crimes.\"\n\nArcturus wrinkled his brow as his father continued to list crime after crime that the beasts had committed. He was unnaturally coherent, as if he had memorized the entire list. Arcturus even got bored of the humongous list of accusations. He even rolled his eyes as his father seemed to continue until he finally ran out of breath.\n\nArcturus focused on the beautiful dragons before him. Their strong looking scales, their smooth looking wing membranes. Arcturus twitched his hands as he wondered what one would even feel like to the touch. In fact\u2026 he had never actually touched a scale before. He laughed to himself. Here he was, son to the best dragon slayer in the land, and he had yet to touch a living dragon's scale or a wing membrane. He had only read about the mighty beasts in his books, and tested against the illusions his father had conjured with the help of spellcasters.\n\nArcturus wondered about the accusations. How could something so beautiful be as evil as the men said? He crossed his arms as the horses started to pull the dragons into the now opened tent, disappearing with a flapping of the fabric. He remembered the picture of the supposedly evil dragon, Radiant Flame, from his grandfather's dragonology books. The red dragon had tolled mortals and killed those who could not pay the fee to pass the bridge. After that, as a grisly sign of superiority, or perhaps a warning against the rest of the human kind, the dragon built a bridge from the very bones of the travelers that wandered too close. He always thought about how pretty her turquoise scales were, and her cerulean eyes that matched the color of the brightest sky. When he looked to them on the pages of that book, or when he went to his father's study, he found himself thinking that dragons could not all be evil. There had to be some good ones out there in the world, right? It just\u2026had to be fair.\n\nArcturus let out a heavy sigh. These were questions his mother would have had. The mother that was no longer there, stolen away from the rearing of a horse, and the hard rock that connected with her neck in the most tragic accident Arcturus knew during his young life.\n\n\"Don't worry your mind about them, son.\" His father swung his arm around his shoulder again and started to lead Arcturus back towards the collection of people, tents, and ever-loud voices. \"These wretched beasts are for the victors of this tournament. You can bet it will be your strong arm that gets the honor of delivering justice to these foul beasts. You are going to learn firsthand what it means to be the hand that delivers justice onto the world.\"\n\nArcturus felt his blood freeze once more at the thought of running a blade through a dragon's head. His hands quivered and his breath got short. In the blink of an eye, he felt sick to his stomach as he pictured their bleeding corpses, and blood dripping from his hands. He shook his head to force his mind towards something pleasant. The image of the dragonesses' bronze scales sparkling in the sunlight helped him more than he could ever admit to his father. Arcturus knew he had to sketch her. No. A mere sketch was improper for such a majestic creature. He had to paint her, and if he was able to, even speak with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "That night, Arcturus laid down on the bed of straw. It was not the most comfortable thing to be lying on, since they were away from home. It surely made him miss the oversized bed in his room, with the softest blankets he had ever known. The boy sighed at the pleasant memory as he gazed down to the book held within his hands. The soft glow of the mana lantern light was all that lit the tent serving as his room. Thankfully, he had gotten this one to himself, as his father had shared one with the gryphon nanny while they were here. He had rolled his eyes at her giggling laughter as she ruffled her earthen brown feathers, his father leading her away with a flick of her lion-like tail.\n\nHis eyes came across the picture of a bronze dragon drawn onto the pages. This one was a male. Arcturus could tell that by the way the horns were sharped. Sharper, more pronounced than the female's had been. He ran a finger along the old vellum, taking a deep breath and letting the pleasant smell linger his nostrils.\n\n\"What am I doing?\" He tossed the book to the other side of his bed as he leaned back, his mind full of bronze scales. \"Here I am... reading about the blasted dragon, when I could\u2026\n\nHe shot up with a smile, practically tossing on his boots and belt as quickly as he could. He snatched a leather-bound pack and quickly stuffed some painting materials inside, including a vial of ink, some parchment, and his brushes.\n\n\"I'll just greet her...Ask her some questions maybe. Not like I'm breaking any of father's rules if I look at her from a safe distance.\"\n\nArcturus pulled a dark brown cloak around his shoulders. He smiled, pushing aside the curtain of his tent. He hesitated as he took his first few steps into the darkness. His father's cautious words rang in his mind.\n\n\"Always be able to protect yourself, my son. No matter how safe you think you are, it's always better to be cautious.\"\n\nThose were words his father lived by, yet Arcturus did not think anything dangerous could happen. It wasn't like the dragon would wait for him to break free if it was able. Still, it always paid to be prepared. With a shrug of his shoulders, he quickly dashed back into the room, grabbed the dagger, and stashed it on his person before heading back towards the dragon's tent.\n\nArcturus looked over the sea of tents lit by the mana torches that were placed every ten feet along the rows upon rows of cloth. The only other light came from the sky, in the form of thousands of stars shining down on them from above. Arcturus wrinkled his brow. He remembered when friends had told him that the stars were all small portals to the realm of fire. He disliked this theory honestly, as it felt too mundane. Especially in a world where the impossible could be done by magic, like heal the sick. Legend said some people were able to even bring the dead back to life. Arcturus took a deep breath of the cool air, coughing on the scent of smoldering fires and horses.\n\nSilent as a cat, the boy made his way towards the dragon. He made sure to ignore anyone walking around this hour by keeping his eyes low, and sticking close to the shadows of the night. There were typically only party-goers or drunks up at this late hour anyway. Even the tent Arcturus sought had no guard, although there was a chair planted there, supposedly to rest the absent sentry. Arcturus rolled his eyes. As ridiculous as that looked, he was nonetheless thankful the guard was out drinking, or as these celebrations often had it, passed out on the floor of some tent. The guard's absence saved Arcturus the trouble of sneaking past a sentry, and he quickly slipped under the tent's door and into the wide, open area.\n\nThe tent was practically empty, except for the metal chains and piles of hay that littered the place. There were several mana lanterns that hardly did a thing to rid the tent of the darkness. However, that did not matter to Arcturus. He paid the surrounding tent little mind as his world narrowed onto the bronze dragon that was laying down in chains upon the layers of hay. He looked around quickly, not finding a scale or a hint of the whereabouts of the other one. He shrugged, figuring they must have hidden it in another tent. He felt his heart skip a beat as he crouched low to sneak over towards one of the stacks of hay for the sole purpose of getting a better look at the bound dragon. He peaked over the hay to see that the creature had leather belts wrapped tight around her neck. Arcturus remembered from his books this would prevent dragons from blowing their breath attacks. He wracked his mind for the information that told him bronze dragons could breathe bolts of lightning from their maws, then sighed in thanks for the belts. The last thing he needed was to be dancing around lightning bolts hurled by the annoyed dragon.\n\nFrom the belts he looked to her forelimbs. Those too bound ever so tightly to her hind legs, with her tail having a belt wrapped around it, forcing her to curl it towards her bound limbs. Her chest was rising and falling in time with her breaths, and her eyes were shut. She appeared to be asleep.\n\nArcturus felt a small pang of guilt course through him as he looked to the dragoness, all defenseless, stripped of every sense of freedom. He thought she even looked kinda helpless, bound up like that. He wanted to take a step forward and introduce himself to the beautiful creature from his books.\n\nBut he quickly found he lacked the courage to do so, his legs refusing to budge no matter how much he tried to force them forward. \"Come on\u2026\" He sighed softly to himself as he pulled his pack off his back and set it on the ground. \"Fine\u2026If you won't carry me over to the dragon so I don't have to shout...I will just draw her then.\" He spoke to himself, pulling out a piece of parchment, a bottle of black ink, and his feather quill.\n\nHe started to trace her form quickly with the quill, first doing the head, and then working his way to the rest of the body. His eyes would peer from the paper to the fine bronze scales on her body, though from this distance it was hard to determine any detail on her frame. How he wished to be closer and inspect her fine features. It would certainly help him get his picture right. He sighed as he finished making the latest stroke when he noticed something. He looked up to see that she had risen her head and was staring at him with her amber eyes.\n\n\"What are you doing over there, scribbling in the darkness?\" She spoke sternly, her voice deeper and more booming than he thought it would be. However, it was just as surprising, causing him to jump back and fall into the hay.\n\n\"Woah....umppffhh...\" He landed on his back, spitting out some hay as he laid sprawled on the ground.\n\n\"Is the hay giving you trouble, little human?\" Her voice came moments later. It cracked slightly from the sternness she had shown. It occurred to Arcturus she may have been putting on an act for him.\n\n\"I-I-I...I'm fine. Isn't as hard as it looks, because it's hay, same as the one you sleep on, actually.\" He stammered slowly, dusting himself and sitting up, then turning to face the dragoness, who -despite what his father taught him about how all dragons were evil, had a silver tongue, and would eat him at a moment's notice-had kind eyes that stared to him as if a mother would a hurt child. He lowered his head as he remembered his own mother's eyes.\n\n\"Are you so sure about that?\" She chuckled, \"You are not supposed to say I three times...Unless I have been speaking the common tongue wrong all these years.\" She licked her nose with her long, dull pink tongue. \"Did my speaking surprise you, hatchling? I had no intention of sending you sprawled onto the floor.\"\n\n\"N-No.\" The boy replied, looking to his picture that now had a large streak of ink down the middle. He scrunched up the side of his face at the ruined image.\n\n\"Why are you making such a weird face? The one where you are trying to fold your hide together?\"\n\n\"Like this?\" He made the scrunched-up face again, pointing to it with a finger.\n\n\"That's the one.\"\n\n\"I...well\u2026I kinda ruined my picture when I fell.\" He sighed, glancing down to the drawing again.\n\n\"Picture? Is that what you were doing? Scratching away with that feather of yours?\" She snorted in amusement. \"You surprise me, perhaps even more than my voice surprised you. Can I see what you produced?\"\n\nArcturus almost approached the dragoness when she had asked that all too inviting, dangerously suspicious question.\n\n\"I would want to\u2026only that\u2026\" He looked to her many pristine teeth, only getting flashes of them when she talked. Despite her friendly demeanor, he knew the damage she could do with those. Even with a belt restricting her movement to mere inches, he could not help shake the feeling that she could reach out and grab hold of him with those deadly white daggers.\n\n\"You think I am going to bite you.\" She said flatly. The dragoness let out a small rumbling chuckle from the back of her throat. \"That is most wise of you, young hatchling. it would be foolish to approach one such as myself without knowing me first.\" She snorted, letting out gusts of warm, humid air as she pointed with a claw to the ground. \"You can stand fairly close without worrying about repercussions. Just hold out that bit of parchment for me. I shall see it fine even from a distance. Does that sound fine to you, hatchling?\"\n\n\"Why do you keep calling me a hatchling? I am clearly a human.\" He took a few tentative steps towards her, his heart starting to beat faster as excitement built within his chest. He was actually getting closer to a dragon. One that seemed eager to hurt him, maim him, or kill him. Even so, he was reminded of his father's words to stay vigilant with every beat of his heart. After all, the dragoness could be lulling him into a false security.\n\n\"Hatchling, boy, child.\" She rolled her eyes. \"All these things describe you in the same way, human. I just used the term I am most familiar with.\"\n\n\"Uh...yeah. Makes sense. Here. Take a look.\" He held out his parchment for the dragoness when he was close enough to her. He watched her eyes look right at the drawing, and waited with baited breath for her answer with his hand trembling slightly. \"What do you think? Still pretty, even with that ugly smudge in the middle? I messed it up by falling down at such a bad time...\" He trailed off, his face going a slight shade of crimson.\n\n\"It's wonderful, little human!\" She smiled, eyes closing as she did so. \"You really captured my likeness impressively well, although I think it would look even better in color.\"\n\n\"I do have paints that can do that.\" Arcturus excitedly thumbed back towards his pack. \"I do like to do that as well. Painting I mean. It's even more fun than sketching.\" His mind drifted to a small cave near his home, where he had painted a rather large painting of the red dragon Radiant Flame. One that his father had not known he had done. No need for the man who hated dragons with a passion to know his son fancied painting them.\n\n\"Do you now?\" She gave a slight croon as he watched her scales ripple and strain slightly against the leathers. Against his better judgement, Arcturus felt himself back away suddenly.\n\n\"Oh, don't worry your little snout, human.\" The dragoness groaned, looking back as much as her belt allowed. \"I am thoroughly restrained...graaarrr...by your uncomfortably tight belts.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 they are there to make sure you don't go killing everyone. Or using your lightning breath to do what your claws can't.\"\n\n\"Is that what you think I would do, if given the chance? You wound me, human.\" She gave a slight growl.\n\nArcturus stepped back further as she glared at him. \"I\u2026\" Arcturus faltered for a moment. \"Is that not why you are here? To be judged like a criminal? Did you not steal, kill, and hurt others?\"\n\n\"I did none of these things, human!\" The dragoness snorted almost angrily, then licked her nose. \"Your brethren took me when I was going for my morning flight. They ambushed me like a pack of vicious monsters, tied me up, and dragged me here to be made an example of.\"\n\n\"T-they can't\u2026be\u2026monsters. I mean\u2026no. We aren't like that. We punish evil dragons,\" He stopped his retreat as her eyes softened.\n\n\"Do you honestly believe that? Tell me, human...Are people that attack innocent creatures...bind them up...spout lies...and then kill them in front of an angry horde that demands blood the kind, gentle creatures you speak of? How is this justice? How are they not the monsters that should rightly scare you?\"\n\nArcturus paused as he thought over her words. \"Y-yes.\" He said after a pregnant pause. \"You are\u2026you aren't wrong. People like that are bad. Maybe even worse than some of the dragons I heard about.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" She snorted, her mood instantly brightening. \"The world is not a fair place, but let us cease this prattle about horrible deeds and monsters. It will only sour my attitude further. You mentioned you like to paint, little hatchling?\" Her voice sounded sweet, as if it were a mother talking to her own child.\n\n\"Yes...Yes I did. Creating makes me feel much better than training, though father insists I should practice for\u2026uhm, things. Stay in shape, I mean,\" Arcturus put a timely stop to his words to avoid upsetting the dragoness with further talk of dragon slaying. She seemed to understand him. Able to see past the hardened warrior he would become in a few years under his father's tutelage. She saw him. The real Arcturus Lund, not the offspring of dragon slayers.\n\n\"That is good. Becoming a master requires knowledge from all fields, including some that might be considered less important. Did you bring those painting things in your leather sack?\" She gave him a tooth filled smiled.\n\n\"You mean, my pack?\" He asked, tilting his head to the side.\n\n\"Yes, that.\" She rolled her eyes. \"Unless you brought two of them with you.\"\n\n\"I did. I mean I have one pack here, not two. Why would I need two?\" He realized the female was joking, and, reddening once again like a ripe tomato, Arcturus looked back to the pack, then quickly back to her. \"Why so interested in my crafts? Dragons can't paint.\"\n\n\"We can. Just not in the same way you do. Besides, I hardly think you look like an aspiring artist,\" Came her voice as he slowly made his way to his pack to retrieve all the tools he needed for the job at hand. It was when he grabbed it and turned around when did he truly take in her size. She must have been at least three times his height if she were able to stand up fully without the leather bindings holding her captive. Arcturus took a few more steps towards her. His eyes traced her entire body, from the tip of her snout to the end of her tail. He figured that she was at least seven times his length from head to foot, at least. He had not realized he was staring as he continued slowly towards her, because she chuckled at him.\n\n\"Admiring my splendor, little one?\" She pulled against the straps gently. \"I did not think my scales would have the same effect on a human as they do on other dragons. Ah yes, our species is very good at flaunting even the most basic of things.\"\n\n\"B-basic?\" Arcturus stammered. How could she name such dazzling beauty basic?\n\n\"You think otherwise?\" The female gave what Arcturus believed to be a snort right after he nodded. \"I suppose you don't gawk at each other's hides. That's why you keep them hidden under these ridiculous crafts you call\u2026cloth, was it?\"\n\n\"Clothes,\" Arcturus said. \"You were close.\"\n\nShe smiled again, her tail twitching slightly within her bonds. \"I find the concept of adorning your body with the hide of prey and plants ridiculous. You understand that, right?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\nShe must have noticed something in his eyes, for her lips moved to reveal her sharp, deadly, and at the same time, beautiful fangs. \"Are you attracted by the way I look, little slayer?\" She laughed deep in her throat. \"That would certainly be amusing, considering our situation.\"\n\n\"I don't fancy dragons like that.\" Arcturus sat before her, cross-legged. He was at least three arm lengths away from her head when he opened his pack again and pulled out his painting supplies. He looked up to see her staring at him with her piercing, beautiful eyes. \"I... just find your scales...beautiful...and\u2026 and striking, like the sun setting over endless fields of gold...\" He stopped as he saw her grin at him from each edge of her snout.\n\n\"If you are trying to convince me you don't fancy dragons, you are doing a very poor job, little hatchling. To my ears, it sounds like you will have a dragon lover in your future.\" She chuckled again in the back of her throat, making her scales clink against one another.\"\n\n\"Ahaha, no, no,\" He laughed, dismissing her with a wave. \"I already have a hard time with girls my age.\" He pulled out some brushes and set them beside the vellum he had procured. His thoughts went to all the time spent training, the hours and hours of reading, fencing, practicing. It felt like that was all he ever did. He never got a moment to himself to do anything he cared about. In fact, this was the most alone time he had gotten in the last few weeks. Inside, alone, with a beautiful living being that was seen by his family like any other dangerous animal. Arcturus wrinkled his brow as he pulled out a few pots of paints. \"Seems like all I ever do is train, train, train. Going where? Doing what? I don't want to be miserable like my father. He hides it well, but I know he's not happy, and he pushes me so hard to follow in his footsteps. Like\u2026he wants me to be\u2026him.\"\n\n\"You sound like you're in a cage of your own.\" She gestured back to her straps. \"Or wrapped in bindings, at the very least.\"\n\nArcturus chuckled. \"Don't get me wrong, fair dragon. I do like the training. It keeps the mind fresh, and the body ready. I just wish\u2026you know, that there was more to do besides swinging swords and learning how to\u2026uhm\u2026hurt dragons.\" Arcturus blurted those last two words out. He found it too difficult to lie when he stared right into her eyes. He wasn't proud of what his father wanted him to become, and, in many ways, Arcturus wanted the dragoness to understand that.\n\n\"Does that mean you look forward to slay a few dragons of your own?\" She asked him with a slight raise in her voice.\n\n\"We don't train to just kill dragons. That's silly,\" He sighed as he grabbed a brush, dipped it into an open pot, and started with gentle strokes on the page. \"We also train to kill monsters, undead, and anything else that would threaten a small village.\"\n\n\"How about your own kin? Do you train to kill other mortals as well?\"\n\nArcturus stopped to think back to the many times his father had taught him how to wield a sword. How to analyze his opponent's movements. He remembered the weak spots his father taught him about, and how to easily strike and fell an opponent he was fighting. He had asked at the time what good it was, to learn how to kill other people when they were going to be fighting monsters and dragons. His father had only a single, obvious reply. It was dangerous times they lived in. Who knows what you would need to defend yourself from, when you land into the wrong place, at the wrong time?\n\n\"Yes, we did.\" He replied flatly, his blood turning to ice as he remembered his father talking in grisly detail of some of the numerous kills that he had gotten over the years. \"But I do not fancy the killing part yet. Probably never will.\"\n\n\"Mmmmm?\" Her eyes widened into amber slits. She looked surprised. Stunned, almost.\n\n\"I mean, I can kill a beast for food, like a deer or something of that sort. I can also defend myself...but to murder an intelligent creature in cold blood?\" Arcturus shivered as he felt a cold tingle rush down his spine. \"The mere thought chills me. I don't want to be a murderer for hire that is fueled only by the desire to get rich, or by hate for that matter.\"\n\n\"Those are strong words for a hatchling...What would you want to be, if given the opportunity?\" She asked softly, in almost a whisper as she continued to stare at him.\n\n\"I prefer to be a knight.\" He thumbed his chest. \"Protecting the innocent, helping others, defending those in need.\"\n\n\"You sound like a genuine paladin...Now hatchling.\" She cleared her throat with a snort. \"What is your name? I would rather cease calling you that title, human, or little one. You have gained my interest, but perhaps you can earn even more than that by lending me your trust.\"\n\n\"My name?\" He asked, sounding a bit more surprised than he should have. After all, she would be dead in a few days time, right? His mood darkened at the thought.\n\n\"Yes, your name. I assume you have one at this age.\"\n\n\"Ahem.\" He cleared his own throat in imitation of her, which got another mmmm along with a widening of her eyes. \"Please call me\u2026 Arcturus Lund.\"\n\n\"Lund?\" She wrinkled her snout at the mere mention of his last name. \"You're their whelp?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He replied, cringing as she continued to glare at him. \"I see you've already been introduced to that name by someone, or something\u2026\"\n\n\"Every dragon family that hasn't lived centuries inside their cave knows the Lunds.\" She growled slightly. \"They have most likely claimed a life from every dragon family by now, at one point in your family history...So yes.\" She continued. \"I know of the Lunds, and their legacy.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm\u2026sorry. I think. \" There was a pregnant pause as he averted his gaze from hers. Arcturus focused back on the painting he was doing. He made sure to only take quick glances as he worked, finding it hard to look her in the eye. \"What\u2026excuse me. I shouldn't be so blunt as to demand. May I know what your name is?\" He asked after a few minutes of passive silence.\n\n\"You may call me the Howling Tempest for now.\" She replied proudly.\n\n\"That's...a fancy name to have,\" He chuckled, dipping his paint again and returning to his work.\n\n\"What did you expect from a dragon, hatchling? The purry cat? The soft rabbit? Such names hardly befit a dragon.\"\n\n\"No, none of those.\" He looked up to her amused eyes. \"But why Howling Tempest? I'm curious if you like storms or something like that, because I am a bit scared by them. Sometimes, I wonder if dragons even fly during a storm. Do they?\"\n\n\"That, I'm afraid, is a tale for another time, little Arcturus. For now, all you need to know is what I've already told you.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" He sighed, shrugging his shoulders. \"There!\" He pulled the brush away, smiling at the fine work he had done. He was proud he was able to capture her radiance in a simple amount of time. Despite her talking and engaging him, he found it quite pleasurable to do.\n\n\"How did it turn out?\" She asked with a pleased croon. It made him laugh to hear such a noise coming from quite a large dragon.\n\n\"You want to see it?\"\n\n\"Why else would I suggest you paint it? Of course I want to see a picture of me!\" She laughed. \"Now show it to me! I wish to see!\"\n\nArcturus turned the paper around and held it out proudly to her, just like he did with the drawing before. He saw her eyes squint this time as she stared onto the page.\n\n\"Bring it closer. I cannot make out the fine details from here...but it looks nice!\" She smiled, closing her eyes as she did so. \"Can you bring it closer so that I may gaze upon your fine work from a more proper distance?\"\n\nHe stood up with a smile, finding that, despite the previous warnings of his thoughts, he was moving towards the dragoness, returning her good cheer. If she was trying to distract him and manipulate him through her mood and flattery, then it was definitely working. Forgetting his safety, he took one last step towards her, but his foot caught a loose chain. His leg snagged, and he fell forward, but when he held his hands out to catch himself, Arcturus did not hit ground. Instead, his little fingers found warm scales, and the dragon's snout, pressed against his chest.\n\nShe had caught him from falling with her head.\n\nTerror gripped Arcturus' heart for a moment as he just realized she was right under him. And that if she wanted to, she could sink her bright teeth into him and end his life in a flicker of time.\n\nSo this is how it ends for me, huh? He thought as his breaths came quick, and his heart threatened to leap from his chest. He closed his eyes and waited for the end to come from the swift strike of the dragon's gaping jaws. However, after a minute of silence and frenzied breathing, he was still alive. There was no sudden jerk or a snarl. There was not even a growl of displeasure. The only thing that did grace him was a puff of warm air as she snorted into the vest he wore.\n\n\"As much as I enjoy your soft touch along my scales, little one, please remove yourself from my head. It is ill fitting of a dragon to be used as a mere resting place for your lazy body.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" He pushed himself away from the dragoness as he resumed his sitting position before her. \"I-I'm so sorry about that. Gods\u2026I did not mean to\u2026you know....\"\n\nHe made sure that he was at least three arm's lengths away from her head. He stared into her eyes while she stared into his own. There was an awkward silence between them, as he could only hear his own breathing, and feel the rapid pounding of his heart. \"You\u2026you didn't bite me!\" He exclaimed at last, louder than he meant to. He quickly covered his mouth with both hands in surprise. \"Sorry. I didn't mean that either.\"\n\n\"No... No, I did not bite you.\" She replied quietly, then quickly snorted. \"Why would I do something so\u2026thoughtless? Senseless even!\" She rolled her eyes. \"One important thing you need to know about me, young one, is that I do not harm hatchlings with my talons nor teeth, no matter what species they belong to. That is simply beneath me. I am not the monster you Lunds painted me to be.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's\u2026I'm relieved. In a weird way, I am happy to hear that.\" Arcturus placed a hand to his chest, his breaths calming him down with each exhale as he gazed at her. She held him within her stare, unblinking. \"I-I would never harm a hatchling too. Goes without saying. I'm not like those monsters you talk about either.\" He said at last, causing her to smile for a moment.\n\n\"Then you might be different from the rest of your kin, even if you bear their name.\" Her eyes suddenly shot up over his head, Arcturus looked back too. He heard a rustling noise from behind him and the drunken burp that must have been the guard returning to his post. \"I think you might want to spirit yourself away before you are caught, Arcturus.\"\n\nArcturus ducked low as he gathered his things, hoping that those flaps would not open. He had no idea what would happen if the guard were to return and catch him, but he was sure it was against the rules to talk to the dragon. After all, why else have a guard here in the middle of the night? Maybe it was to protect her from the others drunken people, in case they wanted to carve out a bit of personal vengeance from the female's scales.\n\n\"I am grateful for the talk we had, human.\" She suddenly spoke up, causing him to look to her once more. \"You will return tomorrow, will you not?\"\n\nArcturus tilted his head slightly to the side as he raised an eyebrow. Did she think she could predict his actions? That he was this easy to read, like an open book?\n\n\"What makes you think I will be back at all?\" He lowered his voice to sound as though he did not care.\n\n\"Oh...well, a simple look reveals all the answers you need. Your hunters have been stripped of everything but hope,\" she gave a rumbling noise in the back of her throat that sounded like a purr. \"I saw the way you were transfixed by my scales, your hands, when you drew upon that paper of yours.\" She gave him a sweet smile and closed her eyes. \"You will be back to talk to me...because you're...different.\" She ended the sentence with a soft snort, and a lick on her nose.\n\n\"Good night, Arcturus.\"\n\n\"Good night to you too, Howling Tempest.\" He waved to her, slipped under the tent as quickly as he could, and quietly made his way back to his own bed. He plopped onto his comfortable bedding with a sigh and tossed his pack onto the floor.\n\n\"What an encounter.\" He ran his hands through his hair with a smile. His heart was pounding as his thoughts went to what had transpired. He had talked to a dragon! An actual, living, breathing dragon! She had also been big and radiant, and much kinder than he could ever imagine of such a rugged beast. He sighed deeply as he sank down onto his bed. She had been a lot more different than what his father had kept on telling him. Once again, he found himself doubting his father's words.\n\n\"All dragons are evil, son. You must never trust the poison that comes out of their mouths, for even their words are a vile weapon. Allow your defenses to slip, and you're dead.\n\n\"Shut up,\" Arcturus sighed as he turned his face towards the window. This night was too beautiful to be spoiled by his father's hateful advice, so Arcturus looked at the stars until his mind became clear. Only then he allowed himself to fall into the realm of dreams, a realm where he could share the sky with his beloved dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The next day was a blur for Arcturus as he went through the usual routine that preceded his combat training. Although it was true that the final test was still a few days away, his father had kept him training the entire time. There was the morning run of several miles, followed by pushups, sit-ups, squats. During these exercises, his father was shouting questions to him on a dragon's weak spots, along with various other inquiries about their lives, such as their eating habits. Arcturus got many of them right, and, as he began to get cocky, his father started asking him questions about other creatures like werewolves, vampires, and displacer beasts.\n\nBut as the day went on, it became harder for Arcturus to focus. His thoughts could simply not get away from the dragoness that was laying bound in a tent several hundred meters away. So, when his father and him split ways for lunch, Arcturus made sure to quickly gather something from his nanny. He asked her for two helpings of the pork that she had managed to cook up with her deft talons.\n\nHer feathers ruffled as she had glared at him with her inquisitive eyes. \"It's for a date!\" She had laughed through a series of squawks and chirps. \"I knew it! You finally took my offer to go date my niece! You really are doing yourself a favor.\" She gave a pleased chirp from her orange beak as she started to put the slabs of meat on his plate. \"Gryphons are more fun, after all.\"\n\nArcturus rolled his eyes as the gryphon nanny gave him the requested food. She had always tried to set him up with her niece. The young lass had a fun attitude as bright as her snow-white feathers, and often spoke of interesting things that charmed Arcturus. Still, even with all those qualities, the gryphoness was not his type. Besides, he always was far too busy for pursuits of the heart anyway. \"No... I'm just hungry is all...Growing boy and all that.\"\n\n\"Oh...sure, sure, my dear boy,\" She clacked her beak and handed him the plate. \"Just don't get up to no good. Your father will have my head if he finds out you two got into any FUN activities.\" She gave him a wink along with a flick of her tail.\n\n\"You can certainly bet on nothing of that sort!\" He protested as she just gave him a smirk like she knew something he didn't. Gryphons. They were always up to no good.\n\nNot him though. Arcturus knew better than arguing. He quickly shoved a piece of bread into his mouth and left the cackling brown gryphon to her own devices. His steps carried him through the tournament grounds, past the people that frolicked around the sea of tents, past the stern-faced contestants, and across the brightly lit grass field. Soon enough, he had snuck around the tent he visited last night, and with a quick glance to confirm no one was looking, the boy slipped past the wall of cloth to greet his mysterious dragoness once again.\n\n\"Hello.\" She turned her head slightly towards him, seconds after he had emerged from under the flap. \"I honestly did not expect you back so soon hatch-excuse me. Arcturus.\" She corrected herself with a smile. \"What wind brings you back? The sun is still high. Is it not risky for you to be here in broad daylight?\"\n\n\"This!\" Arcturus blurted out as he held the plate out to proudly display the assortment of tasty meat he procured for her. \"I know it's not the best food you can catch\u2026but I figured they would not be feeding you anything.\" He scratched his head sheepishly while he waited for her response. The dragoness looked to him, as if in deep thought for the moment.\n\n\"Could you bring it closer?\" She asked, to which he found himself complying, setting the plate down softly before her. She gave him a pleased croon before quickly snatching up the pork, and swallowing the pieces whole with a loud gulp. \"Thank you.... that was most kind of you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. It's the least I could do, heh.\" He turned to leave, quickly gathering the plate. He did not have long before his father once again would be looking for him to continue their grueling training.\n\n\"I'm sorry I have to leave so soon. Wish I could have talked to you more, but\u2026\"\n\n\"You must be going,\" The female's gaze drooped. \"I understand, Arcturus. Do not feel sad. Even though it was short, your visit pleased me greatly, and not only because you brought me food.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The boy's eyes lightened a little. \"I'll return as soon as I can. Promise.\"\n\nThe way she spoke pinched his heart. Oh, how much he wanted to stay here and listen to one of her stories. To catch a glimpse on how life felt through the eyes of a dragon!\n\nIt'll just be a few hours. A few hours that felt like a drop of eternity for sure. Nevertheless, it was better than to risk an untimely discovery. Arcturus sighed as he went to leave the same way he had arrived, taking a quick peek back at the dragoness that was still looking at him. Her tail tip flicked ever so slightly, reminding Arcturus how a cat's tail might do the exact same thing.\n\n\"Fare you well, little Arcturus, and may the sun warm your path.\" She called after him as he slipped under the tent flap and quickly returned to the day's boring routine of training, with the thoughts of the dragoness swirling within his head.\n\nHis day was filled with sword training under the watchful eyes of his father, horseback riding, listing off weak spots of various monsters, and finally, techniques on how to kill a dragon swiftly. His little heart shriveled as his father listed off gruesome ways on how to stab a dragon right through the eye. With shaking hands, the young boy pictured himself with a cold, glimmering blade of sharpened steel in hand. He approached his quarry, pulled his arm back to gather momentum\u2026\n\nThen sunk the sharp tip into the beautiful eye of the dragoness that had been staring at him so kindly before. The voice that came out was not the calm soothing river that cascaded upon his ears the night before, but a wail, sharp as the knots that tightened into his gut. Arcturus closed his eyes. He didn't want to be here. To see her.\n\nBut after years of training, his father's voice had a way of slithering into the deepest crevices of his mind, filling his thoughts with vivid images of the techniques he imparted. Warm blood sprung forth like a river, washing over Arcturus like a tide, covering his body in a curtain of the sticky, warm, crimson goo.\n\n\"Imagining the glory of your first kill?\"\n\nThe heavy hand that fell on his shoulder ripped Arcturus away from those dreadful images.\n\n\"You're shivering.\"\n\nArcturus froze. He dared not even look at his father, out of fear that somehow, his old man could read his very thoughts, so he kept his eyes on the ground and his lips tightly pursed, hoping that he would not be the death of the bronze female. Praying that the flashes of cruelty produced by his mind would not come to pass.\n\n\"It's alright, boy. There can be no strength without weakness.\"\n\nArcturus let out a short sigh once his father took his hand off. \"I felt the same way when I was your age.\" He started to pace around with his arms crossed. \"Afraid. Undecided. Wondering if my first dragon won't make a meal out of me instead. But here I am, standing in the same place as my father, teaching my own son the very things I've learned.\"\n\nThe man approached once again, this time ruffling through the boy's shaggy hair. \"Worry not about the future, Arcturus. This weakness you feel will be forged into courage. The trembling in your arms will give way to strength! And when you are ready, know that I will look upon you with pride as you bring glory to our name.\"\n\nArcturus couldn't listen to another one of his father's words. There was no glory, only the sight of innocent blood being spilled for no reason. He ran to the shelves of books and buried his nose into a drawn-out lecture of dragon habitats as his father went on and on about how to kill the beasts. Arcturus did his best and managed to answer every question correctly, but during this time, he occupied his mind with more pleasant things. Things that did not have him killing such majestic creatures based on his family's history of hatred.\n\nIt was no surprise that when the sun sank below the horizon, and the moon started to bathe the countryside in its white light, that Arcturus quickly gathered his usual things and practically sprinted towards the tent of the bronze dragoness. With a quick, deep breath, he entered the tent to stand once more before the great bronze dragon. \"Psssst....Howling Storm.\" He whispered harshly as he slunk his way through the dimly lit tent.\n\nShe turned her head slightly with a pleased trilling noise as her eyes locked onto him and narrowed into amber slits. \"Welcome back, little hatchling.\"\n\n\"I thought you predicted my arrival?\" He carefully made his way to her front, peaking his head up to make sure that indeed they were alone.\n\n\"I must confess that\u2026 I was not completely certain you would return.\" She licked her nose. \"Although it is pleasant to know that my words proved true...So.\" She tilted head slightly to the side. \"What wind brings you back? Do you wish to talk to the dragon you are supposed to hate? Or is it another reason that got you here?\"\n\n\"I am not a hunter!\" Arcturus snapped back rather harshly, pointing at her with a scowl. She had to understand he was not like his father, or the rest of the hunters.\n\nThe female didn't get angry. Instead, she just gave him a chuckle, her amused eyes sparkled with a set of feelings Arcturus could not fully understand. \"You seem very sure of your words.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026that's because I mean them, and I\u2026\" His words stopped coming as he thought back to the conversation they had the night before. How her words had proven so different than what he had come to expect.\n\n\"I don't want to harm dragons. Even thinking of that makes my stomach feel weird. Instead, I want to know more about dragons. About you.\"\n\nHe blushed and quickly looked down to avoid the female's eyes. \"You think I'm weird.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said the dragoness. \"I am a bit surprised by what I hear, considering you are a Lund, but I also realize that I cannot always see you through the eyes of my memories. You are not your name. That is what you try to convince me of, is it not?\"\n\n\"Mhm.\" Arcturus quickly nodded. \"So\u2026you don't think I'm weird?\"\n\nShe gave another chuckle. \"Not at all. In fact, what I see here now is the same sweet boy that brought me a tasty treat this morning.\"\n\nA rush of pride and excitement rushed through the boy's spine. Her warm words instilled him with the unrelenting urge to hug her, but she was still a dragon\u2026and he, a feeble little boy. Arcturus settled for a meek smile instead of the hug and sat down before her, still outside her reach, but with a relaxed posture.\n\n\"What's on your mind, hatchling?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" Arcturus lied.\n\n\"Nothing, is it?\" The female teased him with her wonderful voice. \"Well then, nothing, one thing you need to know about dragons is that our eyes can not only pierce shadows, but lies as well.\"\n\nArcturus scrunched his face. She caught him. How, he could not tell, as the books mentioned nothing of a dragon's ability to divine lies. Sure, there were plenty of mentions on clever manipulation, yet in this case, he was the one doing the lying.\n\n\"Uhm\u2026ok. I guess I\u2026what I want is to\u2026\" He shook his head off the embarrassment that twisted his tongue. Do you think I could get a better look at your scales?\" The confidence with which he spoke surprised him.\n\nAnd by the look of it, surprised her as well.\n\n\"You may approach.\" The female smiled kindly.\n\nArcturus remained conflicted. Trust her? Or trust his father? Dragons were supposed to be dangerous monsters that lashed out at the world around them, harming any mortal they came in contact with. But when he fell on her last night, she had not attacked him. No slash of claws mauled his flesh, no teeth broke his bones. In the back of his mind, he felt a little more at ease, enough so that he pulled himself closer, so that she could reach him if she wanted to.\n\n\"I am curious about one thing. Why not look in a book to learn more about us?\" She snorted, her eyes still giving him an amused look. \"Your family is also renowned for its resources, and I am sure the answers you seek hide within the pages of a book.\"\n\nArcturus shook his head.\n\n\"No?\" The female inquired. \"Why not ask your father? He must have had a few close encounters with my kind during his life.\"\n\n\"I don't want to.\" Arcturus said sternly. \"Please. Don't make me talk to him.\"\n\n\"Alright, little one. It is not my intention to put you in an uncomfortable position.\" She lowered her snout towards him, making his heart pound a bit faster. He fought the urge to run. She had not harmed him before, after all. \"As for that closer look you speak of\u2026I can always give you a better look if you undo some of these straps.\" She gestured back to the leather binding her. \"They feel like rugged vines twisting and coiling around me. I'm not surprised if they peeled a few scales off.\"\n\n\"I know what you're doing.\" Arcturus scowled as she slowly turned her attention back to him.\n\n\"You're trying to play me. Trick me into freeing you!\" He crossed his arms defiantly, like a knight standing in the face of danger. He was not Arcturus the child anymore, but Arcturus the dragon slayer. The boy who trained for years to resist a dragon's manipulation.\n\n\"Arcturus, I assure you that-\"\n\n\"NO!\" His frown deepened. \"I won't be tricked into doing your bidding. You will have to find some other sucker.\"\n\n\"Sucker?\" She laughed, \"I begin to think you are, for assuming the worst. Have we not talked peacefully before? Have I harmed you in any way so far?\"\n\nArcturus' conviction faltered a little. It wasn't fair to attack his feelings like that.\n\n\"I am only asking for this small favor so that I can offer exactly what you requested. Just release one limb at a time to get a good look at any part of me you wish. You would still get to gaze upon my scales up close, and I can stretch that limb. Then, after you are pleased, you can redo the binding, and undo another one. One by one, you can get a good look at all of me.\"\n\nHer words were true. More than that, they made sense to him. After all, he yearned to see every part of her majestic body. He just wrinkled his face as she just smiled at him. It was like she knew what he was thinking. Aware that she was winning this little game with him.\n\n\"And the book thing? You can agree that you are certainly not a book written by mortals. You can give me deeper insight and knowledge that I would not be able to find there...as for my father\u2026\" His face darkened at the thought of the man that was so comfortable with killing that he could smile and joke about doing it. The man that despised dragons so much that he shut down any pleasant talk about them. They were always monsters, silver tongued devils, evil beings that were never supposed to be trusted or shown mercy. \"I want to learn things unburdened by his hatred.\"\n\n\"Once again you speak strong words. Are you sure you are not a hatchling?\" She gave a pleasured rumble from her throat. \"Now...What was your first question? I do have one condition to mention.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" He asked, raising an eyebrow. Despite being slightly against what the books had said about her kind, the dragoness still seemed to be planning something.\n\n\"For every question that you ask, I request you release a limb to inspect. It will pass the time and allow me to stretch. And besides.\" She snorted. \"Maybe after a few questions and a thorough inspection of my scales, you will see that we are more than mere monsters to be hunted and killed. Do we have a deal?\"\n\n\"We have a deal.\" He approached her further. \"Uhm, so for the first question\u2026I want to know\u2026how does it feel like to fly with the sky beneath your wings?\"\n\n\"Do you not know?\" The dragoness seemed surprised. \"I know you don't have wings, but surely you have been on a gryphon's back by now. I heard of no Lund, child or otherwise, to stay away from the grasp of the sky.\"\n\n\"No\u2026\" He fidgeted slightly. \"I\u2026 I am afraid of heights. Never been on a gryphon or on the deck of an airship before.\" He looked away, his face reddening as he admitted that fact. He waited for a moment for her reply, then looked back when she cleared her throat. He turned to see she was gesturing to her right forelimb.\n\nMentally kicking himself, Arcturus approached her, placing his hands on the tight leather. He took a deep breath as he hesitated with the bindings. Was he really going to do this? Risk her getting loose to get some answers? He looked back to her kind eyes, and her soft smile that melted away his doubts. Of course, she could not escape, and she had been quite nice to him. Without another thought, Arcturus confidently undid the binding.\n\n\"Aahhhhh...That's better.\" She let out a small groan as she stretched the scaly appendage. \"Thank you for trusting me, Arcturus. Here. Look as long as you wish.\" She replied, holding her limb out for him to see. The fine smooth scales shimmered in the mana lantern light as he reached out to touch it with his hand.\n\nHis breath quickened as he hesitated at first, hovering his fingers over the smooth armor. With a quick shake of his nerves, he ran his fingers along the warm scales. He could not believe what was happening as he traced them. Here he was, getting to touch the dragon without fear of getting hurt. He could feel her muscles tense and relax as she sighed from his touch. \"How about that answer?\"\n\n\"Hmmmmm...mind on task\u2026\" She chuckled. \"The wind feels nice beneath my wings, dear little one. When I am up there, I feel as if I were more free than any creature that inhabits the world. To be up there along the white clouds is pure joy. I especially love the feeling of the sun bathing me in its warm rays. There is\u2026 hardly another way to describe it...it's pure bliss.\"\n\nArcturus closed his eyes as he continued to touch the dragoness. For a moment, he imagined himself as a dragon, with wings flapping high into the sky. His green eyes were full of joy as he let out his own roar of happiness. \"That sounds delightful,\" He laughed as he made his way down to her paw. \"Now tell me about-\"\n\n\"That was not the deal, little human.\" She cut him off with a snort. \"One limb for one question.\"\n\nHe retracted his hands, letting her place her limb back on the ground. \"Okay.\" He grabbed the leather and rebound the limb. He was surprised when she did not resist and let him do so. \"You\u2026 did not fight me.\"\n\n\"Why would I? I gave you my word that everything will go exactly as we agreed.\" She lowered her voice, taking a deep breath. \"I do not lie to somebody I care about.\"\n\nArcturus looked back to her as the words lingered in his mind. They certainly sounded truthful, honest, and he felt that familiar feeling about his father's words spring forth. He followed her scales, down her belly, until he was near one of her larger hind paws. He undid the leather there to allow the female to stretch out her hind leg with a groan of relief.\n\n\"Are dragons afraid?\"\n\n\"What kind of question is that, Arcturus? I am a living being blessed with intelligence...I have of course felt fear that has shook me to the very marrow of my bones. I have felt joy that has threatened to lift me into the sky aloft in its embrace. I have held love that has made my heart threaten to leap from my scaled chest.\" She suddenly stopped, as her mood darkened and her head drooped. \"And I have also felt sadness that has stabbed my heart, and made me wish that I were dead.\" Arcturus watched the navy color of her frills turn a darker shade of blue, almost midnight black. It started out slow from her head frill and worked its way towards the tip of her tail.\n\n\"I...\" Arcturus felt guilt strike him like a spear to the chest. He turned back to the dragoness. Her eyes were closed. For a moment, it looked like she had a tear trickling down from her eyes. That was ridiculous, right? Dragons could not possibly cry! However, with the lingering silence that engulfed the tent, he was not so certain anymore, as that tear dripped down her pebbly cheek and dripped onto the ground. \"I'm sorry.\" He approached her snout without any thoughts for his safety, and wiped her tear away from her warm cheek. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"I...\" She opened her eyes with a sniff, and Arcturus saw an honest look of pain within them. The look his father had the day his mother had died, the look he had seen in the mirror as well. \"I lost a mate to hunters.\" She snarled, \"hunters like your parents.\"\n\nArcturus took a step back as it felt like she had struck him with a dagger. \"M-m-m\u2026Mmmy\u2026\" He stuttered heavily as he remembered her kind brown eyes, her soft touch, and the voice that had brought comfort to him for seven years of his life. Despite her being gone for five years, he still felt like a frightened child when his thoughts wandered back to her. \"M-My mother was not a hunter\u2026she\u2026she loved dragons.\" He felt his eyes start to mist up as he looked away from the dragon.\n\n\"Oh,\" He heard her voice, calm and gentle once again. \"Are you crying, little one?\"\n\n\"N-no.\" He wiped his eye with his sleeve. \"M-men don't cry.\"\n\n\"That's stupid. You are not a man yet, little hatchling...Tell me please. What happened to your mother?\"\n\n\"She...went on a riding trip with her horse. The horse got frightened and reared up. My mother fell from her saddle and hit her neck on the hard ground.\" Arcturus painfully gestured to his neck and made a cracking noise. \"She died almost instantly.\" He wiped his eyes again, this time clearing away the crystalline tears that made his vision fuzzy. With a few deeper breaths and extra help from his sleeves, his eyes were dry again. He tried to focus on the dragoness in front of him instead of his missing mother.\n\n\"It's not wrong to cry.\" She said softly, sounding more like his mother with each word she spoke from her snout. \"You don't have to hide your feelings from anyone. Especially me...I bet you miss her dearly.\"\n\n\"I do.\" He hung his head as he felt his heart wrestled away from his chest. \"Even after five years, it isn't getting any easier. I miss her every day.\"\n\n\"Tell me about her.\" The bronze dragoness lowered her head towards him, slowly approaching him with those same kind and caring eyes. Arcturus found himself raising his hands and running them along her snout, with one hand on her nose.\n\nHer scales were once again soft to the touch, and made him think of a warm blanket pressed against his skin. One that had been warmed by the afternoon sun. He told her through misted eyes about all the times he spent with his mother. He told her about the pleasant days, the great nights, and how he longed to hear her voice once more. When he finished, his throat was tight, sore, and his eyes were red from tears.\n\n\"She sounds like a very kind human. Please excuse my thoughtless words. I am truly sorry for judging such a fine human on a whim. I have allowed hatred to find its way back inside me, but that is wrong\u2026so wrong. I know my mate would not approve of it. He\u2026he would have\u2026\" She suddenly opened her maw quickly and gave him a gentle lick across his face with her large, slimy eel of a tongue.\n\nArcturus froze as the tongue retreated back into her maw, leaving him covered with a thin layer of clear saliva. His eyes widened in shock as he just stared at her for a few moments longer. She had just licked him. Right across his face! And he had done nothing to resist it. \"W-Why did you do that?\" He asked her quietly, looking up into her eyes once again.\n\n\"It's a comforting thing to do when someone is in pain.\" She replied quickly without skipping a beat. \"That is something dragon mothers do to their offspring, to show them affection and help fight away the encroaching sadness that might lurk within their minds.\"\n\nArcturus wiped away the sticky liquid from his face, sticking his tongue out as it slowly dripped down his finger. He flicked it away without another thought. \"It's gross.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\" she snorted and narrowed her eyes.\n\nHe quickly snapped his mouth shut, as he realized that he might have hurt the dragoness. She was close, after all, close enough to bite him if she wanted to. \"I-I didn't hate it though.\" He said, lowering his head. \"It was warm, and it helped. Thank you very much.\"\n\n\"You are most welcome, my dear little human.\" She said soothingly. \"Quickly, hide!\" she then hissed, causing Arcturus to bolt towards the closest thing available, which was her. He crouched low behind her neck, finding himself pressed up against her scales. He lowered his head as he listened to the sounds of heavy footsteps moving within the tent.\n\n\"Anyone here?\" Came the slurred voice of the midnight guard. \"Cause ya ain' suppose ta be hya...its da rules!\" Arcturus heard him burp, and suddenly take a large gulp from whatever he was drinking from.\n\nThe boy just stayed crouched low, trying to keep himself as tightly against her as he could. He covered his mouth as he felt his heart beat faster with each approaching foot step. He could feel the sensation of his heart being pulled in all directions at once. He dared not think what the guards would do if there were to find him here with the dragon. Would they disqualify him? The thought sent a shiver down his spine as he pictured his father's disappointed gaze, his wrinkled brow, and his stern words about failure.\n\n\"Coulda swore I 'eard someone talkin' wit ya.\" He heard the sound of a sloshing bottle as Howling Storm just snorted in disgust. He could feel her muscles tense up beneath her scales.\n\n\"There was no one in here except me, you sweaty pig. I suggest you go somewhere else before you fill up my tent with the fine scent of a distillery.\"\n\n\"Oy? What's tha? Ya haf da guts ta speak to me? Don't need a talkin' to from a fockin monster. Besides...who'd want to talk to somethin' like yaself? Tis like\u2026courtin' death or somethin.\" The man laughed, turned back around, and exited the tent as quickly as he had come. Arcturus emerged from the warm dragoness when he heard the sound of the flaps closing behind the man.\n\n\"That was close.\" She said, relief ever present in her voice as she looked to him.\n\n\"You can say that again.\" He wiped several beads of sweat from his brow, giving her a smile. \"Thanks for acting as my hiding spot.\"\n\n\"Did not really have the choice, dear.\" She pulled against the leathers. \"Not bound as I am, anyway. Arcturus, can I ask you a question?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" he found himself smiling as he placed a hand to her snout once again, running a hand gently up her warm cheek.\n\n\"We have grown\u2026closer over the few times we spent together, and I am wondering if, perhaps, you can find it in your heart to free me from these shackles.\"\n\n\"I..I...\" Arcturus stammered, feeling his chest tighten back up again. The dragoness spoke truly. They had grown closer, but to go against his father, his family, against everything he knew\u2026it was too much, even for a friend.\n\n\"I can't,\" Arcturus pulled his hand away. \"I'm sorry, but you are asking me the impossible.\"\n\n\"I understand. It was worth a try.\" She lowered her head, her eyes drooping. \"I thought you would be able to help me.\"\n\n\"I want to, but\u2026\" She was a dragon sent here to be bound and killed. There had to be a reason for all of this. There had to be, unless his father was interested in killing innocent dragons for sport and glory. \"I want to help you. I really do, but they'd start to suspect me, and they'll probably track you down and capture you again anyway.\" He finally admitted with a sigh.\n\n\"No matter then.\" She replied almost in a whisper. \"I think you must go for the night. I wish to be alone with my thoughts for the time being.\"\n\n\"With who? Why?\" he found himself asking as turned to sneak out of the tent.\n\n\"If you return tomorrow, I will tell you why.\"\n\nArcturus nodded as he snuck his way out of the tent, offering her a sweet goodbye. She just returned the sentiment with the same endearment she had shown before. Arcturus tried to fight the guilt building in his heart as he passed the plethora of tents, but it was of no use. He turned back to the tent to admire it flapping gently from the breeze in the air. He made a mental note to return tomorrow night. He had to know why she was here, and where her thoughts were keeping her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "\"Welcome back, Arcturus,\" came Howling Storm's voice as he entered the tent the next night. The entire day had been a blur. Everything he had done was just a way to get back to the dragoness. The scaled creature that had him captivated with its magnificence, drawn in with her unnatural kindness.\n\n\"Hello.\" He said back quietly, looking around quickly and taking a seat cross-legged before her. \"How was your day?\"\n\n\"You ask as if I were not bound in these leather straps while I wait for my death.\" She glared at him, snorting a small plume of air out of her nostrils. \"But to answer your question...Boring.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I could not sneak any food for you today. My father had his eyes on me like a watchful hawk.\" He looked down when she pulled against her bindings once more. \"Can we go back to the conversation we had the last night? The one where I ask a question and I let you stretch a limb?\"\n\n\"Once again, straight to the point.\" She sighed, lowering her head to the ground. \"We may do that, but I have to change our little arrangement a little bit. Instead of being asked every time, I wish to ask you a few questions of my own.\"\n\n\"I\u2026yes, that's doable,\" Arcturus nodded, \"what do you want to know?\"\n\n\"Arcturus...I want to know what you honestly think of dragons. I want to know what lurks within that part of your mind that is still unburdened by your father's judgment, your family's history, and most of all, their hatred. I want to know what the hatchling in front of me really thinks.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026complicated. Need to think.\" He searched his mind for the right answer, finding it fairly easy. He remembered all the nights looking into his books, and every story where he wondered if his father was telling the truth. Every time he looked to Radiant Flame, or any other dragon, Arcturus wondered if there were more sides, more details to the story. \"I don't honestly know, Howling Tempest. I want to know more about you...about all dragons. I want to learn so I can make my own decisions regarding them.\"\n\n\"Would you ever harm a hatchling that had done you no wrong? Even if their parents had done terrible things?\"\n\n\"Never.\" Arcturus stuck his tongue out in disgust at the thought. \"That would be horrible. Can you tell me what you were thinking about last night?\" He moved closer to her as she rumbled in her throat, then took a deep breath that made her scales clink slightly.\n\n\"I can do that. Yes.\" She gestured back to her hind paws. \"Although I wish to stretch my left leg if you would not mind. I think it has fallen asleep and that is driving me with a madness you would not even begin to understand.\"\n\nArcturus nodded and quickly undid the bindings on her leg, letting her stretch it before him with a groan.\n\n\"Mrawwhhhm...That is nice...\" She closed her eyes and started to purr as she wiggled her leg slightly.\n\nArcturus ignored the cute noises she was making and touched the paw that moved towards him. It stopped wiggling as his soft hands caressed the digits there, running over the smooth scales and finding the hide beneath them. He laughed as she suddenly pulled away with a giggle. \"Whoa....Didn't expect you to be so ticklish!\" He gasped as she let loose another giggle as he followed her paw with his deft fingers.\n\n\"Grrrr....\" She closed her snout, and continued to steadily pull from his grasp but, never getting away for more than a couple of moments. \"As embarrassing as that is to admit, even dragons have their weak spots.\"\n\n\"Tickly dragon tickly dragon tickly dragon!\" Arcturus giggled as he traced his fingers from the soft digits to the paw pads beneath them. He caressed the soft leathery hide with the palm of his hand, finding them rather warm and pleasing to the touch. It was hard to believe a creature like this would have such soft paws, especially when the rest of the foot was armored with heavy scales that could turn even metal blades with their strength.\n\n\"Ok, I'll slow down. Tell me about your thoughts.\" He continued to caress the soft toes, finding them captivating and soothing as his thoughts drifted to his mother.\n\n\"Well\u2026this might not be what you expect.\" Her voice lowered as her laughter died and her mood darkened, almost like a shadow had wrapped itself around her heart. \"I was thinking about the little hatchlings I left behind. They are small, vulnerable, just like you\u2026waiting for their mother to come home and comfort them.\"\n\nArcturus' fingers froze on her paw. She was a mother? His heart began to feel heavy again as the guilt started to creep back in. Not just because it was his family that was keeping her here, but that she had a small family of her own. She had offspring that cared about her, that would miss her, that would...\n\nArcturus shook his head. His thoughts immediately flew back to his mother, particularly to how he had hurt so badly when she perished. How he still hurt after all this time. \"I...\" he coughed, the tightness in his chest getting heavier. \"Sorry. Didn't know you had hatchlings.\"\n\n\"Oh yes.\" She snorted weakly. \"They are a bundle of energy, and they make my heart crack and go as soft as your human skin. I cannot fathom what their life will become if they are forced to grow on their own...if they even manage that.\"\n\n\"No\u2026they can't\u2026die.\" Arcturus looked up to the female, trying hard to keep his tears where they belonged. \"Can they?\"\n\n\"They are still small, Arcturus,\" The dragoness' whisper seeped into his flesh. \"Imagine you are left in the wilds to fend for yourself. How long would you survive?\"\n\n\"I\u2026don't want to think about that. Not if I can let you go back to them!\" He found himself saying without another thought. He was surprised, covering his mouth instantly after the words flew from his mouth. He imagined his mother would have just been proud at his exclamation.\n\n\"You can do what?\" She asked, as if she did not hear his words the first time.\n\nHe froze for a moment as she stared at him expectantly. Her breaths were the only sound he could hear as his heart rammed against his chest. He thought to his mother, who was surely watching him in this moment. He cleared his throat and found his bravery as he looked into that dragon's eyes. \"I said I can free you.... on one condition.\"\n\n\"You but only have to name it, human. I imagine you want treasure or something of material value like most of your kind?\" She rolled her eyes.\n\n\"No\u2026I want to know if you did any of the crimes they accused you of. I want to know if you belong here, in these bindings.\"\n\n\"You want to know if I deserve to die over my actions.\" She chuckled. \"I hunted in what one of your lords deemed his forest. I killed what he considered his deer, a big stag that I needed just for my hatchlings and myself. The coward must have hired your family to capture me, all in the name of one little beast I took for food. Are you happy now, little one?\"\n\n\"Sorry. Didn't mean to sound mean.\"\n\n\"The fault is mine,\" The female spoke over him. \"My hatchlings\u2026I worry about them so much. If you'd only know how heavy my heart feels, maybe-\"\n\n\"I will free you.\" Arcturus forced himself to smile. \"A promise is a promise, yes?\"\n\nThe dragoness closed her eyes.\n\nArcturus nodded. He felt his heart pound harder. With shaking hands, he undid one belt around her limbs. One by one the others followed, his quick fingers letting the leather plop onto the ground before he undid the bindings on her wings. His smile broadened as she stood up, easily towering over him.\n\n\"B-b-big.\" He stuttered as the female spread her beautiful wings. The dark navy of her membranes had shifted to a bright shade of pink that reminded Arcturus of the cherry blossoms that he heard about in Drenedar. \"There you go, Howling Storm...Go home to your....\"\n\nHis words were cut short as the dragoness suddenly wrapped her limb around him and charged through the tent. She bounded over the grass, stretching her wings wide and giving them a mighty flap that carried them both into the cold air of the night.\n\n\"Aaaahhhhhhhh!\" Arcturus screamed out, holding tight against her limbs as he felt his stomach lurch in his body. This is how I die...Please....Not here. Not now. Not before I get to\u2026\n\nHe felt her tighten her grip on him, holding him firmly against her warm scaled chest. He felt sorry for himself as she carried him higher and higher into the dark, cloud filled sky. The chill of the biting wind made him shiver in her grasp. His heart sank as his father turned out to be right. Dragons were good-for-nothing, silver-tongued devils, and now he was going to die for being a gullible fool. If not from the fall, she was no doubt going to bring him somewhere and eat him. He cried out into the night air as loudly as he could, tears starting to trail over his flushed little cheeks.\n\n\"Cease your screaming, little human.\" She snarled out. \"You sound like one of those banshee creatures that can kill with a shriek like yours. Stop it, unless you want me to cork your little snout.\"\n\n\"Eep!\" Arcturus shut his mouth and hugged her fingers tighter. Fear wrapped his heart in its embrace as he continued to sob quietly into her scales. For he, Arcturus Lund, was going to die this evening at the claws of the dragoness that he had trusted. The one dragon he decided to help.\n\nThis is what your good deed gets you...Eaten by the dragon you tried to save.\n\nIt was almost ironic how right that sounded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Arcturus shivered in the night. His breath, as well as his heart rate, slowed down during the cold flight. The dragoness had not looked to him once the entire time, her wings beating steadily against the air. It was their constant rhythm and her steady heartbeat that allowed him to shift his focus away from how high up they were right now. Not like he could turn around and look, for she clutched him so painfully close to her chest. He had stopped his sobbing a while back, trying to think about what needed to be done. He was trapped in a dragonesses' grip with little chance of escape. His mind went to his dagger as he wrinkled his brow. There was always the option of making a last stand, one final effort before he would be devoured alive.\n\nHis heart started beating faster when he felt her decent towards a rocky area located near the ocean, if the sound of the waves crashing against the stony shore was any indication. He closed his eyes and readied himself as he felt her backwing and touch down with her hinds, her pads only making the softest of noises against the stone. Arcturus was let go softly, landing onto the stone, and falling backwards onto his read end. He was left staring up at the towering dragoness that had plucked him from the earth. The little boy immediately scrambled away from her as she refolded her wings against her back.\n\n\"Please don't try anything foolish. We are miles away from civilization, and I assure you, the best choice you can make is to stay here with me for the night.\" She quickly reached out to him with a paw like lighting. Arcturus made sure to turn, and in one swift motion, he yanked the dagger out of hiding and plunged the sharp tip into the soft underside of her paw.\n\n\"I will not be eaten without a fight!\" He shouted out with false bravery as she reared back with a snarl.\n\n\"You call that an attack?\" She lifted her lips to expose her teeth as she advanced on him. \"I have felt thorns inflict more pain on my paws. What were you thinking, little Arcturus? What result did you hope for? Please, tell me. I am extremely intrigued to hear more about your escape plan.\" She snapped at him, causing Arcturus to yell out in fright.\n\n\"Stay away from me! I know what you plan. What you want to do. Dragons\u2026You're all the same, and I stupidly fell in your trap!\" He shivered, stuttering as she just glared at him. He looked past her, towards the rocky ground beneath her paws. She was blocking the only way out, and the way behind him led deeper into her cave. She had him trapped. She knew it, and he knew it as well. Arcturus narrowed his eyes and held the dagger out with both shaking hands.\n\n\"Oh, drop the act already.\" She smacked the dagger out of his hand with a swipe of her paw that made him stumble backwards, rubbing the reddened area. \"You are not a warrior, Arcturus. Give up.\"\n\n\"P-please...you can't just\u2026eat me\u2026\" He cried as she advanced and pushed him into her cave with her scaly tail. \"I helped you! I let you go! Please, we're friends!\"\n\n\"Will you ever stop talking? Consider yourself lucky that I bothered to bring you all the way here.\" She growled, guiding him with her tail whenever he slowed down or tried to shift directions. \"You are mine now. I suggest you deal with your predicament in smarter ways than fighting like a drunkard or shouting like a little banshee.\"\n\nHow did I end up here? How? He found his eyes misting again as the female's tail smacked him roughly to force him into the dark confines of her cave. It was only like that for a short portion. A glow came from inside the cave, thanks to the glowing algae on the walls that painted the dark stone with a soft turquoise light. They did not stop as he felt another smack of her tail along with a growl that escaped her throat.\n\n\"Don't think about escaping.\" She pulled him again with her tail. \"I have some dragons that are very eager to meet you, little hunter.\"\n\n\"For the thousandth time, I am not a hunter!\" Arcturus stammered. \"How many times do I have to say it? You're right! I'm not my father. I'm not a warrior!\" He shouted out, causing her to turn to him with a great big snarl.\n\n\"That remains to be seen.\" She held her head up as they came to what looked like a large room of stone spikes jutting from the floor. On the opposite side of this open space was a rather soft looking nest laid out in a circular shape.\n\nArcturus' eyes widened at what lay inside the nest. Three little bronze scaled hatchlings, all huddled together, shivering and whispering to one another when they strolled over. He felt the female's tail leave him as she bound towards her little offspring.\n\n\"Momma!\" They all cried in unison as she began to lick and nuzzle them with an affection Arcturus never witnessed before. The hatchlings bounded around her legs, grabbed at her scales with their tiny paws, all to get their share of attention. A bleak smile forced Arcturus' lips to move slightly. He was almost certain Howling Storm had forgotten about him completely now that she had been reunited with her children.\n\nMaybe I can hide and avoid getting fed to her little monsters. Arcturus quickly bolted behind one of the stone spikes that grew from the ground, peeking out for a few moments as he watched the bronze mother continue to purr and pull her offspring close against her. She fell back with them clutched in her limbs, laughing as her wings hit the back of her nest. He could not make out what she was saying, as the only sounds escaping her maw were snarling, hissing, or growling noises. It could only be described as cute as she touched her hatchling's snouts, licked their cheeks and nuzzled their little bodies. She continued this up for several minutes before carefully picking them off her one by one and setting them on the cavern floor. It was when she shot her snout right in his direction that he noticed his hiding place had not been as useful as he imagined.\n\nShe advanced on him, looking like a great predatory cat as Arcturus scrambled backwards away from her. His heart threatened to burst out as she quickly closed the distance and cut off his escape with her lengthy tail.\n\n\"You will be staying for dinner, little human.\"\n\nHe gulped as he turned around to face the imposing dragoness. \"Don't eat me!\" He screamed out, tears filling his eyes as he begged for his life. \"I'm sorry for stabbing you! I'm sorry for speaking bad things of dragons. Please, just don't eat me!\"\n\n\"Grrrah! You are exasperating! I am not going to eat you.\" She snorted, \"What I am going to do is hunt something that will fill my belly after the warm reception your family gave me.\" She thrust a talon right between his eyes. \"You are to stay here with my hatchings. If I catch even a single scale of theirs out of place, I will start assuming things you don't even want me to think about. Then I will personally eat you, letting you experience digestion while still being alive. Do you understand?\" She snarled loudly, snapping her jaws right in front of his face, causing the frightened boy to yelp.\n\n\"Y-yes!\" He collapsed onto all fours as he hung his head. He only rose it when she had made her way out of the cavern and up the rocky path. Arcturus was left alone to look at three sets of green eyes staring at him from the nest.\n\nGreat\u2026now I have them to deal with. Arcturus scrambled back towards his protective spikes as he saw three tails swish back and forth behind them. The little dragons started to whisper in those same growls and hisses to one another. He thought he saw them shiver, and crouch low to avoid his gaze, although he pushed that thought from his mind. What reason they had to be afraid of him? He was the one who had been captured by the deceitful dragoness. Probably find himself on the evening menu too, if she returned empty handed. He imagined himself as an appetizer, or possibly a snack after they feasted on whatever she brought back.\n\nArcturus waited among those cold stone spikes for countless minutes. Time seemed to freeze when he just continued to glare out in terror at the little hatchlings that looked back at him from the nest. He finally devolved into small whimpers as he hugged his knees and looked away. If only he had listened to his father, if only he was not stupid enough to fall for her lies. He might still be back in his tent, inside his warm bed, under the fluffy covers he looked forward to each night, instead of laying on a cold stone floor, about to be fed to a bunch of dragon hatchlings. Sure. She said she was not going to eat him, but she had already lied to him once. What difference did it make if she lied to him again? He shivered and hugged himself tighter when he heard the sounds of Howling Tempest's claws against the stone as she returned into the cavern.\n\nHowling Tempest held onto the scruff of a large stag that hung limply from her jaws. Her bronze scales were painted in a thin layer of red that made Arcturus shiver at the thought of what she would do to him. Her eyes went to her hatchlings, and then straight to him. It felt like she was piercing into his soul with her fearsome eyes. Her stern gaze caused the little boy to crouch lower and hug the stone spike as the female made her way over to her offspring and set down the animal a few feet away from the nest. She spoke to the little dragons with the same hisses and growls, getting little pleased sounds back. Like little rumbling purrs or chirping noises the gryphons made in similar situations.\n\nArcturus' mouth dropped in horror as the female ripped into the stag, pulling it apart in one great tug, painting the stone beneath in dark crimson ooze. As if on cue, the little ones grabbed hold of sections of the stag with their little teeth and started to rip and tear just like their mother had done, chomping away happily as their little snouts started to resemble that of red dragons instead of bronze.'\n\nArcturus almost vomited as he continued to watch. The sounds of flesh ripping, snouts chewing, and the feasting lingered in his mind like a thick haze you couldn't get rid of. Despite how disgusted he was of what was happening, he could not force himself to look away from them. To his surprise, something else happened in this feeding frenzy of blood. The dragoness was acting very loving to them. Her saw her lick their snouts once or twice to make sure they were not splattered in the blood of the deceased stag. She also cut out sections with her onyx claws and handed them over to the hungry hatchlings. Arcturus was not familiar with sections of the animal, but it occurred to him she might have been offering them the best parts of the kill. The process continued until there was only a small section of the stag left. All three hatchlings purred with fulfillment. They pressed up against their mother, and Howling Storm licked each one in turn from snout to tail, until not a single drop of blood sullied their little scaled bodies.\n\n\"Are you ever going to come out from your hiding spot, fierce, brave Arcturus?\" Howling Tempest looked up with a smile, licking her snout with what Arcturus painted as satisfaction. \"You're not doing a good job at hiding, so I suggest you come over and grab this last piece of stag. For me, it is insignificant, but to you, this is very much life, unless you prefer to clutch your growling stomach throughout the night.\"\n\nDid she want him to feed it to her little ones? He took a step out as she growled her instructions again.\n\nArcturus sheepishly walked over to the family of dragons. What choice did he have? She could just snatch him up whenever she wanted, and feed him to her hatchling with ease. Without a word he hung his head and sat down before them. \"What is it you want me to do before you eat me?\" He shut his eyes tight and fought off the sobs threatening to burst out of his throat.\n\n\"Eat you?\" Her voice devolved into growling laughter. \"It's the third time I have to explain that and you...Oh\u2026I see what the problem is.\"\n\nArcturus opened his eyes to see that her snout was wrinkled up like she was going to sneeze.\n\n\"Ever since I snatched you from the bowels of that ugly cloth-home, you think I am still lying to you.\" She lowered her snout as the hatchlings dove under her. \"I have a family like I said. My mate is not here for the reason I mentioned in our earlier conversation. To say I lied to you is an overstatement.\"\n\n\"A what?\" Arcturus frowned. \"You took me from my home!\"\n\n\"Yes, for reasons you made me painfully aware of. If your hunters come looking for me, I can make a deal with them. Your life in exchange for the lives of my hatchlings.\"\n\n\"That's what I am? A pawn?\"\n\n\"An insurance for a day that hopefully never comes. Now please, relax. I am not feeding you to my hatchlings, nor am I keeping you for myself.\" She gestured to the bloody mess of the stag. \"I figured you were hungry, and since you were kind enough to feed me during my captivity, I thought it best to return the favor.\"\n\nFeed him? He looked back to the stag, trying to not vomit as he looked to the ragged bits of flesh left still on the corpse. \"I\u2026that's not\u2026I can't eat raw meat. It makes humans sick.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" She said flatly. \"I forgot you mortals don't have strong stomachs in that regard.\" She reached down with a talon to cut out a section of the stag for him. She made several quick and precise cuts with her talons. Arcturus watched and imagined what those things could do to armor, or even her enemies if she wanted to really hurt someone. \"Here,\" She held up another paw, and with a simple touch the meat started to change color from the dark red to a well-cooked brown. \"Simple bit of magic, and you have yourself a cooked piece of stag that you can hopefully digest.\"\n\nHe felt his stomach rumble, as if wolves were ripping at his insides. When the dragoness lowered the meat, Arcturus grabbed hold of it with his hands, the juices leaking through his fingers. He wrinkled his brow at the thought of getting so dirty, but he was hungry, and the piece was not that hot to the touch. He took a bite as he saw her, along with the three sets of eyes, watch his feeding. It was not the tastiest meat, magic-cooked and without any sort of seasoning. However, he politely chewed, swallowed, and offered a pleasing sounding. \"Mmmmm.\"\n\nThe dragoness gave him a pleased trilling noise as he continued to gobble up the meat she had provided, and when he was finished he set it aside with the stag, patting his belly as he did so. \"That hit the spot. Thank you for being...well, like this, and sorry for my behavior. After you captured me, I jumped to the worst conclusions and eeeeeep!\"\n\nHe was greeted by her slimy tongue in the most surprising and inappropriate of moments. The warm organ bathed him in dragon saliva in the same sloppy way it cleaned the hatchlings. \"H-Hey!\" He tried to protest, but she insisted. He tried to push her away at first, finding it disgusting and a bit weird for her to be doing it. But then it, occurred to him -as she continued his assault on him with her tongue-that she was licking him exactly like she had done with her little ones, so he stopped resisting and let her work. It was hard to describe what the tumultuous feelings that coursed through his body were as she licked across his brow, across his neck, and eventually all over his clothes. It felt like he was one of her offspring, and could feel the caring nature she held within her heart through each one of her tender licks. Arcturus found himself liking the sensation after the first few minutes of grooming. He even felt a pang of disappointment when she licked her nose and pulled away from him.\n\n\"There now. You are clean, just like the rest of my family.\"\n\nArcturus mumbled his gratitude when the shrilling voice of a hatchling startled him.\n\n\"Story, momma!\" The little male jumped on her right forelimb, rustling his little frills that looked like his mother's, except he bore a dark red strike at the base.\n\n\"Yes! Tell us story!\" Came the voice of another one, clearly a female, with a yellow stripe.\n\n\"Please?\" The last one bounded over, another male with a blue stripe. He nudged and pushed the others out of the way as all three snouts looked to her expectantly.\n\n\"Story! Story! Story!\" The three hatchlings chanted in unison. They tapped their tails against the stone, refolded their wings against their backs, and at times clacked their little charcoal talons together.\n\nArcturus felt a smile come to his face from that display. He let out a small gasp when, suddenly, a larger bronze tail pushed him to sit with the little bronze hatchlings. \"Whoa\u2026\" He went to protest only to be silenced when she started speaking in a loud and booming voice.\n\n\"This is not a story per say, little ones, but a statement of facts.\" Howling Storm lowered her snout to each one of them in turn, including Arcturus. She lingered for a few moments on him, her eyes looking tired and pained as she began to speak. \"We are leaving this home, these lands, and everything they offer behind.\" She rose her head to gaze out to the way that led outside. \"I will take my clutch far from Lumara, away from the rule of a despot who kills dragons based on nothing but lies.\"\n\nArcturus was about to ask a question about this. His king, killing dragons based on lies? Was the man just like his father in that regard? Lumping the bad deeds of certain dragons in with the rest of their species? Before he spoke, however, Howling Storm carried on.\n\n\"Your king would end our lives based on numerous small offenses. Theft of animals, trespassing on his land.\" She snorted, \"He spews such horrendous nonsense. As if all of us were the murdering monsters of old. As if all of us kidnap mortals, eat them, or destroy your villages. All we want is a patch of land to call our own, peace to raise our hatchlings, and freedom to soar along the sky. Surely that should not doom a whole species to death. Gryphons are not targeted for extermination as far as I know.\"\n\nArcturus said nothing as she continued telling her tale about the king's misdeeds towards her kind. Several more dragons that had been killed with nothing more than minor crimes, or some that had done nothing at all. It was a rather difficult thing for Arcturus to stomach on such a strange night, but with the conviction of her words and the honesty blazing in her eyes, Arcturus found himself believing every word that was coming out of her maw. He was even deeply saddened when he heard a story of hatchlings that were stoned to death by an angry mob of mortals, because they thought the little dragons were associated with a villainous monster that had lurked within their hills in ages past. He watched as her own hatchlings shivered at the story, quickly bounding under her wings. They even pressed themselves against her with little whining noises.\n\nArcturus felt his heart start to ache as she wrapped her wing around them, whispering soothing sounds to them, and nuzzling their little snouts. It made him long for his mother's touch, to hear her words once again grace his ears.\n\nWith her tale about the state of dragon kind finished, the bronze dragoness brought her little ones back into her nest, laying down and having them cuddle against her in one pile of striking bronze scales. She wrapped one wing around them and just looked up to Arcturus, then opened her other wing. Howling Tempest gestured to it with her snout. \"Come and slumber with us. My wings and scales are warmer than the cold floor, and much more comfortable.\"\n\nArcturus looked to the dark stone, then back to the expectant female dragon that had fed him, shared tales, and licked him in the same affectionate way she treated her hatchlings. He shivered from the cold air of the night before scampering over to her. Once there, Arcturus lowered himself into her warm embrace. He felt her wrap a forelimb around him, followed by her wing. It was rather warm, pleasant, and the comfort of being protected by such a powerful creature made him want to sink further into her grasp. He closed his eyes, sighing at the pleasant heat exuded by her body and the pleasant comfort of her scales. Arcturus realized that with her breaths, and steady thumping of her heart, he felt at peace. With a final exhale, the young boy left his dreams take him away upon the ethereal winds of a realm where he too could soar upon the sky like a dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Arcturus sat down on the grassy land that grew near the mouth of the cave's entrance. The sun hung in the air, sending its warm rays to bathe the human in its pleasing embrace. He took a deep breath, taking in the smell of the salty ocean. With a sigh, he gazed over the surrounding forest, with towering trees that bore the darkest bark and greens of every variety sprinkled in their leaves. Howling Tempest had allowed him to venture this far from her cave, yet he was still being forbidden to leave. Arcturus realized that despite her warmth, pleasing touch, and food, he was very much still her captive. He wondered how long it would take until someone from his clan came looking for him. How long until this place was swarming with dragon hunters of all kinds. How long until this family of dragons would lay dead around their own home.\n\nHis attention was drawn to a section of large rocks scattered around the grassy field. Like stone monoliths, they rose from the earth in a formation that reminded Arcturus' of teeth in a dragon's maw. The three hatchlings were climbing the tall stones, leaping from top to top with little growls as their talons dug into the stone each time they would catch hold of their destination. The activity repeated several times until the hatchling with the red striped talons did not find purchase. The hatchling kicked frantically for support, then fell with a yelp of surprise, landing right onto his wings. When the dragon stood up, he went to stretch his left wing, but suddenly stopped, let out a pained whimper, and tried to lick at the stiff pain that rendered his wing immobile.\n\nThe human hesitated for a moment as he watched the dragon try to move his wing several times, only for the hatchling to have the same heart-stinging reaction as before. With the latest bit of whining, Arcturus could no longer fight the impulse to help somebody in need. He ran a hand along the leather strap of his pack, and strode over to the little dragons, who separated themselves from their brother. He saw their eyes look to him with fear, as if he was going to kill them and turn them into belts or boots. Even the red striped one tried to get away, but Arcturus offered a soothing sound like their mother had done. This caused the hatchling to cease his struggles for just long enough for Arcturus to grab the limb that was troubling the dragon such.\n\nHe felt his way along the smooth scales, much softer than the female's. The hatchling's armor felt like leathery plates rather than solid material. With the next pass of his hand he saw the hatchling close his eyes and offer a whine. It did not appear that anything was broken. Arcturus's eyes traced along the limb as the little dragon tried to pull it away from him. It was then when he remembered having something similar when he was smaller.\n\n\"Your wing is dislocated.\" Arcturus said softly, patting the dragon's scales gently. \"I can fix it...but it might hurt for a moment. Try to be strong, ok?\"\n\nThe dragon nodded without a word, looking up to him with emerald eyes full of worry.\n\n\"Alright. Ready?\" He asked, paying no mind to the other two snouts that descended on his hands, curious on what he was going to do. \"One\u2026two\u2026three!\" He shoved the wing joint back into the socket with a small yelp of pain from the red striped hatchling.\n\n\"There. The worst part is over.\" Arcturus retracted his hands and dusted them off, a smile coming to his face as the little dragon rose to all fours and started bounding around with a smile on his snout. He opened and closed his wings several times, letting out a little happy roar.\n\n\"My wing feels right again. You were right!\" The hatchling cheered, stopping to stare at Arcturus, tail flicking eagerly behind him.\n\n\"Thank you!\" The female hatchling nudged him with her snout, an act that caused him to push back against her, laughing.\n\n\"It was no problem, really. I could have been faster, but I had to feel my way around the wing to be sure, cause I just couldn't see....um...that bone that connects the wing to the back. It's called\u2026uhhh, it's the\u2026I forgot the name, but maybe you can help me? Uhhh\u2026\" Arcturus slapped his face with his palm. He wanted to feel heroic, yet instead, all he did was embarrass himself further. He gestured to the dragon he had helped, too shy to even ask the hatchling's name.\n\n\"I am Xervir!\" The red striped hatchling proclaimed, slinking over and nudging the human, running his scales over his clothes. \"Thanks again for the wing fix you did. It feels so much better now!\" the hatchling looked over to his siblings, his eyes no longer filled with fear, or worry, but full of mischief. \"Do you play games, human?\"\n\n\"Arcturus.\" He laughed.\n\n\"What kind of game is Arcturus?\" The yellow striped female asked, tilting her head to the side, and ruffling her wings. \"Does it involve wings or tails?\" She opened up her left wing and gestured to the soft membranes.\n\n\"No\u2026that's my name.\" Arcturus chuckled, thumbing his chest.\n\n\"That can't be a name.\" The blue striped hatchling replied, licking his jaws like his mother did. \"You look more like a Zenthyn.\" The dragon nodded. \"Yup, most definitely a Zenthyn.\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Xervir laughed. \"It suits you much better than this weird name you claim to have.\" The hatchling sat down onto is haunches, his snout tracing along Arcturus' clothes, until his gaze fell onto the pack that he had.\n\n\"I don't know about Zenthyn...\" The yellow striped hatchling suddenly put both of her forelimbs up on the human as she moved her snout ever so close to his face. \"I think.... he looks exactly like a....like...mmrrrrr.\" She gave a quick giggle before suddenly licking him across the face and scampering away. \"I'd say an Ordis.\"\n\n\"Hey! That's not fair!\" Arcturus wiped away the slimy strand of saliva.\n\n\"You have to be faster than that, Ordis!\" The female leaped around happily.\n\n\"Ordis?\" Xervir asked, turning to his sister and baring his teeth. \"That is a stupid name for a healer!\"\n\n\"It's better than spell-wrangling Zenthyn.\" She rolled her eyes and swished her tail, hitting the grass. \"Right Arcturus? Ordis is a much better name, right? You don't look like a wizard at all.\"\n\nArcturus nodded with a laugh, causing the two male hatchlings to pout and glare at their sister, who was just smiling and puffing out her chest.\n\n\"See? The human prefers my name.\" She strode over to sit beside him, scooching close, and looking up to him. \"Ordis here is on my team from now.\"\n\n\"Your team?\" Arcturus chuckled nervously, concerned he had just entered a game he did not understand.\n\n\"Does he have any weaknesses?\" Xervir asked, his snout getting close to sniff at his clothes. \"Well\u2026your scales are really soft...I bet you're ticklish like our wings!\"\n\n\"Your wings are ticklish?\" Arcturus laughed, causing Xervir's eyes to widen.\n\n\"N-no.\" The dragon backed away from him, folding his wings closer against his back. \"Mrrr...no\u2026 of course not. Why would they be ticklish? Dragons can't be tickled.\" Xervir looked away as if he did not care. \"That would just be silly...right?\" The dragon snapped his gaze back towards him with a smile. \"Get him! Let's find out human tickle spots!\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Arcturus managed to shout out before he was suddenly bombarded and tackled over by three eager hatchlings. He laughed as their little claws raked across his skin, one or two piercing into his skin by accident, but he paid it no mind, as Xervir found that, by licking the human's neck, Arcturus recoiled with laughter.\n\n\"His neck is ticklish!\" The dragon proclaimed to the other two roaming snouts as Arcturus desperately tried to push them away.\n\n\"Stop it, you\u2026little bundles of scales!\" The human reached out with his fingers through the bouts of shrieking laughter coursing through his chest. The dragons did not relent for a moment, as one found the back of his leg made his entire body spasm and giggle without care. His eyes began to tear up as the dragons continued their tickling, until his fingers found Xervir's wing membranes. It was then when Arcturus wiggled his fingers. A wave of accomplishment surged through him as the dragon suddenly fell backwards with cackling laughter, causing the other two to suddenly stop.\n\n\"He's down! On him!\" Arcturus gasped out, pointing to the fallen dragon, hoping his siblings would join in as he began to tickle the dragon on the ground. He was pleased when they both joined him with their snouts and claws as they ran them along Xervir's soft membranes. \"Go go go! Show him no mercy! Give no pause to your assault!\" Arcturus ordered with the gruff voice of an army commander, delighting in the dragon's whines, his cute small kicks, and his smile as he cackled into the morning air.\n\n\"Nooo! S-ssssstop! I'm not\u2026you shouldn't-\" He shouted out, his tail wiggling under the merciless assault. \"Raawwwwaaaaaahhhh I'm not the enemy!\"\n\n\"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?\" Came the loud booming voice of their mother. Arcturus and the others grew silent as they unwound themselves from one another once the dragoness strode over with powerful steps, her tail swishing back in forth, and her eyes full of anger. \"What were you all doing together?\"\n\n\"We were playing with Ordis here.\" Xervir rolled over on his belly, refolding his wings. \"They all then ganged up on me to tickle my poor wings with-\"\n\n\"WHY ARE YOU PLAYING WITH THE HUNTER?\"\n\n\"Hunter? But I wasn't-\"\n\n\"Shut your snout, human. I heard what you said about assault. You want to poison my hatchlings with the vile things you learned from your family?\" She snapped her mouth at him, thrashing her tail, and growling from her throat. \"I have you here in my clutches, under my roof. That does not give you the right to play with my hatchlings. I have not forgotten what your family had done, and still keeps on doing.\"\n\nArcturus looked to the others as Howling Storm continued to scold them, their little snouts drooping as her chastising words sank in through harsh growls.\n\nArcturus' eyes began to mist. Was this how his life was going to be from now? To be the puppet of this dragoness? Get shouted at? To be berated, snarled at? To be tossed in with his father's hatred? He could not help being who he was: a kind, cheerful boy who never dreamed of harming these hatchlings.\n\n\"I\u2026I wasn't\u2026trying to\u2026\" Arcturus turned his head back to the female to sniffle by himself. Tears began to stream down his face as he lowered himself to all fours and began to cry in earnest.\n\nThe female ceased her snarl, growls, and reprimands. Arcturus felt her snout press onto his back, and she let out a warm puff of air through his ruffling hair.\n\n\"What moves you to tears, little one? Was I too harsh?\"\n\n\"It's\u2026\" Arcturus sniffled. \"It's that...You welcomed me under your wing last night.\" He lifted his head, the tears still coming down his cheeks. \"And now you snarl, hit, shout\u2026We just played together, is all. I never tried to hurt them, or\u2026or teach them bad stuff.\" He wiped his eye with a sleeve, sniffling. \"Why can't I play with the hatchlings? I swear I don't want to hurt them! I thought\u2026I thought we are friends. We were having so much fun together\u2026\"\n\n\"Yea!\" Xervir went to speak.\n\nHowling Storm silenced his little squeak with a pointy claw. Then, her eyes turned back to Arcturus. \"Because, little human, we cannot ignore the truth. You belong to the Lu-\" Her eyes then widened before him as she froze in place. The only movement she was making was her tail, wagging back and forth, and her chest rising and falling with her breaths. She then lowered her snout and averted her gaze. \"By Bahamut's grace, I have been most unwise.\" She turned away, her tail wrapping around the boy and pulling him towards her.\n\n\"Hatchlings...continue to play.\" She turned back to her offspring, offering them a warm smile. \"I am sorry about my outburst. Continue to have fun together. I will return the human shortly...I just need to talk to him a bit.\"\n\nArcturus wondered what she wanted to talk to him about, but quickly scampered after her when the little dragons all nodded to her and resumed their wrestling match with one another. He followed Howling Tempest for a few more minutes, until she turned around, sat down on her haunches, and patted a spot on the ground by her tail.\n\n\"Sit here with me, Arcturus.\" She said softly. \"Please.\" Her voice softened even more. Arcturus saw her eyes fill with the same fondness she had shown to her hatchlings. How could he resist? He took a seat within the curled confines of her tail, and she gently pulled him closer and brought her snout close to his face. \"I am sorry for stealing you from your home against your will.\" She said after a long sigh. \"I only wanted to make sure I could get my family away from danger without you raising the alarm.\"\n\n\"But I was the one who-\"\n\nShe silenced him with a warm nuzzle along the side of his head. \"You are a sweet boy, Arcturus, but I never fully trusted you. Your family name still blinded me from seeing the truth.\" She pulled away to show him her paw. There was still a dark red mark on the underside, where his dagger had found purchase. \"Perhaps you would not have been so terrified to lash back at me if I unveiled my plan. I realize that was my first, and greatest mistake.\" She sighed again before returning her snout to his face. \"Can you forgive me?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for stabbing you.\" He quickly replied, ignoring her question as his eyes returned to her paw. \"I was so scared\u2026\"\n\n\"I know.\" She licked him across the face. \"It was not your fault, and truthfully, I admired the courage you have shown. That, despite being placed in such a dire situation, you chose to fight your way out. You held your head high and stood your ground against me even if you had no hope of winning.\" She chuckled and nuzzled him gently with her snout. \"It was a very dragon thing to do, little human.\"\n\nArcturus touched her enormous snout and held it close to his face when her words came to a stop. Then, he pressed his head gently against hers, sighing under her warm embrace, basking in the soothing air that rushed out of her flaring nostrils. \"So, what happens now?\" He asked softly, a sense of disappointment running through him when she rose her snout above him to look back to her hatchlings. They were still rolling in the grass with a series of growls when she called out in the same tongue.\n\nThe three hatchlings suddenly stopped and quickly scampered over with blinding speed, until they were right beside their mother's tail, paws pressed against the scales, and little snouts close to Arcturus, filled with smiles and grins.\n\n\"I think I would like you to meet my children.\" She smiled, \"properly, this time.\"\n\n\"He already knows my name!\" Xervir shouted, puffing out his chest and thrusting a wing talon in his direction. \"He relocated my wing when it got hurt!\"\n\n\"He did?\" She smiled to the dragon. She flicked her playful tongue at him, causing Xervir to giggle out. \"That is a most helpful human to have!\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. He is a very good healer. Then we played wrestling, and I found out he's even more ticklish than us!\" Xervir than wrinkled his snout and glared at Arcturus. \"And then he recruited Briva and Emmess against me.\"\n\nHowling Tempest just chuckled, pointing to Xervir. \"This little bundle of joy is Xervir.\" She then brought her snout over to the yellow striped hatchling, and licked along her spine, causing the little one to laugh in return. \"And this one is named Emmess.\" The dragoness did the same thing to the navy striped hatchling, who turned to smack her snout playfully in an attempt to thwart of her assault of affectionate licks. \"And lastly, this one is Briva.\"\n\n\"Hi...I am Arcturus, and I am not a game,\" He laughed, waving to the smiling hatchlings.\n\n\"So...\" Xervir rose his head up to his mother, followed by the others joining beside him. \"Can we play with him? Please?\"\n\n\"Please, mother?\" Emmess added, tapping her paw against her mother's scales. \"We promise to not hurt him! Well...\" She looked to the tiny scratches on his skin. \"Besides scratches, but those were accidents! Honest!\" Emmess' tail wagged like a blur behind her as she spoke.\n\nHowling Tempest's grin only got bigger as her eyes went to Arcturus, then back to the hatchlings, who seemed to be bouncing on their paws as they waited her response. \"He is all yours, little ones. Try to be gentle. He does not have the resilient scales we bear.\"\n\n\"Hey, that is not true. I have clothes and-and I'm more than capable of handling a couple of dragonlings!\" Arcturus suddenly exclaimed.\n\n\"Oh really?\" The dragoness inched her snout close to his confident face. \"Guess we're about to see if you are indeed as strong as you say. Get him!\"\n\nThe little dragons growled heartily at the challenge. They leaped on the human at the same time, once again tackling him with laughter and soft paws.\n\n\"Got you now, human!\" Briva shouted out, giving a little growl in the back of his throat.\n\n\"Go for his tail, Ordis!\" Emmess cackled as she fought Xervir away with her tickling talons. \"That is his tickle spot!\"\n\n\"On it!\" Arcturus wrestled with the navy stiped hatchling, who now squirmed to get himself free when the human's deft fingers descended onto his tail.\n\n\"No! You won't get my tail, healer!\" Briva kicked back with his hind leg, knocking Arcturus back onto his butt, allowing the hatchling to bound away with laughter. \"You can't catch me, Ordis!\"\n\nHow could he resist a challenge like that? Arcturus pulled himself free, letting Emmess keep Xervir pinned to the ground with her tickling attacks while Howling Tempest watched over them. The thought occurred to him, that she was watching over them all. Like...they were all one big family...and he was part of it.\n\nNeed to focus. No time for thinking! Arcturus shook his head and chased after the hatchling, who cackled and leaped around in glee.\n\nArcturus spent the rest of the day with the hatchlings as they practiced tag with one another, even if that game always ended with the hatchlings turning on him and tackling him once more to the ground with a series of cute dragon sounds. They then explored the surrounding forests, although every so often, when they would look around, he would see that Howling Tempest was always nearby like a sentinel, ever watching. He smiled at her diligence each time, and went back to following the scampering little dragons through bushes, plants, flowers\u2026he even joined them by rolling in a large field full of grass. They all ended that little play on their backs, looking into the sky. Arcturus pointed out clouds to them, and asked the dragons what they saw. They all would reply with food, animals, or other dragons in flight. He was having so much fun with them he did not keep track of the time, and it felt like the day had passed in a blink of an eye. The sun was already sinking below the mountains in the distance, basking the land in the pleasant fiery caress of a gentle flame.\n\nArcturus sat outside the cave's entrance, with all three hatchlings pressed up against him. He giggled as he put his arms around the scaly bunch. He figured that, if anyone were to come see him now, it would look like the dragons had adopted him right into their little clutch. Arcturus fought off another wrestling match that had started when Emmess had poked Bravis on his snout with her paw, laughing the entire time as he assisted his teammate in the affair. He thought back to his time with his own family, the grueling training, the demands of his overly exigent father, and the hatred he was trying to impart onto his son. With a sigh, Arcturus caressed the dragons as they all piled on top of him in a giant hug of affection. Their scales warmed him up to the very core of his being. How could his father be so wrong about such a magnificent species? Dragons were not all evil like he had said. Part of him wished to stay with this family forever, for how bad could it really be, to live among dragons?\n\nHe ate again alongside the small family when Howling Tempest brought back another meal for them to eat. She cut him off a section and used the same magic to cook the meat as her hatchlings worked away with little rips and tears. Arcturus diverted his eyes from the grisly work as he chomped away at his own morsel. When that was finished, another round of licks came from Howling Storm, to which Arcturus found himself laughing, not minding the shower of saliva in the slightest. His reaction even caused the dragoness to pull her snout away with a rumbling pleased noise from her throat.\n\n\"You seem to have adjusted quite well.\" She looked up fondly to her hatchlings that had started to yawn and cuddle against one another. \"They seem to adore you. I wish their interactions with mortals were always this nice.\" She gave him one last lick before retreating to her nest. The dragoness nestled herself into the nest as the hatchlings bounded for her and wiggled under her wing.\n\n\"Come on, Ordis! Sleep here, where it's warm.\" Bravis squeaked, waving him over with a yawn.\n\nArcturus looked up to Howling Tempest's smile, then to the three hatchlings that looked at him with smiles and expectant eyes. How could he resist? He leaped into the collection of scales, and sighed with obvious fulfillment when they all squirmed and packed themselves around him tightly. He closed his eyes from the feeling of contentment he felt, and when Howling Tempest's wing wrapped around them all, he truly felt like he belonged here, as one of her clutch."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "\"Come on, wake up.\"\n\nArcturus felt a warm snout press against his chest, causing his arms to raise and grab hold of warm scales. With his eyes still closed, the boy unleashed a satisfied sigh. He was still in the warm embrace of his new family. Nothing had changed.\n\nIt wasn't a dream.\n\nArcturus was so relaxed now that he almost felt like dreaming. The pleasant feeling of all the hatchlings still cuddled with him, the warmth from the dragoness they were snuggling against. He could not bring himself to move away from such serenity.\n\n\"You have to get up, Arcturus.\" The dragoness nosed him again, a tad more forceful than before. The last poke caused him to open his eyes as the three hatchlings scampered off him with little whimpers of dissatisfaction.\n\nArcturus rolled off the dragoness and stretched his limbs with a yawn. That had been one of the best sleeps of his life. Resting under a dragon's wing was surprisingly warmer than his bed, and even more comfortable. He found himself looking back to her stretching form, wishing to be back within her embrace. To be held so lovingly as he slept. It reminded him of his own mother, and for a short moment, Arcturus wondered what today held in store for him. Would they get a chance to explore the forest again? Would they fly with the mother in the sky? And more importantly, would she take him with her when she decided to leave this cave behind? His eyes widened when he realized he did not mind the last option at all.\n\nI can live among dragons, Arcturus' fascination rose further the more he pondered on this. I can fly with them, learn so much. And the best thing is, I never have to hold a sword in my life ever again!\n\nHe could be a painter, selling off beautiful depictions of the dragons he would encounter along his journeys, at various markets, to people who found dragons equally captivating. Maybe even change a village's whole perceptions of dragons. How would his father feel then, when he, Arcturus Lund, would make the world love dragons instead?\n\nThe boy's little heart all but fluttered at the beautiful images his optimistic mind could conjure.\n\n\"You have to go home this morning.\" Howling Tempest said softly as she noticed his stare. \"We are leaving, and you cannot stay with us.\"\n\nArcturus' dreams all came crashing down upon hearing those fateful words.\n\n\"Wh-what?\" He blinked, unsure if he heard that correctly.\n\n\"I have to take you back to your real home, Arcturus. Please. Don't make this more difficult than it is. It's\u2026hard for me to part ways so soon after\u2026\" She sighed and looked to the cavern walls.\n\n\"B-but, you can't do that!\" Arcturus protested as his heart sank into a shadowy pit of disappointment. \"I don't want to go back home! I have all the training, the testing, the expectations, and then there's my father. He wants to kill all of you!\"\n\n\"Nonetheless, it is where you belong, little one.\" She lowered her snout, her eyes not daring to look him in the eye. \"I want to keep you here, with us, but your family is big and powerful. They would send out scouts to track us down, then parties, whole squads of armed warriors\u2026there would not be a single place in the world where they would not hunt us, and I don't wish to put my family in that kind of danger.\"\n\n\"But they won't find me! Can't you just take me with you and fly away?\" He asked, tears starting to form in his eyes as the little hatchlings all gathered around him.\n\n\"Can't we keep him, Mother?\" Xervir asked. \"We will take good care of him!\"\n\n\"Make sure he gets fed!\" Bravis added with a smile.\n\n\"Ordis is not some pet to keep around.\" Emmess rolled her eyes, pressing herself up against Arcturus with a purr. \"I'd like him as a brother. Who wants to adopt him?\" She raised her paw, followed by the others doing the same thing with a bout of laughter.\n\n\"Please...\" Arcturus whispered. \"I don't want to be like my father. I don't want to be a\u2026 killer. I don't want to hurt dragons, least of all\u2026murder them for no reason!\" The tears stung his eyes now, rolling down his cheeks as he collapsed. The three hatchlings wrapped themselves around him as Howling Storm lowered her snout to him and gave him one long lick across his face. Arcturus sniffled, and with blurry eyes, saw that she too had tears in her amber eyes.\n\n\"I wish I could take you with us Arcturus. You are different from your kin, a child fair of heart, with a warm spirit unlike any other human I met. One that allowed you to cast off your father's words and free me. Thanks to you, I am not dead, and my family is reformed. I will always be grateful for your deeds.\" She gave him another lick across his cheek. \"But I cannot take you, for your father would hunt us to the end of the earth, slaying us for taking his son away from him.\" She nuzzled him next, pressing her warm scales against him. \"If you go back home, we have a chance.... I am sorry Arcturus...know I truly wish to take you away from all the things that trouble you...and I would want to make you one of my own, but\u2026\" She pulled her head away, wiping the tears from her bronze cheeks. \"The only thing I can give you now is my name. Rasionynth.\"\n\n\"Rays\u2026ion..ynth.\" Arcturus stumbled with the words, trying several times but failing at each one. \"What good is a name if I can't come with you guys? Can\u2026\" Arcturus wiped the tears from his eyes. \"Can't I call you Howling Storm? It's the first name you gave me when\u2026when we became friends.\"\n\n\"You may, little one. But I would keep saying my real one\u2026practice makes perfect after all.\" She licked him one more time as he wiped away his tears. \"Now come...I wish to show you something before we part ways.\" She rose up and guided all four of them to one of the cavern's walls.\n\nArcturus looked up to the grey stone, finding something that once again surprised him. Along the wall were pictures of all sorts, drawn, it seemed, with a claw of some kind. Most were at the same level of the hatchlings. These drawings were of things like trees, animals, the sun, the water, little stick figures for humans. He looked to the hatchlings that were on their haunches, tails wagging with big smiles as they admired their handiwork.\n\n\"Here.\" Rasionynth rose her claw and dragged it along the stone swiftly, drawing the shape for a human, and three little shapes for her wrymlings. He could tell by the little wings and smiles on their snouts. Lastly, she drew a bigger dragon around them all, with her tail curled around their playing form. \"Now...no matter where we go...part of you will remain here, with us, in the same place we called home.\"\n\nArcturus approached the stone carefully, running a hand along the surface. The shapes were rudimentary, lacking the refinement he displayed with the brush, yet the gesture touched him deeply. Howling Storm drew art for him, same way he did for her shortly after they met. He felt more tears come to his eyes as the pain in his heart grew at such touching gesture. \"I\u2026it's beautiful,\" Arcturus sniffled. \"Please\u2026take me with you.\" He looked one last time in her kind, beautiful eyes. \"We can do so many things together! I can teach you how to draw with the brush, and-and color the sketches. It doesn't have to end like this. Please, I don't want to go back.\" He continued to look up to the dragoness, whose amber eyes started leaking honest tears.\n\n\"I know.\" She picked him up gently with her paws and pulled him against her warm scaled chest. \"And it kills me to let such a fine painter go.\" She then wrapped her head around him, and pulled him tighter against her, as he felt her body began to shiver. They stayed like this for a moment before he was set down against the stone. \"Well...\" She looked up to the exit. \"We should be off then. Get close enough to Drenedar before your family's scouts spot us.\"\n\nArcturus nodded. He had to be a man. If he truly cared about these dragons, he had to let them go.\n\nPutting the stern look of a warrior, Arcturus went to follow her as she strode right past him with a swish of her tail, her onyx claws clicking on the stone with each step. He stopped after several steps, an idea forming to his mind as he remembered his pack. \"Wait!\" He shouted out, throwing his pack onto the ground.\n\n\"What is it?\" Rasionynth turned around, tilting her head to the side.\n\n\"I know a way to keep you with me as well.\" He pulled out a small journal that he always kept in his pack. With a leather cover, and a belted binding, the book was as fine as it could get. He set it on the cavern floor and pulled out his vial of ink. \"You just have to let me put ink on your paw, and you can press it against the pages here.\" He smiled to the hatchlings and gestured to the vellum.\n\n\"Mama, can we get our paws dirty for Ordis?\" Emmess looked up to her, her eyes misting. \"I want to play with him one last time, before\u2026\"\n\n\"You may.\" The dragoness nodded, causing all three of the hatchlings to cheer in joy.\n\nOne by one, Arcturus helped the hatchlings get their right front paws covered in the black ink, then letting them press it against the paper. They giggled about how cold the ink was, and it was amusing, how each dragon felt the need to press their nose against the vellum and sniff their handiwork. Arcturus finished off their art with a signing of their name right below the paw marks. When the task was finished, they all followed Rasionynth out of the cavern and into the morning light.\n\nThere was a slight fog in the air that made the surrounding countryside look lost in a sea of murky white. Arcturus took a deep breath of the crisp air, sighing in remembrance. His senses would soon be overfilled with horses, gryphons, and the smell of dragon hunters. He turned to the hatchlings, who bound to him and wrapped him up with their wings. Each one had tears in their emerald eyes as they wished him a hearty farewell.\n\n\"You will see us again at some point, right?\" Bravis asked, his head drooping.\n\n\"Please mother, will he see us again?\" Emmess looked up to her mother with expectant eyes. Her tail twitched slightly.\n\n\"I\u2026do not know where out next home will be.\" Howling Storm sighed, \"But I think Drenedar is a fine place to settle. I heard of a blue dragon that might help us find a place to settle. He goes by the title of Swirling Storm, if my memory serves.\"\n\nEmmess looked back to Arcturus and licked him gently across his face. \"You hear that, Ordis? Just look for this Swirling Storm one day.\" She nuzzled him with her snout. \"Find him, and we can be a clutch again!\"\n\n\"I will\u2026one day\u2026\" Arcturus ruffled her frill with his hands, tears still pouring from his eyes as he wished them all goodbye. When Rasionynth picked him up and brought him into the sky, he never thought it would have been as hard as it was to say his farewells. He started to cry once more as he pressed his face against her scales, wishing to be held within her forelimbs forever, and never go back to the family of slayers that he was bound to."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Rasionynth settled him down within a mile of the fairgrounds. She made sure to keep low to the ground and hug the trees as she flew. When she said her goodbyes, she did so with tears, licks, nuzzles, and hugs. \"Remember to keep your heart true, Arcturus.\" She licked him one more time across his face, like he was one of her hatchlings. \"And if you want to be a knight, to protect instead of punishing... you go be a knight.\"\n\nHe nodded, caressing her scales one last time. \"Good bye Ra...sionynth.\"\n\n\"May the summer winds lead you into a life of prosperity, Arcturus.\" Rasionynth spread her wings, and with a mighty flap, the majestic dragon was gone, her shining scales soon disappearing, leaving Arcturus alone near the edge of a vast forest. He looked around to see in the distance the large collection of multicolored tents, and the black smoke rising from the fires. He found his next few steps hard to make, like his legs were weighted down by stone to stop his advance. He glanced back, hoping to see that the dragoness had changed her mind. However, all he saw were trees. All he heard, silence.\n\n\"Be a man. I need to be a man.\" With a deep sigh, he picked up the pace and made his way back to a family he no longer wanted.\n\nArcturus wandered into the collection of mortals. No one seemed to pay him any mind as he got lost in the sea of sounds, people, and smells. That was until he came across the familiar tent of his own kin, where he was assaulted by hugs, ruffled hair, and caring eyes.\n\n\"Where did ya venture to, lad?\" Came the voice of one of his uncles, a farmer from the southern regions near Trost.\n\n\"Ye worried us half ta death, ye wee basterd!\" Said one of his cousins, a gryphon rider from Whitedell to the east. She carried a concerned look in her radiant hazel eyes. \"Found a lass an' spirited her away into the forest, eh? Needed a bit of lone time fer yerselves.\"\n\n\"I was\u2026I was\u2026\" Arcturus tried, but he could not get out a word thanks to the storm of questions flung at him. Where he had gone, what he had gotten up to, if he had a fling with the gryphon nanny's niece. Even if he could do something that ridiculous, he could not tell them the truth. How could he, when it would put the dragoness at risk?\n\n\"Yes...Where did you get off to, son?\" Came the demanding growl from his father, who pushed aside many of the Lund clan with a sneer on his face. \"Where did you run off to? Is it true you went romancing some lass? How thoughtless is that? Did you not hear one of the dragons went missing? You could have been killed, boy!\"\n\n\"Father\u2026I\u2026\" His mind raced for an answer as he kicked himself mentally for not running over a comprehensible story. He figured he was just so distraught over not staying with the family of dragons, it had simply slipped from his mind. \"I was hunting a boar in the woods!\" He rubbed the back of his neck and gestured to his soiled clothes. \"Damn thing sent me on a chase, and I got a little lost. Stupid, I know, but I wanted to prove I can be a warrior just like you, father.\"\n\n\"Awk, you poor thing. Are you hungry?\" His nanny squawked as she pulled him right against her fur. \"You must have been alone, cold, and oh, so, so hungry! I will whip something up for you with a slice of a claw.\" She poked him in the stomach with her talon. \"Can't have you hungry for the trials ahead, young man.\"\n\nHe looked up from the concerned gryphon to his father, whose stern eyes never shifted from him. For a moment, he was concerned what was running through his father's head. Thankfully, the man did not yell, nor did he scream. Markis just gestured for him to follow. \"Come. Don't make me ask a second time. We need to share words.\"\n\nArcturus gulped as he let go of his nanny in order to follow in the footsteps of his father, who strode away from their tents. He looked back briefly to see the rest of his clan dispersing and going back to the festivities around them. He picked up the pace and stepped in tandem with his father, who looked down to him with the same stern gaze, eyes filled with disappointment.\n\n\"A boar? Is that the best you could come up with, whelp?\"\n\nArcturus froze. \"F-father\u2026I swear it's-\"\n\n\"Do not patronize me, boy! I know it was you who freed the dragon.\" He finally spoke with a growl as they came to a stop in a place far removed from anyone else. \"What...on this fair earth\u2026 were you thinking?\" Markis thundered as he slammed his palms together. \"How many times have I told you of the destruction spread by their wretched kin? They are evil, vile, twisted monsters that wish only to see us killed to the last!\"\n\n\"T-that is not true!\" Arcturus shouted back at his father, clenching his left hand into a fist. \"I got to see how dragons truly are. She was kind and caring and good unlike you lot!\" Arcturus blurted out, his face stern, just like his father. There was no point to play the role of a coward any longer. He had to be a warrior. The same steel-hearted fighter that stabbed a full-grown dragon in the paw. After all, if his father divined the truth, he might as well go all out. \"She was nothing like you said, and you are too blinded by what happened to your brother to see-\"\n\nArcturus was thrown backwards as his father backhanded him to the ground. \"Gah\u2026\". He picked himself up, glaring up the man who had raised him as he rubbed his warm cheek. \"This just proves my point.\"\n\n\"Point? Point?!\" Markis paced around. \"You are my son, you daft child! How dare you disobey me like that?\" His father picked him up by the scruff of his shirt. \"How dare you accuse me, your own sire, of being infested with-with hatred to protect a beast?\" The man spat that word as if it was poison. He let Arcturus to go continue his pacing, a look of disbelief present in his eyes. \"I can't believe it. My son\u2026my only son\u2026my warrior would never betray his family for a dragon! I bet she enchanted you, boy.\" He pointed an accusatory finger at Arcturus' numb form. \"Weaved some spell we could not block in time, or-or used her silver tongue to fill your young, gullible mind with a hoard of lies.\" He continued with a growl.\n\n\"If that is true\u2026 why did she not end me, father? Remove the evidence, as it were?\" Arcturus shot back. \"Explain that to me. Try to think for one. Single. Moment.\"\n\n\"Easy.\" His father moved in again, taking his belt off as he did so. \"After she fled our camp, she used you as a fockin' token. A distraction. Did not want me to go after her out of vengeance. Now she gets a chance to fly away, far away from here, far enough where even our scouts can't find her. You denied us more than a dragon, boy. You stole our right to judge the beast for its crimes\u2026and for that\u2026you shall be punished.\"\n\nArcturus grimaced when his father struck him with his belt as hard as his arm could muster. The stinging lash made him gasp out and squeeze his eyes shut. \"Gahh!\" he could not help stifle the weakened cry when his father continued to hit him again and again and again, the firm leather connecting with various parts of his body.\n\n\"Dragons....*thwack*...Are....*thwack*...Evil....*thwack*.... I am doing this for your own good, boy!\"\n\nMarkis lashed three more times. \"Even if you hate me. Even if you curse me. You are still my offspring, and I know what's best for you!\"\n\nEach strike against his back was a strike right to Arcturus' heart. His gasps of pain filled the air as his father continued to lash him mercilessly, spouting off more lies about dragons. \"Do you want to end up like my brother? That what you want? To get yourself killed?\"\n\n\"Your...brother?\" Arcturus gasped out, his brow sweating. He gave a weakened pull against his father, but still could not find the strength to liberate himself from all this torment. \"You...never mentioned...that he\u2026\"\n\n\"He liked dragons, just like you, boy.\" His father narrowed his eyes. \"But instead of returning the kindness shown to him, the beast my brother decided to call friend killed him where he stood! Was that a proper reward for a kind-hearted man? Hmm? I will make sure you never end up in that position.\"\n\nMarkis shoved Arcturus to the ground. \"Lesson's over. Pick yourself up and get ready for the tournament ahead. You WILL do your best and beat the others, and when it's all said and done, we will drill into your head the evils of dragons until you forget all about this little slip in judgment. I will make sure you are never tempted by such evil ever again.\"\n\nArcturus groaned as he pulled himself to his feet once more, wincing in pain from the plethora of marks left on his back. He wanted to narrow his eyes and glare at his father. Tell him how futile this beating was.\n\nBut Arcturus stopped himself from doing something stupid. It would do him no good, to fight fire with fire. That would just give his father another reason to continue his beating with that awful belt. So Arcturus just nodded to the man, \"I will do as you say.\" He hung his head, clenching his fist, then let his father grab him by the shoulder and lead him back to the others with a firm, painful hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"I'm doing this for your own good, son. One day, you will thank me for this, and you will teach your own son of the lesson I have imparted upon you this day. I love you Arcturus, and I won't let those beasts take you away from me. They've already taken far too much from our family. I will make them pay, understand? They will all pay their due.\"\n\nArcturus kept his head bowed until he was finally let go to his tent. He rubbed his shoulders and winced in pain. His thoughts went back to pleasant warm scales, affectionate licks, and the pleased sounds of the hatchlings. With those thoughts present in his mind, he was able to push back the pain from his wounds he collapsed onto his bed. He knew it would be only a moment of rest, and a few bites of lunch, before his father came back for the usual training.\n\nArcturus wondered what he would be doing tomorrow at the tournament. He knew the top reward would be to slay the remaining dragon. That had to be it. But how could he slay the creature now? He just had the best day of his life with the dragons that were supposed to be his mortal enemies. What if this one was just like the female he had set free?\n\nArcturus closed his eyes with a sigh as he thought to the gold dragon's scales. He made a vow internally to find the creature. He would free him, just like he had done with the female. He only opened his eyes when he detected the alluring scent of roasted lamb, as his gryphon nanny shortly called out to him.\n\n\"Arcturus! Come eat your lunch before it gets cold! Your father wants to go test shooting with you after!\"\n\nArcturus sighed, opened his eyes, and strode outside to eat his meal. He sat down at a wooden table and wolfed down the roasted lamb, corn, and peppers that were mixed together on his plate. He sighed and savored the flavor. It was at least better than magically roasted stag. The spices made things so much better in his opinion. However, the relief did not last forever, and he soon found himself washing the meal down with a swig of water. He bowed slightly to his nanny, who ruffled her feathers and offered him a kind smile. Arcturus stood straight up and made his way to the target range, where he knew his father would be waiting with his stern face and crossed arms.\n\nArcturus spent the rest of the day working with his father, trying his hand at an energy crossbow lent to his father by the king. The weapon was usually something only reserved to those in the military. Arcturus liked the feel of it in his hands as he lined up his shots and easily blasted apart the targets that were brought before him. He rolled his eyes and groaned the entire time as his father continued to question him on dragon weak spots and how vile they were. With that done, he went into a drawn-out rant that included all of the horrible deeds they had done, most of which he'd witnessed with his own two eyes. Arcturus willed himself through by thinking of the dragoness and her hatchlings, so no matter what his father was throwing at him, it met a mind hardened by love and determination. Protected by the pleasant memories of the dragoness Rasionynth.\n\nThat night, Arcturus quickly gathered his things around his room, ready to set out to find the other dragon. He just knew that all he needed to do was talk to the gold scaled beast. In his mind, the dragon would tell him a story about how he had been wronged by the hunters, and placed here to be killed unjustly. Surely that was the case, just like the female had been?\n\nArcturus took a deep breath as he pictured the dragon flying away into the sky, roaring happily after being freed from his bonds. It brought a smile to his face when he went to open his tent, only to find a guard sitting on a chair, watching his flaps.\n\n\"Evening lad.\" The pockmarked guard in chainmail smiled, waving to him from his chair.\n\nArcturus quickly pulled his head inside, wrinkling his brow. His father must have placed that guard to make sure he never left his tent, knowing he would want to go find the other dragon. Damn it!\n\nHe went to the other parts of his \"room\" and peaked under each wall, only to find each one had a different guard placed in front of them. Double Damnation! He crossed his arms, as each of the sentries was positioned in just the right way that there would be no way around them, no way through without getting spotted.\n\nArcturus eventually collapsed onto his bed with a sigh, pulling his journal from his pack and opening it to the page with the paw prints. He looked to the ink, remembering how happy he had been that morning. How he wished he could have stayed with his better family. He eventually felt tiredness take him, and he closed his eyes when he could not fight off slumber any longer. He wiggled once in his bed, his dreams filled with dragons flying high in the bright sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Arcturus made sure to wake up early; early enough so that when he was peeking out from his tent, the guards that had been so vigilant a couple of hours ago were now fast asleep.\n\nPerfect.\n\nArcturus slunk by one of them like a silent shadow. He made sure to change his clothes before heading out. The boy wrinkled his brow as he grabbed hold of the dark green tunic and the charcoal leggings he now wore. Arcturus shook his head and began his search, paying no mind to the sun that was just beginning to crest over the horizon. He checked the outskirts of the place, just like he did before introducing himself to the female bronze dragon, Rasionynth.\n\nOnly now, he was on the trail of a different dragon. Arcturus first went to her tent, thinking logically that the golden dragon's tent would be close to hers. It also had to be big enough to accommodate the size of such a looming creature. Arcturus scurried from tent to tent, quickly peaking under the cloth for any sign of the golden dragon. With each failed attempt, he would look up to the slowly rising sun and wonder how much longer he had before one of the guards would grab him from behind and shout all sorts of profanities in his ear.\n\nI have to do this, Arcturus fought the pit in his stomach and pressed on. I'm a man. And men aren't afraid.\n\nOn the fifth such tent, he came face to face with a dark brown colored cloth. It was held down with many ropes, and bore a guard garbed in chain mail, just like it had been with Rasionynth's tent the nights prior. This man even bore a spear in his hands as he shifted his elven head from side to side. Arcturus realized someone must have told the men to be more vigilant after the first dragon went missing. He snuck past the man, going the long way around to the other side of the tent, where he lowered himself into a crouch and felt with his hands at the taught cloth. He hooked a hand on the underside of the material, then gave a great tug, but nothing happened. The tent fabric was being held down too tightly, and no matter how many tugs he gave, it would not budge.\n\nNo no no\u2026come on. I can't just let him die, you stupid piece of cloth!\n\nSimmering with apprehension and anger, Arcturus stood up and crossed his arms. He did not come this far to be stopped by this overly tight tent. He unsheathed his dagger, and like a hunter, plunged the sharp tip of the metal into the fabric. With several loud tearing noises, he cut a circle into the material and made his own entrance.\n\nArcturus bounded into the tent, his eyes adjusting to the dim light that illuminated the insides of the tent. He squinted and looked around the boxes, the hay, and what looked like torture equipment. The ground around the place seemed to have been ripped up with claws. Arcturus frowned as he realized that the knives, blades, and other such sharp objects had blood on them, most likely carved from the innocent dragon.\n\nDon't worry, my friend. I will set you free from this unjust torture. Arcturus navigated through the maze of items, each drop of blood or torn ground slicing another painful gash into his soul. When he came to the golden dragon to see him bound and bleeding, his heart nearly cracked, for the beast that had looked so beautiful the day prior was now covered in thin red lines. Scales that had looked so majestic now bore cracks and dents, in some places looking like a spiky mess of twisted flesh. His feathered wings were bound just like the female's had been, and his limbs were chained together with a large lock in the middle that needed a key. Oh no. Unlike the female, there would be no undoing of straps or any way through them.\n\nThe golden dragon looked up to the boy with his worried, emerald eyes. His pained eyes filled Arcturus with so much guilt that it made him dizzy. They had done this. His clan, people he knew, had inflicted untold pain onto the dragon before him. A dragon that was most likely not at fault to deserve such unjust punishment. His mind went to the bronze female and her hatchlings, longing for their presence as he took a few tentative steps. The golden beast said not a word and simply watched him, most likely confused as to why this human was slowly approaching him.\n\n\"Hello.\" Arcturus spoke clearly, his voice soft and gentle. He even bowed slightly to the dragon, thinking it was the polite thing to do. He felt his heart quicken and beat with excitement as he neared the scaled creature.\n\n\"My greetings, little hunter.\" The dragon replied, his whiskers flicking as he rose his head slightly.\n\n\"I... I'm not one of them. Mhm. I'm not a hunter.\" Arcturus replied without skipping a beat. \"I have actually come to free you.\"\n\n\"Really? What have I done, to deserve such stroke of fortune?\" The gold dragon tilted his head as much as he could to the side. He did not stray his sight from the boy that continued his approach. \"What compels you, young hatchling, to seek me out and lift my burdened heart with tales of freedom?\"\n\n\"Uhm\u2026well\u2026there's this\u2026\" Arcturus gulped on his words as the golden dragon fidgeted slightly against the bindings. \"Let's just say I have come to an important realization recently. I have seen\u2026no. I've been proved that not all dragons are the shadowy evil monsters from my father's twisted tales.\"\n\n\"Mmm, intriguing words you bring to my ears. Perhaps this is the day when righteous justice finally dawns upon a land basked in darkness.\" The dragon gave a deep rumbling sound from his golden scaled neck akin to tumbling stones.\n\nArcturus cracked a meek smile at that. \"Yes,\" He said as he was filled with the same exhilarating confidence he tasted when he freed Rasionynth. \"I am just trying to do the right thing.\"\n\n\"Then by all means, little one.\" The gold dragon gestured to his bindings with a smile. \"If you think you can free me from these shackles, go for it. I will make sure you are rewarded appropriately for your kindness.\"\n\n\"W-wait. Before I do it, may I know what your name is?\" Arcturus made sure to stay away from the creature's head while he found his way around the metal bindings and the lock that fastened them together. His fingers traced along the cold smooth metal for a weakness. A few moments later he sighed with a frown as he realized they were fine craft. Probably the finest he had ever seen. The same kind his father would use if it were up to him, and in this case, it probably was.\n\n\"You may have my title, savior of dragons. Please refer to me as the Shining Sun.\" The dragon swelled his chest out proudly, his scales clinking together. Shining Sun then let out a pleased sound like a purr that made Arcturus giggle. Did all dragons make such cute noises? Arcturus could easily compare them to oversized cats after he lived among a real dragon family for two blissful days.\n\n\"That's a pretty name to have. Hold on a bit. I have to see\u2026what I can do to\u2026\" Arcturus continued to examine the lock. He had practiced picking them from a young age, it was yet another skill his father had drilled into him. However, with each passing second, it was becoming clearer that he would not be able to undo this lock without the blasted key. His only hope was to pickpocket it from the guard outside, if in fact he was the one who possessed the key to the lock and not a fake.\n\nHe was about to tell the dragon this when he heard the voice of the last person he wanted to hear. The voice of the only man that could make his blood run cold.\n\n\"Arcturus! Where in the blazes are you?\" Came the loud booming voice of his father from the entrance of the tent. His face was contorted into a snarl and was the brightest red known to mankind. The fuming man stomped his way across the tent as Arcturus froze up. \"What?! What in damnation's name did I tell you!?\" Markis barked through his teeth. Within two stomping steps he was upon the boy, roughly pulling Arcturus away from the dragon, who looked away and snorted his disapproval.\n\n\"F-father, I-\" Arcturus could barely find the words to defend himself. What he was doing was much too obvious to explain. There would be no lie that could get him out of this. He had done this knowing the risks.\n\n\"Father, you are wrong! They are not all evil! If you'd just let me prove this to you, please! He's a living being, and if you'd talk to him just for a moment-\"\n\n\"Silence, you gnat!\" Markis slapped his son across the face. \"You dare to tell your father what to do?\"\n\n\"Please\u2026\" Arcturus winced. \"If you\u2026if you'd just treat that dragon like a fellow human\u2026\"\n\n\"He's not a human boy. That there, is a beast!\"\n\nArcturus refused to back down. He spouted more of his young wisdom, but every word, every plea fell on deaf ears as he was tossed to the ground by his father, who stared down on him with the hungry, evil stare of one of the dragons that he hunted with such passion.\n\n\"We will drive this poison out of you, Arcturus.\" Markis grabbed some rope and bound them around his boy's smaller hands. \"I will make sure you don't end up like my brother, even if you kick and scream the entire time. I will not let the dragons take what I have from me, Arcturus. They might have my brother, but they won't rip my only son away from me!\"\n\n\"Please\u2026if I mean anything to you, just\u2026just listen to my words.\" His voice cracked as his father finished his bindings around a wooden pole that was thrust into the earth. \"Dragons are not inherently evil. In many ways, they're just like us, with families and-and loved ones. They only want to live, father!\"\n\n\"That's a load of hog shit.\" Markis thundered as he shoved a finger between Arcturus' eyes. \"What does a boy know of war, eh? What do you know of loss? The dragons use you as their plaything because you're too fockin' stupid to see the truth!\"\n\n\"Please\u2026\" Arcturus winced. \"If I mean something to you\u2026if you ever loved me\u2026 just listen to my words. Mother\u2026you know mother wouldn't have wanted this. You know this, father. You know it!\"\n\nHis eyes began to mist as his father backed away, disappearing for a moment, only to return a few moments later with a cat o' nine tails. Arcturus' eyes widened at the thin ropes held tightly in his father's white-knuckled hand.\n\n\"N-no. No father, please, don't torture me!\" Arcturus cried out in desperation. \"Think of mother. What she'd say if she was here right now?\" He desperately called out as his father grabbed his shirt and raised it to expose his back. He then held the device back, ready to strike.\n\n\"She would smile at me.\" The man's gruff breath fell over Arcturus' back. \"She'd approve of anything I'd do to save your life, boy. Now let's set you free of the poisonous words the beast injected inside your head.\"\n\nHis father lashed out with the device.\n\nArcturus winced and cried out as the tails of the device struck his skin. The vigorous lash made his whole body tremble as he fought to stand up.\n\nThen another came. And another. The whip crackled upon his back like the forks of lightning that split the sky apart during a storm. Arcturus' vision blurred as his father continued his incessant whipping, each stroke bringing a fresh wave of pain that made the young boy scream his guts out. However, despite his screams, despite his words, his father continued with the flogging.\n\nArcturus' thoughts struggled to become coherent words through the nightmare he was living. Each time he got several words out of his shaking mouth, they were cast from his mind by the forceful arm of his father. He was left gasping after the twentieth such whip, the feeling of warm blood dripping down his ragged skin strangely soothing.\n\n\"Now boy...tell me again about the wretched dragoness you foolishly spirited from the grasp of deserved punishment. What happened? And what do you think of her? I want to hear it all, down to the last word, until I am sure her poison leaves your body.\" His father said, his voice laced with hatred.\n\n\"Mghh\u2026nrrrhhh.\" Arcturus knew what his father wanted him to say. He wanted to hear the same lies that came from his own vile mouth on the subject. He wanted to hear about the dragon's evil, and how she had manipulated an innocent boy in freeing her. He wanted to hear that his son, the soon to be great dragon hunter, had not been swayed by the beast. \"She was\u2026a monster.\" Arcturus whispered, his hollow eyes staring into the ground. A bead of saliva made its way down his lower lip, trickling onto the ground beneath.\n\n\"When her words failed to succeed\u2026she enchanted me with magic. Twisted my mind. Made me\u2026 think of dragons as if they are my brothers.\"\n\n\"Correct. Correct!\" Markis beamed with evil satisfaction. \"I've seen the effects of such spell before, and you are describing it perfectly m'boy. More. Tell me more, son. What did she do next? Tell me how you freed her.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I just did.\" Arcturus said with the same helpless, confused voice.\n\n\"No. They can twist the mind. The mind, son. Your head.\" His father tapped at his own skull. \"But they can't control your body. So tell me again. How did your hands find their way to her bindings?\"\n\n\"Her claws\u2026\" Arcturus gestured towards the golden dragon's sharp talons. \"She threatened me with evisceration. Told me that\u2026she'll skin me like a deer and hang my pelt in her cave. I was afraid. Had no choice. She told me of all the gruesome spells she could cast on me if I didn't obey.\"\n\n\"Wretched creature.\" His father spat on the ground and stroke his chin to vent out some of the anger that made his temples tighten. \"To threaten my son like that. My son!\"\n\n\"If I wasn't a Lund, she would have killed me where I stood!\" Arcturus cried out. The words that flowed from his mouth made him hate himself with each passing moment. Lying was always distasteful for him, but he just wanted the pain to stop.\n\n\"You\u2026you're lying to me, aren't you?\" His father grabbed the boy by his chin and sneered into his face. \"I can see it in your eyes, boy. You're only forming words to appease me, but you don't truly believe them, because your head's still with them! With those blasted, deceitful, worthless creatures that took so much from our family!\"\n\n\"Father, that's-I'm saying the truth. I can't lie to you. Come on. Did\u2026did I ever lie to you?\"\n\n\"Yes, son. You did. And not just once. Aaahhh, no matter.\" The man sighed, pulling back the cat o nine tails again. \"We can keep this up all morning, until your eyes speak the same truth as your words. If I ever catch that dragoness\u2026oh, my young, stupid boy\u2026you can bet she will be getting more than she ever bargained for. This flail, see this?\" He flaunted the blood-dripping tool before Arcturus' frozen face. \"I'm going to craft a flail ten times the size with teeth sharper than any dragon's, so I can rip the scales from her body, like this!\"\n\n\"No, father pleeeaaasse! AAAHHHHHHH!\" Arcturus screamed out to the heavens as the coldness of the whips once again kissed his bleeding back. He collapsed onto the ground, a squirming mess of hisses, groans, and endless pain. He cried out to any god that would listen, but no matter what deity he called on, the man above him silenced his desperate pleas with rivers of pain. It continued for so many strikes that Arcturus completely lost count. He only remembered standing slowly up, wincing at all the pain he had endured. His hands shook as his father undid the bindings and thrust a red potion into his hands.\n\n\"Drink it down to the last drop. We need you at top performance for the events we have prepared today.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Arcturus could not find the strength to resist his father and just took a long swig from the horrible tasting liquid. He could not find the taste, but it reminded him of curdled milk, and he forced himself to swallow the entire potion if only to rid himself of the infernal pain. He finished with a gasp, and a wipe of his mouth, finding his strength starting to return. The lingering pain from his wounds soon started to fade away as the magic potion swirled through his body like Rasionynth's comforting licks.\n\n\"Perhaps not now\u2026but I hope that, one day, you'll come to understand that what I've done is for your own good.\" His father spoke almost the same words that he had used when he had whipped him the other day. Arcturus just looked to his father and nodded, internally hating the man that was staring back at him expectantly.\n\n\"I understand.\" He lied again, handing Markis back the empty bottle. Arcturus looked around to see the dragon was now missing from his resting place. However, the metal bindings were still lying on the ground, including the lock that had stopped him. They must have traded those bindings for something that could be more easily moved. Someone had obviously come to retrieve the beast while he was being tortured by his father.\n\nArcturus narrowed his eyes when he was led out into the light of the day. The sun hung midway towards the center of the sky, among a vast, vibrant blue expanse that knew no clouds on such a fine day. The warm rays bathed the entire collection of tents in a warm glow as tournament goers walked through the boisterous crowd, chatting away about the upcoming events.\n\nToday came the day of the festivities, at last. The noise of the crowd was almost deafening, and Arcturus was led right through the thickest crowd. The folks parted before him and his father like water, signifying the respect they had for the name Lund. Arcturus lowered his head and looked to his boots as he heard a mention of his name in passing. It seemed like an eternity before he was tossed back into his old 'room', ordered to get ready.\n\n\"The games will be starting any moment now, son.\" His father crossed his arms and waited for him outside. \"You will do your best. I know it. Then, after you defeat the rest of those buffoons, you will stand proudly at my side. We'll face the beast together, but it'll be your hand that gets to finish off that spawn of filth for good.\"\n\nArcturus scowled as he gathered his things. He strapped on a darkened, worn leather vest that bore the symbol of his family stitched into the hide. He ran a hand along the surface, disgusted by how it looked, and how it made him feel sick to his stomach. Arcturus imagined a dragon would look way better on his chest.\n\nThe thought flew from his mind when he grabbed his steel sword, thrusting it into his leather scabbard, then tying it with a belt around his waist. With that done, Arcturus closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he tied a dark green cloak around his neck. He would win this little talent of contest, and he would stand at his father's side, just not for the reason the old man expected. In spite of his words, Arcturus still had a mind of his own. When he was supposed to kill the beast, he would set the dragon free, to prove his father, the Lunds, and all of the attendants how wrong they were. He would let everyone see with their own eyes that not all dragons were monsters.\n\nAnd then, Arcturus, savior of dragons, would stand proudly up there, a satisfied smile on his face and a final look of defiance thrown in the way of his stupefied father. Arcturus opened his eyes and nodded to himself, rather liking the mental image of that. Without another word or thought, he strode out into the sun and took his place at his father's side.\n\nArcturus took to the center of the arena surrounded by cheering people. He was lined up with many other young aspiring dragon hunters from all around the kingdom. Their own faces were full of good cheer and expectation, and were thrilled when the dwarven announcer had proclaimed the winner would indeed be the one finish off the golden dragon. Arcturus watched as they had wheeled out the dragon on a cart, bound in leather. The crowd had gasped at first, then suddenly roared their approval at the excitement that was going to soon follow.\n\nArcturus? He just gripped the hilt of his sword until his knuckles went white. Make sure to watch me, father...I will win...and then the dragon will be out of your torturous hands for good.\n\nThe tournament started with a target practice of any weapon the combatants chose. Arcturus went with a hand-sized energy crossbow like the one his father had him practice with. He lined up his shots carefully, and nearly got bullseyes the entire time, only getting outperformed by an elven child with a bow and arrow. They next moved onto beasts. This involved setting each hunter against a magical beast the trappers had captured for the purpose of this contest. Arcturus was set against a pair of blink wolves. These brown canines could teleport short distances as they hunted their prey. Arcturus made short work of them, easily side stepping or avoiding their attacks. He met their throats with his metal blade, wincing as their blood stained the green grass. When the last wolf had fallen back with a whimpered cry Arcturus, offered a short prayer for the creature that was being used in such a gruesome way. He finished it off with closed eyes, ending the thing's pain once and for all. With the deed done, he cleaned his sword and ignored the praises that were being sung about his performance, along with the cheering of the crowd.\n\nThe day continued with challenge after challenge. Some were mental ones, involving testing the weak spots of creatures, others were more physical in nature, like the beast contest. In each one, Arcturus was one of the best contestants, once again only being followed by that elven lad that had bested him in the target practice portion of the contest. The last challenge presented before them was a tie breaker, to decide which one of them would be able to slay the beast. The elven warrior, or the human hunter? The crowd went into another screaming frenzy when Arcturus held up the training sword they provided him for the upcoming duel. There was no need for the contestants to maim themselves, after all.\n\nHe took a deep breath and focused on the golden scaled dragon that needed him right now. He could not afford to lose to this elf. A child that was most likely three times his age. If he did, that dragon was going to end up with a slit throat, or a sword straight to the eye. \"For Howling Storm,\" Arcturus mumbled under his breath as he bounded at the elf with his sword held high.\n\nThe elf sidestepped his attack easily, striking at him in a horizontal fashion.\n\nArcturus crouched, the sword passing over his head by mere inches as he brought his own sword up, striking the elf right in the chest. He backed away with a smile as they separated and started to circle one another. Arcturus held his sword out as the elf narrowed his eyes and did the same.\n\nThey then met again and again. Wood on wood clacked out, only to be drowned by the cheers around them. Arcturus grit his teeth as they went at it like a blur, trying to find a weak point in the elf's defense.\n\nWith a pinch of luck, Arcturus found it. He took a step back as the elf swung down at him. The wooden blade missed his torso, and Arcturus struck him twice with his own sword. Once on the shoulder, followed by a quick strike to his left leg.\n\n\"ARCTURUS IS THE WINNER!\" came the shout of the dwarf announcer, adding to the screams of the excited crowd. A few men strode over, grabbed Arcturus' wrist, and rose his hand up for all to see.\n\nI did it! Arcturus smiled to himself. Just like I knew I was going to!\n\nHe glanced back to the bound golden dragon, his heart not letting up for one single moment. He had gone from one battle to the next now that he won the contest. Arcturus did not pay any mind to any of the words the dwarf was speaking until he mentioned finishing off the bound dragon in the company of his father. Arcturus was given back his steel sword and was led over to the golden creature as the whole crowd grew silent.\n\nArcturus looked to his father, who wore a grin from ear to ear. He could see pride swell in his eyes as he looked back to his son. It made Arcturus almost happy to see that look on his father's face, but he frowned when he realized it was only because the man thought he was going to follow in his footsteps and murder the dragon that was displayed before the cheerful crowd.\n\nYou're about to be proven so wrong, father. Arcturus returned his father's grin as he was brought before the beast. He unsheathed his sword with a hiss, the sun shining brightly off its metal surface. He took several deep breaths as his hands shook at what he was about to do. He saw the golden dragon look away and close his eyes, clearly resigning himself to his fate. Don't worry, Shining Sun. This human hatchling is going to save you, and you can fly away and live your dragon life in peace. Have mates, hatchlings, do whatever you wish.\n\nHe twirled the sword in his hand as his father started his speech.\n\n\"Dear warriors, beloved clansmen, families, and friends. We thank you all for participating in these glorious events. It truly is a chance to show off the best and brightest among us while we hone ourselves for the battle ahead.\"\n\nMarkis then clenched his fist. \"For we must all remain at our best to fight against the looming threat of dragon kind. For years, we have tried to teach them a simple lesson. Tell them that we humans only want to live in peace. But such savage beasts know not the sweet embrace of calmness. They thirst for blood. Our blood! The same blood that courses through the veins of our children, who now have the distinct honor of carrying forth the flame of our unyielding justice. Behold, Arcturus! Winner of today's tournament, and soon to be slayer of dragons!\"\n\nMarkis smiled as the crowd erupted into frantic cheers.\n\n\"See? They love you,\" the whispered and gestured to his boy with a wave of his hand to address the crowd once more. \"There is a time in every child's life when the boy must become a man. Today, it is my honor to see my son take the first powerful steps into a much larger, and far more dangerous, world. By finishing off the vile gold dragon we have dragged before you, Arcturus is going to prove that he is indeed ready to carry the mantle of a true Hunter. Turn your eyes upon his wretched prey. Behold, Inferno's Bite!\"\n\nMarkis all but had to point at the captured dragon, and the crowd started to boo, throw insults, vegetables, and whatever objects they had on hand at the helpless dragon.\n\n\"Your feelings stir within my chest as well!\" Markis thundered, \"for the horrible creature that now stains the grounds of our tournament with his festering presence laid waste to an entire village. A village full of good people, same as you. Why? Because the honest, kind hearted people refused to fall into his schemes.\"\n\nMarkis took a deep breath, then pressed on. \"They fought against the beast's greed, paying no gold for misplaced protection, because they put their trust in their rightful king -our king-to protect them, as he promised to us all. Sadly, it had not been so. After the dragon dispatched the scant number of guards that gave their lives in defense of their village, this terrible monster killed every last woman and child, then burned the whole village to the ground, bathing its accursed deeds in the same wretched flames it draws its name from!\"\n\nThe whole crowd gasped, while others called for the beast's quick death.\n\n\"I know, fair people. Believe me, I know what must be done. There's only one thing a rampaging monster deserves.\" Markis pointed to the dragon once again. \"That is why we have the beast here, right now. Displayed before your very eyes, to be made an example of by none other than the winner of the tournament. My son!\"\n\nHis father turned to him with a smile. \"Please finish off the beast, just like I have taught you.\" He pointed to his eye and gave Arcturus a wink, a signal he wanted Arcturus to plunge his blade right into the gold dragon's eyes, delivering his steel blade right into the beast's brain and finishing it off for good.\n\nThis was it. This was the moment of truth. Arcturus felt sweat come to his hands as he raised his sword. He took an anxious breath from his lungs to steel his nerves. Am I really going to do it? Defy my father and all the young hunters right in front of their parents? His thoughts flew to his mother, and her own love of dragons. She was a gentle creature. As good and kind as Howling Storm. He remembered falling asleep under the bronze dragoness' wings, with her three hatchlings pressed against him. Yes...I am going to do it...I am going to become a knight. Be an example to the others. Teach them that hatred is not the only way to peace.\n\n\"No, father.\" Arcturus said with a resolute voice. \"It is you who is the monster, for condemning an innocent creature to its death.\"\n\nThe man's eyes widened with shock. A wave of power surged through Arcturus. Moving his eyes towards the dragon, he slashed down rapidly into the leather bindings, easily cutting them in two with the razor-sharp sword. \"THESE DRAGONS ARE NOT EVIL!\" He slashed again, and again, until Shining Sun's bindings were reduced to tatters.\n\n\"Arcturus! What are you doing, my son?!\" Markis Lund snarled as the crowd gasped in horror at the newly freed creature. The golden dragon shook his head and stood proudly onto all fours, spreading his majestic feathered wings for all to see.\n\n\"I am doing the world a good thing this day!\" Arcturus turned back to the crowd with a large grin. \"We need to move away from old concepts. We need to understand that dragons are just like us!\" Arcturus winked back at his father and sheathed his sword. \"No matter what words you sneak into my ear, no matter how much you whip me\u2026\" He gestured to the dragon as people began to scream. \"I will prove you that dragons are not the monsters that-\"\n\nHis words were cut short as the golden dragon opened his maw to unleash a large golden ball of fire that flew straight towards the crowd. To everyone's horror, the flaming meteor collided with the stands and exploded with a bright flash of white light. It sent splintering wood in all directions, bodies flying, and horrible screams cried out into the air as the same people that cheered moments ago were now melting before the very eyes of the boy who freed Shining Sun.\n\n\"N-no\u2026this\u2026this can't be hap\u2026happening\u2026\" Arcturus felt his whole body go numb as the golden dragon took flight and fired another ball of fire into the crowd, claiming more lives with his engulfing flames. Thick smoke started to billow up from the stands, making Arcturus drop to his knees in terror. What had he done? His eyes looked to the bodies, broken, unmoving, scattered in the crowd, and he clutched at his heart when he spotted the burned, tattered colors of his own clan. People that left the comfort of their homes and came to the tournament to watch the new generation train over a laugh and good food. People that had never hurt or even dreamed of inflicting pain upon a dragon in all their lives. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, now dead because of a stupid boy and his na\u00efve actions.\n\n\"The debt is paid,\" Shining Sun landed near Arcturus. \"Run now. Find your bronze female.\"\n\n\"Wh-\" Arcturus choked, his chest so tight he could barely speak. He knew? How in the blazes could this monster know of Rasionynth? How could he even speak of her after he unleashed such destruction upon innocent people?\n\n\"The drunk told them everything.\" The golden dragon growled back at the stunned Arcturus. \"He knows, boy. Your father heard every word you spoke to her. He's been testing you from the beginning!\"\n\n\"Shut your blasted lying mouth!\" Markis shouted with the same spiteful voice he used during the flogging. \"I'll carve your blackened heart out, hear me? I'll rend the limbs from your pitiful body and thrash your mangled scales beneath my boots!\"\n\n\"Rrrraaaaahhh!\" The dragon quickly looked at the several men that started to surround him. He swiped the first attacking force with his tail, buying himself a small reprieve to look at the stunned winner of the tournament. \"What are you doing, you stupid boy? Fly away from this wretched place. Free yourself from their shackles before it's too late.\"\n\nRun where? Arcturus was more confused than ever, head feeling on the verge of bursting from the sudden turn of events.\n\nThe dragon snarled as he forced back another group of attackers. He threw several looks at the boy's petrified body, and when Arcturus failed to move, the beast gave a mighty shake of his head and flapped his mighty wings, beating hard against the air, lifting himself higher above the stands. It looked like the dragon was going to get away, as it roared into the afternoon sky. His tail flicked behind him as the sun shinned off his scales, almost mocking the human that had let him go. How in this world could something so beautiful cause so much destruction and death? How?\n\n\"Fire the blasted cannons already!\"\n\nArcturus was brought back to reality by the forceful sound of his father's voice. Like a light in a vast sea of darkness, it broke through the screams of terror. It made Arcturus look up to the dragon once more, who was almost gone now, probably smirking to itself. That's when he saw a group of nets fly towards the dragon at a speed he thought impossible. They collided with the golden dragon, wrapping themselves around his scaled body, binding his wings in such ways that rendered him unable to keep himself in the air.\n\nThe dragon hissed and fell from the sky like a stone. Arcturus could not see where he had landed, but he could hear his pained roars as hunters undoubtedly converged upon on him with poisoned weapons, wicked blades, and righteous hearts.\n\n\"Come this way.\" His father grabbed him roughly by the scruff of his neck, easily dragging the boy across the field. \"You have embarrassed our family in a way I never thought possible.\" He hissed, his words filled with hatred. \"That you have defied me so crudely.... despite your punishments...speaks louder than any lie! Look what you have done, you dumb child!\" He gestured out to the charred stands, covered in the corpses of spectators and clansmen alike. \"Look at how many died for your little show of defiance!\"\n\nArcturus could not look away. Not when his eyes began to mist. He did not mean for this to happen. He had not meant to trade so many lives just to prove a point. \"I\u2026nghh, I'm...I can't\u2026\" He stammered, words failing him as his father violently pulled him again by his neck.\n\n\"We will work on this every day, if needs be. No son of mine will be led astray by the vile lies of the dragons. I want you to remember this day, Arcturus.\" His father brought him to the golden dragon that was now being bound once again, his pained hisses and snarls of protest useless against the army of hunters. The creature was flailing, but it was no use. The many gryphons and other mortals had it completely pinned, Arcturus' eyes were drawn to the numerous arrows that had been plunged into its hide, no doubt covered in dragon bane poison.\n\n\"Like what you see? You should. Here. Have a closer look.\" Markis roughly shoved his son towards the dragon as the hunters finished binding its snout to the ground.\n\nArcturus felt so small and alone when the other hunters looked to him. He could see their accusing eyes judging him for what he had done, so full of hatred. He truly felt like he did not belong among these men. These\u2026strangers. He wanted to run away, like the dragon said, never look back and forget this entire thing ever happened.\n\n\"Blame nobody but the monster standing before you. My son, though addled in other ways, has done no evil, for he was enchanted by the beast's foul magic!\" His father spoke loudly and clearly for the crowd. \"I should have seen the signs, and that is my failure. We all know the magics these things can conjure to twist the minds of untrained boys. But we have snapped him out of it.\" Markis snapped his penetrating gaze towards Arcturus in a snarl. \"Isn't that right, boy?\"\n\nArcturus nodded through tears. What else was he supposed to do?\n\n\"Now, we shall have my son take his share of rightful vengeance by finishing off the beast that had enchanted him so! The beast that settled itself free with the arm of my son, and loosened its destruction on the innocents of the crowd!\" Markis grabbed Arcturus by the shoulder and brought him to the beast's head. \"Now, you are going to cut into every weak spot the dragon has, and only when I give the order, you will kill him. Do you understand, boy?\"\n\n\"B-but\u2026\" Arcturus stammered, tears coming to his eyes, rolling down his cheeks as he looked to the dragon that had killed so many.\n\nIt's my fault. All of it.\n\n\"You will do this, Arcturus...or so help me, I will have your clothes used to hunt down that dragoness that you so vehemently defend. Her scent is still in there, and you know how good our gryphons are at tracking their quarry. Why, you grew up amongst them.\"\n\n\"Y-You wouldn't!\" Arcturus gasped, his heart cracking as his father's face refused to falter. He knew that the man had meant what he had said with every fiber of his being.\n\n\"Do not think me the fool for not standing up to my own words. I am not weak, even if you'd like me to be. Now face your prey, hunter.\" He turned Arcturus' head roughly towards the dragon. \"Finish off the beast here, extract vengeance for all those who have fallen, and I promise to you that we will not pursue the bronze female. This dragoness of yours will be given a day to flee from my hunters. If she seeks peace, like you said, she'll leave our lands. But should I hear even a single report of a bronze scaled terror inflicting pain upon another one of us ever again\u2026there will be no forgiveness for her actions.\"\n\nArcturus nodded as his father pulled away, and once again, unsheathed his steel sword with a hiss. He held it out in front of him as tears continued down his face. Despite the death the creature had caused, Arcturus still felt guilty for what he was about to do. Maybe if he was not bound the entire time, the gold dragon would not have felt the need to strike out in revenge.\n\n\"Now Arcturus! Show us the work of my craft! Show us all the weak spots of this dragon!\"\n\nArcturus hesitated as he stared into the dragon's clear eyes. There was no hint of malice there. No monstrous intentions that made his hairs stand on end. His mind jumped back to what the dragon said to him after he blew up the stands. Of how the drunk guard was not what he appeared. He was playing a role. The role of a spy hired by his father for a much grander test than what Arcturus had been led to believe.\n\nHe tried to\u2026help me\u2026 Arcturus' blood chilled at the gruesome realization that the convenient meetings with Rasionynth had been nothing more than a ploy orchestrated by his father. The simplest, surest way to test the strength of his son's conviction was not to order him to kill a dragon. No. What his father wanted was for Arcturus to take upon the mantle of a slayer himself. To want to kill the captive dragons with his own hands, on his own volition.\n\nBut something went wrong. Nobody could expect -not even Arcturus-that human and dragon could find common ground. The unlikely friendship that grew between them threw a wrench in his father's plans\u2026That's why he had been so driven, so angry.\n\nHe feared that he started to lose control of the same son he tried to groom into a slayer.\n\nArcturus looked at the sword he held in his shaking hand, then back at the dragon whose eyes have not moved in the past few seconds. There was something strange swirling deep within his eyes. Sadness that he would not be able to take upon the skies again. Regret that his life had to end here.\n\nAnd shame that his actions condemned a young, kind-hearted, dragon-loving boy to a fate almost as bad as death.\n\nYou wanted to\u2026 free me\u2026 Arcturus' chest tightened when the dragon moved his eyes to the sides, where a thick pair of leather straps bound his limbs, then back at him. I'm as much of a prisoner as you are\u2026\n\nThe dragon's lips twitched briefly. He could not speak or form any other sounds other than a defeated sigh. A shuddering sigh also escaped through Arcturus' trembling limbs. The dragon's closed eyes could mean only one thing. He had made peace with his sins, his past, his failures, as well as the inability to prevent this very moment.\n\nA man must be strong, even when his heart feels on the verge of crumbling, Arcturus formed a steel-like grip around the handle of his sword and sniffled hard, forcing himself not to cry.\n\n\"Have you not heard me the first time, boy? I told you to show us the weak spots of his beast! Proceed. NOW!\"\n\nArcturus shot his father with a piercing glare. \"I heard you\u2026father\u2026\" Arcturus' voice cracked as he plunged his sword expertly into every area that had been drilled into his mind during his father's obsessive lessons. He started with the wings, easily slicing into the unarmored feathers, draping a curtain of blood over the dragon's shivering joints. He coated their white plumage with a sick layer of crimson as he worked relentlessly on a creature that had not coaxed a single whimper. Each cut from his blade was like a dagger strike to his armored soul as he danced around the dragon like a storm of steel and destruction.\n\nHe rammed his blade against the base of the wing's muscular joint, and hit, and hacked, until the whole wing toppled over the ground in a gushing spray of broken bones and spurting blood. The dragon shivered from every corner of his body. Only now, Arcturus realized that the broken whimpers were not his own sniffling, but the dragon's cries, his eyelids jerking over his tear-flooded, half-closed eyes.\n\n\"Next one, son. Strike him when he's weak!\"\n\nArcturus ducked under the two men that lifted the dragon's numb leg and dug his blade deep into the creature's pink, fleshy, unprotected genital slit. His sword sunk through the flesh far easier than expected, and Arcturus had to wrench himself back to avoid sinking his entire arm into the dragon's soft insides.\n\n\"There we go!\" He heard his father cheer as a pair of hands pushed him back to his feet. \"Do you hear that, people? The beast is poised on wetting itself!\"\n\nThe dragon stared at him with pained, flooded eyes. Thick strands of saliva poured down his jaw, and bubbles of froth gathered at the edges of his trembling mouth.\n\nArcturus stared back, feeling\u2026nothing. His nerves went completely numb, making him immune to the sharp scent of blood and the pained noises that assaulted his ears. It was easier to perform when he distanced himself from his actions. This was not Arcturus the protector, savior of dragons, but the dark image of his father's perfect future. A trained slayer that performed his duty with utmost efficiency. Oh, how proud Markis must have been now, to see his own heated vengeance passed down to his son. He was not one to care about pain and suffering, as long as it accomplished his goals. Why, he was the same man who used a good dragon and her hatchlings in order to cement his son's transformation into a killer.\n\n\"Good, Arcturus, good! A fine display you've put up, but you have not yet finished your training. The wings and the genital slit are obvious targets, but some of the weaker spots are hidden from your eyes.\"\n\nWith a snap of his fingers, Markis had two of his hunters unwrap the dragon's snout. They grabbed onto the dragon's upper jaw, then pushed, and pushed, until they spread the dragon's jaws wide enough apart to reveal two sacks small sacks at the base of the creature's tongue.\n\n\"The fire glands,\" Arcturus said with a flat, emotionless voice.\n\n\"The very root of destruction. Pluck them out, son. Show this beast what happens when a dragon plays with fire.\"\n\nArcturus stared at the dragon's fire glands. The things that helped him kill so many of his kin. With a swift strike, he plunged his blade into the dragon's neck and slashed wildly from side to side until the things came off, forcing the dragon to literally choke on his own blood.\n\nArcturus backed off from the creature's sickly coughs. This time, when he carved his way into the dragon's flesh, he actually felt a small bit of pride. Like he was getting vengeance for the dead that had been piled up on the stands. The people that had only come to cheer him on.\n\n\"Fine job, m'boy.\" Markis patted his son proudly on the back. \"The dragon is starting to fade, like all things born of darkness. Kill him. Kill him now.\"\n\nArcturus retrieved his sword and lowered his head, pushing the pleased thoughts from his mind. Now came the last moment. The last thing that his father wanted of him.\n\nArcturus carried his limbs to the front of the dragon. He pulled his sword back and stared into the beast's emerald eyes with an iciness uncharacteristic of a boy his age. The dragon just glared at him, with no regret for its actions. No remorse for the scores of mortals that now lay dead because of its fire, because in his mind, fulfilling a debt was more important than human lives.\n\nA small part of Arcturus felt bad for the dragon. The dragon used wrong methods to accomplish something he considered good, but that little bit was insignificant compared to the shock of seeing his clan mates perish. Arcturus could not forgive, nor forget the screams, the pain, and all that suffering. He plunged his sword as hard as he could into the beast's eye, carrying himself right to the hilt of the sword and right into the dragon's brain, coating his arms and hands with a warm spray of fresh, red blood.\n\n\"There we go!\" His father pronounced loudly, pride latching on every one of his words. \"The beast is brought to deserved end, and justice is finally served by none other than my son! Who else is better fit to extract retribution than the very boy they used to inflict their hate upon us, eh? Arcturus!\" Markis shouted, and the crowd cheered with him.\n\n\"Arcturus! Arcturus! Arcturus!\"\n\nThe man clasped his hand around Arcturus' shoulder so hard it made him wince. \"You've done well, but don't ever think I'll forget about your treachery. Clean your sword now, and smile for these people. You killed the damn beast. Might as well pretend you enjoyed it if you have any respect for the dead.\"\n\nThe world faded away as Arcturus cleaned his blade and sheathed his sword. His nerves were numb, his feelings, shot. He heard fragments of what his father said; whispers lost among the pained whimpers of the dying beast. Part of him still lingered deep beneath the numbness. A fragment of the protector he wanted to become, not the killer he now was.\n\nArcturus forced his numb mind back to the dragoness he had helped save. He ignored the cheers of victory from the hunters, fools who still believed he was free from the dragons that had enchanted his mind.\n\nAs he walked back to his tent accompanied by his father, Arcturus looked up into the sky, wishing he was flying high and free as the golden dragon wanted him to, for all his father had done was cement his feelings on the subject. He was not going to be like that man, cruel and horrible. He was going to be a knight one day, protector of the innocent, defender of the weak.\n\n\"I\u2026I'm sorry,\" He closed his eyes and began to cry once he found himself alone in his tent. Warm, honest tears once again returned to his eyes as the pained cries of Shining Sun echoed in his head. \"I had no choice. You knew that. I had no choice\u2026\"\n\nArcturus jerked when a dragon's roar echoed in the distance. He looked through the flaps of his tent, past the sea of tents and the trees, wondering if what he heard was real, or if it was nothing more than a manifestation of his own, broken feelings."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Call Me Dragon",
        "author": "Marc Secchia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "Dragon Fires Rising"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Map of Solixambria",
                "text": "[ The High Tower ]\n\nDragons. So ruddy predictable. Here he perched atop the tallest tower of the greatest castle in all the land, contemplating a little recreational pillaging, and all he had managed to do so far was to enjoy a long snooze in the glorious sunshine. Since dawn. Till dusk.\n\nWhat a failure.\n\nMight as well be a wingless worm.\n\nSaddled with a name like Blitz the Devastator, any reasonable creature would conclude that an occasional bout of pillaging, followed by an afternoon's casual arson, looting and destruction, went with the territory \u2013 well, like mutton came wrapped in wool, which invariably stuck between his fangs and annoyed him like the worst scale rash in history. With a mental sigh that echoed through all five hearts, Blitz yanked his errant thoughts back on track. The Devastators were a proud clan. The sharpest talons in the paw, one might say. Dragons with a reputation to uphold.\n\nToday's achievement? One long snoozefest, punctuated by ample thoughts of pillaging. Rather less by way of actual action. Sadly, this was also predictable.\n\nDragons were supposed to start with the small villages. With youthful draconic zest, one should smash the place up, fire-blast a few huts into smithereens, voice thunderous roars to panic the peasants into screaming flight, and then greedily loot all their riches to bolster one's growing hoard. Dragons spent years building up a decent stash and a smashing reputation in order to attract a suitable mate. One's sire and dam looked favourably upon such deeds. Honourable, noble, fiery, fierce, draconic \u2013 all those wonderful adjectives he had categorically failed to earn thus far in his life.\n\nPlans to earn said adjectives? Those he had by the pawful.\n\nSlippery adjectives aside, Blitz failed to see the point of pillaging from poor Humans. Miserable creatures. Filthy beggars, the lot of them. Fancy grubbing in the soil for a living? And feeding one's mewling young with roots dug from beneath the ground?\n\n<Blergh.> Made his stomachs churn just to imagine it.\n\nBesides, the teeming mass of peons had no gold. He had long since worked out that all the good, shiny stuff decent Dragons salivated over day and night made its way to these big stone castles, where the ones who wore fancy animal skins flaunted their wealth and station. They lazed at the top of the food chain, seized what they wanted and oppressed those who dared complain. Systematic looting without lifting so much as a talon was a notable skill, he had to admit, as far as ruthless tyranny went \u2013 apparently, Humans called this form of tyranny taxation.\n\nIn his jaded opinion, tyranny was overrated too.\n\nDevastators were the most despotic Dragons of the Tamarine Mountains, the biggest, baddest and richest of all the Clans. In fact, tyrannical was another word that had been thrown at his ear canals more times than he could count over the years. Right up there with the pillaging business in the hierarchy of respectable vocations for Dragons of noble character. As the biggest denizen of his Dragon Clan measuring a whopping fifty-three feet from nose tip to tail spike, Blitz should have been a tyrant. He had the size and physical strength to warrant it. He should have seized respect with both forepaws, wrestled giants and laid waste to entire cities of such dimensions as this which stretched out beneath his blunt nose.\n\nNot that he could see much.\n\nHe blinked his aching eyes and rubbed them with his scaly knuckles, wishing the pain and blurriness away. He could not even distinguish individuals in the crowds today.\n\nHis own craven brown hide? No problem.\n\nSeeing ten feet beyond his own nose was generally an issue. The fuzziness of discontent, he called his affliction. But he could smell the riches, the gold and rubies and aye, the vile whiff of Human excrement. Phew. That made his nostrils itch and his food stomach clench as a precursor to vomiting.\n\nHow was it that no Human had contrived to spot a fifty-three foot mud-brown Devastator perched upon the highest tower of their castle, all day? Maybe because his common colour blended in with the roof tiles? He was good at camouflage. Blitz had to be, otherwise he would never eat. Maybe Humans were predictable as well \u2013 as in, he could reliably conclude that their tiny brains refused to see a gigantic predator lurking upon their rooftop because they simply did not believe he could be there.\n\nTiny cranial capacity.\n\nUnimaginably primitive brains.\n\nJust now, a voice floating up the stairwell inside the tower surprised him out of his ruminations on the essential nature of the Human scourge, causing his great talons to clench upon the tiles. So nearby? Almost below his cavernous, empty belly, his appetite reminded him with a woeful gurgle. Every scale upon his body stilled. Predatory silence. Even his guts, far too accustomed to the hollow-as-a-drum feeling, gave up their complaining. He placed a dislodged tile soundlessly in the roof gutter. Sucking in a long, deep breath, he stopped the movement of his lungs. He could hold his breath for up to fifteen minutes.\n\n\"So, Princess Azania, I trust you've had enough of my dungeons?\"\n\nThe cruel, reedy masculine voice fell upon his ear canals like the unpleasant caw of a crow. The female's reply was like a soft flute's breathy piping, unintelligible even to a Dragon's acute hearing. His quick ear separated out different sets of footsteps, instinctively enumerating the enemy. Soft leather. Harder leather. Something similar to cloth, accompanied by a very light step. Human females were generally lighter than the males. Metal jingled and men breathed heavily, their armour clanking with each footfall. By his dam's egg, was that the whiff of Human body odour basted for months inside those ridiculous tin cans they wore for armour?\n\n<Aah!> His highly sensitive nostrils thrilled to another scent, far more evocative. The scent of desert rose. It snapped him into a scent memory.\n\nHe had not smelled desert rose in years. Not since the Devastator Clan had flown east in search of treasure said to be buried in the endless desert sands. He remembered the sky afire with double sunsets, and the glorious heat rippling over sands as red as a rusted blade. As red as the celebrated colour of his sire, Blaze the Devastator. That same red burned in Blaze's eye as his loathing of his large, worthless son reached its zenith.\n\n<Get out of my cavern, you fireless worm! You are in no way fit to be called a Dragon!>\n\nHis shoulders bunched with remembered shame.\n\nJust below the thin roof, the Humans were making a commotion. The female voiced a litany of strange, fearful noises as the shrill, commanding voice ordered her to be chained hand and foot to the bed. Her terror scent washed his sight in umber hues. They scorned her protests. He tried to picture the scene in his mind. Was this a prelude to some form of ghastly Human torture? A ritual connected to some Humans' love of dark magic?\n\nAnother memory surfaced \u2013 a scroll memory. Imprisoning a Princess in the highest tower in the land was, of course, conventional behaviour. Totally predictable. That was what these barbaric Humans did \u2013 locking up their own kind. They made of this practice an art. Indeed, they often ransomed Princesses for gold or other riches, because Human royalty had extra value above their hordes of peasants and stinking soldiers. Something else tickled his memory with living fires, however. Capturing Princesses, although not often mentioned in modern Dragon lore, used to be a celebrated draconic pastime. One did not consume the poor things, of course. One cosseted them and defended them against sundry knights errant, potential suitors and dastardly Dragon slayers. In time, their fathers would arrive to humbly petition the lucky Princess-owning Dragon for the return of their precious daughter, in exchange for half the riches of their kingdom.\n\nHis lips drew back to reveal a wicked set of fangs, a draconic smile of pure, pleasurable gold lust. His forked tongue flicked the air; his wings quivered in anticipation. Mounds of treasure. Mountains of shimmering golden beauty. If he could contrive to snatch this whimpering wretch from her foolish, unheeding captors, he need never contemplate pillaging another village again.\n\nPillage and village rhymed.\n\nPrincess and richness also rhymed \u2013 mostly. A sloppy effort at best.\n\n*Gnarr.*\n\nStill, this most pleasing notion had his five hearts beating in a single, powerful rhythm. Mmm. Imagine what his sire would say? <Blitz, you are a true Dragon. How powerful you have become.> Ah, verbal music. <I slaver at the size of your hoard, my son!>\n\nImmersed in the details of a delicious daydream, Blitz stiffened as the female voiced a stifled yelp. Pain \u2013 sharp pain. What was this? They cared poorly for their prize? What prize fools!\n\nHe tuned in his ears.\n\nThe reedy voice said, \"This shall be your new accommodation until you acquiesce to my son's rightful demands, o Princess.\"\n\n\"Never,\" said she.\n\n\"You shall be imprisoned in this tower until you marry Prince Floric!\"\n\n\"Floric the Flatulent? Over my dead body.\"\n\nHer laughter was so delectably disdainful, Blitz blinked in startlement. By his wings, she sounded like a \u2013 no. No way could she sound like a Dragoness. Yet she did. His scales tingled at the uncanny impression.\n\nHow enticing, this weirdness. Crouching down even further, he extended his sensory magic into the tower room. Maybe a secret to be sniffed out here, tasted, unravelled by his superior draconic intellect?\n\n\"We have ways to make you obey,\" threatened the male.\n\nOoh, suitably malicious.\n\n\"King Tyloric, you can threaten me until you're blue in the face. I'll never marry your son.\"\n\nFascinating. He had read Humans went blue if they stayed underwater for too long; much more quickly if one stepped carefully upon their chests. He had never tried, but one or two of his relatives had experimented and found these two-legged cockroaches to be disturbingly fragile. One could play with a scuttling insect, but not for very long. He would have to be extra careful not to break this Princess when he \u2013\n\n\"Look, I'll be honest with you,\" she added. Her voice was not as sweet as legends about Princesses claimed. More \u2026 husky, as if a fire's own embers took voice to speak. Rightly, scorn dripped from her lips like fat from a tasty chunk of mutton, as she explained, \"Prince Floric is physically handsome, but he really is quite deficient in all matters above the shoulders. Plus, he reeks. That is a most undesirable combination in a man.\"\n\n\"Father! Are you going to let her speak to me like that?\"\n\nOh! The other whiner was present in the room. Even worse than the father. His spoiled, wheedling voice made Blitz see white. Clearly, that cretin needed a good, permanent Dragon slap.\n\nUnfortunately, as a Dragon who had never pillaged so much as a cattle shelter in his twenty years of life, he had never had the pleasure of smacking an armed Human. Not even a gentle tap upon the noggin. Blitz's Dragon senses delved deeper, testing the hearts of these men. Treachery. Foul ambition. The bitter tangs of immoral intent. This sire and his son did not mean this Princess well. He doubted they even meant to ransom her.\n\nDouble blergh.\n\nWhat was he even doing listening to their disgusting hearts? Come the opportune moment, he must peel this tower apart and snatch her away to a far wickeder fate.\n\nBlitz licked his chops. He could practically taste the gold this Princess would earn him.\n\nJust now, the King said, \"Convince her, Floric.\"\n\nChains jingled slightly as she tested her captivity. Blitz crouched without moving a muscle. Eavesdropping. Wondering how under the double suns he would contrive to remove the Princess from this high tower without ending up looking like an overgrown porcupine. Javelins and arrows made him shudder. Thick Dragon hide could do only so much against the powerful crossbows these restless fleas preferred. Great stopping power. Capable of drilling nice holes into the thickest Dragon hide.\n\nIn a high, intensely irritating voice, the young Prince declaimed, \"O thou dusky desert beauty, how well thou art named! Thou art the Black Rose of the Desert indeed! Thy skin is as the raiment of the night's own starry garb. I, Prince Floric of Vanrace, shall woo thee \u2013\"\n\nShe chuckled, \"I doubt that.\"\n\nBlitz did not think so either. He desperately wanted to clean out his ear canals with a talon. That voice! Put in a forest, Floric's poetry would have murdered the local wildlife.\n\nManfully, the Prince said, \"Oh, how wondrously thy extravagant beauty moveth my soul, o Princess Azania N'gala \u2013 how sable thy hair, how lustrous thy skin, which is as polished onyx, and thy neck a tower of strength and loveliness, o my black desert dove, o muse of the very Gods, o object of mine palpitating heart's verimost desire!\"\n\n*Pah!*\n\nWhat? Had this female spat her fire \u2013 nay, Humans had no fire. She must have spat the wetness inside her mouth at him. Vile!\n\nThe Prince cried out in fury, \"She despises me, father!\"\n\nWho would not despise such a miserable cretin? His poetry was hopeless.\n\n\"Then make her yours.\"\n\nBlitz blinked at the tone, as callous as his own sire had many times been. This King did not mean, surely \u2026\n\n\"What, father? Shall I recite further fulsome compliments?\"\n\n\"Nay, lad. Here she lies, yours for the taking \u2013\"\n\nThe Princess gasped, \"Nay! O King Tyloric, I protest this shameful counsel.\"\n\n\"Protest all you like, wench,\" sneered the King. The malevolence in his voice ran rampant now, causing Blitz's tail to flick restively. \"Here's my suggestion. Who cares for the order of things \u2013 the wedding first, or the wedding night? Who would ever know? You will be married, whether you like it or not! My son, we shall leave you now with Princess Azania. Do not depart this tower until you have fully convinced her.\"\n\nBlitz's blood ran cold. He did mean \u2013 he meant to mate this woman without her consent!\n\nNot that mating was a problem, per se, speaking as one with a hopeless lack of experience in the area. It was the lack of willingness. No sane creature forced another against their will. That was \u2026 he hardly had words strong enough to describe his revulsion. Anathema? Abominable? This marriage thing must be a serious affair, a bit like the vows many older Dragons took with their favourite mate. Judging by her inane screeching and resurgent fear scent, he should conclude that this proposal from the undoubtedly odorous Prince Floric the Flatulent \u2013 he grinned evilly \u2013 was indeed most unwelcome.\n\nBefore he knew it, Blitz had shifted forward, bringing his massive muzzle down over the edge of the gutter. The racket these morons were kicking up disguised even the movement of his tonnage, but a number of roof tiles cascaded down into the courtyard below. Thin yells drifted on the breeze. Spotted! This could quickly become painful.\n\nHe pressed his left eye, usually the better one, up against one of the slit windows in the stone.\n\nInside a room lit by the sallow gleam of an oil lamp, he saw two stocky men-at-arms stuffing the Princess' mouth with rags. Chained hand and foot to the four corners of a massive carved wooden bed, she appeared helpless. Those puny limbs were useless against even the thinnest chains. Truly contemptible, these creatures \u2013 yet they swarmed across more than a dozen realms which nearly surrounded the Tamarine Mountains, home to most of the Dragon Clans. Other Dragons were rumoured to live on the Vaylarn Archipelago \u2026\n\nBlitz! Focus, or the prize might evade his paw.\n\nThe Princess was dark, aye. Surprisingly dark, for a Human. He had thought they all came as white as larvae. By his wings, facets of beauty in this species must truly be a matter of taste.\n\nHer black eyes above those rags were wells of pure dread.\n\nHis Dragon hearts clenched painfully. Never had he beheld such desperation in a creature. Not even in that final instant before he beheaded a deer, say, or snapped off a sheep's head. Only one conclusion could be drawn. She shared his visceral revulsion toward this King's proposal.\n\nThe other person in the room must be Prince Floric. He was doing a peculiar one-legged dance as he struggled to remove his lime-green lower body coverings. That was how Blitz knew him for the Prince. None but Human royalty would wear colours so insulting to the eye of the beholder. Was this a courtship ritual, like the renowned showy dance of the yellow-banded forest warbler, whereby he impressed his mate with a display of hypnotic magnificence? How marvellously barbaric.\n\nPerhaps this Prince sought to entice the dark Princess in her lovely ruby-red gown with gold thread details on the neckline, sleeves and waist \u2013 now here was a garment even a Dragon could appreciate. She revelled in it like a Dragoness resplendent in her scales. Plus, the female wore a golden tiara and plenty of jewellery.\n\nAn appetising little hoard-starter, if he did say so himself.\n\nHaving finished subduing and muffling the captive, the men-at-arms retreated down a stairwell he had not noticed before.\n\nMeantime, the Prince said, \"My dear, sweet Princess, there really isn't any need for this nastiness. Last chance. Will you or will you not marry me?\"\n\nShe shook her head, making unintelligible sounds through the cloth wadding. Oh, and now the eyes were leaking. He had read about this phenomenon. Humans did a lot of leaking \u2013 nostrils, eyes and mouths, all so disgustingly moist.\n\nHe was just about to give that his third *blergh!* when he caught the strangest light in the Prince's eye. He scented the man's heart in all its rank squalor, like a sewer riven through flesh.\n\nEven a Dragon must reel and catch his breath.\n\nThe man snarled, \"Well, Princess Azania, by the time your belly is swollen with my child, I am quite sure you will see \u2013\"\n\nEnough! These words were acid squirted inside his ears!\n\nBlitz the Devastator drew back his clenched paw. Before he even knew what he was doing, he punched right through the tower wall. *GRRAAABOOM!!*\n\n[ Abduction Blues ]\n\nPrince floric took one look at the paw that scraped backward, hauling rubble back out of the tower room, and screamed. It was the scream of a man who sounded as if he were ripping out his own throat. Raw. Strangulated. Utterly pathetic.\n\nRather pleasantly for a Dragon who had most likely broken his middle fore talon smashing through that wall \u2013 self-congratulations most certainly deserved \u2013 Blitz purred, \"You vile, suppurating little pustule, you abominable excuse for a walking blob of excrement, I will have you know \u2013\" he aimed a haphazard swipe at the Prince, but missed by a scale's breadth \"\u2013 this Princess is mine!\"\n\nBy his dam's egg, how these insults buoyed his hearts!\n\nThe Prince's violent flinch caused him to topple, fetching his head a crack against the dresser behind him.\n\n*Swat!*\n\nMissed again! Smoking fires take it, he had terrible aim. Especially upside down, his paw scrabbling around inside a not very large tower room. He drew back, making ready for a third and final swipe. Time for a swift beheading. Nothing less would suffice.\n\nWith a shrill scream, Prince Floric threw himself headfirst down the stairwell, still tangled up in his ridiculous lime green coverings.\n\n*Thump.* \"Ouch! Thundering \u2013\"\n\n*Blam!* \"Ow!\"\n\n*Smack.* \"Gods' teeth be blasted \u2013\"\n\nOn and on he went, for a surprisingly long time. The Prince had a lot to say as he bounced down the stairs, most of it very gratifying, and much of which was profane.\n\nSadly, his scrawny neck failed to crack. A slap in the muzzle to all justice beneath the suns.\n\nThe girl gaped at Blitz. He showed her plenty of fangs in return. Aye! Somehow, in that instant, her terror lifted enough to recognise a kindred soul, whereupon they both experienced an unexpected ambush of utterly daft, shared amusement. His guffaw was of course, a tower-shaking explosion of male draculinity \u2013 the equivalent of masculinity in the Draconian language, he understood from the lore \u2013 while her chortle betrayed mischievous pleasure at the Prince's fate.\n\nFloric still had time for one final, dramatic crash that sounded as if he had taken half of the castle kitchens with him. A piteous groan floated up the stairwell. Much better.\n\nThat was when the first arrow shaft pinged off his hide very near to a place he would rather not be pinned in. Most male Dragons would have said the same, he would like to think. Big target, mind. He had not realised he had twisted all the way around like that, presenting his nether parts as a mark to all those archers on the ground.\n\nMaking a snap decision, Blitz narrowed his shoulders and forced his way into the tower room, widening the gap with his exertions. He scraped along the floor and made the ceiling groan as much as a certain unfortunate Prince who had recently assaulted a stairway and come off second best. Badly. The nauseating reek of his personal odour combined with his appalling intentions still filled the air like the vapours of a festering bog.\n\nUnfortunately, his position left the aforementioned target dangling outside, along with his hind legs and tail.\n\nHe gazed at the captive Princess, wondering how best to make his approach.\n\nShe took her time in producing a shriek of epic perfection around the gag. They could not even get that part right. It hardly silenced her at all.\n\n\"Oh, shut the fangs!\" he exclaimed. \"I'm hardly going to eat you, you skinny runt.\"\n\nSpitting out the gag, the pitiful wretch screamed again.\n\nHad she chewed through the material?\n\nThis time, he had to prod at his ears. How a mite like her produced quite such a racket, he had no idea, but that was not an agreeable sound. Princesses were meant to be songbirds, to interact charmingly with \u2026 well, little creatures. Birds, hedgehogs, rabbits, and other furry hopping snacks. They were never loud nor unbearable.\n\nNot this one. Made him wish for a gag twice the size.\n\nGrowling mightily, he burrowed his way further inside while trying to avoid placing his great paws in any place that would make her turn blue. Even if it was tempting \u2013 well, the experiment would probably fail due to her dark colouration, although he was intrigued to see if her bulging eyeballs might not pop out under the application of just a tad more pressure. That would stop her screaming once and for all.\n\nOne way to ruin his plans for riches.\n\nBlitz considered himself a patient creature. Not half as impetuous as his winged brothers and sisters. This wench's screeching was insufferable, however.\n\nExtending one talon with a practised flick, he waved it in front of her nose. \"Be silent, you snivelling, undersized wretch.\"\n\nQuivering obedience. Hypnotised, even?\n\nNo wonder Dragons enjoyed playing with Humans. This promised endless diversion.\n\n*Thwock!*\n\n*Brrraooorrgghh!!* he thundered. Hole in the hide. Not half as painful as he had imagined, but it was right under the base of his tail. Not a comfortable spot.\n\nEven in his fury and pain, he did not breathe fire.\n\nFutile exercise.\n\nFlicking at his new pet's torso with his talon, he said, \"You are my prize, Princess. I am carrying you away from here. Now, no more of that mindless caterwauling and carrying on, or I shall be forced to amputate a few body parts I consider unnecessary.\"\n\nShe nodded dutifully.\n\nThere. Who said obedience training was difficult? Even if this witless female failed to understand his words, she certainly understood his threatening tone.\n\nAs carefully as if he were caressing a flower, he slid the sadly blunt point of his steely grey talon along her cheek and snipped the cloth. He did not even gouge out an eyeball by accident. Most thoughtful of him. While the girl worked on spitting out the cloth, he helped to drag it out with the point of his talon. Hopefully, he would not catch some unnameable disease from her salivating. Next, he examined the bedframe. Solid wood, and well made. The thing must weigh several tonnes.\n\n\"Can I just snap these chains off your spindly limbs?\" he inquired, in what he hoped was a calming voice.\n\nShe drew a shallow breath, and did not screech again. Teachable, this creature.\n\n\"Princess, are you \u2013\"\n\nBlitz pounded his fist down on the top of the stairwell. *BOOM!* The knight who had been lurking there, fell down the stairs. *Bling, blang, clatter,* plus all the cursing. A second round of entertainment. He had not had so much fun in years!\n\n*Thwock! Thwock \u2013 GNARR!!*\n\nPain arched his back, causing him to tear the tower roof off its moorings. Good idea. Blitz flexed his oversized and underutilised muscles gleefully, remembering to lay a paw over the captive to protect her from the falling rubble and timbers. This was unsuspected evidence of skills in abduction and Princess care, he thought, swelling with draconic pride. With a great groan, the roof gave up the unequal battle and wobbled upon his back. He whirled to heave it into the courtyard below.\n\nSnatch the bed before it teetered too far and slid over the edge! Shiver his belly fires, that was a close one.\n\n*Keerump!* The avalanche of roofing materials silenced a few shouts.\n\nRansacking this castle was proving to be rather stimulating. In fact, he decided on the spot, every Dragon should learn to play with toy castles.\n\nHe dragged the Princess plus her bed back up onto solid stone. The frame now proudly wore three crossbow bolts, but some bright spark down below was yelling orders to the effect of keeping the prisoner alive. Aim at the huge Dragon and not at the bed? Pure genius. They appreciated her value.\n\nPeering into the pentagonal courtyard below, Blitz blearily made out a number of silver-armoured figures running about like crazed ants. Several dozen other archers and men-at-arms gathered on the battlements nearby, although his merest glance sent them stampeding back inside the two smaller towers adjacent to this one.\n\nHuh. Who was the Dragon then?\n\nThis highest tower stood on the northernmost angle of the castle building, which sprawled beneath him in its pleasingly regular tan stone battlements and towers, a second sturdy curtain wall, and then a moat around the base of this hill. The whole structure crowned a low, wide hill upon which Varine, the capital city of the Kingdom of Vanrace, stood.\n\nCheck the loot. Terrified but alive.\n\nThis was just how he liked Humans best \u2013 alive, the better to scream mindlessly at his first foray into the realms of draconic tyranny. What a day!\n\nAbsently lobbing a couple of building stones at archers he saw taking aim at the large brown Dragon decorating the top of their ruined tower, Blitz rubbed his eyes again. The low, mauve-forested hills beyond the town were a blur, and the jag-toothed Tamarine Mountains worse, but he knew his way home lay a few points west of north. Perfect directional sense. He could have found his way on the darkest night over unfamiliar territory \u2026 he shoved part of the remaining wall into the courtyard for good measure. Keep those stinking slaves busy. Lifting another two-foot sandstone block, he hurled it onto the nearest battlement. Soldiers pitched off the edge, their thin screams ending rather abruptly when they landed thirty feet lower down. A few lucky ones crashed through the roof of some kind of outhouse. They might survive.\n\nAssuming a suitably majestic pose, he loomed over his prisoner. \"So, Princess \u2013\"\n\n\"P-Please d-d-don't snap my spindly l-l-limbs, sir D-Dragon!\" she stammered.\n\nA tongue and the wit to use it. Splendid!\n\nGrandly, he announced, \"I am Blitz the Devastator. You are my captive. Do you understand what I am saying?\"\n\n\"I speak four languages, mighty Dragon,\" she said politely, still in trembling voice.\n\nMighty Dragon! The heavens opened to thunder odes of joy to his Dragon pride! If he could teach her to compliment him regularly, this held the promise of a fine relationship. No wonder the Dragons of yore had enjoyed keeping Princesses. A talking domestic worker could be all the rage. Although, this one looked rather scrawny and unsuited to manual labour. She could do delicate tasks, he decided. Fang picking, scale polishing, cleaning and tidying \u2026 aye! Perfect.\n\nWarmly, he purred, <Tell me, do you speak Draconian?>\n\n<A little,> she spluttered. <And I need it, too.>\n\n<You read it?> Simple mistake.\n\nHe flicked a brazier off the remains of the tower, enjoying a fresh round of cries.\n\n<I \u2026 read it munch-somely,> she said, and actually managed to darken. Intriguing. Did he smell embarrassment? <Quite badly \u2013>\n\n<Very badly,> he agreed, deciding that honesty was all this unsophisticated creature could handle. Save all nuance for another day. \"Since I am far more learned than you, I shall speak your barbaric tongue to help you understand.\"\n\n\"I'm not stupid!\"\n\n\"Says she who is chained to a large bed, the better to appreciate the flattering attentions of Prince Floric the Flatulent?\"\n\n\"Bad day.\"\n\nWry resignation filled her voice.\n\nHe startled. What was this? The oddest sensation warmed his fourth heart. Despite being a Devastator, Blitz knew a thing or two about bad days. He sort of made a habit of collecting them, and not merely in ones and twos, either. That collection tended to include just about every day he had ever spent with his family. Did he truly intend to insult a lesser creature in the same fashion as he himself so hated to be teased, disrespected and overlooked?\n\nHe tossed a couple more building blocks for the amusement of watching the little silver fleas hop around the courtyard, before inclining his head above his captive with what he hoped was great gravitas. She squeezed her eyes shut. If he had actual fiery breath, he would have blamed Dragon halitosis.\n\nOne ought to set the record straight.\n\nHeavily, Blitz said, \"Princess, you are absolutely correct about his excessive gassiness. That Prince was an offence to the nostrils of any decent creature, of which I am one.\" A slight giggle escaped her lips, despite that those eyes were not opening anytime soon. \"Now, I am afraid we simply must disappoint the Prince of Vast Flatulence and his equally repulsive father. I shall be kidnapping you away to my lair in the Tamarine Mountains. This is a perfectly respectable arrangement between a Dragon and a Princess, I assure you, with extensive precedent in \u2013\"\n\n\"Respectable?\"\n\n\"Respectable and honourable, as the histories make entirely plain. We shall discuss the details en route \u2013\" he flicked his head as a quarrel suddenly zipped past his nostrils, sounding like a large, angry wasp \"\u2013 but I am afraid, we need to leave in a hurry. King Tyloric of Vanrace appears to be irked by the events of the day.\"\n\nIrked, as in, a large brown Dragon was tearing his castle apart.\n\nAny more loose items to toss over the edge?\n\nAha. Selecting a random chest which had stood against a wall that was now teetering precariously over the courtyard, Blitz tossed it in the direction the quarrel had come from. His tail lashed furiously, spraying boulders in every direction. For the first time in his life, he thrilled to an awareness of the addictive power of destruction. Still, he had not summoned so much as a curl of flame from his apparently dead or deformed fire stomach, but there it was.\n\nClearing his throat, he bellowed, <DEVASTATOR!!>\n\nSuch a fine and ringing Dragon-dominance roar did he produce, he heard the echo rolling back from the faraway hills like thunder. Majestic! If that did not bring ghastly digestive waters spurting from their craven bowels, nothing would. He paused to savour the moment, and collected a quarrel in his left shoulder. *Thwack!*\n\nAlways happened.\n\nNothing he ever did turned to gold.\n\nSeizing the bed in both forepaws, Blitz leaped off the tower. <Oh no!>\n\nThe blasted thing was a whole lot heavier than he had bargained for. Dragons were great fliers. Masters of the vast aerial realms of the world. They did not generally attempt to take off wholly unprepared for the burden of carrying a couple of tonnes of solid hand-carved bed in their forepaws, however.\n\nThat weight immediately tipped him nose-first toward the ground.\n\nWith a last-second, despairing roll and tucking in his left wing to keep from snapping it like a twig, he slammed into the battlement below the tower, smashing several dozen sandstone blocks and three unlucky archers into space. *GRAABOOM!* The Princess screamed as he tumbled through the air, hugging the massive bed close to his chest. Gripping it with all four paws, he flapped mightily and managed somehow to claw back enough altitude that he missed the outer curtain wall by less than the width of a Dragon's paw.\n\nHe hurtled down over the brownish slate tiles of the town. Headlong avalanche. This was not going to end well. A series of mighty flaps kept them going, but he was losing altitude too fast. Stupid bed! All this effort for a prattling flea? She had better be worth every scale he had just lost! A few screams accompanied their plummeting ride as he maximised his wing strokes, but he still clipped several buildings and then demolished a chimney.\n\nTaking aim at the worst-looking building, Blitz ducked his massive, thickset neck and curled up around the bed. \"Hold on!\"\n\nA long, splintering crash and a dozen or so tan milk cows sent into a lowing panic later, he uncurled himself and checked his surroundings. A stunned cow lay draped across his nose. Peering uncertainly between its floppy brown hind legs, he saw that the Princess had also survived the experience, but the bed had lost its gorgeously carved headboard somewhere along the way.\n\nThe musky bovine odour wafting into his nostrils was far too tempting. Flipping the cow into the air, he opened his maw wide and snapped it in half.\n\nThe front part of the cow sort of revived with half a woeful 'moo' before realising it really ought to be dead. Oops. He slit the creature's throat quickly, muttering, <May your spirit rise even as your blood nourishes the predator.>\n\nDipping his head, he wolfed the rest in three huge bites.\n\nA farmer dashed around the corner of what was left of his cow barn, before skidding to a halt. He carried a wooden pail in his left hand. His face turned as white as snow.\n\nBlitz gathered his paws beneath him and made a shooing gesture. \"Run along now, there's a good peasant.\"\n\nShrieks receded into the distance.\n\nNo doubt, if the legends were right, he would soon be back with two hundred vengeful farmers armed with pitchforks and hoes. Turning to the bed, he stopped to savour the Princess' flabbergasted expression.\n\nWell then. The Dragon and the captive Princess! He grinned slowly, peeling back his fangs the better to impress a female with his terrifying dental splendour. \"Was it something I said?\"\n\nHer tiny throat bobbed. Ah, the sign and scent of panic, was it?\n\n\"Maybe it's that you have a cow's eyeball stuck to your fang,\" she suggested, trying to point.\n\nOh. Not that much panic, by all appearances.\n\n*Slurp.* \"By my wings, the eyeballs are the best bit. They pop a little if you bite them just right.\" He was not sure if she found his joke funny or sickening. Hard to tell. \"Right. Let's see about this bed. I'll try not to rip your measly little arms off, alright?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 thanks?\" she said doubtfully.\n\n\"Hold still.\"\n\nRaising his right fist, he smashed the end of the bed between her legs. The girl did yelp at that, but he was beginning to suspect that she was made of tough stuff. Not nearly the fainting maiden sort of Princess he had always read about. Cracking the frame away from the thick bedposts chained to her legs, he snorted in satisfaction. \"Nothing broken as yet. Let's pulverise this side.\"\n\n*Crash!*\n\nShe said, \"Oh, looks like you set the castle alight, Blitz the \u2026 uh, what did you call yourself?\"\n\n\"Blitz the Devastator.\"\n\nHe allowed the words to grind between his fangs. Far from acting scared again, she smiled and said, \"Blitz the Devastator \u2013 that means you hail from the Devastator Dragon Clan, correct?\"\n\n\"Correct.\"\n\nIf she thought that parroting back information was some kind of proof of intelligence \u2026\n\n\"I am the Princess Azania N'gala of T'nagru, the Desert Kingdom.\"\n\n\"I assumed as much. Are all your people so dark-skinned? I had taken Humans for pasty white sort of creatures. Much like grubs, in fact.\"\n\nThis earned him a very undecided, anaemic sort of chuckle. \"We are dark. Some of the other kingdoms take that to mean that black people are destined to be slaves. Certainly, they \u2013 oh, well done. That's my leg free. I mean, they prize \u2026 certain features of my kind.\"\n\n\"You are valuable? Is your father rich?\"\n\n\"I am very valuable,\" she said. Why the tightness in her voice? He did not understand. \"My father is wealthy, but we are neither the greatest nor the wealthiest of kingdoms. That is why I am supposed to marry for a suitable fortune. My bride price is high. As you no doubt gathered from Floric's abysmal verse, my darkness makes me prized indeed. Father makes no secret of his ambitions.\"\n\nThey placed value on skin colour? It made sense, he supposed. Brown Dragons were unremarkable. Now, if he had been a blue; moreover, any other Dragon of any colour in all of Solixambria bar one called Blitz the Devastator \u2026 he champed his fangs in anger.\n\nShe flinched.\n\n\"Huh,\" he snorted, gripping one of the bedposts. \"Move your head aside.\" *Crunch.* Oh, this was a tougher task, but a few sharp blows splintered the wood. \"Done.\"\n\n\"Ah \u2013 careful! You almost \u2013\"\n\n\"I did not.\"\n\nThe Princess moved her right arm gingerly. \"I'm alright. You are very strong, Blitz. Please have a care. I'm very \u2026 breakable. Dragons probably don't understand such things, hating Humans as you do, but \u2026 I \u2013 uh, I should not have said that. Sorry.\"\n\n\"We don't hate Humans,\" he rumbled, annoyed at her presumption. \"Dragons, by and large, are indifferent. Dragons live in the mountains and the neighbouring Human kingdoms occupy the hills and plains \u2013 I am speaking of our immediate neighbours, of course. T'nagru lies farther afield, within the northern periphery of the vast Obsidian Desert. Dragons enjoy T'nagru in particular for its sulphur and hot springs, located in the Blood Desert to the east of your homeland.\"\n\n\"We've noticed, right along with the plundering of our cattle.\"\n\n\"Desert oryx are tasty,\" he agreed.\n\nFascinating that he could hold a lucid conversation with this Princess of the Desert Kingdom. She obviously knew her geography \u2013 she had not said so, but he could scent her affront at his explanation and see it in the narrowing of her tiny black eyes. Did she know her emotions were so transparent to a Dragon? Could it be that these Humans, whom Dragons referred to in the main as lice, fleas or cockroaches, had some modicum of scientific learning? This definitely ran contrary to the opinions of many Dragon scholars he could name. That said, weren't royalty usually assigned to a special category regarding education? Especially Princesses?\n\nPaws on the prize, Dragon. He reminded himself that history was full of stirring tales of Dragons kidnapping Princesses for glittering ransoms paid by their doting fathers.\n\nSetting aside her limb, which was still attached to its heavy bedpost, he worked on the last one, attached to her right arm. Maybe he could twist the manacles loose with his talons? He must take care, for her bones were as fragile as toothpicks.\n\nRaising his head, he cocked it sideways. \"Sounds like a mob coming.\"\n\n\"You hear something?\"\n\n\"Aye, that would be the sound of mucky peasants sharpening their pitchforks, shovels and farm implements,\" he growled, ripping the last of the bed frame free. Only the heavy bedposts remained. Those would have to wait.\n\nBlitz scooped the Princess into his paw, annoyed afresh when she yelped as his talons sliced her calves shallowly. Flaming talons, her dark skin was soft. Useless hide. Once he had her reasonably well arranged, he reminded himself not to clench his fist. She would probably just ooze out between his knuckles. Messy, besides being rather less than friendly. Hard to imagine that would end well.\n\nSpreading his wings, he coiled his thighs and sprang skyward.\n\nHis great wings beat hard for the first eight or ten strokes, propelling his tonnage into the air and kicking up a great storm of red clay dust through which a pitchfork swooshed, destination, his head. It pinged off his scale armour and dropped away. As he cleared the ground, he saw with pride that he had attracted his best mob ever. At least a hundred of the miserable dolts, displaying the collective intelligence of a horde of toads. No mind \u2013 braa-haa-haa! Another joke. His clan would surely be swayed by the retelling of this adventure.\n\nSweeping his wings in longer, cleaner strokes that propelled him forward at increasing speed and altitude, Blitz the Devastator made his triumphal exit, clasping the Princess in paw. His very first successful raid! Pride swelled his chest as he powered upward into the last rays of the setting suns. The sunlight was whiter than usual because Taramis, the white sun, was moving in front of the redder, far larger Ignis. By adjusting his optical membranes, Blitz could filter enough of the white spectrum to see the precise interaction of the suns. He wondered if a Human could do this. They did not act very interested in astronomy, unlike the Dragon scientists in the high peaks, but one never knew.\n\nSetting his great blunt muzzle to the north, Blitz paused to check his captive. Her eyes were leaking again, but he understood that the Human gesture of pulling one's lips back indicated a smile, which meant simple-minded happiness. Dragons could communicate many different types of smile \u2013 cheerful, aggressive, wry, cunning or romantic, to name but a few.\n\nHe said, \"So, my valuable captive, how is your first flight?\"\n\nThe Princess whispered, \"Incredible.\"\n\n[ Flight ]\n\nIncredible? Whatever he had expected of the prisoner of his right paw, it was not this response. Perhaps she was as soft in the head as her skin? The eyes were leaking more and more. Yet she sat still in his cupped paw. Gaze fixed to the fore. Drinking in the scenery as though her hunger rested not in her hearts, but rose from the wellspring of \u2026 a soul? By his wings! Was this even possible?\n\nBelligerently, he snarled, \"Aren't you frightened, girl?\"\n\n\"Terrified out of my wits, o mighty Dragon,\" she admitted. \"But I've never seen the world like this before. Since I'm about to die anyways, I'll try to enjoy the ride and ignore anything else. Like having any thoughts about my immediate future, for example. It promises to be brief and bloody.\"\n\n\"What? I was not planning to mistake you for a cow.\"\n\n\"Should I be flattered?\"\n\n\"Flattened.\"\n\nHis exasperated jest made her chuckle hoarsely. \"Alright, if you're not intent upon destroying me or casting me into the abyss just yet, Blitz the Devastator, what's the plan?\"\n\n\"I could return you to Prince Floric, if you'd prefer?\"\n\nHer dark gaze considered his downturned eye at length. Disconcerting length. \"Is this all about making gold off a captive Princess?\"\n\n\"That would help,\" he admitted, startled at his own honesty. \"Indeed, I did first imagine that having abducted you to my lair, there might be some negotiation for your freedom. The Prince forced my paw. I was not about to let him \u2026 proceed, as he intended. I am a moral creature \u2013\"\n\n\"Moral?\"\n\nHis paw twitched involuntarily. \"Dragons have morals and codes of conduct, Princess Azania. Does this startle you?\"\n\n\"Aye, it does.\" When he failed to crush her for her challenging response, only choosing to gnash his fangs above her tiny head, which he could crack like a nut, she added with rather less certainty, \"It is only that I know so little of Dragons. I thought the kidnapping of Princesses had long since gone out of fashion? The last I can recall must have been at least thirty years ago. I am not ungrateful. Please, understand my \u2026 disbelief. It is not every day a Princess is removed from her month-long confinement in a dank dungeon to a high tower, only to be rescued by a vengeful Dragon.\"\n\n\"Legends have it that captive Princesses are supposed to be confined in the greatest comfort in the highest tower in the land, where they gaze with melancholy mien over the realm \u2013\"\n\n\"Practising their wondrous harp skills, singing sad lays to while the days away, and combing out their extraordinarily long hair?\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" he huffed in delight. This girl continued to astound! \"Whereupon Kings should lay siege to the city, and knights errant ride forth upon noble quests to win the hand of the lady \u2013 although, explain this detail to me, why only the hand? Why not their whole person?\"\n\nAt last, her true laughter rose upon the breeze that bore them northward, and it was a rich, husky bouquet to a Dragon's senses.\n\n\"Dragon, you are too much.\"\n\nToo much? At once too much, and too little. This miniscule desert bloom, who barely stood the height of his knee, had no idea what his life was like in the mountains. How he hoped a Princess might change everything.\n\nStiffly, he said, \"I would not allow that man who stank like the open end of a sewer to despoil you, Princess Azania. I had to act. You are correct. It is an ancient and respectable practice for a Dragon to hold a Princess ransom, and thus to enjoy a substantial donation to their hoard when the transaction is completed. Plus, it enhances one's standing amongst the Clans. To this end, the Dragon should treat his Princess honourably and well. Far better, might I point out, than you would have suffered with that \u2013 *pah!* May his scales rot and his fangs fall out of his putrid gums! You might regard this as mercenary, and a pertinent example of the greed of Dragons. Let it be known that I am not one who enjoys razing villages and trampling the already downtrodden. This struck me as a tidy solution that might be agreeable to both of us.\"\n\n\"You gain gold and reputation, and I lose a whiffy, unprincipled Prince?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\nThe girl gazed toward the horizon. \"Is your lair as horrible as they say?\"\n\n\"Horrible? I happen to think it is cosy and warm, despite its considerable elevation,\" Blitz growled.\n\nNot only was this Human spit-ugly, she narked him with every second word. He was the proud son of a proud race! He tried to picture his sire's face one more time. 'Honoured sire, I brought home a girl.' 'You, Fritz the Failure? Bwaa-haa-haa! Tickle my wings, a girl? Hear how she insults you!'\n\nFantastic. His dreams had just popped like a lava bubble.\n\nThat was exactly how his sire would respond.\n\nHe hated the nickname Fritz. His younger brothers had given it to him early on, and like an unwanted rat infestation in one's lair, it had stuck with him through the years. Fritz, because everything he tried tended to fritz. He could not even reliably light his own hearth. He had to stoop to using flint, which to a Dragon, was beyond humiliating.\n\nBefore he knew it, he snapped toward his paw, very nearly severing her hand as she withdrew it with a yelp of fright. \"It is a dangerous matter to insult a Dragon!\"\n\nLowering her gaze, she stared rigidly to the fore.\n\nFoolish, gabbling slip of a girl! He would teach her how to speak to a powerful Dragon. Princesses needed to learn their place in the world. Even a month in a clammy dungeon had not taught her \u2026 a month, in such a place? A month behind bars, with rats and cruel guards for company?\n\nBy his wings! Was this sympathy? What a weak, shrivelling Dragon he was, to consider such feelings toward a lesser creature.\n\nNo. Set a ransom, get the gold, be rid of her. That was what he must do."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Two hours after nightfall, Blitz whipped over the final village on the northern border of the Kingdom of Vanrace, and scented smelting metals upon the breeze. Dither, dither. Slanting his wings, he returned for a second, much slower pass. This metallic, acrid tang meant a blacksmith's forge here at the edge of town. He must be working late. The forge doors stood wide open, spilling enough orange light that even Blitz could see that the yard between his workplace and his house was clear. Approaching upwind, he smelled the characteristic musky scent of a hound.\n\nDecision made.\n\nCupping his wings to increase the resistance, he slowed, timed the approach more by smell than by sight, and landed in a smooth rush of wind. His tonnage shook the ground.\n\nThe barking wolfhound received the brunt of his glare. Whining in abject fear, the animal slunk beneath the house.\n\nHa. Enter the Dragon!\n\n\"Who's there?\" the blacksmith called. \"Charima? Is that you?\"\n\n\"No, just a weary traveller,\" the Princess called, trying to rise from his paw before discovering she was still manacled to half a bed. Silly thing. So stunted and helpless.\n\nStriding over to the door, Blitz deposited his burden in the firelight where the blacksmith could clearly see both her and her captor.\n\nThe tanned man tried to put his great hammer down, but his hand was trembling so badly that the tool fell to the floor with a clang. He dried his palms on his grey smock. Humans really smelled nasty when they were afraid, as if the foetid contents of their guts tried to work their way out through the pores of their skin. This fellow was no exception.\n\nBlitz announced, \"Drivelling peasant, the Princess of T'nagru requires your service. Remove her chains and be quick about it.\"\n\nThe man's eyes glazed over somewhat as he took in the bedposts, the chains and the humongous Dragon breathing down her neck. He appeared to have lost all volition, and indeed, whatever intelligence he might have claimed had summarily drained out of his undersized cranium. While that was pleasing, it was also an annoyance. This Dragon was far too keyed up by his success and the natural desire to place this prize in his hoard forthwith, to display much patience. His scales prickled all over; the silver blood in his arteries buzzed with the force of its rushing about his body.\n\nSome part of Blitz was still flying above the clouds.\n\nHe growled, \"Tell me, is this woman considered attractive amongst your kind? How so? Answer me truthfully, fool.\"\n\nStill no words.\n\n\"Find your tongue! Now!\"\n\nThe blacksmith blurted out, \"I'm a married man! Uh \u2026 your most draconic \u2026 stupendousness? She is \u2013\" his eyes apologised desperately to the royal visitor, as he tried to shape words in his thick accent \"\u2013 the Princess of \u2026 T'nagru \u2026 is indeed surpassing fair, and wondrous of \u2026 form, your truly dreadful Majesty. I've never seen someone from your kingdom before, ma'am, and I \u2013 I am Blacksmith Karthun, at your service. Your darkness is truly breath \u2013\"\n\n\"Chains!\" Blitz snapped.\n\n\"At once! She's more astounding than any of the tales, Dragon. Far tinier. And far more beautiful, of course. Could you \u2013 no \u2013 could he carry \u2013\" the man wrung his hands \"\u2013 please?\"\n\nWitless incompetent!\n\nSighing, Blitz scooped the Princess plus four bedposts up, eliciting a cry as her soft skin was pinched unavoidably by her manacles, and brought her over to the blacksmith's anvil. The man discovered an abundance of motivation as a fifty-three foot Dragon hulked beneath the forge roof, and blew hot air down his back. Miraculous effect. Really.\n\nHis chisel made short work of the manacles attached to the bedposts. Then, the fellow took his time hunting through a drawer full of keys. Ah, shaky hands, tiny man? Definitely an occupational hazard around this Dragon. He could not believe he had never discovered the joy of scaring Humans witless in his hitherto short and uneventful life. Hmm. Another, more meaty scent on the breeze drew his most carnivorous attention. Venison, if he was not mistaken. Aye, venison dripping with juices, and a bready hint that made him picture \u2026 aye. Pie. That was what Humans called the silly affectation of wrapping good meat in soggy grain.\n\nBarbarians.\n\nHe failed to see the attraction of such insipid fodder, but the Princess looked malnourished, at least to his jaundiced eye. Put her beside the sturdy blacksmith, and she looked like a diminutive wren beside a fat green moorhen. Mmm, what a scrumptious notion \u2013 succulent, fresh moorhen.\n\nHe said, \"Is your wife back in the house, man? And an infant, judging by the smell of your rubbish midden?\"\n\n\"Blessed with twins, sir,\" said the man, fumbling the keys he was handling. Great. Here he went again. \"Please, please, please don't \u2013 please, noble Dragon, I beg you \u2013\"\n\n\"Fool! I do not eat your kind! Although, dealing with King Tyloric's men-at-arms was most agreeable entertainment this afternoon past. *Slap!* Toss a stone \u2013 *splat!* *Blam!* MWAA-HAA-HAA! Like swatting a bunch of silver bugs stuck in a jar. Wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nHe spluttered, \"Aye sir, mighty Drag \u2013 no, uh \u2026\" His eyes rolled wildly. \"It is of course entirely as you say, my lord \u2026 Dragon.\"\n\n\"Not the most popular King, this Tyloric?\" Blitz guessed.\n\nBoth heads nodded, but then the blacksmith began to gabble something about his death if such a thing ever left the doors of his forge. Blitz cocked his head. Footsteps outside. The wife was coming, and if he was not mistaken, she had just spotted his very large tail trailing between the tall, ironbound forge doors. She must think her husband was presently digesting inside his well-stuffed stomach. He had eaten a whole cow, so her conclusion was not unreasonable, even though erroneous.\n\nOne cow would suffice for the next week.\n\nTurning about to the tune of metal pieces falling behind him, Blitz prowled outside, coming face to face with a terrified woman holding a saucepan. He blared, \"Woman, your husband is \u2013\"\n\nShe swung at him. Since he flicked his head upward, she missed and slammed the heavy saucepan into his broken digit. A monstrous bellow ripped from his throat. *GGGRROOARGHH!*\n\nHuman females were insufferable! Far braver \u2013 or stupider \u2013 than their mates.\n\nHere was this straw-haired thing babbling vague entreaties for mercy as she fell over his paw, the pain making him see black \u2026 he snarled horribly, \"Your husband is fine. Feed the Princess. Now, you quivering worm. We will be leaving before the inevitable unwashed mob turns up and I have to squash someone again. What did you say? I'd be most displeased to dirty my paws thus.\"\n\nWhine, whinge, whimper.\n\n\"By my wings, will you be silent, you mindless mop head? I have no interest in your blubbering whelps, your wretched house, or even your dog! Princess! Hurry up. I grow impatient!\"\n\nHe stomped off in a fury."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Twenty minutes later, with the Princess trying to burp delicately after scoffing a slice of rich venison pie in the false belief he would not notice her manners, Blitz winged northward once more. Too gutless to form a mob, these villagers. For a group of unarmed people to try to take down a large Dragon was suicide for most of them. Soldiers, knights and professional Dragon slayers were another matter. They could be relied upon to make a real nuisance of themselves.\n\nHe did not even know why he was being so peevish.\n\nThe Princess in his paw was silent, which made a refreshing change. He was headed home. To his frustration, she had paused to press her last T'nagrun gold coin upon the family for their service. What was the point? Dragons took what they wanted. Now she had made him look weak \u2013 but that was hardly the source of his nagging vexation.\n\nIt took an hour on the wing to work out why he was so tetchy, but when he did, his muscles tensed up and he glided for a moment to ease the heart cramp. He was afraid.\n\nAfraid of what his Clan would say.\n\nHe deserved their accolades. Capturing a costly Princess was no minor accomplishment. He knew his family better than any other. What would truly change? How would they treat him any differently? It would never be down to deeds. It was because of who he was.\n\nWorse, as he examined the tenor and colours of his Dragon emotions, he realised he was afraid of what the Princess would say, too. How she would react.\n\nNo-one understood him. No creature under the suns knew what moved this Dragon's deepest thoughts and feelings.\n\nLoneliness gaped wide in his hearts.\n\nTracking his way by the scents of jasmine and water, Blitz presently brought them to a small dell tucked into a hillside about five miles off the main trail into the mountains. That was the route the prospectors, slayers, bounty hunters and knights occasionally dared, for like Dragons, there were those among the teeming ranks of the Human scourge who sought glory at any cost. The fame of Dragon hunting was great, and the value of Dragon hides and body parts, ever increasing. Forty-two years ago, a Human tribe from even farther south than T'nagru, a violent people called the Skartun who hailed from somewhere way across the Obsidian Desert, had fought their way right into the Tamarine Mountains and taken many Dragons captive. Captive!\n\nHe shook his head. Such a stain ever lived on in the hearts of the Dragons who had survived. Had the Dragonkind not been divided, they would have driven the Skartun off. The whisper in the caverns of the Dragon Clans was of betrayal. Treachery most foul. Clans bought off not to fight. Good, strong Dragons carried off into slavery.\n\nThe opulent aroma of jasmine teased his nostrils as he skirted the tall trees and wheeled in sharply, bringing them to a perfect three-pawed landing on the soft sward beside a low, chuckling trio of waterfalls. He adored this spot. The scents were especially evocative, with fragrant pink peonies growing amongst the boulders in this early summer season, and the thick jasmine. On a good day, he had even occasionally succeeded in hunting blue-bellied river trout here, but he needed a decent slice of luck.\n\nHis gnarled knuckles massaged his eyes. Tiredness always made the infernal itching worse. Stepping over to the river, he drank deeply and long, before washing his eyes surreptitiously.\n\n\"Dragon, will we fly on this night?\" the Princess inquired.\n\n\"No, we will rest here. It's a long flight up into the mountains.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 may I make my toilet?\"\n\n\"Your droppings? Of course. You may place those anywhere \u2013 no. Go downwind, and make sure you bury that sloppy Human foulness. Then, you will come over and sleep beside me. It will be safer for you this way.\"\n\n\"Wild animals?\"\n\n\"Timber wolves, panthers, hill pythons and of course, other Dragons, to name but a few dangers in these parts. I will keep you safe, Princess Azania, but if you try to use that knife you took from the blacksmith's forge on me, I can assure you, it will not end well.\"\n\n\"It was for my own use and protection,\" she said awkwardly.\n\nNot a lie. Unexpected.\n\nHe said, \"I see I mistook your intentions. It is good to be prepared. There are few others of your kind in the mountains.\"\n\nAfter she made her toilet in a discreet manner, downwind so that the stench did not offend, the Princess cleaned her hands and face in the river, and drank before re-joining him. Blitz had curled up as he was always wont to, head to tail, his flank pressed up against a tall boulder that retained a pleasant warmth from the suns. The clear night was already growing cooler. Despite her velveteen gown and under-leggings, she was not dressed for colder mountains weather. He knew that from his studies. These Humans needed to swaddle themselves in all sorts of coverings against wintry weather. Therefore, he raised his head and indicated the hollow created by the curve of his tail, right up against his flank.\n\n\"Make yourself comfortable.\"\n\nThat earned him a rather odd look, but she stepped over his tail and lay down obediently. After a moment's wriggling, she turned about and pillowed her head atop his forepaw, which lay palm-up. Blitz crooked his head into a comfortable position and lowered his wing over her for additional warmth. There. What an excellent tyrant he was.\n\nHer breath hitched.\n\n\"What is it, Princess? Are you claustrophobic?\"\n\n\"No. I was just thinking \u2013 thank you for not being completely unbearable, Blitz.\"\n\nBy his wings, a backhanded compliment. Most cunning. He said, \"I understand this must be hard for you. I'm sure you would prefer to be winging your way back to the desert just now.\"\n\nShe was silent for a long time. His magic prowled about her tiny form, teasing out the fact that she might have many responses to this question, some of which saddened her. A weariness of knowing lay behind her thoughts. Perhaps disillusionment?\n\nHe was not certain how closely Human emotions equated to those of Dragons. Certainly, he was beginning to find his captive a pleasingly complex creature, not at all a wretch moved only by the simplest, most basal hungers, as most Dragon scholarship claimed of Humans.\n\nShe whispered, \"The blacksmith told me that my father had sent troops to test the strength of the Kingdom of Vanrace. They were badly beaten. King Tyloric did not inform me of this. I thought my father had abandoned me.\" Her scent became more pleasant and citrusy, as she added, \"Now, when he hears I have been taken by a Dragon, he will feel encouraged. I do not mean to sound alarmist, Blitz, but he will send many knights and Dragon slayers against you, seeking to test your mettle.\"\n\n\"Do you honestly think you're so desirable?\" he asked.\n\nThe Princess sighed very deeply. The dark intricacy was back in her thoughts. Tonelessly, she replied, \"Every Dragon slayer in two kingdoms will be after your blood, Blitz the Devastator. While I am flattered, I do not wish such a fate on anyone \u2013 upon any creature, that is. You have not been unkind, and you did steal me away from an awful fate.\"\n\n\"I did.\" More lightly, he added, \"Perhaps a few knights in shining armour will come seeking to win your fair hand, milady?\"\n\n\"My hand can never be fair.\"\n\n\"Metaphorically speaking,\" he insisted, stilling his displeasure for the umpteenth time.\n\nShe said, \"I am who I am, and you are who you are, Dragon. What will all this change, do you think? I am warm and secure, and quite exhausted. I bid you a sweet sleep until the morrow.\"\n\nHis own words, returned to shake him. <What will this change?>\n\n\"May your dreams soar evermore, Princess.\"\n\nBlitz wanted to ponder the events of this day long into the night, but to his slow-burning surprise, what spoke most clearly to his soul was the regular rhythm of another creature's breathing almost beneath his chin. He slept soundly, and dreamed of soaring high over a world he saw in every glorious detail.\n\n[ Mountain Fastness ]\n\nThe dawn broke fair and rosy, as Ignis bent his burning eye over the continent of Solixambria, the centre dominated by the Dragon Clans, the coastal regions by swarms of Humans. The dark green tips of the tall, tufty-topped paramis trees were the first flora to be burnished by his crimson gaze. Slowly, the sunlight crept down to the creamy white blossoms of the jasmine shrubs, and finally warmed his spine ridge and wings. Blitz had woken with the birds, but the Princess of T'nagru slept on in the crook of his paw. He waited with the patience of Dragons.\n\nThere really was not much to this tiny mammal. Those Vanracian thugs had handled her easily. He had observed that she was petite and delicate of bone structure in comparison to her captors, her cheekbones high and her eyes \u2013 shuttered for the moment \u2013 relatively large. Were these desirable traits in the Human female? She had braided her hair intricately. It must be long when untangled. Again, the scrolls extolled such a feature. He supposed it was like supple haunches, or the scent of riches to a questing female's nostrils. These strange filaments and those above and framing her eyes were as dark as sable. His keen eye detected a hint of glittering green dust upon her cheeks and above her eyes. Humans liked colouration, just like Dragonesses. Male Dragons were all about scent, but Dragonesses loved to adorn themselves with jewellery and their scales, especially around the eyes, with vibrant colours.\n\nHe was good with colours.\n\nSnuffling, she stirred. Blitz quickly pretended to be looking elsewhere.\n\n\"I thought I dreamed,\" she whispered, her voice burry with sleep. \"Good morn, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Good morn to you, Princess. Satisfactory sleep?\"\n\n\"Certainly beats my dungeon cell. What a lovely location. I've never slept beside a river, and what's that \u2013\" she inhaled deeply \"\u2013 gorgeous scent?\"\n\n\"The jasmine bushes.\"\n\nRising, she stretched luxuriously. \"Definitely an improvement upon my previous accommodation. Rather bracing \u2013 *brrr.* So, onward and upward into the mountains today?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" He looked beneath himself. \"Blasted quarrels. Two in the tail and one \u2013 right, here goes this one.\"\n\nBlitz plucked a crossbow quarrel out of his upper left thigh, hissing at the pain. They made these things to stick in a Dragon's flesh. Hmm. This one beneath his tail was snapped off. No gripping that with paws his size. He would have to get his pliers from \u2013\n\n\"Can I help?\"\n\nWell, this Princess was already proving useful. He said, \"Aren't Human females, especially royalty, supposed to be squeamish?\"\n\n\"I'm not regular storybook material, Dragon, in case you hadn't noticed. Now, roll over and show me your \u2013 ah, what's that? Your \u2013 ah?\"\n\n\"My ah? Aye, how descriptive you are.\"\n\nHer pulse raced off at twice the speed. He heard the capillaries opening beneath her skin as she blushed heatedly, shielding her eyes. \"I did not need to know that about you.\"\n\n\"This is not my male parts. Those lie beneath this retractable armoured casing \u2013\"\n\n\"La la la \u2026\"\n\n\"However, I am most generously proportioned, I assure you.\"\n\n\"La la LAAAA!\"\n\nHe gave that a great draconic belly laugh. A Dragoness, had there been one remotely interested in a Blitz the Devastator, would not have acted coy. Intriguing. Not that he had any issues with Dragonesses sniffing about his lair. Every Dragon Clan in the mountains knew his reputation. His delightful family had made sure of that.\n\n\"Milady, that arrow is all I am concerned about. Please. Spare me your maidenly blushes.\"\n\nThat tiny chin lifted like an arrow pointed in its own right. \"I said I am not like those Princesses you might have read about, if Dragons \u2013 ah \u2026\"\n\n\"We read,\" he growled.\n\n\"Of course you do; never thought otherwise,\" she spluttered, the lying wretch. \"I do not do needlework, play the harp or swoon over handsome Princes, most especially not the smelly ones. I am fierce and independent \u2013 at least, I should like to think so.\"\n\nHer hand fluttered over her heart, reacting to the vulnerability she had unconsciously betrayed.\n\nBlitz said, \"There's only a stub to work with.\"\n\n\"I can do this.\"\n\n\"How many years have you, Princess?\"\n\nHis silver Dragon blood had made the arrow shaft slippery. \"Seventeen. High time to be married in my culture \u2013 what does it matter, anyways? How old are you, Blitz?\"\n\n\"I shall be twenty this high summer.\"\n\nHe should be courting a Dragoness, by now. He'd have better luck trying to fly over the Lumis Ocean by catching a ride on a passing Sea Serpent.\n\nPicking up the hem of her dress, she wrapped it around the arrow stub to improve her grip. Could she just yank it out? Of course, even without factoring in a male ego. He was a Dragon. That was an arrow \u2013 a large splinter, in his humble opinion. She sat down, placed her feet either side of the puncture wound, and pulled with all her strength.\n\nThe arrow popped free. Silver blood gushed; she stopped it with her palm. \"Should we bind this?\"\n\n\"It'll stop soon, but jaramoss is a good remedy against infection. There should be a fair crop, which I smell just the other side of the stream.\"\n\nThe Princess searched for a crossing place. He plucked her up and placed her on the far side of the ten-foot wide flow, instructing her to gather handfuls of the springy moss with its tiny yellow blossoms. Shortly, she had tamped the various wounds full and the bleeding even from the worst wound had slowed to a trickle. Those four arrow holes represented his glorious battle injuries.\n\nThis was what real Dragons did in their spare time. Had he ever felt so alive? Never.\n\nSad, but true.\n\nWhile she washed her hands and the hem of her dress in the stream, he tracked down a couple of large root tubers. An omnivore would need variety in her diet, he understood from the texts. These, a few vegetables from his high and low gardens, and a bit of meat, ought to keep his prize from wasting away. One should keep such a treasure alive, he supposed, the better to achieve a fine ransom.\n\n\"Time to fly,\" he said.\n\n\"Time to take a Princess firmly in paw,\" she echoed, with a wry smile. He wondered how life had been in her kingdom. Could she even begin to identify with his experience?\n\nBlitz the Devastator winged toward the rising mountains all that morning. His passenger kept pointing and exclaiming, so it was not the most peaceful flight, but he took pleasure in hearing about what she could see. He found himself pressing her for details. Why was that stream pink and crimson, she asked? Because of an underwater river weed that bloomed in this season, giving it that extraordinary colour, he told her. Were the highest peaks white because of snow? Aye, all the year round. She had never seen snow, she told him. Desert girl. Well, those peaks were still three to four days' flight away, he informed her. Well above the height of his lair \u2013 over twenty-two thousand feet up there. The highest peaks reached thirty-one thousand feet, so high that even Dragons did not live at that altitude.\n\nThey discussed the strangely sloping peaks, which all appeared to lean to the west, like a Dragon's fangs tilted fifteen degrees from the vertical. This made for smooth rises from the direction of his right paw, while to the left, the drop-offs were sheer and even exceeded the vertical in many places. Majestic, mile-high cliff faces housed many caverns inhabited by Dragons throughout the Tamarine Range. This was wild Dragon country, she said, with a theatrical shiver he was quite sure was meant to be a tail-tugging tease.\n\nGood thing she was in the company of a wild, unprincipled beast then, right?\n\nHuman legends were full of Dragons who fulfilled the stereotype of the immoral, rapacious beast of everyone's nightmares. Had they never considered how noble Dragons shuddered to consider the foetid anthills Humankind called cities and dwelling spaces?\n\nSo many crammed together, living steeped in the squalor of their own filth \u2013 *blergh!*\n\nSurmounting the last of the wooded foothills, he brought her down for a rest beside a copse of mighty sequoia trees, giants over two hundred and fifty feet tall. The Rose of the Desert hurt her neck gazing up at them, she claimed. After helping her forage for some tart early-season loganberries and a handful of nuts, Blitz took to the air once more. Did he scent a hint of wood smoke? As they flew up a low, lush valley that snaked deeper into the mountains, he searched for that elusive trace until the Princess asked why he was so twitchy and nervous.\n\n\"I am not nervous, it is merely that I smell smoke,\" he corrected her loftily. \"That usually means bounty hunters, prospectors or Dragon slayers.\"\n\nShe pointed. \"See out there? There's a thin column of smoke \u2013 oh, maybe two miles ahead? Oh. Oh! Is that why you rub your eyes so much? I'm sorry, I mean no disrespect \u2013\"\n\n\"My eyes are fine!\"\n\nEven he shuddered at the scale-prickling lie. Her slight exhale proclaimed she knew the truth, too. The Princess must have seen him itching at these thrice-blasted membranes, which drove him crazy some days.\n\nGruffly, he said, \"My eyes are poor and always itchy. I \u2013 I apologise, Princess. I am not angry with you.\"\n\n\"How do you fly so confidently if you cannot see well?\"\n\n\"Scent traces, excellent directional sense and my detailed knowledge of the general terrain allow me to fly well enough,\" he said. \"Mountain shapes and valleys are recognisable blurs. I can always find my way home.\"\n\n\"Your home is beautiful. It's a shame \u2013\"\n\n\"Did I ask for sympathy? Blergh!\"\n\n\"No, but you have it. I am sorry if you feel that is a slight to your majestic draconic honour.\"\n\nThat chin was doing its pointy thing again. He scowled down at the inhabitant of his paw. She said honour, but she meant hubris. By his wings, she had known him the lesser part of a day, and already she saw so deep? Humans were not meant to have heart-scent instincts. Maybe this dark Princess was more dangerous than he had supposed \u2026\n\nNo. He was the Dragon! Always in control.\n\nShe was just a pipsqueak sitting calmly in his paw with her legs dangling a mile over nothingness, conversing with a flying Dragon as if royalty took lessons in the art. Too true, she was no make-believe Princess. Wingtips trembling in premonition, he wondered if she might not be a prize of the kind and quality her gold-grubbing father could not even begin to imagine.\n\nDragons had a seventh sense about these things.\n\nAye. Truth or not, he would squeeze that King of the Desert for every T'nagrun gold coin he had in his treasury. Her honour demanded no less."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "As he had warned, the journey to his mountain refuge was no trivial affair; a long and arduous flight almost due north from Vanrace. Fifty miles beyond the Humans' camp, the valley came to an abrupt end in a mighty waterfall, its white plume drawing a squeal of delight from his captive. Ah, awake again. She had nodded off in his paw. Since his three forward-facing talons made for her main seat, he had adjusted his grip so that his longer opposing digit could curl around her back, while the shorter rear talon, which pointed upward when he supinated his paw, clamped neatly across her right thigh. Safe enough. One should not drop the trophy so close to home.\n\nNot even if one's name was Blitz the Fritz, master of confusion and catastrophe.\n\nBlitz flew close to the apex of the waterfall so that the Princess could best appreciate the thundering flow. True, he meant to impress. Rising into noticeably cooler, thinner air thereafter, he turned west to follow the flow of the river deeper into the mountains. Their faces were lit by the ruddy giant red sun, setting so hugely behind the peaks, it covered a third of the sky.\n\nHe pumped his wings smoothly, riding an ebullient high-altitude airstream for a further twenty-nine miles until they approached a cluster of four west-facing peaks. Curving his flight once more, he skirted the southern slopes above an olive green coniferous forest, before making a sharp turn to his right paw, passing into the midst of the peaks. Gliding through a tiny hidden valley, he folded his wings and took the Princess on a wild ride down to the entrance of his lair, some three hundred feet below the valley, cunningly hidden in the fold of what looked like a natural fault line in the rock. Azania gasped as he tucked in his wings to negotiate the narrow entryway, before flaring wide to bring them to an expert landing in the sandy cavern just beyond.\n\nHe purred, \"Welcome to the Dragon's lair.\"\n\n\"I quiver in fear.\" She yawned, tottering upon unsteady legs.\n\n\"As well you should.\"\n\n\"Actually, my muscles have gone to sleep.\" The Princess smiled tiredly. \"It's cooler than I had imagined up here. I guess we are inside a cave, after all.\"\n\nShe chattered on to cover her fear, he decided. That hummingbird heart had not slowed since they landed.\n\n\"Come inside. It's deeper than you think, but perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"I can't see my own \u2013\"\n\n\"Place your hand upon my leg, and I'll guide you,\" he rumbled. \"See if you can reach my knee.\"\n\n\"Short jokes are never funny,\" she sniffed.\n\n\"How short is short?\" said he, patting her upon the head.\n\nNice Princess. Nice pet.\n\n\"Four feet and a whole eight inches, unless I contrived to grow since I was thirteen. Not happening. So I'm \u2026 compact. If your scales had pockets, I'd be pocket-sized.\"\n\n\"A pocket Princess? That'll do,\" he guffawed raucously. What a triumph, this day! \"We can find a lantern in a moment. Again, I assure you that no matter how much like a tiny appetiser you may feel just now, Dragons do not eat your kind. The idea is beyond vile. It is unthinkable.\"\n\nWas any idea truly unthinkable, given as he had actually just thought it?\n\nPerhaps a philosophy lesson in her edible properties would not be appreciated at this juncture. How did one welcome a Princess to one's lair, and give them the equivalent of wing space and ease? He walked the girl through to the inner branching chamber, the equivalent of a Human lounge or living space. Here, he picked up his flint striker and lit a couple of lamps, bustling about tidying a few stray items which must have escaped his notice upon departing.\n\nThe Princess of T'nagru looked about the grey-walled chamber curiously. Her hairy eyebrows, so different to draconic brow ridges, arched judiciously as she noticed the artworks hung on the walls up to a height of five times her diminutive stature. Her gaze lingered on a sculpture of four ruby-red Dragon hatchlings clinging to a horizontal branch, some seventy feet across the chamber.\n\nShe said, \"It's cosier than I imagined.\"\n\n\"It meets my needs.\"\n\nA broad stone hearth lay to her left hand, where Blitz liked of an evening to lounge on the huge leather floor cushions as he perused a book or scroll. Beside that was a cooking area, a worktop with storage shelves below and hooks above for his utensils, pans and spits for grilling meat. He realised that the worktop was taller than her head. Hmm. A problem for the morrow. Besides, this place must be as big as the average Human Great Hall. For her to call his lair cosy was a kindness.\n\nHe said, \"I inherited my home from Swoop the Devastator \u2013 my great-uncle on my dam's side. No bequest of treasure, unfortunately. That all went to my relatives. Old Swoop did like his creature comforts, hence the thick rugs, the floor cushions and this kitchen space. There is running water in the sink, courtesy of a diversion in a spring in the valley just above this cave. I'll see if I can't find a small ladder to help you reach it more easily.\"\n\nThe girl nodded. \"Thank you.\"\n\nPlacing the tubers on the timber worktop, he pointed to her right while fussily sweeping a few clods of earth into a wooden waste bucket. \"This first chamber is where I sleep. The next one's for storage. All sorts of interesting chests and paraphernalia in there \u2013 Swoop was quite the collector of Dragon and Human curios. Some even come from as far afield as the Vaylarn Archipelago.\"\n\n\"His plunder?\" she inquired.\n\n\"Aye, his plunder,\" he snorted. \"Would you prefer I use a more palatable word?\"\n\nThe Princess shrugged. \"Dragons do as Dragons do. Who are we poor Humans to complain about the destruction of our livelihoods?\"\n\n\"As if Humans don't steal or make war upon one another.\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026\" Now, an uncertain smile. \"Shall we argue about which species is the more evil or barbaric? We could be here a while.\"\n\nBlitz narrowed his eyes. Was she testing his patience?\n\n\"Do I spy a library through here?\"\n\n*Gnarr.* Her surprise made his right forepaw twitch in a desire to swat her, or at the very least, frighten that Dragons-are-animals attitude into submission. He said, \"Aye, that's my library. You are more than welcome to use it as you wish. The desk is not suitable for a creature of your woeful proportions, I must confess, but there are two old round couches in the corner that a pipsqueak of your dimensions might find comfortable.\"\n\n\"Thank you. What's through that archway?\"\n\n\"My studio.\"\n\n\"Your \u2026\" she blinked and rubbed her own eyes. \"I'm sorry, did I hear right?\"\n\n\"Aye! I forbid you to go in there! I've had enough of your prattling for one day. Make yourself comfortable \u2013 as comfortable as a captive Princess can be in a Dragon's lair! Make a fire. Cook food. Knock yourself silly against a wall!\"\n\nHe stomped off into his sleeping chamber, knowing but not caring that he was behaving like a hatchling throwing a fit. That woman! He might better apply spicy dragonroot peppers to his eyes! He would more happily clip his wings and tear his own scales off his body. One word sufficed. Insufferable.\n\nIN-SUFFER-ABLE!\n\nThe faster he could arrange to exchange her for treasure, the better, but he knew it would take time for the news to spread and the glory seekers to start to turn up. Would he earn so much as the attentions of a small army from the Kingdom of T'nagru? Or a few real Dragon slayers? That would definitely impress his Clan.\n\nTurning about twice upon his tough leather floor cushions, he arranged his bed to his satisfaction and lay down with a grunt. Why was he so cantankerous about hosting another creature in his space? He was too young to be a crusty old bachelor Dragon, wasn't he?\n\nChattering chit of a child. If she dared to step foot in his studio, he would fly into such a rage, the very mountains would tremble. Yet she was on her feet, exploring. He rose with a huff of breath and peered through the doorway. The lamplight advertised her presence in his library.\n\nPadding over with his utmost skill, he frightened her so badly she almost dropped the lamp. \"Blitz!\"\n\n\"That's my name,\" he grinned, immediately feeling one hundred times better about life. Shallow, but undeniable. He waved a talon. \"I forgot one detail. That way, through the back of the library, is a chamber where I scatter my droppings. The water flow will flush everything away. It is heavy with minerals, however, so you should rather drink from the kitchen tap \u2013 it's less bitter. You pump the handle to make the water flow.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\nAbout to return to his chamber, he paused. \"May your dreams soar, Princess.\"\n\n\"And yours, Dragon.\"\n\nCourtesy toward the captive? No, he would never be numbered amongst the great tyrants of his kind. He was weary of being grumpy, fractious and haughty. Time to shut his eyes. Tomorrow promised better things for this Dragon. Had his fortunes not changed? Did he not hold a Princess in his lair, one of the fabled black tribe of the desert?\n\n<Black is beautiful,> their scholars wrote. Beautiful meant expensive. Expensive meant a hoard stuffed with shiny treasures.\n\nIt was not as if she was near, but Blitz slept poorly nonetheless. His dream was one long, unending, panicked flight from a danger he never saw. He started awake in the early hours, his hearts thundering so loudly in his ears that for the longest time, he could not even hear the Princess' breathing. There. She slept in the library. Rising, he padded out of his sleeping chamber to check on her, finding her fast asleep in one of the circular-framed Human couches he had never quite decided to get rid of. She had tried to curl up beneath one of the smaller floor rugs, he saw, with a pang \u2013 aggravated he had not remembered how these Humans needed coverings for the night time as well. Such fragility.\n\nHis broken fore talon throbbed with pain.\n\nWhanged by a saucepan. Ah, the price of heroism.\n\nPicking up a lamp, he wandered through to the storeroom. Everything was neatly stacked and labelled. The only room where he allowed himself a mess \u2013 relatively speaking \u2013 was his studio. That was his creative space, messy only when he was working. The rest? He had been called 'obsessively neat' by his family.\n\nWalking four shelves down, he turned to his left paw and rooted out the correct chest. Aye. Three cheerfully patterned teal blankets with a fanciful Sea Dragon pattern stitched in crimson along the borders. How many might she need? She was tiny, even in comparison to her own kind. Not much by way of heat retention, if he remembered the science of body size correctly.\n\nPicking up two blankets, he retraced his steps. The rug had slipped onto the floor.\n\nSneakily, he placed the coverings over her person without waking her. Aye, he might be fifty-three feet and many tonnes of Dragon, but he could move noiselessly over fallen twigs in a forest.\n\nOnly one predator in this lair.\n\nRetreating, he paused in his lounge. Dratted digit! He palpated the spot carefully, wincing as the bones ground against one another. That needed to be set without delay. He had just the thing in his workshop, a segment of metal pipe that could function as a cast. Sighing, he lit his lamps, bathing his workroom in bright white light. The tool bench stood along the wall to his left, while straight ahead, fake rock walls concealed a wide window that could be opened to let daylight pour in. His easels and three half-completed canvases stood along the wall, in front of a large collection of neatly organised, finished canvases of miscellaneous sizes and shapes. No time for that now. Measuring the pipe, he scored a mark upon it with his talon, fixed it in a vice, and picked up his metal saw.\n\nThe Princess should sleep.\n\nHe set to work, sawing steadily but quietly.\n\nHalfway through, a voice from the doorway said, \"Can I help?\"\n\nOne Dragon very nearly scared out of his hide. His neck twizzled so sharply, the vertebrae popped. \"You!\"\n\nShe wiped the sleep out of her eyes with her sleeve. \"So, you're a painter? Figures.\"\n\n\"Figures?\"\n\n[ Virtue ]\n\nMurder had not been far from his mind last night, given the way the Princess had snuck up on him. With the aid of a small pair of hands, he managed to work the pipe onto his digit with extra wadding pulled through from the lower end and tamped into place, making for a decent splint. At least the bones were no longer scraping with every step.\n\nThen, he did sleep soundly.\n\nWaking was predictable until he smelled tubers grilling in herbs in his kitchen. He snuffled the air unhappily. Said cooking enterprise was proceeding about as effectively as his first leap off that tower, yesterday. He must have a bruise the size of a cart in the shoulder muscle.\n\nPrincesses of the legends were domestic mages, as skilled in the culinary arts as they were in the delicate arts of romantic diplomacy. This scent was much more along the lines of chargrilled, Dragon style. He was quite certain Humans preferred their meals lighter on the crunchy charcoal element, and ah, was that the whiff of a naughty word trapped by his ear canals, as Dragons would say? Well, Princess. Language that piquant was definitely not enshrined in the scrolls.\n\nPadding through to the cooking area, he cooed, \"How can I help?\"\n\nShe almost jumped into the fire. \"You \u2013 how do you do that?\"\n\n\"Do what?\"\n\nThe girl even shivered at his purr. What fun!\n\nPicking up his smallest pan from where she must have wrestled it into place on the tripod set above a neat fire she had lit, he flipped her tuber slices casually. A dab of fat or oil might have helped.\n\nScowl. Hands on hips. A posture he took to mean exasperation. \"I was doing fine.\"\n\n\"Princess, do you like your meals dead, very dead, or wholly cremated? Look, you need to learn to turn your food over before you destroy it. Good choice on the herbs, however. Those will complement the flavour of your tubers most agreeably.\"\n\n\"Well \u2013 I am a Princess, used to \u2026 not exactly used to cooking for myself. I'm sorry. Did I wake you from your beauty sleep?\"\n\n\"Beauty? Starting early on the insults, are we?\"\n\nHer tiny teeth showed through a startled smile. \"Wrong side of the \u2026 uh, bed, Dragon? Roost? Pillow? However you say that?\"\n\nHe stared suspiciously at her, not accustomed to this level of cheerfulness of a morning. Any morning. Ever. \"What does 'wrong side of the bed' mean?\"\n\n\"It means one feels out of sorts upon waking. May I prepare you something?\"\n\nJaded would have better described his condition. The shoulder was moderately awful and his body ached from the long, long journey \u2013 but somehow, he suspected her clever saying had nothing to do with shoulders. Or paws. More likely the overbearing attitude attached to them.\n\n\"When you learn to cook, maybe,\" he said, nudging her out of the way with his nose. \"Until then, good little captive Princesses should sit on my kitchen counter and look pretty, if they would like something that resembles edible food. Unfortunately, you are not a good Princess. I heard a bad, bad word earlier. Didn't your royal tutors beat that kind of language out of you?\"\n\nShe dimpled sweetly. \"Dragon, they surely tried. However, my jailors were less restrained with their language. I apologise. Did I offend your sensibilities?\"\n\nHere she went again. This was like trying to hold a sensible conversation with a thornbush.\n\n\"No, it just figures.\"\n\nFor the first time, he saw her very dark eyes flash with something other than terror or amusement. Touched a sensitive scale there, had he?\n\nBlitz the Devastator loomed over the girl, grinning broadly. He was quite sure a thought about her mortality crossed her mind just then. \"I'd hardly expect you to act like a proper Princess, would I? You being so very non-standard, so non-storybook and all that.\"\n\n\"I see. Well, that's all I meant last night, too. How many Dragon painters do you know?\"\n\n\"One. Me.\"\n\n\"Self-taught?\"\n\n\"From books and scrolls,\" he replied defensively. \"Dragons are not often accused of dabbling in the fine arts, one might say, apart from the finer arts of mayhem and destruction. I happen to love nature, and I love to paint it.\"\n\n\"I took ten years of classes and cannot paint like you. My chalk sketches are solid, but \u2026 you have a gift.\"\n\nHe stared suspiciously at her. Again, he smelled no lie. Either this Princess was a fantastic liar, or he must believe \u2026 no. He itched at his left wingpit uncomfortably.\n\n\"May I look through some of your other works, Dragon?\"\n\nWithout sounding as stiff as he felt, he said, \"I appreciate the compliment. Aye. I would value your opinion \u2013\"\n\n\"Smoke!\" she yelped.\n\nThat was the end of the tubers. They ended up starting over, and this time, managed to produce a perfectly toasted breakfast for Her Royal Highness, the Black Rose of the Desert. She declared it was inexpressibly better than dungeon fare. Truly an ode to the humble tuber.\n\nHe was not quite sure the average Princess who swanned her way through the histories and legends had quite this energetic a sense of humour. Nor the gumption to test it on a grouchy Dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "They managed to spend most of the day together without further vexation. Blitz tidied and cleaned. The Princess disappeared into the library. It was a fine collection of Dragon lore and legend, much of which he doubted even a Princess would have seen before. Upon reflection, that room was one reason why his reputation had spread. A Dragon who valued the lore enough to visit other Dragon Clans to ask for all their unwanted scrolls and books, or to copy the valuable ones, was peculiar enough to attract much comment.\n\nIt had been a year since he had flown out in search of lore.\n\nWeary of the embarrassment.\n\nLater, he prepared his brushes and paints, but mooched around his studio without the slightest flame of inspiration whatsoever. Even a spark would have been welcome. Gifted? Aye, at being a pariah. How did one even begin to introduce a captive Princess around the mountains? If he wanted her to be noticed, he would have to fly somewhere. Maybe visit his sire and dam?\n\nHe could not face that as yet. Not today.\n\nSo when the Princess came to him to ask if there was a place to bathe, and admired his close-up of a teal fire-crested river kingfisher, a snapshot of the wings outspread just before it swooped for its prey, her request came as a relief. Blitz gathered a fresh canvas, an easel and a pouch of supplies.\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nOne of the secrets of his lair was the passage that branched off behind the library chamber, climbing some four hundred and three small steps to the valley above. Even the tiny Princess could manage these steps.\n\nUp top was another of his favourite locations in the mountains. A brook gurgled down from the peak behind his cavern before spreading over a semi-circular ledge and falling in a fine curtain into a turquoise pool below. The curtain was four standard Dragon paces wide, or twenty-eight feet. His thoughtful great-uncle had long ago stocked the pond with fine trout. Herons fished around the shallows, and the tiny valley in which this natural masterpiece sat, was a mere three hundred and fourteen feet long and a hundred and twenty-two feet wide.\n\nAhem. That might be because some Dragon with far too much time on his paws had measured the place with exactitude.\n\nFurthermore, every last inch had been tended by a meticulous paw. One hundred and nineteen species of flowers. Forty-two different types of vegetables. Many different shrubs and trees had been chosen for their distinctive foliage, or their desirability to particular bird and insect species.\n\nAs they emerged from a door cleverly hidden behind the waterfall, the Princess gasped, \"Blitz, this is amazing!\"\n\nHe purred, \"Aye. I love the way the afternoon sun plays through the waterfall.\"\n\n\"It's paradise. Even the Royal Palace's terraced gardens have nothing on this. Did you plant it all yourself?\"\n\n\"I \u2013\" he bit back a natural desire to boast before a female \"\u2013 I built on my great-uncle's vision. I have added a great deal. You are welcome to forage here from the vegetable patches. I'm afraid there are no fruit or nut trees at this altitude, but in the valley we approached from, there are a few patches. Above this little waterfall, you'll find loganberries, arranberries, raspberries and currants, although not much will be ripe as yet. The pool is safe to bathe in. No-one will bother you up here.\"\n\nHer wan face was alight with wonder. She bounced on her tiny toes, like a Dragoness eager to take off. Aye. Clearly, she adored this location.\n\nHis fourth heart squeezed with a warming sensation. Perhaps this Princess would not be too unhappy in the dreadful lair of the Dragon.\n\nBlitz wandered off a short ways to erect his easel. He had many times tried to capture the effect of the waterfall, but the precise quality of the light radiating through the delicate curtain of water always eluded his grasp. He fussed about finding the right angle, while the Princess shucked her fine red dress \u2013 which reminded him that there might be some other Human clothing near the back of his storeroom \u2013 and began to step out of her leggings, when she stopped and made a circling motion with her finger.\n\n\"What is it?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Turn around.\"\n\n\"Is there something behind me?\"\n\nQuick glance. Clear skies. No horde of vengeful peasants wielding pitchforks.\n\n\"No, I mean, don't look at me.\"\n\n\"I am not \u2013 you \u2013 WHAT?\" His outraged blast knocked his easel flat. \"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?\"\n\n\"You are a male. Please, give me some privacy.\"\n\nHis pulse thundered through his body, making him clench his talons in an excess of rage. It took every ounce of his willpower to deny a desire to smite her for such a \u2026 he had no words. She dropped her gaze, staring at her bare toes, but her discomfort was more than clear.\n\nColossal offence! Unthinkable. Un \u2026 un-anything he cared to mention beneath the suns!\n\nEventually, he managed to grind between his fangs, \"Princess, you may have noticed that you are a Human and I am a Dragon. We are different species. How you can even suggest \u2013 anything that so violates the conscience \u2013 ugh!\" His wings shivered violently. \"Despicable, such an accusation!\"\n\n\"I didn't mean \u2013\"\n\n\"You did! I do not look upon you with desire! Well, not that sort of desire, I mean. Aye, I am guilty of calculating your value to my prospects of something resembling an honourable future amongst my kind, but Princess \u2013 there is not a bone in my body which does not revolt at the thought! Ah, the very heavens cry affront \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, you misunderstand \u2013\"\n\n\"No, you misunderstand. You think I'm an animal, an unthinking, rapacious, bestial \u2026 MONSTER!\"\n\nBlitz found he had stormed toward her, raising his fist to strike.\n\n\"I'm sorry!\" she shrieked, falling to her knees.\n\nShuddering, he let his fist fall. There was something else in her, a tinge of smoky blue shame that washed over his senses, betrayed by the way she had cringed from his anger.\n\nHe whispered, \"Only a beast would strike down a weaker creature over this misunderstanding. Princess Azania, I am not as Human men. I smell the mistrust and distress upon you \u2013 tell me, tell me truly, could it be that you fear all men must lose control of themselves because of your beauty among your kind? That you fear you trigger in them some beast of untameable passion? For I most certainly smell the fear that rules you now. It rules your tongue, and your heart \u2026\"\n\nA wild sob tore from her throat. \"Yes! Yes \u2013 how did you \u2013 Dragon?\"\n\nProwling toward her, he hissed, \"Who told you that lie?\"\n\n\"What lie?\"\n\n\"That it is your fault.\"\n\nThe girl stared at him, haunted of eye. \"It isn't?\"\n\n\"Your sire? Was it your sire?\" As she nodded, he thundered, \"Vile liar! He is a liar and a fool. That you should come to hate your beauty among your kind \u2013 it is a travesty \u2013 what are you doing?\"\n\nTearing off her leggings, she spat, \"You haven't seen the half of it yet, Dragon. Do you think you know something of Humans? Or of the ways of our hearts? Look at this.\"\n\nBlitz blinked. She was wearing some kind of \u2026 well, it had to be a magical device. There was a metal belt clamped about her narrow waist, attached with thin silver chains to similar belts fastened tightly about her upper thighs. A light blue magical field rippled around the centre of her body, where \u2013 well, he had no clear idea of Human anatomy, but he could hazard an accurate guess as to what this dark magic meant. He smelled it; saw the blackness rippling about the edges of his vision.\n\nHis scales prickled as if danger threatened.\n\nHe snarled, \"By my dam's egg, what is that thing?\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Dragon, let me introduce you to one of the wondrous inventions of white-haired old Mages stuck in their high towers. This is called a Mystical Virtue Protector, or MVP for short. The very latest. The best and most effective version money can buy. Father did not wish his investment to lose any value, do you see?\"\n\nNo curse words he knew even began to suffice.\n\n*Pah!* He spat aside. \"You said \u2026 your own sire locked you into \u2026 this thing?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"I must ask, could Prince Floric therefore, not have \u2013\"\n\n\"They told me their agents had stolen the code scroll from the King's own vault. Floric was more than equipped for what he intended.\"\n\nHe could not process what he was seeing and hearing. Human perversity was beyond imagination. Beyond evil. Blitz knew this was no trifling adventure anymore. No simple matter of a Princess of a faraway kingdom kidnapped to his mountain fastness for a tidy ransom. Few Dragons he knew would attempt to put themselves in her paws, or admit that perhaps they appreciated the merest talon tip of what it meant to be so shamefully used by one's own family.\n\nIn an unrecognisable voice, he snarled, \"Your sire exerts hegemony over your reproductive independence using this MVP device, and calls this virtue? Is he quite mad?\"\n\nKneeling on the cream sand beside the pool, the Princess' face registered confusion.\n\n\"Reproductive? No \u2026 no, this is all about virtue. Not dallying with a man, nor being able to be accused of anything of the kind.\"\n\n\"With whom, when and how much you \u2026 dally, Princess, is your choice. This thing is shameful and an abomination. It says far more about your society and your father than you.\"\n\nAzania said, \"My loving father cares for my honour.\"\n\nThe bitterness she expressed was like the smell of aloes on her skin. Blitz forced himself to focus on taking a very, very deep breath and to hold it for a count of ten before he did something truly and memorably idiotic.\n\nFinally, he said, \"By which love he means the economic value of your unsullied state, which this infernal prison supposedly guarantees?\"\n\n\"Aye, you could put it that way, Dragon. Worse, I am a disobedient daughter if I dare otherwise.\" She threw up her hands, scrambling to her feet. \"I would be called unchaste, wanton, a siren of the Lumis Ocean, a stain upon my kingdom's honour. I would be disowned. This is the fate of a woman born into the Human Kingdoms \u2013 although, I hear the culture is different, less repressive, in the Vaylarn Archipelago. I am both the victim and the cause of all these poor men's wandering, lustful thoughts. It's my fault if I do and my fault if I don't. How can I ever win?\"\n\n\"By my wings, woman, none of this is your fault!\"\n\n\"Enough, Dragon.\" She wiped her eyes. Leaking again. He knew whose fault that was. \"Let me bathe in peace.\"\n\n\"I shall allow you to do so, right after a wicked, unprincipled beast acts like a proper tyrant.\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Stand still.\"\n\nReaching out with his paw, he jerked back as a blue flash stabbed into his talon. *Kerack!*\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Be still! I've no wish to cut you again.\"\n\nThe Princess protested, \"This model is powerful enough to kill a man.\"\n\n\"Oh, stop. Now you're giving me ideas about strapping our flatulent Prince's pathetic little parts into this abomination. Permanently!\"\n\nDazed, disbelieving laughter quivered her body. She acted horrified that she had just laughed at his crude joke. Blitz prowled around behind the Princess, noting that the infernal device was the product of diseased intelligence. No padlock, no obvious lock even. The magic was solid. Would it be able to stand brute physical force? Force he must apply without squashing the Princess or tearing her apart like a rag.\n\nThe magic hummed as he slipped a talon down her back, flat, stiffening as a tingling turned to pain. \"You're alright?\"\n\n\"This magic is keyed not to affect the wearer. What are you doing back there?\"\n\n\"Removing it.\"\n\n\"You what? You can't \u2013\"\n\n\"How exactly are you planning to stop a despotic Dragon?\"\n\n\"By asking nicely?\"\n\n\"I find myself experiencing a highly convenient episode of deafness to your pitiful pleas, Princess.\"\n\nShe giggled nervously as he arranged four talons around her middle. One talon was smoking with the power pouring up into his body, but Dragons had their own magic. Right. Stiffening his grip, he began to exert pressure. The device whined forlornly. Being a Devastator, he was nothing if not a stubborn chunk of a Dragon. His shoulders bunched, swelling with power that for the very first time, he recognised as originating not only in the physical realm, but also within the hitherto faulty magical potentials inside his body.\n\nEven magically-enhanced metal could not resist for long. It gave up with a horrid squeal and one last, vicious jolt that sizzled right into the talon sheath of his left foreclaw.\n\nShakily, the Princess pulled the straps off her legs. Free.\n\nMight she fall over in relief?\n\n\"You lost a talon.\"\n\nHe glanced absently at his paw. \"Most of one. It'll regrow soon enough, and I say it's more than worth it for the riddance of that piece of garbage. Enjoy your bathing, Princess.\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to \u2013\"\n\n\"Be virtuous? Doesn't that come from here?\"\n\nShe glanced down. \"My diaphragm? Oh \u2013 my heart's up here, Dragon.\"\n\n\"How do you get by with only one?\"\n\n\"I manage.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "He did produce a respectable portrait of the waterfall in the following two hours \u2013 not a finished piece. It had a fanciful climbing rose rambling along one side of it. He debated adding the Princess, splashing about like a little brown otter, but eventually decided upon a white-beaked heron on one side to balance the roses, and a couple of kingfishers to liven up the centre.\n\nShe even soaked up the late burst of white sun like a Dragon. Flat rock, sunniest spot, perfectly at her ease despite not wearing a stitch of that ridiculous Human affectation called clothing.\n\n*Blergh!* Accused of inter-species feelings?\n\nHe needed to scrub his scales with a caustic until they were raw.\n\nEventually, he heard her shiver and rub at her thin arms. Aye. Despite being a mammal, she had little in the way of internal heating. Handling his canvas with care, he led the way back downstairs. She wanted something called a towel. A kind of thick cloth? Maybe his stores would have something. He could point her in the right direction, at least.\n\nWhile she rooted about in the back of his storeroom like a cheerful mole digging out its burrow, Blitz ambled over to his workbench to repair his talon damage. Dragon talons kept an edge like the finest steel. In olden times they had been used as daggers and wood carving knives due to their excellent durability and tensile strength. All part of the amusement of hunting Dragons for profit. Which highly intelligent creature would not enjoy being turned into a tasteful range of furniture, clothing and weaponry? Really. And Humans wondered why Dragons called them a scourge.\n\nMaybe he ought to turn this eighteen-inch length into a dagger, as a gift worthy of a Princess? She might appreciate a weapon. He would love to see her use it to carve Prince Floric's grasping fingers off his smutty hands. Or, to perform a swift surgical procedure. That filth deserved no heirs! In addition, his kingdom could do without being saddled with any more smelly little Prince Florics.\n\nOne ought to improve the world for future generations.\n\nWith an evil laugh, he bent over his left fore-talon, first sawing it into a rough point before employing a metal file to sharpen it. He really ought to take better care of his talons. Several were chipped or blunted. Deplorable laziness. If he wanted to properly introduce prospective Dragon slayers to what Dragons called 'right of paw,' he ought to make sure they were as sharp as razors \u2013 the better to carve those fools into tasteful sculptures.\n\nAfter improving the state of his talons, he rooted about beneath his workbench. Satisfied purr. What a memory! Here was a Dragon knucklebone which had once served as the handle for a dagger. The existing blade was a disaster, badly pitted and rusted.\n\n\"What are you doing, Dragon?\"\n\nHe looked up. Princess Azania wore a simple green dress, not one such as the peasants wore, but a style he thought a merchant's daughter might have chosen. It was an elegant floor-length day gown in emerald green silk, tightly gathered to her frankly tiny waist, and ruched at the shoulders but leaving most of her arms bare. She held her tiara in her right hand.\n\n\"You look good.\"\n\nWince. Masterful compliment there. Devastating work by the most non-devastating Dragon in history.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nHe made a circling motion with his right foreclaw.\n\nShe turned obediently, not without a dubious half-smile, causing the lustrous material to flare away from her bare ankles. \"It's old enough to be my grandmother's, but I love the style,\" she said.\n\nShyness? Blitz gurgled with pleasure. Could he read a female, or what?\n\n\"Hmm. I shall have to revise my opinion, Princess. You look truly wonderful in that colour, and the dress fits your diminutive frame most agreeably. Did you find some useful items in those chests?\"\n\n\"I did, thank you. And Dragon \u2013 Blitz \u2013 thank you, for \u2026 earlier.\"\n\n\"Nay, it is I who must thank you for the chance to practice being a horrid, overbearing, arrogant draconic tyrant. Just the medicine this Dragon needed.\" He showed her at least thirty fangs. \"Come over here, little morsel. Let me check if this grip is the correct size for your hand.\"\n\n\"You're making me \u2013\" she started visibly \"\u2013 a rusty dagger?\"\n\n\"No, no, NO!\" He pretended to wipe his forehead. \"By my wings, who let that ridiculously bad-tempered Dragon into this lair? The rusty junk will go. I'm replacing it with this talon.\"\n\n\"Your own talon?\"\n\nHer eyes welled up, glistening like onyx diamonds in the soft lamplight. This time, he had absolutely no idea what it meant. His special insight regarding the female mind was clearly a most short-lived episode. Predictable.\n\nTrying to lighten the mood, he said, \"How could I have failed to point out that every rebellious runaway Princess aspires to have her very own Dragon talon dagger? Nothing mediocre or obvious for Her Royal Highness, oh no \u2026\"\n\nLaughing, she came alongside to check the grip.\n\n[ Bounty Hunters ]\n\nThe following day, Blitz worked steadily on the dagger, shaping a tang to fit into the handle, and eagerly checking a few references in his library to make sure he had the cut, whetting and weight of the blade just right. Princess Azania disappeared into a diverting scroll, an introduction to Ancient Draconian talon runes. Well. He would not have imagined any Princess would display a passing interest in historical linguistics, but when he questioned her delicately about the subject, he found himself engaging with a keen, knowledgeable mind, despite its lamentably miniscule size.\n\nSewing, cooking and fawning over fatuous Princes, no. Dragon runes, aye.\n\nShiver the wings! Had this Princess cracked some sort of pre-cast mould when she was born?\n\nIn the evening, he introduced her to the art of grilling trout without outright cremation, prepared with a trio of vegetables basted in mountain herbs and a sparing dab of duck fat. The Princess declared it a most royal meal, even if she hardly did the trout justice. Appetite of a sparrow.\n\nHe polished off the fish despite not being hungry, and had her fish the tail out from between his fangs afterward. Fishy issues, eh? Oh, and she found a stray strip of cow intestine lodged further back. She was too polite to say so, but Blitz observed that the royal captive had taken on something of the hue of her dress when she withdrew her head from his maw. Halitosis. Hard to deal with that, given his deficiencies. Perhaps the Prince had been overwhelmed for reasons this Dragon would very much rather not own up to?\n\nThe following day, he flew his captive a couple of peaks over to the north to bathe in the hot springs there. Dragons did fancy a good soak in boiling water. Unfortunately, this was an error in judgment on two fronts: one, he learned that Humans did not tolerate being boiled alive very well, nor did the royal personage much fancy the sulphurous stench of the place, and two, there were no other Dragons about to admire his captive desert Princess.\n\nMost dissatisfying.\n\nHmm. Or should that be, dessert Princess?\n\nDragon humour.\n\nThe intrepid girl succeeded in finding a pool of a temperature that would not boil her soft skin right off, which resolved the first issue, but the second was sadly left dangling. Properly broiled to a roasting temperature, Blitz managed to produce a small puff of smoke. That was novel.\n\nLater in the afternoon, a weather front fresh from the Lumis Ocean loomed to the east, promising more fickle weather. Blitz pretended to see it when the Princess mentioned the very dark horizon, but the slight change in the air pressure was noticeable, as was the faintest tang of salt in the airstream. Taking the prisoner in paw, he repaired to his lair.\n\nLair, repair, take to the air. Definitely a rhyme that introduced an unexpected bounce to his wingbeat. He could use that in his poetry, another time.\n\nHaving described the retreating whiteness of the more northerly peaks, Princess Azania wriggled in his paw and pointed downward. \"Look, there's smoke again. Those bounty hunters must be right on the other side of the peaks you live on, correct?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" he agreed dubiously.\n\n\"Do they know the location of your lair, Blitz?\"\n\n\"I keep it secret, but the knights, hunters and slayers are known to exchange information about what they find in the mountains. My lair is actually one of the more southerly of all the mountain Dragon Clans. South and west of here is generally regarded as Devastator Territory. North, from west to east, we have the Crushers, Firestorms and Windchasers. In the central mountains there are at least nine Clans, including the Bonfires, Smashers, Wreckers and Obliterators \u2013 since we Dragons don't go for any kind of ridiculous theme in our Clan names, as you can tell \u2013\" the girl chuckled appreciatively \"\u2013 and up on the border of the Lumis Ocean, there are another fourteen Clans. I visited most of them before my \u2026 before my eyesight became so bad.\"\n\n\"Are you afraid of going blind, Blitz? Should we \u2013\"\n\n\"I don't need your help!\"\n\nBlitz flew the rest of the way in silence. What an ornery mood he was in. Why?\n\nA cracker of a storm kept them lair-bound for three days. Blitz finished the dagger for the Princess and presented it to her as a peace offering, which she clearly did not understand. It was a fine piece of craftsmanship, she said, thanking him politely before disappearing back behind a large tome of ancient Dragon legends. He scowled. Whatever was the matter with her, it had clearly bitten her badly, because she barely said a word to him all storm long. He retreated to his studio and in a frustrated frenzy, painted nearly all night long. Piece after piece. He slept deeply and woke long after the storm had blown over, he sensed. The lair was quiet.\n\nToo quiet.\n\nThe Princess had absconded.\n\nClever. She must have timed her escape so that the last of the storm washed away her tracks and her scent. Still, he rushed up to the tiny valley above his lair to check that she was not there.\n\nIt was entirely empty of snarky, atypical black Princesses.\n\nHow had he not seen this coming? She had been hiding her loneliness, her fear and all her sneaky plans from him. He found food missing. The talon dagger. A shoulder bag filched from his stores, flint and striker, and extra clothing. A blanket.\n\nHe narrowed his aching eyes, furious with himself. His future had just bolted out of his lair, and here he was, mulling over his misfortune?\n\nA real Dragon would get out there and find her. Yesterday.\n\nJealous rage pumped thick clots of silver blood through his Dragon hearts. That Princess \u2013 he roared, <Mine, mine, MINE!!>\n\nCharging out of the lair's narrow entryway, he took wing, searching in a frenzy of indignation. This Princess was no fool. She had noticed the bounty hunters and would have hooked up with them. In half a second flat, they would smell the T'nagrun gold upon her skin. Father dearest, the greedy King of T'nagru, who had such a flattering opinion of his daughter's honour, would give them a fat purse for the safe return of his favourite little economic asset.\n\nThe question was, knowing his weaknesses as she did, how would she respond? She knew he would come searching for her.\n\nStinking smart wench! He must adjust his opinion of Humans \u2013 some Humans \u2013 a notch or ten in an upward direction. Unconventional Princess that she was, she would take an unconventional approach. Hide? Take the unexpected trail? Have those fools lay a trap for a Dragon and make double the profit from his hide and parts?\n\nHe must take nothing for granted.\n\nFor the two hours before sundown, Blitz scouted the eastern and southern trails at high speed. He knew the terrain like the back of his paw. He might not be able to see much of the ground, but he had his magical, olfactory and auditory senses to rely upon. Landing periodically, he checked for the slightest signs of passage. On the eastern trail, he found plenty of evidence of the bounty hunters having travelled toward his lair, but no sign of a return journey. Their black Vanracian destriers, which the Princess had pointed at in delight, had been too lightly loaded to suggest that they came as prospective Dragon slayers. That usually required heavy equipment \u2013 nets, Dragon bows, ballistae \u2013 and sufficient men-at-arms to stage a siege.\n\nNo. They had not come this way. So, was it to be north into the mountains, or the more cunning and dangerous westerly trail that led into the coastal swamps of the Kingdom of Ayren? While there was still light, Blitz raced over to the northerly trail, checking three locations before deciding they had not come this way either. Would they have ridden hard for the swamps? Or holed up somewhere in the hope that he would give up the search?\n\nWhat about the gulley almost directly beneath his lair?\n\nThat would not just be clever. Diabolical was the word. Narrow, twisting and choked with vegetation, it was no place for a Dragon to be trapped. He could not use his wings in there. Weighted, cable-reinforced nets could very easily be affixed in places a Dragon must worm his way through. What would he do? Angling his wings, he swept around his four peaks upon their northerly side, flying lower and lower until his wings clipped the topmost branches of the hardy dark pines and redolent cypresses that grew in this area.\n\nHe landed a quarter-mile north of the trail, beyond the gulley. Stalking through the deepening twilight, he came noiselessly down to the faint trail, and found tracks. Enough tracks? No.\n\nBlitz the Devastator paused to lick his lips. \"Not fooled, little Humans.\"\n\nFalse trail.\n\nNow, how astute were these worms?\n\nAs he crossed the trail, his right hind paw snagged a tripwire.\n\nSplit second reactions threw him aside as a huge spiked log swept through the foliage from above, narrowly scraping past his rapidly departing hindquarters.\n\nSaid hindquarters quivered in horror. Had he been walking along the trail with his attention fixed upon those false tracks, he would have been forced to eat a few of those four-foot sharpened stakes. Well, eating them in a bad way. He doubted there would have been time to dig any pit traps, but he should take care. Another favourite was the ten-foot javelin attached to a whippy branch. Dragons tended not to fancy being made to eat those either, and that was before one came muzzle-to-face with all the nasty equipment the professional slayers loved to pack.\n\nInnovative, these malodorous cowards.\n\nAs were Dragons. Besides, he had fifty times the cranial capacity to work with. Best start to use it then, Dragon!\n\n\"So, worms. Let's see. Having set all of this up, you make camp down there in the gulley. Somewhere a Dragon cannot easily get into \u2013 like the section where all those trees grow close together. Where if he attacks, he might get stuck. And \u2026 the wind's shifted.\"\n\nWhy was he whispering to himself?\n\n\"Smell that wood fire? Aye. But is it a false beacon, or the real thing? They could not be having a drunken party, could they?\" He inhaled very deeply, sorting through the different tangs on the slight breeze. \"That ghastly rum they prefer. Whatever are those morons thinking?\"\n\nThey were thinking they were safe from attack.\n\nThat gave a Dragon pause. There must be other plans. Other ideas afoot.\n\nAn hour of careful stalking later, Blitz fairly much agreed with their assessment. Night had fully fallen. Having avoided several more traps, he now lay upon his belly above the gulley, looking down upon their camp from a height of one hundred and fifty feet.\n\nThe Princess was dancing beside the fire.\n\nWhy did Humans find that motion so attractive? Dragon dances were nuanced, formal affairs where the flick of a tail, the angle of a wing or a flaming glance told much. This display was so barbarous, so primitive, it was actually fascinating. Like watching a worm wriggling in a bird's beak.\n\nThe scene had blurred into and out of focus several times, so he had a fairly good idea of what was going on. Nine bounty hunters, seven males and two females, were drinking around a bonfire while taking it in turns to prod the Princess with their spears or sword points to encourage her efforts. Her hands had been lashed behind her back. His thoughts vacillated as he stared downward, no longer able to see details. She could go with them. Eventually, they would find a way of returning her to the Kingdom of T'nagru and some people would get rich and others might perish for the riches.\n\nHe would lose his chance to change his life.\n\nYet, from what he smelled down there, he was not convinced she would make it home. It was hard to smell out a person's intent from this distance, but the hints of yellows and burned oranges he sensed suggested that dancing was the least of the entertainment the Princess might be forced to provide these louts.\n\nHe had torn off her best protection against outright assault.\n\nThe camp lay deep in a copse of fir trees. Those to the north were older and thicker than those to the south. An attack from above did not appear to be possible, unless he envisioned a future as a very large Dragon kebab spitted by a dozen splintered trunks, say. The ground level was perhaps twenty feet wide, which would have precluded flight even if the gulley had been free of obstacles.\n\nJust now, a shout rose from below. \"Sword! She \u2013 urgh!\"\n\nDefending herself?\n\nBlink, blink \u2013 freaking fires take it \u2013 *blink!*\n\nMen piled atop a wriggling form, struggling to truss her with more ropes. Another hung back from the fire, clutching his shoulder, his face drawn with pain. Another frustrating distortion later, and he saw that the bounty hunters had strung her up between two trees, her tiny arms flung wide as if pleading with them for mercy. The injured man had picked up a whip. He stood before her, coiling the weapon in his hand.\n\nThere was a muffled argument down there. Probably something to do with her value. He was sure that damaging her hide would reduce the prize's value.\n\nBlitz's talons clenched on the stone. Whips were meant to be cruel. Yet nothing in all of his reading could have prepared him for this moment. *Crack!* A sound like a boulder split by a chisel. The Princess jerked as if she had been stung by an invisible wasp. Her thin scream dived through his ear canals straight into the core of his brain, shattering his reserve. His head rose, searching. Calculating. *Crack!* Nostrils flaring as he tested the scents of the night. Shuddering at the tenor of his fury.\n\n\"Strip her down! You think you're screaming now, Princess? By the time I'm finished with you \u2013\"\n\nHe saw one way. It might end badly, but it was also the only way, because he was going down there to fetch her back whether they liked it or not.\n\nWhy hesitate? Her vulnerability was his fault.\n\n*Crack crack-KRACK!* The whip lashed the air, threatening.\n\nCoward! Go!\n\nThe man with the whip cursed violently, spewing the dark taint of his fury as Blitz poured down from above. His initial rush was almost silent, made on his belly as he slipped vertically down the side of the gulley, dislodging rivulets of dust and stones. There was enough of a gap between the stone wall and the trees for a large Dragon to wedge himself into that space.\n\nHer value had nothing to do with this. A craving for justice burned like bile in his throat.\n\nThe downward-sloping fir branches yielded to an avalanche of Dragon flesh. They would spring back, trapping him like the flanges of many crossbow quarrels. He thrust rational thought aside. Focus on the man down there, frozen in the act of raising the whip to strike, for he heard the commotion, but his mediocre brain failed to respond in time. Blitz smelled his shock. Clutching a pawful of rocks as he careened helplessly down into the narrowing gap, smashing branches and grunting at the larger impacts, the Dragon chose his moment and hurled the load at the group by the fire. They scattered with terrified yells.\n\n*Crunch!* His attack came to an abortive end at the foot of a large fir tree right behind the man wielding the whip. The reek of his unwashed leather garments and rank, boozy sweat mingled with a sudden spurt of acidic fear. Tremble, victim! Firelight flickered between the trees, lighting the scene with garish, confused impressions. Only the man right in front of him was clear in his sight.\n\n\"Dragon!\" he squealed.\n\n\"Aye, you blithering idiot, what did you expect?\" Blitz agreed spitefully.\n\n\"Run!\" someone yelled.\n\n\"Off you go, then!\" Reaching around the tree, he swatted the man with all of his strength.\n\nBack-pawed. Like flicking away an annoying insect. The man crashed into the trees twenty feet or so to his left and dangled there, spitted like a sheep to a spit-roast.\n\nBefore him, his gaze finally found the Princess' face, drawn and shocked; a crimson runnel of blood trickled from her neck and down the front of her green dress. Her left flank was cut as well, her life's liquid staining the material.\n\nShe cried, \"Blitz! Cut me free!\"\n\nHe was pretty well jammed in place. Could he reach her? Stretching his paw to its utmost, he came up a foot short of her ropes. His talons sliced the air haplessly. One more foot!\n\n\"Get him!\"\n\n\"Stupid worm's got himself stuck!\"\n\n\"Watch his fire!\"\n\nThe bounty hunters rushed around behind the Princess, grabbing weapons, panicking, stepping in their own fire by accident. While he enjoyed the resultant screeching dance, this Dragon was less happy about the pain to come when they started finding the gaps between his scales with those spears of theirs. There was a splintered branch stuck in his belly as well. Really, really not a good idea. Flexing his back, he pushed against the tree. Too strong? Too well-rooted? He shut his eyes. No time for weakness, Dragon! The lily-livered bumpkins gathered together for courage, holding their spears at the ready.\n\nMuscles swelled. His hearts pumped madly. The tree groaned as he shifted and braced his paws, ramping up the pressure.\n\n\"Stab him \u2013 go for the neck, the eyes! This is the fireless worm, remember the report?\"\n\n<DEVASTATOR!!>\n\nHe was not prepared to die like this. The pungent fir groaned as he gathered his power. Even that roar did not faze them. He snapped his fangs toward two of the men menacing his head. The way he was stuck behind the tree meant that his belly was exposed. Spear! Blitz groaned as the pain bit deep somewhere in the muscle of his inner right thigh. They were seeking a crippling strike \u2013 but his tail was free! Lashing it downward, he smashed one of the men on the head with the very tip.\n\nThe man crumpled.\n\nAgain! He shoved against the tree, making it rock.\n\nJavelin in the chest! The attacker drove it deep, using his full body weight. Another man leaped in to help. Ignoring the pain, Blitz swung with his talons, striking for the first man's knees. He jumped nimbly, but landed upon a scaly wrist and stumbled. Bad luck. His other paw reached around the tree. *Blam!*\n\nThe second man leaped away with a cry, leaving the javelin embedded deep in his chest.\n\nOnce more! Rolling his body, he pressed harder. The huge, tough old fir began to tip, its roots pinging free of the dirt. The men rallied each other with cries, stabbing toward his eyes with their spears, but all he could think of was to reach the Princess, to cut her free. No! Grab a weapon! Snatching a sword out of a hand waving haphazardly in front of his eyes, he reversed it in his deft grip and lunged for the girl. *Swish!* She tipped sideways, one hand freed.\n\n\"Sword!\" He tossed it.\n\nIt was her talon dagger. The one he had made for her.\n\nThe blade landed in the dirt beside her feet. He groaned with every bone in his body. Useless. He could never get anything right! The two women were trying to drive that javelin right through his leg. He kicked hard, knocking them off. Go, go \u2026 do something! Anything, you stupid worm, anything not to die!\n\nPrincess Azania picked the blade up with her toes and, with an impossibly limber flexion, transferred it to her free hand. *Swish!* She was free.\n\nHe fully expected her to bolt.\n\nFlee into the night.\n\nInstead, the tiny chin lifted in that mannerism he had come to recognise. A girl with the courage of a Dragoness. Maybe, like him, she just had to learn what she could do.\n\nDarting forward into the pool of warm firelight, she cut down one of the men menacing his head. Another drove a javelin into his cheek and tongue. The sensation was more pressure than pain. All he saw was a silver blur as she arched backward, somehow dipping her body beneath the sweep of a whistling blade, before spinning about in a near-kneeling position with the dagger extended. Her movement was dance. The very dance he had been disparaging, flowed through her now as she sliced a hunter's booted foot right out from beneath him. A man swung his axe toward her unprotected back. Blitz filled his chest with talons. The bright, metallic tang of blood filled his nostrils. Strange emotions swelled his hearts. Fearful ardour for battle. Smoky recklessness. A lust for destruction.\n\nThe Princess whirled to her feet, dagger held at the ready. \"Thanks, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Least I could do.\"\n\nTwo men broke for the Princess. His right forepaw, twisted beneath his body, jerked out to trip up the one closest to her. Azania swung her knee in a short, brutal arc. *Crack!* That sounded bad. He was not sure Human necks were supposed to do quite what that one was capable of. She exchanged blows with the other, more than competent with a blade in the hand.\n\nNow he was beginning to wonder if she even was a Princess.\n\nHer courage fired him up.\n\n[ Ignita ]\n\nStrength raged through his body, making eerie black specks dart around the edges of his vision. Setting his shoulder to the fir tree, Blitz tensed every muscle in his huge body. He thundered, <DEV-AAASTA-TORRR!!>\n\nWith a great groan, the tree toppled.\n\nSquirming over the trunk, he corralled the two female bounty hunters with his talons and tail. \"Going somewhere?\"\n\nOne leaped over his tail and fled with a wild cry, only to stumble and fall. She did not rise again. The other tried to retreat, but found herself trapped. She shrank against his belly, terrified. He snatched her up in his paw. \"Want to die?\"\n\n\"Blitz. It's over.\"\n\nThe Princess stalked toward him, holding out her hands in a peaceable gesture. He panted harshly, his paw twitching as it ached to clench and end this flea's life forever.\n\n\"Not in cold blood,\" the Princess added. Facing the last woman, she said in a cold voice, \"Especially since I'd prefer not to have to clean all that nastiness out of her clothing before I wear it.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" said the woman.\n\n\"Huh?\" said Blitz.\n\n\"Get undressed. I need decent trail clothing. Yours will do nicely.\"\n\nThe light-haired woman spluttered, \"Mine?\"\n\n\"All of it. Dragon, if you please? She appears to require encouragement.\"\n\nTaking his cue from the murderous-looking Princess, Blitz curved his neck around until he could grin right in the woman's face. Plenty of fangs. Probably a terminally violent case of Dragon breath in addition. \"How can I improve your hearing, wretch?\"\n\nShe seemed to exhale and be out of her clothing in one gasp. That quick.\n\nApparently, Dragons were nothing if not persuasive.\n\nThe Princess stopped the woman at her lower underwear. \"Not those. Too nasty. Now, be off with you.\"\n\n\"Barefoot? Unarmed? Into the wilderness?\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to be generous after how you treated me?\" His senses flickered white at her taut tone. \"Take a sword and begone \u2013 no, wait. I want you to spread the word that this mighty Dragon, Blitz the Devastator, has abducted the Princess Azania N'gala of T'nagru, the Black Rose of the Desert. He is holding her prisoner in his lair.\"\n\n\"He is?\"\n\n\"I'm a brutal and despicable tyrant,\" Blitz agreed, realising from the quirk of Azania's lips that he was probably overplaying his paw. \"I hung your companion off that tree for fun.\"\n\nThe man he had first swatted was alive, actually. Not for long, given the way a branch had pinned him through his torso. Unfortunate.\n\nThe Princess said, \"I believe my father, King N'gala N'gala, will pay a substantial reward for news of his daughter's fate.\"\n\nHold on. Hold every wing! \"What are you doing?\" he hissed.\n\n\"Getting myself rescued, at some point. I'm not in much of a hurry, to be frank,\" said she, waving the woman on her way. \"Clear off now. Go make yourself some money carrying my message to T'nagru. Can you manage that much?\"\n\nPausing to snatch up a weapon, the nearly-naked woman bolted into the trees.\n\nBlitz stared suspiciously at the Princess. \"Are you trying to get me killed? You fairly much invited every Dragon slayer in the eleven kingdoms up here to drill holes in my hide.\"\n\n\"First of all, Dragon, the kingdoms number seventeen.\"\n\n\"Side note.\"\n\n\"For pity's sake, just accept that you're wrong, you wretched reptile. Secondly, I have an idea about that. Are you badly hurt?\"\n\n\"A few minor scratches.\"\n\n\"Scratches as minor as your overweening draconic pride, shall we agree?\" He gnashed his fangs politely beside her legs, making her jump. \"Stop that!\"\n\n*Hurgh-hurgh-urgh,* he laughed horribly.\n\nNo startlement this time.\n\nShe shucked her green dress efficiently, hissing between her teeth as the material peeled away from her wound. Blitz volunteered to check the bounty hunters' packs for bandages. One of them might have maintained a glimmer of intelligence in his woefully undersized cranium, although the idea struck him as doubtful. He returned to find her fitting the odd piece of cloth about her upper body. It appeared to function as a kind of sling. Puzzling. She had cleaned the whip cut, which was only oozing a little of her weird blood now. Crimson blood! Who would have thought?\n\n\"Why are you strapping your mammary glands to your chest?\" he inquired.\n\nThe Princess threw him an astonished, perplexed and profoundly discomfited glare. \"Dragon \u2013 you! You're impossible! I thought we discussed this \u2013\"\n\n\"Discussed what? Is this physical feature attractive to males of your species? Is that why you hide them?\"\n\n\"We are not discussing my bosom!\"\n\n\"You have a special word for \u2013 ah, all those literary references. This explains so much! At last, I understand all those ridiculous sonnets describing hands pressed against palpitating bosoms \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! Go head-butt that tree over there.\"\n\n\"But are these \u2013 fleshy lumps \u2013 attractive? It hardly seems likely.\"\n\n\"Blitz! Will you shut your fangs? In just the same way as I find the idea of females being attracted to your flashing man-trap of a grin or vast, scaly behind, I suppose so! Can we stop talking about this? Now?\"\n\n\"Answer my question, pest! Are they \u2013\"\n\n\"Mesmerising,\" groaned the man impaled to the tree. \"Drive a man insane \u2026 so exquisite \u2026\"\n\n\"By my wings, this sounds serious,\" Blitz quipped.\n\nAzania kicked his leg.\n\nA ghastly smile twisted the man's lips as he stared down at the startled pair. \"Dragon, I can tell you this much. Having seen \u2026 the Desert Princess \u2013 nude \u2013 I can die in \u2013\"\n\nHe slumped, no longer breathing.\n\nQuite dead.\n\n\"I had no idea you carried such lethal weaponry, Princess.\"\n\nShe kicked him again. \"Disgusting male.\"\n\n\"He died happy.\"\n\n\"I know. Life is peculiar, isn't it?\"\n\nThere was one small problem. With four sticks poking out of his hide, he was not in the best shape. That one in the chest was particularly deep, touching his third heart, he sensed. This was beyond his normal capacity to treat. He needed to seek medical help, fast.\n\n\"Princess, my injuries will require urgent treatment.\"\n\nShe glanced up from pulling on her new boots. They were soft leather, covering her legs up to the knee. Above that she wore the purloined leather trousers and a blue button-up shirt. Their victim had been suitably diminutive, so the outfit hugged her frame like scales hugged a Dragoness. He thought about inquiring if this more flattering tailoring \u2013 in his jaundiced opinion \u2013 would attract males to her thighs and haunches, since Human males appeared to value tiny things, but decided against.\n\nShe already thought him some kind of draconic pervert.\n\nFrankly, if she only knew how Dragons viewed Humans, that idea would be farthest from her mind. She would also be kicking him far more regularly. Silly chit of a girl.\n\nThe Princess said, \"How can I help?\"\n\n\"You're staying?\"\n\n\"I'm choosing to help you, since you saved my life, which is becoming a habit. The only worse habit you appear to have, is injuring yourself whilst rescuing me.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"It appears I have inadequate skills in wilderness survival, and worse still in dealing with my own kind. I am deeply grateful. You're amazing, Blitz.\"\n\nHer tone communicated incredulity that he had bothered with a Princess like her. He tasted her shame and contrition. What else was passing behind those dark eyes, he could not guess.\n\nUnexpectedly, he recalled that burst of amusement they first shared over Prince Floric's tumbling headfirst down the stairs. A connection made in the most unlikely circumstances. Ever since, for both creatures, preconceptions had been tumbling, biases dissolving, taboos crumbling \u2013 even in such a short time. What did it all mean?\n\nShiver his wings!\n\nInclining his head graciously, he said, \"You are certainly capable with a blade.\"\n\n\"Haven't you read the legends, Dragon? Every rebellious Princess secretly trains at weapons in flagrant disregard of their fathers' wishes.\"\n\nHe snorted merrily, \"Predictable? You?\"\n\nThe slender shoulders rose. \"I trained for years at sword and dagger, open hand combat, archery, riding and battle strategy \u2026 and still got myself captured in five seconds flat.\"\n\n\"An accomplishment of rare skill.\"\n\n\"Perfect ambush. Distraction, thump over the head. I've a nice lump to show for it.\" She touched the back of her head gingerly. \"Last time I trust another woman. No mind. I'm not the one with holes in my hide \u2013 well, a couple. Seriously, Blitz, how urgent is this? What can I do?\"\n\n\"Well \u2013\" he shook his head slowly \"\u2013 the nearest capable help is a thirty-five mile walk away. My Great-Aunt Ignita. Quite the character.\"\n\n\"Can't fly?\"\n\n\"Might just be properly fatal,\" he noted soberly. \"I'll need a healthy dose of dragonip weed just to survive the walk, but that'll probably make me hallucinate. Think you can keep me on track?\"\n\n\"Just tell me what to do. I'm all ears.\"\n\n\"I'll brief you. Right now, we need to climb out of here. Get up onto the back of my neck. Here, behind my skull. You can hold onto my ear canals.\"\n\n\"You want me to sit on you?\"\n\nThank his dam's egg for the utter incredulity that laced her voice, otherwise he might just have nipped her head off for that comment \u2013 and, his grumpy alter ego popped up once again. Why did this Dragon feel as if his world were tipping in weird and wonky directions every time they started talking? Could not be teenage hormones. Those were long gone. In fact, he had barely experienced them in the first place, unlike his brothers, sister and peers.\n\nBlitz growled cheerfully, \"Don't get used to it, or I'll have a turn sitting on you. Understood?\"\n\nShe winked at him. \"Perfectly clear, sir Dragon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "With the wary Princess hanging on to his skull spikes in lieu of investigating the contents of his ear canals, Blitz leap-charge-scramble-flapped his way out of the gulley with something that approximated success. Right after he struggled over the top, he toppled forward and slammed down upon the javelin impaled in his chest.\n\nHe slumped, groaning between his fangs. Definitely the third heart. Not good.\n\n\"Blitz! Are you alright?\"\n\n\"No, but I am alive. That's good enough for now.\"\n\n\"Please stay that way, you great lump.\"\n\nBy his wings! He was not quite sure he heard the insult through the agony roaring in his ears. This scrap of humanity would not dare, would she?\n\nSetting off at a mile-eating lope, he briefed her on the trail ahead. In detail. He had her repeat the salient landmarks and, on further thought, the secret family greeting code one should use to alert Aunt Ignita to visitors. She tended to eat them otherwise. Or, at the very least, threatened to eat them. No Dragon he knew had ever tested her on the matter. Not even in groups of twenty.\n\nOne scary Dragoness.\n\nStill, her reputation as a healer spanned the Tamarine Mountains. He warned Princess Azania not to get herself eaten. Not even if she deserved it.\n\nRoyalty itself chortled at his weak jokes.\n\nFor the first hour, Blitz paralleled the main trail but did not step paw upon it. Finally, wings trembling and mind afire with pain, he stumbled across a large patch of cheerful blue dragonip weed and barely waited to calculate the dose before tearing into the numbing bounty. The point stuck in his upper hind leg scraped against the bone with every step. The Princess had managed to draw the javelin clean out of his cheek and tongue, leaving a decent hole. One javelin stood proud in his upper right flank, but that wound hardly hurt at all. The severest by far was the chest wound. That throbbed with every step. He was fairly certain he could feel constriction around the heart as his blood pumped into the surrounding muscle tissues.\n\nAfter that, he hit the main trail at a run. His instinct was to get as far as possible, as fast as possible, but they did pause to check that the bounty hunters had not created their false trail this far. All clear.\n\nTwo hours and nearly twenty miles later, he stumbled and fell for the first time. Stars swirled gently around his vision. The grass tickled his belly with indescribable comforts. All he wanted to do was to lie down and sleep forever.\n\n\"We have to keep going, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Is that a mosquito?\" he asked dreamily.\n\n\"No, this is Princess Azania \u2013 your worst nightmare, apparently.\"\n\n\"Nightmare?\" *Murr-hurr-hurr.* \"Nice to meet you, Princess Flaming \u2026 Nightmare.\"\n\nShe chivvied him on. A mile further down the trail, he saw a massive column of army ants marching toward them. He sprang into the bushes. A voice chirped in his ear that everything was alright, he just had to keep walking. Two miles later it was a pack of spectral timber wolves, and then a black panther that actually turned out to be real. The gentle, insistent fairy whispering kaleidoscopic dreams into his befuddled brain kept him moving over another deep but narrow gulley \u2013 which he stepped over rather than daring the short rope bridge \u2013 fording mountain streams, straightened him out after he took four circles around a copse of towering sequoia trees, and walked him through another phantasm involving him running through rows of laughing relatives with mushrooms for heads.\n\nThis dragonip stuff was potent.\n\nHilarious, too. Guffawing all the way into his grave.\n\nHe laughed his way up four waterfalls before walking straight into a boulder the size of a Human barn. He shook his head blearily. \"Where did that spring from?\"\n\n\"Come on, Blitz. Just a few more miles.\"\n\n\"Smiles? I can talk about shh \u2026 miles. Smiles.\" He swayed on his paws. \"Where's up gone? Why are my paws floating in the clouds?\"\n\n\"This way.\"\n\nHe head-butted the boulder again. \"It jumped at me! Bad boulder.\"\n\nThe fairy hands and voice guided him away from the misbehaving boulder and further up into the heights, away from the main trail. Peaks flattened into dreamy, wildflower-strewn mountain pastures that he kept wandering aimlessly through, before suddenly there was rushing wind and falling and someone yelling at him to spread his wings. He did so belatedly. Pain shot into his left ear, making him obey by swerving sideways. Naked rock whistled past his paws. Oh. Far too close!\n\nSomething was clamped into his ear canals, leading him about like a sheep!\n\nHe found himself gurgling with mirth. Nothing and nobody could lead a Dragon about like an ox tied to the yoke.\n\nAfter that, the sky smeared into the ground, but the ground was water that exploded around his belly as he crash-landed heavily at the edge of a reed-fringed lake. He knew he was near \u2026 something important, but the memory no longer held the slightest importance. Someone was moaning that he had nothing left. No strength, nor fire, nor anything that marked him a Dragon. He must have stumbled and collapsed a dozen times under the increasingly strident goading before he collapsed at the edge, his head resting high enough on the bank that he could breathe without fear of choking on water.\n\nThe glowing black night fairy left him, saying she was going to get yelp.\n\nYelping whelping helping \u2026 nice rhymes \u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Blitz jerked out of a pit of endless darkness as colours exploded in circular rainbows behind his eyes. He tried to roar, but the sound was more a pathetic mewl of pain.\n\n\"Good to hear you sound like a half-dead river toad, nephew,\" said a scratchy old voice.\n\nWhat was that stench, an acidic fizzing in his nostrils? He snorted, sneezed violently, and regretted the pain that ripped through his body.\n\n\"Can't \u2026 see?\" he groaned.\n\n\"Perhaps opening your eyes might help, although nobody listens to a thorny old Dragoness these days,\" the voice complained. \"Nobody visits me anymore. You don't care for your old Great-Aunt Ignita, do you?\"\n\n\"Ignita!\"\n\nForcing his eyes open, Blitz found himself lying at the edge of a pretty lake. The waters were clear and calm, the reeds tall, the peaks behind a blur. As usual. It was dawn, but the dawn chorus had fled in honking chorus to the far side of the waters, where they were scolding the pair of Dragons for disturbing their peace and quiet at the same time as singing lustily. Odd combination. His left eye rolled tiredly in its socket like the rusty bearing of an abandoned cart, and fixed upon a familiar dark face.\n\n\"You \u2026 still here?\" he slurred.\n\nSomething was amiss with his mouth.\n\n\"Like an unwelcome royal rash,\" the Princess agreed brightly. \"How are you holding up, Blitz?\"\n\n\"Cold and wet behind the ears. Can I \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't move!\" They both yelled at him at the same time. Well, Great-Aunt Ignita bellowed, while the Princess yelped at a painfully shrill pitch. He froze.\n\nIgnita snapped, \"Apart from nearly killing yourself with a severe overdose of dragonip, young lizard, you sent this Princess \u2013 who is totally lovely, by the way; we've had such a congenial chat this morning \u2013 eight miles through the mountains in the dead of night to fetch aid. Nearly ate her, I did.\"\n\nAzania giggled merrily.\n\nCongenial? She whose tongue was a cactus? Something was wrong here \u2026\n\n\"I fully appreciate the temptation,\" Blitz agreed absently. His brow ridges drew down as a couple of stray thoughts had a chance meeting inside his large cranium. \"You hiked all the way from this lake to Ignita's lair in the dead of night? Through Dragon territory? Safely \u2026\"\n\nHe was quite certain any common, reasonable Human ought to be dead or digesting inside a predator's stomach at this point.\n\n\"I killed a huge python along the way!\"\n\nPresumably, some creatures were too troublesome for even the most rabid predators to bother with. He could name one prime candidate.\n\n\"Tiddler. A mere twelve feet long,\" Ignita snorted, billowing smoke from her ear canals rather than her nostrils. The forty-foot lime green Dragoness wore half a swamp's weeds and reeds by way of bodily decoration, which made his world feel infinitely more normal. \"Still, it'll make a decent snack. Great-nephew, this courageous Princess saved your handsome but undeniably reckless and brain-deficient hide. What do we say when someone saves our life?\"\n\n\"I'm glad my great-aunt didn't eat you alive?\"\n\n\"Blitz the Devastator!\"\n\n\"Alright, keep your scales on, great-aunt,\" he said, with a rakish grin that really did not work at all, since his tongue was dangling limply out of his jaw, he realised. Lunatic. He tried to pack his tongue back somehow into a place where speech was more possible and less humiliating. \"Princess Azania, I am indebted. Of course, no self-respecting royal radical would even consider not placing herself in mortal danger for a Dragon who has kidnapped her to his lair, but there we go. Your courage \u2013\"\n\n\"If we're keeping score, you are still one up,\" she sniped.\n\n\"I wasn't, but this Dragon thanks you from the \u2013 how do you Humans say it \u2013 from the bottom of all five of his hearts?\"\n\n\"Five? Braggart,\" she whispered, but she placed her hand daringly upon the side of his muzzle, between his large nostrils and his startled eye. \"I'd hug you, but Ignita has warned me in no uncertain terms that the slightest sign of physical affection will result in the loss of a limb.\"\n\n\"I'm a modern Dragon. The meaning of affectionate Human gestures is not unknown to me.\"\n\n\"Very well. Laying my life on the line here \u2026\"\n\nWhen she hugged his neck, however, not even able to reach around its thickness, his five hearts did some very strange arrhythmic dance. By his wings, was this some peculiar Human emotional magic? Raising his paw, he sort of hugged her back. Bizarrely weak.\n\nIgnita was vocally unimpressed by this display of undraconic behaviour, and set about explaining a few things at a strident volume. His great-aunt was not known for mincing her words. Most of the family thought she was crazy, but he had always got on with her like scales and hide. Maybe that was because they were both unusual characters. A mismatched pair of freaks.\n\n<Modern? You, Blitz? You are a refreshingly old-fashioned young Dragon!> the elderly Dragoness growled in Draconian, baring a set of fangs that was still in excellent condition. <At least you have a sniff of an idea of what honour looks like, unlike your two feckless brothers. Case in point, you had the excellent sense to kidnap this incomparable Princess, and not only to kidnap her, but to treat her with respect.>\n\n<Blaze will say the same.>\n\n<Your sire? All the vision of a blind mole-rat, that Dragon. I'd clout you over the earhole if I didn't think it would kill you even faster than you already attempted on yourself!> she roared, spitting white sparks over his flank. <Ignita the Devastator says so, and that is a Dragon of an entirely different colour. Shut your idiot fangs and for once in your life, listen to the winds of fate whispering through the peaks.>\n\nShe cocked her head as if she could indeed hear something. Eerie! His scales prickled as if ten thousand ants burrowed beneath them.\n\nOther Dragons said she was mad, but he wondered if madness often saw what others could not.\n\nAfter a moment, she shook her head and limped around to his muzzle. Bending close, she whispered, <Cherish this Princess, or call yourself the greatest fool who ever winged through the skies. This one's worth more than all the treasures in all the lands.>\n\nBlink. Very well.\n\nRaising her voice, she boomed, <Now, listen! Three days' recovery, young lizard, and not a minute less! We managed to save your third heart, no thanks to your ludicrous antics, and we've strapped a heat-herb pack in place to allow the magical elements to take hold, but they require three days of complete rest during which you will not move a muscle, or you will lose the heart. Am I understood?>\n\nHe wanted to reach out with a wingtip, but apparently his cunning great-aunt had strapped those down, too. Probably for the better.\n\nBlitz said, <I shall do everything as you command, Great-Aunt Ignita.>\n\nShe eyed him suspiciously.\n\n<Thank you for giving me back my heart.>\n\n<Blergh! Going all soft on me, nephew? Don't tell any Dragon, but you are my favourite. By far.>\n\nThe Dragoness stalked off, favouring her bad left forepaw, growling and muttering beneath her breath as if her final admission was actually an insult. Well, that was Ignita. As crusty as burned Human pie, but five hearts' worth of pure gold.\n\n[ Eye Spy ]\n\nDragons did not often have to be spoon-fed. Especially not by charming Princesses. Blitz, however, had recently stepped into a new world where everything was disjointed. It made his scales itch violently. He desperately needed to rearrange a few things and call life normal again.\n\nUnfortunately, his captive Princess was not of the character or disposition to be easily rearranged.\n\n\"So, what exactly did Ignita tell you about me?\" he hissed, sounding decidedly peevish, even to his own ears. \"All good?\"\n\n\"Besides that you are her favourite great-nephew by any measure under the suns \u2013\" wielding the foot-wide ladle with aplomb, she poured one last bucketful of dragonwort soup, a noted restorative, down his throat with a pleasant gurgle \"\u2013 she said that you are honourable, faithful, creative, artistic, misunderstood, a Dragon whose heart lives in his poetry, which you have sadly neglected to admit to me; you are finicky to a fault, severely short-sighted and lacking in firepower.\"\n\n<Gnarr-rum-blasted-death!> he swore unhappily. \"Nice list. Thanks for sharing.\"\n\nBlithely, the mite added, \"Ignita is also furious that you did not come to her earlier with your eye problems.\"\n\nBlitz said something even ruder.\n\n\"She even claimed that I'm more stubborn than you, which I believe was meant to be a compliment. Now, hold still. The eye drops are next.\"\n\n\"She specifically said, 'Lacking in fire power?' \" He sighed moodily, unable to break the sense of being utterly defeated. This was not a happy place for a Dragon. His wings drooped as if they weighed a tonne each, and his food stomach churned with nausea. \"She didn't use words such as disabled, worthless, fireless lizard, witless fool, cold-hearted undraconic worm, a Dragon who is no Dragon at all, or \u2013\"\n\n\"Blitz, stop.\"\n\n\"So, why don't you just run back to Daddy, little Princess? Go on. Go home. Why be dragged down in the maelstrom of a worthless loser?\"\n\n\"Blitz! Shut your stupid fangs.\"\n\n\"Whinging being so charismatic in a Dragon \u2026\"\n\nGrinding her teeth furiously, the girl who was climbing his neck leaned over to his left upper ear canal and hissed, \"Do you know what I would go back to, you thumping great moron? Let me give you the salient highlights. Since I was old enough to walk and my mother passed, it has been impressed upon me that my sole purpose in life is to get married to the richest fool I can charm into my bed, no matter how despicable he might be. I will not inherit. That privilege is for my brothers. Instead, I am merely an entry on my kingdom's asset register \u2013 a very fat entry. I am commanded to be charming, accomplished and perfectly presented at all times. I go to balls to catch wealthy Princes. Can you imagine what it is like to be valued for your dark, beautiful skin, and nothing else? To only ever be seen skin-deep \u2013 I mean \u2026 you know?\"\n\nBlitz groaned softly.\n\n\"So aye, I don't really want to go home, in case that was somehow unclear. I would rather live with an enormously unreasonable, complaining, crabby, haughty chunk of a Dragon, because among your many admirable qualities and your damnably beautiful honour, you have one gift I value above all others. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?\"\n\nHe croaked, \"Of course, aye \u2026 sort of \u2026 not a whole lot. Sorry.\"\n\nNonsensical, but true.\n\nWarm moisture dripped into his ear. Crying! Oh, by his wings, what had he done now? The Princess whispered, \"You see me, and accept me, just as I am.\"\n\nKaleidoscopic patterns of insight imploded slowly inside his cranium, rendering him speechless. He had never been accused of giving anyone a gift before. Far less, actually being one. For the life of him, he could not knot together into some kind of sensible, logical string how all this worked, but somehow, it did not matter.\n\nThe Princess said, \"I'm sorry I ran away and got you injured, Blitz. I blamed you. I was afraid \u2013 that I had no protection. I was wrong.\"\n\n\"I \u2013 oh. That's my fault, I guess.\"\n\n\"No, it's for the better. I'd have it no other way.\"\n\nJolly unreasonable female. To his annoyance, her unreason was also right. *Gnarr!*\n\nHow could he ever answer all of this? Odd clouds of mushy sensation filled his brain, bringing not confusion, but a sense of expanding clarity. Anything was possible. Any deed, anywhere, in all the world.\n\n\"Well, you are welcome to stay,\" he suggested. So tentative, Dragon? What he meant was, 'and I won't plan to ransom you anytime soon.' Firming his voice, he added, \"I can't offer you a whole lot by way of royal comforts, but I am able to offer a safe space where you can forget all about men for a time \u2026 ah, except for those that will come try to rescue you, I guess.\"\n\n\"No pressure,\" she said wryly. \"Hold your eye open, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Am I really obsessive?\"\n\n\"Blitz, if I replace a saucepan one inch out of place in your kitchen, you notice and adjust it. You don't even notice that you're noticing.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"You arranged your paintings first by ascending size, then by subject, then by primary colouration. That's just in the time I've known you. Your workbench is immaculate. You've memorised the contents of your storeroom, and you planted your vegetables by name in order of the runic script.\"\n\n\"I guess I'm \u2013 fairly bad?\"\n\n\"Intolerable.\" A bright giggle belied her rudeness. \"Truly unspeakable.\"\n\nNext, tiny fingers propped his outer eyelid open with care. Warm, herby water sluiced over his eye. He blinked upon command, not complaining that it was burning like hot sand.\n\nShe said, \"Despite that you got more \u2013 and less \u2013 than you bargained for when you destroyed part of Vanrace for me, I do plan to annoy you by sticking around. Thank you for your kind offer. I am honoured to be your captive Princess.\"\n\n\"Likewise.\"\n\n\"Likewise?\" Quirky smile, widening as he mimed slapping her for the importunity. \"We're somewhat similar, Blitz, don't you think?\"\n\nHe nodded in realisation. \"Meaning, your kind see only your outside, while my kind see only my inner disabilities?\"\n\n\"You are not disabled! You're \u2026 different.\"\n\nHe wanted to bellow at her to explain that nuance to him, but for once, he withheld. Blitz sighed heavily. He could hardly bear the note of hope he sensed in her heart, spreading a rosy glow upon his sense of her emotions. What was there to hope for? Ignita had spilled all his secrets in one fell swoop; he was laid bare.\n\nYet, she planned to stay.\n\nThis was a Princess with severe stubbornness issues. Borderline insane.\n\nOpening his other eye, he said, \"Do you know what a Dragon who cannot breathe actual fire is worth around these mountains, or indeed, anywhere in the whole wide world? My eye does feel better, thank you.\"\n\n\"Well, if this obstinate Dragon I know had actually bothered to consult with his great-aunt rather than mooching about in his lair feeling sorry for himself,\" she snapped, \"or, for that matter, turn up unexpectedly to whisk random Princesses off to dreadful fates \u2013\"\n\n*Gnarr!*\n\n\"Oh, go gnarr yourself! On that note of growl, what were you doing atop that tower that day? No, you don't get to interrupt until I've finished my tirade! Clearly, you are quite oblivious to the perils of interfering with a fine female rant. A most dreadful fate, I assure you. If so, he would have learned that he most likely has Dragon conjunctivitis with chronic complications, which is a severe condition that if left untreated, might well result in his going completely blind!\"\n\n\"Just in time for an invasion of slayers, hunters and eager knights?\"\n\n\"Quite. But I do have a plan.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 right. You're making plans for me? Us?\"\n\n\"Well, you aren't the most terrible fighter when you aren't getting yourself stuck head-down behind a tree, so that your enemy can pick their spot to drive a javelin into your heart, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Thanks. I did swat that fellow pretty well.\"\n\n\"Brutal.\"\n\n\"Blergh! Come on, just say it. I'm a clumsy, fireless oaf!\"\n\nPrincess Azania smacked him atop the head, then apologised at once. Really. Mosquito. She thought she would hurt him? Or, was this an acknowledgement of his feelings? How peculiar. She cared. So did he. When had that started?\n\nNone of this was supposed to happen between a Dragon and a Human.\n\nWith a sense of steadily navigating a dangerous course, she mused, \"Since some girl I could poke with a very short stick feels rather responsible for bringing almost certain death down upon you, Blitz, I plan to help you learn how to fight. We will develop your focus, footwork, tail lashes, paw and jaw techniques, and learn how to summon up a mighty draconic temper. You and I will research everything we can find on the subject of Dragon fire. There must have been a Dragon like you in the past. Besides, Devastators can be devastating even without Dragon fire \u2013 trust me, I saw what you did to that tower.\"\n\nHe chuckled hollowly.\n\n\"Furthermore, Ignita has promised to arrange training for you with Juggernaut the Grinder \u2013 love your Dragon Clan names, by the way.\"\n\n\"Juggernaut? He'll eat me alive!\"\n\n\"That false belief is exactly the problem,\" she averred, hopping back down to the ground. \"Fighting requires at least as much artistry as your paintings.\"\n\n\"And the ability to actually see one's opponent, might I add?\"\n\n\"Good point.\"\n\n\"Did Great-Aunt Ignita happen to break the news to you that Dragon conjunctivitis is degenerative and untreatable?\"\n\n\"Who's a great big wet blanket, then?\"\n\nThis time, he actually did snap toward her shoulder before he could quite contain himself. With great dignity, he snorted, \"Are all Human females as violently vexatious as you, Princess?\"\n\nShe eyeballed him just like Great-Aunt Ignita loved to. \"I do aim to please, Dragon. What she told me is that your condition is not yet treatable. We are far from exhausting all the options at this point. Plus, Ignita believes that a congenital lack of fire in a Dragon leads to many other associated health issues \u2013 and relationship ones, too. So, fix the fires and we fix the eyes, in theory. Then, long-term plan, we land you a Dragoness who loves you for who you are.\"\n\n\"Minus anything resembling a treasure hoard? Future \u2026 poof!\"\n\nHands on hips, she faced him with an exasperated hiss. Really, she was barely as tall as his skull. He could have snapped five of her up in a single bite \u2013 but she was a force of nature. Like a storm lashing the mountains. He had the oddest impression she might just try to move the mountains, if it suited her whim, and moreover, said mountains might find themselves so persuaded.\n\nTwo decades of studying the Human race, and clearly, the sum of his knowledge failed to overrun a pinhead.\n\n\"Aren't you just a ray of white sunshine, Dragon?\" she snapped wrathfully, wagging her finger beneath his nose. \"One paw in front of another. You can start by staying alive. Focus on getting better. Leave the hoard issue with me, and Taramis save us from all draconic obduracy!\"\n\n\"Princess?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Forgot what I was going to say.\"\n\nAzania stamped her foot. \"No, you did not. You're pulling my leg.\"\n\nBlitz tried not to laugh. It hurt too much. \"Right you are. Whatever was on the tip of my tongue just then, Princess, I believe it bears a close resemblance to the biggest 'thank you' in history.\"\n\nHe received another hug for that.\n\nA Dragon ought to wash his scales after the slightest contact with a filthy Human. To his consternation, he found that his jaw hurt from a mortifying in ability to stop ginning like a drivelling idiot."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Two days later, warmed by the very white fires of Taramis which the Princess had invoked, Blitz the Devastator dragged himself out of the lake feeling very un-devastating and very much more like a sodden toad. This length of immersion in water could not be good for a Dragon. Standing upon shaky paws, he blessed the solid ground with a depth of fervour that startled him. The fishes could keep their water. Dragons were for air, and supposedly, for fire.\n\nHow much fire remained to be seen, but his hopes were not sky-high, it had to be said.\n\nHe and the Princess repaired to Great-Aunt Ignita's lair for a celebratory meal of grilled python, a completely undeserved lecture about the lamentable state of his hide, and a range of pithy observations regarding the ancient and noble art of imprisoning a Princess for ransom.\n\n\"Traditional dishes to be prepared by the discerning hostage Princess?\" Azania grumbled.\n\nBlitz grinned, \"One must respect tradition.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"I have been wondering how best to serve you up,\" he teased, drawing a sharp inhale and an arched eyebrow. \"I'm thinking, slow-roasted royal haunch served on a platter of crispy basted impudence, with a zesty infusion of fresh snark. What say you?\"\n\n\"You're sounding like the stale whiff of a soldier's boot, say I.\"\n\n\"How's that a logical metaphor?\"\n\n\"As logical as you being a stuffy, sententious old reptile. Really? You're planning how to eat me?\"\n\n\"Weird, I know, but there it is \u2013 Dragon wit.\"\n\nIn passing, Ignita grinned, \"She refuses to be whittled down by your humour, great nephew.\"\n\nGroan!\n\nIgnita's lair was unique among the Dragonkind, as best he knew. It lay in the hollow heart of a thousand year-old baobab tree. What a baobab was doing in her favourite swamp and not growing happily in a far more arid place, like the northern reaches of the Kingdom of T'nagru where the species was endemic, was a mystery to everyone.\n\nContrary to all expectations, the tree flourished despite its environment. Thick billows of creamy white blossoms crowned its oddly stubby branches, giving it the air of a poorly groomed Human haircut. Indeed, it had grown so large that it dominated the island she called her lair. The hollow interior was one hundred and fifty feet in diameter and forty feet tall. Ignita darkly referred to growth magic when questioned. Over the decades, she had stuffed the interior with all the paraphernalia of a supposedly crazy healer Dragoness, the standard stuff that the Princess cheerfully noted would probably have seen her burned at the stake for being a witch in at least six kingdoms she could name. Unnameable organic lumps preserved in bottles. Skeletons. Great hanks of herbs twisted together and hung from the ceiling to dry. Chopped up, dried or powdered body parts of a great many creatures Blitz could not and would not have wanted to identify.\n\nThe extraordinary breadth of her knowledge meant that Ignita had twenty-three solid ideas about what might work for his eyes, but she also claimed that none of them were a long-term solution. The Princess took notes in a perfect calligraphic hand. Only the best royal tutoring for when she wrote invitations to royal balls and corresponded with drooling foreign Princes, she quipped, producing a truly heroic eye roll she had absolutely not learned in any etiquette class.\n\nShe flicked a few misbehaving curls out of her eyes. \"What?\"\n\n\"Hair's weird.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see. Scales are peculiar.\"\n\nBrief grin. \"So I hair,\" he quipped.\n\nShe winced on cue.\n\nThe following day, Blitz and the Princess took a slow and steady walk up to a knoll which commanded a fine view of the west. Azania looked out and told him that she saw the great emerald hardwood forests, called the Gemwoods, the glittering teal expanse of Lake Mycegeon more to the north, and the Lumis Ocean beyond. Dragons were said to be able to see the ocean from here, but she could not. Human sight was limited, but it was the best they had between them. She shared gladly, chatting to a resting Dragon with an ease that frankly astounded him. They were not even close to alike \u2013 different species, vastly different sizes, unimaginably different backgrounds. Never more mismatched. Yet here they were.\n\nWhy were there no Dragonesses in all the Clans that he could talk to like this? It was so easy; as if his scales and draculinity did not matter in the slightest.\n\nThereafter, his recovery proceeded more rapidly. Despite his various problems, Blitz knew he was an otherwise healthy young Dragon, and he had Ignita's skills to thank for a quick repair to the heart muscle. Properly stirred up, his healing magic should now restore wholeness to the heart. She also saw to and confirmed that his broken foreclaw was healing well, and the zapped one, too. Her poultices ensured that the Princess' whip weals healed satisfactorily, especially the one on her neck, but there would always be a thin scar there, and a slightly thicker scar upon her ribs.\n\nIgnita had her favourite sleeping corner, she called it, where she pillowed her head on a flat boulder which had long since been worn into a comfortable groove. Blitz liked to rest up against the central hearth, where his great-aunt brewed many of her potions, because of the extra warmth. He was more dubious about the way that Princess Azania moved in to the crook of his neck on the first night, and appropriated the spot as her own. She showed no sign of changing her mind. The girl grew sassy. And unpredictable, which he decided must have been the quality that so disturbed his peaceful life.\n\nOne might argue he had chosen to introduce this whiff of chaos into his own life.\n\n*Mwaa-haa-haa.* Excellent nickname.\n\nThe tiny whiff of chaos had the best relationship with Ignita. Nothing the elderly Dragoness said or did, no matter how bizarre, fazed the Princess. In the evenings, she prepared Ignita's favourite bark tea, ignored her chuntering about how the herbs or the sweetness or the temperature was different, sat down, and chatted to her for hours beside the crackling hearth fire. Blitz heard stories he had not enjoyed since his hatchling days, legends, outright fables, and pearls of lore and wisdom. The Dragoness clearly loved the company and tolerated the Princess' attentions with an amused crustiness that he soon came to suspect hid genuine affection.\n\nWhy? He could not fathom their connection. The green Dragoness had never been short of sarcastic opinions about Humans and their ways. Here she was, putting up with an increasingly talkative oversized yellow-headed parakeet \u2013 of which there were many nesting in this unexpected high-altitude bog \u2013 and even humouring her. Truly! Famously, Ignita never indulged any creature.\n\nTake the day a week after his almighty crash-landing in the lake.\n\nA hollow log hung from a tree at the edge of her bog, perhaps eighty Dragon paces from her door. Dragons usually knocked upon it with their knuckles; Azania had been forced to jump and use the haft of her dagger. Ignoring the knocker was a passport to instant rage. Ignita was not lightly disturbed. This morning, the family code boomed hollowly across the dank mud and rotting khaki sedge grasses, scaring a few marsh birds into a fluttering panic.\n\nIgnita's head did that sideways jerk, as if the sound had pulled at her ear canal. She snorted, \"Ah, about time they came knocking.\"\n\nBlitz glanced up from the large Dragon scroll he was reading, a treatment of the anatomy of fire-breathing reptilian innards. So far, it had only succeeded in informing the increasing queasiness in his stomach. Less helpful on the knowledge front.\n\n\"Who's knocking?\" he asked.\n\n\"I needed supplies to treat a granite-headed young fool,\" Ignita sniffed, patting his flank in passing as she walked and her tail rasped toward her door. \"I may have let slip there was a royal reason you were trying to throw your life away. Still those sweaty paws, young lizard.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't sweat.\"\n\n\"My adorable little nephew, your lovely Aunty Ignita has everything under control. Shut jaw. Pay attention.\"\n\nLeaving him steaming with that sarcastic comment, she wandered outside to threaten her visitor with instant dismemberment.\n\nThis was a warning reserved for close family.\n\nThe Princess shifted nervously from her position near the fire. The morning was misty and cool, and her act of theft had not included a sensible cloak. Ignita had berated her soundly for that oversight. 'Next time you steal something, Princess, especially life's necessities, make sure you steal it properly! And thoroughly! No pathetic moralistic half measures.'\n\nIndeed, Great-Aunt. Sage advice. Every aspiring renegade royal ought to brush up on her kleptomaniacal skills and toss her principles into the Lumis Ocean. Azania bowed her dark head and promised to do better next time.\n\nIn a moment, Blitz heard a familiar paw tread outside. Brand.\n\n\"My younger brother, Brand,\" he whispered to the Princess, realising he had neglected to tell her much about his family at all. Nor had she \u2013 not even the basics, apart from who her father was. Evidently, family shame was a catching affliction.\n\nShe whispered back, \"So, your dam and sire are Blaze and Indigofire, then it's you, Brand and \u2026 I forget the other brother?\"\n\n\"Brawl,\" he said, \"and after him comes Inferna, my sister. Four eggs.\"\n\nUnusual number. Dragon siblings rarely numbered more than three in a single family.\n\nBrand was a deep umber colour, which Blitz had always been jealous of. He had a teasing way with the Dragonesses and usually boasted a fine swagger either on the walk or in the air, as if he owned his surrounds. Not so much in Ignita's lair, he noticed, rising to greet his brother fondly. Well, fondly with inner reservations. Brand always acted as if they were as thick as thieves, yet he could be the cruellest of all. Truly a Dragon who walked in his sire's paw prints.\n\nHe nuzzled his brother's neck and threw a comradely wing over his shoulders. At thirty-six feet in length, Brand was no stripling, but Blitz out-bulked him by tonnes.\n\n\"Just stopping by with an invitation,\" Brand said, clearly looking about for the Princess. His glance passed right over her the first time. \"Heard you tangled with some bounty hunters, Blitz? Did you paint them out of existence?\"\n\nThere it started.\n\nHe said, \"Ignita, praise her egg, saved my third heart after I was spitted like a boar for the roast. Brand, may I introduce my \u2013 uh, captive Princess?\" Prickle his wings and pickle his egg, he had almost said 'friend' there! Really? Slip of the old forked tongue. Gesturing with his foreclaw, he said, \"This is Her Royal Highness the Princess Azania N'gala of T'nagru, the Desert Kingdom. Princess, this is my younger brother by two years, Brand the Devastator.\"\n\nBrand's orange eyes squinted slightly as he finally discovered the Princess. Clearly, she was neither as vast nor as draconic as he had expected. \"Princess! I am \u2026 well! I am most honoured to meet Blitz's \u2026 acquisition. Indeed, you far exceed the reports of the beauty of your people.\"\n\nBlitz bit back a hot spurt of jealousy, but to his surprise, the Princess appeared far from flattered by his suave delivery. On the contrary, he scented shades of annoyance as umber as his brother's primary colouration.\n\nShe greeted him with a graceful genuflection. \"Mighty Brand. Ignita and Blitz speak most favourably of your prowess in battle.\"\n\nThe young Dragon swelled visibly and audibly. \"Indeed, I am a fighter of rising renown.\"\n\n\"I should love to hear more tales of your deeds of renown, o Brand the Devastator,\" she cooed, fluttering her eyelashes as if she had a speck stuck in her eye.\n\nBrand nearly popped. His brother's belly fires jolted into a rumble like a swollen rainy season waterfall, his scales heated up visibly, and his five hearts skipped a beat all at once \u2013 exactly as if a pretty Dragoness had just brushed wingtips with him. Blitz could not believe it. Had a fat woolly sheep leaped up onto his nose, bleating humbly to become his breakfast, he would have been no less bemused.\n\nLimping up behind Brand, Ignita's expression was a study in sardonic pleasure.\n\nA cunning talon curved behind this encounter!\n\nTen minutes later, his brother was backing out of the lair, still behaving as if his paws had somehow become disconnected from his body. Male Dragons. So stupidly predictable. The giant red sun itself could bite him if he ever behaved so idiotically around a female.\n\nThe Princess smiled at Ignita. \"It worked. I feel like I want to wash my mouth out with a strong caustic, but \u2013 you are a brilliant, brilliant Dragoness.\"\n\n\"Don't you start with me,\" the Dragoness snapped. \"Go fetch me a pot of fresh water.\"\n\n\"At once, Great-Aunt Ignita.\"\n\nShe snapped her fangs toward their Human companion. \"I'll have less insolence and more obedience from you, child.\"\n\nThis time, the Princess wisely kept her silence.\n\n[ Horse Thief ]\n\nWinging back to his cosy lair a couple of days later, Blitz the Devastator gazed over his domain with what he would have liked to assert was a suitably majestic air. The farther peaks were still an unfortunate white-tipped purple blur, and the half-clouded skies above a rosy smear due to Ignis' giant red bulk entirely obscuring Taramis, the far hotter and smaller white sun. Indeed, Dragons said that their fire took after Ignis in majesty and greatness. One of his great-aunt's admonitions was to meditate upon the red sun. It was good that Taramis was often obscured, mind, for it was said that without the interplay between the brothers, the realms would not exist.\n\nWell, the land would be rather more overcooked. Exceedingly well done with crispy bits all over, so to speak.\n\n\"How's your eyesight, Blitz?\" a gentle voice inquired. \"Are you checking it right now?\"\n\n\"Aye, Princess. The clouds are woolly blobs, the mountain peaks a discernible blur, and if I fly lower, I can see some detail on the ground, such as \u2013 oh! A stray horse. Fancy finding one of those in these parts. I'm surprised the timber wolves haven't put it out of its misery.\"\n\n\"A grey destrier \u2013 oh my stars! Blitz, we have to go help them.\"\n\n\"One does not generally consume noble steeds,\" he said, with a disdainful curl of his lip. \"It is considered beneath a Dragon's dignity to \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't give me the savage carnivore performance again. Blitz, that's one of the horses which belonged to those bounty hunters.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"The others are probably still tied up in the canyon, starving.\"\n\n*Brraa-hurgh-haa!* he chortled. \"Bad luck to them.\"\n\n\"Bad luck? Bad luck? You get me down there right now, Dragon, or I will \u2013\" she giggled in a merry way completely at odds with her apparent fury \"\u2013 I will talk at you non-stop for the next ten hours. Promise.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" he pretended to shudder, \"what vile and unspeakable torture! Anything but the talking.\"\n\n\"Not funny.\"\n\nWhy then the self-deprecation? Was he not supposed to disagree?\n\nNonetheless, he did feel bad for any creature tamed and tied up by Humans. Poor dumb animals. He could not leave them to starve. Still, what would one do with equines in the mountains? Without proper care, the wolves would be upon them within hours. Indeed, that was normally the case. Where were the wolves this time? Would they find only a bloody mess down there in that canyon?\n\nHow would his Princess react if all they found was the carcasses of these animals she so clearly valued? Nonetheless, for her sake \u2026\n\nSweeping lower and circling to return, he brought them to the head of the greenery-choked canyon where they had fought with the bounty hunters, and discovered the likely reason for the wolves' absence.\n\n\"Princess, look, it's my very first Dragon slayer!\"\n\nShe gave him the strangest look. \"Why exactly are you excited about this?\"\n\n\"Well, it is only one and he does look very lonely down there, but do you see the Dragon bow he's trying to string? That malicious monster shoots eight-foot quarrels!\" He made to rub his paws together, but gave up the idea as the Princess yelped that no pancakes were wanted. \"See? He's camped below our lair, waiting for us to return.\"\n\n\"Have I told you how weird you are?\"\n\n\"My first slayer!\" he chortled, rustling his wings with glee. \"Shall we go greet him?\"\n\n\"'Our lair?' You're so sweet!\"\n\nBlitz had decided he was going to be a reformed Dragon, not half as disagreeable as before. He failed instantly, losing his temper with grating roar, \"Dragons are never sweet!\"\n\n\"Spot the joke, Dragon?\"\n\n<Gnarr-t nice,> he mumbled beneath his breath.\n\nDared to tug his tail, did she? This Dragon would lay devious plans regarding her education. Just wait, Princess. Revenge beckoned.\n\nMeantime, they laid a different plan. Blitz put down a hundred Dragon paces from the restive equine, downwind so that it did not bolt. He and the Princess parted ways. She made for the destrier, an animal with a dirty grey coat he did not care for in the slightest. He vanished into the nearby undergrowth, practising his stalking skills. This was meant to be part of his training. As if he was not an excellent stalker already!\n\nThe Dragon slayer was a wiry old fellow with spiky brown hair and a sallow, unhealthy-looking complexion. He chewed on the stem of a foot-long pipe as he worked on his weapon of choice, smoking something perfectly vile. Blitz clamped down on a sneeze. The campsite was set against a clump of boulders beneath several spreading evergreen trees, with broad leaves that concealed the location from aerial view. He looked about as carefully as he could, before sneaking along farther. The fellow was cursing up a small firestorm as he tried to string the weapon.\n\nBlitz strolled out of cover toward him, calling, \"Having a spot of bother there, old chap?\"\n\nFor an old-timer, he was not without courage. After a second of frozen panic, he dropped his huge Dragon bow and whipped out a sword. \"Dragon!\"\n\n\"That's me \u2013 fangs, scales, wings, the whole caboodle.\"\n\n\"Down, Janx!\"\n\nAnother one! Great stalker that he was, Blitz had forgotten to check if there were any more of these pests about. This one had a longbow and an arrow nocked to the string.\n\nCharging forward, he plucked up the one called Janx and waved him in the air as the arrow left the string. *Whurr-whup!* One more twitch, and his Human shield was dead. Excellent \u2026 coincidence. That, or he might start to believe he had actual battle skills. The second man bolted as fast as his bandy legs could carry him, screaming fit to wake the dead. Casting aside his bow, he produced an impressive turn of speed, no mean feat given the ratio of width to height in his frame.\n\nWas it his manners? Or his fangs? He had cleaned them this very morning.\n\nEither way, Blitz lumbered after, because that was the direction that the Princess had gone. A smart Dragon also remembered to look after his allies, which he had summarily neglected to do so far.\n\nPerhaps two hundred yards from their camp was the start of the gulley, where the ground began to dip. The blurring legs stumbled and halted as Blitz belatedly saw what had given him pause \u2013 Princess Azania strode up toward him, leading six horses in a neat row. Well, they were following her as he remembered his sister Inferna tottering after their dam, as if attached by an invisible string. How peculiar.\n\nDistracted by the compliant and fearless behaviour of a group of highly strung warhorses, he forgot to halt his charge in time. Consequently, his thundering chest and the back of the Dragon slayer's head met in an unfortunate collision \u2013 for the man \u2013 followed by a squelching sound farther back.\n\nOops.\n\nOne should really know better than to jump beneath a Dragon's paw.\n\nSlowing to a walk to avoid spooking the equines, he called, \"Princess, I see you have become an accomplished horse thief?\"\n\nSomething squished juicily between his hind talons. He surreptitiously tried to clean his paw on a nearby bush. Joint grease. It came in many forms.\n\nAzania sighed. \"I don't need to ask, do I?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026 no. Best walk a little around that way. Why are the horses not scared of me?\"\n\n\"I told them you would not eat them.\"\n\n\"Way to spoil my fun.\"\n\nHe stopped ten feet short of the scowling Princess, running her words through his mind. Spoke to horses. Hailed from the Desert Kingdom. A couple of thoughts were trying very hard to find one another deep in his mind, he sensed, but had yet to make the connection.\n\nShe added, \"I believe you've been having quite enough fun already. Dealt with your first professional Dragon slayers, I believe? We should start a scroll.\"\n\n\"A scroll of what?\"\n\n\"A record of the deeds of Blitz the mighty Devastator. Every aspiring fire breather needs to create a suitable legend. We don't even need to make this one up. Tricked the first slayer with great cunning, it appears, and stomped the second to death.\"\n\n\"History is all in the way it is retold,\" he agreed, with a knowing grin she did not fail to pick up on.\n\nPointing at the man lying in the open with a large arrow jutting from his chest, the Princess inquired, \"Want to tell me exactly what happened, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I waved him about. The arrow hit him by complete accident.\"\n\n\"Right. Not that. Something closer to: 'cunningly, the Dragon forced one Dragon slayer to slay the other \u2026'\"\n\n\"That's two 'slays' in one sentence. And two 'Dragons,' for that matter.\"\n\n\"Oh dear. I think I will need a robust editor.\"\n\n\"Or a great deal more slaying to justify the reference. You \u2013 aha! You speak Equitone?\" She nodded, giving him the shy smile he realised she often used to hide self-deprecation at her capabilities. \"That's a tall tale. Legend. Bunch of hot air, I am reliably informed \u2026\"\n\nBy some female magic, the shy smile turned instantly into a ferocious frown. One that warned aplenty.\n\nHis magic sniffed around her emotions. Did this girl ever lie?\n\nNot today.\n\nBack to smiling, as if a cloud had merely wandered over the suns for a second. \"Sorry to burst your bubble, Dragon, but Equitone is a real phenomenon. Alright, I'll admit it's been a T'nagrun trade secret since time immemorial, helping us to raise the finest horses in the realms \u2013 don't you growl at me, you unbeliever \u2013 oh, very well. Shall I demonstrate my command of hot air for you, your draconic prodigiousness?\"\n\nHe bowed his head elegantly. \"I should be honoured, your indescribable elegance.\"\n\nTurning to her string of remarkably obedient and docile warhorses, she nickered softly in her throat, and pursed her lips to produce a breathy trill. All six horses burst into high-spirited whickering that sounded exactly like laughter. Then they bucked and pranced in concert, before gathering to nuzzle her back and arms. She laughed and spoke to them again. They formed a column, two by two. Blitz scowled, but was not unimpressed. Clearly, that day, he had stolen a horse magician. Equitone was classed as a mythical magical-physical language. Therefore, the smirking prankster over there was evidently very well-versed in practical spoken mythology, or something to that effect.\n\nDrily, he said, \"Another skill not offered by the official royal tutoring programme of the kingdom?\"\n\n\"The fully unauthorised syllabus.\"\n\n\"Ah. Good. Excellent! So, I have an idea as to where we might keep your horses, unless we're planning to sell them?\"\n\n\"Well, not this week, Dragon. We have the Devastator Dragon Clan get-together in four days' time, remember? The one where they are all supposed to gawk at me and express shock that you're actually behaving like a Dragon for a change.\"\n\nHe flinched.\n\n\"Ah, far too close to the bone. Bad Princess says sorry to noble Dragon.\"\n\n\"I'll survive.\" The lump he swallowed back, however, felt like half a cow. \"After all, I'm a proud slayer of slayers, and tyrannical keeper of the finest Princess in all the realms, and all that. So, about the horses. There's a valley about seven miles from here which is cut off by steep cliffs and waterfalls either end. It's high pasture, so there will be plenty of grass up there in this season. No wolves. The trick is that I'd have to fly the horses in. Do you think you could manage to convince them?\"\n\n\"I might have to bag their heads. But aye, as long as you don't fly like you're holding a couple of tonnes of bed, they should be fine.\"\n\nHe gnashed his fangs on the air. \"Just practising in case I happen to meet some random Princesses out here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "The great horse lift went well. Theft, air transport, hiding in plain sight. Blitz and Azania agreed that villainy definitely had its lighter moments. The destriers acted openly delighted at finding themselves in a lush mountain meadow with its knee-high bluegrass \u2013 knee-high to a Dragon, to be accurate. They had a lot of eating ahead of them before the winter set in. He teased the Princess about not getting lost in the grass. It nearly reached her shoulders. She mimed swatting him like a fly.\n\nAfter that, they returned to scout the canyon and surrounds, and found one more stray, a black horse with a white blaze upon its forehead. It had broken its leg hobbles and wandered off for a mile or so. Furthermore, they retrieved an armful of equipment which Blitz transported back to the lair once the mare was placed with her fellows.\n\nThe slayers had the decency to have packed a skein of quality five year-old Vanracian wine in amongst their belongings. Back in the lair, the Princess made to pour herself a celebratory mug; Blitz stopped her and nipped over to his storeroom to pull out the antique Chamiz Kingdom glassware set his sticky-pawed Great-Uncle Swoop must have plundered at some point. Far more suitable for royalty.\n\nThose brows \u2013 he could not quite erase the image of hairy caterpillars from his mind \u2013 arched in surprise. \"He plundered a palace? This set is priceless.\"\n\n\"I believe so.\"\n\n\"Well.\" Pouring herself a modest inch or so of wine, she raised the fluted crystal to the lamplight. \"To a pair of crazies plotting mayhem up in their mountain lair.\"\n\nBlitz chuckled, poking a log into their roaring fire. \"Indeed.\"\n\nWithout being asked, she told him about her family. Her mother had passed when she was but two years old. Since girls were not important to the succession, she had been raised by various royal nurses, minders and tutors. Her father, King N'gala N'gala, had been too busy with a string of hopeful future queens to pay his daughter much attention, but there had been a regular weekly lecture about her duties to the kingdom. He had married again when she was twelve, but the second queen had died in childbirth a year later. After that, N'gala had busied himself with affairs of state and raising her three older brothers. The weekly scolding had turned bitter and increasingly excruciating to endure.\n\nHer first reaction to being abducted by desert warriors paid off by the Kingdom of Vanrace, had been relief.\n\nNot for long.\n\nPrince N'chala was the oldest, at twenty-six. He was an accomplished warrior and horseman, and already a veteran of many battles. She described him as proud and a touch vain, but a decent man at heart. In the fall season, he was to marry Princess Yuali of Amboraine, a forested kingdom that lay north of the Tamarine Mountains. Prince Yadaxu was twenty-three, also a fine warrior and a musician. Her father was proud of him for siring a collection of illegitimate children with various ladies of noble rank, but the pressure was now on to settle down and sire a few legitimate heirs for a change. At eighteen, Prince Aragu was a year older than her, and a man after her father's heart, she said \u2013 arrogant, inflexible and ambitious.\n\nOf her brothers, Prince N'chala was the closest to her, but he had always been firmly under their father's thumb. Her relationship with her father was distant and strained.\n\n\"Anyways, enough of me,\" she said, leaning back against his paw. \"Let's talk about next steps. I read a reference at Ignita's lair which suggested that flammable oil might be a way of kick-starting your incandescence \u2026 process, I think you'd say? I'm hazy on the Draconian nuances. But I copied the reference for you, if you'd like to read it?\"\n\n\"I would, please.\"\n\nSpringing to her feet, she placed the crystal goblet on the kitchen worktop and danced over to her pack. Another item off the theft list. For a person who had the cheek to lecture him about the draconic love of pillaging, she was certainly developing an affinity for the art.\n\n\"Now, before we fly north to Juggernaut the Grinder's lair next week, the oil treatment is one thing we do need to try. Preferably when you are nice and angry, Ignita said.\"\n\n\"I'll go practice my fulminating and hearty thundering first thing tomorrow,\" he promised, \"but really, I'm just too phlegmatic a soul to harbour much in the way of blistering Dragon fury.\"\n\nShe passed him a tiny scroll. \"Read this.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" he murmured, running his talon down the neat columns of runes. \"The treatment has been known to be successful for three Dragons. That sounds hopeful \u2013 oh, but this one tried to throw a flaming brand down his throat after, and exploded his own stomach.\"\n\n\"Ouch.\"\n\n\"Aye, let's not try that trick, shall we?\"\n\nAfter prodding at the fire with a metal poker, the Princess settled back against his paw. \"Does it sound silly to hope that some other nitwit comes plodding up the trail so that we can experiment on him?\"\n\n\"Dreadful. I'm sure you'd have no trouble breathing fire at general idiocy.\"\n\n\"I can't even tolerate a stinky hot spring. Which reminds me, are there any handy volcanoes about these mountains? One theory is that you ought to go sit on one.\"\n\nBlitz made a constipated face. \"Ooh! That could hurt!\"\n\nThe Princess collapsed laughing.\n\n[ Death Dive ]\n\nBlitz thundered down into his lair, bellowing, \"Smoke! I smell smoke! Do you think it could be another Dragon slayer? Come on, Princess. What are you doing? I need your eyes.\"\n\n\"I was wandering about in my underwear, as every Princess loves to do in public.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2013 ah, I forget about the necessity for clothing in your culture.\"\n\n\"Getting there.\"\n\nSlipping out of another emerald green dress she had been trying on, the Princess quickly jumped into her trousers and wriggled until she had them hugging her behind just right. Blitz nodded sagely. Aye. That was definitely a Human female courtship signal. The tight clothing must signify readiness to mate. Although, that particular text had been scribed by an elderly Dragon with, one might say, a roving eye for the Dragonesses. Blitz decided he could not trust that opinion as far as he could stuff it up said Dragon's left nostril.\n\nHim being so ready with the 'reproductive independence' line.\n\nHe eyed his companion judiciously. The Princess had her boots on already. Just the top part of her body to go. Much more likely, the idea of readiness to mate resided largely in the male's head, primed to be imposed upon the object of his desire \u2013 if Humans and Dragons were in any way alike.\n\n\"Ready,\" she said.\n\n\"Let's go!\" he thundered.\n\nThe Princess poked at her ears. \"Not bad, Dragon! But in future, please save general draconic thundering for the outdoors, or when you are trying to impress Juggernaut the Impaler.\"\n\n\"He's a Grinder. Better not make that mistake around him. You might get impaled and grinder-ated at the same time.\"\n\nShe stuck out her tongue.\n\n\"What does this \u2013 this wet, grotesque appendage waggling out of your mouth mean?\" he threw over his shoulder as they raced up the stairs to the upper valley.\n\n\"It's rude,\" she said.\n\n\"Repulsive is the word I'd use.\"\n\n\"Some Humans kiss with their tongues, Blitz.\"\n\n\"Blergh! Stop, or I'll throw up. Please. I know I keep asking about Human customs, but that one's \u2013 I mean, are you experienced in this vile cultural tradition?\"\n\n\"Blitz! No!\"\n\n\"So there has never been a male \u2013 a boy \u2013 with whom you wanted to \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, you are dead. So dead!\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"My lips are sealed.\"\n\n\"Apparently not,\" he said, and had the great satisfaction of seeing and sensing her blush like a miniature volcano.\n\nUp top, Blitz showed her where he had positioned his Dragon telescope up on an outcropping on the lip of the valley. The instrument was so large that he had to raise her on his paw to the eyepiece, but once they managed to resolve its direction and how to focus it, the Princess nodded at once.\n\n\"Aye, that's a \u2013 single Dragon slayer who appears to have come armed with a very large, poisoned lance. As in, the tip is a horrid swamp green colour. You can't see it?\n\n\"No details, remember?\"\n\n\"Blitz, I didn't know there were poisons that could kill Dragons?\"\n\n\"Kill outright, no. Make a Dragon miserable for weeks, aye. There are paralytic and necrotic compounds which \u2013\"\n\n\"Necrotic?\"\n\n\"Eats your flesh in nice big chunks.\"\n\n\"Ooh, sounds pleasant.\"\n\n\"Insanely pleasant, aye.\" He brought her carefully back down to ground level again. \"The venomous sea snakes of the far north-western kingdoms are best known for that delightful contribution to the art of Dragon slaying. I believe that a particular favourite is the combination of a neurotoxin sourced from our friendly sea snakes, laced with a paralytic venom from the ultra-rare white-banded desert asp.\"\n\n\"As we stand on a beautiful mountain discussing ways of killing Dragons. Lovely. Things I did not need to know. Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go load your second stomach up with oil.\"\n\n\"Now?\"\n\n\"No, genius. Let's wait until tomorrow when he has a chance to get here with that ridiculous lance of his, and give him plenty of time to plan how he's going to use it to murder you.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nShe gave him the look she appeared to reserve for Dragons who were behaving as if their craniums were stuffed with crushed granite. He gave her a look that suggested if she mentioned craniums and granite, he would destroy half the Human kingdoms in a paroxysm of rage never before seen beneath the suns. Impossible, but fun to imagine. He had been working on visualising flame billowing out of his agape maw in great, rolling waves of destruction. His dreams were drenched in yellow flame.\n\nNo deficiency in his imagination.\n\nTwenty minutes later, Blitz spread his wings and tipped off his balcony. Princess Azania wriggled in his paw, getting settled for the flight. A small barrel of oil sloshed around inside his second stomach, the one which was meant to give rise to flame. It was not a pleasant sensation.\n\nHe tried to focus on other things, such as the twittering Princess in his paw, who was busy explaining to a Dragon how to use the last of Ignis' setting rays to mask his flight approach. Honestly. Did she not grasp how beautifully his mud-brown scales would stand out against a ruddy western horizon? Nor understand how demeaning it was to listen to a wingless creature instructing a winged one in the nuances of his native domain?\n\nGrumpy Dragon. Again. This was becoming a habit. He was stoic, composed and logical. Not petulant and ill-tempered. When had he become this Dragon? His wings stirred the air as he considered the tenor of his hearts.\n\nWhen he realised there was more.\n\nNo, that he yearned to be more. That was the difference.\n\nHe had never been content. Nor had he dared to dream. One moment upon that high tower, one choice, one clenched fist \u2013 and everything had changed.\n\nNow, a Dragon must find true courage, and he had this priceless pest in paw to help him do it.\n\nWinging low, he swept down the eastward trail toward the place where an indistinct brightness played upon his vision. His Dragon senses sifted the hints and tangs upon the evening air. Rain in the north. The rising of springtime life in the mountains, almost a month later than the hill country and lowlands beyond the realm of Dragons. The acrid scent of the fire, made from sequoia deadfall. A tang \u2013 another Dragon? His muzzle jerked, seeking that strangely familiar scent trace. No. He must have been mistaken.\n\nFiery thoughts, Dragon!\n\n<I am fire! I am Dragon!>\n\nFocussing on his stomach, he gulped. Rather than sensing some upwelling of living fire in his Dragon magic, which all the scrolls talked about, he suspected he was about to be sick. Sparks. Fire. Bonfires. Lightning. Wildfires. He tried to picture every manifestation of fire he could possibly imagine. He was an artist who painted with his eye barely eighteen inches from the canvas. His flames came fully detailed, gorgeously vibrant, dancing \u2026\n\nPrincess Azania said, \"Ready for the ambush and snatch, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Aye. This is a good idea, by my wings.\"\n\n\"Tradition has the Dragon waiting in their lair for a Dragon slayer or knight to poke holes in their hide in a confined space. Total lunacy, in my untutored, undraconic opinion. Fairly close to some impudent girl trying to tell you how to fly, right?\"\n\nAn involuntary jerk betrayed his shock.\n\nBlitz stared down at the occupant of his paw. Her scent traces were too complex and nuanced to distinguish at once, but there were hints of contrition, truthfulness and tentative humour that he could detect.\n\nHe said, \"How do you do that? Wait. Almost as bad as some pompous Dragon explaining basic Geography to an educated Princess upon first meeting, right?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026\"\n\n\"Just tell me I'm right for a change. Oh. We're close already \u2013\"\n\n\"Not on the tip! Mind that tree \u2026 left! Go left!\"\n\nFlying faster than he had expected, probably because he had not been paying attention, Blitz whistled toward the Human's campsite, scanning the area as best he was able. Every sense lit up as if the suns themselves had broken from behind a cloud to burnish the scene. This was the moment. Snatch, sharp turn, roast that fool in his own juices. He could not wait.\n\nLeaping to his feet, the Dragon slayer grabbed his great lance off some kind of stand. As if in a nightmare, the garish green tip lowered to point at his flight path. Toward the Princess. In reality, he realised with clarity that was as perfect as it was sadly belated, that was the worst possible place for a person to be riding when it came to a Dragon attacking a target on the ground.\n\nMight better have painted a target on the middle of her torso.\n\nThe slayer braced the deadly weapon against his boot. Poised. His posture was textbook, a study in exactitude.\n\nOnly one problem. He faced an unusual foe.\n\nBlitz dipped, inverting his hind paws so that they scraped across the soft sward, shovelling up great clods of grassy dirt and braking sharply at the same time. At the very last instant, he slammed his tail against the ground to launch him up and over the sloped lance. Mounds of dirt showered over the man, blinding him. The lance tip passed his sucked-in belly with a margin of perhaps two inches. In passing, he swiped at the lance with his tail, cracking it in half and throwing the slayer to the ground.\n\nWhirling on his wingtip, he slowed and landed twenty Dragon paces beyond the man.\n\nHe placed the Princess carefully upon her feet. \"Sorry about the jolt.\"\n\n\"No problem. Think flame!\" she ordered.\n\nSummoning up his fieriest thoughts, the infernal infernos of his most garish imagination, Blitz lumbered toward the man, squeezing his second stomach as he had read. This was supposed to work. One little spark in there, and the rest would be history \u2026\n\nThe Dragon slayer, a rangy man with a crooked nose, raised the remains of his lance to threaten him as he stopped four paces short. Here it came.\n\n<DEVASTATOR!!>\n\nWith a violent heave, Blitz vomited the oily gunge in his stomach all over the man."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"Stop sulking, Dragon.\"\n\n\"I am not sulking,\" he said, spreading his wings to power them up into the searing beams of a white-dominant sunrise. \"I am being thoughtful, introspective and calculating. I am considering my past failures, from which I shall learn many lessons and become a better, stronger Dragon altogether.\"\n\n\"You are sulking like a child caught stealing sweets from the kitchen.\"\n\n\"I am gathering my magical resources into a conflagration of epic proportions, which shall thunder forth from my agape maw \u2013\"\n\n\"Spelled, 'sulking'.\"\n\n\"You are incorrigible, do you know that?\"\n\nThe Princess smiled up at him. For the occasion, she wore another emerald dress salvaged from the storage chests, together with her tiara and jewels. *Pah.* Overlooked starting his hoard with those, hadn't he? He would have to find other places to pillage. Meantime, on her advice, he had cleared out his paintings and hidden them in the secret storage chamber behind the library, in case some intrepid knights decided to raid his chambers while they were gone. The last fellow, thoroughly basted in warm Dragon vomit, had been sent packing with orders to the effect that he should advise all his fellows that the mighty Blitz was not giving up the most beautiful Princess in the seventeen realms, and beyond the oceans, without a serious fight and a gigantic ransom.\n\nPlus, there would be less vomit and rather more slaying next time. He did not say this last bit.\n\nTo his surprise, the girl had also found a weapon belt and wore the Dragon talon dagger in it. Making a statement, Princess?\n\nRising above the quartet of peaks that concealed his lair, he winged northward, gaining altitude. The ancient Devastator family lair lay beyond the next range of peaks, in a location all but inaccessible to Humans. The few ravines leading up to this small plateau were choked with brambles boasting highly toxic thorns, the grey cliffs were sheer and icy \u2026 checking his passenger, he blurted out:\n\n\"Sorry, I should have remembered how cold it is up here, Princess. Two thousand feet higher. The lair is very warm inside, however. It's heated by a natural geothermal vent said to be over three miles deep.\"\n\n\"I'm alright.\"\n\n\"Says the dark icicle?\" He cupped her body with his free forepaw in order to reduce the wind chill. \"Is this better?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Remind me to find you something warmer when we fly up to Juggernaut's lair. We'll have to overfly a pass of nineteen thousand feet along the way. That's going to be tough, although hardly as tough as a little piece of gristle like you \u2013 hugh-harr-hurgh!\"\n\nShe wrinkled her tiny nose. \"Hilarious, Blitz. True comedic value.\"\n\n\"I'm a master.\"\n\nDid she know how nervous he was? Her soft-eyed glance suggested so. Any self-respecting son of the winds ought to be insulted by her reaction, but this Dragon was tiptoeing into a wide world of nuance and complication that made his lonely bachelor days seem about as complicated as a sheep's life. Eat. Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Be eaten \u2013 oops. Lair-bound life was simplicity itself compared to smuggling a Princess into his parents' lair.\n\nAzania had treated his eyes this morning. Twice-daily herbal washes had definitely reduced the chronic itching. Although there was hardly any apparent improvement in his long-range sight, the shorter range of up to about fifty feet was fairly consistently clear now. She had dared to tug his wings about wearing spectacles that very morning \u2013 snuff his mortal fires! Not that his belly fires needed much help in lacking existence. In more exciting news, she informed him that there were Human opticians in the western oceanic kingdom of Alaxarmis who had begun to experiment with the correction of sight using lenses similar to telescopic lenses.\n\nA Dragon wearing glasses?\n\nThe Princess declared he would look distinguished.\n\nBlitz knew his fellows would laugh their wings off. No Dragon had ever worn such a contraption. How many might have needed one \u2026 aye. Unwritten, never researched, and most certainly never admitted by any proud, noble son of the winds.\n\nGathering his strength, he hurled himself into the greying heights. A swift-moving tempest gusted in from the east, typical of the mountains. The weather could change in the blink of a Dragon's eye. The girl gasped appreciatively as the powerful acceleration pressed her back in his paws. He was no slouch when it came to speed. Only, the fastest Dragons still needed to see where they were going, or they would have the best accidents, too. He snuck up on a lammergeyer which was lazing upon a thermal, probably contemplating tossing bones onto rocks to crack them open for the marrow, and sent the bird packing with a resounding roar.\n\nHis cupped paws chuckled, \"Dragon thunder!\"\n\nOh! She had been hiding completely out of sight. Small enough, he supposed. \"A few relatives incoming,\" he noted. \"Still time to flee in abject fear and trembling, Princess.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Blitz, I'll hold your paw for you.\"\n\n*Harr-harr-harr!* he chortled with merriment he felt in no bone of his body. \"May your wings surmount the winds until you touch the suns \u2026\"\n\nThat was no blessing for a Human. Well, not a standard one. Dragons did not, on the whole, wander about blessing Human villages before undertaking a spot of light despoilation. That reminded him, he must declare Azania his prize according to a tradition which had not been spoken in any mountain fastness in over three decades, ever since Hangry the Smiter had abducted the last Princess on record, the frail and sickly Amonette of Taribonli. She had not survived the experience, through no fault of the Dragon's. Congestive heart failure. Despite that, King Azarkal of Taribonli had famously vowed to exact revenge upon the Smiter Clan, sending his entire army into the mountains to murder no less than twenty-seven Smiters in one bloody week's work.\n\nUnfortunately, the King's mortal enemy on his northern border, Zobar the Warlord, had seized the opportunity to sack a kingdom bereft of its main army, which was busy decimating and being decimated by the vengeful Smiters. History had not favoured King Azarkal's foolishness. He died after being tossed off his own battlements. Taribonli and its army were no more, the kingdom a ruin inhabited by wolves and crows.\n\nScooting up and over a ridge which concealed a montane plateau beyond, covered in wispy tan grasses, Blitz angled for the start of the peaks two miles further on. His sire and dam commanded arguably the finest lair in the mountains, the majestic ancient holding of the Devastators. It lay two and a half thousand feet higher up a sheer cliff, where a mated pair of Dragons \u2013 Uncle Grudge and Aunt Bonfira, judging by the light yellow smear of the Dragoness \u2013 were just landing on a wide ledge that fronted the deep cave system. In fact, some thirteen Devastators lived within these caverns, a substantial number by the reckoning of Dragons. This gathering would muster over fifty fully grown adults, making the Devastator Clan one of the largest and most prestigious in the Tamarine Mountains.\n\nAll of this, the Princess knew.\n\n\"Oh!\" she cried. \"Baby Dragons, Blitz \u2013 oh look, they're so cute.\"\n\n\"Cute is a bad word,\" he said automatically, trying to focus on the family group and largely failing. \"Aye, that will be Gemira and her mate Talonfire. He's actually the last living Smiter. Our Clan adopted him as a hatchling.\"\n\nHer voice rose an octave. \"They're so tiny, their father's carrying them on his back!\"\n\n\"Tiny is also an inadvisable word,\" he snorted.\n\n\"Ignita told me that they were born just last week,\" she informed him, growing noticeably snippy at his censure. \"That is fairly young to be flying, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Dragons fly within hours of birth. However, this is a substantial height. They would not have the strength to fly up here for months yet, which is why they are being borne aloft with honour \u2013 and before you ask, for Dragons the position on the back is honourable, while for Humans, it is unthinkable.\"\n\nDrolly, she riposted, \"And the neck? Merely inadvisable?\"\n\n\"Dragons not being the least stiff-necked creatures under the suns,\" he agreed, bringing them to a smooth landing despite the rising gusts. He opened his paws to allow her to alight upon a dusting of snow.\n\nLightning!\n\nBlinking a jagged smear of light off his retinae, Blitz whirled as the Princess cried out, \"Talonfire! He's \u2013\"\n\nA vast thunderclap drowned out the rest of her warning.\n\nTalonfire the Smiter reeled in the air, shaking off the effect of an unexpected explosion. Sensing far more than seeing the impending danger, Blitz dived into the abyss before further thought intruded. One of the hatchlings tumbled ahead of him. Flapping bravely, the rare blue tried to orient herself and fly, but a powerful gust crumpled her small wings and slammed her against the cliff face. Blitz's hearts clenched in concert. No! Injured, her left wing hung poorly. Looked like a break, called a greenstick fracture in hatchlings, for their bones remained soft for some months after emergence from the egg.\n\nCatch her, Blitz! He folded his own wings for maximum velocity. A death dive, the Dragons called this manoeuvre.\n\nA passage the Princess had read to him just last night ran through his head.\n\nKeep the wings close. As the inevitable gust buffeted him against the rock, he ran down the cliff face, taking the impact on his paws before reaching out to snatch the plummeting hatchling out of the air. Rock hurtled upward \u2013 three-legged, he sprang away from the jagged face, smacking the point of his hind knee against an outcropping. Not quite a vertical cliff and eyesight too poor \u2026 finding control with his tautly angled wings, he swooped away from danger, pummelled by the merciless wind.\n\nBreathe. Live. Check on the hatchling. <You're safe now, little fire. Wings and paws alright?>\n\nA tiny, hot tongue licked the crook of his neck. <Nice Dragon.>\n\nHe chuckled soothingly. <Let's go see that your sire's alright. I think the lightning struck a metal vein in the rock face just as he was landing. The blast knocked you loose \u2013 aye, there he is. Your dam's looking down at us.>\n\n<Big brother Dragon?>\n\nGemira's light blue paw hovered protectively behind the royal of T'nagru as Blitz executed his second landing within a minute. Opening his paw, he let the hatchling dash over to her dam. The two crooned and necked in the draconic way, snatching him into a scent memory of his own dam's affections in the years before she started brooding over her second egg. Then, she had begun to snap at him when he approached, warning him off.\n\nThose happy early years had been fleeting.\n\n<Blitz, how can we ever thank you enough?> the Dragoness fluted.\n\n<Just fortunate I was in the right place and forewarned \u2013 thanks to you, Princess,> he said gruffly. <Talonfire, are you alright?>\n\n<Dazed,> the crimson male replied, shaking his head slowly. <The blast caught me right in the neck. Sorry \u2013 thank you, Blitz. I would not have thought \u2013 without a scale's thickness of doubt, your quick paw saved our Sapphira's life. We are forever grateful.>\n\nHe would not have thought? Blitz would not have thought, either. He did not entirely appreciate the smooth cover-up. Shaking his head slowly, he shivered to help the violent battle readiness abate. Logic was so overrated at moments like this. Yet the Princess' incessant digging in the scrolls had been rewarded in that instant by a near-perfect run down the cliff, which had kept him and the hatchling alive. He would tell her so later.\n\n<Sapphira hurt her wing,> he purred, stroking the hatchling with a gentle wingtip gesture. <Please have her see a healer.>\n\nThe parents nodded dutifully. As he spoke, a flurry of stinging sleet came lashing in on the gale. He reached for the Princess, but Gemira was already ushering her away from the cliff edge with a kind word. Instead, he lent a helping paw to Talonfire as he limped inside the lair.\n\n[ Dragon Meal ]\n\nThe great, sandy entry cavern with its massive age-carved columns and spectacular overhead stalactites, all glittering greens and blues, was full of Devastators of every hue cheerfully greeting each other, right until a Human walked in. One second they were welcoming one another with shoulder bumps and mock nips for Clan of the same gender, and wingtip caresses between females and males. The next? A stunned silence, in which a Princess' delighted comment rang clear to the back of the cavern:\n\n\"Oh Blitz, it's lovely in here. And so warm!\"\n\nFifty Dragons and Dragonesses goggling at a person was enough give any sane Human pause. Azania was indeed sane. Good to discover this fact. Contrarily normal, in his contrarian opinion. However, one particular Dragon wished in that second that the sandy floor could have opened to gobble him up and swallow him without a trace, but he also knew this opportunity must not be wasted. Not even if his nostrils were yelling stridently at his stomach as he caught the scent of charred, Dragonroot pepper-basted mutton roasting in the kitchens a couple of caverns over. By his wings, the feast smelled amazing!\n\nSummoning his courage, he called, <Honoured granddam Furina, Talonfire and Gemira's hatchling Sapphira needs your help urgently, please>.\n\n<Wing-thanks to you, brother,> Talonfire said hoarsely behind him.\n\n<Always.> Next, Blitz set his stance and arched a wing above and behind Princess Azania. He boomed, <Honoured Dragons of the Devastator Clan, I present to you the plunder of my right paw, by hearts' fire and talon my own possession, her Royal Highness the Princess Azania N'gala of the Kingdom of T'nagru, the only daughter of King N'gala N'gala. She is called the Black Rose of the Desert.>\n\nHe was quite sure the dark eyes of his so-called possession must have flashed with suppressed fury as she made a deep formal obeisance to the assembled Dragons, a desert n'gandura-naa, in which she raised her right hand to shield her eyes before dipping from the knees and supple waist much as a heron's neck bent over water, with superb grace. Yet within, the roiling scents of her black-tinted emotions proclaimed outrage. Perhaps he ought to have warned her, but then, her reaction would have been less genuine.\n\nRising, she said in accented Draconian, <May the magnificence of the suns fire your hearts, o noble Dragons, and your paws ever trample the enemy before you.>\n\nAnother Dragon might have popped with pride, but Blitz managed to maintain a suitable air of decorum \u2013 only just. Not so much the younger Dragons. They murmured amongst themselves, wondering at the ancient form of greeting. She must have picked it up from a scroll somewhere and practised many times. Even he did not know the appropriate response.\n\nPausing before them, the aged yellow Dragoness Furina purred, <May the fury of Taramis ever blaze from your eyes and ignite the glorious deeds of your hands, o most radiant Princess of T'nagru. Be welcome among the Devastator Dragons, the greatest Clan of the Tamarine Mountains.>\n\n<The greatest!> every Dragon repeated by rote.\n\nOnly he saw the clenching of her fist behind her back as the girl steadied herself. <Mine the honour be, o \u2026 mighty Furina.>\n\nThe Dragoness inclined her muzzle regally and moved on to take Sapphira in paw, leaving him more than startled. Unexpectedly formal, the elder had set the tone for the Dragons' dealings with the Princess. He did not understand exactly how. Did she recall the days when kidnappings had been rife? Her archaic manners struck a modern Dragon as stilted, yet gracious in heart and not at all condescending. It now behoved the Clan to follow her example, despite that she was not the declared Clan leader.\n\nAn unshakable age hierarchy amongst Dragons, venerated the elders of their community. His sire, Blaze the Devastator, was in the old parlance the dominant male, while younger Dragons called him the alpha. Some Dragon Clans still staged formal fights for leadership, but among Devastators this position was an honour conferred or confirmed every five years by all elders over the age of seventy years, by a vote of paws.\n\nWhen he had described this system to the Princess during the flight north, she had nearly fallen off his paw. \"Voting? What kind of a system of rule is that?\"\n\n\"A draconic one,\" Blitz replied sardonically.\n\nShe made a face. \"So, you believe you get the best rulers this way?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. Sometimes it's a popularity contest. Sometimes we get a great ruler, other times a tyrant. You never know what the scent of power will do to a Dragon.\"\n\n\"What's the point, then?\"\n\n\"Well, you Humans have authority systems where authority is inherited by bloodline, no matter one's merits or lack thereof.\" She spat a pithy word that might have referred to her own father at this point. \"Among Dragons at least, we believe that any Dragon or Dragoness can aspire to leadership, and by great deeds, wisdom and integrity, achieve this goal. Dragons are cunning and elections can be influenced in myriad ways. Let's just agree that both systems are flawed, shall we?\"\n\n\"Agree with you? This must be a first.\"\n\nStepping up to her side, Blitz courteously offered the Princess his upturned right paw. This was a symbolic gesture they had discovered in the records, and agreed to use \u2013 yet it was with a visible quiver that she laid her left hand upon his fore talon and together, they walked amidst the Dragons toward his sire.\n\nImagine being the only Human in a congregation of Dragons? She acted serene, chin raised and pose regal, but inside \u2026 browns and dark greens of alarm sparked from her thrashing heart.\n\nIf ever a Human must have felt edible, now was the time.\n\nBlaze was a stolid yet striking flame-orange Dragon of middle years, while his dam Indigofire was an unusual shade of red which often looked more purple or indigo, especially by lamplight. She was still a sleek, handsome female, except that her expression was as hard as a diamond, and about as welcoming. Squaring his shoulders, he told himself he would not grovel before them as before \u2013 not literally, but in his thoughts and behaviours. Bigger by ten feet in length than his large father, and standing three feet taller, he need stoop before no Dragon. Respect. Honour. Loyalty. By the honour of his wings, he must absolutely not let anything they did or said get under his skin.\n\nHe would be a river stone. Let it all wash over him.\n\n\"Blitz, my eldest son!\" his father rumbled, making sure he could be heard all over the cavern. \"Today, you have become a true Dragon! How well the revival of this ancient practice suits you.\"\n\nBite the tongue. Bite \u2013 the \u2013 tongue!\n\nHe would never curse the father of his egg over his snide insults, but he both heard and scented every Dragon in the cavern react as the unsubtle implications washed darkly over their senses. Twenty years old and only now being declared a true Dragon? What a rebuke!\n\n\"O Princess of T'nagru, I am Blaze the Devastator, leader of the greatest Dragon Clan in the Tamarine Mountains. Be welcome in my caverns! May you bring the Dragonkind much honour, the attentions of many knights and slayers whose bones shall litter the slopes of our peaks, and of course, wealth according to every report of your great beauty, which reputation justly goes before you \u2013 BRAA-HAA-HAA!\"\n\nThe Princess stiffened. He held her gallantly. Indeed, it was that grip alone that kept her upon her feet as, to his surprise, his sire shoulder-butted him as equals might.\n\nFirst time for everything. Bite holes in the tongue.\n\nBlitz kept his posture tall but lowered his head graciously to nuzzle his mother's cheek, every inch the obedient son, and he caressed her back with his right wingtip. Flawless formality.\n\nShe whispered for his ear canals alone, <Congratulations, Blitz. If you think your honour restored, think again. You cannot fool me.>\n\nHe purred, <Dearest mother of my egg, how you shine this day.>\n\nKnowing she loved a well-turned compliment.\n\nThe glare she turned upon him was positively evil. It shook him to his bones. What? What was this? Jealousy toward the Human Princess? Of course, his mother must think that she had dropped into his paw by convenient delivery at the end of a rainbow, whereupon her stumble-footed fool of a non-fiery son had somehow contrived, by some unimaginable miracle, not to spoil his good fortune in a matter of minutes.\n\nMeantime, the Princess repeated her lithe genuflection for his dam and sire in turn, and complimented them upon the splendour of this gathering, which outshone the cavern in which they stood.\n\nSmooth diplomacy. Blitz found himself scrambling to take mental notes.\n\nNext, he introduced her formally to his brothers and sister, Brand, Brawl and Inferna. All behaved themselves in front of their sire and dam, but Brawl was positively bristling with impatience to let rip with the insults and innuendo, probably during the meal if Blitz knew him at all, while Inferna wanted to talk to a girl. A real girl. The crimson Dragoness soon monopolised the Princess with her chattering.\n\nBurnt-orange Brawl brushed past him with a disrespectful nudge. <Still the same fireless brown worm, aren't you, brother? Nothing's really changed.>\n\n<It's good to see your strength, brother,> he said. Keep it neutral. Move on.\n\n<Let's feast!> Blaze roared.\n\nHe stepped forward to rescue the Princess from the delicate clutches of his verbal waterfall of a sister. The girl touched her brow as if dazed. Aye. Took one parakeet to know another, did it not? They followed the crowd strolling through to the feasting cavern. Fifty quads of paws on the move made the mountain shake; the padding of tiny Human slippers was lost amongst the living earthquake.\n\n\"Do you like mutton?\" he asked.\n\n\"I prefer oryx,\" she replied. \"I thought I smelled some earlier.\"\n\n\"Depends how far the raiding parties flew,\" he agreed. \"I believe some villages in eastern Vanrace farm oryx.\"\n\n\"It's a wild country\u2013 that whole band northeast of Vanrace isn't truly ruled by any King, and it's separated from T'nagru by miles of badlands,\" she replied. \"A few bandits scratch out a living there. And traders.\"\n\n\"Aha. Now, please remember that Dragonroot peppers are unsafe for Human consumption. They act similarly on Dragons to how alcohol affects Humans, minus the belligerence and throwing up.\" She nodded, saying she had not known that. He added, \"So you can expect our gathering to become very merry as the meal drags on, with exceedingly dull speeches and such.\"\n\n\"Can't wait. Sounds just like a royal feast back home.\"\n\nHer royal feasts had never seen anything like this. Stretching the art of comparison there, Princess, he thought sourly, while pasting a genial expression onto his lips. The Dragons gathered around great brass platters set on pedestals a little taller than the Princess, which were loaded with charred meats, fire-grilled vegetables and piles of the great lime green Dragonroot pepper pods. If a Dragon wanted a drink to cool his fiery throat, there was a small waterfall at the southern end of the cavern, which poured into a pool just a couple of Dragon paces across. Great flaming braziers functioned as lighting, pouring smoke up to the roof of the cavern, but it all cleared away through a clever ventilation system. The golden light flickered most pleasingly off the gold and copper flecks in the rock faces and roof of the cavern.\n\nNow, how could they do this? Blitz cast about for a chivalrous way of not placing the Human Princess on a platter. Some fool might mistake her for a snack.\n\nOccupational hazard for Dragons.\n\nAlthough, he had to admit, the temptation had at times been severe.\n\nGemira paced up to his side, walking with that attractive fluidity of a younger Dragoness. \"Princess, why don't you join my hatchlings at a smaller platter? I appreciate it isn't a seat of honour, but I don't believe Blaze has made provision for a Human \u2013 in fact, I believe you may be the very first Human to grace our hall in the history of the Devastator Clan. If this arrangement is not beneath your dignity \u2026\"\n\n\"I am too hungry to fuss over protocol,\" she admitted. \"Lead on, Gemira. Thank you.\"\n\nThe Princess did appear to become slightly queasy as the hungry Dragons dug in with a vengeance, slicing portions off the whole grilled sheep with their talons and smacking their lips in proper appreciation of the delicacies. There was a great deal of rambunctious talk and the usual tossing of choice portions to one another, to be snapped up out of the air. A miss led to teasing and booming laughter. As they strolled over to where the smaller, lower platters had been set for the hatchlings and fledglings, Blaze led out with a ripping belch that rolled off the ceiling with a touch of thunder, making her start visibly.\n\n\"Appreciation,\" Blitz grinned toothily at his guest. \"It's cultural.\"\n\n\"I couldn't.\"\n\n\"You will have to. It is most unseemly not to appreciate the fare.\"\n\n\"You're going to make me, aren't you?\"\n\nHe gave her his best 'call me Dragon' smile. The one he would never in a thousand years admit to having worked on in the mirror in his sleeping chamber.\n\nThe hatchlings were more than happy to have a royal guest at their platters. None of them had ever seen a Human up close before, so she was a great curiosity. She had to explain about her non-scaly skin, her hair, her lack of fangs or fire, and her possession of an actual brain and intelligence. Azania told them stories about the great desert sandstorms \u2013 obsidian in the south and west, and blood-red in the aptly-named Blood Desert to the east of the Kingdom of T'nagru. That area was a favourite with Dragons, full of hot springs and tasty oryx.\n\nTo his amusement, there were at least as many ways of wearing Human hair as Dragons had to polish their scales and fangs, which made sense. The Princess was just explaining to Gemira how she had to submit weekly to having her curly black hair flattened with hot irons in order to give her a smooth, sleek look in keeping with acceptable fashion of the lighter-skinned Human kingdoms.\n\n\"One cannot attract a suitable Prince to mate without the right hair?\" he blurted out.\n\nThe Princess said ruefully, \"There is such a thing as being too black, Blitz. I must rouge my cheeks, straighten my hair, use colours I would never choose to beautify my eyes, and act in a demure and reserved way.\"\n\n\"Frankly, Princess, those men you've been courting sound like a flock of stupid sheep. Let me guess. Wearing your hair natural \u2013 these crazy, rebellious curls I see escaping from your braid here \u2013 would not only bring down the wrath of your father, but ruin your prospects of marriage? Do your kind not wear their hair in the way it grows?\"\n\n\"Aye, and any such style is referred to as 'peasant bush' or 'farm girl frizz,' both of which carry connotations of lesser intelligence, ugliness and promiscuity.\"\n\n\"Ouch.\"\n\nLike a Dragon wished for anything but common, mud-brown scales. Lowest of the low in terms of desirable colouration. Little Sapphira was a beauty, he thought, noting the hatchling arriving shyly at the feast in the company of Furina. Her wing was firmly fixed in a wing splint. She gave him a tentative smile filled with needle-sharp fangs; he smiled encouragingly and gestured with his wingtip that she should join them.\n\nThe adults' party grew raucous. Several of the elders made speeches about the high points of the Devastator Clan's history, including their successful involvement in ejecting the Skartunese troops from the Tamarine Mountains. Chewing meditatively upon a pepper \u2013 he partook sparingly of the Dragonroot because it always gave him a vile stomachache afterward \u2013 Blitz enquired of the Princess whether she knew what had become of those captive Dragons, as the retreat had taken the Skartun back through Vanrace and T'nagru.\n\nShe said, \"That all happened before I was born, Dragon, but it was said they had ways of controlling and forcing Dragons to work for their army as slaves.\"\n\n\"None of our kind would ever submit to such treatment.\"\n\n\"I'm only reporting what I read. They were supposed to have secret ways of subjugating Dragons, which was what they were doing in these mountains in the first place \u2013 they are slavers, Blitz, who built a brutal martial culture on the blood and backs of their slaves. Thank the stars the Skartun retreated back over the Obsidian Desert and have never been seen again.\"\n\nBending her muzzle between them, Furina breathed, \"There are rumours, Princess. Rumours that greedy eyes look north, seeking fresh slaves.\"\n\nAzania shuddered. \"Please, no.\"\n\n\"We're being summoned to the head bowl,\" Blitz said.\n\n\"Best paw forward, Dragon.\"\n\nBrawl greeted him with, \"Ah, it's the coolest Dragon in the land!\"\n\n\"Enough, Brawl,\" his sire snarled, yet his smile was jovial. A great deal of Dragonroot pepper would be the underlying reason. He slurred, \"So, my first son, do tell us all about your glorious adventures in the south. How came you to acquire such a valuable Princess?\"\n\n\"Plucked her from the sky?\" Brand chortled.\n\n\"Scared her off her horse?\" Inferna giggled. \"Wooed her with a picture?\"\n\n\"My son is a Devastator!\" his father announced to the room at large. \"Never done a day's devastating in his life, but there we go \u2013 all that has changed now, not so? Tell me your tale of Dragonish derring-do. Make it good \u2026\"\n\n<Blitz the Fritz,> his sister hissed. She was always silly on the Dragonroot.\n\nSilly and cruel.\n\nMasking his emotions with care, Blitz raised the Princess upon his right paw, bringing her up to the level of the Dragons. She crossed her legs and smiled prettily at them, like a Dragoness preening before an adoring audience. By his egg, she had far better command of this situation than he. No Dragon wanted to feel an inch tall, but this was merely the icicle's tip of years of family teasing. Here, he was a fledgling all over again, his scales heating up with shame \u2013 but never enough \u2013 as the fiery eyes turned upon him. A dull roaring filled his ears.\n\nHe said, \"A few weeks back, I flew down to the Kingdom of Vanrace in search of a little light pillaging \u2013\"\n\nLaughter. Roars of laughter.\n\n\"You, Blitz? Be serious, son,\" his sire chortled. \"You're the gentlest Dragon I know. You've never pillaged so much as sheep in your entire life.\"\n\n\"Well, I \u2013 I was resting on the roof of the castle \u2013\"\n\n\"Translation: He was down in the moat, blending in with the mud as only Blitz can,\" Brawl sneered, drawing the desired round of guffaws.\n\nHis left paw clenched into a fist beneath the level of the bowl. Ignore them. Forge on. \"I was on the roof, as I said \u2013 it was \u2013 uh, evening, and I heard this noise below. Inside the tower.\"\n\n\"Which castle was this?\" his dam put in.\n\n\"The big one. The one in the centre of Vanrace \u2013 King Tyloric's own fortress.\"\n\nCruel laughter beat against his ears. Jeers and incredulous questions rained in. He tried to explain where it was, what he had been doing there, when the Princess stood upon his palm and tried to corroborate his story. He hissed at her to be silent. How shameful to have a female, and a Human female at that, speak for him, as Brawl made sure to clarify for everyone.\n\nShe bit her lip just as he did; her fury washed white upon his Dragon senses. Even that much was pure humiliation. He could not summon so much as a spark of rage. She burned bright. The old despair curled about his gut and innards, squeezing like talons of ice.\n\nWorthless worm. Fireless, smokeless excuse for a Dragon!\n\nAppalled, he roared, \"I stole the Princess of T'nagru from the highest tower in the land \u2013 I swear it by my father's own egg!\"\n\nSilence. The strong oath silenced them.\n\nHe growled, \"Let all of fiery hearts hear my truth ring forth. King Tyloric had abducted the Princess a month before. He locked and chained her first in his dungeon and then in his highest tower, yet his heart never lusted over the gold her ransom might bring. Instead, this King determined to degrade the Princess by forcing her to marry his son Prince Floric. So aye, sickened in every heart by the stench of such degradation, I broke her out of that tower room. I destroyed the tower and part of Tyloric's castle as I made my escape with the Princess in paw, killing many of his men along the way.\"\n\n\"You may be many things, Blitz, but you have never before lied openly to your Clan,\" his dam murmured, but many Dragons heard her.\n\nWhat could have passed for support, from her lips twisted into the vilest of accusations, snatching the very breath from his lungs.\n\nAzania cried, \"It's the truth! Why will none of you listen to him?\"\n\nAt her words, something visceral snapped deep within his chest.\n\nTurning very slowly to his dam, Blitz heard himself in a taut, terrible undertone, say, \"I swore upon my sire's egg. You may fly to Vanrace to see the damage with your own eyes, mother. Or, tell me, what manner of curst fires burn in your Dragoness hearts?\"\n\nHe snapped his jaw shut with a loud clack. Too late.\n\n[ Family Feud ]\n\nThe thundering that rattled the chamber until dust and pebbles rained from the ceiling was as nothing which had come before. His despicable accusation moved the Dragons to a righteous fury. No creature of true fires spoke to his dam in such a tone. Never. She could censure him in any way that she liked. He could not dare the same.\n\nDazed, Blitz cast about in confusion. The Princess had vanished off his palm. His dam sprang over the bowl in a spitting rage that struck his senses with feelings both intense and brutally dark, but he ducked and somehow managed to bounce her off with the sharp arching action of his back, sending her flying into a knot of relatives gathered in stupefied silence at the next food bowl behind. The fire of Brand's attack bathed his left flank, but he ignored his brother. Nothing else mattered. Would they murder her?\n\nHis aching eyes focussed on the thief.\n\n\"Brawl! Put her down!\"\n\nHis smaller brother dangled the Princess teasingly, holding her dress behind her neck with pinched talons. \"Since you have no heart fires, brother, your vow of possession means nothing. This creature is mine, now, and I shall claim her ransom for my \u2013\"\n\nHe saw a colour like an unbearably brilliant silver. Swinging his right fist in a brutal arc, Blitz thundered a blow into the lower side of Brawl's jaw, just beneath the near eye. Perfect connection. His brother dropped like a stone, but when his intended prize fell too, it was a desperately awkward landing. Her right foot caved beneath her.\n\nThe Princess clutched the spot, her face twisted in agony.\n\n<ENOUGH!!>\n\nBlaze the Devastator's thunder shook them all.\n\nHis lowered right shoulder rebuffed his mate's return assault upon her son. <I WILL SPEAK!>\n\nThe Dragoness recovered with ill grace and prowled around behind him, letting the fires of her wrath and humiliation leak between her fangs. Clear enough.\n\nBlitz lowered his paw for the Princess. She mouthed a 'sorry,' and then gazed at her leg in surprise. It hinged below the knee where no joint was ever meant to be. Was it even possible for a dark-skinned person to look so pale?\n\nMore work for Furina.\n\nDrawing a deep breath, his sire said, <Furina, please see to our guest.> \"Princess Azania, my five hearts shiver that you ever had to witness such shameful behaviour between family, beneath my own mountain, no less.\" <Dragons, I have failed as your leader.>\n\nNow, the silence became as a terrible beast lurking in the corners; even the massed breathing of the Dragons beneath the mountain, unbearable. Indigofire halted her pacing, coming up behind her mate with a soft query that he did not reply to, for with a loud groan, Brawl opened his eyes.\n\n<What \u2026 hit me?>\n\nOn another occasion, the timing might have been comical. When no Dragon replied, he whined. <But I \u2026 Blitz, you \u2026 how dare he hit me?>\n\nRounding upon him, Blaze snarled savagely, <If you know what's good for you, Brawl, you will not utter another word.> His son's jaw snapped shut like a sprung trap. <Council. Meet with me. Blitz. Attend to our guest's injury. Do not leave this mountain until I have delivered the word of my judgment.>\n\n<I shall not, Father.> He bowed his head in contrition.\n\nIn all his sordid history of chewing upon the idiocy of his own paws, he had never, ever done anything as bad as this. Not even close."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Cooling off. In the context of what had just passed inside the mountain, the irony was not lost upon him. He stood in the whirling snow, gazing into a nothingness of stormy darkness. The wind's sobbing moaned around the portals of his soul, matching the dirge within. Trying to feel \u2026 something. Yet he did not. All he knew was a numb, cavernous grief as great as the drop out there. Just over the edge of the cliff, a mere half-step from where he lurked.\n\nNo-one had ever meant for it to go this far.\n\nWhat had the flash of his hatred led to? Only the desolation of knowing how deeply and soberly this Dragon had just considered throwing himself over the edge and never opening his wings. Welcoming the crushing impact of skull against rock somewhere far below.\n\nBetter that he had never been born. Better that his dam had never known the psychological and emotional suffering a fireless son had brought her.\n\nIt was all his fault.\n\nHe could not even hold his silence when it mattered most.\n\nWhy, even in his extremity, could he not bring himself to blame any of them? Surely he should thunder the injustice to the very skies. Twenty years of merciless cruelty he had endured. Some of his earliest memories were of his dam's consternation, bitterness and disgust when the extent of his disabilities became clear. Since then, his whole life had been one long, many-clawed struggle to earn their respect. What a sham. A joke. Now, a tragedy.\n\nTo think he had hoped having a Princess might change his stars.\n\nHe must let her go. She deserved better. He would fly \u2026 somewhere. Elsewhere. Someplace where there were no Dragons and no more anguish.\n\nAt the awareness of a tread behind him, he stiffened. To his consternation, the Dragon's footsteps receded, leaving a much lighter step in their wake. He did not move until Princess Azania had walked right up to his side, and then he realised she was leaning heavily upon a stick, trying to keep her leg in its thigh-high cast up out of the gathering snow.\n\nAutomatically, he put out his paw to steady her. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nSnowflakes salted her hair. Beauty so ephemeral, yet so perfect. What paw had crafted the snowflake, the play of suns in water, the delicate treasure of a petal or the scent of a flower's heart? What creative genius had framed the delicate rondure of a black Princess' eyes, like a night sky's darkness unexpectedly endowed with stars that so eloquently disclosed the beauty within?\n\nHe tried to banish such thoughts from his fevered mind.\n\n\"No, I'm the one who is sorry, Blitz,\" she said. \"I goaded you into this. Nothing changed for you, but that I ruined everything. If you want to blame anyone, blame me.\"\n\nShaking his head, he asked tonelessly, \"You met the council?\"\n\n\"Come away from the edge, please. It's not worth it.\"\n\nShe knew! Shocked in every scale of his body, he stepped backward, before halting. He rasped, \"Why? Nothing you could possibly tell me \u2013\"\n\n\"My mother took her own life.\"\n\nExcept that.\n\nBlitz lowered his muzzle toward the mite clasped in his paw. Gently, he touched foreheads with her, and then the grief welled up in a haunting, throbbing lament unlike anything he had ever heard rip from his throat before. This was a Dragon literally crying his fifth heart out. Spilling all his humiliation and pain, loneliness and disappointment before another creature; she spread her arms, and held him with a tiny Human hug, but nothing in the world could have impacted him more just then. She did not say anything stupid like, 'Everything will work out, you'll see,' or, 'You never know what the future might hold,' or any of the ridiculous platitudes the stories always had Humans telling one other.\n\nShe knew it was not alright. It never could be. Knowing he was hurting, she held him.\n\nHe was defeated, yet she bore him up on a soul's wings.\n\nAfter a time, he whispered, \"I'm so sorry about your mother, Azania.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about yours, Blitz.\"\n\nAn inexplicable heaviness lifted off his wings, his hearts, even his tail. In that moment, he knew he could place one paw in front of the next, and walk away from the edge. He would live.\n\nHe had faced the worst, the darkness of a soul born without its gift of fire. Nothing they could do or say could be worse than this place he had been.\n\n\"You must be cold, Princess. Let's go inside.\"\n\nShe touched the plaster cast. \"I'm not sure Human healers know this technique. We should share it with my kind.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\" Heavier, wetter snowflakes twirled out of the sky now, but they would not stick much until the wind eased. Snow, even in the springtime, was not unusual at this altitude.\n\nAs he carried her toward the warmth and safety of the cavern, she said, \"Talonfire and Gemira argued eloquently for you. I told the tale \u2013 some of our tale \u2013 of what we accomplished, and how you hope to learn more about fighting from Juggernaut. At least they heard the truth, this time. What they will believe or decide \u2013\"\n\n\"You stuck up for me. I'll never forget that.\"\n\n\"I tipped you over \u2026 the edge,\" she finished tightly.\n\nAlmost. He shuddered.\n\nHot, dry air tingled his nostrils in the entryway. He said, \"At first I was angry. Angrier than I've ever been in my life. I saw your intervention as shameful \u2013 yet I did not have the courage to speak for myself. Not \u2026 fluently, like you. I was bent on making a mess of everything as usual. Then, I realised why I did not speak up \u2013 why I never have. Because it's easier not to.\"\n\n\"That was easier?\"\n\nHow articulate the disbelief, the outrage in her voice! Yet, how could he communicate what was in his hearts? \"Easier to act the coward, aye. Far easier.\"\n\n\"Blitz! No. Now, you listen to me.\" Struggling around in his paw, she wagged a finger up toward his nose. \"A coward is the very last thing you are. Cowardice did not speed you after little Sapphira. That \u2013 that Dragon \u2013 is a creature of uncontainable nobility, and I am not talking about the stuff of birth and heritage, here \u2013\"\n\n\"It's time.\"\n\nThey both looked up as Talonfire walked across the cavern toward them. His measured paces were poorly coordinated, his left wing drooping from the standard Dragon posture. Had the lightning struck him directly? How unusual.\n\nThe Princess hissed, \"We need to talk. Later.\"\n\nHolding his forepaw as a moving seat for her, Blitz carried the Princess into the inner cavern where they had been feasting and laughing \u2013 and being family, with all the warmth and rancour that meant \u2013 but an hour before. Only an hour? Perhaps it was so. He tasted upon his tongue and breathed deep of the scents of this lair he had known from his hatchling years. So many scent memories. So much love and loss, unpleasantness and hope; those tiny tottering paws turned into huge, blundering ones. This had never been a comfortable place for him. Never home, apart from those early years when his calamitous condition had not yet become clear.\n\nCrimson fire, born of Ignis, made so much of what a Dragon was. Yet, was this him?\n\nDid fire define who he was?\n\nDespite his three-legged walk, the nature of a Dragon's gait could make it smooth, with only a minimal hop. The Princess clutched her rough stick to her chest. Her knuckles whitened as she beheld and sensed the grave air of the Dragons within the cavern. Blaze the Devastator stood upon a black onyx plinth which long ago had been made for occasions of formal Dragon governance, with the elders and Indigofire arranged beside him, a full Dragon's shoulder-height below. The rest of the Devastator Clan, from the oldest to the youngest, had gathered around. There were greens and a couple of blues, but the majority of the Dragons had colourations in the hot end of the spectrum. Although brown was common among the other Clans, Blitz saw now that there were only two others of his dark, earthy colouration amongst this number.\n\nHis gaze rose to his sire, his pose upon that rock, majestic. Yet his eyes did not flame with the old crimson that he knew so well. The gaze that had assessed, judged and dismissed a fireless Dragon. They were tinted blue with grief \u2013 and from that alone, he knew what the decision must be.\n\nDragon law was sacrosanct.\n\nHe halted amidst the congregation of Dragons, his five hearts pounding in a mad, jumbled cadence of pure fear. A familiar sharp pain dug in below his lower ribs, arising beneath the powerful keel bone that supported his massive wing musculature. His stomachs churned with nausea. Here it came.\n\nIn rolling tones, Blaze announced, <Blitz, this is the unanimous decision of the council of Dragons. We all heard you curse the womb from which you were born. Dragon law is clear in such a case. You must be banished. Yet, the law is less clear about what came before. Upon this occasion, a Dragon finds himself weighing the import of that undeniable law which you spurned by cursing the sacred womb of the Dragoness. This act is anathema to any Dragon of true fires, and I see in your eyes, scent in your hearts, and read in the truth expressed of your magic, that you fully understand what you have done.>\n\n<Furthermore, it is also anathema for the congregation of Dragons to despise, dismiss and torment one of our own kind over a period spanning many years. Even today, your mighty paw saved a hatchling from certain death. No act of heroism could more clearly capture the fiery honour of a true Dragon.>\n\nTerrible of gaze, his eyes raked the assembled Dragons, and there was not one who dared to meet the blazing fury he displayed. Yellow flames licked from his lips as he growled, <In our mistreatment of you, we are ALL guilty. Every Dragon is to blame. And I, as your leader, must shoulder the Dragon's share of the blame. I let this undraconic persecution flourish right under my own nose, even revelling in the abuse of the son I sired! No behaviour could be less draconic, and the shame is scorched upon our hearts forever.>\n\nTo Blitz's shock, every Dragon bowed their muzzle to him. Even his father.\n\nHe could not \u2026 believe. What was this? He had trampled all over a sacred law, and they were apologising? A numbness dislocated his paws from his brain.\n\n<Blitz, the will of the Clan is that you be cast out from our congregation, and that the name of Devastator be stripped from you, with all title, inheritance and family bond that signifies. You are no longer a Devastator. You will seal up your lair and depart our territory forthwith. No Devastator will speak to you or acknowledge your presence. However, you may find refuge with other Clans if you wish, according to the unbreakable laws that bind all Dragonkind.>\n\nThere was no breath left in him. No thought, but that he must square up his shoulders, look his sire in the eye, and say, <Father, I \u2013>\n\n<You are no longer my son!>\n\nHis outcry was a crack of thunder.\n\nBlitz squeezed his eyes shut against the agony. <I receive your word.>\n\n<I have not finished speaking.> Sucking in a ragged breath, Blaze added, <In addition, it is my determination as the leader of this Dragon Clan, and the unanimous decision of our council, that you shall be banished for a period not exceeding three years and three days. During this period of separation, I command all Devastator Dragons to reflect long and well upon the transgressions committed here today. You, o Dragon of no name, must fly forth in a quest to find your true fires. Well is it said, that every Dragon is fire, and fire is the Dragon. You are not exempt from this natural law. YOU ARE DRAGON!>\n\nSteady on the paws, Dragon. What \u2026 what was going on here? Through the thundering in his ears, he heard the judgment rolling on: <After the period of banishment, we Devastators shall welcome you back, if you will have us. You will be a Dragon without history, without name and without blemish. None shall speak for or against you save for reason of the honour that I, Blaze the Devastator, attest to and swear by my own sire's egg, permeates your every Dragon heart. By your deeds shall a true reckoning be made.>\n\nMercy? After cutting off his own son from all Clan alliances and banishing him, he offered a path of mercy? His eyes snapped open. His sire gazed upon him with a shocking blaze of love.\n\nLove!\n\nThree years, and he could return? He had never heard of such a law. Being Blitz, he had read it all, every last line. It couldn't be \u2026 Blaze inclined his head, inviting him to speak.\n\nLowering himself upon the elbow of his forepaw which held the Princess, he heard himself say, <I humbly accept your word, mighty Blaze. I am no longer Blitz the Devastator. Nor am I Blitz, son of this lair. Call me \u2026 call me Dragon. For that is all I am.>\n\nHis dam's expression was stone, and her eyes a blaze of dusky resentment. Nothing was forgiven. He knew that his father acted against her wishes.\n\nSomehow, the realisation gave him new strength.\n\nBlaze thundered, <FLY, DRAGON! FLY!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Cupping the Princess protectively to his breast, Dragon hurled himself away into the last buffeting storm winds. Thick snowflakes kissed his nose and scales, each weightless, yet somehow substantial. How could a sane Dragon dare to fly in a sky where visibility was less than two hundred feet? Even so, he could not stand to wait any longer. Stretching out his great wings, he powered toward a home that was no longer his home. Not for three years. How would he leave his sanctuary? The place he always retreated to re-centre himself, find his balance \u2026 aye, and lick his wounds; where he could be alone with his woes.\n\nThe wind rippled beneath his wings, buoying them along in that first great swoop away from the mountain. Already, she shivered uncontrollably. He clasped the Princess between both paws to better protect her tiny, fireless form. The wind chill must bite her brutally.\n\nNo word of complaint did she make. Indeed, for two hours, neither spoke.\n\nBlitz \u2013 he repudiated the name quietly, call me Dragon \u2013 brought them to safe landing in the entrance of his lair. He carried the Princess through and settled her beside the fire with care for her broken leg. \"Food? Water?\"\n\nWhere had the day vanished? Failure had a way of eating up time.\n\n\"First a fire, please, Bl \u2013 Dragon. I'm an icicle. Never been so cold in my life. Then, I'll have a nibble.\"\n\n\"Coming right up.\"\n\n\"Could you repeat what your sire said? Some of the Draconian was beyond me.\"\n\n\"Me too.\"\n\nHe bustled about in all his familiar routines, setting and sparking a fire, blowing on it to make the dry wood catch. He passed the Princess the last hunk of a rough barley loaf she had tried to bake, and a goblet of fresh water.\n\nHe whispered, \"Blanket? Comfortable?\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nThe day had wrung all words out of them. If he was not mistaken, she was as pensive as he, her heart full of reflections and regrets. Her eyes had the dullness of a haunted soul, as if the spark of life had somehow been quarried out, misplaced, left to be kindled another day.\n\nOn an impulse, he added, \"Princess, would you do me a favour?\"\n\n\"Anything.\" Even her smile was faulty.\n\n\"Would you loosen your hair from its braids? I would see it \u2026 free. In its natural state. Breezy.\"\n\n\"Freezy,\" she quipped. \"I'm surprised it hasn't frozen and snapped right off.\"\n\nReturning with the blanket, he judged her expression painted this Dragon a very peculiar creature indeed. He did not know why he had asked this, but he did have a tiny silver hair brush in paw. It must once have belonged to another Princess. He handed over the brush with sober mien, before spreading the teal blanket over her lap. The girl worked steadily at her unruly curls while he repeated and translated for her as best he could, everything he remembered of his father's verdict.\n\nShe said, \"So, we're free to fly up to Juggernaut the Grinder's lair next week, since that's in another Clan's territory?\"\n\n\"Ah \u2013 no. I will take you back to your Kingdom first.\"\n\nThe Princess went very, very quiet. After a long time, she crooked her forefinger at him. \"Come here so that I can hit you.\"\n\nHe pretended to quail, but curved his body around her back, concentrating the heat radiating from the fireplace upon her spot. \"Like this?\"\n\n\"I see that the words 'you're stuck with me' clearly need to be slapped into your brain, Dragon. I repeat, I am here and I am staying. My work is not finished.\" She sounded more saddened than frustrated. \"I have nothing to go back to; indeed, I refuse to go back. So, you stubborn reptile, you can just shove that up your left nostril and \u2013\"\n\n\"Refusing a Dragon is a dangerous business.\"\n\n\"Yet, I am.\" Leaning back against him, she sighed deeply. \"Rough day.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nTaking his paw in her tiny hands, she drew it across her legs. \"Are you truly as daft as you sound, Dragon? Because this is what friends do.\"\n\n[ This Way ]\n\nBefore flying up to juggernaut's combat training centre, at her suggestion, Dragon and Princess flew back to the long valley which they had first negotiated on the way up from Vanrace. The maps in his library showed that the far eastern slope of this valley, and all the mountainous territory eastward thereafter until the vast grassy plains of the Umber Steppes, was not claimed by any Clan. One hundred years before, wild Dragons had made modest lairs here, but since the hunting was poor, the organised Dragon Clans had left the area alone. If they could find a suitable cave or abandoned lair, they might have a place to call their own.\n\nThe wild Princess and the outcast Dragon.\n\nIt took them four days, but eventually they found a narrow crack at the end of a narrow, fantastically meandering valley, concealed behind a waterfall, that led to a Dragon lair which had the air of decades of neglect. Two whole caves. The space was dry and very warm, courtesy of a boiling hot spring that bubbled up at the back, but would need a touch of tidying. A black panther had once made her home here before curling up in a back corner to die. The discovery of the skeleton certainly woke the Princess up with a stifled scream that brought him to her side at a thumping, flustered run.\n\n\"Ooh, our first bit of home decoration,\" he purred.\n\n\"I'd kick you if I could use this foot. She had nice fangs, though.\"\n\n\"I'll show you fangs! Ah, you wretch. Walked right into your trap \u2013 alright, you can stop chortling already.\"\n\nAzania's sharp eyes spotted the entrance to a third cavern right up at the top back of the inner chamber, one hundred and fifty feet off the ground level. Dragon climbed up and found a cave which had once been bolted and padlocked shut, with a strong metal door. No hoard, of course. Nothing but dust piled on top of rotted shelves. Still, he could transport his paintings here, and have a hiding place which was extremely unlikely to be disturbed.\n\nThat evening, as they settled into their new, decidedly basic accommodation, the Princess sat carving and picking at a piece of driftwood she had picked up the previous day.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he asked.\n\n\"Making a sign. Don't look.\"\n\n\"What are you up to, you rascal? Can I get you something for your leg?\"\n\n\"More of those painkilling herbs would help,\" the Princess admitted. \"I was trying to distract myself by working on this.\"\n\n\"What's distracting is your hair.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 why?\"\n\nTaut, her voice; dark blues and browns coloured her emotions as she braced herself for the hurt that was farthest from his intent.\n\nGently, he said, \"Because of the way these sable curls frame your face. I see at last what males of your species must find attractive about you \u2013 one aspect of your attractiveness, I mean. This hair acts like the border of a masterpiece.\" He indicated the wealth of her curls. \"It softens, frames and highlights the characteristics of your dark eyes, and your high, slanted cheekbones. Herein, I see the very apex of feminine mystery expressed.\"\n\nIt was not often he could reduce her to wordless silence.\n\nHer slim fingers wound into the curls that clustered with such bouffant joy around her face. Moisture glinted in the corners of her eyes.\n\n\"You can't mean that.\"\n\n\"You can't say 'can't' to a Dragon, especially not one who is being as thoroughly annoying as me. It just doesn't work.\" He grinned, trying to sneak a peek at her wood carving. Wise to his tricks, she pressed it flat upon her lap. \"Very well, allow me to pontificate further. I am speaking as an artist. All my life, I have had to look very closely to see the beauty in things. My hearts have always responded to beauty, and in nature, there is an endless bounty to gladden the soul. Here, in you \u2013\" he indicated her heart \"\u2013 this Dragon has found such a bounty. A treasure hoard worthy of the name.\"\n\nShe gulped hugely, moved by unknowable emotions. \"Don't \u2026 oh, Dragon. Why \u2013 why did you ask me to loosen my hair, the other day? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"I'll admit, that was for both of us. First of all, you told me about its significance for you as a Human woman of dark skin colouration, but also \u2013 and this is what I did not understand until just now \u2013 it was my seeking to find a way to express that I feel \u2026 lighter.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"All that happened at my parents' cave has lifted a great burden off me. I \u2013 I wish I knew \u2026\"\n\nHe shrugged, lying down behind her again so that she could rest against his flank. That leg was troubling her. Should he take her to see a healer? Curving his head around beyond her outstretched leg, he rested his jaw upon the sandy ground, deep in thought.\n\n\"The lightness of freedom,\" she realised aloud.\n\nOnce again, she named the very feeling he had been chasing for days, now. \"Aye, tingle my wings! You're brilliant! This is freedom, my sire's gift to me \u2013 do you understand? That was what he was doing. My life, until now, has been all about how others see me, and my desperate need to please them. My sire \u2013 oh, Azania!\" Words tumbled over one another, as if conversely trapped by their own drive for release. \"He is far more perceptive than ever I imagined! He wanted to free me \u2026 from everything. The past. Others' expectations. My \u2026enslavement to who I am, to this disability. You see, I don't actually know who I am. I've never known! I was always the Dragon with no fire, the claw-tip of every joke, the smoke of their derision, and I \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! Come out and fight!\"\n\nThey gasped identically and exchanged wondering glances. Had they been followed? Clearing his throat, Dragon boomed, \"Who's there?\"\n\n\"I, Sir Reginac of Vanrace, Knight of the Realm, hereby challenge you to a duel of honour, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Sounds young,\" the Princess commented, her eyebrows dancing. \"Handsome?\"\n\n\"From Vanrace? Blergh.\"\n\n\"Could not agree more. Nonetheless, this being your first knight and all, we should play the game properly. Attend.\" Raising her voice in turn, she cried, \"Oh Sir Reginac, how timely thy advent, come to save a poor Princess from yon beastly draconic fiend!\"\n\n\"Beastly fiend?\" he hissed. He'd beastly her kneecaps for that line!\n\nThe girl made a shushing gesture.\n\n\"Princess Azania!\" Judging by his amazement, she was not meant to be alive. \"I swear upon my honour as a knight that I shall deal with this ruinous beast, this despoiler of mighty castles \u2013 for thy sake, o beauteous maiden, if only you shouldst look favourably upon the daring of this humble knight.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"Very young. Does the chivalrous rulebook allow you not to slay him?\"\n\n\"Fools need slaying, in my humble opinion.\"\n\n\"As a favour to me?\"\n\n\"How many body parts is this going to cost me?\"\n\nRules being rules, the Dragon emerged from his foul lair unmolested by the gallant knight, who waited a short ways from the waterfall's plunge pool upon his white destrier. Had this been a professional Dragon slayer or ten \u2013 well, no trick was too sleazy for their sort. Spear in the back, net, poison, rockfall \u2026 there were many ways to attempt to fell a Dragon. Sir Reginac had turned up in full plate armour together with no less than three squires. Their primary job appeared to be to observe from the sidelines and look stupefied at the Dragon's dimensions as he emerged from his lair, and then even more stupefied as the Princess limped out using her intended signage as a crutch.\n\n\"My sword for thy extravagant beauty, o Black Rose of the Desert!\" cried the knight, smacking the blade of his longsword against his oval shield. His emblem was the lion argent upon a field of silver with crossed spears symbolising death to the enemy, if he recalled his heraldry correctly.\n\n\"Fight bravely and well, Sir Knight!\" called the Princess.\n\nThe squires sighed as one.\n\nWhirling his sword above his head with an uncanny lack of either skill or coordination, the knight dug his spurs into his horse's flanks and charged. The Dragon formerly called Blitz, blinked. That little man in his tin-pot armour thought he could best a Dragon in a straight charge? Mindful of the Princess' orders, however, he sidestepped with a low growl of not entirely simulated outrage. A modicum of skill would have been less of an insult. He swung his tail in a slow sweep, which the destrier at least was smart enough to leap over. Not so much the knight, who almost lost his seat at the jolt.\n\nTwo of the squires cried out in amazement at this manoeuvre.\n\n\"The Princess is mine, little knight!\" he roared, clawing at the air to give the knight a moment to recover his balance and reseat his helm.\n\nGood one.\n\n\"I shall succour this maiden most fair, thou foul, panting fiend of the nethermost hells.\"\n\nFair and foul, foul and fair?\n\nHe had not expected to enter a literary contest.\n\nBest dust off his thesaurus of medieval tomfoolery and get started.\n\nHe roared, \"Through force of arms thou shalt never prevail against the might of the Dragon!\"\n\n\"Guard thy scaly, fulminating self, thou nefarious draconic scourge!\"\n\nOh, enough of this nonsense already. The Dragon clashed with the knight, and discovered that he could actually manage to hit a fifty-three foot target. His blade struck sparks off his scales, a glancing blow. Whirling, he went for the bite, but baulked slightly at the last second. *Clack!* He snapped at the air a foot behind the plate-armoured knight. Princess! By his wings, he was not going into every fight with a handicap like this. They needed to talk, once he finished dealing with this fool. He growled, snarled, raged and thumped his paws about in what he hoped looked like a properly draconic show of rage.\n\nThe squires certainly appeared awestricken, when they were not gaping at the Princess with quite the most staggering range of bovine expressions he had ever seen. Morons.\n\nEvidently, the assessments of the Princess' beauty he had received were right on the mark. Perhaps even shy of it, for these buffoons clearly took her for the incarnation of some goddess.\n\nFour or five passes later, the clever destrier managed to sidestep a clumsy paw swipe and brought his rider into striking range. The sword point pierced his left shoulder. Thundering for real at the pain, he pounded his left fore-talons into the knight's armoured gut, lifting him clear of his mount. He landed with a loud clatter of metal and tried to rise, but fell back with a terrible yet theatrical-sounding groan.\n\nDragon raised his hooked forepaw, scenting the victory.\n\n\"Nay, o Dragon, I beg thee!\" the Princess wailed in piteous entreaty. \"Spare thee this noble knight, who fought thee so bravely!\"\n\n*Grrooaarrghh!!* he disagreed.\n\n\"Ah, Princess, I shouldst die but for the touch of thy delicate hand.\"\n\n\"O most valiant sir, art thou fearfully wounded?\"\n\nWhere did they get these lines? Seeing from the corner of his eye that the hobbling Princess was not yet close, he bared his fangs and vented another thundering roar \u2013 his best yet. One of the squires actually fell over with a bleating curse. Mostly, that roar was to release his battle rage, for the temptation to put a kink in this man's tin armour was almost unbearable. It would be instructive to see how his juices leaked out of the seams of this ridiculous plating.\n\n\"'Tis but a scratch, milady.\"\n\nSo heroic. Dragon nearly retched on the spot.\n\n\"Dragon, I beg thee once more, do not eat this good knight.\" Her dark eyes pleaded with him to see this game through to its conclusion.\n\nNo, not even if he came pre-wrapped in a roasting tin \u2013 mwaa-harr-hurgh! He laughed horribly at his own joke, and threatened, \"Thou canst but whet the appetite of a starving Dragon, thou mighty knight of Vanrace!\"\n\n\"Ah, I fear to perish this day,\" moaned the knight, clutching his belly wound.\n\nStill hobbling forward, the Princess declaimed, \"Thy bravery shall be scribed in every legend \u2013 back up, thou spavined, motley beast of ignoble airs. Let this poor knight be whilst I \u2013\" she pulled up with a coughing fit. Aye. Wrap a man in that much plate armour and send him running about the mountains, and the result was entirely the wrong sort of salutation to the nostrils. Recovering, the Princess held out a white handkerchief to one of the squires. \"Please wet this, that I might most tenderly soothe his noble brow.\"\n\nOr, he could just dump the youth in that stream. He began to wonder if the people of Vanrace knew anything about bathing at all. Ghastly cultural mishap.\n\nAlthough, wrapped in that much metal, he might just sink to the bottom and never rise again. An oceangoing vessel could find him employ as an anchor, which struck him as an entirely reasonable solution to the body odour issue, plus being clean and sanitary. Forever.\n\nHe rubbed his paws together, giving the knight and his squires an evil leer that they could not fail to agree, had horrible death written all over it.\n\nOne of the squires appeared to have wet his trousers.\n\nDragon decided this somewhat redeemed what had threatened to turn into a farce everyone was calling victory.\n\nMeantime, the Princess of T'nagru loosened the knight's helm to reveal a plain but honest face, if his Dragon senses read it right. The squires applied cloths to his middle to slow the bleeding, and unbuckled the stout breastplate. Impressive. His talons had sheared right through the metal. After threatening dire consequences for the knight if his Princess lingered over him, and the Princess having swabbed his fevered brow and entreated the squires to return the knight to Vanrace with all haste and tender care for treatment, they departed bearing their man upon a temporary litter.\n\nThe royal artiste waved energetically and managed to squeeze forth a couple of theatrical tears. Despite his dreadful wound \u2013 cough splutter \u2013 the heroic Sir Reginac did not stop spouting prosaic lines until after they departed from the Dragon's earshot.\n\nHeroic being a synonym for idiotic.\n\nNice rhyme.\n\nAt least the fellow had a smart horse. That was one factor in his favour. Otherwise, he could not imagine that such prize chumps lived long enough to write any history \u2013 or perhaps, the truth was that glorious tales of Dragon slaying were written by even greater fools?\n\nSomeone ought to educate them.\n\nDragon transported his Princess back into the cave, whereupon they both collapsed in a heap, howling with laughter.\n\nOnce they had recovered their dignity somewhat, he snippily bade Azania not to try to save the next fool. One must attempt to improve the intelligence quotient of the species, even if it was one village idiot at a time. She demurely suggested that the situation might be irredeemable.\n\nHowever, the squires had revealed that a much more formidable foe, the celebrated Sir Rumanic, had been discussing raising a force to ride forth seeking redress for the King's honour. He was credited with no less than nine glorious Dragon slayings. Dragon inquired how leading fifty men-at-arms against a single Dragon fit within the code of chivalry. Azania politely informed him that there were grey areas of fairness and common practice. Sir Rumanic was not known to engage in battles he did not feel he could win, and certainly did not approach any encounter without heavy backup.\n\nOne way of staying alive, Dragon approved sarcastically. Ganging up on the foe.\n\n\"Must I call you only 'Dragon?' \" the Princess inquired.\n\n\"My identity crisis being what it is, and considering all the personal agony it entails,\" he snorted humorously, \"I shouldst be most honoured if the indescribably beauteous Black Rose could find it within her power to so endeavour.\"\n\n\"The indescribably beauteous Black Rose shouldst rather biff the colossally quibbling quadruped a swift one up the hooter,\" she returned, quirking her lips in a manner that had made one of those squires half-swoon.\n\nMore hilarity!\n\n\"So, what is this sign meant to be?\" he inquired finally.\n\nShe showed him. It read, 'This way to the Dragon.'\n\n\"This way to \u2013 Princess Azania! I am not some \u2026 tourist attraction!\"\n\n\"Not that you'd make a bad one,\" said she, pursing her lips. Wingtip tugging tease! \"Perhaps that's one way to make us some money? Sir Reginac will boast till the end of his days about how he fought the biggest, baddest Dragon in the Tamarine Mountains and barely escaped with his life \u2013\"\n\n\"That scratch I dealt him? Pah.\"\n\n\"Belly wounds, I should inform you, have a way of going septic.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's unfortunate. Well, do make your point.\"\n\n\"Dragon, we would not want any potential visitors to miss where you now live. Besides, this might just save your old lair from being ransacked.\"\n\n\"Fair point, o most unfair maiden.\"\n\n\"Dreadfully unfair,\" she agreed, chuckling merrily. \"Stir the fire, please, since you're the fireproof one in this friendship. We both need our rest after that show we put on, even if my part was only to shout myself hoarse while trying not to throw up at the reek of our fragrant young knight.\"\n\n\"You were magnificently silly.\" Prodding at the fire with his talon, he added in a moodier tone, \"Yet, we have been fortunate so far. I cannot help but imagine future encounters might not be so light-hearted.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\"\n\n\"Legend has it that most Princesses want to be rescued.\"\n\nShe rested her dark ahead against his flank. \"How many times do I have to tell you \u2013\"\n\n\"'I am not an ordinary Princess, Dragon,'\" he declaimed in a rather dreadful soprano voice, drawing an appreciative giggle. \"'I am not here to wash your dishes, nor to scrub your smelly paws. Who knows what foulness you might have been galumphing through? Nay, I do not sing haunting songs to the moons as I wait for my one true Prince to rescue me from the lair of the foul, sulphur-snorting despot.'\"\n\nShe said sleepily, \"Oh, shush, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Has there ever been one?\"\n\n\"If I ever wanted a Prince, he would be a great deal like \u2026 uh, never mind. There was one. But I was young and timid, and he never came back. What about you? What's your sad tale?\"\n\nWho could that prize fool have been, he wanted to roar, who chose not to return for this Princess? Concealing his reaction, he dwelled a moment upon his reply.\n\n\"My Clan wrecked my chances before I even started. I was always the odd one out, the last picked for chasing or battle games, the bumble-pawed Dragon the others laughed at. I've never met a Dragoness who saw beyond the fire issue \u2013 always, my excellent reputation had long since preceded me, and the inter-Clan gatherings became too painful to bear. Brawl and Brand played it up to the females and made sure to be sniggering around the corner to third-heart-shame any young Dragoness who dared to take so much as a passing interest in their older brother. I'm big, but not handsome of colouration. My hoard, as you can see, is characterised by a great deal more moth and dust than fine yellow metals.\"\n\n\"Don't I count?\"\n\nLightly she asked it, but he saw dark colours touching her mood.\n\nWhy were they both so fragile? How did one ever rise above the unkindness of fate?\n\nAfter the longest time, he managed to force out of his cramped throat words that touched the truth. \"I count not any ransom as the true measure of your treasure. Princess, I could not bear to exchange your friendship for gold. So actually, I'm happy you don't want to go \u2026 home. Is that so very selfish of me?\"\n\n\"Not so much.\"\n\nDrawing his paw across her lap as she was wont to, he saw her eyelashes flutter. Falling asleep. He could not sleep. As her breathing slowed, he pondered what she had meant by that incomplete sentence. What would her ideal Prince be like? Where was that man? What kept him from her; could they go find this absent paragon of manly virtues? Might he be rich enough to \u2013 no. Gold would never even make a top ten of what he considered important when it came to her future.\n\n<There was one. I was young and timid.>\n\nSomewhere amongst the seventeen Human realms, or even the Isles across the Lumis Ocean, there lived a man who set this Princess' imagination aflame. Only a man of worthy character could love an unconventional girl who dared to make friends with a Dragon; he surely must see beyond the dark skin and crazy hair to the luminous heart within.\n\nAye. He would want a Dragoness like that, too. One who saw beyond fireless emptiness, into a Dragon's very soul.\n\n[ Juggernaut the Grinder ]\n\nWith the snowmelt rivers running high, the Princess of T'nagru correctly predicted that no more foolish would-be slayers, knights errant enough to think they could beat a Dragon, nor questing Princes, would come up into the mountains in search of undying glory. Not until the flooding subsided.\n\nAfter planting their sign above the high water mark in a place it could not possibly be missed from the main trail, they flew up to Dragon's old lair in the dead of night to engage in nefarious deeds. Like burgling one's own lair and stealing a few blankets and warm clothing. Robbery most uncouth. And to surreptitiously check his gardens and wrest a few vegetables free of their earthy domain.\n\nOh, the wickedness!\n\n*Mwaa-haa-haa!* A Dragon's soft, mischievous laughter echoed beneath the moons as they raced back out of Devastator Clan territory, having spied the fires of two Dragons watching the boulder-plugged lower entrance to his lair. Brawl and Brand. Charming to have two brothers so dedicated to the business of further smearing his reputation. Could their motives be darker than he had ever suspected?\n\nBack at the lair, there might have been an incident involving shredding a blameless tree with his talons. Startling rage. If a Dragon could summon more of that, this fire issue would soon be consigned to the past. Yet all he knew was a sharp pain like severe indigestion beneath his lower ribs, somewhere behind or alongside his main food stomach, as best he could tell. Dragon ate soothing herbs and may have indulged in a touch of self-pitying chuntering and moaning over his misfortune, until a small plaster-bound foot introduced itself to his scaly backside by way of censure.\n\n\"Shut the fangs and go to sleep, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Far too busy having a pity party here.\"\n\n\"No creature wants to attend your pity party, not even you,\" she said acidly. \"It's a long flight tomorrow. You need to sleep. Now!\"\n\n\"Bad mood?\"\n\n\"You're keeping me awake. Plus, your breath stinks \u2026 which is unusual. Even after you scoffed all those aromatic herbs? Very odd.\"\n\n\"I'm working on my dreadful sulphurous breath wafting from the seething volcanic hells of my fire stomach,\" he professed, more in hope than anything based on actual evidence. \"It's working, isn't it?\"\n\n\"If the smell's anything to go by \u2026\" Wafting some air from his slavering draconic jaw down toward her face, she said, \"No. That's something else completely. It doesn't even smell like food. Besides which, do I detect a hint of minty coolness upon your breath, Dragon?\"\n\n\"One for the ladies. Mint is a masking agent, besides easing this infernal pain in my stomach. Great-Aunt Ignita and her everlasting list of suggestions \u2026\"\n\n\"Ah, you're an infernal pain?\"\n\nHe pretended to clack his fangs next to her legs. \"I'll show you infernal and pain, morsel!\"\n\nUnfortunately, the foolery triggered a strange nightmare about being clamped into a device that shot bolts of lightning into his brain; an endless, inescapable torture that lingered until morning. Dragon dragged himself into the land of wakefulness. Charming. A new favourite. Curled up in his paw, Azania slept the sleep of the blameless. Vastly annoying. He blew upon her hair to wake her.\n\n\"Sing with the dawn chorus, Princess! The day flees before us.\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 do I have to?\"\n\nShe even made waking seem dreamy. No wonder those squires had lost control of their salivary glands upon sight of the diminutive royal. It must be another disgusting physiological reaction.\n\nOdd how Humans found quality in lack of quantity. Less of a girl was more? Very hard for a Dragon to understand such twisted logic.\n\nPacked and ready, since her Royal Peskiness was nothing if not an organiser, there was nothing to it but to make one last sweep of their lair before departing. He hoped any unwelcome visitors would leave the skeleton of the panther alone. He had grown fond of that feature. Macabre, educational and frightening to timid bipeds, all rolled into one.\n\nWith the Princess clad in her leathers and wrapped up in every warm item of clothing they possessed, he walked a hundred Dragon paces down-valley to where the low cliffs widened enough to accommodate his sixty-foot wingspan. The watercourse chuckled down between a series of mossy boulders here; the scent of wild herbs delighted his nostrils as he took a great, steadying breath and settled the Princess in his grip. Long flight today, all of one hundred and ten miles. Ten to twelve hours in the air, depending on air currents and weather conditions \u2013 on that note, the sky looked and smelled fine and clear, if a tad chill.\n\nBounding off a twenty-foot drop, he launched himself skyward with the all-important first five or six powerful wingbeats. Getting those right saved one a humiliating second landing, or worse, an outright crash. Flying was one thing he was born for. Being distracted by Human fingers poking between his digits was not. After checking he was heading around the sequoia growth lower in their valley and curving his flight path to rise over the easterly ridge before turning to the north, he peered down at his passenger.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Science.\" She licked her fingers with a dart of her tiny tongue.\n\n\"What are you \u2013 are you licking my scales?\"\n\n\"Ew, please. No, I am scratching this exudate here with my fingernail and tasting it. Pretty salty, actually \u2013 seeing as someone I could poke with a short stick and occasionally imagine smacking over the head with a stupidly enormous sledgehammer, is extremely touchy about the subject of Human moisture. Tears make you flinch. Tongues make you rush outside to throw \u2013\"\n\n\"It's the moisture,\" he pointed out, showing her his tongue. \"Perfectly dry, see?\"\n\n\"Anyways, do you take a lot of salt in your diet?\"\n\n\"Enough.\"\n\n\"More than other Dragons?\"\n\n\"By my egg, it's too early for this manner of interrogation,\" he complained, trying to shake the sleep out of his eyes. \"Can't a Princess sit tight and appreciate the scenery?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"In silence, perchance?\"\n\n\"Sunrise in the mountains is something else, Dragon. In the desert the sun is hot and huge, and the day can start so dusty-crimson the sky looks like blood. Up here the air is so pure, it's like the peaks and snow and lonely trees crowning the ridges are picked out in crystal.\" His sigh created a wing-bounce in the air. \"I know you wish you could see it all. We'll keep searching for improvements. So, on the subject of salt \u2013\"\n\n\"I've always wanted more than others,\" he said gruffly. \"Much more.\"\n\n\"There now, was that confession so hard?\"\n\n*GRROORRRGGH!!*\n\n\"Something stuck in your throat?\"\n\n\"Very soon, I believe. Charred thigh-bone of snarky Human royal.\"\n\n\"Do you think \u2013 as a teensy-weensy favour to this little morsel you're hauling about the mountains with such mighty strength and ease \u2013\"\n\n\"What do you want, Princess?\"\n\n\"Do you think we could stop on some snow? Land on it? I mean, I know we saw a bit of snow up at your parents' lair, but the day was so fraught \u2026 I wondered if I might walk on snow?\"\n\n\"Consider it done.\"\n\n*Blergh.* Dispensing favours? One step closer to becoming a tourist attraction, he supposed. Still, the idea of giving the Princess a gift, however small, made his wings bounce. Baleful glare for the treacherous appendages. Be still.\n\nThe morning's flight was a long haul up into the centre of the Tamarine Range. They left Devastator territory behind after a few hours and entered the much smaller Windchaser range. Their Clan colour was often light blue, and they were renowned for an ability to fly higher than any other Dragons. By late morning, Dragon stretched his wings to begin the great climb up to the nineteen thousand-foot Malnoose Pass. Snowy peaks towered all around them. The white peaks contrasted strongly with the montane greys, blacks and purples of the lower slopes and the pristine sky. Achingly turquoise waterfalls sprayed off the cliffs and ran down into small lakes.\n\nA shiver from his passenger reminded him of the altitude. Blue-brown was not the best colour for a Princess. Landing on a scree slope, he bade her unpack her blankets. He proceeded to wrap her up like a Human baby in swaddling cloths. Soon, only the dark eyes protruded from a large wad of protection. Even her head was wrapped up. Watery nose, disgusting tongue, the whole moist ensemble. He had her eat a few nuts and cacao leaves, said to help Humans tolerate high altitude.\n\nThen, they flew up the Malnoose Pass under the shadow of three snowbound peaks to his right wing that exceeded twenty-five thousand feet. The terrain was bleak and rocky, the silence immense. Only the creaking and flexing of his wings and their breathing proclaimed they were alive. Dragon had always loved the heights, far from anyone and anything. This pass was famously deceptive. One thought the final saddle was nigh, only for yet another, even higher ridge to reveal itself as the land folded upward. Listening to his passenger's increasingly laboured puffing when he took a wing-break, however, he knew he must remain as low as possible.\n\nAt last, around high noon, as Taramis peeked out from behind the westerly flank of Ignis and set the snows ablaze with white brilliance, he landed again in the middle of a vast snowfield.\n\nThe Princess clambered stiffly out, and giggled with wonder. \"Oh \u2026 it's amazing!\"\n\nSouthward lay ridge after ridge of mountains that eventually led to the Human kingdoms clustered in the green belt above the Obsidian Desert, except for T'nagru. They stood alone, more easterly and southerly than any other. East and west the view was obscured by the towering peaks and broad-shouldered ridges of the central Tamarine Range, but could he have seen several hundred miles to the west, that was where the ocean lay. And north. Nine smaller kingdoms clustered along that fertile northern shore, more than obscured by the backbone of their world.\n\nShading her eyes, the Princess gazed north. \"Are those lakes?\"\n\n\"Aye. We call them the Seven Beaded Jewels. The colour is extraordinary, a very clear, light teal created by glacial minerals.\"\n\nThe Princess stomped her good foot on the snow, laughing. In a minute, a snowball smacked against his left flank. \"Always wanted to do that. Ah \u2013 don't you \u2013 Dragon! No, your paws are too large! That's totally unfair. I can't even run away.\"\n\n\"Stand still so that I can bury you,\" he mock-growled, raising his not at all hard-packed pawful threateningly.\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\nThough he tossed it as softly as he could, his snow boulder knocked her right off her feet. Cursing unhappily, he rushed over to dig her out, only to find a laughing Princess shaking snow dust out of her hair and face.\n\nShe gurgled, \"Brute!\"\n\n\"I wanted you to truly appreciate the snow.\"\n\n\"Oh, very appreciative \u2013 brr, it's so cold. Thanks for the lesson, I think.\"\n\n\"Anytime you want to be bullied, just let me know.\"\n\nGliding upon wide-spread wings, he took a slightly slower and more scenic route down over the lakes. Each was slightly different, the luminous blues like snatches of sky somehow captured and mirrored below. Azania told him how different and wonderful the world was when seen by Dragon flight. Indeed, every nonconformist, disloyal Princess should want a Dragon of her own once they heard what she had been up to. He suggested that pampered rabble could rather peck out their own livers in futile jealousy. His passenger truly enjoyed that image.\n\nWith the benefit of a freshening tailwind, he piled on the speed during the afternoon, sweeping left and right through the peaks. They blazed over a mighty herd of albino ice yaks, sending the huge, two-tonne beasts in their shaggy piles of fur into a lowing, multi-ring defensive huddle. Later on, they passed the strange and little-understood phenomenon of the rainbow springs, a valley in which the multitude of hot springs emitted light which was said to be magical. They filled the deep, forested length of the valley with rainbows, end to end. Ten miles of glorious views. Sweeping low but not too low, he provided the Princess with a couple of glimpses of the massive emerald Serpent Dragons sunning themselves in the treetops. These arboreal Dragons were related to Sea Serpents. According to the best research, this was the only population in the known world. At three times his length and many times his weight, the wild, fierce Serpent Dragons were not to be disturbed. Not even by their smaller cousins.\n\nAzania's eyes were doing her cute, wide-eyed in amazement expression. \"How big are Sea Dragons, then?\"\n\n\"Sea Dragons and Sea Serpents are very different,\" he reproved. \"The difference, for the discerning learner among us, being the body shape and lack of wings. Serpents are elongated and wingless, and daily get themselves legless \u2013\"\n\n\"Ha ha,\" she chortled like the dutiful Princess she most certainly was not.\n\n\"\u2013 while Sea Dragons are migratory oceanic Dragons. I really don't know much about them, but they are said to be very large. Bigger than me, anyways. They fly through the waves and rarely, if ever, leave salt water. Have you ever been to the ocean?\"\n\n\"Never. Yourself?\"\n\n\"Once or twice. Just along the shore. It's \u2013\" he had many evocative words in his head, but what eventually emerged from the muddle was \"\u2013 salty.\"\n\nThe Princess teased him all the way up the next pass about that.\n\nAt the top, they passed over into a vast white snowfield that stretched as far as the eye could see. This highland plateau was inhabited only by wolves and albino yaks, and was an occasional hunting ground for the northerly Dragon Clans. For three hours of flying, they saw no creature. Dragon relied upon his directional sense and a few hints from the person who could see properly, when she was not sneaking a snooze and calling it 'resting her eyes.' He helped her resettle her aching plaster cast leg from time to time, and she complained for half an hour straight about the itching.\n\nSo much itching, he was even itching in sympathy by the time she was done. That was some impressive complaining. Women. He was quite convinced no male would have the vocabulary, stamina or creativity to endeavour such a feat of verbosity. Not unless he had a large splinter stuck in his paw, a bad case of haemorrhoids, or the mildest of sniffles. Then, all bets were off.\n\nAs the suns settled over the far peaks and the shadows stretched long, his efforts were at last rewarded by the Princess pointing ahead. \"Is that it?\"\n\n\"You see a small crater?\"\n\nAfter eleven hours of constant buffeting in the wind, his eyesight was taking a dive toward its worst again. Rest and moistening definitely helped, but they had written off more than a third of the proposed herbal remedies as unhelpful or even worsening his affliction.\n\n\"Small?\" The bundle he carried wriggled with renewed energy.\n\nAye, this was it. Actually, he was unsure if this was a crater or a sinkhole, but either way, it was an impressive geological feature, lying on a slope that faced the final, tall ridges of the northerly mountains. The hole was two miles deep on the near side and seven miles wide. Inside? Hot springs, lush plant growth, and the famous lair of Juggernaut the Grinder. There were plenty of Dragon Clans clustered together around here, to be sure, but they flew through the heart of Grinder territory. The Grinder Dragons were on the alert, because he saw four red and orange blobs closing in on their flight path. What was going on? Clan feud? Dispute? Friendly neighbourhood goons?\n\nCupping his wings to slow down, he glided in the initial signal of peaceable intent. The pursuit did not slow, but when the Grinders came alongside, the leader called, <Fiery wing-ho, Dragon of no Clan.>\n\n\"Great, news has travelled,\" he muttered, before raising his wings in a salute. <Fiery wing-ho, brothers and sister. We travel to Juggernaut's lair. What news upon the airs?>\n\n<A hoard plundered by the Crushers \u2013 a long-running feud,> said the other. <How burn your fires, nameless one?>\n\nWell, not at all.\n\nGrinding his fangs in helpless fury, he replied, <Call me Dragon. I bear in my paw the Princess of T'nagru, called the Black Rose of the Desert. We seek no quarrel with any Dragon, and will tarry only with Juggernaut in the hope that his prowess will lead to a breakthrough in my fighting capabilities.>\n\nThe other grinned. <Well, strange one, you shall find good company down there. May your wings soar, Dragon.>\n\n<May your wings soar, sister and brothers,> he replied, switching the farewell around in the prescribed manner.\n\nThe Grinders acted incurious about a Human, he told the Princess. Few of her kind penetrated this far into the mountains. They both knew that the only viable trade route around the mountains was the coastal route, which ran all the way from T'nagru to the western shores kingdoms before swinging north.\n\nOdd comment about the good company. Did Juggernaut have a visitor? A mate? He had never heard of the warrior Dragon taking any female to lair, although many had aspired to be that one.\n\nAs they swung in over the northern cliff, he saw a flame-orange blur out in the open space in front of his lair, a series of cave openings in the northeast cliff face. Juggernaut. This was his training ground. Many a Dragon knew its hard sands very well indeed, although it was said that Juggernaut took in fewer students these days, or perhaps, it was whispered, modern Dragons feared his famously robust training methods. He would be one of those. He felt no fear, of course. Just healthy respect. A touch of shivery awe. Juggernaut was fifty-seven years old, and he knew of no Dragon who had ever bested him in combat since he was a hatchling.\n\nAs he swung in to land, politely keeping from sweeping over whatever might be happening on the training ground \u2013 although he saw no sign of other Dragons \u2013 he was finally able to take in some details of the legendary warrior. The flame-orange Dragon had flares of crimson and a dark, burned orange upon his upper parts. He measured a decent forty-two feet in length, but he appeared as solid as an ambulatory brick. A lifetime's training had given him massive strength, but it was quickness of paw and discipline which were said to be his biggest assets.\n\nLanding deftly, he inclined his head respectfully. <Juggernaut.>\n\n<Young Blitz \u2013 how should I address you?> barked the other. No niceties for him.\n\n<Call me Dragon, Master. I am a Dragon of no Clan.>\n\n<Dragon, what is this \u2013 you bring a Human to my lair?> So gruff, so clipped his accent, Juggernaut talked with a mouthful of verbal talons. <So, you stole a Princess from Vanrace and lived? Good tale, I'll own?>\n\n<Aye, Master.> \"May I present the Princess Azania of T'nagru?\"\n\n\"The toast of the seventeen realms,\" said he, bowing in a way he had not done with his draconic visitor. \"Welcome, Princess. I like your blade. Know how to use it?\"\n\nShe bowed respectfully from the waist. With the leg, that was all she could manage. \"My skills are modest, Master Juggernaut. I am ready to learn.\"\n\n\"Ignita the Devastator has briefed me. Stand back and pay careful attention. Ariamyrielle Seaspray is about to make her final pass.\"\n\nDragon began, \"Uh \u2026\"\n\n\"From over the trees, youngling. Attend!\"\n\nHe wanted to object, 'What kind of name is that?' His head swivelled slowly. Targets and obstacles lay scattered upon the sands in front of him, arranged to represent an army's deployment, he concluded. Several of the obstacles could fire projectiles or nets.\n\nAs he moved the Princess to his side to ensure she was out of harm's way, he saw from the periphery of his eye, a diminutive cobalt Dragoness rocket over the treetops at such a velocity, several branches cracked at the shearing force generated by her wings. What wings! They were lean and spiny in structure, yet patterned and frilled at the edges so as to be the envy of the most extravagant butterfly. Her forepaws held a pair of slightly curved blades measuring eight feet in length, unlike anything he had ever seen before.\n\nPaw weapons? For a \u2013\n\nSwooping toward them in a colourful smudge of supreme elegance, the Dragoness struck the course like a tornado. Towers toppled. Heads hurtled free of their dummies. Obstacles rocked slightly as she wriggled past or between them, he knew not how. She was striking with everything she had \u2013 blades, wing bones, muzzle, hind paws and tail. Even had his eyesight been perfect, he knew he would still have had no idea how she was doing it, only that it was a dazzling display of martial fury. She out-dazzled dazzling. Landing with the delicious deftness of a moth, she kept right on churning toward them, mowing a wave of destruction through the battlefield. A cacophony of catastrophe! He was quite certain that wooden soldiers the Dragoness could not possibly have touched were leaping out of the way of their own accord. Wood exploded into splinters at the unholy power of her kicks and tail flicks.\n\nShe was moving at such speed, he only realised she was not slowing when the butterfly wings seared the air five Dragon paces in front of his nose. Her blades leaped at his throat as one.\n\nHis right paw snapped out, catching her wrist by some means his rational brain could not immediately process. Protecting the Princess. Her other blade touched his neck scales. Perfect control. Merely the slightest kiss of metal.\n\nBelatedly, he realised that she had never meant to actually hit them. She was that good. Just a friendly old scare.\n\nFrom the scariest Dragoness he had ever seen, bar none.\n\nIn a voice like oceanic flutes, she purred, <Did I invite you to hold my paw, Dragon?>\n\nWheeze. Gasp!\n\nHe made to drop his grip as if he had grabbed a Sea Serpent by the fangs, but she applied a cunning wrist lock with her free paw, capturing him in a painful submission hold.\n\nPanicked, he tried to wrench free. Somehow, his great strength broke the agonising grip and returned the favour, twisting her paw so sharply that she had to flip onto her side or endure a broken limb. *Kerump!* She landed heavily upon the light grey sand.\n\nA stunned silence settled together with the dust thrown up by his inadvertent manoeuvre.\n\n<Strike me down with a feather,> he spluttered.\n\nJuggernaut's mighty laughter boomed over his training ground.\n\n[ Seaspray ]\n\nFlexing up to her paws as if possessed of some insanely wound-up internal spring, the foreign Dragoness eyed Dragon up in a way that made him blush. Dragons did not often blush. Fireless Dragons had barely imagined the possibility in their lives, but the fires snapping and raging in her luminous eyes did things to his hearts he could only equate to spitting them each one upon the point of her terrifying swords, and holding them up for her inspection. Never mind his knees. He could not feel his joints. Any joints. He really hoped she did not summarily disjoint his joints \u2026 ah \u2026\n\nShe was a lunatic squall on paws.\n\nQuivering with a taut, wholly fathomable excess of rage.\n\nSome lumbering know-nothing moron had just dumped this magnificent warrior Dragoness in the dirt. Completely unintentional, he wanted to bleat. Please don't dice his brain into fifty million pieces. Oh, and if she did, he would die as happy as that hapless fool he had hung off a tree a few weeks back.\n\nWhatever her name was, she was unspeakably gorgeous. And lethal. Let him never, ever be unmindful of how lethal she was. Even her wings came with razor edges upon the major bones.\n\nFlicking him beneath the chin, the Dragoness showed him a jaw full of razor fangs, and cooed, <You're a brave one, taking on Ariamyrielle Seaspray. So \u2026 burly.>\n\nHis innards fulminated like a volcano as she paced gracefully around him, taking in the details in a way that did absolutely nothing for his composure. <Mmm. Where did they find a Dragon of your size?>\n\nA Princess-ish hand smacked him beneath the chin. Dark eyes twinkled.\n\n*Mweh-ma-wibble,* he whined. *Mwaaa \u2026*\n\nShe smacked him harder.\n\n*Mweeep?*\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\nHe shivered all over as one of those razor wings ran along his left flank in a gesture so blatantly flirtatious, the pain beneath his keel bone came roaring right back. The Dragoness made fluting inquiry of Juggernaut where amongst the mountain Clans such a colossal hunk had been lurking. He wanted to know if she had ever been thrown like that before. Not in a decade, she admitted, finishing up her purring circuit with a teasing genuflection before his astonished nose.\n\nShe said, <Dragon, in my culture, females are warriors and the males, roost keepers and egg-raisers. Are you a mighty warrior? You have such an evocative scent about your scales \u2026> her razor snout snuffled his neck, instantly wrecking any intelligent response he might have been capable of producing. Such intimacy! <What is your name, mighty one?>\n\n<Dragon!> he spluttered.\n\n<Dragon? Did I make you forget your own name?>\n\n<Aye. No! Erm \u2026>\n\n<What did you make of my weapons display?>\n\nWith a sense of sinking desperation, he tried to cobble together an intelligent response. <Utterly smashing, Aria \u2013 um \u2026 and I'm still sort of mesmerised \u2026 over here, that is. Still sort of recovering from the frisson you introduced to my bones.>\n\n<Do I make you shiver, giant Dragon? How very droll you are.>\n\nHer butterfly patterns danced in front of his eyes. Actually, that effect was properly hypnotic. Grief, how many weapons did she possess?\n\n<Do you find me alluring? I scent sense that you do.>\n\n<Should I answer in the negative, my every heart should call me the worst liar and fabulist that e'er flew beneath the suns,> he replied, startled as something approaching actual eloquence flowed from his tongue.\n\nHow she preened! <Now poetry, o hefty one?>\n\n\"This Dragon is a great warrior,\" the Princess put in stoutly.\n\n\"Artist warrior thingy,\" he agreed.\n\n\"A born killer, and the first Dragon to kidnap a Princess in over thirty years,\" she added, not quite rolling her eyes at his return to thick-tongued incoherence.\n\nHe appreciated her pugnacious display of female covetousness, especially since he was still trying to wrestle his tongue back into making some sort of connection with his brain. Aria. <Aria.> She was a song of sublimity on paws, quite the most alluring marauder he had ever clapped eyes upon. Fact. Somehow, the prospect of being destroyed for his temerity by this Dragoness did not strike him as so terrible.\n\n\"He is temporarily without a Clan due to a family dispute. He had a name, but until the period of banishment is over and he earns new, honourable titles, we have agreed to call him 'Dragon'. I am the Princess of T'nagru \u2013\"\n\n\"Azania? Princess Azania?\" interrupted the hasty Dragoness, rearing back to clap her forepaws together in delight. He tried not to duck in case this presaged her twisting his head off. \"Oh, what fortune smiles upon our meeting, as if the brightest gleam of the suns broke from behind the clouds \u2013 although, the description hardly does you justice, Princess. How you shine! I can see why he has never stopped speaking about you.\"\n\n\"He who?\" she inquired. He had the same question. Who? What? How could this Dragoness possibly know his Princess?\n\n\"The King.\"\n\n\"King?\" Dragon echoed. \"The King of what and how much?\"\n\nThe Princess gasped, \"He \u2013 the who? I'm \u2026 oh, it must be \u2026 but, what happened to his parents? Are we even talking about the same person?\"\n\n\"Taken desperately ill,\" Aria explained. \"Poisoned by a distillate of Sea Serpent poison, the King and Queen lie unresponsive but alive in their royal bed, these last three years \u2013\"\n\nJuggernaut put in, \"I see you youngsters have some catching up to do. I'm going to bathe. Training starts tomorrow at dawn. Be late, and I'll make sure you barely live to regret it.\"\n\nOn that note, he stumped off muttering darkly about rude visitors.\n\nMeantime, one seriously confused brown Dragon put in, \"What's going on? Who are we talking about?\"\n\n\"Prince Azerim.\"\n\n\"King Azerim.\"\n\nThe two females spoke at exactly the same time. They looked at each other with some mysterious sense females shared, even though they were different species and, for that matter, had never met before. He did not plan to try to understand it. Frazzle the poor brain! They came from opposite ends of the map, but somehow had a friend in common? Truly, the world had just dissolved into a cloud of pink, sparkling dust.\n\nThe Princess said, \"He does?\"\n\n\"Never stops.\"\n\nThere and then, he discovered that even dark-skinned Princesses could blush like the suns. So violently did she blush, his sensitive Dragon hearing actually caught the throbbing of her pulse in her neck, and she gazed at her toes in a most uncharacteristic manner. His mind put two and three together, and made one more than seventeen.\n\n\"Everybody, clench your paws. We are talking about Prince Azerim of the Archipelago Islands, who is now King?\" he inquired. \"Ariamagic Seaspray, are you truly an Isles Dragon? Shiver my wings!\"\n\n\"Call me Ariamyrielle, or just Aria,\" said she, flirting with a twirl of her inner eye fires. \"You couldn't say my real name if you tried.\"\n\n\"Aria Seaspray is \u2026 ah, by the suns, your name is \u2026\"\n\nAzania elbowed him unhappily. \"Dragon. Mind on the job.\"\n\n\"You're an artist?\" the Dragoness fluted, looking enormously pleased at how she had just reduced his intelligence by a thousand percent. \"I've never heard of a Dragon artist before.\"\n\nHer exotic vowels rolled like ocean billows, making him feel as if the ground were swaying beneath his paws. Most pleasantly disconcerting \u2013 until reality reasserted itself and he remembered why he was here. Dragonesses did not rub wingtips with Dragons like him. Most especially not destructive warriors capable of razing entire armies on their own.\n\nQuietly, he said, \"I am an artist and novice warrior in search of my fires, Aria. I am here to learn from Juggernaut how to fight, for since I kidnapped the Princess of T'nagru from her captivity in the Kingdom of Vanrace, every Dragon slayer, knight and Prince in the seventeen kingdoms has been seeking my head.\"\n\n\"Your true fires?\" she inquired.\n\n\"My Dragon fires.\"\n\n\"He does not breathe fire, yet,\" Azania said in a small voice, plainly aware of the implications of this admission. \"We're working on that.\"\n\nThe Isles Dragoness' eyes glittered in a way he had never seen before. She sang, <Thou art of mystery and majesty most undeniably conceived, o Dragon of no name.>\n\nSo lyrical \u2013 was this the origin of her name? His five hearts all sighed at once. His paws had long since disconnected from the rest of his body.\n\nHe said, <Ah, well \u2026>\n\nAria purred, <I should long to unravel thy every mystery. If only more time were gifted unto my paws, but the King and Queen are dying, and I must on the morrow return to the Isles, sorrowing that my quest has proven futile.>\n\n<For talk must we \u2026 lots,> the Princess said, and chuckled at her Draconian. \"Sorry. Is Juggernaut done with you for the day? And have you finished demolishing everything in sight, o Dragoness?\"\n\n\"Aye and aye, Princess,\" said she. \"Come to my lair.\"\n\nBehind her departing back, Azania raised an eyebrow. He could not agree more. Forceful, and then some. He could only imagine that any disagreement on his part would be met with a world of pain.\n\nThe Princess nudged him. \"And?\"\n\n\"Exquisite express executer,\" he whispered back, making a cutting sign at his neck that drew a bright giggle. So excited! She had every right to me. This meeting could hardly be called chance or coincidence, could it? Nay, the fires of destiny swelled before his very eyes.\n\nAriamyrielle Seaspray had use of one of the guest lairs beside Juggernaut's private lair. She related that she had been using his training centre as her base for several weeks whilst she made inquiries amongst the Dragon Clans about a remedy for Sea Serpent poison. Without the slightest hint of self-deprecation, she explained that she was the finest warrior Dragoness and explorer of her generation, and the first to work out how to cross the Lumis Ocean from the Vaylarn Archipelago without the use of Human ships. As it turned out, the real reason King Azerim had never returned to the Kingdom of T'nagru in search of she whom he declared was his muse, his intended, the poetry of stars, his one and only beloved, and \u2013 well, the list was greatly in excess of the most epic and self-indulgent poem \u2013 was to do with the Sea Serpents.\n\nAs in, he now had exactly five oceangoing brigantines left of a once-proud fleet. The rest of his trading and warships lay at the bottom of the ocean, courtesy of a number of belligerently territorial Sea Serpents who had moved in and made the Archipelago their favourite hunting ground. Indeed, upon his return five years before, the Prince had been shipwrecked by Sea Serpents but succeeded in swimming no less than sixty miles through serpent-and shark-infested waters to safety on an outer Isle, where he had survived for four months before being rescued by a passing fisherman.\n\nHe politely whispered to the Princess to stop salivating over this description of Azerim's bravery. Most unbecoming behaviour.\n\nUpon request, however, he produced a sheet of white scrolleaf and began to sketch the T'nagrun Princess as a gift for the young acting King, who would be required to drool over the artwork, Aria purred archly. Just like she was slavering over his statuesque shoulders, she added, rubbing her flank affectionately against his upper right forearm.\n\nHow was a Dragon supposed to concentrate?\n\nMeantime, she told them that the Islanders had discovered record of one purported remedy for Sea Serpent venom which had been developed by the Tamarine Dragons over two hundred years before \u2013 sithnarik serum. Unfortunately, no-one knew what it was, nor could anyone work out what the reference meant. Neither could Dragon, nor the Princess. They stared glumly at one another. No clue.\n\nThe cobalt Dragoness bustled efficiently around her lair, lighting lanterns against the growing dark. She was not large, he realised, certainly more compact than that swathe of destruction could possibly justify. He estimated a dainty twenty-nine feet from muzzle to tail tip, a little over half of his fifty-three feet length. Certainly less than half his tonnage. He had no illusions about relative lethality, however, trying and failing to tear his eyes off her compact serpentine beauty. Blitz the Fritz was in full flow. Aye, even Azania had noticed his attempt at self-destruction by immediately mentioning his disability \u2013 but to both of their surprise, Aria had acted intrigued rather than put out.\n\nNo idea what to make of that reaction.\n\nBamboozled.\n\nAria peered past his foreleg to take in the details of a swift but creditable chalk sketch of the Princess. Excellent likeness, he thought, even if lacking in some of the finishing detail he would usually obsess over for a few weeks. The ugly voice in his brain tried to convince him that any self-respecting Dragoness, even if she came from across the ocean and far, far away, must soon revert to type. The disgust, the thinly veiled insults must soon arrive.\n\nAria stared a moment at the Princess. \"Aye, you've captured her spirit. Bravo, artist.\"\n\n\"Did you draw my hair straight, Dragon?\" she asked nervously.\n\n\"Absolutely not.\"\n\n\"Dragon \u2013\"\n\n\"Your curls are symbolic of the mischief bursting out from the inside. Look. Is this not a true likeness?\"\n\nRaising a thin, deadly-sharp talon, the Dragoness pointed it at the Princess. \"Do you have any idea how disgusting it is when Humans salivate as much as King Azerim is bound to?\"\n\nAzania looked doubtfully at the sketch. \"Will he \u2026 like me, the way I am?\"\n\n\"He'll die,\" Aria stated confidently.\n\n\"Dying is not recommended. Disgusting drooling is far preferred,\" he quipped quickly, making both females laugh. The Dragoness gazed at him as if feistiness in a male startled her. He wondered how docile males in the Isles came. Boldly, he said, \"I should like to paint a Dragoness as striking as you too, Aria \u2013 by my wings!\"\n\nTen talons menaced his neck. He had not even seen her move.\n\n\"Do I sense a polite refusal?\"\n\n\"Made you jump,\" she purred, stroking his chin with one teasing talon.\n\n*Gnrr-rrmm!* he growled, as something inside his brain popped and floated away to a very, very happy place indeed.\n\nFine. Drooling was most definitely not restricted to Humans. Feeling vastly and unjustly narked by this discovery, he was further discomfited to hear the Princess explain how they had met, narrating their weeks together so far, including the abortive family gathering which had led to his expulsion. She made him sound \u2013 well, heroic and misunderstood. That was as much appreciated as it was frustrating.\n\nStill, it was hard to fulminate in a lonesome corner when the brazen young Dragoness \u2013 she was only eighteen years of age, by his sire's egg \u2013 kept giving him the fiery eyeball. He really was not sure she did not mean to eat him alive. Maybe this was a prelude to a secret cannibalistic feeding ritual? He kept seeing her kaniaxi blades mowing through those dummies and weapons like a Dragon rending his prey's tender intestines.\n\nHe dimly heard the females discussing how Isles Dragons were allied with their Humans, unlike any other Kingdoms or the Tamarine Mountains Dragons, but the fire was warm and his eyelids weighted with sand after a very long day's flying. To his utter chagrin, he must have nodded off, because the next thing he knew, the Princess was rubbing his right forepaw and saying something about saltiness and unusual webbing. He came fully awake when the Dragoness voiced a yelp and cried out.\n\nAzania grinned. \"It's a spider, silly.\"\n\n\"Is it dangerous?\"\n\n\"Not if you've just stood on it, like you just did,\" the Princess pointed out.\n\n\"We don't have those on the Isles. Plenty of crabs. They aren't stupid enough to climb my scales either.\"\n\n\"Scared of spiders?\" he murmured before his brain quite caught up to the fact that his statement lacked even the slightest modicum of good sense or forethought.\n\nAria seized his fore-talon and bent it backward.\n\n\"Not that one!\" he gasped.\n\n\"Which would you rather I snap like a twig?\"\n\nThe Princess said quickly, \"That's the one he broke smashing a hole in King Tyloric's tower. Please don't break it again. We've just finished patching him up.\"\n\n\"Oh. I do apologise.\" She caressed his paw, and did not let it go. The use of his tongue rather departed him at this point. \"I see you were recently wounded here in your chest? It is plain as the very suns that you need a female to look after you, Dragon. Now, here's my key question. Are you quite sure who your sire and dam are?\"\n\nA wheeze escaped his jaw. It was all the sound he could make.\n\nThe Isles Dragoness played with his digits as if wondering how such a large paw had ever turned to art.\n\nHe wondered the same.\n\nShe said, \"The Princess and I have been talking. One, you have a very distinctive body odour and scale secretion \u2013 which is salty, far more Isles Dragon than Tamarine. Two, you are unusually large in size, more Sea Dragon than any Dragon Clan I know of. Three, have you ever noticed this unusual, flexible webbing between your digits? Four, this matter of you not being able to breathe fire. That is impossible for a Dragon. We are fire. How many stomachs have you?\"\n\nHe spluttered, \"Eh \u2026\"\n\nThe beautiful Dragoness brought his paw to her cheek. \"Total incoherence in a male. It's so satisfying.\"\n\n\"Stop toying with me!\"\n\nHe found himself up on his paws, looming over the pair without knowing how he had come to be standing. Panting. Aghast. The cobalt Dragoness gazed up at him with narrowed eyes, like a feline who had just discovered her mouse had turned into \u2026 well, a Dragon, for want of a metaphor that escaped him in the heat of the moment.\n\nThe Princess said, \"Peace, Dragon. What riled you so? We were just discussing trying to help you. Aria has some special knowledge which \u2013\"\n\n\"I don't mind you discussing my deficiencies, honestly I don't. But I do mind you disparaging my birth. I know my sire and dam! I know where I was born and who I am \u2026\"\n\nHe bit the words off. Such a bitter taste filled his mouth. That strange, pinching sensation had returned together with a huge, bitter lump of ire, lodged deep inside his chest once more. Maybe it was a heart issue. Maybe it was just an acidic wrath at their temerity. He was a decent Dragon. He had always honoured his sire and dam as best he could, and he knew \u2013 well, he knew his sire, at least, had the very best in mind for him. Dark, acrid scent memories swirled through his being.\n\n<Why his dam's lifelong hatred for her progeny? Why?>\n\nThe girl said, ever so gently, \"No, Dragon. You don't know who you are.\"\n\n<Enough!!> His dragon thunder boomed in the chamber. <JUST STOP \u2013 CARING FOR ME!>\n\nHe stomped outside in a blind rage. How dare they \u2013 how dare she? As if his strangeness was not enough, and the wagging of his tongue before his entire Clan evil enough, now they doubted his very birth? The outrage of his hearts! The painful, knotted digits of his paws! The shivering, accursed air upon his wings! Why could he never, never, never be normal?\n\nWhy were the answers not written in the stars? Because this half-blind, half-Dragon fool could not even read that much!\n\n<Female trouble, youngling?>\n\nHe jumped nearly a foot in the air as he realised he had not just head-butted a boulder. That heavily muscled lump would be Master Juggernaut's shoulder. <Sorry, Master, it's just \u2013 it's \u2013>\n\n<Spit it out, there's a good fellow. I haven't got all night, you know.>\n\n<Do I look like a Devastator to you, Juggernaut the Grinder?>\n\n<What an odd question,> the older Dragon began, before he suddenly pulled up with a smoky snort. <Do you really want to be asking this question, Dragon of no name? You might not like the answer.>\n\n<Juggernaut, I'm \u2026 lost.> His shoulders slumped. A thousand-tonne weight called his tail dragged from his hindquarters. <My life's flight is utterly shambolic. When a Dragon loses his Clan, his family and his name, he begins to question all he knows and believes in. I don't know if I am being foolish or not. I don't know anything, and it has me so twisted up inside, I don't even know where to start to unwind this knot. I am a Dragon of no fires! How can this even be? How can I be a decent student if I'm such a worthless, hopeless snarl-winged lump of angst and anger? I'm so \u2026 confused, Juggernaut. Life is so unfair!>\n\n<Did Ariamyrielle Seaspray say something to upset you?>\n\n<No. She was \u2026 gracious. Not at all what I expected in a Dragoness as \u2026 sharp, in every way, as she is.>\n\n<She is extraordinary, by my sire's egg.>\n\nJuggernaut looked him up and down. In his eye was a blue-white fire, a fierce and knowing brand of wisdom that he realised must come from many, many years of dealing with students and other Dragons. His breath sucked at the very stars above, and his stillness matched the night. He listened with his every Dragon sense, for such a long time that his bigger, younger student could no longer hold his breath, and had to let it out in a rasping exhale.\n\nLaying one scarred paw upon his student's shoulder, Juggernaut rasped, <If I were as unusual as you, Dragon, I too would question \u2026 everything.>\n\n[ A Different Chase ]\n\nCome the dawn, the princess slept in and a brooding brown Dragon watched as a matchless speck of cobalt steadily receded into the crimson-burnished purple skies. His eyes burned and his hearts yearned to see, just once, the unblemished glories of the dawn.\n\nAriamyrielle Seaspray must have seen him standing here, and departed without a word.\n\nThere. Life was back to humdrum.\n\nDragon mooched over to the obstacle course and paced out her destructive whirlwind from the previous evening. Shiver his wings. Incredible. He touched the marks of her shearing through dummies and tree trunks with his talons. Whatever he had expected at Juggernaut's lair, this was not it. She was not Juggernaut's mate, but a Dragoness in loyal service of a Human King \u2013 slap him over the head with a Sea Serpent's coils!\n\nHe loathed all things predictable.\n\nJuggernaut stalked out of his lair growling as if a woodpecker had woken him by trying to drill holes into his skull. <Right, youngling. Let's see what you have. Dance for me.>\n\nThen again, maybe he should just snap his jaw shut and get on with it.\n\nAn hour's dancing and the Grinder still looked as if he wanted to grind holes in large young Dragons' skulls, but he was making marginal progress. Juggernaut had joined him. They stepped together through a series of what he called poise exercises. Drills designed to make an overlarge Dragon move \u2013 well, less like a thumping great boulder and more like a Dragon bent upon destruction. Sidestep, sway, whirl, tail poised and wings quiet, for now.\n\n\"Dragon! Dragon!\"\n\nThe Black Rose came running out of her lair with her hair dishevelled, and promptly fell flat on her face. Aye. A leg encased in plaster would tend to do that to a person.\n\nGroaning, she raised herself on her hands. \"Dragon! I've got the answer \u2013 go fetch her back!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Go fetch Aria whatshername \u2013 you know who I mean!\"\n\n\"Aria Skylark? Long gone.\"\n\nThe Princess snapped, \"I know the answer to her riddle, the sithnarik serum.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" His scales prickled. \"But, Juggernaut \u2013\"\n\n\"Juggernaut says, go fetch the Dragoness, youngling. The Princess and I can work on training while you toddle off into the sunrise. One piece of advice?\"\n\n\"Don't get myself killed?\"\n\n\"There's a good Dragon. Shoo now. I have a charming Princess to entertain.\" To his shock, he gnashed his fangs toward the instructor, who acted most pleased. \"Even better.\"\n\n\"But she's too fast \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! Shut the fangs and fly!\" Juggernaut roared, losing his temper in spectacular style. Smoke, fireball, clacking fangs and flaring wings, the whole draconic volcanic explosion.\n\nHe had never launched into the air with such speed. Amazing what a Dragon could achieve with the right motivation \u2013 which was the whole point of that little exercise, wasn't it? Every moment a teachable one. Gnashing his fangs a second time at the Master's casual virtuosity, he powered off to the north. Time to fetch him a pretty young Dragoness.\n\nHope his audacity did not cost him a wing.\n\nAfter flying for an hour and a half, his weak eyes finally caught a glimpse of cobalt against the azure sky. Her dominant colouration was a thrilling, rich cobalt, the precise hue of the pigments he used to create his paints, with that extraordinary, oceanic patterning of many shades of blue upon her razor-sharp wings, slender limbs, underbelly and tail. Oceanic? Butterfly? All he knew was that it was one mesmerising packaging.\n\nNot that he had looked less than a hundred times.\n\nCursed eyes!\n\nHe chased on powerfully, expending more energy than she would with a very long flight ahead of her. Now, where had she gone? Aye, dipping into that canyon ahead. Dragon put on a burst of speed, but when he slipped with subtle grace through a swirling updraft and swooped into the canyon beyond, she was gone. Squint. Stare. Sniff the air. Her slightly briny tang was definitely present, clear scent traces of her passage that put him most favourably in mind of \u2013\n\n<DRAGON!>\n\nHe almost shed his scales in a fight-or-flight reaction. Wretch!\n\nFalling into wingtip space with him from absolutely nowhere, Aria Seaspray's gleaming eyes fixed upon him. Her expression was not exactly comforting. <Why are you chasing my tail? Couldn't leave me alone?>\n\n<Aye, your tail is the sole reason I'm here,> he snorted, warming as her smile widened in toothy appreciation, <since my poor little male mind cannot possibly process anything beyond that. I spent the night scribing odes to your gloriously serpentine tail. Oh, the tail! Oh, how it writhes behind you like a \u2026 uh, I'm struggling here \u2013>\n\n<Stop that. Deliver your message.>\n\nBaiting a creature this dangerous was nothing short of exhilarating, he discovered. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he said, <The Princess of T'nagru bids you return, Ariamyrielle Seaspray, in order that \u2013>\n\n<She bids?>\n\n<Aye. I'm asking nicely on her behalf. Grovelling, actually, in the hope that you won't immediately destroy \u2013>\n\n<Dragon!>\n\n<She has the answer to your serum question.>\n\n<Oh \u2013 why didn't you say so?> With a byzantine flicker of her wings, the Dragoness faced the other direction. He zinged away before belatedly discovering she had already started the return flight. <Catch up, Dragon!>\n\n*Gnarr!*\n\nBy his wings! He was not built for rapid changes of direction. Banking as sharply as he dared, Dragon chased her adorably lethal tail once again, grumbling to himself that there really was no pleasing some females. Flighty creatures. Naturally, she gave the tail an extra wriggle as he rejoined her at the wingtip position, suggesting without words that he might have been contemplating matters other than the spectacular mountain scenery. Guilty of a prolonged gratuitous ogle there, Dragon? Pain of death and so on, he was not about to admit anything of the sort.\n\nHe nodded across the gap separating them. <Shall I break wind for you, Aria?>\n\n<Break wind?> She folded up laughing.\n\n<Break the wind \u2026 break THE \u2026 GRRROOAARRGGHH!!>\n\nWell. That cleared his throat, plus it kicked off a nice avalanche on the steep slope below as they climbed up to the head of the yawning purple canyon. She flicked his wingtip sassily with her own, shaking her head in amusement until he could not help but chortle as well.\n\nEpic slip of the tongue.\n\nEventually, she said, <Definite articles being rather important in grammar, wouldn't you agree?>\n\n<Quite,> he agreed, blinking rapidly as a swarm of insects peppered his head.\n\n<If you learned to focus your sound waves, you could develop quite the auditory weapon,> she added brightly, slipping into wing-second position just behind and slightly below him. Perfect slipstreaming. <By my dam's egg, you shift an airstream, Dragon! I barely have to flap my wings back here.>\n\n<Be ready to dodge. I'm an impressive windbreaker.>\n\n<Mmm,> she murmured, turning him instantly into a puddle of steaming mush.\n\nFemales!\n\nThe Dragoness wore her blades slantwise in thin metal sheaths upon her flanks for ease of draw, he noted. A waterproof tube was also strapped to her right-side sheath, which he assumed contained the sketch he had drawn for the Prince, now the King of the Vaylarn Archipelago. He wondered if Azania might not have added a personal note. To think she had told him just a week ago that there was no boy she liked. Nasty little liar. Still, five years was a very long time at her age. She had been twelve when last she saw this Azerim. Now she was seventeen. Most Human royals were married around this age, he understood. Certainly, twenty years would be regarded as old for a Human woman to marry.\n\n<Do you always think quite so ferociously, Dragon?> she goaded.\n\n<That, or it's a bad case of constipation,> he shot back, <since we're into the tasteless digestive jokes this morning. I was just \u2013 tell me about King Azerim. Tell me about your Archipelago. Uh \u2026 please?>\n\nSmiling as if she knew exactly why he sounded so abrupt, she told him of a young man forced into rulership by ill circumstance \u2013 the attempted double assassination of his parents. He was tall for a Human at six and three, she said; certainly more than a head taller than the diminutive Princess. He was a warrior, a poet and a leader upon whom the mantle of authority had fallen heavily. Several of the Archipelago Lords chafed against his rule and muttered that it was time for a change of kingship. Azerim was under enormous pressure to solve the Sea Serpent issue, for without trade, the kingdom would wither and people would begin to starve. There were massive public works underway to try to increase cultivation and harvest from the ocean, but with the danger to the boats, little could be done. They needed trade.\n\nHe asked what had changed. Why the Sea Serpents; why now? That was one of the mysteries the Isles Dragons were trying to resolve. However, being bound to the Archipelago Islands was no help. The flight across the Lumis Ocean was a prodigious three hundred and fifty miles, or at a Dragon's average long distance flying speed, over thirty hours on the wing. He sucked in his lip. Impossible.\n\n<Aria, how did you manage the flight?>\n\n<Trade secret,> she smiled. <Up until five years ago, we relied upon our Human partners \u2013 since we are relatively small in stature, we are able to land and take off from their ships. There was no need to find another way.>\n\n<You found landing places?>\n\n<Good guess. It's trickier than that. I almost perished a couple of times. You see, the tides rise and fall twice a day. There are shoals and reefs which are only exposed at low tide, and some, only during particular phases of the solar cycle. So you have to get the timing exactly right, or risk a water landing. With the Sea Serpents about, that tends to be inadvisable. We tried five different routes before finding one that worked.>\n\n<Impressive.>\n\n<Necessity being the sire of death-defying foolishness?>\n\nChortle. Snort. Try to shrug off a creeping sense of disbelief that he was winging through a clear midmorning sky chatting to a cute death-wish of a Dragoness, and a reputational lightning bolt had not yet contrived to fry his ridiculous head off his shoulders. He checked if the sky had developed yellow and purple spots by accident. Or changed places with the mountains. Not so.\n\nHe wriggled every part of his body, limbs and wings in turn for the pleasure of feeling the delight of her presence coursing through his arteries.\n\nLaughing, she barrel-rolled over his tail and assumed position upon his right side. <Tell me, did you forget to question the Princess about her actual discovery so that you could report it to me?>\n\n<Aye. It's all a conspiracy related to chasing your tail.>\n\nFire curled around her lips. <In my culture, Dragon, I would destroy a male for such a flippant comment.>\n\n<Look, I chased in haste. Unlike you, I don't have any reputation to worry about \u2013>\n\n<What makes you think I care for reputations?> she snarled, flipping beneath him this time to smack his tail. He stilled a wobble. She manoeuvred like a bat! <Many Isles Dragons consider helping our Humans as the lowest form of undraconic behaviour. Aye, I see your thoughts. The Princess told me of your troubles \u2013 and you made sure to reveal how very awful, undraconic and wretched a creature you feel you are. And do you know what I say to that?>\n\nHe could only shake his jaw in the face of her unexpected rage.\n\nDropping away, she almost clipped a rock face as she sprayed yellow fire across it. <Grrnarr! Grooarr!> Rock exploded beneath the heat of her Dragon fire. Whipping her tail about, she pulverised a flying boulder with a terrific blow, spraying fragments everywhere.\n\nPity? Nothing of the sort!\n\nPointing a talon at his chest, she snarled, <This Dragoness makes up her own mind, hear me? So shove that into your misfiring male mind and process it!>\n\nJaw agape, he could only sieve insects out of the air in response."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "\"Sithnarik serum \u2026 zisrazix serum,\" said the Princess, pointing at the runes she had scribed in the sand beside Aria's offering. \"Languages change over time. Look here. See how the stems and accents changed? Subtle, I'd argue, but accurate.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Dragon said.\n\nThe cobalt Dragoness pretended to push him away. \"Go ruminate somewhere else, windbreaker. Princess \u2013 how do I say this?\"\n\n\"You ask, what is this zisrazix?\" he offered politely, and collected a clout in the jaw for his trouble.\n\n\"Black and yellow desert viper,\" she said, measuring about a foot with her hands. \"As rare as it is deadly. I've heard that a derived, diluted serum has been used in healing in the past. I also know where it is most likely one might find a source of supply. Chakkix Camp.\"\n\nHe spat, \"That cesspit of thieves and bandits? Princess, you are absolutely not \u2013\"\n\n\"Going anywhere near there without two blistering behemoths to back me up?\" A black eyebrow quirked rather dramatically in his direction. \"Exactly what I was thinking, Dragon. You're always a step ahead, aren't you?\"\n\nHe clacked his jaw shut. Females!\n\nNow they were both laughing at him. Not. Happy!\n\nTwenty minutes later, they were in the air. Delay courtesy of a minute creature who created trouble in utter disproportion to her size, needing to pack her effects. The Dragons packed their scales. Ready to fly.\n\nJuggernaut was phlegmatic. \"You hasty youngsters! Of course you can leave. Kings and Queens need to be saved. Draconic honour quests must be met. Bring your Dragon back soon, o Princess.\"\n\n\"Her \u2026 Dragon?\" he spluttered. \"Master!\"\n\n\"It's debatable who has kidnapped whom at this point, I believe,\" said he, with a wicked, many-fanged grin. \"Fly high and strong, Dragons and Princess! May you find all you seek.\"\n\nOne way to raise a Dragon's steam levels to 'violent explosion likely' status.\n\nAs they flapped hard to gain altitude, Aria said, \"So, Princess, which parts of Chakkix Camp shall we destroy to find this serum?\"\n\n\"While I do believe that even the most despicable rogue will be moved to deal fairly with us, given the incentive your sweet smile most undoubtedly provides,\" the Princess observed calmly, swinging her good leg as if she were playing a foot above the ground and not at an altitude of four thousand feet or so above the thin ribbon of river down there, \"their primary desire is for money, and plenty of it.\"\n\nSweet? She could say that with impunity. He would have suffered multiple contusions for such a quip.\n\nNarked, Dragon put in, \"Let's put it this way. Chakkix Camp is not the kind of place one tends to find any respectable Princesses.\"\n\n\"No. This Princess, however, finds respectability to be wholly overrated.\"\n\n\"Wicked wench.\"\n\n\"Despicable draconic despot.\"\n\n\"Giggling girl.\"\n\n\"Blustering bonehead.\"\n\nThe Dragoness stared across at them. \"You two have the weirdest relationship, do you know that? So, where are we flying today?\"\n\n\"Northern T'nagru. The bit the King likes to think he controls, but doesn't.\"\n\nAzania chuckled throatily, \"I like the way you put that, Dragon, but no. We are flying first to your lair to pick up our riches.\"\n\n\"All that dust and a panther skeleton?\"\n\n\"Your paintings.\"\n\n<Gnrrr black-death-on-wings!> he swore sulkily. \"Those so-called artworks are not worth the canvas they are painted on. This is your big idea for building up my hoard? No-one in their right mind will pay for \u2013\"\n\nThe Princess shook her head pityingly. \"What do you do with a miserable bag of guts like him, Aria?\"\n\nShe rubbed her paws together. \"Give me ten seconds. I'll convince him.\"\n\n\"Flee for your lives!\" he bellowed, pumping his wings to shoot away from the cobalt Dragoness before she conceived any ideas about how to convince him about anything.\n\nHe fancied the idea of keeping his wings attached to his body.\n\nAfter resting the night on the far side of the high pass, two Dragons and a semi-frozen icicle gratefully winged down into the lower mountains the following day, reaching the temporary lair by the hour of noon. The white sun blazed glorious, warming them thoroughly. The two females poked through his collection and deemed much of his work suitable for inflicting upon the unwashed hordes.\n\nHumans. Uncivilised brutes, except for a select few.\n\nDragon prepared twenty canvases for transport, since nothing he said was about to make any difference with this pair of insufferable females he had somehow invited into his life. One as bad as the other. Still, they had three river trout grilling on an open fire by the time he emerged from the lair. His growling stomach informed him of a certain ferocity of hunger, and he ate gratefully, even if that two-foot tiddler barely occupied a corner of his capacious stomach. Ten more would do nicely. Now, how could he ask in a way which would not shorten his life by decades?\n\n<Still hungry, Dragon? Dragging all that muscle around the mountains must consume a great deal of energy,> Aria cooed, finding a scab to pick off his shoulder.\n\n<Starving,> he agreed. <Are you offering?>\n\n<Watch me.>\n\nFifteen minutes later, he was sharing fresh kill with her. Unlucky dusky deer; excellent huntress. He tugged her wingtips charily about how spending a day and a night chasing his tail must give a Dragoness an appetite. Aria offered to help him train at paw-to-paw combat. One could not reasonably refuse.\n\nShe did not hurt him too badly, nor make him eat dirt more than a dozen times. After all, they needed him in a fit state to fly.\n\nHow thoughtful of her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "For the remainder of the afternoon, they followed the long valley southward. Aria lagged visibly. Dragon slowed until she gave him a ripping broadside involving her strength, capability and never-say-die attitude, and how dare he suggest she was weak? Since he could actually dodge her snapping jaws, he realised the Dragoness was more tired than she admitted.\n\n\"Just searching for my favourite camping place,\" he called, whisking his tail out of danger of being turned into her personal chew-toy.\n\n\"We can fly on.\"\n\n\"We might, but the Princess is bushed. I mean, she needs to find a bush.\"\n\nThe Dragoness gazed curiously at the royal. \"What do Humans do in bushes? Oh \u2013 knight!\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. How dare you insinuate such a thing?\" Azania sniffed, folding her arms primly.\n\n\"No, look down, there's a man bathing in the stream.\"\n\n\"Right in my favourite camping spot,\" Dragon snarled. The white blob was his horse. The silver beside, a pile of plate armour perhaps? \"Is this one handsome at least?\"\n\n\"Pathetic flea. How shall we squash him?\" Aria sang, sounding cheerful for the first time in hours.\n\n\"Ooh, he is handsome. That's Prince Faratic of Garome, if I'm not mistaken. Red hair, see? Couldn't miss that anywhere in the realms.\"\n\n\"He's completely naked,\" Dragon pointed out.\n\nSo helpful of him to point out what was said to be taboo among Humans. Clothing? Nonsensical.\n\n\"I know! Squee!\" The Dragons shared a startled glance. \"Joking. Wasn't looking. I'm a decent Princess, I am.\"\n\nNot entirely, judging by her scent. White lie, Humans said, which did make him wonder how lies were restricted to all the white-skinned Humans and not the black or brown ones.\n\n\"Very well,\" he decided. \"We'll test him. If this redheaded Prince is in any way worthy, he will stand and fight. You go bait him whilst we sneak up on the other side of the river. Pinch his clothing or something. As the legends say, any Princess worth her title ought to be able to turn him into a witless slave with one flash of her dusky eyes.\"\n\n\"Dragon, I will have Aria deal with you if you don't clap those fangs shut this instant.\"\n\n\"No. She's another independent-minded creature, remember? She doesn't take orders from a mere Human.\"\n\n\"Only when it suits,\" the Dragoness grinned. He scowled darkly at her. \"Or, on the promise of fun.\"\n\n\"Nobody appreciates a sword-wielding maniac, Aria,\" he snorted. \"Still, that unfortunate victim pinched my favourite campsite. Unforgivable sin.\"\n\nThe Dragoness chortled, \"Dragon, you're a hoot.\"\n\nLanding downstream, the two Dragons snuck up on the unsuspecting Prince, who was singing lustily but very badly out of tune as he bathed in the stream. Azania winced and suggested that his head might need to roll merely for the offence he dealt to anyone who knew the first thing about music.\n\nGamely hopping forward using the walking stick Juggernaut had found for her, the Princess greeted the Prince with her signature style and charm. There was a scream and a splash. Then, some mortified spluttering. She had not even kicked him where it hurt, and the Prince appeared to believe that his manly parts required protection. Or support. He could not quite tell which. Still, it was instructive to see a man turn the same colour as his hair. What a physiological marvel this young fellow was.\n\nIndeed, his Princess' smile had instantly drained all semblance of wit or actual brain material out of this young man's head. Or was it the tight trousers? He admitted, however, he had come to slay the Dragon \u2013 uh, and where was the Dragon?\n\n\"Right behind you,\" Azania said, with her most radiant smile.\n\nIt took no less than twenty seconds for the stunned young fellow to turn and spy his doom lurking behind the bushes, not doing anything much at all, to be honest. Oh, very well.\n\n*Grrr?* Dragon said courteously.\n\nNext they knew, a pair of little white buttocks was sprinting away from them at top speed, flashing hither and thither between the bushes. The Prince did not stop wailing until he was at least half a mile away. Great set of lungs. Astonishing runner. He must be a champion amongst Humans.\n\nThe Princess raised her eyebrows. \"Well, that was disappointing. Handsome, entertaining, and a feeble damp squib. Not my type in the slightest. I wonder if he thought to pack some nice food in his bags?\"\n\n\"Thief,\" he accused.\n\n\"The early Dragon divides the spoils,\" she retorted.\n\n[ Bandit Princess ]\n\nMommy had definitely packed prince faratic a very decent royal lunch for his merry outing to Dragon territory. She could be glad her little boy was returning in one piece, even if it was minus any stitch of clothing. They reloaded his mount and sent it after him, for hopefully, he had the good sense to realise he was unlikely to reach home without it.\n\nThe Princess distinguished herself by packing away more than he thought could reasonably be fit into her stomach and legs combined, except for the wild boar, which had been matured to the point that it was crawling with maggots. Dragon graciously helped with that titbit. Protein was protein. He had always been partial to wild boar, but he did prefer it slightly fresher. A week fresher, say.\n\nThe following morning, upon Ariamyrielle Seaspray's insistence, they flew down to the Kingdom of Vanrace to observe the mess Dragon had made of their tallest tower. Aria was a Dragoness of the 'females are to be feared' persuasion. She said King Tyloric had violated her sense of justice.\n\nSpoiling for trouble, in other words.\n\nTwo Dragons circling above the King's castle an hour before noon did rather stir up the peasants, Dragon commented nastily. Aria appeared to be impressed with his bloodthirsty attitude \u2013 all the rage in discerning artists, she murmured approvingly. She was even more impressed by the hole he had slammed into their battlement.\n\n\"I used the Princess' head for that,\" he boasted.\n\n\"They have five new ballistae installed,\" Azania pointed out, smacking his wrist just in case he missed her displeasure at the head comment. \"Trying to cover all the angles, right? I see they've started to repair that tall tower as well.\"\n\n\"All that wood piled up at the base,\" Aria observed, with predatory interest.\n\n\"Ah, how's about we fly on?\" he put in tentatively. \"I've no desire to swallow eight-foot projectiles flung at me at high speed.\"\n\n\"I'll just warm them up. Back in two minutes.\"\n\nFurling her wings, the cobalt Dragoness hurtled toward the castle a half-mile beneath them.\n\n\"Aye. Try to stop a thunderbolt while you're at it, Dragon,\" he muttered.\n\nHis companion chuckled, \"What's not to admire about a vengeful warrior Dragoness? Anyone would think she has someone to impress.\"\n\n\"Try another joke, Princess.\"\n\nWas she right? No chance, never in a gazillion years, but what if \u2026 what if what?\n\nSigh.\n\nToday, he concluded, no god they believed in would spare King Tyloric the wrath of a Dragoness. How he shuddered!\n\nBeautiful morning. Nary a cloud in the sky. From this height, the pentagonal castle looked like a hatchling's toy. Circular towers at the five corners of the inner keep. A strong curtain wall formed a second layer of defence above a sparkling moat. Someone had even hung banners from the towers, a pretty touch. He wondered what they were celebrating \u2013 perhaps annual bath day? A great many colourful people crowded the streets. He sincerely hoped it was a sign of impending regime change. That would be perfect.\n\nMoving so fast that the ballista crews could not possibly keep up, the cobalt blur made a complete circuit of the inner keep, kicking the weapons to splinters or hurling them off the battlements. Then, she darted down into the courtyard to mangle a troop of men-at-arms who had been trying to make a defensive formation. She skidded to a halt at the base of the tallest tower. Her yellow fire blossomed. If he was not mistaken, she shovelled a pile of blazing wood inside the entrance, before breaking for the Great Hall. Tapestries. She was smart. There went the yellow flame again.\n\nMaximum destruction, delivered with brutal efficiency.\n\nFive knights on the charge!\n\nAria ran partway up onto the roof of the hall, before spinning and reversing direction. Her swords flashed in her paws. Dragon wanted to cover his eyes. He truly did, but it was like being glued to irresistible entertainment, even given the limitations of his eyesight. She scattered them like sand. He thought he knew what was coming \u2013 bad mistake. They had no idea what hit them. Neither did he.\n\nNet! Almost trapped, the Dragoness squirmed free, probably tearing her wings on the hooks that these Dragon-catching metal nets came with.\n\nShe darted over to the ajar wooden doors of the royal family's living quarters. This time, the flame was hidden within the building, but dense black smoke started billowing out of the nearer windows almost immediately. Having warmed up the Humans to her satisfaction, the Dragoness flung herself skyward.\n\n\"Wouldn't want to meet her in a bad mood,\" he observed drolly.\n\nThe Dragoness wore half a knight's lance in her left haunch, to her evident annoyance. \"Poor form and execution,\" she said angrily.\n\nHe said, \"The three columns of smoke are symmetrically arranged. Was that planned?\"\n\nAria snarled, \"Absolutely! Let's fly on.\"\n\nThey winged eastward, leaving a fiercely burning castle behind. Even the one with the poor eyes could see the flames leaping from the scaffolding around the highest tower. Half an hour later, the Dragoness told him that the tower had collapsed. The smoke only increased in volume.\n\nOne might reasonably expect to have to plan how to remove a lance from her behind without getting his paws chewed off. That was what he spent the next couple of hours worrying about as they soared over the patchwork farmland toward the eastern border of Vanrace. The terrain grew markedly drier as they approached the Black Canyon, the huge, jagged canyon that split the northern reaches of Vanrace from the badlands beyond.\n\nThe Princess suggested they land on the far side and rest there for the night. Chakkix Camp was still the better part of a day's flight farther into the wilderness. A storm approached from the mountains. Aria spied a shallow cave in the canyon wall which should provide shelter. A waterfall ran off the cliffs right beside it, suggesting that this spot was perhaps a regular stopover for Dragons. Although the terrain beyond the canyon was technically T'nagrun, this northern region was inaccurately regarded as uninhabited \u2013 except by sundry rogues, thieves, bandits and lowlifes, and the odd renegade Princess.\n\nLanding, Aria's hind leg buckled.\n\n<Pain in the butt there?> might have been the injudicious remark that earned him a stinging slap, but a clever Dragon like him would never be accused of such folly.\n\nAria tried to grip the cracked-off lance herself, but a few pithy words soon betrayed her inability to exert enough leverage to draw the shaft free of the muscle. The Princess tottered over on her plaster leg to try to help, but she too was not strong enough.\n\n<Dragon. A little help here?> the ungrateful cobalt death-trap snapped.\n\nPutting on his thickest, most boorish accent, he slurred, <Place my paws upon your peerless haunches, Your Majesty? Oh, can I? Can I?>\n\n<Dragon, you are impossible,> she snorted. <Get over here!>\n\n<Been dreaming about this moment all my life,> he added, before reverting to character. <So, would you like a portrait of this end of you? Or the other?>\n\nEven as she began to complain, he placed one paw flat upon a dainty but exceedingly attractive behind, gripped the lance with the other, and smoothly extracted the offending wooden shaft. She howled at the brief pang, leaped forward so fast she rebounded off the cavern wall, and ended up staring at him in disbelief.\n\n<Tiny splinter,> he said, displaying the six-foot length upon his palm.\n\n<You didn't wait for me to be ready?>\n\nHe flexed his massive shoulders. <I didn't imagine for one second you would be so shy and skittish, Ariamyrielle Seaspray.>\n\n<Shy \u2013 what?> she spluttered.\n\n<Total incoherence in a female. It's so satisfying.>\n\nAs the Princess burst into helpless fits of the giggles, the Dragoness' gaze whitened and he heard her fires make a dangerous popping, crackling noise he had never heard emanate from a Dragon. So speechless was she, yellow-white fire licked unheeded from the right corner of her jaw. Perhaps no male had ever dared to speak to her like this before. Certainly, his every Dragon sense was coiled, on the alert, ready to fling him backward into the yawning canyon not ten feet from his hind paws, should she react as he sensed she might.\n\nThe Princess limped between them, waving her arms as if to clear the air. \"Oh get a room, you two \u2013 I mean, a cosy cavern for two.\"\n\nThey snarled at her simultaneously, and then both broke off laughing.\n\nLittle tease.\n\nStomping over to the roaring, foaming waterfall, which landed upon a ledge perhaps fifteen feet wide before plunging farther down the cliff, he dunked his head beneath the flow. Lovely. Just the stuff to clear a Dragon's head of images of irresistible cobalt rear ends and other mortal dangers. He poked his nose out to offer the Princess a pawful of moss.\n\n\"Stuff her wound with this jaramoss.\"\n\n<And her mouth too, while you're at it.> He strictly forbade that thought from going anywhere near his tongue. Not even in fifteen layers of disguise. Never.\n\nShe beckoned to him, 'you do it.' With a soggy snort of discontent, he ducked back beneath the waterfall. Not touching that crazy Dragoness for the next year. Her eye fires made his peril more than clear \u2013 oh, and here she was, flicking water in his face with her wings! There was more than a hint of challenge in her manner. Moving over peaceably to give her plenty of room, he arched his back beneath the rushing water and wriggled in pleasure. What was it about water that was so glorious? Could Aria be right about his nature, against all the odds?\n\nShaking the water out of his eyes, he cast about for the Dragoness. Where was she \u2013\n\nA hard shoulder to the gut and a cunningly hooked paw toppled him.\n\nBellowing in annoyance, he caught onto the cliff with his hind paws, scrabbling to climb back up, but the surface was wet and mossy. Barely grip for so much as a talon.\n\nAria loomed over him, smirking, <Oops.>\n\nShe might be half or less of his bodyweight, but she was evenly matched in vexation.\n\nIn a split second, he made a decision. Kicking his hind legs outward, he pushed powerfully off the cliff edge with his forepaws, swinging his shoulders and muzzle clear before turning to the vertical and diving headfirst down the waterfall. An ultra-tight flexion of the wings won him a barrel-roll so close to the cliff face, he felt the spines on his back scrape several times. He galloped downward with the lightest steadying touches of his paws. Chasing that invisible hatchling. Speeding up until he was one with the flow, he realised rather too slowly that the waterfall was a series of steps and he was hurtling toward the first in a proper death dive.\n\nOne called pride.\n\nKicking off as hard as possible, he snapped out his wings and changed orientation so fast he must have blacked out for a second, because next he knew, the far canyon wall was approaching at a hazardous speed. It flashed through his mind that one should never argue with a rock wall at high speed. That endeavour was unlikely to end well, no matter how well-armoured one's cranium. Or how stubborn the personality behind it.\n\nSlap the tail like a rudder. Bend the back, the wings, gather the strength of Dragons within his breast, and fly! He hurtled up toward the suns, before curving his belly to the sky and back-stroking his way across the canyon. Rotating his wings in small circles, he swivelled his body back into its normal orientation and nonchalantly landed in the waterfall once more. There might have been a sneaky glance at the ladies to see if they were watching. But he was not that Dragon. Ego the size of a gnat.\n\nWhen he flew like that, he felt so alive.\n\nWater steamed off his back and flanks, to his surprise. Heat. Now, where had that sprung from? He explored the sensation, ruffling his wings to catch the water and shivering when Aria came back to join him.\n\nAfter a moment, she gave him a sly hip bump. <Inspiring flying, Dragon. You frightened the Princess, however, who feels your neck is best left intact rather than disjointed.>\n\nWas she subtly talking about herself \u2013 *gnarr!* He jumped back three feet as she sniffed beneath his left wingpit! Honestly. Talk about uncomfortable. That much familiarity with his personal space was not something any Dragon of the Tamarine Mountains could claim to be used to.\n\nSoftly, he said, <Why did you question my heritage?>\n\n<Because the deepest conundrums require the hardest questions to be asked.>\n\nHe nodded slowly.\n\n<I am \u2026 sorry, if my directness disturbed a Dragon.> Her luminous eye fires blinked through the sheets of falling water, spellbinding. <Yours is not an easy fate. It is said of Sea Dragons that they have a fourth stomach or organ related to breathing fire underwater.>\n\n<Underwater? I've never heard of such a thing.>\n\n<I've never heard of a Dragon unable to produce fire \u2013 yet, you are hot stuff.> She gurgled at her own joke, which he appreciated. Tension crackled over their wingtips, despite their relaxed postures beneath the waterfall. <I scent sense an \u2026 let's call it an affinity, perhaps? Aye. An affinity for water lies within you. It is only because this Dragoness was so shocked, so fourth-heart dismayed, that she spoke in haste. I meant not to disparage. I \u2026 think aloud, sometimes.>\n\nQuite the apology. He had never received such from any Devastator Dragon, save for his father's final words to him.\n\n<I understand, Aria, and thank you.>\n\nHe licked at the water, enjoying its tangy, cool sensation slipping down his throat. Minerals. Flow. Power. The medium of life itself. Attuned to the mighty ocean, Sea Dragons must be powerful indeed. Aria's manner suggested confirmation of the saltiness of his wingpit. Dragons did not sweat. They did not exude salt in the oils that kept their scales in excellent condition, by his sire's egg! Time to tame the tempests of his thoughts. Think \u2013 he must allow reason to lead where it may.\n\n<Still, I would hear your every thought, Aria Seaspray.>\n\nBy his egg! Dragon bit his tongue in horror. Now who was flirting with intent?\n\nThe Dragoness stretched her razor-sharp wings, before touching the lower edge of his blocky jaw with the lightest flick. <We should speak with our Princess. The quest is paramount. She knows you better than I do. Let us seek her insight, before this loneliness grips her fourth heart too heavily.>\n\n<Her fires incline to this Prince \u2013 the King?>\n\n<Dragon, your own nuances of speech betray your knowledge of this fact. Yet she surely knows how the Vaylarn Archipelago is cut off from the seventeen realms, perhaps forever. That is a sadness which grips like the very talons of death itself.>\n\nHis own talons clenched reflexively upon the slick boulders, while his shoulders squared up. <Is that so?>\n\nAnother impossible fate to challenge."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Two Dragons winged swift and sure over the broken, tangled badlands toward Chakkix Camp. The whole landscape was fractured canyons overrun by brambles, old-growth baobab trees eking out a living where their roots might claw deep for scarce water, and few trails. Black-maned lions fought eternal battles with marauding troops of chabada baboons. Both equally dangerous.\n\nThe notorious camp lay directly ahead, a motley, city-sized collection of huge brown tents, warehouse caverns, carousing dens, kilns and furnaces. It nestled against a ridge that offered some protection from the blasting badlands storms that afflicted this area.\n\nDragon sniffed the air. Ah, the best of humanity.\n\n\"How does one create fire out of water?\" the Princess mused aloud. \"This must be mysterious Dragon magic indeed.\"\n\n\"Or, simple science,\" he replied mildly.\n\nThe undisputed owner of his right paw smacked his wrist for emphasis. \"What is water even made of, I ask you? Crazy stuff \u2013 it flows, steams, evaporates, freezes, falls, rises, rests in oceans yet fills the air, and, according to a wonderful experiment performed by my ancestors in times past, comprises about three-quarters of the Human body. Aye, they dried corpses in the name of science.\"\n\n\"I did not need to know that about you, Princess.\"\n\n\"Desert folk being obsessed with drying things.\" She shrugged. \"Now, don't you two go scaring everyone in there, alright?\"\n\n\"How?\" Aria purred politely.\n\nDragon hooked his opposing talon toward his wing mate in a Human gesture. \"You're asking her to look less deadly? Pah, woman. Where do you come from?\"\n\n\"South of here.\" Before either could speak, she raised her hand, \"We are not going there. Focus on the mission. We need gold or at the very least, the promise of it.\"\n\nDragon said, \"Bet I could scare some up \u2013 murr-hurr-HARR!\"\n\nWas that a wink of cobalt, or just the suns glinting in his weak eye? Maybe Isles females did not go for the whole murderous Dragon laughter show?\n\nThe Princess said, \"Of that, I've no doubt. Believe it or not, these you call cockroaches do sometimes serve a purpose in Human society. Ours is not the least repressive. Here, we might find means to achieve ends \u2013 such as healing Kings and Queens \u2013 that are impossible in any other way.\"\n\nNow he understood.\n\n\"I also happen to know a man with whom we can start. The crown of T'nagru has long kept unofficial business here. Any dutiful daughter ought to know her father's affairs \u2026 thoroughly.\"\n\nAria's eyes widened at her insinuation.\n\nAye. This Princess was a jewel who constantly revealed new facets to the viewer. Well did he know it, but every new surprise was an aromatic bouquet to the complex process of draconic sense and memory. Settling the dark green half-cloak borrowed from her latest princely conquest \u2013 which was near full-length on her \u2013 about her frame, she drew up the hood and stared ahead, grimly intent. She had managed to pull the trouser leg partway down over her cast, but the leg still looked very odd.\n\nHe called to Aria, <Low pass to that open area on the southwest?>\n\nOne way to wake a Human populace and all of the animals they kept, was to buffet their tents with the passage of a pair of Dragons' wings. They put down on the dusty open ground, sending a herd of sheep in a nearby pen into a bleating panic. Dragon gave them a predatory stare. The sheep turned into a herd of woolly icicles. Most pleasing to five want-to-be-fiery hearts.\n\nAria nudged his shoulder slyly. <Persecutor of sheep, are we?>\n\n<Just reminding them who's the Dragon around here.>\n\n<I like your style, Dragon.>\n\nThe Princess disembarked. Leaning heavily upon her walking stick, she hopped over to the nearest man, who did not even turn his head when she spoke behind him. \"Could you please direct me to the tent of Tarangis Lionbaiter?\"\n\n\"Who wants to know?\"\n\n\"The Dragon.\"\n\nHard-eyed, thug, tattooed man of few words was he, but when the Princess casually indicated the large Dragon breathing over her shoulder, the show of overconfidence evaporated.\n\n\"At once, milady.\"\n\nThey wound between the large tents, clearing a swathe through the chaos with miraculous ease. Glancing here and there, Dragon noted that the tents were further subdivided inside, creating shadowy interior areas guarded by large men who appeared to abruptly discover they were not as large as they imagined when he caught their eye. Chakkix Camp was not accustomed to draconic visitors, he concluded, judging by the ripple of activity that expanded away from the epicentre of their walk. Gold clinked into sacks. The lids of interesting-smelling chests creaked shut. Treasure? His sensitive nostrils caught a whiff of dank underground air nearby. Aye. The inhabitants were reacting to their presence by hiding everything valuable as quickly and surreptitiously as they could.\n\nFear the Dragon!\n\nAhem. Dragons, plural. One was large and not so much in charge. The real terror stalked by his side, dainty and lustrous, a slender talon poised to strike. Aria was so jittery, he was afraid her hearts might explode. Telling her as much would probably trigger that explosion.\n\nInstead, he said, <Harken to how thy talons stir this tiny anthill, o Dragoness.>\n\n<I mislike this place. It has a stench of suffering.>\n\n<We must walk wisely here.>\n\nHis ears noted the easing of her defensive posture, however. The Princess' jaunty hopping proclaimed how much she enjoyed the effect of having such an entourage. Would this threat aid or hinder her negotiations with this Lionbaiter fellow? Good thing he had not called himself Dragonbaiter. He could not imagine Aria would let that lie without showing him exactly what it meant to bait a Dragoness.\n\nThe man paused outside a large, light-brown tent indistinguishable from any of the others. \"Wait here.\"\n\nHe ducked inside. Dragon smelled spices, weapons oil and plenty of Human body odour. Hmm. Not a space in which he might expect to find someone important. Raising his muzzle, he peered over the tent tops, tracking the man by the signature state of his emotional colouration until he disappeared out of sensory range a couple of tents over. Trickery was absolutely no surprise either.\n\nAt Aria's nudge, he said softly, \"They mean to isolate the Princess.\"\n\n\"Not happening,\" she growled.\n\n\"Stay with her no matter what. Take these paintings. I'm going around this way.\"\n\nHe stalked away, never lighter of paw, sniffing the air as he wound between the close-pitched tents until his nostrils seized upon a hint of incense. Aha. Here was that man's slippery, soapy emotional scent again. He was just returning from a space hid deep within the maze of silken tents, a space concealed by further layers of cloth within, and a wooden screen or lattice, judging by the scent of lacquer. This was much more like it. Casting his senses further, he waited upon Aria's scent \u2013 oh, shiver his wings! Far too distracting. Ocean spume, bright golden sands, waves crashing upon boulders \u2026 go for the Princess rather. There she was, her unique, spicy scent moving closer behind the layers.\n\nVeils within veils. Outlandish place, this. He tried to ignore the waves still turning his male brain into a sloshing puddle of bewilderment. Was he not rather old to be acting like a fledgling scenting his first female?\n\nA gruff voice said, \"Only the girl from this point.\"\n\nAria purred, \"She's with me.\"\n\n\"Lady Dragoness, you will not fit. These tents are not made for \u2013\"\n\n\"Call me a lady again, and I will fit your skull upon the point of my fang, little man. Do we understand each other?\"\n\n\"The Lionbaiter meets customers upon his own terms. Have a nice \u2013 aah!\"\n\n\"I am about to.\"\n\n\"Aria, please put him down. Men are so fragile.\" The delicious irony in her tone made his hearts sing. Oh, this Princess truly was a bandit! \"Now, I'm sure you don't need me to explain a second time. This Dragon is presently holding me captive for ransom, a fact of which your boss has undoubtedly long since been informed. More than five feet separation, and I'm likely to have the same happen to my other leg. I'd really, really prefer not to annoy a Dragon.\"\n\nShakily, the man said, \"I will make inquiry.\"\n\nAgain, he tracked the movement beneath the silks over to his left side. Ah, interesting. Metallic tangs zinged off his questing senses. If he was not mistaken, there was a partially armoured enclave hidden amongst all the rich fabrics. A cultured voice issued from within, almost imperceptible to a Dragon's hearing. Magical masking? How fascinating. He inched closer.\n\n\"Deal with Dragons? Which of my enemies wants me dead, I wonder?\"\n\n\"What shall we say, Master?\"\n\n\"We have no choice. Show them in.\"\n\n[ Business is Business ]\n\nHis ears tingled at a Princess' light footstep, but Aria was even quieter, despite that the tents were floored with rush mats. This inner enclave must have the plushest furnishings yet, he concluded after assessing the sounds. Deliberate? Of course.\n\nThe cultured voice breathed, \"Where's the other Dragon?\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"How do you lose a fifty-foot \u2013 Princess Azania! What a pleasant surprise. Your father has been searching for you.\"\n\n\"Has he?\"\n\nThere was a silence of mutual sizing up. Dragon ducked down as voices approached behind him, men and women searching for a gigantic Dragon at large in a tent camp. Think tiny thoughts. Chameleon brain. Down on the belly, mindful of the solid, lance-like tent pegs and the taut ropes. Bending his ribs, he crept around a heavily pegged corner until his muzzle almost touched the nearest sheet of tent fabric. Her Royal Highness of T'nagru could be no more than six feet from his nostrils.\n\nCertain instincts deep in his lizard brain buzzed with predatory pleasure. Dragon clamped down on the urge to ambush, rend, destroy!\n\nWhy did it always feel so good to be bad?\n\nAzania explained their desire to do business with Tarangis Lionbaiter. Profitable business. He lightly suggested that the reported ransom on her lovely head could have him swimming in gold for the rest of his life. The Princess explained the regrettable awkwardness of being detained by a ferociously jealous Dragon.\n\n\"This Dragoness? She does not fit the reports,\" Tarangis said smoothly.\n\nPrincess Azania chuckled sweetly, but he was certain her voice betrayed nervousness. \"The one listening right outside your tent, Tarangis.\"\n\n\"I don't scare easily,\" he blustered. \"What do you want, Princess?\"\n\n\"Zisrazix serum,\" she said.\n\n\"Fabulously rare. However, I should be very surprised if there were none to be had around Chakkix Camp,\" he noted smoothly. \"That will cost you a pretty sum. While I've no doubt your smile could conjure riches out of the very rainbows, Princess Azania, I don't spy very many sacks of gold around your person.\"\n\n\"I can be very persuasive.\"\n\nFor a dislocated second, Dragon could not work out who had spoken \u2013 the Princess or the Dragoness.\n\nTarangis' chair creaked slightly as he probably considered this statement as it was meant. Flaming destruction. A casual flip of a talon beneath the chin. Girl after his own hearts!\n\nHe said, \"I don't doubt it. You should equally not doubt my staff could make life very uncomfortable for your \u2026 captors. However, business is business. First, a frank exchange of information.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I want to know that we can trust each other.\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\n\"Who sent you here?\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"I did, in agreement with the Dragon. This is nothing to do with my father or anyone else. We need money. This Dragoness, Aria, needs zisrazix serum, and you and I both know you are the man to get it for me. I need clothing, and weapons and armour for both me and a Dragon. I have some ideas \u2013 aye, quirk your eyebrow as far as you like, Tarangis. I appreciate Dragon armour might be expensive. My weapons ideas will require design.\"\n\nThere was a very long silence.\n\nTarangis said, \"I will answer if you tell me how a fifty-foot brown Dragon disappears inside my camp, and no man can find hide nor scale of him?\"\n\n\"Your protections are not worth the sum you paid to the mages, Lionbaiter?\" Aria prodded.\n\nFor the first time, a slight edge entered that oily voice. \"Apparently not. You showed up like a blazing sun. The bigger Dragon does not appear to exist \u2013\"\n\n\"Except in your nightmares,\" he purred.\n\nThere was a muffled yelp and a curse inside the tent. The cobalt Dragoness laughed scornfully, and louder still as he opened a peephole with his left fore-talon. Right behind a more than startled warrior's twitchy behind. The man beat a hasty retreat. The wise rodent lived to scuttle another day. Cutting his hole larger, he reached through and patted the heavily disguised metal cage behind. This fellow must fear a dagger in the back like nothing else.\n\n\"Trapped like a mouse in a cage, Tarangis?\"\n\nMelodrama. He loved it.\n\nCertainly, he heard the Dragoness roll her eye fires. Yet he thrilled to a new realisation. He had a magic few Dragons possessed; the next best thing to complete invisibility.\n\nNo idea what it was. But it lifted his mood like a breeze buoyed up wings.\n\nThree faces appeared around the edge of what he had taken for a wall or veil within the tent \u2013 Azania, Aria and the pale, bearded Tarangis. The man sat in a wheelchair. Dragon's eyes dipped.\n\n\"Aye,\" Tarangis said wryly. \"The lack of legs is why they call me Lionbaiter. Never bait a lion. Nor, as I have recently learned, creatures with four paws and the cunning of forty. What do you want of me, Dragon? Have you come to slay me? This is a ploy of considerable craft, I'll warrant \u2013\"\n\n\"No,\" he said directly. \"We need your help, Tarangis.\"\n\n\"Forgive me a disbelieving chuckle.\"\n\n\"I swear upon my dam's egg that the Princess has been completely honest with you, apart from the bit she just concocted about Dragon armour. That is a surprise to me. We have no plan to take or endanger your life. What we desire is clear. We will provide you valuable merchandise against which you will advance us gold sufficient to purchase zisrazix serum, and whatever else my profligate Princess requires.\"\n\nAzania's eyebrows shot upward.\n\nThe man twirled one of the waxed ends of his moustache. His brown eyes were not unkind, but neither did they lack for cunning in their own right. Dragon observed that he was richly dressed in a fine velveteen jacket. Many costly jewels adorned his slim, neat hands.\n\nHe said, \"You expect me to bear the cost of moving your merchandise?\"\n\n\"We will negotiate once you have made your appraisal,\" said the Princess. \"I believe this offer lies in your realm of expertise \u2013 fine artworks.\"\n\n\"I expect to be fitly compensated, Princess and Dragons. Once the story of your dealings with me gets out \u2026 let's just say, the walls of tents are only so thick, and the ears behind them are numerous.\"\n\n\"What were you going to tell me?\" she challenged.\n\nHe nodded slowly, coming to an unspoken decision. \"Princess, I have on ironclad authority, that the royal deal regarding your future was that Vanrace would cover the cost of your ransom over a period measured in years, with bonuses paid upon the successful production of heirs.\"\n\nAzania wheezed, wobbling so badly that a blue paw snapped up to catch her.\n\nThe man bowed from his seat. \"I regret the undoubted hurt, Princess. Your father has never been an easy customer, but I expected better of him.\"\n\nHurt? He might better have punched her in the gut.\n\nWhy not just stake his daughter out in the desert for the army ants to ravage?\n\n\"I am sorry. Please, show me your merchandise.\"\n\nAfter passing the Princess over to his proffered paw, Aria Seaspray unwrapped the load and began to show the pieces to the man. On the third artwork, a close-up of the magnificent, variegated flower ironically called 'the Queen's ransom,' he lowered the canvas to glance between his guests.\n\n\"Are all unsigned? Who is the artist?\"\n\n\"I'm sitting in his paw.\" Azania made a brittle smile. \"He's a touch shy about his gift.\"\n\nHis reaction to 'shy' almost blasted her curls off her head.\n\nActing utterly unmoved, the Princess added, \"The quality is consistent. Twenty-one pieces. We can bring more, and bigger works, if that is of interest.\"\n\n\"Interest?\" he muttered beneath his breath.\n\nOf course, he insisted on looking through each and every piece. At length. Dragon almost shed his scales in frustration. The longer it took, the more nausea churned in his gut, until he feared he would need to find a different corner in which to lose the contents of his stomach at high speed.\n\nFinally \u2013 finally! Tarangis Lionbaiter stopped driving his guests absolutely batty, and said, \"These will sell richly, to the right customer, of that I have no doubt. You will need to sign them, Dragon. The artistry is exquisite. Unique style. Attention to detail, breathtaking \u2013 right down to shining droplets upon petals, and insects. Truly, Dragons see the world as no other creature.\"\n\nWhat irony. If only he knew.\n\n\"What are you thinking, Princess? Dragon?\"\n\nAzania said steadily, \"We will cut you in to the profit of every sale. Aye, I appreciate that means you take the financial risk. You advance us money against this first consignment of merchandise, and later report your results on an item by item basis. We appreciate this may take time.\"\n\n\"You seek an honesty deal? Some might call that na\u00efve.\"\n\nHer dark brows twitched. \"Some, when doing business with Dragons, might call that the only way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "So, to the waiting. The weary Princess slept in the crook of his foreleg, as ever. Dragon brooded over this peculiar business of Sea Dragons making fire underwater. An extra magical organ that did the impossible? *Gnarr.* He picked at the webbing between the talons of his left forepaw, deciding that he was far too good at brooding, mooching and ruminating for his own good. Nice of his friends to point out another weird feature about himself only his brothers had ever noticed, and that, years ago. Fritz Duckfoot, they had called him for a few weeks, before \u2026 hmm. Before his dam screamed at them to stop, and cuffed Brawl so hard he flew across the lair.\n\nMost unlike Indigofire the Devastator.\n\nTarangis had left to make arrangements and tap his contacts. Finance was no problem. They had settled upon a sixty-forty split, with Dragon getting the Dragon's share. Naturally. To be honest, he had no strong feelings about the terms upon which such a deal should be sealed, but the Princess told him afterward that to refrain from haggling would not only have been regarded as dishonourable, but highly suspicious. The second, he understood. The first? Humans were most irregular creatures.\n\nPeculiar as a duck-billed platypus.\n\nThose were supposed to be mythical, but the Vaylarn Archipelago apparently possessed platypuses in abundance. Showed what he knew about anything.\n\nPlatypus, platypuses, rhymed with \u2026 musses?\n\nHe needed to convince the Princess to purchase the hair oil her type of crazy curl apparently needed. Imagine. Hairy curls. What a perfect horror to a creature of smooth scales.\n\nAriamyrielle Seaspray, as restless as the ocean waves, had disappeared into the heavens. Scouting, she said. Probably checking if anyone happened to be leaving the camp in a hurry, intending to call King N'gala down upon his errant daughter in search of a tidy profit. Dragon kept one eye open a slit, in case any fool tried to pinch this treasure from his paw. It would be the last thing \u2026 ah, a subtle whisper of wings. The cobalt charmer, who dispensed favours at the points of her blades, landed soft-pawed outside the tent at the edge of the encampment which had been given over to the Dragons.\n\nAll the better not to disturb the natives.\n\nAria padded within. <Sleeping?> He nodded slightly. <Nothing from that Tarangis? Hmm. This serum may be rarer than we thought. I see you know how to hold a female, Dragon.>\n\nHe lazily showed her a few fangs.\n\n<Oddly enough, these Humans are giving our tent a very respectful perimeter. Must be your grumpiness.>\n\n<Or your prickliness.>\n\nChortling appreciatively, she \u2026 stalked him. It was the only way he could frame a walk so sinuous, it detached his brain from the rest of the universe, and made him float. Blissful. Uncaring that he stared. Spellbound.\n\nSettling beside him, mesmeric eyes but a foot from his, she murmured, <Made you look.>\n\n<Oh, what did I miss? Was I snoring?>\n\nAll the future pain her dumbfounded look promised was worth it. Surely.\n\nThe threesome dozed. The late afternoon sunshine turned the tent into a hothouse. This was the reason they used so many layers, Dragon remembered thinking at one point. Azania took off her robe and used it to pillow her space, but she did not leave the crook of his elbow.\n\nToward evening, the sound of a footstep brought the Dragons fully awake. The Princess sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. A messenger informed them that Tarangis wanted to speak with them. Shortly, they were back with the man in his tent, being informed that they had a minor problem called Fazikil the self-styled Warlord. He held the only verified source of serum and would neither sell it to anyone for love nor money, nor would he emerge from his fortified cavern in the ridge behind the camp.\n\nRather suspicious.\n\n\"So, what are you suggesting?\" the Princess asked curiously, as their host made a tent of his fingertips and waggled his eyebrows behind them.\n\n\"There are a number of parties in this camp who might be persuaded to part with solid gold should an unfortunate accident occur, especially one involving the Warlord. Including me. I have nine interested business partners. Besides which, I am just now looking at two large, vengeful Dragons.\"\n\n\"We're vengeful?\" Dragon echoed.\n\n\"Of course we are,\" Aria chirped, \"just tell us why?\"\n\nThe Lionbaiter said, \"My partners' research strongly indicates that Fazikil, a noted purveyor of toxins, may have supplied the compound used to poison the King and Queen of the Vaylarn Archipelago.\"\n\nHe clapped his paw over the Dragoness' nostrils in the nick of time. Even so, the snort of her fire singed the man's eyebrows and hair as he jerked back. Rather usefully, he did not instantly lose the offending paw. Neither did Aria thunder and fulminate as he would have expected. Instead, she grew quiet.\n\nAs quiet as death itself.\n\nAfter listening to the sounds of the camp, Dragon growled, \"Let's do business, Tarangis Lionbaiter. Dragon business.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Aria Seaspray's idea of motivation was to tickle him beneath the chin and coo, <Who's a hefty, humongous hunk then, Dragon? Think you can shiver my scales? Think you can make me purr?>\n\nSo un-Devastator-like. His sire and his brothers would have been exchanging fisticuffs and working themselves into a champing, fire-snorting frenzy. She said a few soft words, and that familiar, burning pain developed behind his keel bone. Frustrating, but less frustrating than his part in this raid. The plan was for him to be the diversion while a Human-Dragoness team did the dangerous work. He was the bait. They were the dagger sinister.\n\nHis reply? <Twist off a few heads for me, would you?>\n\n<How adorable you are,> said she, batting her multiple eyelids outrageously.\n\nThat was more than enough to put the rumble into any self-respecting Dragon's chest. Launching off a knoll just north of the camp, Dragon took to the air with a series of powerful wingbeats. The early evening crimsons faded toward night; the first stars twinkled above the horizon to the east, white blurs to his sight. Gathering altitude, he spread his wings over the forest of tan and brown tent spires, taking in the scents of cooking fires and roasting meat, and the ever-present stench of animal and Human excrement. This settlement needed a good, cleansing rainfall \u2013 not that any was due in the next decade. The small stream that served the place entered blue and exited muddy and brown, complete with the adornment of an occasional misplaced body part floating away to supply the hungry scavengers.\n\nThe ruckus of at least three drunken fights drifted up to his ears. As if the raiding party needed a diversion. Those vultures down below, and the snarling pack of wild badlands dogs, could do with a good scare. Never mind the Humans. Time to see if he could flush a few scuttling rats out of cover. Sucking in a huge breath, he wheeled upon his wingtip and prepared to make a diagonal run across the campsite, aiming to turn their attention away from the ridge, where a strongly defended double door guarded the Warlord's caves behind \u2013 a mini fortress.\n\nWind wuthered against his ears as he accelerated toward the tent city.\n\n<Ffaa-zii-kiill!!> He bellowed. Thunderous! <Fazikil the Warlord! Come out of your hole, you mangy, scuttling rodent! Come meet me! I \u2013 am \u2013 DRAAA-GOOONNN!!>\n\nIt was not his wings that blasted dust off the tents ahead of him; that picked up a fold of fabric and its tent pole, and shovelled them brutally to his left. *Krack!* The tent tilted majestically. Despite that he was not meant to be sowing widespread destruction, Dragon's five hearts lifted in fierce song. No fire had he, but there was some other unusual power about him. A sonic blast? He tested it repeatedly, thundering his challenge again and again as he swept over the tents, ensuring that every hearing being within a mile knew that his fury burned against Fazikil the Warlord.\n\nThe white and tan badlands dogs fled in yipping chorus as he exploded over them, back-beating his wings to nearly stall his flight before he turned to look over Chakkix Camp once more. He arched his wings massively, rising into the last crimson sunbeams fleeing away from the tent tops, making sure he looked as large and intimidating as possible \u2013 and that every eye remained fixed upon him.\n\nExcellent. Now to vent his spleen upon these scuttling cockroaches.\n\nDrawing breath once more, he thundered until the far ridge echoed the notes of his displeasure and invective. Dragon drifted above the camp, casually chasing knots of men and women to roar down their necks. Where was this Fazikil? Who was hiding him? He had the pleasure \u2013 or rather, the displeasure \u2013 of seeing two men lose control of their bowels as he pressed them for information. Was it the champing fangs? The thunder that belled, the paws that stamped?\n\nHe was having such a jolly old time, that when he saw the Princess' yellow flag waving, his brain tried to trick him into thinking it was a joke. No. Aria was in trouble! Surging so violently through the air that his wingtips creaked and then smacked together at the limit of their stroke beneath his belly, he blasted toward the royal and landed ten feet aside from her so that the spray of dirt and gravel did not hurt her.\n\nFour motley local militia guarded her person; he heard more scuffling about inside the cavern.\n\n\"What's happened? What's gone wrong?\"\n\n\"Doors shut inside. Aria trapped,\" she gasped.\n\n<Gutless benighted fools!> he swore, charging in through the narrow entrance. Two wooden doors had been ripped open by the Dragoness, gaining her and the strike team access to the first major cavern, but the one beyond that was sealed by metal doors deeply bolted into solid rock. A muffled, concerning scuffle could be heard beyond. No precise clashes of weapons, no battle roars. The cobalt Dragoness sounded as if she were flopping about like a fish in there, which meant one of two things \u2013 a net, poison, or both.\n\nBlood fizzed behind his ears. Trap!\n\n<ARIA!!>\n\n<Dragon \u2026> she coughed and choked on something.\n\nHe struck that door with everything he had, almost crushing a female warrior who was too slow to leap out of his way. Drawing back with a muttered apology, he shoulder-charged it again, barely making a dent in the solid metal. The hinges and bolts shook, but nothing cracked. It was bolted top and bottom as well, he saw. He needed a lever. Something tougher than his shoulder.\n\nThe Princess, hobbling through the cavern that he had crossed in a flash, not even seeing the bodies strewn about the sandy floor, shouted, \"Boulder!\"\n\nExcellent idea. Roaring, <I'm coming. Hold on!> Dragon charged without again, remembering what he had seen just beside the entrance. Granite boulders. Most were too small to be of use, but a six-foot oblong was just the medicine that door needed. Grasping it in both forepaws, he heaved it onto his shoulder and staggered back inside. Alright. Juggernaut had been right about his lack of physical conditioning. He was strong, but should be so much stronger, unless one counted the fine muscles used in painting. Those were in excellent shape.\n\n\"Kill her! Kill the \u2013 urgh!\"\n\nNot so easily done, even if she was half-paralysed, or whatever was going on in there.\n\nHefting the boulder, he considered the door for a second. Bend it. Do enough damage, and he'd be able to get a paw through \u2013 no. The lower left hinge was the place to go for.\n\n\"Stand back, Princess.\"\n\nDragon set about hammering the door down with the aid of several tonnes of granite. The metalwork was sound, the hinges well-made and the deadbolts solid, but they had never been intended to withstand the assault of a crazed fifty-foot Dragon, who decided he was acting a great deal like a maudlin knight in shining armour. Silly, but true. The phrase, 'can't help himself' was foremost in his mind as he battered that first hinge into a twisted, pathetic curl of metal. The tonnage of boulder made the deadbolts squeal in protest; one sheared right off, and that was his way in. Forcing his shoulder into the gap, he peered beneath.\n\nAria's back arched in a horrible spasm. Choking!\n\nExerting every last ounce of his strength, he bent the metal door back and up, creating enough of a hole for him to force his way through.\n\n<Aria! ARIA!!>\n\n[ Hunting ]\n\nAzania, somehow hop-running on her plaster cast leg, dashed beneath him. \"Get her tongue! She's choking \u2013\"\n\nReaching around the Princess, he disembowelled an enemy warrior taking aim at her head with his sword. Picking up the body, he threw it at two others who considered themselves well enough to be trying to crawl toward the Dragoness. Not for long. He helped Azania to force open Aria's mouth. So many dead. This cave had been heavily fortified in preparation for the trap, but the Dragoness had made a mess of everyone and everything inside.\n\nRough evening.\n\nCasting about, he pointed with his talon. \"Get me that board.\"\n\nThe Princess dragged it up and together, they pressed it between her fangs, holding the airway open. The Dragoness' horridly stiff posture relaxed by degrees and her breathing eased, until she blinked several times and focussed on them.\n\n<Not \u2026 here. Get Tarangis. Squeeze him \u2026>\n\n<Your welfare first,> he countered, checking her over for injuries. Nothing too major. Dozens of cuts, especially around the forepaws and shoulders; a couple of imbedded arrows. She would live.\n\nThe battered strike force reassembled in the cavern around them, oblivious to the white fury swelling in his hearts. Could Tarangis have betrayed them? Why had he not examined the colours and flavours of his heart more closely before they embarked upon this revenge hit for a man they barely knew? Aria spat out the plank and then coughed up a greenish, oily substance that smelled like bitter almonds. Ardikx'xit root. Nasty stuff for Dragons. Had they shot it down her throat mid-battle?\n\nIn a couple of hours, she should be fine. Getting the taste out of the mouth could take weeks, he had read.\n\nHe rubbed her back. <Need any help?>\n\n<You did already.>\n\nSadness? What was this? Before he could dwell on the question, however, several men appeared in one of the side passages, carrying Tarangis upon a litter.\n\n\"He's not here, and neither is the serum,\" he spat. \"How did we get this so wrong?\"\n\nAria growled, \"You betrayed us! Tell me the truth \u2013\"\n\n\"No, I miscalculated. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Dragon, squeeze the truth out of him!\"\n\nNarrowing his eyes, he glared at Tarangis, taking in every detail with the attention of an artist, from the dilation of his pupils to the scent of his heart. \"He's telling the truth.\"\n\n<Dragon!>\n\nHe met that smouldering gaze as steadily as he could, trying to communicate everything he could. The fires of her eyes modulated through teal, umber, gold, green and crimson before settling into a more neutral aquamarine swirl that complimented her colouration. Later, that hooded gaze told him. He nodded slightly, wondering if Isles Dragons did not share the same abilities many Tamarine Mountains Dragons did. Humans might react very differently to Dragons if they knew they could scent trace many of the emotions in their hearts. Blitz the \u2013 the Dragon he had been before, had been told he was particularly adept at the skill.\n\nIf so, he had much to learn. Neither Aria nor Azania were at all straightforward to read. He made many mistakes, but with Tarangis, he was certain.\n\nTurning to the man, he growled, \"What went wrong?\"\n\n\"He had a body double. Plus, Fazikil must have built these inner defences without my spies learning of it. I lost a number of good people today. The prize has slipped from our grasp.\"\n\n\"I scouted earlier,\" Aria said coldly. \"Describe this man to me.\"\n\nTarangis instructed his men, \"Turn that one over.\"\n\nThey heaved over \u2013 well, somewhat less than half a man. It must have been Aria's sword which had cleft his torso just beneath the ribs. The Princess gagged and looked away. Even the grizzled militia acted queasy. The two Dragons examined his features \u2013square face, a neatly trimmed black beard, and a surprisingly hooked nose.\n\n\"The nose is the giveaway,\" Tarangis said. \"That one is partly false. See?\"\n\n\"Ah, clever work with the modelling clay,\" Dragon approved. \"Even I barely \u2013\"\n\nAria threw him a disgusted look. \"We do not admire the enemy!\"\n\nOne of the warriors said gruffly, \"This was a well-executed ambush, mighty Dragoness. Without you, we would have been carrion for the crows. We are grateful \u2013 men!\"\n\nThe militia, male and female alike, thumped their right fists against their chests in what must be a salute or gesture of honour.\n\nThe Dragoness nodded, mellowing about as much as a petrified tree swayed in a breeze. He promptly locked up this errant opinion, bound in heavy chains and tossed into the Lumis Ocean. May she never hear him think such a thought!\n\nShe said, \"Likewise, I should have been overwhelmed, save that I was surrounded by many fine swords. I am sorry for those who fell. As I said, I scouted earlier and took note of all leavers of the camp. There were two who might well resemble this man. I don't think our treacherous Warlord could have gone far.\"\n\n\"Tell me where \u2026\"\n\nDragon fell silent, tongue-tied with shame. Here was where it all fell in the trash heap. He just could not be what Aria or the Princess needed when it came to the final reckoning.\n\n\"It's night. We will hunt better once the moons are up,\" Aria said quietly. \"You and me, Dragon. We'll leave the Princess \u2013\"\n\n\"No.\" Tarangis threw up his hands. \"You must guard her well, Dragons. Word has already spread. The most stunning woman in all the realms is worth more than a princely sum. Ma'am. I know this camp. You are not safe here \u2013\" Dragon cleared his throat aggressively \"\u2013 except with you two around. My team will go over these caves minutely looking for any hidden compartments, stores, all of that. There will be plenty. Plus, there's a whole industry in burrowing into the back of other peoples' caves. Princess, I suggest you purchase body armour today. Nice outfit, out of interest. Most of this camp could not believe a royal would not coming wearing \u2026 well, a rich dress. Or look like them.\"\n\n\"Or drool like them,\" Dragon put in politely.\n\n\"That too,\" Tarangis grinned. \"Guilty as charged. Those trousers are the most stupendously wicked example of \u2026 uh, with all respect, Your Highness.\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow. \"I'll take that as it's meant, shall I?\"\n\n\"Let's go, folks. We've work to do.\"\n\nWith ten local militia charged to guard the Dragoness \u2013 someone with cobalt scales was more than a touch grumpy about that \u2013 Dragon conveyed the pert yet devastating rump of the camp-stirring Princess over to Tarangis' trusted armourer, a muscular woman called Yardi. She set about fitting the Princess for lightweight but strong body armour, wrist guards and greaves for her calves.\n\nWhat kind of battles was she planning to get into?\n\nAs the women chatted, he sniffed around her forge, again set back in the ridge. This cavern was barely large enough for a Dragon to swing a sheep in. Yardi asked the Princess if the Dragon might permit her grandmother, Yarimda, to speak with him.\n\n\"Ask him,\" Azania said. \"He's stubborn as a winged brick, but good-hearted.\"\n\nGood thing she had not said 'gentle,' the word on the tip of her tongue. Dragon showed her at least fifteen fangs. \"I'm an unfeeling brute at all times, if you please. Yardi, I should love to meet your grand-dam.\"\n\nEspecially since she happened to be lurking in a narrow corridor at the back of the forge cavern, just out of eyesight. Intriguing scent.\n\nHe said, \"Honoured Yarimda, please come forth.\"\n\nThe armourer's eyes danced as, to the tapping of canes, a white-haired lady emerged from hiding. She stood tall and straight. Reminded him of his Great-Aunt Ignita, to be frank. Plus, she must be ninety if she was a day. He bowed his muzzle, and scented the air inquisitively a second time.\n\n\"Where do you hail from, ma'am?\"\n\n\"I was about to ask the same of ye, young Dragon,\" she said in a scratchy yet warm voice. Her blue eyes twinkled. \"Large for a Devastator, are you not? I mark ye for kin of Bolt the Devastator, have I the rights of that?\"\n\nBy her accent, she was from nowhere near this southern kingdom. Her skin was pale, her oval eyes slightly slanted and flared at the corners.\n\n\"Hamirythe Kingdom?\" he guessed.\n\n\"Perceptive,\" she agreed.\n\n\"I was of the Devastator Clan, ma'am, but am no longer. Bolt would have been my great-grandsire of my father's line, could I claim kinship. I am without Clan and without name. Call me Dragon.\"\n\n\"That would be Blaze, mated with Indigofire, formerly of the Crusher Clan?\" she noted. Without waiting upon his confirmation, she said, \"I grew up in the Hamirythe Kingdom on the shores of the Lumis Ocean. From our front porch we could spy the mighty Sanbris Whales or bluntnose dolphins, and see the Sea Dragons hunting the great Sea Serpents. Mortal enemies they are, and ever shall be.\"\n\nAs she spoke, she approached him, until she stood unafraid beside his forepaws. Dragon hunkered down politely, bringing himself to eye level with her. Yarimda looked him over with an almost proprietary air. Her cane tapped the webbing between the digits of his left forepaw. She gazed deep into his right eye, and nodded as if something had just become clear to her.\n\nDragon shivered.\n\nThe old woman shuddered at exactly the same time. In a voice that threatened to scrape his scales free of his hide, she declaimed:\n\n<I hearken to the ocean, ocean deep,>\n\n<I sense a magic deep asleep,>\n\n<Deep within, a slumberous power,>\n\n<Arise, deep fire, when knocks the hour.>\n\nDragon blinked, never more taken aback. \"Ma'am?\"\n\nShe said, \"Oh! I haven't had one of those in the longest time.\"\n\nThe Princess stared at him, her eyes so full of questions, he feared she might cry. He could not bear her gaze.\n\nInstead, in a hollow voice, he whispered, \"I have no fire, ma'am. It is my greatest affliction.\"\n\nYarimda clutched her canes so tightly, he raised a paw, hesitated, and then clasped her frail form as gently as he could. He helped her to sit upon his folded foreleg.\n\n<Rest for a space, honoured one. I know deep sight costs the bearer much. My Great-Aunt Ignita had episodes like this.> Which of them was the more shaken? He asked, <Is it rightly said that Sea Dragons breathe fire underwater?>\n\n<In water or in air,> she said, once again speaking fluent Draconian. <Dragon, I had a friend when I was but a girl, younger than the Princess of T'nagru. Her name was \u2013>\n\nHe blinked. <Say that again?>\n\nShe repeated the string of burbling syllables, sounding almost exactly like a stream chuckling its merry way between boulders and over a small waterfall. <I called her Wavewhisperer. Each year when her kind migrated, she would stop by for a few weeks. We used to play together in the waves, this girl and a white Dragoness of the ocean. She took me for rides on her back for hours on end. One day, we were set upon by a Sea Serpent in the shallows and she was nearly killed. Thereafter, her dam and sire forbade her from visiting a strange Human creature who lived upon the land. We lost touch. I married and had children, and moved away to another kingdom with my husband. Yet, every time I went to the ocean, I would call for Wavewhisperer. Last time I was back in Hamirythe, they told me that the migrations have stopped, and I have wondered ever after what befell the Sea Dragons, and my beautiful friend.>\n\n<When was that, exactly?>\n\n<About twenty years back, they said.>\n\nHe frowned slightly. That timeframe did not add up with what Aria Seaspray had shared about the Sea Serpents moving in and cutting off all shipping between the Archipelago and the mainland.\n\nHe prompted, <She breathed fire?>\n\n<O Dragon, thou seeker,> she said. <I am not sorry to have spoken over you. Something in you reminded me of Wavewhisperer, you see. I sense you need to hear this, a further word for you alone.> Laying her hand upon the wall of his chest, she whispered, <Ocean always rises. Ocean \u2013 always \u2013 rises.>\n\nHe blinked again, trying to shake off the sense of being a hatchling at this woman's paw. An ache spread from his tired eyes into his head.\n\nYarimda said, <They had a word for it in wave, the speech of Sea Dragons. I \u2026 could not translate it except by explanation. Sea Dragon magic splits water into air, whereupon \u2013>\n\n<Water becomes air? Ma'am, they could not be more different substances.>\n\n<I did not say I understood the process, young Dragon,> she reproved. <This is what I know. It is not about turning water to steam. Their magic deploys an energy similar to lightning to split water into air's \u2026 parts. Different gases. Those parts are highly flammable. And in case your sense of disbelief is running high, I would swear to you on my own mother's womb, that I have seen white fire blossoming beneath the water, and indeed, I have the burns upon my right leg by which to remember the experience.>\n\n<I apologise.>\n\nShe chuckled, and in her laughter was the fond echo of history's remembrance.\n\nHe said, <Ma'am, while your granddaughter and my Princess work together, could I prevail upon you to tell me some stories about the Sea Dragons? Everything you know. Please? I am eager to learn.>\n\n<I understand,> she said, reaching out with her canes to frame his shoulders. <You have broader, more powerful shoulders than your kin. Your skull is sleeker, less blunt of a wedge. The structural qualities of your wings allow you to fly faster and farther than other Dragons. And even your eyes long for water and fire; that I sense most poignantly. Have you tried salt water? Have you ever immersed yourself in the ocean, Dragon, and trembled at its mighty embrace?>\n\nHe opened and closed his jaw, twice. Words failed to emerge.\n\nFate's falling had stolen his tongue."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Four hours later, when he, the newly armoured Princess and Ariamyrielle Seaspray set out upon their hunt, he had still not regained the power of speech.\n\n<Ocean. Always. Rises.>\n\nThis was the new drumbeat of his hearts. Could he believe?\n\nTarangis Lionbaiter had another word for them. Word was that in the fall, when the Obsidian Desert cooled enough to endeavour a crossing, the Skartun would march against T'nagru. King N'gala N'gala had already despatched his spies, although no-one truly believed the enemy would come. A desert crossing was a phenomenal physical feat. Inconceivable for an entire army to make it that far under such harsh conditions \u2013 yet these Skartunese must have their ways, for they had done it once before, rising like ghosts from the deep desert to fall upon and ravage the Kingdom of T'nagru. After that, Vanrace. Then, they had divided and vanquished the Dragon Clans and dragged many off into slavery.\n\nHow? What vile magic could enslave a Dragon?\n\nAria led them at a fast clip to the southwest, over a sea of dry gullies and barren slopes. The occasional brush coverage was the scratchy, dust-covered sort that survived where few other things grew. They surprised a pack of tan desert foxes scrapping over a small carcass, coming upon them so quickly that they were almost overhead before the pack scattered with shrill yips of fright. Half an hour on, the Dragoness' sharp eyes spied the almost-expired glow of a coal not properly banked for the night.\n\nSilent swoop! Nearly scared the trousers off a T'nagrun merchant and the brown-haired strumpet sleeping beside his shoulder. He was not the man they wanted. Dragon had to snarl at the woman to stop her screaming.\n\nAzania asked him to convey a message to her father that she was well, safe and not coming home anytime soon. Life with a Dragon being far too stimulating, apparently. Broken leg and all.\n\nNonetheless, he was more pleased by her response than he cared to confess.\n\nBack on the wing and circling more easterly to intersect the trail of the other man Aria had tracked heading in this direction, he told the two females what he had learned from Yarimda. The Princess pressed him to admit that his heritage may indeed be more complex than he had imagined. The hulking mountain of brown scales snapped spitefully at her prodding and poking into what, for a Dragon, was a topic of great sensitivity. Sigh. Apologise. Explain how great a store Dragons set in what others thought of their heritage, reputation, deeds of paw and size of hoard.\n\nAll those shallow indicators meant \u2026 what, exactly?\n\n<Blergh!>\n\nPrincess Azania said, \"We value birth, station, wealth and beauty. Humans are so much better than Dragons, don't you see?\"\n\n\"Tastier than Dragons, for sure,\" he agreed, snuffling at her legs.\n\n\"Dragon! Get off.\"\n\n\"Tell you what, Princess. When you meet your sweet little King, allow me ten minutes or so to interrogate him thoroughly regarding his intentions toward you. We'll soon smell out the mettle of the man.\"\n\nShe hissed, \"I'll fight my own battles, Dragon \u2013 much as I appreciate the sentiment.\"\n\nFeisty. Did that King have any idea what he was letting himself in for? He said, \"Very well, Princess. Just remember, you've a one-Dragon army right behind you.\"\n\n\"Which body part do I lose if I call you sweet?\"\n\n\"Three.\"\n\nAriamyrielle Seaspray looked askance at them. Did she feel left out of their silliness? Just weeks ago, he had been wishing he could meet a creature like this spirited Princess. Tiny spitfire. Rebellious and unafraid. Accepting of his deficiencies and differences.\n\nOver there was a gutsy martial artist, still bleeding in seven places that he could count, who despite being barely half his size, could thrash the scales off his body any day of the week. The first Isles Dragoness to cross the ocean. Was she also different? A \u2013 how did Humans put it \u2013 square peg in a round hole? Did her service to the King of the Archipelago carry connotations of shame or dishonour? She had revealed only the most minimal minutiae of her life. Leery of prying, he refused to press her.\n\nThey passed over the area several times, gliding silent-winged above the broken terrain. Aria did not grow frustrated. She quartered the ground efficiently. Huntress. He took mental notes, not exactly being a mighty hunter on account of his wretched eyesight.\n\nLanding, they found his trail, only a few hours cold. The man had not stopped even here, despite the dangers. Dragon tracked him by scent and occasional sight. This, he could do. Close up work. An hour later, they spied his desert pony staked on a long rope in the base of a gully. Azania gentled the pony with her Equitone skills. Scent led them to a narrow crack. Fazikil the Warlord had hidden himself well. Before Aria approached, Dragon sniffed out a trap, a quarter-sized crossbow concealed beside the entrance, armed and set to trigger via a tripwire.\n\nFazikil was a nervous man.\n\nHe flexed his talons. Hope he was a ticklish one, too.\n\n[ Juggling Act ]\n\nFazikil came out screaming. Dragon considered bopping his head against the rocks a few times to shut him up, but Human skulls did not tend to respond well to such treatment. They cracked like nuts and spilled their contents. The Princess might be unappreciative of the mess. Besides, they needed information from him, not blood. No. Information now, blood later. Much better.\n\n\"I'll question him,\" said Aria.\n\nTaking the quivering fool in paw, she launched into the air. Shortly, his screams were echoing all over the badlands.\n\nCharming way about her, that Dragoness.\n\nMeantime, he cautioned the Princess against entering the cave to make a search. There was another scent trace inside \u2013 but, no heartbeat? \"Alright, enter cautiously,\" he advised.\n\nThe Princess crept within. Within seconds, her whisper emerged, \"Dead, Dragon. It's G'nura, one of father's \u2026 less official employees. I wonder if Fazikil murdered him?\"\n\n\"Maybe earlier?\"\n\n\"Would he have had time?\" He heard her clothing rustle as she shook her head. \"I'll bring out all of their bags. We should search everything.\"\n\n\"Good. Do that.\"\n\nAria passed across the faces of the three moons, often simply called the triplets, tossing her captive from one paw to another. What was not to like about juggling skills in a Dragoness? Had he forgotten how to scream \u2013 no, there it went again, as she pretended to fumble a catch.\n\nMusic. Sweet music to a Dragon's ears.\n\nWhile Fazikil and G'nura had both been carrying pouches full of items and scrolls of undoubted interest to the Kingdom of T'nagru, there were no vials of serum or anything that resembled them. By the time they had searched twice, Aria Seaspray returned with a limp body in her paw.\n\n\"You killed him?\" Dragon accused. \"We needed \u2013\"\n\nShe spat, \"Poisoned himself. I should not have left his arms free. Fool! Now we'll never learn the location of this serum.\"\n\nHe shook his head slowly. \"That's bad.\"\n\n\"Dragon! I get the point! I've botched this entire mission. The King and Queen's deaths will stain my paws forever.\"\n\nThey flew back in defeated silence.\n\nAria was just leading him to a landing outside the Warlord's cavern, when she turned to him, hissing, \"When you said you knew Tarangis Lionbaiter was telling the truth, Dragon, what did you mean?\"\n\n\"I smelled it upon him.\"\n\n\"You smell truth?\"\n\n\"I smell \u2026 emotions.\" The Princess jerked in his paw. Dragon bit off the pleading, weaselling voice in his head. Truth. Only the truth. \"I \u2026 look, I don't exactly flap around the moons bleating my weirdness to everyone, alright? I know I'm a freak. No fire, weird senses, the whole artsy-cutesy Dragon thing \u2013 *gnarrr-bloody-death!* Just leave it, alright?\"\n\n\"No, no, I think you can help \u2013 you alone,\" Aria countered, threatening his right nostril with her fore talon. He chose to ignore that gesture.\n\nThe Princess whispered, \"You can smell \u2026 how I feel?\"\n\n*Grrrr!* \"Like reading a scroll, Princess \u2013 spot the sarcasm. Sometimes. Female emotions being so clear and uncomplicated \u2013\" they both chuckled on cue, but he steamed right on \"\u2013 so, feelings present themselves to me almost like colours and scents, alright? Grief is dark and dank, serenity is blue, fear can be bitter browns or purples \u2026 ah, I don't know. Look. Everyone knows their heart at some times, and other times, it confuses them worse than a new coat of multi-coloured scales \u2013 sorry, that was a terrible comparison. By some miracle, do you understand what I mean?\"\n\n\"Sort of.\"\n\n\"Sometimes the pond is clear and other times it is murky. Better?\"\n\nAria chuckled, \"So, how am I feeling now?\"\n\n\"Grieved, yet there are flashes of daisy-yellow hope playing in your psyche.\"\n\nHis every scale prickled at the weight of her glance. The cobalt Dragoness breathed, \"Dragon, do you have any idea how powerful and world-changing such a skill could be?\"\n\nFlaring his wings, he landed with care for his passenger's physical comfort. \"Powerful, dangerous, untrustworthy, get a Dragon lynched in the wrong context \u2013 aye, I have an idea, Ariamyrielle Seaspray. That is why I do not use this power, most of the time. Or admit to it. What creature grasps even the nuances of their own hearts? And sometimes \u2026 sometimes you discover things you never wanted to know, like how profoundly your own parents loathe you.\"\n\nTo his surprise, she stood tall and placed her right wingtip beneath his chin. In her rich, fluting soprano, she sang, <Strength and honour to your right paw, Dragon. May the purity of your hearts shine as white Ignis upon the lands.>\n\nWas this some formal blessing among Isles Dragons?\n\nShe said, \"If you have such an extraordinary nose, Dragon, then all may not yet be lost. We must assume Fazikil would have handled the serum recently, perhaps to hide it somewhere. Smell his hands. Get that scent into your nostrils. Then, go track it down.\"\n\n\"Dragon the bloodhound,\" the Princess teased lightly.\n\nTickling her beneath the chin with the lightest touch of his talon, he said, \"May I remind you, I know exactly how you feel about King Azerim?\"\n\n\"I think that was pretty flaming obvious,\" she grumbled, but her tiny fingers touched his talon appreciatively. \"I'm just afraid \u2013 afraid it'll be some girlish fantasy that'll evaporate like water beneath the suns upon meeting him again. It's been years. We've both changed beyond recognition. He's \u2026 he's a King now. He needs some pretty, dutiful little thing who wears actual dresses to bear heirs and smile adoringly at him during endless formal dinners.\"\n\nAria snickered, \"Azerim? You just described his worst nightmares, Princess. Come on. Let's put our Dragon to work, shall we?\"\n\nIt took until dawn, but Dragon's tired nostrils finally sniffed out an underground storage chamber located beneath the Warlord's neighbour's tent. Tarangis Lionbaiter's partners in vengeance had come up with the probable location. Two feet of sand removed and a door opened, and they found a trove of poisons and serums, amongst which they identified five vials of ice-blue zisrazix serum which came complete with dosage instructions. So did every other poison and antidote. Fazikil must have supplied most of the poison in the seventeen kingdoms.\n\nBusy man.\n\nTarangis twisted his lips as if he had swallowed a mouthful of army ants. \"I've seen some nasty business in my time, but nothing on this scale. This is valuable merchandise, but nothing you could pay me to move. Ever.\"\n\nOne of his associates said, \"Bar the serums. Those, I would move for free.\"\n\n\"Aye. Well said.\" Turning to Aria, he held out two vials. \"Free of charge. Few things have given me greater satisfaction in recent times than to be able to perform this service. Safe travels, Dragoness. Princess, if you ever need anything, Tarangis is here for you. Dragon, I look forward to swelling your hoard with the proceeds of our agreement.\"\n\nHe nodded, before on an impulse, he held out his paw for a Human-like handshake. \"Tarangis.\"\n\n\"Dragon.\"\n\nWhat did it mean for a person to earn a Dragon's regard \u2013 and the same in return? He wondered at his reaction as the trio slowly exited the large tent beneath which they had dug up the trove. Job done. Serum in paw. Time to travel on. Tarangis had given him two gold ingots as advance payment from his group. His first hoard. So proud!\n\nOh, alright. Minor celebration, especially since he had an expensive Princess' upkeep to consider. Women did not come cheap. Excellent learning point, Dragon.\n\nAria said, <He'll destroy the poisons, Dragon?>\n\n<I believe so.>\n\nThe Princess put in, <We need pouch make travel \u2026> \"Darn it, just can't get the Draconian out today. We need to get you a padded travel pouch for those vials, Aria.\"\n\n<Good thinking.>\n\n\"I know just the spot as well. I was eying up the ladies' handbags in the \u2013\"\n\n\"I am not a lady!\"\n\nThe Princess of T'nagru reached out to pat Aria's flank. Dragon held his breath. Reprisal threatened, judging by the ruby-red flare of her emotions.\n\nSwallowing audibly, Azania said, \"What makes you think that the only kind of lady is born to the station, Dragoness, and has but two legs? Besides, this is not frivolous adornment. You've an arduous journey ahead. The last thing you need is to worry about two crystal vials knocking together and cracking.\"\n\nThe cobalt beauty growled deep in her throat.\n\n\"I know. Incorrigible, unmanageable, a complete pain in the tiny rear end. Dragon has made my status clear. Technically, I am still his captive.\"\n\n\"Technically?\" he chuckled. *Mwaa-haa-HARR!!*\n\nAzania primped her hair. \"Thanks. Looks like you rearranged my curls perfectly. Come on, Aria. I'm taking a Dragoness shopping.\"\n\nDragon rolled his eye fires. \"Women.\"\n\n\"Only one of those around here, Dragon, or I'll dice you up for stew,\" Aria warned. She always seemed happier when contemplating a swift slaying.\n\nNo chance those gold bars would last the season, was there?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "They flew only half a day before Aria grew tired and Dragon had to go through the mortally dangerous process of trying to get a female to listen to common sense. Once he had pointed out how many of her wounds were seeping blood, she agreed to put down, having threatened him a suitable number of times \u2013 pain, death, dismemberment, having his forelegs braided together with his tail, ripping his wings off. Excellent. The Princess tried very hard not to wet herself laughing.\n\nThe following day, they flew up to his jasmine-scented romantic boudoir beside the river, and the day after, to his sadly deserted cave. No slayers to play with. No naked knights sporting in the river. Boring, predictable, yawn.\n\nThat was, until Aria set about teaching him the basic exercises related to her martial arts. Then his day and his draconic dignity departed with unseemly haste. Azania began to laugh at him and was promptly co-opted to learn the hand motions and techniques for breaking an assailant's grip, or for breaking their noses. She fancied that idea. Dragon struggled with the whole idea until Aria \u2013 visibly smoking at the jaws in frustration at his clumsiness \u2013 told him to shut his eyes and imagine painting the moves upon a canvas that surrounded him in a three-dimensional space.\n\nSuddenly, he was \u2013 well, to call his efforts elegant would be an abuse of the word \u2013 but effective, at least. Right sequence, no paws tangled in wings, no tail dangling behind to unbalance him.\n\nShe still acted sad, and very snippy.\n\nAria continued to exhibit unusual reserve during the day and a half it took them to fly up to Juggernaut's lair, where the Master greeted them with an enthusiastic and thunderous roar. He had four new male students who goggled at the Princess, giggled at the Dragon of ill repute, and put on arrogant airs whenever Aria glanced in their direction.\n\nAttractive? Not. At. ALL!\n\nHe could gladly have ripped their smug little heads off their necks.\n\nAfter settling into their assigned cavern, he flew Azania up to the rim of the sinkhole to where the Dragoness was imitating a large sapphire in the last rays of light sneaking between the westerly peaks. A partial eclipse of the suns gave rise to rich, red-golden rays that inundated both the snows and a whitish overcast above, setting both heavens and earth afire. He captured the best possible impression of the image in his mind for later painting. This would need a large canvas. Huge!\n\nAria cracked open an eye. \"I'll be leaving tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said.\n\nThe Princess said, \"We came to boot you out \u2013 ah! Thanks.\"\n\nDragon steadied the slight Human with his paw. \"Nice ice dancing.\"\n\n\"As if.\" Gingerly, she tottered over to Aria. \"Here's your pouch. I punched a couple of extra holes into the straps so that you can secure this to your scabbard. The inside is lined with goose down. I snugged the vials inside myself and treble-secured the stoppers. I copied the instructions and placed them in the pouch as well. I do hope that this is exactly what the King and Queen need to recover.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Princess. For my part, I have drawn you a map with distances and times, and a tidal almanac,\" she returned, passing over a scroll. \"State secrets.\"\n\n\"I shall guard it with my life \u2013 our lives.\"\n\nDragon said, \"Do the flying times take into account my speed?\"\n\n\"No, this is all at Aria speed and stamina,\" she said, with a wry smile that peeled her lips back from her fangs. \"I worked out a probable route for your best speed, which would cut half a day off the journey. It's still not the easiest. There's an eight-hour unbroken flying stretch that cannot be avoided. I've written down the tidal and moon phase considerations you'd need to plan for.\"\n\nHe nodded graciously, settling down beside her much smaller form. Being a male, he decided that he enjoyed overshadowing her, despite that she was by the extent of several kingdoms the more dangerous beast. He scented the saltiness upon her hide, and again, that sadness she thought she concealed so well.\n\nHow pensive her fires.\n\n\"Will you be back?\" he advanced delicately.\n\n\"It's complicated,\" she sighed. \"That's such a stupid phrase. Dragon \u2013 I wish I knew your name! Firstly, I must oversee the recovery of the King and Queen. Azerim entrusted me with their welfare. While I am in the Vaylarn Archipelago, I must keep them safe from the enemies, the other Lords or whoever it was who wished them ill. The scroll said that full recovery might take months. When I left, a full-blown civil war was brewing.\"\n\nThe Dragoness stared out over the caldera, the reds and oranges reflecting in her eyes. \"Are you scent-sensing how I feel right now, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I am. Your hearts are \u2026 complicated.\"\n\n\"Did you ever wish your life's flight could have taken a different course?\"\n\nHe sucked in a sharp breath.\n\n\"Paw in jaw!\" she groaned. \"Bite me, please.\"\n\nHe clacked his fangs against her shoulder, taking care not to actually nip her \u2013 but the action still made her jump. \"Dragon \u2013 you! Will you promise not to hate me forever for what I'm about to say?\"\n\nHis shoulders slumped; his hearts flattened as if ironed out to crisp all creases out of their fabric. Here it came. Whenever someone said that, bad news was sure to follow.\n\nHe spat, \"Speak. I'm big enough to hear whatever it is you have to say.\"\n\n\"I am promised to another Dragon.\"\n\nBig he may be, but he had never felt smaller. Hollowed out, trampled, despised and rejected. All this time \u2026\n\nAzania hung her head. A touch at her psyche showed how closely her feelings mirrored his.\n\nGutted.\n\n\"I am so, so sorry, Dragon. Before I set out on this mission, my family made certain I was promised to a suitable male \u2013 in our culture, you see, it is an arrangement made between Clans, by the Elders. I know that must sound strange and stupid and \u2026\" She spat fire away from them both, unable to control her emotions any longer. \"This is how Isles Dragons set up mate matches. To go against the wishes of the Elders is anathema. This male, he is not a bad Dragon. He is fiery of hearts, from good stock, and well trained in all the approved domestic duties.\"\n\nFreaking spineless flying drip, she meant! Oh \u2026 he had no words, not even curses. Had she been toying with him? Or was it all more complicated than that?\n\nRage, o Dragon. Bellow! He had flouted his Clan's laws, why could she not do the same? Yet life was never as simple as that, was it? If it came not from her heart, then the gesture would be meaningless, and all too soon, she would learn the law of bitter returns.\n\nHe could never do that to her.\n\n\"I had convinced myself that I would treat him well, terrible as that sounds. We Isles Dragons believe that love grows over time, that it most certainly does not strike like lightning, for then it would burn out just as quickly, lacking for durability and depth. I was angry with my Clan for moving to the match so quickly, but perhaps they, sensing my restless spirit, wanted to hear my promise spoken before I set out for foreign lands, or perished in the ocean.\"\n\nAverting her muzzle, she whispered, \"I gave my word.\"\n\nNever had a silence been more terrible.\n\nFrom everything she said and he sensed, he knew her heart had not been in it. Far from it.\n\nAt last, she said, \"Then I met you, Dragon. And I \u2026 I would never toy with you. That which you accused me of, so very early on \u2013 how very perceptive you were! I've struggled ever since to find the right moment to tell you, for I feared to hurt one already so deeply hurt, but now I have come to realise that by withholding these \u2026 complications, I have only hurt you the more. And that is the last thing I would ever have wanted.\"\n\nWords! Platitudes! Aye, he could not pretend a lack of devastation, could he?\n\nNor that he had not expected something to arise, a complication or situation, which only served to confirm that he was a benighted creature, never destined for happiness. Life had returned to being predictable in the most unpredictable, excruciating way.\n\nHope. How treacherous, how slippery a slope.\n\nIn a sepulchral voice, she added, \"Therefore, I now seal these feelings in my breast. I shall speak no more. Please don't follow me tomorrow, Dragon. I could not bear it.\"\n\nThen why, why, why give the Princess information about how the ocean could be crossed?\n\nWhy tease him with that knowledge?\n\n\"If ever you need a force of mighty warriors at your back, Dragon, I will await you upon the Archipelago together with the Isles Dragonesses.\"\n\n<Then, this?>\n\nThough it cost him such pain he feared his five hearts should cease to beat all at once, and that pain behind his breastbone quarry its way out through bone and marrow, flesh and hide, he held his silence. Scenarios flashed through his mind. He begged and pleaded. He blocked up a cavern and held her hostage. Allowing her to depart, he stood in lonely isolation upon a mountaintop and bellowed his grief until the very stars rained down from the heavens. He flew across the ocean to slay her intended mate. The waves closed over his head, burying his misery forever. He \u2026 spoke not a word.\n\nIt hurt even to breathe.\n\nAt length, she turned toward him and rasped, \"Please \u2026\"\n\nPlease what? With all the studied courtesy he could muster, he said, \"Ariamyrielle Seaspray, I was a Dragon called Blitz. That Dragon would wish you well. This Dragon, who I am today \u2026 this creature doesn't know who he is. He would wish \u2013\"\n\nWhat would he wish? For a different fate altogether?\n\nAfter the longest time, he managed to say, \"He would wish you to grasp deep in your Dragon soul who you are and what it is that you want. Knowing that, he also would wish for you an unreasonable portion of happiness, all the days you soar above the Isles \u2013 may they be many, and as wonderful as you are, Aria.\"\n\nRising, he left them on the bluff and winged away to be alone.\n\n[ Neither Lair nor There ]\n\nAfter six weeks of non-stop training punctuated by numerous bouts of self-pitying, depression-fuelled painting, Dragon and Princess made ready to sally forth into the world once more. An unusually long, wet springtime had at last yielded to a halcyon early summer. The increasing dryness promised that all those disappointed Dragon slayers would no longer need to feel disappointed, but could now go traipsing about the mountains without fear of being swept away by raging torrents. All they need concern themselves with now was raging Dragons.\n\nHe intended to make their dreams come true.\n\nWell, up to a point.\n\nJuggernaut's invitation to depart was characteristically blunt. \"Your new skills need time to soak in. Go away. Annoy a few knights, sack a few castles, fight battles \u2013 I promise if you use that brain as most brains are intended to be used, you'll be fine. On the way, take a trip to the seaside. Figure out who you are, youngling. Come back when you have a few answers.\"\n\nHe had a point, as usual.\n\nBetter than chewing off his own wings with all the fretting, and being mean to random rocks and trees in lieu of being mean to a Princess who deserved exactly the opposite. He knew exactly who the insufferable one had been over these past six weeks, and it was most certainly not the beautiful biped who had recently had her cast cut off. So gratifying to see her walking without a cane again, even if she still limped in a way that made him wince to watch her. The Princess now joined him each morning for all the stretching and strengthening exercises Juggernaut had prescribed for turning a lazy artistic Dragon into a more formidable beast.\n\nHe stretched massively, watching the deeper, more definite striations rippling in his massive shoulder and chest muscles. Aye, in body he had never felt better. The heart? The less mentioned on that score, the better.\n\nHe prodded the Princess in the ribs. \"Adventure, beauty?\"\n\n\"With a flop-pawed, crack-jawed, thumping great bag of moping misery-guts and woe? Oh please, count me in!\" she retorted, not entirely in jest. \"Can't wait.\"\n\nSpare not the adjectives!\n\nHe considered her kneecaps. Truly, this Princess needed to be gnawed down to size. Surely a swift deduction was not beyond the bounds of friendship? Just a teasing nibble?\n\nHe said, \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nBy his wings, even a male Dragon could use the word 'sorry' and mean it. Proudly. He checked. No, the suns had not fallen out of the sky. Not yet.\n\n\"Sorry for what?\"\n\nHer tiny brown hands secured the buckles of her knapsack. She checked the rolls of his paintings carefully packed into a waterproofed canvas bag, and gestured that he should turn his paw over for her to assume her usual flying station.\n\nHe nudged her hips with his nose. \"I must say, you look fabulous this morning.\"\n\n\"You're sorry I look fabulous?\" She squeaked a touch as he plucked her up by the waist, and settled her upon the thickness of his neck. \"What are you doing, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Seating you more comfortably.\"\n\n\"I, uh \u2026 won't this imbalance you?\"\n\n\"Doth my ear canals deceive me? I swear I heard a mosquito suggest that her scant eighty-seven pounds might imbalance a thumping great bag of moping misery-guts and woe like me? Pah! What you may need, Princess, is to use your cloak to pad that skinny rump, and to tie yourself on in case you nod off in the first five minutes of flight, as you usually do.\"\n\nShe touched his head gingerly, clearly unsure how one was meant to pet a galumphing gloom-monster like him. \"Dragon, are you alright?\"\n\nHer gentleness almost undid him.\n\n\"Aye, Princess. Just saying I'm sorry-sorry, hear me?\"\n\nShe hugged the base of his skull as best she could, and whispered into his ear, \"I hear you, Dragon.\"\n\nThat morning, after a curt parting salute from Juggernaut the Grinder, they set out to check how many hours Dragon could spend on the wing in one unbroken stretch. Seven was tough and eight brutal, but a good mark by which to measure as they had to avoid a small, fast-moving mountain squall. After spending an enjoyable early afternoon exploring a cave system which must once have been home to Dragons, they flew on, ever so slightly heavier in pocket. Three gold coins! His hoard was truly taking shape. Glorious riches.\n\nHe'd purchase a private kingdom for the Princess tomorrow.\n\nBy late afternoon, they were flying down-valley to where the new lair lay. His nostrils tingled. Ooh, smoke!\n\nTo both of their amazement, the party of hunters and trappers they tracked down was comprised of seven women.\n\n\"You don't see that every day in the mountains,\" the Princess whispered to him, as they peered down at the unusual group from atop a ridge.\n\n\"This independence thing must be catching,\" he agreed slyly. \"All these women getting ideas \u2013 oh, heavens forbid, actual ideas of their own! Rebelling against the social mores of the day \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, I will swat you.\"\n\n\"Something in the air this year, I swear. Women doing men's jobs? Carrying weapons and surviving in the wilds on their own without an actual man's help?\"\n\n\"Boorish beast. They've seen us.\"\n\n\"Lead on, perfect Princess.\"\n\nDragon picked a lovely, flowery meadow beside the riverside camp for his landing. Only the best for the royal soles. Plus, it was close enough that he could observe the women's reactions as they saw another female dismount from his neck. Worth it just for that. Generously allowing the Princess to lead the way, he swaggered over with a show of muscle and brawn \u2026 ah, forgetting that these were Human females and so, regrettably, none were half as blue as she whom he would have loved to impress.\n\nEasy, Dragon. Let her go.\n\nThe Princess walked into their camp with her hands open to show she meant no ill intent. No self-respecting Dragon was about to do that. Instead, he hunkered down behind her as she greeted the women.\n\n\"You've a tame Dragon?\" the smallest and youngest of the group squeaked.\n\nDragon bared a few fangs. \"Tame is a very bad word, young lady. Is your mother about? Does she know how you talk to Dragons?\"\n\nThe teenager trembled visibly.\n\n\"I'm her mother,\" said a taller, dark-haired woman, drawing her daughter into a protective embrace. \"I'm Sanna. This is Shariba, and she didn't mean \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't mind the Dragon, he's a big tease,\" the Princess advised dryly. \"I'm Azania, and I'm afraid he just goes by 'Dragon.' Long story. We'd love to hear your news.\"\n\n\"It's her! The lost Princess!\" Shariba squealed.\n\nHe was not sure if he despised or ought to be amused by squealing youngsters. Still, since that last knight of the extremely white buttocks had squealed ten times louder than her, he supposed he might dredge a hint of forgiveness out of the depths of his devious Dragon hearts.\n\nThe Princess sighed. \"Please, just call me Azania. I'm not as lost as all that. I've been taking a break from the royal life here in the mountains with this Dragon. I'm supposed to marry for silly amounts of money in order to keep my father happy and fill the kingdom's treasury, but my gallant Prince turned out to be a towering pile of steaming mush.\" She shook her head soberly. \"Men can be so unreliable.\"\n\nDragon growled politely behind her shoulder. All the women stopped nodding at once.\n\nHe grinned. Thirty fangs. \"I was agreeing with you.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Dragon, put a sock in it, would you? He enjoys being intimidating, ladies. Stokes up the male draconic ego, and all that.\"\n\n\"Shariba, would you like to fly with me?\" he offered.\n\n\"Mummy!\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 I was trying to be nice. Ma'am, I assure you, it is perfectly safe and has been tried many times before. Born with wings, see? I assure you, your daughter will see the world in a way she has never seen it before.\"\n\n\"That's precisely what I'm afraid of!\" the woman spluttered.\n\nAzania gave him the raised eyebrow, hand on hip, foot-tapping treatment. \"Dragon. Sit down.\"\n\n\"No,\" he growled, and went and sat in the stream.\n\nHe experimented with drinking a great deal of water, but that only gave him a sore stomach. The mysterious magic to split up water did not materialise. Bathing his eyes was soothing, but yielded no immediate results. He was not moping. Nor in a huff. Just taking some time to rest his weary wings to the background chirruping of eight women getting to know one another. There was cooking, weapons sharpening, clothing repair and enthusiastic hair design going on. Azania taught them some fancy hair-braiding designs they excelled at in T'nagru. Hmm. Hair art? Intriguing.\n\nTruly a peculiar creature, the female of the species \u2013 but in that effortless bonding, a Dragon realised he sensed something which had been missing in his life for so long. This was why he had absolutely no plans to ransom the Princess back to her father, or anyone else for that matter, anytime this side of the next century or so.\n\nLoneliness could be so cruel.\n\nBefore the suns set, he did take Shariba for a gentle flight. No somersaults to wake her up. Just a gentle cruise.\n\nThe girl cried \u2013 for joy, she said, and returned squawking that he was the most awesome creature on four paws. He suggested that certain Princesses take notes regarding his overwhelming awesomeness.\n\nWas that a flash of jealousy, Azania?\n\nLater, as the fires of a glorious summer sunset burned down to their embers, he monopolised two thirds of the fire and the eight women the other third. He lazed in the heat. They chattered like a flock of parakeets. Observing them, he wondered if his charge might not be lonely as well, or, had she been? Was it easy or difficult for a royal to make friends? What about a woman regarded as the most beautiful in the kingdoms? Even these women were afraid to touch her.\n\nAzania took out his paintings to show them off. To his gratified embarrassment, the women all agreed that he was a gifted painter.\n\nThe oldest woman was called Myriba, a white-haired matron missing the smallest finger on her left hand. She said, \"I saw one just like this for sale in Vanrace three weeks ago \u2013 I'd gone up to the capital to try to get seed for my farm. Terribly expensive. Guess who bought it, though? None other than Prince Floric!\"\n\n\"He's so handsome,\" sighed another woman.\n\n\"Not if you're downwind, he isn't,\" said a third, wrinkling her nose. They all laughed.\n\nThe Princess winked at Dragon. So, they had gained from Vanrace's treasury after all? If only the King knew that he was spending on art from the Dragon who had ransacked his castle! Azania informed them that Dragon had stolen her from Prince Floric. They all agreed she had dodged the cudgel of fate on that front. Feminine solidarity. There it was again. Had it started with her wearing tough, travel-ready clothing like them, but very quickly become something deeper?\n\nShariba said, \"Can I touch your hair, Princess? It's amazing!\"\n\nAzania said, \"Of course, as long as I can touch yours?\" The girl chuckled. \"Believe it or not, I was always jealous of girls with long, silky blonde hair. I wanted mine to blow in the wind. But when you've straightened all the life out of your hair \u2026 it doesn't blow anywhere. It hangs like limp washing.\"\n\n\"Yours doesn't do anything of the sort,\" the teenager said shyly, \"and I'll bet it flies when you're aloft with the Dragon.\"\n\n\"Do you want to touch my scales, pretty girl?\" he purred.\n\n\"Save that nonsense for the Dragonesses,\" the Princess laughed, but then apologised with her eyes. She said, \"Isn't it so strange \u2013 well, Human, I mean, how we always want what someone else has? I wanted long, light hair. You probably want to be a Princess. Dragon wanted to be any colour but brown. I've often wished for more contentment in life, but that has yet to align with my stars.\"\n\n\"Contentment is like rest,\" Myriba said. She rubbed her eyes just like he did. \"Some contentment is good, but then discontent may be what is needed to drive us on \u2013 to new experiences, new learning \u2026 I guess I'd say, discontent is why we're here in the mountains. Ladies?\"\n\nThey spoke for a long time. Struggle. Taxation. Oppression. Absent or deceased husbands, failing farms, bandits, hard times and no sympathy from the ruler of Vanrace. Much discontent about \u2013 if that was even the right word.\n\nMaybe something more along the lines of pursuing one's fate with true courage, would suit?\n\nMeantime, the noble Dragonkind wandered about the realms pillaging for a spot of fun and proudly brooding upon gleaming hoards that could have kept these families for a thousand years. This put his distaste of raiding the poor into perspective, didn't it? How lofty and noble he had thought himself, meantime knowing nothing of the real challenges facing those he secretly despised in his hearts. He saw the gleam of desperation in their pinched faces, in the gestures of work-hardened hands, in the longing their voices betrayed. No need for scent trace magic to sniff this out.\n\nWhen prompted, the women told them that there were at least two parties of Dragon slayers nearby that they knew of. One group was camped right outside his lair, awaiting the Dragon's return. The other, much larger group, featured the noble Sir Rumanic, but they had chosen the westerly trail to his old lair. Curious. Misinformation, or deliberate ploy?\n\nHis ire burned as the women described how they had been treated by Sir Rumanic and his men-at-arms. Nothing noble about that knight. Slug-ugly wrapped in a tin can.\n\nHe only realised he had spoken his thoughts aloud when the women broke into nervous laughter.\n\nDragon tried a quirky grin. Probably scared the poor women witless \u2013 oddly, this evening that notion did not strike him with the usual belly shivering pleasure. \"To tell the truth, my nostrils still burn at the memory of Prince Floric. Has the Princess told you that story in all its malodorous detail?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Daybreak following, he and Azania peered down over the cliffs behind his new lair, taking in the arrangements. No less than five Dragon bows had been strung and primed in the narrow valley, pointing at or across the entrance. These Dragon slayers were smart. The heavy weaponry had not only been well hidden in the foliage, it was also located in such a way that the aim could be quickly adjusted. He smelled fresh soil. He narrowed his eyes, and willed his rumbling belly to be still.\n\n\"See a pit anywhere?\"\n\n\"Spike pit?\" she asked. \"Can't \u2026 the only obvious place would be lower down, around there.\"\n\nShe pointed to where a copse of trees standing at the riverbank forced one to wind around them, between the cliff and the trees. It looked too rocky for such an endeavour, but these fellows would have enjoyed plenty of time to exercise their digging muscles while the lair lay empty. He would not like to wander inside their cave until he was clearer about what other traps they might have placed.\n\nDid this mean Sir Rumanic had wandered off to stake out the other lair? He itched morosely at his left wingpit. Something was wrong with this picture. Could the two groups be working together? Why? Deal with this crew first. Hunkering down beside the Princess, they talked strategy. After all, Juggernaut had spent six weeks shouting at him that his brain was his biggest weapon. He heard the instructor's bellowing in his nightmares now, which was absolutely the point.\n\nThen, he went to go chop down a tree with his talons. Most satisfying.\n\nHe dropped the Princess off lower down in the valley and gave her ten minutes to get into position. With the aid of a helpful wind, they knew that the slayers had posted their rearguard about a hundred paces shy of the lair. She had strict orders to step nowhere but the stream. They definitely did not want her finding a Dragon pit.\n\nShortly, he heard a faint cry, \"Dragon, watch out! Slayers at the lair!\"\n\nSeven men twitched beside their chosen weapons. Aha! They had missed one \u2013 a net trap strung high in the trees. Hefting the trunk, Dragon threw it down upon the nearest trio of weapons. The men scattered with pathetic yells. It was a mystery to him how people did not like to be crushed by a falling tree. One of the Dragon bows fell and triggered itself. A seven-foot quarrel feathered in a tree branch right beneath one of the other lurking men. His reflex triggered the weapon; another quarrel hurtled into the lair's dark entrance.\n\nPlucking up two boulders, Dragon threw them as best he could at the other bow emplacements but missed with both throws. *Blergh!* Useless. Another skill to master. Ducking back behind the ridge, he loped toward the Princess' position, before changing direction abruptly to pour down the mountainside. Two swordsmen were almost upon her. Spying him coming, she whipped out of hiding with a wild yell. The talon blade sliced deeply into the foremost man's thigh. Mid-swing, the second man found himself plucked into the air by a vengeful Dragon's paw. He threw the hapless fellow high over the stream toward his fellows.\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\nSpinning upon his heel, he curved his body over the Princess. *Whirr!* A bolt skimmed off his scales. A fraction more penetration, and that would have been his guts. Azania threw her sword overhand, causing the hidden crossbowman to duck. He slipped and fell. Dragon helpfully caught him before he struck the ground.\n\n\"So, what's inside the lair?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not telling you a thing,\" spat the scarred, dark-haired man.\n\nDragon pinned him against the oak trunk with one paw, and spread the talons of the other. \"Let's just see about making you talk \u2013 Princess!\"\n\nIn a flash, he scragged her neck awkwardly as she plummeted into what had been solid ground just a moment before. A pox on their well-hidden trap! So sharp were his talons, her shirt began to rip as she dangled from his paw. He lurched forward to her aid, and discovered the stupidity of throwing himself headfirst into a deadly pit. Paws out! Somehow, he caught a stake with his forepaw before his weight completely slid inside. Just, just saved his blushes. Placing the Princess beside a wonderfully sharpened example of an implement meant to aerate a Dragon's windpipe, he used his other paw to control his precariously balanced weight. Actually \u2013 pluck, pluck, pluck, like he was shredding a duck!\n\n*Whirr!* A quarrel skittered off his upturned behind.\n\nAzania's eyes widened as he pretended to slide down into the pit with a loud but extremely fake groan. She had to duck into a corner as he folded himself up neatly, shovelling several other spikes out of the way.\n\nGlittering of eye, he hissed, \"They could at least bother to construct a pit properly. How insulting.\"\n\n\"Don't give them time to reload,\" she hissed right back, wiping her brow in clear relief. \"Let's go, Dragon. I counted. All of their weapons discharged, save the net.\"\n\n\"Ooh, what a smart little Princess you are,\" he cooed.\n\nShe flushed. \"Dragon!\"\n\nClutching her about the waist, he coiled his thighs and launched skyward.\n\nImmediately, the Princess shouted, \"Beside the cliff!\"\n\n\"Got it. You were not supposed to \u2013\"\n\nFlashing toward the Dragon bow concealed behind a towering oak there, he readied his tail and whipped it forward. Man and weapon rattled together like peas in a pod in the narrow space. The man came off worse.\n\n\"\u2013 leave the river!\" he finished furiously. Hurling himself toward the copse of trees where the other Dragon bow operators still lurked, he realised belatedly that delicate Princesses did not crush small forests quite as well as fifty foot Dragons. He curled up, protecting her against his stomach as he attacked the next bowman with his backside. Squish.\n\nAhem.\n\nThe net triggered and soared uselessly toward the lair. Pleased by that result, he extracted himself from his inadvertent seat and charged around the trees with nothing like the poise he had just spent six weeks perfecting, spraying pebbles and water in a great wave as he fought and failed to regain his balance on the soft footing. In that time, the Princess sidestepped a hacking sword blow and left her dagger in a woman's chest.\n\nAt least one of them knew what she was doing.\n\nThe last thug, the one he had abandoned in order to save the Princess, fled downriver as fast as his bandy legs could carry him.\n\nBeast and woman shared a wicked glance.\n\nWith a brilliant smile, Azania stuck out her arm, and cried, \"Dragon? Fetch!\"\n\n[ Territorial Aggression ]\n\nAfter filling in the pit with the bodies and covering them over properly with a thick layer of soil and river stones, Dragon spoke a blessing of eternal rest over the Dragon slayers. He and the Princess retreated to their lair to count the spoils. One small sack of mostly low value coins, weapons, armour, four good Dragon bows, a net, and a fair amount of equipment for which they had no need. They remembered to backtrack the slayers' mounts to where they had been tethered in a small side gully. He sniffed about the place appreciatively. Fourteen varieties of climbing rose, including a spectacular plant with burnt-orange clusters of flowers with brilliant yellow hearts and a rich, sweet scent.\n\nMeantime, Azania gave the equines instructions on how to find the women farther up-valley and set them on their way. Travelling quickly, they should not have too many issues during the daytime. The women would appreciate the four-hoofed bounty.\n\nDragon stowed his latest canvases and the valuable plunder up above. Other random items, they stacked at the back of the cavern. If someone wanted them, so much the better.\n\nThen, following Juggernaut's explicit instructions, they reviewed the course of the battle as best they could to understand all their mistakes, a list of depressing abundance. Good thing they had no major wounds to show for their incompetence, the one with the fangs groused.\n\nAzania patted her talon blade. \"Better planning and execution the next time. Did you find me that scroll, Dragon? We need to continue to record your exploits.\"\n\n\"Our exploits.\"\n\nApparently, this sort of talk was popular with the ladies. As an additional side bonus, it happened to be entirely true. Naturally, his treacherous thoughts immediately served up an image of butterfly wing patterns and flashing cobalt scales. Taking the scroll with them, they tracked back through the battle, discussing what they would have done differently, and how.\n\n\"Like, sitting on a man's head,\" Dragon growled, eyeing a patch of crimson.\n\n\"Elegant, no. I'd argue that effectiveness rules in this case, however,\" she noted, chewing the end of her quill. \"With a powerful thrust of his hindquarters, Dragon crushed his enemy?\"\n\n\"Rousing prose! Then, there was the vain but spectacular attempt to run fast on soft sand.\"\n\n\"Dragon danced lightly across the uncertain footing?\"\n\n*Murr-hrrr-harrggh!* \"If only.\"\n\n\"Next time, more lightly on the paws and counterbalance with the tail?\"\n\n\"That might help.\"\n\nHe practised the appropriate move twenty times, while she limbered up with her blade and worked through a series of training exercises. Jolly misbehaving tail. One day, he would learn to make it act as if it was attached to the rest of his body. Azania still struggled with a lack of strength in her newly healed leg. It would come, he assured her.\n\nIn the afternoon, they bathed under the waterfall and rested awhile in the congenial heat before he began to grow restless. No particular idea why. Something niggled at the back of his mind like an invisible talon failing to satisfactorily scratch an itch. Nothing to do with Ariamyrielle Seaspray. He tried to distract his conscious mind while watching the Princess repair her favourite top, slit by a lifesaving talon. Fetching a cloth, he wet it in the stream and carefully cleaned her left shoulder.\n\n\"Cut?\" she asked.\n\n\"Narrow but deep, I'm afraid. I can't sew something like that.\"\n\n\"Then we'll stick it with cloth soaked in sarubiz sap \u2013 there's a patch of bushes half a mile downriver, as I recall. Fancy an evening stroll, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Indeed I do, Princess. How very congenial and civilised we are.\"\n\nWere her emotions reflecting Human love? Zesty blues mingled with fiery reds. Perhaps she thought upon a King, while he tried very hard not to remember the beauty of cobalt, and failed miserably. He did like to beat himself over the head with past blunders and regrets, and he would not be surprised if she was doing the same.\n\nHalfway back, his brain finally turned up what he had been worrying over. \"Aha! By my wings, there's a reference to Dragon powers back in my roost!\" he burst out.\n\n\"Oh. Where did that come from?\"\n\n\"My brain.\"\n\n\"Your alleged brain?\"\n\nHe nudged her shoulder. \"Are you feeling as restless as I am, Princess?\"\n\n\"I am.\" She sounded surprised. \"Plus, rebellious, fractious, adventurous, dangerous, and any other 'ous' you care to mention.\"\n\n\"Ah, adjectives, the bane of every good writer.\"\n\n\"Adjectives are the spice of prose, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Ruinous.\"\n\n\"Would you care to take over as scribe? Perhaps your turn earlier was a masterpiece of balletic grace?\"\n\n\"Not so much,\" he chortled.\n\nShe smelled testy, vexed and amused all at once \u2013 all colours of the hot end of the spectrum. Desert Princess. Full of hot air.\n\nThe Princess paused to scent the breeze like a Dragoness. \"If we're heading west, what say you \u2013\"\n\n\"We don't stop until we reach the ocean?\"\n\n\"My, what a clever little Dragon you are,\" she teased, and attempted to sprint away into the lair before he could swat her. A sort of hobbling, hopping run ensued. \"Hurry up and pack!\"\n\n\"That's what I employ you for, lackey.\"\n\nHe ambled after, debating how one cooked snarky Princesses upon a spit and what spices would best enhance her flavour. *Hurgh-harr-harr.*\n\nShe called over her shoulder, \"Say, how do you tell how much a Dragon weighs?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026\"\n\n\"Put them on scales!\"\n\nWorth a chortle? Just about.\n\nHe said, \"Tell me, what did the Princess get for her birthday?\"\n\n\"Oh, I know that one. Lots of peasants!\"\n\nHer Royal Mischief of the southern wastelands packed two Dragon bows onto his back, along with a quiver of arrows appropriated from those who no longer cared about thievery, nor anything else in the present life for that matter. Appropriation was royal. Theft, not so much. The pert Princess told him she did not care a jot for semantics. She was developing an idea.\n\nA woman with ideas \u2013 shiver his wings! Prince Floric should have started running several months ago, and kept right on going. Fool.\n\nAn hour after midnight, the pair arrived at Dragon's old lair. No sign of Sir Rumanic and his merry band of fifty-plus men-at-arms \u2013 the kingdom's finest thugs, of course. That was odd. Less odd was that despite the absence of any Dragons resembling his wonderful family in the vicinity, someone with four paws had definitely been through his place. Hoard plundering. By his sire's egg, his brothers needed a thrashing. They had left his vegetable garden in a dreadful state. No need for this kind of behaviour. The affront!\n\nDragon found the reference he sought after half an hour's perusing his library. It shed no more light on the matter than before. Sea Dragons were said to breathe fire underwater. No handy, concise explanation of mechanism or process. He took the Dragon-sized tome over to show the Princess. She was almost nodding off on the round couch in the corner.\n\n\"Did you see this, Princess?\"\n\n\"Sleep \u2026\"\n\nWith a fussy paw, he tucked her blanket beneath her chin. \"It says that the yearly migration of Sea Dragons kept the Sea Serpents out of the seas between the Vaylarn Archipelago and the mainland.\"\n\n\"Zzzz.\"\n\n\"Are you being the royal snore-dom?\"\n\n\"And you, a royal bore-Dragon.\"\n\n\"Your jokes really do drag-on,\" he snorted. She did look weary, to his considerable annoyance. Curling up beside her, he adjusted the lamp to a much dimmer setting. \"Time for your beauty sleep, Princess.\"\n\n\"You need it so much more than me, minion.\"\n\n\"What were you thinking regarding the Dragon bows? Do tell.\"\n\n\"Ranged weaponry \u2026 it would change \u2013\" she yawned hugely \"\u2013 every Dragon battle. Fire \u2026 limited \u2026\" Well, there she went, halfway through a garbled thought.\n\nUsing ranged weaponry was not a Dragon skill. It was barely regarded as honourable; always used against Dragons by the filthy peons, not the other way round. A Dragon's job was to stand and take the hit, which was brave, or to perform a wily dodge, which was cunning. Then he should charge in to finish the job, fire raging and claws flashing. Unfortunately, according to his research and Juggernaut's far blunter assessment, the glorious frontal charge ended up with a great many Dragons being stabbed fatally in the chest or flanks, especially when teams of men-at-arms or knights worked together against them.\n\nDeath being rather less than glorious.\n\nWas this what the Princess meant? She meant for a Dragon to become a flying archer using a bow?\n\nThe Dragon bow was a simple weapon. A flexible but powerful eight-foot wooden bow was affixed to a metal pole at the centre, where the hand usually gripped a weapon, in order to support a winch mechanism. No Human was strong enough to draw one unaided \u2013 which was their chief downfall. Slow to load. Still, they packed an enormous punch. Used properly, such a bow could spear a quarrel right through a Dragon's torso. Having air holes pierced through one's body was rarely any kind of boon to continued health. Picking up one of the weapons and plucking a quarrel from the quiver, he wandered upstairs to give it a test. Careful draw to its limit. Position the quarrel in the slot. Aim at a tree, release!\n\n*Whirrr!* He missed by four feet, but the quarrel shot away over the edge of his valley and into the night. Serious power. Decent weapon, if he could learn to use it.\n\nOnly, what did the Princess expect him to be firing at? Other Dragons? Nothing else was big enough.\n\nSleep time.\n\nNo, before resting, he must read the rest of that reference. Wandering downstairs, he learned about the greatest migration in the world. No-one knew quite where Sea Dragons went. Another continent? Right around the world? What wonders they must see on the way!\n\nSea Dragon colouration was generally pale shades upon the cooler end of the spectrum, eggshell blues, peony mauves or pinks, delicate greens and of course, pure white. Nothing at all like a muddy brown. Strike one for the 'thou might have a mysterious, unsuspected heritage' crowd \u2013 but could he ignore the webbing, body size and shape, and unusual magical powers? Sigh.\n\nAll of the scholarly lore pointed to an annual migration which was carried out with incredible exactitude. One could set the times and seasons by the arrival of Sea Dragons on the shores of the continent of Solixambria, an ancient term with scant modern usage \u2013 until it stopped, as best any scholar or scientist knew, overnight. Not long after he cracked the eggshell, mind.\n\nThat was \u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "\"Dragon! Dragon! Wake up!\" A small boot introduced itself to his snout with considerable force. \"Wake up. We've been so stupid \u2013 Dragon! Come on!\"\n\nHe leaped up with a thunderous roar, paws ready to rend, strike, disembowel.\n\nNothing. *Blergh!* \"Princess \u2013\"\n\n\"They were headed west, Dragon. Sir whatshisname and his men. West!\"\n\n\"West \u2026 west \u2026\"\n\n<GNARRR-FREAKING-DEATH!!>\n\nShe clapped her hands over her ears. \"Dragon! Please \u2013 that's right. Your Great-Aunt Ignita \u2013 we have to get over there, now!\"\n\nHe had never departed a lair so fast in his life. Leaving the open book where it had served as a pillow for his chin, he and Azania grabbed everything they needed. It was not much. They had been too tired to unpack the previous evening, intending to leave soon anyways. Not quite this soon.\n\nShe had to shout at him to pause for half a minute so that she could string the Dragon bows over his back again, using a simple rope harness. Her deft hands tied on the quiver and her small pack of personal effects. They took all of their gold coin \u2013 nine coins, commonly called 'heavy clinkers.' Smaller brass coins, a hundredth of the value of a gold coin, were 'clunkers.' That should cover the cost of a consultation with an optician they intended to find in the Kingdom of Alaxarmis, on the ocean shore. All this ran through his mind in the time it took her to secure their belongings. Then, the Princess hopped from his upraised paw onto his neck.\n\n\"Fly, Dragon!\"\n\nHe flew as never before, powering into the dawn as the first rays of sunshine tickled the peaks of the easterly mountain ranges. First, he swept down to the main trail that lay below his lair, finding exactly as he had feared, the unmistakable signs of many men upon horseback passing by. They had not even paused below his lair, despite that they must know its general location.\n\nFools! How had they not considered that Sir Rumanic might prefer the odds against a much older, weaker Dragoness? He was not renowned for having an actual spine. More like a blob of jelly wobbling about inside his suit of plate armour.\n\nA few miles on, as they blurred over the lower coniferous forests toward her eerie swamp lair, the Princess leaned forward to speak into his ear canals. \"Dragon, I know how you care for honour \u2013\"\n\n\"I don't care a rotten fig for honour! That's my Ignita!\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\n\"No, you don't. We brought this down on her. I did! It's all my fault, don't you see? This stupid business of building a reputation, of stealing a Princess \u2013\"\n\n\"Who hung about and refused to go back to Daddy like a good girl?\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means the fault lies with both of us. These mountains are crawling with slayers and knights and every other specimen of bipedal idiocy \u2013\"\n\n<Alright!!> \"Sorry. I get it. What's the plan?\"\n\n\"Identify Sir Rumanic and hit him with one of these Dragon bow bolts. Try to drop me near your great-aunt, wherever they have her, and I'll do what I can to help. You go smack the rest of the men-at-arms. Hopefully, the shock effect will be enough.\"\n\n\"I tried the bow. Missed a tree at forty feet by about four.\"\n\nShe clucked her tongue grimly. \"Then, I'll just limber up the other one and aim it over your head or something.\"\n\n\"Off my back. Top-centre of my shoulders is my most stable point when flying.\"\n\n\"Good. Let me tie up this blasted hair.\"\n\n\"By my wings, you're serious.\"\n\n\"Oh, this Princess is infuriated, Dragon. You're going to see me fight today.\"\n\nA wispy early mist hung about the roots of the mountains, turning trees into dark, looming silhouettes. The peaks swam in an ocean of grey. Dragon increased his altitude. No accidents needed here. Twenty-five miles was not a long flight, even taken at the speed of panic, with a Dragon's weak eyes constantly scanning the terrain. He could cut a corner or three. Forty minutes? Half an hour, even? He was being ridiculous. The quickest way was right over the mountains. First labour for altitude, then rest during the fast swoop down into her swamp. Changing direction, he beat his wings, revelling in the power of Dragon flight as he soared into the cool morning skies. Meantime, he instructed the Princess in the landmarks to look out for. She must be his eyes.\n\nHalf an hour's flying later, she pointed out over his right nostril, \"There's the hooked peak. I see a few silhouettes under the mist, but it's hard to tell from this height.\"\n\n\"Load me a weapon. You, too. Please be careful back there.\"\n\n\"You'd only catch me,\" she said lightly, depositing a kiss upon the back of his head. He quelled a shudder. Moisture, like mist. Nothing to it. Think rather upon what she meant by the gesture.\n\nKeeping his flight as steady as he could, he let the Princess scramble back up his neck and onto his shoulders. He felt the rope twitch. Good. Tying herself on was a smart idea. Shortly, she bade him reach up for a fully tensioned bow, and a quarrel. He readied them in his paws, while changing the angle of attack to mute his wings. Slowing. For this strategy to work, the first shot would be crucial.\n\nHis ear canals tingled.\n\n\"I hear a clash of metal,\" he whispered. \"See anything?\"\n\nShe swore indelicately. \"Can't get this blasted \u2013 fixed! There. Braced against your spine spike, Dragon. This could work quite well \u2013 fly a touch more to your left wing. Good. There's the baobab, right?\"\n\n\"I see it.\"\n\nThe characteristic stubby trunk of the baobab loomed in the mist, so much thicker here. Thickets of blossoms held aloft by skeletal arms, the branches. A Dragon's aggrieved roaring shook them, sounding strangely muted to his ear. Approaching from the north, there was no visual sign of battle, but they both heard plenty now \u2013 the rough cries of many men-at-arms, the thrashing and bellowing of a Dragon, shrill whinnies of horses. The acrid scent of char hung damp and thick in the air. She must have used her breath weapon; perhaps not for long. Elderly Dragoness. How much fire had she left?\n\nEnough, for he spied the orange flare of Dragon flame dead ahead.\n\nA lumpen form lay in the mud seventy Dragon paces ahead, surrounded by men goading her with lances and javelins. Amongst them was a magnificent silver figure seated upon a large white destrier. Sword in hand, he directed the struggle to subdue the net-entangled Dragoness. Several men forced her muzzle into some sort of clamping device so that the valiant knight could make the fatal blow undisturbed by a minor matter such as Dragon fire, or a Dragoness still able to fight. Men-at-arms sweated over staking cables over her back. Her thrashing tail smashed three of them into a heap. Another fell with a shrill scream, his leg severed at the knee by a cunning talon. Ignita was not about to give them any pleasure, was she? Her muted thundering shook the swamp.\n\n\"Take her down!\" Sir Rumanic screamed.\n\n\"Let's take him down, Princess!\" Dragon ordered, raising his bow.\n\nHer bowstring creaked. Slight movement tickled his back as she adjusted her posture. \"Ready.\"\n\nTwo quarrels leaped forth. *Whurr! Whurr!*\n\nAs if by magic, an invisible paw plucked the knight off his mount and hurled him away into the mud. Two men of the supporting group, behind the knight's left shoulder, staggered and fell, pinned together as a Human kebab. Battle rage swelled his Dragon hearts. Malignant destruction!\n\n<I \u2013 AM \u2013 DRAGON!!>\n\nThe swamps shook at the outpouring of his wrath. Deep and powerful, the thunder of an enraged male Dragon spooked horses and paralysed veteran men-at-arms in their quaking boots. In that frozen second, he perceived Ignita's eyes widen in shock. Silver blood trickled from many wounds. She had fought hard.\n\nTime to honour his kin.\n\nSwooping right over his great-aunt's back, Dragon smashed left and right at the massed Human heads with his outspread wings, shovelling many into the knee-deep water. At the same time, a pair of boots sprang off his shoulder. With a scream, the Princess threw her Dragon bow into the faces of several men-at-arms, and kicked out on the fly. Her boot snapped a head back so sharply, he distinctly heard the crack of bone. She rode her victim deftly as he toppled backward, the talon blade springing into her hand as if born there. Approving growl for those sweet moves!\n\nTurning so sharply that his left wingtip sprayed dank water across the swamp, Dragon changed direction and brought himself to a landing. Blinking to clear his hazy vision, he oriented upon the fight. The silvery reinforced net. His great-aunt, struggling to rise. The Princess stabbing downward to finish another enemy, before whispering aside to dodge a sweeping sword stroke.\n\nHis chest swelled. *BRROOAARRGGHH!!*\n\nThe visibly shaking men-at-arms tried to form a shield wall against the threat of Dragon fire. His bellow rumbled over them, visibly disturbing the swamp's surface and sending their cavalry into a neighing panic. About half of the force had mounts, despite the swampy ground \u2013 he could not fathom the tactic. Nor had he time. Four men were trying to find Ignita's lungs with a lance. The Princess faced three assailants at once.\n\nDigging his talons deep, he charged.\n\nGrey swamp water fountained around him as he thundered down upon the stupefied knots of men-at-arms. The Princess darted around behind Ignita, fleeing the trajectory of his charge. She knew what was coming. The shields locked. Lances jutted out of the small, brave shield wall. Exemplary technique. Only, they had probably never met a Dragon called Juggernaut.\n\nLeaping into the air with a twisting motion, Dragon tucked his wings out of the way. He spun around the axis of the length of his body like a great, fifty-three foot roller and smashed down upon the hapless men with terrible force. Metal crunched and squealed as the brutal impact hammered them beneath a shattered mess of their own shields, armour and broken lances. He had practised this manoeuvre five hundred times and more. The point of the rotation was to guard against being spitted upon the lances, ensuring that those which dug in splintered under the torque generated by his tonnage. He was a big bruiser and moving fast.\n\nWhat he had not expected was to land with such a splatter in the swamp, that a wall of water surged up and blinded both him and every man-at-arms beyond that first group.\n\nScrape the mud off! A dark, lithe shadow darted forward to spit a man who had been aiming a sword at his left eye.\n\n\"Princess!\" he roared. \"Help Ignita!\"\n\nHe galumphed and she sloughed through the thick mud. Paws to the stakes, he worked at freeing the cables tying her down. The Princess knelt beside Ignita's head, careless of the filth up to her waist, her deft hands loosening the thick buckles of the harness that muzzled her jaw.\n\nGreat-Aunt Ignita waved a paw behind the Princess' back, warding off a couple of intrepid attackers. Dragon leaned over her torso and thwacked them on their way. \"Be off with you!\"\n\nFlies. Fleas!\n\nSpringing to her feet with a cry, the Princess engaged two men trying to ambush Ignita from the front. They shouted and swung at her, clearly discomfited by facing such a diminutive opponent. One blade whizzed a foot over her head. The other, she deflected with a deft flick of her wrist. Swiftly drawing a dagger from her left boot, she slammed it into the man's thigh, finding the joint of his armour. He fell back shrieking like a demented pig. Raising his fist, Dragon pounded the other man into the mud like a stake.\n\n\"Ooh, mighty Dragon,\" the Princess grinned.\n\n\"Mighty Princess,\" said he, flipping her a salute before stiffening. A scent sense? A reverberation in the air neared, approaching from the south. \"Dragons incoming!\"\n\nGripping the net in his paws, he began to work Ignita's body free.\n\n<DEVASTATOR!!>\n\nThree male Dragons swept in, igniting the damp air with massive, rolling blasts of orange fire that cleared the area around Ignita's prone body. Swamp water and scum boiled with a horrible stench. The Princess was back at the Dragoness' head, sawing at the harness with her blade as the buckles or wet leather appeared to have become stuck. Through the crack in her jaw, he heard Ignita asking why they had dared to help.\n\n\"You're family,\" Azania said.\n\nThe Dragoness made a mewling sound he had never heard before.\n\nThumping through the mud, Blaze the Devastator glared about at the scene, flame licking from his nostrils. After stabbing a man who twitched in the mud near his paws, he growled, <Brand. Brawl. Clear out the enemy.> As his brothers turned toward their larger, older brother, he snarled, <The real enemy! This swamp reeks of Human cowardice!>\n\nDragon tugged at the net, freeing hooks with care. Soon, his great-aunt was more than half free.\n\nBlaze said, <Dragon, we are indebted for your aid.>\n\nMajestic. Sad. Still smoking from the aftereffects of his battle rage.\n\nHe replied, <I regret the territorial aggression, noble Devastator. We tracked these fools from the east, thinking that Sir Rumanic sought another, stronger target. Instead, he chose Ignita the Devastator. We chose the path of honour. The knight paid with his life.>\n\nBoth of their eyes turned aside to regard the silver-clad knight. He lay slightly propped up in the mud about five Dragon paces away, with six feet of wood protruding from his lower chest. Not dead yet, Dragon realised from the agonised gasping of his throat, but the final darkness would not tarry long before claiming him. Blaze would not shorten his misery, on account of his Aunt's honour. This suffering was seen as just.\n\nIgnita bent to whisper in the Princess' ear.\n\nThick-voiced with emotion, Blaze said, <The flame of honour burns bright in your hearts, as always, Dragon.>\n\n<Pick up your weapons, and leave Devastator territory at once.>\n\n<As you command, noble Dragon.>\n\nHe added with a courteous dip of his muzzle, <Princess, once again, your deeds honour my kin.>\n\nShe bowed her head. <The honour \u2026 mine is, great Blaze.>\n\nFirst weapon? The Princess. Then the pair of Dragon bows. After that, Dragon flew out of the swamp, ignoring the belligerent growls of his foolish brothers.\n\nHis hearts smarted.\n\n[ Lumis Ocean ]\n\nSouth of devastator territory, dragon and Princess put down beside a small stream to wash up and check their injuries. Azania had a wrenched elbow from a kick; Dragon had collected a lance point between the ribs that needed cutting out. His other wounds were superficial.\n\nMacho swagger. Successful battle!\n\nChuckling to himself, he lay down in the small stream to create an impromptu dam for the Princess. \"Your bath shall shortly be ready, Highness.\"\n\n\"Blasted freezing mountain water,\" she said, through chattering teeth. Fascinating. Dragons did not have such a reaction. Imagine clacking fangs and bobbles of flesh appearing beneath one's scales? One could only shudder at the thought.\n\n\"I do wish I could warm it for you,\" he replied.\n\n\"Next week,\" she apologised, wringing out her clothing. \"Trousers will have to wait. I don't have spare, and this morning is not the warmest.\"\n\n\"At least pour the swamp water out of your boots.\"\n\n\"Good idea. That was one heck of a Juggernaut roll, Dragon. Brutal. Ah look, there's a bit of armour lodged between your spine spikes here. Couple of rents in your wings. I can't believe they went after poor Ignita like that!\" She smashed her fist into her palm. \"At least my shot ended Sir Cowardly Pants and his \u2013\"\n\n\"My shot.\"\n\n\"Yours got the two men behind him.\"\n\n\"Trivialities.\" He bared his fangs lazily. \"Princess, what did Ignita say to you just as we left?\"\n\nThe girl picked a dead frog out of her hair and examined it thoughtfully. \"Ah, that's what I felt. Well, Ignita said thanks for her life, and 'electrolysis via lightning.' As in, the power of Sea Dragons is called electrolysis. It is the splitting of water via lightning, which leads to \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragons don't have lightning.\"\n\nDespite her shivering, she gave a gurgle of laughter at his expression. \"Well, don't ask me. No wings, see?\"\n\n\"Fire, aye. Lightning, no,\" he insisted.\n\n\"If you say so, mighty Dragon. I'm just the minion around here. What do I know?\"\n\n\"Only a minion when it suits.\"\n\n\"Oh, my wicked scheme is wholly undone.\"\n\nHer smile curved into absolute radiance. Having seen more Human faces these days, Dragon felt he had a certain licence to conclude that she was indeed remarkable among her species. It was not just the physical movement or placement of muscles and skin. It was the way her black eyes shone with an unmistakable inner beauty of spirit. Aria Seaspray had that quality about her, when she wasn't in her 'seriously, I'm going to slay everything in sight' mode.\n\nFearsome female fatale!\n\nA hand touched the scales beside his left ear canal. \"Are you thinking of someone, Dragon? I think you might have an ear infection.\"\n\n\"It happens \u2013 a by-product of being fireless, Ignita thought,\" he said. Hesitation, rumination, decision. \"Ah \u2026 I was, aye \u2013 thinking about her. How did you know?\"\n\n\"You looked sad. Anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"Fetch her back? Find my fires? Help me wrestle fate into submission beneath my paw?\"\n\nThe girl sucked at her lower lip. \"Well, one thing I like about you, Dragon, is the fact that you're not just sitting around waiting for lightning to strike \u2013 excuse the pun. Close to the bone, I know. Don't you go all growly on me now. Bad, grouchy Dragon. If you won't listen to me, at least listen to your Great-Aunt Ignita. You have to keep an open mind.\"\n\n*Blergh!* \"How?\"\n\nStamping her foot, she burst out, \"That Aria! She should be lucky to have a Dragon like you! Fancy turning around and stabbing you in the back like that? I know she likes you. Women \u2013 females, even \u2013 can sense these things about one another. Besides, you're hopelessly over the moons about her, so why not \u2026 ah, it's difficult, I know. You don't want to cause dishonour. I get it. I mean, what if I turned up in the Archipelago begging Azerim to notice me? Doesn't that just smack of \u2026 desperation?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said slowly. An outline of a plan slowly seeped into his hearts. A purpose which filled him as much with dread as with hope. \"Maybe, crossing the oceans for one's beloved is heroic, dramatic, romantic \u2013\"\n\n\"And other words ending in 'ic' \u2013 like, completely lunatic!\"\n\n\"Are you ready to do that?\"\n\nThey both flinched and looked away. No. Not yet. Who could face the prospect of flying all that way, through storm and danger, over mountain and ocean, to have one's hearts shattered and ground into the dust? Not this Dragon, nor his Princess. Not today.\n\nStretching out his neck, he nuzzled her shoulder, and then put a paw around her waist. \"Get over here, you. Need a hug?\"\n\nHis very best impression of Human-friendly cultural understanding.\n\nAwkward.\n\nAfter a moment, however, the girl melted against him. A sob escaped her lips, muffled against his scales. For once, he did not mind the moisture. He knew what it meant; his hearts understood these emotions all too well. Pain linked them. Pain, and an incongruous destiny he could not for the life of him smell out as yet. Something was happening out there. Or, in his hearts. Approaching. Shifting. Coalescing.\n\nWhatever could it be?\n\nRising into the air, Dragon and Princess turned their noses to the west. Toward the salty ocean."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "For two days, they flew westward over the low wooded foothills, called the Gemwoods, of the northern region of Garome Kingdom. The redheaded Prince had come from here. Azania declared herself unimpressed. She was most certainly not marrying any man who fled in terror at the sight of her Dragon, even if he did have shapely buttocks.\n\nCough, cough.\n\nLeaving Garome behind as they crossed Lake Mycegeon, they winged across the mighty Chazb River, which leaped joyously down from the mountains and carved through a spectacular gorge to feed the sprawling coastal swamps of the Kingdom of Ayren. South of the swamps lay the realm of Lymarn, noted for its silks and trading prowess. In fact, 'liar of Lymarn' was a common saying.\n\nCutting course on a more northerly heading, he spread his wings over towering hardwood forests, little inhabited, that eventually gave way to a sea of sand dunes, and beyond that, the sparkling Lumis Ocean. His nostrils breathed deep of the briny tang in the air. Consulting a map the Princess must have filched from his library, they agreed that they must be approaching the shores of Bathila Bay. Dragon suggested they put down, but after taking a long look at the size and number of the saltwater crocodiles basking along the dazzling white beach sands, they decided to fly on across the bay to a place where her edible properties might be less appealing to the local wildlife.\n\nAs they set out across the rippling expanse of ocean, he teased, \"It's difficult being so very appetising, isn't it, Princess?\"\n\nShe said, \"At least you know a crocodile's intentions.\"\n\nToo true.\n\nLeaving the snappish crocodiles behind, Dragon winged steadily toward the far shore, visible as a variation of colour to him. The Princess said she saw coastal mountains and white sands. Aluxon, the capital of the Kingdom of Alaxarmis, lay beyond those mountains and across another bay, according to their map. Still a good day's journey for one with wings, or five days on horseback, his companion noted, given the detour one must make around the great curve of the bay.\n\nGorgeous turquoise waters. Blazing white sunshine. Fresh air with a salty zing! His spirits lifted. Flying lower, Dragon dipped his wingtips into the Lumis Ocean with each long, lazy wingbeat. This was the life. Why had he never grasped how spectacular the ocean was?\n\nHe jinked upward in fright as movement in the water caught him napping. Dolphins! Suddenly, a hundred or more sleek, silvery-blue bodies raced along beneath them \u2013 overtaking him, even. Azania's delighted laughter gave him a second start. The rate of his wingbeat picked up automatically. Not that he was competitive. Oh no. Just trying to match these speedy mammals for pace. They undulated through the swell with incredible fluidity. Underwater flying. Every so often, they leaped free of the surface in graceful arcs, and he heard the rasp of their breath through a double blowhole and felt the spray cool his body.\n\nAfter a short sprint, the dolphins began to pull ahead, but this was only prelude to playtime. The first inkling he had was when one zipped up right beside of his wing. It caught his eye before falling away. Then, a trio broke the waters in a synchronised display of somersaults. Barely had Azania pointed and cried out when another duo did the same just beyond his left wingtip. There was a game of tag-chase going on ahead, more energetic leaping and twirling, and then suddenly, a tail walker. Dragon's jaw dropped. Tales and lore had dolphins being smart. This? Wow! After waving its flippers toward the pair, the dolphin submerged, only for his place to be taken by a smaller pair that clapped their tails upon the water, then submerged and flipped up to tail walked backwards right beneath his nose!\n\n\"Didn't know I'd ordered in-flight entertainment,\" Azania called.\n\nDragon clapped his wings on the water. At once, half of the pod surged into the air, flying along with him! He wished he knew how to thank dolphins properly. Open-mouthed, this pod appeared to be chortling right along with him.\n\nWould he one day swim with dolphins? Understand them? Too much to ask.\n\nWhen the bottom turned shallow at the far side of the bay, the dolphins nipped away and headed for deeper, bluer waters. He alighted on the sands, which were a creamier white than the side of the bay they had left, and they looked about. No crocodiles. Only a coal-black female panther lazing up near the treeline with her three cubs. They gave each other a long stare of predatory understanding. The feline ignored him; he ignored her. That was the arrangement.\n\nAzania said, \"I saw a stream a little ways south. I'd like to wash my clothes there.\"\n\n\"Not in the ocean?\"\n\n\"I've heard that the salt makes clothing itchy and crusty. Fresh water is best.\"\n\n\"Not an issue I am familiar with \u2013 however, best give that hair a wash, too. Could be more frogs' legs up there.\"\n\n\"Where \u2013 oh, stop it, you tease.\"\n\nThe Princess did indeed find a few swampy things best left unmentioned remaining in her hair. She brushed it through with a great deal of grimacing, annoyance and colourful commentary that left him in no doubt as to the effort required to keep a woman's hair beautiful. Especially the super-curly sort. Her bouncy hair had curls and helices around curls. However, it transpired that she had purchased a few special clips in the camp, with which Azania shortly developed an eye-catching asymmetrical style that she modelled for him.\n\n\"Ooh, a veritable king slayer!\" he purred.\n\nAzania gave him a mock wrathful glare. \"Slaying the man is entirely beside the point, Dragon.\"\n\n\"To avoid delivering such a terrible fate, Princess, I believe you might want to try combining this style with a little something by way of actual clothing.\"\n\nHer rich laughter mingled with the susurration of the surf.\n\nDragon was not much of a swimmer. Mountain streams were not generally large enough to encourage the skill, and while Dragons bathed and fished in lakes, it was not usually in water out of their depth. Instinct kicked in powerfully, he discovered. He growled at and gave the Princess a hard time for suggesting the term, 'animal instinct.' Animal and Dragon did not belong in the same sentence, little Human!\n\nHe found the currents none too challenging, even though there was a deeper channel a hundred and fifty Dragon paces offshore where he first practised paddling, and then ducking his head beneath the water to swim with his wings. The webbed paws proved excellent for propelling him through the water. The saltiness was a balm upon his eyes. When a large, finned grey shadow came to investigate, he growled low in his throat and it flicked away at once.\n\nHuh. Who was large and in charge, then?\n\nSurfacing just his nostrils and eyes from the water to practise breathing while swimming, he spied the brown form of the Princess dashing through the shallow surf toward him. Beating a hasty retreat. Ah, that would be because five spear-waving yokels were on her tail, executing what they evidently assumed was a very clever ambush on a naked girl. Well, semi-naked. She had her underthings on. According to his knowledge of the male of the species, this was tantamount to nakedness. Indeed, he understood that a reduction in clothing correlated exactly to a lessening in intelligence, which meant that just now, they were probably battling with the average slug for intellectual primacy.\n\nNaked brown belly. Instant lobotomy.\n\nHe intended to hasten that process just a touch. Just for fun.\n\nFinding the bottom with his paws, Dragon paddle-waded swiftly toward the shore, convinced at this point that the black Princess \u2013 black-hearted, that was \u2013 had spied his devious approach and knew exactly what he was doing.\n\nWith the panting morons just a dozen paces or so behind, she flopped over in water that was waist-deep to her, and swam strongly toward him with an overarm stroke. Disobedient desert Princesses learned to swim in the underground water cisterns beneath their city, he had learned. Dragon waited, submerged in the surf like a huge brown log, or a patch of seaweed. Whatever worked to string those fools along just a little longer. Here she came underwater, pulling toward him with a series of froglike kicks.\n\nReaching out a paw, he drew her up onto the back of his neck, with a wink in passing. Azania's tight-lipped expression suggested annoyance.\n\nWait \u2026 wait \u2026 straightening his legs, Dragon cleft the waters like a surging mountain, towering over the young men with his wings outspread.\n\nFive faces blanched in absolute, pure terror. He almost felt sorry for them. Almost.\n\nCracking open his jaw in the evillest smile he could concoct, he said pleasantly, \"Gentlemen. Why were you chasing my Princess?\"\n\nGibbering was so disagreeable in the Human male.\n\nSo was voiding one's bowels. The rightmost man's reaction was one of the foulest things he had ever seen. Brown stain in clear blue waters? *Blergh!*\n\n<BOO!!>\n\nThe reverberation knocked them flat. Then, they were up and running with miraculous speed. Practically skimming the water like dragonflies as they sped off.\n\n\"Azania, place your hands over your ears, please.\"\n\nShe did not ask why.\n\n<I \u2013 AM \u2013 DRRRAAAGGOOONNN!!>\n\nBy his sire's egg, that one actually echoed off the peaks behind the bay!\n\n\"Cleared a few things out of a few places there, Dragon?\" she asked brightly. \"I daresay, that was your best effort yet. You're developing some real thunder! I'll need ear plugs soon. Oh, but that's squeezed some pus out of your ear, uh, canal. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Seawater softened it up,\" he grumbled, wading toward the shore.\n\n\"We'll need a spoon. Maybe a soup ladle.\"\n\nDigging about a bit, she scooped out what she could and flicked it away before washing her hands in the seawater. She was right. His ear hurt.\n\n\"Why don't we go track those dimwits back to their village?\" he rumbled. \"I'm sure the elders will be very happy to help once we explain the situation.\"\n\nHe received a Princess glare for that. \"I thought we were too high and noble a creature to consider sacking poor villages, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Who said anything about sacking? I thought I'd just go knock on their gates and ask nicely.\"\n\n\"You being a nice, polite, reformed sort of Dragon?\"\n\n\"Quite. Or, you could just go ask them as you are. I'm sure they'll give you the sun, the moon and all the stars in payment.\"\n\nShe smacked him. Usefully, that did jolt more pus loose."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Having enjoyed a very tender deer supplied by the grateful villagers \u2013 grateful to be left alive, that was \u2013 and a lovely locally sourced meal for the Princess, they travelled on the following morning in good spirits. Dragon had to confess to a touch of disappointment at the Lumis Ocean not living up to its reputation of being luminous at night, but his research had thrown up the fact that the fabled phenomenon had to do with the seasonal bloom of plankton, which could be either animal or plant in nature.\n\nConfusing, but there it was. This must not be the right season.\n\n\"Schooling a village is like not needing to spank a child,\" the Princess informed him, continuing an earlier conversation. \"Discipline is perfectly possible without the physical violence.\"\n\n\"You could just threaten your offspring with an angry Dragon.\"\n\n\"Never thought of that.\"\n\nSo droll. Unashamedly sarcastic.\n\n\"So, how many children are you planning to have with King Azerim?\"\n\nAh, the gentle sounds of steam rising from a Human's earholes. Well, that part was imagined, but her tongue-tied embarrassment was not.\n\nDragon said, \"I do hope he's planning to pay a worthy ransom for you. Otherwise, I'll just move into his treasury and make myself right at home. I'm sure even a king could shortly thereafter be persuaded to see reason.\"\n\n\"He might just stick fifty Arias on you.\"\n\n\"Ouch,\" he winced. One mental image he could have done without. \"Moving swiftly on, how do you propose we find this brilliant optometrist? I can't exactly walk into a major Human city proclaiming my nonviolent intentions to all and sundry.\"\n\n\"Not even wearing floral garlands about your neck and dancing \u2013\"\n\n\"No. Human children grow up on a strict literary diet of wicked, vengeful Dragons, you know. How are we supposed to change the mores of an entire society on a whim?\"\n\n\"I missed the part where educating a village is different to educating a whole town.\"\n\n\"My dear Princess, towns are full of nasty militias armed with better weapons than pitchforks, hoes and sickles, plus they tend to have excitable populations inclined to stampede even at the sight of a highly intelligent, sensitive creature like myself.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"On the other paw, the arrival of a striking, dark-skinned T'nagrun Princess with a considerable price on her head is unlikely to attract any untoward attention whatsoever.\"\n\n\"Oh, ho ho. Lily-white populace, right?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nThey looked at each other, and decided they had a bit of a problem. Neither of them would stick out like anything less than a very sore thumb, or talon. One being the size of a younger teenager in these parts, the other rivalling the size of a decent house, give or take.\n\nDragon brought them to a landing on the opposite side of the bay across from Aluxon. The city faced the dawn sun, protected by soaring cliffs to its back. The winter ocean weather was not kind. Located on the far side of that isthmus, the houses would have been battered by hundred mile-an-hour winds and forty-foot waves during the height of the short storm season. The suns dipped behind the cliffs as they landed, burnishing a towering weather front over the Tamarine mountain range behind them. Must be fun up there today. What looked warm and orange-golden from down here would be pitiless thunderstorms battering the realm of Dragons.\n\nHe said, \"I reckon it's still an hour's flight over to the city. This evening?\"\n\n\"Sneak in after dark? Crafty lizard.\"\n\n\"You'd be amazed what you can hide in a place that large. Even whole Dragons.\"\n\n[ An Appointment ]\n\nAt eighty-five thousand souls, Aluxon was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the seventeen realms. Azania's home town numbered a mere thirty thousand, but there were numerous desert cities, each an ancient citadel.\n\nAs the city's lantern lights glittered across the still bay in the early evening, Dragon took off from the far shore and winged silently over the dark waters. The Princess had already noted a number of ships anchored offshore, so they steered northward first, intending to approach along the cliffs just above the tops of the thick, immensely tall hardwood forests. This approach made the best use of Dragon's dark colouration. Furthermore, he deployed the camouflage magic Juggernaut had made him practise for two hours a day. That old Grinder was nothing if not a shrewd operator. Any minute advantage that could be gained over an opponent, he had taught them, was to be seized. To refuse was foolish.\n\nOnly the living wrote history.\n\nNot the most debatable point, one had to admit. Unless one's worldview included the glorious pushing up of daisies from down under. Dragon begged to differ.\n\nAll they knew was that the optometrist lived near the old town wall, the fortification now mostly a relic of days when the town was much smaller, and threatened by maritime raiders. The wealthy still huddled behind its thirty-foot battlements.\n\nShame he was not here to teach them the fear of Dragons.\n\nDragon winged silently through the deepening purples of evening, hugging the treetops so closely that he occasionally flicked off a few leaves or a small branch. He came in around the back of town, searching for a dark place to put down. Plenty of gloom. The two-storey wood-frame houses had one or two latticework lanterns out front, throwing pools of sallow yellow light into the main thoroughfares, but around the back and in the alleyways, darkness reigned supreme. He did not fancy his Princess wandering around such places. Too many robbers, ne'er-do-wells and scoundrels for his liking. He smelled out their emotions as they passed overhead like a fleeting shadow of dark cloud.\n\nAt last, he selected his space and whispered, \"Fast landing. Hold on.\"\n\nGiven the narrow wing space, the thud of his landing was unavoidable, shaking the nearest houses down to their foundations. A hound barked twice before smelling out a terror beyond its wildest imagination. It whined and fell silent. Dragon grinned in the semi-darkness. He loved that effect. Apex predator on the loose. Only tonight, he wondered if it was not Humans who were becoming the apex predator of Solixambria. Their numbers were staggering, crammed together in this rabbit warren of streets and houses all leaning upon one another. He closed his nostrils to the scents, yet the sounds of the city remained with him as if one huge, alien organism stirred all around him.\n\nClaustrophobia prowled about the edges of his mind.\n\n\"Stay close. If you need me, sing out loud and clear. I will rip this town apart to find you, and woe betide the louse who dares to lay a paw upon my Princess!\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dragon. I'm going to try just out here. I won't be far.\"\n\n\"Careful of the Watch. We heard them a few streets over.\"\n\n\"You heard them?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\nPutting up her hood, the Princess walked lithely up the alleyway toward the light. The streets were still busy at this early evening hour, which should work in their favour.\n\nDragon stalked after her, blending in with the deepest shadows. His senses extended in all directions, smelling out the night's dangers. Back here against the old wall, the houses were more dilapidated and there was a network of alleyways they might be able to work their way through without being easily seen, except by mischance. She slipped out into the main thoroughfare, trying to move as if she belonged. Purposeful. Not acting overly guarded or furtive \u2013 Juggernaut's instructions once more.\n\nHe heard her voice lilting in a question. No. Move on, and on again. He waited impatiently for her light footstep to return.\n\nSoon she came to him, breathing hard. \"It's at least ten streets over that way, south.\"\n\n\"I think I have an idea,\" he said, pointing a talon at the nearest, yawning black entrance of an alleyway. \"Back ways?\"\n\n\"Great. Stay close in case I have to deal with trouble.\"\n\nHe grinned and breathed heavily down her neck. \"The trouble's right behind you, pretty girl.\"\n\n\"Ooh \u2013 Dragon! You made me shiver.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nA few detours, two drunkards terrified witless and a thief punched unconscious later, Dragon and Princess found their way to approximately the right area. She repeated what she called her shopping trip, but came dashing back almost immediately.\n\n\"Watch. Get back. Be silent.\"\n\nDragon shrank back into the shadows of what he took for a derelict building. Avoid the porch. Sidle backward into a hole in the side. Silent!\n\nThe black-robed Watch poured into the alleyway, sweeping the area with care. They came by so close Dragon smelled the scent of fresh dough on one man's fingers, and knew him for a baker during the day. Azania pressed against his side, holding her breath. Her dark clothing and dark colouration were a great asset here. The Watch stumbled upon the thief they had left farther back. The brief commotion and exclamations informed them that he was a wanted man, apparently.\n\nSoon, they moved on.\n\nThe Princess stepped out again, and was accosted at once by a tall, richly robed man. \"Ullo, me pretty,\" he sneered, gripping her shoulder. \"Out on our ownsome, are we? Want to tell Chugna what a dark girl's doing in these parts? T'nagrun, eh?\"\n\n\"Looking for coin from the likes of ye,\" she breathed, laying a hand upon his arm. Quick thinking. \"My place is just back there. Fancy \u2013\"\n\nThe man did not relinquish his grip. \"And have yer men knock me about the 'ead and steal me boots? I don't think so, ye little strumpet. I fancy yer coming with me all nice-like.\"\n\nTwisting away from his grip, the Princess pretended to stumble and fall. Toward him. Toward the alleyway she had just emerged from. Dragon slunk closer as the man hesitated, and took the bait. One step. Two \u2013 his paw whipped out, grabbing the man by the head in order to muffle his outcry. In a flash, he had this Chugna fellow back in the darkness, pressed against a wall.\n\nDragon cracked open his jaw. \"Tell me again how you like to assault females, my good fellow?\"\n\nHe slumped.\n\n\"Dragon, you didn't \u2026 oh.\"\n\n\"I was about to end this filth, Princess,\" he growled, \"but I believe his heart did the job for me. Was it my smile, do you think?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. You do have the most devastating smile in all of Solixambria, Dragon.\" She hunkered down to check the man's pulse, and shook her head. \"Give me a minute, and we'll try that again. Minus the heart attack, hopefully.\"\n\nTen minutes later, they identified the optometrist's modest dwelling. There was even a sign outside. Doctor Charbi, Optical Specialist. Very good. He was just ushering the last client out as the Princess and Dragon peered diagonally across the main road at his place.\n\n\"Think you can get behind his property?\" she asked.\n\n\"Aye. I'll do it.\"\n\n\"Good. Listen for my signal.\"\n\nBefore he could complain, she darted across the road and rapped at the door. A short, earnest conversation later, and she disappeared inside.\n\nWell. That was unexpected. Oh to be a fly on the wall of that house when she took her hood down. Dragon looked up and down the road. There was an alleyway almost directly opposite, narrower than this one. The road was no longer busy \u2013 not at the moment, anyways. His roving eye lit upon a barrel. Aha. Hefting it in his paw, he hurled it up into the air, a couple of houses over. Crash! In a flash he crossed over, pressing carefully between old barrels, crates and piles of filth. Not so great back here. Now, someone's back fence stood in his way. Hmm.\n\nPicking the entirety of the fence up by its posts, he crossed beneath and placed it carefully back in the holes again. Perfect. He glared at the house cat, caught in the act of doing its business in the vegetable patch at the back. The feline streaked away with an ear-splitting yowl, probably never to be seen again. Someone would find an extremely large paw print in his back garden tomorrow. Focussing his senses, he tracked the Princess' sweet tones toward the back room of the next house over.\n\nHow did a fifty-foot Dragon burgle a Human dwelling? Another fence stood in his way. The stench back here, common to Human dwellings, could definitely be classed as exceptional. He supposed they had sewers of some sort to wash away waste, but something had gone wrong in this area.\n\nWrinkling his nose in a vain attempt to hold the local fragrances at bay, he peered over the wood-slat fence to next door. The Princess of T'nagru was just behind that lamp-lit curtain, which covered a double window made of small, square panes of glass set in metal frames. Tasteful. Furthermore, the doctor had fashioned a pretty layout of flowers and ornate bushes in his back garden. The artist in him heartily approved. Low jump? Another Juggernaut exercise aimed at helping a large Dragon handle his bulk better. Picking up his tail, Dragon hopped over the fence as carefully as he could. Sort of cracked three slats and left six-inch-deep paw prints in the good doctor's lawn, but there it was. Couldn't be helped.\n\nHow incredibly virtuous of him to save the flowerbeds. Coiling his tail carefully behind him, Dragon snuck closer to eavesdrop on the conversation.\n\nA brown hand pushed one of the windows open, thwacking him in the nose. \"Here he is, Doctor Charbi.\"\n\nDragon blinked in the light. \"Princess?\"\n\nThe doctor was made of stern stuff. Pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles up his nose, he murmured, \"Why, so it is a Dragon. Don't find one of those in the back yard every evening, I must say.\"\n\n\"Good evening, Doctor,\" he rumbled politely.\n\nThe man knocked back a glass of amber liquid and set it aside with a trembling hand. Thus fortified, he said, \"Right. Good evening, sir Dragon. Please, step this \u2013 uh, do place your muzzle upon the windowpane, there's a good fellow, and let me get a good look at those eyes. The \u2026 uh, Princess of T'nagru \u2026 told me you suffer from a spot of conjunctivitis and short-sightedness? We'll have you checked over in a jiffy, never you mind.\"\n\nDoctor Charbi's method of dealing with a colossal reptile filling his window appeared to be to pretend he was consulting with any one of his usual patients. Certainly, a far sight better than dealing with the usual predictable reactions of piercing shrieks, disappearing over the horizon with all haste, or the latest permutation, the inconvenient episode of keeling over in his paw, dead.\n\nDecent of him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "After departing Aluxon with an enormous vertical leap and a rush away over the rooftops before anyone could notice there was a monster skulking about town, Dragon took his Princess on a holiday to the seaside. They spent a delightful week exploring the western coastline of Alaxarmis, and Trondis, even briefly crossing the mighty Chorben River into Thob\u00e9 before returning in time for their rendezvous with Doctor Charbi, who had agreed to meet them outside of town rather than risk his prized flowerbeds a second time.\n\nBesides, the neighbour had called in to inquire about the enormous paw prints in his garden.\n\nThey told the doctor they had enjoyed a wonderful break from all the stress and hassle of dealing with pesky knights, squads of men-at-arms and hopeful Dragon slayers. They had swum in the ocean and flown out to play with and be awed by the Sanbris Whales, creatures easily double the length of Dragon himself. He admitted to feeling rather firmly put back in his place by the experience of seeing those oceangoing behemoths. In the evenings, they had been treated to the sight of the entire Lumis Ocean being lit by a phosphorescent turquoise glow. Spectacular.\n\nDoctor Charbi admitted he had brought his wife and two young daughters along in order to pretend that they were having a picnic in the woods. Mostly, they wanted to stare at the Dragon \u2013 oh, and to have the chance to meet a real Princess, of course. Could he promise the scaly giant was still not planning to eat anyone?\n\nDragon cleared his throat meaningfully.\n\nAzania said, \"Dragons do not eat people, Doctor Charbi. This Dragon has even sworn off pillaging villages for sport. Now, he has been known to sack the castles of evil kings, but that is another matter entirely, isn't it? Dragons will be Dragons, after all. Your children are perfectly safe with him.\"\n\nShe gave him a look as pointed as the most self-respecting dagger.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Dragon agreed promptly. \"I so swear upon my sire's egg. Now, please do call them over from hiding behind that tree over there.\"\n\n\"You knew where they were, all along?\"\n\n\"I scented your wife's perfume, doctor. You also looked over in that direction twice when we were talking, and I detected your divided concern.\"\n\nThe Princess gave him a second look. This one came complete with claws and fangs. Aria herself would not have been displeased with such an expression. \"Why don't I go meet your family, doctor, whilst you fit the Dragon for his spectacles? Dragon? Behave.\"\n\n\"I shall be exemplary,\" he promised.\n\nThe moment she had stepped away, however, the doctor said, \"Dragon, she does know that her kingdom is under attack, doesn't she?\"\n\nHe started, and then grew very still. \"Attack? The Skartun? When \u2026 how did you \u2013\"\n\n\"Day before yesterday. I'm sorry, I heard the news in town. Everyone's talking about it \u2013 digging out the histories and all. It's been years.\"\n\n\"How much attack?\" His eyes flicked to the dark fuzziness of the Princess as she disappeared into the trees. \"I mean \u2013 you know what I mean. How long ago did it start?\"\n\n\"The news is at least three weeks old. We only heard because the Kingdom of Vanrace is bracing for war, calling in mercenaries and knights from all over. They're next in line to be conquered, of course.\"\n\n\"Aye, so I understand.\"\n\nPulling out a contraption, he said, \"Now, Dragon, I'm going to fit these. This isn't any kind of permanent solution, alright? These are closer to monocles, since I could not work out a clever way of pinning these to your head without anchoring them with hooks in your ear canals, and you said those were too sensitive. However, I ground an accurate lens for each eye according to your prescription, and I've linked them with this wire so that you can balance them on top of your muzzle. Hooks for the scales should hold them in place, I hope. The right eye is significantly worse than the left.\"\n\n\"They brought Dragons against T'nagru?\"\n\n\"Aye. It is said there are over thirty tame Dragons in their army, and they crossed the desert during an unexpected cooler snap \u2013 or by dark magic,\" said the doctor, clearly unaware of how his words struck a Dragon's soul like hammer blows. \"Please bend your neck farther. I can't reach.\"\n\nDragon was staring at the small group emerging from the trees, when suddenly, the world leaped into focus.\n\n\"By my wings!\" He plopped back onto his haunches in shock.\n\nExquisite. The Princess \u2026 she was something else. A treasure on legs. So tiny and small-boned, even the doctor's wife towered over her, yet there was in her lean stride a poise he had only ever seen in the walk of a certain Ariamyrielle Seaspray. She wore her apparel and blade, her femininity and rare beauty, like scales fit the Dragoness.\n\nWhen should he tell her that her kingdom might already have been wiped out?\n\nCharbi said, \"How's that, Dragon? How's the eyesight?\"\n\n\"A revelation.\"\n\nWhispering. The song of lament rose from his five Dragon hearts, yet he gave it no voice. He knew he must be strong for his Princess' sake. He could not process the twin shocks of detail and doom. Every leaf had an edge. Wonder brightened the children's faces. Every coil of her ravishing hair stood flawless and distinct. He looked to the sky and saw an eagle far, far above. He could count the long pinions, the flight feathers of its great wings, yet his hearts were stones. Grief gripped so sorely, he could scarcely breathe.\n\nThe ancient enemy had come. Far earlier than ever expected.\n\nThey had been running down beaches and soaring over sparkling turquoise waters, never knowing that somewhere, people were dying and enslaved Dragons served as machines of war. T'nagru might already have fallen.\n\nAs she approached, the Princess took in his expression, and a different kind of darkness entered her eyes. In Draconian, she said, <Dragon, what's wrong?>\n\n<I \u2026>\n\n<Your eyes are blue. Blue as the sky. What has happened?>\n\nHe must tell her, though his hearts quailed to know the tenor of her grief.\n\n[ Wings Aloft ]\n\nIn two days of strong flying, Dragon crossed the long breadth of the Kingdom of Alaxarmis, heading from the lush coastal plains and tall hardwood forests into the foothills of the Tamarine Range. They headed directly east, making for Crusher territory. He had no expectations of gaining immediate help for their mission; rather, the plan was to warn the Dragonkind and let the Clans argue while he and Azania flew on to the southern deserts. Culturally and historically, Dragons would not act until some creature \u2013 far less a Clan-less outcast \u2013 gave a first-paw account of the goings-on.\n\nThe Dragon Clans did not raise armies. They preferred to fight and die alone against an overwhelming enemy. That was honourable. Times had changed, but Dragons \u2013 not so much as a scale's difference. *Blergh.* Bunch of hidebound paw-paralysed fainthearted lair-loving fire-dribbling dolts!\n\nDecent round on the compound adjectives, there. He was sorely in need of a few snappier insults.\n\nGiven the courage of an Aria or an Azania, what mountains could he not move? The Isles Dragoness had suggested that a small Dragon army might be his for the asking. Did a Dragoness as young as she truly command so much power \u2013 an all-female army made up of warriors like her? As much as the notion caused his ego minor palpitations, he knew that tremors would rend the hearts of any enemy unfortunate enough to face such a force.\n\nWearing his spectacles in flight led to a visceral quivering of a completely different sort of joy \u2013 although, the wire hooks meant to stabilise the device on his head were a pain to manage. He kept pointing out details to Azania. Peaks, valleys, lone trees dominating ridgelines, the searing white outlines of snowy summits etched against a crimson evening sky, a panther wandering below \u2026 by the simple miracle of corrected sight, his world was made new.\n\nHe had a ferocious headache, but the wonder was more than worth it.\n\n\"When you wriggle in the air like that, does it mean draconic happiness?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Aye. Sorry. I'm just \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, shh.\" Her hand touched his head, below his eye where she had learned the scales were especially sensitive. \"You have every right. Tell me about it. Tell me everything that you see, even the tiniest detail. What do you love most about our realm of Solixambria?\"\n\n\"May I pontificate at length?\"\n\n\"Permission granted. Ever so gladly.\"\n\n\"Well, then \u2026\"\n\nA Dragon ought to satisfy his Princess' wishes. Starting with the highest noctilucent clouds, also called night shining clouds, he talked for six hours straight, barely pausing to draw breath. The gladness just poured out of him, seeming to distract her from the depression she had sunk into after the revelation of the Skartunese arrival at the gates of her kingdom. N'ginta, the main citadel of T'nagru, was located in the far south of the realm, almost at the habitable limit of the desert's fringe. Beyond lay the mighty Obsidian Desert. The fine black sand retained heat with brutal efficiency, creating arguably the harshest climatic conditions in the known world. Out in the central desert, Dragon scientists had measured a daytime temperature of a whopping 151.2 degrees on the Fangheat scale, which Humans incorrectly called Fahrenheit.\n\nBoil an egg? As the joke went, those temperatures were enough to cremate any egg foolish enough to wander that deep into the desert.\n\nDragon's neck creaked. \"Ah, there we go.\" He squinted through the lenses. Green insect splatter. Marvellous. \"Keeping the glass clean is going to be a pain. See over there, about two paws below that peak? That's Gangbuster the Crusher's lair. He's a Dragon of infamous jollity \u2013 laughs when smashing houses, chortles while stealing sheep, you get the picture. Hammaria, my relative, is his mate of many years.\"\n\n\"Gangbuster?\" Surely, he heard her eyebrows twitch.\n\n\"Aye. The Crushers are a clannish Clan, mwaa-haa-harr! They like names that relate to gangs, mobs and generally, what Humans might call activity of a criminal persuasion.\"\n\n\"Oh. Very tasteful. The Dragon version of Chakkix Camp?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\nOff they went to consult with the two orange Dragons in their cosy, sandy cave lair. Hammaria was brooding over three eggs in a private chamber in the back, so hearty congratulations were in order. He made sure to speak loud enough that she might hear. Dragon had to put up with Gangbuster laughing at everything he said, giving him an especially hard time about their intentions to warn the Dragon Clans about the Skartun invasion.\n\n<Believe it when their lairs are burning down around their ears, youngling! Murr-hurr-harrr! Still, you and your picayune Princess have the rights of this madcap enterprise, harr-harr, after all that wrong-pawed nonsense your sire pulled a few months back. Turns a Dragon's fires in his stomach, it does, and certainly had a few Dragons thinking differently. Ha-harr! Go find the truth, Dragon. Find the truth \u2026 if you dare.>\n\nWhat did he mean? Dragon measured the colours of his gaze and the tenor of his hearts.\n\nThen, scales prickling with premonition, he whispered, <Mighty Gangbuster, is it possible you might know something about how a Dragon can become as \u2026 unusual, as to lack the very fires of Dragon life?>\n\nSilence. Yawning, yearning silence.\n\nAzania dropped the talon dagger she was holding with a loud clatter, and apologised. A quick glance caught her hands shaking \u2013 on his behalf!\n\nFrom the back chamber, Hammaria called, <Dragon? Come to me, please.>\n\nHis eyes directed an unspoken query at Gangbuster. As far as he knew, disturbing a brooding Dragoness was never done \u2013 at the very least, it was an unspoken courtesy. The older Dragon made an assenting gesture with his paw.\n\nIn a moment, he stepped through and greeted his Clan relative respectfully.\n\nCurved protectively about her precious clutch, she smiled and tickled the tips of the orange, veined eggs with a touch of fire from her mouth. Lowering her voice, she said softly, <Dragon, what I am about to say could be taken as the worst kind of hearsay. Will you swear never to repeat the source of this information?>\n\n<I so swear by my own sire's egg. Your eggs are beautiful, by the way.>\n\n<Thank you.> The pastel yellows and oranges of her eyes softened. <A little history. At the time of your egg's inception, there was a struggle for leadership in the Devastator Clan. Blaze was already mated with Indigofire, but there was no progeny, and some among the Devastators claimed that she was a poor influence and a drain upon him. As a further wickedness, they tied her egg sac barrenness to the \u2026 grievous political atmosphere, one might say.>\n\n<Ordinarily, I would hold my tongue on such a delicate matter, but I believe in a balance of honour \u2013 that is, your Clan's conduct requires answer in order that honour might be rebalanced and restored. This which I shall share with you is rumour, but a well-founded rumour, I would argue. I have heard it whispered in more than one lair, that your egg arrived with great suddenness \u2013 politically expedient suddenness \u2013 and without any prior sign that Indigofire was actually with egg.>\n\nHis breath snagged inside his throat. <Hammaria \u2013>\n\nShe said, <Listen well, Dragon. Usually when a Dragoness is with egg, she waddles both on paw and in the air. There are distinctive behavioural and physical changes, which the astute may observe with great certitude. Even the eye fires mellow, taking on softer shades and pastels in the inner part, and what is called 'pregnancy patterning' around their edges. However, Indigofire displayed none of these signs before it was abruptly announced that she was with egg, and that Blaze was its sire.>\n\nDespite his reservations at a potential intrusion, Dragon sent forth his magic. Truth. As best she knew it, Hammaria was communicating the truth, and her assurance expressed in the white purity of her inner fires, staggered his every heart.\n\nHe croaked, <Are you saying \u2026 my sire \u2026>\n\n<What I am saying, is that a Dragon only has to glance at you standing beside your sire to know that you two are related. As for your dam?> The Dragoness inclined her muzzle slowly. <I have never liked Indigofire, and I would never desire to speak any ill against her. When Blaze, the newly elected leader, found out about the rumours regarding his egg, he forbade any Devastator Clan Dragon to speak of the matter again. The whole affair, the way it was handled and then hushed up \u2026 it dampened my fires. In part, that is why I mated outside of the Clan. Besides, it was easy to love Gangbuster. I knew we were right for one another. As for his word upon this incident, I have never been able to erase it from my memory.>\n\nWhen he was able to speak, Dragon did not even recognise the voice as his own. <What did he say?>\n\n<He said, 'Hammaria, there is a sacred bond between the egg and the sac of its birth. An egg never forgets. One day, if indeed a crime has been committed, the truth will surface.'>\n\n<An egg never forgets?>\n\nOld, old lore.\n\nReaching out, the Dragoness touched him upon the forehead. <Never forget, Dragon. May the mighty fires of the Dragonkind be roused; o fates, hear my cry: JUSTICE!>\n\nThe most curious sensation rippled all over his body, and vanished.\n\nAfter sharing fresh kill with Gangbuster in the draconic way, they departed and flew directly south, skirting Devastator territory as narrowly as the vagaries of draconic territorial mapping allowed.\n\nIt took him two hours to work past the obstruction in his throat to say, \"So, as it turns out, Princess, my sire may have been unfaithful, and afterward, he probably stole my egg from my real dam.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Aye, and then he covered up the whole sordid affair.\" He shook his head slowly. \"Want to hear the gossip \u2013 the twenty year-old gossip?\"\n\n\"Please share. I'll be your shoulder \u2026 uh, your metaphorical shoulder. No squashed Princesses around here, please.\"\n\nShe was his shoulder in more ways than she knew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Long hours they spent on the wing, once more crossing the mighty emerald sea of the Gemwoods, the hardwood forests of this region. Azania complained of a sore backside, but when they stopped she was the first up onto his back to massage his aching wing joints with her hands and to apply a common herbal poultice used by Dragons, a combination of firewort herb and common saribas oil which she traded for in a village en route. Panting over the sweating, pasty-faced merchant had the wondrous effect of adjusting his prices to a level the Princess agreed was fair.\n\nEven she could produce a wicked chuckle upon occasion.\n\nAngling ten degrees south of east, they headed for the dryer southern reaches of Garome and then Vanrace, where the yellowing plains grasses slowly yielded to the encroaching of black desert sands. When the wind blew from the south, it was an oven's eager blast, and with his spectacles on, he could gaze out over the everlasting black dunes and patches of naked obsidian stone, and see how the heat shimmered in the illusion of water.\n\nAzania consulted her map, and pointed ahead at a most unexpected wink of blue between lush sprays of palm fronds. \"I think that must be Tezmin Oasis. Last stop before the desert. Let's tank you up.\"\n\n\"I am not a water receptacle.\"\n\n\"Your stomach gurgled at the very mention. Or, is that your brains sloshing about inside your cranium?\"\n\n\"My, what a wit we possess this afternoon.\"\n\n\"I'm hot and tired and very badly in need of cool water and a bath \u2013 thank heavens for the constant airflow of flight, eh, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I selflessly refrain from commenting on the subject of your body odour.\"\n\n\"Dragon slap incoming.\"\n\n\"Proper Princesses are always faultlessly fresh and fragrance-free.\"\n\n*Smack.* \"As for improper ones,\" she chuckled, \"never mind. Oh look, merchants down there with those dromedaries. We could gather intelligence from them.\"\n\n\"Gather intelligence? From Humans? Surely you jest.\"\n\nShe kicked his neck. \"Put down, you quarrelsome quadruped. We'll walk in peaceably in the desert way. Aha \u2013 besides which, I spy a hot spring over that side of the oasis. That's steam, right? You'll enjoy a good long soak, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"How does one even sit atop a dromedary? Lumpy has nothing on that creature. I'm sure they taste as foul as they look.\"\n\n\"Uncomfortably. My esteemed mount is far more accommodating.\"\n\n\"Esteemed mount?\" He mimed tossing a Princess into the air and swatting her with his other paw. \"I'm prickly, cranky and highly dangerous, I'll have you know. Esteemed mount my left hind talon.\"\n\n\"Very well, my noble multifunctional aerial weapons platform.\"\n\nHe peeked curiously over his shoulder. \"You've been thinking about siege armies, right?\"\n\nThere came her smile. It had been misfiring for a few days now, but this one was almost back to normal brilliance. \"Not only esteemed, but also the sharpest talon in the paw. Stop it, Dragon, or every Princess in the realms will be fighting me for you.\"\n\n\"Those pampered brats? Wouldn't stand a chance against my Princess.\" She wriggled with pleasure. \"Nothing but the best for this Dragon.\"\n\n\"We need to thrash out strategy later, you sweet monster.\"\n\nOh, thought she could get away with that, did she? Never short on spirit, this one, as he had known from the very beginning. Her disdainful laughter at calling Prince Floric 'the Flatulent,' echoed in his memory until this day.\n\nLanding seventy Dragon paces shy of the oasis, he joined Azania in performing a desert n'gandura-laa, a semi-formal greeting used between strangers who wished to signal peaceful intent, usually as a prelude to trade. Peaceful was not the same as not immediately attempting to cheat or swindle one another. Trading in the south, he was reliably informed, was on an entirely different level of bargaining \u2013 an art, a drama production, and oftentimes, a life and death struggle. She drew a light blue cloth veil over her nose and mouth, beneath the hood of her dark robe.\n\nDragon hulked beside his favourite Princess as they walked into the oasis. He noticed immediately how her stride assumed a new fluidity, shifting easily with the movement of the fine sand beneath her boots. The white-robed men who wore blue turbans appreciated her grace with every glance. The sultry women of their group, less so, even though they were all as dark as her. Traders from T'nagru, he concluded.\n\nNo-one acted taken aback at the sight of a Dragon, which piqued him. Why? Furthermore, these traders had come heavily laden. Were refugees already fleeing the Kingdom?\n\nAzania continued to walk right up to the group. Pausing to size them up, she pulled back her hood and lowered the face veil. Gasps.\n\nOne of the older men's white-shot facial bush moved to gasp, \"Princess Azania!\"\n\nAh, that was a hidden smile. Interesting.\n\nThe group performed an unfamiliar, graceful genuflection that Dragon assumed was meant for royalty.\n\n\"Harbonu, you old scoundrel! How's thievery these days?\"\n\nHis dark eyes flickered with amusement. In a broad southern accent, he said, \"Oh, I hear the theft of Princesses is all the rage in these modern times. I take it this is your captor?\"\n\n\"Aye, this is the noble beast who rescued me from the clutches of Prince Floric of Vanrace.\"\n\nThere was a collective intake of breath. Two of the women actually spat on the sand, which Dragon understood was a grave insult in desert culture \u2013 to waste one's own body's water was the ultimate taboo. Allies, or sympathisers at the very least. Very much the path of wisdom, as far as he was concerned!\n\nHarbonu shifted to bow to him, saying, <Noble Dragon, that was, for many reasons, a deed of paw worthy of the name. So, do you now intend to collect upon our Princess' ransom?>\n\n<Actually, ifragi Harbonu,> he growled, <we heard there might be some local trouble?>\n\nThe grizzled fellow smiled at the southern honorific, but only with his mouth. <What of it?>\n\nThe Princess said, \"We request information, if we may share a meal with you? Our hope is that there is still a side to join against the Skartun, and that we might usefully weigh in \u2013 even if an army stands against, a Dragon and a Princess could make a difference.\"\n\n\"Come eat with us,\" said he.\n\nAfter sharing a meal of dates, flatbread and honey, and passing around a waterskin from which Azania politely indicated even Dragon should drink, Harbonu scratched his voluminous beard, cleared his throat, and said:\n\n\"It is four weeks ago since the Skartunese came upon us out of a smistoon \u2013 a cooler wind that occasionally blows from the east, Dragon, bringing hazy weather and moisture to our water traps. How they made the crossing in this season, is a mystery to us. The King's scouts expected nothing of the sort. First, they laid siege to the citadels of Tha'gunli and Z'bora, using their Dragon armies to ravage those within the space of ten days.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Azania mourned softly.\n\nAll the desert-born made a sign which he assumed had something to do with honouring the dead.\n\n\"After that, the Skartun army fell upon N'ginta Citadel in the fullness of their might. Their leader is called Jabiz Urdoo \u2013 Jabiz is a title similar to 'commander,' or absolute leader. A more ruthless man I could not imagine. Two observations. One, this is a smaller advance army of a far greater horde. Urdoo is but one commander of a reported 'high thirty' who are preeminent among the Skartun. Two, his group or clan seeks the honour they call 'first mover honour.' They will fight to the death \u2013 this type of honour quest is a religious matter, seen as a path to a warrior's eternal paradise. No mercy, no prisoners, only plunder.\"\n\nA small army, and they had already broken down two citadels? Dragon shifted his belly, and drank from the waterskin as it returned for a second round.\n\nLeaning forward, the man drew a circle in the sand at his feet. \"N'ginta is an ancient citadel, with thick walls and mighty gates. The opposing army is approximately four thousand warriors strong, drawn up mainly against the southern aspect, although enemy patrols have now effectively cut off the city from all help. The flanks attack the walls with siege towers, ladders and catapults. Here in the centre, is a wedge of Dragon thralls, heavily armoured and protected from direct attack by strong cohorts of Skartunese warriors. We estimate the Dragons are about thirty in number. They rotate day and night, directing their flame against the gates. No material in all the realms can withstand such an assault for long.\"\n\n\"Why do you call them thralls?\" he inquired.\n\n\"They act not only as slaves, but almost as mindless creatures \u2013 with respect, Dragon,\" the man replied carefully. \"The Skartun handlers must possess a secret to their control, some arcane magic or other means to make Dragons do exactly as they wish. Furthermore, our scouts later reported that over twenty Dragons perished in the desert, bringing the army over. No sane creature would do that without protest. That is why we call them thralls.\"\n\n\"They don't fly?\" he pressed.\n\n\"No, their wings are bound in harness, as are their heads.\"\n\nHe shuddered. *Gnarr \u2026*\n\nLaying her hand upon his paw, Azania asked, \"How is the city now, do you think, Harbonu?\"\n\n\"Princess, we left the city five days ago and crossed the tongue of desert, travelling day and night. When we left, all was as well as could be expected given the siege conditions. We hope to trade for weapons. I would see my family to safety, and then return to help my kingdom.\"\n\n\"Will the gates have held this long?\" she worried.\n\n\"King N'gala N'gala had ordered the gates to be kept constantly wet. That will drain the cisterns down. Maybe not today, but certainly within one more week, it will come down to a question of dying of thirst, or letting the gates burn.\"\n\nHer emotions scorched his senses like acid. Dragon did not see her expression, but the man appeared to answer a question by adding:\n\n\"If you had seen what the Skartun do to captives, Princess, you would far rather die of thirst.\"\n\n[ Sandstorm ]\n\nHaving drunk his fill of water, eaten plenty of dates for energy and rested through the early evening, Dragon and Princess set off an hour after sunset. He took a moment to appreciate the tapestry of stars overhead. Pinprick clarity. He had never, except in a bookish fit of imagination, pictured the stars as more than a sort of misty swirl. Not beads, bracelets, necklaces or intricately detailed laceworks, certainly not this mindfulness of neck-creaking majesty.\n\n\"Dragon. Jaw.\"\n\nHe clicked his fangs shut. \"Princess. Gnarr.\"\n\n\"Could not agree more. Ready?\"\n\n\"Strap yourself in, Princess. I don't want to have to pick you up off the sand later when you inevitably enjoy your in-flight snooze.\"\n\n\"Oh, but your light-hearted chatter always keeps me awake, Draaa \u2026 zzz \u2026\"\n\nHe produced a thunderous chortle. \"Wake up!\"\n\nHis mind tracked over the route ahead. One long night-time flight over an area of the Obsidian Desert called 'the tongue' by locals, essentially because it was a long spit of burning sands that separated Vanrace from T'nagru, about seventy miles wide. Few people crossed it since few generally had reason to. It was a fiery foretaste of the desert proper, hence the night crossing. His throat already felt like sandpaper just thinking about it. After that came G'nandu Citadel. They intended to rest there \u2013 also known as terrifying the local populace \u2013 before flying on to N'ginta. With a following wind, they might cover that second stretch by the following nightfall, but it was a marathon of over one hundred and thirty miles.\n\nRising into the air, he oriented himself according to Azania's instructions in celestial navigation. This was a skill he had never been able to master due to his poor eyesight. Southeast was the bearing. The deserts beckoned.\n\nFor two hours, he flew over increasingly sparse grasses and light brush, until the vegetation ceased completely. Sand. Black sand, rolling like the ocean waves. Sculpted forms of dunes and ripples stood stark in the light of two full moons. The patterns on the sand were so sharply delineated by the monochrome lighting, he could see the languid sweeps of what must be a snake's trail heading straight up a dune ahead. Barrenness could be more fascinating than ever he had imagined.\n\nEndless, the night.\n\nThe monotony tugged at his senses. When would the sameness end?\n\n\"Dragon, are you asleep?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Resting your eyes, perchance? Anyhow, welcome to T'nagru.\"\n\nHe shivered from his nose all the way down to the tip of his tail. Being a large Dragon, the physiological reaction took a noticeable time to travel from his brain down his body. Pleasurable. Flicking his wingtips as a final touch, he looked around, and saw \u2013 well, more dunes, more black sand, a random spiky ball cactus about ten feet across \u2026 that was different.\n\n\"T'nagru?\" he snorted. \"What time is it?\"\n\n\"Two hours before dawn.\"\n\n\"Already?\"\n\n\"Time flies when you're \u2013\" she paused a beat, leaving him in absolutely no doubt as to what she meant \"\u2013 flying in a straight line between here and nowhere. I should have warned you. They call this the desert nod. Drivers have been known to fall off their dromedaries through sheer boredom. Nomads walk all night along paths known only to their feet and not to their conscious minds. Dragons \u2013\"\n\n\"Know when their tails are being tugged?\"\n\n\"Nod off if you agree,\" she chortled, not skipping a beat.\n\nTwittering rascal! When had tolerance for this tiny bundle of vexation turned to the best of companionship? Flaring his wings, he landed atop a tall dune, tugging her leg about the salient differences between sand, sand and sand.\n\n\"My dear Dragon, I should expect an artist to identify the variances immediately,\" she opined, stretching her limbs into a star shape no Dragon could hope to emulate. \"The desert is subtle, unlike your mountains. Variations of shading. Texture. The lay, height and orientation of the dunes. Did you notice that we passed over a dry watercourse a few minutes ago? That will flood in a flash if rains come. Which, by the way, is why you see a few cacti down there. They hardly need water, but when it comes, they are ready and their tissues swell to receive a year's supply in just a few hours. There is water trapped in great aquifers beneath the sand. You just need to know how to find it.\"\n\n\"My scales itch.\"\n\n\"Ants in your pants?\"\n\nThe Princess wore a desert robe gifted to her by Harbonu's clan; no payment accepted. The worn, dark grey fabric swirled around her slim person as she moved, and blended surprisingly well with the sand. Camouflage likely being the point. She stood on the crown of the hundred-foot dune, the hood resting upon her shoulders, and scented the air \u2026 more than that. She melded with her surrounds in a way that reminded him of his mood magic.\n\nAbruptly, she turned, saying, \"The weather's likely to change later today or tomorrow, Dragon. We should fly on, if you are able.\"\n\nHe eyed the still night distrustfully. \"What sort of change, Your Haughtiness?\"\n\n\"Sandstorm, Your Scaliness.\"\n\n\"I'd say, 'I see' but I really do not. I shall simply have to trust your inferior instincts.\"\n\nHer grin flashed white in the darkness of her face. \"Despite the unholy hour, Dragon, I refuse to be riled by your feeble insults. Come on. Were you sleeping or flying?\"\n\n\"Both. Actually, I feel alright.\" He stretched his wings and checked them over. Unpredictable ought to be his new favourite word. \"Not that I was actually sleeping, but I've never heard of Dragons resting quite so deeply on the wing. Might have flown headlong into a \u2026 ah \u2026\"\n\n\"Jumping sand dune?\" she chirped. Baleful glare! How dare anyone be so cheerful at this hour of the night? \"Carnivorous cactus? Giant flying scorpion?\"\n\n*Gnarr-grr-nrr,* he muttered.\n\nThe Princess bounced up and down on her toes. \"Flying swiftly on?\"\n\n\"Best do that before your snark and my gullet have an accidental meeting.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "There was nothing like waking to find a large brown Dragon sunning himself atop the Vazuga's palace to generate mass mayhem and panic. Ah, the sweet strains of chaos. He stretched lazily. Exercise was beneficial for the peasants. Running around screaming, wailing, tearing at one's hair and clothing while begging the gods for mercy, so much the better. Although, judging by the frequency of the Princess' hand-waving in the walled garden below him, a few ill-tempered words were likely to be zinging in his ear canals any moment. He picked at his sore ear and flicked a nasty glob of yellow-brown wax into the next street. Ah, the distraught shrieks \u2026 just a little longer \u2026\n\nThe Vazuga of G'nandu was a straight-backed, small gentleman of impeccable presentation \u2013 who might look slightly less impeccable than usual this morning, in a Dragon's jaded estimation. His air of serenity was taking a severe beating.\n\nOh, very well.\n\nRising to his paws, he stretched from muzzle to toe. Time to brush up on his morning roar.\n\n<I \u2013 AM \u2013 DRAGON!!>\n\nThunder rolled over the citadel, reverberating back from the twenty-foot outer walls to make his every scale shiver. Oh, what wonderful acoustics! He would do that all over again just for the pleasure of hearing the reverberation over the thick-walled, whitewashed buildings with their flat roofs, which packed the oval citadel right to its edges. In the deep, cooler spaces between, he noticed how vegetables and fruits had been planted to maximise use of the temperature differentials. Shade must be so important in the desert. What a far cry from the city of Aluxon! The bracing scent of oranges, grapefruit and lemons filled the already heated air, and it was only a couple of hours after dawn.\n\nHe slithered down to ground level with care for the plants, paintwork and the space he so easily filled.\n\nAzania said, \"Nice roar.\"\n\n\"Really added to the sense of calm this morning,\" he agreed. \"Vazuga \u2013\"\n\n\"Zanu,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Vazuga Zanu, I understand our arrival is most unprecedented. The Princess and I intend to fly on as soon as possible. Please understand that we are only here to help T'nagru \u2013\"\n\nHe paused, frustrated that despite bearing a genuine Princess upon his back, this fellow's face and emotions still openly doubted him. Nor did he accord the Princess more than the slightest regard. His mind had virtually blanked her out of existence.\n\nAzania said, <See a woman's place in the hierarchy?>\n\n<I do.> Eyes narrowed. If only this simmering fury would erupt as Dragon fire. Still, they were not about to change the desert at the snap of his talons. In a deliberately low, modulated hiss, he said, \"Vazuga, I have a simple list of demands. Meet these, and we will leave you in peace. Fail to meet my expectations, and I will personally break your city gates that the Skartun may the more easily make merry with your populace. Do we understand one another?\"\n\n\"I gladly await your every command, my lord Dragon!\"\n\nInstant improvement. \"Azania, brief him.\"\n\nShortly, several hundred blue-robed soldiers rushed into the citadel's streets, charged with calming everyone down. Might take a while, Dragon smirked. Partly, it helped that he and Azania walked down through the narrow streets to the artisans' quarter, for people along the way, these dark, robed desert people fleeing indoors only to peek out of the deep windows and from sheltered balconies, began to whisper her name. \"The Princess.\" \"It's the Princess!\" \"Princess Azania, over here!\"\n\nThen, a child ran out to offer her a spray of delicate pink cherry blossoms.\n\nThe fearless Princess melted. Well, that was his impression of her tangled emotions. Her eyes developed that glistening look at the corners, and she knelt to receive the gift with a smile somehow similar to Hammaria's as she brooded over her eggs. Odd. Must be a female attribute.\n\nFirst, they spoke to the leatherworker. His eyes glazed over in disbelief that a Dragon might tolerate a royal rump, and a female one at that, to be seated upon his august scales. Indeed, and what was wrong with his Princess' rear end, he demanded to know? Azania hushed him and had him inform the leatherworker he had four hours to create two basic saddles, one with neck straps and the other with a girth strap. The artisan and his four apprentices fell to with gratifying zeal.\n\nSaddle? Saddle? Dragon almost mislaid his good mood on the spot. The only reason he did not, was that the gold coin figuratively dropped in the hoard of his mind at this point. Why did he have to tell the leatherworkers what to do?\n\nNext door, it was the metalworkers' turn to be treated to the Dragon treatment. One almost suspected they might want to see the back of the beast as quickly as possible.\n\n\"How may I serve you, Dragon?\" he quavered.\n\n\"The Princess will brief you.\"\n\n\"But \u2013\"\n\nAzania showed the man a Dragon bow. \"I want a rotating, flexible mount for this which will be affixed to Dragon's topmost spike. I will help you to take measurements.\"\n\n\"Haaa \u2026 how?\" the poor man wheezed, querying his scaly visitor with his eyes.\n\nDragon pointed a very unequivocal talon at Azania. The metalworker would not even look at her?\n\nShe sighed, \"I'll demonstrate. Dragon, kneel.\"\n\n\"Princess, I do not answer to that tone of voice.\" In his most helpful tone, of course.\n\nShe smiled sweetly, \"Please, o mighty Dragon, would you consider lowering thy towering self that a tiny Princess might clamber upon the mountain ridge that is thy stalwart back?\"\n\n\"For your radiant self, o Princess, I shall wing to the very stars.\"\n\nThe metalworker was still wheezing. Perhaps the man had a lung condition? Anyhow, he suffered a ladder to be laid against his flank that measurements might be taken for his mobile weapon platform, alias, one foot-tall spine spike. Meantime, he chewed over the problem of how his Princess was being treated by her own people, which tallied with Harbonu's warnings. This society treated their women as nonentities; constantly, they waited for him to speak, to act and to decide, snubbing Azania at every turn. They did not even deign to notice they were doing it. The Princess in turn behaved as if she either was unaware, or refused to care. Was he wrong to be infuriated on her behalf?\n\nIf it was this bad here, how would King N'gala treat his daughter? Dragon society had patriarchal leanings. This desert society leaned so far, he was surprised it had not fallen over long ago.\n\nEyes and ears open, and nostrils to the ground, Dragon. Crystallise a plan in his mind. His Princess deserved better, even if she did not realise it \u2013 yet. Could he imagine Aria Seaspray putting up with this behaviour? Her fangs and talons would have been bloodied already.\n\nOn the five-hour mark, with the weather closing in, they chose to fly on ahead of the storm.\n\nA frantic final packing session saw Princess and Dragon on their way with two new, basic saddles for the royal behind, a nifty Dragon bow mount \u2013 which put a new spin on the classic use of the Dragon bow \u2013 and holsters for a store of shiny metal quarrels which would not spill their contents during flight. They planned to use one saddle on his neck for normal flight and the other upon his back during combat. Azania said his neck seat was more comfortable and sheltered from the breeze generated by his flying speed. Besides which, she liked to whisper sweet nothings into his ear canals. All day long.\n\nPractising for someone, he suggested?\n\nMaybe he should take detailed notes, came the snide retort.\n\nHe gritted his fangs. A Dragon of courage would be planning to raid the Vaylarn Archipelago, if at the very least to bring the Princess to her beloved, rather than fretting over whatever dark magic these Skartun must possess. The mind boggled at the thought of Dragons being held as slaves, and mindless thralls moreover. How was that even possible? A smart creature would do what they planned, which was to attack from the air using their new weaponry. Arrows, quarrels, burning oil, boulders. Anything that would do damage to this Jabiz Urdoo and his army.\n\nHe clenched his paws into fists. Then, if he harboured the slightest intention of trying to free his kin, he would have to get close and face the peril, and the ultimate horror to a free creature of the air.\n\nEnslavement? He would rather die.\n\nA dark haziness rising from the south-western horizon gave their flight impetus. At first it drifted along slowly, but the companions soon realised they were victims of an optical illusion. That sandstorm was rushing along faster than they had imagined. The wind first picked up in fitful gusts, then in a much stronger breeze that hurtled him across the miles. The Princess tucked in her nose and mouth covering. He could do with the same. The haziness rose in eerie silence, soon resolving with the help of his spectacles into a rolling, billowing wall of blackness up to a thousand Dragon paces tall, and above that, storm-dark clouds riven by lightning.\n\nHe had never seen a weather phenomenon to compare.\n\nThe Princess said, \"I can't help but think you might need to go up there and be struck by lightning, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" he spluttered. \"I was thinking about trying to overfly the storm, but that's probably too risky, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"It could blow for two days,\" she agreed.\n\n\"Aye. Landing in that might be a trick. So, lightning? You want to see me smoke at the ears?\"\n\n\"I was hoping for a less drastic way to trigger your powers,\" she admitted. \"I can't imagine what this electrolysis power must be like, only that you would somehow be able to generate and store lightning inside your body. That's \u2026 some scary magic, even for a Dragon.\"\n\nHow perfectly she articulated his fears.\n\n\"I'll admit, I hadn't considered frazzling myself to a cinder might start everything off,\" he said quietly, picking up his wingbeat. Could he even outfly that sandstorm, as he had thought? \"I wonder how Sea Dragons learn to breathe fire?\"\n\nThe Princess did not say so, but the tickling against his senses assured him that she was more than aware of his growing acceptance that his heritage might indeed be mixed \u2013 mixed in a way he had never heard of. A Dragon of the air mating with one of the ocean? His sire \u2026 how would it even have come about? Not that the deed was unthinkable. Isles Dragons were related to the Tamarine Mountains Dragons, but there were distinct differences in body shape and size. They were cousins, so to speak. It must be the same with Sea Dragons. They would have marine-friendly features like gills or \u2013 actually, he did not know that for a fact, despite all his research. Given his webby paws and odd powers, compatibility between Dragon types was clearly a given.\n\nMutual attraction was more than a given \u2026 ah, Aria! How could he fly northwest and ruin her reputation forever?\n\nHearts crammed with furious, futile feelings, Dragon raced ahead of the blast for four helter-skelter hours before it became clear that only the tempest would win this race. He had covered many miles more than they expected, but time, distance and his own physical limitations worked against.\n\n\"Put down behind that dune there,\" Azania said. \"With any luck \u2013 good, see? Bushes and boulders.\"\n\nHe made a querying purr.\n\n\"Enough of a storm can bury a city quite nicely, never mind a person.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Dragon, will you just trust me on this one?\"\n\n\"I trust you implicitly.\" Raising his paw, he touched her knee gently. \"Could it be that the real issue lies within the heart attached to this knee?\"\n\nShe made a strangled sound in her throat. \"Sorry. I'm just \u2026 you know, travelling home on a Dragon's back, with a few matters hanging over my head \u2013 an unpaid ransom, father the betrayer, a fanatical army burning down the front gate, and now a mother of a sandstorm to deal with. Bad day, alright?\"\n\n\"I know a few things about bad days.\"\n\n\"Dragon, there are times it's wise to shut the fangs and let a woman vent. Otherwise, you might as well stand in the way of a volcano.\"\n\n\"Vent away.\"\n\nRaising her fists to the sky, she let out a primordial scream. This Dragon nearly leaped out of his hide. By his wings, that was how a heart voiced its rawness? It spoke deeply to him.\n\nPutting down in the lee of a towering sand dune, he shuttered his eye membranes against the stinging blasts of sand and followed the Princess toward the stand of boulders. Not enough to completely shelter him even when lying down, but they would work for a windbreak. The ground trembled beneath his paws. Now that he had stopped flying, he became aware of an eerie moaning quality to the wind. It sounded ravenous, which to a Dragon, was novel. Not too many things dared to consider eating one of his kind.\n\nLaying his palm flat across his shoulders, he leaned close and said, \"Tell me how best I can shelter my friend.\"\n\nShe smiled tremulously. \"By being who you are \u2026 friend.\"\n\n[ T'nagru Besieged ]\n\nSheltered beneath the folds of his doubled-over wings, they rode out the storm blast. The wind whistled overhead without ceasing, dumping a layer of fine obsidian sand over them that steadily crept into every gap, earhole and eyeball. His wing membranes fluttered as the wind blustered and bullied its way around the boulders and over his back. A small dune built up against the rocks protecting them, and against the exposed parts of his back and lower body. Periodically, he flicked the sand off and they settled down to wait again.\n\nInside the gloomy sanctuary the Princess dozed, treated his eyes with water from her own gourd, and coughed unhappily. High dust content in the air. Of course, it was clear that a sandstorm was a boon for T'nagru, as no army could possibly fight in such weather. The defenders could relax inside the citadel walls, while the siege army tried to keep from being buried without. Why the Skartun army did not simply unleash their Dragons, fly them over the walls and ravage the citadel from within, he had no idea \u2013 but that mystery would shortly become clear. Could they have mutilated their slaves? Could these Dragons genuinely not fly like Sea Serpents, or those tree-dwelling emerald Serpent Dragons they had seen deep in the Tamarine Mountains?\n\nAfter a day and a half, the sandstorm blew itself out. With a final, asthmatic puff, it rumbled off over the dunes in search of fresh conquests. Dragon and Princess dug themselves free of the sand, brushed bucket loads of sand out of every mentionable and unmentionable place, and headed for N'ginta citadel.\n\nHaving expected a late afternoon robbed of its heat by the storm, Dragon found himself contrariwise flying through a living furnace. Taramis blazed as an unrelenting, dazzling speck high in the sky, so brilliant that it almost completely outshone Ignis. The red giant was visible only as a halo of crimson around the white. Heat rolled in stultifying waves over the dunes, which ran north to south in ranks as regular as any well-drilled army. Climbing to an altitude of a mile brought a measure of relief, and the sight of black smoke drifting slightly southward on the horizon.\n\n\"N'ginta?\" he grunted.\n\n\"Without a doubt,\" the Princess agreed.\n\nSilent-winged, he glided past a burned-out oasis. Only the stumps of date palms remained around a muddy waterhole. The clouds of flies around it were thick enough to be seen from a height; they agreed pensively that there was no need to investigate. Dragon tried to adjust his spectacles, but the city on the horizon stubbornly remained out of focus \u2013 oh. Of course.\n\n\"Could you please clean the lenses, Azania?\"\n\nShe passed them back shortly. \"You're not going to like what you see.\"\n\nHe pursed his lips. \"I see a white sandcastle perched upon an endless black beach, besieged by an army larger than they reported. That's a \u2013 a huge number of Humans.\"\n\nHis skills in estimating a flea infestation of that size being sorely lacking.\n\nAs they winged on, the disposition and size of the Skartun army became depressingly apparent. Since there was no way in this inhospitable land to hide so much as a mouse, let alone a Dragon, they made no effort at disguise. Even a night arrival would not have gone unremarked \u2013 the city was surrounded by the enemy.\n\nSeven siege towers stood parked toward the rear of the host, while two had been hauled up toward the walls to make life miserable for the defenders. Mangonels, catapults and ballistae, which must have been dragged right across the desert, pounded the walls steadily. Thin threads of ladders stood propped against the forty-foot outer battlements. N'ginta boasted two mighty curtain walls, the second standing a majestic sixty feet tall, a quarter-mile back from the first. Azania had drawn him a neat sketch. The inner city was small but could serve as a final bolt-hole should the outer gates fall.\n\nFlames licked two hundred feet tall up the outer gates. The attacking Dragons were not discernible from this angle due to the height of the hugely fortified gatehouses, but their effect was more than apparent. The gates had been clad in metal. He wondered if any remained, or if it had long since melted away. Dragon fire was a short-range weapon, useful up to about twenty feet. He had no doubt that close up, it could be as hot as a forge fire.\n\nHe noticed aloud, \"They're not attacking in full force, are they?\"\n\n\"No. Very peculiar \u2013 why?\" The Princess scratched her curls vigorously. \"Either they're expecting the Dragons to do their dirty work for them, or \u2026\"\n\n\"Or, they're waiting for something.\"\n\n\"Do we dare to guess what?\"\n\nHe shook his head, as unhappy as her tone revealed. Something was clearly amiss. Aside from the assault on the gates, there were two main points of contact on the flanks. There, streams of warriors clad in silver plate and black-feathered helms fought to scale the outer battlements using grappling hooks, ladders and the siege towers. The defenders tried to set the towers alight, to hack at the ladders with axes or to push them away using long poles, and occasionally resorted to burning oil. Imagine that? His nostrils flared. The stench would soon hit.\n\nCompared to the number of tents pitched in mathematically perfect rows there in the sand, he and Azania agreed that perhaps only a fifth of the enemy was committed to this present assault.\n\nThis was war. Real war! What place, this, for an artistic, atypical Dragon of no fires? Even Juggernaut's training paled before what he beheld \u2013 if he were honest, he must admit to being daunted of hearts. Hubris paled before the reality of a besieging army going about the business of death with the steady, unchanging rhythm of forge bellows. Men were dying down there. Falling in the sand, never to rise. Arrows flicked through the sky like swarms of darting dragonflies. Rank upon rank of soldiers rushed toward the walls with manic zeal he scent sensed even from this distance. Here was a love of death and destruction to rival even the most rapacious of Dragons.\n\nAt the base of the nearest tower, he sighted the first thrall, a green Dragon of unremarkable size, heavily armoured with banded metal armour. His job appeared to be to trundle the siege tower along upon command. A handler sat upon his back, holding silver reins in either hand. The reins connected to a frightful metal cage the Dragon wore clamped \u2013 or even welded, if he was not mistaken \u2013 about his entire skull. Absolutely no doubt that abomination was a permanent fixture. What was it?\n\nRaking the stubby green Dragon with an aching gaze, his hearts almost stopped. Only scarred stubs were left of his wings. Dragon looked again and again, trying to see what was not there. Black spots danced in front of his eyes. His fangs ground painfully together as he groaned loudly and long.\n\n\"What's the matter?\"\n\n<Blergh! They've \u2026 ah, Princess! Vile torturers, they've maimed that Dragon \u2013 he has no wings!>\n\nShe said a word undoubtedly learned in a Vanracian dungeon. Pointing, she said, \"The Dragon behind the tower has wings, however, just \u2026 they are clamped down, I think.\"\n\n<Aye \u2026 aye, I'm sorry, I just \u2026>\n\n<I know, friend Dragon.>\n\n<No, you don't! Ah \u2026 forgive me. My tongue burns. I \u2026 and I thought being fireless to be the very worst fate.>\n\nSpreading her arms, she held him and whispered, \"I know this means little, Dragon, but I have had a sense of your hearts over these months. You are far more than you think. Together, we will change the course of this war.\"\n\nShudder!\n\nAfter a long, deep breath, he said, \"Thank you, Princess. I shall dredge up courage from somewhere. We will find a way. Even if we have to pick those fleas off the sand one by one.\"\n\nShe did not say so, but he knew the answer \u2013 the only answer \u2013 before he had even finished speaking. There was no time for that. If her kingdom were to be saved, they would need to swing the balance very soon. Time to go consult with the King. Dragon hardened his hearts. He thought of the fire of an Aria, and the bravery of a Princess. Shut the eye membranes for a moment.\n\n\"What are you doing, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Painting a new future in my mind's eye, Azania.\"\n\nTo his absolute, wing stuttering shock, she threw back her head and laughed! Rich and scornful, brutal and ebullient, her laughter rolled over his head toward the city, just a mile ahead now as he tipped into the descent. She laughed like a Dragoness. This girl was something fierce!\n\nPointing ahead, she said, \"We have one chance at a big surprise. I say we go tip over that siege tower. You have the leverage and the weight, don't you?\"\n\n\"As an estimate, aye.\"\n\n\"Good. Then, a fast pass along the wall. Scrape the battlements clear of ladders.\"\n\n\"With the right pass, we could break that flank,\" he agreed, narrowing his eyes. \"Only one chance, however. Next time, they'll be expecting us.\"\n\n\"Aye. So we'll show them something of what to expect, but not all.\"\n\n\"No Dragon bows as yet?\"\n\nHer dark eyes glittered. \"Later. I have a few ideas regarding their equipment. In addition, just look at all those nice tents pitched so very closely together. Windy day, fire arrows \u2026\"\n\nHis dark mood eased. Laughter fizzed in his veins and buzzed like tiny, jabbing bolts of electricity in his hearts. \"You are a wicked, wicked Princess, do you know that?\"\n\n\"Obedient.\"\n\n\"Obedient to the nefarious voices inside your head, you mean.\"\n\n\"I know, and one of them sounds very much like this Dragon I know. How peculiar.\"\n\nAs she spoke, the Princess limbered up her bow and checked the position of her quiver, slung beside her right knee where it tucked against his neck. Dragon plucked the spectacles off his skull and passed them back to her. Into the packs they went.\n\nNo saddlebags for him. Travel packs, maybe.\n\nTime for a change of pace. He flexed his wings and rotated his shoulders to loosen them up after a long flight.\n\n\"Dragon roar?\"\n\n\"Dragon big roar!\" She hooted at her own joke. \"Princess block ears?\"\n\n\"Let's do it afterward,\" he decided. \"I'd like your father to be quaking when we go meet him \u2013 unless he's not the quaking sort?\"\n\n\"Not so much. Casual approach, Dragon. Let's go for the tower without looking like we're going for it.\"\n\nFly casual? Whistle a merry tune as he approached the target with a coy sidelong glance?\n\nDragon ran the needed manoeuvers through his mind, grateful to sense the Princess checking her seat and straps. A series of deep breaths steadied him. He scented the desert, the city and the sheeting fires which smelled like a blacksmith's furnace. More metal than wood burning as yet? The main gate faced the southeast quarter, granting shelter from the main seasonal winds and storms, he understood. The Skartun army camped in a semicircle around the southern side. How much time and manpower had it taken them to dig out from beneath the sandstorm? Had they re-pitched their entire tent encampment in the course of several hours? It would not surprise him.\n\nJuggernaut would have remarked upon their discipline. Always a key sign in an army.\n\nThey approached from a direct westerly bearing. He watched tiny, blurred figures rushing along atop the battlements, forming wedges or shield walls to counter the dark-plumed attackers who had gained footholds on the top in several places.\n\n\"Ready, Princess? It's going to be quite a jolt.\"\n\nDrawing the blue cloth up over her nose and mouth, she said, \"Dragon, I've never been more ready to defend my home.\"\n\nThis girl \u2013 this warrior Princess!\n\nWhirling upon a wingtip, Dragon surged toward the first tower. It looked to have been transported in several pieces and reassembled to reach a height of fifty-five feet, allowing the attackers to shoot down at defenders atop the outer curtain wall. The base was longer than it was wide, set upon eight great wooden wheels. Fine-tuning his speed to use his tonnage to its best advantage, he brought his hind paws into position for the initial kick.\n\n*Kaboom!* His paws smashed home five feet from the top. Gripping with every talon, he allowed his upper body to lurch forward over the top, absorbing the second impact with bent forepaws. Azania cried out briefly, but immediately told him she was fine. Flaring his wings to their fullest extent, Dragon lurched onward, his full strength and weight combining to haul the heavy base of the tower up off the ground. The wood creaked and groaned as it teetered.\n\nLeverage! He growled, <Come on, Dragon!> As he flapped his wings furiously, even his tiny rider flung her weight forward to help. Over it went!\n\n\"Release!\" she shouted.\n\nFireless fool, he had almost forgotten!\n\nA bowstring twanged beside his ear canal. Her shaft spat over the gap toward the wall, striking a Skartunese warrior square in the back. He fell with a faint cry.\n\nThe dark defenders, clad in distinctive chainmail hauberks and wearing the symbol of a flaming desert sun on their left shoulder, shield and helms, appeared to be too shocked to even cheer as the tower crashed to the ground. Narked, Dragon surged for the wall.\n\nLines of silver, heavily plate-armoured men swarmed up the ladders, six or seven men tall before they reached the top. They were noticeably bigger and burlier than the T'nagrun soldiers, but just as dark of skin. Desert warriors. He scythed in beneath the first ladder, ripping it away from its footing as he flapped mightily to keep his balance. A flick of his paws cleared it of a load of Skartun rats. Then, twirling the wood in his grip, he used it as a battering-ram to front his sideways run along the wall. Azania's bow twanged again. A black shaft feathered in the visor of a warrior's helm \u2013 a Skartun leader, he realised belatedly, riding a mass of ladders and warriors down to the soft desert sand piled against the wall.\n\nStupid sandstorm! They were not meant to have a soft landing.\n\nPicking up his paws, Dragon did a stomping dance even as the first arrows and spears whipped toward his back. Wood, bodies and armour shattered beneath his tonnage.\n\nThe soldiers waiting upon the sand began to react, forming their lines, dropping their shields into position. Spinning upon his heels, he lashed out with his heavy tail as Juggernaut had drilled him over and over again. *Kerump!* Their line imploded. Now to put the ladder to good use. Raising it overhead, he beat at their heads in the same way that the Princess liked to fan a fire. *Bling! Blang! Crack!*\n\nThat was too much even for trained soldiers. They broke their lines and fled in a mass panic, the Princess firing shafts at will into their backs. So thick were their numbers, she could barely miss.\n\nDragon eyed the remaining three ladders against the wall. The brown-faced Skartunese warriors stuck partway up did not look best pleased, but neither did they display open fear. Why not? He would teach them to tremble at a Dagon's vengeance!\n\nAblaze with rage, Dragon leaped up to grasp the top of the battlements with his forepaws. He lashed his heavy tail across their backs with a *whup-crack* sound, smashing the unfortunates against the wall and cracking their ladders at the same time. They fell away, screaming \u2013 those who were still alive. Again, he trampled them heavily, finishing the job before leaping again, this time for the top of the battlement. Black plumes waved before him! With a sweep of his paws, he shovelled a troop of Skartun into a fatal fall in the street behind the curtain wall.\n\n\"Get out of my way!\"\n\nWaving her hands, Azania shouted from his back, \"Get out of his way!\"\n\nThe T'nagrun soldiers belatedly tried to press aside on the relatively narrow battlement. Springing onto the crenelated top of the wall, Dragon ran along to the next knot of black feathers, using his wings to aid his balance. This time, he collected several sword blows before he shovelled them off. Brave men, but in cramped quarters with a forty-foot fall at their backs, there was only going to be one winner in a pushing contest. Azania loosed one final shaft, dropping a Skartunese warrior five paces further along the battlement.\n\nA hand touched his skull. \"How's about that roar, then?\"\n\nTurning slowly past a mass of shocked T'nagrun faces, Dragon gripped the stone wall that stood waist-high to these men. The stance he assumed was massive, square-on to the enemy, proud.\n\nThunder belled out over the desert, <I \u2013 AM \u2013 DRAGON!!>\n\nAs the echoes faded over the city, Azania turned to the soldiers nearest them and said, \"Men, fire that siege tower, would you? And do clean up below. It's good to keep the streets tidy.\"\n\nHe said, \"That other tower's still vulnerable.\"\n\nHer dark eyes glittered in the corner of his vision. \"Just the tower?\"\n\n\"Aye. Let's take it by stealth.\" The Dragon poured off the battlement into the streets below. \"I'd like a look at the main gate, too, in passing.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The soldiers of T'nagru were no fools, Dragon had to concede. Before he and Azania rushed over to topple the other tower, they were already rappelling over the walls to deal with the mess at the base \u2013 on the outside.\n\nShocked, he spluttered, \"They're desecrating the bodies?\"\n\n\"Never. That's against our beliefs. Only weapons, equipment and water,\" the Princess explained. \"The real reason is to ensure the ladders aren't re-used against the city. Wood's that valuable in the desert.\"\n\n\"Wood? I see.\"\n\nHaving dealt with the second tower in a similar fashion at a cost of three arrows through his wings and one plugged in his neck, Dragon and Princess flew up over the inner wall. Destination? The Royal Palace. Azania trembled against his neck.\n\nIt was already early evening. Ignis descended huge, crimson and bloody into the western deserts. Taramis hid somewhere behind that great bulk, invisible. Dust and smoke hung thick in the air, creating one of the fieriest sunsets he had ever seen. Hope the Skartun did not take it for a portent, the white city being painted crimson.\n\nReaching up a paw, he squeezed her knee with the utmost gentleness. \"Princess, I apologise.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"I regret to inform you that I am about to turn into a rabid, possessive, unshakable, galumphing tyrant.\"\n\nHer laughter snuffled against his scales.\n\nLeaving terror in his wake, he flew up to a huge, blocky building surrounded by wide, ornately decorated white archways that led into cooler, shielded interior spaces. Desert architecture harnessed the natural flows of air, he understood, air itself being an excellent insulator. His paws touched down upon green-veined white marble floors in which he could see his own reflection. How many servants made this possible? The pedestal and capital of each column was ornately stone-carved and finished with exquisite artistry.\n\nWithin, delicate-looking geometric screens separated the living spaces from the outside. The fantastical patterning delighted the eye. He could spend years painting such artistry. The ceilings were great friezes depicting scenes of desert, and statues decorated the rich colonnaded hallways. Palace indeed. It compared to the finest, richest Dragon lairs, especially the museum lair he had once seen, belonging to the self-styled King of the Dragons, Sledge the Dominator.\n\nThe guards naturally did not welcome an unannounced visitor, but wisely, gave him plenty of room.\n\nHe curled his lips into a toothy leer. \"I have come to pay my respects to King N'gala N'gala. Where may I find him?\"\n\n<In the throne room,> Azania breathed.\n\n<Play the game, Princess,> he admonished.\n\n<Heart's not playing much.>\n\nHe might have differed. It played a new dance, one of apprehension \u2013 a dance he remembered from that first day he destroyed the tower room around her. Complex colours seethed against his senses. Even farther back, he realised, she was not anymore the girl who had been kidnapped from these cool halls months ago, these veiled, scented rooms filled with the whisper of soft desert robes and a faraway tinkling of harp music. That person locked in a stinking Vanracian dungeon was no more \u2013 yet she was not free, was she? Nor was he. Different chains, for different reasons. They had to help one another.\n\nThe guards looked him over, and the veiled girl seated upon his neck, with the utmost suspicion, but did not appear to recognise the Princess.\n\nDragon padded toward the men, bunching his shoulders to remind them just who \u2013 and how much \u2013they were dealing with. In his throatiest purr, he clarified, \"Without delay.\"\n\n\"We'll announce you \u2013 ah \u2026\"\n\n\"Call me Dragon.\"\n\n\"Dragon. Wait here.\"\n\n\"There's a war on, in case you hadn't noticed,\" he growled.\n\nEven up in the sumptuous Royal Palace, the roar of those Dragon flames against the main gates was distant, but noticeable. The metal hinges, supports and lock-and-bar mechanisms had been far too hot to touch. Soldiers clad in heavy protective gear constantly wet the surfaces and, every handful of minutes, shoved an armoured spout over the top to try to wet the outer surface. Huge clouds of steam and damp smoke roared up without ceasing, filling the city with a layer of grey ash \u2013 except here in the pristine Palace, he observed. Must be nice to enjoy one's creature comforts whilst the populace suffered.\n\nPerhaps he misjudged the man.\n\nHe would scent him out in just a moment. Following the Princess' prompting, he extended his legs to follow the guard perhaps more quickly than the man had expected, for he glanced back and then signalled up to the end of the corridor. Great, ornate doors faced him there, wide and tall enough to accommodate even a Dragon. Four guards awaited in stiff array. He wondered how much they liked their jobs, as a toothy beast paced down the corridor toward them. One slipped out of sight, no doubt to deliver a warning.\n\n\"That's the throne room,\" Azania whispered. \"He'll be inside.\"\n\n\"Shall we go in?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do Dragons knock?\"\n\nHe could hear her smiling, he was sure. \"Depends on what their Princesses want. I'm feeling ornery.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n[ Ornery Plus ]\n\nThough he must have had time to return to his throne, King N'gala N'gala did not choose to meet his visitors as Dragon might have expected. He stood beside a table perhaps ten feet square, which held a model of the city and the Skartun army arrayed about it. The strategic situation had clearly been under discussion until the interruption.\n\nThe model needed updating, courtesy of a certain Dragon and rebel Princess beating up a few Skartunese troops just minutes before.\n\nHis fiery gaze roamed the hall briefly. Rectangular in shape, the centre was raised in a great, ornate cupola decorated in gold-leaf friezes of desert horses and battle scenes. At the far end, a great archway separated out the throne area, which was not in use today. Great treasure chests and important relics of the realm framed that space, along with rich silk-woven wall hangings depicting people he assumed must be previous Kings and Queens of the realm. They wore long desert robes; the older pictures all showed the women wearing face veils.\n\nFour great golden braziers shaped as Dragons' upraised paws lit the space. Almost definitely manufactured by Dragon artisans, he decided, but where would they hail from? Certainly not from the Tamarine Mountains. The style was too exotic.\n\nDespite the dark gathering outside, the throne room was light and airy, filled with spangling light golden enough to gladden any Dragon's heart.\n\nGlad? Absolutely not! Inclining his muzzle, he fixed his most malevolent gaze upon the King.\n\nImpossible not to hate this man.\n\nIgnoring the guards trying to keep him a respectable distance from the table, and the seven crimson-robed men who stood around it, Dragon stepped up to join them. Four wore golden crowns. The King's crown was easily the most ornate, a tall design of the flaming desert sun picked out in rubies that appeared to make red-golden beams rise above and behind his head. Unmistakable, besides that his curly black hair was drizzled with white. The three Princes wore simpler golden torcs upon their brows, with an emblem at the centre of the forehead, the desert sun, while the other men must be military advisors, judging by their bearing.\n\n\"King N'gala,\" he purred.\n\n\"Dragon,\" said he, unmoved and unmoving.\n\nNeither bowed.\n\nAfter a moment, Dragon chose to incline his muzzle slightly, a gesture of acknowledgement. He scented the man, and found \u2026 nothing. That threw him. Nothing at all? He must be resistant to Dragon magic, somehow. What an unexpected complication!\n\nThe King said, \"I assume you are the fireless Dragon, Blitz the Devastator, who stole my daughter, come to demand ransom? Your timing could hardly be worse. Where is the Princess Azania?\"\n\nAzania pushed back and lowered her hood. \"Father.\"\n\nThe man's dark eyes flickered. The other six gasped, but King N'gala again displayed extraordinary control of his emotions. \"Daughter. I am glad to see you well, if improperly attired.\"\n\nWhen she did not speak, Dragon replied, \"Are you glad?\"\n\n\"I am. Descend from the beast's back and greet your father properly, child.\"\n\nHe stared down at the King. Obsidian. All he sensed of this man, was obsidian as impenetrable as the desert of his birth. \"King N'gala, we have come to join the war effort. We are no friends of the Skartun, as your generals will report.\"\n\nPrincess Azania slipped down from his neck, as light-footed as any feline. Before she could make a move, his paw clasped her waist, talons extended upward as if to threaten her neck. He rasped, \"No.\"\n\n\"I should greet my father.\"\n\n\"Be silent.\"\n\nN'gala raised an eyebrow in query. \"What are your demands, Dragon?\"\n\nHis dark, harshly lined face was full of years, full of desert winds and faraway places. Effortlessly, he made his visitor feel very much the gauche youngster. How was he so out of his depth? He needed to retreat, sense the scents of this place, regroup \u2013 yet right now, he must be as sharp as an Aria's talons, and as cunning as a desert Princess.\n\nOn the spot, he decided to spring his ambush. \"What price did you agree with King Tyloric for your daughter's person?\"\n\n\"Everyone here knows her price \u2013\"\n\n\"But you don't know mine.\"\n\nSoftness. That instinctive whisper caused the King's knuckles to whiten upon the model Skartun soldier he held in his left hand. The first genuine response. So, the man could be reached. Azania's position here was more tenuous than they had figured \u2013 and, her father's motives must be far more complex than they had discussed. Not a simple ransom. No. Until he worked out what was going on, he needed to be unpredictable.\n\nFlicking out a sharpened talon, Dragon reached over the tabletop. \"I have two reasons for coming to N'ginta Citadel, o King.\" As he spoke, he knocked over the model siege tower. \"Just fixing the picture, here. One, the Skartun represent an existential threat to my kind. I intend to observe and report upon all that I see, especially regarding the enslavement of Dragons. Two, Princess Azania begged me to come and save her kingdom.\" Clearing the western rampart of enemy soldiers, he said, \"A determined Dragon could make a great difference to a siege. Much more so, a Dragon and his Dragon Rider.\"\n\n\"Dragon \u2026 Rider?\" the oldest Prince echoed.\n\n\"Aye. Meet my honoured Dragon Rider, Azania \u2013 trained in warfare by the greatest Dragon fighter of all time, Juggernaut the Grinder. Although you might know her from before, there are aspects of your sister's capabilities, Prince N'chala, of which you have not the faintest notion.\"\n\nHer oldest brother had the ill grace to form his features into a sceptical frown. Indeed, all the brothers exchanged disbelieving glances.\n\nKing N'gala's face took on a thunderous aspect. \"I heard report from Vanrace, Dragon \u2013\"\n\n\"That Prince Floric is very, very lucky to be alive?\" he inserted smoothly. \"On account of my Rider's honour which you value so highly, o King, I did attempt to separate his head from his shoulders. I sacked his castle twice, and burned it down in large part \u2013 but any principled creature would find it crass to speak of ransom when a Dragon army is busy burning down the city gates nearby. Let's discuss what we can do to rid T'nagru of this Skartun rabble. Our aid is yours for the asking.\"\n\n\"Whether we want it or not?\" N'chala interjected drily.\n\n\"We are here to serve, brother,\" Azania said.\n\nN'gala grated, \"You are my daughter and I will have you back.\"\n\nAn inflection in his tone almost dropped the Princess to her knees, but his paw halted the movement. Azania shook her head slightly, as if she had an insect lodged in her ear.\n\nAha!\n\nScenting the air urgently, Dragon realised that these others did not enjoy the same protections as the King. So many nuances teased his nostrils, he could not resolve them all at once, but it was the Princess' scent traces that concerned him most. Her detectable emotions were \u2013 well, smudged was the best word he could think of by way of description. Usually she was sparky, clear, changeable. Now a cloud had drawn over the suns. He must get her away from here as quickly as possible.\n\nSheathing his talons, he placed a paw upon her shoulder as if to make a point regarding his possession of the prize to the King. Meantime, he attempted a measure he had never tried before, extending his magic of subterfuge as a shield around her person.\n\n\"Well, Dragon?\"\n\nHe smiled at the seven red-robed, richly attired desert leaders. \"Shall we discuss how you're going to help us tear that army apart? I'm feeling ornery, with extra-fiery peppers on the side.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "\"Ornery with peppers on the side?\" Azania snorted. \"Is ornery your new favourite word?\"\n\n\"It describes people I can't read at all.\"\n\n\"I sensed you wrapping me about with your magic,\" she said, folding her arms. \"I don't like it when you \u2026 play with my mind.\"\n\n\"That impossible thornbush, do you mean?\"\n\nSpreading his wings above the city, Dragon pressed northward. The feint. He considered what to tell her. How much to reveal. Before he had quite settled upon blunt honesty, she said:\n\n\"Dragon, we agreed not to hide issues from one another. I know you well enough, I hope, to understand you do few things without, well, overthinking them something awful. So, are you a mouse or are you a Dragon? Squeak up.\"\n\nHe groaned at the old pun. \"So funny.\" As he told her what he had sensed of her father, however, the Princess became quieter and quieter, until it was he who flew with a mouse tickling his neck. At last, he shook his muzzle slowly. \"Something is wrong in your kingdom. Very wrong. Look, I'm not well-versed in the whole dark magic \u2026 business. The Terror Clan Dragons \u2013 you remember, up in the far northeast of Solixambria? They're infamous for it. I cannot help but scent sense that something has a grip upon your father and it is plainly not for the better.\"\n\n\"You had better not be defending him!\"\n\nHer hurt blazed, no need of magic to sense that.\n\n\"No, Princess, I am not. Not in that sense. We will defend the city and your people. His actions regarding you \u2013 well, let me make a small species-style confession. Dragons are very poor at dropping grudges. It's a blind spot, a failing, the reason behind every vindictive, vengeful blood feud, an affliction of epic proportions \u2013\"\n\n\"I get it,\" she laughed, but the sound struck him as mournful. She patted the back of his head. \"Thanks, Dragon. You're the best.\"\n\n\"Hardly, but I shall swagger from here to the Vaylarn Archipelago merely to hear you say something like that from time to time, Princess \u2013 my Princess. Mine. MINE!\"\n\n\"Shh, you silly beast. We're meant to be sneaking.\"\n\n\"Oh. Sorry.\"\n\nTilting his wings to glide, he drew in a deep breath.\n\nShe said, \"I guess I needed someone to look after me. My true Prince came wearing scales and breathing f \u2013 oh, Dragon! I'm sorry. You've done so much for me, and what have I done for you, but insult you, bother you, pinch your food and \u2013\"\n\n\"Give me belief?\"\n\nHer hollow chuckle infuriated him. Were males not supposed to reveal thoughts and emotions, without ridicule?\n\nA quiet apology stilled his thoughts, however. The Princess said, \"Perhaps we both need to work on the belief.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Much as he wished otherwise, it was not so.\n\nFor half an hour, they winged up into the night sky, pleased that a thick band of clouds drifted over the stars. Could not have asked for better weather. Flexing his wingtips, he swept out onto a new direction for the return journey. No-one wanted the Skartun to anticipate this attack.\n\nThey discussed priorities for a few minutes. If they could break the Skartun ability to stage their siege effectively, there might be an opportunity to approach those captive Dragons and see what could be done for them. They needed to stay away from King N'gala until they worked out what his powers might be. Later, if they survived, there might be talk of ransom, but even an avaricious Dragon who was meant to building up a hoard had to admit he had zero plans in that vein. Not unless those plans involved the King of a very, very faraway Archipelago.\n\nInstead, he claimed, certain cheeky Dragon Riding Princesses could better spend their days scrubbing a mighty Dragon's scales.\n\n\"Oh, really?\" Azania laughed. \"So, I'm your Dragon Rider now? When did that become a thing?\"\n\n\"It became a 'thing,'\" he snorted, framing the quote with upraised talons, \"when we invented it, so there. How do you Humans say it? Shove that up your stovepipe and smoke it?\"\n\n\"Dragon! Rude connotations.\"\n\n\"I was unaware.\"\n\n\"Well, I am not. Especially considering how my father and brothers regarded me. My wicked trousers and wanton hairstyle sent their collective blood pressure through the palace roof! I'm doomed.\"\n\n\"Hardly. Since you are not planning to marry any walking slugs of the ilk of Prince Flatulent anytime soon, Princess, I suggest you focus upon how the cut of your wings, the sheen of your scales, and the, uh \u2013 just work with the inapplicable metaphor here, would you? Messy, messy language. Something about you not needing a dress, nor for that matter, any clothing at all, to look beautiful.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He mimed clouting himself across the earhole. \"Slip of the old forked tongue there.\"\n\n\"As if! I know when my leg's being pulled \u2013 with Dragon-sized subtlety, might I add?\"\n\n\"Guiltless.\"\n\n\"Total rot. Right. Let's see if this clever fire pot idea will work, shall we?\"\n\nTest number one for their unconventional ideas. Sure, eyebrows had wagged at a few of their suggestions, but the King and his advisors had not been slow on the uptake. A winged ally represented a substantial advantage in relatively static desert siege warfare.\n\nUnfortunately, the King's primary request was for them to destroy the beasts flaming their gate. Immediately. At best, they had five days of water left.\n\nDestroying the Dragons he had come to save was not the point.\n\nNor was the argument he had with the Princess over the issue. She insisted he had to be prepared for the possibility that they might need to choose between the Dragons and the city. He wanted nothing of the sort. They would find a way. A good compromise. Life was not so easy, she said \u2013 rightly, of course, which did not make him any less growly and defensive. Even trying to convince his stubborn inner voice that perhaps they could contrive to injure the Dragons enough that they could no longer walk up to the gate anymore, caused him to break out in a nasty scale rash.\n\nNo less than fourteen ballistae covered the Dragons, however. To get close enough to fire accurately and do real damage meant running a dangerous, likely fatal gauntlet.\n\nAfter finishing their first consultation with the King, Prince N'chala had taken them down to the stores to have their clay oil vessels prepared, fire arrows sourced, and to discuss the all-important fire pot with a team of engineers and scientists. Since a particular four-pawed wonder could not produce so much as a minor spark in his own right, they needed to carry fire with them \u2013 fire that would not be snuffed out by flying or high-speed manoeuvers, nor spill all over the Princess while she was fighting Dragonback.\n\nThat would be awkward.\n\nPrincess Azania had thought ahead far enough to consider having fire-resistant armour made for herself. Unfortunately, that armour was up at Chakkix Camp and nowhere near where it needed to be, such as adorning her person. Lack of preparedness. N'chala had the armourer track down a number of lightweight pieces for her \u2013 nothing else they possessed would fit a person of her diminutive stature.\n\nFour feet and eight inches tall! What a \u2026 titan, he had teased, earning himself a friendly clout across the snout. Girls did not fight, in her culture.\n\nN'chala had said, \"Sister, this light leather-backed plate will not stop a direct arrow strike, so please, be careful out there, alright?\"\n\n\"Now you care?\" she teased.\n\nHe gave her a strange look. \"Of course I do. So does our father, even though I know you don't believe it. It would help if you behaved in less of a brazen manner, Azania. You've gone so \u2026 wild. It's unnatural, that's what it is.\"\n\n\"Necessity,\" she gritted between her teeth.\n\nAzania must appreciate the support of her brothers as much as he always had.\n\nDragon quickly changed the subject to the matter of how they planned to carry heaps of breakable clay pots into battle without cracking them all. The exchange bothered him. Was there something in the air? The water? Could some foul magic be sending all these desert people completely roaring-at-the-moons crazy?\n\nWho would just sit behind their walls and wait for the enemy to burn the gates down?\n\nWhere was Jabiz Urdoo?\n\nToo many questions. Far too few answers.\n\nEven a Dragon must put one paw in front of another. Tonight's nefarious work would target the siege towers, still neatly lined up at the back of the enemy camp. If those went up like torches, as they hoped, their next stop must be the ballistae. Those were the primary weapons which could stop a Dragon mid-flight \u2013 mid anything, to be perfectly clear.\n\n\"A touch more to your left wing.\"\n\nHow, out in the back-end of nowhere upon an overcast desert night, four hours after the suns had finished their day's work traversing the heavens, did she do that? Razor sharp instincts.\n\n\"Like this?\"\n\n\"Perfect.\"\n\nAlthough they were still at least ten miles from the citadel by his reckoning, he slanted his wings to begin a rapid, powerful descent. One vertical mile in five horizontal miles. An ocean of comber-like dunes spread out before him. The lower he flew, the better the perspective helped him, because he could measure his altitude over several summits ahead and decide upon subtle adjustments. Nonetheless, his enthusiasm caused his left wing to clip the height of a dune; thanks to the steep slope beyond, he avoided burying his muzzle in the sand at high speed, and that only by a whisker he most certainly did not possess.\n\nHumans compared draconic movement to feline litheness. Dragons compared Humans to scurrying vermin, and worse. Hmm.\n\n\"Azania, when I called you Humans grubs \u2013 early on, when you were first getting to know how incredibly savvy I am regarding your kind, what did you think \u2026 were you insulted?\"\n\n\"Not particularly. I'm dark-skinned, after all.\"\n\n\"What colour are the Humans from the Vaylarn Archipelago?\n\n\"Lighter than me, but still pleasingly brown,\" she said. \"You will note many differences, however. They are more rugged of build, taller and broader in the shoulder than my people, and their faces are broader \u2013 noble of brow, I'd say. The hair is handsomely curly and worn to the shoulders, and oh! The men! Oh Dragon, Archipelago men are so chiselled, they make a Princess shiver \u2013\"\n\n\"Stop tugging my wings.\"\n\n\"It's all true.\"\n\nDragon squinted as he spied a dark rectangular silhouette looming against a dark sky. \"The towers!\"\n\nThe Princess snapped a naughty word. \"How did we \u2013 so fast \u2013\"\n\n\"Too much drooling over your Prince. Fire?\"\n\nStones clicked together on his back. \"Trying! Darned wind \u2026\" *Click, click.* \"Can't get it.\"\n\n\"Turn around.\"\n\nShe wriggled about upon her seat. *Click, clack \u2026 click \u2026* \"Keep going in.\" *Clack.* \"I'll tell you when.\"\n\nWith his weak eyes and far stronger sense of smell, Dragon hunted for enemies. The inrushing speed worked against him, here \u2013 but his hearts clenched as his instincts worked faster than knowledge. Azania's suggestion had been to scent out their emotions. Excellent! Wind-proof magic. Why had he not thought of this approach?\n\nHe said, \"One guard per tower.\"\n\n\"Got it. Oil jars?\"\n\nHefting the sack in his left paw, the Dragon plucked the first jar out with his talons and rolled it carefully into position. \"Ready when you are.\"\n\nShe had better be quick. The movements against his neck were deft. Snick of a belt buckle. Slight twang of fingers testing her bowstring, not for the first time this evening. The curling breeze brought a fragrant scent of lilies to his nostrils, from an aromatic oil they had been assured would burn beautifully. It was used as a base for many perfumes. Next came a tang of smoke from the fire pot, which was filled with a slow-burning resin.\n\nHis wings flared short of the first tower. \"Princess!\"\n\n\"Ready.\"\n\nStalling in the air with a powerful back-beating action, Dragon lined them up with the open entrance to the lowest level. He pitched the clay pot inside. Shards tinkled. Almost immediately, her bowstring twanged a musical note. A blazing arrow zipped into the yawning black space like an unexpectedly large, swift firefly.\n\n*WHOMP!!*\n\nDragon bared his fangs in approval. Spinning about in the air, he tail-slammed the fleeing guard back into the raging flames. \"Next?\"\n\n[ Sowing Mayhem ]\n\nThe second tower went up with a satisfying roar of flames, but on the next the clay pot of oil failed to shatter. Azania clucked unhappily as her fire arrow then declined to light from the pot. The guard inside hurled a dagger at her, missing her head by inches. She returned the favour with an unlit arrow square in the chest.\n\nSmash, crack, gurgle, reload, *whomp!* Up went the third siege tower.\n\nGood stuff, this oil. The flames even smelled aromatic. Scenting the air with approval, Dragon pounced upon the next man, who had time for a shrill cry of disbelief before he ended up decorating the underside of someone's mighty right forepaw.\n\nAllegedly mighty.\n\nAbandoning one's post must get one killed, he assumed. This tower went up in smoke just as well as the others. The ferocious desert suns must have sucked all moisture out of the timbers, because they took like the driest kindling. No stopping this once it caught. Flames already spurted out of the third level of the first tower, probably travelling up through the ladder holes, he guessed.\n\n\"Freaking worm!\" shrieked the next victim, attacking him with a sword.\n\nBad idea. A snap and a spit of disgust, and his dark head rolled off down the slope. \" *Pah.* These Skartunese taste as horrible as they smell,\" he growled, hurling the next oil bomb into the tower's base level.\n\n\"We should have fitted fuses to these pots,\" the Princess hissed, struggling with the next arrow. \"Ah, got it.\"\n\n*Whoosh!*\n\n\"What did you whoosh for this year?\" he asked politely.\n\n\"Terrible joke \u2013 watch out!\"\n\nDucking, Dragon punched away a flying blade. A slash opened across his knuckle as if by magic. \"Ouch! You'll pay for that.\"\n\nThe sixth guard did run, but only as far as the seventh, who slid a curved desert sword between his compatriot's ribs. \"Die, coward! Run from a slave worm, will you?\"\n\n<Worm?> Bile spurted into his throat. No worse insult could be offered a Dragon.\n\n\"Fool! Call me Dragon!\" he roared.\n\n\"You're a worm!\" sneered the last man, spreading his arms. \"What's the matter, you slinking, belly-crawling, fawning, witless worm \u2013 kill me, I dare \u2013\"\n\nThe Skartunese soldier jerked and made a strange, strangled sound as an arrow sprouted out of his mouth. Dragon blinked.\n\n\"Eat my arrow, I dare you,\" Azania taunted.\n\n\"Nice shot,\" Dragon purred, recovering himself with a shiver of his wings. \"Slid that one right over his tongue and through the back of his throat.\"\n\n\"Juggernaut would have spread your guts for that hesitation!\" the Princess snapped, making his five hearts slam together inside his chest. \"Shut your ears to their insults and don't leave me to deal with the enemy. We are not a gentle Dragon meek and mannerly, alright? Besides that, next time you do your dominance roar, let them know who you really are. Understood?\"\n\nWow. Much more of this, and he would be flaming out of his ear canals.\n\nReaching around his neck, he patted her knee. \"See, being a Dragon Rider is most definitely a thing.\"\n\n\"You can torture me most foully, o Dragon, but nary a murmur of confession shall pass my lips. Now, how's about we commit a smidgen more arson before those Skartunese troops form up properly and come attack us?\"\n\n\"Excellent idea.\"\n\nLeaving seven siege towers blazing so furiously that the flames lit the battlements of N'ginta in a baleful orange light, Dragon and Princess melted away into the night.\n\nTime to take a run at those ballistae.\n\nRising into the air, he squinted over the suddenly busy camp.\n\nAzania said, \"They're loading up.\"\n\n\"They're not all that manoeuvrable. Nor can they shoot directly upward \u2013 but they are positioned to cover one another,\" he thought aloud. \"Low attack again, try to dump and damage a couple, and set them afire? As you said, fuses would have been a lot better.\"\n\n\"Let's go spread the love,\" Azania urged. \"Be careful, Dragon.\"\n\nFlexing his great wings, he accelerated back toward the camp, readying two pots in his talons. \"Arrows?\"\n\n\"Ready. Nine left.\"\n\nOn the way, Dragon realised that with a huge blaze at the back of their camp, the Skartun soldiers had the advantage of flickering firelight to silhouette his form. Dipping, he let his tucked-up paws skim the sands before he hurtled in amongst the tents, executing another creative Juggernaut surprise \u2013 the almost-run, he called it. With the use of wings and Dragon power, he could skim across an uneven battlefield in a bounding, jinking mode of movement that was hard for archers or ballistae to track. Wings gave an additional mobility advantage no charging Dragon enjoyed \u2013 the ability to change direction rapidly.\n\nArrows flitted past his muzzle and skittered off his flanks as he swerved, ripping up two tents in his paws and tossing them atop the nearest watch fire. Jinking again, he chest-charged a Skartunese troop, smashing them backward on the sand. His outspread wings clobbered several more.\n\nThen they were free of the tent line, racing toward the ballistae near the camp's centre-front, where they had been placed to cover the armoured Dragons still flaming the gate.\n\nFocus on the weapons, not on the four Dragons walking deeper into the camp, each with a handler seated atop his neck \u2013 just like Azania.\n\nBy her hiss, he realised she had noticed the same thing.\n\n<Brother dragons, arise!!> He roared.\n\nThey did not react \u2013 had they even heard him? Shocked, he ripped his eyes back to the fore, where a team of engineers tried to bring a ballista to bear upon them. An eight-foot metal quarrel jutted toward his chest; Dragon veered more sharply than before, even digging his wingtip into the sand to help him turn. The engineers' faces were a study in profane fury as he slipped out of their sights. Rising, he hurled a pot against the ballista's frame.\n\nEach weapon stood upon a flat wooden platform. A pair of strong joists held the swing arms, which were tensioned by a winch. The quarrel went into a channel which extended back toward the operating team. The whole heavy contraption could swing about upon a swivel mount and be raised and lowered by a ratchet wheel system, but on the whole, it was not a weapon designed to accommodate rapid changes of direction. Having noticed that this model had a shield to protect the engineers from arrows shot from the front, that was where he chose to hurl the oil pot. Largest target.\n\nAs the dark, viscous oil splashed over the wood, Azania's follow-up shot plugged beneath it. Yellow, smoky flames licked upward.\n\nOne of the engineers dashed forward to try to throw sand upon the flame. It caught right in his face. *Fff-whoosh!* Again, the wood ignited beautifully. Why did they not treat these weapons with some kind of fire retardant, he wondered?\n\nQuarrel! \"Hold on!\"\n\nThrowing himself sideways, Dragon roared as a quarrel rattled against his flank, scoring a long, thin wound as it ricocheted away. Spinning with the momentum, he tumbled head-over-paws, twisting his body and curving his neck to ensure that the tiny Princess would not be squashed as he came down heavily on the sand and skidded backward, ending up with his tail wedged beneath the second ballista they had been aiming for.\n\nNot the cleverest twist, but \u2013 heave! Up went the tonnage, just in time to shield them from two further quarrels. One sprouted right through the base of the weapon, coming within inches of decorating his left haunch.\n\n\"Crumbs,\" said Azania.\n\nWhat did crumbs have to do with anything? Apart from describing what he was about to do to these weapons crews. Raising his paw, he punched the weapon, ripping the tensioning mechanism off its moorings and spreading oil at the same time.\n\n\"Fire it,\" he growled.\n\nHer instinctive shot ignited the flame so close to them, he was certain her hair almost caught alight. His right forepaw definitely did. Staring at the flaming paw, he realised that the oil burned hot \u2013 not hot enough to bother a Dragon, who could happily sit in lava for half an hour at a time, but certainly enough to bother a Dragon's handler.\n\n\"Let's go try something.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Set those handlers alight. See if we can free one Dragon, at least.\"\n\n\"Soldiers everywhere; that direction's as good as any,\" she decided and agreed in one breath. \"Go!\"\n\nHe galloped away as a rain of arrows pattered onto the sand around them. Several passed through his wing membranes, generating pinpricks of intense pain. Another heavy quarrel hissed past, too close for comfort. It smashed a Skartunese soldier in the shoulder.\n\nOne way to reduce the odds.\n\nThe quartet of Dragons plodded over the hot sand looking as if they carried the weight of the world upon their shoulders. All were adult males, measuring about thirty-five to forty feet in length; easily powerful enough to carry five men upon their backs, let alone one. Two were a dusky orange in colouration, one a dull green \u2013 he did not look healthy at all \u2013 and one a brown, like him. In fact, as he barrelled along, his artistic eye absorbed the details of how unwell they looked. Captivity? Inactivity? Not one had good muscle tone or muscle mass; their flanks were lean and their scales dull, where he could see them beneath the banded Dragon armour they wore across their shoulders, backs and upper flanks.\n\nWhat infuriated him most were the strange cages fixed around their heads. Even their eyes were shielded by metal lids, meaning they could only look to the fore.\n\nAs they approached, the dull-looking creatures responded to commands issued by no means he could see; their muzzles turned, tracking him and Azania.\n\n\"Dragon fire!\" he bellowed.\n\nKicking off the sand, he shot upward as a wave of flame and blistering heat rolled toward them \u2013 a tired wave it was, or the Princess might have been roasted there and then. His huge wings beat the air, pushing the flame back toward the handlers. One cried out as an inferno enveloped the head of his Dragon. The others stopped the assault; Azania loosed a shaft, but missed narrowly. He hurled his clay pots as they soared overhead, missing with one but striking dead-centre with the second, possibly crushing the man's skull, he thought.\n\nWhatever worked.\n\nHe skidded to a landing just beyond, showering sand over a cohort of Skartunese soldiers rushing in from that direction. Three javelins sprouted in his flank as if by magic. He whirled into the tail strike, while his Rider readied another fire arrow.\n\n\"Steadying,\" he coughed. Ouch. One of those javelins had lodged painfully between his ribs.\n\nThe bowstring sang. Cleanly shot, the arrow ignited the oil-soaked handler. The orange Dragon did not move. He stood stolidly, staring to the fore as a Human torch burned against his neck.\n\nHe threw two more oil pots, soaking the Dragons; the Skartun handlers responded by doing something with the short silver bars they held in each hand. Those connected via thin silver wires to the head harness. The Dragons responded as if stung by invisible wasps, rearing up to face him and throw off Azania's aim. Fire licked toward them again, but he jumped aside and the Princess took her chance. A second Dragon ignited.\n\n<With me, brothers! Escape with me!>\n\n\"These worms respond to nothing but the command of pain,\" sneered a handler. His silver armour was soaked in oil; he wrenched off his helmet to show he felt no fear. \"Soon, you will be as one of these, worm. Jabiz Urdoo will make you sing the song of agony and enslavement \u2013\"\n\nSharp ear canals caught the twang of another ballista. Dragon sprang aloft; the quarrel whistled between his legs and buried itself deep in the enslaved Dragon's chest. At last he responded, bellowing in mortal pain. The mouth gaped, showing blackened fangs and a mottled tongue, but it was the other Dragon's eyes that arrested his hearts. Almost black with pain. Barely a spark left within.\n\nThe Princess lit up that handler like a torch.\n\n<With me! DRAGONS, ARISE!>\n\nNothing.\n\nWere they animals of no speech? No response? Not even a flicker of recognition in those eyes. Despair clenched his Dragon hearts as with talons of pure ice. What use trying to rescue such as these? There was nothing left \u2013 nothing of the draconic spirit within.\n\n<DRAGONS!!>\n\nBlindly, he rushed toward the fourth and final Dragon. The handler flicked those silver handles, but his mount was nowhere near the size or power he would have needed to be to stop the assault. The powerful brown struck his adversary amidships, audibly breaking several ribs as he rolled him right over, adding a brutal strike with the knee to ensure that his handler was struck free, crushed beneath his rolling tonnage. The Skartun fell heavily onto the soft sand; the Dragon collapsed with a terrible groan.\n\n\"Dragon! Dragon! Stop, you're killing him.\"\n\nThe Princess leaped off his neck; he paused with his paw upheld, ready to disembowel the Skartun handler. The man lay prone upon the sand, face up, bleeding from his mouth.\n\nAzania booted him in the ribs. \"What did you do to those Dragons? What? Tell me!\"\n\nThe man coughed out a laugh.\n\n\"Speak!\"\n\n\"Never \u2026 tell you \u2026\"\n\n\"Why do they obey you? Tell me!\" The man laughed and made a crude gesture. Azania snapped, \"Dragon \u2013\"\n\nHe stepped upon the Skartun's legs \u2013 not with anything like his full weight, roaring, \"Tell me!\" He ground downward. \"Speak! What is this dark magic?\"\n\nThe Princess dropped onto her knees in the sand, spitting with rage.\n\nSo infuriated was he, it was several long seconds before he realised he was grinding the legs of a dead man. He had slipped his own dagger into his heart.\n\nAzania whispered, \"It's done. He said \u2026 'ear.' Something about the ears \u2013\"\n\nShe began to move toward the fallen Dragon, but now it was as if the clamour of battle, having taken an interminable breath during their assault, closed all around them with shocking suddenness. Commands roared in the night. Here came the tread of many men, rank upon rank, rushing up in tight, disciplined groups to engage the raiders; his quick ears caught the creak of the tensioning ratchets on those ballistae, and he realised they were in mortal danger.\n\nSnatching the Princess up into his paw, Dragon coiled his thighs and shot into the night sky. He cupped both forepaws about her as he flapped to gain altitude, protecting her tiny person from a hail of arrows numbering in the hundreds.\n\nThe ears?\n\nAs the arrows began to arch and fall beneath them, he flicked his wings to spin in the air and change direction. Quarrels hurtled past. Ballistae had a maximum range of over two hundred Dragon paces, but to penetrate, they needed to shoot from much closer. Still, one pierced his right hind knee; he was sure it chipped the bone before tearing free. He swore a bloody oath.\n\n\"Alright, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Aye. Alright. Can you climb into your saddle?\"\n\n\"I'll manage.\"\n\n\"Got any more fire arrows left?\"\n\n\"One.\" The Princess' diminutive weight settled upon his neck. \"Planning to light up something more?\" He grunted noncommittally. She smacked his head. \"You aren't thinking \u2026\"\n\n\"Ah, but I am.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Nine jars of oil rained down among the sixteen Dragons gathered in a shallow semicircle to flame the city gate. Three missed, but most struck the backs or heads of his kin. Then, the Princess' final arrow arched down adjacent to a swirling maelstrom of fire.\n\nHe did not understand the tactics. Fly those same Dragons over the wall, and the city would have been razed within hours. What did these Skartun stand to gain by engaging in such slow, grinding forms of warfare? Honour? Time? Extra grey hairs and in the afterlife, a seat in some sort of warriors' paradise? Maybe flying their thralls into battle was somehow forbidden? Either way, the heat that rolled up from their fiery assault was fearful, causing the Princess to gasp and pull back. The entire metal face of the gates glowed red hot.\n\nHaving dared this raid, they must escape intact.\n\nYellower flames flared and then raced across the oil as it ignited, climbing paws and flanks, running across the hard-packed sand to climb the next Dragon. Screams resounded below. Using the distraction, he churned the air powerfully with his wings, changing direction and then, without warning, dropping fifty feet lower before switching the angle of attack and haring off to the east as fast as his wings could carry him. Volleys of arrows and quarrels hissed above and past his departing tail, save one.\n\nDropping lower as his muscles involuntarily seized at the jolt of pain from his tail, he swung his tail in a brain-deficient moment of wrath. Quarrel removal by tail-slapping a cohort of Skartunese soldiers? Brilliant. He left with at least five more holes in his hide that he could feel, and a splintered piece of wood still jutting from the last two feet of his tail.\n\nNot a great result.\n\nStill, alive and a Princess lightly toasted but otherwise unhurt? He'd take that.\n\nTen minutes later, he had to fight off a temper tantrum. The Palace healers would not treat him. \"Not experienced with Dragons?\" he spat wrathfully, snapping at the innocent display of purple climbing roses beside his left paw. \"What am I, a woman's work?\"\n\n\"Maybe that's for the better.\"\n\nHe clacked his fangs together several feet short of her head, which was not difficult.\n\nHere they were stuck in the Palace's ornamental gardens to spend the night, and the healers had just given up and left the Princess to it. Marvellous. What valued allies they were. He was truly feeling their status in the Kingdom of T'nagru \u2013 grass for a bed, plus admittedly picturesque flowerbeds for company. Ah, but then there was a matchless Princess, which ought to make him feel as if a star had casually stepped free of the firmament to light his paw.\n\nToo ornery for that, Dragon? Then, he stooped lower. \"You're bleeding?\"\n\n\"Minor scratch.\"\n\n\"That's my line. Show me.\"\n\n\"An arrow grazed my arm, alright? I said I'm fine!\" As a low grumbling started in the back of his throat, she said, \"Look, I'm not mad at you. We did well. It's \u2026 something else.\"\n\n\"What else?\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it. Dragon, leave me be.\"\n\n\"Princess Azania of T'nagru \u2013\"\n\n\"Apparently not! My old chambers have been given over to someone else and \u2026 and \u2013 oh, Dragon, this is \u2013 why am I worried about my old room when my city's burning? What kind of a freak am I?\" Clearing his throat, he began to speak, only for her to interrupt \u2013 meantime, yanking another arrow out of his tail, \"Don't say it. I know they've stopped flaming the gates. You can be such a pedantic old fossil sometimes!\"\n\nJaw open. Jaw shut. Jaw open \u2026 no. Still no words.\n\nJerking out the final arrow, the Princess leaned forward until her forehead touched his scales. \"Sorry.\"\n\nIt was on the tip of his tongue to rip a few scales off her hide. Maybe he should swat a few inches of height off her after that, but this Dragon had learned a thing or two over the years about dealing with verbal darts. Even had it been meant, she was venting, hurting and feeling very, very alone just now. Leave the emotional magic out of it, he could read the slump of her shoulders. His shoulders might be a gazillion times bigger, but that precise slump had greeted him in a mirror more times than he cared to count.\n\n\"I'm sorry, too.\" Curling up his hurting body, he laid a paw over her upper back. Swamped her, more like. \"Mmm, gorgeous Princess?\"\n\n\"Dragon, just \u2026 stop it. Not tonight, alright?\"\n\n\"Being the creaky old fossil that I am, could I ask you to kindly point out which balcony belonged to you?\"\n\n\"That one, over \u2013 Dragon. Dragon! What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Nice squeak, little mouse.\" Raising her fifteen feet in his paw, he said, \"We're about to burgle your chambers. I will not be kind to this wicked reprobate who dares to replace my Princess in her own kingdom!\"\n\n[ Intruder in Brief ]\n\nThe wicked reprobate lay abed, not asleep, despite the hour. Reading a scroll by lamplight. All they could see of her was the tip of a petite nose peeking at the scroll, held by a slim, dark brown hand.\n\n<A girl?> Azania mouthed, incredulous.\n\nAs the Princess crept through the gauzy hangings screening her chamber, Dragon poured up onto the balcony behind her. He balanced his weight upon a stiff tail, lest the balcony decide his tonnage was not worth hanging around for. Thankfully, desert construction techniques majored on thickness of stone, the better to cool and insulate the interiors of buildings from the burning days.\n\nThey also preferred wide, breezy archways even a sizeable Dragon could sneak through, at a pinch.\n\nFoul imposter, she did not even notice as he snuck into her chambers. Must be a very good scroll, Dragon thought irately, finding himself considering the merits of disembowelment via a horizontal talon stroke as opposed to a vertical one. Spite his Princess, would she? Filth! Traitor! Slime!\n\nThis fraud was about to get the fright of her life.\n\nSome Princess bed, however. This exquisitely carved, four-poster bed with its rich, golden silk hangings was a breathtaking piece of artistry. Note to self. He should refrain from destroying this masterpiece, unlike the last one. Sneaking a paw beneath the light hangings, he drew them up soundlessly. Now, the cold, steely talon, or the gleaming set of fangs? Which would scare best?\n\nAh, his most despicable thought yet. Aye. The genial greeting \u2013 that idea tingled his very wingtips.\n\nLeaning over the bed, he purred beside her ear, \"Good scroll?\"\n\nThe jolt that wracked her body was worth every ounce of premeditation. The girl \u2013 a young girl, he realised \u2013 nearly leaped out of the bed in fright, and perhaps would have, save that he immediately muffled her screams beneath a large pillow. Pillows had their uses, he concluded with a wicked snicker. Her frail limbs beat her coverings, helpless to \u2013\n\n\"Dragon. Dragon, stop!\"\n\nHer fright seared his senses. Still, he snapped, \"Why? I'm having so much fun.\"\n\n\"She's \u2026\"\n\nAzania's dark eyes were huge. Shocked, he realised belatedly. What was wrong?\n\n\"Oh, come on. I am not letting her go. Not before her wits flee screaming into the night,\" he explained. The Princess folded her arms across her chest. \"Just a little snick-snap-snip with the talons. Please?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Not even a touch of leg-pulling?\"\n\n\"No! You'd probably pull them right off, knowing you.\"\n\n\"Cats play with mice \u2026\"\n\n\"Dragon, she's a child.\" He lifted the pillow with a huff of annoyance. \"And, she's \u2026\" Her tiny hands flew to her mouth.\n\nThey stared at one another.\n\nThe young girl's eyes flickered between the Princess and the hulking Dragon several times, as her thoughts probably tried to convince her that aye, a miracle had transpired in that she was still alive, and aye, there was a fifty-foot monster of a Dragon in her bedchamber, and for the third time aye, there was someone who could have been her twin, getting all wet around the eyes. Both of their hearts were whizzing around the moons in reaction; an explosion of shocked, ecstatic colours burst upon his scent senses.\n\nBy his wings!\n\nHe sniffed forlornly. \"Sisters? Ridiculous. Not predictable in the slightest.\"\n\n\"I don't have a \u2026 sister,\" Azania breathed.\n\nRight. These two were practically hatched from the same egg. No need of an artistic bent to observe what was perfectly obvious to the beholder.\n\n\"Azania? Princess Azania? It's really you?\" The girl shrank against her pillow, yet the thrill betrayed by her tone made his scales prickle most pleasurably. \"I'm Inzashu-N'shula \u2013 or Inzashu for short, if the name's \u2013 uh, is he planning to \u2026 to kill me?\"\n\n\"No,\" said the Princess.\n\n\"Undecided,\" he corrected. \"I'm debating whether I start at your toes or fingers \u2013\"\n\n\"He's joking.\"\n\nDragon scowled, \"Not entirely. Who are you, little girl? How many years have you? Where are you from and why does my Azania not know who you are? And what exactly makes you think you can steal her bed?\"\n\n\"Shh, Dragon. You've had your fun.\"\n\nPushing beneath him, Azania seated herself atop the silk covers, beside the girl. After a moment, she reached out and took the other girl's hand. Even their hands were alike.\n\n\"I'm far from done, toy Princess.\" He prodded her in the ribs.\n\n\"Get off, you rude reptile.\"\n\nScent sense magic sifted through the many impressions reaching his awareness. If they were not related, then those Skartunese were right and he was a worm, not Dragonkind. Seething, murky memories shadowed his mind \u2013 both of his own siblings, and the remembrance of the sheer agony those Dragons had been experiencing. What foul magic could cause a Dragon such pain? From slim handles and slimmer wires, agony that drove a Dragon out of his right mind \u2026 for how many years?\n\nMeantime, the girl spluttered, \"I'm eleven. Uh \u2026 does the Dragon always breathe like that, or only when he's \u2026 slavering over peoples' toes?\"\n\n\"Don't be afraid,\" Azania said. \"He's just being overprotective of me.\"\n\n\"Oh. He's awfully large.\"\n\n\"Dragon takes the job of hulking, lurking and intimidating very seriously indeed.\"\n\nTrue, that.\n\nQuietly, settling the frightened girl with the rhythm of her voice, she retold the story of her kidnapping from this very bedchamber, and then the second, far more stirring kidnapping, as she put it. Princess-napping, he noted. Death, destruction and theft of the greatest treasure in Solixambria, bar none. As she blushed and demurred, Dragon explained that he had an excellent record in not eating Princesses, and indeed, she was now his chief paw washer and earhole cleaner. Azania's indignation at this sally had the girl giggling.\n\nFor her part, Inzashu disclosed shyly, she was certain they shared a father, but her mother was another story. How so, Azania pressed?\n\n\"She's from \u2026 the south. Where I grew up.\"\n\n\"South-south? As in, she's Skartunese?\" The Princess reeled as if she had been swatted by a Dragon's paw.\n\n\"Do you hate me now?\"\n\n\"Hate? No, of course not.\" Still, Azania had to take a deep, deep breath. \"So, we're half-sisters? Alright. I can \u2026 handle that.\" Suddenly, fiercely, she threw her arms about the girl. \"Hate you? No, no, no! Don't you ever think that! I love you \u2013 I mean, this takes a little getting used to, of course. Secret, mysterious sister and all that \u2026 amazing! I'm over the moons and the suns \u2026 and I will love you. Sorry, I know I'm not making much sense \u2026\"\n\nUgh. Now there was double leaking going on. Girls.\n\nDragon cleared his throat.\n\nHold on. Hold every paw. What was this other scent emanating from this young girl? He had never smelled such an intriguing uniqueness, such a magical bouquet. This one was not all she seemed. Child she might be, but she was dangerous. Did she know it? Or was this some precocious magic rising in the Human youngster? Beside the bed, Dragon's talons extended. He must be ready for anything \u2013 but here, this shifting of intricate sense colours, did this mean she knew he was aware, too?\n\nInzashu-N'shula said, \"I'm sorry, too, that you had to find out this way. But you will hate me, I know. It's \u2026 complicated.\"\n\n\"Complicated how?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Your Dragon knows. You see \u2013 I know, and I can sense, his magic. When he was reading me earlier, I felt that, and I can do something similar.\" He stiffened, but tried to remain amiable. \"This magic comes from my mother. It's called Psyromantic Magic \u2013 but the name's \u2026 wrong. Well, it depends how it's used. My sense is a healing sense, a kind of physical, emotional and mental empathy.\"\n\n\"That sounds good, sister.\"\n\n\"Not if you can \u2026 change things.\" The girl hid her face in her hands.\n\nPrincess and Dragon shared an incredulous glance. He nodded slightly, trying to confirm and warn at the same time.\n\n\"Do you?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"I have often wished I could tear this magic out of me,\" she whispered. \"You have no idea how many times I have wished it gone. It's \u2026 too much. Too dangerous.\"\n\nHe said, \"You're correct, I sensed your magic, Inzashu, and I sense something of your heart. There is no evil \u2013\"\n\n\"No evil?\" she burst out.\n\nDragon eyeballed the girl, stuffing his ire back where it belonged. He must treat her more like a Dragon hatchling; indeed, an unfamiliar sense of shame at his earlier behaviour muted the beating of his hearts. Not well done, Dragon. Not at all.\n\n\"No evil save that which is common to every creature under the suns,\" he said at last. \"You are not some foul, despicable monster of the night. Inzashu, magic is a tool. The power to use or abuse magic rests in the paws or mind of the wielder. Tell us, why are you so afraid?\"\n\n\"My mother, Nahritu-N'shula. She is \u2026 less honourable.\"\n\nWhat a world of terror and revelation lay in those simple words!\n\nUnprompted, the girl added, \"Psyromantic Magic was first imagined as the magic of the first succubus, a kind of wicked female demon who preyed upon men. It's a belief that is widespread around the realms of Skartun \u2013 we are many peoples, not one, as you northern folks often imagine. Like many beliefs, it does have some basis in reality, and from what my mother taught me, its first practitioner was a woman called Psyaru. The story says that she used her magic first to capture the love of a Jabiz, but then, she drove him mad.\"\n\n\"A kind of psychic-romantic magic?\" he clarified.\n\n\"Aye. You probably think I don't know much about life, being just eleven years old, but because of my senses, I know \u2026 too much, sometimes.\" Removing her hand from Azania's, she clasped her knees to her chest. Staring unseeing across the bedchamber, she whispered, \"This kind of magic is greatly feared in Skartun. My mother used her magic to entice my father \u2013 our father, Azania. That's how I came about. She is \u2013 I could use a lot of words \u2013 ambitious, ruthless, grasping, amoral \u2026 even insane, I've often thought. She does not care what she does, to whom, as long as she gets her way. Opposing her is a huge risk. She can hurt you, make you do things \u2026\"\n\nShadows prowled through her emotions. Sad memories.\n\n\"Azania, you didn't know about me because my mother would have prevented King N'gala from speaking about it. About a year ago, we travelled secretly here to N'ginta. We stayed in hiding until a couple of weeks ago, when my mother placed me here. I don't know what she's planning \u2013 I don't even know if she's in the citadel anymore. My guess would be that she's trying to steal this kingdom for herself. Or to destroy it as \u2026 revenge, I suppose.\"\n\nDragon prompted, \"So, what about Jabiz Urdoo?\"\n\n\"I don't know \u2013 well, Nahritu's definitely using him for something.\" The girl shook her head, radiating misery. \"It's all my fault!\"\n\n\"How so, sweet sister?\" Azania stumbled over the endearment.\n\n\"If we hadn't travelled to N'ginta, and mother had not left me here in our father's care, Jabiz Urdoo would not now be knocking on the gate. I \u2013 don't you see? He wants me. Or, he wants me in order to get to her!\"\n\nThey chorused, \"Inzashu \u2013\"\n\n\"No! He's jealous, see? It's because \u2026 because I was born, that he's come to take revenge on our father, and he'll destroy this city to do it!\"\n\nMore hugging. Honestly, this ridiculous Human affectation was \u2026 surprisingly understandable. Dragon pulled up. Now he claimed to understand Humans? By his wings, a Dragon had come some distance since he first decided to swat the Prince of Uninhibited Flatulence.\n\nGiven another chance? He would not miss.\n\n\"You don't know Jabiz Urdoo. His pride is \u2026 it's a mountain, a volcano! I think he and my mother must have known each other, maybe \u2013 and then he learned about me \u2013 and the King \u2013 and we fled across the desert. I'm sure my mother's up to her tricks again, but I haven't felt her for days \u2026 and now you arrived! It's dangerous, Azania! I've put everyone, and everything, in terrible danger and we're all going to die!\"\n\nPoor thing. So twisted up.\n\nNaturally, Azania could not convince her otherwise. Sometimes, he reflected, family were the hardest of all to believe.\n\n\"Right,\" he said, tapping the girl upon the head. \"Listen with both miniscule ears. You and I share a teeny-tiny something called magic, agreed?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026 aye?\" she breathed.\n\nHis Princess shot him a look so loaded, his wings tingled as if he were carrying a massive boulder. Aye. He was trying to be gentle.\n\nNot always easy for a fireless monster, but there it was.\n\n\"So, I want you to listen with your magic while I make an important, mighty and unalterable pronouncement. Indeed, I am about to introduce an earthquake of understanding to your little world. Ready?\"\n\n\"No? Aye. Er \u2026 alright, I'm ready.\"\n\nIndeed she was. A sensation like ants creeping beneath his scales made his wings flick restively.\n\nGiving her the fiery-eyed Dragon stare, he growled, \"None of this is your fault.\"\n\nBoth girls laughed, to his paw-clenching annoyance.\n\n\"It is not!\"\n\nThey laughed harder.\n\nGritting his fangs so hard his jaw ached, he said, \"Whatever your mother or father or this Jabiz Urdoo did or did not do, it all started long before you were a flame flickering in your sire's eye. What you say is not logical: correction, it is logic valid only at the emotional level. Therefore, expel this 'it's my fault' nonsense from your thoughts forthwith!\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dragon,\" Azania said pointedly.\n\n\"Sometimes things get lost flying from here \u2013\" he thumped the girl's head again, making her wince \"\u2013 to here.\" He poked her diaphragm.\n\n\"Close enough,\" Azania noted. Grr. Princess-style wing tugging.\n\n\"Lesson number one in dealing with Dragons,\" he said, flexing his muscles to their impressive maximum, \"is that Dragons are always right. And even when we're wrong, we're right. Are we quite clear upon this matter, Princess Inzashu-N'shula?\"\n\nThe girl's eyes popped wide. Fluttering her eyelashes outrageously, she declaimed in a squeaky voice, \"Oh, Dragon, you are so right! I'd never think any differently, ever again.\"\n\n\"Ah, the family impertinence is in full flow, I see,\" he purred, caught somewhere between annoyance and blood-fizzing pleasure at her response. \"You definitely get that attitude from your sister, I'll have you know.\"\n\n\"Oh? Azania?\"\n\nThe older sister chortled, \"Dragon, you are awful.\"\n\n\"I am also the world's foremost draconic expert in quirky, irreplaceable Princesses.\"\n\n\"Dragon, you are so right,\" both girls chorused.\n\n\"I collect them.\" Backing away from the bed, he added, \"On that note, I now plan to let you two catch up on the last eleven years. Ignore my snoring over here \u2013 correction. Dragons never snore. We just breathe heavily.\"\n\nTurning about twice, he formed his body into a neat curl, and settled down with a weary sigh. Both Princesses stared at him. Disconcerting, the similarities in their eyes and features.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"Princess the younger, when I spoke, what did your magic tell you?\"\n\nThe girl smiled uncertainly. So much of Azania in her! Yet, minus the fierceness. This one's emotional colours were sweeter and gentler, more the healer than perhaps she imagined.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Dragon, you were right. I don't know how to \u2013\" her voice cracked, drawing a nervous giggle \"\u2013 thank you, enough.\"\n\n\"That was perfect.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "At an utterly unreasonable hour, his Princess snuck out of the bed she had shared for the very first time with her long-lost sister, thinking she would wake a sleeping Dragon \u2013 or rather, avoid waking him?\n\nHe let her tiptoe right up to his head, before murmuring, \"Lesson number two \u2026\"\n\nAzania jumped half a foot off the ground. \"Dragon. Don't you \u2013 you pest.\"\n\nHe grinned lazily. \"Never \u2026\"\n\n\"Never wake a sleeping Dragon? Oh, you got me,\" she gurgled merrily, rubbing the scales beside his eye. \"Rise with the dawn, o Dragon. Actually, it's well before dawn.\"\n\n\"What kind of a horrible hour do you call this, Princess?\"\n\n\"The hour of the zingu'uk \u2013 the dawn wind,\" she informed him, bouncing eagerly upon her toes.\n\nNo conventional Princess would be so excited about a morning's diverting destruction. Positively draconic!\n\n\"Ah, by my wings,\" he said blandly.\n\n\"Ah, indeed. I propose that a brief visit to the closely-pitched tent encampment might be in order. Do I hear that the flaming has resumed at the gate as well?\"\n\n\"You are correct. We ought to test those new fuses on the oil jars.\"\n\n\"Oh, you despicable beast!\" she cried, placing her hand upon her breast. Drama, drama. \"Aye. Sadly, it appears that the Dragon handlers are replaceable. We ought to punish them for their temerity.\"\n\n\"We could not possibly abide this blatant provocation.\"\n\nSharing a wicked cackle, they reverse-burgled the King's residence in search of weaponry, the new oil jars, and sundry implements relating to the chastisement of enemy armies.\n\nDragon grandly ignored all of his recent injuries. Majestic male in all his pomp. Nothing hurt. Of course not!\n\nTwenty minutes later, they launched off the Royal Palace's flat rooftop. Azania sat at his neck, arranging weapons and supplies. More arrows were a must. Two sacks of oil pots hung behind her. These had been fitted with fuses soaked in resin. Hopefully, the flames would survive a fall from a height. The Princess, however, tested the wind with an unhappy clucking of her tongue.\n\n\"Not enough. We need to wait for half an hour, at least.\"\n\nSpreading his wings, he climbed in a slow circuit away from the range of the ballistae. Brutish weapons. They could fire a heavy bolt hundreds of feet through the air with great accuracy.\n\n\"You're thinking of the gate, Princess?\"\n\n\"I was. Then, we can test the fire-snuffer. Otherwise, we might need to land again to replace the resin when it's burned out. It also isn't in the greatest supply, is it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nFlying up to an altitude of over eight hundred feet, he took them out over the eastern wall before they turned and made for the inferno at the gate. He hovered, watching the distracted ballista engineers trying to aim their weapons at near-vertical angles. Limited, weren't they?\n\n\"First away!\" the Princess crowed. A few moments later, she growled, \"Miss.\"\n\nThree more oil pots rained away in quick succession.\n\n\"There we go!\" Dragon approved. Even he could hit that much of a target. \"I guess clonking them on the head is as good as burning them alive?\"\n\n\"Whatever does the job,\" she agreed.\n\nThey took turns bombarding the stationary Dragons with a rain of oily fire. Several of the fuses failed to ignite, but once they had a nice bonfire raging down below, it did not matter. The Princess hit one Dragon right on top of the head cage, as best they could tell; that beast dropped and did not rise again. Had they killed him?\n\nDragons were tougher than that, surely?\n\nThen, the city's defenders took over. Azania spotted them readying several large barrels; despite the heat that reached them even at this height, and the danger of enemy archers and ballistae, they used a wall catapult to toss the barrels over into the mess they had created. Green-tinged flames sheeted a hundred feet into the air. The Dragon bombardment fizzled as the handlers tried to flee out of harm's way. Suddenly, they were in full retreat.\n\nHe snickered, \"Do you think they worked out that standing in a raging pit of burning oil is bad for the complexion?\"\n\n\"Makes me wonder why my father's generals did not try something like that before,\" the Princess mused. \"I mean, it's well known that Dragons are fireproof, and all \u2026 hmm. I have three clay pots left.\"\n\n\"Shall we have a potshot at the ballistae?\"\n\n\"Aye. Better that than simply pottering about up here waiting for the wind to rise.\"\n\n\"Ha ha. Do you think we can make one of them potbellied? Ah, never mind, that was a weak joke. On target \u2026 now?\"\n\n\"Away!\" Azania chirped. A moment later, she deadpanned, \"Well, their day just went to pot.\"\n\nGurgle, snort, chortle. \"You really should take up pottery, Princess.\"\n\nTired of potting one another with increasingly badly potted puns, they winged away toward the southern horizon on a short reconnaissance mission.\n\nHaving found nothing but endless expanses of black sand unmarked by tracks that might suggest Jabiz Urdoo might be up to mischief, Dragon and Princess rode the parched desert wind back toward N'ginta Citadel. There, they welcomed the Skartunese soldiers to a dawn of a burning tent city.\n\nFewer than a third were occupied.\n\nWhy all the show?\n\nLeaving a wind-stoked, rampant inferno turning the skies black in their wake, they flew up to the Palace once more. Time to correct the strategic model.\n\nSomething was wrong; they just did not know what.\n\n[ Perfidy ]\n\nAll morning, the defenders repulsed attacks from either flank as the infuriated Skartun army tried repeatedly to breach the walls. The sands developed darker red runnels of blood. Dragon and Princess played a game of swat-the-mole with any black-crested warriors who dared to show their heads above the battlements.\n\nAzania called it 'swat the dune mole,' a rodent of a certain reputation in the northern eighth of the kingdom, where some desert crops grew.\n\nThey quickly worked out that some of the ballista crews had been moved from covering the main gate to try to thread his snout, should he dare to poke it above the battlements, with an eight-foot quarrel. Since a Dragon of his size could stand upon a handy flat rooftop and reach atop the outer wall to swat luckless Skartun, all was well until he crashed through the roof of a house.\n\n\"Too much breakfast, Dragon?\" Azania sniped.\n\n\"It's your extra weight on my neck,\" he retorted.\n\n\"I'll eat less.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare. Azerim will never forgive me for bringing over a waif.\"\n\n\"I eat well, considering my size.\"\n\nShaking his head slowly, he clambered free of the house, making profuse apologies to the owners, who had arrived from nearby. Much hand-waving and hair-pulling appeared to be the order of the day. Peeling back his fangs, he called, \"I'm sure the King will make redress. And as for you, Princess \u2013 you do indeed, but I've no idea where you put it.\"\n\n\"Active outdoors lifestyle. All that fresh air at high altitude.\"\n\nNever short of a snarky reply, was she?\n\nA child called from nearby, \"We love you, Princess!\"\n\nShe turned to smile and wave. This set off a small commotion among the neighbours, several of whom offered their humble homes for similar draconic demolition.\n\nHumans never failed to surprise.\n\nAs they rushed off to the next warning trumpet call, he chuckled, \"Fame, eh?\"\n\n\"Infamy, thanks to you.\"\n\n\"I am a massively conceited Dragon, that's true.\"\n\nBy the afternoon, the Skartunese forces drew back, having done their work for the day. Hundreds of men lay prone in the sand without, or were being taken into the citadel's mausoleum within.\n\nHe and the Princess walked back up to the Palace, where they rested and the Princess spent time with her little sister in the gorgeously appointed sitting room which formed part of her royal chambers. At eleven, her sister was already half a foot taller. When Inzashu mentioned how some people must have quite forgotten to grow up, or upward at least, Azania waspishly suggested the royal layabout shift her behind into motion and put her healing skills to use.\n\nPractice on a Dragon?\n\n*Gnarr!*\n\nHow his Clan would laugh to see him now, working with an eleven-year-old Human girl on magical skills \u2013 allegedly to hone her healing powers, but in reality, they were both sharpening each other with insights, hints and suggestions. Bright little thing. What a pleasure to see her come alive like this, as she overcame her fear of a Dragon and \u2013 by his wings!\n\nSnapping out a paw, he collected his second Princess.\n\nWell, more accurately, he prevented the girl from smashing her fine but tiny nose upon the marble floor, which was exactly the moment King N'gala chose to arrive with the three Princes in tow.\n\n\"She fainted,\" he explained, placing Inzashu upon the nearest couch.\n\nNone of them even appeared to notice. Wonderful attitude toward women. Perhaps tying the royals to a spit and turning them regularly above a raging bonfire would supply the needful motivation? Hmm. Tasty idea. Flame-grilled royal kebabs. Basted in acid!\n\n\"Dragon. Why are you not out there destroying the Skartun?\" N'gala grated. Again, zero score for empathy.\n\n\"We're resting ahead of the next assault,\" he said smoothly. In the background, Azania went to her sister. \"Any thoughts on where Jabiz Urdoo might have taken himself?\"\n\nCold as ice, Prince Aragu said, \"We were planning to ask you to scout the desert, Dragon, but we hear your eyesight is not the best. Tonight will be full of moons. What are your thoughts?\"\n\nHis thoughts served up a proposal to smack an arrogant young Prince deep into next week. Or a flying lesson, Aria-style. *Mwaa-haa-haaa!*\n\nHis nostrils flared. Smelling salts to help a fainting Princess revive? Inzashu must have overdone her magical exertions. He should remind her that youngsters had a much smaller capacity for magic use, at least from what he knew of Dragons. Perhaps magic-using Humans were the same?\n\nHer eyelids fluttered; Azania helped the girl to sit up.\n\n\"Which direction would you recommend we investigate, o Prince?\" he inquired.\n\nThe Prince tossed his head haughtily. \"How would I know?\"\n\n\"I thought you'd have scouts and spies out.\"\n\nAzania had been right about her bother Aragu; truly his father's egg. The other two were bearable, especially N'chala, but not this one. Aragu dared not voice his opinion, but Dragon was convinced his thoughts revolved about worms and lizards, when he spoke to a mighty Dragon of the air.\n\nThe King said, \"We've inquired of the other citadels via messenger hawk. No-one has seen sign of Urdoo. That leaves only the deep desert. South. Why he would venture back into those hellish conditions is a question we must ask ourselves in all seriousness.\"\n\nDragon nodded. \"We will fly tonight.\"\n\nThe younger Princess coughed, and said weakly, \"Father, may I \u2013\"\n\n\"Absolutely not!\" King N'gala glared at his progeny. \"Having one mutinous daughter in the family is more than enough. You will stay right here in this palace.\"\n\nHad that been her question?\n\nFiery eyes flickered as more than his physical gaze raked the King's person. Could it be that this malady which gripped his family was due to something other than a mental deficiency or change sparked by the Princess' mother, Nahritu-N'shula?\n\nCould there be an artefact, an amulet \u2026 a jewel? He had read of the practice of forcing magical power into inanimate objects \u2013 the dark magic practise was forbidden, because those objects had a way of exploding without warning. One way of such magicians curbing their own numbers. However, what if there was a way of binding power into a crown, say? Or a keepsake?\n\nAbruptly, he said, \"King N'gala, where is the girl's mother?\"\n\nHis head jerked strangely. \"What of her?\"\n\n\"My Dragon intuition has tingled restively since I entered your citadel,\" he ad-libbed. \"I wish to understand the family dynamics and power structures here at N'ginta, that's all.\"\n\n\"I rule!\" His dark eyes blazed briefly with an unnatural light. \"Do you dare dispute my authority, Dragon?\"\n\nNo clue as to where that might have come from. This magic was cunning.\n\nSenses alert, he attended closely as Prince N'chala drew breath. \"Father, it's a basic question. Of course you rule; you are the King.\" Turning, the Prince addressed the four-pawed one, most clearly ignoring his sisters. \"All authority rests in the crown, Dragon. We three Princes support our father in running the kingdom. Our disparate duties have recently focussed on the war effort, of course. There are five generals, three of whom are currently present here at N'ginta Citadel. Princesses have other duties, unrelated to rule or decision-making.\"\n\n\"I understand Princess Azania was not previously aware of her sister's existence?\"\n\n\"No,\" the King said.\n\nNow, his eyes roamed faraway desert landscapes. He was not even with them mentally, Dragon suspected.\n\nHe said, \"You are not currently \u2013 married, or engaged with anyone, Your Majesty?\"\n\nThat provocation bit deep.\n\nAcrid emotions flared through whatever power gripped the man, centred in his stomach of all places, if he was not mistaken.\n\n\"Who are you to judge, worm?\"\n\nAs N'chala protested, Dragon voiced a warning growl. \"I remind even a King to watch his words.\"\n\nThe King spat, \"Yet a fireless, voiceless, Clan-less Dragon, is here in the company of my own daughter; nay, led by her like some dumb beast at the halter!\"\n\nUnderstanding flared. He spoke about himself.\n\nThat insight was all which kept his fury in check. He sensed Azania tense up until the material of her clothing quivered audibly. She must fear a paroxysm of draconic rage. Breathe in through the nose. Out through the fangs, wishing that for once he had even a curl of smoke to dispatch into the fray. That strange, cramped sensation squeezed against his breastbone. <Out! Come out!> As always, nothing of his fire emerged. Not even the scent of smoke.\n\nHe said, \"I had always believed none could rule a Dragon, until I saw how through dark magic, the Skartun subjugate, abuse and destroy my kind. I would do anything to stop them.\"\n\n\"Is this your fear, Dragon?\" the King asked.\n\n\"Aye, it is the fear of any free creature. What is your fear, King N'gala?\"\n\nAgain, he detected a seepage of emotions, almost like smoke drifting through a keyhole. The King touched his stomach, before displaying that strange, jerky mannerism once more.\n\nHe said, \"My kingdom, my people, and aye, the fate of my daughter, number among those fears.\"\n\nBack to aloofness.\n\n\"So, her mother is lost?\" Dragon prompted.\n\n\"Nahritu-N'shula, she was the one \u2013 she was \u2013\" his eyes rolled wildly. Straightening his crown, he whispered, \"She \u2026 left me. Now, he is coming.\"\n\nNo-one else found his behaviour bizarre?\n\nStepping toward the doorway in a clear signal that the interview was at an end, the King added, \"My allies may attempt to prove their doubtful worth by flying out immediately on patrol. Sniff out the enemy. Do not rest until you find Jabiz Urdoo!\"\n\nHe departed on this note, sweeping three obedient Princes along with him. N'chala alone directed a sympathetic glance toward his sisters."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Beneath the bright moons, the desert undulated like a steady, unchanging ocean of sand. Only, Dragon was beginning to learn, that impression was not true. The desert was more subtle, more beguiling and more ravenous than he had ever imagined.\n\nOne thing he had learned to appreciate about Princess Azania was that she gave him space. She did not chatter on. Even now, they exchanged a few words \u2013 the route ahead, how wide to sweep on the east-west trajectory, what sign they could possibly hope to find of the passing of at least half of a large army. The temperature changed rapidly. When they set out, warmth still radiated up from the obsidian sands. By two hours after midnight, it had plummeted, the clear skies swallowing the heat as if it had never been.\n\nChilly desert nights. Who would have thought?\n\nPeering through his spectacles, he said, \"Look there, beyond that dune.\"\n\n\"A Dragon's body,\" she said. \"We should \u2026 aye?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nLanding at the base of the hundred-foot dune, they padded over the still-warm sands toward the half-buried remains of a green Dragoness. Azania shivered, not only with the cold, he imagined. The sandstorm had covered her hindquarters, but her head remained free, facing the north as if she longed to return to the Tamarine Mountains of her birth.\n\nThe Princess said, \"They removed her head cage.\"\n\nThe body had long since stiffened and become desiccated. Scavengers had not been at it nearly as much as he expected. Quietly, he pressed a talon to her forehead and whispered a draconic blessing over his fallen kindred. There were only holes where her eyes had been.\n\n\"Dragon, are you alright?\"\n\nThe question was so kind, so unexpected, his wings quivered and he sucked in a deep breath.\n\n\"I've \u2026 never been this close to a dead body before,\" he realised aloud. \"Not \u2013 I mean, plenty of Human bodies, aye, but not a Dragon. I'm sad. I think she collapsed with failure of the hearts. Your sister might have been able to tell, but I would not have wanted her to see this. Look at the scars here on her lip, and the way they removed two fangs either side to bridle her like a beast.\"\n\nAzania shook her head. \"I just don't understand how they do this.\"\n\n\"Me neither.\"\n\nHe paced a circuit around the Dragoness, kicking moodily at the sand. Even now, as the grief pumped in hot, bloody clots through his hearts, he could not summon the fire. Failure. Fireless worm. Gutless, craven, useless excuse for a Dragon, and a complete waste of lair-space. The old litany ran through his mind, caustic and unrelenting. What was wrong with him \u2013 fire by water and electrolysis? Nonsense. Face the truth. He was deeply, irredeemably defective \u2026\n\n\"Dragon. Dragon!\"\n\n<WHAT??>\n\nThe Princess blinked at his thunder.\n\n\"Sorry.\" He snapped his fangs toward the sky. \"It's not you. I meant, what have you found, Princess?\"\n\n\"You were faraway. Sorry I barked at you. Look. Come look at her earholes.\" He stumped over, touching his spectacles and then removing them. Close up sight had never been a problem. She said, \"What do you think of this strange scarring?\"\n\nHer brown fingers traced the rim of the earhole.\n\nHe frowned, bending closer and tilting his head to get the best view. \"Are you saying they clamp something inside the ear canals? That's rubbing \u2013 no, it isn't. Not quite a callus, is it?\"\n\nOf one accord, they moved so that the white light of the moons shone fully upon the Dragoness' ear holes. Each hole was a little smaller than the diameter of Azania's fist. With an apologetic word, the Princess extended her fingers and slipped her hand right inside.\n\n\"The scarring goes deep.\"\n\n\"Burn scars,\" Dragon blurted out. \"Those are burns!\"\n\n\"Could it be that they're burning the slave Dragons inside their ears?\" she asked. \"Would that hurt, Dragon? Are your ears \u2013\"\n\n\"Extremely sensitive,\" he breathed, aghast. \"Packed with nerve endings. Probably even more sensitive than the eye. How would they even do that? Why? Do you think it could be those silver things \u2013 those handles? I saw that one Dragon, do you remember I told you how his eyes registered so much pain it was almost as if his mind had snapped or been driven into insanity?\"\n\n\"Aye. This is \u2026 I have no words. I mean, if you burned a Human constantly inside their ears, for years, I think it would drive them \u2026 over the edge. Oh, Dragon!\"\n\nThey shook at the same time. Azania wiped her eyes.\n\nSilently, they took to the air again, sweeping southward and more to the west. There was no sign of an army heading in any direction bar due north. How did an entire army vanish in the middle of a desert?\n\nAfter a long time, the Princess said, \"Do you think she could be controlling my father, even from afar?\"\n\n\"Almost definitely.\"\n\n\"His erratic behaviour, do you mean?\n\n\"Using techniques I learned from your sister, I sensed an eerie magic emanating, strangely, from the region of his stomach,\" he explained. \"I thought at first he must be wearing an artefact, perhaps in his crown or upon his breast, but that does not seem to be the case. There was a clear sense of \u2026 well, tentacles, like that giant squid we saw in the Lumis Ocean, do you remember?\" Her body bobbed slightly against his neck. \"It was like mottled grey tentacles of emotion reaching from his gut up into his mind. That was my impression.\"\n\nAzania shook her head slowly. \"He's not in his right mind. Father was always a hard man, but not \u2026 not like this.\"\n\n\"Poor Inzashu.\"\n\n\"Aye, but it's the mother I'm worried about. It seems clear she's using Jabiz Urdoo against my father for her own ends \u2013 but what?\"\n\n\"Winner gets a kingdom, or an army to destroy a kingdom?\"\n\nThe Princess kicked his neck unhappily. \"It just doesn't add up. Nothing adds up.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Why leave your sister in the palace? Surely that gives the King leverage against Nahritu-N'shula?\"\n\n\"If she even cares.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Maybe she just wants the child out of the way.\"\n\nDragon flicked his head as something in that statement percolated into his brain. Out of the way? Azania talked about how difficult it was to discover one had a sister she had never known about, a beautiful and talented creature who had gaily swept in and replaced her with a blink of her dewy, dark eye. She did not want to be jealous, but she was. One daughter sidelined, replaced immediately, as if \u2013\n\n\"As if he wanted you discarded, in order to install her,\" he thought aloud.\n\n\"Dragon?\"\n\n\"The Vanracian fiasco was not his \u2013 it was her initiative!\" he growled, with rising excitement. Insight struck like lightning, causing his scales to prickle sharply. \"Nahritu-N'shula needed to install someone else in your place, someone more qualified to carry out whatever her plans \u2013 it's your sister! She's controlling King N'gala!\"\n\nAzania snapped, \"Dragon, no! We've barely met her, but she \u2013 she wouldn't \u2013\"\n\n\"Perhaps unwittingly?\"\n\n\"The mother primed my sister to use her powers against my father?\" The girl shook her head violently. \"No, Dragon. Aye. Curse it, that makes almost too much sense \u2026 if it's possible. And then she left to rejoin Jabiz Urdoo, to continue with the next phase of her plan \u2013 which is what?\"\n\nHis wings froze.\n\n*Gnarr-grr arrr-GRR!!*\n\n\"Dragon, what is it? Could we kindly use words containing syllables and actual meaning?\"\n\nUnsteadily, he said, \"I scent sense perfidy. Would you not agree, Princess, that King N'gala gave the impression of being very keen to have the two of us out of the way, too, this very evening?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Suspicious haste is what I mean.\"\n\nNow, she scratched her head. Fleas, he wanted to tease. Lice. This was far from the hour for joking. His five hearts sank as he realised \u2013 and she did too, judging by her sharp inhalation \u2013 how cleverly they had been played.\n\nAzania complained, \"I've a horrible premonition that you might be right, Dragon. How do you do that?\"\n\n\"How is hardly the question. When? Answer, far too late.\"\n\n\"So does father want allies or not? A Dragon to defend the city, now shoved conveniently aside \u2013 perhaps he is fighting this enchantment she has cast over him? He's trying to be his own man. He wants us around, then he does not. He wants to protect the city but he also wants to fling wide the gates and let Nahritu-N'shula right in; only, he can't quite do that. They're sealed. Best guess?\"\n\n\"She and Urdoo disappeared to find something to crack those gates like a nut?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Plus, we can reasonably conclude that the nutcracker was due to arrive this very evening?\"\n\n\"Ooh Dragon, you are not just a heavily armoured bag of muscles.\"\n\n\"Handsome bag of muscles, you meant to say.\"\n\n\"A true devastator in a sense your kin can never be,\" she replied, wriggling about as she scanned their surroundings. Despite his better instincts, his ego came ablaze. Predictable, aye? \"You've already turned to the north?\"\n\n\"Aye. We're going to have to shift fast, my flattering friend.\"\n\n\"Shall I blow extra hard?\"\n\n\"I regret to inform you that Prince Floric holds a monopoly on that skill, but not with his mouth.\" She hooted with laughter. \"On second thoughts, would you mind getting that fancy crossbow mount of yours clamped onto my back? I've a feeling we're going to need it all too soon.\"\n\n[ Jabiz Urdoo ]\n\nDragon stretched his wings to their fullest extent as they raced up from the southern wasteland. Massive, powerful beats. No pausing to search for tracks now. Somehow, they assumed, Jabiz Urdoo had outsmarted everyone \u2013 or all parties danced to the tune of the Psyromantic Mage, Nahritu-N'shula. How, they could only guess, but the consequences must surely be dire.\n\nThey flew high for part of the way, nearly three miles up, but after a time, Azania began to complain of headaches and altitude sickness. He descended five thousand feet while gliding, gathering his strength for the final sprint into N'ginta Citadel. Meantime, the white sun crested the horizon first, stretching talon-sharp shadows from the crest of every dune. Soon a much deeper redness followed, softening the effect, but as the white sun remained dominant, Ignis seemed diminished despite his relatively enormous size.\n\nHe tried not to think about large Dragons being diminished. No portents wanted here!\n\nAs the flat rooftops of N'ginta came into sight, they realised the time for portents had passed during their absence. The citadel was under attack by a monster.\n\nQuivering of talon, he pointed, \"What's that? A Sea Serpent on land?\"\n\nThe prodigious creature attacking the main gates was segmented and moved like an earthworm, but its vibrant red colour stood stark against the obsidian sands. The creature was also a goodly fraction of the size of the city. Taller than the outer gates at its crown, he estimated, and perhaps a thousand feet in length. No wings, no paws.\n\nThe Princess gasped, \"It's a \u2013 ah, what do you call these?\"\n\n\"A living city-cracker?\" He made a joke without the slightest mirth in his hearts.\n\nTo the sides, they saw in magnificent array an army easily three times larger than that which Jabiz Urdoo had fielded before.\n\nArmoured worm? Draconic?\n\nWhatever it was, it must freak the scales off any sensible Dragon.\n\nThankfully, this Dragon was anything but sensible, normal or standard, he told himself firmly. Courage! Fire up the fireless one!\n\n\"It's a Bloodworm,\" Azania exclaimed, her voice high-pitched with shock. \"I've only ever read about them. Those would be the reason no-one crosses the Blood Desert.\"\n\n\"Inescapable logic,\" he said drolly.\n\n\"Dragon,\" she gasped, \"are you pulling my leg? How are you calm?\"\n\n\"No, I shed my wings in shock a moment ago,\" he returned, \"and we're now flying by sheer magic alone. Princess, I'm thinking a lot of things right now, and most of them start with, 'That's impossible, but \u2026'\"\n\n\"Aye. I can only say, Jabiz brought one humongous door knocker. Can't really miss it.\"\n\nBloodworm. Dragon had read about them, too. Somehow, this whippersnapper was a tad larger than the legends had bothered to explain. The legends had also not bothered to suggest the use of Bloodworms to flatten cities.\n\nHad three-quarters of his army gone to fetch that monster?\n\nAs they watched, the long creature bunched up, slowly shifting away from the gates. After a breathless pause, it shifted forward almost languidly until it smashed against the gates. They could not hear the impact from this distance, but the dust that shook off the battlements and massive gatehouses told the tale well enough. His wings quivered; he shook them out right to the wingtips, demanding his body behave itself.\n\n\"My guess?\" he said.\n\n\"We'll find one Nahritu-N'shula at the bottom of all this?\"\n\n*Grrr.*\n\nWaving her hands, the Princess seated atop his back added, \"And in today's exciting news, our favourite, mysterious Psyromantic Mage has discovered how to turn the thoughts of the great beasts of the deserts to her beck and call?\"\n\n\"Quite. Therefore, for her, this isn't a casual jaunt through T'nagru.\"\n\n\"Oh, we aren't talking about world domination, are we?\"\n\n\"Crazy is as crazy does.\"\n\n\"Crazy? Mad genius, maybe,\" she corrected, smacking her hand on her thigh. \"Nahritu probably intends to run her little pet right through the seventeen kingdoms. And who would stop her?\"\n\n\"The first and only Dragon Rider and her magnificent sack of flying muscles?\"\n\nPerhaps if he said that another thousand times, he'd believe it too.\n\nToday promised to be grim.\n\nThe Princess said, \"I am totally with you, winching this Dragon bow into readiness, but one teensy question. How do we even damage that thing?\"\n\n\"Eyes, ears, brain,\" he mused aloud.\n\n\"Alright. Let's say it does have a brain in there somewhere. What do you propose \u2013 fill it with splinters of wood?\"\n\n\"Whatever it takes. Meantime, we look around for the other brains of the operation and see if we can't distract her with a talon to the neck, say. Or a bolt through the heart. You wouldn't have a handy schematic laying out where to find Bloodworm brains, would you?\"\n\n\"I'll just pop down and ask around, shall I?\"\n\nThe city's defenders had taken a leaf out of the aerial draconic scroll of hitting the enemy with oil, and burning it as much as they could. One problem. Despite being cooked in great quantities of the finest, most aromatic oil, the Bloodworm showed not the slightest sign of frazzling to a crisp.\n\nVery annoying that the creature did not have a glaring weakness. Fifty feet tall. Over a thousand feet long. How many tonnes?\n\nNor did it possess anything that could be called eyes, Dragon observed aloud as they approached within half a mile. He sensed its magic, like a great, elongated furnace of raw power. *Graaaboom!!* The citadel shook. The Bloodworm shuddered at the impact, but began to steadily draw back again as if unaffected.\n\nThey scanned the massed army for sign of Jabiz Urdoo or a mysterious woman of unfathomable powers and incalculable evil \u2013 but she was not apparently waving a large sign or anything quite so convenient. Plenty more ballistae, he noted in an undertone. Any run upon the Bloodworm was going to be exciting to say the least.\n\n\"There,\" Azania said, pointing. He had to crook his neck to see where she indicated. \"Back of the tail.\"\n\nNow that he spied the man, Dragon wondered how they could have missed him. Jabiz Urdoo was a stalwart chunk of a fellow clad in golden armour and a billowing black cloak. The outfit screamed, 'I'm the leader around here!' Had he been a Dragon, he would have pegged him for the kind of fellow that ate Princesses for breakfast and spat out the bones for the dogs to fight over. Not that he was ugly, scarred or any kind of brute. He carried an aura of velvety power, much like Juggernaut the Grinder. Confidence that stemmed from ability rather than bravado. A calm, calculating demeanour. His black eyes observed their approach with great attention.\n\nBeside him stood a strongly built woman of mahogany skin, clad in a many-layered black dress that shone like an insect's carapace. Unusually for such a dark person, her eyes were green, and ablaze with power like a Dragon's eyes blazed with the fires of battle. She wore many silver amulets draped about her neck and wrists, and in her right hand, clutched a white staff topped with a blood-red jewel.\n\nEnchantress!\n\nAs a precaution, he drew his protective magic about them.\n\nJust in time. Dragon felt the strangest, stroking sensation against his brain \u2013 like a spider's limbs testing silken threads for potential victims.\n\nNo trapped insects here. Not today, lady. He counterpunched, trying to follow the sensation to its source. The green eyes immediately fixed upon him. He wobbled in flight as the threads pulled at his consciousness, his wings, his resolve.\n\n*Snip-snip!* Visualising rending talons, he flung them at her, and had the satisfaction of seeing the woman stagger against Jabiz Urdoo. *Blergh!* Take that!\n\nEnough.\n\nGlasses. Dragon bow in paw. Quarrels at the ready.\n\n\"You hit her?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Not enough. Next time, she'll be ready.\"\n\nAs they approached, arrows and wooden quarrels flicked up to greet them. Dragon flew evasively, then at the Princess' word, straightened and lowered his head. They both fired as one, their quarrels arcing down into the great mountain of blood-red flesh below. *Whurr-whurr!* Zipping off like angry wasps. Hit, and vanished.\n\nThe winch above his back squealed as the Princess worked it frantically; Dragon jinked again, taking them out of the worst of the covering fire. He discovered he could fire at about twice her rate, since he had no need of a winch to draw his bow. They punched five more quarrels into the beast as they passed over; the Princess ducked flat and swivelled the bow to the rear to pound one more quarrel into the Bloodworm as they left it in their wake.\n\nDespite vanishing somewhere inside the massive body, as best they could tell, the quarrels made no impact whatsoever. Not unexpected.\n\nCircling tightly, they sank shot after shot into the behemoth as it slowly pounded the gates. Men laboured frantically behind the shivering timbers, he noticed, trying to bolster it from behind with great dark logs and building rubble. Other soldiers evacuated the populace from the outer city \u2013 already? Not a good sign. Back of the Bloodworm on the eastern flank, the slave Dragons lined up like a docile rank of cows standing behind a fence.\n\nTwice more, Nahritu-N'shula tried to slip through his defences. Azania responded by firing a speculative quarrel shot at the command position, but it fell five feet short.\n\nHe lost count of the number of ricochet shots he took in the belly and flanks. At the range they kept, a fast-moving Dragon made a difficult target, but he now wore a quarrel in his left inner hind thigh, and another which had penetrated his stomach, but only shallowly. He yanked them out in a welter of fury. At least the Princess was untouched \u2013 so far.\n\n\"Out of quarrels,\" Azania said.\n\n\"Me too. We aren't doing enough damage.\"\n\n*Graaboom!!* The gates shook. The left sagged visibly, the massively solid stone gatehouse starting to show signs of cracking as well.\n\nDragon said, \"Much as I hate to say this, I think we need your sister's help.\"\n\n\"Aye. It's a risk, however.\"\n\nThey discussed the matter as he winged up to the Palace roof. There was a distinct danger her mother could use the girl against them. Armoured but unarmed, they decided. That was the best they could do \u2013 and tie her on so that she could not try to escape or throw herself overboard.\n\nSince King N'gala was overseeing the evacuation of the outer city, the Dragon intimidated the younger Princess' guards into turning a blind eye to a blatant case of royal theft. He specialised in the art. Next, he had to bully the Princess into donning armour \u2013 several sizes too large for her \u2013 and terrorise a couple of soldiers into giving up their shields. Useful how a dint of snarling and waving one's talons toward vulnerable necks earned instant obedience.\n\n\"What will I need all this for?\" Inzashu asked, meantime. She was not exactly dressed for war. Lovely white gown. *Pah!* This was war, girl, not a ballroom!\n\n\"Protection for when we're up there,\" Dragon replied.\n\n\"Up where?\"\n\n\"We need your help against the Bloodworm,\" he said grimly. \"Come along now. Azania, tie your sister to my neck saddle.\"\n\n\"No. No \u2013 you can't, I'm afraid of heights!\"\n\n\"Look, Princess, technically you won't be on a height, but in the heights, so actually you'll realise there's nothing to be afraid of.\"\n\nAzania put in, \"Helpful.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Why don't you go chew off your paw in a quiet corner, Dragon?\"\n\nHe glared at the Princess. Now, the extra lip? One would think she was made of pure vexation.\n\n\"Thanks \u2026 but no.\" Inzashu made to take the shields off her arms. \"I am not flying anywhere with anyone, and that's final. I don't do heights. I'm from Skartun. Flat desert, except for the volcanoes. Feet firmly in the sand.\"\n\n\"Well, never mind then. Come help us load up,\" Azania said, winking at him behind her sister's back. \"We'll need more quarrels, Dragon.\"\n\n\"The soldiers were just fetching them.\"\n\nShortly, they walked outside once again, hearing the sound of Jabiz Urdoo's army cheering on the Bloodworm's efforts to destroy the gate. Inzashu helped them to load up the two quivers with quarrels, and they took the proffered sack of oil bombs as well. Might be a chance to anoint Jabiz with the finest of local fragrances. The girl watched in shy admiration as her sister scrambled up to his back and took her seat behind the Dragon bow mount.\n\n\"Ready, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Ready.\"\n\nHe said, \"Oh look, Inzashu, you have something on your toe.\"\n\nAs she glanced down, he scooped her up in one paw, the two shields in the other, and to the accompaniment of a most pleasing shriek of pure horror, he leaped into the air and beat for the great vault of the sky. Frankly, he was amazed. How could anyone be afraid of a little fresh air? Could it be the lack of wings, perchance?\n\nAs they cruised up into the early morning, watching the Bloodworm retreating and gathering itself for what had to be the penultimate assault on the gates, the girl managed to stop wailing. Her eyes remained glued shut, as best he could tell. He thought she might be praying \u2013 at least she had stopped shrieking. Couple of minutes, and she'd be as fine as her sister always had been.\n\nHe peered down, raking the battlements and gatehouses with his unreliable gaze. The great crossbars hung at disconsolate angles, that much was obvious. One of the hinges had ripped right out of its foundation tower.\n\nRight. Time to move. Dragon popped unhappy Princess number two onto his neck saddle. \"Strap yourself in and stop snivelling. If you get one drop of snot upon my scales \u2013\"\n\nAzania snapped, \"Dragon, sit!\"\n\nBy his wings, now she darted agilely down his neck to help her sister! \"Straps. Hold the shields either side of you and for Taramis' sake keep under cover, Inzashu. It's going to be a bad one, alright? Now, eyes on the Bloodworm \u2013\"\n\n\"Ooh, I don't feel good.\"\n\n\"Bloodworm! Where's its brain?\"\n\n\"Owww \u2026 my stomach \u2026\"\n\n\"Sister, our nation needs you. Please, try to detect its brain with your magic.\"\n\nDragon jumped nearly ten feet in the air as with a loud gurgling sound, the girl leaned over and decorated the side of his neck with something warm and unspeakably vile.\n\nAzania said, \"Better now?\"\n\nApparently, this feat earned the younger sister a pat upon the back! Outrageous.\n\nInzashu said, with a clear hitch in her voice, \"I do feel better now, thank you, Azania. One moment.\"\n\nHe spread his wings and tried not to shudder. Circling east, he took them up above the besieging army, gathered in its great gleaming ranks, trying to enjoy the idea that someone down there might discover fertiliser raining from the sky. Humans. Absolutely the grossest species ever to walk the coastal plains of Solixambria.\n\nInzashu said, \"It's quite far back \u2013 let's see \u2013 one, two, three segments from the armoured part of the nose. See the two vertical dark red stripes? Count three segments back from there, then move ten feet down from the top. It feels like a collection of basal ganglions. These creatures are sub-intelligent, but there does need to be some basic function to keep the whole thing working. That's probably what was keeping my mother \u2013\" her voice lowered into a horrible snarl \"\u2013 how dare you steal my daughter, Dragon!\"\n\nHer forehead thonked against his scales.\n\nFor his most scale-frazzling moment of the day, that was impressive.\n\nAzania cried, \"She's fainted!\"\n\n\"Tie her on; tie her shields up or something. We've got to do this now,\" he ordered, willing his hearts to stop thrashing about and return to normal beating. At about ten times the speed. By his sire's egg!\n\nThe Princess said a bad, bad word about Dragons and their demands.\n\n\"Quickly, while I line us up.\"\n\nCloth ripped as the Princess turned her sister's gorgeous white gown into something rather less gorgeous. A minute later, she had tried her in a doubled-over position to his neck. She pulled up the flaccid wrists and tied those too, bracketing Inzashu's body with the shields. Good coverage \u2013 as good as they could get.\n\nTurning, Azania slipped as the wind buffeted him.\n\nPaw!\n\nTo his vast surprise, he executed a perfect, gentle catch as she dropped over the side of his neck. Even more gently, he lifted and then lobbed her back up onto his shoulder.\n\nThe Princess uttered a few extra spicy words. He understood completely.\n\n\"Sit down, shut the mouth and take aim,\" he snapped, demonstrating the depth of his understanding. He was sure she appreciated his Dragon-may-care tone, too.\n\nBlink. Blink again, stupid eyes! He counted segments and estimated the location.\n\n\"We have to get closer than before,\" Azania said.\n\n\"Punch the bolts deep?\"\n\n\"Aye. Nothing at surface level will do \u2013 make sure you don't overdraw your bow either. It can snap, given your strength.\"\n\n\"The Bloodworm's on the move again.\"\n\nTurning upon his wingtip, Dragon lined up his run from a touch north of due east. Hopefully the suns rising behind would partially blind some of the catapult and ballista engineers. Azania cranked up her weapon, he held a bow and quarrels ready in his forepaws. Time to do this.\n\nHe snarled, \"Going in high and fast, then I'm going to plummet just before we hit firing range.\"\n\n\"Uhh \u2026\"\n\n\"Inzashu?\" Azania called. \"Stay under cover!\"\n\nThe girl paused in her struggling, but her heart was getting more exercise than an excited grasshopper.\n\nThe wind whistled over his wings as Dragon picked up speed. Jink. Sway; throw them off their aim, or introduce the element of doubt at least. At least twenty-five ballistae now threatened this flank; less on the western side, but he peripherally noticed men preparing something near Jabiz Urdoo's position. A new weapon? They swarmed over several catapults and a low, long cart behind. It held several lumps covered in a grey cloth. Leave that. Focus on the target, on the essential timing.\n\n\"Hold on!\" he roared.\n\nHe folded his wings. The drop slammed his stomachs up toward his spine. Inzashu moaned, her legs squeezing his neck with surprising strength. A flight of spiteful quarrels buzzed right overhead, not a single one striking the target; many arrows also, but only a couple passed through his wings. Second wave! Snapping out his wings, he arrested the drop and had the satisfaction of seeing almost all the shots pass beneath them. Azania cried out.\n\n\"You hit, Princess?\"\n\n\"It's nothing. Go, Dragon! Go!\"\n\nFlicking his wings wide, he steadied them about fifty feet above the heads of the soldiers, level with the Bloodworm's eyes \u2013 if it had any. The creature elongated segment by segment as it charged once more for the gates.\n\n\"Now!\" the Princess yelled, her voice shrill with pain.\n\nThey released in tandem from fifty Dragon paces out. Azania had fired two quarrels, he saw \u2013 bang on target. His shot plugged two feet lower, buried well beyond the fletching in the Bloodworm's flesh.\n\nReload!\n\n\"A foot lower!\" Inzashu shouted.\n\nBrave girl! Agony speared into his right shoulder, but Dragon held a steady course and slowed as the Bloodworm's huge bulk surged just ahead. Now, he dipped slightly so that Azania could target her shot perfectly. *Whurr-thwock! Whurr-thwock!*\n\nMagical backlash slapped him through darkness into light.\n\nHe shook his head.\n\nA distant voice cried, \"Dragon! Dragon! Pull up!\"\n\nFarther away, another person screamed in a welter of agony that sliced into his mind; conversely, the sharpness of the sensation brought clarity to his reeling senses. Soldiers flashed toward him! Pulling the Dragon bow up toward his chest in a gesture of pure instinct, he smashed full-bore into a regiment of black-helmed Skartunese soldiers, using them to break the momentum of his fall. The Dragon bow ripped away. His clenched paws pounded through them, elbows and knees flying \u2013 the clatter of armour, shields and javelins sounded incongruously like one long kitchen disaster. He ripped free and through.\n\nLeft wing not working?\n\nNet! Somehow, as he slewed toward the black sand, Dragon discovered that his left wing and flank had been netted. For once his size had worked for him \u2013 the snarl was bad, but not incapacitating.\n\nHe landed beyond the decimated squad of soldiers in a sandy shower, glancing back over his shoulder. The Bloodworm convulsed and writhed, rolling across a swathe of the Skartun army.\n\nOoh. Ugly, but ever so satisfying.\n\n[ Lightning Strike ]\n\nJabiz urdoo bellowed orders, but even he was just one of a wave of men fleeing like a school of fish dashing away from a marauding shark. The Bloodworm avalanched slowly over the western flank of his army, before the body crunched up and the head scraped away to the east, sending that flank into a similar panic. Thousands of men, crushed. Brutal as war was, he had never imagined anything like this.\n\nDragon's eyes jerked, fighting for focus. The gates still stood, but not for long. One of the gatehouses had collapsed in its entirety at that final strike, leaving a yawning gap.\n\nN'ginta Citadel lay open.\n\n\"Princess, the net!\"\n\n\"Can't \u2013 I'm \u2026 sort of pinned to the saddle.\"\n\n\"I've got it.\"\n\nTo both of their surprise, Inzashu produced a dagger. Not completely helpless, Princess? She cut herself loose with a series of quick slashes. Then, she ran up the base of his neck and out along his shoulder, onto the netted wing. Quick hands set about unsnagging the claw-like hooks. She folded back the heavy net layer by layer.\n\n\"Azania?\" Dragon curved his head back to check her over.\n\n\"Arrow in the upper thigh. It's a shallow wound, straight through the muscle. I'm fine. Just can't move well.\"\n\n\"There's another jutting from your shoulder.\"\n\n\"Thank Taramis for armour. That one missed. Soldiers!\"\n\nA contingent of keen Skartunese warriors rushed toward them, javelins held at the ready. Cranking up the Dragon bow, the Princess took aim. \"Stop right there!\"\n\nThe men fanned out.\n\nBehind them, the army began to reform its ranks, moving like a great organism with a single brain. Jabiz Urdoo's roaring sounded nearby; despite the loss of his pet, he made certain to launch the final assault.\n\nDragon snapped, \"Inzashu, go to your sister. Hold on tight!\"\n\n\"I need a weapon,\" she cried, but did as he commanded.\n\n\"Where's your mother?\" Azania hissed.\n\n\"Can't feel her.\"\n\nThe second the eleven-year-old reached her sister, he raised his wing, still half-covered in netting. Dragon lurched toward the men, swinging the net in a low sweep, left to right. They roared in fury as he snarled up over a dozen and then stamped on them. Blissful silence.\n\nTwo leftover archers gaped open-mouthed at the destruction. Pleasing, right? So artfully done, one man was actually hugging the other in terror.\n\nAzania shot them with a single quarrel.\n\nDragon said, \"Little Princess, go fetch the weapons you need. Be quick. No pausing to lose your breakfast.\"\n\n\"Already empty,\" said the girl, in a strange voice.\n\nHumans could not only turn pink and blue, but green as well. Oddly fascinating.\n\nShe leaped down onto the soft sand, rushing to the stricken archers to rob them of a bow and several quivers of arrows. Shaking visibly. Predictable, but he did feel bad for her. How much death would a girl have already seen in the notoriously brutal Skartun culture? Nothing like this; rivulets of blood snaking across black sands.\n\nInzashu-N'shula acted steady enough. She had a strong character inside, he concluded, beneath the shyness. After arming herself with a sword and bow, the dark girl ran again to his wing and freed the rest of the netting.\n\n\"Worm! Fight me, you cowardly worm!\"\n\nJabiz Urdoo! Turning, Dragon saw the bearded man, as dusky as Azania, approaching amidst the company of a huge retinue of Skartunese soldiers. The Jabiz bore the limp form of Nahritu one-handed over his shoulder. That strange cart was now some ways behind, bogged down in the sand. What could it hold? Those two substantial bulges looked like stippled columns of stone. Whatever it was, he did not fancy discovering what it could do.\n\nAzania cranked up the Dragon bow.\n\n\"Slinking lizard! Come on, what's the matter \u2013 too busy hiding behind little girls to fight? Shrivelling fool! Weakling! What are you so afraid of? Where's your fire, you slimy, gutless worm, you leftover piece of maggot-puke?\"\n\nLater, Jabiz Urdoo. This Dragon had better things to do than listen to a litany of pathetic insults.\n\n\"We have to get back to the city,\" the Princess whispered. \"Quickly, sister, strap \u2013\"\n\n\"I'm in.\"\n\nAzania whispered, \"Bow ready.\"\n\nRising, he drew breath, and thundered, <I \u2013 AM \u2013 DRAAGOONN!!>\n\nAlmost, the tactic worked. The front ranks shouted and covered their eyes as his rage blasted sand into their eyes, but Urdoo jerked aside so quickly that Azania's quarrel missed him by an inch and flattened a man standing right behind him. Inzashu also unleashed an arrow, but it dipped into the soldiers surrounding the Skartun leader.\n\nWhirling upon his heels, Dragon lurched into a run, purposely spraying sand behind him with his paws to confuse any pursuit or further attacks. Jabiz Urdoo bellowed invective at him until they were out of earshot. Acid to the ear canals; molten lead to the hearts. Let his words wash off the scales, Dragon!\n\nLaunch!\n\nWings pumping as he took to the air, he swept back over the city. Columns of men streamed like army ants toward the breach. Already, five or six slave Dragons had marched up to the broken gates, working to clear the rubble and force a way through. Ladders and grapnels flew up to the battlements in dozens of locations. The Bloodworm had crushed a substantial portion of the Skartun army, but there were thousands left as yet. Where did one even start amidst the mayhem?\n\nThe populace still rushed through the inner gates. They must be the priority.\n\n\"We have to start taking out those Dragons,\" he called over his back. \"Handlers first.\"\n\n\"There's the King,\" Inzashu pointed to the inner battlement. \"Do you think he'll help us now? Or, will you just \u2013\"\n\n\"YOU MEN! HIT THE DRAGON HANDLERS!\"\n\n\"\u2013 deafen everyone?\" she finished.\n\nSquads of T'nagrun soldiers formed up in the area behind the gate, locking shields as they crouched in position. Archers swarmed over the nearby houses and atop the battlements. Men ran to winch ballistae into position to cover the breach.\n\n\"Pass Dragon the oil bombs,\" Azania directed.\n\n\"Here, Dragon.\"\n\nWhat they needed most of all, was time. However, as a hail of arrows took out the Dragon handlers seated atop those first beasts, their Dragon thralls kept on working. Room for but one thought? All those nice ranks lined up behind them \u2026 ah. Target practice. Drawing back his paw, he set about lobbing a few bombs \u2013 some into the gap, others beyond into the Skartunese soldiers. A hail of ballistae quarrels hissed around them. One pinged off his left elbow. Cursing, Dragon ducked behind the ramparts. He flap-ran along the tops of the houses for fifty Dragon paces, before surging up to smash aside a troop of Skartunese soldiers who had established position upon the battlement.\n\nTwo sets of bows twanged behind him, taking out soldiers who thought they were safe out of paws' reach.\n\n\"Low pass,\" he snarled. \"Ballista crews, girls. Let's go warm them up.\"\n\n\"Dragon bow ready. See that quiver next to your left knee, sister? Those are flame arrows.\"\n\n\"Ooh, can I play too?\"\n\nAzania laughed wickedly. \"Anytime.\"\n\nEvidently, both Princesses had taken the wrong sort of education in their misspent youth. So different, yet in some ways, so alike!\n\nThundering his delight, he used the rampart to hurl himself so low over the Skartunese forces, he could kick a few heads in passing. Indeed \u2013 better idea! Snatching men up with his paws, he hurled them left and right, and briefly experimented with using a couple as flails, holding them by their legs to beat their fellows.\n\nThey did not last long, sadly.\n\nNo wonder Aria liked those ridiculous swords of hers.\n\nStill, he now understood a little of what Humans meant when they talked about reaping wheat. Tossing a random leg into the faces of one more troop, he skimmed over so narrowly that one Skartun ballista crew fired their quarrel directly into the backs of their own troops. Funny yet nasty. Here came Jabiz Urdoo and his retinue from the western flank, forging through his own force by means of beating out of the way those who did not clear off fast enough.\n\nInteresting method of command.\n\nDragon assessed the target. The ballistae were arranged in a row behind the troops upon the crest of a taller dune, giving them an excellent field of fire.\n\n\"Net!\" Azania screeched.\n\nHe dodged smartly. The net passed by so narrowly, one of the trailing hooks ripped out a small chunk of his Princess' hair. Now he was spitting mad.\n\n\"I call one and two!\" he roared.\n\n\"Three!\" said Azania, levelling her Dragon bow.\n\n\"Four!\" Inzashu shrilled, blowing on her fingers as she almost dropped her fire arrow.\n\n*Whomp, whomp!* The oil bombs landed perfectly \u2013 to his vast surprise \u2013 and ignited at once, sending the crews scuttling for cover. The Princess pierced the wind-up mechanism of the next weapon, causing it to unleash and rip off one of its own firing arms. Inzashu missed with her shot at the fourth ballista, but Dragon took another bomb in paw and finished the job from a height of fifteen feet or so. Even a creature with terrible eyesight could see that far.\n\n\"They're turning to target us,\" Azania said, working the winch as fast as she could.\n\nDragon slewed toward the Bloodworm, taking them further out of range. \"Up and over!\" he purred, throwing his muzzle toward the sky. Both sisters groaned as he took them through the vertical in a somersault and then performed a half-roll to bring them into normal orientation again. \"Call targets!\"\n\n\"One.\" \"Two!\" \"Three and four!\"\n\nExcellent response from his Riders, he thought peripherally \u2013 he and they were learning how to work together.\n\nHe swept down on the terrified ballista crews. Only one managed to fire on target, but the narrowness of the angle made the quarrel skim painfully off his flank without penetrating. They made the team pay for that mistake.\n\nBy the time they finished with the ballista crews, Jabiz Urdoo stood amidst the massed ranks of his army, toward the front line, directing the attack. The eastern flank was enveloped in heavy fighting, but the greatest press was still at the gates. As they gained altitude, Princess Azania noted aloud that the inner gates were now being pushed shut. It was also clear that both flanks would soon be overrun. Having clearly taken a leaf out of the aerial team's tactical manual, the Skartun commanders must have determined to deploy the Dragon thralls to clear the battlements of defenders. Flame blossomed in multiple places; he saw one Dragon boosting another up to the top of the wall.\n\nThey might not fly, but this was bad enough.\n\n\"Time for the Dragon bow?\" Azania said.\n\n\"Aye. Aim low in the belly, just in front of the hind legs. That'll do enough damage without being fatal, I hope.\"\n\nThey swept back and forth over the battle, struggling mightily to make a difference. Every now and again, they heard Jabiz Urdoo roaring in the background, \"Worm!\" \"Slithering serpent!\" \"Weakling!\"\n\nKing N'gala's ballista teams were unmerciful. The Princess struck down five Dragons almost exactly as they had planned, only for them to discover that the handlers drove the Dragons on anyways. Even one female whose hind leg had clearly been broken, dragged herself up and over the battlements and into the houses behind. The King's teams aimed for the kill.\n\nSoon, they would have to face that reality, for the Skartun pressed in with ruthless efficiency. Their war machine was roaring now, as Dragons would say. Leaving the outer gate in their wake, the handlers walked their armoured Dragon thralls through and up to the inner gates, where the fighting grew fierce. Numbers of the Dragons wore quarrels in their hides, but gave no sign of being affected by pain.\n\nThe T'nagrun soldiers were forced to abandon the outer battlement, or die. Full retreat to the packed inner citadel! Azania called that she spied King N'gala himself fighting amidst the rearguard down in the streets.\n\nDragon fire raged against the wooden inner gates.\n\nLanding briefly to reload, the Dragon-Princess force launched out again, intending to focus upon the Dragons raging against the gate. Dense smoke poured up from the inferno there.\n\nAs they swept overhead, a brutal pain suddenly gripped his mind. He heard Inzashu cry out at the same moment; they drew together to keep Nahritu-N'shula out, but she attacked again and again. Psychic sledgehammer blows! Dragon forced his wings to keep going. Keep flapping. Losing altitude too fast! Her attack was monumental, forcing him lower and lower, toward Jabiz Urdoo's position.\n\n\"With me, Inzashu!\" he snarled.\n\nDrawing together as one, they struck back, staggering the woman. Azania's quarrel skittered off the stone right between her legs.\n\n<I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nHis thunder drowned out all sound of battle as they fought not to crash land, his wingtips brushing the houses, when suddenly from the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a silver flash. A quarrel slammed into his flank, but the jolt it delivered was unlike anything he had experienced before. *Kerack!* Instantly ignited as if by lightning, every muscle in his body seized up at once.\n\nDragon fell hard. It was all he could do to spread his wings, to take some of the sting off their landing \u2013 perhaps that action alone saved the Princesses. He slammed into the cobblestones of the citadel's lower streets and skidded along for a number of Dragon lengths, bruising his sternum. Both girls groaned.\n\nHe groaned, \"What \u2026 hit us \u2026\"\n\nA silver wire linked the quarrel to that strange cart! It stood uncovered, two mounded coils upon it gleaming silvery with power \u2013 yanking the quarrel out at the expense of a badly jangled paw, he tried to rise. By his sire's egg! What had that thing done to him? A team upon the back of the cart aimed a small ballista at him. Another?\n\n\"Off! Princesses, get off! I can't stop \u2026\"\n\nAs if in a nightmare, the engineers worked the winch mechanism \u2013 far too fast for him to recover in time. They could not miss from this distance. Inzashu tore herself free with a groan, rushing to help her sister.\n\nJabiz Urdoo strode toward them. \"Felt a little tickle from my machine, did you, worm?\"\n\nArrogance. Sheer arrogance!\n\nDragon curled his lip. \"Come closer, little man, and I'll snap your head off.\"\n\n\"Hit him again.\"\n\n*Kerack!*\n\nInzashu fell off his back, tossed aside by the machine's terrible force. Azania slumped, then slowly, ever so slowly, slid off the far side. Limp as a withered reed.\n\nThe machine hummed balefully as it pumped its awful load into his body. A crackling sound filled his ears. Dragon tried to move, to unclench his quivering talons. Nothing. Not a chance. He had lost all control of his bodily functions. His hearts fluttered wildly inside his chest, but that was all the movement he knew.\n\n\"Azania. Inzashu \u2026\"\n\nStooping, the Jabiz twisted his fingers into Azania's hair, and dragged her limp body off the ground as if examining a filthy dishrag he had found mouldering at the bottom of a barrel. After spitting directly into her unconscious face, he shoved her toward his soldiers.\n\n\"Take these pathetic females away. When they're awake enough to appreciate it, we'll spill their guts before their father's eyes.\"\n\n\"No \u2026\"\n\nWas he even speaking aloud? The machine purred loudly, building up the load of its dark magic one more time. The silver wire! He had to reach the silver wire, but his paws refused to obey.\n\n\"So, worm \u2013\"\n\n\"Call me Dragon!\" A hoarse whisper was the best he could produce.\n\n\"Worm! Crawling, feckless, pathetic little worm!\" Jabiz sneered, his handsome face twisted into a scowl as he watched his men dragging the Princesses away. \"Keep those two alive. I want them to scream properly for their daddy.\"\n\nEvil. All the colours of this man were a poisonous purple. Ruthless. Proud. Utterly assured in his dominance of the situation.\n\nJabiz Urdoo smiled. Few expressions had ever terrified him more. He held up a silver rod. \"I'm going to teach you about pain, maggot. With this inductor rod, I will introduce you to such agony \u2013\"\n\nGroaning at the supreme effort, Dragon pulled his muzzle toward the man.\n\nUrdoo raised his hand. \"Another hit!\"\n\n*Gnaooaaarrr!!*\n\nWas that sobbing roar even his own voice?\n\nBlackness sucked away at the corners of his vision. The man approaching his head wavered as if seen through the rising heat of a bonfire. Behind him, Princess Azania came alive in the grip of the soldiers. Pinching a sword, she cut one man down and rounded on the second. Seasoned as he was, the Skartunese warrior's eyes rather boggled at the impression that a woman no taller than his breastbone was threatening him. The Princess ran the blade smoothly into his groin.\n\nShe whirled. \"Dragon. Dragon!\"\n\nReaching up, Jabiz jammed something into the side of his head. Deep into his right ear canal.\n\nHis handsome features were impassive, as if he knew this was the end. Without bothering to turn, he waved a hand, \"Shut her up, would you?\"\n\n\"Electricity \u2013 unnh!\"\n\nDragon saw black.\n\nThen, he saw nothing at all. Such pain roared inside his skull, it was as if he had swallowed an ocean tempest. His ear crackled as if fat were spitting in a fire. Every muscle in his body locked up. When his vision cleared, he saw Jabiz Urdoo still watching with that impassive disinterest, as if the agonised thrashing of a victim hardly held any fascination, for he had seen it all many times before.\n\n\"Had enough pain, worm?\"\n\n\"Call me \u2013 gnaooaaarrr!\"\n\nHundreds of Skartunese soldiers had gathered around, jeering, \"Come on, worm.\" \"Get up.\" \"Slacker.\" \"Loser, show us what you've got.\" \"Fool.\" Worst, was their mocking laughter. He had heard it all his life.\n\n\"Asking for more, worm?\" Urdoo sneered.\n\n\"Call me \u2013\"\n\nA surging, sizzling tempest of pain crushed his soul. He felt his back arch so cruelly, he feared his spine must surely snap.\n\n*Gnn-arrr-GNAAAARRR!!*\n\nSo ferocious was his roar, the man stumbled backward, losing his grip upon the silver handle. Dragon knew the other end was embedded in his ear. That was the pain; the thing that drove a Dragon mad. For the first time, he understood how his kindred could have been enslaved. All he could think about was this world of anguish. The roaring destruction of sanity. He heard a voice gibbering inside his head that he had to give up, give over, crawl upon his belly before this man, or the torture would come afresh, and he would die.\n\nCould his hearts even bear it?\n\n\"Want to go another round, you worthless, fireless worm?\"\n\nAs his vision cleared once more, it was to fix upon the Princess of T'nagru, a broken doll slumped upon the stones. Another soldier dumped Inzashu atop her. Discarded like yesterday's rubbish.\n\nHis lips peeled back from his fangs. What had this Jabiz done?\n\n\"Poor little worm, are we crying yet? Did you know that a Dragon can lament just like a person? Come look at this grovelling worm, men! Let me show you what we do to his kind!\"\n\n\"Do your worst, fool!\"\n\n\"Worm! You will call me master!\"\n\nHis blink sliced through eternity before returning to the real world. To the endless clamour of battle, to the whining of that machine. Electricity. The Princess had said something about electricity \u2026\n\nFor the life of him, he could not remember why that was important.\n\nJabiz Urdoo stretched his hand out for the silver handle. Blood trickled from his left ear. \"Worm! You will be my personal slave. Lick my boots, worm!\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\nThe man's eyes bulged. \"Take this!\" He squeezed the handle.\n\nBurning, spitting, unbearable power. Oblivion threatened, but Dragon clung to one thought \u2013 his precious Dragon Rider lay there, struck down by this coward. The city would soon fall and these people would die, all because he could never find the fires within him. But if there was electricity, and pain, those must be greater than whatever it was that always burned within him whenever the grief or rage hurt most.\n\nThat sensation was white fire behind his breastbone now. White, like Taramis.\n\n\"Electricity \u2026\"\n\nThe Princess had never been more right.\n\n\"Useless maggot! Roll over! The torture has only just begun.\"\n\n*Kerack!!* His body buzzed. Sparks flew off his wingtips; his paws clenched uncontrollably. Yet, he was a big Dragon. Their machine had never been designed for one like him, had it? He welcomed the pain and used it, somehow, to drive his paws beneath him. He tore forth the strength to kneel. Panting now. Unable even to see the enemy, the taunting crowd, the man whose words were the distillation of every insult he had ever suffered in his life.\n\n\"What's the matter with you, worm? Don't you know when you're beaten, you crawling bug, you dribbling simpleton? No Dragon has ever lived through what I am able to do to them! I will explode your brains out of your earholes unless you belly crawl to me, now!\"\n\nHe set his jaw. \"Call. Me. Dragon!\"\n\nJabiz Urdoo screamed, \"I am your master! Hit the worm. Again!\"\n\nHe never felt where the following arrow struck him, for the white pain that flashed through his muscles was everything, a song of agony unlike anything he had ever imagined. This was his song. The power that he needed had never flared more brilliantly, coursing through his body in unimaginable waves, needing only to be directed to where it would either kill him, or unleash the beast within.\n\nWelcoming all that was seething, effervescent white fire, Dragon shovelled it toward the pain behind his breastbone. Find his fire? No, that search was over. This time, he would rip it out of his very soul.\n\n<Ocean always rises.>\n\nHe squeezed that sensation harder, and harder still, until that new pain became the focal point of his universe. The pressure swelled and swelled again. Quadrupled. The crackling power made his paws spasm, his wings slap against the ground, his tail dance helplessly upon the stones. Nothing was as it should be, but the Dragon knew this was the only way. An egg could never forget its origins.\n\nForce \u2013 it \u2013 out!\n\nMouth agape, he staggered upright. White sheeted across his vision. Nothing was left. Nothing. Pulling all the murderous, fizzing power into his core, he let rip the thunder of his deepest longings.\n\n<I AM DRAGON! I \u2013 AM \u2013 FIIIIRRREEE!!>\n\n[ Firestorm ]\n\nLiquid heat hissed up through his long throat and over his forked tongue. Since he had never felt such a sensation before, he tried to purse his lips and roll his tongue to control it. A thin, incandescent stream shot forth, a whisper of fire rather than the conflagration he barely dared to dream of.\n\nA column cleared through the soldiers as if by magic. Burned to a cinder.\n\nSo shocking was this revelation, he tried to gulp back the stream of fire. Bad mistake. The pressure built so rapidly behind his keel bone, his eyes bulged and his every talon ripped cobblestones out of the road in an agony of white-hot fury. His maw gaped wider than ever before. Lightning crackled around the edges of his vision.\n\n*GGRRROOOOAAARRGGHH!!*\n\nA crack of thunder shook the city. White flame hosed out of his mouth, gushing before him like a river bursting its banks as he flicked his muzzle from side to side. The Skartunese warriors fell in droves. The houses behind them imploded. Even the bricks burst into flame.\n\nHis body was afire, stinging in every scale. He was certain his ear canals must be smoking. How could he not be? His fire was white, incandescent, shot through with colours like the mother-of-pearl shells he and the Princess had found on the western beaches what seemed like a lifetime ago, now. He had never seen nor imagined hotter infernos.\n\nPrincess Azania!\n\nHe snapped his jaw shut before the fire reached her \u2013 but it had never threatened to immolate her, he realised, because somehow amidst his epiphany, he had stepped forward to assume a protective stance over his Princesses. The girls lay together beneath his white-hot throat, holding one another close. Dipping his muzzle, he began to scent their hearts before he realised that Azania's dark eyes were wide open, glistening with unshed tears.\n\n<Terror-wonder-ified?> his brain tried and failed to find words to express what he beheld in her, in this instant.\n\nAzania whispered, \"That's my Dragon.\"\n\n\"You're the one who believed,\" he breathed back, buzzing from muzzle to tail with wonder at what he had just accomplished. \"I \u2026 I just never \u2026 you're alright?\"\n\n\"Jabiz!\"\n\nThe Skartun commander swooped for the inductor's grip, still dangling from his right ear canal.\n\nPursing his lips, Dragon blew him away with white fire. The gust picked him up and flung him against the shimmering coils of his machine. With a blinding flash, violent electrical energies blazed through his body; then, the sound of the coils developed a grating buzz.\n\nHe dropped his body between the machine and the Princesses.\n\n*KAABOOM!!*\n\nShake the head. Black smoke boiled into the air from a small crater where the electricity machine and its cart had stood. Vaporised! By his wings, that could have been bad \u2013 well, he had a couple of extra bits and pieces imbedded in his scales, but at least his Dragon Rider was safe. He checked again. Safe, but hurt \u2013 as was her younger sister, bleeding from her temple, and her left side and both ears, for that matter.\n\nThe girl's eyelids flickered. \"What was that \u2026 racket?\"\n\n\"My Dragon just spit-roasted the enemy.\"\n\nHer Dragon? The cheek! Still, he admired her joke with a huge grin.\n\nMaybe it suited. In private, if no-one \u2026 he glanced up. Hundreds of Skartunese soldiers looked on. Brown of skin they were, but they looked pale and sickly all of a sudden. *Mwaa-haa-haa \u2026* why would that be, men?\n\nDragon smiled amiably and tried to wave a paw. That bit did not work, but his voice did. He rasped, \"I suggest you boys start running.\"\n\nAs gently as he could, he scooped Inzashu up into his forepaw, and helped Azania to alight on his neck. It was all they could manage. He felt as if he had been run over by a Bloodworm, but while he still had breath, this city needed cleansing of a cockroach infestation.\n\nA nice, cleansing fire.\n\nHis chest felt moderately terrible, mind. He was not sure what he had torn open in there, maybe this extra stomach Sea Dragons were supposed to have, but nothing inside felt hale and hearty. Could he produce one more blast?\n\nAzania said, \"Say, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Aye, Princess?\"\n\n\"Would you have an evil Dragon laugh left in you? I could really stand to hear your wicked laugh right now \u2013 you know, your 'bwaa-haa-haa, I'm such a thumping great Dragon' production.\"\n\n\"Far too predictable.\"\n\n\"But fun.\"\n\n\"You make an excellent point.\"\n\nShe patted his neck with one tiny hand. \"Ouch, you're hot stuff. Of course I do. I'm a woman.\"\n\nUndeniable fact.\n\nAs was the fact that he was hot stuff. Positively molten.\n\nThat was the thought that made his chest swell until he could no longer withhold.\n\n*Mwwaa-haa-haarrrgghh!!* he thundered, chasing the Skartunese warriors out of the city with a monstrous, billowing wall of fire. Well, many of them didn't make it out alive.\n\nBad luck.\n\nAs the echoes of his thunder faded, the Princess said brightly, \"Do you know what? Just every now and again, you being a typical Dragon is allowed. It certainly works for me.\"\n\n\"And me,\" said he, stepping lively over a road covered in smoking bodies.\n\n\"Up to the gates this instant, Dragon!\"\n\n\"Oh, do we think we're calling the orders now? I suggest you limber up your bow, wench, in case we run into any stragglers.\"\n\n\"Wench? I'll have you know that I'm a fearfully expensive Princess.\"\n\n\"I'm rolling my eye fires up here.\"\n\n\"So mature.\"\n\nOn that note, he picked up the pace, rushing up to the inner gate of the city as best he could. Numb paws. Muscles cramping and unclenching in unfamiliar ways. Wings that refused to settle along his flanks as usual. There, they found the surviving Dragons still toiling to burn down the gate. In order to resolve the issue of how to stop the thralls, they took the expedient of borrowing one handler to explain to them, before his spleen squeezed out between Dragon's knuckles, exactly how the inductors worked.\n\nThe man proved both eager and informative.\n\nThereafter, they dashed from one Dragon to the next, squeezing the inductor handles and telling them to stand down. Azania worried aloud that if all the thralls knew was how to respond to pain, how would they ever be rehabilitated to normal function again? He fretted about that too, but he was more worried about a person who was missing.\n\nNo sign of Nahritu-N'shula anywhere.\n\nNor could Inzashu detect her mother's presence. That usually meant she was out of range, but \u2013 no guarantees. As smart and powerful as the Psyromantic Mage was, this could be yet another ploy. Meantime, the T'nagrun soldiers toiled to clear and secure the lower city.\n\nWhen the gates swung open, they had another unwelcome surprise. Report was that King N'gala lay dying upon the battlement beside the gate.\n\n\"Father's \u2013 what happened?\" Azania gasped, shaking Prince Aragu's arm in distress.\n\nHe began to raise his hand to her, but a warning growl from a certain lurking Dragon gave him pause. It was the kind of growl that argued eloquently that such an action would result in the instant, toothy confiscation of an appendage.\n\nPulling away, he said, \"Something burned up inside his stomach. It looked like a metal spider, at least, that's what we saw. I will not miss the man \u2013 go weep over him if you wish.\"\n\nStepping back half a pace, the Princess appeared to consider this.\n\nThen, moving in a blur, she surged forward and slapped her brother with all of her strength. It was neither a tentative nor a girly slap. This was a full-blooded, Juggernaut-approved version of the slap, one delivered with impeccable timing and all the power of her shoulder and torso behind it.\n\nHer brother hit the ground, half-stunned. \"Whaaa \u2026\"\n\nShe spat, \"You are despicable. Dragon?\"\n\nHe leered briefly at Prince Aragu. \"I suggest you take a more civil tone with my Dragon Rider in future, little Princeling, or I'll be the next to slap you \u2013 and that, you will not survive to remember.\"\n\nThen, cradling Inzashu-N'shula in his paw, he lifted Azania up to the high battlement, and leaped up a little further along where there was some space behind the crowd. Azania knelt over her father. His entire midsection was a smoking, charred mess, but somehow, he clung to life.\n\nLifting Inzashu over their heads, he deposited her beside her sister.\n\nThe King's lips moved.\n\n\"What is it, father?\" Azania lowered her ear toward his mouth.\n\nHer tiny face appeared serene, but Dragon smelled something quite different in her emotions. After a moment, she smiled and spoke gently to him.\n\nOpenly incensed, King N'gala of T'nagru perished the very next instant.\n\nTurning her back upon her father's body, Princess Azania pushed furiously through the crowd. After a second, the younger Princess looked up, her face distraught. Too weak to walk? Dragon reached over once more and scooped her up; she curled up in his paw, weeping without a sound. When the fuming older Princess joined them, her demeanour cracked at last.\n\n\"Dragon, take us away \u2026 somewhere, please. Anywhere but here.\"\n\nHe flew them up to her old chambers in the Royal Palace and prescribed a bath. Hot baths were supposed to be good medicine for Humans, he had read \u2013 although, how one fixed whatever her father had said to her, he had no idea.\n\nAfter all, he was only a Dragon.\n\nA breather of fire."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "It took until the late afternoon for the message to filter up to the Palace that all of the Dragon thralls were standing motionless, exactly where they had been left. By then, the doctors had been in to check over and bandage the Princesses. Inzashu had a concussion and was under strict orders not to budge from her bed. That left a limping, melancholic Princess to be his right-paw woman and figure out what to do with eighteen mindless Dragons, once they had rounded up a few stragglers dotted around the streets and outside the walls.\n\nA prisoner told them that the retreating Skartun army had taken five worms with them. In a profanity-laden tirade, he threatened that the other twenty-nine Jabiz of Skartun would not remain unmoved by this defeat. They would return in the cooler season with an army fifty times greater, and many more worms.\n\nDragon bade him watch his tongue, or he would pluck it from his mouth forthwith.\n\n\"Dragon, we want information,\" Azania protested.\n\n\"He can write while he's bleeding to death,\" he growled.\n\nTurning to the chained prisoner, the Princess said, \"Tell me, what happened to this first mover honour you sought?\"\n\nThe man said, \"Jabiz Urdoo was under the enchantress' spell \u2013 the Psyromantic Mage \u2013 as was your witless King, girl. Where's the honour in that? Our soldiers will cross the desert, or perish. Better that than a life in the dungeons. This is the Skartunese way.\"\n\n\"King N'chala will decide what to do with you,\" she said.\n\n\"And with you, I hear,\" he sneered. \"All you are to this kingdom is chattels, woman. A pretty price for a pretty face. I'd pity you, but somehow, I can't be bothered.\"\n\nAzania raised her hand before his paw so much as twitched. \"Don't kill him, Dragon. Much better for him to suffer in our kingdom's finest accommodation. The shameful words of a shamed warrior cannot touch me anyways. I am a Dragon Rider.\"\n\nThe man made to spit at her, but a talon curled about his lips. Dragon growled, \"Desist. I am not so merciful.\"\n\n\"Mercy?\" the Princess laughed hollowly. \"Rotting in a dungeon is no mercy for his ilk.\"\n\nJudging by the warrior's railing and cursing as they departed, she was dead right. He liked that about his Princess. Tiny cranium, to be sure, but it was clearly packed full of the best stuff. Extremely dense.\n\nShe said, \"Dragon, your throat's hurting, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Aye. When you helped me work out what I needed from that machine, I think I tore something inside. Maybe I was defective after all, Azania. Something inside my \u2026 fire tract, I guess, was blocked up from birth. Were it not for your belief, and what you said \u2013\" he shook his head slowly \"\u2013 because of you, I found the courage to push through all the pain. Plus, as you know, I'm an incredibly stubborn, curmudgeonly chunk of a Dragon.\"\n\n\"Brain of solid granite, did you say?\"\n\nGood try. Her smile did not fool him in the slightest.\n\nShe said, \"Well, we'll have to go fetch those five Dragons. Maybe tomorrow. I might be a disreputable Dragon Rider, but I'm also quite exhausted.\"\n\n\"Mighty Dragon Rider.\"\n\n\"Oh, the mighty mite. That's me.\"\n\n\"Who lost her father today. Grief is no easy companion.\"\n\nThe Princess gave him a long, uncomfortable look. \"My father was at pains to point out what a disappointment I have always been to him. And Inzashu. What do you think of that?\"\n\n\"What did you reply?\"\n\n\"I wished him a peaceful rest in the afterlife. Oddly, even after all he's done and that final expression of his hate, I actually meant it.\"\n\n\"Then you're the bigger person.\"\n\n\"If you're trying to be funny \u2013\"\n\n\"No, I was not. Sorry. That's what Dragons would say. You acted with great honour, which is more than anyone could say for N'gala. Your spirit is bigger. Your fires burn brighter. And, in case you missed the point, I am so proud of you after today, my wings tingle something fierce.\"\n\n\"Eh? That's from being zapped to a crisp, or?\"\n\nThis time, his artist's eye detected the slightest curvature of her lips \u2013 a genuine response. He said, \"Smart Princess like you, I'm sure you can work out what I mean.\"\n\n\"Are you afraid you might lose your fire again?\"\n\nHe dipped his muzzle. \"I hope whatever I ripped open does not heal, aye. For now \u2026\" He let a curl of white fire trickle over his tongue, and up past his nose. \"It's hard to control, but from now on, my friend, I plan to light all the lamps for you.\"\n\nTo his surprise, his tiny friend threw herself into his paws, and gave him a huge, fierce hug.\n\nPerhaps there might have been a little leakage involved.\n\nA male Dragon in all his pomp, he ignored that touch of wetness and did not mention it. Nor did he shudder. Well, maybe a smidgen.\n\nAfter that, they wandered off to invade the blacksmiths' quarter with eighteen tame Dragons in tow. They bade the master blacksmiths remove the head cages with the greatest care, especially the inductor probes which penetrated the ear canals to a depth of eleven to thirteen inches. Some of the Dragons were so scarred, the ear tissue had fused to the probes and they had to experiment with grease, oil and blunt, flat instruments to finally extract the wretched instruments of torture.\n\nNow they had eighteen very confused Dragons to look after \u2013 he assumed as much, since they were not talking as yet. Proper granite brains, make no mistake.\n\nThe confusion had to be exacerbated when a Dragon called Dragon sat them down to have a cosy talk with them. To be honest, he was not sure what to say, but a general chat about freedom, recovery and a pain-free life majored amongst the points he made. He and Azania would be their masters and give them orders, he informed them, until they were ready to take charge of their own lives.\n\nZero response. His hearts sank into his scaly socks, or \u2026 something like that. He and Azania shared identically dismayed glances.\n\n\"Next stop?\" he asked.\n\nShe said, \"The healers. Most of these Dragons require treatment, and a jolly good meal. Maybe tomorrow they could help clear up the city and move any rubble that needs to be shifted?\"\n\n\"Good thinking, Princess. Let's call that a plan.\"\n\nAfter spending several hours with the healers trying to work out what to do for the Dragons, including diet and special treatment of the ear canals, they left the former slaves to spend the night in the Royal Gardens. Strict orders not to trample the flowerbeds.\n\n\"Totally essential point,\" Dragon protested.\n\nAzania elbowed his neck and snuggled a little closer. He was sure he could hear her eyelids closing back there. \"Just when I took you for a \u2013\" huge yawn \"\u2013 fiery monster.\"\n\n\"One needs to know where to breathe one's fire,\" he opined. Quick check. Aye, still flaming.\n\n\"Are you strutting?\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Liar, liar, paws on fire.\"\n\n\"I'm a thief, too,\" said he, scaling the royal balcony with aplomb. \"May I remind you, priceless Princess, that I still have despicable plans to ransom you to \u2013 let's see \u2013 the Prince of the farthest realm I can imagine? Other side of the oceans, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\"Oh, you are a wicked beast. Pure evil.\"\n\nTaking the Princess in paw one more time, he gently slipped her into the four-poster bed alongside her little sister. He said, \"Bedtime story?\"\n\nAzania snuggled down upon her silken pillow. \"This bed's so soft. I'm not used to this anymore.\"\n\n\"There's always my paw.\"\n\n\"Give me one night in luxury.\" She winked at him. \"I am an unconventional Princess, after all. Silk makes my skin itch.\"\n\n\"Of course. I believe everything you say,\" he agreed, settling right up against the bed. The wood creaked in protest. He growled, \"No, I am not moving from here, so you can just put up with it. Me and beds have a history, you know. Consider yourself warned.\"\n\n\"Me, or the bed?\"\n\nAfter the day's frenetic events, so many unknowns still buzzed around inside his head. What motivated a man like Jabiz Urdoo? Was it pride, ambition or honour, or rather, the behind-the-scenes machinations of Nahritu-N'shula which had led to this war in which both Skartun and T'nagru had suffered severe losses? The falling of armies, Dragons and Kings was no small matter. Neither was the Skartunese ambition to return with thirty times the number and decimate the Dragon Clans in pursuit of new slaves.\n\nNor was the discovery of one's fires.\n\nChuckling sleepily, the Princess whispered, \"So, about my story?\"\n\nAll these concerns must wait upon the morrow. Tonight, he would rest in the comfort of victory over two terrible foes: Jabiz Urdoo, and his own debility.\n\n\"Very well, Your Highness. Once upon a time, a fiendish, rip-snorting beast perched atop the tallest tower of the greatest castle in all the land, contemplating a little recreational pillaging. All he had managed to do so far was to enjoy a long snooze in the glorious sunshine. Since dawn. Till dusk. Now, despite being saddled with a fine-sounding name like Blitz the Devastator \u2026\"\n\nHmm. In another turn-out for the legends, Princesses did snore.\n\nHis storytelling was definitely not the culprit."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Upon Dragon's Breath 2) Dragons of Kings",
        "author": "Ava Richardson",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Author: Ava Richardson; Tags: dragons; Genre: fantasy",
                "text": "The battle for Torvald begins.\n\nAs the young heir of a noble house fallen into decay, Bower has reluctantly shouldered the mantle he was born with\u2014that of Torvald's rightful king. It is his destiny to throw off the shackles of King Enric and lead his people to freedom, or so he's been told.\n\nWith the help of the wild and untamed Dragon Rider Saffron, he hopes to unite his downtrodden people. It will take an uneasy alliance with a rogue band of Dragon Riders and their charismatic leader, Ryland, to challenge the Dark Mage king, but distrust threatens to tear apart the force that he's risked everything to build.\n\nNow, on the eve of battle, Bower will have to fulfill a mystical prophecy and become the leader he was born to be, or risk his future kingdom falling apart. Surrounded on all sides by deadly foes, he must face not only the evil king, but his deep doubts about himself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The Salamander Prophecy: Old and young will unite to rule the land from above. Upon dragon's breath comes the return of the True King. It will be his to rebuild the glory of Torvald.\n\n\"What do you want for your birthday, Bower?\"\n\nI look up at my father, Nev, and tell him at once, \"A dragon.\"\n\nHe laughs. \"Dear Bower, one day you might see one, if you are lucky. A dragon back in Torvald. Now that would be a sight.\" He glances over his shoulder as if afraid someone will hear.\n\nI am not yet of age, but I am old enough to know not to speak of dragons in front of anyone other than my father.\n\nSeeing no one in the study with us, my father goes to his desk and pulls out a book. He brings it to me and hands me the heavy, leather-bound volume. \"You must read this only when and where no one can see you.\"\n\nI run a hand over the book's binding and open it. The page seems bright with color\u2014a red dragon. My father touches the drawing and says, \"That is a Crimson Red. Once the dragon of the kings of Torvald\u2014the Flamma-Torvalds rode such a dragon.\"\n\nI touch the dragon\u2014but it is a flat image with no life, no warmth, no hard scales. Looking up at my father, I ask, \"Do you think, one day, I will ride such a dragon?\"\n\nHe puts a hand on my shoulder. \"That would be my wish. But for now\u2026\" Taking the book from me, he hides it in the room behind what seems a shelf of dull books on farming and architecture. \"For now, we will hide your book. But when you cannot sleep, come into the hidden room and read. Learn about dragons.\"\n\nWe start down the stairs to the main rooms, and I have to ask, \"But, Father, the king says\u2014everyone says\u2014dragons aren't real.\"\n\nHe smiles, but his eyes still seem dark and sad. \"Oh, they were real. And that is a secret you must keep. Our family has many secrets, as does House Daris. One day, perhaps I will be able to tell you all of them. But if I cannot, I hope that you will understand.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't you be able to tell me?\"\n\nMy father shakes his head. We stop in the great hall, the entrance to House Daris. My father puts his hands on my shoulders. \"Bower, my child, throughout your life I have told you things that perhaps I should not\u2014in the eyes of our king, they are lies. But, know this, I have tried to teach you as much as I can about a forbidden past. You need to know the truth just as one day you will need to know all of the skills and learning that I have tried to instill in you. There is a reason I have you reading the banned books as well as the forbidden stories of long ago. There is a reason I wish you to study strategy, tactics, administration, geography and so much more.\"\n\nI stare up at him\u2014I don't understand.\n\nBefore I can ask, the door shakes with a pounding fist. My father's face pales. He waits and a servant answers the door\u2014he is also pale and shaking.\n\nAt once the hall fills with the Iron Guard, and then with a captain who strides in, glances at me and then faces my father. \"In the name of King Enric, charges have been placed against you, Nev of House Daris, that you spread lies about how our king's illustrious ancestor Hacon Maddox did not free Torvald, but stole the throne and how you read the banned books. What say you to these charges, Nev of House Daris?\"\n\nMy father steps forward so that I am behind him now. Glancing around it seems the Iron Guard surround us. But Cook comes up from the kitchen stairs and puts her hand on my shoulders.\n\nMy father smiles a little and waves a hand. \"Look if you will. You will find no banned books.\"\n\nIt seems a dangerous gamble to me, but my father has hidden rooms throughout all of House Daris. Our family is an old one, one of the few original noble houses. I know House Daris was never as grand as House Flamma or House Torvald, the royal houses. Or they were once royal.\n\nNow they are banned names\u2014just as the stories of Torvald's history are banned.\n\nThe Iron Guard march through our house, their metal boots clanking. I try to be brave, not to shake, to stand tall like my father. But it is hard\u2014the Iron Guard is terrifying. I know, too, the stories about them.\n\nBut they come back to the hall with empty hands.\n\nThe captain faces my father, his eyes narrow and hard. \"And what say you to the charges that you spread lies about your king?\"\n\nMy father shakes his head. \"I, Nev of House Daris, do claim I speak nothing but true accounts.\"\n\nThe captain's mouth twitches down. \"And do you associate with those rebel troublemakers, the Salamanders?\"\n\nNow I frown\u2014why is the captain asking about a kind of lizard. I don't understand this, but Cook does for her hands tighten on my shoulders and she gives a small gasp.\n\nMy father glances at me, then at Cook. He gives a small nod as if telling her something, and then looks at me and says, \"Bower, I believe this captain will demand I go before the king to pledge and prove my loyalty. It may be\u2026some time before I return. This means you are Bower of House Daris.\"\n\nThe captain waves and the Iron Guard grabs my father's arms. He shakes his head. \"That is unnecessary. I will go with you. But who will care for my son if I do not return?\"\n\nIt is my turn to gasp and I pull away from Cook and stand next to my father. \"I will go with you.\"\n\nLooking down at me, he shakes his head. He smiles again, but his eyes are even darker and sadder. \"You carry my hopes, Bower. Never forget that. You must remain.\"\n\nStepping forward, the captain says, \"The king looks after his loyal subjects. Your son will become his ward, and will be raised by the court.\"\n\nMy father glances at the captain and shakes his head. \"The truth is my son is grown enough, and my staff will care for him.\" He starts to walk out the front door.\n\nI call out to him. \"Father?\"\n\nHe pauses in the doorway. The Iron Guard surrounds him now. I want to beat at their metal skins. I want to pick up a sword to defend him. But he only shakes his head and says, \"Remember, Bower, the fairy tales about dragon's breath and what it can do. Never doubt your mother\u2014rest her spirit\u2014loved you. As do I. And whatever you choose to do with your life, know that it is imperative that you survive. If you ever have need, others will come to your aid. Remember Torvald is your home, Bower, to be cared for and looked after.\"\n\nHe turns away and the Iron Guard closes in. I try to run to his side, but Cook holds me by my shoulders and our steward shuts the door. I can only cry out, \"Father!\"\n\nMy skin chills, my heart thuds heavy\u2026and I know I will never see my father again. He is gone\u2014as my mother was taken by sickness, one that came sudden and took her too quickly. Now my father is gone. I am all that is left of House Daris.\n\nBut what is the secret my father mentioned?\n\nWill I find it in his library?\n\nWill it help me find him?\n\nPulling away from Cook, I run upstairs to head onto the roof to try for one last glimpse of my father. But all I am left with is a book about dragons. And dreams of one day seeing dragons in the sky above Torvald."
            },
            {
                "title": "Learning to Fly",
                "text": "[ Unconvinced ]\n\nAnd you are sure? I asked Jaydra, my dragon-sister. Bower really is supposed to be the king? I sent the thoughts to Jaydra, but I was looking at Bower\u2014still skinny and not much different than when we first met. But then I had to rethink that. He was different. We had both been through much of late.\n\nJaydra gave a snort and her consciousness brushed up against mine. It always made me feel safer, as if between us an invisible forest existed which she was forever roaming inside and all I had to do was ruffle the leaves of thoughts and there she would be. I had once tried to explain this relationship to Bower, but he hadn't really understood.\n\nAnd now he was supposed to be King of Torvald.\n\nOf course, Jaydra had managed to speak to Bower back in the city, when Bower had been imprisoned by King Enric. A man related to me. I still wasn't really sure I liked being a Maddox, but I had no choice in that blood tie. I did with my dragon-kin.\n\nDo not worry, den-sister. Bower will grow and learn. He will become King of Dragon Mountain. Jaydra's thoughts seemed fixed with unflinching certainty. Waves of reassurance and calm reached me. I couldn't feel such optimism.\n\nI had seen how the magic of my blood\u2014the same magic King Enric had\u2014was something to fear. I had found some control over it, but I had as much to learn as Bower.\n\nThanks, Jaydra. I sent the thoughts back to her, but I knew she could sense my unease.\n\nAhead of us on the wide river path, Bower tripped over a gnarled root and went sprawling. His hands vanished into the muddy river bank. He pulled himself out, his fingers dripping the thick, black sludge. We were heading back from our latest training, and I'd selected the river path through the dense island jungle as one of the few places where Jaydra could accompany us on land. We could have flown back to the clutch on Jaydra's back, but Bower needed to build more muscle. And he still was more of a city dweller than anything.\n\nHe gave a low growl of frustration, strode over to the nearest patch of greenery, and reached for the leaves to brush off the worst of the mud.\n\n\"Not that,\" I called out. Too late. He grabbed the Biting Reed and rubbed is over his hands. A moment later he gave a shout.\n\n\"That's Biting Reed.\" Coming up to him, I waved at the plant. \"You can tell from the tiny leaves and the long stems. Now shove your hands back in the mud. It's the only thing that will cool the itching.\"\n\nHe shot me a sideways look as if I was to blame for his pain, but he did as I asked, turning back to the river and plunging his hands into the cool, fast flowing river water and the mud.\n\n\"Is everything out to kill me?\" Bower muttered.\n\nJaydra splashed into the deep river as if it was a good idea to swim\u2014or look for fish.\n\nAre you certain he is supposed to be the king? I had to ask of her again.\n\nZenema is certain, Jaydra thought back to me, and closed her mind as quickly as if she had shut a door between us.\n\n\"I guess what Zenema says should be good enough for me, too,\" I muttered. Jaydra dipped into the river and resurfaced with a burst of hot dragon-breath, showering water over Bower. He yelled and then laughed.\n\nI imagined presenting this mud-stained, laughing, accident-prone king to world. But he wasn't all bad. He knew more about books and learning and history than anyone I'd ever met. He had even saved my life when we had to escape Torvald. And he was in this fight with me to defeat King Enric and his Iron Guard. If we could.\n\nSaffron. The voice of Zenema hit my skull like a knife blade against a rock. As one of the oldest of dragons, Zenema could summon all to her side with just a thought. Jaydra lifted her snout out of the water and regarded me with her golden eyes. She'd heard Zenema's call, too.\n\nGlancing up at the sky, I saw the sun was beginning to set. It hovered over the western horizon, burning the sky into rich oranges and deeper reds.\n\nStraightening, Bower glanced around us. \"Who called you?\" He kept looking around as if expecting to see Zenema perched on a nearby branch like a bird. It surprised me that Bower could be so receptive to Zenema's voice. But then again Zenema was an ancient and powerful dragon.\n\n\"Zenema. I need to hurry back,\" I told Bower. And then turned to Jaydra. \"Will you guide Bower? This time without a flurry from your clutch-brothers.\" The younger dragons tended to treat Bower like a toy that might amuse them, rolling him around on the den floor.\n\nJaydra gave bird-like chirrups in a tone that gave away how she thought this funny.\n\nI shot her an annoyed look. But she only thought back to me, Bower will one day be king so he must become accustomed to some dragons wanting to eat him.\n\nOnly Zenema's youngest clutch-brother wanted to eat him. Now, enough. I must go.\n\nWhen the den-mother called, you ran.\n\nI scrambled up the rocks that hovered over one side of the river, leaving Jaydra and Bower to find their way back to the den. Being smaller sometimes helped for I could climb where few others could. Of course, Jaydra might fly Bower back to the den, but that was her choice.\n\nWe had travelled far today, following the river that led from the center of the island and Den Mountain where all the dragons of the Western Isles dwelled. These cliffs would take me straight up to the mountain.\n\nThere were actually few land routes up the sides of the mountain for the dragons could fly and didn't need to walk. Those few that did exist were just shelves of rock that jutted from the mountain, big enough to accommodate the wide body of a dragon. Occasional waterfalls fell from the sides of the mountain and lush plants grew on the slopes. For a human, such as myself, I had to climb from one wide spot to the next, coming at last to the far western shoulder of the Den Mountain, to where I already knew that Zenema was waiting at the perch.\n\nFrom this spire of rock, which formed a wide arrowhead that jutted out from the shoulder of Den Mountain, I could see the ocean, now streaked with gold from the setting sun. Zenema sat here, her silver-white back to me as she regarded the deepening red sky.\n\nDid Jaydra ever tell you what dragons call a red sunset like this? Zenema spoke to me with her mind, as clear and as resounding as any voice spoken aloud. As a queen dragon, Zenema commanded all who lived upon this island. Power resonated from every line and curve of her body, from every gesture of head or eye flick. She was a perfect balance of strength, grace and beauty. Now that I could compare her to the humans and the sorcerer-king I had met, I found her even more awe-inspiring.\n\nNo, den-mother, I answered. Sitting down next to her, I dangled my feet over the ledge of rock and sat facing the sunset. The air smelled of salt water and a little of Zenema's warm dragon breath.\n\nThe Breath of the Mother, that is this sky. If you see the Breath of the Mother, it means next day will be clear and perfect for flying. It is a blessing.\n\nA little confused why our den-mother would tell me this, I glanced at her. She had often taught me and Jaydra separate from the other hatchlings, because of my human-sized mind I had thought. But didn't we have more important things to worry us right now? Like how Bower would ever be ready to become king? Or what Enric, the usurper of the throne, was planning next? Or if the Iron Guard was still hunting us on the mainland.\n\nZenema gave a deep sigh and thought to me, A mixed blessing, perhaps, for legend has it that the great Dragon Mother of us all breathes out the sun in the morning, and burns the sky to blackness at night when the seasons are about to change.\n\nAh. I could see what Zenema really meant. Our lives were mixed blessings right now\u2014we had survived one encounter with Enric and his magic, but that had been due in part to luck. \"Bower is not yet ready.\" I used my human voice, finding it easier to make myself heard against the overpowering strength of Zenema's mind.\n\nHe must be ready. Bower is the True King of Dragon Mountain. Zenema's thoughts left no room for doubt.\n\nAnger flamed inside me, burning hot and chewing at my stomach. Anger at Bower for not trying harder in these past few weeks to become more skilled at dragon riding and at other skills he needed. And, yes, even a touch of anger at Zenema for insisting that Bower's natural kingship must surface. But I had to also admit the truth\u2014some part of the snarl inside me came from my not being able to teach Bower all he needed to know to survive. I stood. The wind had changed and now wrapped around the mountain as a chill breeze from the east.\n\nFolding my arms, I rubbed the bare skin. I'd worn only a light, skin tunic and my skin trousers, and had no boots or cloak. Glancing at Zenema, I told her, \"Have you seen him? He's no natural flier. The other dragons in the clutch don't respect him, and he is still the worst fighter I've ever seen. How is he going to lead dragons back to their rightful place on the mainland? How is he to defeat Enric? All the world fears dragons because of Enric and the lies he and his father and his father's father have spread.\"\n\nZenema turned her head to look at me with her glowing eyes that swirled bright colors. Do you think Zenema must be mistaken? That old Zenema's aging mind no longer can see the truth?\n\nFear washed over me, chilling me even more than the wind. She would never hurt me, but it was still intimidating to have such a huge and old dragon looking at me with annoyance. \"No, of course not\u2014it's just\u2026\" I waved my hand.\n\nZenema nudged me with her nose. The rock below me slid from the cliff, and I struggled to keep my balance.\n\nReaching out, Zenema grabbed my tunic with one claw and pulled me back onto the perch as if I were any other hatchling and unable to look after myself. She raised her neck and looked down on me. Even Saffron falls sometimes. That is why Saffron has dragon-kin to look after you. Saffron is now Bower's kin, so Jaydra is Bower's kin as well. We look after Bower, and Bower will be ready when he must be. His fate is in his blood, just as magic is in yours.\n\nBiting my lower lip, I wanted to deny the truth of that. I didn't know if Enric had been left mad because of his magic, or if he was mad before that. He had seemed so\u2026so fair and good at first. I thought I'd found my family. But it had all been a sham. His mind and his body were as rotting and foul as his intentions. I shuddered. Would magic leave me like that, too?\n\nWhat if the things we carried inside us ended hurting the ones we loved?\n\nZenema folded a wing around me and pulled me closer to her side. Her warmth held off the evening's cooling air, and her voice inside my mind seemed just as warm and encouraging, full of understanding. Some dragons are born big. Others are born fast like Jaydra. Some dragons are gold and others have long tails. They are all dragons. What some of the Maddox clan did with their magic might be evil. But your mother and father brought you away for safekeeping. That shows good in them. So\u2026 magic is just that\u2014it is magic in the blood. The same is true for Bower. He has the blood of Dragon Kings within him, but it is up to Bower to show if he will be a good and wise king or a weak one. And it up to us, and what we teach him.\n\n\"Yes, den-mother,\" I said and curled up closer to her side. It felt better to know she believed we could teach Bower, but how long was all this going to take?\n\nAfter our chat on the perch, I left Zenema to the evening sky and clambered up to the tunnel into Den Mountain. Hundreds of dragons over thousands of years had lived here in the Western Isles, so the mountain was riddled with tunnels and den-caves dug out by all the den-mothers for their clutches. Many of the tunnels opened to the sky, and inside the tunnels wove together into a maze. I knew it only because I had grown up here, looked over by Zenema and raised by her after my parents had left me in a cave on the beach.\n\nIt was nice to be surrounded by the cool gray and yellow rock of the tunnels again. Contrary to what the island villagers thought, dragons were actually hygienic creatures who kept their dens clean. The tunnels smelled faintly of ash and minerals, but no dung was allowed in the tunnels, as every young dragon learned as soon as it hatched. I didn't even need a light, as I knew most of the routes by touch alone, and moonlight spilled into the entrances, glinting off the crystals in the walls, helping me see the walls that had been carved into smooth curves by hot dragon breath and polished by dragon scales.\n\nStopping, I lifted my face for I smelled something odd\u2014something like smoke, but sweeter. Holding still, I wondered if the island villagers had lost control of a fire and set the jungle ablaze.\n\nIt had happened once before, when I was very young. The island villagers had been celebrating something, and their fires had gone wild and free, burning into the jungle with roaring, orange flames that had lit the entire island. It had been a night of terror and loud noises as dragons swooped and shrieked and flew around Den Mountain. Zenema's fierce roar had stopped the confusion and she'd organized the dragons to catch up water in their mouths and drop it onto the flames. The island villagers had never thanked the dragons, and the fire had ended up destroying most of their huts. They had never done anything so stupid again. They also learned to keep far from Den Mountain and the dragons they had angered.\n\nSaffron? Jaydra's thoughts tickled my mind. I could sense her raising her head from where she had tucked it under her wing. She snuffed at the air and started to unfold her wings and legs.\n\nAre we under attack? I asked her with my thoughts.\n\nI could see nothing but the dark cavern\u2014no fires seemed to be burning around Den Mountain. I heard nothing but my rapid heartbeat in my ears and my quick, shallow breaths. No crackle of flames carried to me on the breeze. There was just that faint smell of sweet smoke\u2014it almost smelled like cherries.\n\nHeading back to the tunnel entrance, I tried to follow the aroma. Come, Jaydra, but do not warn the others, yet. I sent the thought to Jaydra, and she sent me back a terse agreement. She also started to worm her way through the tunnels, heading toward me.\n\nThe smell of smoke became fainter as I headed out of the tunnel, so I turned and started back inside Den Mountain again. The smell became stronger and I followed it down a narrow, smaller tunnel that seemed too small for any dragon. Rocks littered the ground and I realized the tunnel must be one where the roof had fallen in, which happened sometimes. I glanced up at the roof and kicked one of the rocks. It rolled and echoed, but the tunnel seemed safe. Slipping past some of the boulders, I headed into the dark tunnel.\n\nSaffron? You have gone where Jaydra cannot follow. Jaydra's frustration came through to me clearly. She couldn't get down this narrow tunnel. I asked her to stay calm and wait and kept following the smoke.\n\nThe smoke was wafting up from deep inside Den Mountain. I crept forward, my eyes stinging now. The tunnel twisted and turned and led out onto a narrow ledge that overlooked the jungle below. For a moment I could see nothing, but then I glimpsed a small glow, as if from a pipe. The faint glow lit a man's face and a long, white beard.\n\nIt had to be the Hermit.\n\nThe Lonesome One! Jaydra said in my mind, confirming my thoughts.\n\nThe Hermit lived not far from Den Mountain, in an old stone ruin right on the shore. Normally, he never went anywhere and had little to do with the dragons or even with the villagers. But then again, the Hermit was always doing strange things, like sailing around the island once in a boat he had built from skins and wood.\n\nJaydra's shadow passed over me as she glided overhead, having gone out of the den through one of the other tunnels. Chase him?\n\nI shook my head. \"No. Leave him alone.\"\n\nIt was from the Hermit that I'd learned to read and write. The Hermit had a few books, and Zenema had some kind of bond with the Hermit\u2014at least enough that he allowed me to see the books and taught me a few things. I looked up at the perch, but I could no longer see Zenema's form blotting out the stars.\n\nWhen I glanced down again, I could no longer see the orange glow of what had to have been the Hermit's pipe. He must have gone back to his tower already and taken his cherry-scented smoke with him.\n\nHad the Hermit heard my talk with Zenema? Could he hear dragons in the way Bower almost could?\n\nThe Hermit was supposed to be the most knowledgeable human on the island, a friend to Zenema at least. Maybe he knew more than I'd ever thought about magic, my mother, and even the Maddox clan?\n\nMore importantly, maybe he knew how to teach a king to lead.\n\nSaffron, ask Zenema first if you are going to do what you are thinking, Jaydra warned.\n\nI gave a rude snort, but Jaydra only soared higher in the sky.\n\nHowever, my heart was beating fast now. I had a plan. Now I just had to find Bower and take him with me to visit the Hermit of the Western Isles."
            },
            {
                "title": "Intruders & Cherry-Smoke",
                "text": "Jaydra let me fly back to the den on her back, and from the way she had nudged me up onto her back and winked at me, I knew she did not want me telling Saffron I'd flown on Jaydra. Sometimes, Saffron seemed to think Jaydra was just her friend and wasn't mine. It was annoying.\n\nFlying on a dragon's back was always a little frightening. I clung to Jaydra's scales with hands and legs and concentrated on staring at the horizon and not looking down. The sea seemed to stretch out forever around us with the islands dots of green amid the blue. Wind tugged at my hair. I could almost feel a sense of joy and freedom from Jaydra, but maybe I was imagining that. I could almost wish Jaydra would fly far away with me. But I knew there was no escaping my fate\u2014I had to do something to save my city and my kingdom from Enric's harsh rule. But with the Iron Guard at his command, I had no idea how I was going to do that.\n\nJaydra spiraled down from the clouds to land on one of the wide ledges of the mountain. I climbed from her back and we both headed inside the den. It was dark in the sandy cavern, but not black. Shafts of light from the setting sun speared down through the tunnel entrances, splashing gold on the walls and pulling colors from crystals embedded in the rock. The sight reminded me of the colored drawings I had seen in my books, and a pang for the loss of my library twisted inside me. But this, in a way, was better\u2014this place had very live dragons. The gentle breath of the dragons warmed the caverns.\n\nSurprisingly, the dragons went to bed early, almost as soon as the sun set. Cold-blooded beings, they needed the heat of the sun and the heat of the earth. Even though I'd now lived here for a few weeks, every night still filled me with the same sense of awe. Only the exhaustion of training allowed me to sleep through the night. I still couldn't believe that I was here, living with not just one dragon, but a whole nest of them. I lived with legends\u2014with dragons that I'd been taught were just creatures of myth used to scare children.\n\nI'd found instead they could be cranky, noisy, gentle\u2014they were all very much individuals. And the young dragons for some reason thought of me more like a toy to be knocked around. At least they were asleep now, deep in Den Mountain.\n\nHeading to my bed, which was little more than an alcove not far from the tiny nook where Saffron slept, I tugged off my belt, pulled off my boots and stretched out on the leaves Saffron had gathered for me. In turn, I had shown her how to use oil pressed from the leaves and some of the nuts that grew here, and a crystalline rock to make a simple lamp. I didn't bother to light my lamp now\u2014I still failed more often with the steel and flint I had to use to make a fire.\n\nIt was warm enough in the cavern that I'd no need for extra warmth\u2014not even for a blanket. Heat from within Den Mountain warmed the rock under the leaves that I lay on, and it felt good against muscles that ached from the day. And flying here on Jaydra had let the wind dry my clothes. They were becoming tattered, and I'd soon need to trade for new ones or switch to skins such as Saffron wore.\n\nA king in rags\u2014that was what I was.\n\nIt was a depressing thought, so I rolled over and stared out into the dark tunnels and thought of the dragons instead.\n\nI'd been trying to keep a journal on dragons, but it was hard to write down everything.\n\nThese dragons seemed to all be predominantly an iridescent sea-green color, shifting at times from a bright turquoise to an almost forest green. A few boasted white, shimmering scales\u2014like Zenema. And I'd spotted two young ones who had deep, orange scales. I still didn't know if color meant anything. Was Zenema so large because she was a white dragon, or was that a sign of age? And were these dragons refugees from Dragon Mountain near Torvald\u2014the dragons of old stories and tales? Perhaps they had fled here to the Western Isles after Hacon Maddox\u2014Enric's ancestor\u2014and his Iron Guard had betrayed the True King and seized power? Or were these dragons of a kind that had never been ridden by humans?\n\nDid even Zenema, the den-mother and the oldest dragon here as far as I could tell, know the answers?\n\nThe way she looks at me sometimes\u2026\n\nI shivered and turned onto my back again, my muscles sore and my joints aching. It seemed at times that she could see into my mind. I knew Zenema\u2014and the other dragons\u2014could send thoughts to each other, and even to people. I had heard Jaydra at times\u2026or I thought I did. It was difficult to really know if I was just imagining such things, and I had no idea how to become better at talking to a dragon.\n\nSaffron seemed intent more on making me learn the physical side of how to survive and fight. She had me learning to tie vines together and how to reach up and grab Jaydra's claws. She had me walking along the highest branches of the tallest trees, and jumping from the tops of rocky waterfalls to dive into the river below. My life had become climbing, running and then sparring against Saffron using long staffs or wooden swords. She'd taught me how to light a fire, find food in the jungle and even to read the elements around me.\n\nBut I kept forgetting everything, it seemed.\n\n\"You have to feel the wind,\" she had said to me just today, which sounded like nonsense. \"Feel how it moves. Is a storm coming? Is it a warm breeze from the desert? What will it bring to you?\"\n\nSighing, I tucked my hands under my head.\n\nDid the Dragon Riders of old have to learn all this? Or was Saffron just afraid I was going to get myself killed by taking a stroll through the woods?\n\nA sudden pang of misery rose up inside my, almost choking me. How I could use my library right now. I thought of all of the banned books I had collected\u2014ancient scrolls said to be written during the time of old King Torvald and even from when the Dragon Monastery had first been founded. They might have told me what a dragon rider really needed to learn.\n\nAnd I'd had the writings of Strategicus, the ancient philosopher and tactician, as well as Instructor Mordecai, the alchemist. I'd scribbled a few things I'd remembered into my journal, but I had so little paper and so much to learn.\n\nIncluding how to raise an army.\n\nI had dragons\u2014or rather I lived with dragons. But I needed riders\u2014and enough strength to overcome Enric's Iron Guard, those seemingly mindless mechanical soldiers who obeyed Enric's every order. Saffron and I had saved Torvald from Enric's plan to wipe it clean\u2014but now Enric hunted us. Even in the Western Isles we had heard that news.\n\nAnd Saffron seemed to think that all I had to be was a strong enough warrior, know how to ride a dragon, and the rest magically happened. As if my showing up on a dragon and twirling a sword would inspire trust and awe. I wasn't so sure. Those on the mainland had been taught to think dragons fearful beasts that existed in old stories\u2014seeing one might well send them running and not to my side.\n\nWhat I needed was an army and maps and scouts and\u2014\n\nA hissing from the dark cut off my thoughts and had me sitting upright. Saffron, a slim shadow in the moonlight, crept up to my side, her red-gold hair glinting in the faint light.\n\n\"What is it?\" I rubbed at my sore shoulders.\n\n\"Follow me. We're going on a new exercise tonight,\" she whispered. She turned and headed down the tunnel.\n\nI let out another long breath. It wasn't enough she tortured me all day, now she had to do so at night as well.\n\nBut I grabbed my belt with my knife and rope and pulled on my boots. As I followed Saffron's light steps, I swear I saw a flash of white, but when I turned I saw nothing. Was Zenema watching? Did some dragons sleep with their eyes open?\n\n\"Don't wake the others,\" Saffron hissed at me. Turning to her, I hurried out into the night.\n\nI was fast enough to bump into her back, and she glanced back. Thankfully, it was too dark to see her expression, but I could practically feel her annoyance. The moon hung in the sky, half full and offering some light, but leaving the world no color. As always, Saffron had no difficulties navigating her way down the side of Den Mountain, climbing more like a mountain goat than a person. I followed more slowly, picking my path carefully, testing each rock to make certain it would not slip out from my boot.\n\nOnce we reached the jungle floor, Saffron seemed to disappear into the trees.\n\nWas this a test to see if I could follow?\n\nI lifted my face and thought about what she'd said about the wind, and sure enough a thrash of leaves came to me on the breeze\u2014that was Saffron.\n\nI followed her. Saffron seemed much more intent on speed than silence. Beside her hurried steps, I picked out the cries of nocturnal birds, frogs croaking near the river, the buzzing of insects, and other animals moving through the dense jungle leaves. It seemed the island was even more alive at night\u2014and probably everything would be trying to kill or eat me.\n\nSometimes I really missed Torvald and a soft bed and the comfortable chair in my library.\n\nGlancing back at me, Saffron muttered, \"Not far now.\" She clambered down a path that sloped to the river.\n\n\"Just where are we going?\"\n\nShe pointed down the river and to a rise, a place where the trees thinned. I smelled a change in the air, too. It seemed brisk, bringing with it the salt tang of the ocean.\n\n\"We're near the shore?\" I said.\n\nSaffron nodded. Her teeth flashed white in a fast smile. \"You're finally learning to read the wind.\" Her smile faded and she glanced around us. The way she was frowning\u2014the expression barely visible in the moonlight\u2014left me certain this was not just a simple night of training.\n\n\"Why are we here?\" I asked, uneasy now. I followed Saffron as she moved up the hill and away from the cover of the jungle trees. She halted on one of the larger boulders and stood so still she could almost be mistaken for a statue\u2014or one of the Iron Guard.\n\nStopping beside her, I glanced around. Below us, the surf hit against jagged rocks with a rumbling and then sloshed away again. The spray blasted up into the air, bringing the tang of ocean and kelp. Saffron's caution was infecting me. I kept looking around us, certain someone was watching, but I could see nothing other than the rough cliffs that led up to Den Mountain and the spill of moonlight on the ocean.\n\nSaffron nodded and pointed just ahead of us.\n\nFollowing her gesture, I spotted a squat tower. Or, to be more precise, what remained of a ruined tower on a spit of rock. The tower stood out, unmistakable against the dark water and darker gray boulders, its smooth walls rounded and the top long ago shattered and left a jagged edge. Just beyond it, I glimpsed a small beach and the white froth of the tidewater washing up on the sand.\n\n\"It's an old lighthouse,\" I said. That much seemed obvious, seeing how the place marked the ocean side of the island and made the rocky shore stand out.\n\n\"A what?\" Saffron glanced at me, her head tipped to one side. She tossed her one long braid back over her shoulder and shook her head. \"It's the Hermit's tower.\"\n\n\"You never said a hermit lived on the island. Right next to the dragons. He's probably the lighthouse keeper.\"\n\n\"What is this lighter house you keep speaking of?\" Saffron started walking to the tower, picking her way over the rocky shoreline.\n\nI struggled to keep up with her, but told her, \"A lighthouse, not a lighter house, as in a place where there is light to mark land for anyone who sails. The old books spoke of such towers all along the shoreline of Torvald, as well as beacon and watchtowers here. They guarded the kingdom, helped warn of danger. I've read they even helped guide dragon riders through storms. Along with the Dragon Horns, that was one of the ways the riders of Torvald communicated.\"\n\nSaffron's head came up and she paused long enough for me to catch up with her. \"The Dragon Horns?\"\n\nSpreading my hands wide, I told her. \"Huge horns said to have been made in the earliest days, and encased in gold and bronze. Bigger than a grown man's height and loud enough to be heard for miles and miles. They were sounded to alert the Middle Kingdom of danger and they also sounded out for celebrations.\"\n\nSaffron shook her head and started for the ruined tower again. \"How can anything be so loud? But we haven't come to the Hermit for stories like that. We need his help\u2014his books.\"\n\n\"Books!\" I hurried to catch up with Saffron. \"Why didn't you tell me he has books? This salt air isn't good for them, you know. Unless they're cared for, they can get moldy\u2014it's too damp here.\"\n\n\"Why do you care so much for books?\" Saffron said, the words grumbled.\n\nI threw my hands wide again. \"Saffron, books are more to me than just past knowledge. Everyone in Torvald has been forbidden to learn, but my father rebelled against that. He taught me the value of knowledge. And if this hermit lives in one of the old towers\u2026well, what if some of his books are very old. He might know about the old lighthouses, and even the watchtowers and even where the Dragon Monasteries once stood. He could have maps and\u2026and a dozen other things we need to know.\" I strode ahead of her, then had a second thought and glanced back. \"But this hermit of yours\u2014he's friendly, right?\"\n\nSaffron only shrugged an answer and headed for the tower.\n\nAs we got closer, I saw the tower was stones closely fitted against each other. It must have once stood three times its height. Stones that had once made up the upper part of the tower lay scattered around, looking as if they'd been blasted apart. That thought left me uneasy. Only a dragon could cause such destruction. Had the dragons torn this tower down? Or was it smaller to better hide it among the boulders of the shore?\n\nOne thing was for certain\u2014it no longer acted as a lighthouse.\n\n\"There's no lanterns burning,\" I said when we reached a narrow door, blackened with age and salt. Someone had used panels and bits of sea-weathered oak to board up the windows and make the door.\n\nI raised my fist to knock.\n\n\"Wait,\" Saffron said, reaching for my arm, but it was too late. I'd already rapped my knuckles against the wood.\n\nI barely heard the knock over the rumbling surf that surged up against the beach, but it was still loud enough. However, no one answered. Maybe the hermit was asleep. I pushed at the door and it creaked open.\n\nI glanced at Saffron. \"It's not locked.\"\n\nShe pulled her bone-handled knife from its sheath. \"It should be.\" She stepped into the dark room.\n\nSwallowing hard, I followed.\n\nA narrow entrance and short hall turned once and then opened into a larger room with a stone floor. Glancing around in the dim light that fell into the room from the open door, I could see nothing but what looked like a roughly hewn chair now broken apart, an iron grate set up in a crumbling fireplace and an old, sagging cot. Everything looked dusty and poorly kept. \"Are you sure someone lives here?\" I asked.\n\nSaffron just waved for me to be quiet and stepped deeper into the tower room. A stone stairway led to an upper level where the floor and ceiling were made of wood. A fire burned here in another iron grate. This room held empty shelves and two huge chests that seemed to be more like seats, one set underneath each set of windows. Glancing down, I glimpsed a darker stain upon the wood. I caught at Saffron's arm. \"Look\u2026blood!\"\n\n\"The Hermit might be hurt.\" Saffron pushed past me, heading up yet one more flight of stone steps. I drew out my knife and started up the stairs after her.\n\nThe stairs curved around the wall of the tower, narrow and steep. A solitary window let in a shaft of moonlight.\n\nThe uppermost floor revealed something like a storehouse with two lamps burning, an overturned table, and an odd array of glass tubes, most of which had been shattered on the floor. Bits of hand worked metal lay among the shards of glass.\n\nFor a moment, I thought this hermit of Saffron's must have left\u2014and he had taken most of his books with him. I could see empty wooden shelves but no books. The room smelled of cherry-scented tobacco and a clay pipe lay on the floor, broken in half.\n\nAnd then something groaned.\n\nSaffron darted around the table and bent over what seemed to be a pile of rags that had been left on the floor. She tucked her knife away and lifted something, and I saw then that the rags were actually an old man's body.\n\nHe gave another groan and then coughed, spitting up blood. Saffron cradled the old man's head in her lap. I could not tell his age. His long beard gleamed white, but his short hair was streaked with dark hair still. He looked pale and battered, his face cut as if he'd been in a fight. A ragged, gray tunic stained with blood covered his chest, and heavy leather breeches and boots revealed skinny legs. Next to him lay a small crossbow, but there was no sign of any bolts, meaning he'd spent them all. But against what?\n\nSaffron glanced up at me, blood on her hand and her face pale.\n\nFear flooded me, left my breath quickening and my hands shaking.\n\nSomeone had attacked this man\u2014had mortally wounded him to judge by the blood now staining the floor.\n\nGlancing around, I could see no windows in this room, and I wondered now if the blood we had seen below was that of this hermit or of his attackers.\n\nKneeling next to Saffron, I glanced at the man's wounds. I knew the marks of a sword, and this man bore them.\n\n\"This is your hermit?\" I asked Saffron.\n\nShe didn't answer, but waved at me. \"Find some water. Something to give him to drink.\"\n\nI nodded, stood and glanced around.\n\nWhoever had done this had not just gone after this hermit but had been savage with the man's few things. I could find splinters of glass and wood, scraps of paper and splatters of blood.\n\nAt last I found a small, metal flask and a scrap of cloth and took them back to Saffron.\n\nShe took them and told me, \"We need to bind these wounds and get him to Zenema.\"\n\nThe Hermit coughed and put a bloodstained hand over Saffron's. \"No need. I won't be long for this world.\"\n\nI thought that once his eyes might have glittered fiercely under his thick eyebrows, but now they seemed dull and fading.\n\n\"No, we'll get you to Zenema,\" Saffron told him, her tone urgent and fierce.\n\n\"Zenema cannot heal me. Not this. Not now,\" the old man said, his voice weak and fading.\n\n\"Saffron.\" I knelt again by her side. \"He's right. He does not have much time with us.\"\n\nShe shook her head, but she asked the old man, \"What happened? Who did this to you?\"\n\nInstead of answering Saffron, the old man glanced at me and for a moment his eyes brightened. \"At least I had the chance to serve the True King. I die without regret.\"\n\nMy skin chilled. I glanced at Saffron, but she was still bent over the old man, pressing the rags I had bought to his side and trying to offer him a sip from the metal flask I had also brought her. The old man pushed away the flask, and I asked him, \"Why do you say that?\" He could not know that I was in fact descended from the true kings of Torvald.\n\nThe old man gave a wheezing chuckle. \"Knowing things\u2014that was my life, my king.\" Turning to Saffron, he gripped her wrist. \"Three men came to the island, flying no flag. I saw them at the village, heard them ask after a girl with red-gold hair and a lad with more knowledge than was good for him. The villagers told them about the dragon-girl. I came to tell Zenema that Enric has come for his blood kin. He found you, Saffron. As I said he would.\"\n\nSaffron gasped. When I glanced at her, I saw her face had paled so every freckle now stood out. \"You knew about me?\" she said, her voice almost a whisper.\n\n\"That you are a Maddox? Yes, child. But it matters little what I knew now\u2026 All that\u2026matters is to get you to safety. I bought you time. I shot one and he fell into the sea, but the other two tracked me here. One I wounded, but the last escaped with him back to their boat.\"\n\n\"You think they work for the king?\" I asked.\n\nThe Hermit spat on the floor, and blood tinged his spittle. \"Enric. That is what I think of him.\" He glanced at Saffron. \"She's the only good thing to come out of the Maddox line\u2026 her mother and father\u2014\"\n\n\"You knew my mother?\" Saffron stiffened. \"Why did you never tell me?\"\n\nThe Hermit sighed. \"Such a kind soul\u2026\" He clutched his side and gasped. \"No time now. I made a promise to hide you\u2014and I kept it for as long as I could. Now, others must help you. Look to the north, to the Three-River clans\u2026\" A sudden spasm shook him. His face twisted with pain. His eyes fluttered closed and for a moment I thought he was gone. But he opened his eyes again and gripped my wrist, a surprising strength still in him. \"Find what I've hidden for you, my king. Take back what is yours by right. Get to the clans. Stop Enric. Trust each other.\"\n\nHe let out a rattling breath and went still.\n\nSaffron lowered his body to the floor. I scrambled to my feet. I had never seen death so close. Looking over to Saffron, I asked, \"Who do you think came here?\" I knew the answer, but I wanted to think we were still safe on Den Mountain. I didn't want to leave. \"The dragons will look after us, won't they?\" I asked her.\n\nSaffron looked at me, her eyes bleak and her face still pale. \"The Hermit of the Western Isles is dead. And I am certain King Enric's spies killed him. What can protect us from assassins who come in the night?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Old Clothes & New Friends",
                "text": "Bower and I buried the Hermit near his tower, piling rocks over his body. He seemed to weigh next to nothing, and Bower easily carried him down the stairs and to a rocky slope overlooking the tower and the sea. He had died to save me, it seemed. And to serve Bower as the new king. But staring at the pile of rocks over the Hermit's body, moonlight spilling onto the gray stone, I couldn't believe the Hermit had actually known who I was and never said a thing to me. Not once when he'd been teaching me to read had he even hinted that he had known my father and mother.\n\nAmelia.\n\nIt was a good name. A forthright sort of name I decided. But it was all I knew of her. I had a scrap of cloth with her name on it\u2014all I'd been left of her. I knew even less of my father. They had left me here on the shore of the island, and Zenema had found me and raised me with her clutch of dragons. I had grown up with Jaydra at my side. But now my heritage seemed to be coming after me.\n\nThinking of my parents now, I found no trace of hatred or pain that had once haunted me. I'd once thought they had abandoned me. But the Hermit said he had kept a promise to hide me. Had he promised my mother such a thing?\n\nAnd had Zenema known who I was all these years? Was that to protect me? Or was it to protect the world from me?\n\nI didn't know the answer, and now we'd been robbed of any help the Hermit might have given us. His warning also left me worried. Did Enric, my blood kin, hunt us because of Bower? Or was I the one Enric wanted to find?\n\nBower touched a hand to my shoulder. The eastern sky was beginning to brighten with dawn's first light. \"We should look for what he said he hid.\" I glanced at Bower and followed him back to the tower, feeling suddenly tired and wishing I had thought to come earlier to see the Hermit\u2014Bower and I might have saved him. Or maybe we would have been caught by Enric's men.\n\nWith a shudder, I stepped inside and out of the cold, dawn wind.\n\n\"I'm going to search upstairs.\" Bower said, moving quickly. He must be as chilled as I. We'd spent the night burying the Hermit and now\u2026now I had no idea what the Hermit might have hidden for us to find. Had that just been the fancy of a dying man? Or had he really left something to help us?\n\nThe lower room seemed only a place to live, but I lit a small fire in the grate. The furnishings already looked broken into bits of wood, so why not use them as kindling? The Hermit had been something of a healer, and herbs hung from the wooden ceiling to dry. Cobwebs also clung to the corners and I glanced around.\n\nWhat was there to find other than dust and mice?\n\nClimbing the stairs to the next room, I moved the heavy curtains beside the narrow windows. I pulled them back, letting in the pre-dawn haze.\n\nBelow me the choppy waters of the sea washed over the rocks, leaving strands of kelp and white foam. Turning to the room again, I scanned it. What had the Hermit hidden? Some clue perhaps as to why my family had left me here?\n\nHeading to the empty shelves, I searched them, but found only a dried scrap of thyme. I turned and headed to one of the chests. It opened easily, and I stared at more dust and chunks of wood that might feed a fire. I let the lid thud closed and headed to the second chest.\n\nOn this one, the hinges seemed to be rusted shut. It took my pounding on it with a fist and struggling with the latch, but at last the top creaked open with a protest. Bright colors greeted me.\n\nLinens and clothes lay inside, all wrapped in pretty bits of silk cloth. I lifted out soft gowns and tunics in pale creams, pastel blues and greens. From the cut of them they seemed to be for a woman, and they reminded me a little of the clothing I had seen being worn in the towns of the mainland. But these were finely made, and of a different style than anything else I'd ever seen.\n\nDigging deeper, I came across embroidery\u2014a vine entwined around letters. And I knew then these had to be some of my mother's things for the embroidery was an exact match to that on the scrap of cloth that had been left with me.\n\nHad my mother meant to return for these things\u2014and for me?\n\nOr had she left them for me?\n\nI had always wondered why Zenema had taken me for lessons with the Hermit. Zenema had never wanted me to spend time in the nearby village, and she had hidden me from any passing sailors who stopped to provision from the island. Now I began to see she and the Hermit must have been hiding me from anyone who might take word of me to Enric.\n\n\"All this time\u2026\" I muttered the words and pressed a hand to the fine silks.\n\nHad the Hermit meant to pass these things to me?\"\n\nGlancing down at the skins I wore\u2014smooth and so comfortable they almost seemed like my own second skin, I doubted I could wear anything from my mother. But I dug deeper into the chest. And there I found a forest green leather jerkin and soft leather breeches that matched.\n\nAnd these looked to me to be like the clothing I had seen on the cliff drawings\u2014they were the clothes of a dragon rider.\n\nZenema had showed me the cliff drawings. They decorated the sea cliffs near where she had found me. On them, people rode dragons\u2014always two to a dragon, and the riders had on leather jerkins in a dark green, breeches and boots and helmets. I found no helmet in the chest, but I could not resist the rest of it.\n\nPutting back the fine silks, I repacked the chest. But I kept the leather jerkin and breeches. I pulled them on over my skins, letting my skin tunic and breeches act like undergarments. The green jerkin and breeches hung a little loose, but I liked the feel of them.\n\nOddly, they made me feel different somehow, more like myself\u2014but like a self I had not even known existed.\n\nSmoothing the leather, I knew I had not been forgotten.\n\nFrom upstairs, Bower's voice echoed down to me. \"Saffron, I think I found something!\"\n\nI ran up the stone steps and found Bower had righted one of the tables. He stood bent over it, his back to the spot where the Hermit had died. I avoided that spot, too. Sunlight streamed into the room through one of the narrow windows, and I noticed a hole in the wall where there had not been one before.\n\n\"What?\" I asked, coming up to Bower's side. He glanced twice at my new, dark green jerkin but said nothing about it. Instead, he waved at the hole where he must have removed a stone to reveal the space. \"Your hermit had a hiding place. Several actually. The other three were empty, but I kept thinking about how I'd had hiding spots in my library back in Torvald.\" Bower stopped and made a face as if remembering something sad. I didn't really understand why books mattered so much to him, but they did. He shook his head, his dark brown hair lank and falling into his eyes now that it had gotten so long. He pushed it back and pointed to paper spread out on the table.\n\nIt looked as if whatever Bower had found was both old and also missing chunks. I could see heavy black lines drawn on the paper, marking mountains and hills, marshes, lakes and even the forests.\n\nLeaning over his shoulder, I glimpsed red lines here and there. These lines almost looked like dragon wings and a curl of flame. \"We saw that mark in your city,\" I told Bower, pointing at it.\n\n\"Yes\u2026it's the mark of the Salamanders. They're a group that defies the king's orders. They're\u2014\"\n\n\"Pirates? Thieves?\" I asked.\n\nBower grimaced. \"Yes and not exactly. They're like us\u2014people who dislike the king's harsh rules and his unjust laws. They helped me escape the citadel the first time I left. And I think\u2026I think my father was working with the Salamanders to fight back against King Enric.\"\n\nAgainst the Maddox clan.\n\nA shiver chased down my back. Why did my family have to be both powerful\u2014and so hateful?\n\n\"Are they dragon-friends?\" I asked. \"Do they even believe in dragons? Is that why they use the symbol of dragon fire and wings?\"\n\n\"They might be, but you have to remember that all the Maddox kings, from Hacon to Enric, have worked hard to make everyone think dragons are some kind of monsters from tales meant to frighten children. Most people don't really believe in them. But the Salamanders are at least trying to keep the old stories in memory\u2014I think they're the reason my father collected the forbidden stories about dragons. That, however, is not as important as this.\" Bower waved a hand at the paper on the table. \"This map proves your hermit\u2014whoever he was\u2014was connected to the Salamanders, or at least knew about them and knew where they could be found. It really is too bad we didn't have more time to talk with him about this.\"\n\nBower's words stung. It was partly my fault the Hermit was dead\u2014if I had gone to him right away things may have been different. I turned away from Bower and his map. \"Well, we didn't have time with him. And what good does this map do us? It's just scribbles on paper. It's like those drawings on the cliff\u2014it's all about the past.\"\n\n\"And that is just what is going to make the future!\" Bower's eyes brightened. He walked over to the wall with the hole showing and pulled out a fat book. He carried it back to the table and opened it as carefully as if handling a fragile leaf. \"This is the Compendium Atlas. I've only seen one other, and never one like this which seems to have been annotated by hand\u2014by your hermit, I think.\"\n\n\"Will you stop calling him mine. He just lived near Den Mountain. And what's an atlas?\"\n\nBower pulled in a breath, then said, \"A compendium is a list of things, an atlas offers up maps of places people have explored. This does far more\u2026just listen.\"\n\nHe turned the page and started to read.\n\n\"'It was my intent to tread the length of the Dragon's Spine Mountains all the way from their southerly end to whatever icy vastness held in the grim north\u2026' And look, here's the map.\" He pointed to a drawing of mountains. \"There's King's Pass marked and Valley of Cracked Willows, and the spot where three rivers converge\u2014the Dangse, the Venge and the Oluk come together in one mighty torrent, cutting off this land of high meadows from the rest of the mountains.\" He grinned at me. \"Do you see?\"\n\nFrowning, I shrugged. \"I don't see anything but a book and papers you call maps.\"\n\nBower rolled his eyes and started to tap his fingers on the table. \"Three rivers\u2014the Three-Rivers clans. Your\u2026the old man said that's where we should head. That we'll find help there.\" He pointed again to the spot on the page where three thin blue lines swirled through the mountains to come together.\n\nI looked from Bower's face, which was almost glowing red, to the map and back again. \"Do you know what you're saying. We're supposed to travel far to the north, across the land Enric holds, with him hunting for us, to see if there is a group of people who might want to help, and all on the say of an old man who might have been sane or might not?\"\n\nBower put a hand on the book\u2014his Compendium Atlas. \"Well\u2026yes. Or do you have a better idea? I mean, do you want to stay here and wait for Enric's spies to come back? Or for Enric to show up with his Iron Guard?\" He waved at the map. \"We have this\u2014we know where we need to get to. And Enric won't know where we've gone.\"\n\nI glanced over to the dark stain on the floor, and then to the window. The sun had come up and lightened the sea. The surf beat a soft, steady rhythm against the rock and the tower's foundation.\n\nBower was right\u2014we could not stay. Enric's spies would take word to him of what they had found. Unless we find them and stop them.\n\nBut how could we do that? They were out in the ocean, and even a dragon would have a hard time finding them.\n\nJaydra's thoughts touched my mind as she woke. You have dragon kin to help you. Always.\n\nShe was right. But the den must be warned about what had happened. I glanced at Bower and nodded. \"First, we must speak to Zenema.\" I smoothed my new leather jerkin. I was about to take a step as if off a cliff, and I knew my life would change. Perhaps never to be the same again. Pushing back my shoulders, I dropped my hands to my side and told Bower, \"We need to formally ask for her aid and ask if any dragons will fly and fight with us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Council of Dragons",
                "text": "Standing next to Saffron at the edge of the main cavern, I decided I'd never seen so many dragons. I didn't even know so many lived within the Western Isles.\n\nThe Council of Dragons, Zenema had called it.\n\nShafts of brilliant sunlight streamed in down the tunnels of Den Mountain. The main cavern looked more like a cathedral now, with the brilliant hues of the dragons. Everywhere I looked I saw dragons. The predominant colors seemed to be the sea blues, with a few greens, but I spotted three whites and five with mottled orange scales. Sadly, none of the dragons seemed to be the crimson reds I had seen pictured in the old books.\n\nThe younger dragons all chose perches on rock outcroppings within the chamber, and sat flicking their long, spiked tails, staring down with inquisitive eyes. The older dragons, however, seemed content to stretch out on their sides.\n\nIf I hadn't been living with dragons for a time, I would have been terrified to face so many, for a few of the dragons seemed to stare at me with a predatory hunger. Or maybe that was just amazement that a foolish human would be at the Council of Dragons.\n\nNudging Saffron with one elbow, I told her, \"I hadn't expected so many.\" Trying to act as if I consorted with dragons every day, I leaned against the nearest wall. Saffron took up a position just in front of me. She was silhouetted against the bright sky at the end of a tunnel and stood so still that for a second I thought she might not have heard me.\n\nBut she answered in a low voice, \"Neither did I. Zenema's called them from all over the Western Isles.\"\n\nI thought I heard a tremor in her voice, but I didn't know if that was excitement or maybe a little fear. My mouth was dry and my heart pounding. I had no idea how I was supposed to behave.\n\nWhen we'd told Zenema about the Hermit's death, she had emitted a long, mournful call that seemed to echo over the island. I'd wondered if maybe the Hermit had been a dragon-friend to Zenema in the same way that Saffron was to Jaydra. Zenema had listened to Saffron, and then said we must call the Council of Dragons.\n\nThe council met exactly one day later. Dragons had been arriving all through the night and day. The cavern smelled like smoke, dragon, and a little bit like fish, which left me hoping most of the dragons had eaten before coming to the council.\n\nSuddenly, a roar and a skittering of claws on stone went up in the cavern. I jumped and almost wanted to duck down the nearest tunnel, for it seemed certain to me the dragons were thinking of me as a dessert.\n\n\"It's Oloxia.\" Saffron nodded toward what looked to be an ancient white dragon, bigger even than Zenema, who had entered the cavern from another tunnel and was hissing and snapping at other dragons to get out of his way. And they did. \"Stay far from him,\" Saffron said. \"He's more reptile than dragon these days.\"\n\nShe didn't have to warn me. Oloxia swung opaque eyes in my direction and snuffled the air as if he could smell better than he could see. His scales seemed dull with age and his bulk was massive\u2014it amazed me he could still fly. His tongue lashed out, lapping at his mouth. I sensed that if he had the chance, he would snap me up as a tasty treat\u2014and maybe Saffron, too. One of the smaller, green dragons hissed at Oloxia. The ancient dragon swung around, lashed out with a spurt of flame and a fast swipe of a front leg, pinning the smaller green dragon's wing to the cavern floor.\n\nThe green dragon started to struggle and two other small dragons swept down next to him. I feared there would be blood, but a roar shook the cavern and a word echoed in my mind.\n\nStop!\n\nZenema swooped down and into the cavern, scattering the younger dragons from their perches, including Jaydra, who chirruped and settled again next to Saffron. Zenema landed in the middle of the cavern and lifted her head high above the other dragons.\n\nThe dragons all seemed to give way to her, except old Oloxia who huffed out a smoky breath, but released the younger green dragon who darted away with his friends.\n\nI glanced around. I didn't know how many of these dragons were Zenema's kin\u2014her children even, such as Jaydra. But it was plain Zenema ruled Den Mountain and held great sway with all the other dragons. And not just because of her size or age. Her stare swept the cavern and she held each dragon's gaze, intelligence and power in eyes that seemed to shift color and swirl with light.\n\n\"A den-mother is a great leader among dragons,\" Saffron whispered to me. \"Even though there might be more than a few clutches of eggs from different mothers, there is still only one who rules, usually the oldest mother. Zenema is head of the whole family.\"\n\nI nodded. I had wondered why Zenema seemed to quite literally rule the roost.\n\n\"The den-mother is like a queen. That one there?\" Saffron nodded to a brilliantly blue-green dragon with silver-flecked eyes and a long neck. \"That's Ysix. She's den-mother to another brood on another island, but she's also one of Zenema's daughters.\"\n\nI edged closer to Saffron. \"That makes Zenema an empress\u2014a queen over other queens.\"\n\nSaffron smiled. \"You know, maybe you really are a dragon-friend. With words like that, you might even charm Zenema.\"\n\nMy face heated. I wasn't sure I could do any such thing. Next to these mighty creatures, I was feeling small and all too vulnerable.\n\nSaffron didn't seem to notice, but told me, \"Every now and again one of Zenema's daughters will have a clutch of eggs of her own. But, to become den-mother, she must go off first and find her own cavern, on her own island like Ysix did. And a lot of the dragons prefer staying under the protection of a more powerful dragon.\"\n\nZenema's thoughts rang inside my head again, so powerful that it was almost like the blare of trumpets. Family and blood kin, this is the third council I have called and the first for many of you.\n\nSome of dragons let out chirrups and clicks\u2014I didn't know if they were agreeing with Zenema or not, but Saffron didn't seem worried.\n\nZenema's thoughts softened a little in my mind.\n\nA darkness once again rises across the land, and it reaches for us. We of the West thought our dens to be safe. We lived as wild dragons, always have, but without savagery. We grew strong\u2014the oceans have been good to us!\n\nA loud hissing rose up from some of the younger dragons. Saffron grinned, and I asked, \"What was that? What did they say?\"\n\n\"Just the younger dragons being silly, saying it's the fish that's been so very good.\" She shrugged.\n\nI thought of how Jaydra always wanted to go hunt the oily ocean fish, but Zenema's thoughts echoed in my mind again.\n\nBut all things are joined at their center, as the old lore says. The darkness comes for us. It will come to try and put an end to us as it did so very long ago. For we are its enemy. We are the spark of life, the fire in the heart, the ray of light that shines even in the night.\n\nI had never known a dragon could be so poetic. It almost seemed as if this might be something spiritual, but did dragons have a religion?\n\nOne of the other dragons hissed and screeched, and I looked to Saffron for a translation. She shook her head and turned to look up at Zenema, so I did as well.\n\nI can promise you, in all my days and across three councils, as there is light, there is dark. As there are dragons, there is the shadow that seeks to extinguish them. We must decide not only our own fate, but that of others.\n\nHissing and chirps rose up from the dragons\u2014mostly hisses from the older dragons and chirps from the younger ones. Even to someone such as myself who couldn't speak dragon, it was obvious that the dragons were arguing about how to deal with the threat that was going to come.\n\nI imagined black war ships bearing Enric's colors of royal purple and gold, staffed with the unflinching, mechanical Iron Guard, and aided with the king's strange sorcery\u2014could anything defeat such a fleet?\n\nBut these were dragons! I had read stories of dragons doing amazing things. However, the king's powers were daunting\u2014Saffron and I had barely been able to escape the king and keep him from destroying his own city, all for the sake of wiping out any who opposed him.\n\nGlancing around, I wondered how many of these dragons even knew how to fight?\n\nZenema's thoughts cut through the noise, which quieted as her thoughts seemed to reach not just me but every dragon as well.\n\nWere it my choice alone, I would say we should give up on the humans who have brought our race so much suffering.\n\nAnother chorus of hisses and wing-beats answered her, and then Zenema rose up above the flurry of dragons.\n\nWere this a generation ago, I would suggest we fly even further west and seek what new lands we might find. Or fly south until we leave the humans to their own petty cruelties. But we have found there are humans who still remember us, and who are still good and true dragon-friends. In them, there is hope the world might remember what humans and dragons were once. And even more importantly I see ahead and see that we cannot run. For in running, does not the prey learn that the predator always runs faster? And I will be no one's prey.\n\nOld Oloxia let out a burst of what sounded to me like angry hissing. Zenema shook her head and spread her wings and the noise quieted.\n\nI hear your arguments. Life has been better, living wild. But are we dragons to run when chased? Once we had no choice. We had to flee or face destruction. But our numbers are vast now. Many of you cannot recall how life was in the times before, but there was a time when humans and dragons lived and worked together. There was a time when humans brought us food and helped make our homes. There was a time when the dragons did not die of scale-rot, or flame cough or any other illness because humans would bring healers and together we lived better lives. If humans remember us, is it not time for us to remember ourselves? Let us remember our past\u2014and look to our future. Step forward, adopted den-daughter of mine, Saffron Maddox, and dragon-friend, Bower of Torvald!\"\n\nI gulped and straightened, my heart thudding into my chest. Glancing at Saffron, I saw she was looking pale, her freckles standing out. But she held my stare and gave a small nod. She stepped into the center of the cavern, into the midst of the dragons. I could not fail her now.\n\nCompelled by the moment, I followed Saffron only to be surrounded by what seemed to me to be suspicious, skeptical and hungry-looking dragons.\n\nSaffron lifted her hands over her head.\n\nThe air around us seemed almost unbearably hot. Sweat trickled down my back and beaded on my forehead. The sandy ground in the cavern gave under my boots and the rustlings of dragon wings seemed to fill the cavern for a moment.\n\nSaffron looked around her much as Zenema had. She seemed to be trying to look at as many of the dragons as she could, turning to include not just Zenema and Ysix, but also the smaller dragons and even old Oloxia, who lay at the back of the cavern now.\n\nThere was something about the deeply textured, inquisitive eyes that always made me think dragons could read my darkest secrets.\n\nSaffron lowered her hands and silence fell.\n\nInstead of thinking her words, Saffron spoke to the dragons. \"Many of you have known me for my most of my life. I am den-sister to Jaydra, and I have flown, hunted, ate and slept alongside you. For sharing your home with me, I can only say thank you. You have shown me how wise and gracious dragons can be and taught me better than any human family could.\" She bowed her head and put a hand to her chest.\n\nWas it just me or had I heard a slight hitch in her voice when she had said that last part?\n\nLooking up again, Saffron balled her fist at her side. \"But now the time has come when I must ask more from you. I have traveled into the human world and discovered a danger that threatens the den.\"\n\nA few dragons hissed, and some reared up, beating their wings. I wondered if that was dismay or an offer to do battle.\n\nSaffron raised her voice so she might be better heard. \"The Middle Kingdom of Torvald is ruled by an evil sorcerer, a man called Enric Maddox, who is blood kin to me. But he is not content with what power he has. He wants more. He will never be satisfied until the entire world bows to him\u2014and all threats are gone. Meaning he seeks to destroy all dragons\u2014and create only the memory of dragons as enemies.\"\n\nMore hisses answered these words, and this time I could feel the anger behind those sounds. These dragons weren't happy.\n\nSaffron's shoulders tensed. She lifted her chin and called out, \"Enric sent his spies here, to this very island. They now carry word back to Enric that dragons live here. Even worse, these spies killed the Hermit who lived next to us and in the shadow of Den Mountain for so many years. Enric will stop at nothing in his quest to control the world. But I cannot allow this to happen. Enric seeks my death, too, or control of me. And so I'm asking you to fly with me, for I cannot fight without your help.\"\n\nShe let out a gasp, as if this speech had taken too much out of her.\n\nA moment of silence answered, and then the cavern erupted into whistles and hisses from the assembled dragons. Even though I couldn't understand what they were saying, from the way they were snapping at each other and swiveled their long, scaled necks to hiss, it was obviously an argument, with some wanting to help Saffron and others spitting out fire in clear rebukes.\n\nA heavy thud from Zenema as she slapped her tail against the cavern floor had every dragon turning to look at her. The air now smelled of smoke, and I tried not to cough.\n\nZenema's stare swept the room. She looked from Saffron to gaze at me and my insides quivered under that hard, swirling gaze, as if Zenema was seeking something from within me.\n\nAt last Zenema turned away from me, and I resisted the urge to wipe the sweat from my face. Saffron stood even straighter as Zenema asked, Why would humans seek to be friends with dragons again? Why should we not stay out here in our dens? What if this generation of humans are as frightened of us as the island villagers? What do you answer, Saffron, to the questions put forth by so many dragons?\n\nSaffron turned and pointed at me. \"The world changes because of him.\"\n\nEvery dragon's gaze turned to me. My throat tightened and my heart seemed to almost jump from my chest. I stood still, heart hammering and wondering why Saffron had said that.\n\nShe came over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. \"Bower is the rightful King of Torvald. Through him the great bloodlines of Flamma and Torvald have come together, and only he can bring peace to the Middle Kingdom\u2026to all kingdoms. He is the bridge between the dragon and human worlds. You all can sense in him that he is a true dragon-friend. You know this or you would not have allowed him to live as he has within Den Mountain. If we see Bower restored to the throne, we not only save those who now live under a terrible rule and terrible lies, but we also will see dragons restored to their rightful place in the sky\u2014so that dragons may live wherever they wish and need not run from this Enric like sheep.\"\n\nI'm still not even certain I want to be king.\n\nThe thought left my face hot and I shuffled my boots in the sand. Under the gaze of every dragon in the cavern, I felt more like a fraud. I was no warrior-king, riding at the head of dragons and battling a dark sorcerer for a throne. My skills were better used with me being the one who chronicled great deeds.\n\nA sound like the hiss of steam escaping a kettle started and grew louder until my ears ached. Then Ysix rose up, spread her wings and gave a roar that silenced all the dragons.\n\nI glanced at Saffron and saw her freckles standing out as her face paled.\n\nLooking up into Ysix's swirling, silver eyes, I thought she had judged me unworthy and was going to eat me.\n\nBut Zenema's voice echoed in my mind. Bower of Torvald, den-mother Ysix challenges you, asking if you have the strength to be the Dragon King. Do we wait until another comes along who is braver? Can you lead as a king must? What do you answer?\n\nHer words cut through me, punching into my gut like a fist. What could I say? Ysix was right. She had seen into my thoughts and knew I was more of a scholar. I had been raised with books, not with battles. Oh, yes, I'd had a sword in my hand, as did all nobles. But my parents had worked hard to hide my real heritage\u2014and they had done such a good job that I hadn't even known I was supposed to rule the Middle Kingdom.\n\nGlancing at Saffron, I wanted her to tell the dragons to follow her\u2014not me. She was a leader. She could fight. She had magic, even. I had\u2026I didn't know what I had.\n\nSlowly, Saffron nodded and mouthed the words to me, I believe in you.\n\nWell, it seemed I had Saffron. Saffron who believed, who trusted, and who was now staring at me with worry tightening her expression. She no longer looked like the half-wild girl I had met in the woods, but instead seemed a young woman teetering between hope I would do the right thing and despair that I might not.\n\nHow could I betray her trust?\n\nPulling in a breath, I faced Ysix. My throat seemed dry, but I knew I needed to prove there was more to me than a skinny youth who'd barely been tested. \"I thought\u2026I once lived only for the stories within the pages of old books. I read about dragons\u2014and did not think them real. I wished\u2026I wished for more. And I found that with Saffron. I have faced danger and battles, but I have not enjoyed them. But I would not\u2014cannot\u2014go back to my old life. You\u2014all of you\u2014have shown me a better world. A world with dragons. A world where dragons and humans join to be so much more together.\"\n\nYsix huffed out a breath. I held my own breath and tried not to choke or cough or wave away the smoke in front of my face.\n\nTurning from Ysix, I spoke to all the dragons. \"I am not one of the heroes of old. I do not come here seeking the heads of my enemies. It is true. I would prefer to talk to someone to reach a resolution. But I do come to you with a passion and a love for dragons and the past that has been with me ever since I first could look at the sky or stare at an old drawing of a dragon. I may not be the great king you were hoping for, but I will be one who will try every day to be better and to understand more how humans and dragons can live together. I wish for there to be peace between our species, and I am willing to fight for that. I will fight for those who need my help, and for the Dragon Riders to return to the skies!\"\n\nGlancing at Saffron, I hoped she thought I had done well. Her mouth curved in a small smile and she gave me what seemed an encouraging nod.\n\nThe flap of beating wings and hisses answered me as the dragons argued over what to do with me and my words.\n\nYsix raised her voice once again above the tumult and this time her voice echoed in my mind. Bower of Torvald, words come easy to humans so let your actions say more. You are challenged to a test that will prove if you can do more than try.\n\nGlancing around, what would Ysix would have me do? Wrestle a Grim-bear? Battle one of Enric's undefeatable Iron Guard? What feat would make a dragon trust a human?\n\nSaffron pushed an elbow into my side. I glanced at her. She shook her head and glared at me, trying to say something without saying it, but I had no idea what she wanted. Instead, I looked at Ysix and told her, \"I accept your challenge.\"\n\nWhat else could I say? If we did not have the help of the dragons, we were as good as dead. Without them, Enric's men or his spies or his assassins would find us and we'd be done. Or I would be. I knew Enric wanted Saffron for her power\u2014but Enric had no use for someone who had a better claim to the throne of Torvald.\n\nYsix glanced once at Zenema. The other dragons fell silent, and then Ysix's thoughts echoed in my mind. Bower must prove he has the blood of the true Dragon King in his. Bower must show he can mend the distrust between human and dragon. Go to the villagers of this island and make those humans into dragon-friends. Do this and Ysix herself and her brood will fly for you."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Dragon's Peace",
                "text": "I kept trying to explain to Bower just what he was facing. \"One of the things you have to understand is that the villagers really don't like dragons.\"\n\nHe nodded and then shrugged as if he was only half-listening, but he said, \"I know, I know. The people in Torvald are the same. Those who ever dare to mention dragons do so only to tell stories of how dragons are monsters from nightmares. But I know what to do. People just need to see what dragons are really like. They just need to meet them.\"\n\nRolling my eyes, I wanted to punch Bower. He was underestimating how difficult this challenge was going to be. The villagers had already met dragons and still didn't like them.\n\nWe had left Den Mountain at once. Glancing back, I could see the visiting dragons swirling around the warm updrafts that circled Den Mountain. It had taken most of the day to reach the nearest village, and we were almost there. Despite Bower's insistence that this was something he could do alone, I'd told him I was going with him.\n\nIt was, after all, partly my quest and it had been my request to have the help of the dragons. The way I figured it, everything depended upon Bower, and if the villagers turned nasty, he would need someone who could fight at his side. Zenema had agreed with me. Jaydra had also insisted she was coming with us. That had kicked up another argument with the dragons, but Zenema simply said Bower needed to have a dragon with him if his task was to convince the villagers that dragons could be their friends.\n\nIt's not that Jaydra does not like villagers, Jaydra mused, her thoughts reaching mine. Jaydra just does not like arrows or their long spears.\n\nI glanced up to where Jaydra soared overhead. Maybe they threw those at you because you ate one of their forest pigs last week.\n\nJaydra gave a loud snort of displeasure that carried to me.\n\nTravelling with a dragon usually had its benefits in that you got to fly on its back, but Bower had insisted we arrive on foot. He was right in that dragons were big\u2014and also a dragon flying low over a village usually sent every villager running. So Jaydra had to stay high above the clouds or down on the ground and out of sight\u2014at least for the moment.\n\nGlancing at me, Bower said, \"You are going to let me try to do this my own way, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I know you have to prove yourself, but I don't think you realize just how many generations of bad blood there are between the islanders and dragons. The villagers try to steal dragon eggs, and the dragons in turn steal livestock from the villagers. Mostly, the villagers keep to themselves these days, but there are stories the dragons tell of wars even between dragons and villagers!\"\n\n\"And the villagers probably have their own sagas as well about what happened when dragons first showed up, or when villagers came to these islands.\" He huffed out a breath and strode ahead of me. I was stunned by this reaction, and felt vaguely ashamed, like I was being a traitor to my own kind\u2014to dragons.\n\nHurrying to catch up to him, I told him, \"Bower, the villagers even set fire to the forest once. Who does that?\"\n\nBower glanced at me, his face pinched with worry. \"I understand. I really do. I grew up in Torvald, where even talking like we are now would have you imprisoned\u2014or killed. I know how horrible some people can be, but that doesn't mean you give up on everyone.\"\n\nI suddenly blushed, remembering how Bower had been tortured at the hands of the king. And I had been the one who had dragged Bower back to his city when really he was trying to escape from it and the king\u2014from someone who had proved he really was terrible.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" I kicked at a rock in the path. \"I just wish you had suggested Ysix pick a different challenge.\"\n\nHe hunched a shoulder. \"Ysix was right! I do have to prove myself. If I can't negotiate a peace between dragons and humans here, how am I going to do this anywhere else? This is important. And it's not just\u2026well, I've give up a lot. My home. My friends. Even my books. I have to know that I really can do what everyone seems to think I should be able to do.\"\n\nPushing a long-leafed palm from our path, I told him, \"But, Bower, maybe you just need more training first?\"\n\nHe gave a short laugh. \"In a way, I have been training for this for a long time. I was a scholar before I had to leave Torvald. I read every book I could, a lot of them old ones, and most of them were ones the king didn't want anyone reading. I read the Strategicus, The Manuals of Mordecai, which noted ways of dealing with dragons and how to fight beside dragons and a whole lot more. If I can apply even a little of that learning, I might be able to do this.\"\n\nBower stopped and glanced at me. For a moment, he looked taller and more confident than I had ever seen him. Sunlight streaked his shaggy brown hair and his dark eyes seemed suddenly far more knowing.\n\nMaybe he has the blood of the true kings in him after all.\n\nFrom above, Jaydra's thoughts came to me. Just so long as Bower can get villagers to stop firing arrows at Jaydra.\n\nI led the way down to a clearing just in front of a river. On the opposite side of the wide, slow flowing river, huts stood on stilts. Wind chimes of shells from the sea and carved wood beads rattled cheerfully. The villagers seemed busy with their day, going in and out of the big, wooden huts with their peaked roofs, mending fishing nets, or just sitting and talking to each other.\n\nSomeone noticed us, for a horn sounded a short blast. Everyone in the village seemed to stop what they were doing, and a boy pointed at us.\n\nBower let out a breath and said, \"Well\u2026here's to at least trying.\" Stepping forward, he walked toward a planked, wooden bridge that crossed the river at a narrow spot.\n\nI put my hand on my knife hilt at my belt and followed him.\n\nThe bridge, while simple, had posts at either end that had been carved into fantastical versions of dragons. I wasn't sure whether to be impressed or insulted by the way they had depicted my family as being all teeth and wings and claws.\n\nAs soon as we stepped off the shaky bridge, a thin man with a beard, a tunic of cloth, leggings and boots stepped in front of us. He lowered a long spear at Bower and called out, \"Halt.\"\n\nBower held up his empty hands. I was wishing now that I had a bow and that Bower had his sword. We stopped. The villagers all stared at us with wary eyes, and behind us the river babbled along. I didn't like that we had our backs to the river, but if we needed to run, we could get across the river fast enough that Jaydra could swoop down and protect us.\n\nBower wasn't thinking about any of that. He smiled and said, \"We come with a message of peace.\"\n\nThe man with the spear stared past Bower and at me, his eyes widening. \"The dragon-girl? You brought the dragon-girl with you?\" He glanced at Bower again, a frown pulling his sandy eyebrows tight. The spear shifted to aim more at me.\n\n\"Saffron. Her name is Saffron, and my name is Bower.\" Bower stepped between me and the spear\u2014not a wise move. I glanced around. A crowd was beginning to assemble. Some of the villagers carried bows notched with arrows, the children had rocks in their slings, and several of the men hefted more long spears. They did not look welcoming. No one was smiling.\n\n\"Bower?\" The man stumbled over Bower's name. It was not one common to the Western Isles. He nodded at me. \"Our shaman will have to decide what to do with her now you've rescued her from the dragons.\"\n\n\"Rescued?\" Bower's eyebrows shot up. \"You think the dragons were holding her captive? No, that's not it at all.\"\n\nFrom the crowd, an old woman stepped forward and called, \"What is this? What is happening?\" She pushed through the other villagers, hobbling forward with the aid of a tall staff. Shells and wooden beads decorated her long tunic, which was white and fringed. More shells were woven into her graying hair, and bones rattled as she walked. Long, gray hair framed a brown, wrinkled face and gray eyes stared at us with a measuring look.\n\nShe had to be the shaman.\n\nThe man with the spear stepped back and said, \"Grandmother, it is the dragon-girl and a dragon-boy come to us. He speaks of peace.\"\n\nThe old woman stepped closer, the dried skulls of birds and even a few teeth, clattering as she moved. She squinted at each of us in turn, and narrowed her eyes. Her nose wrinkled. \"Are you with the others?\"\n\n\"What others?\" Bower asked.\n\nI nudged Bower with my elbow and shook my head. I wasn't sure if the others were the king's men who had killed the Hermit or maybe someone even more dangerous.\n\nBower glanced at me, frowned as if he didn't understand what I was trying to tell him, and then faced the old woman again. \"I am an emissary from the dragons of Den Mountain and I come with their promise of peace.\"\n\nThe shaman gave a sharp laugh. \"Peace from a dragon? What trickery is this? Seize them!\" The shaman stepped back and waved for the four men with spears to come forward.\n\nI pulled out my knife, and Jaydra roared and fell from the sky, landing in the river with a huge splash. The villagers all fell back and some screamed. Jaydra raised her neck and head high over the bridge and over us. With one smash of her tail, she could destroy the bridge and then she could lay waste to this small village.\n\nA cry went up at once, with the villagers shouting or screaming. The four guards with spears moved away from us to stand before their shaman, raising their weapons in an obviously defensive move. Children fled, women gathered them up and headed into the jungle as if to hide.\n\n\"Wait!\" Bower shouted, raising his hands. \"Jaydra means you no harm, she is only here to protect myself and Saffron,\" He moved to stand almost directly underneath Jaydra's jaws.\n\nJaydra set fire to their puny village. Jaydra asked me with her thoughts.\n\nNo. Let Bower talk. I thought to her, even though my fingers were tingling as my magic started to rise. I bit down on my lower lip and tried to hold it back. I couldn't let it go now\u2014I had no idea what it might do.\n\nMy magic had always been more wild than controlled. At times, I could use it to hide myself and Jaydra as well. Other times, it burst out with such power that it frightened me. I'd once almost killed Jaydra by accident, and now I didn't want to harm these villagers\u2014not if I didn't have to.\n\nI watched as Bower and Jaydra stood still, letting the shaman and her guards back away from them.\n\nTurning, Bower pointed to Den Mountain, where dragons whirled around the peak. I had no doubt the dragons had their ears and eyes trained on what was happening here and were readying to attack the village to save Jaydra and me. \"Look\u2014look at the dragons of the Western Isles who now watch you to see if you mean peace or not. To see if you can be trusted.\"\n\nThe shaman glanced at the mountain and then said, \"I see dragons\u2014ready to attack!\"\n\n\"But they haven't,\" Bower said. He waved at Jaydra. \"She could destroy your village and drive off your livestock, but she has not. We came here to offer peace. Think how much more fish you could bring in if you had the help of dragons. And look at how many dragons there are in the Western Isles. They could have driven you from this island years ago, but they have allowed you to share this land with them. But they could do so much more for you. Or\u2026if you fight, they could drive you and your families from these shores forever.\"\n\n\"Are you threatening us, dragon-friend?\" The shaman made the word into an insult and then spat on the ground in front of Bower's feet. Holding up a bird skull, she rattled it at Bower.\n\nMouth pulling down, he stepped forward. He looked far more like an insulted dragon right now, with his chest puffed out and his face reddening. \"I am a dragon-friend, and a proud one at that. I have come to talk with you, not threaten you. I come to make peace\u2014one in which if you will promise to live in harmony with all dragons, they in turn promise not to attack you or eat any more of your livestock.\"\n\nJaydra glanced down at Bower and blinked in surprise. I could feel her shock in my mind and begged her to just let Bower keep talking. But I was certain no human could ever hold a dragon to a promise not to eat pigs or goats or sheep.\n\n\"Lies!\" the shaman cried and rattled her skull at Bower again. But some of the spears dropped a little bit lower. Glancing around, I could see some of the villagers were swapping glances and thinking about Bower's words. The old woman seemed to notice this as well for she turned on the men. \"Remember what the messengers said. The dragon-girl has been entranced by dragon magic.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not entranced,\" Bower said, his tone amiable. The spears drooped even lower until their tips touched the ground. \"There are enough dragons up there to destroy not just this village, but every single village on every island for miles around. Dragons haven't been your enemy. Ever. If anything, they've made this a safer place to live. Do pirates come and raid your village? No\u2014because dragons are near. Now all the dragons ask is that you take a step closer to them, that you become friends. Why is that so hard to believe?\"\n\nThe shaman's mouth worked, but no sound came out. She seemed to be struggling for an answer and not finding one.\n\nThe first man we'd met stroked his beard and said, \"That makes some sense.\"\n\nBower nodded. \"It does, doesn't it? You all live on the same island, but instead of raiding each other\u2014or trying to get the others to go away\u2014why not work together? There is plenty of food, both on the island and in the sea. So the dragons like the taste of your pigs. Raise extras every year and trade with the dragons. They could fish the deepest part of the oceans for you, for food you would never have otherwise. They can tell when storms are coming and warn you. They can protect you from all enemies, not just pirates but other dangers, too. There is no need to keep acting as if you live on this island on your own\u2014or to act as if dragons are here to kill you.\"\n\nSome of the men nodded. And something else was happening.\n\nWomen and children had edged out of the jungle as if drawn by Bower's voice or his words. He sounded so calm and reasonable that the men of the village were nodding to each other. Only the old shaman glared at him.\n\nAs he spoke, Bower was waving his hands and walking back and forth and looking directly at the villagers as if they were his friends. Even to me, his words were having an impact. I was starting to think it really didn't make any sense that villagers and dragons couldn't find a way to share such a small island.\n\n\"But they always fight\u2014with each other and then with us,\" one of the guards said. \"And messengers came to tell us dragons were getting ready to fight again. But help is coming.\"\n\nThe old shaman kicked the guard hard in the leg, causing him to grunt. He shot her an irritated look and stepped away.\n\nBower held up his hands again. \"Do they fight? Or do you just hear them making noises? Dragons are loud.\" Jaydra gave a low roar as if to confirm this. Bower walked over and put a hand on her side. That seemed to impress the villagers more than anything. Glancing around, Bower said, \"Let the dragons prove they can fight for you. That is surely better than having to climb Den Mountain to battle flying, fire-breathing dragons.\" He grinned, making the idea seem ridiculous. He even got a few uneasy smiles. Moving away from Jaydra, Bower asked, \"But who are these messengers you speak of?\" The shaman stumbled backward, holding her staff in front of her as if to fight off anyone who might stop her. \"It's evil magic he is using. Say nothing. Shun these two. They'll kill us all!\" She ducked into one of the smaller huts that wasn't on stilts.\n\nThe villagers in front of us swapped uneasy glances, and a cold trickle slipped down my spine. I tightened my fingers around my knife. Had the shaman just undone all Bower's good words?\n\nThe man who had first stopped us glanced at me and told Bower, \"The messengers came to look for her.\"\n\nBower's head jerked up and he said, \"Did they also go to see the Hermit?\"\n\nThe man stroked his beard again. \"Yes, when we told them a hermit lived on the island, they seemed to want to see him.\" The guard shrugged. \"I told them he was just a crazy hermit and lived too near the dragons, but they said they had boats. We didn't see them after that. But they said the king was sending his ships to protect us.\"\n\nBower grimaced and muttered, \"Enric.\"\n\nMy heart seemed to stutter. Enric was sending ships? How many?\n\nJaydra suddenly lifted her nose into the air and snuffed deeply. Wood. Iron. Black-powder. Hatred. She breathed in the winds of the world and then looked to the east.\n\nWhere? How far? I thought to Jaydra and then edged closer to Bower. I tugged on the sleeve of his skin tunic.\n\n\"What is it?\" he hissed. \"These are delicate negotiations and\u2014\"\n\n\"Something's coming. Jaydra smells it.\" I glanced over at Jaydra, who was now spreading her wings and looking ready to take flight. \"Jaydra smells wood and metal.\" I left out the fact that dragons could also smell emotions. That didn't seem as important as finding out if these were the king's ships coming to the island.\n\nZenema's voice slipped into my mind. They are, Saffron. Ships come from the east. Tall, belching smoke and with soldiers. They will be here before long.\n\nThe air shook with a distant boom. The villagers ducked as if thunder had sounded.\n\n\"What is that noise?\" one of the villagers asked.\n\n\"Cannons,\" Bower said. \"It's not a good sound. It's a huge gun, shooting fire that is more destructive than any dragon's breath.\"\n\nThe villagers started to mill around, and one man ordered the others to stay calm. Children were crying now, and women huddled close to the huts.\n\nA cackling laugh broke out. The shaman stepped from her hut, carrying a cloth bundle as if she intended to flee the village. \"You think you are the only one with tricks, dragon-girl? I once studied with the Hermit, before he thought me not pure enough! Well, I have hidden the king's boats from you until now, just as you hide your dragons from us. The king will reward me when he finds out I, the witch of the Western Isles, lured his dragon-girl into a trap for him!\"\n\nShe vanished into the forest.\n\nBower looked from villager to me and asked. \"How far aware are the ships?\"\n\nClose. Three ships, Jaydra told me, and I told the same thing to Bower, for I wasn't certain he would hear Jaydra's thoughts.\n\nAnother boom shook the trees and something crashed into the forest, knocking four tall trees into splinters. I didn't know if these were warning shots, or some sort of signal, or if the ships testing the range of what Bower had called their cannons.\n\nBower strode into the village. \"You have to get your people to safety. I don't think those ships care what they smash, meaning your village could be destroyed. Go to the Den Mountain and hide in the caves\u2014the mountain is too strong for the cannon, and the dragons will not harm you. They have given their promise to be your friends. But you must go.\"\n\nThe villagers started to shake their head, and Bower raised his voice, \"When the king's soldiers come, they will not leave until every man, woman and child is dead. You know the truth\u2014that dragons exist. This means they cannot\u2026they will not leave you alive. Please, you must go. Hurry.\"\n\nHeads were shaking, but I could see worry and hesitation in the eyes of the villagers. I stepped forward. \"Bower is right. Those messengers? They killed the Hermit. His grave is next to his tower. Go and see his grave of piled rocks if you do not believe us.\"\n\nBower nodded and called out, \"Any of you who can lay a trap, do so. Make your village unsafe for any who invade it. And go to the dragons. They will defend you.\"\n\n\"You ask much of us,\" a woman said, holding her child close to her breast.\n\nBower shook his head. \"No, I only ask that you put your trust in the dragons you know and not the strangers who are coming and who have weapons that can do that.\" He waved at the fallen trees, now starting to smoke and burn.\n\n\"Bower,\" I shouted. \"We have to go as well.\"\n\n\"Send a message to Zenema!\" he said. \"Ask her to take in the refugees from the village. Den Mountain can withstand an attack, and we need to do what we can to repel these ships.\" He reached for my hand and held it tightly. \"I am sorry, Saffron. I failed to protect you. Enric found you.\"\n\nBower did not fail. A shadow rippled over the ground. Ysix flew low overhead, her scales gleaming in the sunlight.\n\nBower has proven a worthy leader of humans, but Ysix still does not know if Bower is fit to lead Ysix's brood just yet! Go with my blessing. Ysix and her den will see how well these little ships burn under dragon fire. The false king will never even hear where they sank. But know this, Bower of Torvald, when you have need for dragons, call. We will come.\n\n\"Thank you, Ysix,\" Bower said, the words almost hushed. He turned back to the villagers and shouted, \"Take only the essentials. The dragons can fish enough to feed you, but go now. Quickly!\"\n\nFor a moment, they hesitated, and then the man who had first met us waved at the trees and shouted, \"You heard him. Let's go before our huts our smashed just as those trees were and our bodies, too.\"\n\nI stepped closer to Bower and nudged him with my hand. \"It looks as if you have finally started to find out who you really might be. And that might be a king.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Northward",
                "text": "Chaos erupted in the village, leaving Saffron and me standing there and trying to help. I had always thought a battle would be terrible and scary, but this wasn't even a fight yet and it was already confusion, with villagers falling and running and sometimes shoving at each other. Thankfully, a few of them seemed to keep their wits and they were able to get the others organized. Saffron and I couldn't do much more than lead the way to Den Mountain, the villagers following in clumps. Saffron asked Jaydra to fly and scout out the ships and keep an eye on them.\n\nJaydra rose into the air at once, and disappeared up into the clouds that almost always dotted the sky over the islands toward the end of the day. And that might be something that helped us\u2014it was nearing sunset and I wasn't really certain the ships would try an attack at night. Not if they couldn't see any fires\u2014and there would be no moon tonight. That might give us a few hours to prepare.\n\nI wasn't really sure the villagers and the dragons would get along. Would the villagers treat the dragons with respect? Would the dragons understand the panic the villagers were in? I was worried for them, I had to trust in Zenema and the other dragons.\n\nWe reached Den Mountain and started to climb the rocky sides. The villagers had trouble and I almost wanted to urge them to let the dragons take them up to the caverns and tunnels, but it was difficult just dealing with dragons overhead. I could hear their wings flapping, their calls and hisses. It seemed as if there were dragons everywhere, flying around the peak in ever contracting circles. I could feel their agitation, and my hair and clothes were buffeted by the breezes their wings created. I had never seen an entire flight of dragons, and they reminded me of the way birds flock in gigantic groups. The only creature still calm seemed to be Zenema, who sat at the edge of one of the stone perches, staring out to the glittering blue sea to the east.\n\nKing's ships bring their filth with them. Zenema's thoughts held such scorn that I almost tripped. I would not want any dragon, but especially one as powerful as her to ever be angry at me.\n\nLooking out from high on Den Mountain, I could see three fat-bellied ships, their dark wood blackened with tar. They seemed wide and slow, and their sides bristling with cannons. The vessels seemed to have anchored in the largest bay in the island, not far from the village where we had been. The ships had no masts, but each vessel had a strange metal chimney from which belched forth oily, black smoke. A black sweep spoiled the water behind each vessel, spoiling the pristine blue waves. More of Enric's magic I guessed.\n\nYsix and her brood swirled over the ships, diving in low and fast every now and then, but I noticed the flames they shot at the ships did no damage\u2014there were no sails to catch fire and the decks seem protected by metal. However, Ysix and the other dragons at least kept the sailors and soldiers from coming onto the decks.\n\nThe sun was setting and I wondered if the sailors would try to land at night and would they try an attack directly at Den Mountain? Or would they raid the village first? I wasn't sure, but the first order was to get the villagers settled.\n\nThankfully, Saffron told me that Zenema had commanded one tunnel to be kept for the villagers alone. Saffron and I were able to settle the villagers there, and once they figured out the dragons weren't trying to attack them\u2014or eat them\u2014they got down to sorting out sleeping arrangements, food and water.\n\nLeaving Saffron to help sort out supplies for the villagers, I headed back outside to stare at the dark waters and the darkening sky. Every now and then a boom shook the air as one of the ships set off a cannon. I could see fires in the forest below, and I wondered if the ships would simply stay in the bay and try to pound the island into dust. Ysix and the other dragons returned to Den Mountain, and then Zenema's voice echoed in my mind, commanding me to attend her.\n\nI climbed up to the higher rocks where she perched, my heart thudding and even more nervous than when I had faced the villagers.\n\nSpeak to me, Bower of Torvald, Zenema asked, her thoughts rumbling. The last time I flew against any human was well over a hundred years ago at the fall of Torvald itself.\n\n\"You were there?\" I stammered, amazed. \"Is that why you sent Saffron to the mainland to learn the truth of her heritage? Do you know of the Flamma-Torvalds? I am\u2014\"\n\nI bit off the last words. I wasn't sure if I wanted to know if I were anything like one of my ancestors.\n\nZenema growled at me. Her wings fluttered and her words came into my mind again. When the time is ripe, I will tell you of these things. But if Bower wishes to do his ancestors proud, advise me now.\n\n\"Well, uh\u2026why are you asking me for advice? I mean, I've read Strategicus, but don't dragons know how to fight?\"\n\nAgainst villagers. And in the old ways. But Bower grew up in Torvald. Bower knows the creations of Enric. We do not.\n\nI thought I caught a hint of sadness in her words, and it seemed wrong that so powerful a dragon should feel sorrow at not knowing how the world had changed. I stood a little straighter. \"I'll do my best to remember what the old books and manuals told me\u2014and mix it with what I know of Enric and the mainland. There have been a lot of battles recorded. I read General Berison's chronicle of his exploits and his military manuals. But that was a long time ago. And\u2026well, a lot of our history has been twisted and blotted out.\"\n\nSpeak of what you know, Bower.\n\n\"Well, one of Berison's tenets was study your field.\" I looked to the darkening vista before us. The water had darkened, with the setting sun leaving a streak of gold across the waves. The island seemed darker than usual, with no village fires burning. The island itself was shaped a little like a squashed star, with points of land sticking out into the water, shallow bays, and Den Mountain rising up at the very center. Rivers wound through the island, with the largest river making a wide loop and then emptying out into the largest bay. Forests covered most of the island, with clearings here and there, and the villagers had their settlement near the river, not far from the bay edged with golden beaches.\n\nCrossing my arms, I told Zenema, \"Enric's ships look to have anchored in the bay\u2014they must know the river is the fastest way to the village. But it's Den Mountain they have to conquer if they want to wipe out the dragons.\"\n\nJaydra and two other of the younger\u2014or at least the smaller\u2014dragons flew back to Den Mountain, gliding low over the forest. Plumes of black smoke lifted from two of the anchored vessels, followed by the heavy, echoing booms of cannon.\n\nI waved a hand at the ships. \"Those cannons have shot that's powerful enough to punch a hole through a dragon's wing or break a skull. That's their advantage. Ours is that the cannon's range can't hit Den Mountain. Look you can see where the shot crashes into the forest. It's demolishing ancient trees and cracking boulders. But to get to Den Mountain, the ships will have to land troops on the island.\"\n\nI do not want to send the young ones against those black guns, Zenema thought at me.\n\nI shook my head. \"That is wise. But they may try to keep you pinned within the mountain. If that happens, that could lead to trouble.\n\nVillagers. They must eat and drink and will become restless. Dragons would just burrow deep and sleep.\n\nZenema lashed her tail and I edged away so the spikes on the end wouldn't hit me. How nice it must be to be a dragon who could sleep until troubles went away. Or who had the power to fight, or even to fly away.\n\nI rubbed at my chin. My beard had not yet come in\u2014I wasn't old enough to grow one. But sometimes my jaw and cheeks seemed to itch as if hair would sprout any day. \"On one hand, here on the mountain is the safest place for everyone, but on the other, we can easily be trapped here by the ships. But I read something once about how if you have allies then you should always choose to hunker down during a siege. You can survive longer than an encamped enemy as you wait for reinforcements. But we've got all our allies here. So\u2026if we don't have allies coming to help us, we must find a way to break the siege.\"\n\nZenema huffed out a warm, smoky breath as if she did not care for my reasoning aloud.\n\nI cursed myself. If I was a True King, why did I not know the answer to this problem?\n\nA wave of anguish knotted my insides as I wondered if perhaps Ysix and the rest had been right about me. I was not ready to be any sort of leader. All I knew about were the dusty and dead lessons from books. What sort of king relied on that alone without any experience to guide him?\n\nI heard a scatter of rock behind me and turned to see Saffron climbing up to the perch. With me, Zenema and Saffron, it seemed crowded. I reached out to give Saffron a hand, but she simply glared at me and climbed up to stand in front of Zenema.\n\nSaffron and Zenema swapped stares as if Saffron was asking if it was acceptable to intrude. Saffron was dressed in her heavier travelling breeches and what seemed a new, green leather jerkin. A heavy backpack hung from one shoulder along with a rope.\n\nLooking away from Zenema, Saffron waved a hand at me and said, \"You should get changed if we're flying north. It will be cold.\" She glanced behind her, looking to the black, oily boats now almost lost in the gathering night. For a moment, her expression seemed bleak.\n\nSomething in me snapped.\n\nI would have to go\u2014I must. But I could not leave the dragons and these villagers in trouble. I might not be a great general or the perfect king, but I could not let Saffron and the others down.\n\nLooking up at Zenema's white bulk, I told her, \"You need to stop those cannons. Without cannon, those ships have no power, no control over the island.\"\n\nOne hit will kill any dragon.\n\n\"They have a weakness. I saw it a few years ago when Enric had had a great celebration to unveil the creation he had used against some of the southern tribes. The cannons use black powder to fire a heavy iron ball that can smash whatever is in their path. But the alchemical primers I read that talked of this magic spoke of how the powders are unstable. One man must mix the powder just right, another two have to load the cannon, another one arms the mechanism and lights the fuse. They have to aim the cannon and all of that takes time to fire them. That is their weakness\u2014the long delay.\"\n\nZenema huffed out another smoky breath and I thought I saw the hint of a scowl pulling down her wide dragon mouth.\n\nRemembering one of the main lessons of battle that I'd ever read, I told her, \"Pit your strongest points against their weakest\u2014that is the way to win.\"\n\nZenema's thoughts swirled in my mind. We can fly. We breathe fire. We are strong.\n\n\"And you are together\u2014you outnumber the enemy!\" Glancing down at the black water where I could only make out the ships as small fires they had lit, I told Zenema, \"Look at the way they huddle so close. They are far from home, far from the mainland, far from their allies. And they think dragons can only fly.\"\n\nBut I knew better\u2014I had seen dragons fish. I knew how Jaydra loved swimming in the river.\n\nJust like one of the many puzzles that I had once solved in my study in Torvald so very long ago, I suddenly saw the way that the battle had to go if we were to win. I started to explain everything to Zenema and Saffron.\n\nAt dawn, the dragons were ready. So was I\u2014I hoped. Zenema had spoken to Ysix and the other dragons and since they thought it was her plan, they were willing to follow her. While the sky was still dark, the dragons left Den Mountain, flying high up into the morning clouds.\n\nI stood on the peak where Zenema had sat last night, Saffron at my side. \"This had better work,\" Saffron muttered.\n\nI said nothing\u2014I could say nothing. I was too nervous to talk. Too nervous to do anything but stand with my hands clenched and hoped this would succeed.\n\nAt Zenema's commanding roar, the cloud of dragons whirling in the gray, early light above us parted. Four of the biggest, most mature dragons broke away from the others. One of them was huge, lumbering Oloxia. The four swooped around Den Mountain and skimmed low over the trees, racing to the other side of the island. There they plunged into the water, sinking out of sight.\n\nI watched the waves, wondering how long it would take them to swim around to the bay, wondering if the plan would work.\n\nIt is a good plan, Bower of Torvald, Zenema thought to me. Almost good enough to be worthy of a king.\n\nAbove us, the other dragons began to roar and shoot fire into the sky. Even from this distance, I could hear the clang of warning bells from the ships. \"Look up\u2026keep looking up,\" I muttered.\n\nDawn streaked the sky and now I could see the ships\u2014three ships anchored in the bay.\n\nThe soldiers on the ships readied their cannons and fired, but the dragons in the sky dove and darted away, unharmed.\n\nThat's when it happened.\n\nGreat spouts of water rose up under the boats. The ships all rocked\u2014and dragons roared up from the water, grabbing the ships' hulls with sharp claws. The soldiers on the ships had no time to reload their cannons. The ships rocked wildly, and one dragon\u2014Oloxia\u2014dug a huge hole in the ship's hull. The ship next to it flipped upside down and now dragons descended from the sky onto it. The third ship tried to fire up its engines and turn to run, but two dragons surged up from the water, crashing down onto the ship with all their weight, sinking it in an instant. The water foamed and dragons tore from the sea, heading back into the sky to swirl over the broken ships. It was too far for me to see if any of the soldiers had survived, but I could see dragons plucking small shapes from the water, and I turned away.\n\nAbove me, the dragons wheeled once around Den Mountain and then broke apart, some flying low over the sea and others swirling over the sinking ships. Every now and again a scream or a wail drifted to me on the wind, and I cringed.\n\nBut I had to remember the horrible things Enric had planned\u2014how he had tried to destroy his own capital city, how he had sought my death, how he had tried to steal Saffron's magic, and how even now he hunted us.\n\nMy resolve hardened\u2014Enric had to be stopped.\n\nEven if a few soldiers escaped, they would be stranded on the island\u2014and either villagers or the dragons would take care of them.\n\n\"It will buy us time,\" I told Saffron. \"Time to find another island. Time to evacuate the villagers.\"\n\nSaffron glanced at me. \"But we still lose Den Mountain. The villagers still lose their village. How is that just?\"\n\nI shook my head. It wasn't. But we were now at war with the king.\n\nWe didn't wait for the celebration. I went and told the villagers what had happened, how the king's ships were no more, how they must find a new home, another island. A few grumbled, but some of the younger villagers were starting to get bold about getting closer to the younger dragons\u2014maybe this alliance would last. I hoped so.\n\nI packed up the few things I had\u2014the few books I had salvaged I would leave with Zenema. She would have to care for them.\n\nWhen I took them to her and gave them into her care, Zenema looked at me for a long moment, her eyes swirling and bright, before she nodded. Once we have a new den, the dragons I can spare will follow you. Go now with my blessing and wishes for a swift flight and steady wind.\n\nI left her and headed back to where Saffron was waiting, her own gear still packed. She gave me another long look, and I asked her, \"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" She shook her head and pointed to two leather pouches. \"Food and water. We have to get them on Jaydra. Then all we have to do is get you to learn how to fly, fight, shoot and generally not look so sheepish all of the time.\"\n\nI mumbled something back to her that was more of a complaint about her.\n\nWe tied the pouches to Jaydra. And Saffron barked, \"Quit moving, Jaydra!\"\n\nI glanced at Saffron and saw her cinching a strap around Jaydra.\n\nJaydra fidgeted, craning her head to look back at what Saffron was doing to her.\n\nSomehow, Saffron had managed to create two makeshift saddles out of old blankets and bits of leather and ropes. The straps to hold them on Jaydra seemed huge, and Jaydra squirmed as Saffron pulled them tight. The saddles sat between Jaydra's spines, and from them hung our pouches of food and the maps we had found in the Hermit's tower.\n\nWe were about to become dragon riders it seemed.\n\nSaffron climbed into her saddle, tested it and lashed an old belt around her. She gave me a hand and I climbed into my saddle. She had fashioned a belt for me was well.\n\n\"We have a long way to go and we're going to be sleeping on the go,\" she said.\n\n\"And you don't want me falling out. You know, they once had a dragon rider academy, and saddle makers as well as harnesses for dragons. Every dragon had a custom harness that wouldn't chaff or itch.\"\n\nJust then Jaydra shook and I had to cling to a dragon spine not to get tossed off.\n\nSaffron glanced back at me. \"Now you have Jaydra wanting just that. She doesn't think much of my skill with rope.\" Jaydra tensed and gave a high-pitched call. I felt a thrum of connection between her and Saffron. Saffron leaned down to hug Jaydra's neck and then she straightened.\n\n\"Ready?\" Saffron asked.\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Me neither.\"\n\nJaydra threw herself into the air. Wind stung my eyes and face and pulled on my hair, and I vowed I was going to create a helmet to wear. Even though Saffron was always telling me not to look down, I did. And then I could not tear my eyes away from the wreckage of the king's ships.\n\nA black slick coated the bay, and the golden sands now seemed stained and strewn with bits of flat metal and chunks of wood. Thankfully, I could see no bodies in the water\u2014but I knew that meant either the fish had eaten them or something else had. I didn't want to think about that, so I looked up again.\n\nThe island receded at an alarming rate, becoming the sort of image that I might see on one of the best maps. Jaydra beat her wings in a steady rhythm, taking us into the clouds and then above them. The sun beat down on my head and back. I held onto my harness and Jaydra's spines, my heart thudding, and my motions mixed.\n\nWe were on our way to perhaps find an army\u2014or allies who would help us. But I wanted to look back at the island. I wanted to know the villagers would be safe with the dragons and the dragons safe with the villagers as new friends. I wanted them to find a new sanctuary, and yet I knew I could not stay to help them with that task.\n\nSeeing the same tension in Saffron's shoulders as she sat hunched and tight, helped a little. She was leaving far more than I was.\n\nThe mainland loomed ahead of us, a darkened haze on the horizon, as we flew toward our future or our doom."
            },
            {
                "title": "Saffron's Lesson",
                "text": "The air was changing, growing colder. I could feel it in my bones, in just the same way as I could smell it and taste the change. And I could hear Bower's teeth clattering. Were it not for the dragon-in-my-mind\u2014the place that was part me and part Jaydra\u2014I wonder if I still would have been able to detect all of this. The air to me seemed to lack the soft smell of ocean. It held a hint of pine and something bitter.\n\nNorthern snows, Jaydra informed me, and her thoughts seemed unhappy. It was one of the few things she had shared with me over the long hours we'd been flying. I sent her my agreement, not knowing whether there was anything I could even say to make her happy about snow and cold winds. Like me, she had grown up with the warm trade winds of the Western Isles. And, like me, she had just left her family again to come with me. But this time we weren't leaving Zenema and the other dragons safe in Den Mountain. Would Jaydra forgive me for taking her away from her family right when they were in need?\n\nJaydra's thoughts butted into my mind. Saffron is Jaydra's family. We are one. We are not the same, but we come from the same spark. She did not sound like the playful Jaydra I had always known. She sounded older and wiser. I wondered if dragons matured not in years but from events such as this one, suddenly turning a corner and becoming cleverer by leaps and bounds.\n\nJust like Bower has.\n\nWhen we had first met Bower, he seemed a gawky youth, unable to survive in the wilderness. It was not that long ago that we'd first met, but events had changed him. His plan to deal with the king's ships had been a good one, hitting them from below when they were looking up at the skies and expecting dragons to fall on them.\n\nFor a moment, when he had been telling Zenema his plan, I had seen the worry rise up in his eyes\u2014that old uncertainty that I'd seen before in him. But then something changed. He had pushed back his shoulders and had seemed to accept the role being pushed onto him.\n\nNow, however, I heard him cough. I turned to see his face now white and his hands just as pale as he clung to one of Jaydra's spines.\n\n\"Losing sensation?\" I shouted. The wind took my words to him. He pressed his lips tight and just nodded, as if he was too cold to even manage words. \"Cold from the north,\" I pointed to where we were heading, and then rubbed my hands over my arms and legs. \"Keep moving. Get blood in them!\"\n\nBower nodded and tried to wiggle his legs, but ended up shifting his weight. Underneath us, Jaydra shifted as well, trying to adjust to Bower's movements.\n\nWhere does he want me to go? She hissed, sounding more than a little annoyed with Bower.\n\nJust keep heading toward the mountains and the snow. Ignore us for a while.\n\nI sent her my feeling of sympathy for everything she was going through, hoping she would be patient with us. We were all tired, and worried for those left behind. But right now I had to make sure Bower knew how to deal with a long flight. I also had to teach him not to send more wrong signals to Jaydra.\n\nUnclipping my belt, I stretched and then swung my legs up and around, so I now sat facing backwards, facing Bower. The cold breeze plucked at my hair and clothes. Bower's eyes widened, but I held up a hand to let him know I knew what I was doing. I had been riding Jaydra's back far longer than Bower had, and I was used to the way Jaydra few. I could anticipate her movements, and since her senses were connected to me just now, she also knew that I needed her to fly steady and straight.\n\nAnd Bower had to learn this lesson as well as others.\n\nPulling my legs up, I crouched on the blankets I had set between Jaydra's spine ridges. I waited for the tingling in my legs to stop and then I shouted, \"I'm coming over to you!\"\n\nBower frowned. \"Are you certain that is wise?\"\n\nIgnoring his question, I eased over Jaydra's spine, spreading my feet as wide as I could and keeping one hand on the spiky ridges on her back. Once I was in front of Bower, I waved for him to unfasten his own belt. \"I found out the first time I flew to the mainland that you have to get up and move or land and stretch your legs every few hours. Your muscles will seize up otherwise.\"\n\n\"Can't we land?\" Bower shouted, hunched over and hugging his arms around his body.\n\n\"If we had island-hopped, as we did when we escaped Torvald, we might have found land every few hours or an atoll. But it's not wise for us to cross the skies over the Middle Kingdom, so Jaydra is taking us north over the sea and then we'll head to the mountains in the north to try and find this Three-Rivers clan. It will be a day or two that we'll not find islands out here.\"\n\n\"Can Jaydra fly that far?\"\n\n\"Good question\u2014it is one you need to know. You also need to deal with things that go wrong. It's a key lesson in flying, one that every dragon learns early. Sometimes you don't know if you can escape that storm or if you are fast enough to avoid the obstacles. You have to find out your limits by pushing up to them. You have to know what you can survive.\"\n\nBower undid his belt and I could see him working hard not to look down. This was one of the hardest lessons I had to teach him\u2014he had to learn to trust that Jaydra would never allow him to fall.\n\nI waved for him to stand. \"Don't worry. A dragon can sleep on the wing, by putting half her mind to rest and just gliding. Dragons can lock their wings. Jaydra will probably snooze once we've stretched. Now, up you get.\"\n\nBower took a deep breath, grabbed my arm and one of Jaydra's spines and struggled up into a crouch.\n\n\"You have to do this every few hours. You have to stand and walk around while in flight.\" I stood straighter to show him it could be done. It was colder standing, for I no longer had Jaydra's spines blocking some of the wind. I staggered a step to find a better balance.\n\nBower watched me but did not rise from his hunched over crouch. \"This seems a very bad idea.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"We'll be through the worst of it soon. Right now we're getting a mix of winds\u2014cold ones from the north and they're hitting the warmer currents from over the sea. It gets a little choppy where the two meet.\"\n\nWhich is why we don't usually fly north over the sea, Jaydra added, her thoughts sharp and still unhappy.\n\nYes, but this is a good lesson for Bower to learn! I held out my hand to Bower. \"Come. Stand up.\"\n\n\"I don't think that I can,\" Bower said, still clinging to Jaydra's spine.\n\nI grabbed his wrist. \"How is any dragon going to follow you if you cannot trust just one dragon, and a dragon who is your friend? Now, if you don't stand, your legs will cramp and when it comes time to land, you'll end up falling off Jaydra's back and that's high enough up that you could end up breaking a bone. So get up!\"\n\nI felt bad forcing him to do this, but my words worked on him. He nodded, turned his hand to grip mine and slowly rose to his feet.\n\nHe lurched to one side as if his legs were cramping, and he almost stumbled back down to one knee.\n\n\"Find your balance. Use your arms and keep your knees bent a little.\" I kept hold of his hand. \"It's actually hard to fall off a dragon. Look how broad Jaydra's back is, and look at all the spines and scales you could catch onto. Just take a breath and relax. Feel how Jaydra moves underneath your feet. You need to learn to trust your dragon will hold you up.\"\n\nBower's face was still pale. And his one leg kept buckling. He leaned to one side, as if to compensate for that weaker leg and in doing so, lost his balance.\n\n\"Bower, stand straight,\" I shouted, latching onto his wrist so that now I held his hand with both of mine.\n\nHe jerked upright, but his weak leg bucked and he slipped to the side and slid off Jaydra's back, pulling me with him.\n\nFreezing wind howled in my ears. A thousand tiny flecks of ice bit my cheeks. I let go of Bower and tried to grab for Jaydra's scales, but my fingers slipped, for she was as icy as the rest of the world. Spinning now, I fell through swirling, misty clouds.\n\nFrom somewhere just below me I heard Bower's scream. Glancing down, I saw a darker shape. I rolled and spun myself and shouted out Bower's name, but the wind whipped away my words.\n\nJaydra's thoughts burst into my mind. Can't see Saffron, but Jaydra can smell.\n\nThrough our connection, I felt how she was being buffeted by the mix of winds\u2014the warm currents trying to carry her higher and the cold ones pushing her down. I didn't know if she could reach me before I hit cold, hard water.\n\nThe clouds cleared suddenly, and now I could see dark water below us, the waves capped with white. Bower tumbled over and over again. We'd hit the water like two thrown stones. If the impact didn't kill us, those icy waves would.\n\nWith a sudden pulse, my magic swirled from within me. Power tingled in my fingers, spread up my arms and burst into my chest like a blazing fire. The power that coursed through my veins was always waiting to bubble up. I didn't really know what it was or where it came from\u2014only that it had something to do with dragons and I had at least learned how to summon it. My hands moved in complicated patterns of their own accord, and power poured from my fingertips.\n\nI threw out my hands at Bower. A golden-green light erupted and wrapped around Bower, catching him. With a jerk, his fall slowed. The light pulled him to me, as if it was a rope that I could pull on.\n\nI spread my hands wider, turning the light into wings. We soared over the white-capped waves on my magic. The wind seemed to disappear as if we were part of it now, not separate and fighting it. We weren't falling. Willing it, I changed our direction, and sped us forward. But I was already exhausted and knew I could not keep us in flight for much longer. The magic wobbled and the green-golden wings of light shrank. We dropped closer to the ocean.\n\nI can't control it\u2014we're going to fall.\n\nAbove me, Jaydra roared. She swooped down, catching us back onto her back. Smoke wisped from Jaydra's mouth. I clutched at Jaydra's spine ridges, and my magic evaporated, leaving my legs shaking and my breath rattling in my lungs.\n\nBower righted himself on his saddle and asked, \"What did you do? That was unbelievable.\" He grinned.\n\nI crawled to my saddle and fastened my belt again, my hands shaking. Jaydra held her wings wide and steady, and swooped down to a lower height where the air seemed a little warmer.\n\nBower shouted to me, \"What were you trying to teach me again?\"\n\nI glanced back at him. \"Not to be scared of flying.\"\n\nBower laughed. \"I don't think much of anything will frighten me after that. That\u2014that was magical flight. It makes sitting on a dragon seem easy.\"\n\nTurning to face front, I hunched over and clung to Jaydra's spine. I had wanted him to just try to stand up on Jaydra and walk on her back.\n\nInstead, I had learned something about myself.\n\nCould I repeat that same magic again? Could I summon it when I had need again?\n\nJaydra's thoughts slipped into my mind. All that matters is that Saffron saved Bower, and Jaydra saved Saffron. That counts a successful hunt!\n\nDragons have a much simpler way of looking at things, I told her.\n\nGlancing down at my hands, I tried to will the magic to return. My fingers tingled and a glow spread over my skin, but it seemed as if I had used up whatever store of power I had. It would have to build up again. My hands had moved more of their own accord, as if they knew what to do while my mind did not. Why was it that I seemed to have to be in dire peril before I could even use magic?\n\nI had to find a way to strengthen my powers, to be able to control my magic when I wanted to use it, and not just hope that it would come to me out of desperate need."
            },
            {
                "title": "Learning to Fight",
                "text": "[ Warning Signs ]\n\nOn the third day of flying we spotted land. Despite the cold and my aching muscles, despite Saffron seeming to want to show me how dangerous flying was by almost getting us both killed, I was learning to love this.\n\nI was riding on the back of a dragon.\n\nIt was like one of the old tales I had read, only it wasn't some peasant boy who got to ride dragons. It was me!\n\nThe dark oceans below gave way to a narrow beach and jagged cliffs. Far below I could see hundreds of sea birds trying to nest above the spray of the waves, suddenly disturbed by our flight. I would have thought by now I might have gotten used to looking down at the land from on high but it still felt fresh and exciting to me. I could see for miles, for what felt like a day. Below us was a patchwork of the light green of occasional, overgrown meadows and the deeper green of the wildwood forests. Beyond them came the river valleys and the mountains, their heads layered with snows. On the horizon I could see the distant shapes and humps of the distant northern mountains that I didn't know the names of. I looked to my right, to the east where, somewhere beyond the horizon, Dragon Mountain and the citadel of Torvald stood.\n\nIt felt like if I could peer far enough into the distance, I might even see my future staring back at me. It was a feeling of total freedom like I'd never experienced before. But we had to find a place to land, as Jaydra was getting tired. She barely beat her wings now, just letting the warm thermals carry her ever deeper and lower over Middle Kingdom.\n\nPointing to a ribbon of gray that cut across the green land to the south, I called out, \"Look there.\"\n\n\"What is it? A place to land?\" Saffron said, glancing back at me.\n\n\"No, that must be the Great Western Road. It is the same one I was travelling when I met you, and you saved me from that grim-bear. It runs right from Torvald all the way to the coast, or so they say.\" It felt like that had all happened years ago, when in fact it was not that far back. I strained to see some sign or indication of my home city\u2014the hearth fires or the great wall that surrounded Torvald. But I could only make out the peak of Mount Hammal, which now seemed far to the south of us.\n\nSaffron's shout pulled my attention back to her and she waved to the north and frowned. \"Do you have a clear idea of where we're heading? Where the three rivers met on the map? It all looks different now.\"\n\nShe was right.\n\nThe Hermit's map had shown flat lines and marks on a paper. Now we could see snow-capped mountains and valleys that offered up winding rivers, forests of green and bright reds as the trees changed colors. But it was starting to make sense to me as I looked at the rivers that crossed the land and matched them to what I had seen on the map. I doubt I would have noticed the pattern if we hadn't been flying, for the Hermit's map relied upon an aerial perspective to make sense of the different colors and lines that represented hills or mountains, fields or forests. Looking down to a ridgeline, I glimpsed the silvered foam of a waterfall that fell into the river, and a lake nearby.\n\n[ I had the Hermit's map in my pack behind me, but I thought I remembered the snaking blue lines of the river and the arrowhead-shaped lake ]\n\n\"If the map is accurate, we still have a good way to travel up to reach where the three rivers meet, but we are closer,\" I shouted.\n\n\"Good,\" Saffron called to me. \"Jaydra needs to feed. And we should hike for a bit so she can ease her wings for a time.\" Leaning forward, Saffron whispered something to Jaydra. The dragon angled her wings toward the lake and began a spiral down to a landing spot.\n\nBeing this much closer to finding the Three-Rivers Clan left me wondering if I really could raise and lead an army. But I had helped broker a peace\u2014I hoped\u2014between the villagers and the dragons, and Zenema had asked for my advice in defending Den Mountain. But this seemed a far more daunting task.\n\nI'd known the dragons of the Western Isles\u2014and the villagers had seemed a small group, far easier to approach than a clan that I knew nothing about. My stomach knotted, even though I kept trying to tell myself I could do this.\n\nJaydra swooped over the tops of the trees, the wall of the mountains ahead of us, and I tried to push my worries aside. Jaydra skimmed the surface of a clear mountain lake, and the spray of water kicked up by her wings brushed my face.\n\nJaydra's claws dug into the water, splashing up waves. She settled like a swan landing, let out a breath that seemed to be one of pleasure, and paddled toward a rocky beach.\n\nI scanned the tall pines that lined the beach. We should be safe. We were far north of Torvald, probably a week's ride by horse and much longer by foot. But that didn't stop a trickle of fear sliding down my back. Enric had a long reach, and being back in Middle Kingdom meant we needed to be on guard against Enric's army and his Iron Guard.\n\nJaydra reached the shallows, and Saffron slid down Jaydra's shoulder, landing with a splash in the lake.\n\n\"Come on, hurry up,\" Saffron called. She waded up onto the beach, her boots crunching on the rocky shore as she looked around. She pointed to dead branches bleached white by time that lay under the trees. \"We'll build a small fire and shelter it with rocks. We can stay the night. Maybe even snare a rabbit to eat.\"\n\nI grabbed our gear from Jaydra, slid off and splashed into the shallows. The water was freezing, but clear enough I could see the bottom and the darting silver of fish as they flitted away.\n\n\"How about fish instead?\" I asked.\n\nJaydra chirruped happily.\n\n\"That's a sure way to a dragon's heart,\" Saffron said. She headed to Jaydra and undid the straps to our saddles. We could use the blankets for bedding. Freed of the straps, Jaydra swam out to the deeper waters and began hunting for food, diving and resurfacing. I waded to the shore and glanced around, settling our gear onto the rocky shore.\n\nThe ground near the trees seemed softer, so I looked for a place where we might sleep. Something not too closed in\u2014I had learned a few things from Saffron. She headed to the trees and started gathering wood, talking as she did so. \"We can follow the river to the place the Hermit spoke of tomorrow and fish in the rivers whenever we need to.\"\n\n[ I nodded, still uneasy for some reason. Was it the lack of birdsong? Or animal chatter? It seemed oddly quiet, but Jaydra might well have frightened off any other creatures. Nothing seemed to be here\u2014no huts, no smoke rising up from some woodcutter's home. It was far cleaner than the city, the air crisp and clear. Everything seemed calm and peaceful ]\n\nAnd then I saw a skull on a stake.\n\nIt looked to be a human skill and I froze. Saffron must have seen me standing still, one bag of food still in my hands. She glanced at me, straightened, and then followed my stare.\n\nThe macabre sight stood at the mouth of a narrow path that wound from the lake and headed along the woods, toward the nearby river. I thought the message seemed clear\u2014do not come this way.\n\n\"Uh\u2026Saffron, maybe we want to find another place to camp?\" I told her. Glancing around, I could still see no sign of any settlement. But someone had posted that skull here. Or was this just a grave site?\n\nStill with an armful of wood, Saffron came over to my side. \"Is this a usual thing for people of Middle Kingdom?\" she asked. She walked up to the skull. \"I didn't spend enough time on the mainland to find out.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"This is not normal, but the king's laws and his army might not stretch this far north. And that should make me feel safer, but given that skull, I'm starting to have second thoughts. This could be a cursed spot. Or a gravesite. Or\u2026or we might want to take to the skies again tomorrow.\"\n\nSaffron nodded and settled to building a fire.\n\nEven more uneasy, I spread out our blankets, but I kept glancing into the woods.\n\nSaffron soon had a cheerful fire going, and I sat near it, my hands spread to it, welcoming its warmth. We had dried bread and Jaydra brought a mouthful of fish to us, which Saffron cooked on long sticks she scavenged. Jaydra settled not far from the fire, the light glittering on her scales. It comforted me a little that Jaydra fell to sleep at once. At least she did not think any danger was near.\n\nI slept poorly that night, startling every time Jaydra shifted, dreaming of flying\u2014and falling. Every time I woke, I fed a little wood onto the fire to keep it burning. We slept next to Jaydra and she warmed our backs, but the night grew chill, and I found more comfort in the bright orange flames that held back some of the night's shadows.\n\nThe first rays of light woke me again. Stiff and puffy-eyed, I stretched, rose and put the last of the wood Saffron had gathered into the fire. Dew had fallen and left the wood damp and it smoked. Saffron soon woke and that woke Jaydra as well. We filled our water skins from the lake and ate a little of the bread and fish. I kept glancing at the skull as if the jaw might move and it might tell us why it had been placed there.\n\n\"Staring won't answer your questions,\" Saffron said.\n\nI glanced at her. She'd brushed and braided her hair and looked far more rested than I felt. But Saffron had always been fine with sleeping on the ground. I still missed my bed back in Torvald.\n\nStanding, Saffron started to gather up our gear. I moved to help her, pulling out the maps just in case we needed them close to hand. We soon had our saddles on Jaydra's back and our food and equipment secured. \"Just in case,\" Saffron said. I nodded back to her. It seemed wise to be able to jump on Jaydra's back to escape any threats.\n\nWith one hand on her knife hilt, Saffron started up the narrow path, walking past the skull as if it did not exist. I hesitated only a moment and then followed, making sure to give the skull a wide berth.\n\n\"How far should we follow this path?\" I asked.\n\nSaffron shrugged.\n\nThe thin track appeared to have beaten-down grass as if it was used infrequently\u2014it would have been dirt only if used often. But the bent grass meant someone had been here recently. Ferns and other undergrowth choked the sides. I glanced back at the lake and saw Jaydra emerge from the water, gulping down fish before she pushed into the forest after us. For so large a dragon, she was very able to move quietly, the brush of her scales against the trees sounding more like the wind that whispered through the pines.\n\nHaving our gear on Jaydra\u2014our cloaks, ropes, food and water\u2014made the hike a little easier. But the path widened and became steeper, leaving me panting and my legs aching. I'd already gotten used to riding a dragon and not walking. \"Are you certain we are going the right way?\" I asked.\n\n\"You tell me.\" Saffron waved a hand at the trees and the mountains that appeared just behind the top of the pines. \"On the island, all rivers lead to the sea and they always fall from the mountains down to the coast. It makes sense they will do the same here, so if we head upstream, we'll reach that spot where the three rivers join at the base of the mountains.\"\n\nI paused and glanced at the Hermit's map, wishing I'd had a better education in map reading. My father had done his best, but my education had been more fitting to a noble, meaning I could read, write and do sums, but trying to figure out the map from here on the ground seemed far more difficult than it had from the air. The map seemed to indicate that we should search for a high meadow that would be surrounded by where the three rivers met. That was the spot marked with the Salamander's sign of a stylized flame and two wings.\n\nBut what if the Hermit's map was in fact old and far out of date? My hands chilled at the thought. Might the Salamanders who had lived here moved on? What if the rivers had changed course? I tried to cheer myself by remembering the Hermit had told us to come here\u2014that must mean there was still help to be had.\n\nPutting the map away, I followed Saffron.\n\nWe hiked all morning and into the latter part of the day. The air warmed, for the sun was up and bright. There was still an odd lack of birds in the air or other animals. The only sound was our soft boot falls, the wind in the trees, and Jaydra's soft swish as she made her way through the trees. I started to become bored, and to amuse myself thought back to what I'd read in the Compendium Atlas about this area.\n\n'A place the local people call the Three Rivers, where the Dangse, the Venge and the Oluk come together in one mighty torrent, with alpine meadows lush and with good grass, and wooded ravines that lead up into the mountains...'\n\nThe southernmost river on the map had to be the Dangse, and I wondered if that was the river we were following. I paused and thought I could hear the river to our left, the water making a soft babbling as it fell over rocks. Looking around, I realized I'd lost sight of Saffron, so I hurried to catch up with her.\n\nSaffron had stopped at a slight rise in the path, and I hoped from there we might have a view of where we were.\n\nPulling out the map, I hurried to Saffron's side, trying to trace where we might be if it really was the Dangse we followed. \"I think I might know where we are,\" I told Saffron. \"It looks as if the Dangse opens into the lake we left, so that means we're here.\" Holding the map in front of Saffron I tried to point to where we must be.\n\nVoice low and urgent, Saffron just said my name in a tone that made me look up.\n\nI stared straight at a knocked arrow and a bow held by a woman clad in patchwork leathers. Brown and ochre paints smeared her face, making her blend with the woods around us.\n\n\"Oh,\" I said and blinked twice.\n\nThe woman gave me a grim smile. \"Oh indeed.\"\n\nTwo more women stepped from the trees, blocking our path. Each held a bow, and all three had black hair pulled back into long braids.\n\nSaffron told them, \"You should be warned\u2014I have a dragon with me.\"\n\nThe three women looked very alike, but the tallest one stepped forward. \"So do we.\"\n\nI elbowed my way past Saffron, the map rustling in my hands. \"You have dragons? But that's impossible! There are no dragons in Middle Kingdom. Everyone knows that.\"\n\nThe woman's mouth curved. She gestured and the woman with the knocked arrow lowered her bow. However, she did not remove her arrow from the bowstring. The tallest woman turned back to us. \"You two have a lot to learn.\"\n\n\"Do we now?\" Saffron put her hand back on her knife hilt, and from behind us, Jaydra rumbled. I didn't want Saffron's quick temper\u2014or Jaydra's\u2014getting us shot full of arrows. Holding up one hand and struggling to hang onto my map with the other, I said, \"We have no wish to fight or spill blood.\"\n\nSaffron narrowed her eyes, her mouth pulled down, but Jaydra quieted. I wondered what Saffron had said or thought to Jaydra.\n\nBefore I could ask, the wind caught at the map, pulling it from my hand. It fluttered to the ground and the woman with the bow and the arrow still strung tight stamped a booted foot down on it. She glanced at it and glanced back, her eyes going wide, then said, \"Nerys? Look.\" She waved with one hand at the map.\n\nNerys\u2014the tall woman\u2014glanced at the map, and then looked from me to Saffron and back again. \"How do you know this symbol?\" She pointed to the fire and wings drawn onto the map.\n\n\"The fire within,\" I said breathlessly. \"Are you with the Salamanders? The rebels who fight the king? That's who we seek.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "A True Dragon Friend",
                "text": "\"Come,\" Nerys said. She turned and slipped off the main path and onto another one that twisted off to the left. The two other women followed her. Bower glanced at me, shrugged and followed after them.\n\nI didn't like it. Not one bit. Neither did Jaydra, but I thought to her that now was not yet time to fight. Bower seemed to think these might be the people we were seeking\u2014the Three-Rivers clan. I wasn't convinced. These three women reminded me too much of the villagers back on the island\u2014too ready to draw a weapon first and talk after the fight. How could they claim to have a dragon or know about dragons if they didn't seem to think anything of facing a dragon in battle??\n\nGive Jaydra a sign and Jaydra will tear out each of their hearts, crunch their bones and set fire to their forests. Jaydra sent images to me of doing just that.\n\nWait, my sister. This is Bower's kingdom more so than ours. And he was good at talking to the villagers. We have to learn if these people are the ones we must find.\n\nAnd if they are true dragon-friends. Jaydra snorted out a fiery breath that all must have been able to smell.\n\nI could tell she didn't believe these women were dragon-friends. But Bower seemed to want to at least talk to them. And I had to admit he'd managed to get them to ease their guard and unstring their knocked arrows. He had a way of getting people to like him somehow. Was that the mark of a good king? Didn't a leader have to know how to fight?\n\nAhead of me, Bower hurried to catch up with the Nerys and the other women and asked her, \"So, you have dragons you say? How many? What colors? I have a theory that the dragons from Torvald and the Dragon Academy that once existed there fled west, but it would be amazing to think some might have gone north.\"\n\n\"Dragon Academy?\" Nerys glanced at him over her shoulder, her black eyebrows low and tight. \"The old monastery you mean?\"\n\n\"You know of it?\" Bower jogged a little faster to catch up with her long stride. \"How do you know of it? Did your people come here from Torvald originally?\"\n\n\"The stone city?\" Nerys shook her head. \"No, I was born in meadows of the north as was my mother and my mother's mother. I'm Nerys, daughter of Nurita, who was daughter of Niall. My mothers have lived in the mountain meadows for as far back as memory goes, or at least we lived there until the metal men came to burn our villages. We fled deeper into the mountains and we fight back when we can, but we have never defeated the metal men.\"\n\n\"The Iron Guard,\" Bower said. \"That is what we call them. They are the king's creation\u2014some sort of magic makes them move and act.\"\n\nNerys nodded. \"Others have joined us. Refugees fleeing the cities and a few old warriors. Some of them drew that sign you have on your map\u2014the one of the flame and wings. They said we would one day need dragons and helped us capture some.\"\n\n\"Capture dragons?\" I muttered. Reaching out, I snagged Bower's tunic hem and made him slow down and drop back with me. \"What is she talking about? I thought you said the Salamanders are dragon-friends, but she doesn't sound a friend at all.\"\n\nHe lowered his voice and said, \"She says others had the symbol of the Salamanders, so I think these women may be descendants of the old northern tribes.\" He hurried forward, and I glanced back to see Jaydra was now swimming in the river.\n\nOur path kept us near the rocky banks. The path turned and headed uphill. The trees started thinning as we progressed to rockier territory. Soon, everyone except Jaydra had to scramble over boulders as we struggled along the path.\n\nJaydra leave river\u2014wild currents not good for fishing or swimming.\n\nThen fly above us, sister, that way you can swoop down if you have to, I counseled her. Jaydra took to the air, leaving us on the ground, the river water turning white, rough and roaring.\n\n\"That must be the Venge,\" Bower said, pointing to the river.\n\nNerys stopped near the top of a rocky rise. Her two friends went ahead of her. Bower scrambled up onto the boulder and I followed him.\n\nLooking down, I could see an impressive gorge now where three rivers met\u2014one streaming down from a waterfall, one wide and slow, and the one we followed cut out from this joining. The path wound down to the river and led to a rickety, wooden bridge that crossed the rough waters below. Once across the river, we'd be in a wide and long meadow that stood between the three rivers.\n\n\"Are you sure that bridge will hold?\" I asked Nerys.\n\nShe shrugged, and then Jaydra circled overhead, casting a shadow over us. Nerys glanced up, raised her bow and knocked an arrow.\n\nStepping forward, I knocked her bow down. \"You should know an arrow will do little against a dragon's scales.\"\n\nNerys narrowed her eyes but she did not lift her bow again. \"Depends on where your arrow strikes. Our dragons are dark, their scales black or a very deep blue. So that is your dragon?\"\n\n\"Mine? Dragons don't\u2014\"\n\n\"You ride wild dragons?\" Bower said, interrupting. He turned to me. \"The black dragon of the North Mountains is supposed to be the fiercest of all. It's said to be a little smaller than Jaydra, with spikes on their tail, and barely civilized.\"\n\nI glanced at him and then turned back to face Nerys. \"Jaydra is with me. But she is not mine.\"\n\n\"Well, see to it she keeps her distance.\" Nerys unknocked her arrow and returned it to her quiver. She followed the other two women down to the wooden bridge, glancing back to shout at Bower, \"And as for riding a dragon, who would be fool enough to try such a thing?\"\n\nBower glanced at me, his expression worried, but he followed Nerys down to the bridge. I noted how Nerys held to the ropes that acted as handholds on either side of the bridge. The ropes creaked and the bridge swayed as she crossed. The other two women crossed as well, one at a time.\n\n\"How could the Iron Guard get across this?\" Bower muttered.\n\nI glanced at the deep waters below us\u2014the river was not so fast here, but the smooth surface might hide fast currents. \"Maybe they just walk through the water. I'll go first\u2014you follow me.\"\n\nThe wood of the bridge was slick with water splashed up by the river. I took my time crossing. The bridge and the wood creaked like a dying animal. Several of the boards looked rotted to me and I stepped over them. This bridge was as much a death trap for the unwary as anything.\n\nWhen I reached the other side, Nerys gave me a grudging nod, as if she approved of me. I turned to find Bower already on the bridge and crossing.\n\n\"Watch the boards,\" I called out.\n\nHe nodded, and clung to the rope handholds, his knuckles almost white. For a moment, I thought he would cross safely, but as he neared the last quarter of the way, a board cracked and split. Bower's foot slipped through the wood and he clung to the rope, staring down at the fall to the water below.\n\nI started to cross back to where he was, but Nerys grabbed my shoulder and held me back, calling out, \"Too much weight on the bridge and it will collapse. It is made for one person at a time.\"\n\nOn the bridge, Bower had frozen, his booted foot dangling through the gap in the boards. Magic tingled in my fingertips and welled up in my chest. But I feared releasing it. Perhaps I could use it to fly him across the river, but what if the power burst out too strong and took out the bridge completely? I could end up sending Bower plummeting into the river below? But another could help.\n\nJaydra?\n\nBower in trouble\u2014Jaydra sees.\n\nWith a shriek, Jaydra swooped down, claws extended. She snatched Bower up by his shoulders, as if he was a tasty, large fish. Beating her immense wings, she soared up and then deposited Bower not far from me.\n\nThank you, sister.\n\n\"Th-thank you, Jaydra!\" Bower said, gasping for breath, his face red and his voice shaking a little.\n\n\"By the mountains!\" With an arrow again knocked, Nerys looked from Jaydra to Bower. She'd hunched down as if fearing Jaydra would grasp her next, but now she straightened and said, \"Your dragon\u2014didn't fly off to eat him\u2014why not?\"\n\nI faced Nerys. \"No dragon would ever take advantage of a friend in need. And no dragon would ever eat a friend.\" Hands on my hips, I stared at her. \"You might as well suggest that we try to cook Jaydra for our supper tonight!\"\n\nShe could try, Jaydra thought to me as she soared back up into the sky. Heading over to Bower, I asked him, \"You well?\" He nodded, and I lowered my voice and said, \"I am starting to get an uncomfortable feeling about the people of the three rivers if that's who they are.\"\n\nBower straightened and shook his head. \"Maybe\u2026maybe this isn't the right clan.\"\n\nI gave a rude snort. So far I didn't think much of these people.\n\nNerys turned and with the other two women strode down into the meadowlands. A narrow path wound through grass as tall as our hips, and then the path opened and I glimpsed smoke from a settlement. Clusters of small huts dotted the meadow, with perhaps two dozen or so huts in total. I heard the bleating of goats and the lowing of cattle, and all too soon I could smell the smoke and the scent of people and animals.\n\nBut no dragons in the sky.\n\nBirds soared overhead, but why didn't dragons swoop from the caves in the mountainsides that I could see. Were there even any dragons here?\n\nJaydra can smell dragon, my den-sister informed me. But as if very far away. They are not like island dragons. Jaydra's hisses carried to me from overhead, a sign she was distressed at what she was uncovering.\n\nAhead of us, Nerys waved an arm and called out, \"Welcome to the Three-River Clan,\"\n\nSo much for these people being the wrong ones\u2014they were indeed the clan the Hermit had said we should find. I was starting to think perhaps the Hermit had not been in his right mind when he'd said such a thing. He'd been dying at the time, and perhaps had mistakenly sent us to the wrong place.\n\nBower, however, started to smile and the tension eased from his shoulders. I could only guess that to him just the sight of people living far from the rule of Enric and his Iron Guard was enough to be an inspiration.\n\nGlancing around, I kept wondering where their dragons lived? If they were dragon-friends, why keep their dragons so far from their homes?\n\nSending my worried thoughts to Jaydra, I told her, Stay near, but not too near. And stay on alert.\n\nJaydra sent back her own worries to me and circled overhead.\n\nThe meadow path led into the center of the settlement. Seen up close, I saw the huts were made of round, gray stones with straw-thatched roofs. In front of each house a banner flew marked with what seemed to be the symbol of the clan, three blue lines under a red flame.\n\nBower slowed his stride enough to walk closer to me and said, \"Judging by the moss on those stone walls, on the north side, this settlement's been here a goodly time, for a couple of decades at the least.\"\n\n\"How is that useful?\" I muttered.\n\nHe lifted a hand and said, \"It means they've evaded Enric's notice for a good time.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Evading is not enough\u2014and I do not see enough fighters here.\" Which was true. Children, old men, old women and then a few women and men who looked able to pull a bow watched us as we came into the settlement. People came out of the huts with wary but curious expressions. It seemed to me that this clan had only a dozen fighters. The people seemed thin, as well, as if they had little to eat. The children all offered up clean, round faces, but everyone wore what looked like patchwork clothing\u2014leather and cloth stitched and mended so many times it was now a mix of colors and materials. Women and men all wore their hair long and braided.\n\nA horn blast echoed from the mountains that sheltered the rivers and the meadows on two sides. Nerys raised her head and let out an ululating cry that seemed to be a reply to the horn. Stopping in the center of the settlement, she said, \"Ryland comes.\"\n\n\"Is he your chief?\" I asked.\n\nNerys didn't bother to answer. I gave Bower a sour look\u2014I liked this Nerys less and less. But I thought the feeling mutual, for she seemed to dislike me as well.\n\nThe sound of galloping hoof beats came to me, and I looked around, trying to find the source. A group of five riders headed to the settlement, riding what looked to be tough little mountain ponies. They wore the same patchwork clothing as everyone here, but with leather jerkins studded with metal, and sunlight flashed off the metal tips of long spears.\n\nTurning to Bower, Nerys told him, \"Ryland is our war chief.\" The ponies slowed as they came into the settlement, their hides steaming. A young man in his twenties led the group. He pulled his pony to a halt and vaulted off, landing on his feet in a graceful and practiced move. His braided hair gleamed in the light like burnished copper. Deep green eyes regarded us with a steady gaze. Strong cheekbones gave him a rough look, and his beard had been braided with bands of silver and gold. He looked first at Bower, seemed to dismiss and turned to face me.\n\nHis gaze seemed to hold a challenge, but I recognized a similar soul to myself for there was a touch of the wild in his eyes, as if he was someone who would never do well in a city or even in the confines of a building.\n\n\"I am Ryland,\" he said, looking straight at me. His eyes seemed to warm, and a wave of heat swept through me.\n\nFrom above, Jaydra sent me a puzzled alarm, asking with her thoughts, Saffron well?\n\nNot now. I cannot explain. And I couldn't. What was wrong with me? Why did I suddenly feel both hot and cold and as stupid as if a rock had struck my chest?\n\nGlancing up, Ryland shielded his eyes with one hand against the sun's glare and said, \"Ah, she is a magnificent beast. With her size, I'll wager she could take down a Grim Bear.\"\n\nThe heat vanished from my body. Annoyed, I crossed my arms over my chest. \"Jaydra is no beast. You speak of my den-sister.\"\n\nHis hand falling to his side, Ryland looked at me as if I had sprouted dragon horns and wings. \"You are close to your companion animal.\"\n\nJaydra not just an animal! Jaydra gave a roar and swooped down over the settlement. Cows bellowed and goats bleated and even a few children started to cry.\n\n\"War Chief,\" Nerys said her voice tense. \"That beast overhead is frightening the flocks.\"\n\nGlancing up, I saw Jaydra swoop down again and then angle up and fly over the meadow settlement in a huge loop. Jaydra seemed delighted by the frightened animals. Even one of the mountain ponies shied and gave a low whinny.\n\nRyland frowned, and I told him, \"Jaydra is just playing. If she meant harm, she could have snatched up her choice of cow or goat, one in each claw.\"\n\nThat earned me even more frowns, so I thought to Jaydra, Calm now, den-sister. We hope to make these people our friends. Please stop chasing their livestock.\n\nWhat good are friends if they will not share food? Jaydra gave another roar, but she circled down to where we stood and hovered over the settlement. That left the mountain ponies pulling to get away.\n\nRyland waved a hand out to the north, to the mountains. \"There are wild pastures on the other side of the ridge, and lakes that have small, but very tasty fish.\"\n\nFish? Jaydra's delight bled into me and I had to smile.\n\nNothing more could be to Jaydra's liking. I told her to go find dinner, and I nodded my thanks to Ryland. Jaydra flew north, disappearing over the mountain ridge. Ryland let out what sounded like a relieved sigh.\n\nStudying him, I didn't think Ryland was as nice as Bower, but he was taller and he didn't strike me as an enemy. He had made no move to search us for weapons and he had at least treated Jaydra with some respect in terms of offering her dinner.\n\nRyland stepped back and waved for us to follow him. \"Come, you must be tired from your travels. Dine with us in our great hall.\"\n\nI glanced at Bower to see what he thought of this suggestion. But Bower was already strolling after Ryland, looking around as if he wanted to see everything at once, gawking like he'd never seen so much as a building.\n\nRyland led the way deeper into the settlement, leading his pony and pointing out various parts of their settlement. They grew oats in one field, had a watermill to grind their own flour, and bred cows and goats for both hides and milk.\n\nThe huts grew a little larger, and several seemed to be barns for the animals. Chickens scratched in the dirt for insects or bits of grain, and we came at last to a larger, open space in the middle of the settlement. Here, large boulders sheltered some of the buildings while tall trees with wide trunks and protective canopies of branches stood between the huts. It seemed that Ryland's acceptance of us had calmed everyone, for those who had watched us earlier turned away to return to their daily life. Even Nerys had departed, taking her two friends with the bows away.\n\nMany of those who lived her wore strange patterns that seemed to be drawn onto their arms or legs. I glimpsed blue whirls and dots. I also noticed quite a few of the men and women had weapons close to their hut doors.\n\nRyland paused outside a barn to unsaddle his pony, take off his bridle and toss it some hay and make sure it had a bucket of water. I respected the fact that he chose to look after his steed himself and not hand her over to another as I had seen in some of the villages of the Middle Kingdom during my time there.\n\nRyland led us to one of the larger buildings, a round structure with an arched lintel of wood over double doors. Bower pointed to the arch which boasted images of dragons and tall stone towers carved into the dark wood. \"That's just like the pictures of the old academy that I've seen. This Three-Rivers clan must have been founded by some of the Dragon Riders of old.\"\n\nRyland turned around to look directly at Bower for what seemed to be the first time. \"You come from the Dragon Academy?\"\n\nBower frowned and shook his head. \"Yes. No. I mean\u2026. I come from the city that once housed the Dragon Academy. From Torvald. But it's\u2026well, the old ruins are considered haunted and the king's laws forbid anyone from ever going there. But I've seen the towers from afar.\"\n\nRyland stopped in the doorway just outside the large building. He tipped his head to one side and seemed to be studying Bower as if searching for something. In turn, Bower stared back at Ryland and I was reminded of the way young dragons sometimes square up against each other as if to test each other's strength and skills.\n\nAt last, Ryland gave a nod and turned to go inside the building, saying, \"Our stories tell us the old academy was destroyed\u2026\"\n\nBower followed Ryland into the large building and I followed Bower. The building looked far grander inside than out\u2014from the outside it seemed only round, river rock stacked high with the wooden doors and carved lintel. Inside the ceiling soared high, all the way up to the roof in an arch. Long tables lined either side of the room, with carved chairs and benches. Two stone hearths boasted huge fires that warmed the room. I was almost too hot in my leather tunic and I pulled at the neck. The floors looked to be made of planks of wood, polished smooth over the ages. Shields and banners decorated the walls with splashes of colors, and I thought these must be the shields for each family.\n\nBower glanced around, then let out a long breath and stared down at the wooden floor. \"By Hacon Maddox when he took the throne, and now Enric rules the kingdom with his Iron Guard to enforce obedience to every law, no matter how harsh or unfair.\"\n\n\"Metal men!\" Ryland grimaced and spat on the floor. I was shocked he would treat a good floor so poorly. But Ryland said, \"Too well do we know them. We know what they do to our dragons if they ever manage to catch one, and we know what they do to us if they ever come upon our scouts or hunters.\" He pulled a face and waved to the doorway. \"That is why we have the bridge. We built it so it would fail under their weight. But one day, we will find a way to defeat them.\"\n\nBower looked up, his eyes bright now and I knew he was about to talk about our quest to find an army to battle Enric. But I did not yet want to reveal why we were here. Nudging Bower with an elbow, I stepped forward and said, \"War Chief Ryland, we are parched and hungry from our journey. Why do we not share our stories after we sit and drink and eat?\"\n\nBower's mouth snapped closed. He frowned almost as if I had taken a toy from him, but when I stared at him, he seemed to understand that I didn't quite trust these people of the Three-Rivers clan.\n\nSmiling, Ryland swept me a bow. \"But of course. Come and let me find you seats and then we will dine.\n\nEdging closer to me, Bower asked, \"Why did you interrupt?\"\n\nI lowered my voice and told him, \"Because I want to find out first why these people seem to hide their dragons\u2014or if they are hiding other dangerous secrets from us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Boy-King",
                "text": "Saffron seemed to dislike the Three-River clan people, but I found nothing to dislike. They seated us in the hall, brought food and drink, and the hall soon filled until it was noisy and bustling. It seemed as if the entire Three-Rivers clan wanted to come see the travelers who had arrived with a dragon. Inside the building, the hearth fire and wall torches were lit. Meat was brought in to roast in the two huge hearths, and barrels of honey mead were uncorked. Toasts had to be made, bread and meat were served on wooden planks and soon laughter and shouts started to shake the rafters.\n\nSaffron wouldn't let me talk to Ryland about why we had come, but instead kept asking him questions\u2014but she couldn't get him to talk about the clan's dragons.\n\nFor my part, I drank only as much as I knew I could handle, sipping from a wooden cup given to me. I was happy, however, to fill my belly with cuts of the rich, dark meat and roasted vegetables offered. I also kept studying the shields pinned to the walls and looking at the dragons carved into the posts that held up the vaulted roof. Everywhere I looked I seemed to see carving of dragons, but Saffron was right. We'd yet to see a live dragon.\n\nHow could these people be descended from Dragon Riders if they had no dragons? It was a puzzle.\n\nWhen Ryland turned away to call for more food and drink, I nudged Saffron and pointed to the carvings. \"They at least know what dragons look like. They got the images they carved right.\"\n\nShe frowned, her sandy eyebrows pulling tight. She pointed to the carving nearest us. \"But what is going on there?\"\n\nGlancing over, I saw a long, slim dragon being held down by what looked like chains and smaller humans. \"I am sure that it is just one of their legends.\"\n\nShe parted her lips to tell me what she thought of such a legend, but the banging of a wooden cup on the table cut off her words. Ryland stood and raised his mug. The hall fell quiet, and a pang of jealousy twisted in my stomach. How could he so easily command everyone's attention?\n\nThis was what I had to learn to do if I was to be a king. But, glancing around at the packed hall, I didn't know how I was to start being a king to these people. The faces around me seemed hardened by the elements, they almost looked as strong as if they'd been hewn from the very rocks of the mountains. How was I to convince them to let me lead them to a war that might mean the death of every man, woman and child?\n\nI was almost relieved now that Saffron had stopped me earlier from talking to Ryland about our quest here.\n\nVoice raised, Ryland called out, \"Three-Rivers clan, we have two new friends with us today. They have travelled from afar and come to us with a dragon!\"\n\nA rousing chorus of roars and thumps of booted feet on the floor burst from the crowd.\n\nRyland held up his hand and the hall grew quiet again. \"They have come to us at a time when the metal men from the south are pressing ever northward into our lands. The king and his metal men seek to destroy our way of life and steal away our heritage. But these two new friends will help us, I am sure, with our liberation of the Middle Kingdom from the tyrant of the Maddox clan!\"\n\nMore cheers rose up. I glanced around. So these people wanted to liberate the Middle Kingdom. I knew now they must be descended from the Dragon Riders of Torvald.\n\nLifting his cup, Ryland shouted, \"The hour is near when we will be able to strike back for all of the wrongs done to us. We will take back the dragon city once entrusted to us.\"\n\nAs others shouted, I wanted to pull Ryland aside and ask him how his people came to the three rivers. Had they flown here? What stories might he have about the original Dragon Riders who fled Torvald so many generations ago?\n\nBefore I could ask him, Saffron shouted over the noise of the crowd. \"You may have come from the dragon city, but the throne is not yours to claim, war chief.\" Saffron stood up and faced Ryland, almost seeming to pit her slender frame and small stature against his immense height and broad shoulders.\n\nShe faced the others in the hall and lifted her voice. \"I am Saffron of the Western Isles and I flew here on the back of my den-sister, the dragon Jaydra, daughter of Zenema.\" She waved at me. \"I have come with my companion Bower of Torvald.\"\n\n\"Why are you bringing this up now?\" I muttered.\n\nWaving a hand at me to keep silent, Saffron addressed the others in the hall. \"The Hermit of the Western Isles named this place a sanctuary for the enemies of King Enric. He thought we would find allies in our fight to free the Middle Kingdom and the world from Enric's tyranny.\"\n\nAround us, heads nodded, but Saffron scowled at the crowd. \"But I am not so certain you are dragon-friends. You do not share your homes with dragons. I do not see dragon dens nearby. You do not give out the names of your dragons. Well, I tell you now\u2014Bower is a true dragon-friend. The great den-mother Zenema calls him the True King of Torvald. It is to him the dragons will respond and fight against King Enric!\"\n\nA moment of stunned silence held the room. I curled my fists tight on the table and muttered to Saffron, \"This was not yet the time to tell them.\"\n\nShe glanced down at me. \"I won't sit here and let them talk of a dragon city when they will not even speak of their dragons.\"\n\nPressing my lips tight, I knew I should have told Saffron to keep her silence. Her cheeks had reddened and not just from wine, but from the anger pulsing inside her. Even I could feel the spark of her magic starting to stir and it left me uneasy. I did not want her doing anything rash\u2014but she had already done that.\n\nRyland stared at me, the look in his eyes not so much considering as it was doubtful. I decided he must be wondering how could I be a king. I had not arrived with an army of nobles, nor did I come with rich clothes or a crown.\n\nMy face burned and a knot tightened in my chest.\n\nAround us the low hum of talk started and then titters of laughter rose. My face burned hot and my guts twisted. I looked over to see Saffron's eyes starting to get a dangerous glint. I stood and put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook off my touch.\n\nSomeone shouted, \"Dragons will come to him? Ha! Dragons don't answer to nobody.\"\n\nThe comment stirred more jeering laughs and more rude comments.\n\nHand falling to her knife hilt, Saffron shouted, \"What do any of you know of dragons?\"\n\nShe was right\u2014these people did not seem to be at all close to their dragons.\n\nHad all the stories I'd ever read of the Dragon Riders been wrong? The tales written down had spoken of how humans and dragons lived in glorious harmony. They were companions, close friends even, who shared everything. But the Three-Rives clan seemed to view dragons as beasts, they kept their ponies and mountain goats closer than they did their dragons.\n\nRyland put down his drinking mug and lifted both hands as if to call for quiet in the hall. Slowly, the chatter and laughter subsided, but I could still hear people shifting uneasily in their seats and mutters of how no one would follow a boy-king.\n\nRyland spoke up. \"These two strangers do have special gifts, for they did come to us with a dragon that appears to answer their every whim.\"\n\n\"Jaydra doesn't take orders!\" Saffron retorted, her words sharp and angry.\n\nRyland put a hint of steel behind his voice. \"Whatever anyone believes of dragons or of you, one thing is clear to anyone with eyes. You are no more than a young woman and this Bower who travels with you is no more than a boy.\"\n\nA flash of rage curled inside me and I stood. \"How dare you name me a boy? I might not be as strong as you, or as tall as of yet. However, I have already battled Enric himself. And I helped defend an entire island. I have proven myself ready to fight for justice and for the Middle Kingdom. Can you claim the same?\"\n\nRyland waved off my words as if they were of no real importance. \"You bring a dragon with you, for which we are all deeply thankful. But you must understand, the Three-Rivers clan has been working with dragons for longer than you have walked the land. We were given this sacred mission from the last of the Dragon Riders after they fled their Dragon Academy. This is our holy war.\"\n\nMurmurs of agreement rose from the crowd.\n\nTheir war.\n\nI gritted my teeth. I thought of how my father had been taken by the Iron Guard, and how I had been driven from my house by them, held captive by Enric in the king's dungeons. I thought of those I knew killed by Enric\u2014and how he had almost torched his own city to drive out the rebel Salamanders.\n\n\"The people of Torvald would not agree with you,\" I told Ryland. \"But I understand that you must take the heritage given to you by the noble Dragon Riders of old. I, too, take my heritage seriously, for I have the blood of the Flamma-Torvalds in me. Yes, Saffron and I look to be no more than two vagabond youths, flying in from the wild, but I tell you now, what of the stories of Agathea of House Flamma? Was she not a youth when she had to face dark times and learn to be more than just a girl who rode dragons?\"\n\nA few heads nodded, but Ryland was frowning as were others.\n\nShaking his head, Ryland said, \"The hour is getting late and we have had too much excitement for one day. Let us take to our beds. Our visitors are welcome to sleep here in our hall, and tomorrow we meet again with clear heads.\" Ryland looked me over as if measuring my words against the sight of me. I knew myself to be tall and lanky\u2014and dressed more in rags. But while I might not look a king, I hoped I at least had sounded like one. Whispers filled the hall, but Ryland held up a hand and they quieted and Ryland said, \"If Bower really is a true dragon king, the test will prove such a thing. If he proves himself, we must follow for long have we sworn such a thing.\" Ryland looked directly at me. \"If you fail, your dragon and Saffron are still welcome additions to the power of ours as we plan our next move against the usurper king and his metal men.\"\n\nMore tests.\n\nMy heart sank. Would anyone ever be able to just look at me or hear my words and believe me? Dragons wanted me to prove myself, and now the Three-Rivers clan needed me to do something before they would recognize me as a king. Would this be another test to broker a peace? Or would the test be worse? From the way Ryland had spoken, it sounded as if this test might well end with me dead.\n\nSaffron tugged at my sleeve and turned to the entrance. \"Come, Bower. I'll not eat a scrap more with these people.\"\n\nShe strode for the door, and I followed her outside.\n\nArms crossed against the chill of the night air, she seemed to be seething as she paused by the double doors, waiting for me.\n\nRyland had followed us out. As voices and shouts rose up in the hall again, Ryland called to us, \"Friends, please!\"\n\nSaffron turned on him. \"How dare you call us friends after mocking us?\"\n\nRyland raised his hands in a placating gesture. It was too dark outside to see his expression, but I thought from his wide-legged stance that he was only trying to calm Saffron. He must feel the energy pouring from her as I could.\n\nHunching a shoulder against the night, I wondered if we should leave this clan to their own war and try searching for others who might help us.\n\nBut Ryland lowered his hands and looked from Saffron to me and back again. \"I ask you to understand. Our clan is very different from the people of the city. We have been at war for a long time, since before even the mad King Enric came to the throne. Once long ago, our clan lived in terror of the wild dragons that roamed our mountains. The dragon riders came and showed us how to tame them. But\u2026of late, it is as if a dark spell has been thrown over the land. Our dragons started to turn on us, and we have had to be sterner and stronger with our dragons if they were going to obey us.\"\n\nSaffron frowned and turned away, but I asked, \"What do you mean stern and strong?\"\n\nRyland glanced at me and shook his head. \"I do not know how you got your island dragon to perform its tricks. Our dragons would as soon tear one of us apart as it would to smash one of the metal men!\" Ryland waved a hand at me. \"So you see, it appears a joke to us when you say that this mere\u2026slip of a youth boy here could make our dragons seem tame. Our dragons are fighters\u2014and they will fight him.\"\n\nIt was my turn to shake my head. \"Why is it you do not have any of the Salamanders with you? You knew their symbol\u2014the flame within. If they've been here, I don't understand how the noble link between human and dragon could go so wrong. Dragons are not merely beasts, but should be your allies and friends.\"\n\nMy words earned me the flash of a smile from Saffron, but Ryland pulled at his beard and said, \"People from the city once traveled to our settlement with dusty, old books, talking of the old days. But our people were dying, and these travelers spoke of ways to hide and only of how to work from within. That did us no good. We told them to stick to the cities and sent them away while we struggled to train our dragons.\"\n\nMy heart leapt. Maybe their test wouldn't be so difficult. If they were trying to train dragons with chains, and I had at least learned from Saffron and Jaydra better ways to work with dragons, this test might be as simple as getting a dragon to behave.\n\nBut hadn't I read something once about the wild, black dragons being very different from all others? That thought worried me, so I asked, \"Why do you think your dragons and the land is under a spell?\"\n\nSaffron asked, \"Why do you hide your dragons?\"\n\nRyland snorted as if we both asked stupid questions. \"We bring out our dragons only when they are needed. It is too dangerous otherwise.\"\n\nDropping her arms to her side, Saffron asked, \"What do you mean dangerous? Don't you offer them enough food to keep them happy?\"\n\nRyland thrust an accusing hand up toward the mountains that towered over the settlement. \"We drive a muddle of sheep up to them every night! But in the morning you will see and understand.\" He turned and headed back into the hall, leaving us in the cold and bright moonlight. Saffron sighed. \"At least we can sleep next to Jaydra tonight. She'll be warm enough to keep us comfortable.\" She turned and headed out of the settlement, walking toward the wide, mountain meadow to the west.\n\nLeaving the light of the settlement behind left me feeling more than a little disappointed in these people. They were even more cynical than the people of Torvald. These people knew dragons existed\u2014how was it they did they not love their dragons?\n\nAnd what kind of test was I to face tomorrow?\n\nMy boots seemed to grow even heavier as we trudged toward Jaydra, who lay snoring happily on what I judged to be a bellyful of lake fish. I curled up under her leathery wing, not far from Saffron. But I lay there, eyes open, staring at the stars.\n\nAnd I kept thinking about the coming day and all I must do.\n\nHow was I going to prove I was a dragon king?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Curious",
                "text": "I woke long before Bower, my eyes seeming to pop open and magic stirring inside me. Like always, I shut it down before it could come fully to life. Anger always stirred the magic, and I was still angry with these people for how they seemed to think dragons were just stupid beasts, and angry with the Hermit for sending us here. But all of that seemed useless. The Hermit was dead and I still wanted to see these wild dragons of the Three-Rivers clan to see what they were like. Slipping out from under Jaydra's wing, I stretched, yawned and glanced around.\n\nDawn seemed a gray light in the east, the settlement sat quiet without so much as a morning fire sending smoke into the air and even Jaydra slept.\n\nJaydra's mind brushed against mine as some part of her sensed I was awake, but she couldn't rouse herself from her own dreams.\n\nSilver fishes, jumping fishes, tasty fishes.\n\nI patted her neck. \"Dream sweet dreams while you may, and keep our boy-king safe,\" I muttered.\n\nI'd grown fond of Bower, but a need to protect him sat heavy inside me. I had never felt close to anyone other than Jaydra. Even Zenema had been more a mother to me, but Jaydra was almost a part of me. Of course, dragons didn't need a lot of protecting, and it was an unwritten rule that everyone in the clutch had to be able to look after themselves, which Jaydra could do. So it was strange to feel this way.\n\nIs this what friendship is?\n\nFrom where he was sprawled under Jaydra's wing, Bower's boot twitched as if he too was still caught up in dreams. He was going to need new boots soon, for his looked to be losing their soles and seemed over-large on his feet.\n\nRemembering Ryland's score of Bower as any kind of dragon-kin I wondered if Bower really was ready to control armies. At times it seemed to me that he was as bad at being a king as I was at dealing with magic. I stared at my hands, wondering why it was that sometimes the magic seemed so simple to me\u2014it just happened and was perfect. Other times the power frightened me and left me worried it would twist into something dark\u2014it was Maddox magic after all.\n\nBut Zenema's words kept echoing in my mind\u2014the truth of who I was lay in my blood. I had to trust in who I really was inside\u2014that I was not like Enric.\n\nI also had to trust in the truth in Bower's blood.\n\nHe had risen to the challenge of organizing the escape of the villagers. He had come up with a good plan to defeat Enric's ships and save the dragons from a terrible battle. I had to trust that when the time came the qualities of a strong and wise leader would be there for him and for all dragons as well.\n\nNone of that, however, helped us with getting through whatever tests the Three-Rivers clan would put before Bower\u2014and I was not certain I would be allowed to help him. And I was certain whatever test Ryland planned for Bower, it would involve their dragons. After all, how can a dragon-king be tested if not with dragons?\n\nI had best go and try to find these wild dragons before Bower had to face them.\n\nUsing some of our water, I washed quickly, pulled out a thick cloak to keep me warm against the chill of the morning\u2014for mist clung to the air, stirred up by the rivers\u2014and glanced around.\n\nThis far north any dragon would need warm dens, and dragons always preferred dens in high places. So the mountains that surrounded the place where the three rivers met must be where these wild dragons lived. The rivers would be too wet, so I set off for the closer mountains, for as the sun rose it showed what seemed to be some large caverns near the peaks.\n\nThinking of dragons and dens left me wondering how Zenema and the other dragons fared. Had more ships from Enric arrived to lay siege to the island? Or was my dragon-kin now safe on another island, hidden from harm?\n\nMy dragon family was tough, strong and quick. I had to trust in that, too. So I put my mind to the task I'd set for myself\u2014climbing up to the caverns I had seen to find the wild dragons.\n\nUsed as I was to climbing, I still wished I could fly Jaydra here. However, it was best to meet these dragons without the intrusion of a strange dragon into their territory. Just my appearing in their den might alarm them.\n\nMy boots crunched on a layer of frost, but soon grass gave way to shake and iron rock. The mountain side grew steeper, but I could still walk and found goat trails that led me higher.\n\nBy the time the morning mists had lifted and the first birds started to sing, I had neared the top.\n\nBut somebody else was here as well.\n\nA low male voice said, \"Steady you go, steady.\"\n\nPeering around a large boulder that blocked my path, I saw a man of middle years, prodding a small trio of sheep forward. The animals seemed too frightened to even bleat. The man looked to be from the Three-Rivers clan for he wore their distinctive mix of leather and cloth leggings and tunic and leather boots, and markings dotted his arms with odd designs. He used a staff to urge the sheep forward, herding up the narrow path I had been following.\n\nLooking beyond him, I saw the path led to the cavern mouth I had glimpsed from afar. At this close range I saw it was actually fenced with an iron gate.\n\nThe bars seemed too thin to ever pose a real barrier to a dragon of Jaydra's size, but a metal net seemed to be threaded into the bars and over it and that would make it stronger.\n\nThey'll never get their dragons to respect them.\n\nI thought of the pure rage Jaydra would inflict on any who tried to imprison her in such a fashion as this. Did these people know nothing of dragons? Why did anyone think that a rider of dragons had ever taught the Three-Rivers clan anything?\n\nThe sheep stopped on the path and refused to go any further, despite the man's prodding. I didn't blame them. It is a wise animal that knows to avoid a dragon's den. But the man herding them pulled out a length of rope, tied the sheep together and then tied them to the metal bars.\n\nReaching down to the belt at his waist, he fumbled with something that clattered. I realized he must have a key and the bars were not a fence, but were a gate. After fitting the key in place, the man jerked back a section of the fence. It gave with a groan of metal on metal. The sheep struggled now to break free of the rope and sympathy for the poor beasts stirred in me.\n\nThese dragons had to be very different not to want to fly and hunt their prey. The dragons of the Western Isles not only enjoyed the thrill of a hunt, but they killed fast and their prey hardly had time to even realize it was about to be a dragon meal.\n\nAt least my prey can run, Jaydra said in the back of my mind. She was awake now and keeping part of her senses on what I was doing in case I needed her help.\n\nThe man shoved the sheep into the cavern, one at a time before hurriedly locking it.\n\nThe man turned and started down the path again. I ducked off the trail and hid behind a boulder, but the man was intent on hurrying away. He didn't notice me, and anger surged in me that he wasn't even going to stay and witness the final moments of these poor sheep. The least he could have done was be witness to their fate.\n\nJaydra thoughts reached me again. Jaydra does not think Saffron wants to see what happens next, either. Come back. Bower wakes and wants food. So does Jaydra.\n\nJust keep him busy. Hunt fish for him and yourself, I thought to her.\n\nJaydra was happy enough to put her mind on hunting fish for breakfast, but I could still sense her senses. She worried over what was about to happen up here behind these iron bars\u2014and she could smell dragons.\n\nA low rumbling echoed from within the cavern, and then a hissing rose. It sounded to me like a dozen or more large, scaly bodies moving in the darkness, shifting and flowing over one another.\n\nThe sheep panicked and threw themselves against the metal bars, seeking escape. The sound grew so loud it seemed about to burst from the darkness like a volcano, but it suddenly stopped.\n\nThe wind whistled through the rocks, but otherwise all was silent. Not so much as a bird stirred, nor any small creature. Even the sheep held still, seemingly frozen in fear. The sun peaked over the eastern mountains, starting to warm the day and stretching light into the cavern, but I saw nothing.\n\nWas this just some bizarre ritual of the Three-Rivers clan to leave sheep here? But Jaydra could still smell dragon and I could feel part of her senses trained on this spot. She was waiting.\n\nAnd then I saw something move in the dark cavern.\n\nEyes appeared first, seeming more red lights. Two sets of eyes blinked and smoke curled into the air. In an instant, two long snouts burst forward, snapping up two of the sheep so quickly the animals had not even a moment to bleat. The third also vanished with a snap and a spatter of blood. I glimpsed scales dark as midnight with the sheen of blue and purple flashing in the light. These dragons seemed much thinner and smaller than Jaydra, with wicked sharp spines along their heads and backs.\n\nAnd then they were gone, retreating back into the darkness.\n\nMy heart was beating fast and sweat cooled on my back and forehead. I stared into the cavern, trying to see if there were more dragons, or just the two I had glimpsed.\n\nI could feel no hint of a dragon mind in the darkness. These dragons seemed as wild as the Grim Bears I had once encountered.\n\nJaydra, do you sense anything? I asked.\n\nBut Jaydra seemed busy hunting the rivers for fish.\n\nI reached out again with my mind, searching the cavern for even a flicker of awareness or sensation. I had always had a strong bond with Jaydra, but even with the other dragons of the Western Isles, I had always been able to reach any dragon mind.\n\nPulling my cloak tighter about me, I wondered if these dragons simply did not want to open their mind to others. Perhaps having been locked up behind bars like this had left them unable or unwilling to trust any human. Or perhaps the rock here, which seemed to be solid iron, would not allow me to reach these dragons.\n\nI was about to give up and turn away when I felt something.\n\nIt at once seemed to me a sense of two dragon minds in the cavern. Their thoughts seemed far different from any other dragons I had ever sensed. Instead of clear thoughts, a wild savagery slipped into my mind, and I wondered if these dragons were all emotion.\n\nPerhaps they had never talked to any human before this. Given how the Three-Rivers clan kept them locked up, unable to fly, I could well believe that no human had even tried to speak to them.\n\nEasing forward on the path, I strode to the metal bars and put my hand through it\u2014perhaps it was just the metal blocking our connection.\n\nMy name is Saffron. I have a den-sister named Jaydra, daughter of Zenema of the Western Isles.\n\nEmotions and garbled thoughts hit me, making me tremble. A sense of hatred as strong as my magic battered at me. From the darkness, one eye opened, this one white and swirling and very much a dragon eye. The dragon glared at me and its thoughts struck like a gale force wind.\n\nHate humans. Eat humans. Hate you!\n\nI staggered back. Never before had any dragon regarded me with such contempt. Never had I sensed such loathing and such a powerful hatred. Pulling back, I wondered if I should try again to reach these two dragons, but in my mind Jaydra was warning me to take care. And she was right.\n\nThese weren't just wild dragons, these were dragons that had been abused and imprisoned. It was possible they might never trust any human. Turning way, I could see now why Ryland had said these dragons were dangerous\u2014they were. They were almost as mindless as Enric's Iron Guard, and they were fit only to be machines that killed. These were not the dragons that might be the basis for an army.\n\nI had learned to dislike the Three-Rivers clan last night when they'd seemed so uncaring of their dragons. But now I could hate these people almost as much as their dragons did. For these people had turned dragons into the very nightmare that Bower had always said was how the people of Torvald viewed dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Challenged",
                "text": "Saffron strode back to where I waited with Jaydra, fish roasting on campfire, looking as though she hadn't slept at all. I could see every freckle on her pale cheeks and purple stains smudged her eyes, leaving them looking huge. Her leather jerkin seemed dusty as did her boots, and she strode toward me, coming from the western mountains.\n\n\"What happened to you?\" I asked and stood. Next to me the fire crackled happily. Jaydra sat not far away, watching Saffron and saying nothing that I could hear.\n\nThe sun had warmed the meadow where we had spent the night, but rivers seemed to leave a chill in the air. Saffron's breath puffed in the air like a dragon's.\n\nSaffron stopped in front of me, her cloak thrown back from her shoulders. She fixed a hard stare on me and said, her voice urgent, \"We should leave. Now.\"\n\n\"What's wrong? Is this about last night and Ryland not believing I could be king?\" I could almost hear a sullenness in my own voice. Even I didn't believe I really would make a great king, so why should I expect anyone else to?\n\n\"No, Bower. Please.\" She reached out and touched my arm. \"We can fly back to Den Mountain and then follow the island dragons to a new home. Zenema will know of other dragons who may help us, or we can fly south. Far away from Enric.\"\n\n\"What are you talking ab\u2014?\"\n\nA long, echoing call cut off my words. It sounded to me like what I had always imagined the great Dragon Horn sounding like. The call echoed again, and I traced it back to the center of the Three-Rivers clan settlement. It had to be coming from the hall where we had dined last night. From within the settlement, excited whoops rose up. It sounded to me as if this was the call to summon me to my test.\n\nMy stomach tightened. The fish Jaydra had brought back for breakfast no longer seemed so appetizing. My mouth dried.\n\nI'm not ready for this.\n\nPanic shook my chest and my fingers, but then I remembered I had not been ready for Ysix's test, either. I pulled in a breath and glanced at Saffron. She was staring at the settlement, her mouth set in a hard line and her blue eyes suddenly dark and fierce.\n\nBefore she could ask again for us to leave, I told her, \"I can't turn away from this. My father died to keep my bloodline secret, to give me a chance at the throne that is rightfully mine. I can't turn away from my duties\u2014I have to think of all those who suffer under Enric right now. Enric won't stop trying to kill every last person who is part of the rebels, the Salamanders. He won't stop persecuting those who only want to know the true history of their kingdom. And he won't stop chasing us no matter where we go. That means we have to fight\u2014and if we want a hope of winning, then I have to prove to these people I am their king. If I don't\u2026I won't just lose their respect me, I'll lose my self-respect.\"\n\nSaffron shook her head. My words had done nothing to erase the doubt in her eyes or ease the creases lining her forehead. \"You don't understand. These dragons are not what we need.\"\n\n\"Yes, but they're what we have,\" I said.\n\nRyland and a group of five men marched toward us from the settlement. Each man held a long spear and the men had dressed in heavy leather jerkins, breeches and boots.\n\nI turned from Saffron to face them, glad now I hadn't eaten any breakfast. My stomach seemed to be knotted tight.\n\nGlancing from man to man, I wondered if I was going to have to best one or more of them in combat. If so, I would surely lose. Like every noble son of Torvald, I'd been trained to use a sword, but these men were taller and thicker than I was.\n\nBut I noticed with a shock that these men were the ones who looked frightened. They swapped nervous stares, licked their lips and shifted their spears from hand to hand as if they were the ones facing a test.\n\nI bet father never expected my inheritance to have to come to me like this.\n\nStudying the men's fear-filled faces, doubts rose up in me. Were these people with their marks upon their skins and their wild ways the ones my father would have wanted me to lead against our home city?\n\nBut I could almost hear him in the back of my mind, repeating the words from some restricted and prohibited book that he had entrusted to my care.\n\nThe old kings ruled for all of the people, not just a few whom they liked.\n\nAt the time, I'd been a boy and he had been talking about how the Maddox kings had relentlessly favored their friends at court, ignoring the common people and the older noble families who kept away from court. But I knew my father would have included the Three-Rivers clan and the island villagers and every dragon as those to whom a just rule must extend.\n\nGlancing at Saffron, I told her, \"A king rules for all, not a few.\"\n\nI stepped forward to meet Ryland and the others. I didn't turn around to see if Saffron and Jaydra were staying or going. If Saffron felt strongly enough, she could go. And I knew Jaydra would go with her. But I was hoping both would stay. Saffron might be worried about something, but I wanted their support.\n\nBehind me, Saffron muttered, \"Bower, you don't have to do this.\"\n\nI kept on walking. Of course I did.\n\nThe sun was well up in the sky by the time all seemed ready for whatever test I had to pass.\n\nI stood on a patch of barren and blasted rock that had been cleared from the mountain side. Fifty spearmen from the settlement created a circle\u2014an arena it seemed\u2014standing alert and in their heavy leathers with their long spears. I stood at the center of the circle, tugging at the breastplate of stiffened leather strips they had given me. It formed a hard shell around my chest and back, but it made any movement difficult. Hardened leather wrapped my forearms and legs, and I thought this seemed a crude imitation of the drawings of Dragon Rider armor that I had seen in books.\n\nOpposite me, Ryland stood just inside the circle, similarly dressed. I had thought that perhaps we were to fight, but neither of us had so much as a knife in hand, and I could not see how we could possibly wrestle or grapple with each other. It was hard enough just to walk.\n\nSaffron and Jaydra had followed the crowd\u2014it seemed the entire settlement, everyone except the youngest children, had turned out to see this test. Just now Saffron hung back, arms crossed over her chest, her expression sullen, as if she could somehow will me to end this. Jaydra hung back with her, almost as if she could hide herself. And it seemed almost as if everyone had forgotten them, for everyone seemed to be staring at me, eyes bright but also nervous.\n\nStepping forward, Ryland turned and lifted his voice. \"We have a challenge called. Bower who comes from the city of metal men says he can lead us in battle.\" A few laughs rose up, but they sounded nervous to me.\n\nI could see Jaydra peering over the heads of those gathered. Saffron climbed up onto Jaydra's back for a better view\u2014and a better way to glare at me. I licked my lips. A part of me almost wanted Jaydra to swoop down and rescue me from this, but I squared my shoulders.\n\nI wanted both Saffron and Jaydra to be proud of what I had to do\u2014I wanted to be proud of myself. And running would never give me that.\n\nRyland held up his hand and the crowd fell silent. \"This boy-king thinks to become our king\u2014and I say we test him!\"\n\nShouts rose up from the crowd, but the men with the spears remained silent.\n\nRyland held up his hands again. \"We will see if he can hold his own against our wild mountain dragons. Let us see if he can sit atop one as I, your war chief, will!\"\n\nThe crowd shouted again.\n\nHeart thudding against my ribs, I stared at Ryland. Sit atop a wild dragon? That was the test? Well, I had managed with Jaydra, so perhaps this would not be so difficult a challenge after all.\n\nRyland called out to the crowd, \"If he can do this, if he can show to all that he is worthy to fight with us and really to rain fire and terror down on the metal men, then I will gladly fly at his side and so will we all!\"\n\nThis time the cheers seemed fewer and mixed with unhappy mutters. Perhaps some did not agree with Ryland's offer for me to lead the Three-Rivers clan alongside him? Or maybe they were making bets about how long it might take me to fail?\n\nTurning, Ryland shouted, \"Bring the dragons!\"\n\nThe crowd suddenly hushed and fear seemed to thicken the air around me. I didn't have much time to wonder why everyone suddenly seemed so afraid of my being tested, for a roar broke from the mountain above me.\n\nA low hiss like a huge kettle boiling over followed the roar. The clatter of chains followed and the sounds grew louder. Gasps came from the crowd and some began to back away.\n\nDragons. I heard the voice in my mind. It was almost like a voice you might hear in a dream, soft and sibilant. I had heard Jaydra like this a few times before, but this time her voice seemed stronger. Turning, I glanced at her.\n\nJaydra very deliberately nodded, before flicking her tongue to one side of the circle where I stood. Her thoughts flowed freely into my mind. Do not show fear, Bower. Stand fast.\n\nEasy for you to say, I thought to her, but I had no idea if she heard.\n\nI turned to face the approaching hiss.\n\nThe men with spears who circled me and Ryland parted and thirty or so more strong men now dragged two dragons into the circle. The dragons snapped at the men and at the chains holding them, but the men seemed to know when to duck back.\n\nI was riveted, aware of only the boiling dark blue and black shapes as they surged forward. I let out an involuntary gasp.\n\nShow no fear! Jaydra bellowed in my mind.\n\nThese dragons were nothing like Jaydra and nothing like any of the dragons I had seen in books. Long and sinuous bodies and necks struggled against the chains. They were not as long as Jaydra and certainly nowhere near the size of Zenema, but they pulled the men holding them off their feet anyway. The black scales looked odd, seeming far more like studs than plates. Barbed spikes stood out from their faces and necks, extending down the sinuous backs. Their wings looked small and leathery. Long tails slashed out and men jumped to get out of the way.\n\nBut the worst thing wasn't just the dragon's seeming savagery, it was the way they moved, curling their bodies around each other, using claws and wings for attacks. They worked almost as a pair and I could see immediately how it was going to make it almost impossible to try and mount either of them.\n\nNot that I wanted to.\n\nThese wild dragons seemed to me deadly and now I knew why Saffron had wanted to go. She had gone up into these mountains and had seen the dragons. She had figured out these were not like the dragons of the Western Isles.\n\nI had no time to glance at Saffron, or shout to her that she had been right. Two men pounded stakes deep into the ground and the others left off holding down the chains of the dragons and all the men jumped back.\n\n\"Guards!\" Ryland shouted. The spearmen making up the circle around us snapped to an offensive position, spears lowered and facing inward. We were now surrounded by a glittering circle of points, and with two wild dragons chained to the ground, tails lashing and jaws snapping.\n\nThe only parts of the dragons kept relatively still were their heads. Each dragon had about its neck a heavy, iron collar and from it chains thicker than my forearm extended to the ground.\n\nSun! Jaydra's thought hissed into my mind, but I had no idea what she meant. Perhaps it was some bizarre dragon-to-dragon greeting, but I sensed none of the nobility or the intelligence from these dragons that I had from Jaydra and her island kin.\n\nAnd now I was supposed to climb onto the back of one of these dragons? How?\n\nSpines, talons and teeth flashed as the dragons faced Ryland and me. I had never been much good at wrestling or any sort of sport\u2014and now I had to jump onto a wild dragon. Shoulders slumping I wanted to give up.\n\nBut then Ryland laughed.\n\nThe sound had me stiffening my back and turning to stare at the man.\n\n\"I'll go first, shall I?\" Ryland said, loud enough so that the crowd could hear over the hissing dragons. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders and threw himself into a run.\n\nHad he decided one dragon was slower than the other? That one dragon might be easier to climb than the other? Did he know some trick I didn't?\n\nAs Ryland neared the dragons, one black head shot toward him, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The chain holding the attacking dragon's neck pulled taut. Ryland threw himself into a roll to avoid being crushed by the dragon's bite. Long teeth snapped together just inches from Ryland's head. He jumped up, and darted away, breathing hard now with sweat pouring down his face. He had failed in his first attempt, but judging by his lack of frustration I had the impression this was to be expected.\n\nWith another grunt, Ryland tried another charge at the other dragon. This dragon also snapped at Ryland, but Ryland did not throw himself to the ground this time. Instead, he leapt up. The dragon pulled on the chain, but could not raise its head high enough to snap at Ryland. Reaching out, Ryland caught one of dragon's horns. The dragon reared up, almost dragging its chain from the ground.\n\nThe move actually helped Ryland swing up and onto the dragon's neck. He rested there, wedged between the dragon's spines. The second wild dragon, seeing Ryland seated upon its companion, tried to snap at Ryland's head, but it could not get between the spines, and the chain holding it down would not allow it to stand and claw at Ryland.\n\nThe dragon whipped its head back and forth twice, then seemed to give up in near exhaustion. Cheers erupted from the crowd, but this seemed nothing like true dragon riding. I glanced at Saffron and saw her scowling at Ryland, looking ready to come at him with her knife. I knew what she must be thinking\u2014there had been no respect in his approach to this dragon, no communication and no friendship existed between Ryland and the dragon.\n\nI did not even think Ryland could control this dragon\u2014all he could do would be to hang on while the dragon flew where he wished. How could these dragons be useful in combat? They seemed to want to fight their riders more than anything else.\n\nRyland waved a hand and shouted, \"I will wait here and give you a chance.\"\n\nI wasn't proud. I would take any help offered, but Ryland's approach of throwing himself at a dragon seemed a poor idea to me.\n\nThe cheers subsided and an uneasy silence seemed to hold everyone. I was left staring at the second wild dragon, which looked from Ryland to me, its eyes glinting as if it wanted one or both of us dead.\n\nHow could I do this?\n\nBut how could I not?\n\nThere might be other wild dragons to face. And I needed to show it would not be mere strength that defeated Enric. No\u2014we needed to be far more clever than Enric could be. Meaning I needed to figure out a way to do this that proved just that.\n\nI clenched my teeth. Sweat dripped down my back under the leather the Three-Rivers clan had put on me. I glanced down at it and then tugged loose the straps and pulled it off. I didn't need a turtle shell on me. I needed agility and brains. I needed to somehow talk to this dragon.\n\nRyland, for all his muscle and skill\u2014had just shown he couldn't call any dragon to him. Zenema and Ysix had promised they would answer my call, but I needed to show the Three-Rivers clan that dragons were not here to be chained and abused.\n\nRemembering the pictures I had seen in so many books of dragon riders sitting atop dragons, soaring across the sky, I knew this was how it must have started. With someone facing a dragon\u2014and becoming a friend.\n\nI took a step forward, and the black dragon lunged at me, faster this time. It obviously expected me to use moves similar to what Ryland had.\n\nI threw myself to one side. The dragon's mouth snapped closed on the air above me. The dragon pulled at its chain, and I knew the restraints were simply making it even more angry.\n\nSun, Bower. Sun! Jaydra's thoughts echoed in my mind, but I didn't know what she meant.\n\nThe crowd shouted out calls, obviously not thinking I'd been brave enough. I rolled to my feet and blinking as I squinted up at the midday sun.\n\nWas that what Jaydra meant? That these dragons could not see so well in such glare?\n\nTaking a closer look at the wild dragons, I wondered if why this smaller, fiercer breed hadn't been trained by the Dragon Riders of old\u2014or at least I had never read of black dragons being trained. Any feral creature would respond to training, given enough time. Was there also a reason why these dragons were black as a night without moon or stars?\n\nJust as sea dragons are green and blue, like their environment.\n\nThat was it! The colors of the dragons had to be directly related to where they lived. That meant these wild dragons preferred to be out at night. The sun might even hurt their eyes, which would only anger them even more.\n\nI studied the dragon in front of me the same way that I would study a new text. I saw what Jaydra had been trying to tell me.\n\nThe two wild dragons were actually trying to shield each other from the bright sun. They must be used to darks caverns and moonlit nights.\n\nI had a clue now, but how to use it?\n\nMoving as fast as I could, I jogged around the circle until the sun was directly behind me. With the warmth of the sun on the top and back of my head, I turned to face the dragon that watched me.\n\nThe dragon turned its head left and right, as if trying to see me better. My heart thudded hard and my fingers chilled. Could I manage to catch hold before it grabbed me?\n\nHaving lived with dragons even for a short time I knew better than to do anything with a dragon without first asking and so I closed my eyes and tried to reach out to it, as I might to Jaydra.\n\nI promise you no harm. And I promise to remove that iron collar from your neck.\n\nWhen I opened my eyes again, it seemed to me that the dragon's glittering eyes were now puzzled. I didn't know if it had not heard me or perhaps did not really understand, but I knew I had one chance..\n\nA shiver of fear ran through me, but I pushed into a run.\n\nI covered half the distance between me and the black dragon before it had seen that I'd moved. But I had no intention of vaulting onto the dragon's back. What had Jaydra said?\n\nStand firm. Don't back down.\n\nI saw my chance and jumped up, grabbing the chain that held the dragon pinned to the ground. It snapped taut, but I reached up and grabbed the pin that held its iron collar in place. From somewhere behind me, I heard Saffron yell. In the next instant, I'd pulled loose the pin and the iron color fell from the dragon's neck.\n\nI fell to the ground and stared up at a wild, black dragon now free to do as it pleased. And it pleased to roar up on its hind legs clawing at the air with its front legs and spreading it's wing wide. With one stroke of an arm, it knocked Ryland from his perch on the other dragon's back, and then it turned to me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Saffron and the King",
                "text": "\"Bower!\" The scream burst out of me as Bower fell to the ground in front of the wild dragon. Somehow Bower had freed the dragon, but the hate within the dragon's mind washed through me, leaving me in no doubt of its intent to kill Bower.\n\nThe dragon reared up over Bower and I knew it intended to snap Bower in two with one bite.\n\nI flung out my hands, reacting as I had when I had caught him in mid-air over the ocean. Power burst from me, tingling on my fingertips and in my chest. But this time the magic went wild. Instead of flinging Bower away from the dragon and to safety, my power flew out in a burst around me. Raw energy flew from my hands, sparking green and golden in bright bolts that struck outward. It was as if my scorn of these people was fueling the magic, striking out at everyone and everything.\n\nA boom like that of a cannon shook the earth.\n\nPeople flew backwards, knocked to the ground. My magic struck the two wild dragons as well, sending them flying, but also tearing their chains to pieces.\n\nThe wild dragons roared. Free of their constraints, they leapt into their air and took flight, spiraling up into the clouds until they had disappeared.\n\nI had no time to follow their departure with my thoughts for I feared I had killed Bower. He lay still on the ground. I jumped from Jaydra's back and ran toward his side, leaping over the bodies of those I had knocked off their feet. Around me, those who had gathered were groaning, holding their heads and struggling to regain their feet.\n\nThe horn that had sounded earlier was echoing again from the settlement, but I gave it no heed. I reached Bower, skidded to a stop and dropped down in the dirt next to him. He gave a moan and I put a hand on his shoulder. \"Bower, can you hear me?\"\n\nChecking him for injuries, I saw he had badly grazed his right hand and arm\u2014the sleeve of his tunic had torn open. Thankfully, the stiffened leather wrapped around his arms and legs seemed to have prevented any broken bones.\n\nHis eyes fluttered open and he asked, \"Did I do it?\"\n\nJaydra landed with a thump next to Bower, spreading out her wings over us to keep us safe. She scanned the skies and thought to me, Wild dragons gone.\n\nI was glad of that, but just now we had other concerns.\n\nGlancing around, I saw the crowd was slowly getting to their feet. The men with spears seemed to have recovered first. The blare of their horn sounded again and again with an odd urgency. However, instead of anyone looking at me or Bower, everyone seemed to be staggering toward the settlement.\n\nRyland ran past us, a gash on his head bleeding from his own fall from the dragon I had freed. \"Get him up,\" he shouted.\n\n\"What happened?\" Bower sat up and put a hand to his head.\n\nI didn't want to tell him just yet that I had caused this mayhem, so I simply shook my head.\n\nHowever, Ryland paused not far from us and pointed to the eastern mountains where three black flags now fluttered, stark against the blue sky. \"We're under attack!\"\n\nPushing himself to his feet, Bower shouted at Ryland, \"The flags\u2014what do they mean? Who is attacking?\"\n\nRyland waved us to keep up with him. Bower broke into a limping run and I followed after, with a quick thought to Jaydra to take to the air and see what she could see.\n\nTalking as he ran, Ryland said, \"The Salamanders taught us to use flags. With it we can pass message for many, many leagues. What that shows is that someone has attacked our scouts to the south and west.\" He ran into the settlement. Everyone seemed to be hurrying past, but a man stopped to hand Ryland a sword belt. Ryland whistled for his steed, and turned to Bower. \"You are certainly lucky. I don't know what happened back there, but I know you were about to be dragon-food. Bravely done\u2026but dragon-food nonetheless.\"\n\nI opened my mouth to confess, but Bower interrupted. \"Where are your other dragons? We'll need them.\"\n\nWe? Bower really did think of these people as his responsibility, even if no one had declared him king.\n\nSomeone brought Ryland his saddled pony. He took the reins and told Bower, \"It's the metal men coming. Their king and his vile magic tricks have caused us to lose two of our dragons. They were the only rideable ones we had, for the others are all far too wild. Without those two dragons we haven't got a hope of countering the metal men.\"\n\nI did not like to think of more dragons caught in catches, but even less did I like thinking of the Iron Guard. I'd seen those metal soldiers in Torvald and had even managed to destroy one during my magical battle with Enric, but that hadn't been anything I'd planned. I'd sent my magic out and it had torn one of the Iron Guard almost in two. I still had no idea how I had done it.\n\nMust I always lose control to be able to use my magic to defeat Enric?\n\nI shuddered. The Iron Guard was an army created by magic\u2014horrible magic. I wanted nothing to do with it.\n\nMagic isn't something Saffron does. Magic is Saffron and Saffron is magic. Jaydra thought to me from far above.\n\nI knew Jaydra's thought magic was as natural as breathing, for that was how dragon magic could be.\n\nAnd look what Saffron did\u2014Saffron saved Bower and freed two dragons.\n\nThat was one way of looking at it. But I still did not have great faith I could use my magic exactly as I wanted. After all, I hadn't intended to knock everyone flat just a few moments ago.\n\nMy cheeks burned, but I was still not sorry I had freed those two dragons. I didn't think Bower would be sorry, either, for he had been trying to free one of them. Glancing at Bower, I said, \"If the best anyone could do was sit on a dragon, how would those wild dragons be any use against King Enric?\" I looked at Ryland. \"What was your plan? Just to goad the dragons into a fury and point them toward the enemy line, hoping they decided to attack the enemy rather than you?\"\n\nRyland shot me a hard look, but Bower said, his tone grim, \"The Iron Guard. That's what they're called in Torvald. They are unstoppable. Unbeatable.\"\n\n\"They're Maddox magic,\" I muttered.\n\nRyland shook his head, threw his pony's reins over the animal's head and swung up onto the pony's back. He nodded to where his riders were approaching with their tough mountain ponies. \"We have to try.\"\n\n\"We can help,\" Bower said.\n\nI didn't want to hear that. If Enric was coming, it might be best if we left. But Bower looked determined, so I looked up to where Jaydra circled overhead and asked, Jaydra, will you fight with us?\n\nJaydra's voice sounded joyful and fierce in my head. Jaydra will always fly with Saffron.\n\n\"We have a dragon. One who will fight with us and who can scout,\" I said.\n\nRyland's mouth flattened, but Bower nodded at my words, and then said, \"But we don't have any weapons other than a knife or two.\"\n\n\"Three-Rivers clan can provide.\" Ryland called out to a youth who was running past. \"Bring them swords, bows and signal flags and quick!\"\n\nThe boy nodded and hurried away. Around us it seemed as if the entire settlement was taking up arms, including women, children and the old. People came out of their huts strapping on leather armor or sword belts or carrying long spears.\n\nWheeling his pony, Ryland called out to the other mounted riders to follow him. They rode off in a cloud of dust. A few moments later, the boy Ryland had sent to get us weapons came back with one short sword, three scraps of what seemed to be red cloth and a bow and a quiver of arrows. Bower took the sword and the red cloth. I grabbed the bow and arrows.\n\n\"All I could find,\" the boy said and sprinted away.\n\nBower strapped on the belt and tucked the red cloth into the belt, telling me. \"We can signal Ryland with these flags.\" Bending down, he picked up one of the fist-sized rocks from around an extinguished fire pit. \"I'll fill a pack with these. We can throw these from above if nothing else and keep the king's forces distracted.\"\n\nWe were going to fly out on our first direct battle with Enric and somehow rocks did not seem to me to be a powerful weapon. But I had arrows and perhaps all Ryland needed were eyes in the sky.\n\nCalling to Jaydra, I asked her to land in the settlement so we might mount. We had no time to secure our blanket saddles to her back, so we simply swung up on and secured ourselves as best we could between the ridges of her spine. Jaydra launched herself into the air, and I leaned forward as we sailed up into the clouds.\n\nAt first, I could see nothing of any army, but Jaydra's dragon senses picked up on smoke in the air, and she thought to me, Look to the mountain slope.\n\nSmoke curled up from what seemed to be a small village with what was now no more than smoldering ruins. I glimpsed blackened walls and figures moving through the wreckage, smashing anything still standing.\n\n\"The Iron Guard,\" Bower shouted from behind me.\n\nPulling out one of the scraps of red cloth, he held it out so it flapped in his hands. Below us, red fluttered on the ground and I knew it must be Ryland or someone from the Three-Rivers clan signaling back to Bower\u2014or that was what I hoped. I did not want to think we had alerted the Iron Guard that we flew overhead.\n\nRyland and his mounted warriors seemed to have found a path across the river bridge and over the mountain. I could see now why they used small, sure-footed ponies. No horse could have crossed that bridge.\n\nShouting to me, Bower said, \"By what I've read, Dragon Riders of old used to harry their opponents. They always had two riders, and one carried a bow or a spear and would fire down on their enemies.\"\n\nI glanced back at Bower. \"Did you fall too hard on your head? What are arrows and rocks going to do against soldiers made of metal and powered by magic?\"\n\nBower shrugged. \"We want them looking at us\u2014not at Ryland's force.\"\n\nI shook my head, but thought to Jaydra, Take us closer. Bower seems to want more excitement than is good for any of us.\n\nJaydra dipped one wing and we circled downward. The air stank of smoke\u2014and of burning flesh. I could now see this wasn't so much a battle as it had been a slaughter.\n\nBelow us, sunlight glinted off the Iron Guard as if these were huge men in armored suits, but I had seen these Iron Guards up close. I knew these were not men, but mechanical things powered by Enric's dark magic. Each guard seemed almost as tall as a good-sized tree, with iron plates sculpted to represent an almost human figure and a faceless war helmet.\n\nEach guard seemed to carry a longsword made of the same dull iron. Around them, scattered like dolls, lay the Three-Rivers clan scouts who had obviously lived in these now burning huts. I counted ten bodies, but I wondered if any had been able to flee, or had the attack come too suddenly.\n\nI had no idea how many Iron Guards we faced, but I could see at least a dozen moving in and out of the trees and forest.\n\n\"Hey!\" Bower shouted and hurled a rock. The stone struck the blackened wall beside one of the guards. But Bower's next stone struck Iron Guard's helmet and the guard seemed to stagger a step.\n\n\"You might just be making it angry,\" I told Bower.\n\nFrom below a human voice rose up, shouting, \"Dragon!\"\n\nSoldiers in armor and the king's colors of deep purple stepped from the woods, some raising bows and knocking arrows to fire up at us.\n\nJaydra roared and turned, using her scales to shield us and herself from the arrows. It would take far worse to harm her, but I could feel her annoyance as the arrows poked her side. We could beat any humans, but more and more soldiers seemed to be pouring from the forest. Had Enric sent his entire army here?\n\nJaydra roared again, turned and plummeted down. I could only cling to her spines and hope Bower knew enough to lean close to Jaydra and hang on.\n\nShe tore over the arm, making men duck away, pulling bows from hands with her claws, tearing and grabbing at anything that moved. Screams and shouts rose up. Jaydra wheeled around and came at the archers once more, scattering the soldiers before she rose up into the air.\n\nConcentrating on showing Jaydra where she should fly, how low and how fast, I tried to be an extra set of eyes for her.\n\nBehind me, Bower shouted, \"I know this is working, but we have more trouble coming.\"\n\nI spared him a glance and saw Bower was pointing out beyond the woods to another clearing.\n\nMore of the Iron Guard marched up the mountainside along with more human soldiers. We did seem to be facing an army.\n\n\"How many?\" I asked Bower.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Too many for the Three-Rivers clan. More arrows flew up at us.\n\nJaydra roared, turned to block the arrows with her scales and then tensed, ready to swoop down on her attackers.\n\nNo, sister! There are too many, I thought, willing her to be cautious.\n\nNever too many for a dragon! Jaydra sent to me an image of scattering the army again. I feared she was going to try to attack an army on her own, so I sent to her an image of needing to warn the Three-Rivers clan of what they faced.\n\nReluctantly, she ascended into the air, out of range of the archers below.\n\nSuddenly Jaydra croaked and started to fall out of the air, plummeting toward the ground, and at the same instant Bower gasped in pain. I had just enough time to register that no part of any of our bodies had blood on them. Neither Jaydra nor Bower had been hit by the arrows below.\n\nAnd that was when it hit.\n\nI gasped. Pain washed over me, spreading through me as if I'd been struck by lightning. But I knew what it was.\n\nI'd felt this before when Enric's magic had gripped me.\n\nIs the king here?\n\nSuddenly, Jaydra croaked. Her wings folded. Bower cried out as well, and I knew he must be feeling the grip of the king's magic, like some horrible hand wrapped around us.\n\nWe tumbled through the sky, and I knew I had to block this cursed magic.\n\nReaching out with my mind, I tried to sense Enric. I could find no trace of him, but still his magic seemed to be wrapped around us. Jaydra could not control her wings\u2014they seemed to be torn off his by magic.\n\nWe were racing toward the ground.\n\nClasping Jaydra's neck with my hands, I closed my eyes and let the power surge from me. The feeling of my dragon-magic was entirely different from Enric's. It was different, too, from when I tried to use magic on my own. With Jaydra, the magic felt right and natural. It was as if this was who we were always meant to be.\n\nMy hands warmed and Jaydra spread her wings wide, but it was almost too late.\n\nOpening my eyes, I saw the dark green canopy of trees, and then we hit.\n\nFor a moment, I could do nothing. My entire body seemed to ache. I knew I had fallen from Jaydra, but I didn't know where. Forcing myself, I opened my eyes and blinked back the pain.\n\nWe had fallen into a wide tree, and I lay sprawled over the branches that had caught me. With a moan, I managed to sit up. I almost fell from the tree, but I reached out to Jaydra, searching for her.\n\nJaydra well. Bad magic, but well. Glancing down, I saw she had crashed through the branches entirely and now sprawled on the ground. She stood and shook her wings as if to right them again.\n\n\"Bower?\" I called out.\n\nA groan from the tree branches above me told me he was alive. The limbs shook and Bower managed to pull himself from the leaves. Face pale, he stared down at me. \"What was that?\"\n\nI started to climb down the tree, my arms and legs hurting and my chest still sore as if I really had been held too tight by a giant hand. \"I think\u2026I think it was Maddox magic. A curse of some kind thrown at us\u2014but I don't know how. I don't think Enric is here.\"\n\nBower started to climb down. His foot slipped and he started to fall, but Jaydra caught him with a claw and set him on the ground. I slid down the tree and leaned against the trunk, patting it to thank it for saving our lives.\n\nBower looked from me to Jaydra. \"Iron Guard, archers and magic being thrown around. Ryland and the Three-Rivers clan will be slaughtered. We have to warn them.\"\n\nI nodded. I had thought the same.\n\nBrushing the leaves from his jerkin, Bower started to walk and then stopped. \"Which way should we head?\" he asked.\n\nI pointed to Jaydra. \"Back up on our dragon. We'll never reach Ryland in time on foot.\"\n\nBower nodded and turned, but his head came up and his hand fell to the swords at his side.\n\nFor a moment I didn't know why, but then I saw what he must have seen.\n\nThree Iron Guards stepped from the woods, swords drawn and all three facing us. They made no move toward us, but an eerie sound like that of a rising wind seemed to echo from their helmets and then became a voice.\n\n\"Saffron.\"\n\nThe single word pulled a shiver from me for it seemed filled with malevolence.\n\nIt was Enric's voice, horribly distorted by however he was using these Iron Guards to speak to me.\n\n\"Saffron Maddox\u2026return to me.\"\n\nHow could this be Enric's voice?\n\nTrembling, I stared at the Iron Guards that were speaking with Enric's voice. More magic at work, I knew.\n\nBalling my hands into fists, I stepped forward to face them.\n\n\"Why would I want to do that?\" I shouted at the Iron Guards, wondering if the king, wherever he was, could even hear me.\n\nHe could.\n\n'\"You belong with me\u2026.\"\n\nEach of the Iron Guards raised their swords. I didn't know if the gesture was meant to beckon me or appear threatening.\n\n\"I am my own person\" I shouted. Jaydra gave a rumble that seemed to me that she agreed. \"I belong with my dragon-kin.\"\n\n\"Dragons? What need do we have for dragons?\"\n\nEach of the Iron Guards took a step forward. I could not mistake the threat this time.\n\nBower stepped closer to me and took my hand. \"We should be ready to run,\" he whispered.\n\nI shook my head. How could we outrun these Iron Guards? I was not even certain we could mount Jaydra in time to fly away.\n\nMagic tingled in my fingers. I had torn apart one Iron Guard, but could I fight three at once?\n\nSuddenly, a shout echoed, along with the clang of swords and the neighing of horses.\n\n\"Ryland,\" Bower muttered. \"They must have met up with the king's army.\"\n\nThe sound of thundering hooves and the clash of battle drifted to us on the wind.\n\nThe three Iron Guards facing us seemed to take no notice of the nearby battle. But why should they? What weapon, other than magic, could harm them?\n\n\"Saffron\u2026return to me\u2026\"\n\nThis time the words carried a prickling that started in my chest and spread to my skin. Enric was trying to use his magic to pull power from me. He was going to do something terrible, I knew, and I had no idea how to counter it.\n\n\"Bower?\" The word came out choked and I had no idea what I was even asking him to do. My hands were shaking, and I knew Bower had to feel that.\n\nHe let go of my hand and I glanced at him. Eyes narrowed, he pulled back his arm and threw something\u2014a rock.\n\nIt hit with a resounding crack and ricocheted off the helmet of the center Iron Guard, leaving a small dent.\n\nEnric's magic faded from around me. I felt it fall away like a dark, heavy cloak.\n\nTurning to me, Bower said, \"I think the Iron Guards are acting like some kind of watchtower beacon, letting Enric reach out to us here through them.\"\n\nOf course. The king couldn't cast his magic this far. No one was that powerful! He was using these Iron Guards, but this must be costing him a great deal.\n\nI knew what it cost me to pull on my power. Could I make Enric use all his power? Deplete him for short time?\n\n\"Jaydra, help me!\" I shouted, and sent her an image of what I needed her to do. She sprang into action. With a swipe of her tail she lashed out, knocking over the Iron Guards. I didn't think this would stop any of them, but I knew that now Enric would have to struggle to reach them again with his magic.\n\nWe had a chance.\n\nI yelled at Bower to leap onto Jaydra. From our right, I could hear the battle coming closer to us. I didn't know if Ryland and his warriors were winning or losing, but I had to do something. Power surged into my hands. I had to unleash it if we were to survive. I started forward.\n\nThe odd echoing voice of the king sounded again, booming through the forest. \"Saffron\u2026return to me\u2026\"\n\nThis time, however, the words came from fifty Iron Guards who stepped from the forest around us.\n\n\"I'll return you something right enough,\" I muttered. Lifting my hands with power glowing a bright green and gold on my fingertips, I stretched out my arms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Bower and the Dragons",
                "text": "The voices of the Iron Guard filled the air like an unnatural thunder, rolling toward the village and echoing over it. It made my knees shake, but Saffron was walking toward the Iron Guards.\n\nWhat was Saffron doing?\n\nA line of Iron Guards had stepped from the tall trees and filled the air with an unnatural, echoing voice that seemed to be calling to her. That voice left my insides shaking, but Saffron was walking toward the Iron Guards, her hands raised and magic sparking from her fingers. However, I didn't know if she could really handle so many guards.\n\nSounds of battle neared\u2014the clash of swords, shouts and screams, the frightened whinnies of the horses. I could smell it as well in blood spilled and fires that still burned. Ash floated on the breeze. We had to get to Ryland.\n\nEven as I thought that, Ryland appeared to the right, still mounted on his pony, his sword now blood-stained and his face dirty with smoke. He pulled his mount to a halt and looked from the Iron Guards to Saffron. I didn't know if he thought Saffron was responding to Enric's magic commands, voiced by the guards. But I had no time to worry about him.\n\nI had seen Saffron's magic before\u2014had even felt it. It was becoming clear to me that when Saffron used it on her own, it always seemed to come out too strong and too wild. It was as if, on her own, her power controlled her rather than the other way around. But with Jaydra just now, Saffron had been in better control.\n\nJust a few moments ago, Saffron had called on Jaydra for help. I hadn't been certain what Saffron meant, but when Saffron and Jaydra eased the magic that seemed to crush us, I knew they had been working together. It was dragon magic and Saffron's magic that had saved us. Now Saffron wanted me to call to Jaydra and run, but I was certain Saffron needed Jaydra here. She needed help.\n\nEven as I thought that, Jaydra landed between Saffron and where Ryland sat on his pony. Ryland struggled to control his mount\u2014the pony wanted nothing to do with any dragon. Ryland's expression tightened, but I glanced at Jaydra. \"Help her again,\" I shouted. I could only hope Jaydra understood.\n\nShouting and battle yells grew louder as Ryland's men neared. Arrows began to skim the air, landing in the ground from shots gone wild. I feared Saffron was about to get herself killed\u2014so many Iron Guards faced her, and they were backed by Enric's magic.\n\nI started to wonder if Enric's magic had gone dark because he had no dragons. Could magic only stay pure if aided by dragons\u2014was that really all Saffron needed to help her? But I stared at the Iron Guards, with sunlight glinting off their metal armor\u2014what we needed were more dragons. That might sway the balance of power here.\n\nI had no innate magic as Saffron did, and I was no mighty warrior like Ryland, but I had been born with royal blood in my veins.\n\nThe blood of a Dragon King.\n\nZenema had spoken to me and I had mentally communicated with Jaydra a few times. Saffron had always told me as well that when the time came I would know how to reach out to a dragon and ask for their help. During our training on the island, she had said it was the one thing she could not teach me\u2014I must know it or not. But it was my birthright, or so I thought, to command dragons. Or maybe not so much as command, as beg for their help.\n\nLetting my worry for Saffron, my fear for her rise up, I looked to the skies and shouted, \"Dragons, we need your aid. Now is the time to come to us!\"\n\nNothing happened.\n\nThe sky overhead remained nothing more than drifting smoke and high clouds. The sun was starting to sink into the west and I knew we could not afford to be out here in the woods with these Iron Guards\u2014they would have no difficulty seeing in the dark, but we would.\n\nAnger and frustration leaked in to replace my fear. Maybe I was doing this wrong. Saffron always just sent thoughts to Jaydra. Maybe Jaydra could hear me and would call the other dragons. But Jaydra was needed by Saffron, so I closed my eyes and poured my emotions into one thought and plea. Dragons of the Western Isles\u2014dragons of old, you once listened to my forebears, now listen to me. The rightful Dragon King of Torvald calls upon our ancient bond.\n\nI wasn't even sure if the words were really mine. Maybe I had read them in an old book, but they felt right to me and seemed to well from my heart.\n\nFor a moment, the world seem to hold still. Then it was as if the wind brushed my face and I rode the currents and the world spread out below me as if I was upon Jaydra's back. My senses did not seem to be my own, and then a voice rumbled through my mind.\n\nHail, Bower, True King and dragon-friend!\n\nOpening my eyes, I called out, \"Zenema!\" But I could still see nothing more than smoke and clouds in the sky.\n\nDragons come. Ysix flies to you with her brood. As soon as we had a new den safe, she left to join you, drawn by Jaydra's thoughts. Resist and be safe. Dragons will be with you by tomorrow nightfall.\n\nSuddenly my mind was empty of Zenema's voice, but something had changed within me. It was as if some part of my mind's long asleep had woken. I had a sense of warmth inside me, an awareness now not just of Jaydra but of dragons approaching from far to the southwest. I could sense their senses, feel their wings beating almost as if they were my own.\n\nAnd that wasn't all.\n\nIt seemed as if I could sense all dragons near to us.\n\nIn the peaks of the mountains around us, three minds touched mine. These were not island dragons, and neither were they the wild, angry black dragons I had faced earlier. I caught a sense of power and minds that were both old and wise. Looking up, I spotted three dots of red growing larger and larger. These dragons appeared far larger than Jaydra, with huge wing spans, thick bodies and powerful necks. Three of them few in a V-formation. With roars, they swooped down on the Iron Guard.\n\nThe dragons released jets of flames down into the trees, setting the tops ablaze. Ryland's pony tried to bolt, but he held it in place with a tight rein and a force of will. Saffron was still walking toward the Iron Guard, and they stood in a line now, facing her. The air seemed to boil with arrows from the king's army, but the red dragons swatted them away or flamed them to dust. The red dragons turned and rose into the sky, starting to climb and turn again for another attack. But could they reach the Iron Guards this time?\n\nThe weird voice from the Iron Guard boomed once more, calling out their frightening message, \"Saffron Maddox\u2026return to me.\"\n\nSaffron's magic\u2014green and gold\u2014spilled from her hands, shot out to tangle with a darker magic that lurked within the Iron Guard. Something like thunder seemed to rise from the ground with a deep rumbling. The ground shook as if the trees were trying to tear their roots from the earth. I staggered, trying to keep to my feet. Jaydra let out a roar and rose up in the air slightly, hovering just over Saffron. The green and gold of Saffron's magic wrapped around the dragon, and the entire world seemed to shake.\n\nBoulders larger than any Iron Guard bounced down from the mountain. I threw myself to the side as a boulder rolled past me and I feared for Saffron, but Jaydra was swatting the boulders with her tail, knocking them into the Iron Guards as if they were nine-pins to be flattened.\n\nThe first row of Iron Guard raised their arms as if to ward off the huge rocks crashing into them. Boulders smashed into the guards. I saw several shattered into parts that lay twitching on the ground. Boulders smashed into the line, knocking into trees, trapping guards in clouds of rock and dust. I could hear Ryland's pony neighing as if it wanted to be anywhere but here.\n\nMore boulders rolled past me, and I got up and ran, seeking to get out of the way, dodging the rocks. The red dragons overhead wheeled and tore down, parting company with each other, now reaching down with claws to pluck up any enemy and then drop him from a great height. I heard screams and the clatter of the Iron Guard as rocks stuck them down, or as they fell and came apart in a horrible smash that almost sounded like a scream of fury and pain. Dust and smoke swirled in the air, along with stray arrows that now fell with their fletching on fire.\n\nChoking on the smoke, I tried to look for Saffron. I could no longer see the sparks of her magic. Had one of the boulders she had shifted loose struck her? Had she fallen to one of the Iron Guard? Seeing no other choice, I ran for the spot where I'd last seen Saffron, knowing that if I could not find Saffron's slight body I could at least find a huge dragon such as Jaydra.\n\nBower! To me!\n\nJaydra's call sounded in my mind. The smoke cleared, pushed away by a sudden breeze. Jaydra stood guard over Saffron's slumped form. She lay still on the ground. Both had been surrounded by the remaining Iron Guard, who were cautiously closing in.\n\nJaydra lashed out with her tail, knocking back the Iron Guard. But they rose and came at her again. She snapped at them, and any she caught she dashed to the ground, smashing them with her powerful claws. Some of the Iron Guard were now missing arms or legs, but still they struggled to come at Jaydra and Saffron. I knew they must be trying to get Saffron away from Jaydra\u2014and take her alive. That was why they did not use their swords.\n\nFrom the side, I could hear Ryland's war cry, and the clash of sword on metal. He, too, was hacking at the Iron Guard. But his sword would do little. Overhead, the red dragons roared, and the sounds of battle in other parts of the woods carried to me. But I kept my focus on Saffron. I had to get her away from here.\n\nAnd Jaydra knew this.\n\nWaiting until Jaydra cleared a gap in the circle of Iron Guard, I ran past and dove under Jaydra's swooping tail. Running to Saffron's side, I grabbed her, my heart hammering. Every muscle in my body screamed at me. I was still aching from my battle with the wild dragon, but I could not think of that now. Lifting Saffron's limp body, I threw her slight form over my shoulders, then reached up to grab onto Jaydra scales. My grip slipped, but Jaydra slapped my back side with her tail, boosting me onto her broad back.\n\nClinging to the spines on Jaydra's neck, I urged her to fly with my thoughts.\n\nShe needed no more encouragement. Leaping forward, Jaydra slashed at two of the Iron Guards with her claws, knocking them flat. She vaulted into the air, her wings stirring the smoke and dust into a mix that left me coughing and my eyes stinging.\n\nWhen I glanced down again, I saw we had gone high above the forest. The three red dragons circled around us, continuing to attack the king's army and the Iron Guard with fire and claw, knocking trees down on the army and Iron Guard, striking out with deafening roars. Far below us, I saw Ryland turn his pony to head up the mountain. A horn echoed and I hoped Ryland was calling the Three-Rivers clan to retreat\u2014escape was the best we could hope for now.\n\nClutching Saffron close to me, I put my cheek against hers. She seemed cold, but she was breathing and I could feel her heart still beating against mine.\n\nSaffron's fingers twitched and a spark of gold jumped at me. I hoped she would not use her magic just now. I had had enough of magic for this day.\n\nWith nowhere else to go, I urged Jaydra to return to the Three-Rivers clan's settlement. And I just hoped we would be safe there for long enough to regroup and figure out what to do next. Saffron gave a groan and muttered something as if a fevered sleep held her. But I really wasn't sure if it was that, exhaustion, or dark magic that had struck her down.\n\nPulling her closer, I muttered, \"You have to be well again. You must be.\" I did not think I could continue this fight without her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Learning to Lead",
                "text": "[ Unwelcome ]\n\nThe eerie voice that had called to me echoed again in my mind. It seemed to be trying to pull on my power. The voice shifted and seemed to fade into the sound of wind through the trees.\n\nCracking my eyes open a fraction, the voice faded into nothing. I thought that somehow I must still be stuck in that mountain forest with the Iron Guard marching toward me.\n\nInstead, clean mountain air brushed my face. Jaydra's wing beats carried to me. I tried to talk but it seemed too much effort so I let myself slip away again.\n\nWhen I woke next I heard voices and footsteps and could smell cooking fires. But the steps seemed hurried, and the voices rose like the sharp cries of the seabirds as they argued over fish. Dragging my eyes open, I stared up at a rough wooden roof. Under my hands I could feel a wool blanket that covered me. Another seemed to be underneath me. The clanging of metal and hurried footsteps carried to me from outside.\n\nSitting up, my head spun. Fatigue dragged at my arms and legs and left me wanting to lie down again, but I forced myself upright.\n\nI lay in a small hut, on a rough, brown woolen blanket on the floor. A small table and two roughly-crafted wooden stools shared the room with me.\n\nWhere am I?\n\nSaffron? Jaydra breathed warm thoughts against my mind. The wooden walls creaked and I realized Jaydra had curled almost completely around the hut.\n\n\"Jaydra?\" I asked and put a hand to my throbbing head. It felt as if my skull had been pounded between two rocks. Flashes of what happened came back to me\u2014the Iron Guard, Enric speaking through them, my magic rippling out and pulling at the mountain rocks, sending them tumbling as I poured my anger and hatred of Enric.\n\nSomething had held me back from destroying everything.\n\nIt seemed to me that Jaydra had been working with me somehow.\n\nDen-sister slept deep and long. Saffron went where even Jaydra could not follow, Jaydra thought to me, and I sensed her sorrow at the idea that we could be separated like that.\n\nIt was the magic, I knew. It had almost killed me. But had it stopped King Enric's dark army?\n\nI felt drained, as if all of the strength had left me. What would this magic do to me if I kept using it like this? Would it turn me into a walking skeleton like Enric had become\u2014was that why he had to use illusions to make people believe he was still young? Was he really old or just aged by magic?\n\nMy skin chilled and I rubbed my arms.\n\nWhat if magic makes me become someone like him?\n\nSaffron can never be Enric, Jaydra thought to me, her tone firm and final.\n\nThe poles supporting one side of the hut creaked again as she leaned closer. Suddenly, I wanted to be outside with her in fresh air and free from these confining blankets. I fought to stand, staggering to the hut's canvas door.\n\nThe canvas seemed almost too difficult to part, meaning I was weaker than I knew. I staggered outside and stopped.\n\nA circle of long spears had been driven into the ground, set so they pointed at the hut and where Jaydra lay curled. Jaydra butted her head against my shoulder, but I stared at the spears. While Jaydra could easily hop over them, the message was clear.\n\nJaydra and I were now regarded not as guests, but as potential enemies.\n\n\"What do you mean, I'm being held under suspicion?\" I said once again to Bower.\n\nWe sat outside the hut where I had woken, looking at the wall of spear points. Clouds dotted the sky, driven on a cold wind. Bower, it seemed, was still a guest, and some of the warriors had moved the spears to allow him to come in. He had also acquired a coat and had brought me and Jaydra water and fish.\n\nHe looked as if he was still a little shaky on his feet\u2014he had been glad to sit down on a blanket I had pulled from the hut. A bruise was swelling on his cheek and a bandage of a strip of white linen wrapped his head. He was also moving a little slowly, I thought.\n\nI wasn't surprised at all, given the battering we had both recently taken.\n\nBut why was he a guest while I'd been stuck behind a wall of spears?\n\n\"It was what the Iron Guard said. Or rather what King Enric said through the guards. It seemed like you responded to that call.\" Bower shook his head and stared at the hard-packed dirt within our spear circle. Just beyond the spears, I could see people hurrying past. It was as if everyone had something to do except us. Were they getting ready to pack up and run? Or were they getting ready to defend their settlement?\n\n\"You said Enric was using those guards the way that the Three-Rivers clan uses horns or flags\u2014to send a message from afar.\"\n\nBower looked up. \"It may be because they're metal. The Iron Guards acted like lightning rods\u2014or like magical relays.\"\n\n\"Is that some other bit of magic? I've never heard of a lightning rod. Does it create lightning?\"\n\n\"It's a thing you put up on a building, a metal pole to draw a storm's lightning to the pole and not any part of the structure. I think somehow Enric can reach his Iron Guard with his magic, and I'll bet he has them stationed between here and Torvald, so Enric's magic can jump from one guard to the next, covering vast distances.\"\n\nI frowned. \"That's still got to take a lot of energy from him. Did we at least beat back his guard and army?\"\n\nBower frowned and let out a sigh. \"It's as I said, the Iron Guard is unstoppable. You managed to destroy a lot of them. So did the red dragons that helped us. But the Three-Rivers clan fears they will regroup and head here next.\"\n\nPeering past the spears to the settlement, I watched the Three-Rivers clan bustle about. Women hurried past, carrying baskets of what I guessed would be food to take with them or store. I could see a blacksmith sharpening a sword. Boys were fitting leather armor to each other. \"These people\u2026.nowhere will be safe. If all it takes for Enric to reach out with his magic is one Iron Guard, he'll be able to spread his power from one end of the world to the other.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Bower said. He sounded depressed at the idea. \"I think that is partly why this.\" He waved at the spears. \"I think Ryland is more than a little afraid of what could happen to his people.\"\n\n\"Meaning I could happen to them. He thinks I will betray him, his clan and everyone else, too.\"\n\nPicking up a rock, Bower tossed it at the spears. \"I'll keep talking to Ryland.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"He can't really listen to you, now can he? Not while still looking like a leader to his people. And he keeps me and Jaydra here. I could ask Jaydra to tear down half of the village and she would do so. Or we could just fly away, right over the top of those spears.\"\n\nBower shifted, winced and glanced at me. \"I can't go.\"\n\n\"I know.\" I sighed. \"If we're to fight Enric's army we need Ryland and the Three-Rivers clan. Just what happened back in the woods? I only remember bits and pieces.\"\n\nPicking up a straw, Bower drew a line in the dirt. \"Ysix and her brood are coming. They'll be here by nightfall.\"\n\n\"What?\" I stared at him. \"How do you know such a thing? Did Jaydra tell you?\"\n\nHe shrugged and tossed the straw away. \"No, Zenema spoke to me. After you started with your magic, I called for help from the dragons. You were right\u2014I called the dragons and they came.\" He waved to the mountains tops.\n\nLooking up, I saw three dragons perched on the rocks. They were larger than any dragon I had ever seen, with shimmering red scales. Even from this distance, I could see how they were grooming each other. They also looked to be keeping an eye on the settlement.\n\n\"They came to help you?\" I asked.\n\n\"Us,\" Bower said. \"They helped us.\"\n\nGlancing to where Jaydra snoozed with one eye half open, I asked her, What do you think of the reds? Are they like the wild dragons\u2014mindless and angry?\n\nThey hear Jaydra but do not always understand. They have forgotten much. She opened one lazy eye wide. Jaydra senses reds are suspicious\u2014they wonder why Jaydra is here with you when Jaydra could be with them instead.\n\nIt had never occurred to me that Jaydra might want to go off to visit other dragons. Even on the island, we had always been together. I suddenly wondered if I was holding her back.\n\nJaydra huffed out a breath as if I was being stupid, closed her eyes and settled back into a doze, refusing to listen to my thoughts. Tired as I was, I was also frightened of what had happened\u2014and what might come next. But I felt better knowing it was Jaydra's choice to stay beside me.\n\nI also had Bower, and I proceeded to drag from him everything that had happened. It seemed that I had slept a night and almost a full day as well.\n\nI still had no real recollection of why I had walked toward the Iron Guard. Blood called to blood, Enric had told me once. Maybe his commands through the Iron Guard had drawn me, but I had also struck out with my magic. I remembered that\u2014but not the boulders rolling loose.\n\nStaring at me, Bower said, \"Jaydra watched out for you. She helped you channel your magic. And then I called out for the aid of any and all dragons. Zenema said Ysix and her brood were on their way, and then those three reds\u2014Crimson Reds, they were once called\u2014came from the mountains and rained fire and destruction down on the army. It at least gave us a few days of time\u2014Enric's army is going to need to regroup before they can attack again.\"\n\nGlancing up at the red dragons on the mountain top, I watched them stretch their wings and asked, \"So they heard you call?\"\n\nBower nodded. \"I think they must be refugees from Mount Hammal, the home of the dragons of Torvald. They must have escaped, much like some dragons did when they fled to the Western Isles.\"\n\n\"We are not refugees,\" I protested, echoing Jaydra's annoyance over such an idea.\n\nA small smile lifted Bower's mouth. \"You are not. And you said Jaydra was born onthe islands. But once upon a time, the dragons of the Middle Kingdom lived near Torvald and the Dragon Academy. And I think that these Crimson Reds came from Mount Hammal. They fled Torvald after the old king was overthrown by Hacon Maddox, and they hid themselves here in the far north. I don't think any human even knew of their existence before now.\" Bower stared up at the mountain and the huge dragons. \"I wish I could hear their story\u2014learn if they even remember anything of what was once a great dragon academy.\"\n\n\"That would make them as old as Zenema or even older.\"\n\n\"Not if they are the children of the dragons who fled\u2014much as Jaydra is a child of Zenema.\"\n\nI nodded\u2014he had a point there. \"But I thought you said you called them. How can you do that and not hear them the same way I hear Jaydra's thoughts?\"\n\nBower's cheeks reddened, and not from the wind that had risen. \"I can't even talk to Jaydra all the time. And Zenema only talks to me when she wants to. When the battle was ended and before you woke, I tried reach out to the Crimson Reds, but all I got was a buzzing in my head and then a headache. I kept hearing clicks and mutters that didn't make sense.\"\n\nBower spent too long in his city and in his paper books, Jaydra thought at me.\n\nI had to laugh\u2014for Bower had once carried a bag of books with him.\n\n\"Did I say something funny?\" Bower asked.\n\n\"No, it's just\u2026nothing. Just Jaydra making a joke.\"\n\nJaydra sent me a surge of affection and I sent it back to her. Then I turned to Bower and waved at the spears. \"Ysix is not going to be happy if she gets here and finds the Three-Rivers clan tried to imprison me and Jaydra.\"\n\nHe nodded and frowned. \"That is just what is worrying me. It seems to me that Ysix is not much like Zenema. What if she burns the settlement when she gets here? Maybe you could talk to her first?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"Ysix may not want to listen.\"\n\nBower sighed. \"Ryland said he and the elders will meet in council tonight to decide whether to release you or not. They also want to figure out how to get the Crimson Red dragons to help them.\"\n\nI sat up straighter. \"And just how does Ryland expect to lead red dragons if he is not a dragon-friend? He treated his black dragons like they were prisoners. If he has no connection with the red dragons, what's he going to do? Try to chain them, too?\" I shook my head. \"Ryland will have to ask us to help him with these dragons, and then we can ask the reds if they will help. It's starting to sound like the Three-Rivers clan needs us more than we need them.\"\n\n\"That's how we view it, but Ryland saw your magic. While you slept, the entire clan could talk of nothing other than the stories of how you moved boulders to smash the Iron Guard.\"\n\n\"That should impress them.\"\n\nBower shook his head. \"Ryland is suspicious of such power\u2014it's magic that is too much like Enric's power. Add in the distrust between the dragons here and the Three-Rivers clan, and I'm not sure Ryland is wrong to be cautious.\" Bower looked at his hands for a long moment, and then glanced up at me. His face seemed even paler, what with the bruise on his cheek. He asked, \"Why do I feel like I should be happy, but I'm not? I managed to call the dragons, I managed to fight by your side, and yet it feels like we already lost everything?\"\n\n\"We haven't lost.\" I put a hand over his. I tried to make my words firm, but I had my doubts. Even with Ysix and her brood, and those three red dragons, even with Jaydra on our side and even if the Three-Rivers clan fought with us, would it be enough?\n\nWe had met the Iron Guards and the king's army\u2014or at least part of his army\u2014and his magic and his forces had been stronger. We had to find a way to defeat Enric, but I wasn't sure how we could do that.\n\nForcing a bravado I didn't quite feel, I squeezed Bowers hand and told him, \"We just haven't won yet.\"\n\nAnd I hoped those words were true.\n\nShortly after I spoke to Bower, the Three-Rivers clan horn sounded. It was either a warning or a call to assemble. Judging by how people walked past the spear circle, their steps slow and deliberate, I judged the council was about to start.\n\nBower told me he would tell me everything that happened and left. Again someone parted the spears for him and he stepped outside. I hated the idea of sitting here, doing nothing, but Bower could talk better than I could.\n\nBut I was not going to spend another night in this hut, trapped behind spears.\n\nWe can go? Hunt\u2026fish? Jaydra opened her eyes but didn't raise her head.\n\nStanding, I pulled the blanket from the ground and wrapped it around my shoulders. I thought to her, Yes, we will. I won't let them treat us as if we are sheep to be penned, but first we must give Bower time to see if his talking will work his own kind of magic with words.\n\nWhile we waited to hear from Bower, I began to stretch my muscles, doing what I could to make myself ready for whatever came. I was stronger now than when I had woken\u2014the food Bower brought me helped. But I still felt weak\u2014magic would not even spark from my fingertips, and my chest seemed hollow and empty.\n\nThe evening darkened. I wondered if Ysix was near. Stretching my thoughts out, I sensed she and her brood were near but had stopped at the lake to feed and drink so they might arrive rested. I sent to her my approval of such a plan, and got back from her faint impatience, as if she wondered why she would ever need my approval.\n\nSo I sat down again to wait, resting my back now against Jaydra's side. Even from where my hut sat near the edges of the settlement, I could tell the council wasn't going quite how anyone had planned. Angry shouts lifted into the air, the words indistinct, but nothing happened. And Bower did not return.\n\nA few fires were lit in the settlement, but I noted that every flame seemed shielded, as if the Three-Rivers clan was worried the king's army might spot them. I heard the flap of wings and looked up to see three dragons circling the settlement. Waves of curiosity came from those dragons, and I thought the reds must be wondering what had happened to the Dragon King who had called them.\n\nI sent thoughts out to the red dragons, but it was as Jaydra had said\u2014they either didn't really understand my thoughts or did not want to let me know they had heard me. The three reds landed not far from my hut, and Jaydra lifted her head to speak to the reds in dragon, with whistles, clicks and hisses.\n\nEvening was starting to fade when I heard bootsteps outside the spear circle. I stood and watched as what seemed to be a half-dozen men and women strode to where the red dragons sat in the meadow. The moon was rising, turning the red dragons into huge, dark silhouettes that blocked the stars.\n\nI couldn't quite see who was headed to face the red dragons, but I assumed Ryland would be there and Bower, too. Or could the Three-Rivers clan be so unwise as to try to negotiate with these dragons without Bower? They certainly had not been wise in how they had treated their black dragons.\n\nLeaning against Jaydra, I watched the small group stop a good distance from the red dragons\u2014however, they were still close enough that the reds could have flamed everyone with one breath.\n\nI thought I recognized Ryland's voice but I couldn't hear what was being said\u2014the wind carried the words way. But Jaydra thought to me, Jaydra hears humans.\n\nHer dragon senses were sharper than any other creatures in the land.\n\n\"Please repeat to me what they say!\" I asked, my eyes fixed on shadowy figures that faced the three dragons.\n\nIn my mind, Jaydra repeated Ryland's words.\n\nOh, mighty dragons, we humbly beseech your aid. We ask you to remember who we were, and who you were of old\u2026 The dragons and their riders.\n\nSuddenly, Jaydra was snorting soot and fire as the lead crimson dragon lifted its head and roared a gout of flame into the sky. Even from this distance I could hear the panicked cries from the delegation as they ran backwards a little way, before realizing that the Crimson Reds really had no intention of killing them all\u2014yet.\n\n\"What was that about?\" I demanded of Jaydra.\n\nTheir clutch-queen called them liars. Jaydra snorted as if that was the best joke ever.\n\n\"Why would she do that?\"\n\nShe can smell their blood and knows none are true dragon-friends. She smells on them the scent of the black dragons\u2014she smells the hate the black dragons had for these people.\n\n\"Those are strong words.\" Didn't Ryland know better than to lie to a dragon? To lie was to insult them, for it was treating them as if they could not sense the truth.\n\nBut what worried me more was that all the dragons I'd ever known were very straightforward in that they did as they pleased. If a dragon didn't like you, it would either never talk to you again or would kill you. Simple as that. So while dragon minds could be complex and subtle, their emotions were very direct.\n\nThe reds hissed and rumbled an answer. The human delegation could not understand the dragons, but two stepped forward and spread out blankets. On this, they unwrapped what seemed to be gifts for the dragons.\n\nGold trinkets glittered in the light of a lantern held aloft. From how one woman put her hands over her mouth, as if grieving, I guessed this was everything precious held by the Three-Rivers clan.\n\nThey're attempting to bribe the dragons? I thought to Jaydra.\n\nJaydra's amusement drifted to my thoughts. Shiny metal? What dragon has need of such a thing when we have shiny scales and the skies?\n\nI would have laughed if not for the fear spreading up through my belly. How would these large red dragons, each the size of a house, take being insulted twice now? Jaydra would probably sweep her tail at them, casting them aside and fly away, never to be seen again, but these dragons might not be so polite.\n\nNot worth killing, Jaydra informed me, and I hoped she was conveying the thoughts of the red dragon.\n\nShe was not.\n\nThe biggest dragon let out a roar and smoking flames.\n\nThe half-dozen people started to back away. I knew now that Bower could not be with them\u2014even he knew better than to treat dragons with such poor manners. But more men hurried out from the settlement, the tips of their spears glinting.\n\nThis was far too much like how the villagers had faced Jaydra, myself and Bower.\n\nWatching the warriors start to advance on the dragons, I told Jaydra, \"Bower is not there and this is all going wrong. It's time for us to do something before someone is hurt.\"\n\nI no longer cared about what the Three-Rivers clan would think of me if I broke from their ridiculous cage of spears, and I was done with waiting for Bower to fix things with his words.\n\nJaydra sprang to her feet, unfolded her wings and casually flattened the hut by sitting on it. I dragged myself up her neck and settled onto her back. With a leap, we were flying free."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dangerous Alliances",
                "text": "I'd tried to go with Ryland to see the dragons\u2014Saffron would expect me to be there\u2014but two of the elders held me back, refusing to let me leave the central hall where the council had been held. From there I watched Ryland and the other five approach the dragons. I had told him to be stand fast, echoing what Jaydra had told me when I had faced the wild dragons. He seemed to manage that part, but now I could feel the anger of the Crimson Reds. Ryland had done something very wrong and I had to fix this.\n\nBreaking free of the two old men who kept trying to hold me back, I slipped past the other warriors and ran after the dozen men now headed toward the Crimson Reds. I had to dodge hands that kept reaching out to grab me.\n\nRyland and his council had decided to approach the dragons to judge where their loyalty lay. I feared now that they'd said the wrong thing, had perhaps treated these Crimson Reds as they had the wild black dragons. In truth, I thought the Three-Rivers clan seemed a little afraid of the Crimson Reds\u2014they were huge dragons and needed to be respected.\n\nI had tried to offer what little advice I could to Ryland, telling him not what I had read but what Saffron, Jaydra and even Zenema had taught me.\n\nRunning now toward the Crimson Reds, I saw that Ryland and the others had spread out bits of gold. A cup, a belt, some chains and silver plate glittered in the lanterns' light. I sprinted past two more men who tried to catch me, slipping out of their reach. There were advantages to being slight.\n\nYelling, I called out to Ryland, \"What are you doing? These dragons fled Torvald because humans turned against them. This is about offering them a return to their home in Mount Hammal!\"\n\nTurning from the Crimson Reds\u2014and backing up more than a few steps\u2014Ryland looked at me, his mouth pulled down and his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. He did not look a man ready to listen to reasonable arguments.\n\nThe warriors now assembling at the edge of the settlement as if they could protect their huts with spears, grabbed me. I struggled to break free, but a roar from above had everyone stopping and looking up.\n\nA flash brightened the sky as Jaydra let out a dazzling breath of flame and swept toward the Crimson Reds. The red dragons called back to Jaydra with a roar. I had no idea what they were saying, but I worried it did not bode well for the Three-Rivers clan.\n\n\"Saffron! Jaydra!\" I called, pulling an arm free to wave at them, unsure if they could hear me over the noise of the Crimson Reds as they roared, or over the shouting villagers.\n\nJaydra landed with a heavy thud between the warriors and the Crimson Reds. Saffron climbed down from Jaydra, but without her usual agility. She was as worn out by events as was I, but we had to prevent this from becoming a disaster.\n\nInstead of addressing Ryland and his people, Saffron turned to face the Crimson Reds. She swept a deep bow, her arms spread wide and then straightened to start at the huge dragons. \"Great dragons, I am Saffron of the Maddox clan, and kin to the kings who stole the throne of Torvald and who have tormented us all. But I'm also Saffron, den-sister to Jaydra and den-daughter to Zenema, of the Western Isles. I beg you to forgive these humans. They do not know how to speak or behave, but I believe they can learn.\"\n\nThe largest of the Crimson Reds stepped forward and thumped her tail against the ground. I had a sense of distrust from her. Jaydra edged a little closer to Saffron and hissed as if warning the other dragon not to take out any insult on Saffron.\n\nThings didn't seem to be going well, and Saffron confirmed my fears when she turned to glare at Ryland. \"How dare you insult these noble dragons in such a manner as this. Do you think dragons can be bought with worthless trinkets? You have no business talking to dragons.\"\n\nRyland's mustache twitched and I thought I saw a spark of anger in his eyes. He lifted his chin and told Saffron, \"We know how a dragon should be treated.\"\n\nOne of the burly warriors next to me let go of my arm and shouted, \"All these beasts know is pain and blood anyway!\"\n\nGlancing around, I took in the glinting spears and the torches that had been carried from the settlement by some of the clan. I wondered if I had been deluding myself. The alliance I had wanted to build with dragons and the Three-Rivers clan seemed utterly impossible just now.\n\nJaydra curled her tail around Saffron as if to protect her. The red dragons had fixed their stares on the warriors and I thought it looked as if these Crimson Reds were ready to destroy this settlement.\n\nBut more dragon roars sounded from the sky.\n\nLooking up, I saw a half-dozen dark shapes outlined against moonlit clouds. A dragon mind touched mine and I knew that Ysix and her brood had arrived. They swooped over the settlement, stirring up a wind with their leathery wings. Turning, I called out to the Three-Rivers clan, \"The dragons have come to join our fight against Enric.\"\n\n\"Join our fight or finish us all,\" Ryland muttered.\n\nRyland unsheathed his sword, which glinted in the light of the torches and candles.\n\nI waved at him to put away his weapon. \"Ysix comes. I know this dragon. She is kin to Saffron's Jaydra.\"\n\nWarriors and the rest of the Three-Rivers clan started to fall back, leaving only Ryland standing his ground. Ysix, and the dragons with her, landed a short distance from the Crimson Reds, who turned to watch the sea-green and blue island dragons. They seemed to be speaking with clicks and whistles and I wondered what they were saying.\n\n\"Den-mother Ysix, welcome,\" Saffron called out.\n\nQueen Ysix, I thought, wondering if she would hear me. You come just in time.\n\nI glanced around me. Saffron, Ryland and myself were the only ones left facing the dragons. All the others had retreated back to the settlement, taking their torches and lanterns with them. The last of the daylight lit the scene, leaving more shadows than anything. Ryland spread his legs wide, as if into a battle stance, his sword ready. He was not a man, I judged, to be dismayed by greater numbers, but now I wondered if he would ever be able to treat a dragon as an equal in battle?\n\nThe dragons were still exchanging some kind of greeting that Saffron seemed to be able to understand, judging by how she was looking from Ysix to the red dragons.\n\nAnd then, to my astonishment, Ysix pushed her voice into my mind\u2014but she seemed to address everyone at once. Saffron and Jaydra, Ysix recognizes you both. And Bower of Torvald, Ysix is come as promised. But what is the meaning of weapons lifted against dragons?\n\nRyland's mouth fell open and he glanced from Saffron to me and finally stared at Ysix as though he could not believe what he had just heard.\n\nI stepped closer to Ryland and said, \"Best be respectful and listen to Ysix. She is wise beyond your years.\"\n\nYsix hissed, and then sent out her thoughts again. I am Ysix of the Western Isles. Who dares draw a sword against Ysix and Ysix's brood?\n\nRyland opened and closed his mouth uselessly. He dropped his sword. I kicked it aside so it might not be easily retrieved and told Ysix, \"Queen Ysix, before you is Ryland of the Three-Rivers clan, who oppose the false king. Thank you, Queen Ysix, for hearing my call and coming to our aid. And please forgive Ryland. It has been too long since the Three-River clan had a dragon to instruct them. They have forgotten much as have the black dragons of the north, and even the Crimson Reds seem to no longer know how to share their thoughts with humans.\"\n\nYsix seemed to be enjoying this scene, or that was the feeling I got from her. The emotion came to me just underneath her thoughts. She bowed her head and something like a rattle or purr of pleasure rumbled in the air. Well met, Bower of Torvald. As Bower vouches for this Ryland, Ysix will recognize Ryland. After all, the blood of the true Dragon King flows through Bower.\n\n\"You honor me, Ysix.\" I bowed and when I looked up again, Saffron smiled and winked at me. I was going to take that for her approving of my words.\n\nNow formalities are done, what is there to hunt? Dragons cannot survive on gold alone.\n\nYsix let out a roar that seemed laced with laughter. It was a little unfair of her to rub Ryland's mistakes in his face, but when I glanced at Ryland I saw him staring at the ground as if ashamed.\n\nHe looked up again and went down on one knee. \"I\u2026Queen Ysix,\" Ryland said his voice thick and awkward. \"I beg your pardon for greeting you with sword drawn. And noble dragons, forgive our mistakes. Bower is right\u2014it was long ago that Dragon Riders came to us and much has been lost over the years.\"\n\nYsix inclined her head. Ryland has fought beside my family? Ryland is enemy of the dark king?\n\n\"Aye, aye\u2014queen.\" Ryland nodded and stood. \"And it would be an honor to fight alongside a dragon such as you.\"\n\nI started to grin. At least Ryland could recognize strength when it landed in front of him. He had spoken as eloquent as any dragon-friend. Turning to me, Ryland again went down on one knee, leaving me shocked and speechless.\n\n\"Bower of Torvald,\" Ryland said, his voice not quite as strong as it had when he had spoken to Ysix. \"If a queen dragon recognizes you as descended from dragon kings, then I must as well.\" He stood and called out to the other warriors. \"People of the Three-Rivers clan. We have guests to feed and oaths to pledge. From this day forward, we must seek to be friends to all dragons.\"\n\nGlancing at the settlement, I saw the warriors had moved forward, their spears drooping much as had the island villagers. I knew then that they must have heard Ysix's thoughts\u2014she had spoken to everyone here. They all now knew that a dragon could not just speak to other dragons, but could speak to them as well\u2014dragons would never again be regarded as dumb beasts.\n\nI looked to Saffron and she nodded back at me, then patted Jaydra's neck. Pride swelled in my chest. We had done it. We had brought the Three-Rivers clan and the dragons together. For the first time, it seemed possible that we might have a chance to fight Enric's dark rule and his foul magic."
            },
            {
                "title": "How to Befriend a Dragon",
                "text": "Ryland really is taking this well, I confided to Jaydra from where we stood at the edge of the meadow.\n\nMost of the Three-River clan had gathered in the meadow near the settlement. Scouts had been sent out to keep an eye on the king's army and the Iron Guard, but so far there was no sign of a threat to the settlement. It was possible the king's army was still in disarray after the battle on the other side of the mountain. But Ryland did not want to be caught unaware. And then Bower had insisted that the Three-Rivers clan must become better acquainted with the dragons. So here we were.\n\nI stood with my arms crossed, tired of waiting already, and even more tired of Bower's pacing back and forth. Jaydra crouched next to me, warming herself. The sun had just peaked over the eastern mountains and the air held a cold bite.\n\nJust above the lush, green meadow, dragons either perched on the lower part of the mountainside or sat on the higher rocks, watchful and still. They all now had full bellies, I knew, both from the meats roasted and presented to them last night and from river fish they had hunted this morning.\n\nThe red dragons seemed to keep mostly to themselves and perched higher than any other dragon. I wondered if the reds were by nature arrogant or shy. I would have to ask Ysix or Zenema when I had the chance.\n\nJaydra huffed out a warm breath and thought to me, Reds cautious. They think Ryland too like a dragonet making foolish mistakes. But Ryland learns.\n\nI had to suppress a smile. Jaydra's thoughts seemed to have a newfound maturity, and I wondered if now that Ysix was here was she perhaps trying to impress the den-mother?\n\n\"If he doesn't get his arm bitten off, that is,\" I told her.\n\nRyland was out near the red dragons with some of his warriors, offering them more platters of roasted pig. The reds didn't seem all that interested, not with full bellies, and seemed to be enjoying ignoring Ryland and his men.\n\nYsix had already told Ryland she would not fly with slavers, which was what she thought of the anyone who would imprison dragons behind bars in caves. When Ryland told his warriors they would have to free the rest of the black dragons they held, that had caused an uproar and a council meeting that had gone on long into the night.\n\n\"It's true,\" I'd told Ryland. \"You have to befriend them if you want them to fight for you. Either that or let them go.\" Ryland had at least argued the rest of his clan into freeing the dragons. Half the settlement had gone to get the black dragons and bring them here.\n\nComing up to me, Bower stopped, the stiff leathers of the Three-Rivers clan squeaking as he moved. \"This is going to work, isn't it?\"\n\n\"At least the black dragons will all be free. That's something.\"\n\nFrom the mountainside, Ysix gave a roar.\n\nLooking up to where she sat on her haunches, her long neck stretched up into the sky. I thought that she already had decided she was in charge. That might prove to be a problem if things did not go to as she wanted them.\n\n\"Here they come,\" Bower said.\n\nI looked to the west where two of the burlier warriors stood on either side of an iron gate that barred one of the cavern openings.\n\nRyland waved, positioning his warriors along a path that led from the cavern down to the meadows. All the men seemed to be white-faced and while I couldn't see if they were shaking in their boots, I knew I would be if I had to face angry wild dragons that had been imprisoned since they'd come out of their eggs.\n\nA nervous silence seemed to settled on those gathered in the meadow. Everyone had to be expecting the worst\u2014the dragons would attack. Or they would fly away.\n\nTo be honest, I wasn't sure what would happen, but I told Bower, \"They need to stop seeing dragons as a threat.\"\n\nHe just shook his head and kept staring up at the iron gates and the cavern.\n\nThe horn of the Three-Rivers clan sounded. Ryland lifted a hand and let it fall.\n\nThe metal gates screeched and banged open.\n\nRyland waved a green flag now, and several of his warriors took up packs and then started to spread something out of those packs, leaving a trail of something silver-looking from the cavern down to the meadows.\n\n\"Do you really think the black dragons will stay for fish?\" Bower asked and glanced at me.\n\nFish! Jaydra lifted her head.\n\nI shrugged \"It's hard for a dragon to resist fish. But they may decide to feed on Ryland or at least take a bit out of his men.\"\n\nBower's frown deepened.\n\nThe warriors left the fish on the rocks in front of the cavern opening and all the way down to the meadow, hurrying away from the cavern as fast as they could.\n\nBower shook his head and started to pace again. \"Those dragons have had years of only seeing humans when they were dragged out and goaded into battle or into that ridiculous challenge of Ryland's.\"\n\nLeaning against Jaydra's side, I told him, \"The dragons need to see these people not as their captors but as friends. Fish is a good start.\"\n\nJaydra was snuffling the air and wondering why this silly human was wasting all his good fish.\n\nI kept my attention on the cavern where I could now see a writhing mass of four wild dragons. Four more came out, and then another four, and after that I almost lost count. It had to be almost twenty dragons now.\n\nThe black dragons' loud hissing was answered by the red dragons that hissed back and spread their wings. I could feel the black dragons setting every other dragon on edge\u2014it was like having unruly children around.\n\nAs the black dragons stepped into the sunlight and hesitated I could see they were thinner than any other island dragons. They looked to be a quarter of the size of the gigantic red dragons.\n\nA dozen of them sniffed the fish, their wings folded tight. Their heads were not the most graceful I'd seen, and spikes jutted out, looking vicious and mean.\n\nOne dragon glanced around, one eye a milky white from an old injury. Others had cracked scales. They stepped over and around each other, weaving around as if sharing their body warmth.\n\nBlacks are frightened, Jaydra thought to me.\n\nI straightened, turned and hugged her neck. \"Of course. Thank you, Jaydra.\"\n\nBower glanced at me. \"What? Did you spot something terrible?\"\n\nWaving at the blacks, I told him, \"The dragons are scared. They're moving like dragonets in a clutch. Young dragons rely on their clutch-brothers and sisters for reassurance. As feral and savage as these dragons might be, they are really like children.\"\n\n\"They need trust,\" Bower said, tapping his fingers on his leather breeches.\n\nOne of the black dragons lunged forward to seize another fish on the path. A gasp rose up from the crowd. Another dragon came over to steal the fish from the first dragon, and then noticed the fish further along on the path.\n\nThe black dragons spilled down the mountain path, hissing and gulping down fish. The largest one with a white eye was the only one to be cautious. She held back and kept looking over to where Ysix and her brood perched.\n\nYsix called out a hooting challenge to White-eye, who halted. I could see her trembling.\n\n\"What are they saying?\" Bower asked.\n\nI shook my head. \"I think Ysix is wondering whether White-eye is a threat or not.\"\n\n\"White-eye?\" Bower asked, and then said, \"That's a good name, but I thought a dragon always told you its name.\"\n\nBefore I could explain that the black dragons weren't much for names or talking, the dragons swarmed into the meadow. I could count them now and nineteen black dragons sniffed the air. So far they had not tried to fly away, but a few of them started to spread their wings as if testing them.\n\nI nodded at Bower. \"Now it's up to us.\" A shiver of apprehension trickled down my back, but I strode toward Ryland and his men, keeping the black dragons in front of me. Bower a few paces behind me, his boots rustling in the tall grass. Ryland might be the war chief of his people, and Bower might be the future king, but I was the only one who really knew what I was doing. But my fingers twitched and my heart raced as I approached these dragons\u2014there were so many of them.\n\nAnd they are not of your den, Jaydra said, her mind close to mine.\n\nI glanced at her. She had taken flight and hovered not far overhead. I nodded to her, thankful she would be near to me both physically and mentally. I might have need of her very soon.\n\nThe black dragons had stopped in the meadow and were now spread out in smaller groups of four or five. They seemed to be all claw, spikes, dark scales and wary eyes. On the mountainside, Ysix was now ignoring them, opening her long wings to show off her belly scales as she preened as if she had nothing better to do.\n\nIt was a show of strength by Ysix. She wanted to prove she thought of this as her territory and was at home here.\n\nWhite-eye hissed and lifted her head. The other dragons seemed younger than her, for they all looked to her.\n\nWalking up to Ryland, I told him, \"The dragon there with the white eye\u2014she is the den mother. The queen. If you manage to get her on your side, the rest will follow her guidance.\"\n\nRyland looked tense, as if he had braced every muscle in his back and shoulders for action. He didn't even look at me or Bower, but asked, \"And how, by the three rivers, do I do that?\"\n\nBower gestured to a pack of fish that lay on the ground, which was now starting to stink. \"That seems a good way to start.\"\n\nRyland reached into the pack and pulled out a large mountain-lake fish.\n\nI nodded to him and said, \"Hold it up to White-eye. She can smell it from where she is. Make certain you have White-eye's full attention.\"\n\nJaydra sent me reassurance that the black dragons were interested, but cautious.\n\nWhite-eye's glance flickered to Ryland, but she turned to stare up at Ysix almost immediately. White-eye wasn't going to be wooed that easily.\n\nI told Ryland, \"Now throw the fish to White-eye.\"\n\nRyland did as I asked, but two of the other black dragons rose up and snapped the fish from the air.\n\nWhite-eye turned and hissed at them and they jumped back from her.\n\n\"That didn't go so well,\" Ryland said.\n\n\"White-eye is testing you\u2014well, testing all of us, I think.\"\n\n\"I've got an idea,\" Bower said and walked toward the black dragons.\n\nFear for him flared in me and I snagged the hem of his tunic to stop him. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nHe glanced at me and lifted a hand. \"During the battle with Enric's Iron Guard I managed to summon the Crimson Reds. And I talked to Zenema. You said that was because of the power within my blood, that I am the rightful Dragon King. So maybe I can talk to them?\"\n\n\"All of them? At once? Will you look at just how wild these black dragons are.\"\n\nRyland glanced at the dragons and then at Bower. \"If you can get these beasts to listen to you, you really are the Dragon King, and all will acclaim you as such.\"\n\nI glared at Ryland. \"They're not beasts. Did you learn nothing last night?\"\n\nRyland shook his head and smoothed his beard. \"I learned your island dragons are different. But I speak now of the black dragons. No one has ever heard a thought from any black dragon.\"\n\nWith a low growl, I fought down the urge to thump him. Keeping my voice low and to the point, I said, \"The sooner you realize, Ryland, that all dragons have as much sense and even more brains than you, the sooner we will have a true army.\"\n\nA sort of prickling behind my eyes swept through me and I sensed a mind reaching out to mine. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as a wave of awareness stirred\u2014an awareness of Bower.\n\nHe stood staring at the black dragons, his fingertips pressed to his temples. It felt something like what Zenema could do, when she turned the force of her attention on you\u2014waves of a bright mind, dazzling as the sun. I had not known Bower had such power.\n\nI could almost sense Bower's thoughts.\n\nGlancing up at Jaydra, I thought to her, Can you hear Bower's thoughts?\n\nSweat trickled down Bower's face. His forehead bunched tight. The black dragons started to turn and look at him, their expressions startled and suspicious.\n\nWait, let Jaydra share minds with Saffron.\n\nJaydra rarely shared her full mind and senses with me. But suddenly I could feel what it was like to be her\u2014to have a body as long as a house, as strong as the mountains and as quick as a dancing bird. Scales like liquid metal contained a fire within that was always burning. And the world changed.\n\nI sensed the red dragons on the mountainside, breathing in their scents\u2014the sea breeze of Ysix and her brood, the sulfur tang of the reds, and the earthy scent of the blacks. Their shapes seemed to glow, hot for the reds like a bonfire, warm for Ysix and her brood, and warm coals for the blacks. The minds of the other dragons touched mine\u2014but the black dragons' emotions seemed hot as a savage forest fire.\n\nAnother voice grew louder in my mind\u2014it spun soft colors of an almost orange-golden hue. It was Bower's thoughts.\n\nNo one is going to hurt you. We are your friends.\n\nDoes his voice seem to be colors to all dragons now? I asked Jaydra.\n\nJaydra's voice wrapped me in waves of her own unique blue-green energy. Bower is becoming a king.\n\nAnd the dragons can all hear him? They will listen to him?\n\nWas it really that easy? As easy as a trick of the magic in the blood?\n\nOf course not. Each dragon must decide to listen or not to queen, king or mouse.\n\nBower's thoughts seemed reassuring to me, calming almost. This is Ryland. Ryland brought you fish. He sets you free to choose your own path now.\n\nA shadow rose up inside Jaydra's mind\u2014there was something she wasn't telling me, something she hid with what seemed a cloud, but she thought to me, Dragons sense something different about Bower\u2014just as Saffron is different, too. Dragons can smell the magic you have within you. Jaydra started to push my thoughts away, detaching her mind from mine.\n\nAm I not your sister in words and heart and mind? I asked her, feeling a little hurt. The realization that Jaydra, my closest confidant, might be keeping secrets from me left me feeling isolated in a way that I had never felt before.\n\nAll dragons have their secrets, even Jaydra There is something Jaydra does not understand about magic and humans\u2026and what Bower is and what we are. Give Jaydra time to think.\n\nWith that, Jaydra pushed me firmly back into my body. With a gasp, I staggered a step. I was left small and inconsequential once more, dizzy from the sudden shift from being dragon-sized down to Saffron-sized.\n\nRyland grasped my elbow. \"Are you well?\"\n\nI pulled away from him and simply waved a hand.\n\nBower stepped even closer to the black dragons, his face creased in concentration. Something dark spilled from his nose. Blood. What would forcing his innate blood-magic do to him? He seemed to be having some sort of effect on the younger dragons\u2014they stared at Bower as if they could not look away. However, Bower's nose started to bleed. Even this seemed to interest the dragons, for one came close enough to sniff Bower.\n\nNudging Ryland, I whispered, \"Feed them, now while they are interested and not terrified.\"\n\nRyland seemed to snap out of his own haze of wonder. He bent and pulled a fish from the pack at his feet. The closest dragon snapped it from the air. White-eyes came closer to snag a fish. Another fish, another throw and another snap of dragon jaws.\n\nOf the twenty or so wild dragons, about twelve began to crowd forward, wanting fish or to examine Bower. A few of those gathered gave gasps, but many edged closer to see the young, black dragons, their eyes wide and their expressions ones of awe. Some even muttered, \"Why did we keep them locked up for so long?\"\n\n\"I'm running out of fish,\" Ryland told me.\n\nGlancing down, I saw Ryland's pack was almost empty. However, I was starting to worry about Bower. Blood still trickled from his nose\u2014he kept wiping it away\u2014and he began to sway on his feet.\n\n\"Bower.\" Stepping to his side, I shook his arm. \"What is wrong?\"\n\nBower's sending of his thoughts blinked out at once. The wild dragons all fell back, but their hunger was overriding the anxiety now filtering out from them. They had not yet flown away.\n\nWhite-Eye thumped the ground with her tail and whatever that meant it wasn't anything good.\n\nJaydra? I asked.\n\nThe black chides her children for listening to the king-human. She calls them back to her, Jaydra's thoughts didn't have any worry in them, but then Ysix rose up on her hind legs and let out a long roar.\n\nI did not need Jaydra to translate as White-eye turned to confront Ysix and exchange hisses and angry whistles with her. They were arguing about whether humans could be trusted.\n\nThe argument was decided when White-eye let out a sudden jet of flame\u2014a rare feat for any dragon. Spreading her wings, she launched herself into the air and circled the Three-Rivers clan's settlement. The other black dragons crouched in the meadow, looking from White-eye to Bower and then to Ysix. From their hisses and grumbling, they sounded as if they, too, were arguing about what to do.\n\nYsix gave another roar. White-eye answered with a hiss and another flame. Wings spread out and with a flurry of movement, roughly half the black dragons took to the air, joining White-eye. The dark cloud of dragons circled once before heading north, into the snow-capped mountains.\n\nSounding distressed, Bower shouted, \"We have to stop them. We need every dragon we can get.\"\n\n\"We don't need those dragons,\" I told him.\n\nRyland smiled and spread out his arms to indicate the twelve dragons who had remained and who now were nosing Ryland's fish pack, looking for more. \"Saffron is right. We should be proud of what we have here.\" Turning to his warriors, he ordered, \"Bring them more food!\"\n\nI held up a hand and stepped closer to the black dragons. \"No. Leave them to Ysix for now. They have just lost their den-mother and need another strong dragon to reassure them.\"\n\nThat is true Saffron. Ysix's thoughts reached out to me, and from the way Ryland's face paled I knew her thoughts had touched his mind, too.\n\nSpreading her wings, Ysix glided down into the meadow. She called the black dragons to her with whistles and soft purrs. The black dragons cautiously approached her.\n\nLeave us, Bower, Saffron and Ryland of Three-Rivers, Ysix thought to us. I knew it for a command, not a request. These young ones have suffered enough and they need to learn to hunt for themselves. Ysix will teach them.\n\nRyland headed back to the settlement with his people. I stayed close to Bower in case he needed help. His nose had stopped bleeding at last\u2014meaning it had something to do with his trying to communicate with the dragons. Just now, he seemed dazed, but he smiled at me and said, \"We still have to work with the dragons\u2014feeding them is a long way still from flying with them.\"\n\nI glanced at the eastern mountains. \"It is. And I worry we will not have time. The Iron Guard is still out there, and the king's army. We might have a few days, maybe a week at most to train before they get here.\"\n\nBower nodded. \"I've been thinking on that. And I think we need to ask Ysix and the Crimson Reds if they could keep an eye on the king's army\u2014but also maybe they can divert them away from this settlement.\"\n\nIt took most of the night to work out a plan that Ysix\u2014and the Three-Rivers clan\u2014would both approve. Ysix had been busy with the black dragons, teaching them how to fish in the rivers and integrating them into her brood. The red dragons still kept to themselves, but Ysix spoke to them in dragon, and seemed to get some agreement\u2014they hated the Iron Guard it seemed and approved of any plan to harass them. The Three-River clan also finally agreed to set scouts out to watch any path that allowed approach to their settlement\u2014they feared losing the lives of more scouts, but with orders to be alert and to leave if any of the king's men were spotted, that seemed to reassure everyone.\n\nThe red dragons flew off that night to scout out the king's army\u2014they would be able to spot them in the darkness or the daylight, for they could smell the army and the Iron Guard as well. Ysix told them not to attack, just to draw the army away from the settlement\u2014lure them into heading north instead of west. The Three-River clan scouts left at first light. It was a good plan and would gain us a little time to train.\n\nI used some of that time for a bath and a hot meal, and to clean my green leather tunic and polish my boots. Bower spent his time\u2014after being forced into at least some clean clothes by the women of the settlement\u2014with the Three-Rivers clan working to make dragon saddles. I had never seen such a thing, but Bower insisted he had seen detailed drawings in books of the harness once used by the Dragon Riders of Torvald.\n\nThe saddles at least made sense to me in that no one here had grown up riding dragons. I knew how to cling to scales or spines or horns, but these riders knew nothing. The saddle would help them not fall to their deaths. It took hours for Bower to finally approve all the harness straps, for he worked hard to make certain the leather would be wide enough to hold but would not alarm the dragons or harm them.\n\nOver the morning meal in the great hall\u2014warm bread and slabs of roasted goat\u2014Ryland announced to the Three-Rivers clan that it was time to begin training their dragons.\n\nBower, for all of his wise words yesterday, looked only too bright-eyed and eager to follow Ryland now, but I stood, pushing back my plate and told them all, \"That is not how it is done. There is no training of a dragon as you would a horse or a mountain pony. A dragon is a partner\u2014a friend. A dragon will choose who to respect and who to ignore. That means not every dragon and every person will fit together, just as not every person will be your friend.\"\n\nBower frowned, Ryland tugged at the braids in his beard, but other heads began to nod as if I must know everything about dragons. Of course, all I had known was what I'd learned growing up with the dragons of the Western Isles. Jaydra and I had simply bonded with each other. I could still recall that she had made the first move to become my friend. None of the other dragons in her clutch chose to be with me.\n\nJaydra sent me warm thoughts of approval of my words, and Bower stood and said, \"Saffron is right. Everything written about the Dragon Riders of old speaks of how the dragon must choose its riders. In the old days, a dragon might choose two riders, but if your dragons will choose at least one of you that is the first step to a deep bond between the Three-Rivers clan and your dragons.\"\n\nRyland stood now, too, and said, \"I will be the first. Let whichever dragon thinks they can handle me choose me!\"\n\nSince only humans were here, I decided he was speaking more for the benefit of his clan. But his words were good, and he spread his hands wide and said, \"Remember, we do this to heal an ancient wound between our species. And we do this to put an end to the evil of Torvald!\"\n\nI noticed Bower wince at those words and I nudged him with my elbow. \"It is the evil of my family they are being asked to battle, not your city.\"\n\nHe nodded and shrugged.\n\nRyland picked up his dragon saddle, fashioned last night, and strode from the building. Bower and I followed, as did most of the Three-Rivers clan. A few hung back\u2014some of the old men and the warriors who were shaking their heads and muttering about the folly of trusting dragons. Women with young children stayed in the settlement, but many of the boys and girls followed us, along with other warriors and women who now wore the leather strips of armor of the Three-Rivers clan. We had with us perhaps thirty people, half of them carrying dragon harness, and I wondered who would be chosen by the dragons and who would be left behind.\n\nYsix had taken all the dragons\u2014except the reds that were out hunting the king's army\u2014to the lake to feed this morning. The black dragons' bellies stuck out, full from their feasting. But they all became alert as the people of the settlement stepped into the meadow.\n\nAt first the black dragons hung back, staying near Ysix, but she nudged them forward and slowly they approached, a few tasting the air with their long, forked tongues. Their eyes seemed to change color and a few of them gave snuffling breaths of smoke.\n\nIt is like a call you cannot ignore, Jaydra whispered in my mind.\n\nOne black dragon pushed the others out of its way.\n\nIt eased hesitantly toward Ryland, and then stopped, lowering its snub nose to sniff the man's red hair and beard. It didn't move, but held its face beside his, gazing directly into his eyes with its own. To his credit, Ryland stood stock still and stared back into the dragon's eyes. A deep, rattling hiss rose from the black dragon.\n\nIt was purring.\n\nRyland raised a broad, battle scarred hand and patted the dragon's nose. \"You are\u2026uh\u2026 a good boy.\" The dragon butted at Ryland's hand as if to ask for more attention. A grin spread over Ryland's face.\n\n\"Girl,\" I corrected. \"She is a good girl.\"\n\nRyland beamed ever wider. \"Ah, then a beautiful dragon. A strong, fearless beauty!\"\n\nIn answer to these compliments, the dragon gave another rattling purr and lowered its head still further. Ryland's chest puffed out at the sight of a dragon actually enjoying his touch.\n\n\"Ryland, the saddle,\" Bower said and nodded to where Ryland had left his dragon harness of leather and cloth.\n\nRyland held up the saddle to the dragon so she could see and inspect it. Ryland had also wisely pocketed some of the roast goat, and he slipped a little to the dragon now, leaving her pleased enough with him that she sat waiting patiently.\n\nTogether, Ryland and Bower slowly put the saddle on the black dragon. She hissed at Bower, but Ysix gave a sharp, warning whistle and the black dragon lowered her head and huffed out a breath.\n\nBower, his voice low and soft, showed Ryland and the others how to fasten the saddle, adjusting it to allow for the dragon's size, and any spines. To fasten the harness straps, Ryland had to crawl under the dragon. I saw his face pale, but he took a breath and managed to accomplish the task. Glancing around, I saw that Ryland was gaining new respect from his people.\n\nSo was Bower.\n\nWhile Ryland seemed aware of his dragon and her moods, Bower did not. He kept talking, explaining things, as if he was lecturing Jaydra.\n\n\"And then these tie here and here, leaving space for lances, bows and spears. That was how it was done in every drawing I've ever seen of the harness of the Dragon Riders of old. Really, we should have a helmet as well and armor, and another saddle and harness a little further back, for a second rider to act as your Protector.\"\n\n\"Protector?\" Ryland almost laughed. \"Why would I need a protector? I am on a dragon.\"\n\nBower straightened and blinked twice. \"That is a very good point. But there always used to be two riders on every dragon. One was called a Protector, who used the weapons, and the other a Navigator, who could read maps and communicate with other riders. Maybe that was just a tradition of the academy, but I wonder if there was a need for it that evolved such a system?\" He tapped his chin and I could see he was getting lost in ideas.\n\nJumping in, I asked Ryland, \"Is there any other rider your dragon wishes to choose?\"\n\nRyland slapped a thick hand on the dragon's neck and spoke to her, which I took as a good sign. \"You can if you want, you know.\" His dragon stared at him and would not even look at anyone else. Ryland's grin widened. \"We have chosen each other. That is enough for us, I think.\"\n\nBower nodded and glanced at those gathered. \"Who wants to go next?\"\n\nA forest of hands rose as everyone clamored for the opportunity to have a dragon as a friend. We faced a busy morning of dragons choosing their riders and their friends.\n\nStepping closer to me, Bower watched the scene as dragons either snubbed someone trying to touch them or turned and singled a person from the crowed. A few dragons were happy to pick out two riders, but most would take one only. Bower let out a breath. \"Well, we have harnessed dragons\u2014now we just have to see if any of these riders can stay in the saddle.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Riding Dragons",
                "text": "\"Bank right! Right!\" Saffron screamed the words from her perch just ahead of me on Jaydra.\n\nWe had allowed some of the recruits to fly ahead of us so Saffron could keep an eye on them, but she seemed to be spending all of her time yelling at the Three-Rivers clan riders.\n\nAhead of us, three black dragons and their riders wove in and out of the clouds, narrowly avoiding each other. They were, quite frankly, all over the sky. We hadn't had any collisions yet, thanks to Saffron yelling at the riders and Ysix roaring at the black dragons. I rather thought it looked as if we were herding a flock of starlings, if starlings were clumsy, prone to sudden changes of direction and about the size of small houses.\n\nThe choosing had gone smoothly. Only one person had gotten tangled in their dragon's harness and no one had been bitten. But when it came time to mount and fly, four riders had fallen off at once, before the dragon was barely in the air. And with a dozen dragons and riders to train, we split the new riders and their dragons into groups of three. Two of the dragons narrowly missed each other again and I winced.\n\nSaffron covered her eyes and then shouted to me, \"And you want them to be able to scout out the enemy? To even attack and fight and somehow stay in the sky?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" I started to say when one of the black dragons came hurtling toward us. I shouted out Saffron's name, but Jaydra was already turning and diving low.\n\nThe black dragon coming at us gave an alarmed squawk and turned as well. We missed a collision by little more than an arm's reach. Jaydra dove down into the forest below.\n\nShe skimmed the surface of the river and its white water and rocks, then rose again into the air. Wind tore at my hair and cut into my skin, but I couldn't help grinning.\n\nYsix roared, and I looked back to see her trying to keep the three black dragons following her and not copying Jaydra's reckless dive.\n\nWe'd lose half the riders to the water!\n\nI had to smile as Jaydra lazily soared back to the others, but my grin faded as I wondered if Saffron was right. We had so little time to train\u2014the king's army was far too close, the Iron Guard far too fierce and we hadn't even started on how to fight from the back of a dragon.\n\nMorosely, I watched the black dragons as they flew, falling, then bouncing back up, drunkenly sliding to one side and then the other, stalling and falling again, and almost flipping upside down.\n\nWhere is the graceful, deadly dragon of old?\n\nI tried to remember the old stories about Dragon Riders flying across the sky and bringing order to the land and terror to the enemy, perfectly in time with each other. Were these dragons trying to do too many things at once? Was it the riders who were throwing the dragons off balance?\n\nMountain dragons can't fly straight, Jaydra thought to me, and I knew Saffron had heard as well for her shoulders shook as if she was laughing at what Jaydra had thought.\n\nShe was right.\n\nThe black dragons I had seen flying on their own looked more like serpents weaving through the air, and nothing like birds. The dragons of the Western Isles and the huge Crimson Reds flew steady and level\u2014more like a bird. But these blacks jerked and flinched this way and like they had bugs under their scales. And then I realized the truth of that.\n\n\"Of course!\" I shouted. \"Mountain dragons can't fly straight!\"\n\nSaffron glanced back at me. \"The dragons will hear you and lose heart. I know it's funny, but it's not their fault their riders are\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no\u2026 they literally cannot fly straight. They have to twist in the air like a leaf on the wind.\" I wiggled a hand in the air. \"We're trying to teach them how to fly like Jaydra\u2026like Ysix. But these dragons are built different. They're smaller. Thinner.\"\n\nSaffron's mouth went wide and her eyes glittered. \"Of course! That's why the reds swoop and glide. They have much larger wing size.\"\n\n\"And why the Western Isle dragons like Jaydra must beat their wings to move faster. Every dragon species is different. The old books of the Dragon Riders of Torvald that my father managed to save for me were from a time when the Dragon Academy really only had Middle Kingdom dragons. They didn't have these black dragons\u2014or the Western Isle dragons.\"\n\nSaffron urged Jaydra closer to the black dragons. \"Ryland! Riders! We're going to try something new!\" She shouted and waved at them. \"We want you to hold on tight and let your dragons fly as they wish.\"\n\nRyland frowned and shouted back, \"Are we not supposed to control our dragons? Fly them as we wish?\"\n\nSaffron shook her head.\n\nFrom the stiff set of Ryland's shoulders and the dark expression on his face, I could tell he thought Saffron was being stupid, so I called out, \"Your dragons want to twist and turn in the air. They have to.\" A lump rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back and shouted, \"I had it wrong. We can't bring the old academy back. But we can do something new. We're going to fly like we fly\u2014not the way that Dragon Riders once did!\"\n\nRyland nodded as if this made sense to him.\n\n\"When you're ready,\" Saffron called out. \"I'm going to tell Ysix to tell your dragons to just fly naturally.\" She bowed her head.\n\nYsix gave an answering roar, followed by clicks and whirrs as she spoke to all the black dragons, even the ones in the meadow still. I glanced down and sat the riders there jumping into their saddles. Their dragons spread their wings.\n\nWith a final shriek, Ysix gave the command.\n\nThe black dragons on the ground rose up into the air, and the three flying with us broke away from the tight formation we had been trying to corral them into. In just moments, they became a cloud, twisting together, spinning and tumbling. I watched in amazement as they lost almost all their ungainliness and became an undulating wave.\n\nOf course, the question was could their riders stay put and not become ill from all this turmoil.\n\nIn answer, one rider shouted as the black dragons spiraled past, all the dragons from the ground now joining the others. The dragons were moving too fast for me to tell whether it was a scream of joy or a shout of terror.\n\n\"At least none of them have fainted yet,\" Saffron called.\n\nLeaning forward, she urged Jaydra to chase after the black dragons, indulging in the natural dragon sport of chasing each other raucously across the sky.\n\nThe black dragon in the lead was, rather unsurprisingly, Ryland's. At times, Ryland stood up entirely from his saddle, holding onto his dragon's horns as she whirled across the sky.\n\n\"Ryland, would you be able to fight?\" The wind whipped my words away, for now we were flying almost as fast as the black dragons.\n\nGrinning manically as he held on, Ryland began to shift his way, as if to get the dragon beneath him to change direction. For the most part, it did.\n\nSaffron laughed and shouted, \"It looks like how they try to ride them on the ground\u2014hang on for dear life!\"\n\nThat was true. It looked almost exactly like how Ryland had tried to ride the chained dragon in their sport, only this time the human and the dragon were working together.\n\nWith a sudden snarl, Jaydra powered herself forward on strong wing beats, almost catching up to the Ryland's mountain dragon. I could feel Jaydra's excitement, thrumming up through her body and into mine.\n\n\"You'll never catch us,\" Ryland shouted, waving one gauntleted hand at us before hunkering down and allowing her to spin even faster.\n\nSaffron gave a harsh yell, and I could feel her encouraging Jaydra with her thoughts to catch up to Ryland. Jaydra pushed herself faster, and Ryland pushed his dragon faster still. I couldn't believe how fast these mountain dragons were\u2014I had thought that Jaydra was the fastest thing in the sky.\n\nJaydra let out a rumble of delight as she caught up with Ryland's dragon.\n\nBehind us, Ysix crowed with pleasure. Everywhere I looked, I saw dragons. Ysix, her brood now in the sky, the dark mountain dragons\u2014it looked a monumental game of chase-tail, scorching the sky with smoke and calls.\n\nFor a moment, everything felt right. I had never known such perfect joy as that moment, with the sky covered with the sound and sight of playing dragons.\n\nAnd I knew this was how the world was meant to be.\n\nThis was what I had to bring back to the Middle Kingdom\u2014or die trying to do so.\n\nSaffron was acting strangely. She had complained of a headache and sought her bed early this night, telling me it had been a long, hard day. But Saffron never before had complained and the only time I had seen her take to her bed was when she was more than half dead from an injury. So what was wrong?\n\nI didn't actually have that much experience when it came to girls\u2014well, when it came to anyone my age, apart from Vic Cassus who I'd thought a friend and who had betrayed me to the king. Which meant I didn't know him quite so well either. But I was certain something was bothering Saffron. This just wasn't like her.\n\nAnd Jaydra wasn't talking to me about Saffron.\n\nSitting on the ledge of rock that held the settlement's main hall, I listened to the songs being sung inside. It seemed the Three-Rivers clan was having to come up with entirely new songs about riding dragons and taming dragons.\n\nAlthough we were not really taming them.\n\nIf anything, it was more the other way around, with Ysix and the dragons teaching us how to treat them and work with them. It was all about equal respect.\n\nThe Three-Rivers clan still had a long way to go, but at least we had finally mastered some basics. There was no time to waste if Ryland's scouts and the Crimson Reds were to be believed.\n\nI watched the shadowed forms of the dragons who had settled on the mountainside above the settlement. Ysix gave a few rumbles. The reds had returned and Ysix had learned from them that the king's army and the Iron Guard had camped on the far side of the mountains and seemed to be waiting\u2014for orders perhaps. No one knew.\n\nThere was still no sign of White-eye and the other dragons that had flown away with her. From what little I had gleaned from the inscrutable Ysix, we were very unlikely to see her again.\n\nThe black dragons who had stayed shunned their old cavern, but they did like to den inside the caves on the mountain. I was a little surprised, though, that Ryland had not brought his dragon into the settlement\u2014the two seemed as attached as were Jaydra and Saffron.\n\nIt was also surprising that Saffron wasn't out here with me and with Jaydra, who lounged in the meadow just outside the settlement. Like the other Western Isle dragons, Jaydra would have little to do with the Crimson Red dragons, which perched far from all other dragons.\n\nStaring up at the dark hillsides and the black sky, I found myself wondering why the reds had responded to my innate abilities.\n\nOf which I know nothing about!\n\nNot that long ago, I'd been an outcast from my own city, hunted by the king, accused of harboring knowledge of the old history. I'd been just about the lowest person in all of Torvald, and had thought of becoming a wandering scribe. Now, I really was a traitor to my king, for I had fought against him. Zenema had declared me to be a king\u2014and I had found a letter from my father, telling me I was actually a Flamma-Torvald, and the true heir to the throne.\n\nThe changes in my life had come so fast at times I felt I had lost control of everything.\n\nI wished that my father was still alive to guide me. Or even that I had had more time with the Hermit of the Western Isles. Or that I had someone who could tell me what to do next.\n\nBower needs no one to command him. Kings take counsel, not orders!\n\nThe shock of Jaydra's thoughts rocked me, almost knocking me off the rocky ledge. I stared out into the meadow and could just make out her dark shape and the glow of starlight off her scales.\n\nI had heard her before, but we did not have the same natural connection Saffron had with her. I could really only communicate with a dragon with all my attention and willpower.\n\nA few moments later, Jaydra rose and padded across the meadow, slipping into the settlement as silently as a cat. It was amazing how quiet she could be. She settled down next to me and her thoughts tickled my mind almost like a dream voice.\n\nBower has no real magic. No dragon tricks.\n\nThanks! I thought a little huffily. But I knew what she meant.\n\nI was not like Saffron. She could wield the Maddox magic, the same power Enric used. I had seen her do incredible things, even thwarting Enric's terrible plan to try and burn the city of Torvald just to eliminate the rebels he saw as a threat.\n\nWe had stopped that plan and left Torvald unable to be walled in again. If Enric tried his plan again, the people could at least escape. But Enric still had his Iron Guard.\n\nSaffron cannot control magic, Jaydra thought to me.\n\nSurprised to hear these words from Jaydra's mind, I turned to face her and asked, \"But why are you telling me that? And isn't this a lot of effort for you to communicate with me? I'm not bound to you.\"\n\nBower is bound, Jaydra replied. I thought she sounded a little smug about it, as well. King magic holds all dragons as does the queen's magic. All are part of dragons and part of humans. All are one.\n\nFrowning, I tried to understand what Jaydra was trying to tell me. \"You mean the Torvald magic is the same as what a queen dragon has? The ability to communicate mentally with everything?\"\n\nJaydra cocked her head to one side, a curiously bird-like gesture as if she were asking me to tell her the answer.\n\nI didn't know what she wanted me to say. What might be right before my eyes that I could not see? Tired as I was from the day, worried about how we were going to win against Enric, as well as worried about Saffron, I gave a sigh and then asked Jaydra, \"Do you know what's wrong with Saffron\u2014other than that we have to face Enric, and it was a hard day, and tomorrow is another hard day. I mean, I know it's a lot\u2014but Saffron's never flinched from anything difficult.\"\n\nSaffron is sad that Jaydra keeps a secret. But not really a secret, it is a riddle, Jaydra thought to me.\n\n\"I'm good with puzzles. Maybe I can help work it out?\"\n\nHooting calls drifted down from where the dragons perched. Looking over, I could see dark shapes moving against the purpling sky. What were the dragons saying to each other? Why could I only understand them sometimes?\n\nI wanted to curse my past. I slumped down and rubbed my arms, wishing I had thought to wear a heavy cloak outside. If knowledge in Torvald hadn't been so hard to come by, I might have already mastered the powers of the Flamma-Torvalds and be able to communicate with all dragons by now.\n\nJaydra moved closer as if to warm me with her body. That is the riddle, Bower. If it is magic for human and dragon to share a mind, is it magic that also breaks our ties? Or is it a lack of magic? And if there is a place where Jaydra and Saffron are one thing in our hearts and minds, is there also a place where Saffron and Enric are one?\n\nHer thoughts chilled my heart. I shivered, feeling a buzz in the air between us as Jaydra huffed out a sooty breath. Jaydra saw Enric speak to Saffron through his metal men. Jaydra cannot protect Saffron from such magic. And now Jaydra feels a shadow looming over Saffron\u2014Jaydra does not know how to defeat shadows.\n\nIt was starting to make sense. \"You're sensing Enric. Maybe that's what his troops are waiting for\u2014him to come. He must be using\u2026what, a blood connection with Saffron to\u2026to do what? Enchant her? Curse her? But Jaydra, Saffron's magic works better when you help her.\"\n\nJaydra does not know how to help now.\n\nNow. The word echoed in my mind. Suddenly worried about Saffron, I stood and headed for the hut given to her for sleeping.\n\nSaffron's hut stood next to mine. Technically, it was the same one where Saffron had been held behind a wall of spears. But the spears were gone and the ground had been smoothed.\n\nEven so, I kept trying to shake off a dark feeling that squeezed my heart as I approached the hut.\n\nThe canvas door glowed softly from the fire inside the small metal box the Three-River clan used for heating. The tang of wood smoke hung in the air.\n\nI knocked on the wooden frame of the door and then pushed the canvas open. The room wasn't that big, with only a bed made of wool blankets stacked on the floor, a couple of stools and a small table.\n\nSaffron lay wrapped up in the blankets, her back to the door. She seemed asleep, her breaths even and deep. I sat down on one of the wooden stools and watched her, warming my hands against the small metal box that sat in the center of the room.\n\nHad I started to worry about Saffron just because Jaydra was worried? Were we seeing too much in Saffron's connection to the Maddox clan?\n\nSurely what she does has to be more important than her blood ties?\n\nBut wasn't it my blood ties that had led me to think myself king? And Saffron's connection to Enric had led him to want to keep her with him\u2014and he seemed to want her back, enough so that he had not sent his Iron Guard to destroy this settlement.\n\nNot yet at least.\n\nHe wants her\u2014but why?\n\nWas it simply a family thing?\n\nI rejected the idea almost as soon as I thought it. Enric Maddox didn't know anything about family, despite some of the pretty speeches that he'd given over the decades about the Middle Kingdom being one happy family. The king knew only one thing\u2014how to rule with fear.\n\nMaybe he doesn't want her, but needs her for something?\n\nThat seemed to make more sense to me.\n\nEnric must need Saffron in order to do something\u2014to reach the dragons maybe? No, that didn't fit with what I knew of Enric, a man who hated dragons and did his best to make them seem a dangerous creature of myth. Enric would destroy any dragon as powerful as Ysix or Zenema.\n\nSaffron murmured something.\n\nStanding, I moved to her side and touched her shoulder. \"Saffron?\" I whispered.\n\nShe turned from me, flinging herself onto her back. She shoved the blankets down and then clutched at them. I touched her shoulder again. \"Saffron, it's only a dream.\"\n\nSweat slicked her face and she turned her head from one side to the next. I started to fear she was in the grip of some terrible fever.\n\nI put a hand to her forehead to see if her skin was hot or cold. As soon I touched my skin to hers, a charge sizzled up my hand and through me. I pulled back but my heart thudded and my hair stood on end as if a thunderstorm was approaching.\n\n\"Get away from me,\" she muttered, her words slurred. She lifted her hands as if trying to fight off someone or something.\n\nI couldn't let her struggle like this\u2014I had to wake her.\n\nPutting both my hands on her shoulders, I started to shake her, but as soon as I took hold of her, pain shot up my arms and into my chest. I tried to gulp down a breath but couldn't. I couldn't move. It was as if I was being ripped from my body and taken elsewhere.\n\nFor a moment, I managed to close my eyes.\n\nWhen I opened them again, I could see nothing but darkness. However, I was still holding onto Saffron's shoulders. But instead of lying on her blankets, she was standing, as was I. Hadn't I just been leaning over her?\n\nShe put her hand on my wrist and asked, her voice taut and anxious, \"How is it that you are here, Bower?\"\n\n\"Where are we?\" I tightened my grip on her shoulders, afraid if I let go I would lose her in the darkness around us.\n\n\"I don't know! I think maybe I'm still asleep. This\u2026I feel as if I've been here before in dreams. Bad dreams.\" She pulled away, but she kept her hand wrapped tightly around my wrist. She was glancing around, looking left and right as I had seen her move as she lay on her blankets in the hut.\n\n\"But I didn't fall asleep. I just touched you.\"\n\nSaffron's hand gripped my wrist even tighter. \"Somehow I pulled you into this. Or maybe the darkness did.\"\n\nIt was dark\u2014darker than the deepest part of a night without moon or stars.\n\nSaffron turned and looked at me. \"Am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming I'm here?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"You were sleeping. But I think this\u2026it's because we're somehow connected through your magic and through Jaydra and the other dragons.\"\n\nSaffron turned suddenly and said, \"Something else is here.\"\n\nI felt it as well. The darkness itself seemed to changed temperature, with a chill that crept into it. I could see nothing, but a feeling swept through me as if something had gone terribly wrong in Saffron's dream.\n\n\"Wh-what is it?\" Saffron said, her teeth chattering and her hands shaking now.\n\nI moved closer to her, chilled as well, wishing I had a fire. Wasn't wishing supposed to change a dream?\n\nA sound like the hissing of boiling lifted and seemed to be getting closer to us.\n\n\"Bower?\" Saffron stepped closer to me. She seemed as unable as I was to control this dream. Or had we been swept somewhere by a dark magic? Closing my eyes, I tried to will us back to reality, but when I opened my eyes again I still stood next to Saffron in the darkness. I wondered if letting go of her would free me, but I could not leave her here.\n\nThe hissing seemed to surround us. Something like a wind or like invisible hands seemed to be pulling on my clothes. My hair whipped about as if a storm was riding.\n\nAnd then a mocking voice lifted from the darkness, so loud I winced and covered my ears with one hand. \"Saffron, child.\"\n\nEven though the voice seemed to have no body, I recognized Enric's harsh tones. In the darkness, a light started to glow and slowly spread out into the king's face, huge and distorted. He looked as he always had to me\u2014or almost always\u2014his skin smooth, his dark hair long and shining. But his eyes seemed unfocused and his glance darted about as if he could not quite see us.\n\n\"Saffron, come home.\" His stare kept searching the room.\n\nLeaning close to Saffron, I whispered, \"He can't see us.\"\n\nBut as soon as I spoke, his stare flickered toward us. \"Ah, but I can hear you. And I know you reach for me. Saffron, I can give you so much more than you have ever dreamed of.\"\n\nBeside me, Saffron tried to pull away from me as she turned to flee from that distorted, huge face.\n\n\"Saffron, don't let go!\" I whispered to her.\n\nEnric's face expanded, growing so large it seemed to fill the space around us. \"Reach out, Saffron. Join your mind to mine.\"\n\n\"No!\" Saffron wailed, wrenching her hand free and turning to flee Enric.\n\nIn an instant, I felt the presence in the darkness seem to focus on us.\n\n\"Ah, there you are, Saffron. And the boy who would steal my throne.\"\n\nThe king's stare focused on us, and waves of malevolent hate poured over me, as hot as any furnace. I thought it to be more like the fires of Torvald when they had burned so many books, and nothing like the clean warmth that came from the belly of a dragon against your back.\n\nSaffron kept shouting at the king that she would never join him. I grabbed her hand and held tight. When we had been together, we had always been stronger.\n\nEnric's face wavered but his voice swept over us, booming and painfully loud. \"You must, Saffron. You will be queen. You will rule Torvald at my side. All you need to do is throw aside this false king. What does he know of family, Saffron? You are a Maddox and meant to rule.\"\n\n\"Saffron!\" I shouted, my voice small compared to Enric's.\n\nThe king's voice rose like a wave that would throw us all away. \"Look at him. Do you think he can rule? Admit it. You know he is weak. He is a fool. He is not fit to wear the crown.\"\n\nSaffron fell to her knees. \"I can't fight it. I'm sorry, Bower, I can't hold him out for much longer.\"\n\nI clung to her hand. I didn't want to lose her to the darkness, to Enric's magic. I feared she might end up trapped in this darkness forever while in the mountain hut her body starved away to nothing. I knew Enric was trying to bend her to his will. But Enric hadn't been able to see her\u2014or us\u2014at first.\n\nThat meant he hadn't created this darkness\u2014he was just using it. It had to be some part of Saffron's mind\u2014for it was her dream. Her nightmare. And that meant Jaydra should be able to reach into this place.\n\nI knelt down next to Saffron. \"Find Jaydra! Find your sister.\"\n\nSaffron glanced at me, her tear-streaked face lighting with a glimmer of hope.\n\nI held her hand even tighter. \"You are connected with Jaydra. Reach out for her.\"\n\n\"You are Saffron of the ancient clan of Maddox, born of storm and fury. You have no other kin than me.\" Enric's voice boomed and his anger battered at me like an invisible hand.\n\n\"Jaydra,\" Saffron whispered, her voice breaking.\n\nEnric's stare turned to me. \"You cannot come between me and what is mine!\"\n\n\"She's not yours,\" I called out, but I could feel Saffron being tugged from my grip. I clung to her..\n\nLooking up, Saffron at last faced Enric. Her hands began to glow and I could see she was pushing back at Enric with her magic. Turning to me, Saffron said, \"Bower, I need your help. Help me call Jaydra.\"\n\nLifting my head, holding tight to Saffron's hand, I closed my eyes and threw the entire weight of his mind against him.\n\nJaydra!\n\nI thought the word, but it seemed to echo as if I had spoken it.\n\nEnric roared, \"Mine! The girl is mine.\"\n\nWind and shards that felt like ice battered me. My hand started to slip from Saffron's.\n\nBut something inside me sparked bright.\n\nIt was what had happened when we had battled the Iron Guard. A knot of emotions like joy and hunger and excitement surged through me. I felt as if I were a dragon.\n\nSuddenly, I knew the shape of Jaydra's mind, of every dragon's mind. They hovered so close I felt I could just reach out to touch them, to pull them close.\n\nBut my grip slipped away from Saffron's hand.\n\nEyes opening, I cried out for her. I could see her\u2014almost. But it seemed as if we were spiraling into an eternity of darkness.\n\nAnd then a red flame blossomed into the dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Of Riders and Friends",
                "text": "The moment our hands broke apart, I felt Bower reach out with his mind to call Jaydra. She roared into the darkness, or a dream version of her did, dragon fire blazing and pushing back the blackness.\n\nI didn't know how Bower had done it.\n\nShe blasted the wavering image of Enric with fiery breaths, and I wondered if he too would writhe in his bed as this terrible nightmare rolled through his mind.\n\nEnric's huge face lost its youthfulness. His hair receded, becoming mere wisps, his cheeks became sunken and his corpse-like face dwindled, shrinking under the onslaught of Jaydra's cleaning fire. As his image faded, his wavering voice called out, \"Too late, Saffron. I have seen where you are. My armies are coming!\"\n\nWith a flash of flame, Enric vanished. Jaydra swept me up in her claws, but where was Bower? I called out his name.\n\nHe answered at once, his voice weak, \"Here\u2026here.\" He was locked in Jaydra's other front claw. Now the challenge was to break free of this vision.\n\nJaydra spoke aloud to me as if she could always speak, \"Now. Both of you. Too dark place for human or dragon.\"\n\nIn the next moment, I was staring up at the ceiling of my hut. Bower sat next to me. I pulled in a shaking breath. My blankets had been tumbled and sweat slicked my back and face. Glancing around, I couldn't see Jaydra, but the hut creaked and I knew she had wrapped herself around the structure. She sent me warm but exhausted thoughts, as if bursting into my dream\u2014that horrible dream\u2014had taken a great deal from her.\n\nBower ran a hand over his face. \"That was\u2026terrible.\"\n\nI agreed. My head was pounding with the most vicious headache I had ever experienced. Rubbing my temples, I struggled to sit up. I noticed Bower did not try to help me and I didn't blame him. Somehow I had pulled him into that vision, but if I had not I wasn't certain I would have been able to free myself. \"I\u2026I didn't know Enric could do that.\" I rubbed my arms. I was still chilled. \"If I had known the king would be able to reach through to me\u2026he knows where we are. He said so. Perhaps I should have flown off with Jaydra. At least then I wouldn't be a danger to anyone.\"\n\n\"Don't apologize.\" Bower groaned, stretched and rubbed the back of his neck. \"I am not even sure Enric knew what he was doing. Remember how at the start he couldn't see us? He might be just learning new magical skills. And we are stronger with you.\"\n\n\"Our enemy is growing stronger as well.\"\n\n\"Well, this might not be such bad tidings.\" Slowly, Bower stood. He sat down again on one of the two wooden stools, his shoulders slumped.\n\n\"Bower, Enric reached into my mind. How can I ever sleep again? And you should see how you look right now, with dark circles under your eyes and your face is\u2026well, it's probably whiter than mine. But\u2026but\u2026well, thank you. For saving me.\"\n\nBower gave a tired smile. \"It was Jaydra, not me. But think, for a moment\u2014if the king is learning new tricks that means he doesn't know everything. He hasn't ever had to face anyone as powerful as you\u2014and he hasn't had to face dragons. He might be scared.\"\n\n\"Might be? I can't imagine Enric scared of anything. What if this happens again?\"\n\nBower shook his head. \"That we cannot allow. I think the answer is to use your connection to Jaydra. She can connect to your waking thoughts and your sleeping ones, too. I don't really know how it works, but I think you need to stay closer to Jaydra than ever before.\"\n\nThe thought of spending more time with Jaydra felt right\u2026it felt comforting to me. Would Jaydra feel that way? \"So you think the closer I am to the place where I and Jaydra are one, the further I move away from whatever connection I have with Enric?\"\n\nBower yawned and rubbed his face as if to reassure himself that he was actually really here, or as if to keep himself awake. \"It's a guess, but it is all we have. And now, I do not feel much like sleeping, but I'm exhausted.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\" I stood and grabbed two blankets. \"I also don't feel much like staying inside.\" Heading out, I led the way to where Jaydra lay. She cracked one eye open.\n\nI greeted her warmly with my thoughts, weary, but infinitely glad she was here. She pressed her long, graceful snout against mine, and huffed a warm breath into my shoulder.\n\nI was so scared, Jaydra. I didn't know how to reach you.\n\nJaydra did not know how to reach Saffron either! Enric had you both hidden.\n\nI handed a blanket to Bower and we both curled up under Jaydra's wing. I'm sorry, sister, for drawing away from you after you told me you had a secret. I should have respected that. It was wrong of me to be upset.\n\nThat matters not. Jaydra sensed something beyond the shadow of the king. Dangerous powers are loose.\n\nI nodded and glanced at Bower, who was clearly too exhausted to stay awake. He lay slumped against Jaydra's the side.\n\nCan you look after him? And me?\n\nJaydra closed her wing over us. Jaydra guards. Ysix guards, too, now. For all dragons know now to beware Enric.\n\nDespite my fears, I pulled my blanket tight and fell asleep listening to Jaydra's even breaths.\n\nBut I wondered how she had managed to tell all the dragons to guard us.\n\nI woke to the sound of birdsong and crept out from under Jaydra's wing. She was awake as well, and Bower was already up and heading back with two bowls of something steaming, and a bag of what smelled like fish slung over his shoulder. Jaydra sat up at the smell of fish. Bower handed me a bowl, offered Jaydra the fish and sat down next to her. The air had a chill to it and mists curled over the meadows. Cooking fires wove smoke into the air. Jaydra nosed the bag and soon was dragging fish out for her breakfast.\n\nStaring at the porridge Bower had brought me, I couldn't take my mind off of what had happened last night. Tired as I was, it felt as if we had turned a corner, faced a challenge and had won a small victory.\n\nI still couldn't take my mind off of what had happened.\n\nGlancing at the hut, I told Bower, \"I'm not sure I can ever go back in there.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I don't think we should. Enric may only have seen the inside of the hut. That may have been what he meant when he said he knew where you were.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"No. I think he's sending his army.\"\n\nBower nodded. He frowned and stirred his porridge with a wooden spoon. \"It was like a trap, that darkness. I think Enric had been waiting for a chance to try and catch you.\"\n\nI hunched a shoulder. \"I hate the idea of him just out there, waiting for me to make a mistake.\"\n\nBower ate some of his porridge. I couldn't eat a bite. And then Bower said, \"I think Enric needs your magic for some reason. Maybe his is running out, or maybe he wants to use your connection with dragons for something.\"\n\nI thought back to the dream. \"Did it seem to you that Enric wasn't really able to hide from us in that dream\u2014that vision? He made himself seem\u2026well, powerful, but I had a sense of something behind his anger. I felt fear coming from him\u2014and it wrapped around me and became my fear.\"\n\nLooking up from his bowl, Bower frowned and asked, \"What would scare an all-powerful sorcerer king who can enter sleeping minds and animate metal golems?\"\n\nTapping my spoon against the porridge bowl, I asked, \"What was that prophecy again\u2014the one you told me about? Enric talked about it once, but I forgot some of it. Something about old and young. He thought he could use it to secure even more power.\"\n\nBower put down his breakfast, cleared his throat, and began to recite in a clear, steady voice \"'Old and young will unite to rule the land from above. From the dragon's breath comes the return of the True King. It will be his to rebuild the glory of Torvald.' It's the Salamander Prophecy\u2014the rebels believe it foretells Enric's downfall.\"\n\n\"Maybe Enric is starting to believe you really are the True King,\" I said.\n\nBower frowned. \"He didn't seem too convinced of that last night.\"\n\n\"That was a trick, wasn't it? He was acting tougher than he really is. Think about how, at the last battle, when we faced the Iron Guard, you summoned the Crimson Reds and they fought the king's army. Enric must have seen that, or at least sensed it, through his Iron Guard. After all, if he can send his voice out through them, he probably uses them to see what they see. I think he's starting to fear the prophecy is about to come true.\"\n\nBower started to nod. \"That would explain why he created that dream-trap or whatever it was. He wanted to use his connection to you to find out what you know\u2014to learn how to defeat us.\" Bower stood up. \"We need to tell Ryland and get the Three-Rivers clan moving. The river and that narrow bridge won't protect them from whatever dark magic Enric has planned.\"\n\nI knew that much. Shaking my head as I stood, I told Bower, \"I can't see a settlement being able to pack up in just a few days. And there is so much training needed before our dragons and riders are ready to head into battle.\"\n\n\"We'll just have to train more on the move. And I think we need to throw a few problems in the way of the king's army. We'll see if Ysix and her brood can act as scouts\u2014and they can also set up a few traps for the army. Block paths by felling trees, and even start a few fires that will put the army in trouble. We need time, and that means we have to create it.\" He turned and headed for the center of the settlement, calling back to me, \"Get the warriors on their dragons. It's going to be a busy day.\"\n\nGlancing at Jaydra, we swapped amused stares. Bower had sounded for once like a true leader.\n\nI put a hand on Jaydra's neck and stared at the hut where I'd had that horrible dream.\n\nYou know what, Enric? You were wrong. Bower isn't weak. He may not be the tallest, or the broadest, or the best fighter, but he is strong in a way you will never understand.\n\nAnd I knew Bower was someone I would follow as my king.\n\nIt turned out I was right\u2014it took four days to get the Three-Rivers clan ready to leave. A day was spent with them arguing in council\u2014no one wanted to believe Enric's magic made him powerful enough to get across the rivers that protected the clan. Finally, Ryland simply had the children come in and he asked the elders if they wished to risk these lives. Two days more of packing up supplies and belongings and at last they were ready to depart.\n\nThe elders, the youngest, and those who could care for them, would leave for the mountains to the north.\n\n\"We have caverns there where the clan will hide,\" Ryland told me. \"And the paths are so steep and hard, the Iron Guard will not be able to reach them.\"\n\nI hoped he was right.\n\nWhile the Three-Rivers clan made ready to move to safety, Bower and I worked with their riders, but we soon found out it was best for the riders to simply learn from their dragons. Ysix was able to communicate a little with the Crimson Red dragons, and she got them to agree to go with the Three-Rivers clan to see them to safety. The reds actually knew the mountains even better than the clan.\n\nEverything seemed set.\n\nYsix had had her brood flying watch, but had seen nothing of the king's army or the Iron Guard. It was as if they had vanished. Some muttered this meant they had been beaten and retreated, but I kept thinking of how dragons could make themselves invisible. I feared the king might be able to do that with his forces.\n\nBower spoke about this to Ryland and it was agreed that all those able to ride a dragon would head to where the king's army had last been seen. Ysix and her brood would come with us. We hoped we would find nothing\u2014but at the very least this would be more good training for the new dragon riders.\n\nWith that in mind, we parted company with the Three-Rivers clan. Ryland's people cried to see him and the other riders take to the sky. A few pressed bread and fish on us to keep us provisioned. Jaydra, wearing a new dragon harness which seemed to please her a great deal, given that it was made of a dark-green leather and decorated with fringe, gave a roar and leapt into the air.\n\nWe had been flying most of the day, using the gorges and deep valleys of the mountains to help the new riders become better acquainted with their dragons, and their dragons with their riders. We needed much more training very quickly. We also searched for sign of the king's army.\n\nThat many men had to leave traces\u2014trees hacked down, or fires lit, or some sign upon the land. We had seen nothing, and my eyes were growing tired. The wind and sun had stung my cheeks, and I was about to suggest we land and make camp for the night when one of Ysix's brood made a strange, gargled noise.\n\n\"Verkaia?\" I shouted, calling to the youngest of Ysix's brood.\n\nJaydra threw us into a tight turn that made my stomach churn. It churned even more when I saw a black shape like a huge arrow sticking out of the dragon's side.\n\nSaffron called out the dragon's name again.\n\nFor a moment, my vision blurred as Verkaia's pain swept into Jaydra's thoughts and into mine. But I didn't need to see in order to feel what we had to do.\n\nFly to her, Jaydra, fly fast!\n\nMy heart was in agony as I held on tightly to Jaydra's new harness. Jaydra gave a roar and sped toward Verkaia's side. Reaching out with her claws, she snagged the huge arrow and pulled it from Verkaia. Verkaia gave a snarl. A smear of blood marred her scales, but she could still fly and soared upward now.\n\nWho did this? Who is attacking us? Jaydra's thoughts swirled with a mixture of panic and fury.\n\nHowever, she was not as furious as Ysix, who roared spit fire and then sent thundering thoughts that rocked me. Who dares attack Ysix's brood?\n\nThe sun seemed to darken for a moment as Ysix crossed in front of it, her rage sweeping out as dark as her shadow.\n\n\"Saffron?\" Bower shouted. \"Down there!\"\n\nI looked to where he was pointing. For a moment, I saw nothing\u2014but then the ground shimmered. Shapes began to emerge and soon became the forms of soldiers. Enric had indeed been using his magic to hide his troops, but now they were on the move, spilling out from under the cover of magic and trees. I glimpsed immense shapes, much taller and broader than a human, their armor dark with rust. It was the king's Iron Guard. They held huge spears and swords, and carried giant bows of blackened metal with long darts that they aimed skyward.\n\nOnly these were not darts.\n\n\"Harpoons!\" Bower shouted.\n\nHe was right. I had seen such metal harpoons used by the island villagers to hunt the huge fish of the ocean.\n\nOne of the Iron Guard hefted a metal harpoon and threw it toward one of the black dragons. The dragon turned and spun, but the harpoon hit, and then I saw the chain attached to the end of the harpoon. The dragon thrashed in the air and her rider only barely managed to hang onto her horns as the dragon spun about on the end of the chain.\n\n\"Jaydra, the chain,\" I shouted, pointing her in the direction of the thick iron chain that was attached from the end of the shaft.\n\nThe black dragon and the guard were engaged in a deadly tug of war, but more of the Iron Guard were raising their deadly bows.\n\nJaydra dove underneath Ysix, who was belching fire at the Iron Guard. Seizing the chain between her front claws, Jaydra wrenching it apart. The black dragon whistled her thanks and spun away as another wave of harpoons sped past us.\n\nDon't get hit! Please, den-sister, fly fast!\n\nI sent all of my strength to Jaydra as she dodged and dived, batting away one of the harpoons with her tail.\n\nCowards! Ysix's anger nearly split my skull. With a snarl and a roar, she tucked her wings close, falling into a dive.\n\n\"Ysix, no!\" I shouted, but too late.\n\nOne harpoon tore through Ysix's wing, another speared her tail. She slammed into the Iron Guard archers, scattering them and smashing two of them, their parts left to flop on the ground. Ysix lit the forest with her fire, sending every man in the king's arm running.\n\n\"Saffron, we have to help her,\" Bower shouted.\n\nI knew what he meant. We had fought the Iron Guard before but we only barely survived.\n\nGlancing around us, I saw the black dragons had become what seemed an angry, dark cloud. I knew they must be unsure what to do\u2014Ysix their den-mother was on the ground. They both must wish to flee and must want to help her.\n\nTurning, I called out to Bower, \"How many Iron Guard do you see?\"\n\nJaydra was already getting ready to launch into a dive that would take her to Ysix's side.\n\nLooking down, I could see the Iron Guard were converging on Ysix and trying to chain her to the ground.\n\n\"No more than fifteen,\" Bower called to me.\n\nReaching out to Jaydra, I showed her the idea I had in mind for our attack. She agreed with a fierce snarl, flicking her tail to change her direction just slightly.\n\nJaydra fell into a steep dive. Bower gave a yell, and Jaydra roared.\n\nRelease Ysix and fight like hunters!\n\nYsix managed to catch one Iron Guard in a jet of orange dragon fire. The force of the blaze knocked the guard down and it let go of the chain it had been holding. Its metal armor glowed red, but it was not melting. It rose again to its feet.\n\nWe would need a hotter fire than what a blue dragon such as Ysix could produce.\n\nJaydra swooped low to the ground and seized one of the largest boulders on the hilltop. She spread her wings and soared up again.\n\nA harpoon narrowly missed Jaydra, and I glanced back to see it skim past Bower. He ducked closer to Jaydra's spines.\n\nLooking down, I judged us to be high enough and called out to Jaydra, \"Now!\"\n\nShe released the boulder. It fell, smashing onto one of the Iron Guards holding Ysix and pinning the guard to the ground.\n\nBut Ysix was still tangled in chains.\n\nRyland came hurtling past, his dragon roaring. The dragon seized an Iron Guard in a grip that would have crushed any weaker creature. It swept the Iron Guard up into the air and then dropped it from high into the sky, sending it tumbling, its arms and legs flailing even as it crashed onto the sharp rocks below.\n\nFour other Iron Guards swarmed over onto Ysix, trying to hold her while the others raised their bows again.\n\nOne harpoon missed and Jaydra batted another aside with her tail, sending it slamming back at the Iron Guard.\n\n\"Bower, you've read the stories of the Dragon Riders. How do we fight this?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I never read of this happening. This is a new weapon\u2014we need a new attack!\"\n\nBefore I could ask what he meant, the air around us seemed to darken and chill. It was too much like the dream of the darkness. Cold seemed to seep under my skin and spread through me like a sickness.\n\n[ Below us the forest seemed to move\u2014but it wasn't the trees moving. No, Enric's army became visible, stepping out from under the trees, a force so vast I had no idea how we could ever defeat them ]\n\nBut there was something else here\u2014I could feel Enric here as one feels the ice of a freezing winter."
            },
            {
                "title": "Countering the King",
                "text": "\"It's an ambush!\" I shouted to Saffron.\n\nI had thought we had only fifteen Iron Guards and a few troops to deal with, but now I saw mounted horsemen and infantry in such large numbers that this had to be nearly the entire army of Torvald.\n\nHow had he hidden them? Or gotten them here so quickly? Or had they been on the march here ever since our first fight against the Iron Guard? He must have thought to crush us early, before we had a chance to prepare.\n\nI glanced around at the few dragons we had in the air, and then called out to Saffron, \"We have to pull back!\"\n\nShe didn't seem to hear me. But I could see from the direction of her gaze that she was staring at the army that was appearing over the land like a dark tide.\n\nNeither of us had ever seen a battle of this size, but at least I had read the accounts in a few books. I also knew what happened when a large force such as this met a small one, such as the one we had. \"We aren't ready for this battle. We lack the numbers we need.\"\n\nShe pointed below us. \"We have to free Ysix. Call in the other dragons. Any other dragon. All the other dragons.\"\n\nShe was right. Our only hope might be the havoc the immense Crimson Reds could cause.\n\nClosing my eyes, I took a deep breath and reached inside to the place where I could feel the tingle of Jaydra's thoughts.\n\nIn the next instant, I could feel Ysix's anger and pain. Jaydra's desperation filled my mind. I sensed the black dragons panic and their need to reach Ysix.\n\nAnd then I stretched out beyond these dragons.\n\nThe world suddenly seemed filled with dragons\u2014some curious about me, some insulted that I would disturb them, some excited about my contact. Breathing hard, my heart pounding, I sent my thoughts to all I could touch.\n\nWe call for your aid. Come protect your brothers and sisters, your winged family that makes their home in the skies.\n\nA pulse of power seemed to ripple out of me and shimmered on my skin like sunlight. The hairs on the back of my neck and the back of my arms rose. A tingling vibrated in my chest and head. This was like the feeling I'd had when Saffron had called on her magic\u2014but it was also different. For now I could feel a pulse that seemed to extend in every direction, as if I was hearing the heartbeat of every dragon in the word..\n\nThe sensation vanished in an instant as a single word floated up from the forest below us.\n\n\"Fools.\"\n\nEyes flying open, I stared down at the Iron Guard below, which now numbered at least a few hundred. They faced the sky, ominously still now.\n\nAnd I knew Enric was speaking through them.\n\nBut then Saffron turned, slapped my arm and pointed to a single black steed. The rider wore pale, gold armor. Even this far away, I could see the waxy sheen of his skin and the glint of a crown on his head.\n\nEnric.\n\nThe contrast between his glittering armor and his soldiers with their dark uniforms and grim, shadowed faces seemed as stark as the contrast between day and night.\n\nAn army of mounted knights surrounded Enric. Behind them rumbled stranger contraptions pulled by black horses.\n\nEnric raised one white hand and the world seemed to still. I could not even hear the whisper of the wind. There was only Enric's voice.\n\n\"Foolish children, you have disobeyed the rightful king for too long! I gave you, Saffron Maddox, the chance to reign at my side, to learn who and what you are, and all you do is cavort with dragons and traitors. May you all be cursed!\"\n\nAt the last word, a force seemed to erupt from the Iron Guard, like a wave made of pure air. It spun up, dust marking its path and hit like a gale. The blast left my limbs aching. Pain slammed into my chest. I clutched at it, unable to draw a breath.\n\nSaffron cried out and doubled over, and Jaydra for a moment tumbled free before she could right herself with a rumble. Around me, I saw the other dragons and riders tumbling as if rocked by a sudden wind.\n\nHow can we fight against this?\n\nI had no magic like Enric. I had no army of metal soldiers to do my bidding. My eyes stung and I wanted suddenly to turn and run. Enric was right\u2014I was nothing. I had\u2014\n\nBower has no magic. Bower has Saffron.\n\nJaydra's thoughts spun into me and seemed to be the slap of warmth I needed. I straightened. Jaydra was right. I had Saffron\u2014she had me. We had beaten back Enric's magic in the dream. Why not do the same here and now.\n\n\"Saffron, take my hand!\" I reached forward to touch Saffron's shoulder. Despite how my arms ached with the residue of Enric's curse, the connection I had with Saffron and Jaydra thrummed between us. Warmth bled into me, pushing back the chill that had seemed to seize my heart.\n\nI went beyond that\u2014reaching out again to every other dragon in the world.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Saffron mumbled. Jaydra began to steady in the air.\n\n\"It's our connection. I am connected to every dragon, and to you. And you have your magic. Use that! Use your magic through me\u2014through the dragons. Enric might have an army and his Iron Guard, but we have our dragons.\n\nSaffron stiffened, but then she held out her hands. Her power glittered on her fingertips and spread up to her wrist and then to her arms. It was a like the rising spark of a dragon's fire, growing hotter and building into an explosive power.\n\nThe ache left my arms, and the world seemed to warm.\n\nSaffron was doing this\u2014she was pushing back Enric's magic. But Jaydra gave a shriek and wobbled in the sky. I glanced down to see a blackened harpoon jutting from Jaydra's side. It had slipped between her scales and dark blood began to well. It was distraction enough.\n\n\"Jaydra!\" Saffron screamed the word. The glow of Saffron's power began to fade. I could feel panic pouring out of Saffron and into me through our connection\u2014and then Saffron's power erupted with a flash."
            },
            {
                "title": "Riders on the Storm",
                "text": "One instant I seemed to be connected with Bower\u2014and with more dragons than I knew existed. The next, my own side throbbed with an echo of Jaydra's pain. My heart seemed to stutter and then the magic I had been holding within me uncoiled and took over.\n\n\"Saffron!\"\n\nI heard Bower's yell as if from far away. I knew without looking that he was staring at me, eyes wide, but I had slipped to another place. It was as if I could see everything at once from high up in the clouds and also from very close. Black dragons tumbled and scrambled away. The army below seemed to shrink back. Even Enric's illusion of youth and power faded. Only the Iron Guard stood still and unmoved.\n\nI felt oddly detached from everything, and I watched myself as if it was someone else muttering the ancient, odd sounds that tumbled from my lips. My hands, raised in the air, moved of their own accord, making shapes I knew but did not know. Drawing power I did not recognize, but also knew within my heart would crush those who had harmed me.\n\nFor to harm Jaydra was to strike at me.\n\nMy magic would not stand for that.\n\nDen-sister, come back to us!\n\nJaydra's thoughts reached me, but only barely.\n\nFor now my head could only heed the power that filled my heart.\n\nLifting my head, I muttered in a tone of voice that seemed to be someone else's voice. I spoke the words that called down fury, that pulled the storm from the sky. I wanted the world to hurt as I hurt. I wanted the storm to rage as I raged.\n\nA boom split the sky, the answer to my words. Dark clouds boiled up, turning the day to night. Rain began to fall, and wind howled.\n\nAnd still it was not enough. My anger and rage wanted more. I was fury.\n\nSaffron?\n\n[ Jaydra once again tugged at my thoughts, but her worry could not sooth the pain in my soul. My power was unleashed\u2014and it would only be satisfied with the storm I was pulling ]\n\nJaydra lurched to one side. I could hear Bower shouting as if from miles away. And Ysix screamed in fury and agony that found a home within me.\n\nRain began to lash my face, fierce as I was. Storm clouds swirled and thickened. But it was still not enough for me.\n\n\"Saffron?\" Bower shouted.\n\nI couldn't seem to think what he wanted. Power raged through me, and Bower's clumsy attempts to reach me were less even than Enric's futile grabs for my attention.\n\nI was the storm now. I was cleansing rain and wind that would sweep away all who stood in my path.\n\nJaydra. Use tail. Use chain against the guards. Bower's words made no sense to me, but from miles up in the clouds I saw him unclip himself from his harness and crawl with a dagger in hand to where the black harpoon lodged in my side. Or was that in Jaydra? I could no longer tell.\n\nFrom far below, Enric bellowed through his Iron Guard, \"Surrender! Surrender your dragons!\" With a twist of my hand, I turned the rain to hail, sharp and biting. Everything seemed to be happening not to me, but to someone else, someone far away. I caught a hailstone almost as big as my thumb and stared at it, then tossed it to let it fall on its way to the army below.\n\nSpreading my arms wide, I spread myself into the wind\u2014into the storm.\n\nGlancing down, I saw Enric, surrounded by his knights, staring up at us, watching what he thought was our demise.\n\nWe'll see who is the fool now.\n\nThe hail grew, becoming as large as my fist at my command. They pummeled dragon, rider army, king and Iron Guard\u2014for my magic wanted all to hurt. All to feel my pain.\n\nI raged\u2014and the sky raged back at me.\n\nLightning streaked down from the black clouds I had called, scorching the ground, striking down one Iron Guard.\n\nI knew suddenly I would blast the world\u2014I was the lightning, I was the storm. I was\u2014\n\nSaffron!\n\nJaydra's urgent plea shook me from my magic\u2014I was suddenly in my body again and not in the clouds. Glancing around, I saw Jaydra was being pulled down to the ground by the Iron Guard and the chain attached to her side and the harpoon.\n\nShe suddenly whipped around in the air, pulling on the chain that held her. She lashed out with her tail, striking the Iron Guard, sending them toppling like dominoes. They released their grip and Jaydra soared back into the air, roaring, the heavy iron chain still dangling from her side. With a slash, Bower cut a gash and the harpoon dropped away, out of Jaydra's hide.\n\nJaydra's mind brushed against mine, as close as if she had never vanished.\n\nJaydra, where did you go?\n\nWhere did Jaydra go? Saffron's magic took Saffron away. Jaydra couldn't reach Saffron or Bower.\n\nHer fear drifted to me through her thoughts. I could see why, for the heaviest storm I had ever seen had fallen upon us.\n\nBower climbed back to his harness, his knife bloody, and yelled, \"You called the storm\u2014can you send it away?\"\n\nI shrugged and waved my hands. \"I don't know what I did. I just reacted to Jaydra being hurt. But where is Ysix?\"\n\nPointing down, I waved at the ice and hail now covering where I'd last seen Ysix.\n\nThe Iron Guard that had held her now seemed to hold noting but frozen chains. Icicles from frozen rain weighted down their arms from the wind whipping against them, slowing them even more than the ice. Even the dragons were having problems flying in these conditions.\n\nBut the ice was one thing the Iron Guard could not defeat. I saw that at once and shouted to Bower, \"We have to use the ice and your idea together!\"\n\n\"The tail whips?\" Bower asked.\n\n\"Tell the other dragons, Bower. Talk to them as their king!\" I gasped, the air biting cold in my lungs. I shivered and glanced around. The mountain dragons were handling the cold better than the island dragons, and I wondered how long even great Ysix of the warm Western Isles could last under this freezing sleet.\n\nOnce again the air thrummed as Bower reached out with the affinity he had with all dragons. His voice echoed in my head.\n\nUse the ice against our enemy!\n\nYsix's brood was the first to respond.\n\nThey caught the images Bower sent them with his thoughts and used his plan. Swooping down toward their enemy, they spun at the last moment and used the wind to power their turns as they slapped down the Iron Guards.\n\nThe air rang with the clang of metal and screeches of the dragons.\n\nThe Iron Guard, left slow by ice and cold, fell and skidded across the thickening ice on the ground. The Iron Guards could no longer find their mark with their harpoons in this storm, which was only growing worse.\n\nWe still had to reach Ysix, and I started to tell Bower that when a hard boom break the sky. A flash erupted from the king's strange metal carts, and I saw they had cannons like on the king's ships. Metal balls screamed through the air.\n\nA dragon's scream left me wincing, and I saw a black dragon falter and then plummet from the sky.\n\nMagic tingled in my chest once again and flared from my hands.\n\nSaffron-sister! Jaydra threw her mind toward mine, wrapping me in her awareness, trying to save me seemingly from even myself.\n\nAnother cannon boomed. I couldn't stop myself. I threw out my hands, my anger and magic bursting out. Words I didn't know flew out as well.\n\nWood cracked and splintered and one of the carts jerked into the air and collapsed.\n\n\"My magic worked,\" I gasped, staring at my hands. I'd done something\u2014something intentional for once.\n\n\"Do that again,\" Bower shouted.\n\nI did, striking out as the storm raged around us. Both Enric's army and the dragons were caught in the icy gale, but the storm seemed to seek out those on the ground. The winds seemed fiercer far below, and the king's troops had not come prepared for winter.\n\nWith a flash, flames erupted across the sky. The red dragons burst through the dark clouds like vengeance on wings. Lightning crackling along their shoulders. The flicker of electricity made the den mother snarl and roar as she unleashed her fire on the king's soldiers.\n\nAnd then even more dragons flew out of the clouds.\n\nBower had not just called a few dragons\u2014he seemed to have called all.\n\nI had never thought I would see the likes of what I saw now.\n\nFlashes of light illuminated storm clouds and floods of dragons falling on the soldiers below. Horses reared and bolted into the forest, bucking and sending their riders flying. Dragons knocked down the Iron Guard with their tails or snatched up any man who tried to stand before them.\n\nAnd everywhere, the sounds of screaming and shouting and dragon roars echoed.\n\n\"Free those chained,\" Bower shouted, using both his voice and his connection to the dragons.\n\nThe other dragon riders and their dragons fell like hunting packs of wolves on the frozen statues of the Iron Guards. Two of the Iron Guard shattered when the dragons hit them.\n\nBut where had Enric gone?\n\nJaydra swooped low over a mound of snow and ice, with two Iron Guards frozen in place and still holding the frozen chains that attached to a harpoon. I forgot about Enric and thought to Jaydra, Is that Ysix?\n\nAn idea hit me\u2014could I free Ysix with my magic, but I did not want to risk hurting her. I had controlled my magic once, but I might not again. So I asked Jaydra to call up her flames.\n\nJaydra will try. She growled, landing on the ground and rearing up.\n\n\"What is she doing?\" Bower yelled.\n\nJaydra arched her back and her neck.\n\n\"Her fire. Not all dragons can summon it, and not all the flames are strong enough.\" I put both hands on the side of her neck to feel the powerful bellows and muscles there starting to pump.\n\nYou can do this, Jaydra. Den-sister, fire-starter, mighty hunter, show them what you are. What you were always meant to be!\n\nA haunting whine rose from within Jaydra, growing fast into a roar. She spread her jaws wide and a whoosh of flame brushed over the mound of ice. Jaydra's fire wasn't as molten orange as Ysix's, but the flames hit the snow, turning it into steam and water.\n\nFor a moment, I could see nothing because of the clouds of steam and the smoke from Jaydra's flame.\n\nBut then Jaydra gave a trill and I shouted, \"Ysix, answer us!\"\n\nA bolt of molten orange flame lit the scene and Ysix roared into the sky, shaking off metal chains and ice. She seemed in far too much pain to answer but flew up, screeched for all dragons to get out of her way.\n\nGlancing around, I saw we had freed all the dragons. It was time to fly northwards and to safety.\n\nEnric's voice rose up, soaring above the wind that beat at us. \"Traitors! Thieves!\"\n\nHis power struck me the next instant.\n\nEnric emerged from the stormy battlefield with a half dozen of his knights. His horse I realized was not a real animal but a mechanical beast. Enric's hand glowed with a horrible, sickly purple hue as he spread his magic in front of him. I swayed and caught at Jaydra's spines so I would not fall. Pain struck me as if Enric had plunged a sword into my chest.\n\nWith a rumble, Jaydra tried to launch herself into the air, but she only hopped on the ground.\n\nI felt as if I was being wrapped in a thousand burning chains.\n\nEnric pulled his mechanical horse to a halt. \"Kneel! Kneel before your king!\"\n\nAnother wave of pain ripped through me. Jaydra gave a gasp and collapsed to the ground, her legs buckling.\n\nI had escaped from Enric before, but only with Bower's help.\n\n\"Bower\u2026need you,\" I gasped, wondering if my bones were going to fracture. Turning, I grabbed Bower's shaking hand.\n\nWe had to combine what was left of our ebbing strength.\n\n\"You seek to bring these monsters to my capital? Return them to my kingdom?\" Lightning sizzled, flashing white, and for a moment I saw Enric's real face. The illusion of him being young and darkly handsome faded. I saw him as he was, ancient and more skeleton than man. His head bald, his skin wrinkled and sagging, his body thin and hunched. How long had he been using his powers to extend his life? For decades or for many generations?\n\nHe slashed his fist in front of him. \"Dragons demean us. They befoul human nature. They are nothing more than vermin upon the land.\"\n\nRage sparked within Bower. It spread to me, igniting my magic.\n\nFrom behind me, Bower's voice rose up, strong and clear. \"Dragons do not demean us\u2014they remind us of what we can be. And you are no fit king, Enric Maddox. You will fall, I promise!\"\n\nI lifted my hand, but my magic seemed only a pale glow\u2014I had used too much of it. I had saved nothing.\n\nThrough Bower, I could sense the other dragons fleeing. With Ysix freed, her brood rose above the storm and sped away, the mountain dragons going with her. Bower sent the red dragons as well, and released the others. I knew he was here, buying them time to get away.\n\nWe couldn't defeat the king\u2014I was too tired and had spent too much of my power summoning this storm and blasting the king's cannons.\n\nI could see that Enric sensed I was weakening, for his power glowed darker. He stretched out his hand. Pain enveloped me.\n\nA screech cut through the agony lashing me. With a sudden flash, the pain evaporated.\n\nIn front of me Ryland and his black dragon now tangled with Enric. The king's knights had scattered, their horses giving terrified whinnies and bolting into the storm. Ryland's dragon took to the sky again, waved away by Ryland.\n\nBloodied and bare-chested, lifting his sword he shouted, \"Fly. Now. Go. The True King must live.\"\n\nEnric still on his metal horse, but with it fallen and frozen and pinning him to the ground, lifted a glowing fist. Ryland's sword shattered.\n\n\"Ryland,\" I shouted, but Jaydra launched herself into the air.\n\nThe last I saw of Ryland was him facing Enric, a knife in Ryland's hand and Enric's magic, dark and fierce.\n\nAnd then we flew into freezing clouds and at last reached above them to the warmth of the sun again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"Saffron?\" I didn't want to wake her, but she had slept for hours now.\n\nIt had taken a long flight to reach the caverns where the Three-Rivers clan had taken refuge. The Crimson Red dragons led the way. The clan, instead of mourning the loss of Ryland, planned to celebrate his heroic death\u2014a war chief, it seemed, could ask for no better end to his days.\n\nIt was cold this deep in the mountains, and the wind was biting and fierce, but it was a natural cold, one that came from Saffron's magic. The caverns smelled of minerals in the rock and even the dragons liked them.\n\nI had glanced back once at the magical blizzard Saffron had called up. I couldn't tell if it was growing larger or fading. I didn't know enough about weather or enough about magic to tell. I did know Saffron felt bad about having called it up, even unknowingly.\n\nShe had asked once on our flight if I thought the storm she had created would spread across the Middle Kingdom without end.\n\nFor a moment, I had reached my mind toward it as if it was just another dragon. Nothing happened. Storms were not dragons, and so perhaps they could not be spoken to.\n\nNow, Saffron opened her eyes and stared up at me. I touched her shoulder. \"Are you well? You've slept for more than a day.\"\n\n\"I think so,\" she said, her voice so soft I had to strain to hear it.\n\nLiar. Jaydra's thoughts contradicted Saffron's words. Since I had spoken to all dragons, I seemed to be having an easier time talking to Jaydra.\n\nSitting down on the floor next to Saffron, I leaned my back against the smooth cavern wall. \"You know, I think these are dragon caves. They're a lot like the caves back on Den Mountain.\"\n\nThat, at least, had Saffron sitting up and looking around.\n\nJaydra's thoughts suddenly filled my mind, but I knew she was hiding the words from Saffron. Maddox magic. Saffron has no control\u2014it is controlling Saffron. When Saffron calls it, it comes between Saffron and Jaydra.\n\nI realized with a falling heart that Jaydra was right.\n\nSaffron really did need to learn to control not just her magic, but herself. She would be a danger to everyone until then. But how could I help her with that?\n\n\"We made it out,\" I told Saffron. \"That has to count for something. And\u2026and while there was time when you seemed to give yourself over to the magic completely, you did that out of love. To protect us all. You also managed some control\u2014you can learn more.\"\n\nSaffron put a hand on the smooth wall and trailed her fingers over it. \"How many came back?\"\n\nI let out a long breath. \"It's a tattered band of dragons and their riders. We lost three riders. Two dragons. Ryland\u2014\"\n\n\"Gave his life to save the True King. Do you finally believe you are that, Bower?\"\n\nI stood again and put my shoulders back. \"To do anything less would be an insult to Ryland\u2014it would diminish his deeds. The Three-Rivers clan plans to sing of his great exploits tonight. I think we should be there.\"\n\nI held out my hand to Saffron.\n\nWe had already paid a heavy price for our escape. But we had learned a few things about Enric's weaknesses. And about our own.\n\nAnd now I had to start thinking of myself as a king\u2014and stop doubting myself. If there was one thing I'd learned from that battle\u2014and from dragons\u2014it was that a king must inspire those who follow him. Saffron needed me just now. And someday soon I knew I would have need of her powers\u2014powers under control.\n\nShe glanced at my hand, at my face, and a small smile quirked her mouth. \"King Bower\u2014kind of sounds good, doesn't it?\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Age of Fire 2) Dragon Avenger",
        "author": "E.E. Knight",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Hatchling",
                "text": "\u2002'BETTER SEVEN RAGING DRAGONS AS YOUR ENEMY THAN A SINGLE PATIENT DRAGONELLE.' \u2014Islebreadth\n\nThe cloudscapes and air currents, so pleasant to drift across, darkened. Her glittering green scales turned dull and slag. A vast black mass rolled overhead.\n\nThunder hit her ears, pounding thunder, relentless, unnaturally regular, pursuing her like hoofbeats.\n\nShe tipped her wings, dropped, tried to flee the storm, but the darkness overtook her. The feathery dimpling of the clouds below disappeared, replaced by a wet mist of confusion \u2026 suffocation. The darkness shot down her nostrils and into her lungs.\n\nOut, out of this weather!\n\nShe tried to straighten her neck, form her body into an arrow, to dive out of the storm and take shelter, but her limbs wouldn't cooperate. She twitched, confused, fighting, unwilling to draw a breath of the storm's thick air.\n\nCrack!\n\nAm I lightning-struck? she thought.\n\nThen the air came and she breathed, a gasp that infused her with new life, her limbs with strength. The mists faded, except for the booming thunder; she realized the noise in her ears was her own hearts. No clouds, no storm, no choking mists, just cramp and wet and a maddening irritation like insects biting under her scales.\n\nShe twisted, stretched, as though each of her four limbs, neck, and tail were in a contest to get farthest away from the others, and then the world gave way\u2014\n\n\u2014and she found herself on her side. Terror struck. My belly is exposed! and she fought to roll. Then her nostrils smelled it, a rich musky scent that set her at ease. Something sharper in the background, blood \u2026\n\nBlood! The smell of appetite and danger.\n\nDimpled, irregular surfaces all around, but hard and dark, quite the opposite of the clouds, an agonized squeaking near her \u2026\n\nCome out Wistala, or Auron will have your breakegg meal.\n\nI am Wistala.\n\nShe rolled her eye, tried to raise her sii, her tail, but instead of coiling ropes of muscle that could fell young trees, she saw stubby deformities trapped in bits of viscous-sided egg clinging to her like a net. Next to her, another green face, pale-pink fringe rising from her skull-ridge and folded this way and that as it descended along the neck. Her sister had her own problems: a head hardly out of her egg.\n\nToo hard, Momma. I-Jizara cannot get out. The thought-words confused Wistala. Had they come from her? No, from the other green hatchling still trapped in her egg.\n\nJizara, Wistala, you must come out of your eggs. This is your first test, and you'll learn a valuable lesson. In any crisis, the first scale you must bite through is your own. Master your spirit, apply your mind, harness your body\u2014then you will be able to break through difficulty.\n\nMother, big enough to be a world herself, rested against a curving wall of stone. She could not be taken in with a single glance. Wistala had to assemble her out of impressions: her endless tail, deep rushing heartbeat, mountainous haunches, softly whooshing breaths, folded wings, arching neck, elegantly fringed head with its shining golden-yellow eyes cut by deep black slits. A loving prrum started deep within Mother's throat, a drum-roll encouraging her daughters.\n\nWistala quit trying to go in six directions at once. She employed all four limbs and her tail to get out of the confining egg.\n\nTch-crick-crack!\n\nAnd she was away from it.\n\nBut down again.\n\nHer rear legs couldn't get purchase. A wet mass that wasn't quite her and wasn't quite egg, attached at her underside, entangled newly uncurled toes. She let out a frustrated squawk.\n\nShe dragged herself, wanting that blood-smell, using her cleared front legs, pulling foul anchor and bits of eggshell.\n\nWistala, how strong you are! Mother thought.\n\nThe smell also meant death. She saw a red-scaled hatchling lying dead on its side, blood still trickling from its torn throat and stomach, brief life over already.\n\nShe knocked an empty broken egg out of her way, freed one hind leg. She could see more of the cavern now. Her mother rested on a ledge halfway up the side of the highest part; the rest was like a dragon's muzzle, narrowing with teeth in the form of dripping stones meeting, though in a haphazard fashion when compared with a dragon's regular rows.\n\nSomething moved at the edge of the precipice, and it took her a moment to recognize it as another hatchling. With its head down over the edge and its gray, black-shadowed skin, her sibling resembled a heap of oddly shaped stone.\n\nIt had no scales. A moment later she got a mind-picture of a mighty grown gray dragon flying over a mountain that hugged ice between its vast arms\u2014some dream out of the past or from her brother's future?\n\nHer sibling turned on her, baleful red eyes under his shieldlike eye crest wild and staring. He cocked his head at her and tested the air with his tongue. With that, he strode up to the corpse as though he owned the shelf and dug at the succulent fresh flesh.\n\nThe fire left his eyes.\n\nIf he thought anything of, or at, her, she could not tell.\n\nHelp, Momma, please help, her sister thought.\n\nWistala wanted a mouthful of that feast, but suppose the gray hatchling objected? She looked behind, saw her sister still struggling against her egg. Jizara had managed to get her head and neck out, thanks to the sharp prong on her snout\u2014why, I have one, too\u2014but hadn't so much as cracked through with her back.\n\nToo hard!\n\nWistala turned, slipped on the drogue still attached to her belly, and pushed herself clumsily sideways, still learning what her legs could and couldn't do, until she stood alongside her sister.\n\nCome, Jizara, come with me to the blood-smell! A fine feast is disappearing down our brother's throat.\n\nJizara gave a dispirited peep, managed to break a little more eggshell with her neck. At this rate, nothing would be left!\n\nWistala felt her tail whipping back and forth, seemingly in a nasty mood of its own. She redirected it, and struck the side of her sister's egg\u2014hard.\n\nThe egg cracked.\n\nAfter that first opening, it was easy. Three sharp blows, and the whole side of the egg clung together, thanks only to a thin translucent membrane beneath. Her sister broke free, lay gasping and squeaking with the effort.\n\nI see what you mean about the smell, her sister thought.\n\nJizara slunk forward, unable even to raise her forequarters and neck off the ground. The mass of broken egg still wrapped half her scrawny long-necked body.\n\nCan you open your mouth?\n\nYes, her sister thought back.\n\nThen hang on to my tail.\n\nShe felt the prick of tiny sharp teeth biting through the hardly-there scales. Using her forelegs and the untangled rear, Wistala pulled her sister free and toward the meal.\n\nHer brother raised a blood-smeared snout, egg horn trailing bits of viscera, and cocked his head in that funny way of his. He let out a satisfied gassy noise that echoed off the egg shelf wall and trotted down to a trickle of water running down the side of the cavern wall. Wistala followed its musical path to a pool at the base, which was rimmed with thick growths of blue-green lichen. The lichen glowed like her brother's eyes, but in a far more soothing fashion.\n\nBut he left the feast to them.\n\nWistala tore into it. Better than any dream of flying, the smells and tastes and textures of meat transmitted by her own buds and nerves made the confusion of her hatching fade. The odd sensation of rended flesh sliding down her throat and the pleasant sensation of a filling belly mattered.\n\nA coppery flash and blazing eyes landed atop the corpse. This hatchling held a bleeding forelimb tight to its narrow chest.\n\nWistala slid next to her sister, tripping on the cursed thing hanging from her belly, and the closing jaws of the copper just missed the air where her nose had been a moment ago.\n\nShe flattened herself against the rock, instinctively covering her vulnerable spots. The copper hatchling pounced on her sister, claws and teeth searing as it tried to drive her away from the meal Jizara was too weak to abandon.\n\nHelp, Mother! Wistala didn't know if the call came from one, both, or all three of them.\n\nWistala let out a challenge, but the battle cry of her dreams came out as a thin peep. It still startled the copper into turning.\n\nIt was fast, even with its wounded leg, and didn't have the wretched umbilical sac slowing and tripping it. She put her head down and butted him as hard as body mass allowed.\n\nAt least he left off attacking Jizara.\n\nHe opened his mouth, glaring at her from behind rows of teeth, and every instinct told her to retreat. Her back end showed its strange tendency to act of its own accord, and she backpedaled\u2014but she showed her own teeth, giving as good as the copper had done.\n\nHe turned his head, grabbed a piece of the carcass's tail, and ran.\n\nHer feeling of triumph vanished as her gray brother bounded up, coiling and uncoiling his body in a way Wistala envied, covering ground in a run that was more a series of elastic leaps than footwork.\n\nThe copper scrambled off the egg shelf, clutching his meal.\n\nHer scaleless brother screeched down at his opponent, long tail lashing back and forth so that it threatened to catch her across the nose. When he returned to the feast, he sniffed at Jizara's neck\u2014What would she do if the gray male tried to make a meal of Jizara?\n\nWistala extended her neck\u2014not so long as either of her siblings'\u2014and began to lick her sister's wound.\n\nThe gray hatchling gave a snort and returned to his meal. He didn't seem to mind sharing. After eating, Mother lulled him off to sleep with a song, and Jizara dozed, bits of shell and membrane still on her limbs.\n\nWistala's sharp ears picked up the sound of claws and scales on rock. She crept to the edge of the egg shelf and looked down.\n\nThe copper rooted around in the waste near the trickle at the far end of the egg shelf. He appeared to be hunting. She wondered if he'd try to attack her siblings while they slept.\n\nThat's a male for you, Wistala. They're always satisfied with a win, even if the victory's incomplete.\n\nHe worries me, she thought back.\n\nYou're ahead of your brother and sister already. How well-formed your thoughts are! And the way you pulled your sister out of her egg. That ability will help you in the Upper World, when it comes time.\n\nPulling Jizara with my tail?\n\nNo, the ability to improvise.\n\nWistala wasn't sure what that thought meant. Tell me about the Upper World. Is it like my dreams?\n\nYes and no. But you should rest, little hatchling. Leave the worrying to me, for now.\n\nThe copper stared at her from the garbage pile. If Mother could see the hatred in his eye\u2014\n\nBut sleep beckoned. And Wistala hoped that with sleep would come more dreams of flying.\n\nHatchlings! Your father has arrived. Come and know your sire.\"\n\nJizara left off complaining to Mother about having to eat her eggshell\u2014Mother insisted it helped grow healthy scale, and Jizara claimed she just said that to get rid of the messy broken bits. Auron dropped Wistala's tail-tip, which he'd been biting.\n\nThe hatchlings smelled Father first, so quietly did he approach the egg shelf. The air around Mother smelled oily but comforting. Father's scent had a harder point as it went into the nostrils.\n\nWistala listened to the scrape of his scales and realized he was approaching the egg shelf in a back-and-forth manner, as though inspecting the cavern. She caught a gleam as he passed a thick growth of cave moss hanging from a crack in the ceiling.\n\nDwarves'-eye, Mother had called it.\n\nThen she saw her father's head, six horns, bronze scales a blend of liquid gold and blood. So wide, even with wings folded tight against his spine, he made Mother look like a drakka. He walked oddly, limping, holding one leg up against his chest. Had he been maimed in his youth like her copper brother?\n\n\"AuRel, meet your hatchlings,\" Mother said, inclining her head. \"Auron, Wistala, and Jizara, out of their eggs in that order.\"\n\nNext to her, Auron quivered when Father gave a snort as he sniffed the hatchlings. He barely acknowledged her or her sister. He ground his upper and lower jaw, setting his teeth clattering.\n\n\"Wistala is speaking already,\" Mother said.\n\n\"Which is she, again? The thick one?\"\n\nThick one? Yes, she was bulkier than Jizara, who was all neck and tail.\n\n\"Greet your Father, hatchlings.\"\n\nAuron extended his neck and peeped, a bit clumsily in his twitchiness.\n\n\"Hello, Father,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Wel'ome home, Faszer,\" Jizara added.\n\n\"Was your hunt successful?\" Mother asked, to break the silence.\n\n\"Not very. A sheep and a tired goat. I'm going to have to try in the foothills east.\"\n\n\"That means men,\" Mother said.\n\n\"I remember,\" Father said.\n\nHe reached out with his foreleg and dropped the carcasses. \"You have the sheep, Irelia. The hatchlings can divide the goat.\"\n\n\"I'm full up on slugs,\" Mother said. Wistala only remembered Mother eating one slug, the slimy creatures that ate the cave moss, bat droppings, even dragon waste. \"Let them eat. Eat, you three.\"\n\nThe hungry hatchlings tore into the bled-out feast. Not a trace of warmth was left, but their appetites were such that it didn't matter.\n\n\"I'm for sleep,\" Father said, winding himself around a towering stalagmite. But his tail still thrashed and his teeth ground.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Mother asked. \"I've no appetite, honestly.\"\n\n\"It's not that.\"\n\n\"What, then?\"\n\n\"There weren't any grays on my side of the family,\" Father grumbled.\n\nWith that they fell into an argument over Auron's merits.\n\nWistala couldn't think of many, unless being a nuisance counted as a merit. Mother changed his mood by praising him for siring two males\u2014the skulking copper counted, as he seemed to be surviving on his own somewhere in the cavern. As Wistala understood it, all the males fought after their hatching until one became the champion of the nest. She and her sister were afterthoughts.\n\nAuron finished his gorge and then, hearing the copper at the base of the egg shelf, jumped down to chase him off.\n\nPerhaps Mother read her mind. She brought her head close to Father's, began to clean him behind his griff, the armored fans that descended from his horn-crest.\n\n\"Oh, of course,\" Father said. With that he disappeared into the darkness beyond the moss light. When he returned, he had a bulge in the side of his cheek.\n\n\"Here you are\u2014\"\n\nYou can do better than that! Wistala overread Mother think. \"\u2014my little treasures,\" Father continued, a little lamely. He dropped some things before them that rattled as they fell. \"Gems for my gems.\"\n\nThey glittered enticingly. They were stones of a dozen different colors, cut and polished to catch light and throw it back broken into dozens of pieces. Jizara squealed in delight. Wistala thought them marvelous, and she joined her sister in placing them into colorful spiral patterns.\n\nFather sagged with weariness, his smell no longer sharp and strange but a comforting shield between them and the forbidding shadows of the cavern. She would grant the Gray Vex that much: he plunged into the darkness readily enough, despite his lack of protective scales.\n\nShe and Jizara encircled the dazzle their father called gems, lying snout to tail-tip to form an unbroken wall of hatchling between jealous world and hoard. As they nodded off, Mother sang:\n\n\u2003Daughter, daughter, shining bright\n\n\u2003Precious jewel within mine sight\n\n\u2003Oh, if I could soar with thee\n\n\u2003As you seek your destiny.\n\n\u2003To see with you the caves and skies\n\n\u2003Vistas grand beneath your eyes\n\n\u2003Taking wing to horizons new\n\n\u2003Let us wonder who waits for you.\n\n\u2003A dragon bright?\n\n\u2003A dragon dark?\n\n\u2003Victor of duels with battle mark?\n\n\u2003A dragon strong?\n\n\u2003A dragon keen?\n\n\u2003Singer of honors and triumphs seen?\n\n\u2003Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue\n\n\u2003To your lord you shall be true,\n\n\u2003Copper, Silver, Black, and White,\n\n\u2003Who will win your mating flight?\n\n\u2003For in your hearts our future rests\n\n\u2003To see our line with hatchlings blessed\n\n\u2003And for those who threaten clutch of flame,\n\n\u2003To feel the wrath of dragon-dame.\n\nThe last fragments of eggshell disappeared, and in time the gems did, as well.\n\nMother neither ate nor slept, as far as Wistala could tell, save for a slug or two, and a whole horse Father brought back along with a dirty-smelling monster Mother insisted was a human. To Wistala he smelled like a two-day-dead sheep not properly bled and gutted. Auron got the honor of hunting and eating him.\n\nWistala watched the Gray Vex disappear with Father. \"Auron's crest must be made of gold, the way you favor him,\" Wistala said to Mother.\n\n\"Don't whine, Tala,\" she said. \"You and your sister have a whole horse to share. That's ten times a man or more.\" Mother had already consumed hers, and was licking the last runnels of blood from her teeth and lip-line. She sighed, and her golden eyes brightened. \"Eat those metal rings from the saddle. They're good for you.\"\n\n\"I'd rather be hunting that man,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"You'll be hunting on your own soon enough,\" Mother replied. \"Practice on slugs.\"\n\n\"They're a bore. Tell us more of the Upper World,\" Wistala said. \"Fish leaping at waterfalls!\"\n\n\"I want to hear about Father's mating song again,\" Jizara said. Jizara liked to imitate the tunes, and even Auron admitted that she had a gift for song. \"Did he really cause an avalanche?\"\n\nMother's stories always entertained. She mixed words and pictures and sense-memory so skillfully, Wistala felt as though she were living it.\n\n\"No, you shall have a lesson.\"\n\nBoth sisters drooped at that. Lessons came only through Mother's words, and one had to form one's own imagery and sensations. Learning about The Hatchling Who Cried \"Dwarf \" or The Geese That Saved the Seven-Egg Clutch couldn't compare.\n\n\"Since you've both seen and smelled a man today, I'll tell you about the Great Betrayal. A man had a hand in that.\"\n\nJizara closed a nostril at Wistala. She stifled a snort and tried to clear her thoughts so she might summon her own mind-pictures.\n\n\"As you know, the Age of Dreams ended when the ravenous Blighters appeared. The Four Great Spirits of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire each gave a gift to Dragons to make them supreme over the Upper and within the Lower Worlds to tame the foul Blighters. But while fighting over their reward for this deed, they created the Dwarves, Elves, and Men who now come to kill us. Men are the worst. Men, who breed so fast that a single female in a dragon's lifetime can produce a nation, like a small rock falling from a mountain's height can knock two that send six rolling that create a landslide. All of that horde seek to kill us.\n\n\"But it wasn't always so.\n\n\"For a time, the hominid races were just as terrified of us as the blighters were. Now back in the Age of Sky-Kings, all blighters did was grovel and worship before dragons, but the other hominids helped the dragons build great palaces and towers. The greatest dragon hall of all the kingdoms was Silverhigh, built out of leftover pieces from the creation of the Moon, so white it shone night and day.\n\n\"Now the Dragons of Silverhigh were oh-so-pleased with themselves to be living in such glorious palaces. The older, battle-scarred dragons who remembered taming the blighters and cowing the men, elves, and dwarves became fewer and fewer. Their hatchlings grew up thinking the luxuries Silverhigh offered were theirs on account of their being born such fine fellows, forgetting that anything worth the having is worth the effort. They painted their scales and wings in magnificent designs but hardly ever flew anywhere with them, as there was no finer place in the world than Silverhigh.\n\n\"Flying off to fight battles and so on does interfere with stuffing oneself with grain-fattened swine and golden coins brought in tribute. So the later Dragon Kings of Silverhigh looked for someone else to do their fighting for them.\n\n\"Blighters are quarrelsome, and only a skilled leader can unite them. Dwarves, though resolute fighters, are stumpy and slow moving, and are not given to taking orders without a good deal of back-talk and complaining, and only by the harshest measure can they be cowed for a brief time. Elves, though dragonlike in their intelligence, will stop in the middle of a campaign to feast and sing and praise each other for deeds they've still to do, and forget about battle altogether. But men are easily trained and pop out young like heated corncobs, so they are well-suited to fill armies.\n\n\"Thus the Dragons of Silverhigh trained a grand army of men to go and do their fighting. This gave them even more time for play.\n\n\"Now there was one man who was particularly useful to the Dragons of Silverhigh. His name was Prymelete, and he was not a famous warrior or a great builder or even a man skilled at bringing delectables from near and far to tempt dragon appetites. Prymelete was a soothsayer. He praised the Dragons of Silverhigh even more than they did each other. Many a high vault and gold-walled nesting chamber saw his presence, as he read flattering oracles predicting future greatness.\n\n\"Prymelete's tongue arts admitted him to the deepest councils of the Silverhigh Dragons, places no famous warrior, great builder, or clever trader were allowed. They even gave him a seat at the Firepit. Now I'm told the most renowned of the Silverhigh Dragons spat fire into the Firepit when making judgments and rules to show their mind had been made up. So much dragonfire went into the Firepit that it burned night and day. Of course, Prymelete outdid himself with praise for the dragons who met around the Firepit; his tongue left them so muddle-headed, they didn't know tailvent from nostril.\n\n\"Then one day Prymelete lingered, watching the fire after the dragons left. He took from his vast cloak a thick steel vessel such as human warriors wear on their heads and dipped it in the dragonfire. Then he ran like a hoard-filch. He left Silverhigh and went to a dark council of men, elves, and dwarves, carrying his dragonfire.\n\n\"The dragonfire had cooled by the time he met this evil gathering, and he filled the wine cups of the hominids assembled there. They all drank from it, and it put dragonfire into their hearts that made them brave enough to challenge the dragons. The hominids marched on Silverhigh and threw down its perches and vaults and galleries, and suffocated its deeps and wells and chambers.\"\n\n\"Why didn't the dragons fight?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Some say it is because they'd forgotten how,\" Mother answered. \"Others say Prymelete returned from his trip and put more folly in their heads, pronounced doom and despair at the approach of warlike men, elves, and dwarves, so that they did not go and fight with the parts of their grand army of men who remained loyal to their oaths. Then when the abandoned men were destroyed, Prymelete redoubled his predictions of disaster. The dragons were so used to abiding by the soothsayings of Prymelete that they panicked and fled, or hid in deep holes to be hunted and killed one by one.\"\n\n\"What happened to wicked Prymelete?\" Jizara asked.\n\n\"There are different stories, but I shall tell you this one: Other dragons from the far side of the world heard about the destruction of Silverhigh and came to seek after their relatives. Finding them slaughtered, they learned the story from some blighters and sought out Prymelete. Since he places himself above dragons, they took him to a high mountain and hung him there by his fine girdle to be pecked at by the great carrion birds who ride the winds of the thin-air heights. When his body fell apart and went down the mountainside, they brought the bones back to the high ledge to give the carrion birds another meal, and there they sit, cold and exposed.\"\n\n\"Tales and terrors, that's a horrible story, Mother,\" Jizara said. \"Dragons hunted and killed in their own homes. I'm scared.\"\n\n\"I tell it to you so you will always be on your guard. Ever since that awful day, the hominids have had fire in their hearts to kill dragons. And so it will be until the happy day, as my mother used to say, when all the hominids kill each other off and the dragons may return from hiding. But I fear that day is far, far off. That is why I'm always listening.\"\n\nIf you're patient enough, and keep still, out of sight and smell, the prey will feed itself right up to you.\n\nMother's words echoed in Wistala's memory as she waited for a slug above the cave moss. According to Mother, it was spring above ground, and snow was melting and finding its way into their cave, feeding flush new growth of moss. And with the moss came more slugs.\n\nShe clung, upside down, content to just roll her eyes as she searched for a pale, slow-moving back. Sometimes you could hear the soft slurp, like dragon tongue against the roof of one's mouth, but with water dribbling and dripping into the cave from a hundred inlets, hunting by ear was impossible. With so many old trails criss-crossing the cavern floor, the nose was useless unless one came upon a still-slimy trail. So that left watching.\n\nOf course, she had more to worry about than being able to properly push off, turn, and land near enough to the slug so she could catch it on the drop or the first pounce. The Gray Vex was prowling and snuffling around near the waterfall whose pool fed her slug. It would be just like him to come blundering through in that off-kilter leaping style of his, scaring every slug away until the next scale-shed.\n\n\"With every day closer to drakehood, he'll be more restless,\" Mother had said. \"Then he'll wander out and never return. Or your father will drive him out.\"\n\n\"How many more days?\" Jizara had asked, probing the hole left by a missing scale where Auron had pounced on her.\n\n\"You'll think differently when he's gone. I know I did with my brother Culekin\u2014Wind Spirit knows what's become of him.\"\n\nDrakka usually stayed closer to their home caverns until a new clutch of eggs came, or so Mother predicted. But Mother needed at least a year in the Upper World to get her strength back, during which she'd teach them much huntcraft. Then she'd fly with Father\u2014\n\nSnick-snick-snick-snick came the sound of Auron's claws as he tore through the moss patch, nose held to the ground and griff half extended. Probably following the copper's scent again.\n\nSo much for hunting.\n\nShe aimed, kicked off, and dropped. Twisting as she fell, she landed in a patch of cave moss with half a mind to pounce the Gray Vex, but by the time she gathered herself, his tail-tip had disappeared toward the pool. Whatever else might be said of her brother, he was fast.\n\nWistala turned, and froze.\n\nTwo hard eyes the color of flowing blood stared into hers. The copper!\n\nThey stood nose-tip to nose-tip, the copper a trifle smaller and a good deal lighter. His scales had come in small and crooked, and his maimed sii had turned in toward his body, though he propped himself up by the forejoint.\n\nHe lowered his griff a claw-breadth or two, pulled back his lips to reveal his rows of teeth. She backed up, sidestepped, and he advanced, matching her, nostrils opposite hers as though she were playing a game in the cavepool, trying to outwit her reflection.\n\n\"What's my name?\" he asked.\n\nThe question, put in simple Drakine, stunned her so she hardly understood what he said. He may as well have spoken one of the more obscure Elvish dialects to her.\n\n\"Wha\u2014?\"\n\n\"What's my name?\" he asked again, and this time she found an answer.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Out of my way or I'll kill you,\" he said.\n\nHis eyes kept flicking in the direction Auron had taken.\n\nWistala didn't know what he expected to accomplish. He was smaller than she, and Auron was bigger still, at least in length. Auron had bested the copper in every contest they'd had. She should bleat a warning, scream and have Auron come running as he did when they came out of their eggs.\n\nBut the Gray Vex had a big enough head. A bite or two would do him good.\n\nShe ate a few dead dropped bats on her way back to the egg shelf, upset for some reason. They made slugmeat taste like fresh horse, but her gut needed something to work on beyond vague worry.\n\nShe climbed up onto the eggshelf. Jizara was matching herself against Mother's tail-tip, standing up when it stood, rolling when it rolled, a prrum in her throat.\n\n\"Mother, I was hunting slugs, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Earth Spirit,\" Jizara said. \"You get any thicker, and your tail will disappear!\" Jizara proudly displayed her long, lean tail, and she never tired of matching her extremities to those of her stumpier sister.\n\n\"Jizara, don't tease. Wistala, you're all latent wingbone, as I was, and short limbs are the stronger for it.\" Mother, despite the more plentiful meals since the melt began, was breathing audibly from the effort of the tail game.\n\n\"Mother, the copper is after Auron.\"\n\nMother stared, long and slow, out into the depths of the cave. \"I'd hoped he'd left. Auron may kill him. Your father never knows when to back down either.\"\n\n\"Maybe they'll do each other in,\" Jizara said. \"We'll have more food and a little quiet.\"\n\n\"Every hatchling is precious,\" Mother said. \"There are few enough left, and it's the rare drake who grows to dragonhood these days.\"\n\n\"If there are fewer drakes, that means fewer songs sung to dragonelles,\" Jizara said.\n\n\"Well, in the North\u2014\"\n\n\"Mother! Mother! Mother!\" came a hatchling's shout. \"Others!\n\nAssassins, dwarves, here in the cave.\" Auron jumped clean to the egg shelf, his stripes hard and black against his skin and blood running from behind his crest. Wistala heard metal ring against stone somewhere in the cave, felt her scales rise.\n\nMother swept her tail around Wistala and her sister, putting her body between whatever approached and her daughters. \"We are discovered?\"\n\nAuron turned this way and that, going in three directions at once. \"They're here. With spears, Mother.\"\n\nMother looked out into the gloom of the cavern. \"No! I'm faint with hunger, and the winter's been so\u2014\"\n\nMother reached up with her long neck and put her mouth about a loose stalactite. She wrenched it free, and Wistala felt air move. \"I hope you aren't too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb.\" She shoved Wistala up the wall with her nose.\n\nWistala climbed toward the patch of shadow with the faintly new air flowing down from it.\n\nWistala looked down at the egg shelf, where chaos ruled. Jizara clung to Mother's leg, all eyes and bristling scales and fluttering griff. Auron stood at the egg shelf, tail twitching, crest-shrouded eyes fixed on ranks of approaching mounds of metal and muscle, short-legged fellows with beards that glowed like fire. Had they drunk some latter-day dragonfire before charging into the cavern?\n\nShe almost lost her grip with her sii as she counted the numbers. Behind the dwarves, she saw what she took to be an exceptionally tall dwarf or broad man in black armor. The tall figure wore a winged helm and gestured with a broad-headed spear that sparked and glowed as though it had a life of its own. He pointed it toward the egg shelf, and dwarves bearing some kind of wood-and-metal contraption on their backs hurried up a broken stalagmite. With his other hand, he held the straining lines of a pack of hairy-backed dogs the size of ponies.\n\nMother, her head level with Wistala and imploring Jizara to release her grip, must have seen them, too. Wistala got a brief thought\u2014Him! Gobold has sold us out!\u2014before Mother reached down and picked Auron up by the base of his neck. She threw him into the air toward the hole. Auron twisted as he flew and struck next to Wistala at the opening. Wistala reached and held him as he found his grips. As he breathed, Auron's ribs moved so fast, they were a blur.\n\nDwarven climbing poles struck the egg shelf with a klank!\n\n\"Climb! Auron, climb!\" Mother called.\n\nJizara, we're up here. Climb with us! Wistala thought, but her sister retreated behind Mother's hindquarters as the first dwarf-helm appeared over the rim of the egg shelf. Jizara looked up at her, stupidly, not even recognizing her. Sister!\n\nScrring came the sound like an arrow in her ear. She saw blades flash silver in the lichen-light as they were drawn.\n\nAuron drove his crest into her side, and the tenuous connection vanished. Wistala, up and away! came Mother's last frantic thought, and with it a horrible, clawing fear that blinded and deafened. Wistala fled upward.\n\nKu! Ku! Kuuuuuu! came the war cries from below. The sound traveled through rock and ice.\n\nDead lichen, ice, and loose rock gave way, dropping onto Auron, who was following below. Vague flashes came through\u2014Blood\u2014spears\u2014Wheel of Fire Drakossozh\u2014Yellhounds! Jizara!\n\nDeath cries and madness pursued her up the shaft. Up she climbed, up until there were no more sounds echoing from below, up until sii and saa both burned and quivered and the hatchlings had to cling to each other with tail and mouth, up until blood-taste coated their tongues with each breath and the hammering in their neck hearts made their ears ache. Wistala pushed through bone and dead dry pine needles in utter darkness, no longer climbing but not walking either. The darkness unnerved her. Not even dragon eyes could pick out detail, and at every moment she feared the terrible sound of blades being drawn.\n\nShe fetched up against something cold and wet\u2014an ice flow blocked the tunnel. She could still feel air moving from a crack at the top, a crack that could hardly fit her snout. What little remained of her ebbing strength vanished.\n\n\"Auron, we're trapped,\" she said, hardly able to get the words out. A last hope flickered: perhaps the dwarves and that tall wing-helmed man had been defeated. \"We have to go back down. Perhaps Mother and Jizara\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Auron said. Dully, she observed that he was hardly panting, though he moved stiffly. Of course, he was lighter, being scaleless. Auron sniffed at the clean, cold air coming in over the ice flow. \"Fresh air. We're almost there.\"\n\n\"That's why you don't want to go back. Your thin hide\u2014\"\n\nAuron shoved her aside. Her brother simply went mad. There was no other word for it. He began to pound the ice with his tail. Pieces, tiny pieces of ice compared to the mass, flaked off and slid down to the bones at the bottom of the tunnel. She wondered if this was the raging fighting fury that Mother said took over young drakes. He bit and clawed at the ice whenever he shifted position.\n\nWhen his tail began to spray blood at each swipe, he spat at the ice. The spittle hissed as it struck, and it ran into fractures, raising a sharp odor of bat urine.\n\n\"Wistala, spit!\"\n\n\"I've no fire yet\u2014\"\n\nExcrement and excuses. It is melting the ice, she realized. She tried to squeeze her fire bladder behind her breastbone. Nothing.\n\n\"Spit, Wistala!\"\n\n\"Can't!\"\n\nThen she could see. A faint pink light came through the ice flow. It must be the light of the Upper World, the sun.\n\nTwo cracks ran up the ice flow, parallel and in a shape oddly reminiscent of the man with the spear's winged helm. She pictured the helm at the base of the cracks\u2014Something spasmed behind her breastbone, and she found she could spit. Found she could\u2014she had no choice. Her tongue pressed itself against the roof of her mouth, and her jaw opened wide\u2014\n\nOut it came, until she felt as though her vertebrae from shoulder-pivot to tail-tip might be running up her neck and out her mouth. An orangish light filled the cave along with the acid smell, stronger than ever.\n\nShe collapsed, spent in an entirely new way.\n\nAuron gathered himself, curled tight, and exploded toward the orange glow like a projectile from one of the dwarves' war machines.\n\nHe broke through in a shower of yellow-white shards\u2014\n\nAnd disappeared straight over a ledge.\n\nWistala struck out from her shoulders, extended her neck even as his tail-tip whipped for a hold. She sank her teeth into it, tasted her brother's blood in her mouth. His momentum dragged her forward, toward the ledge. Impossible distances stretched off in every direction, out, to either side.\n\nEspecially down. Her head went over.\n\nA drop, a thousand times greater than that of the egg shelf, lay beneath. The vast distance seemed to reach up and touch her between the eyes. Her head swam\u2026 .\n\nHer teeth, however, gripped all the tighter as her short legs found purchase. She arched her thick back, claws dug into ice, rock, and hardened snow, setting every haunch against her brother's weight.\n\nAuron found a grip, and his weight vanished. She didn't release his tail, though, until he rolled beside her on the ledge.\n\nThe two hatchlings shivered against each other, panting in the thin air of the Upper World.\n\nDon't think about this big, empty, howling chaos that is the Upper World, Wistala told herself for the beyond-countingeth time. Or how much you miss Mother, even her endless lessons. Or dwarves. Or eager, straining hounds. Don't think beyond the next meal. Just find food, and then rest. Find food, and then rest.\n\nThey made it down the mountain, thanks to Auron. His light weight allowed him to test holds for her, and they'd come off the horrid, cold mountaintop and into a slightly less horrid, slightly less cold tree line, where Auron promptly scared away some feeding goats by leaping at them at first whiff. She had no luck hunting after that, and it was only after they developed a system where he'd drive game to her, or she to him, as his skin naturally changed color to match whatever he rested against, that they were able to eat.\n\nAuron had a plan to find Father. She went along with it. Having a goal, \"a star to fix on,\" put hope in his hearts and stopped him from crying in his sleep at night. She listened, learned to find Susiron, the unchanging star, by following the nose-tip of the Bowing Dragon.\n\nWistala suspected that, small as they were, it was just a matter of time until something got them. The only question was what\u2014and where and when. At one point she thought Auron had died in the night, taken by the frigid wind on his scaleless skin, for when she woke, he was white and cold, until he stirred and she realized he'd just been mimicking the snow.\n\nShe hoped that as they traveled west around the shoulder of the mountain toward the main entrance to the cave\u2014Auron had some idea of the topography, thanks to mind-pictures from Father\u2014they'd find a quiet mountain lake where they could spend the coming spring and summer, feeding on frogs and fat bottom-sucking fish. Perhaps they could find a hollow log and enough muck to hide their smell. When one didn't have a cave, one had to improvise. Without a safe refuge, it was only a matter of time before something got them.\n\n\"Quit saying that,\" Auron said. \"We're doing all right. We've adapted to the Upper World, at least what we've seen of it.\"\n\nAuron trotted fearlessly through the Upper World, turning from brown to green to white as the surface he paused over changed. Wistala felt that every step she took was through an endless arena under thousands of eyes peeping at her from treetop and slidepile. Voices relayed what the eyes saw, berry-brained birds tittered about the hatchlings passing beneath, not caring a dead twig whose ears might hear of their movements.\n\nHaving every field mouse know of their passing bothered her.\n\nThen there was the dirtiness of the Upper World. As she passed through thickets, pine needles and branches caught under her scales; pebbles had an uncanny knack for working themselves inward rather than out, resisting any but the most determined effort of tooth and tongue to extract them. She lost scales in pursuit of biting and stinging insects, stopping to probe and dig for them as Auron stamped impatiently. His leathery skin couldn't turn arrows, but it kept out the flies admirably.\n\nThen the storm hit. Winds screamed up from the southwest, pursued by lightning and thunder, more terrifying than ten thousand stamping dwarves on the march. They found shelter, if the notch between two boulders could be called shelter, and waited it out.\n\nAuron talked her into trying the rainwater. Its clean taste seemed to clear her mind and wash away the thoughts of danger and doom. It was the first sensation in the Upper World she enjoyed. She stuck out her tongue and let the water run off the boulder, onto her tongue, and into her jowls, where it could be easily swallowed.\n\nAnd\u2014Sun-bless the Water Spirit\u2014the rain washed her scales clean. She stretched and rippled and lifted her scales to the invigorating flow. Take that, sticky pine sap! Better luck next hatchling, blood-bugs! Even the faint sparking smell in the air from a nearby lightning strike gave her hearts new life.\n\nThe rain left the valleys to the south and west clear; individual branches stood out in the storm-washed air. Anything was possible. Finding Father, even. Then the dwarves would taste their own blood and tears.\n\nThe rain slackened, and the hatchlings found plentiful soft worms driven to the surface by the moisture. Auron tried to snap his up, but Wistala found that they went down faster and easier if one simply inhaled with one's lips tight around the worm. Auron thumped his tail in appreciation as she showed him the trick.\n\n\"Clever,\" Auron said, giving a faint prrum. \"You know how to find a meal's weak spot.\"\n\n\"Father will boil those dwarves in their own skin,\" she said, more of a mind for vengeance than compliments.\n\n\"To do that, he'd have to dig them out of their own holes,\" Auron said. \"I have a mind-picture of a dwarf fortress from Father. It's all sheer rocks and towers and gates and arrow-slits.\"\n\n\"Father shared more with you.\"\n\n\"And Mother more with you.\"\n\n\"Think of it. Think hard. I'll try.\"\n\nAuron's eyes screwed up in concentration. Wistala got a flash or two, grim towers around a mountain lake, an overhanging rock, a pounding sound, craft on the lake like water beetles\u2014and then it left.\n\n\"Now it's going fuzzy,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Stop trying. I got some of it. Who are they?\"\n\n\"They're some dwarves Father saw at some point. To the north of the cave.\"\n\n\"Dragons must kill them one day. Or they'll come into other caves.\"\n\n\"The only day we can count on is today,\" he said.\n\nShe nuzzled her brother. She'd never felt this close to Jizara, and even Mother had been more presence than person. Perhaps it was the way they depended on each other.\n\nShe settled down next to Auron as he made himself miserable and tore up the turf with his sii. She formed a resolve\u2014perhaps a silly one, with her being so young, but she would grow, and the resolve would not die unless she let it. Auron would have to take care of their line. She'd protect the lines of others:\n\n\u2003And for those who threaten our ancient fame,\n\n\u2003To feel the wrath of dragon-dame.\n\nThe horse smell the next day made Wistala hungry. But they weren't wild horses. They came with blankets and saddles and lines and other accoutrements of the hominids. She also smelled a cold fire, which could only mean hominids\u2014dragonflame, even old, had a greasy smell. Auron counted better than thirty horses in a high meadow, and they decided to climb to avoid the chance of running across sharp-eyed elves in the mountainside forest.\n\nBy Auron's calculation, they were on the same part of the mountain as the western entrance Father used. They moved, taking extra care, staying low behind brush or fallen timber. That approach limited their vision of the landscape, but more important, it also limited their enemies'. As the sun set, they crossed another high meadow, bellies tight to cool earth.\n\n\"Nearly there, Tala,\" Auron said when she tired. \"See that point of rock? Like a claw held out? The cave mouth's just on the other side.\"\n\nWistala saw Father first, high to the north, his bronze scales shimmering in the sun.\n\n\"Auron! Auron \u2026 look,\" she gasped.\n\nWith limp four-leggeds clutched in his sii, Father tipped his wings and began to descend, floating down through the air like water feeding into a cavern crack.\n\nAuron let out a glad cry and leaped away, dashing for the stone prominence. Wistala stood and waved her neck, trying to catch Father's eye, but the dragon kept his head to the dangerous dark just inside the cave mouth, examining his landing spot from a variety of altitudes and angles. Why wouldn't he just look round?\n\nShe caught up to Auron in time to see him sag against the outcropping, neck and tail drooping.\n\n\"Father didn't see me.\"\n\nWistala choked back a wail.\n\nThe cave mouth showed signs of ancient construction, ruined battlements and cracked towers about wide creeper-hung mouth. Father must have considerable flying skill to land inside without disturbing the overgrowth.\n\nSpilled rock covered the whole mountainside beneath the cave mouth. Moss grew thick out of the wind between the rocks.\n\nBetrayed! The Wheel of Fire!\n\nThe power of Father's mind sent a shudder down her long spine. Not so precisely modulated as Mother's mind-speech, Father's was all emotion and imagery. Auron's mind-picture of the dwarf hold, though this time as clear and painful as naked sunlight, burned into her brain. A roar she felt through the rock as much as she heard emerged from the cave, as though the mountain itself were screaming from its broken-toothed mouth.\n\nAfter the roar came the dwarven battle cry she'd heard before: Ku! Ku! Kuuuuu!\n\nFather's pain and need came through to her, as hard and bright as his gemstones they'd thoughtlessly gobbled. She felt wounds as Father emerged, a dwarf with legs set tight against his neck, hacking at Father's scaly spine with a bloody ax as though trying to cut a tree dodging out of the way.\n\nOff, off my back, you klut!\n\nWistala could feel the dwarf on her back, winced at the blows. She threw herself off the rock, rolled in the meadow as battle horns blew in the valley below.\n\n\"Above you!\" Auron shouted in a voice louder than she'd have given him credit for. Then Auron, too, gave in to Father's pain, and he rolled himself into a ball.\n\nFlee!\n\nShe saw Father flapping north, plucking spears from his hide, got another flash of the dwarf halls around the lake. He couldn't mean to go into battle again!\n\nIn the valley below, from hiding places in the mossy rocks, elven heads watched him go.\n\n\"Wistala, lie flat!\" The words came fast as Auron told her to let him lead the elves away. She would go north and find Father.\n\nHer hearts almost ceased beating at the thought of her brother leaving her. \"Blades and raids, let's run. I want us to be with each other, no matter what.\"\n\n\"One of us has to make it, Wistala. You hunt better than I. You have a chance of making it alone in the wilderness.\"\n\n\"I don't know the way!\"\n\n\"Follow the mountains north. You can't miss this lake\u2014it's on this side of the mountains and very big.\" He gave her his fuzzy mind-picture again, but it didn't matter. She'd never make it\u2014\n\nAuron touched her nose, managed a choking prrum as he pushed her into a crevice.\n\nHe listened to the hoofbeats of the approaching elves. \"Go to Father. Follow the Bowing Dragon. Follow Susiron. Father is there!\"\n\n\"Auron, I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, you can. Don't waste time.\"\n\nAuron hurried into the meadow, in the open for everyone to see. High above, wheeling hawks altered course and moved to fly over him. They cried out, and were answered by horns from the valley.\n\nHe can't be leaving! He can't he can't he can't \u2026\n\nShe called to him with her mind, called him brave and good and sent all the love she couldn't find words for, reaching to touch his mind if not his soft gray skin.\n\n\"Good-bye, sister.\"\n\nHe'd never called her sister before.\n\nHe never would again.\n\nWistala cried, alone, and not one living thing in the Upper World cared.\n\nDarkness settled on the mountainside before Wistala moved again. All the time she waited, she had to choke back little peeping hatchling cries. A day ago, she would have put her neck on an oath that she couldn't keen like a still-wet hatchling anymore, but the sight of her brother leading the elves away from her and to his doom brought the sound\u2014whether she liked it or not.\n\nShe waited until long after dark, hoping that Auron would return, galumphing out of the mountainside mists with eyes ablaze and a tail-thumping story of outwitting the elves.\n\nShe looked into the valley in the direction Auron had disappeared. Campfires dotted the area around the meadow where they'd come across the unsaddled horses. She heard no baying of hounds, saw no torches in the trees indicating a hunt still on. But Auron was quick, perhaps\u2014\n\nNo. You're alone now. They're all assassinated.\n\nExcept Father. Gone north, to some dwarven fortress by a lake. The clouds thickened; another storm might be working up.\n\nShe couldn't just leave. She and Auron deserved some mark to show they'd lived and breathed and seen. She went to the ledge where they'd watched Father fight the elves and dwarves. She extended a thick saa-claw and scored a pair of marks into the lee side of the stone.\n\nThough she took her time, the result certainly didn't match the fabled artistry of Silverhigh\u2014it looked like something a bored blighter might carve into his cave wall: two dragons, mirror images, circling each other as though guarding the other's back.\n\n\"We'll always be together here, Auron. This stone won't forget.\"\n\nShe crept up the hill, moving away from the rocky prominence.\n\nGoing up a mountain can sometimes save you travel around its base, but that wasn't the case for Wistala. Without a second pair of eyes to keep watch as she moved, she had to pause every hundred lengths or so, to watch and listen and pick a route for her next creep.\n\nThe cave also drew her from the heights. This time, instead of screaming, the mouth of the cave seemed to call to her. Home \u2026 home \u2026 home, the egg shelf, the trickles, the patches of moss and easily caught slugs.\n\nAnd she had to know.\n\nPerhaps at the last moment Mother had shoved Jizara into the chimney, the way she tossed Auron. Or both sides, having torn each other to pieces, had retreated to lick the blood from their wounds.\n\nShe hazarded an entry by the roof. The elves and dwarves would be less likely to watch the top. While difficult and tiring, it would be infinitely safer to go that way.\n\nOnce closer to the mouth of the cave, traveling through knots of creeper where a hominid could barely crawl and cling, she examined the ancient battleworks. Dwarves or blighters had broken up pieces of mountain and rebuilt them into walls and chambers, sealing them with something that felt\u2014and tasted, she explored a crack with her tongue\u2014like long-dried mud, only harder.\n\nThe view from the top of the cave mouth made her dizzy and disoriented. Not so much from the distance she could see even in the dark, for dragon eyes opened wide, or from the height to the rock spill below, but from the sense that she'd seen this view before. Sensory impressions from Mother, no doubt.\n\nBelow and at the bottom of the rock spill, a tiny campfire guttered with hominid forms sleeping around it. Woven bags containing some kind of prize gleaned from the fight\u2014perhaps dragonscale? The nets were too widely woven to hold Father's gems from the small hoard Auron had told her about and which she and Jizara had played with before greedily devouring. If a sentry watched the cavern, he was well concealed.\n\nShe reversed herself and entered the cave at slug speed. There were no end of grips for her probing sii and saa, and if her tail wasn't so long as Auron's, her rather stumpy limbs were a good deal stronger than his. The great hump of muscle on her back that would one day power her wings\u2014assuming she survived the passage of the season-circles\u2014took over when she clung to just rest.\n\nDetritus of a battle could be smelled below. Dragonblood\u2014dwarf loathsome reek!\u2014and fainter scents like bruised mint-herbs that may have been elf.\n\nThe cave twisted and turned, and at one corner, she descended to the cave floor to pant and rest her muscles. She might have become lost on the way down, as the cave branched out twice, but thanks to the spatterings of dragonblood, the trail was easily followed. When she started to come across cave moss again, she returned to the ceiling.\n\nShe let out a hatchling mew\u2014the noise took her by surprise\u2014as she entered the cave, a tiny skulking shadow of one of Father's glad returns with sii full of feast for his hungry hatchlings.\n\nAlarmed at the noise, she spent a long time looking, listening, and smelling. Except for the odor of dragonblood and the faint foreign smell of dwarf, the cave smelled no different; indeed, it was achingly familiar, so much so that it was all she could do to keep from running to the egg shelf.\n\nThe familiar patterns of the faintly glowing cave moss pulled at her. How could the splashes of light remain unchanged when everything else had? It should re-form itself into spear points and daggers and arrows and\u2014\n\nSomething lay on the egg shelf.\n\nShe lost her grip, didn't even right herself as she plummeted, and only a patch of cave moss saved her serious injury.\n\nThe egg shelf shielded what lay up there. Most of it, anyway. She crept, mindlessly as a slug, toward the shelf. A broken ax-blade slid as she trod on it, and she froze, listening. Nothing but her own heartbeat answered.\n\nShe climbed up to the egg shelf.\n\nIt wasn't Mother. It was mother's size, certainly, but mother had skin, glowing green dragonscale that changed color as it rose and turned according to mood and body temperature.\n\nMother also had a head. And sii. And saa. And tail. And great leathery wings that could cover the whole egg shelf when extended. Not tendrils of cave moss exploring and thriving on what it found as it crept up her back.\n\nShe stood in the cave moss consuming Mother, engulfing her like a growing, grasping soft claw.\n\nWistala's body no longer obeyed her. It jerked and shook as she walked, walked away, turned her back, and shut her nose to the sickly-sweet smell, tripping clumsily like a hatchling fresh out of the egg. She hurried to the trickle at the end of the egg shelf, sat under it, let water fall and wash her scales clean.\n\nThen she saw her sister.\n\nThey'd done the same to Jizara, then tossed her on the dragon-waste pile. The thing that had been her sister was mostly obscured by devouring cave moss, but even moss couldn't hide that the tail she'd once been so proud of, her lovely elegant tail\u2026 .\n\nA shrieking, whistling cry came up her throat, and she didn't care if the dwarves came again. Once her head was off, she'd have no more images of this, this butchery. How could her mind carry this for the remainder of her life?\n\nShe ran all the way to the egg shelf, where it turned into hardly a ledge, drove herself against the cave wall, vaguely aware of a racking sound coming from somewhere deep in her chest. She rubbed her fringe against a sharp rock. Some old scales were coming loose up there, and it would be just as well to be rid of them sooner, and the pain wasn't bad at all; in fact, it was a bit of a relief as\u2014\n\n\"Sister?\"\n\nAuron?\n\nShe looked off the shelf, heart leaping and body ready to join it\u2014\n\nAnd saw the copper. Thinner and more haggard than ever. The copper stood, leaning a little as he balanced on his crippled limb's joint.\n\n\"They killed her, Jiz\u2014\" His voice was only superficially like Auron's after all; he still had some hatchling inflections.\n\n\"I'm Wistala. You're no brother to me. You had a tooth in this.\" She felt her fanlike griff expand. Though she had no crest to rattle them against, they could still flutter angrily, she found.\n\n\"They lied,\" the copper said, but she launched herself off the ledge, jaws agape and sii reaching for him. \"A bloody cave, no hoard\u2014\"\n\nHe dodged as she landed, took advantage of her being off balance to throw himself across her neck. \"We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can't be changed!\" he said.\n\nWistala squirmed, couldn't break free. She gathered her limbs under her body. \"No. But it can be avenged.\" She lifted herself with all four limbs and her tail, pushing forward.\n\nThe copper tipped.\n\nAnd she struck him, sii, teeth, even dealt shoulder blows, trying to tip him so his vulnerable underbelly would be exposed, gutted and thrown on the waste heap to feed the lichen!\n\nShe tried to claw at his eyes, but her sii just rattled off his crest and griff. She found something soft, drove her digits in with claws extended.\n\nThe copper squealed, so loudly that it shocked her into releasing him, vague memories of wrestling with Auron during one of his attacks triggering instincts\u2014\n\nFace smeared with blood, the copper scrambled away, striking her between the eyes with his tail as he turned so that she saw dragonflame explode for a moment. She shook her head to clear her vision, and he was gone.\n\nLiquid gurgled and pulsed behind her breastbone, and she spat after him. Her fire bladder bile had a sharp, unpleasant smell, like vomit and sulfur.\n\nShe sniffed out the blood trail and followed it. The dribbles led her to the biggest of the cave pools, the one with the waterfall next to it. A fissure in the wall had been widened, and she saw a forgotten spike or two still resting in a piece of wall that had come down and fallen into the pool.\n\nHad he gone to get the dwarves?\n\nI'll meet that cripple and his dwarves again when I have real dragonfire, instead of bladderbile.\n\nBut until then, she had to survive. She took a deep drink of the water from the pool; her brother's blood could just be tasted on it. Or perhaps it was simply a loosened tooth from the fight. Wistala turned and left her home cave forever.\n\nWistala used the walls and ceiling again on her way out, now sure of the route and good places to rest. She wasn't afraid of being taken unaware by pursuit; the bloody-handed dwarves might as well bang their shields against the walls for all the noise they made.\n\nShe feared and hated them. It would be hard to say which emotion was the stronger\u2014perhaps her fear, that she would end up another headless, sii-less, saa-less corpse robbed of life and skin itself.\n\nHer body wasn't equal to the anger she felt. It hung above her, vast and thick, like a storm cloud. One day she might be able to inhale that cloud, take it into her body and use it to fuel her vengeance for a butchered family.\n\nOne day. When I am strong. I'm too weak now.\n\nWeak wasn't the word for it, more like exhausted, drained \u2026 Every muscle in Wistala's body ached as she climbed out of the cave. She inched forward as she emerged, not knowing what sort of help her brother might have summoned. Furtive creeping was her only defense. She wouldn't be able to put up any more of a fight than a slug, thanks to her weariness and the cold despair in her hearts.\n\nThe smell of fresh air steeled her limbs and gave her a last burst. As she climbed up through the creepers at the mouth of the cave and squeezed into an old crack in the battlements, she felt as though her body was sloughing off her limbs to puddle beneath her. She joined it, slid down a rushing slide of fatigue, and slept.\n\nWistala awoke to alarm that she couldn't smell Auron. The events of the previous day came back in a rush, along with the tumult of emotions. Not true emotions, rather echoes of them. The fear, the anger, the disgust, the despair all felt cold and dead and dark, leaving her spiritless.\n\nWas it just yesterday she had lost one brother, and fought another?\n\nI'm done for. The world's too much for me. It'll have me, too, in the end.\n\nShe would have laughed at the dreams of were-blood taken from the dwarves were it not too much effort. Never to smell Mother's rich, comforting scent, spin gemstones on the egg shelf with Jizara, listen to Father's approach with awe and a little fear at the bloody odors \u2026\n\nA beetle probed the dirt of a crack in the battlement above her eye. She could pick it with a flick of her tongue and crunch it down, but it still sought sustenance with the determination of one who knew only instinct. It knew nothing of doom or enemies or the vast indifference of this uncaring, friendless world.\n\n\"I shall be you for a time, beetle.\"\n\nThe beetle hunted so that it might eat, unaware of its own near destruction. And so should she.\n\nShe crept out of the cold crack. Everything on her hurt, especially the gripping maniples of her sii. She got behind an old wall, or perhaps it was a paved path; it was wide and low, and thick brush almost turned it into a tunnel.\n\nIt was morning on the other side of the mountains, she guessed. Here the land lay shadowed and cold under a purple sky. The clouds above slowly warmed, and she took advantage of the twilight to explore a broken tower. From an arrow-slit next to a stony ledge, she examined the approaches to the cave.\n\nNo campfires. No dwarves. No hunting dogs. No men. Elves you wouldn't see until their bowstrings sang your death. Some wide-winged birds circled above the woods and meadows; others sat on bare tree limbs with a good view of open ground, preening or keeping watch. Their behavior was regular: they didn't suddenly change course or startle or cry out, as they would if hunters were prowling the woods. To the north, more mountains, a long line of them, snowy tops tinged with morning gold. Father was up there somewhere, but he wouldn't even be a dot at this distance.\n\nIf he still lived.\n\nWistala sniffed the air, smelled mountain goat droppings in the grassy interstice filling the bottom of a rocky runnel. The beetle would no doubt find the clumps tasty. She preferred the source.\n\nWistala followed the smells at a slow stalk with a thoughtless\u2014but not senseless\u2014appetite.\n\nWistala didn't need to follow the Bowing Dragon during the day, since the mountains appeared to run more or less north. She kept to the dead area above most of the trees but below the snow. Brilliant green moss the color of her scales covered every rock, evidence to some play of wind and weather that meant mists at these heights almost every morning and night.\n\nWhile moving in open sunlight meant she could be observed, she'd rather see trouble from a distance than worry what might be around the next scraggly pine tree.\n\nWater was plentiful\u2014the mountains were shedding their winter weight of snow, and it came down in innumerable streams. The streams carried more than just refreshing water and bits of bark and leaf on a long journey down the mountain; they were full of tasty frogs that wiggled delightfully as they went down Wistala's long throat.\n\nBy evening she'd crossed over two shoulders and had to face a decision. The mountains curved away west before going north again, and she could save herself a good deal of time by cutting across the valley, going the same distance in a quarter of the dragon-lengths. But it would mean plunging into thick forest. Trees could mean men, or worse, elves.\n\nBut trees also meant warm-blooded, furry, four-footed feasting, marrow-filled bones to crunch, and juicy eyeballs for sucking.\n\nAppetite and the desire to hurry north, hopefully to find Father somewhere plotting destruction to the dwarves, won out over caution. She descended into the valley.\n\nPatient trees waited for her. Soon she could see only slivers of sky around the tops of pines.\n\n\"Grounddragon look look!\" a blue jay shrieked. It fluttered to a lower branch to scream at her: \"Nestraider! Nestraider!\"\n\nBirdspeech made hatchling babble seem sophisticated.\n\n\"News! Dragon lives?\" a swift answered from a nearby tree. Wistala couldn't see it.\n\n\"Lives, lives, the grounddragon lives,\" the jay called back.\n\n\"I won't raid your nests,\" Wistala said. \"Why would it be news that I live?\"\n\n\"Such news! News! Sparrow say grackle say thrush say elf-hawk say elves kill grounddragon,\" the swift called.\n\n\"Nestraider! Nestraider!\" the jay insisted.\n\n\"I will raid your nests if you don't shut that thorn you use for a beak. When was this grounddragon killed, swift?\"\n\n\"Not-today,\" the swift answered.\n\nPerhaps birdbrains had room for only two concepts of time: something that happened today and Everything Else. Auron might still live, somewhere. The birds might be gossiping about a killing in the area from weeks and weeks ago.\n\nBut she wondered\u2014and her fire bladder went cold. Could birds keep a thought in their singsong heads that long?\n\nMother said some elves understood birdspeech. Wistala didn't want her comings and goings sung about through the whole forest. She knew she couldn't convince them to lie. Then she'd have to come up with an alternative truth they could understand. \"Good riddance. We not-dragons don't like them.\"\n\n\"Nestraider! Nestraider!\"\n\n\"You look like a dragon,\" the swift said, and Wistala finally spotted him sheltering in the notch between two thick branches. She'd seen him only because he raised his whitish chin to speak.\n\n\"No, I'm a not-dragon. Though we look a lot like dragons and are often mistaken for them, that's why we hate them so.\"\n\n\"Nestraider! Nestraider!\"\n\n\"Not-dragons don't raid nests!\" Wistala said. She marched off into the forest, tail held high, exposing her vent to the still-screaming jay.\n\n\"I've met a not-dragon,\" the swift bubbled. \"The sparrows must hear of this!\"\n\nThe next day she cut through another wooded valley and crossed a low rocky ridge in the middle of the forest. It was honeycombed with caves of assorted sizes and, unfortunately, empty nests. There was good snake hunting in the rocks. All she had found to eat in the forest was a white-eyed possum, which had been wandering around in the daylight in a muddled daze. It stank like disease, but she still ate it. Mother had said that the illnesses that plagued mammals wouldn't affect dragons.\n\nSnake hunting was all quickness, and it appealed to Wistala. One good thump behind the head, and a snake's back was broken, leaving a thick feast that fit neatly down one's throat. She got one bulging black-cave serpent that had recently eaten a large rat or a baby raccoon, judging from the size of the bulge in its midsection, thus giving her two meals with one jump.\n\nShe felt dirty, and found a rock where she could bend and stretch and extend her scales to the afternoon sun. Sunlight cleaned the crevices around the scale-root almost as well as water but felt a sky's worth warmer, especially with a snake dinner inside.\n\nA prrum might even have been forming in her throat, until her memories betrayed her: Auron would have been a fine snake-hunter, quick as he was. Why couldn't he be with her?\n\nStop it, Tala. Auron is in the past, gone save for a scratch on a rock and your memories.\n\nExcept for his head and his claws, perhaps. What sort of wretched hominid ritual are they being incorporated into? Mother said the hominids used dragonkind for medicines and magic, if they were lucky enough to get one down.\n\n\"Stupid hearts. Give him up.\"\n\nOr did they know something she didn't?\n\nWistala looked to the sky, to the late afternoon sun, now disappearing behind a bank of clouds. There'd be a rain tonight, if not a storm. She should nap on the ridge, and then shelter from the storm in one of the caves.\n\nAnd lose half a day finding Father.\n\nShe picked her route down the ridge.\n\nWistala would have avoided the great claw-shaped cave, for it smelled like bears\u2014but for the sounds wafted up from it. A breeze blew out of the cave. Perhaps it was another chimney from the Lower World, similar to the one she'd climbed with Auron.\n\nAs this one didn't have to travel most of the way up a mountain, the path to the Lower World must be shorter. It conducted sounds, strange rhythms that couldn't be natural, unless the air was moaning on its way up thousands of individual channels.\n\nShe ventured into the cave, found a bone-strewn ingress that had been collecting odds and ends since the forming of the world. But a trio of cracks sent air and sound up from below.\n\nVoices.\n\nShe couldn't pick out individual words, and indeed she could hardly swear that the voices she heard weren't in her imagination rather than some trick of wind. But the rhythm repeated itself again and again every hundred heartbeats or so.\n\nA song.\n\nNo dragon song\u2014that, she'd be able to comprehend. Probably dwarves, singing as they worked or buckled on helm and shield to go kill more hatchlings. This was not a light, glad sound like that of a bird happy to get the morning dew off its feathers; this was a dirge such as a mother dragon might sing over empty, broken eggs. She hoped Father had given the dwarves reason to lament.\n\nDwarf voices meant dwarf tunnels, chambers, and mines. She must be getting near the tower-girded lake.\n\nAnd Father.\n\n\u2003Sing-song a dragon's dead!\n\n\u2003No more wingwinds, no more dread,\n\n\u2003Sing-song, a firestarter's dead!\n\nThe song awoke Wistala from her predawn nap beneath a fallen tree. Some surviving branches still held up part of the bole, and a fresh start emerged from one of the roots\u2014a testament to the resiliency of oaks\u2014and she'd taken shelter beneath it, waking to find fresh spiderwebs all around and the birds cheering.\n\nWistala's chest heart shrank to the size of one of the wrapped flies in the web by her nose.\n\nCurse the birds and their tinder-dry nests. \"What news?\" she called in birdspeech.\n\n\"Great news, giant log-turtle,\" a grackle chirped. \"A dragon's down by the river-gorge.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you.\"\n\n\"Look under the buzzards, then. Already they gather.\"\n\nWistala came out from under the log, and the birds went silent. She heard some tiny frightened peeps.\n\nA tall pine stood nearby. She ran to it, climbed its regular, neatly spaced rungs as high as she dared. She saw mountains and many treetops and butterflies and an overcast pushed up against the snowcaps but\u2014\n\nNo. There they are. Oh for my wings, for just one hour's use of my wings!\n\nShe went down the pine recklessly, headfirst, in a series of controlled falls, letting the springy wood and interlaced branches catch her, not caring how the needles stuck or the sap clung to her.\n\nShe landed with a thump.\n\nWistala hurried through the forest, crashing through bramble and sending dead leaves flying, leaving a trail a blind elf could follow by touch. The first hot rush wore off, and she settled into an agonized dogtrot, her breath now louder than her footfalls.\n\nThe ground became treacherous and thin soiled, with pines and beeches clinging to strips of earth between rocks flattened and rounded and moss-bitten. She jumped, reached a prominence where she could see through the scattered trees, and corrected her course across blue-green stone with sharp edges that bit her sii.\n\nDragons aren't built like horses or wolves, though their legs can get them over short distances at speeds that surprise\u2014and kill\u2014the unwary. They walk over long distances easily, resting tail and head on the ground frequently with weight otherwise divided between their four powerful limbs. But they are poor runners beyond the limits of a dragon-dash.\n\nWistala, though thick-bodied and strong, was no exception. After the first burst, all she had to give in her run was determination. She matched it against the fire in her lungs, the pain in her high-joints, the fatigue in her muscles. Her field of vision shrank until she saw the forest as though through a long dark tunnel. Hearing was gone save for the sound of her hearts pounding; all she could smell was blood-tinged saliva flowing from her mouth, thanks to stress-ruptured vessels in her long lungs.\n\nWhite froth hung from her dry mouth.\n\nShe hit the gorge first, crashing through bushes, scattering berries that bruised into sickly scent. Only a quick saa-dig saved her tumble down the hillside.\n\nSteep-sided, fern-covered fells flanked a river of frothing white and mist. Just beyond a rainbow created by the rising water, the river threw a wide loop around a prominence that resembled the upper half of hominid leg bone. A long wall of rock ran out to a knoblike point, surrounded on all sides by water.\n\nThe carrion birds circled above the stony bulge. Every now and then one would dip its wings and go lower and the others would follow; then it would rise again, but never quite so high as when she had first marked them.\n\nJust when her body needed to hurry most, it betrayed her. She tripped, she stumbled, lost in a yellow-and-pink fog that played tricks on her vision.\n\nThen she stood on the peninsula, the river rushing in opposite directions a dragon-length to either side, the peninsula riven and notched like vertebrae. Her run became a stagger on stones treacherous with green slimes and gray lichens.\n\nThen to the knob, a scarp like a castle keep with ferns clinging to the side as though they were freshly hatched spiders drying themselves on the egg sac. The birds no longer whirled above.\n\nWistala smelled dragonblood, and the mists cleared. Ancient irregular steps were cut into the side of the rock prominence, but ferns had taken over. She climbed the stairs on a carpet of green.\n\nThe rock was somewhat flatter at the top, stonework like that of the battlements outside the home-cave crowning it. Three mighty toothlike obelisks stood upright, rough hewn, with lichen blurring glyphs carved into the sides facing each other. Had they all been standing, they would have made a roofless cage, but the rest had fallen with broken pieces strewn all about. They lay on their sides, half-covered by jagged pines all leaning upstream.\n\nThe ruin of her father lay in a depression in the center, his own blood in a pool all around. Feathered spikes thrust into riven scales covered his back like fur. He had but five horns now, one was broken off at a great notch in his crest, and he couldn't fold one griff thanks to an ax-head stuck in it. Blood ran from under his sii.\n\n\"Father!\"\n\nBrown-and-white carrion birds, perched at the tops of the obelisks, took wing at her cry.\n\nShe dashed to him, licked at a dimpled wound under one closed eye that hardly even bled. She didn't begin to know how to manage the rest.\n\nHis other side was just as bad. The hilt of some mighty weapon, notched like an arrow but the size of a spear, projected about the length of her tail from his side. The back was attached to a chain, and the chain to a heavy round ball that had cracked the ancient stone where it landed. Had father flown dragging that?\n\n\"Ayangthe, I've hurt myself on the slate pile. Jumped too far down. Is Mother asmelled?\"\n\n\"Father, it's Wistala. Wistala.\"\n\nFather grimaced. \"You're a star, Wistala\u2014I saw you twinkling beneath dear Irelia last night. You, Auron, and Jizara all in a row. I'll be up there soon. Wait.\"\n\n\"Do open your eye, Father.\"\n\n\"Can't. Light hurts.\"\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\" one of the condors croaked. \"He's done for.\"\n\nWistala ignored the judgment, though she admired his birdspeech. It had a loftier tone than the grain-brained bush-hoppers.\n\n\"You're only making it harder for him,\" the condor continued from his high obelisk.\n\nWhat had Mother told her to do with wounds? Oh, it was in one of her Lessons. The hatchling and the wounded tiger, of course! Dwarf's-beard! It loved rotting old logs, especially damp ones.\n\n\"Father, I'll be right back. I'm going to help you.\"\n\nNovosolosk, the little black dragon, had just ventured above ground. \u2026\n\nShe looked up at the condor: \"Fair warning! I see any of you pecking at him, I'll be venting feathers for a week.\"\n\n\"Perish the thought.\" The condor fluffed up his feathers and settled. \"I'm eager to see how you manage this.\"\n\nWhile hunting rock rats, Novosolosk found himself trapped atop a low jungle kopje by a great tiger. The tiger prowled round and round the base of the kopje, growling and panting.\n\nShe looked off the east side of the knob at the river-turn. Sure enough, masses of logs had washed up against the rocks at the base of the peninsula, wetted by the constant spray of white water. Along with more mundane lichens, tufts of gray hung from cracks and knotholes in the logs.\n\nNovosolosk tried to bargain with the tiger for safe passage out of his territory, but the tiger just spat abuse in return. He noticed an arrow through the tiger's neck, broken shafts sticking out either side of his coat, the orange and white gone brown with blood and green with pus.\n\n\"Tiger, tiger, I can extract that arrow\u2026 .\"\n\nHope gave her tired body new life. She eschewed the cut rocks for a quicker climb down the side of the knob. Going down would be easier than coming back up\u2026 .\n\nNovosolosk went to the swamp, the tiger padding along just behind, its hot breath on his tail and drops of saliva falling like rain. He expected the tiger to jump at any point \u2026\n\nSure enough, a few of the logs had thick growths of dwarf's-beard. The plant appeared to like broken-off ends, for some reason, or split trunks. It spilled out of the rotting black wood in a thick thatch of gray, interlaced and layered and almost woven in a way that made it difficult to tell where the growth began and where it ended. It reminded Wistala of the hair shirt from the man Father brought back to the cave for Auron to learn hominid-killing. One final test.\n\nAs the tiger groaned away, Novosolosk broke a piece of the moss at a thick joint. It was joined by a whitish band. He blew on the band. It stretched and waved in his breath but did not break. \u2026\n\nShe tore off two hunks of moss, carried it in her mouth back up the stairs, feeling a bit like a bullfrog she'd seen croaking away in a stream with his windbag expanded under his chin. She took the stairs in a series of leaps.\n\nNovosolosk crushed the moss in his sii and pulled out the arrow with one quick motion. The tiger yowled and swatted him across the crest, but he pressed the mass to either side of the hole the arrow left. Dwarf's-beard both staunched the flow and cleaned the wound, so powerful is its magic, and the tiger's angry fever came down\u2026 .\n\nShe listened to Father's heart when she crept under his wounded sii. Father would not move his limb; she had to wedge herself into the gap between body and arm like a river clam and then flex her back so she could get at the wound.\n\nThe ugly red gash gave off a pulse of blood from one end, a steady flow from the other. She packed the wound with dwarf's-beard, crushing its laced branches with her sii until they were sticky with the whitish gunk. It had been a brave dwarf that came so close to his sii to open the bronze dragon's breast with his ax.\n\nFather looked relieved as soon as she wiggled free of his armpit, although whether this was from instinct at being able to press the wound closed again or comfort brought by the dwarf's-beard, she couldn't say.\n\nThe stream of blood feeding the pool Father lay in slowed.\n\nWistala sank to her joints.\n\n\"Thank you, Novosolosk.\"\n\nI still say he's going to die,\" the condor insisted.\n\nMost of his cousins had left by the time the sun set, but a few still circled far above. The old yellowbeak chuckled every time Wistala limped up the long, long staircase, bearing another mouthful of dwarf's-beard.\n\nWistala worked from nose-tip to tail, crushing the growth and placing it atop Father's wounds. Sometimes it fell out again right away, and every time Father shifted his position, he exposed new wounds.\n\n\"Prophecies and fallacies, I'm starting to enjoy proving you wrong,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Ah, but there I've got you, if you'll take the high view. There's no hole so deep or airs so lofty for any of us that old Father Death doesn't visit. He's more reliable than even your fire. We, his humble retinue, clean up after him. How about giving us a taste and letting me warm my chilled grippers?\"\n\n\"I've no fire yet, and even if I did, I wouldn't waste it on a grouser like you.\"\n\n\"Grouse! I'm a High Mountain Condor, hatchling. Barring your kind, no one matches my wingspan save the lost Rocs of the east. And once you dragons are gone\u2014\"\n\n\"What's that you say?\"\n\n\"Please, take no offense. We carrion birds value our manners. If I spoke on a delicate subject\u2014\"\n\n\"I should have asked you to explain yourself. Do you mean once Father and I leave the river, you'll be the skyking?\"\n\nThe condor clacked his beak. \"I rarely see a dragon anymore. In the time of my father's father's father's egg, I'm told your kind were thick in these mountains, and there was good feasting on the remains of your kills, for kind dragon lords always offered fresh, delectable heads with eyeballs intact to us of lesser wing.\"\n\nWistala wondered how many other caverns hid butchered, moss-covered families. \"Who is driving the dragons away?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should ask your father that, if he ever speaks again.\"\n\n\"You must see everything. I've seen you soaring as high as a dragon.\"\n\nThe condor straightened a little; birds were as vain as dragons sometimes.\n\n\"So who can master dragons and bid them depart?\"\n\n\"The hominids, I suppose. They do shape the world to suit themselves, don't they?\"\n\n\"The world wins back, in the end,\" Wistala said, thinking of the toppled, overgrown battlements around the home cave.\n\n\"We condors look to the day of the Last Swancall. Do you know what a swancall is?\"\n\nWistala twitched her nose. \"No.\"\n\n\"It's a great metal thing shaped like a dragon's neck, and it makes a call as loud as the white swans you see on the lakes of the north. The hominids blow them before slaughtering each other. We carrion birds wait upon the war of the Last Swancall, when all the hominids kill each other off; then there'll be the vast battle feast in celebration and the world will be given over to we of talon and feather again.\"\n\nShe sniffed at the wound around the great shaft. It smelled evil. While waiting and dreaming of the condor's last swancall might be pleasant, she'd have to venture along the slippery banks of the river in search of more dwarf's-beard.\n\nA clear morning sky brought rainbows to the waterfall upriver. If Wistala weren't so weighted down with worry, the bright colors would have made her hearts glad. But Father still seemed to be worsening.\n\n\"Wistala, I'm so thirsty,\" Father panted. \"I'll perish of it before I can move again.\"\n\nRiver, river all around, and not a drop within reach. Father chose a good location to collapse, for it would be difficult and dangerous to cross and climb all the slippery rocks for a hominid bearing arms, but he couldn't reach the river swirling below as it bent back around the knob.\n\n\"But you must move!\" She didn't have enough digits to count how many times she urged Father to move. The blood around him had dried into a brown stain, still claw-deep and sticky under his scales.\n\nFather pressed his back against a horizontal slab at the center of the knob, not a fallen obelisk but obviously a cutting of some importance, judging by how it stood on a little platform. His claws slipped against the stone. He rolled a little, got his claws under him.\n\nWistala had to look away; she couldn't bear to see Father's limbs trembling under him again. Father's mighty head fell.\n\nGluck-glk-glub \u2026\n\nIs Father crying?\n\n\"He must have water,\" Wistala called.\n\nThe watching condor looked at the sky, checking for rain clouds, perhaps. \"Were you speaking to me?\"\n\n\"No \u2026 yes.\"\n\n\"Water flows up to down, not down to up. What you need is a train of pack-dwarves carrying waterskins.\"\n\n\"Waterskins?\" Wistala asked, thinking it was some sort of plant.\n\n\"Hominids make them. They scoop out the insides of sheep and lambs and fill them with water to drink on journeys.\"\n\nHominids must have stomachs stronger than the condor above to drink water stored inside rotting flesh. Disgusting creatures.\n\nWhy did the condor spew such a useless detail? He might as well have said, \"You need a good rainstorm,\" or \"A spring bubbling up through these rocks would help.\" She wouldn't begin to know how to scoop out a dead animal and fill it again with water. They had nostrils, throats, tailvents, never mind the holes one made while killing it. If she could reach up and grab the condor, she'd be tempted to try it with him \u2026 squeeze it out like mother bringing up a tenderized sheep for hungry hatchlings.\n\nWould that work?\n\nShe hurried down to the river, gulped down mouthful after mouthful, felt her stomach swell until she became sick with the fullness\u2026 .\n\nThe water came back up easily enough, a little sour-smelling, thanks to her empty belly.\n\nBut it worked.\n\nShe filled herself even fuller, until it seemed as though she could hardly draw breath from the liquid in her stomach\u2014dragon innards were built for gorging\u2014and learned a lesson when it came back up of its own accord on the stairs.\n\nShe took in less for her third load and made it all the way to the top.\n\n\"I've got something for you, Father,\" she said.\n\nHe opened a weary, bloodshot eye.\n\nShe cast about and settled on the central slab Father braced himself against when he tried to move. It had a gutter running down the center, perhaps designed to catch and hold rainwater? She hopped up onto the edge, and with a loudish belch almost filled half the trough with water.\n\nFather sniffed. \"Tala! You're a miracle!\" He lapped at the water. \"You are your mother's hatchling, no doubt about it,\" he said on the second trip.\n\n\"This is doing me wonders,\" on the third. All the gorging and retching were exhausting, but she pressed on.\n\nAs she filled her stomach a fourth time, she felt a little woozy; the climbs up and down the rock were trying. She needed a meal. Would fish live in water this rough?\n\nIt turned out they did. They liked to wait behind the bigger rocks, sitting in the calm, waiting for a meal to be swept to them by the current. But they scattered when she dived in after them and disappeared into the bubbling water.\n\nShe thought it over and tried steering herself through the current.\n\nThis was far trickier, but with a little practice, she found she could shoot into the calm waters with water-lids lowered and snap down a fish quick as thinking.\n\nBut if her stomach was digesting fish, it wasn't helping Father. He had blood and scale to make up. The juicy fish would help. Weren't they shiny little bags of water, after all?\n\nShe dived into the river upstream, and after a wild ride round the reversal at the knob\u2014and a bloodied nose on an unexpected rock\u2014she had five fish in her belly. She took her time climbing the steps.\n\nFather was asleep. Was his breathing less labored? Hard to tell. Wistala decided against waking him for a meal; the fish just felt too good in her gorge. Besides, they'd give her strength for more fishing. When Father woke, she'd try a few trips with a belly full of fish.\n\nTwo days\u2014and a countless number of trips with fish swallowed whole\u2014later, Father wasn't his old self, but he could reach the river on his own in order to drink and wash the clotted moss from his wounds.\n\nThey'd extracted the oversized spear\u2014Father called it a highpoon and told her dwarven war machines fired it to weigh down a dragon and bring him to earth. At one point, he'd had two in him and was plunging toward the lake around the dwarves' battlements, when luckily the second tore free and he could just fly with the other\u2026 .\n\n\"They got me on that great bridge between those towers of rock,\" Father said as he spat gobs of fire onto the chain links, which Wistala pounded with an edged rock under Father's instruction, feeling that her shoulders would give way long before the chain. \"There are caverns big enough for a dragon to get in at them, but they had the war machines concealed in decorative galleries, all woodwork and flower beds and curtains. I was hit before I heard the roar of the chains. Clever blighters.\"\n\nFinally the links gave way, and Father drew the highpoon out his other side, where it projected from his scale\u2014the barbs on it made any other kind of extraction impossible.\n\nWistala almost swooned during the gory extraction. How did Father manage the pain?\n\nFlying was beyond him, of course. He crept ever so slowly down the knob, shuffling his sii and saa and keeping grip with three while one explored the next step. Wistala fretted as he moved\u2014this was almost as bad as seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood. An honorable death after battle had a twilight dignity to it. Seeing her strong, confident father, lord of her home cave, reduced to a slug's pace down the gentlest slope of this rock pile brought new anguish.\n\nThe trip back up took all afternoon, it seemed.\n\n\"I never knew there could be such a fight,\" he said as the sun set behind fire-edged clouds.\n\nThe old condor still waited above, looking a little droopy. Wistala wondered if he was molting at the thought of his feast living on day after day. She liked his companionship, though, and brought him a whole dead fish she found washed up on the riverside.\n\nThe condor didn't mind the ants.\n\n\"The Wheel of Fire?\"\n\n\"Where did you hear that?\"\n\n\"Mother and Auron.\"\n\nFather bowed his head, nostrils shut. \"I saw her. What happened to Auron?\"\n\nWistala told him. The shouted warning \u2026 the elves chasing him \u2026 the story came slowly. She tried to give him mind-pictures but had to fill in the fuzzier parts with words.\n\n\"And here I thought he took after the grandsire on his mother's side. That sounds like something my father would have done. And you, scales so thin they hardly keep out the raindrops, went on alone?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You might have done better to have found a nook in the home cave and waited another year until you had your flame. A mouthful like you would be easy pickings for wolves, leave alone the hominids. But perhaps the wolves have been driven from these woods, too.\"\n\n\"I wanted to find you. We're all that's left.\" She didn't\u2014 couldn't\u2014mention the copper and his betrayal. Father had grief enough.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Father said. \"Some pair. A hatchling and a half-dead dragon. The hunt's probably on already, you know.\"\n\n\"In this wild country?\"\n\n\"There's no country too wild if there's a wounded dragon down. I tried to confuse them by flying hard south and then circling around through cloud layer, but my wings gave out. An elf will pick up a piece of bird-gossip or those hounds will find me. That dragon-hunter will have a new piece of scale for his harness, and our line will go unavenged.\"\n\n\"I'll avenge it, Father, if it comes to that.\"\n\n\"Were-oaths and corpse-curses are for drakes and dragons, daughter. Dragonelles get their vengeance by seeing clutches of eggs laid to take the place of the assassinated.\"\n\n\"I told you that you should have left him be,\" the condor said.\n\nFather blew his nostrils out at the condor. \"Only thing that'll change the mind of a dragonelle of Irelia's line is herself, Bartleghaff,\" Father said.\n\n\"You know that old buzzard?\"\n\nBartleghaff squawked: \"Condor!\"\n\n\"Know him?\" Father snorted. \"He's my oldest friend.\"\n\n\"Friend? You were waiting to eat him!\" Wistala said to the condor.\n\n\"Of course he was,\" Father said. \"I wouldn't want some stranger getting the best bits. Who better than an old skymate to serve the dragon-wake.\"\n\n\"What a feast!\" Bartleghaff said. \"And my son's got a hatchling of his own now, first year in the sky. Such a gobble we'd have, we'd all be too fat to fly for a week. You'd have been remembered fondly at every cliff-sit for a hundred years. We were gathering to see you off properly.\" He fluffed his feathers again. \"Till she came along.\"\n\n\"For someone who dines on lips and vents, you offer complaints a plenty,\" Father said. \"That legendary politeness of your kind\u2014if it ever existed\u2014is on the wane as your years advance.\"\n\n\"Tell me about the dwarves, Father. Why do you say they betrayed you?\"\n\n\"They broke a bargain they struck with your mother. Strange, for of all the hominids, dwarves are the only ones who can be trusted to keep their word without crabbing. Serves us right for believing legends. Perhaps dwarvish honor, like so many of the other old truths, has been brought down by poisoned arrows.\" He sent a significant glare Bartleghaff's way.\n\n\"What was the bargain?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"It came from our need for a decent cave. Your mother and I had already seen our share of tragedy. For our first clutch, we were too high in the mountains and in too shallow a cavern. A bitter freeze took the eggs. Your poor mother. The next cavern had a seep of bad air, odorless, clinging to the floor. Again, no hatchlings stirring after the first weeks. I was inconsolable at that and gave up hope\u2014all those years of searching wasted. While flying the southern reaches of these mountains, we came across a band of blighters, half of them hurt, and made an easy meal of them. While I chased the survivors off south, your mother nosed through their belongings for digestible metals.\n\n\"Up popped a dwarf. Your mother thought him well scarred from battle and a stout, strong sort, even for a dwarf. Now had I been there, I would have made an end to him, but your mother knew we were strangers to the mountains this far from the sea, and she conversed with him. He gave his name as Gobold of the Wheel of Fire clan.\n\n\"'You're unusually bold for a dwarf abovegrounds,' your mother said.\n\n\"'I'm in your debt,' Gobold said, pouring out the contents of a small purse he carried. There was a goodly mouthful of silver for each of us to be had. Just the thing we needed to put the sparkle back in our scales after the long flight.\n\n\"'Silver and salivation, what service have we done you?'\n\n\"Gobold replied: 'You've finished a battle commenced days ago. The blighters outran us. Yea, they even outdug us.'\n\n\"Your mother let him talk, and he spoke of the decay of the human empire that once circled the Inland Ocean the way cave moss circles a pool. They'd given up their outposts in the southern mountains, and blighters filled some of their old caves and tumbles. The blighters were plaguing the dwarves' trade routes and taking over mines.\n\n\"When he spoke of how the blighters filled several caves at the end of the southern mountains, closed them off from the dwarvish tunnels and roads in the Lower World so that the dwarves couldn't get at them, your mother began to hatch an idea of her own. She told the dwarves that in return for six chests of gold and twelve of silver, we'd drive the blighters from those caverns and see that they never returned.\n\n\"'Such a deed would long be sung at our Memorials, Queen of Dragons,' Gobold said.\n\n\"'I must consult with my husband before formally pledging tooth and claw to bargain. Perhaps you should seek the agreement of your clan?'\n\n\"'That will not be difficult,' Gobold said with a chuckle.\n\n\"In the end, the bargain was formally struck with many words and an etching on a silver war-shield. She had the dwarves pay us half in small sums as we brought back heads for counting. When it came to dealing with hominids, your mother was fond of the old dragon-saying: Trust, but keep an eye open.\n\n\"So we fought the dwarves' war for them. I would have just forced my way into the cave and set fire to all within, but your mother demanded a more patient war that allowed us to build our strength even as we weakened theirs.\n\n\"We attacked their herds and their flocks, burned their Upper World crops, and took such blighter parties as were easily consumed by two dragons hunting by day or night. Such feasting we had\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, yes \u2026 ,\" sighed Bartleghaff.\n\n\"And when they sent out hunting parties or tried to trick and trap us, we got away without too much difficulty, and sometimes got a chance for our own tricks and traps, for your Mother has\u2014had\u2014a fine mind for that sort of thing. Many of the blighters left in despair, but a hard few stayed within their cave, scratching a living from the Lower World. Soon we made them afraid to cast a shadow outside their cave.\"\n\n\"Did you destroy the battlements around the cave, then?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Oh no, daughter, time is fiercer even than dragons. Hatchlings think the world began when their egg cracked\u2014eh, Bartleghaff? Those old works date from the Age of Wheels, when the blighters first ruled the world before dragons tamed their appetites.\"\n\n\"You must have gone in the caves eventually.\"\n\n\"When we were fat and strong with full fire bladders and fresh iron-fed scales, we challenged the blighters in their own caves and drove them out. In a deep chamber, we found a place that fulfilled all our hopes.\n\n\"The blighters had diverted melt and underground springs to feed cave moss plantations and slug herds. It was deep enough to be out of any weather. Even a nice shelf in case of bad air! We let nature take its course and didn't even object to a few bats' helping fertilize the cave moss.\"\n\n\"A triumph,\" Wistala said, but wondered why there was no light in Father's eyes, the way there had been before, when he spoke of his battles.\n\n\"Save for some hard words with the dwarves. Gobold sent some shifty bargainer who showed up with one chest of silver and one chest of gold and a great bag of gems and jewelry. His name was Quizzilick and he was a pogt if I ever met one. He gave us treble praise and precious little metal when we spoke to him on the shores of that great icy moat that guards the approaches to their twin halls.\n\n\"'O dragons mighty, strong, sure, fierce (this went on for some time, daughter, until you began to hear the bats drop of boredom), your work shall be rewarded beyond even our bargain, for we bring you not monies but riches.'\n\n\"'Riches to some, dross to others,' I said. 'A few gems are always welcome to a dragon's appetite. They make for healthy, shining scale, but what we need are soft metals to replace scales lost in our joined war.'\n\n\"'And our hatchlings must have some,' your mother said. Her desire must have unguarded her tongue, for I'd never heard her make such a mistake when talking to dwarves. For even slow dwarvish minds might start turning at the thought of families of dragons being bred on their borders.\n\n\"In the end, Quizzilick slightly increased the amount of gold and gave us more jewelry that had rich strands of it, and a great deal of silver besides, but there was no end of grumbling. But we'd kept our part of the bargain, and when we quit them, we never troubled the dwar-lands.\"\n\n\"How do you know it was the Wheel of Fire and not some other group of dwarves?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I did not lose my head and attack the nearest dwarfworks, Tala. The etchings on their round shields and helm-circlets told me their tale of betrayal. The Wheel of Fire take pride in showing their flame-winged eagles.\"\n\n\"Ironic,\" Bartleghaff said. \"So eager are they for eagle feathers and heads, they've killed off almost every one in these mountains. I'm glad they don't have condors perching atop their standards.\"\n\n\"Happy thought,\" Father said. \"I'd hear fewer complaints. But why bring up iron? Fault them for much, but not for the quality of their weapons. Finest steel, as I know too well.\"\n\nBartleghaff preened his neck-tuft. \"How can such wingspan be powered by so small a brain, you scaly sheep-roaster? I meant their insignia is ironic\u2014irony, a form of elvish humor. Like having your tail burnt by your own fire.\"\n\n\"Come to your perch, if you have one,\" Father said. His eyelids drooped and his eyes were dull. Just telling a story had worn him\u2014or perhaps old emotions had drained his hearts' blood.\n\n\"I'm told by the battle-crows, curse their nest-pillaging feathers, that the flames signify dragonfire. Some story lost in the mists of time.\"\n\n\"Whatever they learned of dragons they must have forgotten, to go murdering hatchlings,\" Wistala said, but neither of the pair appeared to hear her. She could almost hear Mother's voice above as she sang:\n\n\u2003And for those who threaten clutch of flame,\n\n\u2003To feel the wrath of dragon-dame!\n\nFather yawned. \"Time for sleep. A dragon must rest and all that. Daughter, I've had my fill of fish. See if you can catch something red-blooded unawares for breakfast, would you?\"\n\nA week's worth of breakfasts later\u2014mostly fish, unfortunately for Father's blood-hungry appetite\u2014Wistala smelled smoke in the evening twilight of the forest west of the river gorge.\n\nGame had become scarce in the area around Father and Bartleghaff, who seemed to do little but befoul his perch and goad Father into burning him up like a feathery candle.\n\nSmoke in the forest, with the wood so wet from the constant spring rains, could mean only one thing\u2014hominids. No other creatures save dragons wielded so dangerous a weapon.\n\nWith luck, she'd have hers in a few more months. Coming aboveground early had its terrors, but she had to admit she was thriving on the variety of food to be found.\n\nAnd speaking of variety of food\u2014as she rolled the smoke smell around in her nostrils, she got the mouthwatering scent of charred flesh, which she hadn't had since Father brought home a burned sheep to the egg shelf what seemed like a lifetime ago.\n\nThe smoke smell was as easy to follow as a bright moon on a cloudless night through the trees. After a little casting back and forth, she came to a wide hollow.\n\nIt was an unnatural sort of place, like a dry creek, only the bottom was filled with tiny broken stones all roughly the same size, and the overgrown banks carried no smell of running water, though every rill for miles was brim-full with the rains. The hollow bent around the peak of the hill as though a claw like Bartleghaff's obelisk had scored the hillside. But from the heights, one could both see either end of the streambed-like cut for a goodly length and be out of the wind.\n\nA dwarf had chosen to camp here.\n\n\"Great things have small beginnings,\" Mother used to like to say when she and Jizara compared their minuscule size to her bulk.\n\nHer vengeance would begin here. As a bonus, the dwarf had a string of ponies. Surely she'd bring down one or two and be able to carry several limbs back to Father before the birds made off with it all.\n\nShe stayed downwind in the smoke smell. Examining each sii-and saa-hold as she crept up, she reached a pounce point in the cut of the bank. Perhaps two bounds to reach the dwarf, and if he had an ax, he didn't keep it beside him\u2026 .\n\nThe dwarf wasn't even helmed, though he did have a sort of mask across his face and just a few scraggles of beard showing. Her store of dwarf-lore was not great, but she knew that a dwarf without a full beard was either very young or some kind of criminal. The only thing remarkable about him was his riding boots, which rose all the way to his hips.\n\nThe dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.\n\nWistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.\n\nBut he wasn't looking in her direction.\n\nShe tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.\n\nOne of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.\n\nThe dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony's hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.\n\nWistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony's hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon's snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal's foot. The pony didn't like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.\n\nStill grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.\n\nThe desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn't seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.\n\nHe removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff's story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.\n\nThe dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.\n\nThe dwarf turned in. Once she heard snores, she crept up and licked the contents of his pan. Then she picked up two of the nose bags in her mouth. The startled ponies shifted and whinnied in alarm.\n\nShe shot into the brush as the dwarf came awake, still with the grease on her tongue. Once out of hearing from the dwarf's camp, she dropped the nose bags and licked her teeth, searching for lost tidbits. Delicious.\n\nFather didn't like her playing with the nose bags: \"The Four Spirits gave dragons everything they need to survive, and your mother's wit will fill any gaps.\" Once dragons started relying on hominid artifice, they'd be painting their scales and wing tissue again like the decadent dragons of Silverhigh.\n\nBut Mother's wit told her to improvise. The nose bags were big enough to hold rabbit and pheasant or several fish. When she dumped a meal of squab\u2014oh, the thrill of leaping on them as they took wing\u2014out for Father, he bent so far as to say that circumstances permitted a temporary utilization of the nose bags.\n\nThey were so clever! Leather straps designed to hold them on the ponies' heads had little brass latches like dragonclaws poking through holes punched in the straps, and a rope drawstring closed them like the leg coverings she'd examined on the man Auron ate. Wistala, after a good deal of trial and error that was more error than trial, fixed the straps so they hung across her shoulders just where the neck-dip began. They swung about a little, which was a bother, and snagged on her scales. She wished she could find that dwarf again and convince him to fix the bags together somehow.\n\n\"Tell me again about burning the bridges at Sollorsoar,\" Wistala urged her father.\n\n\"You've heard that one before,\" Father said.\n\n\"I like the part where the elves either must jump into the river or burn,\" Wistala said. It was easy to place the faces of wide-eyed elves who rode after Auron upon the group of warriors trapped at the center of the bridge.\n\n\"You're an odd sort of dragonelle, Wistala. Those saddlebags, and now war stories. Even your Mother only asked for my battle anecdotes when she wanted to be lulled to sleep. You gobble them like gold.\"\n\n\"She's a young Ahregnia, or imagines herself one,\" Bartleghaff said.\n\nCurse that condor! Every time he mentioned Ahregnia, Father went into one of his lectures. She felt her sii extend as Father cleared his long throat.\n\n\"My sire knew her as sister, Wistala. A bitter female, consumed by revenge for her lost mate. Scarred she was, poisonous of mind, with tongue as sharp as her claws. Leave battles to dragons, and save your hearts for husband, hatchlings, and home cave.\"\n\n\"Jizara, Auron, and Mo\u2014\"\n\n\"Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again.\"\n\nFather spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala's fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.\n\n\"That's a terrible habit, Wistala,\" Father barked. \"A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle.\"\n\nA failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.\n\n\"You're just wearing yourself out,\" she said. \"I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I'll try to find you a yearling.\"\n\n\"What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed.\"\n\n\"Deer wouldn't carry gold and silver,\" Bartleghaff said.\n\n\"I saw a \u2026 a \u2026 ,\" Wistala said, searching for the word, \"\u2026 road. Might riders carry gold?\"\n\n\"They'd carry weapons, as well,\" Father said. \"I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I'd settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption.\"\n\n\"How far?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Too far for you to find it on foot. You'd spend weeks searching,\" Bartleghaff said.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Father said. \"Listen, old vulture, you're getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Bartleghaff asked. \"I need nails like I need a captive hawk's hood and tether.\"\n\n\"Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then.\"\n\n\"High flier! Not an errand-wing,\" Bartlegaff cawed.\n\n\"Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality,\" Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. \"She's been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?\"\n\nBartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. \"Oh, very well.\"\n\n\"Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You're growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn't hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion.\"\n\n\"So you and Mother have told me. Over and over,\" Wistala said. But she couldn't hide her excitement at the errand.\n\nBartleghaff's guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day, mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn't see, even by climbing a tall tree! She'd follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she'd been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed\u2014birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.\n\n\"You could come down and correct me more often,\" she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.\n\n\"You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees.\"\n\nShe guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they'd long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they'd crafted to tasty frogs and fish.\n\nShe chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.\n\nGreenstuff filled every nook and cranny of the ruins, but where wind and water contested the mosses and lichens, marble still gleamed. Wistala crept to the edge of the forest, swarmed up a tree looking out over the ruins, and tried to put a mental map together.\n\nWistala watched men graze their sheep in the wide grassy lanes of what must have once been a city as their women and children gathered nuts and berries. Dogs, more interested in disturbing the cats sunning themselves atop ruined walls or in the gaps between decorative friezes, trotted from man to sheep, learning whatever might be discovered in each other's tailvents.\n\nThe fallen city had three clusters to it, each atop a hill, linked by low walls between, like three spiderwebs sharing a hollow log. A marsh stood at the very center of the three hills, but ancient vine-wrapped columns projected from it, showing that it hadn't always been a wetland. The village of the men stood a few dozen dragon-lengths off, outside a fallen gate that admitted a stream into the ruins. The stream fed the marsh.\n\nShe decided to hunt and rest for the day, and then explore the ruins at night. Metal would smell the same day or night, and she'd just as soon poke around after the men had retreated to their hearths. She just hoped they didn't loose dogs in the rubble.\n\nShe released Bartleghaff. Retracing her steps would be of no difficulty now that she knew the landmarks. She could find the brick ruin by the stream, and from that the ridge, and from that the wall corners, and from that\u2014\n\n\"Keep clear of those men,\" Bartleghaff warned. \"If you smell stewing lamb, just shut your nostrils. 'Temptation hatches instigation which hatches assassination!'\"\n\nThe old condor had perched over Father too long: he was starting to sound like a dragon.\n\n\"Tell Father I'll be back in a day or two.\"\n\n\"Wasted air. He'll send me back to watch you,\" Bartleghaff grumbled. He took to the skies, wings wider than she was long beating the air as he rose.\n\nWistala flattened some tall grass and let the sun clean her scales. As twilight fell, she found a pile of old timber riddled with termites and tore open the pieces with her claws, taking up the crunchy tunnelers three at a time with her tongue.\n\nInsect eating, once started, is difficult to stop, and it was a very lucky termite that escaped into the fallen leaves. The next thing she knew, the sun had disappeared in her silent fall, and the night belonged to her.\n\nIt was a warm summer night, with red clouds purpling overhead. The air had a thick softness to it that promised a hot day tomorrow.\n\nWistala started her search, mostly following her nose from corner to alley to stoop.\n\nShe found a few nails, almost unrecognizable for their rust, and found it was easier to break up the wood where they still lay than it was to pull them out. She ate one\u2014it tasted almost like blood. She found what might have once been a cutting tool beneath some broken shards of pottery. It smelled like bad steel.\n\nShe chased a smell down and dug at the base of a wall, but found only bits and pieces of mixed metal and glass.\n\n\"What-t-t on earth-th-th are you?\" a voice said to her in rather breathy birdspeech.\n\nA pair of yellow eyes, slit like hers, watched her from a deep shadow.\n\n\"A scaled snaggletooth. Are you a cat?\"\n\n\"Look, learn, and give in to the awe!\" the owner of the eyes said. Wistala found her easy to understand, her body and throat issued patterns sisterly to dragonspeech.\n\nThe eyes came out into the moonlight, walking along the wall. Wistala read the thin orange-striped silhouette from whiskers to long twitching tail. \"A word of advice: Never ask a softstalker whether she's a feline or not. If she is, you may admire at leisure. If she isn't, you'll just shame her. My name is Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter, born this spring here in Tumbledown, and I've never seen anything dumb enough to swallow metal before. Even dogs are brighter. Did you think it a beetle?\"\n\n\"No. I have strange appetites.\"\n\n\"I'll say,\" Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter agreed. \"Have you a name?\"\n\n\"Wistala. Here hunting metals.\"\n\n\"I prefer rats, myself.\"\n\n\"I don't smell blood on you.\"\n\nThe cat licked one of her black paws and rearranged the hair on her ears. \"The moon hasn't smiled on me yet tonight. I'm a free spirit. All the big males have the best spots staked out for their mates and kits.\"\n\nThe cat seemed terribly thin to Wistala. \"I hate rats. My brothers could swallow them whole, but those tails \u2026\" She shut her nostrils.\n\n\"You must know these ruins, then,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Do you know where I can find more metal?\"\n\nThe cat turned a neat circle, looked Wistala up and down. \"You've got short thick claws. Almost badgerlike. How are you at digging?\"\n\n\"I\u2014I don't know. I've clawed through ice.\"\n\n\"The rats have a place under Tumbledown here. They call it Deep Run. A network of tunnels. Not built by them, of course. Supposedly there are outlets in the swamp, but no self-respecting feline will traipse around in there for fear of the channelbacks. I know a hole that leads to Deep Run. If you enlarge it, I'll show you some metal coin. It's old and crusty, but metal nonetheless. Nice little mouthfuls. Of course, you'll have to dig again. I don't think you'd fit.\"\n\nWistala considered. At the rate she was going in the ruins, her improvised nose bags would take days to fill. The men had obviously picked the surface clean of anything useful.\n\nAnything worth the having is worth the effort, Mother used to say.\n\n\"It's a bargain.\"\n\n\"It occurs to me,\" the cat said, \"that once underground, you could make a meal of me.\"\n\n\"Can you keep something from the birds earthbound and ditch-gossips?\"\n\n\"Of course. Felines are full of secrets.\"\n\nWistala drew herself up on her stubby legs. \"I'm a dragon, feline, and I give you my word as Wistala Irelianova that I'll keep a fair bargain if you will.\"\n\nWhiskers twitched. \"And what would a dragon be?\"\n\nWistala froze for a moment. The cat seemed perfectly worldly, well-spoken and felicitous of fang. Apart from the chopped-short neck and face, she was almost drakine after Jizara's elegantly limbed fashion. How could she not know what a dragon was?\n\n\"We are old, falling between mountains and man, gifted by the Four Spirits with strengths to order the world.\"\n\nThe cat's back rose in a graceful arc. \"Order? Order is the enemy of the feline. We thrive on chaos, and if there's not enough about, we instigate some. I hope you haven't come to bring order to Tumbledown.\"\n\n\"Nothing like.\"\n\n\"I should think a creature meant to bring order to the world would be bigger.\"\n\n\"I'm young.\"\n\nYari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter turned her alarmed pose into a casual stretch. \"Make me this hole, Wistala Irelianova, and I and my kits will be in your debt and keep your secret that a dragon has come to Tumbledown.\"\n\n\"Bargain.\"\n\n\"Then let us touch whiskers \u2026 errr \u2026\"\n\nWistala extended her griff. \"Will these do?\"\n\n\"How beautiful! Yes, of course.\"\n\nThe cat approached and stood nose-to-nose with her, then put her head alongside Wistala's. Wistala felt the cat's whiskers tickle as they flicked along her scales and probed the gaps. They prrumed at each other, and Wistala felt a warm affinity.\n\n\"I fear I shall have to like you for your mind, Wistala Irelianova. You are too hard to perch on for a comfortable nap and smell like that furnace the men use to cook their metal.\"\n\n\"It's Tala to my friends.\"\n\n\"Then I'm Yari-Tab to you. Follow.\"\n\nThe cat jumped away, tail flicking this way and that in excitement. Dragons and felines must be related somehow! Even their naming customs bore some resemblance.\n\n\"What's catspeech like, Yari-Tab?\"\n\nThe cat spoke from deep in her throat: long garble garble hrrr hunt and fair garble garble hrr blood.\n\nWhy, felines used words of Drakine!\n\n\"Beware blighters bearing gifts,\" Wistala said back to her in Drakine, quoting an old dragon-proverb.\n\n\"Watch out for\u2014ummm, dirty presents?\" Yari-Tab said, as she trotted up a leaning column that reminded Wistala of a windblown tree on a mountainside.\n\n\"Close. That was dragonspeech.\"\n\n\"Well, I never! I feel like I've got a new tchatlassat.\"\n\nWistala thought she knew the word. \"A \u2026 clutchmate?\"\n\n\"More like a\u2014umm \u2026 cousin. A distant blood relation who is also a friend.\"\n\nWhat was the word for that in drakine? Ah yes, kazhin. \"My mother never told me about felines.\"\n\n\"Mine taught me to hunt, and that's about all. But that's felines for you. Great at telling their own tales and looking out for same, indifferent to anyone else's. We've got to find that basement now. Ahhh.\"\n\nYari-Tab jumped down from the column to a protruding branch, then to a broken windowsill, and then to the ground in a sort of controlled fall. She landed a good deal lighter than a dragon.\n\n\"Can you fit down this, Talassat?\"\n\nWistala looked down what appeared to be an overgrown hole. Brambles trailed over an overhanging pile of rubble.\n\nYari-Tab ventured in and turned so her eyes glittered from the darkness. Above it three ancient arches, all broken open at the top, hosted a tangle of spider-legged plants.\n\n\"It widens out a little way down. Can you smell the rats?\"\n\nWistala stuck her head in, smelled the rat urine mixed with old leaves and wormcast. The gap yawned bigger than it looked; it was mostly closed off by roots and their attendant mosses and trapped leaves. She pushed her head down and through, catching bits of lichen and dry air-root in her scales.\n\nShe found they were on stairs, Yari-Tab already down and through another hole, a half-filled passageway.\n\nShe tracked by smell and sound\u2014the cat's footfalls were as silent as morning mist, but Wistala could hear her breath and sniffing.\n\n\"I wish I had my fire,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Fire?\"\n\n\"Yes, dragons can spit fire. I don't like not being able to see. A torf here and there makes all the difference.\"\n\n\"That's part of the fun, hunting by ear and nose. Though all this talking has sent the rats running.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I like being underground\u2014I just want to explore thoroughly so I can feel safe, and unless dragons live long out of the sun, their eyes can't work on nothing.\"\n\n\"It's light you want? Want to see a bit of magic?\"\n\n\"Cats and rats! You can do magic?\"\n\nYari-Tab purred. \"Oh no, but I'm fond of pretties. See this, my all-nose-and-no-smellsense-tchatlassat.\"\n\nWistala heard the cat scamper up a wall and more prruming.\n\nA faint glow, like an angry dragoneye, threw a faint amber light across the chamber. With a modicum of light to work with, Wistala could now see the passageway they traversed.\n\nShe reared up and sniffed at the light source. It was some humble gem, perhaps enchanted in a fashion, for it held a glowing liquid within. As her nostrils breathed on it, the light grew brighter.\n\nYari-Tab extracted a clump of dirt from her paw and a cobweb from her whiskers. \"There you are, Talassat. Some bit of forgotten magic\u2014they're here and there in odd corners in the underground. The men have stripped them from the chambers they can get at. No one's found this one.\"\n\n\"How do you know about it?\"\n\n\"My mother showed me this chamber and the trick, and I imagine she got it from hers. Rats aren't very clever\u2014if you put a little light in a room, they're far braver about traveling the shadows than they are when it's holefill black.\"\n\n\"Did your father ever teach you at all?\"\n\n\"Never knew him.\" She made another light descent and trotted to the far corner of the passageway. \"One of a dozen possibles and not much for hanging about goes the feline proverb.\"\n\nWistala tried to imagine what the home cave would have been like with other hatchlings and mother-dragons about. Other male hatchlings pouncing her\u2014she got a pang as she thought of Auron.\n\nSo much less to eat!\n\nWistala found herself liking Yari-Tab, though once she began talking, she was like a mountainside stream on a warm spring day, running always.\n\nThey entered an arched chamber, dead-ending in a collapsed cascade of dirt and masonry. The cut-off passage was about the size of Father if you didn't count his neck and trunk, cobwebbed above and rat-fouled below.\n\n\"You're sending the rats running,\" Yari-Tab said, hearing scrabbling sounds from a series of holes at the edge of the room. They were choked with dirt, broken stone, and everything from bits of bark to twigs.\n\nShe paused at one that stood under a crack in the wall where a good deal of masonry had fallen away, showing dirt behind mixed in with chunks of man-cut stone, both enlarging and blocking the passage. \"There are bits of tunnel beneath this. Lots in other places are filled with swamp water, but this one has so much rat-scent coming up out of it, I think it's got to lead to the Deep Run.\"\n\n\"How do you know the Deep Run exists?\"\n\n\"The rats squeak it to each other when they're being chased.\"\n\nWith every word, it became easier to understand the cat. Wistala wasn't sure if they were speaking Feline or Drakine or some simplified version blending the two. Their slit-pupiled eyes regarded each other in the darkness.\n\nWistala sniffed at the blockade. Only the tiniest glimmer of light came from the stone in the other room, but it was enough for her eyes to work on. \"The rats have dug a hole. Why don't you just enlarge it?\"\n\n\"A feline? Dig?\" Yari-Tab flipped onto her back and rolled around in delight, batting at a bit of old cottonwood seed that had drifted down somehow, fighting it like an enemy. \"Digging's for the rodents,\" she said as she sat and reset her fur.\n\nWistala thrust her snout into the hole, widened it enough for her sii, and went to work. Soon she sent showers of dirt in either direction, extracting or shoving the bigger pieces out of the way.\n\nYari-Tab found a perch out of the way of the digging and settled down to watch.\n\nHer claws struck metal, badly rusted. Some kind of bars had been set into the tunnel, which trapped sticks, which collected leaves, which stopped dirt and blockaded the inlet.\n\nThe bars vexed her even after she dug her way through. Though rusted, they were too hard to bite, and all her claws could achieve against them were a series of scorings. Just beyond, a mound of dirt blocked the inlet, but a rat path ran up toward the top of the sluice. She backed out of the tunnel.\n\n\"Finished already?\" Yari-Tab yawned.\n\nWistala blew dirt out of her nostrils. \"See if you can get through the rat hole now.\"\n\nThe cat disappeared down the hole and returned, mud tipping her whiskers. \"You're almost there. Beyond the bars is a hole, and beyond that I smell fresher air and hear lots of water drips.\"\n\n\"Except I can't get beyond those bars.\"\n\n\"Surely your neck can get through,\" Yari-Tab said, cleaning herself.\n\n\"I can't dig with my head.\"\n\n\"Well, don't look at me.\"\n\nWistala's tail swished of its own mind, and she crawled back down the sluice. She put her head through the bars and felt around with her nostrils. At the bottom joins, the water had worn away masonry, and it was quite crumbly on the other side. She extracted her head and went to work with one of her claws.\n\nWhen she cleared off chunks all around the bricks holding the bar, she pushed again, but still it wouldn't yield.\n\n\"Stone and bone, what a bother!\" Muscles convulsed in her chest, and she spat at the bar. A rope of spit clung to it, as ineffectual as her claws. But it gave off a sharp, hot odor.\n\nAm I getting my foua this early?\n\nShe heard a rat make a yeeking noise and scuttle.\n\nIf she could only part the bars a little so they'd offer more room, like\u2014\n\nWistala remembered sleeping between Auron and Jizara. Jizara always took the warm spot against Mother, and Auron would sleep to the outside, leaving her cramped in the middle. Sometimes they pressed so close, she could hardly breathe. When they did that, she turned on her back and used her short, strong saa legs to part them.\n\nShe wedged her hindquarters sideways, pressing her tail through the gap, and backed as far as she could between the bars. She pressed with her legs at the center of the bar, just as she used to do at the center of Auron's back.\n\nIt bent!\n\nWith that achieved, she repositioned herself between the bars facing the other way. She bent that one, as well. Now she had enough space to really put her legs and back into it\u2014\n\nCraaak!\n\nThe sudden release of pressure shocked her into thinking she'd broken her back instead of the bar for a moment, but sure enough, the bottom join had broken free of the rest of the clawed-away masonry. With half its strength gone, she could get down on all fours under it.\n\nTen heartbeats later, it was done\u2014she could get through.\n\n\"Done it done it done it!\" she called up to Yari-Tab.\n\n\"I knew you would,\" the feline called back, sounding half-awake.\n\nWith the bars out of the way, clawing earth seemed like pushing through nothing more than a pile of fallen leaves. She spun as she dug, all four limbs working once and tail helping shove out the loosened earth, and then she got through. Her nostrils filled with fresher-moving air.\n\nAnd the smell of rats.\n\nA smooth-sided tunnel yawned beneath, water and muck filling the bottom. Other arched-off tunnels branched off it, some dry, others trickling a bit of water and algae. A green lichen grew at the rim of the water, some weak cousin of the growth from the home cave. Or rather the stuff living in the lichen\u2014Mother had told her that the lichen itself didn't glow; rather, the light came from tiny creatures that thrived on its fuzzy surface.\n\n\"Come and have a look, sister,\" Wistala said.\n\nHer water-lids fluttered up and back down when she realized what she'd said.\n\nYari-Tab crept easily between dirt pile and a tangle of roots holding the earth that hadn't fallen.\n\n\"Such scents! Such hunting! I'll never suffer an empty belly again.\" Her tail stood straight up as she looked out over the water-bottomed tunnel. Walkways big enough for a man stretched to either side of the main channel; other passages branched off everywhere.\n\n\"Watch yourself. They can be savage when cornered. If they're anything like cave rats, that is.\"\n\n\"Oh, to be sure.\"\n\n\"The coin?\"\n\n\"But, of course.\"\n\nYari-Tab tore herself away from what Wistala suspected were dreams of bloody rat livers and climbed back up the sluice. This time she went to the glow-room, reignited it by rubbing herself round the stone again, and took off down another passage. She passed under a low arch and came to a badly cracked wall.\n\n\"Someone took a lot of trouble to seal the metal behind this wall and make it look like just another stretch of passageway. It's just inside that hole at the bottom.\"\n\nWistala could smell metal through the hole. She thrust her nose in, following an instinct that wasn't quite hunger and wasn't quite lust.\n\nBut nothing but dusty darkness met her exploring tongue\u2014though the dust did taste of refined metal.\n\n\"Where is it?\" she asked, withdrawing her head.\n\nYari-Tab bunched up in the darkness, eyes widening.\n\n\"Where's what? The hole's full of it!\"\n\n\"No, it isn't. What kind of trick is this?\" She felt her griff drop and begin to rattle, and the cat backed away.\n\n\"I wouldn't play a trick on a tchatlassat! Never!\"\n\n\"Take a look,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"I \u2026 I can't seem to move.\"\n\n\"Fears and tears, I'm not going to hurt you.\"\n\nWistala lay down in hungry despair, feeling frustrated. After a long moment, the cat padded to the hole and entered.\n\nYari-Tab reemerged. \"The rats. Wouldn't you know it.\"\n\n\"What would they use coin for?\"\n\n\"I've never made it past wondering why they eat tail-stinkies that are better off buried, myself.\"\n\n\"Well, might as well ask them.\"\n\n\"Ask who?\"\n\n\"The rats, of course. They took it.\"\n\nHer ears went flat. \"The rats? Are you frothing? They can only just vocalize. Hardly more sense than mouse-jibber.\"\n\nWistala picked herself up and started back for the sluice. \"Are you coming?\"\n\n\"Do you even understand Rodent?\"\n\n\"Err\u2014\"\n\nYari-Tab bounded after her. \"Then I'm coming. Someone sensible ought to come on this expedition. This story will be worth yowling till it echos, if you pull it off.\"\n\nThey returned to the opening to Deep Run. They heard rats flee ahead of them as they climbed the dirt pile.\n\n\"Inspecting your claw-work.\"\n\n\"Where to next?\" Wistala asked once they climbed down to the pathway beside the muddy water. She saw glittering red rat eyes on a high ledge that ran near the top of the tunnel.\n\n\"I don't know. You instigated this dogbrained hunt. Follow the strongest smells until we corner some.\"\n\nThis underground felt wrong to her; everything was even and proportioned and unnatural. She felt vaguely tense and unsettled as she explored.\n\nThey came to an outpouring of water from some aboveground entry. The fall was about as wide as she was long and fed a swampy mass of tangled water plants, here and there sending out buds on long stems like dragon necks.\n\n\"Can you jump that?\" she asked, looking at the waterfall. The rats slipped through it under a low, wet overhang of fallen-away masonry.\n\n\"No. Too long,\" Yari-Tab answered.\n\n\"Then hang on to my back. You're going to get wet.\"\n\n\"Oh, bother,\" Yari-Tab said. Wistala winced as she felt claws dig into the base of her scales.\n\nWistala plunged through the spray and came out the other side into a join of passages.\n\nYari-Tab hopped off her back and made a great show of flicking her tail this way and that and kicking up her rear legs as she shook off the wet, a good deal of her grace and all of her dignity gone. She was even bonier than Wistala had imagined, obviously\u2014\n\nA ripple broke the pool, and the water exploded as a blur of a long-nosed shape lunged for Yari-Tab. Wistala saw snaggly yellow teeth and open mouth\u2014\n\nOnce when Wistala was just out of the egg, a stalactite had cracked in the home cave, and Mother came to the edge of the egg shelf in a flash, putting her scaly bulk between the hatchlings and the gloom of the cave before the echo faded. Mother explained it later as \"the fighting instinct,\" and something very similar must have happened in some same depth of Wistala's brain that kept her hearts beating.\n\nWistala jumped forward, threw herself into the jaws, felt them close on her scales and belly. An irresistible force dragged her into the water and under into darkness.\n\nWhatever had a hold of her was perhaps surprised at her size, for it tried to shake her, but managed to only wave her back and forth in the black water filled with tiny strings of water roots. Wistala clawed with both sii and saa, lashed with her tail, brought her head round, and bit whatever held her at the join of its jaw. She got one saa into the teeth and tried to pry the jaws apart.\n\nThe pressure vanished, and the beast rolled, pulling her around it like a constricting snake as she left its jaws. It was perhaps the weight of a pony, though all jaws and tail, limbs smaller even than hers\u2014\n\nSince it had released her, she returned the favor, and it swam off into darkness. As she broke the surface of the water, she saw a thick tail with a serrated fringe like leathery teeth swirl the water and capsize the podlike blossoms of the water plants.\n\nWistala hugged ground and pulled herself up beside Yari-Tab, spat out a loosened hatchling tooth.\n\n\"That was a channelback!\" Yari-Tab said from a perch at the top of the wall. For a half-starved cat, she was quite a jumper. She hopped down and landed softly next to Wistala.\n\n\"It fled. I was too big a mouthful anyway.\"\n\n\"If you miss on your first pounce\u2014,\" Yari-Tab said.\n\n\"Try, try again elsewhere,\" Wistala replied, paraphrasing an old dragonelle proverb. A creature that lived by hunting could ill-afford fights with prey; a lost eye or a broken limb could mean death by starvation.\n\n\"Thank you, tchatlassat,\" Yari-Tab said. They turned and climbed away from the tunnel lake to a drier path, only to be attacked again.\n\nWistala felt a pull at her saa as she saw a trio of rats leap down from the ledge above\u2014she lashed out instinctively with her saa and swished with her tail.\n\nTwo rats landed on her back, one on her head. It went for the eyes, and she panicked, whipping her head and rolling. Yari-Tab squealed as her body weight rolled over the cat.\n\nShe felt a bite in the naked flesh under her sii-pit. She whipped her head down, pulled the rat up by her teeth as she might a tick, crushed it, and flung it back into the channel water. Something bit at her hindquarters again, and she kicked\u2014\n\nThen they were gone as quickly as they'd come. She smelled blood and rats thick all around.\n\nYari-Tab had one pinned, both claws digging into its shoulders as it kicked out. The feline opened her teeth\u2014\n\n\"Wait!\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Whyever? The foul beasts bit my\u2014\"\n\n\"I want him to show us to the coin.\"\n\nThe rat squeaked in fright.\n\n\"Ask it,\" Wistala urged. \"Ask it where the shiny metal is.\"\n\nYari-Tab squeaked out something, and the rat chattered back.\n\n\"He says he knows just what you mean and that there's lots. Don't believe a word, though. Rats will say anything once you've got your claws in them.\"\n\n\"I'll take the chance. Tell him to show us.\"\n\n\"He'll bolt down the first hole or dive\u2014\"\n\nWistala bent down and took the rat in her mouth. She held her jaws just open enough for the rat to see the tunnel through her rows of teeth.\n\nYari-Tab purred. \"That'll keep him in line.\" She squeaked up at the rat.\n\n\"He begs you not to swallow.\"\n\nWistala tried to form words but couldn't. She tilted her head and rapped a claw on the stepstones.\n\n\"Oh. Of course.\" She squeaked out again. \"He says straight ahead for a while.\"\n\nTo any rats, or perhaps cave toads or bats lurking in the tunnels, they must have made a strange procession. Wistala walking with her head aloft, jaw set in its grimace, a rat nose protruding from between prominent fore-fangs. An orange-striped cat walking beneath, hopping over mud and rat droppings, occasionally rising up on its hind legs to squeak into the hatchling's mouth, in and out of mottled moss-light.\n\nEventually they climbed up a pile of fallen brickwork and into a chamber roofed by the remaining masonry and tree roots. The tree roots ran down the sides of columns, rose out of statues of human figures like bizarre hair braids, explored crumbles and cracks and dark ends of holes.\n\nRats filled the chamber, not in a smooth sea but rather in little puddles of brown fur, constantly shifting according to whim. Wistala had found some piles of bat droppings in the home cave that smelled worse\u2014but not by much. Light came down from above in a pair of shafts, large and small, through some kind of half-clogged well in the roof.\n\nThe rats retreated from their entrance, disappearing into innumerable holes and cracks in a flurry of naked tails. The stouter-hearted bared fangs at the cat from beneath piles of fallen brick.\n\nWistala spat out the rat. It scampered away, shaking saliva from its hind feet.\n\n\"Better hop up on my head,\" Wistala suggested as a braver group of rats gathered on a pile of rags and bones at the center of the room.\n\nIt wasn't easy to hold the weight of the cat at the end of her neck, especially with the taste of rat in her mouth\u2014the hairy beast had fouled her tongue in its terror\u2014but she did her best to raise Yari-Tab up.\n\n\"Tell them we come to make a bargain, if there's any such word the rodents use.\"\n\nYari-Tab yeeked out something.\n\nThat set up a storm of chittering like crickets.\n\nMore questions and answers passed back and forth. Wistala hoped Yari-Tab wasn't committing her to driving the men away in exchange for the coin or anything mad like that.\n\nHer head swam, and she lowered it. The rats backed away and returned, easily frightened, easily encouraged.\n\n\"Just a moment\u2014they're calling for someone,\" Yari-Tab said. She made a pretense of nonchalance, licking mud from her paws, but her tail twitched.\n\nWistala stilled it with a sii.\n\nA creeping, cloud-eyed rat appeared, white all around the eyes and snout. The other rats jostled it as it came forward. A big brute of a rat dashed from the shadows and bowled it over, before scampering around them in a quick circle.\n\nWistala felt Yari-Tab instinctively lunge after the rodent, drawn by the motion, but held her back by the tail. The cat let out an outraged hiss.\n\nThe cloud-eyed rat would not be discouraged. It approached and yeeked.\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"I can't make nose or tail out of it. I know we were called nightstalkers.\"\n\n\"Just say what I say: I've come to claim coin rightfully mine, mistakenly taken by the rats.\"\n\nWith a great deal of halting and repeating, Yari-Tab chirped out the message. More rats had gathered, until they surrounded the pair like a gray-brown field.\n\nThe big rat that had jostled the cloud-eyed one stood up on its haunches and chattered. Wistala noted that the brute had a patch of fur missing from its shoulder, pink scar tissue with a few spikelike hairs had replaced brown fur. The older rat yeeked in return.\n\n\"Well?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"What do you suppose 'finders keepers' means?\" Yari-Tab asked.\n\n\"They have it, anyway. Ask them what they could possibly use hominid coin for?\"\n\n\"Oh, my aching head.\" Yari-Tab chattered back. After that, only the cloud-eyed rat spoke, and at length.\n\nYari-Tab stopped to scratch the back of her ear. \"I think I'm getting a perch on this. The rats seem to think if they get enough coin together, men will come and fight over it and leave bodies strewn about as they did long ago, and the rats will have great feasting.\"\n\n\"Tell them\u2014tell them it does no good to just gather it if the men don't know about it. If they'll return the coin from behind the false wall, only enough for me to fill my bags, I'll spread rumors among the men about their hoard. Then the men will come and fight.\"\n\nYari-Tab yeeked, but was cut off by the big rat, who ran up to her and stood nose to nose, baring his teeth.\n\n\"You've just been called a lying every-name and then some.\"\n\n\"Tell them this: I intend to find or replace my coin. I'll dig and I'll dig, looking for more. Who knows how many holes I'll open up, and then these tunnels will be crawling with cats.\"\n\nYari-Tab's eyelids went so wide, Wistala feared her eyeballs might roll out of her head. \"We might not want to threaten\u2014\"\n\n\"Just say it,\" Wistala said, widening her stance and lowering her belly as the feline translated.\n\nAt that, the big brute rat screeched and jumped. It had courage; Wistala had to grant it that. It landed on her back and started to clamber up her neck, all awful sensation, rat claws digging into the base of her scales.\n\nYari-Tab disappeared under a wave of rodents as others jumped on. The feline let out such an earsplitting yowl, the mass of rats around them froze for a moment.\n\nThat worked so well, Wistala added a roar of her own, not so sharp to the ears, but a good deal louder\u2014even if it came out as a strangled cry. The tide of rats turned, save for a few locked in combat with hatchling and cat. The rat sank its teeth into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. Wistala whipped her head to and fro, but the brute hung on, digging in. Wistala opened her mouth and swung it so its hindquarters flipped up and into her mouth.\n\nEven in death, the rat's teeth didn't relax.\n\nYari-Tab, blood-smeared and wild-eyed, exploded out of the rats and jumped to the top of Wistala's broad back, clawing up by way of the canvas bags. From there, the cat lashed out with her paws, swatting rats even as she hung on to the twisting hatchling. Wistala bit the rats clamped to her friend's haunches.\n\nIt was over in a few heartbeats. Wistala and Yari-Tab stood panting, the torn rat still dangling from the hatchling's neck like a blood-dripping ornament.\n\nOnly the cloud-eyed rat still stood its ground. Perhaps it hadn't seen the bloody contest.\n\n\"Well?\" Wistala asked it, prying the dead rat loose with a claw. It came away with no small amount of flesh and blood between its jaws, its scarred shoulder red with her blood.\n\nYari-Tab trembled so on her back, it reminded Wistala of the beating wings of her dreams, only hundreds of times faster.\n\nThe rat yeeked heartily.\n\n\"Did you catch that?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"What?\" Yari-Tab said. \"Oh. My apologies, noble rathunter.\" A conversation ensued. Wistala tried licking out her wounds as the noises passed back and forth. Though shallow, the bites hurt abominably. A great forest boar wouldn't have been able to draw so much blood with its tusks against her scales as the rats could with tiny sharp teeth.\n\n\"The meal of it is, he's going to give you the coin,\" Yari-Tab said.\n\n\"What's his price for the rats we killed?\"\n\n\"Nothing. He thinks it's good for the hotheads to kill themselves off now and then. More room for the rest.\"\n\nWistala swallowed the remaining half of the brute rat. It wasn't so bad after all, and she was as hungry as she'd ever been eating bones and claw-thin, fresh-spawned slugs in the home cave. \"Even so. No sense leaving bodies lying around to remind them.\"\n\nA procession of rats led them to a dank, dark room at the meeting of two sets of stairs where a metal cistern, big enough to hold a clutch of dragon eggs, lay half on its side.\n\nWistala's wounds still stung, but less now, and the pain was being replaced by a warm itch that in a lot of ways was worse than the sharper hurt.\n\nGold and green-covered coins lay within. The spill of metal didn't shine or glitter or gleam, but even the most tarnished coin made Wistala briefly swish her tail and stand with head erect, saliva suddenly thick at her gumline. A hoard!\n\nKill the rats! Kill them all! Kill the cat! Kill anything that so much as makes an echo near my glitters!\n\n\"Tchatlassat!\" Yari-Tab squeaked as Wistala dragon-dashed forward, bowling her over. \"Sister!\"\n\nWistala stood with hindquarters to the coin, the shadows around her dark and red and angry.\n\nThe rats scattered, but Yari-Tab stood her ground, though she stood sideways, back arched, ready to flee.\n\n\"Sister!\" she repeated, sounding passably Drakine.\n\nWistala blinked. The red faded. She took a mouthful of metal, more to give the wet in her mouth something to work on while she set her thoughts in order. She'd never expected the glamour of gold to be so strong!\n\n\"Oh! Sorry, tchatlassat, I came over funny. The rat bites are making me moody.\"\n\nYari-Tab said, \"Your eyes went all red and fiery. I was worried for a moment that you had the froth.\"\n\n\"Better now.\" She took another mouthful of coin, rolled it around with her tongue until it was good and slimy, then let it slip down her throat. A brief, pleasant tinkle sounded from within as it clanked into the first bit.\n\n\"Let's see how much I can carry.\"\n\nThe rats regathered to watch.\n\nWithin a few moments, she had both bags filled\u2014the pile looked hardly touched. Wistala looked around the chamber. Not a bad spot, actually, with water near and ample food. In the form of rats. But a dragon vow couldn't just be shrugged off like a dropped leaf. Besides, Father needed the coin worse than she.\n\nWistala nodded to the rats and trudged back the way they'd come. Yari-Tab jumped on her back and rode, claws dug into the crosspiece for the bags.\n\n\"It's going to feel a long way back carrying this load,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Why leave?\" Yari-Tab asked. \"The hunting's going to be good with that run open. Next tailswell, I might even treat one of the local lazeabouts and have a litter of kittens. Deep Run will be our little secret.\"\n\n\"I'm already overlong,\" Wistala said, as they rejoined the sewer. It took her a moment to get her bearings, but only a moment\u2014she still had her Lower World sense.\n\n\"Will you come back for more coin? I mean someday.\"\n\n\"I can't say.\"\n\n\"You've got a funny smell and a clumsy foot-way about you, Talassat. But I must admit you're the most interesting creature I've come across since I pounced my first mouse. I'll be sorry to see you leave Tumbledown.\"\n\nWistala sniffed the passage with the glow-crystal before reentering it. Full daylight shone outside, and there'd be men up and around. Perhaps she should sleep for a while and go back into the forest by dark. Yes. She was very tired. And the rat bites itched.\n\n\"I'm for a nap.\"\n\n\"Always a good idea,\" Yari-Tab agreed.\n\nWistala found an out-of-the-way corner with good air carrying smells from the entrance and settled down on a patch of dried mud obscuring some kind of tile artwork.\n\nAfter a few tries, Yari-Tab curled up against her belly. \"Your skin's about as comfortable as a riverbed,\" Yari-Tab said. \"Warm belly, though.\"\n\nTogether, they slept.\n\nYari-Tab wasn't much of a sleepmate. She got up and went off to prowl at least four times that Wistala remembered, then returned and made a production out of finding a comfortable spot.\n\nBut she did bring Wistala a dead snake a for breakfast. Wistala had no appetite, as she felt dry and sick from rat bites. Wistala wondered that the bony feline could carry the serpent, which looked fully half her weight, from wherever she'd caught it. Unfortunately, she'd have to carry the onerous weight of the coin much, much farther.\n\nTime to be off.\n\n\"A good jump and a full belly, Talassat,\" Yari-Tab said as they made their good-byes.\n\n\"A good jump and a full belly, fur-sister,\" Wistala replied. The cat rubbed the side of her face against her folded griff and gave her forehead a lick.\n\nAs Wistala sniffed her way out of the ruins, she looked back at her feline friend, who found an old headless statue to sit upon and watch her leave. Wistala flicked head and tail up, and the cat raised a paw. Far off, a dog barked at the motion, and Wistala scrambled to the other side of a fallen column to put its bulk between her and the noisy dog. She looked back once more at the bottom of the hill, but Yari-Tab atop her statue was nothing but a lump against a multitude of other lumps filling the hills.\n\nWistala didn't relax until she was far from the smell of burning charcoal with a forest of shadows behind her. Only then did she cast about for a meal.\n\nShe had no luck\u2014the clanking coins atop her back sounded a warning of her approach\u2014and she went hungry that night.\n\nShe heard the first bay from the ridgetop, her halfway-home mark, as the morning sun turned the western mountains of her birth into blood-edged teeth.\n\nAt first she guessed it to be a distant wolf cry, but when the call wasn't answered from any quarter of the horizon, but rather taken up by other canine voices behind her\u2014quite precisely behind her, she realized with an anxious gulp\u2014she knew it had to be dogs.\n\nPerhaps the dogs were after some poor stag or fox. She'd kept clear of the flocks of Tumbledown to avoid a vengeful hunt, and in all likelihood, she'd roused one anyway.\n\nBut time, she had time. Time to improvise.\n\nKeeping to the ridge had its advantages. She could hear or see the pursuit\u2014and it was the most direct path home. But a series of lakes to the morning side and a stream to the evening side might delay the dogs. She didn't know much about canines except that they couldn't smell their way across water.\n\nWistala trotted along until she found a sharp-sided ravine on the lake-littered side of the ridge. She let a little urine go to give it a strong dragon scent, then slid down its muddy sides. She trotted to a reed-infested pond, scattering waterfowl this way and that. She drank deep and thought for a moment\u2014she had to get this just right.\n\nFirst Wistala loosed the rest of her urine at the pond's edge, allowing most of it to go into the water. With a little luck, it would spread and filter through the whole pond until the dogs would detect it on every bank.\n\nShe left a confusion of muddy tracks and knocked over reeds at the bank, then rolled in waterfowl droppings, smearing her sii and saa thoroughly with them. Then she backtracked and climbed the ridge to her original path at a different spot, and carefully avoided the well-marked ravine.\n\nAll the climbing made her legs weary. The heavy yoke of coins across her neck felt heavier at each step, even as her stomach felt emptier despite the water.\n\nAt the thought of the coins, her mouth flooded with the slimy drool she'd had when she first came across them. Father wouldn't notice a mouthful or two gone\u2014and they'd carry lighter in her stomach.\n\nOnce clear of her dog-dodge, she hurried as best as she could along the ridgetop, carrying tail high and doing her best to keep from snapping branches or trotting through muddy hollows. When her breath left her, she paused and ate a big mouthful of coin from each bag, more to take the desire out of her mind and mouth than because she actually needed it\u2026 .\n\nAn hour later, she came off the ridge, fixing her snout on the mountain notch that marked the source of the river gorge. If she traveled hard, she'd reach Father before nightfall. The rat bites were itching worse than ever, not quite pain, but adding to her bone-deep weariness.\n\nShe tore the loose bark off a fallen tree and managed to get a few insects, but they only made her hunger worse. Oh, for a sick porcupine or a one-winged pheasant!\n\nA noise behind, light footfalls \u2026\n\nWistala caught a glimpse of a hairy back, thinner than a bear's but not much smaller. She jumped up a bank and turned into a concealing patch of milkweed.\n\nA black dog, with foam-flecked tongue and yellow teeth, padded out of the brush. Its eyes were wide and nervous as it put its long pointed snout to the trail. It had an odd sort of fur, extremely short at its head and limbs, thick and spiked like a badger's about the shoulders and upper back. It bore no tail that she could see. A leather collar, fixed high about its neck, and studded rings showed it to be domesticated. Even more oddly, two matching red runes were painted on its flanks. They reminded Wistala of flames or lightning bolts.\n\nIt sniffed the air and turned a nervous circle.\n\nWistala held her breath.\n\nThe dog trotted along her trail, nose pointed down but eyes watching the way ahead, passed her little bank upwind. The dog, like most fur-bearers, smelled like a dungheap. A faint smell of blood came from it, too.\n\nLeap on it leap on it leap on it!\n\nBut she couldn't. All her body seemed capable of was shivering beneath the white-yellow flowers of the milkweed.\n\nThe dog turned, obscenely bulging eyes with their evil round pupils fixing on her location. It gave one querulous bark and looked right and left, as though searching for allies among the tree trunks.\n\nWistala shot forth to the edge of the bank and planted her feet, extended her griff and hissed at the beast:\n\n\"Go away!\"\n\nIf it understood her, it gave no sign. Instead it let loose with a deep-throated snarl and came straight at her.\n\nFast, so fast, it was on her in an eyeblink. They came down the bank, rolling together, the dog's long limbs tangled with her own, teeth clattering against teeth. It yelped as she landed on its hindquarters but still sunk its teeth into her sii-shoulder joint. The upper teeth had no luck against her scales, but the lower went home.\n\nWistala raked it with her rear claws and felt blood and sinew. The dying dog hung on, closing its eyes to the pain\u2026 .\n\nShe resisted the urge to tear it free from her skin; that would do more damage. She waited until its heart stopped and then gently pried its jaws open.\n\nDistant dog barks from the ridge told her at least one of the canine's yelps had been heard. She nosed into the dog's claw-torn belly and found the liver. Mother always said, if you could just eat one piece of an animal, it should always be the liver.\n\nThe body twitched as she chewed and lapped at dripping blood. It was an old dog. There were white circles about its eyes, ears, and nose. Perhaps it had become confused and broken away from the rest of the pack\u2014\n\nThen she licked the bite wound clean and pressed on.\n\nDespite the meal, she'd come off worse from the engagement. Her front limb was horribly sore; she could hardly stand to move it, so she hobbled along as best as she could using the other three, now heading up into the foothills of the mountains.\n\nShe found a dry gully full of thick thorny brush and plunged into it, snaking along with half-closed eyes. The thorns rattled and snapped on her scales, red flowers above like wounds in the sky\u2014those wretched dogs with their thin-furred muzzles would be miserable following her through it.\n\nA tear\u2014one of the bags had ripped open, caught on a thorny branch that had the tenacity of an iron hook. She turned and sniffed at the coins already falling from the sack.\n\nNothing to do but eat them.\n\nWhen she came out of the thornbushes she found that her load was unbalanced, the remaining bag kept sliding over sideways\u2014her makeshift contraption didn't have much in the way of stabilizing straps. She ate mouthful after mouthful of coin from the other bag as she rested, greedy for each deliciously metallic swallow.\n\nShe staggered on, sick with fatigue, the coins in her gut clattering. Step after wretched step after wretched step uphill, until she thrust herself forward using only her hind legs, the front ones folded flat against her side.\n\nThe bags were too heavy; that was why her limbs gave out. She abandoned them, ate a few more coins so that they wouldn't go to waste\u2014maybe her last pleasure in life would be that of silver and gold rolling around in her mouth. Besides, the men would just have them anyway, and go buy themselves new mates or flocks or boots or whatever it was that men did with coin.\n\nBut, Father! She tore off one tiny pocket of canvas and spat two remaining coins into it, gripped it in her teeth as she pushed on, keeping three of her four limbs moving on into darkness.\n\nRoaring in her ears now. She felt wet on the interior of her nostrils.\n\nThe river!\n\nShe could see the prominence ahead. The battered columns, the rocks where Father would perch and fish, the jagged spur he always used to help himself back to the sleeping spot at the old meeting place or whatever it was.\n\nShe gave a glad, trumpeting cry and staggered on\u2014at least she wasn't leaving a blood trail anymore. She'd failed this time, but she knew where to get more coin now, she'd be trebly-careful, cross the man-road by tree limbs above, there wouldn't be rat bites next time \u2026\n\nWistala limped out onto the peninsula, climbed up to Father's prominence.\n\nHe looked dispirited and sleepy; blood seeped from a reopened wound. Perhaps he'd tried to fly again. \"Father!\"\n\n\"Tala! Back so soon? Bartleghaff's only just left to see how you were doing in the ruins. But perhaps he marked you\u2014here he comes.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 ,\" Wistala managed to gasp. Her throat felt too dry for words.\n\nYour contraption didn't survive the trip, I see.\n\nWistala squinted against the setting sun. The old condor waggled his wings this way and that on the confused air currents of the gorge as he approached.\n\nA baying like a thousand wolves broke out from the banks of the river, louder even than the sound of water crashing into rock.\n\n\"What's this?\" Father asked.\n\nWistala could manage thought-pictures: \"Some dogs smelled me. I killed one.\"\n\nBartleghaff swept low over the peninsula but didn't land. \"AuRel: it's the Dragonblade and his pack!\"\n\nFather blinked, let out a deep breath. \"So he's found me,\" he said to no one in particular.\n\n\"The Dragonblade?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"The dwarves would hire him, I suppose.\" His wings drooped a little farther, and he searched the banks. Wistala saw black shapes bounding through the thick mist-washed ferns. Hunched shapes moved in the lengthening shadows of the woods beyond.\n\n\"They're coming off their horses now!\" Bartleghaff shouted on another low sweeping pass.\n\n\"Fathered by a wolf and mothered by a bear, it seems, with the memory of a tortoise to boot, for his sire was killed by dragons long ago, and he's been seeking vengeance ever since.\"\n\n\"Do you suppose he was at our cave?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Dragons must land sometime, and he always finds their refuge,\" Father said.\n\nHe straightened and got to his feet, a new light in his eyes. He cocked his head at Bartleghaff and flicked a griff up and out. \"Go gather your relatives for that feast, old croaker.\"\n\nWistala didn't like any of this. Father's words set her trembling with the worst fear she'd ever known. If only she weren't so small, fireless. Useless, useless, useless. \"Father, I did find you some coin.\" She spat out the canvas bag-bottom; her spit made it smell faintly of oats. She nosed out two tarnished coins: one of gold, the other of silver.\n\n\"Marvelous, daughter,\" Father said, nuzzling her fringe. \"A pair, alike and yet not twins. Like you and Auron.\" He took them up with his tongue, carefully placed them to either side in his mouth.\n\nThe dogs let out another joined cry.\n\nMust get away \u2026 \"Are we going to run from the dogs?\"\n\n\"Tala, I'm never going to fly again, in the air or on land. This fellow's killed more dragons than you have teeth, but he's never tried his luck against me. If I can\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me help you. I'll draw off the dogs.\"\n\nFather stamped the ground, hard enough to cause Wistala to bounce.\n\n\"NO!\"\n\nHis roar echoed off the gorge walls, louder than the rushing water, louder than the baying dogs.\n\nFrightened, she tucked her head down into her wounded joint.\n\n\"Tala, you're too young for this fight. The best way for you to avenge your brother and sister is to have clutches of your own. Each hatchling of your own who lives to breed avenges them thrice over.\"\n\n\"The dogs\u2014they'll bite and hold.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of the dogs or anything else that walks or crawls or swims. Now go.\"\n\nThe dogs must have caught a fresh scent, perhaps Father's blood on the wind, for they set up an eager clamor.\n\nShe stood there, shaking. She'd led them right to Father! That was why they'd sent a single old dog to nudge her along! \"I won't. I can't.\"\n\n\"Promise me, Wistala. Clutches of your own. Lots and lots of hatchlings.\"\n\nHe nosed her over the edge of the precipice and looked once more down on her. His eyes crinkled, and he no longer looked fearsome and angry.\n\nLove. Wistala'd seen it before when he gazed at Mother as she slept.\n\n\"Thank you for the coins, Tala.\"\n\nWith that, he turned. She saw his tail whip briefly overhead, its bronze catching the last of the setting sun. She heard him growl something to Bartleghaff, but couldn't catch it over the churn beneath.\n\nNo. She'd climbed up and escaped before. She wouldn't climb down this time. Not even the pain in her dog-bitten sii could stop her.\n\nShe slipped over the lip of the cliff and wormed between two pieces of fallen masonry. From the crack, she watched Father advance down the ridge of the narrow peninsula, choosing a rocky outcropping difficult to approach.\n\nDogs ran toward him in a mass of limbs and white-rimmed eyes and teeth. Behind the dogs, a file of men approached, led by a tall, broad figure in black armor. He was carrying a spear in one hand and a great sword in the other, helm with wings reaching up and almost touching above his crown.\n\nThe Dragonblade?\n\nAs the dogs approached, Father roared:\n\n\u2003Foe and friend 'tween cave and sky\n\n\u2003All hear me now before I die\n\n\u2003Fire and blood this night will see\n\n\u2003When filial vengeance I take of thee!\n\nIf any of the assassins understood his death song, they showed no sign of it.\n\nFather ignored the dogs as they swarmed around him, leaping to reach his joints and claws. Barbed shafts flew from the archers and broke against his crest and scales. Father sent a great jet of fire up and across the crest of the peninsula, striking man and pine woods beyond. As the trees exploded into flame, she heard men's voices cry out. Wistala saw flaming figures fall down the steep sides of the pathway.\n\nThe dogs\u2014all alike and bearing the same painted design on their sides as the old one she'd killed by the bank\u2014jumped and bit and hung from Father's belly and limbs, planting their feet and pulling, arching their backs as they tugged at his flesh. Father was screaming in pain and turned into a whirlwind, biting and lashing at the dogs with his claws. But there were so many, and new slavering beasts jumped up to take the place of each one he killed.\n\nThe man in the black armor advanced, raising his spear. It sparked and flashed like distant lightning, lighting his armor and throwing shadows all around.\n\nA hot lump burned in Wistala's breast. Father couldn't kill the Dragonblade with dogs pulling at him from every direction. She dragon-dashed forward, squeaking out a roar.\n\nShe'd never smelled such a thick blood odor in her life, if anything made sharper by the oily smell of burning dragonflame.\n\nMad-eyed dogs came at her, and she recoiled, but as her head came up, muscles in her breast took over, and she spat. A thin jet of flame arced out at the dogs, but they jumped aside or over the pathetic puddle of flame.\n\nThe dogs, moving so fast they seemed shadow rather than flesh, piled on her.\n\nA white-tipped spear erupted from Father's neck, and he turned mouth wide and roaring at the black-armored figure who stood atop a rock, silhouetted against the burning trees behind. Arrows that glowed as they flew struck Father all about the neck and jaw and burned there.\n\nWistala staggered forward, feeling the dogs pull at her. She spat the last of her flame at dog haunches clustered at Father's back leg and pulling him over, and was rewarded by agonized yelping above the snarls of the three dogs dragging at her.\n\nFather rolled, crushing the dogs, sending others spinning off into the darkness, the spear lodged in his throat like a great bone. The Dragonblade leaped forward and slashed at Father's belly, opening a wound fully the length of Wistala.\n\nOther men stood at some kind of machine on the peninsula. It sent an oversize arrow into Father's side, punching through scale as easily as her claw-tip could go through a leaf.\n\n\"Father!\" she cried.\n\nThe Dragonblade ducked under Father's bite and swept up with his sword. Father's head and neck crashed down, almost severed.\n\nWistala forgot the pain, forgot the dogs trying to pull her limb from limb.\n\nShe looked into Father's eyes as the battle fire faded and they went dry and glassy. AuRel, Bronze of the Line of AuNor, had joined Mother in the stars above.\n\nWistala wailed out her pain to the sky.\n\nThe Dragonblade knelt and kissed the pommel of his sword, and his men broke into some manner of song.\n\nWistala bit into a dog, exchanging pain for pain. It howled, and the Dragonblade's men left off his victory song and turned toward her.\n\nOther men, some carrying two-handled saws, gathered behind.\n\nShe wouldn't end up on these rocks, her head and claws sawed off. Wistala gathered what remained of her strength and managed to stand. She tottered a few steps toward the edge of the cliff, dragging dogs at every step. The dogs pulled back, at war with her body.\n\nPerhaps the Dragonblade read her intent. He ran forward, bloody sword held out, waving on the others, who stood gaping at Father's bloody wounds.\n\nThe two still-living dogs snarled and fought her every step, their muzzles covered with blood, the spiky hair on their backs standing straight up. They dragged her back, away from the ledge, toward the Dragonblade.\n\n\"You shan't have\u2014,\" Wistala grunted. She swung her tail, knocked a dog off its feet, and lunged at the ledge. She got the claws of one sii over. Now she had some real traction.\n\nTearing\u2014pain.\n\nFly! She'd fly once before she died.\n\nShe got a saa at the edge, and the dead dog fell over the side, its jaws finally relaxing. Freed of its weight, she coiled her spine and jumped.\n\nWistala felt light as one of Bartleghaff's long tip-feathers as she spun through the air. She struck the prominence Father used to climb up from the river, rolling over on a growling dog and hearing a snap, and felt free air one last time before she plunged into the cold, roaring river."
            },
            {
                "title": "Drakka",
                "text": "'WHOSOEVER SAVES A SINGLE LIFE HAS SAVED A WORLD.' \u2014Hypatian Low-Priest Proverb\n\nDrifting, flying, but the air\u2014so cold. Impossible to see through the clouds.\n\nTiring\u2014so she glided. A hurtful pull in the back\u2014had a wing joint slipped?\n\nNow she could see.\n\nA hominid bent over her, face shadowed. Can't raise her claw to strike it\u2014\n\nA sound, sharp and regular tap-top-tap-top, movement in time with the beats, lulling her, and she slept\u2026 .\n\nFighting for breath\u2014cold. Nose must be kept out of water. Drowned dog pulling me under, if I don't get free, I'll die. Bite! Tear! Rushes of warm blood in the cold. Nose up! Nose up! One more breath before I go under!\n\nWistala stretched, unbelievable warmth and well-being suffusing her body, dreams fair and foul gone.\n\nShe opened an eye. She lay stretched out on hairy fabric that caught in her scales. A vast presence, white and curved like a huge dragon egg, gave off heat from a mouthlike opening in its side. Woof-woosh woof-woosh woof-woosh\u2014the sound in her ears reminded her of Father when he got out of breath from his climbs up from the river. She rolled her head and saw a hominid, its back to her, working an apparatus that opened and closed like a dragon's mouth, complete with folding griff at its sides.\n\nA crackling and a glowing came from the huge egg's mouth. She smelled burning charcoal. The heat increased, and she basked in it before she slept again.\n\nShe woke to a salubrious greasy smell, like the road-dwarf's sausages, only more powerful.\n\nA steaming double-handled iron pan appeared before her, filled with a greasy broth. She glanced around, saw a roof above held up by thick rounded beams. Doors wide enough to fit a full-grown dragon had been flung open to the summer air and light.\n\nThe faint smells of horse and goats interested her, but not half so much as the broth. She found enough strength to take two tonguefuls.\n\nThe hominid, standing so still, he might have been one of the timbers holding up the roof, watched her from a good dragon-dash away. Probably a male: he had prominent, angular features, a lean, narrow-hipped body, and a clean-shaven head covered with a thick film that reminded her of the high mountain rocks with winter lichens she and Auron had climbed.\n\nAn elf.\n\nFather's stories about the killing prowess of the elves came back to her in a rush of imagery\u2026 .\n\nHe stayed away. There were windows and the wide doors closer to her than he\u2014though with her body feeling limp and drained, she wondered if she could even manage to right herself for a dash\u2014\n\nA mist-colored horse at the other end of the interior regarded her warily. This place was divided into a number of smaller chambers along a central alley.\n\nAnother sip of the hot liquid, and she felt newly hatched, despite the strange surroundings full of disconcertingly straight lines.\n\nWistala examined her wounds. Cracked scales and any number of brown-stained injuries marked every limb. The brown stains puzzled her. They didn't smell of dried blood, but a sharper smell. But stained or no, the wounds were certainly healing up nicely. She rolled onto her other side and saw that a terrible rend in her saa interior had been sewn like a hominid garment.\n\nPerhaps the elf was healing her to make better sport of her later.\n\nShe rested a few minutes, then had a little more broth, rested and then lapped, until finally by midday, the pan had been licked clean. Then she slept, deep and dreamless.\n\nAfter sundown, she dragged herself\u2014standing hurt her wounded limbs too much\u2014to a central stone cistern, where she smelled water fed by an outlet coming down from the roof beams. She drank deep. Then she slept against the stone.\n\nA gentle cough woke her. The elf stood there, perhaps twice the length of her body away. He squatted, toadlike with his gentle eyes and long, folded limbs.\n\nThis time she didn't tremble. Whoever he was, whatever his aim, she read in his eyes that he meant her no harm. He rocked on his haunches. It took her a moment to realize he was inching forward, putting one or the other leather-strap-bound foot after another an almost imperceptible length.\n\nThe horse didn't seem to like her presence at the trough. He expelled an angry breath and stamped, chewed on a wooden rail in a sidelong manner. Wistala thought horses timid creatures, but this one seemed to be eager to get out of its alcove and at her.\n\nThe elf reached one long hand out, palm empty and toward her. He tickled her under the chin. She couldn't help her griff lowering a little or her fringe standing on end, not with her nostrils full of the terrible odors of elf and horse from that day she lost Auron.\n\nShe watched his eyes. They never seemed to be the same color. Brown when they looked at one of the beams holding up the roof, a dull red color when they glanced down at the bricks paving the floor, green when they briefly rested on her. Now, looking at the water in the trough, they became dark and reflective.\n\nThe elf pulled up a handful of water, let it trickle through his fingers. \"Anua,\" a voice like a soft fall of rain said. \"Anua.\"\n\nShe tried making the sound in her throat. \"Ennuh,\" she managed.\n\nThe elf brought a handful of water to her mouth. \"Anu sah.\" He put his lips to his palm and sucked up the water.\n\n\"Ehnu-ssa,\" Wistala repeated, and lapped up some water.\n\nHis mouth crinkled. \"Anu sah!\" he said, pushing a wave of water to her. She took another tongueful.\n\n\"Ahnu-ssa,\" she said, and nosed a wave at him. She splashed him a little by accident, but he didn't seem to mind. Next he taught her his name: Rainfall.\n\nAfter that, Rainfall drank with his mouth turned up at the corners.\n\nIn the following days, as her strength returned, they made slow progress with her Elvish. He learned her name, though he preferred to call her by the familiar Tala, as it was easier for him to pronounce. Dragon traditions weighted lightly on her. She took her lessons in turn, naming things around the stable.\n\nShortly, she dragged herself outside. The mountaintops to the east were just visible through a part in the trees. She must have come some length down the river, perhaps as far west as Tumbledown, though the hills here were covered with grass and rock, and trees seemed to grow thickly only out of the wind.\n\nThat she'd come so far without drowning was as miraculous as if she'd sprouted her wings. Yet she had not the tiniest memory of being in the water beyond the leap off the cliff with the dogs dragging at her.\n\nThe elf's behavior surprised her as much as her survival. According to Mother and Father, elves were soft-stepping hunters of spear and bow who blew horns and sang swanlike warbles over the corpses of dead dragons as they danced, holding hands sticky with dragon blood.\n\nThe only part of that legend that rang true was the elf's quiet nature. Whether passing over brick, wood planking, or soft grass, he hardly made a sound, save for the whispers of the wind moving around him. The rest of his manner was as gentle and tender as a mother dragon's over still-wet hatchlings.\n\nThoughts of Mother and Jizara left her cold and sleepy and miserable. Why didn't memories heal and fade like wounds?\n\nThat evening he cooked her a platter full of organs and entrails in a sharp-smelling herb she'd learned to call gar-loque, or dragon-buds, as the smell of the white clusters when crushed was faintly dragonish.\n\nThe meal filled her gorge but did little for her anguished mind.\n\nTo divert her thoughts, the next day Wistala ventured out of the stable and viewed Rainfall's home.\n\nIt was a vast home and garden for a single hominid and a few animals. Treble vast when she learned that the wild orchards, melons, and wheat- and tuber-fields around were also his. He made no effort to farm as she understood the word, though he threw the horse's manure on two beds of flowers surrounding the trees on his threshold.\n\nThey were the oddest trees Wistala had ever seen. They became positively animated when Rainfall worked in their vicinity. Their leaves rattled, and their branches scraped against each other, and now and then he looked up and spoke to the limbs, or plucked a bloom and left it to rest in one of the trees.\n\nThen there were the goats.\n\nThey came in a variety of colors, sizes, and temperaments; the only attribute they shared was a fear of dragon smell. The goats wandered away whenever they saw or smelled her, horned billies keeping a watchful eye as their charges paced away with tails flicking. They climbed to the highest peak of the house\u2014\n\nAnd such a house!\n\nWistala had never seen anything like it.\n\nThe house stood on, or rather comprised, a hill and the trees that grew on it. The main door stood between those two vast and arching oaks Rainfall attended, beneath a sort of webbing that had any number of brambles and berries stretching from the oaks to the hillside entrance. Several of the tree limbs supported a sort of stone-and-wood balcony that offered shelter to anyone at the door below.\n\nThere were smaller balconies of stone, not shaped but cleverly laid together, windows you couldn't see unless the sun hit them just right, and chimneys rising up through old stumps.\n\nThe inside had narrow passageways and stairs that opened up on wood-paneled rooms with skylights carrying down birdsong from the outside. It was like a cave with surprises at every turn, including a lower room that held a small waterfall that ran warm after its passage around the chimneys, or so Rainfall explained.\n\nSome of the rooms echoed every claw-click of her saa on the wooden floors, others\u2014the sleeping rooms\u2014absorbed sound with moss-covered walls and ceilings thick with roots. At the uttermost top there stood a room filled with paper bound up in leather wrappers or enclosed in tubes, lit by a cupola of crystal that, when slightly opened to air the room, carried in the bleatings of the nimble-footed goats.\n\nWistala passed a chamber that made her wonder if it was an armory, with many big-doored cases in between, perhaps for armor and shields.\n\nBut the weapons seemed frail and lacking in edges.\n\nRainfall took down one of the devices, vaguely like a small bow, and ran his long fingers along it. A sharp, clear sound unlike anything Wistala had ever heard came from a series of strings that hummed until they quit vibrating. Wistala's nostrils opened in surprise\u2014was the odd bow alive?\n\n\"Senisote,\" Rainfall said.\n\nApparently one could create senisote by blowing into tubes and tapping on clay cylinders topped with leather, as Rainfall demonstrated. She enjoyed it all.\n\nHe pulled out a wooden construct so he could squat without folding his legs and played on the instrument she liked best of all, a long wooden tube with a hollow chamber on the end like a hulled melon. It created a sound as pure as birdsong, sweet as a sigh a mother dragon might make over her hatchlings, and as varied as a waterfall.\n\nWistala gave her first prrum in what seemed like an age. Her neck stiffened, and she began to bob her head. Strange magic. Her head rose and fell with the tune.\n\nRainfall stood and stepped crabwise, his eyes so merry that Wistala couldn't help but move opposite him so she could keep him in view. He turned a circle, and so did she, and the next thing she knew, they were moving this way and that across the floor. He capered as he played, and she imitated; the slight pain in her joints couldn't keep up with the pleasure the music brought.\n\nThe tune ended, and her host attempted to strike a pose that involved entwining his legs and spreading his arms, but he must have misstepped, for he collapsed to the floor with a bit of a bump.\n\nAnd then he began to laugh.\n\nShe'd never heard the like. The sound was as pleasing as his music, and infectious besides, for she found her griff fluttering and scraping against her scales.\n\nThe elf sat back and wiped his eyes, face split by his mouth that now seemed to stretch from cheekbone to cheekbone. He reached out with his foot and tickled her under the chin, and she couldn't object.\n\n\"A rare delight,\" he said, and she took perfect understanding, for his words came out with such a wave of happiness, it was almost mind-speech.\n\n\"Very good,\" she said back. He used the expression whenever she pronounced an Elvish word particularly well. It must have suited him, for he gave a little bow.\n\nWistala saw a smaller version of the stool the elf sat on as he played. She ambled over to the seat, thinking she saw a cat-size creature sitting there, but she realized it was only a bit of craft bearing hair and painted-on eyes. She sniffed at the rather dirty thing\u2014it smelled of elf, but differently from her host.\n\n\"How this played?\" she asked, not seeing strings or blowholes in its design.\n\nAt this, the elf stood. \"I \u2026 you \u2026\" He fled from the room, leaving Wistala to sniff and wonder.\n\nThe gray-white horse was another puzzle, for he did no work. Wistala knew little about the doings of the hominid world, but in the home cave she'd heard stories enough about horses\u2014usually while dining over a piece of one\u2014to know that hominids had them pull or carry or bear them.\n\nIndeed, he appeared to own Rainfall rather than the reverse, for the elf labored long in keeping his berth clean and the horse properly brushed.\n\nWistala, while exploring the stable one morning in pursuit of mice, came close to his stall. The horse snorted and reared and kicked. His simple beast-speech was easy enough to understand. \"Away! Stomp you! Kick you!\"\n\n\"You mistake me for a dragon. I'm but a hatchling.\"\n\nIt occurred to her that she was no longer fresh out of the egg; she'd survived aboveground and breathed her first fire. I'm a drakka!\n\nThe horse seemed in no mood to make zoological distinctions. He danced in his stall. \"Away! Beast! Sharptooth! Away!\"\n\nWistala left him stomping and raging and hopped out the window. She examined the roof and felt up to a climb, using a wide-bellied wheeled contraption\u2014cart, she corrected herself\u2014to gain the roof. She sniffed at the clay-lined holes that guided the rain to the central cistern and gained the peak.\n\nFrom here, even with some of the treetops, she could see more of the lane leading west away from the hill house and barn. She saw stone walls disappearing into overgrown fields, and a few roofless constructs at the base of two massive, partially bald hills to the north.\n\nShe could see nothing of other hominid habitation, unless the ruined houses counted, but she doubted elves, men, or dwarves would live in homes with shrubs growing in the doorways and young trees poking through the roof. The only breathing creatures who seemed to be thriving in the vicinity were the goats.\n\n\"Rah-ya! Rah-ya! Rah-ya!\" came a joyous cry. The sound traveled from window to chimney to door of the house. Rainfall danced out the door and into the overgrown yard separating home from barn, dressed only in a cross-tied wrap of thin white material. He let out a whoop and ran to the weed-choked pool surrounding a statue of three figures.\n\nRainfall tipped, plunged his head into the water, looking just like a duck on a dive, save for the long kicking legs.\n\nWistala couldn't imagine the causes and consequences of such action, so she jumped down from the roof. The impact pained her, but only a little.\n\nBy the time she crossed the courtyard, he was head-side-up again.\n\n\"Rah-ya, Tala! Rah-ya!\" Rainfall said. He pointed to his head.\n\nAt his temples a pair of fuzzy growths, like clover heads, hung rather limply from the rest of the lichen growth, and she detected a few patches of fuzz. \"See? See?\"\n\n\"I see\u2014yes. I understand\u2014no.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't, would you?\" Rainfall said. \"I've been \u2026 down. Ill. Wounded.\"\n\nWistala saw no scars. \"Wounded?\"\n\n\"Not as you think. I'm old, but still a long way from my final haspadalanesh\u2014age.\"\n\n\"The \u2026 greenstuff \u2026 means healing?\"\n\n\"Yes. Means healing. Thanks to you.\"\n\nWistala couldn't imagine what she'd done. He'd stuffed her with hearty kid stews, swabbed her wounds. How would that improve his health?\n\n\"You know a little of our language, but nothing of our souls,\" Rainfall said. \"In time \u2026\"\n\n\"In time \u2026 ,\" Wistala repeated.\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\nTime passed, and it was very good.\n\nThe elf presented her with books, and she began to learn to read by associating sounds with the simple illustrations within.\n\nOnce she began to read, her ability with Rainfall's language took wing. Though she still made him laugh now and then with her pronunciations, they learned each other's minds better through unfettered words.\n\nNow and then men, hairy, oily, and smelly, rode in to visit the estate Wistala learned was called Mossbell. Rainfall received them in his hall with as much food and drink as he could quickly prepare while she hid her body and odor in a masking grove of pines or up a yew tree. These visits always left Rainfall dispirited, and clumps of his bark-colored hair, now sometimes bearing tiny white flowers and red berries, would drop out.\n\n\"Just formalities,\" he apologized upon her return as he fed her in the stable on their leavings, which were ample, as they ate only the choicest goat loin.\n\n\"Where are they from?\"\n\n\"His Rodship Hammar, the Thane of Nure and the Illembrian Foothills.\"\n\n\"Is that like a king?\" Wistala asked, using the only human title she knew other than Dragonblade.\n\n\"It may as well be, for Hypatia has no more knights to send to keep his ambitions in check in these dark days.\n\n\"I must teach you Parl, the Hypatian vernacular, so that you might climb up one of my chimneys and listen. Though you'd fall asleep at their discourse and drop down the chimney like Old King Yule himself. And your appearance would bring no Solstice merrymaking.\"\n\n\"Correct me if I err. Hypatia is all the lands between the Inland Ocean and the mountains?\"\n\n\"Once it was much more. It ringed all the Inland Ocean like a necklace. But the necklace's caretakers let it fragment, and others have grasped at the loosened jewels. Most are gone now, and even the chain is breaking. Once you were a Citizen of Hypatia first, and only a man, elf, or dwarf second. But tribalism has taken over since then, between the conniving Wheel of Fire and that madman Praskall howling up his humanist mobs in the Varvar lands. I fear I'll live to see the last few jewels of Hypatia torn and stolen.\"\n\n\"Is Mossbell a jewel?\"\n\n\"Nothing so grand. But Mossbell does have charge of a link in that precious chain. Tomorrow I'll show you.\"\n\nThe next day Rainfall put a light sort of woven saddle on the irascible horse\u2014Avalanche was his name, and a stallion still, she learned as Rainfall spoke to him\u2014and rode out with Wistala trailing along. First he cantered the horse a few times around the buildings to warm him and take the edge off. Only after this would Avalanche walk down the cobblestones to the Road.\n\nThe Road impressed Wistala, once it had been explained to her. Fully wide enough for two carts to pass and space for outriders beside, it was raised up and paved with fine stones, smashed so as to give them teeth that allowed wheels and horseshoes to grip, keeping mud down and dry surface against wheel, boot, or sandal. Or so Rainfall said.\n\n\"In my grandfather's time, fully six hundred and forty years ago, he'd done his duty to waxing Hypatia in the Battle of the Sword-grass to the south. His skill in battle won him much renown. As a reward, the Imperial Directory awarded him this estate and charged him with keeping the roads and the bridge. He named it Mossbell for an ancient gong he found at the site of the old ferry. A light duty, one would think.\"\n\n\"Bridge?\"\n\n\"We're coming to it shortly. Happily, it's the cause of our meeting.\"\n\nThe trees grew close about the road here, and it seemed little traveled. Rainfall continually watched and listened to the west side of the road. \"If you hear a crashing, or deep and whistling breathing from these woods, hide yourself as best you can.\"\n\n\"Is there something to fear?\"\n\n\"Rarely in the daylight. There's a pestilence dwelling on the banks of the river south of here in the form of a troll.\"\n\nWistala wasn't sure what a troll was, other than that they were more ravenous than a brood of hungry hatchlings.\n\nRainfall continued: \"None dare settle flock or cot here. Much of my grandfather's estate is now the troll's stomping ground. Once many sheep and cattle, even horses, were raised here, along with the best four-season trail oxen in the northlands, if you'll forgive my pride.\"\n\n\"Is there no way to be rid of the troll?\"\n\nAt this, her host blinked and set his mouth, as if barring a gate to keep the words in. \"It's been tried.\"\n\nThey arrived at the bridge, and Wistala stood still in wonder until her eyes could comprehend it.\n\nThe gorge here yawned far wider if a bit less high than around Father's retreat, still so steep-sided that a hominid could climb it only with a careful choice of path and much use of hands. Naked rocks and broken timber filled the river, flowing hard but without the bank-to-bank froth.\n\nThe bridge crossed the river in four arching leaps, columns of shaped and angled stone like towers bearing the road. There had once been a fifth arch in the center, but it had fallen and been replaced by wooden planking under an arch of its own. A stout stone bridge house stood at the Mossbell end. Wistala would hardly have noticed it, except that Rainfall slipped from the horse and went to the door.\n\n\"I was attending to the lock here when I saw you. Oddest thing I ever saw, a condor was circling close over you, but not stopping to eat. You were just there,\" he said, pointing to a black length of shattered timber sticking out into the river, \"lying atop that grandfather bole. Even at the end of your strength, you managed to pull yourself out of the river. I had to pry your tail from one of the knots.\"\n\n\"What did the condor do?\"\n\n\"Flew off mountainways.\"\n\n\"You climbed all the way down there to inspect a half-drowned drakka?\"\n\n\"And more. I used my balagan to get you up.\"\n\n\"What is a balagan?\"\n\n\"A device for lifting things, using ropes and blocks. Another word for it is crane. It allows one to lift the weight of three.\"\n\n\"Whyever would you trouble yourself?\"\n\n\"Curiosity. Dragons are seen only rarely nowadays.\"\n\n\"And if it weren't for you, they'd be rarer.\"\n\nRainfall was a fountain of information about everything but his Rown misfortunes. Only through numerous questions could she piece together his story. She tried asking Avalanche, but he was a simple, literal fellow, and at the slightest head-bob, griff-rattle, or harsh syllable would become enraged and threaten her with a stomping. And most of what Avalanche did know related to the quality of the hay, or displeasure at not being put out to pasture with the chance of meeting females.\n\nSo she spent most of her time with Rainfall, his diverting conversation limited to lighter topics.\n\nOther than his grandsire, the only time he talked about his family was in the portrait gallery. Elves, evidently, had a \"study\" done of themselves once they reached maturity.\n\nA study didn't use paints or inks, but instead bits and pieces found outdoors\u2014tree bark and colored sands being the two most common media. Done in life size, the \"portraits\" were remarkable once you got away from the odd textures. Rainfall's certainly captured his gentle expression, warm eyes depicted with carefully polished and carved stones.\n\n\"And at the end we have my wife, son, and granddaughter,\" her host said.\n\nDid elves not keep their family about? \"I'd like to see them in person to compare with these likenesses,\" Wistala finally said. \"Will I meet them?\"\n\n\"An impossibility with Nyesta and Eyen, my wife and son. They are dead.\"\n\nHis wife had a softness to her features, done in colored sand and painted shell. \"I hope she had a peaceful passing,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Age and infirmity took her too soon, as it does all humans. But we had many years of comfort together. I met her when she passed through with Old Nightingale's Circus, now under Ragwrist\u2014though, like everything else these days, much reduced in scope and splendor. She left me comfort in my son, transitory though it was; he had something of his mother's temperament and my father's courage.\"\n\nShe looked at his portrait. Some manner of sash was woven about the harness that held his sword. His eyes challenged, as if daring the portraiteer to capture him.\n\nAll that served to remember his granddaughter was a sketch. A simple charcoal depicted her; Rainfall apologized that he had no skill with formal portraiture. The girl-child had overlarge eyes compared with the others, but perhaps hominid youth accounted for that, for if the sketch was life-size, she was a good deal younger when drawn than the others. The elf blood came through strong in her cheek-bones and delicate ears.\n\n\"She still lives?\" Wistala asked. Curiosity about her host made her stop in front of the drawing.\n\n\"Yes, but Lada's been away from me these eight years.\"\n\n\"With her mother?\"\n\n\"We never knew her mother. Or I should say, I never knew her. Some sport of her father in one of the taverns of Quarryness or Sack Harbor, I expect. She arrived on my doorstep as an infant, bearing a note my son burned rather than show to me. She was my comfort after her father's death. Since\u2014since\u2014please excuse me.\"\n\nRainfall turned his face to the wall, and after a last look at the charcoal portrait, Wistala crept out of the room.\n\nAs the leaves turned color and dropped, Wistala explored the broken houses at the base of the two hills, pulling nails and hinges from the ruins to satisfy her hunger for metal. She'd come terribly close to stealing a small silver candleholder from a side table on one of her passes through the house and decided to hunt metal on her own.\n\nWhen she returned, all her claws counted thrice worth of horses were standing in the field beyond the barn under the care of two boys who occupied themselves by throwing rotten apples at each other from opposite sides of a stone wall that held the saddles.\n\nShe circled the house to get downwind of it and found a yew tree to climb, where she spent an uncomfortable night. The riders left in haste the next morning\u2014she saw only the backs of cloaks and a few gamboling dogs of the ordinary sort, not the huge savage brutes she'd pulled over the ledge.\n\nSomewhat stiffly she climbed down from the tree to hear Rainfall calling:\n\n\"Tala Tala Comeoutfree! They're gone, and it is safe.\"\n\nHe hurried to meet her as soon as she extended her neck above the bushes.\n\n\"More of the thane's men?\" she asked.\n\n\"Better and yet worse, at least for you. It was the Dragonblade and a party of hunters.\"\n\nBreath and death, the Dragonblade! Wistala couldn't help but crouch at the name.\n\n\"He said a young dragon had escaped him, blamed the miss over the loss of his beloved pack in the summer. He has to go back to training pups for a while.\"\n\n\"You fed him and his horses, then?\"\n\n\"What could I do? He carries a Hypatian Knight-Seal. I'm old fashioned enough to bow to any who carries it, even if he hunts a friend. Though I felt no need to disclose your presence, especially as his line of questioning allowed me to keep my honor and your friendship.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The description he gave was laughable. He got your size right, but had the color wrong\u2014lots of talk of wolves' hides and such. I could honestly say I'd not seen anything like that about the road.\"\n\n\"Why the road?\" she wondered. Of course, they first came upon my scent on the same road near Tumbledown.\n\n\"I gave his dogs as vast a meal as I could manage so they'd sleep rather than sniff around the barn. Same with the men. I fear our dinner tonight will be their leavings, little though there are.\"\n\nWistala was grateful for a moment that she hadn't been hidden in the barn or somewhere closer. There would be danger, yes, but temptation. Men were vulnerable when they took off their armor to sleep. She'd learned the knack of walking silently through the home without letting her claws touch the flooring to save Rainfall's woodwork.\n\n\"Have they gone for good, or will they be back?\"\n\n\"They're hurrying south. They believe you to be heading in that direction, but on what evidence, I can't imagine.\"\n\n\"I may have left southbound marks crossing it from the old hovels beneath the twin hills.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps the Dragonblade makes guesses to impress his men. A right guess is long remembered, and there's always an excuse for a wrong one.\"\n\nWistala spent another cold night in the yew tree that evening, just in case the Dragonblade doubled back.\n\nRainfall had her observe him carrying out his duties on the road, more as a mental diversion for her than anything else. For two active weeks as the temperature dropped, he and a dozen men went along the road, filling in holes; then they applied pitch to the timbers of the bridge to proof them against ice and snow. This part of the north saw frequent freezes and thaws and snow, thanks to the air currents of the Inland Ocean a few horizons to the west. Even once the labor was done, he bargained with the men a little extra to dig up vegetables and bring in hay and slaughter and salt some goats.\n\nPayment was a problem, for Rainfall had little money. He gave away odds and ends from the vast house in return for their work, anything from candlesticks to cooking skillets. Wistala understood now why the place seemed so bare, save for his high room of books and basement of wine.\n\nThen they settled in for the winter.\n\nWistala had been installed in what had once been what Rainfall called a \"health-room,\" a wooden enclosure of fragrant cedar wood, where stones heated in the furnace would be brought so that water might be dripped on them. It had a gutter in the center that made for easy cleaning, and she was happy to find hatchling scales on the floor each morning, with new ones coming in fast and thick owing to a supply of tarnished brass plates and drinking vessels she smelled out buried in the dirt floor of one of the abandoned houses.\n\nWistala asked about hominid commerce one night over dinner, and Rainfall did his best to explain it. \"A dwarf would make it simple, I'm sure. I've not much of a head for additions and subtractions and excises and taxes.\"\n\nThe last in the list seemed to be his chief worry. As she understood it, twice a year he owed his thane an amount of money that had been set at a time when the estate was prosperous, and though Mossbell had the misfortune of having a troll appear and pillage the lands, he was still expected to produce the same sum. No amount of pleading with the thane could alter it.\n\n\"What do you get in return for these taxes?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"The thane's protection.\"\n\n\"But not from trolls.\"\n\nRainfall poured himself a little more wine. \"He has posted a reward, in the form of a small sum and relief from all taxes and excises for five years. But few are willing to take the challenge. What happened to Eyen is still fresh in many minds.\"\n\n\"Your son tried to kill the troll?\"\n\n\"His death is my fault. The bundle containing Lada had just arrived, and I'd engaged a wet nurse. He and I argued about his scattering bastards around the thanedom. Elf blood passes down an alliance of aspect and tongue that human females find pleasing, and he took advantage of manner and countenance. I \u2026 I challenged him to perform some useful duty. I meant that he seek gainful employment to defer the cost of his daughter, but he rode out on Avalanche, the last of his grandsire's line of mighty warhorses, to solve all our difficulties on the point of his lance.\" Rainfall struck the table with his elbows so hard, the plates and goblets jumped. Then he concealed his face with his long-fingered hands.\n\nWistala stood still, never having seen a violent move from her host before.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" he said when he collected himself. \"You've finished your salmon already. Would you care to dispose of mine? Having a drakka about so simplifies the clearing up.\"\n\nWistala learned the cloudsign for snow, sleet, and rain that winter\u2014what weather Mossbell saw depended on the direction of the wind. It blew mostly from the west, and if it veered farther south for a while, it grew warmer, but when it came out of the north, it became bitterly cold and made her alternately ravenous and torpid.\n\nFather had hunted in this winter wind a year ago to feed his hatchlings?\n\nBeing indoors frustrated her, and on the first sunny day after the sun turned south again, she set out to walk the grounds of Mossbell.\n\nIt wasn't an accident that she walked west, crossed the road, and plunged into the broken forests covering old grazing land. The ground was still snow-covered where the afternoon sun couldn't reach, and what wasn't snowy was wet. She found sign for wild pigs and roaming goats.\n\nFinding troll tracks took a little time.\n\nShe found several troll-traps easily enough. It took a good deal of ear, nose, and eye-work to establish what they were. The troll would dig holes in the ground, perhaps her full body-length deep, and then cover them with a lattice of slight branches and growth, with fragrant berries in the center. It lined the bottom with flat rocks chipped and broken in the hope that a sheep or pig would blunder in and injure or trap itself.\n\nShe found bones at the bottom of one.\n\nThen she cut across its tracks. The troll had huge three-toed feet, though the toes didn't point in the same direction as they did with elves and dragons. Something like the mark of a horse hoof stood in the center, with the digits stretching out not quite in opposite directions, like widely spread bird toes. Here and there, similar, smaller versions of the tracks could be seen that she guessed were its hands.\n\nShe found a heap of droppings close to the river-cliff edge. They were like a rotten melon filled with little white worms left on a hillock. Her nostrils closed in disgust.\n\nThe ground here had a trodden-on look like a cattle wade, with a profusion of tracks and divots, and grubby prints on the rocks at the edge of the cliff.\n\nWistala couldn't see her host's bridge from this part of the river, and the twin hills near his estate were just bluish lumps. The river canyon stood so wide here that objects on the far side couldn't be distinguished from each other.\n\nWhite birds crisscrossed the river, looking for food. Another variety, gray with yellow beaks, poked around the rocks at the base of the cliff under all the marks.\n\nWistala craned her neck out as far as she dared, digging her tail into the crevice between two sturdy rocks like one of Rainfall's fishhooks buried in a trout's jaw.\n\nA cave marred the fluted sides of the canyon wall, closer to the top edge than the base.\n\nShe could imagine what the birds at the base of the cliff were feeding on.\n\nInstincts older than she took over as she evaluated the troll's home. Fresh water would never be a problem. Enemies couldn't reach it without a good deal of difficulty, it would take a huge climbing pole or ladder to reach the cave mouth from the river, and anything that walked on two feet would risk its neck climbing down from above. A dragon might like it even better: you could fly in through the river canyon at night, skimming the surface, and escape observation. She imagined there was usually food of one sort or another to be had near a big body of water as the Inland Ocean, just a horizon downriver.\n\nWistala examined the cliff until she found a ledge thick with mosses and ferns, downwind from the cave. She wanted to get a look at this troll. She climbed down and settled between the branches. It was cool, with the wind whipping up the river valley, but she'd spend nights in worse spots.\n\nTired but not exhausted from her trip into the troll's lands, she tried not to sleep, but rather to rest with one eye upon the cave from a perch upriver. Softened by her regular meals at Mossbell, she regretted her missed dinner as the moon rose.\n\nShe heard the troll breathing before she saw it. A snerk-snerk-snerk sounded from the cave, startling her into full awareness.\n\nA face emerged in profile from the cave, if it could be called a face. A fleshy orb at the end of a long snakelike body no thicker than Wistala's tail emerged and waved around. Whether the head smelled, heard, or saw the approaches to the cave mouth, Wistala could not say.\n\nWistala was just congratulating herself on not being afraid of the wormlike body when two giant limbs unfolded themselves from the cave mouth, gripping the rocks above with three-toed hands. They pulled out a stumpy body split by a wide mouth that reminded her of a frog, especially since its skin seemed wet with some kind of oily extrude. At the tail end, a pair of smaller, but still spindly, limbs steadied the body as long forelimbs did the work of climbing.\n\nWistala realized she'd been mistaken in her analysis of the tracks. The troll was almost all forelimbs\u2014thick near the body and digits but bone-thin through the long middle part and joint. Its hind legs ended in the smaller graspers she'd mistaken for hands.\n\nThe troll's body seemed featureless save for warts establishing a striped pattern back from the edges of its wide mouth. A snorting sound came from the troll. It shifted and stiffened, opened the huge mouth, and spat out a mass about the size of a large pumpkin. It splattered on the rocks below, and Wistala recognized the foul smell of troll waste even at that distance.\n\nWistala watched in wonder as the long arms folded against the stars; then it sent its snakelike sensing-and-breathing (she assumed) organ over the edge of the cliff to examine the ground. The snerksnerk-snerk sounded again, and it reached up with those tree-length arms and pulled itself up and over the ledge. As it breathed, its body expanded and contracted at the pale belly.\n\nThen it was gone.\n\nShe argued with herself over exploring the troll's cave. For all she knew, it was full of hungry young trollings or a she-troll, if such even existed. Then there was the danger of the troll coming back and squashing her the way she might burst a tick under her sii.\n\nIn the end, caution won. She trembled at the thought of an encounter with the thing. Her nerve wasn't what it was when she explored the ruins of Tumbledown or outwitted bears with Auron. She crept back in the direction of Mossbell.\n\nRainfall's eyes went agog: \"Poison a troll? You might as well poison a stone,\" Rainfall said. \"They thrive on a month's-rotten corpse.\"\n\nWistala looked across the wide book table at him. Most of his library shelves held nothing but cobwebs, but a few volumes remained behind glass, and it seemed natural history was a favorite subject of his. If they could somehow get the troll to eat of a poisonous plant\u2014\n\n\"He's temporary,\" Rainfall said. \"The troll's ruining the estate, but he won't live forever. Mossbell was standing before he came; it'll still stand after he dies.\"\n\nGentle was a fine quality, but this, this, passivity vexed her. \"It's not a storm. There's got to be some way to rid a land of a troll.\"\n\n\"Yes. Starve it. But the wild pigs and goats have moved west of the road, and even if we hunted them down to the last piglet, the troll would just feed from the riverbottom. Or worse, come after my goats or Avalanche.\"\n\n\"Apply to your thane\u2014\"\n\nRainfall grew so agitated that he interrupted her. \"Tried and tried again.\"\n\nWistala hated even to mention her final idea. \"This Dragonblade fellow. If he's able to kill dragons, I'm sure he could handle a troll.\"\n\n\"An excellent idea, but I've no money to hire him. The only thing I have of value is the title to Mossbell. The Dragonblade can't expect to profit from the small reward. And then a troll's skin and bones yield little compared with\u2014I beg your pardon.\"\n\nYes, the odds and ends of a dead dragon bring a great deal of money. Neither here nor there.\n\n\"You must have some weapons. Arm your crew that helps you maintain the roads.\"\n\n\"What are we to do, snare it with the crane? Shovel gravel at it? While it's been long since I've engaged in an argument, I'd wish we could engage over the merits of Swanfellow's songs, or Alfwheat's dramas. The troll! The troll! As if he doesn't hang over this estate like a cloud, you have to bring the gloom into my library.\"\n\nSpring came.\n\nWistala feasted on the sun each day as she would on a slaughtered sheep. A wooded copse stood at the base of one of the twin hills, and there was an old half-blown-over walnut still fighting for life, judging from the buds upon the upper branches. Wistala liked to nap on the incline or watch the clouds go by, idly taking up bark beetles with her tongue as they explored the rotting underside of the walnut.\n\nSometimes she ventured up the easterly of the twin hills and watched the road that ran between, crossing a stream at two short stout bridges. There was little traffic, and as far as she could tell, her host derived no benefit from it. Carts, wagons, and passengers on foot hurried through Rainfall's lands as though the ground were accursed\u2014which it was, in a sense.\n\nTraffic on the road went so far as to time their travel through Rainfall's land. If headed north, the proper hour to step on the bridge seemed to be about two hours after sunrise. If heading south, one wanted to be on the road between the twin hills at about the same time. Each side would take some rest and water their animals at the walls and gates of Mossbell as the sun reached its zenith, but they'd admire its curious lines only from a distance as they ate preserved food out of bags and jars.\n\nAs far as Wistala could tell, Rainfall had all the duties of keeping a road open and drew none of the benefits. She explored just outside his lands along the road in the morning light and near dark and saw marketplaces and inns to either end of his lands, but thanks to the troll, no one dared set up so much as an applecart near the bridge.\n\nOf course, need or ignorance or foolishness sometimes had messengers riding across the bridge at night. Rainfall showed her the effects of some combination of the three one morning\u2014a pair of neatly bitten-off horse hooves and a dropped hat lying on the road with the stain and smell of blood on the gravel.\n\n\"Probably some young buck from Newcrossing trying to see his girl in Glenn Eoiye,\" Rainfall said, picking up the hat. \"That's a new red feather in his hat, quill cut to write her love notes or a Letter of Intent. In a year, it'll be a sad song, and in ten, they'll have new names in the old tune.\"\n\nHis Elvish fell effortlessly onto her ear with six months of practice. She responded easily: \"I don't suppose a company will be formed to kill the troll and avenge him.\"\n\n\"Thane Hammar isn't that energetic. Let's see if we can learn more of the sad tale.\"\n\nThey followed the tracks back to the bridge, and Rainfall gaped at what he saw. One whole side of the bridge's superstructure had been torn away from the wooden repair in the center.\n\n\"Oh! I'd have an earthquake come if it would just seal that wretched troll in his cave. This is a month's labor. I'll have to hire timberers and see about chain and staples.\"\n\nWistala checked the road for traffic before she ventured out onto the bridge. She crossed the arches, the high-running river filling both banks below, to closer inspect the damage.\n\n\"A rider comes,\" Rainfall said, but Wistala already heard the hoofbeats and scuttled over the edge of the bridge on the downwind side. There was the briefest of ledges there so men might anchor themselves and inspect the stones at the bottom, and she could easily grip it with sii and saa.\n\nShe heard Rainfall call a greeting and recognized the Hypatian tongue used by men in these parts. The rider trotted on without reply. Wistala waited some moments as the elves reckoned time before climbing back up and employing her nostrils.\n\n\"Not so much as a wave of his hand,\" Rainfall said. \"And he wore the garb of a high tradesman. A man with an eye toward commerce is usually better mannered.\"\n\n\"I found something under the bridge,\" Wistala said. \"I think it tells the tale of the young man with the red feather. The troll lurked under the bridge for some time, and had been there much before. Smears of droppings are all along the pilings.\"\n\n\"It's been a hard winter. Maybe it had trouble finding enough pigs and goats for its appetite. Ah well, the waterfowl return, and it'll get its fill of them. I must get the bridge repaired. A bad storm now could blow the wooden span to bits.\"\n\nBirds and words! Wistala thought, with her tail as stiff as an icicle. He's got the advantage of the troll, and he doesn't even consider how to use it.\n\nWistala watched the labor for the next few days, from the felling of two great trees for lumber to the sawing, the ironmongery both in the barn and at the bridge, and then placing the new beams with the crane. The last fascinated her, and Rainfall attempted to explain it over dinner with a great deal of talk about fulcrum points and levers and counterweights and blocks, but as soon as she learned one working of the crane, it seemed to force the previous one out of her head.\n\nIt wasn't until she watched it at work the next day that some of his discourse made sense. After the workmen had gone\u2014few dared labor long past noon, as they had to travel home on foot, save for a blacksmith or two who lodged with Rainfall at Mossbell\u2014she stayed up and asked a few more questions about the crane.\n\n\"Ah, you're getting it. You've no mind for theory, but when you see it in practice, you learn like lightning. I've noticed that with your Elvish, as well. Just when I thought you'd never get the hang of the extrafamilial oratory, you\u2014\"\n\n\"Bother oratory forms for now,\" Wistala said. \"The crane looks like it can go to a great height, above most treetops. Could it lift a tree upright?\"\n\n\"Easily. Vertical, horizontal. Vertical is actually easier to maneuver; you don't have to have stabilizing cables, as the shape of the tree works for you.\"\n\n\"I've got an idea for your crane. But it would have to happen soon. And I expect you'd have to get a group of men willing to brave a shot at the troll.\"\n\n\"Whatever can you mean, Wistala?\"\n\n\"Get a piece of paper. You shall draw as I speak.\"\n\nFour nights later, with the bridge still unfinished in its repairs, so excited was Rainfall by her idea, Wistala walked Avalanche back and forth across the bridge.\n\nNerve, Wistala, where is your dragon courage? A drakka should be firebellied on the night of such a hunt, such a challenge.\n\nThe crane stood at the north end, hidden in the trees by the hard climb of stairs leading up the side of the cliff. It held a long, thin, straight pine, shorn of many but not all of its limbs. The wider bottom end had been sharpened, and ax-heads, saw edges, spear-points, and knife-blades stuck out from the bottom in a ring, like porcupine quills, though all had been blackened by soot so as not to catch the light. If it weren't for the intermittent drizzle, she'd be able to see Rainfall atop the crane. But she wanted bad weather for this job to help mask sounds and smells.\n\nAvalanche wore a thick blanket of quilted leather folded and tied across his back and neck, and grumbled a good deal about being out in the wet and not being near the mares of some of the men\u2014only a handful had been willing to take up with Rainfall, mostly friends and relatives of the snatched young man. Not that Wistala had met any of them; her role in all this would hopefully remain secret.\n\nWistala walked again to the south side of the river, and thought she saw a bulge in the river, but it was hard to tell. She pulled on Avalanche's reins\u2014\n\n\"Careful!\" Avalanche objected.\n\n\u2014and walked him to the side.\n\nYes. A dripping arm clung to the side of one of the stone arches. It moved, pulling up a sodden shape.\n\nHer hearts pounded.\n\nFather always said this was the worst moment. The moment before action was inevitable, that there would be no further delay, and from the next beat of your wings you were committed. The moment of choice.\n\nShe stood frozen. So big. It will be fast if it can run.\n\nIf she could commit herself with words first, maybe the rest would come easier: \"It's time, Avalanche.\"\n\nThere. I've said it.\n\n\"Now for battle?\" His tail flicked up, a white battle banner.\n\n\"Now for battle. All you have to do is run from the troll.\"\n\n\"Brave Master Eyen rode battle. Troll came. Brave Master Eyen fell. I ran then.\" His ears drooped a little, but maybe it was because of the wet.\n\n\"This time I want you to run,\" she said, jumping as lightly as she could onto Avalanche's broad back. Even with her scales, she couldn't weigh as much as a young elf warrior arrayed for battle. \"The best thing you can do is run. Faster you're out of its sight, the better. Now walk on.\"\n\nAvalanche walked, but she could feel him holding himself back at every step. According to Rainfall, the stallion had spent his colt-hood and youth in training, learning to run at other horses and enemies, and the old instincts were coming back with action in the air, though there were wiry gray hairs mixed in with his softer ones on his mane and tail these days.\n\nWistala was grateful to ride Avalanche. She wasn't certain her feet would be as sure as the stallion's, walking along a bridge toward the spot\u2014just across from the repaired timbers\u2014where she knew the troll lurked.\n\nBut she was committed. Avalanche would walk her into peril whether her feet were willing to go or not. She felt her griff extending and contracting nervously, she tried to hold them tight against her neck hearts to stop the rattle.\n\nThey clomped across the wooden timbers, a dragon-length expanse covering the fallen arch. She felt certain her hearts were on the verge of quitting.\n\nThe snake-head orb at the end of its tendril lay on the side of the bridge, motionless, looking like a forgotten drinking gourd left by some traveler. Though she could smell the troll now, as could Avalanche. But he moved on, stepping faster if at all, with sure-footed courage.\n\nWistala's claws set themselves into the leather quilting.\n\nShe heard the troll shift weight.\n\n\"Now, Avalanche!\" she squeaked, in Drakine, but she slapped his muscular rump with her tail.\n\nAvalanche let out a cry and leaped forward onto the stonework, hooves slipping just a little in the wet. Wistala hung on for all she was worth, but far better than the excitement of the run was the absence of fear.\n\nThe troll's dreadfully huge three-digit hand just brushed Avalanche's tail as it came down, and she felt no fear. The body, all gaping mouth and terrible stench, heaved itself onto the bridge behind them, and she only looked with amazement at the length of its forelimbs illustrated against the familiar width of the bridge.\n\nShe urged Avalanche on with another tail-slap.\n\nThe troll began to run after them. It used its long front legs and short back limbs in pairs long-then-short, long-then-short, in a strange unbalanced sort of run that made her think of a goose taking flight across a still lake, with wings beating strong and feet frantically working.\n\nAvalanche was almost at the far end of the bridge when Wistala jumped off, giving him a last flick of her tail. She skidded to a stop on the wet bridge stones.\n\nThe troll came, Wistala thought its gait ungainly compared with that of a horse\u2014even a dragon-dash was a thing of beauty compared with the troll's careen.\n\nShe jumped to the east rail of the bridge, where her rope was tied. This wasn't part of her original plan, but an addition of Rainfall's, who didn't like the idea of her belly-flopping into the river, even with the banks in spring flood.\n\nNow to attract a troll!\n\nShe stood on her hind legs and extended her neck as far as she could. Her griff bristled, and she rattled them against her scales for all they were worth.\n\nTchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-TCHK!\n\nHer ears rang with the sound. The troll pulled up, confused by the sound, its waving orb-topped tentacle turning her way, backside expanding and contracting as it breathed.\n\nAvalanche disappeared into the distant rain.\n\nThe troll set its arms and legs, ready for anything, battle or flight.\n\n\"Here's a mouthful for you!\" she shouted. She gripped the leather wrap on the line and dropped over the edge.\n\nShe felt the heat of her passage even through the protective grip\u2014again, no fear in her hearts but the odd words friction heat crossing her mind, even with the troll gaping over as she dropped away.\n\nIt reached for her and missed, but caught up the line. By the time its slow brain made the connection and it began to draw up the line, Wistala was almost at the river.\n\nShe dropped into the water.\n\nA hominid wouldn't have been able to make it to the cut stairs, but drakka were strong swimmers; they could clasp their limbs to their side and put their whole body into the effort, sucking air through the nostrils. Wistala was bothered by the cold more than by the current\u2014it brought back awful half-memories that took the courage out of her.\n\nShe reached the landing and pulled herself up, weary as though from a long dragon-dash.\n\nThe troll marked her movement, and it reached out with one long arm for the stairs and swung itself down.\n\n\"That's right,\" Wistala croaked, a puny vocalization that didn't even disturb a stalking bird three rocks away. She drew breath and roared her best battle cry.\n\nThe orb turned down on her, and the troll hurried its climb. When the troll filled the view between her landing and the suspended pine trunk above, she called on her flame.\n\nShe didn't aim her sole effectual weapon at the troll. She loosed it out, as far out into the river as she could. It struck the water and formed a pool there, floating downstream with the current.\n\nShe could never be sure what happened next, save that Rainfall saw her orange-red signal and cut the tree trunk free.\n\nPerhaps it was the number of camouflaging branches left on the trunk that made a sound. Perhaps the tightly stretched cable's parting at Rainfall's ax-blow\u2014it made a crack like a nearby lightning strike according to her host, who was in a position to know. Or perhaps the troll's sense-orb could see in all directions, rather than only one\u2014no one had ever lived long enough in the company of a troll to conduct any studies.\n\nWistala's brain had no time for perhapses\u2014as soon as she gave the signal, she jumped into the river.\n\nThe troll shifted as the tree-trunk fell. Rather than hitting it squarely, the projectile opened a gash in its side. This just enraged the troll rather than skewering it. Luckily for Wistala, it took its temper out on the tree, which had lodged itself in the shallow water of the riverbank. The troll picked it up and cracked it against the cliff side, again and again until only a shard remained in its grip.\n\nOnly then did it notice the arrows and spears from above.\n\nBrave or foolish, Rainfall's gang flung spears and fired hunting arrows down at the troll as Wistala made it to the first pillar of the bridge. She saw a spear lodge in the troll's back. The sense-stalk stood straight up, and it began to climb.\n\nThe next thing Wistala knew, she was climbing. Using the deep crevices between the joined stones, a skilled man could make the long climb, but it would take him ten times the effort it took Wistala, with her four shorter limbs and thick muscles. She crawled up the bridge's support like an ant hurrying up a grass stalk, her pace not greatly reduced from what she could achieve on flat ground.\n\nBut she was only halfway up when the troll reached the men.\n\nOne, a lumberman, judging by his broad leather girdle, tried his axe on the troll's hand as it came to the cliff top. She heard the sharp thwack of the blade as it bit into the troll's fountain-size hand even from her distance. The troll's other hand came up and struck the lumberman such a blow, he exploded into pieces.\n\nShe passed over the bridge-rail to find the troll standing on the cliff top, searching the tree line for the fleeing men. It flushed a man and ran him down on the road, where it smashed and then swallowed him. A group of horses fled screaming from the woods, one or two pulling men along.\n\nWistala wasn't sure what she could do, but she hurried toward the north end of the bridge anyway. She had one good gout of flame left in her fire bladder, if not two; she'd eaten heartily for months, and there was still an angry liquid ball inside her, waiting to get out.\n\nShe'd diverted the troll before; perhaps she could again, long enough for it to lose track of the men\u2026 .\n\nA white flash on the road ahead. Wistala, gulping air as she ran, recognized the shape.\n\nAvalanche!\n\nThe stallion\u2014with blood in the air, even on a rainy night, and the frightened calls of mares behind him\u2014had given in to instinct and stood his ground, eagerly pawing at the road.\n\nThe troll rounded on the stallion.\n\n\"Come on! Beast!\" Avalanche neighed. Then he screamed and reared up, front hooves cutting the air before him. \"Try to take of mine. I'll kick your teeth out!\"\n\nWistala dragon-dashed, her vision red with lost breath. The troll's air sacs bulged from its behind; she could see flaps of raised skin like a pinecone opening and shutting as it tried to catch its breath\u2014or was it damaged in some way? No matter\u2014she homed in on the deep whooshing sound.\n\nThen the troll lunged forward, its gait even stranger because of cradling its wounded hand\u2026 .\n\nThe troll reared up and reached for the horse as Avalanche charged. But the stallion danced sideways, and lashed out with a hind leg, kicking one of the thin forearms. Avalanche reared up and struck the troll in the mouth-without-a-face that constituted the front of its body.\n\nThe troll backed up and lifted itself.\n\nThe sense-orb hung over all like a watchful bird. As the troll's mouth dropped open, seemingly with the idea of swallowing Avalanche whole, Wistala slid to a stop and spat her fire, as though trying to get an extra few tail-lengths of distance into it by letting momentum carry the contents of her fire bladder up her throat, accelerated by ring after ring of throat muscles.\n\nThe sense-orb whipped around, and Wistala caught one glimpse of a wide-open eye? nostril? ear? in the center of a wormy fringe\u2014\n\nThe fire struck the troll in its breathing sac.\n\nIt spun, tucking its hindquarters and covering the breathing spicules with its rear legs. An elbow knocked Avalanche aside, and the stallion crashed down, as though tripped. The troll jumped awkwardly away like a spastic frog, stomping on Avalanche in its flight, beating at its hindquarters with its rear feet where Wistala's flame clung and dripped and burned.\n\nIt made for the river, by plan or blind flight of instinctive pain. The troll hurled itself into the trees along the roadway and fell in ruin, its limbs no longer capable of supporting the mouth-body. The sense-orb looked this way and that at the twitching limbs before it, too, collapsed.\n\nWistala couldn't stand and gape\u2014she hurried to Avalanche.\n\nAvalanche fought for breath, his tongue extended and bloody foam on his lips and the roadway. At her approach, the stallion raised his head a little.\n\n\"Beast?\"\n\nShe realized it wasn't an epithet, but a query. \"It's dead. You killed it.\"\n\n\"Kicked its head in. Warned it.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did. I heard.\"\n\nThe head fell back to the ground. \"The mares. Hear them?\"\n\nWistala couldn't hear anything but the soft rainfall.\n\nAvalanche let out a friendly nicker, sightless eyes rolling this way and that. Then his struggling body ceased to move, and the horribly lolling tongue went still.\n\nWistala flung herself across her old stablemate, determined to fight off wild pigs, crows, bears, and set Bartleghaff himself ablaze if any but Rainfall came to claim the body.\n\nRainfall took her to a quiet corner of the estate, a long-sloped hill overlooking the river gorge. It was a scenic spot, but too rocky to be of much use.\n\nTrees thrived there. Well spaced, with thickets of wildflowers all around, bursting with the blues and yellows of spring.\n\nWith them was a windburned lumberman named Jessup driving a team of timber-horses pulling a haywain bearing Avalanche. He had been introduced to her as the younger brother of Lessup, the brave lumberman who'd taken his ax to the troll's hand.\n\nJessup also served as a foreman on his bridge crew and had seen the whole fight from a hiding spot in a muddy ditch beside the road. He was a man of trim beard with the close-cropped head hair married humans in this part of the land wore, and liked to whistle through his teeth, though he didn't do so today out of respect for their duty.\n\n\"This is his spot,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala stood up a bit from the wain. The trees crowned the hill in a half-circle, and within the arms stood a pile of quarried rock, placed so as to make a wide pair of stairs in mirror image facing each other.\n\n\"This is the cairn of my son. He loved Avalanche, and Avalanche loved him. It's only right that Avalanche rest at his feet.\"\n\nJessup said something to Rainfall. One of the words might have been rocks.\n\n\"We should get to work,\" Rainfall said. A month ago, Wistala would have been happy to dispose of the horseflesh in the most efficient and belly-filling manner possible, but her omnipresent appetite vanished when she looked at the dead horse.\n\nThe humans had gathered to do service to their own killed at sunset. Wistala had seen it only from a distance\u2014torches flamed at the spots of their deaths and some kind of priest had passed out powders that the families threw into the torch flame. Puffs of colorful smoke came up, and they marked their faces with fallen ash. Rainfall walked among them, embracing many, but took no other part in the ceremony.\n\nThey'd burned the troll's body.\n\nAll that was left was Avalanche. Rainfall showed Wistala where to dig, and she began to work.\n\nWistala enjoyed the labor. It felt good to score up soil under one's claws, pull up rocks, tear through thin tree roots. Her body had recovered from the encounter with the Dragonblade's dogs; even if her spirit was happy at Mossbell, her body craved effort.\n\nShe smelled metals under the cairn rocks nearby, and rust bleeding into the soil, a fact she tried to take little notice of. Imagine Rainfall's reaction to her prying up the cairn-stones of his son and gobbling down a few buckles and buttons! But civilization requires ignoring one's instincts, as Rainfall liked to tell her in their fireside chats.\n\nPerverse to have such thoughts about a man who'd saved her life.\n\nEarth \u2026 rock \u2026 rock \u2026 more earth. She smelled a mole and extracted it with her tongue.\n\nRainfall maneuvered the wain so they could roll Avalanche out from the uphill side. He was a wonder with the horses, who didn't like her smell one bit and shifted nervously whenever Rainfall didn't stand at their noses to calm them. Once the wagon was in place, Rainfall led the horses into the trees so they could rest and eat with dragon out of scent, out of mind.\n\nJessup helped by widening the channels she dug. Eventually they had a shallow grave and a pile of earth and rock to go atop it.\n\nWistala rested after they pushed Avalanche out of the wagon. Rainfall and Jessup placed earth and rocks over him.\n\nWith that done, Jessup ate and drank from a meal he'd packed in a bag. Rainfall led Wistala up to the crest of the hill and the ring of trees. The canyon wind took up his willow-leaf-like hair, and he tied it together with a bit of red-colored silk.\n\n\"How do you like this spot, Wistala?\"\n\nShe looked across the gorge. A series of small waterfalls ran down the opposite side, though the wind caught much of the spray and turned it into a white mist.\n\n\"There must be good fishing under those falls. Look at the birds.\"\n\n\"We're going to have to work on aesthetic appreciation this summer. You're all gastronomy, my child.\n\n\"I've ancestors in this ring of trees,\" he continued. \"One day I'll come up here and never return, and learn stories older than any book from my fellow trees.\"\n\nWistala didn't understand much of elvish mysticism. Whether they actually became trees or simply lay down at the foot of one and waited to die depended on whose story you listened to.\n\n\"Who'll take care of the bridge?\"\n\n\"There's more to it than just the bridge,\" Rainfall said. \"The whole Hypatian Order is breaking up. Of course, Starfall, the poet-philosopher, tells us all things must pass, even the mountains and oceans, in time. But I love the Hypatian Civilization: the laws I once upheld, the high and low priestdoms, the ceremonies and the titles that brought out the best in us and held the worst at bay.\n\n\"Take the thane. Hammar keeps the Hypatian Law, but twists its intent so that he can live in the manner of a Varvar Despot or an Overking of the Ghioz Golden Circle. Half the people of this land are indentured to him, thanks to civil debts\u2014slaves in all but title, myself included.\"\n\nWistala was pretty sure a badger had made a home at the hilltop somewhere. And there were birds' nests to raid in the cliff side\u2014\n\n\"Can't you petition elsewhere about him?\" she asked, realizing Rainfall was waiting for a question or comment.\n\n\"That's been tried.\"\n\n\"You can't be the only dissatisfied one. Go burn his house down.\"\n\n\"I'm no firebrand. A new, worse thane would rise from the ashes, perhaps one who wouldn't even make a pretense of adhering to Hypatian Justice. Besides, my Lada is in that very hall.\"\n\n\"Your granddaughter?\"\n\n\"Yes. He took her as a ward when she was a child. I've been in default on my taxes for some years, you understand, and that gives the thane certain powers. He was able to seize her as thanedroit, thanks to his corruption of the high judge and high priest. Thanedroit! Again, a polite name for a terrible usurpation. She's a hostage to my debts. If I die or quit the estate she inherits, and as she's untitled and of questionable parentage besides, Mossbell would revert to Hypatia\u2014meaning Hammar would get Mossbell.\"\n\nWistala's head hurt from trying to see through the hedge of words, but she could see the pain in Rainfall's eyes.\n\n\"You should have quit it while the troll still lived,\" Wistala said. \"Let the thane inherit troll-blighted lands.\"\n\n\"Oh, he would have rid himself of the troll quick enough if\u2014\" Rainfall stopped, looked anew at Wistala. \"You don't think\u2014Oh, the infamy! Black infamy!\"\n\nRainfall was silent and bitter all the ride back to Mossbell. She stretched out in the back of the wain. Jessup kept looking at Wistala in a sidelong manner.\n\nWistala, more to break Rainfall from his mood than because the human annoyed her, asked her host to inquire after the purpose of Jessup's stares.\n\nAfter some words, Rainfall handed the horse reins to Jessup and turned around. \"He didn't know it bothered you. He said you're beautiful, and he was trying to memorize your proportions.\"\n\n\"Beautiful?\" She was her same thick-bodied self, with nothing like Jizara's elegant neck and tail.\n\n\"Interested in aesthetics now?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"Has he been in your awful bramble-wines?\"\n\n\"I agree. I told him he should wait some years, when you have wings. Then he'd behold one of the most perfect creatures in creation. The running horse, the flying frigate bird, the peacock, the fabled Tigers of Ghioz\u2014none of them compare to a dragon with wings held high.\"\n\nA messenger waited under the somber figures of the silent fountain turnaround of Mossbell, a down-cheeked boy with a sweated mount. At Rainfall's order, Jessup kept the wain at a discreet distance so as not to alarm the horse.\n\nRainfall jumped lightly down from his seat and welcomed the messenger. After inspecting the seal, he read the contents. He stared at the boy, then hurried into the house, where he remained for only a few moments before he returned the paper to the messenger, resealed, along with a silver coin.\n\nWistala suspected some sort of crisis; Rainfall had very little coin in his hall, unless he kept a secret noseproofed supply.\n\nRainfall invited Jessup to stay for dinner, but the timberman had to get back to his family and his brother's widow and children.\n\nAs soon as they sat alone, waiting for his bread to cook and drop off the clay-sided oven as a joint sputtered inside, she asked about the message.\n\n\"Another of the thane's humiliations, under a masquerade of civility,\" Rainfall said. \"He summons me, ta-hum ta-hally to his hall, so that I might fully tell the story of the death of the troll and claim my reward. Of course, it'll go toward back taxes. The accounting will be announced to all present.\"\n\nWistala turned the handle of the spit, rotating the joint. The turn brought a fresh fall of juices into the gravy pan and mouthwatering smells. \"Refuse him.\"\n\n\"I cannot. There'll be many a jape about elves not being able to keep two pennies proximate.\"\n\n\"Let them talk. No one ever lost an eye to a joke.\"\n\n\"I'll have to beg some part of the reward that should rightfully go to my crew. Imagine: pleading so that the widows and orphans might see some monies, and the men be rewarded for their courage, when the thane should be bowing to each and opening his purse wide to the survivors!\"\n\n\"I thought being rid of the troll would solve your problems.\"\n\n\"It will take time to assemble decent tenants for the land, and they'll need roof and stock. I shall have to go beg of the dwarves.\n\nThe Wheel of Fire will give me more upfront, but at ruinous rates. The Dwarves of the Diadem are fairer, but only lend a small sum at a time.\"\n\n\"Wheel of Fire?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Your eyes have gone all hot and tight, Wistala. Have you had dealings with them? Oh\u2014the joint burns! Quick, get it out.\"\n\nThey extracted the haunch of mutton and took the baking tubers from their metal case. When dinner was laid out\u2014Wistala had learned to eat neatly from the table, but she still had to lift her head to let the food slide down her throat, a gesture that always made Rainfall shake his head\u2014they continued the conversation in what had been the food-servers' nook, a smaller room off the big, dark, and drafty dining hall, warmed by the heat of the oven.\n\nRainfall moved on to happier subjects, mostly the chance of seeing his granddaughter at Hammar's hall, and Wistala put the dwarves out of her mind. The mention awoke dark thoughts and set her griff twitching. She'd promised her father to forget the past and live for another generation of dragons.\n\nWistala kept herself deep inside Mossbell House all while Rainfall visited the thane. Visitors were traipsing across the grounds to see where the troll had fallen.\n\nRainfall returned in the company of a small ill-favored horse. Its shaggy coat and hooves were thick with layers of dirt. He put it in the stall opposite what had been Avalanche's, and when Wistala made sure there was no one around, she approached Rainfall.\n\n\"How passed the audience?\"\n\n\"As predicted. I bowed and begged. He gave me half the reward to distribute to the men, then sent a low priest along to see the money distributed. As though my word wasn't enough.\"\n\nRainfall brightened. \"However, he is keeping his pledge as to taxation. I shall have five years breathing space to turn Mossbell around, thanks to you.\"\n\nWistala bowed; elves took great pleasure in the giving and receiving of bows.\n\n\"The only cloud was that he refused me a visit with my granddaughter. She's living in a room in the fast tower. I should have gone out and shouted for her, but he pulls up the bridge at night.\"\n\nWistala saw an opportunity, and questioned him about this curious feature. She learned much about the thane's hall, from its almost windowless first level to the small herb garden on the roof. The thane's hall sounded impressive and extensive.\n\n\"Galahall should be fine, for the excises and land tax,\" Rainfall said.\n\nThat night she made friends with the horse\u2014or mule rather, as the beast was quick to correct her\u2014as Rainfall saw to its hooves. The mule was either too stupid or too sick to mind her smell, and seemed ill-disposed to talk.\n\n\"There's a spot of hoof-sprout in the cracks,\" Rainfall grumbled as the mule stamped and swore. \"I'll have to make a paste and bag his feet. What kind of stablemen is the thane keeping?\"\n\n\"How did you come by this unfortunate?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yet another of the thane's jokes. He frowned when I told him of the death of Avalanche, my last source of steady income, thanks to stud-price, and offered a replacement. Stog here was the most wretched specimen in his stables, so the hostler presented me with him.\"\n\nThe black ears of the mule perked up at the mention of the name.\n\n\"Hello, Stog,\" Wistala said in the beast-tongue the mule had used in his calumnies. \"Welcome to Mossbell.\"\n\n\"Drop all the two-leggeds,\" Stog said to no one in particular. \"Left to rot again.\"\n\nRainfall worked long into the night on the mule's hooves, gathering plants and then mixing them with a white powder he kept in a clay jar. Then he filled four leather-bottomed canvas bags with the sharp-smelling mix and tied them to the mule's hooves, after fixing a wooden gate around his neck that kept him from lowering his head to chew the poultices free.\n\n\"Bug me! That stings,\" Stog said, and tried to bite Rainfall as he worked.\n\nToo stupid to recognize a kind turn, Wistala thought, and settled down in her old spot to sleep.\n\nRainfall was still at work when she awoke. He'd cleaned, brushed, and clipped every inch of the mule, who looked immeasurably better but still angry.\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" Rainfall said as she drank from the central cistern. \"Could you watch him for a few hours? He's trying to kick the bags off. I hobbled him\"\u2014he pointed at a line between stable and the horse's rear leg\u2014\"but I wonder if he's out of tricks.\"\n\n\"I'd be happy to.\"\n\nRainfall extended a hand to Stog's nose, but he just tried to bite again.\n\n\"As you like,\" Rainfall said. He left, shoulders sagging.\n\n\"You should be grateful,\" Wistala said from a high perch in the almost-empty loft.\n\n\"Gut-kick gratitude,\" Stog said. \"Torturing two-leg. He's burning my hooves right off, I'll signify.\"\n\nStog spoke the beast-tongue better than Avalanche. Perhaps he was a well-traveled mule.\n\n\"He's kind beyond my ability to tell. It may hurt now, but your feet will feel better soon, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"So speaks the drakka with her claws all clean and cool.\"\n\nThis was strange. Not only had the mule identified her as a female, but he'd correctly guessed that she was no longer a hatchling.\n\n\"You know about dragons,\" she said.\n\n\"I know about killing them. I was in the Dragonblade's mule train.\" The long brown face told her nothing, but the ears twitching this way and that suggested that Stog would welcome a fight.\n\n\"The last time I saw the Dragonblade, it was just him and his dogs. No mules.\"\n\n\"You saw the Dragonblade and lived?\"\n\nWistala tried to remain as calm as the mule. His ears were forward with interest. \"Big broad man? Black armor like dragonscale?\"\n\n\"Not like, it is. I've borne many a dragon-hoof or hide-scraping on my back.\"\n\n\"Then why aren't you still carrying pieces of slaughtered dragon?\"\n\nStog tried to stamp, but the hobble prevented his moving. \"The Dragonblade was hurrying north, and I came up lame. I was traded for a shaggy-faced pony and left in the blackest hole of an old stable.\n\n\"I waited days and days for him to return. How could he forget his stoutest mule?\"\n\nWistala saw the mule's ears droop at the memory. Finally his tail swished, and he looked at her afresh as he spoke: \"I pulled a trash-sled in snow up to my fetlocks now and then. The stablehands beat me like a muddy rug. Until the hooves started to go. The hostler tried to sell me off, but the clodclutters took one look at my hooves and wised up.\"\n\n\"So you know the lay of the land around the thane's hold?\"\n\n\"Some of it.\"\n\n\"Tell me more.\"\n\n\"Why should I do that?\"\n\n\"To take your mind off your hooves,\" Wistala said. \"Besides, there might be a way for you to give them a bite back for their mistreatment.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind catching the hostler bending over with his back turned. I'd send him through the wall. But even a good stomp would fix me. If you hit hominids on the inside of their hoof just right, they hop about shouting. Most gratifying.\"\n\nThe moon changed all the way round once, and then to half so fast Wistala hardly knew time passed, save for the changes for the better to Stog's hooves, healing under Rainfall's constant attention.\n\nShe took to exploring outside Mossbell's grounds, particularly to a high ridge to the northeast. From the trees on its top, she could see an even higher ridge with a single line of trees and an old broken watchtower that marked the edge of Galahall's lands, according to Stog. The ground between was little used, as it was poor in soil and water.\n\nShe worked on her Parl by asking Jessup about the woods, ostensibly with an eye toward the hunting prospects of the Thickets, as that part of the thanedom was known.\n\nJessup was working the roadside near the river, sinking a well. He'd laid out a few stones in what Rainfall's study-books called a rectangle on a flat, firm piece of land. Every now and then he would fell a few trees and place them on the rocks so they could dry without touching the ground, whistling more loudly through his teeth as the pile of lumber grew.\n\nHe quit working as she nosed around, and took off his ear-flapped cap to scratch his head. \"Hunting? Some pheasant, a gobbler or two. No wild boar or deer left\u2014the thane has hunted them all.\"\n\n\"I'd like to avoid notice.\"\n\n\"Then keep to the thorn hollows. Not a problem for you. Your skin should keep them out.\" He looked doubtful, then took a step closer. \"May I touch?\"\n\nWistala raised her head and turned sideways. \"The ones on my back are the thickest.\"\n\nHe ran his hand over her scales. \"Like \u2026 like cast iron, only rougher.\"\n\nWistala used a saa to scritch at the back of her shoulder, where a few of her hatchling scales still clung. One dropped off, and she flipped it to him with her nose. \"One of your own.\"\n\n\"I may keep this?\"\n\n\"You may.\"\n\nHe bowed in gratitude.\n\n\"Could I ask a favor of you?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I've more wealth than my father saw in his lifetime, thanks to you. I'd do my best.\"\n\n\"I'd like to start bringing home game to Mossbell. Rainfall has been feeding me for so long, I'd like to do the same for him.\"\n\n\"The master gives too much. He's \u2026 he's noble that way. Go on.\"\n\n\"I need a sort of harness that will allow me to carry a few birds or a quartered deer. Can you manage it?\"\n\n\"I'll see the hidesman and blacksmith a-morrow.\" He scratched his close-cropped head again, circling her and cocking his head this way and that in thought.\n\nWistala bowed. \"Thank you. Anything I can do to help\u2014\"\n\n\"Stand still.\"\n\nHe took a ball of string from his pocket and measured her, along the back, around her neck, across her shoulders, making little marks on the string with a bit of charcoal. \"I expect I'll have it done by blueberry day.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" The profusion of hominid holidays were all jumbled in Wistala's head; they celebrated everything from turns of the stars and moon to hop-picking to the ripening of the first plum.\n\n\"Eight days.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I'm the one obliged, Wisssakle.\"\n\n\"Wistala.\"\n\nJessup did better on the second try. When Wistala nuzzled him and gave a bit of a prrum to congratulate him, his face broke into a grin. \"Me conversing with a dragon in its own tongue. Like something out of a bedtime story.\"\n\nWith the air warm and spring in full bloom, Stog came outdoors. His hooves had been turned flaky and white by Rainfall's applications, but strong and healthy hoof lived beneath, revealed as the diseased parts fell away.\n\nWistala took Stog to see Avalanche's grave, as a final proof of Rainfall's goodness and the turn of his fortune marked by the mule's arrival at Mossbell.\n\nStog snorted. According to the mule, horses got all the glory, and mules did all the work. \"We can go twice as far, carrying twice the load, on half the feed as a horse. Up hills they'd break a leg on and down valleys that would mean their necks, too. But where's the poetry, the statuary?\"\n\n\"Just wait. I'll give you a chance to show a pack of horses a trick or two.\"\n\nJessup came through on his harness. It was a clever bit of craft, looping around her neck, tail, and forelimbs. There were eyes here and there in the leather straps, where she could hook game nets (or bags, or waterskins, she thought). She had room in the buckles for her to almost double in size. He took it away almost as soon as she tried it on, insisting on improvements, and returned it with twin linked straps running ladderlike down her back. She found some game nets in Mossbell's dry attic and learned to fix them on herself.\n\nWith that, she told Rainfall she'd be gone a few days and plunged into the Thickets. She did hunt, but her real purpose was a trek to Galahall.\n\nKnow your hunting ground, Mother always used to say. As hatchlings, Auron had always ignored that advice and plunged straight into the center of the home cave as if expecting a slug to pop up and ask to be eaten. Hunting took patience, knowledge of game trails and habits, and above all, a feel for terrain, weather, and wind.\n\nShe waited for an evening that promised rain to approach Galahall. She sneaked onto its lands, circled wide of its herds and flocks, trotted through ditches bordering its fields, and eventually came upon the Thane's Hall.\n\nIt had grown over the years, ever larger, she guessed by the quality of the stonework. The oldest, blockiest, and worst-laid stones were in a tall square tower that stood at its corner. The tower, higher than an oak, had narrow windows and an overhanging platform at the top. A building had grown up around it, extending first north and then west and then south again so it turned back on itself, with the tower watching a wide courtyard. The north and west buildings were rough-hewn as the tower on their first level, almost windowless, but the level above was fancier and decorated with flourishes that Wistala thought looked like leaves and faces of woodland creatures.\n\nThe south part of Galahall had a huge door facing the tower with a grand balcony above, and windows filled with tinted glass bigger than any door in Mossbell. Smaller supports helped hold up the high, smooth walls of that part of the hall, and there were beds of flowers and shrubs in between under the windows.\n\nIf Wistala didn't know better, she would think that a truly splendid fellow lived inside.\n\nThe whole of Galahall was surrounded by a wide ditch filled with water, bridged under the tower. She approached the moat and sniffed at the water. It smelled faintly of sewage, but the bottom-feeding fish living in it didn't seem to mind.\n\nShe paid close attention to the windows of the tower. Unless the rooms were very small, each level of the tower would probably have only one room. The stairs must be on the inside.\n\nWith that, she left, angling for the ridge marked by its single line of trees.\n\nShe came home to Mossbell with her bags full of pheasants and rabbits, and her mind full of paths and stream-crossings, thorny runs and thick stands. Crows followed her intermittently on her way home, as if hoping that she'd drop a tidbit, but she arrived at Mossbell with a week's worth of dinners and stews to receive hearty words of welcome and praise from Rainfall.\n\nEven Stog seemed pleased to have her back in the stable. He trotted up to her on healthy hooves. \"The mice and rats ran wild while you were hunting,\" Stog grumbled.\n\n\"Next time you'll come along. We'll see if you're a match for the thane's horses.\"\n\nWistala planned her venture all the next week, as the pheasants and rabbits made the transition from the cool room to stews and pies and soups. She brought up the subject to Rainfall as he worked in his garden, mentioning that she'd seen deer tracks in the thickets and had a mind to bring back a tender young yearling.\n\nShe explained her plans for the next day to him, all the while hugging her real intent to her breast.\n\n\"I've found some hollows even the hunters avoid. Stog seems willing to carry a deer home.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he'd enjoy the exercise.\"\n\n\"I'll need a harness for Stog, of course, and a bag of meal.\"\n\n\"I'll rise early and put the harness on,\" Rainfall said. \"If that suits you.\"\n\n\"You're too kind,\" Wistala said. Her host's pleasant manner inspired frilly language in return. Though she stifled a prrum only with difficulty, imaging Lada's arrival at Mossbell atop Stog's back, and Rainfall's delight at having her returned to him.\n\nShe stayed in the house that night, too excited to sleep, and studied Lada's sketched portrait by candlelight long after Rainfall had turned in. Finally she sniffed the doll from the little chair under the musical instruments until she knew the odor, then wrapped it in a clean cloth from the larder.\n\nOn her way out, she noted that the house looked even more bare, if that were possible. The cloak room was bulging with a last few treasures Rainfall doted on: everything from furniture to rolls of heavy draperies to a jeweled belt his grandfather had been awarded for a victory to a silver music box that played a tune his mate had been fond of. Rainfall was sacrificing yet more of the home's interior to raise funds to bring tenants and livestock to his lands. Perhaps matters had gone ill with the dwarves.\n\nThe doll was hidden in with a few game bags by the time Rainfall entered the stable the next morning. He wished them both farewell and a fortunate hunt.\n\n\"All the spits will be cleaned in expectation of a successful return,\" Rainfall said as he waved them off. \"Rah-ya! for an increase to your summer's tally!\"\n\nWistala capered around Stog as soon as they were out of sight of Mossbell, trickery and adventure in her blood. \"We're finally off for Galahall.\"\n\n\"Where I get to show up those oat-stuffed horses.\"\n\n\"Yes. When we get to the ridge, you'll have to show me what you can manage. That's the only path I couldn't pick for you.\"\n\nThey passed through the Thickets easily enough. Stog was both strong and sure-footed, following her in and out of the network of thorny hollows with nothing more than a few bitter oaths when a thorn got him. It was a bad place for flies, too, as it turned out. They ignored Wistala, but they clustered around Stog's eyes, ears, and tailvent.\n\nThey paused for grain and water at a muddy hole. The flies grew thicker than ever as Stog pawed up mud to gather drinkable water.\n\n\"I was bit by a centipede the size of a snake once,\" Stog said, his teeth working in their strange sideways fashion. \"Burned like dragonflame. I've never much minded flies since then.\"\n\nThey rested for an afternoon in the shadow of the ridge with its strange line of sentinel trees. It promised to be a fine night, but they couldn't wait forever. Stog found a path up as the sun set. The other side was steeper still.\n\n\"We'll be crossing this again in a hurry, and at night, so keep that in mind when you pick your trail,\" Wistala said.\n\nThe soil was summer-dry and tended to slide as they went down and entered the grounds of Galahall. They cut through fields, watched only by scarecrows.\n\n\"I remember the smell of this grass,\" Stog said as they came within sight of the hall. They stood in a mass of oaks hugging a stream, immature acorns in the boughs above. They rested again until the lights began to go out in the hall's second-floor windows.\n\nShe poured out more grain for Stog. \"Wait here. I may be coming back in a hurry,\" Wistala said, checking the fitting of her game-harness. \"Wish me luck.\"\n\nStog didn't wish her luck. He was chewing.\n\nWistala kept low as she approached Galahall, making for the old tower that came close to closing the near circle of buildings. She passed through the foul-smelling moat and emerged slimy with duckweed.\n\nThen she began to climb.\n\nShe peeked in the first window, open to the warm night, perhaps three lengths up off the ground. Here Wistala had her first doubt: the window was barred, though not reinforced with crosspieces. Oh, why hadn't she climbed the tower before!\n\nThrough the bars she could see that this floor of the tower looked to be one big room, with a stairway running up the side and a stout door set into the ceiling\u2014or the next room's floor, depending on how you looked at it. Laundry hung off lines everywhere, and she smelled an odor like boiled cabbage.\n\nThe floor above looked more promising from the window: two beds with drawn-back curtains held sleeping figures. She peered carefully inside until her eye adjusted to the gloom. Both had similar reddish curly hair\u2014not Lada, who according to her portrait had straight hair.\n\nThere was no connecting door between the two levels; the lower's stairs just ran into the upper. She climbed up the outside to the next level. This one had a single bed, with a miniature bed beside that Wistala recognized as a place for hominids to lay their freshly hatched\u2014No, they didn't hatch; they popped out live in considerable pain and confusion, she corrected herself. There were numerous windows on this floor, all ancient and narrow, perhaps for the firing of arrows. The woman sleeping here was round-faced. She and her infant had fallen asleep together, the child attached to her like a suckling pig. Something about the set of her eyes and nose made Wistala discount this one as a possibility.\n\nShe tried to guess if there were two floors above or just one as she climbed.\n\nThe next floor marked the end of the stairs. It was cramped and low, with a short ladder propped up at the wall near another hatch. The windows here were round, with one on each side of the tower, and the glass pivoted on a central column to admit the breeze. Wheels edged with gears and pegs stood in a cobwebbed pile on one side of the room, taking up much of the space.\n\nThere wasn't a bed such as she'd seen at Mossbell or the floors below, just a fabric mass on the floor with bits of straw coming out at the seams. Someone slept there under a wool blanket, with an oily-smelling dip beside the bed upon a pile of books. The sleeping figure had drawn the thin covering up to her nose.\n\nWistala examined the fixture in the window. It would break easily enough; nothing but wooden pegs held it in place. Hooks at either side of the round would help hold it against a wind.\n\nShe guessed there to be nothing but a watch-platform above, though one of Galahall's owners had added a wooden roof. If another one of this Hammar's wards slept up there, it would be quite cold in winter. The girl in the bed was the most likely candidate, as the others had been eliminated.\n\nShe just got her hips through the window, at the cost of a slight scraping sound and a whisper of a creak.\n\nThe figure stirred a little.\n\nWistala took the doll out of its bag and unwrapped it, mindful of the ears at the bottom of the stairs.\n\nWistala came still closer, feeling her way across rough, dry wood. A washbasin bowl with a little water, a bit glass with a number of dried wildflowers in it, a half-finished woven basket, and a few odd and ends of clothing hanging from some pegs were all the room contained.\n\nA foot with the five ridiculous, almost-useless hominid toes stuck out of the blanket. Wistala gave it an experimental lick.\n\nThe figure stirred again.\n\n\"Hsssst,\" said Wistala, as quietly as she could.\n\nA wide green eye opened.\n\n\"Don't be afraid,\" Wistala said in Parl.\n\nThe human figure sat bolt upright even as she scooted up against the wall, drawing the covers up with her and bunching them under her eyes. But there was no question, the eyes, forehead, and hair belonged to Rainfall's granddaughter.\n\nWistala smiled and bowed. \"I bring tidings\u2014\"\n\n\"Aaaaaaaaagh!\" Lada shrieked.\n\n\"You don't\u2014,\" Wistala tried, backing away. She held up the doll.\n\n\"Heeeeeeelp! Monster! Esithephe, your baby!\"\n\nA clunk and a bawling sounded from downstairs. Wistala advanced, tipping the doll right side up and upside down to prove that it was just a bit of craft, but Lada snatched up the waterbasin, and liquid flew.\n\n\"Aiiieeee!\" the girl\u2014no, young woman, Wistala could see the smallish protrusions wherewith mammals suckled their broods\u2014shouted, throwing the basin. Wistala lowered her head, and it crashed into the pile of pegged and geared wheels, sprinkling her with water as it passed.\n\nWistala tried again: \"No! Your name is\u2014\"\n\nA mouthful of pillow cut off that sentence. Lada rammed it home as she fled in a jumble of knees, elbows, and white nightshirt toward the stairs down, still screaming her head off.\n\nThe pillow came out of her mouth with a tear, and feathers flew.\n\nNow screams echoed up from the lower levels.\n\n\"Lada!\" Wistala shouted, spitting feathers.\n\nThe girl screamed as she fled down the stairs.\n\nWistala heard footsteps, shouts from below caught up in a babble of voices and a screaming baby. She considered going after Lada, but a male voice bellowing questions made her turn back to the window.\n\nA heavy tread on the stairs decided her. She squeezed back out the circular window.\n\nSomething gripped at her tail, and she pulled it away hard and climbed up the tower.\n\nUp?\n\nShe checked herself. She'd instinctively headed toward the safety of the sky. If only she could will her wings into appearing.\n\nShe turned around, testing her digits against the rough stones for the climb down. She watched pillow feathers drift, gently turning and rocking as they fell, and realized some of them had stuck in her scales.\n\nA hairy face, pale in the dim moon, looked out the window. The man must have heard her, for he looked up.\n\nShe swung her tail down and poked him back inside with its point. He let out a howl.\n\nI must give them an urgency beyond hunting me, if I'm to escape.\n\nShe gulped and squeezed her fire bladder, spat a thin jet of flame up into the wooden roof above. She looked across the narrow gap between tower and the south-facing leg of Galahall.\n\nAll interior-facing windows were open in the summer air.\n\nShe hurried over to the west side of the tower and, clinging rather precariously, extended her neck and spat. Missed\u2014she'd judged the fall of flame badly.\n\nShouts from the courtyard\u2014she tried again.\n\nThis time the flame passed through the window. Orange light glowed within.\n\nShe looked into the courtyard. Shirtless, barefoot men were emerging from doors while female faces, holding gowns closed at their throats, peered cautiously from the windows. She caught the gleam of a sword blade and a pike point. A spike-haired boy pointed up the tower\u2014at her or the growing flame, she didn't know\u2014and screamed a warning.\n\nWistala saw a faster route down. She moved around to the south side of the tower and jumped to the roof of the east-running building, and from that leaped down the wooden roof of an exposed stable by the entrance. She jumped once more and hit the ground running, with men shouting and giving orders behind and a growing clamor of excited dogs.\n\n\"Horses! To horse!\" the booming voice she'd heard in the tower bellowed.\n\nWistala hurried off into the night. Her muscles began to burn as her dragon-dash gave out. The tree-crowned ridge seemed very far away.\n\nStog had vanished. All that remained of him were some tracks and a little of his feed scattered on the ground.\n\n\"Stog!\" she called, panting. The run had been a nightmare of breathless rushes from hiding spot to hiding spot, with dogs barking and crying behind when the horsemen weren't blowing horns at each other. \"Stog,\" she shouted when she had her wind.\n\nShe snuffled around and found the trace of a scent. He'd gone off in the direction of Galahall. Had he seen the flames\u2014the top of the tower still burned like a beacon\u2014and gone off to give assistance? They'd missed each other in the dark, and no wonder: she'd splashed through every ditch she could find to confuse the pursuit. Or had he become frightened at the hunting horns, even now sounding across the wide lands south of Galahall?\n\nLooking for him would be suicide.\n\nShe looked up the tall ridge and started up. The slow, steady climb suited her short limbs so much better than the run across the fields. By the time she reached the line of trees, she felt almost herself again. Hunger gnawed at her, but she was nothing like starved. She body-slid down the other side, flying down on chest and tail.\n\nThe hunters, if they didn't give up upon reaching the edge of Galahall's grounds, would either have to go round either side of the ridge or lead their horses up a very treacherous climb and then down again. By the time daylight came, she'd be deep in the Thickets.\n\nStog would have to find his own way home.\n\nWill they never give up?\n\nThe question hardly left her mind as she made her best speed through the Thickets, a sort of sore-footed trot. Winded, thirsty, hungry, scratched at nostril and earhole, under-limb and tween-toe by the endless thorns, even her left eye had been poked, and it hurt abominably.\n\nShe plunged into yet another strand of bramble as she heard the clattering noise of the men behind.\n\nThe men signaled each other by rapping pairs of hollow wooden pegs, setting up a clatter that might have been designed to drive her insane, as though the thickets were full of maddened woodpeckers. Her mouth was so dry, nothing but cottony saliva covered her teeth, and all it did was catch dust and dirt kicked up by the horses thundering past her hiding spots.\n\nHer one solace was the thought that she'd probably burned Galahall to the ground. What else could cause the thane to summon every man with a horse and boy who could whack two sticks together to this wild and uncomfortable corner?\n\nWistala listened and then crept up another dry ravine. The soil in this part of the Thickets kicked up a chalky dust, and even the thorn-vines and succulents looked sickly and undersize. Nothing took root at the hilltops, or anywhere the wind could reach. She stayed just below the empty crest of it\u2014no need to create a silhouette for one of the hundreds of pairs of eyes looking for her to see\u2014and took a bit out of a green segmented plant. Its buds were bitter-tasting but juicy enough to at least give the illusion of moisture.\n\nShe could see the twin hills of Mossbell in the distance, green and alluring, but she didn't dare make for them. Who knew what the thane might do to Rainfall if he thought her host had sent her on purposes of possible assassination or proven arson?\n\nInstead she headed for the river, carefully cresting yet another slope. They wouldn't\u2014couldn't get their horses easily into the gorge, and it would be a brave rider who'd swim his horse into the rocks of the fast-flowing river.\n\nThe beaters must have spotted her tracks, for the noise level rose and several came together clack-tchick-clack-clack-tok-clack, no rhythm at all, just a crescendo of sound driving her on.\n\nA man negotiated the precarious rim of the finger of land she had to cross. He bore a horn of metal, a long tube wound about itself like a sleeping snake. Obscenely close-set eyes surveyed the thorny runs from above a scarf wrapped round to keep out the dust. He bore a short spear with a long, sharp head and tapered tail.\n\nHe'd chosen his spot well. She couldn't cross behind him, not without a climb in the open, though a brief one, perhaps exposing her to the noisemakers in the thickets.\n\nBut a good deal of thornbush filled a gentler slope leading up to his vantage. He amused himself by relieving himself into it.\n\nWistala was downwind, and the odor struck her nose like a challenge, the clattering in her ears a rattle of an enemy drake's griff. She crept slowly through the densest brambles, sliding around the clusters of branch with their pitiful clumps of earth held tight by roots, until his shadow practically fell on her through the thorny lattice.\n\nShe took two steps closer, marked the route she'd use in the final dash\u2014\n\nHe saw her approach too late and extended his hand, not the one holding a weapon, but rather to show some kind of talisman.\n\nWistala exploded out of the thorns, touching rock once as she leaped onto the hunter. She struck high, throwing her weight into his chest to knock him off the narrow crest of the hill.\n\nThey tumbled off the hill and down the other side\u2014the direction she needed to go anyway. She dug in with her claws and shut her eyes to keep out the dust. Down\u2014they both broke against a rock, its impact harder on her lighter body but bloodying the unprotected skin on his arm\u2014and she went for his neck.\n\nVertebrate prey were most vulnerable there. If you got a good grip, you opened windpipes and blood vessels, and they couldn't bite or gore you back. Her teeth closed, and she tasted blood and heard a strange high wheeze. The man's hands raked at her face but found a nostril instead of her more vulnerable eye or ear holes.\n\nHe went limp.\n\nShe dropped the crushed neck, the man's eyes dry and empty. She opened his gut with her saa to make sure of him, and his body gave a reactive twitch\u2026 .\n\nThe corpse twitched again as she found his liver.\n\nTearing the oblong organ loose, she raised her head and let it slide down her throat in two big gulps. She sucked blood from the wound, and saw something in his hand shining in the sun. Tarnished gold or brass\u2014either would be welcome. She nibbled it free from the leather thong fixed to it that the man had wrapped about his wrist.\n\nIt was a thin round device of hammered heavy metal, a hominid figure in a circle. Hominids had strange superstitions and believed in invisible forces that attracted or repelled evil or good. Was this some kind of proof against dragons?\n\nShe licked it. No sharp taste of poison, just the thick metal-saliva. Satisfied, she sent it down her gullet to join the liver, where it would gravitate to the pocket of her innards that absorbed metals.\n\nSmelling, listening, she picked her way south.\n\nAll the way across the next flat, the terrified, dead eyes of the man stayed with her. She'd killed a hominid from ambush. Rainfall might call it murder. While hungry, she wasn't starving, and attacking him had been a foolish risk.\n\nThe fact of the matter was, she'd let her temper get the better of her and killed to spite the beaters behind.\n\nShe heard a faint, wailing horn. The beaters had probably come across the body. Two more blasts, some kind of signal?\n\nThe wind out of the southwest whistled as it cut through the thick thornbushes all around her. The gorge must be near; she couldn't see any more hills to the south.\n\nA faint and rising sound of hoofbeats came across the wind. Wistala found a rock and climbed near the top, keeping to the shadow side so light wouldn't reflect off her scales.\n\nRiders! A dozen at least, traveling in pairs, their horses and legs garbed in some sort of leather tenting, perhaps to keep out the thorns, trotted through the brambles, lance-tips sparkling in the sun.\n\nAll moved to cut her off from the south. She heard howling; they had dogs with them. Even if the riding men blundered past, the dogs would smell her out.\n\nThe thane's men no doubt wanted her hide in return for some burned shingles and draperies! From Rainfall's description, Hammar wasn't the sort to leave an account unsettled.\n\nWistala gulped, the blood she'd wetted her throat long since caked over by the dry dust she breathed. Her thoughts felt slow and thick as her blood. The men would probably \u2026\n\nDry!\n\nShe came off the rock, spat one jet of flame into the tangle right, then trotted a few steps and started another fire left.\n\nThe thin branches supporting the thorns caught fire easily, and the wind pushed the flame northwest.\n\nShe'd set up a signal to every beater in sight.\n\nBut the men would keep from downwind if they knew what was good for them.\n\nWistala walked along between her two columns of conflagration, nostrils held low to keep out the smoke. At new thickets, she helped spread the flame with another torf or two.\n\nHorns, more confused signals from beyond the smoke. But most of the noise was well behind her.\n\nNow the fire raged so she couldn't hear anything but its crackling. Her scales reflected the worst of its heat, but she still panted, trying to see through the smoke. A stand of pine, a little above the flat, was burning, and she made for it.\n\nThe flame had already consumed the dropped needles; only the tops of the trees burned now. The tough old pines would be green again next spring, but if she wished to be breathing in a year's time\u2014\n\nWistala took a deep, lung-filling breath from below the smoke layer, picked a gap, and dashed. She felt flames licking at her flanks. The betweens of sii and saa burned in the hot soil, and she instinctively closed her digits, and she was through, coated with nothing but a thick layer of soot.\n\nAnd suddenly she breathed cool, dry air, the inferno behind eating its way northwest under a mountain of smoke. From far to the west, she heard more calls as the hunters searched in smoke and confusion.\n\nWistala got her bearings, noted happily that the sun had fallen almost to the horizon, and moved toward the river.\n\nShe negotiated the gorge and swam downriver to the bridge and the landing where they'd tried to smash the troll. The river refreshed after the heat, ash, and dust.\n\nThe burns between her digits were painful, made more so once she climbed up the rough stairs from the landing when the blisters burst, but she'd learned a valuable lesson that would outlast the pain about her body's resistance to fire. Next time she'd close up her toes, she thought as she passed over Mossbell's road wall.\n\nA dim light glimmered from the stone-flanked skylight to the library. Perhaps he was still up, reading. She smelled horses in the turnaround by the old fountain.\n\nWistala decided that the stable might not be the best place for her to sleep. She climbed up her yew tree and made herself as comfortable as possible in the branches.\n\nExhaustion allowed her to sleep.\n\nShe found Rainfall out the next day, gathering blueberries into a satchel that smelled of strawberries, acorns, hickory nuts, and onions.\n\n\"How went the hunting expedition, Wistala?\" he asked with his back to her. Perhaps he smelled her approach\u2014he had a sensitive nose.\n\n\"I \u2026\" She groped for the right Elvish word. \"I've misspent your trust and lost Stog.\"\n\nHe turned, his countenance a foggy morning. \"I heard a most curious story from one of the thane's riders. Two nights ago, the most astonishing creature crept into Galahall.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014\"\n\n\"According to the eyewitnesses, it was bluish, had two heads on long necks, one at either end, feathers all about the face, and shot flame from its glowing eyes. Half the country is rooming with their sheep as men stand guard with fire buckets. I don't know what to think. Should I be on my guard that a two-headed featherface come to burn down my hall?\"\n\nWistala's mouth opened and then shut again.\n\nRainfall suddenly laughed. \"Rah-ya! I'm sorry, Wistala\u2014I shouldn't torment you. Come inside and have a little soup and what's left of those rabbits. I wish to hear this story.\"\n\nWistala fought the urge to nuzzle his cheek against hers\u2014she could just reach if she stood on her hind legs\u2014and instead turned a quick, happy circle.\n\n\"What?\" he asked as they walked. \"You thought I'd be cross with you? Ever since I dragged you out of the river, there's been excitement. Save for the awful loss of Lessup, and, of course, our Avalanche, I'd say those old tales out of the East about dragons being omens of good fortune have been proved. And don't worry about the mule; Stog will turn up. He's smart enough to find his way home.\"\n\nThey went into the house, and he passed her a platter that held the remains of his stew and grease-fried entrails.\n\nAs she ate, she told the whole story\u2014save for the death of the hunter. She didn't feel a bit sorry for the damages to the thane's Galahall, but relating the loss of Stog made her miserable, as well as her confession that she'd failed to return with his granddaughter.\n\n\"I wish you'd have discussed this adventure with me before you'd set out. I would have saved your claws the burns and wear.\"\n\n\"But it's not right.\"\n\nRainfall poured himself a little more wine and juice squeezings. \"Had you come back with her, I would have taken her in both hands. But then I'd have escorted her straight back to Galahall.\"\n\n\"But you could conceal her, as you did me\u2014\"\n\n\"Tala, how can I make it plain to you? The thane misuses the law, certainly, whether he breaks it in his misuse is not for me to say. But that doesn't relieve me of my obligation to live by it. Laws stand only by common consent; enforcement can do only so much.\"\n\nHe paused and waited until she nodded, then went on: \"The thane at least keeps most of the Hypatian traditions, which are just as important as laws in their way. In other provinces, there are thanes who rule like the despots of old. I've heard of thanes who force their landholders to will their estates over to him, lest they be labeled traitors and executed, then find an excuse to execute anyway once everything is set down in writing. All quite legal on the face of it, but appallingly against the Hypatian tradition. Hammar will die or go into his dotage eventually, and Hypat will appoint a new thane.\"\n\n\"Someone like you should be thane, then. An elf is better than any man.\"\n\n\"Oh, that racial rubbish. Have you been listening to the soldiery? There was a time when Hypatian citizenship was what counted, not the shape of your legs and angle of your shoulders.\"\n\nWistala took a last mouthful of fried entrail. \"So you're content to let those blighters in Galahall rut about your granddaughter, and not see her again?\"\n\n\"What's that? Rut?\"\n\n\"That tower. There were babies in it. Well, a baby.\"\n\nHer host's face writhed. \"How young? Perhaps he's warded a child\u2026 .\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. Still suckling at his youngish mother, anyway.\"\n\nRainfall passed his hand through his hair, dropping a long, thin willowlike leaf or two. \"He wouldn't. Not wards of the thane! Oh, if only I'd been more provident with my gold plate, I could sell it or melt it.\"\n\nA thought struck Wistala. \"The form of the wealth doesn't matter?\"\n\nIt took a moment for her words to register. \"Well, the thane is entitled to assess the value of anything that isn't Hypatian coin. What do you have in mind?\"\n\n\"Another expedition.\"\n\nA moon and a blustery week of storms later\u2014five weeks as the hominids reckoned things\u2014Rainfall and a group of local men and boys stood on one of the wall-crossed hills of Tumbledown, speaking with the local shepherds and farmers.\n\nAnd Stog, incredibly.\n\nStog stood in this distant field with some other working beasts, all muddy, thin, and miserable.\n\nThe expedition had come to fruition easily enough. Wistala, after looking at a map and taking a trip to the nearest hilltop with a good view south of the bridge, decided that the same road Rainfall had in his charge cut through near Tumbledown\u2014or Hesstur, as Rainfall insisted on calling it.\n\n\"One of the eight sister cities from the founding of Hypat,\" Rainfall explained after Wistala described the three hills and wet ground in between. \"It was burned in one of the barbarian wars.\"\n\nA good deal more history followed this, but without being able to see the battles and kings and generals and so on Rainfall spoke of, the names and dates left Wistala's head almost as soon as they entered it. If only hominids could pass mind-pictures down!\n\nRainfall had no difficulty pulling together some men and their sons for the trip. The killing of the troll had given Rainfall something of a local reputation, Wistala guessed, and it even attracted one of the thanedom's low priests. She seemed a sturdy woman, in her black robe and tassled hat, white hair at her temples making the rest of her black hair, cut so evenly at the bottom, it might be mistaken as a helmet, look darker.\n\nWistala had to watch it all from a distance. Her presence had to be kept hidden for her\u2014and Rainfall's\u2014safety.\n\nThey made quite a procession. Thick-shouldered farmers and their thicker-shouldered horses, Jessup with a smart new leather work apron driving his cart loaded with feed for hominid and animal, the low priest with boys in tow, showing them strange roadside mushrooms, flowers, and berries. Rainfall walked at the head, wearing layers of heavy traveling clothes, leather-fringed sandals, a cloak, and even a short, slightly curved sword with a guard at the hilt.\n\nShe traveled ahead of the group on the overnight journey south, moving before dawn and after dusk and sleeping out the day while the others caught up. Now and then she met with Rainfall on the road a little ahead of the party. The journey was uneventful, save for some boys throwing dung-balls from cover as they passed through a muddy village. One clod hit Rainfall in the thigh.\n\n\"Wish I'd seen that,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Boys being boys. Their parents should soap their tongues until they learn civil expression, though,\" Rainfall said. \" 'Elvish maggot.' Right in the heart of the village, too. An old woman bowed and apologized for the insult. Perhaps it was the star.\"\n\nWistala had not seen the golden device before. It had eight short points around the edge and a blue jewel at the center. Some mark of his status as the bridge-keeper and road-warden, she guessed.\n\nSo, led by Rainfall's star, they came to Tumbledown and saw the field with Stog.\n\nThe low priest\u2014her name was Feeney\u2014and Rainfall conducted the negotiations with the locals of Tumbledown. Then both sides withdrew, the newcomers to their tents with a purchased sheep, the shepherds and smallholders to their cottages and ricks and cots.\n\nRainfall wandered the woods until Wistala caught up to him. They sat together on an old wall dividing one part of identical forest from another.\n\n\"I let Mod Feeney do the talking. We will split whatever we find exactly in half with the locals. They claim that the ruins have been explored a dozen times a generation, and that they've been stripped to the last lumik.\"\n\n\"Lumik?\"\n\n\"A bit of art that throws off light when you rub it.\"\n\n\"Then they're doubly wrong. I'll show you one when we enter. I saw Stog in with the other animals.\"\n\n\"What other\u2014? Oh, the farmers and so on?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Wistala said. \"I didn't dare approach. There were horses, and I was afraid they'd scream their heads off.\"\n\n\"You are certain? Many mules look alike.\"\n\n\"Yes. Though he looked thin and dirty.\"\n\n\"I'll try to buy him back tomorrow.\"\n\nThe stupid beast didn't deserve Rainfall's kindness. \"I'll see if I can talk to him during the day tomorrow,\" Wistala said. \"Assuming they don't have him pulling loads of rocks or whatever work these humans do.\"\n\n\"The night is wasting.\"\n\nRainfall never seemed to need sleep, though his face was less animated at night than at other times.\n\nThey walked into Tumbledown. A dog barked in the distance, and they stood close to a wall, but they met no further challenge. Soon they were at the triple broken arches that marked the way down to the rats' underground realm.\n\n\"I smell bats,\" Rainfall said. \"I should hate to get bitten\u2014they carry sickness.\"\n\nRainfall opened his satchel. He fiddled with a brass bowl that smelled of oil. Then he poured some powder that smelled faintly of rotten eggs into a rough stone channel, and drew a piece of wood all splintered at one end across it. The powder and the wood burst into flame. He touched it to the closed top of the bowl, and a flame glowed.\n\n\"All that effort for a bit of fire?\" Wistala asked. \"You should have just asked me.\"\n\n\"I couldn't impose on your great gift for something so mundane as a little light,\" Rainfall said. \"Doesn't a wise dragon keep her fire bladder ready?\"\n\n\"I don't see a battle breaking out between your construction gang and the sheepherders. There'd be plenty left to torch some rats if they swarm.\"\n\n\"Show me the way, my shining friend.\"\n\n\"Fair warning: you'll get dirty.\"\n\nShe led him down. When they reached the passage that had the glow bulb, Wistala showed it to him.\n\n\"It is a lumik,\" Rainfall said, rubbing it so it glowed. \"This alone will pay for feasts all the way back to Mossbell, and buy Stog besides.\" He pried it loose and worked it with a bit of cloth until it shone like a slice of moon brought underground.\n\nThe underground still smelled of bits of worms and rats. Rainfall just squeezed down the dug passage to the sewer. It was drier than Wistala remembered. Rats yeeked at them from the corners as they fled the light.\n\nHad she really been here? Fought a channel-back? The sewers felt like some mind-picture from a distant ancestor.\n\nRainfall followed, scratching marks onto the walls here and there with a piece of soft stone that left white traces. \"I don't have your tunnel sense, my dear.\"\n\nShe led him into the room where she and Yari-Tab had fought the rats and spoken to the old milk-eyed specimen. Rainfall didn't mind the smell or the filth thick on his sandals. He spoke of false walls fallen away as his eyes wandered ever upward, to old writings and chipped drawings running the edge of the chamber's ceiling. He stepped over to an old doorway, rusting hinges still projected out into a space where the wood had long since rotted away. He reached up and marked the lintel with an X.\n\n\"It's down these stairs,\" Wistala said, standing at the gap to a circular passage. Rat eyes glinted in the shadows.\n\n\"There's a high crypt this way\u2014No, I shan't disturb any bodies.\"\n\nWistala wouldn't have cared if he wanted to juggle the skulls of kings. But Rainfall continued: \"Sets of edicts can sometimes be found with a thane's remains, or biographies. Both are fascinating reading.\"\n\nShe caught a whiff of precious metals on the stairs. \"I don't dare go any farther.\"\n\nRainfall's hand dropped to the hilt of his sword. \"Ho! Is there danger?\"\n\n\"Only from me. A dragon's heart can grow fierce at the sight of gold. The last time I came down these steps\u2014it could have ended badly for my friend.\"\n\nHe raised the crystal, and sharp shadows sprang up on the stairs. As he went down, the shadows retreated and advanced as though terrified of the light. His footsteps were so light, she could only just hear them.\n\n\"Rah-ya, Wistala, here's a hoard worthy of a dragon,\" he called up. \"Silver and gold and baser coins.\"\n\n\"Will you be able to find it again?\"\n\n\"I'm sure of it. I return. Close your eyes, for I've a handful of gold.\"\n\nShe shut her nostrils, too. Her mouth went wet, and her stomach growled at the faint smell.\n\nRainfall spoke in her ear. \"Now open your mouth.\"\n\nShe complied, and felt a hard fall on her tongue.\n\nRainfall spoke: \"Just a mouthful of the best silver I could find.\"\n\nThe coins slipped easily down her throat, greased by the thick saliva the smell of metals brought to her mouth.\n\n\"But you need the coin,\" she objected. (Once the coins were safe in her stomach!)\n\n\"I matched need against deserve, and deserve won. I have some proofs of the money resting there still in my bag.\" He pulled on the strap of his satchel so the coins within jingled.\n\nWistala napped out the morning light under a cool slab in a quiet corner of Tumbledown, concealed by a cascade of runners dropped by the ferns clinging above. She'd gone to the pasture to look for Stog, but only a mare and her colt remained. The men must have put him to work.\n\nShe felt a soft nuzzle under her chin. \"Tchatlassat?\" came a familiar purr.\n\nWistala came wide awake in a flash. \"Yari-Tab?\"\n\nShe'd grown wide-bodied feasting on rats, or had a bellyful of young, perhaps. \"I smelled you as I was finishing my night's prowl and followed the trail. Such doings in the Tumbledown. Digging by my entrance to the Deep Run. What's the hunt?\"\n\nWistala had to think for a moment\u2014she was so used to speaking in Elvish. \"Hominids come for the gold.\"\n\n\"Will there be fighting? The rats would like that.\"\n\n\"No, my host has arranged a diversion.\"\n\n\"Serves them right, savage beasts. But when mice can't be found\u2014\"\n\nWistala raised her head and stretched. \"Sister! I've a wonderful idea!\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Yari-Tab said, settling down in the warm spot left by her throat. \"A good nap till noontime. Then perhaps a sunbath.\"\n\n\"No. I know of a catless barn that has the mice running wild. Come along to it, and I can promise you all the hunting you like. Perhaps a little goat milk now and then. The owner is a kindly sort.\"\n\nYari-Tab fixed eyes on her. \"Warm and dry?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Oh, tchatlassat! I would like that.\"\n\n\"You deserve it. I'll explain things to Rainfall. Once he knows that you're the spring from where this new stream of wealth flows, he'll take you in. I'm sure of it.\"\n\nWith Yari-Tab running scout, Wistala made it to a hillside downwind from the sheep and watched events beneath the triple arch from an overhanging slab. Shirtless men brought the coin out in small buckets, to be laid on a clean white sheet spread out on the ground in front of the hole that had been widened. Feeney and another man dressed in similar robes and tassled hat passed the coins back and forth before moving them to a chest\u2014in the case of the visitors\u2014or a low trough.\n\nStog made an appearance, dragging a sledge piled with firewood. The man leading the mule struck him about the flanks to drive him on, and Wistala felt her fire bladder pulse. Poor Stog\u2014he was an extraordinarily strong beast.\n\nYari-Tab grew bored with events and fell asleep in the sun.\n\nBy evening they'd brought out the last of the small hoard of coins. Rainfall emerged from the tunnel dirtier than ever, holding what looked like a platter of considerable weight wrapped in a piece of leather. He showed it to the pair of priests.\n\nWistala couldn't see much from her vantage. It looked like a piece of pinkish stone, but the low priests both touched it as they spoke. After they nodded, Rainfall took it away to Jessup's wagon, spoke to him, and placed it on the high driving seat.\n\nAs the sun set, the gathered hominids set up a feast. A bonfire was lighted with the pile of wood Stog dragged. Some of the shepherds took out pipes and drums and small hand harps as others roasted a pig.\n\n\"That's a mouthwatering smell,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Aye, but I must hunt,\" Yari-Tab said. \"I've kittens growing fast within, and they're hungry, too.\"\n\nWistala marked Rainfall wandering the opposite hill outside the bonfire light, taking a small bite now and then from a joint of the remaining mutton from last night's meal. He probably meant to find her and offer it. \"Wait. I might return with something tastier than a sewer rat.\"\n\nThe moonlight-washed ruins frowned down on the figures moving about the bonfire, as though waiting for the merrymakers to disperse so they could return to their gradual collapse.\n\nWistala saw Rainfall, smelled the mutton, and rattled her griff against her scales to attract his attention.\n\nRainfall turned and opened his mouth to speak, but a thundering sound rolled through the night. Hoofbeats!\n\nTwo lines of riders crested the southernmost hill and rode down toward the bonfire.\n\nWistala counted seven \u2026 eight. One carried a high standard, a banner suspended from a crossbar the length of an ax-handle. Wistala's night-sharp eyes distinguished a thin-legged, long-necked bird standing out white on the material of the standard.\n\n\"Dis!\" Rainfall said. \"Bandits, you think? Go and keep hidden, Wistala. Oh, there can't be fighting!\"\n\nHe tossed the mutton shank in her direction and ran toward the bonfire, his hair making a sound like leaves hitting a wall on a windy night.\n\nWistala wouldn't leave the mutton to prowling rats and dogs. She returned it to Yari-Tab at the angled overhang.\n\nYari-Tab sniffed the greasy, ragged joint. \"Tchatlassat, you're a wonder!\"\n\n\"Please stay here,\" Wistala said, an eye toward the center of the three hills. \"There's a new group arrived in Tumbledown. I don't like the look of it.\"\n\nWistala circled around through the ruins and found all a-tumult. Shepherd boys guided their flocks off the grassy hills, dogs barked everywhere, and around the bonfire, the celebrants had divided into two huddled groups.\n\nAt the edge of the fire, the men stood their horses, the banner in the center and another man, rather shorter but above the rest thanks to the size of his horse, speaking with Rainfall.\n\nThe riders had thrown back their cloaks to reveal metal plates fixed about their chests, hands on sword hilts, save for the tall one with the bird standard. She let the wind carry the words, along with the aroma of roast pig, humans, and the horses, to her.\n\n\"I'm thane here, elf. All your legalisms and tricky wordplay won't change that.\"\n\n\"You claim to be thane here, Vog. The maps say differently. The ruins of Hesstur belong to the Directory. You interfere with one of its agents.\"\n\nVog, the short man on the tall horse, laughed. He snapped his fingers in the air. \"That's for the Directory. All sound and no presence. Those doddards couldn't muster an Imperial Host if Hypat itself had barbarians climbing the First Walls.\"\n\n\"They could if their thanes attended to their duties instead of wine and hunts.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to insult me?\" Vog sputtered.\n\nWistala crept around toward the newcomers' horses.\n\n\"I beg your pardon for not making myself understood. If I meant to insult you, I would point out that your roads are so overgrown that a wagon can hardly pass without being tangled in branches, that there are a dozen washouts to a vesk at least, or that I cannot distinguish the difference between a pig-chasing dog's collar and your mens' livery, or that you act and speak in the manner of a barbarian warlord rather than a Hypatian Thane, who would dismount to address a fellow citizen.\"\n\nVog put his hand on his sword hilt. \"How dare you\u2014\"\n\n\"How dare you, sir,\" Rainfall roared. Wistala wouldn't have thought him capable of making such a sound; she froze in her tracks where she crept behind the horses. \"How dare you touch your sword when addressing a Knight of the Directory, a Temple Star, and a former Judge Imperial.\"\n\nVog's mount danced backwards from Rainfall's fury, unsettling the other horses. Wistala heard a rattle, saw one of the men take a handle with a chain leading back to some metal objects that looked like small metal balls set with dragon teeth.\n\nWhen Vog had his mount under control again, he leaned forward. \"I dare because old titles don't frighten me any more than old moss-backed elves. You're badly in need of a hiding, prissfall. I've a mind to give you one.\"\n\n\"Your having a mind to do anything beyond drawing breath comes as a shock to me,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Insult! Bind him!\" Vog shouted.\n\nWistala, at last upwind of the horses, rattled her griff as loudly as she could and loosed her urine. Once before, in her journey with Auron, she'd used her urine to scare off a prowling bear. This time the trick worked to spectacular effect. The horses jumped and plunged as though ghost-ridden. Four riders fell, Vog jumped off, and the rest held on to mane and rein for life and limb as their mounts bolted.\n\nThe men of the wading-bird standard must have blamed Rainfall for the madness of their horses. They picked themselves up and, following Vog's example, drew their swords, or swung the whirling metal ball in the case of the man with the chain weapon. It made a sound as it cut the air that reminded Wistala of eagle cries.\n\nThe two camps scattered, plucking up their children in the case of the shepherds, while the visitors retreated to Jessup's wagon and Mod Feeney.\n\nRainfall sniffed the air and chuckled. \"Put away your weapons, Vog. A pile of old coins isn't worth blood being spilled.\"\n\nVog snorted. \"See, men of Lossend! Just like that Praskallian said: 'Elvish insolence ends at the sight of steel.'\"\n\n\"Sight of steel,\" repeated the man with the whirling chain.\n\nVog and his men took a step closer. \"Stop!\" Mod Feeney shouted. \"This is hallowed ground, of temples old and proud. The gods weep.\"\n\nRainfall drew his thin saber with one hand, detatched his cloak, and whipped it about his arm. \"Vog! Remember yourself!\"\n\n\"You've breathed your last insult, elf,\" Vog said. \"At him, now.\"\n\nIn later years, Wistala only remembered Rainfall's lower limbs. He fought as though performing one of the little jigs he did when happy, as on the morning his hair began to grow back in. The power of blocks and strikes came out of his legs and hips, not his arm, extended as stiffly as though it and the blade made one long weapon.\n\nIn a flash, Rainfall punched a hole through Vog's ear. He sidestepped, knelt, and sent his next thrust into the kneecap of the man with the whirling chain. As the second man fell to the side of his injured limb, Rainfall got out of the way of the whirling balls, which wrapped around the man's helm and went home all about the head and neck.\n\nHe fell and did not move again.\n\nRainfall threw his cloak-wrapped arm around the sword of the next man coming in\u2014Wistala heard a krak! and as Rainfall stepped away, the sword fell and the man clutched his injured limb.\n\nRainfall rewrapped his cloak about his arm as he put his sword-point before the final pair.\n\nThe last two stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they advanced on Rainfall, swords held in both hands in front of them, each urging the other to close and occupy the blood-tipped point while the second finished the job.\n\nFinally one worked up the nerve to raise the sword above his head. With a brave cry he came forward, struck a blow that cleaved the figure before him\u2014\n\nBut the figure was Rainfall's cloak, falling to the ground anyway. Rainfall's sword penetrated the thick muscle at the attacker's backside. The second man, seeing his lone ally hop about cursing, thought it best to drop his sword and run.\n\nVog rejoined the fight with a cry, the side of his head red with blood.\n\nRainfall parried, parried, ducked out of the way, parried again. Wistala heard the pants of both opponents, but Vog's was the more labored.\n\nRainfall spoke next: \"Blood has washed away whatever quarrels, old and new, we've had. Let us cry 'settled' and remember the example of those who built Hesstur's walls and columns.\"\n\nHooves sounded from the darkness, and two of Vog's men trotted up, one with the bird-standard muddied. The thane looked around at his wounded, grunting men.\n\n\"I've been a fool,\" Vog said. \"I'll beg your pardon and bury the sword-point.\" He plunged his weapon into the dirt.\n\nThe riders relaxed atop their horses.\n\nRainfall nodded and turned. \"Mod Feeney, let's look to the injured.\" He wiped his sword on his cloak and resheathed it.\n\nWistala didn't like the look of the man Vog, the way he turned to his side and glanced around. So when he sprang forward, a dagger aimed at Rainfall's back, she was already in motion.\n\nJust before the blade went home, Rainfall twisted\u2014too late. The dagger still plunged in.\n\nWistala's dragon-dash had carried her only a third of the way\u2014\n\nRainfall let out the softest of tired sighs like a man hanging up his hat at the end of a long day. He fell to the earth as Feeney screamed, perhaps at the infamy, or perhaps at the sight of a drakka shooting across the ruins like an arrow.\n\nVog twirled his dagger. \"You forget, star-polisher, that victory's all that matters in the end. And tonight the victory's\u2014\"\n\nAs victory was so important to him, Wistala felt it only right that it should be the last intelligible word to pass his lips. Her spring cut off the rest.\n\nTerror took the horses of the mounted men yet again.\n\nShe landed hard atop Vog's back, sii and saa extended and digging. Vog squeaked, rabbitlike, as she opened him up under the rib cage. She took out a mouthful of neck to be sure of him.\n\nShe hurried to Rainfall's side. \"Oh, Fa\u2014Rainfall. Speak!\"\n\nHis eyes still lived, anyway. They fixed on her. \"Dragon-daughter.\"\n\nFootsteps. Mod Feeny rushed forward, a pickax held high.\n\n\"I'm helping him, you fool,\" Wistala said in her best Parl.\n\nShe pulled up, still with the point raised, and Wistala made ready to jump out of the way.\n\nBut here was Jessup, chasing her down. He put a hand on Feeney's. \"Hold. She's friendly.\"\n\nRainfall managed to raise his hand. \"I still breathe,\" he whispered.\n\n\"We need to leave,\" Wistala said. \"Get him on the cart. Don't forget the coin.\" To Jessup: \"I'll meet you back at Mossbell. If there's a hunt, I'll confuse them.\" A strange clarity had seized her; she had no idea where the words came from, but they flowed steadily. \"Gather those horses and that mule there so more may ride. And weapons, that you might overawe any in the village. Vog's a blackheart and deserves to lose all.\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving the injured lying in the mud,\" Feeney said.\n\n\"Then stay and see how your kindness is rewarded.\"\n\nNext Stog was there, the bonfire revealing the mud on his sides and the filth about his hooves, a broken rope dangling. \"Wistala. Strange fortune brings us together again. Forgive\u2014\"\n\nFeeney and Jessup just stared in wonder at the mule, nickering and tossing his head at the drakka.\n\n\"No time for words, Stog. Do you wish to return to Mossbell?\"\n\n\"Is clover sweet? Of course.\"\n\n\"Then you can do me a favor, and bear a burden back.\"\n\n\"I'll carry the master to the icy tundra if I must, and stomp any\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Wistala said. \"He's riding in the cart. I want you to carry a cat.\"\n\nStog ended up carrying two cats, Yari-Tab and a night-black female named Jalu-Coke, who had a litter of rambunctious kittens.\n\n\"She's a good friend and a stalking good huntress,\" Yari-Tab said. \"She hears like a bat. Speaking of which, I've seen her leap and bring one down\u2014\"\n\n\"Fascinating,\" Wistala said, forestalling more anecdotes. Once cats got talking about themselves, they'd go on about whisker length or tail-balancing until the sun came up, and she didn't have that kind of time. Or Rainfall didn't.\n\nJessup fixed a thick knit blanket and a bread box on Stog's back. The cats and kittens rode easily enough.\n\nRainfall, his shirt bound about his waist, rested in the back of the cart, gripping his leather-wrapped treasures to his chest. He begged them to leave the shepherds' share of coin.\n\nMod Feeney was the last to leave the ruins. She bandaged the foemen and spoke many words about how lucky they were to come away with only two dead, and any pursuit would just call up another vengeful fury of red tooth and claw, for the treasure was cursed and only she held the ward-key. Then she hurried down the road after the receding creak of the wagon-wheel.\n\nWistala watched it all from the ruin-haunted hillside nearest the road. The wounded were helped off to the hovels of the shepherds, leaving the bodies of the two slain men to the rats.\n\nThe old milk-eyed rat's prophecy had come true.\n\nVog's men made a pursuit of it that night after all. As Wistala trotted up the side of the road, she heard them a long way off, a faint but growing sound of hooves. If they'd walked or trotted their mounts, they probably would have caught up to the plodding cart anyway, but perhaps the sight of two bodies, one belonging to their thane, had inflamed them into recklessness. Besides, they were armed and arrayed, and their foes humble.\n\nAs to the stories of a scaled beast, confused accounts by injured men and shepherd boys watching from afar might make a freak encounter with a channel-back more than it seemed, and as for the warning of the priestess, trumped-up midwives are always making dire predictions.\n\nHow the coin figured into their reckoning of risks, vengeance, and rewards Wistala could guess.\n\nShe had to delay them. But how?\n\nImprovise, Mother's voice said to her. She couldn't outfight the men, or outrun the horses. Horses \u2026\n\nRainfall was right about one thing: the road here was in terrible shape. On the north side of the river, it was trim, dry, and even. Here it was sunken, rutted, and holed, with either side of the verge thick with plants.\n\nRainfall was right about the washes\u2014a veritable stream cut through the road a little ahead. It had eroded until it was as deep as her neck, almost as treacherous as a troll trap.\n\nSlowing up the men and slowing up their horses were one and the same. Would a troll trap do that?\n\nWistala went to the wash and placed branches in a grid. Next she tore up twigs and leaves and covered the wash as best as she could. She felt bad for the poor heedless brutes\u2014and the four-legged beasts under them\u2014but they would bring battle.\n\nThere was a chance that the men would just leap their horses across the wash. But with a long chase behind and possibly ahead \u2026\n\nWistala concealed herself a little behind the trap, by the side of the road in the thick undergrowth, listening to the growing noise and wondering how many riders this thane might have seeking vengeance.\n\nShe should have made it deeper. She cleaned the moss off a flat stone and sharpened her claws against it as she tried to count the growing hoofbeats.\n\nAt last they came, emerging as a solid mass out of the night, filling the tree-circled road like a rush of dirty water coming down a drainspout. Perhaps six or eight. No, ten, counting a last few with that bird-banner at the back. Too many for her to fight, then.\n\nThe men urged lather-soaked horses on with bits of rope or sword hilt. They passed her in a solid wall of hair, leather, steel, and thunder.\n\nThen they hit her trap.\n\nA horse went flat on its face, throwing its rider. The next behind was agile enough to leap out of the way, but the third beast skidded on its hooves as it tried to stop, and went into the wash sideways. Another behind jumped into the woods, dismounting its rider on a branch, and yet another rider went over his horse's head as it skidded to a stop.\n\nThe banner hung almost above her, where the back three had stopped in safety to laugh at the chaos ahead.\n\nWistala hated that stitched-up bird. She aimed and spat a thin stream of fire up into it. It burst into flames immediately, and in the subsequent alarm, she quietly backed down the road to cross ahead.\n\n\"Elvish magic!\" a man shouted, stomping on the flames.\n\nWistala's nostrils flared. Superstitious hominids. Imagine my tricks taken for spellcraft! She stifled a self-satisfied prrum.\n\n\"That old leaf-head is a sorcerer!\" another agreed.\n\n\"Our horses have grown treacherous. He whispers to them on the wind, I'll set my hand on it!\"\n\nWistala slunk across the road once all eyes turned to the ring of men in argument.\n\nThe second rider, the one whose mount managed to dodge the first fall, stayed on his horse. He wore an odd double cloak, one hanging from each shoulder.\n\n\"Someone help Plov,\" he said. \"How many are hurt?\"\n\n\"Two cannot ride,\" a gruff voice from the group said.\n\nMore mumbling. \"And three more will not,\" a shriller voice added. \"That elf isn't the only one stabbed from behind by Vog. His landsmen have felt their purse strings cut more than once. Gold is not enough of a lure for us to face sorcery to get it back.\"\n\n\"That leaves four to ride with me!\" the two-cloak man said. \"Hurry, before they're back to the bridge. The cowardly can tend to the injured horses, as that's all they're fit for.\"\n\n\"A man who promises murder to a priestess on the Old Road at night should be careful about that word,\" the gruff voice said. \"You're down to three, Vorl; I ride no farther with you.\"\n\n\"More gold for us, then. Take up the banner!\"\n\nWistala was having a hard time picking out the words as the argument continued. She found an oak with heavy branches stretching above the road and swarmed up it. She tested how far her tail could drop. Then she searched the underbranches and cracked off a drooping limb almost bereft of leaves. She tested her tail's grip on it.\n\nThe hoofbeats came again, and she just had time to press her belly to the limb overhanging the road, watching the riders through the gaps in the leaves. They came on this time at something more than a trot and less than a gallop, the two-cloaked rider the others called Vorl at the lead.\n\nThe third man in line held what was left of the scorched bird-banner.\n\n\"Let's have a song, men,\" Vorl shouted. \"Some airs of wine and women, and all the diversions that gold may buy!\"\n\n\"How about\u2014?\" the last man said, but screamed when he saw the branch swing down from above, striking the rider with the banner full in the face.\n\nWistala felt the impact run up her tail with some satisfaction.\n\nThe banner bearer flipped backwards across his horse's rump, his heels high and his cloak fluttering. He hit hard and the horse behind jumped to avoid hitting him.\n\nWistala flattened herself into the branch, barely daring to peep at events with one eye.\n\nAll the horses snorted and danced, probably smelling Wistala above.\n\n\"What now?\" Vorl rasped.\n\n\"The tree hit him,\" the fourth man shouted, getting his horse out from under the oak. \"A limb full of twigs reached down and struck Gleshick full in the face. It was the tree!\"\n\n\"Vorl,\" the other rider said, searching the dark overhang of branches. \"Perhaps it's time to leave reins and take up bedcups.\"\n\n\"My horse cannot be controlled!\" the last in line said, spurring his mount away. The beast galloped southward, its rider's hindquarters lifted high as he hung on. \"An evil magic drives it! Good luck!\"\n\n\"Brothel spawn!\" Vorl shouted at the receding figure. \"Come.\n\nWe're a short way from House Gamkley. He'll remember the thane and mount his household.\"\n\n\"What about Gleshick?\"\n\n\"A bloody nose and a night on the gravel will teach him not to sleep in the saddle. Let's hurry! Perhaps we can catch up to that fool and talk some sense into him.\"\n\nThey galloped off south, and the empty-saddled horse moved to follow them in a halfhearted manner. Wistala dropped from the tree onto its back.\n\nShe clung as best as she could, digging her claws into the mane as the men did their fingers.\n\nThe horse bucked and screamed. Wistala hung on with all four sets of claws.\n\n\"I'm not here to hurt you,\" Wistala said. \"Bear me but short run the other way, and I'll release you.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Otherwise you'll not live another minute,\" Wistala said. \"I haven't had horse since I was a hatchling, and your quivering makes me long for the taste.\"\n\nThe horse tore off up the road north. They hurried through the village where Rainfall had been abused and were out of it again before any but the barking dogs woke.\n\nAs their racket faded behind and they reentered the woods, the horse tried to knock Wistala off its back by passing under branches, a difficult proposition as she could flatten herself on the horse's back better than any man and still keep her grip. Wistala struck its rump with her tail. \"Keep to the center.\"\n\n\"Pity! Exhausted\u2014\"\n\nThey left the thicker woods and came to open, rocky ground that smelled of sheep and yellow late-summer wildflowers. Wistala saw distant shepherd fires to both sides of the road. Quartz veins in the protruding rocks caught the moonlight. The river ridge broke the horizon in the distance, notched where the road cut through it. She knew that notch. The river ran just beyond.\n\n\"Up this far rise, and you'll be done,\" Wistala said.\n\nThe horse quickened his step but breathed more heavily than ever, snorting and gasping as though each labored breath might be his last. Wistala made out the wagon cresting the notch.\n\n\"Well enough,\" Wistala said, hopping off. \"Go where you like, but on the other side of the river\u2014\"\n\nThe horse tore off down the road, away from the fearful dragon-smell.\n\n\"Stupid brute,\" Wistala muttered. Ah well, of such mentalities meals are made. She trotted at her best pace after the wagon. As the sky grew pink and then orange, she breached the rise.\n\nShe couldn't help but think that the notch would make another fine ambush site. Its steep sides meant that with a little work they could block the bend ahead, and she could rain fire upon anyone at their heels\u2026 .\n\nAnd here was the wagon. She scrambled up the ridge\u2014her hearts beat fast and hard at the sight of the river and the bridge\u2014then got ahead of it.\n\nShe counted heads. Each face was drawn and exhausted from the long flight. One was missing: that priestess, Mod Feeney. Had she gone off the road?\n\n\"Jessup!\" she called when they came within the sound of her voice. \"Jessup! Does Rainfall still live?\"\n\n\"The avenger calls!\" Jessup said.\n\nWhat has that man been telling the others? He halted the wagon and set the brake.\n\n\"Rainfall asks for you,\" Jessup shouted. \"He begs you to join him.\"\n\nWistala came forward.\n\n\"That's a dragon?\" one of the men said. \"I've yearling pigs that weigh more.\"\n\nThe horses didn't like her smell, and only Stog stood quietly next to the wagon, cat-filled breadbox on his back as the other brutes stamped and danced.\n\nWistala jumped into the wagon, and some of the men gasped at the quick move.\n\nRainfall's skin had darkened, like fresh game-meat exposed to air. He sat propped up on a sort of cushion of bags of horse feed. A piece of marbled stonecraft, with letters deeply cut and coated with time-tarnished metal, sat at his side. He rubbed it absently as a man might pet a dog while conversing.\n\n\"Wistala, daughter,\" Rainfall said. \"You are here.\"\n\n\"And glad to see you still alive.\"\n\n\"Jessup, drive on,\" he said with some energy. \"The sooner we're through Mossbell's gates\u2014\" He winced at some inner pain as the wagon lurched into motion.\n\n\"How is it?\" Wistala asked. Oh, the inadequacy of words, even tuneful Elvish! If he were a dragon, she could let him feel her concern. Let him know \u2026\n\n\"I can't move my legs, Wistala. The pain isn't bad at all\u2014if anything I'm cloudheaded. But such wounds \u2026 if I should succumb, you must bring Lada to Mossbell, look out for her until she is of age to run the place. I've told Mod Feeney, and I've told Jessup\u2014\" He sank back into the cushions again.\n\n\"What happened to that priestess?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"She rode ahead,\" Jessup said from his seat. \"Hammar has a healer more skilled than she.\"\n\nIt would be hard to say who heard the pursuing hooves first, the horses or Wistala. Both startled.\n\n\"Jessup, try to get a little more out of the horses,\" Rainfall said. \"Whip them if you must.\"\n\nHe turned his gaze on the drakka. \"Wistala, if they catch up to the wagon, jump on Stog and take that bag of gold to Mod Feeney. She'll see that a judge and a high priest come before the thane and restore Lada to her home.\"\n\nAs dawn came up, some of the men began to run toward the bridge. Home stood just on the other side of the canyon. A more clear-headed one jumped on the lead wagon horse and urged it on.\n\nAs they came down the road\u2014the incline helped speed the wagon\u2014Wistala saw the first rider appear behind. Others, ten or eleven in all, came down in a long straggling line. She saw no sign of the bird-banner.\n\nShe looked ahead. A group of people stood on the bridge. She recognized Mod Feeney by her odd hat.\n\nBehind, Vorl drew his sword and waved it forward, calling to his men.\n\nRainfall looked at the coming riders, moving at a pace to catch the wagon before it even crossed the bridge.\n\n\"Wistala, on Stog, now!\" he gasped.\n\n\"No. Wait,\" Wistala said, seeing the group ahead. What sort of warriors had Mod Feeney gathered at the thane's borders? They seemed dreadfully undersized.\n\nThe wagon rattled past Feeney's gathering, the horses' hooves thundering on the wooden planks that bridged the central arch in the ancient masonry. The apron- and tunic-clad assortment were mostly women and children. Wistala guessed them to be families of those in Rainfall's ill-fated expedition, from the way they waved and called to each other.\n\nJessup halted the column well across the bridge.\n\nThe men dismounted and embraced their wives and children. Many of the latter shrieked as they circled the cart with streamers tied to sticks. Curly-tailed dogs barked, adding to the happy chaos.\n\nWistala peeped at it all through gaps in the wagon-boards. Some of the dogs barked at her.\n\n\"For the last time, Wistala, take Stog and go!\" Rainfall said. \"Look, Vog's armsmen come.\"\n\n\"Your Feeney's building a wall to stop them,\" Wistala said, watching the activity behind.\n\nRainfall lifted himself a little higher. \"What's this?\"\n\nA strange sort of barrier was stretched across the bridge, mostly the women and children holding hands. Their men ran to their families, and Mod Feeney pointed them into place.\n\n\"Don't let go of each other. Even if they ride straight for you,\" Mod Feeney said over the clatter of the approaching hooves.\n\nThe riders slowed their horses, pulled up.\n\n\"What's this supposed to be,\" Vorl snarled.\n\n\"You'll do no murder in our thanedom,\" Mod Feeney shouted back.\n\n\"Then we'll retrieve that elf and hang him from thane Vog's high lintel,\" Vorl said. \"He stabbed my lord in the back.\"\n\n\"I was there\u2014it was Vog who did the backstabbing,\" Mod Feeney said.\n\n\"Ha! Out of my way, or we'll ride you down,\" Vorl said. \"Stirrup to stirrup now, my men.\"\n\n\"Is it come to this?\" Mod Feeney said back, her voice a little more high-pitched. \"One Hypatian Thanedom riding down the children of another? High honors to carry home, the blood of babes on your horse's hooves.\"\n\n\"Enough, Vorl,\" said the compatriot Wistala recognized from her oak-limb perch above the road. \"Buy your way into the thane's hall with different coin.\"\n\n\"And Thane Vog not cold yet!\" Vorl said. \"How dare you\u2014\"\n\n\"How dare you lie to the men of House Gamkley. Beware, men. He lied to you about Vog's death. He died a scoundrel. I should have spoken then, but I've been a fool. A fool drawn by promises and unearthed gold.\"\n\nVorl brought his horse around, pointed it straight at Mod Feeney. His heels went out, and his spurs turned inward.\n\nWistala nerved herself to jump from the wagon. If Vorl rode through the line of people, she'd turn him into a pyre of burning cloak and horsehair. Nothing would reach the wagon but the stench of charred flesh\u2014\n\nThe man who at last spoke the truth to Vorl's company rode up and seized his horse by the throat latch. \"Enough, Vorl. Remember the battles of our boyhood. Thanedom against thanedom at Ciril and Starkhollow. Would you see that repeated? Hammar has the friendship of barbarians and more besides, and he's rich enough to hire mercenaries. Let us put away sword, bury Vog, and take counsel.\"\n\n\"Elvish bewitchment, taking the heart out of you!\" Vorl shouted, turning his horse south. \"You're all under it! I'll call none of you my friends again.\"\n\nThe others gave short head-bows to Mod Feeney and turned for the south end of the bridge.\n\nThe man who had grabbed Vorl's horse looked at the linked-arm assembly and smiled. \"My compliments on your battlements, Mod,\" he said. He rode off.\n\nMod Feeney sank to her knees. \"I should have turned to candle-selling and book-copying long ago,\" she sighed.\n\n\"I'll see her a high priestess if it's my last act,\" Rainfall said, falling back into his feedsack chair. A long brown leaf dropped from his hair. \"Jessup,\" he called. \"Take me to Mossbell, that I might die clean in my bed.\"\n\nRainfall did not die.\n\nAs he recovered from the blood loss, it became clear to all that he would never walk again, barring some kind of miraculous healing. At first Wistala wondered if it was best that he had lived beyond his wounding (though she later looked back on that sentiment with shame). He could not walk, and he made a rather pitiable sight being hauled around like an arrowed deer over the shoulders of Forstrel, Jessup's nephew.\n\nThe only time he moved as she remembered him was upon Stog, for he rode the mule about Mossbell's lands, offering advice\u2014that's how it sounded to Wistala. He was far too polite to issue anything that sounded like an order to the new tenants. And at table, he presided from his chair with his former charm.\n\nTo help him in the house and on the grounds, the Widow Lessup and her whole family moved into Mossbell. With Rainfall unable to so much as work the handle of his well-pump, he needed a good deal of assistance.\n\nWistala helped him up and down stairs. She regularly wore her game harness, and Rainfall sat atop her back gripping it as she negotiated the tight, winding stairs of Mossbell.\n\n\"I should flood the place and pole about, as they do in Wetside,\" Rainfall said. She'd heard stories of its famous water gardens before.\n\nMossbell's old ferry-call rang thrice for dinner, forestalling another tale of spiced shrimp and tuna. The Jessup and Lessup clans trooped in from the fields in answer.\n\nYari-Tab had her litter of kittens in an old laundry basket upstairs, and Jalu-Coke followed with a fresh litter of her own in the barn. Thanks to Mossbell's odd hole-and-corner architecture and rich gardens, the kittens had no end of places to explore, and the older cats feasted upon the mouse and rat population. The inside cats took to following the Widow Lessup about, for she was constantly moving the remaining pieces of furniture and ordering her daughters and sons to clean, polish, and organize, and the curious kittens had learned that explosions of startled insects or mice could result every time a wardrobe was pulled out.\n\n\"A hundred years of dust in this house, if it's a day,\" the widow said. \"Len-boy, fetch fresh rags from the washroom and tell your sister she's falling behind on the laundry again!\"\n\nRainfall could only spread his hands and apologize when the widow found a pile of ancient crockery under a chair in the morning-room, or spider-sacs thick as peas in a pod under his bed, until Wistala wondered who was truly the master of Mossbell now.\n\n\"Carpentry and cooking are the only indoor work I've ever been able to manage,\" he said, after another astonished outburst when she awoke a family of raccoons napping out the day in the upstairs linen armoire.\n\nWistala had become something of a public figure on the estate. The Lessup boys brought their friends, and they'd watch her napping in the sun, not knowing that dragons often cracked an eye as they slept, nerving themselves for an approach. Eventually they'd come up to her in tight little groups of two or three, and one would reach out his grubby hand and run a fingernail across her scales. She'd lift her fringe and drop her griff and bring round her head with a piping dragon cry, and they'd run away shrieking as though expecting to be roasted.\n\nLittle girls clapped their hands over their eyes when they first saw her, but once they got over their initial shyness stepped across the line into overfamiliarity, even outrage, for they liked nothing better than to set wildflowers in her scales and fringe until she looked as though she was sprouting like a young elf.\n\n\"That's women for you,\" Rainfall said, plucking a red blossom from the fold in her skin where she tucked up her griff. \"Always improving on nature.\"\n\nAnd then it was time for Rainfall's granddaughter to return.\n\nBecause of the elf's wounds, the high judge attended Rainfall personally. He came with a dozen attendants and counted out the coin Rainfall owed in back taxes, then sealed Rainfall's petition to have his granddaughter restored to him with a great deal of melted wax and ribbon. Wistala thought the high judge an odd-looking fellow made mostly of wrinkles and sags, with a dismal attire all of black deep as cave-dark, though it made the polished gold star on his collar flap and the golden tips of his boots look all the brighter.\n\nThe judge and his men ate vast meals before they left, leaving the Widow Lessup clucking that the whole household would be eating roots and apples for the next week.\n\nThe next day music woke her.\n\nShe stretched and followed the lilting tune until she found Rainfall in the music room playing his bell-pipe. This time she couldn't dance with him, but she could chase her tail and caper until Widow Lessup stormed in with shrieks about what Wistala's claws were doing to the polished floors.\n\n\"I admire your good humor,\" Wistala said as she left. \"You look fully recovered.\"\n\n\"Fully?\"\n\n\"Your eyes sparkle, and your hair is thickly leaved. Such colors!\" The willow-leaf locks in his hair had gone red and gold and orange.\n\n\"I am happy. I've had a letter. Lada comes home today.\"\n\n\"Do you mind if I ask a question?\"\n\nRainfall's eyes sparkled. \"You've chosen a good day to crave a handful of silver to eat. I'm in no mood to deny anything.\"\n\n\"I should like that. But those tablets with the engraved writing. You held them close all the way back to Mossbell. I'm curious, did you find an old family relic in the ruins?\"\n\nRainfall sat straight upright. \"Our legends say dragons sniff out a weak spot the way dogs find bones. There must be some truth in it.\"\n\n\"If it's painful to you\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no, nothing like that. Closer to shame, perhaps. I think I told you that Hesstur was one of Eight Sister Cities who founded Hypatia, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Let me sit on you, and you can take us into my library.\"\n\nRainfall put away his bell-pipe and got on Wistala. When he patted her side, she stalked off toward the library, and they soon arrived. The lectern that had once stood under the window was gone, probably sold, but a pair of old chairs filled its place with a velvet-covered object like a small tabletop upon one.\n\nRainfall seated himself beside it. \"Such humble accommodations for history so important.\n\n\"When it became evident that the city would fall to the barbarians, those inside did their best to hide their valuables. I'm sure some priest had charge of these tablets and sealed them in one of the lower crypts before all entrances were sealed. She\u2014I say she, for the clues were voiced in the feminine\u2014made some signs in the old law-tongue, the father of the Hypatian high-tongue and the grandfather of Parl, though only judges and librarians read it much now. If the fires and collapses left the chamber intact, earthquake or grave-robbers later opened it again, though I expect the only ones to benefit were the rats.\"\n\n\"This doesn't tell me what the object is.\"\n\n\"An idea, more than anything,\" Rainfall said, removing the velvet. \"When the eight sisters joined, they formed the King's Council. The tyrant Masmodon did away with the King's Council when he broke the Imperial Staves, but after the Reformation, the Directory modeled itself\u2014\"\n\nYou could never get a simple answer out of Rainfall when he fell into history. \"What does that have to do with the tablets?\"\n\n\"These tablets are laws that applied to the Kings on the original Council. It was quite a remarkable idea, kings subject to law. Each of the sister cities were afraid of bad rule, or the assumption of a tyrant like Masmodon, so as a condition of their confederation\u2014\"\n\nWistala wasn't sure what that last word was but dreaded interrupting now that he was getting to the point.\n\n\"\u2014made eight laws, one for each city, that the Kings on the Council would have to obey. The idea that laws applied to kings was the work of the dwarf-philosopher Doomzeg, though some say he was inspired by the practice of Royal Responsibilities in the ancient Blighter Uldam Empire. It doesn't do to mention those sorts of theories, especially around the priesthood.\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" Wistala said, lost again.\n\n\"Not that Blighter Civilization is established. It's still much debated in the\u2014\" Rainfall cocked his head, and his hair-leaves rustled. \"You jest with me. But let me illustrate from the tablets: 'No ruler shall kill, maim, imprison, or exile without trial by judge.' That's an important one. 'No ruler shall make law that applies but to all.' Oh, I fear I've translated that badly, but in essence it prevents a king from issuing an edict preventing, say, one shipmaster from transporting wine if other shipmasters are allowed to. Specific laws were the ruination of many in the days of the despots. 'No ruler shall accept or give divination'\u2014another old practice that might be used to get around the other laws, declaring yourself or a family member a god so that one's word becomes religion rather than law. 'No ruler shall confiscate\u2014'\"\n\nWistala stopped him before he could read through all eight and closely examined the tablets. \"Why does the ownership distress you, then?\"\n\n\"When I found them, I swore to myself that I would make the journey to the Imperial Library at Thallia. Oh, I could lose myself there like a drunkard in a brewery! But I find I can't bear to part with them, even if I had the use of my legs. I've spent much time cleaning the inlay. Now they shine like a mariner's guiding star in these dark times. Is it wrong for me to keep them here?\"\n\n\"Why in the Two Worlds would you ask me?\"\n\n\"While your judgment is not yet developed, your heart is usually in the right place.\"\n\nWistala didn't correct him that a dragon had several hearts. He continued: \"You tell me you are not yet two years of age, yet your mind is so far developed.\"\n\n\"We learn from our parents while still in the egg.\"\n\n\"Fascinating. But what surprises me\u2014\"\n\nThe tolling of Mossbell's signal interrupted his thought. \"It must be Lada,\" he said. \"I asked Forstrel to ring as soon as any riders appeared. Wistala, bear me to the front gallery window!\"\n\nThe front stairwell had a landing with an arched window in it looking out on the balcony between the two trees, made of glass so fine, there were hardly any distortions when peering through. He worked the latches and forced open the frame.\n\n\"Odd that she does not ride,\" Rainfall said. \"She used to love ponies. Yet\u2014it was cool this morning, good of the thane to provide her with more comfortable transport.\"\n\nA two-wheeled cart\u2014very like but a little more elaborate than that of the wandering dwarf with the ponies Wistala had met on the road\u2014moved up the lane with a rider behind.\n\n\"Perhaps you should remain inside, Wistala.\" Forstrel, all hair and limbs, was still ringing the bell as though the barn was going up in flames.\n\n\"Young Lessup!\" Rainfall called. \"Yes, Forstrel, up here, please. I should like to meet my granddaughter on my steps.\"\n\nOne of the Widow Lessup's daughters had the sense to put out a chair for Rainfall, and Wistala saw that he was installed before the rig had even turned around in front of the house.\n\nThe escort, only a little mud-splattered in the blue livery of Thane Hammar, didn't descend from his horse. Wistala could tell from Rainfall's stiff manner that he didn't care for this discourtesy.\n\n\"Here's your spawn back, and more besides!\" the escort said as the rig-driver stepped down and lowered a support for the cart. When that was locked in place, he opened the doors at the back of the cart, and Lada stepped down.\n\n\"Phew, she's tossed all over the inside,\" the driver said.\n\nLada, a little stained about the neck, was helped out of the cart. Her eyes were wide and wet, and she shot an accusing look at Rainfall.\n\n\"Rah-ya, Lada, my moppet,\" he said, extending his hands. Wistala saw a little skirt behind and decided that some of the Lessup household were standing behind their master. \"I'm sorry for the rough journey.\"\n\n\"Monster! Demon! You've ruined everything! Everything!\" she said in so loud a voice, her words cracked. She fled into the house, dodging around Rainfall as he reached for her.\n\n\"And you're welcome to her,\" the thane's liveryman laughed. He reached into a bag on his saddle and drew out the doll Wistala had brought. \"Here's her mystery doll, Rainfall. You should be more careful in your plotting than to leave such tokens lying about.\"\n\nRainfall put his arm about Forstrel's shoulders, and the youth took him inside as the house went into uproar. She heard doors closed, shouting, crying, and quick steps as the Lessup clan gathered to discuss events.\n\nWistala could do nothing. She watched the rider and rig disappear, then went to Rainfall's library. If he were greatly troubled, he'd probably go there. She curled up about his tablets and waited, unable to simply fall asleep.\n\nHe appeared as the juicy smells of dinner being cooked began to fill the house, brought in by Forstrel in a wheeled basket used for gathering fruit.\n\n\"I really must have one of those sick-benches built,\" he said as he settled into his reading chair. \"Thank you, Young Lessup. Ah, Tala, you appear again when you're most needed. You can see about getting some dinner, Lessup. I won't eat tonight.\"\n\nThe boy placed a blanket over Rainfall's legs and left, shutting the door behind.\n\n\"So much for homecoming joy. But she's beautiful, do you not agree?\"\n\n\"I'm just getting so I can tell hominids apart,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Perhaps not in a way that can be captured by portraits or sculpture, you have to look into her living eyes to appreciate her. Wild and open, like my son's. I wonder what her mother was like.\"\n\n\"Why was she angry to you?\"\n\n\"I need a glass of wine,\" Rainfall said. He moved for his bell\u2014\n\n\"I'll bring it,\" Wistala said, glad of an excuse to make the trip to the cellar and back. \"Which kind?\"\n\n\"The blueberry, I think. Something sweet to wash the bitter words from my mouth.\"\n\nWistala crept past the room that had been prepared for Lada and heard sobbing from the crack beneath. Her griff extended a little, and she descended to the wine cellar and searched the tags on the month's table wine for the blueberry picture.\n\nShe carried it back up in her mouth, startling one of the younger Lessup girls as she emerged from the cellar. The child let out a squeak and ran off toward the kitchen. It was the one who liked to tie her hair up in ribbons, Wistala noted absently; all the others in the family simply watched her as she went about Mossbell.\n\nRainfall opened the cork-and-wax top and poured himself a generous glass. \"Once I had thirty of these,\" he mused as he rolled around the purple liquid. \"And I didn't have to make my own wines. Though if the estate prospers now, I'll continue the practice. There's a satisfaction in enjoying the fruits of one's own labors. That's the one thing I've learned all these wretched years since the troll came. Oh, and about dragons. Forgive me, Tala.\"\n\n\"You ask my forgiveness? Since you saved me from the river, you've lost the use of your legs and your granddaughter's love.\"\n\n\"If you'll indulge me in applying a correction: Don't be so quick to mark fate and toss it into baskets marked 'fortune' and 'misfortune' as though you're sorting apples. It was an illness that forced me to cease traveling as a judge\u2014a heavy misfortune\u2014yet that same illness kept me in Tysander, where I diverted myself at the circus and lost my heart to the most skilled rider that ever sat atop a horse. My wife could stand on a horse's bare back with reins tied to her hair all day and still beat me with her strategy at Advantages when we played at night. I imagine if her father or grandfather had spoke against me, she would have cried out, too. I should never have shouted at her. Unforgivable.\"\n\n\"What is the quarrel?\" Wistala asked.\n\nRainfall looked out the library skylight\u2014still cobwebbed and dusty, the Widow Lessup hadn't climbed a ladder in the library yet\u2014and blinked.\n\n\"She's convinced herself she loves Hammar.\"\n\n\"A man who stuck her in a cold attic?\"\n\n\"Apparently she blossomed up there like a solstice succulent shut in the Yule dark. Hammar is young and wild. Nature and instinct took its course.\"\n\n\"So they are mat\u2014married?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"They can't be, not under Hypatian law, because of her age. But sadly, she's not too young to bear his child.\" Rainfall's fingers tightened on the glass stem, and it broke.\n\nHer host blotted up the wine and his own blood with blotting paper. \"And the last of the thirty are gone. Oh, what shall I do, Tala? I've suspected he wanted to add Mossbell to his lands, but to resort to this?\"\n\n\"Wait, this is about land?\" Wistala said.\n\n'\"I've no doubt of it. With the land\u2014soon to be prosperous again now that the troll is gone\u2014goes responsibility for the road and bridge. He should like to make all who cross pay a toll.\"\n\n\"How does he stand to get the land?\"\n\n\"He won't have any difficulty getting me declared an invalid, with the judge in his pocket. It would devolve to Lada, save that she is not of age to run an estate. Lada's child would naturally inherit\u2014I'm pierced from my own quiver, insisting Eyen to confirm his parentage with the priests and courts. And she's only too happy to name Hammar as the father. He would become master of Mossbell.\"\n\nWistala's head hurt from trying to follow the convoluted circumstances. \"I'm not sure I follow the law, but in all your talk of courts and powers\u2014I thought it was to ensure justice and fairness. This strikes me as quite the opposite.\"\n\nRainfall admired the glass one more time before discarding it.\n\n\"The law and fairness often dance together, but they are not married,\" he said. \"Lately I've grown too fond of engineering, for one can trust calculation and breaking strengths. No thane may change the weight of a stone, no matter how much he wishes. But! I am still master of Mossbell. Perhaps I shall sell it to the dwarves and move south.\"\n\nHe sniffed the air. \"But I'm keeping you from your dinner.\"\n\nShe wasn't hungry; perhaps Rainfall's upset and sour mood had transferred itself to her by something like mind-speech.\n\nMossbell's problems were like a tar pit, the more she struggled to help her host, the worse his plight became!\n\nShe went out to the stable barn and found Stog licking at the remains of his evening grain. Jalu-Coke's kittens, all ears and tails, were chasing each other about on clumsy paws. This was the sort of law she understood: the mice ate Stog's grain, and the cats ate the mice.\n\n\"Does the master need me?\" Stog asked her.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Wistala said. \"I wanted to think. The house was closing in on me. You're looking well.\"\n\n\"Good grain and clean water,\" Stog said. \"I am lucky. It is a blessing to know how lucky one is.\"\n\n\"What happened that night we parted? Did the men find you?\"\n\n\"Not the way you think,\" Stog said, shifting on his hooves. Wistala nipped his bristly tail\u2014the donkey in him showed most at the mane and tail.\n\n\"Tell me. I need a diversion. Treks and tracks, I shan't be mad.\"\n\n\"Silly, really. I took my chance to get back to the Dragonblade.\"\n\nWistala was so astonished, she couldn't speak.\n\n\"What?\" she finally said.\n\n\"You hate me now,\" Stog said. \"But I've been wanting to tell you since our return. I'm grateful to you, unlike these fool kittens, I know what you've done for me. Let's have honesty between us.\"\n\n\"Was he such a fine master as all that?\"\n\n\"Not as kind as our good elf. But that didn't signify. It wasn't the treatment; it was the excitement of the hunts. I, a pack mule at column-back, used to have flowers thrown on me as we passed through towns, mouth stuffed with carrots and sugar beets. Cheering. You must know that a dragon can wreck whole lands.\"\n\nWistala tried to keep her tail still. \"I've heard of dragons being blamed for storms and earthquakes.\"\n\n\"You may well glare, but that doesn't signify. Hominids fear your kind.\"\n\n\"Conceded. So you thought you'd make a try for his hall?\"\n\n\"Yes, I know the look of the mountains; it's not far south of here. But I stopped in a field to avail myself of some corn \u2026 and the next thing I knew I had a rope around my neck and another bad master. Then you appeared again. In the Dragonblade's mule train, I learned not to fear the dragon-smell, but I've never liked it until you.\"\n\n\"So the Dragonblade lives not far south in the mountains? He must be close to the Wheel of Fire dwarves, then?\"\n\nStog's ears went up and forward. \"Close? Of course. He lives in their city.\"\n\nFor the second time since entering the barn, Wistala was startled into astonishment. But of course he would live with dwarves, as they helped him kill dragons.\n\n\"The Wheel of Fire?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"The dwarves build fastnesses like no others, and he must be guarded sky and tunnel. It must signify to you that the Dragonblade's line has made enemies, very powerful enemies, of your kind.\"\n\nHe's made an enemy of me, small, stumpy, and misfortunate. But she'd promised Father nests of hatchlings.\n\nShe was making herself miserable and hungry for metals, so much so that the tools hung by the hearth looked tempting. Rainfall had written a letter to the metalsmith's guild in the coastal town of Sack Harbor asking for a quantity of brass and copper meant for the melting pot but so far only an answer had arrived naming a price. Wait, that Jessup fellow said something about spare shingles\u2026 .\n\n\"Stog, thank you for an honest tale,\" she said.\n\nAs the night deepened, she wandered the grounds, prowling, really, for the vegetable garden's fall planting was coming up, and if she was sharp, she might get a raiding rabbit if wind and shadow favored her.\n\nWere she Father, she'd take Stog's knowledge, every memory, every path, and learn about the Wheel of Fire dwarves and the Dragonblade. There were headless, clawless corpses of her own blood with only her left to mourn. What had those men shouted?\n\n\"The Avenger\"?\n\nBut she was alone and small. Even Father in full fury hadn't been a match for the dwarves, and she had nothing like his experience in battle.\n\nThen there was her promise.\n\nEven the worst cave has a best spot, Mother would say. She'd found a good spot here at Mossbell. But if the thane claimed Mossbell, there'd be no more clean, quiet cellars and hearth-roasted goats or Widow Lessup's mutton stew and gravies. Hammar would certainly turn her out\u2014or worse\u2014and if Rainfall sold his estate, would he be able to find a new home with a growing dragon in tow? They'd make a sight on the road: an invalid elf riding muleback, a pregnant girl hardly out of childhood, and a stumpy-legged drakka. Of course, Mother would tell her to improvise.\n\nCurse Hypatia and its laws and courts and judges, robbing a kindly elf of his all. Hammar shaped the law into an ax to cut down a better citizen than he.\n\nCouldn't the law be used to strike back at Hammar? No. Rainfall understood it better than she; he'd called it hopeless and would sell.\n\nOf course. She hurried back to Mossbell, dragon-dashing when she saw the door and flushing a rabbit.\n\nThe household had gone to bed, and she had to draw back his bed curtains and wake him. The room smelled like the hot stones in their grate that warmed the metal plate that supported his bedding.\n\n\"Rainfall, I've got it,\" she said when he left off blinking and rubbing his eyes.\n\nShe was disappointed to see the number of leaves left on his pillow as he drew himself up with his new bedrail. \"Let's have a light and hear it, then. For\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind.\" She spat into the iron plate that caught the wax from his bedcandle. He lit his candle from the flame. \"Some great lord would probably give you employ just to do that,\" he mused.\n\n\"I've had an idea about the estate.\"\n\n\"Let's hear it, then.\"\n\nIf she had the right muscles for it, she would be smiling. She tried pulling her griff as high as she could, and felt the corners of her mouth go up. \"Sell Mossbell to me! I'd let you live here until the end of your days, without asking for anything. My way of repaying the debt I owe you for saving me.\"\n\nRainfall's face fell. \"Ah. An excellent idea, but it wouldn't work, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't be legal. There are actually two objections. You must be a Hypatian Citizen to own Hypatian land. The estate also controls the bridge and road, and only a titled Hypatian may own that.\"\n\n\"So to own the estate entire, I must be a Hypatian citizen and titled. No other objection?\"\n\n\"No. I'd once hoped Lada would marry well, but she's been dishonored beyond any man with a title taking her.\"\n\n\"Why can't I become a Hypatian citizen, and titled, then?\"\n\nAt that Rainfall's hand gripped the bedrail so hard, his knuckles went bloodless. \"By the Guide Divine, you're right! Why not? Rah-ya, Tala. Rah-ya! I know just how to do it. Rah-yah! What a joke! To my library, I'm sure there's a precedent of use.\"\n\nRainfall sat in his reception hall with the tablets on his lap. \"It's a sacrifice, but one I'm prepared to make for our sake. Look on the words with me one last time, Wistala.\"\n\nThe words may have been illustrious, but the reception hall wasn't much. According to Rainfall, there'd once been a grand set of chairs and trophies in the form of helms, scabbards, and weapons belonging to his grandfather\u2014all long since sold. Only his azure battle sash remained, draped behind the very ordinary chair that sat against the wall opposite the arched door, bereft of the gilding that had once adorned it.\n\nBut good light came in through the narrow windows. Yari-Tab protested as she was removed from the sunny ledge in preparation.\n\n\"Perhaps you should step into the attendant room, Wistala, until the dwarves have gone. I don't want to startle our guests.\"\n\nWistala hooked her sii claw in a wall knothole and pulled open the paneled door with a squeak. She closed it again, and found she could see much of the room admirably through the knothole.\n\n\"You may show them in now, Yeo Lessup,\" Rainfall said.\n\nThe lanky boy, in a new suit of clothes and his first pair of attending slippers, raised his eyebrows in surprise at the use of his household title. He gave a little bow as he turned.\n\n\"Forstrel,\" Rainfall said. \"When at court, always finish your bow and then go about your business.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said.\n\n\"No need for apologies. Please go about it properly, Yeo Lessup.\"\n\nThis time the youth bowed and came fully upright before leaving.\n\nWithin moments, two dwarves entered the room. They wore riding apparel with long scarves woven into diamond patterns. Their faces were masked behind stiffened leather, with gauze covering their beards. They removed their hats and bowed. The foremost was a little taller and heavier than the one behind, and had golden coins set into his belt.\n\n\"Ah, couriers of Chartered Company,\" Rainfall said from the humble chair. \"I trust the funds sent were adequate for your appearance?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" the foremost answered in easy Parl.\n\n\"Well here's a Hypatian Silver for each of you anyway for being so prompt. Whom do I have the honor of addressing?\"\n\nThe masks turned toward each other.\n\n\"The signs of the Diadem are not enough?\" the foremost said. \"We'll show you our seals, if you like.\"\n\n\"No need. It's simply that I wish to be social.\"\n\n\"Elgee and my nephew Embee, sir, and honored.\"\n\n\"May I address you as such?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"Of course, sir.\"\n\n\"Elgee and Embee, this package and the accompanying letter must arrive at the Imperial Library at Thallia intact. Have you been there?\"\n\n\"I know Thallia well, sir,\" Elgee said.\n\n\"It is inherently of no great value, but impossible to replace. There should be no danger beyond the usual minor difficulties that go with travel. I would prefer that you go by land rather than water, for the winter winds are coming, and I should hate to lose it to shipwreck.\"\n\n\"Some thanedoms welcome dwarves better than\u2014,\" the smaller one behind said.\n\nElgee stamped. \"No need for that, lad. Sir, you have the word of couriers of the Diadem that it will arrive.\"\n\n\"Give it to Heloise. If she no longer lives, give it to whoever holds the Hypatian Archive Table-Head. I expect some tokens in return, and would wish you to convey them back here with the same care.\"\n\n\"Barring delays in Thallia, you should see our masks again before the moon comes about again. Will you write your price and terms?\"\n\nThe younger dwarf drew a small case from his cloak. Wistala thought it looked like it held paper. The dwarf worked the box, and a fresh length appeared at the top. He offered a quill and ink to his elder, who wrote upon it. He knelt and presented it to Rainfall.\n\nRainfall read it. \"Prices have gone up since I last used your services.\"\n\n\"The roads have become treacherous,\" Elgee countered.\n\n\"This covers all expenses?\"\n\n\"It does. And the bonding: our coin belts shall be yours if aught is lost.\"\n\n\"Ah, you no longer negotiate each separately. It is acceptable, then. Shall I sign and seal?\"\n\n\"A signature is all that is necessary from a Knight of the Hypatian Directory, sir,\" Elgee said with a short bow.\n\nRainfall signed the paper revealed at the top of the box. \"Ah, how courtly the tongues of the Diadem remain. You should give lessons to your cousins of the Wheel of Fire.\"\n\n\"They'd rather burn their beards than listen to\u2014,\" the younger said with a hiccupping cough that Wistala guessed to be dwarf laughter.\n\n\"Keep your tongue behind mask,\" Elgee said. \"Forgive my nephew, he's but\u2014\"\n\nRainfall held up his hand. \"No, a jest is not out of place after business is concluded. Will you stay and bed this night?\"\n\n\"Diadem couriers lose not an hour, once commissioned,\" Elgee said. \"It is written on our cloak-latch. We ride at once. Thank you for your business\u2014and the hot sup. There remains only the portion to be paid.\"\n\n\"Beneath my chair there is a chest. Would you be so good as to retrieve it?\"\n\nThe dwarves turned toward each other again; then the younger stepped forward and lifted the small iron box. He passed it to Rainfall, who opened it.\n\nWhen the accounting was settled, both dwarves bowed low, with more grace than Wistala would have credited them, and Rainfall bowed in return. After his head came back up, the dwarves raised theirs.\n\n\"A good journey,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"If we are not back by the Winter Solstice, write the Chartered Company and claim your bond. Thank you again.\"\n\nWith that they left, escorted by Yeo Lessup.\n\n\"Wistala, come back. I think there's one more bit of business, and I want you for this.\"\n\nShe nosed open the passageway. \"Gracious dwarves.\"\n\nRainfall locked his chest with a tiny key, which he returned to a small bag he kept about his neck. \"You can't always trust appearances with dwarves. They mask more than their faces. But the Chartered Company will keep its bargain. Now all there is to do is hope there's still friendship, or at least honor, at the Imperial Library.\"\n\n\"What do you wish me to do?\"\n\n\"Sit and be amused, dragon-daughter. Yeo Lessup, send in your uncle.\"\n\nThis time the youth bowed properly. Jessup came in, apologizing for the muddiness of his boots and carrying an oilskin-wrapped object the size of one of Mossbell's larger windows.\n\n\"How goes the inn, Jessup?\" Rainfall said as he set down his burden in front of him.\n\n\"Well enough, sir, but I'll beg you to help me with my figures again. I thought running an inn meant tapping kegs and keeping the bedding aired, but I never dreamt of all the counting!\" Jessup was looking at Wistala again in that funny way of his.\n\nRainfall said: \"I admire a full-grown man who is so attentive to lessons. Is it done?\"\n\n\"Just about,\" Jessup said. \"You were right about the paints at Sack Harbor. Such colors! Who knew there were so many.\"\n\n\"Then let us see.\"\n\nHe untied a string around the oilskins and removed them.\n\nWistala blinked and looked at the wooden panel again. There were eyebolts in the top and fretwork to let the air pass through. Was it some kind of miniature door? Wait, it had a design on it, a painted figure. She recognized a long figure, depicted in profile, mostly upright, green and black-clawed.\n\n\"It's you, Wistala,\" Rainfall said as the meaning dawned on her.\n\n\"I'm calling the inn The Green Dragon,\" Jessup said. \"And a good inn needs a good sign that travelers remember.\"\n\n\"If you've got no objection,\" Rainfall said. \"He does this as a form of compliment.\"\n\nWistala understood, but understanding didn't bring a surcease of confusion. \"But the troll, my plan, your brother died \u2026\"\n\n\"All the land round Mossbell and the twin hills honors his bravery and is happier for it,\" Jessup said. \"I can't blame you for the troll's doing.\"\n\n\"So, do we have your agreement?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"Why do you need it? The man may name his inn as he wishes.\"\n\n\"I'd be happier to have you touch the sign,\" Jessup said.\n\nWistala didn't answer, but stepped up to the sign. She extended her sharpest sii claw and dug a chunk of wood out at the eye. \"You made the eyeblack round, like a hominid's eye or a tailvent. Dragons have eyes like a cat.\"\n\n\"Another story,\" Jessup said. \"The dragon herself marked the south-side eye, to look in the direction of the fight with the troll. A good story to tell over honey-mead.\"\n\n\"When do you open?\"\n\nJessup swiped his nose with a sii\u2014fingertip, Wistala corrected herself. \"All is in place. I've been brewing all summer since I bought out Old Golpramp's entire supply of clover-honey. You have advised me on wine. My wife is ready to do the baking, and my son the butchery. There is still much sewing needing to be done, but I can make do. I was going to hang the sign tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Delay another week or two. My old friend Ragwrist leads his troupe south even now, and this is his year to go the north roads. He should stop any day. The presence of his circus would make for a grand door-opening.\"\n\n\"As my landlord wishes,\" Jessup said.\n\nLada kept to her room. The only time Wistala saw her speak to her grandfather was when a messenger arrived. Forstrel took the letter to his master despite the outcry from Lada.\n\nSo great was the fracas that Wistala couldn't help but attend her host. She found two of the Lessup girls listening outside his library door, whispering to each other.\n\n\"What has happened?\" Wistala asked.\n\nBoth jumped, for Wistala's steps were light on the rag rugs Widow Lessup had made to save the hall floors from dragonclaw and tailscale.\n\n\"The moony girl's got a thane-letter,\" the older of the girls said. \"The master insists on reading it before giving it to her.\"\n\nLada exploded out of the library like Auron leaping up onto the egg shelf, and all three listeners instinctively flattened themselves against the wall to get out of her way.\n\n\"Beast!\" she said to Wistala, clutching the open letter to her breast as she fled to her room.\n\nWistala went into the library, found Forstrel standing behind Rainfall in his chair.\n\n\"I think that last was intended for me, my dear,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala had once seen Jessup turn his younger son over on his lap and strike him for starting a fire out of some scrap wood where the inn was being constructed, and couldn't help but think Lada would benefit from a similar treatment, for she had no snout to tail-snap in Mother's fashion.\n\nWidow Lessup's voice intruded through the door as she sent her girls off to work. Forstrel made himself look busy at the bookshelves.\n\n\"Can I get you anything, sir?\" Widow Lessup asked, her dark eyes hard and angry.\n\n\"A little wine, thank you, ye'en,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Perhaps the letter held an offer for her to return to Galahall, that we might have some peace?\" Wistala said.\n\n\"A brief mention that she was often in his thoughts and that he yearned to see her again,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"He's well consoled by his other wards,\" Forstrel said.\n\n\"Rumormongering improves nothing, Yeo Lessup,\" Rainfall said. \"He's still the thane, and I won't have that kind of talk. Go save your mother a trip back upstairs, if you please.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't the thane just marry her?\" Wistala asked after Forstrel left. \"Wouldn't that make his path to ownership that much shorter?\"\n\n\"Ahh, but Hypatian tradition allows only one wife, so he must choose carefully. Poor Lada is small fry from our river. Hammar has cast his net far at sea looking for a greater catch.\"\n\nWistala digested this. \"Have these circumstances been explained to Lada?\"\n\n\"She will not listen. She's like a sleepwalker who will not awaken till she falls off a cliff. Let us survey the road and bridge. I won't have Ragwrist hurling jests as he once did daggers about the state of the roads under my care.\"\n\nThe dwarven couriers returned before Ragwrist arrived, and rather than another formal session in the reception hall, Rainfall invited them to a quiet dinner at the Green Dragon Inn.\n\nWhile the dwarves saw to their mounts and packhorse in the barn, Rainfall and Jessup together hatched a plan to give the dwarves a fine tale to carry back to their delvings.\n\nRainfall and Jessup took her in the great common room of the inn, showed her the wide river-stone chimney dividing the kitchen and storerooms from the common room and two of the sleeping rooms upstairs. Rainfall told her what to do when he snapped his fingers once, and then the second time.\n\nShe smelled that one of Yari-Tab's kittens had already installed itself as the inn feline. Ah, there it was, sleeping on the mantel of the smaller fireplace on the outer wall of the common room.\n\nWistala found the inn rough-hewn and bare compared with the careful workmanship of the interiors of Mossbell, but something about the thickness of the logs and stone-and-masonry walls Jessup had used suggested safety and comfort as much as the carven door-frames and window seats of Mossbell. She recognized a mug, a favorite of Rainfall's, on a special shelf all its own behind the counter of the common room.\n\n\"The landlord's mug, may it be refilled many times,\" said Jessup, taking it down and pouring a sweet-smelling liquid from a tapped keg resting on one side of the bar.\n\n\"I see you've copied the old style,\" Rainfall said, reclining on a lounge next to the big fireplace. A blanket covered his legs. \"The first Hypatian posthouses were built much like this, when there were barbarians of doubtful behavior to consider.\" He sampled the mead. \"Delicious. My compliments to the innkeeper and Old Golpramp for his clover-honey.\"\n\nJessup smiled at being called an innkeeper. He poured himself a pewter mug. \"To better days between the Apple and the Whitewater, thanks to troll-killings and dragon hoards.\"\n\nWistala felt she should point out that the coin from Tumbledown would be more appropriately called a \"rat hoard,\" but she let the hominids talk. Jessup's family watched her from the doorway to the kitchen. They'd seen Wistala only at a distance until now and stood as still as the painted dragon on the wood panel leaning next to the door.\n\n\"Father, the dwarves come,\" the youngest of Jessup's boys shouted as he came in through the door.\n\n\"Very well, Wistala, up the chimney.\"\n\nThough it was wide, she had a little difficulty backing up it. Her tail end found purchase, and she braced herself with her legs.\n\n\"As you bid, we've returned with a response from the scroll-sorters,\" Elgee said upon entering and after words of introduction. \"And a whole host of seals and ribbons their baton contains. Caps are intact, you'll see, Sir Elf.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I've prepared a purse with the balance of your fee. Would you care for it now?\"\n\n\"Only if you'll deduct the cost of a pouring of this fine-smelling mead!\"\n\nRainfall again: \"That's quite impossible, my good dwarf. I rounded up, and there are no pennies within.\"\n\n\"Then the round and sup besides will be paid by our expense purse. A feast, good Innkeeper, and don't skimp on the side dishes!\"\n\nWistala shifted her weight in the chimney, wishing Rainfall would play his trick.\n\nMore drinking, lip-smacking, and beard-wiping followed. \"This is one dragon I'll be glad to see anytime I'm on the Old North Road,\" Embee said.\n\n\"Would you like to hear the tale of how the inn came to be named?\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Stories always make the food come faster,\" Elgee said.\n\n\"Then put that kindling on the fire, would you, Embee.\"\n\nWistala saw a short-fingered hand appear, placing the splinters in a stack with plenty of air space between. \"Shall I call for the innkeeper's fire?\" Embee asked.\n\n\"This inn has all the modern conveniences,\" Rainfall said, and snapped his fingers.\n\nWistala let loose her foua on the stack of wood, which promptly burst into flame. She heard gasps of astonishment from the dwarves. Then she heard a sizzle like fresh meat thrown on a hot stove, and green smoke boiled up the chimney. Wistala hadn't been expecting that, and as she held her breath, Rainfall snapped his fingers a second time.\n\nShe dropped down the chimney and jumped to avoid the small fire. She was a bit clumsy with her tail, knocking the burning wood to the side, but landed credibly.\n\nThe dwarves fell backwards off their hearthside bench and did amazing backrolls, coming up with hands at sheath hilt.\n\n\"What in the Lavadome?\" Elgee sputtered. Embee moved to draw his weapon, but his uncle held his arm.\n\n\"Rah-ya,\" Rainfall said. \"I'm sorry, good dwarves, I couldn't resist. Please, laugh with me at this little trick. This is the Green Dragon herself.\"\n\n\"What, have you conjured her?\" Embee said.\n\n\"Ach, she was hiding up the chimney, blockhead,\" Elgee said. \"Sorry for the violence of our reaction, sir. Robbers may be found round the keg-tap as well as on the road, and we're accustomed to being always on our guard when outside the Delvings. Let me replace the spilled drinks.\"\n\nWhen everyone was settled, Wistala told her tale. It came haltingly at first; then the words flowed more smoothly. She found herself imitating the strange, loping, two-by-two run of the troll and mimicking its roars.\n\nThe dwarves' eyes were white behind their masks, and they hardly looked away save to take another mouthful from their mugs until she was finished.\n\n\"Well told, good drakka,\" Rainfall said. \"You have a talent for pleasing an audience.\"\n\nWistala bowed, hoping the dwarves didn't hear her prrum.\n\n\"Will she dine with us?\" Elgee said.\n\n\"You'll find your expense purse lighter than you might like when you pay the tally,\" Rainfall warned. \"I've been feeding her these eight months.\"\n\n\"What's the price on being able to say you dined with a dragon?\" Elgee said.\n\n\"Though my grandfather said many's the time he feared being dined on,\" Embee added.\n\n\"Keep your\u2014,\" Elgee warned.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure he meant it as a joke,\" Wistala said. \"You dwarves tweak your beards when you jest, and I saw Embee pull at his.\"\n\n\"So we do,\" Elgee said. \"Mark! I look forward to telling this tale to my directing partner when I return to the Delvings. A courtly dragon!\"\n\nWistala ate, even tasted a little of the honeymead on her tongue, but found it too sweet. But even a drakka's appetite, somewhat guarded by Mother's repeated warnings against gluttony, couldn't compare to the amount of food the dwarves ate.\n\nWhen farewells were said and the dwarves installed in their room upstairs, weighted by the vast meal, mead, and Rainfall's coin purse, Rainfall sat beside the fire with the bit of craft from the Library at Thallia on his lap.\n\n\"Aren't you curious to see this opened, Wistala?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I am,\" she admitted. The \"baton\" was made of black shining leather, stiffened in some manner, and capped at one end.\n\n\"Then open Heloise's seal, and let us see their answer.\"\n\nThe wax\u2014it featured what looked like two sets of identical steps rising to a peak\u2014yielded to Wistala's sii-claw with no trouble at all. The seal held a leather thong closed over a tiny metal nub, which in turn secured the leather cap in place, as tight fitting as a hominid's footwear covered the feet. Both a rattle and a rustle came from inside, as she turned the tube.\n\nShe looked within. Rolled paper, and something glinting. She extracted the thick paper.\n\n\"Fine cotton paper, Wistala,\" Rainfall said. \"I expect good news.\"\n\n\"I can't read it.\"\n\n\"May I?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"Of course.\" Wistala handed it to him.\n\n\"Ah, it's in the priestly tongue, the oldest script of Cloud-temple of Thellasa and therefore Hypat, and only used these days for ritual. I shall translate:\n\n\"Be it known within and without the \u2026 ahem \u2026 civilized land that Wistala of Hesstur, having been of service to scholarship and common enlightenment, is recorded among the ancient and exalted order of Librarians, Keepers, and Archivists; is entitled to call herself an Agent in and of the Librarians; is admitted to the commons of all Hypatian Libraries; and is presented with insignia of rank and station in the Hypatian Order, all of which are to be recognized and held for the remainder of her natural life.\"\n\nA thin hammered disk of gold had been set into wax and pressed hard into the paper. Wistala inspected the device, another triangular shape with a star at the top.\n\nRainfall smiled at her. \"The old phraseology sounds a little ignorant these days. It was used before Hypatia knew of aught but barbarians beyond its borders. How do you like being an Agent-Librarian, Nuum Wistala?\"\n\n\"Nuum? Oh, for an expression easier on dragon-tongues.\"\n\nWistala sniffed the paper: ink and a dry sandlike smell were overlaid by the gold and the wax. \"I can't say yet. What must I do?\"\n\n\"Avoid swaggering your entitlement about, unless you wish to be laughed at. Even a Surveyor-Mapper will receive more bows, for on his lines are fields and pastures divided. Should you want to take pupils, it is useful, I suppose. Now let us admire your badge of title.\"\n\nThe badge was a triangular gemstone, about the size of Yari-Tab's nose, set in silver and fitted on the top with an eyehook for a chain.\n\n\"Golden topaz,\" Rainfall said. \"It matches your eyes nicely. Symbolic of a clear head and clear vision, and enlightenment. The motto on the back reads lun-byedon, 'light-giver,' in the old priestly tongue.\"\n\nThe polish of the stone made the baubles Father used to give Jizara and her seem like dull quartz. \"I would like to wear it.\"\n\n\"It would look well set into one of your scales, I suppose, and all elves would smile, for our victory garlands are of wound green and gold\u2014but you shed them, don't you? Chain about your neck? But you'll outgrow anything we can find around here.\"\n\n\"How do the others at the library wear them?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Some fit them into their hair so they hang just above and between the eyes, an old tradition dating back to the priestly scroll-keepers. Or they will puncture the earlobe and dangle them there by a sort of hook.\"\n\nWistala looked at her reflection in a polished piece of copper near the door. Hominids made a little ritual of gazing at themselves before stepping outside.\n\n\"Then I shall fix it in my fringe, at the fore, as I don't have a hominid head with that grotesque plate of greasy skin above my eyes. You may have to help with your blacksmithing tools. A drakka's fringe is nerveless, but tough.\"\n\nJessup returned, and he and Rainfall pointed out different features of the public room to Wistala, and Rainfall suggested the addition of a notice-post outside the door. \"I fear I'm becoming in danger of being entirely too pleased with myself,\" Rainfall said. \"Making Wistala a librarian and getting you the rank of postman.\"\n\n\"Postman? I'm hardly able to read, sir,\" Jessup said.\n\n\"Oh, I'll improve you. Without being able to work my gardens, I need more mental diversions, and if I stay within my library all hours, I'll be thought a hermit. A reliable post will bring visitors to the inn. But before making you postman, I must give Tala her oath of citizenship.\"\n\nJessup dropped his mug, sending mead across the assembly. \"A \u2026 a dragon. A citizen?\"\n\n\"And why not?\" Rainfall said, wiping away the stray mead on his hand with a small cloth he kept in his pocket. \"There are precedents, albeit ancient ones. She can understand our laws and take the oath.\"\n\nJessup chuckled. \"The teeth will drop out of his skull.\"\n\n\"But we must hurry. I can administer the citizenship oath, and you shall witness it, Jessup, and then we will have a bill of sale, and it will be done. What say you?\"\n\n\"I fear.\"\n\n\"What do you fear?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"The course of these events. I don't want to be the one whose witness frustrated the thane.\"\n\n\"He'll count me as an enemy if he does anything to you and yours,\" Wistala said coldly.\n\nRainfall turned. \"I must ask you, Wistala, for something of an imposition.\"\n\n\"Nothing would be too great to my savior and host,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"I'll adopt you as my daughter. That confers on you full citizenship after you reside in Hypatia for six years. A simple oath gives you citizenship for now.\"\n\nWistala had been practicing the words daily.\n\n\"I'd hoped to hear the words in the Hypatian Hall at Quarryness, but Jessup's Inn won't be hurt for having one more story to tell about its sign.\"\n\nJessup looked out the windows, as if fearing hostile eyes in the night.\n\nRainfall pointed to the floor before him. \"It's customary to touch the hem of the officiant's robe of state before taking the oath, but I'm afraid this mead-spattered bit of blanket will have to do; it's the words that matter in the end.\"\n\nWistala laid her sii on his blanket.\n\n\"The oath-taker usually kneels before the officiant. But having four legs\u2014\"\n\nWistala folded her sii under her. In consequence her saa and tailvent were raised, but as they were facing in the direction of Galahall, it seemed befitting.\n\n\"Do you understand the difference between a truth and a lie, and the seriousness of an oath, Nuum Wistala?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Then take the oath.\"\n\n\"I, Wistala, promise to take up the responsibilities of a Hypatian Citizen. I will obey the Hypatian laws, keep the Hypatian peace, and maintain the Hypatian lands and seas against all enemies. May my strength and honor sustain this oath and Hypatia's glory from now until the end of days.\"\n\n\"Rise, Citizen, and never kneel again,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Walls fresh up and already hallowed,\" Jessup said. \"That reminds me: I should have Mod Feeney in to bless the post and lintels.\"\n\n\"Jessup, I must beg for a delay in the rites. Wistala and I must go into Quarryness. Wake up Forstrel and tell him to put my saddle on Stog. Oh, and could I trouble you for a pennysworth for Tala?\"\n\n\"Of course, sir, but she needs no pennies here. As long as I've got a bit of bone in back, her meals shall be free under this roof.\"\n\n\"Not for food, Jessup. She must purchase Mossbell, and while I'd accept her loosest dragonscale, a land sale's not legal unless it's in Hypatian coin. And it's just bad form for me to lend it to her.\"\n\nStog could keep a punishing pace when he put his will into his hooves. Wistala loped along the road northward in the evening dark as best as she could, and finally begged him for a ride behind Rainfall's special strapped saddle.\n\n\"Fine,\" Stog said. \"But sheathe your claws.\"\n\nWistala climbed up, and Stog broke into his buck-trot again.\n\nThe night was foggy and turning cold, the moisture thick enough to collect at the branch-tips and drop with soft, wet taps into the fallen leaves. There would be a thick frost by morning, she expected.\n\n\"You dragons are supposed to be able to sing,\" Stog said. \"I'd like to hear a song of the merits of mules. What horse could carry this burden at this pace?\"\n\n\"Is he complaining about the weight?\" Rainfall asked. \"My beast-tongue is not that of my forefathers\u2014I've been too long in tamer lands.\"\n\n\"He wants a song,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Perhaps it would help pass the time,\" Rainfall said. \"Beside, I don't think I've ever heard you sing.\"\n\nWistala cleared her throat. \"Drakes and dragons are more fond of these kind of displays, and more skilled, but I'll do my best:\n\n\u2003While a horse will carry any fool\n\n\u2003If the going's hard you'll want a mule!\n\n\u2003Twice the load on half the feed,\n\n\u2003A mule is tougher than any steed!\n\n\u2003But treat him well when put to task\n\n\u2003Or he'll knock you on your\u2014\n\n\"Ask no more verses of me, I'm out,\" Wistala finished.\n\n\"Prettier than any nightingale,\" Rainfall said. \"And a good deal louder.\"\n\n\"Let's have it again,\" Stog said. \"While a horse will carry any fool \u2026\" he brayed in time to his hoofbeats.\n\nAnd so, with Stog repeating the verses until dogs whined in complaint, they came into the Quarryness around the midnight hour.\n\nThe town was bordered by Rainfall's road to the east and a great hill to the west. The hillside facing the town was one long cliff, with some wooden scaffolding up the side where men took building stone. A small watercourse cut through the town, bridged in two places by stone. There were several constructs of two or three levels at the center of town around a rather muddy common and a few leafless trees, but the rest of the town was a small warren of narrow, twisting streets.\n\n\"The thane allows for division and subdivision of the town parcels,\" Rainfall said. \"He forgets that the old Hypatian engineering, while somewhat wasteful of space, also prevents fires.\"\n\nThere were still a few lights in some of the upper windows and galleries of the town, but none strode the streets save for a pair of men Rainfall identified as firewardens\u2014also charged with keeping the peace. Downstream Wistala heard faint notes of music and song.\n\nRainfall turned Stog into the center of town, just off the main road. He stopped Stog before a stout, triangle-topped building with a silver banner-staff at the peak. \"High temple,\" Rainfall said, pointing to a grand, round-topped building. \"Low temple,\" he said, referring to a long, flat-roofed stone-walled building opposite. \"Courthouse and muster-hall.\"\n\nRanks of carved men carrying spears and shields decorated the sides. \"Bring me right up the steps to the door,\" Rainfall said, in beast-tongue, to Stog.\n\nThe doors were metal-covered and fitted in such a way that the hinges were concealed.\n\n\"There will be a low judge or two within,\" Rainfall said. \"The law never sleeps, as old Arfold, my law-teacher used to say. Strike the door with your tail, Wistala, and wake them.\"\n\nHer scales rang on the metal surface, and the pounding echoed within.\n\nThe pair of firewardens watched from the common, talking to each other quietly. One hurried away toward the road.\n\n\"Again, please,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala pounded on the door again.\n\nA decorative panel in the door suddenly opened. \"I rise, I rise. What have you to say that can't wait until a daylight hour? Is there a murderer to be celled?\"\n\n\"Good evening, Sobyor,\" Rainfall said.\n\nThe man's rather small eyes widened. \"Your Honor!\"\n\n\"Oh, that title's long since washed to the sea. What are you doing manning the door-minder's garret, Sobyor? You were once the best low judge in the three north thanedoms.\"\n\n\"And high judge for three whole days, thanks to you. What in the worlds is that?\" he asked, staring at Wistala.\n\n\"She's my legs, if you'll let me through this door. We've some small matters of business to attend, and I'm afraid they cannot wait. Admit us, and help me mind the mule, would you?\"\n\n\"I'm \u2026 I'm not to recognize you,\" Sobyor said. \"Orders from High Judge Kal himself.\"\n\n\"What authority does Judge Kal have to give you such an order? This is a Hypatian Hall, and I require admittance.\"\n\n\"I am \u2026 I am not alone in here,\" Sobyor said with a glance to his right.\n\n\"Who is in there with you?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"A pair of firewardens.\"\n\n\"Tell them\u2014,\" Wistala started to say.\n\n\"Hold your temper,\" Rainfall cut in. \"Sobyor, how is your practice in Thellass-tongue?\"\n\n\"Mus mis palandam,\" Sobyor responded.\n\n\"Rah-ya!\" Rainfall said. He rattled off a string of speech Wistala didn't understand, but it meant something to Sobyor.\n\n\"Opt,\" Sobyor replied, shutting the panel.\n\n\"What are you about?\" Wistala heard a gruff voice inside say. There was a brief rattle inside, perhaps a hand checking the lock on the door.\n\n\"My duty,\" Sobyor's voice replied.\n\nQuieter now: \"What was all that grotting about?\"\n\nThe voices faded.\n\n\"Wistala, how would you like to perform your first duty in defense of the Hypatian Order?\"\n\n\"Sir?\" Wistala asked, lowering and raising her head.\n\n\"There are airing windows up under the overhang of the roof on the side walls of this building. Climb up and see if you can get through one, and open the door.\"\n\nWistala didn't like leaving Rainfall perched on Stog at the big doorway; it seemed the whole town was laid out to look at the stairs leading up to the Hypatian Hall. She couldn't imagine what danger to expect, surrounded by paved streets and rain-collectors in the quiet of the night, but she didn't like it.\n\nThe columns were fluted, which served her claws admirably, and alternating grips between sii and saa, she gained the roof despite the slick mist-wet. The roof tiles were long and thicker than her sii, chevron-shapes interlocking as they descended from the peak, and spotted with generations' worth of bird droppings.\n\nShe lowered her head to look under the cornice at the side of the building and saw the gaps Rainfall had mentioned. They were recessed so that it would be hard to see them, let alone shoot arrows or other projectiles into them from the street. Wooden shutters filled the intermittent gaps.\n\nGripping the roof with one saa and her tail, she managed to poke one open. It gave way on a horizontal pivot-point with a loud\u2014to her\u2014squeak. Flattening herself, she crept in under the shutter.\n\nAn entrance gallery yawned below her. She looked down on a row of frozen head tops\u2014larger-than-life busts were on display on the inner side of the walls, and there was little to see beneath but a few benches. The back two-thirds of the building was blocked off by a wide staircase leading up to a semicircular forum, with banners on display above wooden doors.\n\nWistala heard voices from a smaller half-door set beneath the great stairs.\n\nShe lowered her tail and managed to test one of the busts below. It seemed solid enough. She jumped down to it and perched for a moment atop the great man's head\u2014he had a heavy brow and a nose of a size to equal the fame he must have gained in life to be so immortalized\u2014and from there leaped down to the floor.\n\nThe floor was smooth but a little dirty, and had a series of strange divots and channels carved into its surface, not deep at all and useful only in collecting dirt, as far as she could tell. But the object of this exploration was the door.\n\nOr door within a door, rather. There was a smaller portal set in the mighty wooden doors, barred by simple iron bolts set into tubes. She drew back the bolt on the smaller door and opened it.\n\n\"Daughter, you are a wonder,\" Rainfall said in his elf-tongue.\n\nWistala took pleasure in hearing the familiar, but wondered if she could ever call Rainfall father\u2014even in elf-tongue.\n\n\"I do not think you can ride Stog within unless I open the larger doors,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"I'll have to ask you to bear me inside.\" He slid off Stog, using a leather strap to lower himself by the hands in the manner of a laborer she'd once seen come down from Jessup's roof by taking a rope hand-under-hand. Then he switched to his rough beast tongue: \"Stog, this shall only take a moment. Don't befoul the steps, please.\"\n\nOnce he was seated upon her and holding on to her fringe, she took him through the door.\n\n\"Take me to the ingress under the stairs\u2014that's the attendant-judge's office.\"\n\nWistala bore him into the hall.\n\n\"Locks on a Hypatian hall door. Where are late-riding couriers supposed to shelter, or impoverished travelers? And what's this \u2026 the design on the floor's been taken up!\" Rainfall said as they passed the channels in the floor. \"Where had the poor gold gone, I wonder \u2026 gilding the cornices at Galahall, no doubt.\"\n\nFlickering light and voices came from beneath the stairs.\n\nRainfall sighed. \"This hall has become a tomb to old ideals. In my grandfather's time, at this hour there were travelers sleeping beneath the gaze of Iceandler, or Torus the Elder, the smell of pine knots burning in the braziers. I suppose the only crowds nowadays come on Taxing Day.\"\n\nWistala saw at the base of the ingress another door, half wood and half bars, with a sort of cut-off table in the middle and a space just big enough for a man to put his fist through above the table. On the other side, Wistala caught a glimpse of shelving, divided and subdivided into cubbyholes filled with tied scrolls.\n\nVoices and moving shadows came from the other side of the door.\n\n\"Careful with that light, there. You'll burn my ear off. Oh, now I can't see anything,\" Sobyor's voice echoed out into the hall.\n\n\"Take me to the grate,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala went down the eight steps to the area before the barred door. Some old, dirty quill-feathers lay on the floor.\n\n\"Ahem,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala heard quick startled steps inside, but kept her head down and out of sight.\n\n\"How did you get in?\" a rough voice barked.\n\n\"The more interesting question, firewarden, would be by what power you kept me out of a Hypatian Hall.\"\n\nRainfall's voice returned to its usual soothing melody: \"I just need the court's seal on the two small matters we spoke of earlier, Sobyor,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Prepared, and here's the logbook, as well,\" Sobyor said. \"Just as well to have all neat and proper.\"\n\n\"We're not to have any business with him,\" a shriller voice cut in.\n\nWistala heard a heavy tread step up to the grate, and smelled gar-locque and onion. The light from inside the room was almost shut off entirely. From seemingly atop her, Sobyor's voice said: \"Best sign it fast, sir. The wardens are restless tonight.\"\n\n\"Judge Kal will hear every particular!\" the shrill voice warned.\n\n\"Certain particulars will catch up to the high judge, one of these days,\" Rainfall said. She heard him writing. \"Wistala, your penny, please.\"\n\nShe passed it up to Rainfall. \"The transaction is witnessed by the court,\" Sobyor said. \"Make a record of Nuum Wistala's credentials.\"\n\nSobyor again, quieter: \"Is that the\u2014?\"\n\n\"I must make do as best as I can,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"What are you doing, there?\" the rough voice said.\n\n\"Completing a little court business,\" Sobyor said. \"You could read it yourself. If you could read.\" Wistala smelled a candle and hot wax. \"There. Signed, sealed, and seconded in the log.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sobyor,\" Rainfall said. \"You always were the best of men. I'll leave you to this gloom and the barred doors.\" He tapped Wistala.\n\n\"This will really get up the thane's nose,\" Sobyor cackled.\n\nAs she climbed the stairs bearing Rainfall, Wistala glanced back and got her first look at Sobyor. He was an enormous man, both tall and fat, with thick curly hair. No wonder the firewardens protested his behavior with words only. Sobyor closed one eye at her; then they were back in the entrance hall under the statues.\n\n\"That went better than expected,\" Rainfall said. \"Had there been a hostile low judge on duty, I would have had to submit petitions and so on, which could have slowed us up.\"\n\nIt seemed a slow enough business to Wistala, who was beginning to wish she'd burned Galahall down with Thane Hammar in it, saving trouble all around. Except that would have brought a frown to Rainfall's face. He set such a store in his legal niceties.\n\nThey walked the road a good deal slower on the trip home. Wistala trudged along ahead of Stog to keep the pace comfortable, but even Stog seemed tired. Rainfall passed the time by explaining to Wistala about the importance of the Thanes to the Hypatian Order: they could more effectively lead troops from their thanedom when gathered under a general than strangers and were supposed to be the shield and sword of the other elements of the Hypatian Order, the priesthood and the judges. But military power, pomp, and panoply went to some men's heads like wine.\n\nWistala was happy to see the twin hills at the edge of Mossbell's lands pop out against a suddenly pink sky. The far-off chain of snowy mountaintops to the east glowed orange as the dawn crept up.\n\nThen she heard a frighteningly familiar sound from ahead.\n\n\"I hear hoofbeats,\" Wistala said. \"Many riders.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Rainfall asked, waking. Stog halted.\n\n\"Riders ahead,\" Wistala repeated.\n\nRainfall looked down at her. \"Get off the road, Wistala. I'll handle them.\"\n\n\"I hope there's a few horses from the Galahall stables,\" Stog said. \"I'll give them\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving you alone,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Oh, I suppose your existence is public now. I'd hoped to wait until you were a little older and stronger.\"\n\nWistala sat in front of Stog and waited.\n\nThere were seven riders, two riding close to the edge of the road on either side, and the rest in back in a bunch that expanded and contracted as the horses trotted close to each other and then veered away.\n\nThe riding party spotted Stog, and the five in back formed into a line, blocking the road.\n\n\"Rah-ho,\" Rainfall said quietly to himself. \"The thane himself rides. This should be an interesting interview.\"\n\nWistala tried to guess which one was the thane. There was a tall powerful man all the way over to the left side in the group of five. He kept looking at the others.\n\nShe couldn't tell if they were arrayed for war, for they wore cloaks against the chill. The two in front had short horse-bows, and all wore helms of silver color\u2014no sign of spears or lances.\n\nThe men slowed, walking their horses up, the front two falling in a little closer to the others. One dropped back a little, as well. He was shorter than the others, perhaps some kind of servant to the warriors.\n\nRainfall bowed from his tied-on seat. \"Thane Hammar. How nice toto meet you on a chilly morning. Your countenance always warms me.\"\n\nAstonishingly, the one farthest to the rear spoke. \"Greetings! Rainfall of Mossbell. I won't say I was surprised, for I rode looking for you. Your thane recognizes you.\"\n\nRainfall bowed again.\n\nWistala examined him more closely. He was a youth, as far as she could judge men, perhaps Forstrel's age, but more slightly framed. Tiny wisps of facial hair at either side of his mouth made his upper lip look as though it had sprouted wings, and his cheeks were spotted. His red horse, though bigger than the ones the others rode, didn't bring him close to their head-height, and his helm, shinier than the others', swept up to a forward point like a hawk's beak, though it seemed overlarge and heavy for so small a head, for its brim came down almost to the bridge of his nose. He kept looking at Wistala from beneath it.\n\n\"News!\" Hammar said. \"I'm sorry to hear of your injury. I had no idea it was so severe, and word has just reached me. I wish to provide comfort.\"\n\n\"As usual, the thane is all kindness,\" Rainfall said. \"But there is no need for you to exert yourself in my behalf, or add to your cares. I am managing.\"\n\n\"I'll not be dissuaded. Your burdens must be lightened. Especially now that your granddaughter is happily returned to you\u2014\"\n\n\"Bearing your progeny,\" Rainfall said in a sterner tone.\n\n\"Please! Pay no attention to rumor,\" Hammar said. \"The brat might be anyman's. I've heard it was my stableboy. Or possibly one of the gamekeepers.\"\n\nWistala suddenly hated this half-grown bit of tailventing. Like Rainfall's history lectures or talks on leverage, nothing cleared and settled her mind like seeing, smelling, and hearing.\n\n\"I'm shocked to see a girl not yet sixteen so insulted, in so many despicable ways,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Watch your tongue, elf,\" the tall man on the left said. \"Notch!\" He turned his head toward the thane. \"I don't like the look of that creature in front of the mule. It seems ready to jump.\"\n\nThe two riders with bows put arrows to their strings, but did not draw.\n\n\"Wistala, stay still,\" Rainfall said.\n\nShe tried to keep her tail from moving, but it seemed possessed of a mind of its own.\n\n\"The road seems an uncouth place to trade words,\" Rainfall said. \"Perhaps you can return to Mossbell with us and we may talk over breakfast, once weapons are properly hung up.\"\n\n\"Goat-milk yogurt is not to my taste,\" Hammar said. \"I bear a warrant which must be answered in court. You shall appear before Judge Kal to answer. You're no longer fit to be the master of an imperial estate.\"\n\n\"Our opinions are alike, then,\" Rainfall said.\n\nThe thane's eyes widened. \"You are wise to acknowledge your limitations.\"\n\n\"Advice that might be taken as well as given. Our opinions are alike, but I've made my own arrangements. I've sold Mossbell.\"\n\nThe red spots on the thane's face suddenly seemed darker against his skin. \"To whom?\"\n\n\"Nuum Wistala, who you see before you.\"\n\n\"No! Nuum? This \u2026 creature?\" Hammar said.\n\n\"The creature before you is a titled Hypatian,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"It speaks,\" one of the men with the bows said.\n\n\"She's an Agent of the Librarians at Thellasa,\" Rainfall said. \"And my legal adopted daughter. Daughter, mind you, which takes precedence over granddaughter, should I meet with some unfortunate accident on this highway. The bill of sale is recorded.\"\n\n\"Ho! You are undone!\" Hammar said. \"This creature attacked Galahall not three months ago, intent on arson and assassination. I'll have you hanged for treason next to her hide!\"\n\n\"Please! Pay no attention to rumor,\" Rainfall said in a rather squeaky tone that mimicked Hammar's. \"I heard a two-headed, feathered lizard attacked Galahall. She has but one, and as for feathers, it's plain to see she bears none.\"\n\n\"Kill that creature!\" Hammar shrieked.\n\n\"Pull and loose!\" the tall man ordered.\n\nWistala hugged the road as the archers fired. The sharp strikes hurt, but the arrows bounded off down the road. The men couldn't have chosen a worse angle to fire upon dragonscale.\n\nStog screamed piteously, as though mortally wounded, though no arrows came anywhere near him.\n\nShe loosed her bladder, and the horses, already unnerved by Stog's bellows, began to dance at the smell. She shot forward, still piddling, a road-hugging green javelin moving straight for the thane. The thane's big red horse reared, its front hooves awhirl, and Hammar, perhaps overbalanced by the enormous helm on too slight a body, went backwards out of his seat.\n\nWistala pounced upon him, pinned his arms with her sii and left one saa pressed against his belly, ready to pierce and gut.\n\nHammar screamed, almost as loudly as Stog.\n\n\"Anyone draws a blade, and I open him,\" Wistala said to the men, who were fighting to control their horses.\n\n\"Hold, hold everyone!\" Rainfall shouted in his deep and commanding tone. Then in beast-tongue: \"Quiet, Stog.\"\n\nStog left off his bellows.\n\n\"Murder will only make things worse,\" Rainfall said. \"Hammar, you would spill blood on a road like some common brigand? You bring shame on your title. Let him up, Wistala.\"\n\nWistala, hot anger still in her veins, replied: \"Let me at least bite off a finger or two as a reminder not to\u2014\"\n\nHammar squeaked like a rabbit.\n\n\"Oh, very well,\" she said, releasing him. Rainfall knew the best course of action in this odd little world the hominids called civilization.\n\nHammar wiped his nose as he rose. \"Mark! You think you're so clever, elf. There are those who know how to deal with dragons. I've an acquaintance\u2014\"\n\n\"Killing a Hypatian Citizen of any line is murder, good thane. Come, let us forget this ever happened. I won't have Lada's child growing up fatherless. I will write to you.\"\n\n\"You are a famous correspondent,\" Hammar said, resettling the helm on his head. The tall man retrieved the thane's horse. \"Some might use the word informer. Know! I will write you, and if you do not agree to my terms, you'll find yourself in court again and again until you turn to wood like your forefathers. Then I'll have you made into chamberpot-coals.\"\n\nHis men chuckled. Rainfall came forward with Stog, and they parted. One put hand to hilt, but the thane barked at him and Rainfall passed through.\n\nWistala watched them until they were out of bowshot, then hurried to catch up with the mule.\n\nThey returned to Mossbell to find the household under frosted enchantment. The house looked beautiful beyond words to Wistala, with the greenery silvered. From the ferns clinging to the wide chimney to the grass from the fountain to the wall along the road\u2014a little despoiled by goat tracks\u2014the house looked fairy-dusted in the early dawn light.\n\nThe new owner of Mossbell and her steward left Stog to wander on the lawn.\n\nBut the enchantment ended as soon as Wistala carried Rainfall into the house.\n\n\"Sir, you've returned,\" Widow Lessup said. \"We're agog here. The thane! His Honor came looking for you in the night.\"\n\n\"We saw him on the road. I'm sorry I was out\u2014he didn't threaten anyone, I hope?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, sir! It's\u2014Lada's room, you must go up to her. She ran out to him, barefoot as a nymph. I'm not sure what was said, but she came back into the house in tears. She's barred her door somehow, and I'm afraid for her. I sent Forstrel for Mod Feeney. I was afraid she'd hurt herself!\"\n\nWistala bore him upstairs. Lada was still in her room, sobbing, with two of the Lessup girls outside, tapping on her door and trying to bring her a morning infusion.\n\n\"Anja, tell my granddaughter that I saw the thane on the road. I'd like to see her in my library. And if she doesn't want that infusion, I will be happy to have it. Tala?\"\n\n\"The library?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nWistala brought him up to the top floor\u2014the skylight admitted the diffuse morning light through a melting frost pattern. He moved from her back into his desk chair.\n\nRainfall sighed. \"I've not used them, but my legs feel terribly tired.\"\n\nAnja brought in the infusion, and Rainfall drank it gratefully. \"I'm forgetting you, my noble steed. Anja, can you\u2014?\"\n\n\"I can find food in the kitchen myself,\" Wistala said. She didn't like people waiting on her; not hunting for her meals seemed dissolute enough.\n\nLada appeared at the door, a housecoat over her nightdress, though she had on day-slippers and footwrap. Her nose was as red as the spots on the thane's cheeks. The part of her hair not bound up fell in loose curls that reminded Wistala of flowering vines, though unlike her grandfather's locks, her hair took after that of men or dwarves.\n\n\"Grandfather, I didn't dress but came at once.\"\n\nWistala made for the kitchen, but Rainfall halted her with a word. \"Tala, I want you here so you may bear witness to the truth of what I say.\n\n\"Lada, I hope you know you have my love, as does the child you are carrying.\"\n\nWistala's chin dropped at this.\n\nRainfall continued: \"You must listen to me now. You'll come to the truth of this fixation now or later, and you can spare yourself much pain by accepting it now: Thane Hammar does not love you, does not care for you, and has no intention of taking you into Galahall as his wife or anything else.\"\n\n\"Elves lie so\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's have none of that,\" Rainfall thundered. \"You're a fair token of elvish blood\u2014\"\n\nHe spoke no further, for Lada shrieked and threw herself against the bookcase with a wail. She began to cry, and push whole rows of books onto the floor.\n\nRainfall sighed.\n\nWistala stood frozen, paralyzed at the emotional display.\n\n\"Lada, stop that,\" Rainfall said.\n\nShe threw another set of books on the floor.\n\nWidow Lessup appeared at the library door. \"Sir, may I\u2014!\" Her mouth clamped shut when she saw Lada knock down a map hung between bookshelves and a scroll-case, and her lips pursed so tightly Wistala would have sworn she was about to spit foua.\n\n\"Sir,\" Widow Lessup said. \"May I take her in hand?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you can bring her to her room. An infusion might do her good.\"\n\n\"As you wish,\" Widow Lessup said. She marched over to the sobbing girl and grabbed her by the ear, twisting it the way she did her daughter's.\n\n\"Now come along\u2026 .\"\n\nLada shrieked even more loudly as Widow Lessup dragged her out of the room by the ear.\n\nRainfall sighed. \"Wistala, follow and see that no harm comes to my granddaughter.\" He moved from his chair to a lounge just behind his desk. \"I'm so very tired.\"\n\nWistala caught up to the pair just as they disappeared into the upstairs washing room. Lada was still in hysterics, sobbing until Widow Lessup overturned a pitcher of water on her head. That stopped the crying for a moment, and the matron shut the door in Wistala's face.\n\n\"Now let's hear your side of the story,\" Widow Lessup said. \"For I know my master's.\"\n\nNo harm seemed likely to come to Lada in the washing room. She was too big to fit down the drain, and a wooden scrub-stick couldn't hurt any worse than the tip of Mother's tail\u2014so Wistala went downstairs and assuaged her appetite in the cool room. She sneaked a pair of brass buttons out of the sewing room, the stress of the fight in the road having left her famished for metal, and immediately felt guilty and went back upstairs to confess to Widow Lessup, but she was still washing-closeted. Her voice could still be heard through the floor crack.\n\n\"Men and love! Ho! but that brings back memories. Sonnets and sour cabbage. Let me tell you about men and love, my dear\u2026 .\"\n\nShe checked on Rainfall and found him sleeping on his lounge, and diverted herself by reshelving the thrown-down books as best as she could. Rainfall's system wasn't pleasing to the eye at all; she preferred to shelve the books so that they made rising wings, with the shortest at the center of the shelf and the tallest at the edges.\n\nBut for some reason, she could only think of Auron and Father.\n\nMod Feeney arrived at Mossbell, worried that there were deaths and hangings within the walls at the very least. Within moments she, Lada, and Widow Lessup were all sitting in Lada's room with the two oldest Lessup girls.\n\nThe house was considerably calmer when Feeney left, but she had a short interview with Rainfall before returning to her other duties.\n\n\"I offered her a position as my acolyte in the Priesthood, after the baby comes,\" Mod Feeney said. \"But she seems bound to have it and wait for Hammar to claim fatherhood.\"\n\n\"He has little reason to, now that the estate is Wistala's.\"\n\n\"I fear for what may be tried next to wrest it from you,\" Mod Feeney said. \"By the rites, I owe my congratulations to our four-legged friend. Nuum Wistala, you have my duty.\"\n\nRainfall looked at the splash of sunlight on the floor as Yari-Tab, licking milk from her whiskers, plopped down in it. The feline had more or less adopted the library as hers, as it was the highest, sunniest, and warmest of Mossbell's rooms, and frequently claimed Rainfall's lap against some of her rangy kittens. \"Speaking of which, as the crisis seems to have passed, you might be about your rounds. Will you stay for lunch?\"\n\n\"I will wrap something from your kitchens, if it's not asking overmuch,\" Feeney replied.\n\n\"No, of course not.\"\n\nThe priestess bowed and left.\n\n\"She reminds me of my lack of manners. I should congratulate you, as well, Wistala. You're a well-propertied drakka now. Have you any thoughts? I've reason to believe there might be copper in the twin hills, if you wish to look into mines.\"\n\nCopper. My sole surviving brother. Is there anything of Father and Auron in him?\n\n\"All I care to do with these grounds is see that they help preserve you, and our friendship,\" Wistala said. \"And your granddaughter, even if she doesn't deserve you.\"\n\n\"For such a young dragon, you have already an old heart. Have some sympathy for such as her. It's the rare hominid that has much wisdom before a score of years pass.\"\n\nThe weather grew colder in the next few days, and little changed at Mossbell save for fewer harsh words and exasperated sighs from Lada, who seemed sick and moody and had trouble keeping food down. Mod Feeney and the Widow Lessup made a trip to a herbalist in Quarryness for medicines.\n\nThey returned following the strangest procession Wistala had ever seen upon the road, or anywhere her travels had taken her.\n\nThree great hairy beasts, almost the size of a dragon though taller, with tusks and flexible snouts that reached the ground and beyond, each pulled a one-and-a-half-level house on iron-rimmed wheels, with ox wagons and horse carts and dwarf-bearers besides.\n\n\"Ah, it's Ragwrist's Circus,\" Rainfall said. \"Later this year than usual; perhaps bad weather delayed him.\"\n\nForstrel made ready to put him on Stog's back, when summoned to the gates of Mossbell.\n\nWistala gaped at the long-haired creatures, for fully half the beasts were visible above Mossbell's road wall. Dwarves rode them just behind the head.\n\n\"Those are gargants, out of the glacier dells.\" Wistala just saw the head-tip of another, perhaps a young one, following behind one of the houses.\n\n\"What is a circus?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Entertainments, diversions, and wonders,\" Rainfall said.\n\nAn elf on a snow-white horse in a colorful striped coat turned into the gates of Mossbell. \"Come, if you please, Mistress Wistala, I think you'll like Ragwrist and he'll like you. At least I hope so.\"\n\nWistala couldn't imagine why it would matter if a traveling elf liked her or not, but she pulled her sii down her griff and smoothed her fringe. Mistress Wistala must look her part for greeting guests on her lands.\n\nRainfall had been calling Wistala by that title whenever in the presence of any of the estate's people, to impress upon them the change in ownership, though Wistala left all decisions in the care of her\u2014what was the position again? Oh yes, steward.\n\nRagwrist dismounted. He did have a colorful twist of twine about his wrist, but it was the coat that really caught her imagination. It was red and yellow and green and brown and several other colors, pleasantly arranged in panels and pleats, making him look like an aggregation of colorful bird feathers. His riding boots were of the deepest black and matched his hair, which reminded her of tree roots.\n\n\"Our homeleaf is graced,\" Rainfall called in Elvish.\n\n\"This traveler is comforted,\" Ragwrist answered. His voice had a heartiness to it and came from deep within his frame, and though he spoke normally his words carried from the road wall to the stable.\n\nThe elves embraced.\n\n\"Is that char-oil I smell in your hair?\" Rainfall said. \"Honorable frost is nothing to make one shamed.\"\n\n\"I'm not here the time it takes a drop to fall from a low cloud, and already I'm undone and reproached,\" Ragwrist said, though he kept glancing at Wistala.\n\n\"Neither,\" Rainfall said. \"How were the barbarian lands?\"\n\nRainfall straightened his coat's lapels and collars. \"Tiresome. In some villages they hid their children from us, and without their glad cries, a circus is a joyless place. We've come away with only enough to sustain us, and the wagons need new axles. There are improvements around here I see, and new faces.\"\n\nRainfall marked his pointed stare at Wistala. \"Poor manners, so glad was I to see your face and get the news. This drakka is Wistala, the rarest gem I've ever met on four feet. She's brought me back into the world, from hair-tip to foot-pad, and saved much more than my lands.\"\n\nWistala preferred that Rainfall's effusive manners remain directed at courtesy, as she felt little liking for praise that to her mind she hadn't earned. \"If you're old friends with Rainfall, you must know that he does go on sometimes,\" Wistala said.\n\nRagwrist danced in an elegant sort of balancing bow that put Wistala in mind of a goose drinking. \"Such Elvish!\"\n\n\"She's gifted with tongues. Her Parl is intelligible, though the palatals sound a bit loud.\n\n\"I was hoping you'd set up about the new inn near the bridge,\" Rainfall suggested. \"The owner is our good friend, and if you'd send your criers about, he'd welcome the chance to serve visitors.\"\n\nRagwrist sniffed the air about Wistala, looked as though he was going to say something, but turned back to Rainfall. \"Of course. Assuming the troll stays west of the road, that is.\"\n\n\"The troll is dead. Wistala's doing.\"\n\n\"This is news! Oh, we must have some wine and hear about this.\"\n\n\"Shall we meet inside in a dwar-hour?\"\n\n\"Let me say but a word to my lead gargant-dwarf, and then we shall drink. But quick! If we are to perform, I must attend as we encamp.\"\n\n\"May I see the show?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Nothing would please me better,\" Ragwrist replied. \"Provided you stay downwind, if I may abjectly beg your pardon. We have horses, and they are not used to a dragon's airs.\"\n\nWistala did watch from downwind, and enjoyed herself immensely.\n\nThey placed the three wagons in a line in the fields next to the inn, with tenting flanking wagons to somewhat conceal the behind.\n\nThe wagons themselves unfolded on one side so as to make a linked stage, with poles that Rainfall told her were as tall as ship-masts set at either end with a cable between. Balancing acts, exhibitions of swordfighting, and even a comical dwarf negotiated the line from one pole to the other with some skill in the case of the former, and a great many shrieks of fear and expostulations from the latter.\n\nThe dwarf wavered midway, trying to prove that he could do anything an elf could and now apparently regretting it, for he kissed his hand and then slapped his behind with a ribald oath in preparation. At the next step he fell to the joined screams of the crowd and disappeared for one eyeblink into the stage with a crash that struck Wistala as coming an instant too soon. But the dwarf bounced back up, high in the air, then came down on the stage with a loud thud.\n\n\"Dwarves always bounce back!\" he roared to the crowd.\n\nOn the stages men threw axes in such a way that they cut plums from branches, which they then threw to the children; hominid females in clothing so scanty that Wistala wondered how they avoided lung infections danced or sang or jumped and turned and tumbled so high, it seemed they were made of air and sunshine.\n\nIn between the shows the dwarves brought a gargant out for the amazement of all, and one of the dwarf handlers let the gargants rear up and put an enormous foot on each shoulder as he knelt, then with shaking legs he came to his feet.\n\nThe underdressed hominids came out again, riding horses around the crowd as those at the back suddenly had the best view and others fought for position. They stood on their horses' backs, or leaped between mounts, or dropped off the sides of the horses and vaulted from one side to the other, and finished by rearing their horses up and having them turn circles.\n\nWistala wondered if Rainfall's mate had once performed such tricks from under a few wisps of thin cloth.\n\nWith the shows ended, Ragwrist came out and announced that any in the crowd could have their fortune read\u2014\"If you dare!\"\u2014in the blue tent by the famous Intanta, possessor of a shard of the seeing-star, which fell to earth in the days of the dragons and had been the object of no less than six wars.\n\nOthers could visit the green tent, where the finest crafts from around the Hypatian Empire and beyond even the Golden Road in Wa'ah could be found\u2014\"Happy is the wife possessed of even the smallest bauble bought or traded from our display!\"\u2014at bargains merchant-houses couldn't afford to give thanks to the need to keep a roof overhead.\n\n\"So what do you think of the circus, Wistala?\" Rainfall asked from Stog's back as Stog's ears followed the pounding hooves around the audience.\n\n\"Delightful! I've never seen happier people,\" Wistala said. \"They all perform as though driven by joy, rather than the coins flung at them.\"\n\nRainfall leaned down. \"Some of the coins are thrown by the circus men themselves, to give others in the audience the example. They are more often paid in eggs and cheese. But I am pleased you enjoyed yourself. Ragwrist is one of my oldest and dearest friends\u2014though a sharp rascal, as you will learn.\"\n\nWistala wondered what the last portended. Rainfall sometimes preceded action with an assortment of exploratory statements to judge reaction, like a cook tasting broth as the ingredients went in.\n\nMany of the performers continued their exhibitions, informally of course, in Jessup's tavern that evening. Rainfall held a dinner in his long dining room for Ragwrist and a few of his \"Old Guard\"\u2014the expression in Parl was one of Rainfall's, but Ragwrist seemed to know who he meant.\n\nThey gathered around two mismatched tables covered by a single ill-fitting cloth, sitting on chairs that had been brought in from other rooms\u2014Rainfall's better dining furniture had been sold off in his years of want, and there were candelabras under the fitting for the missing chandelier.\n\nOther than Ragwrist, who had cast off his colorful coat for a plain black long-shirt, were Intanta the fortune-teller\u2014a toothless old woman who turned her food into mash, the dwarf Brok, the long-bearded lead gargant-driver, who stuck his facial hair in a special sleeve to keep the food off it, and a horse trainer named Dsossa, whose tight-bound white hair seemed brittle as ice, though otherwise she looked human.\n\nDsossa and Rainfall seemed to share some special understanding, for they clasped warmly on her entry and touched hands frequently throughout dinner.\n\nWistala, who had eaten earlier, sat at the far end of the table and crunched the others' fishheads and tails\u2014smoked fish from the fall's salmon run up the Whitewater River had been served\u2014as they finished their meals and started on their wines. As they reminisced, she learned that Brok, in his wild youth, had been judged by Rainfall after he was caught breaking into a bakery to steal food. Rainfall offered him one year of quarrying stone or two years indentured to Ragwrist.\n\nOf Intanta she learned nothing, for the old woman kept silent save for a polite comment or two. But as the conversation echoed events she'd never seen and faces she'd never known, she began to doze.\n\nShe awoke to a rattle before her. Someone had rolled a coin down the table so that it dropped off the edge before her nose.\n\n\"Yes?\" Wistala asked, as wide awake as she'd been deep asleep a moment before.\n\n\"A coin for a good story, green daughter of the skies and the earth's deepest flame,\" Ragwrist said. \"I want to hear how you disposed of the troll!\"\n\n\"I hardly did it alone,\" Wistala said. \"And I'll tell without asking for payment. I might as well ask for money to look at me.\"\n\nRagwrist laughed, and Wistala liked the easy sound of it. \"Ho! Our ears are quite closed to that line of argument. Rainfall says coin aids your digestion or somesuch. There'll be another if I'm well entertained.\"\n\nWistala told it again, imitating the noises as she had with the courier dwarves. She found she took less pleasure from remembering the events and more from her audience's reaction. She was rewarded with a coin from Ragwrist and another from Brok, and they soon joined the others within, leaving Wistala in a contented mood.\n\n\"I have a suggestion, Wistala,\" Rainfall said. \"Will you hear it?\"\n\n\"I'll hear anything from you,\" Wistala said.\n\nRainfall looked around the table and got nods from everyone save Intanta, who dozed. \"I'm of the opinion you should travel for a while with Ragwrist's circus.\"\n\nShe didn't have to think about it. \"I can neither ride nor clown. I can't imagine what use I'd be.\"\n\n\"Will you hear my reasons?\" Rainfall said.\n\nShe tired of having her head raised above table edge\u2014she became light-headed if she went nose-up too long\u2014and approached the party and wound herself into a circle next to the table. \"Of course.\"\n\nRainfall brought two fingers together under his chin. \"First: Hammar now has a grudge against you. Your life is all that stands between him and possession of Mossbell, its lands, and the bridge. He's not above hiring even the Dragonblade. He fears no murder charge.\"\n\nTwo more fingers came together. \"Second: in happier days it was the custom, as part of a High Hypatian's education, to tour the cities of the Empire, the Inland Ocean, and such lands on the borders as are of interest. I've begun your education with the few poor volumes left in my library, but I want you to become worldly in the best sense of the word, and love the greater Order as I do. You cannot travel in the normal manner\u2014once I'd thought of taking you on a few brief journeys myself, but since\u2014well, I won't repeat the obvious.\"\n\nHe brought the rest of his fingertips together. \"Lastly: our rate of sheep and goat, lamb and kid consumption is alarming, and will only grow with you. A prosperous circus should be able to afford your upkeep.\"\n\n\"Prosperous?\" Ragwrist objected. \"You haven't seen my accounting recently. Bled by\u2014\"\n\nRainfall ignored the interruption. \"And consider this: You will eventually sprout your wings, perhaps wish to find a mate. You'll have more knowledge of the lands, though I should like you to return now and again\u2014in fact, the law will require it.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"The thane will have you declared legally dead if you do not show yourself at least every five years. Of course, there are provisions, were you to be serving in the Hypatian forces, for your existence to be verified, but I mention it more in hopes of receiving visits from you than as a legal matter.\"\n\n\"We come up the Old North Road every two or three years, in any case,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"What would I do? Stand like an exhibited animal?\"\n\n\"That would hardly pay for your food,\" Ragwrist said. \"Wistala, I will offer you the same terms all my other entertainers get. You pay me each new moon for your food and sheltering\u2014\"\n\n\"He only adds the smallest of surcharges,\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"Ho!\" Ragwrist said. \"I take great trouble managing the supplies; I've yet to receive thanks for procuring palatable wine among the Vang Barbarians or those Pellatrian ascetics! But back to the deal: I receive a tenth-part of such coin as you acquire in your displays\u2014\"\n\n\"Fair warning,\" Brok said. \"If you keep three coins in ten out of his clutches after upkeep and surcharges, you're doing very well!\"\n\n\"If I'm such a scoundrel, I wonder why you've been with me these threescore years, my good dwarf?\" Ragwrist asked.\n\n\"There are skimmers in all walks of life, but few do it with such pleasant smiles and compliments,\" Brok replied.\n\n\"And I've a soft heart and softer head for honeyed words,\" Dsossa added. \"Being cheated by Ragwrist is painless.\"\n\nRagwrist extended his arm and pointed to a patch at the elbow of his shirt. \"Cheated! Do I look like a rich man? My teeth are worn down from biting off the ends of pencils to keep accurate track of expenses, and my voice grows hoarse haggling over quality of flour, all so my beautiful riders may keep flesh on breast and hip.\"\n\n\"They would happily be spared your frequent evaluations of same,\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"I will sympathize after I see the accounting books of the Diadem dwarves, who you yearly visit with chest-laden pony,\" Brok said.\n\n\"This is the reward for generosity, Wistala!\" Ragwrist said, turning to the young drakka. \"Wild tales! Accusations.\"\n\n\"How would I earn?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"A dragon is an attraction, certainly,\" Ragwrist said, pulling his hair behind his elegantly shaped ears. \"One so well-spoken even more so. But while your aspect inspires admiration, and later awe as you grow, we must marry that quality to a reliable moneymaker for you and the Circus at large.\"\n\n\"I'm all interest,\" Rainfall said. \"I thought she might just do fireworks.\"\n\n\"Any competent chemist can make better,\" Ragwrist said before turning back to Wistala. \"I mean for you to be my new fortune-teller.\n\nIntanta all this year has begged to return to her family, now stretching four generations beyond her, but I've hesitated, for her prot\u00e9g\u00e9s have been disappointments.\"\n\n\"I've tol' ye manys,\" Intanta said with a yawn. \"A fair smile's fine, but sen' a girl of wits. Lev' her know when to keep those teeth hi' and be silent, for the signs are best read in silence.\"\n\nSome of Wistala's warmth for Ragwrist left her. \"I've no gift at that sort of thing. I can hardly foretell the afternoon weather on a fine morning.\"\n\n\"It's part skill, part showmanship,\" Ragwrist said. \"You can better both with practice.\"\n\n\"To tell folk what they wish to hear takes no skill a'tall,\" Intanta said. \"The trick is the know of which wor' their ears long for. Aye, there's the magic.\"\n\n\"That seems like \u2026 lying,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Not lying,\" Ragwrist said. \"Offering\u2014guidance. Insight. Your opinion. People bring their dreams and fears into Intanta's tent, and come out happier and better prepared for meeting both. Is that so bad?\"\n\nWistala felt confused and crunched some fish bones to hide the fact.\n\n\"Ragwrist can talk a falcon out of his talons,\" Brok said.\n\n\"I should decline,\" Wistala said. \"Kind as your offer is.\"\n\n\"Don't be so hasty!\" Ragwrist said. \"Talk to some of the other performers. Join the circus and see the world! See the fishing boats come in across an Antodean sunset, or the Grand Arena of Hypat, the crystal waters of Ba-drink under the mountain towers of the Wheel of Fire, the red pennants flying from the walls of Kark\u2014\"\n\n\"Rainfall! Save us from this travelogue!\" Brok said. But Wistala didn't hear him. She'd stopped listening as soon as Ragwrist mentioned the Wheel of Fire.\n\n\"How often do you visit these places?\"\n\n\"We have regular routes,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"And you'll return to this good elf and enjoy his gentle talk that washes all road-weariness away,\" Dsossa said. Wistala marked warmth in her gaze and new softness in her voice.\n\n\"When does the circus leave?\"\n\n\"We'll perform again tomorrow, and then pack up,\" Ragwrist said. \"The winter is rather ahead of us.\"\n\n\"You will have my answer before you leave.\"\n\nWistala spent a sleepless night thinking of dwarves and the Dragonblade, promises and parentage. Unable to sleep, she walked around and around Mossbell and the barn, until one of Widow Lessup's daughters tossed the cold ashes from last night's fire on others in the dustpile.\n\nThe next day Hammar and a party from Galahall rode in to see the circus and sample the wine and drink of the inn. Rainfall, at the urging of his granddaughter, offered him the use of Mossbell's stables. Fortunately his party arrived early, before Lada was properly dressed and coiffed.\n\nHammar paid only the briefest call on Rainfall, and Wistala watched from her former nook. After barely perceptible bows and cold pleasantries Rainfall invited Hammar to dinner after the show.\n\n\"I will decline,\" Hammar said, refusing a chair brought by Forstrel with a wave. When he didn't have the oversize helmet on his head, he was a more pleasing youth, especially when clad in a dark riding cloak and festive winter neck-cloth.\n\n\"Have you read my letter?\"\n\n\"Unless you have any proof beyond the words of a girl of dubious parentage, I wondered why you bothered.\"\n\nRainfall leaned forward. \"Both of us are guilty of hard words to each other in the past. I fought your assumption of the thane-title on your father's death, and you have coveted my property as more suitable ground for the thane-seat than Galahall. The coming child gives us a chance at alliance in Hypatia's interest, if for no other reason. I offer you this chance before we become enemies.\"\n\n\"Open enmity?\" Hammar asked. \"That's not like you. As to chances, I've higher title, better men, and enough good yew bows to feather the creature better than that torn pillow. You took too great a gamble when you put so much hope into one scaly beast. Its head will adorn my trophy room.\"\n\nRainfall cocked an ear toward her panel door, perhaps fearing a telltale creek.\n\n\"She's a Hypatian Citizen, and I hear murder being threatened against her in my own receiving hall. Hypatian law is greater than any man, yea even a thane.\"\n\n\"Law is only as strong as the men to enforce it,\" Hammar said. \"And here, I'm the law. I'll wish no good day to you, elf.\" Hammar turned on his heel and strode out the door.\n\n\"I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to just give him Mossbell,\" Rainfall said to her when she emerged.\n\n\"How can I ease your cares?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"You're careworn enough, stomping around the grounds last night. Go watch the circus and forget all worries.\"\n\nSo Wistala watched the antics again from a discreet corner of the inn's roof, sheltered from the wind by a warm chimney. The audience, prosperous farmers and tradesmen, were better dressed today, and had ridden from farther away to attend, answering the calls of Ragwrist's announcement-riders. Jessup's Inn\u2014she couldn't call it the Green Dragon, the name seemed silly to her\u2014had a number of parties staying.\n\nNumerous bills and messages were tacked to the notice-post in front of the inn, surrounded by those literate enough to read and discuss the news as they passed, but the local talk of villains wanted for hanging and auctions left off when Lada walked across the road from Mossbell, intent on seeing the circus and attended by Forstrel.\n\nShe looked lovely, Wistala guessed, judging from the stares of the locals, in her heavy fur-trimmed coat, which hid the small increase at her midsection, hair under its cap curled and tucked so it resembled a bouquet of flowers. Her eyes and cheeks, brightened by the cold of the day, glowed.\n\nAll eyes were on her but the ones she sought. When Hammar rose from his chair before the stage and took his party of huntsmen to the inn for a new cask to tap, he walked out of his way to avoid her at the edge of the crowd. She fought her way through, tripped and muddied herself, but managed to come up on the men at last.\n\nWistala didn't catch what she said, but she did hear her call out to him.\n\nThane Hammar stared at her for a moment and then turned his back. The tall man who'd given orders on the road stepped forward. Two of the men at the tail-end of Hammar's party slapped each other, pointed to her, and laughed.\n\nLada broke into tears and fled the circus.\n\nWistala didn't overly care for Lada, whatever Rainfall's regard for his granddaughter, but even if she was an ungrateful whelp, she didn't deserve contempt.\n\nWistala decided.\n\nShe missed the rest of the circus to hurry back and speak with Rainfall, once he emerged from Lada's room in the small barrow-chair Forstrel moved him about in.\n\n\"I want to stay at Mossbell,\" Wistala told him as Widow Lessup sighed at the dirty dragon-tracks on the stairs. \"If things go hard with the thane, I want to be at your side, Father.\"\n\n\"It will fade. Hammar will put an arrow through a winter wolf or a mountain bear and forget all in boasting,\" Rainfall said. \"But your presence here might tempt him into rashness.\"\n\n\"I'm set.\"\n\n\"Oh, my poor floors. I wish she would go away,\" Widow Lessup said to herself\u2014loudly enough for all in the upstairs to hear\u2014as she bent with a rag.\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" Wistala said.\n\nRainfall sighed and scratched her between the ears. \"I shan't be sorry for your company. You are a far smoother ride up these bumpy stairs than this barrow-chair. I suppose next spring I can teach you how to properly tend the garden, even if vegetables aren't to your taste.\"\n\nWistala heard feet hurrying up and down stairs the next morning\u2014more than the usual morning noises. There'd been another raucous celebration with the circus folk, but Wistala had kept to her low room. When Anja threw open the door of Wistala's basement refuge, she knew something had put the household in disarray.\n\n\"Is Lada down here?\" Anja asked.\n\n\"Why should she be?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"She's not in her room, and sir's asked for her,\" she explained, hurrying off.\n\nWistala wondered at her absence. She might have gone for a walk\u2014save that nothing tempted Lada from a warm bed in the morning until a steaming infusion roused her. She yawned, stretched, and went upstairs to the lively sounds of running feet and doors slamming.\n\nShe heard Rainfall in his dressing room. As she walked through his bedroom, she smelled fresh ink by the bed\u2014it was very unlike Rainfall to work in his bedroom. He might stay up all night in his library but believed in leaving any cares elsewhere when it came time to go to the dreamworld.\n\nForstrel was pulling Rainfall's riding boots on, an easy operation, thanks to the somewhat withered state of the elf's legs.\n\n\"She was in a mood last night,\" Rainfall said. \"I should have talked to her.\"\n\n\"What has passed?\" Wistala asked.\n\nForstrel finished with the boots and handed Rainfall a woolen vest.\n\n\"Lada has run away, I fear. She took her new winter boots, her hairbrush and comb, her favorite book of Tenessal's poems, and riding habit. Anja said there was a wet quill on her desk, but we found no note.\"\n\n\"Note? Have you checked your bed?\"\n\nForstrell didn't wait to be told but hurried over to the bed and overturned pillows and heavy winter blankets. He came up with a folded piece of paper.\n\n\"Wistala, you're a wonder,\" Rainfall said, accepting the paper. \"How\u2014? Oh, I suppose you smelled the ink, or paper, or her footsteps. You'll all excuse me for a moment while I read this?\"\n\nWistala and Forstrel stepped out of his dressing room and eyed each other.\n\n\"Fried fish for breakfast, I suppose?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I hope,\" Forstrel said. \"With tart applesauce. But we'll miss it, I'll fear.\"\n\nWistala heard a sigh from the dressing room, followed by a chuckle. \"The joke's on me, Wistala. Rah-Ya. Forstrel, my cloak and hat!\"\n\n\"What does she say?\"\n\nRainfall held the letter at arm's length and squinted. \"After the usual summation of my crimes against youth, including entailing away Mossbell, which she quite regards as hers, she informs me that she's joining Ragwrist's circus so that the local shepherds no longer snicker at her. So by the circus I gained a bride and lost a grandchild. I must go after her, but I suspect it will be futile.\"\n\n\"Why futile?\"\n\n\"She's old enough to be apprenticed on her own word. If she's earning her keep, the law gives me no recourse, and I'm not up to dragging her back by her hair.\"\n\n\"I will be happy to pull my share of the locks.\"\n\n\"Then you can come along. It'll give Ragwrist one more chance to talk you into joining. I hope Stog is in the mood for a quick trot. The sun is up, and they'll be across the bridge by now. I don't want to pursue too far into the next thanedom.\"\n\nRainfall rode Wistala down to the yard, and Forstrel helped him up on Stog. Stog stamped his foot when he saw Wistala.\n\n\"Drakka! Didn't you hear me call out last night?\"\n\nWistala watched Forstrel secure Rainfall on his special saddle. \"I heard you bellowing, but I thought it was just another fight with Jalu-Coke about using her claws to get up on your back.\"\n\n\"I saw an old not-friend in the party of the thane's horses. A mountain horse named Hob. Let me tell you what it signifies: Hob is a courier horse for the Dragonblade. One of the Dragonblade's men was in the thane's party yesterday. He poked around the grounds all day. You're in danger.\"\n\n\"I didn't catch all that, Wistala. What's he worried about?\"\n\n\"Nothing of importance,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"He most definitely said danger, didn't you, Stog?\" Rainfall said as he set the mule toward Mossbell's gate.\n\n\"Danger to Wistala!\" Stog brayed.\n\n\"Let's have it!\" Rainfall said. \"I don't want to play score-question with you.\"\n\n\"One of the Dragonblade's men was here yesterday, riding with the thane.\"\n\n\"Hammar wastes no time. Wistala, all I know of this fellow makes me fear for you. Certainly he won't kick down Mossbell's door to get you\u2014at least I hope he won't\u2014but we must have some thought on the matter together.\"\n\nThey found the circus still packing up, with dwarves frantically fastening harnesses on their gargants, whose appetites added to the cleared meadow behind the inn. Many of Ragwrist's circus folk were red about the eyes\u2014perhaps the empty mead barrels stacked on the south side of the Green Dragon Inn, being cleansed by winter cold and sun, had something to do with it.\n\nRagwrist, again in his colorful coat and walking his horse about, left off shouting orders and greeted them. He waved Dsossa over, who looked perkier than most in her riding gear with lead lines hanging over her shoulders like a frilled cloak.\n\n\"I won't ask why you're here,\" Ragwrist said with his elegant, balancing bow. \"Do you wish to speak to her?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Rainfall said. \"Thank you, old friend.\"\n\n\"Just as well we were delayed in our departure,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"Only because you've not issued orders with your usual vigor,\" Dsossa put in.\n\n\"Dsossa, bring your new horsehand forward.\" She trotted her horse toward the last of the gargant houses-on-wheels.\n\nWistala watched the gargants being brought into line, along with laden wagons drawn by more brutes. The smell of all the horseflesh reminded her of her missed breakfast.\n\nI've been too long indoors if I'm regretting my third meal in the sun's track, Wistala thought.\n\nDsossa brought forth Lada. There was some reluctance on the younger's part, but Dsossa kept a firm grip and so brought her to her grandfather.\n\n\"I thought your story of the farewell kiss a bit overripe,\" Ragwrist said to Lada. \"Here is your grandfather. Say farewell properly.\"\n\n\"Lada, what are you doing, pray tell?\" Rainfall asked.\n\n\"I want to leave this place!\" she said. \"I'll make my own way in the world.\"\n\n\"Sixteen years of experience and already so worldly?\" Rainfall asked.\n\nLada raised her chin. \"It is too late, Grandfather. I've signed a contract and been apprenticed.\"\n\n\"Ragwrist!\" Rainfall said, and seemed to run out of words after that.\n\n\"Ho!\" Ragwrist said. \"There's always use for a pretty face and figure in a circus. She knows something of horses.\"\n\n\"She used never to leave Avalanche's stall,\" Rainfall said, leaning forward on Stog's neck for support. \"As horses are one of the nobler passions I indulged her. Oh, me!\"\n\n\"Come, come,\" Ragwrist said, winking broadly at Rainfall in a manner Lada could not see. \"I will not break the contract. It's only a four-year apprenticeship. I intend to teach her much of value. You'll see her when we next go north, perhaps in as little as a year and a season, and she may be better disposed to your roof after an absence.\"\n\n\"Did she tell you she is with child?\"\n\n\"Don't worry, my friend,\" Ragwrist said. \"She's young and strong, and old Intanta has seen a hundred babes into the world. We've even got a priest in the caravan, so the child will be properly named under her stars and the Hypatian gods.\"\n\n\"I shall still\u2014Wistala!\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Yes, Father?\" Wistala said, though she suspected what was coming.\n\n\"I asked you once before to travel with Ragwrist. Now I beg you, beg you as I've never begged in my life. I'll feel better knowing you are with her.\"\n\nWistala looked at the familiar stretch of road, the new inn, the twin hills to the north \u2026 Just land. It was the old elf she'd miss, his little readings from books and his lessons\u2014\n\n\"I will. But I still say I can tell no fortunes.\"\n\n\"Must she come!\" Lada didn't so much ask as shout.\n\n\"Watch that tongue, girl. It's for Ragwrist to say,\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"We have no enemies in the circus, Lada,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"Sir!\" Wistala blurted. \"I should tell you\u2014I'm being hunted\u2014maybe\u2014by a man called the Dragonblade.\"\n\n\"She's done him no wrong,\" Rainfall put in. \"She's marked by her breed and by the events I told you of the other night.\"\n\n\"Ho! You've found the soft spot in my heart, Wistala. Lost causes and refugees. No circus is complete without them. Have no fear, we are capable of guarding our own. But I see the gargants are in line and all is ready. Everyone must say their promises and farewells quickly. Rainfall! I look forward to my next visit and Mossbell's table\u2014and the Green Dragon's mead, sir.\" He extracted a silver tube from his coat; it rattled as though a pea were inside, and he blew into it. A piercing, whistling call like a kingbird song, only amplified, seemed to travel right through Wistala's skull.\n\nThe gargants creaked into motion.\n\nRagwrist led his horse to the head of the column, where some ragged-looking horsemen awaited.\n\n\"The place will smell more wholesome with you gone,\" Stog said quietly.\n\nWistala couldn't jest with him. \"Take care of our master,\" she said in the beast tongue, and gave the same caution to Forstrel at the lead line in Parl. He bowed.\n\nRainfall said to her: \"You must write often, and let no opportunity for learning pass. Keep an eye out in the bookstalls for the paired volumes of Alantine's moral-plays, would you? I've had no luck buying my copies back. Lada, will you take my hand and go with my blessing?\"\n\nShe took it, but held it at a distance. \"As long as I may go and forget this place and everyone in it.\"\n\n\"Back to the wagon with you, girl,\" Dsossa said.\n\nDsossa lingered. \"Can I trust you to think of yourself for a change?\" she asked Rainfall.\n\n\"You're too kind,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"I grow tired of the road. Are you still thinking of raising horses at Mossbell?\"\n\n\"That was before my son \u2026 ,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"May I write you with my plans?\"\n\n\"Ahh, I'm too old to be of any use to you.\"\n\n\"That's not an answer.\"\n\nRainfall took her hand. \"I delight in letters. Send me as many details as you care to. But any substantial improvements in the place will need the owner's approval.\"\n\n\"Mossbell is yours as it always was,\" Wistala said.\n\nDsossa backed away. \"I will write. Good-bye, sir.\"\n\n\"It's hard to leave, at the last,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"I fear Mossbell is too small to be much longer a real home to you,\" Rainfall said. \"But hold it in your heart as such.\"\n\nThe gargants were already on the road, and the wagon wheels struck up a chorus of ground gravel.\n\n\"Don't eat all the coins you earn,\" Rainfall said.\n\nRagwrist trotted up on his horse. \"Well, sir, as usual, I wish I could stay with you through the full course of a moon and then some, but duty to my poor fellowship\u2014\"\n\n\"You may spare me the act, you old rascal,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Wistala, you will ride in the second car, second gargant, inside or up top as is your choice. That's Intanta's spot. She shares with a pair of jewel smiths and the laundry pots, but there will be ample room.\"\n\nWistala looked at the column, already a dragon-dash away. She must run to catch up.\n\n\"Until we meet again, elf-father,\" she said.\n\n\"That will be a happy day, dragon-daughter.\"\n\n\"Go on!\" Ragwrist shouted. \"Or do you have another list of books your library lacks?\"\n\nWistala hurried away, leaving Ragwrist and Rainfall talking in the road.\n\nShe ran as best as she could to catch up, and heard horse hooves behind.\n\n\"Don't look so sad, Wistala,\" Ragwrist called from the saddle. \"What dragon heart doesn't yearn for adventures in other lands?\"\n\n\"One that knew happiness where she was,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Mossbell keeps a little piece of an older and better world. But our good elf wants you to see what else civilization holds. Believe me, you'll value him all the more after a few months in the heart of Hypat. See the ladder to the roof of the car? Jump to it and knock on the door in back and they will accept you. They know you are coming.\"\n\nSecond Moon of the Winter Solstice, Res 471\n\n\u2003Beloved Father,\n\n\u2003You will recognize the hand as Lada's, though the words are mine. I write you from the Salt Road west of Hypat, with the sound of the ocean near in the great estuary of the Falnges. All in the circus are in good health. (Grandfather, that's not true, I'm sick day and night, but Intanta says it's the babe's doing!\u2014L)\n\n\u2003It turns out we are not the only ones who joined at Jessup's Inn. One of Jalu-Coke's young toms made himself likable to Brok, perhaps an affinity for one almost as dark, big-eyed, and hairy, and now they are inseparable.\n\n\u2003Lada, after a few days with the horses and draft animals (They worked me like a pigfarmer's own hand, Grandfather!) was put to work caring for me (scooping dragon\u2014-t, she means) and under the tutelage of Intanta and the other older women of the circus. Though Intanta has no teeth, I think her tongue has grown overlarge and sharp to replace them, and she keeps your granddaughter busy. (Slaving! At laundry and sewing if there's not filthier duties at hand.)\n\n\u2002We have enough to eat, just, and are only beginning to know our work well during the \"open\" and \"close\" that comes with every relocation. They have me climbing up and down poles with lines\u2014I've learned something of knots\u2014I see looking over Lada's shoulder that she is adding commentary. (And why not? I've a right to address my own grandfather!)\n\n\u2002As to fortune-telling, I have observed Intanta and her mysterious crystal through a veiled tent-hole several times. Intanta tries to point out how she makes guesses at the contents of her \"seekers' \" lives and hearts by dress, or jewelry, or grooming, or even the rough spots on their hands, but I can't keep such details. I can tell elf from dwarf, and that is about all.\n\n\u2002Lada helps with the costumes of the riders during the performances. (She means the girls throw their sweaty rags at me and yell for the next piece of flimsy all at once, eight hands would not be enough!)\n\n\u2002In happier news, I have seen some of the towns and cities of the Falnges and I never imagined such crowds of people. I am brought out to set a straw-stuffed man on fire at shows, and sometimes I am pelted with fruit (which she makes me pick out of her scales!) though Ragwrist overdramatizes the danger of such acts. Fruit is better than arrows or the deadly looking crossbow bolts our dwarven gargant-drivers carry.\n\n\u2002I imagine Ragwrist is regretting the expense of our food rations! I cannot see that I am earning him much money. (So he makes me do twice as much work! He is quite cruel, Grandfather.) I fear your granddaughter has not seen any real cruelty in her life to put that in\u2014and I hope she never will. (I have been treated cruelly by those who I thought loved me!) I fear this letter is dissolving into nonsense.\n\n\u2002We are now at two-moon's camp on the estate of Director Emeritus Pondus, and many of the circus have left to see family or spend their earnings in the spirit houses. The dwarves are busy patching, mending, and building, and Brok is at work on some kind of harness for me. If you write soon, a letter is sure to reach us here. Rainfall has made up the itinerary for our summer in the southlands, and I enclose it so that you may know our schedule.\n\n\u2002I (we) remain your grateful family, Wistala (and Lada, who would like to know if Thane Hammar has spoken of regretting me?)\n\nWhen the two-moon rest ended, the circus took to the roads south and visited Shryesta, with air fragrant of honey and dates, home of the Amber Palace, where the Hypatian Directors held their spring and fall meetings. They saw Vinde, with its waterfalls and famous jeweled bridges, and the sea-elf city of Krakenoor, thick with water gardens and the lively trade of its boardwalks. They played at Fount Brass, home of a thick-limbed race of men who counted dwarves in their ancestry, who rode on even thicker horned-and-hided mounts, and finally the riverside city of Adipose, whose skilled papermakers and glassblowers brought coin for even the lowliest apprentice and slave.\n\nWistala grew slowly that summer on her meals of stewed offal mixed with a few choice tidbits saved \"for the dragon\" by Brok and Dsossa. She found she enjoyed the chaos behind the line of wagons during performances more than the shows themselves\u2014performers painting their faces with dyes and powders, adorning hair and body, readying their props. She bounced on the stretched canvas the clown-dwarf used for his drop from the tightrope, and some of the performers took to rapping her scales or touching the Agent Librarian medallion. She now wore the emblem between her eyes on a double-strand of chain the jeweler-women created for it.\n\nShe grew to love them all.\n\nThe one personality she still wondered about was Intanta. Fortune-telling seemed like a cheat to Wistala, though the \"seekers\" left her tent happier than when they entered, and sometimes gave her extra money beyond the fee she asked. She'd met the \"family\" Intanta wished to return to at the two-moon camp; they seemed a curious bunch, heavy with metal amulets, necklaces, and hair wrapped in seashells, pipes both musical and for smoking tucked into overlarge pockets on the two or three layers of coats many wore. One tried to steal a loose scale from Wistala's tail.\n\nThey dined only among themselves, with Lada cooking and cleaning.\n\nIf there was any magic to it, it came from the oddly shaped crystal Intanta used. It looked a little like the estuary crabs they sometimes ate boiled.\n\n\"A shard from the great crystal of the lost city of Kraglad, enchanted by Dread Anklamere himself!\" Intanta said, whenever she removed the rune-woven silk that hid it until her seekers had paid for the telling.\n\nThey worked her into the fortune-telling gradually, fixed in a collar and chain harness at the end of pegs hammered into the ground. Wistala could release all by pressing her claw into the keyhole at the collar-join; Brok had built it that way. Intanta became a \"medium\" between the dragon-seer and her seekers. At first, Wistala kept so still that some of the seekers thought her a statue, so she learned to rock back and forth a little.\n\nIntanta, after consulting with a drunken, disheveled, one-eyed elf who visited the circus to see the dragon\u2014\"So it is a drakka. Usually it's just a painted sandrunner,\" the elf said\u2014suggested mosses and herbs that would make her fire bladder more gassy and smoke appear, but Wistala feared a poisoning of her foua or other harmful effects. The one-eyed elf looked rather disreputable.\n\nClose association with Lada brought little improvement in their opinion of each other. Wistala suspected the girl of spitting in her water as she fetched it, and Lada said dragon reek was making her nauseated day and night and harming the baby.\n\nOnce a week, Intanta downed a bottle or two of wine and played dice games with her cronies. Afterwards Intanta was well disposed to all and sundry, and sometimes let Lada hold her magic crystal, which relaxed the girl and soothed her nausea. Intanta often looked into the crystal as it sat on Lada's swelling belly and cackled, or sang or whispered to the growing baby to quiet its movements.\n\nWistala learned the rhythms of the circus. The shaggy-looking riders who went ahead of the column were scout-outs. If they learned a town had been struck by disease, or recently visited by tax agents, or had suffered some other disaster to commerce like a fish die-off or a mine closing, Ragwrist bypassed it. Otherwise they found a hospitable landlord who would sell them fodder, well-use, and shelter for a few days while the circus encamped. They only ever performed for a day or two and then moved on, usually with all the land's children watching the gargants from fence rails.\n\nThey lightened Lada's duties as she entered her final moon of expectation and they traveled at the borders of the southlands. Dark-skinned hominids in silk headwraps visited the circus, and Wistala learned other accents of Parl. Birds that reminded her of Bartleghaff soared above the sunny grasslands, home to vast herds of cattle and horses, and Ragwrist bought beef for all.\n\nWistala did no better at learning how to read the seekers.\n\n\"That one was a prince. Had you but bowed to him when I winked and foretold his rivals in power one day bowing to him, he would have given us his golden bracers, so pleased was he with the telling!\" Intanta groused as they went over the afternoon's events.\n\n\"But he wasn't showing his teeth,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"People in this land don't show their teeth to any but family! If they're pleased, they purse their lips thus\u2014\" Intanta lifted her lips so they almost touched her nose, an expression Wistala found revolting.\n\n\"I heard him take in breath and hold it as you spoke of his rivals. He seemed excited. His heart was pounding.\"\n\n\"You could hear his heart?\" Intanta said.\n\n\"Louder than yours,\" Wistala said. \"Yours makes a faint slooshing sound when you are aggravated, by the way.\"\n\n\"You give me apoplexy, young dragon. But this is of interest. Perhaps instead of reading faces and hands, you should listen to their air and hearts. That'll let you know when you're on the right track.\"\n\nMoon of the Summer Solstice, Res 471\n\n\u2002Beloved Father,\n\n\u2002I write you from the Lumbriar Heights in the city of Thallia. How right you were about travel, though we see almost nothing of the cities we visit, for we are too busy either opening, closing, or performing.\n\n\u2002I am happy to let you know Lada and her child are well. He is a healthy boy of sparse hair but merry eyes, and his name is Raygnar, a name Lada took a liking to when we visited the Barbarian Passes, for it sounds a bit like good Ragwrist's moniker, and it is the custom in this circus to have babies given names that are some tribute in sound. He came quickly and vigorously into the world, an easy birth according to Intanta (Easy for her to say!\u2014L) but it seems a messy process compared to eggs. Your granddaughter clasped Intanta's odd crystal tight all through the birth, staring into it. (The images summoned within did bring some relief.) We have put his handprint in the margin, though now he mouths the ink\u2014\n\n\u2002I will keep this letter short, for Lada tires easily. (True!)\n\n\u2002I visited the Library at Thallia, and the librarians were somewhat surprised at my appearance. I met your Heloise, who they told me is nearly a hundred, though still keeping busy with her duties. She questioned me closely about you and the tablets restored to them\u2014I think they suspected an arson attempt\u2014but they allowed me into the common room, where I found myself answering questions long into the night.\n\n\u2002Ragwrist and Dsossa, who says she has written separately (Thank the holy soulkeepers!) send their regards. I shall end this now. Ragwrist says next summer we are to go north again.\n\n\u2002Wistala, Lada, and Rayg\n\n\"Behold, Wistala, the vale of the Wheel of Fire,\" Brok said at the end of a long summer day the next year. His black cat, whom he called Chunnel, slept neatly balanced on the gargant's hairy dome.\n\nWistala, though now the weight of a large pony or a small horse, was borne on the back of the gargant as easily as its fleas. She sat perched atop its spine, a little above Brok at the neck-saddle.\n\nBy special request, she was riding gargant-back on the lead animal, offering her the best view of a vista many artists traveled far to depict.\n\nUntil they reached the plateau, it seemed another mountain pass, easier than some, along a good road bordering a rushing river of white. But then you passed between two long mountain arms, with a low stone wall running the spine and shorn-off towers at the roads with a catwalk between. According to Brok, the old fortifications were supposed to look deceptively ill-kept.\n\nOnce beyond them, the ground rose a little and you came to the Ba-drink.\n\nThe Ba-drink was a mountain lake, dammed at the west beneath the towers, surrounded by steep mountainsides and cliffs.\n\nShaped somewhat like a crescent moon, with horns facing north, its southmost rim was usually enclosed in a thick mist where the colder glacier-fed waters ran into hot springs. Between the horns on the other side were three short, sharp inlets reminiscent of a dragon's footprint, though the digits were somewhat foreshortened. The mountains between the two outer inlets were almost sheer-sided where they met the lake and faced each other.\n\n\"They say that rive was formed by the fire god's ax,\" Brok said. \"Though of course, the best view is from the lake. You can just see one side of the Titan bridge at Tall Rock. The sides of Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock are both much cut with galleries and balconies, though those towers to the south are where the greater dwarves of the Wheel of Fire live, among their terraced gardens of soil brought all the way up from the lowlands. We shall camp here at Whitewater Landing, for the dwarves let few across the lake to their doorsteps.\"\n\n\"Do they have mines in these mountains? It seems an inhospitable spot, and cold!\"\n\n\"I imagine so. I've visited only a tower or two, and the Titan-bridge. They're descended of warrior-dwarves settled in here to guard the three passes through the Red Mountains, enjoying the patronage and protection of the Hypatian Empire in Masmodon's time, but it doesn't do to mention that now, for now they tell stories of the prophet Thul who led them here.\"\n\n\"Why are they called the Wheel of Fire?\"\n\n\"Let us hope you never learn this the hard way! Oh, don't look at me like that; I don't mean to be mysterious. It comes from their banners and war formations. I can't explain it\u2014I'm no tactician.\" He lowered his voice. \"To be honest, other dwarves call them the Appeal of Gold, for they fight not for defense or honor or justice, but sell their axes and bolts for money. Shameful.\"\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\n\"Death is too serious a matter to be a subject of commerce, don't you think?\"\n\nThey set up camp as they always did, though under the direction of Wheel of Fire road guides. The dwarves dyed their leathers and face-masks a dull red, and black were their flared helms\u2014how ugly the memories associated with that shape!\u2014and cloaks. Wistala found Intanta playing with Rayg, showing him her glowing crystal, and asked for a favor.\n\n\"What's that, me scaly student?\"\n\n\"I would like to handle the dwarves by myself.\"\n\nThe toothless lips formed a perfect o. \"Now ye have the courage to do so, but skill lackin'. Still, I've no love for t' dwar beggars and would be happy to have my ease. Let's see to t' tentin'.\"\n\nWistala begged a few extra candles from Ragwrist, who sighed about expenses. Lada installed them around and behind the spot where she was \"chained\" so their shadows played across her face and body in an intimidating manner. Lada did many of her tasks with a happier, more confident air these days, and anything that didn't involve the routine of cleaning, feeding, or sleeping her baby made Lada break into quiet song. She had an eye for artistry, and costume, and pleasing arrangements of even the most mundane candlestick.\n\nThough she still stuck her tongue out at Wistala when she thought she wasn't being watched. Hominids underestimated the sweep of a dragon's gaze.\n\nThe first day she had many visitors to her tent, but few of the dwarves asked to have their fortunes read. Wistala wished for Intanta's crystal \u2026 perhaps that would invite the dwarves to have a peek and ask a question. Instead they peered from their heavy masks into her eyes, or muttered to each other in the dwarf tongue about she knew not what. They left as soon as she invited them to have their fortunes read.\n\nAt last a young dwarf\u2014or one who had lost his beard, for he had but a grassy fringe on his chin\u2014came into the tent and flung himself on his stomach before her, a gesture she wasn't sure how to interpret.\n\n\"Oh great daughter of dragonkind,\" he said in rather glottal Parl. \"I crave your advice. What do you ask?\"\n\nShe used the speech she'd long rehearsed, a variation of Intanta's invocation when she sat in the tent. \"Rise and place a coin upon my tongue; the quality of the metal brings quality of insight.\" She extended her tongue a short distance.\n\n\"I'm poor \u2026 but I have a ring of my granddame,\" the dwarf said, coming up to bended knee. He reached into a pocket in his leather vest and extracted a short chain with a few pierced coins and a ring with a shining green crystal at the end. He placed it on her extended tongue\u2014she took the opportunity to smell his hands\u2014and she brought it to her mouth and pretended to swallow. The ring she tucked into her gumline.\n\n\"You are troubled. Desperate,\" Wistala said, which was evident enough.\n\n\"Yes!\" the dwarf bubbled.\n\nWhat would a short-bearded dwarf be troubled about? Love or his position, she expected. Perhaps both. The other dwarves smelled of goose grease or salted pork and beer, but this one's hands only had a faint floury smell to them. His eyes looked tired.\n\n\"You labor hard. Something to do with wheat.\" A miller? In the mountains? No! \"A baker.\"\n\n\"Truly!\" the dwarf said, his mouth dropping open.\n\n\"You love what you do?\"\n\n\"Nothing is better than the smell of rising dough, or the steam from a freshly baked bun just opened.\"\n\nShe shut her eyes. Did his family not want him to be a baker, or was it someone else? \"I see a problem. You fear you are not loved and respected by those you wish to keep close to your heart. It is hard to put your images and impressions into words.\"\n\n\"Oh yes! She jests with me almost every day when she comes for her order, and will speak not with the owner but only with me. But she's from a house with a chair at the council table! And who am I?\"\n\nSo that is it. She jests with him.\n\n\"But she smiles at you, good dwarf, every day that you meet?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, but she's famous for her disposition. She's kindness itself! She laughs when I juggle buns and always buys extra for the poor.\"\n\nWistala found herself liking this young dwarf. She'd been prepared to make him miserable, as a member of a clan who'd done murder to those dearest to her \u2026 but this fellow seemed so troubled, her heart pitied him. Then of course, he was a baker, who would probably not be foremost in a charge into a dragon's cave.\n\nShe spat the ring out. \"The stars and winds, waters and stones weep for your unrequited love, and will not have your offering. Take it back. Present the ring to her family, as a pledge of your love for her. Ask that you may borrow gold against the value of the ring and open a bakery of your own. If you prove yourself worthy of her hand, you shall have it.\"\n\n\"How is\u2014?\"\n\nWistala bowed her head. \"Do not question the workings of the Great Spirits. Ah, they've gone. I can see no more.\"\n\nThe dwarf sniffled. \"Thank you, thank you, great dragon!\"\n\nRagwrist and Intanta were aghast. \"You did what?\"\n\nThey spoke to her in the wheeled cabin of the washerwomen and Intanta's cronies that night by the light of a single candle.\n\n\"I couldn't take the ring from one so earnest and desperate. Besides, he needed it as a pledge against borrowed money.\" The last wasn't quite true, since she'd suggested that the dwarf borrow.\n\n\"'Tis the most desperate that needs their fortunes told most,\" Intanta said.\n\n\"Wistala, I cannot deny that you are a draw,\" Ragwrist said. \"Mostly to children who spend not a penny. I cannot pay for your upkeep, or take a percentage, on nothing. You see the position this puts me in? Why, Lada is worth more to the circus than you.\"\n\nWistala didn't give a dropped scale for Lada's worth, though her hand had improved somewhat in the letters to Rainfall. \"I will try again tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No, Intanta will do the fortune-telling tomorrow. You may sit like a stone statue and keep silent.\"\n\n\"Let her try again,\" Intanta said. \"I'm glad of the chance to mingle. She hurts none.\"\n\n\"And helps none,\" Ragwrist said. \"But this is not the first time I've carried dead weight. Curse my soft heart! Sit in the fortune-telling tent again tomorrow, Wistala, and try not to give away my wagons.\"\n\nHer supper that night was a poor thin jelly of cooked-down horse hooves\u2014remains such as these were sometimes used as waterproofing or to grease the wagon axles. Short of giving her dirt, she could not see how her rations could get worse.\n\nAfter nightfall she gathered every particle of information from Brok and the other dwarves about the Wheel of Fire and their habits, then prowled the rocky slopes and managed to get a sick carrion bird. Then she sat and stared at the distant lights glimmering in the tall rocks that faced each other, mirrored in the surface of the Ba-drink. There were towers at the tops of the cliffs. No wonder Father had broken himself against them. Where was the Dragonblade now? In those rocks, or did he hunt her?\n\nThe next morning Ragwrist himself woke her, not through noise or touch but by the smell of a thick joint still sizzling on the platter he bore.\n\n\"Wistala, up and get to your tent and prepare yourself! There's already a line outside the fortune-tent!\"\n\nShe rushed her breakfast\u2014meaning it took her three eyeblinks to eat\u2014and hurried through the show preparations for the back flap of the fortune-telling tent. Lada was already inside arranging the candles; Brok stood ready with her chains and collar.\n\nBrok spoke in her ear as he helped fix her in the false collar. \"The dwarves all say an ambitious young dwarf named Stava demanded entrance to House Steelforge last night. He was so insistent, so fair-spoken, and so complimentary about their eldest daughter and plans for his betterment that Dwar Steelforge himself put their hands together, and the engagement party will last a week. There's some talk of Stava being an unchaired member of the Wheel of Fire Council. A few say Dwara Steelforge just wanted her overripe eldest out of the way so the younger ones could marry, but there's a sour belly at every feast. But all say it was our dragon's doing, and that you bring fortune.\"\n\nMuch of the morning passed in a blur.\n\nRagwrist himself helped usher dwarves in and out of the tent. Most offered her silver or gold coin in return for advice with their problems and plans, though a few grumbled when the \"Spirits\" failed to return the coin as she had the ring. If Wistala seemed stuck, Ragwrist announced that the reading was over. They had to take two breaks to extract the coins from her gums.\n\n\"I'm hardly able to speak without rattling or shooting silver into their faces,\" she said as Lada put new candles in the holders and fresh incense in the brazier Ragwrist had confiscated from the luxury trade-tent.\n\nThe afternoon went much like the morning, only more so.\n\nAs the sun fell, there was some murmur outside, and the sound of dwarf bodies dropping to the ground.\n\nRagwrist bowed as he opened the tent flap and a dwarf strode in, a thin red cape of silk hanging down from a light ornamental helm that reminded Wistala of a spiderweb or the loose-knit caps of the librarians in Thallia, for it was more holes than plate save for a line of what looked like dragon teeth at the top, descending in size from large at the front to small at the base of the skull, rather like her own fringe. His faceplate was golden, and had flames at the edge like those used on some sun signs of the astrologers in Hypat. He carried a staff fully as tall as he was in his left hand, and atop it was a reddish crystal the size of his fist.\n\n\"Hmpf,\" the dwarf said. \"You're not four years out of the egg.\"\n\n\"Her egg drifted down the Holy River of Mherr,\" Ragwrist said, still in his odd balancing bow, \"and was plucked from the bullrushes by a daughter of\u2014\"\n\nThe dwarf tapped his staff on the ground. \"Spare me the biography. A fortune-telling drakka?\"\n\n\"I hide nothing from your greatness,\" Wistala said. Ragwrist bobbed a bit, and Wistala bowed.\n\n\"How much am I to give you?\" the dwarf said.\n\nRagwrist raised his thumb three times.\n\n\"I can ask nothing from one who has a chair at the Council Table of the Wheel of Fire,\" Wistala said, and Ragwrist turned his thumb into a fist and shook it at her. \"But if you care for my oracle, you may reward me as you wish.\"\n\nThe fist stopped shaking.\n\nThe dwarf gave a nod that bent his waist just far enough that a charitably inclined person might take it for a bow. Wistala concentrated every iota of her attention on him; were her perceptions claws, they would be dug into his eyes. \"My name is Fangbreaker. That's all I'll tell you, drakka.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" Wistala said, having heard his heart miss a beat as he spoke the name. Ragwrist toppled out of his bow but came to his feet again quietly.\n\nThe staff came down hard enough for Wistala to feel it through the packed mountain dirt. \"Gnaw! It is!\"\n\n\"Were you born with that name?\"\n\nShe saw eyewhites inside the mask. \"I am titled Fangbreaker, but you speak the truth. I was born to a common name. Gobold was I on the day of my birth.\"\n\n\"Let us call the score even.\" She studied his hands. There was a white scar across one set of fingers, those of his right hand. He was wide, even for a dwarf, and still puffed from his walk into the tent. Perhaps wheezed a little.\n\n\"I'm not the first dragon you've matched yourself against,\" Wistala said, feeling her foua pulse. \"You're a warrior at heart, now relegated to the table and dusty papers that make you sneeze.\"\n\n\"True. But I wish to speak of the future, not the past.\"\n\n\"You are often opposed at the council table.\"\n\n\"Any rower on the icewater could tell you this. I would know the future.\"\n\nWistala wondered what kind of seeds she could plant behind that fiery golden mask. \"You will put your armor on again. You will lead your dwarves into battle. You will take an act other generals will call rash, but it will bring you victory and accolades. Complete victory and high accolades.\"\n\n\"Can I trust a dragon?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Because I have before, a mated pair who cheated me.\"\n\nWistala had trouble forming the words. \"If I cross you, I will die as they did.\"\n\n\"Hmpf,\" Fangbreaker said. \"You take the chance that I will not chase you down the mountain road. But I will cross the Inland Ocean and carry vengeance even into the earthquakes of the fire coast beyond if you prove a charlatan.\"\n\nWistala took a deep breath. She might as well be skinned for a bull as a calf. How would Prymelete put it? \"Then hear my oracle and judge: You must and you will master the council table. You must and will throw away the ways of politic and traditon that hold you back. You must and will master yourself, go down the mountains again, burning off the girdle of fat and replacing it with one of leather and iron. You must and you will master your people, as once Thul did, be firm and they will love you for it. Be hard and they will worship you.\" She half-heard his lips form a familiar word out of Rainfall's histories. \"Forge them into one weapon, and I see no power on the Upper World or Lower that can stand against you\u2014yes, even the ten-jewel crown will be yours\u2014\"\n\n\"The crown of Masmodon,\" Fangbreaker whispered. \"Such an oracle. Oh, dreams! Oh, dreams!\"\n\nWistala collapsed, knocking over some of the candles. Ragwrist stopped one before it could set the tent alight.\n\n\"No more, I beg you, great dwarf,\" Ragwrist said, falling to his knees. \"You'll be the death of my poor dragon.\"\n\nWistala watched the dwarf out of a rolling, water-lidded eye. He shook himself from his reverie. \"Hmpf. The story's worth some coin, though the pratfall at the end is a bit much.\" He reached into his purse and flung a handful of golden coin at her. It rattled off her scales like hail. \"Spend it quickly if you lied.\"\n\n\"You're too generous!\" Ragwrist said, gathering the gold, though he didn't offer any back to make Fangbreaker's payment more equitable. Wistala again heard dwarves dropping on their bellies as the staff tapped its way off.\n\nRagwrist added to the drama by telling the prone dwarves outside that the fortune-telling was over for the day, but by special engagement, the circus would stay one more day before moving off.\n\nThat night Wistala ate at Ragwrist's table.\n\n\"Keep up performances like that, and at next two-moon's break this winter, I shall have a new wagon built special for you, drawn by a tusked-and-silvered gargant. Yes.\"\n\n\"Aren't you afraid he'll come after us if my prophecy doesn't pan out?\" Wistala asked.\n\nRagwrist wiped grease from his chin with his multicolored sleeve. \"They never do. Most hominids spare themselves the embarrassment of admitting they were cheated. Ah, Wistala, this is the beginning of a profitable friendship.\"\n\nThe circus packed up, though no dwarf children were brought across the lake to see the gargants go, and only a few dwarf-helms showed at the broken towers.\n\nOne odd group of humans did come across to watch the circus go, however. A tall handsome woman in a blue cloak, a young girl, and a towhead boy watched the train pack up. The woman knelt beside the boy and continually pointed to Wistala and spoke to the youngest child, and soon the child was pointing, too, but the wind carried her words away.\n\nWistala wondered if this was the Dragonblade's family, and for one awful moment was tempted to run up the hill and burn them down to charred bones, so that the Dragonblade might come home to destruction and grief, but she suppressed the evil thought.\n\nShe was a dragon, after all, and better than the assassins.\n\nA month later, the circus stopped at the prosperous Green Dragon Inn. Wistala couldn't say how she felt about the homecoming: happy that she was again seeing familiar faces, or saddened that she would leave with the next \"close.\"\n\nShe appeared at the Quarryness Hypatian Hall and confirmed that she still lived, much to the delight of the children who gathered on the common and stairs to watch.\n\nRainfall was his same courteous self, and Widow Lessup still despaired at the damage Wistala's scales did to the doorframe and stair walls, though Wistala walked about the house with claws retracted, trying to pad as lightly as Yari-Tab, who now had a velvet cushion under the skylights in the library.\n\n\"And the thane? Still angry with you?\" Wistala asked at dinner. The same Old Guard sat around the table, with the addition of Lada and the subtraction of Intanta, who was watching over Rayg.\n\n\"We correspond but little,\" Rainfall said, Lada hanging on his arm, as she had from the moment of their arrival. \"He has more barbarian emissaries out of the north visiting him than agents of the Hypatian Order.\"\n\nRainfall tickled Lada under the chin, and she beamed.\n\n\"Circus life agrees with Wistala, who's grown to twice her former size,\" Rainfall said. \"How do you like it, Granddaughter? You seem a little thinner, and not just at the waist.\"\n\n\"They work me from sunpeep to the last red cloud,\" she said.\n\nRagwrist refilled his wine goblet. It was not such fine crystal as the glass Rainfall had broken in his library, but it still sparkled, due to Anja's applications of rag and ash. \"Such thanks! You've received an education that will last the rest of your life. And I've two more years on my contract.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can buy her out of the rest.\"\n\n\"I'll ask a heavy price of affection from Lada, before I let her go,\" Ragwrist said, raising an eyebrow.\n\nLada frowned suspiciously. \"How dare\u2014!\"\n\n\"Hear him out!\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"I want but two concessions. I demand first that you mind your grandfather in matters of education and deportment, for both you and your son,\" Ragwrist said. He winked at Dsossa, and Wistala noticed that she and Rainfall were holding hands under the table. \"Secondly, I demand that you accept Dsossa as your grandmother, for she has said she also wishes to quit my circus. Much thanks that I get!\"\n\n\"I promise,\" Lada said, kissing her grandfather's hand and then Dsossa's cheek.\n\n\"Oh, how will I make up two such losses?\" Ragwrist asked.\n\n\"Marlil's as good a rider as I, and her bosoms are still high and full,\" Dsossa said. \"I'm sick of the stench of gargant-vents, and would rather smell hay and horse feed.\"\n\n\"Fallen bosoms or no, count yourself lucky that you've not employed with the long-scrub under that point,\" Lada said. \"Gargants have a sense of humor about when they answer nature's call. I would rather shovel up after the dragon.\"\n\nSecond Moon of the Winter Solstice, Res 480\n\n\u2003Beloved Father,\n\n\u2003I hope you can read the hand of my apprentice. She has a lovely voice, and I often think she should be singing rather than learning to be a fortune-teller, but what the Air Spirit gave her in voice\u2014I know as a good Hypatian you tut-tut dragon cosmology, but it is the belief of my sires and it abides with me\u2014dutiful Earth forgot to place in her hand.\n\n\u2003I pray you, Dsossa, Lada, and Rayg are well. I hope the volume of the history of Ghorghars did not go astray. The bookbinders should cover the gilding on the page edges somehow. Does Dsossa still risk her neck at the road wall on her hunter? How is the new Mod Lada handling her duties?\n\n\u2003I am now too big to ride in a house cart without folding myself in halves. Brok tried building one of greater length but the axles wore so on the turns, they were continually breaking off wheels. He believes craftsmen of the Diadem could supply us with a flatbed, but Ragwrist moans at the expense, and besides I am large enough to hang a banner on, so I go down the road ahead of the gargants announcing the circus in words and pictures.\n\n\u2003Speaking of Ragwrist, the dwarves of the Wheel of Fire have written him again asking for my services to be \"sold\" to their council, as though I am a slave to be bid for in a market square. He shows me the letters, laughs, and then politely declines, though he keeps threatening to accept the Hypat Arena guild's offer whenever I complain about the quality of the fowl and fish he buys.\n\n\u2003I have little news to tell you save that which you've already no doubt heard: your old friend Heloise of the Imperial Library is dead. They asked me to attend a special ceremony for her (as a curiosity, I supposed) at the small Library Hall in Vinde, and as we had only just left it, Ragwrist gave me leave to go with only a few words of regret. I earn his purse and my stomach enough coin each year. After the ceremonies, some of the Librarians warned me about the fortune-telling. They think it reflects badly on my title. I promised them to give up the name \"Oracle\" soon \u2026 for reasons I'll explain below. I caught up to the circus with some deal of bother with the river dwarves and took the first opportunity to write.\n\n\u2003I am weary of fortune-telling. My heart was never really in it; I dispensed more advice such as I saw things rather than prophesy. Sometimes my heart would be so grieved by the stories I heard, I gave away my own small store of coin, but that led to every beggar in Hypatia showing up outside the tent, or so it seemed to the circus. Odd that I should be talented in guessing other races' minds, but there you have it. One improvises to survive. How else could a dragon see the cities of Hypat in such celebration and safety? For this I thank your foresight, in knowing that eventually I'd want mental diversions and new experiences. I love every road, river, and shore of Hypat, but I fear I must leave it within a year or two.\n\n\u2003There are tiny bulges running my back now, elf-father, and they will swell and I shall have my wings and the ability to go wherever there is wind. I have promises to keep and I will go when they come despite the mawkish lamentations of Ragwrist, who, having heard my dictation, has just popped his head in and offered his regards. But don't worry, I shall still fly back to Mossbell every three or four years at least and prove that I am alive. I hope to sell the place back to dear Rayg (is he still raiding Jessup's honeycombs?) one day if his wit continues to so impress you.\n\n\u2003We are readying to go back on the Old North Road again, so you should expect us in springtime.\n\n\u2003Traveling in hope,\n\n\u2003Tala\n\nThe Old Guard assembled again in that easy spring, and for the last time, as they had other years under similarly disposed stars.\n\nThe party dined in the receiving hall that Wistala might fit, and the youngest Lessup girl who once so feared Wistala darted back and forth with trays beneath her neck with giggles to her sister. Rainfall, who scooted about the house on a wheeled chair made by a journey-man dwarvish artisan, worked the big back wheels with his arms as he circled the table, pouring wine for all despite the gentle imprecations of Yeo Forstrel, who was trying to out-Rainfall Rainfall in courtesy and decorum.\n\nThe party adjourned for the Green Dragon Inn, now at one end of a semicircle of a full dozen homes and establishments, from whose narrow windows song carried up and down the road. The post had expanded into a full news-case, with glass, and a special window had been added to the front of the inn to handle letters for Mossbell's tenants, artisans, and a handful of professionals owning houses along the road who liked Rainfall's manners and easy terms.\n\nWistala, as was the custom, called out the inn's evening company and then stood under the sign and raised herself up a little so that she could touch nose to the weathered board, and all put lips to glass after a glad cry.\n\nJessup kept his son at the tap and his daughters with the mugs. He now wore a coat with gold buttons, thanks to the sales of his brewery-mead to taverns in Quarryness and Sack Harbor and beyond.\n\nThe next day the circus moved on to the common at Quarryness. Wistala promised to return to the quiet of Mossbell in the evening across the twin hills, home to Dsossa's two herds of horses, though as the day progressed, she wondered if the throngs who'd descended on the town to see the show would keep all performing late. After her customary appearance to old Sobyor, who'd grown fatter than she knew humans could achieve, she spent the day letting her apprentice \"interpret\" the dragon's impressions of the seekers.\n\nMany of the seekers asked their questions in Parl with a barbarous northern accent.\n\nBut eventually the crowds trickled off.\n\nAs she passed up the road on the way to Mossbell, sniffing the early-summer countryside on a fitful wind, she noticed a blue firework burning atop the eastern of the twin hills. Did Mossbell's shepherds and horseherds signal to each other in some manner? Fireworks, as she knew well from Ragwrist's moanings, even blue signal flares, cost a good deal of money, for only specialists, usually dwarves, could accurately mix the ingredients\u2014\n\nSignal flares?\n\nHearts hammering, she left the road and cut cross-country to more quickly reach the house, troubled by the strange lights against the night sky. When she finally broke through the last line of the back woods and looked out over the garden\u2014full of beanpoles and tomato vines and fragrant with basil and peppermint\u2014and saw the house at peace, she ceased her headlong, bush-tearing charge.\n\nWorried for nothing. Were you expecting flames from the library skylight?\n\nShe still slipped cautiously around to the front, smelling and listening, and pulled on the bell.\n\nDsossa herself, with Forstrel behind, answered the door. She wore an ordinary housecoat; he still had on a button shirt and polished shoes even at the late hour.\n\n\"Our fortunate dragon! We'd given you up.\"\n\n\"It was a rare day at the circus,\" Wistala said. \"Is all well here?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, but we've dined already. We did save scraps, and Rainfall is still up. We're having a digestive gruel and infusions\u2014would you join us in that?\"\n\n\"You mistake my meaning. There aren't strangers or barbarians or anyone dining tonight?\" Wistala asked.\n\nDsossa and Forstrel exchanged glances and shrugs. \"What are you fearful of? Don't tell me you've had a premonition.\"\n\n\"The only auspices I read glowed upon the twin hills. Someone burns fireworks on your property.\"\n\nDsossa came out from the door and walked around the side of the house. \"I see nothing now. Why would shepherds do something like that?\"\n\nForstrel disappeared into the house with a quick step, and the wind died down. There was a vague murmur to the east.\n\n\"Hoofbeats?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I hear nothing,\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"You should return to the house,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"No. I hear them,\" she said, her hand at her throat. \"There are no roads to the east\u2014that land is nothing but thickets and gullies.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Rah-ya! Wistala, what passes?\" Rainfall called from the tree-flanked balcony above the door. Now the hooves could be heard even when the wind blew.\n\n\"Lock the doors and shutters!\" Dsossa called as she raced across the lawn toward the stable, the ends of her housecoat flapping.\n\n\"Forstrel, the doors! The windows!\" Rainfall shouted as he turned his seat on the balcony. He spun around again, completing the circle.\n\n\"Wistala, get in here!\"\n\n\"But the main door\u2014\"\n\n\"Climb up here. The front gallery is wide enough, and I don't care if the paintwork and floors get scale-chipped. Hurry!\"\n\nShe could see lights in the tree line to the east, along the little path Jessup had driven the wagon the day they buried Avalanche. \"Name of Masmodon!\" Rainfall said, his arms falling limp. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"Invasion,\" Wistala said.\n\nWistala heard alarmed cries from within the house, both male and female, and Forstrel's echoed voice bellowing orders: \"Drop that, girl, and get all the shutters on the top floor. Latch and bolt! Hurry!\"\n\nWistala climbed the tree trunk nearest her easily enough, despite the light-headedness she felt at the thought of a battle, and as she put sii on the balcony rail, the hoofbeats grew thunderous with alarming suddenness.\n\nA clump of torch-bearing horsemen with no more formation than a broken egg emerged from the wood path. They spread as they came, one part riding for the garden, the other for the front turnaround.\n\n\"Inside, Wistala,\" Rainfall said, his voice so deep and hard for a moment, she thought she heard Ragwrist beside.\n\nHer shoulders and hips made it through the double doors. It occurred to her that she'd fit on the grand staircase down, but she might not make the tight squeeze to the third floor, should it become necessary.\n\nWistala turned\u2014with some difficulty, and stuck her head out of the gallery door next to Rainfall.\n\nForstrel came down the hall, squeezing past Wistala. \"I've seen to the lower level myself, Master,\" Forstrel said.\n\n\"Douse the lights\u2014let's not give archers a mark,\" Rainfall said. Then he whispered to Forstrel.\n\nWailing battle horns sounded from the riders, now individually distinguishable. Most were hairy and bearded; they rode blanket-back on shaggy mounts, handles of weapons sticking up from their back and belts like quills on a porcupine. But at the center of the group riding hard for Mossbell's door was a better arrayed company. Wistala marked a man in dark plate with a white sash about him atop a black-armored horse, followed closely behind by a boy-man in black leather with a red sash draped across his shoulder.\n\nBehind that pair rode another score of warriors, and more men at the back with packhorses and strings of those sharp-faced dogs with the twin lightning bolt runes emblazoned on their side.\n\nWistala remembered the dogs as being bigger and fiercer looking. Now they just appeared to be like any other pack of tongue-lolling hunting hounds, albeit matching in size and color and odd marking.\n\n\"How can this be? The thane rides at their head,\" Rainfall said.\n\nWistala looked out. Near the man in the black armor rode Thane Hammar, clad in chain armor and blue-and-yellow cloaks and sub-cloaks trailing down across the horse's back to its hocks.\n\n\"Mark! What does she do?\" Rainfall said.\n\nDsossa exploded out of the barn in a knot of horseflesh, her bare toes clutching at the saddle stirrups and fingers holding both reins and mane of her mottle-gray horse. Backside raised and head close beside the neck of her horse, she galloped across the lawn toward the road wall, similar horses flanking and behind her, running for no other reason than that the lead had taken flight. At the rear was Stog, gray all around the nose, eyes, and hooves, who gave up the chase at the fountain and turned to watch the intruders with interest.\n\nThe black-leather-clad youth, fair hair showing under his cap, said a word to the men behind him. A group of six rode to the other side of the turnaround, taking great recurved bows off their backs and arrows from saddle quivers.\n\nThane Hammar pointed and cried out, and three of his saddled retinue charged after Dsossa.\n\n\"Let the archers bring her down,\" the armored rider said, pointing with a long crossbarred spear. Wistala's heart went cold; she knew that armor and spear of old.\n\nThe archers nocked their arrows and edged their horses so they could fire clean.\n\n\"Stog,\" Wistala shouted in the beast tongue, and the giant black helm on the armored rider turned toward the balcony. \"Cry out, as you did that night on the road!\"\n\nBut Stog was already running, tail up. \"Better!\" the old mule cried, and threw himself at the heads of the line of horses. As Stog tore through, kicking at the bigger horses left and right, the archers lifted their bows. One arrow shot almost straight up into the sky. Stog plowed into the horse bearing the young man in black leather, knocked it and the rider over, and jumped clear.\n\n\"Kill that beast!\" the bright-haired youth called.\n\nStog wheeled and ran so that he'd be a crossing target. The archers fired, and as the arrows hit, Wistala felt their impact in her heart. She no longer feared a fight, but longed to plunge into the array in the courtyard, to rend and tear with claw-tips wet and hot\u2014Rainfall took a breath.\n\nStog collapsed, falling forward. Wistala lunged, but Rainfall grabbed her by the rattling griff.\n\n\"No, Wistala. They want that. There's the Dragonblade out there, with his spear!\"\n\nThe archers put new arrows in their strings and turned toward the receding figure of Dsossa, heading for the road wall rather than the gate. The Dragonblade passed his spear point across a torch carried by one of his men, and it sparked and sputtered as though it were a firework.\n\nStog moved and rolled, snapping arrow shafts, then rose, blood running from the piercings. The young man, dusting disgustedly at the dirt on his leather suit, gaped.\n\nFroth dripped from his mouth, Stog stared fixedly at the archers, now drawing against Dsossa. He began to stagger toward them, braying:\n\nWhile a horse will carry any fool\u2014\n\n\"Shoot that wretched animal!\" the youth said. The archers turned.\n\n\"Eliam! She's getting away,\" Thane Hammar shouted. He turned his head to the man heating the spear. \"Drakossozh, your son's a fool.\"\n\nThe arrows flew again, striking Stog all about the shoulder point, neck, and withers. Stog stumbled but did not fall. Wistala saw his ribs against his skin as he took a deep gasping breath.\n\n\"If the going's hard, you'll want a mule \u2026 ,\" Stog brayed, oblivious of the arrows. He staggered forward toward the archers.\n\n\"Again!\" the man-boy shrieked, his voice breaking. \"Will no one find that horse's heart?\"\n\nStog, still lumbering forward, may have understood the words, or at least that he'd been called a horse, for he turned toward the voice, eyes white and staring. The arrows cut air again and struck with wet smacks, and this time Stog's front legs collapsed. The back pair pushed the body forward another nose-length or two, then sagged.\n\nBut Dsossa was at the wall, gathered self and horse, and went over a slight sag in its length in a flash of gray white. Wistala heard hooves pounding up the road toward Quarryness.\n\nThe three riders after her aimed for the spot, as well, but the first horse balked. It tried to turn, sliding on its hooves, and went over sideways, back crashing into the wall with rider pinned between. The second horse half-sat down as it skidded forward, and the rider, carried by momentum, slid forward up its neck and hit the wall at the knees. He spun feet-up as he went over. The third managed to turn his horse to run along the wall but got tangled in the legs of the mount who'd gone back-first into the bricks, and horse and rider tumbled.\n\n\"Get back, Wistala,\" Rainfall said. \"I have to delay them so Dsossa has time.\"\n\nTo do what? Wistala wondered, staring wretchedly at Stog's body, trying to will the old mule back to life. Warn the Inn\u2014no, she'd turned north. Get to the circus? She shifted backwards into the hall.\n\nWistala counted heads. There were over a hundred riders to the front of the house, and she could hear others in back, probably a like number, though there were still no sounds of destruction to the house. What could anything but an army\u2014?\n\n\"Who do I have the dubious pleasure of addressing?\" Rainfall shouted from his balcony.\n\n\"Into the old wood dry-room behind the chimney,\" she heard Forstrel saying as light feet ran down the stairs. \"Then down. Quickly now.\" Forstrel approached, the azure blue battle sash of Rainfall's grandfather held as carefully as though it were woven from a morning mist.\n\nThe barbarians, who'd been poking around at the stable door and looking into rain barrels, moved to look at the tree-flanked balcony. Thane Hammar turned his horse, but kept to the other side of the fountain, perhaps fearing arrows. \"Your Lord Hammar is paying a final call on Mossbell!\" he shouted.\n\nWistala, her fire bladder pulsing, noted that he hadn't had success with his beard, which was still thin and scraggly, for all he tried to shape it into a point below his chin. \"It's time for us to finally settle accounts, in a single night-of-blades.\"\n\n\"Night-of-blades\u2014tsk,\" Rainfall said. \"Barbaric phrases, from a Thane of the Hypatian Empire.\"\n\nThe Dragonblade raised his spear; its tip glowed faintly red, like cooling metal from the furnace, but the steel couldn't have been more than torch-hot.\n\nForstrel knelt beside Rainfall's wheeled chair and tied the sash about his waist, as calmly as though ten-score armed barbarians didn't surround the house. Rainfall raised his arms a little so Forstrel could work the knot after wrapping the silk twice about his waist.\n\n\"I appreciate the call, though not the companions. You keep strange and lowly company these days, Hammar.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Hammar shouted. \"This from an elf with a pet dragon!\"\n\n\"You come bearing arms to this estate, do violence to my animals, and attempt to murder my wife,\" Rainfall said. \"I suppose you know your thaneship is now utterly forfeit.\"\n\n\"Glad I am to be free of the title,\" Hammar said. \"You will wish, before the moon reaches its zenith, that you'd shown more loyalty to me. The barbarians have admirable methods for dealing with those who show disloyalty to their lords.\"\n\n\"I've never claimed loyalty to Hammar, only to the office of thane,\" Rainfall said. \"If you had a jot of your father's wisdom, you'd know that way is better.\"\n\nA rider with a knotted beard and heavy tattooing above his eyes grunted something at Hammar.\n\nAs they spoke, Rainfall turned to Forstrel. \"Good work, Yeo Lessup,\" he said quietly. \"Now get to the tunnel with the others.\"\n\n\"My mother stands in the hall with her laundry ladle, swearing to brain the first barbarian through the door,\" Forstrel said.\n\n\"Drag her down by the ear if you must,\" Rainfall said out of the side of his mouth. \"I want you in the escape tunnel forthwith. Don't stand there rooted\u2014obey!\"\n\n\"Master,\" Forstrel said, bowing, and there were tears in his eyes.\n\n\"Watch out for him,\" Forstrel whispered as he squeezed by Wistala.\n\nOutside, the barbarian finished his speech.\n\n\"And you shall have it!\" Hammar shouted. \"Warriors of Kark, Blacklake, and Turi Fell, all that you may carry off between the Whitewater and the twin hills is yours. Beast, coin, garment, bag, and babe, take what you will.\"\n\nRainfall lifted himself out of the chair, gripped the balcony railing in white knuckles. \"You know not what you do, Hammar,\" he shouted, but the barbarians were cheering so loudly, Wistala wondered if he was heard.\n\nThe barbarians divided, and Wistala, peering over his shoulder, saw a contingent ride off in the direction of the Green Dragon Inn and the homes around it.\n\n\"I know exactly what I do, enemy. I've got men in every town of the Minelands and the Quarterings. Loyal men, and I'm declaring myself Lord. My alliances are set, and my plans are just begun. But there's one small irritant, no more of consequence than a road pebble in my horse's hoof, and that's this estate. I now take what is rightfully mine.\"\n\n\"You and your barbarian wife are welcome to it,\" Rainfall said. \"I will go in peace. Take Mossbell lock and window intact.\"\n\nHammar turned to the Dragonblade. \"Have you ever heard the like? As though he's doing us a favor! No, that is water long since under your precious bridge. I'll have my justice for the years of insult and hang you by the boughs of your grandfathers!\" Hammar turned to the remaining barbarians. \"Search this wart of a hill from top to bottom, and bring out that elf and his riches!\"\n\nFour of the barbarians\u2014it was hard to see where hair and beard ended and where the fur of their loincloths and vests began\u2014drew war-picks and -axes and hurried for the door. Wistala heard crashes at the back of the house.\n\nRainfall backed his chair into the hallway.\n\n\"A good game while it lasted, Wistala. You should break toward Quarryness. The dogs and riders won't get over the wall, they'll have to go back to\u2014\"\n\nA female shriek sounded from below. \"Brutes!\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" Rainfall said. \"Don't tell me she wouldn't\u2014\"\n\nWidow Lessup ran up the grand stairs with a speed that did her years credit, clutching an oarlike laundry ladle.\n\n\"Oh, sir, they're breaking in,\" she said. \"I couldn't leave, I just couldn't, I tricked For and shut the\u2014\"\n\nRainfall ignored her. \"Wistala!\" he shouted.\n\nThree barbarians ran up the grand staircase. Wistala extended her neck and spat her foua, its oily odor setting every fringe-tip down her spine aquiver.\n\nThe first two men dissolved in the hot spew; the third fell back down the stairs, his arms beating vainly as the liquid fire engulfed his head.\n\n\"Go now, Wistala, out the back gallery!\"\n\nThe railing began to burn.\n\n\"No,\" Wistala said. \"Not without you.\"\n\nShe whipped her neck up and crashed her head into the ceiling. A second smash\u2014her vision went white for a moment\u2014and she was through to the floor of the library.\n\nRearing up, she tore the hole wider with her sii. Rainfall pressed on a wooden panel, and a grid of steel dropped down behind them, closing off the balcony doors \u2026 though she imagined arrows could still be shot through.\n\n\"Up,\" she said. Both hominids stood there dumbly. \"To the library!\"\n\n\"I'm to climb your back?\" Widow Lessup asked.\n\n\"No, go up the stairs,\" Wistala said, pointing at the nearby stairwell.\n\n\"But the master,\" Widow Lessup said.\n\nWistala closed her jaws on his seat back and, neck muscles straining, lifted him through the hole.\n\n\"Should have thought of this years ago,\" Rainfall said from the library.\n\nWistala climbed up and through the hole.\n\n\"If we're to die, I'm glad it's here, Wistala,\" Rainfall said. \"Remember when I'd read to you from\u2014\"\n\n\"Always. But we're not dead yet,\" she said, looking down into the grand staircase, where smoldering barbarians were setting wood alight.\n\nWidow Lessup ran through the door and shut it behind her. Below, they heard doors breaking, crockery smashing, and assorted calls in tongues perhaps only Rainfall understood.\n\n\"May For have the sense to keep them in the tunnel until this is all over,\" Widow Lessup said.\n\n\"I wish you'd gone along,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Me? Crawl through all those cobwebs? I'd rather be stripped and carried off by the Hordes of Hesstur out there than breathe spider sacs.\"\n\nWistala looked at the desk, nosed open a drawer.\n\n\"Whatever are you doing there, Tala?\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Your cord-and-seal cutter, there, the short sharp blade. Let's have it.\"\n\nWidow Lessup ran for it. \"Are we to slit each other's throats? This is just like that play \u2026 ummm, the one with the old tyrant king and the three children \u2026\"\n\n\"No. I need my wings. It's a bit early, but I can move them a little, even though they're still encased. I may be able to fly.\"\n\n\"How does a knife\u2014?\" Rainfall said. \"Oh.\"\n\n\"Widow Lessup,\" Wistala said, pointing to the twin lines of raised scales on her back. \"You'll have to do it. Hard and fast, parallel to my fringe, like you're dressing a goat.\"\n\nRainfall grasped her by the hand and pointed.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know\u2014\"\n\n\"Fast!\" Wistala said. \"But not too deep. Cut the skin along the stretch marks\u2014that's probably the way it would open naturally.\"\n\nWidow Lessup took a deep breath\u2026 .\n\nThe first one hurt. The second one hurt even more, because she still had the pain of the first lining her back. Wistala tried to ignore the pain, and concentrated on the crashing sounds on the floor below. She also smelled smoke.\n\nShe extended her bloody wings as far as she could in the library, marveling at their form. They seemed a bit undersize compared with her mother's, but then they weren't fully grown yet, as she was in the middle of her final drakka growth spurt.\n\n\"I take it you're going to go up and out?\" Rainfall said, looking at the crystal cupola.\n\nWistala plunged her head through the hole in the library floor, as though she were going for a fish through an ice hole. She locked her jaws over the head of a barbarian running with an armful of stolen linens through the corridor below, pulled him up, and flung him skyward and through the glass, which mostly shattered outward from the force with which he was thrown.\n\nWidow Lessup sighed. \"It was such a pretty thing. Why must pretty things always be smashed?\"\n\nWistala reared up on her saa and, using the scales on her sii, smashed away the remaining bits of glass. She took a deep breath and roared out her pain and anger into the night: \"Let all who would burn these books know that there is an Agent of Librarians here. Enter to curses and peril!\"\n\n\"You'll have to leave that wondrous chair behind,\" Wistala said. \"I'm not sure I can carry you and it, as well.\"\n\n\"Take Widow Lessup first,\" Rainfall said.\n\n\"Sir!\" Widow Lessup objected. \"My heart will fail me anyway, carried aloft by a dragon.\"\n\nHe wiped his seal-cutter clean and placed it carefully on his desk next to his ink and quill box. \"A Hypatian noble's first duty\u2014and if necessary, his last duty\u2014is to his servants. Carry her to safety, Wistala. I remain to defend my library and all it stands for.\"\n\nHe stared so levelly at her, she knew it was pointless to argue. She plucked Widow Lessup up by her apron and housecoat and lifted her up and out of the cupola. The grounds around Mossbell were bathed in light from the furiously flaming hay and meal of the barn.\n\n\"No! No! No!\" Widow Lessup screamed as Wistala climbed out next to her and extended her wings, flapped them experimentally. The goats had either fled the smoke or blood and dragonsmell.\n\nWistala peeped over the roofline that was part hill crest, hoping the bush and wildflowers atop Mossbell hid her skull's outline.\n\nThere was chaos in the front by the fountain. The Dragonblade was shouting, pointing at her, and upbraiding one of his men with the back of his hand. The thane was riding in circles, trying to bring together barbarians, many with singed beards, who were running from Mossbell carrying everything from candlesticks to dining chairs.\n\nOther barbarians, under the eye of their chief, stood their ground, waiting for action. Behind them were the Dragonblade's warriors and archers.\n\nSave for one. The leather-clad youth called Eliam was chasing something around the courtyard. A blur of orange\u2014Yari-Tab, running rather stiff-leggedly, for she had seen her share of winters since coming to Mossbell.\n\nShe yowled as the man-boy caught her and picked her up, but not a face turned toward the boy running with an old cat.\n\nWistala felt her fire bladder bulge as Yari-Tab clawed and bit vainly at the leather sleeve and gloves. He ran across the courtyard, laughing, swinging her by the scruff to pitch her into the fire\u2014\n\nWistala launched herself, loosing her flame in a shower on the Dragonblade's warriors and dogs, who scattered or burned. As for the wretched boy, her mother's medicine would do for him.\n\nShe wipped her tail down and lashed him across the face with its scaly tip, knocking him off his feet. She beat her wings madly and gained altitude, a little more loopily than she would have liked, but she banked and turned back toward the roof of Mossbell, where Widow Lessup was running down a goat path with skirts held up.\n\nShe saw Yari-Tab dashing into the shadows of the side gardens, and the youth sitting upright in the courtyard, hands held to his face with blood running between his fingers, a sharp shadow thrown by the burning barn behind him.\n\n\"Teach you to wear your helmet,\" the Dragonblade laughed. \"Even if it does spoil your hair and hide that handsome face.\"\n\nShe swooped in behind Widow Lessup, corrected\u2014\n\nUsing her sii with claws tucked in, she grabbed the woman by the shoulders and pulled her into the sky, hearing late arrows fall through the air behind\u2026 .\n\nWistala, daughter of Irelia, lurched as she soared, thrown off by the strugging woman. It was a worse flight than even an aging sparrow or a sick bat could manage, but flying she was, better than in any dream."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragonelle",
                "text": "\u2003BEWARE BEGINNING A WAR. WAR TAKES MANY TURNS,\n\n\u2003AND MOST OFTEN BACK ON THE INSTIGATOR.\n\n\u2014Torus (the Elder)\n\nOld muscles newly used tired quickly, and Wistala found herself panting as she circled over the Green Dragon Inn.\n\nThe scene below reminded her of a riot she'd once seen outside the Great Arena of Hypat after an underdog victory in a game of Flagstaff when bet payments ran out.\n\nTwo houses burned, and through the smoky air, Wistala marked the barbarians as they ran in and out of the other homes in no sort of order. A group of them stood looking sadly at a cart that had lost a wheel after being overloaded with tools and anvils from the smithy. Chickens ran everywhere, to be chased frequently, caught rarely, and then stuffed into sacks and baskets when they weren't dropped in order to pursue a loosed sow or piglet.\n\nThe inn had the most barbarians about it. A long low building in back had been torn almost into planking, and the barbarians dipped helms or hands into the mead vats, to guzzle and swill and then stagger off to find vessels to carry some off before others could drink the brewery dry.\n\nEven if the spectacle below had comedic elements, it was a horrifying sort of comedy. Dead bodies, looking like dropped bundles of washing from the sky, lay in the streets and on the doorsteps. Only one or two of the bodies\u2014in front of the inn's windows\u2014were barbarian.\n\nThey'd had no luck getting through the narrow windows or stout door, and a flung torch or two smoldered on the tin roof. In the road before the inn, barbarians under the shouted commands of still-mounted leaders were piling tarry barrels and cut pine boughs on a wooden wagon, pointed so that it could be run toward the door of the inn. Others were busy chopping down the notice board before the inn stoop to give it a clear path.\n\nWistala's back burned like her fire bladder, and she longed to set the Widow Lessup down. The high roof of the inn seemed the safest spot, so she landed\u2014the uncharitable would say crashed\u2014on the Green Dragon's roof, striking first with her tail and then her hind legs, both from instinct and the desire to protect Widow Lessup.\n\n\"Cling to the chimney,\" she suggested, but the woman needed no prompting. She reached out, prostrate on the roof peak, and hugged brick, gasping for air.\n\nWistala folded her wings\u2014such relief!\u2014and licked at the blood running from the wounds from where her wings had come. According to Mother's tales, the emergence of one's wings was almost bloodless; just a clear, tangy fluid suppurated. She'd known she'd pay a price for cutting them free, and hoped it wouldn't be a lethal toll.\n\nMore hoofbeats sounded from the road, but Wistala could see little. Blowing smoke from flaming houses\u2014four burned now\u2014obscured all.\n\n\"I will try to return,\" Wistala said. \"If they succeed in burning the inn, slide down to the roof of the well shed and keep clear of the brewery.\"\n\n\"Ohhhhh!\" Widow Lessup wailed. \"Don't forget the master!\"\n\n\"I go for him now.\"\n\nShe extended her wings and launched herself off the roof. She left a trail of fire from the notice board to the wagon piled with brush and barrels, which promptly roared into flame and scattered the barbarians. As she flapped up into the sky, she noticed an arrow sticking into the inside of her sii\u2014what difference would this blood loss make when so much ran off her back?\n\nEvery flap of her wings seemed like her last. She passed up the road, saw the Dragonblade and his horsemen in a tight formation riding for the inn, but they must have had their eyes to the sky, for they executed a neat turn, dispersing as she passed above them.\n\nBut she felt in no condition to face the Dragonblade. Besides, she had her mind bent on Rainfall.\n\nShe passed over the outer grounds of Mossbell and saw a throng of men in the courtyard around the statue fountain.\n\nOh, infamy! They had Rainfall there, hanging upside down from the statue, ropes looped about his ankles and the neck of the representation of law. The barbarians were hurling books\u2014the one household item they saw no use for\u2014at him.\n\nHammar and his men observed events from a little farther away.\n\nToo tired to flap, she set her wings and glided in, spreading what was left of her fire right and left and scattering the barbarians.\n\nShe felt the arrows strike. She never remembered it as a painful feeling, more astonished that she didn't hear them whirl through the air or hit her, but hit they did. A lucky couple bounced off her sides but others plunged into her scaleless underside. The next thing she knew, she was on the ground, nostrils full of dirt and grass, a neck-length from the fountain.\n\nShe heard blood rushing in her ears\u2014no, it was the barbarians hooting and cheering, sharp black shapes against Mossbell aflame.\n\nHer breath came with difficulty, and her vision foreshortened. But Rainfall still breathed. She would die beside him. More arrows and a hand-ax bounced off her scale; she noted the strikes uninterestedly. She made one painful crawl toward him, got her nose on the edge of the fountain, smelled blood and water. One of the goldfish came to the surface and looked at her, mouth opening and shutting as it hoped for a tidbit.\n\nDully, she saw the column of the Dragonblade's men ride up. The Dragonblade pulled up, and the black helm waved this way and that as it took in the scene. The man-boy in leather, staggering and with the side of his face crudely bandaged and a medicine vial in his hand, pointed with the unsteady hand of a drunk at the fountain.\n\nWistala found she had a terrible thirst and drank, causing the goldfish to flee to the other side of the pool. As she sucked water, she watched events in the courtyard with amazing calm. Even Rainfall's moans as he hung, upside down and red-faced, were just another component of the tableau.\n\nThe Dragonblade dismounted. He took off his helm, hung it on the pommel of his horse, and drew a gleaming blade. He strode forward, eyes burning.\n\nThis is the end. She wondered what would happen to her head and claws. Would they be sold together, as a set, or separately?\n\nThe Dragonblade swung, and she shut her eyes.\n\nAmazingly she felt nothing, heard only a splash\u2014her own head falling into the pool at the base of the statue?\n\nShe opened an eye. The Dragonblade had cut down Rainfall, pulled him out of the water and set him down on the ground, propped up so he sat against the fountain pool.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Rainfall gasped.\n\nThe Dragonblade glanced down at her, his broad, flat face frowning, gray wisps in his dark hair and thick at his temples, and he turned and walked toward Hammar, removing his thick gauntlets.\n\nShe felt Rainfall's hand on her snout. So tired. But the water was helping. She sucked a little more.\n\n\"The dragon's finished,\" the Dragonblade said.\n\nDragonelle, Wistala corrected rather absently. I lived to fly and by rights must be called a dragonelle.\n\n\"More by her own doing than any arrows,\" the Dragonblade continued as he walked up to Hammar.\n\nThe Dragonblade moved so fast, Wistala wasn't sure what she saw, but Hammar fell backwards. Ah, the Dragonblade held his gauntlets aloft; he'd lashed out and struck Hammar across the face. He threw the gloves into Hammar's face.\n\n\"I'm a slayer, and I quit whatever feud you have,\" the Dragonblade said.\n\n\"I'm takings her earsh,\" the man-boy slurred, drawing a blade and moving forward. \"My idea to baitsh the creasure with\u2014\"\n\nThe Dragonblade reached out, caught him by the red shoulder sash and spun him around so hard that he dropped the medicine bottle and fell. The man-boy got to his hands and feet, and the Dragonblade kicked him at the tailvent, so hard that the youth went face-down in the dirt. \"Get him on his horse,\" the Dragonblade said to the line of archers.\n\n\"Mount your horse, and let's be off,\" the Dragonblade said. \"Vagt kom trug mid suup-seep,\" he said to the barbarians, who growled and fingered their weapons. He waited expectantly.\n\n\"I thought not,\" the Dragonblade said, turning.\n\nOne burst from the others, howling and waving a short ax in each hand. The Dragonblade whirled, lifted his scabbarded blade and used it to catch the pair of axes under the head. He lifted his arms so the squatty barbarian hung gripping the ax-handles with legs kicking, and head-butted him so that the barbarian dropped unconscious.\n\nWith the aid of one of his men, he remounted his armored horse. \"I leave you the honor of finishing the beast off, brave and lordly men of Galahall\u2014Ha!\" He glanced back at the man-boy, who was sagging in the saddle he'd been hoisted into, and touched heels to horse flank. \"Keep the rest of my fee, Thane. Gold from you could buy only wormy meat and ill-fitting shoes.\"\n\nThe thane's armsmen stirred and looked to their chief for orders.\n\nHammar held up a hand, and his men remained in their places. \"You've made an enemy to remember\u2014and regret!\" Hammar shouted at the riders filing east. The Dragonblade tilted back his head and laughed. \"Drakossozh!\" Hammar screamed into the night. \"You've insulted a king!\" Only laughter answered.\n\nWistala found she had the energy to climb up into the fountain. She settled into the water, rubbing her back and washing out her wounds but also washing out one of the goldfish, poor fellow. Pleasant warmth suffused her, and she curled in the pool about the statue so her head was near Rainfall.\n\nNot only did the water feel good, but her underside was now protected by the pool's thick lip of masonry, as well. She rattled her griff in challenge and waited.\n\n\"Well. You heard him,\" Hammar said to his bodyguards. \"Kill the creature!\"\n\n\"We need spears for that, Lord Hammar,\" the closest said. \"Longer spears than our allies carry,\" he added hastily, as Hammar pointed to the spears in dirty hands all around.\n\n\"You have your swords!\"\n\nA man with a deformed lip curled up to reveal brown teeth shook his head. \"It's still moving. I'm not going near those jaws, whatever that dragon-hunter said.\"\n\n\"Then start at the back and work up!\"\n\n\"The tail's just as dangerous. That boy lost his eye!\"\n\nHammar opened his mouth as if to say something else but thought better of it. \"Someone get me a bow!\"\n\nBarbarians began to ride across the yard, their horses laden with bags and tied barrels. Some carried off bound women and children.\n\nThe barbarians before Mossbell were conducting an informal market, swapping candlesticks for plate, furniture for spice boxes and kitchen implements. Hammar yelled something at one of the brow-tattooed leaders, who shrugged or glanced in any direction but the fountain or scratched their beards as if to say, Dragon \u2026 I see no dragon!\n\nPart of Mossbell's sod roof collapsed with a roar.\n\nOne of Hammar's riders rode up with a hunting bow, fully as tall as a man. Hammar notched an arrow and drew.\n\nWistala saw him sight on her eye. She pressed herself flat into the water, which surged and washed over the rim.\n\nAt the last instant, Hammar shifted aim and fired an arrow into Rainfall's chest. The elf let out a weak cry.\n\n\"That was for practice,\" Hammar said.\n\nWistala lunged out of the water. It wasn't a dragon-dash, more of a desperate crawl, and Hammar backpedaled, dropping his arrow\u2014\n\nAnd Mossbell's south yard-wall exploded in orange and yellow.\n\nThrough the dust and falling bricks came three gargants, charging abreast, dwarves tied on their backs holding rein and weapon.\n\nBehind the gargants rode others from the circus, men and women on the show horses who were used to confusion and noise and crowds, and behind them others on foot, carrying everything from mallets to clubs bristling with tent spikes.\n\nHammar gave them one openmouthed look and ran. Wistala did not have the strength to pursue him.\n\nThe barbarians instinctively drew together into a bunch to face the attack, linking wooden shields and raising war-pick and ax, but the dwarves tightened their formation and let the iron-shod feet of their gargants crash through and stomp the barbarians as easily as they would a flower bed. All order left the barbarians, and they ran for their lives.\n\nBut the circus was not done yet. The dwarves situated highest on beast-back fired crossbows down into the rout, passing the empty bow back for others to load and taking up another with remorseless precision.\n\nThe riders harried the barbarians at the edges, throwing knives or small axes, or hooking men at neck or feet with ropes. Ragwrist himself sent Marlil and her women after the fleeing thane and his bodyguard. They lit red candle-fireworks and rode hard on the heels of the men, shrieking like loosed demons and throwing knives until the bodyguard plunged into the woods\u2014save for the man who was dismounted by a branch.\n\nThe battle passed in fury. Dsossa appeared as though dropped from the sky, kneeling next to Rainfall. Those on foot were the last to leave the yard, clubbing their way through the lamed and the wounded barbarians.\n\nWistala tried to rise to her feet, failed. The front balcony on Mossbell fell in a shower of sparks.\n\nRagwrist returned, dismounted, ran to Rainfall, fell to his knees. Ragwrist used his thumbs and turned up Rainfall's eyelids. He detached the sobbing Dsossa, placed a hand on Rainfall's heart, then tore out the offending arrow.\n\n\"He is dead,\" Wistala said. She could hear no breathing.\n\nRagwrist blew his whistle, loudly, and again. He stopped only when he heard answering whistles from the thundering gargants.\n\n\"Quarryness is aflame,\" Ragwrist said. \"It would appear the thane had enemies there, as well. That fat low judge is hanging from the Hypatian Hall peak.\"\n\nWistala's light-headedness brought a strange sort of clarity.\n\n\"You'd better move the circus south of the bridge.\" She would remain beside Rainfall, now and for eternity\u2026 .\n\nSwinging, flying again\u2014no, she was being hauled up onto gargant-back by dwarves with ropes all around.\n\nThrough a sticky eye she saw a golden summer dawn. Mossbell still flamed at the end of blackened beams. A door-pull glittered in the char-heap, and the wind was carrying off fine white ash\u2014probably the remains of Rainfall's library.\n\nThey passed through the village, better than half the houses were burnt, and the others were emptied, but the inn still stood. The villagers had thrown the few dead barbarians on the burning cart before the inn, and added broken shutters and doors. Some joined the circus column, carrying bundles or pushing household goods in carts, and so passed over the bridge into the next thanedom.\n\nRagwrist arrayed his house carts to block the bridge, and the last memory Wistala had was of Widow Lessup consoling Mod Lada\u2014Rayg had been at academy outside Quarryness, and none in the despoiled town could say what had become of him.\n\nThey buried Rainfall the next day on a cool summer morning of the sort that always saw him long at work in his garden.\n\nWistala, drinking like a horse fresh from a race, begged Ragwrist to drag a dead horse from the village and a team of dwarves with a gargant went and fetched two so that she might have one the next day. They hung one and she devoured the other despite the flies. With food and water in her, she felt up to a slow, stiff walk up the riverbank to a prominence overlooking Mossbell's grounds.\n\n\"He'd rather be rooted with the family across the gorge there,\" Ragwrist said. \"But Hammar is a bitter man, I'd hate to have him take vengeance on a rooting elf.\"\n\nWistala watched the procedure. Under Ragwrist's direction they sat the body cross-legged, facing the river and bound up in canvas, then coated him with fresh clay, until he resembled a lumpy, three-sided pyramid. The crown of his head they left naked to the elements. His hair still sprouted there, if anything a little brighter green than before. \"He'll like it better on the south bank anyway, the sun catches the river mist, and he'll have rainbows. And a better view of his bridge and lands.\"\n\nShe asked Ragwrist about the custom as Dsossa smoothed the clay sides with her hands.\n\n\"The being you knew is dead, certainly. The dormant comes to fore after death,\" Ragwrist said. \"Some elf families bury their dead upright in a hole, others hollow out dead trees and place them in there. With us it is clay.\"\n\n\"Us?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Yes, Rainfall is my brother.\"\n\nShe was shocked into speechlessness. \"But you've only shown\u2014\"\n\n\"To elves family is an accident, Wistala. We are dutiful to our parents and try to pass on all we've gained from the world, in wisdom and wealth, to our children, but as to siblings or cousins or all that stuff humans and dwarves set such store by\u2014\" He shrugged. \"Just as well, for I've seen feuds start between brothers over family obligation that make the Steppe Wars mild by comparison. It is sad to see another full-elf go. So few are born anymore these days.\"\n\n\"It is the same with dragons,\" Wistala said, as Dsossa kissed a new bud on Rainfall's head. She planted a handful of Mossbell's green lichen to keep him company. \"Why is this? Are elves hunted, as well?\"\n\n\"If I knew the cause, I'd be in a shell-house, looking out over the water gardens of Krakenoor. We have our enemies, true enough, but that is not the cause. They say the magic is being leeched out of the world. But what do poets know?\"\n\nDsossa touched her at folded wing edge. \"Wistala, I know Rainfall would want you to have this,\" she said, drawing the blue battle sash from beneath her weather coat. \"It is a relic of Hypatian Generalhood and should go to his daughter.\"\n\nThe silk was so shiny and smooth, it was as though water had been woven into fabric. \"I could not wear it. My scales would tear it to pieces.\"\n\n\"Carry it, then. What has become of your harness and satchels?\"\n\n\"We lost much baggage in Quarryness,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"I will ask Brok to make you something more fitting,\" Dsossa said.\n\n\"Will you come with us south?\" Ragwrist said. \"If the circus is to continue, we must back to the winter camp and replace our losses. Would that they'd just taken money instead of lives! Money is so easily replaced.\"\n\nWistala almost snorted, never having heard money and easy so closely associated from Ragwrist. It took her a moment to answer the question, so conflicted were her thoughts.\n\nOh, the allure of familiar routine! Drained in body and brain, she could eat the wheel-size fish of the delta\u2014\n\n\"I must think on this. I told you I would travel with you until I had my wings. But I must decide what purpose to put them to.\"\n\nWistala's wounds ceased bleeding whenever she moved the next day, though she suspected she still had an arrowhead in her, for if she struck her left sii out far forward it pained her.\n\nDespite her fatigue she went across the bridge, and saw Jessup and some of his family rebuilding their brewery. She didn't pause to talk\u2014though she did touch the sign for luck, which caused one aged man sitting on the doorstep to touch a phantom mug to his lips\u2014but instead went to Mossbell. There she took Stog in mouth, holding him as tenderly as a gamesman's bird dog would carry a duck, and crossed Mossbell to the grove of Rainfall's ancestry.\n\nShe had to keep her eyes averted from the ruin. Remarkably enough the two trees flanking the front door still lived, though their smaller limbs had been burned they were still green far above.\n\nAt the glade of Rainfall's ancestors, she found the remains of days-old campfires and a garbage pile, and noted that the barbarians had carved rude symbols in the tree bark with their blades and left their filth all about the roots. Whether it was chance or purpose, she could not say.\n\nShe laid Stog beside Avalanche and gathered rocks, and over the course of the day built such a cairn that not even the strongest badger would be able to dig his way through. When it was done, she sat atop it and looked across the gorge. She could just see a brown dot, Rainfall's cocoon, from which a tree would hopefully emerge.\n\nUtterly sapped by the effort, she slept. She dreamed the trees were whispering to her, soft words made of wind and leaves.\n\nEven before the circus left, Wistala occupied the old troll cave overlooking the Whitewater River west of the bridge.\n\nIt wasn't a bad cave. The outer length stank of gulls; the cave mouth looked like a running sore, so thick were their droppings down the rocks below.\n\nFarther inside bats clung to the cave roof. They were oddly comforting, reminding her of the home cave. The more responsible part of her mind, which often spoke with Mother's voice and silenced those bits interested in old Elvish poems, Hypatian architecture, or the taste of sweetwater fish mixed with gar-locque or other herbs\u2014and occasionally considered what composition of length, curvature, thickness, and number might make the most pleasing array of horns on a dragon, told her that the bat droppings would hide dragon odor. Not that the dog had yet been bred who could negotiate the cliff and stick his wet nose in her temporary lair.\n\nAt night she would visit burned Mossbell, which now belonged, as all ruins must, she supposed, to the cats. Jessup told her that Old Yari-Tab was sharing an upstairs room with Widow Lessup at the Green Dragon Inn until a house could have its roof and doors repaired.\n\nJessup also mentioned that the thane's men had already set up a bridge toll and expected their mead and meals free as part of \"guarding\" the ruined village.\n\nThe younger cats ran wild in the ruins and gardens, hunting the birds and mice and rabbits that came for the beans and vegetables, but scuttled away whenever she approached one\u2014as if a rangy cat would make more than a snack!\n\nShe climbed the burnt bark of the doorway trees and wrapped herself around the trunk at their height and tried to ignore the yowls of mating cats below. She looked off toward the ridge that shielded Galahall's rooftops from her vision, or the two hills, or the long lines of mountains disappearing north and south\u2014she could just make out one of the peaks that bordered the Wheel of Fire dwarves to the north\u2014and the Dragonblade, if he still lived among them.\n\n\"What dragon lives that doesn't count his enemies on more than one limb?\" she said to the wind, wishing she had the strength to at least burn Galahall. But Lessup told her that some years ago Hammar had Galahall's roof re-covered with slate and his cornices and towers shingled with dragonscale, bought at great expense from the Wheel of Fire dwarves.\n\nWistala knew, too well, how they acquired dragonscale. How much was Mother's green, or Father's bronze?\n\n\"I'm but one dragon, what can I do? Assemble an army of dragons? From where? I've not seen another of my kind since\u2014\"\n\nShe could keep neither the promise to her Father nor her private oath of vengeance\u2014the scroll of the family slaughtered now included Rainfall and probably Rayg, for the barbarians could make cruel sport of captives\u2014without knowing another dragon. A dozen would be better, but as far as she knew numbers like that had not gathered since the days of Silverhigh. Even Auron, scaleless and thin, would have been a comfort as an ally with his sparks of inspirational courage.\n\nShe would have to improvise.\n\nShe almost chuckled, she'd been so long among hominids. At least Auron wasn't keeping the rain off some grasping thane with delusions of kinghood. Did dragons naturally indulge in the humor of the funeral pyre, or had they developed it through dark years of murder and assassination? Poor Auron. She tried to imagine him curled around the tree opposite, probably complaining about his empty stomach or talking of the stars.\n\nWhere is his star again? Follow the Bowing Dragon. There. Susiron, always in your spot.\n\nHow sad that Auron never learned the joy of flight. She threw herself from the tree and opened her wings\u2014she still wasn't strong enough to take off without a drop from some kind of height, and flapped up into the clouds.\n\nShe was still weak. To regain her strength, she'd go far away, and work herself until she was as strong and single minded as the toughest barbarian. She would go north.\n\n\"It's as good a place as any for a dragon,\" Ragwrist said with a shrug.\n\nShe had heard the circus was going to leave the next morning and had sent a message through Jessup, and they met at Rainfall's grave on the eve of departure. The clay pyramid now sprouted at the peak like a four-head cluster of broccoli. \"But \u2026 brrr. Not for me. And the tribes up there, they'll slit your throat out of pure meanness and take your skin for coat-shell.\"\n\n\"You won't find any libraries up there,\" Dsossa said. \"Rainfall always appreciated the volumes you sent, you know.\"\n\nWistala hardly believed her eyes, but it seemed the growth atop the clay pyramid tilted ever so slightly in her direction. Had the broccoli bowed to her? No, it was simply responding to the moon above and behind her.\n\nMaybe.\n\n\"I must go north. According to the librarians, there are others of my kind there,\" she said. \"But I will come back to visit. Perhaps to your winter camp, so I don't get frozen solid up there when the sun runs south.\"\n\n\"Don't expect to lie around all day stuffing yourself with veal at my expense,\" Ragwrist said. \"You winter at my circus, and you'll be speaking to select seekers at a commanding price!\"\n\n\"Oh, give it a rest. I'll buy her a bullock or two,\" Brok said. \"If you'll give me a moment, I'll show you your new harness.\"\n\nHe'd made a leather neck pouch, easily expandable, that had stiffened cases all around the sides, about the size of the ones the dwarves used for their crossbow bolts.\n\n\"I put a couple vesk-stone of good softmetal in for you. Metal is rare up there, I understand they use bone fishhooks and flint scrapers and such. Or at least that's what the traders bring back.\"\n\nA transparent blister showed at the buckle on her breast, and a familiar blue sat within. \"That's the old elf's battle sash. Safe from weather and wet in there, though honestly I wasn't expecting the cold of the icelands. If you open the latch,\" he showed her how, \"you can unscrew the crystal if you'd like to take it out for some reason, but remember to seal it up again with good wax to make it airtight.\"\n\n\"You raided my ironmonger?\" Ragwrist said. \"Are you trying to ruin me, Brok? Am I to support the family of every blacksmith in Hypatia?\"\n\nBrok ignored the protestations and slipped it over Wistala's outstretched head.\n\nWistala thought it looked like an oversize gem, and wearing such a thing would make her feel flashier than a proper young dragonelle from her family should\u2014Your wings and scales should be advertisement enough, Mother always said, no need to adorn for Silverhigh aerials\u2014but had to admire the workmanship.\n\nShe put it on. It turned on her neck easily enough, and she could reach the cases, probably even while flying.\n\n\"Rub some fats into the leather now and again,\" Brok advised. \"It's the finest hardened cowhide, but don't mistake it for steel. It needs care.\"\n\n\"Improvident\u2014,\" Ragwrist sputtered. \"He speaks of care. Care! Have care to my balance book!\"\n\n\"I don't know how to thank you, Brok,\" Wistala said, ignoring the byplay. \"You should have my coin savings.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Brok said. \"I loaded two of these cases with it. Eat them sparingly, good dragon.\"\n\n\"What of you, Dsossa?\" Wistala asked. \"Will you live near the inn?\"\n\n\"I will still breed my horses, though on this side of the river, and Hammar won't get one for any price. Old Avalanche left some colts on this side of the river, and I'll see if I can't better the bloodline.\"\n\n\"Stog might suggest a dose of donkey.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'll breed mules too. Less money in mules, but they are more easily sold in any market.\"\n\nThey looked at each other around Rainfall's rooting place.\n\n\"I shall be sorry to leave you all,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"That's circus. You've outgrown us,\" Ragwrist said.\n\n\"No. I've learned so much, and I could lear\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't mean that,\" Ragwrist said, waving away the dragon breath. \"I mean the circus can't afford to feed you any more, or employ an army of shovelers to keep the air breathable.\"\n\nWistala slept out the next day in the old troll cave, half a horse inside her\u2014she'd flown up to Galahall and snatched one from an outer pasture as it stood sleeping\u2014and the other half hanging for breakfast, when she heard a faint shouting.\n\n\"Wistala! Wistala!\"\n\nIt was a female voice. She sent the seagulls flying as she crawled out the entrance\u2014from the noise they made anyone would think it was their cave\u2014and cautiously peeped up the cliff.\n\nLada lay flat on her belly. She waved.\n\n\"I hate heights, you know,\" Lada said.\n\n\"You don't look well,\" Wistala said. \"But I'm glad for a chance to say good-bye.\"\n\n\"I need to speak to you. Please!\"\n\n\"I'd prefer if you'd come after dark. I don't want anyone to know where I am. Speaking of which, how did you find out?\"\n\n\"Jessup told me. His oldest pointed out the cave from chalk hill. And tonight I must stay with a sick family.\"\n\nWistala sighed. It would be easy to fly up there, but any fishermen along the river and every shepherd on the hills would see her.\n\nShe climbed. Amazing how much stronger her forelimbs felt with her wings out. In a moment she stood on the thick pasture grass.\n\n\"Let's try that little hollow over there, out of the wind,\" Wistala suggested. Also out of view.\n\nEven without the hat Lada's priest's robes made her look older than she was. A summer ribbon bound her hair with the aid of a bean-stake. Her eyes were dark and worried.\n\n\"So this is more than just a good-bye, or a last moment of consolation over our father's death,\" Wistala said, once in the hollow.\n\nLada brushed some snails from a rock and sat down. \"It's Rayg. His body was never found, you know.\"\n\n\"I saw several carried off,\" Wistala said. \"He was taken at Quarryness?\"\n\n\"Yes. Another low priest with experience in these matters says he's most likely been made a slave. He's at the perfect age: old enough to work intelligently but still small enough to be overpowered by the least housewoman. Mod Daland believes him to be alive.\"\n\n\"But in barbarian hands.\"\n\n\"I went to see Hammar, you know,\" she said, her thin lips almost disappearing. \"Just yesterday. Just\u2014it took all my nerve.\"\n\n\"He claims to have influence with them.\"\n\n\"His hall is full of their banners, drums with claws and feathers on the heads, and that horrible reeking charcoal they use to toast their flesh. You can scarce see through the glass in the windows. But I threw myself down before him, on those stones full of dog hair and spit, and begged him. I told him that he could have anything\u2014anything\u2014if he'd help find my son. His son.\"\n\nShe hid her eyes under her hand. \"He took my offer, took me. Took me and made a sport of my body \u2026 I can't describe more. But afterwards when I asked him to get Rayg back, he laughed and said he didn't need another bas\u2014boy hanging about the place, counting on a position or thinking of the throne. He calls it a throne now. He said he'd make inquires so I could go north and seek him.\"\n\nWistala watched one of the brushed-aside snails go back up the rock. \"I'm sorry to hear your troubles. But if you think I need more reason to hate Hammar\u2014\" She began to describe the scene before the fountain, but it so upset Lada that she stopped. \"How can I help?\" Wistala asked.\n\nLada wiped her eyes. \"I'm supposed to be the priestess\u2014oh, well, an inworld acolyte, I should say. This is so selfish, I've left the world behind but\u2014he's my son! I'm supposed to be the one who helps people with their troubles. The world is wheels within wheels, and each turn grinds \u2026 but the words aren't helping me.\"\n\nWistala waited.\n\n\"I heard you were going north. I ask you to look for Rayg while you're there. If I learn anything about his location I'll try to get word\u2014Copex knows how\u2014but I'll try, and leave word with the circus. Then you can go in and get him and \u2026 and\u2014\"\n\n\"Burn anyone who gets in my way?\" Wistala supplied.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, hard and low and with eyes alight as though she relished the thought. Perhaps Lada had her heart no more in her role as priestess than as a circus performer.\n\n\"And if I retrieve him?\"\n\n\"A temple built in your honor enclosing a statue of bronze and silver, if I have to work the rest of my life toward it.\"\n\nHominids and their strange vanities. How many times can you fill your gorge at a temple? \"I'm not going to live in barbarian lands. I'm going beyond men, looking for my kind.\"\n\n\"I heard some sailors saw one of your kind. But it is a secondhand story, perhaps they got it wrong?\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Oh, to the north, while crossing the Inland Ocean. They'd been blown off course by a storm and they saw a dragon aloft. They thought for certain they were doomed and made their last offerings, but the dragon only swooped low over them. They said a man in heavy fur rode its back, but sailors are always telling tales.\"\n\n\"Are they sure it was a dragon? Not feathered?\"\n\n\"Yes, a dragon, and blue as the sky. Speaking of blue, I must admire that belt around your throat. Wait\u2014if it goes around your throat is it a belt or no?\"\n\n\"Harness, I call it, but I pity the man who holds on to it to ride my neck. He'll need something thicker than fur to save his skin.\"\n\nWistala pulled her griff up and back so the corners of her mouth could rise. Lada laughed.\n\n\"I used to hate you,\" Lada said.\n\n\"You were young,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Fair can be foul, and foul fair,\" Lada quoted. \"Proverbs of Experience sixty-one. That means something to me. Now.\"\n\n\"I'll make no promises about Rayg, fair or foul,\" Wistala said. \"But I will keep my eyes open. I intend to travel at night, though. Your best chance is through Hammar, distasteful as he is.\"\n\n\"He can be charming, as long as he's getting his way and his appetite is sated,\" she said. \"I will dance to his tune, but as a viper does before it strikes the bird. A fair journey, Wistala, and peril only to your enemies.\"\n\n\"If I come south again, I will leave word at Jessup's Inn and the circus winter camp. I fly north tomorrow, but one of my hearts stays at Mossbell.\"\n\nWistala flew north in easy stages, more from physical limitations than intent.\n\nEven with her wounds healed over and her blood restored, she still tired easily and needed frequent rests, made all the more difficult by a thirst that seemed to start at her tail-tip and grow from there and a hunger that must have been worse than her hatchling pangs. (It wasn't, but lost memories are sometimes a kindness.)\n\nShe followed the road until it broke off into a series of trails or twin ruts, irregularly filled with increasingly crude bridgework. Even the distance posts of Ancient Hypat's short-lived Tribal Confederation, still in use to mark intervals of vesk even in lands where the word Hypat was a curse and Hypatian a synonym for \"devil.\"\n\nFlying mostly at night, but doing what she could to observe the villages and isolated hutments she passed in what felt like a hopeless search for Rayg, she avoided lights below.\n\nHearth lights and campfires grew less and less frequent as she ranged north, until she began to travel at dawn and dusk so that she had a better chance of dropping on a hoofed-and-horned meal. The snowcaps on the mountains, rich with all the dragon colors when the sun was level with them, marched lower and lower and glaciers hanging between became commonplace.\n\nThen, over the course of a single night, she reached new air currents. The wind ceased blowing pleasantly warm from the southwest, and instead spun down the coast from the northeast, a cold, wet breeze that helped her to glide but she had to fight like an enemy for each hop north. She found that she traveled faster with less fatigue if her track crisscrossed the wind in the manner of a serpent.\n\nFood was plentiful. Out on the coast there were shallows thick with crabs the size of a battle shield and great waddling tubes of flesh and fat that sunned themselves on sandbars and coastal rocks, the fattest often at the top where they could bark at the lesser, but the commanding height just meant they were easily plucked up by a hungry dragonelle.\n\nThe exhaustion of flying became too great.\n\nShe found a reef-sheltered isle, in seas she guessed were too rough for the boats of men, and spent a dozen or more days happily in the hardy bush and wind-racked pines atop sheer cliffs, taking various multilegged, pincer-armed crawlers from the sea during the day and plucking the occasional barker at night from the sleeping beaches.\n\nWhile resting there, she saw not one, but three dragons. The sight shocked her, after spending much of her lifetime without so much as a glimpse of her kind. To see not just one, but three, all at once and together, froze her for a moment. They flew almost wing-tip to wing-tip, a slightly smaller silver leading two big reds.\n\nWistala threw herself into the air, fringe high and stiff with excitement, flapping madly to gain altitude.\n\nWing-tips rose in unison as they glided. They must have marked her. All turned gently for a better look.\n\nThat was when she noticed the riders.\n\nIt was so like horses, she glided for a moment, losing altitude, stunned. The dragons had reins, reins! running forward from the riders to the head and out to the leading wing bones.\n\nDragons fixed and ridden like horses had no appeal, and she didn't like the way they were coming around, spreading out a little.\n\nShe rolled on her back, dived, headed for the shoreline, where she wove around her plateau island and changed course a little southward so if they were moving to intercept, they might overshoot. She chanced a glance back and saw one of the riders was in difficulty; his dragon was circling oddly. The silver and its rider dived toward her, then came around in a great swoop, leading the other red, which could not match its turns. The pair headed to the aid of the other.\n\nThe last Wistala saw of them, as she plunged into the coastal forest, was the silver and undercommand red flanking the other as they turned back out to sea.\n\nSummer days at the top of the world lasted forever.\n\nWistala saw patches of ground ice that must linger throughout the year, and inlets where glaciers flowed into the Inland Ocean. Heated by sun and perhaps current, the glaciers would groan and crack and send ice plunging into the water with a rumbling sound like a thousand thunderstorms.\n\nPerhaps it was the rich sea diet, or all the exercise, but she found herself in the midst of another growth spurt and losing scales, despite her careful rationing of coin. But for all her loss of shining scale, her wings grew prodigiously, and she suspected that had she left them alone they would have uncased by themselves at this point.\n\nShe came to a marsh country, where the land looked like ocean, patterned into regular waves of higher ground mixed with wet patches below. Rabbits with oversize feet, herds of moss-antlered herbivores, packs of wolves, and little brush-tailed foxes thrived here, along with a few hardy humans who kept to the waterways in flat-bottomed boats.\n\nThe wind blew hard here, and Wistala used it. Every day she matched herself against the wind, once after the morning's hunt and again in the evening, every day fighting a little harder for speed, or height, or the length of time she could hang over one spot, gaining strength with each battle against the wind.\n\nAnd met her second dragon here.\n\nShe spotted him while eating on one of the ridges\u2014the wetter hollows were thick with mosquitoes, but the bugs couldn't cope with the wind on the hill humps\u2014splashing through the wet, approaching her from land.\n\nHe looked wider than he was long, reminding her of a toad, and had rust-colored scales edged with white cracks and chips that struck her as unhealthy. He approached, nostrils sniffing her as if she were a dinner of venison, perhaps attracted by her smell or the blood.\n\n\"You are stranger, welcome,\" he said. It had been so long since she'd heard Drakine, it seemed more foreign a tongue than Elvish.\n\n\"UthBeeyan am I, dragon of the coldwinds. Which wind brought you?\" He bobbed his head but kept his sii still. She guessed he meant no harm, but she left off eating so as not to be taken with a mouthful of bone.\n\nHis mind held nothing but hunger and an eager lust for her green flanks.\n\n\"Wistala am I, dragonelle of whatever winds may bear me. Are there many dragons in the coldwinds?\"\n\n\"I drive away!\" UthBeeyan said, which Wistala found easy to believe, as she was downwind of him. He let out sort of a croaking roar. \"You hear my song, we mate now.\"\n\n\"We shall do no such thing,\" Wistala said.\n\nHe jumped at her and she backed up, putting her tail point in between his nose and her, ready to crack him across the soft spot between his eyes, but he settled onto her kill and took a mouthful. \"You huntress worthy of spring wind. I take dragonshare. Find another.\"\n\nGladly, Wistala thought.\n\nThe weather turned cold, bitterly so, almost overnight, freezing the swampy areas and turning the soil on the hill hummocks hard. Snow blew some nights, but could only cling where the wind couldn't reach it, and Wistala returned to the rocky coastline. During the day everything turned a hard, uniform gray: water, shoreline, clouds, the sun at best a whitish circle behind mists.\n\nShe happened across a big boat, of all things, hugging the coast as it crept along south, a dwarf at the tiller and four men pulling the oars. All wore hides so thick, they looked like bears, save for the dwarf, who might be mistaken for one of the sausagelike barkers on the rocks, for his booted feet barely protruded from beneath his coat, looking like flippers.\n\nMore hides, entire bundles of them, were lined up in the center and bottom of the boat, along with strings of fox tails and what looked like wolf skins.\n\nSwooping low, she saw the dwarf turn the boat for shore and lift a device that looked like an immense crossbow, wider of bow than she was high. She dropped into the water some distance away, upwind so her words might carry and any bolts fired would have to fight a stiff breeze. The cold, after its first shock, wasn't so bad.\n\n\"May I ask you a question?\" she called across the water in Parl.\n\nThe dwarf startled, and the rowers bent over their oars and bowed and chanted and rattled strings of shells.\n\nThe dwarf lifted a speaking trumpet. \"Question away, though I warn you, I've no coin.\"\n\n\"Do you know these lands, good dwarf?\" she called.\n\n\"Know them? I love them, and will tell you why: Fools don't survive up here.\"\n\n\"I seek my kind. Are there dragons to be found?\"\n\n\"None you wish to find,\" the dwarf said. \"Wait! There are some decent dragons, though it is a long journey.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"East, over the Icespine and then across the plains a full two hundred vesk of journey. The Sadda-Vale. I've not been there in years, but once a goodly white dragon named Scabia ruled there with her kin and accepted some trade.\"\n\n\"What is the Icespine?\"\n\n\"You may know them in the south as the Red Mountains. Cross them and from your heights you may just see the peaks beyond. The Sadda-Vale is pleasant, though rainy, but beware the trolls roaming outside it. They were thick there when last I visited.\"\n\n\"Thank you, good dwarf.\"\n\n\"Any news from the south?\"\n\n\"Wars with barbarians, in Hypat's northern thanedoms,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Ah. One's been building for a while. Luckily the Ya-yuit don't go in for such nonsense. Good day, dragon!\" The dwarf thickened, and Wistala realized he had bowed. She dipped her head and swam for shore.\n\nShe went east with a serious storm, which forced her down to seek shelter in trees. It raged for two days, leaving her hungry and the land thick with snow. She followed a game trail down into a valley and found nothing to eat, save a dead bear frozen solid under a tree, which even her foua could achieve little against without burning the meat to uselessness. She picked at the bits of icy flesh, but it left her with sore teeth.\n\nShe flew east in the clear icy day, and came to a river. The local men\u2014was there anywhere men did not go?\u2014had chipped a hole in the ice and were smoking fish in a shack built next to the hole. They ran for a little cluster of huts standing in the shelter of a hill at the bank as she passed over, and so great was her hunger that she raided the smokehouse and gorged\u2014even eating the poor iron fishhooks stored there. She broke the film of ice on the fishing hole and drank, then slept right on the ice, wrapped around the small fire keeping the smoke going, feeling as stuffed and pampered as though she were back in Rainfall's steam-filled health room.\n\nShe awoke to chanting and the smell of burning fat.\n\nDownwind on the iced-over river the locals were burning a small fire, with a pot hung over it, and a tent pole stood next to it. When she raised her head, three contraptions went whizzing across the ice, pulled by dogs.\n\nWistala blinked the crusts of ice and snow out of her eyes and followed the smell, cold muscles only slowly warming to their work. There was no sign of a trap; indeed, if one could imagine a less likely place for a trap than a frozen river one had to put one's mind to it\u2014but she still felt something was wrong. She probed the ice carefully before taking each step.\n\nBack at the houses, the villagers were lined up along the river's edge, and she heard faint chanting.\n\nSomething moved at the pole, a little obscured by the waves of heat coming off the fire. She circled round, again carefully probing the ice.\n\nA girl stood tied to the top of the pole, shivering in the wind. Pieces of dragonscale were fixed to its peak, in imitation of a flower. The stuff bubbling in the cauldron was hot fat, she could smell it clearly now. At the base of the pole were three dogs, old and scrawny looking, also chained to the pole. They were barking and trying to hide among each other at the same time.\n\nCurious.\n\nThe girl was young, perhaps Lada's age when she was returned to Mossbell, and well coated with fragrant fats to keep the wind off her skin.\n\nOr to make her more appetizing?\n\nWistala decided she was some sort of offering, perhaps a trade off to keep the newly arrived dragon from raiding any more fish shacks. A dragon could destroy a village in other ways than eating the inhabitants or burning them out of their homes. What the dogs were for she couldn't imagine, unless they were meat to serve as an appetizer or dessert in the manner of the fancy tables Rainfall set.\n\nThe girl had her eyes closed, her face turned away, red hair\u2014the only spot of color in the endless whites and grays in this land\u2014whipping in the wind. Wistala reached up a claw and cut the bonds. She fell to her knees but made no attempt to escape.\n\n\"Go back to your people,\" Wistala said. The girl didn't move, probably not understanding Parl.\n\nWistala pushed her by the shoulder with her sii, and the girl finally came alive, struggling against her claws, pounding against her scales. Wistala knocked down the pole and stood on it with her other leg, as the dogs tried to run, still giving a whimpering bark now and then. Wistala put the girl's hand on the dog chains and broke them away from their fixture on the pole, and as she was pulled away in a shower of ice particles thrown up by the scrambling dogs, she looked at Wistala in wonder with bright green eyes.\n\nAfter a quick taste to make sure it wasn't poisoned, Wistala tried the hot fat. Now this was a meal that readied one to face the winter winds again! She even ate the chains that suspended it over the fire before flying off, but sadly the kettle was too large to swallow.\n\nOne advantage of a cold wind is that it makes exercise a good deal more agreeable. Wistala managed to cross the line of mountains in a single day, thanks to a strong wind at her back shooting between the mountaintops. Then she was out over dry, treeless plains that she remembered from the day she and AuRon had escaped up the chimney.\n\nOnly colder and more barren.\n\nThere was nothing to eat on the steppe-lands, as far as she could see. She saw some goats on the mountainside at a distance, but when she flew closer they disappeared, flowing into cracks and behind stones like water. No herds of sheep, no files of elk, just odd two-legged birds that could turn like a zephyr when she swooped in on them, running with bobbing heads and spiny feathers flying. She finally managed to brain one with her tail\u2014by accident\u2014as she pursued another, and got a thin, bony meal that was all skin, tendon, and feathers.\n\nBut she could see her objective in the distance, which gave her heart to go on through hunger.\n\nShe wondered what the trolls ate until she saw plots of torn up earth around discreet holes in the turf.\n\nThe peaks weren't so high as the Red Mountains, and resembled dry rockpiles, with evenly layered lines stuck up this way and that, as though someone had broken up the upper world's crust. These mountains were thick with pine and littered with caves. She saw a few sheep with horns like helms and a huge wildcat or two, and smelled troll waste.\n\nBut she was now a match for a troll, unless one caught her unawares, and she had no intention of letting that happen. She watched the sides and floors of the canyon as she passed over trees, out of reach of even the longest troll arm from treetop below or concealing rock to the side.\n\nUnfortunately, its attack came from above.\n\nLater she visited the spot, and guessed where the troll had climbed when it saw her course. Perhaps it had been sitting on a high ledge, surveying the western slopes of the rock-strewn mountains, and climbed up a little farther when it saw her coming.\n\nIt was a good thing the sun was high when it jumped, for some piece of her noticed the shadow of its fall on the mountainside below, and she turned to avoid it before the rest of her figured out why. The hammer-blow of its arm therefore fell on her side rather than her wing or spine.\n\nThe troll grappled her with its awful rubbery fingers and she felt a tearing at her wing edge. She instinctively folded it down and out of the way, and her careen through the mountains turned into a one-wing plunge into the stony slopes. She had just enough sense to roll over so the impact struck the troll\u2014mostly\u2014and her tail rather than more vital limbs.\n\nThe impact knocked the wind from her, and for a second she did not know where she was.\n\nFury took over when the troll's fingers locked around her neck, trying to twist, trying to throttle, and she clawed at it, but it moved with that horrible, rubbery mobility she remembered. She batted it about the body with her wings, and may have struck the sense organ cluster, for it backed off and swung up a rock, leaving smears of blood as it squeezed into a crack. She righted herself and spat her hunger-weak foua after it, but did not know if she hit it or not.\n\nFearing another sudden jump from above, or thrown boulders, she backed down the hillside, watching the black smoke of her fire disappear into the winter sky.\n\nShe flapped her wings experimentally. The right was sore but worked. She launched herself into the air and saw the troll wedging itself through a crack. It retreated beneath an overhang like a wary spider.\n\n\"Call it a new throw,\" Wistala said, using the slang of the Hypatian dice pits for when a bet is neither paid nor lost. She was breathing and unharmed, and wouldn't risk her wings going after a troll on a point of honor.\n\nHer injuries allowed only a short flight before she had to stop and rest, but she made it to the other side of the mountains. From a prominence she looked out upon the Sadda-Vale.\n\nThe vale reminded her of a half-filled cauldron. Water filled the center of the valley, though unlike the Ba-drink, green flats and low hills surrounded the water. The water was calm and the color of polished steel, the grasses around a deep green that reminded her of seaweed. Forests grew in the spaces between the toes of the mountain.\n\nCapping the cauldron were low-hanging clouds, made of mists rising from the water, or so it seemed from the sheets of moisture rising in slow spirals. The rock face on the inner ring of mountains was black with moisture. Wistala felt the cold wet on her face.\n\nThe temperature had risen considerably on this side of the mountain; Wistala no longer felt frozen and windstruck, but simply chilled and damp. She didn't like this much wet in the air, it fed itchy growths that lived under your scales.\n\nAs she rested she counted waterfalls. It seemed every mountainside had a trickle or two running down, more easily spotted at a distance, as they cascaded between the thick fern growth\u2014higher up they looked like faint veins against the rock face.\n\nAn orange flash caught her eye, a gout of flame that welled and slowly faded. The odd shape to it was evocative of a dragon's\u2014no, there was a dragon there, on a ledge where the mountain was broken by a crack, like a smashed plate unevenly repaired.\n\nSo excited was she\u2014hope died hard in Wistala\u2014that she immediately launched herself off the prominence, flying for the dragon as fast as sore wings would carry her.\n\nThe dragon\u2014she saw it was a male by his distinctive coloring: a dull orange like a fading sunset that alternated with stripes of black. The pattern intrigued her; in her experience scaled dragons were usually uniform in color. Auron sometimes showed stripes like that against his gray, but he'd been born without scales.\n\nShe landed a little up the ledge from him\u2014she folded her wings as she came in, absorbed the impact with her tail and settled with only a slight slip. She wanted the advantage of height just in case.\n\nThough she thought it a well-done landing. But the dragon ignored her.\n\nHe nosed in a pile of broken rock, grasping pieces with his tongue and swallowing them. He had four horns, and two more buds, rising from his crest. Older than she, younger than Father, and there was a strange gold behind his griff: he had a ring threaded in the skin of his earhole.\n\nHe extended his long neck, took a big mouthful of water, then swung his neck to the other side, where the mountain face was broken. Wistala looked closely at the rock\u2014there were threads of metal in the rock, like bits of ragged sewing.\n\nThe four-horn spat water into the broken rock. His head bobbed as he read distances, then he spat flame where he'd placed the water. The rock flamed and hissed, cracking, and with a suddenness that surprised her and made her edge back, he whipped up his tail and struck the flames. Pieces of broken rock slid down and hit the ledge, and he commenced nosing again, still ignoring her.\n\n\"I take it there's metal in that stone,\" Wistala said.\n\nHe swallowed a piece, and rolled an eye toward her as he sniffed over more shattered rock. \"What is your name?\"\n\n\"Wistala,\" she said.\n\n\"We don't know each other.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"May I have your name?\"\n\n\"DharSii.\" He swallowed another stone.\n\nThe name struck her ear funny. If the word were rendered in the simplest form of Parl, a human would have called him \"Sureclaw.\"\n\n\"Do you live here?\" she asked.\n\nHe made a strange throat-clearing sound: Ha-hem. \"As little as possible.\" He kept eyeing her leather carry-harness and the blue emblem at the base of her throat.\n\n\"How is the metal?\"\n\n\"Adequate, though you have to eat a good deal for it to do any good. Cleansing, though.\"\n\nHe took another mouthful of water and spat it into the cracks in the rock face.\n\n\"I've come to find others of my\u2014our kind.\" He said nothing in reply. \"The water helps break the stone up, I take it.\"\n\n\"I doubt you'd understand.\"\n\nWistala felt her fringe rise a little. \"I suppose when your foua strikes the water it vaporizes into steam. The sudden expansion in the confined space of the crack, combined with the heat, shatters the rock.\"\n\nDharSii left off his mining and turned his head so he could fix her with both eyes. He seemed about to speak, his mouth opened anyway, shut again, and finally he said: \"If your design is to meet the others, please follow.\" Then he launched himself off the mountainside and flapped away on wings long and thin that reminded Wistala of knife blades.\n\nShe couldn't say whether she'd been insulted or not, but she flew after him. He sailed off north, crossed the hills that Wistala noted held red, wide-horned, high-backed cattle, and was soon skimming the misty water of the vast lake. The lake was so wide, the trees upon the other side were an indistinct green smear; and so long to the south, the waters ate the horizon.\n\nIt felt distinctly warmer over the lake, and some of the mountains to the east smoldered from vents in their sides, adding to the overcast trapped between the mountains. The mist layer hanging above was tinged with green, gold, and even blue depending on the thickness of the murk and its nearness to the vents. Wistala saw more of the long-horned cattle with the mountainous humps projected up at the base of their necks. They grazed on the thick grass, stupidly oblivious of the dragons overhead.\n\nWistala caught up to DharSii, flying a little below\u2014yes, he was scarred around the right pocket of his arm, and the outer toe was missing from his left saa. Not so scarred as Father, but not so old either. And his snout only showed the barest hints of white fangs\u2014Father's had seemed permanently on display.\n\nHe rolled an eye toward her, and she felt embarrassed to be watching him, so she fixed her gaze ahead.\n\nShe marked a white construct of some kind on the northern shore, well above and back from the lake. Or was it some trick of geology? A spur of the mountain came down and divided, and from the divide on down the mountain was scored with white, far too regularly for the marks to be snow or ice.\n\nThe lake here steamed, tendrils of moisture danced across the smooth, clear water before dissipating into the chill. She saw a head rise from the water, dripping, and a golden dragon made a leisurely climb to a mushroom head of volcanic rock, where he scratched his belly on the stone and stretched out neck and tail with a bit of a yawn as his snout turned to the fliers.\n\nWistala dropped back a little, not knowing if there would be a battle between the dragons. Her striped companion paid the wet dragon no more attention than he did the fork-tailed birds zipping around the masses of rock. The stones here looked shaped, but to dragon proportions rather than hominid, progressing down into the water like irregular, broken steps.\n\nHer guide continued on his way toward the point between the divided spur.\n\nCloser now, Wistala could see a \"garden\" of thick thorn trees\u2014she thought of it as a garden because it was, precisely edged both inside and out and regularly shaped, a great crescent with the points running up the outer edges of the divided mountain spur, thinning somewhat as they climbed the thin-soiled heights. The thorn trees were thick and intertwined, so it wouldn't be a matter of just cutting down trees, for they all supported and wound around each other; sever trunk from root and the rest would hang. She guessed a team of dwarves with axes could hack through it in a day or two\u2014under a tasking leader\u2014and it would be a remarkable thief who could negotiate that wall without becoming hopelessly lost or torn to pieces and waste much time backtracking out of blind alleys.\n\nThe thorn wall guarded a vast courtyard, almost as big as all of Mossbell's cultivated grounds, between the two mountain arms. Instead of wild cabbages and berry bushes, this plaza was paved with broken and irregular bits of masonry. Even the odd statue fragment of a hominid arm or face showed here and there, placed to fit between an old fountain rim or some unknown chunk of temple wall.\n\nTwo pairs of blighters walked here and there and swept up some long thin leaves fallen from the thorn trees. Judging from the size of the courtyard, when they finished they'd have to start all over again where they'd began.\n\nShe forgot the blighters as soon as she saw the arch.\n\nThe stone of the mountain had been formed and carved into a great gallery leading into the darkness between the spurs of the mountain, going up an interlacing like a woven basket of round reeds, meeting like snakes hooking at the neck. The stone had been carved so it evoked bones, or tree roots, or dragon tails, anything but dull and lifeless rock. It was supported both from the courtyard and the mountain ridge by pillars, all shaped to match the whole and etched with scale patterns. At the outer rim of the stony lattice there were holes big enough for a dragon to climb through, but the spacing grew tighter and tighter as it approached what looked to be a cave mouth, though the most regular and finished Wistala had ever seen.\n\nIt was wide enough for a dragon to fly into it and pick a comfortable, well-lit landing spot before the cave. DharSii glided in, widening and then slowly folding his wings as he alighted. Wistala tried to imitate him and made a clumsier landing, not expecting the smoothness of the courtyard paving. It wasn't a sprawl, but it could have been one if her tail didn't catch on a fortunately placed crack.\n\n\"Welcome to Vesshall,\" DharSii said, letting his griff give an elegant little flutter. \"I will take you to the dragons within, but I shan't stay.\"\n\n\"Do you have enemies here?\" she asked.\n\n\"You ask a lot of questions. Scabia will be delighted with you. Make your queries sound like praise, and you'll share endless hours of chatter.\"\n\nA cave entrance, wide enough for two dragons to pass abreast, stood just above a ledge about the height of one human seated on another's shoulders. A ring of stones, chiseled and filled in with a black material like glass forming unfamiliar glyphs like thorns crossed and arranged, decorated the entrance.\n\n\"I don't know that script,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"It's the old iconography,\" DharSii said, rearing up to climb into the tunnel mouth. His tail gave a little twitch; perhaps he was pleased at her ignorance. \"It reads 'Welcome is the dragon who alights in peace.' \" They passed down a short passage, arched above to match the stone lattice outside, filled in with six-sided colored chips in all the colors of dragonhood, making patterns interlaced and winding above and beneath in such intricacy that Wistala wished she had an afternoon just to let her eyes travel the path.\n\nBut DharSii did not stop, but moved on into another cavern.\n\nThis one was vast and round, by far the biggest interior Wistala had ever been in. The far walls were so distant their old footfalls bounced back at them from the walls to join the fresh noises they made, waiting to take their turn to visit the other side of the cavern and return.\n\nThe convex ceiling curved high enough for Wistala to flap her wings and fly if she wished, and went up like an inverted bowl to a circular gap that admitted the outdoor light and aired the room. It wasn't big enough to fly out, she'd have to fold her wings to pass through it. A shallow pool of water stood under the skylight, and the floor under the light was much edged with bands of green copper, one of which the edge of splash of dim sunlight rode even now.\n\nAround the walls of the cavern\u2014or chamber, rather, for while there was mountain muscle to be seen there was no rock that was not shaped by artistry\u2014long blocks of basalt stuck out of the wall, narrowing and rising to a softened point like an inverted dragon claw. At the far end, two scaly forms reclined.\n\nWistala saw more blighters at work beneath the smaller, scrubbing the tiled floor.\n\nDharSii struck off straight across the floor toward the pair and Wistala followed, hearts hammering. The place smelled of dragons, rainwater, and fresh air; she relished every breath, took it in through her nostrils and clamped them so the homey smell might never escape.\n\nThere were still dragons in the world, not skulking and hiding but living in grandeur and peace!\n\nAt their approach the blighters carried off their implements, flattened and squeezed themselves through a thin gap at the base of the wall like escaping mice before a prowling tom.\n\nThey caught her eye only because of the motion. The two dragons on the jutting lofts of rock had her attention.\n\nBoth were dragonelles, one rather undersize, her green scales pale and almost translucent, well formed of limb though in a delicate way that suggested little in the way of gorge or exertion.\n\nThe other was a white dragonelle, formidably huge and perhaps a bit more massive than DharSii. Wistala had the odd sensation of knowing her without having ever been introduced, probably some vague echo of a mind-picture from Mother. But there was, yes, a half-familiar shape to her short, proudly curved snout, the challenging arc of her eye ridge \u2026 Her scales had thinned a bit around her jawline and above her eyes, the flesh sagged in a little where her saa met her spine; she was a dragonelle of long years but still formidable.\n\n\"I bring a visitor, Damesister.\" It took Wistala a moment to work out the relationship; she'd only heard the word once before from her Father in one of his battle-stories \u2026 a man or a dwarf would have said aunt. \"I humbly present Wistala, a dragonelle out of the south, who seeks ha-hem succor and solace.\"\n\nI never said that, Wistala thought.\n\nThe striped dragon turned to her. \"Wistala, this is Scabia, Archelle of the Sadda-Vale, and her daughter Aethleethia, my ha-hem beautiful uzhin.\"\n\nBoth dragonelles fluttered their griffs at Wistala with that same bird-wing delicacy. Wistala thought she should fit in and tried to imitate it, but her griff rattled off her scale, and the dragonelles glanced at each other.\n\nThe white dragon extended her nose just a little and sniffed the air in Wistala's direction, her pink eyes as cold as the glaciers Wistala had passed over.\n\n\"Will you not make her welcome?\" DharSii said, and Wistala liked him a little better.\n\n\"Who were your sire and dame?\" Scabia asked.\n\n\"AuRel of the line of AuNor and his mate Irelia.\" Wistala decided to make her introduction formal, and spoke as Mother taught: \"I was first daughter and fourth out of the five eggs.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Scabia said. \"I thought I recognized your wing-points. I knew your mother somewhat. You are how long out of the egg?\"\n\n\"These thirteen winters.\"\n\n\"And already wide-winged! I'm amazed.\"\n\nAethleethia extended her long neck and scratched herself under the chin with the claw tip on her loft, and DharSii turned away to inspect a piece of iconography etched on the floor in a manner similar to that ringing the entrance. He brushed away some dust with his tail so that the black glass might shine.\n\nA shadow darkened the splash of outside light and the golden dragon dropped through with wings folded. He opened them again with dramatic suddenness and alighted. \"Ah-ha! A visitor!\" he trumpeted, folding his wings.\n\n\"Ha-hem,\" DharSii said, his eyes and nostrils half-closed. \"Wistala, you meet the dragonlord of Vesshall, NaStirath.\" A certain airiness highlighted the words, but what he meant to imply, if anything, Wistala couldn't guess, not knowing him well.\n\n\"My daughter's mate,\" Scabia added.\n\nNaStirath loosed a short but loud prrum in the general direction of Aethleethia's place. The lord of Vesshall was a finely formed fellow, long and well fed, not a scar on him or a scale out of place, and he smelled of steam and hot scale, being fresh out of the lake.\n\nHe spoke: \"Just like you, DharSii, to guide a female over me without an introduction. Don't tell me you're finally courting a mate.\"\n\n\"I hope not!\" DharSii said. \"Too wide of wing, and her tail is so much longer than her neck.\"\n\nThe arrogant, two-colored\u2014\n\n\"My dear uzhin always gives an honest opinion,\" Aethleethia put in. \"It startles those who are not much used to him.\"\n\n\"Ha-hem. I'll be about my business,\" DharSii said. He fluttered his griff, but when Wistala met his eyes, fire bladder pulsing, he looked away. He turned and made for the entrance.\n\nThe tap of his claws played off the walls as he crossed the chamber.\n\n\"Two visits to the Vesshall from DharSii in one winter,\" NaStirath said. \"I feel so honored, I'm having a hard time not yawning.\"\n\n\"Tell us your troubles, dragonelle of AuNor, so that we may comfort you,\" Scabia suggested.\n\n\"I'm the last of my family,\" Wistala said. Was that quite true? The copper still lives, for all you know. \"Dwarves of the Wheel of Fire slaughtered them and took from their bodies as trophies. Elves and men were also involved, but I cannot say which for certain. One called the Dragonblade was almost certainly aiding them in the assassination.\"\n\n\"We've heard this before,\" NaStirath said, in a bored tone as if to indicate he was not much troubled at the news.\n\n\"We are sorry for your loss,\" Scabia said, though she was the only dragon in the room that much looked it, for nothing remained of DharSii unless he lurked still in the shadows of the entrance passage. \"You may claim a loft here for as long as you like; there are ample to spare.\"\n\n\"I heard they got CuSanat and his mate, Virtuthia, in their cave as well,\" NaStirath said, stretching. \"Such a shame we won't be seeing them again, even if they weren't exactly uzhin. The Red Mountains are being quite cleared of dragons. Is it bullock again for dinner, or fish?\"\n\nWistala wasn't sure she was hearing right. Did these fools not realize\u2014?\n\n\"We must take vengeance on these assassins!\" Wistala blurted.\n\n\"I've no dead to avenge,\" NaStirath said. He climbed into a loft on the other side of Scabia. Odd that he didn't sit to the side of his mate\u2014\n\n\"Be quiet, NaStirath,\" Scabia said, pronouncing his name in a way that labeled him still a wingless juvenile. \"And have some feeling for our guest's sorrow.\"\n\n\"I shall achieve both through a nap, where I will dream awful, sorrowful dreams,\" NaStirath said, closing his eyes. \"I rejoice in your survival and arrival, Wistala of the line of AuNor.\" He twitched his griff as he turned on his side.\n\nWistala remembered how Father had once caught Auron sleeping on his side, and though her brother was scaleless, punished him with a series of roars that left the hatchling quivering.\n\n\"Rest your wings,\" Scabia said. \"Pick any loft, and wait for your nostrils to waken you.\"\n\nWistala crossed the room to be away from the others and climbed into one of the giant projections. One could arrange one's body so the head and tail were at almost any height for comfort. She hated Vesshall a little less, and slept.\n\nHer nostrils did wake her, as the blighters brought out huge platters of pan-fried fish and dumped them before the three dragons, with much falling to the knees and arm-waving with palms held toward the dragons. Only the faintest light came down from the circle in the center of the ceiling.\n\nWistala felt horribly stiff from the troll fight even as she wondered why DharSii didn't join his relatives for dinner. Not that she cared to see him, of course, only that his absence struck her as odd.\n\nShe crossed over to the others.\n\nMore platters of fish arrived and Scabia pointed with her tail toward Wistala, shook it three times, and they made a mountain of cooked, blackened fish before her.\n\n\"It's quite safe,\" Scabia said. \"The blighters look to us for protection from the trolls, and of course the other races of the world who have superceded them.\"\n\nWistala ate, but the charm of prepared food was nothing like that of Mossbell, with lively conversation and the friendly banter with Widow Lessup about the cooking. She felt like a pig at a trough.\n\n\"How many trolls have you killed, lord?\" Wistala asked NaStirath.\n\n\"Hmmmmm. Killed? I set one aflame once and he made quite a spectacle rolling back to the mountains, but I don't care to close and kill. Awful, the stench of trolls. I'm not sure that burning improves the odor.\"\n\n\"I know DharSii has killed several,\" Aethleethia said. \"Every time he does it, the blighters talk of nothing else for moons.\"\n\n\"Keen on sports, my good uzhin is,\" NaStirath said with a belch. \"Shall we have molasses elixir tonight, to celebrate our happy arrival?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Scabia firmly.\n\n\"Why do you care so little for the fates of other dragons?\" Wistala asked.\n\nThe other three stared at her.\n\n\"Now see and hear, thirteen winters,\" Scabia said. \"You're a guest, and welcome as long as you will be accommodating, but I don't want challenges or lectures and twaddle about what we must and must not do, or you'll find me a terrible enemy who'll drive you from this home cave with fire and tooth and claw. This vale is safe and distant, and those wise enough to stay here do well. As to other dragons' affairs, we keep out. It was a lesson dearly learned. My father? Dead. My brother? Dead. My mate? Dead. My sons? All dead. DharSii only just survived out there, was even a captive once, and it seems every time he crosses the mountain ring or goes down the river, he comes back with a new scar.\n\n\"We give no cause to the Ironriders or the wildhairs or the blighter bands on the steppe to feel aggrieved, and the trolls on the outer slopes of these mountains keep other hominids from the so-called civilized lands at bay. I don't look for trouble in the wider world, and the wider world comes for no trouble here. Am I making myself understood?\"\n\n\"Perfectly,\" Wistala said. In different circumstances, would she have become Scabia?\n\n\"Oh, I don't care for this sort of talk,\" Aethleethia said. \"Now let us have a pleasant game to aid the digestion. Wistala, how are you at add-a-couplet? We have a poem about dancing gems that is quite without a decent end.\"\n\nWistala woke to the sound of dragon claws on the floor below her loft. She came instantly awake, but it was only Scabia, with NaStirath fidgeting behind.\n\nThere was a little light, but just a little, coming in from the ceiling hole.\n\n\"Good morning, Wistala,\" Scabia said. \"I came to say that I regret some of my words from last night\u2014no, don't apologize.\"\n\nWistala wasn't about to. \"You're most kind,\" she said, which was true, to a point. She'd been foolish to seek an alliance with other dragons.\n\n\"I'm really here to ask you if you wish to stay, to live with us,\" Scabia said.\n\n\"It is quite the most marvelous home cave,\" Wistala said, watching blighters clean up dragon waste about the pool.\n\n\"We would like you to be uzhin,\" NaStirath said.\n\n\"Wistala, I am like my uzhin DharSii in that I've no patience for disguise. My beloved daughter is the best of dragons but barren, and I would have hatchlings in this cave again.\"\n\nWistala stiffened.\n\n\"Don't look alarmed, I'm not asking for you to take wing on a mating flight now,\" Scabia said. \"Nor even call any male here your lord. NaStirath is a fine dragon and would sire strong hatchlings. You would have a home and honor and, yes, even precious metals here for the rest of your moons if you would leave a few clutches for Aethleethia to sing over and raise as her own. Don't look so shocked\u2014it was not an uncommon practice in ancient Silverhigh. You're obviously healthy; I've never seen such thick scale on a maiden before, more like that of your grandsire AuRye, who was always stuffing himself with well-armored dwarves and golden hilts from broken battle-axes. I will condescend to say that such a famous line will improve the blood around here.\"\n\nScabia cast a pointed glance back at NaStirath.\n\nShe'd always meant to keep her promise to Father; in fact, she'd dreamed of a clutch of restless eggs last night for some reason, but this, this\u2014\"Unnatural,\" she said. \"It would be unnatural.\"\n\n\"No more unnatural than a dragon wearing hominid jewelry and a carrying harness,\" Scabia said. \"Were you born with that icon on your fringe, perhaps? Or growing up among hominids, as I suspect you did. Tell me I guess wrongly.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 ,\" Wistala said, groping for words. \"I didn't come here to find a mate.\"\n\n\"Is it a song you want?\" NaStirath put in. \"I know one or two:\n\n\u2003\"There once flew a maiden of AnFant\n\n\u2003Whose mind was as pure as her vent\n\n\u2003But when\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not helping your cause, NaStirath,\" Scabia said, again employing the juvenile\u2014deservedly so, Wistala thought.\n\nScabia turned those faintly pink eyes back on her. \"Now, dear, we shall have breakfast soon. Let's have you join us for a few more meals and we'll speak no more of this while you recover from your fatigues and hurts. Get to know my darling Aethleethia, and I'm sure you'll come to feel, as I do\u2014\"\n\n\"I must go,\" Wistala said, hopping from her loft and running for the exit. Grand, Vesshall was, but it was also hollow. Hollow of honor, hollow of feeling, hollow of\u2014\n\nShe almost bowled DharSii over as she sprang out the tunnel mouth, leaped from the ledge, and spread her wings beneath the stone canopy that suddenly seemed as dreadful as the thorn garden below. He began to say something, but Wistala didn't hear the words in her eagerness to get away, flying south as fast as she could.\n\nIs this a joke?\" Ragwrist said.\n\nWistala sat with him in the equestrian theater, a riding arena outside Hypat, where his riders practiced during winter camp.\n\nShe'd come south in easy stages, keeping to the west side of the Red Mountains and not raiding livestock. She slept only on the loneliest hilltops, and drank snow she melted with her foua, with an eye to avoiding the barbarians. In this way she made a long and ultimately fruitless search of the Red Mountains, even passing into the southlands and the borders of the Empire of the Ghioz, without meeting another of her kind, finding nothing but bats and bears and a horrid troll or two in likely caves. If any dragons did lurk there still, they were being quiet about it.\n\nI am but one, and my enemies can't be numbered. I shall have to improvise. Perhaps the Dragonblade and the dwarves have a weakness only one familiar with their habits could exploit. Cunning is required, treachery even. What would Prymelete do?\n\n\"It would be a terrible risk,\" Ragwrist said after she outlined what she wanted him to do. They'd gone to some trouble to find a place where they could talk quietly. The new apprentice fortune-teller, Intanta's great-granddaughter Iatella, had been hanging about getting an eyeful of Wistala and peering at her through the crystal shard. Though she was a skinny little girl, Wistala didn't like being overheard, even by someone almost small enough to be gulped down in one swallow.\n\n\"I know. If the dwarves suspect me, they will kill me at once. And they know how to do it. I've seen the proof.\"\n\nRagwrist did not ask her to elaborate.\n\n\"No, I don't mean that. This Fangbreaker fellow is offering me so much money for you, I can retire to an estate and sell the circus to pay for the finest velvet cushions for my sore feet and sit-upon. I am afraid to trust myself. Especially since if your plot does not come off, I shall have made a powerful and implacable enemy.\"\n\n\"You may always plead ignorance and desperation brought by poverty,\" Wistala said. \"You've had ample practice.\"\n\n\"You're getting as cynical as Brok. Where is the kindly green giant I once knew?\"\n\n\"Still freezing her tailvent shut in the north, perhaps. Ah, I shall trust you. Perhaps my fate can balance out your desire to become a landlord like your brother.\"\n\n\"Canny of you to mention him. But remember, elves have no particular feeling for their siblings, and evoking his memory awakes in me no desire to help avenge him. All I want to do is forget that unpleasant night.\"\n\n\"Odd that you would send money to Lada to help her get Rayg back, then. Yes, I've been to the Green Dragon Inn and heard the latest from Forstrel. He's raising bees for Lessup's honey-mead now, near an old cave I sometimes use, and complained much of the share Hammar demands from all production. He also told me that you paid out of your pocket to fix some of the damaged houses. And that you raked the old ferry-bell out of the ruins and kept it.\"\n\n\"Rumor, rumor, rumor. I'm interested only in facts and expenses and how much I might get from the dwarves for you.\"\n\n\"I shall ask you to drive a harder bargain than you know. I want several conditions on the sale, all in the interest of my health, of course. Is Brok still with you?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"I need him to forge a very stout collar for me, something that even a troll couldn't break.\"\n\n\"What, so that the dwarves may better chain you? Suppose you wish to break away and escape?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that I wanted to break it. I just want to be able to open it.\"\n\nWistala stood in her new collar at the Ba-drink landing, a tiny escort of circus folk with her.\n\nThey'd set up a tent around her, specially sewn for the purpose, purple and patterned with powerful symbols, for she came to the Wheel of Fire dwarves not as an abject slave, but a great treasure, one to be guarded and protected and honored.\n\nWistala listened to the spring melt pouring over the dam spill and waited.\n\nThe collar itself was a thick ring of steel, leathered at the inside and edges, with two forged-steel loops, one at the top and one at the bottom, for the attachment of chains, though only the tiniest wisp of azure blue silk bound her to a silver peg in the floor. There was no latch or spot for a key, and if you ran your hands around the inside only hardened leather met your fingers. Only Wistala knew where, if you opened the stitching, you could insert a claw point and open the lock, which then left only a false weld to break before the collar fell away.\n\nAt last she heard the creak of oars in their locks, and shouts and orders and calls of dwarf voices.\n\n\"King Fangbreaker comes. Sound the trumpets! Beat the drums!\"\n\nIf you're patient enough, and keep still out of sight and smell, the prey will feed itself right to you\u2026 .\n\nSomething took off with a whistling whoosh and exploded far overhead, Wistala guessed it to be a firework. A thundering tattoo broke out on the drums, it sounded like boulders coming down the mountains, and the trumpets pealed so high and clear, it was like sunshine had been turned to music.\n\nWistala, hearts hammering, waited for the audience.\n\nThe tent flap opened, letting in a little fresh air that Wistala welcomed, as Ragwrist was having incense burned to abate the dragon- smell for the honored guests.\n\n\"Winged, as you see. And a little grown, a little more appetite at mealtimes, but the same Oracle,\" Ragwrist said as he ushered three dwarves in. Wistala saw prostrate dwarves outside, who looked as though they'd been felled or struck by sleeping spells.\n\nWistala noted the changes in him even as the mighty dwarf looked her over.\n\nGobold Fangbreaker wore a silver mask now, emblazoned with a four-pointed star, two slits for his eyes and two more beneath flanking the ridges of the star, whose shining points extended beyond the dull plate of the mask. Below, his beard had swirling designs of gold and silver dust worked into it, and a golden cord bound it into a tuft at the bottom from which hung a piece of glass Wistala guessed to be a magnifier. He was somewhat thinner but still broadly built, in a cuirass of silver and leather cushioning, oddly like her own steel collar in its padding, only with more elaborate flourish down the centerline, evocative of spear heads. King Fangbreaker now wore purple caping at back and throat and sash.\n\nThe most obvious difference, though, was the absence of his right leg. An inverted half skull\u2014Wistala guessed it to be a hominid's, though she knew not what branch had such strangely long fangs and a ridge at the temples that almost resembled horns\u2014capped the missing limb at the knee. Projecting out of this and running to the floor was a rod of white crystal, like lighting frozen into immobility. A mundane steel-shod horse hoof at the base gave him some stability on the ground.\n\nHe still wore the helm capped with dragon fangs, only now overlarge horn-tips projected from its sides, gilded and filigreed.\n\nEvidently the crown of Masmodon still eluded him.\n\nBehind King Fangbreaker stood two more dwarves, one bearing a tall banner he had to dip somewhat to fit in the tent. It was the old ruby-tipped staff Fangbreaker had carried before, only now grown and with a crossbar added at the top to support a small purple banner, and the ruby was the perch of a stern-looking brass eagle. The other dwarf lugged chests and bags tied on either side of a steel shoulder pole.\n\nWistala dipped her snout until it almost touched the ground. \"I see changes in you, Gobold Fangbreaker. Did my oracle come true, or have you come for my head and claws?\"\n\nWhy, why, why did you say that? It sounds like a challenge\u2014\n\n\"Hmpf,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"I come to do this, though there are many who will swear, when the tale is told, that it is an impossibility.\"\n\nHe approached her and threw his strong arms about her neck, and patted her three times with his right hand hard enough to make her scales clatter.\n\n\"Yes!\" King Fangbreaker said. \"So happy am I that I embrace you like a sister! For no sister ever gave brother such encouragement as you gave me. You set my heart afire as though you had spat flame into it! And look!\" He cast his arms wide and lifted his purple robes. \"Results speak louder than any words.\"\n\nHe spun on his horse hoof, then stepped over to Ragwrist. \"Elf, let us settle the accounting. Name your price, and if it's her weight in silver, I'll melt every plate and goblet on both sides of the Titan bridge to meet it.\" He turned back to Wistala. \"I do not come to buy you, Oracle, but to free you. I would not have one who has done such service choking in the wake of gargant flatus.\" He extracted a knife from his sleeve with such speed that it almost looked as though it had grown there and moved to cut the blue silken cord.\n\n\"No, I beg you, mighty king,\" Wistala said. \"That twist could be broke at the slightest pull. I would keep it as a souvenir of happy journeys under the kindest of masters.\"\n\n\"I've never known a dwarf to begin negotiations at such a disadvantage as saying 'name your price,' \" Ragwrist said. \"I'm quite befuddled. But if that is the case, the negotiations shall be brief. I seek only assurances as to her treatment.\"\n\n\"Treatment!\" King Fangbreaker said. \"She may go where she likes. But if she will reside with the Wheel of Fire, she'll want for nothing as long as I have voice to call for it to be brought to her. I would ask only her counsel in return.\"\n\n\"Let us adjourn to my tent, if you will accept my hospitality, great king,\" Ragwrist said. \"It would be unseemly to name a price before the object of the negotiations, methinks.\"\n\n\"Elves and their protocols. Of course, Circusmaster, of course, but I am tempted to simply behead all present and free the dragon.\"\n\n\"My king, no!\" Wistala said.\n\nKing Fangbreaker laughed. \"I joke, of course. Let's get this over with, Ragwrist. It's too nice a day for tents and incense.\"\n\nThe party left, and Wistala sagged. Her spine had been tightening, her body closing on itself like a telescope all through the audience, yet she could not account for her fear.\n\n\"Shall I read your fortune?\" a tiny voice squeaked.\n\nWistala looked down to see Iatella crouching between brazier and piles of pillows, cradling Intanta's old, saucer-shaped crystal in her lap as though it were a very fat doll. The girl was on the fire-keeping staff and had come along to work the camp kitchen and get road experience.\n\n\"Certainly. Practice away,\" Wistala said.\n\nThe little girl stood before her gravely, then knelt, all seriousness as is the manner of hominid children when hard at play. She drew designs around the crystal, then found something wrong with its placement, and inclined it a little so it faced her better.\n\n\"I see tragedy in your life,\" Iatella said.\n\nThis was no great secret to anyone with knowledge of Ragwrist's circus, but it showed the girl had some skill, for you always wanted to start out on firm footing.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Wistala said. \"I'm most impressed.\"\n\n\"Elves, dwarves, men\u2014you have seen a good part of the Hypatian Empire,\" Iatella went on, pulling at her lip in thought.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"Birds, too,\" she added. \"Birds and death.\"\n\nHow \u2026 Where was she going with this?\n\n\"I see you. Something in shadow, a dragon with a scarred face the color of an old soup-pot. And one of many colors, turned white as snow. You thought him dead when he turned white.\"\n\nHow was this possible. Auron? How on earth could she know about Auron, or that morning on the mountainside she thought him frozen to death?\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, and her voice was no longer that of a little girl, but something older and croakier than even Intanta. \"A terrible reckoning. Three dragons, opposition, and the fate of worlds in the balance.\"\n\nAnd then she screamed, such a scream that it seemed to shoot right through Wistala's body, the tent, the soil itself, and fainted.\n\nA circus dwarf, one of Brok's staff, and a pair of the Wheel of Fire dwarves rushed into the tent.\n\n\"What happened?\" the circus dwarf asked, after a dwarvish expostulation from the others.\n\n\"We were playing a game. I coughed,\" Wistala said. \"I think it frightened her.\"\n\nThey patted Iatella on the cheek, and her eyes fluttered open. She claimed no memory of what caused her to faint, and picked up her crystal and fled.\n\nRagwrist entered next, and the same questions were asked and answered. The dwarves wandered back out, leaving her and Ragwrist alone. \"No matter. The bargain was easily struck. You have been 'freed' by the generosity of King Fangbreaker, Wistala,\" he said, untying the azure band of silk.\n\n\"Dare I ask the price?\"\n\n\"I kept it low, saying that his good opinion would one day be worth more to me than any gold, and he looked pleased, though I think sometimes dwarves wear those masks as much to hide their emotions when bargaining as to keep out the light. I or others may visit you at any time, though the dwarves, as always, hold the right to decide who will be admitted to their city, and you are free to fly as you will. But I wonder. He told me to strike off your collar, by the way. All that effort wasted.\"\n\n\"Ragwrist, you are good to run this risk,\" Wistala said, quietly.\n\n\"Ha!\" he said, patting her shoulder, and her scales were happy to have a memory to replace the embrace of King Fangbreaker. \"You still hold Mossbell's lands, should true Hypatian law ever be reestablished across Whitewater. It's the land I've got my eye on. So having let you know my true motive, will you take this last opportunity to turn back? This is no arguing council of dwarves. If Fangbreaker senses a threat, he will deal with you \u2026 harshly.\"\n\nWistala ran her tongue along her teeth. \"Then I will share the fate of my family.\"\n\nShe crossed the Ba-drink in splendor, on the dwarves' largest cargo-barge, pushed and pulled by smaller barges filled with lines of rowers.\n\nThe blue silk stood in place of her collar, the long sash tied loosely so as not to grate on her scales more than was unavoidable. Her little triangular diadem of the librarians dangled at the front of her fringe, sparkling in the mountain sun.\n\nKing Fangbreaker stood beside her as they approached the Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock. Tall Rock stood sheer-sided all around where it met the finger of water, but Thul's Hardhold climbed more gradually like some sort of fantastic staircase. Only to the east, where it faced Tall Rock across the Titan bridge, was it as sheer as its companion.\n\nSheer or not, the sides of the rock were cut with galleries and balconies, precarious outer stairways, even gardens beneath jutting stonework houses holding still more balconies and galleries.\n\nAnd every one was lined with cheering crowds of dwarves, dropping dried flowers (or bits of torn paper or waxen wrapping if they could not afford flowers) as they passed across the water between the Hardhold and the Rock.\n\n\"Not a dwarf lives that doesn't aspire to a balcony of his own so that he might take fresh air and skylight,\" King Fangbreaker said, waving vaguely to the crowds. \"We value it more than the elves, since many of us see so little of it. Some add gold leaf to the railings, but I prefer the natural look of traditional sedimentary stonework, don't you?\"\n\n\"I'm overcome,\" Wistala said, flowers and bits of paper catching all over her scales and gathering in the folds of her wings. The rock walls to either side seemed to be coming together at the top, closing like a pair of vast jaws. But it had to be a trick of eye and distance, she'd seen their shape from across the Ba-drink.\n\n\"Now, a tour of what your advice gave me the courage to break loose, like a gem in a mine wall,\" Fangbreaker said as the barge docked. They tied to a wharf next to a cave with water flowing out of it. \"Had we taken the royal barge, we might have gone right in, but I fear all you would have to do is scratch your ear and you'd capsize it.\"\n\nMore dwarves threw themselves on their faces and another firework shot up between the sheer cliff faces as King Fangbreaker hopped onto the wharf. The cheering didn't stop until he took a short set of stairs up and entered a wide gallery. Court officials\u2014at least, that was what Wistala guessed them to be, for they wore cockades of purple\u2014met him on the stairs, approaching with a sort of permanent, cringing bow and rose only to speak quietly into his ear.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I'll attend to that later,\" he said, passing through the herd of bent dwarves. They clustered and swirled about him so that Wistala was reminded of bloodsucker bats in the hotforests around Adipose attempting to latch on to a fast-moving bullock.\n\nFangbreaker led the swarm around corners and came to a cavern bridge inside, where a narrow crack leading up to the top of the Hardhold inside had its walls thick with mosses and clinging ferns. Water ran down the sides of the rock in a thousand tiny trickles to a sea of ferns below.\n\n\"Thul's Garden,\" King Fangbreaker said, passing over a short wide bridge. Wistala tested it with a sii. \"Oh, come now, Oracle,\" Fangbreaker said. \"This is dwarf work of the highest order. We could stack dragons all the way to the sky above on this little bridge.\"\n\nThere were dwarves in blackened steel at the opposite end of the bridge, with tufts of purple-dyed fur at boot-top and helmet lining. King Fangbreaker used the guards to shake off the courtiers, the way a whale of the Inland Ocean's cold north might use a rock to scrape barnacles from its belly.\n\nWistala passed over the short bridge, her head already in the passage beyond before her tail-tip left the gap behind.\n\nHe went up another short, wide flight of stairs, luckily for Wistala, then turned a corner where dwarves in soft leather shoes opened a set of double wooden doors. Wistala just squeezed through into a room about the size of the presentation tent where she'd awaited the dwarf that morning.\n\nA huge, polished black table that looked like it had been carved out of the mountain itself stood in an oval of curved marble walls. There was a great deal of writing chiseled into the walls, and more on columns that had evidently been added to the room. Wistala counted twenty oddly shaped chairs around the table, draped in black velvet so that their spikiness was softened and hidden.\n\n\"Oh, the years I sat at this table, arguing over nothings,\" King Fangbreaker said, gripping the table as though he wished to lift and overturn it. \"Motions, countermotions, oppositions, reconciliations, none of them worth a pot of passed water. The war with the de-men was being lost on the darkroads, and all we could do was sputter at each other. Until\u2014after your words\u2014I took control.\n\n\"I said what was needed was a King with the Old Powers to forge our divided houses into a single spear.\" He pointed with a finger at a notch in the table. \"That's where Barzo put down his fist in a Rock of Opposition. So I whipped up my sleeve-ax and cut it right off. Arterial blood all over the meeting notes. The others fell into line once I rolled his head down the table. Gnaw, what a day. Felt light as a feather after. Follow me.\"\n\nAs she bowed to let him pass back to the doors she lifted one of the velvet coverings to the chairs, wondering if they hid bloodstains, and was aghast to see green dragonscale. She suddenly realized what the unused velvet hid\u2014dragon claws, opened and digits bent so the dwarves might lean in comfort against stiffened sii and saa.\n\nShe gulped down a sickening mixture of sadness, rage, and regret, and fixed her gaze on Fangbreaker's back. One short jump and\u2014\n\nBut these chairs had stood around this table since long before Fangbreaker, most likely.\n\nThe king brushed more of the soft-shoed dwarves aside. \"Oh, it's as if I've no staff at all,\" he grumbled, and led her to a tall, narrow hall, sort of an echo of the garden they'd bridged before.\n\nThere were paintings all over the smoothed wall, some old and flaking, some almost unrecognizable, but he led her to a new one, so broad it partially covered two others of dwarves linking arms, or shaking hands, or pointing in various directions and talking.\n\nThe new painting depicted some sort of ghastly underground fight in hip-deep water, with canoes like hollowed-out trees filled with dwarves firing crossbows at blighters and other hominids with what Wistala took to be exaggerated evil features.\n\n\"The Battle of Domlod,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"I wasn't actually riding the outside of one of the ramkaks, mind you, which is a fine way to get your head knocked off, but artists do insist on their frills and flourishes for dramatic effect. Lost my leg but won the war, and the de-men will be giving us no more trouble on the darkroads.\"\n\nHe let her admire it for a moment, and as they stood in silence one of the black-armored guards, this one with a purple half-cloak covering his shoulders, approached noisily and spoke in Fangbreaker's ear.\n\n\"Oh, I lost track of the time,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"If the barge is already out, let's not keep the crowds waiting. Come, Oracle. By the way, do you have a name?\"\n\n\"Those close to me call me Tala,\" Wistala said. \"I would be glad to hear it from you, King.\" For the best place to strike an enemy is close enough to gut, as Father used to say.\n\n\"Very well, Tala, up the Hall of Invention and to the balcony over Thul's tomb.\"\n\nThey passed along another wide hall with many short antechambers, each filled with devices of metal and steel and cable, some even in motion, though whether it was to amuse or accomplish something Wistala could not say. She saw daylight ahead at the opening of a very finely wrought gallery atop a huge slab of solid red granite that read THUL in both Elvish and Hypatian scripts. There were other icons and scriptings, as well, though she did not know the tongues.\n\nCurving stairs ran up the sides of the tomb to the gallery above. Dwarves in splendid cloaks and caps were already gathered there, and bowed low but did not throw themselves to the floor as King Fangbreaker climbed up to join them.\n\nNot a few looked at her in wonder as she approached, but most of the others jostled for a place next to the king at the balcony rail, draped with purple velvet, Wistala noted.\n\nShe climbed atop Thul's coffin and some of the dwarves leaned their heads together at that, eyes heavily shaded, but most were still throwing elbows and hip-blocking to gain or keep a position near Fangbreaker at the rail.\n\nWistala looked out and down at the finger of water running between Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock. A small barge looked to be fixed just downstream\u2014if current flowed in the lake\u2014from the Titan bridge where a crowd, but nothing like the crowd at the King's barge trip, had gathered to watch events.\n\n\"None at Vassa's balcony, you see, my mighty king,\" one of the dwarves said in Fangbreaker's ear.\n\nWistala didn't know which was Vassa's balcony, and didn't care. She looked down the sheer side of rock at the barge. A dwarf, shorn of his hair and beard and stripped to a loincloth, was staked out in the daylight, no mask on his face. It looked as though he had something wrapped around his head, but it was at the mouth level.\n\nFive dwarves in black capes, with black great-axes, stood around him, at each limb and the head.\n\nA dwarf on the Titan bridge was reading from a scroll box, but Wistala didn't understand the words.\n\n\"What is this?\" she asked Fangbreaker. A long neck had its advantages for reaching over crowds.\n\n\"Justice. That fellow spoke against me in his guild hall. Dozens of ears heard it; there's no doubt as to his guilt. Oh, the poor fool. It's like a madness; it's struck some of the best families with balconies on the Ba-drink.\"\n\n\"He's gagged?\" Wistala asked as the ax-men, at some signal, lifted their blades.\n\n\"We used to let them say last words, but it led to tedious and insulting speeches. Now we open their mouths and give them just enough time to scream.\"\n\nThe dwarf at the staked-out figure's head nodded at some signal from above, and bent to remove the gag. Wistala heard a shout in Dwarvish from the staked-out man, and Fangbreaker thumped the balcony rail.\n\nIn quick succession the ax-man at his right arm brought down his blade, severing the limb, and four regular strikes followed on the stained wooden deck of the barge. The assorted bits danced a little, like landed fish.\n\nSome cheering broke out, loudest at the king's balcony, or so it seemed to Wistala's ears. She wondered what his limbs might be used for, but they were simply dumped in the Ba-drink.\n\n\"A traitor's burial,\" one of the lordly dwarves said in Parl, perhaps wanting to please the king by explaining.\n\n\"Hmpf,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"Dismembered and dead in five tics. And with his last words he called me brutal!\"\n\nThe dwarves took her across the Titan bridge to the sloping top of Tall Rock and established her in the second highest tower there. The only higher tower was that of the watch-guild, who kept the time of the hour-bells and looked for riders at each end of the pass through secret optics.\n\nShe found herself in the care of a blighter slave named Yellowteeth. Yellowteeth indeed possessed oversize incisors the color of dried hay, top and bottom. He kept them polished by dipping his finger in ash and rubbing his teeth, then rinsing his mouth out with water.\n\nHe grumbled a good deal in Parl, for the dwarves spoke their tongue only among themselves and taught few its secrets, save for a claw-count of pleasantries and greetings and oaths that were public knowledge anyway.\n\nShe soon learned that the dwarves used three different languages, and not surprisingly to anyone who has spent much time around dwarves, ranked them.\n\nThe lowest was Parl, the language of servants, slaves, and those who engaged in commerce. Above that was Dwarvish, \"the golden letters that unite us all,\" according to a dwarf-philosopher Wistala had read somewhere or other. The dwarves of the guilds spoke specialized dialects\u2014there seemed to be guilds for everything, from armor-making to woodworking. Wistala even heard whispers of a Guild of Assassins\u2014she guessed the Dragonblade headed that one. The choicest and most talented dwarves studied the high language, that of mathematics, according to dwarvish legend the only remnant of the perfect world that existed before darkness filled the holes.\n\nHer tower had once been an observatory. Like the council chamber she was trying to forget, writing covered the walls, at the top star charts, moon graphs and planet tracks, beneath them explanations in the cryptic styling of the dwarves.\n\nThe star-guild had left not only numerous charts and symbols painted on the floors but on her high perch, as well, a platform designed to be lifted right up and out of the tower.\n\nShe could just get her head out the hole in the roof, which could be shut by a sheet of reinforced tin by working a bezel running around the ring-hole. (The dwarves and Yellowteeth used a pole with a hook to work it, Wistala could reach it without rearing up on her hind legs.) There were eight windows with thick shutters and curtains set around the observation room. A fixture directly beneath for some sort of apparatus stuck up from the floor below the platformlike toadstools, but all had been disassembled before they moved her into the perch.\n\nIt was a high, lonely place and appealed to her\u2014unless a storm worked up. The tin covering on the hole rattled like a drum when rain or hail hit it, which was frequent at that altitude.\n\nShe could not fly from her room, however, without descending the center of the tower on which the blighter sat, and then moving to the Titan Bridge or squeezing herself out through a tunnel which led to one of the workshop chimneys, rising hundreds of dragon-lengths up from the heart of the mountain. Whenever she did that she ended up with soot on her scales.\n\nThe dwarves of the star-guild, who were few in number as their only employment was making maps and charts for Wheel of Fire dwarves planning a long journey, attended to her needs. Soothseekers sometimes talked\u2014or bribed, she imagined\u2014their way up into the observation tower and got her advice, but those visits were but rare.\n\nSo she had a good deal of free time for thought.\n\nThought about the Wheel of Fire and the Dragonblade, Hammar and the barbarians, the Hypatian Empire and, sometimes, the dragons of the Sadda-Vale.\n\nOn days of clear weather and light wind she explored the mountain pass the dwarves had been occupying since Thul, a General of the Hypatian Empire at its height, had guarded its mountain borders. To the east, where the steppes of the Ironriders stretched farther than even an eye on dragonwing could see, a narrow road hugged the north side of the mountain. It saw so little traffic that when Wistala saw a pack train, a rider, or a file of walkers on it she stopped to guess at their mission. Herds of cattle or horses, so long that they filled the road from its origins at the foothills to the Ba-drink, were brought in from the east by the Ironriders to trade for trade-good-quality blades and shields and helms, and the butchers-guild would work days at a stretch slaughtering and smoking and the Ba-drink would see a scum of blood from their offal.\n\nHardy mountain fish with knobs like horn-buds all across their sides disposed of leftovers, and were in turn pulled up and eaten by the dwarves.\n\nThe track up the west side of the mountains was not as formidable, but there the dwarves had the low wall anywhere an army could possibly march, and watch-guild dwarves in other places. Just coming to the cusp of the Ba-drink would be a feat of generalship for any invading army.\n\nBut no army could reach Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock without crossing the Ba-drink, and the dwarves kept all the barges in their inlets. Unless they could somehow fly over the steep, snowy mountaintops to the north, the attackers would not come within bowshot of the Wheel of Fire.\n\nFather had been mad to attack this place.\n\nShe knew there were other roads, up from the Lower World, but could find no guides willing to take her below some of the lower chambers, and any investigating she did on her own was inevitably stopped by narrow, one-dwarf ladders or passages she was too big to climb. The dwarves working underground chuckled and told her they were not fools, the lower way was shut to keep out blighters and dragons and the foul de-men Fangbreaker had dispersed.\n\nThe dwarves would never be destroyed by invasion. Only a long siege might humble them, but dwarves were legendary siege-breakers, and had been known to eat each other rather than relent, according to Yellowteeth.\n\nHe could talk, after a fashion, though his Parl was broken and thick.\n\n\"Father taken long ago in battle, became tunneler. Father die in collapse. I born water-bearer.\"\n\nBear water he did, up the long stairs, to arrive panting and empty his buckets into a barrel. But the dwarves hurried to install a clever system fed by a tank added to the roof; its pipes gave her clean, cold water in a brass cistern, as much as she liked, leaving Yellowteeth only food and coal to carry.\n\nHe had a platform in the tower hollow below hers, little more than an antechamber off the stairwell that had once held ropes and pulleys, and it struck Wistala as a dark and cold place. She let him bring his mat up by her fire, and he smiled as he settled in by its glow each night.\n\nAs he slept, she had ample time to study his physiognomy. There was something of each of the other hominid races in the blighter, though half-formed and rudely constructed, like an apprentice's clay imitation of a master's sculpture. He seemed to take three times as long to accomplish anything when compared with one of the accommodating dwarves, and burned himself once or twice in a stupid fashion on the coal furnace, which struck her as strange for one who'd been fetching and filling coal all his life, especially since he did most of his other duties intelligently. His intelligence might also account for the lack of scars on his hairy back; most of the other blighters Yellowteeth's age she'd seen elsewhere had bare patches on their shoulders and backs from the lash.\n\nWhen alone she looked out the windows and dreamed as lazily as Yellowteeth shoveled waste. She kept thinking of the hacked-to-pieces dwarf, feeling somehow responsible for placing this dread monarch at the head of these dwarves, who she hated to begin with but now felt a little sorry for. After all, the whole nation of them didn't storm her home cave.\n\nShe knew what she wanted to do; she simply had no idea how to go about doing it.\n\nIn the end, as the summer sun reached its zenith, she decided to start small, like Mother's single rock that created an avalanche.\n\n\"I must see the king! I must see the king!\" Wistala told Djaybee, the dwarf of the star-guild and the most senior of those who resided in their small house carved into the top of Tall Rock below the tower.\n\nDjaybee looked through his off-center mask at the half-sun crawling up between the mountains to the east and scratched his underchin. \"For one so insightful, you know little of the habits of King Fangbreaker\u2014a golden garland upon him, long may he lead.\"\n\n\"You would deny\u2014\"\n\n\"Not deny, good dragon, not deny. It's just that he often works all night and is not to be disturbed until after the noon-bell tolls, and usually then only with his mornmeal.\"\n\n\"Can you arrange an audience, then?\"\n\n\"We've not much influence in the king's hall\u2014may it see no evil deed.\"\n\n\"Try and I will praise you to him, good Djaybee.\"\n\nDjaybee bobbed down to one knee. \"Then I will endeavor to get you a place in the line.\"\n\nWistala got her audience that very afternoon, though whether it was through Djaybee's exertions or the King's interest in hearing from her she could not say.\n\nDjaybee took her across the Titan bridge and through the passages to Fangbreaker's throne room. Yellowteeth trailed along at the back in case during her wait anything needed to be cleaned up and disposed of, for she was too large to use the dwarvish comfort rooms hygienically.\n\nThe throne room was long, high, and austere, formed into a tunnel that narrowed at the top into a triangular arch like a shovel-tip. Squared-off pillars running up the sides created a series of alcoves. In each alcove stood a member of the king's bodyguard.\n\nA long, slightly raised walkway ran from the door wardens to the steps leading to King Fangbreaker's iron throne, forged from the melted weapons of those he vanquished in single combat, or so Djaybee told her. To either side of the walkway were wooden benches of dwarf-size, positioned so the bodygard could look out over all.\n\nLong files of dwarves filled the twin bench areas, snaking back and forth in long lines, many carrying sealed scrolls, or gifts. (Baskets of food seemed to be the most popular\u2014Wistala smelled one surreptitiously; it was filled with sausages and cheeses and tiny bits of hard-baked salty bread.) The older or expectant mothers sat, others stood, some talked to their fellow petitioners across the raised walkway and made jokes about having joined the slower-moving line, according to Djaybee.\n\nUpon reaching the front of one of the two lines, the petitioner would speak to a purple-garbed dwarf seated at a little half-desk. The one to the left was male, the one to the right female, her face hidden under elaborate draping. Sometimes the officials would write, sometimes they would lay a waxen seal upon the petition, and sometimes they passed gifts up to the king through his guards.\n\nKing Fangbreaker sat on his throne with his artifical leg off. He toyed with the skull-and-crystal, his heel resting on the horsehoof which had been detached somehow, and used it as a baton to point, or offer a sort of salute of acknowledgment to those who brought gifts, or to wave the very few of the petitioners up who would be granted a personal audience.\n\nBehind King Fangbreaker sat a line of the dwarf nobles, some dozing against their fellows. She recognized a few of them from the balconies, but thanks to the masks, it was hard to tell one dwarf from another.\n\n\"I shall wait in line for you, Oracle,\" Djaybee said, moving for the back of the left line, which stood three-quarters of the way toward the entrance.\n\nBut King Fangbreaker turned and called to one of his nobles, who rose and hurried down the raised central walkway. He bobbed and gestured for Wistala to come directly up the center aisle.\n\nAs she approached, she noticed that one of the sets of stairs was in fact an overhang. There appeared to be a room under the dais. She saw helmets in the shadows within and some sort of war machine with a good view of those waiting in line, and especially the central walkway.\n\n\"Tala, step up! Tala, it is a pleasure to see you,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"Are your accommodations lofty and airy enough for your comfort?\"\n\n\"They are admirable, my king, and I could fill your afternoon with a thousand thanks, but I've had visions that I thought I should bring to your attention.\"\n\n\"Shall we speak privately?\" King Fangbreaker said, his eyes narrowing.\n\n\"Oh, no, this is good news for you and all your people. But I fear I must ask that all who participate in the discussion speak Parl that I may weigh their words, for I have no knowledge of Dwarvish.\"\n\n\"Easily done. Do all hear?\" King Fangbreaker said.\n\nThe nobles behind stirred, and the two attendants to either side set down their pens and seal-wax. All listened.\n\nWistala spoke loudly enough for all\u2014at least all who could understand Parl\u2014but she kept her snout fixed on the king: \"I've had troubling dreams the last week, but I thought they only applied to me. It was of tasty dishes, gold, all things a dragon's stomach desires. But they came in one door and out the other all while I slept unaware.\"\n\n\"Opportunity passing you by,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"The lowliest soothsayer could tell as much.\"\n\n\"Ah, but then last night came a very specific dream. I saw a great triumphant parade, celebrating dwarves, fireworks, marching up a street paved with gold toward you, Good King. I believe an opportunity is coming your way.\"\n\n\"Can you add anything more helpful?\" King Fangbreaker asked, twirling his leg.\n\n\"The one who led the parade was a human boy, a boy of fair hair and wide set eyes, bronze skin. But he was in manacles, my king. You embraced him, struck off his manacles, and took him to your breast, and the broken pieces of manacle turned into an ancient crown, and the boy put it on your head, but as he hesitated, the crown began to fade, and I woke up.\n\n\"I fear this opportunity may be brief, Great King.\"\n\n\"This is not helpful at all. There must be a million boys\u2014\"\n\n\"He was aged eleven years or so. Garbed like a barbarian, somewhat dirty about the face and hands. Perhaps he is a slave.\"\n\nKing Fangbreaker set his chin on his hand and thought. \"Still a search for a nugget in a riverbed.\"\n\nWistala cocked her head, the way Auron used to when he had trouble understanding one of her ideas. \"What do you mean\u2014you must know the name! Is no one talking of it? Did you not hear the eagle?\"\n\nShe saw the whites of King Fangbreaker's eyes. \"Eagle? What eagle?\"\n\n\"A most remarkable eagle flying at sunrise circled over Thul's Hardhold, my king. Purple it was\u2014\"\n\n\"Purple?\" Fangbreaker thundered.\n\nWistala continued: \"And as it circled it called the name Rayg in so mighty a voice, I can't imagine anyone didn't hear it. But now I fear it was part of the dream, as well.\"\n\n\"Did anyone see this eagle?\" King Fangbreaker said, hopping off his iron throne and standing on one leg, using the throne-arm to balance.\n\n\"Eagle \u2026 perhaps \u2026 bird high up and far off \u2026 dark, possibly purple,\" the Lords of the Wheel of Fire said.\n\n\"A feather fell from it, and landed on my doorstep, purple it was,\" said one lord, falling to his knees. Another at the other end of the group slapped himself on the forehead as if to punish his wits for not being quicker.\n\n\"Hmfp! Very unhelpful, Lord Lobok, that I am only hearing this now,\" said the king, turning a hairy eye upon the kneeling lord.\n\n\"My wife thought it suitable to, ahem, set it in a bed of flowers, or preserve it in glass. I shall get it at once,\" he squeaked, and bowed himself down the stairs, and then hurried up the walkway, jumping over Wistala's twitching tail.\n\n\"A man-child. A man-child,\" King Fangbreaker puzzled.\n\n\"The boy's face was alive with intelligence,\" Wistala said. \"Perhaps he will serve as an emissary, or a craftsman.\"\n\n\"I'd rather Hypatia come to the mountain,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"But if we can find this boy, we'll decide then. An odd sort of vision, Tala.\" He scratched at his beard. \"Hmfp! If it brings happiness to my people, I am satisfied. Let every one of our trading houses know to make inquiries about this boy. Say he is being ransomed through us, that none may learn his value before we acquire him. When it comes time to bring him here, I imagine I must let Lobok handle it, as the duty seems to have fallen on his doorstep along with the feather\u2014though he is the nervous type.\"\n\n\"I will take no more of your time, Lord,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"And keep that out of my court,\" Fangbreaker said, fixing his eye about Yellowteeth, who lurked behind Wistala.\n\nOddly enough, the blighter smiled back at the king as he gave a nodding bow. Wistala might even have called the expression defiant.\n\nWistala flapped in the night sky above Galahall, a cold fall wind from the northwest helping keep her aloft as she turned circles, falling in a glide and then rising with a few hard wing-beats, wondering what transpired within.\n\nHammar had new hutments on the edge of his lands, the round structures of the northern barbarians with their roofs like a single-pole tent.\n\nShe accompanied the expedition at King Fangbreaker's request. He was nervous about Lord Lobok, who'd set out from Thul's Hardhold with an armed force some of the dwarvish lords laughed at as being oversize, especially considering the small amount of money borne as the agreed price for the youth.\n\n\"He never was the steadiest warrior, and always called for more axes and artillerists, whatever his situation,\" Fangbreaker said, watching the barges set out from his balcony ten days before.\n\n\"But the feather fell on his doorstep,\" Wistala said. She'd seen the purple feather, produced after some delay for the King's court; it smelled like a white one freshly dyed. \"In case of treachery, would it not be better to have a large, well-arrayed force at hand?\"\n\n\"This is the simplest of transactions. Why the word treachery?\" King Fangbreaker asked.\n\n\"I cannot say. I speak what comes out of my mind; why it was that word instead of another is as much a mystery to me as to you.\"\n\n\"Hmpf,\" he said in return.\n\n\"Are there commanders to see that the force is well handled, whether it is a peaceful march or a warlike one?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"From anyone else I'd call that an insult, Tala,\" he rumbled. \"But you've little opportunity to learn decent manners.\"\n\n\"May I hazard my manners with another question?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"What happens to those gift baskets of food given to you in your throne hall? Do you eat them all?\"\n\n\"I eat not a one,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"I've a queer stomach, and mostly eat gruel a-mealtimes, which is easily digested and nutritious. And I have a terrible sweet tooth at night, which is responsible for this,\" he patted his paunch. \"The baskets go to the poor of our city. There are many widows and orphans without a dwarf in a guild to support them. Can't have young dwarves growing up all stoop-backed and knockkneed, coughing and feverish from malnutrition.\"\n\nWistala felt the lordly dwarves moving about her flanks, some were pointing to her underside and talked among themselves, perhaps discussing assorted methods and tactics of dragon-killing.\n\n\"How did you get the title Fangbreaker, my king?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I was cheated by a pair of dragons,\" he said. \"They were a wretched, misfortunate pair, who we helped restore to health and vitality with foods and metals. In return they fought for us, as some of the mercenary Ironriders do on the eastern side of this mountain, but they abandoned us to start their family without taking proper leave and asking permission to bear eggs. For we had a market for those eggs, a rich market, and they'd agreed that their bodies would be ours for a period under contract.\n\n\"Now I was not unreasonable. I just asked for one clutch. After that, they would be free to go where they wished, to the ends of the breaking earth in the west or the jeweled kingdoms of the east for all I cared, and hatch as many eggs as they liked. But I'd promised a full clutch of eggs to a buyer, and he would have them.\n\n\"The dragons argued that their services included only flying and fighting, not eggs, and when I stood firm, they fled. The laying time must have been close, for they did not flee far, though they turned up in an unexpected cave, one we'd gone to much trouble to seal from below to cut off the blighters within from the darkroads.\n\n\"I caught up to them in the end, so that I might turn over hatchlings to my buyer, if not eggs. Though that Dragonblade got overzealous in the fight and in attempting to pinion a hatchling killed it. I poked a hole in the female who'd lied to me, spilling her fire bladder and rendering her harmless and gasping, and smashed in her lying mouth with my gauntlet for defying me, turning her teeth into bloody ruin. She died cursing me through a broken jaw. Does this talk sicken you, Tala?\"\n\nWistala, wondering how King Fangbreaker's body would dance as flame consumed it, took a deep breath. \"There are good dragons and bad dragons, just as there are good and bad dwarves, Dread King.\"\n\n\"But so I was titled and given a place at the council table, for we managed to hunt one hatchling down and the Drakossozh killed another with his dogs.\"\n\n\"Bad luck, for the Dragonblade to kill two while trying for capture.\"\n\n\"You're a dragon yourself. You must know that it is not the easiest of tasks. But I feel for you, at the unfortunate loss of others of your kind. Would that more dragons grew up to live useful lives!\"\n\nWould that more dwarves did the same, Wistala thought.\n\n\"How can I ease your mind about Lobok?\" Wistala said. \"I can go to my tower and try to force a vision. Perhaps if you gave me some personal tokens\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I wouldn't care to force a wrong reading from you. But hear! You could act as a courier between my throne room and Lobok's camp. You can bring a message in a few hours over a distance that a rider would take a day to cover.\"\n\n\"Nothing that would make me happier,\" Wistala said. \"Than to be able to set your mind at ease.\"\n\nSo she'd gone to Lobok's camp twice carrying messages from the mountain king, carrying reassurance that all was going according to plan\u2014and made a side trip or two to the vicinity of the Green Dragon Inn to speak to Forstrel among his honeycombs.\n\n\"I wonder why he asks for word?\" Lord Lobok asked. His hands kept coming together and then running up his arms and back down again as he paced and thought, as though the right was worried that the left had eloped with an elbow.\n\n\"I do not know all the messages King Fangbreaker, high may he remain, receives. I only do my duty,\" Wistala said. \"You have ample dwarves for a march through enemy territory.\"\n\n\"Enemy?\" Lobok asked. \"Lord Hammar is a good friend, we've had much commerce with him. The dwarves just come to guard our prize on the way back.\"\n\n\"I've heard he's been calling himself King Hammar,\" Wistala said, and flew off back to Fangbreaker with Lobok's reply.\n\nSo as she hung in the darkness over Galahall, seeing the lights go on within and the carpets laid on the doorstep, she turned and made a careful approach to the nearby stream where the dwarves were camped at the base of the ridge she'd crossed so many years ago in the company of Stog.\n\nShe asked for a meeting with Lord Lobok, busy dressing for the court dinner celebrating another successful transaction, for the boy Rayg waited at Galahall to be sold to the dwarves. She was admitted with the expediency one would expect of a courier from King Fangbreaker, and found him buttoning a formal robe over a chain shirt. He wore a mask of red silk stretched under and over a decorative wooden frame, like a child's kite.\n\n\"Lord Lobok, are you going yourself?\" she asked, putting her head in his tent so as not to crowd him and the servant-dwarf helping his lord dress.\n\n\"Of course. It's a welcoming dinner, and as leader and emissary I'm expected. You don't\u2014\"\n\n\"The night feels wrong to me,\" Wistala said. \"Are your soldiers arrayed well?\"\n\n\"We're on the thane's land,\" Lord Lobok said, fingers fluttering against his chain shirt. \"There's nothing to fear here.\"\n\n\"As long as the thane is true. I've had horrible dreams, but they must be wrong. They must be.\"\n\nLobok left off dressing, turned his silk-masked face to her. \"Why do you say your impressions must be wrong? You are King Fangbreaker's, honors upon his name and so forth, famous Oracle.\"\n\n\"Who could mistake such omens? The feather landed on your doorstep. The Fates have chosen you.\"\n\nLobok and his servant exchanged a glance. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"Yes. I am overwrought, seeing those barbarian encampments around the thane's hall. I'm imagining things.\" She began to shake. \"But beware, O lord; if anyone speaks of a blood relationship between Hammar and the child you are receiving tonight, blood will be shed. A dagger at your back.\"\n\nShe let her eyes roll wildly and then flopped over, closing the water-lids over her so that she would look glassy-eyed.\n\n\"Oh! Oh! Oh, no,\" Lord Lobok said, his hands clasping and unclasping, then gripping elbows tight. \"Someone. Ummm. Is it safe to dump water on dragons?\"\n\nWistala rattled her sii and lifted her head. \"Nur \u2026 what am I doing here? Ia, I'm happy for you, Lord Lobok, you live again \u2026\" She blinked, shook her head. \"I beg your pardon, my lord, were you saying something? I seem to have fainted.\"\n\nLobok gestured to his servant, took a quavering gulp of wine from a proffered cup. \"You didn't have another vision, did you?\"\n\n\"Oh. No, I don't think so. Hazy, so hazy. My eyes vex me. There's a mist about you, my lord. It must be the scented candles. Excuse me, I am obliged to fly back to the throne room.\"\n\nShe left Lord Lobok calling for more wine.\n\nThree days later King Fangbreaker's throne room was lined with many of the most noble families in the mountains, hearing the report of Field Commander Djosh. Wistala waited for it to be read again in Parl, having begged to know what the message she carried read:\n\n\u2003Noble King and Assembled Select and Lordly Dwarves,\n\n\u2003I write you to report a most satisfactory outcome to an attempted treachery by Lord Hammar and his barbarians on the two hundred ninetieth of this year. I thank the Fates for the eagle and his feather landed upon Lord Lobok's door, for were it not for him not a dwarf of this expedition may be returning.\n\n\u2003Lord Lobok insisted on our arrays being placed within hearing distance of Galahall, ready to answer a cry for assistance, and I can only marvel at his foresight, inspired, I'm told, by our lucky dragon, who sensed matters amiss.\n\n\u2003I am told that during dinner an unusual number of barbarian leaders were present, as the infamous Hammar was building around himself a court of scoundrels. As the servants poured wine for a toast, Hammar gave some sort of code word that he was letting his illegitimate son\u2014I shall not sully the throne room with his coarse discourse\u2014be sold for little more than the song that wooed his mother. At this there was some stirring at the priests' end of the table and Lord Lobok let out such a shriek of warning that we would have heard it were we camped two vesk away. Lobok drew blade and flung himself sideways behind the table, knocking over a server who was making to bring the cask of wine down on Shieldmaster Dar's head, Lord Lobok's bodyservant tells me.\n\n\u2003At the calls of alarm and assistance from Lord Lobok I sent my hardhanded dwarves forward and they stormed through the windows of Galahall in good order. The barbarians made some semblance of a fight but clearly intended for the dinner to be a slaughterhouse, not a battle hall, and seemed not much experienced at close quarter fighting under roof and among furniture. Our dwarves, used to such environs, secured the boy with some loss of blood, almost all of it on the part of our opponents, and no loss of the treasure we brought to purchase him, for treachery abrogates any deal. I hope the throne will approve.\n\n\u2003Barbarian cavalry, long prepared to finish off the villainy indoors, made an effort to harry our retreat, but our catafoua made them fall back with loss.\n\n\u2003Wistala smiled, for she'd had Lessup's mead-deliverers start rumors of warlike preparations in the dwarf camp where they'd just sold their honeyed brew.\n\n\u2003I close this dispatch by saying we have lost few dwarves as we retreat in good order for the Ba-drink. I write to you in Lord Lobok's stead, for he travels with the healing wagons, and is so dosed with medicines after his experiences he is currently unable to write legibly. If you have any orders beyond returning to the Hardhold with our young prize, they will be immediately carried out by\n\n\u2003Your faithful Field Commander,\n\n\u2003Djosh Scarchin\n\nAs the words were read in Parl, the dwarves grumbled and swore all over again, and King Fangbreaker paced before his throne.\n\n\"What do you say, Oracle?\" a dwarf called.\n\nFangbreaker glowered. \"This is a military matter, Guildmaster Cyoss.\"\n\n\"Great King, though we would hear the dragon, you must decide, of course,\" another called.\n\nFangbreaker turned to Wistala. \"What do you think, Oracle?\"\n\n\"I have not a military mind. But shouldn't this sort of treachery be punished?\"\n\nThe assembled select dwarves growled in agreement.\n\n\"I am very tired from my flight, and you all have weighty matters to long discuss,\" Wistala said. \"May I be excused from council of war?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Fangbreaker said.\n\n\"Three cheers for the lucky dragon!\" a dwarf at the back shouted.\n\nWistala bowed backwards out of the throne room, but she saw the fixed stare in Fangbreaker's eyes, and trembled.\n\nLord Lobok's expedition returned with Rayg in triumph and glory.\n\nIt must have been strange to the thin little youth, to be borne across the Ba-drink in a garlanded boat, flanked by lordly dwarves and rowed between Thul's Hardhold and Tall Rock, under a rain of tiny white mountain flowers\u2014and bits of paper and wax wrapping\u2014thrown from the balconies and the Titan Bridge.\n\nEven as they returned a new expedition set out, under three of the Wheel of Fire's greatest generals.\n\nWistala heard from the star-guild that King Fangbreaker had decided to launch a \"punitive expedition\" into the barbarian lands, to teach the barbarians a real lesson for the treachery at Galahall. They were keeping their exact plans secret, but the star-guild had provided detailed maps of Kark and the Blacklake area, for barbarians from that region had been identified as among the slain around Galahall.\n\nWistala hung about, asked if she'd be needed to relay messages, and was told that the sight of a dragon in the sky might give away the column's presence.\n\nWhen night fell, she flew away from the Wheel of Fire with all the speed she could manage and almost tore her wings off making it to the Green Dragon Inn. There she dictated a letter to be given to Hammar, and a much longer one to be sent to Ragwrist.\n\n\u2003Lord Hammar,\n\n\u2003You and I have had our differences in the past, but the enemies of my blood, the dwarves of the Wheel of Fire, are marching on Blacklake and Kark, intent on destruction and murder. Whether you tell your barbarian allies to move their women and children away from those areas or plan an ambush is entirely up to you.\n\n\u2003A Daughter of Hypatia\n\nJessup looked at the note after he finished writing it in his chicken-run hand. Wistala pressed her librarian medallion into some very ordinary red wax he helpfully dribbled at the bottom.\n\n\"This is a dangerous game you are playing, Wistala.\"\n\nShe stretched her aching wings and back muscle. \"It's no game, I assure you, and the stakes are beyond anything that can be placed on a table or dice-rug.\"\n\n\"Mod Lada would like news of her son, if you have any. She saw him seized up from table after that treacherous dwarf-lord started attacking the wine stewards and signaled his ambush.\"\n\nWistala told what she'd heard from the astronomers' guild: \"I have not spoken to Rayg, but I am told he's been apprenticed to the Guild of Inventors. Evidently he showed some intelligence in the Hall of Inventions as he passed through it, and recognized some piece of artifice and its use, which much impressed the keepers there. It is a high honor, only the brightest dwarves gain an apprenticeship in that guild. I can assure her those dwarves are the best-treated of the Wheel of Fire.\"\n\nJessup pulled back a lock of his remaining hair. \"It is a strange road we've traveled since that day we buried Avalanche.\"\n\n\"And there are still more trolls to slay.\"\n\n\"I'll let you deal with the trolls. I'll keep my inn and tell your story to anyone who asks about the sign.\"\n\n\"May it not have an end for a long time,\" Wistala said.\n\nJessup reached up, tickled her under the chin. \"I've always wanted to do that. I never tire of looking at you, Wistala. There's something about dragons. All power and dread symmetry.\"\n\n\"I must be off. I have much more flying to do, yes, all the way to the Imperial Library at Thallia. I hope they don't panic and think I've come to burn it. I need to speak to a librarian.\"\n\n\"What will you do there?\"\n\n\"Learn about dams.\"\n\nWhen Wistala returned to her tower a score of days later, she found all of the Wheel of Fire were aquiver. The punitive expedition had not sent communication in many days, and not a few wondered at the silence.\n\nShe received a most odd note shortly after rising the next day. Yellowteeth hurried to get her minder, who hurried to get his guild-chief, who read the note and sent for the escort Wistala requested.\n\nSo it was in the company of the star-guild that she went to meet the Dragonblade on the Titan bridge.\n\nHe stood in the center, in his armor but with sword in scabbard and cloak about him, helm hanging from his belt. His broad face was much as she remembered it, perhaps a little wearier.\n\n\"I've long been curious to meet this Oracle dragon for some time now, but was occupied on the other side of the Inland Ocean.\" For some reason Wistala was relieved. As soon as he said occupied on the other side, she feared a mention of the Sadda-Vale.\n\n\"So you've seen me, Drakossozh. Is there to be a duel here, under the eyes of the Wheel of Fire?\"\n\n\"A duel? With vermin? Spare me your wit, creature.\"\n\n\"Then I will go about my business\u2014,\" Wistala began.\n\n\"No. Walk with me. I will start no fight with you here. You have my word.\"\n\nWistala wondered if she could trust the word of an assassin.\n\n\"I must be growing old. You are the second dragon to slip through my fingers,\" he said.\n\n\"Who was the first?\"\n\nHe turned toward the Hardhold. \"Come. I wish to show you something, Oracle.\"\n\nHe led her down many sets of stairs, across chambers filled with trophies and statues, and finally down a shaft where one traveled by having the floor descend rather than going afoot. He gave a password to guards in a workshop filled with the sound of hammers and deeper pounding, and Wistala smelled hot metal and burning coal.\n\nShe passed a group of young dwarves, their faces unmasked, listening to another older dwarf talk as he pointed with a stick at various features of a hose that fed water into a series of smaller and smaller pipes, until it shot out the bottom with tremendous force. She recognized Rayg among the apprentices, the only human other than Drakossozh this far in the Hardhold.\n\n\"We're deep in the Guild of the Armorers,\" the Dragonblade said. They passed racks of weapons and stacked helms, with dwarves bent over workbenches on all sides. The symphony of noise was as chaotic as a battle, and the air thick with the tang of heated metal. \"Have you ever wondered how the Wheel of Fire got its name?\" he asked.\n\n\"You see the burning shield here and there,\" Wistala said. \"It's an emblem.\"\n\n\"They were called the Wheel of Fire before that. Here, follow.\"\n\nHe passed into a quieter gallery. The ceiling here was wide but low, and Wistala smelled an oily smell like lamp fats overlaid with other workshop odors.\n\nLong ranks of machines stood in little bays. Some had wooden platforms next to them, one or two had been wheeled out so the dwarves could work. A few of the workers gave Wistala a startled look as she crouched to get through the doors.\n\nThe pieces of craftsmanship were like great walls on wheels of assorted sizes. If there was an average, she would put that wheels were fully dwarf height and the walls perhaps twice that, but it seemed some walls and wheels came taller and some shorter, some wider and some narrower. But on each two spars jutted out from the axles of the wheels behind the wall, with handles at irregular intervals. Wistala watched a team of dwarves move one by having four dwarves stand at each spar and lift, then push it forward. Behind the shield were big tanks like water-cisterns, only with hoses and glass devices like clock faces fixed to the joints, along with assorted levers and cables connecting wheel to tanks.\n\nBut the objects at the front caught her attention more than anything.\n\nPipes projected from slits in the great wheeled shields. The slits, indeed the shields themselves, reminded her of overlarge dwarf battle-masks with their thin gaps so the dwarves could see and still have their eyes shielded.\n\nOpen-jawed dragon heads, horribly real, had been fixed to the front of the pipes, their faces forever frozen into snarling fury. Their eyes had been replaced by painted crystals, but otherwise they looked ready to come alive. There were heads with eight horns and heads with none, heads with green scales and heads with bronze, heads of hatchlings, drakes, drakka, dragons, dragonelles\u2026 .\n\nSome were familiar.\n\nThe world spun about her. She fixed her eyes on the Dragonblade, who stood with hand on sword hilt, helmet cradled at his elbow. His knees were bent just a trifle, as though he were waiting to leap into action. Wistala noticed shadows, heard excited breathing, the alcoves just ahead.\n\n\"I'm not aware of all the mechanics to their operation,\" the Dragonblade explained from somewhere on the other side of the Endless Steppe, or so it seemed to her ears. \"But the turning of the wheels forces air into one of the tanks, and that air is then used to drive flame, like dragonflame, out of the other tank and through the pipe at the front. It's ignited by a coal gas-flame there. Certainly not what a dragon is capable of, but I hear it's terrifying in tunnel warfare.\"\n\nThe dwarves had all frozen in their labors, watching her as though fixed by spellcraft.\n\n\"Most interesting,\" Wistala said. \"Is there another stop to the tour, or am I done?\"\n\n\"You hold your anger well. Here's another test.\" He extended his gauntleted palm. In it rested two ancient Hypatian coins, one of gold, the other of silver. \"I found these in the jowls of a bronze I killed on the banks of the Whitewater. There was also a female hatchling there. That hatchling wouldn't have been you, would it?\"\n\nWistala shot out her tongue, but the Dragonblade was quicker of hand, closed his fingers around the coins and withdrew them.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were offering me a treat,\" Wistala said. \"Speaking of which, I am late for my dinner.\"\n\n\"A dragon who can hold her temper,\" the Dragonblade said.\n\nJust, Wistala thought.\n\n\"There's something about you that frightens me,\" the Dragonblade said, eyebrows together. His horridly flat face wrinkled in thought. \"A dragon who can keep her temper could be a deadly enemy. Or\u2014\"\n\n\"Or what?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"I won't misjudge you again,\" the Dragonblade said, not answering her question and crossing to the opposite gallery. \"You've escaped me twice. There won't be a third.\"\n\n\"No,\" Wistala said. \"I expect there won't.\"\n\n\"And even if I fall, I have a son and a daughter to avenge me.\"\n\n\"I've met your son. I hope he gets his chance.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Not his finest performance. I thought I'd try him on an easier target his first night out. I never thought you'd chew your wings open. They've grown out nicely.\"\n\nWistala took a breath. If she kept her eyes on the Dragonblade, she couldn't see the heads, except he kept strolling around so she couldn't help but view the machines.\n\n\"I wonder if Fangbreaker knows all your history,\" the Dragonblade said.\n\n\"I wonder if he knows you've disobeyed him, and killed when he told you to capture.\"\n\nShe turned and moved back through the workshops, keeping one eye on him just in case. But he stood there, helmet at his hip, chuckling. \"You may walk away, dragon. Even fly. But wherever you go, you cannot hide forever. Dragons are noticed, you see?\"\n\nAs she retraced her steps back dwarves seemed to be rushing about everywhere, or standing on stairways talking and gesticulating. Something had them dreadfully agitated but Wistala did not ask what. Her head hurt, perhaps from the fumes in the workshops, and she wanted to retire to her tower to sleep.\n\n\"Dhssol.\"\n\n\"Oracle, what do you think?\" some asked, but she passed in a daze.\n\n\"Dhssol! Dhssol!\" the dwarves said, one to the other. Dwarf wives wailed it from their balconies as Wistala crossed the Titan bridge.\n\n\"Who is this Dhssol?\" she asked one of the leather-slippered court workers.\n\n\"Not a who, a what,\" he said, pulling at his beard. \" 'Disaster,' it would be in Parl. An evil star is on our house.\"\n\nThe dwarves of the star-guild told her the terrible news when she returned to her tower. A tradesdwarf of the Chartered Company had made a rare appearance at the Wheel of Fire to bring tidings of sorrow and fear: the punitive column had been wiped out almost to a dwarf.\n\nAfter a bloody march through villages where the dwarves left burned bodies in wooden cages, they'd been betrayed by their hired scouts, supposedly belonging to a rival clan to the lands they'd been traversing. The false scouts led to a flooded river, and while attempting to cross, they had been attacked during a snowstorm from both sides and by forces shooting down the river in narrow boats.\n\nHammar, now called the Dwarfhanger by his barbarian legion, was reputed to be on the march for the Wheel of Fire, destroying what remained of the column as the survivors retreated.\n\nSome important voices were calling for Lord Lobok to be put in charge of the defense of the city, he'd had his share of luck against the barbarians and Hammar before.\n\n\"And he's cautious, and would not improvidently expose his troops to destruction,\" Djaybee said. \"He can stand against this Hammar, for years if need be. The barbarians always lose interest in war after a season. It'll be over by the summer flowers. Should he assume command?\" the scientifically minded dwarf, who'd never asked her advice before, wondered.\n\n\"I would like nothing better,\" Wistala said.\n\nThey were interrupted in this discourse by a visitor. This time Gobold Fangbreaker himself came to her, rather than going through the delay of having her brought to the Throne Hall.\n\n\"Tala, you have heard the rumors?\" the king said as he arrived, surrounded by his black-armored bodyguard.\n\n\"Yes. Is it true, my king?\"\n\n\"True enough,\" he said. \"Though not quite so bad as some losing their nerve would have it. Battle Commander Vande Boltcaster has a full maneuver array of dwarves left, and they are fighting as they turn back. But they've been forced to abandon their train and are short on supplies and have no time or capacity to seek more. I've had an idea. How much do you think you can carry?\"\n\n\"The weight of several dwarves,\" Wistala said. \"Over short distances.\"\n\n\"This will be a long flight of short hops, then. I need you to bring him food, medicines, and above all crossbow bolts.\"\n\n\"My wings are at your command, Great King,\" she said.\n\n\"There's been talk of you being absent for some time,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"To where did you fly?\"\n\n\"To see my friends at the circus. They go into winter camp about this time each year.\"\n\n\"Hmpf,\" said King Fangbreaker, from behind his shield. \"You seem the type to keep friends long. How about enemies?\"\n\n\"I've set out to make no enemies, my king,\" Wistala said. \"I made more friends than enemies with the circus. Of course, there are those who felt they were cheated\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't mean that. Ach, I don't know what I mean. I'm overwrought, imagining things. You put new heart in me. Eat a good meal and be ready to fly by tonight. The star-guild will supply you with a map based on our best information.\"\n\nWistala lowered her head to the floor, and King Fangbreaker left. She later learned he'd walked all about the city, calming the citizens on both sides of the Titan bridge, answering questions from the lowliest porter to guild-heads.\n\nThat night she came to the Titan bridge, where she was loaded with milk-powders, sugarcubes, crossbow bolts, slabs of honey, medicines, even rolls of needle and thread for stitching wounds. Dwarf wives came and stuck flowers in her scales or tied ribbons with messages inked on them about her sii and saa. She was asked to look for so many dwarves that the king's bodyguard had to push away the supplicants.\n\nShe tried a short practice flight, and returned to the bridge.\n\n\"I can carry more,\" she said, not altogether sure that she could. More bundles were strapped to her back and chest, everywhere but where her wings could flap.\n\nThe King himself drank a toast in her honor and gave her a heaping handful of gold coins to eat, slathered with something sweet and hard the dwarves called cocolat. It gave her a rush of energy, and she launched herself again, and even gliding seemed somewhat of a strain.\n\nBehind her, they set off red fireworks.\n\nShe had to relearn to fly, laden as she was, and it was slow going until she learned to better angle her wings. After an hour she dropped, exhausted, sure she could never reach the sky again, but she did.\n\nAnd so she fought her way north, an hour's flight, a half hour's rest, another hour's flight, a quarter hour's rest, another hour's flight, a drop from exhaustion into sleep that ended at daybreak.\n\nThe next day she passed over the track of the punitive expedition. The snow had covered the burned foundations, but crows poked at charred heaps here and there, extracting unburnt marrow. She'd never heard of war like this in the Hypatian books of tactics and maneuver, parley and honorable surrender. The dwarves had struck with a heavy, vengeful hand.\n\nOr had she?\n\nWistala landed in a crowd of cheering dwarves the next dusk. Their eyes burned so bright behind their masks that they glowed. Beards were shorn to show loss of comrades and officers, and they hadn't had time or energy to clean the caked blood from their armor.\n\nBattle Commander Vande Boltcaster moved with a limp, walking with the aid of a broken bow. His officers untied and distributed the messages bound on her legs and tail\u2014many would never be read by the eyes for which they were intended.\n\n\"Can you carry out wounded?\" Boltcaster asked her. \"I have three hero-dwarves we've been carrying since the Norssund.\"\n\n\"Oh, for some wine,\" she said.\n\n\"Gone,\" Boltcaster said. \"Like much else. There's toasted horsemeat and boiled entrails galore, if you like. They were to be breakfast, but there's not a dwarf here who wouldn't give you his portion.\"\n\n\"Can you make it back?\" Wistala said. The dwarves were taking turns to slip away from their lines and write notes on everything from wrapping-paper to bits of wood, in blood if nothing else would serve, and tying it to her. She submitted, hating herself for what she was about to do.\n\n\"I'll know when we reach the Shoulder-Fell. How long before the king marches to our aid?\"\n\n\"I have not seen a dwarf set out beyond the outer wall,\" Wistala said, honestly enough.\n\nSome of the dwarves growled at that.\n\n\"Silence, there,\" Boltcaster barked. \"I've still reports to send, and you have families.\"\n\n\"How do you move?\"\n\n\"Loose march-square. If the barbarians come, we fall in tight. The cavalry hasn't been trained that can break a Wheel of Fire shield wall.\"\n\n\"Where are the barbarians?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Where aren't they?\" a dwarf answered.\n\n\"They mostly follow our trail, scavenging discarded metalwork and despoiling the dead,\" Boltcaster said. \"We've had demands for surrender, and each time they've ridden from that direction. Good treatment. Ha! What do you expect, fighting savages such as these. Blighters would puke at some of their deeds.\"\n\nWistala took off down the path and winged over the dwarven defenses\u2014felled trees, mostly\u2014to halfhearted cheers. She saw some horses in the trees beyond and loosed some fire, more for show than for effect, and cast about until she saw tightly knit campfires. She swooped in low over the tents.\n\nBarbarian chieftains called for their archers and pointed. A few desultory arrows sang through the air around her.\n\n\"Tell Hammar they make for the Shoulder Fell,\" she said, flying upside down to keep out the shafts. She repeated it again over another group of tents, before turning back for the dwarves.\n\nThey stuffed her with horse entrails before she took off the next morning, with the three wounded dwarves tied across her back. The burden seemed light compared with the supplies she'd carried in the previous day.\n\nBy the time she returned to the Titan bridge, one of the wounded had died. The other two were untied and rushed into the Hardhold.\n\nWistala lay on the bridge like a dead thing as the dwarves untied the messages. One of the lordly dwarves took the courier-pouch from her neck and rushed it to the king.\n\nFangbreaker himself came down to the bridge to see her, stumping along on his horse hoof, which clomped on the wood planks of the bridge.\n\n\"They are in bad shape, my king,\" Wistala said. Some in the crowd cried out, and she heard mutters of dhssol. \"I fear I am, too.\"\n\n\"Boltcaster's need is great,\" King Fangbreaker said. \"I must ask you to fly again as soon as you've rested. He needs more supplies.\"\n\n\"You go,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nWistala raised her head, too tired to do much but speak. If the bodyguard closed on her, it would be all she could do to roll off the bridge. \"You go. Gather your forces and go to his aid.\"\n\nThe crowd went instantly silent.\n\n\"No,\" said the king. \"Boltcaster must rely on his own skill and courage. We cannot take that risk. Every dwarf will be needed here.\"\n\n\"Or you could return with your number of warriors doubled,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"She's exhausted,\" King Fangbreaker said, loudly. \"The dragon is mazed. Pay her no mind. Go, good Oracle, go to your tower and rest.\" He reached for a handful of cocolat-covered coins to place in her mouth and evidently thought the better of it. He tossed the bag down before her.\n\n\"Eat these\u2014you'll feel better.\"\n\nWistala picked the bag up but did not eat them. Instead she bowed to the king and turned for her tower, trying to forget the masked faces of the doomed dwarves in Boltcaster's column. They were getting what they deserved. Would she?\n\nThe bodyguard closed around the king behind her, seeing the hard stares of some in the crowd.\n\nWistala slept, and ate, and waited.\n\nThe news finally came: Boltcaster and his remaining dwarves had been defeated on the slopes of a mountain, evidently the barbarians had prepared and then rolled rocks down on them from above, breaking the shield wall just before a charge.\n\nFangbreaker called their end \"glorious\" and a credit to the Wheel of Fire. But there were mutterings against him, arrests, even an assassination or two, and suicides that some said were not suicides.\n\nOne of these was the son of Lord Lobok, who finally agreed to take command of the outer wall at the edge of the Ba-drink.\n\nThe star-guild whispered of threats to her life, and Yellowteeth grew afraid to go down for coal. Wistala shrugged off the danger. The dwarves needed every warrior who could carry a spear and would not waste any on a dragon that could be dealt with later.\n\nThen came a dread winter morning when word spread that a barbarian horde was on the foothills below the Ba-drink. With them were Hypatian mercenaries, cavalry, even gargants. Will-making became a popular diversion, there were parties of a desperate nature on the balconies as the dwarves who would defend the walls spent one last night with their kith and kin.\n\nWistala watched, from her high tower, the barges creep across the Ba-drink, disgorge the dwarves for the walls, and then return for more. Control of the Ba-drink meant control of the herds on the south shores of the lake, and access to the east road for supplies, so the wall had to be held to avoid a bitter siege.\n\nShe looked at the sheer walls of Thul's Hardhold. Many were the balconies that hung black banners, mourning their losses.\n\nDjaybee joined her at the thin window slits.\n\n\"I think you should know, there's a dozen of the king's guard at the base of the tower. They don't want you to leave,\" Djaybee said. Yellowteeth hung about the passage down, as if fearing a rush of footsteps, but what he could do other than slicken the steps with shovelfuls of dragon waste she did not know. \"Hard words passed between us, and I was cautioned against keeping counsel with you. I fear another night of knives is coming.\"\n\n\"Night of knives?\"\n\n\"As there was when our noble king, a curse be upon his name, claimed all power. Those who opposed him never woke again, but were found dead behind their bedcurtains.\"\n\n\"We'd best take turns keeping watch,\" Wistala said.\n\nHer sleep was uneasy that night, and the tower went cold, for Yellowteeth was too terrified to descend the stairs to get more coal. Wistala finally let him sleep in the corner farthest from the door while she and Djaybee took turns at the stairs.\n\nShe awoke to a tickle behind her chin, dreaming that Jizara was poking her with her tail-tip. She opened her eye and froze.\n\nYellowteeth stood next to her neck, his shovel handle somehow transformed into a spear pressing against the interstices between her scales above her neck heart.\n\n\"Greetings from the Assassins' Guild,\" Yellowteeth said, his Parl-pigdin markedly reduced. \"The king has a message for you as you die: Where is the crown of Masmodon, Oracle? Where is my crown?\"\n\nWistala smelled blood in the tower room.\n\nNear the stair, Djaybee sat hunched over, a dark stain soaking his back. He'd never more gaze at the stars and draw maps with their aid.\n\nYellowteeth might have been a good assassin, but he hadn't learned all he could of dragon anatomy.\n\nShe twitched and lowered her griff above the spear point in an eyeblink, knocking it aside as Yellowteeth threw himself off balance trying to ram it home. The point scraped across the floor instead of burrowing into her neck.\n\nShe helped him off his feet by lashing him between the shoulder blades with her tail as she came to her fours. She put a sii down on the back of his head, grinding his face into the geometry of the floor.\n\n\"In my experience, a good courier always asks if there is to be a return message,\" Wistala said. \"Will you be good enough to carry an answer back for me?\"\n\n\"Mmpfh,\" Yellowteeth snuffled.\n\n\"How thoughtful of you. Tell Gobold to come himself and try to break my fangs, if he wishes to deliver death. Now run, before I breakfast on roast blighter.\"\n\nShe let Yellowteeth up, and he made better time for the stairs than he ever had running coal. If nothing else, he would muddy matters below, and he might even claim the job was done in order to effect an escape from the Wheel of Fire.\n\nA fine cold morning of clean air and mists clinging to the Ba-drink had begun outside. She would not be taken like a rat in a mountaintop cage. The only passage out was down, but she did not want to fight her way through tunnels filled with dwarves, where she would run out of foua before they ran out of spears.\n\nShe needed the sky, and to learn if Ragwrist hovered at the edge of the siege or not.\n\nOn other days she'd examined her tower room, there were hours of leisure to do so, and the stone was most worn to the northwest, where the wind blew coldest in winter and ice accumulated. There were a multitude of tiny cracks in the masonry between the spaced windows.\n\nShe went to her water cistern and took a full mouthful of water, and imitating the unpleasant DharSii, spat it up and down around the masonry, did it once more with a fresh mouthful until the stone was well-wetted.\n\nThen she employed her foua on the wind-chilled stone.\n\nLoud cracks sounded through the flames. Wistala breathed through another window and smashed her tail against the wall, over and over again, as Auron had in the escape chimney, only this time a thousand times the strength was behind it.\n\nA great piece of wall fell away between the two windows.\n\nShe could not quite squeeze through yet, but it was far easier to open it wider by pulling at the broken edges and exposed brickwork. A few more bruising tail strikes and she was out, even as footsteps sounded on the stair.\n\nWistala took wing above the city of the Wheel of Fire.\n\nShe roared and dived between the Tall Rock and Thul's Hardhold, aiming for the Titan bridge. She extended her claws and tail as though to land, then stopped herself with swift beats of her wings just above the bridge.\n\nA highpoon trailing chain, fired by a mighty war-machine, shot across the bridge. As it fell the chain caught and Wistala slipped sideways to grab the chain. A second highpoon lanced out from the other side, but she was watching for it, and reared out of the way.\n\nFather, your pain was not wasted, even if your head now sits on a war-machine.\n\nShe flew into the air, as hard and as fast as she could, as other spears whizzed toward her. One pierced her wing, another glanced off her saa, but scale thickened by dwarf gold kept the worst of the damage out.\n\nShe swung the round iron weight at the end of the chain, back and forth, back and forth as she rose, with each swing building momentum. She let it strike the Titan bridge, breaking off a massive chunk which spun as it fell into the Ba-drink.\n\nShe flew off, flying oddly, fighting to the counterweight on the end of the chain, but her wing muscles were equal to the weight. She smashed a tower on the Hardhold where dwarves fired crossbow bolts. Two swings of the ball, and the shattered tower collapsed and slid down, smashing balcony, gallery, and garden on the way to the wharf.\n\nWistala noted that there were arrows sticking out of her scales and wing-leather, but in the heat of combat, she felt no pain.\n\nShe carried her burden to the far side of the Ba-drink and let the weight go at the flat part of ground by the landing. She flew over the lines of dwarves. Their war-machines were hurling missiles down the mountainside at a wave of barbarians coming up.\n\n\"Dhssol! Dhssol!\" she wailed as she passed over the lines of dwarves at the wall. \"All is lost! Dssol!\"\n\nAnd so she called over the lines of dwarves until she spotted Lord Lobok, standing with a few nobles and commanders on a prominence behind the wall at arrow-shot.\n\n\"Oh, Dhssol!\" Wistala mourned as she landed. \"I have seen it. There are too many! All is lost, see how they approach. You must fall back to the city, we are surely defeated on these slopes.\"\n\n\"Terrible thought,\" Lobok said, wringing his hands as a few ineffective arrows flew over the wall and landed near them in the rocks. \"It goes badly for us, Battle Commander! These dwarves are the Wheel of Fire's last hope.\"\n\n\"Who needs a last hope when there's a battle being won? Your imagination has you counting each one thrice,\" the commander said. \"Step back and let veterans command the fight. The closer they come, the more we kill, see? Our losses are but few.\"\n\nBut some of the troops had been unnerved by Wistala's cries, and were running for the barges.\n\n\"Hold hard there,\" the battle commander shouted through a speaking trumpet. \"Groundholders, get those skulkers back in line. To the line!\"\n\n\"Nothing can stop them, Oh, Dhssol!\" Wistala said, as a mass of barbarians came up the hill. Many to the front fell as the dwarves fired, but others behind came on\u2026 .\n\n\"Shut up!\" the Battle Commander insisted. \"Someone muzzle this fool lizard.\"\n\n\"The Oracle is right,\" Lord Lobok shouted, lifting his own speaking trumpet. \"They cannot be held here! Back to the barges, dwarves\u2014we must fall back to the city!\" He set an example to his soldiers by hitching up his robes and running toward the barges as fast as his legs would carry him.\n\nThe dwarves, many untested in battle, agreed with the sentiment, and the lines fell away like laundry carried off by a strong wind. Dwarves of all descriptions ran, even as the more experienced ones at the war-machines shouted and gesticulated at them.\n\nThe battle commander reached for his ax, and Wistala thought it best to take wing. Pebbles flew up into the eyes of the commanders and nobles as she took off.\n\nThey, too, ran for the barges as the barbarians leaped up the wall with wild cries.\n\nThe battle paused for a moment as the barges pulled away, firing crossbows at the barbarians, who fell back from the water to the wall and continued to hoot.\n\nWistala flew down to Ragwrist's gargants. She saw Lord Hammar there, in a thick fur coat that hung to his bootheels, helping with the blasting kegs being handed down from gargant back.\n\n\"Place them to either side of the spillway, and on those two supporting columns, right where they join the dam,\" Wistala said.\n\n\"I hope this works, Wistala,\" Ragwrist said as the circus dwarves and riggers went forward with climbing poles and lines. \"These casks weren't cheap.\"\n\n\"And good morning to you, too,\" Wistala said. \"Would you rather have King Fangbreaker hunting you up and down the Inland Ocean?\"\n\n\"The risks I run for my circus.\"\n\n\"Stop running risks then. I give Mossbell to you, if Hammar agrees.\"\n\n\"Hammar has other matters to attend to,\" he said. His beard still looked like the poor effort of a youth, even in the fullness of manhood. \"First let us win the battle. Then we'll divide the spoils.\"\n\nThe circus folk climbed up each side of the dam and pulled and tied the blasting-casks into place. Wistala plucked crossbow bolts from her scale and nursed her javelin wounds.\n\n\"What about a fuse?\" Hammar asked.\n\n\"I'm the fuse,\" Wistala said, licking a spear hole in her wing clean.\n\nWhen all was ready, and more barbarians had the time to come up the road and array themselves behind the wall, Wistala took flight.\n\nShe saw that perhaps half the barges still dueled with the barbarians at the waterside, ready to destroy canoes or any other light boats the savages might have brought up the mountain to cross the Ba-drink. The others, undoubtedly led by Lobok, were almost at the Hardhold.\n\nShe saw that the gargants and circus folk were well out of the watercourse down the spillway, and dropped down, summoning her foua.\n\nShe loosed it against the dam wall, and it ran down toward the packed and tied kegs. Wistala flew up and out of the way.\n\nThe explosions came, a gentle hand shoving Wistala higher\u2014crack crack huhoom!\u2014sending rock and masonry shooting out across the mountainside, along with bits of timber and line.\n\nFor a moment after the cataclysm, all was silent, or perhaps it was just that it sounded so to battered eardrums.\n\nBoth the masses of barbarians and the dwarves in their barges left off their gesticulations and challenges, insults and catcalls, arrows, sling-stones, and bolts\u2014frozen as though the icy wind carried a spell across all.\n\nIt seemed to Wistala that the fate of worlds hung in the balance of those few moments, as the mountaintops tossed the sound back and forth.\n\nNothing happened. Water still cascaded over the spillway.\n\nThen came more noise, a cracking, crashing sound of rocks sliding, followed hard on its heels, as wagon-wheels follow horse hooves, by the water.\n\nWhen describing the scene later, Wistala always said there was no word big enough for how the water moved through the gap, opening it wider and deeper as pieces at the edge fell away\u2014a torrent of water, an avalanche, as though the mountain had sprouted a new shoulder falling into a steep cliff.\n\nThe dwarf barges pulled like mad across the surface of the Ba-drink, but the water fell away from them, sloped under them as first one and then the next fell away, carried sideways toward the gap.\n\nThe barbarians stood transfixed as the barges fell one by one into chaos. Whether they felt for the doomed dwarves, pulling at their oars, throwing anchors in desperation, even leaping into the water to swim as though their arms could accomplish what joined oars could not, Wistala couldn't say.\n\nThe lake drained away a claw's-breadth at a time, but soon there was a path along the side of the lake to the Hardhold. The barbarians splashed into the fresh shallows, stomped through mud, a black sea of hide-cape, helm, and round shield replacing the receding waters.\n\nIt was not a charge of ode or poetry. The barbarians came in a ragged line, a few at the front so crazed to outrace the others that they threw away their weapons as they ran, others slipped in the mud and the fortunate got up again before they were stepped on by those behind.\n\nThe dwarves did what they could, barricaded the landings and docks, but the barbarians climbed above to the galleries, or uprighted stranded barges and longships and climbed up the staves at the hull bottom as though they were ladders.\n\nScreams, and over all the cacophony of steel on steel, the growled hurrahs of the dwarves matched against the wild catlike screeches of the men.\n\nWistala caught sight of a long, thin barge flying purple pennants, oars worked by black armored beetles, pulling away from chaos east across the receding waters, a one-legged figure at the center. She took a deep breath and went down to the landing and retrieved the ball-weight and chain.\n\nWistala rose into the air, all four limbs holding the burden to her belly. Up, up, up toward the sun, racing only herself and her exhaustion. In all likelihood, she would never have a mating flight. This would have to do. The air grew thin and cold, but she kept her eye always on the barge below, heading for the eastern road.\n\nWhen she could go up no more she closed her wings somewhat and went down.\n\nIt was dizzying, a little frightening, she felt hurried by the weight of the iron ball, but she needed time to adjust her dive. The surface of the slowly receding lake rushed up to meet her at a frightening speed. She angled a little, then closed her wings more so she dropped almost straight down.\n\nHere is your crown, King Fangbreaker\u2014\n\nPerhaps at the last moment he looked up from his position at the center of the barge, urging his rowing bodyguard on\u2014Wistala didn't know, for she released her weight and opened her wings, sick from the change in air pressure. Pain tore at her joints as she leveled off, streaking across the lake surface at an impossible speed.\n\nKra-sploosh!\n\nShe dipped her wings and looked back. The barge had folded in on itself, and a fountain of water rose from the center like the jaws of some sea dragon shutting on a bird. Flung dwarves spun through the air before splashing down into the Ba-drink.\n\nShe flew back toward the battle, saw that flames were pouring out of some of the balconies and galleries in the Hardhold. Tall Rock seemed still to be holding, and the dwarves manned that half of the half-shattered Titan bridge.\n\nWistala flew with aching wings back to the outer wall. Ragwrist and Hammar stood in one of the towers with a few elderly barbarians, and she alighted next to them.\n\n\"Glorious, glorious, glorious,\" Hammar said, smacking his fist into palm. \"Have you ever seen such a fight? Wistala, you're a marvel. With you at my side, there's no stopping me now. We'll ride your wings to Hypatia herself. 'Twas a happy day when we settled our enmity.\"\n\n\"It's Nuum Wistala, bookburner. I don't remember settling anything with you,\" Wistala said. She beat her wings and rose into the air, seizing Hammar by his fur cloak.\n\nHe hung there, struggling and swearing, and reached for his blade. Wistala beat him about the body with her wing-tips until he dropped it.\n\nShe flew up to the top of Tall Rock, where a few dwarves still manned war-machines, firing down at the barbarians fighting on the Titan bridge.\n\nShe swooped low between the towers, and dwarves scattered. \"A parting gift from the Oracle,\" Wistala called. \"Here's King Hammar the Dwarfhanger.\" She set the former thane down gently. \"Dangle him from the Titan bridge or use him to negotiate, I care not.\"\n\nAnd with that she flapped away, leaving Hammar lying bruised in a ring of desperate dwarves.\n\nNow there was only one more account to settle on the balance sheet of her life.\n\nThe Dragonblade's home was easy enough to find. It was the only one with a dragonscale door and fire-shutters, carved under an overhanging rock that resembled a closed clam. The rest of the dwellings were humble shepherd's huts or fishermen's wharfside homes.\n\nWistala landed in the mud of the fallen-away lake to the barking of hounds from all around the house.\n\nShe waited out of arrow-reach and warily examined the small square windows. The flower boxes and hanging mountain ferns might hide war-machines, for all she knew.\n\n\"I call for the Drakossozh,\" Wistala roared. \"Let him show his face if he dares.\"\n\nSilence from the house.\n\n\"Well? Daylight is burning, as will this home, if I do not have an answer.\"\n\nThe door opened, and a long-limbed young woman stepped out. There was some of the Drakossozh in her broad face, but she had a sensitive mouth. Wistala realized she was the womanly version of the girl glimpsed watching the circus leave years ago.\n\nShe came only half out the door, seemed ready to jump back inside and slam it at the first sign of flame.\n\n\"I speak for the household,\" she said, voice quavering only a little. \"If you've come for vengeance, my father is not here. If you've come for murder, there are children within.\"\n\n\"I've come for neither,\" Wistala said. She sat, the mud squelching against her backside. Had she ever been so tired?\n\n\"What is your name, girl?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"Adaska,\" she answered.\n\n\"I'm\u2014\"\n\n\"The Oracle-dragon.\"\n\n\"No. Well, I was. Now I'm just Wistala, a dragon who has had enough of fighting.\"\n\n\"What can you mean?\" she asked, stepping a little farther onto her doorstep. Someone hissed at her from inside, but she ignored the comment.\n\n\"I don't know when all this started. Did my grandsire kill yours, or did yours kill mine? Your father killed mine, and I should kill yours, but I expect you or your brother would come after me. Am I right?\"\n\n\"We would. But dragons must be slain.\"\n\n\"Must they? Size put aside, I'm not certain we're so very different.\"\n\n\"Dragons bring ruin and fear wherever they go; look what happens across the lake,\" she said. Wistala looked, the carrion birds were already gathering. She wondered if Bartleghaff or his relations were among them. \"This was always a peaceful place until you came.\"\n\n\"As was my home cave until the dwarves across the lake came. Let us put an end to this feud. At least the one that exists between your family and mine.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"You'll know when you have children of your own. Where can I find your father?\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"He rode with his armsmen and dogs, answering the call of the mountain king to hunt you down. He took the north trail.\"\n\nWistala sighed. \"I'll make it easier for him to find me.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't. He will kill you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Wistala said. \"Will you consider what I said?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\n\"Now I go to convince your father.\"\n\nWith some pain she rose into the air and winged across the lake. She found a trail, an old sort of road winding along the lakeside and over little chasms on bridges and between thin, wind-bent trees. The road was nothing compared to Rainfall's, it was little more than a paved goat trail. It looked old enough for blighters to have built it. Old as war.\n\nBut also old as bridges. She alighted on one, and looked to where her eye caught a glint of metal. She retreated to the far side of the ancient bridge and waited.\n\nThe file of riders soon came over the rise and down the path toward the bridge, which leaped across a chasm to waters that lapped where her tail would reach if she let it dangle. Instead she wrapped it about the bridge; the masonry looked loose enough to be pulled apart if she exerted herself.\n\nThe men spotted her and let out halloos. They dismounted and clapped visors across helms, notched arrows into bows, and the Dragonblade came forward with spear and sword.\n\nWith a shout, one of his handlers released the dogs, who poured across the bridge in a bristle-backed river.\n\nWistala flapped her wings, hard, held fast by her tail. The force of the windstorm sent the dogs plummeting off the bridge into the waters below\u2014some with a knock or two, but they swam to rocks and climbed upon them to bark up at their now impossible-to-reach prey.\n\nThe Dragonblade stepped forward, looked down at the vociferous, dripping pack, pulled back his visor and laughed loud and long. He had to lean on his spear shaft.\n\n\"Dragonelle,\" he said, wiping his eyes. \"You are hard on my dog packs.\"\n\nSo he did know the name for a female dragon!\n\n\"Your daughter told me I could find you on this road,\" Wistala said.\n\nThe Dragonblade's face went white, and he raised his spear for a throw. His son behind came forward with a bow ready. \"If you've\u2014\"\n\n\"I haven't touched so much as a winter cabbage,\" Wistala said. \"I was all politeness to your girl.\"\n\n\"I will still kill you,\" the Dragonblade said.\n\n\"Let me speak first,\" Wistala insisted. \"Our kind have shed rivers of blood, matched against each other. I would have the flow stopped. Shall it always be thus, one family slaughtering another, until the ending of the world?\"\n\n\"Or the ending of dragons,\" the Dragonblade said. \"Calls for peace are always made by those at a disadvantage.\"\n\nWistala hugged the road, covering her belly with stone, readied to parry blade or spear with wing-points. \"Come then,\" she said. \"Let's start the madness afresh.\"\n\nThe boy raised the bow, sighted with his good eye, but his father held him back. \"You must let me finish, as well.\" He plunged his spear point-first into the dirt beside the road. \"There's been enough killing for one day. You came to my doorstep and did no harm\u2014\"\n\n\"You would believe a\u2014,\" his son said.\n\nThe Dragonblade glared at him. \"I believe this one. And my eyes. I see no smoke at our part of the lakeshore. And shut it, you fool hounds!\"\n\nDrakossozh looked thoughtful for a moment, and the dogs, silenced for only a moment, started up again. \"The dwarves will pay no more hide-bounties, at least not for a long while. Perhaps I should take up chickens. They taste better and do not singe off one's eyebrows. You have your peace. What is your name?\"\n\n\"Wistala.\"\n\n\"Ah. You are only the second dragon to ever escape me, Wistala. Wear that with pride, as you do that little bauble between your eyes.\"\n\n\"Who was the first?\" Wistala said.\n\n\"A drake, a young gray.\"\n\nWistala's hearts stopped. \"What? When?\"\n\n\"A dozen years ago or so,\" he said. \"I've heard no more trouble of him, I expect he died raiding some farmer's pigpen. No scales, you know. He would be\u2014wait, you two must be related.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Wistala said, wishing the Dragonblade's dogs would cease barking. It detracted from the solemnity of the moment.\n\n\"Now I do fear to let you go. Were two such resourceful dragons to meet up again \u2026 but something in my heart says it will not go ill for me, or my family. Go, Wistala. No blade or arrow of mine will touch you.\"\n\nThe boy fired, and the Dragonblade threw up a blur of an elbow that knocked the arrow off its path. It skittered harmlessly down the rocks. Wistala gulped, it was just as well they had not fought.\n\n\"Eliam, you vex me. But we will talk at home. Go, Wistala, and let my dogs quiet, before I finish off the pack myself.\"\n\nWistala took a deep breath and launched herself into the air. She watched the spear point until she was out of range.\n\nThe old dragon proverb: Trust, but keep an eye open.\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nWistala sat in the old troll cave, near the entrance where the air was cleaner, and dictated her memories of the battle that destroyed the Wheel of Fire, and much of the combined barbarian power in the north, to Lada.\n\nOf Rayg she had no happy news. A great many dwarves fled down their mysterious holes to the darkroads as Thul's Hardhold fell, and as Rayg hadn't been carried off by the barbarians or been found among the dead, she assumed he'd fled for his life with them. The barbarians had caused so much destruction, it was doubtful that he could return through Hardhold, even if he wanted to. But he was in the company of dwarves who would respect him, very different circumstances from abject slavery in the north.\n\nThe thaneship had passed to Ragwrist, of all people, as Mossbell was the largest estate in the thanedom with Galahall divided between Hammar's barbarian relations. Wistala had sold him Mossbell for a song\u2014literally, for he had a wonderful voice. Now Ragwrist complained of his generosity to his tenants, driving him to the poverty of only drinking wines from the less renowned vineyards.\n\nThe circus went to Brok, who kept it out of barbarian lands, where dwarves were increasingly unwelcome, perhaps justifiably.\n\nThe Green Dragon Inn still stood, and tall tales had grown up around it and its sign. People in later years reached up to touch it for luck, and heard stories so bizarre and inaccurate, Wistala would have smiled to hear.\n\nWidow Lessup retired with Yari-Tab in the modestly restored Mossbell hall and devoted herself to feeding and supervising the surviving cats, who kept the mice from nibbling the hooves of Dsossa's \"north herd\" of white horses.\n\nWhat remained of the Wheel of Fire Dwarves came under the leadership of Lord Lobok, who, if he ever led his fighting dwarves out of the mountains again, would be assured an entertaining place in the annals of military history.\n\nSpeaking of which, Wistala had no particular desire to accomplish a war history, but the librarians had asked for a dragon's-eye memoir, and they would get one. It was the least an Agent of Librarians could do, before setting off in search of her brother.\n\nAs she talked, chose phrases, and answered the occasional question, Wistala's thoughts kept returning to the dilemma of dragons. On the one sii, there was the sort of grasping survival of dragons like that smelly wretch in the far north\u2014scattering, hermitage, or worst, assassination\u2014and on the other a useful servitude, a survival that depended on being of use to others, like the man-carrying dragons more and more sailors of the northern part of the Inland Ocean reported.\n\nCould dragons cooperate, form an order like the old city-states of Hypat? Certainly an extended family could, as the odd dragons of the Sadda-Vale proved. And if they did, suppose a Masmodon or a Fangbreaker or worse arose at the council table? Selfishness and greed were not the least of dragon faults.\n\nOddly enough, she wished she could talk the matter over with that dragon DharSii. He had unpleasant manners, to be sure, and was the most arrogant creature who ever cracked an egg, but she could trust him to give an intelligent opinion. And perhaps even more important, an honest one. For in obtaining his opinion, she'd have to sum up her life and actions\u2014she wondered if she'd done right or wrong, though why she should care what he would think of her past she did not know.\n\nThe Wheel of Fire would butcher no more hatchlings in their home cave, and Hammar's half-Hypatian, half-barbarian plot to gain power in war and conquest had vanished in the catafoua mouth, and the Dragonblade had hung up his spear, even if he wasn't exactly raising chickens. She'd kept her promises\u2014\n\nSave the last one to Father.\n\nBut felt little satisfaction in were-blood. Avenging her own was a grim duty, like breaking a bullock's back in a dive so that you could eat, and just as necessary to survival. Ignoring those who kill others in the hope they won't get around to you only means that when they appear to take your head and scales, they would apply all they learned in other victories, making your chances against them so much the worse.\n\n\"Does that have to go in?\" Lada asked.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Wistala said, brought back to the dictation.\n\n\"The battle. Betrayals. Incompetence, even cowardice. Boats falling, mud everywhere, blood running from balconies, carrion birds poking marrow from bones, dwarves hanging from bridges, burned corpses, but worst of all, no hero whose courage and skill is put to the ultimate test.\"\n\n\"They asked for a history, they shall have my history. If someone else will have the battle take place on a spring-green field with pennants at the lance points and songs sung over the honored dead, let them write it thus. This history is a story of death begetting death, and should end with carrion birds, for they are the only ones who come out the better at the end.\n\n\"Speaking of which\u2014steaks and cakes, but I'm hungry. Enough of this wordplay. Let's head over to Mossbell and eat!\"\n\nGlossary - DRAKINE\n\nFOUA: A product of the fire bladder. When mixed with the liquid fats stored within and then exposed to oxygen, it ignites into oily flame.\n\nGRIFF: The armored fans descending from the forehead and jaw that cover sensitive ear-holes and throat pulse-points in battle.\n\nKAZHIN: a dragon related to you on unfriendly terms.\n\nPRRUM: The low thrumming sound a dragon makes when it is pleased or particularly content.\n\nSAA: The rear legs of a dragon. The three rear true-toes are able to grip, but the fighting spur is little more than decoration.\n\nSII: The front legs of a dragon. The claws are shorter and the fighting spur on the rear leg is closer to the other digits and opposable. The digits are more elegantly formed for manipulation.\n\nTORF: A small gob from the fire bladder, used to provide a few moments of illumination.\n\nUZHIN: a dragon related to you on friendly terms.\n\nDWARVISH\n\nDHSSOL: an \"evil star\" or catastrophe.\n\nCOCOLAT: a dwarvish sweet made from rare tropical beans and milk.\n\nPOGT: a dwarvish curse.\n\nELVISH\n\nGAR-LOQUE: a smelly but flavorful bulb of the lily family with a slightly dragonish odor.\n\nHASPADALANESH: The final, rooted stage of an elf's life.\n\nSENISOTE: music.\n\nFELINE\n\nTCHATLASSAT: a close friend.\n\nHYPATIAN\n\nBALAGAN: a sort of crane.\n\nMOD: Hypatian low-priest title.\n\nNUUM: Hypatian librarian or professor title.\n\nVESK: a Hypatian mark of distance based on the amount of distance light infantry can cover in an hour\u2014about three-and-a-half miles.\n\nYEO: an informal title for those who act as retainers for Hypatian nobles."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Tales from Verania 4.5B) Fairytales From Verania",
        "author": "T.J. Klune",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "David's Dragon",
                "text": "Once upon a time, there was a boy named Sam who looked upon the stars through the tiny window in his room in the slums of the City of Lockes, dreaming for more than what his life had become. Little did he know, the stars were watching him back, waiting for the day his destiny would be revealed. The stars whispered to each other about this boy. Some\u2014the furthest and the oldest of the stars, gods who created the universe simply because they were bored\u2014didn't think he had what it took. How could the fate of the world rest on the shoulders of one so young and foolish?\n\nBut there was one who fought for him above all others, one who believed in Sam Haversford with every fiber of its being. And though young itself, this constellation of stars knew about the bonds of loyalty and friendship, of unending love and the power of sacrifice. Paths, this constellation knew, could be set in stone, but stone could just as easily crumble.\n\nThis constellation was known as the Star Dragon.\n\nDavid's Dragon.\n\nThe old gods cried, <He's just a child! Even if his magic is extraordinary, how could he possibly hope to conquer what will come?>\n\nTo which the Star Dragon replied, <He will, because he won't be alone. He'll have friends by his side, those who will do anything for him.>\n\nThe old gods muttered as they twinkled, but eventually, they subsided. <Fine,> they grumbled. <Be it on your head, then. Should the world collapse, we'll start again from the beginning. A new world. We've done it before. We can do it again.>\n\nBut the Star Dragon had faith. This world\u2014though messy and chaotic\u2014had moments of beauty so breathtaking it threatened to bring even the strongest to their knees. Even in darkness, hope was a weapon, if only one knew how to wield it.\n\nIn the end, the brave boy from the slums accepted his destiny, and though he suffered immeasurable loss, he stood brave and true, surrounded by those who loved him most. He battled the Dark Wizard Myrin\u2026and won.\n\nIt was then this powerful wizard made a wish upon the stars, and as the Star Dragon ascended back into the heavens, he came upon a man who hadn't yet passed beyond the veil.\n\n<It is done,> the Star Dragon said.\n\nTo which the man replied, <You were a little rude to him, if I'm being honest.>\n\nThe Star Dragon snorted. <Eh. He'll survive.>\n\n<He is the better part of all of us.>\n\n<He is,> the Star Dragon said. <And he wishes for you.>\n\nThe man smiled, though his eyes were filled with tears. <Truly?>\n\n<Yes,> the Star Dragon said. <His wish will be granted, a gift for all he's done. It is not your time yet, Morgan of Shadows. Never forget.>\n\nMorgan said, <I won't. I\u2026thank you. For everything.> And then he began to shine as if he were a star himself. But instead of taking his place in the sky, he fell back toward the earth, alive once more.\n\nThe Star Dragon climbed higher and higher, searching for the voice that brought peace to his soul. It didn't take long before he heard a whisper. <There you are,> the voice said, glittering brightly. <My friend, my love. Hello, hello. Welcome home.>\n\nThe Star Dragon settled in the sky, the tip of his snout back where it belonged, pressing against a bright star that pulsed warmly. The Star Dragon sighed happily, having returned to the one he cherished most.\n\n<David,> the Star Dragon breathed. <Did I do good?>\n\n<You did,> David said. <A bit of a dick, but you got your point across. I'm so proud of you.>\n\nWith these words, the Star Dragon twinkled brightly. Anyone who chose to look up at the sky would think how strange it was that the constellation seemed brighter than it'd ever been. But then the thought would pass from their head, and the world moved on, as it always did.\n\nBut this isn't about what came after.\n\nThis story is about what came before.\n\nBefore the rise of Myrin.\n\nBefore the love between a knight and a wizard.\n\nBefore a dragon kidnapped a prince to take him to his tower.\n\nBefore Sam ever came to Castle Lockes, before he even knew he had magic.\n\nBefore he was born, before the wizards Randall and Morgan made a desperate decision to stop the one who had betrayed them.\n\nBefore all of them existed.\n\nOne thousand years before Sam stood on the cosmic plane and battled against Myrin, another story took place, one of love and loss, hope and betrayal.\n\nAnd like most stories passed down through generations, details were changed, fanciful additions and unnecessary subtractions made, though the beating heart remained the same.\n\nBut what is to follow here, now, is the truth. The good, the bad, and the ugliness of humanity.\n\nThis is the story of a boy and his dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "David was born on the night of a terrible storm that raged above a small village that sat on the outskirts of the Dark Woods. His father\u2014a hardworking man named Jacob who loved with his whole heart\u2014wiped his beloved's brow with a cold cloth, her hand squeezing his own tightly as she gritted her teeth. The midwife, a squat, handsome woman with frizzy hair, whispered soothingly from her spot between the mother's legs. \"There,\" the midwife said. \"You're doing so well, miss. I can see the child. Oh, look at all that hair on their head. Yes, it's almost time. One last push. Gather your strength.\"\n\nThe woman\u2014Maureen, she with the golden hair and a mischievous smile\u2014cried out as thunder rumbled, as lightning flashed.\n\n\"I'm here,\" Jacob said. \"I'm so proud of you.\"\n\n\"You can bite my entire ass,\" Maureen growled, causing Jacob to choke on his tongue. \"Take your pride and shove it. Next time, you can push out a baby. See how proud you are then.\"\n\n\"I have herbs that can help facilitate that,\" the midwife said. \"Should you decide to go that direction.\"\n\nJacob smiled quietly. \"Let's get through this first, shall we?\"\n\n\"Push, miss,\" the midwife said. \"Push with all your might.\"\n\nMaureen did, and the midwife moved quickly, still speaking encouraging words in low tones as she peered between Maureen's legs. Maureen screamed one last time before sagging back against the pillow, her face pale and slick with sweat.\n\n\"There,\" the midwife said, the sound of scissors snipping through something fibrous and wet. A moment later, she rose from the ground, a tiny child in her arms. At first, the child made no sound, and Jacob felt fear clawing at his chest. And then the midwife suctioned goop out the child's nose, a sound of life filled the room, small and reedy, but clear.\n\n\"A boy,\" the midwife said, wiping the child down before wrapping him up in a blanket. \"Miss, you have a son. Congratulations.\" She leaned forward, setting the boy on Maureen's chest. \"Your work is not yet done. The afterbirth will come soon. Take a moment to breathe. I'll return shortly.\"\n\nShe left the new father and mother to look down in wonder at the tiny bundle against Maureen's chest.\n\n\"He's perfect,\" Maureen whispered, and Jacob fell in love at first sight. The boy\u2014red and wailing\u2014had a head of black hair, his eyes the brightest blue Jacob had ever seen. He had all his fingers. All his toes. A little nose that wriggled, and a gummy mouth that emitted such a strong sound.\n\n\"David,\" Maureen whispered. \"His name is David.\" She looked up at her husband. \"After your father.\"\n\nJacob smiled widely. \"A perfect name. Dad would be honored. I know he's watching us from beyond the veil. A blessing for our first son. What a wonderful day this has been. What a wonderful life we have. Thank you, Maureen. Thank you.\" He leaned down and kissed his wife on the forehead.\n\nAnd though they did not know it, another awaited the birth of the boy. Hidden away in the woods, a creature smiled and whispered, <Welcome to the world, little one.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "For his first six years, david grew knowing only love and peace. He was a headstrong boy, talkative and bright, though his head sometimes seemed stuck in the clouds. His mother, Maureen, was the mayor of their village, his father her assistant. Their village\u2014one of hundreds in the kingdom of Verania\u2014had prospered over the years, their crops helping to feed their fellow countrymen and women. The people of the village grew to love David, often finding him seated with his mother at her desk, asking question after question about every single thing she was doing. A lovely family, the village of the people said. Our future.\n\nEvery night, David and his parents would sit down for supper, just the three of them, talking about their day. They laughed, they teased, they lived. After all, that was the point of life. To be as good a person as possible, but to also recognize when one made a mistake. \"No mistake is too big to apologize for,\" Jacob told his son, \"so long as you mean it. But that doesn't mean you'll earn forgiveness right away. Learn, David. Learn from your mistakes and grow to be the man I know you'll be.\"\n\nOn one such night toward the end of summer, Maureen said, \"David. Tomorrow, you'll go to school for the first time as we've discussed. It's going to be a big day. Are you excited?\"\n\nDavid frowned as he chewed on a hunk of meat. He swallowed before speaking, just as his Mom had taught him. \"I wanna go to work with you. Do mayor stuff.\"\n\nDad laughed. \"Already into government work. Maureen, we've failed. We're miserable parents.\"\n\n\"Hush,\" Mom said, though she was smiling. She looked at her son. \"You'll be fine. You'll get to go with the other children. And your teacher is extremely excited to have you in his class. Can you keep a secret?\"\n\nDavid nodded with wide eyes. He loved secrets. \"Promise,\" he said, crossing a finger over his chest.\n\n\"There is to be a party,\" Mom said. \"To welcome you. It was supposed to be a surprise, but I think we can still pretend you don't know.\"\n\n\"A party?\" David asked in awe. \"For me?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mom said. \"With songs and little cakes. Streamers and confetti. Can you pretend to be surprised?\"\n\nDavid nodded furiously. \"I swear. I'll be so surprised.\"\n\n\"Oh boy,\" Dad said. \"This should be hysterical.\" He grinned when Mom swatted him on the arm. \"What? I'm just saying.\"\n\nThat night, Mom and Dad tucked him into bed, and told him a story as he drifted off to sleep, both of them doing the voices David loved so much. As his eyes closed, the blanket up to his chin, he sighed happily. He felt Mom kiss his cheek, Dad running a hand through his hair.\n\nAnd he dreamed, as he sometimes did. The same dream, one he'd had ever since he could remember. In it, he walked through the forest, but he wasn't scared. If anything, he felt happy, whole, safe. Someone\u2014something?\u2014walked with him, just out of sight. The presence was never threatening, and though David tried to find them, he never could. \"I'm here!\" he called in his dream. \"I'm right here!\"\n\nThat night, as the stars hung suspended in the heavens, a voice spoke back for the first time, warm and melodic. But instead of being spoken out loud, it sounded as if it were coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was in his head, in the sky, in the trees.\n\nIt said, <Soon, David. Soon.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"Surprise!\" The teacher and the children cried as Mom and Dad led David into the school. \"Surprise, David!\"\n\nDavid said, \"Look, Mom! It's the party you said I can't know about! You were right.\"\n\nDad chuckled as Mom sighed. \"David, that's not what we\u2014it doesn't matter. Yes, the party.\"\n\nThe other children\u2014a dozen in all shapes and sizes\u2014swarmed around them. Suddenly shy, David clung to his mother's leg, turning his face into the fabric of her trousers. It was louder than he expected it to be, and he wasn't sure he liked it very much. He calmed some when Mom ran her fingers through his thick hair.\n\n\"Hi, David,\" a boy said, poking him in the arm. \"I'm Levi. Can we be friends?\"\n\nDavid peeked out at Levi. He was a bigger boy\u2014perhaps eight or thirty, David couldn't tell\u2014and he was missing his two front teeth, his tongue sticking out in the gap. He had bright red hair and eyes so green, David wondered if they were made of summer grass. \"Hi, Levi,\" he muttered, still shy. \"I like your name.\"\n\nLevi gasped. \"You do? Oh my gosh, that's awesome. Thank you. I like your name too. We should be friends.\"\n\nDavid hesitated, looking up at his mom. She nodded, and he pulled away from her, gaze trained on the floor.\n\n\"Levi,\" Teacher said, a spindly man with a big beard and a twinkle in his eyes. \"Why don't you show David where he can put his things? I think there's a cubbyhole next to yours he can use.\"\n\nLevi grabbed David by the hand, pulling him along, chattering a mile a minute about all the things he and David would do together now that they were friends. Though slightly overwhelmed, David began to relax as Levi showed him where to put his satchel. The teacher was right; the cubbyhole\u2014painted blue with red and yellow butterflies\u2014was right next to Levi's.\n\n\"There,\" Levi said. \"It's perfect. Now we get to be by each other every day. Come on! Let's go eat the cake we made for you! It's the sixth one we made, but Teacher said we shouldn't tell you about the other ones, because they turned out gross.\"\n\nDavid got so caught up in this strange new world that he didn't notice his parents leaving. In fact, he didn't notice their absence until Dad returned that afternoon. By this time, David had glue in his hair, glitter coating the tips of this fingers, and everything that came out of his mouth began with Levi said or Levi told me or Levi thinks.\n\n\"It sounds as if you made a good friend,\" Dad said, waving to Teacher before leading David from the school.\n\n\"Best friend,\" David corrected. \"He's so cool. He made me a paper swan!\" David pulled it from his pocket, frowning as it looked nothing like the swan it'd been before he'd stored it away. He shrugged before shoving it back in his pocket. \"I get to go back tomorrow, right?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Dad said as they walked from the village. \"And the day after. And the day after that.\"\n\n\"Hurray!\" David crowed as people around them smiled and laughed.\n\nThey reached the Mayor's office, and right before David walked through the door, something stopped him, a tiny tug in the back of his mind. He turned, face scrunching up. He thought he'd heard someone say his name, but he couldn't see anyone looking at him.\n\n\"You all right, kiddo?\" Dad asked from the doorway.\n\n\"Yeah,\" David said slowly. \"Just\u2026\" He shook his head. He was hearing things. That's all it was. He ran past his father into the office, calling out, \"Mom! Mom. You'll never guess what Levi did! So many things, and I'm gonna tell you about all of them.\"\n\nHe forgot about the feeling he'd had. After all, he had more important things to focus on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "A year later, when David was seven and sprouting up like a weed, he awoke in the middle of the night, heart thundering in his chest. He'd been in the middle of the same dream, in the forest, the trees towering over him, the presence feeling as if it'd been right on his heels. But when he'd whirled around, all he'd seen were the Dark Woods.\n\nHe blinked slowly, falling back against his pillow. \"A dream,\" he mumbled before yawning. \"Just a dream.\" He closed his eyes, hoping he could return to this dream.\n\n<David.>\n\nHe opened his eyes once more. The voice from the trees. The same voice. He sat up in his bed, blankets pooling around his waist. Moonlight poured in through the window, bathing the floors and walls in white. He was scared, but like many boys his age, he was also blessed (cursed?) with curiosity, which outweighed any fear. He looked around his room, trying to see if anything was out of place. Nothing, as far as he could tell.\n\n\"Hello?\" he said, voice trembling just a little. \"Who's there?\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"You don't need to be scared,\" David said. \"I promise I'm a good person.\"\n\nNo response.\n\nHe frowned before laying back down, half-convinced it was nothing at all. He was about to drop off back to sleep when he thought he saw movement from just outside the window. He rose swiftly, his feet carrying him as he rushed toward the window that looked out onto the village.\n\nHe saw the watchmen carrying their lanterns as they patrolled the dirt road. He saw two men, partially hidden in the shadows of an alley across the way. They smiled at each other before one leaned in to kiss the other. He saw a cat, carrying a limp rodent in its mouth as it crept through the cool night air.\n\nBut nothing near his window.\n\n\"Seeing things,\" he said. \"That's all.\"\n\nHe went back to bed.\n\nHe didn't dream of the forest again that night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"You're better than this,\" mom said sternly when David was thirteen. \"Honestly, David, what were you thinking?\"\n\nDavid rolled his eyes. \"We didn't do anything! Levi said that\u2014\"\n\n\"Levi,\" Mom said. \"It's always Levi with you. Levi, Levi, Levi. If Levi jumped off a cliff, would you follow?\"\n\nYes, he would, because Levi was the best friend he'd ever had, and where Levi went, David was sure to follow. But that wasn't what Mom wanted to hear. \"No,\" he muttered, picking at a loose thread on his trousers even as he thought yes.\n\nMom sighed as she sat back in the chair in her office. He'd been brought to her after he and Levi had been discovered trying to sneak off into the Dark Woods. Levi had dared him to go as far as he could into the woods. David had double dared him back. Then Levi had double dog dared him, and David knew there was no bigger dare.\n\nLevi\u2014fourteen and already strong, arms lined with ropey muscle that caused David's stomach to twist slickly for reasons he didn't understand\u2014had taken him by the hand and said, \"We'll go together. Not too far, just enough so we can grab something and prove we did.\"\n\nThey'd made it to the tree line, only to be stopped by one of the watchmen, who asked what the hell they were doing. David knew that Levi was probably getting read the riot act just like he was. That didn't make him feel any better.\n\n\"You could get lost,\" Mom said, staring at her only child. \"The Dark Woods are vast and deep, filled with dangers and creatures that could hurt you. You need to think, David. If you got lost in the forest, we might not be able to find you.\"\n\n\"I'm not scared,\" David retorted.\n\n\"I know,\" Mom said. \"But you should be. Why would you make us worry like that? If you got lost, I would cry for days and days.\"\n\nDavid didn't like when his mother cried. It was rare, but when it happened, it made him feel as if his heart was breaking all while making him want to hurt whatever had made her sad. And when he was the cause? Oh, did that make him feel small.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"I was just\u2026\"\n\n\"You were just,\" Mom said. She folded her hands on her desk. \"It happens. I'm asking you to make better choices. I'll keep this between us this time, so long as you promise not to do anything like this again.\"\n\nDavid sagged gratefully in the chair. \"You won't tell Dad?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mom said, sounding amused. \"I won't. We'll pretend it didn't happen.\"\n\n\"Then I promise so hard.\"\n\nHer lips quirked. \"Good. I'm glad to hear it.\" Then a funny expression crossed her face. \"David, can I\u2026\"\n\nHe furrowed his brow. \"Can you what?\"\n\nShe looked at him for a long moment. \"Do you\u2026care for Levi?\"\n\nWhat a strange question. Levi was his best friend. Of course David cared for him. \"I love him,\" David said, without artifice. He knew some boys would make fun of him for saying that, but this was his mother. She'd never make him feel low for speaking his truth.\n\nMom said, \"I know you do. But I meant\u2026you know what? It doesn't matter. I'm glad you have someone like him, even if you don't always make the best decisions when he's around.\"\n\n\"He's good,\" David said, panicking slightly at the thought of his mother forbidding him from ever seeing Levi again. \"He makes me happy. He's my best friend. Please don't take that away from me.\" By the time he finished, he was panting, eyes bulging from his head.\n\nMom stood swiftly, hurrying around the table and crouching before her son. She lay her hands on his knees, squeezing gently. \"Breathe, kiddo. Just breathe. I promise I'm not going to try and keep you two apart.\" She smiled ruefully. \"I doubt I could even if I wanted to. But there is more to the world than him. You may not be able to see that now, but he's not the be all and end all.\"\n\nThat didn't sit well with David. Levi was everything. Ever since that first day when they'd met, they'd been inseparable, and even when Levi had moved to a different class given his age, he always made time for David. For a while, David had worried Levi would make new friends and forget about him, but Levi hadn't. He was always there, waiting with a sunny smile that caused David's heart to stutter.\n\n\"He's my friend,\" David said, not yet having the tools to articulate beyond that. \"He's\u2026\"\n\nMom smiled sadly. \"I know. And if\u2026if you ever need to tell me something about him, about you, I want you to know that I'm always here to listen and support you no matter what.\"\n\nDavid frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nMom shook her head as she rose. \"You'll figure it out when you're ready. I've got some work to do before we go home. You can help, seeing as how you don't have anything else to do.\"\n\nDavid thought about arguing, but he'd gotten lucky. Better to do what Mom wanted than to have her change her mind about telling Dad."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "On David's sixteenth birthday, levi kissed him for the first time. It was unexpected, though not, as these things sometimes are. One moment, David was exclaiming over the book Levi had gifted him, and the next, Levi's determined face grew larger and larger until he was all David could see. Levi's breath became David's, and all rational thought left David's head in an explosion of fireworks. His chest hitched as Levi paused, a mere inch separating them, an impossible chasm. Then David was kissed for the first time in his life, the barest press of lips, there for a beat, two, three, and then gone as Levi pulled back, eyebrows near his hairline.\n\n\"What was that?\" David whispered.\n\n\"Something I've wanted to do for a long time,\" Levi said, face flushed as he scratched the back of his neck. \"I\u2026you don't\u2026I just\u2026\"\n\n\"Do it again,\" David demanded.\n\nAnd so Levi did. And again. And again. And again. Until David was dizzy with it, his skin buzzing, his mind hot. He gasped when he felt Levi's tongue brushing against his bottom lip, and he had to keep from launching himself at the older boy.\n\nWhen Levi pulled away after what felt like thousands of years, David sucked in a sharp breath, chest expanding so wide, he thought he felt his ribs crack.\n\n\"You kissed me,\" David said, touching his bottom lip.\n\n\"I did,\" Levi said, sounding more nervous than David had ever heard him. \"Is that okay?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" David breathed, and shaky laughter bubbled from his mouth. \"Yes. Oh my gods, yes.\"\n\nLevi smiled, and David was lost."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "He took the long way home, trying to collect his thoughts. He was sure Mom and Dad would know right away what had happened. Though he knew they wouldn't mind, he wanted to keep this for himself, at least for now. He had much to think on. What it meant. What it could mean. What would happen tomorrow, the day after, a year from now. Levi was about to graduate and would join his father as a watchman of the village. He'd already been training for the last year, but now that he was a man, he'd be able to do the job on his own, much to his delight. \"And I'll protect your house more than all the others,\" Levi promised him, turning his head in the grass to look at David, his red hair spilling to the ground like fire. \"If anything were to happen, I would protect you.\"\n\nDavid believed him, and in the back of his mind, he thought the thoughts of the young in love for the first time: this was the most important thing to have happened to anyone ever, and it would last for an eternity. No one would come between them. It was their destiny to be together forever.\n\nBut destiny is a fickle thing, diverting paths seemingly set in stone without rhyme or reason, creating a sticky web, entrapping the unsuspecting.\n\nAs David walked along the edge of the village, lost in thoughts filled with Levi, Levi, Levi, another voice broke through the storm in his head, one he hadn't heard in a very long time.\n\n<David,> it whispered in his head.\n\nHe stopped, cocking his head as he looked toward the Dark Woods in the distance.\n\n\"I hear you,\" he said, the sounds of the village fading around him.\n\n<David,> the voice said again, though louder now, stronger.\n\nHe took a step toward the Dark Woods.\n\n<It's time,> the voice sang. <Come to me. Come, come.>\n\nDavid hesitated, but only briefly. He looked back over his shoulder at the village, heavy with indecision. But then the voice said, <Please. I have much to show you. We are connected. I have waited for you for so long. I would have you see my face, so that I may gaze upon yours.>\n\nDavid left the village behind and entered the Dark Woods."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "He walked for what felt like ages, the trees growing thicker, the canopy above blocking out the sky and the sun. Though nervous, he didn't give much thought to turning around and running back home. Foolish maybe, but David had always been brave, much to his parents' chagrin.\n\nHe heard movement in the forest around him: birds singing in the trees, animals hidden by shadows as they crept and skulked. Once, he thought he saw a great stag, flowers dangling from its antlers, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because when he tried to go toward it, all he saw were branches rubbing together in the breeze, the sound like bones rattling.\n\nHe didn't know how long he'd walked before he came to a clearing with a large hill at its center, covered in green grass and moss. It could have been an hour. It could have been a year. He wasn't tired, wasn't hungry.\n\n\"But I'm lost,\" he mumbled, looking up at the cerulean blue sky above the clearing. \"I don't know how I'll find my way back.\"\n\nHe decided to climb the hill in the clearing, hoping to use the height to find the path home. If anything, he told himself, he'd see the smoke rising from the stacks in the village. He approached the hill, coming to a stop when it rose up and down, as if it were breathing.\n\nHe stopped, eyes wide. He'd heard stories of the Dark Woods, of fairies that tricked those lost, of giant trolls that feasted on the bones of their victims, sucking out the marrow as if it were a delicacy. Stories to frighten children, but to a sixteen-year-old boy lost in the woods, they all seemed very real. He liked his marrow where it was, thank you very much.\n\nHe kept a distance from the breathing hill, circling around it, trying to see what it was. The grass swayed, the flowers bloomed, the earth rising and falling. Once he was back to where he started, he cocked his head and sat down on the ground, legs crossed, elbows on his knees.\n\n\"Are you the one calling to me?\" David asked, knowing the shit Levi would give him for talking to a breathing hill. \"What are you?\"\n\n<Your friend,> the voice said, as loud as it'd ever been, its rumbling growl deep. <I have been here since you were born. I have watched over you and your village, waiting for the day when it was time to reveal myself to you.>\n\n\"You're in my head,\" David said quietly, plucking at a blade of grass. \"How are you doing that?\" Then he remembered what the voice had said before he entered the woods. \"We're connected.\"\n\n<Yes,> the voice said. <Connected in ways unexpected. I do not know what the gods are asking of me, but they have put you in my path, and I would see what that brings. There is a reason for all things, though this reason is hidden from me. I am in your head because you are in mine.>\n\nDavid thought, <Can you hear me?>\n\nHe startled when the voice said, Yes, I can.\n\nDavid rose unsteadily to his feet, wringing his hands until his knuckles popped. \"I don't know if I like that. My thoughts are my own. What right do you have to listen to them?\"\n\nThe voice chuckled, low and deep. <Fear not, child. Your secrets are safe. I would never betray you for anything. You are important to me, and I am so very pleased to finally know you.>\n\n\"Show yourself,\" David said, trying to sound as strong as his mother and father. Then, \"I mean, unless you're just a hill. If so, that's\u2026uh. Cool? I guess. Who else gets to say they have a talking hill as a friend?\"\n\nA wave of amusement washed over him, and David trembled when he realized it wasn't coming from himself. No, it came from the hill. It felt heavy and warm, like a blanket on a cold winter's night. <I am no hill,> the voice said. <I am more.>\n\nAnd then the hill rose, the earth cracking and breaking apart, dirt sloughing off in large clumps. David stumbled back when he saw the flash of a large amber eye, reptilian and intelligent, trained on him. The eye blinked slowly. David gasped when he saw a second eye set back in a massive head covered in green, glittering scales the color of summer grass, the same as Levi's eyes. His stomach sank to his toes as the creature revealed itself, four legs on the ground, black talons digging into the dirt. Massive wings spread, covering the width of the clearing, the membranes a translucent shade of green paler than the rest of its body. The beast shook its head side-to-side, its (his?) spike-covered tail thumping on the ground. Its (his?) head lowered toward David, bigger than anything he'd ever seen before. The creature's black lips pulled back over sharp rows of fangs, and it took David far longer than he cared to admit to realize the thing in front of him wasn't getting ready to attack.\n\nIt\u2014he was smiling.\n\n\"You're a dragon,\" David breathed, voice cracking. He'd never seen a dragon before. Most people hadn't. It'd been hundreds of years since the last sighting, the beasts hiding away from those who wanted to kill them for their teeth, their scales, their horns. Dragons were supposedly filled with magic, and every piece and part of them was prized. Hushed stories had been told of their existence, stories that spoke of their penchant for death and fire and destruction. Nothing good came from a dragon, David had been told time and time again.\n\n<I am,> the dragon said, though his lips did not move, still grinning at him. <And you are David. You're taller than I expected. You've grown into yourself.>\n\n\"Thank you,\" David said, remembering his manners. \"Also, that's kind of creepy. Are you a stalker, or\u2026?\"\n\nThe dragon snorted, shaking his head. <Cheeky git,> the dragon said, sounding absurdly fond. <I am not stalking you. Mostly.>\n\nAny fear David had felt dissolved. Excitement roared through him, a billion questions all vying to be the first to escape his mouth. \"What kind of dragon are you? Where did you come from? Have you always lived here? Can I touch you? Wait, is that rude to ask a dragon? I don't know! I've never talked to a dragon before. Oh no, please don't take offense! I have no idea what's going on, and I can't seem to close my mouth.\" Then, \"Why can you talk to me? I didn't think anyone could talk to dragons. Oh crap. Is this my doing?\" He paled. \"Okay, so, I didn't mean to smoke that thing Levi wanted me to try with him. He said it'd get us stoned, but was that all it did? Gods, I'm going to give him so much crap over this.\"\n\nThe dragon chuckled. <No. It wasn't because you got stoned that one time two years ago. I've heard you long before that, and you me. It has nothing to do with Levi.> This last came out in a strange growl, but before David could ask after it, the dragon continued. <I have never been able to speak to a human before. This is new for me as well.>\n\n\"Really?\" David asked. \"That's weird. Isn't that weird? I think it's weird. Why can't I stop talking? Crap, I don't think I'm breathing.\" He tried to suck in a breath, but his lungs felt constricted, as if a vise had squeezed them closed. He bent over, hands on his knees as he gagged, his vision graying.\n\nA sharp burst of hot air billowed against his face, jerking him out of his panic attack. He opened his eyes to find the dragon's head near his own. A long, pink tongue slithered out between the lips and flickered. <Calm,> the dragon said. <Calm. You're safe with me. I would never hurt you.>\n\nOh,\" David said weakly. \"That's\u2026that's good.\" But he did calm, his breaths\u2014though ragged\u2014burning in his chest. His vision cleared, and he marveled at the sight before him. The dragon was as large as the biggest house in the village, and though David had never seen another dragon, he'd always thought they'd be even bigger. Grass and flowers grew along his sides and back over the glittering scales. He had two horns on his head, black and twisting together to a single point. It looked like a crown of sorts. His underbelly was the same pale shade of green as his wings, the colors growing darker along his chest, where they swirled together to make what appeared to be a strange symbol, almost like a keyhole. \"Wow,\" David said as the dragon spun in a slow circle, revealing every part of itself. \"You're beautiful.\"\n\n<Thank you, David,> the dragon said, and David felt a little flutter of happiness in his head. The dragon was pleased with him. <You're not so bad yourself, for a human.>\n\n\"What is your name?\" David asked as the dragon faced him once more.\n\n<My name is ancient. It cannot be pronounced by the human tongue.>\n\nDavid squinted up at him. \"What? That's not cool. You should at least let me try.\"\n\n<So be it. My name is\u2026>\n\nWhat followed was a complicated sound filled with grunts and growls, a symphony of noise that David couldn't follow. It ended with a little trill before the dragon looked at him expectantly.\n\n\"Huh,\" David said. \"So it's\u2026\" He tried to emulate what he'd just heard but ended up biting his tongue and choking on spit.\n\nAnother wave of amusement washed over him. <Something like that. Except you just said something extraordinarily offensive about dragons in my tongue.>\n\nDavid blanched. \"I\u2026I didn't mean to\u2026 oh my gods, I'm so sorry.\"\n\n<That was a joke,> the dragon said.\n\nRelief, then, though he glared at the dragon. \"Well, that's a hard name to say. We'll need to come up with something easier for me. Can't just call you Dragon. That wouldn't be fair since you don't call me Human.\"\n\n<What name would you like for me to have?> the dragon asked, cocking his head as he settled down on his belly, legs folded underneath him like the world's biggest cat.\n\nDavid began to pace, feeling the dragon's eyes on him. \"Well, I suppose I should ask what you like. What makes you happy. What brings you joy.\"\n\n<Ah,> the dragon said. <I see. So, your name is David because David bring you joy.>\n\nDavid shook his head. \"That's not\u2026my name is David because it's the name my parents chose for me. It was the name of my grandfather. I share his name as a sign of honor.\"\n\n<I did not have parents to choose for me,> the dragon said. <I am born of fire and stone and magic. Dragons come into being when they are expected to, and not a moment before.>\n\n\"Truly?\" David asked, taken aback. \"I've heard stories about dragons, but I don't know how much of it is true. I can't imagine not having parents. Doesn't that make you sad?\"\n\n<You can't be sad for things you never had,> the dragon replied. <What would be the point?>\n\n\"It happens all the time, unfortunately. At least for some humans. We covet what we don't have.\"\n\n<Why?>\n\nDavid chuckled. \"It's just the way we are. For all the beauty and wonder humans can create, we're still\u2026.\" He didn't know how to finish.\n\nThe dragon did. <You're still young, as a species. You haven't yet learned how to control it. I have met humans in my many years. Some good, some not. Are you a good human?>\n\nDavid shrugged uneasily. What did it mean to be a good human? Was it doing the best he could with what he had? David wasn't a perfect person, but then he never claimed to be. He could be headstrong to the point of stubbornness, and when things didn't go his way, he could become easily frustrated. \"I try to be,\" he said. \"I don't know how often I succeed, but I always apologize if I do something wrong. Mistakes are how we learn to become better people. It shows us right from wrong.\"\n\n<Some humans don't seem to learn that lesson,> the dragon said. <They are wrong, and yet they continue down that path without a care for who they step on along the way.>\n\n\"True,\" David said. \"But thankfully, I'm not one of them. Tell me, what makes you happy?\"\n\nThe sun, the dragon said, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. <The way it warms my skin when I lay on rocks. The sky, because my wings need the wind. The feeling of grass underneath my feet, as it reminds me to be grounded when my wings grow weary. The stars at night, because they make me feel small.>\n\nDavid sat before the dragon, resting back on his hands, ankles crossed. \"Do you like feeling small?\"\n\n<Oh yes. When you're as big as me, feeling small is a lovely thing indeed. No matter how large I grow, there is solace knowing there are still things far larger than I. It serves to show me my place.>\n\n\"I never thought about it that way,\" David admitted. \"I always feel small.\"\n\nA guttural, rumbling sound came from the dragon, punctuated by sharp exhales from his nostrils. It took David a moment to realize he was laughing. <You may be small compared to me, but you have a strong heart, David.>\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n<You hear my voice. There is no one else who has been able to do the same. I imagine it takes someone with an infallible spirit to converse with me as you have.>\n\n\"Why is that, do you think?\" David asked. \"I'm not a wizard or a magician. I have no magic in my blood. I've never heard of anyone being able to talk to dragons, least of all someone like me.\"\n\n<I know not,> the dragon said. <But I will not question it. Dragons are solitary creatures. We can spend decades without saying anything at all.>\n\nDavid winced as he looked down at his hands. \"I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your quiet.\" That wasn't what he meant to do at all. He was about to suggest going home when the dragon's tail appeared, the tip dropping into his lap and twitching. It was heavy, the weight firm against his thighs.\n\n<I like your interruption,> the dragon said. <Solitude can lead to loneliness. It can be difficult when you only speak to yourself.>\n\nCarefully, giving the dragon time to pull away, he lowered a hand and placed it on the dragon's tail. The scales were much smaller on the end, compact and tight, lined with thick spikes along the top of the tail, the last of which was about the size of David's forearm. He stroked the scales between the spikes and snorted when the dragon's back left leg began to jerk of its own volition.\n\n<That's fine,> the dragon said with a sigh. <That's just fine.>\n\nDavid studied the dragon as he stroked his tail, taking in his immense size, the colors, the way his scales caught the light. His gaze rose to the dragon's chest, and that strange keyhole there. It wasn't a perfect keyhole; the edges were jagged, the top of the symbol larger than the bottom as if any key would have to be turned upside down to work. Or a sword, he thought as he swallowed thickly.\n\n<Why are you worried?> the dragon asked. <You were happy only a moment before.>\n\nDavid shook his head, shoving down the thought of swords and the anger of men into a box in his mind and locking it tightly. He'd have to be more careful if the dragon was in his head. David didn't want to scare him away. \"Sometimes, people can be sad or scared for reasons even they can't explain.\"\n\n<That sounds terrible. I wouldn't like not knowing why I was upset. It'd mean I wouldn't know what to bite to make it stop.>\n\n\"If only it were that easy,\" David muttered. Today has been a strange day. He'd never have thought that getting kissed by Levi for the first time wouldn't be the most exciting thing to have happened. \"That symbol. On your chest. What is it?\"\n\nThe dragon turned his head until one eye pointed down toward the ground. <Why? Is it unsightly?>\n\n\"No,\" David said honestly. \"There is nothing unsightly about you.\"\n\nThe dragon huffed. <You're good for my ego. I will keep you. I don't know what it is. It's always been part of me. Though I have met other dragons in my life, I've never seen another with the same upon them. What does it look like to you?>\n\nInstead of trying to explain\u2014for fear the meaning might be misunderstood or lost\u2014David formed an image in his mind, of a grand, ornate door with a green lock. A key fit into the keyhole and turned, causing the door to open, white light spilling out.\n\n<Ahhh,> the dragon said. <I see. I am a lock. You are a key.>\n\nDavid startled. \"That's not\u2026I'm not much of anything.\"\n\n<I don't like it when you speak badly of yourself,> the dragon said, the tail twitching in David's lap. <You are a key. You are my key.>\n\n\"Keyhole,\" David muttered, mind racing. \"Key. Lock.\" He brightened. \"Lockes! In the Veranian tongue, Lockes means a beacon of hope, a light in all the darkness. What if we called you Lockes?\"\n\n<Lockes,> the dragon said slowly, chewing on the word. <Lockes. A beacon of hope, a light in the darkness. I am the dragon, Lockes. Yes. Yes, David. I will accept the name you have bestowed upon me, and gladly. Thank you. That is much easier to say than what my actual name is. From this day forward, you will be David the Key. And I will be your Lockes.>\n\nDavid smiled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "He returned to the village as the sun began to set, the sky aflame. He promised Lockes not to reveal the dragon's existence to anyone, and though it hadn't sat well with David, he understood why. Dragons, though not having been seen in decades, were something to be feared. And when people were afraid, they acted unlike themselves, wanting to destroy what they didn't understand. He wouldn't let anything happen to Lockes, even if he wished to shout from the rooftops that he had made friends with a dragon.\n\nHe'd learned more in a single afternoon than he'd ever had at school. Over the course of his first meeting with Lockes, he began to understand that all the texts about dragons were woefully inadequate, built upon stereotypes and half-truths. Sure, there might be some factual information, but like people, dragons were individuals. The actions of one didn't necessarily apply to them as a whole. He wondered what else that could apply to. Everything, he thought as his house came into view, it could apply to anything and everything.\n\nMom and Dad looked up from the kitchen table when he walked in through the back door. \"There you are,\" Mom said. \"I thought you'd be home before now. What have you been up to?\"\n\nDavid panicked, saying the first thing that came into his mind that wasn't dragon related. \"I was with Levi! He\u2026\" David blushed, scuffling his boots on the floor.\n\nMom and Dad exchanged a knowing look. \"Levi did what?\" Dad asked, sounding like he was trying to keep from laughing.\n\nDavid rolled his eyes. \"He\u2026uh. Kissed me?\"\n\n\"And how did you feel about that?\" Mom asked carefully.\n\nDavid shrugged. \"Good? And weird, all at the same time. I mean, he's Levi. He's just\u2026\"\n\n\"He's just,\" Dad said, sounding amused. \"If you'd like, we can act surprised.\" His eyes widened as he brought a hand to his mouth. \"Levi? You kissed Levi. I never would've suspected!\"\n\nMom's hand was at her throat. \"This is news to me as well. Even though from the first day you met him, it was Levi this and Levi that. Oh, how I wish I could have seen what was coming to better prepare myself!\"\n\n\"Ha ha,\" David muttered. \"I know you both think you're funny, but you're really not.\"\n\nMom and Dad broke, laughing as Dad pounded the table with a meaty fist. \"We're just pulling your leg, kiddo,\" Mom said, wiping her eyes.\n\nDad rose from his chair and moved toward David, settling his hands on his son's shoulders. \"Levi is a good man. Honest and strong. He will make a good husband.\"\n\n\"Dad!\" David bellowed, cringing as he stepped back, causing Dad's hands to fall from his shoulders.\n\n\"Jacob,\" Mom said.\n\n\"What?\" Dad said. \"He will. And don't tell me you're not thinking it too. A union between our families will benefit us all. What's the problem?\"\n\n\"I'm sixteen,\" David hissed. \"I'm not getting married!\"\n\n\"Well, not yet,\" Dad said. He grew stern, pointing a finger at David. \"Especially not while you're still in school. While I'm pleased you finally pulled your head out of your ass to see Levi has been pining after you for ages, you need to remember to focus on your studies.\"\n\n\"Mom!\"\n\n\"He has a point,\" Mom said, rising from the table and joining her husband in front of David. \"Levi is wonderful, but this is your first relationship. Maybe it'll be your only; and will turn into what your father and I have. Or maybe it will be your first, a stepping stone into becoming a man. Regardless, you shouldn't let it consume you. A clear head means a clear heart.\"\n\n\"I know,\" David said, wishing he'd kept his fool mouth shut. Now, he'd never hear the end of it. He could already see the knowing looks his parents would have whenever they saw Levi. \"But it's not\u2026serious. It's not a relationship.\"\n\n\"Uh huh,\" Dad said dryly. \"Keep telling yourself that, kiddo. But I've seen the way you look at him, and how he looks at you. There's something there, and we couldn't be happier for you.\"\n\nDavid allowed himself to be gathered up in his father's strong arms, head just underneath Dad's chin. And though Levi was there, smiling handsomely in his head, he dissipated into smoke when a dragon appeared, majestic and glorious.\n\nA secret, and one he'd protect with his life."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "David cheered from his seat in the audience when Levi was called to the front of the room, Teacher handing him a scroll that signified his schooling had ended. Levi's mother sniffled into a lace cloth, Levi's father wrapping an arm around her shoulders as they watched their son. Levi took the scroll and looked out into the audience, raising a fist above his head. David clapped and laughed, proud of his friend.\n\nLater, once the other graduates had received their scrolls, Levi found David waiting for him at the edge of the small crowd. He looked handsome in his too-small suit, the sleeves ending at the delicate bones of his wrists. David didn't know what Levi had planned; only their parents knew about their new relationship. But the decision was made when Levi cupped his face and kissed him sweetly in front of everyone. Everything else melted away as David grew weightless, feeling as if he would float away into the sky.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Levi said as he pressed his forehead against David's. \"I was nervous, but I saw you in the crowd, and you made me feel like I could do anything.\"\n\n\"You can,\" David said. \"I'm so proud of you.\"\n\n\"Because of you,\" Levi said, nose brushing against David's, causing his heart to flutter. \"I wouldn't have made it this far without you.\"\n\nDavid shook his head. \"You would have done just fine.\"\n\n\"But I won't ever have to know,\" Levi said. \"Because you're here, with me. And I couldn't be happier.\"\n\n\"You big dork,\" David said fondly. It was only then that he remembered they had an audience, and as soon as he lifted his gaze to the crowd, he saw them all watching. They immediately began speaking loudly, as if they weren't all nosy busybodies. Except, of course, for the two sets of parents watching their sons proudly.\n\nLevi's lips came near David's ear, breath hot. \"You should know Grandad told Dad that he needs to offer a goat to your parents in exchange for you as a sort of dowry.\"\n\n\"Oh my gods,\" David groaned. \"Please tell me your father told him to fuck off.\"\n\nLevi chuckled. \"Told him that it'd need to be at least three goats.\"\n\n<I like eating goats,> a voice whispered in David's head, causing him to freeze.\n\nLevi must have felt the change, because he looked worried as he pulled back. \"He was just kidding. You know how Grandad is, stuck in the old ways.\"\n\n<Make it five goats,> Lockes said. <Never underestimate your worth. Make it five, and then bring them to me and I will cook them for us.>\n\n<I'm not bringing you goats!>\n\n<Fine,> Lockes grumbled. <I can find my own goats. I will bring you twelve, which is more than one or three.>\n\n\"David?\" Levi asked, pulling him out of his head. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nDavid smiled too brightly. \"Nothing. Just\u2026 thinking. Tell your grandfather that the offer of goats has been rejected.\"\n\nLevi laughed. \"I'll make sure to do that. Come on. Mom and Dad said to invite you and your parents over to celebrate. Dad's been cooking all day, and I'm starving.\" He took David by the hand, leading them toward their parents. Levi looked back at him, eyebrows waggling. \"And then we'll steal away and have our own celebration.\"\n\n<What does that mean?> Lockes asked, sounding curious. <Does that mean fornication? Because it sounds like he means fornication. David, are you going to fornicate?>\n\n\"Fuck off,\" David said through gritted teeth.\n\nLevi frowned. \"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" David said. \"I wasn't talking to\u2014never mind. Yes, let's go eat and then go\u2026do stuff.\"\n\n\"Gee,\" Levi said. \"Stuff. That's romantic.\"\n\n<It's really not,> Lockes said. <Romance is spreading the entrails of your latest kill in a pretty display to attract a mate, followed by a dance to show your strength and prowess. David, if he starts to dance on top of intestines, you're being wooed.>\n\n<I'm going to straight up murder your face.>\n\n<Promises, promises,> Lockes said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "That night, levi took david's hand, leading him from his house through the village. He looked nervous, yet determined, as they left the village behind, heading away from the homes and lights. The shadows from the Dark Woods stretched ominously as Levi stopped underneath an ancient oak.\n\nLevi removed the pack he'd brought, opening it and pulling out a blanket. The air was warm and thick, and David was having a hard time catching his breath. He knew what this was leading to, and thought he was more than ready, but this felt big, bigger than he expected. He trusted Levi with his life and his heart, but both were fragile.\n\n<Breathe,> Lockes whispered in his head. <You are safe. You are loved. I will leave you to your moment, but should you have need of me, all you need to do is call my name.>\n\n<Thank you,> David thought in reply. <I'm scared but excited. What if I'm not good enough?>\n\nHe felt the dragon's annoyance. <That is not the question you should be asking. You should be asking if your Levi is good enough for you. You may doubt yourself, David, but I do not. If you are ready to receive what he offers, then take what you're owed. If you are not, then speak up. If he doesn't listen, it will be the last thing he ever does. I will make sure of it.>\n\nThe threat from a dragon against his boyfriend should have caused David to bristle. It didn't. In fact, it did the opposite. A wave of calm washed over him, and he smiled as Levi hurried to smooth out the blanket unnecessarily as if even the smallest wrinkle would ruin what he was trying to do. David watched as Levi pulled out a flagon of wine and two wooden cups, along with a container of fruits and cheese. Atop the food sat a golden flower, the same kind surrounding Levi's house, planted by his mother.\n\n\"Is this okay?\" Levi asked, frowning down at what he'd laid out. \"I\u2026I want this to be good for you. No, wait. I want this to be the best for you.\" He looked up at David, brow furrowed as he gnawed on his bottom lip.\n\n<Well,> Lockes said. <It's not dancing on entrails, but I suppose it'll do. Remember, David: do not force yourself into anything you're not ready for. Also, make sure he stretches your anus before he\u2014>\n\n<Bye!> David shouted in his head as he ground his teeth together. <We're good! You can go now, oh my gods.>\n\nLockes chuckled. <Yes, yes. Go, David. I will be here if you have need of me.>\n\nIt felt as if a door shut in his mind, and for a moment, David was bereft at the loss. Though he hadn't known Lockes for long, his presence in David's head had become something he'd begun counting on. He was never alone, no matter where he went. And though he sometimes pushed against the boundaries of their connection, Lockes never grew angry with him, always giving him time alone when he requested it. And since David was a teenager, that meant he requested it quite a bit as he often took himself in hand late into the night.\n\nBut now?\n\nNow he wished he were with Lockes.\n\nStrange, that.\n\n\"David?\" Levi asked, sounding worried. \"We can go home, if you want. Or we can stay here and just talk. Nothing more.\"\n\nDavid shook his head. \"No. I\u2026want. To be here. With you.\" He took in a deep breath, letting it out slow. \"With all of you.\"\n\nLevi smiled so widely David thought his face would split in two.\n\nAnd later, when Levi loomed above him, David's skin slick with sweat as he cried out in a mix of pleasure and pain, he thought of great wings, and air against his face as he rocked his head back, shouting out to the stars as Levi whispered his name over and over again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "<How old are you?> David asked, sitting lazily against his dragon's chest, long, scaly legs stretched out on either side of him. The middle of summer had brought a heatwave, and though Lockes could breathe fire, his skin and scales were cool to the touch. David had spent the summer working in his mother's office, but today, he had a rare day off. Levi had asked if he wanted to go somewhere, but David had begged off, saying he wanted to catch up on his sleep. He felt a bit of guilt for the lie, but it faded when he found Lockes waiting for him in the Dark Woods.\n\nHe no longer felt the need to converse out loud. Lockes could hear him just as easily in his head, and it seemed pointless to speak his words when he could just think them or send images to explain what he was trying to say. Lockes was pleased with this change in their relationship.\n\n<I'm young,> Lockes said, <pressing his snout against the top of David's head. Though young to you is different than young to me. Your entire life up to this point is but a blink of an eye to me.>\n\n<You didn't answer the question.>\n\nThe dragon nipped at his head, and David laughed. <I am two hundred and seventy-three years old.>\n\n<Whoa. I\u2026huh. I expected something like that, but it's still surprising to hear.>\n\n<Why?>\n\nDavid shrugged. <Because I'll never know what that feels like, to have that much time pass. In a few months, I turn seventeen. I can't even begin to imagine almost three hundred years on top of that.>\n\n<Time moves differently for me than it does for you. He hesitated. Or, at least it did.>\n\nDavid tilted his head up to look at the underside of the dragon's jaw. <What do you mean?>\n\nLockes said, <Your lifetime is marked by events. You're born. You grow. You become a man. You find a love and build a home with them. You age. Eventually, you die. A dragon's life isn't the same. Time is\u2026more fluid for us.>\n\n<But?>\n\n<But,> Lockes said, <I have found myself almost stuck in time. With you. I count the hours of every day until I can see you again. It wasn't like that before.>\n\nHe couldn't tell if that hurt the dragon or not. The mix of feelings he got from Lockes was too big to parse through with any clarity. <Is that\u2026bad?>\n\n<No,> Lockes said promptly. <It's not. The opposite, in fact. It has caused me to slow down, to ponder time in ways I hadn't before. Though my life is longer than yours, it is still finite. Nothing lasts forever.>\n\n<We will,> David said, suddenly sure of himself. <We'll last forever. Whatever life comes after this, we'll still be together. And even though I'll cross the veil first, I'll wait for you, no matter how long it takes.>\n\n<Do dragons and humans cross the same veil? I've never spoken with another human about such things before. Isn't it strange that we hold some of the same beliefs?>\n\n<I don't know,> David admitted. <The crossing is supposed to bring peace and everlasting life. Why wouldn't you and I get to have the same thing? I know I won't have peace without you by my side. No matter how long it takes, I'll be with you, in the end.>\n\nLockes sighed audibly. <I would like that very much. I don't know what the gods have planned, putting you in my path, but I thank them every day for it.>\n\n<Me too,> David thought, turning his head so his cheek rested against the dragon's chest. He smiled quietly when he felt the consecutive beat of all eight of the dragon's hearts, soft and soothing. <How did you come to be here in the first place? How did you know to find me?>\n\nThe tip of the dragon's tail rolled around his body, settling in David's lap. He reached for it without thinking, rubbing the scales between the spikes as Lockes loved.\n\n<I was\u2026drifting,> Lockes finally said. <I did not know my purpose, why I was born. I had my hoard, but it did not bring me the same joy as it once did. Gold and pretty jewels are wonderful, but they're just trinkets, in the end. Little baubles that mean nothing.>\n\n<I know of at least a billion people who'd disagree with you.>\n\n<Lie,> Lockes said. <You do not know a billion people. But I understand your point. A hoard is a dragon's most prized possession, and though it did bring me happiness, it wasn't the same as when I started building it. I felt\u2026unfulfilled. I grew to despair that I wasn't a very good dragon.>\n\n<You are,> David said. <You're the best dragon.>\n\n<I'm the only dragon you know,> Lockes said, and David could hear the smile. <Which is fine with me, because I would hate to have to kill one of my own kind in order to keep you.>\n\n<But you'd do it, wouldn't you?>\n\n<Yes,> Lockes said. <Because you are precious to me. I awoke one day after a long sleep that had lasted a decade. I had planned to sleep even more, but I felt this\u2026thread of light, extending from my chest and disappearing into the distance. I didn't know what it was, but I knew I had to follow it. And so I did. I flew for days and days, crossing vast mountains and the deepest oceans. I came upon a great wood full of darkness and secrets, and there, I met a god.>\n\nA chill ran down David's spine. <A god. Truly?>\n\n<Yes,> Lockes said, his voice taking on a dreamy lilt. <An old one, perhaps the oldest of us all. The biggest dragon in existence, the god of all of us, hidden away in what you call the Dark Woods. I stood before him, and he towered over me. He spoke, calling me a child who had been set upon a path. I had much to learn, he said. There would be hardships along the way, but I had a purpose. And that purpose would define who I would become.>\n\n<The thread led to a god?> David asked in wonder. He couldn't believe such a magnificent creature could live hidden in the forest. David knew the Dark Woods were bigger than anyone knew, but a dragon god? He wondered what other secrets the Dark Woods held within.\n\n<No,> Lockes said. <The thread was not to him.>\n\n<Then who did it lead to?>\n\n<You, David. The thread led to you. You weren't yet born when I arrived here in this clearing, still growing in your mother's belly. But I felt you, even then. And I knew I only had to bide my time until you were ready to see me for all that I am. I slept a sleep of dreams, and there you were, a light that never extinguished, growing brighter the moment you were born.>\n\n\"I heard you,\" David whispered aloud, his skin thrumming. \"Ever since I can remember, I heard you. Whispers, in the back of my head.\"\n\n<I know,> Lockes said. <We're connected, you and I. The old god said that the reasons wouldn't be clear to me, at least at first.>\n\n\"Are they now?\" David asked.\n\n<They are,> Lockes said. <But it's nothing as grand as fate or destiny, or facing an encroaching dark as a last stand for the light. The reason you called to me, and the reason I followed you is because I chose to. We are meant to be friends. Brothers. You are my love, and I would do anything for you.>\n\nDavid's eyes burned as his chest hitched. <Don't you miss your home? Your hoard?>\n\nThe dragon rose to his feet. David stood too, turning and looking up at his friend. Lockes lowered his head until he could look directly into David's eyes. Neither of them blinked, watching, waiting. <I do not,> Lockes rumbled. <Because you are my home. You are my hoard, my greatest treasure. You have brought me peace and purpose, and nothing that came before will ever compare. I will be here, always. And when you take your last breath, I will sleep until it is time for me to cross the veil. And if the gods themselves try to keep me from you, I will tear the heavens apart until I am by your side again.>\n\nDavid flung himself at his dragon, hugging his snout as tightly as he could. Lockes laughed in delight, pulling back. <May I?> he asked, raising one set of talons, and clicking them together in invitation.\n\nThough he didn't know what the dragon was asking for, he agreed readily. He was safe with Lockes.\n\nLockes closed his claws around David carefully, lifting him up off the ground as he rolled over onto his back. He set David down on his stomach, a sign David took as one of great trust. A dragon's underbelly was their weakness, the softest part of their bodies that could be pierced with a sword or spear. Lockes was showing that he trusted David with his life, and he hoped he could carry that trust for the rest of his life.\n\nFor the remainder of the day, they lay there, just the two of them, sometimes speaking, but mostly enjoying the quiet of two beings existing together in this tiny little corner of the world."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "\"I KNOW YOU'RE LYING TO ME,\" Levi said through gritted teeth on the eve of David's eighteenth birthday.\n\nDavid closed his eyes, rubbing the sides of his head, trying to stave off the oncoming headache pulsing against his forehead. \"I'm not\u2026\" He sighed as he opened his eyes. \"I'm not lying to you.\"\n\nHe walked with Levi along the path surrounding the village, wishing he could be anywhere but where he was. He knew this was coming, could see it in the set of Levi's shoulders, the way he watched David with growing hurt in his eyes. It'd been going on for weeks, now, and though David couldn't fault him for that, he didn't know how to fix it without revealing the truth of the matter.\n\n\"You go off,\" Levi snapped. \"To only the gods know where. You tell your parents you're with me, but you're not.\" He looked stricken. \"Are you\u2026is there someone else?\"\n\nDavid stopped, staring at Levi. Those words hurt, even if they had a bit of validity to them, though not like Levi thought. \"No,\" he said tiredly. \"Levi, I love you and only you. There is no one else I'm interested in. You are my heart.\"\n\n\"Then where do you go?\" Levi exploded. \"People are talking, David. They see you wandering away even though you seem to think they don't. If you're not\u2026if you're not cheating on me, then what the hell is it?\"\n\nDavid's hands curled into fists. \"I'm asking you to trust me. I swear to you it's not what you're thinking. There is no one else. There never has been, and there never will be. It's you and me, okay? Nothing else matters.\" This last felt like a lie, but one buried in truth.\n\n\"Then tell me,\" Levi begged, voice cracking. \"Tell me what it is you do. Tell me where you're going. If it's not someone else, why can't you tell me?\"\n\n\"Do you trust me?\" David asked flatly.\n\n\"I want to,\" Levi said, causing David to grunt as if he'd been punched in the gut. \"I'm trying to. But I don't understand what's going on with you. I share everything with you, David. Everything. And I thought you were giving the same in return. But there's always been some part of you that's closed off to me, and I don't get why.\"\n\nA strange anger rose in David's chest, harsh and grating. \"Because it's not for you to know,\" he growled. \"It's mine.\"\n\nLevi paled, and David knew he'd gone too far. Lockes was there, in the back of his head, but he didn't speak, didn't do much aside from making his presence known, and for the first time, David wanted the dragon to go away.\n\n<I understand,> Lockes whispered. <I'll wait until you're ready, no matter how long it takes. The door shut, and instead of relief, all David felt was guilt.>\n\n\"Levi,\" he said, struggling at the loss and trying to find the right words. \"That's not\u2026that's not what I meant. It's nothing bad. It's nothing that would hurt you or me. It's time away from everything to clear my head. It's a part of my life that doesn't involve you, just like your watch duties don't involve me. Just because we're together doesn't mean we can't do things on our own.\"\n\nLevi sagged, head bowed. \"I know that. I just\u2026\" He grimaced. Then, \"I'm not trying to take that away from you, David. I love you too. More than you could possibly know. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, and it feels like you're pulling away from me. I don't know how to fix it. I can't lose you.\"\n\n\"You won't,\" David said, moving until he stood in front of Levi, their knees bumping together. He took Levi's hand in his own, raising it until Levi's palm pressed against David's chest, right above his heart. \"You're here, with me. Always. And nothing can change that. I'm happy with you. I've never doubted you for a moment.\" He wished that last hadn't sounded like a dig, but there was nothing he could do about that now.\n\nLevi sighed, fingers curling against David's tunic. \"I'll be better. I swear it. I just\u2026you'd tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't you? You'd tell me so I could help you.\"\n\nDavid kissed his cheek. \"I would. But I promise nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.\" He wished he could believe his own words, but a curl of doubt blossomed in his heart, the roots digging in deep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "\"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!\" Mom and Dad said.\n\n\"Happy birthday!\" his friends cried.\n\n\"Happy birthday,\" Levi whispered.\n\n<Happy birthday,> Lockes said, tail thumping against David's leg.\n\n<I can't stay long,> David said, already loathing the idea of leaving his dragon once again. <I'm supposed to be getting ready for my party.>\n\n<Will there be cake?> Lockes asked. He'd been inordinately fixated on the idea of cake to mark yet another year of David's life. Through their time together, Lockes had shown great interest in human customs, especially those meant to celebrate. He didn't quite understand the importance of an eighteenth birthday, given that dragons didn't mark time in the same way. But he knew it was important to David, so he didn't mock it too much.\n\n<Yes,> David said. <Would you like me to bring you some?> He lay on the dragon's belly, the sun warming them both in their lethargy.\n\nLockes lifted his head to look at David. <Does it squeal and scream when you chase it? Does it bleed when you bite down into it?>\n\n<Gross. No. It's not alive. It's flour and sugar and eggs.>\n\n<Then what's the point?> Lockes asked, eyes narrowing. <The thrill of the hunt makes food taste better. Why would you eat something that can't run from you?>\n\nDavid shuddered. <Now I never want to eat meat again. Thanks for that.>\n\n<You are growing,> Lockes growled, pressing a single talon against David's cheek, the skin dimpling. <You need to take care of yourself. If cake doesn't bleed, it's not enough to keep you healthy.>\n\n<What if I was a vegetarian?>\n\n<Veg-i-tear-ian. What is\u2026that.>\n\n<It means you don't eat animals, only plants.>\n\nLockes snorted, a tiny lick of fire bursting from his right nostril, disappearing into a wisp of black smoke. <Humans do that?> He sounded horrified.\n\n<Some.>\n\n<Then they are not to be trusted. If they subsist on only plants, their minds have not developed enough to understand their bodies' needs. If you have friends who are vegetarians, you must shun them immediately.>\n\n<Oh boy. I'll get right on that.>\n\n<And if you ever consider following that illogic, seek me out and I will destroy it immediately. Move. I will hunt for you now so I know you're fed. I saw a herd of goats near the edge of the woods. I shall slaughter them all and we will feast like kings.>\n\nDavid laughed as he thumped his fingers against the dragon's belly. <You can't kill the goats. There will be meat along with the cake. Don't worry about me. I can take care of myself.< His smile faded as another thought struck him. <Please don't approach other humans. They won't understand.>\n\nLockes cocked his head. <Because of what I am.>\n\n<Yes,> David said. <They won't see you for who you are. It's not fair, but people fear what they don't know. And when they're scared, they say and do things they might not otherwise.>\n\n<This is important to you.>\n\n<Yes,> David said firmly. <I don't want you in harm's way. I can't promise others would see you as I do.>\n\n<Of course they wouldn't,> Lockes said. <You are David. I am Lockes. We are bound together. I would never have another human like I have you.>\n\nAnd though it hurt his heart to say so, David knew he couldn't let this moment pass him by. He had never been a selfish boy, and now that he was a man, he needed to remember the lessons he'd learned in his youth. <You\u2026> But instead of finishing in words, he sent images. Of Lockes taking to the sky, flying far, far away. Free to explore the world in ways David could never be. David knew his place. He would remain in the village, working for his mother and father.\n\nLockes frowned, one of his front fangs hanging out over his bottom lip. <Why would I leave you?>\n\n<I don't want you to,> David replied. <But are you truly happy here? Staying in one place for so long? Don't you want to see what else is out there?>\n\n<Do you?>\n\nDavid sighed. <Sometimes. But then I start to shake with the idea of leaving all I know behind. I don't know if I'm meant to explore.>\n\n<Then I will stay here. Where you are, I am. Where you go, I go. I am happy, David. I have food. I have shelter. I have you. What else could I ask for?>\n\n<The world.>\n\nLockes scoffed. <I have seen much of the world. I've made my choice. I will stay here unless you decide to go elsewhere. Only then will I leave to follow you. Stop thinking such thoughts that suggest otherwise. Do not worry about me.>\n\n<Do you worry about me?>\n\n<Constantly. I don't like it when you're out of my sight.>\n\n<It's the same for me,> David said. <You worry because you care for me. I worry because I care for you. Don't try and minimize that since I wouldn't do that to you, even though you know I can take care of myself.>\n\nLockes huffed, annoyed. <I know you can. But it's not you I worry about specifically, though I do that too. It's others and what they could do to you. You are a friend of a dragon. That shows your strength of character. But that's enough discussion for now. Today, you're apparently a man even though nothing else has changed. As is custom, I have a gift for you.>\n\n<You didn't have to get me anything,> David said as he slid off Lockes to the ground before the dragon righted himself, talons digging into the earth.\n\n<I am aware,> Lockes said, heading toward an ancient tree that grew at the edge of the clearing. <A dragon never does anything they don't want to.>\n\n\"That's because you're stubborn,\" David muttered, chuckling when Lockes's tail thumped his legs in warning.\n\nLockes lowered his head to a hollow at the base of a tree. His tongue snaked out, pink and forked as it curled into the hollow. When it pulled back, the tip was wrapped around a small bundle of leaves and twigs. He turned and set it on the ground in front of David, looking proud.\n\n<What is it?> David asked.\n\nLockes rolled his eyes, something he'd learned from David. <If would not be a surprise if I told you. Open it.>\n\nHe sat down on the ground, pulling the bundle into his lap. With great care, he unfurled the leaves and twigs to find a shimmery powder laying at the bottom. He poked his finger against the pile, and his skin tingled warmly.\n\n<Thank\u2026you?>\n\nLockes huffed. <You're welcome, even though you have no idea what it is. Take off your shirt.>\n\nDavid's head jerked up. \"Excuse me? I love you, but not like that.\"\n\n<Gods,> Lockes mumbled. <Of all the\u2014just take off your shirt!>\n\nDavid set the bundle carefully on the ground to avoid spilling the powder. He stood, removing his tunic and letting it fall to the ground.\n\n<So attractive,> Lockes mocked him. <Your pale skin without scales and easily broken ribs. I can't wait to get me a piece of that.>\n\n<Shut up,> David retorted, but his smile took away the sting of the rebuke.\n\n<The powder. Take a handful and rub it against your chest.>\n\nDavid thought about arguing but did as he was asked. Lockes would never do anything to hurt him. The powder was thicker than he expected, and it clung to his bare chest as he rubbed it against his sternum. The tingling sensation grew, but not unpleasantly. It made him squirm as if a thousand tiny fingers were gently poking him.\n\n<Do you trust me?> Lockes asked as he lowered his head, sniffing the powder on David's chest.\n\n<Yes,> David said without hesitation. <I trust you in all things.>\n\n<I am going to breathe fire on you,> Lockes said. <It will not hurt. You will not be burned.>\n\nDavid's knees grew weak. \"Uh, maybe we should talk about this. I'm all for you breathing fire, but not at me.\"\n\n<Hush,> Lockes said. <I wish you to carry my mark. It is a source of pride, and it would please me to have it on you.>\n\nDavid blinked. \"What? What mark? What are you\u2026\" His gaze drifted to the dragon's chest, to the keyhole, to the lock. <Like yours?>\n\n<Like mine,> Lockes agreed. <Would you wear it?>\n\n<Proudly,> David said.\n\n<Good. Do not move. My aim is true, but I'd rather keep your eyebrows as they are. Humans look awfully strange without eyebrows.>\n\nAlarmed, David said, \"What? Don't you dare burn off my\u2014\"\n\nLockes inhaled deeply, lips pursing to a tight O. He blew out a strong breath, the dark circle of his mouth beginning to glow red and orange. Before David could react, fire shot from the dragon's mouth, the air burning. The stream of fire struck the powder, causing it to sizzle, though David wasn't burned. It was over before he could move, the air thick with smoke.\n\n<Brush off the powder,> Lockes ordered.\n\nDavid grimaced as he did. The shimmery powder had blackened, and it fell off in clumps. David's eyes bulged from his head when he saw what lay underneath.\n\nThere, about the size of his hand, was a keyhole tattooed on his skin, the exact same shape as the one Lockes had, green in color, the lines wavy. Though Lockes's was bigger, that appeared to be the only difference. It was as if they mirrored each other, and David gaped, unable to speak.\n\n<Do you like it?> Lockes asked, and for the first time, he almost sounded\u2026nervous.\n\nDavid touched the symbol as he snapped his mouth shut. The keyhole was slightly raised and bumpy, but other than that, it felt like his own skin. Awed, he whispered, <I love it. Thank you, Lockes. You have made me incredibly happy today.>\n\nLockes preened. You are mine, just as I am yours. Wherever you go, wherever your life takes you, I will be part of you.\n\nSomething in Lockes's voice caused David to jerk up his head. <But\u2026you're going to be with me, right? You're not going anywhere?>\n\n<Silly man,> Lockes said as he nosed against the keyhole. <What did I just say? Where you go, I go.>\n\nIt should've made David feel better.\n\nIt didn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "HE WAS ABLE TO KEEP THE SECRET on his chest for only a week. Levi laughed as he shoved David into an empty storage shed, eyes dark, skin flushed. David kissed him again and again, trying to untie Levi's trousers without much success.\n\n\"I'm only on break for a little bit,\" Levi said, grunting as David gripped his length and squeezed. \"We have to do this quick.\"\n\n\"So romantic,\" David teased, laughing as Levi growled and tugged at his tunic. Without thinking, he lifted his arms. Levi pulled his tunic off and let it fall to the floor.\n\n\"Romance? I'll show\u2026you\u2026romance. What the hell is that?\"\n\nDavid frowned. \"What are you\u2014\" He followed Levi's gaze, looking down at his chest. \"Oh shit. Uh. Surprise?\"\n\n\"Did you get a tattoo?\" Levi demanded, almost sounding scandalized. \"When did you do that?\"\n\n\"Last week,\" David said, rubbing the back of his neck, trying to ignore Lockes's quiet laughter in his head. \"I wanted to do something for me to celebrate becoming a man.\"\n\nLevi squinted at him before looking down at the symbol once more. \"What\u2026is it?\"\n\n\"A keyhole.\"\n\n\"What does it mean?\"\n\nDavid shrugged awkwardly as he thought quickly. \"Keyholes are part of doors. All doors lead to somewhere else. It's to remind me that we're all on the road to somewhere.\"\n\n<Pretty thoughts,> Lockes snorted. <How delightful.>\n\n<Oh, you're gonna get it, just you watch.>\n\n<Promises, promises. I'll leave you to it. Do not let him expend on it. That's disgusting.>\n\n<Lockes!>\n\nBut Lockes was already gone.\n\nDavid fidgeted under Levi's examination of the keyhole. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"I\u2026guess?\" Levi blanched. \"I mean, I wouldn't get it, but it's your body. You can do what you want, so long as you don't hurt yourself. It\u2026has its charms.\" He must have realized how that sounded because he hastily added, \"It looks good on you.\"\n\n\"Gee, thanks,\" David said dryly. \"That was a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one. Now, if you're done gawking at me, I'd like to suck you off, if it's all the same to you.\"\n\nLevi's trousers were at his feet even before David finished speaking."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The ending of all david held dear began with something lovely.\n\nOn his twentieth birthday, Levi knelt on one knee in front of their friends and family, his jaw tense, his mouth a thin line. He cleared his throat as everyone silenced around them. David couldn't move. He couldn't speak, couldn't breathe.\n\n\"David,\" Levi said, voice cracking. \"You have been my best friend for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can't even think of a time when you weren't by my side. I have loved you from the moment I saw you, and that love has only grown. Would you do me the greatest honor and marry me? I swear if you accept, I will make your life one filled with laughter and love. I will fight for you until my last breath. I will\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" David blurted. \"Yes, oh my gods, yes. I accept. I accept.\"\n\nEveryone cheered as Levi slid a heavy silver ring over David's finger. It fit perfectly. And then he rose swiftly, grabbing David and lifting his feet from the floor, spinning them both around.\n\n<I'm happy for you,> Lockes whispered. <My love, you deserve this and more.>\n\n<I wish you were here with me,> David said as Levi kissed him again and again.\n\n<I am. I am.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Levi and David were wed on a warm spring afternoon, the entire village in attendance. They stood before their people and promised loyalty and everlasting love to each other, a gold sash tied around their joined hands.\n\nThe Man of the Gods said, \"And now you may kiss your\u2014\"\n\nDavid tackled Levi and kissed him for all he was worth."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Levi and David had a house built on the outskirts of the village. The construction took three months, and though the time passed quickly, David was relieved when he was finally able to leave the only home he'd ever known. His father cried even though David was only moving five minutes away, and his mother smiled a watery smile as she held her husband.\n\nHe looked back at his parents only once as Levi led him to their new home.\n\n<You are sad and happy at the same time,> Lockes whispered in his head. <How can you be both for the same reason?>\n\n<I'm human,> David said as he sniffled. <Our feelings don't always make sense.>\n\n<Now that I agree with.>\n\n<I don't know when I'll get to see you again,> David said as Levi chattered away about how he thought they should decorate their new house. <It might be a few days before I can get back to you.>\n\n<Take your time. You've told me that newlyweds only think with their genitals.>\n\n<That's not what I said!>\n\n<But that's what you meant.>\n\n<I hate you.>\n\n<No. You love me.>\n\n<Yes,> David thought. And in his secret heart, tucked far away from even a dragon, a tiny voice whispered, <More than anything else.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The following year proved hard for the village. The healing rains didn't come, causing a drought that no one could have predicted. The ground dried up, becoming hard and cracked. Crops failed, the plants poking through the ground dying without so much as a gasp. By the end of David's twenty-first year, the people of the village began to suffer.\n\n\"What will we do?\" someone cried as they gathered before their mayor. David's mother raised her hands to try and quiet the worried crowd. \"We have children to feed!\"\n\n\"We will come through this as we always do,\" Mom said, looking out at her audience. \"Things will be tight for a little while, but the rains will come again. We're not yet to the point where we'll need to ration food, but I ask that each household take stock of what they have.\" Her gaze grew hard. \"No one should be hoarding anything. We must take care of each other. The children and the elderly will be our first priority. Times are lean, but we will pray to the gods and hope for the best. We'll be all right.\"\n\n<Is it bad?> Lockes asked. <They sound frightened.>\n\n<They're worried,> David said, Levi's hand clutched in his own. <Without the rains, the crops can't grow. If they don't grow, we can't sell anything or feed ourselves.>\n\n<You will not go hungry,> Lockes muttered. <I will provide for you.>\n\n<It's not just me,> David said. <It's the entire village.>\n\n<I care not for your village. Only you.>\n\nDavid sighed. He felt Levi looking at him in confusion, and he shook his head as he smiled weakly. Levi frowned but didn't speak, turning back to listen to David's mother. <I know. But I must think about others too.>\n\n<I can help.>\n\nDavid sat straighter in his seat. <No. I told you that you can't show yourself. They would\u2014>\n\n<I'm not revealing myself,> Lockes said. <I have an idea. It will take me time, but I promise I will return.>\n\nAlarmed, David said, <Return? Where are you going? Are you leaving me?> He began to panic, trying to keep the worst of it from his face.\n\n<Calm,> Lockes whispered. <Calm. I would never leave you for long. Two weeks, David. If I fly now and go as fast as I can, I will return in two weeks. Do you trust me?>\n\n<Yes,> David said, the mark on his chest itching. Without thinking, he rubbed his hand against it. <I trust you in all things.>\n\n<As you should, my love. I will come back. I am not done with you yet.>\n\nThe door closed in his mind, and David sat in a daze for the rest of the meeting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "True to his word, lockes returned exactly two weeks later. David sat in his mother's office, taking notes as she paced back and forth, her thoughts in a tizzy. The door in his mind flew open, and the pen he held fell to the floor.\n\n<You're back!>\n\n<I am,> Lockes said. <I flew as fast as I ever have.>\n\nDavid's brow furrowed. <You sound exhausted.>\n\n<I am, but it's okay. The return trip was harder than I expected, given all that I carried with me. Can you come? I have brought a solution to your problems.>\n\n<What is it?>\n\n<Patience, David. Come, and I will show you.>\n\n<All right. Give me a bit. I'm with my mother. I'll get away as soon as I'm able.> His shoulders relaxed, losing the rigidness they'd carried since Lockes had departed. He knew the dragon would return, but hearing his voice again brought a flood of relief.\n\n\"\u2014and make sure you include the village council in this missive. We don't want anyone left in the dark when they\u2026David. Are you listening?\"\n\nHe smiled tightly as he looked at his mother. \"I am. Sorry. Got lost in my head a little bit.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"This is important, David. I need you here, with me, giving your all. We have to find a way to come through this. I can't have your head in the clouds right now. Focus.\"\n\nHe nodded and slumped in his chair as she continued on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "He escaped an hour later, promising his mother that he and Levi would drop in for dinner the following week. David felt a pang of guilt, knowing the secrets he carried with him, but he knew they wouldn't understand. He had to do what he could to protect his dragon. Levi was asleep at home, resting before another shift as a night watchman. Though David wanted to go to him and curl up in their bed, the thought was fleeting. Lockes was back, and that was all that mattered.\n\nHe found Lockes in the clearing, wings spread out on the ground as if he'd collapsed there and hadn't moved. David rushed forward as Lockes opened a single eye, huffing out a warm breath in greeting.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" David asked, running his hands over the dragon's face, searching for any sign of injury. He found none, but he didn't like how exhausted the dragon seemed.\n\n<Fine, my love,> Lockes said with a sigh. <It will take time for my strength to return, but I will be well. Look at what I've brought you.>\n\nHe raised his head and neck, revealing four bulging sacks as tall as David underneath him. David touched the closest one, frowning at the odd shapes through the burlap. <What is it?>\n\n<Open it and find out.>\n\nDavid did, untying the sack. He gasped when he saw what lay inside.\n\nGold and silver coins in varying shapes and sizes, heavy and thick with faces and strange markings David didn't recognize. And jewels! Jewels of red and blue and yellow and white, some in bulky rocks, others cut into with angular corners and planes. The sack was filled to the brim. As if in a dream, he moved onto the other sacks, opening them all and finding more of the same, along with moonstone dishes inlaid with gold and rubies, ancient chalices that looked religious in nature.\n\n\"Where did this all come from?\" David whispered, hands shaking.\n\n<My hoard,> Lockes said proudly. <I flew all the way back to where I came from, gathered what I could and brought it back for you. Will it help?>\n\nStunned, David choked on a harsh laugh. \"Will it help? My gods, Lockes. This is enough to support the village for hundreds of years to come!\" He blinked against the tears in his eyes. \"We\u2026I can't accept this. It's yours.\"\n\n<We are one in all things,> Lockes murmured, snuffling against David's head. <What is mine is yours. I have no need for it since you are my treasure. I give this willingly.>\n\nDavid had learned that a dragon's decision\u2014especially one as big as this\u2014was ironclad. To deny the gift could cause great offense. He bowed low in front of Lockes, one arm behind his back, curling his other arm across his chest. <You honor me, Lockes.>\n\nLockes snorted. <Take your honor and shove it. I did this because I love you. Pretty things are everywhere. You are not.>\n\nStill dazed, David said, \"But\u2026what about your home? You\u2026went all the way back and returned? Don't you miss what you left behind?\"\n\nLockes pulled his lips back over his teeth in a smile. <You are my home. I did miss what I left behind, but now I no longer need to, because I have come back to it. To you.>\n\nDavid threw himself against the dragon's chest, his face against the keyhole. <You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.>\n\nThe dragon lifted his wings, encasing them in a cocoon of darkness as he curled his head down against David's back. <And you to me.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"A gift!\" The people cried the next morning after a pile of treasure had been found on the doorstep to the mayor's house. \"A gift from the gods! We're saved! Oh, bless, bless, bless!\"\n\n\"Where did it come from?\" Levi asked as they watched David's mother and father sort through the treasure.\n\n\"The gods,\" David said. \"Who else could it be? They must have heard our pleas and sent this as a thank you for our devotion.\" It sounded hollow, even to him. It wasn't the gods. It was Lockes, but no one could ever know.\n\nLevi looked away, the skin tight around his eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "The smiths melted down the larger parts of the treasure, creating bricks of gold and silver that were kept under guard day and night. The coins and jewels were appraised, the jeweler from the next town perplexed at what he found. \"Some of this is ancient,\" he said, face almost inches away from one of the coins. \"Thousands of years old with languages I've never seen before.\" He lifted the coin, putting it between his teeth and biting down. When he pulled it back, little imprints of his teeth remained in the gold. \"How in the world did you come by this?\"\n\nDavid's mother said, \"It just appeared on our doorstep.\"\n\n\"Then you are very lucky,\" the jeweler said. \"It's real. All of it is real.\" He looked down at the separate piles he'd created. \"There's enough here to feed many mouths, and not just here.\"\n\n\"Everyone will get something,\" Mom said firmly. \"Not just in our village, but all those who have suffered because of the drought. We'll need to be careful to not spread it too thin, but we can't keep this for ourselves. No one should be left wanting.\"\n\nThey needn't have worried about that. This was only a small portion of the treasure, the rest stored away in the hollow of the tree. If the time came when more was needed, all David had to do was return to the forest and gather more. Lockes didn't seem to give one whit either way about the treasure, satisfied that he had David.\n\n\"You are gracious,\" the jeweler said with a bow. \"But I would caution you. Greed is a terrible thing, and word is already spreading about what has happened to your village. There will be those who would have this for themselves and would try and take it by any means necessary.\"\n\n\"It will be under constant guard,\" Levi said. \"I have been promoted to Captain of the Watch, and I've already gathered those I trust implicitly to make sure none is taken without agreement by all.\"\n\n\"Agreement,\" the jeweler said derisively. \"Gold drives people mad with desire. I think you'll find not everyone will agree.\"\n\n\"Our village will,\" Mom said, her tone brooking no argument. \"This isn't just for us. It will benefit us all, and though I don't know where it came from, I won't allow us to fall under its spell. We will be smart about this, and if I hear of any dissent, I will deal with it myself.\"\n\nDavid shivered at the steel in his mother's voice. There was a reason she'd been reelected time and time again. The people trusted her to do right by them. Her tone and words did not allow for argument to the contrary.\n\n\"And what of the King?\" the jeweler asked, a shrewd expression on his face that David didn't like. \"If he or his court catch word of this, they will send an envoy and demand an investigation. And that doesn't even begin to address how much they'd tax all of it.\"\n\n\"The Port is far from here,\" Dad said. \"Our people understand that we need to keep this quiet. We ask that anyone else who seeks help does the same. We've hidden more from Varden the Cruel.\"\n\nThe jeweler blanched at the nickname given to the bloodthirsty king. David had never laid eyes on him, but he'd heard the stories of the king's terrible might. His castle in the Port was built on the backs of the enslaved, and he had shown he didn't give a single shit about the struggling villages. They'd been on their own for longer than David had been alive, but this was a way to even the playing field.\n\n\"On your head, then,\" the jeweler said, though not so mired in irony that he didn't look as hungry as the rest of them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Seven months later, as the first snows began to fall, David stole away to the forest, his breath streaming from his mouth in a thick fog as his feet crunched on the thin layer of ice. It was early in the season for snow, a portent for the harsh winter ahead. But the people of the village were safe in their homes, fires lit, their bellies full. And so far, news of the treasure hadn't spread beyond the surrounding villages. David was surprised by this fact, but thankful for it. He'd spent restless nights, sure that he'd awaken to the sound of drumbeats and the village alarms, signaling the arrival of the king's knights.\n\nLockes blinked sleepily, his head dusted with snow as David entered the clearing. <There you are. You're late.>\n\n<Sorry. I had to finish up with work before I could get away. Levi was asking questions again.>\n\n<He always does,> Lockes said. <I don't know how you don't tire of them and his incessant prattling. It's obnoxious.>\n\n<I ask you questions all the time,> David reminded him.\n\n<Well, yes. But I love you. You are mine, and if you didn't ask questions, I'd think you sick. Come. It's too cold for you. I will warm you.> He lifted his wing, allowing David to sit on the hard ground underneath him. He breathed a thin stream of fire above his wings, heating up the air around David. <Is that better?>\n\n<Much, thank you.> David settled against Lockes, taking in the comfort of familiarity.\n\n<You sound tired.>\n\n\"I am,\" David said, scrubbing a hand over his face. Levi is\u2026 He shook his head as he chuckled bitterly. He's wearing on my last nerve, if I'm being honest. <He wants to know where I go. He asked me again if there was someone else.>\n\n<Jealousy is useless,> Lockes said as he yawned, jaw cracking. <You love him. That should be enough.>\n\n<I know, but I am keeping secrets from him. It makes me feel guilty.>\n\n<Why?>\n\nDavid closed his eyes. <Because you're part of my life in ways he's not. A marriage is meant to be open and honest.>\n\n<You are open and honest.>\n\n<Not about you.>\n\nLockes hesitated. <Does that bother you? I've told you that you can bring him if you like. I may not love him as you do, but I can stand him if I must.>\n\n<Wow. You're really putting yourself out there.>\n\n<Oh, hush,> Lockes grumbled. <You know what I mean.>\n\nAnd David did. But he couldn't find a way to articulate how the idea filled him with dread. Lockes was perfectly happy to keep David to himself, and David felt the same. He didn't think anyone else could understand. And if he did reveal Lockes to anyone, he would have to answer as to why it'd been years since he'd first met the dragon and hadn't said anything. Lockes was right: jealousy was a useless emotion, but David didn't like the idea of anyone else taking up his dragon's time.\n\nLockes must have latched onto this thought. <As if anyone would compare to you. Do you think me so fickle that my gaze would wander?>\n\n<No. I just\u2026this is our time. You and me. I need it as much as I need you. I'm not ashamed of you. If I thought I could, I would shout your name from the rooftops. You're my best friend. My love. My everything.> He waited for the guilt to rise again at such thoughts, but it never came.\n\n<I am,> Lockes said, a rumbling purr coming from his chest, a rare sound that expressed his complete satisfaction. <I wouldn't have it any other way.>\n\nDavid tilted his head back as he opened his eyes. <Do you\u2026do you ever think about leaving?>\n\n<No.>\n\n<Never?>\n\n<Never.>\n\n<What if\u2026>\n\n<Spill it, David. Your thoughts are jumbled and I can't find what you're trying to say.>\n\n\"What if I went with you?\" David said aloud. \"What if we \u2026left and went somewhere else?\"\n\nLockes didn't speak for a long time. David was about to tell him to forget it when the dragon said, <Where would we go?>\n\n<Wherever we wanted to. Away from everyone else. We'd find a place where we didn't have to hide. We could just\u2026be.>\n\n<Would you like that?>\n\n<I...>\n\n<Would you be able to leave your mother and father? Levi? Your friends? The home you have built, the life you've created?>\n\nDavid fisted his hair in frustration. <I don't know. Sometimes, I think I could. I don't know what that says about me.>\n\n<It says that you're human. Wonderfully, horribly human. I may not always understand you or your kind, but I know you'd regret it one day.>\n\n<How do you know?>\n\n<You need people,> Lockes said. <Others like you. What if you began to see me with regret and disdain? My hearts couldn't take it if you blamed me for taking you away.>\n\n<I wouldn't!>\n\n<I know you think so. But it might happen, sooner than you'd expect. Think on it, David. Think on it as hard as you ever have in your life. If that's what you truly want, then yes, I would go with you anywhere you wanted. Back to my keep. Or across the snowy mountains to the land of giants. Beyond even that. Wherever you go, I go. Here, or anywhere else.>\n\n<I will,> David vowed. <I'll think on it. I don't have to make the decision today.>\n\n<You don't,> Lockes agreed. <Today, let us just enjoy each other's company. Would you tell me a story? I do love the one about the unicorn. I met a pair of unicorns once. Foul creatures, those, always thinking with their genitals. I would hear your terrible story about them again.>\n\nAnd so David did, the flurries falling around them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "He left lockes behind as the sky began to darken, wanting to get home before nightfall. He promised to return as soon as possible, telling Lockes that the treasure still hidden wasn't needed at the moment. They had more than enough to survive the winter and beyond.\n\nHe was halfway home when he looked down at the tracks he'd made on his trip to see Lockes. He frowned, a strange sense of unease sliding in between his ribs when he saw his own footsteps in the snow\u2026next to another set of tracks. Human. Boot prints, set far apart as if whoever had left them was very tall, or had taken exaggerated steps. But to what end? Wracking his brain, he tried to remember if he'd noticed them on his way in. He didn't think he had. There'd been no snow the last time he'd come, and the prints were slightly larger than his own feet, so it couldn't have been him.\n\n<David?> Lockes whispered. <What's wrong?>\n\n<I\u2026nothing, maybe. Have you seen anyone else? Smelled or heard anything?>\n\n<No. But the winds are blowing away from me, not toward. I wouldn't have caught a scent unless they were close. Is there reason for concern?>\n\n<I don't know. Be ready, just in case.>\n\n<In case of what?>\n\nTo that, David had no answer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "That feeling of unease only grew as he approached the village. Given the oncoming weather, the village should've been locked up tight, everyone in their homes around the hearth to keep warm. Instead, he saw shadows moving at the center of the village as he crossed beyond the houses on the outskirts, as if a crowd had gathered. No alarms were ringing, but that didn't mean something wasn't wrong. He thought about going directly to his parents, but then he heard his father's voice, loud, angry, the words lost but the intent clear. His father was furious.\n\nDavid hurried towards the village center, pressing his back against a shop as he sidled down the side to peer around the edge.\n\nWhat he saw stopped him cold. A crowd of at least thirty people were gathered in the dirt road in front of the Mayor's office. Mom and Dad stood on the porch of the office, wrapped in heavy furs. Dad's face was twisted, his cheeks splotchy as Mom spoke in soothing tones, though she too looked perturbed. The crowd was too thick to see if she spoke to one or all, but torches were lit, and the men had weapons: rusted swords and halberds, taken from the storage shed the watchmen used when they patrolled at night. David couldn't remember a time when the weapons had actually been used, more for show than anything else. He doubted a single person who held a weapon had used it in defense, though they'd all been trained in case the need arose.\n\nAnd then the crowd shifted, and he saw the one person he didn't expect.\n\nHis husband.\n\nLevi looked incensed as he glanced at the gathering behind him before turning back toward David's parents. His voice rose, taking on a cadence David hadn't heard before. \"I know what I saw,\" Levi snapped. \"I wouldn't lie, not about this. Not about him. This pains me more than you know, but it is there. Skulking in the woods, ready to kill us all.\"\n\n\"So you say,\" Mom retorted. Dad placed a hand on her arm, and she shrugged him off. \"I know you love my son, Levi, and you've seen to his happiness. That alone is enough for me to listen to you. But how can you be sure? What were you doing in the woods?\"\n\n\"I followed him,\" Levi said, and David's blood turned to an icy sludge. \"You know he disappears into the forest. He's done it for years. And none of us has done anything to stop him. I couldn't let it go on any longer. I thought\u2026\" He hung his head, his shame evident. \"I thought there was someone else. That he\u2026\" Levi's hands curled into fists. \"But it wasn't. It's worse than that.\" Levi raised his head, and though David couldn't see his face, the rigid set of his husband's shoulders was enough of an indicator.\n\n\"My husband,\" Levi said, \"was with a dragon. A terrible beast with claws and fangs that could tear through any of us in an instant. We are in danger, and David has betrayed us. He was\u2026he was laying on the creature. As if he knew it.\"\n\nThe crowd murmured, the sound like a harsh wind over old bones.\n\n\"That's a serious accusation,\" Dad snapped. \"How dare you. We invited you into our home. Our lives. We thought our son was safe with you, but here you are, disparaging his character. David wouldn't betray us, and the fact that you can speak those words so easily makes me regret ever allowing you near him.\"\n\n\"Then where is he?\" someone called from the crowd. \"If what Levi is saying isn't true, where is David?\"\n\nAnd though David was more frightened than he'd ever been, he wouldn't let them take Lockes from him. He gave brief thought to running back to the clearing, but these were his people. They would listen to him. They had to. He'd make them see.\n\nHe stepped out from the shadows, shoulders squared, head held high. He didn't try to hide his approach and a man\u2014Teacher, David thought dizzily\u2014turned, eyes wide. \"There he is!\" he cried. \"David is here!\"\n\nThe crowd turned as one, all eyes on David. He did his best to keep from flinching, not wanting to show any sign of weakness. If they saw it, they'd think he felt guilty. He didn't. He had done nothing wrong, and he'd prove it, no matter what it took.\n\nThe people parted as he walked through the middle of the crowd. Levi frowned at him, but David ignored him, heart cracking. He loved Levi, but he couldn't look at him, much less speak for fear he'd say things he couldn't take back. He didn't know what that made him. A coward, most likely.\n\nDad jumped from the porch, rushing toward his son. He gripped David's arms, fingers digging in hard enough to leave bruises. \"Tell them,\" Dad begged. \"Tell them Levi's wrong. That he didn't see what he says he did.\"\n\nDavid looked his father in the eyes and said, \"I can't.\"\n\nSilence fell over the village, thick flakes of snow dancing around them.\n\nDad dropped his hands and took a stuttering step back. \"What?\"\n\n<Run,> David thought as hard as he could. <Oh please, run. Fly as fast as you can. Leave. Never look back.>\n\n<No,> Lockes growled. <I will never leave you.>\n\nTears prickled his too-hot eyes, though he didn't know who they were for. Himself. His family. His people. Levi. Mom. Dad.\n\nLockes.\n\nHe said, \"There is nothing for you to fear. I swear it. I wouldn't bring death and fire upon our village. It's not like that. It never has been.\"\n\n\"David,\" Mom whispered. \"What have you done?\"\n\nHe hated the pain in her voice, the devastated look on her face, but he couldn't do anything about that now. This was his secret, one he'd carried for years, and now that it was out in the open, he needed to prove to them that Lockes wasn't dangerous. \"I made a friend,\" he said, his voice stronger than he felt. \"Someone who protects me. He sees me for who I am. He doesn't expect me to be anything I'm not.\"\n\n\"He!\" Levi said. \"Are you listening to yourself? He. It's not a he, David. It's a thing. A monster incapable of rational thought.\"\n\nDavid glanced back at his husband, stiff neck creaking. Levi looked wounded and furious, an awful combination. \"He is real,\" David said. \"More than anyone could have known. I talk to him. He talks to me.\"\n\nThe crowd's whispers grew louder, no longer a wind but an approaching storm.\n\n\"That's not possible,\" Mom said. \"Dragons don't talk like we do. There's a reason they were hunted. They are killing machines, capable of destroying everything they come across.\"\n\nDavid shook his head. \"You're wrong. I know you've heard the stories, and maybe some of it is true. But this dragon isn't like the others. He's different. He\u2026\" Then, \"The treasure.\"\n\nDad grunted as if struck. \"What about the treasure?\"\n\n\"It was a gift,\" David said. \"I told him of our struggles, how our people were suffering. By rights, he could've done nothing at all. But our friendship means more to him than anything in the world. He gave me\u2014us, his hoard. The reason we survived the droughts was because of his selflessness.\"\n\n\"And what did you offer it in return?\" Levi snarled, moving until he stood in front of David, eyes ablaze. \"What did you give it to receive such a thing? Have you been telling him about us?\" David had never seen him so angry, and he flinched as if Levi was about to strike him. \"Did you betray us to the dragon?\"\n\n\"No,\" David spat. \"I have never betrayed anyone. Lockes wants nothing but my company. That's all he ever wanted. He's my\u2014\"\n\n\"Lockes!\" Levi cried. \"You've given it a name? It's not a pet. It's evil. Gods, David, how could you be this stupid?\"\n\nWithout thinking, David shoved Levi back. He didn't fall, though it was close. \"Fuck you,\" David growled, sounding more dragon than man. \"Don't you dare speak of him or me in such a way. You may be my husband, but I won't allow it. Watch your tongue.\"\n\nLevi was shocked into silence.\n\nDavid looked beyond him to his mother. \"Lockes has never harmed me, nor has he ever harmed a single person, either in this village or elsewhere. He has only ever wanted to help. We wouldn't have survived without him. Do you understand what it takes for a dragon to part with his hoard? It is their everything. And yet he didn't hesitate when I told him of our troubles. He offered without reservation.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Mom asked faintly. \"Why would he give such a thing?\"\n\n\"Because he loves me,\" David said. \"And I love him. He's not a monster. He's not evil. He is kind and wonderful and\u2014\"\n\n\"He's been brainwashed,\" Levi said. \"The dragon has addled his mind!\"\n\n\"He hasn't,\" David said, trying to keep his voice calm. \"I've never thought more clearly than I do at this moment. We owe our lives to Lockes. He has provided for us. And there is more, so much more than what he's already given. Because of him we will never suffer again.\" He never looked away from his mother. \"We have survived because of him. Instead of swords and fire, we should be on our knees thanking him.\"\n\n\"Blasphemy!\" someone shouted in the crowd.\n\n\"You will stay away from it,\" Levi growled, gripping David and shaking him so hard, his head snapped back and forth. \"You won't go to the woods again. I won't allow it.\"\n\nDavid shoved him again. \"I can think for myself. You're my husband, but that doesn't give you the right to make decisions for me. Levi, I love you. I do. But you're wrong. All of you are wrong.\"\n\nHe looked to his father. Dad stared at the ground, arms across his chest.\n\nHe looked to his husband. Levi's face was dark with blood, spittle flecking his lips.\n\nHe looked to his mother. Mom had tears in her eyes, her mouth a thin, white line.\n\nAnd then she shook her head. \"I'm sorry, David. I can't take the chance. It's not just about you. It's about all of us. If\u2026if the dragon grew angry, what would stop it from destroying all we hold dear? What if he wants something in return for what he's given us, something that we can't offer? Blood. Our children.\"\n\nDavid laughed, bitter and sharp. \"Are you listening to yourselves? Are you listening to me? I'm telling you he's not a threat! If he wanted to harm us, he would have done it years ago.\"\n\n\"Years,\" Levi scoffed. \"Because that's how long you've known about it, haven't you? You've kept this from us for years. How are we supposed to trust you after this? For all we know, you're working with the dragon!\" His paused, eyes narrowing as if a thought struck him. \"That mark.\"\n\n\"What mark?\" Dad asked as David began to sweat.\n\n\"David has a symbol on his chest. He said it was a tattoo. But I asked. No one in the village has marked David in such a way.\"\n\n\"David?\" Mom asked. \"Is\u2026is Levi right? Do you have a mark?\"\n\n<David,> Lockes warned. <Leave them. Leave them and return to me. Don't make me ask you twice.>\n\nDavid ignored him. For the rest of his days, he would remember this moment, when he believed he could get through to his people, that they would hear his truth and know there was nothing to be afraid of. Regardless of what else he was, David was still remarkably, foolishly human. His hope in his people blinded him to the truth, and had he but done as his dragon requested, all that followed might have happened differently.\n\nYes, this memory would haunt him for years to come: here, in this moment, he still had hope.\n\n\"I do,\" David said. \"And I wear it proudly. Because it marks me as a friend of the dragon. My dragon. And no one can take that from me.\"\n\n\"Show me,\" Mom said. \"Now.\"\n\nHe did. He unfastened his coat and lifted his tunic, the light from flickering flames dancing along the keyhole carved into his chest.\n\nDad let out a long, mournful sound. Mom put her face in her hands. The crowd jostled around David as everyone tried to see the mark for themselves, their faces white in terror.\n\n\"I told you,\" Levi said. \"Everything I said is true. He wears the mark of a dragon, which means the dragon has poisoned him against us. How could you do this to us. To me? You've broken my heart.\" He spat at the ground at David's feet.\n\nDavid bristled. \"Because I knew this is how you'd react. You're all so fucking scared, but of what? Lockes has done nothing but help us. You fear things you don't understand, and when that fear becomes too great, you fill with bloodlust, wanting to strike down whatever frightens you. If you have ever loved me, if you have ever thought of me as husband or friend or son, then you'll trust me with this. I've earned that much.\"\n\nMom lowered her hands, and for a moment, David thought he'd gotten through to her. He thought she'd heard him, really heard him. It shattered like glass when she said, \"I'm sorry, David. We can't take the chance.\" She raised her voice. \"We must destroy the dragon before it can attack. Those who can, take up arms. Hide the children in your homes. We will not stop until the dragon is dead.\"\n\n\"What?\" David cried. \"No! You can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Take him,\" Dad said. \"Lock David up until we can be sure the dragon's magic has been purged from his body. If there's more treasure, then we'll have it for our own.\" He looked grave when he added, \"And a dragon's body is worth its weight in gold. Leave nothing to chance.\"\n\nHands descended on David as he struggled, snarling as if feral. He kicked Teacher in the face when the man tried to grab his legs. Other hands grabbed David's arms, pulling them back so hard, he thought they'd pop out of their sockets. Rough rope wrapped around his wrists, binding them behind his back. \"No!\" he shouted. \"You can't hurt him. Oh my gods, please don't hurt him. Mom! Dad! Don't do this. You have to stop!\"\n\nHis mother and father didn't move to stop him from being lifted up in the air, Levi grunting as David's knee connected with his nose. A savage sense of satisfaction rolled through David as his husband's nose gushed blood.\n\nDavid screamed then, screamed as loud and hard as he could. He put everything into it: his rage, his fear, his anguish. All of it. It echoed in the village and through the woods, causing winter birds to take flight in terror.\n\nAnd it was met with an answering cry: the roar of an angry dragon.\n\nEveryone stopped.\n\n<David,> Lockes whispered. <I am coming.>\n\n\"No!\" David bellowed, back bowing so much that the people almost dropped him. \"You fly. Across the mountains! Across the sea! Go, and never look back!\"\n\n<I can't.>\n\nDavid threw his body as hard as he could. The people who held him were caught off guard, hands slipping. He fell to the ground, landing with a bone-jarring crash that knocked the breath from his chest. He pushed through it, gagging as he flipped over, drawing his legs up underneath him and rising. He managed to make five running steps before someone grabbed the rope binding his hands, pulling it taut, causing David to fall on his back in the snow.\n\nA familiar sound rose above the village: great wings slicing through the air. David raised his head in time to see a massive shadow blot out the black clouds above the village. People screamed around him as Lockes reared back, wings spread, eyes bright in the dark.\n\nLockes folded his wings and hurtled toward the ground. Everyone scrambled out of the way, and the earth rolled as Lockes landed, front legs on either side of David. The dragon's mouth opened, and he hissed, an awful sound David had never heard him make before. His tail whipped back and forth, kicking up snow and dirt, hitting the side of a building, which shook and groaned but didn't fall.\n\n<Are you all right?> Lockes asked as he snapped his fangs at the frightened people gathering in front of the Mayor's office.\n\n<You shouldn't have come! I told you to run!>\n\n<As if I would leave you,> Lockes replied angrily. <You needed me. These people aren't to be trusted. I will take you away from here. We will go and never return.> His tail whipped around his body, falling on David and flipping him over. He used the last spike on his tail to slice through the ropes around David's wrists.\n\nDavid pushed himself up off the ground. Lockes curved his neck around David, shielding him from the crowd. <Are you injured?>\n\n<No. They didn't\u2026yes. We will leave. We will leave and never return. Take me away, Lockes. Take me away where we can find everlasting peace.>\n\nA loud thunk startled David, and he turned in time to see a halberd fall to the ground next to him. Someone had tried to hurt Lockes, but the spear had glanced off his scales.\n\n<That wasn't very nice,> Lockes said. <I haven't killed a human before. I don't want to start now.>\n\nDavid pushed his way from underneath the dragon, cold as he watched his people. Their faces were ashen and slack. He couldn't see Levi among them, but it didn't matter. They had both made their choices. \"We will go,\" he said hoarsely. \"Away from you. Away from all of this. You'll never have to see me again.\"\n\n\"David,\" Mom whispered. \"No, we don't\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop,\" he snapped. \"You've proven your point. You won't listen. Yes, I lied to you. I lied to all of you, but that doesn't give you the right to hurt him. You're my mother. You're supposed to listen to me. You're supposed to protect me.\"\n\n\"I have to protect everyone,\" she pleaded. \"David, you can't expect us to just\u2014\"\n\n\"Look!\" Teacher cried. \"It's there, just as Levi said! The dragon has the same mark as David! It cast his magic on him. The only way to save him is to slay the dragon!\"\n\n\"Kill it,\" the crowd whispered. \"Slay the dragon. Free David from its spell.\"\n\nDavid backed up against Lockes, eyes narrowed, heart thundering. \"Stay back. I told you we would leave. You won't have to worry about us again. We'll go far from here, where no one can hurt us.\"\n\n\"David, you're not thinking clearly,\" Dad pleaded. \"It's infected you. Please, son. Stand aside. Let us help you.\"\n\n<You tried,> Lockes said. <I am sorry that it's come to this, David. We must go while we still can. Run for the forest. I will follow you. Head for the clearing. I'll meet you there, and I'll take you away from here.>\n\n<Yes. Yes. Yes. Away. We'll go away.>\n\nHe gave one last look at his people, his friends. His parents. Betrayal burned, but they'd made their choice just as he'd made his. Perhaps he would one day regret his actions, but that was not this day. Now, he only cared about saving his friend. Nothing else mattered.\n\nHe turned to do as Lockes asked. He only made it a step when a flurry of movement appeared at the corner of his eye.\n\nLevi, sword raised, mouth open in a silent scream of fury, his gaze trained on David.\n\n\"No,\" David whispered, raising his hand.\n\nLockes moved quicker than David had ever seen him, but not for Levi. He slammed his head against David, knocking him off his feet and out of the way. Before the dragon could recover, Levi stabbed him in the chest, the sword a key piercing the keyhole.\n\nAnd oh, how David screamed as pain crashed into him as if his own chest had been run through. His mind whited out as Lockes roared, head back, fangs snapping at nothing. The sword jerked from Levi's hand, still lodged in the dragon's chest as Lockes took a staggering step back. Blood, shiny and black in the darkness, gushed forth, splattering the ground. Lockes groaned deep in his throat as he fell to the ground, his right wing crumpled underneath him.\n\n\"No,\" David muttered as he pushed himself up. \"No, no, nononono\u2014\" He rushed toward his friend, falling to his knees next to the hilt of the sword. He gripped it, meaning to pull it from the dragon's chest, but Lockes whined in pain, eyes squeezed shut, his breaths already labored.\n\n\"Stay with me,\" David begged as he moved to Lockes's head. \"Please stay with me.\"\n\n<I am with you,> Lockes whispered. <I am always with you.>\n\nDavid ignored the hushed crowd around him as he held his friend's face in his hands. \"I can fix this. Tell me how to fix this.\"\n\n<You can't, David. One of my hearts has been pierced. It's\u2026> He groaned again, blood dribbling out of his mouth in a steady stream, coating David's front. <There is nothing you can do.>\n\nDavid tilted his back toward the sky. \"Gods!\" he cried. \"Save him. If he is one of yours, save him.\"\n\nBut the gods did not answer.\n\n<David,> Lockes said, and his voice sounded stronger. For a moment, David hoped against hope. But the blood around the sword continued to pour from the mortal wound. <Listen to me.>\n\nDavid sobbed against the dragon, laying on his snout, head resting on the ridge between his eyes. \"You can't leave me. You promised. You promised me.\"\n\n<I did,> Lockes said. <And a dragon always keeps his promises. This is not the end. Remember? We will be together again, no matter what it takes. We will cross the same veil and defy the gods and stars should they attempt to keep us apart.>\n\nDavid screamed and screamed, the people around them shuddering.\n\n<My love,> Lockes said, voice fading. <My life had no meaning until I met you. You gave me purpose. You gave me a home. Live. Live as long as your life allows and know that I'll be waiting for you when your time comes. We'll find peace. We'll find everlasting life. Together, as we were meant to be.>\n\n\"I can't do this without you,\" David choked out.\n\n<You can. And you will. Do you love me?>\n\n\"With everything I have.\"\n\nThe dragon sighed. <Oh, how that makes me soar. There has never been one such as you. And I love you more than you could ever know. David, I'm\u2026I'm flying. We're flying. Can you feel it? Can you see it?>\n\nDavid closed his eyes, and there, in his head, was the bright blue sky, the sun beaming down on them. Clouds passed them by as they flew far above the world, together, always together. The image began to dissipate, and no matter how much David tried to hold onto it, it poured through his fingers like sand.\n\nHe opened his eyes.\n\nLockes didn't move. His chest didn't rise.\n\n\"Lockes?\" he whispered. \"Lockes. You have to get up. You need\u2014please, get up. Oh my gods, move. Move.\" He slammed his fists against the dragon's face, but the amber eyes he'd known so well had closed for the last time.\n\nDavid slid from the dragon, falling to his knees. He rocked back on his legs and screamed at the sky. The sound echoed through the village, the forest, and for a long time after, people would speak in hushed whispers about his excruciating wail, the way David's eyes flashed like a dragon's, his teeth bared as if they were fangs.\n\nBut that would come later.\n\nNow, they stood as witnesses to the greed and fear of men. They bowed their heads as David's rage washed over them, absolute and never ending.\n\nBut David was not a dragon. His human throat eventually closed, his scream cutting off in a wet choke as he fell to the ground next to Lockes, curling around the dragon's mouth. David closed his eyes, and they did not reopen for three days."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The dragon was slaughtered, quartered, blood soaking the earth. Though they did not know it then, nothing would ever grow in or around the village again. It was as if their hubris had poisoned the very earth upon which they lived. Though they would feel regret, most agreed that it was the right thing to do, and the money the dragon meat and skin brought in was more than enough to make up for the loss of crops. And it was made easier when a group of villagers\u2014led by a silent and brooding Levi\u2014came to the clearing and found the rest of the treasure in the hollow of the tree.\n\nA year later, a traveler would come to the village, meaning to trade his wares. He crested the ridge on the road that led to the village, and stopped, his pack mule bleating in fear.\n\nBelow them, the burnt remains of the village stood smoldering. Once the traveler returned to the Port, eyes bulging, face as white as snow, he spoke of what he'd seen. A contingent of knights was sent to the remains of the village, and though they went through the blackened wood carefully, they never found a sign of any of the villagers. It was as if they'd all disappeared into thin air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "But that came later.\n\nThis was now:\n\nDavid opened his eyes on the third day in the bedroom he'd grown up in. For a moment, he thought he woke from a gentle sleep, but then his sleepy mind reached out for Lockes, only to be met with a gaping chasm where the dragon had once been. In that moment between sleep and wakefulness, he was almost able to convince himself that Lockes was still alive.\n\nTruth seeped in, as it always did.\n\nHe wept then; great wracking sobs that made him feel as if he were being torn apart. The storm eventually passed, eyes gritty, throat ragged, heart sore. Cool winter light filtered in through the window.\n\nThe door opened, and his mother and father stepped into the room, pausing when they saw he was awake.\n\n\"David,\" Mom breathed. \"You\u2026\"\n\nHe did not speak. He had nothing left to say to them. To any of them.\n\n\"David,\" Dad tried, voice gruff. \"I\u2026we know this is hard for you. But we did what we had to in order to keep you safe. You're free now. The dragon's magic no longer has a hold on you. David. Can't you see? You're safe.\"\n\nStill, David didn't speak. He turned away from them toward the wall.\n\nEventually, they left him, closing the door."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "That night, as the village slept, David rose from his bed. He left his parents' house behind. A year later, it would be the second house crushed under the might of a god.\n\nThe first would be where David went after leaving his childhood home. The house he shared with his husband. He kept to the shadows, avoiding the watchmen who patrolled. He didn't look for Lockes. His friend was already gone, and he couldn't bear to see what had been done to his body.\n\nNo lights came from the house. He went inside, up to the room he'd shared with a man who he thought he'd be with for the rest of his life. Love, he knew, could also be poison. And how it poisoned every part of his body. He pulled a pack from the closet, packing up everything he thought he'd need. His heart ached, and he rubbed his chest absentmindedly, the symbol on his chest feeling like it burned white hot.\n\nHe knew where he had to go.\n\nOnly one being could answer his questions.\n\nHe shouldered the pack and turned toward the door.\n\nLevi stood there, watching David with haunted eyes.\n\n\"You're leaving,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Yes,\" David said. \"I am. And if you try and stop me, I will tear your head from your shoulders.\"\n\nLevi flinched, but it brought David no satisfaction. \"I believe you.\"\n\nDavid sneered at him. \"Move. Now.\"\n\nLevi didn't. He took a step into the room, hands raised in caution. \"I\u2026David, I only wanted to help\u2014\"\n\nDavid moved without thought, arm across Levi's throat as he pinned his husband against the wall. \"I will never forgive you,\" he snarled in Levi's face, spittle flying onto Levi's cheeks, his lips, his chin. \"You have taken from me. I hate you. Do you hear me? I hate you.\"\n\nLevi's mouth twisted down, eyes wet. \"You're not in your right mind. You\u2014\" His words cut off in a choke as David pressed his arm harder into his throat.\n\n\"Do not follow me,\" David whispered. \"Do not attempt to find me. If you try, it'll be the last thing you ever do.\"\n\nHe left his husband in their house.\n\nDavid never returned to the village again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "He walked for three weeks, deep into the Dark Woods, grief heavy on his shoulders. He avoided the clearing on the first day, unable to lay his gaze upon it for fear he'd collapse and never move again. His body would give out, and his skin would bloat and rot until there was nothing left but bone. He'd return to the earth, and as much as it called to him, he wasn't ready. Not yet. Not when he had questions that needed answers.\n\nThe days passed in a haze. David rarely spoke aloud, lost in his head, memories of Lockes hanging in tatters. He attempted to gather them together as best he could, but it wasn't the same. He was alone for the first time since he could remember, truly alone.\n\nOn a cold night when the snows fell heavily, he camped in a shallow cave. He lit a fire, trying to keep warm. He lay as close to it as he dared, and the fire snapped and popped, embers rising with the smoke. The embers began to dance, pulsing, and for a moment, David thought he was dreaming.\n\nBut then one of the embers spoke in a quiet voice. It said, \"He waits for you. He knows you're coming, the old god. He hears your sorrow as if it were his own. You will find the answers you seek.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" David whispered.\n\nThe embers grew in numbers, alighting around the cave, bright as stars. \"We are the Fairies of the Wood,\" the ember said. \"We will guide you to him. You may call me Dimitri. I am the King of the Fairies, and I mourn with you. Your grief is our grief. Your pain our pain.\"\n\nDavid drifted after, hovering between sleep and consciousness. And in this half-life, another voice spoke, old and strong.\n\nCome, David, it said. It is almost time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "He followed the fairies through the woods. He did not speak to them, nor they him. David knew that fairies could be tricksters, but he had no other choice. He had to believe they wouldn't lead him astray.\n\nToward the end of the third week since he'd left the village behind, the fairies stopped. It was midday, the sun shining weakly, the trees heavy with snow. Before them, a great white mountain rose from the forest, and David worried he'd have to climb it. He didn't think he had the strength left to do so.\n\nThe fairies formed a bright buzzing cloud in front of him. One of the lights broke apart from the rest, fluttering in front of his face. \"Here,\" the light said, and David knew it to be Dimitri. \"Just up ahead. We'll remain in the trees to allow you an audience with the god. When you are ready to leave, we'll guide you from the forest.\"\n\n\"I'm not going back,\" David said.\n\n\"I know, child,\" Dimitri said. \"Listen to the god. He will show you your path.\"\n\nThe fairies flew past his head, back the way they'd come.\n\nDavid stared resolutely forward. He didn't know what to expect, but he couldn't back down now. Not when he'd come so far.\n\nHe turned his head, looking around. The forest was completely silent. No wind. No birds. Nothing. It was as if the earth itself held its breath.\n\n\"Hello?\" he said. \"I'm\u2026I seek an audience with the dragon god.\"\n\nNothing.\n\nDavid grew angry. \"Show yourself!\" he shouted, his grief pouring from him. \"I demand it.\"\n\nThe mountain shifted. The earth cracked. Snow fell in clumps. David froze as a massive head rose through the trees, knocking them aside, the roots groaning mightily as they tore from the earth. The sun was blotted out as the beast towered above David.\n\nA dragon. A pure white dragon with eyes of gold, the biggest David had ever seen, but it wasn't fear he felt, then. It wasn't terror.\n\nIt was grief, bright and glassy. Grief for all that he'd lost.\n\nDavid's knees grew week, and he collapsed to the ground, tears streaming from his face.\n\nThe dragon's head lowered toward his. David had never felt so small in his entire life. He didn't look away as the dragon studied him, its wings folded at its sides.\n\n\"I have traveled far to find you,\" David choked out. \"I need you to tell me why. Why it hurts. Why I can't breathe. Why, oh gods, why.\"\n\nThe dragon did not speak.\n\nDavid glared up at it, face twisted in a furious snarl. \"Why, godsdamn you! Why was he taken from me? Why do I have to feel this way? Why do we suffer no matter what we do?\"\n\nWhy, why, why echoed in the forest around them, mocking him, and his hands balled into fists as he slammed them into the ground, dirt and ice flinging up around him.\n\nEventually, he tired, slumping in on himself, rocking back and forth. <Please,> he whispered in his head. <Please help me. I don't know how to go on. I don't know how to fill the ragged hole in my chest.>\n\nAnd the dragon spoke, his voice thundering in David's head. <Child, you ask the same questions that many have pondered before you. In their anger, in their grief, they demand to know the why of things, as if they think it can offer an explanation that will satiate the fire burning within. Though I have the answers you seek, I warn you: you are human, and therefore ruled by your emotions. Nothing I can tell you will absolve you of that.>\n\n<Tell me,> David said. <I don't care about the repercussions. I must know.>\n\nThe dragon sighed. <I see that. I won't offer platitudes. You wouldn't take them even if I did. That being so, believe me when I say I share your pain. A dragon's death affects us all. The woods are darker because of the loss, but you must remember that his sacrifice cannot be in vain.>\n\n<Did I do this?> David asked, stricken. <Should I have sent him away the first day we met?>\n\n<He wouldn't have gone had you tried,> the dragon said. He shifted above David, raising his wings and cocooning them in darkness. <The one you call Lockes came to me, years ago. He had questions about the thread of light in his chest. He didn't know what it meant, who was waiting for him on the other end. He sought my council, and I showed him the truth of all things, letting him make the decision for himself.>\n\n<What truth? Who are you?>\n\nThe dragon's eyes glittered in the dark. <I am the Great White, the oldest being in creation, born of fire and rock when the world was young. A god, though I have not yet taken my place in the stars. I am balance. I am the crossroads. I am not the judge. I am not the jury. I am not the executioner. I do not take sides.>\n\n<Then what's the point of you?> David snapped, forgetting momentarily that the dragon could swallow him whole in the blink of an eye.\n\nInstead of anger, the dragon rumbled as if amused. <A question whose answer would require far more time than you have on this earth. Time has no meaning for me, not like it does you. You, as a human, can do only one thing: move ever forward toward your final breath. Even now, you're dying. Not because of the anguish that has consumed you, but because your life is finite. Though you may not believe me, I'm envious of you, knowing that one day, you'll cross beyond the veil. Time slips through your fingers. For me, time isn't a straight line with a dedicated sense of direction. It moves forward and backward. I see all. I know all.>\n\n<Did you know?> David shouted in his head. <Did you know how this would end?>\n\n<Yes, child. I did.>\n\nDavid reared back, furious, teeth bared. <Then why did you\u2014how could you have let him\u2014>\n\n<The one you call Lockes knew as well.>\n\nDavid gasped, another piece of his heart cracking and falling away. <What?>\n\nThe Great White shifted, lowering his head to the ground, his exhalations heating David's skin, causing sweat to trickle down his face. <He came to me, telling me of the instinct within him, the drive toward a future that was clouded to him. He sought my council, asking why he existed. What his purpose was. I gave him a choice: turn from his path and return to live a full life surrounded by his hoard. Or, continue on as he was, knowing his ending would come no matter what. He chose, child. He chose you.>\n\nDavid bowed his head, sobs shaking his chest and shoulders. <I don't understand.>\n\n<Dragons are solitary creatures,> the Great White said. <We can go centuries without ever speaking. And even if we choose to speak, most cannot hear us. You are different, David. You are one who hears the voices of dragons. There have only been a few of you. There will only ever be a few more.>\n\nDavid was then flooded with images that shot across his mind, almost quicker than he could follow, a storm with fierce winds that threatened to knock him over. He saw dragons of all shapes and sizes, black and red, white with ice feathers that shuddered and shook, a creature like a snake, desert sand kicking up around it as it slithered through a crumbling castle toward a cavernous hole.\n\nAnd through it all, a boy, standing tall and true, his robes billowing around him, hands raised toward a gathering darkness. For a moment, David stood next to this boy, and then he was the boy, his lighting-struck heart fierce and warm. He was frightened, this boy, perhaps more frightened than he'd ever been in his life. But what kept the fear from consuming him was the knowledge he wasn't alone.\n\nThe boy faded. The dragons faded. David was left alone, sitting in the snow with the Great White watching him.\n\n<What was that?> David whispered.\n\n<A glimpse,> the Great White said. <Of what will come. The path is set in stone, but stone crumbles. He will have a part to play, but he'll only succeed because of you, David. Though it may not seem like it now, the one you loved above all others will only do what he must because of what he learned from you. You gave him purpose. You gave him a home. You loved him without demanding anything in return, and that taught him more than I ever could. He loved you, and that has given him the tools to stand when he must against the face of evil. You were, in a way, his destiny.>\n\n<It's not fair!> David cried. <I don't care about what happens in the future. I don't care about destiny. I want my friend back!>\n\n<I cannot,> the Great White said, not unkindly. <What's done is done and cannot be undone. Your dragon knew this would happen. And yet he chose you regardless. He saw the time you would have together, and though it amounted to only the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, he could not see a life without you by his side. He knew it was better to have you for the time he did than to not have you at all. He was lonely, David, an affliction most dragons never have. But like you, he was different. He didn't want to be alone anymore. And with that quiet wish, he found his way to you, knowing it would mean his death.>\n\nDavid put his face in his hands as he struggled to breathe.\n\n<You suffer, child, because you gave your heart to him, much as he gave all of his to you. Can't you see? Such a love isn't something to be taken lightly. Grieve for him. Grieve for all that you've lost. But then raise your head toward the stars and know that he watches over you still. You will be together again, one day. Your time with the one you call Lockes isn't over. But before you join him in your rightful place by his side, there is something you must do. You have your own destiny, David, and if you're as strong as Lockes believed you to be, you'll see it through.>\n\n<What is it?> David asked as he dropped his hands. <What must I do?>\n\nAnother image filled his head, and it knocked the breath from his chest. It went on and on and though he did not know it, days passed, the sun rising and falling, clouds gathering, snows drifting from the sky.\n\nBy the time the image faded, David knew what he must do. The how of it was clear, and maybe even the why.\n\nBut still\u2026\n\n<I'm just one man,> he said. <How can I even know where to start?>\n\n<As such things always do,> the Great White said. <With a cornerstone. All other stones are set in reference to the cornerstone, with the first step. It will hurt, David. It will hurt like nothing else. But this is your destiny. This is the path you must follow, even if the stone crumbles underneath your feet. Take your pain and turn it into something more. Lockes will guide you, and I swear to you that by the time you draw your last breath, you will return to him, and nothing will separate you again.>\n\nDavid hung his head. <I don't know if I can do this.>\n\n<You can,> the Great White said. <Because you are a friend to the dragons. We will not let his sacrifice be in vain. Let his fire warm you when you're cold. Let his light chase away the shadows that gather around your heart. You wear his mark upon your chest. A lock, but he is your key, as you were his. Open yourself, David, and you'll do what you must.>\n\n<Will I always feel this way?>\n\nThe Great White lifted his head. <Perhaps. But so long as you remember the time you had together, you will overcome.>\n\nDavid nodded. <Then I'll do what I must. Not for you. Not for those who come after me. Not even for myself. For him. Lockes. Always Lockes.> He hesitated, chest hitching. <Can I\u2026can I touch you? I\u2026> He blinked rapidly, looking away. <I want to feel dragon scales. To\u2026> He sent an image, one he kept in his secret heart. His hands, cupping Lockes face, the dragon smiling in that quiet way he had.\n\n<Yes,> the Great White said. <You can.>\n\nDavid stood slowly, hands shaking as he raised them toward the dragon's face. He closed his eyes as his fingers touched hardened scales. It wasn't the same; he didn't try and convince himself otherwise. But it was still something, and though his sorrow ran deep into his very bones, David took the offered comfort, holding it close.\n\n<Look,> the Great White said, pulling his head away and spreading his wings. <Look up. Do you see it?>\n\nDavid tilted his head back, a shout of joy and agony pouring from his mouth.\n\nThere, in the night sky, was the constellation of a dragon, one he'd never seen before. The stars were tinged green, the wings wide, the mouth open in a silent roar.\n\n<He has earned his place amongst the stars,> the Great White whispered. <And you will join him, one day. But until then, know he watches over you, and rejoices in knowing your reunion will come.>\n\nDavid watched the constellation until the sky began to lighten, the stars fading against a deep blue.\n\nAs the sun rose, David looked at the Great White for the last time. <I'll do what you ask. But I'll warn you now. If you or anyone else tries to keep us apart, I will tear the heavens asunder to get to him.>\n\n<I believe you,> the Great White said. <I promise, child. And a dragon's promise is absolute. Begin, David. Begin so you can end.>\n\nDavid turned and left the Great White behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "The fairies led him from the Dark Woods. They didn't try and speak to him again, for which David was thankful. He was lost in his head, already planning on how he'd achieve what had been tasked to him. The fairies kept a watchful eye, guiding him in the right direction.\n\nWhen he stepped from the Dark Woods a few weeks later, he was determined. In the distance, he could see the outline of the Port, rising up against the vast sea. The flags of the King's Castle waved in the ocean breeze.\n\nHe turned from the Port, pointing his gaze east, toward rolling, empty fields of green. There, he thought to himself. That's where I must begin.\n\nYes, a voice whispered in the back of his mind, sounding like a friend lost. Yes, my love. This is where. I will be with you, every step of the way.\n\nDavid smiled, wiping his eyes. \"I know you will.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Over the course of two months, he built himself a small, single room dwelling of stone with a thatched roof. It was hard work, and he made mistakes, but he eventually got it right. People were curious about this man, stopping by on their way to or from the Port, asking what he was doing, and if he needed any help. He always invited them in for a meal or a cup of tea, but they left without knowing much more than when they'd arrived.\n\nOn a cool Spring morning, David set the first stone. The cornerstone, that which would guide the rest of what he'd create. He cried, then, as he laid the stone, cried great, gasping sobs as he set it in the field where he'd cleared the tallest of the grass.\n\n\"I miss you,\" he said as he touched the stone. \"I miss you so godsdamn much.\"\n\nA dragon's wings fluttered in his head.\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"I know.\"\n\nWith a chisel, he carved words into this first stone, words that came from his secret heart. When he finished, he blew against the words, clearing the dust. He traced his fingers over them, and then he was flying, flying, flying in the clouds upon a dragon's back, and nothing could hurt them. Nothing could take this moment away from them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Varden the cruel, the King of Verania, sent a contingent of knights to find out what David was doing. David ignored them even when they threatened him with their swords, telling him he'd be thrown into the dungeons. He didn't stop, and the knights muttered uneasily about how determined he seemed. They returned to the king, telling him of what they'd witnessed. The king said he'd deal with it himself.\n\nBut the next day Varden the Cruel was overthrown, and a new Queen assumed the throne, a woman filled with kindness and grace. Varden lost his head, and everyone cheered as the king's reign finally came to an end.\n\nThe queen herself came to David a month later. She wore trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, her brown hair pulled back into a braided ponytail.\n\nDavid was nervous as she looked at the wall he'd created so far. It wasn't anything big: ten feet high and twenty feet long, but he worried she would try and stop him.\n\nHe bowed before her, trying to wipe his dirty hands on his pants before she could see them.\n\n\"What are you making?\" the Queen asked as she finished her perusal of the wall.\n\n\"A city,\" David said, wincing at how it sounded.\n\nThe Queen nodded slowly. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it's what I must do. I made a promise, and I intend to keep it.\"\n\nHe expected her to laugh at him. Or order him to stop. Or to have her knights take him into custody and lock him away in the dungeons.\n\nInstead, she said, \"Put me to work. What do you need me to do?\"\n\nHe blinked, confused. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He bowed his head when she gripped his shoulder, squeezing gently. \"We aren't in this alone, sir. Though I don't know why you're doing what you are, I see you're a man with a purpose. You remind me of my\u2026\" She shook her head, laughing to herself. \"Let's just say you remind me of someone I care about greatly. I would help if you'd allow it.\"\n\nDavid could only nod."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The queen came by every now and then to check on the work, but she was still the Queen, which meant her attention was needed elsewhere. But David never worked alone again. She sent her best minds, the people who understood what David was trying to do. She provided the materials, the men and women who didn't mind the back-breaking work, who never questioned David, or complained about the task.\n\nEvery night as he fell into bed, exhausted, he'd look out the window and upon the dragon in the stars. I'm doing it, he'd think. I don't know how far I'll get, but I'm doing it.\n\nThe stars watched."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "When David turned forty, the queen died. David stopped working for only the second time since he began (the first when he'd come down with pneumonia that knocked him flat on his back for two weeks) to attend her funeral. He ignored the way people whispered at the sight of him when he walked into the Port, his clothes covered in dust from moving stone. He waited in line to view the queen in her eternal sleep. When it was his turn, he pressed a hand against the side of her coffin, and whispered, \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe turned to leave but was met with two knights. They took him to the queen's son, the new King of Verania. Though young and having only just lost his mother, the king smiled at him as David entered his office.\n\nDavid bowed, but the king waved him off. \"No need to stand on ceremony,\" the king said. \"My mother loved you, David. She didn't always understand you, but she saw how important your work is to you. Before she passed, she made me promise that I would continue to help you in her stead. Unless you feel otherwise, I intend on honoring that promise.\"\n\n\"Thank you, my king,\" David said, bowing once more, back protesting. \"You humble me.\"\n\nThe king snorted. \"I know a man possessed when I see one. You'd continue on by yourself if you had to, wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" David said, meeting the king's gaze directly. \"I would.\"\n\nThe King nodded slowly. \"Then you have my support.\" He tapped his fingers on his desk. \"Though, I must admit, I wish to know why. Why are you doing this? What set you on this path?\"\n\nDavid said, \"I loved someone, once. And I love them still. Like you, I made a promise, and I will see it through to the end.\"\n\nThe king studied him for a moment. \"Did this\u2026someone love you back?\"\n\nDavid smiled. \"He did. He was my friend.\"\n\n\"Was?\" the king asked.\n\nDavid looked away, heart in his throat. Though the grief had lessened over the years, it didn't take much for it to rear its ugly head again. He wished desperately that it were night so he could flee this place and look upon the stars. \"He's\u2026gone, now.\"\n\n\"I see. I'm sorry for your loss, David.\" He swallowed thickly. \"I know something of loss.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" David whispered. \"To you as well.\"\n\n\"You'll have all you need. Anything you require, you have my permission to come to me directly. Can I offer you a house here in the Port? It'd be better than the place you call home.\"\n\nDavid shook his head. \"I need to stay where I'm at. It's\u2026the Port is too loud for someone like me.\"\n\nThe king considered him for a long moment. Then, \"Don't you get lonely?\"\n\n\"No,\" David said honestly. \"Because I'm not alone.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "And so he continued on, building up and out. A great wall followed by stone roads that lined the growing city. He became weaker the older he got, and in his seventy-fifth year, suffered a fall that broke his right leg. The healers said that he wasn't as young as he used to be, and that he needed to rest before he was no longer able to walk again. David growled at them until they left. He lay in his bed, mind fuzzy from the liquid the healers had made him drink to chase away the worst of the pain. He pushed himself up from his bed, and hobbled toward the window, hissing at the glassy ache in his leg.\n\nHe froze when he saw hundreds of people building in his stead as the first stars came out as the evening wore on. He looked up at the stars, and said, \"Soon. I have a little bit more to do, but I'll be there soon.\"\n\n<Soon,> the stars whispered back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "The boy from the village, the friend of a lonely dragon, the man named David, died on the eve of his eighty-second birthday. He knew it was coming, could feel it in the stuttering of his heart, the way he could never quite seem to catch his breath. His hands shook more often than not, and his mind had begun to drift in ways he couldn't control. He forgot names, forgot people's faces, but he never forgot Lockes, not for a moment. The dragon was always there.\n\nOn his last night, he wrote a short letter before he left his home, wandering towards the half-completed city. Groundwork had been laid for a castle that would rival any in history. He wished he could be alive to see it, but he knew his people would complete it in his absence. He sat down near the wall, touching the first stone he'd laid decades before. The carving he'd made was still clear, though grass had grown up around it.\n\nHe sat down near this stone, and groaned as he lay onto his back, face toward the sky.\n\n\"I'm old,\" he whispered. \"And so very tired. But I've done what you've asked. I've played my part. Please. I'm ready to go home.\"\n\nThe constellation of a dragon was as bright as he'd ever seen it. He sucked in a sharp breath when the wings began to move, the dragon's head pulling from the sky and turning down toward the earth.\n\n<Are you?> all the stars whispered. <Are you ready?>\n\n\"Yes,\" David said, voice rough with age. \"I am. I miss my friend. I've lived a long life, but I need to rest with him.\"\n\n<Close your eyes,> the stars said. <Close your eyes, David, and see what your love has brought.>\n\nHe did.\n\nAnd there, in the dark, was Lockes.\n\n\"Hello,\" David murmured next to the wall. \"Hello, hello, hello.\"\n\n<David,> the dragon said. <How I have missed you. How I have waited for you. Come, my love. Come. It's time to come home. And I will be with you each step of the way, for you are mine as much as I am yours.>\n\nDavid's chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell\u2026\n\nAnd then it did not rise again.\n\nHe died in the field next to his life's work.\n\nBut he did not die alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "When he opened his eyes, all he saw were stars.\n\n<Welcome home,> Lockes said. <My friend, my love, welcome home.>\n\nAnd David smiled, his star shining the brightest in all the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "The builders found his body, cool to the touch, and covered with morning dew that looked like tears. They knelt before him, head bowed, offering their prayers for a safe journey beyond the veil.\n\nWord spread, and spread quickly, of the death of the man named David. The king, now an old man himself, ordered David buried as if he were royalty, entombed in stone underneath the city he'd dedicated his life to building.\n\nOn the eve of his burial, a knight came to the king with a letter.\n\nIt read:\n\n\u2003To whom it may concern:\n\n\u2003My life had purpose. Please do not mourn me. I have returned to where I belong, by his side. Though I may have led a life of solitude, I was never alone. He always watched over me. And that's the point, I think. This life hasn't been easy, but I met each day as if it were the last one.\n\n\u2003It is my hope that my work will continue with those who come after me. I only have one request: a name, to show he did not die in vain. If it's not too much trouble, can you please name the city after him? That would make me happy.\n\n\u2003The City of Lockes.\n\n\u2003I hope it becomes a home for those who want one, and a shelter for those who need it most. A beacon of hope. It's what he would have wanted.\n\n\u2003I'm tired, now. More than I've ever been in my life. But it was the life I chose, and I would do it all over again if I had to. For him.\n\n\u2003Thank you for all you've done. I couldn't have gotten this far without help. I won't forget it, no matter where I go next.\n\n\u2003Sincerely,\n\n\u2003David"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "And so it came to be. The city of Lockes was named, and two decades later, the last stone was placed into the new castle. The queen\u2014daughter of the prior king\u2014moved into the castle and proclaimed for all to hear that from this day forward, it would forever be known as Castle Lockes as a symbol of a man who loved with his entire heart.\n\nA thousand years later, a wizard left the castle behind at dusk. Without thought, he rubbed his hands against the scars that crisscrossed his body, a reminder of how close it'd been. The Dark Wizard had been defeated, and peace was slowly returning to Verania, but it could have just as easily gone a different way.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" the wizard's husband asked him, taking his hand and squeezing gently.\n\n\"Something I need to see,\" the wizard said.\n\nThey made their way through the city in the middle of repairs, and out through the gates. The wizard turned right, leading the knight along the great wall that surrounded the City of Lockes. They walked for a good ten minutes before the wizard stopped, crouching down near a stone at the base of the wall. It was covered in moss and lichen. The wizard brushed it away until he found what he was looking for.\n\n\"What is it?\" Knight Commander Ryan Foxheart asked.\n\n\"A reminder,\" Sam of Dragons whispered.\n\n\"Of what?\"\n\n\"That stone crumbles,\" Sam replied hoarsely. Then he smiled as he tilted his face toward the night sky. Above him, a star dragon held watch, the tip of his snout pressed against the brightest star in all the universe. David's Dragon, the constellation was called, and the wizard felt a great and powerful joy in his heart, as if he were flying through the clouds. \"Thank you. Even if you were sort of an asshole, thank you.\"\n\nOn the cornerstone, below the symbol of a keyhole, were words carved with a delicate yet steady hand.\n\nIn the memory of my dragon, who I loved beyond measure.\n\nEventually, the wizard and the knight returned to their home and lived, because that was the important thing. To live, even when all seemed dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Up in the sky, a star whispered, <Did I do good?>\n\n<Yes,> the dragon replied, voice filled with happiness. <Yes, my love. You did good. I am so very proud of you. Come, come. Let us fly together. We still have so much to see.>\n\nAnd so they did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "It's said, even now, that if you look upon the stars on a clear night, you will see David and Lockes, wings spread across the heavens.\n\nA boy and his dragon, together for eternity."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Fuse 3) Fury",
        "author": "E. L. Todd",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons",
            "elves"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Guilty of Treason",
                "text": "General Callon stepped before Queen Delwyn, at the base below her throne. With his hands behind his back, he waited for the execution promised to him, still in his battle armor. None of his weapons had been stripped from his possession by the watchmen or the soldiers.\n\nQueen Delwyn stared from her throne, flowers interwoven in her hair, her long dress flapping in the subtle breeze that moved through the open windows. Her beauty matched that of the surrounding forest, but her eyes possessed more cruelty than the tips of blades on the battlefield. \"I gave my orders. Yet, here you are\u2026your bow across your back, your sword at your hip.\" Her eyes glanced over him, seeing the flower medals pinned to his chest, decorated as a war hero.\n\nThe queen shifted her gaze to Aldon\u2014the new general. \"Unarm him. I won't ask again.\"\n\nCallon stared at the queen, unsurprised that his position had been revoked and granted to someone new.\n\nGeneral Aldon looked to Callon.\n\nCallon gave a nod.\n\nBut General Aldon remained rooted to the spot. He directed his eyes back to the queen, helpless.\n\nCallon turned his gaze back to the queen, seeing a firestorm burning in her eyes. \"I've given my life to Eden Star. My family has given their lives to Eden Star. I wish to be executed with honor.\"\n\nA volcano of rage imploded, rocks of fire shooting across the surface of her face, her green eyes now red-orange with lava. \"Leave. Us.\" Her long nails gripped the edges of her throne, her bracelets of flowers shifting as her tendons tightened underneath.\n\nGeneral Aldon silently excused himself.\n\nSo did Melian, her queen's guard.\n\nSilence ensued. Angry silence.\n\n\"Was it worth it?\" Still and angry, she was a predator perched on the edge of her seat.\n\n\"She's my family\u2014\"\n\n\"And I'm your queen.\" She rose from her throne, the flowers interwoven in her gown matching the ones in her hair. Her words echoed somehow, even given the open windows with vines crawling inside.\n\n\"You're more than my queen. You're my family. And as much as you hate it, she's your family too.\"\n\nReptilian eyes emerged, narrowed to slits. \"She's an abomination. Nothing more.\"\n\nHis hand gripped his other wrist behind his back, the only physical reaction he was allowed to have. \"I stand by my decision and will accept the consequences of my actions. Do what you must.\"\n\n\"Does she live?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then why isn't she here?\" She approached the top of the stairs, her bare feet emerging from under her dress.\n\n\"She has other obligations.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed once more, and then she began her descent, gliding down the stairs like she had invisible wings. \"She departed the lands she wanted as home. You went with her. What was so important, Callon?\"\n\n\"She needed my help\u2014\"\n\n\"In what regard?\"\n\nWith her face right in front of his, he held her gaze. \"She needed to save someone. But she couldn't do it alone.\"\n\n\"Save who from whom?\"\n\n\"A friend from an enemy.\"\n\nHer eyes flicked back and forth between his, growing more furious. Her intelligence was unparalleled, and with her fast mind, she was able to connect the dots that she'd never seen. \"You should be ashamed for what you've done.\"\n\nRush's face came across his vision, blue eyes full of arrogance, the eyes of an executioner. \"I regret my part in it, but I don't regret protecting her. If I hadn't been there, she would have perished.\"\n\n\"If only she had\u2026\" The queen stepped away, giving a cold side glare as she moved, her beautiful dress dragging across the floor with a gentle rustle. Her attention turned out the window, seeing the endless evergreen. \"Did the empire see you?\"\n\nCallon's eyes were focused on her long hair, the flowers interwoven in the blond braids. \"Yes.\"\n\nHer body pivoted, her eyes provoked. \"Look what you've cost us\u2014\"\n\n\"We've been at war with the empire for thousands of years. It's not a new provocation. They slay my wife, my child, and my brother, my king. They're fully aware where we stand. They're fully aware that I would stab King Lux with my sharpened blade if he ever crossed my path. The silence and separation have not dulled my ire\u2014nor my sword.\"\n\nHer breaths had deepened, along with her anger. \"She's banned from Eden Star. Marked as an enemy to the elves.\"\n\n\"She is no enemy\u2014\"\n\n\"She's provoked the empire. They'll hunt her\u2014and they will not follow her here.\"\n\nPowerless, he could do nothing to protect his niece, not this time.\n\nShe stepped closer, the anger glazing over like a fog that evaporated with the afternoon sun. \"I will not claim the life of a Riverglade, so you're spared. But you're no longer the General of Eden Star\u2014as I'm sure you've surmised. Several lifetimes of loyalty do not excuse a single betrayal.\"\n\n\"You're right, Queen Delwyn. Thank you for your mercy.\"\n\nShe turned away and rose up the stairs back to her throne. When he remained, she turned around halfway.\n\n\"You will grant Cora sanctuary in Eden Star.\"\n\nHer intelligent eyes turned into pointed arrows. \"I will not\u2014\"\n\n\"Because if you don't, I will reveal her true lineage to the elves.\"\n\nHer movements were sudden, facing him quickly and returning to the bottom stair. \"How dare you\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm no longer the general of your army. Now, I'm a mere citizen, so I have no obligation to protect your secrets, secrets that shouldn't be kept from your people. A queen rules with reverence and respect, not self-interest.\"\n\nHer eyes remained fixed, furious and contained.\n\n\"Do not misunderstand my loyalty because it is to you and Eden Star, as always. But she's my Sor-lei. And I will do whatever I must to protect her.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "His Reign Continues",
                "text": "Anastille was blanketed in darkness. A moonless night, the land without a breeze. The midnight black dragon soared across the open skies, invisible to everyone down below, unless their eyes were on the stars.\n\nAnd for just a brief second, those stars disappeared.\n\nCora experienced the world with a new perspective, with the flight of a bird, the strength of a mountain, and the agility of a highly intelligent being. Her mind flickered in and out of consciousness as she rested on the journey, but Ashe remained strong, even though he hadn't taken a flight so long in thousands of years.\n\n<We approach Eden Star.>\n\nHer eyes opened, unable to make out the forest with her eyes. <You can see it?>\n\n<I can feel it.>\n\nThe expansive wings stilled, bringing in a slow descent to the grass below. Cora could feel the air against the bottom of her wings, feel the earth against her talons once her heavy body collided with the ground with a distinct thud.\n\nIt was surreal.\n\n<We complete the journey on foot.>\n\n<I'm not sure how to change back\u2026>\n\n<Pull the energy to yourself.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026you're going to have to do better than that.>\n\n<Draw a deep breath. But that breath is energy.>\n\nShe closed her eyes and completed the instructions, falling forward and landing flat on the ground the second she was on her feet. The lush grass blanketed her fall just a bit, making her eyes smart at the collision of her nose against solid earth. At least it didn't break. \"That was graceful\u2026\" She pushed herself up and immediately opened her canteen to drench her parched throat.\n\n<You'll improve.>\n\n\"Need anything before we go?\"\n\n<A grizzly.>\n\n\"Then you should hunt now. That won't be an option in Eden Star.\"\n\n<You will hunt, Cora. I just completed a long journey.>\n\nShe winced at the awkwardness. \"I'm sorry, Ashe. I-I don't hunt.\"\n\n<You're half human.>\n\n\"But I'm full elf\u2026when it comes to this.\" Before they were fused and they spoke with their minds, she'd felt a distinct connection with the black dragon that was as close as what she had with Flare, but when they were fused into a single person\u2026it was different. Not only could she hear his thoughts, but she could feel his thoughts too. All the nuances of emotion were practically words. It was a whole different method of communication. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nAshe's disappointment was as hot against her flank as if he were a nearby fire. Silent but present, burning. <Then I will make this quick.>\n\nHer vision blurred and she was on the ground again, but she could still see her human palms against the grass.\n\nAshe was nearly invisible, his enormous black body blending so well into the night that she wouldn't have known he was there, otherwise. But then he took a step\u2014and his presence was unmistakable. She listened to his wings open and his body leave the ground as he went on his evening hunt.\n\nShe sat on the grass and waited for his return.\n\nCora approached Eden Star, sunrise making the sky lighten from its deep darkness. She felt heavy, like she was the mass of both human and dragon bundled up in the same body. Once she stepped into the tree line, she felt it.\n\nHome.\n\nThe birds greeting the sun with their morning song, buzzing around the canopy. Bees and other pollinators were visible in the spots of sunlight, going from one flower to the next. There was heavy uncertainty that came with her return to Eden Star, but the soothing calmness of the forest made her forget that.\n\n<Eden Star. It's exactly as I remember.>\n\n\"You've been inside the forest?\"\n\n<Many times. How will the elves greet you?>\n\n\"Honestly, I'm not sure\u2026\"\n\nAnger. Heavy anger. His emotions were so crisp and sharp that sometimes they didn't need words to communicate at all.\n\n\"If my uncle is here, we'll be fine.\"\n\n<If? Where else would he be?>\n\nShe didn't even want to think about it.\n\nShe continued on her way into the forest, knowing the guards would intercept her eventually. They probably watched her that very moment, their bows drawn from invisible places in the trees.\n\n<We aren't alone.>\n\nShe looked over her shoulder, seeing an elf clad in the same armor that Callon wore. Black with a green cape, flower medals pressed to his chest, a powerful sword at his side. He watched her from a distance, walking at her pace.\n\nShe halted.\n\nThe elf approached her, regal and still, his expression hard, eyes lifeless. He halted too.\n\n<I don't remember elves greeting one another with such silent hostility.>\n\n<Well\u2026I'm not very popular here.>\n\nThe elf spoke. \"I'm General Aldon. Callon has asked me to escort you straight to his home upon your arrival.\"\n\n<Oh no. He's lost his position\u2026because of me.>\n\n<But he lives.>\n\nCora followed General Aldon through the trees and grass, the sounds of the forest becoming louder as they approached the heart. Soon, the trees thinned out, revealing the pathway through the market, the homes in the trees, the wagon with fruit picked from the fields.\n\nElves were up at first light\u2014and their eyes were immediately on her.\n\n<You're not respected or revered among your people.>\n\n<Like I said\u2026not very popular.>\n\n<Then the queen won't listen to you.>\n\n<Not right now.> Cora ignored the stares, her eyes straight ahead or on Aldon's back.\n\nMinutes passed before Ashe spoke. <I believe that will change.>\n\n<Well\u2026thanks.>\n\n<You changed me.>\n\n<But you aren't a bitch.>\n\n<A what?>\n\n<Never mind.>\n\nAldon approached the base of the tree, Callon's home high in the branches, hummingbirds sticking their tongues into the flowers right outside his kitchen window. Aldon stopped at the stairs and regarded her.\n\nExcited to see Callon's face, but also terrified that their relationship had changed, she eyed the stairs.\n\n\"I'm to relieve you of your weapons.\" Aldon extended a single palm, ready to take the sword at her hip, made of dragon scales.\n\n<In the eyes of the elves, you're an enemy.>\n\n<Not them. Just that bitch I mentioned earlier.>\n\nAldon's hand remained hanging in the air between them.\n\nShe didn't know what else to do except untie her sword from her belt.\n\n<Your sword is made of dragon scales. She can't see it.>\n\n<What else am I supposed to do?>\n\n\"General Aldon.\" Callon emerged around the tree, walking gracefully down the vines that made loose stairs, and reached the earth below their feet. In a green tunic and brown pants, he was dressed as the others, but he still carried the command of a general. He didn't need weapons or armor to pull it off.\n\nGeneral Aldon turned to him, giving him a nod as a respectful greeting.\n\n\"Her weapons don't need to be relieved.\"\n\nGeneral Aldon held his stare.\n\nHer heart tightened in her chest. Her throat suddenly went hot. The sight of Callon made every breath deep and slow.\n\n<I feel your love.>\n\nCallon gave him a nod in dismissal. \"If Queen Delwyn wishes to contest it, she can speak to me herself.\"\n\nGeneral Aldon took his leave.\n\n<General Callon's reign continues.>\n\nHe walked away, leaving the two of them alone at the base of the tree.\n\nCallon turned his dark green eyes on Cora, examining her with his typical hard expression. The only indication of his emotion was his change in breathing, which had suddenly grown heavy. \"I'm glad you're home, Sor-lei.\"\n\nShe moved into his body and embraced him, her pack still on her back, her cheek against his chest. \"I'm so sorry\u2026.\"\n\nHis arms circled her shoulders and gave her a tight squeeze. \"Come. Just about to have breakfast.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Allies",
                "text": "They sat together at his dining table near the window, colorful butterflies passing across the opening, branches with flowers wrapping around the walls and entering the home. Small birds would come close, their chirps the soundtrack of the forest.\n\nHot bowls of slow-roasted oats were on the table, filled with a mixture of strawberries, blueberries, and crumbled walnuts. A sprinkle of brown sugar was placed on top, along with a dollop of maple syrup.\n\nCallon kept his eyes down on his food most of the time, eating with exaggerated slowness, his spoon sitting inside the bowl for a while before he scooped up his next bite. When he chewed, his eyes lifted to hers.\n\nShe hadn't eaten anything fresh or good in a while, so she devoured her bowl then refilled it with the leftovers from the pot on the stove. Even without conversation, it somehow felt as if no time had passed, as if she'd never left Eden Star in the first place. \"How are you?\"\n\n\"Better now that you're home.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to make you worry.\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, it was impossible not to.\"\n\n\"Rush would never hurt me\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's not speak of him.\" His eyes immediately went back to his bowl as he swirled his spoon around.\n\nCora gave a wince at his sharp coldness. \"I'm so sorry\u2026 You really have no idea.\" His disappointment was a worse pain than the physical agony she endured at the hands of the Steward of Easton. Emotional pain was far worse than physical\u2026as she recently learned.\n\n\"Even if I'd known whom you were saving, I would have done it anyway. Even if I'd known it would cost me the position I've held for thousands of years, it wouldn't have changed anything. So, don't be sorry.\" His eyes remained out the window, watching the birds sit on the nearby branch.\n\n\"It's hard not to be\u2026\"\n\n\"A man's duty is to his family.\" His eyes shifted back to hers. \"Everything else\u2026comes second. It was also time for me to step down. General Aldon is the person I recommended for the position\u2014and Queen Delwyn was wise to listen.\"\n\n\"It seems like you're the one still in charge.\"\n\nHe watched her without reaction, his fingers still on the edge of his spoon. \"As I said before, I've been in the position a long time.\"\n\n<They disobey a queen's orders in favor of his. That means he's earned the unquestionable loyalty of his people\u2014more than their own queen has. I liked him when he served under King Valnor. I like him still. He's a good man. Loves you like a hatchling.>\n\n<I know he does.> \"I'm surprised Queen Delwyn has allowed me to come back at all.\"\n\nCallon dropped his gaze back to his bowl, scooping up a bite that was now cold.\n\n<It's because of him.>\n\n<How do you know?>\n\n<It's been a long time since I've been among the elves, but I do remember one thing. It's not about the words they speak\u2014but those they don't speak.>\n\n\"How did you convince her?\"\n\n\"I didn't.\" He took a bite, a long and slow bite. \"I blackmailed her. Not out of desire, but necessity. When she questioned me about our whereabouts, I spoke the truth, a veiled truth. She is my queen, and I respect her and serve her without reservation.\"\n\n\"How did you blackmail her?\"\n\n\"Threatened to tell the elves who you really are.\"\n\n<Queen Delwyn is corrupt, it seems.>\n\n<I think it's more complicated than that.>\n\n<Nothing is complicated unless we make it complicated.>\n\n\"That probably pissed her off.\"\n\nHis eyes went back to his bowl. \"I had no other choice. If I were still her general, it would have been different\u2026but I'm not anymore.\"\n\n\"Then that was stupid on her part.\"\n\nHe scooped another bite of oats onto his spoon. \"She responded emotionally. Not strategically.\"\n\n<Not a good quality in a leader.>\n\n<Have you met Queen Delwyn?>\n\n<No.>\n\n\"So\u2026what does she know exactly?\"\n\nInstead of taking the bite he took so long to prepare, he left it in his bowl. He seemed to be finished because he abandoned his food this time. Elbows rested on the table, and his arms folded on top. \"That you went to save someone from the empire. I joined you to keep you alive. That's it.\"\n\n\"So, she doesn't know about\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, thank you for keeping it quiet.\"\n\nHis eyes flicked away out the window.\n\n<If he hadn't deceived his queen, you would have been exiled from Eden Star\u2014even he couldn't prevent that.>\n\n<I know.>\n\n\"Queen Delwyn asked if I'd been seen, and I couldn't lie. The empire knows that we're allies now. The battles have been on hiatus, but we still remain at war. That hiatus may end now.\"\n\n<He's right.>\n\n\"Shit\u2026\"\n\nCallon's eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said quickly.\n\n\"They've been searching for you, but now they know exactly where to continue their search. As a firsthand witness to your abilities, I'm unsurprised that finding you is their priority.\"\n\n\"But the forest can't be breached\u2026right?\"\n\n\"Nothing is guaranteed.\"\n\n<They gave me sanctuary\u2026and now I give them war.> \"I shouldn't have come here.\" The consequences of her actions were heavier now that this place wasn't just a mythical forest. It was her home now. Images of the forest burning came into her eyes, the tree houses crumbling to the ground, the throne on fire.\n\n\"This is your home. So, yes, you should have come here.\"\n\nHer eyes moved back to his.\n\n\"Whether it's one or all, we protect our own. We will protect you.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be protected. I want the forest to be safe.\"\n\n\"Like you said before, King Lux would have come eventually. He might just come sooner now. That's the only difference.\"\n\n\"Not if I leave Eden Star and they follow me\u2026\"\n\nHe gave a slight shake of his head. \"You'd buy us time. But nothing more.\"\n\nThe guilt consumed her. Drowned her.\n\nHe continued to stare at her. \"I will do my best to prepare you for what's to come. And when it arrives, you will have my sword, shield, and bow to get you where you need to be.\"\n\n<Your very own general.>\n\n\"Thank you, Tor-lei.\"\n\nHis eyes dropped to his rejected food.\n\n\"I hate to ask for more, but\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes returned, serious and focused.\n\n\"Would it be possible to convince Queen Delwyn to march on King Lux first?\"\n\nHe absorbed the question before he gave a shake of his head. \"It's possible. But not probable. Until the war is brought to our borders, we won't engage. We've lost enough battles to know that it's hopeless. In this regard, I'm in agreement with her decision. Too many men. Too many dragons.\"\n\n\"What if we had allies?\"\n\nCallon stared at her differently now, his eyes narrowed like tips of arrows. \"Sor-lei, what happened after I left you?\"\n\n<Don't tell him.>\n\n<We can trust him\u2014>\n\n<I said, don't.>\n\n\"I have some powerful allies now. That's all I can say.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Hidden Passage",
                "text": "Her tree house was exactly as she left it.\n\nThe only difference was the dishes that she left in the sink. Instead of sitting there covered in mold, they'd been washed and set out to dry on the counter.\n\nCallon.\n\nHer sword leaned against the wall at her bedside, and her bow and quiver of arrows were left on the counter. Her old clothes still hung in the closet, so after a bath, she donned something more comfortable and sat up in bed.\n\nThe night darkened, the birds quieted, and soon it was just the crickets and occasional crack of a branch from a heavy owl. Arms folded over her chest, she stared into the darkness, seeing the moonlight shine off the canopy. <We need to tell him.>\n\n<No.>\n\n<You just said you liked him.>\n\n<I do. Doesn't mean I trust him. He hates dragons, like all elves.>\n\n<Well, he saved Flare from the Steward of Easton.>\n\n<For you.>\n\n<Doesn't matter why he did it.>\n\n<It matters greatly.>\n\n<So, what's the plan here? My entire purpose in bringing you is so you can speak to Queen Delwyn and negotiate an alliance.>\n\n<That was before I realized you are unanimously disliked and the queen is corrupt.>\n\n<Corrupt is a harsh word\u2026>\n\n<She denies her people truth. That's the definition of corruption.>\n\n<Doesn't matter because we need her.>\n\n<Not if she'll betray me. Could save her people by sacrificing mine.>\n\n<She wouldn't do that\u2014>\n\n<Every elf they've lost is a consequence of my ill decision. Wouldn't hesitate\u2014if it were me.>\n\nShe'd never forget the look on Callon's face when he saw the red scales and long tail of a dragon. He'd been so livid, he'd almost chosen to stay behind. That feeling of detest must be mirrored throughout society. <Callon is loyal to his people\u2014but he's more loyal to me. Any secret I confide in him is safe.>\n\nAshe turned quiet.\n\n<We need to tell him, Ashe. He can't help us if he doesn't know.>\n\n<He hates dragons like the rest.>\n\n<He does. But he'll change his mind\u2026and then change the minds of everyone else.>\n\n\"Rise.\"\n\n\"Mer\u2026?\" She turned in the bed instinctively, pulling the sheet over her head to block out the sunlight.\n\n\"Cora.\" His voice deepened, commanding her like an army.\n\n\"Dude, I'm so tired\u2014\"\n\n\"Expect to always be tired from now on.\"\n\n\"Ugh.\"\n\n\"Now.\" His voice grew louder, the threat scary.\n\n\"Geez, okay.\" She threw the sheets back and rubbed the sleep from her closed eyes. \"I'm awake. Just let me get breakfast started\u2014\"\n\n\"No breakfast. Get dressed and meet me downstairs.\"\n\n\"No breakfast\u2014\"\n\nHe was gone.\n\n<Freakin' psychopath.>\n\nNothing.\n\n<Ashe?>\n\nStill nothing.\n\nWish I got to sleep in\u2026\n\nCallon struck down her branch. \"Weak.\" He blocked her punch then threw her arm down, making her spin slightly. \"Clumsy.\" He gave her a shove, sending her tripping backward across the grass until she regained her footing. \"Have you forgotten everything I taught you?\"\n\n\"No.\" She brushed off her pants and straightened. \"I wasn't kidding when I said I was tired. Haven't slept in two days\u2026\"\n\n\"I've fought a battle for four days\u2014and never slept.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't have a bazillion years of experience under my belt.\"\n\nHe tossed the branch aside, the instruction concluded. \"I don't know how much time we have. But whether it's a lot or little, we can't afford to waste it.\"\n\nShe wiped her brow with the back of her wrist, getting rid of the sweat that had started to drip down her face. \"I know. I'll be ready to go tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you sleep for two days?\"\n\n\"Traveling.\"\n\n\"You ran for two days straight?\" he asked. \"Were you chased by the Shamans?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHis eyes bored into her face, silently demanding an answer.\n\n\"We need to talk\u2026\" She headed to their packs by the waterfall.\n\nHe watched her walk away before he followed her. They sat together by the water, just as they had months ago.\n\nHungry, she opened her pack and took out the container Callon had packed for her.\n\nThe little red cardinal emerged, landing on the grass in front of her, giving out a few chirps. His mind suddenly felt strong against hers, like they were side by side, pressing against each other.\n\n\"Hey, honey. Nice to see you.\" She fed him a few berries then watched him fly away.\n\n<Ashe?>\n\n<I'm here.>\n\n<I need to tell him.>\n\n<Be discreet.>\n\n<Always.> \"I need to tell you something, but it absolutely has to stay between us.\"\n\nCallon watched her with the same expression, and if that was the face she met on the battlefield, she would be thoroughly intimidated. \"If anything you share poses a threat to Eden Star or my queen, I will report it.\"\n\n\"It doesn't. But if you share it with anyone\u2026it could be a threat to someone else I love.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Will you promise to keep my secret?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sor-lei.\"\n\n\"You can't ask any questions either\u2026just need to accept my information.\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod.\n\n<This is okay?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"I have allies that have pledged to fight with Queen Delwyn\u2014if she accepts.\"\n\nHis dark green eyes were different from her own. Deep. It was the only indication of age\u2014because they were full of years of sorrow, of wisdom, of experience.\n\nShe lowered her voice to a whisper even though they were alone. \"Free dragons.\"\n\nAs he'd agreed, he didn't ask any questions. His eyes shifted back and forth quickly, his only visible reaction.\n\n\"I've returned to convince her to accept the alliance.\"\n\nHe tore his gaze away, his eyes still frantic, absorbing the information with a display of emotions across his expression.\n\nShe let him have all the time he needed.\n\n<He didn't question you.>\n\n<Because I was right\u2014he can be trusted.>\n\nAfter a couple minutes of quiet reflection, Callon turned his attention back to her. \"Your proposition will be unsuccessful.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"They are not our allies. I can speak on behalf of Queen Delwyn when I say we have no interest in helping the beings that caused all of this in the first place. The reason I've lost my wife\u2026my son\u2026my brother. The reason everyone has lost someone.\"\n\n<As I expected.>\n\n\"Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"I will keep your secret. But you have no chance of convincing Queen Delwyn.\"\n\n\"I do\u2026if you help me.\"\n\nHis head snapped in the other direction, dismissing the suggestion.\n\n\"You fear that King Lux will cross the desert and march on Eden Star. Can you think of a better ally than a fire-breathing dragon that wants to rescue their imprisoned kin?\"\n\nThe dismissal continued.\n\n\"We have to put the past behind us if we ever hope to have a future.\"\n\nCallon stared at the stream as if he didn't hear a word.\n\n\"I wish you knew how sorry\u2014\"\n\n<Cora.>\n\nThe sigh released, slow and heavy.\n\n<He needs time. Give it to him.>\n\n<I need to eat.>\n\nIn the days that had passed, Cora and Callon trained in their hidden meadow, and once she had adequate sleep, her skills returned to her. She was still easily disarmed and had no chance against someone of his experience, but she redeemed herself from that first day.\n\nBut Callon barely spoke to her. If he did, it was about training, and that was it.\n\nCora failed to block the hit coming her way, striking her right in the ribs. She groaned and fell to her knees. \"Geez, you got me good.\"\n\nCallon threw down his stick. \"I shouldn't be able to get you at all. Do better.\"\n\n\"I'm working on it.\"\n\n\"Work harder.\"\n\n\"What do you think I'm doing?\" She cupped her ribs as she glared at him. \"I'm out here every day, giving it my all\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop the excuses.\"\n\n\"They aren't excuses\u2014\"\n\n\"They are to me.\" He stepped away, his shirt showing his muscled mass through the thin fabric. When he was dressed in his armor, he was even thicker, far more ominous. But he was just as ominous in nothing but breeches and a tree branch.\n\n<Cora, I need to eat.>\n\n<Yeah, heard you the first time.>\n\n<Then obey.>\n\n<Obey? Ooh, that was the wrong thing to say.>\n\n<If you obeyed, I wouldn't be hungry right now.>\n\n<Let's just remove that word from our vocabulary right now.>\n\n<It offends you.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<But I'm Ashe, King of Dragons. I don't understand.>\n\n<Would you ever tell Diamond to obey?>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Now you get it.> She pushed herself to her feet, coated in slick sweat. <I'm not sure how to get you out of the forest\u2026and then back in again.>\n\n<I need to eat every few days\u2014so we need to figure this out.>\n\nCallon turned his gaze back on her, disappointment still there.\n\n<Yes, I know.>\n\n<I could hunt here. They'd never know\u2014>\n\n<Yes, they would. That's not an option. Especially if we're asking for their aid.> \"Callon?\"\n\n<Do not tell him.>\n\n<We have no other choice. Unless you want to starve?>\n\nHe gave a quiet snarl. <No.>\n\n\"Callon, I need you to help me with something.\"\n\n\"I'm in the middle of helping you with something else right now.\" He flashed her a look of annoyance, a growl with his eyes.\n\n\"Can you get me in and out of the forest without being seen?\"\n\nThe annoyance faded like the sun setting over the horizon. It turned into razor-sharp focus. \"Why?\"\n\n<Do not tell him.>\n\n<Ashe\u2014>\n\n<He's not ready. Trust me.>\n\n\"I\u2026I can't say.\"\n\nHis breathing changed, growing heavy, and his eyes sharpened.\n\n\"I need to come and go as I please\u2026without being seen.\"\n\nHis jaw clenched next. \"I grow tired of your secrets.\"\n\n\"Please. I promise that my intentions are innocent.\"\n\n\"Someone could follow you.\"\n\n\"I'm not meeting anyone.\"\n\nHis eyes kept their annoyance because no guarantee would be enough. \"If the wrong person becomes aware of this passage, it could be catastrophic for all of us.\"\n\n\"I would never\u2014\"\n\n\"Promise me you will never meet anyone by route of this passage.\"\n\n\"Of course. I promise.\"\n\nHe stepped away. \"After we eat, I'll show you the way.\"\n\nShe watched him walk away.\n\n<He loves you the way I love my hatchlings.>\n\n<I know he does\u2026>\n\nIt was a deep trek into the mountains.\n\nCallon led the way off the path, turning when he recognized a marker in the foliage.\n\n<I'm never going to remember this.>\n\n<I will.>\n\nAn hour of traveling led them to a mass of boulders between rocky mountainsides. When Callon halted, she knew they'd arrived. \"Do you know the way back?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe gave her a final look before he began the return journey.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nAs if he didn't hear her, he kept walking.\n\n<Let's go. I'm starving.>\n\nShe walked through the passageway, roots of trees crossing the gap and growing overhead. The path became narrower, just wide enough for her to pass through. Farther she went, reaching an opening on the other side. <I'll wait here for you. Be discreet.>\n\n<Dragons aren't meant to be discreet.>\n\nShe suddenly felt the world spin, felt her soul tear in half, her vision blur.\n\nHer body was on the ground, and her eyes saw the wall of black appear.\n\nThen a gray eye came into her vision, large and luminous. <Are you alright?>\n\n\"Yeah\u2026just wasn't prepared for that.\"\n\n<I'll return shortly.> He stepped away, each of his enormous feet making a distinct thud as he moved.\n\nShe pushed herself up and watched Ashe crouch down to become as small as possible as he slithered away, almost like a snake. Nauseated and weak, she felt as if her legs or arms had been torn off. Their connection had been brief, just a week, but once he was gone\u2026there was a distinct void in her chest.\n\nLike she would never be the same."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Riverglade King",
                "text": "Her training had completed for the day. She bathed at her tree house then sat at the table in front of the window with a bowl of greens and root vegetables in a lemon sauce.\n\n<That will not sustain a warrior.>\n\n\"It sustains Callon just fine.\"\n\n<Then he must eat all the time.>\n\n\"He doesn't.\"\n\n<Unnatural.>\n\n\"We don't breathe fire and have jaws lined with ten rows of teeth. So, it is natural\u2014for us.\"\n\n<Perhaps.>\n\nShe stirred the contents without taking a bite.\n\n<You're sad.>\n\n\"Just not very hungry.\"\n\n<I can feel it, Cora.>\n\nHer hand stilled on her fork, feeling his presence suddenly thicken, press up against her the way the red cardinal did\u2014but on a much more intimate scale. Two souls in one body. Two hearts in a single chest.\n\n<When you were reunited with Callon, I could feel the way you loved him. Now I can feel this\u2026>\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\nAshe retreated from her mind, like he physically crossed the room to put space between them.\n\n\"Cora.\"\n\nShe turned at the sound of her name, seeing Callon in the doorway. \"Hey.\"\n\nWith his arms rigid at his sides, he stood there, his eyes leaving her face and moving elsewhere.\n\n\"Everything alright?\"\n\n\"I know I've been harsh. I'm sorry for that.\"\n\n\"You don't need to apologize\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd like to show you something.\" His face turned back to hers.\n\nHe wanted the awkwardness to pass, so she did too. \"Sure.\" She abandoned her food at the table and joined him at the front door. \"Where are we going?\"\n\nHe led, taking the stairway of vines. \"The Great Hall.\"\n\nA few hours before sunset, the life in the forest was slowly becoming dormant. The sunlight hit the trees in a beautiful way, highlighting the canopy in a greenish glow from all the leaves. Elves walked the forest floor, mostly alone, but sometimes in pairs.\n\nThey took the path away from the tree houses and passed through the thick forest that obscured most of the sunlight. Moisture was heavy in the air, green moss on the north side of the trees.\n\nCallon was beside her, quiet the entire way. \"I understand you're no warrior, Cora. But I must try everything I can do to make you resemble one as much as possible. I will protect you with my life, but if my life is taken, I fear for yours.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"I've lost enough.\" His eyes were rigidly fixed on the path ahead. \"I can't endure any more. It was I who should have died, not my family. They should have outlived me. They should be the ones grieving me.\" He turned his head and met her gaze. \"You must outlive me, Cora. You must.\"\n\nHer hand went to his arm and gave a gentle squeeze. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"If you ever have children of your own someday, you will understand.\"\n\n\"I already do understand. I understand it every time I look into your eyes.\" Her hand slowly slid down his arm until it rested at her side.\n\nHe forced forward again, emerging from the trees and into the clearing where the large building sat in a field of orange poppies. Stalks broke under their boots as they approached, a quiet summer breeze passing through their hair.\n\nThey stepped inside, the hall answering their presence with silence.\n\n\"What did you want to show me?\" She looked and listened for the sound of other elves in the building, but they seemed to be alone.\n\nHe took the lead down the hallway, made a couple turns, and then emerged into a large room that had benches and portraits on the walls. Enormous portraits, most of which were twelve feet tall.\n\nHe approached one in particular and stopped several feet back.\n\nShe examined the painting that captured his gaze.\n\nQueen Delwyn stood there in a white gown, flowers in her hair, both of her hands placed in the palms of a man across from her. The couple faced each other\u2014like it was a wedding ceremony.\n\nTall, muscular, with a hard jaw like Rush, she knew exactly who he was.\n\nTiberius Riverglade.\n\n\"This was painted on their Union.\"\n\n\"Queen Delwyn looks exactly the same.\"\n\n\"She's aged slightly\u2014but it's hard to notice.\"\n\n\"I thought elves were immortal.\"\n\n\"They are. Doesn't mean we don't mature like humans and dwarves. We just do it very slowly.\"\n\nShe turned her attention on Callon and watched him examine the painting, his expression vacant.\n\nShe looked at the portrait again, looking at the man she'd never called Father. \"I have his eyes\u2026\"\n\n\"You have other things too.\"\n\nHe was a man she'd never met, but somehow, her eyes began to tear. Memories had never been created. Moments never shared. His life came and went, on a timeline that never intersected hers. It wasn't the loss of the man. It was the loss of the opportunity. Blue eyes came into her mind along with a handsome smile, but she pushed it away to a place her mind couldn't follow.\n\n\"Whenever my brother was deep in thought, it was with a stern expression. You do the same thing.\" His hands moved behind his back, eyes straight ahead. \"I doubt this is inherited, but\u2026he was a bit of a smartass too.\"\n\nHer eyes immediately flicked to him.\n\nCallon shifted his gaze to hers, a slight smile moving to his lips.\n\nShe smiled back, her eyes still wet.\n\n\"At least, he was when it was just the two of us.\" His eyes moved forward again. \"He was a good man and a great king. His infidelity was his only transgression, and I wouldn't have believed he was capable of such a thing if I didn't see your ring\u2026and your resemblance to him. Don't think less of him for it. One mistake doesn't erase his lifetime of good deeds.\"\n\n\"I don't.\"\n\n\"He always wanted to have a child. Queen Delwyn didn't.\"\n\nHis strength was palpable through the painting, along with his love and affection for the queen he devoted himself to. How different would that painting look if she were there? \"I wish I could have met him\u2026even if it was just once.\"\n\nHis hand moved to her arm, and he gently pulled her away. \"You can.\"\n\nShe regarded him as he guided her away.\n\n\"In the graveyard.\"\n\n\"Queen Delwyn forbade me from coming here.\" The trees were tightly scrunched together in the space, the evergreen leaves crowded together to create a ceiling that hid the sky from view. A single path was in the center, but the distance was obscured by mist.\n\n\"And she was wrong to do that.\" Callon took the lead, stepping onto the path between the trees and moving farther inside the forest. The mist was imminent, just like the mist that formed the barrier of Mist Isle, but the energy was different. Instead of thriving with the presence of mythical creatures, this was full of the absence of life.\n\nThe pathway opened, having clusters of graves with flowers growing around the headstones, even though sunlight didn't reach through the copse of trees. Trails led in other directions, to other groupings of fallen elves. Crickets and other creatures provided the background of a gentle hum of wildlife, but the mist amplified that noise to higher proportions. With the mist, the sound, the cool moisture against her skin, it felt like she was far away from Eden Star. \"This is where you visit your family?\"\n\nHe was about to take a path to the right when he turned to regard her. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Can I meet them too?\"\n\nHis natural instinct was probably to say no, but instead, he considered the request and gave a nod. \"They're your family too.\"\n\nFireflies lit up the darkness on their way, the shrouded mist refracting the light to make the circumference even larger. Cool moisture pressed against her cheeks as they moved, forming drops that sometimes slid down her face.\n\nCallon stopped when he reached two graves, side by side. There was a third headstone, but it was unmarked. He stared down at the headstones, quiet and still.\n\nShe came to his side and read the first.\n\n\u2002In Grace Lies\n\n\u2002Weila Riverglade\n\n\u2002Warrior. Wife. Mother.\n\nShe read the second.\n\n\u2002In Grace Lies\n\n\u2002Turnion Riverglade\n\n\u2002Soldier. Son.\n\nHer hand moved to Callon's shoulder, and her fingers dug into his shirt. Together, they stared at the graves, the flowers growing over both of the markers. Green ivy grew along their headstones, covered with white flowers. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nCallon's expression was as hard as always, his dark eyes conveying nothing. He stepped away and lowered himself to the stone bench beside their graves, his hands coming together on his thighs. With straight shoulders and head slightly bowed, he looked at the earth beneath his boots.\n\nShe took a seat beside him.\n\nSilence went on for a long time, the crickets echoing throughout the forest, the fireflies slowly floating from one point of the area to the next.\n\n\"Sometimes they come. Sometimes they don't.\"\n\n\"They come together?\"\n\n\"Rarely. It's usually just one or the other.\" His eyes remained on the ground, and he gave a slow and deliberate breath.\n\nThey returned to their silence, waiting and hoping.\n\nShe stared at the forest, finding it both sad and beautiful. It was unlike any other place she experienced on this earth. Her focus would follow one firefly then shift to another. Drops of moisture would occasionally drip from the canopy, like raindrops that made their way down to the base of the tree.\n\nThen she saw it.\n\nA bluish haze.\n\nIt was a flicker that came and went. Translucent.\n\nCallon closed his eyes. \"She's here. I can feel her.\"\n\nWith a held breath, she watched the blue tint come back into focus, and this time, it was more distinct. It was the outline of a woman. Long hair in a braid, it flapped like there was a breeze wherever she was. Petite in size but strong in the shoulders and arms, she looked like the warrior Callon had described. There were no other features to identify because it was just an outline, an incomplete drawing.\n\nWeila moved to her knees in front of him, her hand resting on top of his.\n\n\"Can you feel her?\" he whispered.\n\nCora couldn't speak.\n\nWeila bowed her head on top of their joined hands.\n\nThe moisture on her cheeks was no longer from the mist. Tears sprung to her eyes quicker than the snap of her fingers as she witnessed eternal love.\n\n\"Cora?\" He must have heard the sniffles because he turned to regard her.\n\n\"She's on her knees in front of you\u2026her hands in yours\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I know this because\u2026I can see her.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Best Friends",
                "text": "<You think they'll be there?> Flare glided in the darkness, the lights of Karth in the distant background.\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<And if they aren't?>\n\n<Then we wait.>\n\nFlare drew closer, the darkness covering their arrival in Anastille. <How are you?>\n\n<Fine.>\n\n<Rush\u2014>\n\n<I'm said I'm fine.>\n\nFlare maneuvered around the mountain and dived into the cove. His heavy body landed on the beach with a distinct thud, his talons digging deep into the grains of sand as they shifted under his weight. <I see lanterns.>\n\n<Good, they're here.>\n\nRush emerged and approached the entrance of the cave. \"Wake up. Daddy's home.\"\n\nBridge sat up inside his cot, his palm rubbing his eyes before he tried to focus on Rush's approach. \"Finally.\" He pushed himself to his feet, his eyes still blinking to adjust to the world around him. \"You have any idea how long we've been waiting around?\"\n\n\"Yes, I made a full recovery. Thanks for asking.\"\n\nBridge rolled his eyes as he gave a sigh. \"Shut up. I already knew you would.\"\n\nRush stopped in front of him and looked him over. \"You look like shit, by the way.\"\n\nBridge gave a sly grin, a full beard on his chin, more awake now. \"I've been living in a cave for months, so, no surprise there.\"\n\nZane left his cot next and embraced Rush with a handshake. \"This guy's immortal\u2014and not because he's fused.\"\n\n\"Just because I'm a lucky son of a bitch, I guess.\" He embraced him back. \"You look good, man.\"\n\nHe rubbed his hand through his thick scruff. \"I take care of the front lawn, you know.\" He cast a look at Bridge.\n\nBridge glared. \"Not my fault I lost everything with the ship.\"\n\n\"What happened to the ship?\" Rush asked.\n\nBridge brushed off the question. \"It's a long story\u2026\"\n\nLiam came next, walking up to him with his typical starstruck look. \"How's your dragon?\"\n\n\"He's good,\" Rush said, shaking his hand. \"I'm good too\u2026thanks.\"\n\n<He knows we're the same person, right?>\n\n<He just likes me more. Understandable.>\n\n\"So, what's been going on with you these past three months?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Wait.\" Rush took a look around. \"Where's Lilac?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Zane said. \"She's with Captain Hurricane.\"\n\nRush turned to Bridge. \"As in, she's gone for good?\"\n\n\"No\u2026\" Bridge gave an uncomfortable look. \"They're doing a long-distance thing, so she's with him for a few more days. Where's Cora?\"\n\nThe instant she was mentioned, Rush gave a pause. \"Eden Star.\"\n\n\"Is she joining us or\u2026?\" Bridge's eyes flicked back and forth.\n\n\"Not for a while.\" When he didn't hear from her, he assumed she made it safe and sound. She had Ashe, King of Dragons, to look after her, so he knew she was in good hands. \"As for Flare and me, we've been at Mist Isle.\"\n\n\"With the dragons?\" Liam immediately blurted, his eyes glazing over as he imagined it.\n\nRush dodged the question, always uncomfortable with the guy's obsession. \"Long story short, we convinced some of them to fight with us.\"\n\nBridge's mouth gaped open in shock. \"What?\"\n\n\"So, they are there?\" Zane asked. \"I can't believe it\u2026\"\n\n\"How many?\" Liam asked. \"How glorious were they?\"\n\n<He sounds like you.>\n\n<A bit. I like it.>\n\nRush exchanged a look with Bridge.\n\nBridge gave a slight shrug, telling him Liam was harmless.\n\nRush continued. \"But their participation is contingent on the elves.\"\n\n\"That's why Cora is there,\" Bridge said, following his thoughts perfectly. \"You think that'll work?\"\n\n\"I'm still in shock that we got some of the dragons to agree in the first place.\" If it weren't for Cora, it never would have happened. He was still the number one enemy to the dragons, still considered General Rush. \"I believe that she can do anything.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Bridge said. \"I mean, that elf came with her to save you.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\" A conversation had never taken place, but Rush could see the fury on Callon's face when their eyes met. They were enemies. If the circumstances had been different, General Callon would have had his sword against his neck. \"That was kinda a one-time thing.\"\n\n\"It still happened.\" Bridge nudged him in the side. \"Pretty big deal.\"\n\n<Because of her.>\n\n\"So, what's the plan?\" Bridge asked. \"Eden Star? When Captain Hurricane returns, we'll ask for a ride.\"\n\n\"No Eden Star,\" Rush said. \"We've got to get more allies. Even if the elves agree, we still need more people.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Bridge crossed his arms over his chest, his head tilted. \"Even with an army of dragons?\"\n\n\"We don't have an army.\" Rush gave a shake of his head. \"We have twelve. King Lux has far more than that\u2026\"\n\nDisappointment flickered across Bridge's gaze, but he covered it up. \"Well\u2026better than nothing. So, who do we ask?\"\n\nRush gave him a blank stare. \"So, you guys literally did nothing but grow beards while I was gone?\"\n\nBridge glared. \"How are we supposed to find an underground resistance group and wait for you at the same time?\"\n\n<He has a point.>\n\n<This is taking too long.>\n\n<Why are you in such a hurry?>\n\n<My father knows Cora and General Callon got me out of the prison.>\n\n<Meaning?>\n\n<I'm building alliances\u2014powerful ones.>\n\nFlare considered what he said, his mind suddenly heavy. <Will he march on Eden Star?>\n\n<He might.>\n\n<He never has before.>\n\n<Well, when his son is rescued by the brother of the king he slew\u2026things change.> \"The dwarves. Let's start there.\"\n\n\"Uh, do you have any idea where they are?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"You're the scholar, aren't you?\" Rush said.\n\nBridge nudged him in the side, this time harder. \"I know the location of their territory. But how to get inside? No idea. You're the only one who was alive last time they were seen, so you tell me.\"\n\nRush looked at the other guys. \"Anyone have any ideas?\"\n\nBoth shook their heads.\n\n\"We'd waste a lot of time going around knocking on rocks,\" Bridge said. \"Time we don't have.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Rush said. \"So, we won't do that.\"\n\n\"Then what are we going to do?\" Bridge said. \"Use Flare to tear the rocks apart?\"\n\n\"If you shut up, I'll tell you.\" Rush gave him a nudge back. \"We're going to ask someone.\"\n\n\"Ask who?\" He gave a slight wince where he'd been elbowed. \"Who the hell would know how to contact the dwarves?\"\n\nRush set his pack on the ground and rolled up his sleeves. \"A witch.\"\n\nBridge's eyes narrowed. \"Mathilda? You think she'd know?\"\n\nRush gave an exaggerated shrug. \"She knows how to get dragon tears. What else could she know?\"\n\nDays passed as they waited for Lilac to return.\n\nRush was the last one to finish eating. Before he was done, Zane and Liam retired to their bedrolls on the stone floor in the corner.\n\nBridge glanced at him. \"Never seen you eat like that.\"\n\n\"Been a long time since I've had meat. Forgot how good it was.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\nRush licked his fingers as he stared at the fire. \"Cora doesn't eat meat, like the elves.\"\n\n\"What's that got to do with you?\"\n\nHe gave a slight shake of his head. \"Didn't want to make her uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"Does that mean what I think it means?\"\n\n\"That I'm considerate of other people? Yeah, it was a shock to me too.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he said with a laugh. \"Did something happen with you guys? All alone on Mist Isle\u2026dragons in the skies. Sounds pretty romantic.\"\n\nHis eyes remained on the flames. \"No.\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't romantic?\"\n\n\"No. Nothing happened.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Bridge asked. \"What about all that 'she's off-limits' crap?\"\n\n\"She is off-limits.\"\n\n\"Because she's yours, right?\"\n\n\"No, asshole,\" Rush said. \"Because you aren't good enough for her.\"\n\nBridge chuckled. \"You're totally right. She looked pretty badass breaking into that castle to save you.\"\n\nRush didn't recall much from that night, but he remembered the moment she threw a rock at the Steward's head to help Callon. It gave him a short-lived smile, quickly replaced by loss once more. \"Badass\u2026that's a good word for her.\"\n\n\"Did you at least go for it?\"\n\n<None of your business.>\n\n<Flare, it's fine.>\n\n<Why does he pry?>\n\n<He's not prying. It's just\u2026guy talk.>\n\n<I spoke to Ashe, King of Dragons, many times, and not once did I ask him about his personal life.>\n\n<Well, he's a king\u2014>\n\n<Or any dragon, for that matter.>\n\n<You aren't best friends with those dragons, so it would be inappropriate to ask.>\n\nFlare gave a quiet growl. <I thought I was your best friend?>\n\n<You are\u2014>\n\n<Best means singular. So, how can you have two best friends?>\n\n\"Rush?\" Bridge waved his hand in front of his face. \"Yoo-hoo.\"\n\nRush pushed his palm away. <No need to get possessive\u2014>\n\n<There is only one best friend\u2014and it is I.>\n\n<Oh my god, this conversation is so stupid\u2026>\n\n\"Are you and Flare having a go or something?\"\n\n<Our minds, bodies, and souls are combined. I give you beauty, flight, and immortality. What has he done to earn the same status\u2014>\n\n<Alright, alright. You are my one and only. We good?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nRush gave a sigh before he acknowledged Bridge once again. \"Okay, I'm back.\"\n\n\"What were you guys talking about?\"\n\n<Tell him. Make sure he knows where he stands.>\n\nRush rolled his eyes because this was a side of Flare he didn't see often. Greedy, possessive, like Rush was a hoard of treasure that belonged to him alone. He acted that way toward Cora too sometimes. \"You don't want to know\u2026\"\n\n\"So, did you make a move?\"\n\nRush nodded. \"She turned me down.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Bridge asked in surprise. \"She came all the way to Rock Island to save you\u2026and she's not interested?\"\n\n\"We're good friends.\" Images flashed in his mind. Their first kiss on the border of Eden Star. Her angry but playful eyes every time he grabbed her ass. Firelight casting a beautiful glow on her face inside the cave. Touches. Kisses. A sky full of stars. \"If you and I had swapped places, she would have come for you too.\"\n\nBridge held his gaze, his unblinking stare cutting to the bone. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nRush gave a shrug. \"It's fine. Other fish in the sea\u2026\" He turned away to look at the fire once more, even though the flames reminded him of a different fire in a different place\u2026in a different time.\n\n\"I can tell it really bums you out.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he said with a scoff. \"I'm fine.\"\n\n\"It's fine not to be fine, Rush.\"\n\nRush refused to look at him now, eyes focused with all his strength, squeezing the emotions out of his heart like a wet sponge. \"That elf that came with her\u2026that's General Callon.\"\n\n\"I could tell he was someone important. He wields a sword like it's a stick.\"\n\n\"He's her uncle.\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked in surprise. \"I didn't get a good look at his face with the helmet to see the resemblance.\"\n\n\"And his brother is\u2026the late Tiberius Riverglade.\"\n\nBridge caught on instantly. \"Shit\u2026\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Now I understand.\"\n\n\"Ironic, right? Meet a woman I actually like\u2026but I killed her father.\" He released a sarcastic laugh even though it wasn't the least bit funny. Not at all. Not in the slightest. \"I don't deserve her\u2026she made the right call.\"\n\n\"Why did he come to your rescue?\"\n\n\"He didn't have a choice. If Cora went alone, she would have been killed.\"\n\n\"Still\u2026\"\n\n\"I suspect he didn't know I was the one they were saving.\"\n\n\"What did he say to you afterward?\"\n\n\"I was unconscious. Never spoke. But I can imagine what he might say\u2026\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Bridge rubbed his palms together as he stared at the fire, the sounds of the small waves of the cove floating through the entrance and reaching their ears. The tide never rose above the sand, so they were never flooded with the sea. If there were a storm, that would be a different story. \"What was it like with the dragons?\"\n\nHe searched for the perfect word, but there was none. \"I can't even describe it. It's been so long since I've seen free dragons that it was pretty indescribable.\" He dropped his head and looked at his own hands. \"Made me feel like absolute shit.\"\n\nBridge gave his friend a look of pity, but he had no words to pull him from the sadness. \"Guess that means Ashe didn't kill you when you came back.\"\n\n\"Thankfully.\"\n\n\"And he agreed to be your ally, so that's something.\"\n\nRush gave a shrug. \"He tolerates me, but that's about it.\"\n\n\"Better than being dinner.\"\n\n\"Dinner?\" Rush asked with a laugh. \"Remember how big he is? I'd be a snack\u2026\"\n\n\"An appetizer.\" Bridge chuckled. \"Good thing you shared that memory of your escape, when you freed those three dragons. Probably wouldn't have gotten out alive if you hadn't.\"\n\n\"I wish I had a better memory than that one.\"\n\nBridge watched him for a while. \"I think it's a pretty good one. You saved those three dragons, saved Flare, took a stance against your father, and nearly sliced his hand off\u2026\"\n\n\"I didn't save those dragons. I tried to save them.\"\n\n\"You don't think they got away?\"\n\nRush shook his head. \"That's very unlikely. King Lux isn't going to let three dragons leave his treasury. I'm sure he sent the entire cavalry out, hunted them down one by one, and those that resisted\u2026were probably killed. There's nowhere for three dragons to hide for long\u2014at least, not in Anastille.\" He felt his heart break for the millionth time. The scar tissue made him wince deeper each and every time.\n\n\"Well, I like to think they got away.\"\n\n<Me too.>\n\nIt was too hard to think about\u2014especially when he remembered how terrified their eyes were. Their eyes probably looked the same before they were captured or burned alive. \"There's something you need to know\u2026 I didn't want to share it with the others.\"\n\n\"When are you going to trust them?\" Bridge asked with a sigh. \"When we came to rescue you\u2014\"\n\n\"Which was stupid, by the way. What were you thinking?\"\n\n\"I was thinking that I needed to save my friends and sister. Liam and Zane did too. They didn't hesitate, Rush.\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2026 Liam is a little odd.\"\n\n\"He's\u2026\" Bridge rubbed his jawline, his fingers going through his beard. \"Okay, he's a little odd. But we don't need to question his loyalty. He just has a bit of an obsession with dragons. Who doesn't? You think he's going to steal Flare from you or something?\"\n\n\"Not possible.\"\n\n\"Then he's harmless.\"\n\n\"Your sister is an idiot, too, so it looks like you both inherited that gene.\"\n\nBridge dragged his hands down his cheeks as he sighed. \"Yeah, I don't know what she was thinking.\"\n\n<I do.>\n\n<Shut it.>\n\nHis arms moved back to his knees. \"What did you want to tell me?\"\n\n\"When Cora returned to Eden Star, she didn't go alone.\"\n\nBridge's eyebrows immediately furrowed in a concentrated stare. \"Okay\u2026who went with her?\"\n\n\"Ashe.\" Rush stared at his friend's face, anticipating the reaction.\n\n\"What?\" he blurted. \"She just walked into the forest with this ginormous dragon and assumed that would go just fine?\"\n\n\"They didn't walk in together.\"\n\n\"Then how\u2014\" His eyes shifted away, his mouth wide open. Then his eyes came back, nearly twice the size they'd been before. \"It can't be\u2026 There's no way\u2026 There's just\u2026 Ashe would never agree.\"\n\n\"Well, he did,\" Rush said. \"Because he and Cora are fused.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Polox",
                "text": "The galleon pulled into the cove, the cannons visible over the edges, the beams constructed with wood but also flecks of gold. It was an unsinkable ship, and Captain Hurricane wanted that to be known.\n\nBridge cupped his mouth and shouted to Lilac. \"Took you long enough.\"\n\n\"Shut up.\" She gripped the rail then leaned over to shout back. \"I can't control the weather.\" Her eyes shifted to Rush standing beside him. \"Oh, you're back. Glad to see you're still in one piece.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Rush turned to Bridge and cast him a glare.\n\nBridge shouted back at her. \"We need a ride.\"\n\nCaptain Hurricane appeared over the edge, in his dark-blue jacket and hat. \"Do I look like a horse and buggy to you?\"\n\n\"Kinda,\" Rush said. \"Just replace the horse with some wind.\"\n\nCaptain Hurricane gripped the rail a little tighter, his eyes narrowed.\n\nBridge lowered his voice. \"Why do you never know how to talk to people?\"\n\n\"I'm a smartass,\" he said back, his voice low. \"I can't help it, alright?\" He projected his voice once more. \"Come on, we're allies now. If we weren't, you wouldn't have come back for us.\"\n\n\"I returned for my fair maiden.\" He grabbed the top of his hat and gave a slight adjustment. \"Not you. You didn't uphold your end of the bargain.\"\n\nRush took a step forward. \"Say what now?\"\n\nBridge grabbed his arm. \"Rush, we need him. It'll take us forever to get to Polox\u2014\"\n\nRush threw his arm off. \"A little hard to uphold my end of the deal when I was being tortured in a dungeon.\"\n\n\"Not my problem.\" His hands returned to the rail, his eyes cold on a warm day. \"A failed deal doesn't constitute an alliance.\"\n\n\"Your ship is made of gold.\" Rush threw his arms up. \"What do you need more money for?\"\n\nNow Captain Hurricane just stared.\n\nLilac came to the rescue and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. \"Come on, Captain.\" She leaned into him, took off his hat, and placed it on her own head.\n\nHe turned to her on instinct, giving her a very different look than the rest of them.\n\nBridge exhaled a sigh of disgust.\n\n<Good thing you turned her down.>\n\n<Would have turned her down, regardless.>\n\n\"If I'm your fair maiden, then my allies are your allies, right?\"\n\n<Until he finds out about the two of you.>\n\n<Like he needs another reason to hate me.>\n\nCaptain Hurricane gave a silent response\u2014a simple nod.\n\nShe smiled and kissed him on the cheek before she turned to the guys down below. \"So, boys\u2026where we going?\"\n\nThey sailed north for a few days.\n\nThey stayed away from the coastline, deep in the blue, completely alone.\n\nRush stood at the bow of the ship, taking in the sight of the blue water as it reflected the sunlight.\n\n\"What'd they do to you?\" Lilac came to his side and leaned against the rail.\n\n\"Good ol'-fashioned torture.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Her back leaned against the sail, facing the opposite way of Rush. \"For what it's worth, you can't tell.\"\n\n\"On my face\u2026\"\n\nShe crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes on the ship. \"You shouldn't have saved me.\"\n\n\"You have an interesting way of expressing gratitude.\"\n\n\"I just feel so guilty that I'm the reason you were captured\u2014\"\n\n\"You should feel guilty.\" He turned his gaze on her. \"It was a stupid idea. You shouldn't have come.\"\n\n\"I know. I just\u2026thought you needed help\u2014\"\n\n\"I have a dragon. I don't need help.\"\n\nHer head snapped in the other direction, severing the gaze like the edge of a sword. \"I'm sorry\u2026for everything.\"\n\nHe looked ahead again and sighed. \"It's fine. I might have been captured anyway\u2026no way to know.\"\n\n\"And I do appreciate you saving me, even if I wasn't worth saving.\"\n\n\"Of course you were worth saving.\" He turned back to her, his eyes narrowed.\n\nHer eyes narrowed slightly, her arms a little tighter across her chest.\n\n\"We're friends. That's what friends do. I've always got your back\u2014and I know you've got mine.\"\n\nLike a bolt of lightning that struck the earth in darkness, the disappointment hit, coming and going instantly. She looked ahead again. The silence was broken by the waves as they crashed against the hull. After she cleared her throat, she pushed off the rail and straightened. \"Your girlfriend is a fine piece of ass.\"\n\nRush gave a quick smile. \"She's not\u2026\" He quickly swallowed the words and felt the smile disappear. \"Yeah\u2026she is.\"\n\n\"Pretty badass that she came to rescue you and all that.\"\n\n\"That's what she is\u2014badass.\"\n\n\"Sounds like my kind of woman.\"\n\n<Alright, I like her a bit more now.>\n\n\"I'm sure you two will hit it off whenever you meet.\"\n\n\"For sure\u2014\"\n\nThe pirate in the crow's nest shouted from the top. \"Ahoy! Polox.\"\n\nCaptain Hurricane turned the ship, heading for land.\n\nRush left the bow of the ship and took the stairs to the wheel. \"We can't dock in the harbor.\"\n\nCaptain Hurricane kept his eyes ahead as he continued to turn the wheel. \"You want to jump out, then?\"\n\nRush gave him a stare.\n\nCaptain Hurricane gave him a stare back\u2014with a smug smirk on his face.\n\n\"Take us to a quiet beach.\"\n\nHe looked ahead again, turning the wheel the other way now. \"That's not what you said before. Be more specific next time.\"\n\n\"You know the empire is searching for me high and low\u2014\"\n\n\"Couldn't care less.\"\n\n\"Well, you should care. Because if they find me, they find your fair maiden, alright?\"\n\nHe righted the ship then gripped the top of the wheel with a single hand.\n\n\"Thanks.\" Rush walked away, knowing the captain was drilling holes into his back.\n\nAfter a long and affectionate goodbye, Lilac got into the small boat, and one of the crew rowed them to the beach.\n\n\"How are you going to meet up again?\" Rush asked.\n\nBridge gave a sigh, like he didn't want to hear about it.\n\n\"He said he'll come by the Hideaway and see if I'm there,\" Lilac answered.\n\n\"You don't have to come with us.\" Rush stared at Captain Hurricane at the side of the ship, his eyes on Lilac's back. \"If you want to stay, we would totally understand.\"\n\n\"No.\" She didn't turn to look back. \"This is more important. He knows that.\"\n\n\"You told him what we're doing?\" Rush's eyes flicked back to hers.\n\n\"I told him we want to save the dragons. Didn't give any other details, and he didn't ask. And even if I didn't have more important obligations, I couldn't live full time on a ship anyway, and he'll never abandon his crew. It would never work\u2014at least not long-term.\"\n\nBridge kept his eyes on land, doing his best to tune out the conversation.\n\nThey arrived on shore, gave a wave to the galleon, and then stepped into the brush.\n\n\"Maybe we should have thought about this before, but\u2026\" Bridge walked beside Rush, the other three behind them. \"How are we going to get into Polox without being seen? Their security must be ramped up by now.\"\n\n\"You're going to sneak me in.\"\n\n\"Whoa, what?\" His hand pressed into his chest. \"Me?\"\n\n\"Yep. You live here, remember? The guards might recognize your face.\"\n\n\"Lived. I haven't been home in a while.\" He kept up with Rush's quick stride, his hands gripping the straps of his pack. \"And the guards might also recognize me from my little charade at Rock Island.\"\n\n\"Unless General Noose is at Polox, I doubt it. He's the only one who saw you. The guards will recognize me\u2014because I look just like my father\u2014but they won't recognize you.\"\n\n\"Guess that's true\u2026\"\n\n\"So, we'll steal a wagon. I'll hide inside, and you drive me in.\"\n\n\"May as well. You're already wanted for treason\u2014no harm in committing another crime.\"\n\nThey approached the wooden gate of Polox, with the doors wide open, letting merchants and citizens come and go. From a distance, they squatted down, taking a look at the scene.\n\n\"Uh\u2026guys.\" Lilac kneeled beside Bridge. \"I don't think this is going to work.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Everything looks normal.\" Rush saw the citizens go in and out, wagons full of flour and corn rolling through the gates to sell in shops. Horses kicked up the dirt with their hooves. Quiet conversations drifted to their location. There were more guards than before, but that didn't matter.\n\n\"Do you not see those humongous posters on the wall?\" Lilac pointed to the right of the gateway.\n\nThere were five sketches\u2014showing each of their faces.\n\nRush let out a loud sigh of defeat. \"Great\u2026that's just great.\"\n\n\"Can you fly in?\" Bridge asked.\n\nRush turned to give him a glare. \"Sure. They won't notice a bright red dragon at all\u2026\"\n\nBridge elbowed him. \"I'm trying to think of something, okay?\"\n\nLilac opened her pack and pulled out a telescope. She extended it into position then placed it against her eye.\n\n\"Where'd you get that?\" Bridge asked, eyeing his sister.\n\nShe turned the telescope and focused on the poster. \"My hot pirate boyfriend.\"\n\n\"See anything?\" Rush asked.\n\n\"Well, I have some good news.\" She rotated the dial, increasing the focus. \"The drawings are terrible. I look like a hag in mine\u2026and Bridge looks even worse. Rush, you're the only one with a spot-on drawing.\"\n\n<Not that they need it.>\n\nShe contracted the telescope back into its smaller position and stowed it in her pack. \"Since they've depicted me as a hag and I'm definitely not a hag, I have an idea.\"\n\n\"What?\" Rush asked.\n\n\"Let me see that.\" Bridge grabbed the top of the telescope visible at the edge of her pack and placed it against his eye. He made the adjustments until he got the posters in view. \"You're right, that looks nothing like me. Yours is dead-on, though.\"\n\nShe slugged him in the side.\n\nBridge gave a jerk, slamming the telescope into his eye as he fell forward. \"Ouch, that hurt.\"\n\nRush ignored him. \"What's your idea?\"\n\nBridge stayed down on all fours, rubbing his face. \"Great, now I have a black eye.\"\n\n\"I distract them,\" she said. \"I'll walk up to the gate. Do a bit of flirting. You slip right in.\"\n\n\"What about on the way out?\" Rush said. \"I don't know how long I'll be, and you can't keep that going for too long.\"\n\n\"Look.\" She nodded toward the gate. \"They're only checking people entering\u2014not leaving.\"\n\nRush watched the guards check every person who came to the gate, ordering them to take down their hoods so they could have a thorough look at each person as they entered Polox. Everyone who departed the city was ignored. \"You're right.\"\n\nLilac took the telescope from her brother and stowed it away. \"Let's do this.\"\n\n\"What are you going to say?\" Rush said.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said as she got to her feet. \"It's not like men listen anyway\u2026\"\n\nThe second Lilac strolled up, she captured their complete and undivided attention.\n\nRush didn't catch anything she said as he slipped past the guards and entered Polox, his hood still up to hide his face from everyone in the street. It was past midday, so there were only a couple hours left before sundown. Once that happened, the gates would close, so if he didn't want to be stuck on the street all night, he had to get to work.\n\nHe made it to the potions shop and slid inside, the bell ringing over the door.\n\nThere was already a customer inside, so Rush immediately walked to the rear of the shop, eyeing the strange things that no one ever bought. How did he know that? Because there was dust everywhere.\n\nHe moved toward the window, spotting another flask of dragon tears.\n\n<Interesting.>\n\n<How does she always have tears on hand?>\n\n<Good question.>\n\nThe customer paid at the counter then departed the store. The bell rang again.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Rush?\" Mathilda's deep voice came from the front of the store.\n\nRush pushed his hood back as he approached the counter. \"How'd you know?\"\n\n\"The way you move.\" Her long hair was in thick curls, and she was dressed in purple. The counter separated them, and there was a doorway behind her that led to a private storeroom. \"Entitled men always move in the same way\u2014like they own the place.\"\n\nHe took the insult with a shrug. \"Someone said I was arrogant once\u2026maybe a couple times.\"\n\n\"Whoever told you that is a good friend\u2014because a good friend will lie about your flaws behind your back but speak them to your face.\" She gave him a long and hard stare, one hand on the counter. \"Looks like those dragon tears did you some good.\"\n\nHe met her look, not the least bit surprised by her assumption. \"How'd you know?\"\n\n\"The empire told me\u2014with their posters on every wall.\"\n\nHe gave a subtle nod before he planted his hands on the counter between them. \"I've always been a popular guy.\" He stared at her, people passing by the windows, having no idea that the person the empire wanted most was right inside. \"Why'd you do it?\"\n\n\"I do a lot of things.\"\n\n\"You gave it to her at no cost. Why?\"\n\n\"It was at a cost\u2014which she'll pay later.\"\n\n\"I was the one who needed them, so I should be the one in debt.\"\n\n\"But you aren't a half-elf who would risk her life to save a man and a dragon, are you?\" She gave a smile, but her eyes remained shrewd. \"What can the empire's number one fugitive offer me?\"\n\n\"Touch\u00e9.\" His eyes narrowed, looking at Mathilda in a whole new way. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"That's between her and me.\"\n\n<Why did you think this was a good idea?>\n\n<Never said it was.> \"Where do you get the dragon tears?\"\n\nA slow smile moved on to her lips, more like a taunt. \"From a dragon, obviously.\"\n\n\"But which dragon?\"\n\nHer hands planted on the counter and she leaned forward, her head tilted up to regard him at his greater height.\n\n<She must get them from the empire.>\n\n<You're right.> \"Why haven't you ratted me out to the guards?\"\n\n\"It's not my place to interfere with another's journey. No one interferes with mine.\"\n\nRush withdrew his hands from the counter and straightened.\n\n\"You came here for something, Rush Hawkehelm. Not to buy, because your hands are empty, but something, nonetheless.\"\n\n\"I need an introduction to the dwarves.\"\n\n\"That, I can't give you.\"\n\n\"Do you know them?\"\n\n\"Once upon a time.\"\n\n\"Then tell me the way. I'll introduce myself.\"\n\nShe withdrew from the counter, her eyes hazing over with a foggy memory. \"You waste your time going there.\"\n\n\"What happened to not interfering with another's journey?\" An audience with the dwarves was happening\u2014and a witch wouldn't stand in his way.\n\nShe stared hard and deep for a very long time, her eyes still and focused. \"As you wish. But this information comes at a price.\"\n\n\"Of course it does\u2026\"\n\n\"The shelf life of the Galeco Frogs is short. I need another batch, but last time I ventured west, there were no frogs to be seen.\"\n\n<She knows.>\n\n\"How do you know about the venom?\"\n\n\"Honey, everyone knows.\"\n\n\"But\u2026how?\"\n\nShe gave a shrug. \"When a weapon is discovered, word travels fast. Bring it to me\u2014and I will give you what you seek.\"\n\n<This will be easy.>\n\n<But take weeks of our time.>\n\n<It'll take even longer climbing up and down the mountains like goats looking for a way in.>\n\n<I see your point.>\n\nRush left the counter and headed to the door, knowing he had to get out of the city before sundown. \"I'll be back in a couple weeks.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps not at all.\"\n\nHe gave her a glance over his shoulder. \"Way to stay positive\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Army Marches",
                "text": "They trekked through the wilderness, staying clear of popular roads and trails taken by merchants. It was hot and miserable, and they only made a fire long enough to cook dinner before it was stamped out again. Enemies were in the skies. And Rush had no doubt they were on the ground too.\n\n\"I can't believe this.\" Bridge kept up with him while the others trailed behind. They crested a hill then moved back to the flatlands, cutting through condensed trees and brush, heading west. \"I hate those big-ass frogs. I literally have nightmares about those guys.\"\n\n\"They aren't my favorite either.\"\n\n\"I'd rather deal with an orc than one of those guys.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Rush asked. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Uh, because orcs don't jump ten feet in the air while they chase you\u2014and roar while doing it.\"\n\nRush chuckled. \"Orcs are seven feet tall, have skin thick as armor, and wield swords like decent fighters. That doesn't scare you?\"\n\nBridge shrugged. \"They don't jump on you.\"\n\nRush rolled his eyes.\n\n\"And they aren't as angry. Frogs are pissed, man. Their eyes literally pop out a bit and they do that stupid thing with their mouth\u2014\"\n\n<Hide!>\n\nRush grabbed Bridge by the arm and yanked him so hard his shoulder nearly popped out of the socket.\n\n\"What the\u2014\"\n\nRush cupped his mouth and forced him down behind a boulder.\n\nThe others copied their movements, all giving Rush looks that demanded answers.\n\nHe pressed his finger against his lips.\n\nThe thud of footfalls was suddenly distinct.\n\n<Thud. Thud. Thud.>\n\nIt grew louder until it was right on the other side of the boulder.\n\nBridge mouthed to him. \"Orcs?\"\n\nRush shook his head.\n\nThe thudding didn't stop. It just kept going\u2014for a solid twenty minutes.\n\nRush felt the blood drain from his face because he knew what it was.\n\nWhen the thud turned faint, he popped his head over the edge of the rock to see what he'd already imagined in his head.\n\nGeneral Noose rode his steed in the lead\u2014followed by an army of two thousand men behind him.\n\nBridge and the others did the same, popping their heads to get a look.\n\n<They're searching for us.>\n\nThey stayed low for a few days before they continued toward the desert.\n\n\"The frogs don't seem so scary\u2026after seeing that.\" Rush moved faster now, wanting to get to their destination as quickly as possible to decrease their odds of running into General Noose\u2026and whoever else was looking for him.\n\n\"Dad must really miss me.\"\n\nBridge gave a slight snort that came out as a pained laugh. \"What will happen if he catches us?\"\n\n<Torture us. Kill the rest.>\n\n\"They aren't going to catch us, so don't worry about it.\"\n\n\"What if he sent out another army\u2014\"\n\n\"An army isn't going to sneak up on us. My dad is an idiot if he thinks Flare and I aren't going to notice two thousand soldiers.\"\n\n\"I don't know. We didn't notice them that quickly.\"\n\n\"It'll be fine, Bridge.\"\n\n<What if they weren't looking for us?>\n\n<What do you mean?>\n\n<What if they're preparing to march on Eden Star?>\n\nRush halted next to a tree.\n\nBridge kept walking and took several seconds to notice that Rush had fallen behind. He looked over his shoulder. \"You okay, man?\"\n\n<Why do you say that?>\n\n<I didn't see crossbows.>\n\n<They were pretty far away by the time we looked.>\n\n<I see much better than you do.>\n\nRush replayed the march in his head, mapping out their direction. <They weren't going in that direction.>\n\n<I guess you're right. Still worries me.>\n\n<Yeah, it worries me too.>\n\n\"What are we looking for here?\" Lilac kicked a pinecone as she walked forward, glancing at the grassy area next to the stream.\n\n\"Galeco Frogs,\" Liam said. \"In various pastel colors, their skins are slick with venom along with their saliva. They're six feet tall and can propel themselves to great heights, sometimes launching themselves to a height of twenty feet for the most mature individuals.\"\n\nLilac spun around in a circle. \"Well, I don't see any monster toads. And they sound like they'd be easy to spot.\"\n\n\"If you don't see them, you'll hear them,\" Liam said. \"Because they roar.\"\n\n\"Whoa, what?\" Lilac turned to regard Liam. \"Roar? Like a dragon?\"\n\n<How dare you.>\n\n<She doesn't mean it like that.>\n\n<I'm a beast. Not a pink frog that hops around like a rabbit.>\n\n<Just let it go, Flare.>\n\n<I dislike her again.>\n\nRush moved forward, crossing the shallow stream and moving deeper into the tree line. \"This is where they should be\u2014near the river.\"\n\n\"How many are there usually?\" Zane asked.\n\nRush gave a shrug. \"I don't know\u2026dozens in each group.\"\n\n\"Maybe they moved upstream?\" Lilac asked. \"Downstream?\"\n\nRush took the lead. \"Let's try upstream. The water will be fresher closer to the waterfall.\"\n\nThey hiked for a full day\u2014and didn't see anything.\n\n\"Where the hell are these guys?\" Bridge asked. \"Do they migrate?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of,\" Rush said. \"This is their territory. Anytime I've come this way, they're here.\"\n\n\"Maybe soldiers are coming through this area, so they moved.\"\n\n\"Yeah, they aren't really the turn and run kinda creatures.\"\n\n<That's the only thing we have in common.>\n\n<You're still on that?>\n\n<She compared me to a FROG.>\n\n\"Rush, over here.\" Lilac gave a loud whistle.\n\nRush turned to see her across the river near the base of one of the rock walls embedded with soil. It was a mossy area, evergreen bushes everywhere, moss growing over the soil. \"What is it?\"\n\nShe rounded the corner before he could catch up.\n\nHe jogged, the rest of the guys along with him.\n\nWhen he turned the corner, the sight brought him to a halt. \"No\u2026\"\n\nAn old bonfire sat there, desiccated bodies and bones of the Galeco clan on top. Most of it was dust. Individuals couldn't be discerned. It was an ashy graveyard.\n\n<This is wrong.>\n\n\"Who would do this?\" Liam kneeled down and looked at the pile, his face tight in agony. \"They wiped out an entire species\u2026\"\n\nRush closed his eyes and released a pained sigh. \"The Shamans or the empire. But nowadays, they're one and the same.\"\n\nBridge kicked a bone into the pile. The fire was old because there was no hint of smoke in the air. The graveyard had been there for months, probably. \"Smart. Now they can't be killed\u2026again.\"\n\nRush stood with his hands on his hips, looking at the dead creatures that were all now a single color\u2014black. Their pastel luminosity was gone. Their roars would never echo in this forest. King Lux wiped out the race of free dragons, so of course, he wouldn't hesitate to do it to something else. Rush had no particular fondness for the frogs that had chased him down more times than he could count, but this\u2026was despicable.\n\n<What are we going to do?>\n\n<Don't ask me.>\n\n<Who else can I ask?>\n\n<I'm not in the mood, Flare. This was my one way to get to the dwarves, and now\u2014>\n\n*Ribbit. Ribbit.*\n\nThe group shared a look before they turned toward the sound.\n\n\"Somewhere over here.\" Bridge took the lead.\n\n*Ribbit. Ribbit.*\n\n\"Break into groups.\" Rush went his own direction. \"We gotta find these guys.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we be able to see them?\" Lilac asked. \"Or hear them roar or whatever?\"\n\n*Ribbit. Ribbit.*\n\n<Go right.>\n\nRush felt Flare's mind press up against his, a knock on the door, and then they became one. The energy donated by his dragon heightened his senses, and the sounds of the Galeco Frogs were amplified.\n\n*Ribbit. Ribbit.*\n\n<It's louder.>\n\n<Keep going.>\n\nRush kneeled near the copse of ferns.\n\n<Careful.>\n\n<Are they underground?>\n\n<Maybe it's a regular frog that we're chasing.>\n\nRush gently pulled back the ferns and revealed a hole in the ground.\n\nSeveral pairs of eyes darted to his face, swelling in anger and fear, and then their lips started to snarl. There were a dozen, all with the pastel skin that made them so easy to spot, all the size of his palm. They didn't jump. They didn't attack. They just stared with their snarls. \"Guys, over here.\"\n\nBridge got there first. \"Are those\u2026?\"\n\nThe frogs shifted their hostile stare to him.\n\n\"They're actually pretty cute\u2026when they're small.\" He looked at Rush. \"I guess they must have hidden them when they were attacked.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Rush said, imagining a mother frog burying her young before she could be slain.\n\nLiam kneeled. \"The last survivors\u2026\"\n\nThey all sat there and stared, looking at the frogs as they looked at them.\n\n\"She didn't specify how much venom she needed,\" Bridge said. \"So maybe we can just take one or two\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Rush dropped his pack and dug inside until he found an extra bag with a drawstring on top. \"We aren't doing that.\"\n\n\"Then what are we going to bring to Mathilda?\" Lilac asked. \"We don't have to kill them all\u2014\"\n\n\"We aren't killing any of them.\" He set the bag sideways close to the edge of the hole. \"Come on.\" He shook the bag, trying to entice them to hop inside.\n\n\"Then what's the plan?\" Bridge asked. \"Why are you taking them?\"\n\n\"Because they can't stay here.\" He waved his hand toward the bag. \"Come on, guys. I'm not going to hurt you. Ugh, how the hell am I going to do this?\" He shook the bag again and pointed inside the flap. \"If they stay here, they'll get bigger, and when they do, they'll be killed too.\"\n\n\"Then\u2026where are they going to go?\" Bridge asked. \"They're just as vulnerable anywhere.\"\n\nRush gave an angry sigh as he looked at one of the frogs. \"Get in this bag, or I swear\u2014\"\n\n*Ribbit.*\n\n\"Get.\" He pointed at the bag. \"In.\"\n\n*Ribbit.*\n\n\"Don't be a dick\u2014\"\n\nThe frog hopped inside.\n\nRush's eyebrows both shot to the top of his face.\n\nThen the next one joined him.\n\nOne by one, they went, hopping into the bag until the hole was empty.\n\nRush righted the bag and cinched the drawstring before he got to his feet. <Never imagined I'd be holding a bag of baby frogs.>\n\n<That makes two of us.>\n\nHe put his pack back on his back and held the bag at his side, like it was a bag of flour or something. \"Next, we cross the desert.\"\n\n\"Uh, Rush,\" Bridge said. \"Those guys won't survive out there\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm not an idiot,\" Rush said. \"I'm taking them to the one place where they're safe\u2014Eden Star.\" He took the lead, heading in the direction of the desert, which would have to be crossed under darkness.\n\n\"Rush?\" Bridge was close behind. \"What are we going to do about Mathilda? We're supposed to earn the dwarves as allies, not go on a conservation escapade. It would be a lot easier if we just harvested the venom\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't do it, alright?\" Rush said as he kept walking. \"I just can't\u2026\"\n\nBridge let it go.\n\nThey headed west\u2014right for the unbearable sands.\n\n<I'm proud of you.>\n\n<Shut up.>\n\n<I am.>\n\n<I'm only doing it for her.>\n\n<No, you aren't. You're doing it because of her.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Wor-lei",
                "text": "Mist filled the air around them, fireflies illuminating the area where the sunlight couldn't reach. Callon locked his eyes on hers with the greatest endurance he'd ever shown, not needing to blink, not even when minutes passed.\n\nCora's fingertips touched her face, wiping the last of the tears that had streaked down her cheeks. The blue outline of Weila was still there, holding on to her husband like their separation was as hard for her as it was for him. \"I can't see the details of her face. It's just an outline, a hazy one\u2026\"\n\nHis hands tightened on Weila's\u2014as if he hoped he could feel her.\n\nCora watched his fingers move through hers without touching. \"I know I must sound crazy, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I believe you.\" He turned to his wife, seeing nothing but the ground in front of him. He gave a sigh in disappointment, closed his eyes in pain, as if he'd give anything to see what she could see.\n\nCora watched Weila bring her head back to look into her husband's face. \"She's looking at you\u2026\"\n\nCallon opened his eyes and met the look he couldn't see.\n\n\"Wor-lei\u2026\"\n\nCora sucked in a deep breath when she heard it, the quiet voice of the woman on her knees. \"I can hear her too.\"\n\nCallon turned back to her, his breaths now labored.\n\n\"She said\u2026Wor-lei.\"\n\nHe sucked a deep breath instantly. He closed his eyes briefly, and once they reopened, they began to water.\n\n\"What\u2026what does that mean?\"\n\nHe looked at Cora again, squeezing the hands he couldn't feel. \"Husband.\"\n\nWeila turned her head in Cora's direction.\n\n\"I think\u2026she can hear me too.\"\n\n\"Then speak to her.\" Callon's voice gripped her body the way he tried to grip the hands of his wife. \"Tell her\u2026tell her that my love has not abated in the years we've been apart. Tell her\u2026I'm lost without her.\"\n\nHer eyes watered again, her heart wrenching at the pain her uncle shared so vividly. His words matched the sorrow in his eyes, the sorrow she saw on a daily basis. \"Weila, Callon wants you to know that his love for you still lives on\u2026and he misses you so much.\"\n\nCallon stared at her invisible face, eyes wet, his grief taking over. \"What did she say?\"\n\n\"Nothing yet.\"\n\nA full minute of silence passed. Weila looked at her husband once more. \"Wor-lei\u2026\" Her voice came from every direction, not from the invisible mouth that Cora couldn't perceive. The sadness was heavy. The sorrow worse than her husband's. \"Grief is the perseverance of love. An unbearable burden, but one that keeps us together, across the veil, forever.\"\n\nCora repeated it word for word.\n\nCallon closed his eyes to restrain the tears.\n\n\"Our spirits will touch once more, not as they did in life, but in death. Reunited once more, we will float on the wind, between the leaves, through the trees. We will be the flowers we once admired. The birds that sang to us in the morning. The river that brought our forest life. We will wait until your time has come\u2014and go together.\"\n\nCallon sucked in a breath, the tears escaping his eyes.\n\nToo difficult for her to watch, Cora looked away. She became the vessel of communication between them, but nothing more.\n\nHe spoke through his tears. \"I wish to join you now\u2026\"\n\n\"Now is not your time, Wor-lei.\"\n\nHe shook his head, his eyes closed.\n\n\"We will wait,\" she said. \"We will wait until that time has come.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I can't wait\u2026\"\n\n\"I am here for you\u2014always. We both are. But I must go now\u2026\"\n\n\"No.\" His eyes opened, his fingers tightening into fists. \"Please\u2026don't go\u2026\"\n\n\"Wor-lei, Hei Nu Sen.\"\n\nHe sucked in a breath, his eyes closed. \"Hei Nu Sen, Sun-lei\u2026\"\n\nThe blue outline disappeared.\n\nCallon's hands suddenly dropped.\n\nCora looked away, to cover her own tears as well as avoid his.\n\nHe leaned forward with his head in his hands, breathing through the pain, like Cora wasn't even there.\n\nHer hand reached out until her fingertips felt his shoulder. Gently, she slid it across his back, resting her palm against him, the only comfort she could provide\u2026and she wasn't even sure if he wanted it.\n\nThere was no reaction to her touch. His breaths still came and went, a quiet breakdown that he couldn't control.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tor-lei\u2026\" She spoke through her tears, broken apart by the raw grief he carried every single day.\n\nHe pulled her arm from his back.\n\nShe immediately withdrew, remorseful for invading his space. Her eyes went down to her hands in her lap, wishing she could disappear entirely.\n\nHis arm circled her shoulders, and he drew her close, resting his head on hers.\n\nShe closed her eyes, enveloped by the kind of affection she'd never felt in her life.\n\n\"Thank you, Sor-lei.\"\n\nCallon kept to himself for a few days.\n\nHer daily training had ceased, so she spent her time in the tree house, meditating in the fields, going to the market despite being ignored by everyone there.\n\n<I feel your sadness.>\n\nShe looked out the window with the cup of tea between her fingertips. Steam rose to the ceiling, the rosebuds floating on the surface of the hot liquid. She looked down into the dark tea and gave it a couple stirs with her spoon. <Not sadness\u2026more like heartbreak.>\n\n<For your uncle?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<If I lost my Zuhurk\u2026I'd feel the same way.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026>\n\n<But he still has you.>\n\n<I'm not enough to replace what he lost.>\n\n<It still gives him reason to go on.>\n\nShe stirred her tea, her eyes down.\n\n<Is there more?>\n\nAfter a deep breath, she gave her answer. <No.>\n\nA knock sounded on the open doorway.\n\nShe flinched because she hadn't heard him approach. His elven footsteps were impossible to detect. Unless she happened to stare straight at the door at his arrival, she'd never know he was there. \"Hey\u2026how are you?\"\n\nHe crossed the room with his silent authority, his powerful arms still by his sides, the muscles and tendons visible because he wore a short-sleeved shirt that day. His large frame sank into the chair across from her.\n\nThey stared, back and forth.\n\nShe held her breath, waiting to hear what he had to say.\n\nBut he never answered her question.\n\n\"Want some tea?\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod.\n\nShe poured him a cup before she returned to her seat.\n\nHe stared at the rising steam for a moment before he regarded her once more. \"Needed some time.\"\n\n\"I completely understand\u2026\"\n\nHis elbows rested on the table, one hand cupping his chin, a heavy shadow there because he'd skipped the shave for several days. His fingers rubbed the coarse hair, his eyes down. \"I was too overcome with the moment to think about its implications. But I've thought about them now.\"\n\n\"So, you know why I can see her?\"\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n\"Do you know why I can talk to her?\"\n\n\"I don't know that either.\"\n\n<Is it because I'm fused with you?>\n\n<No. Dragons don't possess those kinds of powers. We also have no concept of the afterlife.>\n\n<You don't?>\n\n<Why would we when we're immortal? We lived in peace. There's been no reason to question our mortality and speculate on the afterlife when we've never needed one. That all changed when King Lux arrived\u2026>\n\n\"Has there ever been another elf who can\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" He dropped his hand to the table. \"You can push your mind in a way I've never seen before. Maybe there's an elf in our history that could, but I'm not aware of it. Perhaps that is the reason.\"\n\n<No.>\n\n<No, what?>\n\n<That's not the reason.>\n\n<Okay\u2026then what do you think is the reason?>\n\n<Death Magic. Ask him.>\n\n<I know it's not Death Magic because I didn't do anything. Didn't perform a spell. It just\u2026happened.>\n\n<You can perform the Skull Crusher without a spell. Death Magic is not what you can do\u2014but what you are. Now ask.>\n\n\"Uh\u2026what about Death Magic?\"\n\n<That's not how you ask such a question.>\n\n<Hey, you gave me zero advice.>\n\nCallon stiffened at the question. His eyebrows drew close together an instant later.\n\n\"What about Death Magic?\"\n\n\"Is that\u2026what I'm doing?\"\n\n\"Are you dead?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then no.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2026so you have to be dead to use Death Magic?\"\n\nHe must have assumed it was rhetorical because he stared.\n\n\"Because I can do the Skull Crusher, and now I can talk to dead people.\"\n\n\"Not dead people,\" he said quickly. \"Spirits of the living.\"\n\n<Careful. Do not offend him.>\n\n\"I just\u2026don't understand. How can I do these things?\"\n\nHis eyes dropped in quiet contemplation.\n\n\"So, is there a difference between dead people and spirits of the living?\"\n\n\"Night and day difference.\"\n\n\"How are they different?\"\n\n\"Shamans are dead. My family has passed on and become spirits.\"\n\nShe'd been close to a Shaman but had never seen inside that hood. Her knife sank into something soft, like a pillow, like they were physical, but barely. \"That's why they can't be killed\u2026because they're already dead.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But, like, what the hell are they?\"\n\nHe lifted his chin, his eyebrows high.\n\n\"Where do they come from? Where do they live? How can something be dead but go around and kill people? Have powers like that?\"\n\n<He's hiding something.>\n\n<No, he's thinking.>\n\nCallon looked out the window for a moment, his lips pressed tightly together. \"It's forbidden.\"\n\n\"What's forbidden?\"\n\n\"To speak of such things.\"\n\n<Told you.>\n\n\"To talk about the Shamans?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It's\u2026\" He pressed his lips tightly together again. \"It's a part of our history that we want to erase. It's been removed from our textbooks in the library. It doesn't exist in our conversations in the market. It just doesn't exist anymore.\"\n\n\"Why? I don't understand.\"\n\nHe kept his eyes out the window, his chest rising with every breath he took. \"Because we're ashamed.\"\n\nAshe's voice deepened, turning hostile the way it did on Mist Isle every time he interacted with Rush. <Make. Him. Answer.>\n\n\"Callon\u2026you need to tell me.\"\n\n\"It's not lore that should be passed down\u2014\"\n\n\"You watched me get rid of those Shamans on the way to Rock Island. Now you've seen me speak with the dead. I need to know this information.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted back to hers. \"You aren't a Shaman, Cora\u2014\"\n\n\"How do we know for sure?\"\n\n\"Because I'm looking at you right now. Your eyes illuminate like the fireflies in the forest, and your heart beats with the soul of the trees. I feel your presence, and it's vibrant, honest, and beautiful.\"\n\nShe released a slow sigh. \"Please tell me.\"\n\n\"You have a powerful mind. That's all.\"\n\n\"Why do I have a powerful mind, Callon?\"\n\n\"Because you're the daughter of the greatest king who ever lived.\"\n\n\"Are you seriously not going to tell me?\"\n\nHe looked away again, his features tightening into a grimace. \"You have your secrets, Cora. I've respected your privacy, have betrayed my own queen to protect your interests. It's your turn to give me the same kindness.\"\n\n<No.>\n\nShe closed her eyes in defeat. <Ashe, he's right\u2014>\n\n<We need this information.>\n\n<There's nothing I can do.>\n\n<Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.>\n\n<I'll try again later, but I have to let this go for now.>\n\nA louder growl, like the stove trying to light the gas. <Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.>\n\nShe did her best to ignore the growl in her head. \"Okay, I understand.\"\n\nCallon instantly grabbed the cup of tea and brought it to his lips for a drink. \"The last thing I'll say about this topic\u2026 You are not a Shaman. Yes, your powers are similar, but there's another explanation for it. Now we're finished.\"\n\n<If that were the truth, he would have no problem giving you this information.>\n\n<Not necessarily. He can prove that I'm not what I fear, but in doing so, he'll reveal something he doesn't want me to know.>\n\n<Now I don't like him.>\n\n<Ashe, I've brought a dragon into their borders without their knowledge or permission. I have access to a private passage that takes me in and out of their lands undetected. He saved Flare from the empire. He's earned your respect a million times over.>\n\nAshe turned quiet, simmering in silence.\n\nCallon drank his tea, his eyes on the window most of the time, the sounds of the birds all around the tree house.\n\nRejection stabbed her deep, and the disappointment was difficult to overcome. It drew her out of the conversation.\n\n\"I've wanted to return to Sun-lei ever since we left. I can't see her. I can't touch her. But I can feel her, so it's like she's there. You speak her words, but I hear them in her voice. The details of her face have never left my mind, so I see them when you speak. We're together again. It brings me joy\u2026albeit short-lived.\"\n\n\"We can see her whenever you want, Callon. I'm happy to do that for you.\"\n\n\"I know, Sor-lei.\" His eyes glazed over as he looked out the window, filling with the pain she'd witnessed countless times since they'd met. \"But I wonder\u2026if she's the only one? Can you see others?\" His eyes shifted back to hers.\n\n<I have the same wonder.>\n\n\"I\u2026I don't know. I didn't see anyone else while I was there.\"\n\n<Perhaps you can see more than your father's grave.>\n\nShe instantly sucked in a breath. <I\u2026I didn't even think of that.>\n\n<Nor did I.>\n\n\"My Vin-lei doesn't come to me as often as my Sun-lei. I don't know why\u2014and I wish I did.\"\n\nThe potential meeting with her father had taken her focus, but the sorrow in Callon's voice pulled her out of it again. \"Let's ask him.\"\n\nCallon inhaled a slow breath, the surface of his eyes forming a nearly invisible film. \"I'm afraid.\" He'd stormed the castle and had taken out the guards as his elvish blade reflected the torches mounted on the wall. With dark and focused eyes, he'd slain men and left their bodies in his wake. He moved with a swiftness that defied his size, a calmness that rivaled a stream. General. Soldier. Hero. But this was a different version of him entirely. Grieving father. Broken widower.\n\n\"Afraid of what?\"\n\n\"What his answer will be.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Death Will Have to Do",
                "text": "On the same bench as before, they sat together.\n\nWhether it was morning or evening, the graveyard looked the same, the mist heavy in the trees, the coolness sticking to their clothes. Both times she'd visited the Cemetery of Spirits, no other elves were present.\n\nMaybe because there were far more living elves than dead ones.\n\nWith his hands together on his lap and a straight back, he sat there, watching a firefly float past his face then leave his vision. Sometimes, his head would bow and he would close his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten her presence because there was no conversation or eye contact.\n\nHours passed\u2014and there was no sign.\n\nCallon showed his unease in his breathing, which had grown more labored over the past hour.\n\n\"He'll come, Callon. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But he will.\"\n\nCallon released a heavy breath, giving a slight nod at the same time.\n\nHer hand went to his back, her palm running over the large muscles that flanked either side of his spine. \"But we can stay as long as you want.\"\n\nHe dismissed the suggestion by rising to his feet. \"His spirit is elsewhere.\"\n\nShe got to her feet too, but her eyes pierced the mist to see the headstone that was barely visible in the haze.\n\nWhen Callon realized she wasn't behind him, he turned back.\n\n\"I think I'm going to stay.\"\n\nHis eyes immediately flicked past her, looking at the same headstone. It was a confirmation\u2014that was Tiberius Riverglade's final resting place. His eyes drifted back to hers a second later. \"I apologize for my self-absorption.\"\n\n\"Please don't apologize. I understand.\"\n\n\"Would you like me to stay?\"\n\n\"No, I'll be okay.\"\n\nHe gave a final nod before he departed, disappearing into the mist.\n\nOnce his presence was gone, she felt the solitude all the way to her bones. It was still the afternoon, but the crickets chirped their song into the glade like it was twilight. Fireflies floated across the clearing, giving off a beautiful glow.\n\nShe left their graves and traveled to the one that stood alone.\n\nIt was a distinguished area compared to the rest, a private niche with several trees. A large statue carved in white was next to the grave. Over six feet tall, Tiberius Riverglade stood in his battle uniform, medals made of flowers pinned to his chest. His thick vambraces were scarred with sword marks, and his gloves were weathered at the knuckles. He was depicted in reality\u2014a battle-worn king.\n\nHer eyes shifted to the headstone.\n\n\u2002In Grace Lies\n\n\u2002King Tiberius Riverglade\n\n\u2002Lord. Protector. Husband.\n\nIvy grew over the corner of his headstone, white flowers in full bloom like the summer sun shone in a cloudless sky. Drops sprinkled the petals and the vines, reflecting the lights of the fireflies as they floated across the glade.\n\n\u2002Lord. Protector. Husband.\n\nSomething was missing.\n\nFather.\n\nHer lungs took an involuntary breath, a jerk of her chest that she didn't see coming. The loss fell across her shoulders like a warm blanket in winter, except the weight wasn't cozy. It was a burden. A heavy one.\n\nThere was no reason to grieve a man she'd never known, but if he shared her uncle's likeness, it was a real loss. Strong. Intelligent. Powerful. He would have been the grace she aspired to be. A role model. An inspiration. But he would have been more too\u2026 Loving, affectionate, fatherly.\n\nShe'd never had the opportunity to feel it herself. And now she never would.\n\nShe lowered herself to the blue bench at his side. Automatically, her fingers went to the ring on her forefinger, feeling the green gem against her skin. It was cold from the mist.\n\nShe saw the blue eyes. The sly grin.\n\nShe felt the warmth of his touch like his hand was on hers.\n\nFirelight. Starlight. Joy.\n\nShe swallowed it back with a painful sigh.\n\nThen she felt it.\n\nA presence so thick it was solid, it drew close, real enough to cast a shadow. Invisible footprints marked the soil. Fireflies drew closer, attracted to the energy that entered the clearing. A majestic soul. An authority that was kingly but intimidating. The command of his reign continued\u2014even from death.\n\nHer eyes lifted from the soil\u2014seeing the blue outline of King Tiberius.\n\nStill, with his arms by his sides, he remained there, watching her without a sense of familiarity.\n\nHer heart had never raced so quickly. War drums sounded in her ears. As if she awaited an execution rather than a meeting, her body went into duress. When she'd occupied the bench, she hadn't expected him to come.\n\nLet alone so quickly.\n\nThere was no face. Just the outline of his head.\n\nHis body pivoted away\u2014and then he began to fade.\n\n\"Wait.\" Her hand flung out, swooshing through the blue outline without contact.\n\nHe stilled.\n\nShe drew her hand close again, her fingers closing into a fist like she'd been burned by a fire.\n\nHe turned back and drew close.\n\n\"Cora\u2026 I'm Cora.\"\n\nA deep and powerful voice broke the silence, having the same regal strength as his presence. \"Your face is not in my memories.\"\n\n\"Because we've never met\u2026\"\n\nHe stilled again, this time taking a step backward. His head turned to one side. Then the other. He drew close again. \"You stare like you see. You speak like you reply.\"\n\n\"Because I see you\u2026and I hear you\u2026King Tiberius.\"\n\nHis invisible eyes stared. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Cora\u2014\"\n\n\"That was not the question. Who are you?\"\n\nHer fingers removed the ring from her hand then held it in her open palm. \"Your daughter.\"\n\nHis blue outline was on the bench beside her, several feet away even though they couldn't touch. \"As much as I wanted children, I sired none.\"\n\n\"It was twenty-one years ago\u2026shortly before your death.\"\n\nThe outline of his head was turned her way, his invisible stare focused on her.\n\n\"You\u2026had an affair.\"\n\nHis head faced forward, the silence so long that it seemed like the conversation was over. When his words emerged, they were filled with a hint of anger\u2026and a storm of regret. \"It was no affair.\"\n\n\"I was left at the gates of a village\u2014with just a note and this ring.\" The ring had been removed from her finger and placed in her palm, on display for him to see. \"I've never seen the note, so I don't know what it says.\"\n\nHe gave a slight turn of his head toward the ring.\n\nHer fingers tightened around it again before she slipped it back on. \"When I showed it to Callon, he knew who I was.\"\n\n\"Because that ring belongs to me.\"\n\nShe looked at the ring again, this time in new appreciation. \"Tell me who my mother is.\" That secret had been taken to the grave, but she could go to the grave too. Her eyes left the ring and moved to where his face would be. The green eyes were invisible to her, along with the strong jaw, the tightened brow.\n\n\"I remember life with the same vividness in death, but I cannot give you what you seek\u2014because I don't know the answer. As I said, it was not an affair. We made camp on our journey, and in the middle of the night, when the campfire burned the lowest, I was pulled out of my tent by an unseen grip. She slipped past my guards with the quietness of a butterfly and locked her eyes on mine.\" He looked forward once more, his head slightly bowed. \"Like a humid storm, my mind was muffled with heavy clouds. All I knew was she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. The flap of the tent closed. That's the last I recall.\"\n\nThis pill of disappointment was too heavy to swallow, so she let it sit on the back of her tongue.\n\n\"Perhaps she snuck something into my food or drink the night before, creeping past the guards just as she did then. All I know is, I wasn't myself, and I can't remember my misdeed. But you are here\u2014so it must be true.\"\n\n\"Does that mean she was a witch?\"\n\n\"That's an answer we'll never know. But I recall her deep, dark hair, her petiteness, the way she moved like a wild cat stalking its prey.\" His head slowly turned back to her. \"I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help.\"\n\nHer eyes returned to the ring.\n\nThe glade turned quiet, even the crickets lowering the volume of their song.\n\n\"Now I understand why she hasn't come to me.\"\n\nCora spun the ring on her finger, wondering how it'd been changed from fitting a king's hand to hers. \"Queen Delwyn?\"\n\n\"Shortly after we married, she confessed she did not want to mother a child. The Tiberius line needed to continue. I needed an heir if we ever grew weary of the burden of rulership. But we were young, newly married, and I knew she would change her mind later.\" It wasn't the volume of his voice that hushed everything else around them, but the depth of his command. Even in death, he ruled over the forest. \"On the eve of my departure, I propositioned her once more. It wasn't just the fear of my own mortality that rekindled my desire for a legacy, but I wanted to share the forest with someone I would love more than anyone else I'd ever known, if I returned. Envy is not something I feel often, but I felt it when I stepped onto the training ground. Watching General Callon impart his wisdom to his Vin-lei made me realize how much I wanted that myself.\"\n\nThe emptiness of his face had filled with the detailed features of his identity. The scruff on his jaw. The tightness of his jawline that shared the sharpness of her blade. His figure was distinct too. In the attire of his sculpture, it seemed like he was right there\u2014in the flesh.\n\n\"Her stance hadn't changed. She didn't want children\u2014nor did she ever.\"\n\n\"That doesn't surprise me\u2026\"\n\nHe didn't seem to hear her because he continued. \"The conversation escalated, an exchange of unforgivable insults, and then I left without a goodbye. She probably assumes I broke my vow in anger, but that's not the case. I wish she knew.\"\n\n\"I could tell her.\"\n\nHis face turned back to hers. \"You would do that for me?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Cora.\"\n\nA distinct chill moved down her spine, savoring the sound of her name on his tongue. \"Callon speaks highly of you.\"\n\n\"Really?\" He gave a slight laugh. \"I gave him many reasons not to speak highly of me.\"\n\nShe smiled.\n\n\"I imagine my brother has filled my shoes in my absence.\"\n\n\"Yes, he has.\"\n\n\"He comes to me often, but sometimes I wish he wouldn't.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"His sadness\u2026 Sometimes, it's too much.\"\n\nGreen eyes full of sorrow were the most distinguished feature of his handsome face. \"He's looked after me ever since I've arrived. He's trained me in the sword. He's protected me against Queen Delwyn's wrath. He even forfeited his title to keep me safe as I rescued my friends\u2026\"\n\n\"General Callon is no more?\"\n\nShe gave a shake of her head. \"Because of me.\"\n\n\"I assure you that it doesn't bother him in the least.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I would do the same for Turnion\u2014with no regrets.\"\n\nShe fidgeted with her ring once again.\n\n\"Cora, I'm very happy to meet you.\"\n\nHer chest suddenly felt tight. Everything else did too.\n\n\"This isn't how I imagined I'd have a daughter\u2014but I'm grateful for the opportunity.\"\n\n\"I wish\u2026I wish I could have met you in life.\" A tear splashed onto her ring, right onto the green gem inside the wooden material.\n\n\"Me too, Cora. But death will have to do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Invincibility",
                "text": "<You failed to ask him.>\n\n<It wasn't the right time.>\n\n<It was the perfect time. You're crossing the veil from the living to the dead. I'm surprised he didn't question you himself.>\n\n<Because he cared more about the fact that I'm his daughter. As should you.> She walked up the vines to her tree house, ascending to her home with such grace that she looked like an elf born and raised in Eden Star.\n\n<I apologize, Cora.>\n\nWhen she stepped into her tree house, it was sunset, and she wasn't alone.\n\nCallon sat at the dining table, looking out the window. When he heard her entrance, he rose from his chair and faced her, his eyes quickly examining her face for an indication of what had transpired in the Cemetery of Spirits. \"I have no desire to intrude. If you wish to be alone, I will excuse myself.\"\n\n\"You're always welcome wherever I am, Callon.\"\n\nHis eyes tightened slightly, as did his jaw.\n\n\"I'll make some dinner.\" She whipped up something in the kitchen before she set the bowls on the table. They sat together and ate. Callon wore an anxious look but never asked a question.\n\n\"He came to me.\"\n\nCallon swallowed his bite and didn't take another.\n\n\"He's exactly like his portrait\u2026strong but kind.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted back and forth between hers, his hands on the table.\n\n\"He said he always wanted to have children, but Queen Delwyn didn't.\"\n\nThere was no reaction.\n\n\"He said this isn't the way he wanted to have a daughter, but he's grateful that it happened.\"\n\n\"That doesn't surprise me.\"\n\n\"I told him everything you've done for me, and he said he wasn't surprised either.\"\n\nHe drew breath, his eyes briefly dropping to the table before raising back up.\n\n\"He said he would do the exact same thing for Turnion without regret.\"\n\nHe dropped his eyes again.\n\nShe knew this was as emotional for him as it was for her, so she gave him a minute to process all of that before she continued. \"I asked him about my mother\u2026\"\n\nCallon was back at attention, eager for this information.\n\n\"He doesn't know. He said he was poisoned or bewitched\u2026has no memory of it.\"\n\nCallon shifted his eyes out the window, lost in thought.\n\n\"He said she had brown hair\u2026that was about it.\"\n\n\"I wonder if it was a witch from the empire.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but why?\"\n\n\"So, they could use the child for leverage. If they threatened to kill his only heir, Tiberius would comply with any and all demands.\"\n\n<Perhaps.>\n\n\"That doesn't explain why I was left at my village. But I guess we'll never know.\"\n\n\"Probably not. Did he say anything else?\"\n\n\"That he wishes Queen Delwyn didn't believe he broke his vows. She hasn't visited him once, and he suspects that's the reason.\"\n\nCallon's eyes instantly narrowed.\n\n\"I offered to tell her the truth on his behalf. It's obvious that clearing his name is important to him.\"\n\nCallon kept up the same perplexed stare.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Queen Delwyn was unaware of your existence until a few months ago.\"\n\n<He's right.>\n\nCallon continued. \"It fails to explain why she hasn't visited his grave these past decades.\"\n\n\"Then, why hasn't she gone to see him?\"\n\n\"I don't have an answer for that.\"\n\n\"He said they had a fight before he left. He wanted children, and she said no.\"\n\n\"Still doesn't explain why.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's just too hard for her\u2014\"\n\n\"No amount of emotional difficulty will prevent you from feeling the spirit of someone you love. That connection is addictive, regardless of the pain, and you return time and time again just to feel it.\"\n\n\"Then\u2026I don't know.\"\n\n\"Nor do I.\" His eyes flicked away out the window.\n\n<The queen is corrupt in more ways than one.>\n\n<Just because they had marital problems doesn't mean\u2014>\n\n<Then it means she's heartless\u2014not a quality you want in a ruler.>\n\nCallon shifted his gaze back to her. \"It would be unwise to go to Queen Delwyn and relay that message.\"\n\n\"But I told him I would\u2014\"\n\n\"She's desperate for a reason to eject you from Eden Star. Don't give her one.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't she want to know that I can speak to her husband beyond the grave?\"\n\n\"She'll be more concerned that you can speak to anyone beyond the grave. Your lineage is a threat to her power, and these abilities will make you an even bigger threat than before. The moment you confide this information to her, as well as the acknowledgment that you're aware of your relationship to King Tiberius, she'll do more than expel you. She'll execute you. There's only so much I can do to protect you\u2014and taking on all the elves of Eden Star is beyond my abilities.\"\n\n\"But\u2026I have to do this for him.\"\n\n\"The last thing he wants is for anything to happen to you, Sor-lei.\"\n\n\"Then what do I do?\" Sunset had deepened into twilight, the shadows shifting across the tree house. \"I'm afraid if I tell him how I feel about Queen Delwyn, he'll refuse to talk to me. How can I sit there and say terrible things about the person he loves most?\"\n\n\"She's not the person he loves most\u2014you are.\"\n\n\"He just met me\u2014\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. It's hard to understand until you're a parent yourself, but when you are\u2026that love is instant and unconditional. Trust me on that.\"\n\nShe dropped her gaze when she felt the burn of his stare. \"Actually, I think I do understand\u2026\"\n\nHe looked out the window again, a minute of silence heavy in the air. \"If you still intend to do this, there's only one way. The queen rules us, but it's the elves who rule Eden Star. Gain the favor of the elves\u2014and she can't touch you.\"\n\n\"Come on, that's never going to happen. You've seen the way they look at me.\"\n\n\"Because you've never integrated into society.\"\n\n\"And how am I supposed to do that?\" she said. \"Trade my smartass comments for fruit?\"\n\nHis eyes showed his laughter, but he didn't let it escape his lips. \"You're forgetting your greatest ability, Sor-lei. When you lose someone you love, you spend your life feeling their absence, pining for one more conversation, wondering how they are\u2026wherever they are. You can answer all those questions.\"\n\nShe dropped her gaze.\n\n\"Give the elves the one thing they want above all else\u2014and you're invincible.\"\n\nHe tested the sword in his hand, spinning it around, making it whirl in a flash of bright red color. \"This is a powerful sword.\" He held it up to the light, taking a closer look at the scales fused together. \"It can slice a stalk of grass and break through a shield\u2014if you know how to use it.\"\n\n\"Well, we both know I don't.\"\n\n\"I've fought against a blade such as this in battle many times. To say I was unintimidated would be a lie.\" He spun it around his wrist again before he lowered it to his side. \"But a blade is only as powerful as the one who carries it. It takes time\u2014a lot of time. But we don't have the luxury.\" He turned the blade, holding the hilt out for her to take.\n\nThe blade suddenly felt heavier once it was in her grasp. It had hung on her hip over the last few months, but she never removed it from the scabbard. \"Damn, this is a lot heavier than the branch.\"\n\n\"Which is why we're in armor.\" He was in the same attire as the first time they'd met at the border\u2014except his flower medals had been removed from his chest. His chest plate was black with a flower in the center, but instead of it being metallic and shiny like the guards of Anastille, it had the ability to bend but not snap. The armor on his shoulders was dark green and sleek, so a blade would slide away from his arm. His black vambraces were jagged and sliced irregularly, so he could catch a blade and fling it from the hands of his opponent.\n\nShe wore the same attire, and it wasn't as heavy as she imagined it would be. It was still uncomfortable, but she wouldn't complain. She wanted to wield her weapon like she knew how to use it\u2014and that was finally happening. \"Where did you get this armor?\"\n\n\"A favor from a friend.\"\n\n\"They made it even though they knew it was for me?\"\n\nHe gave a nod. \"Their loyalty to me is stronger than their contempt for you.\"\n\n\"Contempt\u2026ouch.\"\n\n\"Let's begin.\" He stepped back and unsheathed his green sword. \"I apologize in advance for hurting you\u2014but there is no other way to train you. You've been taught maneuverability, defense, and balance. Remember those skills because you will need them. You can't beat me, or any other opponent, with strength. But you can be quicker, smarter, swifter.\"\n\nShe held up her blade and took her stance. \"I'll do my best, so you do yours.\"\n\nHe spun the green blade in his hand and took his first steps, moving sideways, immediately circling her like prey.\n\nShe pivoted as he turned, waiting for his attack.\n\nHe continued to spin the blade around his wrist, his dark eyes staring her down like a real opponent.\n\n<This isn't terrifying at all\u2026>\n\n<Focus.>\n\nCallon made his move, launching several feet forward, his blade striking down.\n\nShe blocked it just in time, stumbling backward from the immense force he exerted.\n\nHe moved again, his blade clashing hard against hers. He pushed her back, controlled the fight, and then he gave a flurry of hits that happened with lightning speed.\n\nShe caught each one\u2014but barely.\n\nCallon stepped back, spun the sword around his wrist, and then stared her down.\n\n<I swear, he never blinks.>\n\n<Focus.>\n\nHe leaped forward again, this time moving so fast that she couldn't keep up.\n\nHer knees were kicked from underneath her, and then the blade ended up at her neckline.\n\nShe breathed, the blade just an inch from her neck.\n\nHe released her and stepped away. \"You exceeded my expectations. But we have a lot of work to do.\"\n\n<At least I got a compliment in there\u2026>\n\n<Enough with the jokes, Cora.>\n\n<What else am I supposed to do? Just sit and cry?>\n\n<FOCUS.>\n\nCallon rushed her again, sword clashing against hers, her body forced back as he took over the fight.\n\nShe barely met his hits, her forehead already coated in sweat.\n\nHe was at physical ease, his endurance and strength giving him an advantage she couldn't match. There was no sweat. No exertion. No breaths. \"You can't win a fight with defense. You can only hold it. Make your move.\"\n\n\"You're too fast\u2014\"\n\n\"Then be faster.\"\n\n<Pretty.>\n\nHer fingers lost their grip on the hilt, and the blade tumbled to the grass.\n\nCallon didn't bother with the killing blow. Her defeat was obvious enough. \"Pick up your blade.\"\n\nShe moved to her knees but didn't reach for her sword. <Flare?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nThe smile took hold of her face as she pictured the beautiful red scales and yellow eyes. <How are you?>\n\n\"Cora. Up.\"\n\n<Exhausted.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Because I crossed the desert with four people on my back.>\n\n<What\u2026? Are you\u2026are you here?>\n\n<If here is Eden Star, then yes.>\n\n\"Cora?\" Callon kneeled and grabbed her shoulder, his face taking up her entire view. \"Are you alright?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I just need a second\u2026\"\n\nHe took her hand and helped her to her feet.\n\n<Come to us. We have something for you.>\n\n<I'll be right there!>\n\n\"You're speaking to someone.\" Callon's face came back into view.\n\n\"Yes. It's Flare.\"\n\nNow he looked even more intimidating than he did in battle. \"We're training right now. Your time is mine. Whatever he has to say is not more important than the instruction I'm desperately trying to give you.\"\n\n<Flare?> Ashe asked.\n\n<I'll tell you about it later.> She reached out to Flare once more. <I need a couple hours. Callon is training me.>\n\n<We'll wait, Pretty.>\n\n<Thanks. I'm sorry I can't come sooner.>\n\n<You're worth the wait.>\n\nThe moment the instruction was finished, she thought about her friends waiting for her. \"Callon, I need your help.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" He sheathed his sword and drank from his canteen.\n\n\"Flare is outside Eden Star. Wants me to meet him.\"\n\nHe lowered his water, as livid as she anticipated.\n\n\"I can't take the passage because I'm meeting someone. So\u2026can you get me in and out?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"He says he has something for me\u2014\"\n\n\"They have something for you. General Rush, the murderer, and his mindless dragon.\"\n\n*Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.*\n\n\"Callon, please.\"\n\n\"He's not welcome here.\"\n\n\"They aren't coming into Eden Star\u2014\"\n\n\"But they are close enough.\" He whipped away, marching to his pack by the waterfall.\n\n\"Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"Haven't you asked me for enough?\" He spun back around, his eyes snarling.\n\nShe faced his rage with a slow and steady breath. \"I know this is hard for you\u2014\"\n\n\"You've met your father, the greatest king that ever ruled Eden Star, and this is not hard for you? I hoped a single conversation with him would be enough for you to hate Rush as much as you should. But I was wrong.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2026\" She was choked up with wet eyes, and her following words emerged with a long pause. \"You have no idea how hard it is for me\u2026\"\n\nHe turned his head away, closing off entirely.\n\n\"But if King Lux and his army marched on these lands, he'd be the first to come to our defense. As much as you don't like it, he's our ally, and he's the most powerful ally we can have.\"\n\nHis stare remained on the waterfall.\n\n\"He's not that person anymore\u2014\"\n\n\"No amount of contrition will bring my king, my brother, my best friend back from the dead.\" He stepped away and grabbed his pack from the ground.\n\nShe stared at his backside, watching him sort through his rage.\n\n<He won't help you\u2014not this time.>\n\n<He will.>\n\n<Cora\u2014>\n\n<He just needs a minute.>\n\n<We must use the passage.>\n\nCora watched her uncle.\n\n<Cora?>\n\nCallon turned back around to face her, releasing a deep sigh. \"Return your weapon and armor. Then I will take you.\"\n\nCallon escorted her out of Eden Star.\n\nGeneral Aldon was at the perimeter, decorated in the medals of his status. With his guards, he intercepted Callon and Cora. His stare lingered before it shifted to Cora. Then it went back to Callon again.\n\n\"I'm escorting Cora on a tour of the wildlands.\"\n\nGeneral Aldon stared.\n\n\"We'll return in a few hours.\"\n\n\"She doesn't have the clearance to come and go\u2014\"\n\n\"But I do. I take full responsibility for her actions while she's in my care.\"\n\nJust as before, General Aldon didn't impede. He gave a nod to the guards and stepped aside.\n\nCallon moved forward, Cora close beside him.\n\nThey moved deeper into the forest, far away from the sights of the guards.\n\n\"Callon?\"\n\nHe took the lead, moving through the stalks of grass with little disturbance to the ecosystem around him. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Have you ever\u2026thought about being king?\"\n\nHe halted in his tracks and, after a long bout of silence, turned around to face her. \"Why would I?\"\n\n\"Because people treat you like you are.\"\n\n\"You confuse respect with obedience.\"\n\n\"When it comes to you, they do both.\"\n\nHe faced forward again and continued on his walk.\n\n\"Aren't you as entitled to the throne as she is?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not\u2014\"\n\nCallon spun back to her. \"Queen Delwyn is our rightful queen. I don't have to agree with her decisions to respect her as my ruler. I serve the crown\u2014regardless who wears it.\"\n\n\"Even though she's lying to her people about my existence? Even though she removed your rank because you needed to save your niece? The king's daughter?\"\n\n\"Cora.\" He lowered his voice, his eyes angry. \"Tread carefully. You speak of treason.\"\n\n\"To question King Lux's rule is treason because he's a tyrant. Is Queen Delwyn a tyrant?\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed. \"We will speak no more of this.\"\n\n\"She doesn't seem like the best person for the throne\u2026at least not from where I stand\u2014\"\n\n\"Because you're a child.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I'm old enough to know corruption when I see it.\"\n\n<He knows it too. Just doesn't want to see it.>\n\nAngry eyes bored into hers, but nothing more was said. He turned around and continued his trek into the wildlands. \"Where are they?\"\n\n\"I'll ask.\" <We're southwest of Eden Star. Where are you?>\n\nFlare's voice emerged. <Pretty, you're close.> He sent an image of the rocks at the edge of the forest. <Come quickly. I've missed you.>\n\nCora stepped out of the trees and saw them gathered together near the rocks. They sat around a cold campfire. Cora recognized three of them from the prison cell, along with Bridge. But there was only one person she stared at.\n\nHe sat on a rock near the pile of cold wood, arms on his knees, head slightly down as he listened to Bridge across from him. Scruff was on his jaw, his hair was a little longer, and his long-sleeved shirt fit the muscles of his arms a little tighter.\n\n\"She's here.\" The woman with dark hair stood up first and dusted off her pants with her palms.\n\nThe rest turned their heads.\n\nBlue eyes locked on hers.\n\nHers locked on his.\n\n<Shit\u2026I forgot how hot he is.>\n\n<Hot? Is someone on fire?>\n\n<No, it's an expression\u2026 Never mind.>\n\n<Fire safety is no joke, Cora.>\n\nBridge and the others rose to their feet.\n\nRush remained seated.\n\nBridge took the lead with the others behind him. \"We meet again.\" A smile was plastered on his face, and he embraced her once they were close enough. \"It's been so long. We saw each other at Rock Island, but\u2026didn't really count.\"\n\n\"Wish that were under better circumstances too.\" She pulled away and reflected his smile with her own.\n\nBridge gestured to the woman beside him. \"This is Lilac\u2014my sister.\"\n\nLilac sized her up and down before giving a nod. \"Hey.\"\n\nCora gave her an awkward wave. \"Hey.\"\n\n\"And this is Zane.\" Bridge patted him on the back. \"And then Liam. He's a scholar too.\"\n\n\"It's nice to meet you all,\" she said, her eyes shifting between them, heart racing in her chest. A distinct thump sounded in her ears, just the way it did when she got a shot of adrenaline before all hell broke loose.\n\nBridge glanced behind himself then stepped out of the way.\n\nRush came into view, a sack held at his side. Their eyes made contact and stayed there.\n\nBridge nudged the others to head back to the camp.\n\nAnguished blue eyes looked into hers, still and steady, absorbing her appearance as if it was the first time they'd met.\n\nLike a flower facing the sun, she took in the heat of his stare like a summer afternoon.\n\nHe gave a breath. A drop of his shoulders. And then he gave a smile. Not the kind that reached his eyes. \"Let me guess. Still haven't made any friends.\"\n\nHer eyes dropped momentarily. \"You know me so well.\"\n\nHis smile faded and the stare continued.\n\nSilence.\n\nStares.\n\nMore silence.\n\nCora cleared her throat. \"I can see dead people\u2026\"\n\nThe intensity of his stare vanished as his eyebrows hopped to the top of his face. \"Whoa\u2026what now?\"\n\n\"At the Cemetery of Spirits. I went there with Callon to visit his wife and son\u2026and I saw his wife.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you saw her?\"\n\n\"She was this bluish outline. I watched her kneel on the ground and take his hands.\"\n\nHis fingers ran through his hair before he gave a shake of his head. \"Did you tell Callon this?\"\n\n\"Yes. And I could talk to her too.\"\n\nRush took a long pause, processing that information with a gaping mouth. \"So, when you go to the graveyard, you just see and hear a bunch of dead elves?\"\n\n\"No, it's not like that\u2014\"\n\n\"Because that sounds like the scariest shit I've ever heard.\"\n\n\"It's not scary. It's\u2026peaceful\u2026 And sad,\" she said. \"When I visit their graves, sometimes they come, and when they do\u2026I can talk to them.\"\n\n\"So, it's not just Callon's wife?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Who else?\"\n\nHer eyes shifted away. \"Other elves at different gravestones\u2026\" When she turned back to him, his eyes were fixated on hers. She ignored the question in his eyes. \"When I asked Callon about it, he said no other elf has ever had this ability. He attributes it to the size of my mind, but I think it has something to do with the Shamans.\"\n\n\"You aren't a Shaman, Cora.\"\n\n\"I know, but\u2026it's gotta be related, right?\"\n\nHe gave a shrug. \"I really don't know.\"\n\n\"But listen to this\u2026\" She lowered her voice even though Callon was out of earshot. \"When I asked Callon about the Shamans and Death Magic\u2026he wouldn't talk about it.\"\n\nHis eyes immediately flicked past her to look at Callon.\n\n\"Don't stare.\"\n\n\"Well, he's staring at me, and he still doesn't like me very much.\" He looked at her once more. \"So, he knows something.\"\n\n\"He said it's forgotten lore among the elves.\"\n\n\"Forgotten or forbidden?\"\n\n\"The second one.\"\n\nHis eyes flicked back to Callon. \"He's done everything for you up until this point. So, the only reason why he's not helping you now is because\u2026it compromises the elves.\"\n\nHer eyes dropped.\n\n\"You need to get this information from him.\"\n\n<I agree with General Rush.>\n\n<Stop calling him that.>\n\n<I will call him\u2014>\n\n<Stop. Calling. Him. That.>\n\nAshe retreated from her mind.\n\nWhen Cora focused once more, she felt Rush's stare.\n\n\"I know how that is, carrying on two conversations at once.\"\n\n\"I'm still not very good at it.\"\n\nA smile moved on to his face, this time reaching his eyes. \"You'll get better at it.\"\n\n\"So\u2026what are you guys up to?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's a long story, but we're basically going to the dwarves after this.\"\n\n\"Never even seen a picture of a dwarf. Wish I could come with you.\"\n\n\"No, you don't,\" he said. \"Come on, you can talk to dead people. That sounds way more interesting than trying to forge an alliance with rats that live underground.\"\n\nShe gave a slight chuckle. \"If you call them rats, you won't make any friends.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'll let Bridge do all the talking, then.\"\n\n\"That'd be wise.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted past her to Callon. \"His eyes have been trained on me like an arrow this entire time.\"\n\nCora glanced over her shoulder.\n\nCallon stood in his armor, dark eyes driving into Rush with menace. Just like the poisonous frogs, that hatred was etched into the features of his face, and he looked like he might snarl just like them too.\n\nCora gave a sigh as she turned back to him. \"Just ignore him.\"\n\n\"I'd like to thank him for what he did\u2026if that's okay.\" Rush turned back to her.\n\n\"I\u2026I don't think he wants to hear it.\"\n\n\"I owe him my life. He deserves my gratitude.\" He stepped forward to cross the field and approach Callon.\n\nThe slide of metal against his scabbard was loud in the trees, echoing in the canopy up above. Birds immediately vacated their nests and cawed as they flew away. His sword was at the ready, his defensive stance identical to the one he used when he trained Cora. The weapon in his hand wasn't the only one he possessed. His eyes were sharp blades themselves.\n\nRush halted.\n\nCora placed her hand against his chest, her fingers digging deep through the fabric as she felt his hardness. The touch prompted a series of images across her mind in a split second. She sucked in a breath as she guided him back. \"I'll tell him for you.\"\n\nRush dragged his look away from Callon until it was on Cora again.\n\nShe pulled her hand away, her fingers curling into her palm.\n\n\"Have you told him about Ashe?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Are you going to?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I know Ashe would never eat rabbit food, so what's he eating?\"\n\n\"Callon showed me a secret passage in and out of Eden Star\u2026\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod. \"His secret must be pretty big\u2026if he has no problem sharing that secret.\"\n\n\"I'll get it out of him eventually. Or\u2026I'll ask someone else.\"\n\nRush stared for a while, his eyes reading hers like words.\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"Flare said you had something for me?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He held up the sack. \"Bad news. I made a deal with Mathilda. Venom for access to the dwarves. But when I got there, they'd all been wiped out.\"\n\n\"What?\" She took a step back. \"No\u2026that can't be.\"\n\nHis eyes dropped, and he lowered the bag. \"Makes sense. Once the empire realized we had a way to kill them, they made sure we couldn't do it anymore. I'm sorry, Cora. I should have foreseen this. I could have stopped it.\"\n\nShe lowered her gaze to the sack in his hands. \"They wiped out an entire species\u2026\"\n\n\"Not the entire species.\" He uncinched the drawstring and opened the bag. \"I found these guys hidden away.\"\n\nShe peered inside, seeing the snarling frogs staring at her, various bright colors. The breath she sucked in was automatic, along with the film that layered over her eyes.\n\n\"I knew they'd be safe in Eden Star, so\u2026\" He cinched the bag once more before he set it on the ground. \"The Galeco Clan can raise them. Maybe when this is over, we can introduce them to the area again and help them repopulate.\"\n\nShe stared through the small opening at the top, seeing shadows move as the frogs crawled over one another to get comfortable. \"What are you going to do about Mathilda? Did you\u2026get some venom?\"\n\nWith his eyes on the bag, he gave a subtle shake of his head. \"No.\" His eyes flicked back to hers. \"I'll find another way\u2026 Always do.\"\n\nWith soft eyes, she stared at him, the bag between her feet. \"Why?\"\n\nRush gave a stare he had many times before, on an island, far away from this place. \"You know why.\"\n\nHer chin immediately dropped to the bag between them, and she kneeled to grab it. The bag was light, and as soon as she picked it up, she felt the frogs shift and rock the sack.\n\n\"You're the one who thinks they're cute, so\u2026they're your problem now.\"\n\nShe pulled the strap over her shoulder and let it hang at her side, feeling the bag shift and move slightly as they got comfortable once again. \"Thank you.\"\n\nWithout looking at her, he gave a nod. \"When we get to the dwarves, I'm not sure if you'll be able to reach me. We'll be deep underground, so I'm not sure if we'll remain in contact. Just want you to know so you don't assume the worst.\"\n\n\"Thanks for letting me know. Good luck.\"\n\n\"I'm sure we'll need a whole lot of it.\" He gestured behind him. \"Especially with those idiots.\"\n\n\"You're an idiot too.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Am I now?\"\n\n\"Always have been.\"\n\nHe gave a shrug. \"Yeah, you're probably right.\"\n\nThere was nothing left to say, but Cora couldn't say goodbye. She looked at his chest for a moment before meeting his gaze once again.\n\n\"Don't be a stranger. Gonna need some company being stuck with these circus freaks for who knows how long\u2026\"\n\nShe felt the smile move on to her face, but just like his, it didn't reach her eyes. \"Alright.\"\n\n\"One thing before I go\u2026\" He chewed the inside of his cheek and shifted his gaze in the other direction. \"General Noose crossed our path with an army two-thousand strong. He didn't head in the direction of Eden Star, but I'm still wary he might. The empire knows I have an existing relationship with General Callon, and therefore, Eden Star. He might try to eliminate you\u2014just the way he did with the frogs.\"\n\n\"Callon shares your fear.\"\n\n\"Then your queen is aware?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Then prepare for war\u2014because it might show up on your doorstep.\"\n\nShe nodded again.\n\n\"If that happens, I will come to your aid as quickly as I can\u2014hopefully with an army of dwarves.\"\n\n\"I know you will.\"\n\n\"If it happens, it's because of me. And I'm sorry for that.\"\n\nShe gave a shake of her head. \"It would have happened eventually.\"\n\nHis stare lingered, his eyes hard on her face.\n\nShe stared back, picturing the cool mist that fell from the clouds, remembering the sounds of the waves as they crashed against the cliffs below. Eden Star was a place of serenity, but because of magic. Mist Isle was a place of innate peace. Moments like this made her wish to return.\n\nHe gave her a final nod before he turned away and retreated to Bridge and the others.\n\nShe watched him go, and it felt exactly the same as the last time he left.\n\nLike she was alone on an island\u2014watching a fire-red dragon fly across the ocean."
            },
            {
                "title": "Suicide Mission",
                "text": "<You handled that well.>\n\n<Really? Didn't feel like it. Never had to do that before.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<Going from being that\u2026to being friends.>\n\n<You did it with Lilac.>\n\n<Yeah, that's not the same thing.>\n\n<It is the same.>\n\n<What I had with Lilac is not what I had with Cora.>\n\nFlare let seconds of silence trickle past. <Wish I could have seen her in the flesh. Watched her admire my beauty with appreciation.>\n\nRush rolled his eyes. <You just want compliments.>\n\n<Yes. She gives plenty. But she's also my friend, and I enjoy her company.>\n\nRush remained in the lead as they trekked through the wilderness. The dry and blistering desert was behind them, and they were back in the evergreen trees near the stream. He set the pace, and everyone groaned in protest behind him. <Yeah\u2026I enjoy her company too.>\n\n<Hope she contacts us.>\n\n<She will.>\n\n<Do you think she's spoken to her father?>\n\nRush stopped at the top of the crest and looked at the path below. It was a quiet afternoon, no travelers or armies in their vicinity. Their only company was the birds. The poisonous frogs would have been there\u2026if they hadn't been annihilated in a gruesome death. <Yes.>\n\n<I think so too. Just wanted to spare your feelings.>\n\n<I didn't have much of a chance before\u2026but now I have none.>\n\n<Not necessarily.>\n\n<Yes. That's the exact reason why she didn't mention it. He's her family\u2014and I'm just some mistake.>\n\n<You know that's not how she feels about you.>\n\n<If not now, she will soon.>\n\nRush headed down the hill, past a couple boulders, and then came to a stop when Bridge's voice came from the rear.\n\n\"Do you ever stop?\" He paused at the top of the hill, hands on his back, head tilted to the ground. \"You've got some good shit in your pack or what?\"\n\n\"Got some beef jerky you aren't sharing with the rest of us?\" Lilac stopped next to her brother, her forehead shiny with sweat. \"Or maybe some cookies? Did your girlfriend hook you up with some cookies?\"\n\n<It's time to rest, Rush.>\n\n<We have a lot of ground to cover.>\n\n<You can cross all of Anastille, and you'll still never outrun your thoughts.>\n\n\"Fine. We'll rest here for the day.\" Rush dropped his pack in a grassy area between the trees and readied his bow. \"I'll grab dinner. You guys make a fire.\"\n\nBridge was the last one awake, and he continued to cast glances at Rush. \"I'll take the first shift.\"\n\n\"It's fine. Not tired.\"\n\n\"How?\" he asked incredulously. \"Now I'm thinking she gave you more than cookies\u2026\"\n\n\"I just don't want to be out in the open longer than necessary.\"\n\n\"Because of General Noose?\"\n\n\"Because King Lux stepped up his game. His dictatorship has been peaceful for a very long time\u2026until now. I know my father. He's unnerved. And he's especially unnerved that I'm the one who's challenging him.\"\n\nBridge shifted his gaze to the fire.\n\n\"War is brewing.\"\n\n\"You think he'll go after Eden Star?\"\n\nRush gave a nod. \"Unfortunately.\"\n\n\"What about the dwarves?\"\n\n\"His focus is on the half-elf that's immune to the Skull Crusher and the general of the elven army that dropped ancient hostilities to rescue their enemy. Nothing else is his concern right now. We have to keep Ashe a secret as long as possible. Because once that's out\u2026he'll give everything he has. At least right now, he'll continue to underestimate us. That's our only advantage.\"\n\nBridge nodded. \"You think it makes sense to go into the mountains without any idea where we're going? That's like searching for a broken fingernail on the rug.\"\n\n\"You got a better idea?\"\n\n\"Can you offer Mathilda anything else?\"\n\n\"Other than the shirt off my back, no.\"\n\n\"She gave Cora the tears for an IOU. Maybe she can do the same for you?\"\n\n\"Doesn't think I have anything to offer\u2026and she's not wrong about that.\"\n\nBridge rubbed his palms together and held them out to the fire. \"If she's not ratting you out to the empire, then she can't be a supporter of King Lux. So, it's in her best interest to help you. Maybe you should tell her what we're trying to accomplish.\"\n\n\"Too risky.\"\n\n\"Well, combing mountains we're unfamiliar with is more risky, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"It's going to take us twice as long to go all the way back, and she may not even cooperate.\"\n\n\"All I know is, I'm not familiar with anything north of Anastille. There's no passage through the mountains by foot, so the only way to get there is by flight. So\u2026who knows what's out there.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you're scared, Bridge.\"\n\n\"Uh, you aren't?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I've seen it all. Nothing scares me anymore.\" His eyes went back to the fire.\n\n\"Whatever. This is your mission, so I'm down for anything. But if time is of the essence, we've got to spend it well.\"\n\n<I agree with him.>\n\n<Didn't ask for your opinion.>\n\n<Rush.>\n\n<How am I going to convince a witch to help me?>\n\n<I don't know. But it's a better use of our time than hiking up a mountain in the dark. We don't know where we'll find water. How will we hunt?>\n\nRush gave a sigh. \"Fine\u2026we'll go see Mathilda first.\"\n\n\"Tell Flare I said thanks.\"\n\n<Tell him I like him.>\n\n<I'm not saying that.>\n\nBridge looked at the fire for a while, rubbing his palms together again. \"Things seemed tense with you guys\u2026\"\n\n<This is exactly why I didn't want to stop.>\n\n<You don't need to be ashamed of your feelings.>\n\n<Not ashamed. Just don't want to talk about it.> \"It's a bit awkward when a woman says she just wants to be friends.\"\n\nBridge gave a nod. \"Sorry, man.\"\n\n\"That was the first time we'd spoken since she shot me down. It'll get easier from now on.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will.\"\n\nDespite their hustle, it was a two-week trek back to Polox.\n\nThey made fires during the day to cook their meals and immediately snuffed them out with a fire blanket instead of water. Otherwise, it would create a cloud of smoke that could be seen by unwanted eyes.\n\nThey didn't cross paths with General Noose and his army.\n\nBut they came across something worse.\n\n\"Just saw it\u2026\" Bridge lay beside him in his bedroll in the dark. \"And there's another one.\" If he pointed at the nighttime sky, Rush couldn't see it because it was pitch black without a campfire.\n\n<I've counted twelve.>\n\n<That's not good news.>\n\n<They're searching for us\u2014everywhere.>\n\n\"Flare counted twelve.\"\n\n\"Twelve?\" Bridge asked in surprise. \"I didn't even know there were that many.\"\n\n\"Neither did I.\"\n\nThey were either really lucky, or the Shamans only searched by night because they hadn't seen the cloaked Shamans and their steeds in the blue sky. If they thought Rush would light a fire in the dark to keep warm or cook a meal, they were idiots.\n\nThey continued on their journey, just a few days from Polox.\n\n<It's Cora.>\n\nHis heart already raced from pushing himself physically, but his pulse gave a sudden spike. <Put her through.>\n\nHer beautiful voice came into his mind, loud like she was right beside him. <Where are you guys now?>\n\n<Almost to Polox.>\n\n<I thought you were going to the dwarves.>\n\n<We were. But Flare and Bridge decided that it would be more worthwhile to get directions from Mathilda\u2026even though we're gonna be empty-handed.>\n\n<It sounds like she already knew about the frogs\u2026so she won't be surprised.>\n\n<True.>\n\n<Hello, Pretty.>\n\n<Hey, Flare. How's it going?>\n\n<Tired, hungry\u2026hide!>\n\n<What?>\n\n\"Down.\" Rush grabbed Liam because he was the closest person to him and yanked him to the base of a tree.\n\nBridge did the same with Lilac, pulling her under the canopy as they searched around for enemies.\n\nZane was at the tree beside him, turning his head frantically back and forth.\n\n<Is everything okay?>\n\nBefore Rush could answer, he saw the enormous outline above the trees.\n\nThe outline of a dragon.\n\n<Who is it? Flare?>\n\nFlare was silent.\n\n<What's going on?>\n\nRush felt Flare disappear from his mind completely.\n\nEveryone else saw the big outline above the trees and pressed their backs even deeper into the trunks.\n\nLiam looked completely awestruck, his mouth agape, his eyes wide.\n\nRush watched the dragon soar overhead and continue across the sky. <We just spotted a dragon.>\n\n<Do you know who it is?>\n\nRush moved between the trees, getting to the edge so he could see over the horizon.\n\nHe recognized the blue scales immediately.\n\n<Obsidian.>\n\nIt was several hours before Flare returned to his mind.\n\n<I'm here.>\n\n<Why'd you leave?>\n\n<I feared he would feel my mind.>\n\n<Didn't even consider that\u2026 Good thinking.>\n\nThey were close to Polox but didn't move from their hidden location. The skies were clear of dragons, but the fear had just reached a crescendo. <He's looking for me\u2014personally.>\n\n<And he wants you to know that he's looking for you.>\n\n<This is bad.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"What's our plan?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Should have headed straight to the mountains\u2026\"\n\n\"He could be looking there too.\"\n\n\"Unlikely.\"\n\n\"What if he thinks you're going to the dwarves?\"\n\nRush gave a slight shake of his head. \"No one knows anything about the dwarves, so I doubt he would assume that.\"\n\n<Rush, we have a problem.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<What happens when he doesn't find you?>\n\n<I'm not following.>\n\n<If he can't find you anywhere in Anastille, where's the last place he can't check?>\n\nRush released a sigh. <Fuck.>\n\n<Eden Star.>\n\nThey were stationed outside of Polox and ready to slip inside.\n\n\"I have a plan\u2026and you aren't going to like it.\" Rush approached their group, leaning against a big log as they rested after their long trip.\n\nBridge finished drinking his water before he secured the cap back in place. \"We already have a plan. Lilac will get you in just like last time.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026a plan after that plan.\" His hands rested on his hips, his pack at his feet.\n\nLilac folded her arms over her chest. \"What are you up to, Rush?\"\n\n\"You aren't going to like it,\" he said. \"Spoiler alert.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Bridge asked, sitting beside Zane.\n\n\"Dragons, Shamans, armies\u2026they aren't going to stop until they find me.\" He crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his weight to one leg. \"And when they comb every inch of this land and I turn up nowhere\u2026he'll assume I'm in Eden Star.\"\n\nBridge set his canteen down slowly then rested his palm on the lid. \"I already see where this is going.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Lilac said, glancing at her brother. \"We skip the dwarves and head to Eden Star?\"\n\n\"No.\" Bridge shook his head. \"That doesn't fix the problem.\"\n\n\"Then what does fix the problem?\" Zane asked.\n\nBridge gestured to Rush with his hand. \"Suicide mission\u2026but whatever.\"\n\nThey all looked at him and waited for an answer.\n\n\"You get me into Polox. I talk to Mathilda,\" Rush said. \"Then I lie low for a couple days so you guys can get clear of this place. We'll agree on a meeting spot. I'll meet you there when I can.\"\n\n\"Whoa\u2026what?\" Zane asked. \"Meet us after what?\"\n\n\"If my father doesn't find me in Anastille, he'll hit Eden Star,\" Rush explained. \"So, I basically have to tell him where I am.\"\n\n\"Rush.\" Bridge closed his eyes and shook his head. \"You literally have no chance of getting away.\"\n\n\"Seriously,\" Lilac said. \"And you have no idea if King Lux will actually attack Eden Star\u2014\"\n\n\"He will,\" Rush said with a sigh. \"Eventually. And I can't let that happen. Eden Star won't stand a chance against dragons, armies, Shamans\u2026 It's a forest. Their magic will protect it for a short while, but then my father will obliterate the place.\"\n\n\"Then why hasn't he done it before?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Too far away,\" Rush said. \"But it's not going to feel too far away very soon.\"\n\nBridge pushed himself to his feet and dusted off his trousers. \"You do realize that if you're recaptured, all hope is lost? You're literally the one person we can't afford to lose.\"\n\n\"Not true,\" Rush said. \"Cora is the one person we can't afford to lose. She's the one person who can unite the dragons and the elves. My life is inconsequential compared to hers. Eden Star must be protected at all costs.\"\n\n<We must keep Pretty safe.>\n\n\"The reason this is happening in the first place is because General Callon came to my rescue. If he hadn't done that, King Lux wouldn't even be thinking about Eden Star. Doing nothing is a really shitty way of repaying that sacrifice. I have to do this. There's no other way.\"\n\nBridge dropped his arms to his sides, his shoulders falling too. \"What would Cora think if she knew?\"\n\n<Tell us no.>\n\n\"She doesn't need to know. And hopefully\u2026there'll never be a reason for her to know.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Assassin",
                "text": "Rush instructed the others to go to the Hideaway if he didn't escape. Hitch a ride with Captain Hurricane and figure out their next plan.\n\nLilac's plan worked once again, and he slipped inside Polox just before dark. He returned to the shop, rang the bell overhead when he opened the door, and stepped inside the store that held an arrangement of odd objects.\n\n\"You're back.\"\n\nHe sauntered through the aisles and stopped near the window when he saw the dragon tears. \"Business been slow?\"\n\n\"Not a lot of people in the market for dragon tears. Most people don't need it once\u2014let alone twice.\"\n\nHe moved to the front counter where she stood. The walls behind her were covered in colorful tapestries, feathered necklaces, and various jewels. On the counter, there was a bowl of transparent crystals. \"Does any of this stuff work?\"\n\nOne hand moved to her hip, cinching her purple cloak into her side. \"Did the dragon tears save your life?\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod. \"You got me.\"\n\nShe glanced down at his hands, as if expecting to see the jar of venom she requested. \"Didn't go well?\"\n\n\"You were right. Frogs were massacred.\"\n\n\"The empire made the right decision.\"\n\n\"They killed off an entire species\u2014\"\n\n\"And now the Shamans are invincible. Smart play.\"\n\nHe pulled his hood back and revealed his face, a full beard on his jawline because there'd been no time for anything on their travels except hauling ass. \"I know I didn't fulfill my end of the deal, but you still need to tell me what I want to know.\"\n\n\"I don't need to do anything, General Rush.\"\n\n\"You were interested in that venom for a reason. It means you're an enemy of the empire. I'm an enemy as well\u2014which means we're allies.\"\n\n\"Or it just means I want something good to sell in my shop.\"\n\n\"Would you really sell that?\" Skepticism shot out of his mouth like an arrow released from the string. \"You don't think the empire would come knocking?\"\n\n\"I sell dragon tears, and they still haven't come knockin'.\"\n\n\"Maybe not yet\u2026but they will.\"\n\nShe gave a shrug. \"I'll take my chances.\"\n\n\"Look.\" He pressed a hand to his chest. \"I'm an enemy of the empire. So, you should want to help me.\"\n\n\"I see starving children on the street, and I want to help them. Doesn't mean I do.\"\n\n\"Okay\u2026anyone who doesn't help a starving kid is an asshole. But that's not the point right now. Just tell me how to reach the dwarves, and I'll be on my way.\"\n\n\"What do I get in return?\"\n\n\"The hope that I'll be able to overthrow King Lux because of your help.\"\n\nShe popped out one hip and came closer to the counter, her other hand on the surface. \"You shouldn't make such assumptions. Maybe I'm a friend to the empire. Maybe I'm a foe.\"\n\n\"If your allegiance is to the crown, you're doing a terrible job showing it by letting me come and go from your shop without repercussion.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"As I've said before, I don't interfere with a person's travels.\"\n\n\"Then don't impede me now. Tell me how to get to the dwarves.\"\n\nHer fingers started to drum on the counter, her long nails creating a loud clicking sound. \"You would waste your time there.\"\n\n\"That's for me to decide.\"\n\nHer fingers continued to drum against the counter.\n\n\"Mathilda, come on. Don't make me crawl all over those mountains like a damn goat trying to get inside.\"\n\n\"You expect me to help you when I'll receive nothing in return.\"\n\n\"That's called being a good person. Try it sometime.\"\n\nHer nails went silent. \"Didn't realize you were so virtuous, General Rush.\"\n\nIt was a fist to the stomach. \"I'm no longer that man.\"\n\n\"Being a good man serves me no purpose.\"\n\n\"Then what do you want? If it's in my power, I will grant it.\"\n\nHer nails started to drum once more. A stare deeper than the ocean penetrated his face, hot like the summer sun. \"A sword of dragon scales.\"\n\n*Grrrrrrrr.*\n\n\"To sell in your store?\"\n\n\"What I do with it is none of your concern.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen. I'm not a blacksmith\u2014\"\n\n\"I can find one. Just need the scales.\"\n\n<What do I do?>\n\n<She doesn't deserve my scales.>\n\n<I can't think of a substitution.>\n\n\"What's it going to be?\" Her nails continued to drum on the surface. \"I have warned you that this trek into the mountains is pointless. To sacrifice your scales would be a mistake on your part. As a good person, I've given you fair warning. But if you want to go anyway, it'll cost you.\"\n\n<We need the dwarves.>\n\n<I know.>\n\n<But I won't do anything you don't want to do. I'll hike up those mountains day and night until we find them.>\n\n<We don't have the time.>\n\n<Then it's your call.>\n\nAfter a long pause, Flare agreed. <Okay.>\n\n\"Why do you say it's pointless? And fatal?\"\n\n\"Because it is.\"\n\n\"Mathilda\u2014\"\n\n\"You asked for directions. I will grant them. But I'm not obligated to tell you anything else. Do you accept?\"\n\n\"Fine\u2026I accept.\"\n\n\"Alright.\" She pulled her hand off the counter. \"Once I have the scales, I'll provide a map.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's going to be a problem,\" Rush said. \"You do realize everyone and their mom is looking for me right now?\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I can't just transform into a dragon in your shop or in the street.\"\n\n\"Then let's go somewhere you can.\"\n\n<I have an idea.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<You need the empire to see us. Perhaps she can help us.>\n\n<That wasn't part of the deal.>\n\n<Then make it part of the deal.>\n\n\"You also need to help me escape.\"\n\n\"The sword in exchange for the map.\"\n\n\"We both know the value of my scales. I can ask for anything I want\u2014and this is what I want.\"\n\nShe chewed on the inside of her cheek before she gave a raw look of annoyance. \"Fine.\"\n\n\"We'll sneak out and harvest my scales. And then I need to be seen by the guards before we return to your shop so I can hide for a few days.\"\n\n\"Cat's piss, are you kidding me?\"\n\n\"Wish I were.\"\n\n\"Why do the guards need to see you?\"\n\nRush kept quiet.\n\n<She tells us nothing. We tell her nothing.>\n\n\"Do you have a secret way out of the city?\"\n\n\"You think I use the front gate every time I come and go?\"\n\n<At least we'll have a secret way into Polox from now on.>\n\n<That would have been helpful a long-ass time ago.>\n\nThe streets were deserted.\n\nShops were closed. Inns were no longer serving pints of beer. The occasional window was lit up with a candle from a sleepless resident. The dark sky was dotted with little stars that were bright enough to cast a subtle glow on the cobblestone pathway.\n\nMathilda led the way, her dark purple cloak masking her quite well.\n\nShe maneuvered between buildings then reached an alleyway where a group of rats munched on moldy bread. Right up against the thick fence that defended the city from outside invaders, her palm slid across the wood until she found the dial. She turned it, an audible click sounding.\n\nThen two planks spun on an invisible dial.\n\nShe lifted the plank above her head then stepped through the opening.\n\n\"Did you make this?\" Rush followed her, keeping the wood above his head as he stepped onto the grass beside her.\n\n\"Shh!\" She let the plank slide back into place before she clicked the dial on the other side of the wall.\n\n\"Let's go.\" She led the way along the fence, invisible to the guards that manned the wall up above. Silently, they moved, reaching the rear of the city that received little to no attention from the guards watching the perimeter.\n\nThey used the darkness as cover and snuck into the trees, getting far enough away from Polox to have a conversation at normal volume.\n\n\"Did you build that thing?\"\n\nShe pulled out a knife. \"I didn't come here to gossip.\"\n\n\"Asking how you made that passageway is not gossip\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't have time for this.\"\n\n<Sure you're okay with this?>\n\n<I gave my scales to Pretty as a gift. But she's harvesting them as a butcher.>\n\n<Still time to say no.>\n\n<No. We need that map. And we need to keep King Lux away from Eden Star.>\n\n<Alright.> Rush transferred into the fiery red dragon.\n\nMathilda paused to absorb the sight, her eyes glossing over with a dreamy haze. She took him in from head to toe, pressed her palm against his flank, even came close to his snout and reached for a tooth. \"Magnificent.\"\n\n<Thank you.>\n\nShe extended the blade and got to work.\n\n\"I will wait for you at the dial.\" Mathilda disappeared into the darkness, her cloak hiding her form from view within a few seconds.\n\nFlare looked at the stars in the sky, his flank dripping with blood from the scales that had been harvested.\n\n<You okay?>\n\n<It didn't hurt.>\n\n<Well, it's going to hurt me like a bitch when we get back to the shop.>\n\nFlare's head turned when he saw the glimmer in the sky, when the stars were blocked out for just an instant. <They're here.>\n\n<Of course they are\u2026>\n\n<This is going to be difficult.>\n\n<When do we ever do anything that's not difficult?>\n\n<Here we go.> Flare opened his wings and pushed off the ground. *Rooooooaaaaaaaarrrrrr!*\n\nThe scream pierced the night, shook the mountains in the distance, made the guards falter along the fence line.\n\n<That was quite the entrance.>\n\nFlare got to altitude immediately and soared right over Polox, breathing a stream of fire without actually burning anything.\n\n<Don't set anything on fire.>\n\n<I'm not.>\n\nFlare flew low enough to be visible to all the guards, his bright-red scales unmistakable.\n\n<Okay, enough. We gotta get outta here. Shamans are probably already here.>\n\nFlare glided around the city then circled back, returning to the darkness away from Polox. He extinguished his breath of fire before he landed with a thud on the earth.\n\n<Let's go.> Rush came into being, tripping over himself and landing back on the ground. <Damn, this hurts.>\n\n<Move.>\n\nRush gritted his teeth then pushed himself upright. He forced himself into a quick jog, heading back to Polox to reach the secret passage.\n\n*Whoosh.* A gust of wind passed him, making his hair blow back.\n\n<Run.>\n\nHe silenced his grimace and forced himself forward, beelining straight for the fence line.\n\n<I said run!>\n\n<Bitch, I'm going.>\n\nA loud cackle filled the night, an eerie sound that Rush had heard more times than he could count.\n\n<They're following you.>\n\nHis palm slid across the wood, searching for the dial. <Where is it?>\n\n<Rush!>\n\n<I can't find it!>\n\nThe cackle grew louder.\n\n<Now!>\n\nThe wood plank lifted, and a hand shot out to yank him inside.\n\n<That was close.>\n\n<Too close.>\n\nMathilda dragged him down the alleyway and they ran together, crowds in the streets as they came out of their homes to see the dragon they just heard. Guards pushed past them as they rushed to other parts of the city.\n\nShe moved to a walk, and Rush mimicked her movements.\n\n<I feel like shit.>\n\n<Hold on.>\n\nThe adrenaline wasn't enough to numb the pain. <Why do I feel like I'm always in pain?>\n\n<We're here.>\n\nMathilda pulled him inside and locked the door behind her.\n\nRush immediately leaned on the counter, breathing hard as the gapes in his flesh bled into his clothes. \"You got a bandage or something?\" Too weak to stand, he dropped into a chair behind the counter, breathing through the pain.\n\nMathilda walked off.\n\n<I would change back if I could fit.>\n\n<I know. I'll be fine. Just hurts more than last time\u2026>\n\n<Probably because of all the scar tissue from Rock Island.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026maybe.>\n\nMathilda extinguished all the lights in her shop, plunging them into darkness.\n\n\"I need something to stop the bleeding. Got gauze or anything?\"\n\n\"Lift up your shirt.\"\n\nHe turned in his chair then yanked the shirt over his head and to his shoulders.\n\nInstead of feeling tight fabric wrap around his body, he felt drops.\n\nWater poured down his back, and instead of burning like a disinfectant, it felt good. Really good. Immediately, he felt better, like he was brand-new. \"What is that?\" He turned back in his chair.\n\nShe corked the lid. \"You owe me. This wasn't part of the deal.\" The bottle was returned to the locked cage in the shop for someone else to buy.\n\nHe pulled his shirt back on, no longer soaking blood into his clothes. \"Thanks.\"\n\nShe ignored his gratitude and stationed herself by the windows, seeing the silhouettes pass by the curtains as people frantically moved up and down the street. \"You wanted to be seen. Mission accomplished.\"\n\nHours passed.\n\nThey sat in the dark at opposite ends of the shop, waiting for the crowds in the street to vanish. The shadows in the window slowly lessened as people gave up on their curiosity and returned to their now-cold beds.\n\nJust when Rush thought they'd gotten away with it, a knock sounded on the door.\n\nMathilda stiffened in her chair, and the look she gave Rush was murderous.\n\n<Oh no\u2026>\n\nThe knock sounded again. \"By order of the king, we are to search your premises.\"\n\n<Jump out a back window.>\n\nRush crossed the room but stilled when he saw the outline of soldiers on the other side.\n\n\"Psst.\"\n\nHis head snapped in Mathilda's direction.\n\nShe waved him over frantically then gestured to one of the shelves.\n\n<Witches always have tricks up their sleeves\u2026>\n\nThey lifted it together, revealing a hatch in the floor.\n\nShe opened it. \"Go, go.\"\n\nHe grabbed the ladder and slid down to the floor.\n\nThe shelf dragged over the floor as she moved it back herself, doing one side and then the other.\n\nRush kept his eyes on the ceiling, his ears straining to listen.\n\nThe door opened.\n\nFootsteps entered. Heavy footsteps. Bootsteps.\n\nThen clicks.\n\n<Shamans are here.>\n\n\"Step aside.\" The footfalls fanned out to different parts of the room.\n\nMathilda shrieked with annoyance. \"Just don't take anything!\"\n\n<Uh, Rush?>\n\nHis eyes remained on the ceiling, seeing little flecks of dust fall from the floorboards. One of the guards was right on top of him now.\n\n<Rush?>\n\nRush stepped back, watching the dust and listening to the sounds as the guards maneuvered around the shop. The Shaman was impossible to detect because the footsteps were too light. There were no clicks.\n\n<What?!>\n\n<There's someone here.>\n\n<Yes, I'm aware. It doesn't seem like they have a clue there's a basement, so we should be good.>\n\n<No. There's someone in here\u2014with us.>\n\nHis body turned as rigid as ice, frozen over in a chill. Suddenly, the search party up above didn't seem that important anymore because his head slowly turned to the man standing there, against the other wall, eyes on the ceiling.\n\nDressed in black street clothes, he was unremarkable, but that changed once he met Rush's gaze.\n\nHis eyes weren't ordinary.\n\nIntelligent. Confident. Powerful.\n\nHe held Rush's look with a ruthless calmness.\n\nThe steps overhead left as they ventured farther into the shop. \"We need to go upstairs.\"\n\n\"To my bedroom?\" Mathilda shrieked. \"What on earth do you hope to find there?\"\n\n<He's somebody.>\n\n<I agree. Nobody wouldn't be hiding under Mathilda's shop.>\n\n<And he's looking at me like he doesn't like me very much.>\n\n<You did just compromise his hiding place.>\n\n<It's more than that. I can tell.>\n\n<Do you recognize him?>\n\n<No.>\n\nThe man continued to hold his gaze, refusing to look away first.\n\nRush did the same.\n\nMinutes later, the footsteps returned, followed by Mathilda's attitude.\n\n\"Are you done waking me up in the middle of the night to ransack my home?\" Her quick footsteps followed them. \"And if you've taken anything, I'll hunt you down and gut you like a fish.\"\n\nThe guards filed out. The door shut.\n\nBoth men looked up at the ceiling.\n\nSilence.\n\nRush waited for Mathilda to push the shelf away and open the hatch.\n\nShe didn't.\n\n<She probably wants to make sure they don't come back.>\n\n<Yeah.> Rush turned his stare back to the man. \"Who are you?\"\n\nBrown hair. Brown eyes. High cheekbones. His eyes stared coldly before a quick smile appeared on his lips. \"Not surprised.\"\n\n\"Not surprised what?\"\n\nHe moved to the chair against the wall and lowered himself, his knees planted firmly apart, his arms on his knees. \"That you don't recognize me, General Rush.\"\n\nRush sat in the other chair on the other side of the room, but the hostility crossed the space, radiating from the man's eyes and landing on his skin. It was hot like a sunburn, slowly growing more uncomfortable as the skin bubbled then peeled.\n\n<You know everyone\u2014but everyone hates you.>\n\n<But I remember everyone who hates me. I have no recollection of this guy\u2014or what I did.>\n\n<Ask.>\n\n<He doesn't seem like a talker.>\n\n<Know your enemies, Rush.>\n\n\"Care to enlighten me?\"\n\nThe basement was a storage room. Shelves along the walls carried canned goods and dried nuts. There were also extra supplies that would replenish the stock on the shelves once they were purchased. It was a cold and dark place, the only illumination the white candles sprinkled around the room. The man looked at the shelf as he sat with a relaxed posture, but the way he carried his shoulders suggested he was a fighter. His arms stretched the fabric of his sleeves, indicating he knew how to wield both sword and shield. \"Just like you, I served King Lux.\"\n\n<Past tense. That's good.>\n\n\"There are a lot of soldiers at High Castle.\"\n\n\"Wasn't a soldier.\"\n\n\"Then what were you?\"\n\nHis eyes shifted to Rush's, cold. \"An assassin.\"\n\n<It suits him.>\n\n\"I spied on his enemies\u2014then I killed them.\"\n\n\"King Lux doesn't have a lot of enemies\u2014\"\n\n\"Because he kills them before they become a threat.\"\n\n<That's why there's never been a coup\u2014because of him.>\n\nRush searched his memory, coming across a name he'd heard his father mention. \"Maverick.\"\n\nHe cocked his head slightly. \"You remember me, after all. In part.\"\n\n<What happened to him?>\n\n\"King Lux assumed you were dead.\" <He left for a mission and never returned. My father sent out scouts to find him and recover his body. When that didn't happen, he just assumed he'd been killed. That was years before I left.>\n\n\"Well, he assumed wrong.\" His eyes narrowed. \"But I'm grateful for the assumption.\"\n\n<We have an ally\u2014a good one.>\n\n\"Why did you leave?\"\n\nHis eyes flicked away.\n\n<Alright, I'll go first.> \"I told my father things needed to change. He refused. So, I left. My intention is to remove him from power.\"\n\n\"So you can take the throne.\"\n\n\"Because he's a tyrant. Because he's enslaved an innocent race of beings and rules over Anastille with cruelty and fear.\"\n\nHe continued to look away.\n\n<He doesn't trust you.>\n\n<Picked up on that.> \"Why are you down here?\"\n\n\"When did I give any indication that we're friends?\" He turned back to Rush, his confident eyes covered with ice.\n\n\"I've publicly marked my father as my enemy. I say that makes us allies.\"\n\nMaverick gave a subtle shake of his head. \"You're an arrogant, entitled brat. That's all.\"\n\nRush's eyes narrowed.\n\n<Rush. Don't.>\n\nHe took a slow breath and let it release just as slowly. \"You left King Lux's service. You're under Mathilda's shop. We're the same\u2014whether you like it or not.\"\n\nMaverick gave a subtle clench of his jaw.\n\n\"We both did vile things in service to a dictator. Judge me? Then you better judge yourself too.\"\n\nHe looked away.\n\n\"Let's work together here.\"\n\nHe ignored him.\n\n\"Maverick.\"\n\nThe shelf started to slide across the floor as Mathilda pushed it.\n\nRush kept his stare on the former assassin. \"Come on. You and Mathilda are working against the empire. I know it.\"\n\n<I know it too.>\n\nThe hatch opened. \"All clear.\"\n\nMaverick turned to her.\n\n\"You should go now while they're still searching for Rush,\" Mathilda said. \"No one will give you a second look.\"\n\nHe got to his feet and readied his weapons. A sword at his side, a shield and bow across his back, and his pack over one shoulder.\n\n<Rush, we need allies\u2014and they're right here.>\n\nRush jumped to his feet. \"Why won't you let me help you?\"\n\nMaverick's reaction was so fast, his body turning to face Rush with his hand already on the pommel of his sword.\n\nRush glanced down at his hand, immediately taken back to the outside of Eden Star when Callon had reacted the same way. It was an insult\u2014each and every time. \"Tell me.\"\n\nHis fingers released their grip, but his eyes increased their might. \"Loyalties can be severed with a butter knife. But family\u2026there's nothing that can break that bond. The empire hunts you day and night. You will be recaptured, and when that happens, your loyalties will turn once more.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "See The Truth",
                "text": "Mathilda never answered his questions.\n\nThe only answer he got was stony silence.\n\nThe map was in his possession, and once the guards assumed he was long gone, he left the city through the secret entrance and trekked through the wilderness toward the location where they'd agreed to meet.\n\n<You're angry.>\n\n<You think?>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<I don't know\u2026maybe because I can't get anything done because literally no one trusts me?>\n\n<It takes time\u2014>\n\n<I don't have time, Flare.>\n\n<I understand their position. King Lux is utilizing every resource to find you. Any information they give to you could be shared once you're captured.>\n\n<I would never do that.>\n\n<But they don't know that. Would you do anything differently?>\n\nHe kept his eyes forward, his gaze targeting the tree line so he could hide from the hot sun.\n\n<Mathilda has helped us many times\u2014so at least she doesn't see us as a threat.>\n\n<I guess.>\n\n<If we secure the dwarves, we can return to Mathilda with something to offer.>\n\n<I don't know\u2026 I've gotta survive all that death she mentioned.>\n\n<If the dwarves get in our way, I'll just eat them. They're bite-size.>\n\nHe cracked a smile as he imagined it. <Not the best way to proposition allies.>\n\n<A little fear never hurt anyone.>\n\nWhen there wasn't enough light to see several feet in front of him, he stopped for the night. No campfire. Just his bedroll in the grass. <We should be there by early afternoon. Hope the others are alright.>\n\n<I'm sure they went unnoticed with all the commotion.>\n\nHis hands folded underneath his head, and he stared at the stars. Despite the long day, he was still wired. His eyes focused on the heavens, expecting the stars to dim momentarily as a Shaman passed. Thankfully, that never happened.\n\n<Should I contact Pretty?>\n\n<No. It's okay. I'm sure she's busy\u2026>\n\nA moment later, Cora's voice appeared. <Rush?>\n\nHe rolled his eyes in annoyance. \"Flare\u2026\" <I'm here.>\n\n<What's going on with you guys?>\n\n<Chaos. Like always.>\n\n<You're okay?>\n\n<Yeah\u2026we're all good. What about you?>\n\n<Callon has been teaching me with an actual sword.>\n\n<How's that going?>\n\n<I can barely move. I'll leave it at that.>\n\nHe gave a slight chuckle under his breath. <You'll get better.>\n\n<I'm a lot better than I used to be, but I could never imagine holding my own against Callon in a real fight\u2026>\n\n<You probably never will.>\n\n<You just said I'll get better.>\n\n<And you will. But General Callon is one of the best living swordsmen. You would need a good thousand years to get on his level.>\n\nHer words didn't emerge for a while. <Actually, it's just Callon now\u2026>\n\nRush closed his eyes, guilt pulling him under. <No wonder he drew his sword.>\n\n<That wasn't why. He said he would do it again.>\n\n<Because of you.>\n\nShe turned quiet.\n\nHe did too.\n\nConversations by the firelight had been effortless once upon a time. Laughter and jokes, smiles and long stares. Those times were long gone. They were just memories now. <How's talking to dead people?>\n\nShe released a chuckle. <I should have phrased it better.>\n\n<No. A lot funnier this way.>\n\n<I haven't been back yet. Callon and I have been training pretty hard.>\n\n<Good. Have you asked him about the Shaman thing?>\n\n<No. He's been\u2026in kinda a bad mood lately.>\n\n<And I know why\u2026>\n\n<I'm not sure if he'd ever tell me anyway.>\n\n<Ask your father.> He forced it out into the open, pushed through the awkwardness, ripped off the bandage.\n\nFor a while, it was just her silence.\n\n<It's okay, Cora. You can tell me anything.>\n\nThe silence continued. <I've only spoken to him once. Next time I see him\u2026I'll ask.>\n\nRush closed his eyes again, another tide of despair filling his lungs. <How was that?>\n\n<I don't know\u2026a bit indescribable.>\n\n<Did you tell him who you were?>\n\n<Yes\u2026>\n\n<I'm sure he was thrilled.>\n\n<Yeah, he was.>\n\nHe wanted to force the conversation, but he just couldn't, imagining their reunion on two sides of the veil.\n\n<I found out what happened with my mother.>\n\n<Yeah? Who is she?>\n\n<He doesn't know. Said he was bewitched or poisoned. Doesn't remember anything except seeing her outside his tent. The rest\u2026is lost.>\n\n<She might be a witch\u2026but I guess anyone could have bought a potion. But what is the purpose of seducing a king and siring a child?>\n\n<Ashe thinks it was the empire. If they had a child of King Tiberius, they could use that as leverage to get the cooperation of the elves. They could get past the magic of Eden Star and invade.>\n\n<Possibly\u2026but I was never aware of this plan. But then again, I served King Lux like everyone else. Wasn't necessarily privy to a lot of things.>\n\n<So maybe that's what happened.>\n\n<Unlikely. I can't see any king sacrificing all of his people for one person\u2014even if it was his daughter. Sacrificing himself? Yes. But not everyone.>\n\n<True. I can't see him doing that either\u2026>\n\n<We'll uncover this secret\u2014eventually.>\n\nHer voice turned quiet, withdrawn. <Hope so.>\n\nAs if she was right beside him next to the campfire, he turned quiet because it was always comfortable\u2014even when it wasn't comfortable.\n\n<Did Mathilda end up helping you?>\n\n<She did.>\n\n<Without the venom?>\n\n<I gave her scales again.>\n\n<Oh\u2026are you okay?>\n\n<Totally fine. She gave me some dragon tears.>\n\n<That was generous. And out of character.>\n\n<I don't know\u2026she gave it to me with nothing in return.>\n\n<So, you know how to get to the dwarves now?>\n\n<Got a map.>\n\n<That's great!>\n\n<But she did warn me about going\u2026said there was lots of death and stuff.>\n\n<There's death anywhere you go\u2014except Eden Star.>\n\n<I'm not worried about it. It's gotta get done anyway.>\n\n<True.>\n\n<I'm pretty sure Mathilda is actively working against the empire.>\n\n<Why? Though, I guess that would explain why she helped us.>\n\n<She had a former assassin for King Lux hidden in her basement.>\n\n<Why were you in the basement?>\n\n<Long story. Doesn't matter. I didn't remember him right away, but it eventually clicked. His name is Maverick, and when he didn't return from a mission, King Lux assumed he was dead. But it looks like he changed his loyalties instead.>\n\n<Wait. Then that must mean\u2026>\n\n<That they're working together\u2014so there must be others too.>\n\n<That's great news! Maybe this is part of the underground group that you mentioned before.>\n\n<Maybe. But they want nothing to do with me.>\n\n<They said that?>\n\n<Yep. Because the same blood that runs in his veins runs in mine\u2026>\n\nShe clearly didn't know what to say.\n\n<You're the only person who sees me for who I really am.> The only person who looked at him with joy rather than disdain. The only person who saw a future behind his past. The only person who thought he was worth another chance.\n\n<That's not true, Rush.>\n\n<It is.>\n\n<It's not just me. It's Flare. It's Bridge. Even Ashe.>\n\n<He despises me more than anyone.>\n\n<No, he doesn't.>\n\n<Sorry\u2026forgot about Callon.>\n\n<If Ashe didn't believe in us both, he wouldn't be here right now.>\n\n<You're the one he believes in, Cora.>\n\n<And I believe in you.>\n\nHe closed his eyes, the mist against his skin, the crackle of the fire in his ears, her fingers wrapped around his.\n\n<It'll happen, Rush.>\n\nHe let the silence trickle past, holding on to that connection until it slipped away. When he opened his eyes, it was just dark. Solitude. Emptiness. <If we can get the dwarves on board, maybe they'll reconsider.>\n\n<That's a good plan. I like it.>\n\nHe stared at the stars, wondering if she stared at the same thing through her window.\n\n<Tell the others I said hello.>\n\nHe sighed as his hands squeezed on an invisible hand, keeping her close even though she was already gone. <I will.>\n\n<Goodnight, Rush.>\n\n<Goodnight\u2026Cora.>\n\n\"How are you still alive?\" Bridge was the first to run up to him. \"It was pandemonium, man. Even from here, we could hear everything.\"\n\n\"Flare can be loud sometimes.\"\n\n\"I'll say\u2026\" He gave Rush a quick pat on the arm. \"I can't believe you pulled that off.\"\n\n\"When do I not pull off anything I do?\"\n\nBridge rolled his eyes.\n\nThe others got up to greet him.\n\n\"You aren't bloody or bruised\u2026\" Lilac looked him over. \"Lucky son of a bitch.\"\n\n\"If you're referring to my father, then yes, that's very accurate.\"\n\nShe cracked a smile.\n\n\"You got the map?\" Liam asked.\n\nRush pulled it out of his pack. \"Yep.\"\n\nLiam unfolded it and took a look. \"This is going to take a while\u2026\"\n\n\"I'd be suspicious if it didn't.\" Rush turned back to the others. \"So, you want the details or what?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Bridge said. \"Just assumed there was a lot of action, stupidity, and maybe a pretty girl in there somewhere.\"\n\n\"I guess Mathilda can be the pretty girl because she saved my ass,\" Rush said.\n\n\"So, what happened?\" Bridge said.\n\n\"Well, I did meet someone\u2026\"\n\nBridge's eyebrows furrowed. \"You somehow managed to score a date during all that chaos?\"\n\n\"No,\" Rush said quickly. \"It was a guy.\"\n\n\"You're into guys too?\" Lilac asked.\n\n\"No, no, no.\" Rush waved his arms. \"Okay, maybe I should have phrased that better.\"\n\n<I think it's hilarious.>\n\nRush told them about Maverick in the basement and all that transpired.\n\n\"You think they're involved with the people who changed the maps?\" Bridge asked. \"Because this could be huge.\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Rush shook his head. \"They wouldn't share anything with me. For all I know, it could just be the two of them\u2026no idea.\"\n\n\"An assassin from the empire and a witch who has dragon tears\u2026\" Bridge folded his arms. \"It's got to be more than just them.\"\n\n\"I think so too,\" Lilac said.\n\n\"Unfortunately, they hate me, so unless I bring them a dwarf on toast, they're never going to share a drop of information with me.\" Rush took the map from Liam and stowed it back in his pack.\n\n\"Then let's get the dwarves.\" Bridge gave a rise and drop of his shoulders. \"I mean, we found the dragons at Mist Isle. We got Cora into Eden Star. General Callon bailed you out of Rock Island\u2026and we got an infamous pirate to chauffeur us around the deadly seas. I'm pretty optimistic.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Trust",
                "text": "It was a flurry of hits, the green blade striking hers then whipping around to strike her again, over and over, sparks igniting off the steels and scales. With all the expertise of a lifetime of battles and experience, Callon wielded his blade as if she were a foe on the battlefield, menace in his eyes, driving her back farther and farther.\n\nCora blocked the hits with slippery hands, and when she finally got an opening to strike back, she was quickly shot down.\n\n\"Come on, Cora.\" Furious. His look was furious.\n\nHis disappointment gave her a surge of energy, and she kept up the volley, blocking his hits and swinging his sword aside to strike at his armor, only to miss after his graceful side step. Sweat poured from her head, dampened her hair, made her hands slip on the handle.\n\nCallon gave a final flurry of strikes, his sword glinting in the sunlight, and then made a maneuver to steal the sword directly out of her hand before he stabbed it deep into the grass between them.\n\nHis sword was sheathed, and he stepped away, his muscular back to her, rising and falling with deep breaths.\n\n<Better. But still not good enough.>\n\n<Don't need the commentary.>\n\nShe grabbed her sword and yanked it out of the ground, but it wouldn't budge. It required two hands to get it out of the inches of soil. \"I'm ready. Let's go again.\"\n\nCallon looked into the trees.\n\nShe wiped the sweat from her forehead with the inside of her wrist before she dragged her hands down her pants, getting the sweat to wick off her skin. \"Come on.\"\n\nCallon slowly pivoted back to her. His dark eyes were narrowed with coldness, like the battle still raged.\n\n<He's still angry.>\n\n<No kidding\u2026> \"Callon, it's been a week.\"\n\n\"A week for you is a second for me. Elves experience time\u2014\"\n\n\"Differently. Yes, I know.\" She sheathed her sword as she approached him. \"But you need to let this go.\"\n\n<Ooh\u2026not the right thing to say, Cora.>\n\nHis eyes managed to narrow even further\u2014with a spark of fire.\n\n<It was the right thing to say.>\n\nCallon came closer, each step slow and purposeful, like she truly was an opponent on the battlefield. \"To stand idle as my brother's murderer breathes\u2026\" He shook his head. \"The restraint, the sacrifice\u2026your childish mind has no idea.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"A betrayal to my king. A betrayal to my people. He was outside Eden Star\u2014and I didn't strike him down.\"\n\n\"He's our ally that we can't afford to lose.\"\n\n\"If he didn't vow to claim his life once this is over, my sword wouldn't stay in my scabbard. It would swipe his head clean from his shoulders until it rolled down the hill and splashed into the river, to be feasted on by crows\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop it.\" Her hand had risen of its own accord.\n\nHis jaw clenched before his eyes flicked away.\n\n\"I understand this is difficult for you\u2014\"\n\n\"And I see very clearly why this is not difficult enough for you.\" He turned back to her, his eyes piercing.\n\nShe held his look with uneven breaths, the paralysis taking over her entire body. Confronted head on by a raging bull, she had nowhere to run, nowhere to escape.\n\nWhen he couldn't look at her anymore, he stepped away.\n\nHer palms were coated with blisters, even with the gloves she wore, so she applied the cool gel that Callon had given her weeks ago. It burned at contact, but then it was soothing, lubricating the wound and helping it heal.\n\n<I feel what he sees.>\n\nShe stared at the inside of her thumb, where the worst damage had been done.\n\n<I didn't understand the origin of your sadness\u2014until then.>\n\nShe gave neither an agreement nor a denial. Nothing at all.\n\n<He doesn't deserve it, Cora.>\n\n<Well, I can't help it, alright? It's not something I can just control\u2026>\n\n<You shouldn't have allowed it to happen in the first place.>\n\n<Couldn't control that either.>\n\nAshe turned silent, floating in her mind like an apple that had dropped into a lake. He was physical, with a heftiness that increased the load on her shoulders.\n\n<I don't want to talk about this anymore.>\n\n<Nor do I.>\n\nShe wrapped her hands in the leaves, securing them in place with a wooden pin.\n\n<I pity your heartbreak. But I don't pity the one who gave it to you.>\n\n<This conversation is over, Ashe.>\n\nHis mind retreated slightly, as if her hand had pushed him away. <It's time we speak to the queen. We've been here too long as it is. Our fusion has become easier, but it still feels like a mountain sits on top of my chest.>\n\n<I'm sorry.>\n\n<It's not you. Just the circumstance.>\n\n<Would it help if we ventured outside Eden Star every day so you can stretch your legs?>\n\n<We don't have time for that. Have far more pressing obligations.>\n\n<Then I don't know what the solution is.>\n\n<I do. Go to the queen.>\n\nShe closed the jar of goo then sat at the kitchen table. <She's corrupt, remember?>\n\n<But she's still the queen. She's the one I need to address.>\n\n<I agree. But I don't trust her. And the second I reveal you\u2026I fear for my own safety.>\n\n<Then what is the plan?>\n\n<I don't have one.>\n\n<Then this mission is over. I must return.>\n\n<I said I don't have a plan right this second, not that I give up.> She slumped at the table, her chin on her folded knuckles. <Never thought that convincing a dragon would be easier than convincing an elf.>\n\n<Queen Delwyn isn't a good representation of her people.>\n\n<No, she's not.>\n\n<If Callon were your ruler, this would have been a simple acquisition.>\n\n<I agree.>\n\n<I say Callon takes the throne.>\n\nShe shook her head. <You heard him. He's too loyal.>\n\n<He wouldn't be so loyal if her corruption was exposed. Neither would the elves.>\n\n<What are you saying, Ashe?>\n\n<As Callon said, gain the favor of the elves. Then reveal who you are. Her reputation will be destroyed and irreparable.>\n\n<I promised Callon I wouldn't tell anyone.>\n\n<Then ask his permission to break that promise.>\n\n<He said he would keep this secret as a way to keep me in Eden Star.>\n\n<But that's an agreement he never should have had to make. The Princess of Eden Star should not be shunned or ostracized from her home, let alone her identity. After what King Tiberius shared, I believe her corruption goes far deeper than the surface. We expose that\u2014and she's done.>\n\nIt was a treasonous coup, but was it treasonous if Cora was exposing the queen's treason?\n\n<We continue our conversations with King Tiberius, integrate with elven society, and continue our training. That's the plan.>\n\n<Okay.>\n\n<And we need to reveal my presence to Callon.>\n\n<I don't know\u2026you saw how he was today.>\n\n<He needs to know.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Because he isn't the only one that needs to train you.>\n\n<He's going to be so overwhelmed with this. I'm not sure how he'll handle it.>\n\n<He'll be fine.>\n\n<This is different. He'd be harboring an enemy inside his lands. It's one thing to sneak me out of Eden Star, another to protect me at Rock Island, but this\u2026this is knowing that the King of Dragons is behind enemy lines.>\n\n<It does not concern me.>\n\n<How? How does it not?>\n\n<Because I trust him.>\n\nCora landed on the ground, her sword at her side.\n\n\"Get up.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes as her cheek rested against the grass.\n\n\"I said up!\"\n\nShe gave a groan as she reached for her sword, the blisters of her hand immediately stinging. She dug the tip of the sword into the ground and used it to raise her body upright, her entire body protesting with soreness. \"I know I'm not meeting your expectations, but don't you think my progress is remarkable?\"\n\nHe held his sword at the ready.\n\n\"You've had thousands of years to be this good, and I've had what? A couple months\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you dead?\" There was a bite to his words.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Are. You. Dead?\" He made a gesture with his sword.\n\n\"Yes\u2026\"\n\n\"Then it's not good enough.\" He switched the sword to the other hand because he could use either one with the same strength, apparently. \"Don't give yourself a pat on the back\u2014because you haven't earned it.\"\n\n<I like him.>\n\n<Really? I think he's being an ass right now.>\n\n<I would never lower my expectations of my hatchlings to meet their potential. I would demand their potential meet my expectations.>\n\nShe caught her breath as she readied the sword.\n\n<But I think I have something to add to his training.>\n\n<Now isn't the time to tell him, Ashe. You see how pissed off he is?>\n\nAshe pressed his mind against hers, but this time, it was the hardest push she'd ever felt, like when Flare blasted through the parameters of her mind. Everything shattered, and the thin veil that was once between them was gone.\n\n<What are you doing?>\n\nHer hand suddenly felt empty because the sword weighed nothing. The aches in her muscles and the pains in her joints suddenly vanished, like a wave of pain medication took away all her suffering. There were no blisters. No fatigue.\n\n<We are one.>\n\nCallon spun his sword around his wrist as he began to circle her.\n\n<You will learn battle quicker this way.>\n\n<What way?>\n\n<When you can actually finish it.>\n\nCallon lunged, swiping his sword at her shoulder.\n\nHer reaction time was instant, meeting his fast blade with the block of her sword.\n\nHe hesitated, as if expecting her to miss. He swung his sword again, giving her a flurry of blows with a rush of speed.\n\nHer sword met his every time without taking a step back.\n\nShe saw the opening and took it, slicing the sword across the armor of his stomach.\n\nHe faltered back, his eyes wide.\n\n<Okay\u2026this is pretty cool.>\n\n<Focus.>\n\nHe spun the sword as he circled her. Then he moved again, attacking her harder than he ever had in their training.\n\nCora felt weightless, moving her arms without consequence, without the scream of her muscles. She possessed the strength of ten strong men, had more energy than her body could store, and she used it all to meet his blows.\n\nCallon stepped back\u2014again.\n\nHis furious expression was gone\u2014replaced by a shine of pride. \"Yes, Sor-lei.\"\n\nFor the first time, she attacked him. She swung her sword and met his block, but she kept going, slashing and fighting, matching his energy and strength with her own. Swords collided then broke apart. Grunts came from both of them. They circled each other and moved, each one giving their all.\n\nShe went for the killing blow.\n\nHe stopped her blade then tripped her feet from underneath her.\n\nShe fell to the earth, her face pressed against the grass once more.\n\nAshe pulled his mind away, ending the connection.\n\nThe second he was gone, she felt the consequences of her actions. Her muscles screamed. She gasped for breath. Her fingers stung like salt had been poured into the cracks. <No\u2026come back.>\n\n<That's how battle should be. Recreate it.>\n\n<Yeah, I'm never going to be able to do that.>\n\n<You will.>\n\n<I don't have the strength or energy to do that on my own.>\n\n<My expectations won't change for your potential. Your potential will change for my expectations.>\n\nCallon kneeled beside her, his arms resting on his propped knee. The anger in his eyes had changed. Now they were calm like the stream. Bright like the sunrise. Gentle like the raindrops that dripped from the leaves to her cheek. \"You did well, Sor-lei.\"\n\n<I have to tell him the truth.>\n\n<You don't have to tell him anything\u2014if you do better.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Brothers Riverglade",
                "text": "\"Can I ask you a favor?\" Callon walked beside her on the path between the trees, his shoulders square, his muscular arms hardly swinging at his sides. His sword was across his back, his black armor giving his strong body another layer of protection.\n\nShe already knew what that favor would be. \"Always.\"\n\nThey approached the base of her tree house. \"I'd like to speak to my brother.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nA day of training never slighted him. His body didn't droop because of the fatigue, and he carried himself like a general even though the title was no longer his. There was an integrity to every step he took. Honor in his countenance. \"I'll meet you there.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" She turned to the vine stairway so she could drop her armor in the tree house and have a quick bath.\n\nHis hand moved to her arm.\n\nShe stilled at the touch.\n\n\"You are your father's daughter.\"\n\nEverything in her body tightened.\n\nHis hand moved to her back next, where he gave her a pat. \"And you are your uncle's niece, too.\"\n\nThey sat together on the bench in the mist, the rest of the cemetery obscured from the fog that provided privacy to anyone else there visiting a lost loved one. The statue stood tall, perfectly capturing his regal bearing in life. More flowers had grown over his tombstone.\n\nCora felt the droplets stick to her skin. Once they became big enough, they slid down her arms and plopped into the soil. Every time she drew breath, she felt the cold droplets enter her lungs, cleanse her soul.\n\nThen she felt it.\n\nCallon felt it too\u2014because he raised his chin.\n\nCora saw the blue outline of her father's figure, just a blur of color before it solidified into his strong frame. His head was tilted down, his eyes on his brother.\n\nCallon straightened his back and sat with an upright posture, his hands moving to his thighs. His eyes were straight ahead, unaware of his brother's proximity.\n\nKing Tiberius turned his gaze on her next. \"Hello, Cora.\"\n\n\"Hello\u2026Tiberius.\"\n\n\"I'm very happy to see your face once more.\"\n\n\"Me too.\"\n\nCallon turned to regard her, listening to her speak to someone who wasn't there.\n\nShe shifted her gaze to his. \"I'm here for Callon. He wishes to speak with you.\"\n\nKing Tiberius moved to the bench on the other side of Callon, sitting with the exact same posture.\n\n\"He's beside you,\" she whispered. \"Looking ahead the way you are.\"\n\nCallon turned his head slightly, as if he hoped to see him in the flesh. \"My King\u2026\"\n\nCora acted as the translator through the veil, connecting their conversation.\n\n\"You never called me that in private. Please don't start now.\"\n\nCallon cracked a smile, giving a slight chuckle. \"Brother, it is\u2026\"\n\n\"I will not ask about your well-being because I see it in your eyes every time you visit my resting place. You carry a weight that doesn't belong to you. You carry more sorrow than any man ever should.\"\n\nCallon faced forward again, hiding his face from a ghost.\n\n\"Release it.\"\n\n\"I can't. Grief is permanent. The only change is the way I handle it\u2014which is different every day.\"\n\nThe outline of Tiberius shifted, his gaze moving to his brother's face. \"Do not grieve me.\"\n\n\"How can I not?\" He stared at his hands as they came together, sucking in a deep breath to stifle his emotion.\n\n\"Honor me. But do not grieve for me. The same for Weila and Turnion\u2014who are waiting for you.\"\n\nHe sucked in another deep breath.\n\n\"We will be together again\u2014when the time is right.\"\n\nCallon kept his head bowed, his hands clenched.\n\n\"For now\u2026it looks like you have someone else to live for.\"\n\nCallon gave a nod, his eyes still down.\n\n\"Thank you for looking after her in my stead, Callon.\"\n\nHe stared at his hands, rubbing them together as he gave a subtle shake of his head. \"It has been my joy.\"\n\n\"I know it has, brother.\"\n\nThey sat together in a long pause of silence, each man overcome by the presence of the other.\n\nCallon turned his head slightly, regarding the position his brother would have if he were alive. \"Have you found peace?\"\n\n\"That's all there is on this side of the veil\u2014peace. There are times when I miss my queen, there are times when I miss you, but that pain can never truly manifest. It's always quieted, in some inexplicable way. When you wake up first thing in the morning, you're aware of your world, of the sunshine, of the birds, but you don't open your eyes because you're still in that state of slumber. That's how it feels\u2026all the time.\"\n\nCallon gave a subtle nod in understanding.\n\n\"How is my queen?\"\n\n\"Her reign has been peaceful\u2014until now.\"\n\n\"Cora told me that she stripped away your title. I'm sorry for your loss, but I also understand why she did it.\"\n\n\"As do I.\"\n\n\"She must keep everyone accountable\u2014even Eden Star's longest-serving general.\"\n\n\"I understand that. But\u2026\"\n\nTiberius stared.\n\n\"I don't trust her. Not anymore, at least.\"\n\n\"I don't condone her treatment of Cora, but I understand it.\"\n\n\"That's not the only reason,\" Callon stared. \"If she had it her way, no one would ever know who Cora is.\"\n\n\"Give her time.\"\n\n\"I don't think time will change anything, Tiberius.\"\n\nTiberius turned quiet.\n\n\"I don't mean to speak ill of your Sun-lei or my queen\u2026but I'm concerned. She hasn't come to see you since you've passed, but she didn't know of Cora's existence until a few months ago. That doesn't explain her over twenty-year absence.\"\n\n\"I suppose it doesn't.\"\n\nThe silence fell again, this time longer.\n\nCallon spoke some time later. \"War is coming.\"\n\n\"It can't come when it's already here, Callon. We've been at war with the empire for thousands of years.\"\n\n\"But the end is nigh.\"\n\n\"Speak your mind, brother.\"\n\n\"Cora has gained an alliance with the remaining free dragons, along with some high-ranking officials in the empire\u2026\" He faced forward again, his hands clasped together. \"Her purpose in Eden Star is to forge an alliance between the elves and the dragons. It makes me sick to even consider it\u2026after what they've done. I've lost everyone\u2026because of them.\"\n\nCora watched their interaction, feeling like an observer rather than a participant, watching two members of her family interact like the veil wasn't enough to keep them apart.\n\nTiberius held his silence.\n\nCallon turned back to him slightly, expecting a response.\n\n\"Those kinds of resentments run deep. So deep, they become who we are.\"\n\n\"So, this errand is foolish?\"\n\n\"No.\" Every word in the king's speech had purpose, never rushed, matching the flow of a gentle river. \"It is foolish to think this world will become better if we continue to do nothing. It's our right to hold on to the past, to store resentments in our hearts, to continue our prejudice. But what will that accomplish? Cora is the youngest elf in Eden Star, born in a different time, experiencing the world through a lens we can't comprehend. That gives us a perspective we wouldn't have otherwise. You can call her optimism foolish and insensitive. Or you can call it a gift. I choose the latter.\"\n\n\"So, if you still reigned\u2026you would consider an alliance?\"\n\nTiberius turned his head away, regarding the statue that captured his essence in life. \"You can do your best to prepare for a battle you might win\u2014or you can ignore it and wait for it to slaughter you and everyone you love.\"\n\n\"You didn't answer my question.\"\n\n\"Ashe made a decision to the detriment of us all. But let's not forget\u2014we are not innocent ourselves.\"\n\nCora's eyes narrowed.\n\nCallon looked forward again.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tiberius said. \"I would do everything necessary to defeat King Lux once and for all. I would forge an alliance with anyone who would have me. I would sacrifice my life and the lives of those I love for a chance for peace. It's them or us\u2014and it'll be us unless we do something.\"\n\nCallon said goodbye and dismissed himself. He disappeared through the haze, but Cora suspected he stopped at Weila's grave to visit. Even if he couldn't speak to her, her presence was both depressing and addictive.\n\nOnce his brother was gone, Tiberius turned his attention on Cora. \"Have you spoken to Queen Delwyn?\"\n\n\"No. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she's occupied with regal obligations.\" He looked forward again, but his disappointment couldn't be sheathed in his voice.\n\n\"Actually\u2026I thought it was best if I wait.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"She won't be happy when she knows I can do this.\"\n\nHe dropped his chin slightly, his eyes on his own grave.\n\n\"But I will. I promise.\"\n\n\"When it's meant to happen, it'll happen.\"\n\n\"Can you keep a secret?\"\n\nHis head turned her way, slow and purposeful. \"The dead are the greatest secret-keepers. But even if I were living, your secrets would die with me.\"\n\n<King Tiberius is an honorable man.>\n\n<I know he is.>\n\n<Just like his brother.>\n\n<I'm proud to be a Riverglade.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<I'm going to tell him about you\u2026if that's okay.>\n\nThe response was immediate. <Yes.>\n\n\"Speak your truth, Cora Riverglade.\"\n\n\"I've\u2026I've never heard my full name before.\"\n\n\"Beautiful, isn't it?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"When King Lux overtook Anastille, some dragons escaped. Ashe flew them to safety on Mist Isle, an island far away from here. Another sacrificed himself so others could live\u2026Obsidian.\"\n\nHe had no expression, so if he showed surprise, it was invisible. \"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"Because I found the island.\"\n\nHe remained still. \"That's quite the feat, Cora.\"\n\n\"Well, it wasn't me, exactly. More like we\u2026me and my friends.\"\n\n\"They must be pretty powerful friends.\"\n\n<Will you tell him?>\n\n<No\u2026I don't think I can do it.>\n\n\"And what did you discover?\" Tiberius asked.\n\n\"Ashe, King of Dragons, continues his reign. I asked him for his aid, and after several months of discussion, he agreed. But it's conditional.\"\n\n\"On the participation of the elves.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe gave a nod. \"Cora\u2026I have no words. You accomplished something that would have been impossible for anyone else. The dragons would be wise to remain on their hidden island rather than risk what they have left when the odds are stacked against them. How did you convince them otherwise?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I don't know\u2026\"\n\n\"Remarkable.\"\n\n\"But I think convincing Ashe is going to be much easier than Queen Delwyn and the elves.\"\n\n\"You're right, unfortunately.\"\n\n\"Even Callon\u2026he thinks the dragons deserve their eternal suffering.\"\n\n\"He doesn't mean that. He's just bitter.\"\n\n\"And the rest of the elves?\"\n\n\"Also bitter and angry. My death must have been the end of their resistance. It's easier to hide in the serenity of the forest and forget what lies across the desert. I understand the temptation.\"\n\n\"I have to change that\u2026or we'll all die.\"\n\n\"You and I are in agreement, Cora.\"\n\n<This would be so much easier if he were still here.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"How many dragons have pledged their fight?\"\n\n\"Twelve, but I hope we can get more.\"\n\n\"Dragons are the most powerful beings in existence. Just one is enough to tip the scales of war.\"\n\n\"But they have more dragons than us.\"\n\n\"You will find a way, Cora.\"\n\nShe stared at his outline, wishing she could see the eyes identical to her own. \"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"You've made it this far\u2014farther than anyone else.\"\n\nHer eyes dropped, her stomach warm. \"I could always use the wisdom of a king. Will you help me?\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\n\"I wish the others felt the same way. You're the only person I've met who didn't need to be persuaded.\"\n\n\"Because I want the elves to persevere. And that can't happen while evil invades this land. We can't turn away. We can't ignore it. If we don't knock on their front door, they'll knock on ours. Elves view time differently, experience it so slowly, so as long as nothing has challenged the border of their forest, they will continue to hide behind it\u2014and leave the others to be damned.\"\n\nShe gave a nod.\n\n\"Not that I don't have great empathy for my people. They've lost so much. There are others just like Callon\u2014lost without their loved ones.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\"\n\n\"But if we don't fight now, we'll be slaughtered later.\"\n\n\"There's something I need to tell Callon, but I fear his reaction.\"\n\n\"In what way?\"\n\n\"He's done so much for me up until this point. But since this is treasonous\u2026I'm afraid it'll be too much.\"\n\n\"You do not have ill will toward our people\u2014so it is not treasonous. Trust him with your secrets as you trust me.\" With his head turned her way, he regarded her. \"What is it, Cora?\"\n\n\"Ashe, King of Dragons, is here in Eden Star\u2026\"\n\nSilence. Stillness.\n\n\"Because we're fused.\"\n\nA long stretch of time passed, full of silent intensity, a long moment of reflection.\n\nShe waited for something to be said.\n\n\"Ashe must trust you deeply to agree to that arrangement.\"\n\n\"It's not permanent. It's just until we can speak to Queen Delwyn. Once our mission is complete, our separation will be permanent.\"\n\n\"Their race has been enslaved by cruel men who have turned them into flying horses. Ashe has had to watch every one of his subjects become an object to somebody else. Immortality. Power. Fire. They're all gifts that are too valuable to part with. You could do the same to him\u2014but he believes you won't.\"\n\n\"Because I would never\u2026\" Just the thought made her eyes tear.\n\n\"If I were in his place, I wouldn't have taken the risk.\"\n\n\"He knows I would never do that. That goes against everything I'm fighting for. Plus\u2026I simply have no interest.\"\n\nHe turned quiet again. \"No interest? You're bonded with someone in a way that you'll never be bonded with anyone else. Even if you have children, that bond will never compare. A passionate relationship with your spouse will not either. You share your entire soul with this other being, every thought, even feelings you wish to hide. There is nothing like it\u2026and you could just let that go without reservation?\"\n\n<He speaks like he understands.>\n\n<You're right.> \"It's a special relationship. It's been short-lived, but so potent. To feel this connected to another person\u2026is indescribable. Yes, I will miss that once it's gone, but\u2026we will still have this closeness even when we separate.\"\n\n\"You'll never be able to communicate with him again, Cora.\"\n\n\"Actually, I can.\"\n\nThe air grew heavy. The mist cold. The energy changed between them. \"How?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I don't know.\"\n\nHe continued to stare, his invisible eyes piercing her face.\n\n\"I have a feeling I'll never know.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "King of Dragons",
                "text": "Callon disarmed her with an effortless flick of his wrist. \"Come on, Sor-lei.\"\n\nShe stepped back, her arm falling to her side because all of her muscles screamed from holding the weight of the sword.\n\nCallon continued to circle her, his green sword in his grasp. \"Show me that fire.\"\n\n<I have to tell him the truth.>\n\n<You would deny him that pride?>\n\n<Ugh.>\n\n<I've shown you the flow of battle. You know the way.>\n\n<I just don't have the strength\u2014>\n\n<But you have the speed. Do it, Cora.>\n\n\"I just need a second\u2026\"\n\nCallon remained light on his toes, his eyes eager for the swing of her sword.\n\nShe took a drink, caught her breath, and rubbed the kink in her neck.\n\nHe spun his sword around his wrist again and approached.\n\n\"Alright.\" She gripped her sword with both hands, held it at the ready, and did her best to disconnect her mind from her body, to ignore the fatigue, the aches and pains.\n\n<Focus.>\n\nShe drew breath then moved.\n\nTheir swords came together in a loud clank, steel sliding across scales, sparks flying. The air was sliced with a whoosh as Callon's sword made a swoop toward her torso. When her performance improved, so did his.\n\nShe ducked before the blade hit her armor, her hair flying past from the speed of the wind. She stood upright again, taking advantage of the opening to slam her blade down on his arm.\n\nHe caught it in his vambraces and pushed it back.\n\nThe blade toppled from her hand to the grass.\n\n<Don't stop.>\n\nCora continued the flow by pushing down his sword arm and punching him square in the mouth.\n\n<Yes.>\n\nShe rolled away and grabbed her sword from the ground and jumped to her feet, knowing he was right on her with his sword aimed for her neck.\n\nBut he was where she'd left him, his mouth bloody. He sucked the liquid into his mouth before he spat on the ground, a noticeable pool of blood staining the grass. His teeth glimmered with the red liquid.\n\n<Oh man\u2026I feel so bad.>\n\n<Don't.>\n\n<Why?>\n\nCallon looked at her, raised his sword, and grinned.\n\n<That's why.>\n\n\"Very good, Sor-lei.\"\n\n<You did that on your own. I did not help you.>\n\n<That was a very small victory\u2026>\n\n<With perseverance, small victories can become big victories.>\n\nTheir empty bowls sat beside them on the grass as they faced the passing stream. The red cardinal joined them, enjoying the extra berries she brought just for him. When the sun was the brightest overhead, the outline of fish were visible, swimming in the water.\n\nCallon was as still as the statue next to her.\n\n\"I'm ready whenever you are.\"\n\n\"We'll meditate first.\"\n\n\"I don't think meditation is going to win battles.\"\n\n\"Not for me. But it might for you.\" His eyes remained on the stream, speaking slow and easy, relaxed despite the soreness he felt in his mouth. \"Let's not forget that your mind is your most powerful asset. Use it to your advantage.\"\n\n<I agree.>\n\nHis hands rested on his thighs, and he closed his eyes. \"Besides\u2026it's good for your soul.\"\n\nIt took her a while to settle down because she was eager to train, eager to get better, to feel worthy of the pride her uncle had shown her. But eventually, she did, and she pushed her mind out, feeling the heart of the forest at the center and the veins that stretched to the border.\n\nShe could feel the presence of the life in the trees, the elves throughout the forest, the magic that couldn't be touched or conjured, only felt. Every time she felt it, it brought her peace in a way nothing else ever had. It was the same relaxation of sleep, but in a conscious experience.\n\nShe pushed her mind further out, exceeding the border into the wildlands.\n\n\"Your presence is\u2026immense.\"\n\nHer mind floated in space, her breathing so deep and slow.\n\n\"I have never felt it at this magnitude.\"\n\nThe trance ended, and her eyes opened.\n\nCallon stared at her.\n\nShe met his look.\n\n<He may sense me.>\n\n<Can elves do that?>\n\n<They can feel\u2014but not discern.>\n\nCallon watched her. \"You continue to grow in many ways, Sor-lei.\"\n\n<When will you tell him?>\n\n<I don't know. Maybe tomorrow.> Cora walked behind Callon on the trail, taking the long trek from their secret training grounds and back into the heart of the forest.\n\n<You're worried.>\n\n<Can you blame me? You should have seen the way he looked at Flare\u2026>\n\n<I'm much bigger than Flare.>\n\n<Exactly. He's going to lose his mind.>\n\n<When your mind is attached to your body, you can't lose it.>\n\n<You know what I mean.>\n\n<Your father is right, so there's nothing to fear.>\n\n<He may keep our secret, but that doesn't mean he's going to like it.> Her eyes took in the scenery around them, the wildness of the lands. There was always a bird in a nearby branch, always a rabbit hopping across their path, completely unafraid. Wild flowers were in abundance, something she'd never seen in her travels across Anastille.\n\nBlack as the darkest night, it contrasted against the evergreen, the colors of the flowers.\n\nShe stopped in her tracks.\n\n<What is it?>\n\nShe'd never seen something so out of place in her life.\n\nSunlight reflected off the black petals. Metallic in sheen, the surface was covered in a substance that caused a glint so bright, it was like a glare in the steel of a sword. With vines made of thorns as thick as the width of a blade, it was untouchable.\n\nShe left the path and stepped onto the grass, approaching the black flower that hardly protruded from the grass. If it were any other color, she would have walked right by without a second glance.\n\nShe kneeled, bringing herself closer.\n\nBirds sang their song in the trees, the breeze moved through her hair, life bustled around her.\n\nBut she felt nothing from this little flower.\n\nThen there was a faint whisper.\n\nA whisper she couldn't decipher.\n\nHer hand instinctively reached out to swipe her finger across the petal, as if she hoped to catch a streak of dust from a forgotten heirloom.\n\n<Cora. No.>\n\nShe reached for it anyway.\n\nA hand grasped her by the arm and yanked her away.\n\nHer fingers missed contact by just a stalk of grass.\n\nShe fell on top of her backpack, uncomfortable like a turtle flipped onto his shell.\n\nCallon swiped his sword through the stem, right where the stalk met the earth, and it tipped over. When the breeze caught it, it began to roll away, slowly migrating deeper in the brush of the forest.\n\nHe sheathed his sword then stood over her\u2014looking more pissed off than ever before.\n\nShe rolled over and got to her feet. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"Don't touch it. Ever.\"\n\n\"Okay\u2026but what is it?\"\n\n\"You see one again, kill it.\"\n\nHe marched away, the conversation dismissed.\n\nShe turned to look at the flower once more, but it was gone. \"Callon?\" She returned to the path, catching up to his heels. \"Are you not going to tell me what that was?\"\n\nHe looked straight ahead\u2014like she wasn't even there.\n\n\"I've never seen a flower like that.\" She came to his side, holding his stride even when he moved faster. \"Why does it grow here? When I came close to it\u2026I heard a whisper.\"\n\nHe halted.\n\nShe did too\u2014a second later.\n\nHis nostrils flared with the deep breaths he took, and he was maniacal. \"It's death, Cora.\"\n\nHer eyes shifted back and forth as she looked into his.\n\n\"Death.\"\n\n<Flare? You there?> She pushed her mind out, finding his front door easily because he was much closer than he'd been at Mist Isle. <Hello?>\n\nHis majestic voice spoke. <I'm here, Pretty.>\n\n<How are things?>\n\n<Not so good.>\n\n<Everything okay?>\n\n<Everyone is fine. But we were attacked by goats yesterday.>\n\n<Goats?>\n\n<Mountain goats.>\n\n<Oh\u2026that sounds a bit hilarious.>\n\n<It is. It's especially hilarious because it wouldn't have happened if Rush had listened to me.>\n\n<Typical Rush.>\n\n<You get it, Pretty.>\n\nShe smiled, picturing all of his sharp teeth as he showed his form of a grin. <You made it to the mountains, then?>\n\n<Yes. But we're lost.>\n\n<I thought you had a map?>\n\n<Even with the map, we're lost.>\n\n<Oh no.>\n\n<We'll figure it out. Always do. What about you?>\n\n<Just exhausted.>\n\n<General Callon is training you well?>\n\n<He's trying.>\n\n<You'll get there, Pretty. I have no doubt.>\n\n<I've gotten a lot better. Pushed my body in ways I didn't think were possible.>\n\n<And you'll continue to do so. How's Ashe, King of Dragons?>\n\n<He's helping me out a lot too.>\n\n<Kingly.>\n\n<Can Rush join us? I have news.>\n\n<Was hoping to keep you to myself\u2026 One moment.>\n\nRush's deep voice came a moment later. <He told you about the goats, didn't he?>\n\nShe chuckled out loud as well as in her head. <Yeah\u2026he mentioned it.>\n\n<They're like the frogs\u2014but with horns.>\n\n<At least they aren't venomous.>\n\n<Their looks sure are. And they've got horns\u2026big horns.>\n\n<Just be nice to them, and they won't attack you.>\n\n<You think we haven't tried that? Gave them the last of my bread\u2026and they still mauled me down.>\n\nShe chuckled again. <Then I guess they just don't like you.>\n\n<You think?>\n\n<Most people don't, so it's not surprising.>\n\n<Enough outta you\u2026>\n\n<Glad you guys are doing well\u2026goats aside.>\n\n<What about you?>\n\n<Where do I start\u2026?> She told them about the conversation with her father, the training with Callon, and the black flower she discovered.\n\n<Wow.>\n\n<That's a lot of information to get in fifteen seconds.>\n\n<Sorry.>\n\n<So, Ashe lent you his strength. Nothing like it, huh?>\n\n<Yeah\u2026I felt invincible. Do you do that with Flare?>\n\n<In battle. It gives you an edge.>\n\n<Even with the strength of a dragon, he could still defeat me.>\n\n<Well, Callon is the greatest swordsman ever. Like, literally. General Noose is good too, but I would have beaten him if he hadn't cheated. Your dragon doesn't just give you his strength and energy, but his focus and sight. He allows you to navigate your terrain without effort, so you can focus on the battle with even greater detail. Keep practicing because it's overwhelming at first.>\n\n<Ashe only did it so I could really experience battle. Before that, it was just Callon destroying me immediately over and over. It's helped a lot. I'm a better fighter for it.>\n\n<That's good. But you should still practice anyway.>\n\n<We won't be fused after we speak to the queen\u2014so there's no point.>\n\nRush turned quiet for a while. <So, it sounds like Tiberius is an ally.>\n\n<As much as he can be.>\n\n<If only Queen Delwyn were as open-minded.>\n\n<I think he's the only one who is.>\n\n<Maybe he can help you change that.>\n\n<Yeah, hopefully.>\n\n<He say anything else?>\n\n<Well\u2026> His words echoed back to her, the way he described a fused relationship. <I told him about Ashe\u2026and he understood perfectly how that union feels.>\n\n<He wasn't upset? Having a secret dragon in Eden Star is kind of a big deal\u2026>\n\n<He didn't care at all.>\n\n<Huh.>\n\n<Is it possible\u2026that he's fused with a dragon?>\n\n<Since he's cool with Ashe, I assume he would be forthcoming about it if that were the case.>\n\n<True. But I mean\u2026do elves ever fuse with dragons?>\n\n<A long time ago and only for the purpose of communication. That was before he was king, so I highly doubt it.>\n\nCora looked out the window as she sat at her dining table, her finished dinner in front of her. Starlight was visible in the opening of the trees at the canopy.\n\n<So, you saw an ugly flower?>\n\n<I didn't say it was ugly. Said it was black and metallic\u2026>\n\n<That sounds pretty ugly for a flower.>\n\nShe chuckled. <Yeah, it definitely felt out of place for Eden Star. That's why I could see it so well. It just stood out. Before I could touch it, Callon yanked me away and sliced it from the stem. He told me it was death.>\n\n<Did he say anything else?>\n\n<No. And I don't think he's going to. Do you know what it is?>\n\n<Not a clue. I've never seen anything like that before.>\n\nThe image of the flower was seared in her brain, the way it contrasted against the stalks of grass, the color of the nearby flowers. Eden Star was a vibrant place of life\u2026so how could death grow there? <I also heard a whisper when I came close to it.>\n\n<A whisper?>\n\nRush paused for a bit. <What did it say?>\n\n<I couldn't make it out\u2026like it was in another language.>\n\n<That's not creepy at all\u2026>\n\n<You must ask your father.>\n\n<I think I will\u2026since I have no one else to ask. Wait\u2026> An image suddenly flashed into her mind, seeing the flower alive on a shelf, growing out of a small pot near the windows. <I've seen it before.>\n\n<Where?>\n\n<Mathilda's shop\u2026last time I was there.>\n\nRush gave a loud sigh. <Ugh, witches are the worst.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Because you can't get a straight answer out of them. If you wanted to ask her about it, it would come with a price\u2014a big price.>\n\nA price she hadn't paid yet.\n\n<I don't have a clue what it is or what it means, but it's bad. If Callon doesn't tell you, then ask Tiberius.>\n\n<I think I will.>\n\n<And if you see it again\u2026don't touch it.>\n\nCallon was in the lead, hiking to their training ground as the sun rose over the horizon. His backpack was over his shoulders, his sword on his hip.\n\n\"Callon?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Can we go somewhere farther away from Eden Star? Like, really far away\u2026with lots of space?\"\n\n<You make it obvious he's about to meet the most ferocious dragon that ever lived.>\n\n<He needs to know the requirements. Last thing we need is for you to be seen.>\n\nCallon halted and slowly turned around. His eyes narrowed, and he asked the question. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I need to show you something\u2026in private.\"\n\nHis shoulders slumped as the annoyance deepened in his features. \"It never ends with you, does it?\"\n\nShe didn't know what else to do, so she shook her head.\n\nHe sighed and continued forward again. \"We'll stop at the stream halfway to replenish our canteens. We've got a long day ahead of us.\"\n\n<This is happening.>\n\n<Nervous?>\n\n<I'm never nervous.>\n\n<Well, I am.>\n\n<I have no concerns. He's shown his loyalty to you.>\n\n<Doesn't mean he's not gonna be pissed off. Really pissed off.>\n\nThey stopped at the stream and refilled their empty bottles and then continued ahead. They were far away from the path, but Callon seemed to know exactly where he was going because he moved with purpose.\n\n\"Callon?\"\n\nHis response took a little longer this time. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"If that flower is death\u2026why does it grow here?\"\n\nThe sigh he gave trailed behind him and entered her ears.\n\n\"So, all you have to do is touch it, and you just collapse?\"\n\nHe ducked under a low-hanging branch.\n\n\"Why won't you answer me?\"\n\nHe spun back around. \"Because I told you everything you need to know.\"\n\n\"If that were true, I wouldn't have questions.\"\n\nHis eyebrows furrowed together, flashing his signature look of annoyance. \"I suspect today is going to be enough as it is. Give it a rest.\"\n\n<He's hiding something.>\n\n<I think so too.>\n\n<We shall ask King Tiberius.>\n\nCallon faced forward once again and powered through the forest, his armor, weapons, and backpack having no impact on his speed.\n\nThey continued that way for hours, getting farther away from the center of Eden Star than she'd ever been. It was midday when they arrived in a large clearing of trees, in a valley somewhere deep in the forest.\n\n<This will work.>\n\nIt was much bigger than the glade near the stream, but it came at a heavy price. She dropped her backpack and took a seat, needing water and a small snack.\n\nCallon glanced around the area before he did the same.\n\n\"How do you know the forest so well? I mean, it's so big.\"\n\n\"I've lived a very long life.\"\n\n\"And that life was spent out here?\"\n\n\"As the General of Eden Star, it was my job to protect the entire forest, not just Eden Star proper. I know this forest better than anyone.\"\n\n\"Do any elves live away from Eden Star?\"\n\n\"Some.\"\n\n\"Like, alone?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Why would they want to do that?\"\n\nHe drank his water then turned the cap back into place. \"Because as you say, they're 'old and grouchy.'\"\n\n\"Even on my worst day, I'd rather be with people than be alone.\"\n\n\"Company is for the young. Solitude is for the old.\" He stored his things back in his pack then got to his feet. \"What is it, Cora?\"\n\n<Here we go.>\n\n<He's going to be in shock.>\n\n<And mesmerized by my brute strength and glorious beauty.>\n\n<Okay\u2026so Flare's not the only one that does it.>\n\n<Does what?>\n\n<Nevermind.>\n\nShe got to her feet and brushed off her trousers before she faced him. \"Alright, well\u2026yeah.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed.\n\n\"You're going to be upset\u2014\"\n\n\"What is it, Cora?\"\n\n\"I just need you to be calm\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm always calm.\"\n\n\"Well, you don't look calm right now.\"\n\nHe stepped closer to her, his dark eyes vicious. \"You're my Sor-lei, so you've never seen me as anything else but calm.\"\n\nShe took a slow breath, unsure if she should start at the beginning or just cut right to the chase. \"When I found the dragons, I met their king. Ashe, King of Dragons.\"\n\nHis expression remained hard like the blunt end of an ax. The hatred for their race was so deep in his blood that he couldn't feel an ounce of awe. He was a still lake, never changing, raindrops only disturbing the surface but not affecting anything underneath.\n\n\"He, along with others, wish to free their kin. But they can't do it alone. They need allies\u2014they need the elves.\"\n\nHis arms remained at his sides, the only movement of his body his slightly shifting eyes.\n\n\"I knew there was no way I could convince Queen Delwyn to agree by myself. I thought it would be best if she spoke to him herself. King to queen. Ruler to ruler.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed, just slightly.\n\n\"So\u2026I brought him with me.\"\n\nThe reaction was so slight, but it was there. A subtle tightening of his jaw. A slight turn of his head. The tightening of the cords in his neck. And the eyes\u2026glazed over like a fog of mist rolled in.\n\nCora took several steps back, putting twenty feet between them.\n\nCallon wore the same expression.\n\nCora felt Ashe take over, felt her body become devoured by his. She was suddenly high in the air, looking down at Callon below. Her claws punctured the earth. Her belly felt hot with the eternal fire that filled her lungs with every breath. No longer small and insignificant, she was the most fearsome dragon that ever flew across these skies.\n\nCora was herself once again, the enormous black dragon somehow deep inside her.\n\nCallon still hadn't spoken.\n\nShe gave him plenty of time to speak first, but no words were forthcoming. <I think he's in shock.>\n\n<I don't know what he is.>\n\n\"Callon?\"\n\nHis clipped response was immediate. \"What do you expect of me? A sworn enemy has been hiding among us, unknown to Queen Delwyn and General Aldon, and is now intimately acquainted with Eden Star. Now I must carry the burden of this treasonous secret.\"\n\n\"He's not your enemy\u2014\"\n\n\"But he's ours.\" The anger started to burn, his eyes on fire, his jaw so tight his teeth were about to crack. \"My wife\u2026my son\u2026dead because of him. Countless other elves who should have lived so long, they ended their lives themselves\u2026gone. <Because of him.> Because of his stupidity. You shouldn't have brought him here. You bring Riverglade Clan shame. You've brought us nothing but shame since you got here.\"\n\n<This\u2026this was a bad idea.>\n\n<He speaks in anger. Not truth.>\n\nCallon marched off, snatched his pack, and departed the clearing.\n\n\"Cal-lon?\" Her voice broke before she could finish saying his name.\n\nHe didn't look back.\n\n<Cora, it'll be okay.>\n\n<He just left me here\u2026>\n\n<I know the way.>\n\n<But\u2026he doesn't know that.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Black Curse",
                "text": "She lay in the middle of the clearing with her pack as a pillow. It was a warm night, so her skin didn't erupt with bumps without a blanket. There was enough food in her pack to last until morning, and there was a nearby stream that Ashe had picked up on with his remarkable hearing.\n\n<We all say things in anger, Cora.>\n\n<He's never said anything like that before.>\n\n<He's a hot coal. Even when the fire is gone, it'll still glow red-hot. But give it time\u2026and you'll be able to touch it again.>\n\n<He was just proud of me a couple days ago.>\n\n<And still is.>\n\n<What if he tells Queen Delwyn?>\n\n<He won't.>\n\n<But what if he does\u2014>\n\n<He. Won't.>\n\n<I thought you would be upset\u2026because of all the things he said.>\n\n<I can't be upset when it's the truth. I can't be upset when I've seen firsthand how my mistake has impacted others. To watch this honorable man grieve for what he's lost\u2026it breaks me. He's entitled to his anger. He's entitled to his sorrow.> Ashe drifted away, curling up in her mind, like he wished to speak no more.\n\nHer eyes remained on the stars, feeling more alone than she had before.\n\nShe reached out her mind and felt the door. She pressed into it, her hand knocking on the surface.\n\nHis answer was instant. <Pretty.>\n\n<Hey\u2026is Rush around?>\n\nThere was a long pause before he spoke, like he could hear all her pain in just the tone of her voice. <I'll get him.>\n\nHe arrived an instant later. <I'm here.> No jokes. No taunts. Just himself. <Talk to me.>\n\nWith her eyes on the stars and the grass cushioning her back, it was easy to pretend he was right beside her, admiring the same sky at the same time. Whenever the breeze brushed over her face, it took her to a different time, a time when everything felt right, even if it was short-lived. <I told Callon about Ashe.>\n\nA long, heavy sigh. <He'll come around. If he can let me live, then he'll accept this too.>\n\n<I hope so.>\n\n<He will. I know he will.>\n\nThe tears bubbled from her eyes and streaked down her cheeks. As much as she tried to restrain them from entering her voice, they broke through. <He said I've brought him shame\u2026that I've brought him nothing but shame since I got here.>\n\n<Treasure, please don't cry\u2026>\n\n<He was proud of me a few days ago. And now\u2026I feel like I've lost him.>\n\n<You didn't. He's like everyone else\u2014says things he doesn't mean when he's upset.>\n\n<I don't know\u2026 I've never seen him like this.>\n\n<It was a lot to take in. Just remember that.>\n\n<I just don't want to lose what we have.>\n\n<Impossible. I see the way he loves you\u2014unconditionally.>\n\nShe continued to cry.\n\n<I know you're scared, Cora. But he's not going to abandon you. He's not going to leave you outside a gate and walk away.>\n\nHer arms folded over her chest, and she gave a nod.\n\n<I promise.>\n\n<Cora.>\n\n<What?>\n\nShe sat under the shade of a tree with her empty bowl beside her, the last of her rations. When she lifted her chin, she saw him across the clearing.\n\nHis shiny forehead glinted in the morning sun. His wide chest rose and fell in quick intervals\u2014like he'd run the whole way there. Frantic eyes swept across the clearing, unable to see her in the shady spot under the tree.\n\nShe got to her feet and stepped into the sun.\n\nHis eyes immediately spotted her, and a long, deep breath followed. His eyes closed briefly, all the tightness of his face disappearing. He let his pack drop behind him before he ran to her.\n\nHer eyes watered when she saw the look on his face.\n\nShe thought she'd never see it again.\n\nHis arm circled her waist, his other hand cupping the back of her head as he drew her close. His chin rested on her head as he gave her a tight squeeze, his breaths still labored and strained. \"Sor-lei. You're okay.\"\n\n\"I'm fine.\"\n\nHe held on for another moment before he pulled away, his palm still cupping the back of her head. He gave her a once-over before he pressed a kiss to her forehead and released her entirely. \"I went to your home this morning\u2026and my heart dropped into my stomach.\"\n\n\"I'm totally fine\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2014for everything.\"\n\n\"It's okay\u2026\"\n\nHe dropped his head and averted his gaze. \"I just\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't have to explain, Tor-lei. I understand\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes remained down for a moment before they rose once more. \"Doesn't excuse my behavior. Or the things I said.\"\n\n\"Did you\u2026mean what you said?\"\n\nHe winced, like a blade pierced his stomach. \"No, Sor-lei. I'm the one who's brought our family shame.\"\n\n\"Not true.\"\n\n\"What would your father think if he knew I abandoned you out here\u2026alone?\"\n\n\"I wasn't alone.\"\n\nHis eyes remained soft.\n\n\"And I'm very capable, Callon. All I had to do was feel the heart of Eden Star\u2014and follow it home.\"\n\nAfter a breath, he gave a slight nod. \"You're right.\"\n\n\"Let's just forget about it, okay?\" Her hand reached for his arm and gave it a squeeze.\n\nHis hand pressed over hers, gave it a squeeze in return, and then he stepped away. \"Thank you, Sor-lei.\"\n\n<I wish to speak with him.>\n\n<Is now the best time?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"Um\u2026Ashe would like to speak with you.\"\n\nThe softness in his features instantly disappeared. His eyes were guarded. He was cold. But he wasn't livid like he was before.\n\n\"I'll speak his words for him.\"\n\n<Not a day goes by that I don't carry these regrets. If I could go back in time, I would ban them from our lands\u2014and annihilate them if they refused. Our time of peace and prosperity was destroyed by my na\u00efvet\u00e9. This doesn't mean much, doesn't erase what you've lost, but you have my remorse.>\n\nCallon's face was a solid wall\u2014with the exception of an occasional blink.\n\n<I understand if you don't accept my apology.>\n\n\"I don't.\"\n\n<We're all on borrowed time\u2014all the free folk that remain. The elves are the biggest threat to King Lux\u2014so you'll be the first to go. It took a very long time for Cora to convince me that this alliance is necessary, that this war is worth risking what we have left. I hope we can put the past aside temporarily to join our forces and do what must be done. Because without each other, we have no chance to prevail.>\n\n\"You speak to me as if I have any authority in this matter.\"\n\n<You do.>\n\n\"That power belongs to Queen Delwyn.\"\n\n<It belongs to the elves of Eden Star\u2014and you lead the elves.>\n\n\"You're mistaken.\"\n\n<I am not. I know a king when I see one\u2014as do your people. They follow your orders\u2014not hers. That tells me what I need to know.>\n\nCallon stepped away. \"I've served as General Callon for thousands of years. They respect my dedication and sacrifice to our people. That's all.\"\n\n<They respect the general more than the ruler he serves\u2014that's telling.>\n\n\"If your suggestion is to overthrow Queen Delwyn and take her crown, that's barbaric. We're not power-hungry and bloodthirsty like the very enemy we oppose.\"\n\n<She's corrupt\u2014and you know it.>\n\nCallon looked away.\n\n<You may not be the general in name, but you are in heart. It is your duty to protect your people from this tyrant.>\n\n\"Tyrant\u2026that's a strong word.\"\n\n<We don't trust her. Neither do you.>\n\nHis eyes remained elsewhere. \"I served King Tiberius, and I will serve his queen just as loyally.\"\n\n<Your loyalty is unflinching. A great quality in a servant to the throne. But she does not have the same loyalty to her own people\u2014otherwise, she wouldn't hide Cora's identity. I understand the struggle to reconcile the two parts of your identity. You want to serve\u2014but you're meant to lead.>\n\n\"I have no interest in the throne.\"\n\n<That's exactly why it should be yours. A true leader understands the sacrifice the job entails\u2014so takes it with reluctance rather than ambition.>\n\nCallon kept his eyes focused on the tree line, peering into the shadows.\n\n<The armies of the empire will march on Eden Star. And Queen Delwyn is unsuited to defend it.>\n\nHe turned back. \"Our armies are always prepared to protect our borders.\"\n\n<It's not the soldiers that concern me, but the one who gives the orders.>\n\n\"She would do whatever was necessary to protect her people.\"\n\n<She denies her people the daughter of Tiberius Riverglade, so I'm skeptical.>\n\n\"Not the same thing\u2026\"\n\n<Cora is a threat to her power. Seems to me that she will do everything she can to protect that power\u2014whatever the cost may be. Retaining her power comes first. Everything else is second.>\n\nCallon looked away again.\n\n<This time in Eden Star has given me a glimpse of your remarkable character. You care for your Sor-lei like a hatchling. The love you have for your family continues beyond the grave. You tolerate Queen Delwyn out of respect for your late brother. I've never known a man with greater loyalty.>\n\n\"Let me make this clear.\" Callon pivoted his body, his eyes on the ground. \"I will not challenge my queen for her seat. I will not plot to overthrow her. I will serve her as I always have. This conversation is over.\"\n\n<Then will you help us convince her to do what is necessary?>\n\nHis eyes remained on the ground.\n\n<Because she will listen to you, Callon.>\n\n\"I betrayed her, and she stripped me of my title.\"\n\n<Because she had to\u2014not because she wanted to.>\n\n\"I blackmailed her.\"\n\n<You shouldn't have had to in the first place.>\n\n\"I'm not entirely convinced I want this to happen anyway.\" He lifted his gaze, a glimpse of anger on the surface. \"You may admire my character, but I don't admire yours. It's ironic to listen to you question Queen Delwyn when you destroyed us all with your rulership.\"\n\nAshe remained quiet, his mind withdrawing as if the words had physically marked him.\n\nCora spoke. \"This is me now. There are a million reasons not to do this. But we need each other if we want to survive.\"\n\n\"We've survived this long.\"\n\n\"But not much longer. And is surviving the same as living?\"\n\nCallon clenched his jaw.\n\n\"I told my father about Ashe.\"\n\nHis eyes immediately shifted, focusing on her face with deeper penetration.\n\n\"He's lost as much as you have, but he knows we need to put our animosity aside. The preservation of Eden Star is all that matters in the end. Whatever that requires is insignificant.\"\n\n\"He said that?\" His anger dulled like an old blade.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHis eyes flicked away once more, deep in reflection.\n\n\"He is still your king, is he not?\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\n\"Then this is what your king commands.\"\n\nAfter a deep breath, he looked at her once more. \"Tiberius is like a flower. He can be plucked off the stem, but he'll just grow another blossom and forget why he needed to grow it in the first place. His memory is short, his grudges even shorter. Me\u2026I've never been that way.\"\n\n\"I've noticed.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"I will speak to her on your behalf. But I can't promise it'll work.\"\n\n\"Even if she doesn't listen to you, the elves do. And that can make all the difference.\"\n\n\"They won't listen to me if they dislike you, Cora. So, that's something you need to work on.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She gave a nod, hearing Rush's voice in her head. \"Gotta make some friends\u2026\"\n\nAshe sat near the tree line, a dark contrast against the green canopy of the trees. With his shoulders back, his chest puffed up, he watched with ancient eyes.\n\nWith his sword in hand, Callon glanced at the dragon\u2014time and time again.\n\nAshe met his look with gray eyes.\n\n\"Is this okay?\" Cora asked. \"He's been cooped up for so long.\"\n\nCallon focused on Cora and gave a nod. \"It'll take some time to get used to.\" He prepared his sword and took his stance.\n\n<Cora.>\n\nShe held her sword at the ready, eyes on Callon. <I need to focus, Ashe.>\n\n<You need to use your other skills.>\n\n<What other skills?>\n\n<The power of your mind.>\n\n<But\u2026that's cheating.>\n\n<Is my fire cheating?>\n\n<Well, no.>\n\n<Then this is not cheating. This is a skill you have\u2014and you need to use it to your advantage. You're a hatchling, so you've never seen battle. It's barbaric, brutal, and bloody. All that matters is the one who survives. Be the one who survives.>\n\nCallon circled her, spinning his sword with his wrist.\n\n<Do it, Cora.>\n\nCallon launched himself, swiping his sword down on her.\n\nShe blocked the hit then pushed her mind out.\n\nCallon felt the effects and immediately backed away.\n\nShe moved forward, slamming her sword down to defeat him.\n\nHe blocked the hit with a weak hand, his eyes wincing from the assault to his mind. He recovered and responded with even more aggression, swiping left and right, murder in his eyes.\n\nShe blocked his hits then pushed again, assaulting his mind with invisible daggers.\n\nFuming, he gave a growl and pushed on harder.\n\n<Great. Now he's just pissed off.>\n\n<And unfocused.>\n\nHis sword drove her back, his momentum forcing her backward across the grass. With gritted teeth and rage in his blood-red face, he was determined to strike her down. With speed and agility he'd never executed before, he came for her like she was King Lux in the flesh.\n\nShe instinctively pushed her mind out again, this time just to survive.\n\nHe gave a snarl as he grimaced, but he kept going.\n\nShe blocked hit after hit, but all her energy was focused on staying afloat, not striking back.\n\n<Come on, Cora.>\n\n<I won't do it more than that.>\n\n<You must.>\n\n<It might kill him.>\n\n<You underestimate General Callon's abilities.>\n\nShe pushed again.\n\nHe faltered for just an instant.\n\nAnd that was enough for her to slam her knuckles into his face, kick him back, and yank the sword out of his hand.\n\nThe pride was in Ashe's voice. <Very good, Cora.>\n\nCallon was on his back for just a second. He recovered quickly, getting to his feet as if nothing happened. He yanked the sword out of the ground and drew it close to his side.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Ashe told me to do it\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't be sorry.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"You'll never have the time to train the way I did. The way Weila did. Turnion. Any powerful warrior. This is the only way you're going to compete against fighters like me, soldiers, other generals. Use it to your advantage, Cora.\"\n\n\"Do you still want me to use it while we train?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That seems a bit unfair to you\u2026\"\n\n\"How? I'm training you\u2014and you're training me.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"If I face someone with your powers, I'll be prepared. It's been a while since I've been challenged. I welcome it.\" He took his stance with his sword at the ready. \"Let's go again.\"\n\nShe entered the Cemetery of Spirits and passed through the mist.\n\n<General Callon is more exceptional than I realized.>\n\n<Why do you say that?>\n\n<A man who relishes new challenges is unafraid of failure. If you're unafraid of failure, it means you're confident in your abilities, that there's success at the end of the road.>\n\n<Yeah, he's pretty great.>\n\n<You're very lucky to have him, Cora.>\n\n<I know I am.> She passed through the cemetery, the mist immediately cool against her warm skin. She passed gravestones until she reached her father's final resting place. She sat on the bench and stared at the fireflies as she waited.\n\nIt took some time\u2014but he came.\n\nHis power and majesty filled the space the instant he came into being, sending invisible ripples through the air around him. His bluish outline was visible, a subtle definition of his height and musculature. He joined her on the bench. \"Hello, Cora.\"\n\n\"Hello, Tiberius.\"\n\n\"Give Ashe, King of Dragons, my regards as well.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I will.\"\n\n<I appreciate and reciprocate his hospitality.>\n\n\"He gives you his regards as well.\"\n\n\"His scales are midnight black, are they not?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Gray eyes?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nTiberius gave a nod. \"Wish I could see him for myself.\"\n\n\"Callon has.\"\n\nA light chuckle escaped his lips. \"I already suspect his reaction.\"\n\n\"He wasn't happy\u2026\"\n\n\"But I'm sure you made him come around.\"\n\n\"He stormed off, actually.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2026he was always uptight.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"I don't know if I would describe him as that.\"\n\n\"Ever since we were children, Callon has always been a devout rule-follower. I was the opposite\u2026as you probably guessed.\"\n\n\"I've never cared for the rules either.\"\n\n\"Then you got something from me, after all.\"\n\n\"Guess so.\"\n\nTiberius turned quiet. \"He came around?\"\n\n\"A day later. I was actually afraid that would be the end of it\u2026\"\n\n\"Callon has his tantrums, but he always comes back around.\"\n\nShe stared at her hands in her lap. \"I don't mean this in a disrespectful way\u2026but I'm surprised you were the one who became king.\"\n\n\"I'm difficult to offend, so you don't need to worry about that.\" He looked ahead at the statue of his likeness. \"I believe an important quality of a ruler is the ability to adapt to change, to shift your perspective, to question practices rather than blindly following them. That's exactly what I did as I led the elves. I challenged social norms when it was impossible for others. Perhaps that's what got me killed\u2026but I wouldn't change it for anything. Callon is the longest-serving general Eden Star has had because his upstanding qualities make him suitable for the job. He's selfless and dedicated. He wants to serve. He wants to sacrifice his life for something greater than himself. I think we both ended up exactly where we were meant to be.\"\n\n\"That makes sense. Was it weird having your younger brother as your general?\"\n\n\"I got to boss him around all day. It was wonderful.\"\n\nShe chuckled.\n\nHe turned serious again. \"It wasn't weird at all. We were a perfect team, he and I. A king is only as good as the general who serves him.\"\n\n\"What do you think about him being king?\"\n\nHis eyes turned to regard her. \"Is Queen Delwyn unwell?\"\n\n\"No. I just\u2026I'm not sure if she's the best for the position.\"\n\n\"I know you both have questioned her integrity. But until we know more, she deserves the benefit of the doubt. Ask her why she hasn't come to me for these past twenty years. Ask her to join with the dragons and prepare for war. Her answers will tell us what we need to know.\"\n\nShe gave a nod. \"I think I already know how this will go\u2026but I'll try.\"\n\nHe looked at the statue again, which was covered in a vine that wrapped around toward his arm. \"Has Callon pledged his support?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"But only because of you.\"\n\nHe turned back to her.\n\n\"You're still his king.\"\n\n\"I wholeheartedly believe he would have come around on his own. Because your influence is much more potent than my own.\"\n\nShe looked at her hands once more.\n\n\"Is he still teaching you the sword?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How have you progressed?\"\n\n\"I'm much better than I was, but Callon agrees I'll never meet his standards.\"\n\n\"That's an unfair thing to say. You're a child, not a woman with the same years of experience.\"\n\n\"When it comes to war, it doesn't matter. I'm not good enough. I'll never be good enough for what we're about to face.\"\n\nHe bowed his head.\n\n\"But I started using my\u2026powers. I'm not sure what else to call them. That gave me an upper hand.\"\n\n\"Powers?\"\n\n\"It's hard to explain, but\u2026I can basically disarm someone's mind with my own.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"It's basically the Skull Crusher, but at a nonlethal level.\"\n\nMore silence.\n\nShe regarded her father. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"That's Death Magic.\"\n\n\"I know\u2026\"\n\nHe remained quiet.\n\n<Ask him. Now's your chance.>\n\n\"I asked Callon this\u2026but he refused to tell me.\"\n\nTiberius straightened his body.\n\n\"Said it's forbidden.\"\n\n\"Because it is forbidden.\"\n\n\"I need to know anyway. Because Death Magic is as intuitive to me as breathing.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Please tell me, Tiberius. I'm entitled to this information. It could make all the difference in the world.\"\n\nHe seemed to draw breath because his chest slowly rose before it fell once more. A moment was spent looking straight ahead, but then he eventually turned to regard her. \"I can tell you what I know\u2014but that doesn't mean it'll answer your questions.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"But I will only share this with you\u2014and not your other half.\"\n\n<No.>\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because he's not an elf.\"\n\n\"We are one.\" The comeback was harsh, flying out of her mouth like spit. \"I have no secrets from him.\"\n\n\"That's my condition.\"\n\n<It's okay, Cora. You can tell me when the conversation has concluded.> He drifted away, further and further until he was gone from her mind, like he was asleep. He had no conscious presence.\n\n\"Okay, he's gone. But I'll tell him everything you share with me.\"\n\n\"I don't think you will.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe looked ahead again. \"Because you won't want to. That is the real reason I requested privacy.\"\n\nHer heart fell into her stomach, followed by an avalanche of discomfort. Her core temperature spiked, and the mist no longer had a cooling effect on her skin. Her fingers immediately curled in and formed fists as she drew them closer to her body.\n\n\"Are you ready, Cora?\"\n\nShe gave a nod, a hesitant one.\n\n\"Shamans aren't any different from you or me\u2014because they're elves.\"\n\nSeconds turned into minutes.\n\nCora absorbed his confession like a dried-out sponge, soaking in every drop without saturation. Her steady breathing spiked into deep inhales and exhales. Overwhelmed, she didn't know what to say. \"I don't understand\u2026\"\n\n\"A cursed elf becomes a dark elf. Then, in time, they become a Shaman. When men die, they go to heaven or hell. It's our version of eternal suffering.\"\n\nShe stared. \"How does an elf become cursed?\"\n\n\"By being cursed by another elf.\"\n\n\"What\u2026?\"\n\n\"It's a practice that has been outlawed for a very long time. The elves who commit atrocious crimes against their people have to be punished in some way, and the punishment must reflect the degree of their betrayal. The elves who can't be forgiven\u2026are cursed. They are dead, but they never pass on to our spirit world. It's eternal damnation.\"\n\nShe inhaled a slow and deep breath. \"I think I'm in shock right now\u2026\"\n\n\"It never should have been done. It's a shameful part of our history that we wish to forget.\"\n\n\"So\u2026where do they go?\"\n\n\"No one knows.\"\n\n\"So, all those Shamans I've seen\u2026\"\n\n\"Are elves cursed long ago.\"\n\nShe remembered the black flower on the hike, the petals that whispered to her. \"I saw this black flower outside Eden Star\u2026 Callon pulled me away and sliced it from the stem. He said it was death.\"\n\n\"The Black Curse. That's what we call it.\"\n\n\"Is that\u2026how you cursed them?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We removed it from Eden Star\u2026but sometimes it grows back.\"\n\nShe turned away, her eyes back on her hands. \"I understand why Callon didn't want me to know.\"\n\n\"It was a barbaric practice. Regardless of the crime the elves committed, they didn't deserve that cruelty. It's a dark time in our society that we wish to forget. If you question any elf about it, they will disregard your words. The only reason I share this with you is because you're right\u2014you need to know.\"\n\n\"Why would I not share this information with Ashe?\"\n\nHe turned to regard her.\n\nShe could feel his stare even if she couldn't see it.\n\nHe remained quiet.\n\nShe raised her chin and faced him, looking into the blue outline of his face.\n\n\"Please don't make me say it, Cora.\"\n\nThe truth fell onto her shoulders with the weight of the world. \"Because King Lux used the Shamans to enslave the dragons\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Peony",
                "text": "The mist parted and revealed her sitting there.\n\nLong blond hair with flowers pinned into her braid. Dark green trousers and a matching tunic. She sat on the bench beside a grave, her hands together in her lap, her eyes on the tombstone that marked the final resting place of her loved one.\n\nShe had no idea that the outline of a woman was right beside her.\n\nCora stared, enticed to walk away and push this attempt to another day.\n\nThe blonde turned her head slightly and locked her eyes on Cora. They were blue and clear, but they instantly turned hostile once she narrowed her eyes. Her eyes flicked back to the grave once her animosity was made clear.\n\nJust gotta suck it up.\n\nCora approached the grave but kept a few feet of distance.\n\nThe blonde looked at her once more, her look lethal. \"You have no business here. Leave.\"\n\n\"I just\u2014\"\n\n\"I said leave.\"\n\nShe was tempted to leave, but she stayed. \"Is that your mother?\"\n\nHer eyes immediately narrowed.\n\nThe spirit beside her had one hand placed on hers, her head bowed in sadness.\n\n\"She's beside you\u2014her hand on yours.\"\n\nThe blue spirit raised her head and regarded Cora.\n\nThat just infuriated the blonde even more. \"How dare you?\"\n\n\"You can see me.\" The spirit addressed her, pulling her hand away from her daughter's and rising to her feet.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe stepped forward, her arms resting by her sides.\n\n\"Yes, what?\" The blond elf asked.\n\nCora kept her eyes on the spirit. \"If there's something you wish for me to tell your daughter, I can.\"\n\nThe blonde got to her feet, her shoulders squared for a fight. \"Walk away now, or I'll make sure that Queen Delwyn ejects you from our lands\u2014as she should have done in the first place.\"\n\nThe spirit spoke. \"Tell Peony that the brooch I gave her for her birthday looks lovely.\"\n\nCora's eyes shifted to the blond elf. \"Peony, she says that the brooch you're wearing looks lovely\u2026the one she got you for your birthday.\"\n\nHer features immediately slackened as the revelation set in. Several breaths passed before she turned to the vacancy on the bench beside her, her fingers curling toward her palm. \"Mama?\" Her voice broke as a choked sob came forth.\n\nThe spirit moved to the bench beside her, her hand returning to hers.\n\n\"Her hand is on yours\u2026\"\n\nPeony looked down at her hand on her thigh, her bottom lip trembling.\n\nThe spirit continued. \"Tell my daughter that I miss her dearly\u2026and it gives me great happiness to watch her visit me, beautiful flowers always in her hair.\"\n\nCora shared the information.\n\nPeony started to cry, clenching the hand she couldn't feel. \"Mom\u2026\"\n\nCora acted as the vessel between mother and daughter, destroying the veil that separated the living from the dead. Peony seemed to forget that Cora was the one speaking because she never looked her way. She continued to stare right at the place where her mother sat, as if she could see her herself.\n\nHer mother had died in the last war, never to return home after the final battle against King Lux. The musculature of her frame was slightly visible in the haze, and it was clear in the way she carried herself, like she was still covered in armor and weapons.\n\nPeony wanted to know that her mother was okay, but all her mother wanted to discuss was her daughter and her life in Eden Star.\n\n\"Father never remarried\u2026\"\n\n\"Doesn't surprise me.\"\n\n\"He's still sad\u2026 I'm still sad.\"\n\n\"I know, sweetheart.\"\n\n\"Are you waiting for us?\"\n\n\"I'm waiting for your father. You will have your own family someday, Peony. But of course, we will cross paths.\"\n\nPeony wiped the tears away from her cheeks and gave a sniff. \"Father still takes care of your birds.\"\n\n\"I knew he would. He hates that they wake him up every morning, but I know he loves them.\"\n\n\"He loves them because you love them.\"\n\nShe stared at her daughter for a while, her hand still on hers. \"I'm sorry, Peony, but I have to go.\"\n\n\"No\u2026\"\n\n\"We will see each other again.\"\n\nShe nodded through her tears.\n\n\"Rein-Lei-Vu.\"\n\n\"Rein-Lei-Vu\u2026\"\n\nThe blue spirit faded into the mist.\n\nPeony took a deep breath the moment she felt her mother disappear.\n\nThese women were strangers, but the interaction affected Cora just as deeply as it did when Callon spoke to his Sun-lei. Her eyes were wet. Her chest hurt. It wasn't her place to linger and watch a woman grieve her mother's absence, so she stepped away.\n\n\"Wait.\"\n\nCora halted.\n\nPeony walked up behind her with silent footsteps. She came into Cora's line of sight, with tears in her eyes that reflected the glow of the fireflies. \"How did you do that?\"\n\n\"Wish I knew.\"\n\nHer eyes dropped for a moment. \"Can you do that with other spirits?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe took a moment then, her eyes still on the ground. \"I haven't heard my mother's voice in\u2026a very long time. But it came into my head so naturally because those were the exact words she would speak.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to hear that.\"\n\nPeony lifted her eyes from the ground. \"She was exactly the same\u2026like she was in a good place.\"\n\n\"I think so too.\"\n\n\"Sorry I was so harsh earlier\u2014\"\n\n\"It's fine. I'm used to people hating me everywhere I go, so\u2026\" A quiet chuckle escaped her lips, a bitter and painful one.\n\n\"Would you\u2026be willing to do that again?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"I know it would mean a lot to my dad.\"\n\n\"Of course. I just have one condition\u2026\"\n\nHer blue eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I don't want this to get back to the queen\u2026so keep it to yourself.\" Cora tensed once she made the request. It was treasonous, to ask another elf to hide a secret this immense. But if Peony wanted to be connected to her mother again, she would agree.\n\nPeony hesitated before she gave a nod. \"I grant your request.\"\n\nCora stepped around Peony and walked away. \"Come to my tree house if you need me. I'm usually around.\"\n\nShe stepped across the threshold of the tree house and peered inside to see Callon scraping the contents of his pot into a bowl at the dining table. A bird was perched on the windowsill, chirping as he turned his head left and right to get a peek. Like Callon knew he was there, he grabbed a piece of his dinner and tossed it, making it land right next to the bird.\n\nThe bird gobbled it up then took off.\n\n\"Looks like you have a pet.\"\n\nCallon returned the pot to the stove before he regarded her, stern eyes in a stern face. Then he grabbed another bowl and split his dinner into two. \"Barely heard you that time. You're getting better.\"\n\nShe took a seat at the table and pulled the bowl close. \"One of Weila's recipes?\"\n\nArms on the table with his head bowed, he spooned the food into his mouth. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"She knew her way around the kitchen.\"\n\nHe chewed, his eyes out the window.\n\nThe mutual silence continued, the two of them eating together, no pressure to exchange words. Singing birds surrounded the house on all sides, growing louder as the sun set further and further.\n\n\"I made a friend\u2026sorta.\"\n\nCallon's eyes lifted to hers.\n\n\"Peony.\"\n\n\"Peony Mountain?\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2026the introduction wasn't that specific.\"\n\nHe took another bite. \"What happened?\"\n\nShe told him what had transpired at the Cemetery of Spirits.\n\nNow his dinner was abandoned in front of him. His dark eyes were focused on her, serious and narrowed. \"Her reaction?\"\n\n\"Disbelief, obviously. But once her mother gave me details I would never know otherwise, everything changed. I told her I would continue to do it for her if she kept my secret from the queen.\"\n\n\"And her answer?\"\n\nShe gave a nod.\n\nHis arms crossed on the table, his bowl set to the side, his eyes on the window again. \"I would deceive Queen Delwyn for the opportunity to speak to my wife and son again. Others will feel the same. Your secret will spread among the elves\u2014but it won't reach her ears for a long time. But by the time it does, it'll be too late.\"\n\n\"What if she just executes me?\"\n\nHe gave a slight shake of his head. \"The elves of Eden Star will stand in her way. If they lose you, they lose their loved ones too.\"\n\n\"I guess that's true.\"\n\n\"Peony will tell the others. The flame has been lit\u2014and now the fire will spread.\" He turned back to her and studied her face. \"There's pain in your eyes. Why?\"\n\nShe held his gaze in static form, unsure what to share and what to hide. \"I spoke to my father.\"\n\n\"Did his words provoke you?\"\n\n\"No. I just\u2026I wish he were still here.\"\n\nHe shifted his look away instantly, giving a slight nod of his head. \"As do I, Sor-lei.\"\n\nHer mind pressed up against the hard surface with a grooved texture that felt like rigid scales on a muscular flank. Her open palm pressed against the dragon, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing lungs.\n\n<Pretty, you're back.>\n\n<Hey, Flare. How are you?>\n\n<You're always so sad when I speak to you. I don't like it, Pretty.>\n\n<I'm sorry. I am happy to talk to you.>\n\n<Does General Callon continue his tirade of coldness?>\n\n<No, we're good now. Can you bring in Rush? I have something to tell you both.>\n\n<Hold on.>\n\nRush's voice emerged a moment later. <Everything alright, Cora?>\n\n<Yeah, I'm totally fine.>\n\n<General Asshole came around?>\n\nShe knew it was a joke, so she rolled her eyes. <Yes. But don't call him that.>\n\n<Come on, you know I'm only teasing.>\n\n<I know. How are things with you?>\n\n<Well, it's a bit complicated\u2014>\n\n<It's not complicated at all. We're lost. And he's the reason we're lost.>\n\n<Don't act like you don't like eating those goats, alright?>\n\n<The more I eat them, the more they attack us.>\n\n<They're following us all through the mountains. We have to keep one person on guard all night. Not because of orcs. Not because of Shamans. But because of these goats that'll knock your teeth out.>\n\n<I thought you had a map?>\n\n<But it's not very detailed, and there're sooooo many mountains over here. It's like a needle in a haystack.>\n\n<A needle on a mountainside.>\n\n<Literally.>\n\n<Are you guys going to turn back?>\n\n<Nah. We'll figure it out. What did you need to tell us?>\n\n<Well\u2026I got our answer about the Shamans.>\n\n<General Callon told you?>\n\n<My father.>\n\n<Based on the way you're talking, this sounds like bad news.>\n\n<Because it is.>\n\n<Alright. Lay it on us.>\n\n<The Shamans are elves. Dark elves.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Eden Star used to punish elves by cursing them\u2026 And I guess they turn into\u2026whatever they are.>\n\n<That's barbaric. And the elves are not barbaric.>\n\n<He said it was a really long time ago. They're so ashamed of it that they've removed it from their history and lore. It's forbidden to speak of it.>\n\n<Does that mean elves can use Death Magic? That would explain why you're capable of it.>\n\n<I don't think they can. That black flower I told you about? That's what they used to make the curse.>\n\n<So, the Shamans that exist today are elves from centuries ago.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<What does Ashe, King of Dragons, think about this?>\n\n<I haven't told him.>\n\n<Why is that?>\n\n<Because if I do\u2026it'll be over.>\n\n<How have you been able to keep this from him? He would have witnessed the conversation.>\n\n<My father told me it was only for me to know\u2014so I blocked him out.>\n\n<When was this?>\n\n<This morning.>\n\n<And when he questioned you, what did you say?>\n\n<I'm still blocking him. He's pressed against my mind a couple times\u2026>\n\n<You never deny a king, Cora. Especially when he's trusted you with his mind, body, and soul.>\n\n<I know\u2026but I don't know what else to do.>\n\n<You must tell him.>\n\n<I still don't understand why you don't want to tell him.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nShe sat up in bed, her arms crossed over her chest, the blankets around her waist. Whenever their voices were in her head, it was like they were in the same room, just a breath away. <Because if the Shamans never existed, King Lux would have been unable to force the dragons to fuse\u2026>\n\nSilence once more.\n\n<Shit.>\n\nA heavy weight of emptiness broke through his voice. <The elves have blamed us for centuries. They abandoned us to the dungeons. They stayed in their forest as we were tortured\u2014all the while saying we deserved it.>\n\nCora closed her eyes to shield herself from the heartbreak in Flare's voice.\n\n<There is no word to describe that kind of cruelty. Not in Elvish. Not in Dragon. Not in Dwarvish. None.>\n\n<I'm sorry\u2026but I had to tell you.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<He's gone.>\n\n<Maybe I shouldn't have said anything\u2026or maybe said it better.>\n\n<I would have told him anyway. And there was no good way to say it, Cora.>\n\nShe tightened her arms across her chest.\n\n<You can't tell Ashe.>\n\n<I can't lie to him\u2026>\n\n<I understand that's impossible for you to do. Believe me, I get it. But we both know what will happen when he knows the truth. Our only chance of securing this alliance is over. We need more than dwarves and elves to win this war. If we don't have dragons to meet their dragons in the skies, it'll be a massacre.>\n\n<I know. But\u2026>\n\n<He'll leave Eden Star and return home\u2014unless you force him into a fuse\u2014>\n\n<Don't even say that\u2026>\n\n<Cora, I know you never would. I'm just saying.>\n\n<Well, don't ever say that again.>\n\nRush turned silent.\n\n<What do I say?>\n\n<You could say it's an elvish secret that you can't share with him.>\n\n<Ashe would never accept that answer.>\n\n<Then you need to lie to him.>\n\n<Not telling him the truth is much different from outright lying.>\n\n<Those are your two options, Cora. It doesn't matter which you pick\u2014because both are a betrayal.>\n\n<Ugh, I hate this.>\n\n<I know. But if you never tell him, I don't see how he would ever figure it out.>\n\n<He will\u2014once we figure out why I can use Death Magic.>\n\n<Tiberius didn't answer that?>\n\n<No. We didn't talk about it. I was so stunned by what he told me that I didn't think about anything else.>\n\n<Understandable.>\n\n<I just can't believe this, you know?>\n\n<It changes everything. Like our odds weren't poor enough\u2026>\n\n<Do you have any theories? About me?>\n\n<Well, I'm even more confident that you aren't a Shaman. You haven't been cursed, and if you have, you would have been turned by now.>\n\n<I guess that's true.>\n\n<So at least we can rule that out.>\n\n<But we aren't left with any other theories.>\n\n<I'm totally stumped, Cora. I can't even think of anyone to ask.>\n\n<What about Mathilda?>\n\n<Just because she carries the flower in her shop doesn't mean she knows what the elves use it for. And even if she does know, that doesn't mean she can explain why you have the powers of a Shaman without the curse. The only person we could ask\u2026would be a Shaman.>\n\nA shiver went down her spine, a vile and disgusting shiver.\n\n<But even if that was an option, I don't think it'd be a good one.>\n\n<Yeah.>\n\n<All we know is you have the power to take on the Shamans. And maybe\u2026that's all that matters.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Burden of the Veil",
                "text": "When Callon pursued her in battle, it was always a fight to the death.\n\nHe gave her his all\u2014every time.\n\nTo wield her sword, block his hits, be aware of her footing, and project her mind to disarm his all at the same time\u2026was exhausting. It was hard to concentrate on all things at the same time.\n\nIt made her drop her sword more than once.\n\n\"Again.\" Callon readopted his position.\n\n<You need to disarm his mind.>\n\n<What do you think I've been doing?> She pushed off the ground and grabbed her sword.\n\n<You're doing too much at once. Pick your battles, Cora.>\n\n<When he's coming at me like a psychopath\u2014>\n\n<Not a psychopath. He's one of the greatest swordsmen, and you should feel honored that he's teaching you.>\n\n<I do. I just\u2026 It's a lot, okay?>\n\n<Too bad. You think General Noose won't be a lot?>\n\n<I'll do the Skull Crusher if I have to.>\n\n<How? You've never practiced.>\n\n<I'm not going to kill a rabbit for the hell of it.>\n\n<Then we need to hunt some Shamans.>\n\nCallon swiped his sword across the air, left and right, intimidating her from his stance a few feet away.\n\n<Not a psychopath, my ass\u2026>\n\n<Conserve your energy. Choose the moments that will have the most impact. Battles aren't won and lost in hours, not even in days sometimes. Your mind is just like the sword, the bow, the shield\u2014it has its own purpose. Use it wisely.>\n\nCallon approached her, his sword ready to slice her head from her shoulders.\n\n<You can do this, Cora.>\n\nWhen they returned to Eden Star, Callon veered off the path toward his tree house. Cora continued on to hers, sore, with grass stains on her arms and neck.\n\n<I demand your truth.>\n\nCora kept her eyes down, moving under the canopy of trees and taking advantage of the coolness of the shade. <I'm sorry, Ashe. I can't tell you.>\n\n<You must.>\n\n<My father made me promise to keep it to myself.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<I don't know\u2026he just did.>\n\n<But I'm Ashe, King of Dragons, the powerful being that shares your soul this very moment. We are one, Cora.>\n\nHer eyes remained on the ground as a heavy sigh filled her lungs. <I know\u2026>\n\n<Tell me.>\n\n<I can't. I learned nothing about myself or my abilities, so it really doesn't matter anyway. It's of no use to us. Just some elvish lore.>\n\nAshe turned quiet.\n\nShe approached the foot of her tree house and spotted Peony waiting there.\n\n<Who is that?>\n\n<Peony. She's the one I helped in the cemetery.>\n\n<And that man?>\n\n<Must be her father.>\n\nCora approached, visibly sweaty, all of her gear stuffed into her pack so no one would realize she trained with Callon deep in the woods. Her sword was wrapped in a bundle of bulky leaves to hide the outline of the blade. She was suddenly self-conscious of her appearance, her sweaty hair sticking to her scalp and the sides of her neck.\n\nPeony stepped forward. \"Cora, this is my father, Hyacinth.\"\n\nCora gave a short bow.\n\nPeony did the same\u2014as did her father.\n\nCora stilled at their actions, her eyes shifting back and forth between them quickly.\n\n<What is it?>\n\n<No one has ever bowed to me before\u2026>\n\n<They may be the first, but they won't be the last.>\n\nHyacinth was blond like his daughter, with the same blue eyes. But the rest of his features contained despair where hers contained beauty. He gave her a piercing stare, just the way Callon did in battle. \"My Per-lei has told me of your abilities. It's no trick. It's no hallucination. The veil has truly been broken.\"\n\nCora nodded. \"I'm happy to act as your vessel if you wish.\"\n\n\"Why?\" His question exploded like a bomb from a cannon. \"You're an outsider to Eden Star. Why would you offer your abilities to those who have vehemently opposed your existence in our forest?\"\n\n<Didn't know that until now.> \"Because I've lost someone too. I know how that feels\u2026outsider or not.\"\n\nHyacinth exchanged a look with his daughter before he turned back to Cora.\n\n\"Just let me put my stuff down, and we'll go.\"\n\nConnecting two souls from across the grave was fulfilling\u2014but also heartbreaking. There were always tears, always regret, always sorrow. The connection was sometimes more painful than the separation. It was the same experience she had with Callon\u2014over and over again.\n\nBut it was her duty.\n\nWithout her, no one would ever have this opportunity. It was more than just a tool to gain favor with her people. It was also her moral obligation to provide closure to those who never had it.\n\nHyacinth's suspicions immediately evaporated once the conversation began. His Sun-lei said everything to confirm her authenticity, and his tears were immediate. His hand reached out repeatedly to where she was, like her spirit would solidify and they would touch once more.\n\nThe conversation drew to a close when she had to withdraw from the plane.\n\nAnd just like Peony and Callon had, he begged her not to go.\n\nHe sobbed on the bench, his daughter beside him with her hand on his, the two of them grieving their loss together.\n\nCora silently excused herself and left the Cemetery of Spirits. She took her time moving through Eden Star as she proceeded to her tree house. The difference between the cemetery and the rest of the forest was striking. It was evening, but the sunlight still set the leaves aglow with a beautiful light. Fireflies were replaced by monarch butterflies and sparrows. The cemetery was silent, but the forest was loud with music from the songbirds. Visiting the spirits always left a weight in her heart that dragged her down to the earth, and it always required a night of sleep to pass. But the next time she went, it would happen once more.\n\nShe made dinner and ate alone at the table, her backpack and sword against the wall at her bedside. Slowly, the sun set further, the shadows elongating across her wooden floor.\n\n<I feel your sadness.>\n\n<You always feel my sadness.>\n\n<Because you're always sad.>\n\n<The cemetery\u2026 It's just hard.>\n\n<I understand, Cora. It's a heavy burden to carry, to be the vessel for someone's grief. To communicate through the veil and feel nothing would be impossible. You know how much Callon appreciates it, along with Peony and Hyacinth as well. What wouldn't you give to be able to speak to your father the way you do now?>\n\n<I have no regrets about my actions. It just\u2026takes a toll sometimes.>\n\n<Someone approaches.>\n\nCora turned to the door, recognizing Peony in the doorway, carrying a tray in her hands. \"Just wanted to drop this off.\" She carried the tray to the table and set it beside Cora. \"My family has a garden. We grow some of the less common items, like the blue turnips, sugar peas, purple cauliflower. Thought you might enjoy a casserole\u2026as a thank-you.\"\n\nCora stared down at the dish, seeing the roasted vegetables in a sea of black rice. She'd never come across these things in the wild, and Callon never dropped them off either. It was a whole different menu for her to choose from. As much as she'd adopted her new lifestyle, eating the same things over and over got repetitive. \"Damn, this looks good.\" Her meal had already been finished, but she didn't hesitate to grab her fork and dig in. The rice was naturally flavored from the rock salt and minerals, and the potatoes had such a distinct crunch that she'd never had before. \"You made this?\"\n\nPeony brought her hands together as a smile moved on to her face. \"I did.\"\n\nCora took another bite, talking with her mouth full. \"This is, like, the best shit I've ever tasted.\"\n\n<Stop cussing.>\n\n<Oh, right.> \"Sorry\u2026\"\n\nPeony continued to smile. \"I'm glad you like it.\"\n\nCora continued to eat because no amount of food would replace the energy she burned training with Callon every day. Her body was the tightest it'd ever been, but she was perpetually hungry.\n\n\"I also make a vanilla and chocolate swirl with raspberry sauce.\"\n\nWith her mouth full of food, she spoke. \"Didyoubringit?\"\n\nThis time, Peony gave a chuckle. \"No. But I will next time.\"\n\n\"What else do you make?\" Cora wiped her mouth, knowing she looked like a pig. \"Take a seat.\"\n\nPeony sat in the chair across from her, her posture perfect just like Callon's and every other elf Cora had ever seen. Her hands rested together on the table, her long blond hair interwoven with white flowers. She had a resemblance to the queen, especially in white, but there was much more kindness in her blue eyes. \"Since we grow the less popular items, we keep our garden small, but our produce is very high quality because I sing to our crops every morning, from the moment their seed is planted into the soil.\"\n\n\"You sing to plants?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Does it work?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Not sure. But they grow heartier, grow quicker. It's a commitment, but my mother used to do it before she passed away, so I took her place. My father comes out to hear me because I sound just like her\u2026\"\n\n\"That's beautiful.\" Cora set down her fork and spared the casserole before she consumed the whole thing. \"I wish I could sing.\"\n\n\"How do you know you can't?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I can just tell.\"\n\n\"Without proper training, you'll never know. You need to understand how to project your voice, to find that perfect pitch, to feel the vibrations of the world around you and match your voice to that resonance. Yes, some voices are better than others, but everyone has the ability to sing. Would you like me to teach you?\"\n\n\"That's very nice of you, but I prefer the food.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"You sound like my father. He likes my cooking too.\"\n\n\"Psh, how could he not?\"\n\nHer chuckle faded to a smile, but within a few seconds, that faded too. \"I apologize for the way I treated you before. Like everyone else, I didn't give you a chance because of my prejudice. That was wrong.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it.\" Her eyes shifted to the window, the remaining light beginning to disappear. \"I get it.\"\n\n\"There's never been a hybrid before now. It's shocking to the elves, even though they've had plenty of time to process it. We process time differently.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I've heard that before\u2026\" <Like a million times.>\n\n\"If you ever need anything from our garden, don't hesitate to ask. My father is in the market every morning.\"\n\n\"You would\u2026let me take something?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"In front of everyone?\"\n\n\"After what you've done for us, there's nothing we wouldn't do for you, Cora.\"\n\n<Congratulations, Cora. You have a friend.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026I guess I do.>\n\n\"Twilight has almost arrived.\" She rose from the chair. \"I'll let you retire for the evening.\"\n\n\"Do you think you could show me your garden tomorrow?\" The request left her voice like a tense arrow. It shot off spontaneously, without aim. While Callon filled a gaping hole that no one else ever had, she needed more than just him.\n\nPeony turned back and gave a nod. \"Of course. You're welcome\u2014always.\"\n\n<Now.>\n\nCora projected her mind to infect his.\n\nCallon hesitated in his swing, a wince coming over his features.\n\nCora caught his sword with the edge of her blade and threw it down, trying to fling it out of his grasp.\n\nHis hand dropped, but his fingers remained tight on his sword. He maneuvered away, ducking under her swing, retreating backward as he fought against the agony burning in his mind.\n\n<Good.>\n\nThe battle continued, Ashe instructing her to unleash her powers at just the right moment, to disarm him long enough to get the upper hand.\n\nVery rarely could Cora actually get the sword out of his hand or her blade against his neck\u2014but it did happen sometimes.\n\nCallon channeled all of his rage into the battle, using it as energy to overcome the assaults that incapacitated his mind. Beads of sweat rolled down his temples and over his cheeks. His mouth was tight in a grimace, his hard jaw clenched like an angry fist.\n\nHis energy drained as the afternoon waned on, and by the end, he was an easier opponent to face. His physical endurance was stable as always, but his mind simply couldn't stay as sharp when the assaults chipped at his mental state.\n\nShe got the sword out of his hand.\n\nShe went in for the kill, ready to press the blade against his neck.\n\nBeaten and exhausted, he should have surrendered, but he didn't. The sword was inaccessible because Cora stood directly over it, making sure he couldn't retrieve it.\n\nHis hands were up at his sides as he held his ground, ready to take her on with just his palms. His fair skin was red like a ripe tomato, and the rivers of sweat continued to drip down his face. But his shoulders remained strong, his eyes focused.\n\n\"Keep going?\"\n\n\"Battles aren't only fought with swords.\"\n\n\"I don't want to hurt you\u2014\"\n\n\"I want to hurt you. Give me your best, Cora.\"\n\n<Fight him as if he wields a sword.>\n\nShe jumped forward and swung her sword, aiming for his torso then his shoulder, missing every swing because he danced away quickly.\n\n<Don't let him get to his sword.>\n\nShe blocked his path and continued her assault.\n\nHe ducked under her spin, spun into her, and slammed her hand down onto his thigh.\n\nHer sword dropped.\n\n<Run!>\n\nHe sprinted to the sword she'd dropped, but before he could grab it, she kicked it away and punched him in the back of the head.\n\nHe spun around and threw a fist.\n\nIt landed against her cheek, immediately giving her a headache.\n\nThere was no remorse in his eyes. With his palms tight into fists, he circled her, ignoring the swords.\n\n<You can't beat him physically. You must use your mind.>\n\nHe rushed her, his fists flying.\n\nShe blocked each one with her forearms, grimacing because each hit would leave a bruise, even through her armor.\n\n<Now.>\n\nShe pushed her mind, making him back away.\n\nShe rushed him, kicking him in the chest then dropping to the ground to kick out her leg and trip him.\n\nHe landed on his back.\n\nShe immediately crawled on top of him, assuming the fight would continue.\n\nBut he lay there, his eyes calm as if he'd just woken up from a midday nap. \"Eye-gouge.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Unless you have a small blade on you to slit my throat, press your thumbs into my eyes. It'll permanently blind your opponent.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026barbaric.\"\n\n\"It's not barbaric. It's war.\" His eyes turned angry, vicious. \"It'll give you the opportunity to retrieve your sword and finish the job.\"\n\nShe'd been training for battle, but she'd never actually thought about the victories. For her to win, someone had to die. Repeatedly.\n\nShe stood up then helped him to his feet.\n\nHis sight was normal once again, and he examined her cheek with concern, his fingertips moving to her chin so he could examine it. \"Are you okay, Sor-lei?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"You should look at yourself, Tor-lei.\"\n\nHe grinned back. \"You've come a long way. I admire your dedication and resilience. I'm very proud.\"\n\nHer heart clenched with both joy and guilt. \"Without my powers, I wouldn't be able to hold my own.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. You do have them\u2014and you should use them.\"\n\n\"I'm not hurting you, am I?\"\n\n\"Headaches are a common side effect, but I've learned that a glass of wine is an excellent remedy.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you drank wine.\"\n\n\"I stopped after I lost my Sun-lei. She liked to enjoy dinner every night with a glass of wine. I detested the substance at first because it inhibited my abilities, but I grew to appreciate the dulling effect.\"\n\nCora watched his eyes light up when he spoke of her rather than plunging into a sea of gray. \"I'll have to try it, then.\"\n\n\"Our vineyards are in the hillsides. Our wine is excellent. A lot better than the horse piss humans drink.\"\n\n\"I believe it.\"\n\nHe picked up both swords from the ground before he handed hers over. \"Let's head back.\"\n\nTogether, they took the trail, side by side.\n\n\"Peony came by last night. Brought me a casserole from her garden.\"\n\nCallon pulled his gaze away from the path and regarded her instead. \"That was kind.\"\n\n\"I connected her father to her mother. She wanted to show her gratitude.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Cora.\" He faced ahead again.\n\n\"And this food\u2026was unbelievable.\"\n\nHe glanced at her again.\n\n\"Not that your cooking isn't great.\"\n\nHe gave a slight smile before he faced forward once more. \"Weila was the chef in the family. I take no offense to your words.\"\n\n\"She said she makes this vanilla-chocolate swirl with some kind of fruit sauce\u2026 I haven't stopped thinking about it.\"\n\n\"You've never shown passion for food before.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's because I'm starving all the time.\" She gave him a look of accusation. \"Because we train every day, rain or shine, no excuses\u2026\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\"\n\n\"I'm complaining, if that wasn't clear.\"\n\n\"And you're a much better fighter, if that wasn't clear.\"\n\n\"Well, since I'm better, do you think we could lighten up\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe gave a loud and exaggerated sigh.\n\n\"You don't fight. You're a fighter. So, you never pause your craft, because it's not a craft at all. It's who you are. The only time my training ceased was when I lost my family. You never know when your enemies will strike, when war will arrive on your doorstep. You must be ready\u2014always.\"\n\n\"But I'm not a fighter\u2014\"\n\n\"If you want to defeat King Lux, you have to be.\"\n\nShe followed Peony's directions through Eden Star, ignored the sour looks on the way, and then arrived at the garden she'd described. There was a perfect break in the trees for the sun to flourish at midday, giving life to the produce that grew from the earth.\n\nPeony was on her knees in the dirt.\n\nBut she wasn't alone.\n\nThere were two other elves there\u2014one man and one woman.\n\nThe man had short blond hair and light-colored eyes. The sleeves of his tunic were pushed to his elbows as he squatted down and harvested carrots from the soil. He was muscular like Callon, like he was a soldier as well as a gardener. The woman was a brunette, her hair in a high ponytail, small flowers pinned behind her ear.\n\nWhen Cora had thought it would just be her and Peony, all the fear vanished. But seeing other elves immediately brought on a wave of overwhelming intimidation. Sour looks had been cast her way on the entire journey, so now she would receive more.\n\n<Maybe I should just go.>\n\n<No. This is your opportunity to grow your circle.>\n\n<Did you see the way everyone dogged me on the way here?>\n\n<Peony will vouch for you. Her heart is true.>\n\nCora approached the garden and cleared her throat to announce her presence. \"Wow, this is beautiful.\"\n\nAll three of them turned to regard her.\n\nAs she suspected, the two elves were guarded.\n\nPeony was the only one who possessed any warmth. \"Hello, Cora.\" She got to her feet and stripped off her gloves. \"That's very nice of you to say. A lot of love and attention goes into this soil.\"\n\n\"I can tell.\"\n\nThe other elves rose to their feet but kept their distance.\n\nPeony came closer. \"We've got the turnips here next to the carrots, the cauliflower right here, and then our mushrooms are here. We grow our rice in a different place because this spot is just too shady for it.\"\n\n\"What about the vanilla and cocoa?\"\n\n\"Just over here.\" She gestured to the trees at the end of the line, where the beans were visible on the limbs.\n\n\"Can you eat it raw?\"\n\n\"It's edible, but\u2026I don't recommend it.\" The male elf approached, so Peony made the introduction. \"Cora, this is my friend Hawk. He helps me out sometimes.\"\n\nHawk regarded her with a simple nod.\n\n<Speak.>\n\n<He didn't say anything.>\n\n<You're the one who needs to be liked. Not the other way around.>\n\n\"It's nice to meet you.\" She gave a slight bow.\n\nThere was a long pause of hesitation before he reciprocated.\n\n<Was that so hard?>\n\n<When you're used to everyone hating you all the time, it's kinda hard to put yourself out there.>\n\n<People won't stop hating you until you give them a reason to stop hating you.>\n\n\"This is Lia.\"\n\nLia gave a silent bow.\n\n\"Hi.\" Cora did the same. \"Peony brought me a casserole last night\u2026it was one of the best things I've ever eaten.\"\n\n\"Then you haven't eaten well.\" Hawk had a deep voice filled with ancient tranquility. Peony seemed young in years, but he seemed old, despite his ageless appearance. \"Because Peony thinks burning is the same thing as cooking.\"\n\n<Wow\u2026what an asshole.>\n\nPeony grinned and cast him a furtive look.\n\nAfter a moment, he smiled back.\n\n<Oh\u2026it's a joke.>\n\n<A poor one.>\n\n<Elves don't joke.>\n\n<Neither do dragons, but I know a bad joke when I see one.>\n\n\"You want to help us?\" Peony turned back to Cora.\n\n\"Sure,\" Cora said. \"But I've never done this before.\"\n\n\"I'll teach you.\" She handed over her gloves. \"Come on.\"\n\nThey gathered their harvest and carried it to the market, where it would be put on display the following morning. Then Peony invited them all to her tree house for dinner.\n\n<I just got an invitation to hang out!>\n\n<Hang out?>\n\n<You know, socialize.>\n\n<What a terrible phrase\u2026>\n\nPeony washed and prepared the vegetables while Lia took care of the cooking. There wasn't work for more than two people, so Cora sat at the table with Hawk, both of them enjoying the green tea Peony made.\n\n<Was hoping for some wine.>\n\n<Maybe another time.>\n\nHawk sat across from her, but his eyes remained on Peony most of the time, even when she faced the other way.\n\nAll Cora could do was stare at the elf across from her, unsure how to talk to him. <What should I say? Should I ask him a question?>\n\n<Just pretend he's me.>\n\n<Pretending he's a dragon king is not going to work.>\n\n<Then whomever you deem a friend. Perhaps Flare.>\n\nFlare didn't fit into that category. \"Are you a gardener as well?\"\n\nHe slowly turned back to regard her, showcasing intelligent eyes. \"I serve in the army. That is my contribution to Eden Star.\"\n\n\"General Callon is my\u2014\"\n\n<Careful.>\n\n<Oh, you're right.> \"Callon has been very kind to me since I arrived here.\"\n\nHawk regarded her with a solemn stare. \"General Aldon is a strong leader who will protect the forest with his life\u2014but General Callon will always be the true general to me. If he needed to depart our lands, I know that it was for a good reason. I do not need to question his motives or loyalty. I speak for most of us when I say this.\"\n\n<The throne is his to take.>\n\n<But he doesn't want it, Ashe.>\n\n<I don't care if he wants it. His duty is to his people\u2014not himself.>\n\n<He's given more than enough to his people.>\n\n<It will never be enough until there's everlasting peace.>\n\n<Is there such a thing as everlasting peace?>\n\n<There was until the humans sailed to our lands.>\n\nCora ignored Ashe. \"He's a very honorable man. You served under him?\"\n\n\"For a long time.\"\n\n\"So\u2026the rest of the army was unhappy with the queen's decision?\"\n\n\"Extremely. But she is our queen\u2014and we must obey.\"\n\n<No, you don't.>\n\n<How would you feel if the dragons didn't obey you?>\n\n<They don't obey. A true leader doesn't give commands to be followed blindly. They lead by example, by inspiration. I asked for volunteers in this quest. If I expected any of them to obey, I would have commanded them all to join us. Subjects are entitled to free will. Entitled to opinions. Your queen is foolish for thinking otherwise.>\n\n\"Since Callon has taken a vested interest in you, I will as well.\"\n\nCora blinked as she met his look. <If it weren't for Callon, none of this would be possible.>\n\n<A quality of a king.>\n\n\"He speaks highly of General Aldon. Said he recommended him as a replacement.\"\n\n\"I have no qualms about General Aldon. In the event of General Callon's passing, I knew he would be chosen. But General Callon has been our general for millennia, and since we experience time differently than you do, it'll take a very long time to come to terms with the loss.\"\n\n\"Do you think it's possible for him to get the position back?\"\n\nHe gave a shake of his head. \"Queen Delwyn will not go back on her decision\u2014unless General Callon does something to regain her approval.\"\n\n\"What if General Aldon refused to lead?\"\n\n\"Someone else would be selected.\"\n\n\"What if everyone refused to take the position?\"\n\nHe cocked his head slightly. \"You want him reinstated.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because\u2026he left Eden Star to help me. If he hadn't, I would have died.\"\n\nHis eyebrows remained furrowed.\n\n\"It wasn't his fault. It was mine.\"\n\n\"General Callon left his post to help an outsider.\"\n\n\"I'm not an outsider.\" Her temper flared like the light from a shooting star. Peony and Lia both turned away from the counter to regard them both. \"If he thinks I'm worth saving, then you should all think I'm worth saving.\"\n\n\"I never said otherwise.\"\n\n\"Then don't call me an outsider. I may only be half of you, but I'm still you nonetheless.\"\n\nA slow smile moved on to his lips. \"You misunderstood me. Or perhaps I misspoke. General Callon abandoned his post to help an outsider\u2014and that makes you an outsider no more.\"\n\nAfter a quiet dinner, Lia said goodnight and took the path in the opposite direction toward her tree house.\n\nCora and Hawk continued on the same path.\n\nHawk had the same posture as Callon, carrying himself like he wore heavy armor and his sword across his back. He kept a distance of several feet, his eyes straight ahead, the darkness of the forest lit by white candles at the foot of the trees.\n\n\"How long have you known Peony?\"\n\n\"A couple of years. She brought flowers to the front line over twenty years ago. Each soldier was pinned with a white flower to protect us in battle. I fought alongside her mother\u2014and you know how that ended.\"\n\n\"Was that with King Tiberius?\"\n\n\"Yes. He also fell.\"\n\nShe looked straight ahead.\n\n\"She pinned it to my chest and moved on to the next soldier\u2014but I never forgot her face. Perhaps I was just afraid, but her touch brought me comfort.\"\n\n\"You're afraid of battle?\"\n\n\"Aren't we all?\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2026 Callon doesn't seem to be.\"\n\n\"Well, he has nothing left to lose\u2014because he already lost everything.\"\n\nShe turned to regard him, examine the side of his face. \"Are you and Peony\u2026together?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Oh, my mistake.\"\n\n\"No mistake, Cora. You perceive the truth.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I don't understand.\"\n\nHe continued his pace down the earthy path, his voice and expression hiding any trace of pain. \"I declared my love\u2014but she didn't return it.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I hope in time she feels differently. In the meantime, her friendship is enough.\"\n\n\"You don't want to find someone who could return your feelings?\"\n\n\"I have no interest.\"\n\n\"But if she doesn't feel the same way\u2014\"\n\n\"She made her feelings perfectly clear, and I respect her decision. I haven't pursued it or mentioned it again. But it's her company that I prefer above all others, and if that is under the condition of friendship, that's enough for me.\"\n\nShe let the conversation fade and looked ahead once more.\n\n\"My home is this way.\" He stopped at a fork in the road. \"But I can escort you, if you like.\"\n\n\"Eden Star is pretty safe\u2026 I think I'll be okay.\"\n\n<Drop the sarcasm, Cora.>\n\n\"I mean, that's very kind of you, but I know the way.\"\n\nHe gave a slight bow before he continued on the path to his home.\n\n<Looks like I made another friend.>\n\n<Miracles do exist.>\n\n<Oh, shut up.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Girl Talk",
                "text": "Callon stepped into her tree house, silent and swift like he was a spirit himself. His pack was on his back, his sword at his hip because he didn't have to conceal it the way she did. Even if he wasn't in the army anymore, no one would dare revoke his weapons.\n\nShe continued to pack her stuff at the dining table. \"I'm almost ready.\"\n\n\"I arrive at sunrise every morning, so you should always be ready.\"\n\n\"Well, it's pretty hard to wake myself up in the dark.\"\n\nCallon gave her his signature stern expression.\n\nShe continued to pack her lunch in the leaf container. \"I met Hawk last night. Didn't get his last name.\"\n\n\"I know of whom you speak.\" He stood in the open area near her bed, arms by his sides, his gaze out the window.\n\n\"He spoke really highly of you.\"\n\nCallon continued to stare.\n\n\"Said you're still the general\u2026to him.\"\n\n\"A loyalty I don't deserve\u2014but appreciate, nonetheless.\"\n\n\"He trusts that if you left Eden Star, it was for a good reason.\"\n\n\"That wasn't the case.\" He turned back to her. \"As we both know.\"\n\n\"That's not true, Callon. If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have met Ashe, and none of what I've accomplished would be possible.\"\n\nHe looked away again, dismissing the conversation.\n\n\"He also said that since you have a vested interest in me, he does too. So\u2026your popularity is really helping me out around here.\"\n\n\"I'm glad.\"\n\nShe returned to her lunch, putting it away along with some extra berries for the red cardinal she'd befriended.\n\nCallon turned to the doorway.\n\nCora did the same and followed his gaze.\n\nPeony was there, along with Hawk and Lia. \"I apologize, Cora. I didn't mean to intrude while you're entertaining.\"\n\n\"No, you're fine,\" Cora said quickly. \"Callon is impossible to entertain.\"\n\nCallon turned and gave her a stare.\n\nPeony acknowledged him with a bow. \"General Callon. Mera-Nil-Weia.\"\n\nCallon reciprocated with a bow.\n\nLia did the same, bowing and saying those words. \"Mera-Nil-Weia.\"\n\nHawk was the last, giving the deepest bow to his former commander. \"Mera-Nil-Weia.\"\n\n<I wonder what that means.>\n\n<Must be a gesture of respect. When a dragon wishes to honor me, they bring me a kill.>\n\n<That's\u2026touching.>\n\nPeony addressed Cora. \"We were going to the market to have breakfast, but maybe you can join us another time.\"\n\n<More like never.>\n\n\"She can join you now.\" Callon stepped aside and turned back to Cora. \"I was just leaving.\" He gave her a curt nod then departed her tree house, moving silently down the vines even though his pack was full of supplies for a day's journey.\n\nCora abandoned her pack on the table. \"Looks like I'm free.\"\n\nThey went to the caf\u00e9 Callon had taken her to before, and while there were cold stares from every direction and a bit of hesitation from the waitress, Cora felt far more welcome than she ever had before.\n\nThey enjoyed their coffee and tea as they waited for their breakfast to arrive. Cora ordered blueberry pancakes and a vegetable crepe with cashew cheese melted on top. The caf\u00e9 air wafted with an appetizing smell, orders passing by and being delivered to other elves at other tables.\n\nPeony sat across from her. \"I realize it's none of my business, but\u2026are you and General Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"No. Yuck. Gross. Ew. No.\"\n\nPeony gave a chuckle. \"Alright, then.\"\n\n\"Besides, he's like\u2026 I don't even know how old he is. Like five thousand years old? I don't even know.\"\n\n\"Age is irrelevant when you live forever.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm in my twenties, so I'm pretty much a newborn to you guys,\" Cora said. \"Gross.\"\n\nPeony sipped her coffee and gave another chuckle.\n\n\"How old are you?\" Cora asked. \"I mean, you don't have to answer that. Didn't mean to be rude.\"\n\n\"You're fine,\" Peony said. \"I'm less than a hundred. A child like you.\"\n\nCora shifted her gaze to Hawk. \"I'm guessing you're a lot older than that.\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod. \"A bit.\"\n\n\"I'm young like Peony,\" Lia said. \"Just a bit older. We're the children of Eden Star.\"\n\n\"So, there are no actual children in the forest?\" Cora asked. \"You're the youngest elves?\"\n\n\"Well, technically, you are,\" Peony said. \"But yes. There have been no children for a while.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised,\" Cora said. \"After all the lives that were lost in the wars\u2026\"\n\nThe waitress arrived and delivered the hot plates, but didn't depart before giving Cora another cold look.\n\nWhen Cora looked at the deliciousness placed in front of her, it was as if that glare never happened. \"Oh man, this shit looks goooooood.\"\n\nThey all stiffened.\n\n<Cora.>\n\n\"Shit. I mean\u2026\" She slapped her own forehead. \"Sorry.\"\n\nHawk was the first one to crack a smile.\n\nThe other two seemed amused as well and carried on with their breakfast.\n\n<Why is it so difficult for you not to speak crassly?>\n\n<It's language. It's stupid to censor words because we deem them inappropriate.>\n\n<It's called class, Cora. You clearly don't have it.>\n\n<Because I'm real. What you see is what you get, alright?>\n\n<Clearly.>\n\n\"What you said to Callon, what does that mean?\" She took a bite of her blueberry pancakes, and it took all her strength not to turn crass once again. The warm blueberries gushed in her mouth, the maple syrup so sweet in its freshness.\n\n\"Mera-Nil-Weia?\" Peony asked. \"May the beating heart of the forest protect yours. It's a sign of respect toward those who have earned the collective love of the elves as a whole. Very few have earned it.\"\n\n<I can't remember anyone saying it to the queen.>\n\n<Quite telling.>\n\n\"And Rein-Lei-Vu?\" Cora asked.\n\nPeony's eyes softened, like she knew where Cora had heard it. \"I love you.\"\n\nLia was the first to go, and then Hawk followed shortly afterward. Just as Callon did, he was required to serve his rotation at the border for days at a time. That left her and Peony alone as they sipped their coffee with the dirty plates between them.\n\n\"If there's nothing romantic between you, what is your relationship?\" Peony held the small cup of green tea between her hands, the steam rising toward her face because she'd recently received a refill.\n\nCora glanced at her coffee before she answered. \"Queen Delwyn was very harsh toward me, and I think Callon took pity on me. He's taken me under his wing ever since. I know he lost his son, so I think it's just natural for him to be fatherly.\"\n\n\"That's how you see him? As a father?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yeah\u2026I do.\"\n\n\"That's sweet.\"\n\n\"He's a good man. The best I know, really.\"\n\nPeony gave a nod in agreement. \"He's sacrificed everything for his people, and he keeps going. We acknowledge his sacrifice. My mother served under him and always said he was the greatest general that ever served in Eden Star. I've never met another warrior who has said otherwise.\"\n\n\"I hope he can get his position back.\"\n\n\"As do I. But I also understand if he doesn't want it.\" She looked down into her tea, a splash of almond milk swirling on the surface.\n\n\"So\u2026Hawk is a pretty good-looking guy.\"\n\nPeony raised her chin, distressed eyes locking on to hers.\n\n\"I asked him if you guys were together on the walk home last night.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026\"\n\n\"He's just not your type or what?\"\n\nPeony's eyes dropped back to her tea. \"Hawk is a suitable life partner. He's highly respected by the elves. He's a great swordsman on the battlefield, and he has a gentle kindness when he's home.\"\n\n\"Okay\u2026so he is your type?\"\n\n\"I think he would be a good husband and a good father, if we were given permission to do that, but we're better as friends.\"\n\n\"Is there someone else you're into?\"\n\nShe lifted her chin, her eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Cora said quickly. \"I'm not trying to interrogate you. I haven't had girl talk in a really long time.\"\n\n\"Girl talk?\"\n\n\"You know, when girls talk about the guys they're into.\"\n\nShe gave a slight nod in understanding. \"No, there's no one else.\"\n\n\"Then what am I missing here?\"\n\nShe set her tea aside and interlocked her fingers on the table. \"Is girl talk confidential?\"\n\n\"That's the foundation, yes.\"\n\n\"Alright.\" She looked away for a moment and cleared her throat. \"My father has been very clear about this. He has no influence in the elf I choose for my Wor-lei, and if I choose to remain unmarried for my lifetime, that's an acceptable decision. But his one request was\u2026that I do not choose someone who serves in the army.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHer eyes dropped. \"Because he lost my mother\u2026and his daughter should never know that sorrow.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026\"\n\n\"My mother was one of the best. General Callon trained her himself. But she fell anyway, cut down by some monster. It was very difficult for us to retrieve her body, but my father made it happen because he couldn't go on and never feel her spirit again. I understand his request, and after seeing that kind of grief firsthand, I think it's a reasonable one.\"\n\nCora felt Callon's grief the moment she was in his presence. It was in his eyes\u2026his sad eyes. His happiness had improved in recent weeks, either because he could speak to her when he wished, or his relationship with Cora filled the void that his family left behind. But that grief was permanent. Just better on some days\u2026and worse on others. \"Is that the only reason keeping you apart?\"\n\nAfter a quiet stare, Peony gave a nod.\n\n\"Well\u2026if he dies in battle\u2026won't you be sad anyway?\"\n\n\"Yes, but that would be losing him as a friend rather than a Wor-lei. It will hurt much less.\"\n\n\"But won't it hurt more knowing you could have been more\u2026but it never happened?\"\n\nHer stare shifted away.\n\n\"I know Callon wouldn't have chosen someone else\u2026even if he'd known he would lose Weila.\"\n\nPeony continued to look away.\n\n\"It's not my place to tell you what to do, to go against your father's wishes, not when we don't know each other that well. But if you have the opportunity to be together, even if it's going to end, I think you should take it. I know I would\u2026\" Firelight. Shadows. Embers. Starlight. Mist. A smile both boyish and arrogant. Big hands on her body. Kisses against her lips.\n\nPeony grabbed her cup and pulled it close once more, her eyes still down. \"What about you?\"\n\nThe memories were shattered by the question. \"What about me?\"\n\n\"Do you have someone?\"\n\nHer eyes shifted away, unsure what words to speak, what to even think\u2014especially with Ashe there. \"I did. But\u2026it didn't work out.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it's been rough.\"\n\n\"I'm guessing this isn't an elf, then?\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"Maybe you'll find someone here, when you're ready.\"\n\n\"I'm not really looking, so\u2026\"\n\n\"You have a long life to live, Cora. The heart aches for a long time. But it heals\u2014eventually.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026we'll see.\"\n\n<Guess what?>\n\n<You think I have time for guessing games?>\n\n<You have time to hang out with goats all day, so you tell me.>\n\nHe gave a deep chuckle. <You made some friends?>\n\n<Yep.>\n\n<Did you throw a rock at their head or\u2026?>\n\n<No, asshole.>\n\n<Bribe them?>\n\n<Didn't have to do that either.>\n\n<Hmm\u2026General Callon pulled some strings?>\n\n<Shut up. I'm a very pleasant person.>\n\n<The scar on the back of my head says otherwise.>\n\nShe rolled her eyes as she sat up in bed, wishing he could see her do it. <Her name is Peony. I helped her and her father speak to her late mother, and then we kinda became friends. She introduced me to some other people she knows too.>\n\n<That's great, Cora.>\n\n<Yeah, I really like them. I've never really had a girlfriend, so that's nice.>\n\n<Not in your village?>\n\n<They were too busy churning butter and making dinner for their husbands or whatever nonsense\u2026>\n\n<I'd like to watch you churn butter\u2026>\n\n<Shut up.>\n\n<Wearing a little apron\u2026things jiggling.>\n\n<You're ridiculous.>\n\nHe made a chuckle. <You're on the right track. Keep it up, and pretty soon, you'll be the queen of that place.>\n\n<Okay, that's a bit unrealistic.>\n\n<You fused with Ashe, King of Dragons, and that was even more unrealistic. Come on. When they really know you, they're going to love you. You're right. You probably won't be queen, but you won't be an outsider either.>\n\n<Maybe. Ashe and I think Callon should be on the throne.>\n\n<He'd be as good a king as he was a general. But I doubt he'd ever be interested in that.>\n\n<You're right.>\n\n<He's a soldier. He wants to serve\u2014not lead.>\n\n<What's going on with you guys? I'm guessing you haven't found the dwarves because you would have told me.>\n\n<We found a tunnel, went pretty deep into it, but then it was a dead end.>\n\n<Are you sure? Maybe there was a secret doorway somewhere.>\n\n<No, we're certain. And it was Flare's idea\u2014so I'm giving him shit.>\n\n<Is it really that hard to find these guys?>\n\n<Have you been to the mountains?>\n\n<Well, no.>\n\n<Then you have no idea.>\n\nShe left Eden Star through the secret passage and emerged into the wildlands outside the forest.\n\n<Finally.>\n\n<Sorry. I know it's been a while.>\n\n<While you got to enjoy a feast at breakfast, my stomach growled for a bear.>\n\n<Bear is Flare's favorite.>\n\n<Bear is a staple in a dragon's diet.>\n\nThey emerged into a clearing with ample space for them to unfuse.\n\n<Are you ready?>\n\n<Maybe I should just lie on the ground for this.>\n\n<You need to get used to this, Cora.>\n\n<Fine.>\n\nAshe unfused, separating his black body from hers.\n\nCora ended up on the ground\u2014again. \"Makes me sick every time.\" She opened her eyes and looked at jagged teeth and gray eyes. His breaths blew over her face. \"But it's nice to see you in the scales. You're beautiful.\"\n\n<I know.>\n\nShe gave a light chuckle. \"Have fun. You know where to find me.\"\n\nHe gave her a slight nudge with his nostril. <You're beautiful too, Cora. On the inside as well as the outside.>\n\n\"Thanks\u2026\"\n\nHe walked away in search of his meal.\n\nCora sat up and dusted all the blades of grass off her clothes. It was an overcast afternoon, but spots of sunshine would break through and warm her skin. She crossed her legs and looked at the trees as she waited for Ashe to return.\n\nThen she heard it.\n\nA whine mixed with a growl.\n\nIt sounded like an angry horse trying to get her attention.\n\nShe turned to the sound and gasped when she saw him.\n\nWith black fur, gnarled teeth that extended outside of his jaw, and big black eyes with white in the center, he was exactly as she remembered.\n\nAnd he still had the flower behind his ear.\n\n\"Honey, is that you?\" She got to her feet and approached him with an outstretched hand. \"I thought you fell. I'm so glad you're okay.\"\n\nHe hurried over, drool dripping down his sharp teeth to the grass.\n\n\"Okay, easy with those.\" She backed away so his teeth wouldn't rip through her clothes and flesh. \"Thank you for helping us before. We might not have gotten away if it weren't for you.\"\n\nImages flooded her mind\u2014of herself. Of feeding him flowers, tucking one behind his ear, smiling at her, riding on the back of Flare in terror.\n\nShe placed her hand on his flank and ran her fingers through his fur.\n\nHe seemed to like it because he smiled\u2014sorta. His eyes drooped a bit, and he twisted and turned his head so her fingers could get deep into his neck. Anytime she stopped petting him, he gave a snort and demanded she continue.\n\nShe chuckled. \"Alright. That seems fair considering what you did for me.\" She petted him for a while, until he was finally satisfied. \"So, what are you doing here? Just visiting? Where is home for you?\"\n\nAn image came into her mind\u2014a very disturbing one.\n\nDead trees with no leaves. Fog thick as smoke. Eternal darkness. The images were so fast that she barely captured their essence.\n\n\"That's home?\"\n\nHe gave a nod.\n\n\"It's\u2026nice.\"\n\nHe moved into her and nudged her with his horns.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe did it again, along with a growl.\n\n\"What are you trying to tell me?\"\n\nHis hooves pounded against the ground as he stomped backward, his eyes locking on to hers. His mind connected with hers, and a flood of images appeared.\n\nA line of Shamans flying on steeds. More than just three or four. There were dozens, their features invisible under their cloaks. Under cover of darkness, they flew, over a dark ocean. The image changed to trees, thick and green trees with curling branches. An endless forest in sunshine.\n\nThe vision faded.\n\nShe tried to process what she'd just seen. \"I\u2026I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.\"\n\nHe gave another growl.\n\n\"Shamans\u2026ocean\u2026forest.\"\n\nHe dropped his head and nudged her in the side, careful to protect her from his teeth.\n\n\"Okay, a bunch of Shamans are flying across an ocean\u2026toward a forest.\"\n\nHe pulled away and gave her a hard stare.\n\n\"Is\u2026that forest Eden Star?\"\n\nHe stared for a long time.\n\nCora hoped her assumption was wrong, that this was just a misunderstanding.\n\nIt wasn't\u2014because he nodded.\n\n<Are you certain that's what he meant?>\n\n<As certain as I can be given the circumstances.>\n\n<Why would a steed loyal to the Shamans betray his master and tell you this?>\n\n<Because I gave him a flower.> She hiked back through the passage to return to Eden Star as quickly as possible.\n\n<A flower?>\n\n<It's complicated.>\n\n<He betrays his people because you gave him a flower\u2026? That's not complicated. It's senseless.>\n\n<I can't explain it, but we're basically friends. He gave me a ride to Rock Island and attacked the Steward of Easton's dragon so we could get away. I guess he must have come here from wherever they're from to warn me.>\n\n<For a flower?>\n\n<Just forget that part, okay? We're friends. End of story.>\n\n<What do we do now?>\n\n<I guess tell Callon.>\n\n<Yes, that would be wise.>\n\nShe returned to Eden Star and headed straight for his tree house. It was close to sunset, so he'd probably just made dinner. She ran up the vines and made it to his front door, but she saw that his home was empty. \"Callon?\"\n\n<He's not here.>\n\nShe turned back around. <Then where is he?>\n\n<Cemetery of Spirits.>\n\n<You're right.>\n\nShe left the tree house and headed to the other side of Eden Star, plunging into the mist, the sea of fireflies, the land of grief.\n\nCallon was on the bench next to the graves of his family.\n\nHis head was bowed, his hands together, eyes closed.\n\nRight beside him was the outline of a man. Muscular like his father, poised like his mother, his head bowed in mutual grief. His blue outline showed the same sharp jawline that Callon possessed. He had the same shoulders too, wide and muscular.\n\nShe didn't need to see his face to see their likeness.\n\nShe approached the bench, the news she came to share forgotten. \"He's next to you.\"\n\nCallon gave a small reaction, like he heard Cora even in his trance.\n\nTurnion turned his head to regard her.\n\nShe met his look\u2014at least where his eyes would be. \"I'm Cora\u2014your cousin.\"\n\nHe remained quiet.\n\nCallon inhaled a slow and deep breath. \"Not a day passes when I don't think of you. The loss of your mother has broken my spirit, but the loss of my son has broken my heart. I failed to protect you. I failed as a father. I failed as a husband. I failed\u2026both of you.\" The tears came, rivers down his cheeks.\n\nCora looked away because it hurt too much.\n\nTurnion remained quiet.\n\nCallon cried quietly to himself before he wiped his face with the back of his forearm, giving a loud sniff before he brought himself to calm.\n\nTurnion still didn't speak.\n\nCallon waited, his quickening breath showing his impatience. \"Vin-lei.\"\n\nNothing.\n\n\"Why do you not come to me? Why do you not speak?\"\n\nTurnion was still, his eyes still on Cora.\n\nCallon's voice came out as a whisper. \"What have I done\u2026?\"\n\nTurnion finally turned away from Cora, focusing his stare on his father. \"A father should never have to outlive his son. But a son should never have to watch his father grieve his death. Your sorrow\u2026is just too much for me.\"\n\nCallon turned to look at his son, where he imagined he would be, his eyes red and wet.\n\n\"I don't want to feel your sorrow, Kul-lei.\"\n\nCallon pressed his lips tightly together, forcing back the flood of tears that wanted to break through.\n\n\"I gave my life for my people. I died with honor, and I would die a million times to keep Eden Star safe from evil. I've found peace\u2014and you need to find it as well. Honor me. But do not grieve me.\"\n\nWhen he blinked, fresh tears came. \"You're my son\u2026\"\n\n\"You will see me again, Kul-lei.\"\n\n\"You have no idea how much I miss you\u2026\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"I should have protected you.\"\n\n\"I was just as skilled with the sword as you\u2014but it was my time. Do not carry this guilt. Do not carry this sorrow. I can't come to you and see you this way. I want to feel the presence of my father, the general, the strong man with hands that never shake. This\u2026is too much for me. It breaks my heart to see you this way.\"\n\nCallon inhaled a deep breath as he wiped away his tears with his palm.\n\n\"You suffer when I suffer\u2014as I do with you.\"\n\nHe gave a nod.\n\n\"No more.\"\n\nHe took another breath before he gave a nod.\n\n\"Rein-Lei-Vu, Kul-lei.\"\n\nHis entire body started to shake, his bottom lip trembling, the moisture on the surface of his eyes growing until the surface tension wasn't enough to keep them in place. \"Rein-Lei-Vu, Vin-lei\u2026\"\n\nTurnion faded away, his outline replaced by mist.\n\nWhen he was gone, Callon let the tears come freely, his palms cupping his face.\n\nCora felt her own fall.\n\nShe moved to the seat beside him and placed her arm around his shoulders before her face rested against his arm. Her tears soaked the fabric of his shirt every time his chest heaved and he vibrated against her. \"I'm sorry, Tor-lei\u2026\"\n\nCallon opened the cabinets and grabbed two cups for the tea brewing on the stove. His eyes were bloodshot but dry as sand.\n\n<You need to tell him.>\n\n<Now is not the right time, Ashe.>\n\n<Cora, this is important.>\n\n<He's grieving.>\n\n<His son is dead. He will always grieve.>\n\nCallon carried the two mugs of tea to the table, and they sat together. His hands cupped the mug like he needed warmth on a cold day. His eyes remained on the liquid, even when he brought it to his lips for a drink.\n\n\"How are you?\"\n\nHis eyes remained on the tea. \"Unwell.\"\n\n\"Your son wants you to be happy.\"\n\n\"Which is impossible. The loss of a child\u2026you don't recover from that.\"\n\n\"But you can make your peace with it.\"\n\nHe lifted his gaze.\n\n\"Your son wants a relationship with you. But your sadness brings him sadness. It's infectious\u2014just like laughter and joy.\"\n\nHe gave an almost imperceptible nod.\n\n\"I know it's hard. I can't even imagine. But\u2026I understand what he means. The people we love most\u2026we never want them to hurt. Because when they hurt, so do we.\"\n\nHe took another drink.\n\n\"When you hurt, he hurts.\"\n\n\"Grief is like a disease. Once you have it, it's permanent. You manage it, and some days are worse than others. It's a lifelong illness that doesn't get better\u2014just changes. But I will try to find peace with his death so I can continue my relationship with him beyond the grave.\"\n\nShe drank her tea, her eyes on her broken uncle across the table.\n\nWhen his mug was empty, he pushed it away and looked out the window instead. \"I'm glad to see that you're building relationships outside of the one we share. Not just to reach your goals, but for your own well-being. I know the elves have been unkind to you, but they are great people.\"\n\n<Now is the time.>\n\n\"I know they are.\"\n\n\"And maybe you'll meet a partner as well.\"\n\nHer eyes immediately dropped back to her tea.\n\n\"Callon, there's something I need to tell you.\" She lifted her gaze and met his.\n\nHis bloodshot eyes immediately turned serious. He was still and focused, his head slightly cocked.\n\n\"I wanted to tell you earlier today\u2026but it wasn't the right time.\"\n\n\"What is it, Cora?\"\n\n\"When I left Eden Star so Ashe could hunt, I saw the Shamans' steed. The one that flew us to Rock Island.\"\n\n\"And the significance of this?\"\n\n\"I think he came to warn me.\"\n\n\"Of what?\"\n\n\"He sent me images\u2026of dozens of Shamans flying over the ocean toward a forest. When I asked him if that forest was this forest, he said yes.\"\n\n\"He said those words?\"\n\n\"Well, no. He nodded at the question.\"\n\nHe sat forward, his arms moving to the table. \"How do we know this isn't a trap?\"\n\n\"I doubt he would have risked his life for us to get away just to trick me later.\"\n\n\"How are we really certain that's even what he meant?\"\n\n\"Because he's not stupid. You respect all living things, but you're dismissing him like he's an imbecile.\"\n\n\"I don't think he's an imbecile. But he is a servant to the Shamans. He's not like the birds and butterflies in our forest. Surely you must see that.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"I see no difference.\"\n\n\"Cora\u2014\"\n\n\"You're being unfairly prejudiced. His soul is as pure as yours or mine. He's been enslaved by the Shamans to be a flying horse. That's not his fault, and it certainly doesn't attest to an allegiance to them.\"\n\nCallon raised his palm. \"For argument's sake, let's assume those were his intentions and his information is correct. The Shamans can come to our borders, but they can't breach them. The magic of the forest prevents them from doing so.\"\n\n\"Maybe they found a way around it.\"\n\n\"I doubt it.\"\n\n\"Just because something has worked in the past doesn't mean it'll work in the future. Don't be arrogant.\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot to the top of his head. \"Arrogant\u2014\"\n\n\"Arrogance leads to complacency. That's how mistakes are made. People assume they have everything figured out until they realize that they don't.\"\n\n\"Even if you're right, what does it matter? Our army is always ready for an assault.\"\n\n\"Queen Delwyn needs to know.\"\n\n\"Whether the queen is aware of this information or not, her army is ready.\"\n\n\"She may be privy to information that you aren't. It's common sense to report information about a possible attack.\"\n\nHis hands came together on the table as he regarded her. \"And how do we explain where we received this information?\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026\"\n\n\"That you regularly use a secret passage you shouldn't know about so the King of Dragons can feed, and then you conversed with a steed of the enemy, and the reason you have a relationship with him is because he gave you a ride to Rock Island to free the man who slew King Tiberius? How do you think that will go?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"I don't know, alright? But she needs this information so she can be prepared.\"\n\n\"Eden Star is always prepared.\"\n\n\"So, the Shamans have staged an attack before?\"\n\nHe stared.\n\n\"You assume they can't breach your lands, so are you prepared if they can?\"\n\n\"There is no possibility of success.\"\n\n\"Then why are they coming here?\"\n\n\"We don't know that for sure. Your little friend could be misinformed.\"\n\n\"Or he could be giving us a warning to ensure our survival and we're blowing it.\"\n\nCallon bowed his head before he dragged his hands down his face. \"Even if I told Queen Delwyn the truth, she would disregard everything and then exile us from Eden Star for breaking every single law of the land. It would accomplish nothing.\"\n\n\"Then who can you tell?\"\n\nHis palms flattened against the surface. \"I could relay my suspicions to General Aldon.\"\n\n\"Will he take you seriously?\"\n\nHe continued to stare at his hands. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"And he won't ask questions?\"\n\n\"No, he won't question me.\"\n\n\"Will he tell Queen Delwyn?\"\n\n\"Not if I ask him not to.\"\n\n\"How will you explain how you know this?\"\n\nHe gave a shrug. \"I won't. I don't need to explain myself. Something is coming\u2014be ready for it. The order is straightforward.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"Sometimes I wish you were the king because you listen. Queen Delwyn never listens.\"\n\nA heavy chuckle escaped his lips.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The only reason I listen, the only reason I betray my own people, is because of the love I have for you. It does not reflect my ideology. It does not reflect my loyalty to Eden Star. It is love that makes me foolish.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe being foolish is a good thing sometimes.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted out the window. \"That still remains to be foreseen, Sor-lei.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Hatchling",
                "text": "\"Did you speak to General Aldon?\" Cora walked behind him, doing her best to keep up. Her endurance and physicality were better than they'd ever been, but she still had to push herself hard to meet his pace. For every stride of his, there were two of hers. Sometimes three.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"He accepted my warning.\"\n\n\"And that's it? We're done?\"\n\n\"When it comes to war, he's the one in charge. It's in his hands now.\"\n\n\"What would you do? If you were still the general?\"\n\n\"Double the guard on duty. Expand the perimeter. Plant scouts farther into the wildlands.\"\n\n\"You think he'll do those things?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He told you this?\"\n\n\"No.\" He halted in his tracks and turned back to regard her. \"He still lives in my shadow, and he'll continue to live in my shadow until his service equals mine. It's in his best interest to heed my warnings in case it truly comes to pass.\" He faced forward again and continued his hike.\n\n\"I hope I'm wrong\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't worry about the safety of Eden Star. It's not your job.\"\n\n\"Doesn't mean I don't care\u2014because I do.\"\n\nThey reached their secret glade they used for training and dropped their packs and unsheathed their swords.\n\n\"Have you acted as a vessel to anyone new?\" He tested the swing of his sword with his warm-up.\n\n\"No one has asked.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they will soon. Be prepared when they do.\"\n\nShe held her sword at the ready, knowing he would strike when she least expected it.\n\n\"Switch hands.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"You're going to use your left hand today.\"\n\n\"Uh, why?\"\n\n\"What will you do if your right arm is broken in combat?\"\n\nShe stared at her arm, like she could see the broken bones through the skin.\n\n\"That's why, Cora.\"\n\n\"Can you fight with your left hand?\"\n\nHe tossed the blade to the other hand and spun it around just as fluidly.\n\n\"Okay\u2026no need to show off.\"\n\n\"So, what happens if I do break an arm?\" They were on their way back to Eden Star, her in the rear while he took the lead.\n\n\"It hurts.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"I meant, do you have a healer? Do you use magic?\"\n\n\"Both. We have a healer who uses magic.\"\n\n\"You just have one healer?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So, it's just one guy healing a bunch of people in battle?\"\n\n\"It's a very complicated task and requires thorough training. Not just anyone can be a healer. Magic is used to map out the body and then heal it properly, but if you do it improperly, you could cause more damage instead. Or worse, kill them. It's a skill of the mind. It requires no touching. A healer uses the body's natural processes to heal itself.\"\n\n\"Wow\u2026that's really cool.\"\n\n\"But you should avoid breaking your arm because he can fix ailments, but not remove pain.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Pain is a notification from our mind that something is wrong. If you turn that off, it might turn off other things as well, such as automatic processes like breathing, producing urine, things of that nature.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you know a bit about it.\"\n\n\"I know some basics\u2014just in case I need them in battle.\"\n\n\"You think you could teach me?\"\n\n\"No. We don't have time for that.\"\n\nThey returned to the heart of the forest, the tree houses in the canopies, other elves walking by on their outdoor stroll.\n\n\"Would you like to visit the cemetery?\"\n\n\"No.\" He halted on the path, his tree house in the opposite direction. \"I need some time before I return. Some meditation. Some grief counseling.\"\n\n\"I didn't know they offered that.\"\n\n\"I've never tried it. But now I realize I might need it.\" His hand moved to her shoulder, and he gave her a squeeze. \"You did well today.\"\n\n\"I got my ass kicked. What are you talking about?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"But you tried. You didn't complain. You just did your best. The Cora I first met would have been a smartass until she got her way.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes.\n\nHe smiled wider. \"See you tomorrow, Sor-lei.\"\n\n\"Bye, Tor-lei.\"\n\nShe stood beside Peony at the counter in her tree house.\n\n\"Layer the nuts in between the turnips and the cauliflower. It gives it a nice crunch.\" Peony added one layer then the next, showing Cora how to make the casserole she was so fond of. \"The almond cr\u00e8me keeps everything together, so you drizzle that on top and it provides a nice cohesiveness.\"\n\n\"Not too hard.\"\n\n\"Nope.\" She put it in the oven and set the timer. \"Now we wait.\"\n\n\"Torture.\" Cora took a seat at the dining table.\n\nPeony chuckled and poured more tea into their cups. \"How's your week been?\"\n\nShe'd waited for an attack that never came. As the forest remained quiet and peaceful, she wondered if the information had been false or misinterpreted. Either way, it was a relief that nothing had come to pass. \"I helped Helda speak to her sister at the cemetery.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's nice. Helda misses her so much.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"That has to be rough for you, huh?\" She sat across from Cora and brought the steaming cup to her lips. \"Having to be a part of this emotional journey.\"\n\n\"It is, but I'm happy to do it.\"\n\n\"If only there were someone in the cemetery for you, you'd be able to enjoy your abilities as well.\"\n\nCora drank her tea and licked her lips. \"I'm going to make this casserole for Callon. I think he'll really enjoy it.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he will,\" she said. \"It's sweet that he's taken you under his wing.\"\n\n\"Yeah, he's a good guy.\"\n\n\"The entire forest was grief-stricken at Turnion's passing. He was so much like his father\u2014dedicated to his people.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Has Callon spoken to him?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"He has.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Her eyes softened. \"I'm sure that has brought him immense peace.\"\n\n\"I think it's brought them both peace.\"\n\n\"Cora, it won't take long for your abilities to become an open secret. Everyone has lost someone, and everyone will want the opportunity to speak to them\u2014on an ongoing basis.\"\n\n\"That's what I'm hoping for. Everyone contributes to Eden Star in some way. They're soldiers, gardeners, scholars, something. This is how I can become a valuable member of society.\"\n\n\"Master of Spirits.\"\n\n\"That's quite the title.\"\n\n\"I think it's perfect. And it's a great way for you to have a meaningful impact.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"But I fear Queen Delwyn will be upset when she learns of your secret\u2014unless she wants to use it herself.\"\n\nDoubtful. \"It would be selfish for her to take this away from her people. It has brought so much peace.\"\n\n\"I agree. But I also understand why it would be cause for concern. There's never been anyone in our society with your unique abilities. She's already suspicious of you, and that suspicion will probably grow.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026she's not my biggest fan.\"\n\n\"You'll just have to change her mind, then.\"\n\nHawk crossed the threshold. \"I can smell that casserole all the way from my post at the border.\"\n\nPeony gave a smile. \"It's quite fragrant, isn't it?\" She retrieved another mug from the cabinet and filled it with the freshly brewed tea.\n\nHawk took the seat beside her empty chair and gave a subtle nod to Cora.\n\n\"How are things out there?\" Cora asked.\n\n\"Unremarkable\u2014as always.\" He was stiff in his seat, not using the support of the chair to cushion his back. He still wore his armor with his bow slung across his back. After a long rotation in the forest, the first thing he wanted to do was come to Peony rather than go to his private accommodations.\n\n\"You're an archer?\"\n\n\"Among other things\u2014but it's my specialty.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty good with the bow myself.\"\n\n\"Is that a challenge? Come to the training grounds, and we'll see whose aim is true.\"\n\n\"Training grounds? I didn't even know we had that.\"\n\n\"Because it's for the army. But I might be able to get you in.\"\n\nPeony removed the casserole from the oven and set it in the center of the table.\n\nOnce she was near, his eyes were on her, glancing at her repeatedly. \"How's your garden, Peony?\"\n\n\"Coming along nicely.\" She served the casserole onto plates. \"Thanks to you and Lia.\"\n\nCora watched Hawk stare at Peony, giving her a look Cora had never received herself.\n\nPeony looked at her again. \"And of course, Cora as well.\"\n\nNow it felt like she didn't belong, not when their two energies combined to ignite flames of a shooting star. Their bodies never came into contact and their eyes barely did either, but the connection between them was undeniable.\n\n<She'll change her mind\u2014eventually.>\n\n<I hope so.>\n\nThe blue dragon soared over the twilight sky and released a stream of fire, burning the soldiers and cannons on the ground. Everyone caught fire, and the blood-curdling screams added to the cacophony of war.\n\nHer eyes smarted from the heat of the flames.\n\nObsidian swooped around then headed straight her way.\n\nShe unsheathed her sword.\n\nObsidian's eyes narrowed at her form on the ground, and when his toothy jaws opened wide, a circle of fire was in the back of his throat, deep in his chest cavity.\n\nShe pushed her mind forward\u2014though she felt nothing but a solid wall.\n\nThe heat came next.\n\nThe smell burned her nostrils.\n\nShe was on fire, smelling her own flesh burn.\n\n<CORA!>\n\nShe jerked up in bed and opened her eyes.\n\n<Run.>\n\nRed-hot flames set her tree house ablaze. The vines that once grew through her window had been charred to ash. Half of the roof had caved in, falling on the opposite side away from her bed. Smoke drew into her lungs with every breath and made her eyes water until she could barely breathe. <What's happening?> She pushed out of bed and landed on the floor.\n\nThe rest of the roof caved in at that moment and fell onto the bed where she'd lain just moments ago.\n\n<Crawl.>\n\nOn her hands and knees, she maneuvered across the ground and headed to the doorway.\n\n<Grab your sword.>\n\nIt was next to the wall, so she grabbed it along with her pack, coughing the entire way.\n\nMost of the vines of the stairway had been burned away, so her escape plan was severed. <Did someone set my house on fire?>\n\n<Survive now. Questions later.>\n\n<How do I get down?>\n\nThe tree house collapsed further, now a squashed pancake of fire.\n\n<Jump on that tree and climb down.>\n\n<I'm not a monkey!>\n\n<Do it!>\n\nWhen she looked past her own tragedy, she realized her tree house wasn't the only one set ablaze.\n\nThe fire was everywhere. She pushed her mind outward, getting to the invisible front door. <Flare? Rush? Are you there?>\n\nNo response.\n\n<Cora, we need to go.>\n\nShe tried again. <Rush?>\n\n<They can't help us, Cora. We're on our own.>\n\nShe took a short running jump and hit the trunk with her chest. Her fingers and nails dug into the bark to secure her weight above the ground. She gave a scream, all of her fingers in pain.\n\nShe made the long descent to the forest floor and fell to her knees.\n\nThe tree that once housed her home was completely consumed. Red-orange flames engulfed the entire thing, turning it into fuel so it could grow bigger and larger. Everything that had once been hers would be turned into a pile of ash on the forest floor.\n\nThe foundation of the trunk grew weak\u2014and then it collapsed altogether. It cracked smack in the middle, and the flames soared to the floor, the tree house coming apart during the descent.\n\nScreams pierced the night from all directions. She'd never heard them before but knew exactly what it was\u2014the screams of elves.\n\n<Put on your armor.>\n\n<Callon!>\n\n<Armor, Cora.>\n\nShe threw down her pack and donned everything as quickly as possible, securing it in place before her bow was slung over her back and her sword secured at her hip. Her empty pack was left at the base of the tree.\n\nShe ran down the path, watching screaming elves flee in the opposite direction she was going. In their chaos, one bumped into her but shoved off and kept going. One elf was lit up with flames and collapsed feet away. The screams stopped as the flesh continued to melt off the bone.\n\nCora looked away and nearly retched.\n\n<Callon can take care of himself, Cora.>\n\n<We both know I'm the first thing he's going to run to\u2014and I don't want him to die searching for me.> She sprinted as fast as she could, her lungs finally able to breathe now that smoke from her burned tree house was out of her body.\n\nWhen she reached his tree house, she stopped.\n\nIt was consumed in flames, about to collapse any second. \"No\u2026\"\n\n<He escaped, Cora.>\n\n\"Callon!\" She cupped her mouth with both hands and yelled into the night. \"Callon!\" <Ashe, there's room here. Let's unfuse, and you can fly away. No one will even notice.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<This is bad, and I'm probably going to die. And if I die\u2026so do you.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Come on! I don't have time to wait around.>\n\n<I will not leave you.>\n\n<What? Why?> The burning trees lit up the forest, the screams echoing from every direction. The world was just shadows and flame, the enemy invisible but everywhere. The most serene place in Anastille had become a bonfire of wood and bones.\n\n<Because you're my hatchling.>\n\nShe could no longer see the destruction of the forest. Now all she could see was a majestic black dragon, its head hung low so he could meet her gaze. Dark eyes bored into her, his snout close enough to give her shoulder a bump. <Ashe\u2026>\n\n<We are one.> His mind fused with hers, giving her a jolt of energy, sight that could penetrate the darkness. Her mind felt weightless, her thoughts sharp as the tip of an arrow. <Now let's find him.>\n\nJust when she ran forward, Callon's tree house collapsed, the trunk turning to ash and losing its stability. Cora sprinted away, missing the embers that popped into the night and floated like fireflies. The heat seared her skin, even through her armor, and her lungs got a breath of smoke.\n\n<Run in the direction of your home. He will be somewhere along the way.>\n\nHer dragon sight could pierce the darkness when her elven eyes couldn't\u2014and she saw them.\n\nDark cloaks. They billowed behind them as they moved, as if the creatures floated across the forest floor. Long, bony fingers were visible, fire in their palms. Like shadows that moved with the changing sun, their presence stretching in different places. They moved all over, torturing one elf then lighting up the tree next to the corpse.\n\nNow she could hear them too.\n\n*Click-click-click. Cliiiiicck.*\n\n\"Callon!\" She sprinted ahead and maneuvered through the trees, ignoring the clicks that haunted her from every direction. Every click was followed by the scream of a terrified elf. But when the screams stopped, that was even worse because that meant\u2026\n\nShe stopped when she spotted him on the ground.\n\nHe was easy to see\u2014because he was clad in the armor of a general.\n\nHis sword by his side.\n\nThe Shaman stood over him\u2014torturing him.\n\nCallon writhed, on his back, his entire body shaking as his skull started to cave.\n\nWith speed she never could have produced on her own, her feet hit the ground like she had wings to take flight, her body gliding through the air like the feathers of a bird. She crashed right into the Shaman, hitting a stack of pillows rather than a solid being, and tackled him to the ground. One hand went deeper into his body than the other, as if he were twisted like a staircase, as if he were ethereal rather than physical.\n\nHe made a scream she'd never heard before, the howl of a wolf but with the shriek of a fox. It was so loud that it masked the ongoing destruction inside Eden Star. It drowned out the pleas for help, the thuds of the trunks as they hit the earth.\n\nHe was back on his feet instantaneously, his crouched body turned toward her, thin, dead branches for fingers.\n\nHe raised his palm.\n\nHer mind projected forward, and as if her fingers had a grip on his head, she snapped his neck, making his body collapse to the ground. Within a heartbeat, she'd crushed his skull from the inside out, plunging him into the eternal darkness of nothing.\n\nHe didn't even have time to scream.\n\n\"Callon?\" She was on her knees at his side, trying to help him up.\n\nHis breaths were ragged, and his features were tight in a permanent wince. His stern eyes were closed, and he groaned, his hand immediately moving to his temple like he had the worst headache of his life.\n\nShe gave him a second to recover\u2014while the forest continued to burn around them. She scanned the area around them, screaming elves running away from their torturers, suddenly dropping dead when the Shaman behind them did their magic. It was a bloodbath\u2014just without the blood.\n\nWhen he had the strength, he grabbed his sword from the ground and pushed to his feet, staggering slightly.\n\nShe threw his arm over her shoulder and supported him.\n\nHe pushed her away. \"I have to protect the queen.\"\n\n\"You're in no condition to fight\u2014\"\n\n\"I will not let these monsters take my forest.\" He turned on her, his eyes back to their serious hostility. Eyes wide-open and full of unspeakable rage, he looked maniacal. \"You need to run, Cora. Take the secret passage out of the forest.\"\n\n\"This is my forest too, Callon. I'm not letting it burn.\"\n\nHe threw his arm down in frustration, his orders not being followed with perfect obedience. \"I can't protect you\u2014\"\n\n\"But I can protect you.\"\n\nHis dark eyes reflected the firelight behind her, shifting back and forth quickly.\n\n\"We do this together.\"\n\nAfter a long stare, he gave a subtle nod. \"Let's go, Sor-lei.\"\n\nQueen Delwyn stood erect as those who died to protect her lay at her feet.\n\nMelian was facedown on the stairs, the blood from her slit throat a pool on the steps below. General Aldon's eyes were lifeless, staring up at the stars that he couldn't see, even if he were alive, because they were blocked by the smoke. Other elves who gave their lives to protect her lay slain at her feet.\n\n*Click.*\n\n*Click.*\n\n*Cliiiiiiccccck.*\n\nThe Shamans surrounded her on all sides, their cloaks dragging behind them as they crouched and glided through the air. They circled her, like a murder of crows waiting to peck out her eyes once the time was right.\n\nHer gown was stained with blood from those who had bled to keep her heart beating, but she held herself like her white gown was as pure as a flower that still flourished on its stem. Her crown remained perfectly straight on her head, her posture as confident as ever. The only cue to her demise was the fire in her eyes.\n\nIn the black armor of the king, General Noose stood before her with his sword at his side, the mirth in his eyes as well on his lips. \"We will burn this forest until there's nothing left. Then we will build our castles and our keeps. Our homes. Our brothels. Our farmlands. Elves, once immortal, will be forgotten. Shall I keep you alive long enough to see the last elf slain? Or should I grant you mercy and do the honors now?\"\n\nQueen Delwyn held his gaze with an unflinching stare. Bright green like the forest surrounding them, her eyes were the only light in the dark place. There was no one left to protect her, but she carried herself like an army was at her back, arrows trained on her enemies.\n\nA deep chuckle escaped his throat. \"I could take you prisoner and have my fun with you. An elf\u2026that would be a first.\" He raised his sword slightly, pointing the tip at her feet. \"But I've always been an impatient man\u2014\"\n\nCallon broke through the trees and sprinted to the bottom of the stairs. When he got to General Noose, his sword flashed with the surrounding firelight and the greenness of the queen's eyes. He struck down General Noose's sword, putting his body between him and his queen.\n\nGeneral Noose's sword dropped momentarily as he backed away.\n\nQueen Delwyn flinched at his sudden appearance, taking a step back up the stairs to get away from the fight. \"Callon, flee. Save who you can.\"\n\nCallon kept his position, his sword held at the ready. His angry eyes burned into General Noose's, and he gripped the pommel of his blade so tightly that it stretched the fabric of his gloves. He was still, his eyes unblinking, ready to drive his enemy out of Eden Star.\n\n*Click. Click. Click.*\n\n*Cliiiiiiiick.*\n\n*Click.*\n\nGeneral Noose let his sword hang at his side, a large grin across his big mouth. \"General Callon. I'm glad you're here. You deserve an honorable death. I'm happy to oblige.\" Without warning, his sword slashed with the speed of the wind, meeting Callon's with a distinct clank that rang throughout the forest.\n\nThe men engaged in battle, delivering a flurry of hits and strikes. They circled each other, dodging left and right, ducking under the swipes and jumping over the blade as it swung at their feet. They moved with the speed of shooting stars, everything happening so quickly that it was hard to know if it happened at all.\n\nCallon met his might\u2014but only barely. His battle became a defensive one, blocking the flurry of hits that came his way rather than striking on his own. He became Cora in her training, unable to participate as a worthy opponent.\n\n<He's too weak to win this fight.>\n\nA Shaman raised his palm toward Callon.\n\nCora's reaction was instantaneous, bringing him to a collapse. Her mind caved in his skull, killing him before he could move against her uncle.\n\nThe swordfight continued, both fighters oblivious to the deceased Shaman that blended into the darkness.\n\nGeneral Noose pushed Callon back, struck down his sword so it landed on the grass, and brought him to his knees in front of the queen.\n\n<No.>\n\nCallon winced, like the pain in his mind was just too much to carry on. He was not the inferior fighter, but the torture his mind endured had severed the connection between his thoughts and his body. He couldn't hold the sword as he did before. Couldn't execute a lifetime of training.\n\nThe mirth burned in General Noose's eyes as well as his mouth. His grin of victory was grotesque, as if slaying his enemy was the greatest pleasure he'd ever known. General Noose raised his sword and prepared to swipe Callon's head clean from his shoulders.\n\nBut then he gave an involuntary jerk and backed away, his hand clutching his temple.\n\nCallon didn't waste the opportunity and dove for his fallen sword.\n\nGeneral Noose growled as he looked at the sea of Shamans, surveying them in the circle, lines of tension on his face as his temples throbbed. \"What is this game?\"\n\n*Click.*\n\n*Click. Click.*\n\n*Cliiiiiick.*\n\nGeneral Noose gathered his bearings and came for Callon once more, his eyes full of even greater blood lust.\n\nCallon raised his sword to deflect the attack rushing down on him. But his grasp on the pommel was weak, his shoulders heavy, his body slow. He knew he would be slain, but he carried on anyway.\n\nBut Cora got there first.\n\nShe took his place and shoved him back, her body blocking his, her brilliant sword meeting the steel of the empire.\n\nCallon fell onto his back at the foot of the stairs. \"Cora!\"\n\nThe General's sword met the fire of her scales, a thud different from steel on steel. It was steel on earth, a quiet thud rather than a clank of metal. He shoved her sword with his as he stepped back, his wide eyes staring with incredulity that quickly turned into glee.\n\n\"Cora, no.\" Callon tried to push himself to his feet but collapsed back on the stairs. Too weak to get to his feet, he was helpless to interfere. \"Please. I beg you. Run.\" His voice broke with the emotional plea of a father, desperate to protect the one thing he had left. \"Don't do this\u2026\" His eyes filled with a thin film of moisture, of heartbreak, of frustrated tears.\n\nGeneral Noose flicked his sword around his wrist as the grin spread. \"If the little girl wants to play, let her play.\" He extended his hand and gave a dramatic bow before he righted himself again.\n\nCora gripped her sword with both hands, moving her feet the way she'd been taught, waiting for the unexpected attack she'd been trained to anticipate. The blade was weightless in her hands. Strength from an outside source flooded into her body. The darkness was as easy to pierce as daylight. She was aware of everything, from the sweat that dripped down his temple to the shine of saliva on his front teeth.\n\n<Focus, Cora. He may have the strength of a man\u2014but you have the strength of a dragon.>\n\n<Not just any dragon\u2014but the King of Dragons.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nGeneral Noose rushed her, his sword swinging with the speed of Callon's on his best day.\n\nShe was ready for it, her red sword blocking his hit along with the next and the next. Their swords danced together in a series of blows, each hit meeting the block of the other. His armor was made of steel, so she aimed her attacks at his wrists and neck. She barely needed to take a breath because she was so calm, her mind so focused there was no panic, no palpitations to her heart.\n\nGeneral Noose withdrew. \"Not bad\u2014for a little girl.\"\n\nCallon pushed to his feet again. Instead of being the most respectable swordsman in Anastille, he was now an old man, a man who didn't move the way he once did. But he tried anyway\u2014to no avail. \"Cora!\"\n\nThe General was done playing with his food and came at her hard, ready to end this right now and for good.\n\n<Now.>\n\nShe pushed out her mind, hitting him like a shot from a cannon.\n\nHe gave a loud groan and fell back, his features showing the agony that writhed inside his skull.\n\n<Kill him.>\n\nShe pushed her mind out again, to crush his skull the way she did with the Shamans. The fight would end quickly, and King Lux would lose his greatest pawn. It wouldn't just be a victory for Eden Star, but for the continent.\n\n*Click. Cliiiiick. Click.*\n\nThe Shamans' minds formed a protective wall around the General's, protecting the final layer before his skull could be compromised.\n\nShe continued to push\u2014but she was exhausted by the action. It was an element of surprise she hadn't expected, a strength she couldn't defeat. She was powerless, and if she kept going, she feared her own mind would be incapacitated.\n\n<Stop.>\n\nShe pulled away.\n\nGeneral Noose recovered and came at her again, this time with a scowl.\n\nHis hits were harder, fueled by venomous rage, pushing her back with the strength of a bull. Every strike possessed the power of all his muscles, of all the strength of a man three times her size. He came down on her like storm clouds, unleashing hail and thunder. He was a volcano, his lava about to drown her in fire.\n\nCora met his hits, never giving up an opening for him to slice her head off her shoulders. Now her breaths became labored, her thoughts strained, even with Ashe's help. Without their union, she would have no help to prevail. She would have been defeated at the first blow.\n\n<Now.>\n\nShe pushed again, compromising him a second time. His sword lost its momentum, and he faltered just long enough to give Cora an opening. She went for the break in his armor, between his vambraces and his gloves.\n\nHer sword sliced over his wrist, deep into the flesh.\n\nHe stumbled back and gave a growl as he felt the bite of his injury. His eyes went down to his hand, the blood dripping over his gloves and to the grass below him. One drop splashed on his boot. He raised his arm and watched himself bleed before his eyes flicked back to hers. His breaths became heavy, his eyes menacing.\n\n\"Who's the little girl now\u2014bitch.\"\n\nHis nostrils flared as he righted himself, blood still dripping everywhere. His sword switched hands because the open wound made his grip too slippery. His heavy breaths deepened. The rage in his eyes was lethal. \"Two can play this game.\"\n\n<What does that mean?>\n\n<Focus, Cora.>\n\nThe assault happened, hitting her mind from all sides, like blades dragging along the sides of her skull. They all shot through the bone, trying to get in, to break it down from the inside. Her body buckled and she winced, Callon's screams now blurry whispers in the background. \"CORA!\"\n\n*Click.*\n\n*Cliiiiicccccck.*\n\nGeneral Noose came for her once again. \"Let's see who's the bitch now.\"\n\n<This is all I have, Cora.>\n\nShe got another rush of energy, just a bit more to increase her focus, another involuntary jolt to her body.\n\n<But now, I must retreat to save my strength. I know you will defeat him, Hatchling.>\n\nHer sword met Noose's, the ringing in her ears, the gnawing in her stomach. Her eyes closed as she held his offense, using a greater sense than sight. She held back the weight of a mountain with the strength of a dragon, her power coming from the union of two souls. It was a blistering headache, agony. The pain was overwhelming. She gave a scream then sliced his wrist once again, digging her blade deep.\n\nThis time, he screamed as he fell back. \"Arrrrggggghh!\"\n\n*Cliiiiicccck.*\n\nHer eyes opened, and she regripped her sword, seeing General Noose bleed from both hands. Despite her pain, she couldn't wipe away the victorious smirk across her face.\n\n\"Cora!\" Callon continued to scream. \"Run!\"\n\nThe Shamans rushed in, the strength of their spell increasing with proximity. There were six of them, all of their palms raised, doing their dirty work so General Noose could slice her head clean from her shoulders.\n\nShe pushed through the pain and projected her mind around her. The assault came from various directions in front of her, some sources stronger than others. With all the might they could muster, they struck to kill, to buckle her knees from underneath her and make her eyes empty forever.\n\nShe pushed herself harder than ever before, invading all minds at once, infecting every single skull.\n\nThe torture on her mind ceased.\n\nThe six Shamans collapsed on the ground\u2014all dead. With a unifying thud, they were no more. Just corpses on the ground. More dead than they were before.\n\nGeneral Noose hung back, his sword falling to his side. His eyes surveyed the dead before him. Six bodies in cloaks surrounded him, the allies that were supposed to be invincible. Then his eyes turned to her. Now, there was no gloat. No grin. No taunt. Nothing.\n\nShe breathed through the agony, the ringing now faint in her ears. The pain lingered, but it was a fraction of what it'd been before. Her adrenaline masked the rest of it. Her victory straightened her spine, darkened her eyes, made her step forward with a confidence she'd never possessed before.\n\nAll General Noose could do was stare.\n\nShe flicked her sword around her wrist before she took her offensive stance once again. She challenged him with her gaze, ready to end this fight for good. She'd taken out two of his wrists, and now she would go for his neck next.\n\nBut General Noose stepped back.\n\nThe remaining Shamans did the same, backtracking away from her.\n\nShe wouldn't let him leave this forest with his life. Not after what he'd done to Eden Star. After what he'd done to the trees, her people, even her queen. She pushed her mind out to General Noose, determined to make him a corpse like the pile of cloaks next to him.\n\nBut she couldn't.\n\nHer mind couldn't even reach that far away. There was a barrier, not in front of him, but in front of her own mind.\n\nShe had nothing left. She'd exhausted all the strength and energy Ashe had provided, had depleted her own reserves long ago. She could feel the fatigue in her muscles as well as her mind. If she hadn't expended it all on the Shamans, perhaps she would be able to take him out now. But she also might be dead if she hadn't.\n\nGeneral Noose gave her a final hard look. He sized her up differently, as more than just an equal, but an actual threat. His sword remained at his side as he backed away and joined the ranks of the soldiers he'd brought with him. He kept his eyes on her until he was far enough away. Only when he was at the line of the trees did he turn his back on her\u2014and retreat."
            },
            {
                "title": "Into the Mountain",
                "text": "\"Oh yeah, this is the place.\" Bridge examined the stone doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.\n\n\"We thought that last time,\" Rush said. \"And the time before that\u2026and the time before that.\"\n\n\"Look.\" Bridge walked to the wall then dragged his hands over the stone, removing the centuries of dust. \"Those are runes. Dwarven runes.\"\n\n<About time.>\n\n<Hey, you slowed us down too.>\n\n<Not as much as you.>\n\n<I didn't see you complaining when you ate all those goats.>\n\n<Ugh. I'm sick of goat. I want a grizzly.>\n\n<Well, I don't think they have grizzlies in here, so you're shit out of luck.>\n\n\"This is great and everything,\" Zane said. \"But how do we open the door? There's not a doorknob anywhere.\"\n\n\"What does the map tell us?\" Liam asked.\n\nRush unfolded the map and took a look. \"Not much. There's an X, and next to it the word Push.\"\n\n\"Push?\" Bridge asked incredulously. \"We're supposed to push solid stone?\" He pressed his palms against the stone and gave a hard push. \"Yeah, that's not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Flare could push it?\" Liam asked.\n\n<Always looking for an excuse\u2026>\n\n<Can't blame him.>\n\n\"Flare won't fit in here.\"\n\n<I'm far too massive and beautiful.>\n\n<I don't think beauty is the deciding factor here.>\n\n\"Wait.\" Lilac moved to one corner and peered up at the ceiling. \"Doesn't it look like it curves?\"\n\n\"Curves?\" Zane joined her. \"What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Like this isn't straight.\" She pressed her palms against the wall and dragged it down.\n\nBridge examined the other side, looking down at the ground. \"Actually, I think I see a little crack\u2026\"\n\nRush kneeled beside him, seeing the hole that indicated there was empty space somewhere.\n\n<It's a ball.>\n\n<Sorry?>\n\n<A big ball.>\n\n<Seriously, no idea what you're saying.>\n\n<An enormous boulder is blocking the entrance.>\n\n<Ohh\u2026>\n\n<Took you long enough.>\n\n\"Flare says it's a boulder.\"\n\n\"And we're supposed to push it out of the way.\" Bridge straightened then pressed his palms against the stone once more. \"Which would be totally fine\u2026if it didn't weigh as much as a mountain. How are we going to move this thing?\"\n\n\"Together?\" Rush asked. \"I can use some of Flare's strength too.\"\n\n\"This doesn't make sense,\" Liam said. \"Dwarves may be stocky and strong, but they're much smaller than an average human. It would take dozens of dwarves every time they wanted to go come and go. It's just not practical.\"\n\n\"If their goal was to make it as difficult as possible to reach them, then I say they succeeded.\" Lilac pressed her hands against the door with one leg in front of the other. \"A little help here?\"\n\nThey all lined up against the boulder and pushed.\n\nIt moved one inch. Then two.\n\nBridge gave a loud grunt. \"You think those goats could help us?\"\n\nRush pushed his shoulder into the rock, keeping the slow momentum going. \"Wouldn't that be nice\u2026\"\n\nThe rock finally rolled away, finding a curved groove in the ground that guided its path against a different wall. It gave a loud rumble before it went still.\n\nThey all took a moment to regain their breath, bent at the knees, panting, wiping the sweat from their foreheads.\n\nBridge straightened. \"Now what?\"\n\nRush stepped into the long tunnel, which grew darker the farther he looked down. Torches lined the walls, but they were absent of flame. \"I guess we go say hello?\"\n\nThe hallway was endless.\n\nOn and on it went, branching off in different directions, the passages dark unless they held up a torch to chase away the shadows. Instead of veering off in any direction, they continued to go straight so they would always know the way back.\n\n\"I'm so glad I'm not a dwarf.\" Bridge held the torch as he walked beside Rush. \"Could you imagine doing this every time you come home?\"\n\n\"I don't think the dwarves do much coming and going. We were on that mountainside for nearly a month and didn't spot a single one.\"\n\n\"Well, they can't grow their crops underground, so they've got to leave for food.\"\n\n\"Unless they exist off a diet rich in goat legs.\"\n\nBridge chuckled. \"And goat milk.\"\n\n\"That's gross.\"\n\n\"It wasn't so bad. Nice to have a little cream in my coffee.\"\n\nRush stuck out his tongue as he gave a grimace.\n\n\"So\u2026have any idea what you're going to say when we finally find them?\"\n\n\"I thought you were doing the talking.\"\n\nBridge rolled his eyes. \"This was all your idea, man.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I hope the words come to me.\"\n\n\"Wish Flare could do it.\"\n\n\"You and me both.\"\n\n<I heard that.>\n\n<Because you never know when to mind your own business.>\n\n\"What's that up ahead?\" Bridge took the lead, carrying the torch over to the spot concealed by darkness.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"A slide\u2026I think.\" Bridge kneeled and shone the torchlight on the passageway in the rock.\n\n\"A slide?\" Lilac stuck her head inside and tried to peer into the passageway. \"It does look like a slide. But I can't see where it goes.\"\n\nBridge carried the torch farther, revealing a dead end. \"Huh. Looks like we're out of road.\"\n\n\"Maybe this is where they drop supplies to storage,\" Rush said. \"So they don't have to carry it all the way.\"\n\n\"That means the main entrance is through one of the side tunnels,\" Zane said. \"Should we go back?\"\n\n\"Bad idea,\" Liam said. \"We'll just get lost\u2014which is the point.\"\n\n\"Well, this could lead to a pit of lava,\" Zane said. \"A death trap.\"\n\n\"You guys are ridiculous.\" Lilac sat at the edge and dangled her legs. \"I'll go.\"\n\n\"Whoa.\" Bridge grabbed her wrist. \"Let's rear the horse for a second. One person should go and give the all clear to the rest. That makes sense, right?\"\n\n\"Are you volunteering?\" Lilac asked.\n\nBridge shrugged. \"It's better me than you\u2026\"\n\nLilac gave him a gentle pat on the cheek. \"You're a sweet brother sometimes. But it's fine. I'll go ahead.\"\n\n\"No\u2014\"\n\nLilac jumped down and disappeared on the slide. \"Woo-hoo!\"\n\n\"If she dies, then I'm going to die,\" Bridge said. \"Just so I can yell at her in the afterlife.\"\n\nRush kneeled at the hole in the rock, listening to her slide farther away until there was silence.\n\nThey all squeezed closer to the entrance, straining to hear any sign of life.\n\nRush ducked his head inside and called out. \"Lilac? You okay?\"\n\nHer distant voice came back. \"Imahsors!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe yelled a little louder, but her words were still incoherent. \"Imahsoooorrrs!\"\n\n\"She sounds fine,\" Zane said as he stepped onto the slide. \"Let's go for it.\" He pushed himself forward, and he disappeared into the dark tunnel. One by one, they went, Rush taking the rear.\n\nRush carried the torch, keeping it away from his face so he could light the path as they descended deeper into the mountain.\n\nFlare's mind became smaller, his presence retreating the deeper underground he went.\n\n<It'll be okay, Flare.>\n\n<You don't understand.>\n\n<We'll get out of here as quickly as possible.>\n\nThe slide ended, and he landed in a pool of cold water. The torch was extinguished once it was submerged, and he choked down a rush of liquid straight into his lungs. He broke the surface and coughed until his lungs were clear, finding the edge of the rock to hold on to. \"That was fun\u2026\" Soaking wet, he pulled himself out of the water, getting to his hands and knees on the stone slab. \"Everyone okay?\"\n\nHe pushed his wet hair out of his face and watched the water leak out of his pants and boots. There was still a gulp of water lodged in his throat, so he spat it out onto the wet surface. \"Guys?\" He looked up, seeing everyone ignoring him.\n\nHe got to his feet, his weight and pack considerably heavier now that he was carrying pounds of ice-cold water. He pushed his hair out of his face once again then stilled. \"Shit\u2026\"\n\nThe cavern was aglow with green stones in the corners, providing light throughout the ground and up the rigid edges of the inverted rock crevasses. The stones were along the walls, lighting up the inside of the mountain all the way to the very top of the cavern. It was a dim glow, but enough to see the horrifying details.\n\nA sea of bodies hung from posts, sometimes several on a single rope. They were full skeletons now, flesh and hair decomposed long ago. There was no breeze in the cavern, so they hung there idly, for eternity.\n\nThere were at least a hundred\u2014if not more.\n\nWith bones too thick to belong to a lithe elf and skeletons too short to be human, there was only one conclusion to draw.\n\nThey were dwarves.\n\nBridge surveyed the area with his hands on his hips. \"Yep. This is bad. Really bad.\"\n\n\"Can we go back through the slide?\" Lilac walked to the edge of the pool and peered up to the stone arch that delivered them there. \"Maybe we could build something\u2014\"\n\n\"You want to crawl all the way back up there?\" Bridge asked incredulously. \"It's a slide for a reason, Lilac. You can't go back.\"\n\nShe flipped back around. \"So, you just want to chill in this dwarf graveyard?\"\n\nLiam approached the closest cluster of corpses with narrowed eyes. \"Decomposition this far underground would be very slow. This must have happened years ago. Many years ago.\"\n\n\"New plan,\" Lilac said. \"We get outta here as quickly as possible.\"\n\nBridge rounded on her. \"You think?\"\n\n<This is bad, Rush. And I can't help you.>\n\n\"Let's just calm down, alright?\" Rush turned back to them. \"I admit this is a pretty gruesome sight, but we're making a lot of assumptions right now when we have no idea what happened.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're right.\" Bridge joined Liam next to the closest skeletons. \"This was probably a birthday party.\"\n\nRush rolled his eyes.\n\nBridge rounded back on him. \"The dwarves were overrun and annihilated by some psychopaths\u2014clearly.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps these dwarves disobeyed their king, so they were very publicly executed,\" Rush said.\n\nBridge moved his hands to his hips and gave him a stare.\n\n\"Or maybe there was a famine, so they took their own lives instead of starving,\" Rush said.\n\nBridge continued to stare him down, as did the others.\n\n\"Okay.\" Rush rolled his eyes again. \"Fine. They were probably defeated in a conquest\u2026\"\n\n\"But by whom?\" Bridge asked. \"Who would do this? It wasn't men because you would have known about this.\"\n\n\"Well, my father didn't tell me everything. But you're probably right.\"\n\n\"And it wasn't the elves,\" Bridge said.\n\nRush examined the remains with his head cocked. \"The goats, maybe?\"\n\n\"Rush.\" Lilac gave him a smack in the arm. \"This is serious.\"\n\n<He's never serious.>\n\n<You're back, then?>\n\n<If you aren't going to take this seriously, then I need to.>\n\nRush grabbed pieces of his clothes and wrung them out in his hands, releasing as much moisture as possible so his garments wouldn't feel so heavy\u2014and cold. \"I think the plan is pretty simple. We need to find a way out of here\u2014and not be seen.\"\n\n\"I have a feeling that's not going to work very well.\" Bridge started to pace, his fingers interlocked at the nape of his neck. \"We have no weapons\u2014\"\n\n\"Here.\" Rush cut down the closest dwarf and let the bones smack against the stone. The dwarf's sword was still secured at his waist, so Rush removed the belt and handed it over.\n\nBridge didn't take it. \"One, that's disgusting. And two, that's not a blade. That's a dagger.\"\n\nRush forced it into his hands. \"It's sharp and pointy, isn't it?\" He cut down other corpses, brittle bones breaking apart when they hit the rock at their feet. They harvested the weapons they could find.\n\n\"I found a note.\" Lilac unrolled it. \"But it's in Dwarvish\u2026can't read it.\"\n\nLiam took it out of her hands. \"My Bargora, we are overrun. The rock won't hold. I will meet my end with honor defending our mountain. I don't regret my death, but I regret leaving you and Rulan. I love you both.\" Liam rolled the note back into place and slipped it into his pocket.\n\nLilac released a deep sigh. \"Man\u2026\"\n\nBridge looked at the pile of bones on the ground. \"What happened here?\"\n\nRush stepped over the corpses and headed to the archway in the cavern, large pieces of rock on either side where their assailants had broken through. \"I have a feeling we're about to find out.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Fazurks",
                "text": "<I can't reach her.>\n\n<The rock must be too thick. Or we're too deep underground.>\n\n<I will try again later, but I think you're right.>\n\n<I told her not to worry if that happens.>\n\n<She'll worry anyway.>\n\nThe glow of the green stones illuminated their path through the mountain. Caves branched in different directions, their destinations unknown. Stairs led them either up or deeper underground. The large caverns contained workshops or dining halls, all ransacked. There were bodies along the way, all dwarves.\n\nThe storerooms still had dried fruits and nuts along with water and preserved ale, so they were able to stock up on a few things and rest before they continued forward. Conversations were limited, all of them doing their best to stay as quiet as possible.\n\n\"I'm starting to wonder if there's anyone here.\" Lilac came to Rush's side in the lead.\n\n\"You really want to take that chance?\" His sword was sheathed at his side, but he kept his hand close in case he needed it. His armor was minimal, so a battle ax to his shoulder could be deadly.\n\n\"I'm so lost right now. I don't even know the way we came.\"\n\n\"Me neither.\"\n\n\"You have no idea where we're going?\"\n\n\"Do I look like a dwarf to you?\"\n\nHer eyes sharpened like arrows.\n\n\"The exit has to be near the surface, so the higher we go, the greater our chances.\"\n\n\"I guess that's true.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be dramatic or anything, but I really don't want to die in a cave.\"\n\n\"You think any of us do?\" Bridge asked her from behind.\n\n\"Sorry, Lilac,\" Rush said. \"I don't think anyone gets to choose that\u2026\"\n\n\"Well, I'd prefer it to at least be in battle,\" she said. \"That's what we're working toward, right? All of that is lost if we die here\u2026where no one will ever find us.\"\n\n\"Enough with the death talk, Lilac,\" Bridge said. \"Rush, I think we should call it a night\u2026or a day. Whatever it is.\"\n\nScaffolding was mounted against the wall, high up the rock so they could access hundreds of feet in the air. There were pickaxes abandoned on the walkway, as if they had been digging for something before the onslaught happened. They'd had no idea an enemy marched on their mountain until they were already inside. Rush turned around. \"I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"I'm with you,\" Bridge said. \"But I don't want to be attacked when we're exhausted either, especially when we have no idea what we're up against.\"\n\n\"Not to be a wimp or anything,\" Lilac said. \"But I'm tired too.\"\n\n<They're right. You need to keep your strength. Some of these caverns are big enough for me to fit, but if we cross paths with the enemy at the wrong place, I won't be able to burn them for you.>\n\n\"Alright.\" Rush moved forward again. \"Let's find a good spot.\"\n\nThey walked awhile longer before they found a decent hiding place, a small but deep cut into the cavern wall. It was a tight fit, but if anyone passed through the cave, they probably wouldn't even know they were there.\n\nThey opened their bedrolls and lay side by side, their packs as pillows.\n\nBridge sighed. \"I miss grass\u2026\"\n\n\"I miss straw,\" Lilac said.\n\n\"I'll take this over the galleon any day,\" Zane said. \"At least it doesn't move.\"\n\nRush sat up with his back to the wall, his sword across his thighs, eyes on the opening.\n\n\"Rush, you should sleep,\" Bridge said. \"You're the only one of us that knows how to fight.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Lilac asked.\n\n\"Don't pull that,\" Bridge said. \"If you knew how to fight, Rush wouldn't have been captured at Rock Island. Pickpocketing and stabbing people between the ribs with a little dagger does not compare to what Rush can do with a sword.\"\n\n\"It's fine,\" Rush said. \"I'll wake you up when I get tired.\"\n\n<Someone approaches.>\n\nRush stiffened, his hand gripping the hilt of his blade.\n\nBridge caught on, his eyebrows furrowed.\n\nRush pressed a forefinger to his lips.\n\nEveryone stilled in place.\n\nThe footfalls started in the distance.\n\nThey grew louder.\n\nAnd louder.\n\nWhen they were near, Rush could distinguish the details. Whatever it was, it was heavy, massive, with feet with enough heft to shake the rock with every step.\n\n<Sounds like an orc.>\n\n<Too heavy for an orc.>\n\nRush focused on the crevasse in the rock and spotted the black hide of an enormous creature. Seven or eight feet tall, with long black hair that covered the back of its neck, it had arms that bulged with muscles and shoulders that were broader than any man's. The view only lasted a split second, and Rush absorbed as many details as he could.\n\n<It is an orc.>\n\n<I've never seen an orc that looks like that. Is he alone?>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Just answer the question.>\n\n<No. You answer the question.>\n\n<I'm gonna take him down.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Because he knows the way out of this place.>\n\nThe footsteps started to quiet as the enormous orc moved past the opening.\n\n<Too dangerous.>\n\n<It's a lot more dangerous than wandering around this place with those things lurking around.>\n\n<You have no idea what you're up against.>\n\n<I'll just sneak up behind him and shank him. Done.>\n\nThe footsteps stopped.\n\nThe orc sucked in a deep breath.\n\nA loud sniff.\n\n<He smells you.>\n\n<Of course he does\u2026>\n\n<Quick. Before he alerts the others.>\n\nRush pushed through the crevasse to get back onto the path, his sword gripped at his side.\n\nThe orc had already turned around, his enormous black eyes narrowed on Rush. A behemoth, every breath expanded his bare chest, the muscles of his torso, his ribs, his chest all moving together like plates of armor. He carried no weapon\u2014because his body was the weapon.\n\nHis breaths were audible as quiet growls, his shoulders rising and falling with the movement of his lungs. His black lips pulled back as if to smile, but a second row of teeth emerged, pushing over his jaw and protruding out.\n\n<Oh, just lovely\u2026>\n\n<He's going to scream.>\n\n<If I miss, all I have is my bow\u2014>\n\n<Then don't miss!>\n\nThe orc bent forward and inhaled a deep breath to give his shout.\n\n<Now!>\n\nRush threw the sword\u2014impaling him right in the throat.\n\nThe orc staggered back before he fell to the stone floor with a thud.\n\n<How am I supposed to question him now?>\n\n<You wouldn't have been able to question him while he feasted on your flesh either.>\n\nRush ran over and looked down at the impaled orc. <Uh, he's still alive.> Vicious black eyes stared up at him, narrowed and menacing.\n\nHe must be paralyzed because he's not reaching for you.\n\n<Damn, that was a pretty good shot.>\n\n<Rush.>\n\nRush kneeled down. \"Tell me the way out of here, and I'll end you.\"\n\n\"What in the\u2026?\" Bridge came over but kept his distance. \"What is that thing?\"\n\n\"I think it's an orc,\" Liam said. \"But I've never seen an orc like this before.\"\n\n\"Look at his teeth!\" Lilac pointed at his face. \"He's like a dragon.\"\n\n<What did she just say?>\n\n\"Guys, keep it down, alright?\" Rush said. \"More might be coming.\" He turned back to the orc. \"We got a deal or what?\"\n\nThe dark stare continued.\n\n<He can't speak because of the blade.>\n\n<What if I pull it out and he screams?>\n\n<That's a real possibility.>\n\n<This place is a maze. We'll never figure it out without some help.>\n\n<It's risky, but I understand.>\n\n\"I'm gonna pull this out. If you scream, I'll smash your skull with this rock until it's ground beef, alright?\" He propped up the rock with his palm. \"Here we go.\" He grabbed the sword by the hilt and tugged it out.\n\nBlood started to pool at his throat.\n\n\"Tell me the way out of the mountain.\"\n\nHe stared, his large eyes shifting back and forth, and then he opened his mouth and released a blood-curdling scream.\n\n\"You asshole.\" Rush grabbed the rock and smashed it down on his face.\n\n<No blood! They'll see.>\n\nRush grabbed the orc's thick head and snapped his neck.\n\n<Hide!>\n\n\"Help me.\" Rush hooked his arms under his shoulders.\n\n\"Help you what?\" Bridge asked. \"We've got to run!\"\n\n\"I don't have time to explain.\" Rush tried to drag him, but he was too massive. \"Just do it!\"\n\nLoud screams came from the opposite way.\n\n<Quickly!>\n\nThey all grabbed a body part and pushed him through the crevasse, getting him into the darkness and out of the path.\n\nA sea of footsteps approached.\n\n<What if they smell us?>\n\n<They'll probably keep going until they find this guy.>\n\n<And if not?>\n\n<Then we're dinner.>\n\nThe footsteps echoed in the cave, the sound so loud none of them could hear themselves breathe. The green glow was vanquished when the black bodies obscured all the light. Growls and roars accompanied their footfalls\u2014as if the orcs were marching to war.\n\nThey all stayed still, an enormous corpse on top of all of them.\n\nThe blackness passed and the footfalls faded.\n\n<That was close.>\n\n<What do we do now?>\n\n<We gotta move.>\n\n<I'm sure they left Fazurks behind.>\n\n<Fazurks?>\n\n<It means The Big Ugly.>\n\n<We know there's no exit the way we came, and if we don't leave this cave, they'll find us on the way back. They didn't pay attention now, but they'll definitely be combing every inch of this place on their return.>\n\n<True.>\n\n\"Pack up your things. We're leaving.\"\n\n\"What about the orc?\" Bridged asked.\n\n\"Leave the Fazurk,\" Rush said.\n\n\"Fazurk?\" Bridge asked. \"Did you just make that up?\"\n\n\"Flare did,\" Rush said. \"It means The Big Ugly in dragon.\"\n\nLilac gave a nod in appreciation. \"Hit the nail right on the head.\"\n\nThe caves became bigger, expanding as they inched closer to the surface.\n\n<The elevation is changing\u2014slowly.>\n\n<That slide must have taken us all the way to the bottom.>\n\n<Should have gone a different way.>\n\n<And end up right in their den? No. We shouldn't have come in the first place.>\n\n<There was no way to know, Rush.>\n\n<My stupidity is going to get everyone killed.>\n\n<We've survived worse.>\n\n<Uh, no, we haven't. We could always fly away, but now that's not an option for us. You're doing great down here, by the way.>\n\n<I have to.>\n\nRush knew they were about to head into trouble when the orcs' voices started to reach their ears. So deep it didn't seem real, they were vile, accompanied by growls between words. It was hard to make out what they were saying, but they seemed to speak a common tongue.\n\nThey approached the entrance to an enormous cavern, flames visible in a huge fireplace. Their silhouettes were distinct shadows, cast against the wall in a distorted proportion.\n\nRush kneeled behind the rock and watched.\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" Bridge came to his side.\n\n\"I've been out of good ideas since the moment we decided to come here.\"\n\n\"You think this is what Mathilda meant?\"\n\nRush slowly turned his head to regard him, the truth hitting him like a woman's palm against his cheek. \"I hate witches.\"\n\n\"I wonder why she didn't tell you.\"\n\n\"Because her warning was enough\u2014and she did say there was nothing but death here.\"\n\n\"But still\u2026\"\n\n\"She doesn't care whether I live or die. Clearly.\"\n\n\"She seemed to care when she gave Cora those dragon tears.\"\n\n\"I think that was for Cora\u2014not me.\" He looked into the cavern again, distinguishing long tables and a roast turning on the spit over the fire. There were mugs on the counter, probably filled with the ale they stole from the dwarves.\n\nThere were only two options. To step into the cavern with the Fazurks or to take the cave to the left of it.\n\n\"Should we sneak past them?\" Just when Bridge asked the question, two Fazurks left the cavern and disappeared into the cave that would be their escape plan. Another Fazurk passed in the opposite direction. \"Alright\u2026maybe sneaking isn't going to work.\"\n\n\"This must be their settlement\u2014next to the entrance. Flare says our elevation is much higher than when we started, so I think we started at the bottom and are near the top.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Or maybe we're just in the middle\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't even say that, man.\"\n\n\"The area is big enough for Flare. He can move right to the entrance and set the entire cavern ablaze. Like fish in a barrel.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"I think that's a pretty good plan.\"\n\n\"Except one thing\u2026\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The rest will know we're here\u2014and we have to run through them.\"\n\n\"But at least we won't be chased from behind.\"\n\n\"I suppose\u2026\"\n\n\"I think it's worth a try. We don't have any other options.\"\n\nRush sagged against the rock. \"I'm sorry I got you into this.\"\n\n\"You didn't get me into anything, Rush. I wanted to be here.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm about to get you and your sister killed. We're going to be the next roast over that fire.\"\n\n\"Even if that's true, we chose to be here. It's not your fault, Rush.\"\n\nHe bowed his head.\n\nBridge gave him a clap on the shoulder. \"Did you really make it all the way here just to die?\"\n\n\"Seems that way.\"\n\n\"No. We're going to figure it out. We always do.\"\n\n<Rush?>\n\n<Hmm?>\n\n<There's someone here.>\n\nRush immediately turned around to check the rear. \"If there was a Fazurk behind me, I think I'd know.\"\n\n<No. Not behind.>\n\n<Then in front of us? Because I see them come and go.>\n\n<Not a Fazurk.>\n\n<There's someone else here?>\n\n<Yes. They're pressing against my mind.>\n\n<Is it Cora?>\n\n<No. Her mind feels different.>\n\n<Push back.>\n\n<Every time I try, they retreat. They are trying to feel my mind without being felt in return.>\n\n<Maybe try talking to them?>\n\n<I will.>\n\n\"What's going on?\" Bridge asked, recognizing the look on Rush's face.\n\n\"He says there's somebody here\u2014and not a Fazurk.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Bridge asked. \"Can they help us?\"\n\n\"I don't know. It's clear they don't trust Flare because every time Flare pushes back, they retreat. They are trying to feel us out.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026I think this is good news.\"\n\n\"At least we know we aren't alone.\"\n\n\"Hold on a sec.\" Bridge dropped his gaze. \"That whole talking with your minds thing\u2026isn't that something only dragons can do? Well, except for Cora.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So, does that mean\u2026there's a dragon here?\"\n\n\"It's possible. But I doubt it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I never knew these Fazurks existed until now. They must have breached the mountain from the north, a place inaccessible to Anastille except by flight. So, if they exist\u2026what else could exist? We've only scratched the surface. Plus, dragons don't live underground.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's right.\"\n\n\"I don't know whether they're friend or foe\u2026and I wouldn't make any assumptions.\"\n\n<I introduced myself\u2014but I was met with silence.>\n\n<Not sure if that was a good idea or not\u2026but it is what it is.>\n\n<Why would it be a bad idea?>\n\n<Because our enemy could know exactly who's inside their mountain.>\n\n<Whoops.>\n\n<We're probably going to die anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter.> \"Alright, you guys ready for this?\"\n\nAll equipped with swords, they stayed in the rear, doing their best not to look like cornered rabbits.\n\n\"Just stay behind me.\"\n\nThey snuck past the large cavern where the Fazurks waited for their meat to finish its roast over the fire and entered the tunnel just to the left. It was a long cave with a curve at the end, and there was noticeable light coming around the bend.\n\n\"Sunlight?\" Bridge whispered.\n\n\"Probably firelight.\" Rush took the lead with his sword gripped at his side, sticking to the wall toward the inner curve. He crept closer and closer and poked his head around the side. It was quite the view, a large cavern that extended far above his sight in the cave. A wooden bridge crossed a chasm, scaffolding was all along the walls, large stone bowls with enormous fires all along the bridges and the walls. But what he noticed was the light shining down from above.\n\nSunlight.\n\n<You see that?>\n\n<Yep.>\n\n<So close.>\n\nFazurks marched everywhere, from one side of the bridge to the other, all throughout the cavern that led to the opening somewhere at the top of the mountain.\n\n<If the opening is large enough, I can fly us out.>\n\n<I doubt it's big enough, Flare. It's probably an opening they created themselves.>\n\n<I can still burn as many of them as I can.>\n\n<But if you burn the bridges, we'll never escape.>\n\n<So, you intend to run all the way there?>\n\n<You got a better idea?>\n\n<Guess not.>\n\n\"What's the plan here?\" Lilac joined the circle, the only one looking reasonable with a dwarf-sized sword in her hand.\n\nRush gave a shrug. \"Run.\"\n\n\"That's your brilliant plan?\" Lilac asked. \"Run?\"\n\nLiam glanced behind him. \"I hear footsteps.\"\n\nNow the adrenaline kicked in because this was really about to happen, and some of them wouldn't make it to the top\u2014or any of them. \"There's sunlight, so there's got to be an opening somewhere. We run across the bridge and make our way to the top.\"\n\n\"With a bunch of Fazurks chasing us?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"If there's room, Flare will emerge and burn them while you escape,\" Rush said.\n\nBridge shifted his gaze to his sister. \"You don't leave my side, alright?\"\n\n\"Oh, come on,\" she said. \"You're just as useless as I am.\"\n\nLiam turned back to the group. \"They're gonna hear us any minute. It's now or never.\"\n\n\"This is suicide,\" Zane said. \"But at least it'll be a good story\u2026if anyone lives to tell it.\"\n\nBridge turned to Rush, his eyes sad, his smile forced.\n\nRush ignored his look and started to run.\n\nFlare fused their minds deeper together, an electrifying connection that allowed Rush to see the landscape better than with his sight alone. He could see behind him, on the side past his regular peripheral vision. The entire cave was mapped out.\n\n<Guide me.>\n\n<Across the bridge.>\n\nRoooooaaaaaar!\n\nOne by one, the Fazurks released their howls, erupting all around them in a violent protest. The sounds echoed in the cavern, back and forth against the walls like a bouncing ball, amplifying the sound until anything else could scarcely be heard.\n\n<Left.>\n\nRush made it across the bridge and turned away from the Fazurks coming from the other directions. He lost his footing running so fast but pushed himself upright again, his palms covered in dust from the floor.\n\n<Climb up this scaffold.>\n\n<I can go straight.>\n\n<Do it!>\n\n\"Climb up.\" He grabbed Lilac first and tossed her up so she could grab the bar. \"Go.\"\n\n<Hold them back.>\n\nRush unsheathed his sword with a burst of energy, the power of the dragon in his veins. The Fazurks were two feet taller, several times bigger in size, and had teeth that could cut through his bones. But he swung his blade with the strength of ten men and sliced the head clean from its shoulders.\n\nThe Fazurks stopped.\n\nTheir teeth broke through their jaws a moment later, along with their screams.\n\n<I will tell you when to run.>\n\nThe first rushed at him, coming at him with bare hands and claws.\n\nRush sidestepped the attack, swiped the blade clean through both wrists, and then kicked him aside. The Fazurk tumbled over the edge, screaming as he fell to the ground below. <I wouldn't be able to do this without you.>\n\n<I wouldn't be free without you.>\n\nRush stabbed the next one through the stomach and then kicked the one that came for him, teeth first. Another head was sliced off the shoulders, the heavy body collapsing a moment later.\n\nDozens more came for him.\n\n<Run.>\n\nRush sprinted to the scaffolding and jumped as high as he could, reaching far higher than he would as just a man, and pulled himself up as quickly as he could.\n\nLilac and Bridge pushed a boulder over the edge and smashed the Fazurks hot on his tail.\n\n<Thanks, guys.>\n\nHe reached the top and grabbed on to Liam's and Zane's hands, who yanked him to the top of the scaffolding.\n\n<Push the scaffolding down.>\n\nRush sliced through the rope that bound it to the wall, the Fazurks climbing up the wood like spiders up a wall. Together, they all pushed, making it topple over and smash the Fazurks beneath it.\n\n<Right.>\n\n\"Let's go.\" Rush took the lead again, running along the wall to the next scaffold against the mountain.\n\nBelow them, a sea of Fazurks appeared, pouring out of the cavern from where they emerged, this time with swords.\n\nRush helped each one up the scaffolding and looked behind them, seeing them crawling up the walls with their bare hands. When he looked at the ceiling, he realized how far they had to go\u2014and there were more Fazurks on the way. <Man, that's a long way.>\n\n<I will get you there. Now, climb.>\n\nRush took up the rear, climbing up the wooden beams until his friends pulled him over the edge. The ropes were slashed, and they toppled it over like the other. \"We gotta slow 'em down. Push the rocks over the edge.\"\n\nThey worked together to push them over the edge, to smash the Fazurks down below and slow their pace just a bit. They smashed the first group of Fazurks then rolled over the next edge, getting a whole other layer below.\n\n<Keep going.>\n\nThey ran to the other side of the canyon, where the next scaffold was positioned.\n\n<Rush.>\n\n\"Come on, go.\" He stitched his fingers together and took Lilac's boot so he could shove her up to grip the bar. <What?>\n\n<They are coming from the top.>\n\nRush looked to the opening in the ceiling, catching glimpses of blue sky between enormous black bodies. They were flooding in from up top, like water from a faucet filling a basin. <That's the only way out of here\u2026>\n\n<I know.>\n\n\"Rush, come on.\" Bridge hung over the edge, his arm hanging down.\n\n<What are we going to do?>\n\n<I don't know.>\n\nRush started the climb, moving slower this time because there was no point. Whether they went up or down, their demise was guaranteed. <I can't let them die. We have to figure out a way.>\n\n<There's no room for me to fly or perch. And even if I could breathe fire, there's too many.>\n\nRush let Bridge pull him over, and he climbed to his feet.\n\nThey immediately sprinted to the other scaffold, oblivious to Fazurks pouring in from the surface.\n\nRush remained, listening to the sound of thousands of footsteps from the top and down below. The roars of the beasts, the sound of victory before their teeth sank into their flesh. His life had been long, too long, so death wasn't a hard pill to swallow. But the death of those he cared about\u2026would never fit down his throat.\n\n<Wait.>\n\n<You have an idea?>\n\n<Tell them to stop climbing.>\n\nRush sprinted to the other side of the cavern, getting to Liam before he climbed up. \"Hold on. Guys, come back down.\"\n\n\"What?\" Bridge asked. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Just do it!\" <What's your plan?>\n\n<Go straight.>\n\n<Go straight where? There's nothing but rock.>\n\n<Do what I say.>\n\nHe moved to the cliff face, seeing nothing but solid rock. It was so smooth, there was nothing to even grab on to. No way to climb. <Flare, what am I supposed\u2014>\n\n<Start knocking.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<They are coming.>\n\n<Who?>\n\n<Knock.>\n\nHe started to pound his fists into the rock.\n\n<More.>\n\n\"Guys, come on.\"\n\n\"Rush, is this a joke?\" Bridge grabbed him by the shoulder.\n\nRush twisted out of his hold and kept pounding. \"I don't have time to explain. Knock\u2014as loudly as possible.\"\n\nThey all moved to the wall and started to pound their fists.\n\n<Louder.>\n\n\"Louder!\"\n\nLilac slammed the hilt of her sword into the wall, and the others did the same to protect their hands. Rush slammed his palms into the rock over and over, the sound of their enemy growing louder against their backs.\n\nRush stopped to turn around, seeing the Fazurks sprinting at them like ants out of a hill. \"We're out of time.\"\n\n<No, we aren't.>\n\nThe wall vibrated and shifted, forming a sliding door that revealed a dark passageway. There was no sign of a secret door in the rock, just a flat surface, camouflaged so well that it would fool anyone.\n\n<Now, go.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Talc",
                "text": "The door shut behind them and locked into place.\n\nThe Fazurks screamed on the other side, their fists pounding against the solid rock that now separated them. The roars were still audible, just muffled. It took Rush a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness since Flare had withdrawn his abilities. \"What just happened?\"\n\n\"Follow me.\" A deep voice pierced the darkness. His outline became visible, several feet shorter than Rush and several inches thicker around the waist and thighs. He turned down the dark passageway, his footsteps leading the way.\n\nBridge reached for Rush's arm in the darkness. \"Is that a dwarf?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I think so.\" <You asked them to help us?>\n\n<No.>\n\n<So, you're saying they just offered?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<That was awfully nice of them\u2026>\n\nRush was the first one behind the dwarf, the passage so narrow and short that he had to crouch to get through most of it. His palms slid against the stone walls on either side of him for direction, so he wouldn't accidentally bump face-first into a solid wall. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Durir.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Durir.\"\n\n\"It wasn't me who saved ye.\"\n\n\"Where are you taking us?\"\n\n\"To the last Stronghold in the mountain.\"\n\n<Well, it sounds like we aren't prisoners.>\n\n<Even if we were, dwarven imprisonment would be preferable to a Fazurk meal.>\n\n<No kidding. That was close. I thought we were done for.>\n\n<We've survived worse.>\n\n<Why do people keep saying that? No, I'm pretty sure that was the biggest close call we've ever had.>\n\n<Ashe, King of Dragons, seemed intent on burning you to death.>\n\n<That guy is all talk.>\n\n*Grrrr.*\n\n<Respectfully, of course.>\n\nAfter maneuvering through the dark passageways, they finally came to a large cavern similar to all the ones they'd already seen, illuminated by the green stones that provided a glow to all the corners. It was a storeroom, with racks of bottles and canned foods, preserved meats and other items.\n\nDurir stepped aside until they all filed out before he gripped the handles jutting out of the rock, slowly rolling it into place and sealing the passageway. The rock thudded against the other wall, dust filtering from the ceiling, and then everything went still.\n\nRush stared at the sealed passageway. \"Am I the only one in shock right now?\"\n\n\"Nope.\" Bridge spun in a circle as he examined the contents of the room.\n\n\"I think the shock will hit me later,\" Lilac said. \"I felt so stupid knocking on that dumb wall\u2026guess it wasn't so stupid after all.\"\n\nRush moved to Durir. \"We saw all the bodies in the caves\u2026 We feared the worst. It's a relief to know we were wrong.\"\n\n\"Yer weren't wrong.\" In the light, his features were so distinct, with bushy eyebrows and a beard as thick as a rug. A pudgy face squished together with fat cheeks and full lips, it was exactly as Rush remembered from a very long time ago.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nDurir nodded to the next passageway and continued forward.\n\nRush followed, the rest of the gang behind him.\n\nThey emerged into another large cavern, a throne at the top of a rock slab. Wooden benches filled the room, most of them empty, with the exception of a few dwarves that enjoyed a pint in solitude.\n\nDurir continued, showing them a room full of bunk beds, some of them occupied, and then a large underground lake with a waterfall at the rear. That was where most of the dwarves were congregated, their feet in the water or their bodies floating. \"This is all we have left.\" He guided them back to the first room, the one with the throne, which was now occupied.\n\nThe throne wasn't taken by a king, but a queen. With thick red hair, blue eyes, and a stocky figure like all the other dwarves, she sat on the chair carved out of rock, runes etched into the surface.\n\nHer presence wasn't majestic or intimidating, not the way it was when he was in the presence of his own father, with Ashe, King of Dragons, or the elven kings throughout history. This ruler was as empty as the dark cave they'd just crawled through.\n\nHer blue eyes barely acknowledged them, like they weren't even there.\n\nDurir came to her side. \"Megora, Queen of the Stronghold.\"\n\nShe turned her gaze away. \"I am no queen. A queen has to be alive\u2014and I'm not sure what I am anymore.\"\n\n<Is this who you spoke to?>\n\n<No. It was a man.>\n\nRush stepped forward. \"My name is Rush\u2014\"\n\n\"I know your name, Rush Hawkehelm. You're a man who requires no introduction.\"\n\n\"Hope that's a good thing\u2026\"\n\nShe turned back, eyes still cold.\n\n<Or maybe not.> \"What happened here?\"\n\n\"The son of a king should be able to figure it out.\"\n\n<You told them who I was?>\n\n<Yes\u2014both of us. They didn't ask any questions.>\n\n<I'm so confused right now.>\n\nMegora continued. \"They came from the north, invaded our mountain like the plague, infested it like rats in the sewers of Anastille. Our mountain has never been breached in our history. We were unprepared. They came, slaughtered us. All we could do was save the few nearest us. We closed off the Stronghold, where we stand now, and have remained ever since.\"\n\nRush bowed his head. \"I'm sorry\u2026\"\n\n\"Our king made the hard decision\u2014and has since lost his mind to madness. I have taken his place despite my dissent. We're no longer a kingdom\u2014so there is no need for a ruler. We've remained here for years, living off what we have left in our storerooms, but for what reason, I do not know. Whether we perish now or later, what difference does it make?\"\n\nSilence crippled Rush as well as everyone else. The caves where they stood were haunted by the ghosts of the many dwarves that died so the few could live. \"Have you tried to escape?\"\n\n\"There's only one way out of this place\u2014as ye've seen yourself.\"\n\n\"And the Fazurks have taken it over\u2026\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed.\n\n\"That's what we call them,\" Rush said quickly.\n\nHer head turned, and her gaze glossed over. \"We're outnumbered a hundred to one. To attempt an escape is a promise of death.\"\n\n\"Why did you save us? You risked your position.\"\n\nHer hands remained on the arms of the throne, her short nails dark from the dirt that slipped underneath them. \"Whether they know we're here or not, they can't reach us.\"\n\n<You thought that last time.>\n\n\"And if they could, it doesn't matter. We're doomed anyway.\"\n\nRush studied her composure, seeing the lifelessness in every part of her body, not just her eyes. \"You didn't answer my question.\"\n\nShe turned her attention back to him.\n\n\"Why did you save us?\"\n\n<I feel them again.>\n\n<Here?>\n\n<Yes. They are close.>\n\nQueen Megora studied his countenance. \"Our world is underground, far away from the bickering of men and elves. You came to our shores and destroyed Anastille, and while we've remained unaffected by your conquest, it doesn't mean you're welcome in the Stronghold.\"\n\n<No surprise there\u2026>\n\n\"If you were anyone else, we would have left you to your fate. But you deserved to be spared.\"\n\n\"I did?\" Rush asked. \"Why?\"\n\nShe rose to her feet, still short despite the slab of rock that elevated her above the others. With her eyes on Rush, she came closer, taking the stairs one step at a time, regarding him like she knew him from an older time. \"Because you saved Talc\u2014my dragon.\"\n\nQueen Megora sat across from Rush at the table, pints of ale and canned food on the surface so everyone could eat. A fire was lit in the hearth, bringing warmth to the dark cave. \"When Flare shared his identity, she asked me to spare ye. The answer was no, of course. But then she shared her memories with me, the night when you came to the dungeon and freed three dragons.\"\n\nRush hadn't touched his ale or the food they offered. His hands remained on the table, and he stared at the cracks in the wood, the veins of the tree that was now long dead. With heavy breaths, he remembered that night vividly.\n\n<At least one escaped.>\n\n<Yeah.>\n\nQueen Megora studied him with intelligent eyes in heavyset cheeks. \"Are ye alright?\"\n\nRush gave a nod. \"Just\u2026a bit emotional. After I released them, pandemonium broke out. King Lux deployed his entire arsenal to retrieve them, and I feared what would happen once they were recaptured. I knew they would be worse off\u2026and that's consumed my nights as well as my days.\"\n\nThe blades in her eyes noticeably dulled.\n\n\"To know that at least one escaped is a huge relief. How did you find her?\"\n\n\"She crashed into the mountain\u2014a broken wing.\"\n\n<Shamans.>\n\n<I will burn them all.>\n\n\"She didn't want to come into the mountain, but she had no choice. The plan was to heal her broken wing then let her fly farther north. But then the Fazurks came\u2026and we had no choice but to fuse.\"\n\n\"So\u2026this assault just happened?\" Rush asked.\n\nQueen Megora gave a nod.\n\n\"What do you know about the Fazurks?\"\n\n\"They are orcs\u2014but not a kind we can identify.\"\n\n\"They must be from the north. But how did they pass through the mountains?\"\n\nHer blue eyes took on a vacancy. \"That's unknown. There are no paths through the solid rock. There's no way over or beneath. We know they're from the Shadow Lands, but we don't know how they passed through.\"\n\n\"The Shadows Lands?\"\n\n\"It's what we call the north.\"\n\n\"Why do you call it that? Have you been there?\"\n\n\"Everything we know has been passed down through the generations. But no living dwarf has passed the border in thousands of years, so it could just be folklore at this point.\" Her ale was untouched, her bushy hair pulled back into a braid down her back. \"Sunshine doesn't penetrate the clouds. It's a cold and dark place. It's not a land inhabited by civilized beings, but by things that live in the dark.\"\n\nRush grabbed his mug and took a deep drink. \"Sounds like the perfect place for those Fazurks.\"\n\n\"The Big Ugly\u2026\" Megora released a quiet chuckle. \"Aptly named.\"\n\n<Have you spoken to Talc?>\n\n<Not yet.>\n\n\"Why have the Fazurks penetrated the border now?\" It was a question more to himself than Queen Megora. \"Because crossing the border would be more work than it's worth\u2026unless they had a reason.\"\n\n\"There was no time to ask questions, Rush. We were too busy running for our lives.\"\n\n\"How did they break in to the mountain?\"\n\n\"By sheer numbers. Broke it down and passed right through.\"\n\nRush reached into his pocket and withdrew the folded piece of paper he'd found on the corpse of a fallen dwarf. \"I found this. You can return it to the rightful recipient\u2026if they're still alive.\"\n\nHer eyes scanned it quickly before she folded it once again. \"Bargora is no longer with us. But Rulan survives. I'll be sure to give this to him.\"\n\nRush nodded.\n\n\"What did you see?\"\n\nHe kept his eyes down.\n\n\"What did they do to my people?\"\n\nHe still couldn't lift his eyes. \"They fought to their last breath\u2026and there were no survivors.\"\n\nThe queen continued to pierce her stare into him, her pale face slowly filling with a flush that turned her cheeks red. Not rosy pink. But blood red.\n\n\"Are you the king's daughter?\"\n\n\"No. The royal line perished in the assault. I was elected by my people\u2014which is the first time it's ever happened in our history.\"\n\n\"How many of you remain?\"\n\n\"One thousand and twenty-three.\" Unlike most queens, she wasn't covered in diamonds and elegance. There were no distinguishing characteristics that elevated her status whatsoever. But the passion for her people gave her a distinct quality that separated her visage from all the rest.\n\n\"And how many perished?\"\n\n\"Seven thousand and eighty-four.\"\n\n\"Perhaps there are still survivors somewhere in the mountain. The cave system is extensive, and I suspect we only traversed a very small part of the territory.\"\n\n\"Even if that's true, we'll never know. We are not only separated by rock, but by beasts that roam our halls and claim it as their own. When their storage supplies deplete, they will perish\u2014just like us.\"\n\n\"Then you need to escape.\"\n\n\"One thousand against ten thousand?\" Her eyebrow arched high up her face, her deep voice taking a note of incredulity.\n\n\"I didn't say fight them. I said escape.\"\n\n\"The only way out of here is through that same passage from which ye arrived.\"\n\n\"Then how did you get all this stuff in here?\"\n\n\"A cavern. A cavern that we destroyed to keep them out.\"\n\n<She must escape. Not just for our sake\u2014but for Talc's.>\n\n\"Talc can't stay underground. Captivity has poisoned the mind of your king. It's snuffed out all your hope as well. Imagine how he must feel\u2014a creature of the sky.\"\n\nHer eyes immediately dropped.\n\n\"She can't stay here.\"\n\n\"Then where would she go?\" she asked. \"The second she's outside the mountain, she'll be hunted.\"\n\n\"I know a place where she'll be safe.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nRush kept her gaze as well as his silence.\n\nHer stare demanded answers, but she didn't press with her words. \"We have a few Durgin, but not enough for us to get away. And certainly not enough for us to defeat them.\"\n\n\"Durgin?\"\n\n\"Warriors.\"\n\n<Talc will fuse with Bridge, and we'll get her out of here when we depart.>\n\n<That could work.> \"When we escape, we'll take Talc with us. She'll fuse with one of us and then unfuse once it's safe.\"\n\n\"Escape?\"\n\n\"We can't stay here, Queen Megora.\"\n\n\"Ye'll have to. Because we can't open the passageway again. They'll be waiting for it.\"\n\nFlare's mind instantly changed, becoming bigger, thicker, like a rattlesnake uncoiling its body. The click from his throat was audible, like his lungs were about to light a fire that would consume them all.\n\n\"We aren't staying here.\" Rush bored his gaze into hers, the anger swelling under his skin, the rage tinting his eyes red. \"We're on a mission that can't be halted.\"\n\n\"I can't risk what we have left.\"\n\n\"You just said this isn't living\u2014just waiting for death.\"\n\n\"But it is still living. I have women and children in here. I already risked our safety by saving ye from the Fazurks, so yer request is full of entitlement and insensitivity. Be grateful that your lungs still draw breath.\"\n\n<I will burn each dwarf, one by one, until she changes her mind.>\n\n<Calm down.>\n\n<I will not. I will not stay here. I will not be a captive once again. I will not dwell underground without seeing the sky. I will not succumb to this torture\u2014>\n\n<Flare, I will get us out of here. I promise.>\n\nHis mind pressed to every corner of their consciousness, trying to break free from the anxiety, the fear, the desperation. The distress transferred from his mind to Rush's, along with all the terror, the pain, the memories.\n\n<I know you're scared.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<It's okay to be scared.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<But I will get you out of here. You will see the sky once again. You will feel the wind beneath your wings. Your scales will shine in the sun once more. I will not stop until I make it happen. Just give me some time.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Sacrifice of the Durgin",
                "text": "They lay down on their cots and settled in for the night, having some privacy in a secluded cave off the main path. Their bellies were filled with fresh food for the first time since they'd arrived in the mountains, and the ale gave a nice numbing effect behind the eyes and in the stomach.\n\nBridge leaned up against the wall beside him. \"I know she's just trying to protect her people and all that, but what's the point? Unless they know someone is coming to save them, they're just going to die anyway. They may as well try to get out of here, and if they don't, allow us to leave.\"\n\nFlare was still pressing against Rush's mind, but he was distant, just as he was when he was asleep. But he definitely wasn't asleep now. A barrier divided their minds, giving Flare both the solitude and silence he needed. The only time they were separated was in sleep, and a lot of the time, they chose to sleep at the same time. So, this separation was difficult, especially when he knew his dragon suffered. \"I agree.\"\n\n\"So, what are we going to do? Because dying in this mountain is not how my story ends.\"\n\n\"It's no secret that everybody hates me. But Talc convinced Megora to save me.\"\n\n\"Yeah. What's your point?\"\n\n\"I think she can convince Megora to let us go.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you're probably right,\" he said. \"So, let's do it. What are you waiting for?\"\n\n\"Flare.\"\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"He's\u2026inaccessible right now.\"\n\n\"Why? Did you piss him off?\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed. \"No. But thanks.\"\n\n\"Then what's going on?\"\n\n\"He's really worked up. Dragons aren't meant to be underground, and he's not handling it well.\"\n\n\"He handled it up until this point.\"\n\n\"But then Megora said she wouldn't let us go\u2026and that sent him over the edge.\"\n\nBridge gave a slow nod. \"Gotcha.\"\n\n\"So, when he comes around, I'll talk to Talc.\"\n\n\"What do you know about Talc?\"\n\n\"Honestly, nothing. But she saved me, so that's a good sign.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nEveryone else got into their cots and pulled the blankets to their shoulders. There was little warmth underground, and the longer they were away from the sun, the more their limbs started to frost.\n\n\"Did you try to talk to Cora?\" Bridge asked before he took a drink from his canteen.\n\n\"Still can't reach her\u2026\"\n\n\"Too bad. Because we could really use Callon's help right now.\"\n\nRush folded his arms over his chest as he crossed his ankles, his back propped up by the cave wall. \"Hmm, that's not a bad idea.\"\n\n\"What?\" Bridge twisted the cap onto the bottle then stowed it in his pack.\n\n\"If the elves helped us with the Fazurks, we could free the dwarves.\"\n\n\"But what's the point of that?\" He pulled his jacket out of his bag and put it on, the dampness in the air from the nearby waterfall bringing him a chill. \"There's only a thousand dwarves left. They aren't ideal allies anymore.\"\n\n\"But these mountains are huge. There could be others.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't they have helped us if they were there?\"\n\n\"Why? They have no obligation, unlike Talc.\"\n\nBridge gave a slight nod. \"It's a lot to ask of the elves. They come to fight for a chance there could be more dwarves? And let's not forget, they despise you.\"\n\n\"But they don't despise Cora.\"\n\nHe gave a shrug. \"It's still a long shot.\"\n\n\"If we help the dwarves now, and there are more, they'll be our allies later. It's called public relations. The dwarves have no investment in the happenings of Anastille, so we need to secure an alliance in some way. This is the way to do that.\"\n\n\"Rush, it's a long shot. A really long shot.\"\n\n\"But if I could make it work, we could accomplish exactly what we came here for.\"\n\nIt took Flare a day to come back to Rush.\n\nThey spent that time in the cave, keeping to themselves. Most of the dwarves didn't seem to be aware of their presence at all, but that would probably change once word spread that Queen Megora had granted asylum to a human.\n\n<I have an idea.>\n\n<I hope it's a good one.>\n\n<We talk to Talc\u2014and ask her to convince the queen. She convinced her to save us in the first place.>\n\n<Yes. That does make sense.>\n\n<So, patch me through.>\n\n<Hold on. I need to gain her permission first.>\n\n<Alright.>\n\nA couple minutes later, Flare returned. <I'll connect you. But I must warn you, she's feisty.>\n\n<And you aren't?>\n\nFlare ignored the taunt and connected their minds. <Talc, here's Rush.>\n\nIt was no different from speaking to Cora, but it felt like an entirely new experience. When he spoke with Ashe, it was a constant discomfort. It wasn't a natural feeling, not the way it was with Flare and Cora. It felt like an intrusion, like he was somewhere he didn't belong. <Thank you for saving us from the Fazurks.>\n\n<A scale for a scale.> Her voice was just as powerful as Flare's, just distinctly feminine. <My debt is repaid.>\n\n<Thank you, nonetheless.>\n\n<You saved a few of my brethren, but this doesn't forgive your cruelty. We are enemies as far as I'm concerned.>\n\n\"Damn, you weren't kidding.\" <I know this doesn't mean much to you\u2014>\n\n<Then don't speak it.>\n\n<I just want you to understand that I'm committed to freeing every dragon enslaved by my father.>\n\n<And what of the ones that have already died?>\n\nRush sighed.\n\n<The ones that died in their cages? The ones that were killed for refusing to be a pet?>\n\nHis mind shut down, as if wounded by a blade between the ribs.\n\n<Talc, I understand how difficult this is for you. There was a time in my life when I hated Rush as much as you do. But he's a good man\u2014on my honor.>\n\n<Perhaps we have different standards of good\u2014and yours is very low.>\n\n<Or I've just witnessed his character in a way no one else ever has. It doesn't matter where you start, but where you end up. He's risking his life to free all the dragons in captivity. He's prepared to kill his father if he refuses to surrender. He's our ally.>\n\nTalc ignored his words. <What do you want from me?>\n\n<To thank you. And also ask for your help.>\n\n<My debt is repaid. I owe you nothing\u2014not even this conversation.>\n\n<We need to get out of this mountain, and I'm sure you wish for that as well.>\n\n<And go where? There's no place in Anastille for free dragons. My scales will shine in the sun\u2014and those demons will spot me from a mile away. I was too weak to fight when I escaped, but I'm weak still.>\n\n<We have a place for you. A place where you'll be free.>\n\n<No such place exists.>\n\n<It does. Ashe, King of Dragons, lives.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<He's on a hidden island far out in the sea. The surviving free dragons live there\u2014in peace. I will take you there at the first opportunity.>\n\nThe silence continued.\n\n<I speak the truth, Talc.>\n\n<If free dragons survive, why are you here?>\n\n<Because I have to save the ones that remain behind. It's our duty. You've suffered enough, so you deserve to live in peace, if that's what you wish. But we can't accomplish that if we're stuck underground. You must convince Queen Megora to let us go.>\n\n<And how will I escape?>\n\n<You'll fuse with one of our men.>\n\nHer voice deepened, injecting venom into the air. <Never.>\n\n<Talc\u2014>\n\n<I'll fuse with a dwarf. Even an elf. But never a human. Humans are Shamans that don't hide their face.>\n\n<Not all humans are that way. You can trust us.>\n\n<I trust you\u2014but not him<.>\n\n<There is no other way to get you out of here. I give you my word that Bridge will allow you to unfuse whenever you wish. He's not like the men you're used to. I know that's hard to understand after thousands of years of captivity. But the world is changing. Men are changing. We're not the only ones who want King Lux off the throne. It's also elves. It's also men.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<The other option is to leave you here\u2014under the mountain. We can reunite you with your people, on a beautiful island that's far away from everyone and everything, and you can be free once more. But we can't do that unless you come with us.>\n\n<What if he won't allow me to unfuse?>\n\n<Then I'll eat him.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<You have my word, Talc.>\n\nAfter a long stretch of silence, her voice emerged. <If I escape with you, I may be forced into a fuse. I may die in the attempt to flee. But if I stay here\u2026I'll die under a mountain\u2026and not even leave behind my bones.>\n\n<I agree.>\n\n<Do you have a plan?>\n\n<Yes\u2014but I need your help.>\n\n<What do you wish of me?>\n\n<You must convince Megora to let us go. If that passage is the only way out of this place, we must take it.>\n\n<That is a terrible plan. You didn't make it out the first time. Why would you escape the second time?>\n\n<We'll figure it out.>\n\n<There're too many, Flare. And now they are watching. Without help, you'll have no chance.>\n\n<Perhaps you can convince her of that as well\u2014to help us.>\n\n<Unlikely. She already spared you because of me. I can't convince her to make another sacrifice\u2014at least not without something in return.>\n\n<I need you to try.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Our lives depend on it.>\n\nAnother stretch of silence passed. <I will do my best.>\n\nRush rubbed the towel over his hair to get the water out of the strands, tugging it back and forth to get the scalp to dry. They sat together at the edge of the dark pool, the rest of the dwarves clearing out the moment they approached the lake created by the waterfall in the rear. Rush shook out the towel to dispel the drops before he rolled it up to return to his pack.\n\n\"I miss bathing.\" Bridge did the same with his towel, wringing it in his hands so the moisture dripped onto the rock. \"I had my own bathroom\u2026until you came along.\"\n\n\"And I had my own castle\u2014get over it.\"\n\nFlare interrupted the conversation. <Queen Megora wishes to speak with us.>\n\n<Did Talc convince her?>\n\n<That was all she told me. Let's go.>\n\nRush closed his pack and left it at Bridge's side. \"Gotta go. Megora wants a word.\"\n\n\"Don't be a smartass, alright?\" Bridge said. \"Because we all want to get out of this black-widow paradise.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Rush left the cavern and returned to the room with the throne, finding the dwarf at one of the wooden tables with a pint of ale in front of her. Rush had never witnessed this level of casualness with anyone, not his father or the rulers of Eden Star. \"Don't like the throne?\"\n\nHer eyes looked over the edge of the mug as she took a drink. \"It's a rock. Very hard. And very cold.\"\n\nRush took a seat on the bench across from her, his pint already waiting for him.\n\nHer hand remained on the handle of her drink as she stared. \"Your request is denied.\"\n\nSmoke poured from Flare's nostrils, the fire in his stomach as well as his belly. Rush could feel it rather than see it, feel the rage his dragon struggled to contain. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because of the reasons I already gave.\"\n\n\"Your dragon wishes to be free\u2014and you deny her?\"\n\nHer intelligent eyes narrowed. \"That's not what I said\u2014\"\n\n\"Talc wishes to be free, and you're not allowing it. That's what I'm hearing.\"\n\nThe anger burned like a fire that had just received an extra log. Anger turned to rage. Embers turned to flames. \"She won't make it out of here. None of ye will.\"\n\n\"We have a chance\u2014if you help us.\"\n\n\"Help you? How?\"\n\n\"If you give some of your fighters, it'll give us a distraction long enough to escape.\"\n\n\"You expect me to sacrifice the Durgin I have left? I've always known men are selfish and entitled, but this reaches new heights.\"\n\n\"Megora, men, elves, and dwarves all have the same beliefs. Some will die so others will live.\"\n\n\"You aren't one of us.\" Blue eyes flicked back and forth, cheeks red with the strain of her anger. \"I will not sacrifice my people for you.\"\n\n\"No one knows the dwarves are compromised. No one is coming to save you, Megora. Your people will die of starvation or cannibalism, waiting for aid that will never come. But if you help us escape, I can help you escape later.\"\n\nThe beer was neglected entirely, put off to the side.\n\n\"Talc and Flare alone can extinguish them from the skies.\"\n\n\"What about the ones deep underground? You can't help us.\"\n\n\"No. But I can send people who can.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Her arms rested on the table, and she leaned forward. \"Men don't care about anyone but themselves. They will not come.\"\n\n\"I will ask the elves.\"\n\n\"The elves?\" She sat back slightly, the word like poison on her tongue. \"They're just as reclusive as men, and they have no reason to help us.\"\n\n\"They're preparing to take on King Lux. They need as many allies as they can get for the war about to ensue. Help me escape, and I will return with the elves to liberate you, to cleanse the invaders from the mountain you call home. In exchange, you will fight with us.\"\n\n\"That's two favors for the price of one\u2014I know my math.\"\n\n\"Bringing an army to rid the plague that's infested your mountain is more than the equivalent of two favors. You know numbers, but I know what those numbers are worth.\"\n\nMegora turned quiet, her long nails tapping against the wooden table between them. \"I've lived under this mountain for a long time, indifferent to the happenings of Anastille, but I'm not stupid. The elves hate men as much as they hate dragons. And you're telling me General Rush can just march into their forest and call for aid?\"\n\n\"Well, it wouldn't happen like that. I have a powerful ally among the elves. She can make it happen.\"\n\n\"But there's no guarantee.\"\n\n\"Nothing in life is guaranteed. But I promise you, I will do everything I can to make this happen.\"\n\n\"And if the elves deny your request?\"\n\nRush gave a shrug. \"I'll figure out another way. Flare and I can do a lot of damage just from the air. Lure them aboveground and torch them to smithereens.\"\n\nHer eyes were a striking blue but seemed to be covered with a permanent film of dust. Dirt from the rocks. Grime from the mold adhered to the surfaces. Slightly green from the stones that illuminated the caves. \"I'm putting our fate into your hands, Rush. Do you understand that?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"You're asking me to trust you, when the entirety of human history has proven how untrustworthy you are.\"\n\n\"I'm not like them\u2014anymore.\"\n\n\"I can ask the few Durgin we have to sacrifice themselves in the hope that you return with the forces we need to save the rest of us. But do you understand the weight of that request? I'm asking my men to literally die for yours.\"\n\n\"Either a few die now, or you all die later. Not to sound heartless, but that's your reality. I'm sorry.\"\n\nAfter a heavy stare with sagged shoulders, she gave a nod. \"I will grant your request.\"\n\n<Told you.>\n\nFlare released a sigh of relief.\n\n\"When can we leave?\"\n\n\"I must speak to the Durgin first. I will not order anyone to their deaths. It must be voluntary.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\n\"But it shouldn't take long to receive the answer.\"\n\n\"You'll need to unfuse from Talc so she can refuse with Bridge. Is there a cavern large enough for us to do that?\"\n\nA long stare ensued. \"Talc will not be going with you.\"\n\n*Grrrrrrrr.*\n\nRush sized up his opponent, realizing her presence was far bigger than her height. \"We already established that she can't stay here.\"\n\n\"It's the only leverage I have. If you don't find a way to free us, then you don't free Talc either. Consider it motivation.\"\n\n\"I don't need motivation. You already have my word.\"\n\n\"Not good enough. If you truly intend to free us, then Talc staying behind a little longer shouldn't matter.\"\n\n<She is cunning.>\n\n<I have a different c-word in mind.>\n\n<But she's strategic. She knows the dragons are our priority. We will fight much harder for her than any of the dwarves. I'm angry\u2014but I also respect her wisdom.>\n\n\"We have a deal, General Rush?\" Her eyes studied his face, as if she was aware of the conversation going on inside his mind, because she had her own conversation occurring at the exact same time.\n\n\"It's just Rush.\" He swallowed the disappointment and pushed on. \"And yes, we have a deal.\"\n\n\"Am I the only one who doesn't think that's vile?\" Lilac leaned against the wall, one arm propped on her knee. A meager dinner was in front of her, stale bread, assorted cheeses, and a pint of ale\u2014a traditional Dwarven feast. \"How is she any different from King Lux?\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Bridge was against the opposite wall, his fingers tearing the hard bread apart so it was easier to chew on.\n\n\"I don't like it either,\" Rush said. \"But it is different.\"\n\nLiam cocked his eyebrow in disbelief. \"How?\"\n\n\"A ruler will do anything for her people.\" Rush gave a shrug. \"And that's exactly what she's doing.\"\n\n\"If the positions were switched, you wouldn't do such a thing.\" Bridge got a piece into his mouth, slowly chewing because the chunk was so stiff.\n\n\"I'd like to think so\u2026\" His eyes dropped. \"But we know my track record. And Talc doesn't seem to feel oppressed. When we spoke with her, she seemed content with the fuse. It still appears consensual, in a complicated way.\"\n\n\"So, how's this going to happen?\" Lilac said. \"Some poor dwarves run out there and get eaten while we book it?\"\n\nBridge's fat cheeks stilled for a moment, disgust moving across his face.\n\nRush kept his eyes down in shame. \"Yeah, I guess. It's voluntary, so there may be no dwarves at all. If that's the case, then\u2014\"\n\n\"Rush.\" Queen Megora approached, stepping into their enclave, her petite frame casting a long shadow on the wall from the lantern behind her. Her red hair was clipped back, her boots were scuffed and worn, her jacket wrinkled from the constant dampness in the air. But she still had the presence of authority.\n\nRush pushed off the wall so he could get to his feet, abandoning the meal that he hadn't touched.\n\nHer blue eyes focused on his face, hot with open hostility. \"You have five Durgin.\"\n\nSheer surprise moved into his expression\u2014because he hadn't even expected one. \"Five? That's\u2014\"\n\n\"An incredible sacrifice. I explained that if we free you, you will return with forces to eradicate the parasites that have infected our mountain, which will give the dwarves another chance to reclaim our home. These dwarves lost their families in the conquest\u2014and welcome death.\"\n\nSpeechless, Rush stood there, unable to offer remorse or gratitude.\n\n\"The exodus will ensue at nightfall.\"\n\n\"We're doing this tonight?\" Rush asked in surprise.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You know night and day when you're in here?\" There were no cracks in the rock, nor hints of sunlight anywhere in the Stronghold. It was perpetual twilight, a gentle glow that mirrored starlight coming from the rocks stuck to the caverns like moss on a tree.\n\n\"With fire, the Durgin will run into the mountain, and like the dogs they are, the invaders will follow. That will be your opportunity to escape.\"\n\n\"We'll be going against the herd. I don't see how it'll be possible for us to escape.\"\n\n\"Because you'll climb.\"\n\n\"Up the scaffolding?\"\n\n\"No. Straight up the wall.\"\n\n\"Like spiders?\" His eyebrows jumped up on his face.\n\nShe wore no hint of amusement. \"Dwarves are excellent climbers.\"\n\n\"You're going to have to give us a few pointers, then.\"\n\nQueen Megora turned to the dwarves standing behind her. After she gave a nod, they came forward and presented apparatuses. They appeared to be metal vambraces but were only solid on the posterior side. Three distinct circles were fused to the metal, and inside those circles were three bright green spots, plump like pillows. The second piece looked like a metal shoe, with the green pillows on the heel of the foot as well as the toe. \"Climbers. We've used them for centuries to scale the inside of caverns as we continue building our infrastructure. A dwarf has never fallen in our history\u2014not with these.\"\n\nRush took one and examined it, eyeing the green material inside the ring. \"What is this?\"\n\nBridge pressed it into the wall beside him, and when he let it go, it hung there. \"Neat.\" He grabbed it to tug it down, and his hand slipped because the hold was so strong. \"Whoa\u2026\" He tried again, using both hands to yank it off, but nothing worked. \"I can see why no one has ever fallen\u2026\"\n\nQueen Megora's stocky arms remained at her sides as she watched Bridge with a look that was borderline bored. \"Twist.\"\n\n\"What?\" Bridge turned back to her.\n\n\"Twist. The sponge will release.\"\n\nBridge did as she instructed, and effortlessly, it came free with a quiet pop.\n\nRush tested it out himself against the wall, hearing the popping noise over and over.\n\n<Fascinating.>\n\n\"Did you find these sponges in the Stronghold?\" Rush asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Queen Megora said. \"They can only be found deep underground, near sources of water. They're long-lasting and highly durable. I suggest you spend the day practicing.\" The longer her stare lingered, the colder it became. \"This sacrifice can't be in vain. It's the first time my people have felt hope\u2014and you'd better not take that away.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Blood, Flesh, and Bone",
                "text": "The rock was still in place, blocking the path to the tunnel that led to the outside cavern. The torches on the walls were lit, giving the place greater illumination than it'd ever had before. The color of the rock was distinct now, along with the shine of moisture that clung to all the surfaces. Rush's heart would normally be pounding like a drum, like it always did when he was on the precipice of something big. But this time, it was still like a shallow river. This time, it was lifeless, like this very mountain.\n\nThe Durgin were lined up near the opening, dressed in the thick armor of the dwarves, an image of their mountain as a crest on their chests. Axes were over their backs, along with swords. Little blades protruded from their belts. Their helmets were solid metal, covering so much of their face, it was unclear how they could see anything besides what was directly in front of them. They were about to march to their deaths, but they were so still and calm that it seemed like they had other plans. They didn't breathe heavily. There wasn't a drop of fear in their eyes.\n\n<I've never known anyone so brave.>\n\n<Nor have I.>\n\nOther dwarves stood at the entrance to the cavern, silently saying goodbye to the Durgin that would die now so they could live later.\n\nQueen Megora walked up to each one and spoke to them in Dwarvish. It seemed to be a saying because she said the same words to each and every one of them. Her hand went to each of their shoulders as she passed, letting it linger for a few seconds before she continued forward.\n\n<I feel like shit.>\n\n<As do I.>\n\n<We shouldn't have come here.>\n\n<We had to come, Rush. We're the villains now\u2014but we will return as heroes.>\n\nThe rock was rolled to the side\u2014and the pathway was revealed.\n\nThe Durgin held up their torches, and as the rest of the dwarves broke out into a somber song, Queen Megora lit each one.\n\nOne by one, they stepped into the passage.\n\nInstantly, Rush's words came out, audible over the song, just before the last Durgin left. \"Thank you\u2026\"\n\nSlowly, a Durgin turned and regarded Rush, the torch held high over his head. Eye contact ensued, dark eyes hidden beneath bushy eyebrows. It lasted for seconds, a contact so powerful that it went deeper than flesh. \"Save my people. Save the Stronghold. That is the only gratitude I need.\" He followed behind the others and disappeared inside the passage.\n\nDurir stayed at the entrance and watched them move down to the other end, one hand on the handle of the rock, prepared to roll it back into place if the Fazurks managed to get inside.\n\nThey all waited\u2014the song filling the cavern.\n\nRush felt the weight of the Climbers on both of his arms, even in his feet despite the fact that they were against the earth. His ears focused hard to listen over the song, to hear the rock rolling back into place at the end of the passage.\n\nDurir must have gotten a signal from the other end because he ushered Rush and the others forward.\n\n<We will be one for this.>\n\n<Yeah, I need it.>\n\nThe song stopped, and the dwarves stared.\n\nIn heavy silence, they filed into the passage. When Rush passed Queen Megora, they shared a look.\n\nA long look.\n\nCrouched down, Rush entered the passage first, followed by the others. The burning torch the dwarf held illuminated the end of the passage and guided them forward. When Rush made it there, he felt it.\n\nThe drumming of his heart.\n\nThe dwarf grabbed the handle and prepared to roll it aside. \"Take the wall directly to the side of this entrance. When you can't go any farther, there will be a path that can take you to the opening.\"\n\nRush nodded.\n\nThe dwarf rolled the rock to the side and revealed the dark cavern.\n\nLike a horde of spiders, the Fazurks sprinted to the cave that led deeper into the mountain, their roars and cries shaking the walls of the mountain. There was a torch down below\u2014where one dwarf had already perished.\n\nRush swallowed.\n\n<We don't have time for this, Rush.>\n\nRush hopped out of the passageway and waited for everyone else to be free. \"Start climbing.\"\n\nThe rock rolled back into place, sealing the surface like the door hadn't been there in the first place.\n\nEveryone pressed their Climbers to the wall and began to go, twisting their limbs every time they needed to pull free from the surface.\n\nRush remained behind, giving them a head start so he could guard the rear. The Fazurks continued to run into the cave like dogs chasing a thrown stick. Their animalistic instincts were too much and overcame their logic. They could have checked the entrance they had previously discovered, but the blood lust was just too much.\n\nRush didn't even need to linger, but he watched them pour inside, all murderous and vile.\n\n<We will kill them all.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<But not tonight. Hurry.>\n\nRush jumped high onto the wall, caught himself with the Climbers, and used his connection with Flare to scale the mountain at a speed no other man could replicate. He caught up to the group then passed them. Like ants on the wall, they were unnoticeable, blending into the darkness, the popping noises masked by the shouts of blood lust from down below.\n\nIt was a challenging climb, and by the time they reached the top level, they were out of breath, their palms sticky, their shirts sticking to the sweat on their backs. One by one, they collapsed on the path and caught their breaths.\n\nRush removed the Climbers from his body and quickly stowed them in his pack. His eyes were on the opening on the other side of the cavern, Fazurks still running inside, far fewer than before.\n\n<Why are so many outside the mountain?>\n\n<No idea.>\n\n<We didn't see any on our journey here\u2014just a bunch of goats.>\n\n<Those assholes\u2026don't remind me.> \"Guys, up. We gotta keep going.\"\n\nTheir gear was stowed, and they were on their feet once more.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Bridge asked. \"We can't sneak past them. I mean, there's too many.\"\n\n\"All I have to do is get outside,\" Rush said. \"Flare can burn them all.\"\n\n\"What about the Shamans?\" Bridge asked. \"They'll see.\"\n\n<They will see.>\n\n<Ugh. I feel like every day has been the worst day of my life lately.> \"We don't have a choice. I run out, they chase me, I burn them to ash. When they're distracted, make a run for it.\"\n\n\"How will we find one another again?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Make a fire. I'll see you from the sky.\"\n\nBridge dragged the back of his wrist over his forehead, catching all the sweat that beaded on his face from the climb. \"I don't have a better idea, so let's do it.\"\n\nRush took the lead, sticking to the wall as he approached the entrance, the Fazurks too distracted by the chaos below to peer into the shadows. When he was close, he crouched down, hidden behind an outcropping of rock. <Ready?>\n\n<I've always liked charred meat.>\n\nRush stared at the path, waiting for a distinct break between the Fazurks so he could sprint to the surface. They continued to pour inside, usually in groups of a dozen.\n\n<In three seconds.>\n\nRush righted himself, and when the last Fazurk in the group passed, he sprinted.\n\nHe ran up the path and breached the surface, the nighttime sky greeting him like an old friend. The stars filled the wide expanse of darkness, twinkling lights in the eternal space. Fresh air hit him, a cleanse to his lungs.\n\nFlare inhaled a slow and deep breath, the tension ebbing away.\n\nThe oncoming Fazurks roared.\n\n<Take it away.>\n\nRush felt his body change, felt the wings explode out of his back, the talons erupt through his fingertips. Rage ripped through him. Vengeance. Blood lust. Mania. The ground disappeared, and the stars became brighter as they reached for the sky. The air whipped under his wings, the breeze soothed his scales, and the freedom made the fire in his lungs explode.\n\nFlare whipped around and glided over the entrance as the jet of smoldering fire escaped his open mouth. A stream of deep red flames illuminated the night as it scorched the earth and everything that stood there a moment ago.\n\n<Burn.>\n\nFlare steadied himself in place and continued to release the flames from his lungs, burning the entire line of Fazurks, scorching all the ones that inhabited the surface. Then he flew to the entrance of the cave and burned that too. Fish in a barrel, there was nowhere for them to go. Their hides caught fire, and the screams that pierced the night could be heard from every corner of Anastille.\n\nThe scaffolding caught fire and toppled over. Bodies collapsed but remained on fire. What was once the bottom of a cavern was now a lake of fire.\n\n<Okay, that's enough.>\n\n<It is never enough. I'm a dragon\u2014and I burn.>\n\n<Let's not forget that Shamans have undoubtedly seen this spectacle and they're headed this way now.>\n\n<I will not change back.>\n\n<Flare.>\n\n<No.>\n\n<If I could give you more time, I would. If we could stay in this form the whole time, that would be far more beneficial than me running everywhere. But they'll see you. Come on, Flare.>\n\n*Grrrrrrrr.*\n\n<When I can, I'll give you all the time you want.>\n\nFlare glided to the bottom then hit the earth.\n\n<Trust me, I'm so over running everywhere and getting into fights with mountain goats.>\n\nFlare released his hold, and they changed back, Rush back in control. Corpses burned around him, the light so bright it was a beacon to anyone who was awake at that time of night. <Just gotta find the others.>\n\n<They can't be far.>\n\nRush navigated around the dead. When his boot caught fire, he shook it off and extinguished it. \"Bridge!\" He cupped his mouth and called into the night. There was no call in return, so he climbed up one of the rocks to get a better view. <Where are they?> He stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled, not seeing a bonfire in their vicinity. The sky was smoky with bits of hot ash flying everywhere, so visibility was poor. <You didn't burn them too, did you?>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Flare?>\n\nHis hair prickled, standing on end along the back of his neck and his forearms.\n\nThen the sky went dark\u2014for just a moment.\n\nThe stars were blocked by something massive.\n\n<Shit.> He slid down the rock back to the earth and caught himself on his palms.\n\n<Thud.>\n\nWith his back to the rock, he remained crouched down, his ribs the drum and his heart the pedal. With his breath held, he waited. He waited for the announcement that he dreaded. He waited for the emotional onslaught.\n\n\"Doubt my parenting skills\u2014but I did not raise my son to hide like a coward.\" Deep like the very center of the lake, his voice was full of the long years he lived, of someone who had lived long enough to see regimes rise and fall over many lifetimes.\n\nWith his eyes closed, a sigh escaped Rush.\n\n\"You're the son of a king.\" His voice became louder as he drew closer. \"Show your face.\"\n\nHe shook his head as he seethed through his clenched teeth. \"A king? More like a tyrant.\"\n\n<Rush, I'm here.>\n\nHe straightened his body and stepped out from behind the rock, the landscape still ablaze from the damage Flare had caused. The smell of burning Fazurks gave the air a repugnant stench\u2014perfect for the occasion. Stars that were once visible were now veiled by a sky of smoke.\n\nIn his full black armor with his cape blowing in the breeze behind him stood King Lux. The blue eyes were identical. The hard line of his jaw uncanny. The same blood that pumped through his heart pumped in Rush's. Intelligent eyes shifted back and forth as he regarded his son from the distance, specs of ash floating in the air around him. \"No need to flatter me, son.\" A smile broke through the intensity of his stare\u2014packed with arrogance.\n\n<We have no armor. We can't fight him.>\n\n<I don't think I have a choice.>\n\n<Flee.>\n\n<A temporary solution. Very temporary.>\n\nKing Lux stepped forward, his boots audible against the stone. His sword remained sheathed, but his hand dangled close, ready to draw. \"This madness ends now. Return, and I will grant you mercy.\"\n\nRush gave a slight shake of his head. \"Nah, I'm good.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed instantly, his hand giving a slight flinch toward the pommel of his sword. \"You may be my son, but my patience is limited.\"\n\n\"So is mine\u2014and I lost my patience for you a long time ago.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed even further, his smile gone as well as the arrogance. \"You served me for thousands of years. You kept peace in Anastille. You were a general who made your king proud. And you were a son who made his father proud.\"\n\n\"Killing innocent people and enslaving an innocent race makes you proud? Those are your requirements?\"\n\nHe took another step, his boot crunching into the dirt.\n\n\"I hope you hate me, then\u2014because I hate you.\"\n\nHis stoic face remained impassive, as if he didn't hear a word. \"You plot to overthrow me? You have no chance\u2014\"\n\n\"Really? Because you look pretty scared right now. Searching the skies for me. Leaving High Castle and doing the grunt work yourself because everyone else has failed to catch me. You must feel threatened to get off your ass like this.\"\n\nHis fingers gripped the pommel, and he withdrew the sword from the scabbard, the blue scales singing against the steel as it emerged. \"A father should never outlive his son. Nor should he have to execute him.\"\n\n\"You know, there's a third option\u2026\"\n\nHis blue sword hung at his side, his fingers squeezing the handle through his black gloves.\n\n\"I'm just as guilty as you are. I've committed atrocities I can never take back. No amount of remorse will pay for the blood I've spilled. But we can end this now. We can release the dragons and give them the freedom they deserve. We can start over.\"\n\n\"If dragons were fit to rule, they wouldn't have handed me the throne. If dragons were meant to be anything more than servants, they wouldn't have handed me the keys to their kingdom.\"\n\n\"You've been fused with Obsidian all this time\u2014and you feel nothing for him?\"\n\nThe king's eyes remained fixed in place\u2014empty inside.\n\n\"Then you must feel nothing for me too.\"\n\n\"The only reason you're alive is because I allow it.\"\n\nRush released a drawn-out sigh. \"That's sweet, Dad\u2026\"\n\nHe moved forward again, the distance between them starting to close. \"I can't allow this to continue. Surrender.\"\n\n\"You're the one who needs to surrender.\"\n\nHis fingers gripped the pommel noticeably tighter. \"I've fought to wound\u2014never to kill. But that's about to change.\"\n\n\"Yeah, me too.\"\n\n<Careful.>\n\nRush bottled his temper. \"We don't have to fight to kill\u2014if you just let this go.\"\n\nHis deep voice rumbled. \"Perhaps you haven't thought this all the way through. Because if we release our dragons, we die.\"\n\n\"And we will die as father and son\u2014in peace.\"\n\nHe gave a subtle shake of his head. \"I deserve to live forever. I took that immortality and claimed it as my own. I won't give it up\u2014not for anyone.\"\n\n\"Really? Because I think it's overrated.\"\n\n\"You just don't know how to live.\"\n\n\"I didn't know how to live\u2014but now, I do.\" He unsheathed his sword from his scabbard, stepped forward, and dragged the tip across the dirt, drawing a distinct line in the sand. \"The line is officially drawn. Your call. We can fight each other to the death\u2014or you can salvage what's left of this torn relationship.\"\n\n\"Our relationship has nothing to do with this\u2014\"\n\n\"It has everything to do with it. I'm your son\u2014and I've pledged my life to fixing all of your destruction. Free dragons are extinct. The elves are isolated in their forest. The dwarves have been overrun by monsters. Everything that made this world pure has been destroyed\u2014by us.\" He slammed his hand into his chest. \"If you feel anything for me, if family means a damn thing to you, you will join me.\"\n\nA long stare ensued.\n\n\"No man can be this evil.\" He threw his arm down. \"Come on, do the right thing here.\"\n\n\"I already am.\" He moved forward, taking several steps as he approached the line that separated them. \"You're too na\u00efve to understand what your king has accomplished, what your father has done for his family. Our world was on fire, and I saved us from ruin. The only reason you're alive, in more ways than one, is because of me.\" His boot stepped on the line and dragged across, dissolving it back into the dirt. \"I found us a new home. I saved our race from extinction. I've secured enough power that no one could ever oppose us again. You think I'm evil? If I surrendered our power, someone else would take it, and they would do the exact same thing. That's the nature of this world. That's the nature of all beings\u2014from elves to dwarves. I watched our world burn behind us as we sailed away, and as long as I'm living, no one can ever take anything from us again. I will live forever. I will rule Anastille forever. No one will change that.\" Once the dirt had been returned to what it was, he stepped back. \"You're the one who will join me. You've forgotten who you are. You've forgotten what you are. Because you're just like me\u2014blood, flesh, and bone.\"\n\nRush gave a shake of his head, all the blood draining from his heart and dumping into his stomach. There was no chance of reconciliation. There was no chance that they would coexist peacefully. Someone had to die. And even if it wasn't him, it was still the outcome he didn't want.\n\nHe changed the grip on his sword. \"I had a similar phase when I was young. Tired of living in the shade of my father's mighty oak, I became difficult. Disobedient. Headstrong. Insubordinate. That shared experience is the only reason my blade points at the ground rather than at your throat. I need to enlighten you. Your cause is hopeless. The dwarves are no more. And neither is Eden Star.\"\n\nThe drumming in Rush's chest stopped. His pulse went still. Everything went still.\n\nHis eyes shifted left and right, reading the words that King Lux projected on his face. \"General Noose and the Shamans have taken Eden Star. Your only allies are now my prisoners. As I said before, you have no chance.\"\n\nRush held his sword at his side, except his grip was weak. Despair. Betrayal. Fury. He felt it all at once.\n\n<Pretty.>\n\n<No\u2026>\n\n<He lies.>\n\n<Talk to her.>\n\n<I can't do two things at once. I need to be here with you.>\n\n\"You lost, Rush.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you. You can't breach the magic of their forest.\"\n\n\"I can when I know another way inside.\" The arrogant smile was back, coupled with despicable joy in his gaze.\n\n<Shit.>\n\n<How does he know?>\n\n<Like he'd ever tell.>\n\nA growl escaped Flare's throat. <He must burn.>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nKing Lux straightened his shoulders as his smile slowly faded. \"I will slay my own son\u2014if I must.\"\n\nRush felt new life enter his lungs. The world became clear. His vision expanded, seeing the entire topography of his surroundings, even behind his back where his eyes couldn't see. Adrenaline pumped into his heart. Strength filled his muscles.\n\nNow he noticed his father's features in greater detail, the subtle lines in the corners of his eyes from sun exposure, the enormous muscles of his shoulders and arms. The fuse had frozen him in time, making him just ten years older than Rush in bodily form. The man looked more like a brother than a father, but Rush didn't have the heart for either. His eyes swore an oath to deliver on his threat\u2014and take his life.\n\n<I want him dead. But we must flee.>\n\n<There's nowhere to go.>\n\n<He'll kill us both.>\n\n<Not if I kill him first.>\n\n<You have no armor.>\n\n<I don't need it.>\n\n<Rush\u2014>\n\nHis hand squeezed his sword so tightly he nearly yanked a tendon out of his hand. <I end this now\u2014and it's over for good.>\n\n<And if he ends us, it's also over for good.>\n\nKing Lux lunged, swinging his sword with the speed of the wind.\n\n<I'm sorry, Rush.> Flare came into being, launched into the sky, and beat his wings harder than he ever had.\n\nObsidian came into being instantly, as if King Lux already knew what would happen.\n\n<There's nowhere to go!>\n\n<You're outmatched, Rush. At least I have my scales.>\n\n<Obsidian is nearly twice your size.>\n\n<And I'm twice his speed.>\n\n<I can take him on the ground.>\n\n<You are thinking with fury\u2014not logic.>\n\nFlare flapped his wings and maneuvered, flying as fast as he could toward the Shadow Lands.\n\n<Where are you going?>\n\n<Hiding in the smoke.>\n\nThe wind had carried the smoke north, the only cover they had.\n\nObsidian was fast to follow, appearing in the smoke, his massive jaws opening wide then closing right on his tail.\n\n*Rooooooooaaaaaar!* Flare kicked him in the face with an enormous foot and got his tail free.\n\n<Go!>\n\nFlare beat his wings and maneuvered out of the way, diving down into the mist then jerking hard to the right.\n\n<He's not messing around this time.>\n\n<Neither am I.> Flare dived then flew back up, never staying in the same position for long, using the smoke cloud as cover. Without sun or starlight, his scales didn't reflect, and that shielded his red color a bit.\n\n<Cliiiiiiiick. Click. Click.>\n\n<We've got company.>\n\n<I can handle them.>\n\n<And Obsidian? We have to figure out an escape plan.>\n\n<The Shadow Lands?>\n\n<I don't know anything about that place.>\n\n<Neither does he.>\n\nA Shaman on a steed appeared in the smoke, headed right toward them, his open palm showing the fireball he was about to launch.\n\n<Move, move, move!>\n\nFlare dived again then soared fast, breaking through the edge of the cloud and emerging on the other side.\n\nObsidian was there, flying in place, his open mouth giving a direct view of the fire coming down the pipe.\n\n<He's corralling us like sheep.>\n\n<I'm no sheep.> He darted to the right and returned to the cloud, a Shaman whooshing by right across his face. <But he is.> He flew out the opposite side of the smoke and returned to the clean air, the surface of the mountain still ablaze with the corpses as fuel.\n\n<What's your plan?>\n\nAnother Shaman emerged in hot pursuit.\n\n<That's Shadow.>\n\n<How can you tell?>\n\n<I just can.>\n\nThe two Shamans were on their tail, and the fireballs began to launch. Flaming orbs of heat passed by in the darkness, the warmth passing across his scales like the force of the sun. They surrounded him in opposite directions, launching across the sky, almost hitting Flare a couple times.\n\n<Your plan sucks, Flare.>\n\n<Just trust me.> He continued to dodge the fire, flying low then high, outmaneuvering their throws like he knew exactly when they would launch.\n\n<Obsidian's above you.>\n\n<Yes. I see him.>\n\nObsidian beat his wings as he remained in place, and then his throat opened to launch his stream of fire.\n\n<If you don't do something right now, we're toast. No pun intended.>\n\n<Whether intended or not intended, now isn't the time for one.> Flare dropped down and flew directly beneath the blue dragon, dodging the line of fire and coming back up on the rear. Obsidian began to turn to face his assailant, but his bulky body slowed his movements. Flare seized the opportunity\u2014and bit down on his tail.\n\n*Rooooooooaaaaaaar!*\n\n<That's your brilliant plan?>\n\n<No.> Flare dodged out of the way again and went straight for a Shaman. His talons reached out, and he yanked the Shaman right off his steed, biting into his hand before the fire could form in his palm. <This is.>\n\nShadow launched his fireball to free his comrade.\n\nFlare released the Shaman and let him fall to the ground, his steed nowhere in sight.\n\nFlare dropped too, missing the burning fireball by just a few inches.\n\nThe fire soared overhead\u2014and hit Obsidian directly in the wing.\n\n*Roooooooaaaaaaar!*\n\n<Who's the sheep now? Baaaaaa!>\n\nThe enormous blue dragon toppled from the sky, unable to carry his massive weight with a broken wing, and he plummeted into the darkness.\n\n<Flare\u2026that was badass.>\n\n<Yes, I know. But we still have to deal with Shadow.>\n\n<What about the others?>\n\n<We'll come back for them.> Flare pounded his wings and took off, headed away from the Stronghold and to the valley.\n\n<Wait.>\n\n<Yes?>\n\n<He's wounded\u2026>\n\nFlare kept going.\n\n<I can kill him.>\n\n<Perhaps. But not with Shadow in the skies.>\n\n<Take out Shadow. Then we do this.>\n\n<Are you sure\u2014>\n\n<Yes.>\n\nFlare continued to fly, deliberating in his mind.\n\n<This is our chance, Flare.>\n\n<You don't have armor\u2014>\n\n<I don't need armor! Bastard took Eden Star. Took Cora\u2026>\n\nFlare continued to fly, but then he dropped down and turned around. <This means we must kill Ashe's brother\u2026>\n\n<He'll understand\u2026it's necessary.>\n\nThey entered the smoke once more, surrounded by a gray mist that was harsh on the lungs as well as the eyes.\n\n<Where are you, Shadow?>\n\nRush absorbed the landscape, his heart about to burst with adrenaline. The only break in the silence was the flap of Flare's wings in between his moments of glide. Minutes passed, and there was no sign of him.\n\nRush spotted him first. <He's behind you. Right on your tail.>\n\nFlare whipped around in a flash, pulling his wings flush against his body, and spun around to smack his enormous tail into the cloaked figure. Shaman and steed both gave a shriek before they were launched into the darkness.\n\n<Nice shot.>\n\nFlare dropped out of the cloud of smoke and opened his wings to catch his fall above the surface, eyes scanning for the enormous blue dragon with blood splashed on the rocks. Most of the fire had been quenched when all the flesh had been consumed, so the majority of them were pyres of smoke. But fires still burned in isolated camps. It lit the landscape\u2014and there was no large blue dragon.\n\nBoth scanned the area, eyes piercing the darkness for the shine of blue scales. Their eyes lifted to the skies in the direction of High Castle, searching for the dark silhouette as he retreated.\n\nThere was nothing.\n\n<He's changed into his human form so we can't find him.> Flare landed on the ground, his talons digging into the earth. Smoke and ash blew in the breeze, rising up with the flakes of embers.\n\nRush came forth, marching forward as he pulled the sword out of his scabbard. He gripped it by the pommel and held it at the ready, prepared to slice the blade across his father's throat and watch him drown in his own blood. \"And I'm the coward?\" He shouted into the smoke, into the darkness, spit flying from his mouth. \"Show your goddamn face so I can kill you! Come on!\" He advanced through the rocky terrain, his eyes scanning his surroundings, gripping his sword so tightly his knuckles burned. \"Fight me!\"\n\n<Rush.>\n\n\"Slay your son!\" Angry tears poured down his face, the veins in his temple trying to burst through the flesh that kept them in place. \"Do it!\"\n\nA gentle hand dropped onto his shoulder, strong fingers gripping him through his shirt.\n\nRush kept his eyes straight ahead, sucking the smoke into his lungs with every deep breath he took, his fingers loosening their grip on the sword. His eyes remained wet\u2014from the anger, from the smoke, from it all.\n\nAnother hand moved to his other shoulder, just as gentle.\n\nRush dropped the sword on the ground.\n\nBridge squeezed his shoulder once again. \"Come on\u2026let's go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Unkingly",
                "text": "Their silhouettes disappeared into the trees, but chaos ensued around her. The smoke in the air was so heavy that every breath drawn caused tired eyes to water, caused her seared throat to cough. Her sword lowered to her side, red like the flames that claimed Eden Star, and her fingers barely clung to the hilt. Her eyes remained on the place where General Noose had vanished, waiting for him to return even though she knew he was gone.\n\n\"Cora.\" Callon's strong hand gripped her shoulder and forced her in his direction, so she could see the wildness in his eyes. His forehead was still tense with wrinkles, incapacitated by the mental torture he'd endured before she'd intervened. One shoulder dropped lower than the other, and he carried himself as if physically wounded by a blade. But he had enough energy to scar her with his look. \"It is my responsibility to protect the queen\u2014not yours. You were supposed to stay hidden.\" Spit flew from his mouth, he was so livid, rage stabbing her face with every look and every word. \"How dare you\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm okay, Callon.\" Her hand went to his shoulder, her touch gentle instead of angry like his.\n\nHis eyes flicked back and forth.\n\n\"I'm right here. Still here.\"\n\nThe anger immediately receded back into his body. His fingers went limp at the same time.\n\n\"You trained me well, Tor-lei.\"\n\nHis eyes softened in a brand-new way, a way that had never happened before. An involuntary breath took him, the kind that made his eyes water, and not from the smoke. His fingers gripped her shoulder again, and he pulled her into an embrace. His arm locked around her back, and his other hand cupped the back of her head. His breathing grew heavy as he held her, squeezing her like he never wanted to let her go.\n\n\"I'm okay\u2026\" With her cheek against his chest, she rubbed his back.\n\nHe continued to hold her, embrace her longer than he ever had before. \"Rein-Lei-Vu, Sor-lei. It means\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what it means.\" Her eyes watered more\u2014and not from the smoke. \"Rein-Lei-Vu\u2026\"\n\nHe held her a moment longer before he pulled away and looked her over with eyes that had regained their command and hardness. But a slight smile formed on his lips. \"Between you and me\u2026that was pretty badass.\"\n\nA sudden laugh escaped her chest, his words completely unexpected.\n\n\"Callon.\" The Queen's harsh command destroyed the warmth of their moment, dunking them back into the harsh abyss. Eden Star was still aflame. The dead were at their feet. The forest cried in pain.\n\nCallon straightened himself before he faced her, hiding any sign of weakness or fatigue. \"What are your orders, Your Majesty?\" His sword was in his scabbard, his bow across his back, his arms rigid at his sides.\n\n\"Aldon has fulfilled his oath. I reinstate you as General of Eden Star. Secure the perimeter. Get the wounded to the infirmary. Heal the forest before we lose any more of it. Those are your orders\u2014now, go.\"\n\n<If he's doing everything, what is she doing? She is unkingly.>\n\n<You're back.>\n\n<I knew you would prevail, Hatchling.>\n\nCallon secured his hands behind his back as he addressed her. \"I will take the position\u2014but temporarily. When Eden Star has returned to its former peace, a new general will be elected.\"\n\nHer eyes widened immediately, her reaction forming quicker than she could sheathe it. \"It wasn't a request\u2014but an order.\"\n\n<She rules with fear, subjugation, and intimidation. We have a term for this. Wuzurk. In your tongue\u2014tyrant.>\n\nCallon remained with his hands behind his back, looking up at the queen as she stood on the blood-soaked stairs. \"Now is not the time for deliberation. Eden Star burns, and our people need us.\"\n\n\"Then go\u2014and don't make me ask a third time.\"\n\n<Wow\u2026okay. Is King Lux looking to be set up? Because I think I met his match.>\n\n<Unkingly.>\n\nCallon gave a slight bow then turned away.\n\nThe Queen's gaze shifted to her. Her green eyes were red like the fire that consumed the trees, and the anger burst forth with more strength than the volcanic eruption that took the Land of Ashes.\n\n<Bitch, don't look at me like that. I just saved Eden Star.>\n\nWith her eyes still on Cora, she spoke. \"And, General Callon?\"\n\nHe halted, his face tightening into a look of annoyance. He quickly concealed it before he turned around to face her once more.\n\nAfter a long stare, she dragged her sight off Cora to look at Callon. \"We will speak of this later.\"\n\nCallon took the lead, running back the way they'd come to the heart of the forest, where the market had once been, where the remains of the tree houses were now debris and ash on the ground. Infernos continued to consume the forest, fire now replacing serenity. Dead elves littered the ground, their open eyes reflecting the flames in the sky. \"The enemy is gone. Put out the fires. Help the wounded.\"\n\nHysteria subsided significantly once Callon appeared in his elven armor and gave out his orders. A group of elves ran to the base of one tree, and with their palms directly on the smoldering wood, they closed their eyes and focused.\n\nCallon joined them, reaching his hand above their heads to plant his palm against the bark. With his eyes closed, he did as they did.\n\nCora watched the canopy, and slowly, there was new growth. New bark replaced the charred pieces. New branches emerged to replace the ones on fire. Everything that the flame touched was ejected by the tree, dropped to the forest floor, where it could continue in an isolated burn until it was out of fuel.\n\nWithout instruction, she didn't know what to do, but she joined the group, her palm moving between bodies to find a surface she could reach. She closed her eyes and pushed her mind out, feeling the consciousness of the tree that burned alive. The touch used to be met with serenity, with the sound of water moving through the roots into the heart of the tree, with the breeze through the leaves.\n\nBut now, it screamed.\n\nShe'd performed the Skull Crusher on the Shamans, but their death was so swift she didn't feel it.\n\nBut this was a slow and painful death\u2014and she felt it all.\n\nShe urged the tree to grow, guided water from the earth into the roots, pushed it through the branches. Buds grew on the limbs then quickly became flowers and leaves. Branches fell around them, like a snake shedding its skin to make way for the new one.\n\nThen the screaming stopped.\n\nThe elves pulled away.\n\nCora looked up the bark into the branches, seeing that the tree didn't look the way it once had, that the limbs were too immature for the age of the trunk, that the branches were uneven on the two sides of the tree, because one side had been set aflame, while the other hadn't. It would take a long time for it to grow naturally, to look the way it once had.\n\nShe was disgusted.\n\nCallon launched into action and rounded up the elves he came across, telling some to work on the next tree, while he asked others to get the wounded off the ground so a burning branch wouldn't crush them.\n\n\"Cora!\"\n\nShe turned around and spotted the bright blond hair and blue eyes. Her hair wasn't in a perfect braid with flowers interwoven through the strands. Now, it was a mess\u2014and her eyes were red and blotchy. \"Are you okay?\" Cora ran to her friend and, without thinking, wrapped her arms around her in an embrace.\n\nPeony immediately reciprocated without hesitation. \"Yes, I'm fine. You?\"\n\n\"I'm good.\" Cora pulled away, the flames still rampant with destruction. \"Your dad?\"\n\n\"He's helping the wounded.\"\n\n\"Lia?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen her\u2026\"\n\n\"Hawk?\"\n\nThe question made her eyes shine even more, the thin film of moisture more noticeable. \"He's on duty at the front\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm sure he's fine.\" She blurted out the words without taking a moment to really consider them, whether she actually believed them or just wanted to make her friend feel better. But it was what she would want to hear from someone else.\n\nPeony gave a nod, her eyes still sad.\n\nCallon ran up to Cora. \"I need to head to the front. Put out the fires with the others\u2014that's your best contribution.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Cora said with a nod.\n\nHis hand went to her arm, and he pulled her close. \"Keep your sword with you.\" He spoke close to her ear, so Peony couldn't hear.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nWithout giving an answer, he dropped her arm and departed.\n\nNight turned into day. Day turned into night.\n\nOver and over.\n\nThere was no sleep for anyone, not when the forest remained a blaze. Elves worked together to save every tree they could, but unfortunately, some of them couldn't be spared. They fell\u2014turned into ash.\n\nOnce the fires were out, the dead were carried to the cemetery. The corpses were lined up on the dirt while the graves were dug and the headstones engraved. The wounded were carried to the healer, Voronwe.\n\nHis building was in the northern part of Eden Star, away from the center as well as the market. It was built to accommodate several dozen elves\u2014but not hundreds. Cora and Peony carried an unconscious man through the door, his arms over their shoulders, his feet dragging behind.\n\nThere was nowhere else to put him besides the floor, so that's where they laid him, straight on the wood.\n\nVoronwe focused on a patient on his table, his hands joined together and pressed against his chest.\n\n\"I'm going to see if there's news about Hawk\u2026\" Peony left, her hair oily and matted against her scalp after several days of hard labor, of heat from the searing flames, and not bathing or sleeping.\n\n\"Alright.\" Cora continued to watch Voronwe, an elf with silver hair but a youthful face. With his eyes closed, he slid his hand across his patient, feeling the bones against the skin. He seemed to have found what he sought because there was an audible crack.\n\nThe patient was motionless\u2014too deep under to wake.\n\nVoronwe moved his hands to another place, eyes still closed, fixing entrails that he couldn't see.\n\nCora watched.\n\nThe patient's visage slowly changed, from a dull gray to a flushed cream. Breaths became deeper and more natural. The tension in the face slowly faded. Blood flow had been restored with his mind.\n\nAll of the wounded had been collected, the fires had been extinguished, so it was the right time for her to rest. But she remained, fascinated by what this elf could do with just his mind. She could take life away\u2014but he could give it.\n\nWhen he was done, he whispered in Elvish under his breath then removed his hands. As if he'd known Cora had been there the entire time, he turned to regard her. Light-colored eyes examined her face, as if he could see past her flesh to everything underneath.\n\n\"Can I help?\"\n\n\"Are you a healer?\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"Then no.\" He moved to the next patient.\n\nShe wandered to the rejuvenated patient on the table, an elf she didn't recognize. She wasn't even sure if she was the one who had brought him in\u2014because there had been so many. She stared at his chest, as if she could see what had been broken and what had been fixed. \"When we put out the fires, I directed the water into the roots, forced the buds to grow, helped the tree shed old bark and replace it with new bark. Is that\u2026what you're doing?\"\n\n\"The simplification is insulting.\" His hand touched his patient, his eyes open and focused on his actions. \"A tree is a one-dimensional being. It operates in a linear fashion. Elves are much more complicated. Bone. Cartilage. Blood. Tissue. Organs. There's so much more.\"\n\n\"Is that why there's only one healer?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" His hands glided over, mapping out the body in his mind. \"It took a very long time for me to reach this status. It's about exploring the body with just your thoughts, understanding normal, functioning anatomy, distinguishing a variant that's still normal, and deciding if something needs to be altered\u2014and if it's the right thing to be altered. Change one thing\u2014change the whole body. It takes experience, much experience.\"\n\n\"Yes, that does sound complicated.\"\n\n\"Tell me\u2026did General Callon drive the Shamans from Eden Star?\" He looked up as his hands continued to move, his eyes settling on her.\n\nCora swallowed, her wrapped sword stuffed into her pack. \"Actually, it was me\u2026\"\n\n\"You?\" His eyes dropped, looking her over.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n<CORA!>\n\nHer head exploded with his loud voice.\n\n<Cora, are you there? Cora?>\n\n\"Please excuse me.\" She left the building and returned to the forest, stepping off the path and into the tree line. <I'm here. Are you guys okay?>\n\nRush's voice came next, his voice bursting through a solid door and breaking it into pieces. <Are you alright? Has Eden Star been taken?>\n\n<Wait\u2026how do you know about that?>\n\n<So, it's true\u2026>\n\n<General Noose and the Shamans invaded our forest, but they are gone now. For the last few days, we've been putting out the fires and healing the wounded. But a lot of elves have fallen.>\n\n<But you're okay?>\n\n<Yes, I'm fine.>\n\nRush released a heavy sigh of relief.\n\n<What a relief, Pretty.>\n\n<What about you guys? I tried to reach you, but you were gone.>\n\n<We were in the Stronghold. <Really> long story. You have time to talk?>\n\nAll the wounded had been delivered to the healer, the dead had been taken to the Cemetery of Spirits, and the fires had been quenched. There was no place she could go because her home had been destroyed. She hadn't slept in days. <I'll get back to you in an hour. Just have to find somewhere first.>\n\n<These things are big and ugly. I mean, really ugly. They infiltrated the Stronghold like ants overrunning a neighboring anthill. I could take on a couple myself, but not forever. But she sacrificed her Durgin so we were able to escape.>\n\n<Durgin?> She sat in the shade of a tree near the river, the same place she and Callon had lunch after their training sessions.\n\n<Dwarven warriors.>\n\n<That's so sad.>\n\n<Yeah, it sucked. But there was no other way. We were able to escape, and now I need to return with an army to flush out those Fazurks from the Stronghold. The remaining dwarves will have their mountain once again, and Talc will be released to us.>\n\n<How many dwarves are left?>\n\n<Maybe a thousand. But we hope there are more hidden somewhere in the mountain. It's a really big place, so you never know.>\n\n<I hope so too. It'll be hard for them to defend their mountain in the future with such low numbers.>\n\n<True.>\n\n<And the Fazurks are from the Shadow Lands?>\n\n<They gotta be.>\n\n<I would never eat one\u2014too hideous.>\n\n<How would they get through the rock? I thought it was solid?>\n\n<Maybe they climbed? I don't know\u2014but these guys aren't from Anastille.>\n\n<Just\u2026why now?>\n\n<Psh, no idea. It could be any reason. Maybe their food source has become scarce so they're searching elsewhere. Or maybe someone told them to climb the rock and invade the Stronghold\u2026 I don't think we'll ever know.>\n\n<They smell too.>\n\n<Okay\u2026not relevant.>\n\n<Pretty doesn't smell.>\n\nShe was exhausted, dirty, and overwhelmed. But she gave a chuckle. <I miss you guys. I get used to our separation when we're apart, but then when we talk\u2026I'm not sure how I ever did.>\n\nRush gave a long pause before an answer. <Same here.>\n\n<So, what happened next? How did you know Eden Star was under attack?>\n\n<When I breached the surface, Flare took over and burned them.>\n\n<They smell even worse when they're on fire.>\n\nRush ignored him. <We knew the fires would attract the Shamans, but we didn't have a choice.>\n\n<The Shamans told you?>\n\n<Well, the Shamans weren't the only ones that came.>\n\n<Oh\u2026> Cora pictured the blue dragon from her dreams, a dragon she'd never seen in person, only through the thoughts she shared with Ashe. <What happened?>\n\nRush didn't speak.\n\n<You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.>\n\n<Words were shared. So were threats. We battled in the skies\u2014and Obsidian fell.>\n\n<For good?>\n\n<No. He changed into his human form\u2014and disappeared in the smoke.>\n\n<Coward.>\n\n<He told us that he had taken Eden Star.>\n\n<That was a lie\u2014because we prevailed.>\n\n<General Callon protected his people once again. Is he alright?>\n\n<Yeah, he's fine. But it wasn't him\u2026>\n\nBoth Rush and Flare stayed quiet.\n\nThe gentle sound of the stream beside her was replaced by the flames of the inferno. Sunshine was drowned in the blackness. Music from songbirds was replaced by the screams of dying elves. <I was asleep when it happened. Ashe woke me up, and if he hadn't, the smoke would have a moment later. My tree house was on fire, and if I hadn't jumped, I would have gone down with it.> She swallowed, replaying a moment that seemed to occur an eternity ago. <I searched for Callon first. I heard the clicks of the monsters just as I heard the screams of those they killed. When I found him, a Shaman was there\u2014performing the Skull Crusher. Without thinking, I just did it\u2026I killed him.>\n\nShe closed her eyes, remembering the way he could barely stand. <He insisted I take the secret passage out of Eden Star to safety while he protected Queen Delwyn. I refused to leave his side, so we went together. There were a dozen Shamans. General Aldon was dead. The Queen's guard Melian was slain too. There were other elves on the stairs, elves who died trying to protect her. She was the last one standing. General Noose was about to slay her, but Callon got there first\u2014>\n\n<Too weak to fight, his blade fell.> Ashe's deep voice emerged, kingly in its authority, exuding power that could be felt by each of their minds. <The effects of the Skull Crusher had dwindled his mind. But Cora's fiery blade met General Noose's before he could be slain. My strength became hers, our minds became one, and with unbridled power, Cora killed six Shamans at once, all the while holding her own against one of the best swordsmen in Anastille. Outmatched, General Noose and his monsters retreated from Eden Star.> The pride in his voice was unmistakable. <My hatchling prevailed.>\n\n<Ashe, King of Dragons. It is a pleasure to hear your voice once again.>\n\n<It is mine as well.>\n\nCora remained quiet, silenced by the story her dragon had just told.\n\nAfter a heavy silence, Rush spoke. <Attagirl.>\n\nAll the tension in her face left when the smile formed.\n\n<Wish I could have been there to watch you kick his ass.>\n\n<I didn't really kick his ass\u2014>\n\n<You defeated him in battle, and he retreated. Same thing, Hatchling.>\n\n<Callon has trained you well. Must be proud.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026he is. But it was Ashe too. Without my abilities, I wouldn't have stood a chance, so Ashe helped me learn how to utilize my skills.>\n\n<You're the only reason Eden Star still stands. If you didn't have any friends before, you'll definitely have them now.>\n\n<I don't know\u2026the queen looked ticked.>\n\n<Maybe she always looks that way.>\n\n<No. I could tell by the way she spoke to Callon that she's not happy.>\n\n<Wuzurk.>\n\n<Translation?>\n\nFlare spoke. <Tyrant.>\n\n<Callon told me to keep my sword with me, so I think he anticipates an issue.>\n\n<You literally saved all of Eden Star\u2026and she still doesn't like you?>\n\nAshe's deep voice rumbled. <Wuzurk.>\n\n<Well, this puts a damper on our plans.>\n\n<What plans?>\n\n<I told Queen Megora that I would return with an army to eradicate the Fazurks for good. Was hoping the elves could be that army.>\n\nCora shook her head as she watched the water drip through the cracks in the rocks of the riverbed. <Yeah\u2026that's not going to happen.>\n\n<You've gotta have some friends by now. I thought that was the plan?>\n\n<Yes, I have some. But not a lot.>\n\n<Well, what is some?>\n\n<Like three\u2026>\n\n<Wow\u2026that's bad.>\n\n<Look, it's hard to make friends when everyone already has this preconceived notion of who you are.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026been there, done that.>\n\nCora dropped her gaze, the guilt instant.\n\n<When everyone knows that you're the one who saved the forest, everything will change, regardless how the queen feels about it. I'm not worried about it.>\n\n<True.> Ashe spoke. <You will earn the favor of every elf that lives.>\n\n<Even if that's true, I doubt I'll be able to convince Queen Delwyn to send her army to the Stronghold.>\n\n<You can if Eden Star wants more allies. They already have the dragons, and now they'll have the dwarves. Unless\u2026you haven't spoken to her about that either.>\n\n<The right time has failed to present itself.>\n\n<You still haven't asked her? What have you guys been doing all this time?>\n\n<Look, she hates me. Would you ask someone who hates you for a favor? That would be like me asking a Shaman if he wants to have brunch.>\n\nRush gave a chuckle. <Sorry, I pictured that in my head\u2026>\n\nHis deep voice broke through the laughter, serious as a cloudy sky. <Our plan was to earn the affection of the elves through her communion with the dead. It's been a slow process because we can't simply announce her abilities without attracting the ire of the queen. But now that Cora has defended Eden Star, it should be much easier to accomplish this. She's proven her loyalty to the elves, as have I. It's also abundantly clear that King Lux has his destructive gaze on the forest. They have no choice\u2014they must fight.>\n\n<And they'll need allies to do that.>\n\n<Exactly.>\n\n<Cora, I'm sorry for everything that Eden Star has lost\u2014but this definitely worked out in our favor.>\n\n<You're right.>\n\n<We'll head to Eden Star. It'll take us a few weeks to get there with all the obstacles in our way. Hopefully, the elves will be ready to return to the Stronghold with us by the time we arrive.>\n\n<Alright, we'll get to work.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Queen of Corruption",
                "text": "The perimeter of Eden Star was untouched.\n\nThere was no disturbance in the brush or the wildlife, no sign there had been any struggle to breach. When Callon checked the secret passageway, there were no signs of entry there either. The watchmen were unharmed, completely bypassed, and the enemy had headed straight for the civilians.\n\nIt was a relief that his men had been unhurt\u2014but it had cost the lives of those unable to defend themselves. The days were long, and the nights were longer. There was no time to sleep, not when he was responsible for the entire elven army.\n\n\"General Callon.\"\n\nWith his arms by his sides, he stood on the balcony of the tree house, a perfect view of the terrain outside Eden Star. The blue skies were empty, the lands were quiet, and there were no signs of assault from ahead. \"Yes?\" He pivoted slightly to meet the soldier's eyes.\n\n\"Queen Delwyn wishes to speak with you.\"\n\nHe held his gaze for a moment before he left the balcony. \"Fangorn, you're my sword and bow in my absence.\"\n\nHe gave a slight nod. \"Yes, General.\"\n\nCallon departed the tree house and returned to Eden Star, heartbroken when the music wasn't as serene as it once had been. The songbirds were quiet. The butterflies absent. Resilient as ever, the forest continued on\u2014but it wasn't the same.\n\nHe was tempted to deviate from the path, to check on Cora, but it would take far too long to locate her now that her home had been destroyed in the fire. His home was gone too\u2014along with all his possessions. Weila's recipes. Turnion's watercolor portrait. All those heirlooms\u2014burned.\n\nThe pathway through the market was different, all the carts and shops destroyed. Elves worked to rebuild, carrying the natural wood they scavenged throughout the forest. The Queen's residence remained, one of the few things that had escaped the fire. But the steps were stained with the blood of those who died to protect her.\n\nHe stopped, examining the place where he'd fallen, where his sword had dropped because he'd been bested in battle. The damage to his mind had severed his connection to his body\u2014and he'd become too weak to fight.\n\nThe shame was potent.\n\nBut the pride for his Sor-lei\u2014indescribable.\n\nHe rose up the steps and entered the fortress where her throne stood at the top.\n\nShe was there, seated with her legs crossed, the crown of flowers perfectly placed on her elegant head. Her blond hair was in wavy curls, spread out across her shoulders, shining like the summer sun. She would be a beautiful sight to behold\u2014if it weren't for the scowl on her hard mouth.\n\nDecorated in his queen's armor with his sword on his belt, he held her gaze and waited for instruction.\n\nFerocious eyes met his.\n\n\"The perimeter is secure. The only soldiers that we lost were the ones stationed deeper inside the forest. After a thorough investigation of our borders, I'm unable to determine the enemy's point of entry.\"\n\nHer fingers drummed against the wood, her long nails giving a distinct tap every time they made contact. \"Ask Cora\u2014I'm sure she knows.\"\n\nThe foul accusation was like fire down his throat\u2014and straight into his belly. \"She is the reason Eden Star still stands.\"\n\n\"Irrelevant when she's the reason they marched on this forest in the first place. We've lost hundreds of elves\u2014because of her. That girl is a poison. She's soaked into the roots and rotted the trees. She's destroyed Eden Star\u2014\"\n\n\"You draw breath because she took up her sword and defended you.\" He stepped forward as he breathed heavily, his hand instinctively needing his sword as if battle had crossed the threshold. \"You are her queen\u2014and she protected you.\"\n\n\"I wasn't the one she cared about.\"\n\n\"Because of her courage and strength, the two of us speak this very moment. General Noose would have burned this forest to the ground\u2014and done unspeakable things to you afterward. Cora is the daughter of a king, and she has proven her loyalty. The fact that you're still unable to see past your own insecurities makes the fit of that crown questionable.\"\n\nThe tapping of her fingers stopped when she rose to her feet, her white dress no longer stained with splashes of red blood. \"I told you this would happen. I told you that our enemies would hunt her here. I would have exiled her from this forest, but you blackmailed me.\"\n\n\"A queen can't be blackmailed\u2014not when she lives a truthful life. If you didn't wish to conceal the truth and lie to your own people, then I would have been powerless to interfere with your rule.\"\n\nHer eyes were as narrow as the tip of an arrow. \"As long as she remains here, we're unsafe. A target has been placed on Eden Star\u2014and we must move it. Our forest has never been breached, and yet, the first time it occurs happens to be when that girl is here. That speaks volumes.\"\n\n\"We've always been at war with King Lux and the empire. This isn't new.\"\n\n\"But that war has never been at our doorstep. I knew she was death the first time I saw her\u2014and I continue to believe it. We still don't know how our enemy broke through the magic of our forest, and that's not a coincidence. She had something to do with it\u2014\"\n\n\"Lies. This is a spun tale to get what you want.\"\n\n\"Lies? I watched her kill six Shamans at once\u2014with Death Magic. The magic of the forest must have eroded over time. Because she's one of them.\"\n\nCallon stepped forward. \"She is not one of them.\"\n\n\"Then explain.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted back and forth. \"Spies reside within Eden Star.\"\n\nQueen Delwyn stared like she couldn't entertain his suggestion whatsoever. \"I understand your biological affection, but it is misplaced\u2014she is not one of us.\"\n\n\"She is.\"\n\n\"She is what the empire wants. When we hand her over, his focus on Eden Star will end. He'll get what he wants, and we will have peace.\"\n\n\"Peace?\" Callon moved up the first stair, unable to restrain his steps. \"The only peace King Lux will accept is when all the free races of this world are annihilated or subjugated. You're a fool to believe otherwise. I can't explain Cora's abilities, but I can explain her heart. We are her people\u2014and she will bleed for us. It would be wise to appreciate the asset that she is because her abilities are the greatest weapon we have against the empire. He wants to destroy her so she can't be used against him\u2014and you would be obliging that desire. Cora is our greatest potential for destroying King Lux and the empire for good. Our other crusades failed, but now we have a real chance. She can destroy the Shamans. She can wield a sword with the strength of a man. She can unite the most unlikely allies imaginable. Be worthy of the crown upon your brow\u2014and do the right thing for us all.\"\n\nA stare as cold as winter ensued, greener than the forest around them. \"It seems that you've forgotten who leads Eden Star. It is I, Queen Delwyn, not General Callon. You will carry out my commands without question because I decide what is best for us all.\"\n\n\"Move against Cora, and I will tell everyone who she really is.\"\n\nHer hard face remained in place\u2014subtly livid. \"Then I will have to move against you as well.\"\n\nHis jaw hardened as he clenched his teeth tightly together. \"My mind was broken, but I still came for you. I knew my sword couldn't defeat his, but I defended you anyway. I laid down my life for yours without regret.\"\n\n\"Because that is your place\u2014to serve me.\"\n\n\"It is to serve an honorable ruler. But that is not you.\"\n\nShe lowered herself back onto the throne, her hands gripping the edges. \"You have served me faithfully these last twenty years. Served Tiberius for a century before that. I would take no pleasure in strife with you. So, stay out of my way, and there will be no strife.\"\n\n\"General Callon.\" An elf stopped his direction and gave a deep bow.\n\nCallon continued on his way, his eyes scanning the forest in search of Cora.\n\nAnother elf stopped and gave a bow. \"General Callon. Thank you for your service. Eden Star blooms because of you.\"\n\n\"Not because of me.\" He halted and stared at the elf he didn't recognize. \"It was Cora. She defeated General Noose in battle and killed the Shamans. If it weren't for her, I'd be dead like all the rest.\"\n\nThe elf straightened and met Callon's look, bewildered. \"Shamans can't be killed\u2014\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\" He continued, moving to the location where her tree house had once been. There was still debris on the forest floor, but most of the burned wood and ash had been discarded.\n\nHe went to his tree house next, but there was nothing left at all.\n\nThe tree didn't survive.\n\nWhat was once his home was now grass with pieces of ash caught between the blades. The home where his wife gave birth to his son no longer existed. The place where they cooked their meals and sipped tea at the dining table was gone. His home\u2014the most special place in the world\u2014had passed on. \"Sun-lei\u2026\"\n\n\"Callon.\"\n\nHe turned at the sound of his name. \"Cora, are you alright?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. Just exhausted from all the cleanup.\" She turned her backpack around and opened the top to stick her hand inside.\n\n\"Let's go. We need to talk.\"\n\n\"Hold on\u2026 I have something for you.\" She pulled out the green book, tattered and worn, one corner of all the pages blackened from fire. \"I was looking through the debris of your house, and I found this.\"\n\nHe stared at the book that he'd left on the kitchen counter, his wife's elegant handwriting scribbled along the pages, all of her favorite recipes jotted down in one place. His breaths grew heavy as he stared.\n\n\"It's a bit scuffed up and some pages are missing\u2026but I thought you'd still want it.\" She placed it in his hand.\n\nHe squeezed it between his fingers, the greatest possession that his wife had left behind. \"Thank you\u2026\"\n\n\"I found this too.\" She pulled out a picture frame with a painting inside. \"Half of it is missing so it's just part of his face, but I thought it was better than not having it at all.\"\n\nCallon took the picture, seeing half of his son's face in his uniform. Like always, his heart turned into a fist and gave a squeeze. The loss never got easier, but sometimes his acceptance of the loss did.\n\n\"That was all I could find. I looked through everything before I let them take anything away. It seems like the fire got everything else. I'm sorry\u2026\"\n\n\"No.\" He looked at both of the pieces in his hands, the two things he would have saved if he'd had the opportunity. \"These are the only things that I care about anyway.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Not a Moment Longer",
                "text": "They stepped into the clearing where they had their training, where Cora had slept every night since the attack to stay out of everyone's way in Eden Star. The stream was as quiet and serene as ever, like a fiery assault had never taken place.\n\n\"What is it?\" She dropped her heavy pack, her mobile home. It was weighed down by her armor and her wrapped sword. It gave a distinct thud when it hit the grass. \"Did you see anything at the border?\"\n\n\"Did you tell anyone of the secret passage?\" He barked out the question, his eyes strained as they focused on her face.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why?\"\n\nHe studied her face a moment longer before the hostility waned. \"Just had to make sure.\"\n\n\"You think\u2026that's how they got in?\"\n\n\"I have no idea how they got in.\" He was still in his armor, working day and night for the past few days. His eyes weren't as bright as they normally were, like he'd never had the option to sleep since the fires started. \"We combed the border thoroughly and saw no signs of penetration.\"\n\n\"Was there any sign of entry at the secret passage?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"This mystery perplexes me.\"\n\n\"Well, they had to get in somehow.\"\n\n\"My best guess at the moment\u2026the enemy resides in Eden Star.\"\n\n\"What? That's not possible\u2026\"\n\n\"Our forest is massive. I told you that the great majority of the population resides in the heart of the forest. But there are others that live deep in the woods, hundreds of miles in the trees.\" He looked away, his gaze piercing the tree line as if he could see someone watching them that very moment.\n\nShe followed his gaze, as if she could see it too. \"But why would they do that?\"\n\n\"For elves, age isn't a measurement of years lived. It's a measurement of insanity.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\nHe turned back to her. \"The Spirit Ceremony allows an elf to pass from this life with dignity, to give a proper goodbye before eternal rest. As a child, it's hard to understand the desire, but when you're older, you'll feel that yearning. But the few that never do\u2026lose their minds. They retreat into the trees, never to be seen again.\"\n\nHer eyes flicked back. \"That doesn't explain the betrayal.\"\n\n\"Their madness explains it.\"\n\n\"Have you told the queen this?\"\n\n\"Your question brings me to the purpose of this conversation.\" He approached the stream and bent down to splash the water against his face, to let the cold drops cleanse the sweat that had accumulated over several days. \"I informed her of my theory, but all she cares about is you.\"\n\n<This woman fails to surprise me.>\n\n\"You've got to be kidding me.\"\n\n<Let me burn her. We've wasted enough time with diplomacy.>\n\nCallon returned to her, drops falling from his chin. \"I wish I were.\"\n\n\"I saved her ass.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Not to toot my own horn or anything, but this forest is still here because of me.\"\n\n\"I know that too.\"\n\n\"So, what does she think? That I brought General Noose and the Shamans into Eden Star and then\u2026fought them? That literally makes no sense. I know she's a bitch, but she's not a stupid one.\"\n\n\"I agree. It's just an excuse.\"\n\n\"She's doing all this because she thinks her husband had an affair? It bothers her that much?\"\n\n\"You're a threat to her power. That is the issue.\"\n\nShe threw her arms down. \"Could I just volunteer myself to be queen and take her throne? Does it even work like that?\"\n\n\"Tiberius was the greatest king that ever lived. If the people knew that his daughter was among us, then yes, it's possible they'd want you to lead instead of Queen Delwyn. Her reign has been unremarkable up until this point, but now that the border has been breached, people will question her ability.\"\n\n\"She needs to chill because I'm not interested. Maybe if I tell her that, she'll calm down. And I should tell her that Tiberius was literally poisoned into infidelity. Maybe that will help too.\"\n\n\"Far too risky.\"\n\n\"I think leaving her rampage unchecked is more risky.\"\n\n\"That would require you to reveal that you can speak to those who are no longer with us. That's something that should be concealed as long as possible.\" The sun dried his face, his skin back to its natural state, his usual shadow now a thick beard because he hadn't shaved in days. The dark color matched the pupil of his eyes.\n\n\"My crew is on the way here. They went to the Stronghold to initiate an alliance with the dwarves, but I guess it was overrun by these hideous orcs. There's a clan of surviving dwarves trapped underground, but without aid, they'll never escape.\"\n\nCallon watched her.\n\n\"And they have a dragon\u2026\"\n\n\"I don't like where this is going, Sor-lei.\"\n\n\"Rush made an agreement with the queen. They'll return with an army to rid the mountain of the Fazurks. In return, they'll release the dragon and pledge their alliance to the elves for the upcoming war.\"\n\nHe gave a slight shake of his head. \"Cora, that will never happen.\"\n\n\"Well, I assumed that the queen would like me after I saved her\u2026stupid me.\"\n\n\"Tell them to turn around. They're wasting their time.\"\n\n<He's right. You have no leverage with the queen now.>\n\n\"What's our next move?\"\n\nHe turned back to the water. \"Her threat was very clear. We stay together at all times.\"\n\n\"What about when you're at the front?\"\n\n\"Then you come with me.\"\n\n\"We don't have homes. Where will we sleep?\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\n<Hatchling, we came here to request an alliance with the queen. This endeavor has failed.>\n\n<We can't give up, Ashe.> \"What does she want with me? To exile me?\"\n\nCallon kept his eyes on the brook. \"To hand you over to King Lux.\"\n\nIt was one of the rare times she was speechless.\n\n\"I made it very clear that will never happen. She makes a move, and I tell the elves who you really are. She may be the leader of Eden Star, but I'm the leader of our army, as I've been for thousands of years. My political power rivals hers\u2014and I will destroy her if necessary.\"\n\n<I've never heard him speak this way.>\n\n<Neither have I.>\n\n<Then this is serious\u2014very serious.>\n\n<Rush?>\n\n<He's asleep, Pretty.>\n\n<I really need to talk to him.>\n\n<Alright.>\n\nRush came into the conversation, his thoughts clear like he'd been wide awake. <Everything alright?>\n\n<We've got a problem.>\n\n<What's going on?>\n\n<You know how Ashe said I killed all the Shamans, blah, blah?>\n\n<That's not how I would describe it, but yeah. What's your point? Blah, blah.>\n\n<Now isn't the time for jokes.>\n\n<You started it.>\n\n<I was just trying to save time.>\n\n<Well, that worked out great.>\n\n<Get on with it, Pretty.>\n\n<Basically, the queen doesn't peg me as the hero of Eden Star. She thinks I'm responsible for everything.>\n\n<By what logic?>\n\n<Callon says it's just an excuse to get rid of me.>\n\n<I should bite her in half and put one piece in the ocean and the other in a volcano.>\n\n<I can't ask for her help with the dwarves. It would be totally pointless.>\n\n<Then the dragon alliance is out of the question.>\n\n<Yep.>\n\n<Are you in danger right now? We're hustling to get to you.>\n\n<She wants to hand me over to King Lux.>\n\n<Cunt.>\n\n<Grrrrrrrr.>\n\n<But I have Callon, so I'll be fine.>\n\n<I never imagined there would be a ruler more corrupt than my own father.>\n\n<Tell me about it.>\n\n<We're never going to make an alliance while she sits on the throne. We don't have enough people as it is, and the elves are one of the few formidable foes against King Lux. We need them.>\n\n<I know.>\n\n<So, she has to go.>\n\n<You want me to stage a coup?>\n\n<I want Callon to take her place. That would fix all of our problems. And he's a far better leader for the elves anyway.>\n\n<He said he wasn't interested.>\n\n<I have a feeling he's changed his mind about that. If she really tries to hand you over to the enemy for her own selfish interests, she's a corrupt ruler. And if she successfully throws away the greatest weapon Eden Star has, she's a stupid one. He serves the leader on the throne, but his loyalty is to Eden Star. If his duty requires him to take on the role, trust me, he will.>\n\n<Maybe. So, what do we do about the dwarves?>\n\n<Do you think your three friends would volunteer?>\n\n<Only one is a soldier, and I doubt he would leave his post for this. We're friends, but we aren't that close.>\n\n<What about Callon?>\n\n<I can ask\u2026but it's really not the best time.>\n\n<You're forgetting something, Hatchling. You're a decent swordsman\u2014and you're fused with Ashe, King of Dragons\u2014>\n\n<Swordswoman.>\n\n<We can handle a few gophers in a hole.>\n\n<But that wasn't the deal. We came for the queen\u2014and that didn't work out.>\n\n<It hasn't worked out yet, but it shall.>\n\n<Are you sure?>\n\n<We are one, Hatchling.>\n\nCora became Callon's shadow.\n\nWherever he went, she was close behind. When she joined him at the border, the soldiers never questioned her presence. She lingered in the background, watching Callon issue orders and receive hearty obedience in response. His subordinates didn't just regard him with respect, but something much deeper.\n\n<He has the blood of kings.>\n\n<I know he does.>\n\nTwilight descended, and Callon withdrew into his office in one of the tree houses. There was a desk covered with maps and notes. He sat with upright posture, made notes with a quill, and then stared at the parchment with a hard gaze.\n\nCora hardly ever spoke so she wouldn't distract him.\n\nA soldier entered, a bow over his back. Blond hair. Blue eyes. It was Hawk. \"General Callon, the west has no activity.\"\n\nHe kept his eyes on the paper and gave a subtle nod.\n\nHawk regarded her with a stare before he stepped out.\n\nShe followed him. \"I'm glad to see that you're alright.\"\n\nHe turned around and stood tall, his armor the same as Callon's, just without the flower medals. \"Unfortunately, Eden Star suffered the casualties. Not us.\"\n\n\"Peony has been worried about you.\"\n\n\"I received her note today.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"I'm glad that she and her father are well. I did lose a few friends, however.\"\n\n\"I know\u2026 It's terrible.\"\n\nHis hands moved behind his back. \"General Callon told us that it was you who saved Eden Star\u2014not him.\"\n\nShe met his gaze.\n\n\"You have a powerful mind. I can feel it when you draw near. Thank you for using it to our benefit\u2014rather than our detriment.\"\n\n\"I would give my life to protect this forest.\"\n\n\"You've already proven that.\" He gave a subtle nod then stepped away.\n\n\"Do you think this will change anything?\"\n\nHe halted but didn't turn around.\n\n\"Between you and Peony\u2026?\"\n\nHe remained quiet for several long seconds. \"We've taken our immortality for granted. I hope she realizes that.\"\n\nWhen Callon's rotation ended, they headed back to Eden Star. Between the enormous trees, the air smelled like pine and morning dew. Wild flowers brushed against their legs as they passed, vegetation overgrown in the grass and meadows.\n\n\"Have you fully recovered?\"\n\nCallon was completely equipped for war, the plates of his armor fitting over his chest and shoulders like a second skin. His shield was hooked to his back, along with his bow and a large quiver of arrows. His long sword was always at his belt, just inches from his hand.\n\n\"Your mind, I mean.\"\n\nHe continued forward, his gaze straight ahead. \"It took several days. I've been well ever since.\"\n\n\"I was worried.\"\n\n\"The effects were temporary\u2014like a very bad headache that takes time to resolve.\"\n\n\"I'm glad I got there when I did.\"\n\n\"The torture had gone on for minutes. If it hadn't, I would have defeated General Noose swiftly.\"\n\n\"Minutes?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But\u2026that's not possible. I mean, it is. But only for me.\"\n\nHe halted, careful not to step directly on a bundle of orange flowers. \"I've pondered this extensively over the last week. The Skull Crusher is lethal to anyone who comes into contact with it, even just for a few seconds. That's why we lost so many elves that night. It wasn't the fires. It wasn't the fear. It was the Death Magic.\" He turned his face to regard her. \"I trained you to prevail by using your mind. Your lack of experience and strength are compensated by your unique abilities. But I didn't just train you\u2014you trained me as well.\"\n\nShe gave a slight nod.\n\n\"I'm not immune to the Skull Crusher, but I can survive it longer than most.\"\n\n\"I think you're right. It makes sense.\"\n\nHe continued forward again, moving past the enormous trunks of the trees. Most of the sky was impossible to discern because the canopy was too thick, but rays of sunshine struck the forest floor and brightened the petals of the flowers.\n\nWhen they passed the final copse of trees and entered the heart of the forest, a row of soldiers blocked further progression into Eden Star. Twelve soldiers in full armor were in a straight line like a fence.\n\nQueen Delwyn was right in the middle.\n\n<Shit.>\n\n<Do not fear. She doesn't know who she's dealing with.>\n\n<You can't burn them, Ashe. Then we'd be no different than the Shamans.>\n\n<It wasn't me that I was referring to.>\n\nCallon instinctively stepped in front of Cora.\n\nQueen Delwyn stared, eyes without remorse. \"Step aside, General Callon. We will go through you if we must.\"\n\nHe slowly withdrew his blade from his scabbard, metal dragging against metal, the sound audible and sharp. His hand spun the blade around his wrist before he stabbed it deep into the earth, marking the line that shouldn't be crossed. \"The war with the empire has reigned for thousands of years. But it's different now. Eden Star has never been breached, but our forest burned, our people were murdered, and our serenity was forever changed. This is only the beginning. King Lux has revealed his agenda\u2014to rid this earth of us forever.\" With arms by his sides, he remained in front of his sword, blocking Cora from view. \"When my sword fell, Cora defended Eden Star with hers. She killed the Shamans with her mind. General Noose's conquest would have been easy if it weren't for Cora. She saved us all\u2014and she pledged her alliance to us. If King Lux wants her, it's because she's a threat. It's because she's the one person on this earth who can defeat those monsters. To hand over a weapon so powerful is inconceivable.\"\n\nIn her white dress with flowers in her hair, the queen stood with her hands together at her belly, flanked by fully armed soldiers on either side. There was a slight smile, as if his emotional plea was a mere joke. \"She wields a blade of dragon scales. Any friend of Eden Star wouldn't wield such a weapon.\"\n\n\"The blade she wields is irrelevant. It's who she wields it for that matters.\"\n\n<I can't let Callon die for me.>\n\n<He will prevail, Hatchling.>\n\n\"She is Eden Star's savior\u2014and should be treated as such. She should be treated with respect\u2026because she's the daughter of a king.\"\n\nThe smile vanished, and her beautiful face turned tense.\n\n\"The daughter of King Tiberius\u2014Cora Riverglade. My Sor-lei.\"\n\nThe men who flanked the queen all turned their gaze on Cora, trying to see her past Callon's frame.\n\n\"I've served as the General of Eden Star for thousands of years. It has cost me everything I hold dear. My wife. My son. My brother. There is no sacrifice I wouldn't make for my people. My loyalty is unquestioned. If Cora were a true threat to Eden Star, the tip of my own blade would impale her throat. But she is no threat to Eden Star or its people. In fact, she's the best thing that's come into this forest in a millennium. I would lay down my life to protect hers the way I would with Eden Star. I can vouch for her\u2014and my word is my truth. You've trusted me to lead us into battle. You've trusted me to protect our forest. You've trusted me for thousands of years. Trust me now.\"\n\nThe queen's steady gaze pierced his, shallow like the shoreline, the hatred visible from the surface to the bedrock. \"Your judgment has been clouded by your misplaced affection. There is no proof\u2014\"\n\n\"She wears Tiberius's ring. And even if she didn't, she possesses the same kindness in her eyes that he did. Their likeness is easy to see\u2014if you ignore the human traits and focus on the elven.\"\n\n\"Whether it's true or not, it does not matter. She's an enemy to Eden Star\u2014and will be handed over to King Lux. With her gone, there will be no more attacks on our forest. There will be lasting peace.\"\n\nCallon remained rigidly in place, tall and strong, ready to take on twelve soldiers with his bare hands. \"King Lux isn't interested in war. He's interested in complete domination. Once he has it, there will be peace\u2014in death.\"\n\n\"My decision has been made.\" The crown upon her head bloomed with white daisies, of a purity that didn't exist in her heart. Her eyes were the brightest green, but the darkness in her heart had turned them gray. \"Take her.\"\n\nCora reached for her sword.\n\n<No.>\n\nShe dropped her hand.\n\n<Wait.>\n\nAs if a command hadn't been given, the soldiers remained still. They looked to General Callon\u2014as if they expected him to give an order.\n\n\"I said, take her.\" She looked from side to side, waiting for the first elf to step forward.\n\n\"I won't slay my own men.\" He didn't reach for his sword lodged in the dirt. \"So, they'll have to kill me if they want her.\"\n\n\"That's no problem.\" She gave a subtle nod, instructing her men to serve out the execution.\n\nNobody moved.\n\n<His rule has always triumphed over hers. Now will be no different.>\n\nQueen Delwyn's eyes moved from side to side, waiting for her men to carry out the sentence. Not a single sword had been drawn. It was as if she hadn't spoken at all. She grabbed the soldier to her right and shoved him forward. \"Now.\"\n\nHe stumbled slightly before he regained his footing, his white-blond hair pinned back with metal clips that resembled flowers. He gave a glance over his shoulder before he looked at General Callon, the man he followed into battle.\n\nCallon held his position, looking his soldier in the eye.\n\nThe soldier stepped forward and reached for the sword in the dirt.\n\nCora's hand immediately went to her hilt.\n\nIt took both hands for him to tug the sword out of the ground, the tip compacted with a layer of dirt. He eyed it for a moment before he turned it around, grabbing it by the blade, and offered it to its owner.\n\nCallon took it without pulling his gaze away from his. \"Thank you, Rylan.\"\n\n<Told you.>\n\nRylan gave a bow before he backed away and returned to the line of men\u2014this time far away from the queen.\n\nQueen Delwyn's face was identical to the angry look the poisonous frogs wore. Her lips smashed hard together, and her eyes narrowed to slits. A slight tremor overtook her body, her fingers curling into fists.\n\nCallon held her gaze, but when no words were forthcoming, he addressed the men. \"Inform all of Eden Star that King Tiberius lives on\u2014in his daughter. Cora Riverglade is the savior of this forest, and she is one of us.\"\n\nThe soldiers scattered, venturing in different directions to spread the news throughout the forest.\n\nQueen Delwyn never took her eyes off his.\n\nNow they were all that remained, the atmosphere so hostile that the songbirds and their music had relocated elsewhere. There was no sunshine in the shade of the trees. No joy amid the rage in her eyes.\n\nShe stepped forward, her bare feet silent against the grass.\n\nGeneral Callon inserted his blade back on to his hip.\n\nShe stopped just inches from him, her eyes shifting back and forth between his. \"You will live long enough to regret this\u2014and not a moment longer.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Stunning Scales",
                "text": "Cora walked beside Callon, still speechless.\n\nHe led the way like he knew exactly where they were going\u2014even though neither one of them had a place to call home.\n\nThe soldiers must have been quick to spread their news because most of the elves she passed regarded her with intense stares, scrutinizing her features for signs of similarity to their fallen king. Their eyes dropped to her hands, too\u2014to the ring on her thumb.\n\nCallon left the center of Eden Star and hit the weather-beaten path they took to their private glade, where they practiced in secret, prepared her for the battles to come.\n\nShe stepped closer to his side. \"You should come with me.\"\n\nHe kept his eyes on the path.\n\n\"Can you?\"\n\nHe gave her a side look.\n\n\"After what the queen said, maybe it's not best for you to stay here.\"\n\n\"I'm unafraid.\"\n\n\"Can you come anyway?\"\n\nHe halted on the trek and regarded her.\n\n\"I don't think this rescue is going to be as simple as I hope\u2026\"\n\nHe glanced back the way they'd come, as if he could see Eden Star through the dense trees.\n\n\"Need all the help we can get.\"\n\nHe continued to stare into the forest. \"Cora.\" After several breaths, he turned back to her. \"As much as I want to protect you, I can't abandon Eden Star. It was different the first time, but now that our forest has been breached, I can't leave. My people are actively at war now\u2014and I must lead them.\"\n\nShe gave a nod in understanding. \"I didn't ask because I need your protection. You know I can handle myself. But I am worried about leaving you behind\u2026\"\n\n\"My connection with the elves is much stronger than hers. You don't need to worry.\"\n\n\"But the last thing she said\u2014\"\n\n\"She will be off the throne before she can make good on her word.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe gave her his full stare now, a strong jaw that matched the strength in his eyes. \"I'm going to remove her from power\u2014and take her place.\"\n\n<Yes.>\n\nA jolt of lightning moved into her heart, and her eyes widened as a result. \"You are?\"\n\n\"She's given me no choice. Not only has she lied to her people to preserve her image, but now her decisions are actively hurting the elves she swore to protect. Her corruption goes deep\u2014and I think there's more beneath the surface.\"\n\n<Spoken like a true king.>\n\n\"I've never wanted the crown. Still don't. But as the General of Eden Star, it is my sworn duty to protect the forest and its inhabitants, to make any and all sacrifices to ensure its immortality. I know the crown should be handed to you next, but you're just as unfit to rule as the queen. You're a child\u2014and not just in our eyes.\"\n\n\"It's not my cup of tea anyway\u2026\"\n\n\"When King Lux is defeated and peace returns to this land, I will step down. A new regime will step in\u2014and a new legacy will be born.\"\n\n\"I think that's a great idea. Except the last part. Whether we're at war or peace, you're the rightful king.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted back and forth as he regarded her.\n\n\"How will you achieve this?\"\n\n\"That, I don't know. But I do know that she won't expect it.\"\n\n\"I don't think anyone will\u2026\"\n\n<Pretty?>\n\nCora lay on her cot in the meadow, a few feet away from where Callon slept. It was a clear night, and the starlight was almost too bright to sleep. <Hey, Flare. How are things?>\n\n<We're getting close to the forest. Had to take a couple detours, but we made it.>\n\n<I can't wait to see you.>\n\n<Me too, Pretty. Here's Rush.>\n\n<You're still in one piece, right?>\n\n<Yes. But it's a long story\u2026>\n\n<Blah, blah?>\n\nShe gave a quiet chuckle out loud.\n\nCallon turned in his pack to regard her, stirred at the sound.\n\n\"Sorry\u2026\"\n\nHe gave an annoyed look and rolled on his side to face the other way.\n\n<The queen ordered her men to take me away, but when Callon refused to step down, the soldiers backed off. Instead, Callon ordered them to tell every elf in the forest that I'm Cora Riverglade\u2026daughter of Tiberius.>\n\n<General Badass\u2026>\n\n<I know.>\n\n<Did you ask him to help us?>\n\n<He said he can't leave Eden Star, not after it was attacked.>\n\n<That's fair.>\n\n<He also said that he's going to overthrow the queen\u2026and take her place.>\n\n<Whaaaaaat? Okay, that's it. He's officially General Badass from now on.>\n\nShe gave another chuckle but kept it within her mind this time. <I couldn't believe it.>\n\n<It's the right move for his people\u2014so I can.>\n\n<I'm a little worried about leaving him here alone. I can't even talk to him\u2026>\n\n<He's the last person you need to worry about.>\n\n<You're probably right.>\n\n<Based on my calculations, we'll arrive tomorrow afternoon. Ready?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<We'll meet you at the same place. How are the shitheads anyway?>\n\n<Shitheads?>\n\n<The little frogs I dropped off.>\n\nShe rolled her eyes. <They're good. Getting really big. About half the size of an adult.>\n\n<Man, that's still enormous.>\n\n<They're a lot more subdued in the forest because they know they're safe here.>\n\n<You think that's another reason General Noose invaded the forest? To get rid of the last of them?>\n\nIt hadn't crossed her mind. <Maybe. But that doesn't matter anymore\u2026now that they know what I'm capable of.>\n\n<Wait until they find out about Ashe.> He gave a chuckle. <Man, I'd give anything to see my father's face\u2026>\n\nThe fireflies lit up the shrouded mist in the cemetery, providing a solid screen that provided a barrier of privacy for anyone else visiting the spirits of their loved ones. The stone bench was cold to the touch, even through the fabric of her pants.\n\n\"I was able to fight him off until he retreated with the Shamans. Queen Delwyn was unharmed, and Callon recovered. We put out the fires, but most people lost their homes. A lot of people perished. We still don't know how they got in\u2026\"\n\nThe wisps of blue smoke that outlined his presence floated in the air, the line permanent but also ethereal. \"I felt the disturbance. I knew something terrible had befallen Eden Star.\"\n\n\"The forest will recover\u2026and we'll rebuild.\"\n\n\"It's a great relief to know my queen and brother are both well.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And it brings me honor to know that my daughter was the savior of this beautiful place.\" There were no features in his countenance, but his stare was present, hot on her face. \"I'm grateful that my brother has been such a presence in your life. Without him, victory would have been impossible.\"\n\n\"He's the greatest person I've ever known.\"\n\n\"I can only imagine how grateful Queen Delwyn is.\"\n\n\"Actually\u2026she accused me of being responsible.\"\n\nHis stare ensued.\n\n\"Said I was the reason they entered Eden Star. Decided to turn me over to King Lux. It would have happened\u2026if Callon hadn't intervened. There's no doubt of her corruption at this point. Callon intends to remove her from power and take the throne for himself.\"\n\nThe silence passed on indefinitely, like he was too overwhelmed to form a response.\n\nCora feared she'd offended him\u2014and he would disappear.\n\n\"You seem to be describing a different man\u2014because my brother would never do such a thing. But if he has\u2026it's for good reason. He's not susceptible to temptation. There's no ego to feed. His stomach doesn't gnaw for power. Every action he takes is for the good of his people\u2014so this must be right for Eden Star.\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"This is a hard truth to accept. I shared my life with Delwyn in every intimate way imaginable. But now I sort through the memories of the past, wondering what I was so na\u00efve to miss.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm the one who should be sorry\u2014and ashamed.\"\n\n\"Love makes us overlook things sometimes\u2026\"\n\nThe silence returned, hanging there like the mist.\n\n\"I'm leaving Eden Star. Not sure when I'll return.\"\n\n\"Where do your travels take you?\"\n\n\"To the Stronghold. The dwarves need our help\u2014and they have a dragon.\"\n\n\"A dragon fused with a dwarf? Unheard of.\"\n\n\"We want to free the dragon and forge an alliance between them and the elves.\"\n\n\"How can an alliance be forged when the Queen of Eden Star has no interest?\"\n\n\"I'm hoping that Callon has claimed the throne by the time I return.\"\n\n\"His ascension may be swift. He's unanimously loved by every elf in Eden Star. There is no elf in our history that has served his people greater than he has. He will be a great king. Far better than I was.\"\n\n\"They still love you\u2014even though you're gone.\"\n\nHe turned quiet again.\n\n\"I think that's why they tolerate Delwyn. Out of respect for you.\"\n\nThe outline of his head turned away.\n\n\"I'm not sure when we'll speak again\u2026so I wanted to say goodbye.\"\n\nAfter a while, he turned back to her again. \"Please be careful, Cora. I don't want this to be our last conversation\u2014with the veil between us. I would much rather you speak to me while alive than while dead.\"\n\n\"I'll be okay. I'm not alone.\"\n\n\"I know your dragon will keep you safe. Have you told him what I revealed to you?\"\n\n\"No. He asked a few times, but I told him it was elven folklore. It hurt to lie to him. I still feel terrible about it.\"\n\n\"With a connection as profound as that, it goes against nature to deceive and conceal. It's not a door that you open and close. The door doesn't exist at all.\"\n\nAnother jolt moved into her heart, stopping it for a few seconds before it continued on. Her eyes penetrated the mist, desperate to see a face that no longer existed. \"You speak about this like\u2026you know exactly how it feels.\"\n\nSilence.\n\nHer heart drummed like the sound of war, loud in her ears, strong in her temples.\n\nHis head turned away, regarding his own grave. \"Because I do.\"\n\nHer lungs sucked in the air instinctively, her nostrils flaring as her blood demanded a dump of oxygen. A million words came to her mind, but somehow, she couldn't get them into her mouth and on her tongue.\n\n\"It was a short while\u2026but it was the most intense connection I've ever felt. There is no relationship more intimate than one that is fused. My spirit has found peace on this side of the veil, but the heartbreak has never stopped. Even now, I share every thought like she can still hear it.\"\n\n\"You\u2026you were fused with a dragon?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"The plan was to destroy the Steward of Easton in his castle before moving on High Castle. When we camped for the night, I took my evening walk alone. That was when I came upon her\u2014and her stunning scales. Alone. Scared. Injured. With King Lux scouring every inch of Anastille, she had nowhere to go, especially with broken wings. She trusted me when she didn't have reason to. And we fused.\"\n\nCora took a breath, speechless.\n\n\"Our time together was short. Just for a year. I took her to Eden Star, and she was overwhelmed by the beauty of the trees. With her large size, she could never experience the forest the way I could. I gave her things she couldn't find herself. She did the same for me. Our friendship deepened. It turned into something more\u2014familial.\"\n\n\"What happened to her?\"\n\nHe dropped his chin as he sucked in a deep and painful breath. \"I was killed\u2014and so was she.\"\n\nThey took the secret passage out of Eden Star.\n\nThe rocky crevasses on either side of them blocked the sunlight from heating their already warm skin. Roots grew in the cracks. And even in the shade, flowers still bloomed. Water trickled down from a waterfall that couldn't be seen.\n\nNow that Callon was the general once more, he was always in his armor, ready for a battle that could arrive on his doorstep in the middle of the night.\n\n\"Callon?\"\n\nHis eyes remained ahead as he escorted her out of the forest. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"There's something I need to tell you.\"\n\nThey passed through the rocks and entered the meadow on the other side, the wild flowers swaying in the subtle breeze. The trunks of the trees in the forest were beautiful, but the wide-open view was special in its own way. \"I'm listening.\"\n\n\"My father shared something with me. He told me I could share it with you.\"\n\nHe took a few steps in the meadow before he stopped to regard her.\n\nShe held his gaze, the sun beating down on them both now that the mountain was behind them. \"When he died\u2026he was fused with a dragon.\"\n\nThere was no reaction\u2014at least, not at first. It took several moments for his roots to soak up the drops of truth, to process the words he'd just heard.\n\n\"He came across her in the countryside. She was injured, so he fused to keep her safe. They remained that way for a year\u2014until he was killed.\"\n\nHis stare hardened\u2014visibly angry.\n\n\"That's too much of a coincidence, right? The fact that he was fused\u2026and I have these abilities.\"\n\n\"Tiberius Riverglade, King of Eden Star, would never betray his people. He would never harbor the enemy within our borders. He would never conceal such a secret from us all\u2014let alone me.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"You misunderstood him.\" He continued his walk, this time his stride quicker.\n\nShe watched him go.\n\n<Give him time.>\n\n<I don't understand. He knows I'm fused with you\u2014>\n\n<It's a different kind of betrayal, Hatchling. His own brother harbored this secret\u2014and never shared it.>\n\n<Probably because he knew he would react this way.>\n\n<Because of my decision, he lost the people he loves most. For his own brother to fuse with his enemy, it's a different kind of betrayal. He needs time\u2014so let's give it to him.>\n\nNow that the border of Eden Star was being monitored on a grander scale, they had to venture farther away from the tree line to avoid detection. The trek was spent in silence\u2014at Callon's request.\n\nThey moved through a copse of trees and reached the other side.\n\nWhen she saw them, her heart sprouted wings and flew with the strength of a dragon. They sat together on a gathering of boulders, shaded by a lone tree. Rush stood on a rock, one leg hiked higher than the other as he faced the other way, keeping a lookout.\n\nCallon halted at the last tree\u2014as if he refused to go any farther. His eyes drilled into Rush's backside with the same wild anger with which he regarded General Noose. His hand reached for the pommel of his sword, but after a heavy breath, his hand returned to his side. When his emotions were gathered, he turned to Cora. Now that she was about to depart, the anger he'd been harboring faded. The tension released from his face. \"I know you're strong. I know Ashe will protect you. But please be careful, Sor-lei.\"\n\nHer eyes softened as she gave a nod.\n\n\"You're all I have\u2014and I can't lose you.\"\n\n\"I can't lose you either\u2026\"\n\nHe embraced her with both arms, hugging her tightly as he rested his chin on her head. \"Return as soon as you can.\"\n\n\"I will.\" With her cheek pressed to his chest, she closed her eyes. \"Rein-Lei-Vu.\"\n\nHis hand cupped the back of her head. \"Rein-Lei-Vu\u2026\" When he pulled away, he pressed a kiss to her forehead, his hand still supporting her neck. Her body suddenly went cold when his affection was taken away, when he turned and returned the way they'd come. He didn't look back.\n\nShe watched him go until he disappeared into the trees.\n\nThe weight of her heart pulled her entire body to the earth. Her eyes blinked several times to dispel the moisture that built up on her bottom lid. When tears escaped, she wiped them with her fingers and marched forward. \"I'm here\u2026\"\n\nBridge and the others came over to greet her, exchanging hugs and pleasantries.\n\nRush walked over but lingered, giving everyone else an opportunity to stay hello first. When the group parted, he stepped forward, wearing his handsome smirk. \"You okay?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. I just hate saying goodbye.\"\n\n\"It's not goodbye. It's see-you-later.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nHe kept his distance, his arms by his sides, eyes on hers.\n\nShe watched him in return, her heart aching for a whole new reason. \"I'm really happy to see you\u2026\"\n\nThe smirk faded, his eyes giving away his emotion. \"Is that for me or Flare?\"\n\nShe moved into his chest and wrapped her arms around him, her face fitting against his chest just the way it used to.\n\nHis arms reciprocated in a flash, cupping her petite size with his big hands, bringing her so close there wasn't a breath between them. His chin rested on her head, and he gave a deep exhale.\n\nHer hands instantly remembered his body, remembered every aspect of his physique. It was like stepping into her home, the most comfortable place in the world. Fire chased away the mist. Affection chased away the loneliness. \"You.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "One Thing in Common",
                "text": "The campfire glowed just long enough to cook the meat. A rabbit was split five ways\u2014and Cora subsisted on the food she'd packed. The flames were snuffed out before darkness arrived, but there was still a red-orange glow in the embers.\n\nEveryone retired to sleep in their bedrolls. Cora took the first watch because she wasn't tired, but Rush remained across from her, his handsome face fatigued by the constant travels across Anastille.\n\nRush sat on the ground with his back to the rock, his arms resting on his knees. \"So, Hawk loves Peony, and Peony loves Hawk, but since she's afraid he's gonna die, she's like 'Nah, I'll pass'?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't put it like that, but pretty much.\"\n\n\"Well, that sounds kinda dumb.\"\n\n\"I know. I hope the attack on Eden Star changes her opinion.\"\n\n\"It's nice that you made some friends. What did you bribe them with?\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes in a playful way.\n\nHe gave a chuckle. \"You know I kid.\"\n\n\"There's also Lia too, but I'm not as close with her as the other two.\"\n\n\"How did everyone react when your lineage was revealed?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I don't know. Callon and I stayed away from Eden Star after our confrontation with the queen. But the people loved Tiberius so much that I suspect it will improve my social standing significantly.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will get the queen off your back.\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2026 She's vile. I'm worried what she'll do to Callon.\"\n\n\"She can't touch him. He's been protecting Eden Star far longer than she's been queen. The elves know that.\"\n\n\"I know, but\u2026you should have seen her face. She's tried to get rid of me so many times, and Callon has always prevented it. I'm more than just a thorn in her side. I'm her biggest vulnerability.\"\n\n\"Because she thinks you want to be queen? That's ironic because you have no interest in the crown, and now Callon is going for it\u2014and he's a much bigger threat.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is ironic.\" Her eyes dropped to the fire, the gentle glow growing fainter.\n\n\"There must be more to the story.\"\n\nHer eyes lifted up again.\n\n\"Maybe she does hate you. Maybe she is humiliated by her husband's infidelity. But to sacrifice all her integrity to hide this secret\u2026doesn't make sense. She's hiding something else.\"\n\n\"Tiberius said she hasn't come to visit him since he died.\"\n\n\"Suspicious, isn't it?\"\n\n\"A bit.\"\n\nHis eyes dropped and looked her over, examining the strong but durable armor Callon had provided her. \"You look cute in that, by the way.\"\n\nShe instinctively looked down at herself. \"Thanks. I thought I could use it for what's to come. And I'd rather wear it than carry it in my pack the entire way.\"\n\nAfter he looked her over, his eyes settled on her face, the stare so focused he didn't blink.\n\nShe met his look and gave a swallow.\n\n\"It's nice to have these conversations while I can see your face.\" Crickets were loud in the meadow around them. An occasional hoot split the night. The sky was cloudless to expose a full moon, the light piercing the darkness. His hands together around his knees, Rush's eyes glowed as he examined her, a subtle smile on his lips. \"We've been apart for so long\u2026it's hard to believe you're really here.\"\n\n\"I know\u2026\"\n\n\"I have to warn you, being a fugitive isn't nearly as comfy as having a private tree house in a magical forest. Your back is gonna ache from sleeping on the ground. There's going to be a spider in your bedroll from time to time. And the food\u2026pretty terrible.\"\n\nShe gave a smile. \"I don't mind any of that\u2014as long as we're together.\"\n\nHe didn't hold her gaze with as much intensity as before. Now his eyes softened, like a flower that began to wilt.\n\n\"There's something I need to tell you.\"\n\nThe stare continued.\n\n\"When I was talking to my father, he told me he was fused with a dragon.\"\n\nThe look of longing disappeared when his eyebrows jumped up his face. \"King Tiberius of Eden Star? An elf?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Whoa\u2026what? When?\"\n\n\"A year before he\u2014\" her eyes dropped \"\u2014he died.\"\n\nRush digested the implication of her words with a hard jaw, with a look of loathing. His eyes shifted away for a few seconds before his focus returned. \"Where did he find a dragon?\"\n\n\"He said they were about to challenge the Steward of Easton, and he found her hidden in the forest with two broken wings. I guess she was scared and had nowhere to go, so she trusted him to fuse.\"\n\nRush dropped his gaze to the fire, his eyebrows scrunched together. \"I don't know how that would be possible.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't lie.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying he is. I just don't understand how there could have been a dragon just sitting in the forest.\"\n\n\"Well, she had two broken wings, so she was obviously being hunted.\"\n\nWhen Rush looked away again, a whole new look of pain on his face, she knew he'd figured it out.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe gave a quick shake of his head. \"I don't want to say\u2026\"\n\n\"Rush.\"\n\nHe ignored her look.\n\n\"You can tell me anything.\"\n\n\"It's not that. I just don't think you want to know.\"\n\n\"I probably don't\u2026but you still need to tell me.\"\n\nAfter a breath, his eyes reconnected with hers. \"My father tortured dragons at random, to keep them in compliance. So, he would force some of them to flee\u2026 for us to chase them. To give them that small hope of freedom just so we could take it away\u2026and mutilate them in the process.\"\n\nShe inhaled a slow and deep breath, every bit of air painful in her lungs.\n\n\"I never did that\u2026just to be clear.\"\n\nNot that she'd needed more of a reason to kill King Lux, but now she had another. It hurt even more now that she was fused with Ashe, the dragon that had become more than a friend, more than an ally.\n\n\"He was at the right place at the right time\u2026 Good for her.\"\n\n\"Yeah. He took her to Eden Star, and I guess she loved it. They were really close\u2026from the way he described it. The way he talked about their relationship, it was like he was talking about my relationship with Ashe. Your relationship with Flare.\"\n\n\"I suspect the fuse is the reason he's so partial to this cause. The elves hate dragons so much, I wouldn't be surprised if they would have just left her there to die. None of them would have offered the fuse. And none of them would have defended her either.\"\n\n\"You're right.\"\n\n\"That relationship gave him a perspective that no one else has. You guys are strangers, but it looks like you have at least one thing in common. A unique, profound thing in common. My father and I are both fused, but his relationship with his dragon is vastly different from mine\u2026as we both know.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you're right.\"\n\n\"Did he say anything else? What happened to her?\"\n\nShe couldn't meet his gaze as she answered his question. \"She passed away\u2026when he did.\"\n\nWhatever his reaction was, she didn't know because she couldn't see his face.\n\nSilence continued, long and weighty.\n\nShe lifted her chin and looked at his visage\u2014and had never seen it so pale. It was the exact color of the moon, like all the blood had been sucked from his flesh by leeches. \"Rush\u2014\"\n\n\"One less dragon, because of me.\"\n\n\"Look\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't make me feel better, so don't try.\" He left the campfire and walked into the darkness. His silhouette was visible, but only for a few seconds. He blended in with the night, his footsteps silent, until he was no more.\n\nThey avoided common paths and trails and stuck to the brush as much as possible. It caused several detours, adding days to their journey. They were just as vulnerable in the daylight as the darkness, so there was no good time to move across Anastille. They just did it\u2014and hoped for the best.\n\n<This is taking too long.>\n\n<Well, we can't fly.>\n\n<We could. I blend into the darkness better than any other dragon.>\n\n<And the others?>\n\n<They can meet us there.>\n\n<We stay together.>\n\n<That wouldn't be a problem\u2014if the company weren't so unpleasant.>\n\n<Ashe, he feels terrible\u2014>\n\n<He could feel worse, and it wouldn't make a difference. A lifetime of repentance and remorse doesn't even scratch the surface. He slays dragons. He kills kings. That's who he was\u2014and still is.>\n\nCora knew her dragon well enough to know that nothing would assuage his anger. She let the conversation die, waited for a change in the tide to dispel his foul mood. Rush was in the lead, so she quickened her pace to catch up. They hadn't spoken since last night, and judging from the distance he kept between them, he still didn't want to. \"Whatever happened with the goats?\"\n\nRush turned at the question, his high eyebrows showing his surprise. \"We didn't run into them on the way out. If we had, probably wouldn't have made it.\"\n\n\"You think we'll run into them again?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately.\"\n\n\"Come on, goats are cute. I want to see them.\"\n\n\"These are not ordinary goats. These are the kinda goats that will knock you flat on the ground.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"The only animal you like is your dragon.\"\n\n\"When did I ever say I like him?\"\n\nShe gave him a hard nudge in the side.\n\nHis short wince was quickly replaced by that smirk along with his deep chuckle. \"I'm getting an earful right now.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nHe rubbed the tender spot as he continued to walk, and once it subsided, his arm dropped to his side. \"How'd you sleep? Probably miss your bed made of flowers or whatever.\"\n\n\"Wasn't so bad.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure what I'm looking forward to more. Defeating my father and freeing all the dragons or having a bed again.\"\n\n\"The second one, probably.\"\n\n\"You know me so well.\" He turned his attention forward, leading the group through the trees and taking cover from the skies. The Stronghold was visible on a clear day, but so was the distance they had to cover to get there. \"So, I've been doing some thinking\u2014\"\n\n\"Wow, that's a first.\"\n\nNow he nudged her in the side. \"Ha-ha. Blah-blah.\"\n\n\"Careful\u2026I'll throw a rock at your head.\"\n\nHe chuckled and kept going. \"I've felt a target on the back of my head all day.\"\n\n\"I'll save it for the\u2026what do you call them?\"\n\n\"Fazurks. Or the Big Uglies. Terms are interchangeable.\"\n\n\"Not gonna lie. I'm relieved I have Ashe for this.\"\n\n\"If you didn't, I wouldn't even entertain this idea.\"\n\n\"Come on, I handled General Noose on my own.\"\n\n\"You're right.\" He gave a nod in agreement. \"Wish I hadn't missed it\u2026but also hope it never happens again.\"\n\n\"So, what were you thinking about? Must have been important since you do it so rarely.\"\n\n\"Wow, just gonna keep 'em coming, huh?\"\n\n\"Like I said, I missed you.\"\n\nHis eyes softened the way they did long ago, in a different time, in different circumstances. His gaze lingered like smoke hovering over the flames. \"Your father was fused with a dragon when he conceived you. Perhaps that explains your abilities.\"\n\nAshe's powerful voice intruded. <He's right.>\n\n\"But what does that explain, exactly?\" she asked. \"That\u2026I'm part dragon?\"\n\n<Yes.>\n\n\"Yes.\" Rush continued his pace even though his entire focus was on the conversation between them. \"When you're fused, you're one. So, if you were conceived under those circumstances, perhaps parts of the dragon were transferred to you.\"\n\n\"That doesn't explain why other people fused with dragons don't sire children with the same abilities. What about you?\"\n\n\"My father wasn't fused before I was born. Come to think of it, no one has been fused and had children. Families were born a long time ago, and now that they're immortal, there's no reason to continue reproducing. My father is very picky about whom he allows to fuse with one of his dragons. Most of the time, they're temporary fusions. He doesn't grant immortality to just anyone.\"\n\n\"That's why they continue to serve him\u2014because everyone wants to live forever.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"And he has a small inventory, so he has to be deliberate in his decisions. General Noose was promised a dragon for his loyal service, so that's why we're seeing him everywhere we go.\"\n\n\"He almost took Eden Star\u2026and would have received a dragon if he had.\"\n\n\"But it didn't happen\u2014because of you.\"\n\n<I must feed.>\n\n<We're out in the open right now.>\n\n<But my scales are as dark as night\u2014and the blanket of clouds conceals the stars.>\n\n<What does that matter?>\n\n<My body won't block out the stars, so you can't see me pass.>\n\n<Oh\u2026gotcha.> \"Rush?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" He examined the field and the distance before he turned back.\n\n\"Ashe is hungry.\"\n\n<I don't need his permission.>\n\n\"And a bit grouchy\u2026\"\n\nRush took another scan of the surroundings before he regarded her. \"It's not ideal, but we need him to be strong for the Stronghold. Tell him to be careful since he doesn't know the terrain well.\"\n\n<I DO NOT TAKE ORDERS FROM YOU.>\n\nCora winced at the scream in her head.\n\nRush must have noticed it because he dismissed himself.\n\n\"Alright, let's do this.\" She stepped farther into the stalks of grass, away from everyone else so she'd have ample room to make the separation. She pulled her mind away and felt his mind mirror it, their souls coming apart. Then the world shook as she lost her footing, swaying until she hit the ground.\n\nAshe opened his wings and took flight.\n\nA large hand moved to her shoulder. \"You alright?\"\n\nShe pushed herself up, getting to her knees and then her feet. \"Yeah. I'm just not used to it yet.\"\n\nRush looked into the sky where Ashe had been\u2014and saw no sign of him. \"He really is invisible.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"That's going to be a big help in the future.\" He withdrew his touch and stepped back. \"You'll get used to the mechanics.\"\n\n\"Got any tips?\"\n\nHe chewed the inside of his lip as he considered. \"It's been so long that I don't even remember what it feels like\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, that makes sense. I used to get really sick. At least that doesn't happen anymore.\"\n\nThey returned to the main campground, where everyone else was settled in their cots. But no one was asleep\u2014because Ashe took their full attention.\n\nLiam continued to stare into the darkness, hopeful for a glimpse. \"I hope to see his scales in the light of day.\"\n\n\"How big is he?\" Lilac asked.\n\n\"Freakin' humongous,\" Bridge said. \"He's nearly twice the size of Flare.\"\n\n\"What's he like?\" Lilac turned to Cora, who took a seat beside her.\n\n\"Majestic. Wise. Glorious,\" Cora answered. \"And a bit stubborn\u2026\"\n\n\"He can't be that stubborn,\" Bridge said. \"He's here, right?\"\n\nCora gave a nod.\n\n\"Since we're all awake, let's talk about the plan,\" Rush said. \"We're still a few days out, but we should figure out what we're going to do when we arrive.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2026you don't know what we're doing?\" Zane asked. \"That's the plan?\"\n\n\"Come on, I never have a plan,\" Rush said. \"And we do just fine.\"\n\n\"We were almost trapped underground forever,\" Lilac said. \"I don't think that constitutes fine\u2014\"\n\n\"Almost,\" Rush said. \"I got us out of there, didn't I?\"\n\nLilac rolled her eyes.\n\n\"I think we've got to lure as many of the Fazurks out of the tunnels as possible,\" Rush said. \"Burn them to a crisp. Do it over and over.\"\n\n\"But how are we going to get them out of the tunnels?\" Cora asked.\n\n\"That\u2026I don't know.\" Rush sat with his arms on his knees. \"Maybe good ol'-fashioned bait?\"\n\nBridge narrowed his eyes on Rush. \"I hope that means you're volunteering\u2026\"\n\n\"Cora and I can't do it,\" Rush said. \"We're the ones with the dragons.\"\n\n\"Of course\u2026\" Bridge shook his head. \"Look how that worked out.\"\n\n\"What about water?\" Cora asked.\n\nRush stared at her, perplexed. \"Water?\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\" Lilac asked.\n\n\"I've never been there before, so this could be a total miss, but could we flood the mountain?\" Cora asked. \"Is there a lake nearby or something?\"\n\n\"Hmm\u2026that's an idea.\" Bridge looked at Rush. \"Flush 'em out. They gotta have a water system of some kind.\"\n\n\"But I don't know where it is or how it works,\" Rush said. \"And I don't know how to drain it either. Plus, if there are surviving dwarves down there, it could drown them too. That's a good idea, but I don't think it'll work. Let's stick with the bait idea.\"\n\n\"Do you think they'll be stupid enough to fall for that, though?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Rush said quickly. \"They're a bunch of idiots.\"\n\n\"What do we do about the Shamans and Obsidian?\" Bridge asked. \"When they see the commotion on the mountain, they're going to come back.\"\n\n\"The Shamans won't be a problem this time.\" Rush turned to Cora. \"Because we've got this superpower right here.\" He gave her a wink.\n\nHeat flushed her cheeks as if she'd submerged herself in the hot springs.\n\n\"And I hope Obsidian does come\u2014because it's two-on-one this time.\" Rush held up two fingers.\n\n\"That might be a problem\u2026\" Cora was relieved that Ashe was on the hunt so he couldn't hear this conversation. \"Since Obsidian is Ashe's brother.\"\n\n\"Ashe has already said he'll do what's necessary,\" Rush said. \"Back on Mist Isle.\"\n\n\"But it's one thing to say that and another to actually do it\u2026\" She understood his mind better than anyone else\u2014except Diamond. She felt his raw emotions, knew his responses to circumstances without sharing a thought. To feel that anguish with him\u2026would be terrible.\n\n\"I suspect that once Obsidian sees Ashe, he won't be able to move against him,\" Rush said. \"He's been fused with my father for a long time, so perhaps his mind is too far gone at this point, but it's a possibility.\"\n\n\"True,\" Cora said.\n\n\"But then my father will know that free dragons still exist\u2026somewhere.\" Rush dropped his head. \"We would lose that element of surprise.\"\n\n\"And he would search everywhere for that island,\" Cora said. \"We can't let that happen.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Rush said. \"So, if Obsidian comes\u2026you'll have to hide.\"\n\nCora nodded. \"Got it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Baaaaaahhh",
                "text": "<I see the way she looks at you.>\n\nRush stopped at the edge of the tree line, examining the landscape for a passing army, for a dragon in the sky, a tiny black dot far into the distance.\n\n<She misses you.>\n\n<Look, I've finally gotten to a decent place about the whole thing\u2026so don't yank me backward.>\n\n<I'm just saying.>\n\n<Well, don't.>\n\n<Just wanted you to know that you aren't alone in your heartbreak.>\n\nRush shaded his eyes as he studied the surroundings at the base of the mountains. They couldn't scale the mountain in the dark, so they had to go first thing in the morning, even though that left them exposed. <I doubt they're there. Probably assume we wouldn't return.>\n\n<Probably.>\n\nBridge walked up as he spoke to Cora. \"Sailing the seas on a pirate ship sounds cool and everything, but it sucked. I was so sick the entire time. And then we almost died a couple times\u2014and I can't swim.\"\n\n\"Why were you on a ship if you can't swim?\"\n\nRush turned to her. \"Thank you.\"\n\nBridge rolled his eyes. \"I don't live in a port city and I'm nowhere near a lake, so when would I learn?\"\n\n\"Everyone else here learned,\" Rush said.\n\n\"Well, I guess my mom was too busy dealing with the monster-spawn that is my sister.\" He propped his hands on his hips and looked at the looming mountain.\n\nLilac gave him a slug in the stomach as she passed. \"We're climbing that thing again?\"\n\nBridge leaned over, holding his stomach as he labored through the pain.\n\n\"Yep,\" Rush said. \"And we gotta do it fast.\"\n\n\"I've never climbed anything before,\" Cora said.\n\n\"Stay in front of me,\" Rush said. \"I'll catch you if you fall.\"\n\nLilac's eyes shifted back and forth between them, her gaze narrowed.\n\nRush caught the look and stared back. Before she could make a comment, he took a step forward. \"Coast is clear, so let's get to it.\" He started at a jog, moving across the stalks of grass and to the base of the rocks. He boosted Cora up then went behind her.\n\nShe climbed to the top of the boulder then looked down. \"So, where are the goats?\"\n\nRush pulled his heavy body to the top and got to his feet. \"You'll smell them before you see them.\"\n\nCora crinkled her nose in disgust.\n\nRush couldn't keep the grin off his face because she somehow looked cute no matter what she did with her expression. \"Come on, let's keep going.\"\n\nIt was an all-day trek to the highest part of the mountain. They were miles from the entrance to the Stronghold, purposely keeping their distance from the Fazurks that were crawling around the entrance.\n\nWhen they were this high up, a fire was out of the question, and the higher elevation brought a chill across their shoulders. They were a bit closer to the stars, so now they were a little bigger, a little brighter. Everyone was lying in their cots to get some sleep on the solid stone, while Rush sat with his arms on his knees.\n\n<The stars are really bright up here.>\n\nHis eyes shifted as he looked into the darkness, hearing her voice in his mind.\n\nBrightness entered the night when there was a streak across the sky. He noticed it but didn't really focus on it.\n\n<Wow, a shooting star. That's cool.>\n\n<Can't sleep?>\n\n<Hard to go from flowers to this.>\n\n<I can imagine.>\n\n<You never seem to sleep.>\n\n<I'll sleep when I'm dead.>\n\n<I'm really not tired, so I can take over.>\n\n<It's fine. Really.>\n\nHeavy silence passed for a while. <There's something on your mind.>\n\n<My father.>\n\n<Because of what happened here?>\n\n<Yep.>\n\n<I'm sorry.>\n\n<Yeah\u2026it's\u2026whatever. Doesn't matter.>\n\n<I have Dorian and Callon\u2026and you don't have anybody. But just know that you always have me, Rush.>\n\nHe almost said something back, but he kept it lodged deep in his throat, where it died.\n\nAt first light, they maneuvered over the rocky mountains and approached the entrance to the Stronghold. From the top of the world, they had clear views of Anastille, of Polox in the distance, even Cora's village.\n\nIn the other direction were the Shadow Lands.\n\nCovered by heavy cloud bank, the world was still a mystery to the naked eye.\n\n\"Smell that?\" Bridge called from the back.\n\nRush inhaled the pungent smell with his nose, recognizing it right away. \"Great\u2026they smell even worse.\"\n\n<Now I'm hungry.>\n\n<That's disgusting.>\n\n<Men smell worse\u2014in my opinion.>\n\n<Thanks\u2026>\n\n\"Baaaaaahhh.\"\n\nRush's hand reached out and snatched Cora by the arm, stopping her before she could go any farther. \"Whoa, hold on.\"\n\nThe goat appeared on one of the rocks, white with brown spots, his horns pointing straight out.\n\nCora stared at him before she gave Rush an incredulous look. \"You're scared\u2026of that?\"\n\n\"Not scared,\" Rush said quickly. \"Just learned my lesson.\"\n\n\"Baaaaaahhh.\" He wiggled his little tail.\n\n\"Shit, he's calling for the others,\" Bridge said. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"You guys are ridiculous.\" Cora yanked her arm out of Rush's grasp and approached the goat. \"He's like two feet tall.\"\n\n\"Cora, be careful,\" Rush said. \"I'm serious. He'll buck you off the mountain.\"\n\nShe gave him a glare over her shoulder. \"I'll take my chances, alright?\" She stuck out her hand, took a knee, and then watched the goat smell her. \"Hey, honey. You're so cute.\" The goat quickly became acquainted with her, so she petted her hand over his head and down his back.\n\nHe closed his eyes and dropped his head, rubbing his horns into her body.\n\nCora chuckled as she massaged his scalp. \"Ah\u2026this is the sweet spot, huh?\"\n\nRush glanced at Bridge.\n\nBridge glanced back, eyes still wide. \"Elves\u2026\"\n\n<Everyone loves Pretty.>\n\n<I'll say.> \"Hey\u2026I have an idea.\"\n\n\"What?\" Bridge asked. \"Buck it off the mountain while we still have a chance?\"\n\n\"We need bait, right?\" Rush moved closer to his friend, no longer concerned about Cora's safety. \"We put some bells on this guy and make him run into the Stronghold. All the Fazurks will come out to play.\"\n\nBridge cupped his chin. \"Not a bad idea\u2014\"\n\n\"That's barbaric.\" Cora abandoned the goat when she heard what they said, and now her eyes were worse than the storms on the sea. \"We aren't doing that.\"\n\nBridge dropped his arms. \"It's better than one of us going in\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll find another way.\" Her gaze was still lethal, the suggestion enough to make her blood boil. \"We aren't sending a baby goat to his death.\"\n\nBridge glanced at Rush again. \"Elves\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, trust me,\" Rush said. \"I already know.\"\n\nWhen they approached the entrance, they crouched down behind an array of boulders to examine the Fazurks. They came and went, some leaving the Stronghold and taking a trail toward the Shadow Lands. Others entered through the hole in the mountain, carrying kills they intended to roast over the fire. The Stronghold had been entirely claimed by these beasts, as if the dwarves had never been there in the first place.\n\n\"What now?\" Bridge asked, squatting beside him.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Rush tried to count them, but there were too many. \"Burning them will be easy, but the second I take flight, I'll be visible from leagues around.\"\n\n\"Can you burn them from the ground?\" Bridge asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" Rush said. \"But I leave myself pretty vulnerable.\"\n\n\"Not if you have another dragon.\" Cora joined their conversation, her long hair in a high ponytail off her face, her black elven armor depicting flowers on the surface. The material was durable, so it moved and breathed with her, preserving her femininity while also showcasing her strength. \"I can cover you.\"\n\n\"You're even bigger than I am,\" Rush said. \"A lot more visible.\"\n\nCora gave a shrug. \"I don't think there's any way to do this without that risk. We just have to be quick. Might have to retreat a couple times then return.\"\n\n\"That won't work,\" Rush said. \"Once they figure out that we're here for a reason, they won't leave. We'll have to abandon the dwarves and Talc. We need to do this in one go.\"\n\nCora gave a slow nod. \"No pressure at all\u2026\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Bridge was between them, so he turned to Cora. \"You can talk to, like, any dragon, right?\"\n\n\"It's more complicated than that,\" Cora said. \"But pretty much.\"\n\nRush leaned forward and watched his friend. \"Where are you going with this, Bridge?\"\n\n\"Couldn't you talk to Queen Megora?\" Bridge asked. \"You know, through Talc?\"\n\n\"I mean, I guess,\" Cora said. \"But why would I?\"\n\n\"Couldn't we ask her for some pointers?\" Bridge asked. \"Maybe she can tell us how to get these guys out of the mountain.\"\n\nRush couldn't stop himself from narrowing his eyes on his friend's face. \"That's actually pretty smart\u2026\"\n\n\"Why are you surprised? I'm a scholar.\" Bridge turned back to him. \"So, obviously, I'm intelligent.\"\n\n\"With half the stuff that comes out of your mouth\u2026\" Rush shook his head. \"I don't think so.\"\n\nBridge threw an elbow into his side.\n\nRush gave a grunt as he dropped his head. \"Okay, I deserved that.\"\n\n\"So, let's get rid of these guys on the surface before we go further.\" Cora looked at Rush. \"Ready?\"\n\nHe continued to rub his sensitive ribs, wearing a slight wince. \"Yeah, let's get to it.\"\n\nThe second Flare emerged, the Fazurks took notice.\n\nEnormous, with blood-red scales and a toothy smile, he opened his impressive jaws and let out a stream of lava-hot fire. The flames matched his exterior color, creating an inferno of searing heat.\n\nThe Fazurks directly in front of him lit up like matches, burning from head to toe, their mighty roars becoming painful screams. Their knees quickly gave out, and they collapsed, now burning firewood.\n\nHis talons in the earth, he turned his head left to right, burning the stampede that came from different directions. <This is fun.>\n\n<Yeah, kinda is.>\n\n<Too bad they taste like bat.>\n\n<You know what they taste like?>\n\n<I took a bite last time\u2026terrible.>\n\n<Wow, there's a lot of them.>\n\nTheir group increased in size from the north, so many that a single jet of fire couldn't catch them all and guard the other side at the same time. <We could use some help\u2014>\n\n<Already on it.> The enormous black dragon appeared on the collection of boulders beside him, scales the color of darkness, the muscles in the shoulders as big as the ones in the thighs. Ashe opened his throat and let the fire stream out, red-hot, but a slightly different hue, with spots of yellow.\n\nThe Fazurks were engulfed in flames.\n\n<Everything is so much easier when you're a dragon.>\n\n<It really is.>\n\nAshe marched to the entrance of the Stronghold, igniting every foe in his path, knocking the bodies aside with his massive talons when they got in the way. The hole was far too small for him to fit, but it wasn't too small for his mouth. He sealed his mouth over the entrance and released the flame. <That oughta do it.>\n\nRush took care of the rest of the line until there wasn't a Fazurk left standing. <That has to be most of them. If there's more, then they pop out babies like rabbits.>\n\nAshe continued to blow his fire into the hole, but he pulled back and took a look. <The ants are gone.>\n\n\"Rush!\" Bridge ran out from his hiding place in the rocks, his arm pointed at the sky. \"Shamans!\"\n\n<Cora, hide.>\n\nAshe instantly transformed back into Cora, who collapsed on her knees once she was back in her body. She pushed herself forward, getting back on her feet and moving forward. <Do you think they saw me?>\n\n<I'm not sure. You were on the other side of the rocky outcropping, so I think we're safe.>\n\nRush came forth as he transitioned, tall on his feet.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Bridge came to his side, sweat gleaming on his forehead. \"They're headed right for us.\"\n\nRush gave him a pat on the shoulder. \"Trust me.\"\n\nThe details of the two Shamans came into focus, their cloaks billowing in the wind, their monstrous steeds jet black like Ashe. Fireballs formed in their palms, throbbing with energy they conjured from their abilities.\n\nRush nodded toward Cora.\n\nBridge followed his gaze and watched.\n\nThey hovered feet away, reining in their steeds to halt in the sky. Their prey didn't run and scream, and they were clearly bewildered by the sight.\n\nCora closed her eyes\u2014and they fell.\n\nJust like that.\n\nThe Shamans collapsed off their steeds, fell hundreds of feet, and then disappeared over the horizon of the mountain.\n\nThe surviving steeds took off, darting back the way they came.\n\nRush grinned. \"Attagirl.\"\n\nBridge turned back to Rush, wearing an incredulous look. \"Did that just happen?\"\n\n\"Yep.\" He crossed his arms over his chest as he looked at the other dots in the distance, other Shamans that had seen the fire explode from his snout. They halted their steeds then turned around, retreating. \"Ba-ha-ha-ha!\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026why are you laughing?\" Bridge watched the sky before he turned back to Rush, eyebrows raised.\n\n\"Because it's hilarious. These guys have been up my ass this whole time, and then bam, they're gone.\" He snapped his fingers. \"Like that.\" He dusted off his hands. \"Poof.\" He gave another laugh. \"Man, I'm going to really enjoy this.\"\n\nThey moved through the entrance of the Stronghold, immediately surrounded by rocky caverns, smoke from the fires, and dead carcasses that littered the ground. The scaffolding had collapsed from the inferno, so there was no way to get down except to climb.\n\nOnce they were far enough down to give adequate space, they transitioned into their dragons. Flare carried everyone to the bottom, while Ashe never volunteered. He landed at the bottom of the cavern, looking into the passageway that led deeper underground.\n\nFlare looked up at the solid wall where the dwarves were hidden. <The wall hasn't been breached. They're safe.>\n\n<Can you feel Talc?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<Can you talk to her?>\n\n<I'll try.>\n\n<Flare is trying to talk to Talc right now.>\n\n<Alright. We'll keep an eye on the passageway.> Whenever Ashe saw a group of Fazurks emerge around the corner, he released another stream of fire.\n\nFlare returned. <I can feel her mind, but the barrier is too thick for us to speak. Dragons aren't meant to be underground.>\n\nWhile they spoke with their minds, everyone else took a seat and waited, watching the dragons do the work. Lilac took out an apple and peeled the skin with a knife. Bridge unrolled a map and took a look. Liam leaned against one of the rocks as if he might take a nap.\n\n<Pretty, try. I'll take your place.>\n\nFlare took over the passage, blowing fire at the monsters that continued to come even though they knew full well what the outcome would be.\n\n<Okay, hold on.>\n\nAshe walked to where Flare had been standing, his eyes finding the same location in the rock.\n\n<Besides, this is more fun.> Flare opened his throat and released a stream of fire over and over, watching their bodies burn at the opposite end.\n\nRush waited, but he was too eager for news to keep quiet. <Can you hear her?>\n\n<Yes. We're talking.>\n\n<What is she saying?>\n\n<I can't do two things at once, so give me a minute.>\n\nRush let Flare take over while his mind wandered elsewhere, waiting for Cora to return with the news he hoped to hear.\n\n<Why are you so anxious?>\n\n<Because we need to get out of here as quickly as possible.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<I'd rather not continue the last conversation I had with my father.>\n\n<He's injured.>\n\n<I'm sure he's healed by now. And I doubt he'll come alone this time.>\n\n<Okay, I'm back.>\n\n<What did she say?>\n\n<Queen Megora said there's some kind of filtration system farther inside. It allows them to circulate the air, get rid of the mold and moisture, and draw in fresh air from the outside.>\n\n<How does that help us?>\n\n<Because if we turn it on and blow our fire, the flames should reach every single part of the mountain.>\n\n<Awesome. That's a great idea!>\n\n<So, she's going to walk me through it. Give me directions until I find it.>\n\n<Wait\u2026back up. <You> aren't going in there.>\n\n<I'm the only one who can talk to her. It has to be me.>\n\n<Tell her to come out.>\n\n<She said she won't until the Fazurks are gone.>\n\n<Coward.>\n\n<Rush.>\n\n<Sorry. Not sorry.>\n\nThey left their dragon forms and returned to their two feet once more.\n\nRush gave everyone a quick rundown of the plan, which required them all to stay behind. \"I'm going to escort Cora to the lever for the filtration system.\"\n\n\"But that leaves us with no dragons,\" Bridge said.\n\n\"There's no other way,\" Rush said. \"I'm the only one who can match them in battle. If she goes in there alone, she'll be ripped to pieces.\"\n\n\"Eh-hem.\" Cora stared, her eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Cora, these things are huge. Trust me.\"\n\nThe hostility reigned. \"It makes more sense for you to cover the tunnel\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" He pulled his sword out of the scabbard and marched to the entrance of the cavern. \"We don't have time to argue about this. They're coming, so we need to be quick. Let's go.\"\n\nCora jogged to his side, and the two of them entered the tunnel. She withdrew her red blade and carried it, her fingers tight around the pommel. Their footsteps were loud in the cave, their breaths heavy too.\n\nThey switched their conversations to their minds so their voices wouldn't give away their presence. <How far in is it?>\n\n<When we get to the next opening, there will be a hall to the left.>\n\n<You've got to be kidding me\u2026>\n\n<What?>\n\n<Last time I was there, it was full of Fazurks.>\n\n<Maybe there won't be as many this time\u2014> They rounded the corner and saw an army of them emerge out of the tunnel on the other side. This time, they had weapons\u2014and shields. <Oh boy.>\n\n<Go to the lever. I'll handle these guys.>\n\n<How?>\n\n<Just go.>\n\nShe took off at a run, turning left and entering the hall.\n\nThe Fazurks raised their swords, released a roar, and charged.\n\n<Allow me.> Flare came forth, fitting into the cavern with just a few inches to spare, and charred them into blackened meat.\n\n<Cora, are you alright?>\n\n<I'm fine. Just\u2026having\u2026a hard time\u2026getting there.>\n\n<Why are you talking like that?>\n\n<Because I'm hauling ass!>\n\n<More fire.> Flare stepped over the fiery carcasses and stuck his head deeper into the tunnel from which they'd come, burning them to smithereens. <Okay, that should buy us enough time.>\n\nRush came forth and reached for his sword and sprinted into the hall. Tables were turned over. Pints full of ale were on their sides, with shiny pools on the floor. Fazurks were on the far side, chasing after Cora, who was running on top of all the cabinets to get to the lever in the corner.\n\nRush climbed onto one of the tables and let out a loud whistle. \"Idiots, over here.\"\n\nThey all turned to regard him, their teeth pushing out of their jaws, serrated like saws.\n\n\"Who's a good boy?\" He clicked his tongue and patted his thighs. \"Come on. Come get it.\"\n\nTheir attention off Cora, they came forward, their growls turning into roars.\n\nRush withdrew his blade and spun it around his wrist. \"Step right up. Who will be the first to lose their head?\" <Go!>\n\nCora continued her run and dropped down onto the floor. The lever was in the corner, made of a thick rope. Both hands gripped it tightly, and she used her whole body to pull down, to make the hard mechanisms turn.\n\nWhen the sound of the wind was audible, Rush knew it'd been done. <Run. I'll be right behind you.> The Fazurks came for him all at once, climbing up the table or reaching for his legs. He slashed his sword across a couple throats, kicked one Fazurk in the head, and then stabbed his blade into the spine of another. His eyes were no longer on Cora, just focused on his own survival.\n\nHe quickly became overrun, far too many for him to handle in tight quarters. They were climbing up the table on all sides, from in front and behind, reaching for his legs and swiping at him with their claws. Even with Flare supplying his focus, there were just too many. He was outnumbered.\n\n\"Rush!\" Cora called from the entrance of the hall, the Fazurks oblivious to her because he was the meatier prize.\n\nHe kicked another one out of the way and spun his sword, slicing two throats in one go.\n\nMore climbed onto the table, suffocating him from all sides.\n\n<Cora, run!>\n\n\"No!\"\n\nRush took a fist to the face, the momentum hitting him so hard he lost concentration for just a second. Another Fazurk moved in, teeth sharp and glistening. Everything became a blur for a short while, the roars fading as if they were far away.\n\nThe face came closer, so many teeth in his mouth.\n\n<Rush! Focus.>\n\nRush stabbed his blade into the Fazurk, right through the torso. He collapsed.\n\nHe spun around to intercept the next one, but he collapsed\u2014for no reason at all.\n\nA hand gripped his arm and gave him a tug. \"Come on.\"\n\nThey jumped off the table and landed on shaky legs but kept running. When they rounded the corner to return the way they came, their speed dropped\u2014because they were going against the wind.\n\n<Push it.>\n\nWith a force strong enough to make their boots slide over the rock, the filtration system was as powerful as a storm. With every step they took, their bodies slid back a few inches, their cheeks stretched back. They kept their mouths closed. Otherwise, they couldn't breathe with the wind slapping them in the face. They pressed on, but with difficulty.\n\n<They're close behind you\u2014drafting.>\n\nRush grabbed her wrist and shoved her forward, keeping his body between her and the Fazurks. He could hear their roars for just a split second before the wind carried it away. He turned around, pulled out his sword, and stabbed the two closest on their heels.\n\n<Rush!>\n\n<Keep going. I'll hold them back.>\n\n<Use the wall.>\n\nHe sliced another and watched it collapse. The pile of bodies became an obstacle for the others, slowing them down a bit. They had a greater chance of escape than they had a second ago. <What?>\n\n<Look at me.>\n\nHe sheathed his sword and turned around, tears streaking down his face from the unforgiving bite of the wind.\n\nShe motioned for him to join her, her back flat against the wall. <It's a lot easier when you hug the wall.>\n\nInstead of going straight against the wind, he went diagonally, feeling an instant relief once he was right up against the wall like Cora. <Smart idea.>\n\n<Thanks.>\n\nWith their backs against the wall, they slid sideways, inching closer to the entrance.\n\nThe gang stood in front of the opening, their hair swirling because the wind was coming from a hole in the ceiling that had opened once she'd pulled the lever. Bridge extended his hand and pulled Cora in first. Lilac got Rush.\n\n\"Hurry up,\" Bridge said. \"They're following you.\"\n\nRush became Flare as everyone else backed up to get out of his way.\n\nThe Fazurks looked like the undead, popping out of the ground and walking with a slow gait, their arms outstretched.\n\n\"They look so ridiculous right now,\" Bridge said with a snigger.\n\nFlare inhaled a deep breath, compressed the air in his lungs, and then released an explosion of fire that was immediately sucked up by the wind, traveling down the tunnel with the speed of a flood.\n\nThe Fazurks were knocked down and rolled back with the fire, disappearing.\n\nFlare continued to release the flames, only stopping to take a breath and recharge his lungs. Then more fire came, swept away by the tunnel wind. <I will not stop\u2014until every last one is dead.>\n\n\"No way anyone survived that.\" Lilac dusted off the ash that had sprinkled her jacket in the chaos.\n\n\"Maybe a few stragglers,\" Bridge said. \"But not enough to do any real damage.\"\n\n\"But the Stronghold must be utterly destroyed.\" Liam looked back through the tunnel, which was still warm after the fire was gone. \"They'll have to completely rebuild.\"\n\n\"It's better to start over than never to start at all,\" Zane said.\n\n\"Guys.\" Cora pointed to the rock wall. \"Look.\"\n\nThe rock had rolled aside\u2014and revealed a dark passageway.\n\nThey all remained quiet, staring intently at the place where the surviving dwarves would emerge.\n\nWith her long hair, Queen Megora emerged first, her eyes wide, taking in the scene of destruction before her. She gazed at the destroyed scaffolding, the burned corpses scattered across the floor, and then met their looks.\n\nAll Rush could see was pain\u2014the pain at the devastation of their home.\n\nDurgin filed out behind her, armed to the teeth, ready to defend their queen.\n\nRush stepped forward. \"I know it's not the way you remember, but at least it's yours again.\"\n\nThe Durgin lowered their axes as they stood on either side of the queen, seeing the smoke rising up to the hole in the ceiling, seeing the place they hadn't seen in months, a place they'd thought they would never see again.\n\nIt took some time for Queen Megora to compose herself, to swallow the sorrow and find the strength to carry on. \"We must seal the entryway before they return. Hurry.\" The Durgin were the first to follow those orders, and as more dwarves came out of the passageway, it was clear that they'd come prepared for the job.\n\nEvery dwarf that remained in the Stronghold responded to the command, rushing over to seal the gaping hole in the ceiling that the Fazurks had somehow created.\n\n\"How are they going to do that\u2026?\" Lilac's eyes watched them cross the cavern to the hole and get to work. \"And more importantly, how are we going to get out?\"\n\nCora turned to Rush. \"I didn't think of that.\"\n\n\"There'll be another way,\" Rush said. \"And it'll be easy to find now that we actually have directions.\"\n\nMinutes later, Queen Megora arrived at the bottom of the cavern, her commanding presence making up for her petite size. She had to look up to meet each of their gazes, like a child looking up to a parent. Few Durgin came with her, holding their axes at the ready. Her eyes settled on Rush the longest. \"You fulfilled your promise\u2014and swiftly.\"\n\nRush gave a nod. \"I hope this is a dawn of a new relationship between men and dwarves\u2014as well as dwarves and elves.\"\n\nHer eyes shifted to Cora's, examining her for a great length of time. \"The Queen of Eden Star is not only half elven, but also fused with a dragon. Much has changed since the last time we ventured aboveground.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026I'm not the queen.\" Cora dropped her gaze momentarily. \"But I represent Eden Star.\"\n\nQueen Megora examined her once again. \"Are you the General of Eden Star?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cora answered. \"Callon Riverglade is still in charge. But I'm\u2026Cora Riverglade. Tiberius's daughter.\"\n\nRush felt his eyes flick away entirely on their own, focusing on the queen and nothing else.\n\n\"Then I'm still in the presence of royalty. Thank you for coming to our aid.\" Queen Megora gave her a slight bow before she regarded Rush once more. \"When Talc insisted that I spare you, I almost denied her. There's no human life worth saving, not when they've shown us who they really are. But I'm glad that she convinced me\u2014because I was wrong. Most men are evil\u2014but perhaps not all.\"\n\nRush gave a nod. \"Thanks\u2026that means a lot.\"\n\n\"If not for you, the dwarves would have passed from this life forever. Our lineages, our traditions, our hoards\u2014all gone. We will come to your aid whenever you need it. But first, we need to rebuild our caves. We need to search for survivors and pray we aren't all that's left of the Stronghold.\"\n\n\"Can we help with that?\" Rush could hear the dwarves hammering behind him, sealing the open rock that had allowed the Fazurks to pour in like a waterfall. But then those noises fell silent\u2014as if they were finished.\n\nA stain of hostility used to be smeared across her face, but now she regarded him with kindness, with a gaze of respect that hadn't been there previously. \"We can take it from here. You've done enough\u2014\"\n\n<Thud.>\n\nThe Queen's eyes widened slightly at the sound.\n\nThe chatter ceased. No one moved, as if a single breath would give away their location.\n\n<Rooooooooaaaar!>\n\n<Obsidian.>\n\nRush turned around to regard the hole that had once been there, completely sealed with rock as if it'd never been broken in the first place. \"Will that hold?\" His voice emerged as an unnecessary whisper.\n\nThe queen's tone echoed his. \"If it's been given time to dry.\"\n\n\"And has it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, but barely.\"\n\n<Thud.>\n\nRocks and sand sprinkled down from the ceiling under the weight.\n\nRush's eyes found Cora's. \"He brought backup this time\u2026\"\n\n<Thud.>\n\n<A lot of backup.>\n\nMore sand fell from the ceiling, little rocks landing like drops of rain.\n\n\"You have another way out of here?\" Rush asked, turning back to the queen.\n\n\"Several.\" Her eyes were up on the ceiling too. \"Assuming the Fazurks haven't destroyed them.\"\n\n\"Then let's get out of here.\" Rush grabbed his friends and directed them toward the tunnel that had recently been full of fire. \"Just in case that ceiling doesn't hold.\"\n\nAlmost everything in the tunnels was burned to ash.\n\nAnything made of metal survived, but the cabinets, the tables, the sleeping bunks were all destroyed. Now there was a permanent aroma of smoke in the air. The ventilation system would have to be on for a straight week for that stench to leave.\n\n\"I wish you could have seen us in all our glory.\" Queen Megora escorted them through the endless passages, still knowing the way even though she'd been trapped for the last few months. Her Durgin remained at her side, armed and armored, as if they were still not to be trusted. \"Not when it was invaded by rats. Not when it was burned to a crisp.\"\n\n\"It will be glorious once again,\" Cora said. \"And then, we'll be able to see it.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" She led the way for hours, taking them through the long tunnels that branched in various directions, knowing exactly when to turn left and when to turn right. No one stopped for breaks\u2014because the adrenaline was still too strong.\n\nThey eventually returned to the cave system they'd seen at the start of their journey.\n\n\"I remember this place.\" Bridge pressed his palm against the wall to feel the texture of the stone. \"We were too scared to go left or right, so we just went straight.\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Lilac said. \"That slide was pretty fun\u2026\"\n\n\"That's the supply chute,\" Queen Megora said. \"For nonperishable storage items.\"\n\n\"Where do you get your supplies?\" Rush asked.\n\n\"We pay private merchants to deliver our goods rather than venture out on our own,\" Queen Megora said. \"Anastille is such an unsafe place. I would never send dwarves out there unless I had no other choice.\"\n\n\"Then how do you know Mathilda?\"\n\nThe queen continued her graceful walk forward, her long hair in a thick and bushy braid. Nearly half the height of Rush, he could see right over her head without a compromise to the view. \"Ah, the witch. I haven't seen or heard from her in a long time.\"\n\nRush waited for the answer to his question, and when it didn't come, he pressed further. \"How do you know her?\"\n\n\"She's come to our mountains to barter. Sell us items that were quite useful. But then asked for some of our dwarven goods, like our Durgin Glue, our Climbers, and Sun Orbs. They only grow in the Stronghold, and that's where they are to remain. She didn't like that decision. Never saw her again after that.\"\n\nRush exchanged a quick look with Cora beside him.\n\n<That's all she cares about\u2014collecting things.>\n\n<Seems that way.>\n\nThey finally arrived at the entrance, the enormous rock exactly where they had left it. The Durgin worked together to roll it away, to reveal the cave and then the view beyond. It was twilight now, just enough sunlight to see the world beyond.\n\nQueen Megora faced Rush. \"This is where we part. We're in no place for war at the moment. Our mountain needs to heal first. We all do. But when we're ready, we'll join you in your war against King Lux.\"\n\n\"You have some time to do that,\" Rush said. \"Because we've got a lot of other things to take care of first. How will I contact you again?\"\n\n\"This entrance here.\" She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of parchment with a sharpened piece of rock. After she planted it against the wall, she sketched out the directions to the Great Hall. \"Here you are.\"\n\nRush folded it and tucked it into his pocket. \"Yes\u2026directions.\"\n\n\"Take care on your journeys.\" She gave a slight nod to everyone, except Cora. She received a bow, a custom of her people. Then Queen Megora turned to depart. All their matters had been settled, and it was time to part ways.\n\n\"Whoa, hold on.\" Rush moved forward, his hand raised. \"Aren't you forgetting something?\" He waited for her to give a laugh at her carelessness, to say that the events of the day had distracted her mind.\n\nQueen Megora turned back around. \"No.\" The answer was hard as stone. Final.\n\n\"Uh, Talc?\" Rush said. \"You agreed to release her.\"\n\n<I don't like this, Rush.>\n\n<I don't either.>\n\nHer hands moved behind her back, and she regarded him, now cold. \"By keeping Talc, I can be in communication with Cora even from a distance. That is the best strategy to prepare for war.\"\n\nCora locked her eyes on Rush, the anger in her gaze.\n\nRush forced himself to breathe instead of losing his temper, from declaring war and slaying the Durgin that guarded her. \"Dragons can't stay underground. It's unnatural.\"\n\nQueen Megora kept her regal pose, as if she were addressing subjects rather than allies. \"Well, she's handled it quite well\u2014\"\n\nCora withdrew her sword in a flash. \"Hand over Talc, or I'll slit your goddamn throat where you stand.\"\n\nRush glanced at her, his eyebrows raised. <Damn.>\n\nQueen Megora immediately stepped back so her Durgin could move forward and dissolve the threat.\n\nBut they didn't.\n\nTheir axes dropped to the floor, they fell to their knees, and they winced with closed eyes, their hands gripping their skulls. Their screams bounced off the walls and echoed down the chamber, probably all the way back to the Great Hall.\n\nQueen Megora stared at her in horror. \"What are you\u2014\"\n\nCora gripped her sword with two hands, prepared to strike. \"Release Talc, or they die.\"\n\nTheir screams grew louder.\n\n\"Alright.\" She threw her arms down, but the torture continued. \"I said, alright!\"\n\nCora released the spell and lowered her sword.\n\nThe Durgin came to, but they still winced, the pain in their minds lingering and leaving them incapacitated.\n\nNow Queen Megora stared at Cora with wide eyes, taking a step back to put even more distance between them.\n\nCora moved forward, closing the gap between them, getting right in her face.\n\n<Man, she's so hot.>\n\n<If she were a dragon, her flames would burn hotter than the sun.>\n\nCora sheathed her sword as she kept her eyes locked on the queen. \"Cross a dragon, you cross me. You'd do well to remember that.\"\n\nObsidian and the others must have departed because there were no signs of enormous dragons in the area. Their bodies didn't block out the stars as they passed, and Flare and Ashe didn't feel the presence of another dragon in their vicinity.\n\nQueen Megora took her distance then unfused.\n\nA green dragon emerged, her scales difficult to see in just starlight.\n\nJust like Cora, the queen collapsed, her Durgin rushing to her to help her upright.\n\nTalc stretched her neck then gazed at the nighttime sky, her dark eyes reflecting the bright heavens. Her wings opened and closed several times, and then she tested her legs, dug her claws into the rocks, and marked the surface with her enormous talons.\n\n<She's beautiful.>\n\n<She really is.>\n\nShe was about the same size as Flare and just as ferocious.\n\nQueen Megora approached the dragon to place her palm against her scales. \"Please take care of her.\"\n\nTalc turned to look down at her\u2014and issued a low and long growl.\n\nShe immediately backed away with her Durgin and returned to the entrance of the tunnel.\n\n<Connect me.>\n\n<Hold on.>\n\nRush stepped forward. <You're beautiful, Talc. I can only imagine how beautiful your scales will look in the sunlight.>\n\n<I can't imagine at all. Because I've been a prisoner to men\u2014and then to dwarves.>\n\n<I'm sorry that you had to go through that. But it's almost over.>\n\nShe looked up at the skies again.\n\n<I wish I could give you more time, but you're too visible, even in the dark. It's time to fuse\u2014>\n\n<No.>\n\n<Talc, you can't roam Anastille as a dragon. They'll see you within seconds.>\n\n<I've only been in dragon form for seconds, and you already want me to submit to someone else.>\n\n<Not submit. It's to keep you safe\u2014and it's temporary.>\n\nShe released a quiet growl.\n\n<Bridge is a good guy. I promise you.>\n\n<Which one is he?>\n\nRush patted him on the shoulder.\n\nTalc turned to regard him, her eyes narrowed.\n\nBridge gave a hesitant wave. \"Hi\u2026nice to meet you.\"\n\n<What kind of name is Bridge?> She looked at Rush again. <Does he build bridges?>\n\n<Uh, no. He's a scholar.>\n\nTalc turned her head and settled her gaze on Cora. <I want the elf.>\n\n<She's unavailable.>\n\n<I want her.>\n\n<She's already fused with Ashe.>\n\n<Ashe, King of Dragons, is here?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<I still want her.>\n\nRush released a sigh. \"She wants you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Cora asked. \"But I have Ashe.\"\n\n\"I know\u2026but that's what she wants.\"\n\nCora regarded Talc. \"I'm flattered by the request, but I have Ashe. I'm the only one he'll fuse with.\"\n\nShe released a growl.\n\n\"You saw what I did with Queen Megora,\" Cora said. \"Trust me, if Bridge gives you trouble, we won't allow it\u2014not that he would. You've got two dragons on your side.\"\n\nTalc looked at the stars once again. <Wish I could fly again\u2026>\n\n<You will.> Rush felt the heartbreak in his chest, a pain he understood like he experienced it himself. <Soon enough.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Just You",
                "text": "\"Wow\u2026this is weird.\" Bridge swayed on the spot, as if he was suddenly too heavy to be supported by his legs. \"Oh geez, she's loud. Really loud.\" He planted his palm on his forehead, giving a grimace. \"I feel sick.\"\n\n\"You always feel sick.\" Rush supported his friend, giving him a pat on the back. \"Just give it a second.\"\n\nHe bent over at the waist, catching his breath like he'd run across Anastille and back.\n\nLilac rolled her eyes. \"Pathetic.\"\n\n<Let's do what I taught you.>\n\n<You taught me a lot of things.>\n\n<Connect all our minds.>\n\n<As in, all three dragons?>\n\n<Yes.>\n\n<Wow, that's a lot.> She focused her mind and brought them all together. <Talc?>\n\nHer feminine voice was distinctly different from Flare's and Ashe's, and it had a lot more punch. <Yes, I'm here. Fused with a man whose mother decided to name him after the most unremarkable man-made structure in existence. Even Moat would have been preferable\u2026>\n\nFlare released a chuckle. <He's one of the good ones, Talc.>\n\n<I don't care if he is. He's unworthy of my mind.>\n\nAshe's deep voice came forth. <No man is worthy of our minds. But it's a necessary sacrifice for what we're trying to achieve\u2014freedom for all dragons. We're lucky enough that some humans challenge the Wuzurk that sits on the throne, that they believe we deserve to roam the land that belongs to us.>\n\n<Ashe, King of Dragons. It is an honor to feel your mind again.>\n\n<And yours as well.>\n\n<I'm sorry\u2026this is super weird. Who's talking?>\n\n<You'll get used to it, Bridge.>\n\n<Soon, it'll feel so second nature that you'll wonder how it wasn't always like this.>\n\n<I guess I'll have to take your word for it\u2026>\n\n\"What's the plan now?\" Lilac took a seat on one of the boulders, her legs crossed, the hilt of her dagger sticking out of her pocket. \"I can't wait to get off this mountain and sleep on some grass again.\"\n\n\"We could return to the Hideaway and wait for Captain Hurricane,\" Liam said. \"He could ferry us back to Mist Isle.\"\n\n\"We do have three dragons\u2026\" Zane took a seat beside Lilac on the rock. \"Couldn't we lure him out into the open and ambush him?\"\n\nThe emptiness of Rush's gaze passed when he came back to the conversation. \"You heard all those thuds. He's searching for me with a whole fleet. He means business. I say we return to Mathilda and question her again. She'll probably be a lot more receptive to Cora.\"\n\n\"Actually\u2026there's something I wanted to ask.\" Cora crossed her arms over her chest, a bit cold with the sun gone and the hard breeze at this elevation. \"My village is on the way. Could we stop by?\"\n\n\"Did you forget something at home or\u2026?\" Lilac cocked an eyebrow.\n\nRush studied her face, understanding her intentions without having to ask. \"Let's do it.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Cora gave a subtle nod. \"Dorian knows a lot more than he told me\u2026and I want to know what it is.\"\n\n\"You recognize it?\" Rush walked beside her in the lead, the sun at their backs.\n\nThe hills led to a lake, the water still, the bank untouched as if man had never set foot there. \"Yep. The first time you saw me naked.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Yep. A memory I still hold very dear in my heart.\"\n\nShe gave a chuckle as she continued her pace. \"I bet you do.\"\n\nHe waggled his eyebrows.\n\n\"But for the record, that never would have happened if I'd known who you really were.\"\n\n\"I did turn around, you know.\"\n\n\"After you stared for a good five seconds.\"\n\nHe gave another grin, handsome and playful. \"I'm a man, alright? If there are tits\u2026I'm gonna look.\"\n\nShe gave him a playful smack.\n\nHe gave another chuckle. \"Ah, good memories.\"\n\n\"It's crazy to think that's how all of this started\u2026\"\n\n\"It's like it was meant to happen, huh?\" He grinned down at her as he walked beside her, his eyes playful but also deep.\n\n\"Yeah, does seem that way.\"\n\nThey stopped to hydrate and refill their canteens. After a short break, they continued up the hills until they spotted the village down below. Only a few hundred people lived there, so there was no fence around the exterior, farmlands around the perimeter.\n\n<This is where you grew up?>\n\n<Yep.>\n\n<It doesn't suit you.>\n\n<It never suited me.> \"So, I guess I'll go in while you guys wait here.\"\n\nRush dropped his bow and shield along with his pack. He left his sword on his hip. \"I'll go with you.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine on my own\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm coming with you.\"\n\n\"What about the others?\"\n\n\"Now that we've got Talc, we can keep in contact.\" He moved forward. \"Come on, I didn't make the best first impression on Dorian. Showed way too much teeth for a first encounter.\"\n\n\"You would have made a worse impression as you.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes. \"Ha.\"\n\nLilac shifted her gaze between them. \"You guys are the weirdest couple I've ever seen. All you do is tease each other back and forth, but I haven't even seen you hold hands.\"\n\nCora studied Lilac before she turned her gaze on Rush.\n\nHis charming smile was long gone, along with the playfulness in his eyes. \"Come on, let's get going.\" He moved down the hill for the village, not waiting to see if Cora was beside him or not.\n\nCora stared at Lilac for a few seconds before she went after him.\n\nAs if nothing had happened, Rush kept his eyes straight ahead, focused on their objective.\n\nShe stared at the side of his face.\n\nHe never met her look.\n\n\"So, you told her?\"\n\nHe released an angry sigh. \"No.\"\n\n\"Really? Because it seems like she knows full well\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't tell her.\" He halted, giving her his hostile stare.\n\n\"If that's true, why does she think we're a couple? You told Bridge, and he told her\u2014\"\n\n\"That's not what happened either.\"\n\n\"Really? Because it seems like you were bragging about everything that happened on that island\u2026\" She marched ahead, wishing he wouldn't follow this time.\n\n<I warned you, Cora.>\n\n<Stay out of this.> She threw up her mind, shutting him out.\n\nRush snatched her by the arm and yanked her back. \"I would never do that. You know that. Come on, you know me.\" He slammed his hand into his chest, making a distinct thump against his hardness. \"You know how I feel about you\u2014\"\n\n\"Then why won't you just tell me why she knows? If there's nothing to hide, then you would just tell me. But you do have something to hide\u2026from me.\" Her eyes shifted back and forth as they bored into his, angry that she was left in the dark by the one person she shared everything with. When she didn't get an answer, she twisted out his grasp and marched on.\n\n\"Alright, I'll tell you.\" He came after her, matching her stride again. \"She came on to me, so I told her there was someone else. I never said who that someone else was, but she figured out it was you.\"\n\nHer stride slowed, as well as the adrenaline in her heart.\n\n\"I didn't tell you because\u2026I didn't want to make things weird between you guys.\"\n\nCora stopped altogether and faced him. \"She and I both deserve more credit than that. You're a gorgeous man, and I don't blame her for going for it. I would have done the same thing.\"\n\nHis cocky smile didn't move on to his face, and his eyes retained their seriousness. He inhaled a deep breath and let it slowly leave his lungs, his jaw still tight. \"I didn't tell anyone what happened between us. That was just for us. Bridge asked a couple questions because he knows how I feel about you, so I told him you turned me down.\" He drew another slow breath, a pause before he continued. \"But for the sake of full transparency\u2026Lilac and I did have a thing in the past. It was a few years ago. Just physical. Didn't mean anything to me.\"\n\nShe tried not to picture them together, to let the monster of jealousy raise its ugly head. \"I don't blame her for still wanting you\u2026 I would too.\"\n\nHis eyes gave a slight look of relief.\n\nShe dropped her gaze, her heart aching the way it used to. \"I'm sorry that I got so upset\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm sorry that I didn't give you more credit.\"\n\n\"I don't even care if you told anyone. I just\u2026 You said you wouldn't, so I felt betrayed.\"\n\n\"I would never share something that personal with anyone\u2014not even Bridge. Yes, I've talked about the women who come and go once in a while, but I respect you too much to make that a point of conversation. Even if we were still together\u2026I still wouldn't talk about it. That time together\u2026meant the world to me.\"\n\nShe dropped her gaze again because the sincerity in his beautiful eyes was just too much. \"It meant the world to me too\u2026\" After a breath, she lifted her gaze, having the courage to meet the stare that filled her dreams. Blue eyes, both hard and soft, penetrated deep into her soul, read her soul like words on a page, played like music from the harp. \"It's been really hard for me.\"\n\nHe swallowed, his eyes dropping momentarily. \"Yeah\u2026it's been hard for me too.\"\n\n\"I normally talk to you about everything\u2026but I can't do that now. Not with Ashe. Callon. Anyone, really. I've been so busy in Eden Star that it's helped me not to think about it, but during those quiet times\u2026it gets to me.\"\n\nHe gave a long nod. \"It gets to me too\u2026all the time.\"\n\nShe stared into his eyes and saw the same pain that she felt in her heart. Some things were better left unsaid, but they somehow came pouring out when she least expected it. Everything had been sealed behind her heart, but it came flooding out like water through a broken dam. \"I want to be the bigger person and say you should be with her if that's what you want, but\u2026I don't think I could handle seeing you with someone else. At least, not right now.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed on her face, a twinge of surprise in the corners. \"I don't want her.\"\n\nHer breaths grew heavy; her entire body grew heavy.\n\n\"Just you.\"\n\nThe butcher's shop was still on the corner. Chickens that escaped their coops were in the middle of the road, trying to escape one of the dogs that came sniffing around. It was broad daylight, so people were out and about, and it didn't take them long to notice Cora and the armed man beside her.\n\n\"People like to stare, huh?\" Rush gave a wave.\n\n\"Nothing has changed around here\u2026\"\n\nA group of girls stood on the porch of a house, most of them holding babies and toddlers in their arms, watching Cora go by.\n\nRush waved to them too.\n\nOne of the girls smiled and waved back enthusiastically.\n\n\"Stop flirting.\"\n\n\"Not flirting. Being sarcastic.\"\n\n\"Well, you're a really good-looking guy, so you're giving them false hope.\"\n\n\"You've said that like five times since this morning.\" He grinned. \"It's been a great day.\"\n\nShe approached the house where she grew up, the blue shutters, the windows slightly covered by the white curtains. The front door was made of deep mahogany, a dark wood with a thickness that made it impenetrable to the blade of an ax. After a breath, she knocked.\n\n\"Nice place.\"\n\n\"Dorian built it himself.\"\n\n\"Now it's even nicer.\"\n\nFootsteps sounded before the door swung open. She didn't expect Dorian to be home, but she'd wanted to try first before she went to the shop and was seen by even more people. His look was instantly annoyed, as if he expected a solicitor of some kind. Then it was full of shock, like he couldn't believe his own eyes. \"Cora\u2026?\"\n\nHer eyes immediately watered at the sight of him, of his sun-weathered face, his blue eyes that contrasted against his graying hair. His skin was like leather from being outside so much, but he was still lean and strong.\n\nShe moved into his chest and gripped him tightly.\n\nHe gripped her back, his chin on her shoulder, his arms holding her like a father who didn't want to let go of a child. \"Sweetheart\u2026\" He pulled her inside and ignored Rush as if he wasn't standing there.\n\nWhen she pulled away, she saw that the house was exactly as she remembered it, the same blue couches and coffee table, the staircase with the paintings on the walls. It smelled the same. It felt the same. It was no longer home, but it still felt like the home that she remembered. \"I'm sorry to drop by like this\u2014\"\n\n\"Never be sorry.\" He squeezed her arms. \"You're always welcome here. Always.\"\n\nShe smiled before she turned to Rush. \"Dorian, this is Rush\u2026my friend.\"\n\nRush extended his hand. \"It's a pleasure to meet you, sir.\"\n\nDorian took his hand. \"Likewise. But none of that sir stuff\u2026\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Rush cleared his throat.\n\nDorian opened the swinging door that led to the kitchen. \"Come on. I'll make us something to eat, and we'll catch up.\"\n\n\"It's been mayhem since I left.\" Cora left her mug on the counter, most of the tea already sitting in her belly. \"So much has happened. That was a really rough draft, but basically the gist of the whole thing\u2026\"\n\nRush looked down into his mug, tilting it from side to side but not taking a drink.\n\nDorian sat across from Cora and glanced at Rush. \"Can I get you something else?\"\n\n\"Maybe something stronger\u2026if you're offering.\" He set the mug aside.\n\nHe chuckled then grabbed a decanter of amber liquid. \"All yours.\"\n\nRush poured his tea into Cora's mug before he filled his with the strong stuff. \"You're too kind.\"\n\nDorian returned to his seat. \"That's one tall tale. You stabbed a Shaman and fled for safety\u2026and ended up in the company of the general of the empire, three dragons, and a couple scholars.\" He poured himself a glass of scotch after Rush was finished with the bottle. \"I want to say I'm surprised\u2026but the most unlikely things have always followed you wherever you go.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it seems that way.\" She stared into her mug.\n\nRush threw his head back and took a drink. \"Yes\u2026 That's the stuff.\"\n\n\"I'm glad that you stopped by,\" Dorian said. \"It's almost been a year.\"\n\nCora's eyes lifted to meet his. \"What\u2026really?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nHer eyes dropped back to her tea, not realizing she had spent so much time in both Eden Star and Mist Isle. Everything had happened in a blink of an eye, so it felt so much shorter than that.\n\nRush nudged her in the side. \"Looks like our one-year anniversary is coming up.\"\n\nDorian shifted his eyes between them.\n\nCora laughed off the joke. \"Well\u2026there's also something I wanted to ask you.\"\n\nWith his cup between his hands on the table, Dorian watched her with relaxed shoulders, as if he expected to field questions about the town.\n\n\"The night I was left at the gate\u2026 What happened?\"\n\nOnce the subject had been broached, his carefree gaze immediately intensified into something more. Lines formed on his face. Eye contact was severed when he looked away. The distress was like blobs of bold ink from a quill onto the page.\n\n\"And please don't tell me you don't remember\u2026because I know you do.\"\n\nHis gaze was focused out the back window, as if expecting someone to pass by. \"When you left, some of the king's men came to interrogate me and your brothers. I told them you were abandoned in the village, and the only reason I took care of you was because I took pity on you. I must have been convincing because they left without provocation\u2014and have never returned.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"I hope they don't realize you've returned\u2026and come back after you're gone.\"\n\n\"We'll be careful,\" she said quickly. \"I would never want to put any of you at risk.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Good. Because it's also in the best interest of everything you're fighting for.\"\n\nAshe's voice returned, connecting with her mind now that the barrier was gone. <He's a man of secrets.>\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\" Cora whispered, looking at him in a whole new light.\n\nDorian dropped his gaze into his scotch. \"When I was young, na\u00efve, optimistic\u2026whatever you want to call it\u2026\" There was no inflection of affection in his voice, no joy in his eyes. Everything about him was different. \"I joined an alliance of mercenaries who wanted to overthrow King Lux. We all had our reasons\u2026the untimely death of my father was mine. It was about revenge more than anything else.\"\n\n<At least these are good secrets.>\n\n\"Common sense eventually prevailed. I would either die young for this hopeless endeavor, or I could live a long and fulfilling life away from the Empire. I chose the latter. I disassociated myself from the cause and settled down with a family instead. I haven't regretted the choice\u2014especially since they're all dead now.\"\n\n\"Then who dropped me off at the gate? They left my father's ring\u2014which has protected me since the moment I stepped into Eden Star.\"\n\nHe looked Cora in the eye, giving a slight shake of his head. \"I don't know who it was, Cora. But they knew who I was. They left you there with a note asking me to take you in because you would die otherwise. My job was to give you a simple life in a small village, to keep you away from the outside world. That would have been much easier\u2026if you weren't so headstrong.\" He gave a slight chuckle, his eyes gazing over with memory. \"If I had been asked this before, I would have said no. But once I saw you\u2026I couldn't. I took you in and raised you as my own\u2014and I still have no regrets.\"\n\n\"So\u2026when you saw the ring, you knew who I was?\"\n\n\"I knew it was an elvish ring, but I knew nothing of your parentage. The older you grew, the more obvious your features became. But since no one here knows what an elf even looks like, they never became suspicious\u2014thankfully.\"\n\n\"This group of mercenaries\u2026you said they're gone?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because I saw their bodies outside of Polox when I returned for goods.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I am too. It could have been me\u2026\"\n\n\"You don't think\u2026this alliance still lives on?\"\n\n\"Unlikely.\"\n\nRush interjected. \"But it must\u2014because they came to you after the fact.\"\n\nDorian gave a hesitant nod. \"Yes, I suppose you're right. I left the organization long before that, so someone must have kept tabs on me. But if they dropped off Cora, it must have been because they were compromised in some way.\"\n\n<That's true.>\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me all of this when I asked?\" Cora said.\n\n\"Because I wanted you to have a normal life.\" He stared at her. \"I wanted you to stay here where you'd be safe. The last thing I wanted you to do was chase elves in Eden Star\u2026and pose questions to the wrong people. But in the end, it didn't matter, I guess.\"\n\nRush took over. \"Dorian, we're in desperate need of allies right now. The dwarves need to rebuild, and the elves are complicated. If some kind of resistance still lives on, we need to find them. Is there anything you can tell us? Anything at all? A name, location, a place to start our search?\"\n\nDorian kept his eyes on Cora. \"I admire what you're doing. Really, I do. You remind me of myself. Optimistic. Doing the right thing, even if it's the hard thing. But the last thing I want is for something to happen to you, Cora. He's too powerful, and he has spies in the most unlikely places. Tread carefully.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of the risks, Dorian. But even if it claims my life, it would still be worth it.\"\n\nHe dropped his gaze, her words too much to even contemplate.\n\n\"Dorian.\" Rush's deep voice brought him back to attention. \"There has to be something you can tell us.\"\n\nHis eyes remained down for a long time, and after a deep breath that made his shoulders rise then fall, he lifted his gaze. \"I don't know who she was. I don't know her name. I don't even know her face. But I do know this\u2026she was a witch.\"\n\nAfter a long goodbye, they departed the village and headed up the hill.\n\nThe visit with her guardian was too short, and too much of their conversation had been about important matters. She didn't ask about his shop. She didn't even ask about her brothers\u2014who were all out of the house at the time. \"Do you think it was Mathilda?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't put it past her. And Polox isn't too far from here.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"She's definitely acquainted with this resistance group. I wasn't worthy of the knowledge, but I'm sure you will be. Maybe she has the answers to both of our questions.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I'm worried about Callon.\"\n\nRush slowed down his pace and regarded her. \"Your guardian just dropped this revelation, and\u2026that's what's on your mind?\"\n\nShe stopped their progress altogether, her hands on her hips. \"The outcome of this war will be determined by Callon's success in this matter. We need the elves\u2014and whoever sits on that throne dictates our actions.\"\n\n\"You want to go back and help him overthrow Delwyn? I'm sure Lilac can sneak behind her and push her down the stairs\u2026\"\n\nShe didn't laugh. \"The only reason we've made it this far is because we can stay in communication no matter where we are in the world. If I could stay in communication with Callon, it would be instrumental.\"\n\nOnce he followed her train of thought, his eyes narrowed. \"Talc.\"\n\n\"I feel terrible for even suggesting it because it seems like I just want to use her\u2026but it would make a huge difference. No matter the leagues that separate us, we could coordinate. That's something King Lux would never anticipate.\"\n\nRush shifted his weight then ran his fingers through his hair. \"It makes a lot of sense.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it?\"\n\n\"But I already told her we would take her to Mist Isle to be free. That was the only way I could get her to convince Queen Megora to let us go.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm sure Queen Megora's hesitation changed her attitude about that.\"\n\n\"Good point.\"\n\n\"She'll say no at first, but I'm sure we can convince her.\"\n\n\"So, we do this now or after?\"\n\n\"Now. If we could get Talc and Callon to fuse, we could head to Mathilda next\u2026and hopefully that materializes into the next thing. In any case, Callon isn't going to take charge of Eden Star overnight, and the dwarves are overcome right now. We need more people. We should look for those people and keep our connection with Eden Star at the same time. General Noose could return\u2026\"\n\n\"I agree.\"\n\n\"And if she won't fuse with Callon, I could let him fuse with Ashe\u2014\"\n\n<No.>\n\n<Ashe\u2014>\n\n<I have no qualms about his character. He's a good man. But you're the one I agreed to join, and I will not be bound to anyone else in this manner. You're my hatchling.>\n\n\"Never mind\u2026\"\n\nRush gave a smile. \"I knew how that was going to go down.\"\n\n\"Alright. Then let's work on Talc and head back to Eden Star in the meantime.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Return to Eden Star",
                "text": "\"I'm soooo tired of going back and forth.\" Bridge dropped his pack and took a seat near the campfire. They stopped under a canopy of three trees, the copse so dense it would be difficult to spot the flames from the sky. \"My legs have not looked this thick since I was a kid who played outside all day.\"\n\nLilac skinned and gutted the deer before putting it on the spit over the fire. The juice splashed into the flames and sizzled, and the smell of roasting meat filled the campsite.\n\nRush sat beside Cora, his eyes on the side of her face. \"Is this okay?\"\n\nShe'd made a dinner out of what she could find, wild nuts and berries, some cauliflower. \"I'm fine. Don't worry about it.\"\n\nWhen the meat was finished cooking, it was split among the five of them, and they ate in silence.\n\nCora took the opportunity to speak with Talc. <Ashe, will you help me?>\n\n<You're asking me to convince a dragon to fuse.>\n\n<I wouldn't do it unless I thought it was necessary. Surely you must agree that having a connection to Eden Star is vital to win this war.>\n\n<I do. But this goes against everything I stand for.>\n\n<Me too, Ashe.>\n\nAs if he were in his dragon form beside her, he took a long breath and let it out slowly. <Alright.>\n\n<Thank you.> She pressed her mind to Talc's and felt the connection instantly. <How are you?>\n\n<Every breath I draw is much lighter than the breaths I took under the mountain. The weight of the rocks pressed on my chest and lungs. It was a slow suffocation. But now I see trees. I see sky. I see plains.>\n\n<I'm glad you're feeling better.>\n\n<You forced Queen Megora's hand\u2014thank you.>\n\n<Of course.>\n\n<Being stuck under the mountain had taken its toll on her as well. I became a crutch for her\u2014as she did for me. But she was more reluctant to let that go than I was. I know it wasn't just the temptation of my power, but her affection for me as well.>\n\n<I hope you're right.>\n\n<I'm eager to get to Mist Isle, to open my wings and feel the wind against my scales.>\n\n<I can imagine.>\n\n<Your powers are extraordinary. How did they come to be?>\n\n<Honestly, I don't know. Still trying to figure that out.>\n\n<And your ability to communicate\u2014how?>\n\n<I think I'm part dragon\u2026as crazy as that sounds.>\n\n<Your mind does feel like one of a dragon. When I first felt it, that was exactly what I assumed.>\n\n<Not the first time I've heard that. How are things with Bridge?>\n\n<He's a puny human.>\n\nShe gave a chuckle. <He just has a sensitive stomach.>\n\n<Puny.>\n\nShe stared at the fire while everyone ate, doing her best to block out the sounds of masticating, teeth ripping into flesh. <Talc, there's something I need to ask you. And before you get upset, I want you to hear me out.>\n\nHer voice had been gentle a moment ago, but now it had a bite. <This sounds perverse\u2014and I don't like it.>\n\n<I want you to understand that we will take you to Mist Isle if that's what you wish, but I do have a favor to ask.>\n\n<Yes?>\n\n<My uncle is the General of Eden Star. His name is Callon. We've been trying to secure an alliance with the elves for the great war to come. Only problem is, Queen Delwyn is very difficult. Callon is trying to rectify this.>\n\n<And what does this have to do with me?>\n\n<We have other obligations in Anastille that require us to be away from Eden Star. But we need to remain in contact in order to orchestrate this war. The only way to do that\u2014>\n\n<No.>\n\n<I thought you might say that\u2014>\n\n<Then how dare you ask?>\n\n<Look, I wouldn't ask if it weren't important.>\n\n<I was told that I could be free on Mist Isle\u2014>\n\n<And that's still true, Talc. This would only happen if it was voluntary. No one would ever force you to do anything you don't want to.>\n\n<Then take me to Mist Isle. This conversation is over.>\n\n<At least give me the opportunity to make you want to do this, Talc.>\n\n<There's nothing you can say that will make me want to fuse with an elf instead of going to the last retreat of free dragons. I've been a prisoner for thousands of years. I've paid my dues. Now it's my time to be free.>\n\n<Mist Isle is the final home for the dragons. If it's gone\u2026there is nowhere else.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<You can go to Mist Isle and enjoy it as long as you can. But if we don't win this\u2026you won't be free for long. He'll sail to the shores and repeat history. But you have an opportunity to help us win. You have an opportunity to turn the tide. Having you in Eden Star can alter the course of history.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<The fuse isn't permanent. You're free to leave it whenever you wish.>\n\n<So you say\u2026>\n\n<I can vouch for Callon. He's the most virtuous person I've ever known. Honestly, sometimes his integrity is annoying\u2026>\n\n<Cora, what is your favorite thing to do?>\n\n<Sorry?>\n\n<Something you do every day that you couldn't live without.>\n\n<Uh\u2026be with the people I love.>\n\n<Something rudimentary.>\n\n<Eating? I guess I love to eat.>\n\n<Well, what if that were taken from you? Something so trivial, something so normal, something that's part of the human experience? That's how I feel when I can't fly. I haven't been able to fly for a very long time.>\n\n<I understand that, Talc. Really, I do. But that freedom at Mist Isle is temporary. Freedom is not guaranteed unless you fight for it. Please, help us fight for it. Whenever we no longer need the communication, you're free to go. You can choose to stay and fight, or you can flee to Mist Isle.>\n\n<My answer has been given.>\n\n<Ashe, a little help here?>\n\n<She has changed hands three times now. Barely had a moment to catch her breath.>\n\n<I understand that. But you know we need to make this work.>\n\nAfter a long stretch of silence, he projected his mind to them both, his voice powerful but also gentle. <Talc, I understand your hesitance\u2014>\n\n<It is not hesitance. It is a concrete refusal.>\n\n<It was not that long ago that I took your stance. Cora asked me to fuse to pursue this mission. Not only did I refuse, but the question itself was a grievance. I am King of Dragons. How dare she even consider making the request? It goes against everything I believe in, for our majestic minds to be connected with anyone beneath us.>\n\n<Yet, here you are.>\n\n<Because Cora was right. I have a family on Mist Isle, a Zuhurk and two hatchlings. They'll never truly be safe because time passes so quickly for immortals, and before I take my next breath, a fleet of ships will come to our island. Elves and dwarves will fall\u2014and we'll be all that's left in the world. We won't survive the siege. The ones that refuse will die, and the ones that are weak will be subjugated once more.>\n\n<She has the mind of a dragon. She can trap you in a fuse forever\u2014and you'll never see your family again.>\n\n<That possibility does not concern me.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<Because we are one.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<What started as a mere partnership deepened into something more. She is my hatchling\u2014even if she doesn't have scales or wings. That was the original purpose of the fuse, to have a connection so deep that the trust is unquestioned. It's the first time I've experienced it. King Lux and his men are evil\u2014but not all men are.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<I understand what I'm asking you\u2014but I must ask anyway.>\n\n<It is a lot to ask.>\n\n<I know that. You were a prisoner to King Lux, and then you fused with a dwarf to survive. You've never been your own. You've never been a dragon. You've always been part of something else. You deserve more. But the dragons that remain in captivity deserve more too. The free dragons at Mist Isle deserve more than a small island. They deserve their rightful home\u2014Anastille.>\n\nSilence.\n\n<You aren't obligated to have a deeper connection with Callon. It can be about the task\u2014nothing more. If you ever need to reach out, Cora and I will always be available for you.>\n\nThe connection with Talc severed\u2014and she was gone.\n\n<That went well\u2026>\n\n<You need to understand. She thought she was going straight to Mist Isle to open her wings.>\n\n<She still can. We aren't taking that away from her.>\n\n<But she knows it would be wrong to make that choice.>\n\nThey moved across Anastille, taking the route that Rush had laid out through his travels. The journey used to be a straight line, but now it was filled with detours to take cover in forests and between hills.\n\nRush stopped to take a drink from his canteen before he wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. Sweat gleamed on his forehead, and the cords in his neck popped from the exertion of the long day. \"I realized something.\" He screwed the lid back into place before he continued forward.\n\n\"What?\" Cora kept his pace despite the heavy armor on her body, the supplies bouncing around in her pack.\n\n\"Even if you get Talc to go for it, Callon never will.\"\n\n\"I'll talk him into it.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Cora. This isn't the same thing as accepting Ashe or not slaying me every time he sees me. You're asking him to fuse with a dragon. This is a big deal.\"\n\n\"He'll do it for me.\"\n\n\"Cora, he hates dragons.\"\n\n\"He's come a long way. I'll make it happen.\"\n\n\"It sounds like Talc isn't on board either\u2026\"\n\nShe'd kept her mind closed for several days, so Cora had given her space. \"I think she'll come around.\"\n\nThey crossed the desert at nightfall.\n\nTalc came forth and inhaled a large breath, her wings extending and giving a good stretch.\n\nFlare took Lilac and Liam on his back.\n\nTalc took Zane.\n\nTogether, they crossed the desert, close to the ground, racing over the sand and cacti to reach the other side. Several hours later, they landed on the soft grass and turned back into their two-legged forms.\n\n<That felt nice.>\n\nCora resisted the urge to pester her once more, deciding to let her enjoy her moment of freedom without provocation.\n\nThey made a camp early in the morning so they could rest, and after the long trek across the desert, the dragons needed to feed. All three dragons dispersed, getting their kills in the grassy valleys that were hidden behind the mountains.\n\nEveryone lay in their cots and went to sleep.\n\nCora stayed awake to keep watch.\n\nRush was asleep while Flare hunted, so he wasn't available for conversation.\n\nThe last time she'd come this way, she'd passed through these very trees. Deeper into the forest they'd gone until they'd approached the border of Eden Star. That was where she'd received her first kiss\u2014and she still remembered it like it was yesterday.\n\n<How are things out there?>\n\n<I just finished a bear.> Ashe's voice was as strong as it was when they were a single entity. It was like he was right beside her\u2014within her soul. <But I need another.>\n\n<It's been a while since you hunted.>\n\n<A long while.>\n\n<Can you see Talc?>\n\n<Yes. I'm keeping her close in case.>\n\n<You think she'd take off?>\n\n<No. Grow reckless, perhaps.>\n\n<You think you could talk to her again\u2026since she's in a good mood.>\n\n<I would hate to spoil the moment.>\n\n<I understand. I just feel like your words mean a lot more to her than mine.>\n\n<I'm Ashe, King of Dragons. Of course they do.>\n\n<Then\u2026you think you could try? Dragon-to-dragon?>\n\n<I suppose. Just let me eat another bear first.>\n\nThe dragons returned and refused with their counterparts.\n\n<How did it go?>\n\n<She was more receptive\u2014but still resistant.>\n\n<I was hoping to get her on board before we talk to Callon.>\n\n<I don't think that's likely.>\n\n<We can't stall either\u2026 We have to keep moving.>\n\nThey stayed on the outskirts of the forest and traveled to the last location where they'd met. It was on the verge of the open plains, with a wide view of the valleys between the hillsides. Everything on this side of the desert was lush and untouched\u2014wild.\n\n\"Wait here,\" Cora said. \"I'll get him.\"\n\nBefore she could leave, Rush grabbed her by the arm. \"Be careful, alright?\"\n\n\"I'll be fine, Rush.\" She slipped out of his hold then left them behind.\n\nThe secret passageway was as deserted as ever, and she passed through without interference. The music of the forest fell on her ears the moment she was within the perimeter, and the serenity it provided was soothing. It was as if she'd never been gone. She hadn't missed Eden Star on her journey, but now that she was reacquainted with the forest, she couldn't fathom how she'd left in the first place.\n\nThe trees started to thin as she moved closer to the heart of the forest. Elves were present on the trails through the trees, their arms full of the items they'd grabbed at the market. Some of the tree houses had been rebuilt, and the fact that people carried produce and flowers suggested that normalcy had returned during her weeks away.\n\nShe took the path to Callon's old tree house, hoping that it'd been rebuilt and he currently occupied it. The more elves who passed, the more they recognized her, giving her a hard stare as if to discern the features that were similar to their fallen king. Not a word was spoken to her. There was no sheathed hostility like before. They just seemed entranced.\n\nWhen she looked up at the tree that had once housed Callon's home, she saw a brand-new tree house. Constructed of different types of trees, it was multicolored, from pine to birch, an array of options because natural lumber became scarce when they had so much to rebuild. The vines that grew over the outside and into the windows were slender and small, young saplings that had just come from the seed.\n\n\"Yes.\" She took the vine stairway to the open front door, seeing a brand-new place that looked nothing like it used to. It didn't feel the same either, all that history gone. The walls were bare of artwork. There was no sense of ownership. \"Callon?\" She stepped farther inside, hoping he would emerge from the hallway or kitchen.\n\nShe was greeted with silence.\n\nShe stepped into the kitchen to search for clues\u2014and found the green notebook on the counter.\n\n<We'll wait for his return.>\n\nThere was fresh produce in the basket, so she took a seat and helped herself.\n\nHours later, he returned, in the middle of the afternoon.\n\nDressed in his armor and medals, his sword at his hip and his shield across his back, he was the formidable foe that any enemy should fear. His dark eyes complemented the durable metal on his body\u2014strong and unforgiving.\n\nIt didn't take long for him to realize he wasn't alone. He stopped on the threshold of the living room, his dark green eyes piercing her face with scrutiny. Hostility waned, and the affection shone through, like sunlight breaking through the winter clouds. \"Sor-lei.\"\n\nShe left her chair and embraced him. \"I like your new place.\"\n\nHe gave her a squeeze before he let her go. \"What happened with the dwarves?\"\n\n\"We got rid of the orcs. Everyone is okay.\"\n\n\"Good.\" He gave a nod. \"It's good to have you back.\"\n\n\"Any luck with you-know-who?\"\n\nHe gave a slight shake of his head. \"Still working on it.\"\n\n\"I figured it would take longer than a few weeks to overthrow a dictator.\"\n\n\"Might be quicker with you around. Now that the elves know who you are, they've been asking for you.\"\n\n<It's nice not to be hated\u2014for once.> \"Actually, I have to leave Eden Star again. But I needed to talk to you first.\"\n\nHe stepped closer. \"Everything alright?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said quickly. \"Everything is fine. But\u2026we need to have this conversation outside the forest. Can we go now?\"\n\nHe studied her for a long moment before he gave a subtle nod. \"I just finished my rotation.\"\n\n\"Perfect timing.\" She headed to the front door but stopped when she saw Turnion's painting leaning against the wall. Half the canvas was missing, but his son's full presence was somehow captured. \"Found a place for it yet?\"\n\nHe lifted it off the ground and stared at it for a long moment. \"Not yet. Still looking for the perfect spot.\"\n\nThey left through the secret passageway and ventured across the wildlands.\n\n\"I will speak with your friends\u2014except for him.\"\n\nCora didn't have to hide her look of disappointment because they were both focused on the trek ahead. \"He's part of this, Callon.\"\n\n\"I don't care.\"\n\n\"You don't have to like him, but you have to tolerate him\u2014\"\n\n\"I have to do no such thing.\" He halted in his tracks, his look menacing. \"Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.\"\n\n<Do it.>\n\n<He needs to let this go\u2014>\n\n<Remember what you're about to ask him to do. We need his spirits to be light, not burdened by the weight of his brother's murder\u2014and his brother's murderer.>\n\n\"Alright\u2026\" Cora kept going, and Callon quickly followed. <Rush?>\n\n<I'm here.>\n\n<Callon and I will be there shortly. But\u2026he wants you gone.>\n\n<No surprise there.>\n\n<I'm sorry\u2026>\n\n<It's fine. Don't be. I'll leave now.>\n\n<I'll get him to come around. Now just isn't the time.>\n\n<You're right.>\n\nThey arrived at the group minutes later, Rush absent.\n\nCallon was shorter than everyone there, armed for battle, distinguished in his gear but also in his presence. His eyes flicked across them, as if sizing them up for battle. He greeted them wordlessly\u2014with a hard stare.\n\n\"So, here's the deal\u2026\"\n\nCallon turned his stare on her.\n\n\"We stopped by my old village, and my guardian said a witch dropped me off at the gate when I was a newborn. He was part of a resistance against King Lux, which has since fizzled out. But we think we have a promising lead.\"\n\n\"What do you ask of me?\" His arms moved behind his back as he stared down at his niece. In Rush's absence, he was calm and subdued, the first time he'd been that way among her friends.\n\n\"Look, I know it's a lot to ask\u2014\"\n\n\"I will do anything I can to help you. But like I said, I can't leave Eden Star. I can't leave my people when they're vulnerable.\"\n\n\"It's not that\u2026\" She gave a slight shake of her head.\n\n\"Then what is it?\" he asked. \"What have you brought me out here to discuss? What conversation is inappropriate for Eden Star?\"\n\n\"It's not really the conversation per se\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes flashed like the reflection of a swinging blade. \"Speak.\"\n\n<He won't receive this request well, regardless of how it's worded. Just tell him.>\n\n\"We want to move ahead and secure more allies. I don't know what that will entail, how long I'll be gone, where we'll end up\u2026and we'll have no contact with one another. If General Noose returns to your borders, I won't even know about it. So, we need a way to stay connected.\"\n\n\"And how can that be accomplished?\"\n\n<I haven't agreed to this.>\n\nCora ignored her. \"I told you we saved a dragon\u2026\"\n\nThe confusion in his gaze suggested that he hadn't drawn the right conclusion. Not yet anyway. But it came, like a large wave growing larger before it finally broke on the shore. The anger was instantaneous, like steam from the spout of a black kettle.\n\n\"Before you say no\u2014\"\n\n\"My answer is not no\u2014it's never.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2014\"\n\n\"Your entire reason for getting wrapped up in this is to free the dragons. Yet, here you stand, doing the exact opposite.\"\n\n\"That's not what's happening\u2014\"\n\n\"I've tolerated Ashe in Eden Star because I wasn't given a choice\u2014\"\n\n\"And he's the reason we're all still alive right now. Without his strength, I wouldn't have bested General Noose. I wouldn't have killed as many Shamans as I have. Like it or not, we need the dragons\u2014and they need us.\"\n\nHis jaw clenched, his eyes full of menace. \"Be that as it may, I'm not left with the obligation.\"\n\n\"You're the only one I trust.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"It'll allow us to communicate with each other.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"She'll give you abilities that you didn't have before, strength that\u2014\"\n\n\"None of which I need.\" He stepped closer, sizing her up as a real opponent. \"My sword and shield are more than enough. I've survived so many battles and served so many kings because I'm the master of my craft. There's nothing a dragon could give that I don't already possess.\"\n\n\"What if you need my help\u2014\"\n\n\"The General of Eden Star doesn't need the service of a child.\" His eyes were full of smoke, the fire somewhere deep inside. \"It is my duty to protect you\u2014not the other way around.\"\n\n<Cora, this is going worse than I expected.>\n\nCallon turned on his heel and departed.\n\n\"Callon.\"\n\nHe continued like her words were carried on the wind.\n\n\"What if I need you?\"\n\nHe halted in mid-step.\n\n\"We'll be leagues apart. Even oceans. How will you protect me if you can't hear my call? How will you live every day, not knowing whether I live or die?\"\n\nHe didn't turn around, his breathing heavy.\n\n\"I understand you don't want to do this\u2026 I get it. I'm so sorry that I have to ask this of you when I've already asked you for so much. I know it goes against everything you believe. Trust me, I do. But\u2026unless I stay here while everyone continues on without me, there is no other way.\" She inhaled a deep breath. \"You say that King Tiberius is the greatest king to ever rule Eden Star\u2026and he was fused.\"\n\nAfter a lifetime of silence, he turned around, his face even more pissed off.\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nHe chewed the inside of his cheek, something he'd never done before.\n\n\"We'll have the ability to coordinate from all across the continent. King Lux doesn't have that ability\u2014and it's the reason we'll defeat him. It's the greatest tool a general can have\u2014\"\n\n\"Silence.\"\n\nCora winced as she sucked in a breath.\n\n\"My wife and son are dead because of them.\"\n\n\"Callon\u2026\"\n\n\"You've never asked me for a request harder to grant. I'd give my life for yours. I'd turn my back on my own people to keep you safe. I would betray my own queen based on your word alone. But this\u2026\" He shook his head, his jaw clenched.\n\n\"I know all of this and asked you anyway\u2014because I had to.\"\n\nHe turned away, his eyes squinting in the sunlight. He examined the world, the breeze moving through the deep green cape at his back.\n\n<Give him a moment.>\n\nCora waited, her chest aching with the tension.\n\nAfter a loud breath, he turned back to her. \"I have conditions.\"\n\nShe gulped down a breath of air in disbelief.\n\nHe held up a finger. \"It's for communication purposes only. We exchange information pertinent to this cause. There will be no relationship. I do not wish to be connected with this being the way you're connected with Ashe.\"\n\nShe gave a nod.\n\nHe held up a second finger. \"The instant this purpose is fulfilled, we unfuse. Immediately.\"\n\nShe nodded again.\n\nHe held up a third finger. \"Under no circumstances will I fight while being fused. I'm the General of Eden Star\u2014down to my bones. I will not raise my sword for my people while being intimately connected with anyone that isn't elvish. I do not need the strength of a dragon to defeat my enemies. I'm perfectly capable of slaying kings on my own.\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nHe dropped his hand to his side, but the rage continued in his eyes, storm clouds passing across the surface, full of promise of a very cold winter.\n\n<Talc?>\n\nSilence.\n\n<Ashe, can you talk to her? I just need\u2014>\n\nBridge collapsed on the ground as the dragon came forth, scales as green as the evergreens around them. A thud vibrated the earth as her talons hit the soil, her enormous tail half the height of the trees in the center of Eden Star. Golden eyes stared at Callon down below, her mouth parted to show her rows of teeth.\n\nCallon was up close to a fire-breathing dragon, but he didn't even blink. Like she was an opponent he could easily handle alone, he stared at her without a touch of fear. His eyes were squinting in the sun, making the lines of tension more prominent.\n\n<I agree to fuse.>\n\nBridge was still on the ground, his sister there to support him. \"So glad that's over\u2026\"\n\n<What changed your mind?>\n\nTalc kept her gaze fixated on Callon. <Because he's only doing this for one reason\u2014to win this war. There is no personal interest. No temptation. No desire. It's a sacrifice\u2014as it is for me.>\n\nCora's eyes moved back to Callon. \"Talc, this is Callon, General of Eden Star. Callon, this is Talc.\"\n\nThe most he could do was give her a subtle nod. \"We'll do what we must\u2014then go our separate ways.\"\n\nShe stepped forward.\n\n\"She's ready.\"\n\nCallon held his ground as she came to him, still unafraid even though anyone else would shrink back and recoil. She stood over him, her long neck bringing her face close to his, her nostrils flaring to smell him.\n\n\"Put your hand on her chest.\"\n\nCallon swallowed his look of disgust as best as he could\u2014and then obeyed.\n\nFor a few seconds, nothing happened.\n\nThen a flash of movement, of light.\n\nCallon remained behind, still as a rock, like a dragon hadn't been sucked into his body for the first time. His eyes dropped for a moment as he processed the transition, but then his chin rose again, strong and proud, and the anger was back on his face.\n\nShe stared, somehow seeing the green dragon deep under his skin, seeing her soul inside him.\n\nAfter a final stare, Callon turned away\u2014and returned to Eden Star."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Ash & Ambition",
        "author": "Ari Marmell",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "fish out of water",
            "forced transformation",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "goblins"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Trapped by Magic. Trapped by Politics. Trapped by Destiny.\n\nTrapped in the form of the knight who supposedly slew him, the dragon Tzavalantsaval--with a loathsome goblin steward as his only true ally--struggles to navigate the Kirresci royal court and humanity itself, even as politics and intrigues he scarcely understands push the southern kingdoms ever nearer to open war."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Everything ached.\n\nEven the parts he wasn't yet accustomed to having.\n\nThe world swayed and juddered to a song of ear-rending shrieks and moans. The sun, though modestly veiled behind a translucent and wind-kissed overcast, was blinding through the shadows of the bars. On those winds wafted the sour stench of sweat and offal. Directly overhead, the sky was wooden, the patterns in the grain suggesting\u2014\n\nWooden? Bars?\n\n\"Smim?\" His voice was ragged and parched.\n\nThe one that replied was no less a croak, though something about its nasally, savage timbre suggested it wouldn't have sounded pleasant even under more comfortable circumstances. \"I'm here, Master.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"The wagon, Master. Remember?\"\n\nThe wagon? The cage!\n\nOh, but he remembered now. Furious, he sat upright, and nearly collapsed all over again as the world, already swaying, began to spin. The creaking of the wheels, jolting over every imperfection, separated themselves from the pounding deep in his skull\u2014just as the warmth of midday now paled against the feverish heat from within.\n\nAnd above all that, the agony, the infection, the intrusion, in his chest.\n\nClinging with desperate intensity to a lucidity that threatened to dissipate with every breath, the injured man forced himself to look around.\n\nHe was, indeed, within a heavy cage on wheels, lying beside a flattened board intended as a bench. There were others, many others, crowded in with him, but first and foremost, there was Smim.\n\nThe goblin leaned over him, concern evident in the rheumy eyes that peered from a rounded, swamp-skinned face half-hidden by strands of coal-black but moss-textured hair. Whether that concern contained an iota of true affection or merely represented Smim's fear of being left to fend for himself, he neither knew nor cared.\n\n\"Your nose is crooked.\"\n\nSmim's grin, revealing jagged gray teeth, was feeble. \"As it ever has been, Master.\"\n\n\"No.\" The protuberant, almost root vegetable-like snout was definitely even less centered than usual.\n\n\"I may have had something of a misunderstanding with several of our fellow internees,\" the creature admitted.\n\nAt that, squinting through the pain, the wounded man examined the others. All human, save Smim, or so at least they appeared. Many glared sullenly his way, though whether in general resentment over their situation or particular animosity due to the goblin's presence, he couldn't say. Most were men, a few women. None of obvious nationality; hair color varied, and skin tones ranged from nearly snow-pale to the brown-black of lush soil, and every hue between\u2014though even the darkest of them showed a certain greyed pallor from hunger and fear.\n\nElgarrad, he thought, drawing the two primary human ethnicities of Galadras from deep memory, and Cennuen. Mostly a mix of both.\n\nWhich thought, in turn, caused him to raise a hand and examine his own skin, his own flesh, alien as it was. A rich, chestnut hue: abnormally dark if his blood were substantially Elgarrad, about average if Cennuen. He wondered, idly, if that implied any cultural connotations with which he might need concern himself in the future.\n\nThen again, given his current circumstances, he wondered if he'd have any sort of future in which it mattered.\n\nNo! None of that! I've survived too much already to\u2014\n\nA particularly sharp bounce of the wagon, followed by an equally stabbing jolt of torment through his skull, obliterated the rest of his internal rant. He clutched his forehead, groaning.\n\n\"People travel in these contraptions regularly?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Most of them keep to the roads, Master,\" Smim pointed out helpfully. \"I would imagine that makes their journeys somewhat less arduous.\"\n\nIndeed, the view between the bars showed no trace of a roadway, or any sign of civilization at all. Open fields of poor grasslands and the sporadic copses stretched far to the east, first rolling gently before rising to veritable waves of hills at the edges of vision. Between the wagon and those hills, invisible due to the land's contours but just audible above the protests of vehicle and passengers, ran\u2014he scoffed inwardly at the name\u2014the Dragon's Tail, tributary of the Dragon River.\n\nHe focused as best he could on the rushing waters, trying to block out the more immediate noises and the constant agony. Eventually he fell back into a feverish half-doze, in which he dreamed, or perhaps hallucinated, of a sword the size of a mountain, one that cruelly sliced bits of him off and added weaker, incongruous parts back in their place, all while he whimpered in fear or prayed for succor to gods he scarcely recognized.\n\nWhen he awoke once more, when those whimpers and prayers penetrated deeply enough for him to recognize them as genuine sounds rather than products of his near-delirium, the wagon had halted. Beyond the bars, unshaven men of a particularly rough mien, clad in leathers and armed with cudgels, passed bowls of a pasty gruel to prisoners' grasping hands.\n\nHe didn't recognize his captors. He did recognize their cudgels.\n\nHe remembered staggering from the foothills and out onto the plains, every step a fresh hell, his heart the center of a web of agony so intense as to make madness a welcome respite. Step by step, each an impossible act of will, leaning heavily on Smim's wiry frame lest the next stumble be the last. They made for a border that might as well be worlds away\u2014the untamed region known by most as the Outermark was broad indeed\u2014beyond which lay at best a feeble hope.\n\nThen shouting, shapes rising from behind this boulder, that knoll, swinging those massive, knotty clubs\u2026 Sharp pain, in arm and leg and skull, and that pain was welcome for its distraction from a torment far greater, a relieved smile around a mouthful of blood\u2026\n\nThe memory faded, the here-and-now returned. The wagon was already moving once more, the prisoners greedily clutching their pathetic fare, eyeing their neighbors like sworn enemies. Smim, a cracked and battered bowl in each hand, knelt beside him, one arm extended. \"Here, Master. You should\u2014\"\n\n\"You won't be needing that.\" The fellow who spoke was a hairy, unwashed tree-trunk of a man. Clad in tattered rags like the rest of the wagon's occupants\u2014including Smim and his master\u2014he nonetheless stood out. Not merely his size marked him as different, but the healthier flush to his tanned skin, a lesser cracking of his lips. This one wasn't near so hungry as the others, and it took no contemplation at all to understand why.\n\nA quick whisper. \"The one you 'disagreed' with earlier?\"\n\nSmim nodded, flinching. Then, to the larger prisoner, \"My mas\u2014my friend is sick. He requires food and\u2014\" The goblin yelped, only partially able to dodge the kick aimed his way.\n\n\"If he's sick, there's no cause to waste good food on him. And as for you, you damn garbage-eater\u2014\"\n\nThe ache in his head, in his limbs, seemed to fade; even his wounded chest subsided just a bit. \"The goblin is with me.\"\n\n\"Yeah? So?\"\n\nFury blazed, burning away what remained of the pain. \"Have you any idea who you'd defy, you stupid man?! I am\u2014\"\n\n\"Master!\" Smim hissed, alarmed.\n\nDamn it! He wanted to scream his frustration, but the goblin was right.\n\nIt took him an instant to remember, though. \"Anvarri,\" he said, somewhat anticlimactically. My name, for now. I can't afford to let myself forget. \"Nycolos Anvarri.\"\n\nThe other prisoner appeared not merely unimpressed, but irritated, even disgusted. \"Never bloody heard of you,\" he grunted, reaching again for the goblin. The other miserable souls, who had paused their meals to watch the altercation, looked equally ignorant.\n\nAll save one or two. These, if Nycolos read their expressions accurately, indeed recognized the name\u2014they just didn't believe it.\n\nInteresting, and worth further study. Later.\n\nFor now, even as Smim fell back to the floor of the wagon, trying to avoid his tormentor, Nycolos grabbed the larger man's arm in an impossible grip. He allowed the other a moment to stare, locking his eyes with Nycolos's own, jaw gaping in the beginning of a shocked, suffering gasp\u2026\n\nAnd then he twisted, snapping bone midway between elbow and wrist.\n\nThe agonized scream, accompanied by a chorus of softer, startled sounds from around the cage, was the first noise Nycolos had heard since he'd awakened in this damned rolling prison that didn't cause him pain.\n\nStill, he was weak, injured, distracted, far from his best. He failed to notice one of the other prisoners rise, fists raised, moving to help the first.\n\nHe failed to notice, but Smim did not.\n\nAnother horrid shriek joined the first as the second man also collapsed, clutching the back of his mangled, crippled ankle. Smim rose from a crawl behind him, teeth and lips smeared with blood where he'd bitten clear through tendon and flesh.\n\n\"Would anyone else,\" Nycolos demanded, rising to his full height, head brushing the wooden ceiling above, \"take what is mine?\" The sobbing bully still dangled from his fist, arm flexing horribly in his grip.\n\nNobody so much as met his gaze.\n\nIt was not only a small victory, but a short-lived one. The wagon halted, and the cruel men with their cudgels seemed uninterested in Nycolos and Smim's protestations of self-defense. Even as his many pains returned twice-over, however, as he felt consciousness slipping away again beneath the pounding of the heavy clubs, Nycolos was satisfied that he had made an important point.\n\nNot only to the other prisoners, but to himself.\n\nFor all that has changed, I am still me. And I will fight to keep\u2014and to reclaim\u2014what is mine!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "When he awakened again, the aches were worse than before, but his mind was clearer. When he ground a hoarse \"Where are we?\" through ragged throat, it wasn't that he had once again forgotten the wagon. He meant, and Smim properly interpreted, his question in a much broader sense.\n\nThe goblin pressed his face to the bars, peering out into the long shadows and pooled murk of twilight. For the nonce, Smim's night vision was far better than Nycolos's own. He could remedy that, but the requisite change in his eyes would almost assuredly be noticed.\n\n\"We've been traveling west,\" Smim announced after a pause. \"I can see the ridges winding southward, far ahead. I'm afraid, Master, that we must be nearing the mountains.\"\n\nNycolos choked softly on a self-mocking laugh. The Outermark Mountains\u2014or simply \"home,\" as he'd called them\u2014was where they'd started this hellish, fruitless trek!\n\nThat they approached the mighty range far north of where they'd begun was hardly consolation. It still meant that the bulk of their efforts had been neatly undone.\n\nBefore Nycolos could come up with profanity sufficient for the situation, the wagon slowed, accompanied by a brief symphony of human grunts, equine snorts, and wooden creaking.\n\n\"Apparently we're to be examined before 'delivery,'\" Smim informed him in response to a curious glance. \"Or so I believe I overheard. I cannot be certain I heard properly, of course. The others seem disinclined to allow me near them.\"\n\nAfter what had happened earlier\u2014and Nycolos couldn't help but notice that the two men he and the goblin had mauled were nowhere to be seen\u2014that was hardly surprising.\n\n\"Master\u2026\" the goblin continued, his ugly voice dropping. Had Nycolos possessed only a human's hearing, he'd never have caught the word at all.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"You're too strong, Master. You need to fix that.\"\n\nNycolos repressed the urge to hiss. \"I will do no such thing! I'm feeble enough as it is!\"\n\n\"I understand, but\u2026\" Smim scooted closer, fingers twitching anxiously as the vehicle came to a full stop and their captors approached. \"You should not have been able to do what you did earlier, to that lout's arm. It was noticed.\"\n\n\"I'll be more careful.\"\n\n\"Master, you know I would never show you disrespect, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Out with it!\"\n\nSmim sighed. \"You lack your usual patience. Perhaps it is your injuries, or our present circumstances. Perhaps your blood simply burns hotter now than you are accustomed to. And you've rarely before had need to restrain yourself when your anger burnt brightest. You're not used to it. Master, you can't simply 'be careful.' Not at this time.\"\n\n\"Smim\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. But you know I'm right. And you will be noticed. You cannot afford that; we cannot.\"\n\nNycolos felt his shoulders slump, an odd feeling in and of itself. Everything inside him screamed defiance, railed against the notion of making himself weaker still, of giving anything to these\u2026 these animals who dared cage him! He had little left to him, but that short list included his pride.\n\nBut Smim was right. Nycolos had precious little experience with these feelings, with enemies he could not overpower or at least meet on equal terms. The goblin did.\n\n\"You can always regain your might,\" Smim reminded him, doubtless sensing his hesitation, \"should you require it.\"\n\nAnother sigh, a nod, and Nycolos closed his eyes in brief concentration. Beneath his skin, muscle and bone rippled, shifting, softening. In instants, he possessed a strength impressive, perhaps even remarkable for a man of his height and build, but no longer unnatural.\n\nAfter that, there was nothing for it but to rise, the ragged tatters of his shirt and trousers tugging loose from his flesh where the congealing blood of his injuries tried to paste them, and present himself, like freshly slaughtered game, for inspection.\n\nThe sting to his pride burned hotter than any fire.\n\nThe men came, hauling open the door of the cage. They poked, they prodded. They checked teeth, as though purchasing a herd of old nags. They stripped rags away, studying physique. They squeezed muscles. They pushed. Occasionally they slapped.\n\nNycolos nearly bruised the bone of his jaw, so tightly did he clench, biting back an angry protest or worse.\n\n\"This?\" A heavily mustached man with old cheese on his breath, jabbed a finger at the red and angry wound in Nycolos's chest, exposed when his shredded tunic was tugged aside. \"You'd best not let this cost us.\" He conveniently ignored the other injuries, the ones he and his fellows had themselves inflicted. And just as well, really; had he scrubbed away the caked blood and the dust, he might have been startled at just how swiftly those wounds, unlike the one beneath Nycolos's heart, were healing.\n\n\"Perhaps you ought have considered that,\" the seething captive spat, \"when you crept up behind me and clubbed me over the head, you cowardly\u2014!\"\n\nThe slap, made dismissively with an open hand rather than fist or cudgel, startled several birds from a nearby branch, where they had warily studied the wagon and the gathered people. A furious heat washed through Nycolos, from his cheek outward; a tide of rage, not pain.\n\nHe heard screaming, and couldn't be certain at first whence it came. He felt leathers and fabrics bunched in his grip, flesh flattening against bone beneath his other fist. His vision cleared, the crimson veil boiling away, to reveal his captor's bruised face and bloodied nose hanging inches from his own.\n\n\"Master! No! Stop!\"\n\nIt wasn't Smim's beseeching cry that brought him up short, however, but the overheard muttering of the other captives.\n\n\"Idiot.\"\n\n\"Fool.\"\n\n\"Madman.\"\n\n\"Get himself killed.\"\n\nThe goblin had said it, mere minutes ago. His temper was no longer as it had been. His judgment, his patience\u2026\n\nWho am I allowing myself to become?\n\nAnd, of perhaps more immediate import, How quickly will this new \"me\" get me killed?\n\nNycolos released his tormentor-turned-victim and stepped back, hands raised, well before the man's compatriots reached him. He expected, at best, another severe beating. With luck, he might survive it.\n\nBut while many of his captors clearly intended precisely that, cudgels and even a few small blades raised, one man reined them in with a gesture and a sharp bark. His bald head bore signs of peeling, having seen far too much of the midday sun. The ends of his dark mustache dangled low to vanish into the equally dark fur mantle he wore over a battered breastplate of old steel. It was, to Nycolos's memory, the only armor he'd yet seen among his jailers that wasn't of leather and hide.\n\n\"You're fast,\" the bald one said in a voice more befitting a boy than a man of his size and age. \"Not many can get the drop on Inju way you just did.\"\n\n\"He startled me.\" Nycolos wanted to vomit, to throttle himself before he let the words escape, but he would not allow his pride to be the end of him. Not today, not this way. \"It won't happen again.\"\n\n\"We should kill you,\" the other continued. \"Attacking one of us. And you already cost us two perfectly good slaves.\"\n\nSlaves. Nycolos was no fool, regardless of what his fellow captives thought. He'd known these vermin for slavers, known since he'd been taken that he had value only to those who traded in muscle and flesh. Nonetheless, hearing the word nearly set him off once more. It was only an iron-willed effort, one that nearly had him breaking out in a new sweat, that kept him still.\n\n\"If I'd let them harm us, or starve us, you'd have lost just as much,\" was all he said.\n\n\"You wouldn't have starved.\" The bald head shook. \"You're strong, stronger than you look.\"\n\nNycolos ignored the almost accusing sideways glare from Smim.\n\n\"Assuming that doesn't pus up and kill you with infection,\" the slaver continued, pointing at Nycolos's chest, \"you're worth any two or three of these sorry creatures. So you got one more chance. One. Step out of line, though, and you die ugly. Understood?\"\n\nPatience. Let them have their meaningless victory. Patience\u2026\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nNycolos saw the blow coming, squeezed his fists tight against every instinct he had, and allowed it to land. Pain burst through his jaw\u2014though less than the bald slaver might have expected\u2014and he crashed back against the wagon before slumping to the earth.\n\nBy the time he'd hauled himself to his feet, the examination was concluded and the other slaves were being marched back into the cage. Biting his tongue and refusing to acknowledge Smim at all, Nycolos followed.\n\nThe wagon did not, however, lurch back into motion, not immediately. After a brief argument up near the horses, several slavers returned to the rear and entered the cage. Eyes darting nervously about them, they moved to stand over Nycolos. While one kept careful watch on the other prisoners, the second knelt and produced a few lengths of ratty bandage and a small handful of crushed leaves. These he mixed with a splash of water from a skin at his belt, then slathered it roughly across Nycolos's chest without so much as a word.\n\nNycolos wondered if he was supposed to feel something beyond the caustic pain of contact with the infection.\n\nNo act of kindness, this. They'd just told him he was their most valuable piece of cargo; surely this was nothing more than protecting an investment. Still, if the salve did any good at all, Nycolos didn't care why they'd provided it.\n\nWas it stinging, burning, a bit less? Or was that merely hopeful imagination? He sat still and focused on nothing else as the wagon once more wobbled and shook across the Outermark.\n\nIt kept him from dwelling on the other wounds, the wounds to his pride\u2014those he'd already suffered, and the many more he knew must lay ahead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Her name was Justina Norbenus, his was Rasmus. Nycolos knew that much from eavesdropping on the conversation between slavers and, presumably, their clients.\n\nHe knew, too, that he hated them, and not merely because they prepared to purchase him like some low beast of burden.\n\nWhile the slavers had been of mixed ethnicities, boasting every tone of skin and hair, these customers were all of a single type. Even had their pallid, patrician features not been sufficient to announce their nationality far and wide, the cream-hued drapes with colorful trim they wore pinned over one shoulder\u2014hers burgundy, his robin's egg blue\u2014and certainly their names, were a dead giveaway.\n\nYthani.\n\nIn his disdain for that nation's aristocracy, Nycolos stood in accord with the majority of southern Galadras. Opportunistic, sycophantic, and bullying, Ythane remained the only human state to retain its fealty, into the modern age, to the fey of Tir Nallon, and their so-called Bronze Emperor.\n\nThe thought brought Nycolos up short, as he stood waiting for his own examination. Could a true denizen of that declining inhuman empire see through him? His transformation was absolute, but unnatural; would it deceive equally unnatural sight? The mountain fey, with whom he'd had occasional dealings, would be unlikely to penetrate it, but the elves of Tir Nallon were a more uncanny, more uncertain thing.\n\nIt probably wouldn't matter. The rulers of Tir Nallon rarely appeared in the company of their human vassals. As elven focus and appetites turned ever inward, they left Ythane largely to its own devices.\n\nNonetheless, the possibility, however slim, made Nycolos nervous.\n\n\"Start with that one.\"\n\nSeveral slavers marched toward Nycolos from the opposite side of the wagon, Justina and Rasmus in their midst. Their bald leader gesticulated wildly, doubtless boasting of the slave's strength and value. Inspection of the \"livestock,\" to ensure the buyers received their coins' worth, was about to begin. Nycolos, for all that the notion of being bought and sold was abhorrent to him, found himself grateful to be getting it over with.\n\n\"He's injured.\" Justina Norbenus's voice was taut, upper crust with a bit of an accent Nycolos could only assume was Ythani.\n\n\"As I warned you, Lady Norbenus,\" the slaver reminded her. \"But with a bit of treatment\u2014\"\n\n\"It's far worse than you led me to believe, Sanish. You cannot possibly expect me to pay full price for damaged merchandise.\"\n\nDeep breaths. Don't react.\n\n\"He's quite strong. He'll make a good worker.\"\n\n\"Are you?\" It took Nycolos a moment to realize she addressed him directly, now, since she couldn't be bothered to look him in the eye. \"Are you as strong as Sanish claims you are?\"\n\n\"I don't know. How strong does Sanish claim I am?\"\n\nNow the aristocrat did glare directly at him, with something less than amusement in her expression. The bald man\u2014Sanish, apparently\u2014flickered swiftly from murderous glower to sickly smile. \"As I said, he can be a bit mouthy. But he's learned his lesson about disobedience or causing trouble.\"\n\nOh, have I?\n\nJustina snapped her fingers, then pointed imperiously at a pile of stones that must have been placed here, at the edge of their camp, specifically for this purpose. \"I want those in the wheelbarrow. Given that you seem incapable of keeping either your mouth or your injury shut, you had better be quite strong indeed.\"\n\nSwallowing his disgust, Nycolos swiftly and efficiently loaded the rocks. It took some doing\u2014the task didn't come nearly as easily as it might have, had he been willing to resume his earlier strength\u2014but he was winded only a little by the time he finished. \"I could do even better,\" he noted, returning to his spot by the wagon, \"if I could get this wound properly treated.\"\n\nThe woman nodded, more to Sanish than to him, and moved on to the next slave. Rasmus\u2014seemingly some sort of bodyguard or lieutenant to Justina\u2014snarled something unintelligible at him before following.\n\nNycolos ignored him, instead examining the mining camp that would apparently be his home for a while. Built up against one of the peaks of the northern Outermark Mountains, the structures were surprisingly roomy and well constructed. Logs were carefully slotted together to avoid shifting or drafts, and the roofs were evenly shaked. Smoke curled languidly from several chimneys: Cooking fires, to judge by the aroma of meat lurking within. Some sort of stable or corral stood nearby, its presence betrayed by the smell of horse and horse-leavings, but from this angle it must have been concealed behind one of the other buildings.\n\nOf the few people moving to and fro between those buildings, most were clad either as Justina and Rasmus were, or wore sculpted breastplates and greaves, and carried spears. The bulk of the slaves were doubtless asleep, and probably confined to the mines themselves, rather than the more comfortable quarters enjoyed by camp personnel.\n\nThe observant prisoner couldn't help but note that the guards made a regular practice of looking up, into the darkening night sky, as well as around. Clearly these Ythani weren't careless, whatever else might be said of them. They'd heard and taken seriously the rumors that a colony of wyverns hunted the peaks of the Outermark.\n\nNycolos knew well it was more than mere rumor\u2014though the wyverns spent most of their time further south. If they were here now, he wondered idly, could I convince them of who I am? Or would I die as just another few mouthfuls of prey?\n\nHardly the most pleasant way I could possibly go, but surely among the most ironic.\n\n\"\u2026for the whole lot of healthy ones,\" Justina was saying as she and the slavers wormed their way back into Nycolos's attentions.\n\nSanish, despite his nod, was frowning. \"In what coinage?\"\n\nThe woman looked at him as if he'd just asked the color of her unmentionables. \"Ythani dinar, of course.\"\n\n\"It's just, not everyone is entirely happy about taking\u2014\"\n\n\"Silver is silver.\"\n\n\"This is a mine! Couldn't we\u2014?\"\n\n\"It's not a silver mine,\" she reminded him with a sneer.\n\n\"Well, what are you\u2014?\"\n\n\"Ythani dinar, Sanish. Take it or leave it. You've been good to work with, but you're hardly the only slaver.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" He chomped each word from the others like jerked meats. \"You have a bargain.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad. Rasmus, please take our new workers to their pallets. Oh, Sanish?\"\n\nThe bald slaver grunted.\n\n\"If you're going to kill the rejects, please take them further from camp. We had real problems with carrion eaters and vermin last time.\"\n\nNycolos scarcely turned his head at the gasps and cries as a handful of prisoners were separated from the rest. Of course some would be deemed inappropriate for mining work, and it couldn't possibly be worth the slavers' time to transport them all the way back across the Outermark in hope of another buyer. Poor fortune for them, but not anything he\u2014\n\n\"Master?\"\n\nA whisper, scarcely audible even to him, but enough. Now he did turn, tensing as Smim was shoved into the smaller group. Standing upright beside the others, it was clear why he'd been rejected. Although tall for one of his people, Smim only came up to about the ribs of the man beside him.\n\n\"The goblin is far stronger than his size suggests,\" Nycolos called out.\n\nRasmus spun, a short bullwhip seeming to unfold from nowhere in his fist. \"Nobody told you to speak, slave!\"\n\nJustina, at the same moment, snapped, \"I'm not paying good silver for a goblin.\" Revulsion dripped from her voice, so thick Nycolos was surprised it didn't form into a puddle large enough to slip in.\n\nWhat now? Nycolos couldn't fight the lot of them, wasn't willing to risk his life for his servant\u2014not without some reasonable chance of victory. Yet standing helpless while his only companion was wrested from him was intolerable. What should he\u2014?\n\nIt was Smim himself who saved him the trouble. \"If I might be permitted to offer up an argument on my own behalf?\"\n\nThe humans stared. \"And now he's mocking us with his speech!\" Rasmus accused.\n\n\"I assure you,\" the goblin protested, \"it is most certainly not with my speech.\" Then, before the taskmaster could work through that one, \"If my elocution seems formal to you, it is only because I learned the human languages with which I'm familiar from\u2026\" A quick, subtle glance at Nycolos. \"\u2026a teacher and master who insisted on being addressed thus.\"\n\nNycolos had always felt the precise decorum was his due, but now he felt a touch of embarrassment over it.\n\n\"I don't care how you talk\u2014\" Rasmus began, but a gentle cough silenced him.\n\n\"Very well, goblin,\" Justina challenged. \"Convince me.\"\n\n\"For one, my frame allows me to work in spaces that might be excessively confining for a human of comparable strength. Of greater import, however, is my sight. You require workers for a mine? I can see far beyond any of your human laborers, and in greater detail, with only the faintest torch-or candlelight.\"\n\nThe noblewoman leaned in, whispering to her lieutenant. \"Yes, that might prove useful,\" she acknowledged after a brief exchange. \"Rasmus, have two of the men take him into the mountain to prove his claim. If he's telling the truth, we'll buy him. If not, Sanish won't have to kill him.\"\n\nNycolos watched Smim marched away, relieved not to lose his only ally.\n\nThen Justina's guards gathered around, leading the slaves at an awkward shuffle into the mines, and relief faded to the last thing on Nycolos's mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "\"Cart!\"\n\nNycolos muttered something vile under his breath and wrestled with the wooden frame, forcing the conveyance to rotate on protesting, grinding wheels. Had the tunnel been wider, he might have had an easier time with the various maneuvers his new duties required of him, but their Ythani masters saw no need to \"waste\" the labor required to enlarge the mine. After all, the narrow confines weren't inconveniencing them overmuch.\n\nI'd have been wiser to make a poorer showing of my damn test.\n\nIn order to best make use of Nycolos's obvious strengths, without putting a pickaxe or other potential weapons in his hands, they'd expanded the loading and hauling of rocks from test to task. It was his responsibility to clear away the rubble his fellow slaves left behind in their search for more valuable ores. Hour after hour, for days now, his life had consisted of pushing the damn cart up and down uneven tunnels of sagging and poorly buttressed roofs, pausing only long enough to load up here or empty out there before making another pass. The almost ebony hues of his skin were concealed beneath a patina of sweat-matted dust, and he had discovered the delightful twin experiences of blisters and calluses for the first time in his life.\n\nHis chest wound, at least, had been treated\u2014adequately, if not well\u2014and might have begun to show some signs of healing had his labors not constantly aggravated it. The lessening of the pain was more than countered by the frustration caused by his knowledge that, if they'd just give him some time, it might be far better still.\n\nBetween that, the exhaustion, the constant hunger, and the overall humiliation, Nycolos's mood could best be described as \"borderline murderous.\" He'd found swiftly that he was best served keeping his mouth shut and speaking as little as necessary, lest he come out and accidentally say something he'd soon regret.\n\nIt was an attitude the guards appreciated just fine, and if it didn't earn him any friendships among the other slaves, at least it didn't earn their enmity either. Most of them had, early in their captivity, felt similarly. Nycolos, in turn, felt no particular animosity, and even a faint sense of camaraderie and shared purpose, with his fellow captives.\n\n\"You! Rock boy! Hurry it up!\"\n\nWell, with most of them.\n\nNycolos stabbed a rancorous glower at the speaker\u2014a grizzled \"veteran\" of the mines, one slave among a handful who were given small clubs and no observable duties Nycolos had yet seen, who snickered with one of his companions\u2014and made a small show of stacking more broken stone into the already overloaded cart.\n\n\"Sorry about that.\" Keva, a wiry worker of mixed but light-skinned heritage and no obvious nation, shrugged an apology, then waved his heavily scarred pick over the heap of rubble his efforts had left scattered about. \"I told them I didn't need this cleared away yet, but\u2026\" A second shrug.\n\nNycolos grunted noncommittally. Then, more because his fellow slave seemed to expect it than because he had any desire for conversation, \"I'd have had to get around to it eventually, one way or the other.\"\n\nIt was Keva's turn to grunt, and then the smaller slave went back to pounding at the wall, half-stumbling a step with a chorus of small clatters. He wore a pair of rusty manacles around his ankles, long enough to let him work but restrictive enough to occasionally get in his way\u2014and definitely enough to keep him from running. Perhaps one in three or four slaves were similarly restrained. Nycolos guessed they all had escape attempts or some other disobedience in their past.\n\nHe started to turn away, grappling again with the cart whose high-pitched screeches of protest echoed in the cramped mine in way that the flatter impact of steel on rock did not. Those efforts were interrupted, however, by the appearance of Rasmus himself, followed by a pair of bucket-toting slaves. \"Water break! Ten minutes!\"\n\nNobody actually dropped their tools\u2014that could only bring trouble\u2014but they laid them down swiftly and sat or leaned against the rocky walls, catching their breath, wiping feebly at perspiration and dirt, waiting for the buckets to reach them.\n\nPerhaps spurred on by the low hum of other conversations, Nycolos decided now was as propitious a time as any to learn more of his new\u2014however temporary, he swore\u2014home.\n\n\"Collaborators?\" he whispered to Keva, aiming his chin at the older slave who'd summoned him earlier.\n\n\"More or less, yeah. Prove yourself trustworthy, and just maybe you get guard or oversight duty instead of rock pounding. Or hauling,\" he added.\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"The old man you talked to is Veddai. The, uh, 'collaborators' don't have a rank structure, but if they did, he'd be near the top. Been watching over us for a while, now.\"\n\nNycolos felt his brow furrowing. \"There are an awful lot of guards here,\" he noted. \"Surely more than necessary just to keep us from being troublesome.\"\n\nIt was the taskmaster, Rasmus, who answered as he approached, whip dangling with a deceptively gentle sway from his belt. \"Rival miners in the area. And they wouldn't treat you near as nice as we do.\"\n\n\"That\u2026 seems odd,\" Nycolos objected, trying to couch his doubt in more delicate terms than he felt. \"Surely this mine isn't producing so much ore as to make a raid worthwhile. Besides, shouldn't the guards be outside the mine, then? An attack's not going to come from\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut your mouth and mind your own duties, slave! Unless you want to go without your water ration this afternoon.\"\n\nNycolos clapped his lips together, but his mind was racing. Not only was the lie obvious to anyone with a brain in his head, but he couldn't shake the suspicion that Rasmus had no good reason for the deceit. He just enjoyed even so petty a display of power over his captives.\n\n\"Gnomes,\" Keva breathed, leaning in. \"I know it sounds insane, but\u2014\"\n\nHis whisper was not, apparently, silent enough. Rasmus spun, his whole face taut with fury, and snapped his fingers. Two of the slaves Nycolos had dubbed collaborators descended on Keva, fists flying. Several others, along with Rasmus himself, watched Nycolos carefully, just waiting for him to interfere.\n\nHe was tempted, not from any affection or loyalty to Keva but out of shared hatred of their oppressors\u2014and, even more so, out of curiosity regarding what the man had been about to say. It was a temptation he resisted, however, patiently waiting for his water and closing his ears to the meaty thumps and cries of pain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"I don't believe I'm familiar with the term, Master.\"\n\nThe overseers had assigned Smim to scout the new exploratory tunnels, counting on his gaunt build and sharp vision to help them locate traces of ore. Night, in the slave barracks, was the only time Nycolos had to speak with his goblin ally. They sat slumped, side by side, awaiting the evening meal (if one could dignify it with such a term).\n\nThe barracks were not within the mine proper, as Nycolos had initially assumed, but rather in the least comfortable and most poorly built of the camp structures. Breezes and sounds wormed their way through chinks in the logs, then back out again when they decided the place wasn't worth staying in. It was all one great room, without the slightest gesture toward privacy, and it reeked of unwashed bodies and leaky, crusted chamber pots.\n\nThe pair kept their voices low, each relying on the other's inhumanly sharp hearing, to ensure that the cramped confines and gap-ridden walls didn't carry their words to an unwanted audience.\n\n\"Gnome?\" Nycolos asked. \"A term in multiple human tongues. Something they came up with long ago to refer to the mountain fey.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" The goblin nodded. \"Like 'elf' for the fey of the wilds or the Bronze Empire?\"\n\n\"Precisely. A tiny, insufficient word for a notion far too large and too alien for them to comprehend.\"\n\n\"So also like 'dragon'?\" Smim prodded with a faint smirk.\n\nNycolos ignored that. \"It might just be a precaution, inspired by superstition and rumor, same as their fear of wyvern attack. Or they might have actually encountered the mountain fey. I'd very much like to know which\u2026\"\n\nA short procession marched in through the barracks' door, a cluster of slaves carrying large bowls of a thick, unappetizing gruel. Or stew. It varied day by day and was often difficult to tell. Overseen by those same collaborators, including Veddai, they began scooping the slop into smaller bowls, cracked and clumsy little things, before handing them out.\n\n\"Why not ask?\" Smim suggested, pointing at one slave in particular. \"You might have a receptive audience.\"\n\nSafia, on meal duty tonight, hadn't made any particular effort to engage with Nycolos, and he had no reason to count her as an ally. She was, however, a friend of Keva's\u2014a fact that would have been made obvious, even if Nycolos had not already known, by her expression during Keva's punishment. Given Keva's efforts, slight as they'd been, to make Nycolos feel welcome, that might inspire her toward sympathy.\n\nUnless she blamed him for getting her friend beaten.\n\nOnce Nycolos had his own bowl, he moved to her side and walked with her, so they could speak without forcing her to pause in her task. She appeared puzzled by his approach, but he took her lack of obvious hostility as a positive sign.\n\nThis close, he observed she had similar features to their captors, suggesting Ythani descent, but her mixed heritage was clear in her duskier eyes and skin. Otherwise, nothing much differentiated her from any of the other slaves. If her friendship with Keva was based on a common home or any ties of blood, neither of them showed it.\n\n\"How is he?\" That, Nycolos decided, would prove the most effective opening.\n\nSafia frowned. \"I'm not sure.\" She pointed with one of the bowls she carried, nearly spilling it. Across the crowded room, Keva sat huddled in the corner, bruise-pocked arms wrapped around his doubtless aching gut. \"Someone else is serving that half of the room tonight. Deliberately, I'm sure.\" Her bitter tang might have spoiled the food she was delivering.\n\n\"So\u2026 What, do those vermin hate the rest of us so much? They enjoy the opportunity to beat us?\"\n\n\"Some. Others work to earn the overseers' trust because standing watch is easier than the rest of our duties.\" She paused, handed a bowl off into grasping hands. \"They aren't really even assigned to watch us, you know. They're meant to be extra eyes to assist the guards. But some of them feel they can prove their loyalty by reporting the 'infractions' of fellow slaves. And even the ones who don't? They're not going to disobey, if they're ordered to\u2026\" Again she gestured Keva's way. \"Well, do that.\"\n\nIt was as smooth an opportunity as Nycolos could have hoped for. \"What is it exactly they're supposed to be watching for, if not\u2014?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. Vizret take them!\"\n\nAcross the chamber, another slave\u2014acting, most assuredly, on Veddai's orders\u2014had delivered Keva his own \"supper\": a tiny dollop of gruel, scarcely more than a mouthful, and not even in its own bowl. The battered young man was forced to catch what he could in cupped, unsteady hands, then lick and slurp at them like an animal.\n\nVeddai and his fellow collaborator cackled, each holding a bowl notably fuller than anyone else's. Clearly the gruel that should have been Keva's wasn't going to waste.\n\n\"Bastards!\" Safia's whole body was tense, her expression livid\u2014and utterly helpless.\n\nDamn them, indeed, for their timing if nothing else. Was Nycolos never to learn even the simplest of the answers he sought? Frustrated and again swallowing a rising fury, he began to turn away.\n\nAnd yet\u2026\n\nHow long would he be trapped here, in this hellish subservience? Either a great while, in which case he might require allies beyond Smim, to help keep him alive; or he would find, or make, an opportunity to escape, which also might require assistance. Blood of his ancestors, apparently he needed allies just to learn what was going on in this wretched mine!\n\nHe could already hear Smim's arguments, that it was best, safest, to keep his head down, to avoid trouble; that he was ignoring the third option, which was that he offended the overseers enough that they chose simply to kill him. And yes, such arguments contained more than a kernel of wisdom, but Nycolos chose to rely on the fact that Justina Norbenus had, mere days ago, paid good silver for him. She wasn't about to have him slain for a single infraction.\n\nIt was sheer justification, hiding his true motives, he knew, but he quashed that knowledge deep inside.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Safia demanded, alarmed by whatever tensing or shift in his posture she'd sensed.\n\n\"Just going to reason with them.\"\n\nShe hissed something he didn't bother to hear, but when he took his first steps toward Veddai, she followed a few paces behind.\n\nVeddai's companion tapped the grizzled older man on the shoulder and pointed, so he might turn to meet Nycolos's approach.\n\n\"You want something, slave?\"\n\n\"A moment of your time.\" Nycolos chose not to comment on the fact that, his favored position notwithstanding, Veddai was no less a slave than he. \"Surely Keva's been punished enough?\"\n\n\"What business of yours is that? Unless you're looking for some of the same?\"\n\nThe sounds of conversation, muted as it already was, faded throughout the chamber, leaving only soft slurps. The prisoners might not want to miss whatever was about to occur, but they weren't about to stop eating for it.\n\n\"I only wanted to point out, if Keva's too weak to work, it's going to hurt productivity. Justina and Rasmus can't possibly want that.\"\n\nSafia's soft sigh of resignation from behind was clear indication of how well she expected that argument to work. Come to think of it, Nycolos was probably far from the first slave to voice it.\n\nVeddai laughed. \"Guess the rest of you will just have to work hard to make up for it. And maybe help remind Keva of how unhappy you are about it the next time he looks like he's about to yap out of turn.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"Or the next time you are,\" the collaborator added, poking him in the shoulder, hard with a wooden serving spoon.\n\nThere it was. The real motivation, the one Nycolos had tried to bury beneath a topsoil of reasoning and justification along with his ever-simmering resentment and blazing pride: the hope that one or the other of these two brutes would do something very much like this.\n\nBecause now, for whatever miniscule difference it made, this was self-defense.\n\nHis grin grew wide enough nearly to split his face. From the rear of the room, somehow sensing what was about to occur, Smim muttered a fervent, \"Oh, shi\u2014\"\n\nTo a chorus of shocked cries, Nycolos lunged.\n\nNo. He leapt.\n\nMere feet from his victim the slave hurled himself through the air, propelled by an enraged strength. Hands and knees slammed into Veddai, carrying him back as though struck by a ballista before taking him to the floor. His jaw twisted in an inhuman snarl, Nycolos struck, over and over, tearing flesh and cracking bone.\n\nBut he didn't strike with fists.\n\nShocks of pain shuddered through his fingers, but it wasn't enough to stop him. Hands held spread and bent, talon-like, he practically dug at the collaborator, slashing and ripping. Deep gashes gaped wide, oozing thick rivulets of blood, very much as if Nycolos struck not with fingertips and nails but with genuine claws.\n\nShocked by the speed and savagery of the assault, Veddai's companion hesitated a long moment, but his friend's screams ultimately spurred him into action. Rather than take the extra seconds to draw a weapon, he raised a fist high and brought it down, aiming the blow at Nycolos's collarbone.\n\nNycolos saw the strike coming, but instead of raising an arm to block it or dodge aside, he twisted so the fist landed instead on the outside of his shoulder. It ached, yes, but it was the attacker who caught the worst of it. Expecting a more fragile target, the man recoiled, howling at what had to be at least a fracture in his fingers.\n\nNycolos rose, turning to face him, sparing only a quick glance downward to be sure Veddai wouldn't be rejoining the struggle any time soon.\n\nThe older man looked as though he'd been savaged by an animal. Narrow crevices of blood crossed his cheeks, his chest, his throat\u2014which had not been torn wide open through sheer luck alone. Nycolos's hands were drenched in crimson past the wrist, and slender, crinkled ribbons of skin dangled from his nails.\n\nIt was neither the blood nor the brutality that brought Nycolos up short, however, froze him in his tracks. Those he had expected, welcomed, reveled in. No, it was the sudden confusion that his actions weren't suited to his form, that he had fallen back on instinct and possibly given away far too much.\n\nThis is not how humans fight!\n\nHe was still overwhelmed with conflicting urges and a bewildered fear when the first of the guards, drawn from outside the barracks by the sounds of mayhem, tackled him to the earthen floor."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "\"Nycolos Anvarri. What in the name of Straigon's missing jawbone am I to do with you?\"\n\nHe stood before Justina Norbenus in what could only be described as some peculiar merging of an office and a sitting room. An ornate\u2014to say nothing of heavy\u2014sequence of manacles and chains linked his ankles, wrists, and throat. Three guards, fully armed and clad in cuirass and greaves, surrounded him, just beyond arm's reach, but well within range of their narrow-tipped spears.\n\nThe mine-owner herself reclined on a sofa of scarlet velvet cushions, transported here across the Outermark at who-knew-what difficulty and expense. At its head stood a rounded table with an ingenious rotating top, allowing her to keep all necessary ledgers and papers within reach. At the moment, however, it was turned to allow her access to a plate of berries that had, quite possibly, been even more difficult and costly to acquire than the furniture. In all four corners, small shelves held bowls of posies, their aroma cutting, if not concealing, the harsh odors of the nearby mine and its many workers.\n\n\"In the days you've been here,\" she continued, when it became clear Nycolos wasn't prepared to answer her question, \"you've proven yourself a good worker. Strong. In that regard, worth every mark I paid for you.\n\n\"But it's equally clear that you've not learned your lessons regarding troublemaking as well as Sanish claimed.\"\n\n\"Veddai struck me first,\" Nycolos offered with, thanks to the manacles, an absurdly loud and metallic shrug.\n\nJustina's wave of dismissal spattered a single drop of berry juice across an open ledger. \"He is one of the First among you,\" she said, referring not to his length of service but his position as what Nycolos called collaborator. \"He's allowed to strike you, with sufficient reason. Hitting back is not a right you have earned.\"\n\n\"So make me one of the First.\"\n\nA moment of stunned silence, and then Justina burst into a disbelieving guffaw. \"You want me to reward you for crippling one of my best men?\"\n\n\"Hardly crippled. With a chirurgeon's attentions and sufficient time to recover, he should be\u2026\" The slow twisting of his owner's expression warned Nycolos that this was probably not the right approach. \"I'd be good for it,\" he said, changing tack. \"You said yourself I'm strong. I'm fast. And I know something of the mountain fey\u2014the gnomes. That is who the guards and the First are really watching against, isn't it?\"\n\n\"And what would you know of gnomes?\"\n\n\"That if there are any in this stretch of the mountain range, for one, they're going to consider a mine such as yours to be an intrusion on their domain. And they're not likely to notice, or care, for the difference between willing intruders and slaves. We'd all be in danger.\n\n\"Sanish's men did waylay me near the Outermark Mountains,\" he added at her questioning glance, \"albeit farther south. I've had plenty of time to learn much of the region's threats.\" You have no idea how much time, you stupid little creature\u2026\n\n\"I see.\" Justina tapped a finger on her lower lip. \"You very well might make a solid First, at that.\n\n\"But no. Even if I were to ignore the incident with Veddai\u2014and make no mistake, I'll do no such thing\u2014you've not been here remotely long enough. I don't trust you enough, and the precedent\u2026 No.\" She snapped her fingers, and the trio of guards straightened.\n\n\"Take Nycolos back to the barracks. Remove the manacles from his neck and arms, but he's to work hobbled until I order otherwise. Nycolos, you will receive four lashes a day, and short rations, for a week. I think you're tough enough to weather that without too great an impact on your work. When that's done, if you've endured well enough and your behavior's improved, that'll be the end of it. If not\u2026 Well, we'll see.\"\n\nAnother snap, and the guards began marching the chain-swaddled slave toward the door. As the first of them reached for the latch, however, Justina spoke up again.\n\n\"Nycolos?\"\n\nHe tilted his head but said nothing.\n\n\"You are strong, and I suspect you may not fear pain the way many do. I also don't know how close you are to the goblin, or why you spoke up on Keva's behalf. But if we have another incident, if I have to discipline you again, they will share in your punishment.\"\n\nThere seemed little enough to be said to that, and the guards hustled him from the room before he might foolishly decide otherwise."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Justina might have been correct, that Nycolos didn't fear pain as much as most, but that didn't mean he felt it any less.\n\nHis back hurt.\n\nThe overseers weren't foolish. They whipped him at the end of the day, not the start, so as to affect his work as lightly as possible. Further, they allowed the other slaves\u2014mostly Smim, with assistance from Keva and Safia\u2014to treat his lashes with a salve meant to protect against infection or putrefaction.\n\nIt still bloody damn well hurt!\n\nHe sat now on his pallet, hunched over to gaze absently at the short length of chain linking his ankles. The posture was painful, tugging at the wounds, but less so than lying on them or leaning back against the wall. From all about him came the rough snores, sighs, occasional sobs, and other sounds of despair that even slumber could not fully erase.\n\nNycolos burned not with despair, but frustration.\n\nHe could be free. In a mere instant, he could shatter these chains, shatter these walls, slaughter everyone here who had harmed or offended him\u2014and anyone else he chose. Freedom or death, all at his whim. He would be, for all practical purposes, a god unto them.\n\nFor a few minutes. And then he would die, his heart punctured by a triple-damned sliver of eldritch steel so small it should be less than an irritant! Just as that bloody knight should have been, the knight who wore an ever-more familiar face and bore an ever-more familiar name\u2026\n\nNycolos clenched both fists in his hair, tugging almost hard enough to rip tufts out by the roots, to keep himself from screaming aloud.\n\nAnd just as swiftly he stopped. His fists\u2026\n\nHe remembered the assault on Veddai, fingertips stabbing, and he wondered.\n\nIn the desperation of the moment, weeks ago, it had taken all he had, every iota of effort and will, to change his shape to one that the intruding magical shard might not instantly slay. In the intervening days, he had adapted his ears, regaining a touch of the hearing he'd possessed before becoming a man. He knew he could permit his eyes to resume their prior form, ever so slightly, allowing him to see in the dark, and to gaze farther and more sharply than normal\u2014but also that the effect was visible, marked him as something other than human. And he could control the strength inherent in his alien form, of course, as Smim had encouraged him to do; that he could, if he wished it, grow mightier than his human body should allow, albeit still far weaker than he once had been.\n\nWhat else, then, could he do? He had never truly experimented with a partial shapeshift, had performed the aforementioned feats as much by feel and instinct as by intent. He dare not reshape his body as a whole, or any of the organs deep within, for that most certainly would reawaken the sorcery that sought his heart.\n\nHe started with his hands. He held them before him, after ensuring that everyone near enough to see him was, indeed, asleep, and concentrated. He remembered the feel of tearing flesh, the hunt, the many lives his \"hands\" had taken in their prior form.\n\nHis nails began to harden, to blacken. They grew curved, melding with his fingertips, lengthening\u2026\n\nEarlier he had struck as though his fingers were talons, the claws he remembered of old. Now they truly were.\n\nAs he had forced himself to swallow his earlier scream, so now did he fight back an almost hysterical laughter. More intense concentration and they had reverted. His hands were, again, entirely human.\n\nWhat else?\n\nIf he could strengthen his muscles, what of his skin? Could he armor himself against the blows of his enemies, turn aside blades\u2014or at least cudgels, and the lash\u2014as once he had?\n\nAgain he concentrated, focusing on only the surface of his body, his outer flesh, far from the organs that pumped air and blood.\n\nYes! He felt a change, though he at first saw no alteration to the deep brown skin of his arm. He tapped it with a finger, and then\u2014after regrowing it yet again\u2014a claw. Tougher than human, but still normal mammalian hide. It would still bruise, still cut, but not readily. Would turn aside at least a glancing blow.\n\nUseful, certainly, but could he go further?\n\nThe skin grew obviously thick, leathery; impossible to pass for human except in deep shadow. And then\u2026\n\nNycolos's arm took on a pattern of tight, overlapping scales, iridescent as a jungle snake. In the dim confines of the slave barracks they appeared a reflective black, but he knew, in better lighting, they would boast a deep, magnificent purple. Deeper than wine, deeper than twilight, yet shimmering as he moved, as the sun or the moons shone down upon them, reflected from them, dark yet radiant\u2026\n\nWith a sharp gasp, he forced himself to revert, until his skin was, once more, just that. Tougher than it had been, enough to take the edge off the sting of the lash, but not enough to draw attention. Subtlety, for the time being. Secrecy.\n\nBut he knew, now, that he was capable\u2014even in this miserable body\u2014of so very much more. And one day soon, he would reveal it. Revel in it.\n\nIn the gloom and grim misery of the slave barracks, Nycolos could not suppress a widening grin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "How long he labored in those mines, making his so-called \"owners\" wealthy, Nycolos was never certain. In the monotony of those efforts, a seemingly changeless purgatory, he lost count of the days. Measuring the passage of time in such tiny increments had never much concerned him, and it was a knack he would have had to learn even under circumstances far less mind-numbing than these.\n\nWeeks, at least; of that much, he was positive. The sentence Justina had degreed had come and gone long since.\n\nWhich was not to say that things had gone back to the way they were during his first days here. Branded a troublemaker, he still\u2014like Keva and some others\u2014wore manacles around his ankles. The chain was long enough that his walking steps were unimpeded, but try to climb one of the sloping passages, or to run for any reason, and he found himself hobbled and off-balance. It made his task of pushing the rock cart that much more frustrating, which in turn provided no end of amusement for the Firsts and the guards.\n\nOh, but they held a grudge over what he had done to Veddai, one that would not be satisfied by a week of the lash and short rations. The end of his formal chastisement was not, by far, his last taste of the lash. The collaborators\u2014particularly Veddai's friend, whose name Nycolos never bothered to remember\u2014took every opportunity to direct the guards' whips against him. The slightest delay in responding to a call for the cart, a word that could be twisted and massaged until it became an insult or other mark of disrespect, anything was justification if his tormentors were in the mood to make it so. Their penalties were never severe; a single stroke, maybe two; a half-empty bowl at the next meal, or short sleep the next night. Never enough to significantly impact his work, or to attract the attention of Justina or Rasmus.\n\nWell, Justina. Nycolos had his private suspicions that Rasmus was fully aware, and approved. Although the taskmaster himself treated him no differently than any other slave, the man couldn't quite repress the occasional smirk or knowing gaze.\n\nNycolos bore it, as he'd borne everything else\u2014a trial made rather easier since he'd toughened his skin, so that the kiss of the whip was markedly less agonizing than it had been.\n\nThus did time, however much of it, pass. The mine slowly grew, creeping deeper into the mountain like a curious, questing tendril. The corridor of rock and wooden beams became familiar as any home; the slaves, particularly Keva and Safia, as recognizable as the many servant creatures Smim had once managed for him.\n\nNot comfortable, never comfortable. And never acceptable. But, until he came up with a way to either escape his circumstances or turn them to his advantage, unavoidable and, in the day-to-day, unremarkable.\n\nSo he never knew how long he'd waited for something to change before it finally did.\n\nNycolos had dragged his cart over to a trio of slaves working one particular vein, chipping and picking at the walls to reveal more valuable ore, and had just begun loading their latest detritus into the cart when he heard it. He froze, a hefty chunk of rock in his hands, head tilted, trying to listen and wishing the grunts and the panting and the tools would go silent for just a moment.\n\n\"You! Nycolos!\" Veddai's friend; of course it was. \"Get the hell back to work!\"\n\nCouldn't they all just shut up a minute a let him listen?\n\n\"You just go deaf? I told you\u2014!\"\n\n\"Quiet!\"\n\nIt wasn't just the bellow, thundering as it was, but the fact that a slave had dared to make such a demand of a First\u2014and in front of other workers, no less\u2014that grabbed everyone's attention. Whether in shock or in fury, the entire tunnel indeed went silent.\n\nFor a few breaths only, of course, but that was long enough for Nycolos's more than human hearing to confirm what he'd thought he'd sensed, that nobody else present could possibly yet have noticed.\n\nThe stone surrounding them had begun, ever so faintly and oh so deeply, to hum.\n\nThey've come.\n\n\"Oh, that's it, you stupid bastard!\" The First was near apoplectic with fury, but a note of gloating had wound itself into his snarled and spit-drenched words. \"I'm going to enjoy having you flayed and roasted for\u2014\"\n\nNycolos had absolutely no time for that idiot right now. \"Everybody step back!\" he cried out, shuffling toward the center of the tunnel as fast as his manacles would allow. \"Back away from the walls!\"\n\nNot that they couldn't come from the floor or ceiling just as readily, but at least there would be a chance\u2026\n\nThe captives had little reason to trust Nycolos's judgment, nor had they any notion of what had triggered his sudden alarm, but these were men and women accustomed to following commands. Most did as he'd ordered, stepping away from their work and from the walls of stone. Even several of the Firsts and guards had done the same, only slowly realizing that they'd just accepted the command of a mere slave.\n\nOthers, however, including the enraged First, only grew angrier and more resentful that Nycolos dared think to order them about. Their shouts and threats and curses filled the mine, echoing from the rock as they advanced, fists and cudgels and whips raised high.\n\nYet even they could no longer drown out the alien song of the stone that had finally risen high enough for human ears. Slaves gawped in growing panic, and many clutched pickaxes and shovels to their chests, feeble weapons indeed but all that stood between them and a threat they sensed but could not begin to comprehend. The air in the passage grew heavy with a peculiar earthy scent.\n\nThe mountain fey had finally come to Justina's mines.\n\nThe rock disgorged them like jellyfish on the tide. They varied widely in size, some taller than Nycolos, some little larger than a child's marionette. A few boasted wings, though to what purpose Nycolos couldn't have said; others extra legs or arms, which they used to scrabble across wall and ceiling as readily as floor. Beyond such details, however, they all looked very much alike.\n\nIt appeared some sculptor or toymaker had abandoned his work halfway through. Their faces were greatly detailed, though lacking in any human expression. Eyes and mouths were rounded hollows in the stone, twisting and writhing as they shrieked their rock-grinding cries. Those faces were misshapen, often bulging and stretching around cheeks and chin, doubtless the source of the \"beards\" such creatures wore in bedtime tales told to children. Their bodies, however, were far less intricate, consisting only of vague shapes that approximated gaunt torsos and spindly limbs, far too long and possessing far too many joints. All were simple stone, though several possessed striae or embedded crystals granting them additional color and even a touch of beauty.\n\nThey clawed at the air even as they emerged, spindly fingers of rock swiping through empty space where the workers had stood only moments ago. Nycolos's warning had spared a dozen from injury or death, though whether that respite was to last more than a few seconds remained to be seen.\n\nThe first of the mountain fey to completely leave the wall appeared near the man who had been so eager to see Nycolos beaten, and Nycolos gave half an instant's thought to letting him suffer whatever fate had in store. But no, if he was to fight, he would fight.\n\nStrength rippled through his body, the culmination of an internal effort he had begun the instant he sensed the coming fey. He sprang forward, leaping hard and twisting in the air, then kicked out with both feet.\n\nThe cart, only partly full of rocks, cracked along one side as its wheels left the earth, hurtling back to slam against the wall\u2014and the fey creature that stood in its path. Nycolos didn't know if such an impact would be enough to kill the thing, but surely it would at least be injured, slowed.\n\nHis jaw hanging in a stunned and vaguely sickly gape, the First retreated back into the midst of his fellows.\n\nStill, that man was not the only one to have ignored Nycolos's warning, and not all the rest were so fortunate as he. Even as one of the armored guards dropped her whip and fumbled for the short sword at her waist, another of the fey slid from the wall and raked its fingers across the exposed flesh of her bicep.\n\nThe woman's scream choked off halfway through as she collapsed, her body going into shock at the unnatural injury. The triple gashes through muscle and flesh calcified instantly into solid stone, severing arteries, destroying tissue, and further tearing the skin around them. Even if she survived the shock, Nycolos knew, the best she could possibly hope for was to lose the arm.\n\nOthers were unluckier still, the blows delivered by the mountain fey piercing and petrifying organs or closing off throats, leaving a small but growing heap of cadavers part statue and part flesh.\n\nHysteria and dread spread before the fey, and the screams of the living swiftly overwhelmed the cries of the dying.\n\nUntil another shout came, louder still. \"Panic and die!\" Nycolos roared. \"Fight back! You can hurt them!\"\n\nNot well, they couldn't. The steel of the picks and spades would require a great deal of strength to damage the rocky bodies of the mountain fey. Accustomed to hard labor, the slaves were assuredly strong enough\u2014but whether they could deliver such blows swiftly, consistently, or for long was doubtful.\n\nBut picks and spades were not the only available weapons. For all their connection with the mountain, he knew, still these were fey, with everything\u2014and every vulnerability\u2014that entailed.\n\nHoping that what he was about to do would, like his kick to the wagon, be attributed to desperate strength bestowed by the heat of battle, Nycolos reached down and snapped the chain free of the manacles. Hefting the short length in one fist, he swung it in quick circles, links whistling as they cut the air.\n\nNot the most accurate weapon, nor simple to wield. More than once, he came nearer to striking himself than any legitimate target. Still, as the wall disgorged another of the fey, Nycolos swung, catching the creature across the head with the chain.\n\nThe chain, made not from steel but from plainer, purer iron.\n\nWailing piteously, broad flakes of stone \"bleeding\" from the side of its head in a bizarre, sifting torrent, the fey creature retreated into the wall as rapidly as it had emerged.\n\n\"Unlock the chains!\" Nycolos shouted. \"We need iron, not steel!\"\n\nNo longer hesitant to follow his orders, guards leapt to obey, fumbling at heavy keys. Several of the slaves equipped with older or simpler tools of iron\u2014a prybar here, a hammer there\u2014moved to protect their friends, or else passed the weapons to men and women in better shape and of braver mien. Nycolos was unsurprised, and yet strangely gratified for reasons he could not define, to see both Safia and Keva among those who had taken up iron.\n\nThe next wave of fey threw themselves at the assembled workers. Nycolos's chain lashed out, not unlike the whips he'd so recently endured, smashing a small depression into a skull of stone. Keva had wrapped his own chain around and through his fist to make an awkward cestus and punched like a taproom brawler, while Safia thrust the long end of her prybar like an clumsy spear. Others along the line struck with varying effect, but Nycolos hadn't the attention to spare them.\n\nFaced with unexpectedly effective resistance, the mountain fey paused to reassess, but not for long. They advanced again, slower, more cautiously, even as a second wave clambered from the floor, reaching up and out as though from some premature grave. Workers and guards alike screamed and toppled as fingertips raked their feet, transforming tendon, flesh, and bone to lifeless rock.\n\nA hand appeared inches from Nycolos, and he whipped his chain down and around him, kicking up a cloud of rock dust. Another rose and snatched at Keva; Nycolos yanked his fellow slave from its path and literally off the floor by his ragged tunic, then kicked to the side so the manacle around his ankle impacted and shattered the flexing stone digits.\n\nYet another fell to the spinning chain, but Nycolos's good fortune with the awkward weapon had finally run its course. In its fervor to escape the burning and cracking touch of iron, the fey spun away as it crumbled, winding the links around its body. The unexpected weight yanked the chain from the slave's hand, carrying it several yards down the passage before it finally landed in a heap of broken rock-flesh.\n\nHe'd taken one long stride toward the fallen weapon when he heard the cries and grunts from behind. Safia and several others were pinned in a tight cluster with their backs to the half-broken cart. Nobody else seemed able to reach them (assuming any would even have made the effort), and the few iron weapons they wielded only barely kept the grasping, swarming creatures at bay.\n\nCursing under his breath, a string of profanities that nobody present would have recognized had they heard them, Nycolos bolted across the passage. Certain that the others had more to occupy their attention right now, he focused on his left hand, fingertips warping into blackened talons. He grabbed the first of the fey from behind and tossed it away. Those he rescued could never have seen that his grip punched into the creature's back, severing whatever it might have in place of a spine. With his other hand he scooped up a short sword from where it lay beside a fallen guard. A second fey fell before him\u2014not dead, for the blade he wielded was of steel, but temporarily pinned through the chest to the body of the sword's former owner.\n\nEven now, as they turned to face this new assault, he grabbed a third from where it clung to the wall\u2014both his hands were, again, entirely normal, merely human\u2014and hurled it with bone-crushing force to the floor. There, before it could recover, he stepped beside its head, closed his iron-clad ankles around its neck, and twisted.\n\nIt wasn't much, but it opened a small gap through the converging fey. Still laying about them with what weapons they had, Safia and the other slaves broke through, racing to join with the larger band further down the passage. They, in turn, swarmed over the nearest of the creatures, making for the mine entrance. Thanks once more to his enhanced senses, Nycolos heard not only the panicked retreat, but the pounding footsteps of more guards charging this way, having finally overheard and reacted to the mayhem from within the mountain.\n\nHe had no idea, of course, if these new combatants carried weapons that could significantly harm the fey\u2014but then, neither did the fey themselves. Having anticipated a slaughter, not a battle, and uncertain what they might soon be facing, they began to slide back into the walls and the floor whence they'd come.\n\nNot that their efforts at slaughter had been wasted. The corridor lay strewn with bodies of the dead and dying, people with injuries of solid stone that no mortal being could heal. Doubtless Justina and Rasmus would order the survivors put out of their misery; not out of kindness, though it was the most compassionate option, but because it was cheaper and easier than trying to keep them alive.\n\nBefore the overseers arrived, however, Nycolos had something of his own to accomplish. Swiftly he returned to the side of the fey whom he had impaled, and who still struggled to free itself from the corpse to which he'd effectively staked it.\n\nThe harsh sounds contorting his jaw so that it instantly began to ache, tearing at his throat until he felt it might bleed, he spoke to it in its own inhuman tongue.\n\n\"You do not drive the invaders from your kingdom of stone, not this way. Not without great loss. Hold off your attacks until I call to speak with you once more, and we can both have what we desire.\"\n\nHe yanked the sword free with a piercing screech and a fainter squelch of steel through flesh. \"Go.\"\n\nIt made no response, this creature of the mountain, but it peered at him long enough that he knew it understood\u2014though whether it would heed his words, or bother to relay them, he couldn't guess. Then it was gone, as a fish vanishing into the deep waters of a pool of earth, an instant before the first of the guards appeared.\n\nMind racing and hope for freedom burning bright for the first time in weeks, Nycolos allowed his shoulders to sag in only partly feigned exhaustion and moved to meet them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "It was remarkably average, as cudgels go. Not quite thirty inches of hardwood, narrowed at one end, a heavy knot at the other, very similar to those carried by many of the guards and several of the First among slaves. And like those others, it had recently been altered to better serve against the mountain fey. Nails had been hammered into the knot and along much of the length, creating makeshift but brutally effective iron studs.\n\nThe only thing that made this particular club at all significant, as compared to the others like it, was that Nycolos wielded it.\n\nJustina Norbenus was no fool. Although she was, indeed, concerned with precedent, with ensuring the complete dependability of any slave to whom she granted the tiniest sliver of authority, she recognized the severity of the immediate threat. Clearly not all the tales she'd heard of Nycolos's performance against the fey were accurate; some were contradictory, and many described feats of strength or prowess that were blatantly impossible. In the terror and chaos of the battle, the workers' eyes must have deceived them. That he had proven effective, however, and that his initial warning had saved the lives of many, was in no doubt.\n\nThus, though she had laughed off the suggestion as ridiculous only weeks earlier, she had indeed promoted Nycolos to the ranks of the Firsts.\n\nRasmus hadn't been thrilled with the notion, the slowly recovering Veddai even less so, but the others were grateful to have him at their side, watching their backs. The other slaves, too, seemed happy with the situation. Nycolos was still one of them, having achieved his position without playing sycophant to the overseers, and he seemed to take his duties seriously. He proved immediately that he had no interest in spying on his fellow captives for infractions, but was focused solely on standing sentinel against the return of the fey.\n\nOr so he made himself appear, while he worked out how to go about the next steps of what he generously and jokingly called his \"plan.\"\n\n\"So what are we waiting for, Master?\" Smim asked one night as they huddled against the wall, side by side in the barracks. As a First, Nycolos could have claimed a larger space for himself, but he preferred to leave his living conditions as they were. If nothing else, it allowed him to keep having these conversations with his goblin companion.\n\n\"Them.\" Nycolos tilted his head, then emitted something equal parts growl and sigh.\n\nSmim followed the gesture across multiple pallets to Keva and Safia, who were engaged in a similar conversation of their own. \"I see. Is there something in particular that they ought to be engaged in?\"\n\n\"Something in particular I'll need them for.\"\n\n\"And you don't believe they'll be amenable?\"\n\n\"That's just it. I don't know. They very well might, but I don't know. If I ask this of them and they refuse, if they report me, the entire plan falls apart.\"\n\n\"A conundrum indeed,\" the goblin said. And then, \"Now that you are a First, perhaps you might explain something to me.\"\n\nThe subject change was obvious and, Nycolos knew, quite deliberate. It was something Smim often did when playing the part of adviser, to let a topic sit for a few moments, let the mind work on it while the mouth was occupied elsewhere.\n\nThough Nycolos never had entirely figured out if the goblin did it so he could ruminate on the subject, or so his master could.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"If the overseers knew they were watching for an attack from the fey, why were they not already equipped with weapons of iron? Why were you required to improvise?\"\n\nNycolos snorted. \"That was the first question I asked. Apparently they just assumed that fey of mountains and stone wouldn't have the vulnerability to an ore that legend ascribed to their woodland brethren.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 suppose I can see some degree of logic in that.\" Smim sounded dubious.\n\n\"Logical, maybe, but not accurate.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Why do you suppose the mountain fey share the sensitivity to iron?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. Why don't you invite them over for wine or tea and we'll ask them.\"\n\n\"Do they drink wine or tea?\"\n\n\"You can ask them that, too.\"\n\nNeither said another word for long moments, either lost in thought or listening absently to the idle conversation or low snoring from the room's other quarters.\n\nUntil, finally, Smim spoke once more. \"Tell me, Master\u2026\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"How well does your plan hang together if you never ask Safia and Keva to aid you, for fear of their reply?\"\n\nIn less humid climes, Nycolos's glare might well have ignited something nearby. \"You know I'm permitted to club you senseless now, right?\"\n\nThe goblin shrugged. \"If that's part of the plan\u2026\"\n\nNycolos looked down at his feet, in part to hide the faint grin he couldn't quite suppress. Only when he'd wrestled it back under control did he speak again, his voice deathly serious. \"I'm\u2026 not accustomed to making decisions without more information. Or with so little time to ponder them.\"\n\n\"Or that require you to trust others?\" Smim added knowingly.\n\n\"Not others whom I haven't known for a long time, and who owe me no fealty.\"\n\nThe goblin offered no reply. He didn't have to.\n\nIt didn't matter what he was accustomed to, and Nycolos knew it. He hadn't the resources, the power, the lifespan to do things as he would prefer, as he once had. Time to accept that, at least for the time being, and behave accordingly.\n\nNo more waiting, then. Tomorrow. He would speak with Safia and Keva tomorrow, and deal with whatever followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"Fire!\"\n\nAs alarms went, it was one of the last anyone wanted to hear from within a mine. A bracket holding a hanging lantern against the wall had given away, and at the worst possible time. It fell hard against the edge of the rock cart, splashing burning oil down both sides of the old wooden contraption. The vessel caught almost instantly, igniting with a sharp crackle and a dull whoomp. Flames danced high, and smoke swiftly accumulated in a swirling maelstrom around the ceiling.\n\nEveryone, slave and overseer alike, dropped what they were doing and raced for buckets of sand or water to douse the conflagration before it spread. Or rather, almost everyone. Panicked and distracted, nobody noticed when one of the Firsts stepped back into the shadows of the corridor and disappeared into a side passage.\n\nIt would turn out, eventually, that none of the panic, and not even all the dashing about, was necessary. As bad as the situation initially seemed, the mine itself\u2014and its workers, so long as everyone kept their heads\u2014had been in little danger. When the cart had caught fire, it stood well distant from any of the wooden crossbeams that supported the weaker lengths of ceiling. Surrounded by nothing but earth and rock, the fire would have burned for a time, and the smoke could have proved dangerous to anyone who lingered, but barring the most unlikely stroke of ill fortune, it could never have spread.\n\nIn the soggy, smoky aftermath, workers and guards congratulated themselves on their efforts, offering prayers of thanks\u2014depending on the faith in question\u2014to God, gods, or the elemental spirits called vinnkasti, that what had at first appeared so disastrous had proved relatively benign.\n\nAll save two, a pair of slaves in particular, who exchanged furtive, guilty looks and shared hopes. Hope that nobody would ever learn it was they who had arranged and orchestrated the \"accident\"; that nobody would notice that someone had slipped away during everyone's distraction, and hadn't been present to assist in battling the blaze; and that whatever scheme Nycolos had involved them in would prove worth it and wouldn't get them, or anyone they cared about, killed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Nycolos was far less concerned about anyone realizing he'd been absent during the fire. Since before he'd approached Safia and Keva to play their part in his diversion, he'd already worked out his excuse. The fire, he would claim, might have been a deliberate distraction, a precursor to another fey attack. Once he saw everyone else had it under control, he'd stepped aside to keep watch for just such a possibility.\n\nNo, he fretted as he stalked swiftly down the shadowed passage, his eyes transformed to golden, slitted orbs so he might find his way more easily in the dark, his only worry\u2014highly improbable, if his allies had done their job well, but not impossible\u2014was that someone might come looking for him too soon, before he was finished.\n\nStill, this couldn't be rushed. He had to get far enough from the main tunnel even to start, and after that\u2026 They would come when they chose, if they chose. All he could do was call.\n\nWhen they finally did, he nearly missed the signs. From the low-hanging ceiling above, a faint bulge in the stone abruptly developed shallow hollows that opened, closed, shifted, twisted, blinking eyes and smacking lips. A nose sprouted between them, little more than a crooked stalactite, and the first of the mountain fey gazed down upon him from above.\n\nOthers crawled from the walls, spindly fingers parting stone like curtains, or clambered from beneath the floor. Chittering and grinding, the sound of their words blending with the rumble of tiny earthen joints, they came; a pair, a dozen, a score and more. In seconds Nycolos found himself not merely unalone but surrounded. Forcing himself to remain calm and still\u2014to refrain from transforming his skin to an armor of indigo scales, his nails to shredding talons\u2014meant stomping hard on every instinct he possessed.\n\nIt was, he knew, only the flimsiest thread of curiosity that kept them from attacking, but it was a thread he counted on. It wouldn't do to be the one to sever it.\n\n\"I am grateful you have come.\" Again he felt the pain of forcing his mouth, and especially his throat, to speak their language. It was an unlovely tongue, full of harsh glottal sounds\u2014some of which could only be made, at least by humans, while inhaling rather than exhaling\u2014flowing without pause into prolonged chains of almost musical vowels. Combined with a dearth of concepts that most languages took for granted, such as tenses and notions of time, it was nigh impossible for anyone but the fey themselves to master.\n\nA fact that clearly hadn't escaped the fey themselves. \"How do you learn our speech?\" one demanded of him.\n\nNycolos couldn't be certain, so similar were many of the so-called gnomes, but one near the forefront had height and proportion, wings and half-formed features, that might mark it as the same to whom he'd spoken earlier. For lack of any more propitious choice, then, he had addressed his greeting to that one in particular, and it was this one that questioned him now.\n\n\"I am taught\u2026\" He allowed himself one deep breath. Not only might the creatures react poorly to his answer, Nycolos wasn't entirely certain how he himself would handle it. He'd shied away from speaking the name since he'd abandoned the body that had borne it.\n\n\"\u2026by Tzavalantzaval.\"\n\nThe roar of the fey was the rumble of a hundred tiny earthquakes. Their stone fingertips clashed and clicked together like a hailstorm of rock. Nycolos found himself bracing for an attack before he knew his body had moved.\n\n\"The wyrm is our enemy!\" the gnome to which he'd been speaking cried. \"It kills us! Sends its servants to hunt us!\"\n\nNycolos straightened, nodding slowly. Well, perhaps if you hadn't slaughtered my emissaries, if you'd consented to serve as the wyverns and the cliffside goblin tribes\u2026 Or at least hadn't tried to invade my home, steal what was mine, shattered and slaughtered my first clutch in a hundred years\u2026\n\nHe spoke none of these thoughts aloud, of course, saying instead, \"The wyrm is gone.\"\n\nThat, at least, brought some welcome silence to the echoing chamber. \"Dead?\" one of the other fey asked hesitantly.\n\nNot remotely, you wretched\u2026! \"I do not know. Perhaps. But many of Tzavalantzaval's servants flee. The goblin within the mines is another such.\"\n\n\"Mines?!\" It was the first fey who responded again, enraged once more. \"Wounds! Gashes and gouges in our world!\" The others again grew agitated, rumbling and clicking. \"That you escape from our enemy gives you no right\u2014\"\n\n\"We do not intrude on your domain by choice!\"\n\nAgain the noise subsided. The fey said nothing more, but their gaze\u2014already somewhat empty, thanks to the stiffness of their stone fa\u00e7ade\u2014showed no comprehension at all.\n\nIt was all Nycolos could do not to sigh, or to curse aloud at the uncomprehending gnomes. The mountain fey held no concept of government, of hierarchy. Most wanted the same thing, and acted accordingly. Those that didn't were left to do as they pleased. Rarely, if ever, was there conflict between or among them.\n\nThis would have been so much easier with the wyverns. If the mines were only several days travel further south, if he could have gotten outside and up into the foothills as easily as he'd slipped into this side passage, if he could have convinced the wyverns who he truly was\u2026\n\nAll right, perhaps not easier. But less frustrating, for certain.\n\n\"You wish the humans out of your domain. Some of the humans wish the same, but other humans\u2014stronger humans\u2014do not allow it. I have a plan that allows you to drive the humans away, with little battle, little loss of your own. But it works only if you do as I suggest.\"\n\nFor a time the mountain fey rasped and grumbled among themselves, puzzled and untrusting. At last, however, the first one replied. \"We listen.\"\n\nWhich was not, Nycolos noted, remotely any sort of promise to cooperate.\n\nStill, it was a simple plan, all things considered; it should work. If they agreed. If he could get them to understand the necessity of timing, of waiting; of striking not just at the intruders within their mountain, but outside of it, in the outer world where they rarely traveled and for which they cared not a whit; of a handful of other details straightforward to most anyone else but utterly alien to the gnomes' way of thinking\u2026 it should work.\n\nNycolos idly rubbed at the pain in his chest, the true source of all his woes, and began\u2014with great care and deliberation\u2014to explain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "With the passing of the days, life in the Norbenus mines settled back toward normal, miserable as \"normal\" was. The soldiers never let down their guard, but they and the slaves ceased panicking at every sound and every shadow. Hopes that the gnome attack had been a one-time disaster, that no further assault would come any time soon, began to rise.\n\nOnly Nycolos, never certain that the mountain fey truly understood what he had asked of them, always wondering if this would be the day they somehow bungled the entire affair, remained on edge.\n\nStill, nothing went awry, or at least nothing he could observe. His only other problem during those tense days\u2014and more a nuisance than genuine trouble\u2014came in the form of Safia and Keva. Both of his fellow slaves and potential friends remained furious, vexed by his refusal to explain in any detail what he had done with the time their diversion had granted him. Over and over they asked, and over and over he would tell them only to be ready to act when he gave the word. Smim alone, on whose silence Nycolos could utterly rely, was privy to the entire plan.\n\nLess confident in it than Nycolos was, horrified at how much of it relied on not merely the cooperation but the comprehension of the mountain fey, but privy to it.\n\nAnother night fell. Exhausted and filthy, the slaves marched sullenly to their barracks, flopping out across their pallets while awaiting their meager evening fare. Nycolos and the other Firsts, save those who were overseeing the cooking in a neighboring shack, sat about the only table, playing a few rounds with a set of poorly carved handmade Suunimi dominos. Nycolos wasn't especially skilled at the game, having learned it only within the past couple of weeks, but he was fast improving.\n\nHe heard the first faint sounds of struggle\u2014the clash of metal and stone, the shouts of frightened or injured sentries, from deep within the mine\u2014long before anyone else, and he had steel himself to continue playing as though nothing was amiss. It wouldn't do to react too soon.\n\nIt didn't require long. Muttered conversation fell silent, ripples of quiet spreading through the barracks as first this group, then that, became aware of something happening beyond the walls. The Firsts looked up almost as one, listening with growing panic\u2014or, in Nycolos's case, excitement\u2014as they began to understand what they heard.\n\n\"We need to get to the guards!\" one of the Firsts shouted as she rose from the head of the table. \"Arm ourselves!\"\n\nAnother, the man who'd been a close friend to Veddai and whose life Nycolos had saved, was shaking his head as though trying to dislodge it. \"No! We're safe as long we stay out of the mountain!\"\n\n\"I don't understand!\" wailed yet a third. \"They never come at night! There's almost nobody in the mines after dark!\"\n\n\"No.\" Nycolos, too, had risen to his feet, though only after casting a meaningful glance behind him at Smim. \"Not anymore. The gnomes won't hold themselves to the tunnels this time. They've come to understand that they cannot merely drive us out, that they must bring the fight to us out here, in our homes\u2026\" He couldn't keep a bitter, twisted sarcasm from tainting that last word. \"\u2026if they are to rid themselves of us.\"\n\nThe lot of them\u2014and not just the Firsts, but many of the other slaves within earshot\u2014stared in open-mouthed horror. \"How do you know that?\" the woman at the table's head whispered, her voice shaking, almost sifting, through quivering lips.\n\n\"Well\u2026 I explained it to them.\"\n\nVeddai's friend died first, his face forever frozen in almost comical shock. With strength far greater than any normal man his size, Nycolos lashed out, driving his elbow into the man's throat, crushing cartilage and bone within. His other hand was less than half a second behind, cracking into another First's skull.\n\nSlaves retreated from the table, some scampering and scooting back with heels and hands, not even taking the time to stand. Most of the surviving Firsts had yet to recover from their shock, but a few began to act. Two of them moved around the table toward Nycolos: one a woman with her fists raised, the other a heavily bearded man hefting a chair as a bludgeon. The First nearest the door turned and dashed for the portal, screaming for the armed guards stationed without.\n\nShe never reached it, and her scream died scarcely born. Smim leapt from behind, a hideous jumping spider, his spindly limbs clamping around her waist and shoulders. With a grotesque gurgle he latched his jaw onto the back of her neck, jagged teeth sawing easily through flesh and jarring on bone.\n\nNycolos delivered a fearsome kick to the edge of the table, sending the long wooden slab hard into the hips and stomachs of the Firsts standing across from him. Men and women fell, grunting in pain, and he knew none of them would be moving to attack or racing for aid\u2014not in the moments it would take him to deal with the two who approached.\n\nHe punched hard with the palm of his hand, driving the oncoming chair back into the face of the man who carried it. Blood spurted and the First staggered, still in the fight but off his stride.\n\nNycolos spun, catching and then crushing the woman's fist as she struck. Her shriek of pain wavered as her body grew weak at the sudden shock, then died entirely as Nycolos reached forth his other hand, gripped her chin tight, and snapped her neck.\n\nAnother moment and he had wrested the chair away from the woman's companion; a moment after that was all the time it took for that chair to beat the life from the man who'd carried it.\n\nFinishing off the remaining Firsts was even more slaughter and less combat than these had been. In the end, Nycolos stood upon the table, a bloody club that had once been a chair leg grasped tight in one fist, to ensure all the horrified slaves could see him.\n\nNot all, it seemed, were as cowed as others. \"What have you done?!\" someone shouted from the far corner of the barracks.\n\n\"I killed the other Firsts,\" Nycolos answered. \"I figured that was obvious enough I really wouldn't have to explain it in too much depth.\"\n\nThe goblin, wiping blood from his mouth on a scrap of tunic, sniggered.\n\n\"You've killed all of us! The overseers will never\u2014!\"\n\nNycolos shook his head. \"The overseers are not your concern. The sounds of battle you've heard outside? The gnomes are coming. I spoke the truth earlier. They'll no longer confine their attacks to the mines. They're coming for everyone.\"\n\n\"Why?!\" It was Safia who shouted now. \"Why would you do this?\"\n\n\"Because I've also made a bargain with them. Anyone who flees will be permitted to go unharmed.\"\n\nThe murmuring that had been growing as Nycolos spoke, an even mix of anger and fear, faded to nothing as the implications sank in.\n\n\"Where are we supposed to go?\" another slave demanded. \"The Outermark\u2014\"\n\n\"Is dangerous. It can be deadly. But it's not endless. Go with care, help one another, you've a good chance to survive. You can leave here, and live or die, you'll be free. Or you can stay and fight the gnomes at the side of the men and women who've made you into less than beasts!\"\n\nHe leapt from the table and strode toward the door, Smim falling into step behind. \"Do as you will. But I am leaving, and I will go through anyone who attempts to stop me.\"\n\nSeveral of the slaves, Keva and Safia among them, gathered around him\u2014some begging or pleading for a third option, some moving as though they would accompany him\u2014but none stood in his path.\n\n\"You had no right!\"\n\nThat, of everything he heard, dragged Nycolos to a brief halt, locking eyes with Safia. \"I beg your pardon.\"\n\n\"You had no right!\" she repeated, practically hissing. \"Something like this? You should have talked to everyone first! We should have had a say in our own fate!\"\n\n\"So the overseers could hear about it and move to stop us? So we could have our chance at freedom debated on, decided, ripped from our grasp by the cowards among us? No. I saw a chance\u2014not just for myself, but for us all\u2014and I took it. I allow no one, taskmaster or slave, to bind me. No one!\"\n\n\"And is it any more just that your choice binds us?\"\n\n\"Since nobody else was capable of offering us freedom? Yes.\"\n\n\"You could at least have told us,\" Keva interrupted before Nycolos could either storm off or continue the argument. \"Safia and me. You roped us into this, and we helped because we trusted you. You could have trusted us in turn.\"\n\nNycolos blinked once, long and languid, the expression almost\u2026 reptilian. \"And you, of course, would have told absolutely nobody.\"\n\n\"Of course!\"\n\n\"You would never once have given into the temptation to warn even your closest friends of what was coming.\"\n\nKeva's look of righteous indignation faltered. \"Well\u2026\"\n\n\"And they, in turn, would not have warned any of their friends.\"\n\n\"I don't\u2026 I mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Word would have spread, Keva. And whether through cowardice, or greed, or simple carelessness, someone would eventually have let it slip to a First or an overseer. Where would that have left us?\"\n\nThe smaller slave muttered something apparently directed either at his feet or the floor beneath them.\n\nStill, before Nycolos had taken two more steps, Keva spoke up again. \"So what are we doing now?\"\n\nSafia's lips twisted at that \"we,\" but she said nothing to counter it.\n\n\"You,\" Nycolos said, \"are going to get everyone else moving. Or run on your own, if you prefer.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we stay together?\"\n\n\"Smim and I are going to fulfill the rest of my bargain with the gnomes. You're welcome to come along and assist if you'd prefer, but\u2026\" He turned and looked pointedly at the corpses he and the goblin had left scattered about one side of the chamber. \"I'm not convinced you'd care to be a part of it.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a response, or further interruption, he barged through the door and out into the struggle-filled night. As he'd expected, nobody but the goblin moved to join him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The guards fought well, bravely\u2014or perhaps desperately\u2014but they had little chance. Their iron-studded clubs and similar weapons were effective, but they lacked the speed or sheer ferocity of the mountain fey. Even with the occasional lamp or torch, glowing atop poles throughout the camp, the night impeded them far more than it did the unnatural creatures from beneath the earth. Without the Firsts leading the other slaves to support them, they were greatly outnumbered, and none could spare even a moment's attention to try and learn why their workers had not yet appeared.\n\nAnd, as they learned all too swiftly, they faced another enemy from behind.\n\nArmed with a short blade taken from a fallen soldier, Smim crept through shadow and dirt, an invisible predator. Blood streaked sword and teeth, and his inhuman features had warped into an expression of savage glee utterly at odds with his normal demeanor. For a time, he allowed himself to be a goblin, and his heart reveled in the carnage.\n\nFor Nycolos, however, there was no skulking, no stealth. He carried no weapon. Standing tall, flesh hardened enough to turn away weak or glancing blows, he strode through the camp, daring anyone, everyone, to notice. Already a small band of guards, only just having forced themselves awake and climbed into their armor, had seen him coming and called to him for aid.\n\nHe had slammed into them, an avalanche of impossible muscle and razored talons, shredding two before anyone recognized him as threat rather than ally. He had made equally swift work of the remainder, taking only a single injury severe enough to penetrate his skin\u2014a shallow slash across his left ribs\u2014in the process. The exultation of that violence, of striking back not merely at collaborators but at the men and women who had dared to hold him, to call him slave, burned in his veins, searing away most of the pain.\n\nMost, but not all\u2014and even as another soldier crossed his path, fleeing an unseen foe and dying swiftly beneath Nycolos's black claws, he suddenly wondered.\n\nIf the wound wasn't deep, had not penetrated anywhere near the organs he dare not reshape, was it any different than armoring his skin, strengthening muscle, sprouting talons? Could he\u2026?\n\nThe concentration required was intense. Not the change itself, no; rather, shifting that particular patch of flesh back to the form he'd initially chosen, when it was whole and healthy, while maintaining the claws, the inhuman durability and strength, that were alien to this human shape. Reverting here, but not there. Returning one tiny bit of his body to the human template while leaving so much of it\u2026 not.\n\nIntense, but not impossible. His exultation flared higher as the wound closed, faded so that no scar, no sign beyond one extra rip in his tunic, remained.\n\nHe couldn't help it. He laughed, long and loud, the sound carrying over the clash of battle from within the mines and, growing ever nearer, various spots and patches throughout the camp itself.\n\nThe door to the equipment shed and armory, located just beside Justina's \"office,\" burst open, revealing the taskmaster Rasmus and two of his soldiers. For an endless instant they gawped at the apparently maddened figure of their newest First.\n\nNycolos swallowed the rest of his mirth, but he allowed his face to remain stretched in an almost manic grin. \"It seems things have gotten a bit out of hand, Rasmus.\"\n\n\"Where\u2014where are the rest of my Firsts?\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Nycolos spread his hands in an exaggerated shrug, deliberately exposing his crimson-coated talons to the torchlight. \"Where indeed?\"\n\nThe taskmaster screamed an order, the two guards beside him advanced, raising their spears\u2026\n\nUncaring, now, how much of his inhuman strength he exposed, Nycolos leapt.\n\nThrough the humid night air that strength propelled him, clearing more than a dozen feet. Passing between speartips brought to bear far too slowly by their startled wielders, he extended both arms.\n\nClaws punched through flesh and skulls. Nycolos landed in a crouch before Rasmus, having dragged both soldiers to the ground with him. Accompanied by the crack of bone, he stood.\n\nAnd nearly took a spear in the gut for his trouble. Only a desperate bound backward kept the blade from striking with enough force to slide clean through his toughened skin; he bled even as it was, though the wound was shallow. Say what one would about the taskmaster, the man had nerves iron enough they might have harmed the mountain fey. Obviously he was thrown, frightened, by Nycolos's powers, but just as obviously the dramatics had not intimidated him into freezing up.\n\nThey watched one another, circled a few steps. Rasmus's skin glinted in the lanternlight, pale and slick with sweat, but his hands remained steady. The spear flicked out, lizard's tongue-quick, faster even than Nycolos could grab it. Perhaps, if he augmented his body further still\u2026 But he wasn't certain he could push himself that far beyond the bounds of humanity, not without concentration that might distract him at a crucial moment. Later he would experiment with it, but for now he must make do with what he had. What he was.\n\nHe stepped forward, and the spear moved to intercept. The weapon thrust, and each time Nycolos sidestepped or parried with extended talons.\n\nAnd then Rasmus grunted once, coughed up a mouthful of bile-tainted blood, and fell face-first with a limp, hollow whump.\n\n\"Did you get lost?\" Nycolos sneered. \"Should I have left you a map of the camp?\"\n\n\"Sorry, Master.\" The goblin yanked his stolen sword free of the taskmaster's spine. \"You appeared to be having such a grand time, I was hesitant to interrupt.\"\n\nNycolos moved to lift the nearest lantern off its post. \"You have a peculiar notion of fun, Smim.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master. I haven't the faintest idea where I might possibly have learned such a thing.\"\n\n\"Oh, shut up.\" A quick toss with now-clawless human hands, a sharp shattering, and the storehouse from which Rasmus had emerged swiftly began to smolder.\n\n\"Yes, Master.\" Then, doing absolutely nothing of the sort, he continued, \"Have we killed enough of the defenders to fulfill our obligation?\"\n\n\"I thought you were enjoying murdering the people who'd enslaved you, Smim.\" Nycolos crouched briefly, hefting one of the fallen spears.\n\n\"Oh, very much so. But I'd even more enjoy being gone from here before the mountain fey conveniently forget that they're supposed to allow us to depart.\"\n\n\"Fair point. We're almost done. We've just one more stop.\"\n\nSmim followed his gaze and nodded once. Marching almost in unison, the mismatched pair entered the structure nearest the now merrily burning storehouse.\n\nJustina Norbenus stood within, dressed for travel, several chests and leather sacks lying at her feet. Coin and other valuables, Nycolos had no doubt. She was hunched over the desk, gathering selected ledgers, as they entered. She spun, straightening, at their sudden appearance, and just as swiftly relaxed, if only marginally, when she recognized them.\n\n\"Start loading these on the horses!\" she ordered, gesturing at the gathered riches. \"We have to get out of here!\"\n\n\"Well,\" Nycolos mused, crossing his arms and otherwise moving not at all, \"two-thirds of us do.\"\n\nThe mine owner froze, thoughts and questions churning almost visibly behind her slack expression. Her jaw gave a twitch.\n\n\"If you're contemplating shouting for Rasmus,\" Nycolos told her, \"you might want to consider that you're far more likely to attract the gnomes. They have pretty good hearing.\"\n\n\"Also Rasmus is dead,\" Smim added helpfully.\n\n\"Also that, yes.\"\n\nJustina's shoulders, indeed her entire body, slumped. Clearly it didn't even occur to her to doubt their claim. \"You\u2026 You did this?\"\n\n\"Some of it. The fey deserve their share of the credit, though.\"\n\n\"Why?!\"\n\nNycolos felt his chin drop, his mouth gape, in utter disbelief. \"You cannot have just asked me that!\"\n\n\"It was never personal. We needed workers. Were you not fed? Given shelter? It's more than many people can\u2014\"\n\n\"Master?\" The goblin's voice actually quivered with churning emotions. \"May I please chew on her face now?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Stab her, at least?\"\n\n\"No, Smim. We'll not be killing the Lady Norbenus today.\"\n\nThe vicious little creature had no opportunity to express his dismay, nor Justina her surprised and incredulous relief, before Nycolos struck.\n\nWith a low-pitched whistle and blur of motion, his scavenged spear flipped around so that it was the butt end, rather than the blade, that landed. A hideous crack flowed without pause into Justina's agonized scream as she collapsed, clutching at her now splintered shin.\n\n\"Can't have you leaving before the mountain fey find you,\" Nycolos explained, though he couldn't be certain his former \"owner\" heard or understood him through her pain. \"They really don't want anyone intruding on their domain again, you see. So I explained to them the advantages of setting an unmistakable example.\"\n\nHe casually tossed the spear to clatter against the desk, landing halfway across the chamber. \"I believe their intent is to see just how much of you they can turn to stone before you've died of the wounds, and then display what's left. I'm not certain, of course. They were still discussing it when I left. If that sounds too unpleasant, you can always drag yourself over to that spear and slit your own throat. I don't think you've the spine for it, since you've always had other people to commit your violence, but it's entirely up to you.\n\n\"In your next life, if you believe in such a thing, try to be a bit more selective in who you dare think to make your slave!\" He could only hope, as his eyes turned gold and inhuman, the better to make his way through the dark of night, that she was coherent enough to notice it. \"Come on, Smim. Now we're done.\"\n\nWith nary another word, he who now called himself Nycolos Anvarri vanished into the wilds of the Outermark, once more making his long way toward human civilization\u2014and, with luck, the means to shed this pathetic lesser form, lesser life, he'd assumed along with his stolen name."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Conventional wisdom and tavern tales dubbed Tohl Delian the most heavily fortified city the continent of Galadras had ever seen. While some historians or sages might quibble with that claim, none could argue that the walls of this, the capital of Ktho Delios, were an awe-inspiring marvel.\n\nQuarried from the nearby Aerugo Mountains, the stone walls averaged a dozen feet across and nearly three times that in height, though precise measurement varied. They sloped outward, boasted countless watchtowers and engine platforms. Rumor held that thousands of soldiers patrolled those walls or stood sentry within its towers\u2014and many times that number of slaves, prisoners of raids and war, had given their labor, and often their lives, in the construction of that bastion.\n\nNone of which, the foreigner decided as she raised her gaze to that looming barrier for the umpteenth time in the last hour, made it even remotely beautiful. She'd never say so aloud, not in present company, but she thought it looked like some divine infant had used playroom blocks in an attempt to imitate a mountain.\n\nShe stood smack in the middle of a winding line of humanity, awaiting admission to the walled city, wrapped in layers of capes and shawls against the bite of Ktho Delios's autumn winds. Before such gusts the hems of her garments fluttered and flapped, as did those worn by every man and woman she could see, the tarps covering a variety of wagons, the tails and scraggly manes of mules, and anything else the weather could idly pick up and play with. It smelled of a bewildering combination of lush greenery and the coming winter snows, carried down from the peaks of the Aerugos.\n\nIn the distance\u2014far from the ramparts, for the Ktho Delian military would never suffer a tree to grow near their walls\u2014branches and leaves rustled their complaints against the growing cold. Atop the highest parapets furled and snapped the black banners of the Deliant, the military parliament that ruled Ktho Delios under an entrenched and permanent martial law. The dirt of the road, though packed down tight by constant travel, danced low in the wind, swirling around the ankles of all who waited.\n\nOf all the visible world from where the foreigner stood, only the walls, ugly and dark, remained unmoving.\n\nAn old and battered wagon\u2014driven by a burly fellow with the scattered burn scars of a blacksmith, and a curly-haired boy who might have been a nephew or an apprentice\u2014finally made its way through gate inspection and trundled into the city. No surprise they'd been allowed through; the smell alone suggested they were hauling sacks of turnips or some other root vegetable, nothing to which even the most stringent sentinel would object. The entire line shifted forward several paces, the next entrant faced the guards, and the newcomer wondered if she would, in fact, still be young enough to walk unassisted by the time her turn came around.\n\nThe gate, when she did finally reach it, was a tunnel through the wall, a veritable maw: portcullis of heavy steel teeth, and enormous wooden doors, bound in iron, ready to slam shut into an impassible gullet. Although she couldn't spot them from here, she knew there must be dozens of murder holes, soldier-occupied alcoves, and additional layers of doors within. The soldiers who moved to bar her passage were hard of mien, cold of gaze; their mail and weapons well maintained, their tabards\u2014black, sporting a tower of dusky hue only barely visible against the dark fabric\u2014spotless.\n\n\"Your papers, miss.\"\n\nWith a feigned nervousness\u2014not too much; it wouldn't do for him to think she had anything to hide\u2014she passed across the sheaf of documents she had obtained, after careful questioning, at the border, and which had already been examined more than once.\n\nThe Deliant soldier glanced over them, taking in the various marks and shorthand that filled the carefully inked forms. Ironic, in its way, that the gate guards of Ktho Delian cities had to be fully literate, when so many of those passing through probably couldn't sign their own names.\n\n\"Your name is Tamirra Vallenfir?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It is.\" Her name was, of course, nothing of the sort, but that was what the document read.\n\n\"Of Quindacra.\"\n\nShe nodded vigorously. \"Oh, yes, sir. From the city of\u2014\"\n\n\"This mark here,\" he interrupted, \"says that when you entered our nation, you passed through Tohl Khosar.\"\n\n\"Um, yes? I mean, is that\u2014?\"\n\n\"Tohl Khosar,\" the soldier continued, somewhere between instruction and accusation, \"stands near the Kirresci border.\"\n\nThe woman calling herself Tamirra quailed. (Not too much, she reminded herself.) \"I\u2026 I\u2026 Of course, sir. If I'd come through Suunim, I'd have had to cross the Aerugos. And the idea of coming up river, through Lake Orist\u2026\" She shuddered, hoping it looked as dainty\u2014as weak\u2014as it felt.\n\nAnd you already know all that, you arrogant, sanctimonious cockerel. You just want to see Tamirra squirm.\n\n\"Hm. I suppose.\" Again he studied the documents, which she knew damn well he'd already fully read. She listened to the various creaks and mutters of the long line winding behind her, as well as the sounds of the city ahead, and tried not to tap her foot.\n\nHe can't possibly engage in this nonsense with every traveler, or even every foreigner, who comes through. I'd have been waiting a week!\n\n\"And why have you come to Tohl Delian?\"\n\nIt's written right in front of you! Is it just my blinding golden luck that you picked me for this sideshow?\n\n\"Oh, I'm looking for a new home, somewhere I can set up shop. I'm a potter. Big cities always need pottery, don't they? And it's ever so much safer here than in Quindacra!\"\n\nThat much, at least, was plausible. For all the downsides of life under the military cabal, petty crime was less common than in most other nations, particularly one struggling like Quindacra.\n\nLess common, but not remotely unheard of\u2014a fact the woman was counting on to complete her assignment.\n\nAssuming this jackass ever lets me through the gods damned door!\n\n\"I don't see a wagon of pottery,\" the guardsman challenged.\n\n\"Well,\" she said, smiling, all but batting her lashes, and squelching every urge she had to reach for his throat, \"I'm going to send for my stock if I find a place. I'd hardly want to lug it all the way here before I know if I'm staying, would I?\"\n\nThat, at last, seemed to satisfy him. He pawed through the contents of her satchel, but she knew he would find nothing of interest there: several changes of clothes, some hemming and sewing tools for repairing said clothes, some basic toiletries, a smattering of coins. A few more idle questions, then, a few more marks on her documents, a reminder that foreigners could find themselves in substantial hot water if they violated curfew, gathered in large groups, or entered restricted areas, and finally, finally he waved her through.\n\nAs she strode by, a quick sideways glance into the small gatehouse built beside the wall revealed another pair of soldiers. They sat at a circular table, throwing dice, which wasn't remotely abnormal; but as the results came up, she saw one of them raise a finger, counting off the people still waiting in line.\n\nThe hassle, the extra questioning, the irritation? Bored soldiers selecting random travelers to give a hard time. It really had been dumb luck they'd chosen her.\n\nThank you so much, Donaris. I'll have to remember to leave some stale crust or a handful of bird droppings on the altar next time I come across one of your shrines. Just one of the many, many reasons the Lady of Luck was not high on her list of most honored deities.\n\nShe was, at last, inside the walls of Tohl Delian.\n\nThe city was precisely what one might envision, based on its reputation and defenses. Squat buildings, mostly stone, stood at attention alongside broad avenues. The roofs were flat, providing countless archery platforms in case of invasion; the roads were wide, perfect for moving troops and engines, yet twisted and turned without apparent reason so anyone unfamiliar with the layout would swiftly become lost. Other than the wealthy, who bedecked themselves in deep reds and blues, the people dressed primarily in drab hues and furs, an effect that managed to be strangely formal and unremarkable both. Hair was either cut short or plaited; beards neatly trimmed. Even among the common folk, the fashion held an unmistakable martial edge.\n\nConversation, even laughter, was ever so slightly subdued as compared to most other populations Tamirra knew. Few in Ktho Delios desired to stand out from their neighbors.\n\nThe regular patrols of sentries sporting the black Deliant tabards, peacekeepers and law enforcers, were a constant reminder as to why. But then, it wasn't really the uniformed soldiers, the guards one could see coming, that frightened everyone.\n\nAdopting a similar expression and posture, one that screamed \"I'm minding my own business!\" she made her way along the avenue. Nothing about her stood out here, which was just as she preferred; lots of the citizens around her bore hair as black as her own, and while she was paler than most\u2014nearly enough to suggest pure-blood Elgarrad stock, if not for those inky locks\u2014Ktho Delios was, like most modern nations, a mixture of ethnicities. She'd chosen a foreign cover identity because it came with fewer complications in terms of forging and records, not because she couldn't pass if required.\n\nIf everything went well, according to plan and schedule, it wouldn't be required.\n\nAnd when was the last time that happened? she asked herself, then refused to offer herself the satisfaction of answering.\n\nFinding the place she searched for wasn't difficult. The hostelers and innkeeps knew how confusing their city could be, and competed fiercely for spots near the main gates. It took only a few moments of wandering and backtracking, as well as asking directions from an only moderately suspicious and reticent couple, for her to find it.\n\n\"Tiarmov's Inn.\" Creative and evocative, isn't it?\n\nShe picked her way through the common room, a cavernous wood-beamed chamber where men and women conversed, grumbled, occasionally guffawed, and kept to their own small groups, huddled over clear spirits so potent they made Tamirra's eyes water from ten paces. Nobody stared at her, but she felt any number of sharp, sidelong glances, and returned them in kind.\n\nThey wonder if I'm what I seem. I wonder how many of them are\u2026\n\nIt would be far too easy to succumb to paranoia, a way of life in Ktho Delios, where any stranger might be an eye\u2014or dagger\u2014of the Deliant. It shouldn't matter to her if any of them were; she had no intention of doing anything to draw their ire.\n\nNot where they could see, at any rate.\n\nSmiling, she approached the burly, bearded barkeep who may or may not have been the eponymous Tiarmov, and who showed little interest in returning her cheerful expression. He made a quick check of her papers, just enough to ensure he wasn't about to harbor an unlicensed outsider, after which she secured herself a room, a small cup of wine\u2014she wasn't about to risk the spirits\u2014and a bowl of some kind of mutton-and-tuber stew.\n\nThen she planted herself at a small table, refused to allow her expression to reveal what she actually thought of each bite of food, and waited.\n\nAnd waited.\n\nAfter which, there was more waiting.\n\nSomething's gone wrong. Even inside her own head, she couldn't muster the slightest twinge of surprise. Of course it has.\n\nThe barkeep cleared his throat and thumped a meaty fist on the counter. \"Sun's going down,\" he announced in a vaguely bored, put-upon tone. \"Don't forget that foreigners can't be out on the streets after dark without special dispensation.\" Then, grunting, he turned his attention back to his cups.\n\nWas he legally required, as a hosteler, to offer the reminder? Or was he just trying to save himself the inconvenience of a visit from the authorities, if they had to back-check one of his guests? Either way, Tamirra hadn't forgotten the curfew, but it chafed. If something was amiss with the plan, with her contact, she'd prefer to be about the business of learning what it was.\n\nBest not court trouble, though. Not yet. Grumbling internally, she finished off the drink she'd long been nursing and made her way to her room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The following day allowed her to acquire a better feel for the city's ins and outs\u2014or those of the nearby neighborhoods, at any rate\u2014but proved equally useless as the first when it came to advancing her mission.\n\nAfter a breakfast of sausage and some sort of cheese dumpling, which she greatly preferred to the prior evening's supper, and a couple more hours of waiting, Tamirra had decided to explore her surroundings. The morning streets were full of pedestrians, going about this business or that, and for a short time she could easily have been in any city, with only the fashions and accents separating it from one in Kirresc, Quindacra, or the other southern nations. People nodded to acquaintances, stopped to chat with friends, haggled with vendors, complained about the weather. She even received helpful if not always cheerful pointers when she asked, as her cover required, where she might best buy or rent a small property and set up shop.\n\nBut the illusion never lasted, shattered again and again by the arrival of yet another patrol. Normally in small squads but occasionally full-fledged processions, the soldiers of Ktho Delios marched along the thoroughfares, making their presence known. Warriors and watchmen, peacekeepers and government enforcers, each appearance reminded her anew that this was a martial nation, intolerant and wary.\n\nThose soldiers rarely had to do much beyond letting themselves be seen\u2014for they were also a reminder, to visitors and citizens alike, that the Deliant had many eyes and ears, and most were not so readily spotted as these.\n\nTrained to observe such distinctions, Tamirra noted that while most of the Deliant soldiers wore either leather laminar or chain hauberks beneath their tabards, a select few\u2014high-ranking officers, she imagined\u2014augmented their chain with breastplates and other reinforcement. Once she even spotted a knight, mounted atop a massive warhorse, clad in an entire suit of overlapping steel plates\u2014a recent invention by Ktho Delian armorers of which she'd heard but never before seen. It had to be hideously expensive to craft, thank the gods. She shuddered at the thought of the Deliant fielding any great number of soldiers so armored. It was hard enough to keep the damned nation contained within its borders already\u2026\n\nSo she watched, and wandered; studied storefronts as though genuinely hoping to acquire one, and spoke to any number of citizens, most of whom were probably no more or less than they appeared. All the while she worked at memorizing twists, turns, and street names. Always she kept within a few blocks of the inn, checking back often, but nobody ever approached her, nor did she ever find any potential contact awaiting her return.\n\nAs the sun lowered and the temperature fell, she chose to risk a little bit more. Still in the guise of the hopeful shopkeeper, she asked helpful passersby or vendors about local crime. She hoped to unearth some idea of where she might go searching for her ostensible allies, assuming they didn't surprise her by finally showing up, though of course she couched her questions in general terms, inquiring as to which areas were safest, what sort of hassles a local merchant might expect, and so forth.\n\nWhat she learned was that the openness and helpfulness of the Ktho Delians had sharply delineated boundaries, and she had just stepped over them. Smiles turned to frowns or suspicious glares. Men and women who'd been happy to chat only seconds earlier suddenly had business elsewhere, or had to see to other customers. A few actually tried to claim, in unconvincing mutters, that Tohl Delian had no crime to speak of.\n\nIt took until after the third such incident for Tamirra to understand. These people weren't afraid of the criminals, and they certainly weren't overly concerned what a foreign visitor thought of their city. No, it was that they couldn't be certain who she really was, or who else in the nearby throng might be listening. Doubtless the Deliant had strict laws regarding what sort of impression the people were allowed to give outsiders, what information they were and weren't permitted to offer. Just the sort of thing on which the nation's secret police might occasionally test its citizens.\n\nIf she was going to locate Tohl Delian's criminal underworld, she would have to go about it much more directly.\n\nIf I didn't already despise this country, she grumbled internally, it would be remarkably easy to learn to despise this country."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Now clad in a navy blouse and what appeared to be a black skirt, but was rather a pair of baggy trousers cut to resemble a skirt, the woman calling herself Tamirra prepared to face the many dangers of the Ktho Delian night.\n\nAssuming she could even make her way out of the damn hostel!\n\nHours after sunset, the common room of Tiarmov's remained half full. Between residents who weren't permitted on the streets at night, and late-shift workers (with proper documentation, of course) who had come to drink, the place housed far too many observers for her to simply stroll out the door without attracting attention.\n\nOut the window? Her room was on the second story, an easy enough descent, but also uncomfortably near the main avenue. The chances of being spotted climbing or jumping down, before she had the opportunity to vanish into the shadowed depths of the side street, were unacceptably high.\n\nWell, who says the window I use need be mine? It might make getting back in a tad problematic, but she'd pay that toll when she came to it. After two nights, she couldn't afford to sit around waiting any longer.\n\nShe made her way down the hall, soft boots tapping almost silently against the uncarpeted floor, until she'd reached the far end. Slowing her pace only marginally, she listened as best she could at each door she passed. Conversation here; snoring there. And then, so far as she could determine, nothing.\n\nWhich could mean an empty room, either because it was unlet or because its occupant currently inhabited the common area downstairs. Or it could simply mean a quiet sleeper, or someone reading or meditating or any other inaudible pastime.\n\nHer expertise lay in areas other than burglary, but Tamirra wasn't unfamiliar with the use of a lockpick. Straightening a pair of copper lengths that she'd worn as part of a larger bracelet, she reached down and began fiddling with the latch.\n\nShe had a bare instant to wonder if she'd caused that loud click or not when the door swung open and she found herself facing an older, doughy faced fellow. He froze in the midst of a yawn, his whole face widening in shock.\n\nTamirra looked up at him, gasped, and giggled. \"This isn't my room!\" Tightening her stomach, she forced a loud belch as punctuation, giggled again, and staggered down the hallway, listing like a sinking galleon.\n\nThe old merchant\u2014not that she had the slightest evidence he was any such thing, he just looked to her like a merchant\u2014grumbled something about drunkards, then slammed and audibly relocked his door.\n\nShall I count the ways in which that might have gone better?\n\nShe had to keep trying, unless some other plan came to mind, but the tipsy imbecile ploy would only work so many times. If she was caught a second time, she might wind up having to hurt someone\u2014not an idea that bothered her to excess, but she'd prefer it be somebody who deserved it.\n\nFortune finally turned in her favor. The next silent room she tried was indeed unoccupied. After longer fumbling at the latch than she would have liked, she slipped inside, locking the door again behind her. Then she was across the room, kneeling on the bed and peering out between closed but ill-fitting shutters.\n\nHere, back away from the larger byway, the street was poorly lit and currently unoccupied. Perfect.\n\nTamirra pulled open the window and shutters, slid out until she was seated on the sill with legs dangling, and carefully felt for footholds in the brickwork. The wall was smoother than optimal, but she was able to hang on well enough to pull the shutters to\u2014only careful study should reveal that they weren't latched\u2014and then she half slid, half dropped to the roadway.\n\nNow she just had to wander around and get herself found by the right sort of people, while avoiding being found by the wrong sort. Should she happen to be spotted and stopped by a patrol, she could probably play the drunk and stupid foreigner, and get off with a night in gaol and a fine\u2014or perhaps just an expensive bribe\u2014but she had no guarantee. If the wrong officer decided she was a threat, or simply took a dislike to her, she wouldn't be the first person to disappear into the secret dungeons of the Deliant for the most minor of infractions.\n\nFighting the instinct to hide, struggling hard to adopt a posture that said \"I have every right to be out and about at this hour,\" she made her way into the Tohl Delian night.\n\nIt was a balancing act, the lot of it. Avoid the main avenues, where the odds favored bumping into official patrols and were stacked against encountering the people she sought; but avoid, too, back streets so small or out of the way that her mere presence would raise suspicions. Other nighttime pedestrians either ignored her completely or watched her in sidelong suspicion until they had passed. None made any move to attract her attention.\n\nShe wondered, idly, how many of them were out and about legally, and how many were as anxious as she to avoid official notice.\n\nMore than once she heard the jingle of mail, carried on the chill breeze. Then she ducked into back alleys or the shadows around drab stone corners, hunched in the darkness until the Deliant soldiers were long past.\n\nThe blocks of squarish buildings, like rows of dull and graying teeth, looked very much the same wherever she went, and her unfamiliarity with Tohl Delian slowed her terribly, so that what should have taken only an hour or two dragged on. It was well after midnight when she finally found herself in what, to judge by the disrepair of the homes and the rougher cut to the garb of passersby, was one of the city's poorer districts.\n\nHere, the night streets were dim indeed. Few streetlights shone, for many had been scavenged of their feeble reservoirs of oil. Above, the autumn overcast hung thick and ponderous; of the four moons, only Kalitarra and Perradan shone at all, and neither was at full. Still, she'd been wandering long enough, and the shift had been sufficiently gradual, for her vision to adjust.\n\nTamirra allowed her shoulders to slump, her stride to take on a nervous hitch, and continued on her way, choosing streets and turns largely at random.\n\nFor another hour or more she walked, offering herself as bait, with no results. The people, fewer in number now, ignored or feared her as they had before. Again she nearly bumped into a Deliant patrol, and again she hid herself rather than risk being stopped.\n\nClearly the scum here are as paranoid as everyone else.\n\nShe decided to sweeten the lure. She approached other pedestrians, now, rather than ignoring them, asking for help in a quavering, tear-laced voice. She was lost. She couldn't find her way back to her hostel, near the main gate. Oh, wouldn't someone take pity and help her? She avoided anything resembling a Ktho Delian accent, just to drive home her status as poor, helpless stranger.\n\nMost recoiled, hurrying their steps, wanting nothing to do with her. A few mumbled half-hearted encouragement and vague directions while pointing back down this street or that.\n\nUntil, finally, she turned down a small alleyway and found herself confronted by a trio of rough, unshaven men.\n\n\"Couldn't help but overhear,\" one of them told her with a chuckle. \"We can help you out, flower. But it'll cost.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" She put a hand to her lips. \"I\u2026 I don't carry much coin, but I'd be happy to pay what I can if you'd\u2014\"\n\nThey were moving closer, now, gathering around. Two had produced daggers\u2014poorly maintained, she noted with professional disdain\u2014and the third a club that had probably once been the haft of a larger of weapon. Not the most impressive of arsenals, but in a city where citizens weren't permitted to go about openly armed, they were intimidating enough. Or would have been under normal circumstances.\n\nWith a normal victim.\n\nTheir breath, as they surrounded her, was a miasma of garlic and spirits so cheap and so strong they might knock the lice off a man's head. It was enough to persuade her not to waste any more time here than she had to.\n\nIn half a heartbeat, she had a small dirk\u2014sewing scissors, designed to be separated and reconnected to form a single blade\u2014out of her belt and deep in the flesh between thigh and pelvis on the nearest thug.\n\nShe pivoted on one foot as he collapsed, screaming. Her open hand whipped out to snag the end of the second man's cudgel a split second before her heel connected hard with his sternum. He flew back, breath whooshing from his lungs, to slam against the nearby wall, leaving his weapon behind in her grasp.\n\nThe last of the trio reacted more swiftly than Tamirra had anticipated, actually impressing her. He thrust with his dagger, fast and professional, as she came out of her spin. She twisted, sliding her foot back behind her, so the blow slid past. He stabbed out again. This time she parried with the edge of her empty hand, smacking into his wrist and knocking his blade out of line.\n\nIt left him open, and that was all she required. The club landed, hard\u2014a swing, a thrust, another swing. His upper left arm, a rib, his right leg all cracked; probably bruised, possibly fractured. He gawped, gone pale to the lips, and a final rap to the head put him down.\n\nTucking the club under one arm, Tamirra knelt to retrieve his fallen dagger. A few steps and she crouched again, this time beside the man she'd stabbed. With a cold, merciless yank, she retrieved her own dirk\u2014and promptly replaced it in the wound with the blade she'd just picked up. A final yelp and the robber passed out.\n\nHer remaining assailant had only just regained his breath and hauled himself up against the wall. He tried to glare defiantly as she approached, but she could have bathed in the waves of fear spilling from him and they both knew it.\n\n\"Koldan Ovrach,\" she said, all doubt and helplessness gone from her tone. \"And don't insult me by pretending you don't know who he is.\"\n\n\"What\u2026\" He cleared his throat, tried again without the shaking. \"What about him?\"\n\n\"Take me to him.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I know where he is?\" he asked, sullen.\n\n\"Self-preservation.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"You're only useful to me because I need to find him. And you want to live. Since living means taking me to him, you know where he is. It's a biological imperative.\"\n\nAfter more quantities of sweat that were quite impressive given the weather, he swallowed once and nodded. \"Follow me.\"\n\n\"You're a credit to your bloodline.\" Then, just as he took his first step, \"If you're carrying a blade or any other weapon, hand it over. And trust me, if you make me search you, I will find anything you've got hidden, and make you very uncomfortable and bloody in the process.\"\n\nHe gave her a petulant glare\u2014and a dagger.\n\n\"Now I'll follow you.\"\n\nThe route they took was not unlike that she'd used to get here, consisting of back roads and walkways, distant from the flow of nighttime traffic but not so obscure as to be innately worthy of suspicion. The man clearly knew not only where he was going, but all the tricks for arriving there unmolested. Not once did Tamirra so much as hear the distant jingle of mail or the drumming of marching boots.\n\nShe knew the brigand gave serious consideration to running. She'd have expected it even if it hadn't been obvious in the set of his shoulders, the stiffness in his steps.\n\n\"Third knot,\" she told him. Then, before he'd even completed the wh in What? she sent the dagger she'd taken from him winging hard down the block. It sank with a thud into the trunk of a small evergreen, quivering dead-center of a protruding knot.\n\nThe third up from the bottom, in fact.\n\n\"What was that about?\" he demanded in a hoarse whisper. \"Are you trying to bring a patrol down on us?!\" She refused to answer until their course took them past the tree, whereupon she yanked the blade free with a cringe-worthy squeak of steel on wood.\n\n\"The small of a running man's back is a moving target,\" she mused as though the thought had only just occurred, \"which makes it a harder shot. On the other hand, assuming a quick reaction time, it's also a closer target. Those probably cancel each other out, wouldn't you guess?\"\n\nHe didn't actually say he got the point, but he never did try to run.\n\nTheir winding trek finally ended at a large carpenter's workshop, very near the city's south wall. She recognized its purpose by the larger equipment\u2014pedal-driven lathes and saws, for instance\u2014as well as the stacks of lumber, all of which were stored under an overhang outside. It was, Tamirra had to admit, a clever headquarters for a gang of thieves and smugglers. Nobody would question large deliveries moving in and out, smaller goods could be hidden amidst the lumber and furniture, and any late night activity could be explained away as craftsmen and\u2014women catching up on their commissions.\n\nThe sight of their destination added a tiny bit of steel to her guide's spine. \"Koldan\u2026 He, um, he's not fond of unexpected visitors, you understand?\"\n\n\"Unless Koldan is even more of an idiot than I take him for, I'm not unexpected. Now go get us inside.\"\n\nWith a resigned sigh, he marched ahead and pounded a fist on the workshop door.\n\nNothing. He knocked again. And again.\n\nFinally an irritated voice called out from within. \"It's the middle of the damned night! Come back in the morning!\"\n\nAs low as he could while still be heard, the thug hissed back, \"I need to see Koldan!\"\n\nA narrow panel, hidden not in the door but among the bricks beside it, slid open. Tamirra couldn't see through it from her angle, but she figured about an equal chance of either a face or a crossbow lurking behind it.\n\n\"I remember seeing you around,\" the voice behind the wall said, \"which is the only reason you're still breathing at all. But I don't think you've got any business with Koldan.\"\n\nThat'll do.\n\nThe brigand yelped as he was shoved roughly aside. \"My name,\" she told the startled sentry, shedding the identity of Tamirra entirely, \"is Silbeth Rasik. And perhaps you can ask Koldan why he appears to be neglecting his business with me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "At some point in Tohl Delian's history, this spot had housed a public bath, or perhaps a steamroom, dug deep into the insulating earth. When it had closed, for whatever reasons and whims of business steered the course of such facilities, it had been locked away and largely forgotten, with the woodworking shop eventually constructed above.\n\nToday, hidden behind a concealed entrance, it functioned as the heart and brain of Koldan Ovrach's criminal empire-in-miniature.\n\nSilbeth leaned one hip against a support column and idly glanced over the balcony at the floor, and the sloping, tile-lined pits that were the former baths. Within one of those hollows, a cluster of men and women gathered around a table containing stacks of coins. Each disk of copper, brass, or silver\u2014or, far more rarely, gold\u2014passed from hand to hand. The first scraped a fine blade along the edge, stripping just a flake or two of valuable metal from the currency without any obvious alteration, slowly gathering those leavings into piles large enough to be melted down for actual use. The second and subsequent sets of hands counted and organized the coins by type, recording the totals in worn and ragged ledgers. In a second pit, older and more seasoned criminals debated the value of stolen goods, while the smugglers gathered in a third traced out Deliant patrol routes on rough maps and argued over how best to sneak shipments past the walls.\n\nOr at least, she thought that was what they argued over. She couldn't be certain, in part because they kept their voices low even in the heat of their disagreement\u2014as though afraid, even here, that the wrong ears might be listening\u2014and in part because their boss was currently shouting loudly enough for all of them.\n\nKoldan himself reminded Silbeth of nothing so much as a bear just emerged from hibernation\u2014and not only because he smelled, to her mind, more animal than man. He was shaggy, his russet hair and beard longer and fuller than current Ktho Delian fashion, and his shoulders broad, but his features beneath that beard were surprisingly harsh, and his skin hung loose as though he'd but recently shed a great deal of weight.\n\nIf he had, however, it had resulted in no obvious weakness, either to his movements or his voice. Currently he bellowed at a gathering of his enforcers, demanding to know how an outsider such as she had even found his headquarters, to learn the name of the \"traitor\" who had led her here. (Her guide had, wisely, disappeared the moment the door guard had gone to deliver her name to Koldan, and she'd decided to let him go.)\n\nSeveral other fierce-looking thugs watched over her, ensuring she did nothing and went nowhere without their leader's permission. She, however, after a few more moments of idle musing, decided she'd had enough with waiting.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she suggested loudly, \"you could leave off your tantrum until after we've concluded our business? I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to eat your subordinates after I'm gone.\"\n\nKoldan went dead silent in mid-word, turning to stare with a twisted expression somewhere between fearsome and sickly. Then, growling, \"You ought to learn yourself some patience, woman.\"\n\n\"I think I've shown quite an excess of patience, seeing as how you were supposed to contact me two days ago.\"\n\nAgain he growled, waving an arm at the people around him. The sound contained no actual words that Silbeth could make out, but clearly the others took some meaning from it. In a matter of moments they'd produced a pair of chairs\u2014horribly mismatched but looking quite comfortable\u2014and a small table to go along with them. The furniture laid out, the smuggler settled in one seat, gesturing for Silbeth to take the other.\n\nBy the time she sat, a pair of mugs had also appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. She took a polite gulp of the harsh spirits, managing neither to choke nor allow her eyes to water until they bobbed like tiny rafts, but otherwise ignored the drink.\n\n\"We had no way of knowing exactly when you were coming,\" Koldan said then, his tone flat. He was informing her of a fact, not making any sort of apology. \"It was eating into my other operations, having to send someone across town to check Tiarmov's every day. If you'd waited, one of my guys would have found you there in a few more days. A week, at most.\"\n\n\"Absolutely not acceptable. This isn't a sightseeing sojourn I'm on. You were to make contact the day I arrived!\"\n\n\"Tough. You're not my only project, Rasik, and I'll run my business as I see fit. Besides, it's done and you're here. Get past it.\"\n\nInwardly she seethed, and she hated to back down, to begin their dealings with even the slightest show of weakness, but he was correct at least in this: It was done. Nothing could be gained by pressing the issue.\n\n\"Fine. I'm past it. Let's talk specifics.\"\n\n\"I'm all ears.\" He smiled, almost a leer. She restrained herself from punching him until teeth were a distant memory.\n\n\"You should already have been informed that we're hiring you for your smuggling network, yes?\"\n\nThe starving bear nodded. \"You won't find better.\"\n\nNot for what we could afford to pay, anyway. \"You understand that this isn't just a matter of misdirecting a few gate guards? While I hope otherwise, it's entirely possible that the military proper or the Ninth Citadel will be hunting us.\"\n\nSeveral of Koldan's people blanched. Even here, secure in their headquarters, overt mention of the Citadel, the Deliant secret police, was enough to trigger their paranoia.\n\nKoldan himself, however, merely nodded a second time. \"So I've been told. And am charging accordingly.\"\n\nI'll bet. Silbeth gave a silent prayer of thanks that arranging that payment wasn't part of her own assignment. She could never have secreted that sort of coin into the city on her own.\n\n\"All you've got to do,\" he continued, \"is tell me where, when, and what.\"\n\n\"Where is easy. If things go well, we'll just meet at Tiarmov's. If not, then here.\"\n\nThe tic in his jaw suggested he was less than thrilled with that latter option, but for the moment, he made no argument.\n\n\"When is trickier. Sometime in the next few days, but exactly when depends on how the rest of my efforts go. You may have to be patient and ready to go on a moment's notice.\" She sneered lightly. \"More so than you were when it came to meeting up with me.\n\n\"As to what\u2026\" If this lummox is going to cause me any problems, it's going to be now. \"It's not a 'what' at all. It's a 'who.'\"\n\nThe surge of greed practically set the skin of his face to rippling. \"Well, now, that complicates matters. It's a lot harder to smuggle out a person. Can't just stuff them in the nooks and crannies of a crate or what have you. We're going to have to renegotiate my fee just a\u2014\"\n\nHow utterly predictable. \"We'll do nothing of the kind. I know what sorts of missives my employers exchanged with you when they hired you for this, Koldan. You knew this was a possibility when you agreed to their offer.\"\n\n\"A possibility. Not a certainty. Things change.\"\n\n\"Not this thing.\"\n\nThe gang lord made no overt move, but Silbeth would have to be blind not to notice the half dozen brigands closing from all directions on her side of the table. \"I wouldn't think,\" her host taunted from behind his beard, \"that it's in your best interests to be a stickler about this, Rasik.\"\n\nHer reply was calm, soft, and utterly without fear. \"And I wouldn't think that this is the sort of approach you want to take, or the impression you want to make, with the Priory of Steel.\"\n\nThe thieves and smugglers moving in behind her suddenly seemed deeply invested in their impersonations of statues and snowmen. Koldan scoffed, but it sounded forced. \"You? Priory of Steel?\"\n\nSilbeth said nothing.\n\n\"Anyone could claim to be a member of the Priory!\" he protested.\n\n\"Anyone could,\" she agreed.\n\n\"So I'm, what, supposed to believe that you are, just because you say so?\"\n\nHer answering smile was friendly, not remotely threatening, though she tensed beneath the table, ready to jump at anyone's and everyone's next move. \"Yes.\"\n\nA strained silence, as the smuggler pondered his options. Then he dismissed the others with a wave and leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"Fine. If I'd known whatever was going on was so important to somebody that they'd hire the Priory of Steel to carry it out, I'd have charged more from the start. But I won't renege on a deal that involves you people. I'd rather be your friend.\"\n\nHardly likely. But be glad you haven't just made yourself our enemy. \"As would I,\" she lied blandly.\n\n\"This guy you're smuggling out of here,\" he said\u2014in part, she was sure, to avoid letting her have the last word on the subject, though he did sound genuinely concerned\u2014\"he's not a witch or a conjurer of any kind, is he? Because dealing with state security or even the Ninth Citadel is one thing, but Priory of Steel or no, I am not putting myself in a position to pull the Inquisition down on my head. Sure as hell not for anything near to what your employer's paying me.\"\n\nSilbeth felt certain that the reputation of the infamous Ktho Delian witch-hunting\u2014and witch-employing\u2014Inquisition was exaggerated, as much propaganda as reality. Still, she couldn't blame the man. \"If he is,\" she said, choosing at this juncture not to correct Koldan's flawed assumption that the \"package\" was male, \"it would be as much news to me as to you.\"\n\nThat, for the moment, seemed to satisfy him. \"All right. Let's get down to details, then.\"\n\nAnd it's about gods damned time! But at least she needn't worry about sneaking back into her room; at this rate, it would be well after dawn before she was back out on the street.\n\nScooting her chair closer, she began to lay out what she expected to need."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The housekeeper was a slight, blonde woman nearly as pale as Silbeth herself, clad in a woolen gray dress that buttoned all the way up to her chin. \"I'm terribly sorry,\" she said, though her tone suggested she was anything but. \"The Lady Povyar isn't available at this time. Perhaps you'd be so good as to try back another day.\"\n\nSilbeth found herself reduced, if only briefly, to standing in the doorway and blinking. \"I'm\u2026 Perhaps you misunderstood,\" she said finally, swallowing hard to melt the ice forming in the back of her throat. \"My message is of the utmost importance, and Lady Povyar is expecting me.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it is. Nevertheless, my mistress is unavailable.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Gods, what else has gone wrong? \"Have you any idea of when she might be able to see me?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\"\n\n\"Well, might I come in and wait?\"\n\n\"I expect it could be some days. You'll just have to come back. Now,\" the servant concluded, \"if that's all\u2026?\" Her tone, her posture, everything about her made it absolutely clear that the only acceptable answer was yes.\n\nYet\u2026 Worry, too, swirled within her. She did an excellent job of hiding it, burying it beneath the superior impatience that only the best and highest ranking of servants mastered, but it was present all the same.\n\nSilbeth glanced swiftly around her. Located near the center of Tohl Delian, where many of the wealthy and aristocratic dwelled, the Povyar manor was nearly as large as Tiarmov's inn. A sizable lawn spread out before it, and the roofs of its several floors were tiered like a squashed wedding cake, but the home itself was made up primarily of the same drab stone as the city's other structures. A faint gilded trim around the windows and doorways were its only concession to aesthetic luxury\u2014a trait shared, Silbeth had noted on her walk here, by most of the other larger houses and estates. It was as if people feared that the colors and decorations of affluence, but not the size of the homes, their property, or their staff, might draw the suspicions of the military authorities.\n\nFortunately for the current visitor, the Povyar staff was smaller than many\u2014understandable, given Ulia Povyar's surreptitious activities\u2014while the lawn, though not huge, was broad enough that none of the passersby on the street should immediately notice anything amiss in the doorway.\n\nSilbeth began to turn away, then spun back toward the housekeeper before the shorter woman could shut the door. She closed the distance between them in a single pace, wrapping her left hand around the back of the servant's neck. The dagger, clutched in her other fist, pressed tight to the woman's wool-clad breast.\n\n\"Step back inside. I don't take you for an idiot, so I assume I need not spell out what happens if you scream?\"\n\nEyes wide and glistening with sudden unshed tears, the housekeeper nodded and retreated. Silbeth followed, kicking the door shut with one heel. She caught a glimpse of lush carpet, hanging chandeliers, a broad sweeping staircase in a large room at the end of the hall to her left, but kept focused on the woman before her.\n\n\"You may not believe this,\" Silbeth continued, \"and I've neither the time nor any particular interest in convincing you, but I'm on your mistress's side. I'm here to help her. The problem is, I don't know that you're on her side. She should be here. She should have known someone was coming. Something's very wrong, and you're standing in the way of my finding out what.\"\n\nThe dagger twitched by way of emphasis. The housekeeper sobbed once, and Silbeth couldn't help but sigh.\n\n\"Look, I don't want to hurt you, all right? Just tell me where Povyar is. For her sake.\"\n\n\"I can't!\" If it had been any louder, it would have been a wail; as it was, it came out more as a whine.\n\nAgain the dagger twitched. \"I said I don't want to hurt you. I didn't say I won't.\"\n\n\"She's been arrested,\" the housekeeper whispered, slumping. \"Oh, please don't tell anybody! If this got out to Lady Povyar's circles, she'd be ruined! Please\u2026\"\n\nThe frost that had been clinging to the back of Silbeth's throat spread instantly through her veins, wrapping itself about her heart. Arrested? Gods, had all this been for nothing? Was she too late?\n\nShe left the housekeeper in the coat closet, bound with her own sleeves. The other servants would find her soon enough, but a few minutes was all she'd need to be long gone, on the off chance the woman actually chose to summon the authorities.\n\nMaybe slightly more than a few minutes. She was dazed when she reached the street, her feet turning to carry her back toward the inn of their own accord, her mind racing and yet slipping, sliding, falling over itself on that inner layer of ice.\n\nLeaving aside the political repercussions if and when the Deliant learned the full extent of Povyar's espionage, Silbeth's own mission was almost certainly a failure. So far as she was aware, nobody had ever broken out of\u2014or into\u2014a Ktho Delian military prison. Even assuming it could be done at all, it would require a massive team of experts, the best of the best, and months of preparation. There was absolutely nothing she could do on her own, no way she could\u2014\n\n\"Good afternoon, m'lady. Lovely afternoon for a stroll, isn't it? Get the blood pumping, ward off the chill?\"\n\nSilbeth halted and turned, pasting \"Tamirra\" back over her features. \"Why, yes. Yes, it is.\"\n\nThe pair behind her were a veritable portrait of the perfect Ktho Delian couple. He was clad in shades of gray and whites, formal without ostentation, his hair and beard neatly trimmed. Her dress was a bit more colorful, accented in crimson and gold, her own hair wound in ornate braids. She wore a cloak against the autumn breeze, while he sported a long overcoat, a relatively new product of Ktho Delian fashion.\n\nBoth of which, Silbeth observed, were more than capable of hiding an array of blades or other weapons that ordinary citizens of Ktho Delios wouldn't be permitted to carry. But then, she'd known from the instant they spoke to her that, appearances notwithstanding, this couple was by no means ordinary.\n\nThey must have had the Povyar household under surveillance. And I missed it. I have seashells and grape seeds in my damn skull.\n\nThe pair said nothing, just continued to smile. \"Is\u2026 Is there something I can do for you?\" she inquired with deliberate unease.\n\n\"Documents, please,\" the woman said.\n\n\"Oh! Oh, um, of course, just\u2026\" She fumbled at her satchel, eventually producing Tamirra's paperwork. \"I think you'll find, that is, I'm sure it's all in order.\"\n\nThey barely glanced at the forms before the woman passed them on to the man, who stuck them in a coat pocket rather than returning them. Well, that's not a good sign.\n\n\"Is there a problem?\" she squeaked. Internally, she was counting paces, first to that corner there, then past that second house down there\u2026\n\n\"What is your business with Ulia Povyar?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I'm sorry, who are you, exactly? Why is my business your business?\"\n\nThe couple offered her perfectly matching sinister smiles as they produced a pair of icons: tiny towers, smelted of copper.\n\nNinth Citadel. Not a surprise\u2014she'd already figured as much\u2014but still disturbing.\n\n\"Oh,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Povyar,\" the man prompted.\n\n\"I'm\u2026 looking for clients, for my pottery. I've heard Lady Povyar is kind and generous, someone it would be good to work for if\u2014\"\n\nThe woman scoffed. Her partner just shook his head, scowling.\n\n\"My dear,\" he said, \"we're being as friendly about this as we can, but if you're going to lie to us, we'd be happy to take you somewhere we can have a more\u2026 private conversation.\"\n\n\"Oh, no. Oh, please don't do that!\"\n\n\"The truth, then, and all of it. Your business with Lady Povyar. What you know about her. What she's involved in. Where we can find her. Everything!\"\n\nFind her? Silbeth's entire view shifted so sharply she almost stumbled. Why would they have to\u2026?\n\nOf course! Had the Deliant learned the woman was a spy, she'd have been tossed immediately in the deepest, blackest, dungeon they had, subject to all manner of dreadful interrogations. From the word \"arrest,\" Silbeth had just assumed\u2026 But what if that wasn't what had happened at all? The Ktho Delian military might serve to enforce all the nation's laws, great and small, but they would not\u2014could not\u2014punish tiny infractions the same as major crimes. Local watchmen tossed petty troublemakers in local gaols, simple cells as different from Deliant prisons as a child's sling from a wall-shattering trebuchet. And in a bureaucracy as massive as this one, it was entirely possible, even probable, that the records of such minor violations\u2014and their perpetrators\u2014took ages to reach the higher authorities, if they ever did.\n\nAnd that changed everything.\n\nSilbeth ran.\n\nThey pursued, as she'd known they would. Their shouted commands to halt were almost perfunctory, though growing every angrier with each pounding step. She was a foolish, panicked foreigner in their minds, this chase an irritation. She was making their day more annoying, but hardly any more difficult, let alone dangerous.\n\nJust what she needed them to think.\n\nPedestrians stared as she passed, their attention drawn either by her mad dash or by the shouts of her pursuers, though none moved to interfere. Nobody wanted anything to do with a stranger's troubles, particularly where the Citadel was concerned. Had she any choice in the matter, Silbeth would have happily skipped it, too.\n\nStill she ran, her breath steady and even, searching, praying for a spot clear of those damned onlookers, just the briefest veil of privacy\u2026\n\nThere! The manor at the end of the block boasted a fenced-in stretch of yard, probably a garden. That surrounding fence wasn't especially tall, more decorative than functional\u2014unless meant to keep out stray animals\u2014but it would hide what had to happen from public view.\n\nSilbeth hit shoulder first rather than pausing to work the latch. Wood split and the gate flew open before her, rebounding hard and making the entire length of fencing shudder. She ducked to one side rather than continuing on as any truly panicked fugitive would have done, hands raised and ready\u2026\n\nPerhaps, under other circumstances, these agents of the secret police would have been more cautious, would have paused to clear the entryway before charging through it. She had their blood up, though, and their thoughts fixated on the notion of a terrified but harmless stranger who'd simply gotten into something over her head.\n\nBy the time either could have realized there was no sign of their fleeing target ahead of them, their steps had already carried them through the gate, and past the mercenary lurking in ambush.\n\nSilbeth grabbed the nearest handhold, the hem of the woman's cloak, and yanked. The Ninth Citadel agent crashed to the soil with a gurgling gasp, landing hard on her back. Silbeth stomped down and felt something give. She wasn't certain what and didn't have time to look, for the woman's partner had already spun to face the surprise attack, whipping a wicked single-edged blade\u2014built like a knife but the length of a short sword\u2014from beneath his coat.\n\nJust as swiftly she produced her own weapon, but the tiny dagger felt awfully lacking in comparison. Retreating a step, she took an extra second to unfasten her own thin cloak and set it slowly spinning in her left fist.\n\nThey circled, watching one another, late-season tubers crunching beneath their boots along the garden's edge. He stepped in, lunged in a quick feint, retreated. Testing, she knew, trying to determine how badly they'd underestimated the threat she posed\u2014as well, perhaps, as buying time for his partner to recover.\n\nDrawing this whole mess out, precisely what Silbeth couldn't permit.\n\nShe flipped the dagger around her thumb so she held it by the blade, cocked her hand back to her shoulder, and flicked the end of her cloak at her opponent's face even as she made to throw.\n\nIt was a desperate move, a foolish one, to release her only weapon against an armed foe. All he had to do was flinch aside or parry and she would be that much more at his mercy. The hem of the cloak blinded and bewildered him for only a split second, but not nearly enough to keep him from stepping from the dagger's path.\n\nExcept it had also hidden from him the fact that she'd never released the blade. The throw was another feint; she had, instead, reversed her grip once more, stepping in as he dodged a missile that had never flown.\n\nClosing with one long pace, she smacked the dagger hard against the man's heavier blade, the speed and surprise of the strike more than sufficient to knock the sword, and the arm holding it, out of line. Another vicious slash, another quick step, and she was past him, leaving him to fall to his knees, blade tumbling to the earth as he clutched at his newly opened throat.\n\nThe woman staggered back to her feet, an impressive effort given how her right arm hung limp from an obviously broken and malformed collarbone. Despite her pallor and harsh panting, she'd reached back with her left hand to draw her own short sword, and glared at Silbeth with murderous fury.\n\nSilbeth threw her dagger\u2014actually letting fly this time\u2014straight at that dangling right arm.\n\nThe operative twisted aside, barely avoiding the weapon, hissing with a new flare of pain, and that was more than enough time for Silbeth to scoop up the dying man's fallen blade. Now armed with a weapon capable of matching her opponent's, she advanced.\n\nThe Ninth Citadel trained their people well, but Silbeth was Priory of Steel. The contest would have been uneven even if the woman had been at her best. Injured and in hideous pain as she was, it ended in seconds.\n\nIt took Silbeth only a moment to scavenge the bodies, availing herself of a belt and sheath in which to carry her newly acquired short sword. She retrieved her dagger, and took both copper badges. She lifted the identification papers that went with them, though\u2014as she didn't resemble either of the agents overmuch\u2014they'd be useless if anyone of authority demanded to see them. She also reclaimed her own documents, of course.\n\nAfter a moment's thought she took all other coin, jewelry or other valuables on them, in the hopes\u2014slim as they were\u2014that this might appear a robbery rather than a targeted assault. Finally, she stripped the man of his coat and slung it over her shoulders to hide the sword; it was a bit large for her, but not awkwardly so, and unlike the woman's cloak, dark enough to hide the stain of blood.\n\nAnother few moments, and she'd dragged both bodies behind a small shed that, she assumed, held the gardener's tools. It wasn't much of a hiding place, and she couldn't begin to conceal the upturned dirt and trampled vegetables, but if the owner didn't happen to examine the garden in any detail, it might buy her an extra few hours\u2014maybe even a day or two, if Donaris truly smiled at her.\n\nRight, because she's been so generous this far, Silbeth grumbled internally.\n\nWell, whatever time she had was what she had. She crept through the garden gate and marched grimly down the avenue, praying she could locate Ulia Povyar before someone else unearthed her own crime and this entire gods-damned city went straight to hell."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "It proved a simple matter for Silbeth to learn where the local gaol could be found, and how to get there. The badge of the Ninth Citadel, and an imperious attitude to match, inspired a repulsive eagerness in anyone and everyone to cooperate. In her years with the Priory of Steel, never had she seen a more odious amalgamation of fawning, fearfulness, and barely concealed loathing.\n\nShe'd known the gaol itself wouldn't be much to look at, that it was little more than a holding cell for petty criminals the system could scarcely bother with, and a duty station for the sorts of soldiers assigned to watch over said petty criminals. Still she could only stare at it for a time, struggling to convince herself she'd come to the right place.\n\nProper Deliant installations, prisons included, were fortresses, towers and keeps and deep dungeons hunkered behind defensive ramparts. This? This was a brick of a building at an intersection amidst a number of warehouses and workshops, differentiated from its neighbors only by the bars on its windows and the tabard-clad soldiers at its doors.\n\nEven if Silbeth could pull this off, she had no guarantee that Ulia Povyar was actually here. This was only one of a half dozen similar facilities across the city. It was, however, the nearest to the Povyar estate, and thus the best place to begin.\n\nShe steeled herself, forced her mind to stop counting the many disastrous ways the next few moments could go wrong, and stalked across the road.\n\nOne of the bored door sentries moved to bar her path. \"Your business here?\" he all but yawned at her.\n\nSilbeth turned her best glower on him, an expression hammered into her through endless drills and practice bouts by the weaponmaster-monks of the Priory. Only then, when her sneer alone had brought him up short and snagged his full attention, did she present the copper icon.\n\n\"Your commanding officer,\" she snapped. \"Now!\"\n\nHe saluted and darted into the building. After a quick check to make sure the other sentries had all seen her badge and were properly cowed, she followed.\n\nPassing through squared and narrow halls of stone, letting other soldiers\u2014and sometimes their prisoners\u2014step aside for her and her guide, Silbeth kept the mask of arrogance plastered to her face. She wanted no one to suspect just how nervous she truly was. The guards at the door were one thing, soldiers of low promise assigned an unimportant post. Could she assume the same of the man or woman in charge? Might someone demand identification beyond the badge, documentation that would instantly give her deception away?\n\nAnd where did the Ninth Citadel stand in relation to officers of rank? That the common folk and the average soldier acknowledged her authority was no guarantee she had any genuine weight to throw around in this sort of place. What if\u2014?\n\nThe broad-shouldered, slightly portly old officer\u2014definitely not one of the Deliant's finest\u2014rose from behind her desk as Silbeth and her guide burst into the office. Rather than waiting for an introduction, the fake agent again produced the icon of the Ninth Citadel, and while the commandant's nod of acknowledgement was composed enough, Silbeth missed neither the initial widening nor the subsequent tensing around the woman's eyes.\n\nStill, best to test her authority rather than assume. \"You,\" Silbeth said to the man who'd led her here. \"Leave.\"\n\nHe glanced at his commandant, true, but obeyed without waiting for her to confirm the order. Although a brief frown indicated her displeasure, the officer made no objection to Silbeth barking orders.\n\nExcellent.\n\n\"Welcome,\" the officer began. \"Is there something I can\u2014?\"\n\n\"Ledger.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, what?\"\n\nSilbeth exhaled the most irritated, and irritating, sigh she could manage. \"Your ledger. You do actually record the names of the people you lock up here?\"\n\n\"Of course! It's standard procedure to\u2014\"\n\n\"Then figure out your procedure for handing me the damn ledger!\"\n\nBiting back a snarl, the other woman rang a small bell and yelled at the first functionary to respond. A few more moments of fuming and glaring later, a young soldier delivered to them a heavy leatherbound tome.\n\nSilbeth opened up and began flipping to the last several days'-worth of entries. The pages smelled of cheap ink and oily fingers.\n\n\"If you could tell me what it is you're looking for\u2014\" the officer tried again.\n\n\"Quiet.\"\n\nThe woman's teeth snapped shut sounding like the clash of a headsman's axe.\n\nThere! It was right there. She was here! Thank the gods for that much, at least.\n\n\"All right.\" Silbeth finally looked up. \"I need every prisoner recorded on the lower half of this page\u2026\" She stabbed the paper with one gloved finger. \"\u2026to be released.\"\n\n\"What?! Are you insane? I can't just\u2014\"\n\n\"Immediately, Commandant!\"\n\nA fist crashed down on the desk, making a number of quills and a few stacks of forms, but not the massive ledger, jump. \"I can't just let a dozen or so prisoners go at your word, dammit! I need to know what's going on!\"\n\nWas the woman just being stubborn? Prideful? Was this actually the limit of Silbeth's stolen influence?\n\nA moment of study, then she turned and carefully closed the door to the office. \"You understand that what I'm about to tell you is a state secret, Commandant?\"\n\nThe officer puffed up like a mating peahen. \"Of course.\"\n\nSilbeth had to struggle not to laugh in her face. \"One of your prisoners is Ninth Citadel. On a secret assignment. This arrest and incarceration is interfering.\"\n\n\"Oh. I\u2026 But\u2026 Why didn't he\u2026 or is it 'she'?\"\n\nThe only answer Silbeth offered was to cross her arms.\n\n\"Well, why didn't she identify herself when she was arrested?\" the woman asked, apparently choosing a gender at random.\n\n\"Do I need to explain 'secret assignment' to you?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" The officer flushed, angry and embarrassed. \"So why do you want the others released?\"\n\n\"Because nobody\u2014including you\u2014can know who our operative is.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Commandant, these people are here for, what? Being raucous drunks? Brawling? Curfew violations? Petty theft? Please, by all means, tell me how punishing such hardened criminals and threats to society is more important than an ongoing Citadel operation against a genuine seditionist. I'm listening.\"\n\nAnother moment of pride, flaring almost brightly enough to blind, but the officer finally acquiesced. \"I'll have them out before the afternoon shift is over.\"\n\n\"See that you do, Commandant.\" Silbeth was already at the door, flinging it open and determined to be gone before anything could go wrong, any suspicions could rise. \"We appreciate your cooperation.\"\n\nEven from the hall, over the conversation of other nearby soldiers, she could hear the other woman's disdainful snort."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Again she lurked across the avenue, loitering in the doorway of what, to judge by the scent and the coating of powder, was some sort of granary. After long and anxious minutes, a slow stream of un-uniformed men and women emerged from the gaol. She had a general description of the woman, so hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to spot\u2014\n\nUlia Povyar stepped from the squat stone building and Silbeth's heart lodged in her throat.\n\nThe aristocrat and spy was the sort of beautiful more common to fairy tales than the real world. Skin of almost golden hue was accented by deep blue eyes and hair of a dark red normally seen only alongside far paler complexion. Her dress of emerald and gold, worn and wrinkled as it was by her days of incarceration, was a perfect complement, so that the overall effect was more sylvan or fey than merely mortal.\n\nSilbeth felt her cheeks flushing, her pulse pounding, and actually slammed her hand into the edge of the nearby doorway, focusing intently on the pain.\n\nKnock it off, you idiot! Remember how badly everything went wrong in Mahdresh when you got involved with Ruval in the middle of that job, how badly that mistake cost you, cost him\u2026\n\nSwearing at herself, the mercenary moved into the street, following a dozen paces behind Ulia until she was sure they were far enough from the gaol that none of the soldiers would spot them speaking.\n\n\"Ulia Povyar?\" she asked, a formality more than anything else, as she fell into step alongside.\n\nThe other woman turned, and Silbeth ferociously ordered herself not to stare at her eyes. Her distraction wasn't so bad, though, that she missed the tightening in Ulia's lips, the tension radiating from her shoulders. \"Yes, I am. And you?\"\n\nHer tone sounded almost\u2026 Resigned?\n\n\"The salmon are coming to Lake Orist awfully late this year,\" Silbeth observed.\n\nUlia stumbled at the code phrase, would have fallen if Silbeth hadn't caught her arm and steadied her. When she recovered and resumed her pace, those eyes glistened with unshed tears and her voice shook like the last fading reverberations of a church bell.\n\n\"Oh, God. Oh, thank\u2026 I thought you were one of them. I thought something must have happened, it'd been so long since I was told someone was coming\u2026\"\n\nSilbeth squeezed reassuringly. \"No, it just took a while for Kirresc to get everything in order. They started as soon as they got word that your cover was in danger, but\u2026\"\n\nThe aristocrat seemed more than a touch confused by the choice of words. \"I'm not Kirresci myself,\" Silbeth clarified. \"His Majesty couldn't send one of his own. Too politically dangerous if he were caught, yeah? So\u2014\"\n\nUlia looked almost ready to run. \"You knew the pass phrase, but I can't believe they would trust\u2014\"\n\n\"A mercenary?\"\n\n\"Well, yes.\"\n\n\"Priory of Steel.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Then, \"I can see how that might have taken some time to arrange, yes. Um, how did you get me out of there, if I may ask?\"\n\n\"You thought I was one of them?\"\n\n\"As I said\u2026\"\n\nSilbeth flashed the copper badge. \"So did they.\"\n\nUlia swallowed hard and said nothing for perhaps half a block. Finally, she said, \"You were almost too late. Getting to Tohl Delian at all, I mean.\"\n\n\"I can see that. You were right that you needed to get out of here. They were watching your house. If you hadn't been in gaol for whatever little\u2026\" Silbeth trailed off, her jaw dropping. \"You got yourself arrested on purpose!\"\n\nUlia smiled broadly. \"I got 'drunk' and slapped an off-duty soldier. I figured they'd keep me for a few days. I'd have time to think, out of the way, and be out before word of my arrest reached anyone important. Maybe if I got truly fortunate, once it did, whoever suspected me would assume that no spy would be that careless and look elsewhere.\"\n\nSilbeth smirked, though her heart abruptly wasn't in it. The patterns of foot traffic around them were changing; nothing dramatic, nothing overt, but enough to raise her hackles. \"Maybe you're a lot luckier than I,\" she said, trying to study the avenue around her in every direction without a single obvious motion, \"but in my experience, Donaris rarely grants anyone that much good fortune.\"\n\n\"Oh, I\u2026 don't believe the Empyrean Choir. I'm Deiumulin.\"\n\n\"Huh. I've never understood that. Only one god? Doesn't seem feasible to me. I mean, what if\u2014?\"\n\n\"Are you\u2026 Do you really want to have a theological discussion now?\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to keep up the conversation,\" Silbeth admitted, \"so we look nice and casual. Don't be conspicuous about it, but look around.\"\n\nBy now, she was certain, it must be obvious to even the untrained observer. (And she had no idea how much training Ulia, as a spy for Kirresc, actually had.) The street was more crowded than it should be, and many of the pedestrians were grim, nervous, in a shuffling hurry. Much of the throng was desperate to get somewhere\u2014or away from something\u2014and all were moving back in the direction Ulia and Silbeth had come.\n\n\"No panic,\" the aristocrat noted. \"It's not a fire or any sort of disaster. Just something they'd rather avoid.\"\n\nThe women looked at one another. \"Soldiers,\" Silbeth said.\n\n\"A lot of them.\" Ulia absently chewed on a loose lock of hair. \"A simple patrol wouldn't be driving people to flee in these numbers. Do you think it's me? Did someone learn about\u2014\"\n\n\"No. You just got out. Word couldn't have reached them fast enough to have mobilized a large force. And why? Better to send out smaller parties to blend, figure out where you'd gone. No, this is something\u2026 Shit. Someone must have found the bodies. I thought I'd have more time.\"\n\n\"Bodies? What bod\u2026\" Ulia's face seemed almost to tarnish as the blood drained from it. \"That badge isn't a forgery, is it?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Afraid not.\" Then, at the woman's abject horror, \"I didn't have a choice! They were about to take me in!\"\n\n\"What do we do?\"\n\n\"I have a way out of here, but it's going to be hard to reach at the moment. We need to get off the street, somewhere they won't find us. Let the first wave of soldiers move past, try to sneak through before the whole city's locked down in their wake. You know anywhere we can go?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I do, but\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't have a lot of time for 'but' just now, Ulia.\"\n\n\"We'll be putting other people in danger,\" she fretted.\n\n\"And how many people are in danger if you don't get whatever intelligence you've learned to Kirresc? To say nothing of what's going to happen to us if they catch us.\"\n\nUlia nodded, unhappy but steady, and made a beeline for the nearest side street."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "\"You're certain these people can be trusted?\" Sibeth turned from the window, and the shutters through which she studied the busy street below.\n\nAcross the room\u2014a private study, judging by the furnishings and the bookshelves\u2014sat a small table with a pair of chairs. Over the back of one draped the long coat and swordbelt she'd acquired from the dead Ninth Citadel operative. In the other sat Ulia, idly swirling a glass of wine in one hand and picking at a plate of cheese and fruits with the other. The owners of the large house had invited the pair of women to join them at the dinner table, and Silbeth knew Ulia had been inclined to accept, but she'd insisted on privacy. Some time to rest, and to think.\n\nAnd possibly to get away from the household's two children, whose presence made her gut twist with guilt over potentially putting them in harm's way, despite her earlier protestations to Ulia.\n\n\"Lady Salko is a friend,\" Ulia said after swallowing a mouthful of cheese. \"Yes, I trust her. Besides, she and her husband are\u2026 sympathizers.\"\n\n\"Symp\u2026 They know you're a Kirresci spy?!\"\n\n\"No! No, nothing like that.\" She paused, sipping from her crystal goblet. \"A great many Ktho Delians,\" she explained, \"dislike living under the Deliant regime.\"\n\n\"I would expect so!\"\n\n\"A few are brave enough\u2014or perhaps foolish enough\u2014to engage in open sedition.\"\n\nSilbeth grunted, wandered over to the table for a drink of her own. \"I'd heard rumors, but nothing more.\"\n\n\"I'd be surprised if you had. The government spends a lot of effort suppressing word of such things\u2014from its own citizens and outsiders both.\"\n\nThe mercenary pulled out her chair, sat, then nervously stood again and returned to the window. \"And the Salkos are\u2026?\"\n\n\"Not seditionists, no. Sympathizers. People who support the resistance but lack the means, or the will, to act.\" Ulia shrugged. \"I can't blame them. It's a hopeless cause. I just told them that I thought someone had accused me of financing the seditionists, and I\u2014we\u2014needed a place to stay for a few days until I could work out what to do next.\"\n\n\"I was there for that part,\" Silbeth reminded her.\n\n\"My point is, they won't turn us in.\"\n\n\"Mm.\" Silbeth wasn't entirely convinced, but she decided to let it lie. It wasn't as though she had any better idea where to hide. Again she returned to the table, forcing herself to sit and stay seated, at least long enough to eat a few bites.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Ulia said after then, \"it's probably true.\"\n\n\"Eh? What is?\"\n\n\"What I told them about the authorities suspecting me of sedition. I know they're on to me about something, but that doesn't mean they think I'm a spy. Probably they just think I'm a seditionist.\" She bared her teeth in what could only in the loosest of terms be considered a smile. \"Not that it'll make any real difference if they catch me.\"\n\n\"Are the methods of Deliant torturers as nasty as I've heard?\"\n\n\"I've not seen them myself, but I've never heard anything to make me doubt the stories.\" Ulia shuddered faintly, and Silbeth couldn't blame her.\n\n\"Well, then, let's not get you captured.\"\n\n\"Good plan.\" Ulia's smile this time was genuine. Silbeth stood and began to pace, forcing herself to think about things other than that glowing expression.\n\n\"Would the Salkos or any other sympathizers you know be more inclined to actively help us if they did know you were Kirresci?\" she asked. \"I realize you can't just go about telling people, but\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I can't. But even if I could, it would make our situation worse. They still wouldn't turn us in, I don't think, but\u2026 Kirresc isn't well regarded by the seditionists, for the most part. Quindacra, Wenslir\u2026 None of the southern nations, really, save maybe Suunim.\"\n\nSilbeth frowned, pivoted at the bookcase and paced back the other way. \"I don't understand. I figured any enemy of the Deliant\u2026\"\n\n\"The pact,\" Ulia explained, referring to the treaty of mutual defense signed by most of the nearby lands, \"may keep Ktho Delios largely confined to its current borders, but it doesn't do much to help the people here. Many of the resistance and sympathizers feel that the other nations don't really give a damn what happens to Ktho Delios's own citizens so long as the Deliant doesn't try expanding again.\"\n\n\"And they're probably right,\" Silbeth agreed with a sigh. \"I hate politics.\"\n\n\"You and most sane people.\"\n\nThe mercenary chuckled. \"Don't make assumptions about my san\u2014\" She froze as she reached the shutters, peering out between the narrow slats. \"Ulia, there are soldiers on the street!\"\n\nIndeed, the avenue beyond was crawling with them, advancing slowly down the block, the evening sun casting their shadows out ahead as advance scouts. They approached slowly, pausing at each house. There the man at the front of the column would halt, hands held before him. Each time he would shake his head, and the soldiers would advance a few paces until they stood between two new houses, whereupon the process repeated.\n\nNor was it only this peculiar behavior that marked their leader as something other than a normal officer. His chain hauberk and breastplate were black, but what he wore over them\u2026\n\n\"Ulia?\" Silbeth had to ask, though she feared she already knew the answer. \"What does a blue tabard signify?\"\n\nFrom the table behind her, she heard the clatter of a wine goblet dropped from shaking fingers. The answer reached her ears was a hiss, barely above a whisper. \"Inquisitor!\"\n\nThat's what I was afraid of.\n\n\"I don't understand. They've no reason to suspect sorcery in anything that's happened, so why\u2026?\"\n\n\"The Inquisitors aren't just witch hunters,\" Ulia told her, joining her at the window, shoulder pressed to Silbeth's own. \"They're the only ones in Ktho Delios legally permitted to practice sorcery. The only ones the Deliant publicly admits to, anyway. They can be assigned almost any task, if it's deemed important enough.\"\n\n\"Something like finding the murderer of two Ninth Citadel agents?\" Silbeth asked nervously.\n\n\"Yes. What do we do? They'll reach us in minutes!\"\n\nThe mercenary's mind raced. While certainly no practitioner, she knew a little of magic. Several of the Priory monks and priests practiced mystical rites, enough so that she understood some basic theories. Almost against her will, she turned her head to study the coat that lay, innocent and unassuming, over the back of the chair.\n\nBlood. She'd chosen the coat because its dark hue hid the blood that had spattered it during her struggle with its former wearer. That had to be how this Inquisitor had tracked them from the bodies!\n\nBut it was imprecise. It had only led him to the general vicinity, else he wouldn't need to concentrate anew at each house, would already have located her here.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" she announced. \"You're not going to care for it, and the Salkos even less. But if we hurry, and if everyone does exactly as I say, and if the gods\u2014or god\u2014are in an abnormally giving mood today, we all might get out of this without spending the rest of our very short lives in a Deliant prison.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"Colonel! Colonel Ilx!\"\n\nThe Deliant Inquisitor lowered his hands\u2014slowly, though he wanted simply to let them fall\u2014and composed his features before turning. The interruption was irritating, yet he couldn't pretend anything other than relief at the moment's respite.\n\nIt had been hours, now, since he had touched the blood of the dead man, etched the arcane glyphs into the soil around the bodies and summoned the essence of life recently spilled to guide his way. Hours in which he'd struggled to keep the feel of that life, those magics, in his head. He'd mentally redrawn the rune time and again to keep focused, and still it slipped away a bit more every time he stopped to feel for it. This interruption would make it that much harder, but the brief rest was welcome all the same.\n\nHe was a bit young for an Inquisitor, was Navirov Ilx, and wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee to appear older. He might have tried for a full beard, had not the burn scar across the right side of his face\u2014not blatant, visible only up close or in bright lighting\u2014prevented it. Age notwithstanding, however, none who witnessed his work, or had to stand before his determined and nigh unblinking gaze, could doubt that he had earned his accolades and more.\n\nAnd right now, every iota of that determination was bent toward finding whatever criminal or enemy of the state had butchered two Ninth Citadel operatives. Navirov had no great love for the secret police, but still, such violations could not be allowed to stand.\n\n\"What is it, Private?\" he asked once the soldier appeared before him.\n\nThe newcomer snapped off a salute. \"You ordered me to find out if anyone had recently used Ninth Citadel authority to engage in any suspicious activity, Colonel,\" he began.\n\n\"Yes, I know. I was there. Spit it out, please.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir! A woman bearing a Citadel badge ordered the release of several prisoners from a nearby gaol, sir. No infractions of any importance, just petty transgressions.\"\n\n\"Hmm. You have the list?\"\n\n\"Right here, sir.\" He handed over a page torn from a ledger, then pointed to a quickly scribbled and uneven line of ink. \"Everyone from here down.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" he repeated. \"Yashir!\"\n\nA gaunt, severe woman with hair of blackest night and a coat to match\u2014the only person in his entire entourage not clad in armor\u2014stepped forward. \"Yes, Colonel?\"\n\nHe passed the page over his shoulder without looking. \"Have your people been looking into anyone on this list?\"\n\nThe Ninth Citadel operative scanned the paper. \"This one. Povyar.\"\n\nUlia Povyar? Bit of a surprise, that. Navirov had met the woman a few times, at this function or that. She'd never struck him as a seditionist sympathizer. But then, one never knew, did one?\n\n\"Happen to know if she has any friends or relatives on this street?\" The Citadel was rarely so forthcoming with their intelligence, but the loss of two of their own had changed the rules.\n\nIn the end, she had to send her own runner back to headquarters to look at Povyar's file, and by the time they identified the Salko household as their probable destination, Navirov could have already located it by picking up the lingering threads of his spell. Still, at least it was easier on him this way.\n\nHe ordered his people to surround the house, and to take up stations at the nearby intersections. Only then, flanked by several of his best soldiers and by Yashir herself, did he pound on the door.\n\nIt opened to reveal neither a servant nor Master or Lady Salko, but a small, formally clad boy of perhaps ten or twelve years. His younger sister, garbed in equal finery, stood behind him, a silk-dressed doll dangling from her fist.\n\nNavirov dropped to one knee. \"Are your parents here, son?\"\n\nThe boy nodded, eyes wide and shining.\n\n\"Is anyone else here?\"\n\n\"I don't know. They were.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Two pretty ladies.\"\n\n\"And where are your parents now?\"\n\n\"They\u2026\" The boy's lip began to quiver.\n\n\"All right.\" Navirov rose. \"Take your sister to your neighbor's house. Run.\"\n\n\"Colonel\u2014\" Yashir began, voice hot.\n\n\"Quiet. Go, child.\"\n\nThey ran, hands clasped.\n\n\"You should have taken them aside for further questioning!\" the woman from the Citadel snapped, livid. \"Standard procedure\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not interrogate children.\"\n\n\"You\u2014!\"\n\n\"I am stepping through that doorway now. Whether or not you're standing in it.\"\n\nYashir slipped aside, though the weight of her disdainful fury was nearly enough to slow his passage.\n\nNavirov and his soldiers found the Salkos and their household staff, bound and gagged in the wine cellar. None had been too horribly mistreated; a bruise here, a contusion there, just enough to subdue them so they could be tied.\n\nOr, he mused, enough to make it look legitimate.\n\nHe had no evidence of any such thing, and\u2014regardless of what Yashir might do in his place\u2014he wasn't about to arrest the victims of a seditionist on mere suspicion that their involvement was more than it appeared. He would, however, have a word or two with the Ninth Citadel, have the Salkos put under close surveillance for a time.\n\nHe found the stolen coat, as well, along with the copper badges and identification documents. They were buried in the hay of a cart being pulled behind an old sorrel mare trudging casually down a neighboring street. Since most Ktho Delians knew nothing of magic\u2014certainly not enough to deduce that he'd located them via the blood on the coat\u2014this raised a whole host of new questions.\n\n\"They cannot be more than minutes ahead of us,\" he shouted at his assembled unit. \"Spread out! Send runners to nearby barracks with Povyar's description and get more people on the streets! Give them no opportunity to go to ground! Find them, surround them, and run them down!\n\n\"And above all\u2026 Something is going on here, something we don't understand. Something beyond mere sedition. So whatever happens, I want them alive.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"Sure, I remember. Wasn't but a night ago you were here. Still,\" the sentry hedged from behind his viewport beside the door, \"I really ought to check with Koldan before I just let you walk in here.\"\n\nSilbeth shoved her own face against, practically through, the tiny window. When she raised her voice, though, it wasn't solely in an effort to intimidate the thug, but also to be sure he'd hear her over the sound of Ulia's desperate gasping. The spy remained upright only by leaning hard against the wall of the woodworker's shop, far more winded by the cross-city dash than was her Priory of Steel companion.\n\n\"Listen to me, you obtuse bastard! You think my friend and I just ran half of Tohl Delian for the exercise? We've got people after us! If they catch us, we're dead, and if we're dead, your boss doesn't get any of the sizable purse he's being paid for smuggling us the hell out of this wretched town! Now open the gods damned door!\"\n\nBetween his snarl and his hesitation, she wondered if she might have overdone it, but the notion of costing Koldan his due coin obviously weighed on the man. \"Who's after you?\" he asked.\n\n\"I didn't stop to get their names! Rivals of yours, maybe?\" Not precisely a lie\u2026\n\nGrousing to himself, the sentry hauled back the bolts. Silbeth darted inside before the door was fully open, dragging a still-wheezing Ulia behind her by the hand.\n\n\"I suggest you lock up,\" she said as she blew past him, not that she anticipated it doing any good. The pair had barely avoided search parties on numerous occasions, only just managed to escape them on numerous others. The Deliant soldiers knew their general area, and she had no doubt they would swiftly find someone who could be intimidated into revealing Koldan's hidden sanctum. As soon as the soldiers learned the notorious smuggler was based in the vicinity, it was the first place they'd look for the fleeing fugitives. Koldan was about to find a tidal wave of mail and swords crashing down on his head.\n\nThe fib that got her through the door notwithstanding, she never genuinely considered not telling the smuggler and gang leader what was coming. Disastrous as she knew the revelation could be, it would be even worse if they were caught unprepared.\n\nHe took it about as well as she'd had any right to expect.\n\n\"You gods damned stupid bitch! You had to lead them right to us?!\"\n\n\"I had nowhere else to go, Koldan, and you\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll be lucky if we have time to get our asses out of here with a fraction of my money!\" Indeed, his people were already in panic mode, gathering up the most portable riches and most incriminating of stolen goods. \"You have any idea how much I'm going to lose, how much it'll cost to set up a new shop somewhere else? This could break us!\"\n\n\"I understand. Obviously, what I said earlier about renegotiating no longer applies. I haven't a great deal of coin on me, personally, but I can arrange\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll arrange, all right. When your employers find out how much they owe me, you're going to wish you'd let the soldiers take you!\"\n\nFor all Koldan's spitting fury\u2014she felt the man's saliva speckling her face from clear across the room\u2014Silbeth found her hackles rising at the reaction. He was proving too quick to forgive, and for what? So he could demand an unnamed reward that she hadn't even the authority to promise?\n\nNo. This was wrong.\n\n\"Very well,\" she said calmly, stepping aside as one of the smugglers stumbled past her carrying an armful of metalworking tools. \"Shall we get going, then? Ulia, you should\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Koldan interrupted. \"I have to oversee the evacuation, make sure we get all the most important stuff, and I'm not letting you two out of my sight. Besides, you're responsible for this, you can bloody well help lug the equipment!\"\n\nThat was it, then. She could see the lie in his face, taste it in his words, knew what he had planned as surely as if he'd spelled it out. No way a man like Koldan stayed behind to \"oversee\" the gang abandoning its nest. He'd be one of the first gone, probably with the most valuable treasures stuffed in his pockets.\n\nNo, he wasn't running because he had no intention of trying to escape the coming soldiers; he was waiting for them. His only hope was to negotiate, to try and parlay something valuable into a monetary reward and a pass\u2014or at least legal consideration\u2014for his criminal activities.\n\n\"Something\" such as, for example, a pair of fugitives wanted by damn near every department and division of the Deliant.\n\nShe and Ulia needed to find some means of slipping out from under Koldan's gaze, needed to be out of here before\u2014\n\nThe heavily bolted portal, along with several chunks of the stone wall around it, blasted into the room in a hurricane of splinters, dust, and the dying remnants of the unfortunate door guard. Silbeth and Ulia had just run out of \"before.\"\n\nSilbeth had no idea what they'd hit the door with\u2014portable ballista? Some sort of alchemical bomb?\u2014and ultimately it didn't much matter. The first handful of Deliant soldiers poured through the breach, and she moved to meet them.\n\nAnd as she ran, she shouted, loud enough for the others, soldiers included, to hear over the growing chaos.\n\n\"Koldan! Get your mistress out of here! I'll try to hold them!\"\n\nEven in the face of growing danger, the smuggler's confusion froze him. Ulia, however, was no fool. She must have seen the same potential for betrayal Silbeth had; the mercenary offered up a silent prayer of thanks when the other woman picked up on her cue, racing to Koldan's side and clutching at him like a storybook damsel in distress.\n\nHis frustrated, furious roar when he realized what they'd done\u2014that the Deliant would never believe now that he hadn't been involved in Ulia's and Silbeth's crimes, no matter what he did or how he turned against them\u2014was near as loud as the detonating door. He spun away from Ulia, drawing a broad-bladed fighting knife, and sprinted for one of his many hidden exits. Ulia followed, armed with a smaller dagger she'd filched from somewhere on the smuggler's body during her desperate cling.\n\nSoldiers pursued them. Soldiers spread throughout the workshop, running down Koldan's people on the various levels. And then Silbeth couldn't afford to pay any further attention due to the soldiers converging on her as well.\n\nAt least the Inquisitor hasn't gotten here yet\u2026\n\nThe trio facing her didn't seem especially concerned, Inquisitor or no, though they were professional enough to maintain their guard. And no wonder. Three to her one, their broadswords to her oversized knife, their chain hauberks to her unarmored flesh. This pale foreigner would have to be one of the greatest swordswomen they'd ever heard of to pose them any real threat.\n\nSilbeth grinned, slipped to her left so they weren't all coming at her straight on, and attacked.\n\nShe twisted in midstep, allowing the first man's swing to pass her shoulder with a finger's width to spare, and slipped inside his reach. Her arm wrapped around his near the elbow, locking the joint as she thrust hard with the point of her knife. It punctured only shallowly through the sleeve of chain, but the tip digging into flesh, combined with her pressure on the elbow, was enough to break his grip on his own weapon.\n\nMaintaining the lock on the man's arm, she threw her weight to one side, wrenching the limb from its socket and sending them both to the floor. He struck hard, crying out in pain. She rolled smoothly back to her feet, his fallen broadsword now held high and ready.\n\nThe other two were almost upon her and she retreated, cross-stepping and shifting direction at random, her sword moving in wide but controlled circles. Again and again they tried to flank her, only to find that she'd stepped just far enough aside that they couldn't. Again and again they struck, and each time she either pivoted from their weapon's arc or deflected the sword aside with her own.\n\nWithout warning or any obvious change in her stance, she abruptly leaned into a parry, deflecting one soldier's sword hard into the other's path. It wasn't much, would scarcely have scratched his hauberk even if he'd walked into it. Still, he saw a blade appear suddenly before him and raised his own to ward it off.\n\nSilbeth's own sword followed a fraction of a second layer, punching through chain and burying itself deep in the soldier's guts. He slid from the blade with a groan and a hideous sucking sound to collapse in a spreading tangle of blood and entrails.\n\nBy now the first wounded soldier had regained his feet, drawing a heavy dagger with his one working hand, but he made little difference. Unable to fully defend himself and crippled by pain, he quickly fell a second time, and he'd not be rising again. That left Silbeth facing only a single opponent, and though the Deliant-trained woman was skilled, the outcome was never in doubt. After a few brief passes and parries, Silbeth almost casually danced through her defenses and split her opponent's skull.\n\nShe ran before any more of the Ktho Delian forces could converge on her, rushing to catch up with Koldan and Ulia. They hadn't gotten far down the escape passage: a squared tunnel with rough wooden bolsters, and walls dripping with condensation and slick mildew. They'd slain a couple of soldiers on their own, which was presumably why they'd not gotten much farther.\n\nKoldan saw her approaching and drew breath to speak\u2014perhaps to threaten or curse or command, or possibly all three at once.\n\nSilbeth swung her stolen broadsword. The smuggler's head hit the floor with a wet smack, bouncing and rolling until it fetched up against the wall, lips still struggling to form those unspoken words.\n\nUlia stared, open-mouthed.\n\n\"He meant to betray us,\" Silbeth explained. \"He still would have\u2014to the Deliant, if he came up with a new way to do so, or just killing us if he decided we were no longer valuable.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\"\n\n\"He and I discussed detailed plans for sneaking us out last night. I know where to find the next person in his smuggling chain. If we hurry we might reach him before he hears that everything's gone ass-ward, or at least before he hears it was our fault. With any luck, he can get us outside Tohl Delian's walls.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Ulia agreed, steadying herself and stepping carefully over Koldan's body. \"And then? We still have half of Ktho Delios between us and the nearest border.\"\n\nSilbeth tried, and failed, to smile. \"Then we improvise. And do a lot of hoping.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The weeks it took to cross the unwelcoming reaches of the Outermark were, while perhaps not truly \"hellish,\" certainly among the most arduous, most uncomfortable, and most exhausting of Nycolos's life.\n\nThe terrain was indifferent at best, often actively hostile. From the rocky foothills and cracked stone badlands around the mountains; the desiccated and frequently blighted grasslands beyond; the torrent of the Dragon's Tail; the vermin-spawning swamps where the Tail broke from the broader flow of the Dragon River. Every mile ate away their reserves, their strength, until Nycolos would almost have accepted the death that inevitably awaited if only he could resume his true form\u2014and regain his wings\u2014for a few glorious moments.\n\nNor was the land itself their only adversary. Late season storms lashed the open ground of the Outermark. Lightning scored deep lesions into the earth. Chilling rains pelted the travelers before accumulating into clinging puddles and sucking muck, yet never seemed to irrigate the earth much once they'd passed.\n\nPlains wolves; the occasional bear; a circling speck high above, that might have been either wyvern or peryton hunting far from its mountain eyrie. Once, at the edge of the marsh, some form of monstrous toad-beast the size of a small horse, ambushed them. That, at least, was a battle that Nycolos's inhuman strengths had allowed him to win, and the beast, though ill-flavored, fed them for days.\n\nOn a handful of occasions, guards fortunate enough to escape from the mines and the mountain fey had caught up with them, seeking vengeance. Then, though it chafed Nycolos more fiercely than those storms, he and Smim would flee, or find some small shelter or woodland in which to hide, rather than face superior numbers in their fatigued state. So, too, had they been forced to avoid another, more vicious form of raider, as tribes of bog goblins discovered the many bands of slaves trudging across the region. Against these, Smim's presence was no buffer, for the slimy, peat-dwelling creatures bore little love for their cave-haunting cousins.\n\nOne twilight, as they hunted for a patch of halfway dry ground on which to bed down, they had stumbled across one of those goblin raiding parties at camp. The wicked things danced and cavorted around a fire, the light glistening on their algae-smeared and moss-clad bodies, stone-tipped spears and alligator-tooth-edged swords raised as high as their shrill, screeching voices.\n\nAlongside the fire lay several dead men and women, stacked like logs, while another corpse rotated on a primitive spit, already lightly cooked by the flame's kiss. And though his hair had long since burnt away and much of his skin had followed, enough of the dead man's features remained for Nycolos, with his inhuman vision, to recognize the escaped slave Keva.\n\nNycolos's reaction had nothing to do with Keva, of course. That was just obvious, when Nycolos contemplated his choices in later days. He owed the man nothing, felt no affection for him. Rather, it was the frustration of the journey, all the pain and fatigue, the good fortune of catching so many goblins together and unaware. He just lost control, couldn't pass up the opportunity. It was about pride, about Nycolos himself.\n\nNot about some dead slave Nycolos had barely known. That notion was just foolish. Nothing to do with Keva at all.\n\nUnfortunately (or perhaps quite fortunately, if one happened to be a marsh goblin), Nycolos never launched his attack, whatever its motivations. Hoping to catch the entire tribe in one fell swoop, he had concentrated on his body, working to strengthen his gut, his lungs, his innards, the skin of his throat and his tongue, enough to bathe the lot of them in a gout of eldritch fire, as he'd done to so many of his foes of old.\n\nBut the only fire he'd felt burned within him as his entire body convulsed in overwhelming, maddening agony. He'd no idea of whether he was passing out or actually dying, and his final thought before the world and the pain faded was that he would welcome either. It had been hours before Smim had managed to shake him awake, and only\u2014so the goblin told him\u2014after dragging him for miles through the fetid swamp.\n\nPiecing it together later, Nycolos knew he had gone too far, shifted too much of himself back. The cursed sliver, that tiny piece of enchanted steel, had recognized its prey anew, had begun to seek his heart. He must have reversed the process through sheer primal instinct before he'd gone under, turning his organs back to those of a mere human. Whatever healing he'd managed while a slave to Justina Norbenus had been brutally undone. His world was again one of constant torment, a soul-deep suffering that dogged his every breath, his every thought.\n\nDespair might have overcome him then and there, he might have chosen to let himself die, but his ego would never allow it. Especially not with a possible salvation growing ever nearer.\n\nSo he had continued on, every step through the swamp the labor of a lifetime. He allowed Smim to support him, to help him through the roughest patches, though he burned anew at the indignity.\n\nBut finally, finally they stumbled through the last of the bogs to the banks of the Dragon River.\n\nThe broad and rapid torrent proved almost impassible. Even as he was nearly swept away, saved only by a convenient protruding rock and Smim's desperate efforts, Nycolos couldn't keep from smirking at the potential irony that the Dragon, of all things, might kill him. Trembling, more than half-drowned, too exhausted even to stand, they staggered and crawled out onto the opposite bank to collapse among the reeds.\n\nAnd only then, his cheek buried in the muck, did Nycolos begin to truly realize: the Outermark was behind them. It hadn't stopped him, hadn't slain him, no matter how hard it had tried, how close it had come. They were past it.\n\nHe raised his mud-encrusted face and gazed into the kingdom of Kirresc.\n\nIt looked, from here, much like the rest of the world. Grasslands, more fertile than those in the stagnant Outermark, occasionally rolling, bedecked by sporadic patches of woodland. Nothing yet to mark it as a civilized land\u2014by human standards, anyway\u2014let alone the homeland of one Nycolos Anvarri.\n\nThey made camp amidst the reeds, fed themselves on uncooked fish, went to sleep shivering with the damp and awoke the same way. Then, yet again, they walked.\n\nAimlessly, at first. Smim had never been to Kirresc, while Nycolos had only seen it long, long ago, and only from high above. He possessed only the vaguest notion where they might be headed.\n\nThat had changed on their second day in the kingdom, when they stumbled across the highway. The broad dirt road suggested only a moderate amount of traffic, this far out, but it should lead them where they wanted to go.\n\nThe expressions of abject horror upon the first passersby they met\u2014a farmer and several of his hands, hauling a late-season harvest to town\u2014reminded Nycolos that, though the worst of the Outermark filth and sweat had been washed from him in the river, he was clad only in tattered rags. Also that Smim's presence would not go unremarked, or in any way welcomed, in these \"civilized\" lands.\n\nWhen he and Smim moved on, the folks on the wagon were short some clothes, a pair of cloaks, and a sack-full of vegetables\u2014and were, on the whole, grateful that those were all they'd lost to the pair of monstrous travelers.\n\nSo they had continued along the highway, Smim largely concealed by what was, for him, an oversized hood, Nycolos doing what talking proved unavoidable. They asked direction where they could, stole when and what they must, their pace kept infuriatingly slow by the twin necessities of pampering Nycolos's wound and finding shelter from the frequent autumn storms.\n\nUntil now, finally, on one late afternoon after days Nycolos had not bothered to count, they stood outside the walls of Talocsa, the great capital of Kirresc.\n\nThe place was a riot of colors that somehow wove themselves into a coherent whole even where they clashed, a tapestry of eccentric genius. Whitewashed and gleaming, the city's walls were just beginning to glow orange in the light of the setting sun. Above them rose Talocsa's towers and minarets, many built to almost house-like triangular peaks of umber shingles, others squared platforms with stone ramparts. Pennants in the many hues of the Kirresci noble houses saluted proudly, always overtopped by the golden eagle on crimson field that was the ensign of the royal house and the nation itself.\n\nAnd while Nycolos could never have described exactly how, it seemed that the many sounds emerging from within those walls\u2014of travel, of labor, of conversation, of laughter and tears and life itself\u2014were of equally sharp colors.\n\nThe guards at the city gates, and those who walked the wall above, seemed of relatively good cheer, though it did not stop them doing their duty. Unlike some cities of which Nycolos had heard, they didn't halt everyone entering Talocsa, seeming to choose at random those whom they questioned or searched.\n\nWell, not entirely at random. Dressed so roughly and traveling with a companion who shrouded his face, Nycolos correctly anticipated that he would be among those who were stopped.\n\nThe soldier who faced him sported a long mustache; Nycolos had already noted that, though clean-shaven faces were not uncommon, the majority of Kirresci men boasted either mustaches alone or beards of varying styles. Like his fellow guards, this man wore a hauberk of lamellar scales and an open-faced, slightly conical helm. He carried a sabre at his side, while long spears\u2014some traditional, some of a curve-bladed style Nycolos had never seen\u2014and short recurved bows leaned against the wall, within easy reach.\n\n\"You look to have had a hard time of it, traveler,\" the guard said, somehow sympathetic and suspicious at once.\n\nNycolos forced a chuckle he didn't feel. \"You've no idea.\"\n\nThe answering smile was equally artificial. \"Your business in Talocsa?\"\n\n\"Coming home, actually.\"\n\n\"Indeed? And your name, sir?\"\n\nHe gave some thought to lying. (Well, lying about the deeper lie.) It took him no time at all to decide not to bother.\n\n\"Nycolos Anvarri.\"\n\nOh, but he had the soldier's full attention now\u2014and not only his. The nearby guards all stopped what they were doing to peer his way, as did many of the passersby. Against the constant song of the city, a bubble of silence seemed briefly to envelop the gate.\n\n\"Well,\" Nycolos said, shattering that silence like a mace to a mirror, \"I'm pleased not to have been forgotten.\"\n\n\"Baronet Nycolos is gone,\" the soldier before him growled, hand dropping to his sabre. \"He vanished many months ago.\"\n\n\"On a fool's errand!\" an anonymous voice added from the growing audience, just loud enough to be heard.\n\n\"Now the errand is done,\" Nycolos said blandly. \"And the fool has returned. Somewhat,\" he added, as though the admission were some great secret, \"the worse for wear.\"\n\n\"You're a liar!\" the sentry snapped, all but quivering in anger.\n\nAll trace of good humor vanished from Nycolos's features. \"Be very careful what you say, soldier.\"\n\n\"And what of your companion?\" another soldier demanded. \"Why does he hide?\" Before Nycolos could even think to respond, the armor-clad woman lunged forward, snagging the hood of the cloak and yanking it down.\n\n\"That was impolite,\" Smim sighed. \"And unfortunate.\"\n\nEveryone present recoiled, some even going so far as to hiss. Gloves wrapped around spears and multiple sabres slid from scabbards. \"Goblin!\" someone gasped, rather unnecessarily.\n\nNycolos unclenched his fists, fingers held straight, ready to sprout talons if no alternative option presented itself.\n\n\"Oi!\" The voice fell on them from above, atop the wall. \"What's going on down there?\"\n\nLooking up, Nycolos saw another figure\u2014a woman, to judge by the voice and what little of her face he could see between the cheeks and nose guard of the helm. She wore a hauberk of chain rather than the simpler lamellar, but otherwise appeared no different than the other guards.\n\n\"Goblin, captain!\"\n\n\"Are you serious?! There are no goblin tribes left in Kirresc!\"\n\n\"That's not entirely accurate\u2014\" Smim began in a whisper. Nycolos elbowed him.\n\n\"He was trying to sneak into the city!\"\n\n\"And this sort of entirely unwarranted reaction is exactly why\u2014!\" Another elbow.\n\n\"And who's this with him?\" the captain shouted down.\n\n\"A liar and a fraud! Claims he's Baronet Nycolos Anvarri!\"\n\nA pause, then, \"Hold them. I'll be right down.\"\n\nThe woman vanished from the parapet, leaving behind several archers, arrows trained unerringly on the two newcomers. Between them and the surrounding sentries, Nycolos had to admit he was in a great deal of trouble should the situation turn violent. Even if he could probably survive it, it wouldn't be easy, and he saw no way he could save Smim\u2026\n\nShe appeared again, marching from out of the gate. This close, she was definitely female, and to judge by the dark shade of her face within the helm, probably shared a great deal of Nycolos's own heritage. (Or his current form's heritage, anyway.)\n\n\"I've met Baronet Nycolos a few times,\" she announced as she neared. \"Even rode patrol with him once. I should be able to clear this up quickly en\u2014\" She stopped, studying him, working to focus through the wild growth of untamed beard, the months of hardship, the dust of the road.\n\nNycolos, who gazed right back at her, could pinpoint by the sudden dilation of her pupils the precise instant she succeeded.\n\n\"Oh, bloody hell!\" She retreated a step, swept the helm from her head, and then\u2014though not required or technically even proper for addressing a mere baronet\u2014dropped to one knee. \"Welcome home, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nAn array of dropped jaws and gasps that threatened to draw the breathable air from around the gate was quickly followed by a series of salutes or kneeling, depending on the temperament of the individual in question.\n\nThis\u2026 Oh, yes. This is how it should be. This is how it will be again.\n\n\"Please, my friends, this is unnecessary. Rise.\"\n\nThey did, those who had knelt, while the others dropped their salutes. The glares of distrust and growing anger transformed into unabashed admiration, while whispers and breathless supposition raced plague-like through the onlookers.\n\n\"I apologize for the unseemly welcome, Sir Nycolos,\" the guard captain continued. \"None of my people meant any disrespect\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course they did,\" he interrupted. Then, after a pause in which the others had only begun to cringe, he smiled. \"Just not to me, exactly. An understandable confusion,\" he added magnanimously.\n\n\"Um, yes. Quite.\" The woman laughed, if a touch nervously. \"It's only, nobody thought to see you again, sir. Nobody\u2014forgive me, I mean no slight to your abilities\u2014but nobody thought you stood any chance against\u2026. Against a creature like\u2026\"\n\n\"Like a dragon?\" It was an effort worthy of its own ballad that Nycolos kept the humor in his voice, kept the bitterness choked down where it roiled in his stomach like a bad meal. He should have stood no chance, that damned, insignificant\u2026!\n\n\"A dragon. Yes. Is it\u2026 That is, did you\u2026?\"\n\n\"I won. That will have to satiate your curiosity for now, Captain. The tale isn't one I enjoy, and I've no intention of telling it more often than I must.\"\n\n\"Of course, sir,\" she agreed, though the bewilderment on her face belied her easy acquiescence. Understandable, Nycolos decided. To any of them, to these humans, merely surviving a confrontation with a dragon would be the boast of a lifetime. To defeat one? Surely he should be more than eager to spread that tale, shouldn't he?\n\nBut he could not bring himself to do so, not yet, no matter how out of character his reticence might be. The wound in his chest was not the only one that remained too painful.\n\nPerhaps spotting his discomfort, even if she could not possibly have guessed at its true source, the captain snapped once more to attention. \"Would you permit me to escort you to the palace, sir?\"\n\n\"Oh. Yes, Captain.\" Especially since I haven't the slightest notion of how to get there myself. \"That would be most kind of you.\"\n\n\"Not at all, sir. Um\u2026 Sir?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"The, uh, the goblin?\"\n\n\"Is with me.\"\n\nThe mutters and whispers this time were far less content, and even those who remained silent wore their disapproval in their expressions or their bearing. Nonetheless, the officer simply replied, \"As you say, sir,\" waved a few of her soldiers to follow, and marched through the gate.\n\nThe colorful imagery of the city's exterior was easily matched, even exceeded, within. Most larger stone homes and structures boasted colored trim, intricately wrought iron fencing or upper-story railings, and\u2014where space and wealth permitted\u2014soaring archways. Even the poorer buildings, constructed of wood with shingled or thatch roofs, often sported brightly painted shutters, sills, and doorways. Many buildings of either construction were whitewashed.\n\nAnd the pattern continued among the Kirresci people themselves. Men and women with skin and hair of every shade dressed largely in coats, vests, kaftans, robes, skirts, and similar long garments of almost every hue. From darkest black to forest green, sky or ocean blue to rich crimson, and almost always with lacing or embroidery of stark contrast, the garments announced to the world that these were a passionate, hot-blooded people who celebrated life.\n\nNone of which made the atmosphere of sweat, cookfires, and animal droppings any more pleasant, but then, one couldn't expect miracles.\n\nWord of who marched through Talocsa spread before them. The return of Nycolos Anvarri didn't mean a great deal to the bulk of the population, but a significant minority\u2014and certainly a great many of the soldiers and the city's nobility\u2014were indeed shocked and fascinated by the news. Small crowds formed along the main avenue, if only to see for themselves if it were true, though many of the onlookers didn't seem remotely convinced by this bedraggled, exhausted vagabond of a man. A few more squads of soldiers, perhaps off or returning from duty, fell in with the guard captain. Nycolos had a small but significant entourage trailing around and behind him when Oztyerva Palace, the seat of Kirresci royalty, finally hove into view.\n\nExcept Oztyerva was no palace at all, no matter what the people of Talocsa had taken to calling it, but a fully fortified castle. The peak-roofed towers and high ramparts might be bright, the banners and sculpted eaves colorful, everything a shimmering ivory or crimson or gold, but it was every inch of it functional. An invader who thought their troubles over once they'd breached the city's walls might find themselves bogged down in a siege of months or years before this last and greatest bastion of Kirresc fell.\n\nThus the men-and women-at-arms assigned to guard the gates took their duties seriously indeed, and while they were equally as excited at the return of the prodigal baronet as anyone else, they were none too happy at the notion of allowing a \"filthy goblin\" into the palace grounds.\n\nEven after several of the soldiers had personally identified Nycolos as being precisely who he claimed to be, their reluctance to accept his companion failed to diminish. Finally he announced, loudly and clearly enough for the entire courtyard to hear, \"The goblin's name is Smim. I freed him from servitude to the wyrm. I have saved his life more than once on our travels, as he has saved mine. He has sworn fealty to me, and I have accepted his oath. He is my vassal. An attack on him is an attack on me. An insult to him is a spit in my face. And I will respond accordingly!\n\n\"Now, does anyone wish to challenge us?\"\n\n\"What a fascinating interpretation of events,\" Smim muttered, softly enough that only Nycolos's enhanced hearing could possibly have caught the words. Nobody else spoke up, and the guards stepped aside, though many still wore expressions of deep misgiving.\n\nThe lawns beyond the wall were more palatial than the courtyard of a castle, with winding footpaths and marble fountains. And although that lawn required only a few moments to cross, a crowd had assembled on the broad palace steps by the time Nycolos and his entourage reached them. The great double door\u2014gilded, but built of thick and reinforced wood that would frustrate all but the heaviest battering ram\u2014stood wide, with courtiers in colorful finery and knights in the finest chain hauberks and heraldic tabards gathered to welcome Nycolos home.\n\nThe salutes were crisp, the cheers many, and he struggled to maintain a modest demeanor while accepting it all as his due.\n\n\"Oh, yes, indeed, Sir Nycolos. Welcome back.\" The voice cut through other nearby greetings and shouts, or rather those greetings and shouts seemed to recoil from the venom saturating the otherwise polite tone. \"And I hear you've returned with a new vassal. Seeing him for myself, I have to say that, for the first time, I understand why someone would throw in his lot with yours.\"\n\nShe proceeded down the steps until she stood just before\u2014and just one stair higher\u2014than Nycolos. Hair and skin neither particularly light nor dark, her only outstanding features were the faint scar on her chin, her broad shoulders, and the intensity in her bearing. The sabre at her side boasted a well-worn hilt, shaped to her grip by long and frequent use, and she wore the chainmail of a knight, her red tabard sporting a rampant wyvern in black.\n\nNycolos would have wagered she'd never even laid eyes on such a creature in her life.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she finished as she drew to a halt, \"you should have remained with his people. You might have found your place among them more to your taste.\"\n\nAt a wild guess, the newcomer thought, taking her measure, this is someone with whom Nycolos Anvarri doesn't get along.\n\nHaving only this briefest of assessments on which to act, he chose the path least likely to reveal his ignorance of the woman while, to his mind, most likely to offend her pride.\n\nHe stepped around her without a word and continued up the stairs. To judge by the gasps of astonishment from nearby onlookers, and the hiss of fury from between her own teeth, he'd chosen accurately.\n\nShe lashed out as he passed, her fingers grasping his shoulder with such strength that he would have bruised had his skin been only as strong as a human's. \"You should have stayed gone!\" she spat angrily, keeping her tone low. \"It matters nothing what deeds you claim to have accomplished while you were away! You disobeyed orders so you might run off and try to impress everyone. You've handed the position to me! Kortlaus is no threat, and after this stunt, you'll never be\u2014!\"\n\n\"Dame Zirresca!\" Another stranger's voice, but this one boomed from the doorway with such force that Nycolos might have found it impressive even in his true form. Another armor-clad knight, this one far older and sporting a beard equal parts ash and coal, emerged from within the hall. \"His Majesty has heard only the rumors that raced ahead of Sir Nycolos's miraculous return. Please go at once and inform him of their veracity.\"\n\nThe woman released her grip, snapped off a salute, and was gone without another word. Fortunately, Nycolos heard enough of the comments in the crowd to have identified the old warrior addressing him now.\n\nHe mimicked the salute he'd just seen, and which the city guards had directed his own way\u2014right fist, clenched, held to his heart\u2014and bowed his head. \"Marshal Laszlan.\"\n\nOrban Laszlan, Crown Marshal to the king and commander of Kirresc's armies, returned the salute. \"I thank God for returning you to us, Sir Nycolos,\" he said, loudly and with what seemed genuine feeling. They fell into step, marching through the double doors and into the great hall of the palace\u2014partly by choice, partly pushed along by the crowd that had grown impatient with hovering around the entrance. He continued, far more softly, \"Oh, Nycos, you foolish boy. What did you hope to accomplish? You'll be fortunate to come out of this with your rank.\"\n\nNycos? Was he to have yet another name he must remember to answer to? How many did humans need?\n\nEven stranger, both Zirresca and Orban had suggested that Nycolos's quest to hunt and slay the wyrm had been undertaken on his own, without the approval of his superiors. What did that mean? What had the man hoped to accomplish? What did it portend for his future?\n\nThe corridor passed beneath his tread as he pondered his answer. The carpet was lush, though trampled flat by the feet of years. Portraits, statues, and ornate sconces graced the walls between soaring arches of expertly crafted stone. The stairways were broad, yet wound tightly enough for defenders to lurk in wait against enemies climbing from below, and the windows, full of ornamental stained glass, were yet narrow and angled enough to function as arrowslits. Oztyerva was, indeed, an excellent blend of the decorative and the defensive.\n\n\"Have you at least brought it back?\" Orban asked before Nycolos\u2014Nycos?\u2014could formulate a response.\n\nAnd although he could hardly be certain, he had a grotesque, stomach-churning feeling, accompanied by a surge of agony in his chest and wrath in his soul, that he knew what \"it\" was.\n\n\"Marshal,\" he began hesitantly, \"I\u2014\"\n\nAgain their conversation, and those of the people gathered around them, was interrupted. Again the guards\u2014this time it was those assigned to the entryway of the royal court and throne room itself\u2014objected to the presence of a goblin in their midst. And again Nycolos had to give a speech in which he claimed Smim as his oathbound vassal.\n\n\"You heard him!\" Orban's bellow could have been, probably often was, audible clear across a practice-or battlefield. \"Or do you deny the baronet's right to accept fealty from any he deems worthy?\"\n\n\"Forgive us, Crown Marshal,\" the nearest of the men-at-arms begged. \"It's not his right we question, it's just\u2026\" He waved helplessly, jogging his spear.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 With your permission, I should at least obtain permission from His Majesty personally.\"\n\n\"Stay your post. I will go speak to His Majesty about the situation.\" Orban's scowl was dark indeed. \"Among other things.\"\n\nIgnoring the guardsman's salute, the marshal pushed past him, hauled open the double door just wide enough to slip through, and stormed inside.\n\nNycolos stood in the midst of a throng of strangers who believed they knew him, and waited.\n\n\"I anticipate a bright and joyous sojourn here, Master,\" the goblin commented, \"replete with sunshine and celebration.\"\n\n\"I've no intention of remaining here any longer than necessary,\" Nycolos replied, squatting to whisper in Smim's ear and ignoring the odd looks directed his way. \"I'm quite sure we'll be gone long before you've run out of sarcasm.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you, Master. That was indeed my greatest concern.\"\n\n\"I thought it might be.\"\n\n\"Nycos! By the gods, it really is you!\"\n\nOh, who in hell's name is it now?!\n\nThe man shoving through the throng was, like Zirresca and the marshal, clad in the mail and tabard of a Kirresci knight, though his ensign was a deep brown boar on a field of forest green. His hair and full mustache, its narrow ends reaching down past his chin, were the color of straw. He all but crashed into Nycolos, enfolding him in a crushing embrace.\n\n\"Grgh!\" Nycolos greeted him.\n\nApparently feeling the violent flinch, the blond knight released him as abruptly. \"Are you well?\"\n\n\"Wound,\" he gasped, hand to the new surge of pain in his chest. \"Not\u2026 quite healed yet.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Nycos. I had no idea.\"\n\nRather than screaming at him, as emotion demanded, Nycolos forced a smile. Clearly this was someone with whom he was expected to be friendly; best to play along with that. \"No reason you should have. It's good to see you again, too.\"\n\nThe unnamed knight beamed, a second sun in miniature. \"I want to hear everything! Every minute of your journey.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm\u2026 certain you're not the only one.\"\n\nThat brought on a broad, almost conspiratorial grin. \"I'm sure I'm not. Mariscal, in particular. She'll be overjoyed to see you again. And vice-versa, eh?\" He actually elbowed Nycolos with that, though only lightly and carefully avoiding the injury.\n\nNycolos felt his own smile go a bit wan. Obviously he was supposed to know precisely what this fool was blathering about. This may prove more difficult than I anticipated. Perhaps I should\u2014\n\nThe doors drifted open, an unfamiliar voice called his name, and the man who was currently Nycolos Anvarri had no more time to ponder the situation into which he'd gotten himself. Head held high, Smim and the strange knight each a pace or two behind him, he marched into the waiting throne room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The throne room, actually a grand hall, was precisely as Nycolos expected after what he'd seen of the city and of Kirresci culture. Great velvet curtains, trimmed in gold, overhung the walls between the hall's engaged columns. Several massive chandeliers cast their light across the chamber, growing ever brighter as they approached the thrones themselves. Of these there were two, seated upon a slightly raised dais beneath a canopy of royal purple. One was draped in black and, though well maintained, cleaned, and dusted, still somehow gave the impression that it had seen many years since its last use.\n\nIn the other sat His Majesty Hasyan III, King of Kirresc.\n\nEven seated he was an imposing man\u2014and must have been even more so in his youth\u2014as well as a figure of sharp contrasts. His skin was dark, darker even than Nycolos's own, almost obsidian; yet his hair and beard were an iron gray, his robes of office white trimmed in silver and gold. Even his thin crown was of silver, so that only his ermine-lined cloak of wine purple added any real color.\n\nDespite the empty throne beside him, the monarch was not alone atop the dais. Marshal Laszlan stood at his left, hand on the king's shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear. So softly and so closely did he speak that even Nycolos had no chance of listening in. A pair of knights armed with shields and broadswords rather than the more popular sabres, royal purple tabards and cloaks worn atop their mail, stood to either side of the two old men.\n\nMost of the throng that had congregated about Nycolos in the palace corridors were forbidden entrance, yet the throne room boasted crowd enough of its own. Nobles of greater or lesser rank had gathered by the dozens, as had various officers of the court, with more filtering in every moment. Most had assembled along the right-hand wall\u2014or the left, if one were the king or atop his dais. A very few, however, stood upon the lower step of the dais itself. These, Nycolos assumed, were His Majesty's advisors and helpers. A handful of others stood along the left wall, and these bore sufficient resemblance to the king that they must be his children or other blood relatives.\n\nThe blond-haired knight moved to join the bulk of the gathered souls on the right, and thanks to the greetings he exchanged with several, Nycolos finally overheard his name: Lord Kortlaus, not another mere knight but the baron of someplace called Urwath.\n\nOf higher rank than Nycolos himself, then, but the man had treated him as a friend and equal. Useful to know.\n\nThe knight Dame Zirresca was present as well, glaring his way with undisguised enmity and occasionally exchanging whispers with a young man beside her. And also in the crowd was a willowy, brightly-clad woman with coppery hair who also stared his way\u2014not with Zirresca's anger but something more positive yet equally intense.\n\nThe \"Mariscal\" Kortlaus had mentioned, no doubt.\n\n\"Humans are complicated and bewildering entities, Smim,\" he muttered to his servant.\n\n\"There are ways to make them much simpler, Master.\"\n\n\"Not when they outnumber us this greatly.\"\n\nA tall, gaunt man of middle years, stepped forward from his spot beside the dais and rang a small crystalline bell. The chime was hardly an overbearing sound, yet all conversation in the throne room ceased.\n\n\"His Majesty thanks you all for attending to his summons at such short notice,\" he decreed in a raspy but steady tone. \"We begin, as always, by seeking the blessings of the gods on our endeavor.\"\n\nA second man, dressed in an ecclesiastical cassock of deepest blue, advanced. Built like a barrel and sporting a long, thick mustache but otherwise shaved bald, he would have seemed more appropriate in a smith's apron than priestly raiment. Nonetheless he intoned a long prayer, beseeching the many deities of the Empyrean Choir\u2014with particular devotion to Inoleare the Guardian, patron of those who would rule with a just hand, and to Palanian the Judge\u2014for their favor.\n\nPerhaps because the priest spoke on behalf of not just the king but all who attended court, he acknowledged the other faiths in his prayer as well, naming the \"one God\" Deiumulos and the animistic Vinnkasti a time or two, but that his own devotion rested entirely with the Empyrean Choir was blatantly clear.\n\nNycolos, maintaining his fa\u00e7ade, refrained from rolling his eyes or sighing aloud. Humans and their gods\u2026\n\nFinally the priest's benediction wound to an end, the gathered courtiers had all bowed their heads and intoned their proper amens. He retreated to the dais and the first man advanced once more.\n\n\"Thank you, Prelate Domatir.\" The priest nodded in acknowledgment, and the speaker continued. \"Sir Nycolos Anvarri, please come forward.\"\n\nI'm already standing right here in the middle of the room, you protocol-obsessed primate!\n\nNycolos approached, tried to estimate the proper distance from what he knew of various human cultures, and\u2014hoping he wasn't about to prove himself utterly ignorant of details he should well know\u2014dropped to one knee before the throne.\n\n\"Rise, Baronet Nycolos.\" His Majesty's voice lacked the power of the marshal's own thunderous bellow, but was even deeper of timbre. It was remarkable, at least for a human.\n\n\"First,\" King Hasyan continued, \"we wish you to know how grateful we are that the gods have guided you home safely. Most of us had despaired of ever seeing you again.\" He smiled, then. \"Though not all. Madam Balmorra told us you would return. We should have had more faith.\"\n\nOne of those who stood beside the dais bowed her head. An ancient woman clad in stiff finery, she appeared to be made entirely of wrinkles and leather with a tuft of cotton hair. \"The stars never lie, Your Majesty. They told me Sir Nycolos had a part yet to play in Kirresc's tale.\" She turned then to Nycolos and smiled, cracked lips revealing a mouth that, belying her overall mien, still contained most of its teeth.\n\nNycolos, however, felt his shoulders tighten and his stomach twist. A court astrologer? That, he hadn't counted on. If her divinations were potent enough, might she discover his true nature?\n\nNothing in her expression suggested she saw anything but a battered young knight, returned from an arduous journey. He smiled in return and determined to keep close watch on this Balmorra.\n\n\"We have little doubt,\" the king said, \"that your tale is a wondrous one. Ballads will be sung for generations of the man who bested the dread Tzavalantzaval!\"\n\nSeveral cheers erupted throughout the assembly, Kortlaus's the loudest among them. Mariscal's hand twitched at the wrist as though eager to reach out.\n\nAt the same time, it took all Nycolos had not to double over before everyone and retch\u2014not merely for the pain of his wound, though it indeed flared in taunting mockery, but at the sound of that name spoken from human lips.\n\nThe name he'd been forced to abandon along with all, save Smim, that had been his.\n\nAs before, the man who'd first spoken rang his crystal bell, and the noise of the court subsided.\n\n\"Yet however great your deeds may have been,\" Hasyan told him, \"you will suffer the consequences of your actions! To run off on your own with property of the crown, against the orders of your commander and without permission of your liege? When the court had yet even to decide what to do about the rapacious beast? This behavior does not befit a knight of Kirresc, let alone one who would be Crown Marshal!\"\n\nAgain the crowd reacted. Kortlaus and several others muttered in discontent, and Mariscal frowned, deep and sorrowful. Zirresca, however, could not quite suppress a gloating smirk, and the nobleman beside her raised his brow as though studying some peculiar specimen.\n\n\"Rapacious beast\" stuck hard in Nycolos's craw. True he had only recently awakened from a slumber of decades, had hunted beyond the bounds of the Outermark to sate his hunger, but he hadn't taken that much livestock or that many travelers from within Kirresc's borders!\n\nHad he?\n\n\"Surely, Your Majesty,\" he risked saying, \"the dragon was a threat worthy of our attention?\"\n\n\"It was not your decision to make!\" Marshal Orban roared at him. \"As I told you then! Yes, we would probably have moved against the dragon, but when our attentions were not required elsewhere, and with a sufficient force! It was not your place to go haring off on your own, and that the gods' own luck was clearly with you doesn't excuse your behavior or impress me in any way!\"\n\nImpress? Nycolos abruptly felt the urge to scream. Had the bastard knight come after him, wounded him, destroyed life as he knew it for no greater cause than to make himself look good?\n\nHad he been able, he would have roasted and split the life from each and every human in the hall.\n\nIt appeared the marshal might have more to say, but Hasyan reached out and laid a comforting hand on the man's own fingers, which still rested on his king's shoulders. Orban leaned in and again the pair exchanged quick, close whispers.\n\n\"My apologies,\" Orban said when he straightened again, far more calmly, \"To His Majesty and Sir Nycolos both. I spoke out of turn, and some of these matters should be discussed in private.\"\n\n\"Begging His Majesty's pardon.\" It was the nobleman beside Dame Zirresca who spoke up. He was one of the few men present who went clean-shaven, and the light features of his bare face, as well as his red hair, suggested primarily Elgarrad descent. \"Might I address Sir Nycolos and the court?\"\n\nThe man with the crystal bell glanced at Hasyan, who nodded, then spoke. \"His Majesty recognizes Andarjin, Margrave of Vidirrad.\"\n\n\"I thank Your Majesty. My friends, apologies if I am leaping ahead of the conversation, as it were, but I've a concern that I think each and every one of you must share, once you think about it.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos, where is Wyrmtaker?\"\n\nAgain the wound in Nycolos's chest flared, as though the shard within heard the call of its name. \"Shattered,\" he admitted, \"in the struggle.\"\n\nThis time, Kortlaus and those others whom Nycolos took to be his friends and allies shared in the gasps and worried murmuring. Even Zirresca didn't seem happy at the thought, no matter that it would surely make her newly returned rival's position that much more precarious.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Andarjin said, palms upturned as though beseeching aid, \"ladies and gentlemen of the court, I find this to be of far greater import than Sir Nycolos's unauthorized journey, or even his victory, impressive as it is. Wyrmtaker was but recently rediscovered, confirmed as anything more than a wishful myth. And now, as suddenly, it is lost to us. Madam Balmorra? Rare as dragons may be, was it not you who prophesied that 'several' of the beasts would assault and bedevil our beloved kingdom in the coming years?\"\n\n\"I believe,\" the astrologer replied, \"that my words were 'make their mark on Kirresc,' not assault or bedevil.\"\n\nThe margrave waved a dismissive hand. \"Hardly a meaningful distinction where these creatures are concerned.\"\n\nI could come to dislike this Margrave Andarjin with surprisingly little effort, Nycolos fumed.\n\n\"Surely,\" the nobleman continued, \"we ought to be contemplating the potential danger in which we have all been placed by the baronet's\u2014error\u2014before we consider the lesser infractions of his disobedience?\"\n\nI foolishly took for granted the sheer convenience of setting someone aflame from great distances.\n\nBalmorra grunted, then said, \"Or perhaps we ought at least hear Sir Nycolos's tale before we take this any further?\"\n\n\"We agree,\" the king said before anyone might argue. \"Sir Nycolos, if you please\u2026\"\n\nNycolos took a deep breath, then began with, \"After an arduous but largely uneventful journey across the Outermark, I arrived at the mountains where I knew Tsavalantzaval made its home.\" He kept his expression neutral at the name, and at the use of \"it,\" for he thought it improbable that the humans either knew or cared about the dragon's gender. \"I began my climb in the foothills, where\u2014\"\n\n\"Apologies for interrupting,\" Andarjin said.\n\n\"And yet you'll do so anyway.\"\n\nThe margrave's face darkened. \"Aren't you skipping over something rather important?\"\n\n\"I took the sword,\" Nycolos said flatly. \"I've never denied that. Nobody here has forgotten it, so your efforts to remind them are a waste. I see no cause to go into detail for your amusement.\" Which is fortunate, since I haven't the first notion of how it was done.\n\nIgnoring the various shocked looks which suggested he had been rather more forward and impolite in his response than perhaps he ought, Nycolos continued his tale.\n\nFact and fiction melded into a single thread as he spoke, augmenting what he knew and was willing to tell with whatever sounded reasonable. And through it all, his memories flailed about his head like winged mountain fey, pounding at him with heavy fists.\n\nHe told them how Nycolos Anvarri had climbed the heights of the Outermark Mountains, wading with bloodied sword through multiple bands of cave-dwelling goblins and a small clutch of harpies, all agents of the great wyrm.\n\nHow I watched in growing rage through my crystalline scrying pool as this boastful insect dared to invade my home and slaughter my servants\u2026\n\nHe spoke of how he had bravely fought and cleverly wound his way through the many traps and wards, both mundane and mystical, that guarded the labyrinthine passageways of the dragon's lair.\n\nHow that damnable sword had somehow guided him past the traps of collapsing stones and hidden spikes, had dispelled the enchantments that would have incinerated the intruder in pillars of fire or summoned fists of stone from the cavern walls to crush the life from him\u2026\n\nHe told of finally finding Tzavalantzaval alone in a great cavern of monstrous stalactites and stalagmites, ledges and crevices, all told far larger than the entirety of Oztyerva.\n\nNot alone. He had physically restrained Smim and his other favored minions from attacking the knight in retaliation for the deaths of their goblin brethren, for he hadn't wished to lose his favorite servants, never imagining for even a second that he wouldn't soon be rebuilding his forces\u2026\n\nAnd he spoke of the great battle, blade against claw and fang, armor against scale. Great gouts of flame burst from the dragon's maw, but the massive Wyrmtaker had split the hellish torrent in two as readily as it had the goblins. The beast soared from above, knocking stalactites from the ceiling, but Nycolos had readily rolled aside, and without its breath of fire, the dragon had no choice but to return to the ground and to fight. Talons and jaws and tail whipped about him, but Wyrmtaker granted him the speed and strength to meet each and every attack, until finally, finally the mystic blade had pierced Tzavalantzaval's chest, seeking the creature's inhuman heart\u2014but how, in its death throes, the dragon's mightiest blow had shattered the blade that killed it into a blizzard of steel fragments, and badly wounded Nycolos himself.\n\nHe still felt the pain, with every breath and every motion, of that hideous blade. His thrashing, though fraught with agony and a growing fear, had not been blind. He had sought to knock Wyrmtaker aside, rip it from his flesh before it could kill him.\n\nHe had failed, for when the blade shattered, it left a sliver of itself behind, a sliver still containing the magics of the sword. Even as it burrowed through him, seeking his heart, he had lashed out again, determined at least not to die alone\u2014and without Wyrmtaker, Nycolos Anvarri had no means to stave off that blow. The knight had perished beneath Tzavalantzaval's claws, broken and torn asunder so that it was scarcely a slab of bone and meat that had smashed against the cavern wall.\n\nAnd he only half-remembered those last, desperate moments. Clinging to life, the sudden revelation that it was only a dragon's heart the sliver of Wyrmtaker would seek. That if, with the last of his strength, he summoned his sorceries to take on another form, as he occasionally had in decades past, he might survive long enough to find a means of removing the deadly splinter. And that, if he were to gain access to the best chirurgeons or even healing magics that humanity might provide, then the obvious form to take was lying, mangled but recognizable, before his swiftly dimming eyes\u2026\n\n\"Smim,\" he said, gesturing to the goblin, \"was one of the last survivors among Tzavalantzaval's servants. In gratitude for freeing him from his slavery, he helped me, bandaging my wounds and assisting me from the mountains. As he had nowhere else to go, I invited him to travel with me. The journey back across the Outermark was difficult, but\u2026 Certainly nothing worth telling in light of what came before.\n\n\"And so,\" he concluded, \"we stand here before you now.\"\n\nNot a word was spoken for long moments after he completed his recitation, though to his ears the hush was far from total. He heard the soft breaths of multiple scores of lungs, the shifting of arms and legs within armor, kaftans, and blouses. A great many faces stared upon him with pride and awe, and he was certain he was not the only one present to have noticed Mariscal's swift, almost triumphant grin.\n\nYet many of the nobles appeared moderately puzzled as well. No doubt his performance was imperfect; he must have omitted some style of speech, or failed to reproduce some mannerism, they were expecting. Well, so be it. He could perfect his guise only so far. Hopefully he and Smim would be gone long before any vague suspicions crystallized enough to become open questions.\n\nFor the third time, Orban and the king consulted in an intimate whisper. Afterward, the marshal spoke.\n\n\"Indeed a tale worthy of a minstrel's attention, as His Majesty suggested. And we have kept you more than long enough in the telling of it. Clearly you are fatigued, and\u2014with all respect to your, ah, companion's ministrations\u2014your wounds have gone untended for far too long. Retire to your chambers, Sir Nycolos. Rest yourself, while we summon a chirurgeon to attend you. Any further discussion can wait until you've recovered.\"\n\n\"Very kind of you, and His Majesty.\" Nycolos's thoughts twined and spun like agitated serpents\u2014not least over the fact that he hadn't the faintest notion where his chambers might be. \"I wonder if I might beg a favor of Your Majesty?\"\n\nHasyan nodded for him to continue.\n\n\"I've been away a long time, Your Majesty. If you won't miss his presence, I would request Lord Kortlaus accompany me, that I might speak with him about all that's transpired in my absence.\"\n\n\"By all means.\"\n\nNycolos bowed, as did Kortlaus, and both made for the door. Mariscal seemed determined to catch his attention, but Nycolos offered her no more than a restrained smile.\n\nEven as they departed, Smim tagging along behind, Nycolos heard the king dismissing many of the other courtiers and nobles as well. Clearly he wanted only his closest counselors present for whatever they would next discuss.\n\n\"You're sure you don't want to wait?\" Kortlaus asked. \"Greet, um, anyone more formally?\"\n\n\"No. Should I?\"\n\nThe baron examined him a moment, then shrugged. \"Not if you don't think so.\"\n\nDamn humans! Make some sense!\n\nHanging back a mere half step, allowing Kortlaus to take the lead without being obvious about it, Nycolos said, \"So, tell me of the past months.\"\n\nFor a time Kortlaus's report involved little more than gossip, social or political competition between people Nycolos didn't know, or minor border skirmishes he cared nothing about. At one point the tales turned to several young suitors pursuing Margravine Mariscal, and Kortlaus seemed to expect some particular reaction from him, but other than learning the young woman's rank, he couldn't begin to imagine what he was supposed to have gleaned from that information. Again his friend appeared bemused, but said nothing as to why.\n\nInstead, he focused the bulk of his attentions on studying his route, along this hallway, through those great doors, up that sweeping set of stairs. Although no longer in what he would dub the central keep, or whatever they called the main structure that was the heart of the palace, they had never stepped out of doors. The high, soaring corridors had taken him to what was partly another building, yet still a piece of Oztyerva proper. Nycolos knew enough of most human feudal and social systems to recognize that his title of \"baronet,\" though minor, indicated he owned a small parcel of land somewhere. Why he and many of the other nobles appeared to have quarters here in the palace, he was uncertain. For use when visiting? Did something about their duties require them to dwell here, managing their lands via proxy? He would have to find out, so as not to give himself away with some foolish faux pas, but it would require reading or careful eavesdropping. He could hardly come out and ask, could he?\n\nNone of which meant there weren't plenty of topics he could openly discuss. And as they turned a corner into a second-floor hallway in what had to be a far wing of the palace, very near one of the corner towers, he did just that.\n\n\"Dame Zirresca didn't seem especially overjoyed to see me,\" he said with a shallow grin.\n\nKortlaus snorted. \"She's been stomping about with her nose in the air for months. I think she'd all but convinced herself she'd already been declared Marshal Laszlan's successor. I wish I could have seen her reaction when she first got word you'd returned.\"\n\nIndeed, Nycolos had guessed that was the situation the instant he'd been referred to as a knight who \"would be Crown Marshal.\" Equally apparent was Margrave Andarjin's desire to discredit him, though whether that was solely because he and Zirresca were friends, perhaps allies, or whether there was more to it, Nycolos couldn't guess.\n\nShe'd said something else to him on the palace steps, though, something about Kortlaus not being a threat.\n\n\"What of you?\" he asked.\n\nThe baron's mail rattled as he shrugged. \"Zirresca's never seen me as much competition. I think she believes I lack ambition, that my campaign for Crown Marshal is something I simply feel I'm due as the highest ranked of the three of us.\n\n\"I'm truly glad you're back, Nycos,\" he added with a broad grin, \"but I still intend to be the one to prove her wrong.\"\n\nAnd more power to you. I intend not to be here.\n\nWhat he said was, \"We'll see, won't we? Assuming His Majesty and Marshal Laszlan don't forbid it.\"\n\n\"Oh, they won't. You'll be chastised, given some punishment or other, but this is too important not to let our best compete for it. Especially if the rumors that Ktho Delios is mobilizing again have any truth to them\u2026\" He paused, chewing on either his lip or his mustache; from his half-pace behind, Nycolos couldn't quite tell.\n\n\"Nycos,\" Kortlaus said, far more seriously, \"I don't know what your situation is with the Margravine Mariscal, why you haven't wanted to see her. But your position is a bit precarious just now. Leaving personal matters aside, you can't afford to lose any of the nobility who support your campaign over mine or Zirresca's. And she's still your loudest advocate.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I won't.\" Damn. Again he was getting that odd, concerned look that could, with a gentle nudge, teeter over the edge into suspicion. \"Kortlaus, the truth is, my journey back from the Outermark Mountains was far rougher, and my wounds bothering me worse, than I implied. I've no intention of avoiding Mariscal, and I'll speak to her when I'm able, I just\u2026 need some time first.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" The baron was instantly solicitous, gazing at Nycolos with a compassion that actually startled him. He found himself wondering, without any notion whence the thought had come, if anyone had ever looked at him that way before.\n\n\"You\u2026\" Kortlaus hesitated, glancing behind. \"You truly trust the goblin?\"\n\n\"The goblin is well within earshot and has a perfectly good name\u2014\" Smim began irritably. Nycolos cut him off.\n\n\"I do. Completely.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Kortlaus turned. \"You, uh\u2026 Swim, was it?\"\n\n\"Smim, my Lord Curt-Louse.\"\n\nThe baron scowled, hard, but held his temper. \"Smim, then. If you have it in you, I ask you to remain awake tonight, watch over your lord as he rests. Zirresca, for all her fuming, would not resort to dishonorable tactics now that Nycos has returned, but I'm not entirely certain I can say the same for the Margrave Andarjin. I'm probably doing him a disservice, but just in case\u2026 It cannot hurt to be watchful.\"\n\n\"On that, if nothing else\" Smim said, \"we find ourselves in absolute agreement.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Zirresca leaned against the cold stone beside a bust of Hasyan I, her arms crossed tight over her chest, struggling not to scowl at every courtier, page, or fellow knight who passed her by. The small stream of humanity exiting the throne room faded to a trickle and still she waited. Finally she leaned in to glare through the doorway.\n\nAndarjin stood by the room's leftmost wall, engaged in animated conversation with a young woman. Her features were sharp, striking if not beautiful, and so traditionally noble that, along with her dark complexion, even a perfect stranger would have known her for a close relative of His Majesty.\n\nDenuel Jarta, palatine to Hasyan III, rang his crystalline bell, summoning the woman to the king's side, and Margrave Andarjin at last departed from both her presence and the throne room.\n\n\"Are you sure you don't want to spend a bit more time in there?\" Zirresca snapped as he emerged. \"I haven't quite expired of old age yet!\"\n\nAndarjin raised that brow of his. \"A bit testy are we?\"\n\n\"Oh, just a bit, perhaps!\" The knight forced herself to take a deep breath. \"Sorry, Arj.\"\n\nHe smiled, gestured, and they began to walk the corridors of Oztyerva. \"Concerned about Nycolos's return?\" he asked, keeping his voice low.\n\n\"Shouldn't I be? Marshal Laszlan shouldn't be stepping down for a couple of years, yet. Plenty of time for Nycolos to recover from whatever setback his asinine escapade costs him! Gods almighty, Arj, he killed a dragon! That's going to overshadow whatever rules he might have broken, or whatever coarse company he's chosen to keep!\"\n\n\"Possibly. You're still the better candidate, Zirresca. And whatever time he has, so do you. We'll prove it to everyone.\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\" Her scowl was back, now directed inward. \"I reacted poorly to news of his return. My behavior on the steps was\u2026 unbecoming.\"\n\n\"Since when\u2026\" Andarjin held the rest of that thought while they split apart to hug opposite walls, allowing a group of oblivious and overly perfumed courtiers to pass between them, gossiping and giggling and nearly suffocating all who drew near, before coming together once more. \"Gods, what a horrid stench! Anyway, since when do you care what Nycolos thinks of your behavior?\"\n\n\"I care what I think of my behavior. Besides, we were in public.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but\u2014\"\n\n\"What of Her Highness?\" Zirresca asked, unwilling to speak any further of her own embarrassment. \"Was she able to tell you anything of use?\"\n\n\"Not particularly,\" the margrave replied, going along with the topic change. \"She was fairly certain her father wanted to further discuss Nycolos's return and what it entails, but then, that was hardly a surprise.\" He smiled again, a mirror to his companion's frown. \"Don't fret, Zirresca. Princess Firillia still supports everything we're trying to accomplish. If there's a word spoken in that council that we need to know, she'll tell me.\n\n\"In the interim,\" he added, halting at an intersection leading to different wings of Oztyerva, \"I should go pen a letter to mother. I'm quite sure one of her agents here in the palace will let her know of Nycolos's return, but it would be inconsiderate of me not to inform her anyway.\"\n\n\"Well, we can't have that,\" Zirresca said, rather than any of the dozen questions she'd have preferred to ask\u2014and which she knew Andarjin would never answer. Her Grace Pirosa, Archduchess of Vidirrad, ruled the largest of Kirresc's provinces and was, without doubt or competition, the most powerful and influential noble in the kingdom beside Hasyan himself. The knight often wondered just how much her friend's mother knew of her son's schemes and intentions, or whether she would approve if she did.\n\nAnd Zirresca was just honest enough with herself to wonder, as Andarjin offered her a final wave and wandered off to his own chambers, if she refrained from asking because she knew the margrave wouldn't respond\u2014or because she was afraid she wouldn't like the answer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Nycolos sat high in the stands alongside one of the many open fields that made up the back half of Oztyerva's grounds. He was clean for the first time in months and clad in genuine finery for\u2026 well, if one discounted natural scales, the first time in his very long life. Yet he radiated a cold hostility despite those pleasures, or the warming rays of the mid-morning sun. The many melees and jousts below, training for knights, palace guards, and even Prince Elias, scarcely registered in his mind. He was too preoccupied reliving recent events.\n\nThe remainder of last night, after Kortlaus had guided him to his chambers, had not gone well for him.\n\nNycolos had thought, when he first laid eyes upon his quarters, that this might prove the first truly comfortable night he'd spent since adopting this weak and ungainly body. As the bearer of a noble title, however minor, he was apparently entitled to a modicum of luxury. The canopied bed was decadently soft, the full wardrobe boasted every manner of outfit, and the dresser provided a mirror, a basin of clean water, and various toiletries and brushes in silver or ivory. The table bore a platter of fresh fruits, pungent cheeses, and cold meats, as well as a decanter of rich wine. A brass tub occupied one of the suite's several side rooms; it had already been filled, slowly warming over a layer of coals.\n\nIt was the merest pittance compared to what had once been his, what he deserved, but after the past weeks it was so inviting, Nycolos couldn't decide what to indulge in first.\n\nAnd he had swiftly come to understand that things were not to go so smoothly as he might have preferred.\n\nSmim, though proper and deferential as ever, had been irritable and unwilling to speak much. His master had finally wormed out of him that he was upset over the detail and apparent glee with which Nycolos had, during his recitation to the court, described the knight's slaughter of Smim's fellow goblins. The argument that this was the way a real human would have told the tale, oddly enough, did nothing to assuage Smim's ire.\n\nThen, in the midst of that argument, and only just before Nycolos grew aggravated enough to order the goblin to move past it, had come a tentative knock upon the chamber door. Where he had anticipated the chirurgeon, however, he was faced instead with a small team of servants, maids and valets who all but swarmed him under as they poured into the room. His memory must be tricking him, but he swore their presence had made his chamber louder last night than the practice field was today.\n\nTired, uncertain as to custom and propriety, Nycolos had found himself efficiently stripped naked and herded into the tub. His initial instinct was to lash out, to fight, but they obviously expected him to accept, even relish, such treatment. So, though he found the entire notion demeaning, he reluctantly acquiesced. Once he was submerged, a trio of servants washed and scrubbed and combed until he was certain he must glisten like a new bronze statue while the rest went about tidying the chamber and absconding with the dust-encrusted outfit in which he'd traveled.\n\nPained by his injury, irritated at Smim and the fussing of the servants, and otherwise generally bewildered, Nycolos didn't really pay much notice to the procedure, or to the experience of being bathed by strangers. In retrospect, he could scarcely recall a moment of it, and it hadn't even occurred to him until later to wonder if, as a human, he was supposed to be somehow embarrassed by his nudity.\n\nOnly as he was being toweled dry by servants wielding soft and fluffy cloths did a new knock at the door signal the arrival of the chirurgeon: a straight-backed scarecrow of a fellow, clad in a stiff, dark tunic that buttoned up to his chin. Nycolos wondered how the man didn't find it ludicrously confining.\n\nTo him, as he had to no other, Nycolos admitted that a sliver of the weapon remained within his wound. The chirurgeon harumphed, and grumphed, and gave him a careful examination, poking and prodding at his chest until Nycolos nearly screamed in agony and had to restrain himself from taking the man's head clean off that reinforced collar.\n\nAnd then, after all the study, all the poking about, all the pain, the chirurgeon's answer had been most unsatisfying. With the sliver so deep, he would need to consult with other healers, perhaps even seek sorcerous assistance, before it could possibly be removed, the wound properly treated. In the interim, take these herbs with every meal, keep the injury slathered in a salve made of those, and try not to engage in too much physical exertion. At which point, apparently in no way ashamed of his performance or lack of genuine answers, the man departed as pompously as he'd arrived.\n\nHad he dared resume his proper form, Nycolos would have eaten him. Perhaps he still might.\n\nThen, long after the servants departed and Nycolos finally began to stumble and grope his way toward slumber, had come yet another fist upon his door. He'd very nearly chosen to disregard it, but Smim answered before he could order him not to.\n\nThe young boy beyond, a page of some sort, had\u2014after a momentary start, and fighting the urge to flee from the goblin\u2014delivered a note from the Margravine Mariscal. It bore, in a flowery hand, a request that Nycolos meet for a brief conversation in \"their garden, beneath the boughs of the quince trees.\"\n\nDespite Kortlaus's earlier admonition regarding his supporters among the court, Nycolos ignored it. He wouldn't be here long enough to need any such support, and he was too fatigued to worry about maintaining appearances, or to care what sort of unimportant, human concerns anyone else wished to burden him with.\n\nClosing the door in the page's face, he'd fallen into the bed and allowed the yielding, nigh-gelatinous mattress to engulf him\u2026\n\nThe clash of blades dragged him from his reverie. On one end of the field, Kortlaus and two of his companions held a small mound of dirt against an assaulting force of four or five times their number. All were armed with dulled practice blades, primarily sabres and spears. Dozens of yards and several other faux skirmishes distant, Dame Zirresca dueled one on one with Prince Elias, oldest child and heir apparent of His Majesty, Hasyan III. The young man was a veritable giant, topping his father's own imposing height by nearly half a foot, yet his dark skin glistened with a sheen of sweat and, though clearly skilled, he was hard-pressed to defend himself against the far more experienced knight.\n\nEach wielded a szandzsya, or as they were known beyond these borders, a Kirresci sabre-spear. A haft of two feet was topped by a gently curved blade of roughly equal length, sharpened on the crescent's inner edge. Although awkward in untrained hands, the szandzsya was a brutally effective weapon, cleaving armor and bone, crushing helms, or punching through mail\u2014and that merely on foot. When swung from the back of a galloping charger, it was a veritable scythe of humanity.\n\nZirresca spun hers in a sword-like grip, both hands grasping the weapon near the blade, while Elias seemed to prefer a broader stance, fists further apart in a more traditional spear-fighter's hold. Nycolos, observing, found himself appreciating the weapon for its claw-like shape, to the extent he could bring himself to care.\n\n\"See, Master? Right there.\" Smim pointed a gnarled finger and Nycolos almost growled\u2014or perhaps whimpered. The goblin had maintained a running commentary of the duels and skirmishes since they'd first sat down, and the wyrm-in-human-guise had kindled the faint spark of hope that Smim had finally wound down.\n\n\"This is precisely what I've been speaking of,\" Smim continued, clearly not having wound down at all. \"She took the prince's legs out from under him and now she's just standing back, waiting for him to rise! What sort of combat lesson does that teach?\"\n\n\"Human knights prefer to think of themselves as honorable warriors, Smim. Besides, I don't believe she'd do any such thing in a genuine battle. This is practice, after all, and he outranks her.\"\n\n\"Bah. Do you know what goblins call 'honorable' combatants, Master? We call them\u2014\"\n\n\"Food,\" both said in unison. \"Yes,\" Nycolos continued alone. \"I know.\"\n\n\"Even if this is training, even if the boy\u2014\"\n\n\"He's young, Smim, but he's a grown man.\"\n\n\"If you say so, Master. Even if the young man understands he shouldn't behave this way in a real fight, if all he's ever seen is his teachers pause to allow him to rise, who's to say he won't hesitate when the moment comes? This is foolish, the lot of it. And their armor? It\u2014\"\n\n\"You spent almost an hour pointing out the flaws in their armor, Smim. I don't actually need to hear it again.\"\n\n\"My point is,\" the goblin huffed, \"I can think of a dozen ways to kill any one of these 'warriors.' Goblin children would never be instructed so poorly.\"\n\n\"Fewer than half of goblin children make it past the age of seven.\"\n\n\"Yes, but those of us who do know how to survive,\" Smim declared proudly.\n\nWell, Nycolos couldn't argue with that.\n\n\"The humans can't be so incompetent,\" he pointed out, pausing to let a particularly loud flurry of steel on steel come to an end. \"It only took one of them to kill me.\"\n\n\"Magic, Master. It was the power and protection of that damned sword, nothing to do with the wielder. Doesn't count.\"\n\nMy chest feels as though it counts quite solidly.\n\n\"And besides, you're not dead.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. I'm not yet certain this isn't just as\u2014\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos?\"\n\nHe turned and rose, bowing\u2014as gallantly as he knew how\u2014to the woman approaching across the stands. She wore flowing yellows and reds, the offspring of flower and flame, and peered at him from over a closed and folded fan which she tapped idly against her chin.\n\n\"My Lady Mariscal.\" He greeted her with a politeness he didn't feel. He might be unwilling to go out of his way to shore up friendships and alliances he wouldn't be needing, but no sense in deliberately damaging them, either.\n\nShe nodded, curt and unhappy. \"I'm surprised to find you lazing about in the stands. You're not practicing with the others?\"\n\n\"Chirurgeons orders, I'm afraid. I'm not to overly exert myself.\"\n\n\"I see.\" She seemed to be awaiting something. When it wasn't forthcoming, she cast a meaningful gaze, first at the lady-in-waiting she'd left some paces back\u2014near enough for propriety's sake, far enough that she couldn't readily overhear their conversation\u2014and then, with a faint moue, at the goblin.\n\nAh. \"Smim?\"\n\n\"Of course, Master. I'll just go somewhere else and be\u2026 somewhere else.\"\n\n\"Why don't you go keep the margravine's handmaiden company? We'd not want her to get lonely.\"\n\nSmim smirked and scampered past the new arrival. The servant was professional and dignified enough not to flee, but she visibly recoiled and her Eep! was probably audible on the practice field below, despite the grunts and cries and the clash of blades.\n\n\"That is an unpleasant little creature,\" Mariscal sniffed once he was gone.\n\n\"Smim's not so bad. I wouldn't be here without him.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\" The tapping of the folded fan increased to match the beating of a nervous heart, then ceased. \"Have I given you some manner of offense, baronet?\"\n\n\"Uh, no, My Lady?\"\n\n\"I was ecstatic to hear that you'd returned alive. I was so eager to see you.\"\n\n\"I, um.\" Nycolos hadn't the faintest idea why, but his instincts screamed that he trod the very precipice of dangerous territory. \"And I you, of course.\"\n\n\"Then why are you acting this way?\"\n\nIt wasn't a shout; the margravine was far too refined and self-possessed for that. Yet it clearly wanted to be.\n\n\"I\u2026?\"\n\n\"Surely you might have greeted me at court? Properly, chastely, as a peer and a friend, even if that's not\u2014if nothing more?\"\n\n\"I was\u2026 trying to stand before His Majesty and the others, to answer their questions. My fatigue, and my injuries\u2014\"\n\n\"Didn't stop you from insulting Margrave Andarjin, or spinning quite a lengthy tale, or interrogating Lord Kortlaus on the walk back to your chambers.\"\n\nNycolos could only manage a helpless shrug.\n\n\"And then later? My note?\"\n\n\"I told you, Lady Mariscal. Exhaustion. Discomfort. I'd just returned from\u2014\"\n\n\"You could not even spare one moment? For me?\"\n\nFists clenched now of their own accord. Nycolos still failed to understand what he might conceivably have done wrong. Was the woman insane? \"Your message said nothing of this meeting being a matter of any urgency or importance\u2014\"\n\n\"It wasn't.\" Had she stood any nearer to him, he felt her tone would have frozen the humors in his body quite solid.\n\n\"Then why are you so troubled? We're both here, so talk to me now! Tell me what it is you wanted to say.\" He gestured down at the bench on which he'd earlier sat.\n\n\"I'm quite sure,\" she said, each word coated in frost, \"that I cannot for the life of me recall what that might have been.\" She pivoted on her heel with an almost military precision and marched back across the stands, sparing him not one more word or glance. Her lady-in-waiting gratefully rushed to follow, leaving a smugly smirking Smim behind.\n\n\"What was that about, Master?\" the goblin asked as he returned to Nycolos's side.\n\n\"I haven't the faintest\u2014\"\n\n\"Nycos!\" Kortlaus appeared at the base of the stands, glaring upward in equal parts amusement and aggravation. \"What in the name of Vizret's hell was that?\"\n\n\"My, what an original question,\" Smim muttered.\n\n\"I'm sure,\" Nycolos said, dismissive and impatient, \"that I've no idea what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Oh, spare me. Are you trying to drive her away?\"\n\nWould doing so negate the need for any more of these inane conversations? \"Not especially so.\"\n\n\"Then stop behaving like a donkey's arse and talk to the woman as if you value her a little more than your chamber pot!\"\n\n\"I\u2026 What?\"\n\n\"Oh, gods help him.\" Kortlaus's pious glance at the heavens neatly obscured from Nycolos his actual expression. \"Get down here and grab a blade, you lackwit.\"\n\n\"I told you, the chirurgeon\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. I'll go easy on you.\" Then, in a stage whisper, \"I'll make you look good before Mariscal's out of sight.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Nycolos's words were stiff as his spine. \"That will not be necessary.\"\n\n\"Are you quite certain that injury was to your chest and not your head?\"\n\n\"Leave the poor man be, Lord Kortlaus,\" Zirresca mocked from behind, where she'd stepped aside from her princely sparring partner. \"Clearly whatever befell poor Nycolos in the Outermark has stripped him of any courage he possessed. Better that we've learned of it now than in an actual battle.\"\n\n\"Listen here, Nycos is injured and he's suffered through\u2014\"\n\nBut Nycolos was leaning forward over the bench as through straining against a leash.\n\n\"Master, no!\" Smim hissed.\n\n\"I'll be fine, Smim.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's what concerns me.\"\n\nAlthough the unhealing wound did indeed pain him, it was not the real reason Nycolos had avoided joining the others on the field that day. No, he'd meant to hide his complete ignorance of human styles and expertise in combat. That he could defeat any one of these foolish creatures one on one, even in this feeble body, he had no doubt\u2014but it wouldn't be through besting them at their own arts.\n\nHis pride had been poked and scratched all morning, however: by his bitterness over his current state, his ignorance and defensiveness in the face of Margravine Mariscal's ire, and by the ridicule\u2014however friendly\u2014in Kortlaus's questioning and teasing. He allowed them to get away with such things, barely, to maintain his fa\u00e7ade and because these were people whose friendship he might need until he was cured.\n\nBut Dame Zirresca? Who loathed him, and whom he was swiftly learning to despise in turn? He would take no more of that! If he revealed the limits of his martial knowledge here, what of it? What would they do? At worst they would assume his physical and mental state to be even more damaged than they had believed.\n\n\"Enough, Zirresca! You'll swallow those words, and maybe a blade along with them!\"\n\nThe other knight recoiled, startled, then snarled. \"Come, then!\" She tossed her szandzsya end over end, tumbling over the stands. Nycolos snatched it out of the air with blinding speed.\n\nAs he bounded down the steps, Zirresca turned to Prince Elias. \"May I, Your Highness?\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026\" He hesitated, moths of doubt fluttering about his features. \"I don't know about this, Dame Zirresca. I'm not so sure this is a good\u2014\"\n\n\"Nobody's going to be harmed too severely, Your Highness,\" she assured him. \"Probably.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Already a crowd of soldiers and pages had gathered round, eager for the coming display, and Nycolos had reached the base of the stands. With obvious reluctance, the prince handed over his own weapon.\n\nIt was right about then, as Zirresca twisted to face him, that Nycolos registered the true nature of the foreign weapon he clutched. These were not the dulled, heavy practice blades Kortlaus and his partners had been using. Zirresca and Prince Elias had been training with live, razor-edged steel.\n\n\"First blood, then?\" Kortlaus shouted, clearly desperate to at least put some half-sane restrictions on what was about to happen.\n\n\"Fine by me!\" Zirresca agreed. Nycolos nodded, grunting.\n\nThey slammed together with twin screams.\n\nZirresca retreated before the sheer force of Nycolos's charge. Not with the controlled steps of any formal duel but at a near run, the combatants moved out into the field's center, their audience desperately stepping aside to clear them a path. His blade flashed in blinding arcs, driven not by skill but by an impossible, inhuman strength. If he could end this quickly, nobody should have opportunity to spot the deficiencies in his style.\n\nShe was having none of it. Her szandzsya spun almost like a baton in her two-fisted grip, constantly parrying even the fastest of Nycolos's strikes with either the blade or the thick haft. Where she couldn't deflect she pivoted away, sidestepping, always retreating. Whether or not she found her opponent's ferocity and near savage assault suspicious, she'd adapted to it instantly, allowing him to tire himself out while she avoided his clumsy, albeit powerful, blows.\n\nYet he wasn't tiring, would not tire for a good while. Even as he came at her Nycolos grinned, glorying in the power that was, if far less than he once boasted, still greater than she could ever expect. He hacked and thrust, utterly without finesse, driving her back, always back\u2026\n\nZirresca must have recognized that he wasn't about to falter, that fatigue was not an ally on which she could rely. She broke the pattern of her retreat in midstep, lashing out with a low kick. Against a normal opponent, it might well have broken an ankle. Against Nycolos, it produced a jolt of pain and set him staggering, off-balance.\n\nHer own sabre-spear whistled in a short arc that would have left an ugly gash across his chest. Nycolos hurled himself away, desperate to avoid the oncoming blade, and found himself landing hard on his back, nostrils filled with the scent of crushed grass, staring up at the bright blue sky.\n\nStill Zirresca attacked, spinning, weapon sweeping around her and then upward, her first strike flowing smoothly into a second. Nycolos saw the szandzsya rise over him and begin its downward arc. Pushing with both heels, he slid himself across the grass and rolled to his feet.\n\nHis opponent's blade had plowed a furrow into the earth where he'd lain a heartbeat earlier. Zirresca retreated a step, shaking soil from the weapon, studying him with a narrowed gaze. He tried to mimic her earlier motion, spinning the szandzsya in both fists, but he knew he must appear awkward and slow in comparison. Indeed, he could hear puzzled mutters among the onlookers, wondering at his apparent ineptitude.\n\nHis face warmed as his embarrassment grew, though he was scarcely aware of it and would wonder only later what the sensation meant, if it was another human peculiarity. In the moment, he knew only that he had made himself look the fool, had potentially revealed an element of his deception, and had accomplished nothing in exchange.\n\nNow Zirresca came at him and it was he who retreated. Her szandzsya struck first from one side then another, and even where he avoided the blade the heavy wooden shaft often knocked him staggering. He couldn't even pretend any longer, couldn't attempt to mimic what little technique he'd seen. He augmented his human form, allowing the muscles beneath the flesh to grow as swift and as strong as he could without becoming visibly unnatural, and even then it was only with the greatest effort that he parried Zirresca's attacks. Had it been a matter of pure skill, had he been as limited as a human, the struggle would be long over.\n\nSo be it. With what little corner of his attentions he could yet spare, he concentrated his innate magics on the skin he wore, hardening it right to the very edge of where it would take on inhuman hues or the texture of scale.\n\nAnd not a moment too soon. Zirresca's weapon ended its spin in an underhand grip, held flat against her arm. She cross-stepped past him, twisting her body, dragging the inner curve of the szandzsya across his ribs and his left arm. She halted, facing him, butt of her sabre-spear planted, forcing her quickened breathing to slow, presumably so that she might accept his concession or perhaps lightly mock his clumsy efforts and his defeat\u2026\n\nNycolos managed not to laugh aloud, but couldn't suppress a nasty grin, at the expression on her face when she saw she'd drawn no blood.\n\nHis first blow, unexpected and oh, so swift, struck the weapon on which she leaned, knocking it aside and staggering her. He stepped in and delivered a swift punch to her midsection, doubling her over, and then yanked her szandzsya completely away with that unoccupied hand. A final blow, again with the butt end of his sabre-spear, sent the knight flying. She landed hard, hissing in pain, hand rising to what must surely have been a bruised if not fractured collarbone.\n\nStanding over her, Nycolos tossed aside his own weapon. With hers, he deliberately, even contemptuously, reached down and poked just the very tip of the blade against her jaw, drawing a tiny squiggle of blood across the faded scar on her chin.\n\n\"I believe this means I win,\" he told her.\n\nHer glower of overwhelming hatred would have done one of his own kind, his true kind, proud. \"I hit you. I know I did!\"\n\nHe lifted an arm to reveal the gash in kaftan and tunic but not skin. \"Clearly you were mistaken. Perhaps you need more practice.\"\n\n\"You son of a\u2014!\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos Anvarri!\"\n\nHe looked up, only noticing that every man and woman present had stared at him in various degrees of bewilderment and dismay\u2014perhaps even disdain\u2014now that they were looking away toward the source of that shout. He, in turn, followed their gaze, and frowned.\n\nWhere the hell had he come from?\n\nMarshal Laszlan stomped across the field, heavy-footed, as though the grass had recently offended his mother. His face bore a ruddy tint beneath his bristling beard.\n\n\"Is this the man I've trained for years? The man I permitted to vie for my office? I am ashamed of you, Sir Nycolos, and so should you be!\"\n\nThe szandzsya creaked, wood threatening to split, in his grip. \"Marshal\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I don't want to hear it right now. I've seen pages just come of age fight with more proper form than you've just displayed here. And your behavior! I've no idea how you could possibly have bested Dame Zirresca, incompetently as you wielded that weapon\u2026\"\n\nThe woman, clambering to her feet with the assistance of several friends and Prince Elias himself, growled low in her throat.\n\n\"\u2026but to show such disdain for a fallen opponent\u2014\"\n\n\"So,\" Nycolos interrupted, that act itself drawing gritted teeth from Orban and gasps from several of the others, Kortlaus included, \"it's only permissible to show such disdain for an opponent before battle? Convenient that you arrived late enough to miss the insults she cast in my teeth before blades entered into it.\"\n\nJaws dropped and eyes widened. No one could believe what they were hearing from him. Although he was quite certain the act was rude in and of itself, Nycolos departed without awaiting further word or permission from the Crown Marshal, determined to be gone before he could make his situation more dire still.\n\nSmim fell in behind him, but while Nycolos could sense, could literally smell, the disapproval radiating from his smaller servant, the goblin wisely chose to keep his own counsel for a change."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "As a knight of the realm and gentry in residence at Oztyerva Palace, Nycolos was entitled\u2014and, more often than not, expected\u2014to dine with His Majesty, along with a veritable throng of other nobles, courtiers, advisors, favored guests, and so forth. (It was an invitation that, as had been made politely but explicitly clear, did not extend to his goblin retainer.) On his first night back, nobody had looked for him to attend, not as exhausted as he had clearly been. Tonight, however, was another story.\n\nA story that could have most kindly been dubbed a farce, and more accurately a disaster.\n\nThe dining hall was the same carpeted, buttressed, and portrait-adorned stone as the bulk of the palace, and occupied primarily by an enormous table of finest wood.\n\nNo, tables, plural. One, smaller and standing upon a slightly raised floor, seated the king himself, his offspring, and his closest advisors and honored guests. The other, lower and much, much longer, was for everyone else, seated in strict descending order of rank, from nearest the royal family to farthest.\n\nNycolos, having squeezed himself into dark and stiff-necked formalwear that nearly made him claustrophobic, had deliberately arrived as late as he could without giving offense. The near breach of propriety drew some disapproval, but far less attention than he might have attracted had he been unable to find his proper seat. As everyone else had already arrived, however, it was simple enough to estimate roughly where he would fall, as a baronet, and then choose appropriate open setting.\n\nHe planted himself upon well-cushioned velvet, unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar as the others had done. It was the last thing he managed to do wholly right that evening.\n\nDomatir Matyas, the court prelate, rose to speak a blessing over the meal, over His Majesty and his guests, just as he'd done over the court gathering of the previous day. Thankfully for Nycolos's swiftly waning patience, this prayer was shorter than the prior.\n\nThen the servants brought out the first course, an array of pickled fish and hen's eggs served on a bed of vegetables so heavily spiced one could practically taste them from the kitchen. The dishes were wood, far more practical than the crystal, ceramic, or precious metal one might expect in a royal dining hall, though the silver utensils and glass goblets more than made up for it. The table manners and customs, too, were a peculiar combination of fine and functional; Kirresc's was a culture that celebrated its joy in good food and drink, yet also bound itself in custom. Noble etiquette was, perhaps, less convoluted than in some other nations, but what rules there were must be observed in every detail.\n\nAnd it was here that Nycolos made his first blunder. Oh, not with his manners in and of themselves. He was quite careful to study the men and women about him, to note their every move. He learned swiftly enough that knife and fork never switched hands, that both must be laid down before a drink was lifted to his lips, that hands never dipped below the table nor elbows rested atop it, that platters were passed always with the right hand, that the silverware was laid thus to indicate one was finished with his dish but that way if one awaited a second helping, that one always requested a dish or seasoning from a servant even if one's fellow guests could easily pass it along, and so on and so forth.\n\nIrritating, particularly to one who had once been accustomed to eating whole cattle and the equivalent as a cure for peckishness, but hardly impenetrable. No, his error was in being caught staring at those around him. Some flinched away, some boldly returned his examination, but all seemed to take it as tacit permission to openly discuss amongst themselves what had already been on their minds: Namely, the events of that morning and Nycolos's mental and physical state in general. Their conversations, ranging from hushed whisper to arrogant proclamation, rang out over the clatter of dinnerware.\n\nThe rampant supposition grew wilder and, in its own way, more entertaining as the appetizer course concluded, the dishes and scraps removed and replaced with vinegar-drenched salads by the serving staff's well-practiced sleight of hand. Nycolos had taken a bad head injury, some theorized, one that had transformed his entire personality. He suffered from the dragon's dying curse. The goblin was a tribal shaman and held the knight in thrall with foul witchcrafts. Tivador Valacos\u2014one of the youngest knights in attendance and son of Amisco Valacos, Judge Royal of Kirresc\u2014even suggested to his dinner companion, in a low murmur, that perhaps Tzavalantzaval had not been slain at all, and that Nycolos either labored under the wyrm's evil influence or was burdened by the guilt of his lies and disgrace.\n\nThat was one theory that, however inaccurate, Nycolos had to find some means of quieting. He wanted nobody dwelling on the possibility of the dragon's survival.\n\nNot that he could find any willing conversationalists with whom he might readily change the topic. Kortlaus seemed to be having difficulty meeting his gaze, and reddened anew each time he tried, clearly embarrassed for his friend and utterly uncertain of what, if anything, he might do about it. Margravine Mariscal wouldn't even try, refusing to so much as glance his way, maintaining polite interest in her neighbors' chatter while absently chasing errant cabbage around her plate with a fork that hadn't touched her lips that evening. Zirresca, on the other hand, refused to look anywhere but his direction, clenching her knife so hard her arm trembled, glaring with hatred hot enough to overcook any dish carelessly set between them.\n\nEven the royal table provided no succor, no relief from the constant scrutiny. Orban whispered, as usual, in His Majesty's ear, and while Nycolos could hear nothing of the conversation, he didn't think it arrogant to assume he might be its subject. Hasyan's other friends and counselors watched either Nycolos or their liege himself, and Princess Firillia studied the newly returned knight with a frank and oddly contemplative pity. Nycolos had to set down the goblet he'd just lifted, filled with a sour cherry wine, lest it shatter in his fist.\n\nOnly Prince Elias, of them all, seemed largely oblivious to the ubiquitous disquiet, or at least to the source of that unease. On occasion he would raise his head, perhaps seeking to pinpoint a nagging wrongness, but otherwise remained contentedly focused on his meal.\n\nIt was between the salad and the main course\u2014a slow roasted and heavily flavored stew of mutton, by the aromas wafting from the kitchen\u2014that Nycolos's well of patience ran dry and he made his second error of the evening.\n\n\"If I'd known I was to be the night's entertainment,\" he announced during a brief lull in the conversation around him, \"I'd have prepared a performance for you all. Juggling, or perhaps an amusing ditty.\"\n\nA few words choked off with quick gasps, the clatter of knives and forks laid down, and then silence save for the crackling and popping of the torches.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos,\" Denuel Jarta berated him from the king's table, \"this is unseemly.\"\n\nKortlaus rose with a scrape of chair legs. \"Begging your pardon, palatine, but has not the behavior of this entire gathering been unseemly tonight? Sir Nycolos deserves better than to be gossiped of this way.\"\n\nSeveral people voiced their assent, Mariscal\u2014albeit somewhat reluctantly\u2014included. A few others looked down at their plates, properly chastised. Prince Elias leaned over to Prelate Matyas, who sat beside him, and loudly whispered, \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Later, your Highness.\"\n\nMost of those at the lower table, however, seemed unapologetic. \"While I certainly intended no offense,\" young Tivador began, \"after his disgraceful behavior this morning, I hardly think Sir Nycolos has any right to expect\u2014\"\n\n\"No, my Lord Kortlaus is quite correct.\" Margrave Andarjin also stood, seeming oblivious to Tivador's shock\u2014and to his friend Zirresca's, who looked ready to strike him for defending the man who'd humiliated her. Andarjin bowed at the neck, first to the baron, then to Nycolos. \"Our behavior tonight, my behavior, has undeniably been inappropriate, even offensive, and for that I apologize.\n\n\"Indeed,\" he continued, turning in place to face each diner in turn, \"we owe Sir Nycolos a debt we can never repay. He set out a brave and faithful knight of the court, to rid Kirresc, and other nations of Galadras besides, of a great threat. That he obviously gave the best of himself in the execution of his duty\u2014his health, his honor, his dream of someday serving His Majesty in any greater capacity\u2014is a sacrifice that should be revered, not mocked. I thank you, Sir Nycolos, and I am certain that in this I am not alone.\"\n\nNycolos knew it would be yet another mistake to stack atop all the others, that it would only encourage further talk and speculation, but the other option was open bloodshed. Ignoring Andarjin's disingenuous smile, Zirresca's ill-concealed gloating, the helpless pain of Kortlaus and Mariscal, and the growing whispers of everyone else, he pushed back his chair, forced a \"With Your Majesty's permission\" through a portcullis of clenched teeth, and stalked from the dining hall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "\"Inhale. Good. Now hold that as long as you're able and for God's sake, try not to flinch.\"\n\nNycolos obeyed, swallowing a grunt of pain at the pressure that deep lungful of air put on his unhealed wound. A second helping of grunt followed the first as the woman, too, prodded at that tender spot.\n\nLady Ilkya resembled nothing so much as a tree struck by lightning. Tall, gaunt of frame, spindly of limb, dark of both complexion and demeanor. She had little patience for the foibles of those less intelligent than she, which she believed was almost everyone, and was almost as lacking in sympathy for the discomforts her patients endured. Nycolos found it a particularly galling attitude, not merely because of the pain he suffered beneath her ministrations, but because he'd been forced to wait in this damn nest of squabbling nobles and petty rivalries and\u2014and humans\u2014for almost a week before she arrived!\n\nBut she was also, Hasyan's chirurgeon had assured Nycolos upon summoning the knight to his own suite of chambers, which included his operating theater, the single greatest healer he had ever met, versed in methods both mundane and mystical.\n\nThat latter had sent a frisson of nerves through Nycolos. As she pressed her fingers around his wound, however, muttered invocations and slathered him with herbal and alchemical salves, then sniffed at the aromas they'd produced, he grew convinced that any mage-craft she knew was indeed limited to the medicinal arts, used solely to augment her own learned skills. Ilkya was no true sorceress or witch, and highly unlikely to sense that the body he wore, and which she now struggled to treat, was not originally his own.\n\nBesides, this was why he had come to Kirresc, why he had assumed the form of the man who had nearly slain him: to acquire just this treatment. For the promise of freedom, to have that cursed sliver of blade excised from his breast and be allowed to take on his true shape and his true name, he would risk, and endure, far worse. Even through the agony as her magics warmed and chilled the intruding steel, as she poked beneath the skin and deep into muscle with needles and probes, as the discharge of putrefaction burst from his flesh and dribbled in warm rivulets down his torso, he couldn't quite keep from smiling at what was to come.\n\nThen, as if she'd sensed his earlier worries, \"You don't happen to know any mighty sorcerers, do you?\"\n\nIt was a half-breathed mutter, one he wasn't certain he'd been meant to hear, but it set his mind to racing. Or perhaps, imagining a near future in which he'd returned to his old body and his old life, his thoughts had already been inclined toward memories of that life.\n\nOndoniram. Oh, Tzavalantzaval had met many a practitioner of the occult in his time\u2014human, fey, dragon, and other\u2014but none had possessed half Ondoniram's right to the title of wizard. The old man had been longer lived than some of Tzavalantzaval's own cousins, and potent enough to challenge the wyrm himself. Until Nycolos Anvarri and Wyrmtaker, no human had come so close to slaying Tzavalantzaval as Ondoniram once had.\n\nBut the ancient mage was long dead, and wouldn't likely have been inclined to help Nycolos now even had he not been.\n\nWhich train of thought, as a dog chasing its tail, finally circled back around to the start. With a sudden spike of fear, Nycolos voiced the question that should have been his very first thought. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\nThe old stick of a human stepped back, carefully wiping each of her tools clean with a wine-soaked rag, then placing them\u2014in their precise order, of course\u2014in the pockets of a deerskin case. \"I can treat your injury,\" she informed him. Her tone was haughty, matter of fact, yet she wouldn't quite meet his gaze. \"The infection should be gone within weeks, the pain greatly reduced, even absent more often than not. Your body will heal around the sliver, rendering it unlikely to cause you any further harm. Within months, I doubt you'll have cause to often recall it's even there.\"\n\n\"But\u2026?\" No. No, no, no, no, NO!\n\n\"But,\" she admitted with a long-suffering sigh, as though he were at fault for thwarting her, \"the fragment is too deeply embedded, too near your organs. Without magics far more precise and more potent than anything with which I'm familiar, it would be\u2026\"\n\nDon't you dare say it, you filthy, ignorant little primate! Don't you dare think it! Don't you dare!\n\n\"\u2026impossible to remove without killing you.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Sir Nycolos,\" though she didn't sound very sorry at all, save maybe to have found a challenge she couldn't best, \"but I'm afraid you're simply going to have to live with it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "In a distant wing of the palace, Andarjin of Vidirrad and Dame Zirresca lazed about a sitting room that was one small portion of the margrave's vast suite. As heir apparent to the greatest duchy in the kingdom, currently dwelling within Oztyerva to learn the ins and outs of his Majesty's court\u2014as was traditional for all firstborn sons and daughters of Kirresc's high nobles to do for several years\u2014he was entitled to a standard of living not much below that of the royal family themselves. Servants came and went, ensuring that the decanter of fine drink on the table remained no less than half full, and satisfying the dictates of propriety by never leaving their young lord and his female guest alone together.\n\nThey were, however, well trained to remain out of earshot when not needed, and to make a point of never hearing a word spoken even when they could have. Not that either Andarjin or Zirresca had spoken at all in minutes.\n\n\"Come on, now,\" the margrave finally said after a particularly large sip of the pear brandy they currently enjoyed. \"You know I'd not offend you for the world, Zirresca, but this sulking isn't remotely your best look.\"\n\n\"You weren't there, Arj!\" she snarled, twisting the goblet between two fingertips. \"You didn't see it!\"\n\n\"No, but seeing as how I've heard the tale nigh unto a dozen times now\u2026\"\n\n\"I want him destroyed! I want him cowed! Beaten! I want\u2014!\"\n\nYes, yes, he'd heard that a dozen times, too. \"Zirresca,\" he said with far more patience than he felt, \"Nycolos isn't a threat. He's not even an obstacle. You want him destroyed? He's doing a magnificent job accomplishing that on his own, wouldn't you say?\" He took another swig. \"You should try actually drinking some of this, you know, instead of just spinning it about. It's an excellent vintage.\"\n\nThe knight's grunt was unamused.\n\n\"You need to calm yourself,\" he continued more seriously. \"Prove yourself more patient than he. He really is demolishing what little regard, and what little chance at the position, he has remaining. We should let him flounder, and focus our attentions on Lord Kor\u2014\"\n\nAn imperious knock on the suite's front door silenced him. Since his private guards stationed in the hall wouldn't have permitted anyone without official business or sufficient rank to disturb him, Andarjin waved at one of his servants at the room's periphery. The man bowed his head and departed.\n\nA few exchanged words, muffled by the cold stone walls, and then he returned a moment later. \"Her Highness,\" he announced, \"the Princess Firillia.\"\n\nAndarjin rose, of course, as did Zirresca, then joined the various servants in a series of deep bows.\n\n\"Oh, get up, you two.\" Firillia swept into the room, clad in a golden gown that contrasted beautifully with her complexion but wasn't quite formal enough for court proper. Her attendants filtered in behind her, joining Andarjin's at a polite distance.\n\nThe princess took a place at the table, straddling the chair in a casual and most unladylike pose, and poured herself a brandy before any of the servants could draw near enough to do it for her.\n\n\"My dear,\" Andarjin said, seating himself beside her, \"there are people here who would be glad to wait on you, myself incl\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't fret over it, Arj. I promise, I'm capable of pouring a decanter with my own two dainty hands. I've known how for, oh, at least a year or two, now. You pick up all sorts of skills observing the royal court.\"\n\nZirresca snorted, then politely hid her grin behind her glass.\n\nAndarjin's own chuckle was, perhaps, a tad forced. He waited until Firillia placed one hand on the table, then gently laid his atop it. \"To what do I owe the honor, your Highness?\"\n\n\"I assume the two of you are speaking of Zirresca's campaign?\"\n\n\"Indeed, yes.\"\n\n\"And perhaps of Sir Nycolos?\"\n\nThe knight's smile perished of natural but swift causes and toppled from her face.\n\n\"Yes,\" the margrave confirmed. \"I was just telling Zirresca that Nycolos is doing splendidly at sabotaging himself, and there's no need for us to be all that concerned with\u2014\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\"\n\nThat certainly got both their attention. \"Has something happened? Is that why you've come?\"\n\nFirillia took a deep draught, then set it down. \"I'm not all that fond of pear brandies,\" she admitted. \"I much prefer plum or apple. But this isn't bad.\"\n\n\"Your Highness, please\u2026\"\n\nShe laughed, then. \"Sorry, Arj. Just having a bit of fun with you.\" Her expression sobered quickly. \"Though in truth, it's nothing to laugh at. It's going to cost us hundreds of zlatka to replace the tools and furniture he destroyed, and Lady Ilkya has declared that she will never again work, or so much as set foot, in Oztyerva. Gods know how long it may take, or how many additional zlatka-worth of gifts, for her to reconsider.\"\n\nNeither of her two companions seemed entirely able to follow. \"Are you saying\u2026\" Zirresca eventually asked. \"That is, Nycolos attacked her?\"\n\n\"Not\u2026 specifically,\" Firillia hedged. \"Apparently, whatever news she delivered, he didn't care for it. As I've heard it told, he seemed to go mad. Hurling tables, shattering tools, even taking doors off their hinges. He made no deliberate move to harm her or the others, but she was nearly crushed under a bench, and a number of the guards who subdued him suffered contusions and even a few broken bones.\"\n\n\"I should go look in on them,\" Zirresca mused, her expression a study in contradictions. \"Make certain they're taken care of.\"\n\nAndarjin, for his part, was smirking openly. \"I'm sure they will be. But yes, you should make an appearance.\" If he noted Firillia's brief flash of disdain, or that she chose that moment to remove her hand from his, he gave no sign.\n\n\"What happened to him out there?\" Zirresca asked, for all that she well knew nobody could answer. \"Nycolos was always impulsive, but this sort of temper\u2026\"\n\n\"Why should you care?\" the margrave sneered.\n\n\"Far safer to know, wouldn't you think? If only to anticipate whatever else he might do, or in case Kirresc is ever, gods forbid, threatened by another dragon? Besides, whatever else I might think of him, Nycolos has always been a strong warrior, and loyal to his liege. He would be\u2014or would have been\u2014useful, once he'd accepted me as Crown Marshal.\"\n\n\"Bah. Perhaps. Still and all, it's better this way. It certainly makes the road forward easier for you, and thus for all of us. That's worthy of some small celebration, no?\" Chortling, he reached for his goblet.\n\nAnd it was then, as he faced her, that he felt, and begin to wither beneath, Princess Firillia's frosty mien. \"This sort of gloating,\" she informed him, \"is not becoming in a man who would be king.\"\n\nAndarjin physically recoiled. \"Who, then? Your brother? I am by far the better candidate\u2014!\"\n\n\"So you've convinced me, Margrave, otherwise I'd not be here at all. But I've made you no vows yet\u2014of any sort\u2014and Kirresc has others I might choose to support, or who might be enticed to support me.\"\n\nA moment of burning, prideful anger, then Andarjin dropped to one knee. \"You're right, of course, your Highness. My love. That was inappropriate of me. I humbly apologize.\"\n\nZirresca looked away, made deeply uncomfortable by the whole spectacle.\n\n\"You're not wrong, for all that,\" Firillia said, utterly failing\u2014deliberately, no doubt\u2014to address the issue of whether she'd yet elected to forgive Andarjin's impropriety. \"If we're to assist Zirresca in succeeding Orban as Crown Marshal, we're probably better served in focusing on Lord Kortlaus. I truly don't think Nycolos is likely to prove any further competition.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "The following days made Nycolos long for a return to the dreary, painful exhaustion of his slow hike across the Outermark. At least then, he'd seen a possible dawn at the far end of the impenetrable darkness. Then, he'd had hope.\n\nNone but Smim could possibly understand his reaction to Lady Ilkya's pronouncement. None of them understood that it wasn't enough to treat the trauma around the splinter of broken blade, wasn't enough that it should soon cease to bother him save under the worst of circumstances. How could they?\n\nBut Nycolos understood the repercussions. No matter how much healing, how much scar tissue wrapped the cursed thing, as soon as his heart became that of a dragon it would again begin to move, to seek, slowly digging through whatever his body might place in its path.\n\nReturning to who he was, what he was, meant death. And Nycolos sincerely wondered, now that he faced not merely weeks or months as a human, but perhaps the rest of his life, if that death might be worth it.\n\nHe ceased to shave, to bathe or allow himself to be bathed, even to eat save when the ache of hunger grew intolerable. He rarely appeared where he was expected\u2014at court, on the field, at his Majesty's table\u2014and as his foul disposition and even fouler stench grew ever more offensive, fewer and fewer objected to or even commented upon his absence.\n\n\"What can I do for you?\" Margravine Mariscal had asked, nearly begged, standing in his doorway one afternoon. He had ignored messenger after messenger from her, and even her own pounding at the portal. Only when she'd ordered several palace guards to force the door had he deigned to open it, and then only because he wouldn't be able to lock the world out if it were damaged.\n\nShe seemed unsure what to do with her hands, intertwining her fingers and nearly wringing them one moment, fists clenching in anger the next. Her tear-sheened eyes drifted from his ever more gaunt and unwashed face to the wreck of the chambers about him. When they once alighted, however briefly, on the goblin who stood back in the far corner, Smim could only shrug.\n\n\"What can you do?\" Nycolos repeated, his throat a heap of gravel.\n\n\"Yes! Anything!\"\n\n\"What can you do?!\"\n\nAnd damn if he didn't nearly tell her. After all, why not? What had he left to lose? He almost blurted the entire story, almost shouted it in her face, daring her to understand what he was and what he'd lost. How eager would she be to help him then?\n\nAlmost, but he did not. It wasn't worth the effort, wasn't worth the pain.\n\n\"You,\" he told her, \"can leave. Me. Alone!\" He didn't think the slamming door had actually struck her, but he didn't care enough to open it back up and be sure. The sound of her fading steps meant she was well enough to walk away, and that would suffice.\n\nWhat few people had been making an effort ceased calling after that. Kortlaus still tried to strike up conversations whenever Nycolos appeared outside his quarters, but each time he found himself ignored, and slowly his attempts grew more and more perfunctory, until they were scarcely more than a polite nod and a \"Good afternoon.\" Mariscal uttered not another word to him, though he knew she watched his every move. Once, even Prince Elias had approached him as he'd wandered one of Oztyerva's various gardens, this one made up primarily of poppies, peonies, and tulips.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"Mm. Your Highness.\"\n\n\"Listen, I\u2026 I can't, that is, I obviously have no notion what's troubled you so since you came home\u2026\"\n\n\"Obviously.\"\n\n\"You've been through something I can't possibly understand,\" the earnest prince bulled on. \"But I know you're a good man, Nycos. And I know you don't want to be hurting people the way you have been.\"\n\n\"You're absolutely right, your Highness.\"\n\n\"Good! I'm glad to\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't possibly understand. With your permission?\" Not that he'd waited for it before stomping on his way.\n\nAnd so it might have continued, Nycolos further and further isolating himself until he was nothing but a hermit in the midst of the palace, friendless, shunned by all and without purpose or meaning.\n\nThe day things changed was a holy day, though Nycolos hadn't heard, and didn't much care, to what purpose. This observance in particular was sacred not to the followers of the many gods of the Empyrean Choir, but rather to the monotheist Deiumulin. They accounted for a minority of the nobles and servants in the palace, and indeed of the Kirresci populace, but it was a sizable, significant one. As such, while they carried less weight and held less influence than the Empyreans, a few of their holiest days were granted official status.\n\nToday, then, was a time of pious ritual and sermons for some, and a day of feasting and freedom from work for a great many others. Smim convinced his master to leave their chambers, however briefly, if only to acquire some food to bring back. This was, after all, an opportunity for unusual dishes and finely prepared fare that wouldn't require him to tolerate the presence, and the unforgiving disapproval, of the king's table.\n\nThe mismatched pair were returning to their quarters\u2014Nycolos carrying plates heaped with cuts of roast boar, braised in garlic butter, Smim balancing a pair of bowls full of a sharply scented paprika-heavy venison-and-vegetable goulash\u2014when they turned a corner of the winding stone passageways and found themselves face to face with a group of young knights and other gentry.\n\nThese were led by Sir Tivador and some of his friends, and while the young knight was normally of a more polite, well-bred disposition, today an excess of drink, the presence of so many peers, and the general disdain in which courtly gossip held Nycolos, all conspired against his better nature.\n\nIn all fairness, though, it was one of Tivador's companions\u2014a slender, blond-haired young man, baronet of something or other, whose names and lands Nycolos could not have cared about less had he been fully unconscious\u2014who started it all. \"Has Sir Nycolos actually emerged from his den? Perhaps even beasts have a limit to how far they're willing to foul their own nests!\"\n\nCaught up in the spirit of things and the sniggers of his friends, Tivador then chimed in. \"I imagine he's simply run out of rats to hunt. Poor fellow. It must be difficult learning to live as a goblin with only the one instructor.\"\n\nMore sniggers. Nycolos ignored them and continued walking. Smim followed, but as he passed, he couldn't help but comment, \"As he clearly hasn't seen one human worth modeling himself after, perhaps one ought not blame him if he's elected to give being a goblin a try.\"\n\nConsternation rippled through the small crowd, a low grumble spreading like a spilled chamber pot, as drunken minds processed the insult. They pursued, gathering angrily around the pariah knight and his goblin cohort.\n\n\"Filthy beast!\" Tivador spat. \"You've no right even to be here, much less to eat so well. That food was prepared for Kirresci, for people, not animals!\"\n\nHad he held himself to words alone, he would have been just fine. Had he chosen to knock the bowls from Smim's grasp, still he would probably have suffered no consequences. In his slightly pickled fury, however, he darted ahead and wildly smacked aside the plates Nycolos had carried, sending boar and juices spraying over the walls, the carpet, and the unwashed and sullen baronet himself.\n\nNycolos never could remember snapping, that endless instant where rage and humiliation overwhelmed the near fugue through which he'd trudged for days.\n\nHe saw the world through a sheet of hot white, illuminating the stone and the humans around him more brightly than any torch. He felt flesh giving beneath his knuckles, twisting under his fingertips; lifted men without effort to send them hurtling along the corridor, cracked bones in his grip, pried several dislocated teeth from the meat of his hand.\n\nShouts and screams, impacts and footsteps, echoed in his ears, and he failed to recognize that he was in the midst of them, even adding to them. Only a single voice, shrill and inhuman, uttered slow, calming sounds amidst the incomprehensible cries, but he could not, initially, make them out.\n\n\"Master\u2026 Master\u2026 Sir Nycolos\u2026 Master\u2026\"\n\nAnd then, far, far more softly, so that it was nearly lost in the chaos even to his preternatural hearing, \"Tzavalantzaval\u2026\"\n\nNycolos's vision gradually cleared. Sir Tivador and his compatriots lay or crouched throughout the hall. Many were curled in tight balls around this injury or that, while others faced him with bloodied jaws, swelling features\u2014and half-naked blades. None were armored or as fully armed as they might have been on duty, but light sabres and the occasional arming sword or heavy dagger would prove deadly enough. None had fully drawn steel, as of yet, but only because Nycolos had halted his own advance.\n\nAnd there was a peculiar weight dangling from his fists.\n\nSmim. The goblin gazed calmly at him, despite the fact that Nycolos's talons had ripped through his tunic and drawn shallow furrows of blood on his chest, holding him aloft.\n\nTalons? He had no recollection of sprouting talons. And he realized, with a start, that it was only because Smim blocked their view that the others hadn't spotted them.\n\nCarefully he put the goblin down, transforming his fingers back to human with a moment's effort. \"Thank you,\" he mumbled gracelessly.\n\n\"You're welcome, Master. I couldn't allow you to kill them\u2014\"\n\n\"You. Couldn't allow?\"\n\nSmim winced, clearly aware it had been the wrong thing to say. \"Poor choice of words, Master. What I mean is\u2014\"\n\n\"You do not allow me to do anything, Smim!\"\n\n\"I know. I meant\u2014\"\n\n\"Besides, what's the difference? What matter if they know that\u2014\"\n\n\"You're distraught, Master!\" Smim must have been desperate, if he dared interrupt when Nycolos was already irritated. Then, again more softly, \"There are still good reasons for keeping your secrets. Besides, I've developed a hypothesis as to why you've been, well, behaving as you have. You\u2014\"\n\nNycolos shoved him away in disgust, glaring equally at him and the watching\u2014and often moaning\u2014knights. \"You're so concerned with my behavior, are you? These ladies and gentlemen seem to share your concerns. Why don't you talk it over with them?\"\n\nHe marched through the thick of them, slowly, hoping somebody would attack or try to stop him. When nobody did, he turned the nearest corner without looking back and made for the doors, determined to leave all of this\u2014the knights, the court, Oztyerva, even Smim\u2014behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "He wandered without destination or purpose through the streets of Talocsa, just another tiny segment of first this crowd, then that one. The entire world danced slowly about him, or so it seemed: the people to every side; crisp dead leaves and the hems of kaftans, coats, and skirts below; the lowering autumn clouds, leaning listlessly on the minarets and flagpoles above. Nycolos ignored them all, and the leaves and clouds, at least, politely did him the same courtesy in return.\n\nHis fellow pedestrians were often another matter altogether.\n\nOh, many paid him no mind, seeing\u2014if they noticed him at all\u2014just another passerby, perhaps a holiday reveler or one of the many citizens who, for reasons of obligation or necessity, could not afford to take the day away from his labors. Quite a few others, however, couldn't help but note the rich cut and fabrics of his wardrobe, marking him as the upper class. Of course, as soon as he drew even remotely near, his overall slovenly appearance, unshaven and unwashed whiskers, and the rank stench of those clothes\u2014which was grotesquely mixed with, and not remotely masked by, the fresher odor of pork greases and gravies\u2014conflicted wildly with that initial impression. Thus did the people who took any notice of him swiftly draw away in confusion and distaste, all of which suited Nycolos's mood well enough.\n\nStill, the open revulsion and accompanying whispers grew to irritate him. They were unwanted attention, and an even more unwanted reminder of the universal disdain under which he'd been crushed throughout Oztyerva Palace. Without conscious intent, then, and despite lacking any real sense of the city's layout, Nycolos made his way toward poorer, rougher parts of town by moving in the direction of least overt disapproval.\n\nThe clothes grew less refined, more elegant fabrics giving way to meanly dyed wools and worn leathers, their colors drab compared to what had come before. Gaps appeared in the paving stones, and entire side streets were nothing but dirt. The buildings grew smaller, more dilapidated, the whitewash filthy and peeling where it wasn't entirely absent. More and more of the passersby were laborers, and those who were celebrants appeared more frequently drunk, reeking of cheap wines and beers. The ubiquitous stench of refuse left to rot, chamber pots emptied from upper story windows, and unwashed laundry permeated the wood, the earth, the people, so that even the fiercest storms could never wash it away.\n\nAnd Nycolos, as he'd hoped, looked\u2014and smelled\u2014far less out of place, though his garb still attracted the occasional wandering glance.\n\nPerhaps, despite his filth, someone would take those clothes as impetus to try to rob him. Wouldn't that be fun? He found himself rather looking forward to the prospect.\n\nWhen he did find some trouble\u2014after hours of random wandering, as the sun grew sleepy and faint, and the wind began spreading flower petals of a frosty chill across the path of the coming night\u2014it wasn't actually directed his way.\n\nThe thumps and cries, rattles and threats, emerged from a gap between two slumping, wood-walled shops that would have had to raise its standing in the world to qualify as an alleyway. Almost too narrow to traverse without turning sideways, it led, to judge by the echoes and the shadows visible beyond, into a small and otherwise isolated courtyard.\n\nEnticed by no genuine concern or even much curiosity, but simple boredom, Nycolos went to take a look. He squeezed through the opening, stepping over a splintered crate and a puddle of half-dried mud that smelled to have been formed of drunkards' urine rather than water.\n\nThe courtyard, too, was full of garbage and other refuse. Broken barrels, old pans, shattered bottles, and heaps of rot that had once probably been the leftovers of various butchered cuts of meat lay strewn about, creating a repulsive and possibly even injurious carpet. Crows and other scavengers squawked overhead, circling low in the overcast sky or perched atop nearby buildings, watching and waiting that they might return to their meals.\n\nMeals they'd abandoned because various portions of said garbage were trying to kill one another.\n\nNycolos couldn't begin to guess what the grudge might have been about. He watched, leaning against a filth-encrusted wall, as five greasy, sloppily dressed men cursed, laughed, and spat while pounding a sixth bloody. Even though he could see that at least a couple of them wore long knives under their coats, none had drawn them. Instead they wielded rusty chains, broken boards, or\u2014in one instance\u2014a jagged rock. He might have thought that they were only looking to beat their victim, rather than kill him, except that the blows they landed were brutal, savage.\n\nOh, they meant to kill. They just meant for it to take some time.\n\nThe sixth man, who didn't look too different save for the fresh blood staining his beard and his clothes, writhed on the ground, arms wrapped over his head. His own weapon, a sharply curved knife, lay in a heap of filthy rags just beyond his reach. Not, at this stage, that it would do him any good even if he could reach it.\n\nNycolos observed for a moment, turned to go back the way he'd come, and stopped. He had no business here, no reason to care what was happening or why. But\u2026 He burned within, roiling with fury and frustration. Hadn't he just been hoping for an excuse to lash out? Why shouldn't this suffice just as well as if the attack had been launched against him personally?\n\nFurthermore, something about the beating, about the deliberate cruelty of the thugs with their clubs and chains, reminded him of the overseers in the Norbenus mines. It was not a memory, or a comparison, likely to endear these men to him.\n\nGrinning broadly and rolling his shoulders, once more letting his innate magics flow through him to firm up flesh and strengthen his limbs, Nycolos stepped openly into the courtyard.\n\nThe nearest brigand turned his way, mouth opening\u2014no doubt to utter some threat, some command to leave and to forget what he'd seen. Nycolos never knew, because he gave the fool no chance to speak.\n\nA massive leap launched him across the courtyard, over a dozen feet from a standing start. Detritus shattered and mud spattered beneath his boots as he landed, nose to nose with the astonished thug. The knight's fist struck with the force of a battering ram, fragmenting ribs and driving pieces of bone deep into the softer organs beneath. Gasping, choking as one lung grew fat and bloated with blood while the other deflated, the first of Nycolos's prey dropped to a thrashing heap.\n\nThe dying man's nearest companions charged, one swinging his makeshift club, the other dropping his chain to scrabble for the dagger at his belt. Nycolos stepped in, blindingly fast, and caught the wooden board halfway in its arc toward his head. Wood crunched in his grip. With his other hand he stabbed outward, stiff-fingered, snapping the weapon in two, and then plunged the broken end deep into his attacker's shoulder. The man toppled, shrieking wordlessly as he clutched at the thing now protruding from his flesh.\n\nThe third brigand's dagger came in low, thrusting at Nycolos's stomach. He should have been able to dodge aside, more than fast enough to avoid the strike, but his anger and the sheer exultation of letting loose had him preoccupied, less alert than he ought to be.\n\nIt didn't matter.\n\nHe hadn't strengthened his skin to the point of sprouting scales, so it wasn't the armor it could be. It was tough enough, however, that, combined with his last-second twist, the blade merely traced a shallow line of blood through fabric and filth, rather than plunging into his guts.\n\nNycolos pounced, almost cat-like, hands landing on his attacker's chest with his full weight behind them. Both went down, hard, but after a series of sharp cracks, only one returned to his feet.\n\nThe remaining three men\u2014two standing, corpse-white and shaking, the third peering up through a mask of drying blood\u2014seemed paralyzed. Nycolos could have walked over and slaughtered them with no more effort than pulling a book or a dish off a waiting shelf.\n\nBut what fun was that?\n\n\"Run.\"\n\nThe upright pair obeyed. Not wholly mindless from shock and terror, they broke in opposite directions around the courtyard, clearly thinking that, in the time it took their hideous assailant to chase down and maul one of them, the other might escape into Talocsa's busy streets.\n\nNycolos laughed, long and loud; crouched and sprang backwards, a leap more impossible even than the one that had started the fray.\n\nHe all but soared, spreading his hands and allowing reptilian talons to sprout from his fingertips. He struck the wall beside the narrow alleyway, nearly fifteen feet above the ground, and lodged there, claws dug in behind him so that he clung to the building like some impossible lizard.\n\nThe faster of the two thugs, who had nearly made it to the mouth of the alley, froze beneath him, staring upward. The sound he made was low, primal, somewhere between a sob and hysterical laughter.\n\nWithdrawing his grip and shifting his fingers back to human, Nycolos dropped before him, hefted him with both hands around the man's neck, and hurled him into the path of the other fleeing brigand. Both went down in a clatter of limbs, and Nycolos dove after them.\n\nAgain he was the only one to rise.\n\nHe looked long and hard at the injured survivor, the victim of the other five, wondered if it would be wiser to kill him, too, then shrugged. Let the man talk. What did it matter? He started to turn away.\n\n\"Thank\u2026 thank you, stranger.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"Name's Xi\u2026 Xilmos.\"\n\nIt wasn't the introduction that arrested Nycolos's exit, but the fact that the man had forced himself not merely to rise, but to stagger near enough to stretch out his hand. That, after what he'd just seen, was an act of courage if nothing else.\n\nImitating the human greetings he'd seen, Nycolos clasped Xilmos's forearm. \"Nycos.\" He'd never grown used to that shortened version of the name he'd adopted, but he wanted no chance, however small, of being recognized for who he was. Or rather, who he had recently pretended to be.\n\n\"I'm not sure what I saw back there, Nycos, but I owe you. They'd have killed me, and not clean.\"\n\n\"So I noticed.\" Then, as he had nothing better to say, \"What was their grudge with you?\"\n\n\"Those bastards were Fletcher Street Wolves. I'm White Knife.\" He seemed to expect Nycolos to know what those names meant, so the disgraced knight just nodded.\n\n\"They jumped me on the street, shoved me back here,\" Xilmos continued. \"If you hadn't showed up\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, we've established that part already. Well, Xilmos, if that's\u2014\"\n\n\"Come with me.\" The criminal\u2014for Nycolos had put together that much, if nothing else\u2014wiped away a gobbet of blood currently matting his thick mustache. \"Let me introduce you to the guys. Maybe you want to work with us some? Fighter like you could turn this whole thing around for us, and I wager Samsa could more than make it worth your while.\"\n\nAgain he'd started to turn away, and again he halted. Why not? Oh, he didn't see himself joining Xilmos's little gaggle, but it was growing late. He'd exerted himself a lot today, his chest wound ached\u2026 It wouldn't hurt to find a place to bed down for the night, take a fresh look at his options in the morning.\n\n\"Very well, then, Xilmos, I'll hear your Samsa out. Lead the way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Well, Master Tzav\u2014that is, Master Nycolos had really made a right steaming heap of mountain goat scat out of this whole situation, hadn't he?\n\nSmim sat tucked against the cushions that formed one corner of the divan, long spindly arms wrapped about his knees. He managed somehow both to sulk and skulk while so seated, as only a goblin could, and had anyone in Oztyerva seen the bestial twist to his jaw, the jagged teeth bared in frustration or the jaundiced, homicidal slits through which he glared about the suite, they'd most certainly have killed him on the spot, the protection and parole of Sir Nycolos notwithstanding.\n\nHe would, honestly, have almost welcomed the attempt. The snap of a tendon between his teeth or the spongy collapse of a windpipe beneath his deceptively powerful fingers might cheer him up.\n\nRight until someone shoved something sharp and cold and generally unpleasant through his belly, of course. Which might just happen anyway, if the master didn't pull himself together and stop trying to make an enemy of every man, woman, and child in the palace.\n\nNor did it help that Smim hadn't the faintest notion of where the master had gone, or when\u2014if\u2014he might return.\n\nGods of the deep, what a disaster.\n\nThe goblin unfolded, almost uncoiled, from against the furniture and scuttled across the room toward the table. He found the various fruit brandies so popular among the humans of Kirresc to be the pinnacle of revolting, enough to bring bile to the back of his throat\u2014give him well fermented cave lizard squeezings any day!\u2014but just at this moment, the notion of getting blackout drunk was so enticing that he'd gladly choke down an entire decanter of the vile stuff.\n\nMaster wasn't here to object, and it wasn't as if he'd anything better to\u2014\n\nHe twitched and froze, all but canted sideways, one shoulder tensed far higher than the other, at the sudden tapping on the chamber door.\n\nHis first crazed thought\u2014some might have called it paranoid, but as a goblin currently stuck dwelling within a hive of humans, paranoia was hardly unwise\u2014was that his earlier worries had manifested, that they'd come to murder him while Nycolos was away. Just as swiftly, though, he calmed. Rather unlikely that such an endeavor would begin with a polite knock, and anyway, they shouldn't yet be aware that Nycolos was missing. It wasn't as though the man had spent a great deal of time in public lately.\n\nJust ignore it. They'll go away.\n\nMore tapping, more insistent than before.\n\nThey'll go. Any minute now.\n\nTap tap.\n\nGo away!\n\n\"Open this door!\" Margravine Mariscal somehow made herself heard through the heavy wood despite scarcely raising her voice above a whisper. \"You open this door right this instant or I'll have the guards break it down!\"\n\nSmim sighed deeply, strode to the door, and opened it with an extravagant bow. \"You seem awfully fond of that particular threat, my Lady. Do you suppose they'd actually do it?\"\n\nShe swept into the room in a flurry of scarlet and gold, scarcely glancing at him, though whether that was a sign of distraction or merely her surprised repugnance at the unkempt state of the chamber he couldn't say. \"With my rank and title, they'd have little choice but to obey. Where's Nycos?\"\n\n\"I fear the master is out on a personal errand. If you wish me to tell him you called, or deliver a message, I shall be delighted\u2014nay, honored!\u2014to pass along\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, stuff it, you obsequious little toad.\"\n\n\"As you wish. If my Lady would just enlighten me as to what, precisely, I'm to stuff, and where\u2014?\"\n\n\"I'm actually glad he's not here,\" she admitted. \"It saves me from making up excuses. I want to speak to you.\"\n\nThat, finally, caught Smim sufficiently by surprise to shut him up.\n\nMariscal found a chair that met her standards of cleanliness, and planted herself in it. Then, after a moment and a cloudy expression, she rose and moved to the table, poured herself a drink, and returned to her seat. Apparently doing it herself was less offensive than having the goblin touch the goblet she meant to sip from.\n\nI should tell her I pissed in it, the haughty snot.\n\n\"Smim, was it?\" she asked, idly swirling the brandy.\n\n\"It was. Indeed, it still is.\"\n\n\"I apologize for my earlier words. You've been nothing but a loyal servant to Nycos, and you deserve better treatment than that.\"\n\nShocked to the core of his being, Smim found himself so completely paralyzed he actually wondered, for a maddened instant, if he might have died.\n\n\"What happened to him out there, Smim?\"\n\nOh, shit. And just like that, he could move again. \"You\u2026 heard his tale, my Lady. When he addressed the court. He\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I heard all that. It explains nothing! This man who's been brooding and snarling about the palace isn't my Nycos, though!\"\n\nYou've no idea. Also, \"my Nycos\"? Interesting\u2026\n\n\"Something is very wrong. I don't know what he was like when you met him, but this, this isn't him!\" She swallowed once, continued. \"Something happened to him, something he won't tell me\u2014us. So I need you to tell me.\"\n\nWhat was he to say? That the dragon who'd taken the man's form was in deep mourning, deep despair, for the death of his only hope? That the notion of a life trapped in an inferior form among inferior beings was eating away at Nycolos's soul?\n\nOr what of Smim's own theories, that there was more to the master's suffering and behavior? That Nycolos was behaving sullenly and temperamentally, even immaturely so? Smim had slowly grown convinced that the master was battling not merely his circumstances, but his body. The thoughts, the feelings, the urges and needs that lurked in the minds and roared through the blood of all humanoids, that peaked in adolescent years, that all adults\u2014human, goblin, and other\u2014had spent their lives learning to deal with? These were all brand new to Nycolos, who had only a few months' experience with them. Frankly, that things hadn't gotten much worse much sooner was a testament to the master's iron will.\n\nPut a sparrow's soul within a wolf's body, how long would it take for the sparrow to become a predator, or cease trying to fly? How long would that conflict rage? Yet that was a far nearer match, in many respects, than what Nycolos must now struggle to reconcile.\n\nNone of which, even had he been utterly certain, even if it were more than his own hypothesis, could Smim possibly tell the woman.\n\nMariscal had read meaning in his pause, however, in his posture. \"You do know something!\" she declared, leaning sharply forward.\n\n\"Obviously, Master Nycolos did not reveal every detail of his\u2014our\u2014journey,\" the goblin said carefully. \"Nor of our tribulations. If he chose not to speak of something, however, we must trust that he has his reasons. Or at least I must. I suppose you're free to trust or distrust whatever you choose.\"\n\n\"Smim\u2014\"\n\n\"But it is not my place to reveal his secrets, if any. I'm sorry, my Lady.\"\n\n\"I could make you talk, goblin. We have methods, techniques. We prefer not to resort to such measures. They're\u2026 unenlightened. But that doesn't mean we won't. And I imagine his Majesty would prove far less reluctant where a creature such as yourself is concerned.\"\n\nSmim felt his stomach turn over, his knees turn liquid, but he forced himself to remain steady. \"And how do you imagine the master would react to that, when he learned of it? When he heard you had such little regard for his friendships, and his word, that you did that to me when he has already declared me a vassal under his protection?\"\n\nMariscal squeezed and bunched a handful her skirts in both fists until it seemed the wrinkles and creases were indelibly pressed into the rich fabric. Then she rose and made to leave, halting only as she reached the doorway.\n\n\"There are those in Oztyerva,\" she said without looking back, \"who believe you are somehow responsible, in whole or in part, for the change in Nycos. That you have some hold over him, or serve someone who does.\"\n\n\"So I've heard,\" Smim said.\n\n\"I don't believe that's so,\" she admitted. \"But if I'm wrong, if I learn there's the slimmest truth to it, or discover evidence to suggest that it's true, I will have you put to slow torture. Your death will be long and ugly, and damn the consequences. You understand?\"\n\nThe goblin swallowed, hard, and hoped she hadn't heard it. \"I do.\"\n\nShe was gone. Smim lunged for the door, slamming and latching it, and then sank to the floor with his back against the portal.\n\nI've no idea where you are, Master, but it will be far better for the both of us if you aren't gone long."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "The group's gathering spot\u2014it didn't seem worthy of so grandiose a term as \"headquarters\"\u2014was a back room in someone's house. A cheap, ramshackle structure standing alongside a filthy street among other cheap, ramshackle structures, it hunkered against the chilly breeze and faint drops of a late night shower. Nycolos guessed it belonged to the White Knife leader, a squat, pale-skinned, tattooed woman named Samsa, though he supposed it could just as easily have been one of the other members' home.\n\nThe White Knife, as he had picked up from Xilmos on route, and then from everyone else's hushed conversation once they'd arrived, was a small gang of criminals. Thugs, robbers, occasional purveyors of illegal goods, pimps and prostitutes, and so forth. Unimportant and unimpressive, but apparently worth fighting over, as the White Knife currently waged a territorial war with a rival band of riffraff calling themselves the Fletcher Street Wolves.\n\nNone of them had been thrilled to see Xilmos show up on their doorstep with a stranger, though his tale of how \"Nycos\" had saved his life seemed to soften their distrust. Not entirely, though, and in no small part because they refused to believe some of the more outlandish details.\n\n\"Swear to us,\" Samsa had demanded, \"that you won't reveal to anyone what you learn here.\"\n\n\"Or?\" Nycolos had asked, his tone amused.\n\n\"Or you're a dead man.\"\n\nShe and the others had recoiled at his cold laughter, and gone off to the other end of the room to discuss further. Nycolos, who could of course hear every word, had brushed aside a stack of dirty clothes, on which had lain a small collection of cheap jewelry\u2014stolen, no doubt\u2014and sprawled tiredly across the sagging, beetle-eaten old cot doubling as a sofa.\n\nHe eavesdropped for a time, chortling to himself when Xilmos argued that the White Knife should try to entice him to join them\u2014Nycolos couldn't even begin to imagine what they had to offer him, beyond a place to sleep for the night\u2014and then rolled over to face the wall in hopes of drifting off.\n\nAnd he'd almost done just that when a particular overheard word made his eyelids snap open.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said, turning over once more to face the others. \"But who are these 'Creeping Dragons' you're speaking of?\"\n\n\"How in God's name did you hear that?!\" Samsa demanded, her tone shrill.\n\n\"I told you he had some kind of magic!\" Xilmos crowed, though he frowned right after. \"But how've you never heard of the Creeping Dragons?\"\n\n\"Just accept that I haven't and answer my question.\"\n\nIt was Samsa who did so, albeit uneasily. \"The Creeping Dragons are\u2026 I guess you'd call them a thieves' and smugglers' guild, but bigger. They operate in a bunch of cities, in a couple different kingdoms.\"\n\nCreeping Dragons. The Dragon River. What is it with humans and that word?\n\nAlthough I suppose we are impressive\u2026\n\n\"And their involvement in this is what?\" he pressed, though he'd already begun to lose interest again.\n\n\"The Wolves are trying to prove themselves worthy of working for the Dragons,\" Xilmos said. \"Maybe even take over managing their interests in Talocsa.\"\n\nIf the Fletcher Street Wolves are as unimpressive as you silly creatures, I doubt that's probable.\n\n\"We think that's why they were willing to grab Xilmos in the middle of the day like they did,\" one of the others chimed in.\n\n\"And why they're so eager to finally get us out of the way,\" Samsa said.\n\nBecause you lot are such a threat.\n\nAt a whisper and a nudge from Xilmos, she added, \"And why we could really use someone with your talents working with us. If you can really do what he claims you can.\"\n\nNycolos hadn't yet decided whether to explain that he had no intention of throwing in his lot with theirs, or whether to simply laugh in her face again, when the faintest scrape from above caught his attention. It was barely there, far too soft for anyone else to have heard.\n\nHe cocked his head, focusing, and now that he made a point of listening, he sensed this was no mere animal, no branch swaying against the rough shingles in the wind.\n\n\"I would wager,\" he said, \"that's also why they're creeping around on your roof right now.\"\n\nHe'd give them credit for this much: Nobody hesitated, nobody asked how he might possibly know or pelted him with inane questions, nobody panicked. Everyone present either rose or dropped, as appropriate, into a fighting stance, producing small blades and similar weapons from the folds of their clothes and all corners of the room. Several sidestepped so they stood back to back, while others leapt atop or crouched beside the furniture, well away from the door and the boarded windows.\n\nPerhaps the White Knife didn't consist solely of idiots after all.\n\nWhether they'd heard their prey readying for battle or because their timing was simply that dramatically appropriate, the Fletcher Street Wolves chose that moment to burst inside. Some had crept up on the house from the streets, others swung down from the roof on frayed hempen rope, boards and shutters cracking inward before their bootheels. They looked\u2026 Well, they looked, to Nycolos, like the same sorts of unimportant street thugs as their White Knife rivals. The only difference was the mantle of grey-dyed fur each of them wore on their shoulders, presumably a badge of membership. Their enemies were probably meant to assume those were wolf pelts, but Nycolos spotted, and smelled, much dog and other animal fur, with only a few traces of genuine wolf to be had.\n\nHe never did learn, nor did he much care, how they'd found the heart of the White Knife, a secret Samsa and her people had kept for years. The Wolves outnumbered their enemy, but not by much; the battle might, had this been a normal night, have gone either way. The scourge of Fletcher Street had not, however, come alone.\n\nWhen every member of the White Knife present had turned to face the enemies barging in through the windows, the door to house shivered and cracked, sundered by a single mighty blow. The man who stood beyond was one of the largest humans Nycolos had seen in all his many centuries, topping seven feet in height and still abnormally broad of shoulder. Muscles bunched visibly across his chest as he spun, in one hand, a great double-headed axe that most people could scarcely have lifted with two. The grin that split his wild beard was savage indeed.\n\nThey called him the Black Bear, Nycolos would later learn: an infamous killer-for-hire who had learned to fight as a gladiator-slave in the slum-cradled arenas of Mahdresh. The White Knife could never have gathered the resources to hire him, and the Wolves shouldn't have been able to, either. The Fletcher Street criminals must have gone all-out, pouring everything they had into one lightning-swift strike to take down their rivals and impress the Creeping Dragons. The Bear's appearance alone set several of the White Knife to trembling, to lowering their blades as though they'd lost all hope of fighting back.\n\nNycolos roared and leapt to meet him.\n\nThe two ferocious shapes met in the center of the chamber, White Knife and Fletcher Street Wolf alike scrambling from their converging paths. Met, and it was Nycolos, much to his astonishment, who came out second-best in that initial clash. He felt himself hurtling back, a sharp and pounding ache in his ribs, to crash against the cot he'd so recently vacated.\n\nIt wasn't that the Black Bear was stronger than he. So far as he knew, no human could be, though this one came closer than most. The man was fast, remarkably so, but again he was only human. No, he was clever, cunning. Nycolos had been so focused upon that massive blade that he'd never seen the kick coming.\n\nAnd it hurt. A lot. Anyone else would be dead, or at least bleeding to death on the inside, ribs crushed, organs battered. Had the blow impacted against Nycolos's old wound, jarring the sliver in its cocoon of scarred flesh, he might have been, too.\n\nAs it was, he stood from the overturned cot, brushed himself off, and nodded to the Black Bear. \"First round to you.\"\n\nGasps sounded from both gangs, and the behemoth's expression grew uncertain.\n\nHe took the opportunity granted by that instant of hesitation to concentrate on his chest, allowing the skin beneath his tunic to harden beyond anything remotely human, taking on a deep wine hue and the consistency of scales. His goal was solely to guard his lingering injury; for the rest of his body, he didn't bother. No, he didn't want the people here to know of his abilities, but more to the point, against a direct blow from that axe, no protection he could manage in human shape would suffice. His only defense was not to get hit.\n\nThe skirmishes that had begun between White Knife and Fletcher Street Wolves ceased as everyone in the room stepped back to watch, knowing full well that victory or defeat\u2014life or death\u2014hinged on what was about to happen between the outside champions of both sides.\n\nThe axe whirled in great but swift arcs, first from this angle then from that, horizontal, diagonal, vertical, each capable of punching deep into Nycolos's body or taking off a limb. For a time he merely avoided the cleaving blade\u2014and the sporadic punch or kick or grab, now that he was wise to the Bear's tricks. He ducked, weaved, twisted aside, drawing upon his impossible speed, watching for his foe to fall into a predictable pattern or reveal an exploitable weakness in technique. Furniture shattered beneath the axe as they moved about the room, Nycolos slowly giving way, but never was the impact enough to slow the killer's momentum, and no opportunity appeared.\n\nSo he'd simply have to make his own.\n\nWhen next the Black Bear lunged and the axe whistled near, Nycolos didn't just flow aside but leapt back, hard. His momentum carried him several steps from his foe, to land beside the circled audience of criminals.\n\nHe spun, fingers closing tight on the tunic and belt of a startled Fletcher Street Wolf. The young thug drew breath, but the gestating words or shout or scream never saw birth.\n\nNycolos jumped yet again, kicking his legs over and out, spinning flat and horizontal in the air, dragging the other with him. At the height of that spin, he released the Wolf, hurling him away.\n\nPerhaps the Black Bear meant only to protect himself from being flattened by the flying man. Or maybe, not caring which faction the living projectile might belong to, he'd sought to cut him out of the air. Either way he brought his axe in line, but lacked the time for a full swing. The Wolf died, split upon that massive blade, but not fully bisected. Lodged in muscle and bone, the weapon required an extra heartbeat or two to recover, to raise and ready to strike once more.\n\nAll the time Nycolos required to close.\n\nA second pair of fists closed on the haft of that monstrous weapon, two fearsome tugs in opposite directions holding it as still as if it supported the weight of the sky itself. Nycolos was the stronger; the Bear was the larger, exerting greater leverage and holding the better placed, more secure grip.\n\nThey glared, watching, never blinking, sweat breaking out across reddening faces. The audience around them, and it seemed even the chamber itself, all held their breath. Each time one of the combatants took a step, hoping to break the stalemate, the other followed, maintaining the struggle. Sporadically the weapon would shift, half an inch closer to one combatant or the other, and then surrounding lungs would remember to breathe in quick, explosive gasps.\n\nThe Black Bear was indeed cunning, but he was unaccustomed to a foe like Nycolos. More to the point, this axe was his weapon, an ally by his side and a tool he had wielded through countless battles and equally innumerable murders. The answer to their struggle, which seemed so obvious to Nycolos, either never occurred to him, or he couldn't bring himself to do it.\n\nNycolos could. He simply let go.\n\nThe giant stumbled at the sudden lack of resistance, off balance and unable to catch himself. Nycolos stepped in behind those massive blades, reached out, and twisted, hard and fast.\n\nThe snap of the Bear's neck was an detonation that filled the confines of the room and echoed in the skulls of everyone watching.\n\nNycolos plucked the axe from the dead man's grip before the body hit the floor. He hefted it thoughtfully in one hand. \"You run,\" he said, \"and you die before you reach the window or the door. Weapons down.\"\n\nHe was clearly addressing the Fletcher Street Wolves, but many of the White Knife obeyed as well. Just in case.\n\n\"Which of you is the leader?\"\n\nOne man, one of the few whose pelt was actual wolf hair, reluctantly raised a hand\u2014only after the eyes of many of his subordinates had turned his way.\n\n\"Good.\" Nycolos nodded, then moved to loom over the man. \"Only loyal members of the White Knife are going to leave this house alive today. You understand?\"\n\nEven through his fear, the man scowled. \"I don't\u2014\"\n\nThe Black Bear's axe sank through flesh and into the floor. Nycolos booted the puzzled head out of his path like a child's ball.\n\n\"Which of you is the leader?\"\n\nThe former leader's second\u2014now in charge of the Fletcher Street Wolves\u2014assured Nycolos in no uncertain terms, despite the violent quaver in his voice, that he absolutely understood what was being asked of them, and was the first to swear obedience to a somewhat stunned Samsa.\n\nNycolos himself wasn't entirely sure why he cared. He owed nothing to, and had no real affection for, the members of the White Knife. Maybe it was just that they'd offered him a roof, however unselfless their reasons, while the Wolves had tried to kill him?\n\nUltimately, he supposed it didn't matter.\n\n\"You just got a lot bigger,\" he said to Samsa. \"Take your new influence\u2014and perhaps this man's shaggy head\u2014to your 'Creeping Dragons.' Maybe you can assume the position the Fletcher Street Wolves had hoped for.\"\n\nSamsa gazed at him in absolute awe, an attitude mirrored by almost everyone there. Nycolos basked in it, buoyed by it, felt worth something for the first time in days.\n\n\"Join us,\" Xilmos said, voice cracking. \"With you, we can do anything. We might not even need the Dragons!\"\n\nA rumble of assent circled him, skipping across the broken furniture. Samsa frowned briefly, then seemed to come to a decision. \"I'll step down.\" Everyone fell silent once more. \"Lead us, if that's what it takes for you to stay. I've worked long and hard to command the White Knife, but I'll follow you, gladly.\"\n\nSomewhere, deep within his soul, Nycolos wanted to say yes. It was a lowly life among lowly creatures, even as humans went, but he had, if only from them, the respect and the fear and the prestige he was due. He could start with them, perhaps build it all up to something greater, acquire some measure of comfort\u2026\n\nOnly one thing stopped him, a single thought.\n\nI earned their awe, their reverence, so easily. So swiftly. Who else might I win over, then, with a modicum of effort?\n\nFor the first time since the Lady Ilkya's unwelcome diagnosis, he felt a stirring of purpose, felt as though he had an inkling of how to build a life\u2014a human life\u2014that, until he could locate the magics required to heal himself, to resume his proper form and place, he would find tolerable. Even worth fighting for.\n\n\"Thank you, Samsa, but no. Keep your station. And know,\" he added the lie easily, for benefit of those Fletcher Street Wolves who might harbor doubt and resentment for their new situation, \"that I will watch over you when I can.\n\n\"But I have somewhere else I have to be, and some tasks I've put off for far too long.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The water was hot, soothing. The heat seeped into his flesh, relaxing muscles that had grown sore and weary with constant tension, easing the pain of aches and bruises. He had enjoyed such experiences before, soaking his older body in an underground hot spring deep beneath his mountain lair. It had never occurred to him that a man made experience might come near to matching it, and he hadn't relaxed enough in any of his prior baths to discover otherwise.\n\nThat new relaxation, unfortunately, carried with it a number of other fresh discoveries which were, in turn, making it much harder to stay relaxed.\n\nIt wasn't the sickly grey tint to the water or the slight oily sheen that the various soaps and perfumes couldn't entirely hide. No, he'd expected that. He'd not washed in weeks, had known he was filthy\u2014a fact that nearly prevented him from being allowed back into Oztyerva by guards who initially assumed he was some greasy vagabond or, at best, a drunken gentleman in the midst of some dishonorable revelry. Nor was it the clumps of loose hair floating within that ever less cleanly pool, trimmed from his neck and cheeks by meticulous servants.\n\nNo, it was, through no fault of their own, those servants themselves that chipped away at his composure.\n\nPerhaps because the experience had always before been so alien to him, and he had only viewed his humanoid body as a short-term, temporary impediment, he'd never paid much attention to the experience of being bathed by a small gaggle of strangers. Now, however, he felt the stroke of every brush, the wet heat of every cloth, and\u2014most distractingly of all\u2014every slip of a soap-slickened hand or finger against his own skin.\n\nEach such touch was a jolt of miniature lightning, nearly enough to send him leaping from the great brass tub, only getting worse as the careful scrubbing progressed to ever more sensitive spots. And the servants were thorough cleaners indeed.\n\nHis heart pounded. His whole body tensed. His breath caught. And when he felt other, more dramatic reactions occurring below the waterline\u2014to say nothing of the sly glances among two of the servants, suggesting they had noticed, too\u2014the bewilderment and embarrassment became too great.\n\n\"That's enough!\" he snarled. \"You're\u2026 Thank you for your assistance, but it's no longer required. I'll finish up on my own.\"\n\n\"But, Sir Nycolos\u2014\"\n\n\"I said leave!\"\n\nThey fled, leaving him to fumble and fidget with the various brushes and oils until he felt he was probably clean enough to suffice. He actually welcomed the extra time and concentration required; it enabled him to calm himself.\n\nHe emerged from the bathing chamber wrapped in a silken gown belted loosely at the waist. Smim awaited him, tapping spindly fingers against the back of the sofa on which he sat.\n\n\"That, Master, is entirely what we were talking about.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Nycolos ran a towel over his hair and beard, then realized with a grunt that he'd have to comb them all over again.\n\n\"The sort of behavior that you're going to have to alter if you plan to earn back, or enhance, your respect and position in the court.\"\n\nIt was the first thing they'd talked about upon Nycolos's return, even before calling for the filthy knight's bath. He had explained how he'd felt when receiving the adulation of the White Knife, and how he'd realized that, if he could accomplish the same here, he might yet build a lifestyle worth having until he could find new answers to his circumstances. With enough of the nobility looking up to him, he might even obtain a fair amount of power and greater physical comforts.\n\nAll of which began with putting himself back in the running for Crown Marshal.\n\n\"They're just servants, Smim,\" he protested. \"Not the sorts of people I need to impress.\"\n\n\"Which does not change the fact that certain expectations regarding your own demeanor are universal, Master. And servants are known to gossip.\"\n\nAnother grunt. \"Fine. I'll\u2026 better prepare myself for next time.\"\n\nHe allowed the towel that had scoured his head to fall in a heap, then moved to the table and poured himself a glass of sour cherry wine. He found he preferred such drinks to the far sweeter brandies that were so well loved in Kirresc, though both were slowly growing on him.\n\n\"So,\" he continued, raising the goblet to his lips, \"where do you suggest we begin?\"\n\n\"We should probably start with your apologies, Master.\"\n\nNycolos froze mid-sip. When he did finally swallow, he'd forgotten the wine; he was just clearing his tongue for speech. \"What. Apologies.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026 To Lord Kortlaus? Lady Mariscal? His Highness? The entire court? If you're to repair the real Nycolos Anvarri's friendships, regain your standing in everyone's sight\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sure I can make it clear through my actions that my poor behavior is behind me. Once I've impressed them enough, they'll have forgotten all about\u2014\"\n\nThe goblin's head shook so fiercely it almost unscrewed itself. \"That's not how humans work, Master. Oh, you'll have to do all you say as well, but after the sort of offense you've given to\u2014well, pardon me for saying it, but everybody\u2014you cannot simply expect them to welcome you back, or give you a chance to prove yourself changed.\"\n\n\"So you're saying an apology might not even work if I did offer it!\"\n\n\"It might not, no. But it remains necessary.\"\n\nThe goblet shattered against the far wall, leaving a splotch that made the stone appear to bleed. \"I have never apologized to another living creature in all my life!\"\n\n\"Well, that is the sort of behavior you can get away with as a dragon, Master, but as things stand\u2014\"\n\n\"And even if I ever were to\u2026 to apologize for my behavior to anyone, it would be to an equal. Not to a bunch of humans!\"\n\nSmim just waited, watching.\n\n\"What?\" Nycolos finally demanded.\n\n\"Master, if you're to have even the slightest chance of making this work, the first thing you're going to have to do is alter your thinking about this 'bunch of humans.'\"\n\n\"Meaning?\"\n\n\"Meaning you're going to have to treat them as though they are your equals. In pretty much every imaginable respect, save where your rank and title make an alternate case.\"\n\nNycolos scowled in indignant horror. \"I cannot possibly be expected to maintain such\u2026 such a farce!\"\n\n\"If it's too much to ask, Master, you can always return to those hooligans you've spoken of. I've no doubt they'd take you back in a second, and would almost assuredly never demand an apology of you for anything. If you think you could be happy with what that sort of life can offer you, I'll start packing right away.\"\n\nThe nearest chair creaked in protest as Nycolos slumped hard into its embrace, head in his hands. \"This is going to be a lot more difficult than I thought, Smim.\"\n\n\"Of that, Master, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "\"Kor\u2014that is, my Lord Kortlaus?\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nNycolos had found his friend\u2014or sort-of-friend, or ex-friend, or ostensible friend\u2014after nearly two hours of searching. They met not in Kortlaus's quarters, the dining hall, the chapel, or even the training fields but in a random corridor of Oztyerva where they had, by sheer chance, finally run into one another.\n\nNow that they stood face to face, Nycolos rather wished his search had remained fruitless.\n\n\"It's\u2026 I'm glad I was able to catch up with you.\"\n\n\"Oh? Well, here I am.\" Then, perhaps deliberately reminding himself of his manners, the baron added, \"It's good to see you cleaned up and presentable again. Many of us were more than a little concerned.\"\n\n\"Yes, well\u2026 That's rather what I wanted to\u2026 That is\u2026\"\n\nGet it together, you gibbering cretin! Nycolos snapped at himself. Just a few simple words. Not that difficult!\n\nHis sense of pride, sulking obstinately in the corner of his soul, seemed to disagree with that assessment.\n\n\"Kortlaus, I\u2026 Would like to apologize. For, uh, my recent behavior.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Kortlaus crossed his arms, waiting.\n\n\"Um. So, I apologize for that behavior. It was inappropriate.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nIt would have taken some form of incontinence or similar loss of bodily control to make the subsequent pause any more awkward.\n\n\"Is that it, then?\" Nycolos finally asked. \"I mean, can we move past this now?\"\n\nStill the baron's expression didn't so much as shift. \"Is that it?\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" What the hell else did the man want?! \"I suppose it is.\"\n\n\"Then no, Nycolos, I don't believe we can move past this. If you'll excuse me.\"\n\nNycolos watched his receding back disappear down the hallway, melding in amongst the other passersby. Only then did he realize that Smim had emerged from where he'd waited around the corner to stand at his side.\n\n\"That could probably have gone better,\" the knight observed wryly.\n\n\"It almost had to have, Master. It's rather a remarkable achievement that it went this poorly.\"\n\n\"Smim\u2026\"\n\n\"No bloodshed, though, nor any references to incestuous or anatomically impossible ancestral relations, so I suppose an argument could be made that it wasn't quite as bad as it might have\u2014\"\n\n\"That will do, Smim.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master.\"\n\nThey walked, wending their way upstream through the veins of the palace. \"What's the matter with him, anyway?\" Nycolos finally asked, waving his arms in exasperation and nearly striking a passing page with an armful of parchments in the process. \"You said I should apologize, and I apologized.\"\n\n\"Um. By a strict definition, yes, Master, you did. But\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting my apology was flawed somehow?\"\n\n\"It lacked\u2026 substance, Master. And sincerity. And emotion. And\u2014\"\n\n\"So I'm to, what? Humiliate myself further? Abase myself? To them?\"\n\nSmim cringed beneath the weight of multiple passing stares. \"Please, Master, keep your voice down.\" He took Nycolos's heavy sigh as assent, and continued. \"I realize that you've been in a dark mood, Master, and that you never expected to be forced to maintain your current shape for any length of time. But\u2014\"\n\n\"Am I to be regaled with another of your intricate theories, Smim?\" He had not been remotely taken, and certainly not convinced, with the goblin's hypothesis regarding the link between his mental state and his unfamiliarity with the urges and influence of his human blood.\n\nSmim bulled ahead, his words nicking themselves and bleeding on the jagged edges of his clenched teeth. \"But were you paying any attention at all to the humans around us? Surely you must have seen a few apologies on which you might model\u2014\"\n\nBut he was already storming ahead, was Nycolos Anvarri. He remained distraught over his circumstances, though he was gaining control over that emotional maelstrom. He remained irritated that he must lower himself to treat these people as peers. And although he would have denied it, even to himself, he still flailed in the tide of human sensation and emotion and need, precisely as Smim believed.\n\nThanks to his current state, he had already decided that Smim was mistaken about this, too: It was just an apology, simple and straightforward. How could he possibly need help with that? How could one do it wrong?\n\nNo, the problem was with Kortlaus. The baron was being unreasonable. Nycolos just had to find someone more rational, someone who truly, deeply wanted to patch things up.\n\nFortunately, he knew precisely where to locate such an individual. Margravine Mariscal would be overjoyed with any sort of apology from him, and to hell with Smim's nitpicking!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Nycolos staggered back from the door, head ringing with more than the sound of its abrupt slam. His eyes blurred, watering with the unexpected shock and pain. One of the nearby guards, stationed in the hall outside the margravine's chambers, passed him a handkerchief to wipe away the trail of blood that trickled from his door-battered nostrils.\n\n\"T'ank you,\" he said, offering it back.\n\n\"Keep it, sir.\"\n\nSmim awaited him some yards down the corridor, making no effort whatsoever to hide his knowing smirk.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Nycolos said, carefully prodding at his aching nose, \"it might be wise for me to rethink my apologies. Maybe try to observe a few before making another.\"\n\n\"What a marvelous notion, Master. I couldn't have said it better myself. Sooner,\" he added with only a perfunctory effort at lowering his voice, \"but not better.\"\n\n\"Are you quite through, now, Smim?\"\n\n\"At this rate, Master? I can only doubt it.\"\n\n\"You are starting to truly irritate me, you know.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Master. Oh, there! See! One perfectly good wild apology.\"\n\nMuttering to himself in the language of dragons, Nycolos made for his quarters, a non-bloodstained tunic, and perhaps five or six stiff drinks."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Days passed, very nearly another week since Nycolos's return from his overnight sojourn into Talocsa's seedier underbelly. In that time, he attempted no further conversations with either Kortlaus or Mariscal, save for exchanging the necessary pleasantries should he happen to pass one of them in the hall or meet them while he was on duty. Nor had he yet attended any of his Majesty's dinners, so that\u2014despite his newfound reputation for isolation and the fact that nobody really wanted him there\u2014people had begun to talk.\n\nBut he had not, in all that time, been idle.\n\nNycolos tackled the basics of his responsibilities as a knight of Kirresc, standing ceremonial guard for hours at a time, overseeing the ledgers and records of the tiny parcel of land that was his, as baronet, to manage. By playing up his lingering wound and the chirurgeon's earlier orders, he avoided any of his more arduous duties, including training and practice, anything that might give away his ignorance of things he ought to know. That, too, was beginning to wear, and he knew his excuses would not long suffice.\n\nFor that, he was prepared\u2014for that, and so much more. Nearly every waking hour not consumed by his official duties was spent in careful observation of Oztyerva's men and women. He studied their combat training, despite his own lack of participation, quickly picking up the basics of the local fighting styles. He watched people's manners, their interactions, and\u2014wherever possible\u2014their apologies and amends. Now that he no longer held himself above such concerns but instead immersed himself, a drowning man struggling to learn to swim, his self-education proceeded swiftly.\n\nAnd where the knowledge he wished to acquire was less overt, where stealth and sneaking were of greater use, he had Smim. For all their initial objections and lingering revulsion, the court, the aristocrats, and the servants had slowly grown accustomed to seeing the goblin in their midst, running this errand or that for his liege. Now that his mere appearance didn't put people on their guard, Smim went to work. He lingered, he hid, and above all, he eavesdropped, absorbing all manner of gossip and semi-open secrets but with a particular ear toward the various political factions and rivalries that could be found in any and every capitol.\n\nTonight, finally, Nycolos was ready\u2014or, if nothing else, he was ready enough, and had decided he could afford to put this off no longer.\n\nIn the hours before evening, he rehearsed his performance with Smim, touching on everything he knew he must convey. He ruthlessly squelched his prideful inner objections, and what portion he could not suppress he channeled instead into those details of his story that he believed a real human, the true Nycolos, would have found intolerable. Done properly, it would make tonight all the more convincing. Done wrong\u2026 Well, he simply wouldn't do it wrong.\n\nPreparing himself through intense mental effort and several glasses of wine, he called for his servants to bathe him thoroughly until his dark complexion practically shone; to comb any lingering tangles from his hair, and trim his beard back to a thin, stylish length; to oil and perfume his body until a casually sniffing hound might not recognize him as a living mammal.\n\nWith their assistance he donned his most formal garb: supple boots of leather, tightly laced; sky-blue tunic with trousers of black; burgundy kaftan with fine gold trim. He even belted on his scabbard, wearing his finest sabre not because he anticipated needing it, but for the extra air of ceremony it conveyed.\n\nHe left a wake of gossiping pages and gentry behind him, as he'd known he would, but he paid them no heed. And then, finally, he arrived at the entrance to the dining hall and waited for one of the servants to announce him.\n\nEveryone already seated turned his way, and all were clearly shocked not merely to see him, but to see him in his current state. Some were better at hiding it than others, but more than a few stared openly or began to whisper against the cheeks of their neighbors at the table.\n\nThe rest of the guests filtered in over several minutes, adding their own gazes or lowered voices to the throng, until finally Denuel Jarta called for silence so that Prelate Domatir might offer the usual suppertime prayer.\n\nNycolos waited until the invocation was complete, then rose from his seat before the servants could begin to serve the appetizers. He bowed, first to the table around him and then, far lower and more extravagantly, in the direction of the royal table.\n\n\"If it please his Majesty,\" he said, \"I recognize that this is somewhat irregular, but I beg permission to address my king, and this assembly.\"\n\nThe hall grew so silent that everyone present could hear the steam rising from the servants' waiting platters. Several of the gathered nobles and officers leaned unconsciously forward, eager to listen\u2014Marshal Laszlan chief among them, though not without a quick word in the king's ear.\n\n\"Speak, Sir Nycolos,\" Hasyan answered. \"You've our permission.\"\n\nNycolos didn't begin instantly, instead walking past his dinner companions to stand before the royal table itself, where he dropped to one knee. \"Thank you, Your Majesty. If I might\u2026 I've no grounds to ask favors of anyone, after the past weeks, but I beseech you to send the servants and guards from the hall, for just a few moments. What I've to say is\u2026 not merely difficult, but humiliating. I would keep it among my peers and my betters, if you'll permit it.\"\n\nThat required a bit of discussion between the king, the Crown Marshal, and the other counselors and advisors, but again\u2014perhaps sensing the importance of what was to come\u2014his Majesty acquiesced. After a polite scramble, the room was cleared of everybody not of noble breeding or high office.\n\nOnly then did Nycolos rise once more, take a deep and steadying breath that was only partly theater, and begin.\n\n\"Many of you were present in the court, the day I returned and told the tale of my journey to the Outermark Mountains and my battle with the wyrm Tzavalantzaval. The rest of you have, I am quite certain heard the same tale\u2014probably several versions of it\u2014from those who were there.\n\n\"It will also come as news to none of you that my behavior since that day has been inexcusable. Rude. Boorish. Unbefitting any human being with a sliver of pride, let alone a man of my station.\"\n\nSeveral of his audience were nodding or otherwise silently voicing their acknowledgment of his assessment. A few, Lady Mariscal included, kept their faces down, examining the table rather than looking his way.\n\nBalmorra Zas, court astrologer to Hasyan III, also nodded, but she wore the faintest traces of a expectant smile, as if she'd known this was coming. And perhaps she had.\n\n\"If any of you have done the math,\" Nycolos said, \"you might have noted that, even allowing for the vagaries of travel, my story leaves several weeks, even up to a couple of months, unaccounted for. Perhaps, if you noticed it at all, you assumed that time was eaten by a variety of minor pauses and inconveniences, and by the difficulties of traveling while injured.\n\n\"Some of it was. My wounds were\u2014are\u2014more severe than I let on in court. Only the chirurgeons have known how much so. I didn't wish people to worry, or to look on me with\u2026 pity.\"\n\nA very few expressions had lost some degree of hostility, and Mariscal finally looked his way, though most faces still wore masks of neutrality at best, and often dislike. Thus far, what he had said might elicit some measure of sympathy, but still explained little of his behavior.\n\nNycolos took another deep breath, returned to his place long enough to pour himself a small gullet-wetting drink.\n\n\"It was just after I had slain the dragon and lost Wyrmtaker, no more than several days later. My injuries were at their worst, and I had survived even that long only with the help of Smim. And then someone found us. A wagon, deep in the Outermark where few honest travelers have cause to go.\n\n\"It was no rescue. We were found, and we were taken. By Mahdreshan slavers.\"\n\nGasps, of horror and of sudden fury, sounded around the table. Kortlaus's skin flushed with deep anger, and Mariscal dropped the spoon she had been toying with.\n\n\"We were kept, caged, with many others. And then we were sold, traded off like beasts. Smim and I spent\u2026 I'm not certain how long. Weeks, if not more, at forced labor in an Ythani mine, in the northern Outermark Mountains.\"\n\nA dozen nobles spoke at once, voicing their outrage, but Nycolos raised a hand. \"They treated my wounds, enough that I was able to work, enough that I was worth the pittance of food they offered.\n\n\"We were worked to exhaustion. Whipped frequently. It wasn't the pain of the lash, you understand. Pain, I can tolerate. But to be treated as less than a beast, after\u2014however close, however painful\u2014the greatest victory of my life? A man of my station? It was intolerable, it was\u2026 dishonorable. Humiliating.\n\n\"I grew paranoid. Many of the slaves would turn on one another, in hopes of currying favor with the overseers\u2014several of whom were, themselves, all too eager for any excuse to dole out punishment. Danger lurked in the mines, as well, for Tzavalantzaval was far from the only inhuman creature to dwell within the Outermark Mountains.\n\n\"I survived, in part, thanks to what few friends I had. Smim, yes, but several others amongst the slaves as well. Friends I lost, friends I couldn't save, once we finally escaped and fled into the Outermark. Nor was our escape even of my doing, for we merely took advantage of an attack on the camp by some of those creatures from within the mountain's deepest caves.\"\n\nHalf truth, half lies; details he omitted, or altered to fit the narrative he needed to convey. And yet, as he spoke, Nycolos felt a small portion of the weight he carried lift from off his shoulders, from within his gut and within his soul. Telling the tale aloud, even an obfuscated and twisted echo of it, was a balm on a hurt he had not realized he still bore.\n\n\"I was\u2026\" His voice didn't crack\u2014he had more control than that\u2014but it definitely flexed a bit. \"I was ashamed. I didn't feel I deserved my freedom, didn't feel I had done all I should for those who had stood by me in my suffering. I didn't\u2026 remember how to trust. Didn't know how to regain my pride. And the result, well, was what you saw of me over the past weeks.\n\n\"I wasn't ready to return, to resume my life here. I'd forgotten how. I should never have inflicted myself upon all of you, not in that state. And for that, as much as for my behavior itself, I can scarcely begin to apologize.\"\n\nMariscal wept openly as the magnitude of what he had endured sank in, as did several others who had been close to Nycolos in one way or another, or who were particularly tender-hearted. Others, voices raised or trembling with fury, spoke of retaliation against Ythane for daring to treat a knight of Kirresc so\u2014and none seemed angrier on his behalf, surprisingly, than Dame Zirresca. Kortlaus stood, his chair almost tipping over, and wrapped his friend in a crushing embrace, one that Nycolos forced himself to return for a span before gently extricating himself.\n\nHe slowly walked back toward the royal table, briefly clutching hands with many of the diners who reached out to him as he passed, or exchanging nods and kind words. Everyone, it seemed, was horrified and deeply sympathetic. Sir Tivador shamefacedly apologized for his drunken actions of the festival day, and Andarjin expressed his own condolences for Nycolos's travails.\n\nFinally the knight dropped once more to one knee, but this time at a slight angle. Rather than facing his Majesty directly, he seemed to be kneeling to the narrow space between the king and Orban Laszlan.\n\n\"Crown Marshal, my behavior has reflected poorly on myself, and on my suitability for the position I've been striving for. If you wish me to, I will withdraw my candidacy for your office.\"\n\nBaron Kortlaus, still on his feet, instantly moved just behind and to one side of the kneeling knight, then lowered himself next to him. \"Marshal Laszlan, Your Majesty. As one of Sir Nycolos's competitors for the office, I ask that he permitted to continue his efforts, and to prove his sincerity.\"\n\n\"That's quite noble of you, my Lord,\" the palatine, Denuel Jarta, said. \"But you're also well known to be a friend of Sir Nycolos, and I'm not certain that your recommendation in this matter is entirely\u2014\"\n\nThe hall erupted in a new round of murmuring as Dame Zirresca stood from her chair. Although her face was a flickering candle flame of vying emotions, her pace was steady and sure. She, too, knelt albeit on the other side of the table.\n\n\"As the other of Sir Nycolos's competitors,\" she announced, her tone steady and more than loud enough to carry, clearly and unmistakably, \"I, too, ask that he be allowed to resume his efforts. Please, Marshal, don't ask that he withdraw his candidacy. Not after all we've just heard.\"\n\nNycolos was grateful, in that moment, that he must remain in his current posture until the king granted him permission to rise. Had he not been staring intently at the floor, he knew he couldn't possibly have hidden his shock at the woman's support.\n\nOrban and King Hasyan conferred in their hushed tones. Finally, the king commanded all three to rise.\n\n\"Speaking up on Sir Nycolos's behalf does each of you credit,\" Orban said in his booming voice. \"Please return to your seats.\" Only when they both had done so\u2014Kortlaus laying a brief hand on Nycolos's shoulder as he stepped away\u2014did the marshal continue. \"Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nThe knight straightened his shoulders. Whatever was about to occur, he felt confident that\u2014for the first time in weeks\u2014he'd done himself proud. It felt good to be working toward something again, rather than moping about, however justifiably.\n\n\"You have much to atone for, baronet. Not only your behavior since your return, but your unauthorized departure in the first place, to say nothing of taking\u2014and losing\u2014Wyrmtaker.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Nycolos agreed without protest.\n\n\"You'll be doing penance and enduring punishment for some time. You understand this? You accept this?\"\n\n\"I welcome it, Marshal Laszlan.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Then let everyone present know that while you have a difficult road ahead, Sir Nycolos, if you can navigate it with the poise and honor for which you were once known, and if you can show us that you have learned from your experiences, you remain in consideration for the office of Crown Marshal when the day comes for me to step down.\"\n\nAgain everyone spoke at once, but Nycolos was heartened to realize that, from several segments of the table, that susurrus was punctuated by applause and even a few vigorous cheers.\n\n\"You've fallen behind, son,\" Orban said more softly, \"but you're not out of the race.\"\n\nNycolos bowed low, and swept back to his chair, again clasping several hands on his way. Palatine Jarta called for the meal to (finally) commence, and the evening took a few steps back toward normal.\n\nHe returned Mariscal's radiant smile, exchanged a few light comments with Kortlaus, but he knew well not everyone present would be pleased with this evening's turn of events. Several supporters of other candidates scowled his way when they thought he wasn't looking. He half expected to see the same from Margrave Andarjin, but saw only the man's usual polite expression.\n\nOr rather, that was almost all he saw. For an instant, the fa\u00e7ade slipped, and Nycolos caught the briefest glimpse of the anger stirring beneath it\u2014not when Andarjin looked his way, no, but when he turned once to face Zirresca.\n\nDissention in the ranks, is it? I believe I have just the right fellow in mind to peek into that\u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"What in the name of Straigon's missing jawbone is wrong with you?\"\n\n\"First,\" Zirresca said stiffly, \"I'll thank you not to swear by that name around me, or anywhere within Oztyerva's walls. And second\u2026\" She glanced meaningfully at the fingers clasped with almost bruising intensity around her bicep, pressing the wrinkled sleeve of her gown into her skin. \"Because you're my friend, Arj, I'm going to offer you a chance to remove your hand from my arm before I remove it from yours.\"\n\nAndarjin's mouth worked in silence, and it seemed as if the breeze of the thoughts whirling within was audible each time his lips opened. He was, however, wise enough to withdraw his hand, and he even managed a shallow smile.\n\n\"You'd threaten a margrave this way, Zirresca?\"\n\n\"Not just any margrave. Lucky you.\"\n\nHe chuckled, however forced. \"I apologize. I shouldn't have grabbed you. But we do need to discuss what happened at dinner.\" He began to pace, though the small sitting room didn't allow more than a few steps each way.\n\nFor her own part, Zirresca took a seat at the table. \"And were your own expressions of sympathy so empty, Arj?\" She sounded almost disappointed.\n\n\"They were expected. It would have been unseemly not to offer them. And anyway, no, not empty. What Nycolos endured was truly unfortunate. But acknowledging that is a far cry from supporting his return to the marshal's good graces, or from sabotaging your own campaign for the office!\"\n\nZirresca leaned over the table. \"I've sabotaged nothing. I'm still the best candidate, and I still intend to be the next Crown Marshal.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"And even beyond his status as my rival, I've never much liked Sir Nycolos. You know that. But I would not wish what befell him on my worst enemy, and I will not stand in the way of a once-honorable man who seeks to regain that honor.\n\n\"Besides, I want to best him fairly and without doubt. It will strengthen my own position when I become marshal, and it will make him more likely to accept his defeat and the requirement of serving under me.\"\n\n\"You becoming Crown Marshal is too important for our plans to leave to chance, Zirresca! We should be taking every advantage we can!\"\n\n\"Me becoming Crown Marshal is too important for cheats or shortcuts, Arj. I will do it properly, and I won't dishonor myself in the process.\"\n\n\"We\u2014\"\n\n\"Shall we take the question to her Highness? See what Princess Firillia thinks, whose viewpoint she approves of?\"\n\n\"No.\" Andarjin's scowl once more transformed itself back into his traditional polished cast. \"That won't be necessary. It is, after all, already done. For good or for ill.\"\n\n\"Yes. It is.\"\n\nI suppose, Smim mused, ensconced and all but invisible in the deep shadows of the window alcove high above the arguing pair, it was too much to hope that they might feel the unnatural urge to explain these plans of theirs in exacting detail. Still and all, he'd learned much, more images to weave into the ever-growing tapestry that was the political and social landscape of Oztyerva.\n\nAt this rate, he might even learn enough to keep the master from stumbling blindly into something that, lingering draconic sorceries or not, might get him killed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "With each day of autumn's passage and the steady approach of winter, the garden had grown less and less colorful. The best efforts of the palace groundskeepers, even with the tiny sprinkling of magic that rumor suggested they practiced, could only slow the inevitable deterioration. Blossoms were smaller, limper, less fragrant; leaves and stems browner; birds less frequent and less vocal in the denuded trees.\n\nBut here was where the margravine had wanted to meet, on a granite bench tucked away between fading crimson tulips\u2014her favorite flower\u2014on one side, and a marble statue of a centaur on the other. So here was where Nycolos, eager to rebuild bridges despite his bewilderment with certain aspects of the conversation, sat.\n\n\"\u2026genuine than your last attempt at an apology,\" Mariscal was saying. Having dismissed her ladies-in-waiting to stand far back, she leaned eagerly toward him from her side of the bench, both her hands clasped around one of his own. Yet there remained a fragility to her expression, however delighted. Even Nycolos, no expert on human interaction, recognized the need to tread carefully.\n\nHe wished, with hidden chagrin, that he understood more about this relationship he apparently had with Mariscal. His interactions with Kortlaus never seemed this fraught!\n\n\"I wasn't ready to\u2026 admit to everything then,\" he said haltingly. Then, sensing without entirely knowing how or why that she would welcome hearing such a thing, he added, \"Once I had decided, I\u2026 I thought seriously of coming to you with the whole story first. But I wasn't certain you'd see me, and\u2026 Well, I was even less certain I could bring myself to relive it more than once. I'm sorry.\"\n\nMariscal's grip on his hand tightened fiercely. She started to lean even closer, seemed to catch herself at the last minute. \"It's all right, Nycos.\" Her words quavered in the air between them. \"I'm just so glad you finally did speak of it. Whatever you need, whatever it takes to help you heal, I'll do. You know that, right?\"\n\n\"Of\u2026 of course.\" Was it just nervousness, confusion over his situation and fear of another social misstep, that had his heart beating as it was?\n\n\"Tell me,\" she said, sitting up straight and clearing her throat, \"what duties has the Crown Marshal assigned you, now that you're\u2026 working with him again?\"\n\n\"I'm to handle some of the beginner training. New recruits, pages, young children of the nobility. How to properly hold a sabre, basic parries and cuts, and whatnot.\"\n\nMariscal's lips turned in a deep frown. \"That is beneath you, Nycos. Insulting, even under the circumstances. I'd like to have a word with\u2014\"\n\n\"No, it's all right. I volunteered. I thought it a good way to prove I'm willing to take whatever steps I must to regain the court's confidence, while still performing a useful task.\"\n\nAlso\u2014and in fact, foremost in his mind\u2014had been the theory that this would permit him to learn by watching others even as he was required to teach only the bits of human and Kirresci martial skills that he had already picked up. That this would be a way to hide his own unfamiliarity until he could correct that deficit. For obvious reasons, though, he didn't share that particular reasoning with the margravine.\n\n\"That's\u2026 That's brilliant, Nycos! Kind-hearted, humble, and yet perfectly suited to beginning your road back to Laszlan's favor!\"\n\n\"Um. Thank you?\"\n\nHer cheeks had grown flushed, her gaze taken on an almost dreamy cast. \"I haven't felt this hopeful since the day you returned! I feel like you can actually do this. You can make things better\u2014and when you're Crown Marshal, they'll be better still. You'll have your high office, and our differing ranks won't matter any longer. And then\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, struggling to match her smile. \"And then.\"\n\nHe found himself suddenly, almost desperately, wishing Smim were here\u2014but he couldn't decide whether he needed the goblin to explain to him what was going on, or to protect him from it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Earth trembled, songbirds scattered, and dust billowed like a parting sea beneath the rolling thunder of iron-shod hooves; a stormfront of flesh and bone and steel surged along the road and the surrounding grasslands. The knights and soldiers of Kirresc, their powerful steeds shortening the miles with each distance-chewing stride, charged after those who had dared intrude upon their lands and prey upon their people. Crescent blades bristled, scythes to reap the lives from these foolish foreigners. And in their vanguard, half-standing in his stirrups, nostrils choked with acrid equine sweat as he and his warhorse both broiled in their armor beneath the high midsummer sun, rode Sir Nycolos Anvarri.\n\nAfter months of lesser duties, of simple instruction, of standing meaningless posts, of every bit of scutwork not utterly beneath his station, all in the name of proving himself a changed man from the boorish brute who had returned from the Outermark, this was his first assignment of any significance\u2014though it had still been meant to prove uneventful. All the knights of the court took their turn at leading long-running patrols along this border or that highway, a symbol to the soldiers that the gentry, the nobility, the king and his court, stood with them.\n\nHere, though? Not two dozen leagues from Talocsa itself? This was a quiet stretch of border, a line on the map that few crossed with ill intent. Nycos knew full well that being sent here, while a sign of his improving status, had also been an indication he wasn't yet to be trusted with anything of import. He should, at worst, have been required to put the fear of the gods into a few tariff-dodgers trying to scoot around border stations on the main roads.\n\nThen a group of bandits and raiders had crossed that line from Mahdresh, looting\u2014and in one instance, burning\u2014several border towns on the Kirresci side.\n\nNycos had learned much in those months, and he knew precisely how such an event would play out diplomatically. Kirresc would angrily demand Mahdresh keep tighter control of their criminal element. The Mahdreshan government would apologize profusely, but point out that their impoverished society hadn't the resources to deal with crime within the city-state proper, let alone at the edges of its outermost territories. Never mind that many in the Mahdreshan government were wealthier than that government itself, that it was an open secret their people lived in poverty because of their rulers' greed. There was simply nothing they could do, and they certainly couldn't devote what few resources they had to protecting so powerful and prosperous a nation as their neighbor.\n\nIt was, Nycos fumed, an even bet as to whether someone in Mahdresh's upper echelons was actually getting paid off by these selfsame raiders.\n\nBut so be it. Mahdresh wouldn't police its own? Nycos and his soldiers were more than happy to do the job, and now, as their trained steeds slowly closed the gap between them and the fleeing brigands on their smaller, weaker mounts, was near time for them to send a message of their own.\n\nThe raiders had fled off road, pounding across the lightly forested grasslands that stretched for miles in every direction\u2014a mistake that Nycos was more than happy to ensure they paid for. True, had they remained on the highway, they might have found themselves trapped between the oncoming knights and the Kirresci border station, but that station would also have served as a clear demarcation between the two sovereign lands. Here in the wild, that line on the map did not so readily translate into real life, and the Kirresci pursuers could see no border that would obligate them to break off their hunt.\n\nOne of the raider's horses stumbled\u2014not severely, just a brief loss of footing on some bulge or depression hidden in the knee-high grasses\u2014but enough to slow. Nycos kicked his heels into Avalanche's side, but the warhorse scarcely needed the prod; he had already lengthened his stride, snorting his excitement, at the smaller beast's stagger.\n\nScreaming something unintelligible, face slack with fear, the bandit turned in his saddle, raising a heavy broadsword to face the oncoming attack. It made no difference.\n\nNycos rose in his stirrups, snapping his szandzsya to the side with lightning speed born equally, now, of months spent in practice and muscles enhanced just a touch beyond human. The unsharpened outer edge of the sabre-spear smacked the heavy sword partway along its arc, knocking the thicker blade out of line. Then, the shaft braced along Nycos's arm and against his back as he swept it outward, the weapon connected with the raider's neck.\n\nBetween the rigid grip and Avalanche's pounding pace, flesh and bone didn't even slow the blade's passage. A few rogue drops of blood from the sudden geyser spattered across Nycos's kaftan, as well as the chain hauberk and reinforcing breastplate beneath, but otherwise he was gone without so much as a hint that a man had died in his passing.\n\nUp ahead, the Mahdreshan raiders had altered course, guiding their own mounts slightly leftward toward a large copse of trees whose thick boles and even thicker foliage broke the rolling monotony of the grasslands. Many such tiny oases of woodland speckled the region, eventually growing into genuine forest\u2014but that was many leagues distant, east of Talocsa. Here, a copse this size was the closest cousin to forest the land offered.\n\nDid the Mahdreshans mean to hide within? That was beyond desperate, a foolish and utterly futile gesture. The copse, though larger than many, was too small for concealment, could buy them a few extra minutes, at most. Turn and fight? The boles would prevent the soldiers of Kirresc from mounting a charge, yes, but the raiders remained outnumbered by opponents both better armored and better trained.\n\nNo, something about this didn't feel right. Nycos's instincts\u2014both those of his current form and those remembered from his earlier, predatory life\u2014tapped insistently at the back of his head and along his neck, their demands for attention speckling goosebumps across his skin.\n\nHe raised a fist, the entire company slowing to a brisk canter at the signal. Several of the troops tossed questions or complaints back and forth to one another, worried about letting the brigands escape, but Nycos's second-in-command on this patrol, a gruff veteran with graying hair, immediately rode to his side so they might speak despite the lessened but still overwhelming drumbeat of the hooves.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos,\" she began with a sharp nod.\n\n\"Captain Rahdel.\"\n\n\"You're sensing it too, then, sir?\"\n\n\"Indeed. They're up to something.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Any thoughts as to what, Captain?\"\n\n\"Not much of use. I might suspect an ambush in the trees\u2014I don't see how they could have sent word ahead, but I won't swear they didn't\u2014but it seems too obvious. And unless there's a lot of them, the copse wouldn't provide them particular advantage over us.\"\n\n\"And if there were a lot, they probably couldn't all hide there.\"\n\nHer frown deepened. \"No. We'd best figure it out swiftly, though, sir. Else they really are going to escape us.\"\n\nRahdel was right; the raiders were rapidly pulling ahead. Nycos didn't much care for the idea of breaking into another gallop without figuring out what trouble or trick awaited them, but it was a risk he would take if no other option presented itself. At least the Kirresci warhorses could close the gap again, charging over the relatively flat grasslands\u2026\n\nNycos cocked his head. The flat, breeze-kissed, knee-high grasslands.\n\nHe strove to listen, but even with his hearing magnified to supernatural extremes, he couldn't pinpoint anything beyond the horses, the voices, the distant calls of bird and beast, the rustling of those grasses in the faint summer winds. It didn't matter, though, not really. He was sure, or at least sure enough to act.\n\n\"Archers,\" he ordered.\n\nAlthough she must have been running over with questions, the soldier never hesitated, nor did she ask any of those questions save for, \"Target, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\nHe told her, and she practically lit up with understanding. \"I should have thought of that,\" she muttered, before turning to bark a few quick commands to the soldiers behind.\n\nPerhaps a third of the company unslung recurved bows from where they hung upon their saddles, aimed high, and loosed. A small swarm of arrows buzzed through the air, angry wasps hunting prey, to plummet point first into those gently dancing grasses to either side of the trampled path left behind by the Mahdreshan bandits.\n\nShooting blind, it was no surprise that none of the Kirresci archers actually hit anyone. Their sudden volley had all the effect Nycos could have hoped for, however.\n\nIt drove the brigands' own archers, who had lurked prone in the high grasses waiting for their targets to draw near, out into the open. Panicking at their premature discovery, they rose\u2014to their knees, if not their feet\u2014and began to shoot back.\n\nAgainst armored soldiers, who had once more spurred their mounts into a furious charge and whose own more experienced bowmen and \u2013women now had visible quarry at which to aim, they had no chance. Two of Nycos's people fell, true, arrows finding or punching gaps in their hauberks of chain, and for that the enraged knight would see Mahdreshan blood fed to the dry and thirsty soil. Yet in exchange for those two lives, all seven of the enemy who had lurked in ambush perished beneath either Kirresci arrows or Kirresci hooves.\n\nThe fleeing fugitives redoubled their efforts, now, but it was only a matter of time. Their weaker horses tired, wheezing and foaming. With every step the soldiers neared. Nycos didn't doubt that they were technically within Mahdresh-claimed territories by the time they caught up, but again, lacking any obvious markers, who could say for sure?\n\nAnd in the moment, who cared?\n\nAs any cornered animal, once the bandits knew escape was no option, they turned to fight. Spears and heavy chopping swords flew free to clash with szandzsya and sabre. The anger, the desperation, and\u2014in one or two instances\u2014the indignation in their features suggested the raiders were well aware this was a fight they could not win, yet neither were they going down without a struggle.\n\nAll save one. He and he alone continued in his flight, whipping at his steed with vicious but controlled strokes. Fear drove him, yes, but not the outright panic Nycos would have expected from a man abandoning his comrades to certain death.\n\nHmm.\n\n\"Archers!\" he called over his shoulder. \"I want that man off his horse!\"\n\nThen the two opposing forces came together in a deafening clash, and he had no more time for contemplating any foes but those he faced personally.\n\nAvalanche lived up to his name. Hundreds of pounds of dense muscle and chain barding slammed, screaming, into the enemy. The first brigand fell, his steed broken and driven into the dust by the living boulder upon which Nycos rode, and already Nycos was after the next.\n\nMost of the soldiers had hefted their shields as the lines met, guiding their mounts with their knees, laying about with sabres or with szandzsya spinning in one-handed grips.\n\nNot Nycos. Leaving his shield hanging from the saddle, he clutched to the horn with his left hand, fist so inhumanly tight it deformed the leather. So anchored he slid his left foot from the stirrup and leaned far out to the right, his sabre-spear whirling. The first spin severed the arm of a Mahdreshan who had thought himself beyond the knight's reach; the second opened the screaming bandit's chest.\n\nAnother came at him in a charge, hunched low behind a lance slightly thinner but easily twice as long as the szandzsya. Clearly the brigand assumed him an easy target, off-balance and lacking a shield.\n\nConfident that none might spot the impossible details in the chaotic melee, Nycos reached out with his own weapon quicker than a striking serpent, knocking her spear aside so the lethal tip passed him harmlessly by, then leapt from his already precarious perch. Inhuman muscle and bone propelled him, fast and far, so that his own armored body collided with hers as swiftly as the galloping horses themselves. He felt the bandit simply give, bones crumbling at the impact. Her spear fell to the grass from limp fingers, and only her feet, wedged in the stirrups, kept the dying raider from following suit. A quick shove solved that problem, then Nycos twisted and sawed at the reins, turning the wildly frantic horse about. He whistled for Avalanche to return to him, hoped the horse could hear him over\u2014\n\nA second, smaller spear\u2014hurled, not thrust, albeit it from close range\u2014slipped in beneath the cuirass he wore and punched through the chain hauberk protecting his sides.\n\nAnd there it stopped, the impact jarring him in the saddle and sending a jolt of pain through his body. Bruising, but otherwise inconsequential. He smiled broadly enough for the stunned young brigand who had thrown that spear to see the gleam of his teeth even through the ventail of Nycos's helm.\n\nNot that the man's shock lasted long, as one of Nycos's soldiers appeared behind the paralyzed fellow and brained him with a flanged mace.\n\nThat, though of course none knew it, was why Nycos rarely bothered with his shield: Not out of \"high-born knightly arrogance,\" as some of the lower ranks whispered when they thought he could not hear, but because he trusted to his sorcerously hardened skin to stop most blades or bludgeons already slowed by his armor.\n\nHe found, as Avalanche trotted to his side, that his charge, and the leap that followed, had carried him clear through the small mass of the enemy. He stood now beside that copse of trees and, looking beyond them, could just see the fleeing man some distance across the plain.\n\nHe was, indeed, escaping now on foot. One of the Kirresci archers had taken his horse out from under him. An impressive shot, that. Nycos owed the company a round of drinks when they got home.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos!\" Rahdel rode up beside him as he swung himself back over Avalanche's saddle. Her helm looked to have absorbed most, if not quite all, of a nasty blow. The rim was bent inward along one side, and even as he watched, she unhooked the ventail\u2014a \"veil\" of chain that protected the lower face\u2014from one of the cheeks and the nasal guard, pushing it aside so she could spit a mouthful of blood and dust.\n\n\"Are you injured, Captain?\"\n\n\"Nothing serious.\" She waved back at the remnants of battle. \"We cut most of them down on our first pass, sir. It's just cleanup, now.\"\n\n\"Good. See to it that everything's secure and then come after me!\" Without waiting for acknowledgment, he spurred Avalanche forward. The beast sprang eagerly into a run, so that Nycos felt as though the whole world had lurched beneath him.\n\nIt was, in his current life, the closest he could come to recapturing the joy of flying. He would never admit it, but he loved the aggressive creature for that.\n\nThe cluster of lush greenery flashed by, and once again there was only grass and the occasional lonely bole. Avalanche's hooves tore divots in the gently rolling waves of earth, clumps of sod and individual verdant blades launched back in a veritable wake. In seemingly no time at all they had swept by the bandit's dying mount and closed inexorably on the man himself.\n\nHe spun, revealing shaggy beard and sun-reddened skin\u2014and a compact crossbow, an intricate weapon not often found in the hands of Mahdreshan criminals.\n\nNycos leaned even as he hauled Avalanche's reins violently aside. The warhorse twisted, nearly tumbling end over end, then screamed as the powerful weapon thrummed and steel glanced off steel with a piercing screech.\n\nNow the mighty beast did fall, in a roll that might have crushed Nycos's leg had he not yanked it from the stirrup at the last second. He found himself lying awkwardly beside Avalanche, his legs resting atop the horse's heaving side. From here he couldn't see the barding that protected his mount's chest and head; knew the bolt hadn't penetrated, but not how badly the armor had been crushed, or how much damage the impact might have inflicted. A hot rage burned in his gut, and he tried to roll aside so that he could stand.\n\nA sharp tug at his shoulders and his waist stopped him cold. He might have pulled his leg aside in time, he realized, but both his kaftan and his sabre, sheathed at his side, were pinned by Avalanche's massive bulk. His hand was empty. His szandzsya must have been thrown aside when he fell.\n\nAnd from yards away, he heard the grunt and metallic click as the raider cocked the crossbow for a second shot.\n\nNycos roared upright, reaching down to snap the buckles off his belt and ripping himself free of the tattered kaftan. The bolt drove itself through that fabric, deep into the soil where he'd lain a heartbeat before. Rolling with the momentum of his lunge, Nycos dove over his fallen horse, reaching out to yank his remaining weapon clear of the sling by which it hung from the saddle.\n\nHis szandzsya was yards away, his sabre pinned beneath Avalanche, but no need to rely on his claws as of yet (nor to damage his gauntlets, in ways that would prove troublesome to explain, in the process). Nycos rose, a vicious warhammer held ready in two fists. He rotated it slowly, deliberately showing off both sides of the weapon's head: the four-pronged bludgeon first, then the curved steel raptor's beak of a pick, either one capable of obliterating armor and bone.\n\nThe brigand dropped the crossbow, impossible to load for a third time with Nycos so near, and drew his sword. Although very gently curved, much as a Kirresci sabre, this was not the same sort of weapon. Thicker and heavier of blade, this was meant to hack and to chop where the sabre sliced; forged for power, not finesse. In his other hand he produced a small buckler from the back of his belt, then lowered himself ever so slightly into a shield-first stance that looked\u2014to Nycos's admittedly inexperienced eye\u2014far more disciplined, far more military, than one might expect from a Mahdreshan thug.\n\nNycos advanced around the horse with equal care, grass bending and crunching beneath his tread.\n\nHis foe knew what he was doing. He swayed aside, away from each tentative swing of the warhammer, or else brought his buckler around to intercept. The tiny shield couldn't absorb the force of even a moderate blow, not from the crushing head or beak, but the man never blocked directly. Always he angled the shield so the hammer slid away, or slapped it aside with the thick steel edge.\n\nHe proved equally adept with the chopping blade, swinging and spinning the weapon in a smooth flow. He let the weight and momentum of the sword handle the brunt of the work, putting his own muscle into it only to change direction or recover from a missed slash.\n\nWhere Nycos advanced, the other retreated, trying to entice the knight to step into his weapon's arc. Where Nycos feinted, his opponent never faltered. No matter how Nycos struck, with whichever end of the hammer's head, the brigand wasn't there, or else his shield was. Once or twice he even parried with his heavier sword, a tactic that made Nycos nervous. The blade was no axe, it probably lacked the power to chop through the warhammer's fat wooden haft\u2014but Nycos didn't care to rely on \"probably.\"\n\nAround they circled, stomping rough patterns into the grass. And in so doing, Nycos grew careless.\n\nIt wasn't that he forgot his inhuman might or the other advantages his dragon's sorcery could invoke. No amount of time trapped in a human body could cause that. He did, however, grow unconsciously wrapped up in the notion of defeating this opponent with the skills he'd mastered, and with the only slightly exaggerated strength and speed he'd already bestowed upon himself. Perhaps, in the back of his mind, he was testing himself, seeing if he was learning as swiftly as he believed himself to be.\n\nHe was a fast study, was Nycos; since autumn, he'd learned more of Kirresci martial arts and weaponscraft than most humans could have picked up in four or five times as long. What he yet lacked was experience, and so when the duel fell into a pattern\u2014beat by predictable beat, step-following-parry-following-strike-following-step\u2014he failed to take note.\n\nHis enemy did not.\n\nA slip to one side where Nycos expected a step back; a change of direction, a slash of the blade; the crunch of rending mail.\n\nTearing pain shot through Nycos's side, not much above where the spear had failed to injure him earlier\u2014but this time, there was no such failure. Not even his toughened skin had saved him, not from a cut so fiercely and expertly delivered. He felt the sick sensation of metal sliding through meat, the hot rush of blood escaping the wound, welling up through links in the chain, drenching the padding and clothes beneath.\n\nWhich wasn't to say his armored hide had done him no good. The cut was agonizing, nearly driving him to his knees, slowing him, weakening him. But any other man would be dead, organs lacerated, maybe even his spine severed.\n\nAnd Nycos decided he was through testing himself, through fighting human to human.\n\nHe had practiced, these many months, mastering new tricks and learning how to more easily and more swiftly invoke the old. Skin closed over the wound, not healing it completely\u2014it had gone too deep into muscle, too near his organs where he dared not reshape himself\u2014but preventing further blood loss. And then that skin, and indeed his entire body, turned rigid, coming over with a pattern of deep amethyst scales. Power surged through his limbs as an instant's focus transformed those muscles into something never meant to be contained within the human form.\n\nHowling in fury, Nycos sprang at his horrified foe.\n\nNow the warhammer flew through swift, sharp arcs, impossible to predict, nigh impossible to see. Blows that should have sent him stumbling when they missed instead flowed one into the next as he recovered, dragging the weapon back into line through sheer main strength.\n\nPerhaps the raider knew that he could not possibly outrun his monstrous assailant if he broke and fled, or perhaps he simply never had the opportunity to try, but he stood and fought to the end. It was a sign of his skill and determination that it took as long as it did\u2014almost fifteen whole seconds, from the moment Nycos dropped the facade\u2014for that end to come.\n\nBy the time Captain Rahdel arrived with half the company a few moments later, Nycos had cleaned blood and brain from his weapon and caused his body to revert back to, if not fully human, then near enough that no observer would note the difference. He even, with a growl of pain, forced the wound to reopen, so he might have it properly treated without raising questions.\n\nHe was kneeling beside Avalanche\u2014who, Nycos was delighted to learn, had only been stunned and perhaps concussed\u2014when he heard the captain's familiar \"Sir Nycolos! Are you all right, sir?\"\n\n\"I've been better, Captain.\" He rose, indicating the bloody rent in his armor. \"But I'm a damn sight happier than the other fellow.\"\n\nThe captain shouted an order, and one of the soldiers dismounted and began digging bandages, poultices, and the like from his saddlebag.\n\n\"The others?\" Nycolos asked, wincing as he worked at removing his breastplate and hauberk.\n\n\"Sweeping the grasslands, making sure we didn't miss anyone. They'll be joining us shortly.\"\n\n\"How many?\"\n\n\"Four dead, sir. Only one of the wounded I'm concerned we might lose. Everyone else should recover well enough.\"\n\nFour. Not bad against a force of raiders this size. Not great, and not part of his report he looked forward to making, but not bad.\n\n\"I don't\u2014\" Nycos winced as the soldier slathered some sort of herbal concoction over his wound. \"I don't think the man I chased down is just another Mahdreshan raider, Captain.\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"He hasn't been on the road as long as the others. His face is still sunburnt. He's not been out here long enough to get weathered. And he's not quite as filthy. And I'm not convinced he's Mahdreshan at all.\"\n\nRahdel started. \"How can you tell that, sir?\"\n\nWhat could he say? The man didn't especially look Mahdreshan, but in cultures as racially mixed as most nations of southern Galadras, only about half the people, on average, really resembled any particular nationality. And somehow, Nycos didn't think the truth\u2014that he'd given the man a good sniff with his unnatural senses, that his sweat was different, that he didn't smell as though he'd spent the last months or years eating the same stuff as the others\u2014would go over well.\n\n\"Just a hunch. Fighting style, little details like that.\"\n\n\"Hm. Well, you may be onto something, sir. I had a few of the soldiers searching the fallen, see if we could figure out whether they were part of a larger band, maybe even find something the damn Mahdreshan government couldn't shrug off. Didn't come up with anything in that regard, but Valladi found a sizable pouch in the saddlebags of the man we think was their leader.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014ow! Be careful with those bandages! Ahem. Yes, Captain?\"\n\n\"Pouch was half full of silver zlatka, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"Kirresci minted?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But that'd be an awful lot of raw coin for these bastards to have gathered from a few border towns, wouldn't you think?\"\n\nNycos pointed a thumb at the man he'd killed, and several of the soldiers hopped from their horses to look him over.\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" one called back. \"Pouch full of them!\"\n\n\"So either Mahdreshan bandits are paying good silver for an outsider to travel and pillage with them\u2026\" Captain Rahdel began, her tone making it quite clear what she thought of that hypothesis.\n\n\"Or this man paid them,\" Nycos mused, \"to\u2026 what? Strike certain villages? At certain times? As an escort? Or a diversion\u2026\"\n\nHe chewed it over and decided he abhorred the taste.\n\n\"Gather the company,\" he ordered. \"Sound horns if you have to. Anyone still scouring the plains, call them back. As soon as this torturer-in-training is finished jabbing at my wounds with acid and sackcloth\u2014\"\n\n\"It's salves and bandages, sir,\" the soldier piped in, not looking up from his work.\n\n\"\u2014acid and sackcloth, we're making an early camp. We all need rest, and I want us mounted up and on our way to the nearest border station by dawn. Oh, and I want that body\u2014clothes, weapons, pouches, all of it\u2014wrapped up and brought with us. Something rotten's going on here, Captain, something beyond a few savaged villages. I want to see if anyone's heard anything from home while we've been out here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "The stations and checkpoints sitting astride the roadways on Kirresc's northwestern border were symbolic at best. Oh, they had their gates, their small shacks where guards could watch the highway without sun or rain or wind beating on them, the larger cottages further back where they bedded down and entertained themselves in their off hours. Yet the terrain for scores of leagues was grassland or sparse forest, without natural barriers larger than a few rolling hills or gentle streams. A fence ran for miles from the road, but it couldn't possibly encompass the whole border. It was easy enough to travel around, even easier to climb if one were traveling without horse or cart.\n\nOpen. Exposed. Vulnerable.\n\nAnd the reason that Kirresc's government put up with the lies and gameplaying by Mahdresh. Better to deal with their regular irritations than to risk the city-state and its territories withdrawing from the treaty of mutual defense against Ktho Delian aggression. So precarious was the political balance that the loss of even a single ally could spur Ktho Delios to action. Better occasional Mahdreshan bandits crossing that wide-open border than Deliant legions.\n\nNycos and his company had tethered their horses to a length of that fence and now stood in what shade they could find, waiting on the station's commander. The anxious knight, still pained by his wounds\u2014a sharp, fresh ache from the new, a dull throbbing reminder from the old\u2014leaned against the guard shack. On occasion his attention wandered to Avalanche, who cropped unenthusiastically at the sun-baked grass, but so far as Nycos could tell, the warhorse had recovered from his close call. If anything, the beast seemed vaguely embarrassed by it all.\n\nWith that concern fading, then, and being in no mood for idle chatter with his soldiers, Nycos found himself gazing down at his helmet, which he held in both hands and slowly rocked from side to side, watching the partially unhooked ventail flow and scrape across the steel bowl of the helm in an almost liquid fashion.\n\nA peculiar bit of armor, that, though Nycos was certainly no expert. Originally, or so he had learned, the heavy chain hung from all sides of the helm, protecting the back of the head, the neck, even draping over the shoulders of the wearer. Now that Kirresci armor and metalwork had advanced, now that solid steel protected much of the head and neck, now that chain hauberks often had reinforcing bands or breastplates, the chain portion of the helm guarded only the wearer's face\u2014part of the nose, the mouth, the chin. It was effectively a compromise design, offering less protection than a full faceplate, but cheaper and easier to produce, far lighter, and\u2014of greatest import to the wearer\u2014far less constricting of breath or vision.\n\nNone of which was immediately relevant, but pondering such minutiae made Nycos more comfortable in his efforts to fit in, present himself as more knowledgeable than he was. And it passed the time.\n\nTime, of which the commander on whom he waited had already taken too much. That was all right, though. Unlike his underlings, who could only stand and grouse impatiently, Nycos overheard bits of shouting from inside the small house that served as a barracks. The woman wasn't keeping them waiting deliberately, she was trying to figure out precisely what had gone wrong.\n\nAnd who was to blame for it.\n\nShe finally emerged from the structure, mail jangling, boots all but stomping. An older woman of iron in hair and posture, she might have been Rahdel's sister if not for her far paler complexion.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"Commander.\"\n\n\"I apologize for the wait. And for the\u2026 miscommunication.\"\n\nOh, but he knew that look, had seen it many times on many faces in the past months, that combination of shame and fury. One of her subordinates, whoever had bungled things, was going to get more than an earful.\n\n\"Messengers were dispatched to all the border patrols in the area,\" she explained stiffly. \"They had your routes, your schedules. They successfully located all the others, I don't know how they could have missed you.\"\n\n\"We were somewhat off course, pursuing the raiders, commander.\"\n\n\"Yes, yesterday. Maybe the day before. The runners should have found you a week ago.\"\n\n\"Well, never mind how, for the moment. Just tell us what's happening. Your men only gave us the very basic gist when we arrived.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" The station commander made herself relax, if only a little. \"I haven't been told all the details myself, of course. But apparently one of the Oztyerva Palace servants was caught passing information on to an outside party who Marshal Laszlan believes to have been a foreign agent. This man fled Talocsa before he could be apprehended, and we were instructed to watch for him, try to locate him before he could cross the border.\"\n\nOne man, along the entire border with Mahdresh? As likely find a specific tick in a pack of stray dogs. Still\u2026\n\n\"You have a description or a portrait of this man, commander?\"\n\nShe handed him a rolled parchment.\n\n\"Any word on which nation he was spying for?\" he asked as he unfurled the image.\n\n\"Not that I heard, sir. I don't think they knew.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Captain!\"\n\nRahdel appeared almost immediately at his side.\n\n\"Does this look like the man I killed to you?\"\n\nShe peered at the sketch, frowning. \"You can never be too sure with these, but I'd have to say no, sir.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought, too.\" He allowed the parchment to curl itself back up, then tapped it thoughtfully against his chin. \"It wouldn't make sense for an escaping spy to ride with the raiders, anyway.\"\n\n\"A diversion, then? The man with them was a comrade, using the raiders to draw our attention while the spy escapes?\"\n\n\"Seems most probable, doesn't it? It was probably overkill\u2014I doubt we'd have had much luck finding a single fugitive\u2014but still, it fits.\"\n\n\"And the failure of the messengers to inform you, Sir Nycolos?\" the commander asked. \"Also due to enemy action?\"\n\n\"No, I don't believe so. Assuming it wasn't just bad luck\u2026\" He didn't finish the notion aloud, but assuming it wasn't just bad luck, it felt personal.\n\n\"Captain Rahdel, take over the company. You've only a few more weeks out here, I'm more than confident you can manage.\"\n\n\"Yes, Sir Nycolos. And you?\"\n\n\"I am making an early return to Oztyerva. What happened out here needs to be reported, in-depth\u2014and what's happening back there needs looking into.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they have people doing just that, sir.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm certain they do.\" He smiled, though he knew the officers, ignorant of his unique talents and abilities, would take it for arrogance at best. \"But they don't have me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Nycos strode through the stone halls of Oztyerva, grateful to be out from under the midsummer blaze. He had come to fully understand, over the last month or so, why\u2014for the many followers of the so-called Empyrean Choir\u2014the sun god Alazir was among the most highly respected and revered deities, but not widely beloved. How, he wondered for what was far from the first time, did normal humans, who could not magically adjust their bodies to better deal with the heat, learn to stand it?\n\nHe nodded or smiled or spoke his greetings to those he passed, accepting their own in turn; a dramatic change indeed from earlier days! But so, too, had things changed while he was away on his border patrol. An undercurrent of worry, of suspicion, flowed beneath even the friendliest exchanges. Gazes lingered too long, or flickered away uneasily. Steps were stiff, as though everyone were self-conscious about some unseen observer. Armored soldiers, always present in the palace corridors, now appeared in greater numbers than Nycos ever remembered seeing, standing sentry or marching patrols where none had been deemed necessary before.\n\nWhatever espionage or intrigue had occurred here, King Hasyan and his advisors clearly took it seriously. Nycos increased his pace, sweeping toward the throne room, and if his speed and his bulk weren't sufficient to clear his path, the intensity writ large across his features certainly did the job.\n\nWhen he finally stepped into the great hall, beneath the watchful gaze of several guards, he realized he would have to move aside, stand with the bulk of the gathered nobles and await his turn to speak\u2014although Marshal Laszlan did acknowledge his arrival with a quick nod from beside the throne. Many waited to address the king, including Dame Zirresca, who must have only just returned from her own patrols along the northern border with Ktho Delios, but it was not to any of them that his Majesty currently spoke. No, the king and his advisors atop the dais were engaged in conversation with two figures Nycos knew by appearance and by name, though he was only passingly familiar with either.\n\nOne, an old and dark-skinned man in a flowing robe of purple and gold, could almost have been a male version of the physician, Lady Ilkya. He had the same gaunt, spindly limbs and age-roughened features. The other, a round-faced, sandy-haired woman of middle years, wore a blue gown, silver-trimmed, of an almost but not quite Kirresci cut.\n\nAmbassadors, both\u2014Aadesh Kidil of Suunim, and Leomyn Guldoell of Quindacra.\n\nNycos had entered in the midst of Leomyn's response to whatever the king had just asked her.\n\n\"\u2026official response,\" the ambassador was saying, cooling herself with a folding fan that perfectly matched her gown, \"would have to be that Quindacra would never stoop to spying on, or infiltrating the palace of, our neighbors and good friends of Kirresc. I might even have to go so far as to take offense that you would even suggest such a thing, Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Hasyan replied with surprising good humor. \"And if I were to utter a royal command that you provide your unofficial response, Ambassador Guldoell?\"\n\nShe returned a sad smile and as much of a shrug as her formalwear allowed. \"Then I would tell you, Your Majesty, that I'd be the last person to know if we were spying on you. They don't tell me anything that might cause conflict between my loyalty to King Boruden and my duties as envoy to your court. Frankly, they don't trust me that much.\"\n\nWas Ambassador Guldoell always this open, this dismissive of her own position? Nycos had been present in court for very few meetings with the emissaries of other nations, as he'd remained focused on learning what he needed to know of Kirresc itself. He'd have to ask Smim if the goblin knew more about this than he did.\n\n\"And you, Ambassador Kidil?\" Hasyan asked. \"What have you to say if I ask whether the spy we unearthed recently was Suunimi?\"\n\n\"I say,\" the old man replied with a friendly grin, in a voice even deeper than the king's own baritone, \"that if we truly needed to learn something from Kirresci you wished not to tell us, we have far more efficient and subtle ways to go about it.\"\n\nFrom many, it would have been a grossly disrespectful remark, but Aadesh had been Suunim's ambassador to Oztyerva Palace for decades. He and King Hasyan knew one another well, were even friends so far as their positions and political duties would permit. Thus, his Majesty simply laughed.\n\nNor was it an idle boast. Even before he'd become human or cared much for their borders, Nycos\u2014Tzavalantzaval\u2014had known of Suunim's importance. It was there, so history and legend would have it, that the Cennuen people first landed on Galadras after sailing across the treacherous Arrendic Ocean. Suunim was the womb of today's civilization on the continent, the birthplace of philosophy and modern government. They boasted the greatest archives, libraries, schools\u2014if it could be known, people said, it could be learned in Suunim, and travelers came from all over not only to study, but to share new discoveries.\n\nIt meant that Suunim had people loyal to it\u2014to what it stood for and to its institutions and history, if not its government\u2014all over southern Galadras. Further, the archivists there were said to have mastered some of the greatest divination magics known to humanity. The astrologies that Balmorra Zas and people like her practiced had been born and developed within that nation's borders.\n\nSo when Aadesh Kidil claimed that Suunim need not rely on clumsy methods of espionage to learn what they wished, he might have exaggerated, but his words contained some measure of truth.\n\n\"Father?\" It was Princess Firillia, standing along the opposite wall with her brother Elias and several royal cousins and favored servants, who spoke. \"I understand that we must consider all possibilities, but are we not dancing around the most obvious culprit?\"\n\nIt didn't require Nycos's enhanced hearing to pick up the name \"Ktho Delios\" among the many mutters and whispers sparked by her comment.\n\n\"In fact, we are not,\" Hasyan told her. \"Ambassadors? Thank you for your time. Should I learn anything regarding this incident that I believe has bearing on either of your nations, I will of course inform you immediately.\"\n\nAadesh and Leomyn bowed and made their departures. Only when the courtroom doors had thudded shut once more did his Majesty continue.\n\n\"We have just summoned Dame Zirresca back from patrolling the Ktho Delian border, where she was\u2014among other duties\u2014assigned to watch for any evidence of buildup or other military activity. Zirresca?\"\n\n\"Your Majesty.\" She advanced, knelt briefly, then spoke. \"Unfortunately, I can only report that my observations in that regard are inconclusive. I witnessed a great deal of troop movement, border patrols, and military exercises\u2014but that's normal for Ktho Delios in any but the coldest winter months. I cannot say I saw anything to suggest they're any more active than normal.\n\n\"Nor did my patrols discover any hint of the spy escaping over the northern border, though of course with so many leagues of wilderness to cover, the odds were ever against us locating him.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't have caught him anyway,\" Nycos announced. \"He didn't go north.\" Then, with sudden realization as every gaze turned his way, he knelt. \"Apologies, Your Majesty. May I\u2014?\"\n\n\"Of course, Sir Nycolos. Rise, and speak.\"\n\nHe did so, advancing to the center of the room. \"I have reason to believe,\" he began, \"that the fugitive you sought actually fled northwest, across the Mahdreshan border.\"\n\n\"And you let him go?\" Zirresca demanded. \"You let him escape you? What sort of\u2014\"\n\n\"I did not 'let him go,' because I never encountered him. As you pointed out, finding one man in that much wilderness? Nigh impossible\u2014especially since I was not even aware we were hunting for him.\"\n\n\"You weren't\u2014?\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos,\" Orban Laszlan interrupted, \"please tell us why it is you believe our spy fled that way, if you didn't see him for yourself?\"\n\nSo Nycos offered his report, leaving nothing out: the raiders, the outsider among them, the silver zlatka, and the peculiar failure of the runners to find his company on patrol, to deliver the news of the escaping spy, when they managed to contact all the others.\n\n\"It's not hard proof,\" he acknowledged as he wound down. \"The outsider could have been paying the bandits for some other purpose. But it certainly all fits.\"\n\n\"It does,\" Orban mused. \"A pity you found no evidence on the man to suggest who he served, whether this operation was Ktho Delian or\u2026 well, anyone else's.\"\n\n\"No, Marshal. But I did bring the body and all his belongings back with me. Perhaps others, with a more thorough examination, might find something I missed.\"\n\n\"Very good thinking, Sir Nycolos!\" Hasyan said. \"And well done, reporting this to us so swiftly. We are well pleased. We're about done here for the nonce anyway\u2014my advisors and I need to discuss all we've learned today\u2014so go take your ease, clean off the dust of your travels. We hope to see you at supper tonight.\"\n\nNycos bowed, offered Orban a friendly smile\u2014and a second one to the faintly scowling Zirresca, for good measure\u2014and made his way toward the exit through the slowly dispersing crowd."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "\"I'm not a man frequently given to prayer.\" Margrave Andarjin sounded steady as ever, but his hand shook just enough that filling his goblet was proving difficult. \"But I could see my way to offering multiple paeans to Neras if she'd be willing to turn her attentions to Nycolos damned Anvarri!\"\n\n\"Bit of an overreaction, isn't that?\" Zirresca, lounging back on the sofa, sipped her own drink. \"He discovered that someone might have been using the Mahdreshans to cover the spy's escape. It's good for us to know that.\"\n\n\"And it's another victory in the eyes of Laszlan and his Majesty. He was supposed to be out of the way and wasting his time on a meaningless patrol!\"\n\n\"It's a victory,\" Zirresca acknowledged. \"Hardly the end of the contest, though. It's unfortunate he was the one to make the discovery, yes. I'll manage.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you find anything on his housebroken goblin while I was away?\"\n\nAndarjin sighed, pulled out a chair, sat, stood again almost immediately and wandered to the far wall. There he leaned an arm against the stone, peering into his wine as though seeking answers there. \"Nothing. He actually had the creature managing his estates while he was away, and so far as my people can tell, it didn't make a single error! It's been polite, it's kept out of the way. Many people are still unhappy having it around at all, but it's given us no excuse to violate Nycolos's protection. I understand it's even become friends with a few of the servants.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Zirresca seemed equally fascinated with her own beverage, swirling it about in the goblet. They'd hoped to somehow use the goblin to weaken her rival's position, to indicate that he was unsuited to the office, but\u2026 \"I suppose we'll have to drop that line of attack, then.\"\n\n\"We're having to drop a lot of those. He's recovering much faster than I anticipated, Zirresca.\"\n\n\"He's still behind. Anything on Lord Kortlaus?\"\n\n\"No, he's not returned from his own patrol yet.\"\n\n\"Nothing regarding his\u2026 relationship with his subordinate?\"\n\n\"No,\" the margrave repeated. \"If there was anything to those rumors, the baron kept it from influencing his behavior in any way his soldiers noticed. Nothing but positive reports, if uninspired. I can handle the baron politically, if it comes to that. I'm telling you, Nycolos is the greater threat. He's the one we need to worry about.\"\n\n\"I never argued it,\" Zirresca said.\n\nSilence again, as Andarjin returned once more to his chair. \"It could have been worse for us, I suppose,\" he acknowledged. \"At least Nycolos didn't capture the actual spy. That would have been a feat impossible to downplay.\"\n\n\"Yes, but as we both mentioned in court, the odds of finding one man along an entire\u2026\" The knight froze at a sudden, horrid thought. She sat upright, pulling herself from the deep embrace of the cushions. \"Andarjin? Please tell me you're not the reason the runners failed to find Nycolos's company!\"\n\nShe took his instant of hesitation before opening his lips to respond as answer enough.\n\n\"For the gods' sake, Arj! That's practically treason!\"\n\n\"Oh, nonsense. Maybe a messenger simply got a little bit lost while tracking a patrol route. Even if such a thing were to happen deliberately, what difference would it make? You said yourself Nycolos had precious little chance of actually finding the man. Besides, nations spy on each other all the time. I'm quite sure this one particular operative learned nothing that his government\u2014and we have no reason to believe it's Ktho Delios, as opposed to one of our ostensible allies\u2014couldn't acquire some other way.\"\n\n\"I am not remotely satisfied with that answer,\" she said, \"and I don't believe her Highness Firillia would be, either.\"\n\n\"Zirresca, what are you thinking of\u2014?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to tell her anything. This time.\"\n\n\"Thank\u2014\"\n\n\"But you're going too far, Andarjin. It needs to stop. I will be Crown Marshal, and I will support you and Princess Firillia over Prince Elias, when the time comes. But I will not dishonor myself, and I certainly will not endanger Kirresc, to do it!\"\n\n\"But of course, Zirresca. Nor would I.\"\n\n\"So long as we understand each other.\"\n\nOh, yes, Smim noted silently from his by now familiar spot in the alcove above, lying flat to avoid casting a visible shadow in the last rays of the setting sun. I think we all understand each other very well."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "\"Well,\" Nycos said, voice echoing from the depths of the bath, \"isn't that a fascinating tale?\"\n\n\"I thought you might think so, Master,\" Smim replied from the adjoining chamber, where he currently straightened up after the knight's breakfast\u2014a task that appeared to consist, for the most part, of gulping down every scrap of leftovers like a starving hyena. \"The question,\" he continued around a mouthful of breaded and spiced liver sausage, \"is what you wish for us to do about it.\"\n\nNycos allowed his head to sink beneath the warm water as he pondered. After retiring from court last night, the fatigue of the long, hot patrol had caught up with him. Since neither Kortlaus nor Mariscal were available to talk\u2014the margravine was off visiting her father's court, though she was expected back any day\u2014he'd bothered with only a quick dunk in tepid water, to wash away the worst of the dust and stink, and then taken to his bed. Fast asleep when Smim returned from his regular bout of eavesdropping, he'd only heard the goblin's report this morning, first over breakfast and then during a far longer and more luxurious bath. (He had, of course, dismissed the servants after they'd refreshed and heated the water, rather than allowing them to bathe him\u2014in part so that he and Smim could speak in private, but also because he remained uncomfortable with his body's reaction to their ministrations.)\n\n\"We,\" he said, upon coming up for air, \"are going to do nothing for now.\"\n\nHe couldn't help but chuckle softly at the audible pause in the goblin's chewing, followed by a hard swallow. \"Pardon, Master? Nothing?\"\n\n\"It's useful information, Smim. And we'll definitely want to keep an ear on Andarjin.\"\n\n\"Oh, if only I'd thought of that while you were gone, Master.\"\n\nNycos ignored the sarcasm with the ease of long practice. \"But for right now, we've no proof of any wrongdoing. It's your word against theirs, and we both know who comes out ahead in that contest. It might even give them the excuse they want to act against you.\"\n\nDishes clattered as Smim began to collect them from the table in the suite's main chamber. \"On that subject, Master?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"We ought to discuss giving me a formal title.\"\n\nNycos paused in the midst of reaching out, fingers brushing the ceramic vial that held the mixture of soaps and oils he'd come to prefer for his beard. \"Pardon?\"\n\n\"There's a status, a pecking order, even among the servants. It's based largely on the rank of masters and employers, but our own official positions do enter into it. My impression is that some of them, and even a few of the nobles, would be more comfortable around me if they knew how to categorize me. And that might make them more liable to speak to me.\"\n\n\"I see. And what shall we call you, then? My palatine?\"\n\n\"Seeing as how you have neither a royal household for me to oversee, nor a kingdom in which I might serve as your official voice and surrogate, I think not, Master. Besides, I'd rather not give Jarta reason to request my execution. Being without a head might make it more difficult to listen in on conversations.\"\n\n\"I can understand how it might. 'Seneschal' would seem to be out for many of the same reasons. Any suggestions?\"\n\nSomehow, despite the goblin being in the other room, Nycos knew that Smim shrugged. \"Most of your brethren have squires serving them.\"\n\n\"Am I training you for the knighthood, now?\" Nycos asked in amusement, running the soap through his facial hair. \"Sir Smim, the Goblin Knight?\"\n\n\"Pah! I'm certain there must be worse ideas, Master, but it might require more than the two of us working together to come up with one. Although,\" he added with an audible smirk, \"it would be amusing to see everyone's reaction to the notion.\"\n\n\"In any case, we'll figure something out. I don't see that there's any rush to\u2014\" Nycos fell silent for an instant at the abrupt pounding on the door. \"See to that, would you, Smim?\"\n\nHe listened as the goblin's footsteps crossed the room, then ducked under the water once more to wash the soap from his face. The lingering scent of breakfast, when he emerged, was for some reason stronger than the bath oils.\n\nDue to the draft from the open door, maybe.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos!\"\n\nThe messenger, a young palace page, stood in the doorway to the bathing chamber, Smim hovering behind. Clearly something of import, then, if the goblin had allowed the boy inside rather than insist he wait for Nycos to dry off, dress, and come to him.\n\n\"Yes, what is it?\"\n\n\"I'm to tell you that runners have reported a foreign delegation approaching Talocsa, sir.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026 All right? And?\" Kirresc received envoys and ambassadors from most of the southern nations on a regular basis, and Nycos himself wasn't much involved with international\u2014\n\n\"It's Ythani, sir.\"\n\nThe knight was out of the tub like a breaching orca, sending a geyser of water across the ceiling and the floor. \"My clothes, Smim. Now!\"\n\n\"Yes, Master!\"\n\n\"And Smim?\"\n\nThe goblin halted in mid-spin. \"Master?\"\n\n\"My sabre, as well.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "It would be inaccurate to say Nycos had never seen the throne room so crowded\u2014in fact, a great many of the lower ranking gentry and servants who normally formed the ever-present audience along the right-hand wall were notably absent\u2014but it had certainly been some time since he had observed so many of the land's highest and most important assembled here all at once.\n\nThe king, of course, sat in state upon his throne, Crown Marshal Laszlan as ever at his side. Present, too, were the Palatine Denuel Jarta and Prelate Domatir Matyas, also hardly unusual. Hasyan had also, however, gathered to him the astrologer, Balmorra; Amisco Valacos, Kirrisc's Judge Royal; and a small entourage of other politicians and military leaders, several of whom Nycos had never before seen save in passing. Even the king's offspring, their Highnesses Elias and Firillia, stood amidst the group at the dais, as advisors, rather than in their customary spot along the other wall.\n\nNycos found himself standing beside Zirresca, who offered him a polite if frosty nod of greeting. Nor were they the only knights of the realm present. In fact, the entire front row of those waiting along the wall was made up of men-and women-at-arms. The other nobles, margraves and counts and barons, stood behind them. Nycos wasn't entirely comfortable with Andarjin at his back, even though he knew the man was too clever to do anything violent or foolish, but he did appreciate the need for a show of strength.\n\nHe heard many footsteps approaching from beyond the hall doors, and a symphony of voices that were not all Kirresci. The other accent sent a scurry of centipedes down his spine; his shoulders tensed hard, bunching the lines of his tunic. He could only hope that the kaftan he wore over it hid his discomfiture.\n\nMessengers had run back and forth between the palace and the approaching delegation long before they arrived, as would have been standard, so Nycos was unsurprised when Denuel Jarta stepped forward, even as the massive doors swung open, and announced, \"Haralius Carviliun, emissary of honored Ythane!\"\n\nHonored. Nycos wanted to spit.\n\nThe man at the head of the contingent boasted the same pallid skin and sharp, smirking features as Justina Norbenus once had, though not so alike as to suggest any familial relation. His thinning hair was a pale yellow that didn't much stand out from his flesh, and he wore a burgundy robe of office with a golden sash. His guards and assistants halted near the entrance, moving to stand along the back wall, while he alone advanced.\n\nOnly when he stood a few paces from the dais did he make obeisance, a peculiar combination of a low bow and a brief kneel, his fist clasped to his breast. \"I greet his Majesty, Hasyan III, in the spirit of warmth and friendship. I am humbled. You do me great honor by allowing me to appear before you.\" His timbre was soft yet powerful and carrying at once.\n\nSomehow, Nycos thought it would take more than an audience with royalty to humble this man. Possibly an ancient invocation, or an act of divinity.\n\n\"As you do us,\" the king replied with equal formality. \"We are overjoyed to receive the greetings of our dear friend Praetor Anurius, and his senate, from whom we hear far too infrequently.\"\n\nA very polite and political way of saying We have no ambassadorial ties or treaties with you, we rarely have anything to say to one another, what the hell are you doing here? Nycos had to choke back an amused snort.\n\nIt was a question that would go unanswered for some minutes, however. First there were additional exchanges of pleasantries, regards from this ruler to that noble, expressions of affection and honor that were such patent nonsense in both directions it was a wonder Prelate Domatir didn't combust where he stood. Then, of course, nothing would do but to discuss political matters in the world that could impact both nations (of which there were few) and the various possibilities for trade agreements and other economic treaties (of which there were even fewer).\n\nFinally, at just about the point where Nycos worried whether the shortened lifespan he could expect while in human form might not be enough to see him through this interminable charade, Haralius at last got down to the meat.\n\n\"I do have one other matter I must discuss with Your Majesty,\" the envoy said, each word all but marinating in reluctance. \"I hate to bring up something so unpleasant during the first real conversation our peoples have had in so very long, but I fear the issue must be addressed.\"\n\n\"Of course. You have our complete attention.\"\n\n\"It has to do, Your Majesty, with the murder of one of our highest and most revered citizens.\"\n\nHasyan frowned. \"We are deeply sorry to hear of that, emissary.\"\n\n\"Yes, well. It was, it is my sad duty to report, not merely her death alone, but that of a great many others, honest workers and craftsmen all, who labored under her at the mine she owned in the Outermark Mountains.\"\n\nNycos felt it then, surging, raging beneath the surface of his skin, of his heart, as it hadn't for months. The fury, the fire, the searing hatred for all that had been done to him and all who were responsible. No matter its source\u2014his resentment of the direction his life had taken, the pain of his experiences and the wound that would never heal, Smim's foolish ramblings about the alien influence of human blood and brain upon his soul\u2014he had forced it back. Through iron will and careful thought, self-examination and constant practice, he had pushed it deep, extinguished all but its faintest embers, until he had almost forgotten, save in his darkest or angriest moments, how it had felt.\n\nNo more. It roared in his mind, shrieking at him to lash out and damn the consequences, to salve his pride in the blood of those who had wronged him and to dare these mewling, insignificant primates to protest his actions!\n\nHad he tensed? Growled? Was it something less material, a change in his breathing or his attitude visible only to another warrior? Whatever she'd sensed, Zirresca placed a hand before him\u2014not touching, but ready to hold him back if necessary.\n\n\"Steady on, Nycolos.\" Her gaze remained straight ahead, at the yammering Ythani fool, and her lips barely moved with the whisper. \"I'm sure he more than deserves whatever you've got in mind, but trying it here and now won't help anyone.\"\n\nThat she spoke at all was, he knew, not out of any affection for him, but rather concern over the political repercussions of any ill-conceived violence. Nevertheless, he grunted his thanks and worked at taking deep, calming breaths.\n\nSo he listened, quivering with repressed emotion, as Haralius told his tale. He spoke of mangled, bloody bodies, brutally slain and left strewn about the mine and its surrounding camp, including the deeply lamented Justina Norbenus herself\u2014although, Nycos couldn't help but note, he made no mention of the unnatural wounds that would have been left by the mountain fey. The envoy spoke, as well, of many months and many Ythani soldiers, searching the mountains, the rocky hills and the badlands, the wilds of the Outermark, in a desperate hunt for survivors. How they had found mostly lingering scraps\u2014a length of torn fabric caught in a thicket, the remnants of an old and long-cold campfire\u2014or, on occasion, bits of human bone, picked clean by scavengers. How, after battling fearsome beasts and marauding goblins, they had successfully located barely half a dozen survivors, guards or escaped slaves who had managed to flee the massacre and survive the many hardships of the Outermark.\n\nAnd how each and every one of those survivors had offered sworn testimony as to precisely what had occurred.\n\n\"It grieves me terribly to say it, Your Majesty,\" Haralius concluded, hand to his heart, \"for I dearly dislike the notion of bringing you pain at such a nascent stage of what I hope will be a new brotherhood between our nations. Yet I am sworn to the truth\u2014and the truth is that, by the descriptions offered by every witness, the attack on our mine, this massacre of innocent Ythani citizens, was led by a knight of Kirresc.\"\n\nThe volcano within Nycos's soul erupted, refusing any longer to be suppressed. It was all he could do, required every ounce of will he possessed, to keep his outburst partially contained, to resort only to bellows rather than blades\u2014or worse.\n\n\"And what of the rest of the tale, you lying worm?\" His shout was a gale to shake the chamber. \"How this knight who supposedly 'led the attack' was enslaved in the depths of your mine! How many of your slaves, he included, were waylaid, taken by no legal or moral right! How they were beaten like beasts, how this Norbenus was a criminal and a monster, and how she and her torturers died, not at the hands of any intruder, but in self-defense as these poor souls made their desperate escape! How\u2014!\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos! Stand down!\" Many voices called to him as one, but it was, as always, the battlefield-spanning cry of the Crown Marshal that penetrated. Nycos found that he had stepped forward without realizing, that not just Zirresca but several in the crowd had reached out to haul him back. The Ythani guards had dashed from their posts by the door to surround the envoy, each ready to draw the thick-bladed short sword hanging at their waist. Only their own restraint, the knowledge that pulling steel in their host's throne room would instigate far worse, kept their fists empty.\n\n\"Really, Your Majesty,\" Haralius said, his tone unconcerned save for a touch of disappointment, \"is this Kirresci courtesy? Am I to be subject to shouted incivility and slander? We use only the most respectable of slavers, known throughout Ythane, Mahdresh, and beyond. Men who would never stoop so low as to acquire merchandise by any illicit means, let alone violence. Frankly, I would be insulted on their behalf were I not already offended on mine\u2014and my deceased countrymen's.\n\n\"I know not who you are, Sir Knight,\" he continued, now turning toward a fuming Nycos, \"but you have no right, and it would appear no honor. And I wonder if what we are seeing here is, mayhap, the outpouring of a guilty conscience?\"\n\nNycos straightened, statue-rigid. Firmly he brushed aside the many hands that held him, then\u2014internally wincing at but otherwise ignoring the livid expression on Marshal Laszlan's face\u2014directed his next words toward the king.\n\n\"I beg your pardon, Your Majesty.\" He was honestly faintly amazed at how steady a tone he managed now. \"I believe it would be best for all concerned if I were to absent myself from the remainder of this discussion. By your leave?\"\n\nHasyan nodded, saying nothing. Nycos bowed and, equally wordless, made for the door, ignoring the glares every one of the Ythani soldiers cast his way in lieu of their weapons. Palace servants hauled the great portal open before him, slamming it shut again behind, and Nycos was more grateful for his Majesty's forbearance than he could have expressed.\n\nNow, if nothing else, he could find himself somewhere private before the violence came. Now he could avoid humiliating himself further, and could ensure that only objects, rather than people, broke beneath the wrath he'd thought to have mastered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "For the third time in less than twenty-four hours, Nycos found himself approaching the throne room.\n\nHe'd been summoned back, as he'd known he would be since he'd taken his leave so abruptly and with the bare minimum of civility toward his liege. The moments immediately following that departure were a crimson blur he could scarcely recall. He had no notion of how long he'd stalked the halls of Oztyerva, conflicting urges waging brutal war within him.\n\nUltimately he'd decided not to return to his quarters, instead passing the bulk of the afternoon in one of the palace's most distant and most isolated gardens. There, once he'd determined he was truly alone, he'd allowed himself to run amok, purging the worst of his wrath in a paroxysm of violence. Whole bushes were uprooted and left strewn about, soil-encrusted roots dangling like the entrails of slain soldiers. Several of the smaller trees, which even his strength could not wrench from the earth, had instead been mauled, whole stretches torn asunder by inhuman claws, leaving behind a disturbingly sweet-smelling abattoir of bark and sap.\n\nPresumably, when the groundskeepers discovered it, they'd assume a wild animal must have somehow wandered onto the property, though the walls and the gate guards should make that impossible. Maybe they'd even launch some sort of hunt. He decided\u2014later, when his thoughts had emerged from the fog and reassembled themselves in some sort of order\u2014that it might make a good exercise for some of the younger soldiers.\n\nHe also recognized, not just later on but even in the moment, if he were being honest with himself, that the whole tantrum was silly. Immature, childish, and very much not in keeping with either who he once was, or who was supposed to be now.\n\nMaybe Smim had a point, damn the little creature.\n\nAgain the great doors swung open before him, and Nycos forced his mind back to the present. The hall was less crowded than it had been. Not only was the Ythani contingent no longer present\u2014doubtless making themselves comfortably at home in Oztyerva's sumptuous guest quarters\u2014but well over half the bystanders had been dismissed as well. Only his Majesty's advisors and particularly high-ranking nobles remained. It meant, at least, that Zirresca wasn't here to see him berated. Then again, as both a margrave and as the heir apparent to Kirresc's most powerful archduke, Andarjin was, so his rival knight would probably hear every word of it regardless.\n\nWell, so be it.\n\nAs was customary, Nycos approached the dais and then dropped to one knee, speaking only after receiving permission to rise. \"I apologize for taking so long to respond to your summons, Your Majesty,\" he began. \"I was walking the halls, and I fear I did not make it easy for your page to find me.\"\n\n\"And do you feel that is the only breach of decorum worth discussing, Sir Nycolos?\" It was not the king, but Orban Laszlan, standing beside the throne with one hand on his Majesty's shoulder, who spoke.\n\n\"I certainly acknowledge that my outburst was inappropriate.\"\n\n\"'Inappropriate' is the word you'd choose? Not 'undiplomatic'? 'Offensive'? Possibly 'damaging to your king and country'? You've been doing marvelously over the past months, Sir Nycolos, but this is an unfortunate, and worrying, step back.\"\n\n\"In the face of that Ythani bastard's lies? His effort to paint me as the villain after all I endured? I think 'inappropriate' is sufficient, Marshal. Or are we to allow the insults to flow in one direction only?\"\n\n\"In this court, such insults and falsehoods are not yours to answer!\" Orban bellowed. Then, less vehemently, \"Ythane enjoys throwing their weight around, as the only remaining vassal state of Tir Nalon. They know well that, despite generations of quiet, the elven empire still has a reputation for both great power and unpredictability. This? They've merely turned what happened in the Outermark into an excuse for rattling sabres. They can be assuaged with a diplomatic apology and a modicum of\u2026 restitution.\"\n\nFrom the low grumbles to his right, Nycos could sense that he was not the only one present displeased with that particular resolution. \"You mean a bribe they can extort from us, and an admission of wrongdoing that was never committed.\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos\u2014\"\n\n\"I will offer Ythane no apology, Marshal Laszlan. Under any circumstances.\"\n\n\"Even were I to order you to do so?\"\n\nThe knight bowed his head. \"I am your loyal soldier, but this is a matter of personal honor, not a military concern. No.\"\n\n\"And if your king commands it?\"\n\nNycos looked up, his expression stricken, helpless to answer. To refuse a royal command\u2026 Well, Hasyan didn't seem the sort to declare such minor disobedience treason, although he surely could, but it would permanently besmirch Nycos's honor, and probably obliterate any chance he had to succeed Orban. Yet, how could he possibly bring himself to\u2014?\n\nIt was the king himself who saved him. \"Fret not over that impossible choice, Sir Nycolos,\" Hasyan said, reaching up to squeeze the fingers that Orban had laid upon his shoulder. \"I'll not be giving you any such order.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Majesty.\" Nycos bowed, low and sincerely.\n\n\"Amisco?\" Hasyan called.\n\nKirresc's Judge Royal stepped to the front of the dais, the heavy fabrics of her robes and cape of office sliding audibly against one another like heavy leaves in the wind. \"Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"Please work with Denuel to draft a message of condolences and apology worded to contain no admission of guilt admissible in any court\u2014Kirresci or, to the best of our understanding, Ythani. Make no mention of Sir Nycolos by name, either. We'll send that to the praetor and his senate along with a small token of restitution.\"\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty.\"\n\nHasyan leaned back in his throne, uncomfortable though it must have been, and then met Nycos's eye. \"You still object, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\n\"We owe them no apology, Your Majesty, and we certainly owe them no gold. This is extortion, pure and simple, and we're giving in to it. This\u2014forgive me, Your Majesty, for saying so\u2014makes Kirresc appear weak.\"\n\n\"Sir Nycolos!\" It was the palatine, Denuel Jarta, who spoke now. \"It is inappropriate for you to question his Majesty's decisions, particularly in the presence of\u2014\"\n\nPrince Elias stepped forward. \"I think he's right, though. Why should we pay Ythane a single zlatka? It makes no sense, and it's humiliating.\"\n\n\"Your Highness\u2026\" Jarta spoke with the tone of a man repeating the same lesson or explanation for the umpteenth time. \"Sometimes it's better, in the long run, to pay a small amount in gold and pride now than to suffer greater expenses later.\"\n\nElias looked as though he desperately wanted to disagree, but wasn't remotely sure of where to begin.\n\nNycos decided it was as good an opening as any. \"Your Majesty, your Highness, Palatine, perhaps I'm too close to the issue to see the larger picture. And I assure you, I mean no disrespect, I simply wish to understand. We have no financial or diplomatic ties with Ythane. We share no borders with them. What future costs are we avoiding by conceding to these baseless demands?\"\n\nHe took a risk even asking, he knew that. Everything he'd learned of Hasyan III over the past months suggested that this was a monarch who welcomed discussion, so long as it did not cross into disobedience or insubordination, but he'd never seen said discussion quite reach the point of open questioning as he did now. Further, it was just possible that he was outing himself as ignorant on a matter that he, as Nycolos Anvarri, should already be familiar. His genuine lack of comprehension conspired with his anger to make him ask, however, and he could only hope that selfsame anger, the fact that this was personal to him, would excuse any apparent gaps in his understanding.\n\n\"We do trade, and share a border, with Mahdresh,\" Judge Valacos pointed out. \"And they have substantial economic ties to Ythane.\"\n\n\"Ythane also controls a length of the Dragon River,\" his Majesty said, picking up the thread. \"Without which we lose one of our primary routes to points north. We don't do a lot of travel or trade with the frontier towns or the Vingossa tribes, but little doesn't mean none. To say nothing of the religious significance of the Vingossa Plains to Kirresci citizens who worship the Vinnkasti.\n\n\"And,\" he continued before Nycos could object, or point out that those concerns\u2014while perhaps genuine\u2014were awfully minor, \"there are none of us who can predict with certainty how Tir Nalon might react to any open insult given their vassal state.\"\n\n\"It's my understanding,\" Nycos said carefully, \"that the Bronze Empire has remained almost entirely quiescent regarding anything beyond their borders for generations.\"\n\n\"It has,\" Marshal Laszlan said. \"But the elves don't think as we do. They're ageless, and not remotely human. Who can guess what drives creatures such as that, or what might give them reason to stir?\"\n\nNycos could have offered a unique perspective on such questions, but chose, for obvious reasons, to refrain.\n\n\"The ultimate point to all this, Sir Nycolos,\" the king told him, \"is that we determined some time ago just how far we would humor Ythane's posturing, to what extent and how often we could tolerate their pushing before risking their threats, and the unknowable hazards posed by their fey masters. As much as I know it stings at your pride\u2014and not just yours; you're foolish if you don't believe we feel it, too\u2014the current circumstance, and the amount of gold we feel confident will satisfy them, falls within the 'worth paying them off to avoid the hassle' category.\"\n\nAlthough his teeth ground so fiercely he feared the next words he spoke might prove jagged enough to draw blood, Nycos bowed his head in acquiescence. In his Majesty's intonation, and perhaps in the admission that his pride, too, was wounded, Nycos heard the unspoken message that any further challenge or questioning of the issue would not be welcome.\n\nAt least he wasn't alone in his distaste, even if none of the others had reason to take the matter as personally as he. None of Hasyan's advisors seemed any more thrilled about the decision than the king himself, and the expressions many of the gathered nobles directed his way suggested approval of the challenge he and Prince Elias had raised, and even sympathy over his own history with Ythane's rich and powerful.\n\nAndarjin's gaze, too, lay heavily upon him, but in that nobleman's features, Nycos could read nothing at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The attack came out of nowhere, unheralded and unexpected. And Nycos, playing right into their hands, could not have made it much easier for them if he'd tried.\n\nAfter court had adjourned, and following a polite appearance at dinner\u2014where his tightly wrapped caul of frustration had allowed little of the conversation to penetrate his ears, and made even the most delectable foods taste of ash\u2014he had chosen once again to spend some time walking Oztyerva's winding passageways. In his current mood, he preferred the constant motion, aimless wandering through arteries of stone, to the conscious thought that would be required were he to settle down to the peace and quiet of his quarters or engage anyone in prolonged discussion.\n\nHe might have made an exception, to the latter, for Kortlaus or Mariscal, but as both were away\u2026\n\nNight had fallen, as night always does. Servants wandered about, lighting a few additional torches in their sconces or lanterns in their brackets. Traffic thinned as gentry and staff alike took to their beds, until Nycos shared his route with only sporadic guards or messengers. By keeping to less busy portions of Oztyerva, far from the living quarters, he managed to create for himself the illusion that he walked, isolated and alone, through some long-abandoned labyrinth.\n\nAn illusion shattered by the sudden pounding of charging feet.\n\nThey numbered a dozen, easily, spilling out of the corridors to either side as Nycos passed through the next of countless intersections. Each was hooded or masked, and wielding a wooden cudgel: axe handles, old table legs, quarterstaves, bludgeons of every kind. Their choice of weaponry suggested that their goal was not to kill, but that hardly meant their intended victim was in for an easy time.\n\nThe first blow struck the arm he hastily raised to protect himself. The slight toughening of his skin\u2014which he had adopted as his norm, a compromise that allowed him to appear and to feel sensation as normal, while still offering some degree of protection\u2014prevented the bone from cracking, but only just. Pain surged through the limb, a jolt of man-made lightning, and he felt his grip grow numb, the arm hang limp.\n\nThe abrupt ferocity of the attack staggered him, stunning him for a split second. A second cudgel struck him across the back of his skull. Blazing stars and streaks of black flashed across his vision, a wave of nausea nearly swept him from his feet.\n\nAnd then he learned that one of his assailants carried a tool other than a wooden bludgeon.\n\nSomeone hurled themselves at him, leading with a shoulder, so that Nycos flew backward, lips split and bleeding, to slam against the wall. The masked figure who had struck him followed just as rapidly, crushing him between flesh and stone. Nycos felt a cold pressure on his wrists, a sudden resounding click\u2026\n\nThey'd manacled him. The steel cuffs pinched his flesh, but far worse was that they boasted only a short length of fat chain between them, allowing mere inches of slack.\n\nClubs struck again and again, pounding his gut, his sides, his legs, until Nycos crawled on the floor like some low beast, his body seizing up in agony. The acrid, metallic scent of his own blood mixed in his nostrils with the stench of his attackers' sweat, a heady amalgamation of exertion, anger, fear. And still the rain of blows continued, not just cudgels now but kicks as well.\n\nKicks\u2026\n\nHe remained aware enough to recognize that these were no Kirresci boots or shoes striking him. Here, at their level, he could see the leather strips that, wrapped and tied, formed the basis of Ythani sandals.\n\nHis Majesty's advisors, it appeared, had been mistaken regarding how easily the bastards would be satisfied for the deaths of their countrymen.\n\nBut then, for all the pain, the deep aches, the contusions and bruised bone, Nycos had no intention of letting them off so easily either.\n\nA quick tug at the chain convinced him that he'd never break the thing. Had his arm not been numbed, weakened\u2014had he the necessary concentration to focus\u2014he might have strengthened his muscles enough to do so. Now it wasn't possible, certainly not without transforming enough to reveal himself as something other than human. Similarly, without giving himself away, he couldn't armor himself enough to shrug off their attacks, though he did, through great mental effort, thicken his hide a small amount. It didn't end the torrent of pain, didn't keep vessels from bursting beneath his skin or bones from flexing beneath the worst impacts, but it took the edge off.\n\nAnd he still had a few tricks available to him.\n\nNycos had learned well and painfully, in his struggles to cross the Outermark, that he could never again breathe the fire that had been his birthright; that transforming his innards so much would invite the shard of Wyrmtaker to once more seek his heart.\n\nBut he'd had months in which to experiment, to learn the precise extent of those limitations. To learn he could manipulate the interior of his mouth, of his jaw, transforming just a trickle of saliva into the alchemical fuel that had, in his true body, been a vital ingredient of that fearsome conflagration.\n\nTucked into a ball as any human would have, trying to protect his most vulnerable spots from the storm of wood, Nycos struggled to focus, pouring every ounce of will into ignoring the pain until he felt things shifting beneath the flesh in his jaw. Then and only then did he allow his mouth to gape open, a viscous mix of blood and spit to wobble obscenely from his lips and splatter down upon the chain. A few quick passes with his tongue added to the solution, spreading it evenly across the steel links.\n\nOne last effort, putting everything he had into a surge of inhuman\u2014but not too inhuman\u2014strength. Nycos lunged to his feet, hurling himself upstream against the battering current. He bowled two of his attackers over, deliberately stomping on the knee of one and exulting as it shattered beneath his heel, shoulder slamming the other across the hallway. At a half run, half stagger, he lunged down the corridor, not seeking escape but simply the nearest torch, crackling away in its sconce, unconcerned with the violence being perpetrated yards away.\n\nNycos all but fell against the stone, shoving the glistening, fluid-coated chain into the open fire.\n\nThe sheen of dragon's saliva ignited in a blinding crackle, so bright he had to look aside, so hot that\u2014even with his arms fully extended\u2014he felt a painful searing in his forearms and short length of his hair burn away.\n\nJust as swiftly it was gone, the tiny amount of fuel expended in less than a heartbeat, but with it, the supernatural heat had melted wide portions of the links that bound him.\n\nHe turned to face his enemies, mere steps behind him, held the manacles up high where they might see the mangled, misshapen chain. He saw their apprehension, unsure how so brief an exposure to the low flame of a torch could have done such damage. Well, let them wonder.\n\nShowing bloodstained teeth in a fearsome grin, Nycos tugged and the damaged links parted.\n\nThe torch crackled. The man whose knee Nycos had broken moaned in torment. Everyone else breathed aloud, fast and heavy, trying to determine how dramatically the circumstances had just changed. Several eyes drifted to the sabre at the knight's side, grimly certain that he must unsheathe the blade at any moment.\n\nIndeed, Nycos dropped a hand to the hilt. Everyone facing him tensed, their attentions drawn involuntarily to the sword.\n\nHe charged, without drawing, and slammed his fist hard into the concealed visage of his nearest foe. Teeth gave away beneath the burlap mask, ripping bloody holes through the fabric. Several would have ended up embedded in Nycos's knuckles had his skin been that of a normal man. He loosened his fingers for an instant, clenched again, and when he withdrew his hand the mask came with it. He wanted a good look at these Ythani vermin who\u2014\n\nExcept, despite the evidence of the sandals, the battered face staring back his way wasn't Ythani at all. Not only was it darker than the normally pale citizens of that distant nation, it struck in Nycos's mind the faintest chord of recognition.\n\nThe rest of his assailants surged forward in a single tide, determined to beat him down once more, remaining confident in their greater numbers.\n\nStill Nycos chose not to draw his sabre. Furious as he was, he repressed the urge to slaughter those who would dare heap such indignities upon him. Too much was happening here that he didn't yet understand. Instead he snatched the axe handle from the man he'd just pummeled, letting the fool collapse and moving to meet the others. With his other hand he hauled the torch from its sconce, holding it near the base, letting the smoke and cinders plume as he waved it with deceptive languor at his enemies.\n\nHad they known what they were about, had they all been able to come at him at once, those numbers might have made the difference\u2014or at least forced Nycos to resort to feats of strength or endurance he could never have passed off as human. With his back to the wall, however, and the fallen man a partial obstacle to one side, they could approach only four or so at a time without stumbling into one another's way. And between Nycos's months of practice and the degree of strength and speed he was willing display, four at once\u2026 was not sufficient.\n\nHe struck hard, fast, and he aimed for the joints. He twisted, stepping inside the first man's reach and snapping an elbow with one swift blow. A vicious parry when another club swung his way, nearly knocking the weapon from impact-numbed hands, then a strike downward at an exposed hip, sending the foe limping away.\n\nHe turned, stepped, constantly moving but always keeping the wall behind him. The torch protected his open side\u2014not so well as a shield, perhaps, but nobody was eager to approach the blazing brand and risk seeing their clothes or their hair set aflame. They learned quickly to stay away from Nycos's spinning bludgeon, too, but that hesitance left them unable to make any attack of their own.\n\nAgain the hall echoed with a sudden rush of footsteps, but any fears Nycos might have had regarding additional enemies were swiftly allayed. A small bevy of palace servants, their attention drawn by the sounds of battle, came racing around the corner, nearly stumbling over each other as they skidded to a halt.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos!\"\n\n\"Stay back!\" he called. \"Fetch the guards!\" While several of the new arrivals froze, shocked at the tableaux, one woman instantly pivoted on her heel and ran back the way she'd come, skirts held high.\n\nDesperate, now, the ambushers made one last rush, perhaps hoping to catch Nycos distracted by the servants. He met their charge with his own, the axe handle whirling more than fast enough to crack a skull, to break an arm or leg and drive the bone through fragile flesh.\n\nWhen that weapon cracked another man's club clear through, and a vicious thrust of the torch left a blackened blotch of flesh across a carelessly outthrust arm, the assailants finally had enough. Turning tail, pausing only long enough to hoist their wounded comrades from the floor, the lot fled back the way they'd come.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos?\" The servants approached, now, timid and hesitant. \"Are you all right, sir?\"\n\n\"I'll live. Thank you.\"\n\nHe leaned hard against the wall, aching legs barely propping him up. He allowed the cudgel to drop, listlessly handed the torch to the man nearest him and pointed, with a grunt, at the empty sconce. Then he could only stare down at the broken manacles about his wrists and hope the guards wouldn't take too long to produce a key that fit them.\n\nOh, he'd given some thought to pursuit, but the throbbing and pounding of the punishment he'd endured, while less than might be expected, was sufficient to slow him down, to make him think that additional conflict was not a wise choice just now.\n\nIt was also unnecessary. As soon as the servants had rounded the bend, the sight of them had been sufficient to jog his memory, to give him a context for the face he'd recognized.\n\nThe bastard was, himself, an Ozteryva servant! Oh, not part of the regular palace staff, not someone who dwelt on the grounds, but one of the extra gardeners hired on during the spring and summer months. Nycos didn't know his name, didn't know where he lived, but none of that would stop him. He could track the man down if necessary. More to the point, merely knowing who he was told him much.\n\nNamely that this ambush hadn't been conducted by the Ythani delegation at all. He was merely meant to think they had, thanks to the timing and, especially, the footwear.\n\nAnd he could think of only one man in the palace who had both the means and the motivation to orchestrate such a deception."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "\"To what end, though, Master?\" Smim asked, carefully wrapping Nycos's salve-smeared arm. The heavy bandaging would not merely compress the limb, hopefully reducing any swelling, but also tied it firmly to a length of wood, immobilizing it. Nycos winced, and already worked at mentally reshaping it back to its earlier, uninjured form\u2014a process that, though far faster than waiting for it to heal naturally, would still take longer, and leave him in rather more pain, than he would have preferred. \"I don't doubt that it was the margrave behind this, but what do you imagine he hoped to accomplish?\"\n\n\"I think Ow!\" Nycos recoiled as Smim shifted his attention from the arm to the split and battered skin around the knight's lips. \"Watch it, goblin!\"\n\nSmim stood back, holding fingertips coated in salve up before him. \"You were the one who insisted I not call any of the servants or a physician who would actually know what they were doing, Master.\"\n\n\"I don't want them to know how bad the injuries are.\"\n\n\"They're not nearly so severe as one might expect, Master.\"\n\n\"Yes. That's what I don't want them to know.\"\n\nThe goblin nodded. \"Wise. It does mean, however, that you're going to have to tolerate my own tender ministrations. Which will go a lot more smoothly and swiftly, especially around your mouth\u2014which currently looks as though a particularly excitable mule trod upon an overripe plum\u2014if you were to find it in yourself not to shout at me every other breath. Master.\"\n\n\"You,\" Nycos grumbled, \"are not a born healer, Smim.\"\n\n\"I will try to contain my sorrow, Master.\"\n\nA few moments of silent prodding and slightly less silent wincing followed, until Smim had finished applying the herbal balm to Nycos's mouth and had moved on to a badly bruised shoulder.\n\n\"I think,\" Nycos said then, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation, \"Andarjin probably felt he'd discovered a way to tilt at two targets at once. He despises me, of course, for potentially standing in Zirresca's way. He's also furious at Ythane, and he's no happier about King Hasyan's choice to assuage them and pay them off than are the rest of us, even if he understands the expediency of it.\n\n\"So, this attack? Either it gives his Majesty cause to send the Ythani packing for the violence and insult done to me, and thus to him, as their host\u2014or, perhaps, it might have encouraged me to respond with insults or even bloodshed, thus shaming the court and doing severe damage to my standing. And no matter which way that goes, I'm badly beaten enough that I'm working at a disadvantage for months. Or at least would be, if I were what he thought me to be.\"\n\n\"My own guess was similar,\" Smim said. \"What do you intend to do about it, Master?\"\n\nNycos sighed, deeply, irritated at the weaknesses inherent in both his human form and his current position. \"I'm uncertain what I can do, Smim. We've no proof of any of this. Andarjin's not that careless.\"\n\n\"We could track down your gardener, Master.\"\n\n\"I've been trying to decide if it's worth our time. We could probably force him to talk, but it would be his word against Andarjin's. And that's if the margrave approached him personally, which I tend to doubt. At best, it would prove a small conspiracy. People might make their own assumptions, but it would point no solid fingers at any culprit. A lot of work for, at best, a small smirch on Andarjin's reputation in the opinion of only a portion of the court.\"\n\n\"You're assuming we'd have to rely on his word. He might have proof.\"\n\n\"I am assuming that, yes,\" Nycos told him. \"We both know how likely it is that Andarjin left a provable trail.\"\n\n\"You know, Master,\" Smim suggested with an artificial nonchalance that instantly had Nycos worried, \"we don't actually need proof of anything. There are ways he could be handled that wouldn't lead back to\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Smim.\"\n\nThe goblin sighed. \"You're taking this whole affair awfully casually, Master.\"\n\n\"Don't mistake me. I'm furious. The very instant I have solid cause to move against Andarjin and tear his world down around him before picking his heart out through his ribs in tiny, quivering gobbets, I will. But I won't undo everything I'm working for, or my chance at as comfortable and powerful a life as this feeble body offers, by throwing away all I've learned since we arrived.\n\n\"Besides,\" he added hesitantly, \"just at this moment, my standing with Marshal Laszlan is on uneven ground at best. He was far angrier over my unfortunate outburst earlier than his Majesty was. I'm lucky he's so loyal to the king. I imagine I'd be in for some punitive duties, otherwise.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Smim chuckled, his tone snide. \"Loyal.\"\n\nNycos peered at him, confused. The goblin, despite obvious effort, could not help but laugh.\n\n\"Master, I recognize that you've been away from the palace far more often than I\u2014and, further, that the ways of humans are vastly different than those of dragons. But we simply must work on your powers of observation and comprehension where people are concerned.\"\n\n\"If you're quite through amusing yourself,\" Nycos said, clear in his tone that he did not feel similarly, \"perhaps you would care to explain?\"\n\n\"His Majesty and the Crown Marshal are not just liege and vassal, Master, or even friends.\"\n\n\"Meaning?\"\n\nSmim spoke as if to a child. \"They're a couple, Master. Lovers.\"\n\nNycos stared. Blinked. Continued to stare.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, some few years later.\n\nIt was, indeed, a notion with which dragons were unfamiliar. The wyrms were capable of affection for one another, on those rare instances when they met without instant territorial conflict, but nothing more. When the mating urge came upon them\u2014at the pinnacle of a cycle lasting many decades\u2014it was sheer biological impetus, one that overpowered all but the most intense loathing and drove them together with whatever fellow dragons were both compatible and available.\n\nThe idea of linking sexual activity with emotional intimacy, or any purpose beyond breeding, was utterly alien\u2014as was the concept of romantic love itself.\n\n\"And\u2026 this is known?\" he asked finally, because he had no idea what else to ask.\n\n\"Not widely discussed, Master, but yes. It's something of an open secret among the court. Since he's already produced heirs from a legal marriage, there's no cause for anyone to object. Some few feel he engaged in this relationship too soon after the queen died, but that was long enough ago, now, that it's rarely brought up.\"\n\nAgain Nycos could do little more than blink, trying to wrap his mind around such foreign notions. \"Humans are peculiar, Smim.\"\n\n\"No arguments from me, Mas\u2014\"\n\nThey both turned toward the door, wondering\u2014and then swiftly realizing\u2014who could possibly be knocking at this hour.\n\nSmim politely showed her in, offered her a drink which she didn't refuse so much as fail to notice. Then, without waiting to be told, he stepped out into the hall to join her lady-in-waiting (who had never really gotten over her habit of looking down upon him as though he were a particularly squishy bug she'd found in her breakfast). He pulled the door to but not quite shut, granting his master a modicum of privacy.\n\nThe injured knight, who had risen to his feet, waited as Marsical slowly crossed the chamber between them, avoiding the intervening table almost by accident.\n\n\"Welcome home, my Lady.\"\n\n\"Oh, Nycos\u2026\"\n\n\"It, ah, looks far worse than it is.\"\n\n\"Sit down.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Sit!\" It wasn't much of a shove\u2014clearly she was concerned about other wounds she couldn't see\u2014but it got her point across. Nycos allowed himself to fall back into the sofa.\n\n\"You have balms and salves?\" she asked him, casting about the room.\n\n\"I assure you, Smim's already tended to\u2014\" Well, that expression might have changed his mind even had he still worn his original body. \"Over there,\" he pointed, giving in.\n\nShe scooped up the various bowls and tins, planting herself beside him and carefully daubing at the most obvious of the lacerations on his face. Nycos gulped down a sigh that he felt would go unappreciated just at this moment. What is it with this woman?\n\n\"I actually arrived last night,\" she said softly, running a finger across his cheek. \"I wanted to tell you that I'd heard of what happened on your patrol, and to congratulate you on discovering the spy's arrangements with the Mahdreshans, even if you couldn't catch him.\"\n\n\"You did?\" He spoke carefully, unwilling to jar her hand against various sore spots. \"I had no idea\u2026\"\n\n\"Smim told me you were sleeping, that you were fatigued from your travels and making your report to his Majesty. He even permitted me a brief look, though he wouldn't let me stay.\"\n\n\"He trusts you more than most,\" Nycos said with a faint smile, \"but to him, you're still just another human.\"\n\n\"You'd drifted off atop your blankets. I knew you must truly have been exhausted, so I didn't insist he let me wake you.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the consideration.\"\n\nMariscal dipped another finger in the salve, then gently leaned his head forward to rest on her shoulder so she might treat the angry contusions on the back of his scalp. He felt the warmth of her skin through her blouse, the flutter of her pulse along her neck. Further, he found himself gazing down inside her neckline and wondering with a flash of near panic why this particular view should strike him as particularly enticing. He almost welcomed the dull wave of pain as she prodded at the injuries, trying to locate them beneath his hair.\n\n\"I also heard of the argument in court this morning, the lies they\u2014\" Her arms tensed, breath caught; the pounding of her heart grew fast and violent. \"Was it them?\" she demanded, lifting his head with both hands. \"Did those Ythani bastards do this to you?\"\n\n\"Um, what? I\u2026\" Nycos's world spun, a maelstrom of confusion, of pain, of sensations and urges for which he had no name and even less ability to cope. \"That is, I was supposed to believe it was them, but\u2026\"\n\nIt hit him, then, all at once. Mariscal's overly emotional state, the abrupt switch from her deep concern and need to care for him to her rage at those who'd attacked him\u2014but more even than that, their interactions over the prior months, the closeness punctuated by periods of offense and anger over what he had thought of as quite minor slights.\n\nOnly because he had now been primed to consider human relationships in that context, because of the conversation he had just concluded with Smim regarding King Hasyan and Orban, did Nycos finally understand.\n\nShe wants us to mate!\n\nIt was too much. Countless clashing human emotions, none of which he knew how to handle; the vast array of conflicts and intrigues he struggled to navigate every day; the memories of Tzavalantzaval's last few clutches, and the tragedies that had befallen them\u2026 It crashed over Nycos in a frothing wave, until he truly felt as though he were drowning.\n\n\"Are we actually working to figure this out?\" he blurted\u2014panicked, angry, unthinking. \"Or are we just wasting time with more of this foolish mating ritual?\"\n\nHe wondered for a brief and horrid instant if the woman had actually died. She stopped breathing. Her skin paled to a sickly grey, not unlike broken and sun-bleached wood. Two dawning suns of pure crimson rose to burn in her cheek, equal parts embarrassment and fury.\n\n\"How dare you?! I have stood by you, I have excused every one of your mistakes, your insults, because of all you've been through. But I will not be treated this way!\"\n\n\"I'm sure there are many rooms in this palace where you wouldn't need to worry about that, aren't there?\"\n\nShe said nothing more, only rose and, her hands shaking but her steps steady and firm, walked slowly from the chamber. Her lady-in-waiting cast Nycos a single withering glare before falling in behind her mistress.\n\nNycos looked at the goblin, who stared at him in despairing astonishment from the doorway.\n\n\"What?\" Nycos demanded.\n\nSmim went to bed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Nycos deliberately arrived late to court the next morning, having permitted and even encouraged the servant who had delivered his summons to assume he still recovered from his injuries of the prior night.\n\nIn fact, his wounds were already partly healed, thanks to the effort and shapeshifting magics he directed their way. None could doubt that he had taken a beating, but any observer would assume it could not have been terribly severe, or else must have occurred at least a week gone by. Even his arm, though far from perfect, was recovered enough that he could go several hours without any binding or sling.\n\nWhen he did finally head toward the room, again clad in his most formal attire and with sabre hanging at his side, the knight still chose to wait a time before approaching the great doors and the guards beside them. From down the hallway he could hear voices raised in what the diplomats would call \"emphatic debate\" and others would call \"screaming argument,\" and he could not help but grin. He had long pondered how to handle the coming events, and it was only to his benefit that emotions ran hot.\n\nFinally, head high and shoulders straight, he strode toward the men-at-arms, who swiftly hauled the doors aside.\n\nVoices faltered as both sides of the argument became aware of his arrival. Everyone, Kirresci and Ythani, turned his way, observing his approach, and curious whispers were his heralds. He nodded with rigid formality to Haralius Carviliun and his entourage, offered a more sincere greeting and even an open smile to his fellow knights, nobles, and servants along the wall. He forced himself not to linger on Margrave Andarjin, though he did note a brief flicker of curiosity from the man\u2014presumably because Nycos appeared far healthier than he ought.\n\nHe halted, dropping to one knee before the dais. \"Your Majesty. Apologies for my tardiness.\"\n\n\"Understandable given the circumstances, Sir Nycolos. Are you well?\"\n\n\"Well enough, Your Majesty. Somewhat stiff and sore, but I've had worse. I should be fine.\"\n\n\"We are glad to hear it.\" He motioned for the knight to stand. \"If you would be so good as to take your place with the others?\"\n\n\"Actually, if it please Your Majesty, might I address the court and our honored guests? I have news of direct import regarding the current\u2026 discussion.\"\n\nHasyan, Orban, Denuel Jarta, and Amisco Valacos frowned almost in unison, doubtless leery of letting him speak to the Ythani delegation, given his outburst of yesterday. King and Marshal engaged in a hurried exchange of whispers, with occasional input from the others. They came to a decision swiftly, however, and it seemed that the attack on Nycos had bought him some leeway.\n\n\"Very well, Sir Nycolos,\" Hasyan said. \"Speak. But take care.\"\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty.\" He half pivoted, so he might address either the royalty and advisors on the dais, the assembled gentry along the wall, or the Ythani, all by merely turning his neck this way or that. \"I couldn't help but pick up on the essence of your conversation,\" he began, \"as I approached the throne room. Although I imagine I might have guessed at its nature, even had I not overheard.\"\n\nNot that anyone could have missed it, at that volume. Between the witness accounts and Nycos's own broken, incomplete report, a flurry of accusations had awaited Haralius and the others when they'd approached the throne that morning. The envoy, of course, had angrily refuted every one of them, even going so far as to accuse witnesses of perjuring themselves in order to slander Ythane. The argument had, from that point, pursued the obvious course.\n\n\"Having had the night to recover,\" Nycos continued, \"and to think back on the events of the evening, I have come to the conclusion that Oztyerva has been sullied.\"\n\nHaralius looked fit to burst. \"How dare\u2014!\"\n\n\"Not by you, emissary.\"\n\nThe man slowly deflated, gawping.\n\n\"No, by a criminal conspiracy directed, at least in part, against our Ythani guests.\" He hoped nobody heard how near he came to choking on that final word. Before anyone could speak or begin to ask questions, he went on explain how the Ythani sandals and other details were meant to lay the blame at the delegation's feet, but how the one face he'd seen clearly wore Kirresci features, and the voices he'd heard boasted the local accent.\n\nThat he'd recognized the man specifically he did not reveal, instead playing up those other signs far more than he'd actually noticed.\n\nDead silence reigned as he concluded his observations. Not a man or woman present could doubt him. He would never level such accusations\u2014charges that could dishonor the entire Kirresci court, if only by association, and work to the benefit of those who had enslaved and insulted him\u2014were he not certain.\n\nThe Ythani envoy himself broke that silence, his voice shrill. \"And what do you propose to do about this\u2026 this insult and threat to myself and my people?!\"\n\nNycos almost laughed aloud. Haralius couldn't have played his part any better if the two of them had planned it together.\n\n\"The envoy is quite right, Your Majesty. Clearly, until we can guarantee him the safety and hospitality we promise all our guests, until we can determine who his hidden enemy may be and why they've done this, he and his compatriots are in danger every moment they remain here. For the sake of the newly reforged bond of friendship between our nations, I suggest, in the very strongest of terms, that they be granted the protection of the best and most trustworthy soldiers we can muster and escorted to the border without delay. Let them return home, where they can rest in comfort and, above all, security, until we know it's safe for them to return.\"\n\nFrom atop the dais, Orban replied, and though he kept the smirk from his face, it managed to escape via the faint gleam in his eyes. \"I believe Sir Nycolos is quite correct. Our first concern must be the safety of our honored guests. I know just the soldiers, trustworthy to the last. With Your Majesty's permission?\"\n\nHasyan wore a matching glimmer of mischievous approval. \"By all means, Marshal Laszlan. Haralius, my abject apologies for what has occurred, but we will keep you safe until you've reached our borders. No matter what.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" The man was trapped, and he knew it. He'd demanded his hosts act on his behalf, and so they had. Unless he wanted to accuse the court, and King Hasyan himself, of collusion, he had to believe the danger was genuine. Nor could he legitimately demand the recompense they'd discussed earlier while Kirresc mobilized soldiers for his own protection, not without appearing wretchedly ungrateful and quite possibly exposing his motivations, and his entire mission, for the gold-digging they were.\n\nHe could only scowl, furious but helpless, as the king's own personal guards quickly rushed him and his delegation from the hall, that they might swiftly and immediately pack for their well-protected journey home.\n\n\"A splendid suggestion, Sir Nycolos,\" Hasyan said when the Ythani were gone and the hubbub quieted once again. \"Well done.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Majesty.\" Of course, that is only half the problem solved.\n\n\"What of the conspiracy itself?\" Amisco, the Judge Royal, asked from beside her sovereign. \"Have you any notion as to who might be behind it?\"\n\nAnd there is the other half.\n\n\"I have found no sign or proof of that, Judge Valacos,\" he answered carefully. \"But I do believe we must launch a thorough investigation.\"\n\n\"With you leading it, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\n\"I know that you've your own investigators,\" he told her, \"but this not merely an internal crime, but also an act against another nation. So I do feel that the Crown Marshal ought to have a representative assisting with the investigation, someone who holds both social and military rank. However\u2026 No, it should not be me. Must not, in fact. My own personal history with the Ythani would taint the results. Any findings or secrets uncovered must be beyond any doubt.\n\n\"No.\" Again he turned to face the gathering along the wall, in part to study the reactions he hoped his pronouncement might elicit. \"I believe Dame Zirresca should conduct the investigation.\"\n\nThe other knight visibly started, then stepped to the fore of the assembly. \"Why?\" she asked\u2014a perfectly understandable question, given their circumstances.\n\n\"Because this is larger than our competition, Zirresca. Furthermore, when word reaches Ythane that it is one of Marshal Laszlan's presumed successors looking into this\u2014and we all know that word will reach them\u2014it will go that much further toward convincing them we take this seriously. I might have preferred Lord Kortlaus,\" he admitted, or rather pretended to admit. \"But he's yet to return from his own patrols, and this can't wait. That leaves you.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" she agreed slowly, turning her attention to the dais. \"If it please Your Majesty and the Crown Marshal to accept Sir Nycolos's counsel, I'm quite willing to take this on.\"\n\n\"We shall talk it over with our advisors,\" Hasyan replied, \"but it seems sound thinking to us. Your efforts will not go unappreciated, Dame Zirresca\u2014nor your suggestion and willingness to step aside, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nBoth knights bowed. Zirresca wore a moue of faint suspicion, but Nycos fully expected that. No, it was the face of Magrave Andarjin that Nycos was interested in\u2014and though the man kept his expression largely neutral, it was the growing chagrin he couldn't quite hide in which Nycos exulted.\n\nFor now, in addition to his bewilderment over the knight's apparent lack of severe injury, and his fretting over how much Nycos might know of his involvement, the margrave found himself maneuvered into a political trap. He couldn't possibly permit Zirresca to discover that he was behind the ambush. For all her flaws, Nycos was quite certain that his rival would never have gone along with such a plan. Andarjin would have to work against her, hide evidence, lead her astray\u2014and in so doing ensure that she failed in her task, thus weakening her own campaign for the office of Crown Marshal.\n\nIt was, Nycos proudly decided, a political maneuver worthy of Andarjin himself.\n\nHe only wished, and grew irritated at himself for wishing it, he could discuss all that just occurred with Mariscal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "\"Hello, Smim.\"\n\nDespite himself, the goblin jumped, though he swiftly regained control and carefully shut the door. Nycos, stripped to the waist and reclining on the sofa with a glass of cherry wine, couldn't help but snicker.\n\n\"Greetings, Master. I thought you would be longer at court.\"\n\n\"What I had planned for the Ythani didn't require very long. Where have you been?\"\n\n\"Oh, just running various errands and\u2014\"\n\n\"Smim?\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"I know you very much better than most people you lie to.\"\n\nSmim offered a rough, phlegmy sigh and planted himself in a chair by the table. \"Yes, Master. I was visiting Margrave Andarjin's chambers.\"\n\nHad either of the two beings involved in the conversation been human, that might have led to a wide variety of questions and clarifications. What had Smim hoped to accomplish? Didn't he know Andarjin, too, would be at court, leaving nobody to spy on? Had he hoped to search the chambers for evidence of the margrave's misdeeds? If so, how had he planned to conduct any thorough examination without leaving any sign of intrusion?\n\nBut Nycos asked none of these, for he knew the goblin would already have considered all of that, and decided on an alternate course of action. And he knew, too, how Smim's devious and sometimes vicious mind worked.\n\n\"I told you I didn't want you taking any steps against Andarjin!\" It wasn't a roar, for that might have been overheard by someone in the hall beyond, but Nycos easily made up in vehemence what he lacked in volume.\n\n\"I know, Master, but\u2026 That is\u2026\"\n\n\"But you thought you knew better. You thought my decision was too soft, too human. You thought you were protecting me from myself.\"\n\nSmim hung his head. \"Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"Listen to me, Smim.\" Nycos carefully placed his glass down on the floor, so that hands trembling in repressed anger would not shatter it. \"I don't want Andarjin killed because I don't know what the political repercussions would be. For the court in general, and for me in particular. Our dislike for one another, and his support for my chief rival, are well known. An investigation, even without proof, could be more damaging than Andarjin is. That's why I told you not to act!\"\n\n\"I understand. Forgive me, Master.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Nycos's scowl grew even deeper as he glanced down at his beverage. \"Poison?\"\n\n\"Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"You know that others often share his wine, don't you?\"\n\n\"Mostly Zirresca, and if she died, too, it would hardly\u2026\" Whatever Smim saw in Nycos's expression, he clearly realized he'd best not finish that thought.\n\n\"Do I need to take steps, Smim?\"\n\n\"No, Master. This was meant to be a gradual thing, to look natural. Even if Andarjin drinks the entire decanter himself, a single exposure to the poison shouldn't be fatal, though he'd grow quite ill for a time.\"\n\nNycos growled something. \"Stop disobeying me 'for my own good,' Smim. I don't appreciate it. If it happens again, I might have to make that lack of appreciation more explicit.\"\n\n\"I understand. I'm sorry, Master.\"\n\nIt was Nycos's turn to sigh. \"If you feel you must do something, why don't you try to find out more about the gardener who attacked me? See if he can lead us to\u2026 What, exactly, does that expression mean, Smim?\"\n\n\"The man doesn't know anything of use, Master.\"\n\n\"You've already done that, too.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"I don't want to know.\"\n\n\"No, Master.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "\"I cannot believe you spoke to her like that!\" Kortlaus\u2014finally returned from the east and his own patrol\u2014spun his szandzsya in a wide arc, then retreated several paces across the open field.\n\n\"Yes,\" Nycos growled, taking a quick and largely useless swipe with his sabre and then moving to follow, \"so you've told me. Time and time and time again. Have you any plans to stop saying it any time soon?\"\n\nThe baron's answering grin, a mix of genuine good humor and simmering anger at his friend's foolishness, was visible through the chain ventail of his helm. \"As soon as I can force myself to believe that even you could be that stupid.\"\n\nNycos snarled and lunged, feinting with his sword one way, arresting the blow and thrusting from another\u2014and then doubled over, gasping, as Kortlaus's sabre-spear slammed, hard and bruising, into his hauberk-protected ribs.\n\n\"And that,\" Kortlaus said, extending a helping hand, \"is why I insisted on full armor and blunted practice weapons. You're clearly not at your best right now, Nycos. Distracted.\"\n\n\"I wonder what with,\" the other answered through pain-clenched teeth. He accepted Kortlaus's assist, then ripped his own helm from his head, gasping for air and sweating in the baking summer sun.\n\nAround them, the field was a small sea full of currents and whirlpools and islands of other training combatants. Individual duels such as his and Kortlaus's took place between clashing rows of soldiers in massed formation, which in turn took care not to cross over into the archery range. At the far end of the field, several chain-clad mounted knights with lances longer and straighter than szandzsya tilted at one another, less for practice than for sport and to show off for the less experienced squires. All was a deafening cacophony of voices and steel and pounding boots and more heavily pounding hooves, so that Nycos and Kortlaus could speak freely without risk of eavesdroppers.\n\n\"Seriously, Nycos,\" the baron said, voice raised only just high enough to be heard over the clamor, \"what were you thinking?!\"\n\n\"I've told you, I wasn't! I was still recovering from the attack, in pain, my thoughts on trying to figure out what had happened and who was behind it. I was preoccupied, and just sort of\u2014blurted it out.\"\n\nWhen Kortlaus had returned from patrolling the borders with the nation of Wenslir and the purportedly haunted ford of Gronch, he had gone straight to the throne room to make his report. There, too, the baron heard of all that had transpired in his absence, so by the time this morning came around and he finally had the chance to speak with his friend, he already knew of current events.\n\nWhich left their conversation free to focus on more personal\u2014and, for Nycos, far more humiliating\u2014topics. At this stage, he'd rather have been discussing the actual assault and the beating he'd suffered. It might prove less painful.\n\nKortlaus planted the haft of his weapon in the grass and leaned against it, catching his breath. \"You've attempted to make things right, I assume?\"\n\n\"At every opportunity!\" And so, indeed, he had. Distraught as he'd been, it still hadn't taken Nycos long to understand the damage he'd done to a valuable alliance\u2014and, though he was less inclined to admit it, to realize that he missed the margravine's companionship. \"I've gone to her door multiple times,\" he continued, \"but she won't speak to me. Her servants tell me she 'wants time to think.' I've sent messages, gifts. I even made another public apology at dinner once. I swear I'm becoming more known for those than anything else I've done. 'Sir Nycolos Anvarri, Knight of the Apology.'\"\n\nIrritated as he was, he couldn't quite repress a grin at his friend's chuckle. Kortlaus's laugh was infectious. He grew morose again swiftly enough, though.\n\n\"It's been weeks, and she still turns the other way if she so much as sees me in the halls. I've no idea how to fix this.\"\n\n\"Nycos, are you certain you want to fix it?\"\n\nHe could answer that only with an eloquent blink. The baron sighed, then gestured with his helm, suggesting they resume their practice. Nycos crammed his own back on his head and raised his sabre.\n\n\"What I mean,\" Kortlaus said, launching a few probing thrusts with the sabre-spear, \"is that your behavior toward Mariscal hasn't been the same ever since you returned from the Outermark. You've been friendly enough, but\u2026 little more.\"\n\nNycos sidestepped, dodged again, then slapped the szandzsya's tip aside with his own blade and lunged. Kortlaus pivoted so the sabre scraped by, barely nicking his hauberk, and the pair began to circle. \"Go on,\" was all Nycos said, since he didn't believe I barely know how to recognize human romantic overtures! would be a well-received reply.\n\n\"No matter how determined Mariscal may be to keep things prim and proper until you've acquired a station more her equal, few in Oztyerva are ignorant of how the two of you feel for one another.\" Kortlaus feinted, then launched a brutal kick to catch his opponent as he dodged, but Nycos didn't fall for it. \"Or at least how she feels for you, and you did for her. But the relationship, what little the two of you show of it, has been decidedly\u2014\"\n\nHe scarcely managed to bring the haft up to parry a sudden slash from Nycos's sabre, and received for his trouble a closed fist to the helm that Nycos knew must have made his head ring. \"Decidedly one-sided,\" he finished a bit woozily.\n\nNycos took advantage of the opening and stepped in, trapping the szandzsya between his arm and his ribs. Even as he struck at Kortlaus's chest, however, the baron twisted, hurling Nycos aside with his own weight and the leverage provided by the spear. The knight struck the grass, rolled, and came back to his feet just in time to parry a thrust to the belly. \"What are you suggesting?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Oh, for the love of\u2026\" Kortlaus retreated, planted his weapon in the ground in a signal to end the match, and once more took off his helm. \"Nycos, you know how much appearances and propriety mean to her, how much she's bent her own rules fraternizing with you even as openly as she has! You know that she's thrown her entire support behind your campaign to become Crown Marshal in part so you can be together openly, as equals! And you know you were lucky not to have permanently alienated her during your, um, period of adjustment when you first returned. Your lack of warmth since, and then your asinine behavior that night? Knowing all that, you have to have known, on some level, how she'd react!\"\n\n\"You're suggesting,\" Nycos said, tossing his own helmet to the grass, \"that I don't want to be\u2014involved\u2014with Mariscal any longer.\" Somehow, that notion was more disturbing coming from someone else than it had been when confined to his own thoughts.\n\n\"Had you asked me months ago, I'd have sworn on something holy that you would never feel that way, but it's certainly a viable interpretation of your behavior.\"\n\n\"What do you think I ought to do?\" Nycos asked carefully.\n\nThe baron burst out laughing. \"I think you ought to remember who you're talking to, and ask someone whose interest in the opposite sex hasn't been dead and buried for over a decade. Men are just as crazy-making, but at least I understand where they're coming from.\" His laugh trailed away into a subtler grin. \"Sir Jancsiv and Sir Tivador are supposed to be popular with the young noblewomen, you might ask them. And rumor has it Prelate Domatir was quite the ladies' man before age and ecclesiastic duties slowed him down.\"\n\nHis grin, too, slowly faded. \"Nycos, you can ask all the advice you want\u2014from me, from anyone else, from the gods themselves if they somehow deigned to listen.\" He bent down to lift up his friend's helm and hand it back to him. \"None of it means a damn if you don't know what you want to accomplish.\"\n\nWhat did he wish to accomplish? His day-to-day life might well be easier, certainly simpler, if he needn't worry over the romantic pitfalls and personal implications of a relationship with the margravine. Further, on an intellectual level, such entanglements held no interest or appeal. If they crossed his mind at all, they struck him as a silly waste of effort, a time-sink without any value to offset the cost.\n\nThen again, the pull wasn't intellectual, was it? However much he tried to ignore it, Nycos's human body, blood, and heart had their own concerns regarding which they refused to consult his nominally draconic mind. He felt no deep love, no burning passion for the woman\u2014he might be ignorant of these creatures' urges, but he knew enough to recognize that much. He was drawn to her, though, by an affection, an attraction that, while mild, remained unmistakable. The notions of cutting her from his life or of deeply hurting her were bearable, but unpleasant. He'd prefer to avoid either, if feasible.\n\nAnd of greater importance were the benefits to his plans. He needed all the allies and influence he could acquire if he were truly to advance his station, to become Crown Marshal\u2014or any other high office\u2014and Mariscal was both the highest ranking and, at least until lately, the most determined and invested, of those potential supporters.\n\nIf he retained even a small chance of salvaging that relationship, then, wasn't it the wisest course of action, regardless of what emotions were or were not intertwined with it?\n\n\"What I want,\" he said slowly, after obvious thought, \"is to win her back.\"\n\nKortlaus studied him carefully, then nodded. \"We've a couple of hours before I'm to make my full report to his Majesty's council. I'll go speak to her.\"\n\n\"Um. I mean. You can certainly try, but I told you she's been unwilling to see me. I don't know that she'll be inclined to speak to you about me, either.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. But you can't do it. You'll damage your cause if you ignore her request for time to think. I can use the excuse that I just got back to try to find out what's going on, and make it clear in the process that you want to make things right while respecting her wishes. Later on, we'll discuss other possible avenues of approach.\" Kortlaus leaned his szandzsya over his shoulder and headed for the racks on which the practice weapons were stored. \"We're going to have to find a way for you to make your sincerity clear, Nycos. Without you being able to speak to her.\"\n\n\"And how would I do that, exactly?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. But we're both reasonably clever fellows. We'll come up with something.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "The council chamber stood within one of Oztyerva's central towers, rounded on two sides to follow the contours of the outer wall. The light from several arrow slits and a large oil-burning chandelier shone down upon a circular table on which was laid out a detailed and brightly inked map of southern Galadras. The king's usual group of advisors were gathered about that table, along with his two children and nearly a dozen knights and military officers. Also present were Ambassadors Kidil and Guldoell, and a tall, middle-aged man whom Nycos had never met before. He wore stiff, formal tunic and trousers of a style long out of fashion in Kirresc, and had been introduced as Kholdoun Razmos, ambassador from Althlalen.\n\nThe emissary of Wenslir would have attended, had she been in Talocsa at the moment, while the Mahdreshan ambassador was currently away due to the tensions that recent raids had caused between that nation and Kirresc.\n\nAlthough far smaller an assembly than that normally found in open court, it was almost too large for the room to comfortably manage. \"Quite a few kaftans, tabards, and other outer garments had been shed in a futile attempt to escape the heat of so many bodies crammed together. Nycos, as one of the lower-ranking attendees, was stuck at the back of the group, where he could see mostly shoulders and hair, with only an occasional glimpse at the map.\n\nBut at least Zirresca is stuck back here, too, equally frustrated and looking for any excuse to snarl at me. So that's good.\n\n\"\u2026did not encounter unexplained or hostile activity ourselves,\" Kortlaus was saying, repeating and expanding upon the report he'd offered his Majesty the previous day. \"We did, however, come across a large timber camp that had been utterly slaughtered and razed by something.\"\n\n\"Bandits?\" one of the other knights asked.\n\n\"I suppose it's possible, if you can tell me what in the gods' names they might have been after. Raw lumber?\" Before the other could respond, the baron continued. \"We did meet with a Wenslirran border patrol one evening. We stopped, took our supper, and made camp together. They assured me that they had seen overt signs of activity within the shadows of Gronch, not two weeks past.\"\n\nPrincess Firillia frowned. \"The people of Wenslir are good neighbors, but they've always been superstitious zealots. Ah, no offense, Domatir.\"\n\nPrelate Matyas offered a stiff, shallow smile. \"Probably none taken, your Highness. I'll let you know for certain when you finish that thought.\"\n\nSeveral of the attendees chuckled, if a touch nervously. Wenslir was the second oldest of what were now considered the continent's civilized nations, behind only Suunim, and its many temples were widely considered the birthplace of faith in the Empyrean Choir on Galadras.\n\n\"Right. My point is, they take the forest's title of the 'Ogre-Weald' far too seriously. They'd attribute anything that happened in and around Gronch to monsters or haunts or what have you.\"\n\nNycos cleared his throat from the chamber's far side. \"You don't believe in the creatures of Gronch, your Highness? Are they so much more difficult to countenance than, say, elves or the mountain fey?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't doubt there are inhuman things dwelling in that forest, Sir Nycolos,\" she said, her tone that of a teacher to a child. And no wonder, as more people of the modern era agreed with her belief than didn't. \"But the sorts of nightmares the stories claim? Or in such numbers? Pure fairy tale.\"\n\nConsidering that Nycos knew for absolute fact not only that such \"nightmares\" were very real, but that they weren't the worst horror dwelling in the Ogre-Weald, it was difficult for him not to scoff. Instead, determined to remain polite, he said only, \"If we treat the report Lord Kortlaus has passed along to us as fairy tale and you're wrong, Highness, it'll be too late to do anything about it.\"\n\nFirillia's scowl returned, even deeper, but she inclined her head, acknowledging the point.\n\n\"We should indeed keep an eye on Gronch.\" It was Aadesh Kidil, the Suunimi ambassador, who spoke\u2014perhaps unsurprisingly, as his own nation, like Wenslir, shared a border with the kingdom-sized Ogre-Weald. \"If the beasts within are agitated, it could prove a distraction for us at a most inconvenient time. I think, however, that we need to remain focused on the reason we've gathered.\"\n\nRumbles of assent made their way around the table.\n\nThat reason\u2014as was so often the case for assemblies of this sort\u2014was Ktho Delios.\n\nDame Zirresca's patrol may have detected no abnormal activity near the edges of Kirresc, spotting only standard Deliant military drills, but word filtering down from various border towns\u2014not just Kirresci, but Suunimi and Althlalan as well\u2014was rather more disturbing. According to them, Ktho Delios was moving large forces of troops to various staging grounds only a few leagues from the border, sometimes under cover of darkness. It wouldn't be the first time that nation had engaged in such exercises without anything coming of it, but it always made the other kingdoms nervous. Nor would it be the first time such alarms had been sounded and then proved false, but rarely from so many communities at once.\n\nWhen combined with rumors of several new up-and-coming officers making ripples in the Deliant power structure, officers who just might be pushing for a chance to prove their military prowess, it was more than enough to make all the southern nations sit up and take notice.\n\n\"I'm not entirely certain,\" King Hasyan admitted, dropping the \"royal we\" in this less formal gathering, \"what else we can do, beyond posting lookouts and remaining wary. I can't imagine why Ktho Delios would think it viable to move against any of us now\u2014nothing's happened to weaken our treaty\u2014and I'm certainly not going to risk precipitating war by striking against them first when we've no idea what they're doing.\"\n\n\"There's wisdom in all of that,\" Ambassador Razmos said. He spoke with the tone of a man faintly distracted, as though thinking on other matters, yet he never appeared lost or to have missed anything of relevance. \"But it wouldn't be the first time they've tested that treaty. And as Althlalen is arguably most vulnerable and furthest from any potential aid, no matter how well intentioned the rest of you may be\u2026\" He shrugged. \"Well, you can imagine how 'wait and see' may not be our first choice of responses.\"\n\nThe Quindacran ambassador, Leomyn Guldoell, thumped a hand on the table. \"I do understand, but what would you have us do? Any sort of gathering of forces along the borders might provoke the very incursion you fear!\"\n\n\"It's easy for you to counsel patience!\" Razmos snapped back. \"You don't share a border with the bastards! You're in no immediate\u2014!\"\n\nDenuel Jarta, Hasyan's palatine, interrupted. \"The simple truth is, ladies and lords, that we lack sufficient information to take any substantive action. Until we know more, watching and waiting may not be the most satisfying or even the most prudent course, but it's all we can do.\"\n\n\"I'd hoped,\" Hasyan said softly, and the whole room quieted so the attendees might hear, \"that we'd have that information by now.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty\u2026\" Jarta and Marshal Laszlan cautioned in unison.\n\n\"Oh, hush. There's no reason to keep it secret any longer. The whole operation clearly failed.\" The king sighed. \"I had managed, my friends, to get a spy into the upper echelons of Ktho Delian society. No direct access to the Deliant, but she had several indirect channels of information. And in fact, she signaled some time ago that she'd learned something of import, that she needed extraction.\"\n\nThe silence was tense, now, quivering. So far as anyone here knew, it had been well over a generation since any of the southern nations had placed an operative so deeply within the ranks of their common enemy.\n\n\"I don't know what happened,\" the king confessed sadly. \"I never heard from either my agent, or the one sent to retrieve her. Obviously such operations are unpredictable, but this was months ago. I\u2026 have to assume they didn't make it.\"\n\nImmediately the room erupted again: into theories and wild speculation over what the spy might have learned, a list of horrors that might have befallen his Majesty's operatives, worries over what the Deliant might do if they had silence who the spy answered to. And that, of course, brought the argument clear back around to the same empty guesses about Ktho Delios's current plans, if any, and what the treaty nations ought to be doing to counter those hypothetical plans.\n\nNycos, though, found his thoughts returning to earlier bits of conversation. Maybe it was because he knew the many horrors of Gronch, the many nightmarish varieties of so-called \"ogres,\" were real. And perhaps his own experiences using \"monsters\"\u2014wyverns, perytons, goblins, and the like\u2014set the wheels of his mind turning in directions diagonal to every man and woman around him.\n\n\"Lord Kortlaus.\" The near-bellow, a battlefield tone he'd learned from watching the Crown Marshal, cut through the hubbub and dragged the chamber once more into silence.\n\n\"Um, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\n\"Did the Wenslirran soldiers say when the increased activities in and around Gronch had begun?\"\n\nSeveral others in the gathering groaned, sighed, or otherwise indicated in no uncertain terms how they felt about a return to the prior, and clearly less urgent topic.\n\n\"Not specifically,\" Kortlaus replied after a bit of thought. \"I got the impression it had been fairly recent, though.\"\n\n\"Awful timing, isn't that? For us, I mean. Awfully convenient for others.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, Sir Nycolos,\" Ambassador Razmos snapped. \"We've already acknowledged it's problematic, that we need to keep an eye on the Ogre-Weald. But it's hardly\u2014\"\n\nNycos raised an interrupting hand. \"Are we quite certain,\" he asked, cold and implacable, \"that Ktho Delios hasn't deliberately stirred up the creatures of Gronch as a means of keeping us distracted?\"\n\nMouths opened. No sound emerged.\n\n\"Considering the Deliant's distrust toward practitioners or creatures of sorcery beyond their control, I would think their inquisitors and military witches are probably as near as anyone to being experts on the unnatural beasts of the world. Who would know better how to aggravate them, agitate them, to keep our attentions on the Ogre-Weald while they reposition their forces?\"\n\nOrban whispered, quickly and fiercely, into the king's ear, until the monarch nodded his agreement. \"My friends,\" his Majesty said, \"I think we all need to give some thought to Sir Nycolos's theory. However likely or unlikely it may be, we must at least consider the impact it would have on our decisions. Given that, and as we've been at this for some while now, this seems as propitious a time as any for a break. Get some air, ask the servants for whatever food or beverage you might wish, and we'll reconvene in, say, an hour? Good.\"\n\nPeople dispersed, the movement and the opening of the door sufficient to send a welcome draft through the chamber. First a few, then the greater portion of the assembly, filtered out into the hallway, making their way toward this refreshment or that. A handful approached Nycos, Kortlaus included, doubtless wishing to question him further on his theory. All fell back, however, when Prince Elias drew near. His Highness wore a peculiar expression on his clean-shaven and deceptively young face.\n\n\"A word in private, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\nNow what might this be about? Nycos had precious little notion what the prince might have to say to him, and frankly almost as little interest, but it wasn't an invitation he could refuse. With a polite bow, he allowed Elias to lead him to the far side of the room\u2014hardly isolated, but now that the throng had scattered, as good a spot as any. There remained every chance a few stragglers might overhear, but if that didn't bother Elias, it wasn't going to bother Nycos.\n\nAnd if it simply hadn't occurred to the somewhat simple-minded royal scion, well, it still wasn't going to bother Nycos.\n\n\"How may I be of service, your Highness?\"\n\nNow that they stood here, the prince seemed unsure how to begin the conversation, instead idly running a finger along the inner contours of an arrow slit in the wall beside them. Finally, a faint flush coloring his already dark complexion, he took a deep breath and spoke.\n\n\"Nycolos, the idea of war with Ktho Delios\u2014however unlikely\u2014has got me thinking recently.\"\n\nWell, something had to.\n\n\"At my father's age, well, he may have many good years left, gods willing, but he will not sit on the throne forever, and a catastrophe like war can only hasten that time. I'm\u2026\" Another breath. \"I know that I'm\u2026 not the most intelligent fellow in the room most of the time.\"\n\nThat took Nycos aback. Not the revelation itself; that was hardly any great secret. That the prince had the self-awareness to recognize it, however, was news.\n\n\"There are many,\" he continued, \"who wish that my sister were the elder, so that it would be her responsibility to rule after father is gone, rather than mine. Some days, I agree with them. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some hoped to take steps to make that happen.\"\n\n\"You fear assassination or revolt, your Highness?\" Nycos asked, startled.\n\n\"No, nothing so dramatic, just\u2026 If Firillia wanted the throne badly enough, the support of enough of the nobility could basically force me to abdicate, or else have the blood of civil war stain my hands.\"\n\n\"And will you let them do that?\"\n\n\"I hope not to let it come to that.\" Elias's features turned grim. \"For good or ill, I am the king's first born. This is my duty, my responsibility, and I will not surrender it lightly. And that, Sir Nycolos, is where you come in.\"\n\n\"Do I?\"\n\n\"If I cannot count on fully grasping every issue brought before me,\" the prince said bitterly, \"then I need advisors around me whom I can trust absolutely. To help me understand, or\u2014when it's time for me to make the important decisions\u2014to guide me on the right course of action even where understanding eludes me. You've developed something of a reputation, you know.\"\n\nNycolos couldn't help but smirk. \"Several, I would imagine. Might you narrow it down for me, your Highness?\"\n\nElias blinked, then chuckled. \"In this case, I mean a reputation for speaking out, sharing ideas or opinions even if it's not entirely the, uh, polite or expedient thing to do. I need that. I need someone in my circle of advisors to be blunt, without worry over whether it's proper to say what needs saying.\"\n\nThe knight almost reeled. He had little patience for foolishness, thought of Prince Elias as little more than an occasional irritation and didn't relish the idea of spending more time with the man. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to climb the ladder of power and influence that didn't rely on his success in becoming Crown Marshal, as well as the chance to keep an ear on the sundry goings-on within the palace\u2014and perhaps the kingdom at large.\n\n\"I\u2026 am honored, your Highness.\"\n\nThe prince's eyes lit like torches. \"Does that mean yes?\"\n\n\"You understand that I cannot ignore my duties as a knight of Kirresc, or to your father? That, until you are king\u2014some time away, one hopes\u2014those have to come first, and I can offer you my counsel only when it does not conflict with my responsibilities?\"\n\n\"Of course, Sir Nycolos. I would expect nothing else.\"\n\n\"Then I believe I'm your man, your Highness.\" And may all your human gods help me. If nothing else, I'll have plenty of practice being patient.\n\n\"Wonderful! And thank you, truly.\"\n\n\"Actually, your Highness?\" He spoke before the prince could step away, before the thought had even fully formed. \"Perhaps there's something you might be able to help me with, as well.\"\n\n\"Of course, Sir Nycolos. What do you need?\"\n\nWhat did he need? Was it even doable? Would it help if it were? He knew, now, that no single grand gesture would solve his problems with Mariscal\u2014but one might just cool her anger enough that she would speak with him again. He could figure out the rest from there.\n\n\"Is it true,\" he asked slowly, ideas stalking one another through his head like ravenous wolves, \"that the chief gardeners here make use of magics in their craft? I suppose I ought to know that,\" he added, \"but I've never really had cause to pay them much heed.\"\n\nWhatever Elias had been expecting to hear, this clearly was nowhere even in the same general vicinity. \"I\u2026 Well, I mean, yes. Only a very little bit, to keep up appearances when the weather doesn't cooperate or the like. I don't really understand the specifics.\"\n\n\"That's all right, your Highness,\" Nycos told him, grinning. \"I don't need you to understand. I just need you to give a royal command or two for me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "It took a great deal of doing, far more than Nycos had anticipated. At every step of the way, the groundskeepers protested. It threw their entire decorative scheme out of balance, required backbreaking labor as entire bushes were carefully uprooted and moved. The season was wrong. This wasn't how the few arcane tricks they'd mastered were meant to be used!\n\nAnd those tricks were few indeed. Those rare gardeners of Oztyerva who practiced any such magics knew only a few minor invocations, recipes of occult significance or spell-paeans to the Vinnkasti of flowering vegetation. Like healers such as Lady Ilkya\u2014or, indeed, the overwhelming proportion of Galadran mystics\u2014they were dabblers at best, hedge wizards and alchemists who knew only enough in the way of eldritch secrets to enhance and expand upon their more mundane labors.\n\nA genuine sorcerer could have done what Nycos requested in a matter of days. A true archmage of old, such as his long-dead foe Ondoniram, would\u2014had he deigned to perform so frivolous a task\u2014have accomplished the feat in hours, perhaps minutes.\n\nFor the poor, beleaguered gardeners of Oztyerva, it required weeks. More than once, Prince Elias would almost certainly have given in to their complaints, their protests, their near begging, had he not felt indebted to Nycos as his newest ally and advisor. Nycos took merciless advantage of that sense of obligation with barely a modicum of guilt, spurring Elias onward when his enthusiasm flagged, and slowly the garden, one particular patch of color and greenery on the winding palace grounds, evolved.\n\nAnd so, finally, more than a month after the process began\u2014and during which, it must be noted, Kirresc and the other allied nations had indeed increased their surveillance of Ktho Delios but taken no other action\u2014the sun dawned on a late summer morning. The sky shone a cloudless azure, the towers of Oztyerva gleamed, and beneath them all, directly below many a window but particularly that of Margravine Mariscal, the earth bloomed with fire.\n\nProdded and sustained by the hard work of many and the magics of a few, a vast array of tulips, normally quite out of season this long after spring, opened to greet the day. The wide-spread petals were a brilliant scarlet, save in their center where a deep golden hue outlined patterns in far darker, almost coal-like crimson. The result was as though the garden had sprouted hundreds of individual fires, each frozen in time for a few precious days before the harshness of the season would doubtless hammer them down.\n\nPeople gathered at the windows, drawn from all over the palace by spreading word. For many it was merely a touch of beauty before they went about their business, perhaps a whim of the groundskeepers or one of the royal family.\n\nSome, however, understood their significance. They recognized those fiery colors as a match for the garb often worn by one particular margravine, and some were even well enough acquainted with her to know that this particular tulip was her favorite flower. These people, at least, could have no doubt that the wonder in the garden was a message intended specifically, personally, for her.\n\nNor could they doubt who must be responsible for that message. That rumor, too, spread through Oztyerva, until even people who had heard only the barest inklings of the tale gazed at Nycos with a touch of respect or a knowing smirk.\n\nMariscal failed to attend the nobles' supper those next several evenings, and when Nycos stopped by her chambers to ensure she was well, he was still refused entry. The margravine's lady-in-waiting, however, greeted him politely at his knock, and apologized that her mistress wasn't feeling up to company, rather than reminding him that he wasn't welcome.\n\nIt was, Nycos decided, an adequate start."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "\"\u2026of anything new,\" Zirresca concluded. \"Everyone's still arguing over what to do about Ktho Delios, if anything, or Gronch, if anything. Or whether they're related.\"\n\n\"Idiocy!\" Andarjin snapped, briefly clutching his stomach in pain. \"The idea of any link at all\u2026 Why does anyone listen to a word that man says?!\"\n\nZirresca seated herself at one of the small tables, where she'd earlier been poring over and making notes on a potential plan for moving small squadrons of soldiers into northern border towns. Picking up a nearby quill, she scribbled a quick thought, and then shrugged. \"I find it highly unlikely, myself, but it's worth considering.\"\n\n\"Bah!\" The margrave slammed his cane into the wall\u2014he'd been using the walking stick since falling ill last month, though he'd recovered enough that he scarcely needed it any longer\u2014shaking the dust of old mortar loose from between the stones. \"It's asinine.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\nAndarjin snarled something obscene and unkind, snatched a goblet from the cabinet\u2014setting several of the other crystalline vessels rocking precariously\u2014and poured it full to overflowing with the nearest decanter to hand, hoping to settle his churning gut. \"And you! You couldn't bring me any more details? 'Everything's the same.' Not helpful, Zirresca!\"\n\n\"So attend court yourself, Arj. You're well enough again, most days.\"\n\n\"Most days, yes! Today I wasn't!\"\n\n\"So today you get 'everything's the same.' I promise you, if anything of import had occurred, I would tell you.\"\n\n\"I'll decide what's important, Dame Zirresca!\"\n\nSlowly, meticulously, the knight stacked and straightened the parchments she had been examining. She laid them to one side, placing an inkwell atop them at the corner so they wouldn't drift apart at the next opening of the door or passing of a body. Then, careful to make no noise, she scraped her chair back across the thin carpet and stood.\n\n\"Very well, then, my Lord. I most humbly offer my Lord my counsel, if he would do me the honor of hearing it?\"\n\n\"Zirresca\u2026\"\n\nApparently she took that as permission to continue. \"If you would be king, my Lord, it is not enough that you be clever, or educated, or cunning. You must also behave as a king.\"\n\nAndarjin bristled to do a porcupine proud. \"I do behave as\u2026\" He stopped, took a breath. \"Well, I normally do. I admit these past weeks have been\u2026 trying. My illness\u2014\"\n\n\"A king needs to know how to hide his weakness. I sympathize with your discomfort, but you cannot let it influence your behavior this way, my Lord.\"\n\n\"Stop calling me\u2014!\"\n\n\"People are watching you, you know. Watching how you handle this. People such as her Highness.\"\n\nAndarjin went pale and stiff as petrified wood. \"What has she said?\"\n\n\"She's said nothing about it to me specifically, but\u2026 You know that Prince Elias has been gathering a circle of advisors? That he's openly admitted to them he needs their help if he's to keep informed, to be able to make wise decisions when his time comes?\"\n\n\"I'd heard rumors. What of it?\"\n\n\"Princess Firillia was taken aback that her brother showed such self-awareness, and could put aside his pride enough to seek aid. I have every reason to believe she still thinks she'd make a better queen than he would a king, and that she still feels the support of Vidirrad\u2014your support, and your mother's\u2014is integral to making that happen without violence.\n\n\"But it's the only time since we first discussed the possibility, when we were all barely more than children, that I've heard from her even the slightest doubt, the tiniest inkling that perhaps her brother might make an acceptable sovereign after all. This is not the time to give her any cause to doubt you, Arj. Any at all.\"\n\nAndarjin turned, carefully placed his drink on the table, and then bowed. \"I apologize for how I spoke to you, Zirresca. And your guidance is wise, as usual. Thank you.\"\n\nBehind the conciliatory smile he offered her, however\u2014a smile that she faintly returned before going back to her report\u2014the margrave's mind raced. First that damned Nycolos, and now the royal idiot? How many people who should have been nothing were going to stand in his way?\n\nHe'd always had other plans, more dangerous and desperate plans, in case his current efforts failed to yield fruit. It wasn't time to execute any of them, not yet, but he needed to sit down, review them, perhaps start preparing to make sure everything was in place. He needed to have options ready if there was any chance his pursuit of Princess Firillia, or her need for him, was under threat.\n\nAny at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Summer faded, the days growing ever more pleasant and the nights increasingly chill. Leaves turned. The breezes passing through Talocsa came thick and redolent with the flavors of the harvest, the healthy aroma of felled grains and fresh crops and the heavier, less delightful odor as the leavings slowly rotted back into the soil.\n\nAnd with the cooling of the season, the sporadic gentle rains that presaged the fiercer and colder weather to come, the bright blue skies ever more frequently flecked with grey, came his Majesty's tournament.\n\nHeld yearly, save in times of war, it was a period of celebration, of competition, of parley and politics and planning. Nobles and their retinues came from across Kirresc, and even from other lands, for while Hasyan's was not the only tourney to be held in the nations of southern Galadras, it was certainly the largest. Men and women challenged one another to all manner of martial competition, of course, but for many this was merely an excuse, a spectacle to be enjoyed while engaged in other, more pressing matters. Treaties and trade agreements were signed, marriages and alliances arranged, rivalries renewed, battle plans orchestrated. Nobles and gentry who dwelt nowhere near one another reestablished old acquaintances or met one another for the first time. Offspring were introduced to those peers among whom they would one day take their rightful place.\n\nMusicians and entertainers, who had competed all year for the opportunity to perform at the tourney, made or broke their careers over the span of this hectic fortnight. Crafters sold wares enough to equal many months of normal business; hunters and cooks ran themselves ragged. Many of the common folk took a few days off work, some to watch the matches, others simply to enjoy the festive, holiday air. Restrictions on public drunkenness were relaxed (within reason), while both the larders of Oztyerva and the private hunting grounds of the king himself were briefly opened to all who wished to partake. (Again, within reason.)\n\nFor the servants who had to keep everyone happy and everything flowing smoothly, for the guards assigned to keep the peace, and for Denuel Jarta\u2014who, as palatine, was responsible both for overseeing the arrangements of all visiting dignitaries and for effectively managing the kingdom while his Majesty attended the tournament and a thousand different meetings\u2014these two weeks were sheer misery. For everyone else, they were supposed to be a delight.\n\nNycos hadn't the first notion what to make of it all. He understood, intellectually, the need for knights and other warriors to practice their skills among the best Galadras had to offer, to feel as though they were noticed; the need for various nobles of various kingdoms to hobnob amongst themselves; even the need for the populace to have occasional opportunity to celebrate and escape their daily drudgery. For all that, though, it felt like nothing but a waste of energy, a chaotic and cacophonic mess that occasionally reached the level of physical discomfort.\n\nThat might have been the dragon within him talking\u2014he, as with most of his kind, generally preferred solitude and periods of long rest between bursts of activity\u2014but the fact that he was stuck as a human right now didn't mean he had to enjoy it.\n\nSuch were his thoughts in general, and had been throughout most of the tournament thus far, but they were not his thoughts at this instant. No, at the moment, his head was full only of a dull pain, a flicker of embarrassment buried beneath the ashes of indifference, and the rich, heady smell of churned mud and horse manure.\n\nSlow and aching, Nycos began to haul himself up from the dirt in which he'd landed, hard, only to find that his opponent\u2014a fellow Kirresci knight, albeit from the court of Duke Gostav of Janu-Vala rather than here in Talocsa\u2014had already dismounted and now held his sabre to Nycos's throat.\n\n\"Yield!\" the mail-clad warrior demanded from behind a mustache so thick it could have adorned the end of a broom.\n\nNycos nodded tiredly. \"I yield.\"\n\nThe other grinned, sheathed his sabre, and reached down a gauntleted hand. Keeping his grumbles internal, Nycos clasped it with his own and allowed himself to be helped upright.\n\n\"That was a nasty fall, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"You wield a nasty lance, Sir Oclan.\" He winced, flexing and rotating a sore shoulder and struggling to fake his opponent's good humor. \"Best hope we don't meet again in the melee, though. You'll find me a far less easy opponent on foot.\"\n\n\"I look forward to finding out.\" Oclan raised a finger to his helm, then turned to march from the list, accompanied by the cheers of his friends and the blaring of trumpets.\n\nNycos watched him go, then headed the other way, letting the pages and grooms chase down Avalanche.\n\nHe had barely passed between the stands, raised tiers of benches from which audience members could watch the jousts, when he felt the brush of soft fabrics and a small hand almost, but not quite, touching his own. \"What happened, Nycos?\"\n\nHe shrugged, still walking. \"I don't have much use for the lance. If I'm fighting from horseback, I far prefer the szandsya, or just my sabre. I have\u2026 not been keeping up practice with it as much as I probably ought. My hold on it was just a hair out of line, and Sir Oclan took full advantage.\"\n\n\"It looked painful,\" Mariscal said, gently mocking and genuinely concerned all at once.\n\n\"It wasn't fun, but it's not bad. I'm fine.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to hear it.\" Again her fingers just barely caressed his own without lingering. \"You should find time to practice with the lance more, though.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I'm quite certain I'll be hearing that from Marshal Laszlan as well, only louder. Care to join me? He'll likely be a tad politer with you present.\"\n\n\"Are\u2026 If you're sure you want me there?\"\n\nMuch had improved between Nycos and Mariscal, but they still shied back around the edges of their interaction, each worried\u2014albeit for different reasons, with different motivations\u2014that an ill-chosen word might set things spiraling off in the wrong direction once more. It was yet another drain on Nycos's patience, something else to tug at his attentions during what was already a nigh overwhelming time.\n\nRight now, she sounded almost timid, doubtless surprised that he'd want her to witness him being reprimanded. For Nycos, however, more concerned with settling that situation and solidifying her status as an ally than with emotional attachment, to show her that he relied on her was far more important than any potential moment of humiliation.\n\n\"I'm sure, my Lady.\"\n\nHe did have to admit to himself, however reluctantly, that her smile made him feel just a little bit better.\n\nThe pair meandered between various fenced-in competitions, around and among rows of food vendors, dodged wandering jugglers and jesters. Nycos found a minced meat pie in his hand with no memory of purchasing it, and found it gone a minute later with only the lingering spice on his tongue to remind him of eating it.\n\nHe clearly recalled, however, passing by a small melee\u2014three warriors on three\u2014that set him to scowling. One trio consisted of Kirresci soldiers, young but skilled, chosen for their teamwork and swordsmanship. The other\u2026\n\n\"Why are they even permitted to be here?\" he asked, not so much objecting as genuinely curious.\n\nNow Mariscal did take a solid grip on his hand, perhaps half afraid that he would dash off and do something foolish. \"We aren't actually at war,\" she reminded him. \"And I'm quite certain Jarta and Marshal Laszlan both have any number of eyes on them.\"\n\nNycos continued to watch the black-tabarded soldiers of Ktho Delios wielding their heavier broadswords against the sabres of their Kirresci opponents, but allowed Mariscal to guide him past.\n\nHe wondered what intelligence those men and women might be able to provide, if only the methods required to extract that information wouldn't ignite the very conflict King Hasyan and the other southern monarchs sought desperately to avoid. Perhaps someone whose affiliation with the court can't be proven ought to pay them a visit on their journey back home\u2026\n\nThose thoughts, and others of a similarly vicious nature, occupied him until they'd crossed the great fields behind Oztyerva and their destination hove into sight.\n\nThe royal pavilion, not quite a tent and not quite a gazebo but some peculiar offspring of both, stood atop a small hill overlooking those fields. From here, the most important and impressive of the contests played out within view, allowing the king and his guests to observe the best parts of the tourney from luxury. Servants moved in and about the various daises and platforms, providing a never-ending array of refreshments, while several dozen of the king's bodyguards stood post to ensure the safety of their liege. The fact that this shelter was so distant from the doors of Oztyerva bestowed upon it\u2014and his Majesty\u2014an air of vulnerability despite those guards, an impression meant to foster trust and mutual goodwill.\n\nThe hidden hatchway to a collapsible tunnel leading back into the palace ensured that said perception of vulnerability was just that: perception.\n\nAt this time, his Majesty was indeed in attendance, along with several of his court, a number of visiting dukes and counts, and Ambassador Kidil. Most were watching a one-on-one match between Sir Tivador, son of the Judge Royal Amisco Valacos, and one of the Suunimi envoy's countrymen. The tall, slender foreigner wore leathers dyed in deep reds and emeralds that shone against the dark of his skin. He fought with an elongated shield and a short spear that might have resembled a szandzsya save that its blade was leaf-shaped and dual-edged. His tumbling, acrobatic style of battle stymied Sir Tivador, whose own sabre-spear never came near to connecting.\n\nAadesh Kidil smiled broadly at Nycos and Mariscal as they pushed their way beneath the overhang that kept rain, sun, or wind from disturbing the audience within. \"Zeyaash,\" he boasted proudly. \"The nephew of an old, old friend of mine. It appears this year's single combat champion will be Suunimi, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nNycos grinned back. \"Perhaps because I haven't faced him, Ambassador.\"\n\nThe laugh in response was booming. \"I believe your custom is that anyone of rank may challenge the final victor, is it not? Feel free to do so when Zeyaash wins. Do not worry,\" he added, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. \"It will be a duel on foot. We Suunimi do not favor fighting from horseback.\"\n\nThe humor in which the jibe was offered made it impossible to take real offense. Mariscal snickered; Nycos merely grumbled and moved on. He did wonder just how rapidly word of his unfortunately swift unhorsing had traveled, though, since the lists in which he'd ridden were not readily visible from the hilltop.\n\nHis Majesty sat ensconced in a massive wooden chair, cushioned in purple velvet, far enough from the edge to rest in the shade without cutting off his view of the proceedings. He only half watched, however, engaged as he was in laughing conversation and reminiscence with one Duke Ishmar of Hesztilna.\n\nSlightly older than the king himself, Ishmar had been a close friend of Hasyan's since they'd been youths, learning the ins and outs of politics in the chambers of Oztyerva. He was far paler than his Majesty, his beard almost brittle, his skin showing the faint fleshiness and sallow tint of a man who enjoyed his wines and spirits perhaps a touch more often than was strictly healthy. His laugh remained hearty, however, his mind sharp, and his company welcomed by most of the court on those rare occasions when his duties to Hesztilna permitted him to visit.\n\nAnd welcomed, in particular, by his daughter, the Margravine Mariscal.\n\nShe and Nycos wended their way through the guards and servants to stand before the duke and the king. Nycos knelt, while Mariscal moved straight to her father and kissed him on his bristly cheek.\n\n\"My dear!\" he greeted her, moving his goblet to his other hand so he could wrap an arm briefly around her. Then, without hostility but without much in the way of affection, either, \"Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"Your Grace.\" He had no notion whether the duke approved of his relationship\u2014or \"potential relationship,\" at any rate\u2014with Mariscal. Presumably, Ishmar would be a bit happier with it if and when Nycos attained the office of Crown Marshal, but it was yet another complication for which the knight had little comprehension, and even less patience.\n\nHe wondered, at times, if Smim was right and he should just forget this whole concept of intimate relations. He didn't want to hurt Mariscal, nor did he want to surrender his greatest supporter, but human entanglement and courtship were maddening.\n\nHis Majesty took something between a sip and a swig from his own drink. \"What are you doing here, Sir Nycolos? Aren't you supposed to be at the lists?\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\"\n\n\"He was, Your Majesty.\" Orban Laszlan appeared from deeper within the pavilion. His tone was stern, but his expression far milder than Nycos had feared. \"It seems, however, that our honored knight has been less than industrious in practice with the lance of late.\"\n\nNycos grinned sheepishly. \"It's true, I'm afraid. My attentions have been elsewhere than the joust. I\u2014\"\n\nHe fell briefly silent as a gasp of awed appreciation flowed through the audience, both here in the shelter and across the stands beyond. On the grass before them, Zeyaash had leapt into the air, kicking out with both feet and twisting over a sharp slash of Tivador's blade. The Suunimi warrior landed on one foot, continuing the momentum of his spin and sweeping the knight's own feet from under him. By the time Tivador had even realized he was on his back, Zeyaash's spear-tip hovered inches from his face.\n\nThe officiants called the match in favor of Zeyaash, to loud cheers and jeers alike, and the two combatants moved aside to rest and recuperate so the next pair of contenders might take the field.\n\n\"I've been caught up in other practices,\" Nycos continued during the brief lull. \"I'll show you when the time comes for the dueling champion to accept final challenge.\"\n\nThe king nodded. \"Ambassador Kidil seems convinced Zeyaash will be that champion.\"\n\n\"He's probably right,\" Orban warned. \"He's very, very good, Nycolos.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll just have to be\u2014\"\n\nA trumpet blared, announcing the start of the next match. Only those who had already won a significant number of duels or melees were invited to contest here, beneath the watchful gaze of the king himself, so whoever appeared would be skilled indeed, and well worth observing.\n\n\"We present to you,\" the herald's voice rang out over the field, \"the Lord Kortlaus, Baron of Urwath!\"\n\nCheers and applause\u2014some from Nycos himself, glad to see his friend having advanced so far in the tournament. Kortlaus stepped out into the grassy arena, clad in his finest reinforced chain hauberk, sabre held high for the crowd to see.\n\n\"And his opponent, Silbeth Rasik, of\u2026\" The herald's pause was brief, nigh unnoticeable, as though he were faintly startled by whatever bit of information had been passed on to him to relay. \"\u2026the Priory of Steel!\"\n\nNow the audience reaction was one of wonder, a wave of murmurs that formed a slow whirlpool around the field. Although it wasn't uncommon for mercenary guilds or martial organizations to participate in the Kirresci tournament, it had been quite some time since the Priory had bothered. Most of the citizenry had heard tales of their prowess, some doubtless exaggerated, and they were eager indeed to see what this Silbeth Rasik could do.\n\nThe king's guests and even guards were no more immune to that draw, leaning forward or craning their necks for a better view. Hasyan himself had grown suddenly intent\u2014and not just intent but somewhat distracted, as though pondering questions to which few present were privy.\n\nIt was neither his Majesty's reaction, however, nor any particular curiosity over the Priory of Steel that held Nycos spellbound, rapt in open fascination. No, those might have drawn his initial attention, but what kept it, snagged like a fish wriggling on a hook, was the woman herself.\n\nNo mere physical attraction, this. The pale brunette, clad in worn mail and an old, mismatched cuirass, was handsome enough, but not remarkably so. Many of the palace's noblewomen, not least Mariscal herself, were easily her superior if physical beauty was all Nycos had sought, but of course he rarely even noticed such things. No, it was something about the way this Silbeth moved, held herself; her steady gaze, her every fluid step.\n\nThe creature that Nycos had been, that still lurked within his heart and soul, recognized a kindred spirit, a fellow hunter, when it saw one.\n\n\"Wonderful!\" Mariscal appeared at his side. He hadn't even noticed her approach or her presence until she spoke. \"It's been a few years since a woman was tournament champion. I know Lord Kortlaus is your friend, Nycos, but I think I'm cheering for her.\"\n\nHe scarcely heard, but he knew, without the faintest sliver of doubt, that the margravine would not be disappointed. Kortlaus didn't have a chance. The baron might not have been the greatest swordsman in the land, but he was an experienced knight of Kirresc. That alone made him better than most who dared take the field against him. Today, however, Nycos was certain it wouldn't be enough.\n\nKortlaus raised his sabre, twisting his body so that his torso was concealed from his opponent behind his round-topped, kite-shaped shield. With a faint hiss of metal on leather, not unlike the whisper of a soft breeze, Silbeth drew her own sword, narrow and straight, long of blade and of grip so that it might be\u2014but didn't quite have to be\u2014wielded in both hands. And indeed she held it in one fist, her other wrapped around the handle of a small steel buckler.\n\nThe officiating herald called for the two challengers to begin. Kortlaus advanced, slowly, smoothly. Silbeth waited, the tip of her blade weaving tiny curls in the air.\n\nAnd then she proved Nycos absolutely correct. The fight was over almost before he had a chance to cheer for his friend\u2014which didn't matter since, in his fascination with watching Silbeth, he'd utterly forgotten to do so.\n\nThey came together, and though the greater length of her blade allowed Silbeth to strike first, she made only a few tentative prods, tip of the sword glancing off Kortlaus's shield. The baron, in turn, took the opportunity to move inside her reach and make a few quick attacks. She sidestepped the sabre once, deflected it with her buckler, ducked the third stroke, and retreated.\n\nDisappointed mutters sounded here and there, members of the audience wondering when the fabled skill of the Priory might show itself. Mariscal herself made a small tsking sound.\n\nNycos swallowed a laugh. Wait for it\u2026\n\nThe sabre sliced through the air, and Silbeth parried with her buckler. Again, and she dodged. Kortlaus lunged, shoving with his shield, and she pivoted away. He swung the sabre once more\u2026\n\nJust that suddenly, the woman was a blur; Nycos wasn't sure how much the others, with their mere human senses, actually saw of what happened. Silbeth swayed sharply backward so that the baron's blade swept past her, his arm crossed diagonally before his chest for the barest instant, and then she snapped upright.\n\nThe edge of her buckler came down, hooking the lip of his shield and dragging the two opponents together. Her sword came up and across, the blade resting against his throat. The weight of her body slamming into him knocked him off balance, and she extended a foot to catch her heel behind his.\n\nAnd like that, they froze. Kortlaus couldn't attack, for his sword arm was pinned between her breastplate and his own shield. He couldn't straighten, with her leaning into him. He couldn't step backward to catch his balance without tripping over her boot. The hilt of her sword pressed against the side of his neck kept him from sliding or pivoting to his left, and the blade would begin to cut into his throat were he to drag himself across its edge to the right.\n\nAn unorthodox clinch, to say the least, and not one just anybody had the speed and precision to master. Half the audience was on their feet, astonished, trying to figure out what precisely they'd just seen.\n\n\"Yield, my Lord?\" It didn't take Nycos's senses to hear that. Her voice carried nearly as far, as clearly, as Marshal Laszlan's would have.\n\n\"I'm not entirely sure what just happened,\" Kortlaus rasped, chagrined but with good humor, \"but I think I'd better.\"\n\nThe herald announced Silbeth's victory, a trumpet sounded, and the Priory warrior stepped back so the baron might regain his balance. They exchanged salutes and abandoned the field to a wave of applause and acclaim.\n\nMariscal said something, then, but Nycos, still enraptured, caught not a word of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "The last few days of the tournament were a bit of a blur for Nycos. He still had duties to perform, and he saw to those with as much haste as he could manage. So, too, did he have various social obligations\u2014though fewer than he otherwise might, as Mariscal spent long stretches with her visiting father\u2014and he rushed through those as rapidly as propriety would permit.\n\nThe rest of the time, he watched.\n\nHe learned a lot, then, of human martial arts and, to a lesser extent, their various cultures. He watched a twelve-on-twelve melee in which nine fighters essentially sacrificed their chance for victory rather than defend the trio of despised Ktho Delian soldiers with whom they'd been matched. In group melee and individual duels, he witnessed his fellow Kirresci knights in victory and in defeat. He studied the axe-wielders and staff-fighters of Althlalen; the knights of Quindacra, modeled after but never quite so well trained nor so well equipped as those of Kirresc; religious crusaders and masterless mercenaries both out of Wenslir, one of whom fought with a most peculiar style, a flanged mace in each hand. Even a handful of tribal warriors from the Vingossa Plains made an appearance, putting on astonishing displays of mounted archery, then fighting on foot with hatchets and sickle-shaped swords, calling battle-prayers to their animist Vinnkasti spirits.\n\nBut it was all quite secondary. Whenever she was competing, Nycos's attentions were entirely on Silbeth Rasik.\n\nIt would have been dishonest of him to insist that she was amazing at everything she set her hand to. She was a fair archer, but hardly an expert, and never reached the final rounds of that competition; and while her skills at unarmed combat were significant, she lacked the mass or strength to overcome a few equally skilled but larger wrestlers in the tourney's final days.\n\nEven in defeat, however, she was impressive, well worth watching, for still she moved with that almost unnatural grace, a fluidity and clarity of purpose that spoke directly to his soul in a language Nycos recognized yet couldn't begin to comprehend.\n\nHe was, in a word, fascinated, and he could not articulate why.\n\nAnd that? That was when she lost, wielding a bow or an empty fist. Put a blade in her hand and she became something greater, something for whom \"defeat\" seemed an alien concept. Men and women, Kirresci and foreigner, experts in sword or spear or axe or whatever weapon one cared to name\u2026 Some lasted longer than Kortlaus had, a few even made their fights a near match, but none could conquer her.\n\nUntil, as the sun passed noon on the tournament's last day, and a moist, cooling autumn gust swept across the fields, leaving brief shivers in its wake, the many duels culminated in what was\u2014barring any challenge by a noble competitor\u2014the final one-on-one match. The only match to which the prior duels could possibly have led. Nycos, the entirety of the royal pavilion, and every member of the audience waited in breathless silence as the herald made his announcement.\n\nSilbeth Rasik of the Priory of Steel, against Zeyaash Viruk of Suunim.\n\nThe first moments of the contest were a blur of whirling steel, striking limbs, clashing shields. Zeyaash was everywhere, lashing out with spear, foot, fist, spinning and twisting, always in motion. Silbeth was less acrobatic but no slower, her own blade and buckler always in place to deflect an attack no matter how exotic, her own boots and gauntlets landing blows where opportunity allowed. The song of steel was an unbroken ring, less a series of impacts than a single, tremulous note.\n\nThey met, parted, came together once more, a dance in which even the war god Teslak must have found beauty and grace.\n\nJust as swiftly, it very nearly ended.\n\nZeyaash, shield tucked tight to his side, spear moving in tight arcs before his body, stepped in and whirled the haft of the weapon at Silbeth's head. Even as she smacked the attack aside with the flat of her sword, he was spinning, crouched, shield abruptly extended to sweep her ankles. Again she saw the attack coming, easily hopped over it.\n\nBut the Suunimi warrior continued his spin, leaping into the air. Feet pinwheeled upward in a devastating kick, and the outer edge of his boot cracked hard across his opponent's face.\n\nThe audience members came to their feet, Nycos among them. It was a brutal blow, powerful and well aimed. Silbeth staggered, toppling, and every soul watching must have believed the duel was ended then and there.\n\nSilbeth came out of her backwards roll, springing back to her feet and grinning through a mask of blood. Unable to avoid the massive kick, still she'd managed to turn with it, transforming what could\u2014should\u2014have been a stunning blow into a merely painful one. The entire crowd roared with excitement as she wiped the blood from her eyes with the back of a gauntleted hand and the two opponents advanced again.\n\nAnother series of clashes, dodges, parries, ripostes, and then it truly was over. Using her buckler, Silbeth smacked aside another thrust of Zeyaash's spear, knocking it wide. At the same instant, she leaned left and kicked, turning her entire body horizontal save for the one leg on which she stood. The heel of her boot shoved his shield in the opposite direction, leaving his body open if only briefly. Her sword whistled, slicing the autumn air, and crunched into the raised leather collar that protected the man's throat.\n\nIt didn't quite penetrate, but nobody\u2014Silbeth, Zeyaash, or the officiants\u2014doubted that it could have, had she wished it.\n\nThe herald sounded his trumpet, the Suunimi bowed, and the crowd once more roared in a single, unbroken voice.\n\nAs for the victor, she waved once to the crowd and then knelt, planting her sword blade-first in the soil and leaning heavily upon it, catching her breath. Her lowered gaze scanned the crowd, however, as though seeking someone particular.\n\nNycos blinked, startled, as her eyes locked on his and ceased moving.\n\nRelying on his rank where it proved sufficient, and on his size and armored elbows where more forceful measures were required, he pushed his way through the milling throng to stand before her. She rose as he approached, her expression mildly amused.\n\n\"You know me?\" Nycos asked, struggling to be heard over the ambient clamor.\n\n\"I might ask you the same. You've been watching me for three days.\" Then, at his expression, \"I pay attention, and not just to obvious opponents.\"\n\n\"Um.\" Somehow, in all his fascination with observing her, Nycos had never given any thought as to what he would do or say should they actually meet. \"You're very good.\"\n\nHer lips twitched. \"Why, so I am! How did that happen?\"\n\nWas he blushing? He still didn't know this damned body well enough to know if that was what the faint warming in his cheeks actually meant. \"I've been considering challenging the champion,\" he told her, trying to regain some measure of dignity.\n\n\"I've not been declared champion yet.\"\n\n\"Formalities. You just won the final match. It's just a matter of his Majesty making the declaration.\"\n\n\"And you've the right and rank to challenge, my Lord\u2026?\"\n\n\"No lord. Sir Nycolos Anvarri.\"\n\nHer eyes grew wide, then came alight. \"The dragon slayer?\"\n\nNot exactly. \"So they call me.\" He grinned at her. \"Does that make you nervous?\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\n\"And why not?\"\n\n\"I'm no dragon.\"\n\nNycos laughed, loudly enough to draw puzzled looks from several of nearby observers. \"Your opponents might argue differently.\"\n\nShe returned his grin, but her expression swiftly turned serious. \"Please tell his Majesty that I must speak with him when the tournament has ended.\"\n\n\"All you need do is defeat me,\" he said, still chuckling. \"The king addresses all the tournament champions at the end of the final\u2014\"\n\n\"I need him to speak with me in private.\"\n\nThe sounds of the crowd receded and Nycos grew tense, swaddled in a caul of suspicion. \"Why would you need that? Why would you expect his Majesty to agree to something so unheard of?\"\n\n\"Just tell him\u2026 Tell him the salmon were even later than expected this year, but they've finally reached Lake Orist.\"\n\nShe vanished into the milling throng before Nycos could voice even the first of the many, many questions he suddenly needed to ask."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "As he was not an utter fool, Nycos recognized that the bizarre statement as a signal or a code of some sort. It was a fact that left him with more questions than answers. Who was this Silbeth Rasik? What connection had she with King Hasyan? If they had some prior interaction or communication, why choose to make contact through so roundabout a method as fighting her way to the tournament's championships? Why ask a knight of the realm, rather than any one of the hundreds of soldiers or servants present, to deliver the incomprehensible message?\n\nIt left him both suspicious and utterly bewildered, two emotions of which Nycos was rather emphatically unfond.\n\nUnfortunately for his burning curiosity, his Majesty seemed disinclined to clarify. He merely nodded thoughtfully when Nycos explained the conversation and delivered the message, dismissing the knight with a curt thank you before sending a page to go find and retrieve the Crown Marshal. Nycos wandered away, growling to himself.\n\nLate afternoon brought a chilly autumn drizzle, less real rain than a haze of droplets squished tightly between clouds above and earth below. Grass, guards, stands, and stalls all shimmered in the wet. Pennants hung limp, clothes clung to shivering skin, and a good portion of the audience decided that they didn't actually need to stay for the last few performances, challenge bouts, or closing ceremonies. Smim, after a quick check of his master's chainmail and other accoutrements, delightedly wished Nycos good luck and headed back toward their quarters, where he no doubt already had a comfortable fire roaring away.\n\nNycos gave some real consideration to ordering the goblin to stay, purely out of vindictiveness, but decided to let it drop.\n\nEven the trumpets seemed soured by the turn of the weather and ready to call the whole thing over and done with. They announced the challenge match between Silbeth Rasik and Sir Nycolos Anvarri with something of a wet and deflated blat. In the grey of the rain-smeared twilight, the two combatants saluted one another and met in the slippery, glistening grass.\n\nHere, at least, the remaining crowds showed life still within them, shouting and cheering the advancing warriors and raised blades.\n\nNycos had chosen to go with the szyandzsya in a two-handed grip, foregoing the use of a shield\u2014though his sabre hung at his waist, a fallback in case he should lose the spear. Silbeth bore the same longsword and buckler with which she'd fought every match, though something in the way she held them struck Nycos as ever so slightly off. He couldn't quite say what; perhaps, had he the lifelong training he was supposed to have had, he could have put a finger on it. As things stood, it was just another nagging worry.\n\nCarefully, meticulously, he had prepared himself for this fight, mystically bolstering muscle and bone until he'd made himself as swift and as strong as he believed he could get away with, just below the point he would give his prowess away as obviously inhuman. Against most foes, it would have proved an overwhelming advantage.\n\nAgainst this woman? He was not entirely sure he'd done more than even things up.\n\nAnd still he nearly lost as soon as it began. Silbeth took one step, a second, and the buckler hurtled directly at Nycos's head, a thick steel discus that would have knocked him senseless had it connected. He barely managed to dodge aside, and in that split second of distraction she leapt upon him. Her sword, now held firmly in both hands, sprayed rainwater as it neared, and even his nearly superhuman speed only allowed him to avoid the tip by inches.\n\nDramatic, unexpected, but why would she risk losing her shield?\n\nAs they circled, each jabbing at the other in an exchange of blades intended to test rather than to deliver a telling blow, Nycos understood. She'd recognized an opponent both fast and strong, had decided that the extra speed and precision she'd gain wielding her hand-and-a-half sword in two fists was more valuable than the buckler's protection. She could have simply hung it from her belt or left it behind, but she'd chosen to hide her intentions, and take an unexpected shot in the process.\n\nHe couldn't help but grin, impressed. She returned the expression, teeth shining through the chilling shower.\n\nNycos slashed. Silbeth dodged. She stabbed; he deflected. He lunged; she sidestepped. Their weapons came together, scraping and shedding rain. Where he began to overpower her, she danced aside. Where she came in fast, blade weaving a web as it seemed to strike from a dozen directions, he relied on his heavier weapon to bat aside the first and his innate speed to avoid those that followed.\n\nThe crowd had fallen into a hush, so that only the sounds of the weather cheered them on. The wind caught her hair and Nycos watched for an opening, but she had tied enough of it back before the contest began that it never blinded her for even a moment.\n\nTwice he wound up on his back, tripped up by a maneuver he never saw coming, and both times rolled aside just before she could land a final blow. Once he managed to deliver a fearsome punch to her gut, the sheer strength of his spinning szandzsya having forced a hole in her guard, but she twisted fast enough to avoid the worst of the impact and her hauberk took care of the rest.\n\nIt was all, perhaps, less showy than her earlier championship bout, less leaping and tumbling about, but it was faster, fiercer. Tomorrow, when those who had departed early heard their friends speak of this final match, many would refuse to believe it.\n\nUnderstandable, that. Having watched her for days, even standing in the face of it now, Nycos himself could scarcely believe the woman's sheer skill. Even as a dragon he had heard the occasional tales of the Priory of Steel, and had always dismissed them. Humans were humans, were they not?\n\nNow? Even in his old form, his true form, Silbeth Rasik would have been more than a nuisance; as great a threat as any lone human could possibly be, without the aid of magic such as Wyrmtaker. Trapped in his current body, Nycos knew that he would have to tap into magics beyond what he was willing to reveal, would have to become far faster and stronger than human to win this match.\n\nUnless\u2026\n\nHe'd fought her, thus far, to a standstill, and inhuman stamina was far less conspicuous than potence or agility. No matter her training, her experience, Silbeth couldn't possibly keep this pace indefinitely. She must tire, before long, and if he could simply keep her from victory until that point\u2014no sure thing, but conceivable\u2014he just might prevail.\n\nAgain they circled, and the wind briefly parted the thick rain like a curtain. In that moment, Nycos saw clearly the audience of royalty and nobility watching from within the shelter of the king's pavilion. He saw that Mariscal, seated comfortably beside her father, was among them.\n\nConflicting thoughts clashed against one another in Nycos's mind, louder than the steel. He'd all but forgotten his efforts to impress her, draw her nearer, repair the lingering damage to their relationship, and suddenly he found himself uncertain how best to go about it.\n\nHer prior comment about seeing a woman as champion, how seriously had she meant it to be taken? Idle musing, or was it genuinely important to her? Would she be impressed at his ability to overcome one of the tournament's most impressive victors, or would she be angry at him? Would\u2014?\n\nThen the choice, if it ever had been, was no longer his to make.\n\nWhere in Vizret's hell did that kick even come from? He never took his eyes off the woman, could not have been distracted by those whirling thoughts and questions for more than a fraction of a second\u2014and nothing in his stance or his expression should have given away that he was distracted at all! Nevertheless, Silbeth's sword had come swinging down at him, he'd raised the szandzsya to parry, and then his knee had simply given way, caught and hooked by a boot he'd never seen coming.\n\nHe staggered, his unnatural resilience preventing him from toppling outright, but it was enough. Off-balance, he could do nothing to prevent Silbeth twisting inside his reach, knocking his weapon aside with an elbow, and jabbing the tip of her sword into his hauberk.\n\nThe scar-tissue around the sliver of Wyrmtaker flared with remembered pain.\n\nIt was a killing stroke, or would have been had she pressed it. As much as his pride stung, Nycos nodded, stepped back, and announced, \"I yield.\"\n\nHe remembered little of the next few moments. The roaring throng, pressing around him. The support of his friends\u2014condolences for his defeat or congratulations for coming so near to defeating so worthy an adversary, depending on who was speaking. Mariscal's presence by his side, the occasional touch of her hand where propriety or the press of the crowd permitted. The roar of the trumpets, bringing the tournament's final afternoon to a close. The cold embrace of the rain.\n\nBut all he could see was Silbeth Rasik, and all he could think of were the many unanswered questions about her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "His Majesty made a brief announcement, formally declaring this year's winners\u2014not just in the one-on-one duels, where Silbeth had proven victorious, but in contests of grand melee, archery, and the joust. Traditionally, a procession would have followed, in which the champions were displayed before the crowd, offered tokens of victory and other rewards; musicians and performers would have put on their final shows, and the tourney would officially draw to a close. In light of the inclement weather, however, tonight the king would be inviting the champions to a brief and private ceremony within the court, and the bulk of the festivities would be postponed for the morrow.\n\nAs that meant an extra day of celebration\u2014and thus an extra day of drinking and leisure\u2014the crowd cheered the announcement as emphatically as anything else they'd heard or seen for the past fortnight. The servants and heralds were perhaps less overjoyed, but they kept their opinions to themselves.\n\nOnce inside the crowded throne room, Silbeth and the others were named champions with abbreviated pomp and circumstance, including a lone trumpeter, and invited to attend the king's supper in a couple of hours. Marshal Laszlan asked if Silbeth would take a few moments to speak to his Majesty regarding a possible contract for the Priory, and just that easily they'd established a believable excuse as to why the king might spend some time in private conversation with a woman who, for all her skill, was just another mercenary.\n\nIt was all more or less what Nycos had expected since he'd first delivered her message, and he spent most of the shortened ceremony statue-still, fighting the unfamiliar and all too human urge to fidget, while he waited for the nonsense to be over and for the answers to finally come.\n\nAll of which made him want to scream in frustration when the king asked only his most immediate advisors\u2014the Crown Marshal, Denuel Jarta, their Highnesses the prince and princess, and a handful of the others\u2014to accompany him and their guest to the smaller council chamber.\n\nWell, fine. If they weren't going to invite him to participate, he'd learn what he needed via other means. Time to take a page from Smim's book.\n\nNycos tagged along part of the way, concocting excuses to speak with Marshal Laszlan: something about possibly hiring foreign competitors who did well in the tournament to train Kirresci knights in some of their martial arts and fighting techniques. It was, no doubt, an idea that others had already considered, and perhaps it had even been tried, but Orban listened politely and asked Nycos to write up a formal proposal.\n\nThat done, Nycos peeled off as the group approached their destination. He'd established a reason to be near the council chamber, and that was all he'd required. Once on his own, he jogged through a few winding halls until he finally found a small room\u2014really little more than a closet\u2014close enough to suffice.\n\nNobody considered it a threat, in terms of eavesdropping or espionage. No human being could have heard a peep through the thick stone wall.\n\nNycos concentrated, transforming the pieces and contours of his inner ear until he could have heard a worm's after-dinner belch, and pressed the side of his head against the stone.\n\n\"\u2026heard me make mention of an intelligence source I had within Ktho Delios,\" King Hasyan was saying, his voice made gruff and vaguely tinny by the intervening wall. \"Lady Raczia was that agent.\"\n\n\"I only ever knew her as Ulia Povyar,\" Silbeth said, sounding distant, even saddened. \"She didn't even tell me her real name until a few weeks before\u2026\" She trailed off.\n\nThe next to speak was Orban. Nycos could all but picture the marshal standing beside the king, a hand on his shoulder. \"How did she die?\"\n\n\"Ah, begging your pardon and with your permission, Marshal Laszlan,\" the mercenary replied, \"and with yours, Your Majesty, I'd prefer to tell the tale as it happened. I expect you'll all have a great many questions, and it'll be easier to keep it all straight if we're not hopping around.\"\n\n\"I've no objection,\" Hasyan told her. \"Has anyone else?\" Then, after a response empty of anything but silence, he said, \"Please proceed, Mistress Rasik.\"\n\nSo she did, regaling her audience (plus one curious knight) with the tale of her assignment, her mission to infiltrate Tohl Delian and extricate Ulia\u2014that was, Lady Raczia, King Hasyan's spy\u2014from the heart of Ktho Delios. She left out nothing of importance, from her difficulties in meeting up with the criminals they'd arranged to work through, the necessary bloodshed, and their near escape with Deliant pursuers, including one of the fearsome inquisitors, hot on their heels.\n\nAnd here Nycos had thought he couldn't grow any more impressed with this woman!\n\n\"Koldan's smugglers got us outside the city walls,\" she said, \"but not much further. The Deliant soldiers were not only behind us, but ahead. They'd gotten word to their patrols on the roads, since they didn't have to take the time to sneak around as we had. Ulia and I wound up fleeing overland, through the forests and eventually up into the Aerugo Mountains.\n\n\"I don't know if that inquisitor, Ilx, was still in command of the pursuit or if someone else was in charge, as we never saw him again. But they would not let up! Either they were truly enraged at the death of a few Ninth Citadel agents, or they'd figured out what it was Ulia had discovered.\"\n\nFrom the sound of things through the wall, several people began to speak at once, then, but something\u2014a gesture of some sort, perhaps\u2014stopped them before they'd formed a coherent word. \"Please,\" she reminded them, \"I'll get there. You've no reason to trust me, not without U\u2014Raczia to bear witness. I want you to understand why she trusted me with this intelligence, because it's vital that you believe!\"\n\nA moment, in which Nycos heard what he imagined was a long swallow of something liquid, and she continued. \"It wasn't terribly difficult to hide from them in the mountains, but hiding was all we could do. They left us no escape routes. They watched the roads like hawks, were crawling all over the scalable slopes, had soldiers spread throughout the forests. Not that they really had to stand guard for long. Once the snows fell, we weren't going anywhere. We were trapped up there for months, and during the worst of winter it was all we could do to survive. Escape wasn't even a consideration, then. Moving between shelters so we'd not be caught, trying not to freeze, to scavenge sufficient food. We had to fight for our lives, more than once. Deliant searchers found us a couple of times, but there were also bears, something I think might have been a yeti, creatures of the ice that may have been fey\u2026 It was unpleasant.\"\n\nThat understatement inspired a few chuckles.\n\n\"In the mountains, of course, winter lingers. Things did grow easier, once the thaws began, but even then we couldn't get out! The soldiers figured we'd make a break for it as soon as we were able, so the coming of spring saw a redoubling of searchers. I've never heard of such a monumental effort to track down a pair of fugitives!\n\n\"Still, their numbers dwindled eventually. Either they assumed we were dead, or they simply couldn't spare the manpower from other duties. It still required a great deal of running and hiding, but we were finally able to make our way beyond the Aerugo range and run for the border.\"\n\nApparently it was a question Hasyan couldn't hold back any longer. \"So Raczia was still alive, then? She didn't perish during the winter?\"\n\n\"No, Your Majesty, she was still\u2026 still with me, then.\" She paused, swallowed. \"Ulia and I became quite close during those months. We had to, to survive. Trust was more vital than warmth, you understand?\"\n\nNycos sensed the nods he couldn't hear.\n\n\"It was during this portion of our travels, as we carefully made our way south, that she told me her real name\u2014though we scarcely used it, as we were both accustomed to 'Ulia' by then. It was also at this time that she revealed to me what it was she'd learned. And it was in honor of that trust, and our friendship, that I chose to bring it to you, Your Majesty, once she was gone. Even though my assignment had only been to try to rescue her\u2026\"\n\nMore silence, long and dragging.\n\nUntil, \"We still had to move slowly, carefully. We made our way to Lake Orist, skirted around the shore. We actually passed through the edges of Gronch, in order to avoid the Deliant patrols. Perhaps we were fortunate, but we encountered nothing within worse than a few wild animals. If the legends of monsters in that forest are true, they must have been elsewhere.\"\n\nIt wasn't hard for Nycos to imagine the looks that must have passed around the table at that declaration.\n\n\"We took a bit of time in a small town in Suunim, recovering, regaining our strength. Ulia was in a hurry to return, Your Majesty, but we both knew we needed the rest.\n\n\"Our journey through Suunim and Wenslir was long but largely free of excitement, and thank the gods for that! I think we were both feeling almost human again as we approached the Kirresci border. We were intercepted, then, by a Wenslirran patrol.\"\n\nHer voice dropped to a near whisper, so that Nycos had to strain mightily to hear. \"I should have been more watchful. More alert. We just\u2026 we had no warning, no reason to suspect they were anything other than what they seemed\u2026\"\n\nGiven there were fewer than a dozen people in the room, the uproar was intense. Nycos pulled back from the wall, and from the volume, until his Majesty had calmed everyone down.\n\nNot that the king himself was precisely calm. \"Are you suggesting,\" he asked, every word quivering with anger at the possibility of such betrayal, \"that soldiers of Wenslir killed Raczia?\"\n\n\"She died in the attack,\" Silbeth answered. \"I barely escaped\u2014and make no mistake, I would have fought for her to the death, but she was already gone before I knew what was happening.\n\n\"They were dressed as Wenslirran soldiers. I don't think they actually were. I think the Deliant spread word to watch for us\u2014for Ulia specifically, since they had a better description of her.\"\n\n\"That would mean the Deliant have agents in Wenslir,\" Princess Firillia mused. \"That's disturbing to say the least.\"\n\n\"There could be spies anywhere,\" Silbeth said. \"Though not necessarily Deliant.\" Before anyone could ask what she meant by that, however, she continued. \"That's why I approached you as I did, Your Majesty. I'd finally made it to Kirresc, and then to Talocsa, but I didn't know what to do. I couldn't just walk up and see you, not without Lady Raczia's rank to gain us an audience. Some random mercenary asking to see the king? It would have taken weeks, if it happened at all, and gods know who would have learned of my presence during that wait? They'd have taken steps.\"\n\n\"The code phrase you used to identify yourself to Raczia would have gotten my attention,\" Hasyan reminded her.\n\n\"Eventually. If the guards recognized it as a code phrase and not nonsense, and bothered to repeat it to anyone who could bring it to your attention. But again, how long would it take? How many people would the request have to pass through, how far would word spread that some no-name warrior had arrived to see you? How could I be sure none of the messengers were themselves enemy agents? I had to find a way to speak to you that wouldn't attract the wrong sort of attention. But a meeting with a tournament champion? Nothing about that says 'espionage' or identifies me as the woman who'd traveled with Ulia.\"\n\n\"And if you'd been slain in the process?\" None of the Kirresci tournaments were deliberately waged to the death, but they were hardly a safe pastime. Severe injuries and fatalities were far from unheard of. \"Who would have delivered your report then?\"\n\n\"I thought it worth the risk, Your Majesty. And I thought it\u2026 unlikely I'd be killed.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" he conceded. \"Still, such dramatic precautions really only seem necessary if Oztyerva were crawling with Deliant spies. While I am forced to admit that we may have one or two, they're hardly present in the sorts of numbers you seem to fear.\"\n\n\"That would be so, Your Majesty, if it were only the agents of Ktho Delios I was concerned about.\"\n\nNycos heard her take another drink, then another breath. \"This, you see, is what Ulia discovered, what you must know. She had developed a friendship with a young Deliant officer, a man who served under one Colonel Vesmine Droste\u2014one of the new favored prot\u00e9g\u00e9s of Governor-General Achlaine himself.\"\n\nThe whole room had hushed, and even Nycos had to remind himself to breathe. She had told her entire story, explained her motivations, and now listed the provenance of the intelligence she carried, all before delivering that information for which the king's agent had died. What was so awful, so earth-shaking, that she felt they would struggle to accept it, might look for reason to disbelieve?\n\n\"The spies and assassins I've been hiding from, Your Majesty, are not just those of your enemy, but of one of your nearest friends. Ktho Delios has been holding secret talks with the royal house of Quindacra. Talks that, if they succeed, will result in Quindacra withdrawing from the southern nations' mutual defense pact.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Once, so very long ago, it had been called Castle Tzirkrav, named for the powerful but decadent royal lineage that ruled from within its monolithic walls. When the last Tzirkrav king had finally been overthrown and executed, the nation and its government placed under pure martial law, it had been rechristened with the unimaginative but oh, so military designation of the First Citadel.\n\nIt was properly called that still, but in this day and age, most who spoke of it referred to it simply as the Fortress. It was title enough for the unbeating stone heart of the Deliant.\n\nColonel Vesmine Droste, proud and ambitious officer of that military parliament, stalked the corridors of the Fortress, her impassive features masking a whirling maelstrom of worry and profanity. She was slender, fit, her striking blonde hair pulled back so tightly that one might trace the contours of her skull beneath her skin. Nothing save the officer's red trim on her black tabard made her stand out from hundreds of other Ktho Delian soldiers, but she was so much more. One of the youngest ever to attain so high a rank within the Deliant, she fully intended to be the youngest to attain ranks higher still.\n\nAssuming nothing had gone disastrously wrong with her plan. It was fear over just that possibility, sparked by the Governor-General's unexpected summons, that had her thoughts in such an uproar. The only thing worse\u2026\n\nWould be if they'd somehow, though she couldn't begin to imagine how, learned with whose help she'd concocted that plan.\n\nSoldiers and couriers wisely stepped from her path. All the soldiers, that was, until she finally reached her destination.\n\nA long hallway\u2014narrow and easily defended\u2014opened up its end, forming a broad antechamber before a massive, iron-bound door. Posted within that wider space stood four of the nation's true elite, Deliant Fortress guards who could not be bribed, could not be intimidated. All wore gloss-blackened mail with plate reinforcement, all were armed with arbalest, halberd, and broadsword. Three wore the standard black tabard; the fourth bore the dark blue of an inquisitor.\n\nAll of them moved to intercept, their leader demanding her identity and a sequence of code words while the inquisitor invoked his witchcraft to ensure she was cloaked by no illusion or other magic. Only when they were fully convinced of her identity\u2014no matter that each knew her by sight\u2014did they stand aside for her to pass.\n\nNone opened the doors for her. That would have been a distraction from their duties. She grunted sourly, despite approving of the practice, and hauled the massive portal ajar. It swung with relative ease despite its weight, thanks to a system of counterweights that could be disengaged from the room beyond.\n\nShe first noticed, as she always did, the change in scent, the fading of the sting in her eyes. The corridors of the Fortress were well lit, but the lanterns within the parliamentary chamber burned a cleaner, higher quality oil. The leaders of the Deliant often spent hours or even days within, after all.\n\nThe second thing she noticed was how that light was directed.\n\nA horseshoe-curve of seats and podiums wrapped the room on all sides except the entrance, raised so that the Deliant officers could look down upon whomever addressed them. Directly opposite that entrance was the highest seat, that of the Governor-General himself. The remainder gradually grew lower around the curve, until those nearest the door were raised only by a few steps. Had this been a standard meeting of the parliament, the lights would have shone evenly throughout the chamber, and she would have taken her seat roughly halfway around and up the room's right side.\n\nToday, only the floor itself was illuminated, suggesting she was to take a position there, gazing up at the others. Today, she was not an equal, but a petitioner.\n\nSo be it. It wouldn't be her first time.\n\nConcealing her irritation as thoroughly as she had her earlier worry, she stepped into the light and slammed a fist to her chest in salute. \"You sent for me, Governor?\"\n\nVesmine couldn't see Demyand Achlaine with the lanterns focused as they were, but he was hardly a stranger. It required no effort at all to picture the hawkish features; the head bald as an egg save for the fringe of white; the body grown gaunt with age, yet still possessed of strength and cunning enough to defeat challengers half as old.\n\n\"King Hasyan,\" he announced without preamble, his sharp tones even more clipped than usual, \"has sent couriers to every corner of Kirresc. He is calling his entire court to assembly, all his nation's dukes and high nobles.\"\n\nThe colonel nodded, her mind racing. Hasyan wouldn't take such steps lightly, and certainly not this late in the year, with winter snows threatening.\n\nNo, not much would inspire the man to go to such lengths, and only one thing that would result in Vesmine Droste being called before the rest of the parliament like an errant student.\n\n\"You suspect he knows of the Quindacra negotiations?\"\n\n\"This summons to court,\" Achlaine continued without answering the question, \"occurred not long after Hasyan took a private meeting. None of our people are in a position to learn precisely who attended, let alone what was discussed. But we do know that many of his closest advisors were present, as was a woman by the name of Silbeth Rasik.\"\n\n\"I'm not familiar with the name, Governor.\"\n\n\"Nor should you be. She was among the champions of the Kirresci tournament, and\u2014it turns out\u2014a member of the Priory of Steel.\"\n\nStill she failed to see where this was going, how any of it was relevant.\n\n\"Having backtracked her movements as best we can, we now believe that she entered the tournament solely as a means of meeting with his Majesty in a way that wouldn't appear suspicious to\u2026 anyone who might be watching.\"\n\nVesmine caught the curse on her lips before it escaped, but it was a near thing. \"The woman who aided in Povyar's escape?\"\n\n\"So it appears.\"\n\nMore internal cursing. She'd already tracked down the officer under her command who'd let information slip to Povyar, and had him executed, but the damage was done\u2014and, ultimately, her responsibility. It had slowed her meteoric rise through the ranks to a glacial pace. Only the fact that the ongoing plan was hers had mitigated some of the damage to her career, and it would take the success of that plan to set things back on course. After the two fugitives had somehow survived the mountains and eluded her soldiers, she'd all but given thanks on her knees at the report of Ulia's death from Quindacran spies in Wenslir. She'd known then that the traitor's accomplice was a loose end, but she'd hoped\u2014\n\n\"The Quindacran operation is yours, Colonel Droste,\" Achlaine said, as though listening in on her thoughts. \"The failure in our security was yours. Which means the responsibility for fixing this is yours. Kirresc and her allies cannot be allowed to confirm their suspicions, and they certainly cannot be allowed to pressure the Quindacrans into changing their minds.\"\n\n\"King Boruden is a coward at heart,\" Vesmine declared adamantly. \"He's more frightened of us than he is of Kirresc or their allies!\"\n\n\"Don't be so certain, Colonel. Yes, Boruden is a coward, but he's also a cunning little weasel. At the moment, he wants what we can offer, but he shares a border with King Hasyan, not with us. Should Kirresc bring enough pressure to bear, particularly if they recruit Wenslir to the cause as well\u2026\"\n\n\"You're correct, of course. We can't chance it.\"\n\n\"So what do you propose to do about it, Colonel?\"\n\nShe wanted to lick her lips, gone suddenly dry. A small amount of magic\u2014such as the agitation of a few of Gronch's monstrous inhabitants, to draw attention from Ktho Delios's activities\u2014she could readily justify; she'd had several inquisitors assigned to her for the duration of the operation. What she and her partner planned for later could be explained away as a result of that initial agitation, a natural spread of activity throughout that haunted forest. Could they move up the timetable, though? Would she still be able to hide her outside assistance\u2014sorcerous assistance\u2014from her peers?\n\n\"Let me speak with my inquisitors, Governor,\" she hedged. \"I think we can put something together fairly quickly.\"\n\n\"More of your 'monstrous distractions'?\" asked another of the shadowed Deliant officers, clearly unimpressed. Many of her fellow officers had been less than taken with that aspect of her plans\u2014particularly since one of Hasyan's knights, according to their spies, had already guessed at a Ktho Delian hand in the ogres' recent activities.\n\nThe same man, in fact, who had killed one of their most useful contacts among the Mahdreshan banditry: a troublemaker who kept cropping up, seemingly by accident, around the edges of her operation. Sir Nycolos Anvarri. With any luck, she'd find a way to work his unpleasant demise into the next phase of her operation.\n\n\"If we can make it work,\" she said, responding to the snide inquiry. \"Kirresc may suspect our interference with Gronch, but they cannot prove it, nor can they ignore the danger the ogres pose. And if we can't, well, I'm sure a cadre of inquisitors and mercenaries can provide a modicum of distraction for King Hasyan. Either way, they'll have too much to worry about, too many problems, to devote their full efforts to investigating or pressuring Quindacra.\"\n\nThe darkened shape of the Governor-General nodded slowly. \"Go, then. Make your plans. But Colonel? While I still have faith in this operation of yours, that faith is not without its limits.\"\n\nVesmine could do nothing in response to that save salute, pivot on her heel, and hope, as she marched from the chamber, that it wouldn't take her partner long to respond to her summons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Here, deep in the darkest heart of Gronch, the sun never shone, the rain never fell, the wind never blew. Weather was a myth; the seasons were marked by a faint warming or cooling, by a change in color in the trees, and nothing more. The leaves overhead were packed too thick, forming a cavern's ceiling. From above hung stalactites of moss, while branches clutched or hung limp like the fingers of countless dead men.\n\nNothing smelled dead, though. Rather the air was redolent with the scent of growing things, moist and thriving things that should have been wholesome, yet felt vaguely unclean. The soil was thick, black, like a residue of the invisible night sky. Roots snaked just beneath the surface, angry serpents lurking to strike. The brush and fungus-covered fallen logs were as thick as the canopy above. Trunks and branches pressed together to form a maze of walls, and every curve, every arch, might have been the lair of some beast, or the doorway to another world.\n\nIt waited, did Gronch, here in its core. Patient. Hungry. Even the boles appeared hostile, leaning in, looming, claustrophobic. Eyes watched. Limbs shuffled. The things that dwelt here were no mere wolves or snakes, crows or bears. Such creatures avoided this part of the forest, for they preferred realms where the natural order held sway. Where they were the predators, not the prey.\n\nHere, not far from the swampy shore of Lake Orist, that soil had piled up, those fallen boles formed natural archways, creating a twisted, sickly entryway into the depths of an earthen hill. Centipedes, beetles, worms, and things far less natural writhed and wiggled from the mud around that entrance. They wound around blades of grass, across protruding sticks and over lichen-covered rocks, but never did they pass more than a few yards deep into the crooked, gaping tunnel. Even they, driven by some mindless instinct, knew better than to approach what slumbered within.\n\nIt was into this twilit nightmare the stranger came. Where few humans dared, where even the wolves and the poisonous things that crawled in the earth did not dare, he did. And not for the first time.\n\nNo natural traveler, he hadn't walked through the bulk of the Ogre-Weald to arrive in its heart. One moment, the shadows beneath a pair of intertwined arboreal giants had been empty, the next he had stepped from between them as though they were, indeed, a long-hidden door. Had he wished, he could have appeared inside the hill itself, in the winding bowels of that awful tunnel, but penetrating the wards\u2014primitive though they were\u2014would have taken effort.\n\nAlso, it would have been rude. And even one such as he found it wise to be courteous when dealing with the uncrowned sovereign of Gronch.\n\nBeneath his torn and ratty cloak, with its equally ragged hood, he didn't look fearsome. In fact, he appeared to have no business remotely near the Ogre-Weald, nor anywhere more dangerous than a pigpen, or perhaps a pastoral hillside overseeing a particularly docile herd of sheep. A disheveled mop of straw-colored hair topped a face equal parts boyish and mannish. Any halfway intelligent guess would have put him only a year or two past the changing of his voice, and though he hadn't bothered to shave in months, the result was little more than a downy layer of fuzz that pooled haphazardly across cheeks and chin. He was tall, but not strong; lanky and rangy, not muscular or graceful.\n\nHe was, in short, soft. Lost and weak, a lamb or fawn abandoned in the darkness.\n\nOr so, at least, did the denizens of Gronch see him.\n\nThey appeared from the shadows, much as he had, a trio of monstrous forms, roughly human in shape but none remotely human. The shortest and squattest still topped eight feet, and that was without counting the spidery limbs protruding in all directions, including upward, from the lumps of gristle that were its shoulders. Of the other two, one was an asymmetrical thing of two legs but only a single muscular arm, clutching a rusted iron axe; a voracious, canine snout sprouted from beneath a single bloodshot eye, drooling a pus-like ichor that spattered and matted filth-encrusted fur. The last was easily the least alien\u2014discounting the ten-foot height and the array of horns and spines protruding at random from its flesh and bones and even one of its eyes, which constantly wept a clear, glistening stream.\n\nHe watched them, the stranger did, unblinking and unflinching, with the cold analysis of one who had seen more than should ever have been possible at his apparent age.\n\n\"I have an errand here,\" he told them, steady and calm. \"You do not want to interfere.\"\n\nTwo of them advanced on him, slathering and gibbering, deaf to his words or at least to their meaning. The other, the canine being with the axe, hesitated half a breath before joining its companions.\n\n\"Ogres,\" the hooded stranger sighed.\n\nWhen he spoke again, it was to produce sounds that bore precious little resemblance to any human\u2014any sane\u2014language. The syllables were harsh, rough-edged, somehow hollow. That any human-shaped throat or lips or tongue could form them was very nearly an eldritch mystery in itself.\n\nBranches creaked, bending, stretching, shedding leaves and oozing thick sap where bark splintered. Roots coiled and bulged, raising serpentine heaps of soil before bursting into open air. The surrounding trees groaned in hateful protest.\n\nThe one-armed marauder barked and spat as it was dragged from its feet by the winding tree limbs, lifted and bound so that it hung, motionless and quivering, high above the forest soil.\n\n\"You, at least, seem to have a sliver of a brain,\" the stranger said. Then, to the other two ogres, who had frozen in puzzlement for an instant at their companion's predicament but swiftly resumed their advance, \"I fear the rest of you are hopeless.\"\n\nFrom a single pace away, a spiny hand the size of a pony's head reached for the cloaked figure. He extended a hand of his own, as though preparing to grasp the other halfway.\n\nInstead, he spat another throat-rending phrase. From his fingers poured a gout of white liquid fire. On it came, and on, lighting the surrounding forest in its unnatural glare. It not only coated but penetrated the skin of the massive ogre, boiling flesh and fluids, igniting organ and bone. The creature spun away at the impact, dancing like a puppet on a string of flame, twitching, flailing, rotating as it burned. Directed by the hellish stream and the will of the impossibly young wizard, the dying thing slammed into its spider-limbed companion. Licks of flame leapt joyfully from one to the other, cavorting between them, while lengths of half-melted bone gouged deep rifts in unburnt flesh. Long after it was dead, until it was nothing but smoldering ash and charred fragments, it flailed and stabbed, so that the other perished soon after.\n\nA few final embers flickered, then the heart of Gronch once more subsided into shadow.\n\n\"Stay,\" the stranger ordered the surviving ogre, though it remained tightly bound by the animated boles and branches. Then, with no sign that the brutal magics had caused him the slightest strain, he resumed his trek, passing into the depths of the wooded hillside.\n\nHis careful trek through the winding tunnels was long and slow, for though he knew well how to avoid the hidden deadfalls and savage wards, bypassing them required no small amount of care. Finally, he emerged into the hill's central cavern: a massive earth-walled cave, half-swamp thanks to leaks from Lake Orist just beyond the northern wall. He cautiously picked his way around the stalactites and stalagmites of numerous roots, and gazed intently at the slumbering visage of the entity for which he had come.\n\nBoth hands raised, he spoke in a voice augmented by sorcery, so that it resounded not merely in the air but in the dreams of the thing before him.\n\n\"Awaken, exalted Vircingotirilux! I call to you, dread wyrm of the ancient wood! Awaken!\"\n\nMultiple piercing howls, carrying the strength of the quaking earth and the fury of the unjustly damned, blasted through the cave until the hillside shook and the trees beyond trembled. Against that scream even the sorcerer could not entirely stand, staggering back two steps, though he neither cringed nor raised his arms in futile defense.\n\nOn they went, and on. All he could do was wait, and endure.\n\nOne of those voices fell silent as three pairs of hellish, gleaming eyes blinked open in the dark. The other two transformed into bestial roars of rage, mindless and murderous.\n\n\"BACK! CYOLOS! DZIRLAS! I SAID BACK! SILENCE! SILENCE!\"\n\nThe roars subsided into resentful growls at the command. The speaker was less animalistic but no less savage, a monstrous voice that somehow intertwined a guttural thunder and a shrill shriek together as one. As four of the unblinking eyes retracted into the shadowy cave, the third pair turned to look down, down, down upon the newcomer.\n\n\"WHY HAVE YOU WOKEN US, LITTLE MAGUS? WE STILL TASTE THE HARVEST ON THE DISTANT AIR. IT CANNOT BE TIME YET.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is not, dread Vircingotirilux. With apologies, circumstances required that I rouse you ahead of schedule.\"\n\n\"CIRCUMSTANCES?\"\n\n\"My ally in the nation of Ktho Delios has learned\u2014\"\n\n\"HUMAN CONCERNS! PRIMITIVE LANDS! SCURRYING INSECTS AND JABBERING PRIMATES! SUCH WORRIES ARE NOT OURS! HOW DARE YOU\u2014!\"\n\n\"I dare because, in the process of studying my ally's foes among the 'scurrying insects and jabbering primates,' I have found one that intrigued me. And in further study of him\u2026\"\n\nThe young man, whose behavior and demeanor now were anything but youthful, craned his head upward as he leaned in, meeting the inhuman gaze with his own. \"I think I have located an enemy you and I share. A rival of yours who may not be as dead as we believed.\"\n\nSomething lashed angrily at the cave wall, sending a cascade of earth and soil tumbling to the floor. Fearsome growls again echoed throughout the chamber. Clearly, Vircingotirilux, whatever it was, understood exactly of whom he spoke.\n\n\"THIS NOTION DOES NOT MAKE US HAPPY, MAGUS!\"\n\n\"I'm not precisely celebrating, either. After all the effort I went to\u2026\"\n\n\"TELL US WHERE! WE WILL LAY WASTE TO THEIR MONUMENTS, THROW DOWN THEIR RULERS, WIPE THEIR CIVILIZATION FROM\u2014\"\n\n\"I was considering something perhaps a little more subtle, great wyrm.\"\n\nAnother twitch, another\u2014albeit smaller\u2014avalanche of earth. \"WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE?\"\n\n\"Well.\" The wizard leaned against a protruding root, half sitting in the wooden loop. \"To begin with, I might like to borrow one of your pets.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "The throne room, deep and broad as it was, and despite the fact that many of Kirresc's lesser gentry had been barred from this particular gathering, was tightly, even stiflingly, packed.\n\nAlmost decadently comfortable, richly upholstered chairs had been placed to either side of the dais, forming thin wings that curved around the hall's farthest edge. In them were seated the highest nobles of Kirresc, many of whom had traveled weeks to be here. Over two dozen other chairs, smaller and less ornate, sat in the empty center, facing the throne, in which sat those of lower rank. Both walls were packed with those less important still, yet powerful or knowledgeable enough that their presence was deemed necessary. The assembled riches and finery could have purchased a small town in its entirety, and if anything catastrophic were to occur, the leadership and potential leadership of the whole kingdom would have been obliterated to the third or fourth generation.\n\nThe veritable army currently occupying the grounds of Oztyerva\u2014not merely the king's soldiers, but those of every duchy, countship, and barony represented\u2014stood steadfast to ensure that no such catastrophe occurred.\n\nNycos\u2014who, as one Kirresc's knights and possible successors to Marshal Laszlan, was considered important enough to attend but didn't rate a chair\u2014stood against the leftmost wall and idly counted the many colorful banners, representing all those Kirresci territories, currently waving from the arched ceilings. Since he was required to take no particular position in the hall, and since Kortlaus's rank entitled him to a seat, and thus wasn't available to talk to, Nycos had chosen to station himself as near as he could to Silbeth Rasik. She, as a potential speaker at this gathering, stood near the dais but not upon it, and grumbled to herself at a volume only Nycos could hear. She was, he gathered, uncomfortable with the amount of attention she expected to receive, and that so many people would learn of her involvement in recent events.\n\nFor all that, she'd never, in the weeks it had taken to orchestrate this extended court, made any effort to depart. Given that she owed no loyalty to Kirresc or King Hasyan, and her assignment had ended with the delivery of her intelligence\u2014if not earlier, with the death of Lady Raczia\u2014she'd have been within her rights to insist on leaving.\n\nA single horn sounded and those who were seated instantly rose. A curtain parted, revealing a smaller entrance near the dais, and through it entered his Majesty and the great leaders of the nation.\n\nNycos knew most of them personally, of course, particularly those who dwelt here in the palace: the prince and princess; Orban Laszlan; Denuel Jarta; Amisco Valacos, Judge Royal; Prelate Domatir Matyas; Balmorra Zas, his Majesty's astrologer. He knew, as well, Duke Ishmar of Hesztilna, Mariscal's father, who hadn't bothered to return home once he'd learned this assembly was coming.\n\nThe others, he had never met, but recognized by description. Gostav, Duke of Janu-Vala; Matilya, Duchess of Dalgran; a small array of counts and countesses.\n\nAnd seated directly beside the king, in a position of power scarcely less than his own, an older woman, sharp of visage, black of hair, and so piercing of gaze that Nycos would have been only mildly surprised had she pointed his way and announced his true nature. She, he knew, could only be Pirosa, Archduchess of Vidirrad, Kirrsc's most powerful ruler save Hasyan himself, and not incidentally the mother of Andarjin, Nycos's most very favorite margrave.\n\nOne other entered with them, though unlike the rest, she took her seat in the front row of the chairs facing the dais, rather than those set up alongside it. That Ambassador Leomyn Guldoell of Quindacra was the only foreign representative present amidst what was otherwise a purely Kirresci assembly did not escape attention. Many gazed her way, manners warring with intense curiosity, and Guldoell herself, though a consummate diplomat, couldn't quite keep a worried moue from darting across her face.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Hasyan said simply. \"We know many of you have traveled far in what is not a good season for travel, leaving your own affairs untended, at our call. We are grateful.\"\n\nJarta rose and gave a much more flowery speech of welcome on his Majesty's behalf. More flowery and yet, for a gathering of this magnitude, still remarkably brief. Either the palatine had been ordered to keep it short, or he was as eager as anyone to get to the meat of things. Then it was Domatir Matyas's turn. He offered up his usual prayer that the gods (and God, and the Vinnkasti) bless this gathering and their endeavors.\n\n\"We are certain,\" Hasyan resumed after the prelate, too, returned to his seat, \"that some of you have already guessed, in part, at the reason for this assembly. You have heard some of the rumors, received some reports, of Ktho Delian troop movements near our borders, and those of our neighbors.\"\n\nRumbles of assent, anger, worry, in reply.\n\n\"Many of you have also been informed that we recently rooted out a spy in our own midst, one we believe but cannot prove to have been Ktho Delian. And that his escape was aided by an operative they had placed within a Mahdreshan bandit gang.\n\n\"In addition to that, our friends in Wenslir have been fretting over increased activity along the Ogre-Weald. We've had no confirmed reports, but even rumors of such horrors can prove damaging if they force the southern nations to split our attentions. It has been suggested,\" and here his eyes flickered briefly toward Nycos, \"that we consider the possibility of a Ktho Delian hand even in this. That they might deliberately stir up the beasts of Gronch\u2014or spread tales of their activities, if you choose not to believe in things such as ogres\u2014as a diversion.\"\n\nOnce more he waited for his audience's questions, exclamations, and protests to die down. \"Again, we've no proof of this. It's but a hypothesis. Considering the timing, however, it's one I believe worth considering.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty, if I may?\" Archduchess Pirosa's tone was crisp, cultured, razor-sharp\u2014precisely what Nycos would have expected. \"I agree with you completely that we ought to be concerned about the possibility of Ktho Delian activity. If the amount of movement we've heard about is accurate, and especially if they're orchestrating other diversions or unrest, it would certainly appear to be more than their usual exercises or sabre-rattling. If you'll forgive my bluntness, however, all this could have been conveyed via courier, or perhaps messenger pigeon.\"\n\nThe archduchess, Nycos saw, was a born politician. She must know Hasyan had more than this, that he would not have called for the nobles to travel across the kingdom to discuss mere rumors. He was leading up to something, and anyone with half a brain would recognize that fact. By demanding an explanation\u2014and no matter how politely she'd couched it, that was precisely what she'd done\u2014she'd flexed her authority before the assembled court, suggesting however subtly or slightly that even the king must answer to her. He wondered if she was even conscious she'd done it, and if that was how she approached all her interactions.\n\nNo wonder Andarjin was so wrapped up in his own constant scheming, if that was what he'd been raised with, had to live up to. Nycos wished briefly that Smim was at his side. The goblin was more up to date on palace politics and personal gossip than he, could probably have answered whispered questions or pointed out other such maneuvers Nycos might have missed. Like many other trusted servants, however, Smim currently waited in the hall beyond the throne room doors, ready to respond if called but not permitted to attend the assembly itself.\n\n\"Almost a year ago,\" his Majesty continued, \"we received a signal from a spy who had managed to attain a position in the ranks of high society within the walls of Tohl Delian itself.\" His volume rose as he spoke over the next round of astonished comments and whispers throughout the court. \"She'd discovered something of vital import and required aid in escaping without being discovered by the Deliant.\"\n\nPirosa was hardly the only accomplished political dancer present. By continuing without acknowledging the archduchess's comment, Hasyan made it clear he would not be ordered about\u2014while answering her query, thus giving her no room to claim any slight had been done her.\n\n\"This,\" the king said, gesturing for the waiting mercenary to step forward, \"is Silbeth Rasik, of the Priory of Steel. It was to her we assigned the task of extricating our operative.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty!\" One of the counts whose territory fell within the duchy of Janu-Vala, a slender and dusky fellow whose name Nycos hadn't caught, raised his voice in protest. \"How could you trust something so vital and so secretive to a\u2014a sellsword? I understand the need to avoid implicating Kirresc in any official activity within the Ktho Delian interior, but\u2014\"\n\n\"We said she was of the Priory, Count Lajos,\" Hasyan interrupted, as though that ought to explain everything.\n\n\"You did, Your Majesty. And\u2026\" Lajos took in the faces of those around him. \"It's clear that means something to most everyone that I'm apparently missing. I apologize for my outburst, but if I might request an explanation?\"\n\nHe was the only one to have spoken, but a smattering of others appeared equally confused, as well as relieved that someone had asked the question so they didn't have to. Indeed, Nycos himself would have been equally bewildered, had he not read up on the organization in the weeks since he'd overheard Silbeth's story.\n\n\"We see. Mistress Rasik, would you care to edify the good count?\"\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty. I\u2026\" She began, halted. \"Actually, Your Majesty, this might sound self-serving and unconvincing coming from me. Perhaps Prelate Domatir? I'm sure he's aware of the nature of the Priory, whether or not he takes us particularly seriously.\"\n\nA brief exchange of expressions, then Domatir Matyas repressed a sigh and stood. \"The Priory of Steel,\" he intoned as though reciting from a text\u2014whence, indeed, he'd most probably learned all of this, \"isn't a mercenary guild in the traditional sense, Count Lajos. As the name implies, it is a religious organization. Its members pay particular homage to the more martial gods of the Empyrean Choir. Inoleare, Alazir, Louros, Teslak, and so forth.\"\n\n\"Many of us,\" Silbeth corrected politely. \"Myself included. But some of our number revere Deiumulos, the One God.\"\n\n\"Yes, quite. Well, regardless, the point is that they consider their expertise and practice of martial prowess to be a religious observance. Prayer, essentially, a means of honoring the gods. Or God. Which, yes, makes them among the greatest warriors known to Galadras, but of equal import is the belief that those skills must be exercised only in causes that honor their faith. That may vary from member to member, depending on their own ethics, but the result is that their contracts take on the import of religious doctrine. A member of the Priory of Steel is as religiously faithful to an assignment as any true believer to scripture, or the most zealous patriots to their nation.\n\n\"I take\u2026 some issue with the Priory's notions of what a proper religious observance or organization ought to be,\" the prelate admitted, \"but I know from experience that they are true to their beliefs. For a mission such as this one, vital to Kirresc and yet one to which Kirresc must not be connected, his Majesty could not have made a wiser selection.\" Then, with a bow to Hasyan and a brief bob of the head toward Silbeth, he sat.\n\n\"Does that satisfy you, Count Lajos?\" Hasyan asked.\n\n\"I\u2026 Yes, Your Majesty.\" He didn't look entirely certain, but if nothing else the count recognized that further questioning, let alone protest, would accomplish little but to irritate some very powerful people.\n\n\"Good. Then, Mistress Rasik, we invite you to tell your tale, precisely as you told it to us.\"\n\nAnd so she did, repeating almost verbatim, albeit with less obvious emotion, what she had told the king's council weeks before. Since he'd already heard it, Nycos allowed himself to focus on how the rest of the court reacted.\n\nHe saw various degrees of shock, sympathy, doubt, even a bit of vague indifference, all as he'd have expected. That last, of course, would vanish once she revealed the intelligence for which she and Lady Raczia had struggled so hard, but as she'd done before, she was saving that particular revelation for the conclusion.\n\nIt was an omission that many of the gathered nobles swiftly picked up on. Nycos watched as numerous lips frowned and brows furrowed, as several of them drew breath to interrupt and then decided against it. He saw the dukes and duchesses intently focused, waiting for the thunderbolt they knew must be coming. Archduchess Pirosa ran a fingernail across her lip in thought, theories and calculations whirling almost visibly behind her pupils. The chamber all but reeked with anticipation.\n\nAs for Hasyan\u2026 Throughout Silbeth's story, the king himself kept his gaze, subtly but squarely, upon Ambassador Guldoell. And that, Nycos realized, was precisely why his Majesty had instructed Silbeth to again save what she'd learned for the end, why Guldoell was the only foreign emissary present in this small sea of Kirresci nobility. He wanted to see her reaction, unplanned and unprepared, firsthand.\n\nAs the recitation wound toward its inevitable end, Nycos chose to follow his king's lead. When Silbeth reached her revelation, the knight's attention was fixed on the Quindacran's face.\n\nSilbeth leveled her accusation. The chamber erupted, with many present demanding answers, demanding proof, demanding Guldoell be clapped in chains, all depending on how readily inclined they were to believe. A few even moved as though to restrain her physically\u2014or worse\u2014but Hasyan's bodyguards stepped forward to restore order, and to ensure no blood was shed, no international crime committed.\n\nThrough it all, Guldoell sat, eyes closed in sorrow and a mounting despair, cheeks grown paler than the whitest of the moons.\n\n\"Was it truly necessary, Your Majesty,\" she asked with shaking breath when the furor had subsided, \"to spring this on me? In public, no less?\"\n\n\"Our apologies, Ambassador,\" Hasyan replied, every word firm but not unkind. \"We couldn't allow even the appearance of secrecy in this matter, and we had to\u2014\"\n\n\"Had to see my reaction. Yes, I understand. I suppose I might have done the same.\"\n\nIf she'd been at her best, or anywhere near it, she'd never have interrupted the king, but he chose to let it pass. \"As it was, it took the whole weight of the crown for me to forbid any of the other ambassadors from attending. They know something's amiss. But I wanted to have a better understanding before I bring this to them.\"\n\nNycos noted Pirosa nodding to herself, as were the other dukes, presumably in approval of Hasyan's decisions.\n\n\"We've known you for many years, Ambassador Guldoell,\" he continued, \"and we've worked well together. Your expression at Mistress Rasik's news, as well as the fact that you didn't immediately leap to your feet to accuse her of lying, tells me you are as surprised to hear this as we were.\"\n\n\"I am. For the most part. Your Majesty\u2026\" Guldoell started to rise and all but collapsed back into the seat, her whole body visibly trembling. \"We have, as you say, worked side by side for a long time. You have been a friend, to Quindacra and to me, most of that time, and where we clashed, you have always been reasonable and honorable in your dealings. I couldn't live with myself if I did any less now.\"\n\nAgain she stood to address the dais and the assembled nobles, this time forcing herself to remain upright, though it required she turn the chair about and maintain a tight grip on it.\n\n\"I know nothing of any such communications, any such schemes, on the part of King Boruden or any other party of influence in Quindacra. But in complete candor Your Majesty, my Lords and Ladies, I would be among the last to hear of it were it true. The mere fact of my position here, my close ties to and respect for the Kirresci court, would make me\u2026 a risk to any such conspiracy, and everyone back home knows that. Some already worry if my loyalties are too deeply split.\n\n\"They are not. I am loyal to my country. But that loyalty includes speaking out if I feel Quindacra is making a mistake.\"\n\n\"A pretty speech,\" one of the lesser nobles sneered. Harsh whispers from those around him and a murderous glance from Marshal Laszlan silenced him. Other than the breathing of the throng, only the faint grind of the ambassador's chair on the stone broke the stillness.\n\n\"I don't believe it's any great secret that certain segments of Quindacran society are\u2026\" Her lips twisted dramatically, as though trying to change places. \"\u2026envious of Kirresc. Your wealth, your farmland, your timber, your highways are all superior to ours. You know it, we know it. Normally those factions, those voices, are hushed, their bitterness overshadowed by all we have to gain from our relations with you, but\u2026\" She started to shrug, stumbled, and recovered her handhold on the chair. \"I fear I cannot say I would be entirely shocked if what your agent discovered is true.\n\n\"I can make you no promises, Your Majesty. I won't disobey any of my king's royal commands, or return here if I'm ordered not to. But I will travel to Vidiir, and if possible I will let you know what I can learn about this.\"\n\nAgain a number of voices sounded in protest, objecting to letting her return to Quindacra, doubting the veracity of anything she'd said\u2014not many voices, no, but more than a few. Hasyan raised a hand for calm, and when that didn't work, he whispered a command to Orban. The marshal reached out, took the horn from the herald who'd signaled their entry earlier, and sounded a blast like the ones used to signal his troops clear across a battlefield. The chamber fell into a shocked silence.\n\nSeveral guards peeked in from the hall outside, ensuring everything was all right, before once more closing the doors.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Hasyan said fondly. Then, to the gathering at large, \"We understand your fears, your frustrations, your suspicions. Even if we shared them, however, what would you have us do? Ambassador Guldoell has not acted against us. She has committed no crime. We have no hard proof of Quindacra's communication with the enemy, nor are we at war with them. On what grounds would you have us detain the ambassador? With what justification would you have us commit such an offense, even potentially an act of war?\"\n\nA few angry mutters rose in reply, but no clear answers or useful suggestions.\n\n\"Right. Ambassador, we do have to assign guards to watch over you until you have gathered your belongings and departed. They'll travel with you as far as the border. We hope you understand, and we assure you this is to protect you from any, ah, over-enthusiastic citizens as much as to protect any of Kirresc's secrets from you.\"\n\n\"I understand, Your Majesty,\" she replied, albeit stiffly.\n\nNycos thought Hasyan looked very much as though he wanted to further explain, or perhaps just to sigh. Instead, he nodded. Again the doors opened and Leomyn Guldoell departed, a quartet of Kirresci soldiers marching in step around her.\n\n\"We believe,\" Hasyan declared, \"that this is sufficient food for thought for now. Please feel free to return to your quarters, or enjoy whatever hospitality Oztyerva has to offer, though I suggest you ruminate on what we've been told here today. Servants will find you when it is time for supper. Your Graces,\" he said, gesturing to the dukes on either side, \"and Mistress Rasik, if you would remain here with us and our advisors, we'd like to spend a bit longer discussing possible strategies\u2026\"\n\nNycos, whose senses were currently only a bit better than those of normal humans, lost the thread of the king's declaration amidst the multitude of other conversations and other sounds filling the hall. Lower-ranked nobles moved toward the open doors or milled about beside the rows of chairs, discussing or arguing over everything they'd learned. From beyond, more voices still, as servants and gentry called to their betters, or guessed and gossiped about the meeting from which they'd just been excluded. The movement of so many bodies, and the drafts through the open door, set the banners above to a lazy, languorous flapping.\n\nUnsure as to whether Mariscal would expect him to meet up with her, or whether she would make her way toward the exit with the rest of the crowd, and made vaguely uneasy by the thought that Silbeth Rasik might soon depart, now that her role in this international drama seemed near its end, Nycos stood where he was. If nothing else, he would give the meandering throng time to clear out, so that his bad mood and nagging worries wouldn't compel him to elbow a few lingering aristocrats from his path.\n\nHe stretched a bit, casting about over everyone's heads\u2014scowling briefly as Margrave Andarjin, currently pontificating to his cronies and hangers-on, passed through his view\u2014trying to locate Smim amidst the horde of waiting servants. He knew the goblin must be there, but the creature's short stature made him difficult to pinpoint among\u2014\n\nHmm.\n\nAt the side of the broad doorway, one of the guards politely but firmly directed the edge of the human current aside so that a man clad in the tabard of a Kirresci royal courier could squeeze his way in. Clearly the messenger must carry some word of great import to demand entry now, rather than waiting for a less busy, less chaotic time. Nycos almost shrugged it off, assuming he would learn of the matter later if it involved him or his interests, almost turned away.\n\nAlmost. Something about that courier nagged at him, something in the way the fellow moved. He couldn't identify it, and clearly nobody else saw it. Because of his enhanced vision, or because he was paranoid and imagining things? Just in case, Nycos began to push his way through the thinning mass of humanity.\n\n\"My king! Beware!\" Balmorra, the old astrologer and seer, pointed a gnarled and shaking finger at the oncoming courier. \"Beware!\"\n\nHasyan and the nobles twisted about, seeking to understand the danger she'd seen. The royal bodyguards rushed forward, as did Nycos and the other knights still in attendance; he found himself several paces ahead of Zirresca, though both drew their sabres in near perfect unison. The nobles who had lingered in the throne room scattered, many dropping half-empty goblets and glasses as they fled.\n\nChanting under her breath, Balmorra dipped two fingers into the cup of wine from which Duke Ishmar had been sipping and then daubed her eyelids with the rich crimson liquid. An invocation, no doubt, meant to show her clearly whatever it was she'd sensed in the messenger, to pierce any magic or illusion that might hide\u2014\n\nEvery muscle in Nycos's body clenched so tightly it was all he could do not to topple over, rigid as any statue. What would she see when she looked at him?\n\nHer attention, for the moment at least, remained focused on the danger at hand. And the cry that followed a heartbeat later had nothing whatsoever to do with dragons.\n\n\"Psoglavac!\"\n\nThey knew the word, all of them\u2014the Kirresci from their myths and fairy tales, Nycos from the experience of centuries. A living nightmare, a voracious eater of flesh both living and dead, a ravenous ogre with a lust to kill and consume.\n\nBut not a creature, to Nycos's knowledge, able to alter its shape. So how\u2014?\n\nHe\u2014it\u2014looked at them all and grinned, drool running unchecked over its lips to dangle from its chin. It swept the assembled warriors and nobles with unblinking eyes as they closed ranks to protect their king, and yet Hasyan was not its prey.\n\nIt snarled, screamed in furious triumph, charged the line of sword and spear without hesitation. And Nycos wondered, his heart pounding and his head abruptly full of questions, if the others had even noticed that the attack had come not when its gaze had landed upon King Hasyan, but upon him.\n\nThe first of the king's bodyguards, a tall and powerfully built soldier, drove the tip of his spear directly into the \"messenger's\" chest. Steel tore through fabric and seemingly through skin before deflecting from something unseen beneath. From nowhere, the attacker produced a massive axe\u2014the haft uneven, twisted, knotted, more branch than handle, the blade bedecked with blooming flowers of rust. The whole thing was impossibly huge, taller than its wielder, and yet he swung it as the lightest sabre. Mail, flesh, and bone crunched beneath its bite, and the mangled lump that had been a brave warrior flew through the air to sprawl across the lower step of the dais.\n\nNycos leapt, channeling his will and his magics through his body, stronger than any three soldiers by the time he landed. He struck the human-shaped ogre a vicious blow, yet even his supernatural might fell short. His sabre shivered, ringing like a wind chime as it rebounded from whatever lurked beneath mundane flesh.\n\nThe false messenger staggered, knocked off balance by sheer force of impact, but lashed out with a backhanded fist. Nycos dodged beneath, if only just, but the knight who'd charged in behind him was less fortunate. Bone audibly shattered, piercing muscle in a dozen fragments, and the woman fell screaming to the floor, her left arm limp as rope from the bicep down.\n\nMore soldiers struck, more blades landed without visible effect, more people died beneath murderous axe and devastating fist. Silbeth Rasik lifted one of the fallen swords and joined the struggle, landing countless blows and easily dodging every riposte, yet she, too, seemed unable to deal this foe any real harm.\n\nAlthough he fretted at the risk, fearing his own exposure, Nycos caused his limbs to grow stronger still. He lunged, grasping the haft of the monstrous axe, and for a long moment they struggled, shifting to and fro, a step forward, another back, twisting and turning.\n\nAs he stepped to his right and the dais came into view, Nycos spotted Balmorra standing beside the throne, Duke Ishmar's wineglass still clasped in her hand. Again she'd dipped her fingers into it, and he recognized the tension in her old and hunched shoulders. She was prepared to act, to do something, yet she hesitated. Something stayed her hand.\n\nHis opponent snarled and Nycos leaned back, launching a kick at the thing's knee, but it proved faster. In that moment when the knight was off-balance it twisted, yanking the axe from Nycos's grip and sending him flying across the chamber. He crashed through multiple rows of seats to land in a heap upon the stone, and he knew that any other man would have been as broken as the chairs.\n\nAs if that was precisely what Balmorra had waited for, she flung out her hand, sending drops of wine spraying across the dais, and then she lifted her palm to her lips and blew. A tiny stream of droplets flew over the heads of the guards and the knights, much further than they should have gone, becoming a faintly violet mist that settled over the false courier.\n\nInstantly the figure grew, doubling in height, splitting the human skin it wore and leaving it in tatters upon the floor. The thing thus exposed reeked nauseatingly of rotten meat and plague-ridden dog. Its hide was thick, mottled, hairy; its features canine, with one central, bloodshot eye. It boasted only a single muscle-bound arm in which it clutched its axe, leaving Nycos to wonder if the fist with which it had lashed out had been purely a function of its human guise, or perhaps the horrid thing's tail.\n\nPsoglavac. The tales did the foul thing no justice.\n\nIt screamed in agony and fury, a grating, piercing cry like a wolf howling around a mouthful of broken glass, and redoubled its attack.\n\nEven in the face of that monstrosity, though, Nycos couldn't help but shudder at the thought of what had almost occurred. For whatever magics the diviner had thrown, whatever spell had revealed the ogre, it was only because she'd hesitated that Nycos hadn't been caught in it, too.\n\nBy now, more soldiers had flooded into the hall, drawn by the commotion; guards not only in royal service, but loyal to the other attending nobles as well. Crossbows fired from the entryway, embedding themselves shallowly into the psoglavac's skin. Spears and swords stabbed, aiming at the eye, the ears, the throat, the groin, anything that might yield to blade more readily than its hide.\n\nNone of it helped. With no more reaction than the occasional wince or grunt of pain, with no more difficulty than it took to press through a mild hail storm, the ogre again advanced on Nycos, swatting and slashing at anything standing in its way.\n\nAnd Nycos grew afraid.\n\nNot for his survival, no. He'd no doubt he could destroy this thing, and probably without too much difficulty, once he put his mind and his full efforts into it.\n\nWhat he could not do, he realized with a mounting sense of dread, was to defeat this opponent without giving away his own nature. The strength and speed required to kill it, to say nothing of the other powers on which he might have to draw, were all too obviously inhuman.\n\nUnless he found some means of concealing them.\n\nHe cast about even as he scrambled to his feet, examining the crowd of servants and guards who were gathered in the entry hall, unable to help yet too fascinated to flee. And there, in the forefront\u2026\n\n\"Smim!\" Nycos lurched to his feet\u2014snatching up one of the unbroken abandoned wine glasses in the process\u2014and sprinted toward the door. \"Smim, come here!\"\n\nThe goblin's whole face bulged in horror, until he very much resembled an apoplectic frog, but he obeyed. A few shaking, staggering steps, and he met his master at the very end of the throne room.\n\n\"I\u2014I don't really believe there's very much I can\u2014\"\n\nNycos had no time to explain, not with the psoglavac closing from behind, the tumult of the fierce but futile struggle advancing audibly through the chamber. Instead, with a strident shout of \"Have you got it?\" he thrust a hand inside the goblin's coat.\n\n\"Master?\" Smim whispered, utterly bewildered.\n\n\"Later. You'll understand.\" Nycos pulled back, one fist closed tight about the glass goblet he'd palmed earlier so that it would appear he'd taken something from Smim's pocket. His other hand shot out to the side, yanking a small burning lamp from its sconce by the door. Immediately he raced back toward the rampaging ogre, leaving a flaming trail of splashing oil to flare and gutter in his wake. With every step he concentrated, felt the uncomfortable and unnatural shift inside his jaws as glands changed shape, producing a substance that most definitely was not saliva.\n\nSilbeth saw him coming, saw that he had something in mind, and called out. The others surrounding and hacking at the psoglavac drew back, clearing a path\u2014which suited not only Nycos but the beast itself. Again it howled as it hurled itself at its target, axe rising high.\n\nNycos jumped, hard, off his running start, twisting in midair to avoid the arc of the rusted blade. For the barest moment he wrapped himself about the head and chest of the ogre.\n\nHis first blow shattered the wine glass atop the dog-like head, even as he spat his newly formed mouthful into the matted fur. In the speed and chaos, and with a modicum of luck, it should look like he'd broken a container of some mysterious fluid on its skull.\n\nHis second, delivered just as the beast's writhing shook him loose to go tumbling back to the floor, smashed the burning lantern with its open flame on the same spot.\n\nThe sudden gout of fire was blinding in its intensity, hellish in its heat. The psoglavac's scream was impossibly high and grotesquely wet. It staggered amongst the knights and soldiers, many of whom were forced to look away from the blaze. Maddened by the pain, the creature dropped its axe to beat mindlessly at its own scalp, desperate to extinguish the searing flame.\n\nA hopeless task, that. Little in this world could extinguish dragonfire before it burned itself out. Given the tiny quantity of saliva Nycos had managed to work up, however, it was only a handful of seconds before it did just that, dying, sparking one final time, and finally fading to nothing.\n\nThe psoglavac still stood, but it was not what it had been. It teetered drunkenly, its single eye bulging and quivering. The hair was gone from its head, and much of the hide on its scalp had melted and burned away, revealing cracked and blackened bone. Various fluids bubbling through those imperfections to run along the exposed skull, often steaming where they met the open air.\n\nIt would probably have died in moments, but the defenders of Kirresc were unwilling to wait. It was Dame Zirresca who stepped forward, sabre raised high, to bring her sword down upon charred and weakened bone. Skull split with a sickening crack, as did the organ beneath. The ogre shuddered a final time, its maw gaping to drool a mouthful of blood, and collapsed.\n\nThe throne room was a frozen tableau. Soldiers stood throughout, exhausted, horrified, surrounded by the blood and bodies of fallen comrades. Near the rear door huddled a pack of those guards, along with his Majesty's advisors and the king himself. Doubtless his bodyguard and Marshal Laszlan had attempted to drag Hasyan to safety, and just as certainly he had resisted, refusing to leave those who fought in his defense.\n\nSilbeth, not legally permitted to carry steel in the throne room\u2014only the nobles and their guards had that right, no matter that she was his Majesty's guest\u2014immediately dropped the sabre she'd scavenged. Nobody would speak ill of her efforts to protect herself or others, but now that the crisis was passed, propriety must again be obeyed.\n\nZirresca and the young Sir Tivador moved to Nycos's side and helped him to his feet. He cast about in sudden fear, worried for his friends, but Mariscal had already run to her father's side, ensuring the old duke was unharmed, and Kortlaus\u2026 Nycos only now remembered that the baron had been among the nobles to leave the throne room as soon as the court was dismissed, on his way to attend other duties. He hadn't been present when the monstrous assassin struck.\n\nThe assassin who, no matter what everyone else assumed, had not been here for his Majesty Hasyan III.\n\nOr was it everyone? As the king and his inner circle returned to the dais to oversee the cleanup, to ensure the living were properly treated and to honor and commend the fallen, Nycos strove to figure out what Balmorra knew, what she had seen beyond the psoglavac itself. Her features remained impassive, however, save for her sorrow over the loss of life, and she avoided meeting his gaze.\n\n\"I think I can safely say that we're all grateful for your brave efforts in protecting his Majesty and the rest of us.\" Margrave Andarjin spoke from the doorway, surrounded by his own bodyguards as well as his usual flunkies and hangers-on. Although he remained pale to the lips, any lingering fear was absent from either his words or his posture. \"You are all brave men and women, and you should be proud. You've done yourself and the court honor today.\"\n\nBut? Nycos asked silently, waiting for it.\n\n\"But I think we'd all very much like to know, Sir Nycolos, what that flammable substance was that you used to assist Dame Zirresca in making her kill\u2026\"\n\nHer kill. Nice.\n\n\"\u2026and what could possibly have possessed you to give such a potent weapon into the care of a goblin for safekeeping? I understand that you trust the creature, for whatever reason, but that still strikes me as unconscionable.\"\n\nIf the margrave had hoped to attack at a weak point, to lessen Nycos's standing in the wake of this catastrophe, it appeared a tactical failure. While his close allies and friends voiced instant approval, adding their own demands for an explanation, the others throughout the throne room seemed at best taken aback, and some actively angered, by his efforts to politicize what had just occurred. Neither Zirresca nor the Archduchess Pirosa looked remotely impressed with his actions.\n\nWhen Nycos answered, he squeezed as much contempt into his tone as possible without making his words overtly offensive to Pirosa, as Andarjin's mother. \"My Lord, Smim has been my loyal vassal for some time, and more to the point, he has served here in the palace for nigh unto a year now. I believe he has more than proved himself a faithful and zealous worker.\" He turned, briefly, to a group of servants huddled in the throne room doorway. \"You have all worked alongside him. Has he, despite his lineage, given any of you reason to mistrust or mislike him?\"\n\nMore than a few seemed nervous about answering, either because they still held an intrinsic antipathy toward the goblin or for fear of angering the margrave, but enough of them responded to make the knight's point.\n\n\"As for the oil,\" he continued, now spinning a tale from pure moonbeams, \"I 'allowed' Smim to hang onto it because it is his. It's an alchemical mixture taught to him by his former master. Rather than questioning his loyalty, you ought to be grateful he had the foresight to think such an important assembly might draw danger. He's been carrying it since his Majesty's guests began to arrive, against any sort of emergency.\"\n\nAt this, several of the attendees\u2014not just servants, this time, but nobles as well\u2014rumbled their assent, expressing their gratitude to the startled goblin.\n\nSeeing the moment slipping away, Andarjin bowed, albeit shallowly, toward Smim. \"All fair points. My apologies.\n\n\"However, I do think it would be a reasonable request that he make this, shall we say, recipe available to the Crown Marshal's soldiers. It's certainly a potent advantage.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Nycos said, flavoring the lie with a sprinkle of truth. \"One that requires, among other rare ingredients, the saliva of his former master, or another dragon. That's why he only has what small quantities he escaped with. Have you a live wyrm handy, my Lord?\"\n\nRather than let this continue, Hasyan chose that moment to call the guards and nobles to attend him, to discuss the implications of this attack and determine strategies to defend against others like it. Was this another manipulation by Ktho Delios? Did the recent activities in and around Gronch represent a greater, more wide-reaching threat? What sort of sorceries were involved? And so forth.\n\nNycos briefly hung back, ignoring Andarjin's cold regard, and gestured for Smim to join him. \"King Hasyan wasn't the target,\" he whispered without preamble.\n\n\"Yes, I thought that might be the case, Master. Are we assuming the obvious suspect?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he admitted. \"Ogres do exist outside Gronch, but they're so rare\u2026 And I can't think of anyone else I might have angered who has any truck with the creatures.\"\n\n\"Yet you sound unconvinced.\"\n\n\"Because this doesn't feel like her. Sending one of her minions so far in order to murder me? Vircingotirilux isn't much of a schemer. If she wanted to strike at me here, no reason she'd not come herself. And she lacks the sorcery to perform the sort of shape-change we just saw. Besides how she could have found me out at all? She's neither clever enough nor mystically inclined enough for that. There's a skilled wizard mixed up in this, somewhere.\"\n\n\"One of Ondoniram's followers, Master?\"\n\n\"I suppose it's possible, but it's been, what? At least four or five human generations since I slew him. Would they have passed along a grudge that long?\"\n\nThe rest of the conversation would have to wait, as Nycos could no longer justify delaying his own approach to the dais. He would be some time, he knew, involved in his Majesty's discussion, then longer still explaining the repercussions of what had happened to Prince Elias. Throughout it all, however, his mind roved down the list of the many enemies he'd made in his centuries of life.\n\nThe fact that he could come up with few, if any, who were both capable of the feats he'd witnessed and were still among the living, no longer offered him the sense of victorious accomplishment, of comfort or of safety, it once might have."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "Autumn grew long in the tooth and gave way without much struggle to winter\u2014and with the turning of the seasons came an ever-increasing torrent of rumor and reports as chilling as the mounting winds.\n\nFrom Kirresc's easternmost borders, from neighboring Wenslir, even on occasion from distant Suunim, traveled tales of horror. Farms, hamlets, some entire villages wiped from the soil by forces unseen; reduced to empty husks or smoldering ruins between one day and the next. Details were scarce, verification difficult, but after the first handful of stories, and after hastily dispatched riders confirmed at least one Kirresci community was indeed a heap of cinder and ash, few skeptics remained within the halls of Oztyerva.\n\nAnd through it all, just far enough from their own borders that it was impossible to keep track of maneuvers or troop movements, the Ktho Delian legions continued to mobilize, churning like a long-boiling pot.\n\nWere they responsible, in some way, for what was happening in and around Gronch? Or was the combination of threats sheer coincidence, or perhaps divine whim? No evidence presented itself either way, and even if it had, the course of action was the same: All the southern nations could do was watch, wait, hunker down and try their best to prepare.\n\nThe timing was particularly poor for Kirresc (not that any time would have been good). Since major conflict was now a looming possibility, Orban Laszlan had chosen to begin the Marshal's Trials.\n\nThis was far from the first time in history that Kirresc's Crown Marshal was faced with multiple viable candidates to succeed him. Had one of the three been an obvious choice, the situation would have been simpler, but while Zirresca remained the odds-on favorite, her qualifications did not so obviously exceed the others' as to assure her of victory. To serve as a tie-breaker, a means of final selection, one of Laszlan's predecessors had devised a series of military tests, problems and exercises that would, over the course of several weeks, determine a frontrunner. The Marshal's Trials were not based in statute, neither binding nor required\u2014but the weight of tradition made them all but a necessity when two or more campaigns of succession had dragged on without resolution.\n\nNormally, they would not take place so soon after Kirresc's royal tournament, nor during the icy months of winter. With war on the horizon, however, Laszlan wanted the matter decided before it was too late, before the soldiers and resources\u2014and indeed, the candidates themselves\u2014were needed elsewhere.\n\nToday was day three of the first trial: a four-day test, with Nycos as one of a quartet, rather than the anticipated trio, of competing generals. As a means of enhancing his Highness's own military experience, however simulated, King Hasyan had asked Laszlan to include Prince Elias in the exercise, along with the three contenders. Each \"general\" was responsible for conquering as much of the others' territory as possible while defending his or her own. The battlefield, located in the wilds just outside Talocsa's walls, was hundreds of acres across, consisting of grasslands, rolling hills, and multiple copses of trees. Just like a real engagement, each of the four factions had different numbers of troops, different defensive capabilities, and differing stores of supplies, all determined randomly at the start of the trial.\n\nBetween the soldiers assigned to each faction, the judges responsible for ensuring that those soldiers \"died\" properly and honestly based on their melee with blunted training weapons, and the noble observers who had the right to oversee any given battle or play audience in any contestant's headquarters, it was a lively battlefield indeed.\n\nA light snow had begun to fall, a faint dusting of white turning grey, limiting visibility and melting swiftly to trace frigid trails down the insides of even the most tightly sealed kaftans, coats, and armor. Standing inside a makeshift fort atop a tree-covered hillside, Nycos was spared the worst of the weather's discomforts, but he might as well have been out and about. His mood was a perfect, chilly match.\n\nHe peered, fists clenched, over a hastily sketched map of the region, enemy emplacements and forces marked in charcoal where his scouts had managed to locate them. At his side were two military advisors, chosen from among those gathered by Orban at the start of the exercise. Sir Jancsiv was a broad-shouldered fellow, ebon-skinned and white haired, the sort of man who maintains a dashing and rakish charm even into his middle years. Captain Natalin was a short, slender woman, pale as Jancsiv or Nycos himself were dark, who would have looked more at home attending a formal ball than on the battlefield. She'd threatened to break more than one man's bones for telling her precisely that.\n\nBoth were among the top military tacticians Nycos could have chosen, and both were as bewildered by the events of the day as he was.\n\n\"Let's go over this again,\" Natalin said, leaning on her knuckles until the map crinkled.\n\n\"Yes, because we might have missed something the first fifty-seven times,\" Jancsiv muttered.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos has been focused on Sir Kortlaus and Dame Zirresca,\" she bulled on. \"He's only been directing attacks against his Highness's territories since yesterday evening.\"\n\nNods all around.\n\n\"His first two offenses were both direct thrusts, using overwhelming force to punch through Prince Elias's lines.\"\n\nIndeed, Nycos\u2014though more than willing to change things up when necessary\u2014was quite fond of engaging in swift shock-assaults from a secure defensive position. (That was, after all, the primary attack pattern of most dragons: soar out from the lair and obliterate whatever or whoever needed to not exist any longer.)\n\nSo, another pair of nods.\n\n\"Then how in God's name did Elias, of all people\u2014no offense to his Highness,\" she added, belatedly and somewhat unconvincingly, \"\u2014figure out this afternoon's offensive was a feint?!\"\n\n\"My goodness!\" Sir Jancsiv remarked. \"You're absolutely right! If only we'd thought to ask that question the first fifty-seven times we\u2014\"\n\n\"Bicker later,\" Nycos snapped. \"I lost a skilled unit in this fiasco. I want to know why.\"\n\n\"I might be able to shed some light on that, Master.\"\n\nSmim, wrapped tightly in a fur-lined coat that was far too large and dragged in the dirt and snow behind him like a bridal train, shuffled in through the door, accompanied by a gust of frigid air. Just behind him came Mariscal, clad far more elegantly in multiple layers of stoles and fine cloaks. She carefully picked her way through the goblin's slushy trail to stand beside Nycos. He offered her a brief smile\u2014it wasn't the first time she'd taken advantage of her status as a \"noble observer\" to visit and offer her support during this first of the Marshal's Trials\u2014but his attention remained focused on his servant.\n\nServant and, for the duration, spymaster. It was Smim's responsibility to consolidate and deliver all the information reported by his master's scouts.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Nycos commanded.\n\n\"We've learned who Prince Elias chose as his two military advisors, Master.\"\n\n\"They'd have to be pretty damn good,\" Natalin grumbled.\n\nSmim half-shrugged, a gesture that set the overlong sleeve flopping well beyond the reach of his hand. He glared at the garment, sighed, and then said, \"Would Silbeth Rasik and Marshal Laszlan qualify as 'pretty damn good,' Captain?\"\n\nNatalin and Jancsiv both subsided into slack-jawed silence, and Nycos teetered on the edge of literally sputtering in outrage. \"That\u2014that is unacceptable! His Highness's rank and titles don't entitle him to cheat in an exercise of this sort! We were clearly told\u2026 Clearly\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off, thinking back. Had they been told? Marshal Laszlan had assembled a group of knights and officers to stand at his side when explaining to Nycos, Zirresca, Kortlaus, and Prince Elias the rules of this first trial; had specifically pointed all of them out as viable choices when instructing the competitors to consider who they would choose to advise them.\n\nBut had he actually said, in so many words, that the choices were limited only to those specific men and women standing there? Now that he pondered it, Nycos didn't recall him ever having done so. He and the others had simply assumed, taking it as a given.\n\n\"Well, I'll be damned.\" Even as he shook his head, chewing on the bitter taste of having been outsmarted, he couldn't help but chuckle. Had Elias made an abnormally clever choice? Or had his simplemindedness actually worked for him, saving him from the \"obvious\" conclusion everyone else had drawn?\n\nEither way, there was a lesson to be learned from this.\n\n\"All right then,\" Nycos said, shaking himself and the others from their amazement. \"So we're up against the most senior and most experienced officer in Kirresc and one of the most skilled combatants I've ever seen.\" His smile was grim. \"It just means this'll be a little harder. It's still Prince Elias making the decisions, and they still don't know the full extent of our resources. We've got to be clever, is all.\"\n\nThe knight and the captain both looked more than a bit skeptical, but obediently turned back to the map. Mariscal tried her best to appear reassuring, but he could see the doubt in her expression as well.\n\nSo be it. Let them doubt. Orban, above all others, would take this test seriously. He wouldn't permit his Highness to turn command over to him, or to Silbeth. They really were still dealing with Prince Elias, first and foremost\u2014and it remained possible that Zirresca and Kortlaus were yet ignorant of Elias's choice of advisors. With a bit of thought, Nycos might even be able to turn this to his advantage.\n\nIf he could focus on the matter at hand.\n\nNycos had never entirely shaken his fascination with the Priory of Steel swordswoman; her skill, her demeanor, her sheer predatory grace. He had assumed, with no small measure of disappointment, that she'd departed weeks ago, her task completed, and had bemoaned to Smim on more than one occasion his failure to find any excuse to speak with her in depth before she'd gone. To learn, now, that she remained at Oztyerva was welcome news\u2014but also a distraction, and one that bore with it a number of new questions.\n\nWhy had she stayed? What was she doing here? How might he contrive to get to know her, learn how she had become what she was, study her techniques and her beliefs? And above all else, how had he not known she was still here? Had she deliberately avoided him? The notion disturbed him intensely, for reasons he didn't entirely understand. What sort of offense might he have\u2014?\n\nSmim peered at him between narrowed lids, as though sensing his dismay, and Nycos gave himself a sharp mental slap. What was he thinking? Silbeth would have had no reason to avoid him, but above and beyond that, what reason would she have had for seeking him out? It was entirely possible, given the parameters of his own duties and responsibilities, that they'd just never crossed paths, and the woman certainly had no cause to come looking for him. Attributing deliberate intent was just\u2026 silly.\n\nIt never once occurred to Nycos, as he moved to join the others at the map, to question why he was so fascinated, so captivated, by Silbeth in the first place.\n\nWhether the four of them\u2014Nycos, Sir Jancsiv, Captain Natalin, and Smim\u2014could have altered their plans and tactics well enough to account for the prince's unexpected advisors, they were never to know. An in-depth planning session, with Margravine Mariscal observing around the edges, came to an abrupt halt after an hour or so with the sound of horns, a series of coded blasts alerting Nycos to an attack on his territory's southern edge.\n\nAnd he had only just responded to that, riding Avalanche to the edge of the trees to spot a large force under Zirresca's banners appearing like phantoms from the drifting snow, when the entire battle, the entire exercise, was jerked to a halt by a different sequence of calls from a separate set of trumpets. Though flattened by the slush-laden air, the signal carried, snagging the full attention of soldiers and commanders on every side\u2014for this was no factional code, but one restricted to royal heralds.\n\nReturn at once to Oztyerva. His Majesty requires your attendance.\n\nDuring the trudge back to Talocsa\u2014a journey of only a few miles, but rendered slow and unpleasant by the weather and the sheer number of travelers\u2014Nycos reined Avalanche back, eventually clopping along beside the silver-trimmed carriage in which Mariscal rode. The two gold-bedecked palfreys pulling the vehicle groused and snorted at the snow, tails and heads flickering with equal discomfort. Avalanche, as proud a veteran as any senior officer, gave no indication of unhappiness at all, save for occasionally chafing at the slow pace. The whinny he directed at the smaller, more sensitive horses sounded for all the world like contemptuous snickers.\n\n\"I'm sorry things were going poorly back there,\" Mariscal said through a half-opened window, voice raised over the clacking of the wheels. Her smile, an obvious effort to be supportive, rang hollow.\n\nNycos, holding himself rigid to avoid shivering and inwardly cursing the idiotic rules of propriety that kept the margravine from offering him a seat in the carriage, took a moment to thaw out his response. \"His Highness caught me by surprise, but we could have dealt with that, given the opportunity.\"\n\n\"Oh, I've no doubt. I\u2026 wasn't speaking of his Highness.\"\n\nFor that, the knight had no reply. The margravine had gotten a good look at his map, and it didn't require a military scholar to recognize that the faction to have taken the most ground, by far, was Zirresca's.\n\nIt was difficult to admit to himself, let alone to others, but Nycos knew Mariscal had good reason for worry. Given how swiftly he learned, and his ability to contextualize new information with the knowledge of centuries, he could become both Zirresca's and Kortlaus's superiors in every way that mattered within another year or two. Unfortunately, with the Marshal's Trials now underway, he clearly wouldn't have those years\u2014and at the moment, Zirresca's strategic and tactical acumen, where human forces were concerned, exceeded his own by every measure.\n\nHe still had a chance at becoming Orban Laszlan's successor, but the odds were not in his favor.\n\n\"Do you suppose,\" Mariscal asked after a few moments of relative quiet, \"that the other emissaries have finally arrived?\"\n\nNycos was absurdly grateful for the topic change. \"I hope that's what this is. We could just as easily return to news that Ktho Delios is on the march.\"\n\n\"What a dreadful thought.\" She paused, brow furrowing. \"Would they do that in the dead of winter?\"\n\n\"Probably not,\" he admitted. \"I just meant, until I hear that this news is not about some new catastrophe, I'm going to brace myself with the assumption that it is.\"\n\nNor was he alone in that attitude. In point of fact, the bulk of the Kirresci court waited in anticipation of some disaster or another. They'd received no official word from the Quindacran government since Ambassador Guldoell had returned to Vidiir. No notification of her safe arrival, no acknowledgement of King Hasyan's further missives, certainly nothing to suggest that either Guldoell, or any other emissary, would be returning to Talocsa. While a few nobles still held out hope, and the king was unwilling to take any precipitous actions, most in Oztyerva took that silence as tacit admission that the accusations of collusion held some weight.\n\nHasyan had called for an emergency assembly of envoys from the rest of the southern nations\u2014every signatory to the mutual defense pact, and even Ythane as well. As of yet, however, few such emissaries had arrived\u2014unless, as Mariscal theorized, the assembly to which they'd been summoned was meant to inform them otherwise.\n\nThat particular theory was dashed when Nycos and the others finally strode between the great doors of Hasyan's throne room, after pausing only long enough to wash and change into clothes not drenched with the slurry of melted snow and caked road mud. Only two foreigners were present amidst the Kirresci knights and nobles: Ambassador Kidil, who had already been here in Talocsa; and Ambassador Razmos of Althlalen, who appeared as freshly changed out of traveling garb as the contestants themselves.\n\nNycos briefly caught Mariscal's eye and frowned with new worry before taking his place among the other knights of his rank.\n\nHasyan spoke without preamble from the throne, surrounded by the usual group of counselors and advisors. \"We are grateful to all of you for coming,\" he said. Nycos found himself startled by how weary the king sounded. \"And to those of you who were engaged in the Marshal's Trials, we apologize for the interruption. Sadly, the urgency of the situation left us no other course.\n\n\"You have all, of course, heard tales and rumors of trouble along our borders, and those of our friends in Wenslir and Suunim. Creatures out of Gronch\u2014creatures that,\" he added with a faint shudder, \"we now know with far too much certainty are more than mere ghost stories. Villages destroyed overnight. Travelers who failed to reach their destinations, though they walked the most well-trod and well-patrolled highways.\"\n\nHe waited for the various mumbles of assent to fade. \"Ambassador Kidil,\" he said in an apparent change of direction, \"do we understand correctly that you have found it difficult of late to communicate with Suunim? That many of your couriers have failed to complete the journey?\"\n\nThe old man bowed his head sadly. \"I fear you understand quite correctly, Your Majesty. I have begun to feel that I ought to be making the trek myself.\"\n\n\"It's well you did not, Aadesh.\" The switch to an informal, friendlier form of address was not lost on Nycos. \"You would likely have accomplished nothing but to join your lost couriers. Friends, it is our sad burden to inform you that we have finally received some more detailed reports, tales carried by fortunate survivors\u2014and the situation is far more dire than we ever feared.\"\n\n\"Because things were going so easily and peacefully up to now,\" Zirresca, standing a few places down from Nycos, muttered under her breath.\n\n\"The villages that have been razed were not destroyed by any ogre. We have heard stories of\u2026 Of a great winged shape, scarcely visible against the stars or when it passed briefly before the face of a moon. Monstrous, wreathed in flame.\"\n\nHe could have stopped there. The horrified silence that choked the throne room was evidence enough that everyone knew what he implied.\n\n\"After decades of freedom from their kind,\" he pressed on, driving the point home, \"we now face the distinct possibility of a second dragon in as many years.\"\n\nVircingotirilux? Nycos had suspected her before, and it seemed near certainty now. That vile beast of a wyrm dwelt deep within Gronch, commanded the ogres of the wood as her minions, just as he himself had once ruled over the goblins, the wyverns, and other creatures of the Outermark Mountains.\n\nAnd yet, as before, so much seemed\u2026 off. Random devastation and the deaths of whole communities, that indeed sounded like Vircingotirilux, but the subtleties of her earlier attack? The magics required to transform an ogre into a man? Those were beyond her. Nor could he imagine common cause between the ravening, lunatic wyrm and the highly disciplined military machine of Ktho Delios.\n\nAll signs to the contrary, could it be a different dragon entirely? Nycos could think of only a few with both the magic and cunning to orchestrate all they'd seen. None dwelt nearby, but it was conceivable that such a wyrm might turn its attentions to territories far beyond its own. And as rare as dragons were, Nycos couldn't be positive he knew of all those living in southern Galadras. A particularly secretive wyrm might have kept itself concealed.\n\nHe wished they had a more precise physical description of the dragon, but it sounded as though a \"winged shape in the night\" was the best available. Still, he drew breath to ask, though he would need to phrase the question carefully so as not to give away that he knew more than he was letting on.\n\nSomeone else beat him to the punch, however, and with a far more sinister question. \"Are we entirely certain,\" Margrave Andarjin asked, as though the notion had just occurred to him, \"that this is a 'second' dragon?\"\n\nIt took a moment for the implications to sink in.\n\n\"Petty, my Lord,\" Nycos snapped. \"Have you grown so hopeless of ever having accomplishments of your own to tout that you've decided it's easier to question everyone else's?\"\n\n\"There will be none of that!\" King Hasyan shot to his feet. \"We will have no squabbling among the court, and we will have no such accusations or insults thrown about!\"\n\nTeeth grinding like a millstone, Nycos bowed his head.\n\nThen, to the surprise of all, Balmorra stepped forward to stand beside her liege. \"Let me assuage the margrave's, ah, concerns. And any others he might have raised. I may not see all, with my magics or in the stars, but I see enough. I can assure you, with no doubt, that whoever or whatever we face from the depths of the Ogre-Weald, it is not the dragon Tzavalantzaval.\"\n\nThat was sufficient for most of those gathered, to judge by the murmurs that followed. Andarjin bowed his head to the old astrologer, then more deeply to the king. He should have also extended Nycos an apology, but apparently even he couldn't take his insincerity that far.\n\nFor his own part, Nycos once again wondered and worried over just how much Balmorra knew.\n\nHasyan sank slowly back into the depths of his throne. \"Crown Marshal?\"\n\nOrban advanced to address the court. \"This dragon, and the beasts of the Ogre-Weald, are a greater threat than we had expected to face. Suunim, Wenslir, and our own eastern provinces are effectively under siege. Trade, travel, and military maneuvers are hampered. This is why, among other consequences, Ambassador Kidil has received no messages from Suunim, and why Wenslir hasn't sent an ambassador to discuss our current situation.\" He scowled contemptuously. \"It is also why Mahdresh has failed to do so, or so they say, despite sharing no borders with Gronch. Opportunists and cowards, the lot\u2014\"\n\n\"Manners, Marshal,\" Hasyan interrupted, not unkindly. \"And focus.\"\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty.\" He frowned, apparently irritated at himself. \"My sincere apologies. My point is that we have a great deal of potential trouble ahead, and that's just Gronch. Whether Ktho Delios is behind this or not, they'll doubtless try to take advantage, and we still don't know for certain where Quindacra stands\u2026\" He trailed off, abruptly sounding as tired as the king.\n\n\"For the foreseeable future, we're going to need all our greatest military minds developing strategies and contingencies, and all our soldiers at station and prepared to march. As such, as much as I'd hoped to complete them before war is truly upon us, I am suspending the trials to determine my successor until the situation calms.\"\n\nNycos abruptly felt as though every eye in the throne room was upon him, though he knew that Zirresca and Kortlaus feel equal scrutiny.\n\n\"I apologize to all three worthy candidates,\" Orban said. \"But I assure you that we'll return to the matter as soon as his Majesty and I consider it viable. Who knows, perhaps the upcoming struggles will allow one of you the opportunity to perform feats so great, I won't need the trials to make my choice.\"\n\nThis was nothing but good news for Nycos. Any delay was an opportunity to improve his skills, to narrow the gap between himself and the obvious frontrunner. Others, however, were far less pleased. Zirresca's whole face had gone red with fury and frustration, and Nycos heard Margrave Andarjin swallow once, hard. No doubt choking down a protest that he must have known would go over poorly.\n\nKortlaus, so far as Nycos could tell, was untroubled, equally content one way or the other, but then, Kortlaus had never seemed as emotionally engaged in his campaign as either Nycos or Zirresca were in theirs.\n\nA few more moments of general discussion, and then his Majesty dismissed the bulk of the nobles and gentry\u2014Andarjin managed not to storm out in a huff, but an abnormal stiffness in his gait implied he wanted to\u2014while the royal advisors and military leaders moved to the council chambers for the first of what promised to be many tense strategy sessions.\n\nIt was on their way to that smaller room, passing through winding and heavily guarded halls, that Prince Elias dropped back to fall in beside Nycos. So preoccupied was the knight with questions of dragons and other hidden foes that it took him a moment to realize the heir apparent had asked him something.\n\n\"I'm deeply sorry, your Highness. My mind was elsewhere. Might you repeat that, please?\"\n\n\"Oh, I was just requesting that you stay at my side during the discussion, in case I have any questions.\"\n\n\"Of course, your Highness.\" It was an aggravation Nycos didn't need at the moment, but he'd agreed to advise the prince, and had done so on several matters of lesser import. It seemed inappropriate, and potentially damaging, to refuse now.\n\nSo, trying to think as an instructor, he continued, \"You have a solid grasp of the situation thus far?\"\n\nElias smiled, though somewhat self-mockingly. \"I'm not a complete fool, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\n\"I never thought you were,\" Nycos lied. Then, just as the prince's smile began to brighten, \"So run through it for me, your Highness. I need to know what you know if I'm to advise you properly.\"\n\nIn a tone not unlike a schoolboy reciting a lesson, the prince explained Quindacra's importance to the treaty. Although that nation shared no border with Ktho Delios, it controlled a vast stretch of coastline. Should Quindacra grant them access to said beaches, the Deliant navy could easily sail about the cape of the continent and disgorge an army to come at Wenslir from the south and Kirresc from the southwest. Both nations would be required to split their forces, with potentially catastrophic results, and that assumed Quindacra merely allowed the enemy safe passage. If they were to actually join with the invaders\u2026\n\n\"And of course,\" Elias concluded, \"the loss of their soldiers on the front lines would be a massive blow to our defenses, before even taking the rest into account. So, teacher, did I pass your test?\"\n\n\"Yes, your Highness. But not well.\"\n\nThe prince blinked his royal eyelids. \"What did I miss?\"\n\nGive the young man credit. He sounded more curious than offended.\n\n\"Two points.\" Nycos raised a hand, counting off fingers. \"First, neither we nor Wenslir have any major cities near our shared border. It wouldn't be difficult for Quindacra\u2014or Ktho Delian forces moving through their territory\u2014to cut off communication between Kirresc and Wenslir. Or, by extension, between us and Suunim.\"\n\n\"Oof. You're right.\"\n\n\"Second, any Kirresci war effort against Ktho Delios might be crippled without Quindacran goods. Tools, weapons, raw materials.\"\n\n\"But Quindacra doesn't craft anything we can't make for ourselves! And most of their materials aren't as good!\"\n\n\"True. But if Ktho Delios invades Kirresc, the first thing they're going to do is try to take or destroy our resources. Lumber. Crops. Mines. Smiths and carpenters, if they reach any of our cities. Quindacra's farther from Ktho Delios than we are, so they'd be able to maintain those industries longer than we might.\"\n\nElias nodded slowly. \"I hadn't thought of any of that.\"\n\n\"Think beyond the moment,\" Nycos advised, though he wondered if there were any real point, if the prince could alter his thinking. \"Don't just envision the immediate threats. Try to think about where you might be a week, a month, a year from now.\"\n\n\"I'll try, Sir Nycolos. Thank you.\"\n\nAt which point the conversation, and indeed the walk, ended at the door to the council chambers. While everyone else gathered, Nycos found himself once again chasing his own thoughts, and every single one of them eventually came back to the same roost.\n\nVircingotirilux.\n\nNothing he could come up with, no angle of approach, forced any of this to make sense. She had to be involved, and yet so much of what had happened was beyond her abilities, her maddened mind, or both. Did she know who he was? How? What was she planning? Who or what was she working with?\n\nHe had to know\u2014for the sake of everyone around him, yes, but particularly for his own. And unfortunately, though he passed the hours of the council meeting in trying to envision another option, in the end he could come up with only one way to find out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "\"He barely let me finish speaking before he told me it was insane and he wouldn't even consider allowing it.\"\n\n\"Good!\" Mariscal poked Nycos in the arm, hard. \"Because it is insane, and he shouldn't even consider it!\"\n\nThe two of them walked, side by side but not quite arm in arm, through what Nycos had come to think of \"Mariscal's garden.\" The flowers he'd long ago arranged to bloom for her were dormant, slumbering beneath a confectioner's dusting of sugary snow. The garden smelled only of winter, without a trace of the floral aromas of the past. Still, it held great meaning for the pair\u2014although Nycos was sure that meaning was very different in her mind than it was in his\u2014and they came here often to talk. Other than a handful of Mariscal's ladies-in-waiting, who hung back far enough to grant the knight and the margravine a modicum of privacy, they were the only souls present.\n\n\"He then went on to call me insane,\" Nycos complained.\n\nAgain she poked him, hard enough to suggest some genuine anger. \"I'm not sure he's wrong there, either.\"\n\n\"You don't believe I can do it, either, my Lady?\"\n\nMariscal stopped, then dragged him to a halt and turned him to face her. \"Nycos, you had an enchanted blade last time. One specifically crafted to slay dragons! And you still survived only through sheer luck! Donaris doesn't smile so broadly twice on anyone!\"\n\n\"It's true, I no longer have Wyrmtaker.\" Well, most of it, he added mentally as the old wound twinged. \"But I learned much about dragons during that hunt, and Smim knows much as well. Between the two of us, we could come up with another means of hurting Vi\u2014the beast.\n\n\"Besides,\" he continued quickly, both to cover his slip of the tongue and forestall the argument he knew was coming, \"the plan would be to try to kill the dragon only if a near-perfect opportunity presents itself. Otherwise, this is intelligence-gathering. Where does the dragon lair? Is Ktho Delios somehow in contact with it?\" Who is she working with? Does she know who I am? How?!\n\n\"It's madness,\" Mariscal insisted. \"Marshal Laszlan was right to refuse to hear anything more of it!\"\n\nOf course it was madness! For all his power, everything he could do to grant himself might and abilities far beyond human, Nycos was only a fraction of what he once had been. The thought of facing Vircingotirilux in his current state was utterly terrifying.\n\nBut what choice had he?\n\n\"Don't you dare! Don't you even think it, Nycolos!\"\n\n\"What? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I can see it in your face. You're thinking of going anyway!\"\n\nDamn it, I'm not even the Nycos she knew. How can she read me this way?!\n\n\"Mariscal\u2026\"\n\n\"No!\" Snow puffed up in a small cloud where she actually stomped an angry foot. \"Putting aside the danger, if you abandon your duties, leave against orders a second time? You'll never be Crown Marshal. We won't be\u2026 It won't be good for any of us.\"\n\n\"Even if I can learn something, or accomplish something, that would save the lives of Kirresci soldiers?\" he demanded. \"That would save us from having to divide our forces? Would that not make it worthwhile?\"\n\nMariscal, shivering with more than the cold, began to turn away.\n\n\"What if,\" Nycos asked softly, \"I could solve the Quindacra problem while I was at it?\"\n\nThe margravine stiffened. \"How in the name of the gods,\" she hissed between clenched teeth, \"would you even imagine you could do that?\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026 just considering a few wild ideas,\" he hedged, mentally lashing himself for bringing it up. It's not as though he could explain even if he wanted to!\n\n\"You seem to have a lot of those. When you want to go into detail, we'll talk. Until then, don't do anything foolish. Consider that a command from a margravine as much as a personal plea, Baronet Nycolos.\"\n\nShe swept from the garden, her servants rushing to follow, and Nycos let her go. He knew her anger was a mask for her fear\u2014for him, for them. It was a fear he shared, at least in part. And perhaps she was right. He didn't want to go, didn't want to take the risk, didn't want to face the consequences.\n\nBut neither did he wish to face the consequences of his ignorance.\n\nIgnoring the cold, ignoring the layer of frigid slush, Nycos found the nearest of the garden's marble benches and sat, staring at the stone walls and feeling nearly as lost now as when he'd first awakened, his body a strange and foreign land, in the slavers' wooden cage."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "\"I am a great believer in seeking knowledge wherever one may find it, Sir Nycolos. But I rather doubt that these particular walls have anything more to tell you.\"\n\nNycos blinked and looked around for what felt like the first time in hours. The sky had gone dark, with only a few brighter patches in the clouds suggesting the presence of the moons. The snow fell more thickly, in spinning flurries. He discovered that his boots, his knees, and his shoulders were well coated.\n\nAnd standing before him, tightly wrapped in several layers of cloaks and shawls, was the old astrologer.\n\n\"Time appears to have gotten away from me,\" Nycos admitted, rising politely.\n\n\"It's slippery that way, yes.\"\n\n\"I, um. I didn't realize you enjoyed the garden.\"\n\nBalmorra gave him a flat and vaguely pitying look.\n\n\"Or,\" he amended, face flushing, \"you might have been searching for me.\"\n\n\"Considering the weather, and the absolute lack of visible plant life, that does seem a rather more probable motive for me being here, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"So what can I do for you, Mistress Balmorra?\"\n\nDespite her earlier comment, it was her turn, now, to stare blankly at the far wall. \"The stars and the signs,\" she said slowly, \"tell me that you have a momentous choice before you.\"\n\n\"Do they?\" he asked in a dull monotone.\n\n\"I've seen few specifics\u2014and they aren't necessarily mine to know, anyway\u2014but I see bits. Pieces. And more importantly, I see the ripples made by your choice, spreading out to mar the image of Kirresc itself, and perhaps even beyond.\"\n\nNycos's throat closed tight. \"What\u2026\" He tried again, each word an act of will. \"What should I do?\"\n\n\"If you choose the path of greater danger, you will lose much. We all may.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Nycos felt a weight, a tension in his shoulders, begin to fade. \"Well, that seems\u2014\"\n\n\"Choose the easier, safer path, and we stand to lose far more. Everyone will suffer for it.\"\n\nNycos cursed, long and loudly, at one point pounding a fist into the statue of an old knight that topped a tiny fountain. As though responding to his frustration, the snow fell more thickly still, so that the far side of the garden became invisible.\n\n\"That,\" he spat, his brief fit of temper spent, \"is not much of a choice, Balmorra.\"\n\n\"No, it isn't.\" She had all but disappeared behind the curtain of white, and her voice sounded somehow more distant as well. \"It's an awful, discouraging choice, and that it lies on you to make is unfair in the extreme.\n\n\"But that's all a part of being human, is it not, Sir Nycolos?\"\n\nShe was gone before the question could penetrate the veil of his anger, before he thought to wonder at the implication of her words. Again Nycos stood alone in the white-cloaked garden, unanswered questions and impossible decisions weighing on him far more heavily than the snow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "He'd taken a day to ruminate, or perhaps to hunt for some excuse. It had changed nothing, as he'd expected. He'd known what he would do since Balmorra's warnings had passed her lips.\n\n\"I intend no offense by this, Master,\" Smim whispered as they slunk through the largely empty and, at this hour, poorly lit halls of Oztyerva's outer wing. Each carried a small sack of supplies, the last of several batches they'd been hiding beneath the straw of the stables throughout the night. \"But you're insane.\"\n\n\"For future reference, Smim, I'd be more inclined to believe you meant no offense if this weren't the ninth time you'd said that to me.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, Master. One must sometimes belabor the point when speaking to lunatics.\"\n\nNycos snorted and continued on his way.\n\nStone halls led to a hefty wooden door with\u2014thanks to the goblin's earlier efforts\u2014newly oiled hinges. Only a few guards patrolled near the stables, and it was simple enough for Nycos to listen at the portal until the sound of footsteps crunching on the thin carpet of snow passed out of range. He and Smim slipped swiftly through the door, keeping to the darkest shadows of the curtain wall, and scurried across a few dozen yards of the bailey.\n\n\"Ready, Smim?\" They would have to work quickly and quietly to saddle Avalanche and Smim's chosen mount, and load their supplies in the saddlebags, without being caught. Not that Nycos was by any means forbidden from taking his own steed out on a late-night ride, but it would certainly raise questions\u2014questions that couldn't be avoided, but might at least be delayed.\n\n\"It's not too late for us to return to our nice warm beds and forget about this,\" Smim replied.\n\nNycos chose to take that as a yes, unbolted the outer door of the stable, and darted inside. The goblin followed a half-step behind.\n\n\"I thought you gentlemen were never going to arrive. What did you do, stop for drinks?\"\n\nNycos's sabre leapt to hand in a flash of steel lightning. Smim uttered a high-pitched wheeze and dropped into a crouch equally suited to springing toward or away from whatever appeared.\n\nA soft chuckle ended in the scrape and spark of flint on steel. A small candle caught, the wick dancing as though it, too, shivered in the cold. It wasn't much light, but enough to make out a fully saddled Avalanche, alongside not one but two other mounts, equally equipped and ready for travel.\n\nLeaning against the extra, a dappled grey not much smaller than Avalanche himself, was Silbeth Rasik. She wore a fur-lined coat, Wenslirran or Ktho Delian in style, and belted slightly open to allow her easy access to her sword.\n\n\"Um,\" Nycos commented.\n\n\"Astute, Master.\"\n\nFor all that he'd longed for the opportunity to speak with her, this wasn't precisely how Nycos had envisioned the conversation taking place. \"I'm, uh\u2026 Mistress Rasik\u2026\"\n\n\"Silbeth, please, Sir Nycolos. We are going to be working together, after all.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Nycos said again, possibly unsure she'd properly understood him the first time.\n\n\"She's saddled herself a horse, Master. I think she's planning to come with us.\"\n\nSilbeth grinned. \"Astute, goblin.\"\n\nNycos finally got a hold of himself, forcing his startled bewilderment aside for later examination. \"Silbeth, I don't know how you found out I was planning on a journey\u2014\"\n\n\"Margravine Mariscal. She hired me. Didn't even balk at the price.\"\n\nThings fell into place with a series of clunks so loud Nycos was surprised they didn't spook the horses.\n\n\"And you're here to\u2026?\" He let the question linger.\n\n\"Accompany you. Assist you. Make certain you return in, if not one piece, then at least usable condition.\"\n\nNycos breathed a bit more easily and sheathed his blade. \"I'm a bit surprised,\" he admitted, \"that your orders weren't to knock me senseless and drag me back inside.\"\n\n\"Oh, we discussed that.\" It was the casual, even offhand way she said it that convinced Nycos she wasn't remotely jesting. \"She came quite close to it a time or two. Ultimately, though, she recognized that wouldn't have been a good idea. You'd just try again later.\" She shrugged. \"She knows that once you've decided that something needs doing, you're going to do it. She'd rather you not get horribly killed in the process.\"\n\n\"We've been around the humans too long,\" Smim grumbled at a volume only Nycos's hearing could possibly have picked up, \"if you're getting this predictable.\"\n\nFor a long moment, Nycos said nothing, stroking Avalanche's nose as he pondered. He found himself moved by Mariscal's actions. Nor was he remotely displeased with the thought of spending some time in the mercenary's company, getting to know her, possibly watching her skills in genuine battle.\n\nHowever\u2026\n\n\"I'm grateful,\" he said at last. \"To both of you. But what Smim and I have planned is not only dangerous, but private.\" Indeed, her presence would make it exceedingly troublesome for Nycos and the goblin to converse freely, to ask the necessary questions, or for him to draw upon many of the abilities he might require. \"So I'm afraid I must decline your company.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you misunderstand, Sir Nycolos. This wasn't an offer. I was hired to do a job. I will do it.\"\n\n\"I can't permit you to come with us,\" he insisted.\n\n\"You can't stop me.\"\n\n\"Are you so sure?\"\n\n\"You would have to physically force me to stay. Kill me, or injure me so badly I can't follow. I don't think you're prepared to do that.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"After our match at the tournament, I don't think you're capable of doing that. But even if you are, do you believe you can outfight me without your efforts drawing the attention of every guard walking patrol?\"\n\nNycos growled something that would have been unintelligible no matter what body he wore.\n\n\"Wonderful!\" Silbeth swung into her saddle in one smooth motion. \"Shall we be off, then? I think I packed everything you had hidden in here, but you might want to take a quick pass just to be sure. And,\" she added, gesturing at the long, leather-wrapped bundle she'd tied across the back of Avalanche's saddle, \"you're going to have to explain to me at some point what those are for.\"\n\nIn no mood to explain much of anything, Nycos hauled himself into Avalanche's saddle and rode toward the stable doors.\n\nDeparting in complete secrecy, as Nycos was well aware, had never been an option. In these pre-dawn hours, the gates of Oztyerva were firmly shut, and only his rank as a knight of the realm granted him the authority to order that one be opened long enough for the trio of riders to make their exit. Doubtless the sentinels had many questions\u2014why he and his companions had to leave at such an indecent hour, why they were so heavily laden with supplies\u2014but none had the right to question his order. The tale of his departure would spread, particularly once these soldiers' shift had ended, but by then he ought to be far enough away that it wouldn't matter.\n\nBetween the white flurries and the black of the night sky, the streets of Talocsa were all but deserted. A very few passersby, wrapped in kaftans and coats, studied the trio with curiosity before going on about their business, but none chose to pause in the bone-deep cold to exchange polite greetings. A barking dog ran and pranced alongside the horses for a few blocks before returning, shivering, to the warmth of his den.\n\nEven Nycos lacked the authority to order the city gates opened once they'd been shut for the night, but he had accounted for that, too. By the time they'd crossed the length of Talocsa, less than an hour remained before dawn. The three riders huddled together in a small side street, hunched against the cold, until fingers of shadow crept from the east, pursued by the diffuse light of an overcast sunrise. The gates clanked and clattered open for the new day's business, light as it might be this time of year, allowing Nycos, Silbeth, and Smim to depart as the vanguard of the morning's traffic.\n\nThe highway itself yet saw sufficient use, and the early winter precipitation had so far been light enough, that little snow marred their path. Splotches lingered here and there, like a mildewy growth, and heaps of murky sludge lined the roadway, churned up and kicked aside by hooves and grinding wheels. So long as the weather held, they ought to make good time.\n\nSmim had retreated into a shallow sulk, and Silbeth seemed content, for the moment, to ride in silence. Since the horses needed little guidance to follow the highway as it meandered its way between east and south and back again, Nycos found himself with plenty of time to think.\n\nHe remained torn by Silbeth's presence, a gnawing hesitation and dissatisfaction. He wanted to speak to her, yet he hadn't the first notion of what to say. He knew she could be of great help, yet his need for secrecy and privacy was intense.\n\nMore than once, in those early days, he gave genuine consideration to leaving her behind. He couldn't just sneak away in the night. He suspected she was far too alert, too light a sleeper, for him to get far. Traveling alone, and boosted beyond human, he had the speed to match the horses and the endurance to outlast them, but that would mean leaving Avalanche behind, along with a sizable portion of his supplies. It meant leaving the goblin behind as well, and Nycos wasn't yet prepared to make this journey, take these risks, entirely on his own.\n\nAnd, well, he did want to get to know this woman, this predator in human form, almost\u2014to some extent, anyway\u2014dragon-like in her own right.\n\nTo Vizret's hell with it. Let her come along. He could always try to lose her later, if the situation required it.\n\nTheir pace remained brisk, swift enough to chew away the miles, not so fast as to endanger the horses. Still they spoke little, save to discuss matters of immediate import: where to camp, who had what duties, and so forth.\n\nOn the third day, however, Nycos tugged on the bridle, steering Avalanche off to the left. \"I'm taking us cross-country for a bit,\" he explained. \"We'll return to the highway up ahead.\"\n\n\"That's going to slow us down, Master,\" Smim pointed out.\n\n\"Aldsolca,\" Silbeth said.\n\n\"What?\" The goblin sounded confused and vaguely irritated, but Nycos was nodding.\n\n\"The highway takes us directly past the city of Aldsolca,\" she explained. \"On the off chance King Hasyan or Mashal Laszlan have anyone out looking for him, they could have sent a messenger pigeon or other word out to the major cities.\"\n\n\"And even if not,\" Nycos added, \"I might be recognized here, and I'd rather not have to explain my presence, or deal with any formalities. It's probably an unnecessary precaution,\" he admitted, spurring Avalanche off into the slush-covered grass and frigid mud, \"but it's worth a few hours and a little discomfort.\"\n\n\"You know,\" Silbeth said after a few moments of squelching hooves and shivering splashes of muck, though at least they'd gotten no new snow that day, \"this reminds me a little of one of my earliest hired missions for the Priory. We had to get into Mahdresh\u2014I mean the city-state proper, not just their territories\u2014but the criminal guild we were supposed to strike at knew we were coming, and they had a lot of the city guards on their payroll\u2026\"\n\nIt was as if the brief conversation about Aldsolca had jarred something loose, though Nycos suspected her sudden loquaciousness was more about distracting them from the unpleasantness of off-road travel. And indeed, he found himself captivated by her tale, even though there wasn't really much to it. The miles of uneven terrain, unsure steeds, and chilly muck seemed to pass far more swiftly than had the far easier miles of the road behind.\n\nFor him, at least. Smim just hunched deeper into his coats and glowered as though all the world had offended him.\n\nThe tales continued, now that the dam had been breached, even after they rejoined the main road beyond Aldsolca. With seemingly endless breath and enthusiasm, Silbeth segued from the infiltration of Mahdresh to bodyguard duty for a low-ranking but highborn priestess of Uldamboros, god of the mountains\u2014and thus of gems, metals, and wealth in general\u2014on a pilgrimage from Wenslir. \"And make no mistake,\" she insisted, \"a lot of people have a bone to pick with the clergy of a god they feel should have made them rich, and didn't.\"\n\n\"I can imagine\u2026\"\n\nAnd from that story, she'd gone on to describe a fierce four-way battle at the border of Quindacra, between two different robber-barons, the soldiers of the king, and an uninvolved mercenary company whose ill-luck had them passing through at just the wrong time, and whom each side assumed was working for one of the others.\n\nBy that point the sun was threatening to dive off to sleep and the snow was falling once again, though in flurries and spurts as light as dandelion fuzz. The trio made camp in the shelter of some trees, and Nycos, in thanks for Silbeth's storytelling, offered both to cook and take the first shift at watch.\n\nFor a time he sat, back up against a heavy bole, the fire crackling softly off to his right, and gazed into the empty dark. Something about this night, in particular, made him miss the open sky, the rush of air over his wings, the earth scrolling beneath him like an endless tapestry. He wished, if nothing more, that the overcast would part enough for him to see the moon and stars.\n\nHe didn't turn or even glance aside as Smim carefully picked his way through the camp to come crouch at his side. He knew well the sound of the goblin's movement.\n\n\"Something on your mind, Smim?\"\n\n\"Master\u2026\" The pause that followed was startling. Usually Smim was quick with his thoughts, and not remotely shy about sharing them. \"How much longer are you going to humor this woman?\"\n\nAh. He'd been expecting this, sooner or later. \"And what would you have me do?\"\n\n\"You know me, Master, and what I can do. Nobody sleeps that lightly. I could\u2014\"\n\nThe conversation, Nycos might have anticipated. The surge of fury at the goblin's implication, however, caught him by surprise. \"Don't you dare so much as think it!\" That he kept his voice to a whisper\u2014or perhaps it was a low growl\u2014was nigh miraculous.\n\n\"I needn't kill her!\" Smim insisted, backpedaling. \"Just a\u2026 a mild injury, enough to hobble her for a few days! We would be long gone by\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Master\u2014\"\n\n\"I've decided I prefer to have her along, at least for now.\"\n\nThe goblin appeared almost physically ill as he rose. \"If you say so, Master.\"\n\nHe'd started away, a single footstep crunching in the snow and dead leaves, when, \"Smim?\"\n\n\"Yes, Master?\"\n\n\"On occasion, you have taken it upon yourself to act, to 'help' me, if you feel I'm not able to manage something, or that I'm making a grave mistake. We've talked about this a few times.\"\n\nNothing. Only the faint whisper of the wind.\n\n\"There have been times, I admit, when I've been grateful for that propensity. I'm sure I will be so again. But on this matter? You have been an excellent servant, and a good friend to me, but if you try to harm or otherwise get rid of Mistress Rasik behind my back, I will roast one of your legs for supper and leave the rest of you to the wolves.\"\n\n\"I obey, Master, as always.\" The words came colder than the snow. Nycos swore even the fire dimmed.\n\nWell, he might have taken that a step too far. He'd decide if it warranted an apology in the morning. Not an overt one, of course, but perhaps an unexpected compliment or reward. Smim would know what it meant.\n\nWhy had he reacted so fiercely? Yes, Silbeth was a useful ally, as well as fascinating company. He wanted to build trust with the woman, and he had to know for certain that Smim wouldn't sabotage that. Still, that didn't explain the strength of his outrage. Perhaps\u2014\n\n\"Your manservant\u2014ah, 'goblinservant,' I suppose\u2014doesn't seem particularly happy to have me along.\"\n\nNycos tried not to jump. Had he allowed himself to grow that distracted? He glanced up at Silbeth, nearly panicked. She was speaking of his general attitude since Oztyerva, not tonight's conversation, wasn't she? How much had she overheard? They'd spoken in low tones and she'd been in her bedroll across the camp until a moment or two ago.\n\nHadn't she?\n\n\"Smim is\u2026 protective,\" he said at last, gesturing for her to sit on the large tree root beside him. It wasn't much of a stool, but it kept them off the frigid soil. \"And he doesn't readily trust.\"\n\n\"I imagine he's not the only one,\" she said, lowering herself to the root. Then, before he could ask what she meant, \"How did you two become friends?\"\n\nSo he told her the same tale he'd offered Hasyan's court, that the goblin had been a servant of Tzavalantzaval, that he'd chosen to accompany Nycos after the dragon's defeat, and that they'd saved one another's life multiple times on their harsh journey across the Outermark.\n\n\"I'd enjoy hearing that entire story, Sir Nycolos. I've seen much and heard more in my time, but never the slaying of an actual dragon!\" She sounded almost childishly excited by the prospect.\n\nNycos was less enthused at the notion of recounting those particular events\u2014either version of them. \"Perhaps you will someday,\" he said, staunchly noncommittal. Then, \"And it's Nycos. 'Sir Nycolos' may grow cumbersome if we're to be traveling together.\"\n\n\"Oh, no need to worry about that.\" She grinned. \"I assure you, it already had.\"\n\nHe smiled in return, reflexively and genuinely, but then subsided once more into silence. Why was it so hard to think up anything to say to this woman?\n\nSilbeth gazed briefly into the same darkness he had, then dug into her pack for oil and a whetstone. She'd unwrapped the both, and gotten as far as laying her sword over her knees, when she paused to glance back, frowning, at the now-slumbering goblin.\n\n\"It's fine,\" Nycos told her. \"He's slept through a lot worse.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, repacking her supplies with a soft sigh. \"It doesn't actually need it yet, anyway. Just habit.\"\n\nThe various metals, and some of the leather, glinted in the dull firelight. \"May I?\" Nycos asked, startling himself.\n\nShe paused, considering, then slowly slid the sword\u2014belt, scabbard, and all\u2014over to him.\n\nCarefully, almost reverentially, he drew the long, narrow blade, holding it before him and admiring the feel in his grip. He'd rarely paid much attention to weapons beyond the basic \"How long and sharp are they?\" for the bulk of his existence. Since sliding into the life of Nycolos Anvarri, he'd observed any number of cultures' armaments\u2014during practice, during his patrols, and particularly during the tournament. And yet\u2026\n\n\"I don't believe I recognize the style,\" he admitted.\n\n\"I'm not surprised,\" Silbeth said, a response he found faintly relieving. \"It's actually of Ktho Delian make.\"\n\nNycos frowned. The shape of the blade and the feeble illumination turned it into a monstrous, twisted scowl in his reflection. All the Ktho Delian swords he'd seen had been heavier, thicker weapons, and most had been notably shorter.\n\nEither she saw his confusion, or she'd anticipated it. \"It's an older style. You only really see it today among some of their aristocracy. Modern Ktho Delian swordsmanship developed to favor shields, so they prefer shorter arming swords or the like. Me?\" She shrugged. \"I prefer the buckler, or else to fight with a two-handed grip, so the older, narrower hand-and-a-half suits me well enough. It loses some striking power,\" she confessed, \"compared to the heavier longswords a few of them still use instead of carrying shields, but it's quicker. Better control.\"\n\n\"So I recall,\" he said, grinning and passing the weapon back her way.\n\n\"And you? Are you required to wield the traditional Kirresci arms as a loyal and faithful knight of the realm?\" she asked jokingly.\n\n\"It's not a requirement, but we do get the dregs of wine and the most gristly cuts of meat at supper if we don't.\"\n\nHe was absurdly pleased when that response drew a laugh from her. \"You seemed to favor the szandzsya in the tournament.\"\n\n\"I do. The sabre's well and good, and the shield has its place, but I prefer hitting hard and fast as possible. Dead enemies don't require much defending against, by and large.\"\n\n\"You know, I think I remember the Priory teaching us something to that effect.\"\n\nThat led neatly enough to the question he'd been sitting on for a while, but he decided, even with his still imperfect grasp of interpersonal etiquette, that he hadn't yet earned the right to ask. They subsided again into silence, but at least it felt more companionable this time, less awkward.\n\nA small log in the fire split, sending up a shower of sparks. \"Nycos,\" Silbeth said, as though that crack had been a signal, \"shouldn't we have left the road and moved into the Brackenwood by now?\"\n\n\"That\u2026 would be a more direct route to Gronch,\" he hedged, not yet prepared to explain that Gronch wasn't their first destination. \"But I'd rather cleave to the highway a bit longer. It may add some distance, but I think we'll more than make up for it in speed.\"\n\n\"Your decision,\" she said, rising lithely from the tree root. \"There's a price attached, though.\"\n\nHe blinked, startled. \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"If we're going out of our way,\" she told him as she headed back toward her bedroll, \"you're definitely going to have to take on some of the storytelling duties. Starting tomorrow. Wake me when it's my turn on watch.\"\n\nIt was just as well that she'd walked away, as he hadn't the first notion of what to say to that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "Snow would have been preferable to the next day's sleet and freezing rain. Although light, sporadic, it soaked into everything, slipping through even the tightest folds in cloak and kaftan. The horses trudged miserably along the roadway, heads bowed, while those who sat atop them shivered despite every effort to keep warm.\n\nWarm, or at least distracted.\n\nEndeavoring to make the telling of it as exciting and suspenseful as he could, Nycos spoke of his patrols along the border with Mahdresh, the pursuit and ambush, the discovery of the Ktho Delian agitator amidst the bandits. As best he could recall, he detailed every question, every cry, every blow and every parry.\n\nAlthough he did, of course, alter or omit a few details\u2014specifically those pertaining to his more-than-human abilities and techniques. He wasn't entirely certain how well he succeeded in making the tale remotely entertaining, but at least several miles of sodden roadway and bare, depressed forestry had passed them by when he was done, and if Silbeth found the recitation lacking or dull, she was polite enough to hide it.\n\n\"All right,\" he announced around a quivering mouthful of sleet. \"Your turn.\"\n\n\"My\u2026 I seem to remember telling a good five stories in a row yesterday!\"\n\n\"Um.\" Nycos thought back, then actually held up a gauntlet-wrapped hand to count off fingers. \"It was three, in fact.\"\n\n\"We'll compromise. Call it four.\"\n\n\"But it wasn't four, it was\u2014\"\n\n\"My point, though, is that you can cough up a few more tales before it's back to me.\"\n\nHe was grinning again, despite the ache of the cold against his teeth. \"No, you see, I let you go on yesterday for your sake.\"\n\n\"My\u2014?!\"\n\n\"It would have been rude to interrupt you, would it not? I was being chivalrous. That's what we're supposed to do, with people of lesser station.\"\n\n\"Let me guess. And if you don't, you get dregs and gristle at supper?\"\n\n\"Precisely. You wouldn't want to punish me for being chivalrous, would you?\"\n\n\"I think,\" Smim declared disgustedly from behind the both of them, plodding along on the smallest of the horses, \"that I would very much like to freeze to death now.\"\n\nIn the end, Silbeth talked him into telling one more before she took over, and they alternated turns after that. Nycos didn't have terribly many experiences to relate, of course, but he'd learned enough about the life of the other Nycolos that he was able to come up with several mixtures of fact and fiction that sounded believable.\n\nWhich did, in turn, make him wonder for a moment how many of Silbeth's own stories were entirely truthful. Ultimately, though, he decided it didn't matter. They were interesting enough to listen to, helped pass the time, and\u2014her jesting protestations to the contrary\u2014she clearly enjoyed telling them.\n\nNo story, however, was so all-consuming as to make the damp and frigid journey at all pleasant. After another day and a half, when the highway had begun to lead them ever-further south, no amount of diversion could keep the inevitable questions at bay any longer.\n\n\"We're not going to Gronch,\" Nycos finally confessed, when Silbeth pressed him yet again about his choice of routes, about electing the highway over the Brackenwood. \"I mean, yes, we are, but not yet.\"\n\n\"I'd more or less picked up on that,\" the mercenary said around a shallow scowl. \"So where are we going?\"\n\n\"Just a slight detour.\"\n\n\"Nycos, where?\"\n\nWell, he was going to have to tell her sooner or later. \"Vidiir.\"\n\n\"What? That's\u2026 You're adding over four-hundred miles to our journey! In the dead of winter!\"\n\nHe yanked open a saddlebag and began hauling out lengths of canvas to set up a tent for the night. \"I hadn't actually done the measuring on a map, but that sounds about right, yes.\"\n\n\"For the gods' sake, why?\"\n\n\"Because that's where Vidiir is?\"\n\nOne look at Silbeth's face and the grin slipped from his own. Apparently, this was not the proper time for the sort of jesting that had become a habit between them over the past few days. Damn fickle humans.\n\n\"Because,\" he said far more seriously, \"I figured as long as I was setting out to try and neutralize the threat posed by a mad dragon, I might as well also swing by the Quindacran court and make them change their minds about withdrawing from the treaty.\"\n\nHe smiled tightly over the wrinkled canvas, mildly amused that, for once, Silbeth appeared honestly speechless. \"I mean, once you're already performing the impossible, it's not as though things can get any more difficult, right?\"\n\nOddly, though she continued to say nothing at all, Nycos couldn't shake the vague sense that she didn't entirely agree with his logic."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "\"What the hell sort of name is 'Wayloq,' anyway?\" Silbeth groused. \"It doesn't really sound Kirresci.\" She seemed as though she were trying to maintain the irritation she'd felt\u2014and shared\u2014since Nycos had announced their detour. Trying, and failing, thwarted by the warmth of the crackling fire in the hearth and the other gathered patrons, to say nothing of their recent hot meal, now reduced to steaming leftover scraps of mutton and fish spread about various plates. Truly comfortable and well-fed for the first time since leaving Talocsa, neither of them were able to keep their mood from partially thawing.\n\nSmim doubtless felt otherwise, but since he was confined to the rooms they'd let for the night\u2014they'd all decided, some more grudgingly than others, that they couldn't afford the attention a goblin would draw in the common room\u2014he was in no position to complain. He'd feel better once Nycos brought him up some food.\n\nNycos leaned back, a pewter tankard held at his lips, and glanced around. Walls of carefully fitted logs, tables bustling with clients and servers, a long bar along one end of the room, and the thick scents of heavy brews and roasting meats\u2026 It was the very spiritual ideal of a traveler's tavern. It was less the ambience, here at the Inn of the Hungry Dog, that concerned Nycos, however, but the patrons. Most, to judge by the rougher cut of their furs or the oiled sheen to their kaftans, were probably locals; trappers, sailors, or craftsmen, making their lives here at the very edges of Kirresc. The gazes they cast at Nycos and Silbeth in turn were inquisitive, but not hostile. They might wonder what these strangers were doing, traveling in such an unfriendly season, but it was an idle curiosity at worst.\n\n\"It's not,\" Nycos finally answered, having reassured himself\u2014for the umpteenth time\u2014that the inn concealed no hidden enemies or looming threats. \"Wayloq's been here since before Kirre the First claimed Talocsa as the capital of his kingdom-to-come. I understand it hasn't changed much in all those generations, either. Grew all the way,\" he explained sarcastically, \"from a large fishing town to a small port town.\n\n\"It's moderately important to Kirresci trade, but not big enough or close enough to the rest of civilization to be worth more than a modicum of royal attention, so\u2026\" He shrugged, then drained his flagon. \"It sits out here and does what it does, without much concern for what anyone else thinks.\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean like some people I know,\" she retorted. \"No wonder you wanted to come here.\"\n\n\"I wanted to come here so we'd have the chance to warm up and fill our bellies with something other than camp fare before approaching the border. I didn't hear you complaining about the fire or the food.\"\n\n\"I didn't say it was a bad idea,\" Silbeth grumbled.\n\nNycos, who had rarely felt the urge to sigh until he'd become human, swallowed one now. He couldn't really hold her resentment against her. It wasn't the change in plan, or even the perceived insanity of his intentions, he knew, that bothered her. It was the fact that he'd steadfastly refused to tell her what he meant to do in Vidiir, how he could possibly go about altering the course of an entire nation.\n\nAfter several days of building comradery, she'd taken his abrupt reticence on this one vital topic as a lack of trust. And to be fair, it was; she just couldn't possibly comprehend the magnitude of the secret he felt obliged to keep.\n\nHe did have to keep his true nature secret from her. Didn't he?\n\nAround them, conversation hummed, punctuated by raucous laughter and the clatter of dishes. Beyond, the peculiar melding of sleet and the lapping tide of the Cerenean Sea melded into a low, whispering song. An urge overtook him, to invite Silbeth to join him for a walk along the shoreline, along Wayloq's piers and the nearby inlets. It was only the sudden memory that the cold would bother not just her but\u2014in this form\u2014Nycos himself that stayed his tongue.\n\n\"Well,\" Silbeth said, pushing back from the table. \"If we've only got genuine beds to sleep in for one night, I don't intend to miss the opportunity. Good n\u2014\"\n\n\"How did you wind up joining the Priory of Steel?\" He'd been sitting on the question since they'd begun this trek, if not longer, and he hadn't meant for it to slip out here. Now that it was out, however, he found himself relieved, though that would doubtless change should she refuse to answer. It wasn't merely a matter of learning more about her, either, although that was certainly part of it. He couldn't yet have described why if he'd been asked, but he felt that this was the first step toward making a much bigger decision regarding how much of himself it would be safe to share.\n\nSilbeth had stopped, half-standing, so that she now hunched over the table. Her arms and her expression were equally stiff, while a dozen different emotions danced with the firelight reflected in her eyes. She spoke not a word, but Nycos could hear the questions and challenges all the same.\n\nMost of them amounted to, Why should I tell you something so personal when you so clearly don't trust me? And in all honesty, had she actually come out and asked him that, he would have been hard pressed to offer up an acceptable answer.\n\nFor whatever reason, though, she didn't ask. In fact, she seemed ever so slightly to relax as she sat back down. She tried to take a sip of her drink, discovered the flagon empty, and waved vaguely at the nearest server for another.\n\n\"My family is from Wenslir,\" she began, her words taking on a very different cadence than when she'd told so many of her other stories over the past few days. \"I was born in Imirrin.\n\n\"I know what you're thinking,\" she told him, even as he'd begun to nod in understanding. \"It's what everybody thinks. That everyone from Wenslir is a religious zealot. That's not so, of course\u2014but then again, there are a lot of reasons people believe it. My family is one of those reasons. I was seven years of age before I knew the difference between conversation and prayer.\"\n\nHer smile in response to his chuckle was faint but genuine, the first in two days. \"Close to half of my family were clergy of the Empyrean Choir. If you hadn't shown a penchant for some other craft or profession by adolescence, then it was just a matter of figuring out which god of the Choir you were best suited to serving.\"\n\n\"And did you? Show a penchant for something else?\"\n\n\"That\u2026 depends on your definition.\" Her new drink arrived, dropped off by a massive, broad-shouldered man of dark skin and even darker hair. He'd been working in and around the bar since the two of them had arrived, and gave every impression of owning or at least running the place. Silbeth seemed not to notice him, and had apparently forgotten that she was thirsty.\n\n\"Children fight,\" she said. \"It happens. Someone goes home with a split lip, maybe a broken nose, and quite possibly gets worse from their parents.\n\n\"Most children don't dig kitchenware into their opponents, or look for blunt objects as a reaction to perceived insults. I don't know how many people's bones I'd broken by the time I was eleven, but there's a fairly good chance that was when I first killed somebody.\"\n\nNycos couldn't move, could scarcely breathe. To say that this was not the story he'd anticipated was a colossal understatement. To say he couldn't entirely comprehend why she would confide this in him, especially under their current circumstances, even more so.\n\n\"I don't know for certain that the boy died.\" She spoke almost by rote, as if reciting off a written page. \"People pulled me off him, hustled me away, and my family moved soon after. But I'd hit him in the head with a loose paving stone from the street. If I didn't kill him, I can't imagine he hasn't wished every day since that I had.\"\n\nShe finally reached out to take a drink. Despite the apparent lack of emotion in her face, her voice, her posture, Nycos could hear the beer sloshing violently in the mug.\n\n\"Silbeth\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" She wiped her lips, lowered the flagon. \"I had a knack for the fighting, skills I'd picked up from watching others or practicing behind my parents' backs. It wasn't just wild blows and fury. In fact, I really don't remember ever feeling all that angry. I know I must have been, on some level, to react with such violence, but I didn't feel it.\n\n\"If my family didn't do something, I was going to wind up dead, either in a fight or on the gibbet. So of course, they turned to the gods. And it was through some of our friends in the priesthoods that I was eventually passed into the custody of various temples. Temples of war gods, of course. And from them, the Priory.\n\n\"Whatever was broken inside me, they fixed, though it took years. And I don't just mean they taught me to control whatever it was, though they did. Through various martial practices, meditations, all of that. There was magic involved, Nycos. No overt sorcery, but more subtle mysticism, through ritual and prayer.\"\n\nWhat was he to say to that? \"I can only imagine how grateful you must feel to them.\"\n\n\"Grateful, absolutely. But of far greater importance, I believe. I've seen, felt, what the forms and focus of battle can do for me. I know there's genuine power there. And I know that I've a knack for these skills, that the gods must have made me a warrior\u2014even before I knew what to do with that\u2014for a reason. That's why, of all the martial gods of the Choir, all those to whom the Priory offers its veneration, I've chosen Louros as my primary patron.\"\n\n\"The Lady of the Moons? Why?\" he asked, startled.\n\n\"Because she watches over those who travel by night. Those who are lost in darkness. As I was, in my own way.\" For the first time she looked away, gazing into her flagon or perhaps at the whorls in the wood of the table. \"A lot of people scoff at the Priory of Steel even as they respect our skills. They don't understand how we can consider what we do to be a religious practice, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I understand. Or I think I do, anyway.\" He felt dizzy, his entire view\u2014of the world? Or just of Silbeth Rasik?\u2014shaken slightly from its axis.\n\n\"Maybe you do at that.\" Again her chair scraped as she rose. \"Good night, Nycos. I hope you heard whatever answer it was you were seeking.\"\n\nHe watched her go, winding between various tables on her way to the stairs. He had no idea what answers he had sought, or whether he'd heard them\u2014but he knew, now, that he had more than a few new questions. That he might just be insane for even considering them.\n\nAnd that he probably ought not tell Smim he was thinking of asking them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "The morning was crisp, cold, windy but surprisingly clear as they left Wayloq, the Hungry Dog Inn, and the coast of the Cerenean Sea behind. And fortunate for them that the weather held, that\u2014though uncomfortable\u2014it never approached the levels of misery it had reached during their earlier travels. For they rode in silence the bulk of that day, and a portion of the next, each far too deeply lost in his or her own thoughts and emotions for the telling of tales or the trading of jibes.\n\nIt was just past noon, on the second day since they'd departed the port-and-fishing town, when they approached the border between Kirresc and Quindacra.\n\nThe border, and one particularly devastating error in judgment.\n\nWhile thick woodland lay not far to the north, an extension of the same sprawling forest of which the Brackenwood was part, vast stretches of the border were grassland with sporadic copses. Between that, and two days without much precipitation, going off road would scarcely have slowed or inconvenienced them. Sneaking into a sovereign nation carried with it some risk, certainly, but the odds of discovery in the vast expanse were negligible. It would have been simplicity itself to avoid the official crossing, and the tariff-collecting border station that sat alongside the highway.\n\nIn fact, the trio had gone off the road to avoid the Kirresci station. Nycos hadn't wanted to risk being recognized, however remote the chance. It would have been simple to stay off the highway, to enter Quindacra with the same stealth they'd exited Kirresc. Both nations kept such outposts a couple of miles back from the actual line on the map, to avoid stepping on one another's toes; a league-and-change across the grasses would have proved easy enough.\n\nBut Nycos had fretted over the various ways his plan could go awry, and he'd decided that being caught trying to sneak into Quindacra\u2014however improbable\u2014was a gamble not worth taking. He'd chosen to approach the crossing openly.\n\nIt was a simple hut, manned by roughly half a dozen soldiers, with little to differentiate it\u2014or them\u2014from their Kirresci counterparts, save colors and emblems on tabards. Perhaps their arms and armor were of slightly lower quality, their discipline suggestive of training not quite up to Kirresci standards, but not by any great degree.\n\nThe guards emerged from shelter as the trio approached, their faces chapped red and their breath steaming in the chill. Smim put his arms around himself and shivered heavily to explain why he kept his face wrapped, while Nycos and Silbeth stepped forward to speak. They answered a few perfunctory questions with a tale of an emergency in a cousin's business affairs, one that required winter travel. They were headed to Vidiir, the capital. Yes, they'd been here before and knew which highways to take. And yes, of course they were happy to pay an entry tariff, though Nycos made sure not to sound too content with the prospect.\n\nA smattering of silver Kirresci zlatka changed heavily gloved hands, the three of them began to ride on, and it was just as Nycos prepared to pull his scarf back over his face that the whole thing went to hell.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos?\" The death knell of a question came from a soldier at the back of the squad, a middle-aged man with the bearing of low gentry. \"Captain Arvisk! Remember? We met when you escorted Leomyn Guldoell home for Duke Hemmet's funeral.\"\n\nOh, damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn!\n\nNycos had no memory of any such thing, of course, but he couldn't exactly explain why to the excited soldier. And it wouldn't have mattered even if he could.\n\n\"Why in Alazir's name are you traveling without a retinue, and in this weather no less? You could\u2014\"\n\nHe died instantly, his skull neatly cloven with a single arc of Nycos's szandzsya. He would go to Vizret's realm, or wherever else, never knowing what had killed him, and for that, Nycos found himself oddly grateful. It would occur to him only later that what he felt in that moment was a pang, however faint, of guilt. That, though once he would have given it nary a second thought, today he actively wished he need not do what he was about to do.\n\nHe wished, but it wouldn't stop him.\n\nAvalanche spun at the merest pressure of his rider's knees, the scent of blood driving the warhorse into a screaming exultation. The sabre-spear whistled, slicing cold air and hot flesh, and a second soldier fell, features locked in a mask of permanent bewilderment.\n\nBy now the rest of the border guards had overcome their shock, crying out in alarm, hefting spears and yanking swords from scabbards. Nycos lunged into their midst, his mount surging beneath him, a living siege engine. Two more Quindacrans died, one by szandzsya, the other beneath the winter-wrapped but still iron-shod hooves of Avalanche.\n\nThat left only two of the original six, but their shouted warnings had quickly drawn\u2014perhaps awakened\u2014others. Although unarmored, a few still blinking the sleep from their eyes, the second shift poured from the hut, and if any remained drowsy, the twin slaps of the cold and the sight of comrades sprawled across hard earth woke them well enough.\n\nOf greater concern to Nycos, three of them held not sword or spear, but recurved bows crafted in the Kirresci style. That last was an irony the knight felt unable to appreciate.\n\nOnly two arrows flew, however\u2014both of which Nycos evaded, though he nearly hurled himself from Avalanche's back\u2014before the newly arrived soldiers found themselves threatened up close. Silbeth was among them now, sword and buckler flashing, forcing the archers to drop their bows in favor of blades. Blood flew, the horse reared, and steel shrieked against steel.\n\nSmim appeared behind the pair still facing Nycos. He clutched a short chopping blade he'd acquired somewhere in Oztyerva, more cleaver than sword or sabre. One soldier fell, screaming, having never seen the goblin coming. The other perished an instant later beneath Nycos's larger weapon.\n\nNycos paused only an instant, troubled by Smim's peculiar expression, then once again prodded Avalanche into a sprint. Skilled as Silbeth was, Nycos wasn't prepared to leave her facing six-to-one odds on her own.\n\nOr even four-to-one, which is how the confrontation stood by the time he reached her side. Between the pair of them, those remaining four dwindled to zero in moments.\n\nBlood and other fluids steamed heavily in the winter air, while the miasma of offal and human pieces never intended for the light of day scratched at their nostrils, their throats, their lungs with ragged nails of fume. The horses shifted, whickering uneasily, their pulses still racing but no threats left to face. Silbeth reached two fingers to her forehead, wiping away a sheen of perspiration that was already freezing into a thin glaze.\n\n\"Explain to me,\" she said in low tone, \"why we just slaughtered twelve people who were not our enemies?\"\n\nHe cast about him, his attention tugged in morbid fascination to the swiftly cooling pools of crimson, rippling glutinously in the breeze. When he did reply, his words were softer even than hers. \"I\u2026 It never even crossed my mind that someone here might recognize me! Some random soldier, not even Kirresci? It\u2026 The odds\u2026!\"\n\n\"Yeah. I've been on the boot-end of Donaris's fickle moods more than a time or two, myself.\" She, too, turned about as though burning the sight of the bodies into her memory. \"You\u2014we killed them to keep a secret?\"\n\n\"We killed them to prevent a war.\" Nycos straightened in his saddle. \"If anyone\u2014anyone\u2014learns that Nycolos Anvarri was here in Quindacra, what I'm planning won't work.\"\n\n\"I suppose I'd have known that, if I had any idea what you were planning.\" She no longer sounded accusatory or even especially irate over his reticence, just mildly discontent. \"What are we doing with these poor idiots? The highways may not see a lot of travel at this time of year, but someone's still going to find this mess well before we've reached Vidiir.\"\n\n\"We need to make this look like bandits,\" he decided after a bit of thought. Then, \"Yes, I know, it's peculiar for bandits to attack an armed border station. Maybe they were desperate over the lack of winter traffic. I don't know. It just has to look right. Smim?\"\n\n\"On it, Master.\" The goblin dropped from his horse and set about rifling the bodies for valuables. Silbeth, vaguely disgusted, gathered the better of the fallen weapons, while Nycos went inside to find the strongbox, or wherever they kept the tariffs they collected.\n\nThey even went so far as to leave some extra drag marks where the earth wasn't too rock-hard to accept them, used a few of the dead\u2014after careful maneuvering\u2014to scatter extra bloodstains about the battlefield. It wouldn't look right without some evidence of wounded raiders.\n\nAnd then there was nothing else for it but to move on.\n\nNycos dropped back as they rode, letting Silbeth take the lead. \"It's not like you to keep your opinions to yourself, Smim,\" he said to his old companion. \"But you've clearly had something to say for a while now.\"\n\n\"Nothing important, Master. I'm just fine.\"\n\n\"Ah. Just being sullen and resentful for the warmth, then?\"\n\nBeady eyes glared from a woven bird's nest of scarves.\n\n\"Come on, Smim. What's bothering you?\"\n\n\"What's bothering me, Master, is that you're bothered!\"\n\nIt took Nycos a moment to work through that and figure out what the goblin referred to. \"You mean the fight back there.\"\n\n\"Not a fight, Master. A massacre. The soldiers never had a chance, and you know it.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to make me feel worse about it?\"\n\nThe goblin's fists clenched so tightly on the reins that his horse stumbled, twisting his head in confusion. \"No, damn it, but that's precisely my point!\" He calmed himself, quieting his voice with a suspicious sneer at the woman riding ahead. \"You shouldn't feel anything about it!\"\n\nNycos shrugged. It wasn't a huge weight, but\u2026 \"Those people shouldn't have had to die, Smim.\"\n\n\"And they didn't especially have to live, either. Why does it matter, Master? Why are you giving it a second thought? They're just humans!\"\n\n\"I\u2026 Yes, they are. And I did what I had to do.\"\n\n\"Yet you're still fretting over it. Tzavalantzaval wouldn't mope about it.\"\n\nThe many layers Smim wore to protect himself from the cold guarded him against the worst of the blow as well. Still, it was more than sufficient to bruise, and to send him hurtling from the saddle to the cold, packed earth.\n\n\"I am Tzavalantzaval!\" Nycos hissed at him, near shaking with rage. He couldn't remember ever raising a hand or a claw to the goblin, but the implication behind Smim's words gouged his soul. He only just kept his voice low enough that Silbeth, now riding madly back their way, would not hear the declaration. \"Do not ever forget it!\"\n\n\"I'm not the one, Master,\" Smim said, hauling himself upright with a hand on the stirrup and no doubt already coming up with some lie to tell Silbeth about what had happened, \"who seems to be in danger of forgetting.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "More people would die tonight. He would take pains to avoid it where he could, and if fortune were with him they would be few, but Nycos had no illusions. Under no circumstances would he greet the dawn with clean hands.\n\nHe wondered idly, as he peered at the flickering lights of Vidiir through a veil of sleet, why that thought disturbed him less than the murder of the border guards, now almost a week gone by. Did their proximity to the king, these soldiers of the capital and of Castle Auric, bestow upon them, in Nycos's sight, some of the guilt and treachery of their sovereign? So that he felt they deserved an unkind fate more than their distant brethren?\n\nOr had the fact that this was always an element of his plan, that he'd had longer to adjust to the idea, simply rendered their possible deaths less impactful?\n\nNycos shook himself, and not just to rid himself of the chilling snow accumulating on his shoulders and hood. It didn't matter. He was here, and he knew what he had to do. The night was already half over, and he must be done and away by dawn.\n\nThey had camped, the three travelers, in the wilds just outside Vidiir, hidden behind a small rise and within a copse of bare boles. Nycos had departed the moment Silbeth was asleep, leaving Smim with a variety of instructions\u2014and a warning, in no uncertain terms, of what would happen to the goblin if the woman was to suffer any sort of \"accident\" in his master's absence. He'd also left behind his weapons, which were too obviously of Kirresci make, and his armor, which would have rendered stealth nigh impossible.\n\nAnyone but Smim would have thought him a fool, that he'd rendered himself helpless.\n\nFrom there, Nycos chose a roundabout way to the city proper. The ice and snow fell heavily enough, but the weather was fickle, and the drifts that had already accumulated lay thick. He had no wish to risk leaving a trail, however unlikely, to his companions' camp. Thus, Nycos had instead made his way to the shore, and through the lapping tides that would hide any tracks.\n\nHe crouched now in those same frigid waters, soaked to the knees, leaning against the slimy pylon of a pier and studying, as best he could, the great port that was Quindacra's seat of power. It scarcely bothered him, that cold. Little in the way of discomfort would bother him now.\n\nBeneath his heavy cloak and thick winter garb, Nycos had become something that nobody he would meet tonight had ever seen. Something with little concern for trivialities such as weather.\n\nFinally certain no passersby lurked between the docks and the streets beyond, Nycos broke into a run. The sound of his steps was lost in the pounding surf behind, the wind and frozen rain all about. In seconds he crossed the gap, a slightly darker blur against the icy night. None saw him, and even if they had, they would have dismissed him as a trick of shadow, for nothing human could move so fast.\n\nIn that sprint, with the wind in his face, he exulted. Never since he had become Nycolos Anvarri had he willed such strength into his limbs, such power into his body. He could not be a dragon, not now, perhaps never again, but tonight he came as near to it as he could without the sliver of Wyrmtaker piercing his heart.\n\nTonight, he need not pass as human.\n\nHe reached the edge of the street and sprang for the rooftops. His talons stretched out, ready to pierce the walls be they wood or stone, but they proved unnecessary. His jump carried him more than high enough, and he alighted firmly on the eaves of a fishmonger's storehouse. Again he ran, until the edge of the rooftop loomed, and another leap easily cleared the narrow avenue with room to spare.\n\nThus did he cross the breadth of Vidiir, yards above the streets, above the view of any duty-bound guards or unfortunate pedestrians forced outside this miserable night.\n\nIt wasn't too unlike Talocsa, this city. The buildings trended slightly narrower, the whitewashing and paint less colorful. Fewer streets were paved or lit with any regularity, and to judge by those few souls he observed, simple cloaks were favored over coat or kaftan. All he had heard over the past year proclaimed the wood and stone here were of poorer quality than in Kirresc, but between the haze of the storm and his own lack of expertise, Nycos saw no difference.\n\nIt didn't smell at all the same, though. All those ambient scents he'd grown accustomed to\u2014the vegetation (however muted by the season), the lingering cookfires, the nearby woods, they were all different. Even the people had dissimilar odors, doubtless due to their diet. The aroma of fish, and the tang of the Cerenean Sea, infused it all.\n\nBuilding by building, street by street, he neared his goal. Most of the rooftops he could reach with an inhuman bound, sometimes covering several dozen feet with each. Occasionally, as he passed through wealthier parts of town, he had to climb to the top of a particularly high structure, and that was when his claws proved their worth. While most Vidiirians were surely asleep, or attributed his sounds to the frozen rain, he doubtless drew some attention with his footsteps, or the crunch of talons on stone. If anyone came out to investigate, however, he was gone long before they appeared, the evidence of his passing already hidden by his co-conspirators, the wind and snow.\n\nOnly twice did he come across a gap too wide to traverse, where open courtyard and grand avenue combined into a veritable chasm between the buildings. There he clambered down and dashed across the roadways, and just as before, he moved unseen.\n\nUntil, finally, he stared at the moat and the outer walls of his destination.\n\nCastle Auric. What sort of insecure, puffed-up jackass names his fortress \"Castle Auric\"?\n\nDespite the grandiose epithet, the keep boasted no actual gold, or even gold coloration, that Nycos saw\u2014though that could, he acknowledged, have been a trick of the light and the weather. Still, all he observed was stone, from the curtain wall to the looming silhouettes of towers rather more slender and more square of roof than those to which he was accustomed. At the base of that wall flowed a narrow moat, sluggish and half-gelid, splotched with leprous scabs of dirty ice.\n\nAll protected, but the sentries at the gate huddled in the mean shelter of the guardhouse, while those who patrolled the walls hurried through sporadic rounds and otherwise took refuge within the watchtowers. Any given length of parapet remained absent of witnesses for minutes at a time.\n\nSloppy, perhaps, but understandable. No invading army besieged those walls, and even if an assassin were somehow skilled enough to anchor a hook and climb the stone unheard, none in his right mind would try on a night such as this. What did they have, really, to stand guard against?\n\nNycos retreated far enough for a running start, waited for the gusts and the crunch of sleet to pick up, and then hurtled the moat. He soared briefly through the frigid air, then thrust out his hands as the wall loomed to meet him.\n\nTalons crunched into stone, catching fast against the pull of gravity and the push of wind. They didn't sink in too deeply. With the might of his true body he could have dug whole craters from the rock, but he lacked much of that strength now, however he enhanced his human form. Those claws though, remained as sharp and as hard as always, and that was enough to hold.\n\nIt was also why, at some point between here and Gronch, he would have to\u2026\n\nNycos shuddered and cringed from that unpleasant thought. It was a travail for another day, and he had enough to worry about right now.\n\nHand over hand, he hauled himself upward, the tips of his talons digging the tiniest furrows. Once or twice he regretted not having shed his boots, wishing he could have used his feet to cling against sudden blasts of wind, but the strength of his arms proved sufficient. He peered over the parapet, ensuring that none of the soldiers lurked nearby. Then, satisfied everything was clear, he scrambled over and across, took another quick look to ensure the inner bailey beyond was equally deserted, and dropped.\n\nA vicious chorus of barks and snarls burst from what must have been the kennel as the royal hunting hounds caught his scent, but either the to-do went unheard amidst the freezing storm, or the beasts' keepers assumed they were reacting to the weather.\n\nShadow to shadow he flitted, ducking behind various outbuildings where he could, no matter that the entire courtyard was a sea of gloom. Several flickering lanterns warred against the night as he drew nearer the main keep, and it wouldn't do to let some eagle-eyed sentry spot him now. This close, he saw that many of Castle Auric's windows and doorways, as well as some of the bas-relief adornment on waterspouts and supporting columns, were indeed trimmed in gold\u2014or at least something gilded. Given the place's smaller, more utilitarian construction as compared to the likes of Oztyerva, it felt rather akin to putting a goblin in a wedding gown.\n\nHe decided against sharing that particular observation with Smim when he told his companions of this night.\n\nPenetrating the inner keep proved bloodier work. None of the doors were barred; since the inhabitants weren't currently besieged, they saw no need to make the jobs of the soldiers and servants any more difficult. Even the smallest and most insignificant of those entryways, however, boasted a few guards within.\n\nThose same claws that had punctured stone felt little resistance in chainmail and flesh. Nycos dragged the trio of bodies into the first side chamber he could find, and quickened his pace.\n\nMost of the castle slumbered, so he was forced to kill on only two further occasions before finally reaching the uppermost floor of the keep. It took almost another hour, hall by hall, door by door, to figure out whose chambers were whose, and then to sneak into one without waking the inhabitants.\n\nHe didn't quite succeed. As he slipped inside, a young servant on a bed near the door sat upright, blinking in drowsy confusion. A few candles on a side table cast a bit of light throughout the room, enough for her to instantly recognize that he didn't belong. She drew breath to scream, hands clutched to her chest, and Nycos had no choice. A brief lunge, and the only sound to emerge was the harsh snap of her neck.\n\nLong he stood over the body, in part listening to make sure the sleepers across the suite hadn't awoken, but mostly staring unhappily at the limp form. He'd killed many since becoming Nycolos, quite a few on this journey, and several this very night. But the others, to the last, had been some manner of threat. Soldiers. Bandits. The woman who'd purchased him, held him, as a slave. Even if not an enemy in the moment, they'd been people of violence in one form or another, people who, while maybe not deserving of death, had chosen a life where they must regularly face it.\n\nNot this one. She'd been a maidservant, nothing more, had probably counted herself intensely lucky to work for the royal family. Guilty of nothing, not a woman of violence who'd known death potentially lurked around the next corner.\n\nSmim had been right. This sort of thing shouldn't disturb him. He did what he must\u2014and not merely for himself, as had long been his wont, but for the greater good of others. He shouldn't feel remorse, shouldn't give it a second thought, shouldn't care.\n\nSo why did he?\n\nDespondent, he cast about the room until he found what he needed. Carefully, quietly, he took it from the floor beside the other bed, where a pair of small figures still slept, blissfully unaware. Slipping his prize into a pouch at his belt, he crept back toward the hall, pausing only to lay a heavy quilt over the body. He didn't want anyone awakening to that sight, if it could be helped.\n\nThen, softly shutting the door behind him, he moved toward his final destination of the night.\n\nThe doors to the royal couple's bedchamber were larger, the lintel trimmed in gold. It was also guarded, though not from without. Careful listening with inhuman ears revealed a pair of individuals standing on either side of the door within the room beyond. Doubtless the king and queen had a full suite, so the presence of the guards inside was no invasion of their privacy.\n\nTricky to deal with, but not impossible.\n\nNycos scraped a claw across the wall not far from the door, just loud enough to be heard. The guards would ignore it, doubtless taking it for some servant delivering a late-night message or snack to someone.\n\nSo he waited a moment and repeated it.\n\nAnd then again. And again.\n\nEnough to draw attention, not enough to raise genuine suspicion. If he'd read the atmosphere in Castle Auric right, the soldiers\u2014expecting no danger, fully secure in their fortress\u2014should grow curiously irritated long before the idea of a genuine threat even crossed their minds.\n\nIt was after the fourth scrape that the lock opened with a heavy thunk and the door swung gently inward. \"What's the ruckus out here?\" one of the soldiers demanded, poking his head out into the hall. \"Their Majesties are trying to sl\u2014\"\n\nNycos grabbed the man's skull, talons punching through bone. The second guard hadn't yet brought her halberd around, nor drawn breath to shout a warning, before he was inside. He wrapped a fist around the haft of the weapon, yanked it and her forward, and opened the front of her throat, only just pivoting away from the crimson jet that followed. Catching the body before it could clatter too loudly to the floor, he lowered her, pulled the other corpse inside, and then carefully shut the door.\n\nA quick glance around the suite showed a number of rooms for this purpose or that, all larger and rather more ornate than necessary, but only a single shut door. He'd have known that for the bedchamber even without the faint snoring he heard from beyond.\n\nNycos hit that door, a living battering ram, crossed the room and was crouched atop the mattress, claws to the king's throat, before either he or the queen knew what was happening. A heavy rope hung beside the bed, doubtless to summon servants or aid. Nycos turned his head far enough that it was clear, even under the hood he'd worn against the weather, where he was looking.\n\n\"Listen to what I've come to say, your Majesties,\" he told them, his voice made rough and raspy by his partial transformation, \"and you will both see the dawn. Try to escape, try to raise an alarm\u2014any sort of alarm\u2014and if you're fortunate, I'll kill you both before I leave. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"How dare\u2014?!\" the king started to squeak, while her Majesty drew breath to scream.\n\nNycos lifted his other hand, the talons still wet with the blood of the guards, and allowed the viscous mess to drip across the velvet quilt. The other tightened, just enough to press against skin without quite puncturing it.\n\n\"Do you. Understand?\"\n\nBoth nodded, although the king moved rather more timidly of the two.\n\nNycos drew back to stand beside the bed rather than atop it. He moved through the gossamer canopy then ripped it off the frame, tossing it behind him, so nothing stood, even symbolically, between him and the royal couple. Then he reached up, grasping the rope with one hand and severing it flush against the ceiling with the talons of the other.\n\nUp close and without his regalia, King Boruden was a nondescript man: slim, of average complexion and brownish hair, a faint beard not much thicker than an adolescent's. His wife, Queen Emdara, was taller, more attractive; her pale skin and blonde hair implied an almost pure Elgarrad ancestry. She also had the vacant (if currently fearful) features to suggest that Boruden had married for appearance over ability.\n\nHow like the man.\n\n\"People have died here tonight, your Majesties,\" Nycos said, \"and you brought that on them. Though I'd have wished otherwise, I will kill to achieve my purpose. Said purpose would be better served with the two of you alive, but I can work with your successors if need be.\"\n\n\"How do you propose to get away with this?\" Boruden demanded, though he kept his tone low. \"When I learn who sent you\u2014\"\n\nNycos finally drew back his hood. And had someone compelled him to be honest in that moment, he would have admitted that he missed, desperately, eliciting the sort of reaction, the sort of terror, his appearance wrought; the fear and obedience that were his by right\u2026\n\nBeneath his cloak was a visage scarcely human. Lizard-like scales the hue of rich wine covered every inch of flesh, down to lips and eyelids. His face was distended by unhinged jaws and predator's fangs, and his eyes were a gleaming, slitted gold. Nobody, not even Mariscal or Kortlaus, would have recognized Nycolos Anvarri in that image.\n\nHe didn't know if Borduen was aware that Ktho Delios was somehow working with Vircingotirilux, but he'd doubtless heard the tales of the dragon's rampages. Let the wyrm of Gronch serve Nycos's purposes for once. \"Look at me, Your Majesty. Who do you think sent me?\"\n\nThe rulers of Quindacra nearly choked on their screams.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Boruden finally forced through clenched throat.\n\n\"Open warfare doesn't suit our needs at this time. We can't have Ktho Delios trying to expand its borders. So Quindacra is going to remain a faithful signatory to the southern nations' treaty.\"\n\n\"How\u2026 How could you possibly\u2014?\"\n\n\"You are going to send couriers to the court of every other pact nation, with a sealed message. In it, you are going to declare that you pretended to go along with Ktho Delios's scheme to learn more about it, but that now you are prepared to share that information with your allies. You will, then, proceed to detail everything\u2014dates, names, methods of contact, everything. They won't believe you, but they'll accept the explanation if it means keeping you as an ally, and it will allow you to save face.\"\n\n\"You can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't send only one messenger to each nation. Send five or six, to make certain the message arrives. You will follow that up by sending ambassadors back to all the other courts. You will also make a public proclamation to your citizens, explaining how Ktho Delios approached you to be part of their dishonest, unworthy scheme, and how you are assisting your neighbors in standing up to them. Use words such as 'honor' and 'loyalty' and 'as the gods would expect of you.' Humans seem to respond well to that sort of thing.\"\n\nThe queen spoke for the first time, through trembling lips. \"Won't\u2026 won't that let Ktho Delios know that we've turned on them? They're\u2026 They've almost certainly got people in Vidiir, watching.\"\n\n\"Yes, it will. You won't have the option of changing sides yet again.\"\n\n\"You don't understand!\" Boruden was practically begging, woefully unkingly behavior. \"Quindacra could gain so much from\u2014\"\n\nNycos hissed, a hideous reptilian sound. \"This is not about your nation! This is about you, your delusions of persecution and poverty! You will gain nothing! But let me explain what you have to lose.\n\n\"If you turn on Ktho Delios, you will anger them, but they cannot attack you, not without facing every other nation of the south. But if you do not do as I say, your Majesties, you die. Pure and simple. You have no comprehension of what I am, what I can do. You cannot keep me out. You cannot hide from me. And even if you could, you have no defenses against the one I serve. We have spared your nation from our ravages thus far.\" Because the Ktho Delians think you an ally, but you needn't know that. \"That can change.\"\n\nNycos moved around the bed, so he now stood at the foot of the mattress. \"While I think it unlikely, it's possible I've misjudged you. It is possible that fear for your own lives isn't the motivator I think it to be. So I leave you with this.\"\n\nHe reached into his pouch and tossed onto the bed the item he'd taken from the adjoining room, where he'd killed the unfortunate servant. It was a toy animal, a knitted and stuffed unicorn, taken from where the royal couple's youngest child had dropped it sometime during the day.\n\n\"Your lives are not the only ones forfeit if you disobey.\" He stepped back, knowing that, to their limited vision, he had faded into the shadows. He would, he decided, break the latch on the door as he departed. Without the rope to summon aid, it would take the king and queen some time to get out or attract attention, giving him plenty of opportunity to vacate the castle. \"I am going to intercept several of your couriers, chosen at random. If the messages do not read as I have instructed, if their orders are anything other than I've instructed, if you haven't delivered your address to your people before the sun sets tomorrow\u2026 Then I will be having this conversation with your successors the day after.\n\n\"And those successors will not be your children. Have a lovely night, your Majesties, and try to get some sleep. You've a busy day ahead of you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "Baron Kortlaus and Crown Marshal Laszlan proceeded up the gently winding stairs with the too-steady and overly precise steps of men fully aware they've imbibed just a little bit more than they ought.\n\nThe bulk of the evening, over which much wine was consumed, had been spent in discussions of a martial nature. Orban held many such meetings with a variety of nobles and officers, putting together countless possible plans and counter-plans for the moment Ktho Delios finally made their move. Kortlaus was present for of those sessions, as one of Orban's three\u2014or two, to hear him speak of it now\u2014possible successors. Tonight, however, he'd attended not as a potential Crown Marshal, but as Baron of Urwath, since the territories and strategies under consideration involved his own lands and soldiers.\n\nOnce the borders on the map had begun to move under their own power\u2014an effect, to be fair, caused as much by exhaustion as by drink\u2014they'd elected to wrap up the conversation. The talk, then, had turned to more personal matters, a discussion that continued as the baron politely walked the old marshal back to his quarters.\n\n\"\u2026doesn't matter,\" Orban explained as the steps gave way to carpeted, lantern-lit hallway, \"how sure you are that you won't let your affections influence how you command him in battle. It will interfere. You'll find yourself wondering, 'Does his station really need to be over there, where it's so dangerous? Surely he could do just as much good over here.'\"\n\n\"I don't know, Orban, I really feel I could separate\u2014\"\n\n\"We all do, initially. But you can't. And even if you could? He won't believe it. He'll wonder if he's earned every opportunity you give, every choice assignment, or if you're doing him personal favors. He'll wonder if every shit duty you give him is you compensating for any potential influence. And what about the other men and women under you? They'll wonder the same. It breeds resentment, and resentment between a commander and his soldiers is lethal. To people and possibly to nations.\"\n\nThey turned a corner, the shadows around them seeming to dance in time with their footsteps. \"You make it sound as though a bit of dallying is going to bring all of Kirresc crashing down.\"\n\n\"It probably won't. But it's not impossible. There's a reason we have rules about officers fraternizing with soldiers under their command. And while those don't necessarily bind you, as baron and lord of your own vassals, let us just say that it remains a strong suggestion.\"\n\n\"How strong?\"\n\n\"'Keep it behind your codpiece where your subordinates are concerned if you ever want to be Crown Marshal, or to prevent your troops from being co-opted by royal decree' strong.\"\n\n\"Ah. That is strong.\"\n\n\"Isn't it, though?\" Orban suddenly laughed. \"I promise you, you're not the first officer or nobleman I've had this talk with, Kortlaus. You'll get over it.\"\n\n\"Oh, I've no doubt. When did you and his Majesty have it?\"\n\nThe Crown Marshal froze, and Kortlaus\u2014feeling suddenly a lot more sober\u2014wondered if he'd just stepped in something too deep to easily yank himself out. But while Orban's smile turned sheepish, it didn't fade. \"Would you prefer the official response to that, or the unofficial one?\"\n\n\"How about both?\"\n\n\"The truth is, King Hasyan and I did give this a lot of thought, before we\u2026 became too deeply involved. I've a signed and sealed royal proclamation, granting me permission to ignore even the king's own commands if I ever feel they're intended to protect me at the cost of a military objective or any of my people.\"\n\nKortlaus boggled.\n\n\"That's the official response,\" the marshal continued. \"Unofficially? Um, I'm an old hypocrite, and you should do as I say, not as I do.\"\n\nBetween the wine and his relief at not having offended the man who held his future in his hands, Kortlaus's laughter was more uproarious than the comment warranted. Either way, however, both men were in high spirits when they finally reached the door to the marshal's quarters.\n\n\"Remember,\" Orban said. \"We've an early morning briefing with Sir Jancsiv and Dame Zirresca on saddlery and barding stockpiles.\"\n\nKortlaus groaned aloud and staggered theatrically against a buttress in the stone. \"Surely we can put that off for later in the day!\"\n\n\"Not a chance. My schedule's too full, and if I'm rising early after tonight, you're rising early.\"\n\nThe baron sighed loudly. \"Taskmaster.\"\n\n\"And don't you forget it.\"\n\nThe younger man began to walk away, and then, unable to help himself, \"Orban, have you heard any news of\u2014?\"\n\n\"The idiot? No.\" As always when the subject of Nycolos Anvarri came up, the Crown Marshal sounded equal parts furious and afraid. \"No, I have not.\"\n\nHe'd known better, but it had been over a week since he'd last asked. Worry had gotten the better of him. He definitely knew better than to press the topic. \"Understood. Sleep well, Marshal.\"\n\nOrban grunted something vaguely polite. Kortlaus left him fumbling at his door, retracing his steps down the hall and wishing his own quarters were nearer.\n\nWhat the hell was Nycos thinking?! Did he understand what he'd done, how much trouble he was in, the opportunity he'd assuredly torched without hope of repair? Kortlaus had no doubt his old friend believed he was doing something important, something right, but he still wanted to strangle the man with his bare hands. He'd only barely climbed back into everyone's good graces from the first time he'd pulled something like this. He couldn't possibly have thought he'd be allowed to do so twice!\n\nAs he'd done so many times, Kortlaus silently begged the gods and the heavens for some kind of answer, some flash of insight that would make Nycos's actions make sense. And as every time before, they failed to answer.\n\nThis time, though, Kortlaus heard something. The clatter of toppling furniture, the familiar limp thump of a falling body\u2026\n\nHe shouted, calling for help from whomever might hear him, even as he pounded back toward the marshal's chamber. He hit the door hard, shoulder first, unconcerned now with courtesy or propriety.\n\nThe room beyond was unlit, a murky swirl of shadows as unsteady as a wind-swept pool. Still, the illumination from the hallway peeked furtively around the corner, enabling him to make out a pair of figures\u2014one sprawled awkwardly beside the table, the other standing, one hand raised high and clutching a blade that reflected the feeble gleam.\n\nAgain Kortlaus cried out, tensing to spring at the mysterious figure, enraged beyond measure that anyone would dare attack the old Crown Marshal here in his own home, in the safety of Oztyerva Palace. And then he too collapsed, a flash of agony swiftly fading into soothing unconsciousness, felled from behind by a second assailant he'd never seen."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "The commotion spread through an entire wing of the palace. Servants and soldiers raced through the halls, drawn first by alarmed shouts and then by frantic commands as word of what had happened spread through Oztyerva. Nobles awakened to the furor and either opened their doors to learn more or barricaded them for extra safety against the unknown tumult, depending upon their individual natures.\n\nAll save one particular nobleman, who did neither.\n\nHe'd known this was coming, if not tonight then soon enough. He'd arranged it, provided servants' garb, patrol schedules, the layout of Oztyerva, everything necessary to make it possible. Still it came as a shock to hear it actually happening. Only now was it real, and he felt as though the blood had drained not merely from his face but his entire body. He grew weak, dizzy, and found himself kneeling beside his great, almost decadently lush bed.\n\nHe'd done what he must. With so much at stake, he'd had to take such drastic steps! Not just for his own ambitions, but for the greater good!\n\nThey'd made him do this!\n\nMargrave Andarjin tried so very hard to pray, but even the gods could hardly have understood him through the tears he would never have shed before another living soul."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "Saying only that he needed to be sure his plan had worked, Nycos had insisted on remaining in the vicinity of Vidiir for another couple of days. In that time, he'd snuck back into the city to ensure King Boruden carried through with his proclamation, and that the messengers were dispatched as ordered. Nycos was fully prepared to pay the royal couple another visit if necessary, despite the fact that Castle Auric was now swarming with additional soldiers. Fortunately, it hadn't proved necessary. Whether fearful for their own lives (a threat on which Nycos would have followed through without a second thought) or for their children (a threat Nycos honestly didn't know if he'd have carried out), the king and queen obeyed. They addressed the populace from the walls of Castle Auric, and indeed dispatched several dozen couriers\u2014couriers who, to judge by the one Nycos intercepted on the snowy highway, carried precisely the message he'd demanded.\n\nIt had been, all told, a brute force effort, but Nycos was convinced that was why it had worked. Facing a known opponent or diplomatic pressures, Boruden would have been in his element. This? A monster in his own bedchamber? He'd been helpless. Perhaps he might eventually have devised some scheme or deception to get around the problem, but that was why Nycos had given him no time to think.\n\nUnfortunately, Nycos had decided, he himself was also out of time. He'd something he needed to do, and he'd already put it off as long as possible.\n\nAfter scouring the grasslands around Vidiir for a while, he finally found a rock large and flat enough to serve his purposes. Hauling it from the earth, he'd then carried it to the nearest copse of trees and settled within.\n\nWincing in anticipation, he laid his left hand on the rock. An instant's focus, and the fingertips of both hands again transformed into those fearsome, piercing talons.\n\nWith utmost care, he placed the tips of his right-hand claws against the first knuckles of his left hand; any higher and he wouldn't get the roots. A deep shout in defiance of the pain to come, to summon the fortitude he needed, and he pressed his right hand down, hard, until talons met rock.\n\nA few moments drifted by as he caught his breath, allowed the first wave of shock and pain to subside. With his undamaged hand, he carefully collected the claws he'd severed from the other, wrapped them and slid them into his pack.\n\nSilbeth's frustration and irritation shifted to concern when he'd wandered back to camp, his left hand swathed in bloody bandages. \"What happened?!\"\n\n\"Tree branch broke when I was trying to climb, get a better view of the surroundings.\"\n\nAnd just like that, her concern faded. \"In this weather? Ten feet up or a hundred, you couldn't see a dancing manticore more than a few yards out. If you're going to lie to me, Nycos, at least pretend you don't think I'm an idiot.\"\n\nSmim snickered. Nycos cast a sidelong glare, and the snickering abruptly stopped. Without another word, he'd begun to strike camp.\n\nThanks to winter's various moods and leavings, to say nothing of the lack of convenient highways, it took them almost a week to reach Quindacra's border and pass into neighboring Wenslir\u2014deliberately far from any official crossings. The countryside didn't change much, nor were there any obvious markers out here in the wild, so the precise moment of transition was something of a guess. It hadn't been long, however, before they'd stumbled upon what had once been a Wenslirran village, now a charred skeleton half-buried by snow. Not merely the buildings, but the surrounding trees, had been razed by a flame so brutally intense that, in its hottest spots, even ash hadn't survived.\n\n\"I've never seen a fire that could do this,\" Silbeth whispered as they picked their way past the lonely ruin.\n\n\"I have,\" was the only reply Nycos could make.\n\nLater that afternoon, he'd steered Avalanche over to pace beside her\u2014a simple act made frustrating by his still-healing hand. \"Silbeth, how does your religious devotion to an assignment impact your behavior after the assignment's complete?\"\n\nRather understandably, she blinked at him. \"You're going to need to clarify that a bit.\"\n\n\"I mean\u2026\" His grip on the reins saved him from waving his hands about and making himself look even more foolish. \"You're here to keep me safe.\"\n\n\"Ostensibly. Something I'd feel a lot more confident about if you weren't constantly running off and keeping things from me.\"\n\n\"No doubt. But, suppose you were to\u2026 learn something about my past.\" He kept his gaze firmly, stiffly forward. \"A secret that, were it to come out, would cause me great harm.\"\n\n\"Then,\" she said thoughtfully, \"as long as this secret in no way meant that I'd been misled as to the nature of the job I'd undertaken, I'd be obliged to keep it.\"\n\n\"But only so long as the assignment lasted?\"\n\nIt was an odd look for her, but Silbeth fidgeted in her saddle. \"It's a murky area,\" she admitted finally. \"I would\u2026 probably keep it to myself anyway. Unless I felt doing so was going to severely harm others, or a future contract somehow required me to reveal it.\"\n\nNycos slumped. \"So you couldn't guarantee you'd never speak of it.\"\n\n\"No. No, I couldn't make that promise.\" Then, clearly sensing the unspoken importance, she added, \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nSo am I. It startled him how much so, and he realized\u2014much to his own chagrin\u2014how deeply he wanted to be able to trust her, to stop keeping her in the dark as he had been.\n\nIt made sense, though. No matter how strongly the Priory of Steel considered its members' assignments to carry the weight of religious writ, that devotion had to end when the job did. Otherwise, they couldn't commit equally to the next one, or the next.\n\nExcept\u2026 Silbeth's faith shone through the lens of the Priory, but it wasn't to the Priory, was it?\n\n\"What if you swore an oath?\" he asked. \"In Louros's name, separate from any ties Mariscal's contract might establish between you and me?\"\n\n\"If I swore such an oath, of course I would keep it. Which is why I won't do it. Put plainly, Nycos, I don't trust you that much. I'm not going to let you bind me without knowing to what end.\"\n\nFor a time they rode without speaking, each listening to the patter of light hail bouncing from their cloaks and from the frozen soil around them.\n\n\"I don't want to put you in this position,\" Nycos began sincerely.\n\n\"Then don't.\"\n\nHe had to force his hands not to drop the reins, to reach out, beseeching. \"But we've both got our backs up against a wall. You can't complete your task if I run off without you\u2014and before you say anything, we both know I can lose you if I truly wish it. And I can't do what I have to do with you around, if I can't be absolutely positive of your discretion.\"\n\nNycos swore, despite the climate, that he was about to sweat beneath the heat of her glower. \"If your intent here is to increase my willingness to trust you, Sir Nycolos, you have impressively missed your mark.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nIt was clearly not the response she'd anticipated.\n\n\"I could\u2014some would say should\u2014have just vanished one night,\" he continued, \"without bringing this up at all. But the truth is, I don't want to continue this journey without you. I'd rather have you fighting at my side. I'm not trying to extort you into giving me your oath where you'd rather not, Silbeth. I'm trying to find an excuse not to leave you behind.\"\n\n\"I see. I'll\u2026 think about it.\"\n\n\"That's all I can ask.\"\n\n\"So go away and let me think.\"\n\nNycos fell back, allowing her to ride alone, a short distance ahead. He felt absolutely zero surprise when Smim's own steed swiftly sauntered up beside him.\n\n\"Master, this has gone far enough.\"\n\n\"Has it?\"\n\n\"You cannot truly mean to trust her, or any human, with the truth!\"\n\n\"Smim, I live among them, as one of them, and yet I'm unable to talk about, or act on, the central facet of my being. It's maddening!\"\n\nThe goblin shook his head hard enough to set tiny hailstones flying. \"I don't understand. You spent centuries at a time alone, save for your servants! Sharing with others wasn't precisely on your list of priorities.\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026 I know. But you were the one who pointed out, months ago, that my human body, human blood, was affecting me. I can't pretend you were wrong any longer.\"\n\n\"And what of me, Master? You've always been able to speak freely with me.\"\n\n\"Smim, you've been a loyal servant, and even a friend, since my transformation. But you're still a part of my old life, and an outsider to human culture. I need\u2026 It's not enough.\"\n\n\"Master, you cannot trust her with this! Not her, not anyone! You're going to get yourself killed, and quite possibly me along with you.\"\n\n\"You worry too much, Smim. I know what I'm doing.\"\n\nOh, how he wished that were true! All he could do, for now, was hope that Smim wouldn't do anything stupid \"for his master's sake\" until Nycos had figured out just what the hell he was doing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 75",
                "text": "Another few days nearer to Gronch, and Nycos decided it was time they properly arm themselves.\n\nThey'd stopped for a midday meal, sitting in the lee of a tiny rise that barely qualified as a hill, and he'd announced that they should set up their tents against the cold, start a fire\u2014essentially make camp.\n\n\"We've still got a good few hours before it gets dark,\" Silbeth protested. \"Why waste the travel time?\"\n\n\"Because,\" Nycos said, carefully unwrapping that long, narrow bundle on which the mercenary had remarked back when they'd first snuck from the Oztyerva stables, \"we've some preparations to make before we reach the Ogre-Weald.\"\n\nLaid out upon the snow, the leather parcel revealed a couple of long prybars, a slightly shorter hook-beaked crowbar, and two bars of iron fencing. Beside them, tied together in a smaller bundle, were a blacksmith's hammer and tongs.\n\n\"Um?\" Silbeth asked after taking it all in.\n\n\"Wooden hafts,\" Nycos explained, hefting his own szanzsya for emphasis, \"would be too weak for what we need. Everything here is iron or steel. They'll be heavy, but I think you're strong enough to wield them. I know I am.\"\n\n\"We're making dragon-slaying weapons,\" she summarized flatly.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And wood isn't strong enough.\"\n\n\"Correct.\"\n\n\"And the fact that we've both got perfectly good swords isn't relevant because\u2026?\"\n\n\"Why do you suppose it normally takes an army, or an enchanted blade, for humans to kill a dragon, Silbeth? For all the strength, the speed, the breath of flame, it's the dragon's hide that makes them nigh invulnerable.\"\n\nSmim made soft choking sounds. The knight ignored him\u2014just as he ignored his own twisting, conflicting emotions at exposing the weaknesses of his kind.\n\n\"Our swords wouldn't penetrate the scales,\" he continued. \"We need weapons that will, or we've no chance at all.\"\n\nSilbeth grunted, reached down and lifted one of the prybars. For a few moments she spun it around her body, thrust with both hands, running through an array of lunges and parries. When she was done, her breath had grown labored and she had to wipe away a sheen of sweat before it froze, but she nodded. \"Heavy, and the balance is for shit, but manageable. I assume you've some idea for blades or tips, if you've thought it through this far?\"\n\nNycos nodded and produced a thick pouch, from which he in turn poured the five black talons he'd sliced from his own hand days before. \"Slivers of Tzavalantzaval's own claws,\" he said in what wasn't entirely a lie. \"Smim and I kept them as trophies after the battle.\"\n\nIt had been long enough, he hoped, that Silbeth wouldn't think to associate these five talons with his injured digits. Even if she did, though, he'd spent enough mystical effort on forcing his hand back into its original human shape that not even a close examination would suggest that, mere days ago, he'd literally been missing his fingertips.\n\nWhatever thoughts she had, however, whatever suspicions she may or may not have nursed, she said nothing of them. She only nodded once more, after a brief examination of the talons.\n\n\"I need space to work,\" Nycos said, \"where we're not going to set fire to anything.\" He shortly had Silbeth and Smim excavating a circle in not just the snow but the frigid soil, building a small bank of earth, while he ostensibly went off to search for stones they might use to augment that miniature barrier.\n\nOnce out of sight, he removed a small metal flask from his belt. Concentrating on his throat and jaw, he felt the flesh warp, shift. Careful not to spill, he worked up multiple mouthfuls of draconic spittle and deposited them into the flask. It would retain its potency for only a few hours, but that ought to be enough.\n\nHe had little luck with the stones, but then, he hadn't really anticipated otherwise. The banked sides of the earthen circle would do. Returning to the camp, he laid out the wood for a small fire near the center of the cleared space, and the five iron \"spear shafts\" beside it. Finally\u2014after claiming for Silbeth's benefit that the flask contained more of the goblin's alchemical mixture he had wielded against the psoglavac\u2014he coated the narrower ends of the various tools with the spittle.\n\nIt all worked about as well as he'd hoped. As each tool was thrust into the small flame, igniting the dragonfire, the sudden burst of supernatural heat bent and softened the metal. From there it was a simple matter of taking a talon in the blacksmith's tongs and thrusting it base-first into the now pliable shaft, followed by a few blows of the hammer to ensure it was secure and more or less straight. It was sloppy, ugly, but \"it would suffice.\n\nSmim cooked them a hot stew that night, rich enough to warm them\u2014though he hadn't been able to do much about the taste of the salted meats of which they were all growing heartily tired. Clustered around the campfire, they discussed tactics and techniques for battling dragons: the need to surprise the wyrm with their ability to harm it, to keep the fight in a contained space as best they could, to always have cover close at hand. Nycos even offered up some pointers and observations on Vircingotirilux herself, claiming to have heard tales of the wyrm of Gronch from Smim, who had in turn heard them from Tzavalantzaval.\n\nSilbeth took it all in, listening intently, asking for clarification on this point or that, but otherwise offering no comment, no observation of her own. She'd still given no oath of secrecy, and Nycos went to sleep that night wondering just what the mercenary was thinking.\n\nWhat she suspected.\n\nTomorrow morning, then. He hadn't wanted to push the issue, but he had to have an answer, one way or the other, tomorrow morning.\n\nBecause come tomorrow evening, they would stand within the shadow of Gronch."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "\"All right.\"\n\nHunched tight against the frigid morning, Nycos wasn't certain he'd heard correctly. He'd been reluctant, even sheepish, bringing it up, and he'd anticipated, at the very least, a bit more discussion.\n\n\"I'll swear to keep your secret,\" Silbeth continued, calmly dismantling her tent as she spoke. \"But only so long as you're alive. Your death frees me to choose whether it warrants exposure or not.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" The caveat made him nervous, but he saw no specific harm in it. \"Fair enough. Thank\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't. Don't thank me, Nycos. I haven't yet shown you the other side of this particular coin you'd have me pay with.\"\n\nHe waited. She rolled up the canvas, stuffed it in her backpack, and then turned to face him. \"If anything I learn suggests to me that I've been deceived into committing acts, supporting a cause, I find abhorrent? If I decide your secret makes you too much of a threat? I will stop at nothing to free myself from my oath.\"\n\n\"But you just said your oath binds you so long as I'm\u2026 Oh.\"\n\n\"Can you accept that?\"\n\nSmim was all but hopping foot to foot behind him. \"Master, might I have a word with you before you\u2014\"\n\n\"I can,\" Nycos said.\n\nThe goblin spat a variety of syllables that might just have inspired Silbeth to behead him if she'd understood what they meant.\n\n\"Then I swear by my honor as one chosen to serve the Priory of Steel, and by Louros, Lady of the Moons and protector of all who travel in darkness, to keep your secrets, Sir Nycolos Anvarri, until your death or my own.\"\n\n\"Oh-ho! Options!\" Smim crowed.\n\n\"Hush, Smim. Silbeth, thank you.\"\n\nShe waited a moment, perhaps to see if he were going to reveal anything immediately, and then went about striking camp.\n\nSo, now what? Some humans would violate even the most sacred oath if circumstances warranted. He didn't believe Silbeth was among them, but could he be certain? He didn't know her nearly as well as he sometimes felt he did. And even if she'd keep his secret, if she discovered who he was\u2014and who he wasn't\u2014would that constitute a threat? An unforgivable deception? Would he be forced to kill her?\n\nAfter all that, could he really trust her any more now than he had? He wanted to, desperately, and he hated that he did.\n\nMaybe\u2026 Maybe luck would be with him. Maybe he could yet get through this without revealing himself more than he already had. He couldn't erase her suspicions or questions, but those would fade in time if she never saw, never learned, anything that might feed them.\n\nHis thoughts racing like maddened hounds, Nycos clambered up into Avalanche's saddle and began the first of the day's many fretful, worried miles."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "The trees stood packed together, branches intertwined. Untamed beards of moss hung from jowls of rough bark, and the undergrowth\u2014as much fungi as vegetation, and far moister than it ought to be\u2014slurped obscenely at passing shins.\n\nEven accounting for the lack of wind and sleet, both blocked by the thick woods, it was warmer than it should have been. The air still carried winter's bite, enough to cause a shiver, yet the boles seemed to generate their own humidity, a sticky warmth that not only clung to the skin but somehow seeped inside. The result was an unpleasant, vaguely feverish blend of sensation to make the flesh crawl and the stomach roil.\n\nAfter lengthy debate, they'd left Avalanche and the rest of the mounts at the edge of the great wood. Tethering them wasn't an option, in case they had to run or defend themselves from ogres or other threats, so all Nycos and the others could do was trust in the strict Kirresci warhorse training to keep them there for the duration. After hours of slow trail-breaking through this damnable forest, though, with the bundle of makeshift spears slung over his back and catching on every single obstruction and protrusion the place thrust in their path, Nycos would have gladly traded places with them.\n\nSmim muttered constantly under his breath in the language of his people, jumping at every sound, snarling at every upthrust root. Silbeth, on the other hand, was almost hostilely silent, lips pressed together until they'd gone as pale as her skin.\n\nNycos found both grating, though he couldn't blame either of them. He wanted to lash out with szandzsya or clenched fist, not merely at any perceived danger hidden within the trees but at those trees themselves, to clear a space in the woodland that seemed to grow tighter by the step. It was crushing, suffocating, as though Gronch itself sought to swallow them whole. He realized he was breathin hard and forced himself to calm, drawing upon centuries of patience and self-control.\n\nHe shoved a branch from his path, hissing in the back of his throat at the greasy feel of whatever grew upon the bark, and slipped past. The limb bounced back into place and he heard sharp gasp.\n\n\"Watch it, you jackass!\"\n\nHe spun, literally growling. Silbeth stood behind him, a dark smear streaking her cloak and mail hauberk where the branch had lashed them.\n\n\"I trust my companions to be able to watch out for themselves,\" he retorted in a harsh rasp. \"If you can't even do that much\u2014\"\n\n\"I can watch out for myself just fine, it's the idiots around me that are posing a problem!\"\n\nSmim advanced on her, hand on the hilt of his short sword, a low rumble in his throat Nycos had heard from other goblins in his time.\n\n\"Look,\" Nycos said, fists shaking with the effort of swallowing his mounting fury, \"let's all take a breath and\u2014\"\n\nFast enough to catch even him by surprise, Silbeth's blade was in her hand and she hurled herself at him. In the blind confusion of what followed, it took an instant to register that she hadn't, in fact, attacked him at all. She slammed into him with her left shoulder, knocking him away from the looming bole even as she swung at something dangling from the canopy above.\n\nSomething that shrieked in frustrated rage as it scrabbled to avoid her sword.\n\nIt hung from a thick, ropey web like some great arachnid, and indeed it had six spidery legs protruding from its midsection. Before and behind those, however, it boasted four canine limbs, and its body was roughly that of a mangy, blood-slicked wolf. Its jaws gaped open as it screamed and howled, exposing a pair of oversized mandibles within. They emerged, slow and slick, tearing at the soft flesh inside its canine maw until thin streams of saliva-diluted blood dribbled to the earth.\n\n\"What in the name of\u2026?\"\n\nEven had Nycos known how to answer, he lacked the time. For while Silbeth was focused on the nightmare above, he spotted another threat below.\n\n\"Smim, stop!\"\n\nToo far gone to obey, perhaps even to understand, the goblin leapt for Silbeth, mouth wide in a drooling howl, cleaving sword raised high.\n\nNycos, uncaring now what Silbeth saw, lunged with impossible speed to meet him. Gripping the sabre-spear backward, just below the blade, Nycos swung the butt end as a club, catching Smim in the gut and knocking him back to the soil. He continued the turn, letting the momentum carry him around even as he spun the szandzsya and then, trusting in desperate strength to make up for the weapon's utter lack of aerodynamics, he threw.\n\nThrew and missed. The hideous creature on its web dropped a foot or so, easily avoiding the clumsy, wobbling missile. It chittered at him, mandibles clacking and throat wobbling in a grotesque song of mockery.\n\nSilbeth leapt, swung, and the tip of her blade sliced neatly through the distracted monstrosity's stomach.\n\nLoops of ichor-smeared and cobweb-coated intestines spilled forth, coiling and bouncing. The beast plummeted with an agonized shriek to land, twitching and kicking, at Silbeth's feet. Her sword rose and fell, again and again, and Nycos turned back to the disobedient goblin, confident that his companion had the other creature in hand.\n\nSmim lay beside a puddle of vomit, still dry-heaving from the blow to his gut. Nonetheless his fingers remained clenched around the hilt of his weapon and he struggled to roll over, to drag himself toward Silbeth.\n\n\"Smim? Smim!\"\n\nNycos saw no recognition, only the instinctual, fearful hatred so common to Smim's people. The goblin screamed at him, and the sounds only vaguely resembled words.\n\nWrath flooded Nycos's heart. How dare he?! How dare this pathetic little creature defy him, turn on him now, of all times? He raised a hand, preparing to transform fingertips into talons and end the wretched, dishonorable beast\u2026\n\nNo.\n\nHe couldn't stop himself from striking. The anger was too strong for that. But when he did, it was with a human fist, with roughly human strength. The goblin spasmed, face gone slack.\n\n\"Rope.\"\n\n\"What?\" Silbeth finally stopped hacking at the thing, now long past dead and verging on no longer entirely solid.\n\n\"Bring me some rope.\"\n\n\"Get it yourself, you\u2014!\" She stopped, stared at her ichor-coated sword, and took a deep, shuddering breath. Carefully she lay the weapon down and retrieved a large coil of rope from the side of her own pack.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she muttered, stepping close and handing it over.\n\n\"Not your fault. Not mine. Not even his.\" Nycos played out a length of the hemp line and carefully tied the goblin's arms and feet. \"Something about this place. It's\u2026 getting to us. On an emotional level. Maybe spiritual.\"\n\nWas this part of why Vircingotirilux was mad? Had her home driven her out of what was left of her mind? Or the reverse, perhaps. Had her madness somehow spread through Gronch itself?\n\nThen again, maybe neither. Maybe she was just drawn to the place, her broken mind having found comfort here.\n\n\"We've got to move,\" he said, hefting Smim over one shoulder and casting about for his missing weapon. \"All that screaming's likely to have attracted attention.\"\n\nSilbeth only nodded, took a moment to retrieve a rag from her backpack, and then collected her sword. She wiped the worst of the grime from it as they walked.\n\n\"I've never seen anyone move that fast,\" she said finally, dodging around a particularly gnarled tree. \"When you stopped Smim, I mean. Thank you. But how did you do that?\"\n\nEven in her gratitude, she had to push, didn't she? To question? Why couldn't she just\u2014?\n\nCalm.\n\nNycos grunted, not trusting himself to answer, and Silbeth, perhaps for the sake of her own self-control, fell back into silence rather than press the issue.\n\nWhether it was the tumult of the earlier struggle or something more subtle\u2014their scent, perhaps, or even some primal awareness within the denizens of the Ogre-Weald\u2014the trio indeed attracted further attention. On multiple occasions they had to dive for cover or scurry into the shelter of the underbrush, concealing themselves amidst thistles and dead leaves. Once, they hid from a creature near twelve feet in height, with the gait and build of an ape but a slick, cracked carapace that resembled nothing more than the enamel of a human tooth. Other times they never clearly saw what it was that stalked them, but one of the ogres walked with so heavy a tread, rustling the branches so high above, that Nycos thought it might have looked big to him even if he wore his true form.\n\nEither Smim had regained some semblance of his civilized self, or else even in his maddened, monstrous state of mind, the goblin recognized the danger. Whatever his motivation, the bound figure went as silent as Nycos and Silbeth when stealth was called for.\n\nOn other occasions, hiding was no option at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "The club, nearly a small tree in its own right, hurtled toward Silbeth with enough force to turn organs and bone into something akin to pudding. Nycos threw himself into the weapon's path, as near the ogre's fist as possible, in hopes of avoiding the worst of the impact. Still it sent him flying to collide hard with a heavy bole. He slumped amidst the roots, head ringing and spine screaming, watching dully as his szandzsya once more spun off into the shadows of Gronch.\n\nBut at least he'd gotten the thing's attention, drawn it away from his companions. Fantastic. And the next step in my brilliant plan was\u2026?\n\nOther than the massive cudgel instead of a rusty axe, the psoglavac looked very much like the one that had attacked King Hasyan's court. It was, if anything, a bit larger, and somehow smelled even more foul. Its single eye gleamed with the same fury, however, and its slathering jaws suggested similar vile appetites.\n\n\"Get the spears!\" he called as the ogre closed on him, each footfall landing with limp, meaty thud. \"They should penetrate its hide!\"\n\nSo too, of course, would his own talons, but he still clung to a faint hope of keeping some of his secrets.\n\nSilbeth dived for the parcel of makeshift weapons, which he'd dropped as he'd charged the psoglavac, fumbling at the ties. She'd have the shafts free swiftly, but he could see already it wouldn't be swift enough.\n\nThe club crashed down and Nycos rolled aside, ignoring the discomfort as protruding roots poked at his back and sides, bruising even through the mail. He rolled back just as swiftly, grasping the weapon under one arm and bringing the heel of his boot down upon the fingers that clutched it.\n\nIt wasn't sufficient to break bone, but he struck with far more strength, far more pain, than the ogre anticipated. It reared back with a low roar, dropping the weapon as it tried to shake the agony from its hand.\n\nNycos shot to his feet just as the psoglavac lunged down at him, determined to tear him apart. Palms met and fingers\u2014one set far larger and more twisted than the other\u2014curled around and between each other. Fists clenched, hoping to crush, and the two combatants strained.\n\nThe ogre had every apparent advantage. Its height, its mass, the fact that it stood tall while Nycos had only half come out of his crouch\u2026 This should not, could not, have been a contest at all.\n\nSlowly, inexorably, impossibly, Nycos straightened. The psoglavac gawped in dumb incomprehension as first its arms were lifted upward, and then, even more unbelievably, its tinier, \"weaker\" foe began to force it back. No matter how it strained, how it shoved, it couldn't stop itself; one backward step, a second.\n\nAgain the ogre shrieked, its back arching and its whole body shuddering, as Silbeth drove a talon-tipped prybar through it from behind.\n\nNycos stepped aside as the psoglavac toppled to its knees where he'd stood. Silbeth pulled the spear free and thrust again, over and over, until the creature's back was nothing more than a cluster of weeping wounds. It whimpered a final time and collapsed, blood oozing from its injuries and its slackened jaw.\n\n\"That's a lot easier when we've got weapons that can actually hurt the damn things,\" Nycos noted. \"Very nice job, Silbeth. I\u2026\"\n\nShe hadn't lowered the blood-coated spear, despite its weight. In fact, while it wasn't precisely aimed his way, it wasn't really aimed anywhere else, either.\n\n\"No more, Nycos. No more keeping me in the dark. I saw what happened back there. Nobody could outmuscle that thing. Nobody.\"\n\n\"It\u2026 You must have seen us from a weird angle, is all. It\u2014\"\n\n\"No. You made me swear that damn oath. Now you're going to tell me why. Who are you? What are you?\"\n\nNycos raised a hand, imploring\u2014and froze.\n\nHe'd pushed it too far. Digging deep for the strength to battle the psoglavac, he'd allowed his body to reshape itself too much, asked it to provide more power than it could manage while remaining human. The hand he'd stretched out between them was thicker than it should have been, slightly misshapen, and streaked with jagged patches of deep violet scale.\n\n\"Master!\" Although ragged around the edges, the voice of the tightly bound goblin was nearer that of his servant and friend than it was the ravening beast he'd become over the past few days. \"No! You mustn't!\"\n\nIn a way, he didn't have to. Silbeth's eyes flickered to Smim\u2014as though this were the first time she'd truly heard, truly understood, the title of \"master\" from his lips\u2014and then back to the splotches on Nycos's skin.\n\nAnd she knew. He saw it in her face before she spoke another word.\n\n\"Oh, my gods\u2026\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Nycos said with exaggerated resignation, \"you're going to feel this qualifies as deceiving you?\"\n\nSilbeth stared as though she couldn't possibly have heard him correctly. Her eyes were nearly as wide as her buckler, her gaping jaw struggled to form words her brain clearly hadn't yet concocted.\n\nAnd then, despite herself, she laughed. It was, bar none, the loudest he'd ever heard her, either unwilling or unable to control herself despite the risk of drawing further attention. Body-shaking guffaws doubled her over. Tears ran down her ever ruddier face as she gasped for breath.\n\nNycos wasn't sure when he'd joined her, only that he found himself bracing with one arm against rough bark, counting on the nearest tree to keep him from toppling in his mirth.\n\n\"Might I impose on one of you to untie me before you go completely mad?\" Smim demanded irritably, resulting in a new round of near hysterics.\n\nWhen they finally regained control, Nycos and Silbeth faced one another, each half slumped against an opposing bole. Although it was most probably a temporary balm, he realized that the fit of uncontrolled laughter had washed away a goodly portion of the feverish temper that had beleaguered them since they'd entered this cursed wood.\n\n\"Why,\" she asked, coughing to keep from falling back into laughter, \"would you possibly think I'd consider this a deception?\"\n\nNycos grinned, but swiftly composed himself. \"Silbeth, we've fought together. We've watched one another's backs.\" He didn't specifically mention throwing himself in front of the psoglavac's club for her\u2014he knew she'd take it as manipulative if he did\u2014but he knew, as well, she hadn't forgotten. \"And I've made no move to harm the people at Oztyerva, or anywhere else, save where Nycolos Anvarri would and should have done. Surely all that buys me at least the opportunity to explain.\"\n\nShe nodded slowly and planted the butt of the iron spear beside her\u2014still ready at hand, but not immediately threatening. \"Explain, then.\"\n\nAnd he did. There, in the deepening gloom of Gronch, as though the constant threat of the haunting ogres and related nightmares had receded, he told his tale\u2014his true tale\u2014for the first time. From the arrival of the real Sir Nycolos in the Outermark Mountains up until that very night, and if he didn't tell her everything, neither did he lie or dissemble. He made no effort to paint himself as selfless, heroic, to pretend that he cared for the bulk of the Kirresci people. He had no desire to lie to Silbeth, and it wouldn't sound believable if he had. No, instead he confessed openly that his initial goal had been to build for himself the most comfortable and most powerful life he could among the humans, to live as well as he might until and unless he could resume his proper existence. And he told her that, over the year and more he'd dwelt among them, he had come to value a handful of Oztyerva's people, that he'd grown fond enough of them, beyond their practical use to him, that he'd prefer they come to no harm.\n\nNycos hadn't especially considered the truth to be a burden, so he didn't feel like any great weight had been lifted from him. Rather, he himself seemed lighter. Less alone.\n\nHe'd scarcely known loneliness as a dragon, for camaraderie, sharing, was not in their nature. It had taken him long to recognize the feeling as a man, and only now did he understand how strongly it had enwrapped him.\n\nFor long moments she watched him, absorbing and pondering all he'd told her. In the gloom of the Ogre-Wealde, he couldn't have been more than an inky shade, but she gazed into him as though measuring every detail, reading the secrets of his soul.\n\n\"We have fought together,\" she said finally, slowly. \"And you've put yourself in danger for me, though I don't know, now, how much danger you were truly in. That matters.\n\n\"And I appreciate you telling me the truth, Nyc\u2026\" She broke off, a sudden flash of puzzlement on her face that nobody but he could have seen.\n\n\"I'm still Nycolos. Nycos. Any other name wouldn't\u2026 feel right, for the time being.\" To say nothing of possibly proving disastrous, if the wrong person were ever to overhear.\n\n\"Right, then. Nycos.\" Again she paused, doubtless chasing thoughts that had scattered like a flock of quail. \"My truth, then, in exchange for yours. I'm with you until the dragon\u2014um, the other dragon\u2014is dealt with and we've returned to Talocsa.\"\n\n\"And then?\" He hoped the question didn't sound as plaintive to her as it did in his own ears.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she answered plainly. \"It's too much, too big, for me to figure all out at once. I need time to think.\"\n\nTo that, he could only nod. He found himself deeply disappointed, but she was right. It was a lot to ask her to take in; hardly unfair or unreasonable of her to need time. No matter how unpleasant the waiting might be for him, or how problematic her eventual decision might prove.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said at last, \"for being honest about it.\"\n\n\"I did think about lying,\" she admitted. \"Telling you I was all right with it. Some would say I'm being foolish, that I've invited you to try to kill me in my sleep or something, now. But as I said, I owed you for your truth.\"\n\nNycos stood and moved over to the bound goblin. Carefully, and with a clear warning of what would happen if Smim were to lose control again, he began loosening the many knots. \"And if I do try to kill you in your sleep?\" he asked Silbeth, with what he hoped was an obviously jesting tone.\n\n\"Then one way or the other, you'll have made my decision a lot easier, won't you?\" And her tone was such that Nycos couldn't even begin to tell whether she was jesting or not.\n\n\"Let's go find Vircingotirilux's lair,\" he said. It seemed, suddenly, to be the simpler, and possibly even safer, of the various challenges ahead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 79",
                "text": "Finding that lair proved a lengthy process, with multiple days spent searching the darkened wood and hiding from the things that dwelt within, but not a difficult one. Nycos's own past existence meant he knew what sorts of terrain and features to look for; what sort of accessibility to the sky and the surrounding territories the wyrm would most probably seek; what signs would indicate her presence.\n\nOnce they'd located the hidden caves, beneath the root-ridden hillside on the wildly overgrown shores of Lake Orist, it was again Nycos's knowledge that guided them safely inside.\n\nFor all their differences, all their varied personalities, strengths, even shapes, most dragons fell back on similar notions when protecting their homes. Vircingotirilux's minions, the ogres of Gronch, were unlikely to be found within her lair proper. Nycos knew his rival was unstable enough that nothing would survive so near her for long.\n\nShe was not sorcerously strong, her mind too twisted for the workings of great magics, but not totally lacking in eldritch skills. Guided by his own instincts and augmented by inhuman sight, he pinpointed the hidden glyphs clawed deep into earthen walls, steering his companions aside before they could trigger the mystic energies. Had he not, if he read the sigils properly, the roots would have burst through the surrounding soil, gripping and crushing like a ravenous beast of the deepest seas; or else those walls would have disgorged swarms of insects and gouts of boiling water to alternatively consume and sear the flesh of all who passed.\n\nThat left only the mechanical deadfalls for the others to watch for, while Nycos hunted for those glyphs. Between Silbeth's swift reactions and sharp sight, and Smim's own experience setting up similar (if far more intricate) devices on his master's behalf, those proved no more difficult to circumvent.\n\nThe tunnels themselves were curious, twisting, winding. In a way, they resembled the gnarled roots that dangled from the ceilings and stretched from the walls, writ large. Other than in the immediate vicinity of the glyphs, the place was completely free of crawling life, as though even the insects knew enough to keep their distance. Patches of mud formed where the water of nearby Orist leeched through the soil. A moldy, stagnant miasma coated the throat and seeped into the lungs, so that the urge to cough\u2014not involuntary, but in a desperate effort to scratch an internal, unclean itch\u2014grew overwhelming.\n\nThe complex really, Nycos felt, shouldn't have held its shape at all. The nearby lake ought to have rendered the earth too swampy, too shifting and unstable, for caves so large to survive. He wondered if Vircingotirilux had managed the basic sorceries required to maintain her lair, or perhaps hardened the walls with some sort of alchemical concoction or\u2026 or excretion. He shuddered at that last thought, and decided he needn't share his suspicions with the others.\n\nAnd then, finally, they'd arrived in the veritable cavern that was the heart of the dragon's domain.\n\nMists rose from the entryways and condescension slicked the walls, for here the unnatural warmth of Gronch seemed to pool, mixing resentfully with currents of cooler air. Their footsteps squelched as the muddy floor clung hungrily at every pace. In the far corner, heaps of old branches and the stolen heirlooms of a dozen villages\u2014candelabras, dishware, bits of furniture, jewelry, and the occasional decayed remnants of their former owners\u2014twisted and intertwined to form a haphazard nest. Beside and beyond that was a smattering of rough shapes and vile stench: an unchecked midden, the leavings of gods alone knew how many months or years kept soggy and fresh by the chamber's humidity.\n\nSilbeth gagged once, then cast Nycos a horrified, incredulous look.\n\n\"No. No, we do not all live like this. Vircingotirilux is vile. Savage. An animal.\"\n\nHer grunt was noncommittal, at best, and Nycos found himself oddly embarrassed. He moved on to study the outer edges of the cavern.\n\nHigh above, a crooked shaft led to the open air, though the many roots and constricting trees made it almost impossible to make out. That and the main passage through which they'd come appeared to be the only genuine entryways. Other passageways branched from the central cavern, smaller than the two major arteries but still large enough for the wyrm to slink through, yet these\u2014to judge by scent and air current\u2014offered no egress to the outside. If Nycos had to guess, he would have said they probably provided access to a smaller chamber or two, before winding back here.\n\nPerhaps he'd have time to explore and make certain. For of the many sights and details the trio observed, here in the heart of Vircingotirilux's domain, the dragon herself was not among them. Without knowing where she had gone, what she was doing, when she'd departed, Nycos had no way of guessing whether she would be absent for minutes, hours, even days.\n\nHowever long it might be, it was time that Nycos did not look forward to. Time in which he had little to distract himself from what he was doing, the situation into which he'd thrown himself.\n\nHe had always respected Vircingotirilux for her strength, if nothing else; known her to be a formidable enemy. He had wisely avoided conflict between them where it was unnecessary, and planned carefully when it proved unavoidable. But never, in all his centuries, could it have been said that he feared her.\n\nNow? Trapped in this body? It had slowly begun to sink in, over the course of the journey, how great the differences between them had grown. Now that he was finally here, the doubts and worries, the sense of how much weaker he had become, wrapped him tight as a burial shroud.\n\nNor were his fears for himself alone. More than once he considered suggesting, demanding, even begging that Silbeth leave. What could one additional human, one normal human, do against the wyrm of Gronch? Less often, but still multiple times, he thought the same about Smim. Surely they would both refuse to leave him, each for his or her own reasons, but ought he not at least try? Yet he never did. Perhaps they could make a difference, at that, and even if not?\n\nHe didn't want to face this trial alone. He wondered if that made him a coward.\n\nSo they laid their plans, as best they could with what they knew, and risked a bit of exploration. And then there was nothing left but to settle in\u2014spears held fast, guts clenched tight\u2014and wait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 80",
                "text": "When it finally happened, it happened fast.\n\nWhat feeble light managed to leak in through the canopy of trees and the twists of the slanted passageway went dark. A blast of air, like the coughing of the earth itself, rushed through the passage to send the dust and the soil within the chamber swirling, followed by the deafening rumble of scales against unyielding walls.\n\nA sudden sense of movement, a massive shape in the gloom as though a portion of the ceiling had begun to collapse\u2014and she was there, plummeting into the cavern, a falling star made flesh.\n\nVircingotirilux.\n\nThey attacked even as she appeared, pushing through their shock at the sudden entry. As Nycos had instructed, knowing they could never land a killing blow as she moved, they stabbed at her wings, partially folded against her massive flanks. Claw-tipped iron pierced leathery membrane, and an impossible voice shrieked in startled pain. The great body twisted as it struck the floor, talons scattering new clouds of dirt to add to the ambient gloom.\n\nSmim fell back, clutching the smallest of the spears, having only just scratched the beast. Nycos's inhuman might allowed him to maintain his grip on his own weapon as it tore at the wound, widening the ragged hole until it ripped free. Silbeth, however, lacked the strength to retain her hold. Cursing she stepped back, snatching up one of the two spare lances to replace the one still dangling from wounded wing.\n\nThey darted in again, thrusting at scale-clad flesh, but delivered only a few shallow scrapes before talons, thrashing in the dark and nigh invisible even to Nycos, drove them back.\n\nHe heard the inrush of breath, shouted a warning and dove aside, rolling across the muddy soil as a gout of hellish flame raked the chamber's floor. The fire's roar was deafening, and the trio squinted against the sudden light.\n\nSquinted, and looked up\u2014and up\u2014at the great wyrm they only now clearly saw.\n\nThose bleeding, membranous wings protruded from a gargantuan form that might have been birthed of the swamp and the forest themselves. Scales of stagnant green and mossy grey armored an awkward, twisted body. It bent and bulged where it shouldn't, not unlike a marshland tree bowed beneath the weight of ages. Vines like exposed veins ran across the brown hide between those scales, and a foul, watery fluid sluiced from beneath them with every move. Wingtips and talons appeared wooden, almost like bark.\n\nThe wyrm's body alone was forty feet long, easily twice that if one counted the writhing tail and twining\u2026\n\nNecks.\n\nNot one but three savage heads bobbed and swayed, wrathful serpents, jaws agape and drooling a viscous, sickly spittle. The centermost twisted side to side, seeking, studying, while the right and left roared and snapped, howling their fury without intelligence or restraint. Near mindless hounds, forever bound to a master only slightly less bestial.\n\nVircingotirilux gazed upon the intruders, and for an instant all they could do was stare back in turn. Silbeth and Smim stood frozen, Nycos's tales having woefully failed to prepare them for horrid reality. Nycos himself had experienced the wyrm's hideous presence before, but never from such a small, limited perspective. His heart pounded, his breath caught, as terror he'd never imagined washed over him.\n\nSilbeth broke the paralysis first, thrusting her spear at the growling snout that slid her way. The head recoiled, bloodied, snarling in fury. Vircingotirilux twisted about, bringing all three heads to bear\u2014and taking all six eyes off Nycos long enough for him to dart forward and gouge an ugly wound into her leg just below the knee.\n\nAll three heads howled as one. The dragon reared nearly to the cavern's ceiling. Her tail whipped about, catching Smim as he attempted to run. He flew across the chamber, bouncing and rolling, and Nycos could only hope the goblin was merely bruised. He and Silbeth both leapt for safety as Vircingotirilux crashed back down upon them, claws outstretched to grind them into paste. They tumbled aside, shot back to their feet, and ran, talons slamming at their heels again and again.\n\nOne landed close enough, for all his dashing and dodging, to send Nycos sprawling. He sat up and jabbed at the massive paw, his own talons sprouting. Vircingotirilux recoiled, stunned at the blood and the pain\u2014for all that the wound was tiny\u2014and Nycos didn't waste the opportunity. Again he stood, scooped up the spear he'd dropped, and ran. With each step he focused on his magics, sending as much strength as he could possibly manage flowing through his body. Behind him, the wyrm inhaled like a great bellows.\n\nNycos reached for Silbeth, who was just about to duck into one of the cavern's many side passages. Grabbing her by collar and belt, he hurled her up and into a corridor much higher on the wall, then leapt after her. Another inferno roared beneath him and deep into the tunnel Silbeth had almost chosen, so near it burned the heel and sole from Nycos's boot, before he crashed into the tunnel wall and found himself flat on his back.\n\n\"I think this is going very well,\" Silbeth said, reaching out a helping hand. He paused, tearing off his ruined footwear, before accepting. She managed not to flinch as his own clawed and now clearly inhuman fist gripped hers.\n\n\"Could be worse,\" he agreed, pulling himself upright. They moved deeper into the tunnel, hoping to put a few twists and turns between them and any further torrents of flame.\n\n\"Please tell me you didn't look like that,\" she said a moment later, ducking beneath a protruding tree root.\n\n\"Not remotely.\" It was true, yet Nycos found the question oddly painful. Graceful or bestial, magnificent or fearsome, he believed wholeheartedly that all dragons were creatures of terrible beauty. He didn't expect, however, that Silbeth would understand, and now certainly was no time to explain. Instead, with a touch of bitter resentment, he went with the simpler answer. \"Vircingotirilux is pretty monstrous even by our standards.\"\n\n\"Good to\u2014\"\n\nEchoing from the great chamber came a monstrous grunt, followed by a grating noise that Nycos recognized as teeth on iron, and then a faint tearing.\n\n\"She's just pulled the spear out of her wing. Still, the pain should be\u2014\"\n\n\"SUCH A TEENY TINY CLAW. BUT WE KNOW THAT TASTE!\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" Nycos said. \"She recognizes me.\"\n\n\"IS IT TRULY\u2014\" The monstrous voice was interrupted by a chorus of roars. \"DZIRLAS! CYOLOS! DOWN! QUIET! I'M TALKING! I SAID QUIET!\"\n\n\"Who\u2026? Is she talking to her other heads?!\" Silbeth demanded, voice as shrill as Nycos had ever heard. \"She's insane!\"\n\n\"More than a little, yes. To be fair, you'd be too if bits of you were unintelligent and only partially housebroken.\"\n\nShe goggled at him and said nothing more.\n\n\"IS IT YOU, TZAVALANTZAVAL?\" Vircingotirilux continued. \"YOU'VE LOOKED BETTER!\" She cackled madly, as though her observation were the funniest thing she'd ever heard.\n\n\"We've met,\" Nycos told Silbeth in a whisper.\n\n\"I'd pieced that together myself, but thanks.\"\n\n\"YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD! WE WERE PROMISED YOU WERE DEAD!\"\n\nWell, isn't that an interesting tidbit of\u2014\n\n\"DEAD AS YOUR PRECIOUS CLUTCH, SHATTERED AND SCATTERED TO THE REACHES OF YOUR ROCKY PLAYPEN!\"\n\nDeep in his throat, Nycos growled.\n\n\"It was\u2026 It was a long time ago,\" he reluctantly explained in response to Silbeth's unasked question, as they crept further down the narrowing corridor. \"Well over a century. Vircingotirilux and I both selected the same dragon as a mate. There aren't many of us left to choose from, especially here in the south. He chose me, for reasons I think our host has made fairly clear. We thought we were being clever, hiding our eggs away from my lair, but she found it. It was the second clutch in a row I lost, and it's\u2026 one of several grudges between us.\"\n\nHe had never before seen the expression Silbeth now cast his way. \"What?\" he asked her.\n\n\"You're female?\" she demanded.\n\n\"No, I was female, and will be again. But for now, the human form I've assumed is male, and the change of form is absolute.\" He shrugged. \"Honestly, it doesn't make much difference to us. For dragons, if it's not mating season, it scarcely matters.\"\n\nThey reached a fork in the passage, and Nycos turned to call back toward the main chamber, where the wyrm still ranted. \"Who promised you, Vircingotirilux? Who told you I was dead?\"\n\nThe voice fell silent, though the two bestial heads continued to howl. \"How did you find me? How did you transform your pet psoglavac? I know you, you poor, dumb beast! You haven't the sorcery to manage such tricks on your own!\"\n\n\"Are you as mad as she is?\" Silbeth demanded, as behind them, the dragon screeched indignantly.\n\n\"If I get her riled enough, she might let something slip.\"\n\nThe tunnel echoed with the sounds of inrushing air. Nycos shoved Silbeth down the side passage at the fork, following on her heels. Between one step and the next his body swelled, the wine-hued scales covering him head to toe, armoring him as fully as possible against what was to come\u2026\n\nFire filled the passageway they'd just left, and though they'd escaped the worst of it, the heat pursued them, carried on a few rogue tongues of flame. Agony danced across Nycos's back, his thin and human-sized scales too weak to absorb the entirety of the inferno. He staggered, gasping, unable to catch his breath as the dragonfire sucked the air from the corridor.\n\nSilbeth's hands closed on his shredded cloak, and though she Once they'd left at the heat radiating from his hauberk, she didn't flinch away. She dragged him upright and further from the fork, until the air had returned and he could once more stand on his own.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he panted.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Her skin shone red, like a severe sunburn, and she winced with every step. \"When you said you wanted her to let something slip, I assume 'the flame of Erlivius's own forge' wasn't what you had in mind?\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said through a forced smile that probably looked hideous on his now half-human features, \"it proves I was right that she needed help with those magics. If I'd been wrong, she'd have taunted me with it, not tried to roast me out of injured pride.\"\n\n\"As opposed to her earlier attempts at roasting us?\"\n\n\"That was anger. It's different.\"\n\n\"Huh.\"\n\n\"YOU WISH TO EXPERIENCE MY MAGICS, THEN, TZAVALANTZAVAL?\" Vircingotirilux roared, her voice echoing through the complex.\n\n\"That isn't what I said,\" Nycos protested.\n\n\"Well, let's just go correct her. I'm sure she'll be\u2014\"\n\n\"SO BE IT, THEN!\" The wyrm of Gronch bellowed a series of syllables that bore no resemblance to any language a human jaw could form, but a language Nycos recognized all the same.\n\nIn fact, he'd seen those same sounds in written form, in the glyphs that guarded the entrance to the dragon's lair.\n\n\"Down!\"\n\nAgain he threw himself at Silbeth, but the magics that twined through the earthen caves were faster still. A writhing root burst through the soil overhead and wrapped tight about Nycos's waist, snatching him in mid-leap and constricting. His iron spear clattered uselessly to the floor.\n\nHe felt pressure, pain, as the animated limb attempted to squeeze the life from him, but he had a moment to act; against this threat, his armoring scales held. His breathing grew difficult, but not impossible. Already he plucked and poked at the root with his claws, as though it were a particularly stubborn belt. It would have been so much easier if he could flip himself over, attack the length of vegetation where it protruded from the ceiling, but he lacked the leverage to turn.\n\nSilbeth struggled to work her way back to him, but she had problems of her own. Crouching low, she struck back at the veritable garden of roots trying to grab at her, from wall and ceiling and occasionally even the floor. For all her speed and skill, she clearly struggled. She didn't dare wind up for a full swing of her sword, lest blade or arm become entangled by swift-grasping tendrils from behind.\n\nAnd in the other direction, back the way they'd come, something massive slithered through the tunnels, wings and legs tucked tight so that she might fit. Something that gibbered and chortled, barked and bayed, and rasped each breath three times over\u2026\n\nHe couldn't risk trying to grow stronger, to strengthen his scales any further, for already the sliver of Wyrmtaker deep in his chest twinged and tickled as it threatened to move. He could spit into his palm and smear the root, but he had no means of igniting it. And picking with clawed fingertips shredded the root, but not nearly fast enough.\n\nSo be it, then.\n\nNycos pressed against the root, holding it tight between his fingertips and his belly, braced himself, and shoved.\n\nPain shot through him as his own talons dug into, and in a few spots through, his armored scales, but he dropped from the grip of the now severed tendril. Hot blood flowed over his hands, slick and sticky. Running at a low crouch, struggling to ignore the pain, he scooped up his spear and moved to Silbeth's side.\n\nShe asked no questions, only glanced at the blood on his hands and his stomach, and nodded. Working together, each watching the other's back, they hacked through the grasping roots, yard by gradual, precious yard.\n\nVircingotirilux neared. Their time was short, every instinct screamed at them to run\u2014but if they rushed, if they allowed even one grasping root to reach them, they'd have no chance of escape.\n\nUp ahead, the passage opened high on the wall of another vast chamber, nearly equal in size to the central cavern. The lair, Nycos realized, must encompass the entire hillside, transforming the rise into a hollow bubble of earth. Again he wondered whether it was magic or some more mundane reinforcement that kept the entire complex from collapsing.\n\nNot that he had much time to ponder it.\n\n\"Get ready to jump,\" he shouted. Silbeth, who could see little if anything in the subterranean gloom, audibly gritted her teeth.\n\nThey heard the inhalation of three separate throats as they reached the corridor's end.\n\nNycos grabbed Silbeth as they plunged, twisting to take the impact on his far stronger legs. A jet of flame shot from the tunnel, passing over their heads as they plummeted, illuminating the chamber in shades of blood.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Silbeth muttered.\n\n\"Wouldn't be much good to me with two broken legs.\"\n\n\"Because I've been so helpful up to now,\" she groused. Then, before he could respond, \"Any way we can lay an ambush for her?\"\n\nNycos glanced around at the rock-and root-strewn cavern, then up at the tunnel from which they'd leapt, twenty feet above their heads. \"I don't see how. She'll be coming out of there any moment. We need to find shelter, a place to hide before she spots us.\"\n\n\"Or roasts us.\"\n\n\"That, too.\"\n\nThe chamber did boast one unique feature: a pool of slightly muddy water tucked away at one end. Doubtless fed by Lake Orist through some underground artery, it probably served as Vircingotirilux's drinking cistern.\n\nUnfortunately, it stood clear across the cavern, and Nycos couldn't tell from here if it was deep enough to conceal them\u2014nor was it probable, even if it were, that they could hold their breath long enough to effectively hide within. In the end, then, they could do nothing but scamper up into another side passage, perhaps a third of the way around the chamber from where they'd entered. Silbeth, vaguely embarrassed, clung to Nycos's back as he scaled the walls.\n\nThey'd vanished into this new corridor, peeking around a convenient corner as Vircingotirilux slithered from the tunnel they'd so recently vacated, extruded obscenely into the chamber. Several dangling roots, nearly as thick as smaller trees in their own right, still flickered with lingering flames from the dragon's last burst. They cast the chamber, and the three-headed beast, in a confusing panoply of dancing shadow, and wafted the aroma of singed rot throughout the winding complex.\n\n\"WE CAN CHASE YOU ROUND AND ROUND, LITTLE HUMAN TZAVALANTZAVAL! WE KNOW EVERY TWIST AND TURN, WE DON'T TIRE.\" She rose up, towering, to peer into a high passage, while one of her monstrous heads sniffed and grumbled at a lower one. \"YOU'VE ALREADY BLED. WE SMELLED IT. WE TASTED IT, LICKING IT FROM THE SOIL. SUCH AN ODD MIXTURE OF FLAVORS, FROM THE ODD SHAPE YOU'VE TAKEN. WE WANT MORE.\"\n\nHer whole body rumbling, rustling against the dirt, she moved on to the next cluster of holes in the wall. \"ARE YOU STILL HUMAN ENOUGH TO SWEAT, TINY DRAGON-MAN? IS THAT HOW WE'LL FIND YOU?\"\n\nDespite himself, Nycos raised his hand to his scale-covered brow, feeling for moisture.\n\nVircingotirilux ducked low, examining several of the bottommost tunnels, her central head peering into one, her left sniffing at another.\n\nAnd abruptly she recoiled, screaming in three voices. Dark blood gushed from between two monstrous teeth in that leftmost head, dripping and spattering across the walls. Nycos's own heightened vision detected a quick flash of movement in the corridor she'd just been smelling, a small, furtive figure rolling to its feet and dashing back into the darkness, and he couldn't help but grin.\n\nThe dragon staggered back, pawing madly at the talon-tipped crowbar Smim had lodged deep in the soft tissue between her fangs. Her stumbling brought her near the far wall, and her rightmost head, raised high and howling in fury, nearly filled their field of vision from where they crouched.\n\nNycos and Silbeth looked at one another, raised their spears in unison, and charged.\n\nThey hit the edge of the passage side by side, neither hesitating. The intervening leap was nothing for Nycos; for Silbeth it might have been a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. He landed atop the monstrous skull, stumbled as he scrambled for footing, and stabbed downward, hard, with his iron spear. Silbeth struck the side of Vircingotirilux's head, digging in with her own weapon as much to catch herself as any sort of deliberate attack.\n\nBoth bit deep, driven by momentum, by main strength, and by the piercing power of Nycos's talons.\n\nThe dragon's earlier writhing was nothing compared to her violent thrashing now. Her agonized shrieks were a nightmare, tearing at the ears until they almost bled. Her entire body arched upward, the wounded head snapping like a whip as she struggled to dislodge the dreadful barbs, while the other two bit and flailed in blind rage. Gouts of flame shot into the open cavern, but none came near the desperately struggling pair.\n\nNycos dug in with the talons of his feet, shoving and leaning into the spear, trying to sink it securely before he was thrown free. Silbeth flopped and dangled, a living pennant in the side of Vircingotirilux's head, but through main strength and possibly a miracle she maintained her grip on the spear, and the spear remained lodged in flesh.\n\nIn its mad convulsions, the bleeding head whipped near the wall, nearly crushing the mercenary between earth and scales. Even in so precarious a position, Silbeth took full advantage, thrusting her legs back against that wall and pressing the spear ever deeper. The wyrm froze an instant, overwhelmed, and Nycos drove his own weapon down in a final, furious thrust.\n\nBone cracked, and the dragon's rightmost neck went limp even as the beast's body shook. Both warriors were thrown from their unstable perch, rolling across the floor and fetching up against the wall, each gathering a fresh array of bruises and abrasions. Quickly they darted into the nearest passage, this one at ground level, just to get out of sight before their foe could focus. Once there, they peeked back through the rough opening, unable to look away.\n\nVircingotirilux beat the floor with all four claws and the length of her tail until the entire hill shuddered. The wailing of her two remaining voices was as nothing Silbeth or even Nycos had ever heard, the last shreds of her sanity escaping into the ether on wings of suffering and despair. She clawed at the walls, bathed the ceiling in torrents of fire that spattered against the dirt to rain back down in flurries of ember.\n\nNever taking his eyes from the dragon, Nycos unslung the last of the metal-hafted spears from his back and passed it over to Silbeth. \"I have talons,\" he explained when she began to question. \"You don't.\"\n\nThe wyrm of Gronch skittered backward a few steps, placing the far wall against her back and stood, gasping and mewling. Then, as her leftmost head swept slowly side to side, watching and scenting for any sudden attack, the center head slowly snaked sideways. For a long moment she sniffed at the third, the one now dangling limp and dead. A great forked tongue darted out, running one time along the length of the skull.\n\nThen, after a last deep breath, she fastened her middle set of jaws on the base of her rightmost neck.\n\n\"She's not\u2014!\" Silbeth gasped.\n\nNycos, horrified, could only answer, \"I think she is.\"\n\nThe crunch of scale, meat, and bone was horrifying, a sound to echo in dark dreams for years to come. Blood flew, fibers of muscle and great veins dangled free. The two remaining heads screamed again, one voice muffled by mangled flesh. It tugged, hard, but fearsome as the bite had been, it hadn't severed the neck cleanly. Bone and tissue still held fast.\n\nHarder the center head pulled, and harder still. She barked an order, nigh impossible to make out, but the leftmost head obeyed, slinking over to help. It, too, clamped onto the dead neck further on, and then both, moving as one, gave one last, massive yank.\n\nFlesh and bone ripped. For an endless moment the dead head and neck dangled from Vircingotirilux's jaws, still twitching. Blood and other fluids erupted from the stump, a fetid geyser that drenched a broad portion of the chamber. The soil of the floor, rocky and hard as it was, grew soft and boggy where it pooled.\n\nShe dropped her own dead parts before her with a loud and hollow splat. Again she reared, tail slamming and thrashing with agony. She clawed at the tunnels, as though to dig out anything that lingered within, and once more she bathed the room with flame. Whether by intent or by accident, she turned one of those gouts of fire upon herself, cauterizing the ragged stump with a fearsome sizzle.\n\n\"I need to get above her,\" Nycos muttered.\n\n\"Sorry, what?\"\n\n\"Above her. She's treating us like human opponents. She's not looking up.\"\n\n\"We are human opponents. More or less.\"\n\n\"But I can climb. Can\u2014?\"\n\nNycos halted as Smim appeared in the entrance to one of the passageways, roughly halfway between them and Vircingotirilux. He carried one of the spears that had been dropped back in the central chamber, though he clearly struggled with its length, its weight. No way to speak loud enough for him to hear, not over the cacophony the dragon made, and even if Nycos could shout that loud, he'd just be announcing his plans. Instead, looking straight at the goblin, he gestured to his eyes and then to Silbeth. He wasn't certain Smim would get watch her, do what she does from that, but it was the best he could manage.\n\n\"Do you think you can keep her distracted?\" he asked. \"For just a moment?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure I can distract her. Whether I can live through it\u2026\"\n\n\"I'll be quick.\"\n\n\"Do that.\"\n\nMoving low and keeping to the dragon's right, Silbeth darted from the cave. She ran a crooked course, ducking behind this rock, that heap of earth, once even behind Vircingotirilux's own limp and severed head. Even as she moved, Nycos leapt as high as he could and then drove his talons deep into the wall. Punching finger-and toe-holds into the packed soil, he scampered upward, swiftly rising.\n\nVircingotirilux began to turn his way, and Silbeth lunged. She sprinted hard, crossing the remaining yards of the chamber and drove her spear deep into the dragon's foot.\n\nThe wyrm yanked her leg up and slammed it back, trying to crush her tormentor, but Silbeth dove away. Again she lunged, tearing another small wound in the scales, and again she rolled aside. Smim darted from his own shelter and tried to deliver a stab or two of his own, but the ungainly weapon slowed him enough that he couldn't land a meaningful blow.\n\nAnd through it all, Nycos climbed. Just a bit longer, just a bit farther.\n\nHe'd never thought she'd do it. The dragon's scales would protect her from her own fire to a point, but too much exposure, at too close a range, would burn even her. Vircingotirilux's rage, her frustration, her madness had, however, moved her past the point of caring. When her third effort to stomp on Silbeth failed, when the mercenary managed to dodge away even when the dragon tried to bite her in half or swallow her whole, Vircingotirilux reared back and inhaled, deeply.\n\nAll thoughts of stealth forgotten, Nycos cried out a warning. Silbeth didn't need it. Already she had turned, raced back across the cavern, but she had nowhere to go. The pool might provide some protection, if it didn't boil, but that would have meant getting past the dragon. And she was too far from the wall and its many passageways, could never possibly reach it before\u2014\n\nFlame filled the chamber, washed across Nycos's vision. He flinched from the sudden brightness.\n\nWhen he looked back, the floor steamed where Vircingotirilux's blood had evaporated in the infernal heat. More steam, and a bit of smoke, rose from her severed head and neck.\n\nOf Silbeth, there was no trace. Not so much as melted armor, charred bone, or even a heap of ash. She was simply gone.\n\nWrath the likes of which Nycos could never remember flooded through him, setting his soul alight hotter than any dragon's fire. Wrath and something far less familiar, something he'd come to know only sporadically and only as a man.\n\nGuilt.\n\nWith an animal bellow, he hurled himself from the wall and dropped, talons outspread, toward his enemy. Vircingotirilux's center head roared back, unleashing flame, but the dragon had nearly exhausted her inner furnace. The sheet of fire that washed past him, over him, was thin and dull. He felt tattered cloak and tunic disintegrate, ringlets of mail grow searing, scales and flesh burn, but he remained intact when he landed hard upon her other, more bestial head.\n\nEven as his talons sank home, however, she thrashed, nearly throwing him off. Back and forth the neck whipped, and it was all he could do to hang on. With hands and feet both he clung, unable to attack lest he lose his grip and go flying. He grew dizzy; his singed limbs weakened. And off to the side, Vircingotirilux raised her other head, jaws agape to pluck him off and rend him into pieces.\n\nHe caught a brief glimpse, as the chamber swirled and spun, of Smim, stabbing desperately at the dragon's tail, trying to distract her from Nycos, but the goblin's efforts were futile. Vircingotirilux knew her enemy, knew the true threat, and nothing would divert her attention, would stop her from\u2014\n\nShe froze, body and her central head both. Gleaming eyes grew wide\u2014in pain, yes, but mostly in shock. A small rivulet of blood trickled from the corner of her middle jaw, and even the savage head to which Nycos clung slowed its thrashing, struggling to see and to understand what had just happened.\n\nShe's alive!\n\nSilbeth stood below, the dragon's distraction having allowed her to come terrifyingly near. She had plunged her spear deep into Vircingotirilux's centermost neck, ripping at flesh and various pipes within. Not a lethal stroke in and of itself, but unexpected, devastating.\n\nBut how had she\u2026?\n\nHe looked again, focusing past the dizziness of his wild ride. Silbeth was absolutely coated, slick with blood and saliva and other fluids, as though she'd rolled through an abattoir. It caked her clothes, gummed her hair into a sodden mass.\n\nNyos's gaze flickered to the dislocated head that lay, still steaming, on the cavern floor, and he knew where Silbeth had sheltered from the torrent of flame. His admiration for this woman who should, by all rights, have been born a dragon grew stronger still.\n\nBetter not let her efforts go to waste, then.\n\nHe reared up, plunged both hands deep into Vircingotirilux's flesh and began to burrow. Like a maddened badger, he scooped out clawed handfuls and tossed them behind as he dug. Again the head and neck thrashed, but Nycos had gone deep. A thick tendon provided a convenient handhold for one fist as he continued to carve with the other.\n\nIn seconds he exposed a patch of bone. Straightening his fingers, making a blade of his talons, he struck. And again. And once more.\n\nSkull split; a tiny rift, but enough for a claw to penetrate. Head and neck froze. Nycos lay flat upon the scalp, arm fully extended and all but encased in the hole he'd excavated.\n\nAnd then, as before, the neck went limp.\n\nNycos let go, allowing himself to be thrown aside. Silbeth, too, wisely retreated, as once again Vircingotirilux convulsed, tail and her one remaining head beating the floor of the cavern. Blood and fire spilled from her surviving set of jaws in equal measure, yet her maddened thrashing and her screams were weaker than before. Now and again she spat a few syllables, but they formed nothing resembling coherent words.\n\n\"Do we\u2026 try to question her?\" Silbeth asked skeptically. \"I know you wanted information\u2026\"\n\n\"I did. I do.\" Indeed he seethed with frustration, wondering who or what had told her where to find him, had provided the magics to cloak her ogre assassin. \"But she's too far gone.\"\n\n\"Then we should finish this.\"\n\nNo argument there. \"Smim!\" He stretched forth a hand as the goblin came running. \"Spear.\"\n\nThe shaft smacked into his palm. He lifted the weapon, saw Silbeth hefting her own, and nodded.\n\nPerhaps too pained, perhaps too maddened, now, to even recognize the danger, Vircingotirilux didn't react as they drew near. Just like that, head by head, the wyrm of Gronch died.\n\nAnd took her secrets with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 81",
                "text": "At first, perhaps driven by pounding hearts and racing thoughts, they'd chatted up a storm.\n\nSilbeth expressed her sympathies, again, that Nycos hadn't learned what he'd hoped from their journey. He, after brushing it off as unimportant\u2014a lie they both recognized\u2014had set the trio to collecting as many of the iron spears as remained salvageable.\n\n\"Planning to hunt another dragon next year?\" she'd taunted.\n\n\"For the ogres,\" Nycos had replied. \"I've no idea how they're liable to react to their 'queen's' death, but I'd prefer to have weapons that can harm them. Besides,\" he added with a shrug, \"the spears probably won't be any good in a year. Once the talons start to decay, in a few months, they'll grow brittle.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\n\"They should still be more than strong enough if you plan to kill me now, though. I'm tired and I hurt, so this is probably your best shot.\"\n\nSmim and Silbeth had exchanged shocked glances. \"Why would you even tell me that?\" Silbeth demanded.\n\n\"Because I don't think you'll do it. But also because I don't have the energy to lie around wondering if it's coming.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to kill you, Nycos. Not now, anyway.\"\n\n\"Oh, good. Then can you help me get this hauberk off? It's partly melted.\"\n\nOnce they were beyond Vircingotirilux's lair, however, they seemed to leave conversation behind with the dead dragon. Days of meandering back through Gronch, hiding sometimes from lone ogres, sometimes from shouting, rampaging bands\u2026 then, once they'd recovered the horses, riding across snow-swept grasslands\u2026 and all of it in near silence. They didn't speak of their experiences, either their victories or failures. They told no tales of past adventure. Even the setting up and striking of camp, the sharing of meals, occurred with minimal speech.\n\nNycos welcomed the silence, the solitude. His head was awhirl with questions and worries, none of which he knew how to address. The death of a dragon, even one as horrid and savage as Vircingotirilux, was no small matter. He felt the weight of his actions. No guilt, not in this case, but a sense of magnitude, with repercussions he could not begin to anticipate. He racked his mind, trying to determine who might have aided the wyrm of Gronch, to think of anyone with both the magic and the motivation to throw in with the maddened beast. None of the answers made sense. Tzavalantzaval had many enemies, of course, but few were masters of the necessary sorceries. Few were of the sort to work through allies or pawns such as Vircingotirilux and her ogres. None he could come up with were both.\n\nNone who still lived, anyway.\n\nHis whole body ached with the wounds and burns he'd taken in the struggle, and though he'd resumed his human form and concentrated on his own shapeshifting magics as often as he could, healing his hurts, it would be many days before he felt whole.\n\nHe worried over his actions in Quindacra, wishing he had some means of knowing if his gambit had paid off, if he'd prevented dissolution of the pact, prevented war. He worried over Ktho Delios's schemes, wondering at their involvement with Vircingotirilux, if their own inquisitors had contributed their magic to her cause. But then, why would they have targeted him? How could they even have known of him? No matter how he chased it, over the days of freezing cold and frequent snows, he could never catch a solution.\n\nThen there were the consequences of this journey to consider. For the second time\u2014well, so far as anyone else knew, for the second time\u2014he'd disobeyed a direct order and sneaked from Oztyerva on a mission he'd taken onto himself. That he'd successfully slew the dragon wouldn't protect him from the Crown Marshal's ire. That he'd saved the treaty might, except he couldn't take credit for what happened in Castle Auric. He'd had no choice, he'd had to deal with the threat Vircingotirilux posed, but he might have destroyed his life back home, or at least many of his ambitions, in the process.\n\nAnd above all else, he fretted about the woman riding beside him, about whether they would remain allies\u2014even friends\u2014or whether she was about to turn her blade upon him, to strike down what she must surely consider a potential threat to the people of Kirresc.\n\nMore than once, during what few whispered conversations they had, Smim tried to convince him to kill Silbeth in her sleep. He never did, of course, and he forbade the goblin from moving against her, but he couldn't deny that he might well suffer for his mercy.\n\nNo, not mercy. Affection.\n\nAs for Silbeth herself, her thoughts on that long, silent trek remained her own.\n\nThe day was cold, the air smeared with gently drifting flurries, when the walls and the banners of Talocsa hove into view. The steeds, cold and tired, picked up their pace, sensing the end of their journey and the promise of shelter. Thus, it took only a few minutes for the trio to draw near enough to make out the narrow black pennants hanging beneath the traditional ensigns.\n\nNycos and Silbeth both went stiff. \"War?\" she suggested grimly.\n\nFor an instant, Nycos battled the urge to turn Avalanche around, to ride hard for Vidiir where he would peel the king and queen of Quindacra like tubers. After a few breaths to calm himself, however, and to review what he'd learned of Kirresci pageantry, he shook his head.\n\n\"Those are symbols of mourning, not conflict. Besides, look. The gates are open. They'd be sealed in a time of war.\"\n\nThey rode ahead at a swift trot, determined to learn what had befallen the kingdom in their absence. Several bows and spears bristled as they neared, but Nycos called out, identifying himself before the soldiers could even issue challenge.\n\n\"Sir Nycolos! Welcome home!\" The guard commander scrambled down from her post atop the wall. It was, as fortune would have it, the same captain who had been on duty that day\u2014so long ago, now\u2014when he'd first arrived after stumbling his way through the Outermark. \"We're so glad to see you well, particularly\u2014\"\n\n\"Captain.\" He raised a gloved hand. \"I apologize for my rudeness, but please. What's happened?\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" The officer stopped, exchanged a look with her soldiers, cleared her throat. \"I'm truly sorry to be the bearer of this sort of news, Sir Nycolos. Crown Marshal Laszlan was\u2026 He's dead. Murdered.\"\n\nNycos felt as though he'd once again been burned by Vircingotirilux's breath. He literally rocked in his saddle. \"What\u2026 I don't\u2026 How?\"\n\n\"I've only heard rumors and thirdhand reports, sir. Apparently enemy operatives or assassins somehow gained access to Oztyerva. They\u2026 Sir, there's more. Baron Kortlaus apparently interrupted the struggle.\"\n\nNow he had to dismount, to lean on Avalanche for support lest he topple. \"Dead?\" He'd barely remembered how to speak the word. His friends were so few\u2026\n\n\"No, sir, but\u2026 He took a blow to the head. He's alive, but none of us know how he's doing, or if he'll recover. Sir Nycolos, I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" He couldn't remember feeling so adrift, so helpless, since his earliest weeks here in Talocsa. Perhaps this guard captain is an ill omen, he wondered, though he knew the thought was borderline hysterical. \"I need to go to the palace.\"\n\n\"Of course, Sir Nycolos.\" The soldiers stepped aside, allowing the travelers to pass.\n\nNycos kept his gaze downward. The road seemed oddly blurred, obscured by something beyond the gentle snows. It was almost as if\u2014\n\n\"Nycos?\" Silbeth, now also on foot, took his arm and pulled him to a halt. \"Are you crying?\"\n\n\"Am I?\" He looked up at her. He'd shed tears, as a human, of exhaustion, frustration, pain\u2026 Never such as these. He reached up, felt the moisture in his eyes, a single trail threatening to freeze as it traversed his cheek. \"I guess I am. It's a curious thing; I\u2026 don't think I care for it.\"\n\nShe studied him, lip twitching as though she would say a hundred things at once, and then she wrapped him in a brief but steadying hug.\n\n\"I've made my decision,\" she whispered in his ear. \"I'll keep your secret.\"\n\nShe pulled away, and it took him a moment to realize just what she was telling him. Despite everything, a tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I mean, unless you give me a new reason to change my mind,\" she warned him, only half in jest.\n\n\"Of course.\" And then, again, \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Nycos.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 82",
                "text": "He stood alone in the council chamber, staring idly at the table where maps and other documents of war so frequently lay. The guards had directed him to wait here when he'd requested an audience with the king, but they'd given no indication of how long he was to wait, or why here rather than the throne room.\n\nDuring his trek through Talocsa, and then Oztyerva, Nycos had picked up on much that had happened in recent weeks. Quindacra had, indeed, not only dispatched the messages he'd instructed but reopened ambassadorial channels as well\u2014all good signs, though he thought it unfortunate they'd sent a new envoy in place of Ambassador Guldoell.\n\nThe treaty remained intact. The attacks on communities in and around Gronch had ceased, for reasons Nycos understood better than anyone. Ktho Delian forces had concluded their supposed exercises and drawn back from the border, albeit not far. The threat of imminent invasion, it seemed, had passed.\n\nYet while Kirresc might not be at war, neither was the nation on a peacetime footing. Nycos had spotted far more soldiers on the street on his way to the palace, far more knights in residence once inside, and had overheard enough conversation to know that troop movements were underway all across the nation. If conflict had not yet been born, it clearly gestated, and he wasn't entirely certain why. Perhaps when his Majesty finally arrived\u2026\n\n\"Welcome home, Sir Nycolos.\"\n\nThat wasn't King Hasyan's voice.\n\nNycos turned and dipped his head in polite greeting. \"Dame Zirresca.\"\n\nShe started to speak, then seemed to think better of it, instead shutting the door behind her and moving to stand at the table. \"Have you seen Baron Kortlaus?\" she asked, not unsympathetically.\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"You should know, before you do\u2026 He won't recognize you. He's not really there. He hears us, lets us feed him, but that seems to be it. We still hope he'll recover, but\u2026 Well, I thought you should be prepared.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Nycos told her sincerely. \"I'll go see him as soon as I've spoken to his Majesty.\"\n\n\"His Majesty won't be joining you this afternoon. He\u2026 spends a lot of time alone, these days. Mourning.\"\n\n\"I understand. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"We all are,\" she said brusquely. \"I've been instructed to speak to you on his behalf.\"\n\nA faint suspicion flared in Nycos's mind. \"Please, go ahead.\"\n\n\"First off, we're all going to assume that you left with Marshal Laszlan's permission, on a secret mission he chose to conceal.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026\"\n\nZirresca leaned over the table, her expression, her entire posture intent. \"If we believed otherwise, Sir Nycolos, we would have to take punitive steps. And we can't afford that right now. We need you. You understand?\"\n\n\"I do. That said, if Quindacra's not abandoning our pact after all, there should be no invasion. Why\u2014?\"\n\n\"Ktho Delios may not be put off so easily. Their scheme may have disintegrated, but we have to consider the possibility that they've merely been delayed, not thwarted.\"\n\n\"Come on, Zirresca.\" Again she looked as though she wanted to interrupt, to say something, but as she chose against it, he continued, \"You and I both know that the military build-up and preparation happening around here is more than a precaution.\"\n\n\"His Majesty,\" she confessed, \"is all but convinced the attack on Laszlan was orchestrated by Ktho Delios.\"\n\n\"Surely he wouldn't go to war with them over a suspicion! He\u2014\"\n\n\"No. He's grieving, not insane. Of course we're investigating, trying to determine for certain what happened, who was responsible. But make no mistake, Nycolos. Whether it was Ktho Delios, one of the other nations, or even some noble or organization within Kirresc itself? As soon as we know for certain, we are going to war.\"\n\nNycos desperately wished that he were within reach of one of the chamber's chairs.\n\n\"What I need to know, Sir Nycolos, is that I can count on you. That you won't be caught up in past grudges.\"\n\n\"I'm a loyal knight of Kirresc! Of course you\u2026\" He stopped, Zirresca's precise words catching up with him. His earlier suspicion crystallized into absolute certainty, and he knew what she'd already almost told him twice over.\n\nWell, he could hardly pretend to be surprised, could he? Orban was dead, Kortlaus not far behind. He himself had been away. And she'd been the frontrunner anyway, hadn't she?\n\nHe'd nowhere else to go, no easy way to start yet another new life, and those people he truly cared for\u2014however few in number\u2014were all here.\n\nSo, no matter that everything he'd strived for over the past year and more was beyond his reach, that the only path he knew to a higher position and a better life was now closed to him, that his pride rankled and churned at the very notion, he gave the only answer he could.\n\n\"Of course you can count on me, Crown Marshal Zirresca. It's my honor to serve.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "\"It's all coming apart.\"\n\nVesmine Droste, officer of the Deliant, leaned her head up against the cool stone wall. \"I put this all into motion. It was my plan. Quindacra, the ogres, all of it.\"\n\n\"Was it?\" Behind her, an adolescent boy in a ragged cloak placed a wooden mug on the table and leaned back in his chair. \"I seem to recall having a bit of a hand in it.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean. As far as Governor-General Achlaine and the rest of the Deliant are concerned, it's all me. The operation was supposed to leave our neighbors open and isolated, ripe for the taking. And now it's failed, utterly, after we've devoted a lot of resources. I'll consider myself fortunate if they just take my rank!\"\n\n\"Calm down, Colonel.\"\n\n\"Calm\u2026!\" She spun from the wall, stormed over to slam her fists on the table. \"How dare you\u2014?\"\n\n\"Yes, calm. We've suffered a setback\u2014but it is a setback, nothing more. We'll have to take some new steps, rely on some of my failsafes. Your conquest will have to wait another year or three.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that all? And I suppose you expect me to convince the rest of the Deliant to be all right with that?\"\n\n\"Dealing with them is a large part of your purpose in this little cabal of ours, Colonel.\"\n\n\"Don't overstep yourself, wizard!\" she hissed. \"You need me more than I need you! If necessary, I'm sure I could find some Inquisitors who could do the same\u2014\"\n\nThe table reared like a furious stallion, slamming Droste across the chamber with two legs. It charged after her, those same limbs colliding with the stone to either side of her, pinning her to the wall.\n\n\"There are no Inquisitors,\" he snarled, \"no sorcerers for you to call on, who can do what I can!\"\n\nHer gaze flickered from him to the table legs, which had struck the stone hard enough to leave scratches. \"They'll hear you!\"\n\n\"Oh, relax, Colonel. Nobody can hear a thing that occurs within this room unless I wish them to. You might want to consider the various repercussions of that before you think to threaten or insult me again.\"\n\nVesmine nodded stiffly, and the table dropped away, returning to its spot in the center of the chamber.\n\n\"Anyway, none of this effort has been wasted,\" he explained. \"We've identified an enemy, one I thought I'd dealt with when I arranged for the Kirrescis to locate Wyrmtaker. Trust me when I tell you it's better that we learned of him now than when our plans were further along. I'll figure out how best to deal with him, and you will yet have your war. It's just a matter of time.\"\n\n\"Hmph. As you say, Ondoniram.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The ancient sorcerer smiled broadly with the stolen face of a child. \"As I say, indeed.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "World In My Claws",
        "author": "Bard Bloom",
        "genres": [
            "comedy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "humor",
            "first person",
            "Mating Flight",
            "1st person"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Summary: Jyothky and her fellow dragons were supposed to have a nice simple mating flight on Hove. Instead they got tangled up in everything \u2014 accidentally conquering a sophisticated, unwilling country, unleashing an undead god upon an innocent city, discovering horrible mind-controlling parasites, an invasion by some of their older and more powerful friends, and massive violations of draconic etiquette. How can they possibly get out of this with their honor or even their hides intact?"
            },
            {
                "title": "View of a Rebellion (Day 126)",
                "text": "\"Your homes, your jobs, your families, to them you must return while you still live! The flames, they are ready to harm you!\" Llredh circled the rioters so low that his wingtips furrowed the crowd. He kept his hukuch\u00f4 curled up high in the astral plane, so that they would disperse intentionally or not at all.\n\n\"Monsters of evil! Spawn of the anti-gods! Go back to Garchune! Lady of Peppers prepares a woeful soup for your punishment!\" yelled Dr. Sband. He had been delivering an incendiary sermon proclaiming that our conquest of Trest was illegal, illegitimate, and evil. (He was wrong. I'm pretty sure it was actually legal.) Grands upon grands of hovens packed Marmelane Square to hear him, and a half-dozen other speakers: brave loyalists to the former regime, or firebrands and rabblerousers, depending on your point of view.\n\nLlredh laughed, a deep booming laugh from his throat and his wings that must have rattled every window in Churry City. \"Threats of imaginary spirits, these do not impress me! Threats of riots, these do not impress me either. Burn your city down if you like! You shall not get another!\"\n\nI was circling far over Llredh's head. This conquest is his idea. He can do all the work \u2014 and if there are any rewards from it, those are his too, to share with his husband if he wants. But Ythac had asked me to go with Llredh and keep him and Churry City safe. The hovens still had some weapons that could kill a dragon, here and there, and Llredh's dangersense isn't much better than my sense of touch.\n\nThe crowd didn't seem to have any serious weapons, or not the martial kind at any rate. They weren't there to fight us, anyway. They weren't even expecting us to be there; after all, we'd been in Perstra the capital three hours ago.\n\nThe crowd's weapons were the different kind, and they wore them as their clothes. By the stage two dozen judges listened to Sband, the balance-emblems on their flat-caps damp with the drizzle. Beyond them, a half-grand of hovens who were wearing the striped teal uniform of Churry City's civil service, with abacus pendants for the accountants, wire circles for the gendarmes, black bottles for the secretaries, and so on. Behind them was a squad of ritual musicians, a company of refuse-takers, a brigade of shopkeepers, a legion of students. Without their labors, Churry City would be ungovernable and all but unliveable.\n\nDr. Sband didn't quite seem to understand the powers at his command, though. So he invoked some powers which weren't his to command, and, as far as I could tell, didn't exist at all. \"You are arrogant, you are foolish, you overreach yourself! Bmern and Drukah will bring destructions to you!\"\n\nLlredh didn't understand what opposed him, either. He roared, \"My might, you doubt her? My ruthlessness, you doubt her? Your country, she is the present for my wife Ythac! I do not tolerate disobedience towards Ythac! Dispersal and obedience, these are your protections from me! Silly gods, fake gods, not so much so!\"\n\n\"They are serious gods, real gods! You will discover this soon, to your harm!\"\n\nLlredh arched his head back, as one does when one is about to breathe powerfully. I squealed at him, \"Stop! Don't do that!\" He ignored me, of course. His flames covered the stage and splashed further, scorching judges, singing accountants and gendarmes and secretaries, heating the face-fur of musicians and refuse-takers and shopkeepers. He wasn't trying to kill them very much though. He uses tighter, hotter fire on his friends.\n\nThe stage burned, where it was wood. Hoven clothes and fur burned. Trestean flags set around the stage burned. (We hadn't yet replaced the Trestean flag, but the hovens were using it as a symbol of opposition to us.) The hovens on the stage fled if they could, but a dozen of them couldn't. The hovens in the audience mostly fled too. Of course, Marmelane Square doesn't have very good exits, so some of them fled and some of them fell and got trampled by the others' hooves.\n\nLlredh boomed, \"Who can stand against me? There is no hoven, there is no dragon, there is no god on Hove who can! Peaceful submission to me, she alone is your hope and your survival!\" This was a bit of a boast past truth. Csirnis and Llredh are fairly evenly matched.\n\nRather more practically, I swooped down and landed on the stage. Or tried to; my left hindleg was on the wooden part, the burning wooden part, and fell through. No great matter, really. I swept the fallen hovens off the burning part of the stage, and started putting the Arcane Anodyne into them.\n\n\"Jyothky! Your chore, what is she, why is she? These people, they opposed me, they are dying! What could be simpler? There is nothing, there can be nothing!\" he said in Grand Draconic. (Actually he talks normally in Grand Draconic, I've just made it sound like the way he usually talks.)\n\n\"Ythac asked me to keep you from destroying Churry City too much. That includes not killing all the people.\"\n\n\"My breath, I rendered her moderate! Those who die, they are few in number and circumscribed! The rest, they learn!\"\n\n\"You're better off letting them accept your rulership and live. Says Ythac, not just me.\"\n\n\"Will they live?\" Llredh landed nearby, on the stone pavement of the square.\n\n\"I'm not that bad with healing spells, on hovens. I've had lots of practice, fixing Tarcuna after I killed her cyoziworm,\" I reminded him.\n\nHe roared and struck the pavement with his tail, so that it crazed and shattered. \"The worm, the worm, the vile worm! I do not forget the worm! Soon, soon must I pacify Trest! For my wife, yes, but for my revenge too!\"\n\nI scooped up another struggling hoven. A minister or something, it's hard to tell after their clothes are burned off. \"Why are you calling Ythac your wife, Llredh? He's a boy. You're both boys.\" They're on the \"perverts\" side of the mating flight. I'm on the \"cripples\" side, myself.\n\n\"Hah! Last night we have the mount-fight, only without the fighting. The love, that is easy with Ythac. But the sex, there are many choices, some nights we want to not be so careful. The quick game of cards, we play her, that is our mount-fight! Ythac loses. So he is my wife again. So often he is!\"\n\n\"I don't see how you can pretend to have the least bit of honor, if that's how you carry on.\"\n\n\"The gambling debt, what is more honorable than keeping her?\"\n\n\"You picked the stakes, though. It wasn't like an open-ended gamble with a small person, where you didn't expect to lose and you get surprised by the result.\"\n\n\"No, it was not that,\" said Llredh. \"Z\u1e65r\u00e0s\u1e2bi\u1ecd \u017a\u00f3 Hra\u0161\u015bi\u01d2\" Politeness is lightness.\n\n\"Right. Well, the next time I ask a question like that, just look mysterious and superior and don't tell me the nasty little answer.\"\n\nYthac's the Horizonal Quill wrote words in my mind. \"Llredh broke up the demonstration already, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Yes. One cloud of fire, and they all ran off. I'm healing the ringleaders now. You did want them healed, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you! Could you make sure they don't run off before I get them arrested? I'd ask Llredh, but he'd probably sit on them.\"\n\n\"He's not very happy with them, or with me.\"\n\n\"He likes you just fine,\" Ythac wrote.\n\n\"Right. I was his third-favorite girl in the mating flight.\" Which is, of course, calling Ythac a girl, just like Llredh did. I was annoyed at both of them though.\n\n\"I really am trying to get you to be friends with each other.\"\n\n\"I'd be a lot happier being his friend if he weren't fireblasting crowds of hovens. Or torturing hovens. Or conquering hovens.\"\n\n\"That's just an excuse. You've killed nearly as many hovens as he has. Your moral superiority over my husband is pretty scanty.\" Ythac wrote.\n\n\"I don't torture people or steal their countries,\" I answered. If you are ever in an ethical discussion and that's your best response, you've pretty much lost. So I healed the last couple of hovens on the stage. They weren't exactly very scorched; they'd run up to see if they could help the speakers, and sort of gotten trapped between Llredh and me.\n\n\"And neither of you reanimates dead mhelvul paingods and doesn't take proper care of them and lets them take over major cities, like your fianc\u00e9 Osoth,\" wrote Ythac. \"I don't think any of us are in a particularly strong moral position at this point. I think we've got to stay around here for a gross-year or two. Long enough to give the hovens all the benefits of proper draconic rule. By way of apology for all the chaos and devastation we've given them so far, even if you're not much of an Uplifter.\"\n\n\"We've certainly got plenty to apologize for, and I think I'm getting to be an Uplifter.\" I agreed. \"I'm not sure that Llredh's style of enforcing rule is going to give us less to apologize for, though.\" Dangersense mumbled of a minor threat off from a corner of the square. \"Sorry, Ythac, I've got to go. Someone's shooting at us.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jyothky!\" Ythac wrote.\n\nA purple-furred hoven woman was running across the mostly-empty plaza towards us, holding a big ray gun. When I turned to look at her, she stopped running and pointed it at me. I swatted it out of her hands with a wingtip. She raced after it, shouting, \"You killed my husband!\"\n\n\"I did?\" I asked, and breathed lightning on the ray gun before she could get to it. She hadn't been lying, but I hadn't killed anyone in a while. At least three or four weeks.\n\n\"He's in the street over there! He fell while everyone was running, and nobody stopped to help him up, they just ran all over him, and you killed him!\"\n\n\"The error, she comes here with a ray gun!\" said Llredh. \"The dragons, they did not kill your husband. The hovens, they killed him.\"\n\nSo I bit his tail.\n\n\"What is that for, Jyothky?\"\n\nI waddled towards the edge of the square. A dozen or so hovens were lying trampled and bloody by each street out of the plaza, with a few less-injured ones trying to tend them here and there. \"Which one is your husband?\"\n\nShe pointed. Her husband was quite mangled, marked with the prints of many hooves. His right eye was smashed, and many bones broken here and there. \"He's not quite dead though.\" I put the Arcane Anodyne into him. Twice, because the first one didn't fill him.\n\nHe moaned, and tried to sit up. Which wasn't a very good idea. A few barely-healed bones broke again, from the sound of it. So I got his wife to make him lie down again, and put another the Arcane Anodyne into him, and some of the slow healing spells. And then did the other injured hovens, because that seemed fair.\n\nAnd then the gendarmes came. They weren't particularly racing to the square all full of obedience to their beloved draconic overlords. But Ythac had been intimidating the gendarmes chief, rather more gently than Llredh had been intimidating the crowd, and had persuaded him of the obvious truism that the citizens of Churry City would be better off if they enforced the dragons' decrees rather than making the dragons do it themselves.\n\nThe hovens at my corner were quiet and subdued. Maybe I was mollifying them by healing their wounded, or maybe they remembered that I had destroyed the Peace Everywhere Array more or less single-handedly. The gendarmes put the husband and a few others of the injured on stretchers, and arrested the wife and some of the other helpers.\n\n\"Why are you arresting them?\" I asked of the lieutenant or whatever in charge.\n\nThe lieutenant looked away from me. \"Gendarme chief said to arrest the people in the square.\"\n\n\"Probably mostly the ones on the stage,\" I said.\n\nThe lieutenant looked over to where Llredh was towering over some previously-grilled speakers. \"Um... Chief said everyone. We gotta do everyone. Starting with these, I guess.\" He and his men started asking many, many questions to the people they had captured. \"We gotta be thorough. Chief said so.\"\n\nOn the other side of the square, matters weren't so peaceful. The uninjured audience members were yelling at the gendarmes who were trying to arrest them. The argument had a few salient and intellectually substantial points:\n\nThe audience members were assisting some injured people. (Quiet gendarme answer: their medics will take care of them.)\n\nThe audience members committed no crime. (Morose gendarme answer: Chief said to arrest you.)\n\nThe audience members are loyal Tresteans; the gendarmes are collaborators. (Miserable gendarme answer: Archons say the dragons are in charge. What're we gonna do?)\n\nSo I waddled over and healed their injured people as best as I could, which helped on point 1 a lot. I didn't really have much of an answer for points 2 or 3. The dragons in charge are Ythac and Llredh. It's their territory, I'm just a guest trying to be helpful.\n\nTo my best friend, his horrible husband, and his vast empire of exceedingly unhappy subjects. This is getting to be a problem."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rituals of Conquest (Day 144)",
                "text": "Some days, we seem to be drowning Trest in a sea of blood and flame. That's perfectly normal. Other days, like today, we're trying to drown it in a sea of dramaturgy. I suppose I should worry more about the blood and flame.\n\nTarcuna woke me up in her customary manner of these days. Specifically, by picking her Dragon-Taming Staff \u2014 which is a length of steel drain pipe to which she has attached some heavy hand-sized bells and cloth streamers \u2014 and thumping my eye with it until the noise or the danger woke me up. (If the staff isn't at hand, she'll use a chair or something, which works just as well.) She has realized that I am not going to kill her for any but the gravest of reasons, and exploits that mercilessly.\n\n\"I'm not asleep, I'm awake,\" I said, in tediously non-rhyming Trestean.\n\n\"It's humiliate-the-Tresteans day. Ceremony's in a little over an hour,\" she said.\n\nI twisted my head around and glared at my body, which was still small and tubby and flat black. \"Oh, that's right. I'd better get ready then.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose you'll let me out of it?\" she asked.\n\n\"You might be part of the Diplomatic Brigate of old Trest, in which case you belong there for one reason. Otherwise, you're part of my retinue. Actually you're all of my retinue, and I certainly want you there.\"\n\n\"Everyone watching will think I've sold my country,\" she said.\n\n\"Which isn't so far off,\" I said. \"At least you got a good price.\"\n\n\"You are unbearably comforting sometimes,\" she said. \"At least I had the foresight to attach myself to you by unbreakable bonds before the conquest.\"\n\nI slithered out of my tent \u2014 Ythac had acquired some big tents for the dragons to sleep in \u2014 and started shapeshifting a row of curved spikes down my back. \"You can leave any time you like, as far as I'm concerned. I'd be sorry to see you go of course. But I don't really need a hoven prostitute very much, much less a retired one.\"\n\n\"Only if you send me away again,\" she said. \"It's not just the side effects of getting freed. You've conveniently made me the enemy of honest and loyal people everywhere.\"\n\n\"I'm honest! I'm loyal!\" I noted, while I gave myself a triple rack of black lyre-shaped horns. Impractical as anything, but they ought to be pretty.\n\n\"'People' means the sort of people you call 'hovens'. We don't even like that name,\" said Tarcuna. She got out a cosmetic kit, and started tinting her ears blue. She muttered, \"If I'm a political whore, I might as well dress the part.\"\n\n\"Beg pardon?\"\n\n\"Decent people do not wear bright blue ear-dye to formal events, as my parents were very careful to tell me several dozen times,\" said Tarcuna. \"But I am doing it anyway. In case anyone might possibly wonder whether I consider myself decent.\"\n\nI don't know what to do about her when she's in that sort of mood. So I made her do something useful instead. \"Well, I want to look proper. Do I?\"\n\nShe stared up at me. \"Tilt your head right... turn a bit... No, your horns on the left are a lot closer than on the right.\"\n\nI fixed them, and checked with a scrying spell. \"Ah. Thank you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Stone of Merraro",
                "text": "Behind the great cathedral of Merraro is a glorified and very sacred shed. It's decorated like a chapel itself, with carved illustrations of the benevolent suns and some mythical angels and whatnots. It's lit by (as of yesterday) thirty-eight big oil lamps with the flags of the nations that merged into Trest. But it's still a big shed, for storing a big rock.\n\nAnd it is, indeed, rather a big rock. It is almost rectangular except for a long spike on the top right, making it about the length of my neck total, and half that wide, and a nice solid two or three feet thick. It's a pretty grey color, with faint swirly spirals of darker grey shot through with golden sparkles of pyrite. And, according to the guidebooks, in days that Trest thought more glorious, Archconsul Nespers \u2014 who was a stonemason in her youth \u2014 carved the first treaty establishing Trest. \"For amity, for loyalty, \u2014 for glory, for peace, for civilization, we do freely and gloriously unite together and form the country of Trest. Pleovar, Ventelia, Greater Naspen,...\" Thirty-eight names are carved in the stone, seven of them by Nespers' hand. (I don't know why the guidebook says that; hoven hands don't have claws to speak of. I'm sure she used tools.) The rest came later, as other countries joined Trest. I don't know who carved them though.\n\nLots of people \u2014 both kinds of people \u2014 had been collected to observe the fate of the big rock. Lawmakers and treasurers and generals, wearing their greatest finery, with silken cords binding their hands to their necks. Reporters for newspapers and television stations. Hated and hateful the event would surely be, but a thoroughly-documented hatefulness. Dozens of gendarmes, wearing new blue and orange spiked caps. And of course the seven former consuls of former Trest were there. They didn't get to wear their finery though. They wore leather yokes, with heavy chains trailing behind.\n\nAnd us, of course: the seven remaining dragons, all looking as glorious as possible. \"Ythac, why aren't you making a point of having seven dragons and seven consuls?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Couldn't think of anything sensible to do with it. If you five had asked to rule Trest under us, I might have done something with it. Since you're not planning to help us, or even stay past the end of the mating flight, I didn't want to make you seem like crucial symbolic elements to the dracarchy.\" Ythac's mental letters were jerky, the points on the \"i\" and \"f\" tall and spiky. But I couldn't tell that he was nervous just to look at him. He was a sculpture of delicate blues and greens, his natural spikes augmented by secondary ruffs, staring monumentally at the hovens. Llredh, next to Ythac, grinned a huge predatory grin, and curled his tail over Ythac's.\n\nThe chief of gendarmes gestured at the lawmakers with her baton. Most of the lawmakers dropped to their knees and recited in a loud ragged unison, \"We are gathered today to surrender our empire to Llredh and Ythac our conquerors.\" Two of them, more battered than most, refused to kneel and chant. The chief gestured. Two frozen-faced gendarmes picked their way through the surrenderers. They tied cords of catgut around the arms of the resisters, and twisted them slowly. The others finished their recitation, and then started it again, quietly, as a background obbligato to the rest of the ritual.\n\nLlredh roared. \"Let Archconsul Shuvanne bring forth the ancient symbols of Trestean unity, so that we may revise it to show the reality that is now, and evermore shall be!\" He had obviously been rehearsing too, or that would have come out in his usual twisty speech.\n\nGendarmes unrolled the chains that trailed off the backs of the consuls' harnesses, and carried them into the shed, and hooked them into seven hooks in the front of a cart. Someone surreptitiously started a little motor, too: the Stone of Merraro was far too heavy for seven unathletic hovens to drag. But the consuls had to do a good deal of the work.\n\nThe leaders of Trest wept when the Stone of Merraro rolled out of the shed. One of the two who had resisted fell to his knees then, and the catgut was untied from his arms, and he joined the chant.\n\nYthac reared on his hind legs, and spread his glorious blue wings. \"Hovens of Trest! Your former rulers were fonts of wickedness! They stole from you the admiration that all of Hove once had, and replaced it by universal fear and resentment! They took your money and your peace and your children, and built weapons and tried to impose their will upon the whole of the world. You poured forth your blood and your labor, and all that came to you was hatred and strife! At last, in their arrogance and blindness, the consuls challenged the world-travellers, the world-conquerors, the dragons. Such a thing could not endure, and has not endured.\"\n\n\"And today the supremacy of the consuls is over. Today my husband and I shall rule you. Today is the beginning of peace, of harmony, of prosperity and joy.\"\n\nYthac and Llredh reared their heads back and breathed together upon the Stone of Merraro, darkness and flame. I wasn't entirely sure that darkness and flame were the best symbols of peace, harmony, prosperity, and joy. Speaking as a fire-breather myself.\n\nLlredh's fire neatly melted the top spike off the top of the Stone. That sort of evened it out, which will do for a symbol of harmony, I suppose. The crunch of the spike falling back and breaking the wall of the shed sure won't.\n\nI don't think the hovens noticed the result of Ythac's darkness at first. A few seconds later Tarcuna wailed, \"The words! The words!\"\n\nThe Stone now read, \"For agony, for legality, for humiliation, for passivity, for submission, we are compelled to deliver the unity of Trest into the claws of Ythac and Llredh.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you could pervert meanings with that,\" I wrote to him.\n\n\"It's like causing grammatical errors, only semantic. I did cheat a bit with a language spell though,\" he wrote back.\n\nAnd then the ritual got exceedingly dull. Ythac had composed a Charter for the Dracarchy of Trest. It was generally based on the Charter of the Consularchy of Trest, except that Ythac and Llredh, each, have absolute authority to do whatever they want. Mostly, though, the hovens are expected to govern themselves, as long as they do so wisely in Ythac's opinion. Not the sort of \u00fbj you might expect.\n\nThe only part that was the least bit interesting was when the last remaining resister needed to get his arm amputated. I broke the script a bit and put a healing spell into him afterwards."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda: Conquest Party",
                "text": "Afterwards, of course, there was a big reception in the huge public square in front of the cathedral. Everyone at the ritual had to attend the reception too, of course. Only a handful of Merrarovians came, and they mostly didn't eat very much and didn't look very happy.\n\nBut Ythac and Llredh did pick up a gaggle of hovens, eager to chatter with them, to flatter them, to offer their services. I only recognized the chief of gendarmes. So I asked Tarcuna, \"Who are those people?\"\n\n\"I don't know many of them. The one with the red stripes and the red cape is named Uborst. His picture's in the paper sometimes, he does a lot with politics. The one next to him is Larella Spargee. She's very rich, she gave a great deal to Archconsul Shuvanne. I don't know the others... oh, that one with the green and pink globes is Reverend Dreyrey.. He's in some strange sect or other, he's on television a lot. We always changed the channel when he started talking.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad that some important people look like they want to cooperate with Ythac and Llredh. They're going to have an awful time trying to govern a huge nation by force, just the two of them,\" I said.\n\n\"People who attach themselves to the dragons aren't going to be people you'd want to rely on. Anyone with any principles or moral integrity is going to oppose you. Even if you cut their arms off,\" said Tarcuna. She flopped her useless arm.\n\n\"I'm sure Ythac can get them to behave decently,\" I said. \"They can't really keep secrets from Ythac, and people like that are surely going to be particularly cowardly and susceptable to threats of violence.\"\n\n\"Have I been paraded around in public enough yet? I'm the only Trestean citizen lucky enough not to be surrendering to Llredh and Ythac today. Even if that's because you already got me.\"\n\nWell, since I do have her, I have to take care of her. \"You can go home if you want. I'm going to stay here 'til the end of the reception though.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Best Food On Hove (reprise) (Day 148)",
                "text": "We \u2014 the mating flight, plus Tarcuna \u2014 have been staying in Perspeckle, by the Quenjo Wastes. The hovens here are not terribly happy with us. They are mostly soldiers, or the families and friends of soldiers. They hate the drakes quite reasonably and (uninvolved) Arilash and me quite unreasonably for killing so many of their comrades in our abortive war. They hate all of us (quite unreasonably) for the dragons who are not us conquering their country. Oh, and they hate me (quite reasonably) for destroying the Peace Everywhere Array, with which they could have won the war.\n\nI am beginning to understand my parents a bit more. When they first conquered Mhel, all the mhelvul hated them too. I can smell the hatred when I fly low over Perspeckle. I have taken to flying with my mouth closed, which helps some.\n\nThey don't dare disobey us, though. Not when they remember how easily the drakes destroyed their best-prepared army.\n\nDarrir came to my barn this morning. Darrir is a former Social Warfare specialist of the former Army of former Trest. He regularly tries to make some of those less 'former'. So I greeted him with, \"Good morning, Darrir. What's the sedition of the day?\"\n\nHe looked a bit pained. \"Today, you have a phone call.\"\n\n\"I do? Not Tarcuna?\" Tarcuna spends time on the phone each day with friends in Dorday. I have at most seven friends on Hove, five of whom are close at hand, the sixth can write messages on my mind whenever he likes, and the seventh is Llredh, who isn't much of a friend and could get Ythac to write to me if he wanted to. So I've never gotten a phone call.\n\nHe held out a sophisticated technological telephone thing to me. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, since I'd probably poke a hole through it when I pushed the 'talk' button, so I made Darrir work it. It was awkward.\n\n\"Hallo?\" Which is the traditional way you talk on the phone, I think.\n\n\"Hallo, Joffee. I'm Churdle, you ate a vask on the farm, then we gave you some chili and troublecakes,\" said a scratchy little voice missing all the high and low tones.\n\n\"Yes, you had something wrong with your polysthegides and Fralian nodes. I put the Arcane Anodyne into you... did it work?\"\n\n\"Well, it worked, I don't have Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome any more, thanks for that,\" he said scratchily.\n\n\"You sound rather miserable,\" I said, because he did. \"What's biting your tail?\" But of course he doesn't have a tail.\n\n\"Well, you see, mister dragon, we'd taken some pictures of you and showed them all 'round. And we spoke well of you, telling everyone all around what you'd done with the healing and all. We were grateful, me 'specially,\" he said. Which was mostly true, I think, though it's harder to alethiocept over the phone.\n\n\"Well, that's all fair, it sounds like,\" I said.\n\n\"But then you go and smash our army and conquer our country...\"\n\nI motioned to Darrir to mash the 'talk' button. \"I didn't! That was Llredh. Except the Peace Everywhere Array.\"\n\n\"Well, mister dragon,\" said the farmer, who evidently didn't get a very good look at me. I suppose it was dark in the barn. But if I argued with everything, I wouldn't get much of a conversation. \"My neighbors, they don't quite fuss about which of you did which piece of it. And it's not a friendly place to live when everyone thinks you're a dragon-lover.\"\n\nWhich was astounding. \"Dragon lover? Just what have you been telling people that you've done with me? Or who was it?\" But that's not what he meant \u2014 for which I am very glad \u2014 he meant \"partisan of the dragons\".\n\n\"Anyhow, my neighbors aren't so happy with us now. Coming around with rifles and clubs, is how not happy they are. I hid behind the woodpile. They shot Looskie dead, though, and a few of the others are bad hurt. Basanne, she's got a big hole in her belly. She's the one who cooked that chili for you. And the doctor, he won't come by our farm any more. Except he did last night, he was one with a rifle. Could you come here and heal her, like you did for me?\"\n\nTroublesome hovens. Always killing each other and then asking you to take care of things. Well, in a few duodecades Ythac will surely set things right. In the meantime... \"Ythac? Mind if I go heal some farmers by Churry City?\"\n\n\"Hi, Jyothky. Go right ahead.\"\n\n\"I'll owe you the tribute, OK?\"\n\n\"If you keep insisting on the formal etiquette, I am going to bite your tail seven times,\" he wrote.\n\n\"Just being polite, you prickle drake!\" I told him. \"Certainly. I'll be there in, oh, perhaps five-twelfths of an hour.\"\n\n\"Thank you kindly, sir dragon,\" he said.\n\nI got the Melismatic Tempest and a bit of teasing from Arilash, and flew for Churry City."
            },
            {
                "title": "How to Heal a Farmer",
                "text": "Churdle's farm was looking a bit chewed around the edges, when I got there. A shed was in ashes, and the glass windows on the farmhouse were smashed and replaced by something that smelled like oiled paper. Which didn't seem like a very good defense against fire, really. Hovens aren't very good at tactics.\n\nFive rather grim and rather injured farmers met me. I squeaked, \"Hallo, Churdle, Joffinet, Marfy, all the rest!\" Fortunately I had remembered to reread Day 48 so I remembered some of the names.\n\nMisremembered, rather. Churdle said quietly, \"Joffee's inside, on the couch. Can you help her, too?\" I had to shrink to not much bigger than a horse to get inside, and that took some squirming, but I didn't want to look any less impressive than I had to. The black-timbered farmhouse was a mess. They used to have shelves of china statues, intricate clocks, glass teapots, but they had been smashed to the ground, and swept in piles in the corners of the sitting room.\n\nThree badly wounded hovens lay on the couches, shivering with fear and stinking with rotting wounds. Joffinet, who was about adolescent, had bullet holes in one leg, one arm, and one shoulder. Basanne, Joffinet's mother, had been shot in the intestines and not cleaned up very well, and looked and smelled as if she was going to die in a few hours. \"Oh, that's not good,\" I said, and started putting the Arcane Anodyne into them. So much for the wounds.\n\nBasanne and my definitely-not-namesake rubbed at their sides and arms, where they had smooth skin and flat fur where they had just had holes and septicemia. They thanked me for a while, but the only part I remember is Basanne apologizing for not having any delicacies to feed me. To which the only answer was, \"Oh, don't worry about it. I had breakfast this morning; last time I hadn't eaten for two days.\"\n\nThere was a mumble of light danger and a rumble of light engines from the driveway. The farmers looked scared, and scrabbled around to find rifles and an old sabre. Hooves clattered on the stone walkway, and deep voices growled, \"Dragon-lovers! What'd you do, call your friend back?\"\n\nI stuck my head out the doorway. \"I'm the only dragon-lover here, and I think I'm allowed.\"\n\nA dozen or so angry and poorly-armed hovens glared at me. \"Dragon! Monster! Defiler of our country! We kill you now!\"\n\nThey raised their guns, which, as noted above, mumbled light danger.\n\nI reached out with my wings to sweep the guns out of their hands. Nothing happened; my wings didn't get to them. I turned my head to look, and realized that all of me except the head was inside the house. My wings had hit the doorframe and I didn't feel it. I am such an idiot. Or at least not used to fighting indoors.\n\nAnd by the time I had figured that out, they had put a dozen bullets into my head and neck.\n\nI glared at them. This was going to be awkward. \"Ythac? Some of your hovens are shooting at me.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's just a celebratory display or something,\" he wrote back.\n\n\"I wish so. They started out by saying, 'We kill you now!' I am sorry, Ythac. Oh, they just shot me some more.\"\n\n\"Are you hurt? I know you can't always tell.\" So I had to check, but I wasn't much. \"What did you do to them?\" he asked. So I had to explain.\n\n\"No real choice,\" he wrote. \"Kill them and their families.\"\n\n\"You're the ruler!\" I scribbled back. \"You're in charge of justice! You do it!\"\n\n\"Look: you antagonized them. You execute them.\"\n\n\"I was just healing some of your other hovens! I was doing you a favor, having your subjects not die, contributing to the prosperity of your realm and generally being a good guest!\"\n\n\"Interfering in a local dispute without asking me first! My, Jyothky, I do believe I have caught you in a violation of etiquette finally!\" The fifth volley hit me in the left eye.\n\n\"All right, all right. Where are their families, anyway?\" I answered, because I really was feeling bad about being so rude to him.\n\n\"One minute.\"\n\nSo I healed my eye, and killed the attacking farmers with forky lightning. Carefully; I didn't want to break the farm any more than it already was. The friendly farmers howled. \"Are any of you hurt?\" I asked them, but they weren't. \"I have an errand to do, I'm afraid. Killing their families; that's the punishment for attacking a dragon without permission.\" They wailed incoherently.\n\nI didn't have far to fly; it was Churdle's neighbors who had been punishing him. A bit of flame, a bit of lightning, and two wives, one husband, six children, and various assorted livestock were dead as required by the oldest of draconic laws. The farmhouse next beyond that was a bit bigger, and eleven more people died for the crimes of their families.\n\nThe rest came from an old manor a mile away, a big house of stone and brick and black timbers on top of a hill, all surrounded by almond trees and gardens. The house shimmered upside-down in a reflecting pond by the front walk, where elegant blue-scaled fish swam. It smelled of roses, more than Perstra, even. Two children played at hoops on a gravel path. A heavy breath of flame roasted everyone in it alive, though I didn't bother with the children outside. They ran away screaming, and I suppose they survived or something.\n\nBy then I was furious. At Ythac for making me do his justice. At the neighbors for attacking me and making me kill them. At Churdle for calling me in. At myself for not squirming my whole tubby body out of the farmhouse when the danger came. At my great-to-the-whatever grandparents for making a horrible law like that. At everyone, really.\n\nSo I breathed on the manor again and again. The wood in the walls burned, and the almond trees and aromatic bushes all around. The stone glowed red, then white, and then slumped and pooled as so much magma. I switched to ice breath, then, and the magma froze and cracked and exploded. I alternated, heavier and heavier breaths each time. When the flame came, the stone spattered and boiled. When the frore came, the stone froze and shattered.\n\n\"Jyothky? What on Hove are you doing to that building?\" Ythac's writing was small and precise, apologetic.\n\nWell, there's no breathing at him across the Horizonal Quill. \"I promised that I'd crunch your wings up and then forgive you for, what was it, promising to marry me and then choosing another boy instead, remember?\"\n\n\"You promised, but you've never done it yet. Want to now?\"\n\n\"Yes. Where are you, Perstra?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don't want to be seen getting chomped in public and not fighting back. I'm a very dignified ruler. Can I join you in Perspeckle?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" He owns Perspeckle anyway."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "I didn't get around to it, though, because I got there much before Ythac did.\n\n\"Sacred suns, Jyothky, what happened to you?\" squeaked Tarcuna. My brave and helpful fianc\u00e9s were bravely and helpfully off cavorting with my rival.\n\n\"I got into a fight with some farmers. Outside Churry City.\"\n\n\"What did they do to you?\"\n\n\"Shot me, died. About what you'd expect.\"\n\n\"What did they shoot you with?\" She made me look at my face in a mirror. I was all over a'a.\n\n\"Oh, that's just shards and scoria. I got a bit upset at a stone building afterwards.\"\n\n\"Put your head down here.\" She started prying bits of rock-splatter off of me with her one good arm. \"Tell me what happened. You sound angry and miserable.\"\n\n\"I was just going there to heal a friend... she's a good cook...\" and on and on, I probably whined at her half an hour, lying on my back, until Ythac got there. I didn't bite him even once, though. I just lay there and let the two of them clean the ruin off my face.\n\n\"I'm going to transport those farmers,\" Ythac proclaimed regally. \"Move them halfway across the country to a new farm, and nobody will know who they are or why to hate them.\"\n\nI have the best friends in Hove.\n\nWhich would mean a lot more if I, personally, weren't the worst friend in Hove."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda: New Alignments",
                "text": "Nrararn was rather surprised to see Ythac tending me, and poked him with his sparky twirly horn until he slithered aside and let Nrararn groom me instead. Which is fine. Nrararn is a sweet little drake, and one that I actually could marry, and might. And I think he'd let me, for some reason that I cannot begin to understand.\n\nHe dug a bullet out of my inner eyelid. \"You didn't have the beautiful Uplifter day, it looks like, Jyothky?\"\n\n\"Not very Uplifty at all, actually,\" I said. \"Well, I tried to.\" And had to tell the whole story to the mating flight.\n\nArilash shook her head. \"When you spend too much time around small people, you start getting tangled in small people concerns and small people feelings and small people fights. Sorry, Tarcuna, but it's true.\"\n\n\"Says the dragoness as she apologizes to the offended hoven,\" noted Ythac.\n\nArilash airily lashed him with her tailtip. \"It's true, though, and you will see it in great awful clawfuls as you rule Trest. When we're too close to them, we get all involved, and usually small people die from it. My parents were all political with their mhelvul, and kept having to execute this one for embezzling, or that one for threatening to sic Mother on his rivals, or the other one for being too harsh an overlord. And both my parents are the upliftiest Uplifters on Mhel.\"\n\nOsoth cocked his head. \"To exhume this matter with a somewhat hypothetical air, albeit with an inadequate armamentarium of other hypothetical implements, which alignment might you subscribe to? You have just cast the effulgence of your intellect upon the bitter entanglements of the Uplifters. Yet that executionary act which spatters your speech with regret is one which Downcrushers do not deign to dread.\"\n\nArilash peered at me. \"Did he just say 'yes'? I couldn't tell.\" I sort of blinked miserably at her. Nrararn took the opportunity to clean some nonexistent scoria off the tip of my muzzle, so I obviously couldn't talk even if I had wanted to. (I hereby award a fianc\u00e9 point to Nrararn for cleverness and another for kindness. Unfortunately my tally is weeks and weeks completely out of date.)\n\nArilash sat on her haunches, and groomed her left talon a bit. She quietly said, \"Neither one suits me very well. There are all sorts of choices in the society of dragons which don't suit me. Decent or slutty? Married or single? Uplifter or Downcrusher? Drake or dragoness, for that matter, though that's not so much a choice as just a dichotomy. Why can't I make up a new affiliation? Overflyer, let me call it. I'll fly over the small people, I'll tend to my matters, and let them tend to theirs. Everyone will be better off. Jyothky, you can come with me.\" She sounded kind when she said that. Actually I think I was the only one paying the least bit of attention to mating flight etiquette in the whole conversation.\n\nI just whiffled a bit, noncommittally. I mostly like small people, despite winding up killing them constantly.\n\nCsirnis reared his head. \"I agree that the choices on that dichotomy are unfortunate. Uplifter or Downcrusher, yes, but either way we are the rulers. If one has no love of governing, neither choice brings delight.\"\n\nNrararn rose to the bait. \"No love of governing, perhaps. But who shall tend the herds of cattle you and your mate and your spawn will require? Who shall weave and sew your tents? Who shall build your home? Or do you wish to live in a cave and chase boars and wild whales to eat?\"\n\n\"I don't know how to live the way I want,\" grumbled Arilash. \"Not about small people, and not about other things, either.\"\n\nCsirnis curled his tail over his forepaws, and looked more superior than he usually does. \"In Ze Cheya, during the still-unfinished game of Hide and Seek...\"\n\n\"I found you all,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"...In the just-finished game of Hide and Seek, then, I experimented with a different approach. If Arilash calls hers Overflying, I shall call mine Withdwelling. I lived in Ze Cheya, in a home that the hovens gave to me, and I ate some quite delicious roast oxen and such that the hovens cooked for me, and I hoarded treasures ranging from amusing to exceptional that the hovens gave me as gifts. And, at the time, the hovens were glad to do all of that. I labored for them, you see. I was not terribly different from the cook at the noodle shop across from my home. I would happily live that way again. It gripes my conscience less than any other way I have lived, and provided for my comfort just as well.\"\n\nThe rest of us looked dubious. Arilash said, \"The aftermath gripes my conscience, and, with apologies to Jyothky's little Tarcuna and exactly no other small person anywhere, I don't even care about hovens.\"\n\n\"Mine as well, dear Arilash,\" Csirnis answered. \"I have not mastered life yet. Still, the root causes of Greshthanu's death and the destruction of Ze Cheya were largely outside of my attempt at Withdwelling.\"\n\nYthac huffed and glared. \"I count myself as a traditional Uplifter. I rule Trest, and I will yet make Trest as close to a utopia as I can manage.\"\n\n\"You are more ambitious than I am!\"\n\n\"For the sake of symmetry, then, I shall proclaim myself a Downcrusher,\" said Osoth.\n\nNrararn stared at him. \"Whenever I turn my back, you fly off to do archaeology and necromancy with a research expedition full of hovens.\"\n\n\"We all have our little hobbies, Nrararn,\" hissed Osoth.\n\n\"Distinctly uncrushed hovens,\" Nrararn noted.\n\n\"And sometimes our little hobbies get in the way of our nominal philosophical positions,\" Osoth hissed smoothly.\n\n\"I'm the Downcrusher here,\" I mumbled. \"I killed five dozen hovens today.\"\n\n\"And you sound so pleased with yourself for it,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I didn't want to!\"\n\nNrararn flomped a wing over my back, which would be comforting if I could feel it. \"You're not a Downcrusher. You're just willing to do what needs to be done, when the rest of us are a bit too squeamish.\" (Three fianc\u00e9 points to Nrararn for the day.)\n\nI sprawled against him, and listened to Arilash and Csirnis debate impossible philosophical positions."
            },
            {
                "title": "Back To The Mating Flight (Day 150)",
                "text": "After the conquest was made official in the eyes of... um... I'm not sure that anyone but Llredh and Ythac would consider it official, if them... the rest of us took to the air and fluttered around and tried to figure out what to do.\n\n\"Csirnis found us a very nice city,\" I said. \"A shame it got broken.\"\n\n\"They might take us back,\" said Csirnis. \"We didn't entirely make ourselves unwelcome.\"\n\n\"I have no great desire to spend every morning healing hovens,\" said Osoth. \"Especially if they are not my own hovens.\"\n\nI thought about Tarcuna, and Churdle and others. \"We'll get better service from the hovens if they think we're good to have around.\"\n\n\"I exemplify this principle more cogently than you, Jyothky! Do you not remember how eager the archaeologists at the Prevalian Tombs greeted me?\" said Osoth. Obnoxious beast.\n\nNrararn laughed and shook sparks out of his mane. \"Or better service still if they fear us. We could help Ythac and Llredh rule Trest for a while.\"\n\n\"Llredh may be my spirit-brother in many ways. But I do not want to rule any country,\" said Arilash. \"Not that I will complain when Jyothky helps her spirit-brother.\"\n\n\"I frequently engage in commerce \u2014 and, indeed, in repart\u00e9e \u2014 with actual spirits. I confess myself unaware of the means by which two dragons may be siblings in a necromantic sense,\" said the obnoxious beast.\n\nArilash puffed smoke towards Osoth. \"Just a metaphor I picked up from some hovens.\"\n\nOsoth puffed deadly dust back towards Arilash. \"A metaphor based on a wholly inaccurate understanding of their own spiritual nature, to say nothing of yours! Such a metaphor can do you no good. You must breathe upon it quickly!\"\n\nArilash laughed. \"You'd never have argued back when the mating flight started. Ready access to claspers is already distorting your judgment!\"\n\n\"Bah. When the mating flight started, I had little hope of ending up with a mate. That is no longer such a bitter concern, for several regrettable but not in all instances regretted reasons. Obsequiousness is no longer a dire necessity!\"\n\nArilash stared at him. \"Does this mean you won't be doing the hunting and cooking any more?\"\n\nOsoth coughed a poisonous cloud. \"Cooking was never my greatest pride, also for several regrettable but not in all instances regretted reasons. I should hope that, for the remainder of the mating flight, grateful and slightly intimidated hovens will rejoice to provide us with provender.\"\n\n\"He said no,\" I translated.\n\nArilash smirked. \"I'll rejoice in that bit, at least. Does it mean you won't be constantly challenging each other over who gets to mate with me next?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you and Jyothky could challenge each other over who gets to mate with me,\" said Osoth. \"Or at least with the suspiciously silent golden-scaled abdicationer flying insufficiently far off to be utterly outside of the conversation.\"\n\nCsirnis turned his head to look at Arilash. \"For my part, I shall observe the traditional forms as best as possible. I have no wish to be rude or dishonorable.\"\n\nI called to him, \"I've never seen you be either one!\" I can do mathematics, you see, and with three males to two females, mathematics calls for flirting and flattery. Besides, it's true.\n\n\"Right. Well, where should we go now?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"Let us go somewhere civilized, where there are hovens who will provide good things for us without excessive effort on our part,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"You really don't want to do the hunting and cooking, Osoth,\" said Arilash, flicking her tailtip in amusement.\n\n\"I do not. I further promise any prospective mate of mine a life painted with considerable luxury, provided by small people living and dead. And not, directly, by me,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"You're still acting like the females are in charge of the mating flight anymore,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"They are,\" said Arilash.\n\nI did more math. \"I think Arilash and I each have three-twelfths of the authority, and the drakes each get two-twelfths. And in a standard mating flight, without perverts or purple rays, each dragoness gets two-twelfths. So our drakes are as in charge as dragonesses usually are.\"\n\nArilash stared at me. \"That makes nonsense, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I shall not fuss in such detail about the numerology. I am fussing about cartography, or, in any case, navigation. I propose we go to Damma. Damma is a rich country, beautiful with ancient history, and fascinating with mountains and jungles,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Isn't that the other way 'round?\" asked Nrararn. \"Ancient history isn't usually beautiful.\"\n\n\"Not in this instance. In any case, I suspect that Damma would be happy to supply us with spicy delicacies and civic entertainments and mountain caves in exchange for a promise to destroy any Peace Everywhere Arrays used against them during our stay, and other such minor chores,\" said Osoth.\n\nThe other drakes shrugged. Nrararn said, \"How about the city that Jyothky found? Dorday, wasn't it? I'd like to see more of Trest. Especially off the battlefield. Civilization's nice, and Trest is supposed to have lots of it.\"\n\n\"Dorday is delightful. I'll show you around,\" I said. \"And what I don't know, Tarcuna does.\"\n\nCsirnis flapped his forewings. \"I should be glad to see Dorday.\"\n\nWhich was three votes out of five, or seven out of twelve by my axiomatization, so that's what we did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Our Invasion of Dorday",
                "text": "This deserves a full military-style summary."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Negotiations with the Allies",
                "text": "\"Ythac? The mating flight would like to go to Dorday. That's your territory. Do you mind?\" I wrote.\n\n\"Are any of you going to rule it \u2014 and, if so, before or after you get married?\" he asked back.\n\n\"No, just being tourists.\"\n\n\"Then enjoy! I will be glad to come visit now and then. I haven't seen Dorday yet.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Preparations",
                "text": "Tarcuna was living in a hotel room not far from the Diplomatic Brigade's offices. It was small and dingy, and I didn't much want to come in. The curtains were dusty when I brushed them aside with my muzzle to stick my head through the window.\n\n\"Tarcuna, I would like you to come with me back to Dorday.\"\n\n\"Do I have a choice?\"\n\nI had to think about that. \"You can, at least, express dissent,\" I said after a while.\n\n\"I'd rather negotiate.\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Negotiate away!\"\n\n\"I'm going to go visit some family and some friends. You come with me.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd be glad to,\" I said.\n\n\"And you're not to injure any of them.\"\n\n\"I should be glad not to injure any more hovens,\" I said.\n\n\"You are trying to be nicer than me in that. I doubt you can manage it,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I imagine I'll want to injure my mother, at least,\" said Tarcuna. \"I won't injure her, and you won't either.\"\n\n\"You have an unusual style of requesting favors of dragons,\" I said.\n\n\"Fine. I'll threaten you: if you kill anyone in Dorday, you'll have to kill me too,\" said my broken hoven.\n\n\"I'm not going to kill anyone in Dorday!\" I protested.\n\n\"Right, then. When do we leave?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Approach",
                "text": "We flew from Perstra to Dorday. The route was free of fighter planes and zeppelins and other hoven-built obstacles. Which doesn't mean it was safe. Arilash cut her wing on the track of my the Scratch-the-Sky, from a long time ago.\n\n\"Subtle, subtle Jyothky, to prepare such a trap for her rival!\" said Osoth.\n\n\"The wing will heal, the sky will heal. But Jyothky really needs to learn some better travel spells,\" grumbled Arilash.\n\n\"I learned the Dozenwing Dozentail!\" I called out.\n\n\"No. Better travel spells,\" said Arilash.\n\nAnother fianc\u00e9e point lost, I suppose."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Actual Assault",
                "text": "The other dragons shrank down to hoven size, and landed in front of the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium. I landed in my full size \u2014 rather amused to be towering over Arilash and Csirnis for once. Dozens of hovens left the street quickly.\n\n\"Ho, gendarmes!\" I called to five of them who hadn't left quite so quickly. \"Come help me take this woman and her luggage off my back!\"\n\n\"Bertrand, you go. Distract them until the street is clear,\" said the squad-captain. Bertrand walked towards me slowly, as if he actually hadn't planned to commit suicide this afternoon, and somewhat resented the opportunity to die gloriously in the service of his fellow citizens.\n\nI sang, \"I'm not killing anyone today! But take this woman off my back!\"\n\nTarcuna waved her good arm. \"Bertrand! Remember me from the Red Spire? Come help me down.\"\n\nBertrand's colleagues snickered. Bertrand's fur went muddy. \"Doesn't the Red Spire promise discretion?\" he muttered to her, as he opened buckles.\n\n\"Oh, I've quit the Red Spire,\" she said lightly. \"I work for Spotty now.\"\n\n\"I didn't know anyone quit the Red Spire,\" said Bertrand, helping her down.\n\n\"Oh, the old rules are gone forever. I'm the first one to quit,\" she said. \"Not the last, I hope. It's a horrible place.\"\n\n\"It seemed pretty nice to me,\" he said. \"Safe, for one thing. We never had any complaints from it.\"\n\n\"What was wrong, was something we couldn't complain about.\"\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"Cyoziworms,\" she said.\n\n\"Right. Cyoziworms. I've been there a dozen times, and I don't seem to be possessed,\" said Bertrand.\n\n\"They are absolutely real, Bertrand. I was wormridden.\"\n\n\"Get your story straight, girl. If they're real, you don't 'were' wormridden. They don't let you go.\"\n\nTarcuna jumped down off my back, and her hooves clattered on the pavement. \"Nothing on Hove can stand against the dragons, nothing. Not our army, not cyoziworms. Nothing. Spotty saved me.\" She doesn't use that awestruck tone when she's actually talking to us.\n\nBertrand glared at her, but didn't seem to want to argue too much with five dragons watching him. \"Who's Spotty?\"\n\nI shrank to hoven-size, for better conversation. \"I am. Pleased to meet you, Bertrand.\"\n\n\"Um... Likewise...\" he said. He stank of fear and resentment, though.\n\n\"We're not here for blood or destruction,\" I reassured him. \"We're just tourists. Just like any other visitors to Dorday.\"\n\n\"...of course...\" he said.\n\n\"Spotty, you're scaring him more,\" said Tarcuna, as if I couldn't smell it. \"Bertrand, thank you for the hand, and I promise that the dragons won't be any trouble. As long as nobody antagonizes them.\"\n\n\"Even the last time, I didn't kill anyone who didn't attack me first. And this time it would be very rude to Ythac if I did,\" I added. Which helped not at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Avoiding Premature Detection",
                "text": "Osoth spread his wings. \"And now that that is accomplished, I beg of you, O my stygian fianc\u00e9e, to impel your courtesan to deliver us unto the divers disportments procurable in the vicinity!\"\n\n\"He said 'yes',\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Well. I certainly didn't say 'no',\" Osoth affirmed, or, at least, did not deny.\n\nI turned into my usual hoven shape. \"Right! Let's go!\"\n\nThe other dragons stared at me, tails curled in distaste.\n\n\"We'll have a much better time in hoven shape,\" I said. In Grand Draconic, out of embarrassment.\n\nThe other dragons glanced at each other, not speaking, not changing.\n\n\"Really. Everything's arranged for hovens here. Because, well, they've never had visitors who weren't hoven before,\" I said. \"So, if you want a comfortable seat at a show, say, or a ride on the big wheel, or anything, you'll need to be in hoven shape. And we'll scare them less that way.\"\n\nThe other dragons eyed each other.\n\nAfter a moment, Csirnis put on his most diplomatic voice. \"I wouldn't say I'd never take a hoven shape on this part of the trip, but on the whole if I'm around other dragons, I'd rather look my best. It may be somewhat of a drake's foible, or even shortcoming, and I freely admit that it is not a matter of dire rational necessity, but... forgive me. I shall assume, I have assumed, a smaller size for the sake of the natives. But the situation has not yet arisen in which I wish to give up my claws and teeth in front of my worthy adversaries Osoth and Nrararn.\"\n\nOsoth and Nrararn smirked a bit at each other to get called 'worthy adversaries'. Nrararn said, \"You know I'm not entirely averse to shapeshifting in the pursuit of tourism \u2014 I was once the gaudiest duck on all of Hove, if you recall \u2014 but for more than an hour or two, I'd rather be myself.\"\n\n\"To say nothing of the risk of cyoziworms,\" said Arilash. \"You and Llredh both got menaced by them in a matter of days. Our drakes and you would probably be safe enough, but I don't have any more dangersense than Llredh.\"\n\n\"And no more ability to keep away from whores, too?\" I snapped. In Grand Draconic, which Tarcuna never will understand. \"That's how Llredh got caught.\"\n\n\"Right. Here's your fianc\u00e9e point. I think you're still keeping score,\" she said. \"Though, for those who care, I haven't mated with anyone but my fianc\u00e9s since the mating flight started.\" She glanced at the drakes as if challenging them to care. They did not meet her glance, though. \"Or maybe I'm just as vain as a drake.\"\n\nI turned back into a hoven-sized dragon, and hissed, \"And I guess there's your fianc\u00e9e point back.\"\n\nArilash dipped her head. \"Thank you. For not fighting, I mean. I've had too much fighting lately.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Establishing a Beachhead",
                "text": "\"We'd like five rooms, please,\" said Tarcuna to the receptionist. \"On the ninth floor, if you've got that many free.\"\n\nThe receptionist looked at Tarcuna, and looked at us. \"For... them?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe receptionist preemptively curled up crying. Management had to be called, and further reassurances had to be made.\n\n\"This would be all much easier if we look like hovens,\" I reminded nobody in particular, in Grand Draconic.\n\n\"Except, of course, that in that situation we would look like hovens,\" said somebody in particular that I was engaged to.\n\n\"And watching hovens squirm and whimper is fun. It's not at all appropriate to actually threaten them, much less hurt them, but nobody can really blame us for just looking like ourselves. Especially, like ourselves only smaller,\" said somebody else in particular.\n\nI bit somebody else in particular's tail. Some days I don't like dragons very much.\n\nMost of the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium staff ran away at that point \u2014 three of the four who hadn't already left, that is. Our rooms were delayed by another third of an hour."
            },
            {
                "title": "Maintaining Amicable Relationships with the Locals",
                "text": "\"A very important thing!\" I chirped, after we finally had our rooms. \"The hotel ordinarily sends hovens in to clean and tend the room. I got very upset about that at first.\"\n\n\"I certainly won't have hovens poking at my hoard. Or even my bedclothes,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Tarcuna, could you arrange with the hotel staff so they don't go in to Nrararn's room?\"\n\n\"Nor mine,\" said Arilash. \"I shall ask for them when I require them.\"\n\n\"I shall not fret overmuch about servants. I have endured their attentions in a previous career,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"Spotty and Csirnis yes, Nrararn and Arilash no,\" said Tarcuna. \"Osoth?\" The necromancer didn't answer, being in the middle of an astral conversation with a ghost. \"Osoth?\" She rapped on his forehead hard with her Dragon-Taming Staff. \"Osoth? Are you there?\"\n\n\"I am, at least, currently found somewhere on Hove's inner surface, at approximately the present time. What is it that you wished to speak with me about, good tour guide Tarcuna?\"\n\nShe had to explain again. Osoth is used to servants too, it turns out, though he is only grudgingly willing to accept living ones."
            },
            {
                "title": "Establishing Clear Lines of Authority",
                "text": "Each room had a big heavy brass key. It wasn't difficult or even notable for hoven hands to use. It wasn't easy to manage with claws, so I had Tarcuna do it for me. Then she had to do it for the others. Except of course that Csirnis didn't seem to have any trouble. Some days I hate Csirnis.\n\nAnd then Tarcuna walked into my room and tossed her backpack on the desk. \"Same arrangements as last time?\"\n\n\"Did we forget to get you your own room?\"\n\n\"I thought you wanted me close by for your convenience.\"\n\n\"You're the one who usually needs help. We just forgot about your room.\"\n\n\"Should I go get a separate one? There're two more rooms on this floor free. By tomorrow I'll bet that all fourteen are open.\"\n\nI was feeling distinctly low on friends. \"No, don't bother. Same arrangements as last time.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Spotty,\" she said. She was probably even lower on friends than I was."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda",
                "text": "Certain facets of this plan are not working as well as I might like.\n\nNickname: If I am going to keep going by \"Spotty\", I need to remember to have spots. Fortunately none of the other dragons have spots.\n\nNot so surprising, for spots are pretty rare. Chevethna has spots, six spots on each flank. Rankotherium has two spots on his cheeks. That's about it for dragons close to me.\n\nActually, some of the older guests at my coming-of-age party had spots. It used to be high fashion for drakes to have a single stripe of spots from your foreshoulder to the end of your tail. Now it looks somewhere between frumpy and archaic.\n\nInconspicuousness: We are simply not getting the degree of inattention as dragons that I got as a hoven. This is obvious. It is also not going to get fixed.\n\nFestivity: Last time I was here, Dorday was a city on the perpetual verge of a party. Not the whole city, really, but the tourist parts. This time, there aren't very many tourists, and nobody is happy to see us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Surgical Arena (Day 152)",
                "text": "Arilash and Tarcuna and I were eating at an early lunch at Com' al Virtu. We were more direct than last time, and started off ordering a whole loaf of the zotanco al besti puree, and don't bother with the crackers since they'd be more annoyingly sticky than delightfully crunchy on dragon teeth. Tarcuna scooped up a small spoonful and licked at it delicately, and Arilash and I gobbled the rest like icecream.\n\nA pair of hovens came in, and yelped when they saw us. This happened every time, of course, but usually the hovens were staring at Arilash and me. The man of the couple was, but the woman was staring at Tarcuna, and looking utterly devastated.\n\nTarcuna looked back at her. \"Oh, rails of the black sun. That's Bthera!\"\n\n\"Beg pardon?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"I worked with her at the Red Spires.\"\n\nArilash said, \"So she's wormridden still?\"\n\n\"Still? Unless you've rescued her without mentioning it to me.\"\n\nArilash glared at the liver pat\u00e9, her tailtip twitching.\n\nBthera and her john sat as far from us as they could: not quite all the way across the room, since the furthest tables were already taken. They ordered this and that, and started to eat it. We ordered this and that and another eight dishes besides, and devoured the ones that came first. Arilash did, grudgingly, admit that Ventelian cuisine is quite tasty.\n\nIn the middle of a sentence, Bthera suddenly squeaked, and scrambled awkwardly to our table. \"Tarcuna? Is that you?\"\n\nTarcuna's fur wrinkled. \"Yes, it is. Sorry \u2014 I had to resign from Red Spires pretty abruptly. I didn't manage to call and tell you.\"\n\nBthera said in a frantic voice, \"Is Bopo all right?\" She didn't look much like she wanted to ask that, especially so loudly.\n\nTarcuna laughed a laugh of draconic cruelty. She is picking up my bad habits. \"Bopo is exactly where I want him.\"\n\nBthera looked greatly relieved. \"We've been seeing you on television, hearing about you in the newspapers. We didn't know what had happened with you, with Bopo.\"\n\nTarcuna grinned. \"Where I want him. Not where he wants him. What he wants doesn't matter anymore.\"\n\nBthera screamed in terror and despair. Arilash and I sighed: this was clearly not going to be a peaceful gourmet luncheon anymore. Bthera's consort of the day stormed over. \"Bthera, what is going on?\" He turned to me. \"Great dragon, please ignore this woman. She should not be bothering you. She will not bother you further.\"\n\nI glared at him. \"She's fifteen hundred thurneys a day, plus tip, right? Tarcuna, give him fifteen hundred plus tip. I've got a better use for Bthera than you do.\"\n\nTarcuna looked eager. \"Oh, you're going to do that for her? Spotty, you're so sweet! But why does he get a tip?\"\n\n\"Right, no tip,\" I said.\n\nBthera picked up the table and dumped it on top of us, and turned to flee. Her john tried to take her arm, but she threw him at Arilash with one hand. We dug out from under tablecloths and a platter of very good zotanco al besti. Arilash bit my wing in annoyance. I healed myself and flew after Bthera.\n\nBthera was fast. No natural hoven can run as fast as the wormridden, when they need to. With the Dozenwing Dozentail, I was faster. I caught her in the middle of Pourride Avenue. Bthera was strong. No natural hoven can kick as hard as the wormridden, when they need to. She damaged me worse than the Dozenwing Dozentail had done. I couldn't subdue her at hoven size. She wasn't much of a trouble at my full size, though.\n\n\"What are you going to do with her?\" asked Arilash. I had accumulated quite an audience: Arilash and Tarcuna, and hundreds of hovens wondering what the right response was when an empire-killing monster tried to abduct a beautiful woman in the street. (Or, if you prefer \u2014 and I do \u2014 when a marginally beautiful woman tried to abduct a conquersome monster in the street.)\n\n\"I am going to give Llredh a present. Or, I am going to focus him back on something worthwhile, instead of just letting him make his newly captured hovens miserable.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do to Bopo?\" squeaked Bthera.\n\n\"I'll take you and him to the hospital, where he will be revealed and destroyed, and you will be set free, Bthera.\"\n\n\"A present for me too!\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\nArilash bit my wing again. \"We're here for a mating flight, remember? You are getting distracted.\"\n\nWhich is true, but cyoziworms are so disgusting."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Hour of Biology",
                "text": "Bthera struggled as hard as she could, hammering on me with her fists, kicking, biting. Bopo forced her to use every bit of her body's strength, to get away if she could. Which only meant that, when we got to Dorday Academy, she was exhausted, shaking and quivering in my hand.\n\n\"Duschafle Hall is biology,\" said Tarcuna. \"That building, with the dull pink spire.\" The academy buildings had spires, like everywhere in Dorday, but they were more sedate. So that's where we went.\n\n\"This young woman is wormridden. Bring out your best scientists and instruments, so that you can observe the phenomenon, and learn about it, and attest to it. When your master Llredh arrives, we will extract the cyoziworm, and save the woman,\" I said. (I had written to Ythac, and Llredh was on his way.) About two dozen times, in two dozen different phrasings, to two dozen different administrators and scientists and newspaper reporters and whatnots.\n\nArilash looked small and annoyed for the first dozen and a half of those. That changed when we came to the Intrascopy Laboratory of the Grey Star. (Dorday Academy keeps the old tradition of identifying its rooms by painted symbols on the door, not room numbers.)\n\n\"What's an intrascope?\" she asked.\n\n\"A tool for observing a helical cross-section of a living organism,\" explained Professor Wulpmegarn. He explained for another half-dozen minutes. I didn't follow the science even well enough to write any of it down. Arilash understood a bit more, until Tarcuna cut in to try to explain it. Then we were both lost. Anyway, it's sort of like using a very low-intensity twistor beam that mostly just draws what it encounters, rather than twisting it around.\n\nMostly.\n\n\"We need to get her consent before we use it on her,\" said Professor Wulpmegarn. \"There are inevitable side effects, ranging from the occasional short-term hematomata to the increased likelihood of long-term carcinomata. When I was a student, we were rather too casual about such matters. Now the Experimental Board is very strict.\"\n\nI heard a heavy double wingbeat in the distance. \"The conqueror of your land overrules the Experimental Board.\"\n\nHe settled the glass medallion of a Laboratory-Master around his grey-furred neck. \"In my experience, it is, indeed, better to get informed consent from the subjects to all invasive experiments.\"\n\n\"She can't give consent. Her worm won't let her,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I would never dream of arguing that cyoziworms are impossible, not in the presence of two extradimensional creatures who have exhibited undeniable powers which defy current scientific explanation. But cyoziworms are a different order. If the stories about them bear any resemblance to the truth, they are native to Hove. It is difficult to understand how such a remarkable entity could avoid detection. If nothing else, autopsies have been legal for nearly two centuries, and are frequently performed. No cyoziworms have been noticed yet.\"\n\nSo we argued a bit about the reality of cyoziworms and the ability of the wormridden to avoid having their worms detected. I hate arguing with professors. I knew I was right, but I nearly got persuaded I was wrong.\n\nThen Llredh arrived. He didn't bother shrinking to fit the laboratory, as Arilash and I had done; he just looked through the window, and the weight of his musky smoke filled the laboratory. He listened for half a minute, and glared a bit, and said, \"Prepare the intrascope.\"\n\nProfessor Wulpmegarn didn't argue any more about that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Intrascopic Evidence",
                "text": "So Bthera was duly rendered unconscious by means of drugs, to add to her unconsciousness by means of exhaustion, and placed in extensive restraints, and her beautiful chest was exposed to the pale flickering violet beam of the intrascope. In minutes, a wide stream of clear tape slithered slowly out of a printer, with incomprehensible shapes outlined in intense red and green and purple on it.\n\nDr. Wulpmegarn took it with a well-practiced hand, and twisted it into a spiral. The outer lines took the shape of a hoven body, adequately visible through the transparent tape. The inner lines showed organs. The biologist showed us the ugly shapes of lungs and Fralian nodes and heart, pointing with the tip of a pencil held between the coils of the intragram.\n\nArilash was utterly delighted with the intrascope. To the point of, she'll accept one in place of a magic ring in her mating hoard. Our remaining drakes seem distinctly pleased by this, since they're much easier to find than magic rings on Hove.\n\n\"And I am compelled to admit that there is an anomalous body extending from the base of the brain through the chest, forking right there by the heart,\" said the biologist.\n\n\"That's your cyoziworm. Well, that's Bthera's cyoziworm,\" I said. \"Be glad it's not yours.\"\n\nLlredh opened his mouth. Arilash spat quick fire into it. \"Don't kill her, Llredh! We're here to kill the cyoziworm, remember? And get your subjects to believe in them. Can't do that if you burn up the lab.\"\n\n\"The sensible comment, you bring her with you, Arilash. Yet, the fury, he is large and thick within me! Not long will I allow this worm to live!\"\n\n\"I would recommend that we study it further,\" said Dr. Wulpmegarn.\n\n\"Is fearlessness a common sort of brain damage among hovens? Maybe one of the intrascope experiments when he was a student caused it?\" I asked Tarcuna, but she didn't know.\n\nLlredh just hissed at the professor, \"Study fast! For not long will I allow this worm to live!\"\n\n\"The more we know about it, the better chance we'll have of eradicating it altogether,\" said the professor calmly. \"After all, this is the first time anyone has seen scientific evidence of it.\"\n\n\"Not so! I have seen it before, I have felt it drip into its little cup, I need no further evidence! Also hovens have seen them before. Even scientists!\"\n\n(Much later that evening, he told us about that. Ythac had looked around a bit with finding-spells, and uncovered dozens of fragmentary stories of scientists and natural philosophers learning somewhat about cyoziworms. They generally wound up wormridden or dead within days of their first publication, by the intentional and devoted effort of the wormridden to protect themselves. The wormridden ones, of course, immediately recanted their findings, and dedicated themselves to obscuring the truth of cyoziworms as much as possible. Ythac compelled Prof. Wulpmegarn to have a constant bodyguard.)\n\n\"And there are plenty of other cyoziworms. I can find you thirty by nightfall if you want. Which is the problem, actually. If it were the last of its kind we might be a bit more interested in science,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Well, let us at least perform it as a proper, if rather rushed, Observed Experiment,\" said the professor."
            },
            {
                "title": "Preparations for a Proper Observed Experiment",
                "text": "Getting fourteen distinguished professors of biology and medicine assembled, plus dozens of students and several reporters, was a matter of two hours' work. Finding a place to do the vivisection was not so easy. Llredh refused to be at anything but his full size in front of his students. (Or, refused to be in a shape that cyoziworms could even remotely attack in the presence of cyoziworms, I really think.)\n\n\"Let's use the Lecture Hall of the Balanced Parallelograms,\" said Tarcuna after a while. \"Llredh can look in through the window.\"\n\n\"That's not a suitable place for surgery,\" said Prof. I-don't-remember. \"It's not sterile.\"\n\n\"I did this operation before,\" I reminded him. \"Starting on the Boulevard of the Orange Pine Trees, and ending on the roof of a bank. I'll be using so much healing that sterility won't matter.\"\n\nBicker-bicker-bicker, went the surgery professors.\n\n\"You've seen them change size with your own eyes, you've seen them breathe fire and lightning and darkness on television. Why are you arguing about their healing powers?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\nJust because they can distort the laws of physics doesn't mean that they can also distort the laws of biology, went the surgery professors.\n\nPoke with the smallish but very sharp claw!, went Arilash.\n\nScream and bleed!, went Dr. Smends, the most arguesome surgery professor.\n\n\"Observe this fine injury \u2014 a textbook example of a sucking chest wound in its early stages,\" lectured Arilash. \"Dr. Smends, would you not agree?\" Dr. Smends was perhaps less eloquent than he had been a moment before, though not actually any less noisy. \"Other honored professors?\" They concurred that it was, indeed, as she had specified. At least, one might well take their rush to perform first aid and/or escape as agreement. \"No, don't bother to treat it yourselves.\" Arilash brushed them aside with her tail. \"My assistant will demonstrate the use of astral magic to distort the laws of biology.\" She looked to me.\n\n\"Assistant, nothing. Your superior in matters of healing,\" I said, because fianc\u00e9e points. It wasn't hard to heal. Arilash had carefully sliced flesh, but not broken bone. I looked at the professors. \"Any questions?\"\n\nYes, they had plenty of questions, mostly along the lines of \"How did you do that?\" and \"How could we learn to do that?\" and \"How can you be so violent so casually?\" To which the answers are, \"Astral magic\" and \"We are not going to give hovens any astral magic!\" and \"Because we can heal so easily.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Dissection",
                "text": "Dr. Smends, despite being physically unhurt anymore, declined to perform the actual surgery, preferring to sit in a corner with a beaker full of brandy. Dr. Grauzeng, the most recently-hired of the surgeons, was selected to do the actual cutting. I warned her what to expect from the surgery \u2014 disintegrating bits of very poisonous worm, and the wounds constantly closing from the healing spells.\n\n\"So let's leave the worm alive as long as possible,\" said Dr. Grauzeng. \"If the poison isn't evolved until it dies.\"\n\n\"Oh! We could try that,\" I said. \"The time I had done it, I started out killing it.\"\n\n\"Sever the brain connections first. Otherwise it might wreck her brain, out of fear or fury,\" said Tarcuna. So we drafted Arilash to try to render the worm insensate for the first part of the surgery \u2014 I didn't want to fuss with that and the healing at the same time. She's better with the Lure of Dreams than I am \u2014 anyone who's ever cast it except for practice is better.\n\n\"And Bthera's going to love you forever,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Beg pardon?\"\n\n\"Well, you or Spotty. That's the natural reaction to getting rescued from cyoziworms,\" she said with a shrug.\n\nArilash looked out the window to peer at Llredh. \"Is that right?\"\n\n\"Wrong, she is not. The clearer situation with Ythac, though, her I did not resent, nor reject! We were on our way there before.\"\n\n\"Perhaps a single, male surgeon would be a better choice...?\" said Dr. Grauzeng. \"A man might find the patient appealing. I am a woman, and a married one at that.\"\n\n\"Not that kind of love. More along the lines of, well, worship,\" said Tarcuna. \"I mean, I'd do that if Spotty asked. Or nearly anything else. But I was a public friend for a while, so that isn't much of a problem.\"\n\n\"Bthera is a public friend too,\" noted Arilash.\n\n\"This topic, she brings me resentment. Resentment, she brings fire to my tongue and to my lips. Commence the surgery!\" roared Llredh.\n\n\"Or maybe it doesn't work that way for everyone. We've only seen it twice, and was pretty different for the two,\" I pointed out, to give poor Dr. Grauzeng a bit of hope.\n\nDr. Grauzeng, that artist of the scalpel, went in through the cheek. Arilash stunned the worm as best she could, and Dr. Grauzeng clipped its brain-probes. The audience, watching projected images of the surgery on big screens over the table, yelped and squirmed as they saw the writhing proof of the cyoziworm's reality.\n\nAfter a bit of quick consultation, we decided to try to pull the worm out of Bthera from the top, on the hope that that would be less damaging than cutting her open from cheek to chest. I put the Small Wall into the worm \u2014 and did that ever get a bitter hiss from Llredh! \u2014 so that it wouldn't be quite so vulnerable to tugging. Either the idea or the execution is imperfect, since the worm broke halfway out. Llredh roared in triumph, nearly making Dr. Grauzeng drop the worm back into the patient.\n\nWhich gave Dr. Grauzeng and I our time to scramble, cutting and healing in a frantic rush, like last time. This particular surgery is easier without warplanes. I think we did it in a quarter of the time, and spilled much less poison in Bthera. Taking the probes out of the brain was still very hard, and in the end we didn't have much better choice with two of them than pull quick and heal quick and hope for the best.\n\nAfter the last incision had been healed, Bthera was in much better shape than Tarcuna had been. She only needed healing every six minutes, even right after, not every minute, and by midnight it seemed safe to leave her in the hospital attended only by hovens and material medicine.\n\nThe medical aftermath was more, well, amusing. I didn't get to see much of it, since I was tending Bthera. Arilash was in the thick of it, and told me afterwards. The doctors and biologists had recorded the whole surgery, and were pointing at a dozen pictures from it. They were discussing how the cyoziworm fit into Hove's biology. Two biologists held forth at great length on the phylum of forkworms, a minor branch of parasitic life found in mainly in a distant continent on the Godaxle. Forkworms are hard to dissect because they melt into poisonous slush when killed. The conclusion was obvious. Llredh hissed and fumed, trying to decide if he would destroy the entire phylum or just the cyoziworms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Results of the Experiment",
                "text": "Several of the doctors, at the same time, were discussing how sure they were that they were seeing the etiology of Chapifou's Lesion \u2014 a large, horrible lesion of the interior of the throat and chest, cause previously unknown, only discovered during autopsies of (usually) patients who were generally asymptomatic before death. \"Because, if dying cyoziworms really do cause Chapifou's Lesion, we've got a great deal of epidemiological information about them. There must be tens of thousands of case records... a wealth of facts, now that we know what we're seeing,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn.\n\nProf. Grauzeng fiddled with a slide rule. \"That operation took, let us say, a quarter of a day. Eight dragons for healing, assume we can work them full time and speed the matter up manyfold... that's a hundred cyoziworms a day. How many are there?\"\n\n\"Tens of thousands in Trest alone. I'm sure they can reproduce faster than that. Even if you could get all the dragons to work,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Which you can't,\" said Arilash. \"I'll do a few, maybe, as a favor to Jyothky or Llredh, but not my share of a hundred a day.\"\n\n\"Pretty hopeless,\" said Tarcuna, and flopped into a chair miserably.\n\nLlredh's angry, despairing red breath was a column of consuming fire reaching many miles into the night sky, and brought fear to grands of hovens and meltation to a section of the side of Duschafle Hall. I bit his tail. He kicked my head and crushed the side of my skull. Nothing worth noting there.\n\n\"We shall have to find another approach,\" said Dr. Wulpmegarn. \"No brilliant ideas come to mind instantly... but half a day ago I should have believed the problem wholly fictional. I'm sure that there is some reasonable answer around, waiting for us to find it.\"\n\n\"Take not overlong! If I cannot heal them, I shall kill them. My revenge, she will come!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Twelve Dooms (Day 158)",
                "text": "\"I need a favor from you,\" said Tarcuna, looking upset, fur all bristly and everything.\n\n\"He-or-she is as good as dead,\" I told her. I was rather upset too. The Dorday Museum of Art and Culture had somehow gotten a great deal more tedious since my previous visit. The means by which it had accomplished this feat were not so clear, since none of the exhibits had changed. The company had, though. Osoth was far more aware of the vagaries and idiosyncracies of hoven cultural history than I was then, and than I am now, and he didn't have very much good to say about the museum. And, since it was a mating flight event, Tarcuna was not allowed to come, despite that she's a highly-trained professional companion capable of making amusing conversation without the slightest sign of stress or strain. I didn't actually bite Osoth or anything, but Arilash did invite him to couple instead of seeing the second half of the museum. Sex with her trumped Hoven art and culture with me. Which I would expect from Llredh or Nrararn, but this was Osoth.\n\n\"What? No, no, you are not to kill anyone!\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Not one of Ythac's anyones, certainly, which is everyone but you in Dorday. What favor do you want?\"\n\n\"Do you remember Prof. Wulpmegarn?\" she asked.\n\nI glared at her. \"I am totally incapable of remembering the person in whose laboratory we spent most of a day recently. Stupid lizard, me. Didn't get enough museums as a hatchling.\"\n\n\"Well, you're certainly in a mood. Prof. Wulpmegarn is going to present the Twelve Troubles Report to Ythac. If he can get your protection, which is what I'm asking you for.\"\n\nI spread my ears. \"What's a Twelve Troubles Report, and why does he need protection?\"\n\nTarcuna climbed onto the chest of drawers so she could be taller than me. \"When Ythac took over the country, he asked some professors to tell him the twelve most troublesome troubles facing the nation. They've been fussing about the list \u2014 they mostly have it, but they're afraid to tell Ythac. So they asked Wulpmegarn, since you seemed to like him and they thought you might be willing to keep Ythac from killing him,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I don't see the problem. I've killed lots more hovens than Ythac. He teases me about it, even.\"\n\n\"I know that, but something in the report is going to upset him. Will you help?\"\n\n\"Sure, I'd be glad to. It'll get me away from my fianc\u00e9s a bit more. That's got to be good.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Ythac's court in Perstra was now a very large tent, on a very large and very muddy avenue. He, himself, sat on a dais which seemed to be made from boards resting on the raised stone flower planters that had once adorned the sidewalk. Llredh had had a similar dais, which was now a tumble of scattered planks and overturned planters. Which may have been the reason that Llredh was not there.\n\n\"Ythac, the splendor of your throne room rivals all description,\" I told him.\n\n\"I know, I know. The hovens of the old regime didn't get around to building proper state facilites. I tried using the Cauldron of Roses Havocs Arena. This is better,\" he said ruefully.\n\n\"What was wrong with the stadium?\"\n\nHe drooped his ears. \"Well, the smell, first of all. Hoven sweat, beer, and used beer. Not the atmosphere I wanted to present for my enlightened and dignified reign. And of course when I cancelled a havocs game, the hovens all rioted.\"\n\n\"I suppose this is better. Anyhow, I'm here to see your Twelve Troubles get read. And make sure you don't kill Prof. Wulpmegarn.\"\n\nHe breathed fire at me. \"I am not going to kill anyone!\" He wasn't very upset though, or he'd have breathed darkness.\n\n\"Hey! I presume that hurt! Also you'd better be careful, or you'll burn your replacement temporary court down.\"\n\nHe drooped. \"I suppose I had better get some hovens on to building the permanent one. Out of stone and metal.\"\n\n\"Shall I get you your helpful and nicely-warded professor now?\"\n\nYthac blinked at me. \"He rode in on you? What are you anymore, a bodyguard and a taxi service for hovens?\"\n\n\"I carried him in a brass car that used to be part of the Wheel of Iron in a Dorday amusement park, I'll have you know. A spare one, to be sure, but I certainly hadn't paid for it.\" Which I had, as an easy way to not crush him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Prof. Wulpmegarn adjusted his formal robes, resettled his glass medallion, and brushed at a spot of his grey forehead where the fur might have been infinitesimally out of line. \"I suppose there's no more delaying it,\" he said. \"You say that Lleredh is not here?\"\n\n\"His name is Llredh, just one 'e', and he's not.\"\n\n\"A pity. He seemed relatively peaceful, at least compared to that tan monster in the surgery,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. I stared at him; anyone who thinks Llredh is more peaceful than Arilash hasn't been paying much attention. Wulpmegarn shrugged and added, \"Or at least, inclined in my favor as well, while I am researching cyoziworms for him.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Ythac's court didn't have very many courtiers. A dozen or so hovens: I recognized Rev. Dreyrey and Larella Spargee. A dozen gendarmes in fancy uniforms, I have no idea why. Ex-Archon Shuvanne wearing a quite soiled formal suit, swinging in an iron cage in the middle of the court. A dozen reporters from various Magic Horns. A big empty space where Llredh sometimes sits, which I took for myself.\n\nAnd one rather nervous professor. \"Well, your committee has asked me to deliver their report,\" he said. \"Please be aware that I didn't have very much to do with it, though I was quite active in the sudden inclusion of item eight.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you could start with item one? I am eager to start fixing the country that my true love has given to me,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Right.\" He smelled terrified. \"Item one. According to your select committee on the major troubles facing Trest, item one is, that Trest was just conquered by monsters from another universe.\"\n\nShuvanne laughed, a loud and rather crazed laugh. \"They got you pegged, Ythac! Of all the problems here, you're the worst!\"\n\nI flicked him with my hukuch\u00f4. \"Quiet, murderer of my fianc\u00e9!\" He screamed and struggled to escape me, which only made his cage sway wildly.\n\nYthac reared 'til his spikes brushed the tent, and hissed a terrible hiss. \"All of you, be quiet! Jyothky, please do not torment the former regime any more. I thought you were here to protect hovens, anyway.\"\n\nFortunately I can't lose fianc\u00e9e points with Ythac anymore.\n\nProf. Wulpmegarn looked at Ythac. \"Shall I proceed?\"\n\nYthac laughed. \"You weren't expecting to get past the first point? I know exactly what punishment to impose upon you.\" Prof. Wulpmegarn whined and groveled. Ythac sneered, \"Finish your list. Your punishment shall come after it is done. But don't delay, or I will increase it.\"\n\nI hissed at Ythac in Grand Draconic, \"I promised him safety!\"\n\nYthac hissed back in Grand Draconic, \"It's not that kind of punishment!\"\n\nProf. Wulpmegarn looked at me helplessly. I smiled at him \u2014 I hope he can recognize the gesture as friendly, it's a lot fangier than a hoven smile \u2014 and told him to go on. So he did. \"Second trouble is the increasing noxiousness of the lower air, particularly around our more industrial regions. The causes of this are straightforward: smoke from the burning of wood, dust from mining and milling, toxic vapors from bleaching, curing, and various other industrial processes. Cleaning the air without destroying Trestean industry has been a troublesome and difficult puzzle.\"\n\nYthac nodded. \"The air is, indeed, not as sweet as in the Khamrou Mountains in Ghemel. Jyothky, do you feel the need to defend the professor from my lack of a fury about that answer? No? Prof. Wulpmegarn, pray continue.\"\n\n\"Third is a widespread economic weakness, which the recent troubles have done nothing to improve,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. He didn't have as much to say about economics as biology. \"Fourth is military: our soldiers are arguably overtaxed by too many peacekeeping efforts in too many places. Fifth is also military: our soldiers are thoroughly demoralized by your war of conquest, and their losses in the Mystery Zone in Ghemel.\"\n\nYthac chuckled. \"It wasn't a war of conquest, just a war of punishment. Llredh conquered you on his own, so we had to stop the war. And it's not a mystery zone. It's an undead paingod from Mhel.\"\n\n\"I am a biologist, untrained in such matters,\" the professor protested.\n\n\"You are, at the moment, reading a summary report, not lecturing in detail on any of the topics. Pray go on.\"\n\n\"Sixth is the decrease in the intensity of the light of Virtuet, by approximately 1.28% over the last century. If, indeed, this is an actual decrease in intensity of sunlight rather than a measurement error of a century ago; I admit to some doubt about this issue. Still, if the main sun and the epicenter of divine light is going out, for whatever physical or religious reasons, we are in rather a lot of trouble. Or our grandchildren will be,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. \"Seventh is a joint problem, of increasing noxiousness in our rivers and seas, and a concomitant decline in the quantity and wholesomeness of fish and seafood. Eighth, of course, is the cyoziworms, though the precise dimensions and difficulty of the matter are far from certain. Ninth is the increase in apostasy and religious schism, threatening the religious foundations of the country. Tenth is resurgence of krasthic plague in the Estagnion region. Eleventh is the depletion of various raw materials worldwide, including tantalum, vrexium, and copper. Twelfth is the rising economic and cultural power of various other countries, including Damma and Vlechinse.\"\n\nYthac nodded. \"That's quite a list. Well, I declare the first (dragons), fifth (military morale), ninth (apostasy), and twelfth (other countries) to be problems of hoven perception. You think they are bad. I think they are good, unimportant, silly, and unimportant, in that order. So here is your punishment: figure out the next-worst four troubles facing Trest, to replace the four that I have eliminated, and one more besides as actual punishment for being obnoxious about the conquest.\"\n\nHe smiled benevolently, and spread his glorious wings. \"And next, we must start thirteen studies on how how to solve these matters. These study groups must not be limited to hoven abilities alone. Llredh will surely assist with the cyoziworm issue, and perhaps the water toxicity issue as well, as he enjoys that sort of thing. We don't need the sort of military that was necessary a few weeks ago: no country or countries in Hove can stand against two dragons. We might be able to persuade the sky-mage Nrararn to improve the air, at least for a few years.\" He beamed. \"And in a dozen years or two, these problems will be gone! Thus it is when dragons rule!\"\n\nI'm glad Ythac is ruling Trest. He'll be the best overlord ever, I'm sure."
            },
            {
                "title": "Wheel of Iron (Day 162)",
                "text": "[ Punishing the Innocent ]\n\nTarcuna, Csirnis, and I were eating at Porphirio's. We knew How It Is Done At Porphirio's, and, being polite alien invaders and native collaborators, politely asked waiters to carry all our plates and planned to leave a few extra thurnies at the end of the meal. Politeness did not seem to help very much. The waiters were awkward and haphazard, and spilled a large bowl of hot pea soup on Tarcuna out of very intentional carelessness. I've healed her of worse than minor burns, of course. And, since they're not our hovens, and Csirnis is as Uplifty as my mother, we demonstrated just how fearsome and dreadful we monsters are by giving them a very small tip afterwards.\n\nAs usual, Tarcuna ate a modest breakfast for a hoven, and got a copy of the Magic Horn of Dorday to entertain Csirnis and me with as we ate a tiny breakfast with tiny bites. She looked at the front page. Her fur went miserably muddy, and she read intently, silently.\n\n\"What's the news? You look stung!\"\n\nShe pried her head away from the words. \"The gendarmes raided the Red Spire and took my friends to prison. Three of them died, my friends I mean, and some gendarmes too. Can I read it all and find out who and how?\"\n\nI spread my forewings. \"Certainly. And I will interrogate Ythac about it. With my claws if need be!\" And that got some serious staring from the rest of the diners. Not the proper sort of staring that subjects should stare when one threatens their beloved ruler with injury, unfortunately.\n\nTarcuna finished her reading, and set the paper by her plate. \"This is bad, this is terrible.\" So we asked her to explain.\n\n\"Last night, the gendarmes arrested lots of us. Wormridden, I mean, from all over Dorday. All of the Red Spires, the deputy mayor, everyone I know,\" she said. \"They argued, demanded their legal rights, saying they weren't wormridden anyway and even if they were it's not a crime. Somehow the gendarmes got the idea of intrascoping them. They dragged them all to Dr. Wulpmegarn. Elesma went second, and she said she'd be quiet, but she struggled and twisted when they turned the intrascope on. Moving during the intrascoping must have injured her worm and spilled its poisons. She died before the intrascoping was done. And Tiri was sedated, but she died before she even got into the intrascope. We'd always said that sedation was very dangerous for wormridden; worms live in blood, and drugs can kill them so easily.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's a pair of sorrows,\" I said, and curled my tail around Tarcuna's shoulders.\n\nShe sniffled a bit, and continued. \"When the other wormridden saw that, they went berserk. They'd have had to, their worms would make them try anything to survive. The Magic Horn didn't give a lot of details. The deputy mayor got one of the gendarmes' twistor pistol and used it and killed six of them \u2014 or maybe everyone did, I'm not sure. They shot him back and killed him. Oh, and Dr. Wulpmegarn's laboratory got ruined, too.\"\n\n\"That's rather a disaster,\" said Csirnis sympathetically. \"Is there anything to be done, do you think? We can scold Ythac and Llredh; I do not think it is what they want!\"\n\nSo I wrote a note to Ythac about it.\n\n\"I know, Jyothky. Llredh is furious. He's given orders that the gendarmes never use intrascopes on the wormridden ever again.\"\n\n\"That's won't help Elesma, though, will it?\" My letters were all slashy in my imagination, and probably worse in his.\n\n\"No, it won't. We're still trying to figure out how to use the hovens for Llredh's revenge. Ha! You should have seen the chief-of-gendarmes' face when we told him he was going to be hunting cyoziworms. Even after the demonstration, hovens aren't believing them.\"\n\nTarcuna went to the deathyard to say farewell to Elesma. The rest of us didn't, but there should have been plenty of actual amusement to do in a tourist city like Dorday, shouldn't there?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Guardian of the Wheel of Iron",
                "text": "After breakfast, we went to the St. Cheerior Amusement Park. Tarcuna and I had spent an afternoon when I was here before, and I had enjoyed it a lot.\n\nThis time... well, the amusements were pretty much the same. The spirals spun, the balls bounced, and the whirligigs were ready to ride. There weren't very many hovens around to ride them though. Perhaps a few dozen, in a park which had held a few grand the last time I was here.\n\nThe centerpiece of St. Cheerior Amusement Park is the big wheel. It's a very big vertical wheel, a massive thing of iron and wood and glittery brass cages for hovens to ride in, built in earlier days when hovens knew some technology but not all that they know now. A heavy iron engine by its side somehow burns wood and boils water and turns it around. Not terribly fast; this isn't a whirligig ride. I could levitate up faster than the big wheel turns. Of course hovens can't levitate, or get into the sky in all that many ways, so the big wheel is perhaps the easiest way to see all Dorday spread beneath you like a very spiky picnic. When I was here before, the lines for the big wheel took a third of an hour.\n\n\"Let's go up on the Big Wheel!\" I said.\n\n\"Ooh, we can get stuffed in a little iron cage and hoisted around to shallow heights much more slowly than we can fly!\" said Arilash. She flapped her wings. \"Let's go!\" She and I had been determinedly mocking each other all morning, in best Mating Flight style.\n\nSo we went, or tried to.\n\nWith the park so empty, there were no lines, for the big wheel or anything else. A bored-looking hoven boy sat by the ticket booth, with an older hoven, just as bored, tending the engine.\n\n\"Give us five tickets,\" said Arilash to the boy. \"Here's the fifteen thurnies.\"\n\nThe boy smelled of terror. He pushed the money back at her. \"No.\"\n\n\"Beg pardon?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"No. No dragons allowed.\" said the boy.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"No dragons allowed. This is for hovens only,\" he said.\n\nThe engineer said, \"Dakko, let me take care of this,\" and stepped to the ticket booth. The boy scuttled behind the engine. \"Well, sir dragon, this wheel's only for people. No dragons.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" said Arilash. \"Your country is ruled by dragons now.\"\n\n\"That's as may be, sir. I ain't in charge of the country. I am in charge of the big wheel. And as long as I'm in charge of it, no dragons go riding it nohow.\"\n\n\"Would you deny Ythac, your master?\" she hissed.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I'd deny that Ythac is my master. I'm a free man, I am. I don't have a master. I've got an archconsul, to be sure. An archconsul who's a coward and an idiot for surrendering, but we elected him and no dragon is going to come say that he's not ours,\" said the engineer.\n\n\"Except for Llredh, of course,\" I added.\n\nThe engineer glared at me. \"I said Shuvanne's a coward, to give up so easy. Me, I ain't no coward.\"\n\n\"You don't have a dragon's claw rammed through your chest,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"You do that, sir. Kill me if you like, go right ahead. You're still not getting a ride on the big wheel from me,\" said the engineer, stinking of fear and gleaming with bravery.\n\n\"It would be ungracious to kill this man,\" said Csirnis in Grand Draconic. \"Even if it were not Ythac and Llredh's territory.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to!\" I hissed back at him.\n\nI stared at the engineer. He frowned at me. \"Well, you've got no business here. Go away.\"\n\nI glared at him. I was awfully offended. Of course I couldn't kill him or hurt him very much without poaching against Ythac and thinking much worse of myself. Maybe a flick of hukuch\u00f4? But driving him off didn't sound helpful, and he certainly didn't deserve the torture anyway. Maybe arguing that I was helping the hovens, but I wasn't sure I could persuade myself of that, much less one of them. So I just glared.\n\n\"Observe the might of Jyothky! She is currently having her tail handed to her by an unarmed, feeble hoven,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Because I was helping you!\" I squeaked.\n\n\"I didn't need help. I know what to do,\" she said to me in Grand Draconic. In Trestean, she hissed at the engineer, \"Your meagre Hoven obstinacy cannot prevent me from riding the wheel!\" She leapt into the air and circled over us, hissing. \"Come on, come on! We all must conquer this wheel!\"\n\nSo the drakes flew after her to the top of the wheel. I blinked at the engineer, and joined them. We sat on top of a glittering cage, which swayed and wobbled under our weight. The wheel turned slowly. When the one cage with hovens in it came to be the bottom, the engineer stopped the wheel and let them out. They fled. The engineer glared at us, and left the wheel still. So we flew back to the top car, and sat on it for a third of an hour as the engineer told everyone about us.\n\nAfter we had been there long enough to declare victory, we flew back to our hotel, and sat in the lobby while doleful or angry hovens watched us darkly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Language of Serpents (Day 167)",
                "text": "\"What should I wear to visit your mother?\" I asked Tarcuna.\n\nShe finished buckling her green leather belt with the big pouch around her waist, then burrowed around in the suitcases of clothes and personal effects she had taken from Red Spires, which were now taking up most of our hotel room. \"Here, try this on!\" she said as she tossed me a tangle of black straps and sequins.\n\nIt didn't seem significant to either vision or dangersense. I dodged away from it anyway. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"It matches your scales!\"\n\n\"So does the night sky, and I don't wear that,\" was the only reasonable answer.\n\n\"The night sky doesn't match your scales,\" she pointed out. \"It's green and orange and brown and blue and white. You are black. Black is not any of those colors.\" I obviously can't even keep track of which universe I'm in.\n\n\"Well, it's black where I come from,\" I said. \"How am I supposed to wear this, anyway?\"\n\n\"You can't, not without turning into a hoven first. And don't do that. It's a very practical private working garment from my old job. Even when I was wormridden I wouldn't wear it in public.\"\n\nI poked the thing with a claw. It didn't react. I'm sure it was just biding its time to strike. \"What do you want me to look like when we visit your mother?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\nShe can be a very confusing hoven. \"You don't want me there?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, I want you there. I want you invisible.\" Tarcuna asked.\n\n\"That works better when I'm flying. On the ground I run into things. That makes everyone suspicious,\" I said. Spells like the Esrret-Sky-Painted and the Pyerthu's Spare Hallucination are a vaguely useful trick now and then. But they don't work very well where it counts the most: other dragons can't see you, but they can find you with any of a dozen other senses. You've made yourself look like a fountain of glitter to magioception, on the off chance you didn't have any spells on otherwise.\n\n\"Well, I don't want my mother to know I've brought a dragon for backup,\" Tarcuna said. \"It would be embarrassing.\"\n\nI turned into a tri-colored ribbon snake and slithered into Tarcuna's belt pouch. \"I suppose that will do,\" she said. \"Now for the harder question, of what I should wear? I'd take the peach tunic, but... do you have any spells for sewing clothes up instantly, Jyothky?\"\n\nI peeked out at the tunic. \"I don't. Is it torn? It doesn't look torn.\"\n\n\"It's got a flap for Bopo to stick out. I am not going to wear any clothes like that ever again,\" she stated inexorably. \"But everything shocking is like that, or is too indecent to wear outdoors.\"\n\n\"You're trying to shock her?\" I wondered.\n\n\"When she disowned me, she was vicious and vehement about the sort of life I'd be leading and how bad it would be for her social standing. As if the only reason I'd fall in love with Kangbok was to trouble her. She was sort of right about that.\" (Which was a lie, but I count it as storytelling.) \"So it would be only gracious to show her how right she was. And if I happen to be bad for her social standing in the process, well, that's just more evidence she was right, isn't it?\"\n\nI peered up at her. She looks a good deal more imposing when one is a tiny snake. \"Is that how you're supposed to treat your mother?\"\n\n\"I'm picking etiquette up from you.\"\n\nI blinked at her. Which works very badly with transparent eyelids. \"I don't treat my mother like that.\"\n\n\"I've never seen you with your mother. You treat hovens like that. I'm your catspaw. What do you expect from me?\"\n\n\"Obedience and moral guidance, maybe?\"\n\nShe flicked my chin with a fingertip, hard enough to presumably hurt. \"Not likely.\" She stared at her clothes, and picked something red and orange and not as revealing as she wanted.\n\nI let my catspaws get away with far too much, don't I?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Tarcuna's Ancestral Home",
                "text": "Tarcuna's family certainly had some status to lose. Their home was a substantial three-floor mansionlet on the side of a big park. Heavy oak trees guarded the front door, and flowering ivy dripped off the walls. A stone hoven danced on the back of a stone turtle in a little pond, and water dripped from her spread hands.\n\n\"Great-grandpa made his money in cans, you know,\" said Tarcuna as she tugged on the doorbell.\n\n\"I don't know. I don't even understand,\" I said. \"Was he in a can? Or did the money come to him in cans? The Word-Fox doesn't list that as an expression of abundance, but it's not a very good fox with metaphors.\"\n\nTarcuna said, \"Neither of those. He invented a way to boil canned food quickly, and made a lot of money. We still \u2014-\"\n\nA hoven man opened the door. His fur matched Tarcuna's, red with grey stripes, though he wore his hair short and his bathrobe long. \"Yes... Tarcuna? Is that you?\"\n\n\"Your very own daughter, in the flesh.\"\n\n\"Who were you talking to?\" he asked.\n\nTarcuna stomped one hoof. \"Not 'Welcome home, dear child!'? Not even 'Go away, you disgusting monster!'?\"\n\n\"Come in, come in. I am glad to see you.\" Tarcuna's father held the door open, a corridor into a private universe full of knickknacks, bagatelles, flummeries, objets d'art, thingamajigs, whatnots, baubles, bric-a-brac, and novelties, but absolutely not a single whimsy. As Tarcuna walked through, he took her in his arms for a close hug. She tensed at first, and then hugged him back. Which left me, in the purse, rather squashed. A real snake might have been upset. My apotropaics are proof against paternal affection.\n\n\"Who is it, Mogen?\" called a woman from deeper into the house.\n\n\"Tarcuna's come back to us, Vetha!\" Mogen answered.\n\nVetha came running, her hooves thumping dully on the antique carpet, her braid of red hair thumping on her back, her stench of confusion and anger all about her for anydragon who has a working tongue to smell. She glared at her daughter, and said, \"You've been in the news lately.\"\n\nTarcuna extricated herself from her father's embrace, shoved past her parents, and sat in a big puffy chair with threadbare green upholstery in the parlor. I poked my head out of the bag and looked at walls full of dusty-framed photographs of self-important hovens, and stained glass lamps depicting three of the four suns. \"Doing my part for the family reputation.\"\n\n\"I'll have you know that everyone thinks you're being simply dreadful. Treason, they call it, and I can't say I disagree,\" said Vetha.\n\n\"Working with the government of Trest is treason? Or maybe it's treason to be working to keep the dragons from killing too many more of us. Or perhaps it's the bit about trying to get rid of the soul-stealing worms that's the problem?\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Getting monsters to conquer your country is treason, dear,\" said Vetha, sneering a bit.\n\nTarcuna laughed. \"I don't have that kind of influence. I have kept them from burning a few cities and everyone in them, though. So if you really care about your reputation, you can tell everyone I've been more effective protecting us from the dragons than anyone else. Than everyone else put together, even.\"\n\nVetha hissed, \"What do you want here, Tarcuna?\"\n\n\"To see you and Dad again. See if you're ready to forgive me for the little things you disinherited me for, now that I'm a hero of the nation and all,\" said Tarcuna. She was lying.\n\n\"I don't think that's exactly right, Tarcuna,\" interjected Mogen. \"The newspapers have not yet chosen to reveal that side of your saga.\"\n\n\"Tarcuna! You started out as a pervert, then became a whore, and now a traitor and collaborator with the dragons!\" said Vetha. \"I'm at a loss for what you'll come up with for an encore.\"\n\n\"Apostasy, probably. After the worm ate me I stopped going to services,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nMogen mumbled, \"After moving in with a tappu lover, and a girl at that? The only thing keeping you from apostasy proceedings is the lax state of religious record keeping and enforcement nowadays.\"\n\n\"That plus a large black dragon in my pocket should just about do it, though,\" said Tarcuna. \"I should try to talk Llredh into repealing the apostasy laws. They're pernicious laws anyway.\"\n\n\"Why did you do it, Tarcuna? Why did you do it to us?\", cried Vetha.\n\n\"I didn't do it to you. Kangbok I did to me. After she kicked me out, I had less than a week of free will before Elesma's worm got me. After that I wasn't thinking about you at all, or about myself either.\"\n\nVetha was twisting a heavy tassle in her hands, and looking quite uncomfortable. \"Lying isn't a big addition to your list of crimes, Tarcuna. I suppose you might think you can't dishonor yourself any more deeply. But that nonsense about cyoziworms isn't even a very good lie. Nobody believes it. If I were you, I should just just say, 'I needed money, so I took up the one trade that my natural inclinations suited me for and led me to.'\"\n\nTarcuna frowned. \"Let us leave aside the question about just why I needed money, when, after all, my parents haven't yet managed to squander all of grandpa's inheritance yet. Actually I didn't need money that much. I was a waitress at Billy's. But you really ought to believe about the worms. It's true.\"\n\n\"It's preposterous,\" said Vetha.\n\n\"It's true. Prof. Wulpmegarn and lots of others saw them. That was in the paper too.\"\n\n\"My dear Tarcuna!\" Vetha's adjective made my veriception sneeze. \"There were three dragons in the room. Including the one who tortured Archconsul Shuvanne into surrendering the country! I should imagine that your Wulpmegarn would have been quite glad to swear to the papers that Virtuet is dark and Curset is light!\" She sat up a bit straighter. \"If he's not a cunya altogether!\"\n\n\"That's not a word I approve of in the presence of my daughter,\" said Mogen.\n\n\"What does it mean, anyway? It sounds almost like a certain rude word for one of the nicest parts of a woman's body,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"And it sounds almost like the last half of your name, which is where it comes from,\" said Vetha. \"And what it means is, a collaborator with the dragons. I don't know for sure everything you've done, but I do know you've given us that word.\" She crossed her legs primly. \"At least you had the good luck not to use the family name for it.\"\n\nTarcuna picked up a stained-glass lamp in her good hand, and threw it clumsily at the photographs on a wall. \"And you aren't so much a mother as an earthly incarnation of the Lady of Peppers.\"\n\n\"We'll have no more of that, young lady,\" said Vetha. \"Now get out of my house, and go back to your dragons, and stop troubling decent people anymore.\"\n\nThey tossed a few more insults back and forth, with Mogen waving his arms and trying to calm them down. Neither one wanted to be calmed, though. Theirs was an old fight, and a bitter one.\n\n\"And how, exactly, are you keeping those dragons in line? The Magic Horn says you're sharing a hotel room with one of them! I think that the implications of that word 'cunya' are very precise in your case, My Daughter the Traitor Whore!\"\n\n\"I am doing no such thing!\" said Tarcuna. Veriception said she was lying. Memory, of course, said she was telling the truth. I resolved to ask her about that, though I haven't, yet. \"I shan't stay here and be insulted!\" She got up, kicked the chair over, and clomped through the front door.\n\n\"If the truth is an insult, you are certainly living your life wrong!\" shouted Vetha after her, sounding glad to get the last word.\n\nTarcuna pulled me out of her pouch. \"Did I say something about you shouldn't kill my mother? I didn't mean it.\" She was lying, but not very much.\n\nI coiled around her wrist. \"Yes, you did mean it. And even if you didn't, I'm not killing people for your convenience. If you want them dead, you can do it yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm almost tempted. I come back trying to apologize and make up, and she starts with the insults,\" lied Tarcuna.\n\nI didn't much want to argue with her about that. \"Try again in a few years. Once Ythac gets to work, being the dragons' ally won't seem like such a bad thing.\"\n\nFortunately Tarcuna doesn't have veriception."
            },
            {
                "title": "More Storming Off",
                "text": "\"I thought you said Dorday was fun,\" said Arilash in a rather whiny voice, in Petty Draconic. She was draped artistically over Csirnis in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium. They had been up to something more appropriate for a mating flight than what I had been doing with Tarcuna, from the smell of it.\n\n\"It was fun, the first time I was here,\" I protested. I was myself again, or rather the small-sized version of myself that I was using for this leg of the trip.\n\n\"I'm afraid that it's coming off as a bit awkward socially,\" said Csirnis. He gave me a big golden smile, with barbels spread.\n\n\"Your display of beauty will not help you!\" I hissed at him. \"I still recognize that you are not pleased with my choice of city!\"\n\nOsoth crept from behind a potted fake tree. \"Indeed, a strange restlessness has fallen thickly upon us all, with you as the sole exception. Now, the phantoms of departure beckon us onward, forward, farward to some distant realm wherein we may, perhaps, find something closer to the heart's desire.\"\n\nThat earned him a lightning bolt. Just a tiny one, but the accompanying thunderclap sent the hoven hotel staff scurrying away and even got Tarcuna to frown. \"I'm supposed to be your heart's desire. Or Arilash if your heart desires sharing.\"\n\nOsoth looked hurt. \"One may acquire the occasional misconception about what is desire for me, and what is tactics. Case in point: I desire to act honorably; thus I hold to promises made for tactical reasons in a very different situation.\"\n\n\"He said 'no',\" Arilash translated.\n\n\"It is far from obvious that I did. Indeed, it is far from obvious what 'no' might mean, under the circumstances,\" Osoth clarified. Unclarified, actually.\n\n\"Dorday's not going to get much better,\" said Nrararn, on the hotel's registration desk. \"The Magic Horn said that tourism is down by 90% from this time last year.\"\n\n\"How much is that in real numbers?\" asked Arilash.\n\nNrararn tightened his wings to concentrate on the math. \"Ten and three-quarters twelfths. The whole country is scared, and people don't want to go away from home in case some extra disaster happens. By 'disaster' they mean 'dragons'. Especially they don't want to come here, since according to the Magic Horn, Dorday is crawling with dragons.\"\n\n\"More room for us, then,\" I said.\n\n\"More closed attractions, and more resentment from the hovens running the ones that are open,\" said Csirnis softly.\n\nI had obviously gotten outmaneuvered again, with the whole rest of the mating flight deciding on what to do next without mentioning it to me. Getting out without bleeding fianc\u00e9e points all over the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium lobby was going to be hard. I wrote a quick urgent note to Ythac, and got back a quick urgent answer. \"Patthakadu, then?\"\n\nArilash peered at me. \"What does that mean? What language is that, even?\"\n\n\"It's a big city in northern Damma. Also it's a big forest and game preserve,\" I said, sounding just as if I had investigated the whole of Damma thoroughly and picked the best place after much careful consideration. Actually I had picked the best place, I just didn't know why. \"Thank you, Ythac, for your finding spell!\"\n\nEverydragon blinked at me. \"You want to go? We thought you'd want to stay in Dorday.\"\n\n\"Dorday's only a good tourist spot if you're clever and skillful enough to blend in with the hovens, to win their trust and lull them into complacency!\" I explained. \"As I did last time.\" I count that as winning a few fianc\u00e9e points, or at least losing fewer.\n\nTarcuna gave me a very odd look. \"What are you say you are hoven?\" She was trying to speak Petty Draconic, and making a total hash of it.\n\n\"We're going to leave Dorday. I am trying to talk the others into going to Patthakadu, in Damma,\" I said. The other dragons nodded \u2014 yay, I had my fianc\u00e9e points! If anyone else was keeping any score anymore, which I don't think they were, since I'm the only one who had even started out doing it.\n\nWhat I gained in fianc\u00e9e points, I lost in loyal minion points. Tarcuna looked rather hurt. \"I haven't seen Kangbok yet.\"\n\n\"Then stay and see her,\" said Nrararn. \"This isn't your mating flight, after all. If Jyothky wants a servant, well, there are grands upon grands of people in Damma, most of them terribly poor and eager to get hired.\"\n\n\"She's not my servant exactly. More of a minion,\" I said. \"If I wanted a servant, I'd get one with two working arms.\"\n\n\"If you were better at healing magic, I'd have two working arms,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"If I were better at healing magic, I'd start by fixing your broken psyche, so you'd have the least bit of caution back. And better sense about insulting dragons.\"\n\nTarcuna shrugged. \"It's all borrowed time anyway. Do I get time to pack at least?\"\n\n\"Go pack now, if you want to come with us. We're still deciding where to go.\"\n\nPatthakadu, of course."
            },
            {
                "title": "Patthakadu (Day 169)",
                "text": "Damma wanted us.\n\nAlso, of course, Damma didn't want us.\n\nDamma is a very big country, larger and more diverse than Trest. It has the Chidana mountains, huge and vicious, against which the Khamrou range would be small and very innocent foothills. It has the flood plains of the Mumtarry river and its many tributaries, so green with corn and mustard, beans and cabbages and the thousand spices of Dammese cooking that they can be seen from the other side of the sky. Patthakadu and Tethettha are cities as urban and sophisticated as Dorday and Perstra, at least in the wealthier quarters. Bhalata is ancient and holy, and the huts of the gods are unchanged since the earliest days.\n\nAnd the politics is just as messy. The Mother Spice Party is more or less on top of the country, ruling with occasional stunning flashes of adequacy. The SNKVhH \u2014 a few people told me what that stands for, but I can't remember \u2014 opposes Mother Spice at every turn. Fifty-eight registered minority parties swap back and forth between the two main poles at their convenience. Then there are the religious parties. Damma has lots of religious parties. Damma has lots of religions, each of them with lots of gods, some of whom are the same as other gods. I don't think that even the Dammans have a very good idea of everything going on in Damma.\n\nFortunately, we're not trying to understand Damma, or even rule Damma. We're just trying to get official permission to use Patthakadu and environs for a few years.\n\nOur approach was straightforwardness itself:\n\nFly from Dorday towards Patthakadu.\n\nRealize halfway there that we might want to warn Patthakadu first.\n\nAsk Ythac to have what's left of his Diplomatic Brigade send them a message.\n\nSpend two and five-twelfths hours trying to calm Ythac, apologize to Ythac, and otherwise get Ythac to understand that we're not actually tossing him into the volcano of his husband and his country all by himself.\n\nI (carrying Tarcuna) fly back to Perstra, while Arilash and the drakes go to Patthakadu.\n\nI stay up very late talking with Ythac about nothing in particular. We actually sleep together, in a somnolent but not adulterous sense. Llredh, according to Ythac, finds something else to amuse himself with.\n\nCsirnis somehow talks the Spice Mother Party and the SNKVhH into provisionally letting us stay in Patthakadu with official blessing. I do not think that anyone specifically points out quite how imposing it will be to have five of the seven dragons on Hove living in their country. The official blessing is conditional on some sort of religious test, in which the nation's gods get a chance to reject us. Since they're not real, we are not particularly worrried.\n\nTarcuna, smelling considerably of soap and perfume, and I, smelling considerably of tired drake and no sex, fly on to Patthakadu. Of course Arilash's the Melismatic Tempest has worn off, so the trip takes over a day and many broken ribs thanks to the utterly cursed the Dozenwing Dozentail.\n\nWhich, unfortunately, makes it one of the best-conceived and best-executed plans we have ever devised.\n\nWe have been given the Imperial Patthakadu Cavalry Academy as our home for the next few years. Convenient, I suppose, because cavalry hasn't been used in the army in over a century, so they had just started shutting the academy down. (Damma doesn't make changes over-hastily.) By the time I got there, the others had voted four to zero that everyone would look like themselves, with none of the size-changes that satisfied absolutely nobody in Dorday.\n\n\"That's fine,\" I said.\n\n\"So we're sleeping in the buildings that are big enough for us to sleep in,\" said Nrararn apologetically.\n\n\"I can concede that there might be some advantage to that approach, compared to the possibility of sleeping in buildings that we do not fit in,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, you might want to sleep out of doors for a few weeks, even though it rains every night,\" said Nrararn, as he showed me to my sleeping chamber. Which was a stable, again. The Royal Stable in Strobland had had a floor of mighty flagstones, tilted and drained, and washed every day by heroic Stroblander stable hands. The Imperial Patthakadu Cavalry Academy was built and maintained to different standards. The floors were dirt. Dirt packed by centuries of hoven hooves and horse hooves, to be sure. Dirt cleaned by Dammese peasants, who, as far as I could tell, had not been heroic. I didn't dare go in.\n\n\"I'll either sleep outdoors, or bite my tongue off so I can't smell it,\" I said. \"Can't you use some sky magic to air it out a bit?\"\n\nNrararn's tail drooped. \"I tried most of yesterday.\" He pointed a wing to the other side of the parade ring. \"That is no longer a stinking barn.\"\n\n\"It is no longer a barn at all,\" I pointed out. The boards of its walls and roof were scattered over a hundred yards, and a dozen peasants were gathering them.\n\n\"Yet, it still stinks,\" said Nrararn sadly. \"Csirnis is trying to arrange for some tents.\"\n\nI flomped on the well-horsed ground. \"Csirnis should arrange to bite off the prime minister's toes. This isn't much of a place to live, compared to the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium.\"\n\nNrararn trickled his foreclaws over my head tenderly. (I thought for a while and decided to take it as a comforting gesture rather than an utterly unnecessary and inexcusable bit of ignoring my basic flaw. I was too tired to have a proper fight.) \"I'm sorry, Jyothky. Csirnis is arranging to get new buildings built, actually.\"\n\n\"I suppose that's more practical than biting off toes,\" I said.\n\nBy eveningtime, two big tents had been procured. Nrararn and Arilash shared one of them, vigorously. Csirnis and Osoth shared the other, chastely. I turned into a seabird and slept on the back of a chair in Tarcuna's dorm room, also chastely.\n\nWe should have stayed in Dorday."
            },
            {
                "title": "I Win The Sex Contest! (Day 188)",
                "text": "Arilash and I had a sex contest today and I won!\n\nWe were at the Erotic Temple of Patthakara, all devoted to hovens mating with each other for the glory of some of their gods. I don't understand the theology one bit. And I got the devious idea. I said, \"Arilash! We have three males here, for a total of nine male members! That's an odd number! I challenge you thus: Each member will be used once, by one of us. Whoever has used more of them in the end, wins!\"\n\nWell, she could hardly refuse that contest! And it was sort of a performance piece, it fit the style of the Patthakara complex quite nicely. We had grosses of hovens watching us, just sitting on the steps of the temple or under the spreading uulama trees, eating their picnics and watching and sometimes filming.\n\nI am the devious little dragoness though! I made sure that Arilash got two turns with Csirnis, on the larger and thus slower two hemipenes. Csirnis does not do things by halves. He does not rush. He can be quite distracting, in the most pleasant way, to a dragoness who is capable of feeling his distractions. I am not nearly so pleasant. I hope not unpleasant \u2014 the ghee helps a good deal, and after the first few rounds I was quite sloppy and sloshy with drake-juices anyway. Nor so distractable: I kept an eye on Arilash, though she mostly had eyes for her drake-of-the-moment.\n\nAnyway, when I had finished my fourth twine, which was with Osoth, Arilash and Csirnis were all lovingly tangled up together, their tails flopping in the reflecting pool, and they looked as if they'd be glad to enjoy each other for another hour or two. So I grinned at Nrararn, and called him over, and he was my fifth round.\n\nAnd when Arilash and Csirnis finished, my rival knew that she had been defeated in a contest in her area of strength.\n\nBy my superior powers of arithmetic.\n\n(I doubt that I'll ever win a sex contest again. I've managed to twine the three drakes maybe half a dozen times since the Hide and Seek game, total, compared to Arilash's keeping them all pretty happy for most of that time.)\n\nOh, well, I do what I can do. I'm pretty sure that everyone enjoyed the contest, anyway."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fury! (Day 274)",
                "text": "I am so angry.\n\nTwo days ago, Tarcuna sort of vanished. One of the servants told me she had gone off with an appealingly spherical local woman, and said to tell me she'd be back in a few days. I didn't much blame her. She's rather bored here, being my retainer in a situation where I don't need retaining. There aren't even many books in Trestean to be had. She's trying to learn Petty Draconic \u2014 but we don't have any books in that \u2014 and trying to learn any of the Dammese languages at the same time wouldn't be easy.\n\nI mostly hoped that her romances were going better than mine.\n\nThis afternoon, one of the servants gave me a telegraph.\n\nFirst of all, the telegraph was in a hybrid of Petty Draconic and Ghemelian, rendered as well as possible (not very!) in squirmy Dammese characters. I had to use the Word-Fox several times to make sense out of it.\n\n\u2002Dear Jyothky,\n\n\u2002I hope that the circumstances of your mating flight have become more pleasant than in the early phases. I offer my condolences for the death of Greshthanu and the departure of Tultamaan, though I hope that the composition and character of your remaining harem of suitors is more to your liking, and that you have found sufficient means for satisfying interdraconic relationships despite your technical difficulties.\n\n\u2002It is my unfortunate obligation to inform you that my slaves have kidnapped your companion Tarcuna and brought her to the Pit of Despair Prison in downtown Ghemel. I completely acknowledge that this is unconscionably rude, though I hope it stops short of the start of outright hostilities. I need to invite you, in person, alone, to the Pit of Despair Prison (the name is inherited from the days of Uncle Holder and is no longer strictly accurate). It goes without saying that Tarcuna will be released unharmed into your custody as soon as possible, unless truly regrettable circumstances compel otherwise.\n\n\u2002In any case, I look forward to greeting you at the Pit of Despair, and proferring my most sincere and spirit-felt (for I lack an actual heart) apologies for my actions. Please be aware that I have collected the most valuable and portable treasures of Ghemel in the Pit of Despair, and am prepared to emphasize my apology which any or all of them.\n\n\u2002I'm afraid that the invitation is for yourself alone. We cannot accomodate even a single dragon more in suitable style, although, should uninvited guests arrive, the divine magic of Mhel combines with Hove's military science exceedingly well. It might well suffice to discourage unanticipated guests. It will certainly suffice to kill a hoven already in our clutches. This inhospitality, though regrettable and indeed regretted, is quite temporary. After events have completely satisfied their evolution, you and your companions may help yourselves to the valuables of Ghemel with my (admittedly vile) blessing.\n\n\u2002Your regrettably wicked friend,\n\n\u2002Xolgrohim\n\nThe primary fury: My friend Xolgrohim \u2014 or self-proclaimed friend Xolgrohim \u2014 has kidnapped my second-best friend in anywhere, and is using her as bait to lure me into a trap! Aside from the obvious difficulties and inconvenience of that, I do not approve of my friends behaving badly towards each other.\n\nThe secondary fury: After a bit of consideration, I can't tell my mating flight about it. I would lose so many fianc\u00e9e points, there'd be no counting them. I'm sure I could find something more humiliating to do than announce to everyone that I had lost track of my pet hoven and they had to go rescue her. I can't think of what, though.\n\nStill, I am not without resources.\n\n\"Ythac? Do you have time to chat?\"\n\n\"Only if it's supremely urgent do I have time this hour, and you and Llredh are the only two who can call on that degree of urgency. Can it wait for an hour and a third?\" he answered, and his mindwriting looked a bit ragged.\n\n\"It can wait that long, Ythac.\" Flying to Ghemel would take much more than an hour and a third.\n\nI'm not a complete idiot. (Eleven-twelfths an idiot I will grant you without the least bit of argument.) I wrote the mating flight a detailed note about what I was doing, and gave it to a slow but reliable servant to copy several times and send to everyone through the slow but unreliable Damman postal system.\n\nSo: fly, fly, fly. I had lots of time to think, and not much else to do. I made a few guesses about Xolgrohim's plans and intentions.\n\nNearly an hour later, over one of Damma's interminable jungles: \"Right. Executions are properly arranged and sentences commuted for tomorrow. What did you want, Jyothky? Your words looked worried.\"\n\n\"I am worried.\" ...and I transcribed Xolgrohim's whole telegram to him.\n\n\"Well, that's not good,\" he wrote back.\n\n\"That it is not,\" I answered.\n\n\"No \u2014 what's not good is that Tarcuna is hidden from finding spells. I can't help very much from here.\"\n\n\"Oh, that is bad. I didn't know paingods could do that,\" I said.\n\n\"I didn't either. I wish I could give you useful clues here, Jyothky, but I don't have many. Do you want Llredh and me to come with you?\"\n\n\"I do, but I don't know whether or not it's a good idea. If he's being honest, he's not going to hurt me, and he'd try to kill you if you came.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\"My best guess is, he's trying to kill my parents for killing him. Osoth didn't exactly say very much about it, but that sounds like a very undead reason to do something like this.\"\n\n\"That's one possibility. Maybe he's just trying to get revenge however he can. Killing his killer's child might satisfy him just as well as killing his killers would.\"\n\nI had been avoiding thinking about that option. \"Probably that's not it.\" I waved some textual exegesis of bits of the telegraph at him. Unpersuasively, since we weren't sure that anything was compelling Xolgrohim to be truthful.\n\n\"So, the only thing we're pretty sure of is that Xolgrohim is trying to kill some dragons. Maybe you, maybe your parents. Maybe your parents preferably, but failing that, you. So I am not particularly happy about you flying there alone,\" Ythac wrote. \"Fianc\u00e9e points won't do you much good if you're dead. If Arilash or anyone is paying any attention to them, which I doubt.\"\n\nI scribbled \"Well, find out what weapons he's got for me, and I'll do something appropriate.\"\n\n\"The most appropriate thing would be to leave your hoven there. Poor Tarcuna, but you're a lot more important than she is.\" Which is both sensible and true, but I was having none of it. So Ythac poked at the Mystery Zone with his best far-range information spells, but Xolgrohim had blocked them. \"That's all I can do from here. If I were nearby, I could do a lot more.\"\n\n\"So come nearby,\" I wrote back.\n\n\"You don't mind? You're flying off like some heroine from before the astral era. Thought you might want to do it alone.\"\n\n\"Esrret's star! I want whatever help I can get! Besides, you had better help me for your own sake. Your parents offended him nearly as much as mine did. If we let him live succeed this time, he'll be after you next. With more expertise for him, and fewer allies for you. You and Llredh had better be flying right outside the Mystery Zone, ready to swoop in for rescue or revenge!\"\n\n\"Hold on...\" I waited a while. \"Llredh says that yes, he'd absolutely rather fight an undead paingod than spend a single hour more on the new constitution.\"\n\nWhich sounds like a plan to me, and a better one than flying into the Pit of Despair all alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "(Day 277)",
                "text": "There wasn't any great hurry to rescue Tarcuna, not really. Xolgrohim didn't much want to kill her, we guessed. If he did want to (or anything else), he would have done it already.\n\n\"Unless he is trying to bring you woe, Jyothky. Or give you a distracting fury,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I don't think he actually hates me,\" I argued. \"My parents, certainly, they killed him. Killing me would annoy them a little. Killing my hoven friend whom they've never met wouldn't bother them at all.\"\n\n\"I should go in there with you,\" said Ythac. \"Xolgrohim won't want to kill me. If he hates my father too \u2014 and he ought to \u2014 killing me would only save my father the trouble.\"\n\n\"Have you heard from Rankotherium?\" I asked.\n\n\"I've told my mother about Llredh. She's not very happy. I don't know if she's told my father or not. Let's think about your lich-god problem now, please, Jyothky?\"\n\nBut there wasn't very much we could do from outside the Mystery Zone. Except to stare at the Mystery Zone itself. It was a sticky dysparallel mess of astral magic, a rough hypersphere woven of loose burlappy cables, mostly for detection, and shot through with the scratchy tin wires of painspells. Blinding-spells grew like stinking mushrooms here and there, mostly around the Pit of Despair and one of the palaces, blocking many of Ythac's attempts to discover anything. (But we had excellent maps, made during Trest's invasion and occuption, current up to and excluding the capture and enslavement of both countries by astral monsters from beyond the curve of the universe.) Nothing was terribly strong, but there was a lot of it \u2014 and we felt the theoceptive prickling of the loose god about. And of course it wasn't that much like dragon magic, and we had only a loose idea of exactly how it would behave.\n\nYthac and Llredh insisted on doing every kind of research they could think of. So we interrogated some terrified local farmers, thus:\n\nAll three of us landed in a triangle around a lentil-field where barehoofed peasants labored in thick mud. Llredh roared, \"Innocent farmers! Fearing and fleeing, you must do neither of these!\"\n\nThe most organized and clever of the peasants tried to figure out what Llredh had said. The rest, naturally, tried to run away from him. Ythac and I blocked them with wings and tails and such. \"Please don't run away. We just want to ask you a few questions about what's happened in Ghemel. We'll pay for the information, in healing.\"\n\nAfter two-thirds of an hour of determined, iron-willed, fierce peasant calming, punctuated with healing sunburn, blisters, day-old scorpion stings, and a lost finger that wasn't going to grow back but didn't need to be infected about it, we had three peasants to talk to. And a dozen others to farm desultorily and pretend they could rescue their friends if they got into trouble.\n\n\"What happened in Ghemel?\" we asked.\n\n\"Don't know for certain,\" they said. \"All we know is, anyone who crosses Pran ad'Darak Street screams and screams like they was being boiled alive or something, then turns and walks into the city and never comes back out.\"\n\n\"We've seen hovens walking around in the city. Do you know what goes on in there?\", we asked.\n\n\"Not for sure 'n certain, that we don't. My cousin says they're mostly building things in there,\" said the youngest informant.\n\n\"What does your cousin know that you don't?\"\n\n\"Probably a lot, if it please you. He's been in there since nearly the beginning, and he's important in there,\" said the informant.\n\nWell, that was interesting. \"You can talk to people inside?\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. We bring food and things to Damarrhu Market, just on this side of Pran ad'Darak, and people from the city come out and buy it. Sometimes they stay and talk. Not like proper people visiting their friends on market day, they won't sit down and drink mint tea and sit and catch up with old friends. But they'll say a few words,\" said our peasant.\n\n\"And what do they say?\"\n\n\"Well, Murghal neng Nhestravvath came back from the desert with a doomsome demon as an ally. He's harnessed everyone in the city up with pain. If they don't do exactly what he says, right prompt, they hurt so bad that they'd cut their throat with a hacksaw to make it feel better. I know that for a fact. Murghal made some of the Trestean soldiers do it in the grand square, my cousin says. He was terrible before, now he is a thousand times terrible.\"\n\nLlredh refurrowed the lentil-field with a foreclaw. \"My soldiers and my husband's soldiers, that is who these soldiers that Murghal kills are! With Murghal, with Xolgrohim, there will be a reckoning and a night of fire! What hoven, what god, contends against me and endures? There is none! There can be none!\"\n\n\"I go first,\" I said. \"Those soldiers were never yours; Murghal took them before you conquered Trest. Tarcuna was mine before that, even. So I have precedence.\"\n\n\"I cede precedence!\" roared Llredh. \"But what of Murghal you do not destroy, that much is mine to destroy!\"\n\n\"Especially if I get killed or captured,\" I said.\n\nLlredh breathed his assent as a column of flame, pouring miles into the sky, and most of the peasants fled. Ythac watched his husband. \"Llredh, I was not sure until this very moment if they knew we were out here.\"\n\n\"Bah! Drakes and dragonesses, we are these! The dead god should quail and cower before us!\"\n\n\"The dead god is well-prepared, and intentionally tugged Jyothky's tail to get her here. I don't think he'll be quailing or cowering very much,\" said Ythac quietly.\n\n\"Then he knows we are here! Or if not for certain, than he acts as if we were!\" roared Llredh. \"The secrecy for sneaking and creeping around in private, we never had her!\"\n\n\"Very comforting, Llredh. I'll go round up our peasants again. Maybe they can tell us more,\" I said, and did, which wasn't so easy.\n\n\"Llredh is very angry at Murghal,\" I said. \"Llredh is the dragon who conquered Trest, too. I don't think Murghal will be around much longer.\"\n\nThe peasants allowed as how that might be a good thing. \"He won't let us leave here, anyway, and he won't pay for food for the city.\"\n\n\"How does he keep you?\"\n\n\"Cross the Bul Alen river and it hurts. Don't bring food to the market, and it hurts,\" said the peasant.\n\n\"Typical paingod approach to economics... The more you can tell us about what's going on in there, the less we'll have to wreck... and the less chance we'll have of killing your cousin.\"\n\nWhich uncalmed the peasant rather. \"Why are you killing my cousin? Murghal is doing that already!\"\n\n\"Is he alive or dead?\" Ghemelian uses different verb forms for the two, and the cousin had been getting the living forms. Fortunately we didn't need to talk about Xolgrohim much with the peasants; I don't know what verb forms to use for the living dead.\n\n\"My cousin Khudris is big, my cousin Khudris is strong, my cousin Khudris is tough from farming and farming! So Murghal called him to the Pit of Despair Hospital two months ago and did a fearsome surgery upon him! Now loops of shining grey metal sprout out around his spine, spikes of metal from his shoulders, barbs pierce his cheeks, gemstones are his eyes, stained-glass lamps his ears!\"\n\nYthac and Llredh and I looked at each other. \"Really? Why on Hove would he do a thing like that? Did your cousin Khudris offend him and need to be tortured? \u2014 but that sounds like a very strange and difficult torture. A paingod must have easier, cheaper ones.\"\n\n\"My cousin says that he has been made a god himself! I think he has been! He bought a thousandweight of beans and tomatoes. No cart brought he! He spread his arms and the beans and tomatoes floated over him, and he walked them thus into the tortured city!\" said the peasant.\n\n\"Niobium Apotheosis Coils,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"What?\" said Llredh and I.\n\n\"It sounds like the technology that the mhelvul used to become gods, before our parents conquered Mhel,\" said Ythac. \"Of course Xolgrohim knows how to do it; he was one of those gods. It's sort of like the Great Separation for us: a few mhelvul survived, but they gained a presence in the astral realm.\"\n\n\"So I'm not facing one god in there. I'm facing... dozens? hundreds?\"\n\n\"You had better go as soon as you can, Jyothky,\" said Ythac, arching his head over to me.\n\nI bopped him on the muzzle with my left ear. \"You're that eager to get rid of me?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking that a new-made god isn't going to be that skilled with his powers. How good were you a month or two after your Great Separation, after all?\"\n\n\"Terrible. I was mostly throwing tantrums about not being able to feel anymore,\" I said. \"I didn't want to learn magic.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't know you missed it,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Oh, I've been complaining about it constantly in my diary... Actually, Ythac, do me another favor?\" I fished my diary \u2014 not including this entry \u2014 out, and gave it to him. \"If I die, and anyone misses me, have them read this. It's the diary.\"\n\nWe embraced in the lane outside the lentil fields, while Llredh and some wondering peasants looked on. No, not that kind of embrace.\n\nJust a farewell kind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Into the Trap",
                "text": "I flew straight and fast to the Pit of Despair Prison; secrecy seemed pointless. I wore every defensive spell that Llred or Ythac or I could cast, and scribbled notes to Ythac constantly. Like, \"Ghemel looks worse every time I fly over it. Xolgrohim's been ripping homes down and building factories and smelting plants.\" Not that I particularly needed the distraction, but if I got killed, best if Ythac knew what was going on for purposes of revenge.\n\n\"I wish I could find out why that was,\" wrote Ythac. Information mages always hate not knowing things.\n\n\"I'll ask him if I see him,\" I scribbled back.\n\nAnd there was the Pit of Despair Prison: a huge complex surrounded by thin walls of powdery stone pierced by several roads. There was a great deal of new construction, mostly in a ring around the Pit of Despair proper, and the air stank of iron and oil-smoke and chemicals, and the despair of hovens. The trap proper was nicely marked, with a big sign on a building saying \"Welcome, Jyothky. This way to Tarcuna.\"\n\nThe arrow pointed down into the pit.\n\nI circled the prison in the air, watching, thinking. Well, I could... Destroy all the surrounding buildings? And maybe kill Tarcuna if she's being kept there. Oh, and certainly kill lots of Xolgrohim's hoven pawns. Turn into something tiny and try to infiltrate? Silly at this point, and undignified. Ask Ythac? \"Sorry, no good advice,\" was his answer.\n\n\"I'm just going to follow the arrow and fly into the trap,\" I said. So I tried. Actually I had to land on a conveniently placed and non-dangerous ledge and climb down, since the pit wasn't big enough for much flapping of wings and I didn't want to use a levitation spell that anygod could swat away and tumble me inelegantly into the pit. They had conveniently installed a very solid wooden staircase, with heavy beams stuck out of the steel-clad walls of the pit, just big enough for me, so this was obviously part of Xolgrohim's plan.\n\nAs I climbed down, I heard a tremendous grinding of gears from overhead. Three huge metal jaws were closing off the top of the Pit of Despair, snipping me off from the light of Virtuet. \"I think I know what Xolgrohim has been foundering,\" I told Ythac.\n\n\"Foundreying. Yes, it sounds that way. There's your trap, I guess.\"\n\n\"Not much of a trap, if that's all. Those doors won't be a dozenth as hard to melt as Kuhankun Mountain,\" I wrote.\n\n\"If that's all, yes,\" wrote Ythac. \"Keep your nineteen senses up, OK?\"\n\n\"All of them? I am nibbling on the wall now. Yummy!\" I wrote. I wasn't, and it wasn't.\n\nThe spiral staircase took seven turns around. At the second turn, Tarcuna called up to me: \"Jyothky! You came!\"\n\n\"Oh, hi, Tarcuna. Nice to see you!\"\n\n\"I was hoping you wouldn't, actually,\" she said.\n\nI strolled down the staircase, my tail thumping on the wall. \"Oh? Got a better companion than an alien monster who mostly ignores you?\"\n\n\"No, I still love you. But I'm pretty sure this is a trap,\" she said.\n\n\"Absolutely, it's a trap. Did you see the poster, and the doors closing?\"\n\nMetal slammed against metal, twice, and hoofsteps tapped out on the pit's floor below. Someone shouted up, \"I am afraid that, yes, it is a trap. Please don't be offended.\" The voice sounded half-familiar.\n\n\"Xolgrohim, is that you?\" I asked, and looked down. It was Murghal. Rather, it was Murghal's body, with a heavy sevenfold cable of bitter sorcery wrapped around it and trailing off into the distance, and tenasensitive signs of strain everywhere. \"Or Murghal?\"\n\n\"Xolgrohim, using Murghal's body,\" he said, and I saw the cables twitch with each word. \"Perhaps I could explain the conditions of the trap in a bit more detail, to start with, and thereby avoid or at least postpone unpleasantness?\"\n\n\"Nice little puppet you've got there,\" I said. The stairs ended thirty feet above the floor, so I leapt down to the middle of the clear half of the room. It wasn't safe, but its loud hiss of menace was all potential. Tarcuna ran over and hugged my foreleg, and I folded a wing around her protectively.\n\n\"Well, the most important thing to remember about the trap is the walls. I know you could burn your way out of anything on Hove. But these walls are special. They are a sandwich. The outer layers are steel \u2014 enough steel, I believe, so that you cannot easily claw or bite your way through them; you will have to breathe. The inner layer is a very insidious sort of filling. It is ampoules of various chemicals. If you burn them, or pierce them, they will form any number of fearsome toxic vapors, which flood the pit. I am not sure if they will kill you or not, though they are quite strong. They will certainly kill Tarcuna,\" said Xolgrohim, in a smallish voice.\n\n\"So I shouldn't grab Tarcuna and burn my way out of here,\" I said, and relayed Xolgrohim's words to Ythac.\n\n\"Exactly! I knew you would be sensible!\" he beamed. \"Now, the floor.\"\n\n\"The very dangerous floor,\" I said, since dangersense was rather howling about it.\n\n\"Don't listen to him! It's twistor guns!\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\n\"Excuse me, Tarcuna, but I am having a conversation with Jyothky at the moment. You should not interrupt,\" said Xolgrohim.\n\n\"Actually, I am at least as interested in what Tarcuna has to say as in what you have to say,\" I told him.\n\nXolgrohim smiled apologetically. \"Very well then! Feel free to interrupt as you wish, Tarcuna. The floor is very thin, just big enough to support you and the other contents of the room. Beneath it are three of the largest twistor projectors I could manage in the few months that I had available to me. They are not, unfortunately, up to the standards of the Peace Everywhere Array, though they do have a range of some dozens or hundreds of miles. At a word to my gunners, though, they will entirely fill the Pit of Despair with torque. I do not know for certain that even that will kill you, but I rather suspect it might. I am certain about what it will do to poor, interrupt-prone Tarcuna.\"\n\n\"I have destroyed many large twistor guns,\" I said.\n\n\"And no doubt you could destroy these as well! But they are arranged so that any destruction of the gun itself will also set off the torque battery. Again, that might not kill you, but it will be a remarkably potent occurrence, which Tarcuna may find unfavorable,\" said Xolgrohim.\n\nI thought about the devastation that even a single battery had caused: more dangerous than my strongest breath by far. \"An excellent precaution! When I destroyed the Peace Everywhere Array, I worked from a distance, but in your poison-walled pit, that approach is not available.\"\n\nHe beamed. \"Exactly. Exactly! It is a pleasure working with you, Jyothky.\"\n\n\"What, precisely, do you mean by 'working'?\"\n\nYthac's wrote to me in letters jagged with alarm, \"Jyothky! Dragons!\" Xolgrohim said something too, but I didn't catch it.\n\n\"Who? Arilash and Csirnis?\"\n\n\"No, no, the sky over Khamrou Voresc is crawling with dragons. More than a dozen of them.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear. Send them my greetings, I suppose. At least can you find out who they are?\" I looked back at Xolgrohim. \"I'm sorry, but I was lost in thought for a moment. Could you repeat that?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't specifically want to catch you, Jyothky. Your parents killed me, as you may recall. It is certainly a flaw in my personality \u2014 I regard it as such in any case \u2014 but I cannot refrain from trying to kill them in exchange. Or, failing that, to bring them whatever degree of sorrow and woe I can.\"\n\n\"Jyothky won't cooperate with you!\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\n\"I certainly don't want to make my parents unhappy, or dead,\" I said. \"Nor you, nor myself.\"\n\n\"If you risk your own life to save mine, I am going to kill myself!\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"You have the oddest concept of helping me, Tarcuna,\" I said. \"Please, let's let Xolgrohim tell us his plans before anyone kills herself to foil them?\" She threw herself to the metal floor by my feet, stinking of anger and shame.\n\n\"Now that you have, temporarily, subdued our loquacious and lecherous lure, may I explain your role in the upcoming festivities?\" asked Xolgrohim.\n\n\"Tultamaan's back. Chevethna back from her mating flight, Arthane flying next to her so I bet they're married, Ignissa back from her mating flight, Vuuthon, Ressal,... Kuro for heaven's sake,... lots of dragons I don't know,\" wrote Ythac.\n\n\"That's bad,\" I said. That many dragons my age, already mated, are probably here for conquering.\n\n\"I should be fascinated to hear it,\" I said. I curled my tail around Tarcuna, and cast the Library in Scales and wrote to her, \"After he has finished, we will discuss our next step privately. Now please let's listen. I'm trying to write to Ythac too, and if I'm not careful I'm going to get horribly confused.\"\n\n\"Bad, bad. I'm holding territory now. It might be me and Llredh against fifteen of our age-peers,\" wrote Ythac.\n\n\"Well. Ressal and Tultamaan barely count. And I'll help you when I get out of here,\" I said.\n\n\"All right, all right, I'll be quiet,\" said Tarcuna. \"For now. If you're going to kill me, Xolgrohim, I at least get to tell you what I think of you first.\" She cuddled into the arc of my tail.\n\n\"Four to one is certainly an improvement over seven to one. Are you getting out soon?\" asked Ythac.\n\nXolgrohim spread Murghal's hands apologetically. \"For the moment, I simply request that you \u2014 both of you \u2014 remain in the Pit of Despair. My part-time messenger on Mhelvul should earn his extravagant pay soon, or so I hope, and your parents should arrive within, perhaps, a day or two? You know them better than I do: how long would you guess they would delay when their darling daughter is in deadly danger?\"\n\nI paused, as if to consider the question, but actually to write \"Not sure. I might need to do something stupid and humiliating, like promise to come right back after the fight,\" Then I said, out loud, \"Last time, they came in a hurry, but that was easier. They'd have to get directions here, and find someone to cast the Triangular Cyclonette. And probably another day or several to learn it, so they can get back afterwards,\" I said.\n\nXolgrohim laughed. \"Yes, I suppose they might think that getting back would be relevant to them and make arrangements. No more hurry than that?\"\n\n\"I suppose it depends on what your messenger told them, and how much they believed it.\"\n\n\"My powers of sending messages between worlds are not so great, and neither are Tultamaan's. He was supposed to tell Cterion and Uruunma that you had been trapped in the heart of a vast ruby, which your companions' fire was inadequate to melt but which Cterion's own flame probably could. He sent back the chirp that he was to send when he had done so.\"\n\nI stared at Xolgrohim. He lowered Murghal's gaze, and apologized, \"I merely sought some story which would require their presence, and not raise too many suspicions about the actual situation.\"\n\nI was still staring. \"You got Tultamaan as your messenger?\", I said out loud, and summarized the matter to Ythac.\n\n\"Regular couriers between here and Mhel are infrequent, and their rates are extravagant! There is rarely one available when you want one,\" Xolgrohim explained.\n\n\"We haven't particularly wanted to send many messages back. Arilash told Greshthanu's parents that he had been killed, is the only one. Plus whatever Tultamaan wanted to say,\" I said.\n\n\"Which, I believe, included a dramatization of your capture. Ah, and speaking of that regrettably brutal event, perhaps I shall return to my catalog of brutalities and menaces?\" asked the lich-god. Neither of us stopped him. \"Well, then, there are few other points of note. Observe the ventilation ducts there, and the servant's entrance by which we provide food and cleaning services? They cannot, inherently, be as well-armored as the walls proper. Nonetheless they are well-defended, by means of mighty electrical currents. Behind them are no fewer than three deified hovens on guard, one of whom was once an enhanced agent of Trest. Even you might find them troublesome in battle.\"\n\nI opened my organs of theoception, and yes, the place was crawling with minor gods. \"Why are you boasting about all of them? You're just giving me that much of an easier time defeating them,\" I asked. Which was a stupid question \u2014 I should have let him explain.\n\n\"Ah, but I hope that my precautions are never actually necessary. If they are tested, they may succeed, or they may fail; in either case it will be expensive and may well interfere with my ultimate wishes. If they are untested, they will not fail. I should prefer that you know enough not to make the attempt. Your immediate death would not serve me well.\"\n\n\"My immediate death...?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Well, one possible outcome is that Cterion and Uruunma remain too powerful for me to defeat, even with the tools currently at my disposal. I should be compelled, in that case, to inflict whatever injuries I could arrange, before they inevitably kill me again. Killing you holds no intrinsic pleasure for me, but killing you in front of their eyes would be a passable second choice. And, in case it is not clear, killing you before they arrive would be a distinctly inferior third choice, but still provide a form of revenge. So do not take my wish to preserve your life as too much of an encouragement to attempt to fight your way out of the Pit.\"\n\n\"Time for me to be a bit crafty,\" I wrote to Tarcuna. Out loud, I said, \"So, either I can try to escape and your traps and gods might kill me, or I can stay and you probably will kill me.\"\n\n\"I should judge the probabilities in the reverse,\" he said. \"My traps and gods will probably kill you. If you stay, I might kill you.\"\n\n\"You underestimate both me and my parents!\"\n\n\"Forgive me! I withdraw all measures of probability! In either case, it is possible but not certain that you will be killed.\"\n\nI spread my ears. \"Well, then. Give me some extra reason to want to say!\"\n\n\"Observe the caskets and armoires behind you,\" Xolgrohim said with a wave. \"The contain many treasures of Ghemelia...\" He yelped as I breathed sparks at him.\n\nI snarled. \"Treasure-hunting is for drakes. I am a dragoness. This attempt to bribe me is an insult to my future husband!\"\n\n\"I meant no offense! I am regrettably ignorant of draconic etiquette!\"\n\nI towered over the body my captor wore. \"No, I want something else. Something that you alone can provide.\"\n\nMurghal flattened his ears in fear, but Xolgrohim, being far away, was not much impressed. \"My resources are at your disposal, save for certain necessities \u2014 large of a martial nature \u2014 I wish to keep for my own purposes...\"\n\n\"I haven't felt anything since I was six years old,\" I said. \"I miss it, as much as you miss life itself. And your powers concern the sense of feeling.\"\n\nXolgrohim dipped Murghal's head. \"With all due respect, my specialty is pain. I have a limited selection of spells for pleasure, but they are not my strongest.\"\n\n\"Start with them!\" I roared.\n\n\"Certainly,\" he said, and concocted a gleaming clove-scented lump of (metaphorically) lace and crumbs on the astral plane and stretched out his hand to put it in my head. I reared my v\u00f4 away to let him do it. It sat right in the chasm in my psyche where feeling ought to go.\n\n\"Is it in?\" I asked.\n\n\"I have activated it. Do you feel anything? A sensation as of a thousand mhelvul lips kissing you everywhere, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Not a thing,\" I said. \"Pity. You'll have to try harder.\"\n\nHe tried harder, indeed, did Xolgrohim. He chanted and wriggled Murghal's fingers. He danced the most ominious jig that I could imagine a hoven dancing. He called for skull rattles and a necklace of bloodied feathers, and built a bonfire of wood and the bones of ancient kings. Astrally, he brought forth huge spiky things that stank astrally of asafoedita and terror, and I let him put them into me, too.\n\nFinally one worked, at least a little. The forks of my tongue felt as if they had been dipped in fire.\n\nThere's no describing it. Not the sensation itself, you can probably understand that unless you're one of the pawful of dragons injured the way I am. You're probably thinking, \"Ow, pain.\" But you are too used to pain, too used to feeling anything.\n\nThis was the best thing I had felt in five dozen years. (Yes, also the worst, but that didn't matter.) It was all I could do not to roll around in happiness. Not pleasure, just happiness.\n\n\"Remind me that I should marry Osoth, so he can raise up a tame paingod for me,\" I asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"I don't much like paingods,\" she said. \"Aren't they dangerous?\"\n\n\"Probably it's a bad idea,\" I wrote. I grinned a huge grin at Xolgrohim. \"Well, that one worked, a little bit.\"\n\n\"A little bit!\" he exclaimed. \"I have no stronger spells!\"\n\n\"You couldn't impose pain on a stone,\" I said, \"And my body's not much more than a stone, as far as sensation goes. But my tongue is a bit less broken than the rest of me.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, then, that that spell is the only one that works! If, at some future time, you wish to ransom my non-life, I offer to try to develop a spell that provides more pleasant sensations,\" he said.\n\nSo I yelled at him about how this was the best thing I had felt in five duodecades, and all of that.\n\n\"This is not a usual reaction for a paingod's powers!\" he said. \"But if you proclaim yourself satisfied, far be it from me to argue with you.\" He looked at me hopefully. \"So, now I have provided my best attempt at what you have requested?\"\n\n\"You have done admirably,\" I said, and I meant it. \"So here is my promise. I shall not attempt to leave the Pit of Despair for so long as this spell lets me feel.\" I spoke the ancient formula which binds us to our word on pain of dishonor. Though I did say \u0211\u1e73s\u1e61 instead of \u0211\u1e73\u1e61s, making the vow on pain of dumplings instead. If I ever get in the position of arguing about whether I were dishonored or not, that classic bit of sneakiness would count just a little in my favor. That wasn't my real trick.\n\nXolgrohim beamed. \"I am delighted that we have found a basis for temporary cooperation! I was not hoping for such amity!\" He is not any sort of fool though, even if he doesn't speak Grand Draconic, and he added: \"You will, I hope, understand and forgive me if the means of imprisonment that are already in place remain in place. It would be impractical to remove them at this late date.\"\n\nTarcuna, who maybe has picked up some Petty Draconic, looked horrified. \"Jyothky! How can you make such a deal with that!\"\n\nI grinned the vicious draconic grin to her. \"It's not quite the deal he wants. I promised not to leave the Pit of Despair: nothing more. I will go kill his gods and destroy his projectors, if I can. From inside, as long as I don't leave.\" That wasn't my real trick either.\n\nXolgrohim stared Murghal's square eyes at me. \"Oh, dear. I did not expect a great deal from a few words, but this is less than I might have hoped. I should have insisted on a vow of greater passivity.\"\n\n\"The vow was not yours to insist upon, foolish paingod!\" I thundered. Where by \"foolish\" I mean \"clever enough to catch me in quite a nasty trap\" of course.\n\n\"Well, of course. Forgive me for the suggestion that it was... and forgive me also, but I would like to remind you that the walls, weapons, and warriors of the Pit of Despair are just as deadly even though you have your vow. Indeed, the reduced flexibility of motion may make them just one bit the deadlier. So I fear that I must recommend that you stay inside of the metal prison of the Pit of Despair, even though it is not strictly required by your vows.\"\n\n\"For now, I am going to enjoy being able to feel!\" I roared. I can play arrogant, short-sighted, and self-centered extremely well. It's not very far from the truth.\n\n\"I am pleased to have been of some small service to you, even though I have done a greater disservice.\"\n\nI rolled on my back and enjoyed the pain in my tongue, as long as I had it. And traded a few notes with Tarcuna and Ythac, and completely ignored Xolgrohim. After an hour or two, he politely excused himself, and departed, leaving a rather worried and utterly undefended Murghal with us in the Pit of Despair."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "The next thing to do was the hardest thing I have done this whole mating flight. The last sixty years, even. I wrapped my v\u00f4 around the painspell and crushed the life out of it, as if it was a baby goat in my paw. Well, breaking the spell was easy. Persuading myself to do it was hard.\n\nAnd the dull blank prison of unfeelingness was back on me again.\n\n\"Did it work?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"Yes. No pain spell anymore. No vow anymore. And no alarms either. I don't think Xolgrohim can tell when his spells are broken.\" I wrote to her. That was my real trick. \"Now, tell me about how you planned to get us out of here?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Plotting",
                "text": "\"How did you know I had a plan?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"You've been here for days. Of course you have a plan. I tell you now though, if it involves you getting killed for tactical purposes, I'm vetoing it,\" I wrote back.\n\n\"How about a plan where you get out first, then rescue me?\"\n\n\"I'd rather do it right the first time.\"\n\n\"And I'm a pretty worthless hoven minion,\" she said. \"You're better off without me.\"\n\n\"That's not your judgment to make. If I thought so, I'd have gotten rid of you one of the dozen or two times it was convenient and polite to do so.\"\n\n\"I betrayed you!\" she wrote.\n\nWell, that could be a problem. \"How did you do that?\"\n\n\"Xolgrohim asked me all kinds of questions about your powers and everything. I didn't answer, and then he did something that hurt a lot, and I had to answer,\" she wrote. She snuffled a bit, so I wrapped my tail around her comfortingly.\n\n\"Well, of course. I didn't expect that you could stand up to a god. But I am going to kill Xolgrohim for that, you know.\" And on and on, comforting her, for at least twelve minutes.\n\nShe hadn't completely broken though. She didn't exactly lie to Xolgrohim, but she only answered his direct questions, and pretty literally at that. \"Like I sort of thought you could turn into animals, but I hadn't seen it myself, so I didn't tell him. I don't think you could get out of the Pit in hoven shape, but couldn't you turn into a hummingbird and fly out?\"\n\nI looked at the roof. \"There might be cracks up there I could get through.\"\n\n\"I was thinking more the ventilation ducts. They're trapped with electrical cables. But Khudris said the cables are about eight inches apart.\"\n\nI lick-groomed the last few tears off her face-fur. \"Who is Khudris?\" (I had forgotten about him.)\n\n\"He's one of the Ghemelians who kidnapped me. Xolgrohim did some very strange surgery on him, and he's got metal coils all in his back, and spikes coming out of his face, and a sort of a glass shell over most of them so they don't get bumped. They're very sensitive, and not in a good way.\"\n\nWhich sounds like the devices of the gods of Mhel. And it stands to reason that Xolgrohim would know enough about mhelvul apotheosis technology to reconstruct it here. Which means that Khudris is a young god. \"Oh! I'll bet he's got some spells too?\"\n\n\"Yes. He puts me to sleep sometimes, and carried me floating in the air, and nobody can see us,\" wrote Tarcuna.\n\n\"Convenient. But he was telling you things about the passageways while he was kidnapping you?\"\n\n\"He's one of the guards here now. He comes in here once in a while. You don't care if I have sex with other people and anybody and don't tell you, do you?\" Tarcuna's mental handwriting was rather wobbly.\n\n\"It's your body. Put anyone in it that you like. Except another cyoziworm of course; that would upset me.\"\n\nShe sighed, and leaned against my flank. \"I thought so. I was thinking and thinking you'd be upset with me for sleeping with all of our jailors.\"\n\n\"All of them?\"\n\n\"All I could get. I was bored.\"\n\n\"You must have been, if you're sleeping with males.\" Teasing her about that still feels very odd.\n\n\"I can be professional about it! And I can weasel information out of them when I'm sleeping with them. Besides, they're just as much prisoners here as we are, and just as unhappy about it. Maybe more. Xolgrohim has been really brutal with the pain spells on them. On all of Ghemel. They've seen people, ordinary hovens like grocers or something, who said 'no' to Xolgrohim. He put heavier spells on them. One of them sawed through his own throat with a clothes zipper to escape the pain.\" Tarcuna shuddered against my leg. \"And Branner is from Trest. He's one of the enhanced agents from the Darkness Axe helicopters. He really wants to go home, but every time he thinks about it for more than thirty seconds, the pain gets so bad he nearly faints. He was in me when that happened, once. It was awful even to watch.\"\n\n\"We did Mhel a big favor when we killed all the paingods,\" I said.\n\n\"Jyothky?\", she wrote, in Petty Draconic. She can't speak my name very well, but she can write it. \"You broke the pain spell on yourself. Can you break pain spells on other people?\"\n\n\"Sure, my v\u00f4 works fine.\"\n\n\"Do that on the guards, and we'll have some allies,\" said Tarcuna. \"Enhanced agents and coil gods, even.\"\n\nSo we made some detailed plans and told Ythac all about them. Never mind what they were, we didn't get past about step two."
            },
            {
                "title": "Obvious Epiphany",
                "text": "Tarcuna went to the servant's entrance, and shouted, \"Hey! Menes Hu, Khudris, Branner? Anyone want to have sex?\"\n\nA Ghemelian woman, spiky with her apotheosis and with the first letter of \"Fool\" branded on her forehead, looked in at the door, and spoke poor Trestean. \"In the presence of the dragon you wish to do this?\"\n\n\"Sure. I don't mind the rest of you guys watching, do I? She's not even a person.\" Tarcuna parted her upper clothes and revealed some of her udder, more to the presumed peepholes in the walls than to Menes Hu. \"C'mon, Menes Hu. You'll enjoy it. Xolgrohim won't let you see your husband 'til this is all over. Even then, you look so horrible and spiky he probably won't want you. You might as well get what you can, and I guarantee I won't make you pregnant by mistake.\"\n\n\"No, no, it is an abomination.\"\n\n\"Which you enjoyed a lot last time!\" Tarcuna laughed.\n\nWhile they were talking, I was staring. Menes Hu wore eight spells around herself. Two were obviously illusion spells, and very big ones: probably the ones that kept Ythac's finding-spells from working. The third was probably strength, and the fourth and fifth were small ones that didn't obviously do anything. The sixth, seventh, and eighth were jagged ones wrapped around her psyche, and they looked older than the others. So I caught them between the lobes of my v\u00f4, one at a time, and squeezed. Crunch, crunch, crunch. \"I think that's it,\" I wrote to Tarcuna.\n\nMenes Hu gasped in elation at her new freedom. This is about where our plan started falling apart.\n\nTarcuna thinks very quickly. \"I know, I should be very quiet about that. You don't want the others to find out.\"\n\nMenes Hu stared at her, and then nodded. \"It will not stay secret for long.\"\n\nTarcuna smiled. \"Well, maybe you don't want any this time.\" \u2014 she flashed her udder at the Ghemelian \u2014 \"But could you tell the boys? They could get some. Of what you got that one time.\"\n\nMenes Hu dipped her head. \"I will do that thing.\" She stepped away from the door and urged her companions to come forward and provide to Tarcuna's insatiable needs.\n\nThe next hoven at the door was tall and brawny, blocky and mighty, thick with muscle where most hovens have fat. Tarcuna smiled at him. \"Captain Branner! Want another round of top-notch Dorday call girl?\"\n\n\"Dunno the boss wants us going in there with the dragon and all, and sure thing you can't come out here,\" he said.\n\nTarcuna continued to be clever. \"Well, I'm bored and I'm horny. How about I put on a show for you, and afterwards you put a bit of yourself through one of the peepholes and I am very nice to you that way?\"\n\nBranner chuckled. \"You're sure in a good mood...\" And I broke the painspells on him, too. He shouted, \"Yahoo! I am free!\" Tresteans are not as used to concealing their feelings as Ghemelians.\n\nFrom behind him, in the weapons and servants' area, came a dozen hoven voices, wailing, wondering. \"Xolgrohim gave us no orders for this circumstance!\" shouted Menes Hu in Ghemelian. \"As long as the prisoners make no attempt to escape, we don't need to do anything!\"\n\n\"It is hard not to think that it is some attempt to escape!\" called another voice.\n\n\"I'm not escaping, I'm still right here in the Pit of Despair!\" I roared.\n\n\"Anyone who wants to see that the dragon is just lying on the floor not doing anything at all, come look at a peephole!\" shouted Tarcuna in Trestean. \"Anyone who wants to kill everyone in here including yourself \u2014 why don't you take a look too? I don't want to die for not doing anything Xolgrohim said not to do.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes! Come look through the peephole! The dragon and the person prisoner, they do nothing! See for yourself! Khudris, you are the other leader, you must look first!\" proclaimed Menes Hu in Ghemelian. \"Branner! You may save yourself if you can, but you must not risk the captives.\"\n\nA hoven man, stinking of infection, his fur barely visible under spikes and many dressings, looked in at the peephole. He had seven spells on him, so I whacked him with my v\u00f4, and then he didn't have any. He looked up. \"Menes Hu is correct as far as I can tell. You and you, come look. Menes Hu and I will hold the controls to the guns until you are satisfied.\"\n\nAnd so forth until all fifteen hovens were free, and everyone had the Ulthana's Targe on them. I hoped that it would be good enough to keep off a few painspells.\n\nThen the plans completely fell apart.\n\n\"Well, miss, I'm much obliged to you for freeing me,\" said Captain Branner. \"But I have to wonder. You did a number on my home country, I hear. Wrecked the Peace Everywhere Array, then beat up the army, then tortured the archconsul into surrendering the country to you.\"\n\n\"I only did the first one of those, and that only because it killed my fianc\u00e9,\" I explained. \"The other dragons did the rest.\"\n\n\"You're here, and you're standing on a big dragon-killing gun. You want something from me. I want something from you. And I aim to get it before you get to go free. If I don't get what I want, you get the biggest twistor ray bouquet of your life,\" he said.\n\n\"Captain Branner! Do not do this thing!\" shouted Khudris. \"The dragon, she will free the people, she will kill Xolgrohim!\"\n\n\"Khudris, you gotta take care of your people, I gotta take care of mine,\" said Branner. \"I hate it worse'n you do, but Xolgrohim's a Ghemelian problem, and the dragons are a Trestean problem. If I kill this one, that's some justice for what she's done to Trest.\"\n\nAnd I was, indeed, sitting on the muzzle of a gun made to kill dragons, with Branner at the trigger. \"Well, what do you want?\" I said, and made sure my defensive spells were in good shape. I didn't think they'd be good enough, not that close to that many twistor cannons.\n\n\"I want your promise to set Trest free,\" he said. Khudris tried to cast a sleep spell at him, but the Ulthana's Targe protected him.\n\n\"It's not mine to free,\" I said. \"I can try to talk Ythac and Llredh into letting it go.\" I broke Branner's the Ulthana's Targe as I spoke.\n\nCaptain Branner scowled. \"I want more than that. I want you to fight them for it, I want you to push for freedom for Trest night and day, I,... oh...\" Khudris had cast his spell again, and sent Branner to sleep. One of the gunners jumped for the trigger, and caught it in time.\n\nSo we gently tossed the sleeping Branner into the Pit of Despair. The gunners tied the triggers \u2014 they're dead-man triggers, set to go off if they're released for too long. I shrank to a hovenish sort of size, and we all scrambled up the stairs to the street.\n\nAt about which point I realized that hovens really, really treasure their freedom, and even each others' freedom, and are willing to spend nearly anything for it. I should probably pay attention to that in the future. It sounds very important if my friends and I are thinking of ruling Hove."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dealing with Xolgrohim",
                "text": "On the way up, the mechanics and native gods of Ghemel told of the other things their erstwhile master had forced them to do. Three big towers on the three tallest hills of Ghemelia now held twistor cannons, not much inferior to the Peace Everywhere Array. To try to kill my parents if they showed up and didn't immediately dive into the Pit of Despair, of course.\n\nI yelled at Ythac until he stopped fretting about the intruding dragons for long enough to locate Xolgrohim's sapphire bottle. Naturally, it was deep underground in a concrete maze, with the last of Xolgrohim's seven big twistor guns at the bottom of it so he could kill me or a parent if we were about to kill him from close at hand. \"If you or your parents try to burn it out, the three twistors get to whirl you to bits before you're very far in,\" wrote Ythac. \"And right now the twistors are pointed in a triangle: if you try to destroy one, another one will hit you. Leave your dead god alone, he's not going anywhere, and help me deal with Chevethna and all.\"\n\n\"No, no. It's time for my revenge,\" I explained.\n\n\"If you get ripped apart while you try to pry open that dragonproofed oyster of a paingod, it won't help your revenge, or me, or Tarcuna, or anyone but Xolgrohim.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to get ripped apart,\" I said. \"I am far too clueless and confused.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make any sense,\" he replied. So I told him my plan \u2014 well, 6/12 Tarcuna's plan, 4/12 Khudris' plan, and 2/12 my plan \u2014 and he complained that it was hopeless and stupid but he'd let me do it anyway since he couldn't stop me.\n\nAt the head of the stairs, in the wasteland around the Pit of Despair prison, the Ghemelians tied Tarcuna to my back \u2014 she preferred to die by my side than get controlled by Xolgrohim, if things went badly \u2014 and set off on their errand. I set off on mine. This consisted of flying in crazy circles around the city, roaring, \"Xolgrohim! Xolgrohim, you coward! Come out and fight me!\"\n\nAnd he did, somewhat, though as battles royale go, it wasn't very flashy. I don't think Xolgrohim even knew that it was a battle royale until the very end.\n\n\"Jyothky!\" he shouted. In this case, he was a strong square man of obvious Trestean ancestry, presumably one of the captured soldiers, trailing the astral tentacles of Xolgrohim's possession. He stood on top of a flat tile rooftop, one tenement building in a slum, and spoke into a microphone amplified by some battered stereo equipment.\n\nI circled over his head. \"Xolgrohim! I have escaped your foolish little prison!\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, Jyothky. I had somehow gotten the misapprehension that dragons kept their word of honor.\"\n\n\"And so we do, feeble and incompetent paingod! And so we do!\"\n\n\"So how is it that you have left the Pit of Despair?\"\n\nI flew in quick wide circles. This was important. I didn't want to stay still for long enough for any of the great weapons to shoot at me. \"Your gods, your soldiers \u2014 they are no more!\" For some reason, when I wanted to seem clueless and belligerent, I tried to talk like Llredh. Probably Llredh only uses it as a distraction too, come to think of it.\n\n\"My gods and soldiers were not the reason you were staying there!\" I'm pretty sure that Xolgrohim wanted to argue me back into the Pit, back to my position as bait for his trap. Maybe he was just offended.\n\n\"Fool of a paingod! The reason I was staying there, she is on my back!\" That was a tactical mistake on my part, if he started wondering how I got her strapped there. So I started trying to describe the battle I hadn't had, without actually lying. \"Your gods \u2014 they are weak against claws and teeth and the swiftness of the tail! Your warriors \u2014 they are weak against breath and against the Lure of Dreams!\"\n\n\"Your vow, it is weak \u2014 altogether!\"\n\n\"My vow? I never break a vow! What I break, is your trap, your warriors, your power!\"\n\nAnd on and on like that. I had no real idea how long the Ghemelians would take. So the discussion wandered around from topic to topic.\n\n\"Jyothky!\" boomed Xolgrohim in a voice thick with mechanical static. His stereo amplification really wasn't in very good shape. \"A thousand of my subjects, Ghemelians and Tresteans, are now standing here and there around the city, holding sharp, sharp knives!\"\n\n\"Bah! Are they too poor to afford guns and missiles? But know this, fool of a necromancer: if a thousand knifemen come at me, a thousand knifemen will die. If a grand come at me, a grand will die,\" I blustered. I didn't quite get his point, which is just as well. So he had to explain it.\n\n\"I was not going to have them attack you directly. I respect the thickness of your hide quite devoutly! Instead, if you do not go back to your cell, I am afraid that I will cause them to turn their knives on themselves.\"\n\nWell, misunderstanding that took a lot of effort, but I managed it. I hooted at him, \"So that they bop me with the pommels of their daggers? Xolgrohim, fool of a Xolgrohim! I despise weapons, but I know weapons! You love weapons, but you do not know weapons! The pointy end of the knife is the dangerous end, not the pommel!\"\n\n\"No, they shall not use their knives on you, neither front nor back...\"\n\n\"Unless you have poisoned the knives! A thousand poisoned knives might sting me. But, squishy little paingod, know this: I am expert with the spells of healing, and I am not the least among toxicologists!\" Sounding more and more like Llredh; I even borrowed his hobbies. And it's not strictly a lie: I remember a little of what Llredh told me (plus healed poisoned Tarcuna), and presumably the least among toxicologists is the one who knows absolutely nothing.\n\n\"Forgive me for an imprecise speech. They will kill themselves!\" Paingods are not very nice when you back them into a corner.\n\n\"And what sort of an attack upon me might that be? I am not such a glutton as to eat a thousand hovens worth of poisoned meat! Five, perhaps six, at the utmost! Seven if they are small! Eight if the poison is particularly delicious!\"\n\n\"I did not expect you to eat them, and, in fact, the knives are not poisoned.\"\n\nSo after that we argued for a while about whether the dead hovens would be better off dead, and thus outside his service. To delay things more, I went off on a tangent at the end of the argument. \"Well, I challenge you to this. Command one of your hovens to kill himself. Then I shall fly the body to my fianc\u00e9 the mighty Osoth \u2014 whose powers you yourself depend upon crucially! Osoth shall interrogate him posthumously, and have him explain which condition he prefers.\"\n\n\"Jyothky, your understanding of death is great, I am sure, but I have actually been dead for some centuries. I say that life, even as the slave of a painlord, is preferable to death.\"\n\n\"The life of a mhelvul god, perhaps! These are not mhelvul gods, they are hovens! Tell me, Xolgrohim, how long were you a dead hoven?\" If Headmistress Inth heard me making such a specious argument, she'd rap my knuckles with a ferule, dragon or no dragon.\n\n\"Ask your slave, if you wish. Tarcuna, is the life of a hoven sweet to you?\" asked Xolgrohim. Then he roared with anger. \"Jyothky! What treachery is this? Hovens are slaying my guardsmen!\"\n\n\"I can't tell what's going on.\" But presumably my freed and hopefully protected Ghemelians were about to break into his dragonproofed crypt and smash his bottle. Time for more distractions. \"Oh! What I meant to say before is, your spell on me fell off, so of course I killed all of the guards I felt like and flew out. I wanted to ask you, though \u2014 put that spell on me again, and I'd be so happy I'd do you another little favor like going back in that pit. I truly miss being able to feel, really I do.\"\n\n\"I am afraid it is an awkward time...\"\n\n\"Well! How d'you like that!\" I chirped mockingly. \"I offer to make myself bait for your trap, but you're all 'oh, it's a bad time, maybe you could come back next Thursday and we'll have some tea and then see about just what sort of curses we can place on you but you might have to wait 'til Tuesday week when I think I have an opening in my schedule at 2:15 but we need to be done by 2:35 promptly.' Well, I want to feel again. Now.\"\n\n\"Jyothky, give me just ten minutes...\" he said. Oh, dear, I hoped my Ghemelians weren't that close to getting defeated.\n\n\"Now!\" I roared, and landed on the top of the tenement next to Xolgrohim's victim. He could shoot me if he wanted. \"Now, instantly! If you delay even a single second more, I shall fly home and tell my parents everything about you! What chance of revenge will you have then, Xolgrohim?\" If there's any better chain to tug on a vengeful ghost's spirit than that, I don't know it. And had better learn from Osoth for the next time one of his pets gets loose.\n\nHe started dancing and chanting his borrowed body, working on the spell. \"I shall endeavor to hurry, both for your convenience, and for my own...\" Twenty-six steps into the dance, the sevenfold psychic cable granting Xolgrohim possession of his victim frayed and splintered, scattering darts of commanding will in all directions. The Ulthana's Targe did an adequate job of stopping them from hurting me or Tarcuna, but I daresay some of his former subjects will be trying to dance the painspell dance for days.\n\n\"Ythac? Where's Xolgrohim's bottle now, and is he in it?\"\n\nYthac must have cast seven spells, he waited so long to reply. \"I think those heroes have pulled your tail out of the volcano,\" he wrote. \"Now will you please come help me with the other dragons?\"\n\n\"It's not so big of a hurry, really, is it? I want to go check.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Liberation of Ghemel",
                "text": "Khudris and Menes Hu and Captain Branner were waiting at the adit to Xolgrohim's bunker, with three of the fifteen Ghemelians I had freed, and a paper cup full of blue shards and writhing indigo sand. The sand made me homesick at once.\n\n\"Well, that plan worked,\" Khudris said. \"The map you gave us was accurate. Xolgrohim had a dozen warriors and one of his gods guarding him.\"\n\n\"And with two gods and, from the look of it, one enhanced agent, you seem to have won?\"\n\nBranner nodded. \"I decided to help these guys out when I woke up. I still have a bone to pick with you though. Freeing Ghemel is all well and good, but I'm going to be freeing Trest soon. Whether you like it or not.\"\n\nThe Ghemelians glared at him. \"Tresteans are so rude! Jyothky has played her part in winning our freedom! Berate and threaten her tomorrow, if you must, but not today!\"\n\n\"Especially not today. This whole Ghemelian adventure was just a side-quest in what is going to be a truly messy and bloody day. Chances are, Branner's not going to have to liberate Trest from Ythac and Llredh, but from the dragons who are about to take it from them.\"\n\nWhich called for explanations all around. I told them what Ythac had told me; only Tarcuna really understood what it meant. They told me how the freed warriors weren't as good as the enslaved ones. The enslaved ones take risks and press their bodies more intensely than self-willed hovens do ( \"Just like the wormridden,\" said Tarcuna, shuddering.) So Xolgrohim's guards were winning. Then Khudris announced that he was going to kill Xolgrohim if he could. Three of Xolgrohim's guards and his god chose to defy Xolgrohim over that. So they were struck with the most terrible pain in Xolgrohim's impressive repertoire, or at least the most terrible kind that didn't require dancing and such. So they couldn't fight for a few seconds. So Khudris and Branner and Menes Hu killed or crippled them. Noble sacrifice and statues in the public squares and such, all 'round, when the Ghemelians get to it.\n\nThen Branner ripped a heavy steel door off its hinges, straining his enhancements to the limit. Behind it was an alcove packed with the most refractory insulation in Ghemel. Not the strongest material, since Xolgrohim was expecting to be attacked by fire from above, not by weapons from in front. The Ghemelian soldiers shot it full of bullets, and a few bullets hit Xolgrohim's bottle. Which was just spun sapphire, not very strong. And that was that.\n\n\"But we would like you to confirm that Xolgrohim is actually dead,\" they said.\n\n\"I don't theocept any gods in Hove but the two of you,\" I said. \"Not anymore. And there's no magic on the scraps. For more than that, I'll have to get Osoth.\"\n\nThey weren't happy about the necromancer getting his claws on Xolgrohim again. I promised to keep Osoth well-behaved. Besides, Xolgrohim wasn't a very useful ghost to Osoth, now that his treasures were (a) elseworld, and (b) probably in Tultamaan's hoard. To say nothing of Xolgrohim showing everyone just how obedient an undead god he actually was.\n\nFinally, I flew back to a very nervous Ythac and Llredh. And my mating flight was there too. Llredh had told them to be nearby to rescue me at need.\n\nI definitely need more insults to use on Llredh. He's proud of the perversion-styled ones."
            },
            {
                "title": "Prelude to The Battle for Hove",
                "text": "I have to write down all the new dragons, or I'm going to get confused.\n\nActually I already got confused, so I made Chevethna help me with it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon - Sex; Description, Notes",
                "text": "Chevethna - female, married to Arthane; 18', black scales, but she's wearing brilliant glowing blue spikes, and looks like more of a lesbian slut than Arilash or Tarcuna, which really disturbs me. (She said, quite indignantly, that she's nothing of the sort, she just likes to match Arthane. And she does, indeed, match Arthane in her spikes. And her tailtip is usually curled up with Arthane's. So I suppose I believe her. It's a shame that my bad company, viz. mating flight, has made me even think of such things. A friend of most of us, from Mhel.\n\nArthane - male, married to Chevethna; 26', blue and crimson and scarlet with glowing blue spikes all over. Also from Mhel; more Greshthanu's friend than mine though. I had met him a few times, but not that often.\n\nHyxy female, married to Ngassith; 14' (my size) and reddish-brown. From Hasqueth. I do not know her at all.\n\nNgassith - male, married to Hyxy; 21', red and green, with red-orange-yellow frills on his head and green-blue-purple spikes on his wings and tail. Somewhere between pretty and gaudy. From Hasqueth. I do not know him at all.\n\nMshai - female, married to Irssaan; 18', grey and brown. From Mhel, though I didn't know her well there.\n\nIrssaan - male, married to Mshai; 23', brick-red in front, shading to gold by the tail. His wings burn with a golden inner light, by some spell. From Mhel, but I don't think I'd met him there. A friend of Nrararn maybe. I think his wing-light is related to Nrararn's lightning-braiding.\n\nIgnissa - female, married to Gwixion; 18', dull black like me. Unlike me \u2014 and I might start imitating her \u2014 she looks very sharp without looking any less feminine. She gives herself thin gleaming white stripes, just one or two, all along her body. From Mhel, and a friend of sorts, though a bit older than me. Her forewings don't work, like Tultamaan's forelegs, so she's very slow in the air when she's in the air at all, which isn't much. She never seems very healthy at all really. Oh, and her parents gave her that very classic fire name, so of course she breathes lightning.\n\nGwixion - male, married to Ignissa; 23', green above, aquamarine scutes on his belly, an emerald stinger in his tail that actually works, and pointy little curved yellow horns. From Hasqueth. I do not know him.\n\nPsilia - female, married to Boruu; 20' and tan. Big in part 'cause she's rather older than the rest of us. From Chiriact. She and Boruu left there under some sort of cloud, lived on Mhel for a few years, and now have moved to Hove.\n\nBoruu - male, married to Psilia; 18', coppery-shiny mostly, coppery-patina green around horns and wings. From Chiriact; see Psilia.\n\nVuuthon - male, bachelor; 16', purple with black highlights, but usually wears girlish dull colors. From Mhel. He doesn't like other dragons very much (including me), and he's a bit vicious.\n\nRessal - male, bachelor; 19', gaudy red and blue stripes From Mhel. One of Arilash's lovers, and she tells the most embarrassing stories about him, too.\n\nKuro - male, bachelor; 18', blue and green bands with thin orange lines between them. From Mhel \u2014 from Fohhona. Older than me by some duodecades, and completely outside my social circles. Not in a good way, from what I hear.\n\nNlirei - male, bachelor; 18', green and purple with lots and lots of frills. From Hasqueth. No further information.\n\nAnd the fifteenth of them was Tultamaan, about whom you and I both know far too much.\n\nBut that's from the end of the day, when we were being social. Let's start in Ghemel."
            },
            {
                "title": "Setting Ghemel In Order",
                "text": "Well, actually we didn't set Ghemel in order at all. I just told Tarcuna to stay there and be helpful and be safe. \"There\" being a restaurant named \"The Blazing Lyre for Grilling Lambs\" . Xolgrohim had compelled the owners to keep it open and serving food, for free, to the workers on the Pit of Despair. Nobody in the city was allowed to have or use money, actually; the whole place was organized around the plan to kill my parents. Anyway, lots of half-freed hovens were there, being generally grateful to Khudris and Meles Hu and me.\n\n\"Why can't I come with you?\" Tarcuna asked.\n\n\"It's not safe,\" I said.\n\nSo she whomped me on the muzzle with a chair, and everyone stared at us. \"Spotty, I just sat on a giant twistor cannon for the last few days, then seduced some gods for you, and then rode your back while you taunted Xolgrohim! I am used to 'not safe!'.\"\n\n\"Well, this time I'm going to go help fight a lot of dragons. Which means plentiful fire breath. Enough of it to get through my apotropaics and my scales. I can put apotropaics around you, but you don't have scales. So if you're on my back you'll get roasted,\" I explained.\n\n\"Why are you fighting these dragons, anyway?\"\n\n\"They're coming here to conquer Hove.\" So obvious.\n\nShe glared. \"Didn't you already do that or something?\"\n\n\"I didn't. Llredh did, or part of it anyway. Oh, I guess I just conquered Ghemelia, didn't I? I'm not sure.\" The waiter came by and gave us some lunch. I broke the masterless pain-spells around him.\n\nShe pointed a skewerful of grilled lamb at me. \"But you don't want to rule Hove. According to you, anyway.\"\n\nI ate the lamb and the skewer. \"I don't. We're just helping Llredh and Ythac.\"\n\n\"Hey! That was my lunch!\" Tarcuna got another skewer. \"So the seven of you are going to go try to kill twice as many dragons as you?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure we'll lose. We have to try though. It's embarrassing if we don't.\"\n\n\"If you get killed I am going to be so angry with you, you have no idea!\" hissed Tarcuna.\n\n\"I'm not going to get killed. This is just a friendly dominance contest.\"\n\nTarcuna looked aghast. \"A friendly contest to see who rules the world?\"\n\nI cocked my head. \"Well, of course. Half of them are friends of ours from Mhel anyway.\"\n\n\"You have the worst friends ever,\" she noted.\n\n\"They're perfectly fine dragons. Except Tultamaan.\"\n\n\"My statement is proved,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nAnd after a bit more spellbreaking, I wished the hovens well, and they wished me well right back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Plotting",
                "text": "Ythac put the Horizonal Quill into all of us, so it wouldn't be nearly so easy to eavesdrop on us or anything. The invaders were clearly aware of us; we could magiocept their scrying spells around us, just as they could ours around them.\n\nSo we made a really stupid plan: mostly Csirnis' idea, with some help from Ythac. It's much easier to plan for dragons because we know how we'll react to things, generally.\n\nI had to fly back to Ghemel and get Khudris and Tarcuna and all out of the Blazing Lyre for Grilling Lambs. I flew Tarcuna around here and there and the other place, and broke painspells on engineers and artillerists, and set them to work. The remote control was the hardest part. That, and deciding where to point things.\n\nTarcuna tried and tried to talk me out of it, but of course it's a matter of honor. And I was sure she could make it safe."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Ritual Challenge to the Invading Dragons",
                "text": "And at length we flew back to Khamrou Voresc, and bellowed out to the invaders in the most formal register of Grand Draconic,\" Hello!\" . A better translation of that word under the circumstances might be,\" We acknowledge your presence on our territory and your lack of immediate hostilities, and we refrain, however briefly, from attacking you, for the sake of the polite negotiations which are to come!\".\n\nAnd they bellowed back, also formally, \"Hello to you too!\" . Or, in more detail, \"We acknowledge your presence on debatable ground, and agree to a transient truce while terms of the upcoming events are debated!\"\n\n\"This is our world!\"\n\n\"Technically, no, it's not.\" Which is true. We haven't established a formal claim to most of it.\n\n\"We're defending it now!\" we roared in approximately unison. Which counts as a formal claim of sorts.\n\n\"Then we shall be glad to contend, fang to fang-and-fang-and-a-little-extra, breath to breath-and-breath-and-a-little-extra, claw to claw-and-claw-and-a-little-extra, and take it from you by greater force!\"\n\nArilash snorted flames. \"Well, drop the little extra from the claws, since you're talking about Tultamaan. That leaves the advantage to us.\"\n\nNearly everyone laughed. Tultamaan hissed at Arilash. \"You will need to come up with a better Arrangement of Battle than you currently demonstrate for your Understanding of Arithmetic!\"\n\n\"Let's arrange it then! Send us your leader!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Arrangements for a Dragon-War",
                "text": "Chevethna darted up towards us. \"Arilash, Ythac, Jyothky! I am so sorry about poor Greshthanu!\"\n\nI dived down to embrace her. \"I know, it's so awful.\"\n\n\"I was hoping you'd marry him. I married Arthane, you knew him on Mhel, didn't you?\"\n\nI smiled at her. \"I didn't know him all that well. He was more Greshthanu's friend than mine.\"\n\n\"They were inseparable. They probably saw each other every month. It would have been so nice, if you'd married him. We could have ruled adjacent domains and lived side by side,\" she said sadly.\n\nWhich did sound nice. \"We still can, with whoever I marry, if we're staying on Hove. But I think we'd better figure out the terms of the dominance war first.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're in a hurry to fight \u2014?\" she said. \"Oh! Right! You're on a mating flight. You're fighting constantly!\"\n\nI curled my tailtip. \"Rather a lot, yes.\"\n\nShe peered at me intently with half a dozen senses. \"Jyothky, you look awful. Arilash! Have you been abusing poor little Jyothky?\"\n\nArilash pounced on Chevethna for a hug too. \"Not enough. She keeps challenging me, and I turn her down half the time. I'm really not enjoying the fighting part of it. I'm trying to make up for it with the twining part.\"\n\nChevethna giggled. \"That was the fun part! It's wonderful being married to Arthane, but I did enjoy the promiscuity. Oh! Jyothky? Is that any good for you?\"\n\nI shook my head sadly. \"No. It's just as pleasant as having my back broken for me. I know; I checked.\" I have only one joke, so I need to use it on every new person.\n\nShe hugged me again, which I appreciate conceptually even if it's just as painful as sex or as delightful as backbreaking. \"Oh, Jyothky! I am so sorry. I was hoping that you'd be able to get some fun out of it.\"\n\n\"Drakes smell nice, at least. That's worth something,\" I said. I don't like seeing her so sad.\n\n\"Well, what have you been up to? You look exhausted or something \u2014 the lluyew of your scales is so flat and shatterdy!\"\n\nI didn't really want her to think too much about that, because of the plan. \"Oh, I had to kill an escaped undead Mhel paingod this morning. My job, I'm immune to most of his best spells. It was harder than I thought it would be though.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear! What did he do to you? What did you do to him?\"\n\n\"It's a story for after-war feasting, I think. I've been having lots of very stupid adventures on Hove.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, the war... Do you want to wait until tomorrow? Or even later? You really don't look like you've had a good day at all.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"No, I'll be fine. Might as well get it out of the way. I'm pretty much the weakest dragon in the war, except Tultamaan. Me being tired or rested isn't going to make much of a difference.\"\n\n\"I think you're more than a match for Tultamaan, or Ressal, or Ignissa. An equal to Hyxy or Mshai, I think,\" she said comfortingly.\n\n\"Aren't you supposed to be boasting how strong your army is and how doomed we are?\" I asked.\n\nChevethna laughed. \"You, my sweet young friend, have your head so firmly stuck in the middle of mating flight manners that you have forgotten more ordinary ones. I miss that!\"\n\nArilash smiled. \"Well, we are being a bit aggressive and challengy. Could you give us a hit extra, to even the odds a bit?\"\n\nChevethna looked offended for a moment, then grinned. \"One hit? I should say not! We outnumber you more two to one! We should grant you twice our hits!\" Which would be dishonorable to accept.\n\n\"Well, how about you each withdraw after three hits \u2014 that's thrice fifteen, or forty-five for your side. And we withdraw after five \u2014 that's seven times five, thirty-five for our side,\" I said. Which was the foregone conclusion, and there was no reason to put off reaching it: enough of an advantage for us so that it's a respectable contest, but not so much that we could actually win. (In a fair fight, leaving aside our trick.) Picking three for the number of hits, instead of five or seven, probably sounded like we were trying to concede the matter with as little actual pain as possible. Actually it was quite devious. Arithmetic is as mighty as breath, if you use it right.\n\n\"I should think that was entirely dignified,\" said Chevethna. She called up to Ythac. \"Hey! Are you allowed to fight a Caramelle these days?\"\n\nYthac huffed. \"If my father knew a grossth of what I have been doing, it would dwarf the pretended dishonor of the Caramelle beyond noticing. In any case, he's on Mhel, I'm on Hove, and I have better things to do than pay attention to him.\"\n\nSo we agreed that healing the other side counts as a hit, but healing our own side doesn't count either way. And dragons can put defensive spells on each other \u2014 so Ythac and I gave everyone on our side the Hoplonton, and Boruu did the same on their side.\n\nA friendly little war."
            },
            {
                "title": "The War for the Heart of Hove",
                "text": "After we spent another quarter-hour chattering with Chevethna, the dragons from Hasqueth and Chiriact were getting a bit impatient. Hyxy, who is a quick little reddish-brown monster, spat corrosive venom at Arthane. \"It's time for the war, already! You can catch up on the gossips and secrets after we rule the place!\"\n\n\"I suppose you're right. Chevethna-so-sweet, could you please come back so we can start the war?\" Arthane called up to his wife.\n\n\"Oh, I should at that! Coming, coming, Arthane!\" she called back down.\n\nSo we laid the trap for them. Osoth, Nrararn, and I picked a spot high in the air \u2014 as if by pure chance why that spot instead of half a mile to the right or left. Nrararn wrapped it in winds and coils of lighting, giving us a bit of a fortification. Llredh, Csirnis, Arilash, and Ythac flew low, darting in close formation around the mountains. So it looked rather as if we were expecting the invaders to attack the stronger four, and then the weaker three of us would swoop down on them from above, getting some advantage of position and the sky-mage's spells at our backs.\n\nWell, weren't we surprised when twelve of the fifteen of them split up into four trios and came flying up towards us from four different directions. We had been hoping to get more than twelve, but of course Ignissa wasn't going to be flying that high, and two others stayed near her.\n\nSo we sort of hovered there looking bewildered and lost as a dozen dragons charged up at us, and most of them bigger and stronger than us. The first triad to get there (Arthane, Ressal, and Kuro) took just a moment battering the lightning storm down with their v\u00f4s. Which was just enough time for the rest to get there.\n\nWe were so doomed, so outnumbered. They smiled and circled once, and flew carefully towards us from all directions.\n\nI mashed a button on a jerry-rigged metal box strapped to my foreleg. This sent some very scientific signals to some equally jerry-rigged receivers on three towers in Ghemel.\n\nAnd when the towers of Ghemel roared their dragon-wounding danger at us, Osoth and Nrararn and I knew what to expect. The invaders didn't. They did what we had done when the Peace Everywhere Array struck us over Ze Cheya, viz. they ignored the distant roaring danger (which didn't sound so intense as the Peace Everywhere Array) and went in for the convenient kills. Nrararn and I were out of the war almost immediately. I think Nrararn got one or two hits on them before he was out. I tried, but I didn't get any.\n\nAnd then the three twistor bolts fell upon them, and upon us as well.\n\nTarcuna and the Ghemelian artillery specialists had done their important job well. The twistors were heavy enough to injure, to tear scales from flesh, to rip wings and frills. They weren't heavy enough to do too much more, at least not to a dragon with a nice fresh the Hoplonton.\n\n\"What was that?\" Chevethna yowled.\n\nI flipped my tail against her flank and put the Rose Rescaler into her, which didn't count as a hit since I was hors de combat. \"It was my Hoven technology attack! Called twistor beams. A lighter version of the thing that killed Greshthanu.\"\n\nTultamaan hissed. \"And you turned them on your Conspecifics to score a few Points in a Friendly Sort of War? Your recklessness with our lives is Distinctly Notable!\"\n\nPolychromatic Ngassith laughed. \"They turned them on themselves too! That's a\" Xh\u00ea t\u015bi\u012ba\u0151 \u0161sy\u1eb5i\u0105\u1ef3\u015b\u015b \u1ebesr\u0155y\u016f... \"sort of moment, if you ask me!\"\n\nI blushed to the periphery of my thez\u00f4. \"Thank you!\"\n\n\"Well, who's in what state now?\" called Arthane. All of us, from both sides, flew in a tight circle, healing ourselves and each other. Irssaan had gotten the worse of it; Mshai's wingclaw had gotten knocked into his face and ripped up his eye. Nothing that couldn't be fixed quickly enough.\n\n\"So who's got how many hits left? I've quite lost track!\" he roared.\n\nWell, the three twistors weren't perfectly arranged, so Mshai, Arthane, and Chevethna had only been hit twice, and had one hit each left. Osoth, with two hits left from his initial five, barely had time to squeak before they were on him. He did puff graveyard dust into Mshai's face and take her out of the war, but Arthane and Chevethna caught him in an elegant pincer attack and removed those last two hits.\n\nWe healed Mshai and everyone, and let Arthane and Chevethna dive for the four stronger drakes. \"Three of us untouched is nine hits, plus those two have one each, total is eleven. Four of you untouched is twenty. You have quite thoroughly foxed us!\" said Gwixion.\n\n\"And our four best fighters, too,\" said Nrararn with a grin.\n\nSo we watched. Hyxy and Psilia lured Arilash and Llredh and Ythac into a race. Ignissa, who wasn't even flying, was a quite excellent lightning cannon perched on a hilltop, and badly scored Llredh's scales, and Ythac's, before Csirnis swooped down and elegantly removed her from the battle. Gallantly removed her, too, which took long enough for Arthane and Chevethna to dive and breathe and claw and bite.\n\nIn the end, Csirnis had two hits left, and Llredh had one, and Arilash and Ythac were out too.\n\nBut we won."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Peace for the Heart of Hove",
                "text": "Everyone was healed, and everyone was washed who liked water, and everyone was lying in the red sand by our old camp.\n\n\"Well, that was rather clever of you, and rather brave too,\" said Chevethna. \"Are you going to chivvy us off immediately, or can we at least stay and see the world you've won for yourself?\"\n\n\"It would be unconscionable if we made Tultamaan leave and let everyone else stay, wouldn't it?\" asked Arilash. But of course it would be.\n\n\"Not the first, and not the second, but neither!\" roared Llredh. \"The great dragons of Hove \u2014 you may stay as their viceroys and vicars, and rule vast domains of your own!\" Which is how it commonly goes with a victory over too many friends like this. We couldn't really compel them to do anything they didn't want to do, or they would challenge us to another war, and, since we were out of tricks, they would win it. We had a useful and pleasant degree of dominance, as long as we were useful and pleasant about it.\n\n\"It's more complicated than that,\" I added. \"But we'd be delighted if you were to stay here.\"\n\n\"Speaking officially for very few of us, but informally for most of us, I imagine we will generally accept,\" said Chevethna. \"Though I am a bit confused about the formalities. I had understood that you are a mating flight, not conquerors. Who, in particular, are the king and queen of Hove? Since you're not married yet.\"\n\nWhich had us all staring at each other with considerable perplexion.\n\n\"I guess Llredh and Ythac...?\" I said.\n\n\"I am not a girl!\" hissed Ythac.\n\n\"No, but you've got territory and nobody else does,\" I said.\n\n\"Jyothky's the queen,\" said Arilash.\n\nSo I blasted her with lightning. \"How dare you vent your disrespect for me in front of these newcomers? Bad enough to refuse to treat me as a worthwhile rival in front of our fianc\u00e9s, but in front of everyone?\" In retrospect I admit that declaring me queen isn't the greatest possible sign of disrespect, but Arilash has been avoiding contests far too often, which is insulting, and this is avoiding a very big and important one indeed.\n\n\"I am doing no such thing!\" Arilash roared at me. \"Which female has hoven servents aplenty to build mighty dragon-conquering weapons for her? Which takes days and days out of her mating flight to attend to matters of rulership and subjects? That one is acting like the queen already! And, conversely, which female pays hovens very little attention save when they get in her way? Which one never makes the slightest attempt to impose her will on anyone? That one is not acting like the queen!\" (Not everyone would agree to her last point.)\n\n\"I won't tolerate this!\" I roared back in a fury. \"I challenge you to a Krage's Glory!\" Because I absolutely needed to prove to all the newcomers how feeble a fighter I am, in case they couldn't tell from the war we had just finished.\n\nSo we fought a Krage's Glory with twenty dragons watching. Arilash was in fine form. I didn't have any more twistor cannon surprises or anything.\n\nAfterwards Arilash actually stood on top of me \u2014 she had knocked me completely over \u2014 and boomed, \"By my right as victor of this fight, I declare that Jyothky is the dragon queen of Hove!\"\n\nIgnissa stared at us. Well, everyone did, but Ignissa was the first one who got unperplexed enough to talk. \"Arilash won the fight, so Jyothky's queen?\"\n\n\"Backwards! On Hove, she is the best style!\" said Llredh with a laugh.\n\n\"Certainly the way you talk, sweetie,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I'm pretty sure that the two females are competing misiere,\" explained Nrararn. \"To lose, you know.\"\n\n\"I don't really see, but I suppose I don't have to see,\" said Chevethna. \"If Jyothky is queen, who is king?\"\n\n\"Ythac! Ythac is king! Any who disputes that must fight me!\" roared Llredh.\n\nYthac grinned at his husband. \"I should challenge you. Then you can climb on top of me and proclaim me king properly, the way the girls did.\"\n\nArthane said, \"The customs of dragons on Hove are truly perplexing. Are we required to follow such things?\"\n\nHyxy laughed. \"Actually, since we lost the war, shouldn't you be declaring us the rulers of Hove?\"\n\nYthac snorted sparks. \"By that logic, we should be declaring the hovens the rulers of Hove. No, Arilash and Jyothky were having an angry fight, not a contest for the queenship. Jyothky hasn't quite figured out that Arilash is a would-be pacifist and egalitarian, and hates dominance contests and even rulership of all sorts. She thinks Arilash is avoiding fighting her out of unimpressedness.\" I glared at him a bit from under Arilash's wing.\n\n\"And Llredh? Is he a pacifist too?\" asked Hyxy.\n\nThere was much laughter from everyone who knew Llredh. \"No, no. I have taken Careful Precautions to avoid mentioning certain Troublesome Matters on Mhel. Some Unsavory Details of my former mating flight are best explained by those who are the Perpetrators,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"I suppose I had better explain how matters stand between Llredh and myself,\" said Ythac. And he did.\n\nThe newcomers were suitably disgusted."
            },
            {
                "title": "New Rulers of Ghemelia",
                "text": "\"I shall impose a penance on you and your tribe for daring to infringe upon my sovereignty!\" I told Chevethna in an imperious voice, in somewhat more private, after everyone had eaten and such. \"And never mind that I seem to have gotten sovereignified under rather questionable circumstances after you weren't infringing any more.\" Chevethna giggled. So I thundered, \"Still I shall be Merciful!\"\n\n\"Mercy is always the most important and indeed most characteristic attribute of a tyrant queen!\" she agreed.\n\n\"Just so! That's how you can tell they're tyrant queens and not, oh, just aggressive archbishops or pompous potentates or what have you,\" I said, which made her giggle more. She seemed much happier now that she was past her mating flight, not that she was ever a particularly miserable girl beforehand. \"Who of your number are the most intent of Uplifters?\"\n\n\"I imagine you're going to set them to work reducing hoven civilization to ashes and dooms?\" she asked. I nodded emphatically. \"Arthane is a monstrous great Uplifter, of course, and Boruu does nothing but egg him on. Ressal too, Kuro, Ngassith, Ignissa, Mshai, to a lesser degree. I suppose I wouldn't really try to stop Arthane, but I have to say I'm the Downcrusher in the family. A mhelvul unslayed is a mhelvul to be flayed, like I've always said, O tyrant queen!\" Her eyes twinkled. Actually she's always been more Upliftey than me. Drumet Academy does that to a dragoness, I suppose. Or maybe, only dragonesses like us are sent there.\n\n\"Hovens now!\" I blinked a few times. \"Actually, I did just slay a mhelvul \u2014 a dead one \u2014 and I'd like a dragon or two to clean up after.\"\n\nChevethna giggled. \"Oh, dear. Has Osoth been conjuring up undead hordes and letting them wander about?... No, you said it was a mhelvul. Is Osoth such a great necromancer that he can call the dead from one world to another?\"\n\n\"Not that good. He'd summoned it on Mhel, and accidentally brought it here. One lich of a paingod, not an army of shambling mummies,\" I said seriously.\n\nChevethna peered at me. \"That doesn't sound so good.\" So I told her what had happened. She called Arthane and Boruu over to listen. I told them the details, and after it was all done, she said, \"That really doesn't sound so good.\"\n\n\"It's not very good. The city was mostly neglected for duodecades under the old regime. Then there was a war there. Then there was a civil war there, with foreign soldiers shooting at all the sides and all the sides shooting at foreign soldiers. Then a paingod who neglected all civic improvements that couldn't be used to kill dragons. Now they're free of him. But they've still got the painspells on them.\"\n\nBoruu frowned, and twitched his tailtip. \"I do not know paingods and the history of paingods as well as those who grew up on Mhel. What sort of painspells are these?\"\n\nChevethna said, \"I don't know exactly \u2014 Jyothky would know more, I don't know why I'm not letting her talk \u2014\"\n\n\"Court etiquette. Comme il faut to interrupt the tyrant queen,\" I noted.\n\n\"Hove is so much a mirror-land! Anyway, my parents talk about spending months and months breaking painspells on their new subjects, when they first conquered their part of Mhel. Most of them had never been free since they were four. The spells prickled and stung the neck and shoulders all the time, and got more intense as the subject hesitated to obey, or even thought about it. One of my parents' cities was so miserable! The spells burned hot when the subjects didn't try to obey their gods, and with the gods all dead, there wasn't any way to try to obey. That was my parents' first chore after the conquest, breaking all those spells.\"\n\n\"And that's someone's first chore here, too.\"\n\nBoruu craned his head close to me. \"How sane are these hovens anymore, do you think? Being oppressed, conquered, embattled, and mind-taken is not so good for the psyche.\"\n\n\"I don't know. My allies seemed reasonably sane at the time, but they were the strongest hovens there. I should probably go back now and pick up my...\" I struggled for a word for Tarcuna. \"...my minion. I left her there. She's probably seduced half the girls in the city by now.\"\n\nChevethna gave me an odd look. \"Is that ordinary behavior for hovens?\"\n\n\"No, nothing like that. Tarcuna is as broken as anydragon in the mating flight,\" I said.\n\n\"What's wrong with Osoth? Well, aside from he's a necromancer,\" Arthane asked. So I had to be more specific and detailed, and give a full accounting of everyone. \"Oh, sky of clouds, Jyothky, that's really not very good.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not so bad if you don't think of it so much as a mating flight as a way for the king to get rid of the most embarrassing children on Mhel,\" I said.\n\n\"You poor tyrant queen! My mating flight was delightful,\" said Chevethna. \"Even if I only came in second. A long vacation on the Tgeriu Coast.\"\n\n\"And we spent every weekend in the Loriaun, or Fohhona with travel spells. Splendorio guaranteed that he'd be last of the drakes by going to a mount-fighting club. The rest of us behaved well!\" said Arthane.\n\n\"I should hope you didn't have any thought for any other dragoness!\" said Chevethna, and crunched one of Arthane's spikes and healed it possessively.\n\nThey started crawling over each other, so I breathed cold on them. Not enough to harm, really, but enough to get their attention. \"Will you go and cure some hovens in Ghemel?\"\n\nChevethna stuck her head out from under Arthane's left wings. \"Do we get to rule Ghemel after?\"\n\nWhich is a tricky question, after this morning's epiphany. \"I think we'll conquer Hove by the method of insidious insinuation, or whatever it's called. The one where we make ourselves useful and helpful and indispensable and beloved for a few duodecades.\"\n\n\"Oh, then we declare that we rule the world, and everyone cheers?\" said Boruu, a bit caustically.\n\n\"We'll figure out the right approach when the time comes. Hove's a huge world, anyway. We don't need the whole thing just yet.\"\n\nBoruu nodded. \"On Yyrclarian, for one world, we do not rule as tyrants. We rule as tycoons.\"\n\nChevethna breathed a bit of fire on herself and Arthane to warm up. \"So, we're selfless and benevolent dragons of healing who are coming to help out in multiply-devastated Ghemel, without the least bit thought for our own benefit?\"\n\n\"Exactly!... Oh, do you remember poor Greshthanu's palace? Don't do that to Ghemel. Make sure they've all got places to live and food to eat before you start them building things for you.\"\n\nArthane folded his wings. \"Do we have to sleep in a stable?\"\n\n\"An airplane hanger, I would think,\" I said, and had to explain what it was. \"Oh, and I think you get to keep some of the Ghemelian national treasures. Xolgrohim looted them to his Pit of Despair Prison.\"\n\nBoruu said, \"Psilia wouldn't enjoy that very much. She's not one for coddling small people. Do you need four dragons for this, or will two do?\"\n\n\"Two should be plenty. One would, in a pinch,\" I said. And let him go.\n\nChevethna and Arthane peered at each other a bit, and said, \"We need to discuss this.\" Arthane cast the Library in Scales. I'm sure that Ythac could have found some way to eavesdrop, perhaps even without them noticing, but I had to wait. I couldn't even tease Ythac. He was having some sort of drama with Llredh and Kuro. He threatened to explain it to me if I bothered him anymore.\n\nAfter well more than twelve minutes, Chevethna spread her wings. \"O tyrant queen, we will do your wicked bidding! We will fly to this place you call Ghemel, and work our subtle sorceries upon the defenseless populace, until they lie helpless beneath us! Nicely!\"\n\n\"See that you do, my minions! Or a terrible fate awaits you! Probably involving trying again somewhere else.... Actually, if you ruin Ghemel any more, I will be a bit upset. We already ruined it enough.\"\n\n\"Wait, who did? You and Osoth?\"\n\n\"Osoth the most, but all of us. Oh, and Trest and Uncle Holder before us.\"\n\nChevethna reared her head and grew a few more blue spikes. \"But now you have competent lieutenants! Fear not for your pet city!\"\n\nI didn't quite fear not. But they can't be worse than the last three rulers."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Castigation of Tultamaan",
                "text": "We did our best to intimidate Tultamaan by surrounding him with eight dragons. That's the mating flight, less Osoth who was off chatting with Ngassith and Irssaan, and with Chevethna and Arthane, their tails curled up together.\n\n\"As the loyal adjunct of the Tyrant Queen, I must ask you, Tultamaan, to give a full accounting of your dishonesties, evasions, and betrayals!\" thundered Chevethna. Arthane looked determined and diligent by her side.\n\nTultamaan muttered, \"And I suppose that mere Reason will not be sufficient to show that I am being Honest and Open in all Regards.\" He crushed his veriception-blocks, and looked to Chevethna expectantly.\n\n\"That is a good start, but we'll think better of you if you actually say something,\" said Chevethna. Arthane giggled.\n\nHe tugged at his forepaws with his mouth a bit, arranging them on the sand. \"As everyone here knows Perfectly Well, I found the mating flight Not To My Taste. It did not live up to either half of its name. There was altogether too little Mating going on compared to the other flights I have Enjoyed. And, while we certainly spent more than enough time in the Air, we did not actually acquire the common sense to Fly from the Deadly Dangers that Hove so generously provides.\"\n\nArilash glared at him. \"Your virility and your bravery are of similar sizes, as I very well know. I have twined more dragonesses than you have, and they liked it better, too. Why did you come back?\"\n\n\"And why did you make an arrangement with Xolgrohim against me and my parents?\" I added.\n\n\"That should Not be a Particularly Tricky Matter, Jyothky. I see no reason why one should not Defraud the wraiths of dead small people, even if they do happen to be gods. Making a wicked arrangement is no Great Matter of Grand Importance. Keeping it would be unconscionable of course. Xolgrohim's message remains undelivered.\" Tultamaan kept to the truth in this. \"Instead, your parents know the Actual Nature of your situation.\" That was a lie.\n\nHalf of us hissed at the lie in the last sentence. I roared, \"Tultamaan! What did you tell them!\"\n\nTultamaan flicked his tail as if brushing away buzzing insects. \"I took the Insufferable and Intolerable Liberty of presenting your situation in a More Favorable Light than it actually is. I did not mention the Heinous Peculiarity of Ythac and Llred, for one thing. And I Intimated that your own Matters of Personal Affection were generally successful and pleasing, rather than being Barely Tolerable to either yourself or the occasional Innocent Drake whom you manage to lure into your Claspers.\" Which was manifestly true, though I would phrase it rather differently and still have it be true. \"So you see, I was being a Helpful and Considerate drake to you, and in no regard an Effective Co-Conspirator of Xolgrohim. Despite your Exceedingly Limited Degree of being either Helpful or Considerate towards me. You have no Cause for Complaint in this regard.\" All true, or close enough.\n\nI didn't have much to say to that, except to mumble, \"I suppose not.\"\n\n\"And how much profit did you get from cheating Xolgrohim?\" asked Ythac.\n\n\"I am afraid Xolgrohim got the best of the deal,\" said Tultamaan.\n\nArthane chuffed, \"Did Xolgrohim get anything at all?\"\n\nTultamaan smirked. \"It's fortunate that you have Clever Advisors, Arthane, for you surely Need 'em. Xolgrohim got rather less than nothing. His actual request was not granted, and I sent him his signal at a time when it was of No Use, or, rather, Less Than No Use, to him.\"\n\n\"Then how'd he get the better part of the deal?\" asked Arthane.\n\n\"His payment to me was in the form of the location of certain Caches of assorted Valuables. The first three were not there at all any longer. The fourth remained where he Said, but it was no longer Valuable. When I retrieved the fifth, I discovered a rather raging redoubtable Rankotherium at my rear. He is a territorial beast, to be sure.\"\n\n\"My father ripped your wings off for that, I'm sure,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"That he did not. He reserves such Pleasantries for you. He brought the matter to the attention of the king. This was one Factor in the king's Suggestion that I might do best leading an expedition of Colonization to Hove on his behalf.\"\n\nNrararn blinked at Chevethna. \"Tultamaan is your leader?\"\n\nChevethna laughed. \"He's our twistiest lizard! Don't trust a word he says, not even with veriception. He did lead us through the Cyclonette. And he did talk us into coming to Hove. He's not in charge of the expedition though; I am.\"\n\nTultamaan hissed a cloud of frosty fog. \"I never claimed to be in charge of the expedition.\"\n\nArilash thumped her tail on the ground. \"Why did you come back here?\"\n\n\"It is a world in which a bachelor dragon might achieve power and status. Mhel is less such a place that it might have once seemed.\"\n\nArilash scowled. \"Hove is no less dangerous than it was.\"\n\n\"I brought Fourteen Skillful Dragons with me, in addition to the Two or Three of them already present,\" said Tultamaan, nodding to Csirnis and Ythac and Llredh. \"I hoped that would suffice. If Hove proved too troublesome, I can take advantage of Quel Quen's directions to Orro, I believe.\"\n\nArilash roared, \"Are you simply trying to twist my tail? To ruin my mating flight, as you think I ruined yours?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" said Tultamaan, truthfully.\n\nChevethna grinned. \"You aren't much of a truthforcer, are you, Arilash? Ask like this: Tultamaan, to what degree are you trying to ruin Arilash's mating flight?\"\n\nTultamaan scowled. \"It is not my most important reason, which was obeying the command of my uncle, or, if you prefer, escaping from his annoyance and that of Rankotherium and such. It is not my second-most-important reason, which was my own profit and aggrandizement. I suppose it might be some lesser reason.\"\n\nArilash spluttered bright sparks. \"Lout! Idiot! Performer of futile tasks! I am perfectly capable of ruining it all on my own!\"\n\nChevethna mewed at Arilash. \"Don't do that! It's one of the happiest times of your life!\" She nuzzled her husband to prove it.\n\nThe rest of us glared at them. We're not ruining things on purpose, after all. Except for Tultamaan, I suppose."
            },
            {
                "title": "Nrararn Idyll (Day 345)",
                "text": "I don't actually hate my fianc\u00e9s, or even my rival. Once in a while I manage to be pleasant to one or another of them.\n\nNrararn was sitting on a cloud, having a fight with a sylph. Not a breath-and-claws kind of fight, though, just an emotional sort of fight. Nrararn had promised the sylph one hyargique-qua if the sylph would warn him about attacks through the air for so many days, but the sylph had failed him twice in a Caramelle with Csirnis, so Nrararn was adding half again as many days before the sylph would get paid. The sylph, for its part, wanted to make a wind garden for its birthday celebration, which would come before that time, so it wanted the hyargique-qua sooner.\n\nI circled around \u2014 Nrararn is the only one I know who can actually sit on a cloud \u2014 and watched the argument. Nrararn, being a nice sort of monster, agreed to pay the sylph today, but put a binding-spell on it constraining it to extended obedience. Nrararn built the hyargique-qua with a heavy crash of his thez\u00f4, and had to wait for a full heartbeat to have the strength for the binding.\n\nWhen the sylph had fled, presumably to build its wind-garden, I asked him, \"Didn't that take much longer than just paying the sylph to start with?\"\n\n\"Yes, and took twice as much magic too. It's important to keep one's prices fixed and one's standards high, though, or one may find oneself having that sort of negotiation in the middle of a battle or something. Here, have a cloud!\" He did something sky-magey to the cloud, and I landed on it and didn't fall though.\n\n\"Good trick, that,\" I said. \"An excellent lurking-spot, if you ever feel like lurking.\"\n\n\"A bit less expected than, oh, behind a melted ridge, that day you were spying on us,\" he said with a fangy grin.\n\n\"You utterly deserved every bit of spying I did,\" I said. \"You personally. You were trying to get my fianc\u00e9s to say awful things about me.\"\n\n\"Back in the days when we somehow had persuaded ourselves we were having a mating flight,\" he said.\n\n\"We still are! It's better for you this way, with only three drakes, isn't it?\"\n\nHe considered. \"Mathematically better. There's a lot to worry about now.\" I peered at him with my ears spread, so he went on, \"For one thing: if you pick me, say, what sort of a territory will we get? Back on Mhel, I don't think my parents are expecting to give me any; they don't realistically expect to need to. I'm sure they would, mind, but they'll be surprised and have to do it in a hurry. And it won't be very much of one.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe my parents will. It's a bit nonstandard, but they might. Again, not such a big territory. But that's maybe just as well: I don't think you and I are really strong enough to defend a big territory.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Exactly. That's my second worry. You and I couldn't really keep a Llredh-type from raiding our small people, say. We'd need allies. Osoth would be an ally, if things fall out that way.\" He scratched at the cloud with a forepaw. \"But that depends on you, well, continuing to be nice to him after the mating flight. And me pretending not to notice.\"\n\nHe looked so serious that I didn't even try to bite him. \"It'll look just as bad for you, Nrararn. Everyone will think you're Osoth's lover also.\" Which wouldn't have occurred to me before Day 63. This has been a very educational trip.\n\n\"Likely so.\" Nrararn twisted some cloud-stuff in his talons. \"So, if you marry me, or if you marry Osoth, would you be willing to stay on Hove? It's big enough so there shouldn't be any troublesome neighbors for a while.\"\n\n\"Not going home would be a bit of a sorrow,\" I said. \"Though living too close to my parents would be, too.\"\n\n\"If Arilash stays on Hove too, and I think she will, you can always get home to visit now and then,\" he said. \"Or whichever of the newcomers is their travel expert.\"\n\n\"Or learn the Cyclonette myself, if I don't mind spending another year or two stretching on travel spells instead of doing anything interesting,\" I said. Nrararn's claws were getting all tangled in the cloud, so I asked him, \"What are you being so nervous about?\"\n\n\"Thinking about the long term, like this. And thinking about the short term, even: this afternoon, say.\"\n\nDrakes always come back to that one point. Dragonesses too, when we're not broken. \"Oh! I'll bet you brought some oil!\"\n\nHe stopped clawing the cloud. \"I usually carry some, these days.\"\n\n\"Optimist!\" I hooted at him, and his mane drooped. \"Justified optimist!\" I added, and he fluffed up again. \"But kiss me first. With lightning.\"\n\nSo we breathed lightning into each other's whef\u00f4s for a while. It's trickier than with fire, since lightning is faster and sharper. And of course Nrararn doesn't have Csirnis' polished elegance about kissing, or anything else. Neither do I. So it was a lot more like two real people breathing lightning into each others' mouths, and a lot less like a fairytale.\n\nSo, Nrararn was holding way more lightning than he usually can, about five breaths' worth, and our lower bodies were all oiled and busy too.. He slipped a bit, distracted by an orgasm I think, and blasted a huge hole from the inside of my cheek. He looked so apologetic, all huge eyes and spread ears, and trying to pretend that his hindquarters weren't being quite happy with mine. So I stuck my tongue through the hole and waved the tips at him, and got him to giggle before I healed it closed. Another unsuspected advantage of not being able to feel!\n\nAfterwards, we lay on the cloud together, tails tangled up together, and watched zeppelins drift around half a world away. The actual act of mating still doesn't provide a bit of fun, but a good drake can still make it worth my time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Etiquette of Arilash (Day 394)",
                "text": "I was asleep in one of our large temporary tents in Damma when Arilash's roaring woke me. We have four more solid buildings built by now, though they are a bit rickety and haphazard in spots. They are covered with big enthusiastic paintings of imaginary gods, at least. Usually I sleep in one of them, but Chevethna and Arthane were visiting and I had given them my usual bed.\n\nArilash was treating them quite rudely, though. \"Get out of here! You're not supposed to be around! This is the mating flight's land, and the mating flight has important things to discuss!\" Which was news to me.\n\nChevethna hissed at Arilash. \"Well, the queen herself invited us, if you're going to be pissy about etiquette. Take it up with her.\"\n\n\"Where did Jyothky get off to, anyway?\" roared Arilash. \"If she's gone back to her pervert of a not-quite-boyfriend and his not-quite-husband today of all days, I am going to rip her wings off!\"\n\nI waddled out of my tent. \"He's not my boyfriend. Chevethna and Arthane are here on an utterly ordinary and dignified visit. They were reassuring me about getting married, if you must know.\"\n\nArilash glared at everyone at once, which is pretty impressive since she has only one Head. \"They need to leave. Now. I may be coming in last in the mating flight, but I will be more polite about it than Roroku at least.\"\n\nChevethna yawned. \"Well, we'll leave. Though I'm a bit mystified by what you mean by 'polite', exactly.\"\n\n\"The important word there is 'more', not 'polite',\" hissed Arilash, and crouched spitting sparks in the middle of the field until my friends were gone, and my fianc\u00e9s had shown up.\n\n\"Each of you deserves to hear this first, so I'm afraid you all get it at once,\" she said. \"Anyway. I have enjoyed myself \u2014 you might prefer to say 'defiled myself' \u2014 with Nlirei, Psilia, and Boruu. What are you going to do about that?\"\n\nFour furious dragons glared at her.\n\n\"She certainly doesn't waste any time, does she?\" said Nrararn in a light tone. \"I was sure she was going to wait 'til at least a month after the wedding.\"\n\n\"Our dear sweet Arilash has all the patience of a three-day-old infant. She has saved her claim to maturity for another topic altogether,\" said Osoth.\n\nCsirnis belched sparks at both of them. \"This is no time for banter. This is a serious breach of honor. We must consider some form of atonement, so that the shame of the matter is contained.\"\n\nArilash laughed harshly. \"You thought I was going to apologize and stop? Half right. Jyothky, why are you biting your tail? You can't even feel it.\"\n\nWell, if none of her fianc\u00e9s were going to attack her, I wasn't going to breathe the first bolt. \"I am shedding tears of blood for the sanctity of our mating flight.\"\n\n\"From your tail?\"\n\n\"Why are you trying to goad me into attacking you?\" I asked her. \"I think the drakes get to go first. After that, let's fight a Caramelle. With just healing spells; you'll need that many.\" I waved my bloody tailtip. \"I'm preparing for that, you see.\" (Well, I thought it was clever at the time.)\n\nCsirnis was lashing his tail in a fury. \"Arilash! We have made every endeavour to behave with honor and punctilio in what have become increasingly complex and entangled circumstances! We have accommodated your needs, your demands, your whims, your pets! We have accepted vast measures of ill fortune: one dragoness lost, one drake dead, one departed and betraying, two others sunk into perversion! We have fought side by side against a world of small people and a horde of dragons, and we have triumphed! And now, what? Will you shit upon your own saga?\"\n\nArilash snarled back, \"If I were a drake, I would simply be gone. I would have left before Tultamaan, and with less compelling a reason.\"\n\nCsirnis arched his head. \"You are not, in fact, a drake. You are, in fact, a dragoness. Ythac and Llredh have perhaps paid less attention than they ought to basic draconic biology and sociology. You have no such excuse. Dragonesses are so far outnumbered by drakes that you have an obligation to marry.\"\n\n\"Just like your obligation to assist your parents as crown prince of Chiriact 'til you inherit, or, more likely, they tire of your sanctimonious hypocricy and have you quietly disposed of into some convenient oubliette?\"\n\nCsirnis winced, but shook his head. \"Replacement princes are easy to come by. Replacement dragonesses are rather less so.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you can marry Jyothky and own a nice manageable territory,\" she said.\n\n\"The mating flight is hardly over. Though, at this rate, there won't be anything left of it by next year,\" said Nrararn. \"Osoth, who do you think will be next to go? Csirnis or Jyothky?\"\n\nCsirnis snarled. \"That is beside the point, Arilash! Married or bachelor, I wish to compete and live with honor!\"\n\nArilash dipped her head. \"Then you're better off not even thinking about marrying me, Csirnis.\"\n\nOsoth puffed graveyard dust. \"By which I take it you plan to content yourself with Nrararn and myself, and our arrangement to tolerate a most limited and careful degree of adultery? You illustrate this plan most acutely with your fornications with, if I am not mistaken, one bachelor drake, one married drake, and one married dragoness. At least the latter two are married to each other. In this way you illustrate your careful and dedicated concern for the noble institution of marriage.\"\n\nNrararn breathed a heavy lightning bolt into his paws, and started braiding it into his mane. \"You and I must fight once more, Osoth, the longest and bitterest fight in Rhedosaur's book. The loser \u2014 he must marry Arilash.\"\n\nCsirnis had caught his temper by the tail and was gnawing on it, but a dragon's temper is notably hard to defeat. \"Osoth! Nrararn! This is no time for frivolous insults! A single course is available to us! That is, we must cooperate to guide Arilash back to decent and proper behavior!\"\n\n\"There's no 'back' there. I don't think she's ever been decent and proper,\" I said.\n\n\"Not really, no,\" said Arilash. \"Why d'you think I never wanted to fight you? I knew I was coming in last because of this. So why ache?\"\n\n\"...I thought I was going to be last,\" I said.\n\n\"Girls, girls! There is no need to quarrel!\" said Osoth. \"You can both be last!\" Which is not a bit fair, since Arilash had betrayed him horribly today and I'd just been my usual mediocre self.\n\n(Actually, maybe it is fair.)\n\nNrararn finished braiding his lightning. \"So, my dear fianc\u00e9e \u2014 my presumably-dear possibly-fianc\u00e9e \u2014 what do you want to do now? What do you want to do ever, for that matter?\"\n\n\"I was going to marry Llredh, you know. We would have shared drakes and dragonesses and small people and anyone else that caught our eager eyes. He would tend the territory, since he cares about that, and I do not. But I have finally admitted to myself that he is really, truly married to Ythac, and I am never going to be anything more than a minor amusement to him anymore. None of the rest of you would be at all suitable as husbands for me. Claw all the cyoziworms, anyway.\" Arilash bit her left forewing, drawing blood.\n\nOsoth nodded gravely. \"The past future subjunctive is an admirable tense, of especial interest to necromancers. The ragged, simpering ghosts of the dead often speak of what they would have liked to accomplish. And what a treat, to hear that most delicious of tenses in the mouth of a ragged, simpering ghost of a dragoness!\"\n\n\"Which is to say, stop avoiding the question, Arilash,\" explained Nrararn.\n\n\"I am going to fly off. I will go where I will. I will couple with whomever I will \u2014 or triple or quadruple or more. I will scoop great fishes from the sea to eat, or steal cattle, or hunt deer, as the fancy takes me, and I will eat it raw or grilled with my own breath. I will sleep in a cave. I will raid small people now and then for a bit of treasure, or accept tribute for the favor of not raiding. I will live as a dragon ought to live, as our ancestors did in the distant past,\" She swung her head around, full circle. \"Will any of you join me? Or are you all too deeply entangled in the ways of small people?\"\n\n\"I, for my part, approve of small people,\" said Csirnis. \"In many cases, their ways are good ways, and where they are not, we do not follow them.\"\n\n\"And your social history is specious. Dragons have always married, one drake to one dragoness, in even the oldest stories that I know. So your main argument is not firmly between your teeth,\" said Osoth. \"The rest of it is accurate enough. Though of course all that predates our acquisition of astral magic and consequent exodus from S\u015br\u00f2u. Which, while it does not wholly confute your argument, does weaken it considerably. We are not our distant ancestors. We are smaller of body and greater of intellect and spirit than they were. And many of us prefer to behave accordingly.\"\n\n\"I am not trying to live like some historical figure or other. I am trying to live the way that suits me. Which includes a great deal of freedom,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"So you have not the slightest intention of marrying any of us?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"I have not the slightest intention of marrying anyone who isn't going to marry me. If you want to marry a dragoness who behaves like Uruunma, faithful to Cterion and up to her shoulders in small people affairs and living in one place for grand upon grand of years \u2014 that is not me.\" She swung her head around again. \"And by this time I know you all fairly well. I have loved you all \u2014 even Jyothky, though I never managed to get her the way I wanted. I hope to visit you again, to laugh and hunt and make love with you for a time, because you are dear to me and I am not doing this to avoid the dragons who are dear to me, not any of them. But I don't think any of you would be happy as my husband, nor I as your wife. If we married, we would be Dessvaria and Rankotherium: always fighting, always miserable. Am I not right?\"\n\n\"You have a particularly foetid way of showing how dear we are to you,\" said Osoth. \"Give me the honest stench of the grave instead. Miserable and full of woe it is, yes, but at least it does not betray.\"\n\nCsirnis flicked his tail. \"I will have an honorable marriage, or no marriage at all.\"\n\nNrararn laughed. \"Still trying to score fianc\u00e9 points with Jyothky at this late date, Csirnis? Osoth and I made a treaty for as dishonorable a marriage as we could tolerate. If that does not suffice, then farewell, Arilash.\"\n\nGood manners yelled in my ear to get up and take care of the matter. \"Given that you broke the most basic custom of faithfulness on your mating flight and you won't apologize and you won't atone and none of the drakes will have you, it falls to the other dragonesses to drive you out of the mating flight.\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" she said dully. She waved her v\u00f4 and crushed her the Small Wall.\n\nI didn't breathe very hard. She didn't fight back at all. I did chase her to the edge of Patthakadu, both of us flying without any travel spells at all. I caught up with her there, and healed her burns as if we had been fighting a Caramelle and roared as if it were a victory. She smiled miserably, and flew off to her other lovers, and her life outside of draconic society.\n\nI flew back to the sorry shard of a mating flight that was left."
            },
            {
                "title": "Aftermath: Marriage",
                "text": "\"Did something interesting just happen?\" Chevethna asked. She and Arthane had flown some three miles off, and, if the flagrant scents and bits of grass and brush caught in their spikes were any indication, had found an agreeable way to pass the time.\n\n\"Arilash quit the mating flight,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" She pounced on me to hug me. Which is not a very comforting thing for me in general, and I had to heal her belly a bit from where I lost track of what my left hind leg was doing. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Arilash realized she wasn't the sort of beast to get married,\" I said, and explained everything.\n\n\"Your mating flight is having all the worst luck!\" Arthane proclaimed. He had breathed his spikes clean by now, and looked quite striking and dignified. \"How many dragons have quit so far?\"\n\n\"Roroku, Tultamaan, and now Arilash,\" I said.\n\n\"I thought it was more...?\"\n\n\"Ythac and Llredh got married early. I don't think that counts as quitting. It certainly felt different: the right general idea, even if the details were a faint hint of hideously incorrect. And Greshthanu got killed. That's not quitting either,\" I said.\n\n\"So you're down to three?\" said Arthane.\n\n\"Four; that golden boy from Chiriact replaced Roroku,\" said Chevethna. \"Nobody actually left our flight. Splendorio as much as resigned halfway through, after it was clear he was going to be last. He didn't exactly leave though. He just didn't stay near the flight very much.\"\n\n\"Splendorio would have been right at home in mine,\" I said. \"Or maybe not. He doesn't sound melodramatic enough.\" I drummed my talons on Chevethna's flank. \"We are now down to less than half a mating flight, a little more than a year in. Should we be doing something differently?\"\n\nArthane looked quite innocent, which does not come easily to a vast blue and crimson monster. \"Aside from not resigning and not getting killed?\"\n\n\"Well, the four who are left. Should we go back to Mhel and petition the king for more dragons, do you think?\"\n\nChevethna polished a non-blemish on Arthane's flank. \"It sounds somewhere between humiliating and offensive. As if to say, 'Dear king: the flight that you so carefully arranged for me proved to be the worst-arranged mating flight in all draconic history, in a way that anyone surely would have realized from twelve minutes' contemplation of the personalities involved.' No insult intended to you, Jyothky, but nobody really thought you'd be the erotic centerpiece of a mating flight.\"\n\n\"That would be Arilash. I was more the one who'd sometimes sneak off and destroy a bunch of heavy weapon emplacements or something. For reasons that have nothing to do with getting married.\"\n\nChevethna laughed little blue and crimson sparks that matched her husband remarkably well. I'm sure she did it on purpose. \"And by what cosmic law are those incompatible? You surely can bring a drake along when you go! A bit of twining between barrages is the height of good behavior and good fun!\"\n\n\"I did,\" I mumbled.\n\nArthane laughed, his mouth glowing an eye-aching blue. \"Yes \u2014 Ythac! Not the drake of your dreams, if what Tultamaan said is true!\"\n\nChevethna butted her head against mine. \"Or is he? You were always very close to him.\"\n\n\"The original plan was, I suppose, that I'd marry Ythac, Arilash would marry Llredh, and Roroku would marry Greshthanu. I think the king's concept matched me to Tultamaan, figuring that he's smart and I need some brains in the family.\"\n\n\"I, too, am fortunate to have a mate with some brains!\" roared Arthane, and breathed a spotlight on Chevethna's head. She cuffed him, and I sulked while they mock-fought lovingly. When Arthane ripped up a tree to tickle Chevethna, I did breathe cold on it to wither its leaves and drag them back to the conversation.\n\n\"Sorry, sorry,\" said Chevethna. \"It's actually wonderful to be married, even if you do have the misfortune to have chosen a huge lump of muscle and kindness without a bit of wits or courage like I did.\"\n\n\"I have courage a-plenty! Consider this: Did I make the least attempt to escape your clutches? Who but the bravest could meet you with anything approaching equanimity?\"\n\n\"Bravery I will grant you, my love, but you provide prima facie evidence about the witlessness,\" said Chevethna. Then she glanced at me. \"Oh, dear. We're making Jyothky miserable.\"\n\n\"Helping Arilash do that, is all,\" I mumbled. \"Is it actually worth getting married?\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, I've been delighted with it. Never happier. Even having my career aspirations thwarted by the surprising machinations of a tyrant queen hasn't disappointed me a bit,\" said Chevethna.\n\n\"Well, you'll probably oust me sooner or later,\" I said.\n\n\"No hurry! I'm happy to wait until Hove is fully conquered before fussing about whether I rule all of it or just two-thirds as your chief viceroy. I do believe you're trying to change the topic, though, and in this you will fail. I roar the praises of marriage! There is no better alliance, there is no better friendship! There is also no better lover, but I guess that doesn't matter much for you.\"\n\nI drooped my head. \"Maybe a little. Once in a while it's fun.\"\n\nChevethna reared her head to me. \"Well, consider this. You have your choice of the remaining drakes.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I suspect I'm going to come in last among dragonesses.\"\n\nShe patted my face with fire breath. \"I don't know that it's even possible with just one dragoness...\"\n\n\"My mating flight has vastly expanded the frontier of what is possible. And I don't mean that to sound the least bit encouraging.\"\n\nChevethna ignored me. \"...but, first of one or last of one, you still get your choice of the remaining males. Nrararn and Osoth are adequate, I suppose. Csirnis seems splendid, if I'm any judge of drakes at all.\"\n\nArthane smirked. \"I know what you did when you had your choice! Jyothky, don't trust her a bit. She picked me.\"\n\n\"Shall I rush back and marry Splendorio straightaway?\" she asked, with her own smirk. \"Anyhow. What do you think of Csirnis?\"\n\n\"He's very good at everything a drake should be good at. He was pretty much the best fighter in the mating flight, and got all the notable victories. Like the time he gave Greshthanu the advantage of position, and won a Dominance five touches to zero. He's quick and graceful. He's charming; he and Osoth were the only ones who made hoven friends...\"\n\n\"I do believe there's a hoven woman who follows you around all the time, and whom you even rescue on occasion.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's Tarcuna, but the rest of them hate me. Csirnis made great friends of everyhoven in Ze Cheya. He's elegant. Whenever he does anything it looks beautiful, even if he's never done it before. He's honorable. I can't imagine anyone ever having anything bad to say about him. Except for friends of course; he'll have to live down being on a mating flight with Ythac and Llredh and Arilash. If he's got any hidden darknesses, they are well-hidden.\"\n\n\"Dragons with light breath generally don't have hidden darknesses,\" said Arthane. \"They would make us itchy.\" He caught Chevethna's eye, and scratched his neck on her spikes intensely. I almost breathed cold on them.\n\n\"Well, then! You must marry Csirnis! You will have the second-best husband on Hove, from the sound of it, and just half a scale's thickness behind Arthane!\" chirped Chevethna. \"That should compensate for all of Arilash's bad behavior, and everyone else's too.\"\n\nIt's impossible to be too unhappy around Chevethna, so I let her cheer me up some."
            },
            {
                "title": "Aftermath: Drakes",
                "text": "The drakes weren't so cheerful, when I got back. They were sitting in a triangle around a burning cinnamon tree, chatting or meditating quietly. I didn't want to send them out to Chevethna. I'm not sure she could cheer three of them up at once in any case. Not in the same way certainly. Only one of them gets to marry now, and him to someone far, far less impressive and desirable than Csirnis.\n\n\"Did she put up much of a fight?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"Not a bit. I healed her, as if we were fighting a Caramelle,\" I said.\n\n\"I suppose the dignity of the occasion is somewhat compromised in any case,\" said Csirnis. \"Arilash did not prove to care that much for honor, in the end.\"\n\nI prowled around the fire, and embraced my drakes. \"I'm sorry. I'll try to do what I can to take her place.\"\n\nOsoth snarled, \"Your place and hers are utterly different. Our needs for reprehensible behavior and shame by association are quite satisfied. You need not exert yourself in the slightest in that regard.\"\n\nI shrank back. \"I mean, about being a decent dragoness for you.\"\n\n\"I am unaware that Arilash ever was decent,\" Osoth snapped.\n\n\"I believe she is offering to copulate more,\" said Csirnis. \"With us, I mean.\"\n\n\"Well, yes. Sorry if I'm still a bit of a prude.\"\n\n\"I thank you for your offer, Jyothky. I cannot fault prudery today, having seen the opposite extreme rise to icarean heights,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"He said 'yes, thanks',\" noted Nrararn. \"I say 'yes, thanks' too. Because we're trying to be decent drakes, that is, not out of any particular urgent need.\" Which is how they smelled to my tongue too.\n\n\"It's not urgent in the sense of overwhelming lust. You'll never get that from me, I don't think,\" I said. They all nodded. \"It's urgent in the sense of, we ought to reaffirm that we're a mating flight and not a total disaster.\"\n\n\"Not a total disaster, no. 5/9 of a disaster.\"\n\n\"Besides, I do want my eggs to be part-fertilized. That will be important to my husband and me in some years,\" I pointed out. Which was calculated to say that I was going to marry one of them in the ordinary way, and hatch dragonets in the ordinary way, and never mind all the crazy things like flying off or getting killed that half the flight had done.\n\nSo we got out some ghee, and some male members, and behaved as we ought. The drakes were still rather grumpy, but I did have the sense that they'd rather mate with me than go off and be violent to Arilash. Just barely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Camp Magistrate Beanfeld (Day 586)",
                "text": "Alarmingly, today did not start with Tarcuna getting clipped on my back and flown at a break-ribs speed to somewhere or other in Trest. Today, we were quite organized about it: we'd been planning this trip for weeks. Today, we had some extra hovens coming with us, Prof. Wulpmegarn and Dr. Grauzeng and title-less unimportant Bthera: they'd been planning the trip for weeks too.\n\nToday, we took a zeppelin. An elegantly appointed military officer zeppelin, like the one I rode to Trest a long time ago. It was pleasant to be able to walk around in it, instead of hiding mousedly under a couch. I didn't take hoven form \u2014 I haven't done that in months, and rather miss it \u2014 but hoven-sized dragon form works just as well unless I'm trying to open a door with a shiny polished brass doorknob with a forepaw. Or trying to sit, rather than crouch, on a stuffed and polished leather chair. Or trying to fill a plate from the officer's buffet. We didn't have any officers on this flight, but I insisted on the buffet anyway. The very dignified and important Prof. Wulpmegarn served me. Bthera served Tarcuna.\n\n\"Glad to be free?\" asked Tarcuna, when I was distracting the more dignified hovens into explaining the bovine digestive system to me on the other size of the gondola. (It's complicated. Arilash and I would never have figured it out. It's also boring and somewhat unpleasant to think about, so I will not record it here.)\n\n\"You have no idea,\" said Bthera. Tarcuna snorted. Bthera continued, \"Well, you know, but nobody else seems to. Dr. Grauzeng certainly doesn't.\"\n\nTarcuna put a hand on her friend's shoulder. \"You've been following her, have you?\"\n\n\"I've just been trying, but she doesn't want me to. We had a huge fight about it in the hospital, with all the doctors giggling about it under their masks I'm sure,\" Bthera snuffled.\n\n\"Did you get anything at all?\"\n\n\"I'm allowed to clean her house, and help out in the kitchen. Their cook is old; I hope she'll retire in a few years and I'll be the new cook. Dr. Grauzeng and Himself don't want me taking care of their children. They don't want a reformed whore as a nursemaid,\" said Bthera.\n\nTarcuna nodded. \"That's something, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I wish I could do more though. I've never loved anyone like this before,\" said Bthera.\n\n\"I know that feeling. Jyothky won't let me do any more. Never did, even when I was her hired friend. Actually all I do is get her into more and more trouble; she'd be better off without me. Could you get me another couple of quail eggs? I'm sorry, I can't peel them one-handed.\"\n\nBthera helped with the eggs. \"Dr. Grauzeng doesn't want that either. I envy Llredh; he got to marry the one who freed him.\"\n\nTarcuna took a dainty bite of an egg that was already too small to make a respectable mouthful, even for a hoven mouth. \"What we need is a vast supply of unmarried expert surgeons who are looking for devoted lovers. Also, a vast supply of dragons who don't mind spending all their time healing hovens. Then we could get rid of the cyoziworms once and for all.\"\n\nBthera shrugged. \"I'm glad to be free. I don't care about the rest of the worms so much.\"\n\n\"I've been with dragons too much,\" said Tarcuna. \"Their ways are starting to rub off on me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Indiscretions",
                "text": "Much construction had been inflicted upon the Magistrate Beanfeld Array Site since Ythac and I had ruined it. Six squat morose apartment buildings huddled on the twistor-scarred plain. They were trebly walled, surrounded by tall panels of pressed stone, coils of razor wire, and a concrete moat tiled with scales. The weighing kind of scales, that is. Anyone walking across the bottom of the moat would be noticed by machines that would sound warning klaxons. A dozen gangly metal towers with cabins for soldiers and guns on top, and a small barracks-house, provided a menacing overtone to break the otherwise purely dismal atmosphere.\n\nToday, of course, they tried to be festive. Sloppy plastic banners reading \"All Hail Our Draconic Overloads\" and \"Welcome Wormridden Victims\" fluttered from two of the guard towers. A small sort of podium had been set up at one end of a half-filled parking lot, with the emblems and flag of Trest behind it. Several dozen hovens, Csirnis, and Kuro were already there. I duly embraced my golden prince fianc\u00e9, and exchanged casually friendly roars with Kuro.\n\nYthac, who flew in not long after we arrived, peered tenasensitively at the arrangements. \"I think I will dispense with the podium. I'd crush it if I tried to stand on it.\"\n\nI tangled necks and wings with him in greeting. \"Oh, maybe they did mean 'overloads', then. I thought they just couldn't spell on those banners.\"\n\nYthac read the banner, snorted, and destroyed it with a quick snort. \"I swear, hovens are such idiots half the time. I cannot understand how they put together a sophisticated and advanced civilization, the way they're working for me. I cannot imagine how they could put together anything bigger or more impressive than a mediocre dumpling factory, and even that wouldn't work half the time. Because they'd use flowers instead of flour to make them, or something.\"\n\nI shrugged my wings. \"Damma wasn't nearly that bad, nor Ze Cheya. And Tarcuna's as sharp as a claw.\"\n\nYthac shrugged his wings too. \"Well, mine aren't very good. I have to do half of everything myself. Well, today's event is important, to Llredh especially, and we're going to do it right. Where is Llredh, anyway?\"\n\n\"You're the master of finding-spells, and of Llredh's heart,\" I reminded him.\n\nYthac threw his head back and bellowed \"Llredh!\"\n\nLlredh bellowed back, though not so loudly. He had shrunken to hoven-size, and was wrapped around Tarcuna, and behind a locked bus full of miserable hovens from the rest of us.\n\nTarcuna thumped Llredh between the horns with her fist. \"Stop yelling. You're hurting my ears.\"\n\nYthac hissed angrily at the two of them, in Grand Draconic. \"Llredh! This is your event! This is not a suitable time for adultery, and you must not be so public about it!\"\n\nLlredh hissed back at Ythac. \"Adultery, she takes place in the forests and wild caves only! Tarcuna's clothing, she is neither mussed nor disturbed! Tarcuna's vulva, she is neither entered nor stretched! Your tongue, she can smell the truth!\"\n\nYthac didn't bother checking. (I did. Llredh was on the edge of concupiscence, as he often is when Ythac is nearby. Tarcuna was more emotionally intense than usual, but not in ways that suggested immanent adultery.) \"Llredh, disentangle yourself from her at once.\" He did. \"Are you going to give the opening speech, or am I?\"\n\n\"The opening speech, you give her. The fine words, they are in your mouth. The roaring, the snarling, the half-formed threats of vengance, the broken grammar \u2014 these things pour forth from my mouth when I open it!\"\n\nYthac glared at Llredh. \"Very well. You will stand by my side though. Keep off of Kuro and Tarcuna.\" He glanced at me. \"Arilash, at least, couldn't make it.\" Llredh did as he was told, looking as contrite as he could manage, which is never very much.\n\nTarcuna wrapped herself around my foreleg. \"What was that about?\"\n\n\"I could ask you the same,\" I said, but I summarized the conversation in Trestean for her.\n\n\"So Kuro's on the list too,\" said Tarcuna. \"That's interesting.\"\n\n\"What list is this?\"\n\n\"Llredh's permitted extramarital lovers,\" said Tarcuna, smelling rather afraid.\n\n\"There were three names on the list...\" I started.\n\n\"And one of them is mine,\" she finished for me. \"Only twice. The first time was when you and Ythac were beating up the Peace Everywhere Array, and most of the other dragons were away, and Llredh and I needed more than you can possibly imagine to be distracted. The other was in Perstra, a month or so ago. You'd gone out flying with Ythac.\"\n\nI glared at her.\n\nShe glared back at me. \"You said you didn't care who I diddled. If you want me to be your devoted lover, chaste and faithful to you and you alone, you just have to ask. But you do have to ask.\"\n\n\"No thanks! I am not glaring at you for inchastity or infidelity! I am glaring at you for injuring my best friend's marriage!\"\n\n\"Well, if Ythac doesn't want Llredh playing around, he should tell that to Llredh. They discussed it a lot, I understand. There's a short list of permitted adulterous lovers: me and Arilash. And Kuro, though that seems to be new,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nI glared more. I meant to be glaring at Ythac, only I was still facing Tarcuna, so some of it got on her.\n\n\"What? I can't do anything about it now!\"\n\n\"I think I want to bite Ythac. Maybe I'll call in that debt from when he told me he loved drakes. He stills owes me a complete wing-gnawing.\"\n\nTarcuna glared back. \"So what am I supposed to do?\"\n\n\"Remind me later. I can't do it while he's giving the speech.\"\n\nAnd it was nearly time for the speech."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Ythac destroyed the podium with his flames, and spoke standing on its ashes. \"O my husband! O my allies and friends! O my subject peoples! Know that, today, we flap our wings for the first time in the direction of saving Hove from the terrible wickedness that is cyoziworms. This is the beginning of a course of treatment. And at the end of this course of treatment, no unridden hoven in Trest will ever need fear the terrible worm again! No more will a casual kiss or tight embrace risk the loss of blood to feed the wicked parasite! No more will you risk that, in some horrible day, you yourself will lose your free will, and be compelled to devote your life and your soul to the preservation of a monstrosity that coils around your heart and insinuates itself into your brain!\n\n\"To be sure, we have not yet found a wholly general cure for the worm. Our current successes, while crucial to the happiness and good governance of Trest, are not to be widely repeated. On this topic we provide hope, rather than victory. The wise and clever Prof. Wulpmegarn leads a mighty research team, and in time hoven science will surely triumph.\n\n\"But we cannot wait for the scientific victory. We must protect the uninfested! We must pinion the worm beneath our claw, so that it cannot escape, even if we cannot kill it! And thus, today's part of the course of treatment. Magistrate Beanfeld has become the first of what will be many cyozi camps. In these protected halls shall dwell the worm's current victims. They shall be provided with all necessities and comforts! Yet, they shall be denied exit. They shall not prowl freely among the uninfested! They shall never drink pure blood, nor claim pure souls!\"\n\n\"Soldiers, unlock the doors of the busses, show the first of the quarantined to their new homes!\"\n\nThere wasn't much applause."
            },
            {
                "title": "Beanfeld Battle",
                "text": "The soldiers unlocked the door of the first bus, and lead five dozen manacled and presumably infested hovens across the single narrow bridge over the moat, through the temporary gate in the coils of wire, through the permanent door in the grey stone wall. Once they were inside, their manacles were unlocked, and they drifted towards the apartment buildings.\n\nThe second bus didn't work so well. Two soldiers opened the door, as before. Manacled hoven hands grabbed them with transhoven strength and transhoven speed, dragging them into the bus, slamming the door. The soldiers outside blinked in confusion, hooting to their officers for instruction. By the time the officers had their first order ready \u2014 \"Open that door again!\" \u2014 the wormridden hovens had started the bus. The soldiers scattered before the gigantic (to them) vehicle, with mixed success. A few of them shot at it as it drove by, and the tasty scent of hoven blood and brains spread in the air.\n\nCsirnis leapt into the path of the bus, and breathed. All the tires of the bus burst in his flames, but the volatiles in the engine were untouched. (Can I marry that beautiful, graceful, merciful prince? \u2014 yes, if I want to.) The bus skidded into him, but he and his the Ulthana's Targe stood firm.\n\nFive dozen more wormridden hovens, less two and all rather shaken, were led from the ruined bus into their new homes. Csirnis and I did what we could to save the victims. The two wormridden shot by the soldiers were dead. The dozen or so soldiers injured by the bus were straightforward enough. One of the soldiers that had been dragged into the bus had been injected with a juvenile cyoziworm, and Dr. Grauzeng and I ripped his chest open and took the worm out whole. It had only gotten one probe into his brain, and we think not fully seated yet.\n\nThe rest of the busses were unloaded under the intense glare of five dragons. There were no further incidents."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "\"Well, wasn't that miserable,\" said Tarcuna, as she scooped a bowlful of spiced snails from the zeppelin buffet on the way back. \"Oh, light of Curset, these are going to be a pain and a half to eat one-handed, aren't they?\"\n\n\"I'll shell them for you,\" said Bthera, also looking subdued.\n\n\"The apartments are miserable, you mean?\" asked Dr. Grauzeng. \"They were erected in a hurry, is all, I think. And of course they have to have walls and guards. We can't trust the wormridden to stay nicely away from uninfected people until we find a general cure.\"\n\nBthera broke a snail shell with her thumbs. \"I'm thinking what it must be like to live there. There's nothing to do, except tend the cattle that your worms will be feeding from. The only people around are just puddles of wormridden misery like you. And guards who think you're a half-legendary soul-devouring monster.\"\n\nProf. Wulpmegarn nodded. \"And they're not exactly wrong about that part.\"\n\nTarcuna stabbed her snail on an official Trestean Army snail-stabbing fork and waved it to punctuate her words. \"I'm thinking it's utterly doomy! First you lose your life and your free will to a worm... then, as punishment, they throw you in jail for the rest of your life. Except that your worm is under a death sentence, if they can figure out how to kill it, so you're going to have to try to escape. Past armed guards. Terrified armed guards. Who will kill you if they can, or Llredh will probably kill them if you escape.\"\n\nI hissed, \"So go tell Llredh to let them go. You're on that kind of terms with him.\" I seem to be a bit jealous or something.\n\nTarcuna menaced me with the fork, so I ate the snail off of it. (spicy!) \"I know what he'd say. He'd say, 'If you have a better way to keep the worms out of the population at large, please tell me now.' Also you owe me a snail.\"\n\nI shucked a few more snails for her with my claws, working next to Bthera. \"No, he'd say something like, 'The better way for confining the hateful worms \u2014 if you have her, give her to me!' He's not a drake who likes the word 'please', for one thing.\"\n\nTarcuna giggled at the imitation, and the professors grinned. The rest of the hovens obviously do not pay enough attention to their master's mannerisms and idiosyncracies.\n\nTarcuna menaced Prof. Wulpmegarn with her next snail. \"And when will you figure out a cure for the hateful worms?\"\n\nWulpmegarn did not take the bait. \"I have no idea. Llredh is not helping much. He insists that there must be an herbal remedy for it, so we must look for one first. I think that we are wasting time and effort with that, but I am not really willing to argue with Llredh very much.\"\n\n\"Can't Ythac find one? He's good at finding,\" I said.\n\n\"He tried. There's nothing currently prepared in Hove that's a cure,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. \"She explained that, for example, if there's no tincture of blethany anywhere in the world, and that were the cure, her spells wouldn't notice that blethany plants could be tinctured to give a cure. So have my students and less-skilled assistants and various new hires preparing all manner of tinctures and potions, hoping that one of Ythac's spells picks one out. I should be on expedition to the Godaxle, collecting parasitic forkworms and their hosts. Finding vulnerabilities in their life cycle! Figuring out how to extract them from their animal hosts! That is where the scientific value surely lies. You may tell that to Llredh, if you can somehow pound it into his exceedingly armored skull. I cannot.\"\n\n\"So, no time soon, then?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"I cannot reliably predict the timing of scientific revelation,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. \"In this matter I am not particularly optimistic. Our research is just getting started, in only a handful of laboratories so far. It must be performed on live patients \u2014 and, indeed, patients who resist the experiments with amazing violence. Many of my colleagues consider the problem to be imaginary. I suspect that some of those are themselves wormridden. The issue is unlike any other in the history of science. Ten years would be optimistic. Twenty or thirty does not strike me as unduly pessimistic.\" He glanced at me. \"I suppose that the dragons might speed the matter up somehow, as well as interfering. Ythac might come up with the answer tomorrow with her spells.\"\n\n\"His spells,\" I corrected. \"Ythac is a boy.\"\n\n\"Ythac is...? But is not Llredh the male?\"\n\n\"Tarcuna, you explain about Llredh and Ythac. You know more about it than I do.\" Serves her right for, well, knowing more about it than I do.\n\nThe revelation did not improve Prof. Wulpmegarn's opinion of Llredh any. Nor of Tarcuna, unfortunately."
            },
            {
                "title": "False Negatives (Day 650 and 651)",
                "text": "\"And how was your visit to Dorday?\" I asked Tarcuna, as she clopped out of the armored car that had brought her from the airport.\n\n\"Miserable. My family still thinks I'm a traitor. My ex-girlfriend still thinks I'm a traitor. My former friends from college don't want to talk to me at all. My former friends from the Red Spire and such are mostly in protective quarantine camps and wormridden and I don't want to talk to them. I can't think of anything I'd say to them. The one that's out didn't want to talk to me either. Having an honor guard of the dragon's most trusted soldiers to protect me didn't help one bit.\"\n\n\"Poor hoven,\" I said, and patted her on the head. She glared at me, so I stopped. \"But didn't you expect that when you set off?\" Since she had said as much.\n\n\"I expected everything but meeting Ailenne in the street,\" she said. \"Ovor, please put my luggage in my bedroom? I should be safe enough with Spotty around.\" The guard was not pleased at being ordered around, but he didn't argue.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"You. You're Spotty, right?\"\n\nI puffed winter fog at her. \"Only to people who haven't learned to talk right. Who is Ailenne?\"\n\n\"An occasional worker at Red Spires.\"\n\nI asked, \"One of your former lovers?\" since I am trying hard to act like a grownup.\n\n\"Half of Dorday are my former lovers,\" lied Tarcuna. \"I thought she was wormridden. She certainly knew all about it, and seemed quite sincere. You didn't heal her?\"\n\n\"No, just you and Bthera. I wanted to check with Llredh about it. After a bath and a nap. The driver went out of his way to find rough roads whenever I nodded off, or turn the radio on high.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "Considerably later, after a dinner and a pencil-and-paper game of tsheriaf (scores too low all 'round for me to want to record), Tarcuna did ask, \"Llredh? Are there any more wormridden loose in Dorday?\"\n\n\"The worms, they are gone from Dorday, I have sent them to camps! A small triumph over them, but a triumph!\"\n\nYthac said, \"Well, a very small one. We've been putting them in prisons here and there across the country. We're trying to build more camps, but the hovens are so clumsy and incompetent that it's happening very slowly.\" He glared at the mottled walls of his palace.\n\nTarcuna shook her head. \"Wrong. I saw one on the street yesterday; a woman named Ailenne.\"\n\n\"A worm, free? I do not permit this revolution!\" roared Llredh.\n\nYthac cast the Draft of Direction or something, and then a scrying spell. \"We missed one... actually that's a man, so we missed at least two.\"\n\nLlredh breathed jagged orange flames across Ythac's flank. \"Your spells, your spells, your finding spells! Why did you cease to cast them?\"\n\nYthac dipped his head. \"I'm sorry, but we discussed this already. The questions get trickier and trickier to pose with each one I find, and there's only so many I can seek. And I do have other things to do than finding worms all the time. Just like Jyothky won't do surgery constantly either.\"\n\nI chirped, \"Besides, one berserk hoven with an unsatisfiable crush on me is quite enough.\"\n\nTarcuna nodded seriously. \"I'd be jealous, and Spotty can't handle that.\" The first half was true. \"Bad enough that I can't marry her and have to let someone else do it.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that the someone else isn't looking forward to it any more than you are,\" I said, which didn't make anyone feel any better. I healed Ythac's burnt flank, though, since nobody else was doing it.\n\n\"The worms of Dorday, they must be caught, they must be imprisoned or destroyed! All the worms, they must be!\"\n\nTarcuna nodded grimly. \"Perhaps I can come with you and see how your people are finding worms? They clearly have to do a much better job.\"\n\n\"'Better job' is not the style of Trest nowadays,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Now! We shall go now!\" clamored Llredh.\n\n\"I just got back from there,\" whined Tarcuna.\n\n\"Now! Come with me!\" He made a grab for her. So I bit his foreleg to stop him, and Ythac scooped her out of the way as Llredh ripped bits out of my wings and slit my belly open while I tried ineffectually to do anything much more to him.\n\nAfter five hits, he glared at me. \"The Caramelle, do we fight her?\"\n\n\"I think that's enough to prove your point,\" I said, and healed myself in case any of the wounds was serious, which they didn't seem to be very.\n\n\"Tonight, that is the time when we go!\" proclaimed Llredh.\n\n\"How can you stand getting bitten like that, even if you can't feel?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"How can you stand having the weakest dragon on Hove as your defender?\" I snapped back.\n\n\"Bah, Tultamaan, Ressal, even Nlirei, they are weaker than Jyothky. My victory over you, you must not insult her, Jyothky! You are slightly competent!\"\n\nI glared at him. \"Fine, but I'm coming with you anyway.\" In Petty Draconic, using the right forms for someone who had just lost a fight.\n\n\"Tarcuna, you may carry her yourself!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Screening Techniques",
                "text": "\"How is it that at least two cyoziworms got past your detection schemes, and are still lurking around Dorday, surely preparing to colonize more innocent people now that the worm density is so low?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\nThe Dorday Arsenal didn't have an empty room big enough for us, so we were horse-sized, and sitting at three of the corners of a big square table in the Hall of Government, glaring at some senior gendarmes and a scared-smelling Prof. Wulpmegarn. Tarcuna was doing the actual interrogation, because she had more actual scientific training than we did.\n\n\"Well, we followed the professor's protocols very carefully,\" said one of the gendarmes. \"I'm sure that there weren't any errors in enforcement. I think that the protocols don't catch all the worms.\"\n\nProf. Wulpmegarn snorted. \"My protocols are based on the best available scientific research on cyoziworms. Llredh, you do remember that you ordered me to develop protocols to find all the cyoziworms in the country, and try them out in Dorday and see how they worked?\"\n\nLlredh's voice was smoky. \"To find all the cyoziworms, this is what I ordered. To find the cyoziworms, this is what you have not done!\"\n\n\"This is part of the development of protocols. I understand that your own powers are perfect and not subject to error, but ours are not. They start off severely flawed, and, over a period of experimentation and adjustment and improvement of theoretical models, become, if all goes well, extremely good. But even at our best, we must accept the possibility of false negatives.\"\n\n\"What is a false negative? It sounds like a number that's pretending to be below zero, but isn't,\" I had to ask.\n\n\"A false negative is a situation when a test is negative, falsely. For example, when a wormridden Ailenne is proclaimed clean, incorrectly,\" said Wulpmegarn. \"A false positive is when someone is proclaimed infested, incorrectly.\"\n\n\"The false negatives, they must never happen!\" exclaimed Llredh.\n\n\"Then you must use powers beyond those of ordinary people to perform your tests,\" said Prof. Wulpmegarn. \"Technology can make no such guarantee.\"\n\nLlredh and Ythac hissed at each other in Grand Draconic, about how Ythac could detect every worm in the country in a matter of one dozen years, or more, if he put his mind to it. And didn't sleep or eat or rule Trest \u2014 or couple with Llredh. And if the worms stopped reproducing, and no new ones came into the country. And if the guesses about the worm population were on the low side. I didn't try to translate for any hovens.\n\n\"Powers beyond those of hovens will be used, in the final cleansing. But the greater part of the work must be done by the hovens themselves. You, ultimately, are the ones who suffer from worms. You, ultimately, must labor the most to cure them,\" proclaimed Ythac.\n\n\"By which I understand that you will spare my life once more so that I can work on your programs for you?\" snapped Wulpmegarn. \"And these gentlemen of the gendarmerie as well, for all that they are trying to put the blame on me?\"\n\nYthac lashed his tail. \"Yes. But you must improve your protocols. You fail too often!\"\n\n\"What are the protocols, anyway?\" asked Tarcuna."
            },
            {
                "title": "How To Find Mind-Controlling Parasites",
                "text": "So we got a tour of the Cyoziworm Detection Program.\n\n\"This room is the eyeball of the operation,\" said the chief of gendarmes. \"Until yesterday, we were inspecting the outskirts of the city. Now we are back on the downtown itself.\"\n\n\"An eyeball, it is not. An accounting-factory, she is what it seems to be,\" said Llredh. I couldn't argue. Dozens upon dozens of hovens sat at small desks with large stacks of paper, typing things into machines. Or, at the moment, staring at us and smelling of fear. A few tried to slink off, claiming biological necessities with varying degrees of truth. Llredh glared at the ones who lied. More of them looked as if they wanted to leave, but didn't want to call attention to themselves in the presence of the destroyers of their country.\n\n\"An accounting-factory we shall call it if you prefer. Every gendarme in Dorday is constantly alert for any report of suspicious behavior, according to the list of likely symptoms that Dr. Wulpmegarn provided. We attend to changes in behavior, especially an increase in fornication or in periods of absence without explanation in which the worm could be feeding. An increase of cowardice and reluctance to face physical danger. An avoidance of religious and social obligations. A sudden switch of profession to harlotry. We pay attention to instances of weakness and fatigue, as if a worm had fed from an uninfected citizen; then we attempt to locate the worm based on the time and location of such events. Such reports come to this room, to be collated and tracked, and, in the case of suitable suspicion, followed up upon. Allow me to show you the next phase.\"\n\nAs we left, the clerks started to breathe again. And whispered to each other, \"The usurping dragons and the Black Curse. I knew I should never have taken this job.\" \u2014 \"Me too, but the hotel laid me off. What else could I do?\"\n\nI flicked my tail, and scored the paint on both walls. I don't much like that nickname. The chief of gendarmes hastened to explain that the clerk's actual words were surely something else, and that the clerk would be put into administrative detention and inspected for worms straightaway.\n\n\"No, I hear quite well. But worms? I don't think that the wormridden are the only ones who hate me. You do too.\"\n\n\"I don't!\" he lied. \"I did until I saw a worm sticking out of a woman's chest and trying to claim my soul,\" he said, a half-truth.\n\n\"You've seen a worm?\" I asked, to avoid bickering with one of Ythac's important subjects in front of him.\n\n\"Three of them. Sometimes when a person is strapped to the wall unable to move, the worm will protrude itself forth and strike. If it weren't for my udder-guard I would be in a cyozi-camp myself,\" he said. \"Every gendarme on my team has seen a worm, every gendarme on my team hates them more than they hate you.\"\n\n\"Please stop lying to dragons. It really doesn't work. And you're allowed to hate us all you like. We certainly deserve it, for what we have done to you,\" said Ythac.\n\nA different gendarme showed us the actual testing for worms, while Wulpmegarn narrated. \"We have four tests for cyoziworms. The first test of course is intrascopy, which is as close to perfectly reliable as hovens can get. We are forbidden to use that test.\"\n\n\"Should we permit it again?\" asked Ythac. \"We cannot permit false negatives.\"\n\n\"I recommend against it. I estimate that ten to twenty percent of the wormridden would die in the intrascope, and that using intrascopy on a large number of healthy people will cause a wide variety of medical problems,\" said Wulpmegarn. Ythac agreed, before Llredh could say anything.\n\n\"The second and third tests are standard biological tests, of urine and blood respectively. The presence of a large parasite in the hoven body produces a variety of metabolites: the hormones and wastes of the worm itself, plus the stress products of the body's natural reaction to a large intruder.\" I had to cast the Word-Fox repeatedly, and I still didn't understand Wulpmegarn. Here's Tarcuna's summary: \"The worm's easily-detected byproducts are all normal chemicals in the hoven body. There are more of some of them with the worm than without: the Kia ratio, of kiasterol to anakiathics, is much higher. That's easy to test. But the problem is that the Kia ratio varies a good deal in people generally. Some healthy people have a high Kia ratio naturally. (It would go up still more if they got wormridden.) So simply taking everyone with a Kia ratio of 0.08 or higher is wrong. Wulpmegarn's tests look at five indicators like that. His team of scientists is working to find more indicators, and to find more accurate ways to use the ones they have. That is Science. Which means it is slow to do, and imperfect.\"\n\n\"And the fourth test, invented by my student, is the easiest, the most reliable, and the least popular one of all. Recall that the cyoziworm protrudes through the lower part of the victim's udder?\" Tarcuna's fur went entirely flat, and she and Llredh nodded fiercely. \"Although the worm's influences do promote quick healing, repeated punctures leave a modicum of scar tissue. So, the shaving test is, the lower udder is shaved and inspected for scar tissue. It is an unusual place to get scars, after all.\"\n\n\"I'll bet that one is popular. Shaving there isn't much fun afterwards. You want that fur to keep your udder from chafing on your chest,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nThe chief said, \"I've heard that, certainly. More often, our suspects don't like to be taken into a public room, and have a private part of their body exposed, manipulated, shaven, and inspected by a few strangers. Most of them don't believe in cyoziworms anyway. Several objections were quite violent: some from the wormridden, some from the clean. So suspects are now preemptively restrained.\"\n\nTarcuna inspected the restraints: solid metal chains to hold the suspect spreadeagled against a wall. \"Even when I was a wormridden whore, you would have had to pay me a lot to strap me into that thing and poke at my udder.\" The chief of gendarmes frowned at her, and she frowned back.\n\n\"It is a good test, though,\" said Wulpmegarn. \"The current protocol uses it as the primary test. Patients who fail it are then given the blood and urine tests.\"\n\nThe chief of gendarmes demurred. \"No. We collect specimens for those tests regardless, in advance, as is more convenient. The specimens are discarded if not needed.\"\n\nWulpmegarn concluded, \"Evidently there have been unauthorized changes in the protocol, though that one should be harmless as long as the tests are done promptly. If all three tests come out positive, the patient is highly at risk of being wormridden.\"\n\n\"Change the protocol!\" thundered Llredh. \"The blood test, the piss test \u2014 either of these, not both, indicates a worm!\"\n\n\"There would be too many false positives \u2014 there are too many already. The tests aren't individually that accurate,\" said Wulpmegarn.\n\nLlredh glared at him. \"Improve them quickly if you wish! But you must use them as I command. Your replacement, she is somewhere to be found. Your severed head, he will encourage her obedience as a desk ornament.\"\n\nWulpmegarn shuddered. \"I will do as you demand.\"\n\n\"Do your mightinesses wish to observe an actual inspection?\" asked the chief of gendarmes.\n\nTarcuna nodded. \"I do. Not just because I like seeing pretty half-naked girls pinned to the wall, Llredh. I might have something to say about your protocols.\"\n\nWulpmegarn frowned. \"Your scientific training is minimal...\"\n\n\"Two years in Dorday Academy, weapons engineering program, before my brain got taken over. My training as wormridden isn't minimal,\" she snapped. \"I'm the only actual useful informant you have anymore, what with Llredh being a dragon and all.\" She gave Llredh an intense look.\n\nLlredh nodded. \"Tarcuna, you must listen to her, Wulpmegarn! She knows much, she is wise!\"\n\nSo we sat through the inspections of twelve terrified and unhappy hovens. They were brought in wearing hobbles and handcuffs. They were released and stripped, and then bound to the wall.\n\nTarcuna frowned. \"That's one point of vulnerability. The wormridden are stronger and faster than you are. One could fight his way free at that point. Or at least start fighting hoping to get free. You need to keep them bound all the time. Hands to the wall, then unlock the handcuffs, and so on.\"\n\n\"We did that originally, but this version is easier when the suspect needs to be stripped,\" said a gendarme.\n\n\"Ever have any trouble?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"Not to speak of,\" said the gendarme, lying. So we interrogated him, and, yes, two wormridden had exploded in violence at that point of the procedure and wound up getting killed by the gendarmes.\n\n\"Do it Tarcuna's way from now on,\" ordered Ythac. \"I do not permit my subjects to die for your convenience.\" Simple enough. He really does have the best interests of Trest at heart.\n\nThen a nurse came to take a blood sample, which was straightforward. The patient was encouraged to provide a urine sample as well, which they uniformly found shameful and miserable. It had to be done that way, though, because when privacy was permitted, the wormridden smuggled in clean urine. The shaving test generally caused struggles as well.\n\n\"You need a tight chest-strap as well as arm and leg straps there,\" said Tarcuna. \"If I were wormridden and knew what you had planned, I'd writhe around when you were shaving. You'd cut my udder, and that would make the scars harder to see.\" (And when we interrogated Ailenne later, that is precisely what she had done.)\n\n\"That shall be part of your protocol too,\" proclaimed Ythac.\n\nThen the suspect was released from the wall \u2014 the gendarmes changed the protocol on the spot to keep the suspect restrained at all times, without needing to be ordered to \u2014 and taken to a holding cell until the blood and urine samples could be checked. After which, they were unlocked, given their clothes back, and allowed to depart, generally trembling or even crying.\n\nNone of the dozen people interrogated while we watched were wormridden. \"We get one, maybe two a day tops,\" said the gendarmes.\n\nYthac cast a spell. \"Nobody in custody here is wormridden. Release them all. No need to subject them to that torture.\" He flattened his ears and smelled quite miserable.\n\n\"Torture? That is no torture! Public safety, science, my revenge \u2014 all three demand these protocols!\", roared Llredh.\n\n\"I agree with the spiky orange and brown guy,\" said Tarcuna. \"Sure, it's an awful way to spend an afternoon. But it's better than spending five minutes wormridden. And when it's over, it's over. Being wormridden isn't over ever unless some dear kind dragon comes along and rescues you, or you get lucky and die.\" She was truthful and passionate. \"Better that everyone goes through that examination than anyone gets a cyoziworm again.\"\n\nLlredh agreed. Ythac gave orders to inspect hovens more broadly, and to convert other buildings to examination centers, and train more examiners. Wulpmegarn was given special orders to improve the protocols still more.\n\nAnd that's how you fight an evil insidious mind-controlling parasite."
            },
            {
                "title": "Etiquette of Jyothky (Day 683)",
                "text": "The High Desmers tower over the hilly Bweldraan farmlands, forming the northern barrier of that modest and generally tedious nation. I flew alone, with only a smoked bustard for company. At the edge of the mountains I bugled, my cry sending sheep fleeing across the plow-patterned hills and echoing jaggedly from the ancient stones.\n\nArilash answered me in kind.\n\n\"Arilash! Behold, it is I, Jyothky, erstwhile companion of your cave of nights! I bring tribute! Do not rip me again with your fearsome claws, do not breathe the familiar flames against me! If you challenge me here, I shall surely flee!\"\n\nShe flew the seven miles to me in a few seconds and a scatter of broken music. \"It is good to see you, Jyothky. What's with the formal manners though?\"\n\nI waved the bustard at her, and she snatched it out of my talons. As she bit it, I said, \"I'm just trying to be polite. I didn't know what sort of terms we were on after I drove you away from some drakes you said you loved.\"\n\n\"I do love them, but not in a marrying sort of way. And as for us... can we be on 'You're the first dragon to see me and not have a fight since I left the mating flight?' terms?\"\n\nWe flew side by side, far enough apart not to foul each other's wings. \"We can try. Also on sharing the Horizonal Quill terms so I don't need to fly a quarter of the way around Hove to talk to you. What happened?\"\n\n\"After you so boldly and violently chased me off \u2014 I will never forget those deadly vicious healing spells, not as long as I live! \u2014 I went to Psilia and Boruu. Seeking comfort and solace, of course. I didn't find it. I somehow tangled my wings and fell into a fight with both of them. They're not a bit faithful to each other, I know for a fact. But I said a few rude things about the institution of marriage as applied to the constitutionally unfaithful dragon. Meaning myself of course. They got quite offended, I think. They started explaining in considerable detail the great goodness of their marriage, despite both of them being rather like me. I couldn't take even an hour of that, Jyothky, not after giving up on the mating flight. I wasn't terribly polite to them, and then I flew off. I haven't talked to anyone since then. You're the first, and if you're not at least a bit nicer than they were I'm going to rip your wings off. Or maybe my own, if I can't catch you.\"\n\nI glided under her and looped my tail around hers, which is the closest thing to a hug that one can really give in the air. \"That sounds awful. Besides, you'll be able to catch me. You're wearing the Melismatic Tempest.\"\n\nShe peered at me. \"And you're wearing the Dozenwing Dozentail. That's the nastiest spell ever! How can you stand it?\"\n\nI grinned at her. \"I have Secret and Special Powers, remember?\"\n\nArilash belched thick smoke. \"It'll break your ribs, pain or no pain! It's a horrible spell \u2014 and don't you agree with me, or it'll bash you! Take it off this instant!\" So I did. \"I am going to teach you the Melismatic Tempest before you go!\"\n\nI laughed. \"Long visit then! That's a hard spell. And I can't really pay you back with anything. I'm still playing catch-up on grownup spells.\"\n\n\"You will owe me a favor. Start by telling me the gossip.\" She descended a quarter-mile or so, circling a watchtower-adorned peak. Hovens pointed at us and watched us with telescopes, their weapons ready.\n\nI followed her. \"The mating flight pretty much fell apart when you left. Osoth went back to his catacombs and archaeologies the next day. Csirnis and Nrararn fought five Caramelles between breakfast and lunchtime...\"\n\n\"Poor Nrararn.\"\n\n\"Poor Nrararn, indeed. It's his fault though. He kept challenging Csirnis. Csirnis went easy on him.\"\n\n\"How did he do?\"\n\n\"Nrararn won the second fight. Csirnis was going too easy on him. Anyway, I think that was the last of the mating flight. Csirnis went back to Ze Cheya that afternoon.\"\n\nArilash flew by the tower, and breathed flame three winglengths over it. \"Are they happy about having him there?\"\n\n\"I haven't visited him there yet. I haven't recovered from the last visit yet. I don't think they have either. Why are you roasting those hovens?\"\n\n\"You are such an Uplifter! I'm not roasting them,\" said Arilash. She wasn't. \"I just want them to stop spying on me.\"\n\n\"I don't think they're quite going to get the point of what you want if you don't tell them,\" I said. Arilash hissed and sparked. I giggled at her. \"It's not such a terrible matter. I'll tell them if you like.\"\n\nSo I dived at the tower and snatched one of the rangers from the window, and stole his language with the The Spilling of the Speech, and took him on a presumably-thrilling ride twice 'round the tower before I set him safely on the ground, unhurt save in dignity. \"The horrible tan beast up there \u2014 wait, I don't have to call her that anymore! The largely sweet and relatively peaceful tan beast up there says that she doesn't want you spying on her anymore. She might have a boyfriend over now and then, but you're not to watch.\" Explaining that took not many more minutes.\n\n\"I wish I'd get a boyfriend visiting, though,\" said Arilash. \"Flying over to seduce someone sounds desperate. They still should be coming to me, shouldn't they? The bachelor drakes at least.\"\n\n\"I don't know if there's any official etiquette of it. You're the first bachelor dragoness I've heard of. A widow would have some suitors chosen by the king, I think.\"\n\nArilash landed by her cave, which was barely big enough for her, and that only because she had melted it larger. \"If Ythac tries to get me married off properly, I'm going to threaten to marry him. How are he and Llredh doing?\"\n\n\"I'm never sure anymore. Ythac is trying to rule Trest, and having a sad time of it. Llredh is mostly working on his revenge, and, from what I can hear, on seducing everyone he's allowed to seduce.\"\n\nArilash peered at the cave. \"You can sleep there if you like; I'll be comfortable outside. Poor Tarcuna; she must be getting terribly sore.\"\n\n\"She hasn't twined Llredh very often at all. I think it's Kuro.\" I folded my wings embarrassedly. \"I'll sleep outside. I'll be more comfortable than you will.\"\n\n\"I'll melt the cave larger,\" said Arilash. \"For when the drakes come calling, you know.\" She scooped a small pile of unimpressive valuables out of the cave, and breathed into it. As she was recovering, she said, \"Kuro was Ythac's first love, wasn't he?\"\n\nI breathed on the cave after her, until the rock glowed white. \"He wasn't talking about that to me at the time. I suppose I should get his true life's history. When I bite his wings off and officially forgive him, I suppose. I haven't done that yet.\"\n\n\"You're still angry at him?\" asked Arilash, and took her turn melting the cave.\n\nI breathed again, and the stone poured out of the cave over the black glassy path from Arilash's first expansion. Arilash and I hopped out of the way. Getting lava on your feet is awkward, and probably painful. \"Oh, not at all angry, but I did promise.\"\n\n\"So who are you going to marry? Have you decided yet?\" asked Arilash.\n\nI laughed, and boiled more stone. \"I haven't. Only Nrararn seems to be staying around to court me. Csirnis sounds like a better choice, but I don't think he much wants to marry me.\"\n\n\"He doesn't. He wants a female version of himself.\"\n\n\"The only way he'll find that is by shapeshifting,\" I said, melting more rock.\n\n\"And he wouldn't change sex, not even when I asked,\" said Arilash. \"I think that's big enough. Now we wait a week for it to cool down.\"\n\n\"If we're not competing for drakes anymore, maybe you won't tell me what you had in mind when you asked him that?\" I begged. I glared at the molten rock, and started breathing cold on it delicately.\n\nArilash laughed. \"You're allowed to stop being a prude now, Jyothky. Oh, ice breath. I should have remembered you know that, you used it on me often enough.\"\n\n\"If you don't stop teasing me about that, I'm going to ask you the clawsome questions!\"\n\n\"I'd just answer them. Do you want to risk that?\"\n\n\"...I guess I don't. You have defeated me again, Arilash.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "\"Death to the Cunyas\" (Day 710)",
                "text": "Nrararn and I had been playing tsheriaf on the cliff walls by the Sea of Tangay all morning, and were busily eating roasted goatish sorts of things in spicy yogurt, and joking with the cooks about whether he could make flatbreads big enough for us to eat roast goatish sort of thing properly (viz., with flatbread). Tarcuna clomped by my side and whacked me with a clatter of her dragon-taming staff.\n\n\"So why are you angry at me today?\" I asked her, since she smelled quite angry.\n\nShe fumed, \"If you've saved someone once, you're obliged to save them again \u2014 right?\"\n\n\"No, but I often will. What do you need rescue from this time? You don't look kidnapped.\"\n\nShe tossed her staff down, and the cymbals crashed on stones. \"Not me. Bthera. Also Dr. Grauzeng.\"\n\n\"I remember Bthera,\" I said, since I did.\n\n\"I should hope so. Well, are you going to go rescue her, or not?\"\n\n\"Probably I am, if the expression on your face is any indication. From what, or is that a surprise?\"\n\nTarcuna glared at me. \"You have not been paying attention to the news from Trest.\"\n\n\"I have a fierce minion to do that job for me,\" I pointed out reasonably.\n\n\"You've got a combat-grade social secretary, I should say,\" Nrararn pointed out. \"It's easier to fight Csirnis than Tarcuna. Csirnis knows how to stop fighting when he loses.\"\n\nI nodded. \"And when he wins, too.\"\n\nTarcuna picked up her staff again. \"Are you going to just talk when there's lives to be saved?\"\n\n\"Whose lives are we saving, exactly, and from what?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"We? You're coming too?\" I asked him.\n\nHe snorted a gust of incandescent sparks. \"I could stay here and eat your share of the goats 'til you get back.\"\n\n\"My goats! My goats! My tasty, tasty goats!\" I lamented. \"Actually, if Arilash were still around, I imagine you'd stay.\"\n\n\"A drake cannot afford to pass up any advantage in his quest to get a mate,\" he noted. Which he says at least twice a day now.\n\nI've got about three good answers. I picked, \"Csirnis and Osoth have their own approach to the matter.\"\n\n\"Csirnis and Osoth flee in the face of my intense devotion,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Which has intensified considerably now that Arilash's claspers are out of the picture,\" I pointed out.\n\nCymbals crashed in front of my nose. \"Will you please get going?\"\n\nI looked down at Tarcuna. \"Where are we going, and why?\"\n\n\"Dr. Grauzeng's house got set on fire last night. Snipers shot everyone as they came out,\" said Tarcuna. \"We are going to the St. Ploque-Dar Hospital in Dorday, where they are in critical condition. To start with. Then we shall see what to do next.\"\n\n\"Poor hovens! Whyever did anyone do that?\" I asked. \"But you're right. Yes, we are going. Nrararn, will you come?\" I put the Melismatic Tempest into myself, and, when he spread his v\u00f4 away, into him as well. I don't cast it nearly as well as Arilash. Or please my fianc\u00e9s as well as Arilash. I am pretty sure she's ahead of me in the mating flight, despite dropping out of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hospital",
                "text": "More hours than it should have taken later \u2014 considering that we had both the Melismatic Tempest and a real tempest behind us \u2014 we landed at St. Ploque-Dar Hospital. Not Naliere Hospital, which is what you get when you ask a gendarme in Pourride Avenue \"Where is the hospital?\" rather than \"Where is Ploque-Dar Hospital?\" We took hoven size, which was harder for Tarcuna than Nrararn and me. Technically, she was already hoven size, but she had to deal with the flight harness that fell off me. That is fair because she's (1) my minion, and (2) the reason I wear a flight harness anyway. It's unfair because (-3) she has only one working hand. Of course (4) I don't have working hands at all, and (5) I was supposed to go do some healing.\n\nThe secretaries and priest welcoming patients into the hospital were not very impressed. \"Ah. More dragons. You must be here to see about the patients in room 71.\"\n\n\"That would be Bthera, Grauzeng, and family?\" I said.\n\n\"The survivors.\"\n\n\"Who was here before?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"The orange and brown one who styles himself our overlord,\" said the priest. Which is to say, Llredh.\n\n\"Where is room 71?\" I asked. And got directions, and scrabbled my claws on slippery oilstone floors 'til we got there.\n\nThere was healing to be done, of course. Three bullet wounds in the girl; I don't think she would have died of them, unless one got infected. Only one in the younger boy, who might have died without healing. Five in Dr. Grauzeng's husband, who was in quite bad shape indeed.\n\nThe older boy and Dr. Grauzeng had been dead when they got to the hospital. Bthera had been alive, but had died not quite an hour before, as two doctors worked to save her life. Llredh probably could have saved her, but he was trying to hammer healing spells into Dr. Grauzeng at the time instead.\n\nSo I bit his tail. \"Llredh, you are the useless drake! You let my friend die!\"\n\nHe bit my muzzle. \"Jyothky, you are the unwise dragoness! My useful professor, she is the one I need to be alive!\"\n\n\"You are not going to make your hovens any happier with your reign by letting them die when you're standing in room,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Nrararn, you are the irrelevant drake! My hovens' happiness, of her you understand nothing!\"\n\n\"He's right, though. You should have healed them,\" I said.\n\nLlredh hissed, \"The great fool of Dorday, she is Jyothky! For hoven happiness, it is slaying she should do here, not healing!\"\n\n\"And what do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"These children, this man, my doctor, your spare whore \u2014 hoven rebels killed them. You and I, we are too much trouble. The hovens who work with us, the hovens who side with us, they are the ones to die.\" Llredh pointed to a short spear on a table. Tied to its shaft was a flag, on which \"Death To Every Cunya\" was stencilled.\n\n\"What's a cunya?\" asked Nrararn, and cast the Word-Fox. He stared at Tarcuna. He must be good enough to get etymologies with his spells."
            },
            {
                "title": "The First Proper Trial on Hove",
                "text": "In the early afternoon, we flew here and there around the city collecting the seven assassins and sixteen of their co-conspirators. In the midafternoon, Ythac and Llredh amended the Stone of Merraro to allow proper draconic justice. In the late afternoon, we held a private little trial. I was truthforcer and judgment-maker. Llredh was sentence-maker and executioner. Tarcuna was the crime-speaker. Nrararn was impresario. Some gendarmes and hoven judges were bailiffs and attorneys. We were in an actual Dorday courtroom, which meant that some of us were hoven-sized for good reasons, and others were hoven-sized for other good reasons.\n\nTarcuna shrieked, \"Some finding-spells say that you seven killed Bthera, and Dr. Grauzeng, and the family of Dr. Grauzeng. The rest of you made plans with them, bought them guns and kerosene, and encouraged them to the deed of flame and blood. I accuse you all of murder. Murder of the innocent, for children died. Murder of the distant, for they had worked no kind of harm to you.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't know about the harm, Miss Arch-Cunya,\" growled the wiry black-furred one. \"You think dragons are a good thing.\"\n\n\"I know dragons better than any other hoven!\" Tarcuna shouted. \"I rein 'em in better than any number of vicious killers!\"\n\nI shushed Tarcuna with a glare, and tried that on the murderers. I am not quite sure that they understood that I was glaring; they certainly continued growling out slogans and accusations. So I swished my hukuch\u00f4 over them, not quite touching, and they fell silent.\n\nNrararn jabbed me in the flank with a claw, which I didn't notice. So he said, \"Jyothky, don't do that. Get the bailiffs to quiet people. That's why we have bailiffs. Oh, and you're bleeding.\" (-1 fianc\u00e9 point.)\n\nLlredh hissed at the murderers, \"Grauzeng, did you burn her house, did you shoot her head?\"\n\nThey stared at him quietly, though fearfully.\n\nLlredh roared, \"An answer! For to me you will make an answer, and you will make her now!\"\n\nThey stared at him quietly, though fearfully.\n\n\"I don't think they can understand you. You!\" I pointed at the wiry black one, whose name I think is Carlio. \"Answer, yes or no. Did you shoot Bthera, or Dr. Grauzeng, or anyone in her family?\"\n\nHe clopped a hoof on the courtroom's tiled floor. \"Don't see why I should answer that one. You'll kill me if you want, you will.\" Truthful, claw-rasp it.\n\n\"We are doing things properly. Ythac would have it no other way. Answer my question, and truthfully,\" I said with all available dignity.\n\n\"Won't, and you can't make me,\" he said.\n\n\"Bailiffs, make him answer,\" I said.\n\nThe bailiffs stared at me. \"Are you asking us to torture him?\" one of them asked, smelling scared and upset.\n\n\"No, no, you should do that part. Bailiffs don't have hukuch\u00f4s,\" said Nrararn. (-1 fianc\u00e9 point.)\n\nI breathed a bit of ice on Nrararn (-1 fianc\u00e9e point, presumably) and then brushed Carlio with my hukuch\u00f4 delicately twice or thrice, until he was shaking and vomiting. \"Now, answer. Did you kill any of those victims?\"\n\n\"No!\" he snapped.\n\n\"You're lying,\" I said.\n\n\"Tell whatever fiction you want,\" he said. \"Or will you use that magic torture spell to make me tell it, monster?\" He tried to stand, but couldn't. His gang-mates helped him to his feet.\n\n\"It's not a spell,\" I whined.\n\n\"Do your worst! You cannot break the spirit of free Trest!\"\n\n\"The spirit of free Trest is all about shooting children running from a burning house? How sweet. You are better off under Ythac and Llredh,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Grauzeng and Bthera were cunyas \u2014 collaborators! They deserved to die!\"\n\n\"So you killed them?\" I asked, trying desperately to keep to the truthforcing.\n\n\"I asserted an obvious corollary of a moral principle, nothing more.\" Which was true. Carlio was a slippery murderer.\n\nNrararn leaned his head over Carlio. \"It has been some while. But didn't Trest go to war with us over whether it was acceptable to kill children for their parents' crimes? And was not Trest, at that time, opposed to it?\"\n\n\"The situations are utterly different!\" shouted Carlio.\n\n\"Ah, the cry of the moral relativist,\" said Nrararn. \"Before you die, I will bring you to the hospital \u2014 St. Ploque-Dar, let's get it right this time \u2014 and you will explain to Lyre and Pasquara just why you killed their mother. I'm sure they will appreciate the ethical niceties of the situation and find great comfort in your thesis.\"\n\n\"Ah, the cry of the kangaroo court,\" said Carlio. \"You have written the verdict and the sentence already. All that remains is the charade of arriving at them.\"\n\n\"Nrararn's not the judgment-maker; I am,\" I said. \"And we are going to have a decent trial. Your part in that is to answer questions and tell the truth. Did you kill Grauzeng and family?\"\n\n\"I deny the authority of your court,\" Carlio said calmly, truthfully, and uselessly. His co-conspirators agreed.\n\n\"My husband's spells, they are not wrong,\" said Llredh. \"Carlio, the murderer is he, and the murderer of a hoven who worked mightily against the evil worms. Now, he dances and evades at court. Mercy, she will not come for Carlio!\"\n\n\"My point exactly, monsters! Kill me \u2014 and I am sure you will \u2014 but I shall not submit to your wicked and illegal reign! Nor shall Trest!\" shouted Carlio.\n\nThat was quite aggravating. \"Carlio! If you do not immediately and truthfully and unambiguously state that you did not participate in this arson and murder, I will interpret your continued evasions as a full confession!\" I roared.\n\n\"Interpret it how you like. You will in any case,\" he said.\n\n\"And that will have to do for a confession. Bailiffs, take Carlio away, and bring the next defendant,\" said Nrararn the impresario.\n\nThe rest of the trial didn't improve a bit. Except for three of the hovens who weren't at the murder itself, who tried to argue that they were innocent. They had bought guns for Carlio and made plans with him. One had even visited Grauzeng's house and gotten a quick tour on some pretext, and sketched it for Carlio.\n\n\"I'm not exactly happy with what we've got so far,\" I said. \"Finding-spells and non-confessions.\"\n\n\"Bah, the wicked ones, they are they! Death, she is their fate, and soon!\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Let's get some witnesses. That's what you're supposed to do at a real trial if the criminals don't confess,\" said Nrararn. \"I'm sure that Osoth can help out. He should see you at least a few more times while you're engaged, anyway.\" So we stopped for for overnight, and extracted Osoth from his catacombs. We slept in the Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium, and I politely coupled with Osoth twice by way of thanks."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Judgment of Ghosts (Day 711)",
                "text": "\"Leave the dead to the quiet of the grave!\" wailed Dr. Grauzeng. Or, rather, what was left of her, cradled in a basket of leaden words. \"There is no sorrow like the sorrow of visiting the broken remnants of my life!\"\n\n\"Sorry, sorry!\" hissed Osoth. \"Just a few questions and we'll have you on your way again.\"\n\n\"Ask. We must answer.\" said Bthera hollowly. Tarcuna hid her face in the curl of my tail and sobbed. I carefully didn't move.\n\n\"Who killed you?\" asked Osoth.\n\n\"That one, and that,\" Dr. Grauzeng said, pointing to Carlio and another defendant. \"My house burned. I ran to get Lyre, giving him such shelter with my body as I could from the kerosene-scented flames. Those two men shot us with Davrok-33 automatic guns as we came out the front door.\"\n\n\"Lyre lives. I healed him,\" I told her. I should know better than to try to comfort the living dead.\n\n\"He lives. I do not. Will you avenge me, monster? Will any one of you?\" she cried, surveying the courtroom.\n\n\"The claws of the law, they shall be your claws! The breath of justice, it shall be your breath!\" roared Llredh.\n\n\"It must be. I have no other breath,\" said Dr. Grauzeng. Meaning life's breath, I suppose, which isn't what Llredh meant at all.\n\nCarlio laughed. \"I'm sure that's some sort of illusion.\" Truthfully, though wrong.\n\n\"Those are the real spirits of the women you murdered.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Silly games. Do you really think that the population of Trest will accept this trial? All your evidence is dragon magic, dragon senses, dragon proof. Nothing is real here.\" Truthfully. Wrong, since it's all real, but he believed it.\n\nWe asked a few more questions of the ghosts, and let Osoth return them to death.\n\nAfterwards, Tarcuna asked us, \"Why didn't you just ask the husband, or even the two children? They saw as much, or more.\"\n\nNrararn blinked at her. \"I didn't think of that.\"\n\nOsoth smiled. \"It was merely an excuse to return me, however briefly, to my conjugial duties.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "So, the judgment was easy to make: \"You are all guilty of some quite wicked crimes, arson and murder and attempted murder.\"\n\n\"You are too,\" said Carlio. \"Far more than us.\" Truthfully, yes.\n\n\"The torment and the death, they shall be yours!\" roared Llredh the sentence-maker. \"Nrararn's subtle torment, that shall come first!\" And it was done as he commanded. I didn't watch the torment \u2014 it was probably worse for the children than for the murderers. Llredh killed them slowly, ripping them apart with his claws. That seemed appropriate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Aftermath",
                "text": "Ythac and I flew through the upper air, chasing the edge of Eclipse. No travel spells, we were just flying and chatting.\n\n\"I'm glad you got them convicted at least,\" he said.\n\n\"Was there much doubt of it? What chance do some hoven criminals have against four dragons? Or even one, if he's got working veriception?\" I asked.\n\n\"That's just the problem. I don't have enough dragons. I could employ all twenty-two of us, full time, just truthforcing at trials,\" he said, lashing his tail as much as one can lash one's tail and still fly straight.\n\nI glanced at him; he was in the middle of a smouldering sort of fury. \"You have that many trials?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. There's a gross of revolutionary groups opposing me. Two gross... a grand... sometimes I think that every soldier I've fired from the army has started his own revolutionary group, and half the civilians too. Most of them aren't doing anything, or not very much. The gross of them are doing things. Wicked things, too, from a hoven's point of view as much as mine.\"\n\n\"Like what? I haven't heard much of that, in Damma, and you don't write about it.\"\n\nHe fumed more, clots of darkness slithering over his chin. \"I hate to scramble your mating flight any more. I've asked too many favors of you as it is. Some few murders: my chief of gendarmes in Churry City, is one you've met. Two of the scientists on the Twelve Troubles Report. Now Dr. Grauzeng. Hers was the bloodiest; usually they just go after the cunyas.\"\n\n\"That's a very rude word. Tarcuna kicks me every time I say it.\"\n\n\"Apologies. Usually they just go after my supporters. Well, I only have one supporter, that's Llredh...\"\n\nI hooted, \"Me! Tarcuna!\"\n\n\"Fine. I have three supporters, and I am very fond of all three of you. Usually they go after collaborators.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just find them and deal with them?\"\n\nHe did something I have never seen before: he turned his head and breathed a wide cone of darkness at Perstra. It didn't get all the way there \u2014 he's a careful and Uplifty sort of drake \u2014 but I had to stare. \"I did. I did my part anyway, I gave the names and addresses of the murderers to the gendarmes and sent them out arresting. The gendarmes did not do a very good job. They arrested the rebels wrong.\"\n\n\"How do you arrest someone wrong?\"\n\n\"Kicking them, is a good way. A hoof to the belly of an un-resisting criminal, and the arrest is invalid in the eyes of Trestean law. There was rather an epidemic of belly-kicking. So Llredh changed that part of the law, and there was an epidemic of mishandling evidence instead in a dozen other ways. If a dragon's involved, the case goes right \u2014 as long as the dragon's actually in the room. As soon as the dragon flies off to get some much-deserved time with his husband, the hovens are suddenly as clumsy as Tultamaan giving a hand job.\"\n\n\"They don't want to be ruled by dragons,\" I said, brilliantly.\n\n\"It's not their choice,\" he snapped.\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Not mine either,\" he said.\n\n\"Llredh thought it would be a good idea.\"\n\n\"At this point, it's as much a matter of honor as anything. I don't think I'm going to get much respect from any dragon for a grand of years even if Trest works brilliantly. If I marry another drake and we fail at our attempt to hold a country... we might as well go live on Plurdat or somewhere else that nobody will ever want to follow,\" he said.\n\n\"My poor trapped friend. I'll be helping you, as best I can,\" I said.\n\n\"I need you vastly, I'm afraid.\"\n\nAnd then Virtuet escaped Curset, and we turned back to his entanglement of a capitol city."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Invaders Plot (Day 810)",
                "text": "Eleven dragons came to visit us in Damma, us being Nrararn and me. Chevethna and Arthane of course, and Psilia and Boruu. Ythac and Llredh and Kuro, flying in a triangle. Csirnis. Tultamaan. Ignissa and Gwixion: last, despite the heaviest travel spells I have ever seen. Ignissa can barely fly. She's elegant and pleasant though. If Tultamaan had a dozenth of her grace, he'd still be in the mating flight.\n\nWe welcomed them all with suitable happiness and considerable amounts of spiced meats. Damma was being a very good host, especially considering that we were meeting to discuss how best to conquer them.\n\nTultamaan said, \"Before we can conquer anyone Else, we must conquer Ourselves. I suggest that a King and Queen who are not married to each other \u2014 who are, in fact each married to someone Else \u2014 are not a suitable King or Queen. They might be Disharmonious. A certain amount of Disagreement is possible, and maybe even likely. It is not a Supportable Monarchy. I urge them both to Abdicate in favor of Chevethna and Arthane, in keeping with the Original Plan.\"\n\n\"The fool of a silly, he is Tultamaan! Changing king, changing queen, this is no easy matter the tiny dominance fight! A war has established it, a war it will take to change it!\" roared Llredh.\n\n\"By standard law, a straightforward dominance challenge should do it. Not like on a long-conquered world, with a knotted net of fealties and allegiances,\" said Boruu.\n\n\"I wasn't in on the original plan,\" I said. \"And I mostly defeated you to protect some friends here: some hoven, some dragons. Chevethna, Arthane, I'll want some broad and honest promises from you if you are queen and king.\"\n\n\"What, we're not Uplifty enough for you? Listen to what we have done with Ghemel and Ghemelia!\" roared Arthane. \"Then you may judge for yourself!\"\n\n\"I'm more worried about Ythac and Llredh. And Trest,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm pretty worried about us too,\" noted Ythac.\n\nChevethna sprayed us all with delicate flames. \"What are you saying, you sillies? Ythac and Jyothky rule Hove. Anyone who disputes this may fight me first.\"\n\n\"Backwards is good style on Hove,\" said Boruu. \"I thought you wanted to rule a world, though.\"\n\n\"I certainly do! I want Jyothky to conquer it for me though. That's much more convenient.\"\n\n\"Never had a tyrant queen such a loyal subject,\" I complained.\n\n\"More precisely, Jyothky and Ythac know Hove rather better than the rest of us. They might as well suffer through leading the conquest, which I imagine will be long and tedious. When Hove lies quivering and helpless in our claws, Arthane and I will have a long private discussion to decide whether we'd rather be king and queen of all Hove, or simply the power behind the throne.\"\n\n\"It is theoretically possible that Jyothky and Ythac will have their own power, and you could wind up as neither,\" noted Csirnis.\n\n\"Exactly!\" chirped Chevethna. \"If that happened, we'd challenge them.\"\n\n\"Like any proper tyrant queen, I am flattered to be informed that I will either be weak or deposed,\" I said, rather annoyed with her. \"It will be harder to conquer Hove if I constantly have to worry about you supplanting me.\"\n\n\"That's exactly it. We promise not to be underhanded about it, and to be your loyal subjects and warriors \u2014 or doctors and architects or whatever you want from us \u2014 until we've won. Then you will need to worry about us supplanting you for a few days. After that it will be over, one way or another. And if you'd like me to say that again without veriception blocks, I'd be glad to,\" said Chevethna.\n\nTultamaan hissed. \"I do not approve of this Change of Plans. Jyothky and Ythac are not suitable as Leaders.\"\n\n\"Not as easy to talk into things as Arthane is, you mean,\" snapped Chevethna.\n\n\"Which of them is the picture of a Heroic and Mighty Dragon, suitable as symbol of power and rulership? Arthane, definitely. Llredh, perhaps, if one is Unaware of his Disgusting Habits and Wilfully Ignorant of his History. But even so, Llredh is neither King nor Queen. Ythac is a stout and solid beast, again ignoring his History if one can somehow manage to do so. He is not the Picture of a Great One. Jyothky, for her part, is the Smallest and Slowest of us, and a rather Flighty and Inconstant sort of person.\"\n\n\"We're not in a mating flight together, right, Tultamaan?\" I asked. I'm sure I was spitting sparks in two flavors, fire and lightning.\n\n\"You proved yourself Thoroughly Unsuitable to marry me quite some time past. I merely took the natural action that follows.\"\n\n\"Then I challenge you to a Duello Prolongato. With the stakes being, the loser shall stop complaining in public about the winner for a duodecade,\" I snapped.\n\nMost of the dragons smirked. Chevethna giggled outright. \"I think you'd best do it, Tultamaan.\"\n\n\"Win or lose, I shall surely Suffer the Most,\" he said.\n\n\"If you're not my fianc\u00e9e, you can't score points off me for not being able to feel. And I'm not going to score points off you by talking about your foreclaws,\" I said.\n\nWell, it wasn't a brilliant heroic fight. Tultamaan isn't a great warrior. Neither am I. I started out by zooming far away and searing his side with lightning before he tilted his the Small Wall against it. He breathed back, but I was too far for ice to reach the first time. We got closer together, and we traded breaths for a bit. With the Hoplonton to block his cold breath mostly, and him having to guess which of my three I was going to use next, I got five hits that way and only let him touch me once. So he tried to get close enough to bite me. Being an arrogant beast sometimes, I let him. We were pretty well-matched that way. Which is shameful for me, since I was two claws up on him, but he's quick with his neck and he's still got hind claws. He was starting to catch up, eleven to seven. So I did a fast dive, taking a cold breath on the back, but getting far enough away so I could breathe lightning and he couldn't do much of anything but block it and chase me. My fifteenth try at a lightning bolt got through. Twelve to eight, for a full Duello Prolongato.\n\nWhich got appreciative nods from the other dragons. Chevethna flew up to heal me, in case anyone was confused about who was queen and who had the queen's ear, wings, and tail. (Confusion remains about who has the queen's claspers of course.)\n\nTultamaan healed himself, and glared at Chevethna. \"Your Support of your Supporters is lacking a certain Subtle Something.\"\n\n\"Now that you're not complaining about Jyothky, it is only fitting that you complain about me. Too much and I'll make the same challenge. And I am not the smallest and slowest of us,\" said Chevethna.\n\n\"Are we quite finished with the dominance contests?\" asked Boruu. \"While it is certainly a pleasure to watch our queen risk defeat for no particular reason \u2014 or to inspire loyalty in the shakiest of her troops, I'm not quite sure which \u2014 the original purpose of this gathering was to discuss conquering Hove.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. So it was,\" said Arthane."
            },
            {
                "title": "Status: Ghemel",
                "text": "We arranged ourselves in a rough circle, with Tultamaan as far from me as possible, and Chevethna on one side of me and Ythac on the other. \"Chevethna, perhaps you could tell us what's going on in Ghemel?\"\n\n\"I would say that Ghemel is well and thoroughly pacified,\" said Chevethna, strutting into the center of the circle, her oddly-masculine blue spikes pricking the air. \"Actually, I would say that Ghemel is well and thoroughly ventilated in heart and liver and lungs by the last few conquerors. Jyothky imperiously commanded us to go there and Uplift at the place. Which has worked splendidly. If you want the real reason I'm deferring to Jyothky, it's because she's been a fine general so far.\"\n\n\"By 'fine general' you must mean 'telling you to do something and then leaving you alone for a few months'?\" I said.\n\n\"Telling us to do the best thing and then not bothering us as we do it? My favorite sort of general, to be sure!\" said Arthane.\n\nBoruu poked the sand with a foreclaw. \"A more effective general might pay more attention to details on occasion. Sometimes detailed tactics may be necessary.\"\n\n\"I said nothing about 'most effective'!\" roared Arthane. \"I said 'favorite'! I enjoy a general who is in no great hurry that the city be conquered this year or a dozen years from now. A more effective general might complain when I take a week or two off to twine my wife!\"\n\n\"What's going on in the city?\" I asked. I refuse to speculate or learn anything about Chevethna's and Arthane's intimacies.\n\n\"Hospitals are going on, and a great deal of healing by spells as well. That week or two we took off, we still spent a quarter of each day healing people. Nearly everyhoven in the city is suffering from harthene poisoning, asthma, or nerve damage from pain spells.\"\n\nLlredh reared his head. \"Harthene poisoning, what is that?\"\n\n\"A waste product of making torque batteries for those big ray guns. Xolgrohim wasn't worried about safety precautions very much, and had them pour the stuff into a valley. It got everywhere. We had Hyxy come and breath-freeze the valley, so the hovens could at least pour concrete onto it and keep it from blowing around any more.\"\n\nBoruu cocked his head. \"How sane are your hovens?\"\n\n\"They are fearful. They are given to weeping and despair when they look upon the wreckage of their country. At times they fall down crying. At other times, they wander about numbly, often but not always without the wit to avoid obstacles and menaces. Occasionally they are violent and full of rage, often at the works of Xolgrohim, of Trest, of Uncle Holder, but sometimes at each other and occasionally at us. But for the most part, they are fearful. At the start of each eclipse and each night, I fly over the city, slowly and loudly, and breathe my most brilliant and harmless breath over all. They are comforted to see a mighty protector and a light against the darkness,\" said Arthane.\n\n\"Me too. Well, 'aroused' more than 'comforted'. I can take care of myself,\" said Chevethna.\n\nBoruu considered. \"So I conclude that they are not very sane?\"\n\n\"No, not very. But in a useful way,\" said Chevethna.\n\n\"What about the gods?\" I asked.\n\n\"I tried to teach Menes Hu healing spells, but they didn't take. She's been pretty helpful though. Khudris got one, barely, and then he slunk off. I don't know where he went. I don't know what became of Branner at all; he was gone by the time we got there.\"\n\n\"How about the rest of the country?\"\n\n\"We haven't worked on it much. The northern and southern regions are anarchies, with a bit of an extended festival of revenge going on in the south especially. The eastern regions were a bit worse, but that's finished now. We arranged for a partition, so that the ethnic groups who hate each other don't live quite so close together,\" said Chevethna.\n\nArthane flicked his tail. \"Not a delightful answer. Many hovens were furious at losing their homes and businesses. Better than losing lives, I thought.\"\n\nBoruu frowned. \"So, is Ghemelia conquered and under a proper dracarchy?\"\n\nArthane shrugged. \"Ghemel the city is ours by any reasonable measure. The hovens see us as rescuers and healers. They obey us without question. Perhaps this is because our orders mainly concern who will get healed and which buildings be rebuilt first, and other such needful things.\"\n\n\"That's not true! We forced them to have a festival the other week, and to perform their traditional songs and dances for us! Remember?\"\n\n\"The Kashlak Tver, yes. They more asked our permission to hold it, so, in principle, we could have told them not to,\" said Arthane. \"In any case, we have been good conquerors, and are generally much loved by Ghemel. This is pleasant.\"\n\nChevethna thumped Arthane in the face with her tail. \"My much-loved husband omits the answer to the second half of the question. The rest of Ghemelia is under no clear authority. Local warlords rule here and there. Trestean brigades control a city or two, counting as foreign warlords.\"\n\n\"They do?\" Ythac sounded alarmed. \"I thought all my armies had come back home. I ordered them to!\"\n\n\"Ex-Trestean brigades, I suppose. They're called Tresteans in Ghemelia. I'm not accusing you of anything, Ythac. Anyway, the eastern regions vaguely acknowledge our authority or perhaps just power. We haven't really conquered them in any useful sense though. The rest of the country isn't under a proper anything.\"\n\nTime to act regal. \"Ghemelia is going to be one of the moral foundations of our presence on Hove. Anyhoven wondering what we are up to should be able to look to Ghemelia, and decide that we are not completely horrid. Chevethna, Arthane, are your claws full with Ghemel, or do you have time to work on the rest of the country too?\"\n\n\"There is plenty for us to do in Ghemel. Would you rather we work on the city well, or on the whole country badly?\" said Chevethna.\n\n\"I would rather that Ghemelia be worked on well. Ignissa and Gwixion, since you have come here today, I understand that you want to be part of our scheme?\"\n\nIgnissa dipped her head elegantly. I wish I could do that. (I can dip my head. I'm sure it comes out awkward and waddly.) \"We want a domain of our own, and a generous one. We do not expect to get it without fighting or some sort of labors.\"\n\nI turned. \"Boruu, please cast the Draft of Direction and find out which part of Ghemelia would respond the most to Ignissa and Gwixion cleaning it up. They shall go there first. Perhaps the rest of Ghemelia will accept their direction better, having seen what they can do.\"\n\nHe stared at me. \"What, now?\" I don't think he was expecting me to give him any orders.\n\n\"Today we are deciding what to do. If you can't manage the spell, O sorcerer of information, I will ask the king to do it.\"\n\n\"As you usually do!\" scribbled the king.\n\n\"Shush! I am trying to exert authority here!\" I scribbled back.\n\nBoruu frowned. \"I... well, yes. I suppose I was expecting that we would make general plans and not worry about which province to go for first.\"\n\n\"We have a general plan: insidious insinuation. We will be useful and benevolent for duodecades, and prove that hovens are better off under our rule. Aside from the practical and ethical advantages, this plan will put off for quite some time the day when Chevethna deposes me.\"\n\nWhich got Chevethna blowing firebubbles at me for the rest of the meeting when I wasn't looking."
            },
            {
                "title": "Status: Trest",
                "text": "\"I don't mean to disintegrate Jyothky's plans in the darkness of my breath,\" said Ythac, \"But Trest is not being an example that hovens are better off under our rule. Not yet.\" He lashed his tail. \"I don't think it's the fault of our rule. The hovens aren't cooperating very well.\"\n\nI waddled over and leaned against Ythac's side. \"I know. Tarcuna gives me no end of misery about it. But your troubles are the best evidence that a direct military conquest won't work properly here. If you don't mind telling us?\"\n\nYthac put a wing over my flank. \"I don't mind telling you. Llredh conquered Trest for me as a wedding present...\" He told the story of the conquest in cold Grand Draconic, without an inflectional marker of how he felt about it.\n\n\"That's certainly a more classic form of conquest than insidious insinuation. In some texts, it is the best form of conquest, when it works. It is quick. It preserves the value of the country, which conquest by flame does not.\" (That's burning a few cities, destroying the army, and demanding surrender of whatever is left. The dragons of Hasqueth conquered by flame, and notoriously burnt up a vast treasure of peerlessly carved bone and wood, and caused an economic collapse which cost them two-thirds of their subject population over the next duodecade.) \"If the leader is hated, as Shuvanne seems to have been, it may engender less resentment than conquest by flame, as well.\"\n\nYthac flicked his tail. \"I haven't lived inside those texts, though I certainly read them. Trest obeys us, Trest is conquered. Trest does not obey us well. I have commanded vast public works; they are not being built, or not fast or skillfully. I have proclaimed beneficial laws; they are not enforced, or not very often. I have revealed the peril of cyoziworms, with plentiful evidence from hoven scientists; the populace does not believe me. Dragons are feared in Trest, but not respected and certainly not loved. Chevethna and Arthane have better control of Ghemel than I do of Trest, and never mind that I've been at it much longer.\"\n\n\"You have my sympathy, and if I could figure out how to support you, I would,\" I said, and hugged him again. \"But I think I understand something of the hoven psyche by now. They are not an easy people to conquer. The mhelvul were easy; they lived as slaves of their paingods in any case. We simply took the place of the masters, and the mhelvul obeyed us. Hovens... some hovens are slaves, to be sure. Mostly they aren't, or not exactly. The peasants in Damma can vote for the rulers of their country, though their votes are often ignored and generally bought. The citizens of Trest had much more say about the government of Trest than the peasants of Damma. Having had this taste of power and autonomy, hovens react very badly to being conquered by greater force. Oh, and the greater force is a problem too; they have killed a dragon, once.\"\n\n\"They killed a dragon after we had weakened him greatly and broken his apotropaics,\" said Csirnis. \"I am not sure how even their greatest guns would work against, say, Boruu and his quotidian protections.\"\n\n\"True. That matters a great deal in a war. If we get impatient and try to conquer by force, we will have to worry about that extensively. But in the minds of hovens, we are not unkillable near-gods from beyond the universe. We are monsters of considerable power, yes, but we can be defeated and killed, and they know it.\"\n\n\"When were we ever unkillable?\" asked Gwixion. \"Mhelvul must have killed nearly a dozen of us.\"\n\n\"Unprotected children and careless adults were killed, much after the conquest. When nineteen dragons came to Mhel with flame and magic, a grand of mhelvul gods died, but not one dragon,\" Ythac said.\n\n\"Not so on Hove,\" I said. \"We have lost one already. I do not intend that we lose another. So the theme of our conquest of Hove is this: In regular conquests, resistance to us seems impossible and hopeless. When we move to conquer Hove, resistance to us shall seem short-sighted and pointless. Hovens will not fight us. They will choose us.\"\n\nArthane cheered and crashed his wings together. The rest of my friends smiled, more or less dubiously. Boruu, who is not particularly my friend, rolled his eyes. \"You're not planning to rule for a gross of years, or two, or three, are you? Hove doesn't have a single world-wide government, and if it did, they certainly wouldn't abdicate in your favor any time soon.\"\n\n\"I think I could endure simply being wealthy, powerful, much-loved by a medium-sized country, and, of course, frequently found in the company of my husband. Speaking as someone who had intended to rule Hove, and still might at some point,\" said Chevethna. \"This will come about over the next year or two.\"\n\n\"Exactly. We'll rule Ghemelia, or we sort of do already. We'll fix it up, and then we'll have a home country for the first while,\" I said. \"We'll pick up a few other countries here and there too. We don't need to conquer Hove all at once: one country at a time, as convenient. That's the 'insinuation' part of the plan.\"\n\nBoruu shrugged. \"I don't suppose I had any big plans for the next grand of years. None that Chevethna and Arthane hadn't already dashed, anyway.\"\n\n\"This isn't the last planning meeting we'll have,\" said Ythac. \"In a duodecade, or twelve, we can change our minds and conquer the place by flame and magic. What is harder is to start off conquering by flame, and then switch to insidious means. I know that rather too well.\" He disentangled from me and embraced Llredh, rather shyly. \"Though I do not reject or resent my husband's present in the least.\"\n\nArthane hissed to me, \"They really are in love, aren't they? I do not understand that. I do not even want to understand that.\"\n\nI hissed back, \"Well, I don't understand how anydragon can be in love. I don't need to understand it, I just need to pretend it made any sense and that the dragons involved care about it.\"\n\nHe didn't speak for another dozen minutes, chewing on that."
            },
            {
                "title": "On the Use of Supernatural Medicine as a Tool of Conquest",
                "text": "\"Do you have any particular part in this conquest for Boruu and myself?\" asked Psilia.\n\n\"I have a part for you to consider, and tell me whether you can put up with it,\" I said. \"If you can't, I'm sure there are plenty of other choices.\"\n\n\"I'm worried already,\" she said.\n\n\"Chevethna said you're a good healer. I would like you two to go Zheribac and set up a medical practice,\" I said.\n\nShe looked at her flank regretfully, where dozens of scales were loose. She put some small and elegantly-scented healing spells into a couple of them. \"I am a good healer. Not because I enjoy it, though. With my weak scales, I get hurt far too much, and somebody has to take care of it. Which usually means me, but sometimes Boruu. So we've got the power to do that.\"\n\n\"She is unenthusiastic, not being much of an Uplifter at all,\" said Boruu. \"I am an Uplifter, though like most of us I prefer to uplift my own small people intead of some that I've never met in a country that I've never been to. Perhaps you could explain your intent here? In your most inspiring words?\"\n\n\"I am not an Uplifter at all. I am a Downcrusher. You would be too, if you visited the war-pits of Logresh,\" said Psilia.\n\n\"I never have,\" I said. \"But we're on Hove now, and I hope I don't need to explain again why we're taking a slow and subtle approach.\" Two-thirds of an hour of repeated explanations later, plus an incomprehensible but rather upset polemic from Llredh, we got back to the point. \"I want to start the process of getting hovens to regard dragons as powerful, benevolent beings who will, for suitable consideration, bring them good things that hovens cannot procure for themselves. So I want you to heal them \u2014 especially diseases that they don't know how to cure \u2014 for money.\"\n\nBoruu nodded. \"How much money?\"\n\n\"Lots of money,\" I said. \"But not lots and lots of money. Ythac, could you please use your considerable hoven spy network to find out how much a doctor charges for treating, oh, Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome for a year? In Trest, if not in Zheribac. That should be what you charge for a full heal, Psilia. We want to be Hove's best and most expensive doctors.\"\n\nChevethna laughed. \"You have done your homework, if you know the uncurable local diseases already! If anyone doubts my wisdom in putting Jyothky in charge, let them listen to this!\"\n\n\"Well, if you were in charge, I'd be just as helpful,\" I told her, because I am the worst dragon for dominance that ever was. So she bit my wing as punishment for defying her in her support of me, which is very confusing. Psilia is very good at healing spells though. She used a small one like a silver ball full of plainsongs, that worked more nicely than the Rose Rescaler and with a twelfth the effort.\n\nTultamaan shook his head. \"You are being Unwise. You may think you're working in support of your scheme, but you're really not.\"\n\nI hissed at him, \"And you may think that you're keeping your promise not to complain, but you're really not.\"\n\nTultamaan shrugged his wings. \"I'm not coming here to be Useless, you know. I'm not just on this trip because I Know The Way. I have Many Excellent Ideas.\"\n\n\"You're just on this trip because the king of Mhel finally got sick of you, plus you were poaching from Rankotherium, and you got exiled,\" I shrilled.\n\n\"That's one Way of Looking At It. A Wrong Way, but it is one Way,\" he said. Infuriating beast. \"Are you ready to hear the Devastating Flaw in your Current Scheme? Together with the readily-available Means for Fixing It? Or would your Royal Queeniness prefer a bit more Libel first? I don't mind. I'm quite used to it.\"\n\n\"Just say it, Tultamaan. If it's your usual whining nonsense we're going to fight another Duello Prolongato, though,\" I said.\n\n\"I imagine we'll end up fighting, because you don't seem to Understand Things Very Well sometimes. But here it is, None The Less. You said we were to become Hove's best and most expensive doctors,\" he said in a mockingly gutteral version of my voice. I nodded sharply. \"And you also said that we're trying to become well-loved by hovens,\" he continued. I nodded to that.\n\n\"Now, your Brilliant and Insightful Investigation into the depths of the hoven mind \u2014 which involves shapeshifting, does it not? And has something to do with that whore who follows you around constantly? \u2014 In any case, you might not know this, but the most expensive doctors are Not the best-loved. They are, I would suspect, rather Unpopular.\"\n\nI hissed annoyedly. \"The price isn't to be well-loved, Tultamaan. You're missing the point. We also need to become rich. We want to live well while we're conquering the place. And, for that matter, wealth will let us conquer more easily: if a country has a famine, we could buy them food, and earn that much extra gratitude.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I had gotten that far, and Quite a Few Steps Further. But y'don't want one part of your plan to Counteract the other. That's casting spells into your v\u00f4. You don't want the doctoring to make us Unpopular. And if there is any dragon who understands Unpopularity in all its varigated Splendor, that dragon is Myself.\"\n\nI flicked my tail. \"For some very good reasons. Go on.\"\n\n\"So Psilia and Boruu ought to charge a lot sometimes. But they ought to do half their healing for free. Hire a hoven secretary to hold a lottery, perhaps. Show everyone that they are Benevolent and Hoven-Loving Creatures, who mean nothing but Good Will to the Whole World. Unlike the wicked tan personage who showed up at the Kyongsy Temple first, who might have given them the Wrong Impression. What was her name again? I seem to recall that she was the Less Inferior of my last pack of fianc\u00e9es, back when I still thought such things mattered.\"\n\n\"Um... Arilash?\" guessed Arthane, while I spluttered sparks and other sparks.\n\n\"Arilash! I remember now, yes, Arilash. What has become of Dear Little Arilash? I haven't seen her or heard of her since the war.\" Which surely was a lie; I can't imagine Tultamaan not keeping up with the gossip. \"In any case, if this honored and surely entirely proper Couple.\" He swept a wing at Boruu and Psilia. Everyone but Nrararn and Csirnis and I laughed. \"This Couple who Surely are Uninvolved in any Indecencies with Arilash or Anyone Else. If they charge high fees sometimes, and free sometimes, they will get both the Wealth and the Good Regard that fit in your plan. They won't be working against themselves.\"\n\nBoruu grinned. \"The real reason Tultamaan came to Hove: Psilia is the one dragoness anywhere who will have him.\"\n\nPsilia smirked. \"He's not that bad a lover. If you wrap your tail around his muzzle to shut him up, of course.\"\n\nI snarled at them. \"Please keep that private. Hove isn't all libertines.\"\n\nShe slithered over and bonked her muzzle against the underside of my chin, which is a sort of lightly grovelly apology. \"I'm sorry. I'm not used to having any other libertines around, or dragons who tolerate us.\"\n\nI licked her between the eyes, which is the polite acceptance of that apology. \"I'm getting used to the libertine part. I did share a cave with Arilash for a long while. But the last breaking of my mating flight is still poison-bitter on my tongue.\"\n\nBoruu had been chatting with Tultamaan. When I finished mutually apologizing on his wife, he spread his wings. \"I think I like Tultamaan's plan, to get both money and respect of hovens. We'll present it as compensation for Arilash's fight at the Kyongsy Temple, even.\"\n\n\"Which was also My Idea. A Codicil on my Previous Point,\" said Tultamaan.\n\nI bit my left wing. \"Right. It does sound like a good plan, Tultamaan.\"\n\n\"Heartfelt Thanks are not necessary, Jyothky. An Angry Expression of Adequacy will suffice. It's not as if your plans would be Completely and Inevitably Thwarted by your own incompetence without me. They might simply be Greatly Delayed.\"\n\n\"Tultamaan, thank you for contributing to our plans, and if you ever have any other improvements to them, please don't hesitate to say them. Though with fewer insults, if you can manage it.\" Getting the words out was not so easy, and I don't think they sounded quite sincere, because they weren't. He's bad enough when he's wrong, but he's utterly horrid when he's right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Privately",
                "text": "There was a great deal else to say. We said it all, at least six times each, and it took all day and through eclipse and well into night, and I was so glad when ten of those dragons left. The eleventh one, Csirnis, left too, which was rather insulting since he's engaged to me and he hadn't treated me a bit like a fianc\u00e9e.\n\nStill, that left me and Nrararn and a whole lot of quiet, flying over a fecund forest in the middle of the night.\n\n\"I know you're probably tired of talking, but there's one thing that still bothers me,\" he said.\n\nI was tired of talking, but I know how to treat a fianc\u00e9, even if Csirnis doesn't anymore. And that's not just twining him. \"If there's only one, you're in better shape than anyone.\"\n\n\"One thing that nobody quite said. Conquest by fire always works. Well, mostly. Sometimes you end up with a cinder-world, or sometimes you try to kill a god too big or something and you have to run away. But we could pretty much conquer Hove by fire if we tried. We'd be boiling our tails afterwards, but we'd win.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, because it's true.\n\n\"Insidious insinuation doesn't always work. It doesn't even often work. We've been on Yyrclarian for how long? Two grand of years? I think we own about eight cities and a pawful of islands.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, because that's true too.\n\n\"What if it doesn't work here?\"\n\n\"Then we'll be stuck living very well here, without actually ruling, the way the dragons of Yyrclarian do. And we'll have been treating the hovens decently all the while, too. Think you could stand that?\"\n\nNrararn thought a while, which I really do appreciate. \"I wasn't exactly expecting to hold territory myself in any case. I'm still not sure if you're going to marry me.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure either,\" I said, because it's true. \"I haven't made up my mind one way or another. I have a few years left.\"\n\n\"I suppose that the burghers of Yyrclarian endure their fates with aplomb. And with a rather more lavish lifestyle than we had on Mhel, mostly. I could probably do the same,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"Well, will you support me in doing this the slow but morally defensible way? I'm trying to behave well towards everyone anymore, even hovens. Not that it's easy or even possible.\" I demanded, which is rather rude in retrospect.\n\nHe laughed. \"If I say yes, will it get me married?\"\n\n\"If you say yes, it will get you twined,\" I said. \"Behaving well towards everyone starts with my fianc\u00e9s.\"\n\n\"That's the best offer I'm like to get, for love or life. So yes,\" he said.\n\nWe're not Arthane and Chevethna. We're not even Nrararn and Arilash. But he seems to have an adequately good time with me. Unlike the dragons who used to inhabit the temporary tents in the Imperial Patthakadu Cavalry Academy."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Conquest of Vlechinse (Day 944)",
                "text": "I'm not quite sure why Vlechinse brought out their whole army when we came to visit. They hadn't done very much to us the last time we came to Vlechinse and fought them over Port-of-Zom. Or maybe that was a good reason: they wanted to show that they were brave enough to face us again. We weren't persuaded, since they stank of fear all day. But they didn't run away either.\n\nPremier Clistei rather stank of fear too, poor hoven. He had six huge tanks with big twistor cannons on each side of him. That gave him no great chance of surviving a fight: there was nothing but the eighty-eight stairs leading to the front door of the Vlechinse parliament hall between him and us. \"You have requested a meeting, O dragons,\" he announced when we landed. \"What do you want?\"\n\nThis was an unduly difficult question. The answer was easy enough: I wanted to apologize for my part in wrecking Port-of-Zom. Because we \u2014 all the dragons \u2014 were trying to appear as friends to hovens and reasonable neighbors, despite a rather dubious start and some of us having conquered one big country. Also because I was, and am, sorry for killing all sorts of hovens, for all sorts of reasons that were mostly good at the time but seem rather petty now. Mostly I can't do anything about it.\n\nBut of course one can't say \"I'm sorry for killing your soldiers when they tried to defend that city, and I'd like good relations between us so we can get started conquering your great-grandchildrens' country. Or at least getting rid of your cyoziworms only without all the blood and flame this time.\" One does not admit mistakes like that if one is honorable, and one does not admit plots like that if one is sensible. I'm not nearly enough of either one, but with Csirnis at my left flank I managed to be a bit more attentive. Nrararn and Osoth, whom I'd managed to talk into helping, are about like me.\n\nI didn't know the etiquette. It's part of the proper way of dealing with free small people and free small-people countries, of which there were none on Mhel. I had had to ask Csirnis as we flew there. There weren't any on Chiriact either, but of course Csirnis knows every etiquette.\n\n\"I come with demands for the people and the country of Vlechinse. In four days you must bring four grand of sick hovens to four hospitals in four cities. Each of these sick hovens must be suffering from a disease or injury against which hoven science is helpless. In those places, by our might, the sick hovens will get their healing.\" The honorable approach is to arrogantly phrase your apology as a set of inexorable demands which must be obeyed.\n\nPremier Clistei was no more familiar with this corner of etiquette than I was. \"And what else?\"\n\n\"I have presented the fullness of our demands upon Vlechinse!\", I said, which I hope is the right answer. I glanced at Csirnis with my left eye, but he was carefully impassive and dignified.\n\nClistei seemed a bit bewildered. \"You are demanding patients to heal?\"\n\n\"Other countries have felt the weight of our powers of healing!\" I proclaimed. \"Now it is the turn of Vlechinse!\" Csirnis was clearly exerting himself to stay impassive, and Nrararn was out-and-out snickering. Fine. I will couple with Osoth tonight!\n\n(And I'll hope that that's still an attraction anymore.)\n\nThe premier didn't snicker, at least. He looked nervous and dubious. \"What, precisely, do you hope to accomplish with this?\"\n\n\"By this exercise we demonstrate our majesty!\" I explained. Nobody found this persuasive, least of all me.\n\nCsirnis butted his head against mine. \"May I explain further?\" I gave him grudging eager permission. \"In other lands, such as Ze Cheya, dragons live harmoniously with hovens, to the extent that hoven politics permits. Part of the harmony is based on a simple exchange: the dragon is a doctor in ways that hoven doctors are incapable of applying. In return, hovens provide things which hoven science and hoven craft and hoven hands can do. In my case, this is largely food, a place to live, and occasional presents.\"\n\n\"That is Ze Cheya,\" said the premier. \"And what, precisely, do you hope to get here? Are you coming to live?\"\n\n\"After we have finished with our healing, we shall depart from Vlechinse and cavort for some days in the sea,\" he said.\n\n\"I am unclear on your motives, dragon of Ze Cheya,\" said the premier.\n\n\"We wish to be regarded as valuable and welcome guests wherever on Hove we choose to travel,\" said Csirnis, beautifully skirting between truth and apology. \"Vlechinse has reason to regard dragons otherwise. The reasons are outdated; we no longer hold hovens responsible for the actions of the wormridden. So, we come to explain the matter further, in the most direct way possible. You have seen our powers of widespread destruction. Now you shall see our powers of widespread benefice.\"\n\n\"And if we refuse?\"\n\n\"Then six thousand, nine hundred, and twelve hovens will die, that we could have saved,\" said Csirnis, so diplomatically that he actually used decimal numbers.\n\n\"You would simply depart?\"\n\n\"We would be offended! We would depart, and not return any time soon. And we would visit each neighboring country, and work an extravagance of healing there. Your citizens would soon grow to understand the vast blessing that you cast aside,\" said Csirnis. It always comes down to threats sooner or later.\n\n\"I shall consult with my cabinet,\" said the premier.\n\n\"Take not overlong! In four days we shall expect our patients. If they are not there, neither shall we be there for overlong,\" said Csirnis. He made a secret gesture, and we all took off in a thunder of wings, more or less simultaneously. The tanks pointed their twistor cannons at us as we left. It will be a long time before Vlechinse trusts us.\n\nAnd a long time before we've earned their trust. I don't know what we'd do without Csirnis. I should marry him straightaway.\n\nCoda: Yes, Yes.\n\nVlechinse accepted our apology charity demonstration of power. I had to get Tarcuna to call him and explain where the patients should go, though.\n\nOsoth accepted my offer to couple. He didn't seem particularly unhappy about it, though not nearly as eager as the first time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Terror Hospital (Day 948)",
                "text": "A grand of patients filled the Igtatte havocs arena quite nicely. The sicker and worse-injured lay on cots on the field, with a gross of harried nurses running to and fro trying to keep them alive. The greater part of the patients waited in the bleachers. A small herd of gendarmes stood attentively. A large herd of soldiers blocked the exits. The whole place smelled of fear and hatred.\n\nWell, I had insisted upon this chore, and bullied my fianc\u00e9s and Vlechinse into it. I landed in the middle of the arena, and started putting the Arcane Anodyne into everyone I could reach. Cancers and syndromes spilled shrieking into the outer darkness before me. Or at least hovens stopped being unhealthy.\n\n\"That feels much better,\" said one young man, sitting up for the first time in probably a long while.\n\n\"Glad to hear it!\" I said. I finished up the last two people on the field, and shouted at the gendarmes to bring the people from the stands down here because I certainly wasn't going up there at my size.\n\n\"What happens next?\" he asked.\n\n\"I think a bunch of people with Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome, if my tongue is right,\" I said, showing off nearly the full extent of my hoven medical knowledge.\n\n\"I mean, after all the healing.\"\n\nI cocked my head. \"That's up to you, I suppose. Your family or whoever, too. You could spontaneously decide to contribute a grand of thurnies to me.\" We are not specifically shaking the hovens down at the moment, so I added, \"Or write a nice thank-you note, or whatever the Vlechinse do in response to nice gifts. And I certainly would appreciate it if, whenever someone asks why you're still alive, you say that Jyothky healed you. You can call me 'Spotty' or 'the black one' if you'd rather. Not 'The Black Curse'; I don't really like that nickname.\"\n\n\"Do I just go home?\"\n\n\"I imagine so,\" I said, as I made a ragged woman with ragged clothes stop having a blood disorder that didn't quite smell like Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome. \"Assuming that you've got a home.\"\n\nHe shrank a bit. \"What did you do to it?\"\n\n\"Nothing! I just don't know the first thing about you, other than you were sick. And come from Vlechinse. OK, I know the first and second things about you, but not the third. Maybe you've been an orphan for the last dozen years and don't have a home.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I have a home. My parents are waiting outside, beyond the soldiers. I'm Hemm.\"\n\nI waved a wing a bit. \"Glad to meet you, Hemm. Why are there soldiers out there, anyway? If they attack me I'm probably going to wind up killing more people today than I healed. Which isn't what I got up this morning to do.\"\n\n\"The soldiers? They're making sure none of us run away.\"\n\n\"Why would you run away from getting healed?\"\n\nHis fur went muddy. \"The rumor was, you'd be taking us for slaves afterwards.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"No. I've got one hoven slave already and there's no end to the trouble she causes me.\" (Tarcuna is back in Damma, enjoying an utterly unearned vacation with the help of two very expensive hired girlfriends. She is treating them very nicely, having worked in that trade herself.)\n\n\"Glad to hear it.\"\n\nI smirked at him. \"Glad that she's causing me trouble? Do you perhaps think that she causes me so much trouble that I fly to Vlechinse for a day of medical exercises to get away from her?\"\n\nHe dipped his head. \"No, I spoke wrong. Glad not to be taken as a slave myself.\"\n\nI healed a couple more hovens, and said to Hemm, \"Oh, that. I'm glad not to be taking slaves. For one thing, carrying a grand of you would be a bother and a half. And feeding and tending you would be even more inconvenient. A starving slave is a useless slave. A naked slave is a slave who is about to get his legs infested with mites, in Damma at least, and that's not much more useful,\" I said. He looked nervous, so I added, \"I'm joking. I mean, everything I said is true \u2014 dragons generally don't lie. But I'd rather have servants than slaves. They usually do a better job, and they don't smell nearly so miserable.\"\n\nHe didn't look greatly comforted. \"Can I go home now, please?\"\n\nI blinked. \"Oh, certainly! Just chatting. Casting the same spell all afternoon is a bit tedious, and I've two or three gross more to do.\"\n\nHe thanked in my general direction a bit, while I healed three more people, and ran off towards an exit. In a few minutes he was back, \"The soldiers still won't let us out. My parents are probably dying of terror outside.\"\n\nI looked at the line of patients. They were all dying too, of worse than plain terror, but by months not by hours. \"I should do something about that, shouldn't I?\" I raised my voice and said, \"I'm going to take a break and tell the soldiers to let everyone go. Back in a few minutes to heal you. Don't go away!\" Hemm looked a bit quizzical at that, so I added, \"Unless you want to!\" He grinned, though nobody else did. (I am clearly conquering Hove one hoven at a time. Two already, and I've only been working at it about 948 days.)\n\nThe soldiers didn't want to let the patients out of the arena. \"Rather, we'd love to let them go, but we have our orders,\" said the commandant.\n\n\"Would it be quicker if you got new orders, or if I dispersed you myself, do you think?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Let me call my commanding officer, please,\" he said.\n\nIt wasn't quicker, but in a third of an hour, ex-patients were leaving the stadium to their families.\n\nTwo hours after that, I finished with the last patient and got to leave, myself. I have no family per se here. I joined Osoth, who is the worst healer among my fianc\u00e9s, and helped him finish up. He wasn't particularly grateful, since I had made him do the work in the first place. So I let him stop altogether, and conjure a choir of ghosts singing patriotic Vlechinse anthems and drinking songs 'til I finished his chores."
            },
            {
                "title": "Undercover (Day 1126)",
                "text": "\"Your cooks aren't very good, I'm afraid,\" Nrararn said to Ythac, digging a seven-inch shard of glass out of his gum with a claw.\n\nYthac nodded ruefully. \"Haphazard and careless. I suppose we could go interrogate them and discover the perfectly ordinary and natural explanation of why Pern St.-Hermaph, who is widely recognized as one of the best barbeque chefs in all of Trest, accidentally leaves large chunks of glass in an animal intended for an honored guest of his master. If you like.\"\n\nNrararn and I looked around the banquet hall. It was large enough, at least; it could have held eight dragons, not just four and one hoven. It was supposed to be a rectangular prism, which is a simple shape and ought to be well within the skills of the expert architects and building companies that Ythac had drafted to make his palace. The walls jogged crazily in the middle, though, where the surveyors had unaccountably made a whole hooflength of an error. I took a tenasensitive glance, and closed the blades over that sense; the entire room was rancid with tiny structural flaws. \"Why do you put up with it?\"\n\n\"Bah, the minor inconveniences, they are nothing to us,\" said Llredh. \"Mighty dragons, they dwell here! Effete comforts, they are not our urgent need! Your own flanks and wings, they have felt worse than some bit of glass! They have felt my claws, my fangs, when we contended as fianc\u00e9s!\"\n\nYthac shrugged. \"I fired the first few incompetent hovens. Which produced such a wave of incompetence, you could never believe it. The gentleman who painted that wall did it with his eyes closed.\" Ythac gestured with a wing; the one wall that was not bare concrete was a mess of blue and white streaks. \"He said he did it that way so as not to get any paint in his eyes, truthfully. He said he usually wore protective goggles, but had neglected to bring them, truthfully. He said that he had forgotten them, lying. He said that he was in such a hurry to do the wall that he did not wish to go get another set, lying. He said he was sorry for any inadequacy in his work, lying. He said he wouldn't charge us, true, but he was doing corv\u00e9e labor anyway. I nearly killed him out of frustration, but how could I kill someone for just painting badly?\"\n\n\"The crazy Uplifter, he is my husband dear! That crime, or far less, for that I could kill any hoven. When skill returns to them, then they deserve such mercies.\"\n\n\"If you killed everyone who did badly by you, you'd have no subjects left,\" said Tarcuna, who knows how to talk to us.\n\n\"Bah! Useless subjects, dead subjects, what is the difference to us?\" roared Llredh, loudly, in Trestean. Then, more quietly, in Petty Draconic, \"Actually the difference is fairly large, but we can hope that they are intimidated into better obedience by hearing that.\"\n\nI don't think Tarcuna followed that, since she just said, \"Unless you rescued a few from cyoziworms. Then you'd have a few completely devoted hovens.\" Which got the two of them discussing the devermification plans, which were going as badly as everything else involving unwilling hovens. Worse, since most hovens don't believe in cyoziworms, still.\n\n\"Jyothky, do you remember how Llredh and I flew out to Ghemel to help you and protect you against Xolgrohim? How we were prepared to dive into a trap to save you, though it turned out unnecessary?\" asked Ythac.\n\n\"Yes, of course. I'm quite glad to have friends like you. Especially since you're not just after my claspers.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon!\" chirped Nrararn. \"I am not just after your claspers. I am after your matrimony!\"\n\n\"You are after my claspers for life, then!\" A certain amount of swatting each other with claws was obligatory (and fun) at this point.\n\nYthac waited for us to finish, and then he said, \"I was wondering if you could do me a favor as well, Jyothky. There aren't very many dragons I can ask, and not very many hovens I can trust.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"You like turning into a small person and, well, pretending to be one...\" he said. I nodded, because it was true. \"Could you lurk around for a while in small person shape, and, oh, find the special solution to all my problems?\"\n\n\"I can do half of that,\" I said. \"I don't know what I'll find that you can't find with finding spells.\"\n\n\"You'll learn things, you'll get clues and hints. Maybe you'll come up with something that can let hovens tolerate us better. I'm trying to be a good ruler, really I am, but I can barely get anyone to obey me at all, and when they do it always comes out all wrong.\"\n\n\"I'll go with her,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"That you will not,\" I told her. \"They hate you more than Llredh, I think.\"\n\n\"I don't care what they think anymore. I've been despised as a woman-lover, then as a whore, now as a dragon-lover.\"\n\n\"But if they recognize you, they will probably try to kill you. Then I'll have to massacre some of them to rescue you, again, and that will just make Ythac's lot that much harder,\" I told her. \"You can stay here and entertain Llredh.\" Which got a snicker from Llredh and a snarl from Ythac. \"And give me advice by the Horizonal Quill, so I'm not quite such a naive idiot all the time.\" Which she accepted grudgingly. My minion isn't any more obedient than Ythac's subjects, though she's certainly more determined to be helpful than they are.\n\n\"I'll go with you,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"I don't quite know why two confused hovens will do better than one confused hoven,\" I said.\n\n\"I will be your pet cat. Your loyal and very clever pet cat, who follows you everywhere and only talks to you by means of the Horizonal Quill. And, incidentally, will blast any cyoziworm that shows up with lightning breath,\" said Nrararn. I suppose he likes animal shapes. He didn't mind being a duck, back in the mirror cave.\n\n\"Excellent. I've found you the best subversive group to infiltrate,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Did I agree to go?\" I asked, because I hadn't.\n\n\"Didn't you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nYthac reared up and hissed. \"If...\"\n\n\"I was going to, but everyone kept trying to come with me, so I didn't get the words out. Of course I will, Ythac.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "1779 Morganthaler Street West",
                "text": "I have seen prettier cities than Tublier. Greater Naspen (the district) is generally a beautiful place, with its own distinctive architectural style dating back several gross years, all wide arches and big plazas and low domes with oblate stones on the top, pink and sparkly grey brick. Tublier is a new city, though, which grew up from a small town because of the zeppelin business, and such as that. So it's all quick blocky rectangular apartment buildings, hung about with drying laundry on lines on every balcony. I rented Apartment 28J at 1779 Morganthaler Street West, furnished. I paid an extra month's rent in cash, in advance, as a deposit in case my cat took his true form and destroyed the whole miserable building peed on the carpet or brought new insects to join the large and vibrant colony that already lived in the mattress.\n\n\"I'm sorry, the furniture isn't in the best shape, it's a bit uncomfortable,\" said the superintendant apologetically. \"I'll bring you a better bed when one frees up, and there's a nice armchair in 21G when that comes open you can have.\" His lies were rotting fish to my veriception, but I had to ignore them.\n\n\"I've slept on worse and not felt it,\" I said, truthfully. I don't generally like lying \u2014 my own lies are no more pleasant to veriception than anyone else's \u2014 and I seemed to want to see how truthful I could be and still fool everyone. If I were alone I wouldn't fuss quite so much, but with Nrararn watching I wanted to be punctilious. Or at least look brilliantly clever. For once.\n\n\"Well then, it might be two or three days 'til the new one comes, and I hope you can wait,\" he said, lying. \"The last tenant left some food, pasta and olive oil and stuff, you can use that. There's a convenience store in the first floor across the street, too.\" He showed me the security features, which weren't very, told me that as a special favor (lie) I could use the freight elevator if the people elevators were full or broken (true), and accepted my money (happily).\n\n\"Are you actually going to sleep on that bed?\" Nrararn asked.\n\n\"I don't see why not.\"\n\nNrararn, who was a small and very white tomcat distinctly lacking in horns, spikes, rainbows, or lightning braids, leapt onto the bed and lashed it with his hukuch\u00f4. A grand of bugs fled or died. He gathered them in a whirlwind and threw them out the window.\n\n\"That should do 'til the next generation hatches,\" I wrote to him. I'm not sure why I was writing rather than talking; good practice perhaps. \"But you'd better not do any of that when there are hovens around. Hove's cats generally are more circumspect with their astral sorcery.\"\n\n\"I am merely looking out for your dignity. It would be unseemly if welts were showing under your beautiful yet short hoven fur.\"\n\n\"Really. I don't want to disappoint Ythac. I do owe him.\"\n\n\"Really on my part too.\" He smelled a bit eager, and it was late in the day, and the bed was clean. So I turned into a cat myself, then back into a hoven to get the olive oil, and thanked Nrararn for whatever. Or just for being Nrararn and putting up with me, which not many people do anymore. He was unusually vigorous and enthusiastic, so we had a long talk afterwards about how he likes being small harmless animals sometimes and I like being small people sometimes and how we shouldn't be quite so embarrassed about that in front of Llredh and Ythac and Arilash and Boruu and Psilia and Kuro and Osoth and all, because their tastes are far more questionable than anything either of us would do. I don't know what Osoth did to get on that list, aside from being a pretty good friend of ours, and I hope I never find out."
            },
            {
                "title": "RARU (Day 1128)",
                "text": "Ythac had picked out RARU because it was large and particularly careless about new members. \"Though nearly a quarter of my subjects are in some sort of anti-dragon society or other, if you're a bit generous with the definition. Far too many to do anything about. And it's growing. I should just make a law that everyone needs to join a seditious organization and leave it at that. A few subjects might choose not to join one because of that law.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "He was right. Two RARU members were handing out flyers on the corner of Burrer avenue and Twelfth street to anyone who looked (a) hoven and (b) not like a gendarme. My hoven clothing was a very ordinary workaday tunic, blue and slightly stained, and a two-flounced skirt, also blue but not stained, and I wasn't wearing wire hoop insignia, so I got a flyer",
                "text": "Are you unhappy with the current administration? Do you disapprove of the actions and the nature of the government? Do you find their actions unfair and inappropriate? Come to a peaceful demonstration at the St.-Larque Government Building an hour after Eclipse!\n\nA pair of gendarmes walked past me as I read it, their hatchets thumping against their leather leggings. The RARU flyers looked nervous, and so I did too. (But my small white cat was brave.) One of the gendarmes frowned, and extorted a flyer. He read it, and showed it to the other. \"It is nothing, merely a silly advertisement for some concert or other.\" The other nodded. \"Nothing we should be concerned about.\" They handed the flyer back to the RARU members, and wished them a pleasant afternoon and a good concert. So much for the loyalty and diligence of Ythac's gendarmes. At least it is clear why RARU is so careless about new members.\n\nThe demonstration didn't have the fury of the one that Llredh had broken in Churry City so long ago. The St.-Larque Government Building stands stolidly behind a large semicircular amphitheatre. Someone had hung a banner reading \"Dragons out of Trest!\" between two third-floor windows of the Government Building. \"A printed banner, not just casually painted on a sheet. They have used it before,\" wrote Nrararn. \"A weather-stained banner, at that, used many times.\"\n\n\"Ythac doesn't have a government in Tublier. He's got a rebellion disguised as a city. If not as a province.\"\n\nRARU didn't quite hand out programs and sell expensive cups of very good fermented watermelon juice, but almost. They did have a table offering knit hats with the letters RARU around the brim, and pamphlets which would have gotten the writers burnt up in Llredh's breath if half what they wrote was true, and biscuits and cookies. I bought a hat and a cookie. \"No, you can't have any,\" I told Nrararn. \"If you want to eat cookies, be an omnivorous pet.\"\n\n\"I won't give up my fangs. Unlike some dragons,\" he answered. So I teased him about the intimacies he's not giving up in that form either, and what I would do to him when I got him back to the apartment. I felt rather like Arilash to talk that way, or at least like an ordinary grownup.\n\nThen the speakers started. The demonstration had an easy rhythm. One person would stand on stage, being introduced in highly enigmatic terms like \"Brother Red\" or \"Magistrate Turquoise\" . Many of them wore masks of the appropriate color, presumably so that the gendarmes would have to take the extra quarter-minute's effort to remove the mask when they got arrested. Not that the gendarmes were arresting anyone that day; they seemed quite oblivious to the whole event. The masked speaker would then propose a simple chant, which the audience would try and fail to chant in unison for a few minutes. \"North, East, South, West! Dragons must get out of Trest!\"\n\n\"What does that even mean? If they left one of those out, should we get out of three-quarters of the country?\" Nrararn wrote.\n\n\"It's a geomantic allusion. A sign of active undeniability, like sweeping all the way around the compass, pushing dragons out of the land,\" wrote Tarcuna. \"If it went 'North, South, East, West', it would indicate completeness and completedness. You really need to be Trestean to pick up this sort of fine point.\"\n\nI chanted it properly.\n\n\"Everyone can tell you're lying,\" wrote Nrararn, with a smirky spoiled-milk edge to his lie. Which is an ordinary taunt from one dragonet to another.\n\n\"They can not. I've got veriception blocks up.\"\n\n\"And they don't have veriception anyway.\"\n\n\"They don't. You, however, have a sense of touch, and can feel pain,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"Torturing your pet cat in the middle of a demonstration will not further your purpose.\" Nrararn wrote. He sprawled on the pavement in front of me and chewed his hind paw, carefully exposing his traditionally-feline genital region to me.\n\n\"Then you should be less obnoxious. Especially if you are hoping to twine me later tonight,\" I wrote.\n\n\"Jyothky? Has our relationship changed considerably since we last discussed the matter?\" Arilash wrote back. I had not controlled my the Horizonal Quill right.\n\n\"Oh, no. I meant that for Nrararn!\" I wrote to her.\n\n\"Alas! I would dearly love to twine you later tonight. Or anydragon. Even if I had to be less obnoxious. But I suppose you won't be interested.\" Arilash wrote back.\n\n\"No. I certainly owe you a conversation though. And I deserve every obnoxious for getting that message wrong. I have to get back to Nrararn now though.\" I wrote to Arilash. Then I wrote the original message to Nrararn.\n\n\"Your cat is bored,\" wrote my cat.\n\n\"My cat can go skulking around and eavesdrop on the speakers if he likes,\" I said. Nrararn was off in a flash.\n\n\"Oh, no! Your cat got away!\" said an old woman chanting next to me.\n\n\"He does that a lot. He'll be back in a few minutes, I'm sure,\" I said, truthfully but just barely.\n\nSo we chatted good things about cats and bad things about dragons. Then, \"Oh, dear, I'm up next,\" she said.\n\n\"You're a speaker?\"\n\n\"Of course not, dearie. The speakers are just colors,\" she said. She fished in her purse and found a knitted purple mask. \"Back in a few moments. I hope your cat returns first.\"\n\nI found Granny Purple one of the better speakers, perhaps due to my cat being otherwise occupied and me actually listening to what she had to say. \"I was a history teacher at St.-Vurne Grammar School for forty-two years. I know our federation's history fairly well. We have conquered every enemy: second-most of all our distrust and hatred of each other, when we were many nations. Most of all, though, our own self-interest. When each of us worried about his own little duchy or barony, we were weak and warful. When we abandoned those things, we became mighty. The dragons are a sort of enemy more terrible than any we have ever faced. But the same weapons will bring us victory. Not mighty twistor cannons, but the spirits of unity and sacrifice. I defy every dragon. I will lay down my life to oppose them and render their stay here undesirable and noxious. If I were younger, I would go and apply for a job at Ythac's palace in Perstra, so that I could spill his soup on his disgusting claws and pour bitters in his drinking water. He may have us at a disadvantage, he may have his entire scaly weight on our neck, but he shall not get what he desires from us!\"\n\nHer chant was awful, though. \"Every monster must go back! Leave, Lareth! Leave, Ythac!\" I chanted Llredh's name properly the first few times, but nobody else was pronouncing it right. Their dialect doesn't have the right sounds.\n\nGranny Purple, unmasked, got back before Nrararn. \"Very nice speech,\" I told her.\n\n\"Why, I do try to pay attention whenever Granny Purple speaks,\" Granny Purple corrected. \"She used to teach, and she seems to have the voice and manner for it. I am Versley, by the way.\"\n\n\"A pleasure to meet a fellow admirer of Granny Purple, Versley. I'm Jyothky Meragathium,\" I said, slurring my name a bit.\n\n\"A pleasure to meet you as well, Joffee,\" she said. She didn't seem to catch my family name at all, which is just as well.\"\n\n\"Might you know where I could go to get a bit more involved in RARU?\", I asked. \"I'd like to contribute something to the movement, but I don't know how to begin.\"\n\n\"I'm sure I don't know,\" said Versley. \"I've never been to a RARU event before.\" Lies, of course, but with the cheese-like aspect that indicates a lie shading into a fiction that should be mutually understood. \"There are two speakers more. After them, may I treat you to hot tea in a caf\u00e9? Who knows, we might encounter actual RARU members there. It is said that they are about. If your cat is back, of course.\"\n\n\"Nrararn, get your white fluffy tail back here!\" I wrote, and explained why. In a moment he was sniffing around Versley's ankles. \"You're smelling with your nose?\"\n\n\"If you smell with your tongue, you look very strange as a hoven or a cat,\" he pointed out.\n\n\"I'll be careful. I am careful.\" Which is approximately true, isn't it?\n\nThe next speaker, Rev. Taupe, mostly proclaimed a stream of religious nonsense about the origin, motives, and powers of dragons. One thing did catch my attention, though. \"When the dragons say that one of us is infested by a cyoziworm, when they take them away to those dreadful camps \u2014 why do you suppose they do that? Well, I've got some statistics for you. Eighty per cent of the camp victims have opposed the dragons in public, and some of them a lot more incautiously than RARU. Eighty percent. They're not quarantine camps for some imaginary infection. They're camps for political punishment. Well, I have this to say to the dragons. You can't stick us all in your camps! We're too many! We'll break down the walls of the camps, and we'll all go free! All Trest will be free!\" Every word of that was true, too. Rather, he believed it all, though he was wrong.\n\n\"Well, what do you expect?\" wrote Tarcuna. \"The wormridden know that the dragons know about them, and are trying to eradicate them. They don't have a lot of choice: they have to push back, or run away, or something. Their worms won't let them just hope the dragons go away.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Caf\u00e9 Du Treme",
                "text": "Versley paid for a table and a pot of tea. (Restaurants here seem to charge for space, not just food. I don't know why.) After a moment, a dignified man with a scale pendant on his flat-cap asked if he could join us.\n\n\"That's Magistrate Turquoise,\" my cat wrote.\n\n\"Certainly, Sporthen,\" said Versley. \"Do you know this young woman, Joffee? She's got a very pleasing hat.\"\n\n\"I certainly must admire it!\" he said. \"A pleasure to meet you, Joffee.\"\n\n\"And you as well, Sporthen.\"\n\n\"She's interested in more than just wearing that hat,\" said Versley.\n\n\"Wearing hats never changed anything,\" said Sporthen. \"Except for the dryness and stylishness of one's hair. Perhaps you could tell me a bit about yourself, Joffee?\"\n\n\"Well, I was in Dorday for some while, not that long ago. I saw the first dragon there. It blasted a fighter plane, you know. I saw it explode. Three soldiers, killed, and not a bit of mercy or even concern from the beast,\" said the beast in question, quite truthfully, and with more than a hint of concern and even displeasure for the incident in its voice. Of all the hovens I've killed, I regret them second-most, unless I'm forgetting someone, which I probably am. (The most being the cook that I dropped a wall on in Ze Cheya.)\n\n\"A terrible incident.\"\n\n\"We've all seen the torture of Shuvanne, and the destruction of the Stone of Merraro, and all of that, on television. But when you see the dragons killing and destroying so casually with your own eyes, you begin to realize what wicked monsters they are,\" I said. I remembered to say \"they\".\n\n\"Wait. Jyothky, was that true?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"Yes, if you take that 'begin' seriously. It took me a while.\"\n\n\"I'm not a wicked monster!\"\n\n\"You're a very nice monster. We'll discuss this more later. I need to be a very insidious monster and trick some hovens now.\"\n\nWe chatted for a while. I think the closest I got to an actual lie was, when Versley asked me what I was doing in Tublier, I said, \"I don't have a regular job at the moment. The tourist industry in Dorday is in the midden. Tublier ought to be better; it can't be worse at least. I've got some savings, enough for a while. And Ythac is paying a dole to people who've lost their jobs. It doesn't make me any more grateful to him, mind you.\" Still all true, but anything you might infer from it is wrong.\n\nAfter a certain amount of interrogation, Sporthen said, \"I wonder if you might excuse us for a moment, Joffee.\"\n\n\"Actually, if you could watch my cat for a moment... where's the toilet?\"\n\n\"Of course. It's over there, under that sign that says 'toilet'.\"\n\nSo I plopped my very nice monster fianc\u00e9 cat in Versley's lap to spy on her while I took an unnecessary and smelly private moment. Nrararn got very much the better part of the arrangement.\n\n\"They're saying that you seem like a straightforward and motivated young lady, and if you were a spy they'd probably be arrested already,\" he reported. \"Also three-quarters of the gendarmes in Tublier are in sympathy with RARU in any case, and dragons never come here.\"\n\n\"Pity they're wrong. I'm sure this will end with them in the flames,\" I said, because I really am a wicked monster who destroys hoven lives by the grand and plots to take their world from them, even if I try to be nice about it. I turned a finger into a claw and scratched a warning to Tublier about myself in the mirror. Only I wrote it in Petty Draconic, meaning that only Tarcuna of all the hovens on Hove would have a hope of reading it. In retrospect, this makes no sense whatever \u2014 Nrararn is standing on my head and reading this and making cute feline incomprehension noises. My only defense is that, at the time, it made no sense whatever either.\n\nWhen I got back to the table, Versley smiled. \"Well, Joffee. I'm holding a small party of sorts at my apartment tomorrow evening. Hot chocolate and cookies, nothing terribly fancy. Sporthen will be there, and a few of our other friends, some of whom also have very fashionable hats. Would you like to attend?\"\n\n\"Oh, that would be wonderful! I have so few friends in Tublier so far!\" I exclaimed.\n\nThey smiled and nodded, glad that I had figured out how to speak their language of light evasion. I smiled back, having penetrated their quite haphazard security.\n\n\"Well, they are rather the casual end of the spectrum,\" Ythac wrote. \"At the other extreme is Quarters, which is your friend Branner's organization. Eight members only, and they've known each other for years in the army. They're trying to build a big twistor beam without my noticing it.\"\n\n\"They haven't been that careful.\"\n\n\"Pretty careful! But I do cast finding spells for the most dangerous threat in Trest to me, which is them.\"\n\n\"Why don't you kill them?\" I asked, because that is how monsters think.\n\n\"There will always be a most dangerous threat. If I kill them and cast the spell again, it will get the previously second most dangerous threat. If I thought they were actually dangerous, I would do something. If they get anywhere on their gun, I will do something,\" he wrote back. \"Besides, my the Hoplonton is the best on Hove. Family specialty.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to get hurt, Ythac. Even with the new imports, I am low on friends.\"\n\n\"I will not get hurt, I promise. But I won't not get hurt by killing every hoven I can. That couldn't possibly end well. Besides, Jyothky, how many hoven lives is one dragon's life worth?\"\n\n\"That's a horrible question. We live at least, oh, a dozen grand years, with astral magic. I don't think anyone has died of old age since we got it, have they?\"\n\n\"Not that I've heard either.\"\n\n\"So, um, we live a dozen grand years, say, and they live a gross of years, say, to make the math easy. By that, say a gross of hoven lives equals one dragon. I don't think that calculus makes any sense, but it's a number for you, anyway,\" I wrote.\n\n\"If you can't make sense, at least make nonsense, I guess. So if a gross of hoven lives is worth mine, that's about how many I get to kill to protect myself. I shouldn't go killing eight just now just because I know they're trying to kill me. I'd use up nearly my first grand's allowance of murders before I got to a gross of years,\" I wrote.\n\n\"You're about to make my head fall off with that kind of mathematics.\"\n\n\"I just don't want to kill anyone unless there's some good reason. I refuse to be the tyrant they're painting me! Besides, if I'm decent at them for long enough, they'll figure out that I am, and then things should be easier.\"\n\n\"Not this year, Ythac.\"\n\n\"Not this generation, I think. I've got time. Though I do want to do what I can to speed it along and keep the misery down along the way.\"\n\nHe's a monster too. A kindhearted ruiner of countries and destroyer of lives, like me. A good bit better about actual murder, though."
            },
            {
                "title": "Seditious Chocolaterie (Day 1129)",
                "text": "\"Tarcuna, what are the manners that go with a party at someone's apartment?\"\n\n\"The ordinary sort of party, or the sort I might have gotten hired for?\"\n\nIt is hard to glare at someone over The Horizonal Quill. \"Tarcuna, be helpful. This is a small social party for RARU recruiting. Do you really think there will be whores there? Much less that I'd be treated as one?\"\n\n\"I hope you're not treated as one, you'd be utterly incompetent at it and you wouldn't get paid. As for the other guests, I don't know. You introduced yourself as a jobless and not very rich young woman without obvious family or other means of support. You could be looking for a position, as far as they know.\"\n\n\"Do you think that's what they're after?\"\n\n\"No. But if you were one of my college friends going into that sort of situation, I'd definitely have you think about it. I got wormed doing something not too much different.\"\n\n\"Tarcuna, you are my most annoying minion. Are there any particular manners that I should pay attention to?\"\n\n\"I'm also your least annoying minion. Bring some cookies or something like that, but not the best cookies because it's not polite to bring better than the hostess. Start off by admiring the apartment and its furnishings. I've never actually been to a seditious chocolaterie, but I suspect you should let the hostess bring up treasonous matters first.\"\n\nSo I took my exceedingly dangerous cat to the convenience store across the street. It's a quarter of the ground floor of 1778 Morganthaler Street West. It is also a dense little maze of packages of foodstuffs, housewares, tools, magazines, beers, contraceptives, spare clothing, and all the sorts of things that sophisticated yet disorganized and poor hovens might want to buy at any hour of the night. I bought a box of Sendile's Pentagonal Biscuits, chocolate flavor, which Tarcuna said wouldn't be any sort of a culinary challenge, but at least would be edible. Nrararn persuaded me that he would not wear a leash in any case."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chocolate and Conspiracy",
                "text": "Versley's apartment is older than mine. The building is in rather worse shape; concrete was flaking off the front of it, and the staircase was so structurally unsound that I had to remind myself I weighed far less than a ton in this shape or I wouldn't have dared step on it. Her front door is thin metal over thin wood, painted grey, and rather scratched and battered.\n\nInside the apartment, though, is a whole universe of pretty. The walls were covered with thin quilts for tapestries, cloth prints of flowers cut into squares and triangles and sewn together. Every window had plants in front of it in big ceramic window boxes: some blooming, some resting, and some, in the kitchen, being culinary herbs, I think. That was all easy to admire, so I did. The furniture was old and a bit threadbare but well-padded. The tablecloth was white edged with a curl of blue, but I couldn't see much of it, because the table was covered with a mighty array of tarts, cookies, silver pots of burbling water kept boiling over alcohol flames, ceramic pots of hot chocolate not being boiled, cups, saucers, cheeses, and, a few minutes later, one dismal looking box of Sendile's Pentagonal Biscuits hiding in the corner and hoping to be overlooked.\n\n\"Ah, you brought your cat. What's her name?\" said Versley.\n\n\"You can call him Narr, but I don't think he'll answer to that,\" I said, which was the best I could do and not give up on always telling the truth.\n\nVersley presented a hand to Nrararn to sniff, which he did, and then petted his head. \"Blique is somewhere around, probably hiding under a bed. She doesn't answer to her name either. Blique! Come here this instant and meet a new friend!\" She poured a bit of chocolate in two saucers and set them on the floor. \"Oh! Where are my manners, tending to the cats before I tend to the people? Joffee, this is Dulac, and the gentleman on the couch is Quarri.\" So I was polite and rather shy at Dulac (tall, blueish, striped, well-dressed, very nervous) and Quarri (tall, purple and somewhat unfortunately spotted, working-class clothing like mine, and supremely confident in himself.)\n\n\"Well, first of all, what is your interest in RARU?\" asked Versley, as she grated nutmeg over her own saucer of chocolate, and poured it elegantly back into the cup.\n\n\"I was in the army. 518th Maintenance Crew. Right there at Quenjo Wastes, in Depot 18. Saw my friends and commanding officers burnt up. Saw planes get blasted. Got chased around by a skeleton 'til my buddy crushed it with a D-wrench. Unit got disbanded a couple months later. Came back home. Things are pretty hopeless,\" Quarri said. He was indifferently truthful. \"I was in Methu in the army. Methu's not a going concern now. So I wanted to see what RARU is up to.\"\n\n\"I was in Dorday when Spotty was,\" I said. \"I saw her explode planes and kill people. I also saw the five dragons strolling around the city pretending they belonged there, keeping all the tourists away.\"\n\nDulac shrugged. \"I have never seen a dragon in person. They have not come to Tublier, or anywhere close, after all. But my cousin Elrique in Churry City was taken away into a punishment camp last month. He wrote me a long letter. He is innocent. He is not even accused of any sort of crime. He does not even know what he did. He protested at Churry City, as did thousands of others; he fled when Leredh and the Black Curse came to kill. He supposes that he was taken as an example. They say he is possessed by a horrible monster, but he is my cousin. I would know if he was possessed.\" Fairly truthful, until the last sentence.\n\n\"Had he changed his behavior or habits a lot lately?\" I asked.\n\n\"Certainly. In the punishment camp, he can no longer see his wife or daughter, for one thing,\" said Dulac dully.\n\nVersley sipped her chocolate. \"People get taken to the punishment camps for any reason, or no reason at all. I do not know if you have heard this, Joffee. Every two or three days, Ythac's gendarmes will issue a list of sixty names, or thirty. Those people will be hunted down and taken to the camps. There is no real rhyme or reason for it. Often they are notable protestors. Just as often, they are nobody in particular. RARU has helped save fifty or sixty from the camps and spirit them out of the country, but that is all. Hundreds have gone in. Some have died, but none has come out.\"\n\nI nodded quietly. \"I think they are quarantined for cyoziworms. I have seen the exhibits Prof. Wulpmegarn produced, showing a normal person and an infested one. I saw the movies of Dr. Grauzeng's surgery, with the live worm struggling in Bthera's breast, and dying.\"\n\n\"You might want to stop arguing about now,\" Nrararn scribbled to me. \"Everyone is glaring at you.\"\n\n\"Well, I say that Wulpmegarn is a cunya trying to get the favor of the dragons by telling whatever story they want told, and Grauzeng was a cunya and we are better off without her, and Bthera was a whore who could be hired to do any thing or to say any thing,\" said Versley. \"Besides, even if the worms were real, how could Ythac decide that Elrique, say, is infested? He has not even seen Elrique!\"\n\n\"Well, Wulpmegarn certainly got carried by a dragon once or twice, so he's certainly a friend of theirs. And he's doing what they want,\" I said, because it's true and it sounds like it's being agreeable even if it's not quite. \"And I'm sorry about your cousin, Dulac. Whatever the reason, or if there's no reason at all, it's an awful thing.\"\n\nDulac nodded glumly. \"It is my grief. And my fear, that I might join him.\"\n\nQuarri laughed. \"And what is RARU doing about the camps?\"\n\n\"We are trying to exert pressure on the contractors who build them, and to interfere with the construction\" said Versley. \"With some success. The Tublier-North camp is now three months behind schedule. The razor wire plant seems to have thoroughly bollixed up their order, so it may be delayed further. You cannot be imprisoned if there are no prisons to throw you in, Dulac.\n\nQuarri laughed. \"Fighting defensively, are you?\"\n\n\"We oppose the invaders in a variety of ways.\"\n\n\"We hit Ythac with a mortar shell while he was asleep two months ago,\" said Quarri.\n\n\"And you're still alive?\" I asked, astounded. (I wasn't worried about Ythac \u2014 I'd seen him just the other day.)\n\n\"That's we, Methu. I only had a little bit to do with that operation,\" he said. His lie had the rotten-chocolate edge that indicates bragging.\n\n\"And Methu got massacred for that. Massacred. Leredh burned up a hundred homes \u2014 the heart of Methu, and all their families,\" said Versley, setting down her chocolate cup on the quilted arm of her chair.\n\n\"I barely escaped with my life!\" exclaimed Quarri. His lie was rotten chocolate with a sandy mold over it.\n\n\"Good for you. Many were not so lucky. Do you think that another round of mortars will do the job?\" asked Versley.\n\n\"I dunno. Maybe a lucky shot to the head or something,\" said Quarri.\n\n\"Luck does not favor us very often these days,\" said Versley. \"Even if that worked, we would still have Leredh to face. Do you think he would spare any city in Trest if we killed his buggard?\"\n\n\"Besides, we hit the grey one with a warplane and didn't hurt it much. What's a little mortar round going to do?\" asked Dulac.\n\nQuarri stood up. \"That 'little mortar round' you are speaking of is really a Mozarde 3A. 340-millimeter caliber! Nothing in the world is going to ignore that!\"\n\n\"It doesn't sound like Ythac and Llredh ignored it,\" I said. \"But it didn't kill them, and didn't even seem to hurt them.\"\n\nVersley nodded grimly, \"Exactly. Military means have failed.\"\n\n\"Old woman, you don't know what you're talking about,\" said Quarri.\n\nVersley stood up angrily. \"Young man, I...\" She knocked her cup off the arm of her chair, so I caught it. \"Oh, thank you, Joffee. We 'old women' can be clumsy at times. Quarri, if we had an military option that seemed the least bit effective, we would be more than happy to use it. Hove seems to have just one weapon that can kill dragons. And Trest is currently deprived of twistor cannons. Pinning our hopes on somehow being able to kill one more dragon, much less all of them, is not a good strategy. We must do something useful in the meantime.\"\n\n\"But the Limp Rebellion is so, so, un-virile,\" whined Quarri.\n\n\"If I had a virility, I shouldn't waste it on the dragons. I daresay they would enjoy it,\" said Versley. \"If you want to die in glorious battle, and take your family and friends with you, you can go to some other resistance group. RARU will make a statue of you after we regain Trest.\"\n\n\"It's just cowardly, that's all,\" said Quarri.\n\n\"Limp Rebellion? I'm new to the resistance,\" I said. \"I haven't heard of it before.\"\n\nVersley handed me a pamphlet. \"It's all in here. Simply, we don't advocate letting the dragons rule Trest. We don't do what they tell us. They may have formally conquered the government, but they haven't conquered the country. There's never been a dragon in Tublier...\"\n\n\"The black one flew over here, before the conquest.\" I pointed out, because I had done.\n\n\"It didn't land, and it certainly didn't conquer us. So on the whole, we're simply going to go about our lives and ignore the dragons, as much as we can.\"\n\n\"Which doesn't do very well when they throw your cousin into a punishment camp,\" said Dulac.\n\n\"If the gendarmes of Churry City ignored the dragons, if the contractors there refused to build for the dragons, your cousin would not be in the camp,\" Versley proclaimed.\n\nI opened the pamphlet. \"What happens when Llredh is towering over you, telling you to arrest everyone left in the square in Churry City, or he will burn you to ashes?\"\n\nVersley smiled. \"Now there is your chance to be as brave and virile as Quarri likes, or more subtle. If you turn to the page 5, you will see a little table, with levels of resistance. You could simply spit in his eye. You will probably die for that. That's the top level, the purple level, and we don't have very many people up there. Most of us are at the green level, two bands down. We'd only obey a direct order, and we'd be as reluctant and do as bad a job as we could manage. The blue level is between those: we'd not do anything that hurt another hoven. I'm sworn at the blue level. I don't expect it to matter, the difference between blue and green, but for the chief of gendarmes it certainly would.\"\n\nI looked at the table, which was a rather technical bit of sedition. \"It's a bit intimidating. Even the lower levels are making a promise to irritate dragons.\"\n\n\"Do you expect to free Trest without getting the oppressors a wee bit ticked off?\" asked Dulac.\n\n\"I don't. I don't expect to free Trest without getting clawed or bitten, for that matter. I can still be intimidated, can't I?\" I said.\n\n\"You don't need to swear to it now. But take the pamphlet home and read it. Every RARU member has sworn something, even just the red level.\"\n\nRED: I, __, swear that I will not provide direct comfort or assistance to the dragons or their cunyas, save under coercion; and after the coercion is finished I will immediately denounce my coerced actions to RARU.\n\n\"I would like to wait a bit, and read it carefully,\" I said. \"It's a big step, pledging emnity to dragons.\" Or, in my case, I'm not sure I could eat and follow that oath, much less behave properly towards my fianc\u00e9s, or Tarcuna, or Ythac.\n\n\"It doesn't bother me a bit,\" said Dulac, and recited the blue-level oath, and meant it.\n\n\"I am no coward!\" said Quarri, lying, and recited the purple-level oath, lying.\n\nVersley glanced at me curiously. I had my nose in the pamphlet, trying to figure out some interpretation or minor change so that I could take it and not be forsworn. \"Well, let me tell you about a few of our programs and such in Tublier.\" Which she did. Half of them are resistance things, like keeping the cyozi-camp from being built and making sure that most of the gendarmes are sworn to as high a level as possible. The other half seemed unrelated to dragons. I'm not sure what, if anything, the dam on the Tublier river has to do with us. Ythac doesn't either; he didn't even know there was a dam there."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda",
                "text": "\"They hate us. They hate us for some understandable reasons, like conquest. They hate us for some terrible reasons, like we're trying to get rid of an actual horrible menace and they don't believe it's real. They'll be perfectly reasonable if that suits their purposes, and perfectly unreasonable if that does. They are determined that everything dragons do is evil and wicked,\" I told everyone, as a conclusion to my report.\n\n\"Sounds about right. Thanks for telling me about the colors. That explains several things,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"You hadn't found out about them?\"\n\n\"Information magic is excellent for finding the answers to your questions. It is not always so good for finding the best questions to ask. I had heard 'so-and-so is purple' before, but thought it was about fur color.\"\n\n\"The helpful plan, is she in your claws yet?\" asked Llredh.\n\n\"No. I can't imagine that this generation is going to feel properly conquered, much less happily conquered.\"\n\n\"Keep looking, if you please,\" wrote Ythac. \"I wanted to be much better than the previous government. I don't think I'm even managing to be better than nothing.\"\n\n\"I will. I may need to go somewhere else, though. I can't take any of those oaths for RARU, or not mean them anyhow.\"\n\n\"You could investigate them in animal form too!\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Just as useful, probably.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Persuasions (Day 1130)",
                "text": "I spent most of the day being a tourist in Tublier. Tublier with an ignorant white cat for providing local color is not as much fun as Dorday with an expert native guide for local color, but we managed. The Alberhominie Civic Museum provided us with much more entertainment than we had expected of it, in the form of a special exhibition on zeppelins. Nrararn did have to turn into a hoven to come in; they don't allow pets. Everyone thought we were twins. Next time I shall have to tell him to look like some other no-hoven-in-particular.\n\n\"Sorry, miss, but the armchair in 21G needs to be refinished,\" lied the superintendent as I walked in.\n\n\"No hurry,\" I didn't lie.\n\n\"Oh, and there's a note for you called in,\" he said. \"Sounds like you might be dating someone important soon, if you play your cards right.\"\n\n\"You are dating someone important,\" wrote my small white cat.\n\n\"Really? Csirnis will barely talk to me anymore,\" I wrote back, to annoy him.\n\n\"Miss, oh heavens! I'll get you a bandage straightaway!\" said the superintendent, and rummaged in his desk drawers. \"But you should get rid of that cat, if he bites so much.\"\n\n\"No, this is quite unusual for him.\" (Usually he breathes lightning.) I bandaged my cat-bite, renewed the Hoplonton on both of us. \"Wait until we're in private to bite me!\"\n\n\"And here's your message, miss,\" said the superintendent, after I was bandaged. \"You should tell him your room number. We've got three Joffees living here. I had to make him tell me fur color, and lucky we don't have another dark grey or you might be missing a date.\"\n\nSporthen wanted to meet me for a discussion at the Laich Street Caf\u00e9 in midafternoon.\n\n\"You think it's a date?\" I asked the superintendent.\n\n\"Young woman new in town, older important man? How badly do you need work?\"\n\n\"Not that badly, yet,\" I said. In part because my cat was glaring at me. I scooped him up and went back to my apartment, to tend my wounds properly (the Arcane Anodyne, though nearly anything would have worked), and to scold him properly (a Caramelle in the bathtub, with both of us as small as possible, which he won by one touch.)"
            },
            {
                "title": "Not a Date",
                "text": "\"I'm very sorry if I kept you waiting,\" I told Sporthen, when the waiter in the red flannel hat took me to his table.\n\n\"Hardly a concern these days,\" he said, setting aside a bowl of cream-of-oyster soup. \"Government business does not proceed with breakneck speed under the dragons. An hour or two off in the afternoon to tend to other important matters is not a matter worth troubling over. And if it is delayed, what then? The legal problems concerning the Tublier-North punishment camp may not be resolved for a bit longer. Certain contractors may spend an afternoon cooling their hooves in a lobby. Fortunately the dragons pay them by the day, not by the project, so complaints are few. Such things happen now and then, under the dragons. Do you not approve?\"\n\nI just laughed. \"RARU is quite clever.\" I don't actually approve of hovens cheating my best friend in order to delay quarantining a very unpleasant menace away.\n\nHe smiled, and indicated a red-cushioned chair. \"We do our best. Please, sit, choose a mid-afternoon snack if you wish, as my treat.\" He looked a bit more closely, and grinned. \"Does your cat need anything?\"\n\n\"Tell him to perform our marriage straightaway!\" said my cat, hopping into another chair and curling up.\n\n\"My cat will be ridiculously demanding given the slightest encouragement. So let's not, just yet.\" I ordered a smoked fish omelette, with sour sauce and a mug of cocoa.\n\n\"Very well. You bring your cat everywhere?\"\n\n\"He's very well behaved, with one or two notable exceptions,\" I said. \"And we're on duty now, so no exceptions please.\"\n\n\"I am very helpful! If he attacks you, I will kill him!\" Nrararn answered.\n\n\"I think I can defend myself against one unarmed hoven.\"\n\n\"Well, if a grand of warriors with mystic lances leap out of the woodwork, I'll be invaluable. For one example. Not that the hovens are able to make mystic lances.\"\n\nI petted Nrararn, and smiled at Sporthen. \"What did you want to talk about today?\"\n\n\"Simply this: you wished to join RARU. We would happily accept you \u2014 as we would any true-spirited Trestean, make no mistake. But all of our members have sworn a promise to oppose the dragons. So, we were wondering if you would like any further discussion or information that might make you more comfortable joining us.\"\n\n\"He's asking us to spy on him!\" wrote Nrararn.\n\n\"Well, yes, I do have a few. The biggest one is, what sort of chances does RARU have?\"\n\nSporthen scooped soup. \"I wish I could answer that with complete confidence. Of course, we do not know. But it seems the best approach. Violence has not been particularly successful, and shows no great promise for the future. Ordinarily, if we disliked our rulers, we would elect new consuls to replace them. That was well on its way to working to remove Shuvanne. The dragons seem unlikely to care. What else might work? Grovelling and pleading?\"\n\n\"You make a strong case that it is the best way. But do you think it will work?\"\n\n\"I have more hope than some in RARU! Consider this: the dragons seem to mix the personal and the political. RARU's official publications say that the dragons are anti-consular, that they particularly hate our system of government. I do not think so. They have not dismantled it; they have simply plopped themselves on top of it. They seem to care more about each other than they do at all about us. They might simply fly away in frustration, if sufficiently frustrated.\"\n\n\"Or they might burn up a few cities on the way. Llredh is not the most peaceful of dragons,\" I noted.\n\nSporthen clinked his spoon on his bowl twice. \"Definitely a risk. I fear that it will happen regardless; they seem always on the edge of a massacre. We might as well get something for our burned-up cities. Let me turn the question around: would you rather live under the invaders' rule, or die removing them? Or \u2014 suppose they kill ten thousand of us before they go, but there are a billion. Would you accept, what is that, odds of a hundred thousand to one in your favor? Which is what we are actually asking of you.\"\n\n\"Those are certainly good odds of surviving,\" I said.\n\n\"Phrased in those terms, fear of death in rebellion seems simply ridiculous. The chance that you even see a dragon is not that great, unless you travel to Perstra in person,\" he said.\n\n\"I've seen them in Dorday,\" I said.\n\n\"Does that intimidate you?\" he asked.\n\n\"I think the Quenjo Wastes battle was a bit more intimidating,\" I said, after a bit of a pause to think of something true.\n\n\"Also an unusual situation,\" he said. \"And here, I believe, is your omelette.\"\n\nThe presentation of the omelette was less than perfect. The waiter tripped on nothing in particular, and sent omelette, sour sauce, cocoa, and their suitable condiments showering towards my lap. So I caught the tray in one hand and set the sauce and cocoa upright with the other, before they were completely turned over.\n\nThe waitress curtsied, \"Very sorry, miss. Nothing lost, I hope?\" She smelled rather nervous, probably because half the restaurant was staring at us.\n\nI looked at the tray. \"Not much. The cocoa sloshed a bit.\"\n\n\"I'll bring you another cup straightaway,\" she said.\n\n\"Just into the saucer.\" I poured it back into the cup. \"No harm done.\" She headed back to the kitchen anyway.\n\nSporthen nodded. \"You're quick.\"\n\n\"Well, yes.\"\n\n\"Did you have any sort of special training?\" he asked.\n\nWhich took a bit of thought. \"Nothing in particular,\" I said, since most dragons had at least the training I did, and mostly more.\n\n\"I see... what did you say your last name was?\"\n\n\"Meragathium. Spelled how it sounds,\" I said.\n\n\"Joffinet Meragathium. How is your omelette?\"\n\nI tasted it. \"Delicious with sour sauce. Better being eaten than worn!\"\n\nHe grinned, and ate more soup. \"I am told that you have unusual opinions about the punishment camps and the reality of cyoziworms.\"\n\n\"Not so unusual among people who have seen the horrible things,\" I said.\n\nHe looked interested. \"Ah, you have seen them? Most of us regard them as a trick: an imaginary enemy for us to fear, to lure us into accepting the dragons as the lesser of two evils, and accepting the punishment camps. What did you see?\"\n\n\"I was in the operating theatre when Spotty and Dr. Grauzeng removed the worm from Bthera. I saw it myself.\" I described it as best I could.\n\n\"I see,\" he said. \"And the camps?\"\n\n\"As far as I know, they are just what the dragons say they are. Dragons have few virtues in hoven terms, but they are not liars. I do think you shouldn't get distracted by the worms or the camps though.\"\n\n\"There is something to your point of view,\" he said, and changed the conversation to non-seditious topics some while.\n\n\"Well, that was useless,\" I wrote to Nrararn.\n\n\"Next time, tell Ythac to find a group that doesn't have an entrance vow,\" he answered.\n\n\"Tomorrow, or the day after. I want to finish seeing Tublier while we're here,\" I replied."
            },
            {
                "title": "Night Visit (Day 1131 or 1132 depending on how one counts)",
                "text": "I have been sleeping on the kitchen floor, because the bed smells nasty and has a disgusting lluyew, even after Nrararn chased all the insects off of it. The kitchen floor was easy to scrub, being made of tiles. It was also probably horribly uncomfortable for a hoven, but you know my opinion of discomfort. Nrararn was sleeping on top of me, which he found comfortable and both of us found friendly.\n\nOf course we both woke up instantly \u2014 OK, Nrararn a bit more instantly than me \u2014 from the danger roaring at the door. A loud and grumbly sort of roar; it could kill us or hurt us badly, in our soft shapes. We shrugged at each other, and I put the Hoplonton around us both, and the Ulthana's Targe. With that protection the roar quieted down to a grumbly mumble.\n\nBy that time, the danger had gotten out a jangly set of keys and opened the door. We looked, and saw a pack of intruders. Some were harmless: the superintendent, Quarri, Sporthen, two other judicial-looking hovens that I did not know. The danger was three others: Branner and two other hovens. They looked plenty dangerous. Each one held a quite large twistor bazooka, such as one might use to rip a tank into bits if one liked weapons. The weapons were the loudest danger, but the three warriors themselves were only a bit softer.\n\n\"Good evening,\" I said to them.\n\n\"You're still up and dressed at this hour?\" asked the superintendent.\n\n\"I am,\" I said, because I was. \"You are too,\" I said, because he was too.\n\n\"A few questions had arisen about your recent application to RARU,\" said Sporthen. \"May we come in?\"\n\n\"To save you the inconvenience of firing twistor cannons through the walls? Certainly, come in,\" I said. They did. \"I'm sorry that I can't offer you all seats. The superintendent hasn't been rushed about getting furniture.\" The superintendent scowled at me.\n\nSporthen put a professional tone in his voice. \"We have noticed certain inconsistencies and peculiarities in your stories. We would like to entertain the possibility that you are guilty of nothing worse than an entirely understandable cowardice and confusion of communication.\"\n\nI grinned. \"And waking a girl up in the middle of the night by breaking into her apartment is the best way to figure that out?\"\n\n\"You don't seem to have gone to bed yet,\" he said. \"Were you alerted somehow?\"\n\n\"No, I was sleeping in my clothes, and my cat woke me up from your noise,\" I said.\n\nOne of the other judicial people, who had been looking around my apartment, said, \"Your bed hasn't been slept in.\"\n\n\"I don't like the way it smells,\" I said, getting another frown from the superintendent. \"Does my habit of sleeping on the floor in my clothes render me unfit for RARU? Of the sort that needs three augmented soldiers to deal with?\" The three of them smirked.\n\nSporthen shook his head seriously. \"Not that. Not to put too fine a point on it, Joffinet, but there are serious questions about whether you are what you say you are. We wonder that you might be a spy or an agent provocateur, a traitor to your species and your nation.\"\n\nI had to laugh. \"I'm certainly not a traitor to my species or my nation.\"\n\nNobody else laughed, except Nrararn who did it quietly. Sporthen said, \"In which case you have nothing to fear, and your application to RARU will be approved. In the meantime, we wish to investigate certain matters.\"\n\n\"What, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"First of all, there is the matter of your identity. It is impossible to live in Trest for any length of time without leaving certain administrative traces. There are databases of religious affiliation, voting records, addresses, tax payment, and many other things. Going further back, there are educational records, confirmations, parentage, and so on. An exhaustive search of these finds not a single mention of one Joffinet Meragathium or any reasonable variant thereof. Joffinet is of course one of the most common personal names; Meragathium seems to be invented of whole cloth.\"\n\nI asked \"Nobody ever approaches a revolutionary organization using a false name?\" \"Nrararn, remind me to ask Tarcuna about those records before next time.\"\n\n\"It is not unheard-of. It does not make a strong basis for an application, however,\" he said.\n\n\"And you bring warriors and cannons to deal with the people you reject?\" I asked.\n\n\"In general we simply avoid the matter. In your case, though, there are suggestions of exacerbating circumstances. You told Quarri quite distinctly that you saw the movies of the cyoziworm surgery, but you told me just as distinctly that you saw the event itself. An inconsistency \u2014 not criminal in itself, but one which indicates a more general falsity of your story. In any case, you seem quite sure that cyoziworms are real, and that the punishment camps are intended to contain them. One is moved to wonder that you might be an agent of the dragons sent to RARU to break our unity of spirit.\"\n\nI smiled. \"I'm definitely not that!\"\n\n\"Again, I look forward to your proof that you are not. I will make a sincere apology when that happens. Unlike the draconic propensity to kill people or toss them into punishment camps on a whim, we uphold Trest's legal traditions as best we can.\"\n\n\"Right. What else?\" I couldn't think of anything clever to say.\n\n\"The most worrisome part of the story is your speed of reaction. You caught an upset cup of cocoa before it could fall in Versley's apartment, which is so extraordinary that Quarri took note. I had the waiter at the Laich Street Caf\u00e9 drop a tray, and got to witness your extraordinary speed myself.\"\n\n\"I am faster than most hovens.\" Physically. Not so fast of mind. Not only had I given myself away, I hadn't even realized it 'til he told me.\n\n\"Branner, could you do that? Catch a falling restaurant tray in one hand and right two things on it, without spilling much, as has been described?\"\n\nBranner grinned. \"No problem.\"\n\n\"Could you before you were augmented?\"\n\nBranner snorted. \"No. Don't be silly. No person would have much of a chance at it without augmentation. Not as you described the scene before.\"\n\n\"Plus, there are such minor matters as your extraordinary quantity of money given your backstory, and your persistent use of the word 'hovens' rather than simply 'people'. We are thus forced to consider the extremely disturbing case in which you are an augmented agent in the service of the dragons.\"\n\n\"I'm certainly not that,\" I said, because it was true.\n\n\"Your claim is noted. We are, sadly, unable to have a full trial with proper witnesses. Especially since you seem to have no history in Dorday, and hence no witnesses for us to call. So, would you submit to an injection of truth drugs? The alternative of course is up to these military gentlemen.\" The warriors grinned dangerously. They rarely got to fight their own kind.\n\nNrararn made the decision for me. He rather elegantly breathed a bolt of lightning that forked in three and ruined all the twistor bazookas. The room became much safer.\n\n\"Nice! Can I marry you?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Please do!\"\n\nBranner evidently had a different opinion. \"Monster!\" he shouted, and dived at Nrararn as fast as an augmented agent could, reaching to strangle the cat or break his neck. Nrararn turned back into his usual pretty self, but sized to fit in the apartment. Branner wrapped his arms around Nrararn's azure neck. Then he howled as Nrararn's lightning-braided mane destroyed his hands.\n\n\"A dragon! The cat was a dragon somehow!\" wailed Quarri, and turned to flee. I was rather annoyed at him, and put the Lure of Dreams into him. The superintendent and one of the soldiers started tending to Branner.\n\nSporthen stared, shaking. \"I was more correct than I ever imagined.\"\n\nI glared at him, and yelled, \"You are more wrong than you ever imagined!\"\n\nHe glared at me, and said in a cold dignified tone, \"How much more of a spy could you be, than to bring a dragon to our meetings in person?\"\n\nSo I turned back into myself too, sized to fit the apartment. \"I actually brought two dragons.\"\n\n\"The Black Curse!\" wailed one of the magistrates, and also turned to flee. I don't much like that nickname, so I put the Lure of Dreams into him as well. Bad dreams, too.\n\nI smiled the wicked draconic smile. \"Since you have been so kind as to come a-calling, you simply must stay and enjoy our hospitality.\"\n\n\"Rather rude guests,\" said Nrararn, in much the same tone. He stank of rage, though less than me. \"One should never hug a cat without asking his permission. One never knows just how dangerous the cat might be.\"\n\nThe two unhurt soldiers started smelling brave and growling more dangerously, preparing to jump on one of us. \"I get the one near me,\" I wrote, and tried to knock him down with my tail. He dodged that, being augmented, so I feinted a bite at him and drove him a step sideways while he shot at me with a handgun, to a very convenient spot for my forepaw. His ribs crunched in a very interesting way, since they were part metal. A loud report shook the room; Nrararn had destroyed the other soldier's leg with lightning.\n\nThe remaining hovens stared at their ruined augmented soldiers. \"Anyone fancy a spot of healing?\" I asked. \"Branner, I do believe I saved your life before, more or less. Shall I do it again?\"\n\n\"Actually, I could use a bit myself,\" said Nrararn. His soldier had stabbed his flank three times with a knife, hard enough to draw a bit of blood. \"So could you; you've got three bullet wounds.\" Nothing terribly serious, but I healed both of us. The soldiers were bleeding and demolished. I didn't want them to escape their punishment so easily, so I put healing spells into them too, and then made them sleep.\n\nThe other hovens had made some attempt to run away. Nrararn blocked the door. \"Jyothky, will you be wanting these hovens too?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, thank you very much. I should be glad to uphold Trest's laws onto them. The draciarchic laws.\"\n\nSporthen explained, \"We did not know you were dragons! We thought you were an augmented agent! We didn't know that you even could turn into a person!\" Which was irrelevant and insultingly phrased, so we ignored him.\n\nNrararn gave me a concerned look. \"You usually like to find a reason to spare them.\"\n\n\"Not this time. These hovens have rather annoyed me.\" I had worked very hard to be a perfect hoven myself, and they hadn't let me. \"Besides, if we let them get away, all the revolutionaries will know that we're spying on them in hoven form, and it'll be twelve times as troublesome next time.\"\n\nQuarri tried to beg, which was boring, so I made him sleep too. One of the magistrates tried to sneak into the kitchen and call someone, so I made all the hovens except Sporthen sleep. I wanted to argue with someone, and poor Nrararn didn't deserve it.\n\n\"So, let us continue our conversation, Sporthen,\" I said in a silky voice. \"It is what you came here for, after all, is it not? And be assured that you shall have the truth. I've never lied to you in any case.\" He looked briefly hopeful, as though I were giving him a chance to talk his way out of his doom. So I told him, \"But don't worry. You won't be getting back to RARU with it.\"\n\n\"Going to kill him, Jyothky?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"I'd like to, I've never been so furious at a small person. But he didn't actually quite attack me. Only the soldiers did that.\"\n\n\"Well, ask Ythac and Llredh. I'm sure they can spare a few traitorous magistrates, and they certainly owe you,\" said Nrararn, who is as sweet as he is pretty.\n\nWhen you corner them, hovens get brave and defiant sometimes. \"You'll get no more secrets out of me, monster!\"\n\n\"I don't want any secrets out of you. You can't imagine that you have any secrets from us anyway. Do you know how I found your organization in the first place? I asked Ythac to pick a secret subversive society for me to infiltrate. He knows all about RARU. He knows all about Branner's super-secret Barracks, too, which my fianc\u00e9 and I seem to have 3/8 defeated without even 1/8 trying or even meaning to.\"\n\n\"Liar! Why come spying on us if you knew everything?\"\n\n\"Oh, you want to know the ever-so-horribly-wicked thing that we are planning and you are working so hard and risking your lives to try to prevent? Do you want to know what massive evil Ythac is preparing for your country and your people?\" I let him fret for a moment.\n\n\"Jyothky, I have never smelled you so angry.\"\n\n\"You have, when Roroku humilated us in public. You might not have noticed, there was a lot going on that day. These hovens... We absolutely do not deserve to be killed for this! And how dare they be willing to kill each other, like they thought we were! And breaking into our apartment in the middle of the night, and trying to break your neck! I am furious, and rightly so!\"\n\nOut loud, I hissed, \"Ythac sent us to try to find some way in which he can rule Trest better. Better for hovens. Do you know that everything he's done as your master is for your good? Everything!\"\n\n\"And you say that you are truthful!\" Sporthen shouted back. It's easy to draw an important hoven into an argument.\n\n\"Yes, indeed. Do you have any counterexamples?\"\n\n\"There's the stone of Merraro! The destruction of our laws and our government! The punishment camps!\"\n\n\"The first two are simply your misconceptions. Of course you're better off under under our laws. For yourself you make some terrible laws! It is a crime to worship your made-up gods the wrong way! But the camps are not for punishment. They would be nice camps, if hovens like you didn't build them so badly and slowly. They are quarantine camps, to keep a truly horrible parasite away from you.\"\n\n\"I didn't believe you when you were pretending to be a person and said that. I don't believe it now.\"\n\n\"Then I will make you believe,\" I proclaimed.\n\n\"Your lies will never trick me! And what does it matter what I believe, if you're going to imprison me or kill me anyway?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to be in a hurry about it,\" I hissed at him. \"It will be part of my entertainment to watch you languish or die knowing that you wasted your life fighting the absolutely wrong side of the fight.\" Which seemed a bit of a filthy thing to say, but it really wasn't convenient to go melt a mountain at this point.\n\n\"If you get him colonized, Llredh will be upset with you,\" Nrararn pointed out.\n\n\"That is a problem. Even if I kill him right afterwards. Well, there's another way to do it too,\" I answered. And, out loud, \"Where does Dulac live?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't tell you even if I knew,\" shouted Sporthen.\n\nNrararn poked around the kitchen a bit. \"It's in the phone book, though.\"\n\n\"We'll collect him. Versley too, and some of the chiefs of RARU. Let's see what happens to their movement when they know what they're fighting for.\"\n\nYes, I am the villain of my own diary. Why did you expect anything better from a dragon?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Rescue (Day 1132)",
                "text": "Being a polite and helpful villain, I arranged with Ythac to commandeer an airplane to transport my victims from Tublier to Churry City. One does not carry victims by paw a long way, if one does not want to kill them too quickly, and I certainly wasn't going to let them ride on my back or make my fianc\u00e9 carry them. It wound up being over a dozen victims: the eight who had broken into my apartment last night, plus Versley and Dulac, and the head and vice-head of RARU's Tublier chapter, and two surgeons from Tublier who were members of RARU. The gendarmes I sent around let the second half talk to the first half, and generally spread the story of my perfidy and shapeshifting. My own fault for trusting hovens to follow orders right, when I knew perfectly well that they were fighting me RARU-style and disobeying me at every turn.\n\nStill, I was furious.\n\nThe only sort of pleasant surprise was Tarcuna and Llredh joining us in Albanne General Hospital. \"We're not going to miss a chance to see a cyoziworm die,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nThe next problem was doing the surgery. Dr. Grauzeng was dead. We didn't want to intrascope Elrique, since we didn't know how likely that was to kill his worm at an inconvenient time. The surgeons refused to perform an operation to remove something that they didn't believe existed. Finally, I agreed to do it myself, with some of them stepping in to help when and if the worm was actually revealed.\n\n\"Cousin! I am sorry, I apologize myself! I somehow have mentioned your name to spies, and now the dragon wishes to eviscerate you!\" cried Dulac.\n\n\"Cousin! I do not wish this torture!\" cried Elrique, reasonably enough.\n\n\"To get rid of your worm, and she'll heal you afterwards,\" added Tarcuna. \"She does a pretty good job of that when there aren't warplanes shooting at her.\" She rubbed her still-crippled arm.\n\n\"Worm! I have no worm! There is not a bit of truth to the stories of the worm!\" cried Elrique, with a dismal miserable stench to his lie, vaguely like a rotting duckling which has starved to death.\n\n\"Quiet,\" I said. He struck out at the orderlies attending him with super-hoven force, and we had to quiet him ourselves. I did get to show off the Arcane Anodyne on two injured orderlies to the surgeons, who were grumpily envious and grudgingly impressed.\n\nAt length \u2014 considerable length \u2014 we had Elrique forcibly asleep on a table in an operating theatre, with several surgeons standing around, and an assortment of dissidents in various degrees of manacles and restraints behind them, and of course their guards. And my fianc\u00e9 and Llredh watching from the back, craning their necks high.\n\nI took a small shape with sharp, sharp claws, and ripped Elrique's udder and chest delicately open. His worm was there, squirming in terror, trying to move Elrique's unresponsive body to escape somehow. I healed Elrique's chest, leaving the worm sticking out halfway and caught between two ribs so it couldn't retract very well, and invited the audience to come and inspect the nasty thing themselves.\n\nThey weren't very eager.\n\nNrararn poked Dulac in the back with a claw. \"Your cousin. Your mistake. Your turn.\"\n\nDulac walked over reluctantly, and poked at the worm, and cupped its fork in his hand. Tarcuna charged into him from behind, knocking him to the floor. Dulac picked himself up, his fur flat, and all sorts of fear and shame mixed in his scent. \"It is a horror! I was about to place it to my breast!\"\n\n\"I didn't know worms could do that,\" I said.\n\n\"I did know,\" snarled Llredh. \"The fools of you, go now and learn of this worm, quickly. Its destruction, she is coming soon!\"\n\nI glared at Sporthen. \"Your turn.\" He didn't move. \"I won't let it take you.\"\n\nFear and disgust warred with bravery in his scent for a moment, and bravery won. \"I am a magistrate. I will judge this for myself,\" he said. He strode over and put two fingers on the worm's fork. All of us watched in horror as he held the fork in one hand and fumbled at his blouse with the other, and none more horrified than Sporthen. Tarcuna and a surgeon pulled his hands away, and he retreated, shaking.\n\n\"Well?\" I asked him.\n\n\"I cannot deny what I have touched, and seen, and been forced to do,\" he said. \"I reserve judgment on the ultimate cause. You can change shape, you can breathe fire, you can heal fatal wounds. Can you not also create this terrible thing as your servant?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, which is true.\n\n\"I was taken before the dragons came to Hove. I've known people who were wormridden for much longer. Wulpmegarn found biological analogies that date back, I don't know, millions of years maybe,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"So you say,\" he answered.\n\n\"You can review the science yourself in Dorday. Indeed, when we cast you into the vilest prison in Trest, it will be your only entertainment,\" I said. Ythac had been a bit of a prissy stickler, and wouldn't let me kill Sporthen.\n\nOne by one, the other RARU members were lead up to get the experience of a live cyoziworm. There wasn't much to argue about after that.\n\nLesser matters fall away under the truth's inexorable breath, after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Getting It Wrong",
                "text": "\"Cousin! That monstrosity \u2014 how did it catch you? How long had it been dwelling in you?\" cried Dulac at the side of Elrique's bed. The operation had been moderately successful, though Elrique's legs were paralyzed. Tarcuna was properly sympathetic.\n\n\"Two weeks and two days, cousin,\" said Elrique. \"In the camp, I shared a cell with three other men. Twenty-two days ago I woke to find one of them holding my arms, his worm already touching my chest. I felt numb, I felt dizzy, I felt weak, I felt lost. A moment later or two, I was the worm's home and its eager servant.\"\n\n\"Wait. This happened at the camp?\" I asked, and paid close attention to veriception.\n\n\"Yes \u2014 I had been at the camp for months by then!\" he cried, truthfully.\n\n\"That's not right,\" I said.\n\n\"Spotty! Great dragon! I would not lie to you \u2014 I would never lie to you!\" he howled, suddenly in a panic. He seemed very eager to please me. My own fault for saving him.\n\n\"You did not lie. But I wish to know more. How is it that you were put into the camp, when you had no worm?\" I patted his head. He glowed happily, and Tarcuna scowled just a bit.\n\n\"I offended the mayor of Churry City, for I was the spokesman for her opponent in the last election, and I spoke quite strongly about her,\" said Elrique. \"When it was time to find victims for the camp, she chose to look heavily among her politicial foes, as well as those who exhibit Wulpmegarn's symptoms. When the inspector shaved the underside of my udder to look for worm-scars, he cut me with the shaver. And swore up and down that I had done it myself to hide the evidence. I was not the only one whom he served thus.\"\n\nLlredh roared in a terrible fury, and Nrararn wrestled with him to keep him from damaging the hospital. The hovens had many questions for Elrique, and asked them all at once, and got few answers.\n\nSporthen stomped to face me. \"This is roughly what we said all along!\"\n\n\"Except that cyoziworms are real,\" I said.\n\n\"Which simply makes it worse. You are not simply imprisoning your enemies \u2014 you are transforming them into legendary monsters of horror!\"\n\n\"Not our enemies,\" I noted. \"Hovens are doing it to each other.\"\n\n\"In a system that you set up for your own purposes! If it were not for you, Elrique would have been free, unimprisoned, uncolonized, un-horror-ridden! The fault is yours! Your rule is immoral, a vicious and cruel conquest, and even when there is some thought to doing good, you do it in such a way as this!\"\n\nUsually when someone harangues me like that and veriception says it's true, I remind myself that veriception tells whether the haranguer honestly thinks that it's true. Only great spells can find actual absolute truths. This time, he was right as far as I knew, too.\n\nHe tried to argue with me more, so I put my forepaw on his face and shut him up. For absolute truth, or thoughts at doing good, I have a friend to consult. \"Ythac, could you please come to Churry City as quickly as ever you can fly? You need to hear this in person,\" I wrote.\n\n\"Give me a hint? Are you going marry Llredh?\" he answered.\n\n\"He's all yours. The affairs of dragons have not changed. But there's a bit of a problem with your cyozi camps.\"\n\n\"That's better, then. How much of a problem?\"\n\n\"You might want to use the Dozenwing Dozentail,\" I answered.\n\n\"That urgent?\"\n\n\"Not that urgent. You could fly normally, or take a zeppelin, and the matter won't get too much worse. But my advice is to come quickly.\"\n\n\"I am out the window, I am over Perstra's suburbs, and I have had to heal my ribs twice already,\" he answered in a moment.\n\nI smelled hoven blood and heard Tarcuna whacking me with a hospital chair, and realized that I had started to crush Sporthen's skull. I healed him in a hurry, and curled up in the corner to listen to the details of Elrique's story. I didn't have much to say to anyone.\n\nLesser matters fall away under the truth's inexorable breath, after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Defeat (Day 1133)",
                "text": "Last night we told Ythac about the innocent Elrique being tossed into a quarantine camp and getting infected. He had to investigate for himself. When an information sorcerer investigates a matter that he is passionate about (or that his husband is), great spells are cast and much truth is revealed.\n\nSo: of the three hundred hovens in Elrique's camp, sixty-one had been infected when they were quarantined. Two hundred thirty-nine uninfected hovens were thrown in with them.\n\nAs of today, none remain uninfected.\n\nWe have fed the worms two hundred and thirty-nine hovens in the one camp alone, when we intended to deny them all opportunity to colonize anyone ever again.\n\nAnd that camp is a fairly old one, among cyozi-camps. More recent ones have been filled by the No False Negatives decrees, which make the standards for avoiding the camp harder. We intended that fewer worms, no worms, escape the camps. But that meant that more uninfected people were thrown in there with them.\n\nWhen we looked at the records and interrogated some laboratory workers, we estimated that about two-thirds of the mistakes were purely scientific in nature \u2014 people with under-udder birthmarks and naturally high Kia ratios and such. The rest seemed to have some political or personal element to them as well. The mayor encouraged the 'very careful examination' of certain of her political rivals, such as Elrique. She did not exactly say it, but it was clear to the laboratory workers that they should try particularly hard to find them infested. The gendarmes also made their recommendations: this hoven had fought fiercely against his arrest and afternoon of torture, so surely he must be wormridden. And that one had tried to bribe her way out of it, but the bribe was insufficient; ditto. And after a while, it was clear that the camps should be filled as quickly as possible, or the dragons would be upset and become destructive, so standards were relaxed somewhat despite Wulpmegarn's publishing of somewhat stricter standards.\n\nSuch is our revenge against the worms.\n\n\"Llredh, may I summon Csirnis? I wish to behave with honor and justice, but I somehow seem to have utterly lost track of where they are. Csirnis knows about them more than most of us.\" asked Ythac. \"Actually, Csirnis is in the mating flight still, so I should and do ask Nrararn and Jyothky as well for permission to summon him.\"\n\n\"The mating flight, such as it is,\" said Nrararn. \"It would be polite to call Osoth, though I doubt he'll come.\"\n\n\"I would be happy to see the rest of my fianc\u00e9s,\" I said.\n\nOsoth did, though it took him until this morning to get here. I had to fly out and give him the Melismatic Tempest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Justice",
                "text": "Ythac held court in his dining room, with Llredh, Osoth, Csirnis, me, and Nrararn in a circle before him. Tarcuna was on a stuffed chair between my forelegs. Wulpmegarn had a small desk covered with documents in front of Llredh, and kept looking over his shoulder at the large smouldering dragon behind him.\n\n\"We haven't done very well against the worms,\" said Ythac, by way of opening. \"We would appreciate suggestions of what to do next.\"\n\n\"Not to put too fine a point on it, but you haven't done very well on anything to do with Trest,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"The worms! This meeting is about the worms!\" snarled Llredh.\n\n\"This meeting is about what I say it's about,\" said Tarcuna, who is entirely too brave still. \"Do you think that I, out of all hovens and all dragons, want the cyoziworms to escape unpunished?\"\n\nYthac hissed. \"I do not doubt your passion about cyoziworms, nor your loyalty to Jyothky at least, but this is my meeting.\"\n\nTarcuna laughed. \"Fine, it's about how you're going to get revenge on the worms, with honor and justice. Will it do you any good to do that if you don't treat Trest with honor and justice?\"\n\n\"There is no question but that Ythac and Llredh will treat their domain with honor and justice, and with the greatest of care for their subjects,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"There's no question that we'd like to,\" said Ythac. \"We haven't done very well so far.\"\n\n\"RARU! It is the rebels of RARU who break the country with the Limp Rebellion! It is Ythac and I who strive to repair it!\" moaned Llredh.\n\nI had to add, \"It is everything and everyone. RARU is trying to drive you away, or at least make it too disgusting for you to live here. They are willing to let the country go to ruin to get rid of you, because they hate you intensely for some very good reasons. It is the violent ones, Barracks and their like, who kill the Grauzengs and the me's and anyone powerful or effective who collaborates too much with you. It is the chiefs of gendarmes and the mayors of Churry City and their like, who have adapted more or less to the new regime and who are learning how to use it to their own advantage, to use your laws against their own enemies. Don't just blame RARU.\"\n\nYthac bit my tail. \"You are leaving someone out. Two people, to be precise.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to insult you in your own castle, Ythac,\" I said, after I healed it.\n\n\"I will!\", said Tarcuna in a fit of unnecessary loyalty. \"It is my mistress's best friend Ythac and his lover and mine Llredh, who conquered my home country by violence. For all their good intentions, everything they touch turns to shit.\"\n\nLlredh hissed at her, \"You! I touched you, outside and inside!\"\n\n\"And I am shit in the eyes of my countrymen,\" she said.\n\n\"Tarcuna! That is not how you speak to Ythac!\" I pointed out.\n\nYthac dipped his head. \"It's a fine way to speak to me. I claim few virtues these days, but at least I am an honest monster and I appreciate the truth. It's not anything I didn't already know.\"\n\nCsirnis craned his head until his crest brushed the ceiling. \"If you will be honest to speak, as well as to listen, what will you do about it?\"\n\nYthac drooped. \"I have no good answer. I am fighting the worms as best as I can, but they are too many and too scattered to make a good enemy. I make good laws and dispose of bad ones on all topics, but my subjects ignore or pervert my decrees. I cannot abdicate honorably. I cannot rule effectively.\"\n\n\"Why can't you abdicate?\" asked Wulpmegarn, who really should have known better.\n\nYthac answered him, though he should have known better too. \"Dragons never give up their territory. It can be taken from us in various ways, mainly by other dragons. It is a dishonor and a risk to the whole species to simply give it back to the original owners. It would suggest to small people that dragons weren't their eternal and inexorable masters: it would encourage rebellions and weaken draconic rule elsewhere, and there is no good in that. For myself and Llredh in particular it would be a particular humiliation. I know of no other pairs of drakes who try to act like married couples. We need to be perfect; for there are many many tongues smelling us.\"\n\nWulpmegarn said, \"Tongues...?\"\n\n\"Many dragons paying attention to us.\"\n\nWulpmegarn frowned. \"You choose to ruin Trest, rather than suffer embarrassment from other dragons?\"\n\nTarcuna nodded. \"That's the way of things, with dragons. They weigh a bit of inconvenience or trouble for a dragon as the equal of a thousand hoven lives. They care only about the ethics and concerns of their own kind; we are nothing to them.\"\n\n\"Which explains perfectly why I flew off and rescued you from Xolgrohim,\" I said, in defense of my own species.\n\n\"I love you too, Spotty,\" she said, infuriatingly, and meant it, even more infuriatingly. \"But none of you went there before, when Xolgrohim was tormenting the Ghemelians. Not even you, Csirnis.\" And the golden prince could not meet her square eyes. \"And whatever good you try to pour into your dominion over Trest spills out of it faster than you can pour, Ythac, Llredh.\"\n\n\"The difference between boy lovers and girl lovers, now I understand him! The boy lover, he is grateful for love, he does not breathe in your eyes! Not so the girl!\"\n\nTarcuna shook her head. \"I'm not trying to blind you, Llredh. Rather the opposite.\"\n\nAll of us looked morose for a time.\n\n\"Ythac? If I can arrange for your defeat by hovens, would you abandon your rule of Trest?\" I asked.\n\n\"If you can arrange for me to be defeated in a way that, first, lets us continue attacking cyoziworms (if we could ever figure out a good way to do that), and, second and just as important, doesn't ruin whatever cinders of honor we still have left, I would be glad to,\" said Ythac. Llredh nodded hard.\n\n\"I'll see what can be done.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Please Die for Trest",
                "text": "\"You mostly took the blue oath, or maybe the purple oath, didn't you?\" I asked my prisoners.\n\n\"We did,\" said Versley. \"And we we'll keep it, too, every one of us. Even if it means our deaths.\" She wasn't quite lying, but she wasn't very confident either.\n\n\"I offer you a better way to risk your lives,\" I said.\n\nSporthen scowled at me. \"Pursuant to the terms of my purple oath, I summarily reject your offer.\"\n\nI pointed out, \"You don't even know what it is.\"\n\n\"But you do know what my oath is. I shall not be violating it. One sentient species in here has a sense of honor,\" said Sporthen.\n\n\"And naturally that species is the one whose gendarmes and local rulers toss their enemies into prison to get infected by cyoziworms,\" I said. \"And set a surgeon's house on fire and shoot her children as they try to escape.\"\n\n\"The average dragon has killed more innocent children than the average hoven,\" said Sporthen, careful to keep to the truth.\n\n\"I wouldn't be surprised if Branner and the other augmented soldiers were ahead of me on that, though. The Trestean occupation of Ghemelia was a bit on the perfidious side,\" I pointed out. Branner scowled at me and didn't say anything. I wasn't entirely sure he could talk, since his augmentations had been turned off; he looked rather limp.\n\n\"The draconic occupation of Hove has been even more perfidious!\" said Versley.\n\n\"No, it hasn't. You've just seen it from closer,\" I said. \"And the worst of it was done by hovens to hovens, anyway.\"\n\n\"The blame for it falls directly upon you! And are you even the least bit sorry, much less repentant? No!\"\n\nWhich reminded me that I was here for applied philosophy, not theoretical. \"Yes, actually, I am. I'm here to arrange for the hoven reconquest of Trest, or close enough.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course. What could be more natural? The Black Curse himself infiltrates RARU, threatens us with every torture and doom, and drags us off to a punishment camp for the purpose of arranging the hoven reconquest of Trest,\" said Quarri. (The Trestean media have been haphazard with my gender, among other details.)\n\n\"The gentleman has a point,\" said Sporthen. \"It is far from apparent why you, of all monsters, would have the least bit of concern for Trest. Considering that you leave a trail of blood and flame whenever you come here. You, even more than Ythac and Leredh [sic; few Tresteans can pronounce Llredh's name properly \u2014 J\u02b8], seem devoted to the unmitigated destruction of Trest.\"\n\n\"I'm not, though. It just sort of happens that way a lot,\" I said. (If that's your best argument, you're on extremely weak moral ground indeed.) \"I'm on Hove for half a dozen reasons by now, and the dracarchy is bad for most of them. It's making my best dragon friend and my best hoven friend both miserable, for one thing.\"\n\n\"You have hoven friends?\" said Quarri with a laugh.\n\nI hissed at him, \"Tarcuna, for one. I was fond of Dr. Grauzeng too, as a comrade-in-surgery, but some hovens killed her for it.\" Quarri sneered at me, but Sporthen and Versley were taken aback. \"What, you thought I am a force of viciousness and meanness, a demon of Garchune existing solely to make hovens miserable?\"\n\nNobody wanted to say anything to that, which probably meant that they agreed with it.\n\nI reared my head and breathed a noisy cloud of sparks of lightning. \"Anyway. This is your best chance to win a big measure of freedom for Trest. Ythac will accept individual challenges from you. If you win, he will relax his grasp on your country.\"\n\nVersley shook her head. \"I somehow doubt that I could win a fight against Ythac.\"\n\nBranner stood up. \"Give me my weapons, turn my augments back on, and I'll take him on.\"\n\n\"Not you. Your life is forfeit already for attacking Nrararn,\" I had to point out.\n\nSporthen scowled. \"So you summarily reject and exclude the three of us who actually have a chance against a dragon in a fair fight. I am a magistrate, an old man. What do I know of weapons?\"\n\n\"Not that kind of challenge, Sporthen. Something where dragons and hovens can compete evenly. Algebra, maybe.\"\n\nSporthen was nonplussed. \"Algebra?\"\n\n\"Yes, algebra, or some such. The judges give you and him a set of algebra problems. If you do better than he does, he grants you the victory, and abdicates.\"\n\nSporthen frowned. \"And in the event of a tie?\"\n\n\"Ties are resolved in favor of the larger dragon,\" I said, because that's the usual rule.\n\nQuarri asked, \"And if I play and lose?\"\n\n\"Ythac is putting up quite a large wager. It is only fitting that you offer something comparable,\" I explained. \"If you wager a cupcake or a book of poetry, and he wagers Trest, he will look ridiculous for taking it.\"\n\n\"And if I had something worth as much as Trest, I'd offer it,\" snapped Sporthen.\n\n\"Something comparably dramatic will do,\" I said. \"You can offer your life. You've already sworn a purple oath to risk it for Trest anyway.\"\n\n\"It always comes down to hovens dying,\" said Versley.\n\n\"Well, yes. But you've got better chances of surviving this time than most, and if you win, you win a lot.\"\n\n\"Weren't you going to kill us anyway?\" asked Sporthen.\n\n\"Just the ones Ythac said I could: Branner and the other augmented soldiers,\" I said. \"You will not die, Sporthen, though I shall have you punished in all ways that Ythac allows.\"\n\n\"So I'm dead if I do what you want, and I'm not much better off if I don't. Pursuant to my oath, or to simple logic, I refuse to do what you want,\" said Sporthen.\n\nI hate lawyers, and everyone else who knows how to negotiate and make sense at it. \"Fine. I won't punish you otherwise.\"\n\n\"You're offering to spare us?\" asked Quarri.\n\n\"If you challenge Ythac and win, I will spare you,\" I said.\n\nSporthen frowned. \"So we're all to challenge Ythac... one at a time, I should think?... and the first one of us who wins, wins freedom for Trest. After that, are further challenges required?\" Clawrasped magistrates, legalistically sucking all the drama out of the event.\n\nI had to think about that. \"No, once one of you has freed Trest, it's free. I suppose you could challenge Ythac if you wanted to get anything more out of him.\"\n\nSporthen nodded professionally. \"And what assurance do we have that it will be a fair contest? From the sound of it, you aren't even considering the possibility that a hoven might win.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous. We're doing this so that a hoven can win.\"\n\nQuarri shook his head. \"Ythac wants to free Trest?\"\n\n\"Ythac wants the best for Trest. His reign hasn't been that,\" I said.\n\n\"Then why doesn't he simply free Trest?\"\n\n\"It's a matter of honor. He needs to do it in a way which doesn't make him look weak or incompetent.\"\n\nSporthen laughed. \"But he's allowed to look bad at algebra?\"\n\n\"Algebra isn't one of the dignities of a dragon. Though Ythac's quite smart. And taking wagers from small people is honorable enough, once in a while.\"\n\n\"I will do it! I am no coward, to fear a dragon in a contest of algebra!\" proclaimed Quarri, lying on the second half. I'm pretty sure he was hoping to live. I suppose I can't blame him for that.\n\nOne of the other night invaders asked Sporthen, \"This is a conundrum. I have sworn to deny the dragons what they want, but in this case, the dragons seem to want just the same thing that we want.\"\n\nSporthen shook his head. \"The intent of the oath is plain: it is to remove the dracarchy from Trest. We can cooperate with dragons in matters of removing the dracarchy. Indeed, if I understand the situation, RARU and the Limp Rebellion have achieved their goals, more quickly and peacefully than we imagined possible.\"\n\n\"You and your disgusting allies the cyoziworms and the corrupt hovens,\" I said in the nastiest voice I could manage. \"Oh, and with more help from Tarcuna than you will ever give her credit for.\"\n\nSporthen, Quarri, and the other two magistrates agreed to challenge Ythac. The soldiers were disqualified, having already lost their lives, and the superintendent didn't have the courage. I glared at the rest of the captives. \"And will any of you challenge Ythac too? The more of you who do, the better your chance of success. And if the challenges fail today, I doubt you will get another opportunity, ever.\" Versley agreed in her turn, and five other RARU leaders.\n\n\"Can I do it too?\" asked one of Ythac's gendarmes who was guarding the prisoners.\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" I said.\n\n\"I will too,\" said another guard.\n\nTwelve brave hovens, then."
            },
            {
                "title": "Pickle-or-Pie",
                "text": "My twelve nominally brave hovens were in the throne room, lined up in front of Ythac.\n\n\"I'm not offering to abdicate exactly,\" said Ythac. \"Llredh and I will remain as the ceremonial heads of the state, as the greater part of the military, as the directors of the cyoziworm-elimination program, and as the rulers of Perstra and its environs. But eleven-twelfths or twenty-three twenty-fourths of the governance of Trest shall pass to hovens.\"\n\n\"That's not what the Black Curse promised!\" snarled one of the soldiers. \"He said you'd abdicate!\"\n\nYthac glared at me briefly. \"Jyothky \u2014 and give her her proper sex, even if you can't pronounce her name \u2014 is my best friend. She is not my vicar. I did not give her power to negotiate on my behalf. If my proposal is unacceptable to you, you may reject it. In which case matters shall continue as they have since the conquest, which is to say, badly.\"\n\nAll the hovens looked at Sporthen. Sporthen argued with Ythac for half or two-thirds of an hour about exactly what was staying with the dragons, and what wasn't. Sporthen won some matters that he cared about intensely. The full form of consular government would be restored (except for Perstra), for the most important, and the consuls would have nearly all the authority that they did before. After a while, Ythac got testy, and started taking all the unsettled topics for himself. The draciarchs have the right to veto any act of government because Sporthen brought that up late, though they can't initiate any. And Shuvanne will die without hearing of this.\n\n\"Sporthen, you're annoying Ythac,\" I said. \"You'd better stop trying to get things from him, at least until you've won them.\"\n\n\"Greedy monster! Bring on your algebra, and do your worst!\" shouted Sporthen, who was just as annoyed himself.\n\n\"I am not doing algebra,\" said Ythac.\n\nI bit his left hind wing. \"It's got to be something fair.\"\n\n\"Stop that. I refuse to do any test of skill or strategy. I don't want anyone ever to think that I lost the contest intentionally. That would be embarrassing!\" snarled Ythac back.\n\n\"Perfidious dragon!\" started Sporthen.\n\n\"The coin, we flip her!\" hissed Llredh. \"No skill, no strategy is in that!\"\n\n\"That's not a worthy contest,\" said Ythac. \"You can't let me call it. If I win, everyone will think I was scrying. And if I don't call it, I'm not even involved.\"\n\n\"How about Pickle-or-Pie?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"That's a horrible game,\" said Versley. \"Nobody above the age of five ever plays it voluntarily.\"\n\n\"It's horrible because you never get to make any choices. If the cards go your way, you win; if they don't, you lose, and that is that. Ythac's scrying and brilliant strategy won't help him.\"\n\n\"Tell me about Pickle-or-Pie,\" said Ythac. Well, it's a children's game. There's a long twisty path of colored spaces on the board, with a few symbols on it. You start with a pawn at the beginning; if you get your pawn to the end first, you win. You draw cards, that either say \"Move forward by three spaces\" or \"Go to the next red space\" or \"Go to the symbol of the octopus.\" You never get to make any choices. There's no strategy.\n\n\"It's a very fancy way to flip a coin,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"It's what you want,\" said Tarcuna. \"You have to do a lot before the game is decided.\"\n\n\"It's usually over in a few minutes, but by the fifth game those minutes seem like hours,\" said Versley.\n\n\"We'll live that much longer,\" said Quarri.\n\n\"Living while playing Pickle-or-Pie is scarcely life,\" said Versley. \"I have three children and seven grandchildren, and I taught young ones for years. I know far too well.\"\n\n\"Actually, we will save the execution of the losers for the day of the transfer of power. You might as well see the victory that you are paying your life for,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"That's very sweet of you,\" I said, not entirely kindly.\n\n\"Jyothky has just volunteered to perform the executions,\" he added. So I bit him again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 100",
                "text": "The courtiers arrived with a fresh, unopened box of Pickle-or-Pie. Tarcuna ripped the paper off, and picked the square pawn. \"OK, Ythac. Triangle, circle, or egg?\"\n\nYthac glared at her. \"You are not playing, Tarcuna.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am. I'd kind of like not to be considered quite such a traitor.\"\n\n\"No, you're not. You're Jyothky's hoven, not mine.\"\n\nTarcuna snarled. \"Llredh's too!\" (Not true.)\n\nLlredh hissed, \"Suicide permission, I also deny her to you!\"\n\nTarcuna threw the board at him.\n\nThe twelve allowed players drew lots to see who would go first. Twelve bullets were put into a helmet: eleven lead, one steel. One of the magistrates got the first game. \"When I promised my life with the purple oath, I never thought I'd risk it playing a children's game,\" he said.\n\nTarcuna shuffled the cards and set up the game, hissing at Ythac and Llredh as she did. The magistrate picked the egg; Ythac picked the square. The magistrate drew a Move 3 card. Tarcuna offered the deck to Ythac. Everyone who wasn't risking their life giggled. Pickle-or-Pie cards are small enough to be comfortable to hoven children; Ythac, at full size, couldn't use them at all. \"Tarcuna, please do me the service of drawing my cards and moving my pawn for me.\"\n\n\"Sure thing. What, exactly, will you be doing in this game, Ythac?\"\n\n\"Ruling.\"\n\nBut that wasn't all he was doing. Three dozen cards into the game, he was ahead by two spaces and close to the goal, and obviously finding the actual gameplay just as boring as Versley had suggested. He started casting a scrying spell. I whomped the spell with my v\u00f4 to break it, and then breathed lightning into his left ear.\n\n\"Ow! Jyothky! That hurt!\" said Ythac. The hovens were all quivering and weeping in alarm. And some pain perhaps; a lightning bolt is rather loud indoors.\n\n\"Yes, I presume it did. No spells, Ythac. This is supposed to be a fair contest.\"\n\n\"I'm not doing anything that will affect the outcome of the game!\" he whined.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. No spells at all,\" I told him.\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" he mumbled. He drew another card, and skipped five spaces ahead, next to the goal.\n\nThe magistrate drew the Pickle, which called for him to move back to the middle of the board. \"Curse that to Garchune.\"\n\n\"That's how the cards fall,\" I said. \"Nobody's been cheating.\"\n\n\"Trying to, I'd say,\" said the magistrate. Tarcuna drew the top card for Ythac, which was \"Move four\" . The magistrate shook his head, \"So much for that. So much for my life.\"\n\nYthac proclaimed in a harsh voice, \"The first of you has fallen to my unconquerable powers of playing Pickle-or-Pie. The chances of continuing the dracarchy have doubled. Who is next?\"\n\nWhile the hovens fumbled with ten leaden and one steel bullet, Nrararn giggled privately to me. \"Doubled, yes, from one in four thousand to one in two thousand.\"\n\n\"He's not trying to win, remember? Just look impressive while he's giving up his empire.\"\n\nQuarri looked at the steel bullet in his hand, and fell to his knees whimpering. I poked him with my tailtip. \"You have talked bravely. Now you must act brave.\" He got up and walked to Tarcuna, shaking, his fur flat, and picked his pawn (square) and first card (red). Ythac's first draw was the Pie, the symbol closest to the goal, and the game only went for four more draws.\n\n\"Hovens are not doing very well recovering their country,\" said Ythac. \"Who is next?\"\n\nNext, by the bullets, was one of the other RARU leaders. \"I think Tarcuna is cheating,\" he said. \"She's not an honest Trestean.\"\n\nTarcuna threw the deck at him. \"I'm not cheating, and I'm as loyal a Trestean as possible at this point. Sporthen, nobody's questioning your loyalty to Trest. You shuffle. I'll just move Ythac's pawn.\"\n\nThe RARUvite played fiercely. Or, rather, the cards fell in his favor several times. Once Ythac was two spaces from the goal, but drew the Pie and had to move back. Then the hoven was ahead for several turns. At the end, both players were near the goal. They each needed to draw a number card \u2014 any number \u2014 to get to it. They got a run of color cards, but Ythac drew a Move 3, and won. The hoven fell into tears, protesting his innocence. \"That's fine, you are innocent,\" I told him. \"I'm not going to kill you as a punishment.\"\n\nSporthen shuffled the cards again, and held them as he drew a lead bullet. One of Ythac's gendarmes drew the steel one.\n\n\"Is it too late for me to back out?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, too late by far,\" said Ythac. \"Play.\"\n\nYthac was ahead for most of that game too. But then the gendarme drew the Pie, and on his next turn Move 7, and Ythac was still meandering around the Sundae two coils of path below. Ythac grinned, and had Tarcuna take his next card: green, moving him a couple spaces forward. The gendarme drew Move 2, and won.\n\n\"Gendarme Niremme!\" roared Ythac, after a quick glance at the guard's nametag. \"You have wagered your life, and you have defeated me at my game! From this defeat, I cede the greater part of my dominion and my husband's to you and your conspecifics!\"\n\nSporthen and the others stared at Ythac suspiciously. So I hissed at them, \"No tricks. We pay our gambling debts.\"\n\n\"You're just going to let me live?\" he asked.\n\n\"For now. Feel free to challenge any other time, and I will happily kill you,\" I said, because I was (and am) still rather upset with him. \"Be glad he is staying on as a figurehead. You are still nominally his, enough so that draconic law keeps me from killing you without his permission. Or would you rather be entirely free?\" I might not have killed him in any case \u2014 I have some manners \u2014 but I didn't much want him to feel entirely happy over defeating some dragons.\n\nThe other hovens eventually realized that we weren't tricking them, and weren't going to massacre them. Llredh darted off to kill Shuvanne, which was either a relief or a final indignity to him, I don't much care which. Ythac, Sporthen, Versley, Csirnis, and a courtier or two started working on the wording of decree of mostly-abdication.\n\nNrararn tugged my forepaw. \"Let's leave. I'm not sure I want to be around Ythac and Llredh when they realize we've just mostly removed their territory. Even if they were helping out, they might be a bit upset.\"\n\nI dragged Tarcuna away from the growing celebration of her country's freedom, and we fled our victory."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Restoration of Trest (Day 1140)",
                "text": "Tarcuna set down the newspaper, getting the corner of it into her curried eggs. \"Hey, Spotty, are you the Forces of Good, or the Forces of Evil?\"\n\nI put the curried sheep I was nibbling down onto the mat of fresh alatrobius leaves which our Damman servants had served it on. \"I don't think that any sane hoven would call me Forces of Good.\"\n\n\"Can I vote for\" Forces of Sexually Available?\" scribbled Nrararn.\n\n\"I will be a good fianc\u00e9e to you after Tarcuna finishes with the current newspaperial assault. And after breakfast,\" I wrote. I need to learn how to appreciate his devotion.\n\nTarcuna giggled. \"You're calling me insane, aren't you? But actually the Magic Horn of Perstra has gone insane too.\"\n\n\"They actually said something nice about me? That wasn't written in terror of their draconic master and half-full of subtle insults, I mean.\"\n\nTarcuna waggled a hand. \"Well, they didn't go so far as to mention your name, or even that you were on the same continent. They're not that mad. But you do seem to be allied with Bmern and Drukah today. Listen to this.\"\n\n\"The brave and selfless efforts of RARU have come to fruition! The dragons more cowardly and venal than anyone could have expected! Anyone, that is, save those who listened to the celestial music of Bmern and Drukah, who promise peace and consularity and freedom for all who truly follow them!\n\n\"Today, at noon, the brave heroes and martyrs of RARU finally threw off the wicked yoke of the dragons! Nearly all of Trest is free of the horrible beasts! They are now confined to the district of Perstra \u2014 alas for our fair capitol! Yet, rejoice for the rest of the federation! Rejoice for the consular government restored! Rejoice for the strength of will and majesty of character of our heroes of RARU! Rejoice in those whom the Forces of Good have moved to counteract the Forces of Evil!\n\n\"Even at the cost of their own lives! As their last act of official vileness for the nation as a whole, when Ythac and Llredh had resigned from the bulk of their usurpations, they chose to end as they had begun. Three of the brave members of RARU died in the monsters' jaws! Their blood shall be the last hoven blood that the beasts taste! \u2014 Assuming that they have sufficient decency to keep their word. We shall have to keep many, many close eyes upon them! And if they renege, the full weight of the Limp Rebellion and the divinely fortified wrath of RARU shall fall upon them once again!\"\n\n\"We do seem to be moved by the Forces of Good. Of course, so were Ythac and Llredh, by the end,\" I had to agree.\n\n\"The Magic Horn didn't actually mention us, though,\" said Tarcuna. \"Didn't mention Pickle-or-Pie, either, or tell all that much of the story.\"\n\n\"They really should, you know,\" said Nrararn. \"As a tactical move. They didn't win by waving their so-called divine goodness around, and the Limp Rebellion would never have worked on its own either. The important thing was, Ythac \u2014 and nearly any dragon \u2014 will keep his word and honor his wagers.\"\n\n\"And because Ythac is a good and Uplifty ruler\" added Tarcuna. \"Which, is what got him to make the wager in the first place... that plus the Limp Rebellion. I'm going to count this as a Hoven victory, with help from you two and Ythac.\"\n\n\"Whose side are you on, anyhow, Tarcuna?\" I asked, not that seriously.\n\n\"Yours of course. It's still your victory, right? You like hovens, don't you?\"\n\n\"I seem to. If they keep in their places,\" I said. Which got me thumped about the head with the dragon-taming staff."
            },
            {
                "title": "Etiquette of Csirnis (Day 1241)",
                "text": "I flew around the Golden Pagoda in Ze Cheya, and shattered the lower sky with lightning. \"Csirnis! You must stop hiding from me!\"\n\nHe peeked his head out from the middle of the temple. \"Oh, good morning, Jyothky. Please stop scaring the natives.\"\n\n\"Then wake up when another dragon comes on your territory!\"\n\nHe slithered all the way out of the pagoda. \"Ze Cheya is not my territory. Indeed, as a single drake, I have no territory.\"\n\n\"You're not quite a single drake, though. You're on your mating flight. Or so it is said,\" I yelled. I am not the most subtle dragon ever.\n\nHe smiled at me. \"In any case, I do not wish to be a rude drake. May I offer you a grilled ox?\"\n\nI rarely refuse such things."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 103",
                "text": "As we flew to the Royal Racecourse, I looked around the city. Big swaths of it were still in ruins, but ruins scabbed over with scaffolding and protective fences, or pink with new construction. \"Your hovens have been busy,\" I said.\n\n\"As have all the Ze Cheyans,\" he said pointedly.\n\nI do speak draconic. \"You are emphasizing that most of the locals aren't yours. But you have some?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I have eighty-three at the moment, more or less. I am splitting them with several local surgeons, and some of them have mixed loyalties or confusing situations, which we largely ignore. You will meet several of them shortly.\"\n\n\"That's a very strange and precise number,\" I said. \"I'm sure you haven't been conquering \u2014 Oh! Have you been unworming them?\"\n\n\"Exactly. We do not have any excellent way to find the wormridden. But when we do, we extract the worm immediately.\"\n\nWe landed at the racetrack. \"That's very nice of you. I wish I could manage it, but I've only done a few so far. You always do everything right... Can I marry you?\"\n\nHe flattened his ears. \"I do things right when I can, which happens occasionally. May I introduce you to some of my hovens?\" He avoided my question, which was very undrakely of him.\n\nSo he did introduce me to a dozen of them. They're a rather haphazard lot. Many of them are rather poor, being ex-prostitutes who left their families when their worms took them. Csirnis is still taking care of them to a large extent. \"Or rather, the royal family is taking care of them, as a personal favor to me. Several of them have been given jobs as my grooms, cooks, and secretaries.\"\n\n\"And you are taking care of hundreds and hundreds, and us all!\" said an extremely loyal former wormridden prostitute or something, sounding a lot like Tarcuna.\n\n\"I hardly think that Damma would conquer Ze Cheya, even if I weren't here. They simply have a demanding style of negotiating,\" he said calmly.\n\nHis cooks are, if anything, better than last time. They have had three years to learn how to serve dragons. They're not making as much as before (lunch was somewhat skimpy, split between us), and they're using their spices more effectively. Oh, and they're not taking the entrails out of the cow when they roast it. Actually they did take them out, and cleaned them, and stuffed them with onions and turmeric and chili peppers and cloves and oily fresh cheese, and packed them back in. Delicious, when the flavorful juice permeated the whole cow. And more nutritious too. I should eat more liver, but most hoven cooks don't cook it.\n\nThree dozen more hovens wandered over for lunch. The chefs fed them out of different pots, giving them lentil stew and rice and vegetable porridge, and a little slice from the roast cow each. (I got tastes of the hoven foods, which were delicious.) Csirnis introduced me as the dragon who had figured out about the cyoziworms and freed the first hoven from them, and they were thoroughly grateful and enthusiastic at me. Some of them brought out xylophones and harps, and played traditional Zeanese music for us. It was a delightful little luncheon.\n\nI was ready to bite Csirnis' tail off by the end of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 104",
                "text": "After lunch, I dragged Csirnis into the sky by a forewing, more or less. \"You avoided my question,\" I said in Grand Draconic. I rather expected an annoying conversation of 'which question?' \u2014 'the one about whether I can marry you' \u2014 'oh, you say that to all the drakes when you're happy with them. What, you meant it as a real question this time?' But this was Csirnis, who is the bravest as well as the most beautiful of drakes.\n\n\"The answer is not so simple,\" he said.\n\n\"How could it not be? No dragoness will come ahead of me in this mating flight, so I choose first. I can choose you. It would be an easy choice: you were probably the best of the drakes even when there were seven, by nearly any measure, and where you were not first you were always a close and beautiful second.\"\n\n\"Let's fly over the ocean, so that the chance of collateral damage is less,\" he said.\n\n\"It's never a good sign when you need to worry about collateral damage when you discuss your relationships,\" I pointed out, as we passed the reefs. (We didn't end up causing any collateral damage.) \"I have noted that you haven't been around the mating flight very much for quite some time. I'm not expecting much of a surprise here, beyond simply being told that you'd rather be a bachelor than marry an incompetent dragoness like me, or an unsexed dragoness like me, or a murderous dragoness like me, or a selfish dragoness like me, or whatever other entirely deserved adjectives you want to stick on me.\"\n\n\"I might say such a thing, if the answer were an unambiguous 'no' and you insisted on knowing my reasons,\" said Csirnis. \"The situation is not so simple.\"\n\n\"Please explain the not-so-simple situation,\" I said. He looked a bit nervous, which never happens with Csirnis. So I put the Hoplonton around him, which amounts to calling him a coward in a very nice way.\n\n\"I may need that, indeed. It is customarily the dragoness' prerogative to decide whom to marry. However, this is Hove, and we do everything backwards on Hove. There is no fair reason why the dragoness should choose, after all; that is simply a consequence of the scarcity of dragonesses. After Arilash left, Nrararn and Osoth and I discussed arrangements. We decided that the one of us, of our choice, would have first chance to marry you. If, after a decent time, he prefers not to, then we revert to the traditional approach.\"\n\n\"That's Nrararn, right?\" I kept all four talons firmly on my temper.\n\n\"That is Nrararn.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you press your case more?\"\n\nHe looked diplomatic. \"You are, currently, queen of the dragons on Hove. If I wanted to be involved in such matters, I would still be on Chiriact.\"\n\nI hissed at him, \"That barely counts for anything. Twenty-two of us, and Chevethna will depose me as soon as she gets around to it.\"\n\n\"I suspect not. For one reason among several, her followers are not particularly loyal to her. I believe that Arilash has gathered some of them into your camp already.\" Which is more than I knew.\n\n\"Was that the only reason? Or even the main one?... And drop your veriception blocks when you say it. You're brave enough to do that when you confront a whole world, you should be brave enough to do it when you confront your fianc\u00e9e. Or whatever I am.\"\n\nHe broke those spells on his v\u00f4. \"There were any number of minor reasons, of which the amatory contrast with Arilash was somewhat important. There is an issue of future adultery...\"\n\nI snapped at him, \"I know I'm not as good a lover as that coral reef there, much less as Arilash. If you want to marry me and sneak off with Arilash when you get pointy... you can ask! I'd probably be grateful for not being bothered!\"\n\n\"Not your husband's adultery, but yours.\"\n\n\"I am the least likely adulterer on all of Hove! I can count on my wings the times I've actually wanted to twine with anyone, and still have wings left over. My husband won't need to worry about my fidelity.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, you and he will, though not out of any wickedness on your part. I expect that few of your eggs are even one part fertilized, much less twice-fertilized by the best two drakes other than your husband on the mating flight, as those of a typical dragoness would be.\"\n\nI spat lightning near him, to rattle his wings with the thunderclap. \"Whose fault is that? I've only had one drake around for most of the flight! The others decamped! Some to Ze Cheya!\"\n\n\"The reasons are reasonable, Jyothky. The effect is reasonable as well. But if you want to have dragonets, you will have to either accept a very limited set of fathers for them, or arrange for a better set. And I don't think you'd have so little regard for your own dragonet as to do the former. So, sometime, you will be coupling with some drakes you are not married to. Looking bored and annoyed, I'm sure, if not out-and-out reading a science textbook and pretending not to be involved while your consort humps away and simultaneously apologizes to your husband, who in turn reminds him that he, the husband, asked for it out of a basic biological necessity. Nrararn felt that he could be more sanguine in this circumstance than I could.\"\n\nI blasted my own foreleg with a lightning bolt, and wished I could feel it at all. Csirnis healed me, as if we were doing some sort of Caramelle. \"I'm sorry, Jyothky. I should have chosen more respectful words.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry too. I should have been a better fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\n\"In a mating flight designed to carry away all of Mhel's dragons' flaws, one could hardly expect perfection,\" he said, which didn't help all that much really.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Nrararn was the most confident that he could come to love you quickly and best, of the three of us.\"\n\n\"Gah, I'm going to get married for love too, like Ythac and Llredh?\"\n\n\"Better than a marriage without love, or so I hear,\" said Csirnis.\n\nI glared at him. \"I'm sure you or Osoth could manage it too. And I'm sure I could love any of you, for that matter, in time.\"\n\n\"Probably so. Nrararn had somewhat of a head start, though.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Acting Married (Day 1337)",
                "text": "[ Chevethna, three days ago ]\n\nChevethna is furious on my behalf. \"Drakes mustn't be allowed to choose dragonesses! Where would we be then?\" The answer, according to Arthane, seemed to be \"Hove, just like we are now.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Arilash, yesterday",
                "text": "Arilash (yesterday) is more amused. \"I was wondering when they'd figure out that they could do that.\"\n\n\"With three females and six males, they probably can't do it. The high-ranked ones are so proud. They'd just end up having dominance contests, and we'd be back to the usual way,\" I agreed. \"When it's three of them for a not-very-desirable female, it's easier.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chevethna, three days ago",
                "text": "Chevethna (three days ago) recommended that I punish the drakes somehow.\n\n\"Any suggestions on how?\" I asked.\n\n\"Bite them? Breathe on them? Deny them your favors?\" said Arthane.\n\n\"They're mostly bigger than me, they're mostly living far away from me, and my favors aren't worth much anyway,\" I pointed out. So I didn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 108",
                "text": "Arilash (yesterday) recommended that I think carefully about whether I actually wanted to get married to anyone.\n\n\"I don't want to be a bachelorette like you,\" I said. \"The less I have to go chasing drakes, the better.\"\n\n\"That word is 'slut', not 'bachelorette',\" said Arilash. \"If we're bothering to be honest about ourselves. But you could be a different kind. The virgin queen! All would look upon you and despair.\"\n\n\"With suitable flagellation with my hukuch\u00f4,\" I said. \"And I'm not a virgin. I've even beaten you in a sex contest.\"\n\n\"You did! I still don't quite understand how you managed it. Anyway, bachelor dragonesses don't have to go chasing after drakes. Mostly not, anyhow. I had to work a bit to get Vuuthon, but the rest were easy.\"\n\n\"You're less, well, lonely nowadays?\" I asked.\n\n\"Much less. Ressal, Kuro, and Nlirei have almost a regular schedule with me. Boruu and Psilia visit often. Gwixion and Llredh show up now and then, and Vuuthon occasionally. I haven't tried any hovens yet,\" she said.\n\n\"Isn't Gwixion married?\" I knew he was, to the elegant and crippled Ignissa.\n\nArilash shrugged. \"Ignissa doesn't mind. She's like Ythac that way. She's not the only married dragon with that opinion.\"\n\n\"I wish I had a dozenth part of Ignissa's grace. When I get married \u2014 or not \u2014 will you add Csirnis and Osoth to your list?\"\n\nArilash laughed. \"You've made up your mind to take pretty sparky Nrararn? But yes, I will, if Csirnis wants to. I'm not sure about him. Osoth has visited almost as often as you have, and been almost as flirtatious.\"\n\n\"I haven't quite decided, but I suppose I'll take Nrararn. Have I been flirtatious at you?\" I fretted.\n\nArilash laughed. \"Not a bit, and neither has Osoth. He wanted to though; I could smell his lust a dozen miles off. And I wouldn't ruin your mating flight any more than I already have.\"\n\nYthac can do this, and Ignissa can, so I suppose I can too. \"Arilash? Want to borrow Nrararn too sometimes? He deserves some actual pleasure once in a while, and I can't help much with that. And I trust you to give him back.\"\n\nArilash thought a moment, curling her tailtip around her claws. \"After you've been married three years, or six, I think might be wise. You two should get settled together first. After that, I should be glad to visit the two of you in your domain. I expect you'll want to crunch my wings the first time or two.\"\n\n\"I'm used to sharing drakes with you,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"So was Ythac, and he did that too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chevethna, three days ago",
                "text": "Chevethna offered me another spicy grilled octopus that her hired hovens had made. \"You poor thing. To think they're trying to make you marry Nrararn instead of Csirnis! Why, Nrararn can't be three-quarters of Csirnis' size, and he's much less impressive.\"\n\n\"You think so? Csirnis doesn't seem like a very good husband. He's crazy.\"\n\nChevethna flipped her wings back. \"Crazy? I must admit I had not noticed! I had not studied him carefully. There is just one drake whom I inspect in any sort of detail anymore.\" She grinned at her mate. \"Beside Arthane, even your golden prince is insipid and inferior.\"\n\n\"Which is why Csirnis always wins when they have dominance contests,\" I pointed out. They've had two, both quite friendly. \"No, he's honorable to a fault, and it is a fault, for him. He quit being crown prince of Chiriact over a point of honor. He might just as well quit being my mate and the father of our dragonets over a point of honor too.\"\n\nArthane nuzzled Chevethna, and said, \"I never asked the full story there.\" So I told them, and they tut-tutted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Arilash, yesterday",
                "text": "Arilash rubbed her face with her forepaws. \"I'm confused now. Are you upset because the drakes are trying to choose, or do you actually want to marry Csirnis instead of Nrararn? Or even Osoth instead of Nrararn?\"\n\nWhich was a very good question. \"I can't imagine being Csirnis's wife. Can you?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I tried imagining it a lot! I had to!\"\n\n\"Didn't work, did it?\"\n\nArilash giggled. \"Not a bit. The first thing I'd imagine is how I'd possibly twine someone else, maybe a month later, maybe two. What thought was clawing you?\"\n\n\"Not that one! He's always so superior and perfect. He's the best at everything, or maybe a close second and more elegant than the best. He doesn't actually say it very often, but he definitely knows it. And acts like it goes without saying, and is the most natural thing in any universe.\"\n\n\"He is that good. How should he act? If he were a traditional drake, he'd be boasting about it constantly. That would be worse, wouldn't it?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"Yes... he's the best about being the best... but I still don't want to feel so insignificant whenever I look at my husband,\" I said.\n\n\"You won't with Nrararn. He's good at what he's good at, but that's only some things. Is he good enough to be a husband for you? Especially if you're going to try to keep ruling Hove?\"\n\n\"I will definitely need allies.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chevethna, three days ago",
                "text": "\"Well, did you at least have lots of sex with him?\" asked Chevethna.\n\n\"'Til we could want no more!\" I boasted. It's literally true."
            },
            {
                "title": "Arilash, yesterday",
                "text": "After she asked for permission to say something delicate, Arilash said, \"You know, you could cut down on your need for getting drakes to help fertilize you after you're married by using them more beforehand.\"\n\n\"I had a sort of farewell coupling with Csirnis,\" I said. \"I didn't really want any more. I'm rather insulted. And he doesn't like twining me very much, not after he's used to you.\"\n\n\"A pity. He is crazy, but his offspring would be excellent. You could probably blackmail him. Tug on his famous sense of honor that he's got to service you a lot, and before the actual marriage.\"\n\n\"'Service', like I was a sheep. You pick the most romantic words, Arilash.\"\n\n\"That's how you're treating it. And how eager you sound for it.\"\n\nI puffed frost at her. \"Hardly. The sheep is much more eager.\"\n\n\"I suppose I shouldn't try to talk you into borrowing some of my drakes to help you now? I've enough to spare.\"\n\nI drooped. \"I think I'll wait until we actually want dragonets. I can hardly do that after chasing you out of the mating flight for doing that.\"\n\n\"Somebody is too honorable to be counted as sane.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "A Reconciliation",
                "text": "I flew back to Damma, where I had left Nrararn. He flew up to meet me, grinning. \"You are alone, Jyothky. You didn't bring Csirnis back?\"\n\n\"No, he didn't want to leave Ze Cheya. I think you know why,\" I hissed at him. \"He told me quite an interesting story.\"\n\n\"He wasn't going to...\"\n\n\"Csirnis is excellent at many things, but not at deception. He didn't much try,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh...\"\n\nI glared at him more. \"What makes you think you're at all competent to marry me?\"\n\nNrararn knows his list, as any drake presumably must. \"I'm a good sorcerer, I'm not bad as a fighter. I've got dozens of diamonds and thousands of books in my hoard. And six Hoven computers, and I invented a twisty little lightning spell to power them, and learned repair spells to keep them fixed.\"\n\n\"Compared to Csirnis, who is an adequate sorcerer and the most beautiful fighter on Hove. And has plenty in his hoard, too, even though he's been collecting a lot less time than you have.\"\n\n\"Csirnis doesn't want to marry you though,\" said Nrararn quietly.\n\nI hissed, \"Did he say so to you? Tell me the whole thing! And take your veriception blocks off!\"\n\nHe broke his spells, and said, \"He would generally like to get married. He's a bit disappointed that he's unlikely to have any children, unless Arilash decides to raise a fertile egg alone or something. But he asked if either of us actually wanted to marry you, since you were the only choice anyway. I did. I do. More than I ever wanted to marry Arilash, anyway, and more than someone in the abstract.\"\n\nI looked at him suspiciously. \"Are you falling in love? A duodecade or so too early?\"\n\nHe curled his tail. \"Well, no, not really.\" Which had the far-overripe-fruit character of quibbling over definitions and details. \"Not very much. Just what's decent for a close couple in a mating flight.\" Which he thought was true. I don't much know what he meant by it.\n\nI glared at him. \"I think the occasion calls for a Caramelle.\"\n\n\"A Caramelle it is,\" he agreed.\n\nHe was wearing the Small Wall, untilted, and some fancy air protections, and had a crowd of sylphs and airy spirits helping him. I flew close to him, with the Melismatic Tempest for speed, and blasted his left forewing with fire (blocked), his right forewing with cold (which hit), and his left forewing with fire again (also hit) in quick succession. He pounced on me in the air, biting and clawing distractingly, and ripping my left hindwing. I couldn't touch him with anything but cold breath. Then he slammed into me, and we each smashed healing spells into the other. I'm pretty sure he realized he'd be better off losing this fight, so he kind of flailed around and looked fighty but ineffectual while I burned a great patch of scales off his tail, and won.\n\n\"What sort of apology would you like?\" he asked, after we finished healing each other.\n\n\"One that doesn't make me look like the largest idiot on Hove,\" I said.\n\n\"Tultamaan is ahead of you there,\" he said, so I breathed lightning next to him, very loudly.\n\n\"He's got lots of competition,\" I sneered. \"But if you're going to want to marry me, and there aren't any other drakes around, let's act married and see how it works.\"\n\nHe grinned happily at me. I imagine he was expecting more doom than that.\n\n\"First, let's pick where we want for our territory. Not Damma. And somewhere that we can get Osoth and Arilash to live near.\"\n\nNrararn cocked his head. \"Arilash is an ally too?\"\n\n\"I'm working on that. Actually you should work on that too, in a while. You deserve a better lover than me, at least occasionally.\"\n\nHe looked rather too pleased at that, so I bit him. Just the wingtip, though. One should be nice to one's husband.\n\nAnd I'm a little boggled that I'm going to have a husband. Though that's rather the point of a mating flight, and the common fate of just about every dragoness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Damma and Katayay (Day 1474)",
                "text": "Damma had a bad habit of picking fights with the dozens of small nations around it. Damma was not a small nation, nor was its army a small army. Usually, after one of these fights, Damma became a slightly larger nation.\n\nWhen Trest had the Peace Everywhere Array, Damma stopped doing that. Actually when the Array was first built, Damma didn't stop. The military bases at Okku Psaddu still have huge twistor scars from the consequences.\n\nBut that was before we came. Damma did conquer Lirradak the year we were living there, but we didn't have anything to do with that. Except we'd kept Trest from interfering, by destroying the Array and conquering the country, but we didn't do that to help Damma.\n\nAnd, for the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, there had been all sorts of incidents between Damma and Katayay. (Katayay is another of those small countries.) Three journalists from the Damman state television station had been brutally beaten by masked men after they tried to interview soldiers in Katayay, and the Bishop of Katayay (who might be called \"Supreme General\" in another country) was unable or unwilling to find out who actually did it.\n\nA wooden bridge was ignited, though conveniently placed Damman firemen were able to extinguish it without great trouble. A bomb was found in a Damman trading enclave in Katayay, fortunately before it exploded. False prayer books printed by presses in Katayay (the first time Damman prayer books were ever printed in Katayay) were discovered in Damman temples near the border, substituting the religious cadences of Katayay for those of Damma in the ceremony of allegiance. Grand upon grand of people had taken their annual vows improperly before someone who knew the ancient ceremonial language well enough discovered the substitution. Vimenti, again, was unable or unwilling to find the perpetrators.\n\nFinally the new Damman ambassador to Katayay was discovered in his bedroom, having been killed in a particularly gruesome manner. His brain ended up in a pool of defiled milk, which supposedly condemned his soul to a million years of torment. The Damman government was furious. The prime minister was particularly furious. This was particularly great-souled of him, as the new ambassador had, shortly before his appointment, adulterously impregnated the prime minister's adult daughter, and caused the prime minister much personal and political trouble. And of course Vimenti was unable or unwilling to find the perpetrators. And by \"unable or unwilling\" Damma meant \"Damma made official proclamations about the event before Vimenti even heard about it.\"\n\nAnd if Vimenti was unable or unwilling to do it, then the Damman military could manage it for him. And the Damman military had tanks and artillery and jets and zeppelins and bombs and twistors and many, many, many soldiers. Conveniently, a plentiful supply of them happened to be near the border with Katayay.\n\nWhile the diplomats of Damma and Katayay were issuing preliminary ultimatums at each other, Nrararn and Osoth and I paid a sneaky night visit to Vimenti."
            },
            {
                "title": "Sneaky Night Visit",
                "text": "Osoth knocked over a chair with his tail by mistake.\n\n\"Help! Guards! Assassins! There are assassins in my bedroom!\" shouted Vimenti.\n\nA dozen soldiers charged in, pointing a dozen twistor pistols at Osoth. \"A dragon! A dragon! Damma sends a dragon against us now!\"\n\nNrararn and I destroyed their guns with delicate lightnings. (It's so fun fighting by his side! We're starting to learn to work well together!) \"Osoth, you were supposed to turn into a cat before you got into the bedroom. Not after,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"I see no particular reason to multiply the indignities of the situation,\" said Osoth.\n\nVimenti was a vast barrel of a man, red-furred, dressed in an elegant silk nightgown. He fell on his knees in front of Osoth and begged for his life.\n\nI prowled over and nuzzled my temporarily feline and black-furred cheek against his ankle. \"Actually, we're not here to kill you at all. We just wanted to have a private conversation about the situation in Katayay, and in Damma. You might even be happy with the result.\" And eventually the guards and pistols were gone.\n\nThe Bishop's chefs brewed him a very large pot of very strong spiced tea, and brought us saucers of cream, and a cauldron of cream for Osoth, which didn't make any sense but perhaps the cook's instructions were confusing. The Bishop attempted social niceties, but mostly proved that he hadn't much been paying attention to dragons. Out of respect for the Bishop, let's skip that part.\n\n\"Damma is about to invade Katayay,\" I said.\n\nThe Bishop nodded. \"They are determined to. This is the same approach that they have taken in conquering many other states. Our soldiers are fierce and expert, and will drive them off.\"\n\n\"You can't lie to a dragon,\" I said. \"On this matter, you can't even lie to the international news agencies. Your armies are small, inexperienced, and poorly equipped. Damma's armies are huge, used to this game, and far better prepared.\"\n\n\"I have read the same reports,\" said the Bishop, and didn't deny it further.\n\n\"Katayay has few allies,\" I said.\n\nThe Bishop huffed, and listed seven countries who promised to send support. We interrogated him a bit. Four were tiny neighbors who probably had the next places in line; I hadn't even heard of one of them, and I'd been studying the region some. One is Trest, but that alliance is pre-draconic and very limited. Two were significant \u2014 Vlechinse was one of them \u2014 but distant and unlikely to send more than a few advisors.\n\n\"Without further help, Katayay will cease to be a country within the month,\" I said. \"And no hovens can help and will help stop that.\"\n\nThe Bishop acknowledged that my claim was not entirely outside of the realm of the possible.\n\n\"Some time ago, four dragons duelled the armies of Trest, back when Trest was the mightiest country on Hove and its armies the mightiest armies on Hove. The armies of Trest could do nothing to them. Only the surrender of Trest to another dragon saved their armies from defeat on the Quenjo Wastes,\" I said.\n\nThe Bishop smelled desirous and hopeful, but he kept his words calm. \"I am aware of recent history,\" he said.\n\n\"Katayay could have four dragons defending it,\" I said. \"Damma will have none.\"\n\nThe Bishop blinked. \"The gratitude of Katayay to the four dragons would be considerable!\"\n\n\"The gratitude of Katayay to the four dragons must be expressed in specific terms. It will not be cheap.\"\n\n\"What terms? How expensive?\"\n\nHe was in my mouth now, and it was simply a matter of biting off whatever flesh I wished to eat. Which was going to be a small snack. \"One part in twelve-to-the-fourth of your national budget, this year and every year. We may impose certain laws and edicts on Katayay. Dragons and our servants may come and go as we wish in Katayay, and the government will help us if we wish it. We may pick three mountains as our homes, though Katayayans may continue to live there, and we will not choose either of your two sacred peaks. And we, not you, get reparations from any peace treaty that is concluded with Damma.\"\n\nThe Bishop rubbed his face. \"One part in what of our budget?\"\n\n\"One part in 20.736. Last year that would have been...\" I named a sum. In Dorday, you could get a reasonably nice house for that sum, but not Tarcuna's parents' mansion.\n\n\"That is not very much money. I would expect to pay more for a small company of hoven mercenaries,\" said the Bishop.\n\nI grinned viciously. \"It is not very much money. We are not trying to discourage you from hiring us. The reparations from Damma will be larger. We are trying to discourage hovens from defying us.\"\n\nThe Bishop smiled a bit. \"I feel no great obligation to protect Damma's budgetary process. What about the laws?\"\n\nI curled my tailtip and spread my claws. \"The price is not so low in terms of laws. There will be several. You may not fight any nation whatsoever that is under our protection. This will put an end to your hopes of invading Trest.\"\n\nThe Bishop didn't grin, but Osoth and Nrararn did at least, so I know it was funny. \"We have not engaged in military adventures for several decades,\" said the Bishop.\n\nI smiled sweetly. \"This law may be more relevant for some of our other clients. We simply wish to have a uniform fee structure.\" Actually this was a trap for him. He was a military dictator. A gentle and well-loved one as military dictators go, but he did sometimes use force against political problems. With Katayay under draconic protection, his political problems would be under draconic protection as well. If we felt like being Uplifty, (and I certainly do, I've got a ton to apologize for and, unlike some other dragons, I want to apologize), and had any idea what else to do, we could interfere.\n\nThe Bishop didn't realize the trap. \"That one broadly seems acceptable. What of the others?\"\n\n\"The most troublesome one will be laws about the cyoziworms infestation. We're still working out how to do that, mostly in Trest. When we figure out what to do there, we'll try to do it everywhere we have influence,\" I said. Which lead to a longish discussion, and I don't think the Bishop believed our answers. At that point in his upcoming defeat, he was prepared to sacrifice plenty of his subjects to us in any case.\n\n\"Oh, and one more law, requiring severe punishments for any hoven who tries to kill a dragon, or who even plans it, or discovers plans and doesn't tell anyone.\" Not many of us like killing their families and friends. Maybe we can get out of that most of the time, if the hovens do a good enough job preventing some and punishing the others without us needing to. Which isn't a perfect agreement with draconic law, but nothing else we've done on Hove has been either.\n\nBy the morning, the exhausted Bishop agreed to our terms. He was sure we had somehow cheated him, or would turn around and conquer Katayay ourselves, or some such wickedness. Which wasn't our plan at all. We just wanted an easy income for life \u2014 Katayay's life, probably \u2014 and a chance to do some gentle Uplifting without all the doom that comes with conquest.\n\nOh, and of course reparations from Damma should make a nice hoard for Nrararn to give to me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Conquest of Damma (Year 4, Day 1477)",
                "text": "Vimenti's new allies made him confident. Or at least we insisted that he act confident. He sent Damma an unendurable ultimatum: they must withdraw all their charges against Katayay, not make any more in the future, move their armies away from the border, and so on. On pain of losing the armies. Also on our command, he did his best to keep the rumors of dragons quiet.\n\nSo the hoven diplomats burbled at each other for another day or so. Then Damma pronounced the situation untenable, and sent jets to Katayay to destroy supply stations and assorted big weapons, and scare infantry.\n\nWe are wicked beasts. We let them.\n\nThis morning, Damma started with the rest of their army. Tanks and artillery and armored busses full of soldiers drove down the three main roads and two agricultural regions. Zeppelins carrying medium-sized twistor cannons drifted over the land. Airplanes patrolled this way and that. The armies of Katayay retreated in a hurry.\n\nVimenti complained about that. \"Why must we retreat, when dragons are our allies? Why do the dragons do nothing?\"\n\nOsoth explained, \"Their translocation allows, or rather ceases to inhibit, our brighter exhalations and darker sorceries.\"\n\nNrararn translated, \"You're not retreating. You're getting out of the way.\"\n\nAnd we waited three more hours, until enough Dammans were in Katayay to satisfy anyone's sense of justice.\n\nAnd then we destroyed them. Hyxy, our fourth, did most of the work. She's quite a vicious little monster. By \"little\" I mean, about the same size as me. By \"vicious\" I mean that she despises small people and very much enjoys killing and tormenting them. She zoomed around, belching corrosive vapors at soldiers and weapons, letting them choke and die slowly, or giving them huge suppurating wounds that are tremendously hard to heal even with good spells. She got to play today.\n\nWhich is fine, for all that she killed some grands of hovens today. If all goes well, she will get few more chances to play this way on Hove.\n\nThe rest of us fought without any such joy, except I suppose for the joy one takes in exercise and skill. Nrararn built a vast hurricane that dashed the Damman jets to the ground. I punctured the zeppelins with lightning and sent them tumbling, and roasted some soldiers in their own tanks. Osoth called forth armies of ghosts, whose touch rusted and ruined the artillery, and whose hideous explanations left soldiers crying and scoring their own chests with knives.\n\nWe worked for, oh, three hours or so. Damma had actually intended to surrender after the first hour, but didn't manage to tell their armies about it. So the armies kept attacking, or not surrendering in any case, and we kept killing them. Next time we'll have to be more emphatic about communications. Perhaps I'll get Ythac to go sit at the enemy parliament and write to me when they actually surrender. Or I'll do that, and have dragons who actually enjoy slaughter do the slaughter. Hyxy and Vuuthon and Llredh.\n\nBut Damma finally managed to surrender. A third of their invading army was dead, and a sixth of the part of the army that hadn't gotten to the border yet. A sixth of the survivors were wounded, poisoned by Hyxy's breath or driven mad by Osoth's ghosts mostly.\n\nKatayay, for those who care, lost a few dozen soldiers, mainly those who refused to retreat, or got caught by long-range attacks while they were retreating. And some gross of innocents, farmers and villagers on the border.\n\nAnd that was the end of Hyxy's fun. She flew off, eager to couple with Ngassith. The rest of us presented our demands to N. V. Satthara, prime minister and head of the Mother Spice Party.\n\nN. V. Satthara was the only hoven who managed to inflict any sort of injury on us. She harangued us about how we had been guests of Damma for so long, how they had given us the Imperial Patthakadu Cavalry Academy, and see how we repay them?\n\nTo which the answer might have been, \"Friendship is one thing; permission to wage unjust wars is a somewhat different thing.\" But I don't want to have that discussion with anyone but Ythac, and that only in private.\n\nSo we stood in a triangle around N. V. Satthara, our heads arched high in the air, and the sparky precursors of our breath weapons crackling over her head now and then. (Which is rude \u2014 it's like belching in public \u2014 and we generally don't do it.) And when she finished her polemic of surrender, we presented our terms.\n\nAnd our terms amount to the ones we demanded from Katayay, except for two things. The first thing is the reparations, of course. (We're calling them \"reparations\" even though there's not much to repair, and the money is going to us anyway.) A twelfth of Damma's income for one year; then one hundred-and-forty-fourth of it for a dozen years, then one part in 1.728 forever.\n\nAnd the second difference, of course, is that Katayay is nominally hiring us, and can nominally fire us, and Damma, as a defeated enemy, is stuck with our terms and whatever vae victis we choose to give them, forever. I'm sure that Vimenti has figured out that he shouldn't fire us, now or ever. At some point we should probably encourage him to change the national charter to make our hiring permanent. But if Katayay ever fired us, we would be honorable and simply leave. And cease to protect Katayay. And allow other hoven countries under our protection free rein to do whatever they wanted to Katayay. I imagine Damma \u2014 which is now under our protection, as well as under our hindpaw \u2014 might want to do something.\n\nBut this serves our end quite nicely. When Damma starts paying us, we'll have no end of money. (Which will be distributed among all the dragons, by the way, though double shares for the ones who did the work.) And when we figure out how to dispose of the cyoziworms, we'll be able to do that to Damma.\n\nAnd if we ever figure out how to construct any justice, without a greater measure of wickedness behind it, we'll be able to do that too. But we will be more careful than we ever have been, doing that. We've never managed to get it right so far."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda",
                "text": "Within three days of our conquest, sixty-one countries had hired us as mercenaries, for the same fee that we charged Katayay. They represented twenty minor wars, present or near past or near future. We were well pleased to accept them all. Hyxy got to play once more. After that, we had nineteen cease-fires or armistices or whatever you call it when all the sides of a war had hired us and were bound not to fight each other.\n\nI told Tarcuna, \"And that is my apology to you for destroying the Peace Everywhere Array.\"\n\nShe didn't look entirely persuaded. \"What is it, the Peace Somewhere Array?\"\n\n\"I think it's better than the Array. For one thing, it's voluntary. If hovens want to fight, they can fight.\"\n\n\"Until the one that's losing hires you,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"Hovens sometimes feel obliged to fight other hovens, that is true. Yet, somehow, hovens do not feel obligated to lose to other hovens,\" I said. \"I prefer the draconic style. I expect to lose most fights with dragons I start. Anyway, if hovens would prefer small fees and enforced peace to losing a war, why should I refuse to indulge them?\"\n\n\"You're just doing it for your own advantage. You're going to extract fees from every hoven on the world, right? And you're going to do absolutely nothing to get it. You're just going to build a mountain palace in Katayay or something, and sit there, and twine on Nrararn all day \u2014 or actually you're going to eat all sorts of delicacies and complain that you ought to be twining on Nrararn \u2014 and study Hoven science, and have a perpetual vacation while every hoven in the world pays for it,\" said Tarcuna, who knows me very well.\n\n\"To do nothing except prevent wars and miseries, but yes, we hope, without having to work very much to do it. You'll be getting the single best part of being ruled by dragons, without the indignities and sorrows of actually being ruled by dragons. Just for a tiny fee, per hoven.\"\n\nShe poked me with her staff. \"You are pretending to be an honest monster, you horrid thing.\" She grinned. \"I'll let you get away with it. I don't think anyone in particular will be fooled, though.\"\n\n\"I'm not trying to fool anyone! I'm just trying to get everyone to behave halfway decently. Starting with myself. I need it more than any hoven.\"\n\n\"And be rich doing it. Better than what Ythac and Llredh did to Trest, at least... I don't suppose Trest could hire you now?\"\n\n\"Trest has different arrangements, and always will.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Offending Ythac (Day 2742)",
                "text": "\"You've been very distant lately,\" Ythac wrote to me this morning.\n\n\"It's been a long day,\" I wrote back apologetically. \"Certain countries do not quite understand what\" no fighting other hovens who are under our protection \"means.\" Which is true, but not very true. It never takes long to write to Ythac.\n\n\"More than just today,\" he wrote.\n\n\"Well, I've been busy more than just today. Nrararn and I are building one house in Katayay, and another one in Vlechinse, in the headlands of the Zom,\" I wrote back. \"And collecting the last of Damma's reparations, finally, a few years late.\"\n\n\"A few years is about how long, actually,\" he wrote. \"More or less since you, shall we say, helped cut my territory down to a manageable size.\"\n\n\"I was worried that you'd be upset about that.\"\n\n\"Losing an empire is one thing. Losing a friend is another. Friends are harder to replace.\"\n\nWe discussed my negligence for some while longer. So, Nrararn and I are going to Perstra to visit Ythac and Llredh in person, and staying for a month.\n\nNot for a few weeks, though. Not because I'm trying to put it off. Because I'm going to need that long to make some very very impressive tribute."
            },
            {
                "title": "Returning to Perstra (Day 2745)",
                "text": "Nrararn and Tarcuna and I were a bit wary on our way to Perstra. First of all, we had to fly over a great expanse of more-or-less-freed Trest. Fighter planes rose up to follow us. They didn't attack \u2014 Hove has seen what becomes of fighter planes who challenge my storm-maned fianc\u00e9 \u2014 but they followed, shouting our position by radio to the wary nation. They are, at best, uncertain about my benevolence towards them. I am too, actually. I seem to wind up doing something horrible every time I visit Trest.\n\nThe borders of Perstra were marked by brilliant astral fountains. These fountains are only built with much effort and much pain. Kings mark their domains with them; lesser dragons content themselves with lesser marks. \"Your fence is beautiful,\" I wrote to Ythac, because it was. \"Your domain looks regal.\"\n\n\"I am king of the dragons on Hove,\" he answered.\n\n\"I haven't done anything like that,\" I said. \"It doesn't seem worth the effort. Chevethna will depose me any year now.\"\n\nYthac and Llredh were close enough for him to shout, \"Me too. But Llredh wanted the fountains. I imagine that a former king can keep them, since they're there already.\"\n\nSo I spent the last minute of flight telling Nrararn what we had been talking about, and Ythac did the same to Llredh."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 120",
                "text": "I flew politely under Ythac, waving a smallish box of lacquered aromatic woods in my wingclaw. He wrote, \"Must you be so formal?\"\n\n\"It's an apology disguised as tribute.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" he scribbled, and dived and snatched it from me. \"Heavy!\" The four of us circled as he opened it. \"Oh, thank you!\" He tossed one to Llredh, and put his own on: matching spike-rings of palladium and silver with vrexium roses, Ythac's brightened with turquoise and emerald, Llredh's with tiger's-eye and ruby. \"I have inspected your tribute and found it adequate! I shall not drive you off with claws and teeth and hellish breath. This time. Indeed, you shall come to my cavern and dwell for a time therein, to ogle the glories and luxuries of Perstra, and know that your own meagre realm holds nothing to compare with them.\" \"There! Formal enough for you, Jyothky?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "On the Elimination of Cyoziworms from Perstra and her Environs by Hovens with Extremely Limited Draconic Assistance (Preliminary Report) (Day 2749)",
                "text": "Wulpmegarn tapped his hoof on the leg of his desk. It was a rather impressive hoof compared to the last time I had seen him, having five pearls inlaid into it. It was a rather impressive desk, too. My whole head would have fit on it, and most of my neck too, even if I hadn't been shrunken to hoven size. Wulpmegarn had done very well for himself.\n\nPower and wealth had not made him a patient man, nor had his victories distracted him from his ultimate purpose. \"While you are in Perstra, Spotty, will you have time to perform any vermectomies?\"\n\n\"That's medical for 'taking worms out of hovens', isn't it?\", I had to ask. (It was either ask him, ask Tarcuna, or ask the Word-Fox, and Wulpmegarn was far and away the most demanding of the three.) I cocked my head at Nrararn. \"Do we have time?\"\n\n\"Certainly! I'd be happy to impose on Ythac and Llredh for an extra month or two,\" he said. Which was the wrong answer, since I didn't want to do that much surgery or collect that many lovebound rivals for Tarcuna. (-1 husband-in-training point for Nrararn, not that they count for anything at all.)\n\nI flicked my tail. \"I will grant your surgeons the benefit of my healing for a few weeks. I am actually here to see what you have done, though. Ythac said I would be impressed.\"\n\n\"The Grauzeng Institute has made a good deal of progress. Most of which was made after Llredh stopped trying to direct our research program, and let us do actual research the way we know how to do it. I should say that we have the worms in Perstra somewhat under control, and provide their victims a passable quality of life,\" said Wulpmegarn, sickly-sweet and faintly rotten with understatement.\n\nTarcuna clicked her hoof on Wulpmegarn's desk, showing off flashing emeralds. She has been doing well for herself, too. \"What, exactly, do you mean by a 'passable quality of life'? I've been wormridden. It's not passable.\"\n\nWulpmegarn smiled. \"You did not have access to the modern medical approach to the problem.\"\n\n\"I had access to the modern magical approach to the problem!\" she snapped.\n\nHe smiled blandly. \"Quite effective in the few cases in which it can be applied. As you can see, we hardly refuse it.\"\n\nI blinked innocently at him. \"You rather insist on it.\"\n\n\"We don't make demands of dragons,\" he said truthfully. Veriception is useless in the face of self-delusion. \"In any case, the medical approach, while not yet quite as effective as the magical, is capable of broad application. We have some eighteen thousand wormridden patients in our care. Most of them have some approximation of free will.\"\n\n\"Now that I need to see,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I had intended for my lead assistant to give you a full tour,\" said Wulpmegarn. \"Ythac adjusted my schedule, so I will be doing it myself.\"\n\n\"I'll count it as thanks for protecting you from him. And getting you into your current comfortable-looking position,\" I reminded him.\n\n\"Well, yes. Thank you,\" he said, with the spoiled-fruit aura of insincerity on his words. \"Though I hesitate to describe a position in which I regularly have to deny things to Llredh as entirely comfortable.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Concerning the Use of Depressants in the Treatment of Cyoziworm Infestation",
                "text": "\"You remember the problem of anaesthesia and cyoziworms?\" asked Wulpmegarn as we walked down corridors in his citadel of medical power.\n\n\"Anaesthetics kill worms. A dose strong enough to put me out would have killed my worm, and that would kill me,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Precisely. A troublesome problem, we thought. But of course it was a crucial clue. Worms are, in many cases, more strongly affected by many sorts of drugs, and neurodepressants in particular. So, we give our wormridden patients a moderate dose of, say, kikodanzan. Tarcuna may know it as 'bosum'.\"\n\n\"I took a biology class from you! I'm not just a whore! I know what kikodanzan is.\" Tarcuna drew a chemical structure. \"That, right?\" I looked at it but didn't understand it. Once I'm married and deposed I need to learn the local science.\n\nWulpmegarn erased one glyph, and added a diaresis to another. \"Close, close. Spotty, Narararn, are you familiar with the drug?\"\n\nNrararn said, \"The only hoven drug that does much for me is alcohol, and it takes a barrel of brandy before I feel it.\"\n\n\"Well, bosum induces a satisfied indolence, or a pleasant torpor, or a heavy approximation of post-coital slumber, depending on the dosage and individual sensitivity. We use a small dose, which tends to make our patients lazy and contented... and leaves the worm in a pleasant torpor. Too torpid to make many demands on the patient in most cases.\"\n\nTarcuna laughed. \"We never got many bosum-guys when I was a whore. They're too lazy to want any sex. So I don't think much of your plan so far. What good are drugged-out, contented worms?\"\n\n\"Lleredh was furious at the treatment. He wants the worms to die in torment, not to pass their days in a pleasant torpor. Ythac had to defeat him in a terrible combat before he assented to let us use this treatment on any broad scale. It is not perfect! Some people are too susceptible to the drug, and have a choice between losing their will to the worm or to bosum. Some worms are too susceptable, and die, and kill the patient as well. Some are not susceptable enough. Bosum has long-term medical disadvantages for hovens and for worms. It shortens the worm's life expectancy from some twenty years to, we estimate, ten to twelve years. This of course curtails the patient's life too.\"\n\n\"I'd rather have ten to twelve hours half-free of a worm than twenty years wormridden. Ten to twelve years is a good deal indeed!\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Our patients generally agree,\" said Wulpmegarn.\n\n\"Really? You're too credulous, Wulpmegarn. How do you know it's not fully controlled hovens pretending to be partially uncontrolled?\" I had to ask.\n\nI didn't understand his answer, which was full of science, so I interrogated a few patients. The interrogations went mostly like this, about three times, with variations:\n\nMe: \"Are you wormridden?\"\n\nPatient: [truthfully] \"Yes.\"\n\nMe: \"Is the worm controlling you now?\"\n\nPatient: [truthfully] \"Just a little.\"\n\nMe: \"Would you like me to rip the worm out of you by sorcery and surgery?\"\n\nPatient: [truthfully] \"Why yes, thank you very much.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess your drugs work,\" I admitted.\n\n\"Indeed they do, Spotty. Indeed they do,\" said Wulpmegarn. \"You have surely noted the thick orange plastic vests that our patients all wear?\"\n\n\"They are certainly thick, and orange, and plastic,\" I said. Which is to say that I had seen them but hadn't noticed that all the patients wore them.\n\n\"Those vests provide a backup, a failsafe in case the drugs wear off too soon. They are too thick and too full of chainmail for the cyoziworm to penetrate. As long as the vest is on, the worm can neither feed nor colonize. Removing the vest without the key is a considerable challenge, and in any case the lock is unreachably in the center of the back. If it is tampered with, or if the patient does not return to the treatment center at a suitable time, the vest will set off a very loud alarm and broadcast a strong radio signal, and inject a personally-tailored dose of kikodanzan. And, incidentally, become rigid, hampering even a wormridden's movements. It even has four independent batteries, making it very challenging to disable its electrical systems.\"\n\nTarcuna whistled. \"Very nice.\" I stared at her. \"Jyothky: a wormridden wearing that sort of suit is going to have a great deal of trouble hurting anyone else, or escaping. The Tresteans don't need to put them in cyozi-camps any more.\"\n\nWulpmegarn nodded. \"Camps are still needed. A minority of patients do not respond well to our current repertoire of drugs. But the camps can be less like prisons, and more like asylums. They can be near cities. Patients can visit their families several times a week. The guards carry tranquilizer darts, not twistor guns. Of course, full freedom is not possible on the current regimen. The worms must be permitted a day or two of wakefulness each week to feed \u2014 on farm animals that we provide, not on people. Goats. We are confident that cyoziworms cannot colonize goats.\"\n\nI couldn't think of anything more to add. \"Oh \u2014 how do you even find the wormridden?\"\n\n\"Screening and testing. Everyone in Perstra has been screened, and will be screened every four years. Not by the barbaric and primitive process you saw years ago! We have more accurate blood and urine tests than we did. We use a device to measure skin conductivity on the udder, thereby detecting internal or external scarring. It is not as accurate as a careful shaving and visual inspection under a microscope, but it is not as humiliating or unpleasant afterwards, either. Anyone appearing potentially wormridden on even one of these tests is given a quarantine test. They are placed in one half of a divided chamber, and provided with all necessities and comforts. In the other half is a goat, also provided with all necessities and comforts. The room is under constant observation by mechanical and often hoven means. And then we wait. Should the subject enter the goat's half of the chamber and attempt to feed a cyoziworm upon the goat's blood, we know that he is infested. Should the subject suffer sudden anemia, ditto. Should a month go by without either of these, the subject is uninfested; in that time, the worm would have had to feed several times.\"\n\n\"That sounds quite accurate,\" I said. Animals need to eat: I know that much science.\n\n\"It is extremely accurate. We only missed a single worm in Perstra, and Ythac found that one by his magic. It is also a logistical infestation of salt-lice to administer. When we instituted it, we expected to run short of rooms, which we did, and recording equipment, which we also did. We even ran short of goats. We have an alternate second-line test, which we used for a while, abandoned due to a regrettably high death rate, and are refining and hope to reintroduce as a voluntary alternative in some months. Full-body intrascopy is too dangerous, too likely to injure the worm and poison the patient. However, a cerebral intrascopy merely looks at the worm's probes, not its soft body, and is much less likely to do any injury. If a narrow intrascope shows a dozen thorny probes, the patient is infested; if not, not. Of course, once in a while it does rend the worm and kill the patient. And of course intrascopy of even healthy people has health risks.\"\n\nThen he showed us the equipment. Tarcuna, who loves twistor beams and hadn't gotten to play with them at all since she had taught me how to breathe them (two years ago, now), had a wonderful time inspecting the intrascopy equipment. Nrararn and I got bored, turned into ducks, snuck off, and behaved in ways suitable to a married couple on the nearest pond. I don't mind amusing Nrararn. The scientists didn't much care if we understood their methods or not.\n\nWulpmegarn was a proud, proud man. He deserved it. He and his scientists and technicians had started to vanquish a foe against which twenty-two dragons had made no particular progress. (That's too nice to us. We had a great deal of regress.) I did stay to do surgery on some hovens, just to prove that dragons aren't entirely helpless or useless. But Wulpmegarn picked my patients, not me, and he picked them for responding poorly to his methods."
            },
            {
                "title": "Prelude to a Coup (Day 4383)",
                "text": "\"I do hope you don't mind very much, Jyothky,\" said Chevethna in her sweetest voice.\n\nI flicked my tongue over her tribute again. She had given me a pile of vrexium and silver statuary, an ancient magical sword from an entirely different universe, crates of art and bales of spices. It was a massive gift for visiting one's territory, or a puny price for a queenship, depending on how you want to look at it. \"It's not quite in the spirit of Hove to mind being deposed. Ythac didn't seem to, when I took his empire away. But I haven't particularly been asking to be deposed, have I?\"\n\n\"Not a bit, and I very much hope you will forgive me sooner rather than later when I rule the world,\" she said.\n\n\"Actually I'll probably go back to Mhel, get properly married with my family and all, and... I might be back, or I might not.\" Which is literally true. Rankotherium might kill me for letting Ythac marry Llredh, say.\n\nChevethna pouted. I poked her chin with a claw. She hissed, \"Don't be petty, Jyothky. You always knew that I'd have to depose you.\"\n\n\"You could wait a century or two more,\" I said, as if we were so grown up that that wasn't much time at all to wait.\n\n\"Not really. I said I'd depose you when the conquest of Hove was over. It pretty much is over. Not that they're conquered exactly, but they're mostly paying us tribute and obeying a few convenient laws. Which is as conquered as they're going to get under your plan,\" she pointed out very sensibly.\n\n\"I suppose so. Well, I'll accept your tribute now, in any case. I suppose I won't be getting any afterwards.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 124",
                "text": "Rhedosaur's Forms of Fighting gives several options for coups d'etat. We picked the one suitable for the smallest places. The drakes \u2014 that is, the king and the would-be king \u2014 fight, in one of the longer forms. The dragonesses \u2014 that is, the queen and the would-be queen \u2014 fight, ditto. If both of those give the same result, the coup is complete or quashed. If they give different results, then our partisans fight a massive m\u00eal\u00e9e, and the winner of that decides the fate of the coup.\n\nSince Arthane is bigger and stronger than Ythac, and Chevethna is bigger and stronger than me, and they came with twice as many dragons as we had, the outcome isn't really in that much doubt."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Democracy of Dragons (Day 4402)",
                "text": "Getting everyone together for the actual coup d'etat took a week and a half. Chevethna had to personally go and bite Vuuthon's tail and drag him back to Esbaril. (Esbaril, chosen at random out of a list of sixty islands first thing in the morning. Chosen at random, because Chevethna didn't want me to set up a twistor cannon array in advance like last time. Ythac and Boruu searched with their best finding-spells to prevent such tricks, anyway.)\n\nYthac made a good account of himself against Arthane. He lost, of course, but only ten touches to twelve. I didn't see too much of that fight; I was mostly busy restraining Llredh.\n\nThen I got to fight Chevethna. We fought frequently as children, and she usually won. Then she got big, and I didn't much, and we went off for separate mating flights where she got lots of practice and I didn't much.\n\nShe started out with a flurry of claws and fangs, getting five solid hits on me in a hurry. I only got one: a twistor breath that shredded her left forewing. I don't think she knew I had picked up twistor breath. She yelped from that, and lost some altitude. Not that she was in much danger of falling into the sea; we were quite high up.\n\nSo I put on the Melismatic Tempest, and flew up higher, and started sleeting breaths down upon her. She fixed her wing enough to fly, but not very fast. I climbed more, and threw flames at her (which she dodged), and ice (which stung her flank), and lightning (which she parried), and twistor beams (which she dodged), and...\n\nAnd I had plenty of space to retreat. There was nothing but open sky at my back, up to Floret far far far above me. I had plenty of time to retreat. Spells aren't generally much use in duels, anything aggressive will simply shatter on your opponent's v\u00f4, and anything defensive will too when you close with each other, but the Melismatic Tempest was on me not her, and I was out of v\u00f4-reach. So she couldn't do anything about it.\n\nAnd she could breathe at me. But all she breathes is fire, which isn't very fast. Back in Port-of-Zom, my friends had trouble breathing fire on airplanes, and airplanes are sky-turtles compared to the Melismatic Tempest.\n\nWhich made for perhaps the longest duel I've ever been in. And the least impressive one. I spent most of it trying to stay out of her way. I must have breathed two or three gross of times to get eleven touches, since she grew very canny about dodging towards the end.\n\nAnd at the end, I did feel obliged to close with her for the last touch. Anything else would have been too cowardly for someone who somehow thought she had a chance of being a queen. Of course, Chevethna is a much better fighter than I am, so getting my one touch cost me another five.\n\nAnd then we flew down to Esbaril and all our peers. Chevethna seemed just a touch miffed. \"You really didn't need to do that, Jyothky. You're just making it inconvenient for everyone else.\"\n\n\"You still get a world to rule either way. I just get a bit more honor for winning one fight. Besides, you don't want to look like you snatched Hove from a totally incompetent lizard, do you? An even contest is good for you too.\"\n\n\"You did not look precisely competent in that fight, Jyothky. Simply victorious.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 126",
                "text": "So it was time for the grand m\u00eal\u00e9e of everyone else.\n\nRather, it was time to pick sides for the grand m\u00eal\u00e9e of everyone else.\n\nLlredh and Nrararn were on my side, of course. Osoth was mine naturally, and Csirnis. Mshai and Irssan and Vuuthon, three great vicious beasts, immediately flew beside Chevethna, giving her side the advantage.\n\nHyxy and Ngassith embraced each other tightly. Ngassith flew to Chevethna, and, rather to my surprise, Hyxy flew to me.\n\nI blinked regally stupidly at her. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nShe nipped my muzzle. \"Fighting for you, silly.\"\n\n\"Why? Your came here with Chevethna, and your husband is on her side.\"\n\n\"I fought alongside you at Damma. It was fun. I don't like deserting a comrade-in-arms. Ngassith won't be upset with me, nor I with him. We're happy enough whoever wins,\" she explained.\n\n\"Well, glad to have you here, Hyxy!\" I chirped.\n\nArilash trumpeted at the remaining dragons, \"I am fighting for Jyothky! Anyone who wants to mate with me in the next gross of years is also fighting for Jyothky!\"\n\nNlirei was at her side almost before she finished talking. Ressal laughed, and flew and joined them, though Nlirei hissed jealously at him.\n\nLlredh hooted, \"I am not fighting for Jyothky! I am fighting for Ythac! You must nonetheless continue to twine with me when Ythac is otherwise busy!\"\n\nArilash laughed jagged flames. \"I accept this variation!\"\n\nPsilia glared at Arilash. \"I don't really need the blackmail, Arilash.\"\n\nArilash dipped her head. \"Count it as a enthusiastic roar of support, enthusiastic to the point of rudeness?\"\n\nPsilia snapped, \"So counted. And you'd best make it up to us, alone, and far sooner than a gross of years.\"\n\nArilash smirked. \"I can manage that.\" Nlirei hissed jealously at them again, but they ignored her.\n\nChevethna roared at them, \"Boruu! Psilia! What are you doing over there?\"\n\nBoruu roared back, \"Voting for the regime which has provided us with money and sex, without us having to work very hard for either one!\"\n\nPsilia added, \"And the one which won't evict us for being too depraved, because, well, they're worse than we are!\"\n\n\"Our partisans are pretty embarrassing!\" I wrote to Ythac.\n\n\"Csirnis isn't. Actually there's nothing wrong with Osoth or Nrararn either.\"\n\nGwixion grinned at Arilash, and flew over to my side. \"I vote in favor of money as well!\"\n\nIgnissa, elegant crippled Ignissa, spat lightning at her husband Gwixion, and drifted towards Chevethna's side.\n\n\"What's that about?\" I asked Arilash.\n\n\"Ignissa did not, in fact, give her consent to any amatory adventures on his part. They are not particularly happy with each other,\" she wrote back. \"For that matter, I'm not particularly happy with Gwixion about that either.\"\n\n\"Please wait until after the battle to express it!\" I wrote.\n\n\"He knows. He is trying to get back into my good graces,\" she said.\n\nKuro wordlessly flew next to Llredh. The less said about whatever's going on there, the better.\n\nWhich left Tultamaan in the center. \"Twelve dragons on one side, a mere five on the other.\" I counted my side, and, yes, I had twelve dragons to Chevethna's five.\n\n\"Tultamaan, observe! Chevethna is there, you must fight for her!\" roared Llredh. \"Arilash's claspers, they are clasped tight against you! Ythac's side, Jyothky's side, she is not the side for you! Your wings, I shall rip them off and cast you into the sea when we fight!\"\n\nTultamaan looked at him with distaste. \"My actual Considerations are rather more Reasonable than a large and brutal creature such as yourself might imagine. Jyothky has a Multitude of Flaws in every conceivable aspect. Fortunately, it is Nrararn, rather than myself, who must Endure or even Pretend To Enjoy the greater part of these flaws. In any case, unlike Chevethna, she is Occasionally Willing to Pay Attention to the Good Advice of her Moral and Mental Superiors. Perhaps, with Practice and diligent Training, her Expressions of Heartfelt and Sincere Thanks will not be quite so labored and difficult. For this reason, and not for Llredh's implicit and Wholly Puerile threats, I am choosing Jyothky's side. With Considerable regret.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Tultamaan,\" I said, which was no great effort. \"I will endeavour to live up to your expectations. Especially all the flaws.\"\n\nTultamaan chuffed, and looked put-upon. Which is how he best likes to look."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 127",
                "text": "My forces didn't make a brilliant accounting of themselves. All five of Chevethna's dragons were mighty. We had Tultamaan, Osoth, Kuro, and Ressal, who, together, accounted for two hits. The first three of them were the first three to be driven from the m\u00eal\u00e9e, though Ressal was still flying at the end. Nlirei and Nrararn each accounted for three more. Of course, they took time and attention from Chevethna's mighty five. And the remaining seven on our side were about as good as Chevethna's five.\n\nAs Mshai floundered in the air, with Csirnis and Hyxy and Arilash and Boruu snapping at his wings and Vuuthon, her last ally, trying futilely to distract at least one of the four, Chevethna flew over to me. \"I should never have let you get away with beating me.\"\n\n\"You would not be the first pretender to the throne to regret such an act of mercy,\" I said.\n\n\"Now, it seems that the forces of adultery and luxury combine to defeat me,\" she complained.\n\n\"Well, this is Hove. The forces of adultery seem to be overwhelming... Which is to say, I am going to owe Arilash a great deal as queenmaker,\" I said. \"Oh, Vuuthon is out.\"\n\n\"He took Llredh with him, at least,\" Chevethna said. Llredh thundered through the air to Ythac, bleeding considerably.\n\n\"Poor Mshai, all alone with half a dozen enemies,\" I said. I curled my tail with my rival's, and we watched Mshai's beautiful dexterity and litheness, sufficient to save her for another half a minute, and four seconds more.\n\nAfter which, it was time for healing all around.\n\nAnd a bit of thinking. Nobody was really expecting this turn of events."
            },
            {
                "title": "Home Again (Day 4564)",
                "text": "There is a secret way into my parents' castle, a passage that runs from the corner of the sea into the corner of the basement. It runs under stone and under water, enough to be opaque even to most dragon senses. Most of my senses, I mean, and I'm sure that nobody who can feel, can feel me through sixteen yards of stone.\n\nOf course my parents noticed me creeping up to them instantly. Either I had gotten a great deal more powerful and dangerous, or my sneaky comings and goings as a dragonet weren't as sneaky as I thought. I'm pretty sure it's the latter. I don't feel any more dangerous.\n\nMother was waiting for me as I wriggled a thin serpent's body out of a crack in the larder. \"I do seem to have a daughter after all. I was beginning to wonder anymore.\"\n\n\"You do. Not the best one around, I'm afraid,\" I said, and turned back into myself to offer her a large vrexium-and-steel box filled with various technological amusements.\n\nShe kindly snatched it out of my talon, and roared for Cterion. The two of them pawed over it for a full quarter of an hour, particularly admiring the solar orrery (useless off of Hove, but beautiful). Then they smiled in unison and said, \"We have inspected your tribute and find it adequate. So we shall not drive you off with claws and teeth and breath. This time.\"\n\nWhich is what you get when you come to your parents' home as an adult.\n\nAnd then I had to explain everything to them. I accidentally told them who I was marrying, which is supposed to be a secret, but they didn't mind. They laughed in the right places (like my first mating, in the artillery-scored air over Ghemel). Also at the wrong times (like me hiring a whore without realizing it). And that lead to some questions.\n\n\"You did get married, didn't you?\" asked Cterion.\n\n\"Most of the way. Nrararn and I were hoping you and his parents would give us your blessing, to complete it,\" I said.\n\nUruunma grinned. \"We would be glad to. But why were you sneaking in? That's for drakes who didn't find mates, if I recall the etiquette I taught you so many decades ago.\"\n\n\"And for dragonesses who came in last, right?\"\n\nCterion blinked at me. \"You came in last?\"\n\n\"Didn't I?\"\n\nUruunma blinked at me. \"Can you come in last out of one?\"\n\n\"I think so. I didn't get my choice of drake, anyway.\"\n\nCterion blinked at me. \"Nrararn is not to your taste?\"\n\n\"Nrararn is working out quite well, actually, but I still didn't get to choose him.\"\n\nUruunma flicked her tail. \"That is not what 'last' means. 'Last' means that you did not put up a good contest against your rivals. If I were you, I would express it as, neither rival that you started out with was capable of completing an entire mating flight against you. Is that not true?\"\n\nI hissed twistor sparks. \"It is technically true. But it would have been just as true if I had been a female Tultamaan, say. Or a butter sculpture of a dragoness. Arilash would have been twining around nonetheless.\"\n\nCterion spread his ears. \"Do I recall correctly that you conquered Hove \u2014 against our express instructions, you disobedient chit! \u2014 and defended your reign, successfully, twice?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, but that had as much to do with Arilash sleeping around as anything else, too.\"\n\n\"And she won't twine Tultamaan, if I recall, and I doubt that she'd go for a butter sculpture either. So you must have done something right.\"\n\nI was feeling a bit browbeaten. \"If anyone asks, I suppose I'll say I came in in the middle of the dragonesses.\"\n\nUruunma grinned. \"Which is meaningless, so they are sure to ask for clarification.\"\n\nCterion grinned too. \"And then you can deliver your extended biography, which will confuse them mightily even if it doesn't render them unconscious altogether. An extra weapon to your arsenal, in case four flavors of breath \u2014 you did stop with four? Good. \u2014 are not enough.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"Now come eat. There is a sort of feast upstairs. It is modest, because someone did not see fit to give us any particular advance notice.\"\n\nBut meat baked with my childhood spices, and fibrous bones to chew, were all the feast I wanted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Tricking Rankotherium (Day 4566)",
                "text": "The preparations for a wedding are infinite in number and endless in duration; they are cosmic in scope and terrible to behold; they are as vast as the sea, and just as annoying to go swimming in. And, in our case, one or two came with a most considerable risk. There's usually some danger: three sets of parents will be unhappy with the wedding under normal circumstances. Not that Osoth's parents would be too surprised when he failed to marry; they can hardly have expected him to do very well in the mating flight. But Llredh's parents knew their son's prowess, and certainly should have expected that his chances were excellent. But the worst danger was Rankotherium: a mighty beast indeed, and well-known to despise his son's tastes in love.\n\nSo I flew to Pdernuz this morning, melismas trailing from my wings, and a very nice book of Hoven biology, which we had an excellent artist of Katayay encrust with gemstones and vrexium swirls, for tribute. Rankotherium snatched it from me, beaming. \"Why, this is most considerate of you, Jyothky. Hardly necessary as visiting-tribute, but I shall treasure it in my collection, and read it eagerly when I have a spare day or two.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not exactly visiting-tribute. It's more of an apology in advance. I have a favor to ask of you, and not a terribly easy one.\"\n\nHe wheeled over the edge of the sea, with Drumet Academy underwing. \"Is this the sort of favor you would prefer to discuss in a private place, such as my palace? Or would you prefer to keep your lines of retreat open, and stay in the open sky?\"\n\n\"Let's go to your palace,\" I said. I was fairly sure he wouldn't kill me.\n\nWe came to his palace, and he shooed all the mhelvul out of the small audience chamber all hung about with the tropies of his victories over the paingods. I recognized Xolgrohim's banner among the others. Rankotherium sprawled comfortably on the main floor, beckoning me to crouch next to him. \"And what can I do for you today, Jyothky?\" he asked in a friendly voice, though he smelled rather of worry and fret.\n\n\"I'm here to beg for your son's life,\" I said.\n\nHe smelled considerably more upset. \"In the ordinary course of events, I should expect to find myself begging for my son's life. He is, after all, my only surviving child.\"\n\n\"We didn't manage to do very much in the ordinary way, I'm afraid,\" I said. \"I don't imagine you will much like the way the mating flight ended. Oh! I forgot.\" I broke my veriception blocks, so that the truth of all my words would be obvious to him.\n\nWhich got me a big scowl. \"Now, I am suspicious of you, Jyothky. I didn't expect you to lie to me before. Now, I am sure that you will choose your words most precisely in ways that mislead me without outright lying.\" Rankotherium is redoubtable in more than simply battle, and knows every trick a dragon might use.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Shall I put them back on?\"\n\n\"No; that would be the worst of both worlds. Are you planning to trick me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sort of. I think you'll be upset about the trick at the wedding, but glad of it a few days afterwards.\"\n\nHe chewed a foreclaw for a moment, a vast and shining foreclaw, well-used and well-groomed both. \"So. Ythac's performance in the mating will enrage me, and you think I will try to kill him at the party?\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly. But before you do, can I make a promise or two to you?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to fly off and kill him now. I don't even know where he is. Can you tell me the whole of the situation?\"\n\n\"Ythac has asked me not to,\" I said. Then I hissed, because I do have some pride, \"And I don't want to: you didn't tell me some rather important things about Ythac before I went off on a mating flight and made an utter fool of myself in front of a dragoness and six drakes who knew all about it.\" Rankotherium nodded, quietly, conceding the point. I continued, \"I can tell you part of it: after the wedding, Ythac will be the king of the dragons on Hove, and I will be the queen.\"\n\nRankotherium curled his tailtip around the leg of his throne. \"A circumstance which will surely move any doting parent to a murderous frenzy, or, under the most rare of circumstances, to celebration.\"\n\nI sighed. \"Some of the details will be enraging, hideously so, but I promised not to tell you those now.\"\n\nHe twitched his tail loose. \"You discovered something about how Ythac was known to occasionally pass some time before the mating flight?\"\n\n\"I know about Kuro, and about various other drakes, yes, exactly.\"\n\n\"Well, I shall hazard a guess: he is not wholly done with Kuro. He will marry you, but it is Kuro, not you, who will hold first place in his affections. Somehow he has persuaded you that this is a desirable arrangement for you as well. Speaking as, if I may be explicit, as the spouse of an unfaithful spouse myself, I suspect that you shall not find as pleasing as you might have hoped.\" Grey and orange flames coiled around his muzzle.\n\nI flattened my ears. \"I'm sorry; I won't tell you any more yet. I am at peace with the arrangements, though. I am worried that you will not be.\"\n\n\"If that is it, I certainly shall not be!\" he roared.\n\nI was rather intimidated \u2014 I have rarely heard him roar like that \u2014 but pressed my case anyhow. \"I want you to promise that you won't hurt Ythac about it \u2014 or any of the other dragons of Hove, for that matter. For as long as I am queen and Ythac is king of Hove.\"\n\nHe lowered his head, and chewed on the concept for a moment or two. \"The final clause of that vow does a good job of reminding me that, whatever vile behavior Ythac has gotten himself into, he has not entirely made an unworthy child of himself.\"\n\n\"He has not one bit!\" And I spoke a brief peaen to Ythac, his skills and kindnesses and carefully-selected triumphs.\n\n\"That is all very well \u2014 and it is, indeed, very well,\" said Rankotherium. \"I give you your promise: I shall not hurt any dragon of Hove over Ythac's behavior for so long as you are queen and Ythac is king of Hove.\" He spoke the proper formula, without even changing \u0211\u1e73s\u1e61 to \u0211\u1e73\u1e61s. \"Indeed, I shall grant you a greater present than you have asked for. I promise to forgive him entirely \u2014 at the celebration of the successful Great Separation of my first grandchild through him and you.\"\n\nI rather gulped at that, and choked on a small twistor-bolt burp. As of now, there is no chance that Ythac will be any father of any child of mine; we have never coupled. \"Thank you. Indeed, great thanks.\"\n\nRankotherium swung his great antlered head. \"Let my son play with his catamites if he must. I shall teach him to have some observance of the forms of proper behavior and draconic society, if I can.\" He belched out a great cloud of smoke. \"And that, I believe, is what you came for?\" I nodded. \"Then let us take our leave of this sort of negotiation and trickery and blackmailing of old friends. I recognize that it is not so long before your wedding, but perhaps you can spare an hour for a pleasant visit?\"\n\n\"I would be glad to. Just one hour, not even one and a third,\" I said, for I was quite grateful on one paw, and quite busy on the other.\n\n\"Well, put your veriception blocks back on, and let us dine on stewed dolphin, and... perhaps you can tell me something of those twistor rays?\", said Rankotherium. He was a perfectly gracious host, which I find to be an excellent trait in a dragon who knows I am conspiring against him."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Consequences",
                "text": "Ythac snarled, \"I shall kill him!\"\n\n\"Not any time soon. He's more than twice your size, and probably more dangerous than all the dragons on Hove put together,\" I said. \"And clever, too.\"\n\nNrararn twisted his mane until the lightning wreathed his claws. \"Ythac? Jyothky? No offense intended, but perhaps we could take him up on it?\"\n\n\"Not. Before. The. Wedding,\" said Ythac. \"I am marrying Llredh. I am not going to be unfaithful to him now of all days.\"\n\n\"And one act of congress probably won't help much. We'd need, oh, dozens. We don't have that much time now,\" I added.\n\nLlredh snorted sparks of fire. \"The extensive course of adultery, you are preparing for her already!\"\n\nNrararn breathed sparks of lightning at him. \"We've been planning on that anyhow. Jyothky has about nine-twelfths of a mating flight to make up for. Csirnis and I have done adequately by her, and Osoth somewhat. You, Llredh, are unconscionably far behind, and Ythac is just a touch worse.\"\n\n\"Tultamaan, let us not forget him! Behind me at least he must be.\" Llredh looked worried. \"...is he?\"\n\n\"I never got to twine Tultamaan, no,\" I said.\n\n\"You got never to twine Tultamaan, you mean,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Fitting and proper is this!\" roared Llredh.\n\n\"I will admit I'm less unhappy about Ythac helping with children than most of the other choices,\" wrote my one true fianc\u00e9. \"I don't think he'll enjoy it much, and I certainly don't need to worry about him trying to drag you away from me. He's got a mate and a half already, and both of them more to his taste.\"\n\n\"I won't enjoy it either. It'll be an optimistic twine, but not a particularly joyful one. I imagine we'll be chatting with our heads, and trying to pretend that our hindquarters aren't doing anything worth speaking of at all,\" I wrote back. \"You can still get the occasional vacation with Arilash. Someone in the set might as well enjoy mating.\"\n\n\"I enjoy mating with you!\" he scribbled back in a hurry. That's good. I think he's learning how to be a spouse already.\n\nI certainly hope I am, too."
            },
            {
                "title": "Roroku and Gyovanth",
                "text": "Gyovanth is Csirnis' second cousin or something. (Yes, that's a girl's name in most universes, too; I guess that good style on Chiriact is to give girl's names to boys.) He's approximately as beautiful as Csirnis: eyes like sapphires, eight wide crescent-moon horns (two of them real), a gleaming silver crest, silvery diamond-shaped scales, claws like scimitars of ice. He moves like Csirnis too: every wing-twitch and neck-bend is an elegant gesture in the grand dance that is his life. His parents own a continent, and more dragons are subordinate to them than live on all of Mhel. So Roroku got exactly what she came to Chiriact to find.\n\nAs the wedding-grounds came into sight, Roroku stopped in midair, folding her wings and levitating. \"I don't think I'm invited,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course you're invited. What, do you need to be asked personally to come to a wedding?\" hissed Gyovanth. \"You know the celebrants and their families. And as my wife, you are even related to one of the celebrants.\" As if a prince of Chiriact, however much self-exiled he might be, could possibly lose to dragons of Mhel.\n\n\"The others must still hate me,\" said Roroku.\n\n\"You are a dragon. At least you look like one. You can endure a little hatred. You will endure a little hatred.\"\n\n\"What if they attack me?\" whined Roroku.\n\n\"Don't be an arrogant little snake, Roroku,\" snapped Gyovanth. \"Do you think that my cousin will permit his wedding day to be ruined over you?\"\n\nRoroku kept her wings firmly folded. \"...maybe afterwards?\"\n\nGyovanth circled around her in the air. \"Don't be more of a coward than you have to be, Roroku. What would you do if some actual danger appeared, I wonder? Perhaps an aged mhelvul nun, attacking you with archaic religious philosophies and a blunt guisarme?\"\n\nRoroku snapped at her husband's wingtip, but he glided out of her reach without bothering to notice the strike. \"You don't need to be so insulting!\"\n\n\"And you do not need to be so incompetent! You are representing Chiriact now! The behavior that might suffice for a dragon of Mhel is greatly inadequate!\" snarled Gyovanth. By this time, they had collected an audience of a dozen dragons, all of whom took great glee in repeating this story to me, Arilash, and anyone else who might perhaps be interested or couldn't get away fast enough.\n\n\"I'm not from Chiriact!\" whined Roroku.\n\n\"That has become abundantly clear,\" said Gyovanth in a voice as sharp and icy as his claws. \"Your tutor has noted that you are the worst student she has ever taught. You will have to apply yourself with far greater vigor to train the Mhel-ness out of you!\"\n\nRoroku howled, and turned tail and flew away from the wedding. Gyovanth caught up with her in seven flaps, fouled her wings with a quick twist of his tail, and by the strength of his body and power of his levitation spells dragged her back towards the grounds. \"How many public humiliations are you eager to provide for yourself, Roroku? In this party you could be an obscure married acquaintance of the families \u2014 or you could be the center of attention due to the puerility and rudeness of your behavior. In the latter case, I should be ashamed to be associated with you. Yet again.\" Roroku struggled and mumbled something that my informants did not catch. \"Now, will you come quietly and behave decently?\"\n\n\"I will, Gyovanth,\" moaned Roroku, sounding defeated.\n\nAddendum: Roroku was perfectly civil to everyone at the actual wedding. She was obviously treating it as a situation be endured rather than enjoyed \u2014 which is how many of the guests were treating her presence there. Gyovanth was polite and elegant and glittery, and quite friendly with Csirnis.\n\nRoroku had come in a very definitive last place in her mating flight. This is no great surprise: the dragonesses of Chiriact get the same sort of intense tutoring that the drakes do. She had sprung into competition with two female versions of Csirnis \u2014 or, rather, two such who had no particular reason to be conciliatory or in any way kind to her. She did have her choice of four males at the end, of course, and picked the one of highest status because that is what one does when one does not know any better. Gyovanth was perhaps somewhat pleased to be married \u2014 he did get a huge estate from his parents \u2014 but he did take it upon himself to mold his new wife into a dragoness suitable for Chiriact. He has not yet succeeded, it seems."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Wedding (Day 4569)",
                "text": "A grand of mhelvul musicians played The Triumphal Return of the Young Dragons. This isn't just a small family affair, the way a coming-of-age party is. The royal domain provided a lot of the musicians, and even a lot of the food. (Note to self: acquire a vast number of hoven musicians, and train them in all the proper music before our subjects' first wedding. Not urgent. We'll have about a century's advance warning. Actually, even if we get them now trained, we'll need to replace them by then, so never mind that note to self.)\n\nThe eight of us \u2014 excluding Greshthanu, of course, but including Tultamaan because he wasn't being quite as cowardly as usual \u2014 flew to the peak of the Grand Pyramid of Mhel. Which is not a pyramid really, it's a pseudosphere (a sort of trumpet standing on its bell). Very tall. People perched anywhere on it can see the top clearly. Unlike Ztesofaum's Pyramid (which, incidentally, is a pyramid), we built the Grand Pyramid. Well, dragons commanded its building, and mhelvul or something actually built it.\n\nI am talking about the Grand Pyramid because I'd rather not write about what happened there today.\n\nAnyhow, we flew around the Grand Pyramid nine times, breathing into the sky each time, because that is How It Is Done By Proper Dragons. Then we landed on the point of the pyramid, and stopped doing things the way they are Done By Proper Dragons.\n\nNrararn breathed a huge booming web of lighting, just as the first-choosing dragon ought to do. \"I claim the right of first choice! Is there any dragon in the flight who will dispute me? No, there is none \u2014 there can be none!\" I am so used to hearing that from Llredh that it was quite strange on Nrararn's tongue. But it's the right thing to say.\n\nWell, the right thing except that every other time the first dragoness says it. So the dragons of Mhel, plus those of Hove and quite a few from elseworld, mostly stared in perplexity, and some tittered or made comments that I refused to hear. Or wondered to themselves or their neighbors, \"Nrararn won? He beat Llredh and Ythac and that Chiriact prince?\"\n\nThe rest of us answered, \"You have the primacy! Yours is the first choice, O Nrararn!\"\n\n\"Then I take Jyothky as my mate! She will give me eggs to fertilize, she will guard my territory with me, she will strike my foes from the left as I strike them from the right!\" Which are just the traditional words, sex-reversed.\n\nAnd they were quite a delight to hear, even if we had been planning this for a duodecade or so. And even if the audience was wondering, \"Small tubby undertrained Jyothky beat Arilash somehow?\" I fluttered over to him, breathing sparks of flame and shimmering cascades of snow. \"I take Nrararn as my mate! He will sire my children, he will guard my territory with me, he will strike my foes from the right as I strike from the left!\"\n\nWe flew together, wingtips brushing wingtips for most of the spiral course up and down the Grand Pyramid. When we came to the royal balcony, we split up \u2014 Nrararn to the right, me to the left, following the ritual properly \u2014 and joined again on the other side, and flew to the uppermost of the three balconies for newly-married couples. The king and queen gazed out at us as we passed, heads high, their demeanour full of dignity and elegance. (Note to self: acquire some dignity and/or elegance. (If possible. (Probably isn't.)))\n\nThen it was Ythac's turn. \"I claim the right of second choice! Is there any dragon in the flight who will dispute me? No, there is none \u2014 there can be none!\" To which the remainder of the flight answered, \"You have secundicity! Yours is the second choice, O Ythac!\"\n\n\"Then I take Llredh as my mate!\" Ythac and Llredh couldn't sensibly promise to sire children on each other, and didn't feel like saying only part of the traditional vows.\n\nThere was a great deal more perplexity, and a great deal more tittering and commenting. Llredh ignored it, and roared \"And I take Ythac as my mate!\" . They flew the spiral course. The king and queen rather scowled at them as they passed, and the king muttered, \"I trust you are enjoying your little joke, Ythac.\"\n\nThey landed on the second balcony, and we hissed down at them companionably. I glanced down. Rankotherium was raking the concrete of the Pyramid with his foreclaws, humilated and furious. I hoped he would eventually be happy that he was bound by his peace-vow. Dessvaria was smirking beside him: she knew what the plans were. Llredh's parents were pretending, unsuccessfully, to be uninvolved and unconcerned.\n\nBack among the mating flight, Arilash and Csirnis roared in unison, \"Then, the winners having selected their mates, we declare this flight over!\"\n\nThe crowd of dragons boiled with a fury.\n\n\"What? The flight cannot be over! A dragoness remains unmated!\" roared the king, and, in similar words, half a grand of other dragons.\n\n\"I withdrew from the mating flight!\" boomed Arilash. \"And in any case, no drake therefrom would have me for his wife!\"\n\nThe king flew up to her. \"I do not permit this violation of law and custom! Every dragoness must be married! I decree that you must now select one of these drakes!\"\n\nArilash cocked her head. \"Actually, I'm not your subject anymore, O great and puissant King of the Dragons of Mhel. I'm a subject of Ythac and Jyothky, the rulers of the Dragons of Hove.\"\n\n\"A useless sophistry! Ythac and Jyothky must uphold the ancient traditions of dragons, just as surely as I!\" hissed the king.\n\nTultamaan clumsily pushed himself forwards with his hind legs. \"And in any case, the Solution to this Inevitably Unfortunate Situation is quite Obvious to anyone whose Brain is not utterly Buried in the Annoyance of the Moment to remember the Noble Traditions that our Grandparents happened to Invent Not So Long Ago.\"\n\nThe king glowered at his cousin. \"What are you going on about, you amazingly obnoxious frozen turd?\"\n\n\"If a dragon king \u2014 let us say, Arguendo, he of Mhel \u2014 discovers that a Mating Flight is not completely Suitable, by reason of one of the Participants remaining Unmarried, the answer is not to Change the Results of that Flight. That is Not Done under Any Circumstances. The answer is to send the Perplexed or Perplexing Participant upon another Flight. Indeed, this process can be repeated More Than Once should the Circumstances Warrant,\" explained Tultamaan. \"This honorable and highly dignified Precedent can be applied just as rationally to a Dragoness as to a Drake. In the case of Arilash, I should imagine that a Great Many Repetitions will be Required. She is not a Particularly Desirable Dragoness for marriage, despite Desiring and being Desired by a great many drakes in the short term.\"\n\nThe king beat his tail on the pyramid. \"Exiling you to Hove is the only worthwhile part of this situation!\"\n\n\"Then I believe the Wedding, proper, is offically Over, and we may, finally, proceed to the Miserable Aftermath?\" said Tultamaan, frost puffing out of his muzzle.\n\n\"Nearly, Tultamaan. Nearly,\" said the king quietly. He turned to his subjects, and all the others. \"When we assembled this mating flight, we took care to include only the most contemptible of the young dragons of Mhel: the insufferable, the weak, the degenerate, the crippled. This was an unwise choice on our part. In retrospect, it should surprise no-one that the resulting marriages and alliances are insufferable, weak, degenerate, and crippled.\" He paused. Half the listening dragons hissed angry things at us, and half were quiet.\n\nThe king continued, \"Fortunately, these dragons, and many others who are their betters, have emigrated to the distant world of Hove. To the extent that they are our children and were our subjects, we wish them the best there. And it would be dishonorable for so many of us, the decent dragons of Mhel, to attack so few of them. But to the extent that they violate our customs, choose mates backwards, marry drakes to drakes, and, worse of all, leave dragonesses unmarried, we officially proclaim the day after the wedding to be a day of celebration, that such a vile crew is departed forever from Mhel!\"\n\nWe \u2014 the just-former mating flight \u2014 cheered and bugled triumphantly. Not that it made much sense after that pile of insults, but one eight might as well amuse one's self eight's selves at least a bit at one's four's wedding."
            },
            {
                "title": "Happy Ending",
                "text": "After the royal benediction, such as it was, it was the time to drive off the bachelors. We \u2014 my husband (!) and I, and Ythac and Llredh \u2014 did our part with considerable glee. We harried Arilash off in the direction of a crowd of bachelor drakes, many of them old companions from her visits to Fohhona, and all of them looking rather less discouraged than they're supposed to look by this part of the ritual. They reprehended her rather less than the king did, and shielded her from his royal disapproval or at least his royal vision, and, I hear, put on a brilliant and protracted display of heterosexuality.\n\nSince we were acting so normal, the married adults generally followed suit, and evicted the adult bachelors (losers of previous mating flights) in the ordinary way. The king sat on the royal balcony, scowling bitterly and thereby preserving the royal dignity. At least, until the crowd of married mhelvul servants poured out of the underground tunnels leading to the catacomby kitchens, and served the feast. Which was, predictably, whole roast animals cut in half, with two halves of different species joined together with girdles of bacon or extensive use of toothpicks made from spicy bark. I am entirely sure that the bachelors get unjoined half-beasts, to reinforce their inferior and subordinate status.\n\nThe traditional conversations didn't proceed very traditionally either.\n\nHow They Are Supposed To Go:\n\nGuest, to Drake: \"Congratulations that your beauty, your prowess, your skill, your wealth, and whatever other good features you possess were sufficient to attract the favorable attention of a dragoness!\"\n\nDrake: \"How could it be otherwise?\"\n\nGuest, to Dragoness: \"Congratulations upon being female! Or, perhaps, encouragement upon your first major act of fulfilling important social roles!\"\n\nDragoness: \"It's OK! At least I got a good drake out of it.\"\n\nInstead, we got some predictable variations."
            },
            {
                "title": "Gyovanth and Roroku",
                "text": "Gyovanth, to Me: \"You did not choose Csirnis!\"\n\nMe: \"No.\"\n\nGyovanth, to Me: \"How could you choose that wriggling worm of a drake over a prince of Chiriact?\"\n\nMe: \"The question is inapplicable, since I did not choose him. He came in first among the drakes, and he chose me.\"\n\nGyovanth: \"How could he beat a prince of Chiriact?\"\n\nNrararn: \"...handily?...\"\n\nGyovanth: \"Impossible!\"\n\nNrararn: \"Yet, somehow, it is what happened.\"\n\nGyovanth: \"Ridiculous!\"\n\nMe: \"The dragons of Chiriact are impressive and worthy, to be sure, but the dragons of Mhel have their own depths of power and character. I imagine your own wife will someday surprise you.\"\n\nRoroku: \"Thank you!\"\n\nMe: \"Well, you certainly surprised me.\"\n\nRoroku had nothing more to add. I think that evens the score between us, at least sufficiently."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rankotherium",
                "text": "Rankotherium: \"How can it be that the terms of my oath are still satisfied?\"\n\nMe: \"Ythac is king of Hove; I am queen. We've also got two prince-consorts.\" I was forgetting about poor Kuro, who was trying to hide among the bachelors. Probably just as well to leave him out of the discussion.\n\nRankotherium: \"Does any important draconic law or custom stand unchallenged and undistorted at all, on Hove?\"\n\nMe: \"I think we've been pretty good about killing small people attacking dragons.\"\n\nRankotherium: \"I daresay you will have plenty of need of that, if you continue on as you have begun.\"\n\nMe: \"Perhaps so. Though outside of a few large countries, hovens regard us as worthwhile monsters.\"\n\nRankotherium: \"Yet your world is improperly conquered.\"\n\nMe: \"Not conquered at all, in most places, yet we have more tribute and authority than we know what to do with. Have you congratulated your son and his new husband yet?\"\n\nRankotherium: \"Don't be ridiculous.\"\n\nMe: \"Don't you be ridiculous. He is the greatest and most influential of the drakes of a new dragon-world; he will be a major historical figure, who may exceed even your own glories. He will bring you more honor than dishonor.\"\n\nRankotherium: \"Plenty of both, though.\"\n\nMe: \"I imagine you can blame the dishonor on Dessvaria.\"\n\nRankotherium: [laughing] \"I will congratulate him. You know what you must do to win my forgiveness, though.\"\n\nMe: \"Nrararn and I will work on it diligently.\"\n\nOff to one side, Dessvaria was quietly chatting with Ythac and Llredh about whether she and her adulterous lover could and should emigrate to Hove. In case we need another draconic law or custom or major dragon of Mhel to offend, I suppose."
            },
            {
                "title": "Tarcuna",
                "text": "Me: \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nTarcuna: \"I told the waitstaff that I was one of the ones you brought from Hove, so they let me help serve.\"\n\nMe: \"You're not married! You should be on the outside!\"\n\nTarcuna: \"So I lied to them about it. Besides, whose fault is that?\"\n\nMe: \"Yours, for not staying with anyone for more than a half-dozen months.\" (She had gone through a great many girlfriends over the last dozen years, and even a few boyfriends.)\n\nTarcuna: \"No. Yours.\"\n\nMe: \"What, you've been waiting for me to realize you love me more than Nrararn does? I've known that for years. It's your own fault, or at least mostly due to brain damage.\"\n\nTarcuna: \"Actually it's because we've never lived anywhere that girls can marry each other. And some big black monster with immense legal powers has not seen fit to make it so.\"\n\nMe: \"Well, next time you're in love with a hoven girl, go to Perstra. I suspect Ythac and Llredh would give you that law, as a present. And it's not so far from your home.\"\n\nTarcuna: \"In case my family ever forgives me? Well, anyhow, I am happy for you.\"\n\nMe: \"Jealous, too.\"\n\nTarcuna: \"Not too bad. I'm still your friend and seneschal.\"\n\nMe: \"Always, Tarcuna.\" Well, as long as she's alive and wants to do it, which is only a few more duodecades.\n\nTarcuna: \"That's plenty for one hoven. Hey, I'd better get back to the kitchen... I love you, y'know.\"\n\nMe: \"I love you too, Tarcuna.\"\n\nNrararn gave me a very tolerant look, so I wrote to him, \"And you, I am busy learning to love. Properly and fully, and in good draconic style.\" He seemed suitably appeased."
            },
            {
                "title": "Typical Guest",
                "text": "Guest: \"Are you serious?\"\n\nMe: \"About what?\" (as if I didn't know.)\n\nGuest: \"Some or all of the obvious: Arilash not marrying! Two drakes marrying each other! A drake picking a dragoness!\"\n\nMe: \"Yes, of course we are.\"\n\nGuest: Any of a variety of prophecies of social and moral decay! Or, depending on the mood of the guest: Admiration and wishes that the guest him-or-her-self had chosen to breathe in the face of convention.\n\nMe: \"We shall see. Fortunately, Hove is far from the other dragon-worlds, so any doom shall probably be confined there.\" Or, \"Thank you! So few other dragons agree with you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Various Bachelors",
                "text": "The bachelors who had these conversations weren't talking to us of course. They were talking to Arilash by ones, or Kuro by twos, outside the main festival area.\n\nBachelor(s): \"Please summarize the immigration policy of the rulers of Hove to me or us!\"\n\nArilash or Kuro: \"Up to Ythac and Jyothky. I imagine they would accept a few more dragons.\"\n\nBachelor(s): \"I or we are interested! Mhel's attractions are somewhat limited. And, if you are Kuro and if I are we, we might have more in common with Ythac and Llredh than we are willing to admit even indirectly, despite having just done so.\"\n\nArilash or Kuro: \"I shall bring it to the attention of the king and queen.\"\n\nBachelor(s): \"I or we are grateful!\"\n\nWe can probably fill Hove with as many drakes married to drakes as we want. Not that it's a terribly common thing for two drakes to wish to marry, or live as if married, but I imagine most who do, will come to us. The question of how many married drakes we want remains to be discussed. Is it worse if we have a grand of them than if we have two? Not sure."
            },
            {
                "title": "Nrararn's Parents; My Parents",
                "text": "Some Parents: \"Congratulations, our son or daughter! You have exceeded or even matched our highest expectations!\"\n\nNrararn or Me: \"Thank you!\"\n\nParents: \"We love you! Both of you!\"\n\nNrararn and I: \"We love you as well!\"\n\nSo at least a few people got their lines right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda",
                "text": "As mating flights go, that was an utter disaster. We got distracted. We got attacked. We got killed. We resigned in droves. We got more distracted. We committed a variety of injustices. We got even more distracted by cleaning up our injustices. We didn't do very much right. And most of us didn't even get mated in any reasonable sense.\n\nI suppose it wasn't too bad as the founding of a new dragon-world though.\n\n\u2042\n\nGlossary:\n\naeroception: Draconic sense of air: where there is air nearby, and what it is doing.\n\nAstral: A nonphysical but very real aspect of a dragon, comprising the v\u00f4, whef\u00f4, and hukuch\u00f4.\n\ndangersense: Draconic sense of danger.\n\ndozen: about 12\n\ndragon: (1) Adult dragon of either sex, or (2) any dragon (q. n. v.)\n\ndragoness: (1) Female dragon of any age; (2) female adult dragon.\n\ndragonet: Child dragon of either sex.\n\ndrake: (1) Male dragon of any age; (2) male adult dragon.\n\nduodecade: Twelve years, or about twelve years.\n\nefforasze: A strong bleu cheese of Mhelvul.\n\ngrand: (1) 1.728, which is 123; (2) about 1.728, like about a thousand or two.\n\nGreat Separation: Astral surgery, performed by dragons on young dragonets. Most of the patients die. The few who survive get considerable magical powers. Many are injured, losing a few senses or the use of some limbs or what have you. (Historical note that does not matter in the book: All dragons in Mating Flight come from the branch of dragons who perform the Great Separation. This is a minority branch, whom the majority consider quite wicked for what they do to their children.)\n\ngross: about 144, between a hundred and two hundred or so.\n\ngross-year: (1) precisely 144 years; (2) approximately 144 years, like about a century and a half.\n\nhukuch\u00f4: An astral part of a dragon; most small people cannot endure contact with the hukuch\u00f4\n\nkineception: A dragon's sense of things moving in the vicinity.\n\nlluyception: A dragon's sense of \"lluyew\", q.v.\n\nlluyew: A sensory property known to dragons and few if any other people. It is largely an aesthetic property. Certain treasures and dragon scales exhibit a pleasurable lluyew. It is most relevant to the value of a hoard, or a drake's beauty.\n\nmagioception: Draconic sense of magic.\n\ntheoception: The draconic sense that detects gods and their activities.\n\ntsheriaf: dragon game, played using breath weapons on a cliff wall or something, requiring both precise control of the breath weapon and a sense of tactics.\n\nveriception: Draconic sense of truthfulness. Dragons can tell if people are lying (in the sense of saying things that they believe to be false \u2014 dragons do not have the ability to sense absolute truth.) Lies are personal and unpleasant sensations, comparable to smelling severely bad breath, so dragons dislike being lied to.\n\nveriception: blocks Spells which prevent one dragon from vericepting another. Most dragons wear veriception blocks most of the time. Veriception blocks prevent others from vericepting the wearer's lies, but the usual spells for this don't prevent a dragon from vericepting their own lies. So, dragons rarely lie, even when they can get away from it.\n\nv\u00f4: The four-lobed astral aspect of a dragon which can be used to break magic.\n\nwhef\u00f4: An astral part of a dragon; the heart of breath weapons."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Enchanted Forest 2) Searching for Dragons",
        "author": "Patricia C. Wrede",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "young adult"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Searching for Dragons \u2014 In Which the King of the Enchanted Forest Takes a Day Off",
                "text": "The King of the Enchanted Forest was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain. He sometimes wished he could say that it was exactly at the center, but this was impossible because the edges and borders and even the geography of the Enchanted Forest tended to change frequently and without warning.\n\nWhen you are the ruler of a magical kingdom, however, you must expect some small inconveniences, and the King tried not to worry too much about the location of his castle.\n\nThe castle itself was an enormous building with a wide, square moat, six mismatched towers, four balconies, and far too many staircases.\n\nOne of the previous Kings of the Enchanted Forest had been very fond of sweeping up and down staircases in a long velvet robe and his best crown, so he had added stairs wherever he thought there was room. Some of the steps wound up one side of a tower and down the other without actually going anywhere, which caused no end of confusion among visitors.\n\nThe inside of the castle was worse than the outside. There were corridors that looped and curled and twisted, rooms that led into other rooms, and even rooms that had been built inside of other rooms. There were secret passageways and sliding panels and trapdoors. There were several cellars, a basement, and two dungeons, one of which could only be reached from the sixth floor of the North-Northwest Tower .\n\n\"There is something backwards about climbing up six flights of stairs in order to get to a dungeon,\" the King of the Enchanted Forest said, not for the first time, to his steward.\n\nThe steward, a small, elderly elf named Willin, looked up from a handwritten list nearly as long as he was tall and scowled. \"That is not the point, Your Majesty.\"\n\nThe two were in the castle study, going over the day's tasks. Willin stood in the center of the room, ignoring several chairs of assorted sizes, while the King sat behind a huge, much-battered oak desk, his long legs stretched out comfortably beneath it. He was not wearing a crown or even a circlet, his clothes were as plain as a gardener's, and his black hair was rumpled and needed trimming, but somehow he still managed to look like a king. Perhaps it was the thoughtful expression in his gray eyes.\n\nWillin cleared his throat and went on, \"As the center of Your Majesty's kingdom, this castle-\" \"It's not at the center of the kingdom,\" the King said, irritated. \"It's only close. And please just call me Mendanbar and save all that 'Your Majesty' nonsense for a formal occasion.\"\n\n\"We don't have formal occasions anymore,\" Willin complained. \"Your Majesty has canceled all of them-the Annual Arboreal Party, the Banquet for Lost Princes, the Birthday Ball, the Celebration of Colors, the Christening Commemoration, the-\" \"I know,\" Mendanbar interrupted. \"And I'm sure you have them all written down neatly somewhere, so you don't have to recite them all. But we really didn't need so many dinners and audiences and things.\"\n\n\"And now we don't have any,\" Willin said, unmollified. \"And all because you said formal occasions were stuffy.\"\n\n\"They are stuffy,\" King Mendanbar replied. \"Stuffy and boring. And so is being 'Your Majestied' every third word, especially when there's only the two of us here. It sounds silly.\"\n\n\"In your father's day, everyone was required to show proper respect.\"\n\n\"Father was a stuffed shirt and you know it,\" Mendanbar said without bitterness. \"If he hadn't drowned in the Lake of Weeping Dreamers three years ago, you'd be grumbling as much about him as you do about me.\"\n\nWillin scowled reprovingly at the King. \"Your father was an excellent King of the Enchanted Forest .\"\n\n\"I never said he wasn't. But no matter how good a king he was, you can't deny that he was a stuffed shirt, too.\"\n\n\"If I may return to the topic of discussion, Your Majesty?\" the elf said stiffly.\n\nThe King rolled his eyes. \"Can I stop you?\"\n\n\"Your Majesty has only to dismiss me.\"\n\n\"Yes, and if I do you'll sulk for days. Oh, go on. What about the North-Northwest dungeon?\"\n\n\"It has come to my attention that it is not properly equipped. When it was first built, by Your Majesty's great-great-great-great-grandfather, it was naturally stocked with appropriate equipment.\" Willin set his list of things to do on Mendanbar's desk. He drew a second scroll from inside his vest and began to read. \"Two leather whips, one Iron Maiden, four sets of thumbscrews-\" \"I'll take your word for it, Willin,\" the King said hastily. When Willin got going, he could read lists for hours on end. \"What's the point?\"\n\n\"Most of these items are still in the dungeon,\" Willin said, rerolling the scroll and stowing it inside his vest once more, \"but the rack was removed in your great-great-grandfather's time and has never been replaced.\"\n\n\"Really?\" King Mendanbar said, interested in spite of himself. \"Why did he take it out?\"\n\nThe little steward coughed. \"I believe your great-great-grandmother wanted it to dry tablecloths on.\"\n\n\"Tablecloths?\" Mendanbar looked out the window at the North-North-west Tower and shook his head. \"She made someone haul a rack up eight flights of stairs and down six more, just to dry tablecloths?\"\n\n\"A very determined woman, your great-great-grandmother,\" Willin said.\n\n\"In any case, the dungeon is in need of a new rack.\"\n\n\"And it can stay that way,\" said Mendanbar. \"Why should we get another rack? We've never used the one we have.\" He hesitated, frowning.\n\n\"At least, I don't think we've ever used it. Have we?\"\n\n\"That is not the point, Your Majesty,\" Willin answered in a hurry tone, from which the King concluded that they hadn't. \"It is my duty to see that the castle is suitably furnished, from the topmost tower to the deepest dungeon.\n\nAnd the dungeon-\" \"-needs a new rack,\" the King finished. \"I'll think about it. What else?\"\n\nThe elf consulted his list. \"The nightshades are becoming a problem in the northeast.\"\n\n\"Nightshades are always a problem. Is that all?\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\" Willin cleared his throat, then cleared it again. \"There is the matter of Your Majesty's marriage.\"\n\n\"What marriage?\" Mendanbar asked, alarmed.\n\n\"Your Majesty's marriage to a lady of suitable parentage,\" Willin said firmly. He pulled another scroll from inside his vest. \"I have here a list of possible choices, which I have compiled after a thorough survey of the lands surrounding the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"You made a survey? Willin, you haven't been talking to that dreadful woman with all the daughters, have you? Because if you have I'll... I'll use you to test out that new rack you want so badly.\"\n\n\"Queen Alexandra is an estimable lady,\" Willin said severely. \"And her daughters are among the loveliest and most accomplished princesses in the world. I have not, of course, talked to the Queen about the possibility, but any one of her daughters would make a suitable bride for Your Majesty.\"\n\nHe tapped the scroll meaningfully.\n\n\"Suitable? Willin, all twelve of them put together don't have enough common sense to fill a teaspoon! And neither have you, if you think I'm going to marry one of them.\"\n\nWillin sighed. \"I did hope Your Majesty would at least consider the idea.\"\n\n\"Then you weren't thinking straight,\" the King said firmly. \"After all the trouble I've had\u2026\"\n\n\"Perhaps Your Majesty's experiences have given you a biased view of the matter.\"\n\n\"Biased or not, I'm not going to marry anyone any time soon.\n\nParticularly not an empty-headed princess, and especially not one of Queen Alexandra's daughters. So you can stop bringing it up every day.\n\nDo you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty. But-\" \"But nothing. If that's everything, you may go. And take that list of princesses with you!\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty.\" With a final, fierce scowl, Willin bowed and left the room, every inch of his two-foot height reeking of disapproval.\n\nMendanbar sighed and dropped his head into his hands, digging his fingers into his thick, dark hair. Willin meant well, but why did he have to bring the subject up now, just when it looked as if things were going to calm down for a little while? The feud between the elf clans had finally been settled (more or less to everyone's satisfaction), the most recent batch of enchanted princes had been sent packing with a variety of improbable remedies, and the giants to the north weren't due to raid anyone for another couple of months at least. Mendanbar had been looking forward to a quiet week or two, but if Willin was going to start nagging him about marriage, there was little chance of that.\n\n\"I might just as well go on a quest or hire some dwarves to put in another staircase for all the peace I'm likely to get around here,\" Mendanbar said aloud. \"When Willin gets hold of an idea, he never lets go of it.\"\n\n\"He's right, you know,\" said a deep, raspy voice from somewhere near the ceiling. The King looked up, and the carved wooden gargoyle in the corner grinned at him. \"You should get married,\" it said.\n\n\"Don't you start,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Try and stop me,\" snarled the gargoyle. \"My opinion is as good as anyone else's.\"\n\n\"Or as bad,\" the King muttered.\n\n\"I heard that!\" The gargoyle squinted downward. \"No thanks to you, I might add. Do you know how long it's been since anyone cleaned this corner? I've got dust in my ears, and I expect something slimy to start growing on my claws any minute now.\"\n\n\"Complain to one of the maids,\" Mendanbar said, irritated. \"We weren't talking about hiring a housekeeper.\"\n\n\"Why not? What are you, cheap or something?\"\n\n\"No, and I wouldn't discuss it with you even if I were.\"\n\n\"King Mendanbar the Cheapskate, that's what they'll call you,\" the gargoyle said with relish. \"What do you think of that?\"\n\n\"I think I won't talk to you at all,\" said Mendanbar, who knew from experience that the gargoyle only got more unpleasant the longer it talked.\n\n\"I'm leaving.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute! I haven't even gotten started yet.\"\n\n\"If Willin asks, tell him I've gone for a walk,\" Mendanbar said. As he left the room, he waved, twitching two of the invisible threads of power that crisscrossed the Enchanted Forest. The gargoyle's angry screeching changed abruptly to surprise as a stream of soapy water squirted out of the empty air in front of it and hit it squarely in its carved mouth.\n\nMendanbar smiled as the door closed behind him, shutting out the gargoyle's splutters. \"He won't complain about dust again for a while, anyway,\" Mendanbar said aloud. As he walked down the hall, his smile grew. It had been a long time since he had taken a day off. If Willin wanted to grumble about it, he could go ahead and grumble. The King had earned a holiday, and he was going to have one.\n\nGetting outside without being caught was easy, even without using any invisibility spells (which Mendanbar considered cheating). Willin was the only one who might have objected, and he was at the other end of the castle somewhere. Mendanbar sneaked past two maids and the footman at the front door anyway, just for practice. He had a feeling he might want to do a lot of sneaking in the near future, especially if Willin was going to start fussing about Queen Alexandra's daughters again.\n\nOnce he had crossed the main bridge over the moat and reached the giant trees of the Enchanted Forest, he let himself relax a little, but not too much. The Enchanted Forest had its own peculiar rules, and even the King was not exempt from them. If he drank from the wrong stream and got turned into a rabbit, or accidentally stepped on a slowstone, he would have just as much trouble getting back to normal as anyone else. He still remembered how much bother it had been to get rid of the donkey's ears he'd gotten by eating the wrong salad when he was eight.\n\nOf course, now that he was King of the Enchanted Forest he had certain privileges. Most of the creatures that lived in the forest would obey him, however reluctantly, and he could find his way in and out and around without even thinking about it. He could use the magic of the forest directly, too, which made him as powerful as any three wizards and a match for all but the very best enchanters.\n\n\"Magic makes things much simpler,\" Mendanbar said aloud. He looked around at the bright green moss that covered the ground, thick and springy as the finest carpet, and the huge trees that rose above it, and he smiled. Pleasant as it looked, without magic he wouldn't have wanted to wander around it alone.\n\nMagic came naturally to the Kings of the Enchanted Forest . It had to; you couldn't begin to do a good job of ruling such a magical kingdom unless you had a lot of magic of your own. The forest chose its own kings, and once it had chosen them, it gave them the ability to sense the magic permeating the forest and an instinct for using it. The kings all came from Mendanbar's family, for no one else could safely use the sword that did the choosing, but sometimes the crown went to a second son or a cousin instead of to the eldest son of the king.\n\nMendanbar considered himself lucky to have followed his father onto the throne.\n\nUneasily, he glanced back toward the castle, then shook his head.\n\n\"Even a king needs a day off once in a while,\" he told himself. \"And it's not as if they need me for anything urgent.\" He turned his back and marched into the trees, determined to enjoy his holiday.\n\nFor a few minutes, he strolled aimlessly, enjoying the cool, dense shadows.\n\nThen he decided to visit the Green Glass Pool. He hadn't been there for a while, and it was one of his favorite places. He thought about using magic to move himself there in the blink of an eye, but decided against it.\n\n\"After all,\" he said, \"I wanted a walk. And the pool isn't that far away.\"\n\nHe set off briskly in the direction of the pool.\n\nAn hour later, he still hadn't reached it, and he was beginning to feel a little cross. The forest had shifted twice on him, each time moving the pool sideways or backward, so that not only was it farther away than it had been, it was in a different direction as well. It was almost as if the forest didn't want him to find the place. If he hadn't been the King of the Enchanted Forest, Mendanbar would never have known he was going the wrong way.\n\n\"This is very odd,\" Mendanbar said, frowning. \"I'd better find out what's going on.\" Normally, the Enchanted Forest didn't play this sort of game with him. He checked to make sure his sword was loose in its sheath and easy to draw if he needed it. Then he lifted his hand and touched a strand of magic floating invisibly beside his shoulder.\n\nAll around him, the huge tree trunks blurred and faded into gray mist.\n\nThe mist thickened into a woolly fog, then vanished with a suddenness that always surprised him no matter how many times he did the spell.\n\nBlinking, he shook his head and looked around.\n\nHe was standing right where he had wanted to be, on the rocky lip of the Green Glass Pool. The pool looked as it always did: flat and still as a mirror, and the same shade of green as the new leaves on a poplar.\n\n\"Oh!\" said a soft, frightened voice from behind him. \"Oh, who are you?\"\n\nMendanbar jumped and almost fell into the pool. He recovered his balance quickly and turned, and his heart sank. Sitting on the ground at the foot of an enormous oak was a girl. She wore a thin silver circlet on her head, and the face below it was heart-shaped and very lovely. Her long, golden hair and sky blue dress stood out dearly against the oak's brown bark, like a picture made of jewels set in a dark-colored frame. That was probably exactly the effect she had intended, Mendanbar thought with a resigned sigh. Somehow princesses, even the ones with less wit than a turtle, always knew just how to appear to their best advantage.\n\n\"Who are you?\" the princess asked again. She was examining Mendanbar with an expression of great interest, and she did not look frightened anymore. \"And how did you come here, to this most solitary and forsaken place?\"\n\n\"My name is Mendanbar, and I was out for a walk,\" Mendanbar replied.\n\nHe sighed again and added, \"Is there something I might do for you?\"\n\nThe princess hesitated. \"Prince Mendanbar?\" she asked delicately.\n\n\"No,\" Mendanbar answered, puzzled.\n\n\"Lord Mendanbar, then? Or, belike, Sir Mendanbar?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\" He was beginning to catch on, and he hoped fervently that she wouldn't think of asking whether he was a king. It was a good thing he wasn't wearing his crown. Ambitious princesses were even worse than the usual variety, and he didn't want to deal with either one right now.\n\nThe princess's dainty eyebrows drew together for a moment while she considered his answer. Finally, her expression cleared. \"Then you must be a virtuous woodcutter's son, whose deeds of valor and goodwill shall earn you lands and title in some glorious future,\" she said positively.\n\n\"A woodcutter? In the Enchanted Forest?\" Mendanbar said, appalled.\n\nDidn't the girl have any sense? \"No, thank you!\"\n\n\"But how came you here to find me, if you are neither prince nor knight nor deserving youth?\" the princess asked in wide-eyed confusion.\n\n\"Oh\u2026 sometimes these things happen,\" Mendanbar said vaguely.\n\n\"Were you expecting someone in particular?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" said the princess. She studied him, frowning, as if she were trying to decide whether it would be all right to ask him for help even if he wasn't a prince or a lord or a virtuous woodcutter.\n\n\"How did you get here, by the way?\" Mendanbar asked quickly. He hated to refuse princesses pointblank, because they cried and pouted and carried on, but they always asked him to do such silly things. Bring them a white rose from the Garden of the Moon, for instance, or kill a giant or a dragon in single combat. It would be better for both of them if he could distract this princess so that she never asked.\n\n\"Alas! It is a tale of great woe,\" the princess said. \"Out of jealousy, my stepmother cast me from my father's castle while he was away at war. Since then I have wandered many days, lost and alone and friendless, until I knew not where I was.\"\n\nShe sounded as if she had rehearsed her entire speech, and what little sympathy Mendanbar had had for her vanished. She and her stepmother had probably talked the whole thing out, he decided, and come to the conclusion that the quickest and surest way for her to make a suitable marriage was to go adventuring. He was amazed that she'd actually gotten into the Enchanted Forest. Usually, the woods kept out the obviously selfish.\n\n\"At last I found myself in a great waste,\" the princess continued complacently.\n\n\"Then I came near giving myself up for lost, for it was dry and terrible. But I saw this wood upon the farther side, and so I gathered my last strength to cross. Fortune was with me, and I achieved my goal. Fatigued with my efforts, I sat down beneath this tree to rest, and-\" '\"Wait a minute,\" Mendanbar said, frowning. \"You crossed some sort of wasteland and arrived here? That can't be right. There aren't any wastelands bordering the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"You insult me,\" the princess said with dignity. \"How should I lie to such a one as you? But go and see for yourself, if you yet doubt my words.\"\n\nShe waved one hand gracefully at the woods behind her.\n\n\"Thank you, I will,\" said Mendanbar. Still frowning, he walked rapidly past the princess in the direction she had indicated.\n\nThe princess's mouth fell open in surprise as he went by. Before she could collect herself to demand that he return and explain, Mendanbar was out of sight behind a tree."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Discovers a Problem",
                "text": "Mendanbar was still congratulating himself on his escape when the trees ended abruptly. He stopped, staring, and quit worrying about the princess entirely.\n\nA piece of the Enchanted Forest as large as the castle lawn was missing.\n\nNo, not missing; here and there, a few dead stumps poked up out of the dry, bare ground. Something had destroyed a circular swath of trees and moss, destroyed it so completely that only stumps and a few flakes of ash remained.\n\nThe taste of dust on the wind brought Mendanbar out of his daze. He hesitated, then took a step forward into the area of devastation. As he passed from woods to waste, he felt a sudden absence and stumbled in shock. Where the unseen lines of power should have been, humming with the magical energy that was the life of the Enchanted Forest , he sensed nothing. The magic was gone.\n\n\"No wonder that princess didn't have any trouble getting into the forest,\" Mendanbar said numbly. Without magic, this section of forest couldn't dodge away from her; all the princess had to do to get into the woods was cross it.\n\nSeriously annoyed, Mendanbar kicked at the ground, dislodging more ashes. He bent to touch one of the stumps. The wood crumbled to dust where his hand met it. Coughing, he sat back and saw something glittering on the ground beside the next stump. He went over and picked it up.\n\nIt was a thin, hard disk a little larger than his hand, and it was a bright, iridescent green.\n\n\"A dragon's scale? What is a dragon's scale doing here?\"\n\nThere was no one near to answer his question. He inspected the scale with care, but it told him nothing more. Scowling at it, he shrugged and put it in his pocket. Then he began a methodical search of the dead area, hoping to find something that would reveal a little more.\n\nHalf an hour later, he had collected four more dragon scales in various shades of green and was feeling decidedly grim. He had thought he was on good terms with the dragons who lived to the east in the Mountains of Morning: he left them alone and they left him alone. Glancing around the burned space, he grimaced.\n\n\"This doesn't look much like 'leaving me alone,\" \"he muttered angrily.\n\n\"What do those dragons think they are doing?\" He began to wish he had not left them quite so much alone for the past three years. Right now it would be useful to know something more about dragons than that they were all large and breathed fire.\n\nAbsently, Mendanbar pocketed the dragon scales and walked back to the edge of the burned-out circle. It was a relief to be under the trees where he could feel the magic of the forest again. Frowning, he paused to look back at the ashy clearing.\n\n\"I can't just leave it like this,\" he said to himself. \"If that princess came this way, anyone might get into the Enchanted Forest just by walking across the barren space. But how do I put magic back into an area that's been sucked dry?\"\n\nStill frowning, he circled the edge of the clearing, nudging at the threads of magic that wound through the air. None of them would move any closer to the burned section, but on the far side he found the place where the normal country outside the forest touched the clearing.\n\nHe paused. It wasn't a very wide gap.\n\n\"I wonder,\" he said softly. \"If I could move it a little, just around the edge\u2026\"\n\nCarefully, he reached out and gathered a handful of magic. It felt a lot like taking hold of a handful of thin cords, except that the cords were invisible, floating in the air, and made his palms tingle when he touched them. And, of course, each cord was actually a piece of solid magic that he could use to cast a spell if he wanted. In fact, he had to concentrate hard to keep from casting a spell or two with all that magic crammed together in his hands.\n\nPulling gently on the invisible threads, Mendanbar stepped slowly backward out of the Enchanted Forest. The brilliant green moss followed him, rippling under his feet. The trees of the forest wavered as if he were looking at them through a shimmer of hot air rising off sunbaked stone.\n\nHe took another step, and another. The threads of magic felt warm and thin and slippery. He tightened his grip and took another step. The trees flickered madly, as if he were blinking very rapidly, and the moss swelled and twitched like the back of a horse trying to get rid of an unwanted rider. A drop of sweat ran down his forehead and hung on the tip of his nose. The magic in his hands felt hot and tightly stretched. He stepped back again.\n\nWith a sudden wrench, everything snapped into place. The trees stopped flickering and the moss smoothed and lay still. The forest closed up around the burned-out clearing, circling it completely and cutting it off from the outside world. Mendanbar gave a sigh of relief.\n\n\"It worked?\" he cried triumphantly. A breeze brushed past him, carrying the sharp smell of ashes, and he sobered. He hadn't repaired the damage; he had only isolated it. \"Well, at least it should keep people from wandering into the Enchanted Forest by accident,\" he reminded himself.\n\n\"That's something.\"\n\nOne by one, Mendanbar let go of the threads of magic he had pulled across the gap. He felt them join the other unseen strands, merging back into the normal network of magic that crisscrossed the forest.\n\nWhen he had released the last thread, he wiped his hands on his shirt, then wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve.\n\n\"Are you quite finished?\" said a voice from a tree above his head.\n\nMendanbar looked up and saw a fat gray squirrel sitting on a branch, staring down at him with disapproval.\n\n\"I think so,\" Mendanbar said. \"For the time being, anyway.\"\n\n\"For the time being?\" the squirrel said indignantly. \"What kind of an answer is that? Not useful, that's what I call it, not useful at all.\n\nFinding my way across this forest is hard enough when people don't make bits of it jump around, not to mention burning pieces of it and I don't know what else. I don't know what this place is coming to, really I don't.\"\n\n\"Were you here when the trees were burned?\" Mendanbar asked. \"Did you see what happened? Or who did it?\"\n\n\"Well, of course not,\" said the squirrel. \"If I had, I'd have given him, her, or it a piece of my mind, I can tell you. Really, it's too bad. I'm going to have to work out a whole new route to get home. And as for giving directions to lost princes, well, it's hopeless, that's what it is, just hopeless. I'll get blamed for it when they come out wrong, too, see if I don't. Word always gets around. 'Don't trust the squirrel,\" they'll say, 'you always go wrong if you follow the squirrel's directions.\" They never stop to think of the difficulties involved in a job like mine, oh, no. They don't stop to say thank-you, either, not them. Ask the squirrel and go running off, that's what they do, and never so much as look back. No consideration, no gratitude.\n\nYou'd think they'd been raised in a palace for all the manners they have.\"\n\n\"If they're princes, they probably have been raised in palaces,\" Mendanbar said. \"Princes usually are.\"\n\n\"Well, no wonder none of them have any manners, then.\" The squirrel sniffed. \"They ought to be sent to school in a forest, where people are polite.\n\nYou don't see any of my children behaving like that, no, sir. Please and thank you and yes, sir and no, ma'am-that's how I brought them up, all twenty-three of them, and what's good enough for squirrels is good enough for princes, I say.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right,\" Mendanbar said. \"Now, about the burned spot-\" \"Wicked, that's what I call it,\" the squirrel interrupted. \"But hooligans like that don't stop to think, do they? Well, if they did, they wouldn't go around setting things on fire and making a lot of trouble and inconvenience for people. Inconsiderate, every last one of them, and they'll be sorry for it one day, you just wait and see if they aren't.\"\n\n\"Hooligans?\" Mendanbar blinked and began to feel more cheerful.\n\nMaybe he wasn't in trouble with the dragons after all. Maybe it had been a rogue who had burned out part of his forest. That would be bad, but at least he wouldn't have to figure out a way of dragon-proofing the whole kingdom. He frowned. \"How am I going to find out for sure?\" he wondered aloud.\n\n\"Ask Morwen,\" said the squirrel, flicking her tail.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I said, ask Morwen. Honestly, don't you big people know how to listen? You'd think none of you had ever talked to a squirrel before, the way most of you behave.\"\n\n\"I'm very sorry,\" Mendanbar said. \"Who's Morwen?\"\n\n\"That's better,\" the squirrel said, mollified. \"Morwen's a witch. She lives over by the mountains-just head that way until you get to the stream, then follow it to the big oak tree with the purple leaves.\n\nTurn left and walk for ten minutes and you should come out in her backyard. That is,\" she added darkly, \"you should if all this burning things up and moving things around hasn't tangled everything too badly.\"\n\n\"You think this witch had something to do with what happened?\"\n\nMendanbar waved at the ashy clearing a few feet away.\n\n\"I said no such thing! Morwen is a very respectable person, even if she does keep cats.\"\n\n\"Then I don't understand why you think I should talk to her.\"\n\n\"You asked for my advice, and I've given it,\" said the squirrel.\n\n\"That's my job. I'm not supposed to explain it, too, for heaven's sake. If you want explanations, talk to a griffin.\"\n\n\"If I see one, I will,\" said Mendanbar. \"Thank you for your advice.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" said the squirrel, sounding pleased. She flicked her tail twice and leaped to a higher branch. \"Good-bye.\" In another moment she had disappeared behind the trunk of the tree.\n\n\"Good-bye,\" Mendanbar called after her. He waited, but there was no further response. The squirrel had gone.\n\nSlowly, Mendanbar started walking in the direction the squirrel had pointed. When someone in the Enchanted Forest gave you advice, you were usually best off following it, even if you were the King.\n\n'specially if you're the King,\" Mendanbar reminded himself. He wished he knew a little more about this Morwen person, though. He wasn't really surprised that he hadn't heard of her. So many witches lived in and around the Enchanted Forest that it was impossible for anyone to keep track of them all. Still, this one must be something special, or the squirrel wouldn't have sent the King of the Enchanted Forest to her.\n\nWhat sort of witch was Morwen? \"Respectable\" didn't tell him a lot, especially coming from a squirrel. Morwen could be a white witch, but she could also be the sort of witch who lived in a house made of cookies in order to enchant passing children.\n\n\"She could even be a fire witch,\" he said to himself. \"There are probably one or two of them who could be termed respectable.\" He thought about that for a moment. He'd never heard of any himself.\n\nIf Morwen had lived in the Enchanted Forest for a long time, she was probably a decent sort of witch, he decided at last. The nasty ones generally made trouble before they'd been around very long, and then someone would complain to the King.\n\n\"And nobody has complained about Morwen,\" he finished.\n\nMendanbar reached the stream and turned left. Maybe it had been a mistake to cancel all those boring formal festivals and dinners Willin liked so much, he mused. They would have given him a chance to meet some of the ordinary people who lived in the Enchanted Forest. Or rather, he amended, the people who didn't make trouble. \"Ordinary\" was not the right word for anyone who lived in the Enchanted Forest, not if they managed to stay alive and in more or less their proper shape.\n\nHis reflections were cut short by a loud roar. Glancing up, he saw a lion bounding toward him along the bank of the stream. It looked huge and fierce and not at all friendly. As it leaped for his throat, Mendanbar batted hastily at a nearby strand of magic. The lion sailed over Mendanbar's head and landed well behind him, looking surprised and embarrassed. It whirled and tried again, but this time Mendanbar was ready for it. With a quick twist and pull, he froze the lion in the middle of rearing on its hind legs and stepped back to study it.\n\nThe lion roared again, plainly frustrated as well as embarrassed and confused. Mendanbar frowned and twitched another invisible thread.\n\nSuddenly the roaring had words in it.\n\n\"Let me down.\" the lion shouted. \"This is entirely undignified. How dare you treat me like this?\"\n\n\"I'm the King,\" said Mendanbar. \"It's my job to keep this forest as safe as I reasonably can. And I don't much like being jumped at when I'm just walking along minding my own business.\"\n\n\"What?\" The lion stopped roaring and peered at him nearsightedly.\n\n\"Oh, bother. I'm exceedingly sorry, Your Majesty. I didn't recognize you.\n\nYou're not wearing your crown.\"\n\n\"That's not the point,\" said the King. \"It shouldn't make any difference.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" the lion said earnestly. \"I'm the guardian of the Pool of Gold, and I'm supposed to keep unauthorized people from dipping branches in it, or diving in and turning into statues-that sort of thing. But if you're the King of the Enchanted Forest, you're not an unauthorized person at all, and I've made a dreadful mistake. I do apologize.\"\n\n\"You should,\" said Mendanbar. He looked around and frowned.\n\n\"Where is this Pool of Gold you're supposed to be guarding?\"\n\n'Just around the bend,\" the lion answered. He sounded uncomfortable and a little worried.\n\n\"Then what are you doing attacking people over here?\" Mendanbar demanded. \"I might have gone right by.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't have if you were a prince,\" the lion muttered. \"They never go on by. I was only attempting to get ahead of things a little, that's all. I didn't mean anything by it.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, you should have thought it through,\" Mendanbar said in a stern tone. \"Princes don't always travel alone, you know. Someone could distract you with a fight along here while a friend of his stole water or dipped branches or whatever he wanted. This far away from the pool, you wouldn't even notice.\"\n\n\"That never occurred to me,\" said the lion, much abashed. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Stick to the pool from now on,\" Mendanbar told it. \"And make sure that the people you jump at are really trying to get at the water, and not just wandering by.\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty,\" said the lion. \"Uh, would you mind letting me down now?\"\n\nMendanbar nodded and untwisted the threads of magic that held the lion motionless. The lion dropped to all fours and shook itself, then bowed very low. \"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" it said. \"Is there anything I can do for you?\"\n\n\"Does a witch named Morwen live somewhere around here?\"\n\nMendanbar asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" said the lion. \"Her house is up over the hill where the blue catnip grows. It isn't far. I haven't ever been there myself, of course,\" it added hastily, \"since I have to guard the Pool of Gold, you know. But sometimes one of her cats pays a call, and that's what they tell me.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Mendanbar said. \"That's very helpful.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Your Majesty,\" said the lion. \"Any time. Is there anything else? Because if there isn't, I should really be getting back to the pool.\"\n\n\"That's all,\" Mendanbar said, and bid the lion a polite good-bye. He waited where he stood until the lion was well out of sight, then continued on. He was very thoughtful, and a little annoyed. His quiet walk was turning out to be more of a project than he had expected.\n\nA short while later, he passed the oak the squirrel had described, and a little farther on he found a hill covered with bright blue catnip.\n\nHe paused, debating the wisdom of walking around the hill rather than through the thick growth.\n\n\"You never know what things like oddly colored catnip will do if you touch them,\" Mendanbar reminded himself. He looked at the knee-high carpet of blue leaves, then glanced at the deep shadows below the trees at the foot of the hill.\n\n\"On the other hand, one of the easiest ways of getting lost in the Enchanted Forest is to not follow directions exactly.\" He looked at the catnip again. He did not want to spend hours hunting for Morwen's house just to avoid some oddly colored plants. Cautiously, he poked at the invisible network of magic that hung over the hill. It seemed normal enough.\n\nWith a shrug, he waded in.\n\nHalfway to the top, he saw some of the stalks near the edge of the patch wobble, as if something small had run through it. The wobble kept pace with him until he reached the top of the hill, but though he tried to see what was causing it, he was unable to catch a glimpse of whatever was brushing by the plants.\n\nThe patch of catnip ended at the top of the hill. Mendanbar stopped to catch his breath and look around. The hill sloped gently down to a white picket fence that surrounded three sides of a garden. A large lilac bush was blooming on one side of the gate in the middle of the fence, and an even larger apple tree loaded with fist-sized green apples stood on the other side.\n\nMendanbar frowned. \"Aren't lilacs and apple trees supposed to bloom at the same time? What is one doing with blossoms while the other is covered with fruit?\" Then he laughed at himself. \"Well, it's a witch's garden, after all.\" He supposed he shouldn't be surprised if things behaved strangely.\n\nOn the other side of the garden stood a solid little gray house with a red roof. Smoke was drifting out of the chimney, and lace curtains were blowing in and out the open windows on either side of the back door. Below the right-hand window was a window box overflowing with red and blue flowers. The stone step outside the door was cleaner than the floor inside Mendanbar's study, and he resolved to do something about that as soon as e got home. Sleeping on one corner of the step was a white cat, her fur gleaming in the sun.\n\nMendanbar walked down the hill to the gate. A small brass sign hung on the latch. It read: \"Please keep the gate CLOSED. Salesmen enter at their own risk.\" Smiling, Mendanbar lifted the latch and pushed the gate open.\n\nA loud yowl from just over his head made him jump back. He looked up and discovered a fat tabby cat perched in the branches of the apple tree, staring down at him with green eyes. An instant later, a long gray streak shot out from behind a nearby tree and through the open gate. It slowed as it neared the house, and Mendanbar saw that it was actually a lean gray cat with a ragged tail. The gray cat leaped to the doorstep and from there to the sill of the open window. The white cat on the step raised her head and made a complaining noise as the gray one vanished inside the house.\n\n\"So much for a surprise visit,\" Mendanbar said to the cat in the tree.\n\nThe cat gave him a smug look and began washing its paws. Mendanbar stepped through the gate, closed it carefully, and started across the garden toward the house."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Receives Some Advice from a Witch",
                "text": "Before Mendanbar was halfway across the garden, the door of the cottage swung open. Seven cats of various sizes and colors trotted out, tails high.\n\nThey flowed over the stoop, collecting the sleepy white cat on their way, and lined themselves up in a neat row. Mendanbar stopped and looked down at them, blinking. They blinked back, all eight at once, as if they had been trained.\n\n\"Well?\" said a voice.\n\nMendanbar looked up. A short woman in a loose black robe stood in the open doorway. Her hair was a pale ginger color, piled loosely on her head. Mendanbar supposed she must use magic to keep it up, for not one wisp was out of place. She wore a pair of glasses with gold rims and rectangular lenses, and she held a broom in one hand.\n\n\"You must be Morwen,\" Mendanbar said with more confidence than he felt, for she was quite pretty and, apart from the black robe and broom, not witchy-looking at all.\n\nThe woman nodded. Giving her a courteous half-bow, Mendanbar went on, \"I'm Mendanbar, and I was advised to talk to you about-well, about a problem I've discovered. I hope you weren't on your way out.\" He indicated the broom.\n\nMorwen examined him for another moment, then nodded briskly. \"So you're the King. Come in and tell me why you're here, and I'll see what I can do for you.\"\n\n\"How do you know I'm the King?\" Mendanbar asked as the cats exchanged glances and then began wandering off in various directions. He felt disgruntled, because he had not intended to mention the fact. At least Morwen wasn't curtsying or simpering, and she hadn't started calling him \"Your Majesty\" yet, either. Perhaps it would be all right.\n\n\"I recognize you, of course,\" Morwen said. She set the broom against the wall behind the door as she spoke. \"You've let your hair get a bit long, but that doesn't make much difference, one way or another. And Mendanbar isn't exactly a common name these days. Are you going to stand there all day?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Mendanbar said, following Morwen into the house. \"I didn't realize we'd met before.\"\n\n\"We haven't,\" Morwen said. \"When I moved to the Enchanted Forest five years ago, I made sure I knew what you looked like. I'd have been asking for trouble, otherwise.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Mendanbar, taken aback. He had never thought of himself as one of the hazards of the Enchanted Forest that someone might wish to be prepared for, and he did not like the idea much, now that it had been pointed out to him.\n\nMorwen waved at a sturdy chair next to a large table in the center of the room. \"Sit down. Would you like some cider?\"\n\n\"That sounds very good.\" Mendanbar took the chair while Morwen crossed to a cupboard on the far wall and began taking mugs and bottles out of it. He was glad to have a minute to collect his wits. He was not sure what he had expected her to be like, but Morwen was definitely not it.\n\nHer house was not what he had expected, either. The inside was as neat and clean as the outside. The walls of the single large room were painted a pale, silvery gray. Six large windows let in light and air from all directions. There were no gargoyles or grimacing faces or wild tangles of trees and vines carved into the window ledges or the woodwork around the ceiling, and no intricate patterns set into the floorboards. One of the cats had come inside and was sitting on a big, square trunk, washing his paws; another was lying in an open window, keeping an eye on the backyard.\n\nThere was a large black stove in the corner by the cupboard, and three more chairs around the table where Mendanbar was sitting. It was all very pleasant and uncluttered, and Mendanbar found himself wishing he had a few rooms like this in his castle.\n\n\"There,\" said Morwen as she set a large blue jug and two matching mugs in the center of the table. \"Now, tell me about this problem of yours.\"\n\nMendanbar cleared his throat and began. \"About an hour ago, I ran across a section of the Enchanted Forest that had been destroyed. The trees had been burned to stumps and there wasn't even any moss left on the ground. I'm afraid it may have been a rogue dragon. I found dragon scales in the ashes, and a squirrel suggested I come and see you.\"\n\n\"Dragon scales?\" Morwen pressed her lips together, looking very grim indeed. \"Did you bring them with you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Mendanbar. He dug the scales out of his pocket and spread them out on the table.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" said Morwen, bending over the table. \"I don't like the look of this.\"\n\n\"Can you tell anything about this dragon from his scales. Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"For one thing, these scales aren't all from the same dragon,\" Morwen said. Her frown deepened. \"At least, they shouldn't be.\"\n\n\"How can you tell?\" Mendanbar asked, his stomach sinking.\n\n\"Look at the colors. This one is yellow-green; that one has a grayish tinge, and this one has a purple sheen. You don't get that kind of variation on one dragon.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Mendanbar groaned, shutting his eyes and leaning his forehead against his hands. He had so hoped that it had been a single dragon.\n\nIt would have been a nuisance, sending letters of complaint to the King of the Dragons and waiting for an answer, but it would have been better than a war. If a group of dragons had attacked the Enchanted Forest, war was almost inevitable. \"You're sure there were several dragons involved?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that,\" Morwen snapped. \"I said that these scales look as if they came from different dragons.\"\n\n\"But if the scales came from different dragons-\" \"I didn't say that, either,\" Morwen said. \"I said they looked as if they came from different dragons. Have a little patience, Mendanbar.\"\n\nMendanbar opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again.\n\nMorwen was staring with great concentration at one of the scales, the one that was the brightest green, and she didn't look as if she would welcome an interruption. Suddenly she straightened and in one swift movement scooped the scales together like a pile of cards. She tapped the stack against the tabletop to straighten it, then set it down with an air of satisfaction.\n\n\"Ha! I thought there was something odd about these,\" she said, half to herself.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Just a minute and I'll show you.\" Morwen went back to the cupboard and took down a small bowl and several jars of various sizes. As she spooned and mixed and muttered, Mendanbar felt magic gather around her, like a tingling in the air that slowly concentrated itself inside the bowl.\n\nAt last she capped the jars and carried the bowl, brimming with magic, over to the table.\n\n\"Stay back,\" she warned when Mendanbar leaned forward to get a better view.\n\nMendanbar sat back, watching closely, as Morwen spread the five dragon scales out in a line. She set the purple scale at one end and the bright green one at the other. Then she held the bowl over the center of the line, took a deep breath, and said, \"Wind for clarity, Stone for endurance, Stream for change, Fire for truth: Be what you are!\"\n\nAs she spoke, she tilted the bowl and poured a continuous line of dark liquid in a long stripe across the middle of the five scales.\n\nThere was a flash of purple light, and the liquid began to glow. The glow spread outward, like fire creeping around the edges of a piece of paper, until it reached the rims of the dragon scales. Then it flashed once more and vanished.\n\nFive identical scales lay side by side on the table, all of them bright green.\n\n\"I thought so,\" Morwen said with satisfaction. \"These scales all came from the same dragon. Someone altered them so that they would each look different.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" Mendanbar said with some relief. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"The scales were the same shape, and very nearly the same size,\" Morwen said. \"Different dragons might have scales about the same size, if they were the same age, but there's as much variation in the shape of dragon scales as there is in their color.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mendanbar said, interested. \"I didn't know that.\"\n\n\"Not many people do. But look at these-they're all round, with one flat edge. If they'd come from different dragons, I'd expect one to be, say, squared off, another oval, another long and wiggly, and so on.\"\n\n\"In that case, it shouldn't be too hard to find the dragon who destroyed that chunk of forest,\" Mendanbar said.\n\nMorwen looked at him severely over the tops of her spectacles. \"I'm not sure it was a dragon at all.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Mendanbar asked. \"Because the scales were changed? But if he didn't want to be blamed-\"\n\n\"If some dragon wanted to avoid being blamed for burning up a piece of the Enchanted Forest , he wouldn't have left his scales lying around, changed or not,\" Morwen said dryly. \"Picking them up would be a lot easier than enchanting them. Besides, a healthy dragon doesn't shed scales at this rate. Unless you think your rogue dragon burned down a lot of trees and then stood around looking at them for a week or two.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Mendanbar picked up one of the scales and ran his fingertips across it.\n\n\"It's a good thing you were the one who found these,\" Morwen went on, waving at the dragon scales. \"If it had been one of the elves, there would have been trouble for certain.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that? Whoever found them would have had to bring them to the castle-\" \"And long before he got there, word would have been all over the forest that a lot of dragons had burned half the woods to powder,\" Morwen said. \"Most elves mean well, but they can't keep a secret and they have no common sense to speak of. Flighty creatures.\"\n\n\"Do you think someone was trying to make trouble between the Enchanted Forest and the dragons, then?\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" Morwen answered. \"If you hadn't come to me, you probably would have thought the scales came from different dragons.\n\nPlenty of people know about the color variation. I doubt that you'd have figured out the transformation, though. Only people who are fairly familiar with dragons know about the differences in the shapes of their scales, and I don't think anyone at the castle understands dragons very well.\"\n\n\"How do you happen to know so much about dragons?\" Mendanbar asked, nettled.\n\n\"Oh, Kazul and I have been friends for a long time,\" Morwen said.\n\n\"We trade favors now and then. She lets me have a spare scale when I need one for a spell, and I lend her books from my library and pots and pans that she doesn't want to keep around all the time. In fact, Kazul was the one who convinced me that it would be a good idea to move to the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"Kazul,\" Mendanbar said, frowning. \"That name is familiar. Who is she?\"\n\n\"Kazul is the King of the Dragons,\" Morwen said. \"Drink your cider.\"\n\nAutomatically, Mendanbar lifted his mug. Then the implications of what Morwen had said sank in, and he choked. Morwen was a good friend of the King of the Dragons? No wonder she knew so much about dragon scales! Morwen gave him an ironic look, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. To give himself time to recover, Mendanbar sipped at his cider. It was cold and sweet and tangy, and it fizzed as it slid across his tongue. He looked at the mug in surprise and took a longer drink. It was just as tasty the second time. \"This is very good.\"\n\nMorwen looked almost smug. \"I make it myself. You may have a bottle to take back to the castle with you, provided you take a bottle to Kazul when you go see her about these scales you found.\"\n\n\"Thank-wait a minute, what makes you think I'm going to see Kazul?\"\n\n\"How else are you going to find out who these scales belong to? I may know more about dragons than most people, but I can't tell whose scales these are just from their color and size. Kazul can. Besides, you should have paid a call last year, when the old king died and Kazul got the crown.\"\n\n\"I sent a note and a coronation present,\" Mendanbar said. He sounded sulky even to himself, and he felt as if he were being lectured by his mother, who had died when he was fourteen. \"I was going to visit, but the Frost Giants decided to come south early, and then some fool magician tried to turn a rock snake into a bird and got a cockatrice, and-\" \"-and it's been one thing after another, and you've never found the time,\" Morwen said. \"Really, Mendanbar. Haven't you learned by now that it's always one thing after another? Being busy is no excuse.\n\nEveryone's busy. You take those scales and a bottle of my cider and go talk to Kazul. At the very least, you'll get some good advice, and I expect you'll get some help as well. You look to me as if you could use it.\"\n\n\"The castle staff is very good,\" Mendanbar said stiffly. \"And my steward does an excellent job.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he does,\" Morwen said. \"But one good steward isn't enough to run a normal kingdom, much less one like the Enchanted Forest. It's perfectly plain just from looking at you that you're wearing yourself out trying to do everything yourself.\"\n\n\"It is?\"\n\nMorwen gave a firm little nod. \"It is. And it's quite unnecessary.\n\nAll you really need-\" \"-is a wife,\" Mendanbar muttered resignedly, recognizing the beginning of Willin's familiar complaint.\n\n\"-is someone sensible to talk to,\" Morwen finished. She looked at him sternly over the tops of her glasses. \"Preferably someone who knows at least a little about running a kingdom. An exiled prince, for instance, though they don't usually stay long enough to be useful.\n\nSomeone who'll do more than make lists of things you need to attend to.\"\n\nMendanbar thought of Willin's endless schedules and could not help smiling. \"You're probably right.\" He suppressed a sigh; he didn't have time to spend hunting for a capable adviser. \"Do you know anyone suitable?\"\n\n\"Several people, but they're all quite happy where they are right now,\" Morwen said. \"Don't worry. This is the Enchanted Forest . If you start seriously looking for good help, you'll find some.\"\n\n\"I hope I recognize it when I see it,\" Mendanbar said. He took another long drink of cider and stared into the mug. \"You're the most sensible person I've talked to in days. I don't suppose you'd consider moving to the castle?\"\n\n\"Certainly not,\" Morwen answered tartly. \"I have quite enough to do here. However, I'll have the cats keep an eye out for any more burned-out patches of forest, and if I think of anything that might be important I'll let you know. Finish your cider and go see Kazul before you talk yourself out of it.\"\n\n\"I won't talk myself out of it,\" Mendanbar said, taking another sip of cider. \"It's a good idea.\" He picked up the dragon scales and put them back into his pocket. He hoped Kazul would be able to tell him something worthwhile.\n\nThe Enchanted Forest was large, but it could disappear in a hurry if someone started punching holes in it. He frowned suddenly. \"Do dragons eat magic?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of,\" Morwen said. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"That burned-out place I told you about,\" Mendanbar said. \"There wasn't any magic left in it. It had been sucked dry. I've never seen anything like it.\"\n\n\"I don't think dragons would have done that,\" Morwen said. She considered for a moment, then rose. \"Wait here a minute; I want to look something up.\"\n\nShe walked over to the back door, the one through which Mendanbar had come in. He watched, puzzled, as she opened the door and stepped through into a room full of tall, dark bookcases. Morwen left the door open and disappeared among the shelves. Mendanbar blinked. The windows on either side of the door looked out on the garden, and the one on the right still had a cat in it. Oh, of course, he thought.\n\nIt's one of those doors that go where you want them to. There was a door like that in one of the castle attics, which was convenient for getting back to the ground floor without actually climbing down seven flights of stairs. Unfortunately, you still had to climb up all seven flights in order to get to the attic in the first place.\n\nMorwen reappeared, holding a red book with the title The Patient Dragon printed on the cover in gold. She closed the library door behind her and sat down at the table again. She flipped rapidly through the book, then slowed and read half a page with great care.\n\n\"I thought so,\" she said. \"Dragons don't eat magic. They generate their own, the way unicorns do.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"See for yourself.\" Morwen held the book out. \"Austen is very reliable, and the more obscure the fact, the more reliable he tends to be. If he says dragons make their own magic, they do.\"\n\n\"I'll take your word for it,\" Mendanbar said. \"But the more I find out, the less sense any of this makes.\"\n\n\"Then you haven't found out enough,\" Morwen said.\n\nThey talked for a few more minutes while Mendanbar finished his cider.\n\nMorwen told him how to find Kazul's cave in the Mountains of Morning but refused to advise him on what to do when he got there. Finally, she packed him off with two bottles of alder, the red book about dragons, and a recommendation not to waste any more time than he had to.\n\nMendanbar headed straight back to the castle. Visiting the King of the Dragons was going to take more preparation than simply talking to a sensible witch, and Morwen was right about wasting time."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which a Wizard Pays a Visit",
                "text": "When Mendanbar got back to the castle, the first person he saw was Willin standing in the doorway looking relieved. By the time Mendanbar got within earshot, however, the ells expression had changed to a ferocious scowl.\n\n\"I am happy to see that Your Majesty has returned safely,\" Willin said stiffly. \"I was about to send a party out to search for you.\"\n\n\"Willin, that's ridic-\" Mendanbar broke off as his brain caught up with him. Willin might fuss and complain about the king playing hooky, but he wouldn't send someone out looking for him without more reason than irritation. \"What's happened?\"\n\nWillin unbent very slightly. \"Your Majesty has an unexpected visitor.\"\n\nHe paused. \"At least, I presume he is unexpected.\"\n\n\"Don't frown at me like that,\" Mendanbar said. \"I certainly didn't expect anyone. If I had, I'd have told you.\"\n\n\"So I had assumed,\" Willin said, relaxing a little more. \"And since Your Majesty is not forgetful, in the normal way of things, I felt sure you would not have, ah, left the palace so precipitously if you had had an appointment.\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" Mendanbar asked. \"Not another complaint from the Darkmorning Elves, I hope? If it is, you can tell them I won't see them. I've had enough of their whining, and I've got more important things to attend to right now.\"\n\n\"No,\" Willin said. \"It's Zemenar, the Head Wizard of the Society of Wizards.\"\n\n\"Oh, lord,\" Mendanbar said. He had only met the Head Wizard once before, at his coronation three years earlier, and he hadn't liked the man much then. Still, the Society of Wizards was a powerful group, and its members were not the sort of people it was a good idea to offend.\n\nHe ran a hand distractedly through his hair. \"How long has he been waiting? What does he want?\"\n\n\"He's only been here for a few minutes,\" Willin reassured him. The elf frown returned. \"He refused to tell me his business, Your Majesty. He said it was a matter for Your Majesty's ears alone.\"\n\n\"He would,\" Mendanbar muttered. \"As I recall, he's got an exaggerated idea of his own importance.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty?\" said Willin, clearly shocked by such plain speaking.\n\n'-e certainly thinks so,\" Mendanbar said. \"Oh, don't worry, I won't say anything improper when I'm talking to him. Where is he?\"\n\n\"I asked him to wait in the main audience chamber.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll go see what he wants. You take these down to the kitchen.\"\n\nMendanbar handed Morwen's jugs of cider to Willin. The elf blinked in puzzled surprise. Before Willin had time to collect himself, Mendanbar grabbed a handful of magic and twisted hard.\n\nThe courtyard faded into white mist. An instant later, the mist evaporated, leaving Mendanbar standing in the middle of his study. The wooden gargoyle in the corner immediately began shouting at him.\n\n\"You! You've got a lot of nerve, waltzing in as if nothing's happened.\n\nI bet you thought that trick with the soapy water was funny! You'll be sorry for it when the wood up here starts to rot from the damp, you wait and see.\"\n\n\"That's why you're there,\" Mendanbar said as he set the book Morwen had given him on the desk. \"You're supposed to let us know if the wood starts to go bad or gets termites, so we can fix it before the castle falls apart.\"\n\n\"And look at the thanks I get,\" the gargoyle complained. \"Water in my ears and soap in my eyes. How do you expect me to do my job if I can't see?\"\n\nMendanbar listened with half an ear while he rummaged through the desk.\n\nThe gold circlet he wore for official business was in the bottom drawer under a pile of old envelopes and out-of-date invitations to balls, dinners, birthday parties, cricket games, and teas. As he put the circlet on, Mendanbar frowned at the drawer, wondering why he was saving all that useless paper. He resolved for the hundredth time that week to clean everything out someday soon, shoved the drawer closed, and glanced around to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything.\n\n\"Are you listening to me?\" the gargoyle yelled.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Mendanbar said. \"I never do when you're being insulting.\n\n\"Insulting? You want insulting? I'll give you insulting. You always dress funny! You've got feet like an elephant! Your nose is too big and your ears stick out!\"\n\n\"Not much, compared to yours,\" said Mendanbar cheerfully as he crossed to the door. \"Stop grousing; if you can see my nose from up where you are, there's nothing wrong with your eyes.\"\n\n\"Your hair is a bird's nest!\" the gargoyle shouted just before the door closed behind Mendanbar. \"A bird's nest, do you hear me?\"\n\nMendanbar rolled his eyes and headed down the corridor toward the main audience chamber. He supposed he would have to apologize to the gargoyle sooner or later, unless he could figure out a way to muffle the noise while he worked. Maybe he could enchant a pair of earplugs to keep out the gargoyle's voice and nothing else. A spell that specific would be tricky, but it would be worth it just to see the gargoyle's face when it realized Mendanbar didn't mind its chatter.\n\nMendanbar smiled and pushed open the rear door of the audience chamber.\n\nZemenar turned as Mendanbar entered, and the blue and gray robes he wore flared out around him. His face was just as sharp and angular as Mendanbar remembered. Giving Mendanbar a long, appraising look, Zemenar bowed his head in greeting. \"Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"Welcome, Head Wizard,\" Mendanbar said, bowing slightly in return.\n\nSomething tugged gently at his mind, distracting him. The strands of magic, which were always particularly plentiful inside the castle, were drifting slowly toward the staff Zemenar carried. In another minute or two, they would begin winding around Zemenar's staff like thread winding onto a spool. Before long, the wizard's staff would absorb them, leaving a tangled knot in the orderly net of magic, and Mendanbar would have to spend hours straightening it out later.\n\nIt happened every time a wizard came to the Enchanted Forest, and it was very inconvenient. Mendanbar had gotten tired of asking wizards to keep their staffs from soaking up magic. They hardly ever understood what he was talking about, and if he did manage to make it clear, they generally got upset and indignant. He didn't want to upset the Head Wizard of the Society of Wizards, but he didn't want to spend his afternoon cleaning up a magical mess in the middle of his castle, either. He reached out with a mental hand and nudged the invisible cords away from the staff.\n\nZemenar did not seem to notice. \"I have come to see you about a matter of much urgency to the Society of Wizards,\" he said, stroking his long gray beard portentously. \"I hope you will be willing to assist us.\"\n\n\"That depends on what kind of help you're asking for,\" Mendanbar replied. \"There are some things I won't do, and a few that I can't.\n\nI'm sure you understand.\"\n\n\"Entirely,\" Zemenar said, though he sounded a little put out, as if he had hoped to get Mendanbar to agree quickly, without asking any awkward questions.\n\nMendanbar felt like rolling his eyes in exasperation. Everybody who lived in the Enchanted Forest knew better than to make a promise without knowing what they were promising. Did this wizard think that Mendanbar was stupid just because he was young?\n\n\"We in the Society of Wizards have been having a great deal of difficulty recently with the dragons in the Mountains of Morning,\" Zemenar went on. \"That is the root of the problem.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can help you with the dragons,\" Mendanbar said. The strands of magic were drifting toward the wizard's staff again. He gave them another nudge. \"The Mountains of Morning aren't part of the Enchanted Forest, so I can't just order the dragons to behave. If you were having trouble with elves, now, I might be able-\" \"Naturally, we don't wish to involve you in our dispute,\" Zemenar interrupted smoothly. \"However, one of the results of our quarrel is that the King of the Dragons has cut off the Society's access to the Caves of Fire and Night.\"\n\n\"I still don't see-\" \"The caves are the source of many of the ingredients we use in our spells,\" Zemenar broke in once more. \"They are also the only place it is possible to make certain items we need for our research.\" He paused and blinked, fingering his staff with one hand as if he thought there might be a rough spot somewhere along it and he was trying to find it without attracting attention. \"We-the Society of Wizards-must have some way of entering the caves.\"\n\n\"Go on.\" Mendanbar tried not to sound as irritated as he felt. He did not like Zemenar's lecturing tone, he was tired of being interrupted, and he still did not see what the Society's dispute with the dragons had to do with him. On top of that, the invisible threads of magic were moving toward Zemenar's staff again, almost as if something were sucking them in.\n\nMendanbar yanked at them hard, wishing he could do the same to the Head Wizard.\n\n\"That is where you come in, Your Majesty,\" Zemenar said. He sounded vaguely confused, as if he were trying to concentrate on two things at once. \"You, ah, could be of great use\u2026 that is, you could help us enormously.\"\n\n\"How?\" The strands of magic were gliding toward the staff more quickly than ever. Mendanbar could see that if he kept pulling at them he would soon be unable to pay attention to anything else. He thought for a moment, while Zemenar rambled, then he took hold of a fat, invisible cord and with a swift gesture threw it in a loop around Zemenar. The loop hovered three feet from the Head wizard in all directions, spinning slowly.\n\nOther cords floated toward it and glanced off before they came anywhere near Zemenar or his staff. Mendanbar smiled slightly.\n\nThe Head Wizard broke off his speech in mid-sentence. \"What was that?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" Mendanbar said with dignity. \"As the ruler of the Enchanted Forest, there are sometimes matters that require my immediate attention. I have dealt with this one.\"\n\nZemenar frowned, plainly taken aback. \"You have? But I didn't sense any spell-\" He stopped short, staring at Mendanbar in consternation.\n\n\"You would not,\" Mendanbar said in an offhand manner. Inwardly, he smiled. Apparently wizards could feel normal spell-casting, but they could not sense Mendanbar's way of doing magic. He wondered why no one had ever mentioned it. Undetectable spells could be a big advantage, if he ever had trouble with the Society of Wizards. \"It was not exactly a spell, just something to do with the forest forces. It need not concern you.\"\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty,\" Zemenar said after a long pause. \"If I may continue?\"\n\n\"Please do.\"\n\n\"What we are asking is that you allow the wizards of our society to enter the Caves of Fire and Night from the Enchanted Forest,\" Zemenar said. \"There is a way in somewhere along your eastern border, I believe.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it doesn't stay put,\" Mendanbar pointed out. \"Nothing in the Enchanted Forest does, at least, not for long.\"\n\n\"It's always in the same general area, though,\" Zemenar said confidently.\n\n\"We're willing to take whatever time is needed to find it.\"\n\nMendanbar thought of the enormous number of knots and tangles that the wizards would cause while they wandered around looking for the entrance to the caves, and he could barely suppress a shudder. \"What about the dragons?\"\n\n\"If you have no authority over them, they can have none over your gateway into the Caves of Fire and Night,\" Zemenar said, watching Mendanbar closely with his hard, bright eyes.\n\n\"That's not what I meant.\" Mendanbar paused, pretending to consider.\n\n\"I think I must refuse your request, temporarily at least,\" he said in as judicious a tone as he could manage. \"I have certain\u2026 differences of my own to settle with the King of the Dragons at the moment. From what you say, the dragons would object if I let your wizards into the Caves of Fire and Night, and I do not want to make my discussion with them any more difficult than it is likely to be already. I hope you understand.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" A fleeting expression of satisfaction flicked across Zemenar's face. \"I am sorry to hear that you, too, are having trouble with dragons. I hope you will be able to settle things suitably. They are sly creatures, you know, and one can never tell what they are thinking.\"\n\nThe same thing could be said about the Head Wizard of the Society of Wizards, thought Mendanbar. \"Thank you for your kind wishes,\" he said aloud.\n\n\"If you would like our assistance, the Society of Wizards would be happy to advise you,\" Zemenar said with a smile. \"We have had a great deal of experience with dragons over the years.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the offer,\" Mendanbar replied cautiously. He did not want to offend the Head Wizard, but he doubted that the wizards' advice would help him much. After all, they seemed to be having more trouble with dragons than he was.\n\n\"Have you met the new King of the Dragons or her princess?\" the Head Wizard went on.\n\n\"No, I-princess?\" Mendanbar forgot his misgivings in a wave of surprised dismay. \"The King of the Dragons has a princess?\"\n\n\"She does indeed,\" Zemenar said. There was a faint frown in his eyes, and his fingers were stroking his staff again. \"She's a real troublemaker, too-the princess, I mean. Our misunderstanding with the dragons is all her fault.\"\n\n\"Oh, lord,\" Mendanbar said. He raised a hand to run his fingers through his hair and remembered just in time that he was wearing his circlet. \"And King Kazul listens to her?\"\n\n\"Certainly. Most of the dragons do, now. Cimorene is quite the power behind the throne in the Mountains of Morning.\"\n\nThere was a sneer in Zemenar's voice, along with a good deal of suppressed anger. Mendanbar couldn't blame him. He'd had enough trouble with princesses himself to know the type. Cimorene must be one of the beautiful, empty-headed, ambitious bores whose only talents were the ability to stare innocently with their blue eyes and a knack for wrapping people-or, in Cimorene's case, dragons-around their fragile fingers. She was probably too stupid to realize how much trouble her manipulations caused, but if she did notice she probably liked having the power to produce turmoil.\n\n\"Oh, lord,\" Mendanbar repeated. Why hadn't Morwen warned him?\n\nWell, he had to talk to Kazul, one way or another. Perhaps Morwen had heard about his aversion to princesses and hadn't wanted to give him any reason to put off the visit. Mendanbar looked at Zemenar, completely in charity with the wizard for the first time. \"Thank you for telling me.\"\n\n\"You're very welcome,\" Zemenar said. \"You will let me know how things go, won't you? And do remember that the Society of Wizards will be happy to give you whatever help you may need. It's in our own interest, after all. The sooner you get this little matter settled, the sooner you'll be able to reconsider our request about the Caves of Fire and Night.\"\n\n\"Yes, certainly,\" Mendanbar said. \"Is that all, then? I'll have Willin show you out.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" Zemenar gave Mendanbar a smile that set Mendanbar's teeth on edge. \"I am a wizard, after all. Good day, Your Maj Zemenar bowed and was suddenly and completely gone. No, not completely; Mendanbar could feel a lump of magic in the center of the looping spell where Zemenar had been standing. Mendanbar frowned. He might appreciate Zemenar's warning about Kazul's Princess, but that was no reason for the wizard to go leaving leftover bits of magic in his castle.\n\nMendanbar reached for the loop, to undo it, and paused. As long as he was at home, he might as well do this the easy way. He twitched a different strand of magic, and the audience chamber dissolved around him.\n\nHe materialized in the cool darkness of the castle armory. Lighting the wall torches with another twitch of the magic threads, he looked around. Willin had been hard at work since the last time Mendanbar had visited the armory.\n\nMost of the swords and shields that had been piled in one corner or another were now hanging in neat pairs on the walls. Extra swords, spears, maces, lances, and knives hung in closely spaced rows higher up. The effect was almost decorative. Mendanbar made a mental note to compliment Willin, then turned his attention toward the wooden chests along the far wall.\n\nThe one he wanted was in the center. He reached into his pocket for the key and realized he had left it in his desk. He sighed and snapped his fingers. With a small pop, the key appeared in the air level with his nose and fell into his palm. Mendanbar smiled at it and bent to open the chest. Willin was always after him to have a proper set of keys made for the various doors and drawers and chests and hiding places in the castle, but Mendanbar couldn't see any reason to waste the effort when the Key to the Castle was all you needed to open any lock in the place.\n\nIt wasn't as if Willin needed a spell to call the Key, either, Mendanbar thought as he lifted the lid of the chest. The Key had its own magic. As long as it was inside the castle, it came to whoever called it. Willin just wanted to puff up his own consequence by carrying a big bunch of keys jangling at his belt. Mendanbar looked down and forgot about Willin.\n\nThere was only one thing in the chest: a sword, gleaming in the torchlight.\n\nIt was very plain, almost ordinary-looking, and it didn't have an air of magic about it at all, though anyone who looked at it closely would notice that it shone too brightly and had too sharp an edge to be an ordinary sword. Mendanbar reached in and took the hilt in his hand with a sigh of satisfaction. In the air around him, the unseen strands of power hummed in response, for this sword was linked to the warp and weft of the Enchanted Forest in ways no one, not even the Kings of the Enchanted Forest , really understood. Mendanbar always felt better when he had the sword with him, but he couldn't wear it around the castle all the time. It made Willin unhappy and visitors nervous. So he kept the sword in the armory unless he could think of an excuse to use it.\n\nRising, he swung the sword twice, just for fun. Then he hunted around until he found a sword belt and scabbard, put the sword in the sheath, and buckled the belt around his waist. With another wave of his hand, he was back in the audience chamber."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which There Is a Misunderstanding and Mendanbar Does Some Plumbing",
                "text": "The awkward lump of wizard-magic was right where Mendanbar had left it.\n\nHe studied it for a moment, then drew his sword.\n\n\"Your Majesty!\" said Willin from the doorway. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Cleaning up after our visitor,\" Mendanbar replied. \"Do be quiet for a minute, Willin. I need to concentrate.\"\n\n\"But-\" Mendanbar shot an irritated look at Willin. The castle steward broke off and closed his mouth into a thin, disapproving line.\n\nMendanbar waited half a moment longer to make sure the elf was not going to say anything else, then turned back to the lump. Raising the sword, he reached over the loop of Enchanted Forest magic and stuck the point into the center of the mass.\n\nA surge of power ran through the sword as it sucked up the wizard's leftovers and sent them to reinforce the invisible network of Enchanted Forest magic. The surge was stronger than Mendanbar had expected, and he frowned as he lifted the sword away from the now-empty space and put it back in its sheath. Perhaps it hadn't been extra, unused magic, after all; perhaps Zemenar had deliberately left a spell behind. It was too late to test it now, though. The sword was thorough, and whatever the lump had been, it was now gone for good.\n\n\"Your Majesty?\"\n\nWillin's voice sounded much more tentative than it had a moment before. Mendanbar almost smiled, but Willin was sure to get upset if he thought he was being laughed at. So Mendanbar kept his face stiff and took a little longer than necessary to undo the loop he had left to guard the wizard's magic. When he was positive that his expression was normal, he turned.\n\n\"Yes, Willin?\"\n\n\"What was all that about? Has my lord the Head Wizard gone? Why are you wearing your sword? What-\" \"One thing at a time,\" Mendanbar interrupted gently. \"Zemenar has gone, yes. He cast a vanishing spell, and a very good one, too. No smoke, no whirling dust, just poof and he was gone. Unfortunately, he wasn't as tidy with the end of his spell, and some of it got left behind. Or at least, that's what I thought until I got rid of it a minute ago.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 see,\" Willin said in a tone that meant he didn't. \"And that's why you have your sword?\"\n\n\"Partly.\" Mendanbar looked at the empty patch of floor where the wizard had been, then shook his head. Whatever Zemenar might have been up to, it would have to wait. \"I have to pay a visit to the King of the Dragons.\"\n\nWillin's face went completely blank. \"You what?\"\n\n\"I'm going to the Mountains of Morning, to see the King of the Dragons,\" Mendanbar repeated. \"And I'm certainly not going without a sword.\n\nThere are lots of dangerous creatures in those mountains, and some of them wouldn't care that I'm the King of the Enchanted Forest , even if they bothered to stop for an introduction before they attacked.\"\n\n\"But you can't just leave, Your Majesty!\" Willin said. \"A formal embassy to the King of the Dragons will take weeks to arrange. You'll want a full escort, and-\" \"I don't think there's time,\" Mendanbar broke in, before Willin could get too involved in planning. \"Something's come up, and it needs to be dealt with now. So I'm going today, in another minute, and you're in charge of the castle until I get back.\"\n\nIn a sudden inspiration, Mendanbar pulled the Key to the Castle out of his pocket and handed it ceremoniously to Willin.\n\n\"I am deeply honored by Your Majesty's confidence,\" Willin said. \"But are you sure this is necessary?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mendanbar said. \"Oh, and don't let any wizards in while I'm gone. Something funny is going on, and I don't want any of them inside the castle until I figure out what, especially if I'm not here.\"\n\n\"But what should I tell them, if they ask for you?\"\n\n\"I don't care, as long as you don't let them in,\" Mendanbar replied.\n\n\"Is that all? Then I'm going.\"\n\nHe took hold of a strand of magic and pulled. When the misty whiteness cleared away, he was standing among the trees of the Enchanted Forest just outside the castle. With a bit more care, he chose another magic thread and pulled again, harder. This time, he appeared at the very edge of the forest, where the Mountains of Morning began. Two paces in front of him, the vibrant green moss stopped as if it had been sliced away, and the dry gray rock began. He checked to make sure this was the right place-Morwen's directions had been very specific-and then, reluctantly, stepped over the boundary.\n\nMendanbar had not left the Enchanted Forest for over three years, not since he had become King, and he had forgotten how very barren everything felt outside. He could still sense the free-floating network of magic behind him, but where he stood, the air was empty.\n\nThin grass and scrubby bushes grew in patches wherever dirt had accumulated in low spots and cracks and corners. Ahead, the mountains rose high and sharp and dead.\n\nMany magical creatures lived here, but the Mountains of Morning had no magic of their own. Mendanbar could feel the emptiness where the magic should have been, and he shivered in spite of himself.\n\n\"At least I don't have to worry about finding Kazul,\" he told himself.\n\n\"As long as I don't get my directions mixed up, I should be able to walk straight to her cave.\" He smiled suddenly. \"And it will still be there when I get to it!\" That was worth something. And he still had some of the magic of the Enchanted Forest along with him in the form of his sword. Even through the sheath, Mendanbar could feel the reassuring pulse of power.\n\n\"Well, there's no sense in putting it off.\" He shrugged, took a last look back at his forest, and started walking.\n\nOnce he got used to the dry, dead, magicless feel of the mountains, Mendanbar actually enjoyed the walk. Much as he loved the Enchanted Forest , he had to admit that it was nice to see so much sky. Since dragons liked high places, the walk was mostly uphill, but that was fun, too. With no trees to block the view, Mendanbar could see for miles, and the higher he got, the more he could see. The hills in the Enchanted Forest tended to be either low, rolling bumps that you hardly noticed, or steep mounds that were usually home to something dangerous, or magical, or both. Most of the latter were made of something strange, too-jasper or polished coal or solid silver. There was even one made of glass somewhere along the southern edge of the forest.\n\nSome king had built it in order to get rid of his daughter.\n\nDaughter. King's daughter. Princess! Mendanbar's good mood vanished.\n\nHe'd forgotten about Kazul's princess.\n\n\"And I'll have to be particularly polite to her, no matter how irritating she is,\" he reminded himself gloomily. If she had as much influence as Zemenar hinted, she could make things very difficult if she took a dislike to him. He wondered why Kazul had kept her. The King of the Dragons didn't normally bother with a princess, or at least, Mendanbar had never before heard of one who did.\n\nHe came around a curve and saw the mouth of a cave in front of him.\n\nThere was a wide, flat, sandy space in front of the cave, big enough for several dragons to land at the same time, if they were careful about it. The mountain rose straight up behind the cave mouth. Set in the stone over the center of the opening was an outline of a spiky black crown.\n\nAs Mendanbar drew nearer, he saw a tarnished brass handle sticking out of a small hole beside the cave. The handle was level with his waist, and next to it was a sign that read: \"WELCOME TO THE CAVE OF THE DRAGON KING. Pull handle to ring bell.\" On the line below, someone had added in neat letters printed in bright red paint, \"ABSOLUTELY No wizards, sales-people, or rescuers. This means YOU.\"\n\nMendanbar stared at the sign for a minute and began to smile. No wonder Zemenar didn't like Kazul's princess. Well, he wasn't a wizard, he wasn't selling anything, and he certainly didn't want to rescue anybody. He gave the handle a pull.\n\nSomewhere inside the cave, a bell rang. \"Well, it's about time,\" said a woman's voice, and Mendanbar's heart sank. He heard footsteps coming toward the mouth of the cave, and the same voice continued, \"I was hoping you'd get here before I left. The sink is-\" The speaker came out of the cave, took a look at Mendanbar, and broke off in mid-sentence. \"Oh, no, not another one,\" she said.\n\nMendanbar stared at her in utter bafflement. If this was a princess, she was like no princess he had ever seen, and he had seen dozens.\n\nTrue, she had a small gold crown pinned into her hair, and she was very pretty-beautiful, in fact-but she was wearing a blue-and-white checked apron with large pockets. Mendanbar had never seen a princess in an apron before.\n\nThe dress under the apron was rust-colored and practical-looking, and she had the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. He had never seen a princess with her sleeves rolled up, either. Her jet black hair hung in plain braids almost to her knees, instead of making a cloud of curls around her face. Her eyes were black, too, and she was as tall as Mendanbar.\n\n\"Well?\" she said in an exasperated tone. \"Are you going to stand there like a lump, or are you going to tell me what you want? Although I think I already know.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Mendanbar said. He pulled himself together and bowed uncertainly. \"I think there's been some sort of mistake. I'm looking for Kazul, the King of the Dragons.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you are,\" the young woman muttered. \"Well, you can't have her. I handle my own knights and princes.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Mendanbar said, blinking. He was beginning to think the mistake was his. This young woman didn't look like a princess (except for the crown), she didn't act like a princess, and she didn't talk like a princess. But if she wasn't a princess, what was she doing here?\n\n\"I handle my own knights,\" she repeated. \"You see, I don't want to be rescued, and it would be silly for someone to get hurt fighting Kazul when I intend to stay here no matter what happens. Besides, Kazul has enough to do being King of the Dragons without people interrupting her to fight for no reason.\"\n\n\"You really are Kazul's princess\"-what had Zemenar said her name was? Oh, yes \u2013 \"Cimorene?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Look, I haven't got time to argue about this, not today.\n\nCould you please go away and come back in, oh, a week or so, when things are a little more settled? Or I can direct you to a more cooperative princess, if you'd rather not wait. Marchak has a very nice one just now, and he lives quite close by.\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not,\" Mendanbar said. He was beginning to think Willin had been right to say he should wait for a formal audience. \"You see, I didn't come to rescue you, or anybody. I'm the King of the Enchanted Forest, and I really did come to talk to Kazul. And it's urgent. So-\" \"Oh, drat,\" said Cimorene. \"Are you sure it can't wait? Kazul isn't here right now.\"\n\n\"I'll wait for her,\" Mendanbar said with polite firmness. \"As I said, the matter is urgent.\"\n\nCimorene frowned suddenly. \"Did you say you were the King of the Enchanted Forest?\"\n\nMendanbar nodded. \"My name is Mendanbar.\"\n\n'Just why is it that you're so eager to see Kazul, Your Majesty?\"\n\nCimorene said suspiciously.\n\n\"I ran across a\u2026 problem in the Enchanted Forest this morning,\" Mendanbar replied, choosing his words with care. \"A witch named Morwen advised me to talk to the King of the Dragons about it.\"\n\n\"Morwen sent you?\" Cimorene looked surprised, then thoughtful. \"It must be all right, then. Come in and sit down, and I'll see if I can explain.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Princess,\" Mendanbar said, bowing.\n\n'Just call me Cimorene,\" she said, leading Mendanbar into the cave.\n\nShe bent to pick up a lantern from the floor inside the entrance and added, \"My official title now is Chief Cook and Librarian, so I've gotten out of the habit of being called 'Princess'.\"\n\n\"Chief Cook and Librarian?\" Mendanbar said curiously. \"How did that happen?\"\n\n\"Kazul and I decided on it between us after she became King of the Dragons last year,\" Cimorene said. \"You see, the King of the Dragons doesn't usually have a princess, and we didn't want the other dragons grumbling about Kazul breaking with tradition. I was hoping it would discourage the knights a bit, too.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Well, it doesn't sound particularly noble and knightly to say you've rescued the Chief Cook and Librarian, does it? And it has cut down on the number of interruptions. I used to get two or three knights a day, and now there's only about one a week. And the ones who do come are at least smart enough to figure out that I'm still a princess even if the dragons call me Chief Cook.\"\n\n\"Doesn't that make them harder to get rid of?.\"\n\n\"Not at all. The smart ones listen when I argue with them. The stupid ones think I'm kidding. I had to offer to fight a couple of them myself before I could get them to go away.\"\n\nMendanbar peered doubtfully at Cimorene in the dim lantern-light.\n\nShe didn't look as if she were joking. \"You actually offered to fight a knight?\"\n\n\"Four of them,\" Cimorene said, nodding. and a prince. It was the only way to convince them.\" She looked at Mendanbar uncertainly. \"I'm sorry if I behaved badly to you at first, but I really did think you were here to rescue me. It's the crown.\" She pointed to the circlet on his head. \"You wouldn't believe the trouble I've had with some of the princes. Being rude is the only way to get rid of them in a hurry, and sometimes even that doesn't work. Especially if they're particularly stupid.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Mendanbar said without thinking. \"They sound a lot like princesses-stubborn, witless, and-\" He stopped short in dismay.\n\nHe'd forgotten for a moment that Cimorene was a princess, too. He hoped she wouldn't be insulted.\n\nFortunately, Cimorene didn't seem insulted at all. She nodded.\n\n\"Exactly.\n\nThat's why I send the knights and princes on to rescue other princesses.\n\nThey mostly deserve each other. Of course, I do try to make sure I send the nicest knights to the nicest princesses. They can't help it if they're silly,\" They had reached a side opening, and Cimorene hesitated. Then she shrugged and went in. \"The kitchen's a mess today,\" she said over her shoulder, \"but even when it's messy, it's more comfortable for human-type people than the big caves where the dragons go to chat. I can make tea, too, if you'd like some.\"\n\nBefore he could answer, Mendanbar emerged from the side tunnel into a large, well-lit cavern. An enormous black stove took up half of one wall, and the other walls were lined with tall wooden cupboards. A stone sink next to the door was filled to the brim with scummy gray water, and the shelf next to it was overflowing with dirty dishes. In the middle of the floor stood a large wooden table and three mismatched chairs.\n\n\"Tea sounds good,\" Mendanbar said, politely ignoring the dishes.\n\nCimorene scowled at the sink and began rummaging through the cupboards.\n\n\"Do you mind having your tea in a wine glass? I know it's a little strange, but I'm afraid all the cups are dirty. The sink has been plugged up for nearly a week, and I haven't been able to do the dishes.\"\n\n\"I don't mind,\" Mendanbar said. \"But you'll have to do something about that sink sooner or later, you know.\"\n\n\"I've tried,\" Cimorene said in an irritated tone. \"Do you have any idea how hard it is to persuade a plumber to come look at a dragon's sink? I thought I'd finally found one, but he was supposed to get here yesterday morning and still hasn't shown up, so he's probably not coming. And there aren't any books on plumbing in Kazul's library, or I'd have fixed it myself.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Mendanbar said. \"Maybe I can do something about it.\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" Cimorene replied. \"You can't make it any worse than it is already.\"\n\nThat didn't sound like much of a vote of confidence to Mendanbar, but it didn't matter. He went over to the sink and studied it for a moment, then backed up a pace and drew his sword.\n\nCimorene made a startled noise. \"Your sword does plumbing?\" she said, sounding interested. \"I knew it was magic, but I thought it was for dragons.\"\n\n\"It does most things,\" Mendanbar said absently. Working magic outside the Enchanted Forest took a lot of concentration. He squinted down the length of the blade at the sink, feeling the power within the sword tingle against his palm. Then he whipped the sword through the air, pushing power out of it to wrap around the sink. With a final flourish, he touched the tip of the sword to the surface of the scummy water. There was a spray of magic, a loud glug, and the water swirled and began to run down the drain.\n\n\"There,\" said Mendanbar. \"That should do it.\" He wiped the tip of his sword and stuck it back in its sheath.\n\n\"It certainly should!\" Cimorene said. \"Is your magic always that flashy?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Never mind. I'll wash some cups while the tea water is boiling. Sit down while I get the kettle started.\"\n\nMendanbar sat down at the table and frowned suddenly. \"Oh, bother.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Morwen gave me some cider to bring to King Kazul, and I was so busy cleaning up after Zemenar that I forgot to pick it up before I left.\n\nI'm sorry. I'll have to send it with someone when I get back.\"\n\nCimorene stopped short, holding the teakettle suspended in midair.\n\n\"Zemenar? Not the Head Wizard of the Society of Wizards?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Mendanbar said, a little surprised by her reaction.\n\nThen he recalled how much Zemenar seemed to dislike Cimorene.\n\nPresumably Cimorene felt the same way about Zemenar.\n\n\"And you had to clean up after him? It figures,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\nShe finished filling the kettle and put it on the stove, then went back to the sink and washed two cups, two saucers, and two spoons with an intense concentration that made it obvious she was thinking about something else.\n\nMendanbar was happy to let her think. He had a few things to mull over himself. Cimorene was not at all what he'd expected. She acted more like Morwen than like a princess. He wondered where she had come from and how she had gotten captured by the dragons. He nearly asked, but pulled himself up short before the words left his mouth. He hadn't come to talk to a princess. No, indeed. \"When will King Kazul be back?\" he asked instead.\n\nCimorene did not answer at once. She set the teacups on the table, poured hot water into the teapot to brew, and sat down across from Mendanbar. She studied him for a long minute, then gave a decisive nod.\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"I'll tell you the truth. I don't know.\"\n\nA wave of irritation swept over Mendanbar. \"If Kazul didn't tell you when she expected to be back, why didn't you say so at once?\"\n\n\"Oh, she told me,\" Cimorene said. She looked very sober. \"She was supposed to be home the day before yesterday.\"\n\n\"And she's not back yet?\"\n\nCimorene nodded again. \"And she hasn't sent a message or anything.\n\nShe's disappeared. I was just getting ready to go search for her when you showed up.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar and Cimorene Have a Long Talk and Mendanbar Reluctantly Decides to Embark on a Journey",
                "text": "Mendanbar took a deep breath. \"I think you'd better tell me everything you know about this,\" he said. \"When did Kazul leave, and where was she going?\"\n\n\"She left last Monday,\" Cimorene replied readily. \"She was going to visit her grandchildren in the northern part of the mountains. She does that whenever she gets a chance, and sometimes she stays a few extra days, but she's always sent word before when she's done that.\"\n\nShe frowned worriedly.\n\n\"I-grandchildren?\"\n\nCimorene smiled. \"I know. I was taken aback when I found out about them, too. You just don't think of the King of the Dragons as a doting grandmother, but she is. In fact, I suspect she took longer than she had to about the negotiations with the Frost Giants up there, just so she'd have an excuse to stay a few more days. Anyway, she was planning to spend a couple of days with them and then swing through the Enchanted Forest on her way home.\"\n\n\"She was coming to see me?\" Mendanbar asked, surprised.\n\n\"Not exactly.\" Cimorene hesitated. \"We'd heard that someone was growing dragonsbane in one of the valleys along the border, and she wanted to see whether it was true. You can see why I'm worried.\"\n\n\"Growing dragonsbane-you mean, deliberately planting it? There have always been a few patches of the stuff here and there.\"\n\n\"The way we heard it, this was an entire valley full. That's hardly accidental.\" Cimorene lifted the lid of the teapot and peered inside, then poured a cup for each of them. \"Kazul wanted to check for herself, quietly, before any of the younger dragons heard about it.\n\nSome of them are\u2026impulsive. She didn't want someone tearing off in a fury to burn down the Enchanted Forest with no more reason than a rumor.\"\n\n\"Oh, lord.\" Mendanbar pushed his hair backward off his forehead and grimaced at his tea. \"I'll bet that's what happened. I wish she'd sent word to me.\"\n\nCimorene studied her cup with unnecessary thoroughness. \"She was afraid you might be the one doing it.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"The King of the Enchanted Forest . You haven't been particularly friendly since she took over, you know.\" She frowned suddenly. \"Why'd you turn up today, anyway? And what did you mean, 'that's what happened'? Don't tell me somebody really has started setting fire to the Enchanted Forest!\"\n\n\"Almost,\" Mendanbar said. He explained about the dead area and the dragon scales he had found. \"Morwen said that they were all from the same dragon, but they had been enchanted to look as if they came from several different dragons. I was hoping King Kazul would tell me which dragon they belonged to, and maybe let me ask him a few questions.\"\n\n\"Let me look at them,\" Cimorene said.\n\nMendanbar took the scales out of his pocket and spread them out on the table.\n\nCimorene made a face. \"I can tell you whose scales they were, all right, but I'm afraid it won't help much. Woraug isn't around any more.\"\n\n\"It's a start,\" Mendanbar said. \"You're sure these are his?\"\n\n\"Very sure. But I'm afraid you won't be able to ask him any questions.\" Cimorene smiled, as if at some private joke.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because the reason Woraug isn't around any more is that he got turned into a toad about a year ago. Do you know how the King of the Dragons is chosen?\"\n\n\"By a test,\" Mendanbar replied, a little puzzled by the question.\n\n\"When a king dies, the crown goes to whichever dragon can carry Colin's Stone from the Ford of Whispering Snakes to the Vanishing Mountain.\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, Woraug poisoned the old King of the Dragons. Then he arranged with the Society of Wizards to rig the test so he'd be the next King,\" Cimorene said matter-of-factly. \"It was mostly luck that we found out in time to stop them. When we did, Woraug turned into a toad because of his un-dragonlike behavior.\" She sipped at her tea. \"I think a snake ate him,\" she added thoughtfully.\n\nThere were so many things Mendanbar wanted to say in response to this disturbing summary that for a moment he couldn't say anything at all.\n\nHe took a large swallow of tea, which gave him an extra minute to think. \"Is that why the wizards have been banned from the Mountains of Morning?\" he managed at last.\n\n\"Of course,\" Cimorene answered. \"Kazul couldn't do anything more.\n\nEven though we knew it was all their idea, it was Woraug who actually poisoned the King. Didn't Morwen tell you about it? She was there.\"\n\n\"No,\" Mendanbar said. \"It didn't come up.\" He shook his head. \"No wonder Zemenar didn't want to talk about why the dragons don't want wizards in the mountains anymore.\"\n\nCimorene nodded. \"The wizards don't talk about it because their scheme didn't work out, and the dragons don't talk about it because the wizards came so close that the dragons are embarrassed to admit it.\n\nAnd Morwen is too discreet to spread the story around when the dragons would rather she didn't.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Mendanbar saw considerably more than that. The disagreement between the dragons and the Society of Wizards was not a minor matter, as Zemenar had led him to believe. And Kazul's princess-or rather, Chief Cook and Librarian, he reminded himself-was nothing like the sneaky, manipulative girl Zemenar had hinted she was, either. It looked very much as if Zemenar had been deliberately trying to cause trouble between Mendanbar and the dragons, or at least get Mendanbar off to a bad start with their King. He wondered what Zemenar would have said about Morwen if her name had come up.\n\n\"It wouldn't surprise me if the Society of Wizards was behind this, too,\" Cimorene said, waving her hand at the scales. \"It's exactly the kind of twisty scheme they'd come up with.\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" Mendanbar acknowledged, \"but why would they want to bring the Enchanted Forest into their argument with the dragons?\"\n\n\"Maybe they think you'll clean the dragons out of the mountains, or at least reduce their numbers enough so that the wizards will be able to come through without getting eaten.\"\n\nMendanbar shook his head. \"If it came to a fight, the Enchanted Forest and the Mountains of Morning would be very evenly matched. A war would cut the wizards off from both places as long as there was any fighting, and it would probably drag on for ages. Zemenar must know that. He'd have to have an awfully good reason to start something like that.\"\n\n\"Maybe he does.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but I can't think what it could be. Can you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene admitted. \"But if I figure it out, I'll let you know.\"\n\n\"Meanwhile, is there anyone else who could have done this?\"\n\nMendanbar asked, waving at the line of scales on the table.\n\n\"There aren't many people who can get hold of even one dragon scale, much less five from the same dragon,\" Cimorene said, scowling at the table.\n\n\"Woraug's princess might have kept one or two as a souvenir, but I don't think she'd have had this many, and anyway she doesn't know any magic.\"\n\nSuddenly she looked up. \"Wait a minute! When Woraug turned into a toad, a whole batch of scales fell off and scattered.\"\n\n\"What happened to them?\"\n\n\"We just left them at the ford,\" Cimorene said with a shrug. \"Nobody thought it was important. Most of them are probably still there.\n\nDragon scales last a long time.\"\n\n\"At the Ford of Whispering Snakes?\" Mendanbar asked. Cimorene nodded, and he grimaced. \"Then anyone who walked by could have picked up these scales any time in the past year. That doesn't narrow things down much.\"\n\n\"I'm as sorry about that as you are,\" Cimorene said.\n\nMendanbar's face must have shown his surprise, because she gave him an exasperated look and went on, \"Hadn't it occurred to you that we'd want to know who's plotting to get dragons blamed for their mischief?.\n\nEspecially if it turns out not to be the Society of Wizards.\"\n\n\"But-oh. If it's not the Society, then you have a new enemy you don't know anything about.\"\n\nCimorene nodded again, very soberly. \"I just wish I had time to look into it right now, but with Kazul missing it will have to wait.\"\n\n\"You'll let me know when she gets back?\"\n\n\"I'll tell Roxim to send you word if she shows up while I'm gone,\" Cimorene assured him. \"And if I find her first, I'll tell her everything you've told me. I'm sure she'll get in touch with you right away.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Now, is there anything else you want to know? Because if there isn't, I need to be going,\" Cimorene went on. \"It's a long walk to Flat Top Mountain, and I'd like to get there before dark.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't plan to walk all the way to the northern end of the Mountains of Morning.\" He was surprised and suddenly disappointed by this evidence of princesslike behavior. From their brief acquaintance, he'd thought Cimorene had better sense.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Cimorene replied impatiently. \"I'm not stupid. I'm going to borrow a magic carpet from Ballimore, the giantess who lives on Flat Top Mountain.\"\n\nMendanbar choked on the last of his tea. \"Do you expect a giantess to loan you a carpet just because you have a dragon with you?\" he demanded when he could talk again.\n\n\"I'd better not, since I won't have a dragon with me,\" Cimorene retorted.\n\n\"Not that it's any of your business.\"\n\n\"You're going to wander around the Mountains of Morning alone looking for King Kazul?\" Mendanbar said, appalled.\n\n\"Exactly. And if I can't find her there, I'll swing through the Enchanted Forest on the way back, just the way she was planning to.\n\nAnd it's time I got started, so if you'll just-\" \"Oh, no.\" Mendanbar set his teacup down so emphatically that it rattled the saucer. \"If you're fool enough to travel through the Mountains of Morning without a companion, that's not my concern, but you are not going through the Enchanted Forest alone. It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"I can take care of myself,\" Cimorene snapped. \"You forget, I've been living with the dragons for over a year.\"\n\n\"Maybe so,\" Mendanbar said, trying hard to hold on to his temper.\n\n\"But the Enchanted Forest is very different from the Mountains of Morning.\n\nAnd what do you suppose will happen if the King of the Dragons's Princess-or Cook and Librarian, or whatever-gets captured or killed or enchanted going through my forest?\"\n\nCimorene opened her mouth to reply, then paused. \"Oh,\" she said in a very different tone. \"Oh, I see. That would cause just the sort of trouble we're both trying to avoid, wouldn't it? I'm sorry. I'm used to people objecting to things because they think I can't do them or shouldn't do them. It didn't occur to me that you might have a real reason.\"\n\n\"Then you won't go?\" Mendanbar said with relief.\n\n\"I have to,\" Cimorene said in the tones of one explaining something obvious. \"It's my job. Besides, Kazul is my friend. I'll just have to make sure I don't get captured or killed or enchanted, that's all.\"\n\n\"It's not as easy as you make it sound.\"\n\n\"I know. I've visited Morwen a time or two,\" Cimorene said. \"I'll manage, one way or another.\"\n\nMendanbar started to object again, then stopped. He didn't think Cimorene was quite as sure of herself as she sounded, but she was plainly determined to go hunting for Kazul. Well, she was right about one thing: somebody had to find the King of the Dragons, and soon.\n\nMendanbar didn't like to think of what might happen if Kazul stayed missing for long, especially if rumors about dragonsbane in the Enchanted Forest started floating around the mountains.\n\n\"Is there anyone you can take with you?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene said. \"Roxim and Marchak are the only dragons who have enough sense not to go off in fits when they hear that Kazul is missing.\n\nRoxim is too old for adventures, and Marchak has to stay and take care of business while I'm gone. And I hope you're not going to suggest I borrow Marchak's princess.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of it,\" Mendanbar said sincerely. \"Is she very awful?\"\n\n\"Actually, she's one of the nice ones,\" Cimorene admitted. \"But she's very silly. She'd try, but she wouldn't enjoy it at all, and she'd be much more of a nuisance than she's worth. I'd rather take my chances alone.\"\n\n\"That's almost as bad an idea as taking that princess along,\" Mendanbar said. He sighed. \"I suppose I'll have to come with you myself.\"\n\nCimorene stared at him blankly for a moment, then began to giggle.\n\n\"It isn't funny,\" Mendanbar said. \"I mean it.\" He felt a little hurt by Cimorene's reaction. He wasn't necessarily stuffy or useless or a nuisance to travel with just because he was the King of the Enchanted Forest. Cimorene ought to realize that. After all, he'd fixed the sink for her, hadn't he?\n\n\"I know you mean it,\" Cimorene said when she could talk again. \"It wasn't what you said, it was the way you said it.\" She shook her head, chuckling. \"You sound about as eager to come with me as I am to have company. Which isn't much.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but somebody-\" \"What was that?\" Cimorene interrupted, holding up a hand for silence.\n\n\"I didn't hear anything,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Shhh,\" Cimorene hissed. She rose and tiptoed to the door, listening.\n\nIn the quiet, Mendanbar heard a faint thud outside. Cimorene's lips tightened.\n\n\"Princes or wizards?\" she muttered. \"Wizards, I'll bet. Princes are noisier.\"\n\nStill frowning, she picked up the bucket of soapy water that was sitting beside the door. As she reached for the doorknob, Mendanbar started after her. Cimorene hadn't asked for his help, but a bucket of soapy water wasn't much of a weapon against a wizard. If it was a wizard.\n\nThe corridor outside the kitchen was pitch black. Cimorene vanished into the gloom, moving with the calm sureness of long familiarity.\n\nCursing mentally, Mendanbar picked his way after her, one hand on the cave wall for guidance, the other stretched out in front of him to keep him from running into anything.\n\nAnother muffled crash echoed from up ahead. Mendanbar took two more steps and his outstretched arm touched Cimorene's shoulder. A moment later, Cimorene's voice said calmly, \"Phrazelspitz.\"\n\nMendanbar felt magic rise around him. Light flared from the walls, then settled into a steady glow, revealing an enormous cavern. He and Cimorene stood in one of five dark openings spaced unevenly around the wall. Halfway across the cave, a tall man in blue and brown wizard's robes stood hanging onto a staff and trying to squint in all directions at once. His hair and beard were brown, and he bore a strong resemblance to Zemenar, only younger.\n\n\"Antorell,\" Cimorene said in tones of disgust. \"I might have guessed.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to see you again, Princess Cimorene,\" the wizard said in an oily tone. \"But who could fail to rejoice at the sight of so lovely a princess?\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Cimorene demanded. Mendanbar was pleased to note that she didn't sound at all mollified by Antorell's flattery.\n\n\"And how did you get in without being eaten?\"\n\n\"Oh, we wizards have our little ways,\" Antorell said airily. \"And I came because-well, because I was concerned about you, Princess.\"\n\n\"I'll bet,\" Cimorene muttered. \"What do you mean?\" she said in a louder voice.\n\n\"I thought you might need a friend.\" Antorell's voice oozed sincerity.\n\n\"Especially after what Father said when he came back from the Enchanted Forest. If King Mendanbar really is getting ready for a war with the drag \"Where did your father get that idea?\" Cimorene asked in tones of mild interest.\n\nAntorell frowned slightly, as if he had hoped for a stronger reaction.\n\n\"Something the King said to him, I think. I shouldn't have repeated it, I suppose, but I was carried away by my feelings.\"\n\n\"Sure you were,\" Cimorene said. \"That's why you sneaked in here without knocking and went blundering around in the dark, instead of calling me or at least bringing a lamp.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to disturb King Kazul, if she happened to be here,\" Antorell said stiffly.\n\nCimorene snorted. \"If you'd really thought Kazul was here, you wouldn't have come at all. She doesn't like it when people ignore her rules.\n\nOne of which, may I remind you, was that wizards aren't allowed in the Mountains of Morning anymore.\"\n\n\"But if there's going to be a wan\" \"There isn't,\" Mendanbar said, stepping forward into the light. \"At least, not if I can help it. Why are you people trying so hard to make trouble, anyway?\"\n\nAntorell's eyes widened, and he sucked in his breath. \"Mendanbar? You'll ruin everything, blast you.\" He smiled a sudden, nasty smile.\n\n\"Unless I deal with both of you now. Oh, yes, that will do very well.\n\nFather will be so pleased.\"\n\nHe raised his staff. Mendanbar started toward him, pulling his sword free as he ran, though he knew the wizard was much too far away to reach before he finished the spell. Cimorene followed quickly, not quite running, carrying her bucket carefully to avoid spilling. They had only gone a few steps when a swirl of smoke appeared in the air in front of them.\n\nThe smoke thickened rapidly, then congealed with shocking suddenness into the largest nightshade Mendanbar had ever seen. It was two feet taller than Mendanbar and covered with spikes of coarse black fur. Its beady black eyes glared at him as it raised a long arm and clicked its dark purple claws together. It hissed, showing a mouthful of fangs.\n\n\"There!\" cried Antorell over the nightshade's noise. \"Vanquish that, Cimorene-if you can!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which a Wizard Makes a Mess and the Journey Begins",
                "text": "Ignoring Antorell, Mendanbar kept his eyes on the nightshade. He had a moment's useless wish that he were in the Enchanted Forest , where he could have disposed of the monster with relative ease. Here, things were going to be a lot more complicated. He shifted his grip on the sword and pulled at the power within it.\n\nThe nightshade swung at him: its fully extended claws carving a whistling arc in the air. It was very, very fast. Mendanbar barely managed to block in time. The force of the blow knocked him to one side, and he almost lost hold of the sword. The nightshade hissed in pain and shook its arm, but Mendanbar knew it was not seriously hurt.\n\nWithout active magic behind it, the most damage the sword could have inflicted on a nightshade this big was a bruise.\n\nAgain he pulled at the power in the sword, then had to roll to avoid another swing by the nightshade. This time he kept on rolling until he was out of the monster's reach. He came up on one knee and pointed the sword at the nightshade, pushing power through the sword in the pattern he had pictured in his mind.\n\nAntorell's staff struck him across the shoulders. The sword flew out of his hands and he went sprawling. His half-formed spell spun wildly in the air and then was sucked away. He heard an angry shriek from Cimorene, then a shout: \"Mendanbar! Dodge left, quick!\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Mendanbar threw himself to his left. He heard a rush of wind as the nightshade's claws missed him by inches. There was a splash somewhere behind him, and Antorell's voice cried, \"No! No! You'll be sorry for this, Cimorene!\" Then Mendanbar's hand closed on the hilt of his sword. He twisted and brought the sword up, shoving power through it recklessly.\n\nThe blast of barely formed magic caught the nightshade in mid leap.\n\nThe creature hung frozen in the air for an instant, then dissolved in a cloud of bright sparks. Mendanbar seized the remnants of magic and pulled them together into a tight knot, ready to throw at another nightshade or at Antorell himself. Only then did he pause to look around.\n\nCimorene stood a little way away, swinging the empty bucket in one hand and looking at him as if she were impressed in spite of herself.\n\nAntorell had vanished.\n\n\"You really do like flashy magic,\" Cimorene commented as Mendanbar climbed warily to his feet. \"I haven't seen anything like that since Kazul's coronation party.\"\n\n\"Where's Antorell?\" Mendanbar asked. \"Did he get away?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene said, waving her free hand at a damp area of floor to Mendanbar's right. \"I melted him.\"\n\n\"Melted him?\" Mendanbar looked at the damp patch more closely.\n\nAntorell's soggy robes were plastered to the floor in the middle of a gooey puddle. His staff lay along one side of the robes, half-in, half-out of the goo.\n\nThere was no other trace of him. Mendanbar was impressed, and said so.\n\n\"It's really not hard,\" Cimorene said. \"All it takes is a bucket of soapy water with a little lemon juice in it. A friend of mine discovered by accident how to do it, and I've kept a bucket ready ever since, just in case.\"\n\n\"I thought that only worked on witches.\"\n\nCimorene shrugged. \"Lots of things don't work the way they're supposed to. Morwen's a witch, but she certainly doesn't melt in a bucket of soapy water.\"\n\nMendanbar thought of the shining stone step and the spotless wooden floor in Morwen's house, and nodded. \"I can see that. But why does it work for wizards?\"\n\n\"We don't know.\" Cimorene gave him a sidelong look. \"I'm sorry I let Antorell wallop you with his staff, but I didn't want to throw the water at him while you were in the way.\"\n\n\"Why-oh, you mean you were afraid it would melt me, too?\"\n\nMendanbar blinked. \"But I'm not a wizard.\"\n\n\"You work magic,\" Cimorene pointed out. \"And I don't know how strict the soapy-water-and-lemon:juice trick is about defining wizards. It would cause a lot of trouble if I melted the King of the Enchanted Forest in the middle of Kazul's living room, even if it isn't permanent.\"\n\n\"You mean he'll be back?\" Mendanbar had started to put his sword back in its sheath, but he stopped at once. \"How soon?\"\n\n\"Not for a couple of days, at least,\" Cimorene reassured him.\n\n\"Antorell may be Zemenar's son, but he's never been a very good wizard.\"\n\n\"Antorell is the son of the Head Wizard?\" Mendanbar shot a considering look at the puddle and the pile of soggy robes. \"So that's what he meant when he said his father would be pleased.\"\n\n\"Probably.\" Cimorene frowned pensively at Antorell's staff. \"I've got to find Kazul. The Society of Wizards is up to something for sure, and she needs to know right away.\"\n\n\"Couldn't Antorell have come here on his own?\" Mendanbar asked, although he didn't really believe it himself.\n\nCimorene shook her head. \"I don't think he'd have dared. As I said, he's not a very good wizard. He wouldn't have been able to keep himself concealed from the dragons, and he certainly must have had help to make anything as nasty and complex as that construct you took care of.\"\n\n\"That wasn't a construct,\" Mendanbar said. \"That was a nightshade.\n\nThey're fairly common in parts of the Enchanted Forest . Antorell didn't make it, he just snatched it from somewhere nearby.\"\n\n\"Snatched it?\" Cimorene's eyes widened. \"Yes, I suppose he could have managed that. I begin to see what you meant about traveling in the Enchanted Forest alone,\" she added in a thoughtful tone.\n\n\"I should hope so,\" Mendanbar muttered, turning away. \"Then you've changed your mind about going?\" he added hopefully over his shoulder.\n\n\"No, just about whether I accept your offer of escort,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"It'll probably be a nuisance, but nightshades would be much worse.\"\n\nSlightly startled by this unflattering comparison, Mendanbar glanced back at Cimorene. There was a decided twinkle in her eyes. Mendanbar smiled and bowed elaborately. \"Thank you for your kind words, Princess.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Your Majesty,\" Cimorene said, curtsying in response.\n\n\"Now, we'd better get to work, or we'll never get this mess cleaned up in time to get to Flat Top Mountain before dark.\"\n\nCleaning up the large cave took less time than Mendanbar had expected, despite the unpleasantly gummy look of the goo that Antorell had left behind.\n\nA large part of the mess turned out to be leftover soapy water, which was very convenient. Cimorene mopped most of it up with Antorell's robe, then wrapped the robe around the staff and started toward the rear of the cave.\n\n\"What are you going to do with that?\" Mendanbar asked curiously.\n\n\"Hide it,\" Cimorene said. \"There's not much else you can do to a wizard's staff. They won't break, and even dragon fire won't burn them. I know because we tried everything we could think of the last time we melted some wizards.\"\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"Morwen and I. Antorell will get it back eventually, of course, but hiding it will slow him down a little.\" She left to dispose of the staff while Mendanbar scraped up the last of the goo.\n\nThe kitchen was another matter. Cimorene insisted on doing all of the dishes that had been waiting for the sink to get unplugged, which took a while. Mendanbar offered to use his magic on the dishes, but Cimorene politely declined.\n\n\"A magic sword that does plumbing is unusual but very useful,\" she explained as she filled the sink. \"A magic sword that does dishes is just plain silly. Besides, there have been two big flares of magic in this cave in the past hour already, and if there's a third one, someone might come to see what I'm up to.\"\n\n\"I didn't notice anything remarkable when Antorell brought the nightshade in,\" Mendanbar said, frowning. \"Though I'll admit I overdid it a little when I got rid of the thing. I was in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" said Cimorene, setting a clean plate on the drain board. \"But you weren't in a hurry when you unclogged the sink, were you? That was the other flare I meant, not Antorell's fiddling.\"\n\n\"What was conspicuous about that?\" Mendanbar asked defensively.\n\nHe picked up a clean towel and began drying plates. \"It was a perfectly ordinary spell.\"\n\nCimorene looked at him. \"Right. Just like that sword is a perfectly ordinary magic sword.\"\n\n\"Well, I wouldn't call it ordinary, exactly, but that's because it's linked with the Enchanted Forest,\" Mendanbar said. \"Outside of that, it's nothing special .\"\n\n\"Nothing special.\" Cimorene stopped washing dishes for a moment to stare at him. Suddenly, she frowned. \"You mean it. You really haven't noticed.\"\n\n\"Noticed what?\"\n\n\"The way that sword of yours positively reeks of magic,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"We're going to have to do something about it, unless you want the Society of Wizards to be able to find us with their eyes closed.\"\n\nMendanbar looked at her. She was perfectly serious. He set the dishtowel down and drew his sword. It didn't look or feel any different to him from the way it normally felt, but Cimorene winced.\n\n\"Can't you\u2026 tone it down a little?\"\n\n\"I still don't know what you're talking about,\" Mendanbar said, irritated.\n\n\"And even if I did, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about 'toning it down.\"\n\n\"Why not? It's your sword, isn't it?\"\n\n\"It didn't come with directions?\"\n\n\"Most of them don't.\" Cimorene shook her head at him and picked another dirty teacup out of the rapidly diminishing stack. \"Maybe there's something in Kazul's treasury that will take care of it. I'll check as soon as we're done here.\"\n\nWhen the dishes were finished and the kitchen tidied to suit Cimorene's exacting standards, she left Mendanbar to mull things over while she went off to investigate the treasury. Mendanbar was glad of the chance to think.\n\n\"What is the Society of Wizards doing?\" he muttered. Between the misleading things Zemenar had said to Mendanbar and the downright lies Antorell had told to Cimorene, it was clear that the wizards didn't want them comparing notes. Cimorene might even be right about their desire to start a war between the Enchanted Forest and the dragons.\n\nStarting a war, however, would take more than a misunderstanding between the King of the Enchanted Forest and Kazul's Chief Cook and Librarian. Were the wizards behind the mysterious burned area Mendanbar had found? They could have gotten hold of Woraug's scales, and they certainly could have enchanted them.\n\n\"But why would they do it?\" Mendanbar asked the sink. \"They're not stupid, at least Zemenar isn't, and a war would cause the Society almost as many problems as it would cause us. What could make them overlook the problems and try to stir up trouble anyway?\" The sink did not answer.\n\nBut if it wasn't the wizards, Mendanbar wondered, who was it? Where had Kazul disappeared to? And was there really a dragonsbane farm in the Enchanted Forest, or was that just a rumor someone was spreading to add to the confusion?\n\nHe was still trying to put his questions into some sort of order when Cimorene returned. She had exchanged the apron and the rust-colored dress for a dark blue tunic with matching leggings, a pair of tall black boots, and a maroon cloak. She had taken off her crown, and her braids were wound neatly around her head. A gold-handled sword hung at her side, next to a small belt pouch. She held out a sword belt and sheath, the leather gray with age.\n\n\"I think this will do the job,\" she said. \"Try it and see.\"\n\n\"I've already got a sheath,\" Mendanbar pointed out.\n\n\"Yes, but this one blocks magic,\" Cimorene explained. \"It'll keep your sword from being so-so obvious all the time. At least, I hope it will.\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" Mendanbar replied, taking the scabbard. He held it a moment, testing. It didn't feel magical, but then, that was the idea.\n\nHe shrugged, pulled out his sword, and put it into the sheath Cimorene had given him.\n\n\"Oh, that's much better,\" Cimorene said with evident relief. \"I can hardly notice anything now.\"\n\n\"I can,\" Mendanbar said, touching the hilt with a thumb. The pulse of the Enchanted Forest was still there, ready for him to use.\n\n\"Of course you can,\" Cimorene said. \"It's your sword.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose I don't mind using it, then,\" Mendanbar said. \"As long as it doesn't damage the sword.\"\n\n\"It won't,\" Cimorene promised.\n\nMendanbar took off his sword belt and set it aside, then buckled on the belt and scabbard Cimorene had given him.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, \"let's go.\"\n\nAs they left the cave, Cimorene muttered something under her breath and waved at the entrance. Mendanbar jumped as a coil of strong, hard magic sprang into place behind them. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a solid wall of rock. He transferred his gaze to Cimorene and raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"What kind of magic was that?\"\n\n'Just something Kazul and I worked out a while back,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"It's to keep wizards and knights and so forth from prowling around while I'm gone.\"\n\nSo Cimorene is a sorceress, as well as a cook and librarian and goodness knows what else, Mendanbar thought to himself. Every time he thought he had her figured out, she surprised him again.\n\n\"It's a good idea, but please warn me if you're going to do anything like that again,\" he said. \"I'm not in the mood for being startled, if you know what I mean.\"\n\nCimorene nodded, frowning slightly, and asked just what it was about the spell that had startled him. This led to a long, technical discussion of the various ways of casting spells, detecting spells, and comparing spells other people had cast. Mendanbar found it both interesting and informative. He had always known that his own methods of working magic were not much like anyone else's, but he had never had time to study other styles.\n\nCimorene knew something about most kinds of magic, and she was naturally very well informed indeed about dragon magic. She was as interested in Mendanbar's system as he was in everything else, and the conversation lasted all the way to Flat Top Mountain.\n\nThe sun had slipped behind the mountains and it was almost dark when they came to the foot of the last slope. Mendanbar could see the giant's castle at the top, large and dark and ominous against the graying sky. A broad road wrapped three times around the mountain as it wound its way to the castle gates.\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right place?\" he asked.\n\n\"Quite sure,\" Cimorene said. \"I've never been here myself, but Kazul has described it often enough. And that's certainly a giant's castle.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Mendanbar said. \"But is it the right giant?\"\n\n\"We won't find out standing here. Come on.\"\n\nCimorene marched confidently up the mountain. Shaking his head, Mendanbar followed. By the time they reached the castle gates, the stars were beginning to come out and it was getting hard to see.\n\n\"There ought to be a bellpull or a knob,\" Cimorene said. \"You check that side of the gate, and I'll take this one.\"\n\n\"All right, but what-\" A loud grinding noise interrupted Mendanbar in mid-sentence, and the gates swung open. Yellow light spilled across the road, making Mendanbar and Cimorene squint.\n\n\"Come in, travelers,\" a woman's voice said, much too pleasantly.\n\n\"Come in, and make yourselves comfortable for the night.\"\n\nNeither Mendanbar nor Cimorene moved. \"This was your idea in the first place,\" Mendanbar said softly to Cimorene. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"Ask questions,\" Cimorene replied just as softly. She raised her voice and said, \"Thank you for your kind hospitality, but we're not just traveling.\n\nWe're looking for the giantess Ballimore, and we're in a hurry. So if you're not Ballimore, we'll have to go on.\"\n\n\"I am Ballimore,\" said the voice, still in an artificially pleasant tone that made Mendanbar's skin crawl. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I'm Princess Cimorene, Chief Cook and Librarian to Kazul, the King of the Dragons, and this is Mendanbar, the King of the Enchanted Forest,\" Cimorene answered.\n\n\"Cimorene?\" said the voice in an entirely different manner. \"Oh, good. I've been wanting to meet you for the longest time. Come on in, you and your friend, and I'll have supper ready in a jiffy.\"\n\nMendanbar and Cimorene looked at each other. \"I think it's all right now,\" Cimorene said after a moment.\n\n\"Well, we won't find out standing here,\" Mendanbar said. He held out his arm. \"Shall we go in, Princess?\"\n\nCimorene gave him a bright, almost impish smile, and laid her fingertips on his arm as if they were walking into a court ball. \"I should be pleased to accompany you, Your Majesty.\"\n\nTogether they walked through the gate. The courtyard inside was high, wide, and empty except for two rows of blazing torches in iron holders lined up on either side of the path. Mendanbar and Cimorene paced slowly up to the door, which swung open just as the gates had, only without the grinding.\n\nAs they went in, they heard the castle gates crunch shut. A moment later, the doors closed silently behind them.\n\nThey stood in a stone hall three times the size of any Mendanbar had ever seen. A wooden table, surrounded by high-backed chairs, stretched the length of the hall, At the far end of the room a large fire burned in an open hearth. High on the walls, more torches lit the room. A brown-haired woman in a pale blue dress was bending over a cauldron that hung from an iron hook above the fire. It all looked very ordinary, until Mendanbar noticed that the seats of the chairs were level with his eyes and everything else was similarly oversized.\n\nThe brown-haired woman sniffed at the cauldron, nodded to herself, and straightened. \"Welcome,\" she said, coming forward. \"I'm Ballimore.\n\nYou must be Princess Cimorene. I'm so pleased to meet you at last, after all that Kazul has told me about you.\"\n\nThe giantess bent over to shake hands gently with Cimorene. She was at least three times as tall as Mendanbar, but she moved with a grace that suited her size. Cimorene returned the handshake gravely, and said, \"I hope Kazul hasn't given you the wrong idea about me.\"\n\n\"Not at all, I'm sure,\" said the giantess. \"Is this your young man? You're not running away from the dragons after all this time, are you?\"\n\n\"Certainly not,\" Cimorene said with unnecessary vehemence. \"I'm very happy with my job.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Ballimore said, sounding disappointed. She gave Mendanbar a speculative look, then leaned toward Cimorene. \"If I were you, I'd reconsider,\" she said in a loud whisper. \"Your young man doesn't look like the patient type.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Cimorene said, reddening. \"It's not like that at all. This is the King of the Enchanted Forest, and he came to see Kazul, only Kazul has gone to visit her grandchildren and isn't home. That's why we came to see you-to borrow a magic carpet, so we can find Kazul.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" said the giantess. \"Strictly business. Well, you'll have to wait until after supper. Dobbilan will be home any minute, and he hates it when his meals are late.\"\n\n\"Dobbilan?\" Mendanbar said with some misgiving.\n\n\"My husband,\" Ballimore said.\n\nThere was a loud crash from the courtyard outside, followed by the thud, thud, thud of heavy footsteps that shook the castle.\n\nBallimore straightened with a happy smile. \"Here he comes now.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which They Give Some Good Advice to a Giant",
                "text": "Mendanbar and Cimorene turned to face the castle doors as the footsteps drew nearer. A moment later, the doors flew open and the giantess's husband stepped into the hall. He was a giant's head taller than she, with wild brown hair and a beard like a large, untidy broom's head. He carried a club that was as long as Mendanbar was tall.\n\nJust inside the door, the giant stopped and sniffed the air. Then he sneezed once, scowled ferociously, and said in a voice that shook the torches in their brackets: \"Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.\n\nBe he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.\"\n\nBallimore shook her head. \"Nonsense, dear. It's just Princess Cimorene and the King of the Enchanted Forest .\"\n\n\"And neither of us is English,\" Cimorene added.\n\nThe giant squinted down at her. \"Are you sure about that?\"\n\n\"Positive,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Well-\" The giant sniffed again, experimentally, then lowered his club with a sigh. \"That's all right, then. I wasn't in the mood for more work tonight, anyway. Sorry about the mistake. It must be this cold in my head.\"\n\n\"I told you yesterday to take something for it,\" Ballimore scolded.\n\n\"And I told you this morning to wrap some flannel around your throat before you went out. But do you listen to me? No!\"\n\n\"I listen,\" the giant protested uncomfortably. \"But I can't ransack villages with a piece of flannel around my neck. It wouldn't look right.\"\n\nCimorene snorted softly. Mendanbar got the distinct impression that she didn't think much of doing things for the sake of appearances.\n\n\"Well, really, Dobbilan,\" Ballimore said, \"how do you think it looks if you're coughing and sneezing all over everything while you're ransacking? Have a little sense.\"\n\n\"I'd rather have a little dinner,\" said Dobbilan and sneezed again.\n\n\"If you sound like that tomorrow, you're staying home in bed,\" Ballimore informed her husband.\n\n\"I can't do that! I'm scheduled to pillage two villages and maraud half a county.\"\n\n\"You're in no condition to pillage a hen house, much less a village,\" Ballimore declared. \"Besides, you've earned a bit of a rest, what with all the extra time you've been putting in lately, looting and marauding and I don't know what all.\"\n\n\"That's not the point.\"\n\n\"It's precisely the point. You're just being stubborn because you think having a bad cold is un-giantlike.\"\n\n\"Well, it is.\"\n\nBallimore shook her head and looked at Cimorene. \"Men!\" she said in tones of disgust.\n\n\"And don't you say 'men' to me,\" Dobbilan said. \"It's my job we're talking about.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should try a different line of work,\" Mendanbar suggested.\n\n\"Eh?\" Dobbilan peered down at him with interest. \"Like what?\"\n\n\"Consulting,\" Mendanbar said at random, because he hadn't actually thought about it.\n\n\"Consulting?\"\n\n\"You know,\" said Cimorene. \"Giving advice to people. You could teach other giants the best ways of-of ravaging and pillaging and marauding, and you could tell villages the best ways to keep giants away. With all your experience, I'll bet you'd be good at it.\"\n\n\"I never thought of that,\" Dobbilan said, rubbing his chin.\n\n\"I don't know why not,\" Ballimore said. \"It's a very good idea. And you wouldn't be out in all sorts of weather, catching colds and flu and goodness knows what else.\"\n\n\"Plundering has gotten to be an awful lot of work lately,\" the giant admitted. \"It would be a relief to stop. I'm getting too old to tramp through fields.\"\n\n\"I understand consulting pays very well, too,\" Mendanbar told him.\n\n\"I'll do it!\" Dobbilan said with sudden decision. \"Tomorrow morning, first thing. Thank you for the suggestion. What did you say your names were?\"\n\n\"If you'd listen once in a while, you wouldn't have to ask me to repeat everything,\" Ballimore said. \"This is Princess Cimorene, the one who's been with Kazul for the last year or so and gave me that marvelous biscuit recipe you like so much. And her young man is the King of the Enchanted Forest, who she's not running away with yet.\"\n\nMendanbar choked and shot an apprehensive look at Cimorene. She rolled her eyes and made a face at him but did not say anything, having apparently decided it was a waste of effort to correct the giantess.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Princess,\" Dobbilan said solemnly. \"Nice to see you, King. What brings you to Flat Top Mountain?\"\n\n\"They say it's business,\" Ballimore said before either Cimorene or Mendanbar could answer.\n\n\"Then it will have to wait until after dinner,\" Dobbilan announced. \"I never discuss business at dinner. Or with dinner, for that matter.\"\n\nHe winked at Cimorene. \"Besides, I'm hungry.\" He sneezed a third time. \"Excuse me.\"\n\nBallimore began scolding again as Cimorene and Mendanbar nodded politely. Mendanbar was beginning to wonder how long they were going to have to stand next to the table, when Ballimore shooed her husband to a seat at one end and started for the other herself, saying over her shoulder, \"Cimorene, dear, you and the King are on the right. Just walk around to the chair; it's all set up.\"\n\nWith some misgiving, Mendanbar escorted Cimorene past Dobbilan's chair toward the seat Ballimore had indicated. As they approached, he saw that the giantess had not been exaggerating. A set of normal-sized wooden steps, equipped with wheels so as to be easily movable, stood next to the giant right-hand chair, and two ordinary chairs were perched side by side on the seat at the top. The combination was, Mendanbar discovered, exactly the right height to reach the table.\n\nApparently, Ballimore was accustomed to having smaller people at dinner, for the plates and glasses were the usual size as well. As long as Mendanbar did not look down, it was easy to pretend he was sitting at an ordinary dinner table.\n\nThe food was very good. They started with fresh greens and went on to roast pig with cranberries, mushrooms in wine, and some sort of lumpy vegetable in a thick brown sauce that disguised it completely and tasted marvelous. There was a great deal of everything. Mendanbar supposed this was only to be expected at a giant's table, but Ballimore did not seem to realize that a person who was only a third her size would have a smaller appetite as well. She filled and refilled Mendanbar's plate until he was ready to burst.\n\nNear the end of the meal, Cimorene leaned over and whispered, \"Don't take any dessert.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"Ballimore's using her Cauldron of Plenty,\" Cimorene said, \"and it doesn't do desserts very well. So unless you like burned mint custard or sour-cream-and-onion ice cream...\"\n\n\"I see,\" Mendanbar said quickly. \"Then it's a good thing I couldn't eat another bite even if I wanted to.\"\n\nWhen dinner was over, Cimorene brought up the question of the magic carpet. Ballimore nodded at once.\n\n\"Of course you can borrow a carpet, Cimorene dear. I'll just take a look around and see what we have.\"\n\n\"You won't find much,\" said her husband, and sneezed loudly. \"That last Englishman you let in took most of them. You should have let me find him and grind his bones, like I'm supposed to.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Ballimore, frowning at her husband. \"We can afford a few cheap magic harps and a coin or two. I keep the good silver and Mother's jewelry in the top cupboard, where they can't reach it.\n\nBesides, they're always such nice boys.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" said Dobbilan. \"Beggars and thieves, if you ask me, and boring at that.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\" Mendanbar asked curiously.\n\n\"They always do the same thing-come in, ask for a meal, hide, and then run off with a harp or a bag full of money the minute I fall asleep,\" Dobbilan said. \"And they're always named Jack. Always. We've lived in this castle for twenty years, and every three months, regular as clockwork, one of those boys shows up, and there's never been a Tom, Dick, or Harry among 'em. Just Jacks. The English have no imagination.\"\n\n\"About the carpet,\" Cimorene reminded him.\n\n\"Oh, that. Well, the last Jack wasn't musical, and he cleaned us out of magic carpets instead of harps.\" Dobbilan sneezed again and began to cough.\n\n\"Bed for you, dear,\" Ballimore said firmly and shooed her husband out of the room. She followed him closely, muttering to herself about cough syrup and vaporizers and hot tea with lemon and honey. Mendanbar and Cimorene looked at each other.\n\n\"Is there anywhere else we can borrow a carpet?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"Not that I know of,\" Cimorene said with a worried frown. \"We'll just have to walk. Drat. It'll take days.\"\n\n\"We could go back to the Enchanted Forest and-\" \"There,\" said Ballimore, coming briskly into the room and cutting Mendanbar off in mid-sentence. \"He'll be much better in the morning. I'm afraid he's right about the carpets, Cimorene dear, but I'll just have a look around and see if there isn't something stuck off in a corner somewhere. I can't believe we're completely out.\"\n\n\"It's quite all right,\" Cimorene said. \"We'll manage somehow.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, dear,\" Ballimore said in the same tone she used to her husband. \"It will be quite an adventure, seeing what's stuck off in corners and so on. I haven't been in some of the storage rooms in years.\"\n\nIt was clear that nothing they could say would shake her resolve, and after a token protest, they gave in. Ballimore showed them to a pair of comfortably furnished rooms and left them for the night. Mendanbar did not object, even though it was still fairly early. The long walk from the dragon's cave had been very tiring. He lay down on the bed and fell asleep at once.\n\nBreakfast next morning was cinnamon-flavored porridge, milk, and toast with blueberry jam. Mendanbar found it waiting on the high table in the central hall when he left his room to look for his hosts. There was no one else around, but the giant-sized dishes and crumbs at either end of the table showed that Ballimore and Dobbilan had already eaten.\n\nMendanbar climbed the stairs to his seat and began dishing up the porridge. Before he had finished filling his bowl, Cimorene walked into the room, peering around for the giants.\n\n\"Good morning,\" Mendanbar called. \"Madame Ballimore and her husband appear to have been and gone, but they've left an excellent breakfast.\n\nWould you care to join me?\"\n\n\"I'd be delighted,\" Cimorene called back, and climbed the stairs to join him. \"I had no idea giants were such early risers,\" she said as she sat down in the second chair. \"Where do you suppose they've gone?\"\n\n\"Gone?\" said Ballimore's voice from the hallway at the end of the room. \"Dear, dear, I thought sure I'd left enough porridge for the pair of you, but it won't take a minute to make up some more.\"\n\n\"There's plenty of breakfast,\" Mendanbar said quickly. \"We were talking about you and Dobbilan.\"\n\n\"But he was supposed to wait for you,\" Ballimore said, emerging from the hallway. She inspected the room over the top of the large bundle she carried, then shook her head. \"Isn't that just like a man? Cimorene dear, I've found just the thing for you. I knew there would be something upstairs, no matter what Dobbilan said. Are you quite certain you have enough porridge?\"\n\n\"Quite certain,\" Cimorene said. \"What-\" \"Ballimore! Ballimore, where's the inkwell?\" Dobbilan's voice echoed down the corridor, interrupting Cimorene in mid-sentence. \"Where are you? Why can't I find anything around here when I want it?\"\n\n\"Because you never look in the right place, dear,\" Ballimore called.\n\n\"The inkwell is in the kitchen next to the grocery list, where it's been for the past six months, and I'm in the dining room. Which is where you'd be if you'd done what I asked you to, instead of wandering off in all directions.\"\n\n\"I didn't wander off,\" Dobbilan objected, sticking his head into the room. \"I went to get some paper and ink so I could write a letter.\n\nOh, good morning, Princess, King. I didn't see you.\"\n\n\"You were supposed to see them,\" Ballimore said, exasperated. \"You were supposed to be here when-oh, never mind.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're done scolding, could you find me that inkwell?\"\n\nBallimore shook her head, set her bundle down on a chair, and went off to deal with her erring husband. Mendanbar looked at Cimorene, and they both burst out laughing at the same time.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Cimorene when she got her breath back. \"I hope they didn't hear.\"\n\n\"Are they always like this?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Cimorene admitted. \"This is the first time I've been here. Kazul has always been the one who comes to talk or borrow things.\"\n\nThe thought wiped the smile from her face. \"I hope she's safe.\"\n\n\"You'd know if she wasn't,\" Mendanbar said, hoping he was right.\n\n\"Being King of the Dragons is a little like being King of the Enchanted Forest; if anything really drastic happens to you, everybody knows.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Cimorene said. \"And I know perfectly well that she can take care of herself, but I'll still feel a lot better when we find out where she is.\"\n\nThere wasn't much Mendanbar could say to that. They ate in silence for a few minutes and were just finishing up when Ballimore and Dobbilan returned. Dobbilan was carrying several sheets of white paper and a pen made of a feather as long as Mendanbar's arm. Ballimore held an inkwell the size of a sink. The giantess cleared the dishes away from the far end of the table and set the inkwell gently in place, then steered her husband to the chair. When she had him settled, she picked up the bundle she had brought in earlier.\n\n\"I'll just take this outside and shake the dust out,\" she told Cimorene.\n\n\"You and your young man can come along as soon as you've finished eating. Don't rush.\"\n\n\"How do you spell 'resignation'?\" Dobbilan asked, nibbling on the end of his feather pen.\n\nMendanbar spelled it for him as Ballimore bustled out the door. He and Cimorene finished their breakfasts with only an occasional interruption from Dobbilan. Leaving the giant mumbling over his letter and chewing on the tattered end of his pen, they went out to see what Ballimore had found.\n\n\"There you are,\" Ballimore said as they came into the courtyard. \"I've gotten most of the dust out, and it's ready to go. What do you think?\"\n\nShe stepped back and Mendanbar got his first good look at the carpet.\n\nIt was enormous, with a three-foot fringe on all four sides. In places it looked rather worn, and there was a hole the size of a teacup in one corner.\n\nThe background was a rich cream color, dotted with teddy bears a foot long. Pink teddy bears. Bright pink.\n\n\"It's certainly large enough,\" Mendanbar said at last.\n\n\"Are you sure it will fly?\" Cimorene asked, looking dubiously at the hole.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Ballimore reassured her. \"It's the very best quality, but we haven't used it in years because of the pattern.\" She gestured at the teddy bears. \"Dobbilan thought they just didn't look right in a giant's castle.\"\n\n\"I think I agree with him,\" Mendanbar said under his breath, eyeing the pink teddy bears with dislike. \"No wonder that Jack fellow didn't take it.\n\n\"As long as it flies, I don't care what it looks like,\" Cimorene declared.\n\n\"Thank you so much, Ballimore. I'll make sure you get it back as soon as we're through with it.\"\n\n\"There's no rush,\" Ballimore said. \"It'll just go back in the attic.\"\n\n\"How does it work?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"I couldn't find the instruction manual, but it's perfectly simple,\" Ballimore told him. \"All magic carpets are the same. You sit in the middle and say, 'Up, up, up and away' to make it take off, and you steer by leaning in the direction you want to go.\"\n\n\"What about stopping?\"\n\nBallimore frowned in concentration. \"I believe you're supposed to say 'Whoa,' but 'Cut it out, carpet' works just as well. I'm sorry I can't be more definite. It's been a long time.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Mendanbar looked at Cimorene. \"Are you sure you want to do this?\"\n\nCimorene hesitated, then nodded firmly. \"We'll manage. If I could think of some other way of getting to the north end of the mountains quickly, I would. Come on.\" She stepped onto the carpet, and plopped down in the center.\n\nWith some misgiving, Mendanbar sat next to her.\n\n\"Oh, heavens, I nearly forgot!\" Ballimore said suddenly. \"Stay right there, Cimorene dear. I'll be back in a flash.\"\n\n\"Now what?\" Mendanbar asked as the giantess hurried into the castle.\n\n\"Maybe she remembered where the instruction manual is,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"Somehow I doubt it,\" Mendanbar said.\n\nA moment later, Ballimore came hurrying out again, carrying a large bag. \"I packed you a bit of lunch,\" she explained, handing Cimorene the package. \"Goodness knows what you'll find out there in the mountains.\"\n\nCimorene thanked Ballimore again and set the bag between herself and Mendanbar, then said, \"All right, carpet: up, up, up and away!\"\n\nThe carpet shuddered, shifted and rose slowly into the air. Smiling broadly, Cimorene waved at Ballimore, then leaned forward. The carpet shivered again and began to move. It sailed up out of the castle and into the sky over the mountains, gathering speed as it went."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which They Discover the Perils of Borrowed Equipment",
                "text": "At first, the magic carpet ride was thoroughly enjoyable. The air was crisp and cool, and there was no noise at all except their own voices.\n\nThe view was amazing, even better than looking down from a mountain.\n\nThe Mountains of Morning stood in crooked, gray-blue rows below, each crack and boulder outlined in sharp black shadow. Tiny figures moved across the rocks and through the strips of greenery at the bottoms of the mountains: sheep and mountain goats and adventurous knights. Every now and then Mendanbar caught a glimpse of the lush trees of the Enchanted Forest between the peaks.\n\n\"Stop craning your neck like that,\" Cimorene said. \"You're confusing the carpet.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Mendanbar sneaked a last look and sighed as the patch of green disappeared behind a rocky slope. How was Willin getting along without him?\n\n\"Mendanbar, is your sword slipping?\" Cimorene said. \"I thought I felt something for a minute there. Is it coming out of that sheath?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mendanbar replied, checking it. \"It's fine. And I haven't touched it. Are you sure it was the sword?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene admitted. \"Maybe we flew over something magical and that's what I felt. It's gone now.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Mendanbar. \"Are you-\"\n\nThe carpet gave a sudden lurch sideways, then dropped three feet.\n\n\"Mendanbar!\" Cimorene cried. \"I told you to stop that!\"\n\n\"It wasn't me!\" Mendanbar protested, trying to find something to hang on to.\n\n\"Well, it wasn't me, and there's only the two of us up here,\" Cimorene shouted.\n\nThe carpet rippled alarmingly, then resumed its peaceful progress.\n\nCautiously, Mendanbar turned his head to look at Cimorene. Wisps of black hair had come loose from her braids to blow wildly across her face. It made her look particularly lovely, even though she was scowling at him.\n\nMendanbar blinked and pulled his thoughts together.\n\n\"I really didn't do anything,\" he said.\n\n\"But-\" The carpet wiggled and began to spin slowly. Mendanbar swallowed hard, wishing he had not eaten quite so much breakfast. He closed his eyes, then opened them again very quickly as the carpet bounced twice, paused, and started spinning twice as fast in the opposite direction.\n\n\"Carpet? Mendanbar shouted. \"Cut it out!\"\n\nThe lurching and spinning stopped. The carpet hung motionless in midair for a long moment, then dropped like the bottom falling out of a cardboard box. Cimorene gasped, then said something that sounded like \"Oof!\" as the carpet froze once more, three feet lower than it had been.\n\nMendanbar started to push himself up, then-without warning-the carpet dropped another three feet.\n\nThis time, Mendanbar stayed flat on the teddy bears. Two seconds later, the carpet dropped again. And again. And again. Mendanbar lost track of the bumps and concentrated on keeping track of his stomach. Suddenly, the carpet spun around twice and took off in a steep, fast climb.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Cimorene cried. \"Whoa, you stupid carpet, cut it out\"\n\nAgain, the carpet froze. Then it dropped again, but this time, instead of bumping, it fell like a stone. Mendanbar got a glimpse of the ground drawing quickly closer, and then he had both hands on the hilt of his sword. He didn't bother to pull it out of the sheath, he just yanked at the power it held and flung it around himself and Cimorene.\n\nThen he shoved with all his might.\n\nTheir speed slowed abruptly. The carpet fell away beneath them, rippling angrily, and plopped down on a rocky depression at the foot of a mountain. Mendanbar and Cimorene drifted after it, landing softly in the carpet's center. They lay there for a moment, catching their breath and collecting their wits.\n\nFinally, Mendanbar raised his head and looked warily around. They lay in the middle of a circle of pine trees. \"I think we've arrived,\" he said, sitting up.\n\n\"Good,\" Cimorene said shakily. She sat up, pushing tendrils of hair out of her face, and gave him a crooked smile. \"I guess I should have asked Ballimore a few more questions about this carpet before we took it.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, it's too late now.\" Mendanbar rolled off the carpet and stood up. \"How far have we come?\"\n\n\"A little over halfway, I think. Too far to walk back, not far enough to walk the rest of the way there.\" She made a face at the teddy bears, which looked innocently back. \"We may have to try the carpet again.\"\n\n\"We don't have to try it right away, though,\" Mendanbar pointed out.\n\n\"There's a house over there-you can see the roof through the trees.\n\nMaybe the owner can tell us exactly where we are and the shortest way to get where we're going.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Cimorene agreed, with a swiftness that made Mendanbar think she was no more eager to get back on the carpet than he was.\n\n\"We'll have to bring the carpet with us, though. If you leave magical things lying around, all sorts of dreadful things can happen.\"\n\nMendanbar had to admit that she was right, though he wasn't happy about it. They set Ballimore's lunch in the middle of the carpet, then rolled the rug around it, folding the fringe carefully to the inside.\n\nThen Cimorene took the front end and Mendanbar picked up the rear, and they started toward the house.\n\nWeaving through three rows of pine trees, they ducked under the low-hanging branches along the outer edge of the grove and emerged in front of the house. It looked, thought Mendanbar, as if it had been put together by the same person who had built his palace, except that instead of too many towers and staircases, this house had too many windows: square windows, round windows, wide windows, tall windows, skinny windows, diamond windows, tiny windows filled with milky glass, enormous picture windows, windows with stained glass pictures of ladies in sweeping robes and birds with gold feathers, open windows with curtains blowing out of them. The roof was made of red tile and skylights, and the chimney had a square block of clear glass in the front side. Even the door had a window in it, right in the middle at about waist height. With only two floors, there were hardly enough walls to hold all the windows, in spite of the way the building sprawled in all directions.\n\nAs they drew near, Mendanbar felt a faint aura of power around the house, hanging in the air like mist. He was about to mention it to Cimorene, when he heard yells and shouts of laughter coming from behind the house.\n\nSuddenly a small blonde girl dashed around the corner and stopped short, staring. A slightly larger boy followed in hot pursuit and barely managed to stop in time to avoid a collision. The blonde child looked at him reproachfully, then turned toward the house and shrieked at the top of her voice, \"Herman! Herman, there's people.\"\n\n\"Bah!\" A deep, cross voice came carrying through the open window beside the door. \"I don't want any people. Tell them to go away.\"\n\nThe little girl obediently turned to Cimorene. \"Go away, please,\" she said, and stuck her thumb in her mouth.\n\n\"No, thank you,\" Cimorene responded. \"We want to talk to your parents.\"\n\n\"Haven't got any,\" said the boy. He tilted his head to one side, as if considering, then took off for the house at a dead run. \"Herman, they won't go!\" he shouted as he ran. \"They want parents. They-\" His shouting stopped as he dove headfirst through the open window and vanished inside. One of the upstairs windows scraped open, and two older children poked their heads out. At the same time, three small heads appeared at the corner of the house, gazing timidly at Mendanbar and Cimorene.\n\nCimorene looked at Mendanbar and set her end of the carpet on the ground. Mendanbar put his end down, too, and stepped forward to stand beside her. The children stared at them without speaking.\n\n\"ABSOLUTELY NOT!\" the cross voice shouted. The front door of the house flew open and a dwarf stomped out. He was not much taller than the oldest of the children, but his long black beard and muscular arms showed plainly that he was no child. His hair looked like an upside-down black haystack. He glared angrily at Mendanbar.\n\n\"I won't do it!\" the dwarf declared before either Mendanbar or Cimorene could say anything. \"I don't care if it's family tradition, I don't care if you need the money, I don't care if her mother lied and now you have to convince your council, I don't care if your mother is going to turn her into a toad tomorrow if she doesn't perform. I WILL NOT DO IT AND THAT'S FINAL!\"\n\n\"That's quite all right,\" Cimorene said. \"We don't want you to. We just want-\" \"I know what you want,\" the dwarf said, hopping furiously from one foot to the other. \"You want a chance to talk me into it.\n\nWell, you won't get one, missy. You should be ashamed to even consider such a thing!\"\n\n\"She isn't considering it,\" Mendanbar said. \"We're travelers, and we've just stopped to get some directions.\"\n\nThe dwarf paused in midhop. Balancing on one foot, he peered suspiciously at Mendanbar. One of the children giggled. The dwarf glared in the direction of the sound, then turned back to Mendanbar.\n\n\"Directions? What sort of directions?\" he asked with evident mistrust.\n\n\"Who are you, anyway?\"\n\n\"I'm Princess Cimorene and this is King Mendanbar,\" Cimorene said, \"and we're trying to get to the cave where the dragon Falgorn lives.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're after a dramatic rescue,\" the dwarf said with relief. \"I suppose that's all right. But are you sure you know what you're getting into? Dragons are tough.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Cimorene said in the exasperated tone of someone who is very tired of correcting the same mistake over and over. \"I'm Chief Cook and Librarian for Kazul, the King of the Dragons, and I'm very happy with my job, and I don't want anyone to rescue me.\"\n\nThe dwarfs eyes narrowed. \"Then why are you looking for this other dragon?\"\n\n\"Because I have an urgent message for Kazul, and she's gone to visit Falgorn,\" Mendanbar explained.\n\n\"Huh.\" The dwarf hesitated, looking from Cimorene to Mendanbar.\n\n\"How do I know this isn't some sort of trick?\"\n\n\"Why should we want to trick you?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"To get me to spin straw into gold for you, you silly girl,\" the dwarf said. \"That's why everyone comes to see me. And look at the thanks I get: children! Hundreds and hundreds of children! Bah!\"\n\nThe littlest children giggled and pulled their heads back behind the corner as the dwarf spun around. The blonde girl stared solemnly at him for a moment, then took her thumb out of her mouth, ran forward, and gave the dwarf an enormous hug.\n\n\"Thank you, Herman,\" she told the dumbfounded dwarf. She hugged him again and skipped off, apparently tired of listening.\n\nThe dwarf smiled foolishly after her. The expression made him look pleasant and almost handsome. After a moment, the dwarf turned back to Cimorene, and his frown returned.\n\n\"I don't see the connection between children and spinning straw into gold,\" Mendanbar said before the dwarf could start complaining again.\n\n\"Would you be good enough to explain it to me?\"\n\n\"Explain?\" the dwarf fumed. \"That's what the last girl said, and what happened? Twins, that's what happened! And she claimed she couldn't remember which one was first, so I ended up with both of them.\"\n\n\"I can see why that would be annoying,\" Cimorene said noncommittally.\n\nThe dwarf glared at her. \"Yes, you say that now, but-oh what's the use? You'll get it out of me one way or another.\"\n\n\"If you'd rather not tell us-\" Mendanbar started, but the dwarf cut him off with a despairing wave.\n\n\"It doesn't matter. It's my fate, that's what it is. I should never have agreed to learn to spin straw into gold in the first place.\"\n\n\"Why did you?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"It's a family tradition,\" the dwarf answered gloomily. \"Of course it doesn't work if you're just spinning for yourself. So, a long time ago, my great-grandfather offered to use his talent to help out a girl who was in a sticky situation. If he hadn't been such a do-gooder, I wouldn't be in this mess.\"\n\n\"What good did he do, exactly?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"The local prince had gotten a notion that the girl could spin straw into gold,\" the dwarf said. \"Brainless young idiot, but they're all like that. If she could spin straw into gold, why was she living in a hovel? Anyway, Gramps said he'd do her spinning for her in return for part of the gold and her firstborn child. She agreed, but naturally when the baby was born she didn't want to give him up. So Gramps agreed to a guessing game: if she could guess his name, she could keep the baby. Then he let her find out what his name was. She kept the baby and Gramps kept the gold, and everyone went home happy.\"\n\n\"I think I'm beginning to get the idea,\" Cimorene said. \"It's not just spinning straw into gold that's a family tradition, is it? It's the whole scheme.\"\n\nThe dwarf nodded sadly. \"Right the first time. Only I can never make it work properly. I can find plenty of girls who're supposed to spin straw into gold, and most of them suggest the guessing game, but I've never had even one who managed to guess my name.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Cimorene.\n\n\"I even changed my name legally, so it would be easier,\" the dwarf said sadly. \"Herman isn't a difficult name to remember, is it? But no, the silly chits can't do it. So I end up with the baby as well as the gold, and babies eat and cry and need clothes, and the gold runs out, and I have to find another girl to spin gold for, and it happens all over again, and I end up with another baby. It isn't fair!\"\n\n\"You, um, seem to be fond of the children, though,\" Mendanbar said.\n\nThe dwarf looked around to see whether any of the children were within hearing distance, then nodded sheepishly. \"They're good kids. It's just that there are too many of them. I moved out here so it would be harder for the silly girls to find me and talk me into spinning for them, but they keep finding me anyway.\"\n\n\"It was a rather drastic move, wasn't it?\" Cimorene said. \"What about the dragons and giants and rock snakes and so on?\"\n\n\"Oh, they're no problem. The house used to belong to a magician, and he left a lot of guarding spells on it. Nothing nasty can get anywhere near.\"\n\n\"That's why it feels magical,\" Mendanbar said, relieved.\n\n\"It's an odd sort of house for a wizard,\" Cimorene said, studying it.\n\n\"Why so many windows?\"\n\n\"Not a wizard,\" the dwarf said. \"A magician. He was trying to find out which kinds of windows work best when they're enchanted.\"\n\n\"Did he find out?\"\n\n\"I suppose so, or he wouldn't have let me buy it. Most of the windows don't work anymore, but there's a round one at the end of the attic that still shows things once in a while.\"\n\n\"What kinds of things?\" Mendanbar asked. \"Can you ask to see something in particular, or does it just show scenes at random?\"\n\n\"You have to ask,\" said the dwarf, \"and you don't always get an answer.\n\nWould you like to see it?\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Cimorene said quickly.\n\nMendanbar looked doubtfully at the carpet, wondering whether it would be safe to leave it where it was with all the children around, and thinking how much trouble it would be to haul along if they didn't.\n\n\"Let it be,\" the dwarf said, following Mendanbar's gaze. \"The kids won't touch it.\"\n\nWith some reluctance, Mendanbar nodded and followed the dwarf and Cimorene into the house. The inside was just as mazelike as Mendanbar had expected from the rambling exterior. The dwarf led them down a passage, around a corner, up a flight of creaky wooden stairs, through a room lined with pictures, up another flight of stairs, and down a long hall to a cramped, stuffy little room under the farthest slope of the roof. The only light came from a circular window about twice the size of Mendanbar's head.\n\n\"There it is,\" said the dwarf. \"If you want to see something, ask; but I can't guarantee it'll work.\"\n\n\"Show me Kazul, the King of the Dragons,\" Cimorene commanded at once.\n\nFor a moment, nothing happened. Then Mendanbar felt a tentative swelling of magic around the window. \"I think it needs a boost,\" he said and reached for his sword.\n\n\"No, let me,\" said Cimorene. She thought for a minute, then raised her right hand and pointed at the window.\n\n\"Power of water, wind, and earth, Cast the spell to show its birth.\n\nRaise the fire to stop the harm By the power of this charm.\"\n\nPower surged around the window, and the glass went milk-white.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Mendanbar said, impressed.\n\n\"It's a dragon spell,\" Cimorene told him, keeping her eyes fixed on the window. \"It's easy to remember, and it's not hard to adapt it to do just about anything. I found it in Kazul's-look!\"\n\nThe window glass had cleared. Through the circular pane, Mendanbar could see the inside of a large cave. A sphere of golden light, like a giant glowing soap-bubble, covered half the cave, and inside the glow was a dragon. She was easily four times as tall as Mendanbar, even without counting her wings. Three short, stubby horns stuck out of her head, one on each side and one in the center of her forehead, and her scales were just starting to turn gray around the edges. An angry-looking trickle of smoke leaked out of her mouth as she breathed.\n\nIn front of the bubble stood two tall, bearded men in long robes, carrying staffs of polished wood.\n\n\"Wizards,\" Cimorene said angrily. \"I knew it!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Decides to Experiment",
                "text": "Mendanbar stared at the window, angrier than he could remember being in a long time. In the back of his mind, he could hear a voice reminding him that the King of the Dragons was no concern of the King of the Enchanted Forest and that the Society of Wizards was a dangerous group to offend or interfere with. He could hear another voice that sounded very like Willin's, suggesting envoys and formal complaints. But he was in no mood to pay attention to either of them. Mendanbar was not going to stand by and let the Society of Wizards kidnap and imprison anyone, King of the Dragons or not.\n\n\"Huh,\" said the dwarf. \"So you weren't kidding about looking for that dragon.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Cimorene snapped. Her eyes were fixed on the window, and there was a little crease between her eyebrows. \"But where are they? Window! Show me where they are.\"\n\nMagic rose up around the window in a great wave, and Mendanbar felt an answering surge in his sword. The window turned bright green, glowing brighter and brighter, then suddenly shattered into dust.\n\n\"Hey!\" said the dwarf. \"My window!\"\n\n\"Drat!\" Cimorene's hands clenched into fists, and she glared at the empty space where the window had been. After a moment, she shook her head and turned to the dwarf. \"I'm sorry, Herman. I didn't know it would do that. And we don't really know any more than we did before.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, we do,\" Mendanbar said. \"We know that some wizards have captured Kazul, and we know that they're somewhere in the Enchanted Forest .\"\n\n\"We do?\"\n\n\"I'm sure of it. I think that's why the window couldn't show a more general picture of where they were. Things in the Enchanted Forest move around a lot, especially if the forest doesn't like something.\n\nI'll bet my best crown that that\"-Mendanbar waved at the empty window frame-\"is something the Enchanted Forest doesn't like one bit.\"\n\n\"All right, but that doesn't help much,\" Cimorene said. \"The Enchanted Forest is a big place. How are we going to find them?\"\n\n\"That won't be a problem,\" Mendanbar said. \"I'm the King of the Enchanted Forest , remember?\"\n\n\"That makes you good at finding missing dragons?\"\n\n\"It makes me good at finding out what's going on,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"I can tell when places are moving around, and I can get where I want to go even when it's moving. I don't think it will be too hard, once we get back inside the forest.\"\n\n\"Then let's go,\" Cimorene said. \"I didn't like the look of that bubble thing those wizards had around Kazul.\"\n\n\"At least they don't seem to have hurt her,\" Mendanbar offered.\n\n\"That's true. Oh, I wish I knew what they were up to!\" Cimorene scowled at the broken window, then turned sharply away, almost running into the dwarf.\n\n\"I don't understand this at all,\" the dwarf said, looking from Cimorene to Mendanbar with a puzzled frown.\n\n\"I'm sorry we don't have time to explain,\" Mendanbar said. \"But I'm afraid we don't.\"\n\n\"Thank you for all your help,\" Cimorene added.\n\nThe dwarf shook his head and led them back to the front door, frowning in such deep concentration the whole time that neither Mendanbar nor Cimorene could bring themselves to interrupt. In the doorway, the dwarf paused.\n\n\"Are you sure you don't want any gold?\" he asked.\n\n\"Quite sure,\" Mendanbar said. \"We have a long walk ahead of us, and gold is awfully heavy.\"\n\n\"I thought you didn't want to spin gold anymore,\" Cimorene added.\n\nThe dwarf looked down. \"It's not the spinning, it's the rest of it,\" he said, not very clearly. \"And spinning's the only way I know to make money, and you wouldn't believe how fast kids grow.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Cimorene. She bit her lip. \"What if we asked you to spin some gold for us and then let you keep it?\" she asked without much hope.\n\n\"No,\" said the dwarf. \"I tried it once. It just doesn't work.\"\n\n\"Can you spin for the children?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\nThe dwarf shook his head. \"They're my responsibility, so it's the same as spinning for myself as far as the spell is concerned.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do with them all?\" Cimorene asked as renewed shrieks and the sound of pounding feet came through the open door.\n\n\"Oh, most of them will grow up and save their kingdoms from something or other in the nick of time,\" the dwarf said. \"Long-lost heirs, you know. That's what makes it so difficult. I have to see that they're properly trained on top of everything else.\"\n\n\"Training,\" Mendanbar said under his breath. He squinted into the sunlight, trying to catch hold of an idea that hovered just out of reach.\n\n\"I don't suppose their parents\u2026\" Cimorene's voice trailed off as the dwarf shook his head.\n\n\"A bargain's a bargain. Besides, it wouldn't be the same without them running all over. I can't give them back.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Mendanbar said, blinking. He smiled suddenly. \"But you can charge for training them, can't you?\"\n\nAn answering smile lit up Cimorene's face. \"A boarding school for long-lost heirs. What a good idea[\" \"A school?\" the dwarf said as if the words tasted funny. \"A boarding school? I don't know-\" \"why not?\"\n\nCimorene said. \"It would solve your money problems for sure. Special schools are always horribly expensive. You could charge the parents of your children for just the training part, and take on a few more kids at training plus full room and board.\"\n\nThe dwarfs eyes gleamed at the idea, but then his face fell. \"what about my spinning?\" he said. \"It's a family tradition.\"\n\nCimorene rolled her eyes. \"Haven't you done enough of that already?\"\n\n\"Well-\" \"I have an idea about that, too,\" Mendanbar put in. \"The problem with the spell is that you can't spin for yourself or for anyone who's your responsibility, right?\"\n\n\"That's it in a nutshell,\" the dwarf said. \"And there's nothing to be done about it.\"\n\n'\"what if you set up a scholarship fund?\" Mendanbar said. \"I'll bet a really good lawyer could design one that would get around the spell's restrictions so you could spin for it.\" Good thing. And if that doesn't work, you could spin for other scholarship funds and only take part of the gold, the way you usually do.\"\n\n\"I never thought of spinning for a fund,\" the dwarf said in wonder.\n\n\"You think about it, then,\" Mendanbar said. \"We have to go.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cimorene. \"I won't feel quite comfortable until I know Kazul is out of that bubble. Thank you again.\"\n\nThey left the dwarf in the doorway, muttering to himself about rooms and expenses, and walked over to the rolled-up carpet.\n\nMendanbar looked at it with distaste, remembering their wild ride. He hoped Cimorene wasn't going to insist on using it right away. His stomach hadn't completely settled from the last time. He turned his head. Cimorene was looking at him with a wary expression.\n\n\"Let's carry it for a while,\" she suggested. \"The children are probably watching, and we shouldn't give them ideas.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mendanbar said with relief. \"Do you want the front end or the back?\"\n\nCimorene took the back end, and they hoisted the carpet to their shoulders and started off. Walking with the carpet was surprisingly easy.\n\nCimorene was a good match for Mendanbar in height, and she was quite strong. Mendanbar supposed it must be from carrying around dragon-sized servings of lamb and beef, and before he thought, he said as much.\n\n\"Actually, it's the chocolate mousse and cherries jubilee,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"I didn't think chocolate mousse was particularly heavy.\"\n\n\"It is when you've got a bucket full of it in each hand,\" Cimorene retorted.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Mendanbar. \"Yes, I suppose it would be.\"\n\nHe was trying to figure out how much a bucket of mousse would weigh when the carpet jerked suddenly. Mendanbar grabbed at it, thinking Oh, no, it's going to start dancing around on its own-Then he realized that the carpet had jerked because Cimorene had stopped. He looked reproachfully over his shoulder.\n\n\"It's time for lunch,\" Cimorene said. \"All this talk about food is making me hungry, and I don't want to have to face a lot of wizards on an empty stomach.\"\n\nNow that she mentioned it, he was hungry, too. \"Good idea,\" Mendanbar said with enthusiasm. \"And this looks like a nice spot to stop.\n\nWill you serve, or shall I?\"\n\nCimorene laughed. They set the rolled-up carpet on a stretch of grass between two pines and got out Ballimore's package, then sat down to see what the giantess had sent along with them. It was, as Mendanbar had expected, an enormous quantity of food-seven fat pastries stuffed with chicken and herbs, a large bottle of cold spring water, a round loaf of bread and a generous wedge of yellow cheese, four large red apples, and a small box filled with a wonderful, creamy chocolate fudge.\n\n\"My goodness,\" Cimorene said when they had unpacked everything.\n\n\"Ballimore certainly believes in feeding people well. Look at all of this!\"\n\nNo, no,\" Mendanbar said, picking up one of the pastries and handing it to Cimorene. \"Don't look at it. Eat it.\"\n\n\"I wonder where she got the fudge,\" Cimorene mused. \"Everything else is probably from the Cauldron of Plenty, but it doesn't do desserts very well.\"\n\n\"Maybe she made it herself.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" Cimorene smiled at Mendanbar's look of surprise. \"If she did, I can ask her for the recipe.\"\n\nBy an unspoken mutual agreement, neither Mendanbar nor Cimorene mentioned Kazul or the wizards during lunch, though they were both certainly thinking about them. Instead, they had a pleasant talk about some of the odd and interesting people they had each met over the past few years.\n\nCimorene knew a lot of unusual folk. Many of them were dragons, of course, but her position as Kazul's Chief Cook and Librarian meant that she had also met most of the visitors from outside the Mountains of Morning who came to pay their respects to the Kin g of the Dragons or to ask her questions.\n\nNear the end of the meal, Mendanbar noticed that Cimorene was gazing intently at him. No, not at him: at his sword.\n\n\"What is it?\" Mendanbar asked worriedly.\n\n\"Have you been doing things with that sword again?\" Cimorene demanded.\n\n\"No,\" Mendanbar said, puzzled. \"I used it on your sink, and to stop the nightshade, and when the carpet started falling, but that's all.\n\nWhy?\"\n\n\"Because it's leaking magic all over the place,\" Cimorene said. \"I thought so before, but now I'm positive.\" She finished her second pastry and stood up, brushing crumbs from her lap. \"That sheath must not be as good as I thought. Would you mind letting me look at it? Without the sword.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Mendanbar answered. He stood up and drew the sword.\n\nCimorene flinched. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Cimorene said. \"Can't you feel it?\"\n\n\"Feel what?\"\n\n\"Your sword. It isn't the sheath after all; it's that dratted sword.\n\nIt's gotten worse. Put it away, quickly.\"\n\nThoroughly puzzled, Mendanbar did as Cimorene asked. \"All right,\" he said. \"Now, would you please explain?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can,\" Cimorene said. \"You didn't know what I meant before, when I said your sword reeked of magic, so I suppose it's reasonable that you can't tell that the reek is twice as strong now.\n\nYou'll just have to take my word for it.\"\n\nMendanbar looked down at the sword, thinking hard. \"It's linked to the Enchanted Forest , and I've never taken it out of the woods before,\" he said at last. \"Maybe it doesn't like it. Maybe it's trying to make the mountains more like the Enchanted Forest .\" It sounded silly put that way, but he couldn't think how else to say it. It would sound even sillier if he told her that he thought the sword was trying to stuff some magic into the empty, barren-feeling land around it.\n\n\"Um,\" said Cimorene, gazing absently at the sword. After a moment, she looked up. \"I'll bet you're right. Bother. That means we have to use the carpet.\" She bent and started packing up the remains of their lunch.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Mendanbar said. \"What has my sword got to do with that carpet?\"\n\n\"If being outside the Enchanted Forest is what makes your sword behave like a-a magic beacon, then we have to get it back inside the Enchanted Forest as fast as we can,\" Cimorene explained patiently. \"Otherwise every ogre and wizard for leagues and leagues around will come looking for whatever is making all the fuss. And the carpet is a lot faster than walking.\"\n\n\"I don't trust it.\"\n\n\"We managed before. It ought to be easier now that we know what to expect. Here, help me.\" She knelt and began unrolling the carpet as she spoke.\n\n'Do we know what to expect?\" Remembering the bumping, spinning, unpredictable ride, Mendanbar shuddered.\n\n\"Look, I don't like it any better than you do, but we have to do something about that sword. Besides, the sooner we get to the forest, the sooner you can find out where those wizards have Kazul. And do we have any other choice?\"\n\n\"I could probably use the sword to get us to the Enchanted Forest,\" Mendanbar suggested.\n\nCimorene sat back on her heels, staring at him. \"You can do that? Why on earth didn't you say so to begin with? We could have gone straight to Kazul's grandchildren's cave and saved a lot of time.\"\n\n\"I didn't mention it before because I'm not really sure it will work,\" Mendanbar said. \"I've never tried that particular spell outside the Enchanted Forest before, and it wouldn't be a good idea to test it for the first time to get somewhere I've never been. Especially somewhere that isn't in the Enchanted Forest either.\" Actually, he hadn't tried any of his usual spells outside the Enchanted Forest before, for the very good reason that he hadn't been outside the Enchanted Forest since he'd become King and started working magic, but he didn't like to mention that in front of Cimorene.\n\nHe was quite sure that if she had suddenly become the ruler of a magical kingdom, she would have tested all her new spells and powers and abilities immediately, under as many different conditions as she could come up with. He didn't want her to think he was careless or neglectful.\n\n\"So we can either experiment with the carpet again or experiment with your spell,\" Cimorene said. She scowled thoughtfully at the teddy bears, then looked up at Mendanbar and smiled. \"Let's try the spell.\n\nWhat do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Just stand there,\" Mendanbar said, returning her smile. \"I've never worked with another magician, and one experiment at a time is enough.\"\n\n\"Why haven't you?\" Cimorene asked as she climbed to her feet.\n\n\"Worked with another magician, I mean. From what you were telling me yesterday, you've got more than enough work for a couple of assistants.\"\n\n\"I've never had time to find any assistants,\" Mendanbar said. \"Except Willin, my steward, and he's never learned much magic.\"\n\n\"You mean you're trying to run the whole Enchanted Forest by yourself?\"\n\nCimorene said. \"You're as bad as the dragons!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It took me six months to persuade them that the King of the Dragons didn't need to do everything all the time,\" Cimorene explained. \"And then it took me three more months to get a system set up so they wouldn't keep returning to Kazul with every little problem.\"\n\n\"You set up a system? How? I mean, how did you know\u2026\"\n\nMendanbar's voice trailed off.\n\nTo his surprise, Cimorene flushed very slightly. \"I studied a lot of unusual things when I was growing up,\" she said. \"Unusual for a princess, I mean. Politics was one of them.\"\n\n\"It sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing for a princess to study to me,\" Mendanbar said. \"Look how useful it's been for you.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not one of the things a princess is supposed to learn,\" Cimorene said. \"You wouldn't believe the fuss they made when they found out I'd talked my protocol teacher into covering it.\"\n\n\"What were you supposed to be learning, then?\"\n\nCimorene made a face. \"Embroidery and dancing and etiquette and proper behavior.\"\n\n\"No wonder princesses are silly, if that's all they're supposed to know about,\" Mendanbar said without thinking. He blinked and added hastily, \"Not you. I mean, you aren't silly, even if you are a princess. I mean-\" \"Don't try to explain any more; you'll only make it worse,\" Cimorene said, laughing. \"Now, hadn't we better try that spell? We are in a bit of a hurry, remember.\"\n\n\"Right.\" With some difficulty, Mendanbar pushed the discussion out of his mind and tried to remember how he had been planning to work the transportation spell. Usually he simply twisted one of the threads of power that crisscrossed the Enchanted Forest , pulling himself to his destination, but outside the forest there were no threads that he could feel. There was power in the sword, though, and it was linked with the Enchanted Forest . If he pulled on that, he should be able to move whatever he chose back to the forest.\n\nBefore he moved anything, however, he would have to indicate who and what he wanted to move. He didn't want to arrive in the Enchanted Forest with a magic carpet covered with pink teddy bears and no Cimorene.\n\nMendanbar suppressed a sigh. Spells were so much easier at home, where he didn't have to think about them as much. He dismissed that thought and concentrated on figuring out the shape of the spell he wanted.\n\nWhen he was satisfied that he knew exactly what he intended to do, and in what order, he put a hand on the hilt of his sword and looked at Cimorene. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Whenever you are,\" Cimorene said.\n\nMendanbar nodded and drew his sword. He heard Cimorene suck in her breath as he raised the weapon over his head and swung it in a slow circle. Carefully, he pointed the sword at the carpet and pushed a tiny bit of power out to label it for the next part of the spell. Then he pointed the sword at Cimorene and repeated the process even more gently than before.\n\nCimorene shivered, but she remained silent.\n\nTurning, Mendanbar pointed the sword in the direction of the Enchanted Forest. Now for the tricky part. He drew on the power in the sword, feeling it hum through the hilt and into his hands. In his mind he pictured the giant trees of the Enchanted Forest, ranged in silent rows around the rocks that edged the Green Glass Pool, with the still water reflecting them like a green mirror. When he was sure he had the picture clear and steady in his mind, he gave the power in the sword the same twisting pull he used to move from place to place within the Enchanted Forest.\n\nSlowly, almost reluctantly, the rocks began to blur and fade. Mist rose, wavering, to veil the mountains and sky. Then, just as the landscape was about to vanish into thick, woolly grayness, the mist stopped condensing.\n\nFor a moment, everything was still. Then the mist thinned and the outlines of the rocks and mountains grew sharper.\n\nAlmost, thought Mendanbar. It must need more power because we're outside the Enchanted Forest. He clenched his hands around the hilt of the sword and pulled again, hard.\n\nGray fog slammed down around him like a window shutter dropping closed. Something hit him like a giant's hammer, and he felt himself falling. Now I've done it, he thought vaguely, just before everything went black. I hope Cimorene is all right. Then he lost consciousness completely. He didn't even feel himself land."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "In Which Mendanbar and Cimorene Are Very Busy Something was wrong.\n\nMendanbar could feel it, even before he was fully awake. The magic of the Enchanted Forest floated all around him, but it seemed tenuous and tottery, almost disconnected. He thought he had better get up and fix it. He opened his eyes.\n\nCimorene's concerned face hovered a foot above him. Her braids had come loose from their tight crown and there was a worry line between her eyebrows. He didn't want her to be worried. He tried to say so, but all he managed was a coughing fit. Cimorene bit her lip, and her troubled expression intensified.\n\n\"Don't try to talk,\" she said unhappily. \"Don't try to do anything yet.\n\nYour sword is safe, and I'm all right, and everything else can wait for a few minutes. Just lie there and breathe slowly.\"\n\nIt occurred to Mendanbar that Cimorene was anxious about him. That was nice, in a way, but he still didn't want her to be unhappy. In fact, it was suddenly very important to him that Cimorene should not be worried or unhappy in the slightest. He closed his eyes to consider how best to convey this and fell asleep at once.\n\nWhen he woke, the sky was the pale blue of late afternoon. Rubbing his eyes, he sat up carefully, remembering what had happened earlier when he'd tried to talk. Cimorene was at his side at once.\n\n\"Are you sure you should do that?\" she said.\n\n\"It hasn't hurt so far,\" Mendanbar replied. \"What happened?\"\n\nCimorene studied him for a moment, then relaxed visibly. \"I'm not sure,\" she said. \"One minute we were going somewhere, and the next minute we weren't. When I picked myself up, you were lying there looking three-quarters dead and as white as cracked ice, and you've been that way for over four hours. If that's your transportation spell, I think I would have preferred the carpet.\"\n\n\"At least it got us to the forest.\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nMendanbar blinked at her, then looked around. The carpet, on which he and Cimorene were sitting, lay in the center of a twenty-foot circle of thin green fuzz. Seven saplings, pencil-thick and none more than waist high, poked randomly upward through the fuzz. Beyond the circle, patches of short, brownish-green grass alternated with mottled gray rock that rose quickly into cliffs and ridges and the sudden, sharp heights of mountains that shadowed them all. None of it looked familiar, though it still felt vaguely like the Enchanted Forest to him.\n\n\"Well, at least we went somewhere,\" Mendanbar said after a moment.\n\n\"Yes, but where? Those are the Mountains of Morning, but this bit\"-Cimorene waved at the green fuzz and the saplings-\"looks as if it belongs in the Enchanted Forest . So what's it doing here?\"\n\n\"It feels like the Enchanted Forest , too,\" Mendanbar said. He shifted, and his hand touched cool metal. Even without looking, he knew it was his sword. He picked it up and looked at it thoughtfully. \"Cimorene, is this still 'leaking magic' the way you said it was earlier?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene said. \"I can tell it's a magic sword, and an odd one at that, but only if I study it. It's not-not so obvious anymore.\"\n\nMendanbar pushed himself to his feet. It took more effort than he had expected, and by the time he finished, the worry line had reappeared between Cimorene's eyebrows.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" he told her. \"Mostly.\" He waited a moment for his head to stop spinning, then walked cautiously to the edge of the circle of fuzz. He stepped over the boundary onto a patch of grass. The comforting sense of being surrounded by magic vanished, and although he had more than half expected it, he staggered slightly.\n\nCimorene was beside him almost at once. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"It was just the change. Can you feel my sword now?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Cimorene said. \"But it's nowhere near as bad as it was this morning.\"\n\n\"I was afraid you were going to say that.\" Mendanbar looked at the circular area of green and sighed. \"I hate to do this, but you're right. It doesn't belong here.\"\n\nHe started forward. Cimorene grabbed his arm. \"Wait a minute! What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"This.\" Mendanbar pointed at the saplings with his sword. \"In a way, it really is part of the Enchanted Forest . That's why it feels like home to me, and that's why the sword doesn't feel 'obvious' when it's inside.\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Cimorene said. She still had hold of his arm.\n\n\"But how did it get here?\"\n\n\"I don't think it did, exactly,\" Mendanbar said. \"I think the sword made it for us when we couldn't get through to the real forest. That's why it's so-so new-looking.\"\n\n\"Your sword\u2026\" Cimorene paused, thinking. \"Yes, you told me it was linked to the Enchanted Forest.\" She looked at the green area. \"I didn't realize it could do things on its own, without someone directing it.\"\n\n\"Normally it doesn't,\" Mendanbar said. \"Unless it's picking the next King of the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"Picking the next\u2026\" Cimorene's voice trailed off and she shook her head. \"I think you'd better tell me about that sword. All about it, not just dribbles of information when something comes up. I have a feeling we're going to need to know.\"\n\n\"I don't know that much,\" Mendanbar said. \"And I have to take care of these things first.\" He waved at the saplings.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"If the sword did it, it ought to be able to undo it,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"I don't want to erase this patch, but I can't think of anything else to do with it.\n\nIt wouldn't be a good idea to leave a bit of my kingdom disconnected like this.\n\n\"No, I can see that,\" Cimorene said, releasing his arm at last. 'Just watch what you're doing with that spell. It's going to be dark soon, and I don't want to spend another four hours waiting for you to wake up.\"\n\n\"I don't like the idea myself,\" Mendanbar said. \"Don't worry. I'll be \"You'd better be.\"\n\nMendanbar smiled, raised the sword, and walked back into the tiny forest. He paced around the edge, getting the feel of the magic that was spread spider-web thin across the circle. Then he stopped. With his left hand, he lowered his sword so that the tip rested on the green fuzz that might one day have grown into moss. With his right, he reached out and touched the web, gathering in the threads. When his hand was full, he began to feed the threads into the sword.\n\nIt was touchy work, for the invisible strands were thin and fragile, and he knew that if he missed even one he would have to begin all over again.\n\nThe task took a lot of concentration, for the sword accepted the threads with great reluctance. He was not at all sure he would have the strength to do it twice, so he worked with painstaking slowness.\n\nWhen he was halfway through, the saplings began to shrink. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the little trees grew shorter and more slender, until they disappeared into the green fuzz. For a moment, nothing more seemed to happen. Then the circle of green began to shrink. Like a drop of water being sucked up by a napkin, the green edge drew back toward the sword, leaving bare rock behind. In a moment, the retreating border was out of sight beneath the carpet.\n\nMendanbar continued feeding magic into the sword. There were only a few threads left, and he slowed down even more. A puddle the size of a wagon wheel was all that was left of the original circle. It shrank to the size of a dinner plate, then a pancake, then a penny. Then it was gone.\n\nFor a heartbeat longer, Mendanbar held his position, checking to be certain he had not missed anything. Finally he let go of the end of the spell and lifted the point of the sword from the ground. He felt much better than he had when he began. He looked up and smiled at Cimorene.\n\n\"That was extremely interesting,\" Cimorene said. She eyed the bare ground around the carpet. \"Is that all of it?\"\n\n\"I think so. Why?\"\n\n\"Because if we don't want to spend the night here, we're going to have to leave quickly. It'll be getting dark soon.\" Cimorene paused, then added, \"You'd better put that sword away. It's dripping magic again.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Mendanbar said. \"Why don't we-\" With a rattle of small stones and a vicious hiss, a long, gray-black snake shot out of a crevice at the top of the nearest cliff and dropped toward Cimorene. Mendanbar jerked his sword up and sent a crackling bolt of power to meet the serpent. The hiss became a choking gurgle as the snake flared into a bright line of fire and disintegrated. Flakes of ash drifted the last few feet to fall around Mendanbar and Cimorene.\n\nThree more snakes launched themselves from parts of the cliff, and another slithered from behind a boulder. From the corner of his eye, Mendanbar saw Cimorene yank her sword out of its sheath. He hoped briefly and intensely that she was good at fighting, and then he had no time or attention for anything except the snakes.\n\nA second blast of magic disposed of two of the three in the air, and a single sword-stroke chopped the third in half. By then four new snakes were in the air, and Mendanbar could hear more hissing on all sides.\n\nHe sent another spell skyward, and another, then swung at two snakes that had leaped from a crack barely shoulder-high above the ground.\n\nAfter that he lost track of how many he burned or blasted. He had no time for anything but fighting. He swung his sword until his arms were tired and his head hurt from concentration and spell-casting. And then, suddenly, there were no more snakes.\n\nThe ground was dusted with ashes and littered with pieces of snakes, and the air smelled of charred meat. Slowly, Mendanbar lowered his sword.\n\nA few paces away, Cimorene was straightening up from a fighter's crouch with the same wary hesitation. Her sword was covered with dark blood, and there were quite a lot of dead snakes around her.\n\n\"Oh, wonderful,\" Mendanbar said with heartfelt sincerity. \"I was hoping you were good with a sword.\"\n\n\"You aren't bad with one yourself,\" Cimorene replied a little breathlessly.\n\n\"It's a magic sword,\" Mendanbar reminded her, but he felt absurdly pleased nonetheless.\n\nCimorene grinned. \"So is mine. I know a little about fencing, but not enough to do me any good against most of the things in the Mountains of Morning. That's why Kazul lets me carry this.\" She lifted her sword, and a drop of snake blood fell from the tip. She frowned and began fishing in her pockets with her free hand. \"It's supposed to make the bearer impossible to defeat.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" Mendanbar said, looking at the bits of snake near Cimorene's feet. \"What's the catch?\"\n\n\"Getting killed isn't the same as being defeated,\" Cimorene said. She pulled a handkerchief from a pocket, smiled, and began cleaning the sword with it. \"Not always, anyway. And it doesn't keep you from getting hurt, either. So I still have to be careful. Do you want to use this?\" She held out the stained handkerchief.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Mendanbar said, taking the square of cloth. He wiped his sword carefully, resheathed it, and hesitated. \"Do you want it back? I'm afraid it's ruined.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Cimorene said. \"I always carry one or two extras.\"\n\nShe retrieved the handkerchief, grimaced, and tied it into a tight bundle, which she stowed in her belt pouch. \"There. Now, let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"Why such a hurry?\"\n\n\"We still have to rescue Kazul. And besides-do you want to fight more rock snakes?\" Cimorene asked. \"That's what we'll be doing if we stay.\n\nWe've cleaned out this part pretty well, but there's sure to be several other colonies around.\" She pointed at a dark ridge a couple of hundred feet farther on. \"There, for instance. Or there.\" She gestured in the opposite direction, at a wrinkled cliff.\n\n\"I don't see how we can get past them on foot,\" Mendanbar said, frowning.\n\n\"Well, we can't stay here. They'll slither over as soon as the last of the light goes. We'll have to take the carpet.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't recommend it,\" said a new voice.\n\nTogether, Mendanbar and Cimorene turned. The voice belonged to a dark-haired man who stood calmly next to the magic carpet, watching them with interest. He was several inches shorter than Mendanbar, with bright blue eyes and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. He wore tall black boots, dark gray leggings, a loose-sleeved, high-necked shirt in pale gray, and an open knee-length black vest covered with pockets of all shapes and sizes. Under the vest, his wide black belt was hung with strangely shaped pouches and sheaths. The air around him crackled with magic.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Cimorene asked. \"And why don't you want us to use the carpet?\"\n\n\"My name is Telemain,\" said the man, bowing, \"and I have a considerable familiarity with the basic mechanics of carpets. Magic ones, that is.\n\nAnd this carpet\"-he gestured left-handed, and three silver rings glinted in the fading light-\"is plainly defective.\"\n\n\"Defective?\" Mendanbar said suspiciously. Telemain didn't look like a wizard, but that didn't necessarily mean much. Wizards could wear disguises as well as anyone else.\n\n\"Oh, it will probably operate, after a fashion,\" Telemain said. \"But not well, and not for long. I'm surprised you got this far on it.\"\n\n\"We didn't, exactly,\" Mendanbar said. \"And we have had some trouble with it. What do you suggest?\"\n\nThe sound of a pebble bouncing down a series of rocks echoed along the narrow canyon. \"I suggest we talk somewhere else,\" Telemain said, glancing toward the sound. \"This isn't a safe place, even with my defensive enchantments fully erected.\"\n\n\"And how do you suggest we get there?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"Like this.\" Telemain raised a hand and made a circle in the air with his forefinger. As he did, he muttered something, then clapped both hands together.\n\nThe canyon flowed and melted into a sloping meadow halfway up a mountainside. \"Much better,\" Telemain said. \"No rock snakes, trolls, ogres, or other dangerous wildlife. I guarantee it.\"\n\nMendanbar was inclined to believe him. Trolls and ogres liked places where they could jump out from behind things or pop out from under rocks. An open meadow didn't have enough cover. Besides, Telemain was no longer surrounded by the hum of magic, which meant he had dropped his guarding spell.\n\n\"Now,\" Telemain went on, \"how did the two of you get into a ravine full of rock snakes with a defective magic carpet? Having rescued you, I think I am entitled to some explanation.\"\n\n\"We were on our way to the Enchanted Forest ,\" Cimorene said carefully, pushing wisps of loose hair out of her face. Mendanbar noticed with approval that she said nothing about Their reasons for wanting to go there.\n\n\"How did you happen to come by at such a convenient moment?\"\n\n\"I was-looking for some people I thought might be in this area,\" Telemain said. \"By the way, what are your names?\"\n\n\"This is Cimorene and I'm Mendanbar,\" Mendanbar said. \"Who were you looking for?\"\n\n\"You, I think,\" Telemain said, smiling. \"That is, if you're the same Cimorene and Mendanbar who visited Herman the dwarf earlier today.\"\n\n\"That was us,\" Cimorene said cautiously.\n\n\"Good! Then I can settle this quickly and get back to my work. How did you-\" \"Excuse me,\" Mendanbar interrupted. \"But how do you know Herman? And how did you find us?\"\n\n\"I know Herman because he bought his house from me,\" Telemain said. He was beginning to sound irritated. \"I also maintain certain defensive enchantments, which are especially designed to prevent incursions by noxious creatures, around the house and neighboring areas for him.\n\nWhen someone demolished the scrying spell I had established on the attic window, I felt obliged to investigate. Herman was in the middle of an explanation about visitors and dragons when I sensed an extremely interesting sorcerous flare to the northwest.\"\n\n\"I knew that dratted sword was going to get us in trouble,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\n\"Before I had time to locate it precisely, there was another burst of magic, which I recognized as a transportation spell,\" Telemain continued.\n\nHe frowned disapprovingly. \"A rather confused one. It has taken me all afternoon to disentangle the traces and discover your whereabouts.\n\nDoes that satisfy you?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Mendanbar said. \"I'm sorry if we seem overly suspicious, but we've already had some trouble with one wizard and we've reason to expect more. So you see\u2026\"\n\n\"I am not a wizard,\" Telemain said emphatically. \"I'm a magician.\n\nCan't you tell?\"\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene said. \"what's the difference?\"\n\n\"A magician knows many types of magic,\" Telemain said. \"Wizards only know one, and they're very secretive about it. I've been researching them for years, trying to duplicate their methodology, but I still haven't managed a workable simulation.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Cimorene, looking puzzled.\n\n\"He's been trying to figure out how the wizards work their spells,\" Mendanbar explained, \"but he hasn't done it yet.\"\n\n\"Why do you want to know that?\" Cimorene asked Telemain with renewed suspicion.\n\n\"Because that's what I do!\" Telemain said. \"I just told you that.\n\nAnd if you'll answer a few questions for me, I can go back to doing it.\n\nHow did you shatter that window?\"\n\n\"We asked it to show us something,\" Mendanbar said. \"It couldn't, so it broke.\"\n\nTelemain shook his head. \"Impossible! That particular glass was enchanted to reveal anything, anywhere, even in the Enchanted Forest .\n\nIf it couldn't discover the object of your inquiry, the viewing plane would display an empty information buffer.\"\n\n\"What does he mean?\" Cimorene asked, frowning.\n\n\"He means that if the window couldn't find what we were asking about, it should have just stayed blank,\" Mendanbar explained.\n\n\"That's what I said.\" Telemain nodded emphatically. \"It should not have broken.\"\n\n\"Well, it did,\" Cimorene told him. \"And we don't have time to stand around arguing. We have to get to the Enchanted Forest and rescue a friend of mine. So could you just tell us what's wrong with our carpet?\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Telemain muttered. \"You must have done more than frame a question.\" He intercepted a look from Cimorene and sighed. \"Oh, very well, I'll examine the carpet. Spread it out so I can see all of it at once.\"\n\nThey unrolled the carpet the rest of the way. Telemain's eyebrow's rose in surprise at the sight of the teddy bears, but he did not comment, for which Mendanbar was grateful. When the carpet was stretched full-length on the meadow, Telemain paced twice around it, frowning and gesturing occasionally. Then he turned to Mendanbar and Cimorene and shook his head.\n\n\"The landing compensator has a gap in it, and the flight regulator has completely deteriorated,\" he said. \"It needs more than I can do without special tools and yarn for re-weaving. You'll have to take it to a repair shop.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Cimorene said sarcastically. \"This would happen with a borrowed carpet.\"\n\n\"Can you recommend a good place?\" Mendanbar asked Telemain.\n\n\"Preferably somewhere close,\" he added, noting the pink tint of the sky to the west. The sun would be completely down in another hour, and he didn't want to wander around the Mountains of Morning in the dark.\n\n\"Or can you send us straight to the Enchanted Forest?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"We're in kind of a hurry.\"\n\n\"The Enchanted Forest requires a complex and destination-specific enhancement to the basic transportation spell module,\" Telemain explained.\n\n\"But the repair shop is simple.\"\n\nHe raised his left hand and made the same circular gesture he had before. \"Gypsy Jack's,\" he said, and clapped, and the meadow and the mountain melted and flowed. The mountain bulged higher, and the meadow flattened and grew rockier. A long, rectangular section of ground squeezed upward and settled into the shape of a narrow house on wheels.\n\n\"There,\" Telemain said with great satisfaction. \"We've arrived.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Yet Another Wizard Tries to Cause Trouble",
                "text": "They were standing in front of the wheeled house. At least, Mendanbar assumed it was the front because there was a door at the end of the long side facing them. Two iron steps, black and worn with age, led up to the door.\n\nThe house itself was painted a cheerful blue with yellow shutters and a yellow trim around the door. There were four windows on the side facing Mendanbar, lined up in a neat row next to the door like chicks following a hen. The roof above the windows was low but not quite flat, and covered with wooden shingles that looked brand-new. There were four pairs of wheels, too, the rims painted blue to match the house and the spokes painted yellow to match the shutters. A beautifully lettered sign on a stick had been pounded into the ground next to the door: \"Ask About Our Low prices!\"\n\nMendanbar looked at Cimorene. Cimorene looked from Mendanbar to the wheeled house to Telemain.\n\n\"Don't do that again without asking first,\" she said to the magician.\n\n\"I thought you'd be pleased,\" Telemain said. \"Look at all the time you've saved.\"\n\n\"Asking doesn't take much time.\"\n\n\"Where are we, exactly?\" Mendanbar put in before they could start arguing. \"And what is that?\" He pointed at the house on wheels.\n\n\"That is Gypsy Jack's home,\" Telemain answered. \"If anyone can mend that carpet of yours, he can. As to where we are, all I can tell you is that we are still somewhere in the Mountains of Morning. If you want a more precise location, you will have to ask Jack. Assuming he remembers; he moves around a lot.\"\n\n\"How did you find him, then?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"Oh, Jack supplies me with unusual things now and then, when I need them for a spell or an experiment,\" Telemain said. \"I pay him by enchanting his house for him. Any good magician can find his own spells.\"\n\n\"Enchanting his house?\" Mendanbar said. \"You mean, to keep ogres and things from bothering it, the way you did Herman's?\"\n\nTelemain shook his head. \"I offered, but Jack wasn't interested. He has his own way of discouraging unpleasant company. No, what he wanted was a spell to keep the paint from fading.\"\n\n\"Why does he need you to put spells on his house?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n'Jack isn't a magician,\" Telemain said. \"He does a little bit of everything-smithing, gardening, music, tailoring, pretty much any trade you can think of. For example, he designed and built his house.\n\nHe has a rare knack for patching up a spell that's wearing thin, but he can't set up a complex enchantment on his own. That's why he deals with me.\"\n\nOne of the windows scraped open and a head poked out. \"Yo! You going to stand there all night and maybe get eaten by a dragon? Not that I would dream of interfering with your plans, but if a quick exit is what you want, I got a dozen faster ways, all very cheap.\"\n\n\"Hello, Jack,\" Telemain called. \"I've brought you some customers.\"\n\n\"Customers! Why didn't you say so? I'll be right out.\" The head vanished and the window screeched closed.\n\n\"Customers?\" Cimorene said, looking at Telemain.\n\n\"You want that carpet fixed, don't you? Jack can-\" The door of the house flew open with a bang, and a large man leaped over the steps and landed in front of them. He had a thick black mustache, long black hair, bright black eyes, and a wide white grin. Pushing a soft, baggy cap back from his forehead, he bowed deeply.\n\n\"Welcome to my home, friends of Telemain!\" he boomed. \"And very welcome you are. What's the problem?\"\n\n\"A little difficulty about transportation, Jack,\" Telemain said before Mendanbar or Cimorene had quite recovered from the man's abrupt appearance.\n\n\"We were hoping you could help.\"\n\n\"No trouble! What do you need? Shoes? I got a barrel full-sandals, clogs, dancing shoes, walking shoes, horse shoes\u2026\" His voice trailed off and he looked hopefully at Telemain.\n\n\"Nothing that simple,\" Telemain said. \"The difficulty is magical in nature.\"\n\n\"Ah! You want seven-league boots! Well, you're in luck. A pair of them just came in this morning. They're practically brand-new, hardly been used at all. Or there's a swell pair of ruby slippers that'd be perfect for the lady.\n\nI'll throw in the magic belt that goes with them for free. On\" \"No, no, Jack,\" Telemain interrupted. \"The problem is with this.\" He stepped aside and let Jack get a good look at the magic carpet.\n\nJack's eyes narrowed to slits of concentration. He stepped forward and studied the carpet, then paced around it, much as Telemain had done earlier. \"No kidding,\" he said at last. \"That carpet's a problem, all right.\"\n\n\"Can you fix it?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"Sure. Give me a week, and she'll be good as new.\"\n\n\"A week? Cimorene looked at him in dismay. \"Can't you fix it any faster than that?\"\n\nJack spread his hands out and shrugged. \"Maybe, but I can't promise.\n\nIt depends on how fast I can get parts.\"\n\n\"Then we'll leave it here and go on without it tomorrow,\" Mendanbar said. At least they wouldn't have to carry the thing around anymore, and they wouldn't be tempted to use it in spite of its hazards. \"You can send it home when it's finished, can't you?\"\n\n\"Shouldn't be a problem.\" Jack smiled. \"Where do you want it?\"\n\nCimorene hesitated. \"You're not one of those Jacks who go around killing giants, are you?\"\n\n\"Lady, what do you think I am, stupid or something?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"I'm a businessman. I don't do giants.\"\n\n\"Then please send the carpet to Ballimore the Giantess on Flat Top Mountain when you're done fixing it,\" Cimorene said. \"And the bill to Cimorene, Chief Cook and Librarian, in care of the King of the Dragons.\"\n\n\"King of the Dragons, eh?\" Jack said thoughtfully.\n\n\"Yes, and don't go padding the bill, Jack,\" Telemain warned.\n\n\"Me? Wouldn't dream of it.\" Jack kicked the carpet into a loose roll and heaved it up onto his shoulder. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Is there a safe place near here where we can spend the night?\"\n\nMendanbar asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" Jack said. He balanced the carpet with one hand and jerked the thumb of the other at the blue-and-yellow house on wheels. \"Right there. I got two spare rooms on the end I can rent you for as long as you want 'em.\"\n\n\"Tonight is all we need,\" Mendanbar said, and Cimorene nodded.\n\nJack bobbed his head in a way that managed to suggest a full-fledged formal bow, then started toward the house, carrying the carpet.\n\nMendanbar turned to Telemain. \"Thank you very much for your help.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Telemain said, and started after Jack.\n\n\"Hey!\" Cimorene said. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To arrange for my own bed and board,\" Telemain explained patiently.\n\n\"You didn't really expect me to leave before you'd answered my questions, did you?\"\n\nWithout waiting for a reply, the magician followed Jack into the house.\n\nMendanbar and Cimorene looked at each other, shrugged, and went in after them.\n\nThe front door of Jack's house opened into a cluttered room painted a bright green that clashed with almost everything. Fortunately, most of the walls were hidden behind piles of boxes, barrels, bales, and bundles. Jack propped the carpet in a crowded corner, where it leaned precariously against two paintings balanced on a stack of books. Then he set about fixing dinner.\n\nCimorene kept Telemain's attention occupied while Jack worked, and at first Mendanbar was glad of it. He wanted time to think and sort out some of the confusing things that had happened in the last two days.\n\nHe was sure that a few of them were important, and if he could only concentrate for a little while he could figure out which ones.\n\nHe quickly discovered that it was not going to work. The conversation between Cimorene and Telemain was much too distracting, even though he was not particularly interested in anything they were talking about.\n\nFinally he gave up trying to think and listened instead.\n\n\"-window wasn't up to it,\" Cimorene was saying. \"So I used a spell to boost it.\"\n\n\"And that broke it?\" Telemain said, frowning.\n\n\"No,\" Cimorene replied. \"It worked just fine. The window turned white, and then showed Kazul and a lot of wizards.\" Her face darkened.\n\n\"And when I catch up with them-\" \"Yes, of course,\" Telemain said hastily. \"What happened next?\"\n\n\"I told the window to show me where they were, and then it broke.\"\n\n\"I can fix up a new one for you,\" Jack put in over his shoulder. \"I got some glass around somewhere, and it's no trick at all to cut it to size.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it, Jack,\" Telemain said. He looked at Cimorene.\n\n\"The window just\u2026 broke? It didn't show anything at all?\"\n\nCimorene nodded. \"Not a thing. Right, Mendanbar?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mendanbar said. \"The picture of Kazul and the wizards disappeared, and the window turned bright green, and then it broke. I think it was trying to show us a place inside the Enchanted Forest and couldn't.\"\n\n\"It should have been able to,\" Telemain said. \"I tested it very thoroughly.\n\nI suppose the enchantment might have been wearing thin. What kind of spell did you say you used to boost it?\" he asked, turning to Cimorene.\n\nCimorene hesitated, then shrugged. \"It was a dragon spell I found in Kazul's library last year. It's very adaptable, and-\" A shout from outside the house interrupted Cimorene in mid-sentence.\n\n\"You in there! Come out at once. There's no point in hiding.\"\n\nJack muttered something and stuck his head out the window. \"Hang on!\" he shouted. \"I'll just be a min-\" Something exploded outside, knocking Jack back through the window and making the whole house rock. \"Come out!\" the voice repeated.\n\n\"Wow!\"\n\n\"Wizards got no patience,\" Jack muttered, glaring at the window.\n\nMendanbar stiffened and looked at Cimorene.\n\n\"We'd better go out, or he'll tear the house down,\" she said. \"Jack, can you mix up a bucket of soapy water with a little lemon juice in it, quick?\"\n\n\"Huh?\" said Jack.\n\n\"A bucket of soap and water and lemon juice,\" Cimorene repeated impatiently. \"It melts wizards. Hurry up and bring it out after us.\n\nI think we're going to need it.\"\n\n\"Soapy water with lemon melts wizards?\" Telemain said with great interest. \"How did you discover that?\"\n\nAnother explosion rocked the house. \"Never mind that now,\" Cimorene said. \"Come on!\" She pushed the door open and darted out.\n\nWith a muttered curse, Mendanbar followed. He remembered the steps just in time to jump over them instead of tripping. As he landed, he dodged to one side and pulled his sword out. Only then did he stop to look around.\n\nCimorene stood with her back against the house, watching the wizard warily. The wizard was very easy to see, even though it was by now quite dark, because he was glowing as brightly as a bonfire. He was taller than the wizard who had invaded Cimorene's cave, and he wore red robes instead of blue and brown, but his staff was of the same dark, polished wood and his sandy beard was just as long and scraggly.\n\nMendanbar wondered irrelevantly whether the Society of Wizards had a rule against its members trimming their beards.\n\n\"Cimorene!\" the wizard said. \"I might have guessed. What have you-no, you haven't got it. Where is it?\"\n\n\"Where is what?\" Mendanbar demanded. \"And what do you mean by causing all this commotion? Didn't anyone ever teach you to knock on doors and ask for things politely?\"\n\n\"So you've picked up a hero\" \u2013 the wizard said to Cimorene with a sneer.\n\n\"He won't do you any good. Where is it?\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"Neither does he,\" Telemain commented from the doorway. \"Unless he's even more fuzzy-headed than he seems. From the way he's been leaping to conclusions without any evidence at all, that's entirely possible.\"\n\nThe wizard's eyes narrowed and he pointed his staff at Telemain.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"That's the first intelligent thing you've said since you arrived,\" Telemain said. \"My name is Telemain. I'm a magician.\"\n\n\"A magician!\" The wizard sucked in his breath. \"I suppose we are after the same thing. I warn you, you had better not cross me. I represent the Society of Wizards in this matter.\"\n\n\"What matter?\" Cimorene asked crossly.\n\n\"Yes, you have displayed a lamentable lack of precision in your account of your purposes,\" Telemain said. 'Just what-\" Mendanbar felt the harsh swell of the wizard's magic an instant before the spell left the man's staff. Without thought, he swung his sword to parry it. As it touched the bolt of magic, the sword hummed hungrily. A shiver ran up Mendanbar's arm from the hilt of the sword to his shoulder, and the spell was gone.\n\n\"I wouldn't do that again, if I were you,\" Mendanbar told the wizard.\n\nEveryone stared at Mendanbar. The wizard was the first to recover.\n\n\"The sword? he cried. \"I should have seen it at once. Excellent! This makes everything easy.\"\n\nHe moved the end of his staff a few inches to point at Mendanbar and muttered something under his breath. Mendanbar sensed magic building up in the staff again. This time he didn't wait for the wizard to release the spell.\n\nHe pushed a tendril of his own magic out through the sword and touched the wizard's staff gently with it.\n\nPower flowed into the sword like water being soaked up by a sponge.\n\nThe feeling of magic that surrounded the wizard vanished, and so did his glow. The wizard gave a squawk of surprise. He lowered his staff, staring at Mendanbar.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" he demanded. \"You're just a hero. How could you possibly reverse my spell?\"\n\n\"I didn't reverse your spell,\" Mendanbar said. \"I stopped it, that's all.\n\nAnd I'm not a hero. I'm the King of the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\nThe wizard's eyes widened. Certain that the man was going to try another spell, Mendanbar reached out with the sword's magic, hoping to stop him before he could properly begin. He wasn't quite fast enough.\n\nAs the threads of the sword's magic wrapped themselves around the wizard's staff, the wizard disappeared.\n\nThere was a moment of silence. \"Mendanbar, what did you do?\" Cimorene said at last.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Mendanbar said. \"I wasn't quick enough. I'm sorry. I should have expected him to try to get away.\"\n\nTelemain walked over to the spot where the wizard had been standing.\n\n\"Interesting,\" he muttered. \"Very interesting-ah!\" He bent over, and when he straightened up he was holding the wizard's staff in one hand.\n\n\"Here's your bucket,\" Jack said from the door of the house. \"What's all this about wizards?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter now,\" Cimorene said. \"He's gone.\"\n\n\"Then you won't be needing this?\" Jack said, lifting the bucket.\n\n\"Don't throw it out,\" Mendanbar said hastily. \"We might want it later.\n\nIn case he comes back.\"\n\n\"I seriously doubt that it is necessary to worry about his return,\" Telemain said as he rejoined them. \"Wizards depend a good deal upon their staffs. Without his, our recent visitor is unlikely to be much of a problem.\"\n\nHe sounded very satisfied with himself, and his fingers stroked the staff lightly as he spoke.\n\n\"Then he's sure to come back for it,\" Cimorene pointed out.\n\n\"Yes, but how long will it take him to get here?\" Telemain responded.\n\n\"I assure you, he didn't transport himself anywhere close by. We'll be long gone by the time he makes his way back.\"\n\n\"We?\" said Mendanbar.\n\n\"Of course.\" Telemain smiled. \"I've been trying to get my hands on one of these\"-he lifted the wizard's staff-\"for years. You've managed to get hold of one in a few seconds. You don't think I'm going to miss an opportunity like this, do you?\"\n\n\"If that's all you want, keep it,\" Mendanbar said. \"I haven't any use for a wizard's staff.\"\n\n\"Neither have I,\" Cimorene agreed.\n\nTelemain bowed. \"Thank you both.\" He paused. \"I would still like to join you, if you are willing. There are other matters I find intriguing about you.\"\n\nCompletely at sea, Mendanbar stared at the magician.\n\nCimorene sighed. \"Mendanbar, your sword is at it again, worse than ever. I'll bet that's what he means.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Mendanbar put his sword back in its sheath and inspected Telemain for a moment. The magician was still something of a puzzle, but he had been very helpful so far. And it was clear from the wizard's behavior that magicians and wizards did not get along, which was another point in Telemain's favor. \"I can't promise I'll let you study my sword, but it's all right with me if you come along.\" He glanced at Cimorene.\n\n\"It's fine with me, too,\" Cimorene said. \"But you'd better hear the whole story before you make up your mind. You might not want to come with us after all.\"\n\n\"If you're all done out here, come in and eat,\" Jack said. \"Supper's ready, and if you're sure there won't be any more wizards, I'll just use this water for the dishes afterward.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which They Return to the Enchanted Forest at Last",
                "text": "They told Telemain and Jack the whole story over dinner and discussed it late into the night. Telemain was intrigued by their description of Kazul's imprisonment.\n\n\"You say these wizards have an enchantment capable of confining a dragon?\" he said eagerly. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"That's certainly what it looked like,\" Cimorene said, pouring herself a cup of hot chocolate. The stew and the dinner dishes had long since been cleared away and were piled in the bucket of soapy water waiting for someone to have the time or the inclination to wash them.\n\nMendanbar wondered idly whether a bucket of soapy water plus lemon juice plus dishes would be as good for melting a wizard as one without dishes, and what effect the dishes would have on the process. Being melted was probably not very comfortable, but being melted while cups and plates and forks were falling on your head was likely to be even less so.\n\n\"I knew I was right to join you,\" Telemain said, smiling. \"I might not have heard about this enchantment at all, if I hadn't. It sounds like a simple modulation of the upper frequencies of a standard reptilian restraint spell, but on an enormously increased scale. I wonder where they're getting the power.\"\n\n\"I don't care how they did it,\" Cimorene snapped. \"I care about getting Kazul out of it as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"A trivial detail, once the construction of the spell is properly understood,\" Telemain said confidently.\n\n\"Trivial?\" Mendanbar said. \"Aren't you forgetting about the wizards? I don't think they'll just let us walk in and take their spell apart.\"\n\n\"And goodness knows what they'll do to Kazul in the meantime,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Telemain said. \"I comprehend your concern, but it is highly unlikely that this episode will prove more than a minor inconvenience so far as your dragon friend is concerned.\"\n\nCimorene did not look convinced, so Telemain launched into a lecture on the political implications of the situation, the main point of which was that it would be stupid for the Society of Wizards to hurt Kazul and that wizards were not stupid. Privately, Mendanbar thought that it had been stupid of the wizards to kidnap Kazul in the first place, but saying so would not reassure Cimorene, so he kept quiet.\n\nAfter a while, Telemain finished his lecture. He did not wait for Cimorene to respond, but turned at once to Mendanbar and asked about his sword. Like Cimorene, the magician could feel the sword spilling magic \"like a beacon on a mountaintop,\" and he was amazed-and completely fascinated-to learn that Mendanbar noticed nothing unusual.\n\n\"I don't understand why I didn't spot it at once,\" Telemain said, shaking his head over his cup of chocolate (which looked to Mendanbar as if it had gone cold during his long speech about the relative intelligence of wizards.\n\n\"You mean when you met us?\" Cimorene said. \"Mendanbar's sword wasn't spraying magic all over right then. He'd just used up most of it on the rock snakes.\"\n\n\"It seems to recover very quickly,\" Telemain said with a sidelong look at the sword. \"Is it always like this?\"\n\n\"How should I know?\" Mendanbar said, running a hand through his hair in frustration. \"I can't tell when it's doing it, much less when it isn't.\"\n\n\"Yes, you said that before.\" Telemain sipped at his chocolate, staring absently into space. \"I shall have to think about this for a while,\" he said at last, as though making a profound announcement. \"It's a pity you haven't time to visit my tower for a few tests-\" \"Absolutely not?\" Mendanbar interrupted.\n\n\"We have to rescue Kazul from the wizards,\" Cimorene put in quickly.\n\n\"Before this business turns into more than a minor inconvenience.\n\nBefore those wizards decide she's too much trouble to keep around and feed her some dragonsbane.\"\n\nTelemain considered this for a moment. \"An excellent idea,\" he said at last with evident sincerity.\n\nMendanbar and Cimorene stared at him.\n\n\"If the Society of Wizards poisons the King of the Dragons, there is certain to be a war,\" Telemain explained. \"Wars are very distracting.\n\nI don't like being distracted; it interferes with my work. So it would be a very good thing if we made sure there was no war.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad you think so,\" Cimorene said. Her voice sounded a little strange.\n\nThe discussion continued for a little longer, but it was getting late and everyone was tired. Finally, Jack suggested that they go to bed.\n\n\"It's all very well for you adventurous types to sit around jawing until past midnight , but some people have work to do in the morning,\" he said pointedly.\n\n\"I am not an 'adventurous type,\" \"Telemain said with dignity. \"I am in research.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" Jack said. \"So go research my second-best bed. You and the King, here, take the room on the right, Princess Cimorene gets the one on the left, and I get to bunk under the kitchen. Good night, everybody.\"\n\nThat settled things for the evening, but the conference continued the next morning over a breakfast of flapjacks and honey.\n\n\"It seems very likely to me that you are correct about Kazul's location,\" Telemain said. \"She is probably being held somewhere in the Enchanted Forest. Our first task, therefore, must be to find her.\"\n\n\"Our first task is to get back into the Enchanted Forest,\" Mendanbar corrected. \"I don't even know which direction it's in anymore.\"\n\n\"It's over that way,\" Jack said, waving at the large mountain in back of the house. \"Not far if you're flying, but a long way to walk. You have to go around, you see. Now, I've got a nice broomstick that'll get you there in a jiffy. It's extra long, so it'll seat all three of you very comfortably, and it's hardly been used at all.\"\n\n\"No, thank you, Jack,\" Telemain said firmly. \"Broomsticks are only reliable transportation for witches. We will manage this ourselves.\n\nPass the flapjacks, please.\"\n\n\"Here,\" said Cimorene, handing him the plate. \"Do you mean that you're going to take us to the Enchanted Forest the same way you brought us here? I thought it would be harder than that.\"\n\n\"Actually, it is,\" Telemain said. \"The Enchanted Forest is unique, magically speaking, and therefore the interface between the forest and the rest of the world is equally unique. Penetrating that interface requires a specific application.\"\n\n\"What's that mean, when it's at home?\" said Jack.\n\n\"You need a special spell to get into the Enchanted Forest , because it's different from everywhere else,\" Mendanbar translated.\n\nTelemain looked irritated. \"That's what I just said.\"\n\n\"Is that why Mendanbar's spell dropped us into the ravine with the rock snakes instead of in the forest?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"Possibly.\" Telemain frowned. \"It seems unlikely, however.\n\nMendanbar's magic is of the same variety as that of the forest. It should have worked perfectly well, assuming it worked at all.\"\n\n\"Well, why didn't it?\" Mendanbar asked crossly. He was getting tired of puzzles, especially puzzles connected with his sword, his magic, and his forest.\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't answer that from your description,\" Telemain replied, his frown deepening. \"I can think of half a dozen things that might have gone wrong, but without seeing it myself I don't know which of them it was.\"\n\n\"So do it again, and watch it this time,\" Jack said. \"Hand me the honey, would you, Your Majesty?\"\n\nMendanbar picked up the honey pot, which was shaped like a fat purple bear. Resisting the urge to throw it at Jack's head, he handed it over and said mildly, \"I don't think I like the idea of repeating the spell.\n\nLast time it knocked me out for four hours, and I'm not willing to do that again just so Telemain can find out why.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's easy enough to fix,\" Telemain said. \"A few wards, properly set, and there won't be any backlash worth worrying about.\"\n\n\"How much backlash does it take before you worry about it?\"\n\nCimorene asked, sounding dubious about the whole idea.\n\n\"A three-day headache,\" Jack put in before Telemain could answer.\n\n\"And that's only because if his head hurts he has trouble thinking about the wherefore of the whatsit.\"\n\n\"That is a serious exaggeration,\" Telemain said stiffly. \"And I don't anticipate that this experiment would result in any kind of prolonged effect, particularly if I set wards first. I have some idea of what to expect, you see, so I can customize the shielding spells to correspond to the specific variety of backlash.\"\n\n\"It sounds good,\" Cimorene said. \"I think. But what happens if it doesn't work?\"\n\nTelemain began a long, involved, and somewhat indignant explanation of why his shielding spells could not fail to work. Mendanbar listened with only part of his mind; the rest was busy thinking about Telemain's suggestion.\n\nIt looked to him as if the only way they were likely to get back into the Enchanted Forest was by means of his own magic. Telemain hadn't actually said he couldn't do it himself, but Mendanbar was fairly sure that was what he had meant. And from the way Jack talked, walking would take more time than they had to spare.\n\nEven if it took Telemain two tries, or three, to figure out what had gone wrong with Mendanbar's transportation spell, it would still be much faster than walking. Of course, they could always rent some of Jack's wares, but after their experiences with the magic carpet, Mendanbar was not at all happy with that idea.\n\nRepeating the spell would be a chance to find out more about the sword, too. His adventures since leaving the Enchanted Forest had made Mendanbar see just how little he really knew about his magic, and the sword seemed like a good place to start finding things out. The only question was, could the wards actually keep the transportation spell from knocking him head over heels again?\n\n\"Telemain, how sure of these shielding spells are you?\" Mendanbar asked as soon as there was a lull in the conversation.\n\nTelemain looked at him. \"Very sure indeed. I have just spent no little time and breath telling Princess Cimorene, here, exactly how sure that is, why I am sure, and how unlikely it is that I am wrong.\n\nObviously, you have not been attending. Do you wish me to repeat the entire explanation?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Mendanbar said hastily. \"I'm sorry I wasn't listening, but I had to think for a minute.\"\n\n\"And?\" said Cimorene.\n\n\"And I think we should do it. As long as Telemain is sure he can keep me from being knocked out again, that is.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Telemain said, sounding faintly put out. \"I have been telling you that all morning.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Jack. \"I like to have things settled. You sure you don't want a pair of seven-league boots for backup?\"\n\n\"There are three of us and you only have one pair of boots,\" Cimorene pointed out.\n\nThey finished breakfast quickly and helped Jack clear up. Telemain had some things to discuss with Jack, so Mendanbar and Cimorene went outside to give them a chance to talk alone. Mendanbar noticed that the worry line between Cimorene's eyebrows was back.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" he asked.\n\n\"Are you sure about this?\" Cimorene said. \"Doing the transportation spell, I mean. After what happened before\u2026\"\n\n\"I'll be more careful this time,\" Mendanbar said. \"And Telemain's wards should help. Between the two of us, it ought to be all right.\"\n\nCimorene did not look convinced. \"You're still taking a big chance.\n\nThere are other ways to get into the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"Not in a hurry, there aren't,\" Mendanbar said. \"And once we get back, we still have to find Kazul. We can't afford to waste any more time.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Cimorene chewed on her lower lip, frowning. \"Look, you're the King of the Enchanted Forest . You shouldn't be taking chances like this just to help me out.\"\n\n\"I like helping you out,\" Mendanbar said. \"But it's not just that.\n\nIt's my job to take care of the Enchanted Forest . If the wizards have Kazul trapped somewhere in my kingdom, it's my responsibility.\"\n\n\"You're not responsible for what the Society of Wizards does.\"\n\n\"No, but when it involves the forest it involves me, too, and I have to try to put it straight.\"\n\n\"No wonder you looked so tired when you showed up at Kazul's cave,\" Cimorene muttered. \"Mendanbar-\" The door of the house slammed.\n\nTelemain came hurrying down the steps, carrying the wizard's staff.\n\n\"I'm sorry I kept you waiting,\" the magician said. \"Are you ready to start?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Mendanbar.\n\n\"You aren't bringing that along, are you?\" Cimorene demanded, eying the staff with disfavor.\n\n\"Of course I'm bringing it along,\" Telemain said. \"I told you how long I've been looking for one. If I leave it with Jack, odds are he'll sell it to somebody before the day is out. He wouldn't be able to help it. Here, hold this for a minute while I set up the wards.\"\n\nWith visible reluctance, Cimorene took the wizard's staff. She grimaced as her fingers touched it, as if it felt slimy and unpleasant.\n\nAt the same time, Mendanbar laid a hand on his sword and pushed a tendril of magic at the staff, to see whether there were any lingering spells, but he did not sense anything.\n\nRaising a hand, Telemain began to mutter rapidly. Mendanbar watched with interest as the magician worked, calling up magical power and shaping it into a loose net that surrounded all three of them.\n\n\"There,\" Telemain said at last. \"That should do it.\" He repossessed the staff from Cimorene and looked at Mendanbar. \"Whenever you're ready.\"\n\nMendanbar studied the net uncertainly. \"Is that all there is to it? Should I aim through one of the holes or through one of the threads?\"\n\n\"Holes?\" Telemain said. \"Threads? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"This net of yours,\" Mendanbar said. \"The warding spell. Does it matter where I aim?\"\n\n\"You can see the warding spell?\" Telemain looked and sounded considerably startled by the very idea.\n\n\"It's not seeing exactly,\" Mendanbar said. \"But I can tell where it is and how it's put together.\"\n\n\"Fascinating,\" Telemain said. \"Have you always been able to do that?\"\n\n\"No. It comes with being King of the Enchanted Forest .\"\n\n\"Does it?\" Telemain's expression was all eager interest. \"Can you do it for any spell? Here, let me try a listening spell, and you see if you can spot it.\n\n\"I thought we were supposed to be trying to get to the Enchanted Forest ,\" Cimorene put in pointedly. \"Can't you wait and experiment after we rescue Kazul?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Telemain said. \"Do forgive me. I sometimes get carried away.\" He nodded apologetically, but Mendanbar thought he sounded disappointed.\n\n\"About this net-\" Mendanbar reminded him.\n\n\"Oh, yes, you wanted to know about aiming.\" Telemain considered for a moment. \"It shouldn't make the least bit of difference.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Mendanbar. He drew his sword, and both Telemain and Cimorene jumped. Mendanbar supposed the sword must be leaking again.\n\nHe pushed careful little dabs of power through the sword to mark Telemain and Cimorene, to be sure that they would come along with him.\n\nThen he raised the sword and pointed toward the mountain, where Jack had said the Enchanted Forest lay.\n\n\"I think I'll try to take us straight to the palace,\" he said, and began forming the picture in his mind.\n\n\"No, no!\" Telemain interrupted. \"Do it exactly the way you did before.\n\nThat's the whole point of this exercise.\"\n\n\"I thought the point was to get to the Enchanted Forest,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\nMendanbar shrugged. The castle would be a better place from which to try and locate Kazul, since it was at the center-near the center-of the Enchanted Forest, but once they were in the forest, getting to the castle would be no trouble. If Telemain wanted to watch an exact duplication of the transportation spell that had dumped them in the ravine, there was no reason not to let him. Releasing his image of the palace, Mendanbar substituted a mental picture of the Green Glass Pool.\n\nHe took his time over the image, painstakingly remembering every detail of the rocks and trees and water. When the picture was as clear as he could make it, he took a deep breath and gave the power of the sword a slow, twisting pull.\n\nThe mountains and the trees and Jack's queer little house faded to gray ghosts, then melted into mist and were gone. An instant later, the mist vanished. They were standing at the edge of the Green Glass Pool.\n\n\"Absolutely fascinating!\" Telemain said. \"That is, without a doubt, the neatest transportation spell I have ever had the pleasure of utilizing. But I thought you said you had some trouble with it.\"\n\n\"He did, last time,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"Well, you'd better not put your sword away, then,\" Telemain said. \"I can't tell what the problem was until I see it. You'll just have to do the spell again.\"\n\nMendanbar, who had already stuck his sword back in its sheath, shook his head. \"I never use the sword to move around the Enchanted Forest .\n\nI don't need it.\"\n\n\"By the way, your sword has stopped spraying magic around again,\" Cimorene said. \"I thought you might want to know.\"\n\n\"So it has,\" Telemain said. \"What an intriguing phenomenon.\"\n\n\"That reminds me,\" Mendanbar said. \"The burned-out area I told you about should be right over there. Would you mind taking a look at it, since we're here?\"\n\n\"Happy to oblige,\" Telemain replied.\n\n\"What about finding Kazul?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"I'll try and locate her while Telemain is examining the clearing,\" Mendanbar said. \"A locating spell takes a while to set up, anyway, so we won't lose any time to speak of, unless looking at the charred spot takes a lot longer than I expect it to.\"\n\nCimorene still did not look altogether pleased, but she nodded, and Mendanbar led the way between the enormous trees. There was the burned section, as empty of life and magic as it had been when he had first seen it.\n\nCimorene's expression changed to one of shock and anger, and even Telemain looked shaken.\n\n\"I see why you wanted me to look at this,\" Telemain said.\n\n\"So do I,\" Cimorene agreed.\n\nSetting the wizard's staff under a tree near the edge of the charred area, Telemain walked slowly forward until he reached the spot where the ashes began. Kneeling, he ran his fingers over the dry, dead earth. After a moment, he rose and moved on, into the burned section itself. Little swirls of ash followed him.\n\nFor a few minutes, Mendanbar watched the magician work. Then, remembering his promise to Cimorene, he tore his attention away and turned to his own task.\n\nIt was a relief to be back in the Enchanted Forest, where magic was nearly automatic. Quickly, Mendanbar sorted through the invisible threads of power, selecting the ones that ran all the way to the farthest edges of the Enchanted Forest. They made quite a bundle, but it was better to do it all at once than to split them up and risk skipping one by accident.\n\nWhen he was sure he had all the threads he wanted, he looped them around his right wrist and twined his fingers through the strands as they fanned out in all directions. With his left hand, he caught a free-floating filament and wound it into a small ball. He set the ball on the web of unseen tendrils that radiated out from the bundle at his wrist. In his mind, he pictured Kazul and the wizards as he and Cimorene had seen them in Herman's window. Then he gave the invisible ball a flick and sent it rolling rapidly out along the first of the threads.\n\nThe ball picked up speed and vanished. Then it was back, bouncing to the next thread and spinning away along the new path. Out and back it went in the blink of an eye, over and over, eliminating one thread each time.\n\nAnd then it went out and did not return.\n\nMendanbar frowned. That wasn't supposed to happen. If the spell-ball didn't find Kazul, it should come back and hop to the next thread, to check along it. If it did find Kazul, it should come back and stop, marking the thread they should follow to lead them to the dragon.\n\nEither way, the spell-ball was supposed to come back.\n\n\"What is it?\" Cimorene said.\n\nMendanbar looked up, startled, to find Cimorene watching his face closely. \"Something's wrong,\" he told her. \"Wait a minute while I try something.\"\n\nGently, he wiggled the last thread down which the spell-ball had vanished.\n\nHe felt a vibration travel the length of the thread, and for a moment he hoped that it was the spell-ball returning. Then, with a high, thin sound like a tight wire breaking, the thread snapped, leaving a long end waving loose in the air in front of him.\n\n\"What was that?\" Telemain said, looking up.\n\n\"Something very wrong indeed,\" Mendanbar said grimly. \"You'd better stop that and come over here. We're going to the palace right now.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Has Some Interesting Visitors",
                "text": "Both Cimorene and Telemain stared at Mendanbar for a moment. Then Telemain shrugged. \"Very well,\" he said, dusting ashes from his fingers. \"I was nearly finished, in any case, though I can't say that I like all this flitting around.\"\n\n\"Mendanbar, what happened?\" Cimorene demanded as Telemain walked out of the burned area and crossed to the tree to get the wizard's staff.\n\n\"I'm not sure I can explain,\" Mendanbar replied. \"It has to do with the way I work magic. The spell-Telemain, what is it?\"\n\nTelemain had picked up the staff and was gazing down at the ground where it had lain. \"I think you'd better come and see for yourself,\" he said without looking up.\n\nFeeling mildly irritated, Mendanbar went over to join Telemain. His irritation vanished when he saw what the magician was looking at. At the foot of the tree, a strip of moss had turned as brown and dead and brittle as the crumbling remnants within the burned-out area a few feet away. And the strip was the exact size and shape of the wizard's staff.\n\n\"Wizards again,\" Cimorene said in tones of disgust. \"It figures.\"\n\n\"It looks the same as that part,\" Mendanbar said cautiously, waving at the dead spot. \"But is it?\"\n\n\"So far as I can determine from a limited visual examination, it is,\"\n\nTelemain said. \"If you want absolute certainty, you'll have to give me another couple of hours for tests.\"\n\n\"We don't have a couple of hours,\" Mendanbar said. \"How sure are you, right now, that this wizard's staff has done the same thing to this bit of moss as something did to that whole section over there?\"\n\n\"And have you any idea how it did it?\" Cimorene put in.\n\n\"The how is very simple,\" Telemain answered. \"The staff is designed to appropriate any unattached magic with which it comes in contact. Magic appears to be a fundamental property of the Enchanted Forest. So when the staff rested for a few minutes in one location, it swallowed up all the magic from that location, leaving it as you see.\"\n\n\"What about that?\" Cimorene asked, waving at the burned area.\n\n\"What did they do, roll a wizard's staff around on the ground for an hour?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Telemain said. \"It's simply a matter of extending and intensifying the absorption spell. One couldn't maintain such an expansion for very long, but then, one wouldn't have to.\"\n\n\"That's it!\" Mendanbar said suddenly.\n\nThe other two looked at him blankly. \"what's what?\" said Cimorene.\n\n\"That must be what happened to that locating spell I sent out,\" Mendanbar explained. \"Some wizard's staff sucked it up. That's why it didn't come back.\"\n\n\"Come back?\" Telemain said. \"You mean your locating spells work on a sort of echo principle? Would you mind demonstrating just how you-\" \"Not now, Telemain,\" Cimorene said. She looked at Mendanbar.\n\n\"Does that mean you know where the wizards are?\"\n\n\"No, but I think I know how to find out,\" Mendanbar said. \"Ready or not, here we go.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a response, Mendanbar took hold of a thread of magic and pulled. Mist rose and fell, and they were standing in front of the main door to the palace.\n\n\"Willin!\" Mendanbar shouted, throwing open the door. \"Willin, come here. I need-\" He stopped short. Standing in the middle of the entrance hall was a boy of about ten in a blue silk doublet heavily embroidered with gold, a middle-aged man in black velvet with a pinched expression, two cats (one cream-and-silver, the other a long-haired tabby), Morwen, and an extremely harried-looking Willin. The footman who tended the front door was watching them all with the carefully blank face he kept for odd visitors and unusual events. He had had a lot of practice.\n\n\"Your Majesty! Oh, thank goodness,\" said Willin in tones of heartfelt relief. \"This woman-these people-\"\n\nThe elf stopped abruptly and made a visible effort to pull himself together. While he was still working at it, Morwen stepped forward.\n\n\"Hello, Cimorene, Mendanbar,\" she said briskly. \"You're back just in time. These people have some very interesting infor-\" \"Morwen?\"\n\nTelemain's incredulous voice interrupted from behind Mendanbar. A moment later, the magician pushed his head between Cimorene and Mendanbar to get a better look. \"It's you. What on earth are you doing in the Enchanted Forest?\"\n\n\"Living in it,\" Morwen answered calmly. \"As you would know if you bothered to keep up with the doings of your old friends, Telemain.\"\n\n\"I've been busy,\" Telemain said defensively.\n\nOne of the cats made a small growling noise. \"Nonsense,\" Morwen told it. \"It's perfectly normal for him to be busy. The question is, has he got anything to show for it?\"\n\nBoth cats turned Their heads and gazed expectantly at Telemain.\n\nMendanbar decided it was time to take a hand in the conversation, before things got so far off track that he'd never get them back on again.\n\n\"Telemain has been very helpful,\" he said. \"Morwen, who are these other people?\"\n\n\"His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Jorillam of Meriambee,\" Willin said in a loud, formal tone before Morwen could reply. The elf nodded at the boy, who bowed uncertainly.\n\n\"And His Royal Highness's uncle and guardian, Prince Rupert,\" Willin continued. This time, the older man stepped forward to acknowledge the introduction.\n\n\"They have come with the witch Morwen\"-Willin paused, obviously waiting for Morwen to curtsy. Morwen only looked at him, and after a moment the elf went on-\"with the witch Morwen to beg a boon of His Majesty Mendanbar, the King of the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"It's not a big thing, Your Majesty,\" Prince Rupert said hastily.\n\n\"Really. If I could just have a minute or two of your time\u2026\"\n\nHis voice trailed off in an indistinct murmur.\n\nMendanbar looked from Prince Rupert to Morwen and back, completely baffled. \"I'm in something of a hurry just now,\" he said at last.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"If we could, ah, discuss the matter in private\u2026 ,\" Prince Rupert said with a sidelong look at his nephew.\n\n\"Oh, Uncle,\" said Crown Prince Jorillam in an exasperated tone. He turned to Mendanbar. \"He just doesn't want to say straight out that we're lost. And he especially doesn't want to say that the whole reason we came was so he could leave me in the forest and go home and take over my kingdom.\"\n\n\"Jorillam!\" Prince Rupert said, plainly horrified.\n\n\"Well, it's true, Uncle,\" the Crown Prince insisted. \"And if they're in a hurry, it's better to tell them and not waste time.\"\n\n\"Mrow!\" one of the cats agreed emphatically.\n\n\"Morwen\u2026\" Mendanbar said, hoping he did not look or sound as confused as he felt.\n\nThe ginger-haired witch shook her head and peered sternly over the top of her glasses at Prince Rupert . \"You, sir, are here to tell these people your story with as little shilly-shallying as you can manage.\n\nYou'd better get started, or I shall be tempted to do something drastic.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" asked the Crown Prince, greatly interested. \"Could you turn him into a toad?\"\n\n\"I could,\" Morwen said repressively, \"but I won't. Not yet, anyway.\n\nProvided he starts talking.\"\n\n\"Isn't that a bit severe?\" Telemain asked, frowning.\n\n\"You wouldn't think so if you'd been dealing with him for the last two hours,\" Morwen said.\n\nCimorene stepped forward and gave Prince Rupert a perfectly charming smile. \"Perhaps it would be best if you told us your story,\" she said.\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course,\" Prince Rupert said, rubbing his hands against each other. \"I, um, we, en\" \"It's because of that stupid club Uncle joined,\" said Crown Prince Jorillam helpfully. \"Tell them, Uncle.\"\n\n\"What club is that?\" Cimorene asked.\n\nPrince Rupert gave her a hunted look. \"The Right Honorable Wicked Stepmothers' Traveling, Drinking, and Debating Society,\" he said, and sighed. \"I've been a member of the Men's Auxiliary for the past fifteen years.\"\n\n\"That would be for Wicked Stepfathers?\" Mendanbar guessed, wishing the man would get on with it.\n\n\"Yes, though we don't get many of those,\" Prince Rupert said.\n\n\"Mostly, it's wicked Uncles. You can even join on expectation, if you're not an uncle yet.\" He sighed again. \"That's what I did. I never really expected to be an uncle at all. Rosannon-she's my sister-was under a curse for a hundred years, and I thought I'd be dead when someone finally broke it and married her.\"\n\n\"So you joined this club,\" Cimorene prompted.\n\n\"And it was wonderful!\" Prince Rupert's face lit up, remembering.\n\n\"The places we went to, and the wines, and the discussions! It was everything I dreamed. Only then a smart-alec prince figured out a shortcut and broke the curse, and he and Rosannon got married and had Jorillam here.\n\nAnd then the two of them left on some silly quest or other and put me in charge of him.\"\n\n\"It isn't a silly quest!\" Jorillam objected. \"It's a matter of vital importance to the future of Meriambee.\"\n\n\"You can see my problem,\" Prince Rupert said earnestly. \"If I don't do something really wicked soon, I'll get kicked out of the club. I only have until sunset tomorrow.\"\n\n\"So you brought Crown Prince Jorillam to the Enchanted Forest , intending to abandon him here,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Actually, it was my idea,\" the Crown Prince put in. \"After the other thing didn't work out, we needed to think of something fast.\"\n\n\"Other thing?\" said Telemain, fascinated.\n\nPrince Rupert looked embarrassed. \"I hired a giant to ravage a village by the eastern border. He was supposed to show up yesterday, and I was all ready to send the documentation in to the club when I got a letter of resignation saying he'd quit that line of work and wouldn't be coming.\"\n\nMendanbar and Cimorene exchanged looks.\n\n\"Did he say why?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"No, just that he'd done enough pillaging for one giant, thank you all the same, and now he was going to try something new.\"\n\n\"So I said Uncle Rupert should abandon me in the woods,\" Jorillam said.\n\n\"That's much more wicked than hiring a giant, isn't it? And I'd get to have some adventures, too, instead of sitting home while Mother and Father are off on their quest. Only first we couldn't find the forest, and then we got chased by some wizards, and then we found the forest just in time and lost the wizards, except we got lost, too, and Uncle Rupert wouldn't leave. And then we were captured by a witch and she brought us here. Are you going to throw us in a dungeon?\"\n\n\"What was that part about wizards?\" Mendanbar demanded.\n\n\"I thought you'd be interested,\" Morwen said with considerable satisfaction.\n\n\"But that was before we got to the Enchanted Forest,\" Prince Rupert said in a bewildered tone. \"Why would the King of the Enchanted Forest be interested in that?\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" said Mendanbar. 'Just tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"Well, we were just coming out of the old Pass of the Dragons,\" Prince Rupert said. \"It cuts straight through the Mountains of Morning to the Enchanted Forest, and hardly anyone uses it these days, so I thought it would be a good choice. Only things must have changed, because when we came out of the pass we were in a wasteland, and not in the Enchanted Forest at all.\"\n\nMendanbar, Telemain, and Cimorene looked at each other. \"Describe this wasteland,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"It was-it was bare,\" Rupert told him. \"Um, well, bare. No grass or trees or anything. Just\u2026 just\u2026\"\n\n'Just bare,\" Cimorene finished for him. \"Did it look burned?\"\n\n\"Yes, now that you mention it. I didn't examine it closely, you understand, because that was when the wizards came out of the cave and chased US off.\"\n\n\"We had to run for miles,\" Crown Prince Jorillam said with relish.\n\n\"They almost caught us.\"\n\n\"It was a long way, but it wasn't miles, \"his uncle corrected. \"And they lost us as soon as we got to the trees.\"\n\nThe forest must have shifted, thought Mendanbar. Good for it. \"Thank you very much,\" he said aloud. \"You've been very helpful.\"\n\n\"We have\" Prince Rupert said.\n\n\"Does that mean you're not going to throw us in a dungeon?\" asked Crown Prince Jorillam, sounding disappointed.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Mendanbar said. \"Willin, after we're gone, see that His Royal Highness, here, is made comfortable in one of the dungeons. The one under the North-Northwest Tower, I think.\" Mendanbar smiled to himself, thinking that it might do the overeager young prince good to climb up and down six flights of stairs to get what he wanted, and it certainly wouldn't do him any harm.\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty,\" said Willin in tones of perfect understanding.\n\nHe paused. \"May I inquire where you are going and when?\"\n\n\"To rescue the King of the Dragons,\" Mendanbar said, \"and as soon as possible.\"\n\nWillin swallowed hard, Prince Rupert choked, and even Morwen looked slightly startled.\n\n\"The only question is, what's the best way of doing it,\" Mendanbar continued. \"Any suggestions?\"\n\n\"We can't just charge in and attack the cave,\" Cimorene said, frowning.\n\n\"The wizards could kill Kazul before we got to her. And if the area around the cave looks like that bit you showed us a few minutes ago, it simply won't be possible to sneak up on them.\"\n\n\"What we need is a back way in,\" Telemain said. \"I don't suppose there is one?\"\n\n\"Every cave in the Enchanted Forest has a back way in,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"The problem is finding it. Do you know anything about that part of the forest, Morwen?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not,\" Morwen said. She turned to the cats. \"Chaos? Jasper? How about you?\"\n\nThe cats looked at each other, blinked, and looked back at Morwen.\n\n\"They aren't familiar with the area, either,\" Morwen said with regret.\n\nWillin coughed. \"If I may venture a suggestion, Your Majesty\u2026\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"I believe there is a list of caves, passages, vestibules, and entrances in the Royal Archives,\" said the elf. \"Would you care to examine it?\"\n\n\"Immediately,\" Mendanbar replied. \"I might have known you'd have a list somewhere with the right information, Willin. I should have asked you at once.\"\n\nThe elf bowed deeply, looking very pleased. \"I shall bring it without delay, Your Majesty,\" he said, and whisked off down the corridor.\n\n\"Hey!\" cried Crown Prince Jorillam. \"Are you going to fight the wizards? Can I come?\"\n\n\"Yes, we are, and no, you can't,\" Mendanbar told him. \"You're going to be locked in the dungeon, remember?\"\n\n\"But a fight with wizards is much more interesting than being locked in a dungeon,\" Jorillam complained. \"I want to watch.\"\n\n\"Maybe so,\" Cimorene said. \"But that's how it is with dungeons. You aren't supposed to get a choice about whether you're going to be locked up in one, you know.\"\n\nThis was evidently a new idea for the young prince, and he did not look happy about it. \"But-\" \"But, nothing,\" Mendanbar said. \"I'm the King, and I say you go to the dungeon instead of fighting wizards, and no argument.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Morwen. \"We have much more important things to argue about. Such as how to get rid of the wizards once we find them.\"\n\n\"Buckets,\" said Cimorene. \"Lots of buckets, and soap, and lemon juice.\n\nWhere do you keep your buckets, Mendanbar?\"\n\n\"Around somewhere,\" Mendanbar said vaguely. \"I'll have someone bring us a few. Can the three of us carry enough buckets to get rid of all the wizards?\"\n\n\"Four of us,\" said Morwen. The cats yowled. \"Yes, I know, and of course you're coming, but you can't carry a bucket of soapy water, so for purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter,\" she told them.\n\nThe cats gave her an affronted look, turned their backs, and began making indignant little noises at each other.\n\n\"It seems probable that the wizards will be present in force,\" Telemain said. \"They were certainly aware of Prince Rupert's appearance among them this morning, and they may well have detected your unsuccessful locating spell, Mendanbar. Consequently, I would wager that there will be far too many to dispose of by means of your, er, interesting methods, Princess Cimorene.\"\n\n\"We'll bring some buckets along anyway,\" Mendanbar said. \"It can't hurt.\"\n\nHe nodded a summons to the blank-faced footman by the front door.\n\nThe footman came over at once, and Mendanbar told him to bring half a dozen buckets of soapy water mixed with lemon juice out to the entrance hall immediately. The footman, who had worked at the palace for a long time and was used to peculiar requests, bowed impassively and departed.\n\n\"Any other ideas?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"Can't the witch turn them into toads?\" said the Crown Prince.\n\n\"I certainly don't object to trying,\" Morwen said.\n\nCimorene shook her head. \"I don't think it would work. The Society of Wizards has some new spell that soaks up magic. That's what makes the bare spots in the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"I still wish I understood why the Society of Wizards is doing all this,\" Mendanbar said, half to himself. \"I suppose it makes sense to try and blame the dragons for burning bits of the Enchanted Forest, but they've been deliberately trying to start a war. That would make almost as much trouble for them as for everyone else.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, but would it?\" put in Prince Rupert timidly. \"I mean, if these wizards are soaking up magic, they must want it for something.\"\n\nCimorene, Morwen, Mendanbar, and Telemain stared at one another in dismay. \"Yes, what are they using it for?\" Cimorene said after a long, thoughtful silence.\n\n\"In all probability, to intensify their general enchantments,\" Telemain said. \"Alternatively, to enable themselves to achieve something more substantial than would otherwise be possible.\"\n\nPrince Rupert looked at the magician blankly. \"Oh,\" he said in a doubtful tone.\n\n\"Don't mind him,\" Morwen said. \"He always gets technical when he's talking about spells.\"\n\n\"But what did he mean?\" the prince asked.\n\n\"He meant that the Society of Wizards wants more magic to power their spells,\" Mendanbar replied. \"Or maybe to use in a spell that would be too big for them to work without it.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that is an idea I don't care for at all,\" said Morwen, frowning.\n\n\"The Society of Wizards is too powerful already, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"You know, if the dragons start fighting with the Enchanted Forest, any new wasted areas would be blamed on the war,\" Telemain commented.\n\n\"The Society of Wizards could absorb considerable quantities of magic before anyone realizes what they are up to.\"\n\n\"That would explain why they're doing this, all right,\" Mendanbar said. \"We have got to stop them.\" Without thinking, he put his hand on the hilt of his sword.\n\n\"Mendanbar!\" said Cimorene suddenly. \"Didn't that wizard say something about you reversing his spell? Not Antorell, the wizard at Jack's house.\n\nAnd you were using the sword. Maybe it can reverse this spell, too.\"\n\n\"It's worth trying,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Not until we have a better idea of exactly what we're up against,\" Morwen said firmly. \"If the King of the Enchanted Forest gets killed trying to rescue the King of the Dragons from the Society of Wizards, goodness only knows what will happen.\"\n\n\"We'll sneak in and take a look around,\" Telemain agreed. \"Then we can formulate a plan of action.\"\n\n\"As long as it doesn't take too long,\" Cimorene muttered. \"This isn't some kind of experiment, where we can take our time and try again. If those wizards figure out that someone is trying to rescue Kazul...\"\n\nMendanbar tried to smile reassuringly at her. \"I don't see how they-ah, Willin! Did you find that list? Good! Then let's all go into the parlor and look at it. The sooner we're done, the sooner we can be on our way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Everyone Argues",
                "text": "Willin's list was remarkably clear and well organized. Once they found the section headed \"Caves and Caverns Near the Mountains of Morning,\" it was only a matter of a few minutes before they discovered the listing for the Cave of Stone Icicles, the only cave at the western end of the Pass of the Dragons. As Mendanbar had predicted, there was a back way into it. A tunnel started from the bottom of the Crystal Falls and wound around under the hills and forest until it reached a crack at the rear of the cave.\n\n\"This doesn't look as if it will be hard at all,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Mendanbar. \"This shouldn't take long. I'll be back in an hour or so. Willin, take care of everyone while I'm gone-you know, refreshments and things.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute? Cimorene said, her voice rising above startled objections from everyone else. \"You're not going without me.\"\n\n\"But-\" \"I am Kazul's Chief Cook and Librarian,\" Cimorene said firmly.\n\n\"It's my job to help rescue her.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Mendanbar said, \"but all I'm going to do is sneak in and look at the wizards, and then sneak out again.\"\n\n\"That's all you think you're going to do, but what if something goes wrong?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Morwen said. \"You should have someone with you. Several someones, in fact.\"\n\n\"I'm real good at sneaking,\" Crown Prince Jorillam put in eagerly.\n\n\"And I want to see a dragon up close.\"\n\n\"No, you don't,\" Mendanbar said. \"Morwen, are you trying to tell me you want to come along as well?\"\n\n\"No,\" Morwen said, looking at him sternly over the tops of her glasses.\n\n\"I'm telling you I'm going to come whether you like it or not. Kazul is my friend, and besides, I want a crack at those wretched wizards.\"\n\n\"We aren't going to do anything to the wizards until we know more about what we're up against,\" Mendanbar said, feeling harried.\n\n\"Then how come you wanted those buckets of soapy water?\" Crown Prince Jorillam demanded.\n\n'Just in case,\" Mendanbar said. \"This is only to find out what the wizards are doing and how many of them there are.\"\n\n\"Which is precisely why I must accompany you,\" Telemain put in.\n\n\"Not you, too!\"\n\nTelemain frowned at him. \"You don't seem to realize what a priceless opportunity this is,\" the magician said. \"It is entirely possible that we shall be able to observe the Society of Wizards in the very act of casting their magic-absorbing spells. Since they are extremely secretive about their methods, this may be the only chance we have of studying their techniques.\"\n\n\"It isn't worth the risk,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"Not to you, perhaps,\" Telemain told him. \"I, however, intend to take full advantage of these circumstances. One way or another, I am going to get a look at those wizards.\" He leaned the wizard's staff against the wall and folded his arms stubbornly.\n\n\"Yeah, and then we melt them!\" Crown Prince Jorillam said enthusiastically.\n\n\"You are not coming with us,\" Mendanbar told him.\n\n\"But I'm real, real good at sneaking,\" Jorillam said. \"Tell them, Uncle!\"\n\n\"He is,\" Prince Rupert said earnestly. \"And I'll keep an eye on him so he won't get in your way.\"\n\nMendanbar stared at him. \"No, you won't. Because you aren't coming with me, either. I am going to sneak into the Cave of Stone Icicles by myself\" \"No, you're not,\" said everyone at once. Morwen's two cats glanced up, then went back to washing their tails. Mendanbar got the distinct impression that the only reason they hadn't joined in the general outcry was that they thought it was beneath them to argue.\n\n\"It is inappropriate for the King of the Enchanted Forest to embark on a mission to the King of the Dragons without a formal escort,\" Willin added.\n\n\"You want me to take all these people along as a formal escort?\"\n\nMendanbar said incredulously. \"Really, Willin-\" \"Not at all,\" the elf replied. \"They are all persons of distinction, and it would not be suitable for any of them to take a position as a formal escort to Your Majesty. Properly, only those of your subjects already in Your Majesty's employ may make up such a retinue. Due to Your Majesty's general dislike of formality, we have very few such persons available at present.\"\n\n\"What are you suggesting?\" Mendanbar asked with a sinking feeling.\n\n\"That I am the only possible person who can accompany Your Majesty in this capacity,\" Willin said.\n\n\"If he gets to go, so do I!\" Crown Prince Jorillam cried.\n\n\"Not without me,\" Prince Rupert said, setting his jaw. \"I don't know anything about this business with the dragons and wizards, but Jorillam is my responsibility. Until I lose him in the forest, that is.\"\n\n\"And Kazul is my responsibility,\" Cimorene said.\n\n\"Like it or not, I am going to get a look at those spells,\" Telemain stated flatly.\n\n\"Those wizards have caused me a lot of trouble, what with one thing and another,\" Morwen pointed out. \"I intend to cause them a bit of trouble back.\"\n\n\"It is necessary to Your Majesty's dignity that Your Majesty take a proper escort with you,\" Willin put in.\n\n\"Quiet!\" Mendanbar said.\n\nEveryone stopped talking. Willin looked utterly astonished. Jorillam had a wary expression, and Prince Rupert and Telemain both looked mildly taken aback. Morwen's eyes gleamed approvingly behind her glasses.\n\nCimorene looked momentarily startled, but then she smiled.\n\nMendanbar took a deep breath. First things first. \"Crown Prince Jorillam.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"You are not coming on this expedition. You will stay here, at my castle, until I return. In the dungeon, just as you requested.\"\n\n\"But it's not fair,\" Jorillam said. \"I didn't know then that you were going to go fight wizards. And that elf-\" \"Willin is one of my people, and a native of the Enchanted Forest,\" Mendanbar said. \"You aren't.\n\nDon't bother arguing; you don't get a choice.\n\nI'm the King here, remember.\"\n\nJorillam gave him a sulky nod.\n\n\"Prince Rupert,\" Mendanbar went on, \"you were quite right to say that your nephew needs watching. You will stay here and keep an eye on him while I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Your Majesty,\" Prince Rupert said with a relieved sigh.\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't bring you with me, either, Willin,\" Mendanbar said, turning to his steward. \"Somebody has to take care of our visitors, you know, and you're the only possible person.\"\n\nWillin hesitated, plainly torn. \"It is my duty to serve Your Majesty regardless of the danger.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your willingness to accompany me,\" Mendanbar assured him.\n\n\"I feel, however, that you would serve me better here. Now, please take these two guests to the North-Northwest Tower dungeon and see that they get some refreshments.\"\n\n\"As Your Majesty commands,\" Willin said, bowing. He gestured to Prince Rupert and Crown Prince Jorillam, and led them away.\n\nWell, that takes care of them, anyway, Mendanbar thought as the three rounded a bend in the corridor and vanished from sight. The rest wouldn't be that easy. He looked over and saw Morwen, Cimorene, and Telemain standing side by side, wearing identical expressions of stubbornness, and he sighed. He supposed he could accidentally-on-purpose forget to include them in the transportation spell, but somehow he didn't think that would stop them. Not when one was a witch, one a magician, and one an experienced dragon's princess.\n\n\"Don't even bother trying to talk us out of it,\" Cimorene warned.\n\n\"You'll only waste more time.\"\n\n\"You're probably right,\" Mendanbar said at last. \"And anyway, I suspect I really should have some help with me, just in case.\"\n\n\"Very sensible of you,\" Morwen told him.\n\n\"Yes, well, let's get our buckets and go,\" Mendanbar said uncomfortably.\n\nThe four of them collected buckets of soapy water from the imperturbable castle footman. Cimorene and Telemain took two each, but Mendanbar only took one, because he wanted to keep one hand free in case he needed his sword. Morwen also took only one bucket. She did not explain, and her expression dared anyone to comment. No one did.\n\nThe footman left, removing Telemain's staff along the way. \"Be sure you put that somewhere safe,\" Telemain called after him.\n\nMendanbar looked around one last time, checking to make sure everyone was finally ready, then twitched the strands of power and transported them all to the foot of the Crystal Falls.\n\nThey appeared on the slippery bank of a narrow stream. A little farther on, the Crystal Falls poured in a shining curtain down the side of a sheer cliff of black glass. The water foamed and swirled at the foot of the falls, forming a small, restless pool, then rushed down the channel at their feet and dashed on into the deeper parts of the Enchanted Forest . The noise of the falling water was tremendous, and the air had a clean, sharp smell.\n\nMendanbar looked around to see that everyone was there and that no one had spilled the soapy water. He noticed, without surprise, that the two cats had come along, even though he had not specifically included them in the transportation spell. Cats were like that.\n\n\"Which way is the tunnel entrance?\" Cimorene asked. She had to shout to make herself heard over the roar of the waterfall.\n\n\"Over there,\" Mendanbar shouted back, waving at a clump of fir trees near the foot of the cliff. \"Watch your step.\"\n\n\"What did you say?\" Telemain yelled.\n\n\"He said, 'Watch your step,'\" Cimorene replied at the top of her lungs.\n\nTelemain nodded, and they moved cautiously away from the water-slick bank of the stream. The cats had already moved out of range of the mist billowing up from the base of the waterfall. When the rest of the group caught up to them, the two cats gave Mendanbar looks of deep reproach, as if to imply that he should have more sense than to set everyone down so close to such a damply uncomfortable spot.\n\nThe runnel entrance was a narrow crack in the side of the cliff, hidden behind the clump of firs. The cats trotted through it and vanished into the darkness. Morwen gazed after them with a thoughtful expression on her face.\n\n\"I don't suppose anyone remembered to bring a light?\" Cimorene said, eying the crack with evident misgiving.\n\nTelemain smiled and said three words that crackled in the air. A small globe of golden light appeared above his head. \"I'll go first, so the rest of you can see where you're stepping,\" he said, smiling with a trace of smugness.\n\n\"And what do you think will happen when we get near the wizards and their magic-absorbing spell gets hold of your little glow-ball?\"\n\nMorwen said sharply. \"You're not thinking, Telemain.\"\n\n\"I suppose you have a better idea?\"\n\nMorwen pushed her glasses firmly into place, set down her bucket of soapy water, and reached into one of her long, loose sleeves. She pulled out a small lantern and set it on the ground. Then she reached into the other sleeve, from which she pulled a flint striker and a long splinter of wood.\n\nExpertly, she struck a spark and lit the splinter, then used the splinter to light the lantern. She blew the splinter out, stuffed it and the flint back into her sleeve, and smiled at the surprise on everyone else's face.\n\n\"I thought we might be needing this,\" she said. Picking up the lantern and the bucket, she started for the mouth of the tunnel.\n\n\"Hang on a minute,\" Mendanbar said. \"I should go first. Would you give me the lantern, Morwen?\"\n\n\"Only if you don't dawdle,\" Morwen responded. \"My cats are in there.\"\n\n\"Of course. You come next, then, and Telemain after you. Cimorene can come last. That way we'll have a light between every two people.\"\n\nCimorene did not look happy about these arrangements, but Mendanbar did not give anyone time to argue. As soon as Morwen nodded, he took the lantern and started into the crack. It was only wide enough for one of them at a time to edge sideways, and the ground was covered with shattered rock, which made the footing treacherous. Juggling the lantern and his bucket back and forth from hand to hand, Mendanbar tried to see what lay ahead of him while still giving Morwen enough light to follow.\n\nProgress was slow, and he began to wonder whether the whole tunnel was going to be as narrow and difficult as this beginning.\n\n\"Maybe we would have been better off charging at the main entrance,\" he muttered to himself.\n\nAfter what seemed a very long time, but was probably only a few minutes, the runnel widened. The piles of shattered rock became fewer, then ceased altogether. Mendanbar heaved a sigh of relief and stopped to let the others catch up.\n\nMorwen was the first. \"Good,\" she said as she clambered over the last of the rock piles, balancing carefully to avoid spilling her bucket.\n\n\"I was beginning to think that rocky stuff was never going to end. Any sign of my cats?\"\n\n\"It would be more reasonable to ask whether there is any sign of the wizards,\" Telemain said, following Morwen into the wider part of the tunnel.\n\nThere was a large wet spot down one side of his many-pocketed vest; apparently he had not been as careful with his buckets as Morwen.\n\n\"I haven't seen a trace of the wizards,\" Mendanbar said, \"but the cats have been by here.\" He pointed at two small trails of footprints leading down the tunnel.\n\n\"Thank goodness that's over,\" Cimorene said as she emerged from the narrow section of the tunnel to join them. \"Why are you all just standing here? The Cave of Stone Icicles is a lot farther on.\"\n\nAs this was undeniably true, they set off again. There was still not room for all four of them to stand in a line, but at least now they could walk two by two without difficulty. Somehow, Cimorene ended up walking with Mendanbar in the front. Mendanbar was not sure whether to be glad or sorry. He enjoyed walking with Cimorene, even if they did not dare to talk much; the wizards might have someone listening for odd noises. On the other hand, being in front meant that he and Cimorene were the ones the wizards would attack first. Mendanbar did not like the idea of anyone attacking Cimorene, although he knew she could take care of herself.\n\nHe had some time to consider this, for the tunnel was long and winding, but he found it hard to concentrate with Cimorene walking so close beside him. He discovered that he wanted to put his arm around her as they walked-the one carrying the bucket of water, not the lantern-but somehow that didn't seem like the right thing to do when they were supposed to be watching out for wizards. He had never met a princess like Cimorene before.\n\nHe had never met anyone like Cimorene before. She was smart and brave and kind and loyal, and he liked her. In fact, he liked her a great deal.\n\nIn fact Suddenly, the light around Mendanbar dimmed. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder. The little globe that had been hovering over Telemain's head had gone out.\n\n\"Telemain?\" Mendanbar whispered.\n\n\"I didn't turn it off,\" Telemain whispered back. \"We must be getting near the wizards.\"\n\nMendanbar nodded without surprise-the atmosphere in the tunnel felt dry and magicless, and though they were still within the Enchanted Forest, he could no longer sense threads of power floating invisibly in the air. He swallowed, hoping he would not have to do any spells in a hurry.\n\n\"Keep close,\" he whispered to Telemain and Morwen, and slowly started forward once more.\n\nThe tunnel bent sharply to the left, then right, and without further warning opened out into a forest of stone pillars. A glimmer of light showed between the stones, and they could hear a mumble of voices in the distance.\n\nHastily, Mendanbar covered the lantern with a corner of his cloak, so that it only lit the area just in front of his feet. Cimorene dropped back. After a moment, she put her hand on his shoulder, and Mendanbar wondered briefly what she had done with the bucket. She gave his shoulder a brief squeeze to indicate that Morwen and Telemain had taken their places. Then he heard her pick the bucket up again.\n\nCarefully, Mendanbar edged through the pillars toward the light and voices.\n\nAs they drew nearer, Mendanbar began to understand what the voices were saying.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" grumbled one. \"We've wasted too much time already.\n\nWe should just take her outside, dose her with dragonsbane, and leave her for someone to find.\"\n\n\"Stop complaining, Dizenel,\" replied a smooth voice, and Mendanbar frowned as he recognized Zemenar's fluid tones. \"I have told you a hundred times how foolish that would be,\" Zemenar went on. \"I am not going to tell you for the hundred and first.\"\n\n\"He's right, though,\" another voice said. \"Someone is going to notice us pretty soon, and then where will all our planning be?\"\n\n\"Someone already has,\" a fourth voice rasped. \"What about those two this morning?\"\n\n\"A couple of adventurers,\" Zemenar said dismissively. \"They don't matter.\"\n\n\"They got away, didn't they? If they tell someone what they saw-\" \"They won't,\" Zemenar said.\n\n\"How can you be sure of that?\"\n\nZemenar gave a snort. \"Because of who they are. Can't you recognize a Wicked Uncle when you see one? He was probably here to drop the boy somewhere in the Enchanted Forest . He isn't going to tell anyone about us.\n\nAnd even if he does, what of it? Everyone knows odd things happen in the Enchanted Forest. His story will only be one more.\"\n\nMendanbar was at the end of the stone columns, close enough to see the wizards if he peeked around a pillar. There were ten of them, grouped about a small table at one side of an enormous cavern. Zemenar and two others were seated; the rest leaned against the wall of the cave or stood in clumps close by. High above the wizards, hundreds of long, cone-shaped columns hung like stone icicles from the ceiling. Four torches dangled from iron brackets on the wall and a lamp stood in the center of the table, throwing shadows like dark fangs from the hanging rocks.\n\nPartway across the cavern, a pale golden glow cut across the shadows like a drawn curtain. On the other side of the glow was a dragon, her wings folded along her back, her eyes narrowed to slits. Mendanbar recognized her at once, even without Cimorene's hiss. She was the same dragon they had seen in the magic window at the dwarfs house-Kazul, the King of the Dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Cleans Up",
                "text": "Mendanbar blew out the lantern and set it on the floor. They didn't need it anymore anyway. They were near enough to see by the light of the wizards' torches, even in the shadows. Carrying their buckets, Cimorene, Morwen, and Telemain slipped behind nearby pillars as another wizard came around the corner from the far end of the cave.\n\n\"Most gracious and powerful Head Wizard,\" he said, bowing to Zemenar.\n\n\"We've checked everything at least twice. There's no one outside and no sign of anyone coming. That spell Xinamon felt before must have been some sort of normal variation.\"\n\nBehind the pillars, Mendanbar winced. The wizards had noticed the locating spell he had sent out earlier. Cimorene frowned and shook her head at him, but he wasn't sure what she meant by that. Morwen scowled at them both and put her finger to her lips.\n\n\"Possibly,\" Zemenar replied. \"I don't want to take any chance, though.\n\nThe King of the Enchanted Forest has a certain amount of magic, and we don't fully understand it. Call in a few more wizards, just to make sure.\"\n\n\"If you don't want to take chances, we ought to use up the dragon now and get out of here,\" Dizenel said.\n\n\"I'm with you,\" the most recent arrival agreed. \"Dragons make me nervous. Are you sure she can't get out?\"\n\n\"If she could, she'd have done so right away,\" Zemenar said. \"Don't worry about it. We've put the power of at least an acre of the Enchanted Forest into building that shield, and no one can lower it except us.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" the wizard persisted.\n\n\"Take a closer look, if you're not satisfied,\" Zemenar said, waving at the glow.\n\n\"It's impressive,\" the wizard said, moving nearer. \"But with a spell this new, how can you be positive-Say, what's that?\"\n\nAt their companion's change in tone, the wizards' heads swiveled to look at Kazul. For a frozen moment, no one spoke. Then a wizard at the back said, \"It's a cat.\"\n\nMendanbar glanced sideways in time to see Morwen shake her head and take a firmer grip on her bucket of soapy water. He grimaced. They had only six buckets of soapy water among them, and there were already eleven wizards in the cave. If it came to a fight, they would be badly outnumbered.\n\n\"How did a cat get inside the shield?\" another wizard asked. \"It wasn't there yesterday.\"\n\n\"It wasn't there a few hours ago,\" Dizenel said. \"Where did it come from?\"\n\n\"Spread out and search the cave,\" Zemenar commanded, rising. \"And bring in the dragonsbane. Someone's snooping.\"\n\nThe wizards fanned out across the cavern and started toward the forest of pillars. There was no way Mendanbar and the others could get away without being seen, even if they had been willing to abandon Kazul to her fate. Mendanbar drew his sword. Soapy water or not, he felt better with a weapon in his hand.\n\nAs the first wizard reached the pillars, he jerked in surprise, then raised his staff. Before he could release whatever spell he had planned, a shower of soapy water drenched him from head to foot. The wizard shrieked loudly.\n\n\"Blast you six ways from next Wednesday!\" he shouted as he began to melt. \"This is the second time you've liquefied me! May you and your pet dragon and your triple-cursed wash water turn purple with orange spots and fall down a bottomless pit!\"\n\nThe other wizards stopped in their tracks. \"It's Cimorene!\" one of them said nervously.\n\n\"That's Princess Cimorene, to you,\" Cimorene said, stepping out from behind a pillar. She held her second bucket in plain sight, ready to throw.\n\n\"Stay back,\" Zemenar ordered. \"Blast her from a distance.\"\n\n\"Cowards!\" Cimorene taunted, and ducked behind another of the stone columns. \"Come and get me!\"\n\nIt wasn't going to work, Mendanbar told himself, taking a firmer grip on his sword. Zemenar was too clever to let his wizards chase Cimorene into the maze of stone. They would stay at a safe distance and throw bolts of power into the pillars until they destroyed the maze or killed everyone in it, or both.\n\nThree more wizards came running in. Zemenar stopped them with a gesture. The rest of the wizards backed away from the pillars and lined up across the width of the cave.\n\n\"Now, then,\" the Head Wizard said, lifting his staff and pointing it at the pillar Cimorene had ducked behind. \"Take this.\"\n\nMendanbar felt magic swell around the end of the staff. An instant later, before he had time to reach for the magic himself, the spell shot forward and exploded, shattering the pillar and sending chips of rock flying in all directions.\n\n\"Ow!\" Cimorene's voice cried from somewhere in the shadows.\n\nWithout thinking, Mendanbar stepped out from behind his pillar, bucket in one hand, sword in the other, into full view of the wizards. \"Over here!\" he called. If he could distract them for a minute or two, perhaps Cimorene could get safely behind another column.\n\n\"Mendanbar!\" For an instant, Zemenar looked thoroughly startled.\n\nThen he smiled nastily. \"How nice to see you. I've been hoping you would turn up, so we could finish this little business at last.\"\n\nAs he spoke, Zemenar stepped forward and shifted his staff to point at Mendanbar. Mendanbar raised his sword and stayed where he was. He felt magic building around the staff once more and decided not to wait to find out what Zemenar intended it to become. Instead, he reached out through the sword and touched the wizard's spell, the same way he touched the magic threads of the Enchanted Forest.\n\nIt was much easier to do here than it had been in the Mountains of Morning. The sword sopped up the spell in an instant. Mendanbar could sense the channels of power Zemenar had been using to feed his spell, and he touched those, too, and pulled. The sword obligingly drank them in.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Zemenar cried in astonishment, lowering his staff. His hair stood out around his head, as wild and tangled as the magical mess he'd left on the floor of Mendanbar's castle.\n\n\"I'm stopping you,\" Mendanbar said. His whole arm tingled with the power the sword had absorbed. If he could just think of the right thing to do with it\u2026\n\n\"And a good thing, too,\" Morwen said from several pillars over.\n\n\"You're too greedy for your own good, or anyone else's, for that matter.\"\n\n\"I am not greedy,\" Zemenar protested angrily. \"I have every right to-\" \"You're greedy, all right,\" Cimorene said from just behind Mendanbar.\n\n\"And you wouldn't know what to do with all the power you want even if you got it. Just look at you! Your hair's like a bird's nest.\"\n\nZemenar scowled. Mendanbar stared at him without really seeing him, trying to remember why Cimorene's words sounded familiar.\n\n\"The gargoyle!\" he said suddenly. \"Why didn't I think of that before?\"\n\n\"What gargoyle?\" one of the wizards asked.\n\n\"Never mind him,\" Zemenar said. \"He's only trying to distract us. All together, now: blast them?\"\n\nThe line of wizards raised their staffs. Mendanbar grinned and twisted the mass of power in the sword, just as he had done two days earlier when he had grown tired of the gargoyle's complaints. Soapy water spurted out of the empty air in front of the wizards in a hard, fast stream, as if it were being pumped through an invisible hose. The foaming spray washed over the entire line, thoroughly soaking them all.\n\nPuddles grew rapidly on the stones underfoot, and wizards shouted and slid on the suddenly slippery floor.\n\nSeveral of them dropped their staffs to rub at their eyes, which had apparently gotten soap in them. None of them melted.\n\nMendanbar felt a moment of panic. He'd been sure that his magically created soapy water would work just as well as the buckets they had hauled with them from the castle, but it didn't seem to be doing anything. The wizards would get themselves together any minute, and what would he do then?\n\n\"Did you remember the lemon juice?\" Cimorene said in his ear.\n\n\"Oh, right,\" said Mendanbar. He twisted the power again, and another spray of soapy water (this time smelling strongly of lemon) squirted over the wizards. To Mendanbar's considerable relief, they collapsed into gooey puddles, one after another. In another moment, there were no wizards left in the cave at all, only staffs, soggy robes, and a great deal of water and soapsuds.\n\nMendanbar studied the puddles, then set his bucket of soapy water on the ground. It didn't look as if he'd be needing it anymore. He kept his sword out, however, since he didn't know how many more wizards might still be outside.\n\n\"Fascinating,\" said Telemain. He moved forward and knelt at the edge of a puddle. \"This mess appears to be mainly the liquefying agent.\"\n\n\"It does?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"He means it's mostly soapy water,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"And a good thing, too, or it would take forever to clean up,\" Morwen said. \"Wizards are a nuisance even when they're gone.\"\n\n\"It's a pity it isn't permanent,\" Cimorene said. \"I'd like to get rid of that Zemenar once and for all.\"\n\n\"Removing their staffs will delay their reappearance,\" Telemain said.\n\n\"I suggest we do so before we leave.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Morwen said. She picked her way between puddles and began collecting the wizards' staffs. Telemain went back to studying the puddle.\n\nCimorene turned to Mendanbar. \"Now, if Kazul can just-oh, no!\"\n\nMendanbar followed Cimorene's gaze. The glowing, golden shield spell still blocked half of the cavern, imprisoning Kazul.\n\nThere was a long silence. Then Cimorene said, \"Telemain, were those wizards right when they said they were the only ones who could take down that spell?\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Telemain said, looking up. \"Really, must you interrupt so constantly? I'm never going to get anything finished at this rate.\"\n\n\"But think of all the interesting things you're finding out,\" Mendanbar said. Kazul's shield, for instance. Have you ever seen anything like it before?\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, no,\" Telemain replied, scrambling to his feet. \"Let me look at it.\"\n\n\"That was the idea,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\nThey all watched while Telemain examined the shield. He walked from one end to the other, then put a hand gingerly against the glow and pushed.\n\nWhen nothing seemed to happen, he twisted one of his rings twice and touched it to the glow.\n\n\"Can you get rid of it?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"I don't know yet,\" Telemain said. \"I'm still checking the parameters of the primary enchantment.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nThe magician twisted a different ring and touched it to the glow. This time there was a spark. \"Ah!\" Telemain said in a satisfied tone. \"I suspected as much.\"\n\n\"Well, are you going to tell us about it?\" Morwen said as she dropped a load of wizards' staffs in a pile against the wall.\n\n\"It's a self-sustaining barrier produced by a recirculation of the initial power input,\" Telemain explained. \"Because of the rotation effect, most physical substances cannot pass through the shield in either direction. Unlike the majority of spells, this one needs no exterior energy source, so the usual procedures for dismantling such sorceries would be completely ineffective.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Cimorene demanded.\n\n\"The spell keeps itself up, we can't get in or out, and we don't have any way of getting rid of it,\" Mendanbar translated.\n\n\"Then how did the cat get in?\" Cimorene asked, pointing at Morwen's large silver-and-cream cat, which had climbed onto Kazul's back and lay curled up between her wings.\n\n\"Cats are like that,\" Morwen said. \"When he comes out, I'll ask him how he did it, if you want me to, but don't expect too much in the way of an answer. Cats enjoy being mysterious.\"\n\n\"I don't care what they enjoy,\" Cimorene said. \"We have to get Kazul out of there, and if that cat can help-\" \"It is unlikely,\" Telemain interrupted, stepping back from the glow.\n\n\"The cat's method of moving through the barrier is, in all probability, useless to anyone else. Fortunately, we have other resources.\"\n\n\"We do?\"\n\nTelemain looked at Mendanbar. \"While I have not had a chance to make a thorough and complete examination of that extremely intriguing weapon you carry, I have observed enough to determine that its function is fundamentally antithetical to wizards and their magic. A straightforward penetration appears quite possible and would disrupt the recirculation effect, resulting in the collapse of the self-sustaining mechanism.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Cimorene.\n\n\"Really, Telemain, must you?\" said Morwen.\n\n\"Right,\" said Mendanbar. He took three steps forward and stuck his sword into the glowing spell.\n\nA jolt of power ran up his arm and the globe of light flashed brighter than the sun. Mendanbar's eyes were dazzled by the flare, so he couldn't see anything except purple spots, but he heard a loud roar, the angry hiss of a cat, and the sound of scales on stone, so he was sure the barrier was gone.\n\n\"Kazul,\" Cimorene called from behind him. \"It's all right. It's not wizards, it's us.\"\n\n\"And about time,\" a deep, unfamiliar voice said. \"Hello, Cimorene, Morwen. It's nice to see you again. Who are these others?\"\n\n\"This is Mendanbar, the King of the Enchanted Forest,\" Cimorene answered, and Mendanbar felt her hand on his shoulder. \"He's the one who let you out. Over there is Telemain. He's a magician, and he figured out how to do it.\"\n\n\"Greetings, Your Majesty,\" Mendanbar said, blinking. The purple spots began to fade at last, and he found himself staring into the green-gold eyes of an enormous female dragon. He only just managed to keep himself from backing up automatically. \"Pleased to meet you.\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, most definitely so am I,\" said the dragon with a smile that showed a large number of sharp-looking silver teeth.\n\n\"How did you manage it?\"\n\n\"Weren't you watching?\" Cimorene asked.\n\n\"Watching what?\" Kazul replied. \"I couldn't see a thing except what was inside that blasted bubble with me.\"\n\n\"We could see you.\"\n\n\"The shielding spell was unidirectional,\" Telemain put in. \"The external absorptive effect would enhance its efficiency.\"\n\nKazul gave Telemain a hard look and smiled again, this time showing a//of her teeth. \"What was that again?\"\n\nTelemain looked at Kazul. Then he looked at Mendanbar. He frowned in concentration, and finally he said carefully, \"The shield was a one-way spell. It soaked up everything that tried to get in from outside and used the energy to make itself stronger.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Morwen said. \"I was beginning to think you were hopeless.\"\n\n\"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about,\" Telemain said A yowl of complaint made them all turn their heads. The cream-and-silver cat was standing at the edge of the wet, soapy, lemon-scented area where the wizards had melted, shaking his front paws one at a time and eying the water with extreme disfavor.\n\n\"Too bad,\" Morwen told the cat. \"If you hadn't sneaked in and attracted their attention, Mendanbar might not have had to be quite so extravagant with the spray. You'll have to get across it by yourself.\n\nWhere's Chaos?\"\n\nThe cat blinked disdainfully and began washing his right paw. Kazul snorted softly. \"If you want a ride, climb up,\" she told the cat.\n\n\"But you'd better hurry, because I'm leaving now.\"\n\nKazul rose to her feet, shaking her wings. The cat looked up from his washing, then took two bounds and leaped from the top of a projecting rock. He disappeared behind Kazul's shoulder, and there was a brief sound of claws scraping against scales. Then the cat appeared on Kazul's back, riding comfortably between the dragon's wings and looking tremendously pleased with himself.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Mendanbar said as the dragon started toward the other end of the cave. \"There may be more wizards out there.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Kazul without slowing down at all. \"Four days is a long time to spend inside a blank bubble, and I owe them one. Besides, I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"I should think so!\" Cimorene said, following the dragon. \"Didn't they give you anything to eat?\"\n\n\"No, and I wouldn't have taken it if they had,\" Kazul said. Her voice became muffled as her head turned the corner at the far end of the cave.\n\n\"For all I knew, those mumble mumble could have mumble dragonsbane in everything. I mumble mumble end up like Tokoz.\"\n\n\"But if there are more wizards-,\" Mendanbar began, then gave up and hurried after Cimorene. Clearly, neither she nor Kazul was going to listen to him, and if there were more wizards outside it would be better if he-and his sword-were there to help."
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Mendanbar Grows Some Trees and Makes a Wicked Suggestion",
                "text": "There were, however, no wizards outside the cave. There was only an enormous stretch of barren land that looked as if it had been burned.\n\nMorwen's long-haired tabby cat sat in the ashes several feet from the mouth of the cave, surveying the waste with evident disapproval.\n\n\"There you are,\" Morwen said to the cat as she joined Cimorene and Mendanbar by Kazul's left shoulder. \"Any sign of more wizards?\"\n\nThe cat meowed.\n\n\"Good,\" said Morwen. \"Did any of the others get away?\"\n\nThe cat made a growling noise.\n\n\"Very good,\" said Morwen. She turned to Mendanbar. \"Can you keep them from interrupting us by accident?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Mendanbar said. \"There isn't any magic here for me to work with.\" He was horrified at the extent of the destruction. How was he going to fix it?\n\n\"So this is how they did it,\" Telemain's voice said from behind Mendanbar. He sounded pleased, as if he had just solved a very difficult puzzle. \"I'd been wondering.\"\n\n\"Did what?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"Established that shield spell,\" Telemain said. \"The power involved was clearly several factors beyond the generating capacity of-\" Kazul turned her head and looked at Telemain.\n\nTelemain coughed. \"There weren't enough wizards to have done it by themselves.\"\n\n\"Power,\" Mendanbar said, half to himself. \"They sucked all the magic out of this whole area and put it in the shield. Where did it go when the shield disappeared?\"\n\n\"Into your sword, of course,\" said Telemain, as if that were so obvious that everyone should have realized it without his saying anything.\n\n\"And the sword is linked to the forest,\" Mendanbar said. \"And this is part of the forest, or should be. So\u2026\"\n\n\"So all you have to do is use the sword to put the magic back where it belongs,\" Cimorene finished.\n\n\"Theoretically, that should work fine,\" Telemain said, frowning. \"But the practical applications aren't always that easy.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Cimorene. \"That sword turned a whole patch of the Mountain of Morning into a bit of the Enchanted Forest when we were having all that trouble getting here. Mendanbar pulled it back into the sword then; all he has to do now is turn that spell around and push magic out. Try it, Mendanbar.\"\n\nSlowly, Mendanbar lowered the tip of the sword until it touched the ashes. He couldn't feel anything at first. Then he realized that he was trying to reach outside himself for the threads of magic that always floated around him in the Enchanted Forest . And in this wasteland there were no threads.\n\nHe frowned. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the sword instead.\n\nThat felt more promising. He could sense power crackling along the length of the blade, lots of power, but he did not think it would be enough.\n\nHe stretched deeper, using his experience outside the Enchanted Forest to pull together every last bit of magic he could reach. It was still not enough.\n\n\"I don't think I can do it, Cimorene,\" he muttered.\n\n\"You can, too,\" Cimorene said, and put her hand on his shoulder encouragingly. \"Try again.\"\n\nAs she touched his shoulder, Mendanbar felt it come-not just magic, not only power, but all the magic and power of the Enchanted Forest itself.\n\nIt washed over him, and as it did he saw patterns in it, patterns that were the threads he manipulated to work magic in the forest. And he saw how to shift the pattern just a little, filling it in with the power stolen from the forest and stored in the sword, to repair the damage the wizards had done. Without thinking, he did it.\n\nHe heard an astonished gasp from Cimorene, a snort from Kazul, a low whistle from Telemain, and a surprised noise from one of the cats.\n\n\"Well? said Morwen.\n\nMendanbar opened his eyes. A thick carpet of moss, greener than Kazul's scales, spread out in all directions from the cave mouth.\n\nMassive oaks and beeches with cooper leaves stood so close together that it was hard to see more than a little way into the shadows below them, packing every part of what had been a burned-out waste moments before.\n\nAll around, Mendanbar could feel threads of magic hovering in the air, ready to use for more ordinary spells.\n\nNo one said anything for a long moment. Then Telemain tore his gaze away from the restored forest and turned to Mendanbar.\n\n\"Could you do that again, slowly, so I can analyze it?\" he asked.\n\nDespite Telemain's urging, Mendanbar refused to repeat the spell immediately, though he did offer to let the magician watch when he went to clean up the barren area near the Green Glass Pool. Then Telemain wanted to stay and investigate the melted wizards some more, but Morwen and Cimorene insisted that this was a bad idea, and eventually he gave in. He was inclined to be sulky about it until Morwen pointed out that he had fourteen more wizards' staffs to study, including one that had belonged to the Head Wizard. It cheered him up enormously.\n\n\"You're quite right,\" he told Morwen. \"Those wizards will get themselves back together before long, and once they do, they'll come looking for their staffs. If I don't examine the staffs before then, I'll lose my chance. I can always melt another wizard later and study the disintegration process then.\" He hurried back into the cave, reappearing a moment later with his arms full of wizards' staffs.\n\n\"Be careful with those!\" Mendanbar said as Telemain came out onto the moss-covered ground.\n\n\"They are unlikely to be a source of difficulty without intelligent guidance,\" Telemain said reprovingly. \"So long as the wizards are not in contact with them, they are merely passive instruments of assimilation. There's nothing to worry about.\"\n\n\"Yes, there is,\" Cimorene put in. \"If you drop them, Mendanbar will have a lot of ugly brown marks on his nice new moss. And if they can do that, there's no telling what else they might do.\"\n\n\"Wizards store spells in their staffs,\" Morwen said, nodding. \"You can't always be sure what will set one off.\"\n\nTelemain looked at them with annoyance. \"I suppose you'd rather I left them here. Have you no spirit of scientific investigation?\"\n\n\"Not where wizards are concerned,\" Cimorene muttered.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Morwen said. \"I'm just as curious as you are, Telemain, but I never heard that a spirit of scientific inquiry precluded taking intelligent precautions.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" said Telemain. \"Why didn't you just say so in the first place?\"\n\nWhile the others talked, Mendanbar studied the staffs, keeping a careful watch on the threads of Enchanted Forest magic that were nearest to Telemain. To his surprise, the threads showed no tendency to drift toward the magician or wind themselves into knots around the staffs he carried. Apparently, Telemain was right-the staffs would only be a minor nuisance as long as their wizards weren't carrying them. He resolved to mention this to Telemain later. Perhaps Telemain could even help him find a way to deal with the problems the staffs caused when they did have their wizards with them.\n\nA few minutes later, when Kazul was satisfied that there were no wizards left in the area, Mendanbar took them all back to the castle with a quick spell. He was relieved that the wizards' staffs caused no trouble, and pleased to discover that transporting a dragon was no harder than transporting anyone else.\n\nThey materialized in the castle courtyard, just inside the moat.\n\nWillin, who had apparently been watching for their arrival, came hurrying out to meet them.\n\n\"Welcome home, Your Majesty,\" the elf said with evident relief.\n\nMendanbar noticed that he'd dug up a formal uniform somewhere, all sky-blue velvet and dusty gold braid. \"May I assume that your mission was a success?\"\n\n\"Yes, you may,\" Mendanbar said. \"Willin, this is Kazul, the King of the Dragons, and she's very hungry. See if you can scare up something in the kitchen that would do for a dragon-sized meal.\"\n\n\"At once, Your Majesty,\" Willin said, bowing. \"And may I congratulate you and your companions on your great achievement and welcome King Kazul to the Enchanted Forest.\"\n\n\"The welcome I'm interested in is dinner,\" Kazul said with a smile that showed all her teeth.\n\nWillin backed away hastily. \"Of course, of course. I'll see about it immediately.\"\n\n\"I'd better come with you,\" said Cimorene. \"I've been Kazul's Chief Cook for over a year, and I know what she likes.\"\n\nThe two of them left, heading for the other side of the castle, with Kazul trailing hopefully behind them.\n\nMendanbar wasn't sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. He wanted very much to talk to Cimorene, but he wasn't sure how to tell her what he wanted to say, and anyway they certainly couldn't discuss the things he wanted to talk about with all these other people around.\n\n\"Mendanbar, have you got somewhere I could work on these without being disturbed?\" Telemain asked, nodding at the load of wizards' staffs he was carrying.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind examining them myself,\" Morwen said.\n\n\"The blue room would be best, I think,\" Mendanbar said. \"The light is better in my study, but there's a gargoyle in the corner who can be, um, difficult.\"\n\n\"We'll take the study,\" Morwen said decisively. \"Light is important, and once Telemain gets involved, he won't notice any distractions.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" Telemain asked, nettled.\n\nMorwen sniffed. \"I can handle considerably more than a mere gargoyle.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Mendanbar said. \"As long as you're sure.\"\n\nHe showed them to the study and helped them get settled, then went down to the kitchen to see how Cimorene and Kazul were doing. He found Kazul in the rear courtyard, eating an enormous kettle of stew that had been intended to be supper for the entire castle. Cimorene was in the kitchen, her arms covered in flour to the elbows, rolling out pie crust and giving orders to the cook. Mendanbar stayed long enough to make sure the cook would do whatever Cimorene told him to, and then Cimorene chased him away, saying that it was difficult enough to cook in a strange kitchen without people hovering over her.\n\n\"You don't have to cook anything,\" Mendanbar told her.\n\n\"I do if we want any dinner,\" Cimorene retorted. \"Kazul is already eating everything that was ready for tonight, and she's going to want more as soon as she's finished. Your people aren't really prepared to cope with a visiting dragon.\"\n\n\"We've never had one before.\"\n\n\"Well, you have one now.\" Cimorene glanced toward the courtyard and lowered her voice. \"I think We'll be staying for a few days at least, if that won't cause too many problems. Kazul needs to get her strength back before she tries to fly back to the Mountain of Morning.\"\n\n\"You can stay as long as you like,\" Mendanbar assured her. \"Is there anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"You can let me get back to making dinner!\" Cimorene said. She was smiling, but she obviously meant what she had said.\n\n\"All right. Call me if you need anything.\" Mendanbar bowed and left, feeling a little put out.\n\nHe went to the castle library, since his study was occupied, and poked about in the scrolls for a few minutes. Then he decided to check on Prince Rupert and his nephew. He found the middle-aged prince quickly enough, but he had to send someone to retrieve the young Crown Prince from the dungeon.\n\n\"Did you enjoy your stay?\" Mendanbar asked when Crown Prince Jorillam arrived at last.\n\n\"It was all right,\" Jorillam said. He looked rumpled and vaguely dissatisfied.\n\n\"But there weren't any rats. I thought there'd be rats. There wasn't a rack, either.\"\n\n\"Jorillam!\" Prince Rupert said sharply. \"It's not polite to complain about things like that. Where are your manners?\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Jorillam said, frowning. \"If there were rats and a rack, I'd be expected to object, wouldn't I? So why can't I complain when they aren't there?\"\n\n\"It's not the same thing,\" Rupert told him. \"I'm sorry, Your Majesty,\" he went on, turning to Mendanbar. \"He's used to getting his own way.\n\nI'm afraid I haven't done a very good job of teaching him how to behave.\"\n\n\"I behave just fine,\" Jorillam said.\n\n\"I am beginning to understand why you wanted to abandon him in the Enchanted Forest,\" Mendanbar said to Prince Rupert.\n\nRupert flushed. \"No, no, it's not that. I'm really very fond of the boy.\n\nBut I have an obligation, you know, and there's no getting out of it.\"\n\n\"You can leave me here, Uncle,\" Jorillam said persuasively. \"That's abandoning me in the Enchanted Forest, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Mendanbar put in quickly. He didn't want to think about the problems the young Crown Prince could cause if he stayed at the castle. \"There are too many people here for it to count as abandonment.\"\n\nPrince Rupert nodded gloomily. \"I'm afraid you're right. And frankly, I'm not at all sure that abandoning him is the right notion. I just can't think of anything else wicked to do on short notice.\"\n\n\"But you promised you'd abandon me in the Enchanted Forest,\" Jorillam protested. \"And I want to be abandoned and have all sorts of adventures and come home covered in glory.\"\n\n\"You're a little young for that,\" Mendanbar commented, studying the Crown Prince. He smiled suddenly as an idea came to him. \"What you need is some proper training.\"\n\n\"There isn't time,\" Jorillam said smugly. \"Uncle has to do something wicked to me right away.\"\n\n\"Ah, but that's just the point,\" Mendanbar said. He turned to Prince Rupert, ignoring Jorillam's suddenly wary expression. \"Abandoning Crown Prince Jorillam won't do you any good, because he wants to be abandoned.\n\nLetting him have his own way isn't terribly wicked, even if it isn't good for him.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you're right,\" Rupert said sadly.\n\n\"But Uncle-\" \"On the other hand,\" Mendanbar went on, disregarding Jorillam's interjection \"if you promised you'd abandon him, breaking that promise would certainly be wicked. And if you sent him off to a private school for princes-\" \"I don't want to go to school!\"\n\n\"Oh, my.\" Prince Rupert looked from Mendanbar to Jorillam-who now looked thoroughly alarmed-and back. \"I think I see what you're getting at. If he hates the idea, then it probably is wicked, even if it's good for him. And there's breaking the promise, too.\"\n\n\"And you wouldn't have to tell anyone at home what you'd done with him,\" Mendanbar said. \"You could rule the country just as if you really had abandoned him in the forest, and no one would know. Surely misleading all those people would be wicked enough for your society.\"\n\n\"I think you're right,\" Prince Rupert said, smiling for the first time since Mendanbar had met him. \"I really think you're right.\" His face fell suddenly. \"But how am I going to find a good school before sunset tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" Mendanbar said reassuringly. \"I know just the place. It's up in the Mountains of Morning, where no one is likely to run across it, and it's run by a dwarf named Herman. If you like, I'll send a messenger off right away to arrange things.\"\n\n\"No!\" said Jorillam.\n\nThat would be wonderful,\" said Prince Rupert with relief. \"Ah, I don't suppose this Herman person would be willing to write a letter to the Society explaining matters?\"\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" Mendanbar said. \"But what do you want it for?\"\n\n'Just to confirm that I'm fulfilling the requirements,\" Prince Rupert explained. \"It's a rather unusual arrangement, you see, and I want to be sure the Society will think I've been wicked enough.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Mendanbar told him. \"Don't worry about it. If Herman won't write you a negative enough letter, I'll send one myself. I'll bet even the Right Honorable Wicked Stepmothers' Traveling, Drinking, and Debating Society will believe the King of the Enchanted Forest.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "In Which Willin Finally Gets to Arrange a Formal Celebration",
                "text": "For the next several days, Mendanbar was busier than he could remember being in a long, long time. Besides arranging for Crown Prince Jorillam's schooling, a stream of messengers had to be sent to the dragons in the Mountains of Morning to explain where their King was and to warn them about the wizards.\n\nMorwen and Telemain argued constantly about what they were finding out from the wizards' staffs, and when they weren't arguing, they were asking for obscure reference books and peculiar ingredients for their spells.\n\nBetween the two of them, they kept the small castle staff busy hunting for things.\n\nThe wizards themselves seemed to have disappeared completely, but Mendanbar didn't trust them to stay gone. He spent several hours every day checking the entire network of magic that enveloped the Enchanted Forest , looking for the tangles that wizards with staffs always caused, so that he would know if any of them returned. In the process, he found several more burned-out areas where the wizards had stolen the magic of the forest.\n\nFortunately, none of the charred spots were very big, but repairing them was not an easy task, and Mendanbar worried constantly about what would happen if a wizard sneaked into the forest and soaked up a larger patch before he could be melted.\n\nHe confided this worry to Cimorene on the third day after Kazul's rescue.\n\n\"What you really need is a way to keep them from soaking up magic in the first place,\" said Cimorene. \"Then it wouldn't matter if they sneaked in, because they wouldn't be able to do any real harm.\"\n\n\"They could still cause plenty of trouble,\" Mendanbar said. \"But you're right, it would solve a lot of problems. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to stop them.\"\n\n\"Well, of course you can't,\" Cimorene said. \"You don't know enough about wizards and that ridiculous magic-absorbing spell of theirs. Why don't you ask Telemain?\"\n\nSo Mendanbar went off to find Telemain, who was with Morwen, working on the last of the wizards' staffs. At first, Telemain was a little annoyed at being interrupted, but when Mendanbar explained his problem, however, the magician nodded.\n\n\"An automatic spell to reroute any magical power should do the trick,\" Telemain said. \"That way, anything they try to grab will just slide back where it belongs, and there will never be any new holes to fix.\"\n\nMorwen looked at Telemain in mild surprise. \"You're slipping,\" she said. \"I actually understood that.\"\n\n\"Can you make up an automatic spell for me?\" Mendanbar asked quickly, before Telemain could take offense.\n\n\"It shouldn't be a problem,\" Telemain said. \"It'll need some sort of anchor, though, or you'll have to keep checking to see if it's still working.\n\nAny ideas?\"\n\nThe three of them discussed it for a few minutes, and finally Morwen suggested tying the spell to the sword. This turned out to be an even better idea than it first appeared. Working through the sword, Mendanbar could manipulate the power of the Enchanted Forest directly, and with Telemain's help he made the new spell an integral part of the forest's magic.\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Cimorene asked when he sought her out to tell her how well her idea had worked.\n\n\"It means that if any wizards come into the Enchanted Forest, their staffs won't absorb any magic, ever, for as long as they stay,\" Mendanbar explained. \"I won't even have to check the spell very often, because it's tied to the sword. As long as the sword is anywhere in the forest, the wizards can't do a thing.\"\n\nCimorene frowned. \"They could still use the spells they have stored in their staffs, couldn't they? And what if you have to leave the Enchanted Forest again?\"\n\n\"I'll have to take a different marc sword, that's all,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"I ought to do that anyway, because of the way that one sprays magic around outside the forest. It's not exactly inconspicuous.\"\n\n\"Very true,\" Cimorene said with a smile.\n\nThey were silent together for a moment. Then Cimorene shook her head.\n\n\"Kazul will be ready to leave tomorrow. She thinks she's ready today, but I told her not to push.\"\n\n\"I\u2013 That's good,\" Mendanbar said. He hesitated, then said tentatively, \"I suppose you'll be going with her?\"\n\n\"What else would I be doing?\" Cimorene asked. She sounded more curious than sarcastic.\n\nMendanbar took a deep breath. \"You could stay here. At the castle, I mean. With me.\" This wasn't coming out at all the way he had wanted it to, but it was too late to stop now. He hurried on, \"As Queen of the Enchanted Forest, if you think you would like that. I would.\"\n\n\"Would you, really?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mendanbar said, looking down. \"I love you, and-and-\" \"And you should have said that to begin with,\" Cimorene interrupted, putting her arms around him. Mendanbar looked up, and the expression on her face made his heart begin to pound.\n\n'Just to be sure I have this right,\" Cimorene went on with a blinding smile, \"did you just ask me to marry you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mendanbar said. \"At least, that's what I meant.\"\n\n\"Good. I will.\"\n\nMendanbar tried to find something to say, but he was too happy to think. He leaned forward two inches and kissed Cimorene, and discovered that he didn't need to say anything at all.\n\nThe first person they told was, of course, Kazul. Mendanbar was a little nervous about it, because from what he'd heard, dragons tended to get testy when their princesses ran off with someone, but Kazul didn't seem to mind at all.\n\n\"Good for you,\" she said to Mendanbar. \"And congratulations to the pair of you.\" Her eyelids lowered halfway, and she looked at Cimorene.\n\n\"I'd been wondering how much longer you were going to stay.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you mean,\" Cimorene said indignantly. \"I wasn't planning to leave! This just sort of happened.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Kazul said. \"But you'd have gone soon in any case. Now that you've gotten things organized, there isn't really enough work to keep you busy in the Mountains of Morning. You wouldn't have stayed long, once you started to get bored.\"\n\n\"Living with dragons doesn't sound boring to me,\" Mendanbar said.\n\n\"That's because you've never done it,\" Kazul replied. \"Being Queen of the Enchanted Forest will give Cimorene more scope for her talents.\"\n\n\"Then you really don't object?\" Mendanbar asked.\n\n\"Why should I?\" Kazul said. \"You're a nice enough person, as humans go, and you've been very polite about the whole thing. That doesn't happen often. Normally, knights and princes just grab a princess and run. And most of the princesses don't even bother to say good-bye, much less give proper notice.\" She looked at Cimorene and sighed.\n\n\"I'll miss your cooking, though.\"\n\n\"I can come back for a week or two, if you'd like, and train a replacement,\" Cimorene offered.\n\n\"I may take you up on that, once I find one,\" Kazul said thoughtfully.\n\n\"And in the meantime, you can come over for dinner a lot,\" Mendanbar said, and both Cimorene and Kazul smiled at him.\n\nWhen Willin heard about the engagement, he was delighted. The wedding of the King of the Enchanted Forest was just the sort of vast formal occasion the elf had been craving, and he threw himself into the preparations with enthusiasm. He didn't even object when he learned that the bride wanted the King of the Dragons for her matron-of-honor and a witch for her bridesmaid.\n\n\"Kazul and Morwen are my best friends,\" Cimorene explained. \"Besides, if I have them, Mother won't insist that my sisters be bridesmaids.\"\n\n\"You have sisters?\" Mendanbar asked, somewhat taken aback.\n\nCimorene nodded. \"Six of them. They're all perfectly lovely and sweet, and the sight of Kazul will probably scare them silly.\"\n\n\"Typical princesses,\" Mendanbar muttered, but without any active dislike. He didn't seem to mind foolish princesses much anymore, as long as he didn't have to marry one. It was amazing what a difference being engaged to Cimorene made.\n\n\"They aren't as featherbrained as they sound,\" Cimorene told him.\n\n\"They just act as if they are.\"\n\n\"I don't think I like the sound of that,\" Mendanbar said. \"Are you sure they won't want to be bridesmaids anyway? Maybe we should just elope.\"\n\n\"No, it's too late for that,\" Cimorene told him. \"Don't worry about it, though. It will work out fine.\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" Mendanbar said, but he was not really convinced.\n\nThe note Cimorene's mother sent to acknowledge the engagement only increased Mendanbar's misgivings. I am delighted to hear that you are going to be properly settled at last, Cimorene dear, ran the note. I am enclosing a list of relatives and family friends who ought certainly to be included in your wedding plans, however unconventional those may be. Your father wishes to know which half of the kingdom your betrothed would prefer, as he is anxious to get the paperwork out of the way as soon as possible.\n\n\"Half the kingdom?\" Mendanbar asked cautiously.\n\nCimorene looked more than a little put out. \"It's the usual reward for rescuing a princess from a dragon. I hoped they'd forgotten about it, but I should have known better. Mother would never do anything so incorrect.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't want it. One kingdom is more than enough for me.\"\n\n\"Then you'd better write them immediately and tell them so,\" Cimorene advised. \"Otherwise they'll have all the forms and documents and records written out, signed by twenty noble witnesses, and sealed by every member of Father's Council, and you'll never be able to get rid of it.\"\n\n\"I'll see to it at once.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Cimorene picked up the long list of names that had been enclosed with the note. \"I'll take this in to Willin, so someone can start addressing the invitations.\"\n\n\"Do we have to invite all of them?\"\n\n\"We might as well,\" Cimorene said. \"We're asking everyone else. And most of them are family.\"\n\n\"I think it would be easier to elope,\" Mendanbar said.\n\nThe guest list was enormous. Almost all the dragons were coming, and so were a great many of their princesses, past and present. After some initial misgivings, Cimorene's entire family decided to attend, including all six of her sisters and their husbands, her fourteen nieces and nephews, her parents, three of her aunts, two uncles, seventeen cousins, and her fairy godmother. Queen Alexandra was also coming, along with all twelve of her daughters. Mendanbar couldn't help feeling a little nervous about that, out of habit. All the kings and queens and princes and grand dukes who lived around the edges of the Enchanted Forest had had to be invited, and so had most of the odd and unusual people who lived inside the forest itself. Even the ogres and trolls had agreed to behave themselves if they were allowed to be present. In fact, the only people who hadn't been invited were the wizards.\n\n\"This wedding will be the best and most prestigious event in years!\"\n\nWillin said happily as the acceptances poured in.\n\n\"It's certainly going to be the biggest,\" Mendanbar said, gazing at the stacks of paper in mild amazement. \"Where are we going to put them all?\"\n\n\"You are not to worry about that, Your Majesty,\" Willin told him sternly. \"It is my job to oversee the preparations, and that includes arranging an appropriate place to hold the ceremony and the reception afterward.\"\n\n\"I really think it would have been easier to elope,\" Mendanbar grumbled.\n\nIn the end, they decided to hold the wedding in Fire-Flower Meadow.\n\nThe gargoyle in Mendanbar's study complained about the decision long and loudly, because it would obviously be unable to attend, but the meadow was the only open area in the entire Enchanted Forest that would be large enough for the enormous crowd of guests.\n\n\"I bet you think that makes it all right,\" the gargoyle told Mendanbar and Cimorene several days before the wedding. 'Just because you want to have hundreds and hundreds of people at your wedding, I'm supposed to smile and say I don't mind being left out. Well, it isn't all right and I won't do it!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't expect you to smile about anything,\" Mendanbar muttered.\n\nCimorene studied the gargoyle thoughtfully. \"If you're that eager to come, I suppose we could take the molding in that corner apart and find someone to bring you down to the field to watch,\" she offered.\n\nThe gargoyle looked down at her in alarm. \"Take me apart? Oh, no, you don't! I'm not stupid. I know what would happen. Even if you managed to get me out of here without damaging me, you'd forget to put me back afterward, and I'd spend centuries in a storeroom somewhere. Dust and dry rot!\"\n\n\"Well, then I'm afraid all I can do is stop in before I leave for the ceremony,\" Cimorene said. \"Unless Telemain can fix up a spell on one of the windows so you can watch from here.\"\n\n\"I don't want that magician messing around with anything in my-wait a minute, did you say you'd stop in? You mean, here? In this room?\"\n\n\"That's what she said,\" Mendanbar told it.\n\n\"I wasn't talking to you,\" the gargoyle said. Looking back at Cimorene, it went on, \"You mean, you'd come and see me before the wedding?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Cimorene said, nodding. \"Right before? All dressed up and everything?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Cimorene promised.\n\n\"Hot dog!\" said the gargoyle. \"I'll take it! Oh, boy, I can hardly wait! This is going to be even better than going to the wedding.\"\n\n\"It is?\" Mendanbar said suspiciously. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I'll get to see her all dolled up before you do, that's why,\" the gargoyle answered smugly. \"Everybody knows the groom doesn't get to see the bride on the wedding day until the ceremony. And she's going to stop in here first! Oh, boy, oh, boy!\"\n\nMendanbar looked at Cimorene.\n\n\"He's right, you know,\" Cimorene said apologetically. \"And I've promised.\"\n\n\"He's never going to let me forget this,\" Mendanbar muttered and left to talk to Telemain about setting up Fire-Flower Meadow for the wedding.\n\nDespite Willin's determination to handle the wedding plans himself, there were a number of things only Mendanbar could do. Among the most important was making sure that Fire-Flower Meadow and the area around it stayed firmly in one spot on the day of the wedding, so that all the guests could find it. This was not an easy thing to arrange. Even with Telemain's help, it took Mendanbar several days' worth of work before he was positive no one would miss the wedding because of a shift in the forest.\n\nThe night before the ceremony, Mendanbar and Telemain went over the whole field an inch at a time, to make certain that all the fire-flowers had been picked (so that none of the guests would get an accidental hotfoot) and to take care of any lingering minor enchantments. They found two princesses who had been turned into pinks, a frog prince, and a hedgehog that had once been somebody's groom. All of them were grateful to be disenchanted and very happy to be invited to the wedding.\n\nThe day of the wedding dawned bright and clear. Telemain had spent most of the previous week making sure that it would, while explaining to anyone who would listen that weather magic worked best if one set it up over a long period of time, which was what made it so difficult.\n\nThe guests started arriving early, and Mendanbar was kept busy greeting them.\n\nA large corner of the field had been roped off as a landing place for dragons, and for most of the morning the sky was full of flashing green wings. Ballimore and Dobbilan-who had come the previous evening to make sure their Cauldron of Plenty would have enough time to produce a proper wedding dinner for so many guests-directed traffic, as they were the only ones large enough for the dragons to see clearly from a distance amid the growing crowd.\n\nJack was early, too. He parked his wagon in a corner of the field and did a brisk business selling seven-league boots, cloaks of invisibility, and magic rings(along with wrapping paper and tape) to those who had forgotten to bring wedding presents. Nearby, all nine of Morwen's cats prowled on, around, under, and through the stacks of gifts that covered the six long benches that had been set out to hold them. Whenever someone brought a new package to lay on the benches, three of the cats would converge on him and purr loudly, while the others kept a watchful eye on the rest of the presents.\n\nSlowly, the meadow filled up. Everyone was in a good mood, everyone was on his or her best behavior, and everyone was trying to be helpful.\n\nEven Cimorene's family seemed to be having a good time. Her father was deep in conversation with Dobbilan, discussing ways of discouraging marauding giants. Several of her sisters were comparing notes with the dragons' ex-princesses, while her mother helped Queen Alexandra and her daughters (who did not seem nearly as awful as Mendanbar remembered) set bowls of punch and trays of sandwiches on a table at the far end of the meadow for people to nibble on until dinner was served.\n\nHerman and his flock of children-including Crown Prince Jorillam-arrived and bought several bags of walnuts from Jack to feed the squirrels.\n\nJorillam was delighted to discover that the squirrels would give him advice about quests. He went through three bags of nuts before the ceremony began and had to be almost dragged to his seat when the time came. His uncle, Prince Rupert , showed up at the last minute, wearing a black cloak and an enormous fake mustache. He looked very wicked and thoroughly pleased with himself.\n\nFinally, everyone was there, everything was ready, and it was time.\n\nResplendent in deep green velvet, milk white satin, and his best crown, Mendanbar waited nervously while the musicians, a talented group of Goldwing-Shadowmusic elves, began the wedding march. Willin, who had at first argued-but not very hard-that he was not a proper person to be a groomsman because he was Mendanbar's steward, came down the long, open aisle with Morwen, who was wearing her best black robe. Following them came Kazul, the matron-of-honor, and Telemain, Mendanbar's best man. Then came Cimorene, and Mendanbar forgot about everyone else.\n\nInstead of her usual crown of black braids, Cimorene had let her hair hang in loose, shining waves down her back. She wore a wreath of fire-flowers, specially enchanted to burn without being hot or setting anything ablaze; from the wreath hung a veil of silver lace. Her bouquet was of fire-flowers, too, and her dress shimmering snow-silk trimmed with silver. She was stunningly beautiful.\n\nThe ceremony went by in a blur, but Mendanbar was pretty sure he hadn't made any mistakes because suddenly he was kissing Cimorene and everyone was cheering. He felt like cheering himself, except he would have had to stop kissing Cimorene.\n\nA finger poked him surreptitiously. With considerable reluctance, Mendanbar broke away from Cimorene and turned.\n\n\"Enough,\" Telemain said in a voice so low Mendanbar could hardly hear it over the cheering. \"Now it's time for the party.\"\n\nMendanbar looked at Cimorene, who gave him a wry smile as if to say that she didn't think it was enough, either, but there was nothing they could do about it now. He looked back at Telemain.\n\n\"I knew we should have eloped,\" he said.\n\nCimorene laughed and shook her head at him. \"You don't really mean that, any more than you mean it when you complain about the gargoyle,\" she said, taking his arm.\n\n\"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"The gargoyle did,\" she admitted, and they both laughed. \"Come enjoy the party.\"\n\nArm in arm, the King and Queen of the Enchanted Forest went to accept the congratulations of their guests."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Shaman 1) Taming the Blowing Wind",
        "author": "Teresa Garcia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "native American",
            "time travel"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2003Fluttering notes\n\n\u2003Float on the wind\n\n\u2003Piped from a reed\n\n\u2003While fears rescind.\n\n\u2003Follow me Ai!\n\n\u2003The horizon calls.\n\n\u2003In purple distance,\n\n\u2003Mountains rise tall.\n\n\u2003Come to me Ai!\n\n\u2003Burst through\n\n\u2003And run past\n\n\u2003Skies all blue.\n\n\u2003The voice beckons\n\n\u2003While shimmering\n\n\u2003Forms entrance me\n\n\u2003With their glimmering.\n\n\u2003I stand at the gate\n\n\u2003Where the wind blows\n\n\u2003Wondering where\n\n\u2003The new river goes.\n\n\u2003Still the flute echoes,\n\n\u2003Follow me Ai!\n\n\u2003Run to me Love,\n\n\u2003Before light dies!\n\n\u2003Now I must choose.\n\n\u2003Do I turn away\n\n\u2003And let my light fade,\n\n\u2003To keep danger at bay?\n\n\u2003Or do I shoulder my fear\n\n\u2003Running with long strides\n\n\u2003To the beckoning\n\n\u2003Where my purpose hides?\n\n\u2003The mountains grumble,\n\n\u2003The spring entreats\n\n\u2003Water leads the way\n\n\u2003For bold foot beats."
            },
            {
                "title": "Remembering the Beginning",
                "text": "[ 1986 \u2013 1998 ]\n\nShe had gone to bed hours ago. However, just because mother had made her go to bed did not mean that she had necessarily gone to sleep. Mother might have thought that the silence meant that her little bundle of energy was lost in dreams of desert adventures with Hawk and Coyote. This was not so though.\n\nBlue eyes had been open for around two hours after bedtime, watching the Star People spin by in the night sky. A red cotton hand-me-down night gown hung down around her pale and skinny seven year old body while little hands supported a tiny chin as she pouted at the window.\n\nHer father had not been allowed to take her with him to the protest and anti-nuclear power rally, this time because she had been grounded by her mother for skipping school earlier that Arizona spring day.\n\n\"It's Coyote's fault, he was the one lurking behind a trash can on the playground waiting for a chance to steal my stuff, including my homework. The teacher wasn't going to believe that Coyote stole my homework. If even Mom won't believe me about him, how does she expect me to show up in class and get made fun of again?\"\n\nIt had been a long and dusty chase away from the playground after Trickster. Ultimately though, he had out run her, leaving her where old man FourHorses had found her spread out by his well. The school had not been happy, Father had been mildly amused, and Mother was absolutely furious. BlowingWind had always been complaining nearly ever since she could talk that Coyote was either making her do bad things, or framing her for doing bad things.\n\n\"It was fun though. I've always liked leaving Town behind. Did he have to get me in trouble for stealing cookies from the jar again too? I swear, sometimes Mom must be blind. He walked right past her covered in cookie crumbs, but I get yelled at for ditching and filching.\"\n\nA scratching pulled the child's attention down from the moon to the dust outside of the stucco and adobe home. A scraggly and thin yellow coyote sat panting outside of her open window, her now very ragged and dirty red bag at his feet... minus her school books.\n\n\"Hey, you ruined my favorite backpack and got Mom mad at me again.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I got you in trouble again. Why won't you ever come and run with me? You would certainly get in less trouble.\"\n\n\"Father told me that you would get me in trouble no matter what I do, but that I would be safer if I didn't. I'm not like you, you know. I won't come back to life if I die.\"\n\n\"And you won't learn what really matters if you keep hiding safely in Town.\"\n\nThe coyote changed form, shedding his fur in exchange for sun leathered skin that bore wrinkles as deep as the Badlands, though his hair was still as black as the arrowhead point on the Sacred Arrow that her cousin was the Keeper of. His buckskins, although the fine white preferred by the holy beings, were covered with the dirt of a long hunt. Smiling, Old Man Coyote gave her pack back.\n\n\"Old Woman Coyote will be angry at you for dirtying your leathers again.\"\n\n\"It won't be the first time.\" He sighed, a wry smile playing at the corners of his lips.\n\nCoyote was about to leave, when a gust of wind kicked up the dust, causing him to stay.\n\n\"Ba'ts'os\u00e9, is she still awake?\"\n\nThe wind settled to reveal the speaker as a large golden hawk who had settled on Coyote's shoulder. Coyote rolled his eyes.\n\n\"Yes Hawk, BlowingWind is still awake. Why?\"\n\n\"You had better stop bothering her and let her get to bed then. Come to Council.\"\n\nCoyote resumed his animal shape, loping off after the Hawk who had gained the air once again. Shaking her head, BlowingWind went back to bed.\n\n\"I hope Hawk doesn't tell Father I'm up past bedtime again. He really will be angry about that.\"\n\nLaying down in her bed and pulling up the thin blanket, she stifled a yawn.\n\n\"He still has my homework hidden somewhere, and I'll bet he ate my lunch. I hope someone runs him over again.\"\n\nThe drone of her mother sewing new clothes out in the living room drifted through the night, another calico dress for a stretching body conjured by a mother's magic. An hour later she still had not found sleep, but a loud knock at the door relieved her boredom. The young and happy voice of her mother carried softly through the home.\n\n\"RedFeather, 'tis a pleasant surprise it is to see ye, for sure. Are ye stayin' the night again, leanbh? Where's my Soaring'awk now?\"\n\n\"Uncle was shot Aunt Marie. They want you at the hospital, but there isn't any hope. He's gone.\"\n\nRedFeather had tried to keep his voice down, not wanting to wake up the little one. BlowingWind had heard though, and heard her mother's anguished cries as the child was forgotten for a moment. BlowingWind got out of bed and went to her mother.\n\nRivers of red hair spilled down from where a beaded barrette had corralled it while she was working, strands escaping where her curls rebelled. Blue eyes leaked liquid crystals onto high, freckle spattered cheeks, and a tall dark boy handed Marie his red handkerchief.\n\n\"Mommy, why are you so sad?\"\n\nMarie MountainChild grew silent as she saw her little one standing in her bedroom door, and then drew a breath before diving into carefully crafted words.\n\n\"Daddy 'as gone away, and 'e won' be coming back.\"\n\n\"Why Mom? Why won't Daddy come home?\"\n\n\"Daddy 'as to go somewhere we can't.\"\n\n\"Will we ever see him again?\"\n\nMarie looked at the child, and then at RedFeather, who was nodding his head and motioning for her to go.\n\n\"You will see your Daddy again.\" Red Feather bent down to his cousin's height. \"He was shot, kind of like when my little brother went hunting the first time when he got too excited, remember? David put that hole in his foot, and you doodled all over his bandages?\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded, and RedFeather continued.\n\n\"Well, your Dad's at the hospital right now. After the doctors fix him, Kato'ya needs to see him, so he is walking the Star Path. Mommy has some work that she has to do now, but I'll be here to watch you while she is gone.\"\n\n\"Ok. Will you tell me a story Feather?\"\n\n\"Sure Wind, but then you have to get to bed. You won't receive any dreams from the Ancestors if you're awake.\"\n\nMarie kissed BlowingWind goodbye before leaving. RedFeather sat down on the blanket covered couch, pulling out the red feather that he always wore, while he waited for the child to situate herself on his lap.\n\nIt was a few days later at the funeral that young BlowingWind had begun to understand what the Star Path really was, when she saw Grandmother crying that her son was dead. Not long after her father's death, BlowingWind found herself moving.\n\n\"Where are we going Mother?\"\n\n\"Somewhere new, leanbh.\"\n\n\"Mom, why can't you just speak English like other moms?\"\n\n\"Tis a 'ard 'abit to break for sure now. Would ye rather I spoke like a bloody Brit then?\"\n\n\"Mom, Ms. Sanchez said it's not okay to call them that.\"\n\n\"Well, then, don' ye be gettin' all uppity there with me. I'm sure that after a few more years 'ere my accent will a slowly change. We're moving to McCloud sure enough now, to answer ye question.\"\n\nMother had taken a job in Northern California as a wood worker and carpenter. The house they moved to had been a large two story, an 1800's historical home hidden away in the woods near the old logging town. The mountain forests had suited her well, and she had freely and happily roamed that summer while her mother got everything in order. Eventually, things had settled down enough that they could go camping like they used to.\n\nWatching her daughter perform the prayers that her husband had once done while they set up camp in the high desert that held Medicine Lake had been odd, and it brought the loss back as sharply as if it had been just yesterday. In order to move past it, Marie had paid attention to establishing camp, instead of watching her daughter follow SoaringHawk's footsteps into the forests of spirituality.\n\nWhen BlowingWind had been singing the old prayers, she had been facing towards the lake. The layers of green reached into the distance beyond the condensed sky that had formed the waters and even further beyond this, like a smiling father had loomed the sacred mountain. Something about the area soothed her wounded soul, and she could almost feel the presence of her father, urging her to look into the lake. And so, after the songs had been finished, she had followed the tugging on her soul.\n\nTwin whirlpools of chocolate and mud had pulled her soul to the lake bottom, creating a longing that the eleven-year-old did not fully comprehend. She felt safe and whole looking into the orbs that were in the water, paying no heed to how guarded they were, nor to the black fur around the pointed face, or the scales running along the lithe body. Neither did she see the great red mane as it waved in the currents where the lake serpent hid beneath the surface. She was in ecstasy that there was someone who could take away her pain for even a moment. In joy, she had called to her mother.\n\n\"Mama, look what's in the water. Aren't his eyes beautiful?\"\n\nThe woman's screams pierced the ears of both the child and the water creature still hiding in the murk and lake plants. They echoed out over the lake, rebounding off of trees and rocks to amplify even more, and flocks of birds abandoned their nests believing it was a warning of danger.\n\n\"Whoever ye be, Spirit, leave my baby alone! Ye can't take 'er too!\"\n\nBlowingWind watched as the eyes faded, and ripples moved in the water as the creature swam away. Turning, she realized her mother was paler than usual, shivering the way she did when shocked or frightened, like when they had found a rattlesnake contentedly sleeping on their porch not so long ago.\n\n\"What's wrong Mother?\"\n\n\"Draigan. Mother was telling me for true, an' she wasn't touched. They be real.\"\n\nShe held her head, rubbing between her eyes, for a moment her gaze pulled from the present into a locked area of her memories. Every muscle bunched and tenses, and hair lifted as BlowingWind watched.\n\n\"Mom, are you ok? You're acting kind of weird.\"\n\nMarie's eye cleared, and once more she was the practical Irishwoman BlowingWind knew.\n\n\"Oh, for sure now. T'was but a trick of the light now. Come now, we'll go for a bit of a stroll for some firewood.\"\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nLater that same night, a fire crackled only to die down into their makeshift hearth to cook their dinner.\n\n\"Alright, story time. What is it tonight Mother?\"\n\n\"Tonight, I'll be telling a story about long ago, and about a geas laid on our family by a draigan.\"\n\n\"What's a geas?\"\n\n\"That's a curse, my leanbh.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Maeve was a brave lass, and was among the finest of Brigit's priestesses. There were few warriors better, man or woman, and 'er prowess attracted a draigan that knew the magic of shape trickery. As a comely lad, 'e enticed 'er to join with 'im in marriage, and being lonely, she was sorely tempted. There was another lad, a cobbler, in another Clan that also loved 'er, and war was common then.\"\n\nBlowingWind leaned in closer, and Marie's speech dropped some of the heavy accent, though not all.\n\n\"Maeve loved this draigan, but 'er service to 'er goddess required that she 'ave permission before taking a 'usband. The well and forge that she was a protector, and keeper, of was attacked before she could do anything about 'er suitor though, and Maeve was one of the priestesses who were captured.\"\n\n\"If she was so good, how was she caught?\"\n\n\"The story is old, me mother did not remember all of it. Bits 'ave been forgotten over time, they 'ave.\"\n\nMarie dropped her gaze from her daughter, looking into the fire instead.\n\n\"Ultimately, Maeve was dishonored by the cobbler, who somehow was involved in the raid. Drake, the draigan, learned of it, and the draigan came to stop it, but was too late. She 'ad already been taken, and in a rage 'e had not only killed the cobbler but also cursed any children that the cobbler had ever begotten. Unknown to Drake, Maeve had been more dishonored than 'e 'ad 'eard tell of, and a cursed child came under 'is care due to 'is own wrath. Now, every child of that child loses the first marriage partner to the curse. That is 'ow our family was named, and why the Spirit World is so drawn to you. We 'ave unfinished business with the spirits, an' so ye must be careful with what ye do, and who ye trust.\"\n\nUnderstanding her mother a bit more, BlowingWind secretly made an apology to the lake spirit after her mother was asleep.\n\nThe next day, she had woken up with a polished obsidian mirror and a swirling snail shell necklace beside her pillow. The child put on the necklace and dropped it beneath her shirt, then hid the mirror. Her mother would surely take these away if she saw them, and the lake spirit obviously had given them to her. There was power in the gifts, and she knew better than to refuse the sacred medicines she had been granted guardianship of.\n\nA year later on another camping trip, this time with friends, she met a boy there of about her own age. Strong and well built for his youth, he had impressed her with how he was able to keep up with her on heart pounding runs through the wilderness. His dark eyes had captivated her, always reminding her of the unnameable and only half-remembered shape of the thing that had been calling to her soul from ever since she could remember. The boy had always been there on every trip after that she had taken, until her mother put a stop to her going to the lake. After a while, he had begun to show up in town to walk with her. This was a discovery that her mother could not and did not reject out of hand.\n\nBlowingWind had never questioned it. It just felt right. When he was around, she felt like she belonged somewhere, as if she had roots of some kind. Obsidian was a fixture in the family before the three even realized what had happened.\n\nTime roared through the wilderness with alternating snow and drought, pulling the dreamer with it. March of the year 1998 arrived, after a winter of record snowfall, and snowboarding practices bogged down by poor visibility and sticky slush that had tested many young men and women taking their first tentative steps into adulthood. Mount Shasta, the patriarch of Northern California, sparkled in the glorious and much prayed for winter sun. Hundreds of high-school students from all over the state milled over Douglas Butte like an army of ants, including BlowingWind.\n\nThe day passed her by in a glorious blur, and once more she was the carefree girl she had been, streaking down the race course only to ride the ski lift back up to man her station, in order to make sure the others had actually cleared the gates.\n\nHer final run of the day had also been the very last for the day. The wind rushed around her body and over her helmet as she bulleted down the mountain, and knocked on the gates. It was biting cold, and yet she relished it. To her, the world was a perfect waterfall of sound, the scrape of her edges on ice, and the white ice that she danced over like a surfer riding a great frozen wave. As she skidded finally to a stop at the bottom, she saw him grinning widely next to her mother and wildly ringing two great cow bells, right along with a couple strange looking women from the Big Valley Ski Team, and one from the Yreka Ski Team. Willow, or Angelina as she now preferred to be called, a racer from the Big Valley Team who was also in her senior year, blew an air horn while shouting at her friend.\n\n\"You rock!\"\n\n\"No! No rocks, rocks are bad for our equipment.\"\n\nBlowingWind suspected that Willow had sweet-talked the mountain spirit into allowing the weather for the championships to be clear and cold. He had been focusing this year on gathering enough water underneath his mountain to restock swiftly falling water tables, but Angelina had been worried about someone getting hurt racing in white out conditions.\n\nAs she quickly undid one binding to get out of the clearing area, she eyed him through her goggles. Tall and lean, Obsidian's tanned skin spoke of long days out in the sun while his long black hair poured behind him in a great waterfall. His chocolate eyes sparkled with glee as her time was announced. Before she could even stand her teammates and a few others from different schools in District 2 and 3 had glomped her.\n\n\"Dude, you pulled off turn three without catching your edge, sweet!\"\n\n\"Awesome, MountainChild.\"\n\n\"Hehe, I'm gonna rub the Buddah for luck, ski championships are tomorrow\"\n\n\"Hey, this suit has no padding guys. Get off, and whoever just grabbed that is going to meet Mr. Slappy.\"\n\nMother had laughed and yelled that she would wait in the cafeteria and send up something for her.\n\n\"Mom, don't leave me to this pack of hyenas! Obsidian, help! Don't you dare lift me.\"\n\n\"Do I look crazy? They all had tall Mountain Dews. I keep telling you that stuff is dangerous.\"\n\n\"Gee, thanks for your support Obsidian.\"\n\nWhen she had finally escaped the writhing mass of fellow adrenaline and caffeine junkies, he had been waiting for her with a steaming mug of hot cocoa, just what she had been planning to go and get from the cafeteria.\n\n\"Congratulations, Miss Number One for Female Varsity Giant Slalom in Snowboarding.\"\n\n\"Really? I didn't think I was going that fast. Thank you Obsidian.\"\n\nHe had placed a chaste kiss on her cheek as he put the cocoa in her hands, and she drained 16 ounces of the steaming liquid in one long pull.\n\n\"How could you not? You are up there four days a week practicing after all. This is your last year, what are you going to conquer next, Little Warrior?\"\n\nShe blushed at the compliments and the heat in the young man's gaze.\n\n\"I... hadn't decided yet. Universities are lining up for me, but I don't know where to go.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could stay here? I... could help you.\"\n\n\"I suppose I could. What are you really trying to ask me? Hey, are you blushing?\"\n\n\"There's too many people here. Say you'll be mine, and I will tell you everything later tonight.\"\n\n\"Ok, but you're telling me what this is all about later. No more secrets.\"\n\n\"No, no more secrets after tonight.\"\n\nThe simple shell necklace that she wore around her neck began to heat beneath her clothing, and she began to wonder what she had just agreed to.\n\nHe had eaten dinner with them, Marie insisting on taking them out to the Black Bear Diner on their oddly roundabout way back to McCloud. Her excuse had been that she needed groceries, even though their hometown had a grocery store. The teenagers played along though, pretending to have forgotten all about the store. BlowingWind couldn't help but laugh in joy as her mother told her how the others on her team had placed. Eventually though, dinner ended and they had driven home.\n\n\"Don't you need a ride home Obsidian? The streets are so icy at this hour, and that road into the main part of town isn't what I would call exactly plowed.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine Mrs. MountainChild, thank you for your concern though. Good night.\"\n\nInstead of going to where his home really was, he had hidden in the trees until after Marie had gone to bed. BlowingWind was so tired from her day that she had prepared to go to bed as well, when a snow ball exploded next to her window. She stormed to the window, opening it to glare outside.\n\n\"Who did that?\"\n\n\"Did you forget?\"\n\n\"Oh, sorry Obsidian. I'm just so tired.\"\n\n\"I understand. I'm sorry for disturbing you. I'll trouble you no more.\" he said, then turned to go.\n\n\"Wait! You said you would tell me everything. You aren't a normal human, are you?\"\n\nHe looked up at her once more after turning around. There was a stronger quality to him now, as if part of him had been in hiding. As she watched, his clothes changed from the modern T-shirt and jeans, morphing instead into a leather suit. His leggings, tunic, moccasins and breech-cloth were a finely done pale color, like the holy beings wore, and resplendent with quill-work. Nothing else changed, yet he held out a hand.\n\n\"Do you trust me?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why wouldn't I?\"\n\n\"Come down, I have much to tell you, as long as you will listen and believe me.\"\n\nHe watched as she withdrew from the window, and seeing how much it looked like his heart was being pulled to pieces as she backed away, she gave him a gentle smile to ease the pain. She threw on some warm clothing, and then made her way out of her room, before stretching over the squeaky floorboard in front of her mother's door. Feeling her way down the dark hall to the stairs, she found herself becoming high on yet another adrenaline rush.\n\n\"I'm going to need a nap in the car on the way back up the mountain tomorrow morning. What is he?\"\n\nFinally, she was down, through the entry room, and out the door, paying no heed to the blue oriental carpet or the fire that was dying in the fireplace. The snow covered the porch in a thick mantle where neither she nor her mother had bothered to shovel, leaving only a path out and down to where he stood waiting, unaffected by the cold. The stars blazed overhead like diamonds set in a rich field of blackened velvet while the pines whispered among themselves in their quiet groaning language that only they spoke. Soft light danced in his hair, giving him an ethereal cast, as if he was only a dream that would vanish when she opened her eyes.\n\nRushing forward, the young woman surprised him by engaging in a flying tackle, pinning him beneath her in the snow as she gazed eagerly down at him. The woman had no idea of the effect she was having on the spirit below her, with the hunger in her eyes that was waiting to devour the knowledge he would finally divulge.\n\n\"You had something to tell me?\"\n\n\"As soon as you let me regain a more dignified position.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\nThey sat on their knees side by side, neither looking at the other.\n\n\"Do you believe in spirits?\"\n\n\"Yes. I believe in spirits.\"\n\n\"You have no idea how much easier that makes this. Would you believe me if I said that I was a spirit?\"\n\n\"After seeing you change your clothes without undressing, what do you think, Obsidian?\"\n\n\"If I was a spirit, would you still agree to be mine, as I would be yours?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why are you skirting around this, just spit it out!\"\n\nHe drew in his breath and looked up at the moon, before gazing into her eyes, blushing brighter the further he got into his speech.\n\n\"I, Obsidian, am the current guardian spirit of Medicine Lake, and I am asking you to be my wife and my vessel to convey blessings to this world that has nearly forgotten me. I ask you to live with me and give me children after your studies are over, and I will always provide for you, keeping you safe for all eternity.\"\n\n\"Is that all? Here I thought you were going to tell me that I would be childless if I still accepted, or that I would never be in the Human World again.\"\n\n\"Just like that? No throwing me into the wall screaming about the nerve I have in even thinking of fathering your children?\"\n\n\"No. We've known each other for years. You've been my date for my Junior Prom, and you'll be my date for my Senior Prom. Why not get married?\"\n\nShe leaned in to kiss him, but his face turned before she hit her mark, her lips grazing his cheek instead.\n\n\"You aren't ready for that, as much as I want to. Besides, if your mom gets restless and looks out her window and caught us doing that, we would both regret it.\"\n\n\"Good point. Mom may slowly be loosing her Irish accent, but she still has the O'Drake temper.\"\n\n\"You're tired. Go to bed Love. But don't grab any Mountain Dew or chocolate on the way. You still have regular Slalom tomorrow, and then after that you have to help with the skiers' gates.\"\n\n\"Party pooper.\"\n\n\"Caffeine addict.\"\n\n\"I'll hold you forever in my heart Obsidian.\"\n\n\"I will love you forever, my BlowingWind.\"\n\nLate March of that year had still allowed the forest to harbor patches of snow, while the spirit of Mt Shasta had continued to keep his mountain cloaked in that crystallized water. The championships had been over now for about a week and a half. As she and Obsidian had been hiking in the silent chapels of the forest perhaps two miles from her home, one of the ravens had winged overhead. Fascinated by the beat of wings, she had paused to watch it pass in awe. Unknown to her at the time, Obsidian had been watching her child-like joy, drawing up behind her to grasp her hand.\n\n\"There are times that I wish I could fly like that. It must be wonderful to ride the wind, to feel it lift you up.\" She sighed as she closed her eyes, mentally following the flight.\n\n\"What if I granted your wish?\"\n\n\"I'm just a human. If I had been meant to fly, I would have been born a bird.\"\n\nA short bout of silence fell companionably around the two as the spirit held her wrapped in his arms. The shaman's breathing was contrasted by the lake spirit's lack of breath.\n\n\"What if I told you that I can fly, even though I too am no bird?\"\n\n\"You would have to show me, seeing's believing.\"\n\n\"Really? Then hold on to me and what ever you do dear one, don't let go.\"\n\nBlowingWind went to shift her weight, finding less resistance on her feet than she expected. Experimentally, she flexed an ankle, only to find nothing.\n\n\"Oh God! We're gonna fall!\"\n\nHe squeezed her hand tighter than he was already holding it, pulling her body closer to his own. Embracing her now, Obsidian held her until her initial terror passed.\n\n\"I would never let you fall, don't you trust me yet Love?\"\n\n\"Yes, I trust you. I don't trust the ground not to smash me if I slip.\"\n\n\"BlowingWind, look down.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Aw, come on honey, you know you want to see for yourself.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Hey, you're the one that said you wanted to fly. If you don't like it, I'll take you back down.\"\n\nShe cracked her eyes open slowly, processing the spires of pine and cedar reaching for her feet.\n\n\"Woah, it's like I'm standing on glass. How are you doing this Obsidian?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you, to understand it so soon would take the magic away. Without magic, life means nothing. Maybe in a couple years.\"\n\n\"Can we do this more often?\"\n\n\"Of course. I rather like the feeling of not being alone up here.\"\n\nThe wild forest continued to breathe through her seasons, the spirit and the human just two parts of her greater whole, joining and separating in a dance of love and time, and the struggling dreamer was pulled along with the currents of time. Late winter's snows gave way to the early spring showers of April, then the warmer days of early May as other spirits and animals lived, and died. Gradually, the nature spirits' activities grew to fevered pitch as they desperately fought for their continued survival against invading Man.\n\nTwo spirits in particular were most concerned about the drilling only one mile away from the sacred waters of Medicine Lake, dark forms meeting at the geothermal power plant for yet another night of mischief.\n\n\"Obsidian! Why are you here tonight? Shouldn't you be in the lake, making sure that all is ready for your young bride? BlowingWind already worries about you enough.\"\n\n\"Saksque, I thought you had been satisfied after you dismantled their heavy machinery and spooked last week's workgroups so badly they quit. Everything's prepared for BlowingWind when we go home tomorrow night, but I have to finish disabling those turbines tonight.\"\n\n\"Idiot, tomorrow night is your wedding night. Take a break. You'll be too tired to do anything with her.\"\n\n\"Exactly. She's going to live with me down below for a month our time before I return her to her mother for a visit. I don't want any interruptions, I've waited years for this, and I'm not letting some capitalist big wig wreck my honeymoon by distracting me with his unholy machines.\"\n\n\"Always the overachiever. Five shells to a trout that the magnetic grid transport system messes up again when Angelina goes to learn from SingingSerpent and drops her right on your lake surface again just when the two of you settle down for a nice tussle.\"\n\n\"Yeah, ok Bigfoot, that's a bet you'll lose. Her school doesn't get out until next month, which gives me two weeks before she visits the mountain spirit again. See what damage you can do up here, I'm going to screw up those turbines of theirs.\"\n\nThe giant of the forests shook his wooly head as he watched his friend dive into the wound that the developers had inflicted on Mother Earth.\n\nHours went by and the sky was beginning to grey as dawn approached.\n\n\"Oh Lover-boy, you might want to come out before this thing powers on for its test. They put it on a timer and I couldn't disarm it, stupid computers. They probably have this mess hooked up to a secret power source this time.\"\n\n\"Coming, I think I got it.\"\n\nThere was a popping and snapping sound echoing back up the shaft, followed by a string of expletives that had been learned from irate fishermen.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I slipped.\"\n\n\"You slipped? Giant talons of death, and you still manage to slip?\"\n\n\"Hey, I'm only five hundred years old, ok? Just because I've reached full size does not mean my talons are completely hardened. That doesn't happen until my horns begin to come in fully at one thousand.\"\n\n\"Fully? They'll get bigger?\"\n\nA low humming began to fill the air as generators that had been set up for the test began to come to life, and computers clicking as they began to store data on the plant workings down below.\n\n\"Aw crap, they did. Get out of there, moron.\"\n\n\"I'm stuck.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You heard me. I can't move, I'm trapped, I'm stuck. My midsection is wedged in such a way that I can not get out fast enough. How else can I say it?\"\n\n\"Then get unstuck. You can't leave her like this. That human you charmed built her life around you.\"\n\n\"Tell her I love her, and to be happy.\"\n\nA final click while the dragon was still struggling to free himself where his midsection had become wedged and knotted, and the turbines began to spin. His last thought was of BlowingWind, and how bright her smile had been when they had been planning what followed their elopement. Miles away, BlowingWind sat up in bed, glancing where her dream catcher had been only the night before.\n\n\"My God, what a nightmare. Maybe I shouldn't have burned it yesterday, should have made a new one first. Either that, or I'm more nervous than I thought. Yeah, that's it. BlowingWind, you're just worried about shadows, and here you are talking to yourself again.\"\n\nLying back down, she closed her eyes, forcing herself to rest. Without a transition, she was standing in line with the other graduates of her class, taking congratulations and waiting for Obsidian's embrace.\n\n\"Wait a minute, this is pretty familiar. Oh no, not again. Please not again. Come on, wake up. No more dreams.\"\n\nShe was in fast forward, her life blurring before her eyes as she ran out into the night with her bag, shedding her cap and gown like the refuse they had become until she only wore the doeskin dress and moccasins her grandmother had sent her. The streets of the town fell behind and she took to the safety of the forest, speeded on her way by wind spirits who recognized her as the one who had been chosen by the Medicine Lake.\n\n\"Obsidian!\"\n\nShe had passed the night in sliding through the forest, following the call of her heart. Against all reason, thanks to the secret portals between trees that folded space, she made it to the lake by daybreak.\n\nInstead of the purple water dragon that she had found in her waking life that day her world had ended, the lake itself had dried in her dream, and fish lay rotting in the sunrise. The shell at her neck shattered, and so did her dream.\n\n\"The worst yet. Why can't I just die too and be done with this nightmare?\"\n\nA large lake lay quietly beneath the blue sky, reflecting the glory of the winds in the heavens like an oversized mirror. All around the edges towered great trees while rocks lurked and grasses waved. Fish swam or rested happily in the big blue, while ducks dove below after the lake weeds or minnows. A bald eagle swooped down like some great chief to grab a trout from the natural reservoir, and nature's beauty was at its finest in the morning.\n\nShe threw a rock out into the lake, watching the ripples spread and gazing into her mind.\n\nA howling pulled the young woman out of her reveries, demanding her attention now as her hair was whipped around her head, even though there was not much to pull anymore. One of the fish spirits had left her some of his fish and a knife for cleaning them a few days ago. She had eaten a little of the fish, first using the razor sharp stone blade to cut her hair once more, curling forward around her jaw.\n\nAnother rock skipped across the water, just like her thoughts skipped across the lake of her mind, skimming the surface and never going far below until there was no more energy left to fight with. The memories pulled her down into a dark oblivion that even He could not have kept her from drowning in. Her soul was shattered and her heart broken, lying on the forest floor to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later to piece back together and wonder at. He was gone, and all she had left to her were ephemeral dreams, a necklace, and her Shaman's mirror.\n\n\"What do you want with me? Leave me alone! No more! I failed.\"\n\nThe voice that called to her through the wind froze her heart and yet caused it to burst with joy. It was the one she had been dying to hear, the rich sounds a melody to her ears. He had come for her at last.\n\n\"You are still mine. Follow me, reidou.\"\n\n\"Reidou? What's a reidou? Obsidian, where are you?\"\n\n\"There are earthquakes and mountains here, and forests. Start again.\"\n\nAn image filled her mind. It was an island country that had interested her greatly in school, full of hot springs, volcanoes, fault lines, and other such powerful medicines. On one of the northern islands there was a river restoration project going on, and an engineering school there had earlier courted her.\n\nMost importantly, there was a lot of territory in the islands, all things she had never seen before. There were far too many memories here. Moving away over the salt water, she could make new ones. He had promised to provide and protect, and he would. He would lead her to where he wanted her to be.\n\n\"Come.\"\n\nSmiling for the first time in two weeks, BlowingWind began to head back to civilization.\n\n\"I wonder why Japan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Pulling Out One's Roots\n\nMiles had fallen behind her feet as she hiked somewhere along the Medicine Lake road, and the sweet morning wind blew her along her way. It was a lovely summer day, with the sun smiling from his blue sky, and the mountain was still managing to wear his white skins, even though they would soon muddy into brown. The countryside was already beginning to go brown, the grasses bending under the breeze and the rabbits hopping in between. No one had been at the Medicine Lake Campground when she had checked, and so she had decided to head back on her own.\n\n\"It was better when the lake was still nearby, at least the air was a little moister. Welcome to the High Desert, where you're an idiot if you think the forest will keep you cool.\"\n\nThe crunching of tires on the road behind her drew her away from her personal diatribe, and she held out her thumb. The green Ford truck slowed down, the trailer it was pulling stopping too.\n\n\"Young lady, what are you doing way out here all by yourself?\"\n\n\"Well, I was on a vision quest, but I'm done now and need to get to Mount Shasta... Mr. Sanchez, is that you?\"\n\n\"BlowingWind? You look different without your snowsuit and helmet. Hop in, we're on our way to Mt. Shasta anyway.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nMr. Sanchez hopped out of the truck and popped the seat forward, looking like a grizzly bear to BlowingWind. Squeezing into the back between Willow and her little brother, she held her pack on her lap and breathed a sigh of relief after she had buckled in and the truck was rolling again.\n\n\"I'm so glad you stopped. It would've been a long, hot walk. What are you guys doing so far from Big Valley though?\"\n\nWillow shook her head, her long black hair held back in a pony tail as her emerald eyes sparkled in amusement.\n\n\"We're in the same grade, remember? My graduation ceremony was just a couple of days ago. Now we're on our last vacation together before I head up to SOU for my geology program. Can you believe we're done?\"\n\n\"No. So, was there any development in your pet project?\"\n\n\"Oh sure, the cracks in Valentine widened by two centimeters this winter, and the temperature is another degree higher. That's an increase of seven degrees on average since I started monitoring the cave. What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"I'm getting ready to go to Japan.\"\n\n\"Cool. Comparative Religions?\"\n\n\"Engineering and Geology.\"\n\n\"Wow, heavy stuff. You've got my address still, I want a rock from Fuji for my collection.\"\n\n\"Will do. From the crater like all your others, right?\"\n\nThe rest of the ride passed by in chatting about Willow's ambitions and hearing about the other plans that the few skiers from Big Valley had for themselves. At length though, they had pulled up by her bank, and BlowingWind was waving good bye as the Sanchez family rolled on to their next destination. Turning around after they were gone, the small brown building stood invitingly before her, beckoning her inside with a cheerful sparkle of glass doors.\n\n\"Oh my God! Wind, you're ok!\"\n\nHaving gone through the second door and been spied by the newest teller, BlowingWind nearly fell in shock at hearing the familiar voice here of all places. Her best friend from school, and a former member of the McCloud ski team, she had forgotten that Summerrose Smythe had taken a job at the bank after graduating last year. Relief glowed from every pore of the pale woman, her deeply green eyes as piercing as pine needles. Black hair had been pulled up in a severe bun, giving the late teen an air of command softened by the pastel blue hues of her flowing dress.\n\n\"Hi Rose. Yeah, I'm fine.\"\n\nBlowingWind tiredly made her way over to the counter, steeling herself for the barrage that was sure to come.\n\n\"Why did you run off and where were you hiding? You worried your mother sick!\"\n\n\"Something happened to my boyfriend. I've been out in the woods where we first met.\"\n\n\"Wow. Tough luck buddy. He was a really nice guy. Are you going to be ok?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'm going away for a while. I need to clean out my account.\"\n\n\"Too many memories?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Number?\"\n\n\"277349180003.\"\n\nRose's fingers tapped out a rhythm as she input her friend's account number.\n\n\"We are going to have to issue you a check for $30,000. Here is your other $5,000 all in cash. Bet you're glad you saved all your birthday money and sold all those dream catchers through Black Bear.\"\n\n\"Fine by me, and yes I am.\"\n\n\"Wind? Say goodbye to your mom before you go. Don't just disappear like you did that summer you were 16 and stupid.\"\n\n\"We'll see. Goodbye my friend.\"\n\n\"At least write!\"\n\nAfter BlowingWind had spoken with the head teller and gotten the check for the rest of her money, she silently left the credit union, her thoughts chasing through her head.\n\n\"I've already got everything, my passport, birth certificate, driver's license, and the few things I just couldn't live without. What would I say? Bye mom, I've only got the vaguest clue what I'm doing?\"\n\nAs Summerrose watched her old friend leave, the young woman knew that this was the last time that she would ever see BlowingWind again. It was a while before her break, but when it came, she would be certain to call Mrs. MountainChild to let her know that her daughter was alive.\n\n\"Adios mi amiga. May your winds blow fair.\"\n\nBlowingWind smiled after she was away from her friend.\n\n\"Sorrow and regret bind me to Mother, but who am I to ignore a call once given? I'd better pick up some light provisions, and I know just where to go. It could be a long trip to Redding if the spirits aren't with me.\"\n\nA right turn after she crossed the street brought her around the corner to the best natural foods store in town. Entering the swinging doors, the familiar and comforting smells of coffee beans, sage, and incense warred with the fresh flowers while she drifted back to the nuts and berries.\n\n\"BlowingWind!\"\n\nA short older woman with long hair gracefully becoming silver, the proprietor reminded the young Shaman of an earthbound angel with the way she seemed to float everywhere in her gauzy dresses. Grey eyes worriedly locked with her own where she was filling her shopping basket with water, nuts, jerky, and dried berries.\n\n\"Namaste, Angelique.\"\n\n\"I heard rumors that you ran away little one. What really happened?\"\n\nOne hand had begun to toy with her necklace as she felt like bursting into tears again. Angelique had always been the kind of person who you could spill your problems out to, no matter how crazy, and she was sorely tempted to do so right now. Angelique was a devout Buddhist, and had a broad range of things that she had studied both metaphysical and mundane. Some rumors even claimed that she was an onmyouji, a magic practitioner.\n\n\"Did you hear about the mess out at the geothermal plant?\"\n\n\"From several sources child. Why? What's wrong dear?\"\n\nAngelique had already been worried when the news of the secretive young woman's sudden disappearance had reached her, and that worry only increased as the one who had always seemed larger than life began to fold in on herself.\n\n\"Do you believe in spirits?\"\n\n\"Dear child, I am a Buddhist. Of course I believe in spirits.\"\n\n\"He was my boyfriend. But he's gone now, and I need to follow him. He has a plan for my life.\"\n\n\"He?\"\n\nBlowingWind tightened her grip on her necklace as she drew herself back together again, whispering a name while her eyes begged the woman to understand.\n\n\"Obsidian. I was told he got stuck down there during one of his sabotage attempts, and didn't have time to get out before the turbine test. He was always such a klutz when we went into the lava tubes, he should have known better.\"\n\n\"Are you sure dear? Scientists apparently still haven't been able to identify what or who it was. It could have been anything they found.\"\n\nBy now, they had made it over to the counter, where Angelique was ringing up BlowingWind's purchases in the empty market. Tears threatened to spill out of the young woman's eyes, yet they did not.\n\n\"I just know. How much?\"\n\n\"$30.\"\n\nBlowingWind paid for her food before giving the older woman a hug over the counter.\n\n\"Thank you for listening, for caring as much as you do, and good bye.\"\n\nNot even bothering with a paper bag, BlowingWind put her items directly from the counter into her knapsack. As she was doing so, Angelique got a glimpse of something dark that had wrapped itself around her soul, resting its heavy head on her shoulder. Shadowy and serpentine, it did not seem to be threatening, but instead like it was trying to comfort the young woman who was embarking on a journey she did not know the ultimate outcome of. As the small form faded out of the door, the older woman sent up silent prayers for the child, and made a note to request special prayers for her from the monks at the local monastery.\n\n\"I'll go to the monastery today and ask the monks to pray for you Little One. I always wondered what made you so different from your peers. There are more of us than you think.\"\n\nSure that she would have plenty of food for her journey now, BlowingWind walked through the busy streets, bound for the highway on-ramp and a new life. The few minutes she spent walking past the various stores containing sundry items passed by her like an eternity, until she reached the intersection again.\n\n\"What a doofus I am! The only Japanese I know is 'Ramen.' Well then, I guess I'll be stopping by the travel book shop first. They always have a great selection of books for learning languages.\"\n\nWhen the little green man lit up the pedestrian sign, the woman made her way across the street, just another woman in a sea of traveling Buddhist monks, Goths, Punks, and normally dressed people.\n\nShe sighed in relief when she finally made her way in to the new bookstore, then looked around at the large array in confusion. The silver haired man at the desk came to her aid.\n\n\"Can I help you miss?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'm looking for some books on learning the Japanese language. I'm going there, and I want to be able to understand what people are saying to me.\"\n\n\"This way miss.\"\n\nThankfully, the gentleman in the store just sold her a couple books after helping her find and select them, which took all of two minutes thanks to his superb organization. She wouldn't have been able to pick him out in a crowd, he was so non-descript, however he radiated a warmth that she decided she loved.\n\n\"Thanks, if I wasn't moving, I'd tell people to come here.\"\n\nAfter she had made her purchase, the woman scurried for the on ramp.\n\n\"I still would like to know why Japan. Boy, I hope I get picked up by somebody sane and not some nutjob.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Great Spirit Will Provide\n\n\"Wow, this is boring, and dusty. Do all these people passing me by think I'm going to mug them or something? Even the guys look at me and keep going. Gees, I must have been here like an hour already.\"\n\nThe telltale rumble of an old engine filed the air, and BlowingWind looked up hopefully as she stuck out her thumb yet again for a lift when a dusty brown pickup pulled over. Stopping only a few feet from where she sat in the summer dust, the passenger door popped open and a young man's voice shyly poured out.\n\n\"Do you need a lift?\"\n\nThe Native American stood up and grabbed her knapsack, slinging it over her shoulder in a practiced motion that told of great outdoor experience. Blushing while meeting the stranger's gaze, she made her reply.\n\n\"I need to get to the Redding Airport. Can you help me?\"\n\n\"As luck would have it, I'm on my way there myself.\"\n\nBlowingWind couldn't help her jaw dropping.\n\n\"Really? I was only expecting to get as far as Redding itself and then have to walk to find another ride.\"\n\n\"Yup, really. Hop in, uh... What's your name, Miss?\"\n\nEagerly scrambling onto the wooly Navajo patterned seat cover, she buckled herself in and shut the door. Looking her savior in the eye, she noticed that they were a strange yellow color, like gold, or what one would find on a mountain lion. He had sun kissed skin possessing a healthy glow and sandy hair exactly the color of the hawk feathers that were plaited into two braids hanging over his shoulders. The more she looked at the man, the more he reminded her of a hawk, right down to the sharp aquiline nose carrying a slight downward tuck at the end.\n\n\"BlowingWind MountainChild, sir, but my friends usually call me Wind. And you are?\"\n\n\"Nice name. I'm Freedom WindSong.\"\n\nChecking his mirrors and glancing over his shoulder, the man maneuvered his vehicle back into the steady flow of traffic, using his signals when needed and seeming rather hyper alert. He did not calm down until they were actually merged onto Interstate 5 and matching the speed of the others. Freedom had left his window down, which fluttered the feathers on the tiny dream catcher that hung from his rear view mirror, drawing the woman's attention to them curiously.\n\n\"Freedom. I like that name. How did you come by that?\"\n\n\"Father is from the Karuk tribe, and mother is an Ute. The tribal Elder, my grandfather, called my parents one day before they even knew she was carrying me. Grandfather told them that the spirits had just informed him that mother was pregnant. He went further predicting that I was a boy and that I should be named Freedom.\"\n\nFreedom shrugged.\n\n\"Apparently I was supposed to have a hand in helping someone become free. Oddly enough, I was indeed a boy, so they went along with it. How did you get called BlowingWind? It suits you somehow, but it's pretty weird in this world of Mary, Sally, and Britney.\"\n\n\"My dad was a Shaman of the Apache Nation. One night he had a dream, and Hawk had told Father that his daughter would be called the Blowing Wind. So, when I finally came, that's what they called me.\"\n\nSilence filled the truck for half an hour as they passed through the luscious mountain country, reveling in the caresses of the wind together and exclaiming mentally at the Sacramento River as they passed over it. The whole countryside was alive and vibrant, dancing beneath the summer sun as its hidden spirits went about their secret lives. After a while though, talk resumed.\n\n\"So, why are you going to the airport, if I may ask?\"\n\n\"I guess you could call it a spiritual calling.\"\n\n\"You too, huh? You know, as soon as I saw you sitting there, I said to myself 'Freedom, she's a Shaman in need of some help,' though I have no idea why. So I stopped to see what I could do. Ultimately, I'm on my way to Tahoe. I don't know what I'm going to do there, but two weeks ago I had this awful urge to go. Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Japan. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"Spirit sure is mysterious.\"\n\n\"Yes. At this rate though, everything's mysterious.\"\n\nFreedom laughed.\n\n\"I hear that. BlowingWind, if you look in the glove box, you will find my wallet. Open it up and take one of my contact cards. When you get where you are going, send me an email. I would like to keep in contact with you.\"\n\n\"But I don't have email.\"\n\n\"No problem. They'll have plenty of Internet cafes over there. Just sign up for a free email when you visit one and drop me a line. My laptop has wireless, and I'll be doing the same until I get set up down there in Tahoe. This way, you'll have someone that you can talk to every now and then.\"\n\n\"Ok. Thanks.\"\n\nThe training Shaman did as she had been asked, chuckling a little at the picture of Freedom and his friends goofing off at Burney Falls, that was the first thing one would see opening the parcel. The rest of the trip was spent in telling each other of hilarious exploits with their friends, and BlowingWind actually felt a lot better laughing as much as she did. Obsidian wouldn't want her to be sad, and although she missed him, she needed to continue on and be strong. She would see him again, she was sure of it.\n\nAt last, they had made it to the airport, and Freedom dropped her off at the terminal. She eyed the yellowed paint and outdated architecture.\n\n\"At any moment, I swear that a Fuller Brushman's gonna pop out of there, blue suit, brown shoes, and all.\"\n\n\"I'm going to go park, but here you go to spare you a little walking. Good luck, and remember to drop me a line.\"\n\n\"I will. Thanks again Freedom.\"\n\nShe waved a last time and turned to go into the terminal, pausing as a gust of wind enveloped her. Looking around, she noticed that the truck was completely gone, nowhere to be found out in the parking lot. In the near distance she could see a small hawk circling, as if it were watching something or circling for prey. Touching her hair where she felt an unaccustomed weight, she found a small braid into which a hawk's tail feather had been tied with twine.\n\n\"Strange, the wind's been doing that a lot lately. Was he a spirit? Had to have been, how else would this feather get here? I'll have to try and be more observant from now on for the differences. I could have been spirited off into their world really easily.\"\n\nShaking her head in confusion, BlowingWind resumed going inside. Goose bumps instantly formed on her arms in the air conditioning, a shock to her system that was used to the outdoors. The terminal was large and open, encased with glass giving the facility an empty feeling despite the rows of gray seats for weary travelers waiting for their flights. An expensive cinnamon roll and coffee shop could be seen, and across the way waited the ticket counter. It was for the polished efficiency of the attendant that she headed, forcing tentative steps across mint green linoleum tile.\n\n\"Hello, my name is Robin. May I help you Miss?\"\n\nSlightly rounded, her black and red uniform further drove in the resemblance to the bird that was her namesake. Short red hair fell in a perfectly arranged bob to her chin, and laughter seemed to sparkle from her dark eyes.\n\n\"When is the next flight to Japan?\"\n\n\"One moment while I check for you Miss.\"\n\nThe attendant clicked in a few commands on her keyboard, chatting about various inane things that BlowingWind found herself not hearing while the commands were processed. At last, the computer screen brought up what they were waiting for.\n\n\"The next flight for Japan leaves in an hour on United. There will be a two-hour layover in LAX, and then your flight will arrive at Tokyo International. The flight after that leaves...\"\n\n\"The first one is perfect. How much?\"\n\n\"$900.\"\n\n\"Sold Robin.\"\n\n\"And when will you want to come back?\"\n\n\"One way is fine.\"\n\n\"Very well Miss, your information please?\"\n\nAs if in another dream, she gave the necessary information, showing her identification to confirm her identity. As the money changed hands, she watched herself smile and chatter about dreams she never knew had lived in her heart.\n\nHer thoughts echoed in her head. \"Who is this woman taking over my body? Am I really going to do this? What should I do first when I get there? I'll climb Mt. Fuji definitely, but what happens the rest of the time before school?\"\n\nTickets in hand, the wait went by quickly as she snacked from her traveling provisions. After a short eternity her flight was called and the young woman boarded her plane. The safety instructions passed her by unheard as disbelief closed in all around her, paralyzing her. As the jet engines roared to life, she was reminded of the roars of a great dragon preparing to fling itself into the air. They began to taxi forward, and her eyes turned to gaze out of the window, watching the ground pass them by to fall away.\n\nThe numbness gave way to relief eventually, and she pulled out one of her books to begin studying the language she would soon need. Unknown to the young Shaman, the spirits of the winds were relaying information about her departure ahead of her. The spirits of her new home needed to be alerted of her approach.\n\nTongues of orange and red danced across a lake of magma to kiss and lick the iron red walls with subterranean light born of the river of magma far below, inside the chasm. Obsidian deposits reflected the light further here and there to direct the beams down otherwise darkened hallways teeming with moving shadows. Here, where the earth liquefied in the internal fires, was the realm of dragons and other spirits aligned with the powers of earth, fire and the nurturing darkness before birth.\n\nEmerging from the river of fire where he had been held prisoner by his father and liege lord for five long years, a strapping man who seemed to be in his early twenties could be seen trying to smooth down his hair. Formal Japanese kimono in blazing red and yellow waved around him in the heat, as the personified tongue preened. Rich and dark like earthen secrets, his agitation swept the short spikes into a frenzied mess. Eyes dark and rich as chocolate gazed hopefully up at the edge of the crevasse where he knew his father gazed down at him.\n\n\"Is it time yet Otou-sama? May I be released?\"\n\n\"Not yet Ryu, you have just a few more days of your confinement left. Be at least a little patient, be a good example for your servants. You know I don't like it any more than you do. Next time, don't meddle with their affairs so closely as to loose yourself. Humans are not suitable for such as you.\"\n\nThe voice was deep and gruff, roughened from an effort to hide how much he actually sympathized with his son.\n\n\"Yes father. I'll not seduce another weak human.\"\n\nHeaving a bored sigh, the spirit of the magma tongue rolled his eyes before diving back into his liquid heat. Leaving behind the form that he would use above ground, he assumed his birth form to slide through, and attempt to find something to occupy himself with. Black scales shed the heated rock like water as his blood colored whiskers and mane waved gently with his currents, the former image of the Japanese male seeming to be just a mirage brought about by the infernal heat.\n\n\"I'll just find a stronger one next time, a beautiful maiden who has not yet killed her magic or belief. It will be sweet indeed to have such a treasure of my own and to be away from my Otousan's weekly lectures.\"\n\nRyu had the extreme \"good fortune\" to be a son of Take Fujiyama, who was the Konohanasakuya-hime's highest vassal, and Fujiyama-san was the next in line for control should she meet an untimely end in the occasional spirit wars that reordered Heaven and Earth. She herself had not been the original head spirit of the workings of the ancient volcano, having taken over at the retirement of the older Ainu fire goddess Fuji who had once been responsible for the eruptions that both destroyed and replenished the lands below the summit.\n\nIn other words, Ryu had quite a bit to live up to thanks to his noble father's post.\n\n\"Thank Heaven that my professorship contract had expired before he dragged me back here. That really would have been a mess for me to clean up. What's so bad about teaching Humans a little bit of history? I'd rather them not repeat their silly mistakes. Or even any of ours.\"\n\nRyu continued to swim lazily as his mind drifted over thoughts of his father.\n\nIt wasn't that his father was truly against humans. After all, he processed most of the offerings gifted to the goddess that their clan gave allegiance to, and took care of a great deal of the ever dreaded paperwork that came with such high ranking managerial positions. The problem was that Fujiyama conceived of most humans as weak, spineless, greedy, smelly, rude, over-populous and idiotic. Even worse in Fujiyama's view was the impermanence of their forms, a human would only live a hundred years or so at the lengthiest bodily longevity, and their women could not bear many children as they harbored the growing beings inside.\n\nFujiyama also thought that humans stank, quite literally. As his mind crossed over that, Ryu snorted.\n\n\"Only the bad humans smell like rotten meat. She smelled very nice, like a summer meadow. Roughly half of the world population is female. The only time I wouldn't set eyes on a female would be if I joined a unisex monastery. So I like to date human women now and again. Big deal, we used to breed with them.\"\n\nHe came to a wall of solidified granite, turning in the slow current.\n\n\"How did he find out about her anyway? I swear, I said my father was a hoary old dragon caught in convention once, using it as a metaphor, and the next day I'm here. It's not fair.\"\n\nAs he swam through his elemental subconscious, an unaccustomed breeze managed to find its way down from the surface through the secret passages the spirits used. Rising back up to check the disturbance, the young magma dragon lifted above his own surface, and the wind caressed him with feathered wings. The scent of the fresh air was warm and spicy like cinnamon, and laced with pine, temporarily overriding the thick fumes of sulfur.\n\nA hawk's feather fell out of the incorporeal being, floating on updrafts as it slowly worked itself down to him.\n\n\"She's coming, prepare yourself.\"\n\nWhy it was brought here, the magma lord had no idea. He could only puzzle over the odd pulls as the wind dropped a hawk feather into the fiery river to flame away.\n\nWith the entrance of the feather into his being, the magma lord felt a sharp needle pierce his heart, connecting him to something and causing a sleeping heart to ache.\n\n\"That was odd. I wonder what the wind spirit meant to say. Prepare myself for what? I hope it's not another random inspection.\"\n\nRyu was not the only one that the news had been relayed to though, and from where the spirit watched from his place at the entrance of the medical wing of their division, a very similar dragon smiled to himself.\n\n\"Watch over my Reidou, sire. She is going to be quite the handful if past serves out the same.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Puppets and Strings\n\nThe hawk stopped his circling as the jet plane roared into the sky with all the eagerness of a mountain lion lunging for his prey. In the high winds produced, the spirit phased into the Wind Realm in a flash, and if any humans had been watching his majestic flight they would have assumed he had only been a mirage produced by the heat shimmering from the cement and tarmac. Releasing his news to his brothers and sisters to have it sped nearly instantaneously to a land far across the Great Salt Water, he assumed once more his illusory human shape before the leader of the Hawk People.\n\nPerched on the top of a high and craggy mountain was a similar looking spirit, although obviously much older judging by the fine lines finally beginning to make scores around the eyes and mouth of the personage. Buckskins of the palest variety garbed him perfectly, and the quill-work resembled the currents of wind dyed in blue and bleached white. Leaning on a ledge below his naked feet was a Brother Shield with a single Hawk painted on.\n\nOther wind spirits for North America and sundry Winged People went about their business in the surrounding sky or holding learning circles in the forests far below. Eagles mingled in with the Hawk People in some places, exchanging news and services, or even just chatting peacefully together. In all, the main camp was a busy place, and the children of his people took advantage of the bustle for their adventures.\n\n\"I have done as you asked, Hawk. The child of your pet human SoaringHawk has been assisted.\"\n\n\"I am pleased Freedom. SoaringHawk was very special to me when he was alive, and it eases my mind to know that she is finally following her destiny.\"\n\n\"What is so special about the human, Great Father of our People?\"\n\n\"I may not say yet, only she can decide. Based on her father's performance as a Shaman though, I believe that we can expect great things from young BlowingWind when she comes into her own prime. Now, I believe that you need to attend to your new home? There is a young woman there who will need your teaching.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nHawk watched as his young relative swirled back into the winds to soar to his new home.\n\n\"With any luck, more people will begin to see the world as sacred once more. It is strange to think how it is up to the humans themselves to teach each other to use the Medicines once entrusted to them so long ago.\"\n\nHawk looked down at the rest of his people who were unaware of the loss of one more of their number.\n\n\"If the White Skins had never arrived, what would the current time be like for Turtle Island? Some of the Old Folk still listen and follow our teachings as well as a few of the other colors, but even the mixing of the races of humans had done little to bring about peace in this chaotic world.\"\n\nHe followed the path of his friend's daughter as she winged her way across the skies in the belly of her metal bird.\n\n\"SoaringHawk, will you rest when you see your daughter in safe hands? When she is at peace, will you finally leave the earth and set foot on the StarPath?\"\n\nA dark eyed Asian male, seemingly in his prime sat behind his low teak desk, resplendent in golden robes that shone with their own light. A large and imposing nose easily lent a rather intimidating air to the deity. Hair currently as dark as midnight was held captive in a topknot, and his otherwise fine features betrayed his nobility if one could not gather it from his garb.\n\nTall in height and of otherwise average build, the Heavenly Grandchild never the less had an air of authority that made him seem twenty times more imposing than anyone else ever could. The staff that he usually carried when he went about his patrols leaned unobtrusively in the corner of his serene office, waiting for its master. Curiously his hand reached for the envelope that had just materialized on his desk.\n\n\"That is odd. It is from Kazekami-san. He never sits down long enough to write anything, much less attend to his paperwork.\"\n\n\"What does he have to say, my grandchild?\"\n\nGrinning as he carefully opened it, Sarutahiko surveyed the form of his grandmother. She too appeared to be in her prime at this time, shining with light from both her body and golden robes. Like his own, her hair was also of the darkest midnight, streaming down freely behind her like a veil far past her buttocks.\n\nKneeling demurely on a cushion, Amaterasu sipped contentedly at a cup of tea as she visited with her grandson. He was very busy as the leader of all the Earthly Kami and likewise she always had much to do as the leader of the Heavenly Kami. So it was that they treasured these moments where they got to visit with each other.\n\nIt had not always been thus though. In fact, at their first meeting both Amaterasu and Ninigi, the grandson that she had chosen to rule over the land for that time span, had both been very frightened by his looming presence at the entrance to the human world. Eventually Ninigi had come to take his position as the leader of the Kunitsu Kami after Sarutahiko had relayed his intentions as guide through Uzume.\n\nAfter Ninigi's passing into the Land of Death though, Sarutahiko had taken both Konohanasakuya-hime and her sister under his wing and assumed responsibility for this August position. By this time, Uzume had become his wife, and though she was not what one could call pleased at the arrangement the three women had worked matters out among themselves.\n\n\"Maybe he is finally asking for an assistant to do his paperwork so that he can devote himself to the field work entirely. It would certainly make it much easier to read his reports.\"\n\n\"That I doubt very much, although I do agree it would be easier to read his reports.\"\n\nSarutahiko's smile dropped from his face as his eyes scanned the hastily penned kanji from the lord of the Divine Winds, left to lay on the desk like a forgotten rice cake as the meaning began to sink in.\n\n\"Apparently, an onmyouji of some sort from the Americas is being sent here. Her guardian has been killed, and there is no one suitable for her temperament on either continent. She is one MountainChild BlowingWind, one of the mixed race people. Grandmother, is this name not shared by a woman chosen by the Grand Council of World Gods as a gateway?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do believe so. I remember hearing Coyote, Hawk, and Raven babbling on about her at the last meeting. She was to be conjoined with a lake dragon if my memory serves me.\"\n\n\"Grandmother, is it not against policy to so easily accept someone of her position into our lands? Especially as the intention had already been announced?\"\n\n\"Yes, but what else can we do if she is already on her way? My worry is over whether she is strong enough to keep from being claimed by one of the darkened Kami. The world already has enough onmyouji that misuse their spiritual powers. I will leave the matter in your hands.\"\n\nBlowingWind had already gotten through all of the exercises in her first book, and was now on her second book. To her relief, it also contained sections on normal Japanese life. It didn't have much, mainly focusing on getting through an intermediate level conversation, but at least it was something.\n\n\"This is stupid. What if the offer doesn't stand anymore and I can't get a job?\"\n\nThe aggravated wind currents tossed about the jet, intent on jostling the passengers, and BlowingWind began to panic. As a first time flier, she had been ignoring the thoughts of dying a fiery death as the jet crashed into the ground, which had happily been rumbling around the back of her head like thunder from an approaching storm front. Children and other new fliers of all ages joined in her frenzied screaming as mothers tried to hush their offspring, and young men patted the hands of their girlfriends soothingly.\n\n\"Oh God! I don't want to die! Not like this!\"\n\n\"Wheeeee!\"\n\nThe shrill whoop from somebody next to her pulled BlowingWind out of her nosedive into the pits of despair in complete confusion.\n\n\"Of all the things to say when the plane is going to fall out of the sky like a rock, somebody has the audacity to enjoy their last few moments of their human existence? Of all the nerve!\"\n\nMuttering to herself as she looked to her left at the aisle seat, the Shaman found a young man who looked like he was probably from the military at one point. Blue eyes sparkled in glee and his teeth gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the windows. Sporting a reddish buzz cut and outfitted in a meticulously cared for T-shirt and jeans, he had his hands in the air like it was a roller coaster.\n\n\"Some fun, huh, kiddos! Wheeee! Don't you all want to be pilots when you grow up?\"\n\nHis enjoyment started to rub off on the kids, who eventually began laughing as the ride smoothed back out. When the children on the plane were quiet again, the man's eyes pierced straight through her.\n\n\"There now, that wasn't so bad. Was it? There are children on board. We weren't going to die kiddo, but if we were, why make them panic?\"\n\nShe hung her head.\n\nUnbidden, vague memories of Obsidian cluttered her mind. She missed his warm arms, and how he would nuzzle her ear with his nose when she felt down. BlowingWind missed his bad jokes, even the ones that she didn't fully understand because of their own cultural barriers they had crossed. Just once more she wanted to feel his lips graze her cheek or his teeth nipping her ear playfully.\n\nDwelling on what she had lost would do no good at this time though, and she hastily shoved her thoughts into another dark corner of her mind. Her seat partner had not unpinned her yet from his incredulous glare. His eyes stung like spears in a gaze that only someone from the military could manage.\n\n\"I'm sorry. There was no excuse for my lack of courage. Your point is taken.\"\n\n\"Don't worry too much about it, it happens. So, I take it this is your first time on a plane.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is.\"\n\nSilence fell between the two for a moment while she returned to studying. The realization that there was not anything holding them up still scared her, and her knuckles turned white as she gripped her book. The man watched her from the corner of his eyes as the plane continued on and tears began to form silently, to roll down and hit the language primer that she was reading.\n\nThe silence stretched out as the woman's eyes went blank, going over things that obviously had nothing to do with what she had been reading. With the grief and loss etched onto her face at that time, the man had to wonder what had happened to such a young woman to give her that look of bitterness. The tears continued to fall, dampening the paper, and he pulled a blue and white bandana from one pocket to sop up the mess and then pressed it into her hand.\n\n\"Whatever it is Miss, you have to move past it. I've lost lots of very good buddies in my line of work, and even though they are gone I soldier on. You seem like you were a strong woman at one time. I saw it in your eyes while you were reading earlier. Soldier on girl.\"\n\n\"This is your pilot speaking. Please return everything to its upright position and stow your gear. We will begin our descent to LAX shortly. Thanks for flying United.\"\n\nThe pair stowed their gear away, and as the plane began to descend the young man grinned at the woman next to him.\n\n\"Now, we are only landing. Don't scream this time. My ears can't take it.\"\n\nBlowingWind couldn't help but laugh from behind her drying tears.\n\n\"I'll try not to, but I've got another whole flight ahead of me after a couple hours.\"\n\n\"Really? Where are you going?\"\n\nShe dabbed at her eyes.\n\n\"Japan.\"\n\n\"What a coincidence. So am I. Do you have a two hour layover, then a flight to Tokyo?\"\n\n\"Yes. How did you know?\"\n\n\"Because that is what they gave me. Usually I get flown directly to the Air Force base, but this time I've got a stop first. My wife is having our first baby soon, and I managed to talk our transport department into routing me through her home area. It's my fourth tour of duty there now. Would you like me to help you with your Japanese?\"\n\n\"Would you? It would really help.\"\n\n\"Sure. Verbal practice is the best way to learn any language. Besides, it will hopefully keep you from freaking out too much. It's going to be a long flight. Do you like coffee?\"\n\n\"Love it.\"\n\n\"So do I, but I can't have it for now. How about I buy you a big one and myself a bottle of water and pretend it's coffee. I'll watch you drink it, we start out with simple conversation like the weather, food, and family, and then get progressively harder.\"\n\n\"O... k... But I don't know your name.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Shawn Bowers.\"\n\n\"BlowingWind MountainChild.\"\n\nHere, he gave her a critical eye while laughing.\n\n\"What an unusual name. Going by your clothes though I thought it was something like that though. I thought it was 'Burns in the Sun' actually. I take it either your parents were New Agey people or one was American Indian.\"\n\n\"I do burn in the sun, it sucks. Mom is Irish, Dad was Apache.\"\n\n\"Ready to start practicing?\"\n\nThe wheels hit the ground with a bump, and BlowingWind barely managed to stifle a squeak. She hadn't realized they had nearly finished landing until that jarring wake up call. Looking out the window, she saw the glassy buildings reaching out shining arms for the sky while the tarmac slowed down, rolling by.\n\nThe sky was a dingy blue, tired under the weight of the pollutants pulling her weary head down. It had been bad for BlowingWind the times that she went to Redding with her mother, but here the need for space and greenery was even worse.\n\n\"Yeah, uh, hai. Where's all the trees?\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\nAs Ryu swam in his magma, his urge to just get out had grown even worse. Something screamed in his head to go somewhere, to find something. The problem was where did it want him to go?\n\nThe frantic tugs continued on his heart and bowels. His whole being was experiencing emotions that were not his own ranging from mind blowing grief to intense excitement. He had the oddest urge to reach out and wrap his arms around this felt presence, but when it became nearly tangible to his spiritual sight it would vanish again.\n\n\"Whatever you are, you're definitely female. Quit teasing me already! I swear, when I get out of here, I'm going to catch every wind spirit until I find out who cast this blasted spell on me. Then I think I'll squish it, or bottle it, or something.\"\n\nBlue eyes watched the lord paddle around the river of fire again as the owner's slightly pointed ears twitched a little at every foul word uttered from time to time.\n\n\"The master is working himself up quite well on his own, and when the time comes, guess what lucky dragon gets to be the one calming him down.\"\n\nThe eyes' thoughts were disordered though by a flute-like voice from behind.\n\n\"Ob, dear? You need to take your medicine before your scent becomes too apparent. Remember the last time that you forgot and all the sectors were in an uproar over a human invasion.\"\n\nA slender and pale hand pressed a purple vial into the lurking healer's hand, as another wrapped around a black and red clad waist. Her unique scent wrapped around him soothingly as she pressed her body lovingly to his back.\n\n\"You are right Mayu, as always. Besides, if he smelled my relation to the child you have prophesied coming, it could certainly throw the whole timeline out of alignment. It's still disgusting though.\"\n\n\"The potion, or the thought of Ryu chasing your mother?\"\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nOb gulped the mixture down quickly under the matching eyes of his mate.\n\n\"She won't be easy for him to entice. You should pity him when your memories of her are fresh.\"\n\nHaving finished the last of the glowing goo from the vile vial, Ob pulled a hideous grimace.\n\n\"I'm sick of pretending to be something and someone I'm not. I really hope that snake was telling us the truth of who I am. If only I...\"\n\n\"It is in the past. We have to live the present Ob. We still have some time before our services are needed again. Come with me.\"\n\nAs his treasured mate purred into his ear, Ob relented his hold on his tortured thoughts. Turning after her warmth left him, Ob followed after the slender form that retreated into shadows. He savored the last of the light bouncing off of the copper hair and green kimono their resident priestess dragon wore, as the darkness of the medical wing enshrouded her and their path to their den.\n\n\"The wounded soul blown by the wind and shattered by the lake is for the magma destined. Crossing the sea, she answers a call. A channel is drawn away from Death's cold thrall. Yet here is the danger that she must accept, the missing piece by a stranger is kept. Ryu, fight her despair. Love through her fear. To Heal her Heart and Soul, obstinately hold her dear.\"\n\nThe words of the dragon woman floated unheard past her mate, the woman's prophetic advice meant only for the irate spirit still chafing at his captivity and testing his father's bonds. As the words of his old friend lilted into his ear, the troubled dragon stilled.\n\n\"Mayu only is gripped by the words of Those Beyond Time when something important is befalling the clan. Why do I hear her words now though, when she is supposedly in Isolation as her Fertile Time nears?\n\nHis eyes grew heavy and his blood sluggish, despite the super-heated rock he was in. Grumbling to himself again, Ryu allowed himself to float upon the surface as his orbs slid shut in light repose. The gamut of emotion was a thing he had become unused to, and sleep would help to regenerate his wasted energy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Broken Heart, Broken Soul\n\nPeople milled about in the shops, and two fairly normal seeming Americans sat talking while they sipped their drinks at the tables outside of the airport coffee shop.\n\n\"You mean to tell me the bathroom's a glorified closet?\"\n\n\"That's about it Wind.\"\n\n\"Ugh, in that case, I'm going now. There is no way I'm going to use a closet masquerading as a toilet.\"\n\n\"Ok, we'll practice more when you get back.\"\n\n\"Oh joy, I know I am terrible. You don't have to be so nice about it.\"\n\nBlowingWind had enjoyed drinking her coffee and chattering on with her current escort surprisingly well in Japanese, given the fact that she had only just begun to learn the language today.\n\n\"Ugh, it's gonna be a long flight to Tokyo. Time to go hide for a little bit. Sure I had friends due to boarding, but we're all just a group of loners. This plane stuff sucks. What happens tomorrow?\"\n\nShe continued muttering to herself as she navigated the people filled hallways, trying desperately to keep both her personal space and her dignity. Finally, she ducked out of the throng and into the peace of an empty room.\n\n\"Obsidian would want me to move on and be happy, but this still feels like a betrayal.\"\n\nPushing open the inner door to the Porcelain Hall, she noticed that the room was blissfully free of other women. Twenty stalls stood in boring rank and file as their doors gaped open waiting to devour all of a woman's filth and flush it away. The walls of the room were of a white porcelain tile, and a single path of forest green trekked around the mid-level. The floor was a standard white tile as well, as cold and empty looking as the floor of a morgue, as it lurked under the accumulated film inherent in the very nature of the function it served.\n\nChoosing the nearest stall, the woman sank down and attempted to relieve herself of all that had been accumulated. Tears ran silently down her face as she pondered the nature of existence yet one more time, wearing salty tracks where their brethren had run before.\n\n\"How could I have forgotten the curse, even for a moment? Now I pay for that mistake for the rest of my life. The spirits were right to distance themselves from us and become the things of fairy tales to us. Our love was doomed from the start.\"\n\nShe pulled out her mirror, gazing into the inky depths.\n\n\"Where are you now Obsidian? When humans die and leave their fleshly bodies behind, numerous things can happen. Some move on to other planes of being, either paradisaical or hellish depending on the personal beliefs and how the person had been. Some of those eventually return to live other lives and some others do not. Some go directly back to the Source of All that Is, their part of the Dance of Creation done. Some humans move right into another life, the soul retaining memories and lessons learned while a whole new ego was shaped for the next life. Where did you go?\"\n\nThe surface of the black glass swirled as she searched for a glimmer of him anywhere.\n\n\"Very few would have conscious memories of their previous lives. When I die, where will I go? You spirits don't die so much as you enter a type of suspended animation. Even if you are reborn somewhere, who knows how long your childhood will last or even if you would still possess the same feelings for me?\"\n\nThe mirror showed her a fuzzy picture of the two of them when they had discussed the afterlife while walking between her beloved pine trees.\n\n\"What about concurrent incarnations? He had said that I wasn't open enough to understand yet and that it made his own head hurt to think about it.\"\n\nThe image in the mirror cleared as the figures from the past settled lightly into a favorite perch in one of the swaggering pines forming the forest at the foot of Mt. Shasta. In her mind, she could hear the discussion.\n\n\"Play another song for me. Your guitar and voice is such a welcome distraction from the tedium of waiting for the others to catch up.\"\n\n\"Willow doesn't get up here very often to hike with us. You should wait for her.\"\n\n\"Serpent will make sure she and the others don't get lost. I would rather not share you.\"\n\n\"Sometimes, I don't even know who you are Obsidian.\"\n\n\"Even in the course of one's earthly life, there are many lifetimes within one incarnation.\"\n\nThe image in the mirror faded to black, and she wrapped it once more before putting it away. Wiping away the tears and half-formed thoughts, BlowingWind stood once more and re-shouldered her pack.\n\n\"I must move ever onward, leaving what is done behind. Only the earth and sky go on forever.\"\n\nResolutely she emerged from the stall, pausing at the sink to wash her hands and face before drying them using the air dryer. Pushing forward, the door opened for her, a gateway unnoticed between two very different worlds. As she was exiting the physical space of the restroom, a dark form solidified before her, pressing her back into the empty room as the door between the two realms locked.\n\nPicking herself up from where she fell from the unexpected attack, BlowingWind again noticed that the room was empty. Looks could be deceiving though, as she had learned before, and as the hairs on the back of her neck stood the shell of her necklace warmed in a familiar warning fashion.\n\nAlthough it was visually empty, a being still filled the room. The looming sense of malice and disquiet affected the very air, chilling her to the bone and pinning her with a great weight. The sinister presence caused her hackles to rise even further, and if she had actually been blessed with fur her size would have increased exponentially.\n\n\"You are no ordinary being. Name yourself.\"\n\nHer voice echoed off of porcelain tile and polished mirrors, empty, yet commanding and now slightly mocking in intonation and inflection.\n\n\"You are no ordinary being. Name yourself.\"\n\n\"I asked you first spirit. Father taught me far better than that.\"\n\nA flicker at the corner of her eye alerted her to movement. A dark shape was beginning to meld into the wall, seeking to avoid her gaze. Her turquoise eyes locked the Shadow into place.\n\n\"Let me go!\"\n\nThe panicked spirit finally used its own voice in its demand. Empty and hollow, the tone spoke of years of bitterness and regrets that bound this being to the material realm.\n\nDesperation led the being to his next attempt upon her sanctity. No spirit had his or her protective and guiding claim upon the young woman, leaving her open save for her own rather developed defenses. However, everyone had his or her own weakness, and he had watched as she had wallowed in her own pain and self pity.\n\nLeaping from his wall haunt, he wrapped around her spirit, taking advantage of the loneliness that palpably oozed from her being. She was strong, but the fresh wounds on her soul promised sweet weakness and the possibility of a fresh young host.\n\n\"How dare you touch me! Obsidian!\"\n\nThe savor of her suppressed pain called to him and every other being with ears to hear an unprotected channel into the world of physical form. The music that their souls gave off was unmistakable, the heavenly notes lilting off of the living soul as it spun inside the physical shell that clothed it.\n\nBlowingWind was shocked that a low-level spirit would dare to wrap around her own spirit. In her whole life, none other had attempted to embrace her soul so intimately except for Obsidian, and that had taken him years to attempt. He had always done it at the lowest points in her life since their meeting, and always his arms had somehow healed the gashes in her heart.\n\nIf she allowed it, she would no longer be alone in her own body, a possessed person hosting an unknown spirit.\n\n\"We are both so lonely. If you let me join with you, neither of us will be lonely anymore.\"\n\nThe thing continued to whisper to the bewildered woman. Her loneliness grew as the memories swept from the chest in her mind where they were kept as treasures. BlowingWind remembered how Obsidian's hand had felt in her own as they walked or ran together. His eyes twinkled with unshed tears at the look on her face when dealing with grief every year on the anniversary of her father's death.\n\nThe smell of water and pine that filled her nose when she would bury her face in his neck after loosing one of her many goldfish easily came back. Memory after memory ran before her vision, and her heart bled with loneliness. Ragged breaths tore from her chest as she fell to her knees in tears, unseeing of her surroundings.\n\n\"Where are you Obsidian?\"\n\nThe memories began to move into the dreams she had shared with Obsidian. They were simple things, such as teaching their children to swim or what a spirit gathering would have been like for her to attend. Fantasies of what their children would have looked like danced before her vision.\n\nShe thought that she had already mourned what would never be for them, but apparently it had not been enough. The blood of Kato'ya the rainbow rattlesnake, known also as Quetzalcoatl to the Aztec, no matter how diluted it was by the generations among humans, would not mingle with that of Obsidian to produce another powerful medicine guardian for the Apache Snake Clan she was part of.\n\n\"Just another task I have failed at.\"\n\nAt this time, the shade had wrapped completely around the kneeling woman. The darkness was nearly palpable around her as she fell further below the weight of her own sorrow. Her own power bequeathed to her by her spirit ancestor was forgotten and abandoned as she lived the false life inside her own mind while her focus turned even further from the danger she was in. Her memories and dreams were like a drug, stupefying her spirit into stillness and utter vulnerability.\n\n\"I'll hold you forever in my heart Obsidian.\"\n\nBlowingWind's usual parting words to Obsidian as she last watched his skin clad form melt into the forest drove a stake through her heart. She never knew his true shape, whether he was a snake like the ancestor of her clan, or a fish, a beaver, or even a coyote. The dragon shape that she had seen could have been just as illusory as the shape he had chosen for her to be at ease with as he courted her. All the mysteries he had been planning to show her in their own divine wedding that would ignite a new clan would be forever lost, and never again would she find a true place in either world.\n\nOr so she thought.\n\n\"I will love you forever, my BlowingWind.\"\n\nThe parting words that he always gave her echoed back in reply within the memory she was currently trapped in. As the tall pine trees swayed in the hushing wind to mask their heartfelt whispers, and the disguising mist rose around him while he took his true shape and disappeared, the last of her childhood fell around her as petals from a wild mountain rose going to seed.\n\nIt was at this moment that the last of her shields shattered, and she was completely open to the being seeking to possess her, as open as the day she was born and lost in dreams. The light in her eyes was gone as they stared into an eternity he could not see. Her desperately grasped innocence shone before him like a beacon as the delicate turquoise bead that was her soul rose from it's shell in a wish to follow an unseen vision.\n\n\"What luck! How lucky I am to have found a woman so weakened by her own grief.\"\n\nCarefully he drew closer to her being. Long ago he had already encircled her with his amorphous clouds so that she would be lost in memory. Now all that was left was to enter her body, pouring in like dirty mop water.\n\n\"We will be one forever, and you will forget this ever happened.\"\n\nThe first tendrils of his being touched her flesh and began to penetrate her skin.\n\nSomething inside of her snapped awake at the intrusion of his touch, some survival instinct disengaging from her soporific dreams. Her Shadow, that part of her being that she did not fully accept, was wary of this new energy seeking entrance within her house of flesh and bone. Her very blood began to rebel, and formerly paralyzed limbs rose in her defense as repressed emotions and an urge for self-defense boiled to her surface like an erupting volcano.\n\n\"Don't touch me!\"\n\nNo holy light emitted from her slight form, nor did anything else happen of an otherworldly nature, as she was still a child of man and much of her spirit ancestor's DNA remained inactivated. Instead, the unrepressed RagingTornado merely got off of her knees. Rising to her feet like the Shadow-side of her name given to her long ago by the spirits, blue fires were burning in her eyes as wind whipped up storms to ravage the earth through the Channel.\n\nReaching out for the being she had just knocked away, RagingTornado scoffed at the gentler parts of her soul that were still lost in their shared pain like babes in the woods. BlowingWind had expressed her light side for long enough, and was not able to help right now.\n\n\"Now is the time for Chaos and Destruction to find release and be employed in their protective and creative nature. BlowingWind's spirit was broken by sorrow and grief, and it is up to each of us four that composed her spirit to do whatever we can to defend and heal her.\" RagingTornado's voice was a harsh whisper as she spoke to the spirit.\n\nUnnoticed by the dominant aspect and shadow aspects, Wisdom and Love flew off to a place they knew would be safe, following the Red String of Fate that bound them to another spirit in a distant land. The souls of Gentleness and Roughness were left alone within the mortal body.\n\n\"That was a dirty trick, making me relive that, Dark One. I am not that weak.\"\n\nShadow became flesh beneath the shaman's touch, and a young man materialized from the swirling blackness. Gold shone beneath the fluorescent lights while bottomless blue orbs sparked back in indignation like white capped lakes.\n\n\"Really, are your most treasured memories that bad? You're just like her then. She left me because our precious memories caused her pain.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you are talking about Lost One. However, I am not going to let you cheapen my memories of him. I deny you my being.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do about it?\"\n\n\"Is that a challenge? You picked the wrong time to mess with me. Go away.\"\n\nAs always, her obsidian mirror was near the top of her pack, and skilled hands were blurs as they pulled it out. She was no direct link to the Otherworld like some were, but with the proper tools she could push others fully one way or the other. Hers was the gift of Life and Death, a Healer as well as storyteller.\n\n\"Be gone!\"\n\nThe former guardian of BlowingWind's spirit was no longer accessible to her, but the mirror responded to its misplaced mistress anyway. The shadowy depths reflected the black nothingness of the Infinite Possibility that was beyond the Veil of Living Existence, fascinating the malicious shade as soon as his madman's eyes fell on the spiritual implement.\n\nWith a flash of the light hidden somewhere in that creative darkness, he was gone. All access to the mortal plane was now cut off for him, and he was left to find his way home on his own.\n\nThe rest of BlowingWind that was still present within her body began to wake up. As the dominant aspect of the woman began to regain her power from where it had been dropped, her Shadow stepped back within her mind.\n\n\"This has to stop somehow. Love leaves me too open. No more romance for me.\"\n\nUnknown to BlowingWind, RagingTornado had also decided the same thing. With the light and dark aspects of her spirit in agreement, a formidable wall formed around her heart. Brambles grew between the trees in the interior forest, and wild animals took shape to wander about, hungry and willing to devour any being who dared to intrude so far into her being.\n\nSomewhere in the depths of her mind, a pale woman surveyed her work with icy, glacial eyes. The fringes of her black dyed buckskins played in a waterfall's misty breeze. A thin and weary hand tucked an earthy red-brown lock back behind an ear, as the hair was still unused to its current length. The waterfall that was the source of her being was now well protected from invasion. The birches, aspens and pines had been forced to re-grow from where the fires of grief had reduced them to ashes. It was the passageway not only to her heart, but also beyond that to where her spirit originated.\n\nAny man that wanted her love would have a difficult time finding his way through the wilderness of her own fears. Friends she would have, but never again would she be as wounded as she had been by the loss of a prospective husband.\n\nA knock sounded on the door of the locked bathroom, and a concerned voice called in to her.\n\n\"Uh, BlowingWind, are you okay? We need to get to our gate before they start boarding.\"\n\n\"I'll be right there.\"\n\nCarefully, she put the obsidian mirror back in her pack, wrapping it back up in a length of leather tanned by one of the Modoc Native Americans that she had been friends with back home. She had little of her beloved lake spirit left to her, and she did not want to damage this special item.\n\nThe soft leather shrouded the shewstone and protected it, and BlowingWind wondered what had possessed her lake spirit to ask her that fateful question when she knew he had to have heard her mother's story that day at his lake so very long ago. Angry tears trickled out of one eye, which she swiped away in irritation.\n\n\"I just had something to take care of.\"\n\nHer newest friend and traveling companion was taken aback at the power of the dry grief welling from behind her eyes as he saw her emerge from the room. She had slipped even further into the darkness chasing after her soul. In his line of work, he had seen it happen to countless others. As quickly as he saw it, the tsunami passed. The young woman threw up a cheerful fa\u00e7ade, grabbing his hand and beginning on a dash for their gate.\n\n\"Come on! You've got to get to your wife! She's due any day remember.\"\n\nFalse laughter rang out, fooling everyone but herself and the soldier she had befriended.\n\nA writhing mass of red, black, and green coiled within and above the nest the pair had constructed of precious metals and jewels. The volcano dragon halfling and the forest dragon that was his mate had melded the objects together long ago, beginning just after their mating ceremony. That day so long ago had resulted in a small clutch of eggs, but they had never hatched.\n\nSo it was that they were trying to breed again.\n\nSomewhere between the status of Kami and Youkai, the healers were unbound by the restriction of only breeding when natural features and energies needed guardians. However, they were still bound by their own biological clocks; hence the long and arduous wait; hence also their rather arduous mating.\n\nMayu extracted her impeccable fangs from the scaled midnight neck of her mate, licking her lips where some of his blood remained. Ob purred in appreciation as her green scales reflected the torchlight and her leathery wings stroked his sides.\n\nTake Ob finally managed to extract himself from his mate's embraces, even though he was a little worse for wear after having done so. Having bred in their dragon forms, it was a very rough process on the male, often resulting in more than a few missing scales. He was lucky this time, and she had been surprisingly gentle with him this time.\n\nSoon, she would be laying their eggs and beginning the long brooding process. Mayu was probably capable of carrying their pups within her in a mammalian fashion, but as Ob was only a Kami through his father's blood, it was important that those Kunitsu Kami around him did not realize that he was not purebred like they were. It had been a long time since a half-human had been recognized within their ranks.\n\n\"It is time. Go.\"\n\n\"Yes Mayu.\"\n\nOb thanked the Amatsu Kami that he had remembered to take his potion to disguise his scent. The one time that he had forgotten to take it and had begun to smell human the whole mountain had been in an uproar looking for an intruder. What a mess it had been, and he had nearly been caught as what he really was.\n\nIt was a dangerous predicament that he had grown up in, and it would have been even worse if they had realized why he had been found orphaned. Exactly how could he have explained the fact that at that time his parents had not met yet, while a hatchling still without the power of speech?\n\n\"Lord Healer Ob, where are you going?\"\n\nThe deep voice of one of the gate guardians broke into the young dragon's thoughts, dissipating slowly awakening memories. Truthfully, he didn't know where he was going. By all rights he should be guarding his bride and their nest, but here below Fujisan there were no dangers to guard her from. No one had penetrated the Take Clan fortress for centuries without an invitation, and Nobunaga had long since ceased his oppression of Youkai, Kami and Priest alike, dead for a long time.\n\nAll Ob knew was that he had to get to the surface and into the woods. He didn't know why, but something was calling for his help. Perhaps he would gather some herbs in the forest while he was searching for what was issuing the call for him in the human world. It was simpler to remain in the spirit vibratory range and easier to be unobserved by passing hikers or climbers, but the urge told him to drop his vibration for a while. Still, he would need to assume his human shape and be very careful in the human realm.\n\n\"I will be sojourning in the Sacred Forests for a while, Chin.\"\n\n\"Very well then, Ob-sama, please be careful as the climbers have become more numerous from the last time that you have been above.\"\n\nOb left the armored forms of his clansmen and childhood playmates behind, passing more guards every few Li as he navigated the upward wending passages carefully. It had not been often that he had gone to the forests, but he and Ryu had gone so often in their distant youth that it was a simple matter to find the exit.\n\nFinally, gentle breezes kissed his face and stirred his black and red silks around his form. Darkness gave way to twilight and then the light of the full moon as he emerged from the fern encrusted mouth of the secret cavernous world below and within Fujisan.\n\nOb looked around the forest clearing, and admired the lichen-covered boulders of the ancient high seat, and the moss mantled cypress and pine trees. Not too distant from where he stood, the source of a stream delivered its water into the care of the stream spirit.\n\nThe water sang to itself a newly filtered tune as it was set on its course. Usually, the stream and spring were more observant when any member of the Take Clan actually emerged from the volcano, but it looked like they were mired in red tape at this time.\n\n\"Yuck, it must be terrible to be bonded to a place. I remember too much work.\"\n\nA young woman's voice resounded in his mind and conjured a thin face that he could almost place, and then the memory was gone.\n\n\"Where are you Obsidian? I don't want to be alone.\"\n\nA troubled frown marred the Asian's face.\n\n\"My life was far easier when I did not remember my past. Mayu has been my mate nearly since I can remember, but I still feel guilty.\"\n\n\"Why have you abandoned me?\"\n\nThe voice had not been in his head after all, and while the pair of Honshu Clan water dragons argued over their watershed reports, the healer began to dash through the woods towards the heartrending wails. The trees and boulders flashed by with his supernatural speed as the young spirit nearly flew along the ground. Animals watched curiously as the non-bonded Kami passed them by, and yet he found himself drawing no nearer.\n\nAhead of him, a slight and glowing form darted through the forests in its own headlong dash, and its sobs sounded distinctly feminine. No smell was left behind, and Ob found himself wondering just what kind of spirit he was chasing.\n\nIt ran as fast as the wind, and yet could not have been a wind Kami, as it possessed what had to be a solid form as the branches were pressed aside for its passage. Finally, the form collapsed on the ground motionless and exhausted.\n\nOb drew near to the being, turning it over carefully to see the face of the creature capable of running as fast as a dragon. The body was solid, and yet possessed of translucence that marked it as a soul.\n\nThe face was strikingly familiar, one that had haunted his dreams ever since his childhood a thousand years ago when a powerful tree Kami had brought him from a hazy past to his proper family. The features were angular and foreign, and yet there were many similarities to his hidden human features within her pink light. Rounded ears marked her as a human soul, yet her spirit was obviously broken, as this soul was only one color, one layer of the human spirit.\n\n\"Oh my.\"\n\nHe set about doing what he could to make the soul more comfortable, shocked at seeing the woman in this state. The soul was wounded; great gashes had been ripped into her being as if she had fought a hard battle against something. Cleaning and bandaging them from a kit that he always kept hidden in his pockets, he was startled when a silvery being bearing the exact same features and wounds came crashing through the underbrush.\n\nHer voice was cool and stern as the winds that swept the summit of the mountain where the various Kami lived as she addressed the disguised dragon.\n\n\"Step away from us and declare your identity spirit. Then you will tell us how it is we find ourselves so far away from our other two souls.\"\n\nSlowly Ob put down his kit so that the conscious soul was able to see what he was doing, and then retreated a few paces to put her more at ease. Lifting his face to study the new soul that had disturbed his work, he was dismayed at the extent of the injuries.\n\n\"Where is your mortal body? It will die if you are gone too long and you have sustained such injuries.\"\n\nThe woman gasped as she saw the face of the spirit attending to her Love soul's wounds, instantly recognizing the face of the one she had been looking for. Yet, in this astral existence that she was in, she saw clearly something that had escaped her when she had known his other incarnation. A red string led from his heart to somewhere deep within the earth and two cords of black and green wound tightly with it in the strong rope of a soul bond. The being that she had come to find was bound to another already.\n\n\"Obsidian.\"\n\n\"Hello, my Reidou. It seems that we have much to discuss, and much of it you will not remember until the time is right.\"\n\n\"I am too late, aren't I?\"\n\n\"Yes and no.\"\n\nThe silver soul collapsed on a nearby boulder, the deep blue of her eyes darkening as the tsunami of the past swept her away for a moment.\n\n\"If I had known what would have happened, I would have stayed with my own kind instead of searching for a bride among humans.\"\n\n\"No, everything happens for a reason. There has to be some reason why our threads have been woven into the Tapestry of Creation in the manner they had been. Everyone's thread has a part to play in the greater whole.\"\n\nHe watched her the way she watched him, and was dimly aware of how his thoughts played in the back of his mind. This particular life he was living now would most likely be his last in this realm, and it was to be used to correct his mistakes. BlowingWind was his beloved Mayu's descendant from her human incarnation, which made her family.\n\nShe was also something even more important to him, and although he had only been newly born the last time he had seen her as Ob, she was still the woman responsible for his living body. He was not sure how it was, but the old tree spirit who was his mate's father had been adamant that he was a child who had traveled through time to serve his mother.\n\n\"You died, and I came to find you, hoping that when and if I did find you that you would feel the same way about me as you once did.\"\n\n\"I do, but it was never meant to be. Our paths are different, but there is someone to help you revitalize the blood of humanity if the two of you can brave our family curse. On another continent the solution is also beginning to play out, if it makes you feel any better.\"\n\n\"Love must not know about this. It would destroy her.\"\n\n\"Ah, so the pink one is Ai. You would be Shin then, Wisdom.\"\n\n\"I ask again Obsidian. Why are we here?\"\n\n\"Always so direct. Please listen without interrupting.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nOb drew in a deep breath in an attempt to order his thoughts, and carefully began to relate in English what Wisdom would need to know in order to guide the other three aspects of herself in the right direction. He could not tell her everything, as the future was not carved in stone. Still, he could tell her a little, and hopefully his sire would be able to help BlowingWind find her lost souls and heal her broken heart.\n\nHe also hoped that she did not figure out what his prehistoric term for her meant."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Crossing Into the Unknown\n\nBlowingWind had dropped her friend's hand sometime during their dash to the gate, and slipped quickly through the spaces between people and baggage.\n\nShawn forced his breathing to remain normal,as he also did his best to run through the crowds that threatened to make him late, but his friend's smaller form made it easier for her. As they wove through the crowds to their gate, he could see her composure solidify, until at last they were at their gate.\n\nThe pair skidded to a halt, BlowingWind narrowly missing tripping over a child's ball that rolled into her path.\n\n\"Where the heck did you learn to run like that? You should join the military.\"\n\nWind listened as Shawn gasped his question to her. Shaking her head, she made her reply.\n\n\"Nah. I couldn't stomach taking orders or killing someone. I had a lot of self-training, and plenty of extra-credit for gym. Let's get in line.\"\n\nThe pair looked at the already long line extending from the check in desk, and then groaned. Those forming Group One were already starting to come together in anticipation of the flight. Taking advantage of the wait, Wind checked out her surroundings.\n\n\"Wow. Good thing we checked in before getting those drinks.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we'd better get in line with the rest of our boarding group.\"\n\nAs could be expected for a major metropolitan airport, the gate was thronging with people. Dark and light, tall and short, young and old, all of these dualities and more mixed together to create a living palette to paint the lifeless canvas with a daily and ever-changing masterpiece. The cushioned blue metal chairs alternately sheltered tired bodies and released them once more into the hectic dance that took place even when people were just waiting. Some of the people filled her with dread. A few leered at her, licking their lips. Most paid no attention to her though, caught up in their own little dramas.\n\n\"Creepy.\"\n\nBy now, the first boarding group at a neighboring gate had just finished, and the second group was being called. She wondered if she should just stay standing or if sitting down would ultimately be the wiser choice. Shawn's voice broke her thoughts.\n\n\"Have you ever seen an official international jet?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then you should. We've got a bit of time before they call our group, why don't we look out the window and see our bird?\"\n\n\"Ok, but I don't see how you can still be comfortable around so many people. It's so noisy.\"\n\nAs she caught sight of the plane, the sheer enormity of the jet nearly took her breath away. Gleaming metal baked in the sun, and with the logo for Japan Airlines boldly rising from the tailfin like the rising sun it was, it lurked just outside the bay as the crew worked on pre-flight preparations. The ramp-way was extended and joined to the door near the front of the beast to allow the thronging hoards onto the mechanical bird.\n\n\"Thank you for choosing Japan Airlines for your travel needs. Group One is now boarding Japan Airlines Company Flight 75 bound for Tokyo Japan. Group One is now boarding.\"\n\nThe bored voice of the flight attendant echoed over the speakers. Looking at the desk, BlowingWind saw the Asian man pushing the button that changed the green LED bulletin to display which group was now boarding for any hearing impaired fliers. His female partner stood by the ramp in her smart red uniform checking the passes of those who had already begun to board from their group.\n\nShe shuffled forward in line, praying that the creepy men would just leave her alone. Wind wanted nothing to do with their oily appearance, stringy hair, or suspicious leer. She had never had to deal with guys looking at her in that manner and it made her feel dirty. It had been one thing beating up one of her male classmates for molesting Summerrose in a dark corner at their perennially postponed prom. It was a totally different ballgame when someone else was making eyes at her.\n\nShawn noticed what she kept glancing at. If the truth were to be told he did not like how the men looked either. They could easily be hijackers, walking bombs, rapists, or anything else. On the other hand, they could also just be travel weary fliers hoping to get a smile. With the look in their eyes he doubted it though. It was the same kind of look he gave his wife at times.\n\nUnfortunately, BlowingWind wasn't helping matters by watching them and giving off the helpless victim vibe.\n\n\"Don't look in their eyes, and quit looking at them like that. It's what they want. Just look straight ahead and mind your business.\"\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nBlowingWind stamped down her urge to inspect the carpet. Instead, she looked at the terminal display behind the check in desk, noting how many flights were lined up after her own. It amazed her that any place could be so busy. So many cities and countries were connected to the LAX, and she found herself wondering what places like Denver, Sacramento, and New York were like. Continuously inching her way up in the parade that consisted of the line, she was blindsided by a comparison to what it must be like to carry a silken dragon at the Chinese New Year.\n\nShe smiled to herself as she thought about her favorite type of beast. In the Land of the Rising Sun, she would no doubt find many images of the fantastic beasts to fuel her imagination, and perhaps she would be inspired to write songs again.\n\n\"With the kind of luck I've been having, something interesting is bound to happen. This is it though. I'm leaving the country.\"\n\nAs the thought rebounded through her mind, BlowingWind felt guilt at leaving without even saying goodbye to her mother. What kind of daughter was she to just abandon her like that, not even telling her how much she meant to her for one last time? She almost wanted to call it off and go home, but to do so would be to live forever mired in the memories of the area and her beloved boyfriend. What was done had been done though, and even though a large part of her wanted to wallow in the past still, she had to move on in her life. Perhaps she could forget the pain in the process of setting up in a new place. Maybe she would work up the courage to call once she was settled.\n\n\"We had better get moving if we don't want to be last.\"\n\nBlowingWind drifted after her friend, superficially responding to his summons, disturbed at the lack of emotion other than guilt that she felt in leaving everything that she had known behind. The BlowingWind who had run laughing through the forest with Obsidian had died the night that she found out about his death. She had been buried when his friend Saksque had found her wandering by the lake and told her his last words of love for her.\n\nHer body continued onward, mechanically doing what it was supposed to. As she passed the bin where the flight bags were, the stewardess handed the woman one. BlowingWind took it with a distracted \"Domo Arigato,\" and walked up the ramp. However well she seemed to be functioning in the outer world though, her thoughts had gone back to when she heard the news from Saksque himself. The cold and sorrowing air could be felt on her skin once more as she replayed the scene in her head.\n\nShe had been at their special place, sitting on a cold rock and dangling bare feet into frigid early morning waters. The lake had been still, no welcoming presence stroking the soles of her tired feet or trying to steal the soft moccasins temporarily abandoned at the shoreline. As she had gazed into the waters, the imposing and hairy forest spirit had lumbered towards her from his precious trees to gently rest a large hand on her shoulder.\n\n\"He really loved you above even his lake you know. Obsidian would want you to find happiness.\"\n\nNow she felt an emotion, and it was one that she did not want. She was angry that Obsidian had been taken from her because of his involvement with the geothermal power plant. She also felt anger at him for not coming out of the tunnel sooner, and for getting caught in the turbines. Most of all, she felt angry at herself for affecting him so much that he had gone to such lengths to make the day of their union perfect. She was even mad at Saksque for not having been able to save his friend.\n\nIn her mind, she sought to strike a bargain with the Creator. She knew she was not quite ready to let go of Obsidian in much the same way that the great ancestral snake spirit of her Apache Clan Kato'ya had not been ready to release his beloved human Kali\u00f1ya to the Star Path so many uncountable cycles ago.\n\n\"Oh, please let me find him. I'll do whatever you want me to do God, just reunite us.\"\n\nUnknown to the young woman, her Creator was watching and listening. She had made the vow that They were waiting for, and was in agreement with His Plan. Now, he could reach forth His hand and write a bit more of her story.\n\nAlthough she had not spoken a word out loud as to her thoughts, the change in her breathing must have alerted Shawn that she was being sucked back into the tides of grief. He took it upon himself to make sure that she was in her seat, glad that they had been placed together. Luckily, the three men who had been making her nervous had not boarded the plane, and he desperately hoped that they were waiting for a different flight.\n\n\"Here, let me get that for you.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\nShe had been quickly pulled out of her morose thoughts when Shawn addressed her, marooned in a sea of reality to look around in confusion. BlowingWind had no memory of having gotten onto the plane. She could dimly remember walking the ramp, but not actually boarding the plane. Shawn had his hand out for her knapsack, which she relinquished grudgingly. It seemed to be becoming her security object because of the precious mirror that it contained. Making a face at herself for developing a dependency on an object for security and for having spaced out, she spoke again.\n\n\"Oh. Sure. Thanks.\"\n\n\"You know 'Wind, I've told you pretty much all about me, but you haven't told me much about you.\"\n\n\"I'm not very interesting.\"\n\n\"So? Neither am I. We just killed two hours talking about my family.\"\n\n\"Fine. But I hate talking about myself. I guess it's fair though.\"\n\nTime could work against her, but it could work for her as well. As the next group began to board, she began to weave him a story. A blond man in the seat across the aisle turned his head to listen, but she was too immersed in thought to notice him.\n\nBlowingWind talked through lift off, slipping in between Japanese and English when she was not sure of how to say something in Japanese. When this happened, Shawn would correct her gently, listening to what she told him, and peering in between the unwritten lines for the parts that she was withholding.\n\n\"Well, that's a pretty crappy reason to move to Japan. And you didn't even tell su madre, 'adios?'\"\n\nThe unexpected baritone made both of the conversants jump in their seats, their heads swiveling quickly to match gazes with the blue eyes of their tanned and golden haired eavesdropper. BlowingWind narrowed her eyes, already disliking him.\n\n\"I suppose you have a better reason to go to Japan?\"\n\n\"Of course. After a bit of exploration, I'm going to Hokkaido to help with a river restoration project. If things go well for me, I might make the move permanent, or not. It all rests on the heart of a pretty maid.\"\n\n\"I hope you and your girlfriend enjoy yourselves then.\"\n\n\"Oh, she's not my girlfriend... yet. As soon as she meets me though it will be magic.\"\n\n\"Lovely.\"\n\nBlowingWind refrained from gagging and returned to her storytelling, much quieter so that hopefully they would not be heard. The man took no notice.\n\n\"I am Se\u00f1ior Queso.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are. Thank you.\"\n\nShawn rolled his eyes. BlowingWind smirked.\n\nThey continued talking after she had told what she was going to tell about her life, even through the meal that was provided. At last though, BlowingWind fell asleep, slipping away from the stress and strain for a few precious hours of sleep.\n\nWisdom rubbed her head, her silvery hand ghosting over her brow. The flow of time was not really something that she had thought much of before, as she had not had to think very deeply about it. This was the first time that her personal drama had been involved in such a grand dance.\n\n\"So, basically, you want me to move on in my life so that you can be born to help break my curse, so that I can be happy with some guy you won't even tell me about, and so that you can be born and we can be together again? Do you know how confusing that sounds? This has got to be a hallucination brought on by some kind of head trauma.\"\n\n\"Yes. I am confused too.\"\n\nDragons were highly skilled with language, speaking all tongues of the world easily. After all, it was the dragons themselves who had given the humans the gifts of speech and writing. He was lucky in that, as he had not been exposed to English very often, having reached maturity before the English even came to the country. If he were completely human, he would never be able to understand the English speaking soul that he had been with which he had been conversing with given his pitiful experience. Unfortunately since he was also half-human it took him a little longer to phrase things in her native language than it would have if he were wholly dragon.\n\nShin sighed.\n\nOb had taken off the black outer jacket of his kimono, leaving him clad with his black hakama and the red kimono that he wore beneath his haori. The haori he had folded into a packet to provide a pillow for the still unconscious Ai.\n\nAlthough she had received the same wounds that Shin had, it seemed that they affected her worse than her cerebral counterpart. The soul would need a nearby host to hold her and heal her. Ai would not have the constitution to make the travel back to her body unassisted. She would need to be invited home.\n\n\"I'm sure this will work.\"\n\nWisdom shook her head again, angry at not being able to fathom such a seemingly simple and yet surely impossible happening.\n\n\"I don't buy it. If you haven't even been born yet, then you shouldn't even be here. Time travel just isn't available without moving at the speed of light. Even then, it requires movement and makes time relative. At least that's what I understood in math.\"\n\n\"Shin, there is much that you do not know yet. You are still young, I am hundreds of years old, and I was hundreds of years old when my mate's father brought me here to my clan. Time travel does exist.\"\n\n\"Doesn't telling me about it create a paradox then? I think Albert Einstein wrote something about killing one's own grandfather if time travel was possible. I don't know for sure, it was a really boring conversation between the class eggheads and the math teacher.\"\n\n\"But it would also create a paradox if I didn't tell you.\"\n\n\"And now I have to find the rest of myself again and get RagingTornado and BlowingWind to work together before the two of them get so addled with emotions that they can't function.\"\n\n\"Only if you want to heal.\"\n\nWisdom crossed her arms where she sat on a rock, partially irritated to be addressed by a non-English version of her name.\n\n\"What happens if I don't?\"\n\n\"I cease to exist. Why? Don't you want to heal?\"\n\n\"I meant what happens if I fail. Any number of things could happen. I might not like the guy. BlowingWind and RagingTornado could ignore my whispers. I could get so caught up in my studies, and then work, that I totally miss dating at all. I might even not have that offer still at the University, and end up having to go home, or starve, or something. Most importantly though I still maintain that the future isn't fixed.\"\n\n\"You're right, the future isn't fixed. You have a great deal of choice.\"\n\n\"Are all spirits as cryptic as you?\"\n\n\"Not all. I suggest that you get going though.\"\n\nWith a withering glare Shin, or Wisdom as she called herself, contracted into an orb. Spinning angrily, she zoomed off into the night, searching for her body and following the invisible cord that would bind her to it until her death.\n\nOb was left alone with Ai now. He could not carry her back to the stronghold in her current form. She was still bound to her body and carried the smell of human on her due to her low vibration.\n\n\"Well Ai, it looks like it's just you and I. I'm going to have to encase you in something, but I do have a place where you can rest and heal safely. You will like him.\"\n\nOb produced from one of the many folds in his robes a rice ball that he had recently made. The cooled bundle of rice was slightly sticky, and as white as the moon currently overhead somewhere above the canopy of branches. Having a greater need for food than his counterparts, he always kept a little something or other to snack on with him. The smell of the onigiri would hide her own smell, and the ball itself would serve as the perfect vehicle to where he was planning to place her. The healer spirit began to chant his spell beneath his breath, his voice echoing in the stillness between the syllables.\n\n\"Kiwamete kitanaki mo tamari nakere ba kitanaki to wa araji uchi to no tamagaki kiyoku kiyoshi to maosu.\"\n\nLove, or Ai as Ob referred to her, contracted into a small orb of pink energy. In a sleepy voice, somewhere between voluntary oblivion, and a desire to feel no more pain, the soul reflected back and inward the spell in her own language as she reacted to the gently forming directive energy. Ai did not understand the words consciously, but the shaman translated the feelings behind them.\n\n\"Even for the things which are the most impure, even if things I have left undone and in disarray, respectfully I ask that the spirits hear and grant me complete purification and clarity, both inside and out.\"\n\nThree times Ob chanted in Japanese, and three times Ai replied in her own language. At the end of the spell, Ob took the sleeping soul of the love that BlowingWind's spirit was capable of and guided her into the rice ball.\n\nAs carefully as the Kami who was responsible for being sure each soul was seated into an infant's body, he checked his work to be sure that all was in order. After being satisfied that it was, he wrapped this special offering in a silken square that he produced from yet another pocket in order to be able to tell it apart from others he had with him.\n\nThis special rice ball should only be eaten by one particular Kami, and he knew just who to give it to in order to facilitate this very special healing. True, it would be a bit of a role reversal, but it should be easy for this particular Kami to put the soul where she ultimately belonged.\n\nAt least, Ob hoped so.\n\nJikokusecchuuki stood in the sparse room where Sarutahiko had summoned him. The time Kami's short brown hair and dark eyes were a product of these times he found himself in, yet he still wore the brown and green kimono he had adopted ages ago to match the tree that he had become.\n\n\"You wished to see me, oh noble leader of all the Earthly Kami?\"\n\n\"Jikokusecchuuki-san, you are known as wise. Kazekami-san has brought to me most disturbing news. There is a Miko riding his back to our country even now, who hails from the American Lands. I need your help in this matter.\"\n\nThe old time spirit could feel his respiration quicken, but he caused himself to remain still. It would not do to reveal his hand too soon, especially if this was not the young Miko that he was expecting. He had learned over the long course of his existence that time was not as linear as most thought it to be, more like the cocoon of a silkworm wrapped upon itself. By sending out his roots and studying the way the threads of time and destiny wove together he had made predictions that had come to pass, and had foreseen many things happen that were unavoidable.\n\nIf this was the child that he was thinking of, then whatever happened would be what needed to be, and it was always possible that he had misread the tapestry of time. She was the only one who could write the story that would unfold; it was not for him to tell.\n\n\"What would you have me do, Lord?\"\n\n\"She intends to stay in our country permanently, and Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami-sama is worried about one of the unbalanced among our number claiming her for a priestess and gaining power.\"\n\n\"What does the Shining One from the Heavens wish done, my Lord?\"\n\n\"The Lady wishes to know what lies in the Miko's future, and how best that we may turn her to our wishes.\"\n\n\"My Lord, we can do nothing. We must watch to see, for this section of time is still being woven. One can not tell a story before learning it.\"\n\n\"I see. You may go then time teller.\"\n\nJikokusecchuuki bowed low before exiting the audience chamber of Tsubaki Jingu. Going out into the courtyard, he spied the energy of Ame-o-Uzume watching some of the shrine dancers, unseen from one of the porches.\n\nGone was the time when the greater Kami allowed themselves to be seen by their worshippers, hiding away in unexpected places, although some of the lesser Kami still lived among them. At the same time though, the Kami were gradually losing the energy that they needed. With the decreasing belief in their powers, many of the lesser Kami were dying out.\n\nWalking unseen past the dancers and the scattered ones who came to the shrine to make their requests, the time teller went back to pondering something that had puzzled him for centuries now. Just where had the dragon that had eventually become his daughter's mate come from? Why had he been abandoned by his own Clan, and how was it that the hatchling had even found his way into the small clutch of new tree dragons that had contained his daughter Mayu?\n\nAs he continued his walk through the capital towards where his own residence was, he paused to glance at a clock in a shop window.\n\n\"For the first time in my life, I do not know what the future contains for many of us. Our Lord should have asked my little Mayu. It is she who serves as priestess to Time.\"\n\nThe molten rock surrounding him glowed with its own light, heated further by his impatience. Sulking at the bottom of his elemental self, the mobile consciousness coveted the freedom to explore once more. Yet, he also wanted rest.\n\nFor a while now a sad voice had woven through his unconscious mind, whispering his loneliness to himself. Although he was surrounded by many unbound spirits who sought shelter within Lady Fuji, he had very few that he could share his troubling dreams with.\n\n\"I wish I could talk to Ob, but he has so much to do that I don't see him often anymore. He and Mayu are always brewing some strange potion, or busy performing healing services for the various other Kami. My siblings, even of my own clutch, aren't any more help. Whether bonded or not, they could at least send word. Not once have they visited me these five years, it should be easy to slip past the guards.\"\n\nThe magma dragon stretched and continued muttering to himself, one half listening to the other half complain.\n\n\"I'm sick of being in trouble. I never asked for material existence, maybe I could have been happy with no other body than just this magma and this realm. I at least wouldn't be aware of this terrible boredom. Then again, it's not like I really had a choice, since father and mother had decided they wanted to brood over another clutch of eggs!\"\n\nThe other half of his mind nodded in agreement, continuing the stretching and striving.\n\n\"Time to get some exercise Take.\"\n\n\"You're right Ryu. If I keep sitting down here pouting, I'll just get more bored.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"I think I'll play some lava ball!\"\n\nRyu gave up on sulking at the bottom, slithering and slinking upward through the viscous goo. It was going to make a mess for the servants to clean up, but at this time he didn't really care. He just wanted out.\n\n\"May Sarutahiko and Amaterasu provide me with a suitable challenge to dissipate some of this energy once I am released.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Boiling Point\n\nTen hours after her flight had left behind the American soil, BlowingWind was rudely awoken from her fitful rest.\n\n\"Please fasten your seatbelts and return your seats and trays to their upright and locked positions. We are experiencing minor turbulence. Currently, we have just entered Japanese air space.\n\n\"Are we going to die? Can I panic now?\"\n\nTurning her head to her left where she fully expected her panic insurance to be, she was disappointed to find that Shawn was actually sleeping through the disturbance. Shaking the man vigorously did nothing to rouse him from his dreams of who only knew what, nor did her shouts in his ear do anything. As the hand luggage in the above racks slid around the compartments noisily, BlowingWind could only think of all of the movies that she had seen about plane crashes.\n\nShe began to wonder what kind of death would be preferable. Would it be the fiery death, burnt alive until oblivion claimed her mind, that was the kindest? Was the choicest death having her neck snapped by the impact into the sea? Would it be better to drown in the cold and salty Pacific instead? She certainly could not take the idea of dying of starvation in a life raft, or eating a decomposing corpse.\n\n\"Shawn?\"\n\nBlowingWind shook her travel companion again, hoping to rouse him. They had not reclined their seats when they fell asleep, and they had kept their seatbelts on. Still, he continued to sleep.\n\n\"And you're in the military. If I had a bugle, I'd be blaring revelry in your ear. I bet that would wake you up.\"\n\nStill the young man continued to sleep, exhausted from the long shifts that he had been pulling before his transfer back to Japan.\n\n\"Perfect. Some travel insurance you are. Must you sleep now?\"\n\nIt wasn't that she was afraid of flying. It was the crashing that bothered her. Flight was something that she had enjoyed once upon a time. Obsidian had taken her.\n\nBlowingWind wished that he was there to hold her hand now, but he probably never would again. It was a hopeless dream she was pursuing. Still, her hand reached for the simple lake snail shell around her neck. Dismally, her thoughts of the happy past left her behind. The words that had given her the unexpected invitation onto the back of the wind rang through her head.\n\n\"Don't let go.\"\n\nThe shell bit into her hand, drawing her blood. The sting brought her back to herself. In his own way, perhaps Obsidian could still calm her, despite the fact that he was no more.\n\n\"I have to let go. I am not this weak.\"\n\nThat determined thought soothed her in an odd way, yet it also felt like she was dying just a little more inside and betraying something important.\n\n\"I don't want to move on though, not just yet. Am I falling into depression like that girl who shot herself in Fall River last year, after her boyfriend dumped her? Do I need mental help?\"\n\nBlowingWind rested her forehead on the cold glass separating her from the wild storm tossing her plane around. Gazing into the shifting clouds, she could almost fancy that it was trying to keep her from her destination and her new life. It was like a guardian or gatekeeper in her imagination, and unless it lost interest then surely it would send them all to their deaths.\n\n\"Yeah right, it's minor turbulence by my mirror and Father's pipe. I know I saw a gremlin out on that wing, I'm about to blow chunks, and find myself afraid to die. What would Obsidian and my ancestors think? Surely they would think me weak. No, when I die, it will be when I say.\"\n\nThe ride smoothed back out as the jet hit a stable patch. She was very thankful for the airsick bag that had been tucked into the pouch in front of her, and filled it with the roast beef that had been her in flight meal. As she finished, the voice of the captain spilled out of the speakers.\n\n\"We are beginning our initial approach and descent to Tokyo International Airport. Thank you for maintaining your seats and trays in the upright position.\"\n\nThe relieved voice of the captain had been a welcome distraction for the shaman, and dropping below the cloud-line was a thrill. The city played peek-a-boo with her as the jet assumed a holding pattern while it waited for landing clearance, followed a half an hour later by a shy emergence as she approached the ground. The bump and bounce as the tires kissed the tarmac awoke Shawn from his sleep.\n\n\"Ah, home sweet home. I see you managed not to panic.\"\n\nAll BlowingWind could muster as a reply was a glare. After the initial wave of irritation, she managed to find a better reply that was more in keeping with her Irish heritage.\n\n\"Oh sure, we only hit a bad patch of turbulence about 250 miles or so ago, flew through a bad storm, and listened to the luggage do the Electric Slide in the overhead bins. If I had brought my guitar, I would have to replace every single string.\"\n\n\"Really? Why didn't you wake me up?\"\n\n\"I tried. You sleep like a log. Has anybody ever blared revelry in your ear?\"\n\nOb returned to the secret entrance cave into the sacred mountain, pausing here and there to gather herbs, berries, and roots for their medicinal or magical values. The ancient forest willingly yielded his secrets to the healer that was employed for the spirits and Kami dwelling within, and upon the mountain. His trained eye had learned long ago where to find the answers to his needs, and Ob was glad that this area of the forest was still undeveloped by man. True, the occasional Yamabushi did manage to find it, but the Tengu that still called the mountain forest their home often managed to lead the old priests astray.\n\nStill, the humans had encroached further into the forests with their bulldozers for housing developments. He had heard of spirits losing their clear streams for the humans to have houses or stores, or meadow masters finding themselves master over apartment buildings that eventually contained the guardian spirits for the indwelling families. Those spirits that could not assimilate into the new web of energy either died, or had to wander until they found a new home.\n\nOb paused in the lovely clearing, looking around at the pristine wilderness.\n\nHis eyes fell on the small trickle spring feeding the stream that danced away down the mountainside. The two spirits must have worked out their problem, for they had released their semi-corporeal forms, once more becoming the amorphous indwelling presences of bonded Kami living within the natural features.\n\n\"How many people understand the intricacies of this place any more?\"\n\nHe shook off the gloom that threatened to engulf him each time that he worried about the preservation of the area where he found the bulk of his medicines. It did no good to dwell on it though, as death was also natural. Even the greatest Kami would one day fall under the power of the ultimate transformation, making way for something new, just as Izanami-no-Mikoto had.\n\nOb entered the cave, descending from twilight into inky blackness darker than a stormy midnight. The floor of the ancient lava tube frowned up at him forbiddingly, just as it had for thousands of years for not only his predecessor, but many others who made the medical and healing division what it was.\n\nAfter 300 yards of midnight pitch, a red lantern was revealed, glowing serenely forth for the workers of the mountain's innards. Ten yards later, another red silk lantern magically lit the eternal night. In the shadows beneath, Ob heard the guardians shift their nebulous presences in acknowledgment of his passing. Eight red lanterns total he passed by and then eight yellow. Here, the guards were less shadowy, and more formed, as the forbidding passage before had kept intruders out for centuries. Finally, brash torches blazed from the walls, and fully formed guardians greeted the Head Healer.\n\n\"Welcome home Lord Healer. Has your mission been a success?\"\n\n\"Yes guard. I do believe that it has been so.\"\n\n\"That is wonderful, my Lord. I am sure that you will work many miracles on behalf of our masters.\"\n\nOb moved on, many similar exchanges happening between him and the respectful guards. Finally, the orange glow and rampant heat of his master reached out to warm him. Ob felt a flutter of excitement when basking in the safe and familiar energy.\n\n\"He is quite active today. I wonder what's wrong now.\"\n\nRunning through the last few yards to the central chamber of the division, Ob saw fireballs streaking up from the pit. Now it was clear why the energy had been roiling.\n\n\"Just peachy. What a way to have an excuse for a visit. How old is he now?\"\n\nRyu had snapped and was going to make everyone else just as miserable as he had been for the last five long human years. The fully-grown dragon was throwing himself a nice juvenile temper tantrum, complete with magma balls.\n\nDodging a deadly glob of lava that had been hurled by the laughing maniac dancing on the tongue surface, Ob dug out a reed pipe from the pouch tucked into his obi belt. Weaving to the edge of the crevasse, he had only one thought as he prepared to fire.\n\n\"I really need a raise.\"\n\nAt the edge, Ob grinned. Ryu had assumed his human guise in an outrageous act of defiance. Whirling on the surface, Ryu was scooping up handfuls of the molten rock and flinging it as far as he could. The great lord looked like a complete lunatic, and it wasn't long before he bent over and presented Ob with an irresistible target while scooping up more ammunition.\n\nRaising the reed to his lips, Ob blew.\n\n\"Ow! Now there are wasps down here harassing me?\"\n\nOb smirked at his handiwork, admiring the black feathered dart sticking out of the magma lord's posterior. He waited for the medicine to take effect, having used it on Ryu enough to know just when it would take effect.\n\n\"Three, two, one, and down he goes.\"\n\nRyu knelt down, staring at his elemental surface while holding his head. Suddenly, he was feeling quite relaxed, if more than a little dizzy.\n\n\"Can I come down now, or are you going to continue making a mess for me to get blamed for?\"\n\n\"Ob, what are you doing up there? Otou-sama said I was not to have any visitors.\"\n\n\"Oh, it is just a routine intervention, your Father won't mind. Sometimes, my job can get me into interesting places. Are you hungry?\"\n\nRyu's eyes widened as he pulled out the small but powerful dart. \"This makes ten. If I didn't know better, Ob, I would say that this was your favorite method of delivery. I'm starving. Just what do you put in these things anyway?\"\n\nCarefully schooling his voice to be more remeniscent of a sage than an amused youngster, he replied. \"It's an ancient Japanese Healer's trade secret Ryu-sama. Catch!\"\n\nOb pulled out the special onigiri, tossing the precious package down to the confused dragon-man. Eagerly Ryu unwrapped the black package, and then scowled down at the pearl of rice grains.\n\n\"Kind of a meager offering, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry. It will fill you up more than you would imagine.\"\n\nCarefully sniffing the ball, he spoke.\n\n\"I'm not biting. You put more medicine in it, didn't you?\"\n\n\"What's wrong sire, don't you trust me?\"\n\n\"No. A doctor who shoots his patients with unknown drugs I do not trust. I especially don't trust this little medicine filled onigiri since I know how bad you are at cooking, and with how many pranks that you have pulled on me since our youth.\"\n\nOb couldn't help the cheeky grin. He was on thin ice and he knew it, but he had also inherited a small love of trouble.\n\n\"Come on Ryu-sama, my cooking doesn't destroy the kitchen anymore, just the pots.\"\n\nDoubtful, Ryu took a small bite, followed by another. Thoughtfully, he nibbled on the ball, trying to place the exotic flavor. Eventually, the mouthful was gone, and the flavor was finally identified. It was not one that he was overly fond of, as he was not a fan of spices, and yet it held a certain attraction. Confused, he muttered to himself.\n\n\"You're still a bad cook. Why would rice taste like cinnamon?\"\n\nOb smiled as he watched the Kami devour the rest of the rice ball.\n\n\"I have no idea Ryu-sama.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Customs\n\n\"We have landed at Tokyo International Airport. Thank you for choosing Japan Airlines for your international travel needs. Please to remain seated until we have taxied to a full and complete stop.\" The stewardess repeated herself in Japanese as well, but it went unnoticed to the ears of one young woman who was eagerly peering out the window.\n\nA few minutes later, the 747 had stopped, and the ramp-way had been extended out to the door. A bit later, the lights for the seatbelt were turned out, and after retrieving her bag from the overhead bin she gratefully poured herself out of the plane.\n\n\"Land! Sweet land! I love you ground!\"\n\nShawn couldn't help but laugh. By looking at her, one would think that perhaps she had just emerged from a minor car wreck, with her hair standing on end and a desperate gleam in her eyes. Either that, or that the woman was just plain crazy.\n\n\"Technically BlowingWind, we are still on the ramp-way. Then we will be in the terminal. You can't spout that cheesy line until you are actually on land.\"\n\nThe ramp was soon left behind, and BlowingWind found herself passing through customs once again. She had gone through the U.S. customs on her way out of her country, but she had not really paid much attention to all of the X-rays and security checks as they had been focused on preventing the export of illegal substances. Now that she was going through the incoming customs checks of another country, things were rather different. It was more than a little odd having people looking through her few belongings and checking her papers to make certain that she was who she was claiming to be.\n\nThe smiling Japanese woman looked through her papers, then looked again more carefully. The smile turned into a slight frown of concentration, and then an expression of worry.\n\n\"MountainChild-san, I am afraid that you will have to come with me for an examination.\"\n\n\"Is there a problem ma'am?\"\n\n\"I am sorry, but I can not seem to find your statement for reason of entry.\"\n\n\"I came here for schooling. I was planning to see the country while waiting for the next school year to start and use that time to learn Japanese enough to facilitate my schooling.\"\n\n\"I can not find any proof of your acceptance to any of our fine universities. Not to worry though, this happens all of the time. We will just go and see my supervisor, and he will put in a call to your university to confirm your acceptance and reason of entry.\"\n\n\"Oh, okay then.\"\n\nShawn had noticed BlowingWind's problem. He was ready to move on, and his escort was probably waiting rather anxiously for him. No doubt his fatherin-law was the one waiting. It was always his lovely Haruko's father who picked him up from the airport when coming home.\n\nCustoms could take a long time for those with missing paper work. Who knew exactly how long it would be before she was released?\n\n\"BlowingWind, here.\"\n\nHe pulled his notebook and black ballpoint out of his back pocket, quickly jotting down his contact information. Ripping out the tiny leaflet, he pushed it into her hand.\n\n\"Give me a jingle when you get done if I'm not here. You have to meet Haruko, so you are staying with us. You can pay rent if you want, before you start protesting. She'll help you get acculturated and find a place to stay until the school year starts up again.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked at her friend, truly grateful for the help that he had given. With any luck, she would get to stay in the country. There was so much she wanted to see. She wanted to visit each shrine, to experience the tea ceremony, and to get past her soul-weakening attachment to her past.\n\n\"Thanks, I will.\"\n\nShawn smiled, and then picked up his bag one more time. He was finished with customs, and it was time for him to go and collect the rest of his luggage where his gifts were safely stowed. It was time to go, and he was sure that she would be fine.\n\nAs he walked down the corridor with the other passengers, BlowingWind wondered when or if she would ever see him again.\n\n\"This way Miss, please.\"\n\nBlowingWind followed the aging customs official through a door emblazoned with strange red characters, noting the strands of silver that flashed now and again in the otherwise umber brown hair of the woman in front. The official's black uniform set her apart from the other airport workers that she had seen so far, and the American could only assume it really was to set the different groups apart.\n\nThe further down the corridors she was led, the more ominous and imposing the vibrations were to her. Out where the main groups of the travelers were screened the atmosphere had been cheery, the white walls relieved by stripes of color, and the halls had bustled with activity. Here, through the door that had no doubt been marked for \"authorized use only,\" the hallways were stark and white, lifeless as any morgue. Even though the air circulated freely the walls gave no impression of space. The smallness of her current location reminded her yet again of her fear of enclosures.\n\nAt the end of one hallway, another door stood before her. The official knocked three times on the door, and a voice issued from within.\n\n\"Enter.\"\n\nThe door was opened, and BlowingWind was ushered inside to where the supervisor was waiting at his desk. While Shawn had hurriedly given her his contact information, the official had made a quick call to alert the man of her situation.\n\n\"So, this is the student who forgot her acceptance papers. Have a seat please.\"\n\nAlthough his order had been disguised as a request, there was no room for argument. His dark eyes were like twin holes of oblivion threatening to swallow her very being.\n\n\"Papers please.\"\n\nBlowingWind handed in her passport and other documentation, bravely trying to hide the fact that this particular person had turned her insides to Jell-O. The dark business suit that he wore made her think of FBI agents from some political film, or perhaps some gangster. No, he was even worse than that really, more like the creepy American Government teacher she had way back in her freshman year of high school. As he looked at her immunization records, it appeared that he was disappointed.\n\n\"Well, it seems that your immunizations are all in order MountainChild-san, as you are not required to have any for entry. However, you have no paper of permission to land and no Visa. The proper procedure would have been to obtain these things before boarding your plane. Which university have you supposedly been accepted into?\"\n\n\"Hokkaido University, sir. I was planning to attend the Fukuhaku campus.\"\n\n\"A forgetful American will be attending one of our universities, really! With all of the competition between our students, I do not see why they would allow a backward American, who probably can barely speak enough Japanese to survive in a restaurant, to take a spot from one of our more deserving students. Never the less, I will call and confirm your status.\" His tone was stern as a father's, then gentled when directed to her guide. \"Yura, please watch our guest while I confirm.\"\n\n\"Yes supervisor.\"\n\nBlowingWind had not formally accepted the spot yet, and had not brought her letter of acceptance with her. It had been filed with all of the other acceptance letters she had received that year, safe in a folder in her mother's filing cabinet. All she could do now was to pray that she would be allowed to stay in the country. With every fiber of her being, BlowingWind released her wish, and awaited her fate.\n\nRed and white hairs hung limply disheveled around a thin, and aristocratically, haggard face that had recently gained a few more worry wrinkles etched into the glacial mask of sorrow. Frozen lakes gazed sadly at a picture reverently held in one pale and thin hand, while the other hand mechanically lifted a mug of steaming coffee to sorrowing lips. Woodenly, Marie gulped the scalding liquid, not even noticing the pain.\n\nSo many years ago, the smiling young man in the photo had been cruelly wrested away by a curse that she had never really believed in, as imaginary a thing as the little green dragon that she had once believed in. Now, the little girl in his arms had been dealt the same hand if the ever-truthful Summerrose could be believed. The child had called on her lunch break earlier in the day to tell about seeing BlowingWind.\n\nMarie wished that she could go back and change the past, perhaps to stop whatever accident had befallen the gentle boy who had been her daughter's dearest friend, or to prevent the pair from having fallen in love. Such wishes were in vain though. She was no time traveler, and certainly no witch or priestess of the Old Ways, as had been the women of her clan for generations into the mists of the past. That had fallen to her elder sister.\n\nMarie could remember the many further years ago when she too had fled from her home, and her own mother. Mother had insisted that she be married to the young man that she approved of. It was a tradition in her extensive family, that all marriages were arranged by the mother, who would be better able to choose matches for her children based on the head, and the future, rather than the heart. It did no good to marry for love when it could not be guaranteed how long the first husband would live. It had to be assured that any children would be well cared for, so that they in turn could tend Brigit's Well.\n\nAccording to the local legends that supposedly had been handed down since even before Saint Patrick had landed on the shores of Ireland, the old stone well at the top of Draganp\u00e1irc was where the triple goddess known as Brigit made her home. At one time, her forge had been nearby, but she supposedly took it back down the well after her beloved children were systematically stamped out. Only a few had survived, and hidden under the guise of Catholicism they had sought sanctuary, eventually breeding up to an entire community. Mother had been the Keeper of the Well, and had told stories about encounters with Her, the Gentry, and the Dragons who still called the area home.\n\nMarie had never encountered the Goddess, or any of the Wee Folk, and had seen no evidence of dragons, to her memory. She had thought her entire family crazy. Not seeing any point in retaining a silly superstition and not wishing to be tied for life to a man that she felt nothing for, she fled the country the day before her wedding. Marie wanted to marry for love, and had argued many a time with her mother about it. As a consequence after running away, she had not seen her Mother, sister, or half-brother since. Was the separation and alienation among family members also part of her curse?\n\nMarie had not believed in curses, fairies, or magic until the day that a lake dragon had nearly bewitched her daughter. That day when she saw the dragon she no longer thought of her own family as crazy. The headache that had washed over her had been immense, and to this day she could not shake the sense of something shifting and strirring, partially unlocking within her mind. That very night by the campfire eleven years ago she told the old legend, warning of the dangers of dragons.\n\n\"Soaring Hawk, where did I go wrong? What would you do, and where would she go? Please God, watch over my baby.\"\n\nThe temperature in the room dropped suddenly, and the wind picked up sharply outside, howling around the house. She could almost hear a voice in the wind, it always seemed to sound like a person to her. It even managed to penetrate inside, swirling around the slim figure to further place her appearance in disarray. For a moment, Marie imagined that she could feel her dead husband's presence around her.\n\n\"Odd, I thought I managed to fix all of the drafts.\"\n\nShe was filled with an urge to look through her daughter's college acceptances. Walking to where she kept the filing cabinet, she remembered how proud she had been when they had all come in, excited that her daughter was eligible for so many fine schools. BlowingWind was very intelligent and much better at math than she gave herself credit for. Most of the colleges had wanted her for their snowboarding teams though, not for her academics. In fact, all of her offered scholarships had been for snowboarding. Ultimately, her baby girl had decided to attend Southern Oregon University for its scholastic and athletic programs as well as its commutability.\n\nHer footfalls echoed dully through the house. The door creaked. Outside, only the normal sounds of the woods broke the silence. The house itself listened and breathed.\n\nBlowingWind had said that she wanted to be close to her, but Marie knew better. The handsome Obsidian had more to do with her decision to stay local than the girl would admit.\n\nMarie opened up the black cabinet, carefully bringing out the folder where she had kept each letter. After a moment of reading through them, the wind died back down, leaving her alone once more while she lingered at looking over the space letter that had pleased her the most should have been. She put the folder back with a sigh. It had excited her daughter also, as it was one that she had not even thought of applying for. Her school's guidance counselor had filed on her behalf, acting on BlowingWind's interest in the foreign exchange program.\n\n\"I wonder why she threw away Hokkaido University's letter?\"\n\nMarie did not see the hawk breast feather that fell behind the filing cabinet. Instead, she went to the window to be certain that her novena for her daughter's safety was still lit. She was not Catholic, nor did she follow any form of Goddess religion, as a non-practicing Protestant, but in times of stress she did fall back on old habits ingrained as a child. Her mother had often prayed to Mary, and to Bridget, and seemed to have been a devout Catholic. Marie had preferred not to deal with intermediaries during that short time when she truly had believed, and had gone to a Protestant Church. Things were changing though. In the morning she would pay another visit to Saint Michael's, but first she had to get through the night. No doubt she would only be able to sleep curled up in her daughter's bed, surrounded by abandoned treasures.\n\nIn the windowsill burned a tall candle in clear glass, and behind this were pictures of Saint Bridget and Lady Mary. A Celtic cross had been crudely painted on the windowpane in red paint. Arranged before all of these monuments to her spiritual past were several mementos of her only child, odds and ends such as her baby teeth and a small bit of hair from her first hair cut. Kneeling in front of this altar, Marie began to pray.\n\n\"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost I pray that my daughter be kept safe from all harm and bewitchment. Mother Mary, I ask you to help me bear my loss with grace and to teach me the fortitude to have faith until she returns to me. Saint Bridget, who was once known as the goddess Brigit, I ask you to also lend your aid to my baby as one of your own.\"\n\nAfter her heartfelt prayer to all of the powers that she knew of, Marie retired to finally attempt some sleep.\n\nBlowingWind could feel her heart pounding the entire time she had been waiting for the supervisor to be connected via phone to the University. It seemed that everyone in the admissions department was out on lunch or that they were all busy. Yura had also seated herself, obeying her superior's hand motions. BlowingWind was beginning to give up on her dream, when a gust from the ventilation system sent all of her paperwork flying all over the formerly pristine office. She and Yura scrambled to collect everything and arrange it on the desk once more, beneath his disapproving glare.\n\nBetween the two women, everything was put back on the desk quickly, including an extra paper that they had not seen when it had fluttered down through the air system when the mysterious breeze had happened.\n\n\"Perfect, I will have to have a word with maintenance about the faulty air conditioning after this phone call.\"\n\nBlowingWind could not believe how full of himself this supervisor was. All of her experience with Japanese people back home had painted them as polite and considerate to a fault, but this guy was making even the crabby old janitor at her old high school look like Miss Manners in comparison. If only there was some way to knock him back down to size. However, Father had tried to teach her that violence solved nothing. If he were here, what would he have done?\n\nHe certainly would have done his research before running off to another country. It was an understatement that she was in deep trouble.\n\nAt that moment, she paused in her self-punishment after catching sight of something much unexpected. Lying there on the desk in front of her, as innocuously as if it had been there the whole time, was her college acceptance paperwork, and one hawk breast feather on top of the sheaf. Picking it up, she looked incredulously at the very thing that she absolutely knew she had left at home, puzzling over how it could have gotten here when two customs officials said it had not been. By the presence of the feather, she knew that at least one spirit had followed her from home. She just hoped that Coyote had not decided to tag along for the ride.\n\n\"Sir, I found my acceptance letter.\"\n\nShe handed the irate man her papers, keeping the feather to herself. After glancing at the papers he placed the black handset on its cradle once more, grumbling about how Americans were always misfiling things and wasting his time.\n\n\"You have ninety days to file for and receive a student residency visa. You will also need to file for a visa to obtain and hold a job if you intend to work. If I were not required to let you in for ninety days based on your stated objective of sightseeing then I would send you back to America on the next flight. Consider yourself lucky; now get out of my sight. Yura, escort her back.\"\n\n\"Yes supervisor.\"\n\nYura led the young American back to the traveler's area silently. She had apparently overlooked the acceptance letter, and would be receiving a stern reprimand if not actually loosing her job. What was worse, she had lost face in front of her department head.\n\n\"So, is that guy always like that?\"\n\nThe American looked sympathetic through Yura's eyes. She was too young to have been in such a precarious predicament before, but something about her earnestness kept Yura from feeling resentment.\n\n\"Yes, but it is my fault for being unobservant. Please forgive me for detaining you in your journey.\"\n\n\"Hey, we all goof up from time to time. It's a good thing you did though, since I didn't know I needed any visas to go to school. And confidentially, I hadn't seen the letter either. Sorry for getting you in trouble.\"\n\n\"Arigato gozimasu.\"\n\nThe women were at the door to the main hallway again, sharing a last look at each other. Nodding, they went through and parted ways. BlowingWind felt an insistent pull leading her onward, and this chafing was driving her further into insanity than she was willing to admit.\n\nWisdom had been wandering all over Tokyo, chasing down little bits of herself that had been flung about due to the stress she was under. She had already found her physical body at the airport, but watching her own thoughts from BlowingWind and RagingTornado, it seemed that they needed a little time to grow. It had been very irresponsible to move to another country without getting the proper permissions. Perhaps, if she led them on a little chase, then they could all learn to work together.\n\nHaving gathered up the bits of herself that her other parts had shed in their nervousness, Wisdom continued on her own mission. She would leave each soul piece in various shrines, temples and churches throughout the islands of Japan. There on holy ground they would be safe until her more dominant aspects either found them once more or learned to sing them home.\n\nOb shook his head as he navigated the upward flowing passages towards the main vent, to where Fujiyama's office was. As much as he enjoyed hitting a high ranking magma spirit in the haunches with a blow dart, he hated having to report the injection just as much. It was hard to know who hated it more though. Ryu for receiving it, Ob for having to sedate the dragon, or Fujiyama for not having exposed Ryu to a female dragon or even a phoenix strong enough to balance out his yang essence with soothing yin essence.\n\nThe hallways outside of the office were studded with globules of obsidian and rough diamonds that had been forced up the ancient volcano's throat by the roiling forces of Earth's beating heart, refracting the light upward from the magma in the central pool far below.\n\nOb knocked on the door, and the shoji slid open quietly to admit the healer dragon. Here in this room, the walls were all smoothed obsidian of the deepest black, serving as magical monitors for the surveillance of all the processes of the mountain below the skin that the humans saw. Along one wall were rows upon rows of tall black metal filing cabinets that contained the records of offerings that the mountain Gods had received even before he had taken this post. In the center of the room was an array of crystals that fed information into the crystalline matrix of the planetary brain. On another wall was a writhing red and gold tapestry that listed every member of his clan and their relation within it, and nearby this sat a teak desk where an exhausted and worried Fujiyama morosely scried in the mirror of his cold tea.\n\n\"He sleeps now Lord Fujiyama.\"\n\n\"Thank you Ob. He is getting harder to control. I am afraid that if we do not find some way to balance him soon, that he will become darkened. He has far too much energy and not enough outlets for it, and you have already seen how little care he has for his own domain at times when in the grip of such excess.\"\n\nWith a wave of his hand, Fujiyama summoned a kneeling cushion for the healer spirit. It was a bothersome thing, and he had already had to prune out troublesome tongues too eager to extend their elemental manifestations to their aboveground territories in the dance of re-creation. Each time he had needed to kill a son or daughter for endangering the plans of Nature he had sprouted at least one gray hair while making those hard decisions. Ryu was his favorite son, and it was heartbreaking realizing that unless things changed he would either have to seal him away or destroy his body.\n\n\"Where did I go wrong?\"\n\n\"You haven't Lord. Ryu is just more Yang than many dragons have been for a long time. The blood of Lord Susanowo flows richly through his veins, just as it does in your own. It is no small wonder that Susanowo-sama's outrageousness is as glaringly evident in one, out of as many broods as you have had. I gave him something new in addition to his usual sedative. I believe that it should be an exceptionally calming influence for him.\"\n\n\"That is good news. Your sensei has trained you well.\"\n\n\"Domo arigato gozimasu.\"\n\nNodding to dismiss the healer to his normal duties, Fujiyama felt less trepidation as he logged the footage of Ryu's bout of insanity. The great Kami that he was directly accountable to, Fuji-sama, Konohanasakura-hime, and Sarutahiko, would not be overly sympathetic. Neither would the other four members of the Great Council of Asian Dragons, that he was a part of, be pleased if he were to lose yet another heir to his important and yet highly unenviable job.\n\n\"Ryu, I hope that someday you will understand.\"\n\nNow that the incident was logged, Fujiyama was free to visit his son. Perhaps having someone to talk to when the boy awoke would prove helpful."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Home Base\n\nBlowingWind found herself overwhelmed yet again as she made her way to the exit. Thankfully, the way out was fairly straightforward. As long as she remembered to follow what the signs on the wall indicated, instead of following the thronging hordes, she was pretty sure she would eventually find her way out.\n\n\"Note to self: learn to read Japanese, at least katakana if not kanji.\"\n\nLuck seemed to be with BlowingWind today. It was a fairly simple task to win her way through the thronging hordes to baggage claim. If the movies of airport meetings she had seen had been right, then the way out would be close by.\n\n\"Awesome! I can see the light. I really hope there are less people out there, or at least some more space between them. I feel like I ran after a train.\"\n\nBlowingWind slowly made her way down the stairs leading off of the fairway. Her first order of business would be to find a place to stay. In good conscience she could not crash at Shawn's home uninvited. No, she needed a place of her own, a home base of sorts for her operations. Besides, his wife probably wouldn't approve of a strange woman just showing up out of thin air. Marital problems were not what she would consider a proper repayment of such kindness. Similar thoughts rushed the citadel of her mind as she grumbled to herself.\n\n\"What am I going to do? I'm such an idiot for coming all the way here without a game plan. Even Angelina, or Willow, or whatever that Big Valley girl calls herself in her mundane life had a plan of attack for when she left home for Southern Oregon University.\"\n\nWhile BlowingWind was kicking herself some more for the mess she had jumped headlong into, a semi-familiar call carried over the heads of racing salary-men and gawking tourists.\n\n\"Hey! Over here! I'm surprised they let you go so quickly. Customs can be harsh.\"\n\nFiguring that the shouts hadn't been meant for her, she continued on her way towards the door. She would just have to hail a cab and get to the nearest hotel for now. Once there, she could take a nap, peruse the phone book, find a realtor, and maybe even get some takeout.\n\n\"BlowingWind! Just where do you think you are going? You'll be eaten alive out there.\"\n\nA hand reached out of the crowd and grabbed her elbow, whirling her to the right. How she had missed someone close enough to touch her she had no idea.\n\n\"Let go of me! Rape!\"\n\nLashing out with her left hand, she used her right hand to free herself from her captor. Looking outward, the face of her attacker registered a half-second after her fist had slammed into his face. Both parties felt the sting of crushed nerves between opposing bones, and while BlowingWind cradled an abused appendage Shawn edged away as well as he could while nursing a blackening eye.\n\n\"Oh my God! Shawn, I'm sorry. You scared me.\"\n\n\"You're vicious! There is definitely Celtic blood in you. Maybe I should be protecting Tokyo from you instead of the other way around.\"\n\n\"I said I was sorry Shawn.\"\n\n\"Shawn, you should never grab a lady, and certainly you would have learned to never let your guard down.\"\n\nThe old voice that had broken into their conversation underscored its point when the owner's cane came down on the young man's head. BlowingWind's eyes followed the weapon to find a deeply lined and craggy face glaring down on Shawn. The light brown eyes were fierce as twin hawks, betraying ancient life knowledge hard won by experiencing life in the best and the worst of times. Clad simply in a pressed black dress shirt and slacks, he was a somber representative of all elders, his silver hair cut in a business like manner although no indication as to his occupation could be seen.\n\n\"Please forgive the boy, he gets overexcited. Shawn tells me that you need a place to stay until you get your feet under you child. You seem to be more stable than others that he has flown with, but perhaps that is only because you are a civilian and war tends to do strange things to soldiers. Do you have any more luggage than that, my child?\"\n\nBlowingWind was reminded of her paternal grandfather by this man's straightforward manner. It had been long since she had seen WolfPaw, and the word from RedFeather had been that he had taken to the Star Path only a few months ago. She felt a longing to go back to the Reservation again, to immerse herself in the culture she had known at her birth. Yet here she was, in a land very distant from any that she had previously known. Would her ceremonies still work here, or would she need to learn new ones? Why would her training bring her here?\n\n\"Of course I forgive him, I just wasn't expecting anyone to grab me. No, this is all of the luggage that I have.\"\n\n\"Well then children, let us leave.\"\n\nBlowingWind followed Shawn and the old man out into the drizzling rain. Her leathers were well oiled, but she was still a little worried about how much water they would soak up. It was possible that they would need another oiling before she began her exploration of the country.\n\nAn old gold Toyota Tercel waited out in the parking lot amongst many other Japanese cars. She was squeezed into the back with Shawn's bags, feeling rather like a sardine freshly pulled from the sea and dumped into the hold of some ship with tons of other stuff. The old man, who had not introduced himself, darted through Tokyo's early morning traffic, stopping at traffic lights and merging so close to other cars that BlowingWind was certain she would wind up in the Emergency Room.\n\nHaving little else to do than to pray to anybody listening that they would not wind up as splatters on the pavement, she watched out the window as they rolled by stores, business buildings, street vendors, and other such common city sights. At one light, she watched a business woman buying a bowl of noodles for her breakfast; at another light she saw a group of sailor suited girls on their way to school. Jet lag was truly a terrible thing, as she was exhausted and the day here was barely begun.\n\n\"You children look exhausted. Haruko will have breakfast ready when we get home, and then it is into bed with both of you.\"\n\n\"Ji-san, I've had my four hours of sleep on the plane and was looking forward to helping around the house. I am sure BlowingWind could use some rest though.\"\n\nThe American pulled her eyes away from puzzling out the heartbeat of the city, looking up and into the rear-view mirror at the wise and dark eyes of the old Asian driving the car.\n\n\"If you please sir, I have much that I need to do today. I have to apply for a student and a work visa, contact my University, get set up for language schooling, and start exploring.\"\n\nThe old man began to laugh, pulling over to the curb and handing his son-in-law some money. Shawn pulled a list out of his pocket, grinning himself as he ran into the store to pick up some needed items. The old man looked back at the young woman while he waited, giving her some important advice.\n\n\"Young One, the first step may begin the journey and the last may end it, but it is those in between that make the journey what it is. Experience each step before you take the next.\"\n\n\"I don't understand sir. Isn't that what I am doing now?\"\n\n\"How can you see if you are running in a fog?\"\n\n\"I am?\"\n\n\"Are you? You are the one who said it.\"\n\nThe old man was right. She was in a fog, and completely lost to boot without a light to guide her home. She didn't know where to apply for her visas, only had ninety days to get them, and the school year didn't start in Japan until April. Her vision quest had only told her to come to Japan. The quest was done now, or at least so she thought, so what came next? What were the steps of the correct path, and why did a new quest start at the end of the previous one?\n\n\"My whole life I have been lost in fog, searching for answers and the way home.\"\n\n\"Then walk.\"\n\nThose two words were oddly troubling, as if she had been running her whole life and still not leaving the same spot. It had all passed her by so fast when she looked back, and as she thought about it she realized she had always been pursuing something just out of sight. Perhaps she had been running after the phantom of Coyote then, but how did one learn to walk on the path of life instead?\n\n\"Thank you for your wisdom, sir. How do I repay you?\"\n\n\"You call me Ji-san or Grandfather, instead of sir. I am no officer after all. You also let us help you begin your new life, and you help Haruko catch up on her chores before you leave town.\"\n\n\"With all due respect Grandfather, you don't even know me. Why are you willing to offer so much help?\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't I? It is something that the Buddha would do.\"\n\nAt that moment, Shawn got back into the car, carrying two small bags of groceries.\n\n\"I've got it all Ji-san, including Haruko's green tea ice cream. Let's go home.\"\n\nJi-san pulled back out into the traffic, following the paths of artificial stone that lead out of the teeming city and out into the relatively quieter suburbs that stretched wistful arms ever closer to the most sacred place in all of Japan.\n\nBlack braids adorned with the breast feathers of a hawk framed the thin and sun tanned face that gazed out upon the material world he was no longer part of with gold-brown eyes. Clad in leather boots and blue denim jeans that had wandered countless miles of desert, his red bandana and blue ribbon shirt were the only new things that he had worn on the last day of his physical life. It was easiest for him to materialize the clothes that his thirty something body had been buried in, and so that is what he wore when taking his insubstantial, and usually invisible human form. Watching his daughter's progress in her testing and training, from his usual unseen location above and behind the young woman, SoaringHawk contemplated how he found himself so far away from the familiar energies of Turtle Island.\n\nHis murder had caused him to leave his mortal flesh at the moment of his death. Ultimately the nuclear power plant that he had given his life to defend his people against had been built, and it seemed that his sacrifice had been in vain. His restless spirit had become one with the air as his body was broken down by decay into its basic elements. His breath had flown all over the world mingled with the wind of Hawk's wing. The fire of his youth was passed on for his next seven generations to draw their own passions from. His body had become one with Mother Earth once more, and the waters of his body had been evaporated into the air to rejoin with the water cycle thanks to the work of the crematorium's transforming oven.\n\nOnly one part of him remained tied to the world of mortals, tethered by bonds of love, and regret. Like the ghosts of the other men of his wife's Clan he would find no rest until his wife and child were at peace. For all he knew, he would be restless for eternity, as the curse could well continue that long, with the luck that seemed to befall those of Maeve and Marie's blood.\n\nSoaringHawk was proud of his baby girl, although he felt so guilty for not being able to provide physical comfort as a good father should. Although he had been able to lend a comforting presence from time to time, and to hide the car keys at critical times when Marie had been too distraught to drive the family car safely, neither had been able to see him. BlowingWind had felt him, but she had not developed the gift to see those who lived on in the realms of the dead. BlowingWind had grown into a fine and proud beauty nearly on her own, intelligent and yet as stubborn as anyone could imagine. It was his thought that she took after the women of her mother's family, as those of his family were much more temperate. SoaringHawk had watched with pride as she followed in his footsteps though, her search for meaning surely making their Spirit Animal Ancestors Snake, Hawk and Coyote proud as well.\n\nWith a father's indulgence he had watched when she was befriended by Obsidian. BlowingWind had been a very lonely girl after he had been cast out of his body, and it was good to see someone taking such an active role in her life and leading her on her life's path. The Lake spirit had become her Spirit Guide and Protector, lending her his strength and protection as she grew. Coyote still got her into trouble, and so Obsidian's protective influence had come in handy when BlowingWind had played a small part in Willow's adventures in the spiritual world. His pride and indulgence had turned to concern as His daughter and the lake spirit fell in love though, but their ill-fated courtship had not raised his ire.\n\nObsidian had been a good boy, as young non-human spirits went, but it was a father's tendency to be a bit over-protective. To Obsidian's credit, he had never made an inappropriate advance. On the other hand though, perhaps it had been the thought of a dead man watching him as closely as a Hawk that had kept him in line. BlowingWind may not have discovered the ability to see her Ancestors yet, but Obsidian had seen their self-appointed chaperone quite clearly.\n\nGazing at the white cone of Fujisan from his perch on the roof of the Tercel, SoaringHawk admired the godly presence looming over the island of Honshu that was so similar to the commanding presence of Mount Shasta. It was a serene vision, but like the other volcanoes of the Pacific Ring of Fire and even throughout the world, it too was awash with activity unseen to the normal mortal eye. Not even the volcanologists of the world were privy to the hidden activities of the spirits who either embodied the processes of the earth or who were responsible for them. He had been a guest beneath Mount Shasta, and had invaded Fujisan when following the string that Life had been drawing from his daughter. Somewhere beneath that spire of rock and snow was a dragon that hopefully had the courage and fortitude to tame his daughter somewhat.\n\nThe spirit was lost in his pensive thoughts for quite a while, enjoying the wind produced by the speed of the car. SoaringHawk had been working hard in the past several days with aiding the Tribal Elders in the search and call for a strong enough spirit to withstand BlowingWind's fierce temper. As if that had not been enough, he needed to be certain that she connected with the right people. Who knew what would have happened if someone had picked her up with dire motives instead of one of the Hawk People? Truly it was something he would rather not think about, and he was thankful to Hawk for having sent Freedom on a little side trip on his own trek The car pulled off the road again, parking in an ordinary garage beneath a house so similar to others on the street. The green two-story home had a few stairs leading up to a porch enshrining the red front door. The simple porch was adorned with bamboo wind chimes tinkling and dancing in the breeze fanning away the last of the rain shower, and a Japanese and American flag flanked either side of the porch in the same manner repeated by most of the other houses on the street. Diagonal to the door on the lawn, a golden frog faced the home, sending the occupants prosperity. Although each house had overt nods to the country they were in, it was easy to see that this was off-base housing for the American military personnel and their families.\n\nBlowingWind stepped out of the car, her knapsack nervously slung onto her back. He smiled as she grabbed several bags and helped to bring in everything, already beginning to assimilate into what he hoped would become like a family of sorts for her.\n\n\"Ji-san please let me carry that for you.\"\n\nThe old man nodded as he turned over the bag of groceries. With two free hands now, Ji-san led the way up the steps and opened the door for the young ones bringing the things in. During all of the shifting in and out, an even older man stepped out unseen to float up to the roof. Long, snow-white hair was lifted up into an ancient topknot, and the carefully combed beard came down to his knees. A white robe clad the elder, stirring in the breeze while the man motioned SoaringHawk to join him. Flowing with the breeze, SoaringHawk joined the other departed human.\n\n\"The child is yours Young One?\"\n\n\"Yes sir, she is my daughter.\"\n\n\"It is far from home that you are, Traveler.\"\n\n\"Yes sir, and long will it be still in my sojourn before my daughter will find a new home.\"\n\nThe ancestor Kami frowned, sympathizing with the young father spirit and discarding the formal mode of address. He himself had been an ancestral guardian for centuries now, and his house had been blessed by staying somewhat close to where they had lived for generations beyond counting now. His family had never been high in the governmental hierarchy as they had been mere rice farmers, but it had been enough for them. It surely would be hard to start all over again and even harder for those who were as obviously far from home as these two souls. It was also tiring for Ancestors to follow the living from the Ancestral Grounds, and until the girl wed and was assimilated into a family it would be difficult for following Ancestors to find a place to rest and gain strength.\n\n\"The house of Takamura has taken in wanderers before. We will provide shelter for now, and we guardians will entreat Nushiwatarimono-Kamisama, the guardian of wanderers, to assist in the re-establishment of your own house Young One.\"\n\n\"The Mountain Children and Snake Clan of Turtle Island thank you and your Clan for your generous hospitality.\"\n\n\"You are of the Take, the Mountains? Your child must go and pray at the Sengen Shrines then. The Take-Kami there will ultimately be responsible for settling you and yours. We are only of the field, but we will do what we can for you.\"\n\n\"I thank you again Mr. Takamura.\"\n\n\"Come now; join me and my people in the Kamidana while the living attend to their own matters. Eat of the sacred rice with us and partake of the sake while we rest and wait for our children to have need of us.\"\n\nThe Takamura elder ghosted inside, riding the wind as be became an ethereal orb, unseen to the living humans. SoaringHawk followed, merging with the wind until he was naught but an invisible hawk, alighting eventually upon the spirit shelf. BlowingWind, who had been bringing in the last bag, paused in the doorway for a moment. On the shelf diagonal to the front door, she swore she had seen something pass in front of the small round mirror.\n\nShawn had gone into the back after putting away his last bag of gifts. He was looking for his beloved Haruko, looking forward to seeing her again after six months of separation. The letters that had been flying back and forth between the pair during his absence had told about how the office was letting her work at home until shortly before her delivery. The wonders of telecommuting were a godsend for them, as Haruko was one of those strong-willed women who felt a deep need to help put food on the table, a necessity now that her father was retired and an assistant at the local shrine. Thanks to e-mail and telephone conferences, Haruko would have extra time to recover before going back to work.\n\nHis home was decorated in simple and traditional Japanese style, the pine floors overlaid with fragrant tatami mats. What furniture was here was low to the ground and black. Plants abounded, bringing in a touch of nature to soothe the chafed soul. His wife was proud of her heritage, and her love was reflected in every aspect of the home. Sliding aside the shoji door that the Japanese used to save that always-important space, he entered her small home office.\n\nShawn found his blushing and pregnant bride pouring over spreadsheets at her desk. A chewed up pencil had been tucked behind one ear, and her little square reading glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose. Beside her sulked a cold cup of green tea and a forgotten bowl of rice that had been half-eaten. Long brunette hair had been hastily pulled back into a pony tail, and her long green dress did nothing to conceal her nine month pregnant and very due belly. A longed for voice pulled her out of her work and brought her head up.\n\n\"Working so early in the morning, dear?\"\n\n\"It's good to see you home Koi-kun. Breakfast is waiting for you in the kitchen. I was just finishing up on the Nakamura account before my office-partner takes over during my leave.\"\n\n\"It's good to be home, love. How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"A little tired, very beat up, and the housework piles on faster than I can keep up with it. Ji-san tries to help, but he isn't as young as he used to be, and he has so much to help with at the shrine.\"\n\n\"I know. It doesn't seem possible that he is a grandfather now, and we are parents. I can still remember when he threatened to kill me himself if I didn't remove the dishonor I had put on your family by merely being your associate and taking you 'to wife' as he had put it.\"\n\nThe pair shared a laugh at the memory of when Ji-san had discovered they had been dating. He had been displeased for weeks, but after the San-San-Kudo ceremony he had calmed down again.\n\n\"Speaking of disturbances Koi, Oba-san has been rather active the past few days. She has been stealing Ji-san's keys again, and the dishes have been breaking like crazy. I know you don't believe in ghosts, but there haven't been any earthquakes strong enough to knock down dishes from the cupboards, much less rattle them. I can't think of any other explanation than Grandmother.\"\n\nShawn sighed and shook his head. Haruko and Ji-san were very superstitious in his opinion. Indeed, it seemed that the whole Japanese Nation was superstitious with its Shrines, Temples, and the various ceremonies they were always doing to appease the spirits. He did not believe in any of it. In his mind, there was always a better explanation.\n\n\"I'll check the shelves later on today then. I also brought you some gifts, and I found someone to rent the spare room and help around the house for a bit. She'll be leaving for Hokkaido after she gets her paperwork squared away, but she's got a long way to go before she can make it on her own.\"\n\nHaruko smiled and shook her head at her husband as she put away her glasses. Shawn's soft heart was going to get him in trouble one of these days, but Haruko had played the mentor before.\n\n\"You found another runaway high school student, didn't you Shawn?\"\n\n\"Not exactly, but close. Why don't you come and meet her. Otherwise Ji-san is probably going to start inundating her with old legends. Remember, when he was telling my last battle buddy about how easily the Earthquake Kami is insulted? Fair warning though, her Japanese is very poor, since she just started learning.\"\n\n\"Shawn-kun, one day you are going to see that there is far more in this world than we understand.\"\n\n\"Yeah, like why I keep getting passed up for promotions and shipped back to the States and messing up my base seniority. Oh well, just a few years left.\"\n\nA dry wind danced through aspen and pine trees, rustling summer leaves and pulling him back into wakefulness. The fresh air invigorated him, and the blazing sun was a welcome kiss on his skin. Ryu's eyes opened in shock, registering with great surprise the scenic high desert diorama spread before and below him.\n\n\"Oh boy, Ob's concoctions are finally making me hallucinate.\"\n\nStanding up, Ryu looked down from the rocky crag that he had awoken on, gazing curiously over the mountain canyons housing low shrubs and summer-gold grasses. Nestled in the arroyo below him, near to a trickling stream feeding steadily into a mighty river that issued from a connected canyon was an encampment of some kind. The simple shelters looked like rounded and very primitive huts to him, arches of branches interwoven with smaller branches from local shrubs. Dogs roamed through the camp, nosing from group to group, searching for handouts. Young women tended children or smoked meat for storage while young men tended horses or brought in freshly killed deer.\n\nWhile he was overlooking the camp and listening to the chatter in a language he had not heard with his own ears before, an old woman came out of one of the larger and more ornate outlying lodges. Her iron-gray hair was plaited into two long tails on either side of her face, and it was difficult for him to tell her sun darkened skin from the animal skins that she had borrowed to fashion primitive and yet fine clothing. Other old humans very much like her followed out of the lodge, some in elaborate costumes and others in the simplest of garb. These others began to drum, sing or dance; the dancers ringing around the camp, watched by the young ones who had formerly been absorbed in their day-to-day duties.\n\nThe music was a vital beat, stirring the Kami's blood. Ancient beyond memory, it was the beat of the earth itself, calling him down from the distant peak and to the natural granite outcropping much closer to the humans' camp. As the others sang blessings for the tribe, their land, and the planet, the old woman walked beside the stream down to where the river met it.\n\nCurious as to what the woman was doing while the other apparent priests of her clan were occupied, Ryu slipped through the foreign landscape behind her. What could possibly be so important as to draw an elder away from such a seemingly important tribal ceremony?\n\nAt the river, the woman stopped, bending down to drink of the life-giving waters. At length, she looked up from where she had kneeled, gazing caringly upriver at something that he could not see. Words poured from her mouth then, the language not that of the five ethnicities that had created the people of Japan, unknown to him and yet still understandable thanks to his heritage and the root language that all dragons knew.\n\n\"Mountain spirits of distant lands far beyond the Salty Sea, take my Grandchild by her hand and lead her home to me. Shelter our little rattlesnake and help her find her True Direction out of the Watery Lake and back to the Heart of the Mountain. She is lost within a forest guarded by fear. Penetrate and begin her life to gently Steer. Such is the People's prayer, from the Doorway of the Snake; let no need to cut our hair come as our songs we make.\"\n\nSomething stirred in the depths of his being, reacting to the love in the song and yearning to hunt up the solemn river, the unfamiliar and separate consciousness sheltered within him drawing strength from him. The gentle stretching was like that of a tired babe searching for its mother and then quieting at her breast. It was the first he was aware of another being taking up residence inside of him, and he was vaguely aware of it being a yin influence. This feeling, although something he had not experienced for himself before, was not totally unknown. He had heard other Kami describing it before, but it had only been those who had been involved enough in the realm of the humans to take disciples to uncover their own spirit nature. They had only experienced such a feeling after the initial possessions though.\n\nThe old woman smiled, dancing now back to the rest of her tribe. Twice she swooped down to pluck up a pine branch discarded for her use by one of the trees, and TeachingPine passed by the wondering spirit, who had thought himself well disguised by the rocks he hid within. The prayers of the other Ancients to Creator had worked and connected the tribe to a spirit of the land that their Granddaughter had fled to. There was hope for the future of the Clan that the Rainbow Children would soon be coming. The chosen Keeper of the Pipe would soon receive her Calling and her Guide. Ryu was left alone, looking upriver where a roaring of a mighty waterfall could be heard in the distance.\n\nThe being enfolded inside him yearned forward, striving toward what it recognized as its Source. The nourishing energy of the one she had been entrusted to was nice, but Ai had to get back to the other three. The easiest way home to the others would be to retrace the path to her Source, and with what strength she could muster she wordlessly attempted to get her point across. Soon though, she did not have the strength, and so she had to subside and rest within the body of her somewhat unwilling host. However, she had at least managed to convey her feelings of loss and emptiness, leaving her host in confusion.\n\n\"Odd. What is this about?\"\n\nAssuming his dragon form for increased safety in this strange land, Ryu began to explore his way upriver. He could hear the calls of ferocious beasts in the forest, and wondered about what the Elder's song had meant. As he walked, his vision turned into a dream, and then the dream faded into wakefulness in his own realm. Looking up out of the pool of magma, Ryu saw the face of his father gazing down with concern."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Sending New Roots\n\nThe long weeks had passed her by without hurry, turning blithely and uncaringly into months. It had been two months now since she had entered this strange and exciting new land, the novelty of new places and experiences taking away the fresh and ragged edge of her loss. She had even worked up the courage to try true sushi for the first time in her life, and had discovered that she absolutely adored raw seafood. There was something about the juicy and succulent flesh that fed her soul in a way that she could not describe, that would have horrified her only a few months previously.\n\nBlowingWind could not say that the time had passed by without event, it had been both as lazy as a dog in the sun and yet as frantic as ants scurrying to escape a flood. She softly hummed a tune to herself as she washed her breakfast dishes, listening to Haruko singing a lullaby to the baby out in the living room. Ji-san had been rightly proud of his granddaughter, and had proclaimed loudly that she would be called Yuki since she was as pure as the snow.\n\nBlowingWind had a special place in her heart for little Yuki. While Haruko and Shawn had been laboring at the hospital, she had been tearing around the house making last minute preparations for the new addition to the family and seeing to it that everything would be simple for the new mother. For the kindness of the Takamura-Bowers family, BlowingWind had only felt it right and proper to help out with the little one. It was a new experience, and BlowingWind had soon discovered that she hated changing diapers much more than she had hated scrubbing the toilet back home. It was alright though, soon everything would be in order and she could move on in her life.\n\nJi-san had helped BlowingWind to navigate the maze of infinite peril that was more commonly known as the visa application process. In a few days she would be hearing the decision of the visa department, but things seemed to be sailing on favorable winds as far as that was concerned. Waiting on tenterhooks would do little to speed or affect the department's decision, and so she had thrown herself full-bore into working on preparing herself for facing the wide world on her own. Haruko had helped work on the very shaky foundation of Japanese language that BlowingWind had painstakingly erected, pointing out many mistakes that she made in pronunciation or grammar.\n\nHer hunch had been right, Shawn had been far too easy on her that first day, and Haruko had gotten tired of hearing her struggle through dinners. When she had resorted to carrying around a tourist phrase book in order to survive at the market, Haruko had taken it away and started her out again from scratch. BlowingWind was getting better though, at least she could say that about herself, and soon she would be able to apply for a place to stay in Hokkaido.\n\nHaruko had been very tired when she came home with the baby seven weeks ago. Those first two weeks BlowingWind had been spending much of her time cooking, cleaning, and following Ji-san around as he ritually purified the house to protect his only grandchild from evil spirits. Ji-san was a lay-priest at the local Oinari shrine, and deeply devout in his spirituality. As time passed, she still learned what she could from him on the local practices. It was her opinion that she needed to learn as much as she could about the local spirits to avoid offending them, and the guise of folklore perfectly conveyed the ancient wisdom. Although Shawn rolled his eyes every time that Ji-san began to tell the stories of old Nippon or to teach her a new chant, BlowingWind hung on every word like it was a precipice, thrilled at the fresh view she was getting into the spirit world.\n\nToday, Shawn was at the base. The US President had called for another war in the Persian Gulf area, and as a result of the immanent threat of being shipped out on short notice the soldiers were being required to barrack at the base. BlowingWind didn't understand it, but whatever was going on in the Gulf had to be big. Haruko didn't show it, but BlowingWind also knew that she was afraid that her husband would be shipped off again so soon; or even worse, she could lose him entirely. While the others slept at night, BlowingWind found herself sitting in front of the kamidana, praying for the small family with the prayers of her homeland, and the prayers of this new land that she was slowly learning.\n\nOld eyes watched the girl who was trapped in a woman's body as she went about her chores and cleaning up after herself. It was her day off, yet she still insisted on washing her own dishes. He was thrilled with the sincerity in everything that she did, but it disturbed him to see her constant refusal to deal with whatever she was hiding from. Through numerous teeth-clenching exchanges as he had slowly gotten to know the girl, he had found out about how she had been training as a mystic in her own land. Takamura Kenshin had been glad to entertain her with the old stories from the Kojiki and Nihongi, and to teach her the simple rituals the family performed daily at their spirit shelf. In return, she had told him her ancestral tales of the beings Snake, Holy Boy, and a rather deranged wolf-dog that she called Coyote.\n\n\"Scrubbing dishes until the flowers are gone is not going to make the reply letter arrive any faster, my child.\"\n\nBlowingWind jumped, disturbed from her pondering.\n\n\"Oh, ohayo Ji-san. Why aren't you at the shrine yet? Isn't that where you normally go today?\"\n\n\"BlowingWind, the other lay priests and I have been talking, and we think that it is time for you to speak with the Daitoku. You told me about your ancestral calling, and we think that we might be able to help you.\"\n\n\"Really? I mean, uh, honto ne?\"\n\n\"Honto ne, really. Bring the items that you usually use for your rituals so that the spirits of those objects can be naturalized here, and we have some additional items that you may find useful in your new path.\"\n\n\"Is that so? I am not Shinto though. What if I mess up and accidentally anger one of the spirits that live at the shrine?\"\n\nThe dish that BlowingWind still held in her hand began to grow warm. Staring incredulously at the porcelain platter, she desperately tried to remember how hot the wash water had been. Surely it had not been hot enough for the plate to retain heat for so long, and it had been cool just a moment ago. Platters and cups in the cupboard began to rattle softly, and the temperature dropped several degrees. As quickly as the phenomena arose though it subsided just as quickly, leaving the woman to wonder why she could not just have a normal life like others did.\n\n\"Perhaps you would offend more spirits by not going.\"\n\n\"Good point Ji-san. I think this is the most haunted house I have ever been in.\"\n\n\"We like to keep our ancestors close, here.\"\n\nShe put the plate away, nervous as to what would happen next. BlowingWind had been immersing herself in daily life to escape her pain, much the same as her mother had done after father's death. As the days had passed, she had begun to wonder if she truly wanted to continue on the Blue Road of Spirit. It was getting increasingly difficult to pray or sing to the spirits the old songs without remembering Him. She was cursed with this knowledge that there was more to life than what was seen, and this intense need to drown in it, as if she were not truly meant to leave the past behind.\n\nShe had no choice though.\n\nHer father's death had caused the Hawk Pipe to come into her guardianship at the young age of seven, her family, Clan and Nation unsmoked for until the time that she had become aware of her recent loss. It was a long time for a people to go without the medicine of Hawk, and she was now a Keeper of a Sacred Mirror as well. If she were to lay down her burden, whom could she give it to? Who would sing the songs and offer the sage? No, this was her path, what she had been born to do. She had to continue in her training and trust that she would be where she was needed.\n\nJi-san watched as the child left the kitchen to gather her things. He had not seen spirits before with his eyes as far as he was aware, but he had been able to sense them his entire life. Lately, ever since the child had begun her stay to be precise, he had been feeling more than ever. They seemed to be attracted to her somehow; as if she were a magnet and they were iron filings. It was worrisome, as not all spirits were beneficial and it was well known that some cases of seeming psychosis were truly cases of spirit possession.\n\nShe had not completely left behind the mentality of childhood either, and so perhaps it was this innocence, however wounded it was, which happened to be drawing the kitsune and other troublesome spirits seeking a home.\n\nBlowingWind was unaware of Ji-san's thoughts, climbing the stairs and turning left to her little room at the end of the hall. She gently pushed aside the sliding door, surveying the cozy enclosure that had become home in its Spartan way. Her futon had been rolled up and stowed away in the closet as soon as she had risen to greet the day, and when she got an apartment one of the first things she intended to put in was a real western bed. Also hidden in the closet were her doe skins with her grandmother's beadwork hung reverentially, to keep them clean for special occasions now that she was in the mundane world. On the wall to her left was a round mirror, and next to it she had hung her old knapsack that contained her holy items.\n\nShe closed the door gently, removing the white T-shirt and slacks that she had gotten at a local store as she started her new existence. Reaching out to take up her grandmother's hard work once more, BlowingWind realized how lost and exposed she felt. If she had run home to the White Mountain Reservation, Grandmother would have helped her in her search for truth and reason. But if she had, she would still be in Coyote's territory, and he still had not given up on teasing her until she left Turtle Island. Here, perhaps, she would be safe from him and his tricks.\n\nThe drawback was that she had to watch out for new trickster spirits, the kitsune or fox spirits that Ji-san said still caused problems to this day.\n\nAs she donned her ceremonial clothing, she felt the connection to her people strengthen, a physical reminder that although she needed to find a new guide she still had a purpose of some kind. BlowingWind smoothed down her leathers, relishing the feel of them against her flesh. Her ancestors, both Celtic and Apache, had been warriors and explorers. If she thought about it, she was only following an old path trodden down by countless booted or moccasined feet before her own.\n\nMoving towards the mirror and her sacred objects, BlowingWind could not help but see herself. Her hair and eyes were so unlike the others who were pure blooded, and even the other half-bloods did not look like this. The elders had said that every few generations, there would be the occasional child that was born with light features, even in the old days. It was said that those children showed their spirit blood. It was the only explanation she had for her looks though; as according to what she had learned in Biology by all accounts she should have both dark hair and eyes. This, perhaps more than anything else, had driven her to want to be as great as her father, as the spirits were giving her much to live up to.\n\nPulling her eyes hastily away from the mystery she had lived with her whole life, she set it aside for now. Checking carefully, she made sure that all was in order in her bag of tools. Obsidian's mirror slept in its wrapping as silent and cold as it had been since his death. She had pouches of cornmeal and tobacco, bundles of good white sage, and gourd rattles that she had made herself, all glaring accusingly up at her for neglecting them for so long. Feathers of various kinds waited for their proper use.\n\nThe tanned hide of a rattlesnake was rolled up as well, waiting to be tied around her head. RedFeather had caught the snake himself and gifted the hide to her when he had gotten word of her first moon. Mother had not been able to take her to the Reservation to participate in the Sunrise Ceremony that year, and so she had missed her own welcoming into the ranks of womanhood. The Hawk Pipe waited in its painted leather case, and BlowingWind was glad that this relic only had meaning within her own family. If it had been something belonging to the Nation, she would not have been allowed to Keep it at such a young age. All was well among her tools, and silently she brought out her moccasins, keeping them out to put on at the door.\n\nQuietly padding out of her room and down the stairs with her pack in tow, BlowingWind noticed that Haruko was no longer singing to the baby. Pausing at the door to the living room, she saw the pair sound asleep in a rocking chair in the corner of the room. It was good to see Haruko resting, and it would be a shame to wake her. Instead, BlowingWind went to the kitchen and left a note explaining where she had gone.\n\n\"This is the way your holy people dress?\"\n\nJi-san had come back into the house after he had made sure that everything he needed was in the car. It wasn't that he had much to take in all actuality, but what he did need was easily forgotten at times. To his eyes, the leather that she wore was odd, but no doubt he would look odd to her eyes when he donned his ceremonial garb at the shrine.\n\n\"Not anymore Grandfather. Most just wear jeans and a calico shirt now, even for the pow-wows unless they are one of the dancers. Even father tended to dress that way, but Grandmother insisted that a Medicine Keeper should look like this one for the ceremonies.\"\n\n\"Admirable. That is the way that things should be. If the old lessons and traditions of a people are not passed on then they die, taking the spirit of the people with it. It is time to leave now my child.\"\n\n\"All right, Ji-san. I am ready.\"\n\nTwo gold eyes watched from under a bush as the pair got into the car. Her defenses were failing to hide her from him as her thoughts began to fall away from the Blue Road and becoming mired more increasingly in the mundane. He had watched her for a long time now, witnessing many of her triumphs and tragedies. Indeed, he and Puma had even kept the girl from killing herself after the boy she loved had left this world, she foolishly believing the love of a child to be the mature love of true mates. Although he was not the girl's Guide, he did feel a sense of responsibility for the girl as her grandmother was from the Coyotero Clan. He had taken the hard journey as a stow-away in her plane, and Thunderbird had not been very precise as to where the child had been running.\n\nCoyote had not been amused to find himself in Japan. Now he had to compete with the native trickster spirits here, the Kitsune, Tengu and Tanuki, among other spirits. How was he supposed to be her mirror to show her what she shouldn't do, if he had to fight his way through a bunch of foxes looking for a host, or trying to earn their daily bean curd? In his opinion, they needed to step aside and let him do his work.\n\nAs if this wasn't enough trouble, Hawk and Raven had followed him and had been trying to drag him back. If they would drag her home then he would be happy to go home. He could only hope that RedFeather would give his wayward cousin a severe tongue lashing when he found out just where she was.\n\n\"It has to be the O'Drake influence. My people never ran away from themselves, at least not that I can remember.\" He ground out.\n\nRunning through the streets, Coyote attracted little attention as he chased after the car. The townsfolk were used to seeing wild animals run the streets, as they were often misplaced from their homes, and so the wild dog was no different to them than a crow frequenting the market. Although he could not run as fast as the car did, he would still be able to keep up by catching the wind and transforming into sand when no human eyes were upon him. So it was that he followed her.\n\nBlowingWind had delighted in observing life going on around her as they drew closer to the shrine located at the edge of the sleepy suburb. It was small, but parking guidelines necessitated a short walk of a few blocks to the steps that ascended a small hill, to where the shrine grounds were. The fresh air and gentle breeze invigorated her, and the earth below her was warm and inviting, tempting her to lie down and watch the leaves dance on the trees and the clouds skitter by. The quiet and benevolent power in the sacred site so close and surrounded by the arms of the city without irritation was intriguing, and she wondered why the spirits of her home had not accepted humanity changing the land yet.\n\nTwin stone Kitsune stood guard at the base of a red torii, the curved crossbar soaring at the top of the gate like a triumphant Thunderbird brewing a life-giving storm. At the sides were basins of water, and ladles for the devout to cleanse themselves before entering the sacred grounds. Ji-san had walked over to one, and so she followed so that she could learn to proper way to enter without offending any indwelling spirits guarding the grounds.\n\nFollowing Ji-san's lead, BlowingWind silently picked up one of the wooden ladles with her right hand, pouring a little water over her left hand, being very careful for the water to fall onto the gravel and not back into the basin. At his nod of approval, she switched the ladle to her left hand to purify her right hand. Next they switched the ladles back into their right hand, catching a little water in their left hands and rinsed out their mouths. BlowingWind thought this was rather strange, but if it were local custom then she would observe it.\n\nFollowing his motions, she rinsed her hand again, and then tipped the ladle up to let the remaining water cleanse the handle.\n\n\"Is this so that the ladle will be clean for the next user Ji-san?\"\n\n\"Yes child. It was necessary to remove the unavoidable impurities picked up by daily living before coming before the Kami, as impurities repel the beneficial spirits.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see ,Ji-san.\"\n\nMounting the steps to the shrine grounds finally, BlowingWind could feel eyes watching and appraising her as she climbed. Although she felt the presences, and could hear vague whispers hidden by the wind, she saw nothing. The spirits of this land had not accepted her enough to show themselves to her yet, but she did not know what it was they were waiting for.\n\nAnother torii stood guard at the top of the staircase, echoes of a well-maintained samurai solemnly standing guard, even though the samurai class had been disbanded long ago. Another set of Kitsune stood guard here, smiling tauntingly at her as she regarded them, each playing with its own spirit ball. White sand poured like a dividing river across the shrine grounds, lovingly raked into waves and graced with stone pathways serving as bridges over to where Oinari supposedly was enshrined in a small wooden building. Ji-san led BlowingWind over the stones and toward the small shrine, speaking like a whispering pine as they crossed over into the grass and stonework courtyard.\n\n\"When you come before the Kami, you place an offering into the wooden box that we call saisen bako, in thanks for the help that you will receive. The shrine uses the funds generated for upkeep. You will then make your prayer, followed by nirei nihakushu ippai. To perform this, you will bow twice, clap twice, and bow again. This respectfully lets the Kami know of your presence and shows gratitude for Oinari taking the time to help you.\"\n\n\"Ji-san, what if I forget what to do?\"\n\n\"I am sure that it will not be a problem.\"\n\nNervously, BlowingWind stepped up to the simple enclosure, placing a few coins in the box. She wasn't sure what to pray for, or whether she just wanted to offer her respect. She was lonely, of that much she was certain, and it was not a feeling that she relished. Not knowing what to think, she stood there for a moment, feeling the confusion roiling beneath her surface and wishing that she knew what to do. Something stirred behind the wooden doors that she stood before, and jolted out of her reveries she bowed, clapped, and bowed again. Looking once more at Ji-san she saw him talking with a man in cloud white haori and powder blue hakama, and at length Ji-san motioned for her to come back.\n\n\"Taisan-dono, this is MountainChild BlowingWind. BlowingWind, this is Taisan Haku, another lay priest that serves here to assist tourists and worshippers.\"\n\n\"Ohayo kannushi-san.\"\n\nBlowingWind bowed as she had learned was a polite greeting here, and Taisan bowed back. When the men began to walk toward a larger wooden building, she followed them, not knowing what else to do. Taisan smiled internally at how the child unquestioningly followed, as she was passing her test. He saw no reason that she would not be successful at the Sengen shrines where he and the others who had vouched for her to begin training. There was much time yet before she would need to leave for Hokkaido A woman in blazing red hakama and white haori opened the door to the building, bowing as they entered. Each of the men made a small bow to the woman and then a deeper bow into the room, and so she followed suit. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, but there was a presence that told her that there was something else in the room as well, watching and waiting like so many of the spirits at home had until they had become comfortable around her.\n\n\"Follow me MountainChild-san. We have been expecting you. Please let us assist you in your preparations.\"\n\nFollowing the Miko through the building, BlowingWind was led to a small chamber for changing her robes. Her leathers were changed for a simple white robe of snow, fastened shut with a similarly chaste obi tie. The soft cloth discomfited her slightly, leaving her with no worn ties to her own culture. Carefully she packed her clothes into the old knapsack that had served her so well, watching another young Miko carry away the pouch after she had secured it. Nervously following the other Miko away into yet another room, she heard things stirring behind the thin walls, bringing their attentions back from wherever old spirits go who have lost interest in the happenings of their homes.\n\nAt last, she was led into a small plain room, and motioned to kneel before the sole occupant of the small and yet gaping enclosure.\n\nKneeling softly on the woven bamboo mat, BlowingWind eyed the short man carefully. His costume of the Heian period was a green rivaling new rice shoots, and he himself was folded in a grim and yet flowing manner. His eyes were closed, and yet he seemed perfectly aware of her. They sat in the ravenous silence, each measuring the other in their own way. When he finally broke the oppressing nothing, BlowingWind could feel nothing but relief.\n\n\"The seed is to make pilgrimage to the Shrines of the Sengen. It is there that she will find the soil suitable for her roots and it is there that what is missing will be found. In the lower shrine you will stay for a time, and then you will wander the forest to finish your preparations. When you have found your guide, he will lead you to the upper shrine. So says Lord Inari to his humble priest, who says this to the seed.\"\n\nThe Miko came back from wherever she had gone, retrieving the greatly shaken BlowingWind. The old priest's voice had trembled, yet it was not with the weakness of old age. No, what had spoken was more like what she would expect to hear from an ancient rice paddy, or perhaps an old river that had no more need of cavorting through depleted fields. She did not notice when her knapsack was pressed back into her hands, or even when she was deposited back in the garden outside. The insistent pulling that she had ignored so much that it had been forgotten had begun once more, and all she could see was a longed for laughing face.\n\n\"Father, is that where I will finally find Obsidian again?\"\n\nOnly the air replied to her whispered question, a small whirlwind skittering over stone and sand to dance with a few discarded leaves and papers.\n\nRedFeather gazed out over the expanses that the cattle grazed upon, hard at work checking on the meat that would feed his family. These cows were not his own, as he was just a poor cowboy, yet as he was paid to take care of them, he was still responsible for them. In his way, he would be feeding his family and Nation, providing for their needs in the way that a warrior should.\n\nOther Medicine Keepers of the Nation had noticed Coyote's lack of overt activity in their lives. Coyote's many children still roamed and performed their own mischief, but his silence had never boded well before. Someone was due for a very large scale awakening by the look of things, and all of the Keepers were nervous as to who would be exposed for a fool.\n\nOther problems had been bothering him as well though. Recently, he had received a letter from his Aunt Marie. Enclosed with the expected graduation photo of his favorite little cousin had been a tear-stained letter informing him that she had run away. Coyote had always been fascinated by her overly adult view of life, and had long worked to fill her life with spontaneity and mischief. RedFeather could only hope that wherever she was, Coyote was letting her get on her feet instead of trying to seduce her or playing one of his dangerous pranks on her.\n\nIt was over a month ago now that he and the other Medicine Keepers for both Clan and Nation had gathered in Council over the disappearance of the Keeper of the Hawk Pipe. They had sung and prayed long, some dancing beneath the sky, others within Sweat Lodges. The Seers had sought to find her, but she had been scattered, and all that they could find were bits and pieces that refused to come away from where they had hidden themselves. One particularly troublesome piece of BlowingWind's spirit had even seemed to take up residence with a rather grumpy creature that they had described as a snake with legs and bearing plumes of fire. Where she was hiding was an impenetrable mystery to humans. Unknown to RedFeather, a separate Council was discussing his cousin even as he worried over her state.\n\n\"What will happen to my cousin? Please be safe BlowingWind.\"\n\nA whirlwind passed by after he spoke to himself, and for a moment, RedFeather could almost believe that it was some spirit come to harass his cattle or to addle his brain. With the luck that had befallen his family in the past generation, there was little possibility that the errant wind housed a spirit that would help them.\n\nThree figures kneeled upon cushions in the room, engrossed in the ritual that happened before the actual conference that had been called. Each bowed and greeted the others according to rank. The Daitengu and Tenko, the leaders of the crow and fox spirits of the land, had asked for audience with Sarutahiko, calling upon his position as the leader of the earth-born spirits to solve their problem.\n\nDaitengu, having long ago lost his personal name when he rose to power over the other Tengu, was arrayed in the robes of a simple monk. His red face and long, beak-like nose had once struck fear in the humans of simpler times, and the impressive wings on his back were the furled night waiting to confuse the unwary. His companion and the head servant of the rice god Oinari, Tenko had also lost his personal name in the same manner. Nine tails spoke of how many long millennia the Kyuubi no Kitsune's white coat, and flinty eyes, had chased after fools as he listened to his compatriot speak. Kneeling respectfully before their lord, the trickster spirits posed their dilemma, the Daitengu speaking first.\n\n\"Sarutahiko-sama, what is to be done about the intruder who followed the Miko-child?\"\n\n\"Yes, that is my question as well my lord. The humans are blaming my fellow Kitsune and me for many things happening around the child, which are not our faults. The tricks always are aimed at the foreign girl, but humans in her vicinity unwittingly step into them and we are tired of taking the blame.\"\n\n\"The Kitsune is right my Lord, and the child will be setting out on a journey through our forests soon enough when she makes pilgrimage to Fujisan. I and the other Tengu have no wish to have him interfering in the tests that we will be administering to this girl, who is training as a type of priestess. If he wants the volatile thing he should just take her, and stop making our job as testers so difficult.\"\n\nSarutahiko gazed tiredly at the two spirits that had come to him for audience complaining of the foreign spirit who had invaded the soil, while chasing after the strange holy woman, who seemed to bear a trace amount of spirit blood from some unknown source. As far as he could tell, the wild dog held no ill will towards the girl, although he did seem to have a penchant for attempting to embarrass the poor child. Other spirits had followed her on the back of the winds as well, although these two seemed to be seeking to return Coyote home once more.\n\nNow was not an appropriate time for the trickster to go on a world tour, as Nippon had enough problems and who knew how Amaterasu would react to his mucking about in her country.\n\n\"I know that you are frustrated, but this will soon be over. As she is now stepping out of the protection of the spirits of the house she has been living in, she will once more be undefended. It will not be long before she is claimed, for good or ill, and then he will have no further reason to stalk her.\"\n\nThe Daitengu's face broke into a series of chasms and gorges, such as could be found hidden in the forests over which he was lord while his pointed teeth glinted in the light. He well remembered the time long ago when he and others would kidnap children and the unwary. He remembered \"tormenting\" or teaching them secrets until either returning them as half-wits, depositing them in far lands, or the souls of the unlucky leaving their body unable to stand any more of the broadening of their perception.\n\nIt had been long since any humans had received the full severity of their tests, but those who had been so favored and managed to keep their wits had become great heroes. Sarutahiko himself had called a halt to the practice, believing the humans to be too frail for such barbarous training as they fell further away from their own spirit natures. Perhaps when this child finally took up the mantle of true womanhood the balance would begin to dip back the other way and spirit-kind would once again rise in dominance over the earth, returning health back to the planet.\n\n\"So you will not interfere in her life, no matter who takes possession of her and her abilities? You will do nothing even if Amatsu Mikaboshi himself takes an interest in such a 'lowly' thing as a human or if any of my kind were to accidentally test her as hard as we have others in the past?\"\n\n\"Amatsu Mikaboshi is too vain to go after a human woman, too busy pursuing my grandmother, and is too busy working on his latest plan to take over the Heavens at the approaching end of the Age to worry about the happenings here on Earth. Should he acquire the Seat of the Heavens, then the Earth will already be at his feet, and there is nothing that I can do to help in the High Expanse until the Gateway opens once more. As for your training methods, it may be preferable for her to die and exist as spirit than for her body to serve as a link to the material world for a Kami with malignant motives.\"\n\nNeither the Tengu nor the Kitsune could hide the smiles on their faces as they were given leave to test by any means that was deemed necessary.\n\nAt the Foot of Fuji, Release!\n\nBlowingWind had wandered after Koji meekly as a child, riding home in a now very familiar sense of unreality. Things were moving again, and she could not shake the feeling of some great machine poised to crush her. The ride home was quiet though, the silken silence only broken when they pulled up in the driveway.\n\n\"Ji-san, what am I going to need to take with me?\"\n\n\"Take your sack. You already have all that you need in it. After that, allow the spirits to guide you.\"\n\nNodding her head, she followed Ji-san in, pausing only to collect the mail from the box, drifting in and wondering what would happen next. Sorting the mail, the only thing she found for herself was an official looking envelope. Shaking fingers set aside the rest, and then broke rudely into the white expanse like a snowboard carving through the early morning powder. Removing the letter as carefully as she would a tiny kitten from a hay nest, she felt her future teetering on the edge of a precipice between where she was and the Great Unknown. Finally, she unfolded the fateful leaflet and awaited the decision of the Powers That Be.\n\nBlowingWind scanned the paper, her eyes only skimming the surface. It was indeed from the Visa and Immigration Department. Gathering her courage to herself, she read it properly. Falling into a boneless heap on the foyer floor, the meaning of the words finally sank in.\n\nThe thud and shake of a body hitting the floor attracted the attention of Haruko, who had awoken long ago. Peeking out of the kitchen where she was preparing a meal, her eyes became wide as gongs as she saw the young American puddled on the floor. The poor child's face was a mask of shock similar to one she had seen long ago in a Noh play, and nearby a letter lay forgotten on the floor.\n\n\"Ji-san, come quick! Something's wrong with Buro-kaze! Kaze-chan!\"\n\nBoth of the natives rushed to Wind's side, kneeling down and attempting to awaken her from the shock. Finally, a slow grin began to spread across her face like the first thread of a summer dawn. Barely a whisper, words breezed out filled with the freedom of relief.\n\n\"I can stay. I have to re-apply for each scholastic year I'll be staying unless I want to change my citizenship, but I can stay.\"\n\nHaruko desperately hugged BlowingWind, holding the girl steady as tremors of relief began to take over her body. Being able to stay in Japan seemed to mean more to the mysterious girl than just going to school, otherwise the reaction would not have been so big. Just as quickly though, BlowingWind's display of emotion was gone, blown through like a small but powerful storm.\n\n\"Ji-san, when can I get to the base of Fujiyama?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow if you like.\"\n\n\"Yes, I would like that very much. Thank you.\"\n\n\"Good morning Sun! Good morning Amaterasu!\"\n\n\"Kaze-chan! Don't you think you should eat breakfast first?\"\n\n\"Oh, right. Thanks Haru-chan. Sorry Ji-san, I thought I was running late.\"\n\n\"BlowingWind, don't forget what I said about always running around. Slow down and enjoy life.\"\n\n\"Kaze-chan, must you really go?\"\n\n\"For a little while Haru. I promise I'll write, and you know that I'll be back before I move up to Hokkaido. Shall I bring you an omamori? What charm would you like?\"\n\n\"Something for the baby would be fine, thank you Kaze-chan.\"\n\nThe young American had eagerly greeted the next day, although Haruko was sad to see her go. BlowingWind traveled south toward the sacred mountain, half-dreaming of a passionate reunion with the spirit she loved and half dreading the more likely outcome that her entire adventure was little more than a wild goose chase. When they arrived at the shrine, the assistants were preparing for the fire festival that would announce the official beginning of the climbing season. Already, there were a few devotees of the Fujiko here, undergoing their austerities in preparation for the anticipated climb.\n\n\"Ji-san, there are already so many people. What is going on?\"\n\n\"Just the fire festival. It happens every year. Perhaps you could help while you are here.\"\n\n\"That would be great!\"\n\nShe had a short conversation with the head priest, which mostly consisted of smiling and bowing at each other. With her broken Japanese she explained why she was there and what she intended to do. BlowingWind ended up sharing a room with some female student priests. She gladly made a sizable donation to the shrine in thanks for their help, and spent her days in helping with festival preparations and slowly merging the shrine's practices with her own. Her nights were spent with visualizing her ascent to the peak and sleeping in her thin futon on the tatami mats. Shrine life was quiet, and in her mind it was perfect save for the loud tourists who passed through on picnic hikes up the mountain. Regarding those, she was reminded of the rabble that always seemed to litter the Ski Park back in California.\n\nAnother donation had provided for a priest to be assigned to her, teaching her all she needed to know for a traditional climb. He informed her of the tradition of bathing in the five lakes around the mountain, and dutifully she had bathed in them. He helped her to memorize her route until she could practically see it with her inner eye, although she would most likely have little trouble as she would only need to follow the hordes that would be filing up the mountain after the opening ceremony. However, on her hikes she had seen an area that called to her soul, and finally she asked her burning question.\n\n\"Kannushi-san, what is that area of twisted trees lost among the volcanic rock that has such a strange feeling to it?\"\n\nThe young man looked carefully at her, the training mystic sitting demurely in the Miko-san uniform they had issued her after she had come to train with them. After he was certain that she was of fairly sound mind, he reluctantly answered her apparently innocent question.\n\n\"It is called Aokigahara Jukai, The Sea of Trees, The Forest of No Return, or the Forbidden Forest two hundred years ago. That is all that remains of the old forest after Fujiyama's eruption of 1706 to 1707. Legend says that those who enter never return, and for this reason it is a popular place for suicide. The police do a yearly sweep for bodies, but I am sure that many of the bodies are never found. It is a strange place where one is easily lost, and a good place to stay away from.\"\n\n\"I see. We had many places like that at the foot of Shastayama. People would get lost for weeks, mostly tourists. I visited a few of those places, and the feel was always very odd. Why would they feel odd?\"\n\n\"In the old days, it was said that such places were where the bridge between our world and the world of the Kami was easily crossed. Those who crossed over the borders rarely returned, for good or ill. Now, it is said that travelers are so easily lost because the landscape looks the same and the rocks confuse the compasses. I personally do not put much stock in confused compasses from the iron content of the rocks though. Still, I would take great care all the same.\"\n\n\"Yes. I will be careful. Thank you.\"\n\nBowing, BlowingWind rose to go and prepare her things. In reality, all was already prepared, but it was always good to double-check everything. However, she also felt that it would be more appropriate if she was in her own clothes. What she was learning of the native faith dovetailed beautifully with her own for the most part, however she also was no Miko. She had no wish to remain virgin, even though she was not looking to loose that precious gift at this time. No, she was an Apache shaman even though she had been deprived of a full childhood in that culture; her new location could not change that and only gave her new knowledge and more forces to call on.\n\n\"When will you be leaving MountainChild-san?\"\n\n\"As soon as I am changed and have finished the Hawk Dance.\"\n\n\"Good journey then.\"\n\n\"Arigato gozimasu Kannushi-san.\"\n\nRyu stared up at the ceiling of his grotto, floating gently on the heated currents of his magma tongue. For the past several days after he had awoken from his calming sleep, he had felt a strange presence roving in his above land keepings. Most of the time it was beyond his borders, but a few times it had ventured near, pulling him from morose musings into musings after tendrils of cinnamon. When it had moved away from his borders he was in peace once more, or at least relatively speaking.\n\nFujiyama had come down to visit his wayward son, reminding the fidgety spirit that it would not be much longer before he was free again. Ryu's reclusive dam had even sent word of her encouragement through her mate, even though she herself could not leave her clutch of eggs. Ryu appreciated the sentiment, but he was still rather sore at his father for having wrestled him back into his origins. Things were so dull here, and it had been so sobering to have discovered that although he had reached full size, he still had a long way to go before being as powerful physically and magically as his august father.\n\nThe visit had soothed the dragon's nerves somewhat, but he was still on edge. Something was happening, and he did not know what. Being trapped inside of himself only gave him time to stew and wonder, which did nothing but make him even tenser, a bowstring poised to snap.\n\nAt last, Ryu felt the magic bonds tethering him into the fiery river loosen their irresistible grip; falling away at last and evaporating like dreams. With a great cry, the magma dragon hurled himself into the air, riding the magnetic currents to the ledge high above him, where his high-seat lurked empty these many years. Landing squarely on the granite, his great claws etched in new furrows with their excitement. Shaking out years of imprisonment, globules of his molten earth sprayed off like sheets of fiery rain or discarded scale. His wild howl still reverberated throughout the hallways, eventually filling the whole volcano with his joy and causing the more unstable deposits to shift or crumble.\n\nHis brothers and sisters that were still residing inside of Fujisan no doubt cringed at his exuberance, anticipating perhaps some oncoming practical joke for having not attempted to sneak a visit or smuggle him some fresh meat. Despite the hesitant misgivings of his more reserved siblings, the various other earth and fire spirits who dwelt in his sector cheered along with their lord and master. Dragons, snakes, and salamanders left posts in kitchens, store rooms, onsen, and other areas, joined by lizards and bats from other areas of the division. Healers who were not tending patients at the time left their quarters, and even Mayu, who had just finished arranging the new eggs in her nest, looked up before curling around them again.\n\n\"I take it that it feels good to not have your magic enchained anymore.\"\n\nRyu snorted in disdain, shaking his head like a dog that has discovered something unexpectedly malodorous, which sent his mane flying madly.\n\n\"I will take that as a yes then, my son, and be glad that you seem to be in such a good mood.\"\n\nRyu's dark eyes regarded his father's endless night that was his dragon form mistrustfully as a high school student would watch a substitute chemistry instructor. Servants watched with interest at the edges of the chamber while guards released their human shapes for the heavier natural armor of dragon scale.\n\n\"What did I do now Otou-sama? Or is it what I have not yet done?\"\n\nFujiyama shook his head, realizing that in some ways he did deserve the mistrust of his son. Something was bothering the old dragon about his son though. It was not something that he could place his claw on yet, but something was different. The boy was even more distant than ever perhaps, and the chemistry of the magma that composed the boy was changing slowly, as if the ever-reaching tongue had happened on some rare element it was incorporating into itself.\n\n\"Just be careful out there my Son. Even though the majority of humanity does not believe we exist as they do, does not mean they can not do great harm if we allow them to come too close to us.\"\n\n\"Father, you have given us all this talk before. I remember my lessons about Kaguya-hime and the Emperor, and the havoc in both worlds that relationship caused. I will allow no human to intrude inside this holy mountain, I will toy with no hearts, and I will not tell anyone that my father is a hoary old dragon stuck in ancient tradition.\"\n\nRyu shook his head as he made his reply, uncomfortable at the thought of his now long distant puphood, but mildly amused at the more recent memory of the conversation with a favorite student that had been the reason his father had chained him in the first place. At the time that he would have said something to hopefully break the tension between himself and his \"hoary old man\" that would hopefully result in his complete freedom, thunder rolled through. His escape was now firmly blocked by the summons and invitation of all the resident spirits to the fire festival now commencing as the setting sun painted the horizon fire red. Resigned to perform his duty, he followed his father through upward wending passages instead. It figured and was his luck that he was released from his magma just in time to hear the drummers enticing his fellow spirits to witness what was being done in their honor.\n\nSubterranean passageways gave way to the vents at the top and side of the mountain, and various volcano-dwelling spirits took the forms of wind or steam to waft out and alight in secrecy at the shrines around the rim of the craters, or to venture down to the lower shrine. Bells and gongs joined in the wild pulse, and the smells of the food offerings were tempting this year. Down below, the fires could be seen where they would blaze throughout the night, in imitation of the mountain's own fierce inner fire. Ryu knew that the next day the coals would be raked out, and people would be guided across the heated bed to be purified for the next year. Eventually, the stirring scene would lure him down as a shimmer of heat to dance in the bonfire with the others. It was always the same, each year that he was present even in part.\n\nThe unusual scent of cinnamon hung heavy in the air in the courtyard of the lower shrine this year, and a laughing voice wound through and above all of the other revelers. Ryu wanted to find the owner of this voice, and this scent that had started to grow on him. A new dance had been added to the usual fare, surprising him, and when the woman swooping and soaring with a feathered blanket appeared to give her offering the voice was gone, replaced by chiming bells tied to the foreign dancer. The Kannushi announcing the addition was very excited to have such an offering from a holy woman from another land to present, it showed even through the carefully trained exterior. To Ryu's consternation, paints obscured the face of this new delicacy, turning the human into a very believable hawk. Tendrils of his spirit extended, seeking to brush and explore.\n\nAt last, when the graceful bow of the moon rode high and the stars brightly danced in the skies to a more ancient music than that the humans offered, Ryu and Fujiyama answered the humans' plaintively joyous calls and partook of what was offered. Konohana-hime and her sister, joined also by the retired Lady Fuji, descended in invisible forms to send their blessings as well. In the golden glow of gilded festival lanterns as he stalked the grounds and wound between parishioners, Ryu did not notice a leather-clad woman, carrying a simple pack on her back, waft the smoke of the fire over herself after being allowed to scatter a handful of earthy ceremonial tobacco over the coals. Nor did he notice when her cinnamon scent withdrew from the gathering to wander midnight forests on her search for a true purpose, being too drunk on the ambient energy.\n\nOther ancient spirits did notice the presence and withdrawal of the visitor, following her as she wandered from the light and noise into the cloak of the night. Moccasined feet stepped lightly along the rocky paths, following both her eyes and the quiet pull at the core of her being. During her eight days at the shrine, a small piece of herself, infinitesimal to say the least, had slinked back into place during a quiet moment of meditation. It was certain that it wasn't everything that she was missing, but somehow she felt a little bit better, as if she were on the right track.\n\nThe bow of the moon was an old friend to her, a familiar face from the time before she had her heart broken and even before she had given it away. Although it did not provide as much light as it would at the full, it was still enough to make out her path by for the time being. As she went further into the forests it would not be enough any more, but she had to escape the noise. She was on a quest, and the living celebration would only have sucked her further into it, holding her back and plunging her into the crowds searching for entirely different answers.\n\nUnnoticed, a small red fox bearing two tails ran past her on a parallel path, and it paused now and then to survey the shaman' progress. Once satisfied, he reached into her mind, borrowing the form and voice of the male most prominent in her mind.\n\nNubby roots reached up from the ground now to trip her, and the gravel's sharp edges told her that somehow she had managed to wander from her intended path. Regaining her footing once more, a fog began to rise from unseen water sources, twisting like a silken dragon through avenues of jagged stone and twisted trees. A voice from not so distant happy days called out to her in a laughing challenge.\n\n\"You can't catch me Beautiful!\"\n\n\"Obsidian!\"\n\nHer heart thundering now with surprise and excitement, BlowingWind accepted the challenge of the ghost conjured by the magic of an ancient forest, wily Kitsune, and a lonely heart. Racing unheeding after his calls into the Forest of No Return as the Tengu peeked at her from behind their rocks and trees, neither the shaman nor the dragon that fate was weaving her together with were aware of the challenges that soon would come their way."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Tests of the Tengu\n\nBlowingWind chased after Obsidian's laughing voice, spurred on by her bouncing knapsack and her intense desire to be with her Beloved once more. Mist rose higher than before, first sucking at her ankles, then nipping at her knees, obscuring the already difficult path she followed. Her bearings had been lost hours ago, a thought which brought her up short, to collapse on an oddly shaped rock gasping for breath like a fish out of water.\n\nThis natural maze of tree and stone had done its entrusted work well, acting as a barrier to trap its prey for hundreds of years. BlowingWind could not allow fear to grip her now though. Looking around from her moss-covered perch, the nightmarish land was unbroken by any manmade object, save for one. Oddly placed, a wooden bridge painted garishly in crimson arched innocently over what seemed to be a river of dry stones. No trace could be seen of the one that she had pursued so passionately, a sign that once more she had fallen prey to the ghosts of her abundant imagination.\n\n\"I really hope I didn't chase Coyote, or a Kitsune. Why on earth would there be a bridge over a dry riverbed, when somebody could just walk across? It doesn't look like there has been water in there for years.\"\n\nStanding back up, she did not notice that the knee-high rock she had been sitting on was carved into the rough resemblance of a double-faced creature, nor was she aware of the mocking leer the sinister engraving was possessed of. Her eyes were fixed on the worn bridge and her hand was outstretched in an effort to verify the evidence of her eyes.\n\nThe bridge was as solid as the rocks, and as her hand first touched the rail the wind chose that moment to howl under it. The phantom sounds of a rushing river carried to her ears as she slowly began to cross it.\n\n\"What could have once been up ahead for this to be in place so obviously long?\"\n\nNow at the other side, the shaman turned around to look back, although she had no idea as to why she would do so. By turning and looking back, the magic of the borderland was activated, and magic sealed the way to the human world without her even knowing she was crossing that fine line. As she consciously expected, she saw nothing unusual, and the fog crawling down low obscured the rising water that she otherwise would have seen. Shaking her head at her foolishness, BlowingWind continued onward, away from the ghostly river and the bridge that was vanishing unseen behind her.\n\nBehind a rock, the small red fox with two tails watched with a small smile. Sitting down, he nibbled on some aburage that one of the Tengu he was currently and oddly partnered with had left for him.\n\n\"Good luck.\"\n\nHer path took an upward tuck now, and it flitted across her mind how similar this area was to a spirit world that had been depicted in one of the hangings she had seen in the Buddhist temple that shared grounds with the Fuji Shrine. After a short time, she was so tired that she could no longer walk on, far more than she expected.\n\n\"It's as if the very forest is sapping my life force. Must be my imagination.\"\n\nWith a groan, she rose, searching out a cave for her seclusion, or a suitable clearing. After a while, she finally found a clear space with enough room, knowing her search would have to continue after the sun rose. The tangled roots of a tree, naturally covered over with soft and fragrant moss, served as a bed and exhaustion soon pulled her into a deep sleep.\n\nAs the young woman slept, what appeared to be a wandering Yamabushi materialized beside her still form. Simple robes of coarse earth brown wrapped loose arms around an old and wizened figure that was yet unbent by age. A woven straw hat, resembling a mushroom, lurked on the top of his head while a long red nose poked out of his face like a fire-prod. The ringed staff in his hand did not wake her, even though the otherworldly music that it made was not silenced. Tiny black wings fanned the air around him as he bent over to administer the medicine that would keep her in the world of spirit disappearance, instead of allowing her to fade to nothing.\n\nSoft pink lips parted for the hard red berry, grimacing as her teeth crushed the pellet to release bitter juice. The Tengu nodded as the human swallowed reflexively. If her tests accidentally killed her then the body would not be found. It was time now for her first test though, that of endurance.\n\n\"Run my child! Run as if the hells themselves were burning your heels!\"\n\nAlthough the Tengu was an old man, the booming voice was that of a young one. As it roared across the forest, stirring the birds out of the trees, it also stirred the young wanderer out of her barely begun rest. Befuddled by her lack of rest, all she could do was to blink at the rude \"person\" who had awoken her, not noticing the obvious signs that he was more than human.\n\n\"Run girl!\"\n\nThough highly confused, she took off like a rabbit. The tattoo of her feet was the drumbeat that would have been played at her maidenhood ceremony if her mother had taken her to the Sunrise Ceremony in the year she obtained her moon. Night gave way to day, the gray of early dawn resplendent silk as stars faded away. Every time she thought to stop, the strange man was there to yell into her ear the dreaded word. At last, after the longest four miles of her life, the sun rose and she fell beside a peaceful stream. The only other creature with her on the grassy bed was a laughing crow, which seemed to be amused at her plight and enjoying the chance to mock her. With eyes rimmed with the yellow of stress, once more the human sank into sleep.\n\n\"Good job onna, you pass this one.\"\n\nBy the time that BlowingWind awoke, midmorning had cast her radiant garment on the canopy of tree limbs above. The grass had released its sweet scent thanks to her crushing fall, and the stream nearby tinkled quietly to itself. The strange crow was gone, and she would have thought her headlong and confused flight through the forest a dream if it were not for the ringed staff that had carefully been laid beside her.\n\n\"Well, I guess that must have been a Tengu. From the way Takamura-jisan described them though, I thought they would look more crow-like. Pretty good joke though, chasing me through the forest and then leaving a fancy stick to lean on. Thank goodness it wasn't Coyote.\"\n\nScarcely had she turned away from the bank to continue on her way, but she was shoved roughly into the water. Strong hands held her under as she struggled, and when her head broke water once more she was able to get a glimpse of a crow's head perched on a monk's body before she was plunged back under. Her new staff connected with what BlowingWind desperately hoped was at the very least his gut, which ended ultimately with her release to the mercies of the now churning water. As consciousness stole away once again, the stream, deeper than she had supposed, swallowed her and swept her away to its underwater ruler.\n\nAlthough consciousness had left her, BlowingWind's body had entered into its own struggle to continue living. Though her soul was broken and aching for release, instinct eventually brought her clawing back into consciousness.\n\nBlowingWind found herself at the feet of a large dragon firmly ensconced at the end of a great hall. Pine needles had lent their green to his great scales, while onyx colored his mane and claws. Eyes the blue of a summer sky gazed with boredom upon the little human who had been forced into his domain. One great claw clutched a giant pearl in its three-clawed paw, lazily rolling it as one would a meditation ball.\n\n\"So, the Tengu had thought to defile me with yet another human body, but at least this one is still alive. Tell me Ningen, what is it that brings you into the Aokigahara Jukai, where they still roam free?\"\n\n\"I am seeking my guardian.\"\n\n\"You do not look like a Miko, or a Yamabushi.\"\n\nClouds narrowed the blue skies into slits as the dragon contemplated whether it was worth his time and effort to devour her, or if he should merely allow her to drown. BlowingWind was glad that Obsidian's shell necklace still possessed its magic protecting her from drowning, but there was little she could do to defend against those sword-like teeth.\n\n\"I am neither. I come from another land. There, we perform much the same function although we dress very differently from those you are used to seeing. I am a training shaman and a Spirit Keeper.\"\n\n\"One who keeps spirits? It would make you similar to an inu-gami-mochi or kitsune-gami-mochi, one who employs dogs and foxes as your magic servants for your evil spells, witch.\"\n\n\"I am no witch, nor do I seek to own anyone. I only want to find my guardian again.\"\n\n\"Lies.\"\n\nThe dragon pounced on her then, wrapping his coils around her, seeking to constrict her so as to more easily swallow her small form. However, at that time the staff that she still had with her sprang to life, driving the suigami back with a holy shield while a roar issued from the depths of her knapsack.\n\n\"Obsidian!\"\n\nBlowingWind's cry resounded through the ancient hall and mingled with the roar, a plaintive cry that knew it would never be answered, even though she still sought after him and carried the torch of memory. The dragon picked himself up from where he had been thrown, shaking in his anger.\n\n\"Get out. I will eat no one with a pure heart.\"\n\nHurling a much smaller pearl at her than his own, the water god called on the waters to cast her out of his domain. A giant wave tossed her onto the shores of the streambed, leaving her half-drowned and doubting her sanity. During her tumultuous exit from the water realm contained within the stream, the pearl had somehow mounted itself on her staff. These items proved to her that these adventures were no dream, and for just a moment she caught herself missing Coyote and his tricks. At least with him, she knew what to expect.\n\n\"What a rude water spirit. I need to find a friendly place. Otherwise, a rock might try to squish me for sitting on it.\"\n\nHidden in the branches of a cedar tree, the Tengu that had pushed her into the stream nodded in approval, then signaled to the other Tengu and the Kitsune he was working with that she had passed and survived his test.\n\nRyu had enjoyed the night's celebration, the carefree air of the matsuri recharging him with all of the vivacity that dragon-kind was noted for. He had left as the priests were raking out the coals, a nagging feeling telling him that he had to find shelter for the delicate feminine soul he had been guarding as of late. She was not yet strong enough to take form on her own in the material realm, and although he knew very little about his charge or how she had come to him, his dragon's sense of honor could not leave her unprotected.\n\n\"I wish that you would talk Little One. I enjoyed myself, but I hope that it was not too much for you.\"\n\nHaving flown invisibly as a shimmer of heat back to the peak of Fujisan, and then navigated the sundry lava tubes back to his subterranean abode, it was a curious relief to secrete himself once more in inky depths and infernal heat. Glad of freedom once more, instead of plunging into molten rivers of earth, Ryu closeted himself in the chambers that had been prepared long ago for his more mobile portion of himself.\n\nHere, roughly smooth stalactites slowly dripped down the walls to whisper the secrets of water and wood going about their purposes above. Although earth itself composed the boundaries of the rooms, these chambers had been filled with the artistry of Buddhist monks now long dead, and furniture crafted by artisans whose names had never been uttered by the tongue of man.\n\nKneeling down on one silken cushion, his Ningen shape stretched forth an arm, waiting for the little pink orb to shyly come back out of his body, to roll down onto the table. Troubled dreams had led him up the river that had begun flowing in his strange fantasy world deep within a forest he had never known with waking eyes. It was a dark place full of fierce creatures that gladly attacked him on every visit, without even the slightest provocation or warning.\n\nHe had fought and vanquished these demons countless times now amongst the twisted and blackened trees invested with their own vengeful life and the scorched rock holding tales of pains of the past. Yet each time that he thought them dead and gone, they sprang to life again, hungrier and more vicious than before. Each demon seemed intent on finding the little soul who whispered and pleaded to him for protection from the fear and pain, and each creature called out to her to give up and return with them to something called a Source and to the protection of a raging tornado.\n\nIt was on one such unexpected excursion into the strange world that he had finally gotten to see the little being that had been living inside of him. Ferocious wolves had closed around him as he had been pushing farther up the river in response to her urgings, pinning him into a side canyon and taking advantage of his inability to use his larger form for self-defense. While he had been snapping at one, another, even scrawnier and tawnier than the rest, had ripped at his left flank. With a cry, a little pink orb had flown out and high into the air. Her weak attempt at flight was brought pitifully short though as the wolf's jaws snapped up the morsel that had been screaming something about a Coyote.\n\nSeeing the hapless tama quivering in the jaws of the monster, and hearing her high keening, had sent the dragon into a rage that he had only entered into perhaps twice in his life. Fang and claw had become coated with bitter blood as he burst out of the box canyon to attack. Gladly would Ryu have ended it all and eaten the horrid creature, but before his jaws could close around he who had dared to steal a dragon's jewel a giant Hawk and Raven swooped in to carry off the battered and cursing being. The tama fell from the creature's jaws into an outstretched draconic claw, and by the laughing of the Raven he supposed that perhaps he had either passed some kind of twisted test or the thing called Coyote was not very well liked among the other demons of the forest.\n\nWhatever had truly happened, the dreams came to him less now, and the little soul was feasted daily with meat and fish, or whatever else the dragon had been fed. The small being rested carefully between a jar of water and a juicy piece of raw venison, bringing Ryu out of the recent past with her tiny and still voice.\n\n\"My sisters will be coming for me soon.\"\n\nIt was the first time that he had heard conversational words come from the strange jewel in more than a whisper. Ever curious, he leaned closer to her until his face was level, as if by moving closer he would learn more through a strange process of osmosis.\n\n\"There are more of you?\"\n\n\"Three other souls actually, Spirit. I can feel our approach. The main of us is moving closer, but it will not be until later that she will come. You must take me to the others, please. Her forest is too much for us.\"\n\nThe dragon man and spirit orb silently partook of the food; Ryu thoughtfully sipping some tea while the soul did her best to absorb the energy in the fare. Something was bothering him, and had been for quite a while now.\n\n\"Little One, what are you called? I can't keep calling you Little One, Mysterious Jewel or Precious Treasure.\"\n\nA paler shade of pink washed through the ball, as if someone had set a rose quartz sphere on a light stand, or left it out in the sun for long enough to bleach it out.\n\n\"If you don't know my name, then it is not mine to give. Ask the others for my name.\"\n\nRyu did not understand what he had said to cause her pain or sadness, but by the dejected way that she rolled back to his palm and settled for sleep again he knew he had caused her great pain. She was quickly absorbed into his being again, shielded from the other much larger energies around them, and he was finally ready to leave the mountain on his own terms.\n\nMay I Stay?\n\nAfter hours of wandering, BlowingWind at last found an area suitable for her purposes. An inky cavern gaped wide its hungry maw, waiting patiently to devour any soul brave enough to venture into the underworld through it seeking arcane knowledge. A small stream, thankfully a different one than the one that she had been pushed into with such murderous intent earlier, wandered down the slope through trees and rocks, and concealed both sleeping fish and succulent river weeds. Pine trees offered familiar pine nuts tucked within their prickly cones, while low and twisted bushes proffered their bright berries. Ferns and moss took away harsh edges that had survived the centuries of wind and rain, and at last the wanderer finally felt safe.\n\nOpening her pack, it could be seen that the suigami-ryu, or water dragon-god, had taken his due from her before she had awakened, and her supply of jerky was gone. He had even taken the store of dried fruits and nuts that she always kept in her pack for emergencies and offerings. Luckily, she could go for a while longer without food, and she was still supposed to be fasting anyway. It was the principle of the matter that offended her though, that someone had looked inside and through her things without proper permission.\n\nFurther looking through her things, all else was in order. Her kinickinick was thankfully dry as well as her sage and other herbs, thanks to the wonder of plastic bags protecting the cloth pouches. Her rattle was unharmed, as was the small flute that had been slipped into her items by someone while she was busy with the Kannushi and Miko at Inari Jinja. The small hand drum that had also been added to her medicines was still wet though, but a fire would easily remedy the situation.\n\nThe flute was a gift that she halfway could understand. It was a soothing instrument to hear, and her own culture often would send prayers upon the back of the wind in this manner. Once, only Buddhist priests had been allowed to play this particular version of the instrument, a means of meditation upon the Divine. BlowingWind had never taken lessons with flutes, having been more of a stringed instrument kind of girl, but she had been greatly cheered when the priest mentoring her at the lower Sengen shrine had told her that the intention was more important than any melody. Still it was a medicine she did not understand and would need to work with.\n\nThe drum was a gift that had puzzled her upon its discovery. It was as simple as many that she had seen in the multi-ethnic store called Soul Connections back on the main street in Mount Shasta City. However, it still had its own aura of simple elegance giving her the feeling that it would be sacrilegious for her to so much as tie a feather to one of the strings serving as a handle. This she knew was not destined to be truly hers, and yet the energy was already inextricably entwined with her own.\n\n\"What was I supposed to be doing with it?\"\n\nBlowingWind took one more look around, marveling at the beauty all around her. The earth itself seemed to have made a perfect fire pit in the center of the clearing, complete with a ring of stones waiting with open arms to embrace wood and fire. There also was a small natural table of stone that looked as if it were meant to hold offerings. Following the inner prompting welling inside her breast, she gave a gift of the sacred cornmeal and some of her fine tobacco, singing as she made her gifts in the ways of her people.\n\n\"I ask to be allowed here, to rest and sing and pray. I seek the way to steer, so I will listen to what you spirits say.\"\n\nA wave of curiosity issued out of the fern covered cave, and the trees sighed as the preliminary verse of her song ended. They had not sent her away, waiting for something, and this encouraged her. Setting up camp was a simple thing, and soon she had wood and tinder arranged for the fire that would be the heart of her temporary home. She continued, feeling eyes following that were neither welcoming, nor forbidding, ever increasing just beyond her range of sight. Rummaging in her bag again, she pulled out the bit of steel and flint she used for her fires, striking sparks into the dry tinder and hoping for a catch.\n\n\"Fire came to my people through Coyote, Puma, Hawk, through Four Legged and Winged People. So goes the talk. May this fire be as sacred as the first.\"\n\nThe fire caught and roared to life and smiling, she gratefully offered a pinch of tobacco and sage to the flames, wafting the smoke carefully in all six directions acknowledged by her people. The leaves rustled as the trees and other plant people talked among themselves and the Tengu hiding in the cryptomeria, the cedars, discussed how they could lead the girl away from her appeasing magic. Still singing, this time in thanks to Creator for her journey, BlowingWind positioned the drum near the fire where the skin could dry and remain properly tuned. Lovingly setting out her tools so that they too could bask in the sacred energy of the place, she additionally narrated the story of each item to honor them, as the medicines were her partners in her journey. She sang of her totems and helpers back home, and invited the spirits of the land to join in her dance.\n\nAs she unwrapped her mirror, her song suddenly fell off, leaving the clearing even more silent as rocks and plants kept watching the strange woman who had penetrated so far into the Forbidden Forest's secrets. Memories of Obsidian washed through her once more, and as she gazed into its depths tears coursed unnoticed down well-worn waterways. The insulation of dreams had rotted away at last, and once more she was face to face with the painful end of a relationship that had been so young. She had accepted that Obsidian was dead and gone, and yet it was still hard to move on even after so many months. It was useless to believe that she would find even a piece of him; her shell had grown cold long ago. It was time to go under the sponsorship of another, but even though she had gone all this way she was afraid, and very lonely.\n\nHer silence lasted no more than a moment, and the mirror found a place with everyone else. As she sighed and tried to shake her depression away again, a great tsunami of welcome and comfort ,rivaling her former dark currents, poured out and over her from the direction of the cave. The spirits had made their final decision, and it was good to feel like she belonged in this forest that was so similar to where she had grown up and yet so different.\n\nHe had finally reached the entrance to the ancient forest of which his above ground holdings were but a small part. Most magma beings could very happily exist solely underground their entire existence, but as he was fated to flow completely to the surface one day, he continually strove towards the sweet air. The thought of seeing trees and ferns again so intimately made him purr with pleasure even though he was investigating a disturbance. He could feel the confusion and mixed feelings penetrating the earth even before he could smell the earthy richness of a new blend of herbs. Ryu had been about to boil out in defense of the weaker spirits when he heard her songs and saw her innocently bright face shining like Amaterasu.\n\n\"My, what is this then?\"\n\nRyu's draconic vision took in not only her material form, but also all the other shapes that her souls and spirit were capable of. Layer upon layer bore wounds and scars attesting to losses and trials, but it was her innermost being that took his breath away and froze him just within the shadow of Mother Earth's birth canal. Still rough, but slowly becoming tumbled into a round bead of sky-blue turquoise, she was shot through with veins of silver and gold. The human woman was performing a ceremony unknown to him now, lighting a fire and singing of the spirits who had accompanied her and stood ranged about her like old friends.\n\nIt was easy for him to tell she was not native to his land. Her red-brown hair was like the iron rich obsidian hidden about the landscape, in his opinion, a far cry from the usual blacks and dark browns of the indigenous population. The pale jasmine colored skin so liberally sprinkled across her pert nose with freckles told him so as well, just as clearly as the cobalt of the heavens that had been fashioned into her eyes inherited from some ancestor and the fringed white leathers now piquing his curiosity. His best bet was that she was American, although he had been wrong on human ethnicity before.\n\nRyu had been enjoying her dance, reminded of the mysterious hawk maiden swooping and sweeping before him at the festival, painted pink and red by firelight like some phoenix descended from the Heavens. Her voice he enjoyed as well, and performance, in addition to her prayers to stay for a while on her sojourn.\n\nBreaking her performance short, some sub-oceanic tremor below the waters and winds of her spirit set a great tsunami ripping through her tiny form. The epicenter seemed to be the polished hemisphere of volcanic glass that she had been dealing with at that point in her ritual, so carefully held as the maiden lost herself within it. The grief and loneliness poured from her eyes told the dragon that it held a very fresh and quite raw memory encased within it in addition to all of the other uses it had been put to. The tiny soul riding within him stirred uneasily, fighting her own grief as silently as a sphinx from Greek Myth regarded its prey. None of the other spirits in the area had made her truly welcome he could see, and something about the woman plucked at a chord deep within him, urging him to protect her. So it was that Ryu expanded his warmth and welcome to the strange little onna in a great volcanic eruption.\n\nAs Ryu's searing warmth ripped through her frigid inner tides, he was gratified to see whole icebergs trapped within her seas melt away, and the glacier blue of her eyes swiftly warmed to a sapphire shot thorough with olivine. How quickly her eyes changed with her mood fascinated him, and he gladly watched from his lair as movement found the woman once more, and she danced to complete her previous tasks. The smile on her face was all the reward he had needed, but he certainly was not about to turn down free entertainment.\n\nNow that her song was finished, he watched as she sat silently regarding her surroundings, as if she were waiting for something to happen. The normal sounds of the forest continued, but the crack and snap of an occasional twig began to wear on the dragon that waited for her voice to rise once more and soothe his soul.\n\nIt was well that she should be on her guard. The Tengu that lived in the forest surely would not treat her kindly if they discovered her in the forest. Truly, he could not even understand how she had gotten this close to the gateway into the mountain world. The Forest had kept humans away for a long time, even with the human habitations encroaching upon their borders here, and to even enter into the version that the spirits dwelled within necessitated both finding the dry river and crossing the bridge. If the arch was not passed over, the humans stayed in their own world, and the bridge presented itself for crossing only if someone was pure enough or other spirits were entering into the human world. Such people as never found the bridge merely got lost or eventually found their way home. For those who did cross the bridge though, there were only two possibilities for them.\n\n\"How did you come here Little One?\" Ryu whispered.\n\nA human, even one who had recently undergone the ritual purification of misogi, could not tarry long in the spirit world. Being flesh and blood, the denser vibrations of their bodies would eventually fall back into the human world, unless fed upon the spiritual substance of some edible. As most were unaware of that magical law, many quickly returned to the human world, fading away and remembering their brief sojourn or not as may be. If they did manage to eat something, or were fed by someone, then they were trapped in the spiritual world, never to return to the human realm without a guide or being cast out. This young woman was obviously currently guideless, despite all the spirits who were her helpers.\n\nNow that she had formally been accepted into the area by one of the leading families here, the wildlife of the place went back to their normal lives. The birds sang in the trees, a deer crashed through underbrush looking for berries, and the resident fox peeked out at the foreign woman. Time passed by, and the woman picked up the flute to shakily pick out a melody. Her inexperience with the instrument was glaringly obvious, and it wasn't long before she put it away again, much to the relief of his ears.\n\n\"I should have stopped to get my guitar before running away. Now I can't share any music except through my voice, or this drum.\" She shook her head after, heaving a small sigh.\n\nThe wind rose as the woman made her statement, swirling up and away, taking a few leaves with it. Then the wind was gone, and a few hawk feathers fluttered down to land on the girl and in the fire. She picked one up and examined it before twisting it into her hair. One of the feathers also managed to find its way to Ryu, and the tiny flutter of joy from the strange soul that he carried with him was an unnerving dance, fluttering his belly with recognition of whatever spirit had just left. Also, the matching of the pattern of the last feather that he had seen to this new one confirmed for him his connection through this unknown windy spirit to the woman now sitting silently listening to the wind.\n\n\"Interesting.\"\n\nRyu made himself comfortable out of her sight, watching the antics of the newcomer.\n\nThe stream flowed on into a river, feeding a sacred lake in the distance. Just like the stream that BlowingWind sat by, outside in the Spirit World, the waterfall that RagingTornado so jealously guarded flowed away from its Source to an ultimate destiny. What it was, she knew not, only that two paths would cross in herself to unite two worlds some day, as with any other woman.\n\nThe winds in this interior forest were changing again, and the beasts of her forest had told her that a far more dangerous beast than they had infiltrated the dense defenses as of late, following the river towards the Heart. Having peered through BlowingWind's eyes from time to time, she knew it was an uninvited presence.\n\nRagingTornado cleaned her snowflake obsidian tipped spear again, anger coursing through her veins. She wanted to be left alone, to wander these woods and mountains within her mind without a life mate to abandon her at the journey's end. The rumors had it that this beast also possessed a human form, and part of her soul as well. Perhaps it was merely Coyote trying to tempt her out of hiding and back into the treacherous world. This put her at a loss as to what to do. Should she chase out the intruder, or should she stay here at the roaring falls issuing out of subterranean waterways to guard her most precious secrets?\n\nIn the outer world, RagingTornado knew that her lighter half was calling for Obsidian, although she refrained from using his name. It would have changed anyway, so what was the use of it? She could also tell that BlowingWind was close to grief paralysis again, as her surroundings stilled and the waters took on an icier note. If this happened too frequently, the river would freeze, and she would have to break the ice again with her spear. If the waters and winds ceased completely, BlowingWind's physical life would end. It had been much easier when the missing two souls were here to help, but Wisdom and Love had been missing for quite a while now.\n\nAt first, their absence had been a good thing. Love's endless moaning about Obsidian had ceased, and Wisdom could no longer be heard rationalizing their grief. The quiet had soothed the injured and irritated soul at first, but then it had become eerie. Now, it was becoming harder to maintain the connection into the physical world because of their absence. The winds that had once torn through the valley, to carry the waterfall's mist farther away, no longer blew as hard to water the forest, and no part of BlowingWind's four part spirit had learned yet how to sing back missing souls or soul pieces for themselves or others.\n\nThings got worse though. As to this mysterious beast of obsidian colored rivers and flowing flame, the pine and cedar claimed to have seen for themselves that he held a pink being captive within his own being. Coyote, who she absolutely knew had to be lurking about, had attacked this beast, this four-legged and plumed serpent, and liberated the little orb for a short time. However, the interference of Hawk and Raven had resulted in the dragon regaining control of Love. So then the beast couldn't be Coyote in disguise. Somehow, some creature, some demon of this Land of the Rising Sun, was trying to possess her piece by piece. Perhaps he had Wisdom also then. If so, then she had to do something.\n\n\"Was this how Rattlesnake felt when the first humans moved too close to his home?\"\n\nSnake stirred on the rock he had been sunning himself on, previously unnoticed by the training Shadow Shaman. Few of her generation followed the calls they received from Spirit, and dark was not always evil. Each shaman had to balance the dark with the light within him or her; it was the use of power that caused a shaman to be good or evil.\n\n\"Yes, I felt the fear, anger, and confusion that you feel now my Granddaughter. One must face their fear though, and your forest will not keep him out of the Heart forever.\"\n\n\"What should I do Grandfather Snake?\"\n\n\"A member of the Snake Clan has her rattle. She should make her warning before striking with fang and venom. However, the solution may be reached within a council with the invader.\"\n\n\"This forbidding forest and the creatures I have placed in it are not enough warning?\"\n\nSnake, coiling upon himself to raise his wide head to better regard his distant descendant, restrained a sigh. She lacked scales, lacked fangs and venom, and many of the other things that self-respecting snakes had which made them so beautiful. This human did have a vast mystical potential though, and was probably born a few centuries late. The only physical trait he had ever picked out that might be a sign of the reptilian blood that also ran in her veins, was the diamond pattern in her eyes that resembled his fine diamond-back. Still, she was of his blood, his ugly but beautiful grandchild.\n\n\"Sometimes, one must carry the warning themselves to make an intruder realize.\"\n\n\"You are right Grandfather, of course.\"\n\nRaging Tornado stood up from her own rock, carefully staying away from Snake's personal space. She did not know why her tribal helpers and ancestors were able to reach her from so far away, but there were many things that she did not know yet. Perhaps some of her questions would be answered when facing the intruder. The woman stormed down the river, her dark fringes racing with the breeze. As she left her haven, a sudden wave of delicious summer heat tore through the forest and thawed the once congealing waters. However, her rage had elevated her own temperature so much that it passed her by completely unnoticed as she raced the river and wind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "A New Guardian\n\nAfternoon rolled lazily by as her gentle beams slanted down through the trees in reverential and passionate forays into the future. In due course, Dusk came to the volcano's forest spreading behind her the shawl of Night that she was never without. BlowingWind had alternated singing and dancing to the fire's crackling beat with praying and listening to the speech of the forest.\n\nAt first, she had come close to the cave entrance with her spiraling circles of life and supplication. Dipping and whirling outstretched arms like those great wings of her father's namesake, BlowingWind had brought to Japan and to a spying dragon the energies of Arizona deserts and Shastayama's winter blizzards. All that she had ever been and was now had been laid bare to the inquisitive eyes of the volcano Kami as he peered into her soul, but after awhile she grew conscious of the furtive peeks into her being. A warning tingle had set itself about her belly, bringing her teeth to sharp edges every time she passed near the tempting entrance, as if someone in the cave had been poised to snatch her away into the dangerous subterranean world below. So it was that the young Shaman had gradually and unobtrusively moved further away from the beckoning gateway into the mysterious lair, tightening her circles around the familiar safety of the likewise dancing flames.\n\nAi could feel the building pressure within the inner currents of her current protector, Ryu's greed to possess for himself such an exotic treasure for his perennial delight. She desperately whispered warnings of the curse upon her family, afraid of the doom of another man through her very act of being. In vain were all her efforts, the whispered warnings falling on ears paying attention only to the songs of the human he watched outside and the music of her rhythmic body, the faint taste of the forbidden having already ripened the interests and possessiveness of the magma dragon.\n\nIndeed then it had been wise for the little thing to back away. Ryu had more than taken a shining to the turquoise soul seated so very tenuously in her mounting of flesh and blood. The glints of pain and longing desire within her being awaked his long-buried desires to hoard and brood. Not all dragons were completely good, if any, and Ryu was certainly no exception.\n\nPatiently the dragon waited for an opening to spirit her away for his own, or to enter her body as a mist and lodge in some choice cavity of her body, but not one decent chance presented itself to him again, now that his mind was set. She was too focused on calling to her mysterious guardian that she was seeking so desperately, even though she refused to call out its name and it was pointedly refusing to answer her. The dragon seethed with his choler against the spirit who had abandoned the tender morsel, as even though he had had no specific worshippers of his own, he could not fathom the thought of leaving such a devout follower to the mercies of the world. Even though he would have no quarrels over territory, it was clear to him that he would be a better guardian than this \"He who calms the tempest within my heart.\"\n\nFinally, Night came to the forest, and this visit gave him new shadows to lurk in, so that he could get closer to his prey. Humans tended to react unpredictably when surprised, and out in this forest was no place for her to take off in a headlong flight to save herself from him. Rocks and ledges were plentiful within this twisted landscape, and a human's body was far more fragile than even the most delicate flower Kami. As he watched, the woman finally collapsed into the eager embrace of the loam, mechanically rolling herself into the thin blanket that had been waiting patiently there to hold her in its tender embrace. While BlowingWind hoped to receive at least a dream from Obsidian, Ryu stewed over not being able to use the ground to caress the temporary abode of his shining flame.\n\nBlowingWind's dreams contained no messages from her departed love. Only ancient voices of her ancestors greeted her with the croaking of elderly oaks in a high wind to chant new songs to her, songs that worked into her memory like worms into the earth. The tribal elders of times long gone had been teaching her the old songs during her sleeps for a while now. Their faces were always unseen because of the wild forest that she was lost in, but she knew that they were hidden somewhere in one of the high-mountain arroyos. She wanted to follow the voices and learn more of the old ways of her ancestors, eager to have some kind of strong connection to at least one side of her heritage. However fear of the beasts roaming in her mind kept BlowingWind hidden in the cave that was her stronghold in this dream forest of hers.\n\nAs the human maiden slept and learned from the ancestors of her body and soul, Ryu crept close to sit beside the woman and the warm fire. Even sitting so close to a slumbering human eased his crushing loneliness, and her body was a symphony to ears long deprived of the music of living material beings. The slow and steady pound of her heart accompanied the electric zing of her nerves and synapses, while her gentle breath was sweeter than any flute note. Even her smell, curiously like what had been haunting him of late, was something to savor before it faded away with the eventual death of this mortal. It always awed him how delicate and temporary the human and animal kingdoms were, so much more fleeting than the mountains and rocks that his particular breed of dragon were. An hour he managed to pass in what could become a favorite past time, but his peace was shattered by the snapping of a twig just out of the ring of the fire's crackling influence.\n\nThe heavy and acrid scent of Tengu drifted to the brooding dragon, offending his nose like the stink of garbage left too long unburied. He had become so engrossed in his entertainment that he had not paid attention to the encroaching presence of the Tengu, but his instincts were now unfettered now that her spell over him was temporarily broken. Turning and rising away from the maiden, Ryu began an advance towards the invader in defense of his morsel, but a misplaced foot snapped a larger stick. Though small, the sound resounded through his ears like the echoes of gunshots that had once thrown even the High Plain of Heaven into an uproar when the Western guns had entered into the Sengoku Jidai, or Warring States Period. To him, it was even louder than the fateful atomic bombing that had taken the lives of so many Kami and Ningen in Tokyo and Nagasaki.\n\nCougar eyes snapped open at the sound, BlowingWind responding to the danger hanging in the air like mist and also to the noisy misstep of her new and as of yet unknown protector. Throwing back the blanket, the shaman flew at the \"invader,\" intent on driving off whatever creature was daring to interfere with her search. Whoever it was had his back to her, and a well placed fist bruised a kidney while her weight and inertia drove him to the ground. Ryu glanced back in surprise at the unexpected contact, shocked that a human who had been so fast asleep was now attacking him. Although he was quite capable of defending himself, Ryu was leery of warding her off, afraid to hurt his new treasure.\n\nIt was not the first time that he had tasted dirt, nor the most embarrassing, but it was enough to annoy him. Although part of him did want to cherish and protect this child-warrior, a deeper and ingrained voice gained from the long respect that his kind had enjoyed, wished to sear away her body so that she would never repeat this mistake again. Doing so would also have the added benefit of freeing her spirit from its flesh to appreciate more fully, even if he did lose the entertainment of her material shape.\n\nFortunately for the human, BlowingWind was able to deflect his ire. While the ground softened at the impact of the earth spirit below her, BlowingWind glimpsed his face. Her normally pale flesh lightened all the more, and trembling hands gently turned him over to get a better view, although as nervous as the land when the earthquake Kami danced or the plains when Thunderbird came visiting.\n\n\"Obsidian?\"\n\nYellowed eyes mottled with the browns of confusion as they stared into the chocolate eyes whose shock matched her own. So similar to the visage she knew so well, the minor differences now leapt out at her. His skin was paler than Obsidian's had been, as if he had not seen the sun very often within the past few years. Where luxuriant rivers of deepest currents would have been plaited into streams, short and overlapping spikes of hair wildly waved at her. Pulling back and to the side, BlowingWind hugged herself in disappointment as her eyes took in the now rumpled but still expensive fiery silks. Just as quickly as that, the new hope that had been kindled in her eyes was drowned by the waves of despair. As the spirit sat up, the Shaman questioned him.\n\n\"Who are you Spirit? What were you doing sitting beside me?\"\n\n\"I am Take Ryu, Maiden. You seemed lonely when you came to my attention and I thought to provide you with some company. I also live here.\"\n\nSomehow, Ryu could not look into those eyes and admit that he had been waiting for a chance to possess her, nor that he had fallen in love with the way she moved and sang. He could see the thoughts flying through her head as she deciphered what he had just said to her, and then formulated what she would say next.\n\n\"My name is MountainChild BlowingWind.\"\n\n\"It is a pleasure to meet you then MountainChild-san, even if you did greet me by shoving me in the dirt. May I call you BlowingWind, onegai? Your given name suits you so well.\"\n\nA flush crept up BlowingWind's cheeks, painting them a delicate shell pink, despite her best efforts to stamp it down. She tried to raise her plentiful anger to hide it, but the mask would not fit itself to her face underneath his humored smirk and twinkling eyes. Something deep inside her mind whispered of danger, but the voice was buried deep within and too hard to hear, and the play of emotions on the Kami's face was very distracting.\n\nA lock of her cropped hair had fallen over her face during the brief scuffle, and when Ryu's hand swept forward to tuck it away BlowingWind could not stifle her flinch at his touch, leaping several feet further away from the fire. His hand was hot, and her skin had always felt so cold, and touch was not something that she had felt much lately.\n\nFor his part, Ryu had been amused at her embarrassment and unnecessary fear of him. However, as she had just placed herself closer to the Tengu lurking in the forest he was more concerned with luring her back to safety. She was cute in the dust, but that wouldn't last for very long if the Tengu had their way.\n\n\"So, you obviously do not come from around here. Tell me about yourself, and where you come from, and use your native language if you wish.\"\n\nBlowingWind averted her eyes, self conscious of how the warm eyes seemed to note the changes she knew they were going through, and at having attacked a spirit who seemed now to bear her no ill-will. After all, she had attacked from behind, and he had therefore been at a disadvantage. English flowed easily to her lips as she replied to Ryu, wondering just how much she should tell.\n\n\"Father was a Shaman, Mother is a carpenter. I'm sorry I attacked you.\"\n\nRyu's lips curved gently upward, a fair imitation of some benign Buddha. Returning to the more urgent matter though, his eyes were flints as he looked back to where the Tengu had been. Of course, it was no longer where it had been lurking, but hiding elsewhere nearby. The trickster had no doubt merged with one of the cryptomeria trees nearby, waiting for its chance to administer some test or pull some prank. Kitsune would not be far behind. The siren song of her injured and weakened spirit would attract many such undesirable spirits for some time unless she began to heal soon. As long as he was with her, he could keep her safe.\n\n\"It is nothing, and you were right in what you did, I suppose. The forest is not safe for humans, especially after nightfall. Let us repair back to the warmth of the fire.\" He struggled to keep a lofty speech pattern, to impress on her some feeling of wisdom or anything that she might look up to. But he felt that resolve failing quickly.\n\nRising from the earth's embrace, Ryu smoothed his hair, dusted off his robes and rearranged his folds as he took a few steps toward the heat of the fire. BlowingWind had stayed where she was though, staring at the ground. With each experience in this strange country, her hopes of meeting with Obsidian's spirit were raised and then dashed, dwindling away like a candle left to burn. Her gaze had fixed forlornly where Ryu's imprint still was.\n\nRyu paused to look back at the little human, watching her wallow in her sorrow like a boar at a mud-hole, while one eyebrow defied the other to reach mountainous heights somewhere near where his mane masqueraded as hair. He had expected her to follow him to safety, but whatever had happened to her seemed to make it difficult to focus anywhere but within her own mind, making her ambivalent toward life at the best. However, he knew a historian was a far cry from a psychologist, and only now did that realm begin to raise his curiosity. Taking a few steps back to the side of the child-woman, he bent over to whisper gently into her ear.\n\n\"Perhaps I could interest you in a little tea as well as safety, little BlowingWind? I do hope that you have a kettle.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked up; pulled out of morose thoughts long enough to register the Kami's outstretched hand.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Thank you.\"\n\nIn a daze, she took the hand offered, not noticing as he began to wrap threads of his energy around her with the touch. The woman was too wrapped up in memories of underwater currents that had sang so gently in such a manner and of long artistic hands that had pulled her through water and sky. These memories contrasted with the forgotten caverns hoarding ancient jewels and mountain winds now murmuring to her so softly, and with the broad sturdy hands that gently worked their way through the earth's crust. Pointedly not looking at the painful reminder of what progress had stolen from her and her former home, BlowingWind followed after the oddly chivalrous spirit as he shepherded her to the fire.\n\n\"Forgiven. Tell me BlowingWind, what brings you so far from the realm of humanity?\"\n\nHe already knew that she was seeking for her former guardian, but to admit his knowledge would be to admit that he had been spying for hours. Ryu also hoped that he would be able to draw her out and find out more about this shattered woman.\n\n\"I am looking for someone. His voice told me to come to this country, but I have found no other clues. At a shrine I was told to come here, and so I wander these woods looking for him. What are you doing here? Why were you in my camp?\"\n\nThe spirit couldn't help but to smile at the naivet\u00e9 behind the fa\u00e7ade she was trying to build, and at how she also was trying to find out the truth of his own story. Grandly seating them on the log beside the fire, he threw more wood on before answering.\n\n\"As I said before, I live here. You called me out, so I have been investigating you. Why don't you tell me about yourself? I know that you are far from home little one.\"\n\nThe command had been gently put, but it was a command all the same. Long used to getting his way most of the time, it did not surprise him when she complied. Though her eyes stared into the shifting flames of the fire he had been keeping going during his vigil, she seemed grateful to have someone to talk to.\n\n\"Mother came from Ireland, running from Grandmother O'Drake for some reason she doesn't talk about much. In Arizona, she met my Father while he was attending college, even though she didn't go herself. Mother said that a whirlwind chased her into the library that day. Later, I came to be. Dad had majored in politics and law, because he was helping to fight a nuclear power plant that was being built near the Reservation. That project took his life when I was seven.\"\n\nBlowingWind had no idea why she was telling him this, but it felt good to talk about it as her tale unfolded. Maybe one day she would work through the grief. Falling silent for a bit, she thought about her father while Ryu hid his horror at the mention of nuclear anything. The memories of the atomic bombings were still fresh in his mind, and so many that hadn't been lost to the blast became twisted by the radiation poisoning. After a little, her story continued.\n\n\"Father was grooming me to be a Shaman like he was, a Medicine and Spirit Keeper. After he died, the elders had called a council to decide who would take over my training. The Apache survive, but the old ways are dying and being forgotten slowly, or sold for white people curious about 'savage' ways. Mother couldn't stay on the Reservation though, the memories were too fresh, and so we moved. I guess you could say that she ran away from the pain. At any rate, we moved to where Father had always wanted to visit, Medicine Lake and Mount Shasta in Northern California. I think you call it Shastayama, which is what the local Taiko group called it.\n\nRyu nodded encouragingly. They did refer to that mountain as Shastayama or as Shastasan, and he was familiar with the mountain. It was part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, and one year Ryu had the misfortune of attending one of the meetings of the Ring with his father. Caught in the winds of her story like a kite in a storm, BlowingWind continued.\n\n\"Despite that move, I became one anyway. That same year I met Him, the Spirit of Medicine Lake. My first night camping beside the lake, he gifted me with this necklace, and my Smoking Mirror.\"\n\nThere was confusion on her face as she indicated the items and tried to recall the shape in the water. She hadn't ever clearly been able to remember it, but it had to have been a dragon since that was when mother revealed Drake's Curse to her. The image was cloaked by Spider in dust-hardened cobwebs though, and would not come forth. BlowingWind's hand gripped her shell, her eyes finally leaving the fire to lock on the mirror still sitting on her altar.\n\n\"The lake always had a special magic. Eventually I met a boy as passionate about it as I was. It wasn't until recently that he revealed to me who he really was though, after I agreed to be his. My plans had been to attend a local college back there, pursuing a major in engineering with his support. I put even more energy into protesting the geothermal power plant that was being built, since my duties with the snowboarding team were over. I can still see how irritated Mom was when she woke up one sunny morn to find three 'Save Medicine Lake' bumper stickers on her car.\"\n\nWistful breezes fought her amused smirk at the thought of her sticker escapade. As annoyed as Marie had been at stickers on the car, they had stayed. Ryu watched her face with interest, wondering what other pranks she had played in her not-so-distant youth.\n\n\"I take it your mother did not like sticky substances on her car.\"\n\nThe smirk widened into a grin with the speed of a sparrow.\n\n\"No. She thought the idea of car stickers was a 'tacky American practice that no self-respecting Irish woman would implement!' Mom was funny like that; she gave up her Irish citizenship but still lambasted America and her politics constantly.\"\n\nRyu shook his head, not bothering to conceal his own grin. After all, he now knew where she got her swift temper. As she continued though, the smile faded like a dying ember.\n\n\"We were going to have kids some day, like in the old stories. I was even going to move in with him after my high-school graduation. I guess fate had other plans. He wasn't invincible, and turbines apparently can kill spirits while using material forms. I wandered the forest around the lake for a while after I was not allowed to kill myself. A bit later is when he told me to come to Japan. So here I am.\"\n\nRyu's heart broke. The woman before him was obviously here because of a delusion. Unless she had gone down to Yomi, the Land of the Dead, she had no way to know for sure if it was really her former guardian, a trick of her mind, or just a troublesome spirit who had told her that. Besides, not even the Great Ancestor Izanagi had been able to bring his wife and sister Izanami back from Yomi. She was not going to see him again. By her depressed state, it was clear that she was realizing this.\n\n\"This 'He' you refer to was the guardian you have been calling for.\"\n\n\"Yes, he is. To find him, I am supposed to find a guide to take me up the mountain.\"\n\nThe glaciers rose in her eyes again as twin tsunamis of grief and despair tore through her being again. As her hand tightened around the shell necklace, delicate human flesh was sliced by sharp edges, releasing blood filled with the tang of copper and cinnamon. The pain went unnoticed though, although the dragon did not miss the scent. Gently prying her fingers open with one hand Ryu's other turned her chin toward him.\n\n\"I will be your guardian and tutelary, and will guide you up the mountain.\"\n\nThe tears that had been forming stopped at the edge of her eyes, and she could not help looking into those murky pools before her. BlowingWind wanted to look anywhere else, but the Kami's inescapable grip on her face prevented a turn of the head and his gentle gaze froze her in place.\n\n\"You will? Really?\"\n\n\"Honto ne, really.\"\n\n\"When do we start? Can we go now?\"\n\nThe tears continued now, venting and welling up from some underground spring to release more of the pain that she had been feeling but denying. Ryu had always hated the scent of tears, and the sight of her silent crying caused a guilt to burn within his hardened rock that served as a heart unlike any he had ever felt stir before.\n\n\"Tomorrow, in the morning. For now, rest BlowingWind.\"\n\nThe young American closed her eyes, too tired to lie down for sleep. As her consciousness fled for the land of sleep her body slumped against him, falling against a chest unused to contact with a warm body. Fevered flesh burned into him even through the silks, and he wondered if she was supposed to be that hot.\n\nRyu could not remember any of his history students at the University radiating such heat when they turned in assignments, and he began to regret his promise to take her to the summit. He had given his word though, so he could only keep it and the hurry her to a clinic afterwards. When he had a chance, he would need to go to one of the numerous Kami libraries hidden throughout the country to learn the proper care of a human. He didn't want her to end up like the deer he had taken in as a pet in his distant puphood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The Storm Contained Within\n\n\"Come on, I don't think you want to sleep on my chest so soon. Here you are.\"\n\nThe short remainder of the night flew by far too quickly for Ryu, who had just bedded down his new human in the thin blanket that pretended to be a proper covering against the night. As the minutes marched into hours, those very same hours painted a distinct rose flush on the shaman's face. Likewise, the waters of her body thought to escape her earthy caverns, erupting to her surface to stream away into the earth below, stealing valuable salts and minerals in the process. On the other hand, it was also passing too slowly for him. Once moving onto one of the major trails up the mountain, he could easily merge the both of them back into the human world.\n\n\"I need to either return you to your plane or bond you to me soon. By your body's reactions this is probably not your first time in the spiritual dimension. What are you running from? A spiritual sickness is far worse than any physical malady, and far more difficult to cure, threatening the very present and future of the shining gem of your soul.\"\n\nHer face creased in the firelight after he voiced his thoughts, but she did not wake up. The malady only slowly increased, and despite her being at rest he could hear the increased labor of her heart.\n\n\"Perfect, I finally have my own human, and I have to choose a sick one.\"\n\nMany similar thoughts had run through his mind as BlowingWind slept before him. Seeing her shivering beneath the blanket had prompted him to shift into his dragon form twice now, each time coiling around her the way a snake would with his prey. Currently he still held both the form and the maiden, but her heart rate was picking up again, telling him she was slowly swimming into consciousness. It was time to release her and to take up the pretense of a human shape once more. As Amaterasu climbed into the sky, Ryu left his human to prepare a small meal.\n\n\"Don't you have any food or things to cook with? Your body is part of you. You should take care of it. You don't want to mummify yourself like those tree priests.\"\n\nGiving up on the idea of tea and boiled rice, Ryu began to gather berries and nuts for the two of them. It was meager compared to the bacon that he had grown used to during his professorship, but it was far healthier and quite readily available. Ryu had taken off his outer haori to use as a basket of sorts, leaving only his yellow under kimono to cover the flesh above his waist. Once he had gathered enough, he was unperturbed when he heard the rustles of his human rising.\n\nHer soft voice was hoarse with a need for water and from the morning. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I should think it obvious BlowingWind. I happen to be getting our breakfast. It isn't very wise to climb on an empty stomach, even for a spirit. I hope you like berries and pine nuts.\"\n\nRyu settled down beside the American, spreading out their fare with as much flourish as if it had been the shinsen offerings before one of the major Kami. In his mind, this meal would be closer to the naorai, or ritualized sharing of the shinsen after the Kami had dined, in order to ease the transition back to the human world. Happily he gave his thanks for the meal, his smile a bright beam in the sun's early morning glow as he began to eat. The human seemed to become a fresh shoot of bamboo though, so green did her face become as she eyed what had seemed so appealing just the day before.\n\n\"No thanks. I'm not hungry.\"\n\nBlowingWind went to drink a little from the stream, settling her stomach and easing a parched throat.\n\nThat she was not hungry did not surprise the guardian in the least bit, but he was comforted by the thought that he had at least tried. Perhaps he would be able to interest her in eating something later. Having eaten his fill, Ryu carefully tied up his haori in such a way as to easily sling it around one shoulder. Extending a hand to provide a firm foundation for the unsteady maiden below him, Ryu summoned his new Miko to her first task.\n\n\"Come then, and we shall break camp.\"\n\nAn unexplainable force made her grip his hand, her muscles responding to the spirit's command. BlowingWind couldn't understand why her body was responding, and it frightened her in all actuality as it had only ever obeyed her own demands or Obsidian's gentle suggestions. Still, she did not fight it at this time, as they did need to get moving so that she could finish her quest.\n\nThe shaman moved about quickly, reverently packing her things and uttering prayers of gratefulness for her short stay, watching herself as if she had been watching a movie shot in the first person point of view. Before long, her few possessions had been stored away, and she followed after the sure-footed form before her.\n\nForest paths slowly gave way to winding rocky slides posing as trails, while the woman and her self-appointed guardian rose ever higher. Many times Ryu stopped to wait for her, or to help her past the more difficult areas. However, they had a long way to go before they would break into one of the main trails, and the smell of trailing Tengu burned the dragon's nose. His suspicious eyes wandered all around, and on more than one occasion his warning growl frightened the very human he was protecting. The two Tengu withdrew each time though, and Ryu saw it as a small price to pay in order to win their way unharassed to the humans' paths.\n\nBlowingWind slipped backward in time while following the otherwise amiable spirit, remembering painfully a hike that she had taken up Mount Lassen one summer with her few friends that had included Obsidian. Thusly occupied with memories, it was no surprise that while walking one foot took a misstep, and only Ryu's quick reflexes saved the little human from a very nasty spill off of the rock outcropping they had been navigating.\n\n\"Be more careful Little One. The mountain itself likes to trip the unwary, and my elder brother is only granting you safe passage over his back because I spoke for you.\"\n\n\"The mountain is your brother?\"\n\nRyu's eyebrows could not contain his surprise, floating high up on great currents as he restrained his laughter. He continued supporting her, her head cocked like a little child as she processed his words. Wherever her mind had been, obviously it hadn't quite returned completely. Under their feet, the ancient lava flow was also laughing, its very atoms vibrating with amusement.\n\n\"No BlowingWind, the mountain is not my brother. The old lava flow we are navigating is.\"\n\n\"Oh. When did you speak for me? I didn't hear you say anything.\"\n\nShe was centered in her body again, so Ryu could safely let her out of his arms once more. He retained hold of her hand though, for the rock was slick due to the fine sand that had been blown over it, and the crow-stink had drawn closer again. Still, having a companion to speak to soothed him.\n\n\"Speech is not always through the mouth BlowingWind. I could teach you later if you wish.\"\n\nThe warm smile gracing his face did little to warm her heart, instead it was like he had taken daggers of ice and hollowed out her chest. It was strange to see the face of the one she loved on another, and the crashing tsunami of grief threatened to drown her once again. Ryu sensed the sudden change in her mood and saw clearly the change in her eyes.\n\n\"He said something very similar once.\"\n\n\"BlowingWind, a Kami always keeps his promises, even if one is not aware of the reason someone else seems to fill it. Stay here with me, don't go where the wave is taking you.\"\n\n\"Ryu, nothing is taking me anywhere, except my feet up this mountain and closer to the Star Path. Stop trying to read my mind.\"\n\nBlowingWind let go of Ryu's hand, picking her own way up the slope. The red flush of embarrassment had unmistakably opened her petals across the human's face though. What was worse, BlowingWind's doubt had begun to grow even more. Ryu watched his human scramble ever closer to the main trail, listening to her heartbeat and his brother's subsonic chuckles.\n\nBefore long, his brother contained his amusement enough to speak in his mind. The voice was deep and stark, fitting for the flow.\n\n\"Ryu, our Otou-sama will not be pleased to find you are courting a human, especially one who has become occupied by thoughts of death.\"\n\n\"Aniki, I'm not courting her. She was alone and unprotected. How could I let a lone woman suffer the 'tender mercy' of the Tengu Tribe?\"\n\n\"But she is still occupied by death, and you have already begun a binding spell on her. I'm sure that you are aware that her spirit is trying to lose her physical body little brother.\"\n\n\"What am I supposed to do about that Aniki? She's looking for her guardian, or so she says, but the weak protective energy around her makes me wonder if he even still exists.\"\n\n\"You are too soft hearted Nii-san. Let the girl go, she will only cause you pain. That is all any human can or will do to us.\"\n\n\"Elder Brother, how can you say that? The stories below still tell of you as one of the greatest champions in our Clan for the Ningen. What has happened since your body was released to here?\"\n\n\"You will see in your own time Little Brother. Until then, you should worry about bringing life-giving minerals to the soil when you also erupt properly. Stop chasing after the perfect female, for she does not exist. Find a good ryu-onna who will stay with you.\"\n\nAlthough Ryu had continued after his human during his psychic conversation with the very ancient lava flow, BlowingWind's embarrassment had lent extra speed to her ascent. One small step was all it took to turn that momentum against her and a small spray of rock showered down on the hapless dragon, bringing with it a now very flummoxed woman. Once more his inherited reflexes came into play, and once more blue skies were locked with dark earth. Just as suddenly, the blue skies turned to the gray-green of approaching monsoons, and Ryu was flung to the ground.\n\nShe had watched quietly for hours now, perched just behind BlowingWind's eyes and just below the skin, waiting. RagingTornado had tried to warn BlowingWind of possible ulterior motives that the spirit could be possessed of, but their long mourning and state of soul loss was dampening once strong gifts of insight. Something had rankled her about Ryu as soon as she had seen the Kami. It was not the obvious reason of his having stolen Obsidian's face, or the rumors that he had stolen one of her souls. No, it was something far worse than that, even though she had no idea what it was.\n\nPerhaps it was his eyes that bothered her the most, how BlowingWind calmed mysteriously every time she locked with his dark orbs. To tell the truth, even she felt their hypnotic power, and it infuriated her that he could even dare to presume such a thing as using hypnosis. If he were truly capable of doing so, there was no telling what he might force her to do later. And so, for her own safety, RagingTornado watched for a chance to strike.\n\nAt last, her chance came as BlowingWind tripped yet again, lost between the past and the present. The rocks skittered down the slope before her, shatteringly announcing BlowingWind's failure to stay within one world yet again. Although RagingTornado would have welcomed death before, there were things yet unfinished and cracking her head open on the rocks would only serve to trap her here with no mourners, and no way to move on. BlowingWind fought for purchase on the slippery slope while RagingTornado waited for her chance to take control of the situation.\n\nBlowingWind's eyes locked with those of their captor, stunned by the fall and by the resemblance that was now never far from her mind. It was the chance the shadow had been waiting for, and RagingTornado threw BlowingWind into the psychic forest of their collective mind while wresting control. The rage and sorrow of months spent in various states of dissociation gave RagingTornado strength, and swift hands hurled what she thought of as \"The Impostor\" to the ground.\n\n\"Impostor! Kidnapper! Thief! Give back my soul!\"\n\nA calmer and saner version of herself could be heard inside of her head, telling her to stay calm. RagingTornado was not one to listen though, preferring instead to rage and scream at the very confused spirit lying in the dust at her feet. Her desperation to be whole once more had called out to the wind spirits of the area, and her kindred spirits howled around her as forest fires burned in her eyes.\n\n\"Miss MountainChild, what in the five ancient lands are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Oh no, that innocent act may work with my Light, but it doesn't fool me. Give me back Love and Wisdom. I don't know how you got them, but give them back.\"\n\nRyu's faced hardened, as stern as the solidified flow that was now his brother below his back. He was not impersonating anyone, nor was he a kidnapper. Like many other dragons he could not claim to have never stolen, but he definitely had no desire to steal anyone's soul. Loosing his affable manner and his patience, one leg snaked out to knock the audacious human back into her proper place.\n\nThe woman acted as he expected, but tooth and nail were no match for his weight and training. She had no right to treat him thusly, and if this was how she had been allowed to act before then her lesson in humility and respect was sorely overdue. Ryu could feel his own dark side striving for release, but to allow his violent nature to be exposed would mean the end of the little one now snarling her hatred and other incoherent drivel below him. Other, more powerful Kami would have thought nothing of ending her life here and now; however, she was the first Miko he had ever claimed. She would pay for her disrespect later, but not with her life.\n\n\"Be still human.\"\n\nHis magic called out to the cells and atoms of her body, which all at one time or another had been part of the earth. His weight still pinned her to his brother's back, waiting for every molecule of her shell to come under his control and possession. Her spirit was strong, fighting with tooth, claw, and spear, but he was far older and far more powerful on all levels. At last, she lay still below him, although the fire in her eyes had grown into a true inferno. Sighing, and restraining a strange urge to eat the maiden, Ryu sat back on his heels at her side.\n\n\"Explain to me what you are speaking of, slowly. The process of claiming you as my priestess is not complete; therefore I can not yet read your mind well enough to understand your tangled thoughts BlowingWind.\"\n\nAlmost afraid of what would spew out of her mouth, the dragon spirit yielded control of her mouth and vocal chords. One thing was certain; he knew he was going to need a great quantity of hot sake after this to appease his darker nature.\n\n\"BlowingWind is a weak and broken woman living in a fairytale. We will never find him again. He has left us. I am the Tornado that all Winds become when fueled by repressed emotions and given only the meager substance of a life lived in shadows. A tortured soul provided the last stress that we needed, and so we broke apart. Four must work as one, but when one or two are gone, the sickness comes and all weaken.\"\n\nHer eyes continued to smolder, and Ryu thought that surely her fury would have incinerated an Oni quite easily. However, only part of his many questions had been answered. If he kept her talking, perhaps her fury would calm.\n\n\"Four of you? Four souls like in the Buddhist and Aikido theories? And you believe for some reason that I have two of your four?\"\n\n\"I do not know about Buddhism or Aikido thoughts on souls. All I have is my own experience within my spirit. There are four major parts of me. Two are missing and unaccounted for. I have received reports from the creatures that you definitely possess Love. If you hold her, then surely Wisdom is not far away.\"\n\n\"Love?\"\n\nAs he said the name, there was a stirring where the little soul had snuggled in for sleep, a quiet stretch only confusing the poor dragon more. Shaking it off as perhaps just her reaction to her name, Ryu spoke again.\n\n\"If she is a pink orb of rose quartz, then I have been caring for her, although it is a mystery to me as to how she has come into my possession. As to Wisdom, it has been said that completing a Shrine Circuit can bring that.\"\n\n\"Then give Love back to me.\"\n\n\"I don't know how. I can only wait for her to come out on her own, but I will try. However, in return you must stop knocking me to the earth. The ground softens to cushion me, but it still hurts and is not very dignified.\"\n\nA short silence fell between the two like a lead curtain, and below the pair an ancient rock dragon coiled, waiting for the drama to end so he could go back to sleep. After a while, RagingTornado grudgingly answered.\n\n\"I can't promise that. I have a bad temper, but I will try to stop knocking you in the dust. I can't speak for the others.\"\n\n\"I guess that's good enough then. I can see that we are both going to have to work hard at this relationship though.\"\n\nA wry smile flickered across the Kami's face as he carefully placed his hand on the human's chest, hoping that the shy little orb would transfer easily into her proper body. The elder Take would have rolled his eyes quite gladly if he had kept his mobile body, disgusted at his little brother's knack for getting himself into trouble. However, the little orb known as Love was not ready to leave her host yet and stubbornly refused to move.\n\nThe pair could have stayed like that for hours, trying to convince Love to return to her proper place, but a low chortle drew their attention away from the task. RagingTornado let her control go in surprise, and BlowingWind snatched back her body from her Dark Side.\n\n\"Go away Coyote, I got myself into a fine mess already. I don't need another.\"\n\nRyu let go his control of BlowingWind's body, chagrined that he had been so wrapped up in what he was doing not to notice the presence of another spirit. Then again, he was now in his brother's territory, and apparently the elder dragon had not been concerned enough to give Ryu any warning. The tawny canine laughed again, retorting before scampering back down to the forest below.\n\n\"Fine, I'll let you figure it out on your own then. I was going to be nice and tell you the easy way.\"\n\nThe dragon and human regained their feet, Ryu frowning after the strange Coyote.\n\n\"Should we not have let him teach us the easy way to put her back?\"\n\nBlowingWind shook her head, her eyes now a faded end-of-summer blue. Long experience had taught her that Coyote's plans were not always well thought out and could only bring trouble.\n\n\"Coyote's job is to be the fool and to get others into trouble. He is a great teacher, but his methods are questionable. Come on, let's go.\"\n\nRyu shook his head again, confused at her sudden mood change yet again, and it occurred to him he had done more head shaking in the past day than he had in the past year. When they were done, she was going to see a doctor and a psychologist for her split personality problem. Once BlowingWind had gotten about fifteen feet away from him, she called back.\n\n\"We'd better not get too far apart. He might try to convince you that he was me. He is a very good shape-shifter. Trust me on that.\"\n\nSomehow, Ryu didn't want to know how she knew that, or to fall prey to such a joke."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The Ryu Carries a Treasure\n\nRyu cheered inwardly when he finally saw the people streaming up and down the main path. Although his human had started with a quick pace, it had not lasted long. Loose rock had slowed her down, and the dust of their endeavor covered them both like a pale cloak. Although he was of the earth, Ryu hated being dirty, and a visit to an onsen was now also on his list of things to do. He was willing to bet a considerable amount of gold that Miss Foul Temper would fancy a trip to a bathhouse as well. Kamikushi knew that her sweat certainly smelled ripe enough.\n\n\"Great Ryu, you really did find it! I was beginning to wonder if you were going to climb to the summit without the aid of a humanly navigable path.\"\n\nHer sunburned face cracked into a smile below the sun, her leather dress heavy with her sweat. Dust had afforded a little protection for her skin, but the thin film was tracked with little rivulets of sweat tracing their way down her face and neck. BlowingWind carefully limped upward, favoring her left ankle and wincing almost unnoticeably every time she had to put her full weight on it.\n\nJudging by the grin now lighting BlowingWind's face with relief the way a spotlight does the poor soul singing the national anthem at any great sports undertaking, she was even more glad to see a trail than he was.\n\nLooking at the poor thing lagging behind him now, Ryu almost felt bad for leading her around the mountain and to the crater halfway up Fujisan before connecting with the trail. However, this trail was the easiest, and the border was thinner here than where they had been earlier. Ob the healer may have been able to adjust his frequency to meet with the human world, but it was not something that Ryu had mastered. No, he was still stuck using the gates.\n\n\"We are halfway to the summit now. We should be able to reenter your world anytime.\"\n\n\"Wow, what a great crater. Willow would kill to get to see this.\"\n\nBlowingWind limped closer to Ryu, who had the best view. During their climb to this point, Clumsiness had severely beaten the poor girl for her impatience, and the ultimate result was a twisted ankle. The magma spirit had offered to carry her numerous times before, but BlowingWind's pride just would not allow it. As the young shaman admired the gaping and blasted expanse and unthinkingly used his arm to brace herself, the dragon allowed a quizzical look to dance over his expressive face.\n\n\"Willow?\"\n\n\"A girl I used to compete against. I boarded, she skied, we were in opposing schools, but when you see each other several times a week... well. Willow really loved volcanoes, but hardly anybody really got to know what she looked like because she almost never took her mask off outside. She's starting college this year too.\"\n\n\"Ah. You must miss your friends.\"\n\nBlowingWind turned eastward, gazing out to where she knew the sea and sky shared embraces and beyond to where her home once was. Mother would be up to her elbows in home contracts, and Summerrose probably would be soon starting her business management classes on the days that she wasn't at the bank.\n\nNow would have been the time to visit Medicine Lake and Glass Mountain. That was probably where her shaman's mirror had come from, exchanged for who knew what Lake commodity had been needed by that spirit so long ago. BlowingWind almost began to follow the train of thought further, but a subtle brush of feathers at her neck pulled those thoughts away. Her father's spirit was near, and reflex caused her to reach into a pouch of cornmeal that was currently around her neck, sprinkling a pinch in thanks to her father and in respect for the forces that had formed this gateway into the earth's hot core.\n\nShe cleared her throat and tore her thoughts from her friends and mother.\n\n\"Yes, but I must continue along my path. Perhaps I will see them again, but more likely not.\"\n\nRyu nodded, understanding the sentiment well. He had seen many creatures rise and fall, some of which he had been rather attached to. As he looked around, he scanned for any humans that might see them materialize into their world or other spirits who would make trouble. Most specifically, he was looking for the Tengu, who had not been in the range of his nose for some time now.\n\n\"The crows are gone, for now. They are probably scheming something though. They always are. Let's get moving.\"\n\n\"Ryu, you sound as paranoid about Tengu as I do about coyotes. But since one nearly fed me to an aggravated dragon I'll agree with you.\"\n\nThe duo left the lower crater behind, crossing effortlessly and unnoticed between the realms of the spirits and of man. Ryu strode easily onward, slowing his pace for the pained gait of the human who was now quite glad of the first Tengu's gift to her.\n\n\"An aggravated dragon? Who else have you been baiting?\"\n\nHer harsh eye nearly sliced Ryu in two with all the surgical precision of worked obsidian, so great was her severe unamusement. Ryu's detached joviality had been wearing thin for her over the past few hours, and he had begun to remind her somewhat of Coyote or Raven.\n\n\"The Tengu tried to drown me first, after a different one chased me through the woods. Creator only knows what I did to piss them off.\"\n\n\"Maybe they just could tell you would be easy to bother. Some of them like to torture people who are easily annoyed. I can't blame them for that; I like to be rather bothersome myself.\"\n\n\"I've noticed. You definitely are not what I expected.\"\n\n\"What? You expected all the spirits here to be old and overly dignified like what some people think is in the Nihongi or Kojiki? If you really read it carefully, then you'll see the Kami mentioned are far less dignified than what many people think, and more human than you might think. Perhaps you thought that your guide would be wrinkly with a long grey beard, or just a mist? Most of us don't live in one form that long these days, or find the elderly do not get as much respect as they once did.\"\n\nImpatient for the trek to be over, Ryu gently fended off BlowingWind's less than feeble attempts to ward him off, ultimately perching her upon his back where she could continue to pummel his head until she felt her dignity had been sufficiently avenged.\n\nHer outraged squawks attracted the attention of climbing tourists that they had somehow managed to mingle with, as well as a few university students on a geological field trip. However, the attention was only passing, for Ryu's deep laughter at the peeved woman on his shoulders only made them look like a young couple out on a date.\n\nAt last, her urgent and vociferous demands to be put down ceased ringing off of rocks and faded to more approximate the deep grumbling of the earth after a tremor.\n\n\"You wanted someone to take you up the mountain, and your limping was only slowing us down. Besides, I get to laugh at you making a fool of yourself.\"\n\nAlthough she was rather glad to be off of her foot, it was not exactly something she really wanted to say to him, especially after how vigorously she had protested his carrying her. In order to prevent herself from falling off and making a further fool of herself, she had gripped him quite tightly with her thighs, a most undignified position for the modest woman. As her doeskins happened to be a dress it did not make her happy that his very hot hands could be felt where the leather had ridden up in her struggles.\n\n\"I can walk, Ryu.\"\n\n\"I would rather carry you though. At your pace, we'll miss both the sunset and tomorrow's sunrise. I'm sure you will want to stay for that. I hope you don't mind sleeping on a shelf if we can manage to get space in one of the inns.\"\n\n\"I think I would have rather taken my chances with the homicidal Tengu.\"\n\n\"I could always take you back down, and let them challenge me for you.\"\n\n\"That's quite alright.\"\n\nRyu looked up at her, looking into her frowning face with a sparkle of mischief.\n\n\"Good then, although I could have used the fight. I can't leave you alone to go roll in the clouds or spar with a storm ryu right now. Anybody could come along and take you from me if I am not here to defend you.\"\n\n\"You are going to let me have privacy for personal needs, right?\"\n\n\"Of course. Do I seem like a barbarian to you?\"\n\nLooking back to the trail he was walking on, Ryu frowned at the thought of letting her have any time to herself. After all, he had claimed her as his own property, and being near the girl at least served to take some of the edge off, but something was going to have to happen soon.\n\nHe liked the way she felt on his back, how she was lighter than she looked, as if she had a delicate bird's skeleton. Her scent curled around him like a blanket, and the more he smelled her spice the more possessive he became. BlowingWind's personality really needed adjustment, but then again she was spiritually ill and it was spreading into her other etheric bodies. Ryu was willing to wager that she was truly sweet underneath the exterior that reminded him of the cacti that he had seen in Tokyo University's Horticultural Museum one year.\n\nThankfully, his steady pace quickly lulled the tired woman into a light doze, and so he let her slip a little further down his back to let a petal-soft cheek rest gently upon his broad shoulder. A warm presence settled over the dragon-man as he carried his charge up the sacred mountain, the sun goddess bestowing her blessings on the descendant of her troublesome brother.\n\n\"Thank you Amaterasu-o-kami-sama. Kami only knows I am going to need all the blessings that I can get when and if Father discovers this adoption. After all, Fujiyama-sama has killed and eaten offspring older than me before.\"\n\nA frown marred the young volcano Kami's face, darkening it so that his expression was nearly as dark as the deepest cavern under his control. Was taking the girl as his own just another risky way of rebelling against his father, and the strict tenets he had been crushed under for nearly his entire existence? Why would fate have brought the two of them together, and how was it that part of her soul was now stubbornly lodged and hiding somewhere in his body? Why had her scent plagued him for months before they met?\n\n\"And just why in all of Nippon am I laughing at your exceedingly bad temper and finding it cute? Bah!\"\n\nThe woman did not answer Ryu's external musing, her sweet breath instead tickling the hairs on his neck that were what was left of his mane and scale in this smaller, illusory form. Amaterasu finally dipped below the horizon, painting resplendent imperial colors of crimson, gold, and indigo across the clouds as the deliberating dragon finally reached the summit of the towering entity that was Fujisan.\n\n\"BlowingWind, wake up. We're here.\"\n\nWeary eyes cracked open as a low moan escaped, cut off as a gasp rushed into her lungs at the sheer beauty of the land spread out below her feet. The awe of the moment caused her to forget all pain, embarrassment and exasperation, leaving only child-like wonder splashed across her face like watercolors on fine silk.\n\n\"Oh Ryu, it's beautiful. Thank you.\"\n\nThe chi flowed through her body a little faster then, and the notes of her personal harmonic rang a little truer in the ears of the spirit. This was why he had taken the woman for his own, this glimpse of an exotic child hidden behind walls of fire only extinguished by the waters of the earth, sea, and sky. A gust of wind drew his attention away from the one he would cultivate for his own Miko, a tawny feather fluttering instead where the shape of a man melded into that of a hawk to rush through him and then away.\n\n\"Do you want to pay your respects before we find you a place to stay? Many visitors don't anymore, but it would be wise for you to.\"\n\n\"There is so much up here, like a town. It will be hard to find a properly private place.\"\n\nRyu shook his head at the little human, his hair rustling against the tip of her nose.\n\n\"You can do it from where you are if you wish, or we can repair to a quiet mini-shrine that I know, if this is still too public for you.\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nRyu turned off the main path, heading for a barren outcrop of rock far to the side that it seemed few people frequented. BlowingWind clung to her guardian spirit, eyes wide as she concentrated on not falling off, even though she knew he was not going to drop her. As he said he would, Ryu had taken BlowingWind to a secluded mini-shrine, hidden at the base of the forbidding outcrop near the nearly sheer drop. The small pile of rocks was an unobtrusive marker, and exposed as it was to the wind it was one of the less frequented of the many shrines upon the summit, and one of his favorites.\n\nIt had an added benefit as well. While the human was occupied, he had a chance to send a part of himself to secure safe and adequate lodgings for the night.\n\nThe high traffic of pilgrims and tourists though the area had produced both psychic and physical offal to litter the holy ground, to his great disappointment. A special task force had been created to deal with the physical refuse, but the psychic soot caking the more usual lodgings of the seventh and eighth stations had rendered them highly unsuitable for his purposes. His charge was spiritually weakened from disowning parts of herself, and he did not want to reveal himself as what he was to normal humans by warding off hungry and lonely Youkai created from junk all night long.\n\nAs what passed for the physical part of Take Ryu stood guard over the human stumbling through her respects in a language that she understood better than she spoke, a shimmer of heat wafted toward an old gray torii, the gateway into the upper Sengen shrine at the summit. The old and frayed shimenawa and shide had been replaced with a brand new rice straw rope twisted together with the sacred paper streamers for the New Year much earlier on. It was there beneath this ritual festoon that a familiar figure had come out of her retirement to greet the young spirit.\n\nAs formless now as he currently was, Lady Fuji gracefully accepted the other spirit's reverence. Without words, Ryu communicated with the former head of the mountain his needs concerning both himself and the young woman he had claimed. With amusement, she indicated by the flickers of a secret fire that he was to lead the human to her. As far as Ryu was concerned, that did nothing to procure room and board, but perhaps the goddess knew of a way to help that required the human's presence.\n\nRyu followed orders, swiftly flying back to Take, or his other half, who was restraining his curious urge to poke through the knapsack left so enticingly upon loose stones. Merging with himself once more, he was gratified that BlowingWind was still only half-awake and that her masks were set aside.\n\n\"Follow me. There is someplace we must go.\"\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nTottering as precariously as a hatchling towards him, the dragon spirit wondered just when had been the last time that she had set anything to her lips. He knew for certain that she had eaten nothing this morning and the night before. Her careful and unsteady gait gave him cause to believe it had been at least a few days, and her already thin body did not need much more abuse.\n\n\"You are still moving too slow BlowingWind. Here.\"\n\nImpatient still, he scooped the shaman up once more, internally cursing whatever imbecile had given the humans the moronic idea that not eating would bring them closer to the gods. Gravel crunched underfoot as he walked, and the expected sharp crack with her staff never came. Instead, she revealed how tired she was by leaning into him with soft sighs.\n\n\"Sorry Ryu. I don't feel well. I haven't felt this bad in a long time.\"\n\nHer uncharacteristically languid manner sent his worries to new peaks, giving his feet a faster beat as he hurried to do the Lady's bidding.\n\nRelief filled the dragon as he reached the torii, his eyes seeing a great palace behind it reserved for the greater spirits residing here, and only accessible to humans or lower spirits by divine decree. Other humans still moving about at the peak could not see the vast gables sweeping the sky or the golden dragons that were perennially patrolling ancient cypress rafters. Neither could those same humans see the crisply arrayed servant in cloudy silk that waited to bring the dragon and his maiden into the hall, and away from the destructive energies hidden amongst the humans.\n\nIf any human had been watching the pair walk below the torii, they would have been hard pressed to know if the mist now engulfing the mountaintop had swallowed the two, or if they had merely been an illusion from listening too closely to inn-keepers' stories.\n\n\"The girl will need to remove her animal skins before she goes before the mistress.\"\n\n\"Very well, thank you boy. BlowingWind, do you have any other clothes with you?\"\n\nThe mist boy waited patiently as the dragon roused his charge. What else was there that he could do? His mistress wanted to meet the sick creature before him, although he was unclear as to why the lady would send for such an injured thing as this one that wore the skins of others for her barbaric covering.\n\n\"No. I put the feather blanket away with my other things I left in the lower shrine's keeping. I left right after my dance pretty much.\"\n\nThe girl's response was directed to her master, as it should have been; though in the servant's opinion the fledgling priestess needed to be on her own two feet.\n\n\"If your human has no suitable clothing, then kimono will be provided.\"\n\nA female servant, clad in the same pure and supplicatory clouds of white as the boy who had admitted them to the palace, stepped forward from where she had been waiting unobtrusively near the wall. It was only reluctantly that Ryu handed over his newest jewel to her care. Said jewel regained wobbly feet when his hand left her body, but she steadfastly refused to be carried any further.\n\nResolutely, the little human bravely followed her guide away to be changed, and as the scent of cinnamon retreated from him, Ryu could feel once more the rising pressure within his being. Following the boy to be bathed before being admitted before the full presence of Lady Fuji, Ryu hoped that he had done the right thing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Shin's Retreat, The Power of a Bath\n\nCream colored walls held this quiet place in their still arms, while soft light poured from the floating orbs that functioned here as lamps, mingling with her own softly silver glow. The lovely smell of old scrolls and ancient books mingled with oiled wood and the sharpness of crystals well cared for. Here she had hidden when not checking on the juvenile parts of her being that still fought each other for control, Light and Shadow each wishing to deny the other yet craving balance. To check on them, she had also been avoiding the Tengu Tribe and Coyote during her occasional treks. The sun had told her to find shelter on this mountaintop, and so she had come.\n\nA particularly talkative quartz had called to her while she had been pouring over the beautiful ancient script that she could not read. Perhaps one day she would learn, although with the career she hoped to pursue it was doubtful she would have the time. Every once in a great while she had been able to pick out a common character, and that small victory cheered her greatly.\n\nResponding to the quiet pulses of energy, she had picked up the crystal, thrilled at how it unfolded its secrets before her mind's eye with the merest touch. This crystal had not been able to help her learn ancient Japanese, but it had gladly expounded at length on ancient architecture and building methods. She was pulled out of her lesson by the voice of one of the greater Kami's formless servants.\n\n\"Shin-san, Fuji-sama wishes to speak with you.\"\n\n\"Very well, I will be there. Thank you.\"\n\nWisdom, or Shin as these spirits called her in their language of sacred sound and rhythm, gently glided down the halls of the hallowed mansion hidden in a dimension behind the torii of the uppermost Sengen shrine. She loved it here, with the high mountain winds and the reclusive sky spirits. Fuji-sama, who was the same beautiful Lady Fuji who was most well known to humankind as the mistress of the mountain, or as the spirit of the mountain itself, had kindly listened to her story. Moved by her story and the counsel of the sun, Fuji-sama had given her sanctuary as she waited for the other parts of her spirit to find their way to the peak.\n\n\"I wonder why Lady Fuji wishes to talk with me again so soon.\"\n\nThe soaring ceiling and dark rafters did not know, nor would they tell her if they had known. No servant spoke to her as she passed, merely bowing silently. It was perfectly normal for the spirits of the clouds and mists, who were always so silent in her short experience. Their mysterious ways were comforting, and she was always given time to ponder the questions of her soul here. Polished pine was soft beneath her feet, and the ancient building made her want to bring the old designs back into the world. Perhaps she should be an architect instead of an engineer. After all, demand for houses that were gentler to the environment would be growing soon.\n\nThe only thing out of the ordinary, at least in her opinion, was a spirit who had looked somewhat like Obsidian. The male being was paused at the beginning of the male-spirit onsen as if she had been the one to surprise him and distract him from some grave task. Shin could not say what had caused her to look down the intersecting hallway for sure, only that there had been an odd pull. The spirit looked about to say something, but froze.\n\nIt wasn't him. Shin closed her eyes, trying not to let the tears fall.\n\n\"It's all in your head Shin. I'm just seeing things again in my grief. It's just a normal everyday hallucination.\"\n\nMuttering her thoughts beneath bated breath, she bowed a greeting anyway, just in case she was superimposing faces onto existing beings. Politeness taken care of, she continued on her way to the Lady.\n\nBlack lacquered doors slid open at the end of a distant hall, revealing rice paper walls painted with murals of Fujisan in her four seasons of the year. Directly across from the doors on the other side of the room was a dais of white hinoki wood, polished to perfection, where upon green cushions sat the mountain herself.\n\nThe young Wisdom entered demurely, bowing to the retired deity and in awe once more of the beauty. Classic Japanese black hair mingled with the little summer snow that was still left in places on the mountain, which were swept up in elaborate coils that possibly only magic could manage. Verdant green grasses had manifested into robes of softest silk for the mountain spirit's summer attire, and Lady Fuji's cool, but warm, manner never failed to put the human soul at ease mixed in with the required and healthy reverence.\n\n\"You called, my Lady?\"\n\nThe spirit smiled, pleased with the politeness and sincerity in the young voice addressing her.\n\n\"Shin, I am happy that you answered so swiftly. I have important news for you.\"\n\n\"I await your pleasure, Fuji-sama.\"\n\nThe goddess became somber, the intricate white and black fan that she held coming up now to shield her face from view as she made her decree.\n\n\"It seems that your material manifestation has finally arrived. You will be rejoining with the others this night. You also seem to have a new guardian, who is very protective of you by his own admission.\"\n\nThe Lady lowered her fan once more, unveiling a face that had worn what expression? Had it been sadness, joy, caution, neutrality, or some measure of all? Only Lady Fuji herself knew, and would not tell.\n\n\"Thank you for your hospitality, my Lady.\"\n\n\"You are welcome. Amaterasu had asked me to see that you were well taken care of. Child, I wish you to sit behind that screen behind me, until I call you out. I may not, but I wish you to be here when I meet with your other selves and your protector.\"\n\nFuji-sama gestured to a folding silk screen painted with a very stylized version of the mountain, perhaps the Lady's own insignia. Shin's heart rose in her throat as she moved carefully over to the screen behind the goddess.\n\n\"Why would I need to be behind this screen, or even at this meeting at all? Is something wrong?\"\n\nShe wanted to ask the venerable matron her questions, but did not dare to. When the Lady told one to do a task, it was done. Her questions were replaced on her lips by a dutiful reply.\n\n\"Hai Fuji-sama.\"\n\nLight footsteps echoed down the halls, in addition to his own, possibly belonging to some servant coalesced into a more solid form for some unknown task. The ancient palace enfolded him tenderly, the history of millennia whispering tantalizingly to him out of rafters and from relics displayed so carefully in auspicious places. Strangely enough, as the steps drew closer from down another hall that intersected with the one he was in, so too did cinnamon curls begin to taunt his nose, pulling his mind from thoughts of bathing to other, far more tangled and confused, ones.\n\nRyu would not have seen her at all, had the scent not become unbearably strong and the footsteps drawn to a sudden halt to allow a surprised gasp to dance through the hallway, drawing his attention to the being. So transparent and translucent was she that he thought at first he was seeing a visiting moon spirit, and she had her own silvery glow that reminded him of little Love's glow. The only color, real true color, was in her eyes, blue as turquoise or sapphire. It was eerie, how much like BlowingWind she looked, as if she were the way that fragile human had been meant to look, with her shoulders drawn back and long hair gently waving down her back like a fresh landslide.\n\nHe wanted to call to her, to ask her what she was doing there, or if she was a ghost. The words died on his lips though, and his ears picked up the barest of mumbles.\n\n\"It's all in your head Shin. I'm just seeing things again in my grief. It's just a normal everyday hallucination.\" Murmured the spirit, shaking her head.\n\nThe apparition bowed mechanically to him and hurried off, her doubt in what she was seeing pouring off of her like ash. The retreating cadence of her rushing feet took with her the heavy swirls of scented torture that was the breeze playing around the woman, leaving the dragon doubting his own eyes. Shivering, wondering if he had in all actuality seen the ghost of who BlowingWind had once been before the calamity that had befallen both her and her destiny, Ryu continued after the servant leading him to the male's onsen.\n\n\"Blasted onna. She must have cast some sort of spell on me so I can't keep her out of my mind. I'm seeing apparitions.\"\n\nThe nameless spirit boy did not reply, knowing that the dragon was speaking more to himself than to anyone else. If that broken being he had seen in the entry hall had indeed cast some spell on the ryu, it would not be the first time a ningen had sought control of a dragon, nor would it be the last. If the mist boy had been a mist dragon, he personally would have eaten the woman, and been done with it. Quietly, the mist spirit pulled open the doors.\n\n\"The baths, sir.\"\n\n\"Thank you, boy.\"\n\n\"The others will assist you now.\"\n\nThe smells of water and heat, mingled with cedar and herbs called to the dusty dragon, and more servants, steam spirits this time, scurried about in preparation and invitation. Entering this haven did much to improve his mood, smoothing chafed pride as sullied silks were removed from his body to be washed. Both forms of his were cared for in the embrace of hot water after the dirt had been rinsed away, skin pampered and scales scrubbed to gleaming perfection.\n\nIt was well for BlowingWind that the men's and women's baths were separated. Here in the heat, his urge to wrap around his pet and to never let go had grown greatly. Eyelids heavy, his tongue lolled out as he imagined her slight form polishing his scales or perhaps brushing out his mane, the favor to be returned with the gift of some precious something from his hoard of priceless treasures. He would cover her in nothing but the best silks, and cause her to drip with jewels and gold, turning her into a shining and sparkling yorishiro for his use.\n\nHere, as he imagined the specifics of how alluring she would be, sparkling and twinkling to lure him into her delicate mortal body to gift her with his preternatural abilities and turning her into some hitogami, or living goddess, did his thoughts pull up short. Hurriedly he resumed his human shape, letting go of his favored form in near panic at the newly discovered emotion.\n\n\"Kami! I've fallen in love with her somehow, haven't I?\"\n\nToweling quickly, Ryu hurriedly dressed in his freshly laundered kimono, grateful that the task of laundry was so much swifter here with magic than in the human world with their noisy clothes washers. Love was not something that he had precisely counted on, at least not so soon, and could very well endanger the grand plans he had already been sketching out for her life.\n\n\"How can I make proper decisions for her if my personal feelings can get in the way?\"\n\nThis thought rebounded in his head, growing louder and unlocking other thoughts. Ryu now knew how he had grown so patient and intrigued with her rash outbursts, why he felt so possessive, why the mere thought of any Tengu anywhere near her would cause him to growl so menacingly. A final question, and perhaps the one most important to him, danced out of a dark and dusty corner of his mind as he padded soberly away to meet with the goddess.\n\n\"How could I have fallen in love with anyone, or so quickly? I never thought it would happen.\"\n\nThe palace of the myriad gods had fascinated BlowingWind, just as any other holy place did. Although she plodded tiredly after the attendant, her eyes roved along, devouring everything and committing it all to memory. At last, the quiet spirit drew open a door and bowed her in.\n\n\"The baths, mistress. I will return with new clothes for you while you bathe.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I appreciate it.\"\n\nThe cloud spirit looked up in surprise, grey eyes wide and inquisitive as a squirrel.\n\n\"You do? Lord Ryu's aniki sent part of himself up earlier asking the Lady to remove you from his custody because he was afraid that one of you would hurt the other, and because you were so disrespectful towards his nii-san.\"\n\n\"If you had been stuck with him for as long as I was, and he had done the kinds of things to you that he has to me, then you would have been angry with him too. But my anger is usually short lived, and it is hard to stay angry for long with someone who has carried you halfway up the tallest mountain in Japan. Ryu is a lord?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. Ryu-sama is Fujiyama-sama's favorite son, with massive holdings and a very active magma tongue. When his father steps down from managing mountain affairs for the other Kami, everyone suspects that Ryu will be the one he passes the duties to. He is rather known for his flamboyant personality though, as you seem to have discovered. Perhaps not the best spirit to be a bride to, but you could have done far worse.\"\n\n\"Bride?\"\n\n\"That's what a Miko is, bride and handmaiden, a link between our world and your own.\"\n\n\"You mean Miko are not just assistants at shrines?\"\n\nBlowingWind wilted further than she already was, resembling so closely a lily floating in the water that had not sent her roots down deep enough yet. The spirit frowned a little, thinking very hard, her whole body becoming grayer the harder that she pondered.\n\n\"I myself have never been as far as the shrines where the people frequent, so I am not entirely sure of the functions that a human Miko performs these days. I only know that in the old days when our kind intermingled with your kind and affairs more fully that the role of bride was fulfilled in its entirety. They say that a newly chosen Miko died to her old way of life and became someone new, belonging entirely to her Kami.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nThe spirit saw the woman grow silent and thoughtful, turning with all the sorrow, regret, and perhaps anger of a soul being led down to the Land of Yomi, to drift instead into the onsen. Wondering what had come over her to say such brash and forward things, the diminutive cloud was ashamed, no matter how true her statements had been. She had brought pain and sadness to a human already very sick and obviously untold by her \"guardian\" what her payment for his services was to be. Still, something about the young woman was so innocently trusting, that perhaps to have left those things unsaid would have been an even greater disservice.\n\n\"Are all humans as paradoxical as this one who had been reported to be so fierce and yet was so gentle?\"\n\nWhispering the question to herself, the cloud spirit left to find clothing that was considered proper here that would fit. She would have to go through the things that belonged to the Take Clan that were left here for anyone of that family who had need. Meanwhile, while the faithful attendant was gone, female steam spirits rinsed the ningen-onna delivered into their care before carefully assisting the tired and unsteady innocent into the steaming waters.\n\nNo one dared to interrupt the thoughts streaming through her head, so tangled together were they, and the human's face was as tightly closed as any geode found in the rough. All had heard the conversation at the door, and gave what comfort that they could through scrubbing, aromatic oils to cover her human scent, and the arrangement of her hair that had begun to grow out of where she had butchered it to.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nHer whispered words brought all to a pause, including the mist spirit who had slipped back in unnoticed to lay out the blazing scarlet kimono and golden obi, that had been graced with a symbol that BlowingWind knew she had seen somewhere on Ryu's clothes. Memory would not reveal where to her, but she absolutely knew she had seen it before. She was nothing but property in the eyes of the spirits in this land it seemed; yet these kind beings in this room had done what they could for her regardless.\n\nThen again, as servants they were property too. So then they knew how she was feeling right now.\n\nShe dried and dressed quickly, receiving help from the spirit women with the complicated work of donning the strange and intimate garments correctly. When they were done with tying her together, one raised a mirror for BlowingWind to appraise their work.\n\n\"Do you approve?\"\n\nBlowingWind was not sure if she completely liked what she saw. The woman in the mirror was breathtaking, yes. Like some ancient Japanese princess, some Hime-sama, she was a pale wisp in the flowing garment, fragile looking as any flower. She much preferred her trusty doeskin dress, or even some good sturdy denim that was ready for anything, wild, down to earth and strong. Her leathers had been cleaned and packed away, unsuitable for the presence of a goddess, as the Kami shunned death, and the things resulting from it, as a matter of course. It was small comfort that her grandmother's handiwork was safe, and her short hair now bound by a complicated series of buns was-lacking.\n\n\"It's nice, but something is missing. This is not me.\"\n\nGoing to her bag so carefully placed in a corner, she searched for what she had seen in the thought that had passed through her head like a summer breeze. Quickly, she found the woven cloth, unfolding it as the others crowded around to see what the little human would bring out. The small breast feathers of a hawk had been safely stored in the bright cloth, just as she remembered them. As the spirits saw them they caught the thought from her head, and the glimmers of happy memories that were attached to these, and the more recent memory of how she had worn them in her dance before a bonfire. Acting on it, one of the steam spirits could not help but comment happily.\n\n\"That does look better mistress, working them into your hair to brush so gently, as if you were part phoenix. You must hurry now though, you are ready and the Lady is waiting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Love and Wisdom, Shadow and Light\n\nSimple black lacquer doors welcomed Ryu into the chamber where Fuji-sama waited to meet with him, sliding open gently, as he knew they would. Before this most respected goddess had been arranged many trays of various succulent foods, and also places for himself and his beautiful little shaman who was and would become his Miko.\n\n\"Ryu, don't be so shy, come in my child. Sit.\"\n\nThe warm and smiling voice beckoned just as strongly as her magic and her delicate hands, and Ryu quickly moved to follow her commands. Bowing reverently from his place, Ryu could see how his father's allegiance had been so strong when she had been the Headwoman of the mountain, and why he kept relations sweet with the spirit.\n\n\"Arigato Gozaimasu, Fuji-sama.\"\n\n\"You are welcome as always young Take. I can feel you casting about for your charge. She is quite safe, and will be here soon. While we wait, perhaps you can tell me again what your greatest concern for her is. Knowing the essence is one thing, but hearing a perception is another.\"\n\n\"I want to heal her. She is so sad and broken, and it hurts to see her like that. I think that maybe even all of her anger is a mask to hide her pain. Fuji-sama, I want to help her, but I don't know how. There are no chants or motions that I know for it.\"\n\nThe dragon could not help his frantic gestures as he spoke, repeating what he felt was the most crucial part of their earlier conversation when her mitama, or separated spirit, had greeted his own at the torii. He would not allow himself to slump in despair before her, but the telltale droop of his usually unruly locks was more than enough to communicate the feeling.\n\n\"If she is missing Love and Wisdom, Ai and Shin, then you must give them to her.\"\n\n\"That's what I don't understand. Ai has been safely in my keeping for quite some time now, even though I still have no idea where she came from. But when I tried to pass her back to BlowingWind, Ai completely refused to go. She clung inside my heart like to be removed from me was death!\"\n\nA shifting slide sounded behind the screen that Lady Fuji sat before, as if someone were slightly bored or extremely uncomfortable sitting still. Cinnamon hung heavy in this room, shrouded by Lady Fuji's crisp snow and ripening fruit.\n\n\"She had been angry at you, you had also said, O child of Fujiyama. Perhaps she could not accept Ai at that time, or both must be together to facilitate this transfer. Or perhaps,\" the musing afterthought slipped from her lips, \"Perhaps she feels unworthy of love.\"\n\n\"She really doesn't seem to like me very much. She tolerates me, but even this seems questionable to me. She only calmed down because she was weary, I think.\"\n\nEvery line of his body spoke of his frustration while Lady Fuji looked serenely on. Such a scene she had seen many times before with other courting dragons, her own children of the mountain, and the occasional human. Lady Fuji had also seen it in well established marriages that had been made out of custom and necessity, instead of desire.\n\n\"Do you know how you feel about this human?\"\n\n\"I would give her everything if it would make her happy! My very scales even would be hers if she asked it! I want to keep her safe, and I'm afraid of what will happen if she slips away. I've fallen in love with the woman, or at least think so my Lady, and when I am near her, I feel... calmer.\"\n\n\"How do you know it is love, and not just a passing infatuation or mere lust? Others before you have taken Miko, making them full brides, and then moved on after only a few months to leave them alone and with child.\"\n\nHorror at the thought painted the spirit white while anger narrowed his eyes to knives and thinned Ryu's lips as he replied.\n\n\"I would never hurt her like that. I would never abandon her. I, Take Ryu, would commit seppuku before dishonoring BlowingWind like that.\"\n\nThough his voice had not been loud, the vow carried a binding magic that seemed to swell it to monstrous proportions, filling the room and drawing a gasp from the witness politely hidden behind the screen. Startled by the magic of the vow, the witness was equally startled by the gossamer strings wrapping her, but as Lady Fuji had not yet called, she remained hidden. Trembling with rage at the thought that anyone thought he would commit such a crime, Ryu stared at his food to avoid challenging the Lady any further.\n\nLady Fuji looked away from the dragon, who was now thrashing about with an invisible energy tail as he tried to do away with his anger. Hesitant footsteps had paused outside the shoji, and though oils had been well applied, the decaying scent of a living human was still detectable.\n\n\"Come in my child.\"\n\nThe door slid open to reveal BlowingWind, hand still stretched out to move the door herself. Ryu began to purr lowly at the sight of his treasure safe and in the robes of his Clan, reacting before he could seal away his aramitama. The human came in shyly, as if sensing the possessiveness of his dark side and not knowing what to do in the presence of such a well-known spirit as Lady Fuji.\n\n\"So shy, come and eat Daughter of Man.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\nBlowingWind bowed before sitting down on her mat, the humbleness and respect of her tone and gesture stupefying the dragon that she had previously shown such supreme disrespect for earlier. The three ate silently, Lady Fuji silently watching the quiet interplay between the younger Kami and the human. It was amusing to the mountain spirit how the human sat as far from her guardian as she could, and yet carefully watched him for cues as to how to eat the various dishes. Once, Ryu had caught her watching him, and the smirk that played on his face turned the human an amusing shade of magenta while she tried to pretend she had not been watching him.\n\nBefore long, the food had been eaten and the human did not look so wan. The meal had been small and light, but it had gotten something into her, though tying her more firmly into the spiritual world she was now trapped in once again.\n\n\"I hear that you have had some tamashii run away from you child.\"\n\nLady Fuji had said her statement noncommittally, as if she were talking about the weather or the cherry blossoms. BlowingWind gazed back at the ancient goddess, calm since she was not talking to the spirit that chafed at her memories and had tricked her into such a compromising position thanks to her lack of knowledge of the customs of the land.\n\n\"I have found Love, she is hiding inside Ryu. I do not know where Wisdom is though.\"\n\n\"I see. Do you have any idea of where to look for Wisdom?\"\n\n\"Ryu thinks that maybe I can find her on one of the Shrine Circuits.\"\n\n\"Quite possibly. It would be a logical place to start looking. I have also heard that you had difficulty in getting Love out of Ryu. It sounds like she is quite comfortable where she is.\"\n\nChoking sounds now came from behind the screen, as if whoever was witnessing the goddess' meeting with them tonight was inexperienced, had not been able to swallow their tea, or possibly was trying to swallow laughter. The Lady continued on, unperturbed by the minor interruption and her eyes sparkling as if she had been privy to some joke with the hidden chaperone.\n\n\"Do you have any idea why she would not return to her proper place MountainChild-san?\"\n\n\"Because Ryu doesn't really want to let my soul go?\"\n\nThe person behind the screen could no longer swallow their laughter at the angered statement. BlowingWind's blue eyes washed yellow in a flash, glaring angrily out upon the world as Ryu turned his own incensed eyes on her. He had tried to the very best of his ability to coax out and return her wayward soul, but Love had dug deep and held fast, just as stubborn as the rest of the woman. Lady Fuji only smiled gently at the pair, as if to two children rowing over a tattered doll.\n\n\"I don't think that is it. He wants to give you Love very much. Shin?\"\n\n\"Hai, Fuji-sama?\"\n\nThe curious voice rolled from behind the screen, the owner leaping to her feet and coming out swiftly to look enquiringly at the Lady. As she did, both Ryu and the shaman rose to their feet, breathing the same exclamation with one breath.\n\n\"You!\"\n\nShin calmly moved her gaze from the spirit that had so kindly taken care of her, transferring it disinterestedly to BlowingWind, then freezing when her eyes came to rest on the spirit that she knew could only be Ryu. Paying no attention to the outburst at all, Lady Fuji only directed Shin's attention back to her.\n\n\"In your opinion Shin, why would Ai not want to return to her body?\"\n\n\"Ara, our Shadow, is very hard to live with. She is always angry and hurting. Our Light does not want to deal with our Shadow, and so they almost never work together anymore. It is very tiresome.\"\n\n\"That's not true. I'm not angry and hurting all the time!\"\n\n\"Ara, come out if you are going to shout at me. You are confusing our guardian.\"\n\n\"Kidnapper more like.\"\n\nDespite her grumbling, a dark amethyst orb issued from BlowingWind's chest, forming herself in her normal image with her blackened skins. Standing there cockily holding her spear and defiantly staring down Shin, RagingTornado stamped her foot at the tired and sad Wisdom.\n\n\"You don't know what has happened. We've managed to become his bride while you were hiding up here.\"\n\n\"This anger is what makes you unable to receive Love and I back into our body. Is it so bad to be someone's bride? Obsi-.\"\n\n\"Don't use that name. Never use that word as a name again! He's abandoned us and gone Home, leading us to this foreign country with what must have been the last of his energy. And you just accept it and soak up what you can of this place! You are even speaking mostly Japanese now while the rest of us still speak mainly English.\"\n\nRagingTornado raised her spear, shaking it at Shin as if threatening that she would throw life away and run her through with it. Wisdom, taking advantage of the spiritual realm they were in, called upon her resources to produce a bronze shield with the Celtic Dragon that was the symbol of the O'Drake Clan worked carefully into the surface.\n\n\"If it makes you feel better, I won't. This is not the place for another power struggle. I was merely going to say that He would want us to be happy. We promised Him that if anything happened we would Live, and that's what I want to do.\"\n\n\"But both Shadow and Light are crystallized with our grief, and are refusing to move on so that we can too. Thus, we cease to Live, although we Exist.\"\n\nThe new voice, the same as the others though from a different quarter, startled the other three parts of BlowingWind as well as the two spirits who had brought her pieces together. Ai, the little pink orb, was perched carefully on Ryu's shoulder, as if one wrong move from anyone would send her diving for the safety of dark arms within the magma spirit once more.\n\n\"Now you come out. Why?\" BlowingWind, or the part of her still occupying her body, quietly asked her question.\n\n\"Wisdom is here now. What good is Love without Wisdom, or Wisdom without Love?\"\n\n\"And what good is the Light or Shadow without us? The two of you are still fighting for control. We have to accept each other to heal, as well as what has happened. It's an initiation. Into what secret I don't know, but it is anyway and Great Spirit must have some reason for it.\"\n\nShin had finished Ai's thought, while Light and Dark glared at each other and Ryu wondered how much sake he would need to recover from the sheer shock of the situation.\n\n\"I thought that we spirits had personality problems with two main parts. It seems to be really hard to be human. Does this kind of thing go on in your collective head all the time?\"\n\nRagingTornado opened her mouth to growl an answer to Shin, ignoring Ryu's question and trying to honor the promise she made to him even if she still did not like him.\n\n\"She's weak, and always invests me with anything that she doesn't want to deal with. I am created of all her pain, rage, hate, fear, embarrassment, lust and everything else that she wants to hide. I'll accept her when she fully accepts that I am her and starts helping me with all of these unresolved issues.\"\n\n\"I am not weak. You really want me to admit things like lust, hate, and pain, such base things?\"\n\nBlowingWind had ground it out at her Shadow. She was not weak; it was just that she did not know how to deal with her darker feelings other than running away from or repressing them. No one had ever truly shown her how to work with these things, and she was not about to admit that to anyone yet.\n\nShin threw up her hands, letting her protective shield fly into the air to dissolve with her exasperation.\n\n\"You are both so immature. We all know why you won't deal with your Shadow. Love and I will come out when you are ready to accept us.\"\n\nShe shrank into an orb, looking like a silver moon, to hurtle into her protector along with Love, seating herself deep in Ryu's heart.\n\nWhen the time was right, she would come out, and there where the others could not hear, they plotted with Ryu's own Shadow a way to break down their Ara's resistance, creating yet another bond with the spirit. Meanwhile, RagingTornado reentered her body with a huff, muttering about how half of her spirit seemed to be abandoning their past and turning Japanese at heart.\n\nRyu himself was horror struck.\n\n\"No human healer can fix this problem!\"\n\nLady Fuji, thoughtful and serene as any painting of her physical manifestation, replied while BlowingWind merely sat with bowed head, tired.\n\n\"No. I suspect that only you hold the key Ryu, but now you at least know more of what you are dealing with. I see that I certainly can not release the child from your side if I tried. We shall perform the bonding ceremony now, to give your human more time.\"\n\n\"Hai Fuji-sama.\"\n\n\"Does my opinion count in all of this?\"\n\nBlowingWind's small voice drew the attention of the spirits to where she looked up at them through sad and frightened eyes, rather like the doe as she watches the semi-truck bearing down on her. It was clear by her huddled form that the poor girl felt like that proverbial doe as Fate and Destiny smeared her on the highway of life that had hacked through her peaceful forest of her life. Lady Fuji shook her head sadly.\n\n\"I am afraid not. My Lady Amaterasu and Lord Sarutahiko instructed me that if you came to me I would act in your best interests. They are that you are bound to Ryu, who will protect you and share his All with you gladly. You have a duty to the Future, not the Past.\"\n\nTiny waterfalls sprung from the eyes of the human as she began to tremble like the land in an aftershock. Ryu chewed on his lip nervously while Lady Fuji poured the o-miki, the consecrated sake, into three small cups to perform the ancient ceremony that had wedded both spirit and human in the Land of the Rising Sun since time immemorial.\n\n\"Why are you so frightened BlowingWind?\"\n\n\"The women of my family have brought only disaster. Please, I'll stay under your protection, but please, don't make me your wife, not in all the physicality that brings so much trouble!\"\n\nRyu reached out slowly, gently blotting away her tears.\n\n\"I will not force you into bed if that is what you fear, but if we are not wedded, it will leave you open for spirits far worse than I. Also, since fully half of yourself is hiding within my heart, this is the best way to reunite you, for now, however tenuous it may be.\"\n\nLady Fuji gave the pair the o-miki, helping the shaman with the ritual exchanges and making her both an official and true Miko. Gathering BlowingWind's tiny body to himself, he waited as the ties binding them tightened. Her pain and heartache was his as other and more subtle exchanges occurred between them, pulling him into her energy matrix as surely as she was mingled with his. She attuned to him, becoming a channel for his powers when the need arose and he became her anchor in the world of the spirits.\n\nAt last, when the room stopped spinning for the pair, the deed was done.\n\n\"You are not fully bonded, and will not be until the day that your union is physically consummated, if that happens at all. Yet you are one, which will give you time to heal BlowingWind. Ryu, you must take very good care of her. Perhaps time together in the Sea of Trees will help remove the blocks between you and strengthen this weak tether.\"\n\n\"Hai Fuji-sama. I will.\"\n\nRyu stood carefully; cradling his Treasure to his chest tenderly as she drowsed against him from the magic exchange, waiting for a servant to show him to the room he knew had been prepared. The servant waited at the door, bored, and annoyed that he would be the one to lead the \"filthy human\" and her guardian to their quarters, though he hid it well. Before he was out the door, Lady Fuji called one last time to the dragon.\n\n\"Ryu, remember your promise to her. As time passes, you may find that hard to keep.\"\n\n\"Yes Lady Fuji, I will remember. Thank you for your help.\"\n\n\"Go now my child. Rest.\"\n\n\"Hai!\"\n\nBowing over his precious cargo, he backed respectfully out of the room to follow the retainer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The Day After\n\nScaled coils threaded through the gossamer strands of her dreams, while the combined calls of perhaps dozens of animals made themselves known. Vague impressions of centuries past danced through her mind while a soothing voice whispered secrets to her in a language of cadence and tone. As her mind grew accustomed to the odd dream sounds, meaning came across and stories unfolded for her.\n\n\"Receive healing knowledge when you acknowledge the partnership of Miko, my yorishiro. Gain perpetual health and unending wealth, with an eternity of safety. I bring life and death, in the same breath across the lands for those that understand.\"\n\nIt was a flowery and embroidered tongue, that of the Norito she had heard intoned at the shrines that she had visited so far. Promises enticed BlowingWind to cautiously poke her head out of her cave, a wolf surveying the lands outside of her den. The speaker was unseen, but the nearness of his voice was a mystery. He whispered gently into her ear with sinuous syllables of his native language, and she realized that every word she understood.\n\n\"R-ryu? What are you doing in my dream?\"\n\nTurning around and around, like a spindle that she had once seen a woman use to spin thread, she scanned the cave for him or for anyone. No one greeted her eyes, yet she felt his gentle touch and heard his quiet song.\n\n\"Sleep in my arms safe from all harm. My fierce monsoon, heed now this tune. The roiling earth from deep below longs to feel the harsh wind blow, cooling his incessantly raging passions of the inner fire from which he's fashioned. A golden cup, a golden bowl, a boisterous one to have and hold, halls of stone soaring high beneath the ground and spreading sky.\"\n\nCaverns of volcanic wonder were painted around her, the treasures of the earth sparkling with the light of the molten tongue that was somewhere farther back in the passage. In all this time that she had frequented the cave in her inner forests, it was the first time that she had been aware of how much more there was to it. The mixture of dark and light beckoned to her, and the warmth eased her weary muscles.\n\n\"I didn't realize I had used so much energy in just hiding. I wonder what's down there.\"\n\nA purr filled her being, vibrating her atoms, and the invisible hands turned to strange coils again, gripping and holding her still, inescapable.\n\n\"Sleep here in my coils. Forget now your toils. Rest and relax, you've been overtaxed. Send down your roots. Like the pine it suits you to reach deep into me to rest and to sleep.\"\n\n\"I hate it when people think they know what's best for me.\"\n\nThe dream faded, though the pressure of arms increased in the dark, holding her, comforting her, but still restraining her after all.\n\n\"Mother used to hold me this way, when the nightmares came and I fought Daddy's killers in my dreams. I won't give in.\"\n\nGradually, she grew aware of her own breath, and the smell of rich new earth, and a firm and enticingly warm chest, but still without the heartbeat of a truly material creature. No words came from his lips, but the song still whispered in her mind, keeping her lids heavy. It was tempting to drift back into sweet sleep, but pride could not let her stay in the world between wakefulness and sleep any longer.\n\nAfter a long war, her eyes finally opened.\n\nFlawless and seemingly poreless skin, like sun-warmed marble greeted her, sickening in its perfection. A familiar aristocratic nose jutted out as if to spear the air around them while the innocent mask of sleep graced his face. His sleep-tousled hair dared her to rumple it further, and BlowingWind found it was difficult to restrain her hands.\n\n\"Dear God, I've been knocked out and drug into a cheap romance novel! How long have I been sleeping on your chest? What have you done to me?\"\n\nAs BlowingWind sat up to glance wildly around the room for anything to disprove her theory, Ryu gave up his feigned sleep, choking on his laughter.\n\n\"You do come up with the oddest theories!\"\n\n\"What did you do to me while I slept?\"\n\nThe wind howled in the form of the enraged woman, carrying far and wide with the power behind the voice. Flesh met flesh through silk as she drove her fist into his gut in her anger and frustration, bringing groans of pain bubbling up from the battered spirit.\n\n\"It was just an observation. What a foul temper you have. Look, you're under the covers and I am on top. I haven't done anything!\"\n\n\"You were thinking it. How long have I been asleep?\"\n\n\"The thought never even crossed my mind until you brought it up. You shock me, O Blustery One. You have slept most of the night, and the sun will rise soon.\"\n\nRyu had grumbled his answer, massaging his stomach as BlowingWind examined the bare traditional sleeping quarters and the flowered quilts covering the shared futon. He was right; she was under the covers, much to her chagrin.\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"I said I would not force you. Have you changed your mind? Is that why you ask? Should I be testing my limits?\"\n\nHis face was that of the curious child as he watched her trying to piece the night together, but his mask was shattered by laughing eyes that BlowingWind honed in on without any effort.\n\n\"No! You pervert! Get out!\"\n\nThe phoenix and the dragon had long been a symbol of marital happiness in Asia, but also a symbol of war. Like the phoenix that she unknowingly now represented, she too had a fiery temper and was not being tamed. Like the tiger, she was capable of taking her anger out on those around her and so now the battle of Tiger and Dragon ensued. Her hand found the pillow that had held Ryu's head, reuniting with it once more and in several other places as she chased him out of the room, while he cackled at the baitable human.\n\n\"It was just a question. Are you going to beat me for our entire honeymoon, my little hitogami? Perhaps we should leave soon then and let the others have the peace they are accustomed to.\"\n\n\"You... you... Coyote! Argh!\"\n\nThe shoji slammed shut in his face as BlowingWind tried to find a suitable name for him. More laughter bubbled up out of him like the springs at the base of the mountain.\n\n\"You started it.\"\n\n\"Jerk.\"\n\n\"You wound me Wind-chan.\"\n\nBlowingWind stuck her tongue out at the door, refusing to play along with him any farther and sulking like any child who had been teased. For his part, Ryu had his hand on his chest as if he truly felt wounded, but the devilish grin and sparkling eyes put the lie to his previous statement. He had been perfectly happy to hold her and listen to her sleep.\n\nOn the other hand, he was beginning to enjoy watching her eyes flash as she tried to beat him. Still, he didn't want to push her yet, there was plenty of time to play with her later. In an entirely serious tone and manner, he tried to mend the situation.\n\n\"I'm sorry. It was wrong of me to tease you. I have never been very good at holding myself back, and sometimes become far too exuberant. There is no coffee here, but we could go get some tea before we take our leave, if you like. Please don't stay angry with me.\"\n\nThe door slid open just enough for one baleful eye to glare out like Medusa rounding a corner.\n\n\"No coffee? What about chocolate?\"\n\nRyu brought his hand over his heart once again, holding the other out to show that he had no crossed fingers, a gesture he had picked up from watching students back at the University's Quad.\n\n\"None. If I'm lying, you can make a shintai for me to reside in and bury it upside down in your protest for as long as you wish.\"\n\n\"Do you realize how long it's been since I've had either?\"\n\n\"I take it that you want me to promise to get you some later if I want any chance of you accepting my apology.\"\n\nThe eye continued to bore into him relentlessly, silent and venomous. It was an eye that held promises of many things, imaginative and terrifying. Ryu began to wonder if maybe he should start protecting the Tengu Tribe from her, now that she had access to a small portion of his magic.\n\n\"Fine. When we go to human civilization then I will personally take you to the finest shops and let you choose what you want.\"\n\n\"Promise?\"\n\n\"I promise Wind-chan.\"\n\nThe door opened the rest of the way, and the human shuffled out to look up defiantly into the spirit's amused face.\n\n\"If you don't deliver, into the mud you go.\"\n\n\"With all speed Little One. Now, let's get some tea and something else warm into you, and then we can say our goodbyes to our Lady and go find how to fix you, even though you are already looking much healthier.\"\n\nTaking her by the hand, Ryu gently drew the woman with him down the corridors to where he knew Lady Fuji would be waiting to breakfast with her guests. With every step, Ryu watched as her mask gently melted away, replaced by that quiet and impassive face of a woman lost deep in thought. Once more they passed through the lacquered doors, and once more Lady Fuji greeted them.\n\n\"Good morning children. A little early for marital spats, is it not? Have you possibly brought a Tiger into your home young Dragon?\"\n\n\"According to my Otou-sama, a Tiger in the home would burn out some of my excess energy so that I do not run ahead of schedule.\"\n\n\"Your Father is perhaps right. You have far more energy than many of the females of your kind.\"\n\nLady Fuji's laughing eyes and light tone gently mocked the young dragon, producing a reaction that BlowingWind had not known him capable of. A red tinge, barely noticeable at first, spread across his nose like ink across paper, growing more vivid as he realized that BlowingWind had seen it. Schooling his voice and manner, it was the only sign of his embarrassment.\n\n\"It is a simple early morning miscommunication, nothing to worry about my Lady.\"\n\n\"I see. Just remember that rice paper walls hide far less than your usual chambers of hard stone.\"\n\n\"Hai Fuji-sama, gomen gozimasu. I am sorry.\"\n\n\"It is only to be expected with two as young and vigorous as you. Even Susanowo took a little time to settle after his first wife was gained. BlowingWind, can you eat something more this morning?\"\n\nAll arguments were forgotten as simply as that, and the Lady was gesturing with the appropriate elegance to the daintily presented dishes. Steaming bowls of rice and seaweed embraced bits of sweetened and fried tofu, to tempt the still turbulent stomach into the realm of hunger. Although the request was gently put, it held all the command that BlowingWind's own mother used every morning, and so she meekly sat at her cushion and tray.\n\n\"Hai Fuji-sama.\"\n\nBlowingWind could only pick at her meal and sip at her tea, while Ryu quickly finished his with both grace and speed, to wait patiently for the human to empty her bowl. Lady Fuji nodded as she watched, having slowed her own pace in respect to the human. Finally, BlowingWind was done, though something was still lacking in her nourishment. Listless and frail as a hatchling that had not received its first meal, she quietly sat beside her Kami as the mountain goddess looked on.\n\n\"I would suggest that you eat some meat soon. You will find that because of Ryu's specie and the unusual way that you are bound to him that you will require meat far more often than you once did. I am sure Ryu is looking forward to a hunt after so long, and it will give you an opportunity to learn how to work together. Fare well children.\"\n\n\"Domo arigato gosaimashita, Fuji-sama.\"\n\n\"Sayonara Fuji-sama.\"\n\nRyu bowed deeply, folded double on the floor while BlowingWind copied his demonstration of gratitude. It felt more natural than before, and she realized that she herself was speaking easily in the Japanese tongue. As they left, Ryu began to move with a restrained urgency that she soon matched, her staff tapping in tandem with their pace.\n\n\"We have to hurry. After sunrise the entrance to the human world is sealed. It used to be open all the time here, but after people started to climb the mountain... well. Not all Kami are as accepting of humanity as the Lady.\"\n\n\"I see, Ryu.\"\n\nThey had passed under the torii, just as the red sun rose in the sky with her rays of life dancing over land and sky. Turning around, BlowingWind watched as the palace faded from her eyes.\n\n\"It's gone, just like a dream.\"\n\n\"Just like any ghost castle or monastery, of which the country is still full, for the right ones. Come on, let's get back to the forest.\"\n\nRyu started off, expecting her to follow, but she was rooted to the ground, breath stilled and eyes wide. To her eyes, the very spirit she was searching for stood in the air just past the end of the ground, smiling and beckoning. Ryu's eyes saw nothing, but he could tell that she did. A smell raised warning alarms to him now, formerly dismissed as only some disguised Youkai pilgrim making penance for some misdeed.\n\n\"I smell a Kitsune. Don't move.\"\n\nBlowingWind did not listen though, enthralled with the vision conjured before her eyes. She was faster now, and calling on her resources she bounded for the arms of her love. Caught by surprise, Ryu had not moved fast enough to stop her, pounding hard after her fleet toes. Her foot came to the edge, and what had appeared to be a rock threw her high and over the precipice, the illusion vanishing without a trace as BlowingWind hurtled through the air. A scream tore from her throat, warbling and clear.\n\n\"Oh God!\"\n\nThe frigid morning air roared past as she fell through it, gravity pulling her downward and her forward momentum carrying her ever outward. This was the end as far as she was concerned, and so she closed her eyes, not wishing to see the red stain she knew she would make. Falling was a far cry from flying, and she knew that the ground would make its mark on her body soon enough. The roaring increased, and then died away, as did the cold. Surprised, BlowingWind opened her eyes.\n\nRed filled her vision, great waves of a soft warm mane materializing from nowhere.\n\n\"Well, are you going to just keep falling, or are you going to grab on? Eventually you will fall if you don't.\"\n\nThe voice was familiar, although it had a deeper and more gravelly sound now, as if some great beast were questioning her from the cavernous lairs of her mother's campfire stories. Two great horns curved back through and above the wild forest of fur, onyx spears that her hands wrapped around on instinct.\n\n\"Good. Now hold on tight. I've used an invisibility spell so the humans won't see us, but I have no guarantee that some Kazekami will not push you off.\"\n\nThe towering pines grew ever closer, reaching out for her as if to catch or impale her with their venerable boughs. The serpentine creature below her writhed in the sky, gracefully swimming an invisible current that she could feel, but not see. Here where there was no land under her feet, the freedom that she had remembered came rushing back, if only for a short time, and she could marvel at the cities, the wilds, and all that lay in between. As all things must, this came to an end, and the dragon silently descended into a favorite hunting ground in his territory.\n\nBlowingWind slid silently off of the great dragon, awed by his sheer size and the graceful sweep of his body. His ebony scales gleamed in the sun and his midnight fur embraced his wolfish face. Now she could see that the scarlet waves surrounded his head and licked down to the end of his tail like fierce flames, never resting, always moving. Twelve sabers were on the tips of his toes, eager to rend the flesh of enemy or prey. A mouth full of swords curved upwards as the dragon watched her.\n\n\"Please don't eat me Ryugami.\"\n\n\"Are you done ogling me now, or should I roll over so that you can see my underbelly?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stare. I have just never seen such a...\"\n\n\"Fine specimen of a dragon?\"\n\n\"Hai. When I fell off the mountain, I left someone behind. I need to tell him where I am.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't worry. I'm sure he knows exactly where you are.\"\n\nThe dark eyes were laughing as the dragon preened before her, and he rumbled his amusement as he spoke to her. The voice was even deeper now, and yet it sounded almost like her Kami.\n\n\"Ryu?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me you were a dragon?\"\n\n\"Your mind works very fast when you are awake. I never told you because you never asked. Now, shall I go and find us some game? Perhaps you would like a deer, the meat of longevity? Or would you rather that I fished for us?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. Is there someplace that I can lie down for a while? I'm a little dizzy still.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nRyu gestured into the woods at the edge of the clearing, his tail curling majestically through the air. Now that the shock was wearing off, her surroundings were making themselves known. Where the grass melted into the trees lurked a small hut, the clean lines and simple framing harked back to ancient days, although it was clear that it was a fairly new construction.\n\n\"This is one of the places that I go when on sabbatical. I've led several human 'lives' under several names. So I have found it convenient to have a place to go when I am working on historical manuscripts or just need time away from the city. You should find all that you need therein.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nRyu nodded his great head before meandering into the forest, and BlowingWind paused to watch him before she carefully entered the hut. The dragon Ryu moved with the same pressurized fluidity as the other form that she had known, and the volcano itself seemed to lend him her internal drive.\n\n\"So, now I've finally met a dragon face to snout, and he happens to be my husband. What else can happen to me? Eat your heart out Murphy.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Confronting the Inner Demon\n\nRed, gold, and black coiled upon each other in grand sweeps of heat on the surfaces that bore paint. Elsewhere, bare wood made its brazen appearance in the vacant spaces where books or martial arts equipment had not been carefully arranged, waiting for their master's return. Period after period flowed relentlessly on upon the bookshelves, preserved in both texts and an assortment of curious curios. The odd blouse-ripper romance novel and paperback manga collection had also found their places to rest, poorly hidden by sandwiching with some equally tattered notebooks.\n\n\"It figures that he would read cheesy romance novels and shoujo manga. Judging by how ragged they look, he's read them several times, too. I would never have pegged him for a comic book reader, much less the romantic kind. I guess I expected something related more to volcanoes. Well, this really finishes shattering my image of most spirits.\"\n\nBlowingWind left the bookshelf after fingering the least delicate items in the array poised there, examining instead the mahogany desk and seven-year-old computer. They humbly tucked themselves into one corner, as if they were ashamed to be in the same room as the vast library of historical literature and the museum quality items. Lesson plans and a half finished manuscript waited patiently for a final review, and though obviously old had recently shed any dust that might have built up.\n\n\"Where's the dust?\"\n\n\"What kind of servant would I be if I let Master's possessions get dirty?\"\n\n\"Who said that?\"\n\nBlowingWind looked wildly around, scanning the cabin for the source of the voice. Nothing moved, and everything was still and inanimate as stone. Her hand drew up against her chest, a gesture she had not made since she was very small.\n\n\"I did. What are you doing going through my Master's things?\"\n\n\"Ryu dropped me off. He said that I would find all I need.\"\n\n\"Then get it and go.\"\n\nThe owner of the voice still hadn't become obvious yet, but BlowingWind had tracked it down to the vicinity of the doorway.\n\n\"After falling off the mountain, I don't think that Ryu would be very pleased with me if I took off into the forest alone right now.\"\n\n\"That is no concern of mine. Take what you need and go. Some of Master's things are very delicate, and it is my duty to care for this place while he is away.\"\n\nStanding at the door, she cocked her head to one side, a curious little girl trapped in a woman's body and shining through like a sacred jewel.\n\n\"Am I talking to a doorpost?\"\n\n\"How rude! You are talking to the Spirit of a doorpost. Now get out before I leave this goshintai and carry you out myself!\"\n\n\"Well I never! I was just curious, Doorpost-san. Just when I start thinking that maybe being married to Ryu wouldn't be so bad, I get ordered about by a talking doorpost! When Ryu gets back, you can tell him I went to bring down my own game. Good bye!\"\n\nBlowing out the door, she deposited her bag beside it, not even once thinking about how lucky she had been to have kept it on her back, her walking staff beside it. She also did not even think about how difficult it would be to hunt anything, given the fact that she still wore the formal kimono she had recently received. Tripping over her hem on her way down the wooden steps her current state of dress came crashing down on her with the force of her last mid-term.\n\n\"I can't go out like this!\"\n\nSpinning on her heel, she stormed back up the steps and through the door, picking her bag up again as she banged through.\n\n\"What are you doing back?\"\n\n\"Changing. I can't even fish in this, much less hunt.\"\n\n\"Change? You bear Master's crest upon your clothing and you want to change? You dare to insult the noble house of Take in such a manner?\"\n\n\"I don't want to get it dirty, alright? I'm not changing out there, it would be my luck that there's a Tengu waiting to run off with my top, chase me through the forest again, or try to feed me to another dragon. Where's the bathroom? I know he's got one.\"\n\nA sigh came from within the wood as the door shut seemingly on its own.\n\n\"I suppose you may as well stay since you seem to have some respect for Master's house. If he truly has gone hunting 'Mistress' then he will not be gone long. I apologize for my rudeness. Master has never allowed anyone here before other than me, for my caretaking abilities and the fact that he cut my tree down.\"\n\n\"No one?\" She calmed as she asked her question. \"I'm sorry too. I have been under much stress lately, and I never really learned any other way to deal with it. I guess I need to try harder.\"\n\nThe desk chair rolled back on its casters, turning around to present its cushions for her use.\n\n\"Please sit down Mistress. I will bring you some tea. While we wait for Master, perhaps you should sort through your feelings. From where I stand, that hunt is more important.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nDrifting to the chair in a daze, she was barely aware that the caretaker was using his spells to put the new addition to the house he served in order. Sinking down into the chair, her bag slipped back out of her hand and her eyes slipped closed. Soon, she was fast asleep, leaving the doorpost Kami to unpack her things as the rest of the cabin came out of its magical hiding.\n\n\"I still have my doubts you have married my Master, but if you have then you are my responsibility while he is gone. Sleep well, and please take my advice.\"\n\nBlowingWind fell through soft layers of foliage that caressed her with ferny fingers, delivering her once more into the relative safety of the cave hidden in the forest of her mind.\n\n\"What am I doing here? All I did was to sit down. How did I fall asleep so fast?\"\n\n\"It's just as well. We have a hunt to go on.\"\n\nA quick look around revealed her shadow-self sitting on a rock beside where the new part of the cavern begged to be explored with its heated glow.\n\n\"What do you mean? Ryu's bringing some game, and we have feelings to sort through that I have been trying to divorce myself of.\"\n\nThe Shadow shook her head.\n\n\"The game we have to bring down Ryu can't hunt for us. As your Shadow I am also Gatekeeper of Initiation. I can't wait for you to be ready anymore. I need help now.\"\n\nThe Shadow calmly picked up her spear, handing BlowingWind one that had been tipped with worked quartz crystal. BlowingWind followed RagingTornado out of the cave with her heart in her throat, the bellows of a great beast ranging over the forest like a desert storm.\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"Our feelings. Time to truly face the beast we have been running from.\"\n\n\"But what if it kills us? We can die here. What about Ryu? What happens if he comes back to find our lifeless body? What would that do to him? I don't want to put anybody through anything even remotely similar to what we're going through.\"\n\n\"Have you found a reason to live then BlowingWind? All the more reason to bring it down and eat it, before our pain, fear and confusion drive him away. As annoying as he is, I don't want to be left alone again either.\"\n\nThe Shadow darted off toward the sound, her Light racing at her heels as her kimono melted into her white doeskins. Darkened and twisted trees reached for the hunters, urging them to lay aside their weapons and sleep, to stay on the known side of the door into a realm where few ventured very far. Whispers and chants rattled along with gourds that fear spirits fiercely wielded to defend the great beast that dwelled within every person, but neither paid any mind, swept up in great rivers of adrenaline and the thrill of the hunt. They were Shaman, and instead of fighting to return the soul and health of another they now fought to retain the power and life they had been granted.\n\nAbove and beyond the terrible death rattles calling the life from their bones, the chants of the Elders of ages past and present wove and danced, reminding the pair of the eternal dance of Dark and Light. The broken wails of BlowingWind's mother twined in with the rest, begging a God she did not know for certain truly existed to be with her baby and reunite them again. Guilt ran slimy fingers over her at the cries. As the duo dodged the reaching grip of branches and brambles, the triumphant calls of the Beast continued as it laid waste to yet another part of her being and the subconscious constructions that protected her.\n\nAt last, the forest yielded its greatest test, drawing back suddenly from a ravaged and bloodstained battleground, revealing a field of horror and death. Formless and black as the most ancient of demons, her greatest fear waited to gobble them both in body and soul. Embers served as eyes, burning her soul as it laughed cruelly.\n\n\"Hello BlowingWind. It's about time that you faced me. I have been slowly devouring you for months now without a fight. It's a pity that less than half of your spirit has come to me though. You are very shattered. You may regret allowing that.\"\n\nBlowingWind rooted herself to the ground, determined not to give into her fear of the shapeless mass that had been poisoning her for so long.\n\n\"Name yourself.\"\n\n\"I am That Which Kills.\"\n\n\"That's not a name, that's a title. Cheater!\"\n\nRagingTornado had spoken this time, shifting her grip on her spear and inching closer, fire filling her eyes with life. BlowingWind readied herself and asked again.\n\n\"What is your name?\"\n\nThe inky mist congealed as it laughed, giving birth to two forms within its charged confines. The familiar shapes came to the edge of the mist, rotted and pale as the corpses they were, worms eating at their defiled flesh as they shuffled from the Deeps.\n\n\"I am your Greatest Fear.\"\n\nThe mists parted, and BlowingWind locked eyes with the clouded eyes of the spirit she loved, and the spirit she had become bound to. Icy fingers squeezed her heart and stole her breath, while at her side her Shadow hissed in pain and clutched her own heart. Finally, the pain overcame the fear, and BlowingWind screamed as the sleeping spell broke.\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Wind-chan, I've brought you some venison. I hope you have been comfortable.\"\n\n\"Welcome back, Master.\"\n\nThe door swung open for Ryu, who entered carrying several parts of a butchered deer. Blood on his robes told the tale of how he had rent it himself, bleeding it as he worked to preserve the much older robes that BlowingWind had been given for their wedding. Behind him, the servant shut the door.\n\n\"Thank you, Ku. You fell asleep in the chair Wind-chan? You must have been tired if you didn't finish your exploring, or at least make it to the bed. I'm surprised that you didn't find the instruments.\"\n\n\"She didn't fall asleep Master. I enchanted her.\"\n\nLaughing, Ryu walked past the desk into the kitchen, through a door that had not been visible when BlowingWind had entered.\n\n\"Let me guess, she wanted to hunt her own meat, and you didn't think it appropriate for a woman.\"\n\n\"She also wanted to remove your robes. I did not think that appropriate since she claims to be part of your house now.\"\n\n\"Ku, you're more old-fashioned than my Ototo. He at least lets Omoto hunt her own game.\"\n\n\"A woman's place is in the home or at the shrine.\"\n\nRyu opened the freezer and the refrigerator, putting the meat away before glancing around his modern kitchen at the new conveniences that had been manifested by his human's presence. Pinewood walled the room, contrasting with the steel and black of the stove, dishwasher, and freezer/fridge combination. The coffeepot brought a wider smile to his face.\n\n\"I still have to go and get her the coffee and chocolate I promised her. You didn't let her see the bedroom, much less anything else other than the living room. Just what did you think I was going to do to her if I found a comely female asleep in my nest?\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure of her, Master. She is a human, and though she claims to have married you, I wasn't sure what type of bond you had entered into with her.\"\n\nRyu leaned against the doorjamb separating the kitchen from the living room, frowning as he watched his shaman's troubled sleep.\n\n\"For now, she is just my Miko. She isn't ready to be filled yet. The poor girl has so many demons of her own to face. I can't ask her to give clues about my own yet, much less coil within her inner springs.\"\n\n\"So why her?\"\n\nRyu sighed and moved across the room to the door leading into the bathroom.\n\n\"Why not? She needs someone to take care of her, and maybe having someone to care for will help with my own problems. Now, I'm a mess, I am going to bathe and change before I move her. Eating my own kill is much cleaner than preparing it for use by another. If she wakes up before I am done, you can let her know I am back.\"\n\n\"Yes Master.\"\n\nRyu opened the door to the bathroom, and then frowned at the billows of cloudy white lace that had taken over his simple bathroom, and the powder blue towels that had replaced the ones he had left for later use.\n\n\"Ok you two, everybody out, and please don't completely womanize my whole cabin. This is far too much lace.\"\n\nTwo chuckling orbs disengaged themselves to float behind him. Neither had the slightest intention to leave him alone now that it had been confirmed the cabin conformed to the thoughts and energies of the occupants.\n\n\"I can see what you will be like as a ghost. I don't suppose either of you are interested in going back into your body?\"\n\n\"No, not yet.\"\n\n\"They should be ready soon though.\"\n\nRyu wasn't sure which of the orbs had said what, but decided not to let it show.\n\n\"Father was right. Females make no sense. I'm sure you would like a long, hot bath too, but it's rather difficult without a body, and I'm not letting you share mine for this. If you filled it with frothy lace, who knows what else it will cross your minds to do to me.\"\n\nWith that, Ryu waved his hand, reordering the room to include his Jacuzzi bathtub and black towels, and then closed the door behind him after he was sure they had seen. From where they floated, the rushing stream of hot water as he rinsed in the shower and filled the separate tub called as loudly as the waterfall within their body that they needed to return to.\n\n\"Oh, he fights dirty, Love.\"\n\n\"Ryu's right though, since he won't take us with him for that, and Wind and Tornado aren't ready yet, it will be a long time before we can soak.\"\n\n\"Man, I want a bath after Ryu's hunt. He makes it look so effortless. It sure beats a gun, bow, or trap.\"\n\n\"Mmh. Wisdom, how are we going to know it's time?\"\n\nThe silver orb floated over to the sleeping woman while the pink one settled carefully on a bookshelf next to a small model of an ancient Chinese weapon neither could recognize.\n\n\"I don't know. I am free to go at any time, but there is some connection between you and Ryu that won't make it easy for you to reenter. You've become dependent on him, and however he got you is going to have to be reversed to put you back. Can you remember anything yet?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nBlowingWind's scream brought Love hurtling off of her perch in a panic while Wisdom dove into her body to find out what the problem had been. At the same time, the bathroom door slammed open to reveal a dripping, and towel-clad, Ryu.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\nBlowingWind's eyes focused on the room, her ragged breaths a panted testament to the spiritual battle she had awoken herself from. Ryu knelt in front of her, ignoring for a short time the trembling form of Love huddled in a far corner, waiting for the clouds to finish clearing from her eyes.\n\n\"BlowingWind, what's wrong? What happened?\"\n\n\"I can't. I can't stay here. You'll be hurt. Not again.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\nRyu eased the trembling woman into his lap, watching for any sign that she would bolt. Wrapping her in his arms like she was a child, he pillowed her head on his chest. Love rolled over to the pair, slipping unnoticed into the dragon.\n\n\"I don't want it to get you. You don't deserve that. You've been kind to me, even though I have been a real witch to you.\"\n\n\"What don't you want to get me?\"\n\n\"My greatest fear.\"\n\nShe slipped into sleep again, innocent and soft as the child she had once been, tired and trusting as she gathered life energy to herself.\n\n\"You must be facing your demons finally. Don't worry Little One, they won't hurt me. Let's get you into bed.\"\n\nRyu smiled as he lifted her, feeling his heart begin to beat in tandem with hers as his bond to her tied him more firmly into her world.\n\n\"Be strong.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Starlight Spider Web\n\nThe moon had risen and set seven times, getting smaller every trip she made across the sky after Amaterasu had set. Ryu could no longer remember why the sun goddess and her brother Tsuki-yomi fought, but it served to denote the passing of time. BlowingWind still had not awoken again, lost within his volcanic coverlets upon the bed.\n\n\"This isn't what I meant when I told her to sort her feelings Master.\"\n\nRyu sighed.\n\n\"Ku, she recently lost someone she loved very much and now finds herself my bride, however minor a consort others would consider her. That is something that takes time. For her peace of mind, I am glad that her cycle I now know, but I hope she wakes up before her feeding presents a danger.\"\n\nTaking a sip of water, he gently passed the life giving fluid into her mouth and watched as her body reflexively swallowed. A sip of the venison broth that he had laced with healing herbs chased the sip of water. His saliva that mixed with the items finished the spell, nourishing her soul as much as her body, and thankfully unable to kindle life within her, at her current point of her cycle. Drawing back, he watched as her eyes fluttered, and then opened gently as spring blossoms.\n\n\"Well, it seems that Shin decided to rejoin with you finally and you are back at my side. I hope you are well rested.\"\n\n\"Ryu?\"\n\n\"Hai.\"\n\nBlowingWind struggled to sit up, still exhausted by her first encounter with her inner demon and from the stress of reassimilating part of herself.\n\n\"Stay down. All you've had the past week is water and broth.\"\n\n\"Well, now I know how long I've been asleep. I'm afraid to ask how you fed me though.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't be very happy if I told you, especially if you know much about my species.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought. I did read something in a mythology book about dragon saliva having fertilizing and healing properties. If you've made me a mother already, then you are in serious trouble. You're a scaly coyote, taking advantage of me while I was asleep like that. Thank you for feeding me though.\"\n\n\"I don't think that will be a problem, but we will watch you for a while anyway. I have some rice sitting on the stove, Wind-chan. I had mixed some venison with it, but I can pick it out of your bowl if you don't feel up to something so solid.\"\n\n\"Venison sounds delicious Ryu.\"\n\n\"I'll be right back then. Stay put.\"\n\n\"I've been asleep for a week!\"\n\nRyu's answer drifted to her from the kitchen.\n\n\"And you were fasting for only Kami knows how long before you came to me, with only small meals with Fuji-sama after that.\"\n\n\"Fine. But I don't have to like it.\"\n\nShe took advantage of his absence to look around the room, noting how once again everything was a swirl of lava, rich earth, or blackest night interspersed with bronze, copper, or gold. Her red kimono had been carefully folded and stowed on a shelf, as was her doeskin dress and precious knapsack. Ryu had a shelf for clothing as well, and in the closet she could see a normal teacher's slacks and dress shirts peeking out along with shy oxfords and some casual yukata. A night table beside the generous bed held the small bowl of broth that he had recently been feeding her from, and a cup of water. Looking down at herself, her under kimono was missing, replaced by a white cotton T-shirt that was oversized on her.\n\nBlowingWind groaned and blushed when the implications hit her.\n\n\"Ryu, why did you undress me?\"\n\nHe reentered the room bearing a black ceramic bowl filled with the promised meat and rice, along with mahogany chopsticks.\n\n\"Would you rather I not have cared for your needs? I didn't think that you would have appreciated waking up in a crusty pool of blood. At least I know why you were so testy.\"\n\n\"What other embarrassing things have you done to me?\"\n\n\"That's all. Now open.\"\n\nRyu sat down on a chair beside the bed that she had somehow missed, smiling and stifling his laughter at her discomfort.\n\n\"I can feed myself still Ryu.\"\n\n\"Alright, I guess I should let you keep some dignity. I've seen worse though.\"\n\nHe handed the utensils over reluctantly; watching as she carefully brought each bite to her lips and spoke between mouthfuls.\n\n\"Worse? That's right, you're a spirit, and have probably seen quite a bit.\"\n\n\"I've watched countless human battles, and fought in wars among spirit kind that humans have no knowledge of. I don't mind the rainmaking battles, it's interesting to watch the arashi-gami, but I would much rather attend to your needs than to help patch up another friend wounded in pointless fights over the fate of humans in relation to the land.\"\n\n\"Are we really that bad?\"\n\n\"No. Spirits get scared of what they don't understand, just like humans or anything else. Others become jealous of what you humans have made or taken, and so want to fight for possession. Others are just started because some of us are twisted. Most are just skirmishes of minor spirits against defenseless innocents. It is easy to forget that humans are children of the Ancestral Kami too.\"\n\n\"What about the other battles?\"\n\n\"Territory disputes, perceived slights, breeding rights and courtship rituals, the occasional malcontent seeking to overthrow a dynasty... It seems that the only worlds of peace are the Heavens. But even those I sometimes doubt. You are doing well.\"\n\nBlowingWind sheepishly put her empty bowl down.\n\n\"I hate to admit it, but you're a good cook.\"\n\n\"Was that a compliment?\"\n\nRyu's smirk played on his lips while BlowingWind blushed.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Since you seem to be feeling so much better, would you like to go for a short walk? We had a small rain shower a little while ago, and the raindrops still look like diamonds on the leaves.\"\n\n\"I do get to get myself dressed, right?\"\n\n\"I'd have to maim and eat anything else that saw you in what you are wearing now, including the house guardian. If you need anything, either call me or concentrate on what you need, and it will materialize. Here anyway.\"\n\nRyu rose, taking the finished meal with him, and gently walked to the door. She watched him go, and caught the flicker of a spectral tail as the door shut behind him. When the rushing water in the kitchen told her he was occupied with cleaning the dishes, she quietly rose to pad over to her shelf.\n\n\"At least I don't need to check my underwear. No pads or bandage means that I'm already done for at least a day, unless he had tampons kicking around for some weird reason. I can't believe he did that though, how embarrassing. Can it get worse?\"\n\nPulling down her doeskins, BlowingWind breathed in their earthy scent. \"Grandmother, you have no idea how much these mean to me.\"\n\nPulling on her dress quickly, she frowned, \"With sleeping for a week, I must look like a wreck.\"\n\nA golden mirror and brush materialized on the nightstand, and she cautiously pulled the brush through her hair until it shone like silk and the tangles had fled in defeat. \"More magic. I wonder if I'm in the Spirit World still, or if this is just a retreat in the Human World. Well BlowingWind, I guess that's enough primping for you. It's just a walk, not a date.\"\n\nSteeling herself and squaring her shoulders, she put down the mirror and brush, watching as they faded back to wherever they had come from. \"This could seriously put a damper on my self-reliance. I need to be able to provide for myself. I hope he doesn't intend on keeping me here. School starts in March after all.\"\n\nOpening the door, she was greeted by the sounds of Ryu humming an ancient melody to himself in the kitchen as he worked, and the voice of the household servant.\n\n\"I hope that you found everything that you needed, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you. How is it that things fade away when they are not needed?\"\n\n\"You refer to the brush and mirror, Mistress?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I transferred them from the bathroom to the bedroom, then back. A simple process really, but one that Ryu-sama has not mastered yet. He is still quite young after all.\"\n\n\"What haven't I mastered?\"\n\nRyu stood in the kitchen door, watching as BlowingWind jumped and his servant answered.\n\n\"Object teleportation, Ryu-sama.\"\n\n\"At least I'm getting better at it though, Ku. You look lovely BlowingWind. Are you ready? Your moccasins were put by the door, as were your geta.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nSilently she pulled them on, feeling much better after putting on the familiar gear that now covered her feet. The door swung open as she stood, revealing dusk bejeweled with stars peeking through the haze of rice paddies and city pollution and shining liquid diamonds filling in for the stars upon the earth. A light step fell behind her, sweeping her out the door into Nature's embrace.\n\n\"I thought this would put you at ease and soothe your chafed spirit.\"\n\nTo her right Ryu walked beside her, gently tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow. A warrior's soul streaked through the sky, falling to earth from the Star Path and pulling a gasp out of a still numb heart.\n\n\"It's so magical.\"\n\n\"Nature always is.\"\n\nA spider web had trolled the air fruitlessly for flies, displaying the jewels of life that had been caught instead from the deeply purple sky that was now almost velvet black. The sight of the sodden spider resting under leaves at the edge reminded BlowingWind of how trapped she truly was.\n\n\"It would have been better to let me die Ryu.\"\n\n\"I guess I'm a sucker for difficult situations. I don't understand why you keep saying you only bring trouble though.\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about that, not yet.\"\n\nAnother star fell, blazing brightly and then dying bravely far from its goal. The wind danced in the trees, which sang low songs known only to them.\n\n\"I'm not a psychologist Wind-chan, so I don't know much about healing the mind, and I can only hear very strong thoughts from you, so I'm not really psychic either. It is distracting to listen to you constantly blaming yourself. You weren't even with him when he died.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Then why are you so scared?\" Ryu had slid behind her easily as a shadow to enfold her softly in arms that had taken countless lives, and would devour many more in the course of history, as he whispered his question to her. Ryu instinctively nuzzled at her ear, subconsciously imitating the way his parents had soothed him as a pup.\n\n\"I can't tell you. No matter what we do, Fate will have her way.\"\n\nA tear slipped down her face, unseen but smelled by the salt marring the mountain's forest night with its seaside tang. Warm lips brushed the nape of her neck, sending shockwaves throughout her touch-starved body from that hot epicenter of flesh as a blush erupted onto her face.\n\n\"I will do what I can to mitigate your pain.\"\n\nShe turned in his arms, drowning him in her melancholy pools lit by the jewels of her soul from the deepest currents of her being. His heart sped as the starlight showed how pale she was, a child of mountain winds now but a lost and colorless thread in the Grand Tapestry.\n\n\"I'm so lonely, Ryu. It hurts. I want to heal, but I don't know how. My Fear is great, and even if whole I don't know what to do to defeat it. Every time I think I have my life together, it changes completely, and little bits of myself are lost.\"\n\nAs suddenly as the wall was down, it rose again, although considerably weaker than before, a lone fortress instead of the Great Wall of China. The defiance burned in her eyes like watch fires, as if by admitting her weakness she was afraid of loosing a decisive battle. Ryu found himself drawn to the gateway of her lips, ghostly sakura blossoms in the night, but dared not invade.\n\n\"There is much I can do about that, if you would let me in. Just because our marriage is binding in the spirit realm does not mean we are legally bound here in your realm. If you will let me, I could court you properly. Even if you will not allow me to woo you, you will still not be alone.\"\n\nLaughter floated through the trees, mocking and wheedling at once, like a magpie.\n\n\"Of Love BlowingWind is afraid. Is not a warrior bold? Is not a shaman brave? Why keep your heart so cold? Tuck your tail my Coyotero. Slither away, infant Snake, and hide. Hunter, draw your broken bow. Step into where Mystery abides.\"\n\nThe chortling song faded away as the spy danced through the night, the echoes melting away like soy paste into miso soup.\n\n\"That Brat. He told me both to accept and not accept. Now I know I'm in trouble whichever way I go. That Blasted Trickster Coyote! Your wife will have your hide when you get home!\"\n\nNature continued to whirl in all her beauty, the forest dancing with itself, uncaring of the countless dramas being enacted within its bounds. The romance of the night had died a bloody death for the pair below the chattering sword of Coyote's taunts.\n\n\"Come along then, we might as well go inside before some Tengu decides to test my patience or an Oni smells you, Wind-chan. After what things they have gone through, they aren't all friendly.\"\n\n\"Please don't tell me you expect to be sleeping in the same bed again.\"\n\n\"Of course. Why not? We are married.\"\n\n\"I want something sharp dividing us.\"\n\n\"Don't you trust me?\"\n\nBlowingWind glared at Ryu, putting her hands on her hips.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Ouch. That hurts.\"\n\n\"I'm not falling for it.\"\n\n\"Please let me hold you? I promise my hands will be good.\"\n\nRyu's eyes pleaded with her as he held his hand out toward her, but she danced back after smacking one.\n\n\"I barely know you!\"\n\n\"So? Not very long ago, you would have had no say in who you married.\"\n\nAs BlowingWind walked through the door, Ryu caught a new spark in her eye. He followed her inside, receiving as his answer a sharp crack over the head with her Tengu Staff.\n\n\"Ok, that's it. You have to learn who is chief here, little girl.\"\n\nSweeping her up over his shoulder, her shrieks soon turned to laughter, confusing the dragon as he carried her to their bed.\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\"\n\nFingers dove into his armpits, drawing a surprised yip from him as he dropped her to glare at her still convulsing form.\n\n\"What in the seven Hells was that for?\"\n\n\"I'm very ticklish! I was getting my revenge.\"\n\n\"Oh? Are you? Then I'll be taking my revenge now.\"\n\nRyu descended on her now wriggling form, and their peals of laughter carried into the night as they fought for supremacy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Sorting Seed, Grinding Meal\n\nGolden gleams cut back through the night, darting between rock and tree as if they were sagebrush and shadow, back where the shaman he considered his grandchild had been born. Taking on one of his many human forms, Coyote peered through the window of the small cabin the girl had lain in for the past week, mumbling to himself and Creator.\n\n\"Matchmaking really isn't my profession, but there are others to mirror that I am neglecting.\"\n\nA second set of golden jewels joined the first as a shadow winged down to roost upon his shoulder. Both spirits of Turtle Island watched the questioned pair sleep, separated by a sword that knowing the girl, had been meant to keep wandering hands away.\n\n\"What is she so afraid of Coyote?\"\n\n\"The curse isn't gone you know Raven. Her father's murder was a result of it, but Obsidian knew he was going to die early even before he met this girl. It was his misfortune to have inherited that lake, and his misfortune that White Man could not have found a more friendly way to situate that power plant.\"\n\nThe dragon was still, barely anything vibrating, the normally lively dance of his soul paused as if he had reentered the egg, or stone, his dragon shape had hatched from.\n\n\"He's so still. Are you sure he's a natural dragon, and not just some human wizard that's learned shape-shifting?\"\n\n\"Raven, have I ever been wrong?\"\n\n\"Coyote, think about that.\"\n\n\"Go ahead and rub it in then, but I'm not wrong about this.\"\n\nBlowingWind stirred, shifting her face towards the open window, but fell back into the arms of sleep when Ryu moved slightly towards her.\n\n\"You would think that getting back part of her soul would give her more energy.\"\n\n\"She slept a week straight Raven, and he took care of her. He passed sustenance into her as if she were a very young pup being taught how to eat, and used a great deal of his energy to help her bind that part of her soul back within her body. They are both rebuilding their stores. It probably doesn't help that she started a tickle war with him over a really stupid thing.\"\n\nThe raven shook his head at everything and nothing in particular.\n\n\"BlowingWind had always been unpredictable. Are you sure this plan of yours will work?\"\n\n\"You and I both know she will sneak off sooner or later to think, and how long she wanders when she has no commitments to worry about. Like a moth to a campfire, he will go after her. After all, he's still got part of her soul, and oddly enough, that part happens to be her heart.\"\n\n\"With how deeply he's sleeping, I don't think you will need any sleeping songs to keep him knocked out for her head start.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Who's the idiot that kept the sun in a trunk?\"\n\n\"Fine, but Hawk and I are taking you home soon.\"\n\nThe shadow leaped into the air in a silent flurry, melding back into the shadows, unaware of the Tengu watching from the pines at the edge of the clearing. Coyote's song rode the wind, winding around the dragon now dreaming of winding around his prize, pushing Ryu deeper into sleep with the magic of desert and mountain.\n\nThe new day peeked shyly over the horizon, pearl gray warming into rose and gold as the sun goddess climbed into the sky again for her daily inspection of the world. Birdsong wove into heavenly choirs as Amaterasu's warmth roused them from sleep, and twin blue skies opened to view the starling singing on the windowsill of the bedroom.\n\n\"Good morning, Little Brother.\"\n\nThe starling preened, and then started singing again as it flew away, drawing a giggle from BlowingWind. Her eyes fell downward, observing the tousled head that pouted in his sleep.\n\n\"I see you were good last night, the sword is still between us. Thank you for that concession, Ryu.\"\n\nRyu replied by groaning at the sun and pulling his pillow over his face. Another giggle slipped out as she got up and stretched.\n\n\"You would be more energetic if you hadn't spent so much of the night watching me sleep, or tickling me half the night trying to get me to give in before bed. So much for well-behaved hands.\"\n\nWandering out of the bedroom and finding the kitchen, the shy smile dripped away as she fell into thought, pondering Ryu's last proposition.\n\n\"I have a lot to think about. Either way, I feel like a traitor. I guess that's what I get for following one of Coyote's illusions. I suppose he meant well, Coyote isn't bad, just a little foolish like all of us.\"\n\n\"What's wrong, Mistress?\"\n\nSitting on a chair at the kitchen table, BlowingWind rubbed her forehead while studying the close grain of the wood.\n\n\"He asked to court me last night. Who asks to court any more? It's sweet in an old-fashioned kind of way. But he asked to court me!\"\n\n\"Is that bad? You are already his chief and only wife.\"\n\n\"I was very attached to the last spirit that had courted me, and lost him. I'm cursed you know. I'm afraid of what will happen to Ryu.\"\n\n\"You are already bound. Master's fate is already sealed.\"\n\n\"What if it isn't? What if I can still save him from me? I feel like I threw him in a blender and hit frappe.\"\n\nBlowingWind held her face in her hands, shuddering as she pictured what had happened to Obsidian.\n\n\"Mistress, I think you should eat something. It will help you see reality.\"\n\n\"Ku? Please stop. My name is BlowingWind, not Mistress. I'm still American, and we didn't do this ranking nonsense there. It makes me uncomfortable. Onegai?\"\n\n\"If that is what you want.\"\n\n\"Arigato.\"\n\nBlowingWind got up, prowling through the kitchen for anything that caught her eye. Most of the dishes she did not recognize, but the indispensable pot of rice was easily found. Nothing appealed to her though.\n\n\"I think I'll go for a walk.\"\n\n\"It is not safe.\"\n\n\"It's no more dangerous now than it was when I first set out on this quest of mine. The only difference is my increasing doubt that I will find what I was searching for, and wondering what I was really looking for.\"\n\nAbandoning the kitchen, she went back to the bedroom, carefully putting on her knapsack. Pausing by the bed, Ryu's now uncovered face caught her attention, his eyes staring at her though clearly they were still sleeping. Kneeling beside the bed, she studied him.\n\n\"I wonder if that's normal for you. Ryu, if you can hear me I'm going out for a little air.\"\n\nA soft peck on an upturned cheek caused his eyes to slip shut once more, succumbing to the ropes of slumber that were ever beckoning. An odd throb in her heart confused her body even more than the mind already was, and she drifted to the door. After tying her moccasins, BlowingWind silently padded out the door to join with the wind, following once more where it blew her.\n\nHer feet danced through grass and over stones, light as deer along their tracks. Cedar and pine coated her with their sweet perfume as dew washed her legs. The beat of her heart sped as her legs flashed percussion for the incessant chatter of the birds. As always, the wind seemed to feel her mood and it sighed her twisted thoughts throughout the primeval forest.\n\n\"Ku's right. His fate is already sealed, just like Obsidian's. If the legend of the curse is real, he might not die like Obsidian did. If that's so, I might be with him for life. But is he who I want for an earthly husband?\"\n\nBlue peeked though a curtain of trees, the smell of sweet water calling to the woman who had once freely roamed distant lake-shores. The ground sloped toward the lake, as if it too felt the primordial pull of the ebb and flow of the Elixir of Life. Picking her way down the steep and eager incline, she continued her voiced musings.\n\n\"Ryu's sweet, and he's saved my life and taken care of me. Without him I would probably have been one of the so-called suicides rotting out here. But something about him irritates me.\"\n\nShe had won her way to the water's edge, sinking down on a rock and praying her perch was uninhabited. Clasping her hands the way her mother instinctively did when she felt something evil was about to happen, BlowingWind felt the familiar sense of cold heat when her spirit was shielded.\n\n\"I let the Light Protect me.\"\n\nThe wind danced, making waves play upon the once glassy surface of the mere.\n\n\"Maybe it's because he is so irritatingly direct. It took Obsidian years to kiss me, although I had wanted to since I was twelve, and it was only ever on the cheek. What kind of woman does Ryu think I am?\"\n\nThe wind rose and fell, as if it wished to sweep her up in intangible arms to rock it all away.\n\n\"What kind of woman am I? I'm spiritually married only months after Obsidian's death. What would he say? And I've not been able to tell my mother that I'm safe. I wonder if she got the letter I sent when I was at the Takamura's?\"\n\nReaching down, she picked up a pebble, skipping it far across the water over the caps. Tears began to wash the beginnings of streams into her face.\n\n\"The worst part is that I'm actually attracted to him. I barely know him, but I have been wondering what it would be like. I never actually thought about that with Obsidian. He was so placid, but Ryu is like a smoldering ember. I'm so terrible! That sword I requested was for me as much as to keep him off of me!\"\n\nThe wind dropped away, as quickly as if she had caught it up in a knot on a red string like her Celtic ancestors supposedly had been able to.\n\n\"What would Obsidian really want me to do? I don't want to abandon him. I don't want anyone to take his place in my heart.\"\n\nAnother stone found its way into her hand to fling itself out across the water to release some of her anger and drown it in the frigid depths. A guttural cry rose from her throat, ululating up to the Heavens and down to the very roots of the Earth, carrying her sorrow and guilt upon wings of confusion. The wind picked up, released from its shock, embracing her in whirls of earth and leaves as a human spirit took form long enough to embrace his only child.\n\n\"I know you will do what's right Wind. Follow your heart and be happy.\"\n\n\"Daddy? I'm so scared and confused.\"\n\n\"A stag's antlers have more than one point, and Rattlesnake's tail has more than one bead.\"\n\nThe arms dissolved and the winds rose directly into the distant sea of the sky, her father returning to the sky realm again, leaving a feather clutched in shaking hands remaining upon the fertile earth.\n\n\"Follow my heart?\"\n\nA beast chose that moment to rise, roaring its hunger to the forest.\n\n\"I guess right now I should follow my stomach before it eats itself. Hey, those berries look tasty.\"\n\nHaze retreated to the horizon of his mind, releasing him again into the land of the living. Nightmares had tormented him throughout the night, feasting on the insecurities he had hidden so very carefully from his fragile human bride, and causing him to spend much of it watching her sleep. He had fought them easily when she had been assimilating herself, when he had been free to hold her in his arms or wind her into his coils and feel her living warmth. For reasons completely unfathomable to him, she had insisted he unsheathe one of his antique swords and place it betwixt them.\n\nOn discovery of her weakness he had exploited it, but her hands instinctively had found his own ticklish points, resulting in a draw. So, the sword had slept with them.\n\nMorning sun greeted his eyes with her golden glow, painting everything into a warm panorama of peace. His nest was cold and empty though, his bride having removed herself hours ago.\n\n\"I thought I was dreaming when she said she was going for some air.\"\n\nSauntering to the closet, he quickly stripped out of the formal robes he had worn for so long in her presence, glancing at the window vaguely hoping to see a feminine shape frozen in surprise. No such form materialized for him though, and in disappointment he pulled out a simpler cotton yukata in his red and yellow.\n\n\"I'll go back to modern clothes when we are done in the forest. I hope she remembered to eat something.\"\n\nPrancing to the bathroom, he checked on the state of his countenance and his hair, grumbling when he began to pull the brush through his hair.\n\n\"Why does it always look like I tried to eat an electricity imp in the morning? I probably barely even moved, and it still looks like this.\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ku?\"\n\n\"Mistress BlowingWind has been gone for quite some time now. She said she was going for a walk, but that was hours ago.\"\n\n\"Exactly how long?\"\n\n\"The birds had only just begun to sing.\"\n\n\"That is quite a while. Did she seem distressed to you?\"\n\n\"She had been talking aloud to herself about someone called Coyote. She was also distressed that you asked to court her.\"\n\n\"I knew I shouldn't have asked. It's obvious that she hates me and only tolerates me because I have been protecting her.\"\n\nHe dragged himself dejectedly into the living room, flopping forlornly into his desk chair to stare at the sketches of her that he had done as she slept. The angelic face pouted up at him, mockingly innocent.\n\n\"Master, she likes you very much. She is suffering under some foolish delusion that her curse is going to make her hurt you.\"\n\n\"Yes, we've been over that.\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"It's nothing. I should go and collect her now.\"\n\nHe strode out of his front door, hiding once again all traces of uncertainty. Showing weakness in the forest could be death, as many had found out the hard way. The solemn forest waited for his entry, and he lifted his nose to the wind.\n\n\"It shouldn't be too hard to track such an unusual spice through the forest.\"\n\n\"You would be surprised, Young Dragon, how difficult it can be to find her when she wants to be alone. She led her poor lake spirit on many a chase through her home forest when someone had annoyed her.\"\n\nRyu's eyes narrowed as he turned to see where the owner of the voice lurked. Tawny fur disengaged itself from the shadows around a shrub, laughing eyes pinning the dragon.\n\n\"Coyote. Don't you have anything better to do than to haunt the poor girl? You seem almost as bad as a Kitsune.\"\n\n\"I am not haunting. It's my job to show shamans and others what not to do. Creator himself gave me the job. This time though, I am actually worried about my grandchild.\"\n\n\"So you confuse her?\"\n\n\"No. I merely showed her what not to do. Now you have two choices: show her exactly how much you care, or let her slip away. No matter how much she might try, she can't stop walking between worlds. I'm sure you know what happens when someone like her has no strong tether on either side.\"\n\n\"They go mad. Every spirit knows this. She's well on her way already.\"\n\nThe frown that had found Ryu's face etched itself deeper, beginning to look like the floor of a lava tube. Coyote laughed at his distress, leaping into the forest and following the traces of BlowingWind's trail.\n\n\"Don't be a cowardly dragon! She's waiting for you. Perhaps you could sing a love song and charm her clothes off.\"\n\n\"Come back here you flea-laden mini-wolf! I don't care if you are a grandfather to her, I'll garland my high seat with your intestines, and your teeth and claws shall be the magatama for my innocent Miko's rosary!\"\n\n\"You would be surprised at how she really is if you knew half of the things I've heard her discuss with her childhood girlfriends.\"\n\nA dark beast stirred, roaring his fury and fully stretching into his body. Take Ryu claimed his entire self as he took off into the forest, fully ready to enjoy the blood and flesh of the one who had spoken of removing his innocent maiden's clothing. The dragon took his real shape, a river of black and red death rampaging through the forest, easily capturing his prey and rending him into bloody pieces. A feral and wild cry echoed through the forest, capturing his attention before he could finish with his threat.\n\n\"BlowingWind!\"\n\nContinuing through the forest after the source of the heartrending shriek, Ryu left his prey. After the unbalanced dragon left, Coyote's broken body slowly pulled itself back together.\n\n\"Thank you Creator for making me always able to return to life.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Listening to Coyote\n\nThe forest had pulled her farther into itself as she quietly walked along, in search of berries, or small game that she could easily bring down with a rock. Midmorning poured through Nature's cathedral to light her way, and soothe her soul, as the wind whispered secrets in its ancient language.\n\nUnknowingly, she slipped between the worlds of spirit and man, flickering like a ghost and startling a monk that was making a circuitous pilgrimage around the base of the mountain, the woman silent as a shadow, stealthy as a mountain lion. He watched in wonder as she faded in and out before his eyes, murmuring a sutra, believing that he had seen a forest demon. The apparition paid him no mind though, flashing through the forest intent on her errand. Minutes later, a fallen sapling lay across her path, drawing her to a stop.\n\n\"That could make a good spear. Thank you for giving yourself. You are already dry for me even.\"\n\nA moss mantled stone sat by the edge of the path, and there she sat to work her tool. Digging into a small medicine pouch around her neck, BlowingWind carefully pulled out a small flint scraper she had found on one of her many childhood walks through the woods.\n\n\"It looks like you will be put to work again, Little One.\"\n\nThe outer bark fell away quickly below her hands, and soon light fingers were smoothing the sapling, as she remembered Obsidian's words when he had once tried to teach her to make a simple spear. The scent of the fire came back as she swept back in time.\n\n\"You want to use a straight sapling and the straighter the better. Even the straightest need straightening and it takes a whole day to dry these buggers. Arrows are quicker since you can use reeds, but it's the same process really. If you heat the bend over the fire, you can use your hands. Hold it until it's cool and move on.\"\n\n\"It's hot Obsidian! What happens next?\"\n\n\"You smooth it. A steel knife is okay, but a stone, bone, or piece of glass gives a better result. You won't take big chunks out that way, or at least you'll be less tempted to so you don't cut your hands.\"\n\n\"That stick doesn't look like it's going to kill anything. Are you sure it's almost done?\"\n\nThe bottom of the lake had sparkled in his eyes, laughter singing below his surface as he held the willow shaft in the smoke and heat over the coals of his fire pit.\n\n\"Pointed right and cured well, this is as deadly as any spear tipped with stone or metal. If you ever get lost, you can use this process to procure a means of obtaining your meat. If you make a forked one, you can fish much easier than grabbing the Slippery Ones by hand. They also make it a lot easier to harvest apples.\"\n\n\"Wow Obsidian. Your parents must be survival buffs. I don't know if I have the patience for doing this though.\"\n\n\"They are something like that, I guess. It beats throwing rocks.\"\n\nThe memory faded as she returned to the present, a wistful smile flitting across her face.\n\n\"That was a long time ago, before he told me his big secret. I must have been fifteen or so then. I wish I had a fire to cure you properly, but let's see if you'll do.\"\n\nFrowning at her feet, she inspected the leavings of her project.\n\n\"I shouldn't waste anything. I'll bag this up for fire starter for later.\"\n\nPutting the shavings in an empty pouch quickly, she then rose to continue her hunt when a rustle to her right returned the knowledge that she could also be prey for a larger animal, like Bear. Staring hard where the noise had been, she waited for an attack, but nothing came.\n\n\"It's probably just a squirrel then. A spear is overkill for that. I know I'd miss.\"\n\nWalking farther through the forest, another path intersected hers through the screens of bushes, bearing the tracks of a lone traveler, a silent haiku waiting to be heard.\n\n\"Deer.\"\n\nFollowing the tracks onto the weaving secondary trail, the utter silence of the forest raised the hairs of her neck.\n\n\"I still feel like I'm being stalked.\"\n\nQuickening her pace, she ran along after the tracks, silent as a ghost and light as a leaf in the wind.\n\nBarest hints of cinnamon were the only confirmation of his human's passing to the edge of the lake. The dragon irately prowled the area she had once sat in, chafing to whisk his prize back to their den.\n\n\"A little air my claws, this is at least a four hour hike for most humans. This is where her scream came from though. Where did she go and why can't I find her scent leading away? There isn't even a track!\"\n\n\"I told you she could be hard to find. All my harrying has taught her how to hide herself when needed.\"\n\nCoyote sat on his haunches beside the lake, blood still matting his fur as he eyed the frigid water, before leaping in long enough to rinse it away.\n\n\"You! I killed and dismembered you! How is it you are alive?\"\n\nCoyote sprayed the area with jewels of water before answering.\n\n\"Didn't she tell you? I always come back to life. It is Creator's will. What would the world be like without me?\"\n\n\"No wonder she doesn't like you.\"\n\n\"No. She's still mad at me for getting her in trouble with her mother when she was seven, so that she did not get to spend her father's last night with him. What she doesn't realize is that if she had gone to that rally with him, she probably would have been shot too.\"\n\n\"So you saved her life then?\"\n\n\"Unintentionally. I was more focused on getting a playmate.\"\n\n\"Leave her alone.\"\n\nBrown eyes flared to red, glowing embers and blazing fires ready to devour the tawny beast.\n\n\"Soon enough I'll be heading home for a while. You still haven't found her though. Her unconscious illusion is too strong for you?\"\n\nRyu took a step closer, his teeth gleaming in the light as he locked his more reasonable aspect away.\n\n\"I wouldn't do that, young dragon. I have a secret charm that will allow you to see her. Without me, your prey will get away.\"\n\n\"Give it to me.\"\n\n\"You have to promise not to kill me when we meet again.\"\n\n\"No deal.\"\n\n\"Fine. She'll find her way back to Man's civilization without you then, and drive herself crazy with her grief.\"\n\n\"Very well then. I won't kill you next time, but I can't guarantee after that.\"\n\n\"Good enough. This will only work one time to find her. If she sees you while you wear it, it loses its magic and can't be recharged. You can recharge it using the standard procedure.\"\n\nUsing his jaws, Coyote pulled a burr out of one of his matted tangles. Trotting over, he swiftly encased it in Ryu's waving mane.\n\n\"You're sure about this?\"\n\n\"Never fails. How do you think I've always been able to find her? Good hunting.\"\n\nCackling, Coyote took off into the forest in search of Raven and Hawk, eager to get away from the mess that would surely ensue from his meddling. Before Ryu could wonder why the Coyote had gone so easily, his quarry's scent cleared again and her tracks became plain.\n\n\"There you are Koibito. Let's see why you are hiding when I still have your soul. Or is it that you wish me to pursue you like you were a ryu-onna? You did attack me again last night after all.\"\n\nHer path wove through berry bushes and under trees, stopping here and there where something had called her to graze. Stalking quietly, the thrill of the hunt tingled through his nerves and sped his blood, the challenge of bringing her down beckoning to him and blinding him to the monk that was still chanting sutras where he had spotted the demon woman fleeing the dragon. The monk, frightened by seeing a dragon in its true form, chanted more sutras with more fervor than he ever had before, hoping to ward off the ill omen.\n\nFinally, Ryu found her, a smiling Tennyo working a dead bit of wood into a new creation. Lovingly the sapling was stroked with her stone, while her misty eyes watched a memory only she could see.\n\n\"I wish I could see your memory Little One. It will be good when our bond is strong enough that your strong mind can not repel me anymore, my lovely.\"\n\nHis thought coincided with her return to the present, her wordless song dying away, absorbed by the spear.\n\n\"That was a long time ago, before he told me his big secret. I must have been fifteen or so. I wish I had a fire to cure you properly, but let's see if you'll do.\"\n\nShe looked down at her feet, muttering vaguely about a fire later and putting her mess away before leaving.\n\n\"So she is running away! I won't let her.\"\n\nHe tensed to pounce, his tail flicking a bush as he shifted his weight. The sound attracted her, and she stared cautiously but without fear at where he was hidden, a warrior prepared for whatever was necessary. Her true face froze him, spellbound at the strength she displayed. Held still for ages, he relaxed when she laughed at herself.\n\n\"It's probably just a squirrel then. A spear is overkill for that. I know I'd miss.\"\n\nShe continued along the path, stopping only at an intersection where she leaned down to examine tracks in the softened dirt. Her scent changed, excitement swirling heavily and hooking his nose on great whirls of something close to possessive desire as she whispered to herself.\n\n\"Kami! She smells almost good enough to eat. No wonder Father likes to stalk Mother so much when she hunts.\"\n\n\"I still feel like I'm being stalked.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed as she spoke to herself, and when she shot off he gleefully followed at a leisurely pace. There was no need to rush, her tracks were plain, and although he had hunted recently, he had never hunted this type of quarry before. The dance was complex and his pride could not allow her to win.\n\n\"You are mine my BlowingWind, but yes, let us dance. We should do this right.\"\n\nStealthily padding after her, ancient desires roiled within him, building pressure with every step as her scent told him she thought nothing pursued her anymore. Her pace slowed as she caught up with her own prey, focusing instead on becoming one with the deer.\n\nIn a green carpeted clearing the buck grazed, the wind bringing the dragon its rich scent and the pounding surf flowing in its veins. He watched as she slowly hefted her spear, and then released the shaft like one of Susanowo's lightning bolts in a battle. The weapon traced a graceful arch, flying straight, but ultimately falling short of its mark, the arm propelling it unused to such tactics. The buck leaped for the forest, breaking down a panicked path where none had been before.\n\n\"It can't be fish I'm craving. No, it just has to be deer liver. At least it's not monkey liver. Yuck.\" Muttering to herself, BlowingWind collected her spear, and then tensed when the greenery shifted. \"What's out there?\"\n\nRyu had moved before she could see him, flashing after the buck faster than a human eye could travel and leaving little trace of his passing with practiced ease. BlowingWind could find nothing that would have made the noise, returning instead to the more fruitful prospect of pursuing her meal.\n\n\"At least the path will be easy to follow, but I'll have to get closer next time.\"\n\nRyu brought down the deer easily, reveling in its scent of terror and thanking the keeper of the deer for his generosity. Easily breaking its neck, he retreated and left the prize catch for BlowingWind. It was not long that he waited for her to find it.\n\nBlowingWind rested the haft of her spear on the ground, looking down at the deer lying dead on the ground.\n\n\"It seems someone has already taken my prey. I'd better not touch it in case it's a trap, or whatever spirit killed it returns with butchering tools.\n\nShe took a step away, freezing when a great beast growled its displeasure at her. Blue skies widened and yellowed in surprise, and the increased beat of the drum that was her heart called to the beast within him as he watched her struggle to thaw and whirl to face the rocks he had hidden behind.\n\n\"I've been hunted!\"\n\nThe woman brought the spear up; angry for having gotten so wrapped up in her hunt that she had been the quarry for another.\n\nAgain, the growl rose as Ryu fumed over his advance being rejected. Fear rose from her body in great billows as she fell easily into the classification of prey, exactly where he did not want her. He wanted to hear her challenge fly up to the sky, initiating the next step in the ancient dance. All he could do was growl and roar as the color drained out of her face. The roars shook the earth below him, and distantly he could feel as his molten river below the mountain rose several inches in his great frustration and his counterpart Take protested the display of temper. The changing pressure underground triggered another small quake, registering on the ultra-sensitive seismometers in Tokyo University's Geophysics department and gently setting the ground to roll like waves on a lake.\n\nIn fear, BlowingWind fled through the forest; desperate to escape the unknown rock beast she had angered.\n\n\"Rock demon! Ryu! The rock is gonna eat me!\"\n\n\"What? What rock demon?\"\n\nHis growls stopped, frozen by the shock of her terror as she fled. The raucous laughter of a Raven floated through the trees, grating his ears and spurring the young lady faster.\n\n\"The young Wind is no dragon, rock demon! She poses no threat to you, and she does not understand this is what part of you meant by courting.\"\n\nRoaring before taking up his kill in his jaws, Ryu exclaimed, \"I've been tricked! I never should have listened to Coyote.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Heart of a Shaman\n\nHer heart was a racing drum as her feet pounded out ancient rhythms upon the skin of the earth. Swift as Rabbit, she fled between the towering sentinels of pine and cedar, darting around boulders and stones, leaping living roots, but no burrow large enough for her was in the range of her endurance. Soon enough, a root reached out to trap her foot, and grasses eagerly embraced her falling form.\n\n\"Ow. I guess I'm still a little weak. I can't believe I chickened out back there. And I'm such a wimp I screamed for Ryu. He's back at his retreat miles away, there's no way he could have heard me. What's happened to me?\"\n\nRolling over onto her back, BlowingWind gazed up into the sky through the canopy of interwoven trees. Cottony white clumps of down skittered in the airstreams overhead against a backdrop of turquoise, paying no attention to the young shaman on the ground.\n\n\"At least I out ran it. I still want deer liver, but maybe the liver of something smaller will work.\"\n\nSitting up, a chipmunk peered at her from on top of one of the nearby rocks that was hugged by the gnarled fingers of roots. His cheeks puffed out with treasure, even this creature could present a challenge to capture, but no more difficult than a lizard.\n\n\"Here, Chip.\"\n\nFlinging herself at the chipmunk, BlowingWind did not hear the snapping of a branch as Ryu hid himself behind a tree, or his muttered gratefulness at storing his catch in one of his caches. The chipmunk chattered reprovingly at her as it scampered up the tree and her head introduced itself forcibly to the rock.\n\n\"Ouch. Just one bite, please? It won't hurt, I could kill you quickly.\"\n\nRyu, in his human form, stifled his laughter at how she gazed hungrily up the trunk, like a pup still too young to hunt on its own. Hidden behind a bush, he continued stalking his target.\n\n\"Fine, I'll eat somebody else.\"\n\nA rabbit hopped lazily through the glade as it foraged, unafraid of the still panting and physically weakened shaman. BlowingWind threw her spear when it came in range, but once again it fell short and the bunny hopped mockingly along.\n\n\"Coyote must have been the one to fell this sapling, my aim has never been this bad. Let's try something.\"\n\nCollecting her stick, BlowingWind looked for a suitable target.\n\n\"I'll aim for that clump of grass ten feet away since it only seems to have a ten foot range.\"\n\nTaking aim and then releasing, her spirit soared with the primitive spear, then fell as it obstinately flew ten feet beyond her mark.\n\n\"Yup, I either suck at spear hunting, or Coyote bewitched the stick. I've got to get some meat, and it's too far to head back to Ryu before eating something better than nuts and berries. Why does it have to be liver?\"\n\nRyu's heart soared to hear that she was considering returning to his side, and he could no longer contain his laughter at her childish antics. At that moment, the spear dissolved, and now weaponless, BlowingWind whirled around to face her stalker. Before she could turn to see him, Ryu laid out the deer liver on the large maple leaf he had kept it wrapped in, retreating behind another tree.\n\nNothing greeted her, save for the liver offering itself. Timidly as a fawn, she approached the oddity, carefully not touching it. Looking around from that vantage, the woods still did not reveal her pursuer.\n\n\"If you are hunting me, just get it over with. Stop playing with me.\"\n\n\"Your aim is off because you are hungry, although it seemed that the spear had a spell playing off of that.\"\n\n\"R-ryu?\"\n\nBy the time she turned around to his new hiding spot, he had already moved to a completely different one. In transit he removed the burr from his hair, slipping it into a pocket of his yukata to protect its magic, if she did manage to set eyes on him.\n\n\"If I had been a demon, you would be dead now. You should eat.\"\n\nTurning around again, he watched as the blushing rosebud closed on herself, shaking her fist and taking the challenging stance that had begun to fire his blood.\n\n\"Ryu, I can hunt my own deer. I don't like talking to things I can't see. Come talk to me properly.\"\n\nRyu stepped silently from the tree he had darted behind, which she had drawn up beside in her searching wandering, creeping up on her until he could wrap his arms around her, twirling her around and watching in satisfaction as her breath was easily stolen. As she tried to regain her dignity, she turned in his arms to face him, to challenge him with her polished turquoise.\n\n\"Like this, Koibito?\"\n\n\"W-what are you doing Ryu? This isn't right! Let go!\"\n\n\"Now, why is it that when you know I am around, I only ever see you grieving, even when you play? I watched you go through many emotions today. Why won't you show this lonely Ryu the other faces you possess, instead of hiding behind your masks?\"\n\nShe was off-balance, clutching him for support as his hungry eyes drove her even further backward than his body did.\n\n\"It isn't right for me. Don't you understand? My betrothed is dead and you are working to make me forget him and to put you in his place. Why shouldn't I grieve his passing?\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't you accept what your life has to give you? Have you thought about my proposal?\"\n\nHer eyes searched the meadow desperately for a distraction as the color rose higher on her face. Ryu leaned closer in, trapping her back against the scaly black pine behind her.\n\n\"I see you have. Would you be so cruel as to keep me waiting for an answer? Of course, I suppose I have been cheating, as this is how we dragons court, but I would like to court you the way you have been accustomed to, instead of you triggering my instinctual responses.\"\n\nThe dragon closed the remaining inches between them, crushing her into the venerable pine and devouring her lips as he poured through her Red Lotus Peak and into her Jade Spring, drinking deeply of the clear waters welling from that sacred place as he stole her first kiss. He felt as her eyes closed and the wall around her heart crumbled at its weak point when Love passed back out of his mouth and into her rightful body, allowing their hearts and minds to join as their fates were spun tighter together. The sounds of the forest faded, and together they fell through frigid mist as the sounds of a roaring waterfall cascaded into their heads.\n\nReleasing her lips, Ryu opened his eyes again, cautiously looking around at the unexpected teleportation.\n\n\"Where are we? I didn't know you could teleport.\"\n\n\"I can't.\"\n\n\"Well, I can't either. I have to use the crystal network or other means to travel long distances.\"\n\nBlushing, BlowingWind pulled away from Ryu, leaving him growling his displeasure for her to hear.\n\n\"Oh stop. Are all dragons so possessive? To answer your question, this is my Source, where my spirit enters my body.\"\n\n\"And it's about time you and Love got here too. Did you have to bring the dragon with you? Hasn't he stolen enough of our secrets?\"\n\nThe Shadow stepped out of the waterfall, white bandages on her arms and legs contrasting the smoke black of her dress as she eyed their suitor.\n\n\"Oh honestly, Ara, you act like you're afraid of giving him your heart.\"\n\nWisdom stepped out of a pine tree that had been growing near the pool, her silver dress gleaming in the sun filtering through prismatic mists. The Shadow shook her fist.\n\n\"Stop calling me that, that's not even close to my name and you know it, 'Shin.' Love's already given him her heart for taking care of her, and you gave your mind for what he can teach you. All that's left is BlowingWind's body and my secrets. And when I faced our demon, she ran away and neither of you even showed up to help us until after that thing had me in its grip.\"\n\n\"But who saved you and bandaged you when BlowingWind called for help?\"\n\nThe Shadow closed her eyes and sat on the water-soaked rocks she had been standing on to pout. The water rolled down over her, veiling her from sight as she wallowed in her annoyance and muttered to the Stone People around her. Shin rolled her eyes at the other aspect of her self, waiting for the time their Shadow could release the mask she still was trapped beneath.\n\n\"You hold the body as your gift BlowingWind?\" Ryu stood in the breeze, watching as she knelt to drink out of the pool representing the unity of her spirit.\n\n\"As the dominant aspect, yes it seems I do. It also seems that I had already given you the most important parts of myself. No wonder it was so hard to even think about going away.\"\n\nA cherry tree stirred in the wind, the being finally returned home and reveling in the air filled with the liquid of life. Wisdom laughed as she walked over the grass to pat the slender trunk,\n\n\"Welcome home, Ai! Are we being shy after Ryu was your generous host for so long?\"\n\nAlthough the wind did not increase, a gracefully laden bough dropped her fruit on Shin, who continued to laugh.\n\n\"What are you worried about? Our plan to get you home worked didn't it? The kiss broke the barrier that Fear had erected, and we now also know why He refused to kiss our lips until the wedding.\"\n\nA rock winged its way to hit the tree, followed by several that pummeled Shin as BlowingWind continued to drink peacefully, and Ryu watched the fight with disbelief. The woman hidden in the sakura hissed at the attack, as Wisdom called her shield once more. The Shadow emerged fully from her waterfall again, standing instead upon the turbulent surface of the pool.\n\n\"You two planned for us to fall in love with the scaly coyote? If I wasn't still hurt I would hog-tie both of you!\"\n\n\"Is it always like this here BlowingWind?\"\n\n\"Welcome to my mind, Ryu. I miss the times when the only voice inside my head was my own. So close to my Source I can't lie, no matter how much I try.\"\n\nA sly look slithered across his face before being hidden behind a smile, like a snake plunging into a hole. \"Tell me then my dear; would you like for me to court you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe answer slipped out before wet hands clapped over her mouth, the single word a bomb that ended her internal battle even more suddenly than Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended World War Two for the Japanese. The two souls that had stepped out of their astral representations hurriedly retreated.\n\n\"Thank you, Miss MountainChild.\"\n\nThe scene faded, replaced by oppressive heat and eternal darkness that swallowed sensation and threatened sanity.\n\n\"Ryu!\"\n\n\"Over here.\"\n\nHe oozed easily through the unmitigated void, long practice with the gate and crystal systems lending him serenity, the transference between minds complete when he took hold of her trembling form.\n\n\"You aren't very fond of limbo I take it. I'll do my best to keep you out of that then. You showed me yours, now it seems I must show you mine.\"\n\nRopy ground formed below their feet and walls could be felt close around them, although no light penetrated the subterranean womb. His hands holding hers, he attempted to draw her with him, but fear had rooted the human to the ground.\n\n\"Come with me, Wind-chan.\"\n\n\"I can't see, Ryu.\"\n\n\"That's no problem.\"\n\nHer slight form was light as an origami bird to him, cradled carefully against his chest as he swept her off of her feet. The darkness unfolded her secrets to his eyes, nothing in his realm being able to hide from him once he had decided to search for it. Soft footfalls echoed through the ancient tubes as he carried her closer to the heat, and slowly a fiery glow made itself known.\n\n\"Ryu! Stop! I can't take the heat.\"\n\nSweat poured off of her body as the underground fire sought to conquer the water flowing in her veins, and her breath came in weak gasps as her still living spirit struggled to maintain its connection to her body in the outer world.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I forgot that mortals can not approach me without special charms, even if I bring them myself. We'll stop here then. I forgot that you and I are not bound tightly enough yet to give you even the least of my heat resistant magic. I'll have to let him come to us then.\"\n\n\"Him?\"\n\nRacing footfalls echoed a frantic rhythm only heard when the crust rolled and bucked in response to the emotions of his family, growing louder the closer they came. A shimmer of heat moved at the end of the tunnel, slowly gaining form as it drew near, wavering in the heat and congealing into a form that mortal eyes could see.\n\n\"Sorry I'm late Ryu. Some of the vassals had a disagreement and attacked each other while you were stalking poor BlowingWind. Your temper tantrum didn't help matters either, you wouldn't believe the paperwork you made me file, and I had to smudge the truth a little bit because of you.\"\n\n\"Thank you for trusting me so long in protecting her Take. As you can see I have not forced her.\"\n\n\"I didn't really have much of a choice since you took over when Coyote taunted us. I hope you mauled him.\"\n\nThe spirit before her still panted slightly from his exertion, grinning as Ryu answered him, until he heard the whole reply and a scowl erupted momentarily.\n\n\"I had literally strewn him along the meadow, there were parts everywhere. The blasted canine came back though, and took a bath in the lake as if nothing had happened!\"\n\nBlowingWind murmured, \"Well that's annoying.\" She eyed the twin to the one called Ryu, watching carefully for any tricks. Ryu chuckled and put her down.\n\n\"BlowingWind, this is Take, my nigimitama. You could say that he's my better half.\"\n\nTake bowed to BlowingWind before taking her hand and raising it to his lips.\n\n\"I do hope that my troublesome aramitama has not been accosting you too badly. He does need to learn patience, although I must confess that I need to work on that lesson as well.\"\n\n\"He did steal a kiss.\"\n\nThe blush on her face showed clearly, despite the glow painting her from the orange light. Take glared at Ryu, who smiled back unabashed.\n\n\"Did he? That is a memory he had better share then. I wondered what had happened when Ai disappeared.\"\n\n\"Take? Where are we?\"\n\n\"We are close to my heart. My magma is at the end of this passage. Perhaps someday you will be able to see it while still in your flesh, but the charm that will allow that will require a sacrifice you will not give to me yet. Well, we're not really there, this is the copy of my realm that exists in my mind, but the physics are the same. I could show you other, less passionate, parts of myself if you wish.\"\n\n\"Is this the passageway from the cave in my forest then?\"\n\n\"Perhaps, would you like to walk the other way and see?\"\n\n\"Hey! What about me? Didn't I prove I can be trusted for a few hours?\"\n\n\"I suppose so, but you were still a thief.\"\n\nSighing, Take pulled Ryu into himself, the essences melding easily together, their heat swirling around the shaman until they solidified once more. Take Ryu smiled down at BlowingWind from his place before her, no difference to the eyes, but warmer than he had been.\n\n\"I'm sorry I interrupted you. Shall we find out now?\"\n\nThe former flush had run away long ago, fear now painting her white.\n\n\"I am afraid. There is a demon prowling that forest, and part of me is still injured and not ready to fight it.\"\n\n\"When you are ready, I'll help you fight your demon. You are not alone anymore.\"\n\nRyu's lips softly came down on hers as he leaned her against the warm wall of the lava tube. Neither one could keep their eyes open as their spirits overlapped slightly, lightly as darting dragonflies. Vertigo claimed the pair as the world shifted around them, and when they opened their eyes they stood once more in the Sea of Trees. BlowingWind gasped for breath in surprise as Ryu gently gazed into her wide eyes.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"What kind of Kami would I be if I let my Miko battle demons without some help? More importantly, what kind of boyfriend or husband would I be?\"\n\n\"Can we at least go slowly, please? What should I call you now anyway?\"\n\n\"Whatever you wish.\"\n\n\"I'm so tired Ryu.\"\n\nExasperation darkened his visage as he bored into her eyes.\n\n\"Of course you are! You need to eat more than nuts and berries now, and there was plenty of food at home. Instead, you went for a walk and decided to go hunting along the way. Speaking of that, you need to eat the liver before it spoils.\"\n\n\"Too late Lovebirds, this bottomless pit ate it. That was the longest kiss I've ever seen. It's a shame I don't carry a camera.\" Raven's harsh voice crowed, shattering the moment like a sledgehammer through glass, and then fell into laughter.\n\nCoyote tried to hide the evidence of his latest theft while a large hawk held a weary wing over his eyes.\n\n\"I'm tired of seeing Coyote parts thrown around, but maybe if you rip him apart the trip home won't be filled with these Trickster's arguments. I'm sorry child, but he insisted he check on you one final time.\"\n\nThe shaman burst out of Ryu's arms, running to the branch that Hawk had perched on.\n\n\"Will you be going to the Reservation?\"\n\n\"I don't know yet where Raven and I will drop him, but probably somewhere with sharp rocks. You would like me to tell RedFeather and the Elders that you are safe?\"\n\n\"Yes please Grandfather.\"\n\n\"Very well Granddaughter. You should visit civilization soon and write your family and all of your friends soon, before you go much farther in your training. Snake regrets that he could not come as well, but perhaps you will see him in dreams soon.\"\n\n\"Yes Grandfather Hawk.\"\n\nHawk reached out to caress her with a wide wing, and then leaped into the air, catching the wind and rising. Raven repeated the movement from a rock he had hopped onto, and the pair gripped Coyote by the scruff of his neck. Coyote's yips and yowls of pain carried well as they disappeared into the currents.\n\n\"Ow! I'd rather stow away on another jet and freeze!\"\n\nBlowingWind shook her head as Ryu wandered up behind her, the shaman giggling as she pictured Coyote breaking open luggage for warm clothing.\n\n\"That explains why he was able to tail me for so long.\"\n\n\"We should get home Wind-chan. You need to eat, and we have your future to plan. Tomorrow we'll go back to civilization and take care of the needed things, and purchase your coffee and chocolate that I promised you. Then we will come back for a short time so that I can help you learn what you can do now.\"\n\nBlowingWind leaned back into his waiting arms, gazing into her past.\n\n\"It's been a while since I could say I had a home. We will need to go to the shrine and pick up the things I asked the priests to guard for me, and I still have to get an omamori for my landlady's baby. It's late afternoon now though. How are we going to get home before nightfall?\"\n\n\"I'll carry you.\"\n\n\"Carry me?\"\n\nBlowingWind turned around to determine if her Kami was joking, but by that time he had already taken his dragon form.\n\n\"I will fly above the treetops, and I'll use invisibility so that the humans will not see us, if any are wandering out here.\"\n\nHe lowered his head, lying down so that she could easily mount him as his whiskers twitched in his excitement. Timidly she clambered up behind his head and grasped hard horn as he shivered in pleasure at her touch.\n\n\"Don't you dare pull any stunts, you scaly coyote!\"\n\n\"Of course not dear, you haven't had much practice riding me.\"\n\n\"Don't count on it becoming commonplace if you can't behave.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that I am misbehaving?\"\n\nWith that, Ryu leaped into the sky, riding the air as the forest streamed along below them. BlowingWind's scream of fright at their sudden lift-off echoed through the trees, changing into howls of pleasure as the wind freed her spirit once more.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Volcano Spirit ]\n\n\u2003Eyes of burning fire\n\n\u2003Tempting me into the pyre\n\n\u2003As I toe the wire\n\n\u2003While climbing ever higher.\n\n\u2003Red obsidian skin\n\n\u2003Holding earthly heat within\n\n\u2003Molten you have ever been,\n\n\u2003Ye volcanic jin.\n\n\u2003Magma robes rustle\n\n\u2003As you dance and bustle\n\n\u2003Bidding me to hustle\n\n\u2003Stretching spiritual muscle.\n\n\u2003Laughing, you jump into the crater\n\n\u2003Daring me not to wait 'till later.\n\n\u2003Such a mischievous baiter,\n\n\u2003O spirit to whom I cater.\n\n\u2003Liquid fires deep below stir,\n\n\u2003Causing racing pulse to whir.\n\n\u2003In I leap, stung by a burr,\n\n\u2003Now the rocky throat blurs.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Dragon Song ]\n\n\u2003Dance beneath the Sun.\n\n\u2003Sing beneath the Moon.\n\n\u2003Come and have some Fun.\n\n\u2003Hear the Dragon's Croon.\n\n\u2003Snow cloaks the Mountain.\n\n\u2003Laying soft and White.\n\n\u2003Filtering through to Fountain.\n\n\u2003Again to see the Light\n\n\u2003Deep within to find be I.\n\n\u2003Heart so bold to seek Me.\n\n\u2003Come to me, Be not afraid to Cry.\n\n\u2003I stand in the Wind plain to See.\n\n\u2003Let me Coil within your Soul.\n\n\u2003I'll chase your Fears Away.\n\n\u2003My eyes, black as Coal,\n\n\u2003Keep Watch both Night and Day.\n\n\u2003Do not Fear me Little Maid.\n\n\u2003Beautiful You I'll never harm.\n\n\u2003I am the Force that hither you Bade.\n\n\u2003Come to be your Strengthen Arm.\n\n\u2003Stroke my furry Cheek.\n\n\u2003Pat my scaly Hide.\n\n\u2003Truly, I am quite Meek.\n\n\u2003Let me take you on a Ride.\n\n\u2003We'll Swim through the Rivers.\n\n\u2003I'll Fly you over the Seas.\n\n\u2003Please, don't get those Shivers.\n\n\u2003Sweet Maiden, Trust me, Please.\n\n\u2003Beneath this Sacred Mountain,\n\n\u2003Lies a Place Lovely and Fine.\n\n\u2003Therein too, the Sacred Fountain.\n\n\u2003These Waters here are Mine.\n\n\u2003'Tis true I have not Wings.\n\n\u2003Gentle Woman, can't you See?\n\n\u2003I have no need of such Frail Things.\n\n\u2003My Power is at full, when you are with Me.\n\n\u2003Wise Little Priestess, Hidden in Plain View,\n\n\u2003That Mystery that you have Sought to See,\n\n\u2003Hidden deeply in the Caverns of You,\n\n\u2003I am You, and You are Me, Together is Your Key.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Child Within the Woman ]\n\nThe foreign child gazed into the deepening blue sky from the forest around Fujisan, contemplating the mysteries hidden within their clear depths. Untold beings lived their lives there, seen only to those who had the eyes to see. The night-time winds ruffled her closely shorn auburn hair, fondly as a parent would to a cherished offspring. For this short span of time, she was genuine and unguarded, letting her heart flow freely and her troubles to abate.\n\nRyu's breath was taken away at her unshrouded beauty, watching BlowingWind's own open skies close to savor and preserve the moment in her memory. The traveler's tears ceased their relentless course down her face as he watched from his hiding place behind the rock high-seat. The winds swirled around her slight form ever tighter, as if some spirit from long ago were trying to communicate a desperately needed secret.\n\nThe air within the human's form began to dance with that which was drying her tears so tenderly, producing an unearthly song of innumerable feeling compressed into a ball for so long to unravel and spin out into the rest of creation. Unaware that the mischievous, and often troublesome, spirit that insisted upon shadowing her was even there the woman-child began to gift back to Creation a dance from the heart. Mimicked movements of hawks and cougars mingled with those of the snake and fish while her song flowed from her like some Hawaiian lava flow of love and loss, loneliness and near despair.\n\nAt the last, the native Japanese magma spirit glimpsed the shape of the spirit who had been shrouding from his influence the tender human who he was going to claim as his abode within the world of the humans. Long dark hair plaited into twin braids held golden hawk's feathers, while the skin of a male deer clothed the Spirit's body. As BlowingWind's song and dance came to an end to carry her prayer to what she had termed \"Great Spirit\" the two Guides locked eyes over her collapsing form. The human child fell into an exhausted sleep for her body to rest, and her soul to receive more instruction from her Apache ancestors.\n\nThe two males stood staring into each other's inner Fire for an untold span of time, each gauging the other's intentions toward the Spiritual Woman who had taken on flesh for this life. The ancient pine trees bowed closer to the ground in the wind that carried this foreign visitor, anxious to know what would happen next. Finally, the departed human must have found the things he was looking for, smiling at the dragon spirit that had called to himself a corporeal human shape.\n\n\"Take care of my daughter. Through you, the blood of my Clan will be spiritually replenished.\"\n\nSurprised to hear such arrogant seeming words from the mouth of a mere human spirit, Ryu was about to utter a retort. However, he fell silent as the child's father came forward and placed in the dragon-man's hands a stringed instrument brought from across the seas.\n\n\"Stay with her, though she will try to push you away for a long time. Be sure that she receives this again when she returns.\"\n\nThe wind rose abruptly to shroud the deceased's departure, driving dry needles from the forest floor into the nature spirit's eyes. When it died down again, the human spirit was gone.\n\nRyu inspected the object within his hands, noticing the contrast of the dark and light woods and the supple curves that the traditional instruments of his own people did not possess. Shaking his head at the trouble he found himself bearing for one lone human woman, when he could easily take any that he desired by force, he allowed a more natural form to house his being.\n\nAncient courtly silks and flesh dissolved as bone and sinew stretched to become covered by scale and lithe muscle. Black and red could dimly be seen in the moonless light as he wrapped about the little human to preserve her warmth. The price to be extracted for such a liberty was most likely going to be a bit painful when she returned to her body, but he would rather it be so than to see her fall ill. In one large claw he still carefully cradled the guitar, fascinated by the warmth that seemed to exude from it the closer it came to the human's presence. Darkly burning eyes turned at last from the gift to the woman-child, then to once again regard the alluring being that he had claimed as his own.\n\nThrough the night he watched, brooding over every rise and fall of the chest as the Divine Wind filled and emptied her lungs. The blood of the human child sang sweetly to him of familiar liquid flows of rock deep below the ground, and for a time the dragon contentedly guarded this newfound treasure.\n\nAs all things must though, with morning it came to an end. Clouded skies once more opened upon the physical world and the child hid within the woman once more.\n\n\"You perverted scaly Coyote! Remove your coils from me this instant, or I will stuff my medicine pouch with the whiskers from your beard and nose!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Finding a Friend ]\n\nFrigid water reflected the blue of a high summer sky, while the pines danced alongside the shores of Medicine Lake. Blue eyes reflected the lake back to itself, and a little red-headed girl released a lonely sigh to ghost over said lake on the back of the wind.\n\nThe girl, BlowingWind, and her mother had moved camp today, Mother being ill at ease to stay long where she had sighted any type of dragon. Hence, they had hauled everything until Mother was sure they were out of its territory. Why her mom could see dragons, but not the Spirit Animals who had once helped her father, she could never figure out, but at any rate it had severely limited her amount of friends before. Thanks to their recent move away from the reservation her father had grown up on, now she had to start all over again.\n\nShe had actually been hoping to at least attract a Raven while Mother slept. BlowingWind sang the Raven Song that Father had taught her before he walked the Blue Road home to Creator, but nothing came to keep her company, save for the mosquitoes that bred in sluggish and shallow bays. Fed up, the seven-year-old girl abandoned the lake where she had seen the water dragon, in favor of a run through the forest before Mother woke up from her nap. The wind went with her, and its spirit beckoned her through forest paths that her father had once talked with others about following. Her loneliness grew as she thought about her father, one of the very few people who had understood her.\n\n\"He promised he would teach me. Who will teach me the stories now? How can I be like Daddy now?\"\n\nPine needles crushed under her drumming feet to release their sharp scent. Her little voice lifted itself to sing of her sorrows.\n\n\u2003\"Alone, Alone, Alone.\n\n\u2003A wolf cries alone,\n\n\u2003A wolf cub hunts\n\n\u2003And her pack is gone.\n\n\u2003Alone, Alone, Alone.\n\n\u2003A fledgling waits in the nest.\n\n\u2003Hunter has taken them West\n\n\u2003The Ancients have moved on.\n\n\u2003Alone, Alone, Alone.\n\n\u2003Snake is far from home.\n\n\u2003Plucked up by Eagle\n\n\u2003But one bite leaves her alone.\"\n\nExhausted, the tired child tripped on a stone, spilling down onto Mother Earth and still caught between two worlds. Mud-dark eyes had watched her, shyly hiding in the water and then following behind as she had run away from her camp. Centuries now he had watched humans and their ways, but he had been too shy to purposefully attempt to contact one. This one was as lonely as he was though, and it was hard for him to think of anyone being that lonely. There was a special light inside the girl, and with proper cultivation, it could benefit not only her, but also his lake, and the world at large.\n\nHis long, snake-like body contracted, shortening and losing his coils until his body was that of a human's. Black scales hissed and faded away, red plumes which had been his mane and hoary whiskers following them. In their place, midnight waters flowed down past his shoulders to become plaited hair, and water-drowned logs lent their browns to his skin. Satisfied with his disguise, the lake-boy stepped out of the shadows to answer her calls.\n\n\"The Forest is a dangerous place. Hikers get lost here, and the Furry People are not tame.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked at him a moment from the loamy ground, then got up to brush the dirt from her clothes. To her eyes, the boy seemed only about nine years old.\n\n\"Father always told me that if I showed respect to my four legged brothers, that I would remain unharmed. A shaman would know such things.\"\n\n\"Then what about rattlesnakes? They grow very big here, and if one were to bite you, what would you do without an adult? I should help you back to your camp.\"\n\nHis comment did get her to look around. Rattlesnakes were big in Arizona too, and she had never had any problem with them. She had often wandered by herself at home, so being alone did not bother her. However, she had realized now that she was lost, for the first time that she could ever remember. Tears came to her easily now, because of her recent loss, and so to her embarrassment and his horror, BlowingWind sank down onto a rock bawling. She hid her reddening and crumpling face behind her hands.\n\nThe boy's eyes softened, and he reached out toward her with one hand, refraining from touching her as his quiet voice soothed the air. \"Don't cry. I didn't mean to make you cry.\"\n\n\"I'm scared. I want to go home. I want to go back with Grandma and Grandpa, and Cousin RedFeather back on the Reservation in Arizona. I miss Daddy's songs, and RedFeather's stories, and my friends. Now I'm lost in the woods with some boy, and I don't even know your name!\"\n\nThe boy sat down on the rock, carefully reaching out to touch the girl's shoulder. When she didn't pull away, he scooted a little closer and put his arm around her.\n\n\"There, there, it'll be alright. I can't do anything about getting you back to Arizona, but I can tell you my name. I'll even be your friend if you want.\"\n\nBlowingWind wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve, missing the boy's unboylike wince at the gesture and the odd sharpness of his teeth he had been unable to hide in his smile.\n\n\"Really? You'll be my friend?\"\n\n\"Of course. My name is Obsidian. What's yours?\"\n\n\"That's a nice name. Mine's BlowingWind. Are you Native too?\"\n\nObsidian nodded his head, and looking around his spied a pine cone. Opening it, he prized out the nuts while making his reply.\n\n\"I'm from the Shasta Tribe you might say. I have been in the area my whole life. Are you hungry? I've learned these are good for eating.\"\n\nBlowingWind accepted a few of the seeds from her new friend, thanking him before tasting them. Once clearing off the papery wings, they were actually quite tasty, and reminded her of the pi\u00f1ion nuts her father used to bring her from his treks. The tiny seeds made her feel stronger, and it was only then that she realized it had been a while since her last meal at breakfast.\n\n\"There now, much better, huh? I'll help you find your camp. Your mom's probably worried about you. I know mine does when I'm away from home too long.\"\n\nObsidian stood up, drawing the human child with him as he then led her through the forest back to the lake. BlowingWind followed easily, no longer feeling quite as lonely as before. Before long, he had brought her back to the edge of her camp. Miraculously, her mother was still asleep, and the portable clock on the picnic table said that she had been gone for only an hour. BlowingWind went over to the cooler and pulled out two cans of soda, one of which she gave to Obsidian. Hers she popped open, but Obsidian only eyed his dubiously.\n\n\"Thanks for helping me Obsidian. That soda is to pay you back. Don't you like soda?\"\n\nObsidian looked back up at her. Although he shook his head he was smiling at her kindness.\n\n\"I can only drink natural things. This has too many chemicals in it. Thank you though. I need to get going now.\"\n\n\"Ok. Will I see you again? I like having a friend again.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you will. Where is your home, maybe I can visit you someday? If not, you can visit me, I can be easy to find around the lake, well, to the right people anyway.\"\n\n\"Mom got a house for us near McCloud. When school starts, we won't go camping again until next summer.\"\n\nObsidian nodded. McCloud was well within his traveling range, and he knew the spirits at the base of Mt. Shasta well. Although he looked like a child to this human for her ease, the dragon intended for her to achieve great things one day. As she had said, her father was a Shaman. He would see that she became one as well.\n\n\"Oh, well, I wouldn't worry about that too much. Time is tricky up in these mountains. Besides, we're friends now, friends have a way of finding each other BlowingWind.\"\n\nHaving said that, Obsidian gave BlowingWind a quick hug before dashing off along the shore and out of sight around a bend. She felt a little lonely again now that the boy was gone, but she would see him again. Her hand reached up to fiddle with the snail shell necklace that she had found beside her pillow that morning, and only then did she realize the boy had been wearing one just like it.\n\n\"The Creator must have heard my songs last night, and so he and the lake spirit found me a friend. At least I didn't run into Coyote, sneaky old Coyote always gets me into trouble.\"\n\nHaving finished her soda, BlowingWind stowed the can where Mother had taught her to, so that Bear would not pay a visit, and then she went to lay down and napped with Mother. As she slept, she dreamed about her father, who told her how proud he was of her. In her sleep, her new necklace glowed, and somewhere in the depths of Medicine Lake, a black and red dragon entertained some spirits who had been Helpers to her father."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Wings of Fire 11) The Lost Continent",
        "author": "Tui T. Sutherland",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2003Turn your eyes, your wings, your fire\n\n\u2003To the land across the sea\n\n\u2003Where dragons are poisoned and dragons are dying\n\n\u2003And no one can ever be free.\n\n\u2003A secret lurks inside their eggs.\n\n\u2003A secret hides within their book.\n\n\u2003A secret buried far below\n\n\u2003May save those brave enough to look.\n\n\u2003Open your hearts, your minds, your wings\n\n\u2003To the dragons who flee from the Hive.\n\n\u2003Face a great evil with talons united\n\n\u2003or none of the tribes will survive."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "About two thousand years ago \u2026\n\nIf you are flying directly into a hurricane, it is probably useful to be a dragon who can see the future.\n\nThen again, if you are a dragon who can see the future, you are most likely far too smart to fly directly into a hurricane.\n\nAnd yet, according to Clearsight's visions, that was exactly what she needed to do.\n\nShe shook out her black wings, which were already tired from how far she'd flown all morning and the day before. Her talons clung to the slippery wet rock below her. Her scales felt itchy with salt from the ocean spray. Above her, the sun peeked wearily through cracks in the dull gray clouds.\n\nShe closed her eyes, tracing the future paths ahead of her.\n\nIn one direction \u2014 south and a little east \u2014 there was a small island with a warm sandy beach. Two coconut palms nodded toward each other and there were lazy tiger sharks to eat. The hurricane would pass it by completely. If she went there, Clearsight could rest, eat, and sleep in safety. Then she could continue on in two days, after the storm was over.\n\nBut in the other direction \u2014 a long flight west and slightly north \u2014 the lost continent was waiting for her.\n\nShe knew it was real now. When she'd left Pyrrhia to find it, she'd half expected to fly all the way around the world and end up back on Pyrrhia's other coast. No one was sure another continent even existed \u2026 and if it did, everyone knew it was too far away to fly to. Any dragon would tire, fall into the sea, and drown before reaching it.\n\nBut Clearsight wasn't any dragon. She had something no one else did: the ability to carefully trace the paths of multiple possible futures. Standing on the edge of Pyrrhia, she could see which direction would take her to an island where she could rest. And then the next day: to another island. Shifting her course slightly each day, guided by her visions, she had found a trail of small islands to take her safely across the ocean.\n\nA gust of wind roared over her, splattering a handful of raindrops onto her head.\n\nThe hurricane was almost upon her. If she didn't leave right now, dragons on the lost continent would die. Dragons who might one day be her friends, if she saved them. Dragons who had no idea what was bearing down on them, because there was no one there to warn them.\n\nYet.\n\nClearsight took a deep breath, vaulted into the sky, and pointed herself west.\n\nHer mind immediately started flashing through all the ways she could die in the next two days. This was why she hated flying in storms. They were too unpredictable; the smallest twitch of the wind in the wrong direction could send her plummeting to the rocks below, or drive a stray palm branch into her heart.\n\nDon't think about that. Think about the dragons who need you.\n\nThe other vision was fading; the one where she flew southeast and hid. In that one, she'd arrived on the lost continent in the hurricane's aftermath. The images of the devastation and dead bodies would be hard to shake off, even if she prevented them in reality.\n\nWill they believe me? Will they listen to me?\n\nIn some of her visions, they did; in some, they didn't.\n\nAll she could do was fly her hardest and hope.\n\nThe hurricane fought her at every wingbeat, as if it knew she was trying to snatch victims from its claws. Rain battered her ferociously. She felt like she'd be driven into the endless sea at any moment. Or maybe she'd drown up here, in the waterlogged sky.\n\nBut this was only the outer edge of the storm; there was far worse still to come. Clearsight was trying to reach land before the really terrible fury behind her did. She couldn't stop, couldn't slow down for a moment.\n\nAt one point she glanced back and saw a spout of water sucked into the air. In the middle of it, an orca flailed desperately, before the storm flung it away.\n\nA while later, after the sun had apparently been swallowed for good, Clearsight saw an entire hut fly by her, then splinter apart. She had to duck quickly to a lower air current to avoid the debris. Where had it come from? Who had lived in it? She would never know, her visions told her.\n\nAnd then, when Clearsight was beginning to lose all feeling in her wings, she saw a shape loom out of the clouds ahead.\n\nA cliff. Land. A lot of land.\n\nA whole continent, in fact.\n\nShe canted her wings and soared toward the top of it, where she could see a never-ending line of trees tossing violently in the wind. The hurricane made one more effort to throw her back into the sea, but she fought with her last reserves until she felt earth beneath her talons. She collapsed forward, clutching the wet soil for a moment, grateful to be alive.\n\nKeep going. They're not safe yet.\n\nClearsight pushed herself up and faced the trees. They were coming. The first two dragons she would meet in this strange new world.\n\nWhat would it be like to face unfamiliar tribes, completely different from the ones she knew? There wouldn't be any NightWings like her here. No sand dragons, no sea dragons, no ice dragons.\n\nShe'd glimpsed what these new dragons would look like, but she didn't know anything yet about their tribes \u2026 or whether they would trust her.\n\nThey stepped out of the trees, eyeing her with wary curiosity.\n\nOh, they're beautiful, she thought.\n\nOne was dark forest green, the color of the trees all around them. His wings curved gracefully like long leaves on either side of him, and mahogany-brown underscales glinted from his chest.\n\nBut it was the other who took Clearsight's breath away. His scales were iridescent gold layered over metallic rose and blue, shimmering through the rain. He outshone even the RainWings she'd occasionally seen in the marketplace, and those were the most beautiful dragons in Pyrrhia.\n\nNot only that, but his wings were startlingly weird. There were four of them instead of two; a second pair at the back overlapped the front ones, tilting and dipping at slightly different angles from the first pair to give the dragon extra agility in the air.\n\nLike dragonflies, she realized, remembering the delicate insects darting across the ponds in the mountain meadows. Or butterflies, or beetles.\n\nShe sat up and spread her front talons to show that she was harmless. \"Hello,\" she said in her very least threatening voice.\n\nThe green one circled her slowly. The iridescent one sat down and gave her a small smile. She smiled back, although her heart was pounding. She knew she had to wait for them to make the first move.\n\n\"Leefromichou?\" said the green dragon finally, in a deep, calm voice. \"Wayroot?\"\n\nTake a breath. You knew it would be like this at first.\n\n\"My name is Clearsight,\" she said, touching her forehead. \"I am from far over the sea.\" She pointed at the churning ocean stretching way off to the east behind her. \"Anyone speak Dragon?\"\n\nThe two strangers exchanged surprised glances.\n\n\"The old language,\" said the shimmering dragon, awkwardly and slowly, as if pulling the words from his memory bit by bit.\n\n\"You do know it!\" Clearsight said, hope darting through her veins.\n\n\"Some little,\" he said. \"Much old.\" He smiled again.\n\nThe green dragon said something in their own language and nodded at the ocean. The other answered and they spoke for a few moments. If they had been a pair of NightWings, Clearsight would have guessed they were arguing, but their tone was so peaceful that she couldn't really tell.\n\n\"The old language\" \u2026 I wonder if their continent and ours had more contact in the past. Maybe we will again in the future. I could teach them all Dragon, especially if some of them already know it. That way if any more Pyrrhians ever come this way, they could communicate.\n\nIt was hard to imagine other dragons making the journey she'd just made, though. It was so far, and depended on finding those small islands in such a vast sea.\n\nBut maybe she could help with that. Not soon, though. Not while I feel any temptation to wake Darkstalker. I can't go back to Pyrrhia until I've forgotten him.\n\nSo, probably never.\n\n\"Whyer you here down?\" the gold-pink dragon asked her.\n\n\"There's a really bad storm coming,\" she said as clearly as she could. \"Very bad.\"\n\nHe spread his wings and looked up, smiling into the raindrops. \"See that,\" he said with a shrug.\n\n\"No.\" She shook her head. \"I see.\" She pointed to her head. \"I see the future. Tomorrow and tomorrow and the next day. I see all the days. This storm kills many dragons.\" She waved her talons at the dripping forest around them. \"Rips up many many trees.\"\n\nBoth dragons were frowning now.\n\n\"Treeharm?\" growled the green dragon. \"Twigheartlots splinterfall?\"\n\n\"But you can save them,\" Clearsight pressed on. The visions were crowding into her head; she was running out of time. She couldn't be diplomatic and patient any longer. \"We have to move everyone. All dragons, far far far inland, as far as they can fly, right now. And wait there until the storm is over.\" She turned to the metallic dragon, her talons clasped together. \"Please save them.\"\n\nThe moment teetered, two paths waveringly possible.\n\nFinally the shimmering dragon nodded. \"Move all. We will do.\" He said something in their language to the green dragon, who nodded as well.\n\nThe relief hit Clearsight so hard, she nearly had to lie down again. But the dragons beckoned her to follow them, and they all took off, flying cautiously through the storm-tossed treetops.\n\nDragons appeared between the leaves as she swept through the forest with her two companions, all of them watching her with startled curiosity. Most of them were dark green and brown with leaf-shaped wings. That's their name in Dragon, she realized from a new cascade of visions. LeafWings.\n\nBut about a quarter of them were the other tribe, the one Clearsight didn't have a name for yet, and those glittered like jewels on the branches: gold and blue and purple and orange and every color of the rainbow.\n\nShe saw a tiny lavender dragonet clinging to a branch, and for a moment Clearsight was alarmed to see that she didn't have any wings. Then she spotted little wingbuds on the dragonet's back and remembered\u2014or foresaw, or remembered foreseeing\u2014that the glittering tribe grew their wings a few years after hatching. Growing up wingless \u2026 that must be so strange.\n\nClearsight's mind flashed to that other vision, the horrible one, where this dragonet had been one of the many bodies left in the hurricane wreckage.\n\nBut instead, tomorrow the little dragon would wake up and chase butterflies in the sunlight, complaining that she wanted blackberries for breakfast.\n\nI saved her. I did something right.\n\nThe green dragon called out in a booming voice like a bell tolling. Whatever he said, the dragons around them repeated it, passing it along. Clearsight could hear the echoes of other dragon voices rolling through the forest. She felt the drumming wingbeats behind her as both tribes rose into the air and followed them to safety.\n\n\"You save us,\" said the shimmering dragon, looping around to fly beside Clearsight. He smiled at her again. \"You safe now, too.\"\n\nMaybe I am, she thought. I stopped Darkstalker. I saved Fathom, and the NightWings, and my parents. And now I've found a new home, with new dragons to save. I can help them with my visions. I can do everything right this time.\n\nNew futures exploded in her mind. She might marry this kind, funny dragon, whose name would turn out to be Sunstreak. Or she could end up with a dragon she'd meet in three days, while helping to clean up the forest, whose gentle green eyes were nothing like Darkstalker's. She could move in with an affable, very old LeafWing named Maple, who spoke the old language, or she could find her own tree hollow to live in, or she could explore the new continent first, then come back here to build a home.\n\nAnd there would be dragonets, if she wanted them. Clearsight felt a sudden, dizzying rush of love for dragons who weren't even eggs yet: little Jewel, and whip-smart Tortoiseshell, and cuddly Orange (who names their dragonet Orange? Sunstreak, apparently. They might have to have some conversations about that plan), and Commodore, the king of giggles.\n\nShe would always miss the dragonets she should have had with Darkstalker, but she would love the ones that were coming with all her heart. And nothing bad would ever ever happen to them. They would all live the longest, happiest lives, because she would be here, tracking their paths, keeping them safe.\n\nShe would get it right this time.\n\n\"Your rootplace,\" Sunstreak said, gently interrupting her thoughts. \"Where?\"\n\nShe pointed back out to sea. \"Pyrrhia.\" She waved her claws at the continent around them. \"This? Where?\" she asked.\n\nHe smiled again. \"Pantala,\" he said slowly and clearly, and with evident pride.\n\n\"Pantala,\" she echoed back.\n\nThe lost continent is real, and it has a name. And it's my home now.\n\nPantala, here I am.\n\nTwo Thousand Years Later \u2026\n\nBlue was a dragon who liked things the way they were.\n\nThat is, if he didn't exactly like everything about life as a SilkWing, he had to admit that at least he was safe, and, you know, things were fine, really. It wasn't perfect, but at least his tribe and the HiveWings coexisted peacefully. The HiveWings protected them from outside threats. And everyone followed the rules and the Hives were beautiful and spotless and there were always enough yams and okra to eat, so wasn't that the kind of world everyone wanted to live in?\n\nBlue wasn't sure how everyone else felt, but he wondered about it all the time. He often tried to imagine himself as other dragons \u2014 were they all as content as he was, or was he luckier than most? Did they want the same things he did? What did they worry about; what did they hope for? If they seemed unhappy, why was that?\n\nHis guesses were probably mostly wrong, he was sure, but Blue couldn't stop thinking about it. It felt like a constant tugging on his imagination.\n\nWhat was the fidgety dragonet next to him in math class thinking while she drew hexagons in the margins of her test? What did their rose-pink neighbor worry about while he cleaned the dead bugs from his webs? What about the HiveWings \u2014 how were their lives and hopes and lunches and morning aches and nightmares different from his?\n\nThe other lives drew him like a flame, or the scent of nectarines.\n\nHe spent the night before his sister's Metamorphosis as her, winding himself deep into the dream of being Luna.\n\nPerhaps her wingbuds had started to flutter open as she fell asleep. Perhaps she lay awake for a while, gazing up at the shrouded stars, thinking of the moment she could leap from the top of the Hive and race the skylarks to the sea. He thought she might also be looking forward to the moonsilk dark she would spin herself and the days of emerald-tinted sleep inside the Cocoon. No one could yell at her or assign her extra work while she was in there, growing her wings.\n\nHe knew Luna wasn't scared, like he would be in six days when his own Metamorphosis time came. Luna had always felt ready for life with wings. Blue was not, and most of all, he was not ready for life with her wings, which meant everything changing.\n\nOnce she had wings, Luna would be assigned to a work order. Soon she'd be paired up with whichever partner the queen chose for her and given another cell to live in. She might even be moved to another Hive.\n\nIt was normal; it was the way life always was for SilkWings. Everyone had a Metamorphosis. Everyone had a new life chosen for them. Everyone moved on.\n\nBut now that it was happening to his family, Blue found it extremely nerve-racking.\n\nHe was already awake when Luna bounded across the web and started shaking him, shortly before dawn. He wasn't sure he'd slept at all. For a while he'd been watching the glow of tiny lights moving far below them in Cicada Hive, imagining himself as one of those early-rising dragons on their way to work, awake before the sun. In the distance he could see Hornet Hive in one direction and Mantis Hive in the other, although the webs that connected them were mostly invisible in the dark.\n\nHe'd never been to any of the other Hives, but he knew they were spread out in a wide circle around the plains of Pantala. The enormous dragon cities rose from the grassland and reached for the sky like towering, dragon-made echoes of the trees that used to dominate the land. Their roofs arched out like branches, and the dense silvery threads of SilkWing webs created a canopy tying those branches together, so even wingless SilkWing dragonets could travel between Hives far above the ground, if they wanted to (and were allowed to).\n\nHe yawned and batted Luna's talons away, pretending he'd been in a deep sleep. Dewdrops glittered all across the web around and above them, as if it had rained tiny diamonds in the night. He could see the silk-bundled shape of Luna's mother on the outer edge of their cell, still fast asleep. His own mother was on a night crew these days and had been gone since midnight.\n\n\"It's today, it's today!\" Luna whispered. Her pale green tail flipped back and forth, sending tremors through the silken threads. She bounced closer to Blue to poke his shoulder again and sent his hammock rocking perilously.\n\n\"Hey, watch it,\" he teased, nudging her away. \"Some of us won't have wings for another six days.\" There were layers and layers of other strong webs crisscrossing below his family's web, ready to catch any falling dragonets \u2026 but even so, it was hard to forget how far down the ground was. He always felt safer in the Hives than he did out on the webs, which he worried was not a very normal SilkWing attitude.\n\n\"And some of us,\" she sang, \"will have them todaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!\" She sat up and flexed the tiny wingbuds on her shoulder blades.\n\n\"Well, not exactly,\" he pointed out. \"Today is only your cocoon-spinning day. It'll take another five days for your wings to actuaaaaAAAAH!\" he yelped as she upended his hammock and dumped him onto the web.\n\n\"Don't you 'actually' me,\" Luna said sternly. \"I'm your older sister and I've been to, like, twelve Metamorphosis days, plus I have the highest grade in our class in silk studies. I can 'actually' you under the table.\"\n\n\"Yes, all right,\" Blue said, stretching his legs one by one. \"You're the smartest dragon in the family, I know, I admit it.\" He snuck a glance over his shoulder at his own wingbuds. They looked the same as yesterday: small, tightly curled, and iridescent violet, a brighter, more purple shade than the gemlike azure of the rest of his scales.\n\nLuna's wingbuds were starting to unfurl, so he could see whorls of cobalt and gold inside the pale green exterior. There were also signs of her silk coming in; already her palms and wrists were glowing a little, as though tiny fireflies were waking up under her scales.\n\nThat'll be me soon, he thought, tamping down a wave of panic. After my own Metamorphosis, I'll have wings and silk, too.\n\nMaybe the changes would be small. Maybe he'd be assigned to live right here to help his mother strengthen the bridges between Hives. Maybe Luna would stay, too, and be a Hive drone like her mother, working for one of the upper-class HiveWing families.\n\nShe wouldn't like that, though. Luna wanted to be a spinner. She was hoping to be paired with Swordtail in an artist's cell near the sunny heights of the web. She wanted to make a weaving so beautiful it would have to be given to the queen of the HiveWings, who ruled both tribes \u2014 or at least to one of the queen's sisters.\n\nBlue had seen the queen only once, when she visited Cicada Hive. Queen Wasp had come through to inspect their school with twenty HiveWing soldiers marching in impressive exact unison behind her. Her scales glittered in perfect black and yellow stripes and her eyes were large and completely black, surrounded by an oval of yellow scales.\n\nImagining himself into her was almost impossible; it was like trying to imagine life as the sun. But he couldn't help trying. He thought about how she must wake up in the morning and eat breakfast like anyone else. (Although if the rumors were true, she ate as rarely as possible, and only predators: the head of a lioness for lunch one day, slices of black mamba in squid ink soup for dinner twelve days later.)\n\nHe wondered if her wings felt strong or heavy as she flew from Hive to Hive to check on her subjects. Was she relieved to have sisters to share her responsibilities with \u2014 or did she worry that they might covet her throne? How often did she check the Book of Clearsight? If he were queen, with two tribes full of thousands of dragons depending on him, Blue guessed he'd read it every day until he had it memorized.\n\nAt one point during her visit, she had spotted Blue and Luna and stared at them for approximately a century and a half, by his internal clock. He'd gotten the distinct feeling that she was trying to decide between adopting them or eating them.\n\nQueen Wasp was as breathtaking and superior as all the stories said. After that, her sister Lady Cicada, the ruler of their Hive, had never seemed quite so terrifying to him again.\n\nAnd maybe that was the point of the queen's visits: to remind everyone whose claws held the real power.\n\n\"So?\" Luna said, taking one of his talons in hers. \"My last day as a dragonet! What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"Lie around on the web in the sunlight?\" he suggested hopefully.\n\n\"No, you lazy banana slug,\" she said. \"All my favorite things! That's the correct answer.\"\n\n\"This isn't fair,\" he pointed out. \"By the time it's my Metamorphosis Day, nobody will be left to do all my favorite things with me. You'll all be too busy flying around with your big flappy wings doing fancy busy wingish things.\"\n\nLuna managed not to make a face, but Blue instantly felt guilty anyway. He knew she wished Swordtail could spend the day with them, too. But Swordtail was on construction duty on the west side of Cicada Hive all day \u2014 probably getting dusty and frustrated and missing Luna like crazy.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Blue said.\n\n\"Don't be,\" Luna said. \"Once I have my wings, Swordtail and I can be partnered, and then I'll see quite enough of him.\" She grinned, as though applying for the partnership actually meant they'd get it, which Blue thought was far from certain. He didn't know any adult SilkWings who'd been given the partner of their choice. His mother and Luna's mother hadn't even known their father, who had been whisked away to another Hive once there were eggs. Blue knew his name \u2014 Admiral \u2014 and nothing else.\n\nBetter this way, though, he thought. Burnet and Silverspot ended up loving each other much more than they could ever have loved Admiral. They were a good family, the four of them. It had all worked out for the best. Queen Wasp and her sisters knew what they were doing with the partner assignments. If Luna and Swordtail weren't matched up, it would be for a good reason.\n\n\"So where do we start?\" he asked. \"No, wait, let me guess. Honey drops.\"\n\n\"Honey drops!\" Luna sang, bouncing the web again and fluttering her wingbuds. \"Move your tail and maybe we'll beat the line at the checkpoint.\"\n\nHe dipped his snout into their dew collector, washing his antennae and the dry scales under his eyes, as Luna darted across the web to her mother. Silverspot sat up and wrapped her wings around Luna \u2014 quickly enough that Blue wondered whether she had been awake all night, too.\n\n\"Have a wonderful day, my darling. I'll try to make it to the Cocoon,\" Silverspot promised. \"But \u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Luna said. \"It's all right.\" Silverspot's mistress was bad-tempered and frantically insecure about her place in the Hive hierarchy, and she tended to take out her rage on Silverspot with thousands of small cruelties. Keeping Silverspot from her only daughter's Metamorphosis would probably be the highlight of her year.\n\n\"Just think,\" Luna said brightly, \"next time I see you, I'll have wings! We can go flying together!\"\n\n\"I can't wait,\" Silverspot agreed. But when she hugged Luna again, Blue caught a strange expression crossing her face.\n\nAnxiety? Fear?\n\nHe felt a weird chill run through his scales. Silverspot looked as though she knew something they didn't.\n\nAs if, for some reason, Silverspot suspected she would never see her daughter again.\n\nThe creeping sense of foreboding followed Blue as he clambered along the webs after Luna. The sun was rising, sending shafts of filmy gray light through the silken strands around them. The soft hum of insect wings rose from the tall, waving grasses of the savanna below.\n\nLuna was a reckless climber, leaping from one level to the next like a monkey \u2026 or like a dragon who already had her wings. Blue was more sensible, relying on the slight stickiness of the silk to keep him anchored as he ascended. Even so, today he felt more airsick than he normally did. Each tremor along the silk seemed to vibrate right into his bones, making his antennae twitch nervously and his teeth ache.\n\nHe was relieved when they reached the Hive entrance, where the webs connected to the uppermost tier of the city. There was already a line twenty dragons long, but at least here they could wait on the solid ground of the entrance tunnel. He stepped off the web onto the papery dry surface and flexed his talons.\n\nThe walls of the tunnel were painted with a mural of SilkWings and HiveWings flying together in a bright blue sky, all of them looking as happy as Luna on a honey drop spree. Much of the mural was covered up, though, by the posters that lined the walls.\n\nBE VIGILANT!\n\nWE ARE ALWAYS IN DANGER!\n\nBEWARE OF LEAFWINGS!\n\nREPORT DISLOYAL SILKWINGS TO A HIVEWING AUTHORITY IMMEDIATELY!\n\nQUEEN WASP SEES EVERYTHING. QUEEN WASP PROTECTS US ALL. ALL HAIL QUEEN WASP!\n\nLEAFWINGS: GONE \u2026 OR LYING IN WAIT?\n\nREPORT ANY SIGHTINGS OF POSSIBLE LEAFWINGS TO A HIVEWING AUTHORITY IMMEDIATELY!\n\nThat last one had a drawing of a snarling dark green dragon on it, complete with bloodstained claws and teeth. It seemed as if a new poster appeared on the walls every other day, and half of them were about the threat of LeafWings.\n\nLuna caught him studying the picture and snorted.\n\n\"What?\" he said.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said. \"You're not really afraid of LeafWings, are you?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" he asked. \"They nearly wiped us out half a century ago. Or has my genius sister forgotten all our history lessons already?\"\n\n\"But they failed,\" she pointed out. \"And now they're extinct. So there's nothing to worry about. It's not like they can attack us if they're all dead.\"\n\n\"We don't know that they are,\" he argued. \"Tussock said his uncle saw one flying overhead a couple of years ago. And what about that section of Mantis Hive that collapsed last year? Everyone said that was LeafWing sabotage.\"\n\n\"Pffft,\" Luna said scornfully. \"What Tussock's uncle saw was a green SilkWing. He's just hysterical. And that collapse was caused by shoddy workmanship. The sabotage story was so obviously a cover-up.\"\n\n\"Shhhhhhh,\" Blue said, glancing at the HiveWing soldiers up ahead. They looked busy checking IDs, but they might still overhear Luna's treacherous talk.\n\n\"Look,\" Luna said, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. \"No one has really seen a LeafWing in over fifty years. And we cut down all their trees, so where would they even be living, if they were still alive? Slithering through the tall grass of the savanna? No, they're gone, thanks to Queen Wasp, so all of this is totally unnecessary.\" She waved her claws at the warning posters.\n\n\"The Hives don't cover the whole continent,\" he suggested, but she was already talking over him.\n\n\"The queen just needs us to have a \u2014 what's it called \u2014 a common enemy, you know? So the SilkWings don't start complaining or asking for their own queen or anything like that.\"\n\n\"Our own queen?\" Blue was startled. He'd never even thought about the SilkWings asking for a separate queen before. It was kind of alarming that Luna had. That seemed like the kind of dangerous idea Swordtail might have put in her head.\n\n\"I mean, not that I think we should,\" Luna said hurriedly, and this time she was the one to glance over at the soldiers. \"But, you know, someone might, if they were unhappy with the way things are.\"\n\nBlue shook his head. \"I don't think so. I don't know any unhappy SilkWings.\" The poster behind Luna read LOYALTY ABOVE ALL, with a giant drawing of Queen Wasp's huge dark eyes. Sometimes they were a comforting sight, but in the middle of this conversation, they were making him uneasy. \"Everything is great in the Hives. We're safe, and we all work together, so I don't see what anyone would have to complain about.\"\n\nThe line moved them within earshot of the soldiers, and they both stopped talking instinctively. Blue gazed at the long, pale blue wings of the dragon in front of him, imagining where she might be going, until finally it was their turn.\n\n\"Names?\" said one of the soldiers in a bored voice.\n\nEvery HiveWing had at least a few black scales, inherited from their common ancestor, Clearsight, but this dragon was almost entirely black, with only a few orange flecks here and there. Blue and Luna had seen him here at the checkpoint nearly every day for three years, and yet the soldier never gave any indication of recognizing them or caring that they existed beyond their IDs. His name was Hawker, not that he'd ever told them that. Blue had picked it up from listening to the guards grumbling at one another.\n\n\"Blue,\" he said, holding out his right arm. The soldier studied the letters that had been carved into Blue's palm when he was a newly hatched dragonet: B for his name, forming a triangle with a smaller B and A for his parents' names. Luna always said she was glad the marking happened while they were too young to remember, but Blue was pretty sure he did have memories of that day \u2026 a bright light, a searing pain, and, most clearly, a sense of betrayal.\n\nHawker grunted and moved on to examining the wrist cuff on Blue's other arm. It was a dull bronze color and annoyingly heavy, although Blue was mostly used to it by now. It indicated that he was a student at one of the schools in the Hive, so he was permitted to go in and out through this checkpoint. The name of the school was inscribed in the metal: Silkworm Hall.\n\n\"And I'm Luna,\" said his sister.\n\n\"Ah,\" said the soldier, turning to consult a list on a small rectangle of paper. \"Metamorphosis today.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Luna said. Blue could tell she was trying so hard not to smile. Smiling at soldiers was always risky. You never knew if you'd get a rare smile back, or if you'd end up spending an afternoon on Misbehaver's Way for \"taunting a figure of authority.\"\n\nBlue imagined that the soldiers had to be that alert and suspicious \u2014 if dragons didn't respect them, how could they keep the peace and control the Hive?\n\nBut he also believed that Swordtail hadn't deserved it any of the three times he'd wound up on Misbehaver's Way. Swordtail had wild ideas and talked a little too freely, but he wasn't a danger to the Hive.\n\n\"You'll have a new one of these next time you come through here,\" Hawker said, tapping Luna's wrist cuff, which matched Blue's.\n\n\"I know,\" she said, as Blue's heart sank. One more change: Luna was done with school now. He'd have to go without her.\n\nNot for very long, though. I'll be needing a new wristband soon, too. How would it feel to have this one cut off and exchanged for something else? Surely it would be a bit like having one of his toes casually replaced.\n\n\"Well,\" said the soldier. He looked at his list and then back at Luna again. \"You may go.\" Hawker cleared his throat gruffly as they started forward. \"Hrm. Good luck.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2014 thank you,\" Luna said, startled. She dragged Blue forward, managing to hold on until they were far down the tunnel before she burst into giggles.\n\n\"He said so many words to us all of a sudden!\" she cried. \"I didn't know he knew so many words!\"\n\n\"Maybe he likes you,\" Blue suggested with a grin. It was a joke \u2014 but then, what if he did? Blue felt himself slipping into visions of the HiveWing's possible life. Did Hawker go home and dream of the SilkWing he saw every day but couldn't ever be with? Did his friends tease him about his dedication to his work? Did he like being a soldier, following orders all day long, or did he ever wish the rules were different?\n\n\"Oooo, maybe we'll have a forbidden love!\" Luna gasped, falling into Blue and knocking him back into reality.\n\n\"Well, I am not going to be the one to tell Swordtail,\" he said.\n\nLuna laughed and started telling a story about something funny Swordtail had said the night before. Blue padded beside her, glad to be off the topic of SilkWing-HiveWing relationships. Forbidden was putting it mildly. Whatever the strongest word for illegal was, that was the right word. Prohibited? Outlawed? Punishable by death? All of those times a million.\n\nThey reached the end of the tunnel, where it widened and forked into several other tunnels. The path to the right led to the Mosaic Garden, but they'd go there later, Blue was sure. It was Luna's favorite place in the Hive.\n\nFirst, though, they made their way down three levels, through two more checkpoints. It was warm, as always in the Hive, with sunlight filtering through the walls to cast an amber glow over everything. All the Hives were made of treestuff, which was a particular mix of wood pulp and silk and clay and other things Blue would learn about if he was assigned to a construction crew. It looked paper-thin and allowed light to filter through, but it was solid as rock. Under his talons, the treestuff floor was dry and mostly smooth, apart from a few lumps where workers hadn't been careful enough.\n\nThe problem was, the Hives had been built back when there were plenty of trees all over Pantala. Now that the trees were all gone (or mostly gone), the only wood pulp came from the shrubby little bushes that fought their way out of the dry soil of the savanna. So the only way to expand a Hive was to take the treestuff from somewhere else in the Hive and reshape it where you wanted it. It was hard, back-breaking work, usually given to the SilkWings who caused the most trouble in school.\n\nSuch as, for instance, Swordtail.\n\nBlue was really, really hoping he didn't get assigned to a construction crew. A silk work detail would be different \u2014 what his mom did in the sky between Hives was half architecture, half art. He wouldn't mind a job like that. Blue had been a good, quiet, obedient student at Silkworm Hall his whole life. Surely he'd earned a better assignment than treestuff construction.\n\nFinally, Luna took a path to the right instead of the left, and they came to the open market of Cicada Hive. This was a huge, vaulted space that hummed with activity. The best shops had permanent six-sided cells around the outer wall; everyone else had to scramble for stalls in the labyrinthian middle. Overhead, yellow and orange lanterns hung along silk filaments, crisscrossing the ceiling like necklaces of tiny suns.\n\nAnd, as always, soldiers perched on balconies above the market, keeping a sharp eye on the hustle and bustle of the dragons below. Some of them held long, needlelike lances that looked like bigger versions of the stingers that could spring from the tips of Queen Wasp's claws. Not that Blue had ever seen her use them, but they were featured in several of the posters. Some of those in here, in fact \u2014 her face loomed over the market in murals and posters until he almost felt as though he had a hundred lenses in his eyes, each of them reflecting her back at him.\n\nLuna led the way confidently through the maze, until Blue realized she was aiming for the best nectar store in the Hive: a tall, imposing cell-front with delicate sugar confections arrayed in the window.\n\nHe jumped forward and stepped on her tail, yanking her back.\n\n\"Ow!\" she yelped. \"What was that for?\" Three haughty-looking HiveWings nearly ran into them, and he tugged Luna out of their way, mumbling apologies. They wrinkled their noses and spread their wings, making a few other SilkWings duck to the side of the path to give them space, and then they swept away.\n\n\"Luna, SilkWings don't go into The Sugar Dream,\" he said. \"Let's go to Droplets, like we always do.\"\n\n\"It's my Metamorphosis Day!\" she objected. \"We've only never been there because we usually can't afford it, but today is different. Mother gave me enough scales for it. She said to have the best last day ever.\"\n\nBlue shivered involuntarily. The phrase \"last day\" really wasn't helping his anxiety about Silverspot's face this morning.\n\n\"Stop worrying,\" Luna said, nudging his shoulder. \"They'll take our scales no matter who we are. And these might be the best honey drops we ever get.\"\n\nShe bounded off again and he followed, unconvinced, but aware that arguing with his sister would get him exactly nowhere.\n\nThere was only one other customer in The Sugar Dream when they entered: an older lemon-yellow HiveWing with black stripes on her wings and ruby scales freckling her nose and tail. She peered over a pair of spectacles at them, then went back to squinting at the shelves of pale pink and lavender candies.\n\nBut the HiveWing behind the counter stiffened and flicked his long red tail disapprovingly, his brows arching as high as they could possibly go.\n\n\"Hello!\" Luna said cheerfully, ignoring his expression. \"We'd like two honey drops, please.\" She touched the soft gray silk pouch around her neck as she spoke so that the scales inside jingled.\n\n\"Who's your mistress?\" the clerk asked. \"Is she new to this Hive? She should know that shopping for luxury items is not a task traditionally entrusted to servants.\"\n\n\"We're nobody's servants,\" Luna said indignantly. \"We want them for ourselves!\"\n\n\"Nobody's servants yet,\" Blue added quickly. \"We're still in school.\" He pointed to their wingbuds. \"It's her Metamorphosis Day today, actually, so, we'll know our assignments soon, and then I'm sure our \u2026 uh \u2026 the dragons we work for will \u2026 uh \u2026\" He made himself stop talking. Judging by the frown on the shopkeeper's face, it was clearly not helping.\n\n\"Indeed,\" said the salesdragon. \"Well, as you can see, I am currently assisting another customer. I'm afraid you will have to wait.\" He narrowed his eyes and tipped his chin at the spectacled dragon.\n\nBlue and Luna glanced over at her. The elderly dragon had her snout down close to a box of honey sticks. As they watched, she nudged a bag of sugar cubes closer to her and tapped it with a claw, mumbling as though she was counting each cube.\n\nLuna shot the clerk an \"are you kidding me?\" look. He pretended not to see it.\n\n\"We can wait,\" Blue whispered to her. Causing trouble would only get them kicked out with no honey drops.\n\nSeveral long moments passed. Blue studied the beautiful spun-sugar artwork behind the clerk: an elegant pale green praying mantis, a glittering blue-and-white dragonfly, an array of different jewel-colored beetles, and several miniature wasps. He wondered if it felt disrespectful to any of the HiveWings to eat something their queen was named after.\n\nWas this clerk the one who had made the delicate sugar insects? Did he spend his early mornings in the back room of the shop, carefully pouring honey into frozen teardrops and lacing chocolate stars with speckles of orange peel? Did he love coming here every day, or was he so sick of sweetness that all he could stomach anymore was the saltiest gazelle jerky?\n\nBlue guessed that the shopkeeper had hoped his rudeness would drive them away \u2014 and now he was regretting his choice, because it meant two SilkWings were lingering in his precious store, right where anyone might wander by and see them. He probably wished he had taken their money and gotten rid of them quickly, but now he was stuck waiting for his other customer to make up her mind, just as they were.\n\nThe door swung open, letting in a burst of noise from outside as two HiveWings entered. Their giddy chatter dropped away abruptly when they saw Blue and Luna standing by the counter.\n\n\"Oh,\" said one of them. \"Chafer, what \u2026 interesting new customers you have.\"\n\nThe other one giggled and edged past Blue, keeping her wings canted away from him.\n\n\"Don't worry, Weevil, sir. I'm sure they'll be leaving soon,\" Chafer said, somehow managing to be oily and tense at the same time.\n\n\"Yes, we will,\" Luna piped up. \"As soon as we get our honey drops.\"\n\nChafer twitched his snout at her as if she were an actual moth he'd found nibbling on one of his rugs.\n\n\"By the Hive, what a bore it must be to be wingless,\" Weevil said, pacing around the two SilkWing dragonets. \"I bet you feel like half a dragon. Hardly a dragon at all. Such cute little wingbuds, though. Can I touch one?\" He reached out toward Luna's back.\n\n\"No!\" Luna cried, jerking away from him.\n\nBlue wasn't sure which dragon was the most horrified: himself, Chafer, or the rude HiveWing.\n\n\"You can touch mine,\" he said quickly. \"It's her Metamorphosis Day, so she's \u2014 they're \u2014 it's, um, better not to touch them right before the change.\" That wasn't true at all. Luna was just being difficult and impertinent to dragons who could really get them in a lot of trouble if they wanted to. Those soldiers outside could be summoned at a moment's notice by any HiveWing.\n\n\"Ohhhhh,\" said Weevil. \"Right, of course,\" he added, as though he obviously knew everything about Metamorphosis. \"How exciting for you, little SilkWing.\" He reached out his talons and poked Blue's wingbuds roughly, as though Weevil was trying to unfurl them by force. Blue tried not to wince. He tried to make it better by imagining Weevil's life\u2014a family who loved him, perhaps, who hugged him good-bye in the morning. Maybe he'd desperately wanted to be a soldier but hadn't qualified for the academies. Maybe he'd been reassigned to a management or gathering job instead, which made him bitter and imperious with anyone he could safely push around.\n\nIt was difficult, though, to slide into sympathy with this particular dragon. Possibly he was just a jerk and had always been that way.\n\nThe old HiveWing with the spectacles suddenly appeared at Weevil's side. \"There's no need to be a brute, Weevil,\" she said to him. \"Could you help me with these nectar vials over here? I'm always afraid my old claws will drop one.\"\n\n\"Of course, Lady Scarab,\" Weevil said deferentially. He let go of Blue and followed her to the other side of the shop.\n\nLady Scarab? Blue thought. If she had a title, she must be related to the queen. A sister or an aunt, perhaps, but not one with her own Hive. Still, she would be way up the hierarchy of the HiveWings, which explained Weevil's behavior toward her.\n\n\"Mmmm, someone said honey drops, and now I must have them,\" said Weevil's friend, who had been blissfully pretending not to see Luna or Blue. \"We'll take eight of those, six of the little sugar wasps, and a box of apricot taffy. Make it pretty.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the salesdragon. He took a pale pink box out from under the counter and started packing her order into it.\n\n\"Don't say anything,\" Blue whispered to Luna, who was giving Chafer her best murderous glare. \"It's just the way it is.\"\n\nTo her credit (and Blue's surprise), Luna bit her tongue until the two HiveWings were gone, sailing out of the shop with their candy and a few loud whispers about poor wingless street urchins cluttering up the place.\n\n\"So,\" Luna said to Chafer, with strained politeness. \"May we please have our honey drops now?\"\n\n\"After I serve the Lady Scarab,\" he said sniffily.\n\n\"But \u2014 those \u2014 you just \u2014\" Luna protested.\n\n\"I beg your pardon.\" Blue turned and saw Lady Scarab eyeing Chafer like a bone she'd already chewed on. She had moved on from counting sugar cubes to checking nectar vials under one of the lamps, but her talons were suddenly still and her tail was coiled up like a snake. \"Am I to understand that you are delaying these little nowings on my account?\"\n\n\"It's no trouble, Lady Scarab,\" Chafer oozed. \"They can wait. You are my first priority.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't want to be,\" she snapped. \"Serve them right now.\"\n\nBlue poked Luna with his tail to try to get the smug look off her face.\n\n\"My lady,\" said Chafer. \"I quite insist. We do not serve second-class dragons before royalty in this establishment.\"\n\n\"Even if I insist?\" she said coldly.\n\nThey stared at each other for a long moment, and Blue suddenly got the feeling that there was something more complicated about Lady Scarab's place in the Hive than he'd realized. Something that made this salesclerk willing to test the edges of her dominance.\n\nAnd then the air shifted. Blue's nose twitched and twitched again. It was some kind of \u2026 smell. It started small, a faint hint of rottenness, but slowly grew stronger and sharper and more horrible. Luna covered her snout with a gagging sound.\n\n\"My lady!\" Chafer cried, stumbling back as though the odor had punched him in the face. \"Please don't! I'll have to close my shop for the rest of the day! This isn't necessary!\"\n\n\"I said,\" she hissed, \"serve them right now.\"\n\nHe scrabbled frantically behind the counter, grabbed a small white box, and dumped two honey drops into it. \"Here,\" he gasped at Luna. \"Take it.\"\n\n\"How much?\" she asked through her talons.\n\n\"Just get out of here,\" he begged.\n\nBlue took the box, but Luna stopped to pull a pair of scales out of her pouch. She dropped them on the counter and darted toward the door.\n\n\"Thank you, I think,\" Blue said to Lady Scarab, trying not to breathe through his nose. She looked serene and supremely unbothered by the smell.\n\n\"Choose an establishment friendlier to SilkWings next time,\" she suggested.\n\nHe nodded and escaped out into the market behind Luna.\n\n\"Was that her?\" Luna asked as they hurried between stalls. \"Did she make that awful smell?\"\n\n\"I've heard some HiveWings have that power,\" he said. \"But I didn't think anyone would ever actually use it. I mean, why would they?\"\n\n\"To terrorize their enemies!\" Luna answered. \"Moons, I sure would! If I had super stink powers, I'd have blasted that Weevil guy right in the snout the moment he got anywhere near our wingbuds. Oooo, that would have been awesome.\"\n\n\"For about two heartbeats,\" Blue pointed out. \"And then it would have been the opposite of awesome, because you would be in jail forever.\"\n\n\"Blue,\" she said. \"Don't you think it's unfair that HiveWings can use their weapons on us anytime they want, but we can't do anything to fight back?\"\n\n\"No!\" He looked around quickly, but none of the nearby dragons reacted as if they'd just heard treason. It was loud enough in the market, and they were moving so quickly between stalls, that he could hope no one would overhear them. \"The HiveWings saved us, remember? Our tribe agreed to accept their queen. Besides, there's a reason why the universe gave them weapons and not us. That's why they're in charge.\"\n\n\"But maybe if we fought back, they wouldn't be in charge,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"Luna.\" He herded her into the tunnels that led to the other levels of the Hive. His voice dropped to a whisper. \"For the love of silk, what's gotten into you today? I know Swordtail is full of crazy ideas, but please don't let him drag you into prison along with him.\"\n\n\"Those are my ideas,\" she said crossly. \"He got them from me.\"\n\n\"Well, then leave me out of it.\" He covered his ears. \"La la la, everyone's a good Hive citizen here.\"\n\nHis sister rolled her eyes. \"Oh, Blue.\" She hesitated, studying his face, and then shook her head as though she hadn't found the answer she wanted there. \"All right, I'm sorry.\" She flexed her claws and looked down at her wrists. \"It's probably because of my silk coming in. It hurts a lot more than I expected it to.\"\n\nHer palms and wrists were glowing even brighter than before. Blue hadn't noticed in the well-lit market, but here in the dim tunnels it was impossible to ignore. She seemed to have little balls of fire clustered under her scales, bubbles of molten orange and gold.\n\n\"That doesn't look normal,\" he said anxiously. \"I've never seen anyone's silk glands do that before Metamorphosis. Have you?\"\n\nSwordtail and his sister, Io, had gotten their wings not too long ago. He remembered their palms glowing a little bit, but not like this \u2014 and they hadn't mentioned anything about it hurting.\n\nDoes Metamorphosis hurt? Why wouldn't someone warn us about that?\n\n\"I'm sure it's nothing,\" Luna said with a shrug. \"Everyone Metamorphoses a little differently.\"\n\n\"Should we take you to a doctor?\"\n\n\"No WAY,\" she said. She swiped the box of honey drops out of his talons. \"I'm not spending my perfect last day getting prodded by some HiveWing who thinks we're all weird and revolting. I'm totally fine! To the Mosaic Garden! Let's go!\"\n\nLuna darted away up the tunnel. Blue rubbed his own wrists worriedly and then followed her. He could see the glow from her scales reflecting off the tunnel walls.\n\nIs she going to be all right?\n\nIf everything has to change, could it at least be ordinary predictable change?\n\nSpirit of Clearsight, if you're listening: Please take care of my sister. Please let her Metamorphosis be normal.\n\nAnd if you have time, please could you also make sure she's not arrested for treason? That would be great, thanks.\n\nThe Mosaic Garden glimmered in droplets of amber and gold, cobalt and jade, obsidian and pearl. Fragments of dragons prowled along the walkways underclaw and coiled around the columns. In the pavilions, claws and teeth roared across the ceilings, ancient battles captured in bits of glass forever.\n\nHere at the top of the Hive, the sky was allowed to run free. It was the only space where HiveWings could look up and see no roof, unless they wanted to climb to the top layers of the webs (which HiveWings never did) or venture into the dry savanna below.\n\nAcross the garden, sunlight drenched the grassy slopes and hedgerows, soaking into the obedient faces of the flowers that marched rose-carnation-marigold-violet in orderly lines beside the path. The scents were heavy and warm, like the drowsy buzzing insects that browsed the floral options. The path itself seemed winding and random, branching and wandering back, but it eventually spiraled everyone in to the central feature, the Salvation Wall.\n\nThis morning the garden was busy with dragons, but Blue and Luna found a spot on the grassy slope where they could sprawl with a view of the Salvation mosaic.\n\n\"I'm not sure why you like this scene so much,\" Blue said as Luna passed him his honey drop. \"It has a few too many dead SilkWings in it for me.\" His wingbuds twitched and he glanced around, double-checking that there were no HiveWings in earshot. He didn't think it was treason to criticize the Salvation mosaic, but it certainly might be.\n\n\"But even more dead LeafWings,\" Luna pointed out. \"Isn't that reassuring?\"\n\nBlue didn't argue with her, but he'd always found the mosaic sad instead of triumphant. He knew it showed the end of the war, so it made sense that there were dead dragons in it. It should make him glad that these were supposed to be the last dragons ever killed in the war with the LeafWings. He also knew they should all be grateful to the HiveWings for saving the SilkWings from the vicious green tribe.\n\nBut it just made him wonder why there had to be a war at all. Why didn't the LeafWings give up and go away, or agree to be ruled by Queen Wasp? Why did they fight so hard instead? They must have known they couldn't win \u2026 there were so many more HiveWings, and, of course, there was the Book, which was guaranteed to guide the HiveWings to victory.\n\nSo why did the LeafWings bother fighting, knowing so many dragons would die for no good reason?\n\nIt was their own fault their tribe was wiped out, if Luna was right and they were really gone. Queen Sequoia should have given up her throne and accepted Queen Wasp's protection, like Queen Monarch did. Then the LeafWings could have lived alongside the SilkWings, all three tribes under one queen, working together. Maybe Queen Wasp would have left them some trees to live in, between the Hives. So what made them fight instead of accepting that? Had their queen really thought her tribe had any chance of winning?\n\nBlue studied the blocky dark green shape that was meant to be the queen of the LeafWings. It was so hard to imagine being Queen Sequoia, leading an entire tribe into a doomed war. He didn't even like arguing with other dragons. If someone offered Blue peace and stability and all he had to give up was a little independence, he would say yes in a heartbeat.\n\n\"I hope I get to see it one day,\" Luna said, licking honey off her claws.\n\n\"What?\" he said, startled out of his reverie.\n\nShe pointed at the mosaic, at the central yellow-and-black striped figure holding a rectangular shape over her head, the only object in the mosaic made entirely of gold tiles so it caught the sun like a fragment of fire.\n\n\"The Book of Clearsight,\" Luna said softly. \"Don't you ever wonder what it says? What the next big disaster will be, or what's going to happen to all of us next?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Blue said, \"but nobody gets to read it except the queen and the Librarian.\"\n\n\"I could see it, though,\" Luna said. \"From a distance, if I get to visit the temple one day.\"\n\n\"Well, Wasp Hive's not that far away,\" Blue said. \"It'll be easy to visit the Temple of Clearsight once you have wings.\" If you're assigned a job with travel permission and time off, he thought, but didn't say out loud. Luna had enough to worry about.\n\nHe stole a glance at her wrists, which she kept rubbing and then resting in the cool grass. Would the quiet lavender scales on his arms glow like that in six days? Was Metamorphosis really more painful than anyone had warned them? He'd expected his wings to hurt a little as they came in, but he hadn't even thought to worry about his silk.\n\nThey heard the chatter of approaching dragonets, enough voices that it was probably a field trip from one of the fancy HiveWing schools. Blue scooped up the empty Sugar Dream box and they retreated to a less crowded section of the garden, where they played hide-and-seek until the sun reached its highest point and began to slant back down the sky.\n\nThey ate lunch at Luna's favorite caf\u00e9 and then wandered through the Lady Cicada art gallery on one of the lower floors of the Hive. Blue found all the different portraits of Lady Cicada a little intense, but Luna liked the tapestry rooms. Weavings were the one kind of art that was left entirely to SilkWings. A HiveWing could probably buy dyed silk threads from one of the market stalls and a loom, like the ones SilkWing dragonets used for practice, but none of them would bother with learning to make a low SilkWing art. Which Blue thought was a bit silly; they certainly didn't mind buying the results and hanging them all over their walls.\n\nHe left Luna gazing at her favorite tapestry \u2014 the one where Lady Cicada is flying with a long trail of radiant SilkWings behind her in the sky \u2014 while he checked out the sculpture rooms. Lady Cicada was old enough to have been alive when there were still trees to spare, so there was one small wooden carving of her in the middle of the clay and metal and marble statues. The wood was a shade of brown close to her actual red color, and Blue liked to look at it and wonder about the artist. What did woodcarvers do when there were no more trees to carve? Did they still get to make art, and did they have to learn all new techniques, or did the queen give them new jobs? Did they ever wish all the trees weren't gone?\n\n\"Let's get to the Cocoon,\" Luna said, appearing behind him. Her pale green scales looked white in the dim light of the gallery, and it was hard to see the gold flecks along her back and tail. Her wingbuds were definitely more unfurled than they had been this morning, though, and her wrists were glowing as brightly as the lamps.\n\n\"We have a little more time,\" Blue said, seized with a sudden panic. \"We could get another honey drop? Or \u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Luna said. Her expression was strange, as though she was already drifting into the Metamorphosis trance. \"I think I need to get to the Cocoon as \u2026 as quick as we can.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Blue said. Should he have made her see a doctor after all? But someone at the Cocoon would know what to do if there was anything wrong, surely \u2026\n\nThey hurried to the outer spiral and down, down, level after level getting darker as they descended in strange silence (for Luna \u2014 Blue couldn't remember a time when she'd stopped talking for this long). Blue wasn't sure if he was imagining that the hum seemed louder down here, as if the insects outside were closer to the Hive, busily swarming around it.\n\nThe Cocoon wasn't on quite the lowest, ground-floor level of the Hive, but it was close to it. Here the streets were dimmer and emptier, the lamps fewer and farther between. A few lower-class HiveWings lived down here, in the small cells near the outer spiral. There was one hulking building that Blue thought might be a training center for guards. The courtyard around it was open for a few levels up to give them space to fly their exercises. Blue glanced up as they went by, watching the dragons moving around the streets above them. Occasionally a flutter of black and red wings broke the quiet as a HiveWing flew from one side of the Hive to the other to save walking time.\n\nBut the main thing on this level was the Cocoon: a long oval dome, two levels tall, which was swathed in so many beautiful weavings it almost seemed to be made out of silk itself. Every SilkWing in Cicada Hive came here for his or her Metamorphosis, and according to tradition, afterward each one made a silk weaving for the dome as an offering of thanks.\n\nSome of the weavings, especially the older ones, were simple: shimmery silver-gray silk in the shape of cobwebs or sunbursts or clouds. Other dragons had used dyes to add brilliant colors \u2014 here a silver dragon spangled with emerald green wings and matching green eyes all around her; here a swarm of tiny orange butterflies. Someone had even been able to afford two colors, weaving a midnight black shape of a Hive behind an iridescent blue web.\n\nThere were no trees, of course; it was forbidden to include trees in art ever since the LeafWings had been driven out. Even the Hive shape was dangerously close to that of a tree, and Blue wondered if the weaver had been worried about that.\n\nBut for the first time \u2014 maybe because anxiety was sharpening his attention \u2014 Blue noticed something on one of the tapestries that looked like a leaf. No, wait \u2014 was it a teardrop? A single, autumn-red shape, somewhere between a leaf and a teardrop and no bigger than his claw tip, gleamed in the middle of the butterfly swarm. Was he seeing that right? Why spend the money on a second dye color and only use it in such a small way?\n\nWait, there was another one! He blinked, startled. This one was slightly darker red, hidden against the black backdrop of the Hive weaving.\n\nHis eyes scanned the dome. There was another, veiled among a spray of escaping diamonds from a waterfall.\n\nBlue wrinkled his snout, puzzled. Now that he was looking, there were little red \"leafdrops\" hidden in half the weavings he could see. Why had so many SilkWings decided to include that shape in that color? If it meant something, why didn't he know about it?\n\nBlue realized that Luna was staring up at the dome weavings, too, opening and closing her talons nervously. He thought about asking her if she'd noticed the hidden red shapes. But it wasn't worth it to start a conversation that might stress her out \u2026 what she needed was distraction and calming down.\n\n\"What's your weaving going to look like?\" he asked. \"Have you decided?\" She'd been talking about nothing else for weeks, so Blue had heard all her ideas. But he was mostly trying to get her to smile, or blink, or do anything to reassure him that his bubbly sister was still in there.\n\nLuna winced. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"I have to \u2026 get through this first.\"\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" Blue said, taking her front talons in his. \"I've never heard of anything going wrong during a Metamorphosis. I'm sure what you're feeling is totally normal. All of this is normal. It's going to be all right. Everything is always all right in the end, you know? You're going to wake up with awesome wings and cool silk and fly everywhere and be the greatest spinner in the history of the Hives.\"\n\nLuna closed her eyes and whispered, \"Everything is always all right\" as though he'd just said \"The sun is always shining\" or \"The bees would absolutely love for you to take all their honey\" instead.\n\nBlue was relieved to see a cluster of dragons gathered near the low arched entrance of the Cocoon \u2014 maybe one of them could get through to Luna.\n\n\"Look how popular you are,\" he joked, but his smile faded as they got closer and he realized that most of the gathered dragons were HiveWing guards.\n\nWhy are there so many guards? He was sure that normally there were only two. He remembered the two extremely bored-looking guards who had fallen asleep by the exit during Swordtail's Metamorphosis while he and Luna called encouraging words to their friend.\n\nBut today there were at least five outside, and they all looked anything but bored. Black and yellow and red scales shifted and caught the dim lamplight as the HiveWings scowled and stamped their feet. Two of them carried weapons, but the other three looked menacing enough without them. Most likely they had venom in their claws or shot poisonous darts from their tails, or something along those lines.\n\nBlue shot a worried look at Luna.\n\nFirst Silverspot. And Luna's weird glowing scales. Now all these guards \u2026\n\nWhat does everyone know that we don't?\n\nBlue had to keep Luna calm. Whatever was going on, he didn't want her to go into her Metamorphosis feeling scared or anxious.\n\n\"Why are there so many guards today?\" Luna whispered to Blue. \"Weren't there only two at Swordtail's Metamorphosis?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't remember,\" he said brightly. \"I'm sure there are always this many and we just never noticed them.\"\n\n\"Hm,\" she said doubtfully.\n\n\"Luna!\" Swordtail cried, emerging from the group and bounding toward them. His scales were dark blue with a small pattern of white triangles along his spine and snout, and then dappled all over with orange splotches, as though someone had melted a sunset in a cauldron and flung it at his wings. Blue always thought of his friend as one of the shiniest SilkWings around, bright and gleaming, the way Swordtail had been when they first met on the school racetrack five years ago. But lately Swordtail was always covered in dirt, with splinters of treestuff caught between his claws and tangled in his long, elegant horns.\n\nAnd all too often he wore this expression \u2014 this worried, grim look that was really the last thing Luna needed today.\n\n\"Happy Metamorphosis Day!\" Blue said to him, perhaps a little too loud. He widened his eyes significantly at Swordtail. \"Isn't this exciting?\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Swordtail asked, gathering Luna into his wings. She leaned into him as though she'd been flying for days and he was the island she'd been searching for. He took one of her front talons in his, and soft gray silk spun out from his wrists, gently wrapping around hers to wind them together.\n\n\"I can't believe you're here,\" Luna said. \"I thought Grasshopper would never let you come.\"\n\nSwordtail made a face. \"He didn't. I finished all my work and asked \u2014 yes, very politely, Blue, I promise \u2014 and he still said no.\" He shrugged. \"So I snuck off when he wasn't looking.\"\n\nBlue's idea of \"politely\" tended to be quite different from Swordtail's \u2026 but Blue had met Swordtail's boss once and was not at all surprised that Grasshopper had tried to keep Swordtail from attending Luna's Metamorphosis. Silverspot's mistress would do it out of spite; Grasshopper most likely said no because he was still trying to teach Swordtail obedience and good behavior.\n\nIf Swordtail would quit picking fights with HiveWings and expressing unpopular opinions all over the place, Blue thought, perhaps figures of authority would be a little less annoyed with him, and his life would be a little bit easier.\n\n\"Oh, Swordtail,\" he said ruefully. \"You're going to be in so much trouble.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. This is more important.\" Swordtail turned Luna's palms up and frowned at the glowing embers under her scales. \"Whoa.\"\n\n\"Does it look weird to you?\" Luna said anxiously.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Blue said. \"You're totally fine.\"\n\n\"I remember a little bit of light where my silk came in, but not this bright,\" Swordtail said, completely trampling over Blue's efforts to calm Luna down. \"I'm not \u2014 I'm not sure this is normal. Io, have you seen anything like this before?\" He turned to his sister as she came up to join them. Directly behind her was Blue's mother, Burnet, who stepped around the others to give Blue and Luna quick hugs.\n\n\"No,\" Io said, sounding even more alarmed than he did. Her wings had come in several months ago, huge and dark purple with shimmers of aquamarine green. She was only a year older than them, but she had long, aristocratic-looking bones and horns, and she towered over Luna. \"You don't think \u2026\"\n\nThey both glanced at Burnet, for some reason, but she wouldn't meet their eyes. \"Oh,\" she said carelessly, \"I've been to so many of these, and there's always something surprising. Never anything serious, though. Nothing to worry about.\"\n\nBlue had never heard his mother lie in his own stretched \"everything is fine here\" voice. It made him feel as if his nice, normal world was as thin as paper and as easy to stab holes in.\n\n\"Are you Luna?\" one of the HiveWing guards said roughly, slithering up to them. He muscled Swordtail aside, breaking the slender threads that bound him and Luna together. \"You're late. Time to get inside.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Luna said, which was what she was supposed to say, and yet so unlike Luna to actually say it that Blue shivered. The ground felt unsteady below him.\n\nAlso, they were not late, not even by a heartbeat. All HiveWings and SilkWings had a precise internal clock that always kept their days on schedule and warned them when the rainy season was coming. Blue's told him they were right on time \u2026 but of course he wasn't about to argue with the guard.\n\n\"I love you, Luna,\" Swordtail said fiercely.\n\n\"We do, too,\" said Burnet, and Blue nodded, although his sister wasn't looking at them and didn't seem to hear them either.\n\n\"You lot, up to the balcony if you must stay,\" the guard said, waving one of his crimson-and-black dappled wings at the side entrance. He gave Luna a small shove in the direction of the archway and she went, with only one last nervous glance back at them before she disappeared inside.\n\n\"Should we do something?\" Io asked Swordtail. \"Tell someone?\"\n\n\"There's no time,\" he said. His long blue antennae unfurled, twitching, and he turned to stride toward the dome. \"And it's probably not \u2026 I mean, it's so rare \u2026\"\n\n\"What?\" Blue asked. \"Tell someone what? What are you so worried about? Io, what's so rare?\"\n\nIo looked as though she might be about to tell him, but \u2014\n\n\"Nothing,\" Burnet said, putting one wing over Blue's shoulders. \"Don't worry, sweetheart. Let's go cheer for Luna.\"\n\nHe let his mother steer him through the side entrance and up the stairs, their footsteps muffled on the ancient silver-silk carpets. The gallery was a long, open balcony that ran around the entire dome, overlooking the dim, quiet floor below. The only light came from small candles floating in the central pool of water.\n\nBlue started toward their usual spot, on the far side of the dome, but Burnet gently tugged him back.\n\n\"Let's stand here this time,\" she said, choosing a spot not far from the stairs. Swordtail and Io joined them, the faint glow of candlelight rippling along their iridescent scales. Swordtail rested his front talons on the thick stone railing so he could lean over the edge, as though trying to get as close to Luna as he could. Blue wouldn't do that until he had wings; it wasn't far to fall, but it would still hurt if he did.\n\nAll around them, SilkWings were gathered in the shadows of the balcony, friends and family to the three other dragonets undergoing Metamorphosis today. Blue recognized many of their faces, lit from below like eerie moons all around the dome. Most of them were whispering to one another, but a hush fell as Luna was escorted onto the floor.\n\nLike the others, her wrist band had been cut off by the guards. Now, in the twilight room next to the other dragons, and with her scales more visible, it was terrifyingly clear that something different was happening to Luna. Where the others had a pale silvery light coming from their wrists, Luna seemed to have fireflies on fire, startling spots of molten gold.\n\nBlue felt Io grab Swordtail's arm, but he couldn't look away from his sister, all alone on the Cocoon floor.\n\nI'm the one who was with her all day. I should have noticed that something was wrong. I should have made her ask someone for help.\n\nOne SilkWing, a starved-looking turquoise dragonet from their class at school, had already entered her Metamorphosis trance. Two long seamless strands of moon-colored silk spiraled out of her wrists. Her eyes were closed and her talons moved automatically, weaving the silk into a cocoon around her.\n\nAs Luna glanced around nervously, a second dragonet drifted into his trance and lifted his talons, silk threads spinning out. His cocoon looked like the first dragonet's; like every SilkWing's, it would shelter him for five days and nights while his wings came in.\n\nSwordtail had promised Blue that he wouldn't remember a thing about the trance time. But Blue found that almost scarier: the idea that he'd be unconscious to the world for that long, and then he'd come out looking totally different. (\"Not totally different,\" Swordtail insisted. \"I still look like me, don't I?\" Which he sort of did, except that the wings made him look quite a bit bigger and more dramatic.)\n\nThe third dragonet was eyeing Luna's wrists with concern and taking small, sidling steps away from her. Whispers were gusting through the watching SilkWings, like the sweeping winds that shook their webs before the storms of the rainy season. There were even more guards now \u2014 at least seven of them, most standing unsettlingly close to Luna and pretending not to watch her, while their eyes darted constantly from her to the balcony to the pool to the others and back to her.\n\nLuna held out her front talons, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath for a moment.\n\nThen suddenly she let out a sharp cry and silk began to spiral out of her wrists.\n\nBut it wasn't normal gray silk. Luna's silk flared like threads of lava erupting from under her scales. It hissed as it hit the air, lighting up the room with sudden bright-star brilliance. It was like the fire of the sun twisted into filaments that snaked back to clutch at Luna's talons, her legs, her whole body.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Io whispered. She looked at Swordtail, whose face was transfixed with horror.\n\n\"Flamesilk,\" he breathed.\n\n\"What's flamesilk?\" Blue asked frantically as the guards advanced toward his sister. He shook Swordtail with trembling talons. \"What's happening? What's wrong with Luna?\"\n\nThe third dragonet down below bolted for the far side of the dome and tried to scramble up one of the side walls, away from the guards and the burning light. Luna shrieked with fear and leaped away from the fiery silk spilling out of her, but there was nowhere to go. It clung to her like a real cocoon would, winding around her talons and legs even as she tried to claw it away.\n\n\"Is it burning her?\" Blue cried. He turned to Io, his voice high and desperate. \"Io, is she all right? What is flamesilk?\"\n\n\"It won't hurt her,\" his mother said, but her voice was as sad and soft as the splash of a silk-wrapped corpse slipping into the bay.\n\n\"Did you know?\" Io asked Burnet fiercely over Blue's head.\n\n\"Silverspot and I suspected,\" Burnet answered. \"Their father didn't say anything, and you couldn't tell by looking at him \u2026 but he was watched so carefully and taken away so quickly, we knew there had to be something.\"\n\n\"You could have warned us,\" Io hissed. \"We could have hidden her!\"\n\nBurnet shook her head.\n\nLuna let out another, fainter cry, collapsing forward with her eyes closed. The flamesilk spun on and on, and everywhere it touched her she went still, as though it was tranquilizing her.\n\n\"Everybody, please remain calm,\" one of the HiveWings said smoothly, spreading his wings to address the horrified audience of SilkWings. \"We are well prepared for SilkWing diseases like this. Everything is under control.\"\n\n\"Diseases?\" Blue echoed in a choked whisper. Io scowled.\n\nHis sister wouldn't be left to transform quietly on the floor of the Cocoon, like the other two small silken bundles beside her. Already she was surrounded by all the guards, spears lifted, swords and claws and tail spikes all pointed at her as though her flamesilk cocoon might sprout fiery wings and try to escape.\n\nAnd a dark metal cart was rattling through the door, yawning mouth ready to swallow her up.\n\n\"Luna!\" Swordtail shouted, shaken out of his horror by the sight of the cart. He vaulted over the balcony railing and plummeted to the floor below, with barely enough time to spread his wings to break his fall. His legs were already moving as he landed, galloping across the floor toward the guards.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Blue asked Io and Burnet. Should they all jump down and try to save Luna? But there were so many guards \u2014 and maybe they were trying to help her. They did say they were prepared, so they'd seen this before \u2014 maybe they could take her somewhere to cure her? Maybe they could fix her silk and make it normal \u2026\n\n\"You run,\" Io said. She dragged Blue away from the railing and shoved him at the stairs.\n\n\"Me?\" Blue said, astonished.\n\n\"He can't escape,\" Burnet argued tiredly, following Io. \"There's nowhere he can go. It would be safer for him to turn himself in.\"\n\n\"No way!\" Io cried. \"We can't just let them take him!\"\n\n\"Why would they take me?\" Blue yelped in alarm. His talons scrabbled on the stone floor as Io pushed him forward again. \"I didn't do anything! I'm not sick!\"\n\n\"Neither is Luna,\" Io pointed out. She herded him along in front of her, talking fast as they stumbled down the steps. \"Flamesilk is something you hatch with. She must have inherited it from your father, which means you have it, too. Which means they'll come for you next.\"\n\n\"But why?\" he said. One of his claws snagged painfully on the carpet. He paused to unhook it, looked back up the stairs, and saw his mother watching him go with a bleak expression. Watching, but not following. She'd already given up. \"What are they going to do with Luna?\"\n\n\"We don't know,\" Io said. \"We've never been able to find out. Flamesilks are very rare, and the HiveWings make them vanish immediately.\"\n\n\"Vanish?\" Blue echoed. \"Like \u2026 forever?\" His insides felt as if they'd all leaped off the top of the Hive and were currently plummeting toward the distant ground.\n\n\"Do you see why you have to run?\" Io pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and looked out. \"All clear. Quick, while they're busy with Luna and Swordtail.\"\n\nBlue dug in his claws as she tried to throw him out the door. \"Wait, wait! Run where?\" he pleaded.\n\n\"Anywhere!\" she said. \"Run, hide, and don't let them find you!\"\n\n\"But I'll get in trouble!\" he said. \"I can't hide from the HiveWings! Mother's right; if they want me, I should turn myself in. They won't hurt me.\" His voice wavered, thinking of flamesilks vanishing forever, disappeared so thoroughly that he'd never even heard of them. \"M-Maybe they can fix me so I w-won't have flamesilk.\"\n\nIo groaned softly. \"Why did it have to be you?\" she said. \"The one SilkWing who thinks HiveWings have any good in them? Listen, Blue. Stop trusting them right now. They've let you go about your ordinary life so far, but now you look dangerous to them, and they're not going to let you have that life back. It's gone.\"\n\n\"But it doesn't have to be,\" Blue protested. \"If I'm good, if I do what I'm told \u2014 I mean, I'm not dangerous. I could never be dangerous.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Io said, rubbing the spot on her forehead between her horns. \"Unfortunately, I think that's true.\" She took his shoulders and shook him. \"But they don't care. Please promise me you'll hide from them, Blue. Don't let them catch you.\"\n\n\"For how long?\" Blue said. \"Where can I go? What about my Metamorphosis? It's really soon and then I'll have to come back here.\"\n\nIo sighed. \"Let's hide you first and then figure that out,\" she said. She shoved open the door, flung him outside, and bolted after him. Blue found himself running even though his brain was shouting at him to go back, to ask the guards for help, to make sure Luna was all right.\n\nWas she still terrified? Or had the silk entranced her, taking her into peaceful darkness even as chaos swarmed outside her cocoon? What had the guards done to Swordtail? He could never fight so many; a SilkWing didn't stand a chance against even one HiveWing. Was he lying beside Luna on the sand now, bleeding and swollen with venom?\n\nBlue shuddered, his claws wobbling underneath him.\n\nThey had just reached the edge of the outer courtyard when he heard shouts behind them. \"Stop! You there! SilkWings! Stop at once!\"\n\nHis feet obeyed instinctively. Guards were talking to him; guards were to be listened to. You never argued with HiveWing guards, or else you'd get sprayed or stabbed with something; everyone knew that.\n\nBut Io didn't stop. Io threw her talons around his chest and hurled up into the air, her spectacular wings pumping desperately.\n\n\"Io!\" Blue yelped with fear as his claws left the ground. Suddenly they were flying along the narrow streets, flashes of startled faces peering out of windows at them. The indigo whirl of Io's wings beat around Blue's head and he covered his eyes.\n\n\"Stop! Queen Wasp orders you to stop at once!\"\n\nWhere did Io think they were going? There was nowhere in the Hives where Queen Wasp wouldn't find them. Nobody ran from the queen's guards. And she would surely kill them both for disobeying her orders.\n\nIo let out a small roar of frustration, and Blue peeked through his claws. They were nearly at the exit that led to the tunnels spiraling up \u2014 but guards were closing rank in front of it, spears crossed, teeth gleaming.\n\nThat's the only exit, Blue thought frantically. There weren't even any windows or ledges to the open sky on this level of the Hive.\n\nOh, he realized with a fresh burst of terror. That's probably intentional.\n\nSo there's no way for a flamesilk to escape.\n\nIo whirled in the air and shot down one of the avenues toward the training center. Which, frankly, seemed like a poorly thought-out plan: Blue could see a small army of eager-looking HiveWing trainees swarming out of the front gate. Yellow-striped wings flicked and buzzed; sharp white teeth snapped at the air as the dragons spread out to search the streets. For us. They're searching for us.\n\nBut then Io banked suddenly left and up \u2014 up through the open courtyard toward the higher Hive levels. Blue yelped again as the ground dropped even farther away, and then really wished he hadn't even thought the word dropped.\n\nShouts of fury rose from below, followed by the sound of buzzing, beating wings as all the guards and soldiers took to the air.\n\nWe're going to die, Blue thought. There's so many of them, and they have \u2014 wait \u2014 why aren't they shooting at us?\n\nHe knew some of the HiveWings behind them had dart weapons and spears. So why hadn't they thrown them?\n\nDragons on the surrounding levels rushed to the edge of the ledges to watch the chase. Blue had never had this many eyes on him before. What do they see? What do they think? Does anyone want to help? Or are they all hoping we'll be caught and it'll be exciting to watch?\n\nSuddenly, Io was jerked backward and Blue felt himself slip through her talons for just a moment, until she dug her claws in (ouch!) and gave a mighty heave of her wings, kicking backward at the HiveWing who'd grabbed her tail.\n\nThey struggled in the air, Blue dangling between them, and then Io swept her wings in a huge arc and threw Blue up toward the highest open level.\n\n\"YAAAAAAAAAAH!\" Blue screamed. He flung out his claws and felt them catch in the rough treestuff walls. His body slammed into the side with a bone-jarring thump and he dug in his back talons desperately.\n\n\"Up!\" Io shouted to him as she swung her attacker like a club, smashing other HiveWings away. \"Climb, Blue! Go!\"\n\nHe tried to imagine he was out on the webs, having a perfectly normal climb with lots and lots and lots of secure webs below to catch him. He pushed himself up, and up again, and in a moment he felt the ledge above. He clutched at it, his wingbuds churning as though they could help.\n\nTwo faces peered down at him \u2014 SilkWings, ones he didn't know. But he could guess what they were thinking: Should we help this wingless dragonet? Will the HiveWings punish us if we do? What has he done to make the guards chase him? He must be a very bad dragon to be running from the guards \u2026 but if we let him fall, he'll die \u2026\n\nTalons reached down and circled his wrists; strong arms pulled him up to safety. He sprawled on the treestuff, gasping more from fear than exhaustion. This was a residential level, full of HiveWing homes a bit smaller than the one where Silverspot worked, and he'd landed in their school's practice vegetable garden. All around him were garden boxes full of dirt and little tendrils of maybe-one-day-I'll-be-a-plant, labeled with optimistic scrawls on flat wooden sticks.\n\nThe two SilkWings, watching him with confusion, were the only dragons nearby, but he could see HiveWings running toward him along the streets and others spreading their wings on the far side of the city.\n\n\"Io,\" he panted, scrambling up. \"Is she \u2014\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" asked the gray-blue SilkWing with speckles of yellow across her scales.\n\n\"What's \u2014\" began the other, but he broke off as Io landed on the ledge behind Blue.\n\n\"The seeds will grow again,\" Io said to them. She shoved Blue forward without waiting for a response, but he saw a look of recognition cross their faces.\n\n\"What?\" he said to her as they plunged down the nearest empty street. He glanced back and saw the SilkWings casually blocking the road behind them, their wings spread wide as they started arguing about something.\n\n\"There are SilkWings who will help you,\" Io said rapidly, \"if you can find them. A group called the Chrysalis.\"\n\nThe houses they ran past were narrow but elegant, made of treestuff that flowed straight into the street below and into the roof above them, as though they had grown with the Hive. Most of them had intricate patterns of seashells or glass tiles embedded in their outer walls, spirals of pearl-pink-coral or zigzagging diamonds of aquamarine. Streetlamps that hung from the ceiling above cast a warm glow over everything, deceptively calm and cozy, like a shroud of silk around a wasp nest.\n\n\"The Chrysalis \u2014 what \u2014 why don't I know about them?\" Blue asked, breathing hard. He'd never run this much for this long in his life. His sides ached and his talons hurt and his eyes were blurry and his heart felt like a beehive about to explode.\n\nIo snorted. \"Because every time someone says to you, 'Hey, wasn't that mean what that HiveWing did?' you say, 'Oh, maybe she's tired or frustrated with work or just lost something important or is having a fight with her sister,' and then it's kind of hard to follow up with 'Well, so, care to join a movement to take her down?'\"\n\n\"A movement?\" Blue sputtered. \"To take who down?\"\n\nThe street abruptly ended, spilling them out into a HiveWing park \u2014 or at least, it looked a bit like a park, but without any grass or flowers. Instead the vast circle was full of playground structures carved from real wood, dark and smooth, like the abandoned bones of ancient trees. Many of them arched all the way to the roof, which was probably a lot of fun if you were a dragonet with wings and a chance of surviving a fall from that height. A HiveWing school, shinier and much bigger than Silkworm Hall, loomed along one side of the park, and in the center of the circle was a pool of water lined with silver-bright mirror tiles.\n\nOn the far side of the park, Blue caught a glimpse of slanting sunset light through one of the openings where dragons could fly in and out of the Hive. Out that window were the savanna and the open sky.\n\nBut how could they get there? The park was full of HiveWings: dragonets playing, parents gathering water from the pool, guards and families and teachers who'd finished school for the day, all strolling the paths, filling the space between here and escape.\n\nHe'd wondered why the houses they ran past seemed to be empty. Apparently this park was the place where the entire neighborhood gathered at the end of the day.\n\n\"Duck your head,\" Io said. \"Pretend to be a servant. Walk quickly but not too fast.\" She folded her wings in close and darted out onto one of the more crowded pathways, weaving between dragons. With her head bowed submissively, she blended in with the other SilkWing servants Blue could see here and there, many of them carrying heavy water jugs or keeping an eye on young dragonets while HiveWing parents chatted with each other.\n\nThis is never going to work, Blue thought as he ducked his head and followed her.\n\nAnd yet, for a moment, it seemed as if it might. The HiveWings barely glanced at two more lowly SilkWings. They were so busy with one another, it was as though the SilkWings didn't exist. Many of them were watching a group of young dragonets leap from a climbing structure, their tiny wings pumping to help them drift down. One little black-and-orange dragonet crashed into Blue as she ran across to her friends, but she just yelped, \"Oops! Sorry!\" and kept going.\n\nIt looked like a nice place to live \u2014 perhaps not as huge and impressive as the higher level where Silverspot's mistress had her mansion, but a place where families were friends with one another. These dragons made one another laugh, worked hard, cared about their dragonets. They were happy to be safe. They weren't so different from Blue and his family.\n\nSurely they wouldn't let him be dragged away by guards to \u2026 whatever happened to flamesilks. Did they even know about flamesilks?\n\nBehind him he heard clanking and running talonsteps. He tried to duck his head even farther, following Io around a tall, fortlike playhouse where three HiveWing dragonets passed pretend honey tea out the windows.\n\nThe open air wasn't too far away now. In a moment Io could swoop him off into the grassland. HiveWings didn't like going out too far into the savanna, so they should be able to find somewhere to hide out there. And then Io could explain everything to him and they could figure out a safe way to make this right.\n\nThey were passing behind a cluster of tiny dragonets in a sandbox when the silence fell.\n\nIt fell so suddenly, like a wall of nothingness, that Blue found himself pausing to touch his ears in bewilderment.\n\nWhy did everyone stop \u2026 talking \u2026\n\nHe glanced around uneasily. They hadn't just stopped talking; every HiveWing in sight was frozen, right in the middle of whatever they'd been doing. The dragonet halfway up the climbing structure had one claw raised; the twins in the sandbox were scowling at each other, mouths open, but no sound coming out.\n\nIo slowed to a stop in front of him, spreading her wings slightly to keep him back. Her gaze nervously darted around at the silent dragons. Blue realized that the other SilkWings in the park were looking around, too, many of them just as bewildered.\n\nAnd then the HiveWings lifted their heads, all of them at once, and tilted their chins toward the east.\n\nBlue felt a scream building in his throat.\n\nAll of their eyes had gone pure white.\n\n\"Find the flamesilk dragonet,\" the HiveWings said in unison. \"Capture him. And bring him to me.\"\n\nA shriek of terror ripped through the heavy air, but it wasn't coming from Blue.\n\nIt came from near the pool, from a young SilkWing with pale blue-and-pink wings holding a baby HiveWing in his arms. The tiny dragonet glared up at him with its fathomless eyes.\n\n\"Aphid,\" the SilkWing cried. \"What's wrong with you? Aphid, can you hear me?\"\n\nAphid bared small teeth and twisted his body fiercely, struggling to get free.\n\n\"Let him go,\" said an older SilkWing softly, touching the younger one's shoulder. \"They're not themselves right now.\"\n\nThe dragonet snapped at his caretaker's talons as the SilkWing set him gently on the ground.\n\n\"Where is the flamesilk?\" Aphid said in spine-chilling unison with the other HiveWings. \"Who can see him?\"\n\nThe HiveWings all slowly, eerily, began swiveling their heads, staring in turn at each SilkWing in their line of sight, like snakes studying a herd for the weakest prey.\n\n\"Io?\" Blue whispered as softly as he could.\n\n\"I think \u2026 run,\" she whispered back.\n\nThey bolted for the exit, Blue's legs screaming in protest.\n\nEvery head snapped toward them. A black-spotted scarlet dragonet, no taller than Blue's wingbuds, threw herself off a slide at them, hissing. She landed on Io's back and sank in her claws, but Io dove into a roll and knocked her off.\n\nBlue felt pinpricks of pain stab into his ankle. He glanced back as he ran and found an orange dragonet with his teeth embedded in Blue's back leg, too small to do much damage, but hanging on grimly.\n\nHow do I shake him off without hurting him? Blue thought frantically.\n\nThere was no more time to think. Two much larger HiveWings blocked their path, wings spread and claws gleaming.\n\n\"Give up, wingless,\" they said. \"You cannot escape me.\"\n\nBlue skidded to a stop and the dragonet tumbled off his ankle. There were HiveWings in every direction, all focused on him. The voice was right; there was no \u2014\n\nIo barreled into the two dragons in front of them. Her wings flapped huge and purple in their faces, driving them back for a moment, clearing a path.\n\nAnd there was the sky \u2026\n\nBlue darted through the opening and ran pell-mell toward the ledge. It was close now. He could see two of the three moons rising. He could see small twisted trees and a distant giraffe and the long yellow grass waving far below.\n\nToo far below.\n\nHe reached the edge and froze.\n\nThe wall of the Hive plunged down before him, impossibly steep, impossibly terrifying. This level was far below the webs, but still a long way from the ground. Blue couldn't possibly jump from here; he would break his neck and die.\n\nIf only I had my wings!\n\nHe turned and saw Io fighting off three full-grown HiveWings. Their talons slashed at her side, and one had his tail raised to stab her with the stinger at the end.\n\n\"Io!\" Blue cried.\n\n\"Go, Blue!\" she shrieked. \"Get out of here!\"\n\n\"I can't!\" He felt tears finally start to flood his eyes. \"I can't go without you!\"\n\nIn a way he meant, \"I can't fly from here; I need your wings,\" but in another, deeper way, he really meant that he couldn't leave her at the mercy of these zombie dragons. He couldn't keep running, alone, knowing she would be caught and punished, and punished worse if he did escape.\n\n\"You have to!\" she shouted. But she must have realized he couldn't take that leap. As he took an indecisive step back toward her, she kicked a HiveWing in the face and broke free for a moment, just long enough for her to grab a twisted ladder structure and knock it over between her and her attackers. In the breath that gave her, she shot a twist of silk from her wrists up at the ceiling and another that coiled around Blue's ankle. A heartbeat later, he was hurled toward the roof.\n\nHis claws caught the webs that Io was shooting across the top of the cavern. Instinctively he swung to the next one and then the next. He jumped swiftly, like they'd learned to do in school during emergency drills: What if the web is falling, what if you have to get to a Hive quickly for safety, what if you only have a few strands of silk to escape along.\n\nBut those drills had been about the threat of LeafWings attacking the webs. They were practiced so that little wingless dragonets would be ready to flee to a place where HiveWings could protect them. Never once, despite his overactive imagination, had Blue ever imagined using these skills to run away from HiveWings.\n\nHe shot over the heads of the families on the playground, so fast that they lost track of him for a moment. As they whipped their heads around, buzzing and hissing, he reached the end of Io's silk, shielded by a tall slide near the walls of the school, and looked back.\n\nIo was almost at the ledge \u2026 and with the HiveWings distracted, looking for him, she might be able to get out and fly away.\n\nBut not with him. She'd only be able to escape without him.\n\nHe gouged a chunk of treestuff out of the ceiling above him and threw it as far and hard as he could. It landed with a scattering thud halfway across the playground, and all the HiveWings spun toward the sound.\n\nBlue let go of Io's silk and dropped to the top of the school wall, then over it and down into the small courtyard beyond. Triangles of lime-colored chalk marked out the games young HiveWings played here during recess. For a moment, Blue thought about grabbing one of the pale blue metal practice spears that leaned against the wall, but the truth was that he'd be more likely to hurt himself than anyone else with one of those \u2014 and he couldn't even begin to imagine stabbing another dragon on purpose.\n\nWhere do I go? He glanced around the courtyard, trying to catch his breath. It was surrounded on all sides by the school, except for the wall behind him, which had the neighborhood park and a horde of white-eyed zombie dragons on the other side. They'll follow the trail of Io's silk and figure out where I went in a moment.\n\nEven if I can get out of this school somehow, where would I go after that? I can't go back to Mother. I'm sure Swordtail will be on Misbehaver's Way by morning, if he's still alive. And I have no idea what they've done with Luna.\n\nHe pressed his talons to his mouth. He didn't have time to cry. He didn't have time to be sucked into imagining how Luna and Swordtail and Burnet and Io must be feeling right now.\n\nHe started across the courtyard toward one of the school doors, although at this time of day he was afraid they'd all be locked.\n\n\"Pssst! Over here!\"\n\nBlue whirled around. A small equipment shed was built along the side of one of the school walls; the door was open a crack, and a pair of golden-yellow talons was reaching out of it, beckoning to him.\n\nHe could hear the HiveWing voices issuing commands on the other side of the wall. There wasn't time to be worried and indecisive. He bolted toward the shed and let the strange talons yank him inside.\n\nThe door snicked shut behind him, leaving them in pitch-darkness. Blue tripped over a ball under his claws and the other dragon caught him, strong arms holding him up. He felt the brush of wings against his side. This was a SilkWing who had already gone through Metamorphosis, then \u2014 but it must have been recently; this dragon was smaller than he was.\n\n\"Who \u2014\" he whispered.\n\n\"Shhhhh,\" she said. She wrapped her front claws softly around his snout.\n\nThe shed was small and packed with paraphernalia; there was barely room for Blue and the other dragon to stand. His claws felt clumsily entangled with hers; his neck kept bumping against cool scales, and her tail lightly rested over his. But she was so perfectly still that he couldn't pull away \u2014 or at least, he feared that if he did, he might knock over a wall of armor or something.\n\nHe wondered if she could feel his heart slamming around his chest. Did she work at the school? Cleaning HiveWing classrooms or preparing their snacks? Had she ever seen the HiveWings act like this before, as though their minds had all melded into one? Did she know what was happening, and how dangerous it was to protect him?\n\n\"Don't move,\" she whispered, apple-scented breath in his ear. She let go of his face and in the dark he felt her crouch beside him, reaching for the inner wall. Her wings were like a cloud of butterflies against his scales, touching down and taking off in a thousand little brushes.\n\nMaybe she was scared, too. Or had she rescued other SilkWings like this before? He tried to imagine being that brave \u2014 brave enough to see a dragon in trouble and an entire tribe turned terrifying and still reach out to help.\n\nMaybe if he imagined it hard enough, he could make himself a little braver, too.\n\nShe took one of his front talons and touched it to the wall, or rather, to a spot where the wall disappeared: an opening, a trapdoor into a tunnel.\n\n\"Stay close to me,\" she whispered. \"The tunnels can be confusing.\"\n\n\"Are you with the Chrysalis?\" he whispered back, his nose bumping hers as he turned toward her.\n\nShe touched his mouth again, a \"hush\" gesture, before ducking into the tunnel. He followed as close as he dared, trying not to step on her tail.\n\nIt was like crawling through an ant farm, following the tunnels in a winding maze through the walls of the school. Here and there chinks of light shone through the cracks and Blue caught glimpses of the buttercup yellow scales of the dragon in the dark. Through the cracks he could also see fragments of the school: even rows of tables, a blackboard covered with neat columns of numbers, an easel divided into narrow lines of blue and black paint.\n\nAt last she stopped and peeked through a small hole just at eye level. After a moment, she unlatched a trapdoor, pushed it open, and climbed out, beckoning for him to follow.\n\nHe had to duck his head as he came through, since the trapdoor opened out of the wall under a long table. Blue's eyes were dazzled for a moment as he crawled out, although the room they were in was not particularly bright. It had no outer windows and was lit only by a few small lamps.\n\nThe first thing he saw as his eyes adjusted were the books \u2014 shelves and shelves of books reaching floor to ceiling, all around the room. He stretched his aching legs and turned in a slow, wondering circle, thinking of the students who were lucky enough to attend a school with so many books. Had anyone read all of them? Did the librarian love handing them out, or did she wish she could keep all of them safely within the circle of her wings?\n\n\"This is our library,\" said his rescuer, hopping up onto the table and curling her tail around her back claws. \"I know, it's pretty small. But it's closed most of the time \u2014 we share our librarian with a bigger school uplevel \u2014 so it's a good place to hide when the rest of the tribe goes all creepy-eyes.\"\n\nBlue turned slowly toward her, his heart thumping like mad.\n\nHer claws were small and sharp, like a leopard's, and her four wings swooped down from her back in beautiful smooth folds. She had an open, curious face, gold-rimmed spectacles, and warm, dark brown eyes that made him think of owls and tree hollows. In the glow of the lamplight, her scales were gold and tangerine, but speckled here and there with black scales that looked like tiny inkblots.\n\nBlack scales. The unmistakable sign of a dragon descended from Clearsight.\n\nSilkWings never had black scales.\n\nHis rescuer was a HiveWing.\n\nBlue inhaled sharply.\n\n\"I \u2014 I thought \u2014\" he stammered.\n\n\"Wow, you're beautiful,\" she said wonderingly. \"I've never seen a SilkWing in those shades of blue and purple before. Is that what your parents look like, too?\"\n\n\"Um,\" he said, looking down at his azure talons. \"Not exactly. Or, I mean, I'm not sure. I've never met my father. Shouldn't you \u2014\"\n\n\"Really?\" she said. She tipped her head at him, catching sparkles from the lamps in her glasses. \"Why don't you know your father? Is that normal for SilkWings? Don't you live with your parents? Or, I'm sorry, is that a question I'm not supposed to ask? I ask a lot of questions I'm not supposed to ask, apparently, according to most of my teachers \u2014 also my parents \u2014 actually, according to pretty much every grown-up HiveWing. Too many questions, Cricket! Don't you know what happens to nosy little HiveWings? They lose those noses! Which is silly; I've never seen a dragonet without a nose and I'm sure I can't be the first one with this many questions. What's your name? Oh, that's another question. Sorry. I'm Cricket.\"\n\n\"Blue,\" he said. \"I'm Blue.\"\n\n\"You sure are,\" she said, and giggled. \"Oh dear, I'm sorry, I bet you've heard that one before.\"\n\nHe took a step closer to her, trying to rearrange his understanding of what kind of dragon she was. A HiveWing who helped SilkWings \u2014 that wasn't a thing. \"Um \u2014 shouldn't you \u2014\"\n\n\"Be all mind-controlled, too?\" she finished for him, and hesitated. \"Yes, I should be. Every other HiveWing is. I have no idea why I'm not.\" She flicked her wings and settled them again with a little laugh. \"I can't believe I've kept that secret for six years and the first dragon I'm telling is a strange SilkWing. Katydid is going to be so mad.\"\n\n\"Is that what happened to everyone? Mind control?\"\n\n\"You didn't know about that?\" she said. \"I mean, I suppose I didn't either, until I saw it happen the first time. She doesn't do it very often, but Queen Wasp can control every HiveWing in the tribe \u2014 one at a time, or just one Hive, or everyone at once if she wants to.\"\n\n\"Whoa,\" Blue said, reeling a little.\n\n\"I know,\" she said.\n\n\"Except you?\" he said.\n\n\"Except me. Isn't that fascinating?\" Her face lit up like all three moons rising at once. \"I can't figure it out! There's nothing in any of these books about how she does it. Is it genetic? Am I some kind of mutation? Or could it be something we eat? But I eat everything, and, like, a lot of everything; I'm always hungry. It's so mysterious. There's seriously nothing about me that's different from all the other HiveWings.\"\n\nBlue thought there was. He'd never met another HiveWing like her \u2014 first of all, willing to talk to a SilkWing as though they could be friends. Second of all, looking at him as if he was a real dragon, not a wingless curiosity or nuisance to be stepped over.\n\n\"That must be such a weird feeling,\" he said, \"having someone take over your body like that. Making you say things and do things you wouldn't say or do yourself. Do you think they remember it afterward? Are they in there, feeling trapped, while it's happening?\"\n\n\"They do remember it,\" she said. \"They remember pretty much everything. My sister, Katydid, says it's not a trapped feeling, though \u2026 it's more like, suddenly you really want to do exactly what everyone else is doing. There's no struggle. She says it's kind of peaceful, having someone else make all the decisions for you for a bit.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Blue thought of the tiny dragonets attacking him and shivered. \"Except then later you'd feel like everything you did was still your choice, and you'd probably feel guilty about it, even though it wasn't really you at all.\"\n\nShe looked surprised, and then her gaze drifted up the shelves of books as she thought about what he'd said. \"That's true,\" she said after a moment. \"I don't actually know if it ever bothers them. I wonder how I can find out.\" She flicked her tail thoughtfully. \"You know, without getting my nose cut off. I think 'do you ever feel bad about what Queen Wasp makes you do?' is definitely one of those questions I'm not supposed to ask.\"\n\n\"Especially if you don't want anyone to know that the mind control doesn't work on you,\" he said.\n\n\"Right.\" Cricket fiddled with the earpiece of her glasses. \"Katydid is the only one who knows. I'm worried Queen Wasp might be angry if she found out. So I hide whenever it happens and hope no one notices.\"\n\n\"I won't tell anyone,\" Blue promised.\n\nShe gave him a sweet, slightly sad smile, and it occurred to him that he might never have a chance to tell anyone anyway. He felt a sharp prickle of pain under his wristband.\n\n\"So what did you do?\" she asked. \"Why is the whole Hive looking for you? What kind of criminal enterprise have I gotten myself involved in?\"\n\nShe kept smiling, but Blue noticed a shiver tremble across her wings. He guessed there was a part of her that had suddenly realized she was alone with a dragon who might be dangerous. Him, of all dragons, scaring a HiveWing!\n\n\"Nothing!\" he said quickly. He looked up at her and put one talon on the table, palm open. \"I promise. I'm totally harmless. The most harmless. Thoroughly utterly completely incapable of harm doing.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. She thought for a second. \"That is reassuring. Thoroughly utterly completely reassuring, except for how it's exactly what a dangerous criminal would say.\"\n\n\"Is it really?\" he asked, wide-eyed.\n\nCricket laughed. \"I don't know. I guess I'll have to ask all my dangerous criminal friends.\"\n\nHe liked the way her laugh made sun-colored scales ripple all down her long neck. His head was starting to feel strangely woozy. \"What would the least dangerous dragon in the world say?\" he asked.\n\n\"Why would the least dangerous dragon in the world be running away from HiveWing guards?\" she countered. \"What could he possibly have done that's so terrible, it made Queen Wasp bust out her mind-control powers?\"\n\nThe question hit Blue like an entire Hive collapsing on his chest.\n\nWhat did I do? I've always been a good dragon. Why is this happening to me?\n\n\"Oh no,\" she said, slipping off the table and crouching beside him as he folded to the floor. \"Why did that make you look so sad? What happened?\" She unfolded her wings to shelter the curve of his back.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. It was splendid having her wings over him, like being hugged by the sun, although actually it would probably be terrible to be hugged by the sun; this was much cooler. What was he talking about? Oh, right: the worst day ever. \"One moment it was a normal Metamorphosis Day, and then suddenly Luna was on fire and Swordtail was attacking guards and Io was carrying me and I don't even \u2014 I mean, I would never disobey a HiveWing \u2014 it all just happened so fast and I was so scared.\" Were the books blurrier from this angle? Or were his eyes losing focus?\n\n\"It's your Metamorphosis Day?\" Cricket said. She tipped her head at his wingbuds but politely didn't touch them. (A polite HiveWing? How did she get so weird and perfect?) \"Are you sure? They don't look ready yet.\" She picked up one of his talons and examined his wrist scales.\n\n\"No, no,\" Blue said. \"It's Luna's Metamorphosis Day. My sister.\"\n\n\"The one on fire,\" Cricket said. \"Is she all right? Why was she on fire? Lightning? I think I'd have noticed lightning striking the Hive today. How would fire even get into \u2014\" She stopped suddenly, staring at him with her mouth open.\n\n\"Did you get frozen?\" he said in a panic. \"Are you being mind-controlled right now?\"\n\n\"Your sister's a flamesilk?\" she whispered in her own voice. \"A real one? That's amazing!\"\n\n\"It is? You \u2014 you know about those?\" He tried to get to his feet, discovered that his knees had chosen an entirely different life goal, staggered a little sideways, and fell into her.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Cricket said, wrapping her wings around him. \"Let me see your wristband.\"\n\nHe could barely move his arm over to where she could catch it. She tugged on his wristband, trying to slide a claw underneath it, but it was heavy and snug.\n\n\"Why is my \u2014\" he tried to say, but apparently words were too hard. Really it was just unreasonable to expect entire word sentence groups arranged in order.\n\n\"Shhh,\" she said, helping him lie down on his back. \"Don't be scared, but there might be a toxin in your wristband. I read a study about the idea once, but I didn't think they'd implemented it yet. Did you feel anything? Like a needle poking you, kind of? I bet they rigged it to inject you if they ever couldn't find you.\"\n\n\"Whyyyy,\" he mumbled. He wanted to ask if it was going to kill him; he thought he should probably be worried if he was about to die. But it would be much easier to close his eyes, wouldn't it? And stop thinking about it? It would be much easier to think about how sparkly Cricket's glasses were. And how they made her face all interesting, as though there were lots of unexpected angles and layers to it, like a prism. Prism. Words were funny.\n\n\"They're hoping you'll flop over somewhere and be easy to catch,\" she said, wiggling a folded piece of paper between his wristband and his scales. \"Joke's on them, though, because you've got me to hide you.\" The paper caught on something hidden, tearing a little gash in his skin, and he yelped with startled pain.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Cricket cupped his face in her talons and caught his eyes with hers, like her gaze was amber and he was safe inside of it. \"Don't conk out. We might have to go back into the tunnels if they start searching the school.\"\n\n\"Can't \u2026 move \u2026 \" he slurred.\n\n\"I'm going to take off your wrist cuff,\" she said. \"Is that all right? Blue, can you hear me? Blink if that's all right with you.\"\n\n\"No way,\" he managed around his numb tongue. \"I'll be in \u2026 so much trouble.\"\n\n\"Oh, beautiful dragon,\" she said sympathetically. \"Don't you know how much trouble you're already in?\"\n\nHe closed his eyes. Something wet was leaking out of them. Apparently the toxin had affected his tear ducts, too.\n\nCricket scrambled up and disappeared from his side. He opened his eyes again, afraid that she'd be gone completely, but she was only across the library, carefully unscrewing one of the lamps from the wall, with a dust rag wrapped around her claws to protect them from the heat. Soon she had uncovered a small, glowing glass ball from inside the globe of the lamp. It shone bright enough to make Blue's eyes hurt. She folded the cloth over the ball and carried it to the librarian's desk, where she cleared away the books and papers, then set down a metal plate from a side drawer.\n\n\"Whrm?\" Blue mumbled.\n\n\"Don't worry, I've done this before,\" she said. \"I mean \u2026 never anywhere quite so \u2026 flammable. But I'm sure it'll be fine.\" She dug through the rest of the drawers until she found something that looked like a long, thin pair of tweezers. Blue had seen tools like that before; he'd even used them a few times, to untangle particularly messy snarls of silk.\n\nCricket took a deep breath, unwrapped the ball, and caught it between the tweezers, setting it down on the metal plate. She threw the rag into a far corner, still holding the ball steady, and then picked up a marble paperweight shaped like a coiled python.\n\nShe moved so confidently and efficiently that it didn't occur to Blue to be afraid \u2014 until the last moment, when she looked up at the ceiling and whispered, \"Please help me not set the library on fire, Clearsight.\" He couldn't have stopped her anyway, as she brought the pale gray snake smashing down on the light ball.\n\nGlass splintered across the desk and a powerful burnt-metal smell filled the air, but Cricket pounced forward with the tweezers and lifted something up.\n\nIt looked like a filament of silk, as long as one of Blue's claws, but alight with fire from end to end.\n\nThat was the source of light in all the lamps in the Hive. Flamesilk.\n\nHow had he never known that before? He'd never even wondered how the lamps worked. He'd assumed it was a HiveWing skill. If he'd had to guess, he would have imagined that perhaps some of them could create fire, like the dragons from the old stories who'd once lived across the sea.\n\nScarcely breathing, Cricket eased across the room toward him, holding the flamesilk thread in the tweezers.\n\nCould she really set the whole library on fire with that little thing? he wondered. If so \u2026 she's taking a big risk for me.\n\nShe crouched beside him and lifted his left arm gently in her free claws.\n\n\"Don't move,\" she said. \"I mean, I know you can't, but really don't.\" With infinite caution, she traced the flamesilk across his wrist cuff. It seared a smoking black line in the bronze, right across the w in Silkworm Hall.\n\nHawker is going to kill me, Blue thought deliriously. When I get to the checkpoint, he's going to make that very stern frowny face and tut-tut and check his list and grumble about paperwork and then stab me with his spear thingy.\n\nCricket traced the line again and then again with the flamesilk thread, burning it a little deeper each time. The smell of blacksmiths and melting chains filled the room, swamping the scent of old paper.\n\nAnd then, a few careful passes later, the metal gave way and fell off his wrist, brushing against his scales and leaving a small scorch mark that hurt like a viper bite. Blue bit back a whimper.\n\n\"Oh, shoot,\" Cricket said. She jumped up and ran back to the librarian's desk, grabbed a small watering can, and poured water from it over his burn. Then she dropped the flamesilk thread into the water that was left in the can. A sizzling, hissing sound and a cloud of steam billowed out of the top of it.\n\nBlue's arm felt as though it was floating \u2026 like maybe it would drift right up to the roof and bump around between the books on the top shelves. He felt untethered from the earth, a feeling that was tangled up with how close he was to Cricket and how she maybe had superpowers or at least the absolute very best brain in the world.\n\nCricket laughed. \"I don't know about that,\" she said, and he realized that he must have said something out loud. \"My teachers seem to think my brain is terribly annoying.\"\n\n\"I like it,\" Blue said. Everything still felt blurry, but his mouth was working a little better, or at least, words were coming out of it in order, even though those words didn't seem to be waiting for approval from the rest of him. He managed to sit up and smile at her. \"It's my new favorite brain.\"\n\nAnd then the world kind of tipped sideways and went dark, and Blue slipped quietly into the nothing.\n\nBlue had the impression that he should wake up. That it might be a good idea. That the reason it was a good idea might have something to do with how wherever he was sleeping wasn't swaying in the breeze, the way it was supposed to. This web hammock he'd fallen asleep in was weirdly still and hard underneath him.\n\nAnd there was someone shaking his shoulder. Someone whose wings brushed his face sometimes. Mother? Mother never smelled like books and apples, the way this dragon did.\n\n\"Are you awake?\" the dragon whispered. \"Blue? If you're not, could you be? Please? Now-ish?\"\n\n\"Yrmrft,\" Blue said, which was odd, because he'd been trying to say \"You bet,\" but apparently \"yrmrft\" was good enough for the dragon with all the questions, because she started trying to nudge him up to his feet.\n\nOh, questions \u2014 it's Cricket.\n\n\"What are you smiling about?\" she said curiously. \"I hope that's a good sign. Do you think you could smile and stand up at the same time? I would love to let you sleep more, but I think we really need to move.\" She froze for a moment, with him leaning heavily against her shoulder.\n\nNow the library was coming into focus around him. The glow of the lamps, the rows and rows of books, the sound of tramping talons from the hallway outside.\n\nUm. The what?\n\nHe pointed at the door in alarm and she nodded. \"That's why I woke you,\" she whispered. \"Quick, into the tunnels.\" She bundled him under the table and through the trapdoor. His arms felt all wobbly and his tail seemed to be entirely in the way, but he somehow managed to crawl into the dark space beyond. He dragged himself forward so Cricket could scrunch in behind him.\n\nThe glow from the library lamps vanished as Cricket pulled the trapdoor shut. Blue started to retreat farther into the shadows, but she caught his nearest talon and put one claw to her mouth in warning.\n\nBlue froze, and in that instant he heard the library door slam open. Three sets of talons thundered in, shaking the room so that a couple of books toppled off tall shelves and a small cloud of book dust wafted through the cracks in the trapdoor. He twisted his neck to peek over Cricket's shoulder. In the glimpses he could see as they moved around, the HiveWings' eyes were blank white pearls.\n\nSo the queen was still mind-controlling them. He wondered how long he'd been unconscious. He wondered how long she could keep it up. He wondered if she planned to keep them all as her zombies until she found him, no matter how long that took.\n\nAnd then his heart stopped in his chest as he remembered the wrist cuff Cricket had burned off him. He couldn't see it from his angle, but wasn't it still lying out there on the floor? Wouldn't they see it and know immediately that he'd been here?\n\nBut several agonizing moments passed and the searching dragons didn't cry out or roar for backup or hiss in triumph. They moved mechanically, soundlessly, through the room, checking every obvious hiding spot. One crouched down to look under the table, and Blue closed his eyes in fright, not daring to breathe. But the trapdoor must have looked like part of the wall, because the HiveWing \u2014 jet-black with flecks of red along his ears, wings, and claws \u2014 only grunted and moved on.\n\nCricket twitched suddenly, as if startled, and Blue realized he was leaning against her side, their tails entangled, their talons touching. He had been too terrified to notice, and he was afraid that pulling away would make a noise the searchers might hear. He checked her face, or what little of it he could see in the tiny bars of light. She had her gaze fixed on one of the HiveWings, a yellow-orange dragon freckled all over with black spots, but he couldn't quite interpret her expression. Dismay? Regret? Anger?\n\nWhat is she feeling? he wondered. Hiding from her own tribe, in the dark with a stranger, risking her queen's wrath to help a SilkWing.\n\nHe wondered about the HiveWings out there, too. Their sweet family evening of slides and seesaws and zebra meat snacks had abruptly turned into a dragon hunt. Everything they'd been planning to do tonight had been ripped out from under them. They didn't even know where their own dragonets were because, right now, finding Blue was all they cared about. The giggling little dragonets had gone from playing tag to prowling the shadows of the Hive with snarling teeth, every scale ready to attack.\n\nHow could they all go back home after this, back to family dinners and wing aerodynamics homework, knowing that someone could take over their minds and change their whole lives at any moment?\n\nThe three HiveWings touched their foreheads with one talon, all at the same time with exact mirrored movements. \"Nothing in the library,\" they said in unison. A ripple of fury crossed each of their faces simultaneously. \"He must be here somewhere. Keep looking.\"\n\nThey marched out the door, but Blue could hear their talonsteps in the corridor for a long time after they were out of sight. Cricket opened her mouth to say something, and this time he was the one to shush her. His antennae unfurled softly, feeling the vibrations in the air. Now that he was calmer and more awake, he could sense at least twenty other dragons searching the school.\n\nHe could also feel Cricket's heart beating, very close to his and almost as fast.\n\nDon't be scared, he tried to think to her. There was no reason not to be; if they were caught, he was sure she'd be in awful trouble. But he'd do everything he could to keep her out of it. He'd let them catch him first.\n\nHe reached out carefully through the dark and took one of her talons, pressing it to his own heart.\n\nI'm so glad you're here with me.\n\nShe looked up at him, small cracks of light dappling her face in gold and shadow, and he felt her pulse jump to match his.\n\nOh, this is the thing that's forbidden, Blue realized. This feeling. Looking at a HiveWing like this. Her looking back.\n\nIf they could be in more trouble than they already were, this was how.\n\nBut maybe that wasn't what she was feeling. Maybe he was still woozy from the toxin and confused by his life being upended. Maybe he was just imagining the flutter in their twining heartbeats.\n\nHis antennae twitched quietly, following the vibrations of dragons moving away from this section of the school.\n\n\"I think they've all gone upstairs,\" he whispered. \"Is there an upstairs?\"\n\n\"Yes. How can you tell where they are?\" she whispered back. \"Your antennae?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"I found some old biology books that said HiveWings used to have antennae, too,\" she said softly. \"But when I asked my science teacher about it, he said not to be impertinent, and then the books disappeared from the library.\" She sighed. \"Everything interesting is off-limits. Why can't we study our own evolution? Don't you want to know what the tribes were like two thousand years ago, when Clearsight arrived?\"\n\n\"I never thought about it,\" he admitted. But she was right \u2014 if HiveWings were all descendants of Clearsight, what had they been like before she came to Pantala?\n\nThey stayed there, quietly, in the dark, with their talons and tails entwined, for a long time as the sounds of the search tramped above them, around them, in and out and along the halls and every room of the enormous school. Blue felt the jarring thumps of tables being overturned, the rattling clatter of closets being emptied, all their contents clawed out and thrown on the floor. He felt tremendously sorry for whoever had to clean up all this tomorrow. He guessed Queen Wasp wouldn't helpfully brainwash them into doing that.\n\nAt last all the vibrations faded, and Blue tested the air until he was sure the school was empty again.\n\n\"They're all gone,\" he whispered.\n\n\"That's a pretty cool superpower,\" she said, smiling at his antennae as they curled back in.\n\n\"Not quite as cool as knowing everything about everything,\" he said.\n\nShe blinked. \"Are you talking about me? I hardly know anything! There's so MUCH I don't know! I mean, yet. One day I will, I hope. I'm working on it.\" She wrinkled her snout as though the existence of unanswered questions was one of the greatest trials of her life. \"Like how Queen Wasp's mind control works. I really want to know that.\"\n\n\"Do you wish \u2014\" He hesitated, then plunged into his question. \"Do you wish you were like the other HiveWings? If you could make yourself, um, mind-controllable, would you?\"\n\n\"No!\" she said, her wings brushing his sides as they flared out and hit the walls of the tunnel. \"Would you? Who would? No, I'd fix it so it didn't work on anyone, if I could. That's what you would do, too, isn't it? At the very least I'd fix Katydid.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said. \"Was that your sister? The yellow one with the black spots you were watching?\"\n\nShe exhaled. \"Yes. She's my sister and my best friend. She normally looks much \u2026 kinder \u2026 than that.\"\n\n\"It must be awful,\" Blue said, studying her face. \"Seeing someone you love transformed. Like her brain and soul were stolen. She looks like her, but she's not, and you don't know what she might do or how she might treat you, but you know you can't reach her.\"\n\nCricket tilted her head at him. \"That's right,\" she said. \"That's exactly what it's like. Katydid says it's fine and she doesn't mind, since it happens so rarely \u2026 but she can't see herself all creepy-eyed. She doesn't know what it feels like for me to have to hide from her.\" She shivered slightly and Blue realized he was still holding her talon. He let go of it reluctantly.\n\n\"I hope you do find a way to save her,\" he said. \"And all of them.\"\n\n\"I know the grunting one who checked under the table, too,\" Cricket said quickly, as though she was trying to change the subject so she wouldn't cry. \"His name's Bombardier. But he's awful, so there's not much difference between regular him and brain-dead him. He thinks I'm in love with him, if you've ever wondered what the most enormous arrogance looks like. I guess I'd still save him, but maybe, like, last.\"\n\n\"Why didn't they see my wrist cuff?\" Blue asked. \"Or the broken glass and the flamesilk thread in the watering can?\"\n\n\"I cleaned it all up, of course,\" she said. \"You didn't notice, in between your snores?\"\n\n\"I wasn't \u2014 did I? I didn't, did I?\"\n\nCricket laughed. \"No, you're a very polite sleeper, don't worry.\" She glanced out at the library again. \"The only thing I couldn't do was replace the missing light globe. But those burn out or get stolen all the time, so hopefully no one will connect it to you.\"\n\n\"So every light globe in the Hive has a bit of flamesilk inside it?\" he said tentatively.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said. \"Every light globe in every Hive. It would be tough to live the way we do without flamesilk. We'd all be bumping around in the dark, treading on everyone's claws. Plus we need it for everything else that's made with fire: metalwork, glass \u2026 \" She touched her spectacles self-consciously.\n\n\"Do all the HiveWings know about flamesilks?\" he asked. \"Because I'd never heard of them until today.\"\n\n\"I think they know the queen has a source of flamesilk,\" she said thoughtfully, \"but most of them probably don't think about where it comes from very much \u2026 it's just something you order when you need it.\"\n\nBlue opened and closed his mouth on his next question. He remembered the eerie golden lava erupting from Luna's wrists and weaving around her scales. Her silk was a \u2026 a commodity to the HiveWings. Something to be ordered and bought and sold and used.\n\n\"If your sister's a flamesilk,\" Cricket said, reaching for his wrist, \"does that mean you're going to be a flamesilk, too?\" She traced one claw over the spot where his silk would come out, and he shivered.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. \"Io said I would be, but we weren't taught anything about flamesilks at Silkworm Hall.\"\n\n\"But that must be why they're chasing you, right?\" she said. \"Queen Wasp would never let a flamesilk wander around her Hives unguarded.\"\n\n\"I've never been guarded before,\" he said. \"I've never done anything wrong. I'm really good at following the rules. She doesn't have to worry about me.\" He frowned, touching the spot on his forehead that was starting to hurt. \"Maybe she just doesn't know that. Maybe I could go to her and explain that I'm a loyal SilkWing. Maybe if I promise I'll be careful, she'll let me go back to my normal life. And Luna, too. Luna isn't dangerous.\"\n\nCricket hesitated. \"I think \u2026 I think HiveWing policy is that all free flamesilks are dangerous, no matter what they say.\" She unlatched the trapdoor and crawled back into the library. Blue followed her as she pulled a book off one of the high shelves, fluttering her wings a little to lift herself up to where she could reach it. She flipped through the pages, then slid it under his nose.\n\nScarlet colors leaped off the page, assaulting his eyeballs. The picture was of a Hive on fire, burning from top to bottom, with screaming HiveWing faces dimly visible through the smoke. At the top, huge dark letters proclaimed: THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNCHAINED FLAMESILKS.\n\n\"Yikes,\" he said.\n\n\"I guess that's supposed to be you,\" she said, pointing to a SilkWing standing in the middle of the burning Hive with fire pouring out of his wrists. The illustrated dragon had a gleeful, unhinged grin on his face as he torched the city.\n\nBlue shuddered. \"I would never,\" he said. \"Why would anyone ever \u2014 that's just horrible.\"\n\nCricket tugged the book back over to her and turned to the next page, studying the words. Her eyes darted so quickly across the text that Blue couldn't believe she was actually absorbing any of it, until she said, \"OK, here. Flamesilk genetics. A dragonet with one flamesilk parent has a fifty percent chance of being a flamesilk, too. So we know Luna is, but you might or might not be.\" She looked over the top of her glasses at him. \"Do you think you are? Do your wrists ever feel like they're burning? What symptoms did Luna have?\"\n\n\"She didn't have any!\" Blue said. \"I mean, not until today, when her silk started coming in all arrrrrgh-now-there's-lava-everywhere. But she's been totally normal before now.\"\n\n\"So there's no way to know if you are or not until your Metamorphosis Day,\" Cricket said. \"Hmmm. They must want to keep you locked up until then anyway, in case you try to run away.\"\n\n\"My friend Io's the one who made me run away. It wouldn't have occurred to me to run,\" Blue pointed out, \"at least, not until they started chasing me.\"\n\n\"What's the Chrysalis?\" Cricket asked.\n\n\"The \u2014 what?\"\n\n\"When we first met, in the shed. You asked if I was with the Chrysalis.\"\n\nBlue felt a twist of guilt in his chest. He was pretty sure that whatever the Chrysalis was, HiveWings weren't supposed to know about it. Even smart, sympathetic HiveWings with interesting glasses. Io would be furious if she found out he'd blurted it out to the first dragon he met.\n\nCricket was studying him curiously. \"Is it a secret?\" she said. \"A SilkWing secret? Do you guys have lots of secrets from us? Can you tell me some of them? I promise not to tell anyone! There's so much I don't know about SilkWings, but Father won't let me ask the servants anything.\"\n\n\"I don't really know what it is,\" he admitted, trying to stem the tide of questions. \"My friend just told me they'd help me if I could find them. But I have no idea how to do that.\" He slid the flamesilk book over and studied it himself, hoping he hadn't hurt Cricket's feelings. \"So \u2026 if flamesilk is so useful, then Queen Wasp probably isn't killing them. Right?\"\n\n\"Of course she isn't!\" Cricket said, startled. \"We're not barbarians, Blue. The queen's a little scary, but she's not a murderer.\"\n\nBlue would have said the same thing himself this morning. But something about watching those guards surround Luna and then hiding from white-eyed, mind-controlled dragons was making him a little less certain about the queen's trustworthiness.\n\n\"Do you think I should turn myself in?\" he asked hesitantly. That sounded like the right thing to do, except that it felt very very wrong. Io's warning that he couldn't trust any HiveWings rang in his ears.\n\nAnd here I am, of course, doing exactly that.\n\nCricket thought for a moment, tapping her claws on the book. \"No,\" she said finally, slowly. \"They won't kill you, but if you are a flamesilk, they'll \u2014 well, you'll end up with the other flamesilks, I guess.\"\n\n\"Where is that?\" he said with a sudden rush of hope. That's where Luna will be.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry I made you look so excited,\" Cricket said anxiously. \"Nobody knows where the flamesilks are kept.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Blue asked. \"Someone must know.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she said, leaping to her feet. \"Let's think. Flamesilk orders go out all the time, because each thread only burns for about one cycle of the smallest moon before it fades. Which means someone has to get the flamesilk from the dragons producing it, to fill the orders. So whose job is it? And someone must keep them fed and taken care of \u2014\"\n\n\"And guarded,\" Blue put in.\n\nShe flinched. \"Yes \u2026 probably that, too.\" She started pacing up and down between the library tables. \"And of course Queen Wasp knows. So there must be a way to trace the flamesilk back to wherever the dragons are. This is definitely a solvable mystery.\"\n\nCricket hurried over to the librarian's desk and opened one of the bottom drawers. \"All right, forms, where are you? She's always complaining about how many there are to fill out. Order forms \u2026 replacing library supplies \u2026 you would think a librarian would be all about alphabetizing her folders, wouldn't you? Do you think she'd notice if I alphabetized them for her? \u2026 Oh, light globes! Here!\" She pulled out a sheaf of papers and narrowed her eyes at them.\n\nBlue glanced at one of the lamps. It was weird to think that there was a tiny thread of silk in there, glowing and burning. It was even weirder to think that the thread had come from a dragon very much like him, or Luna. A dragon trapped somewhere, spilling flame from her arms for HiveWings to gather and snip into little useful bits that could be packaged and sold across the continent. A dragon whose whole life would be about producing flamesilk for HiveWings and nothing else.\n\nMaybe it came from my father.\n\nThe thought dazed him for a moment. His father was a flamesilk, kept under guard wherever other flamesilks were kept. That's why Blue had never met him. He'd only been brought out for a moment to father more dragons \u2026 in the hopes of creating more flamesilks, Blue guessed.\n\nWhich meant Queen Wasp knew exactly what Luna and Blue might become. She'd created them on purpose, for that purpose.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" Cricket said. \"It looks like the order forms get sent to a department in Wasp Hive. So maybe the flamesilks are there, or maybe that department forwards it on.\"\n\n\"If we can figure out where they are,\" Blue said, \"maybe I could go see what it's like. Maybe it's not so terrible. Maybe that would help me decide whether I should turn myself in.\"\n\nCricket tipped her head up at him. \"And if it is terrible?\" she asked. \"Would you want to rescue your sister?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 yes,\" he admitted. Of course that was what he was really thinking, and of course Cricket had figured that out. \"But I'm not exactly the right dragon for that job.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Well \u2026 I mean \u2026\" He waved vaguely at himself. \"I'm not very \u2026 I don't like \u2026 making trouble.\" Troublemakers. \"I need Swordtail,\" he blurted. \"He's the one who should rescue her.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Cricket said, whisking the forms back into the drawer. She smiled brightly at Blue. \"Then let's go get him.\"\n\n\"It's not that simple,\" Blue argued, following Cricket into the dim hallway beyond the library. \"Swordtail attacked a bunch of HiveWing guards. He's either on Misbehaver's Way or somewhere worse by now. And I can't exactly stroll around the Hive with everyone looking for me.\"\n\n\"I bet I can solve that problem,\" Cricket said. \"Let's think. Both problems, maybe? Will you let me try?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 sure,\" Blue said, distracted by the school around him. Rows of cubbyholes lined the corridor, many of them overflowing with crumpled papers, books, sticky bags of half-eaten nectar snacks, seed packets, and little buckets of dirt. Every few steps there was a glass terrarium embedded in the wall with something growing in it: tidy clusters of blue forget-me-nots in one, long white carrots in another, prickly cactus balls bristling in an orderly row from a third.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Blue said. \"It's so plant-y in here.\"\n\n\"We're an agriculture-track school \u2014 do SilkWings have those?\" Cricket said. They passed one glass case that was full of water, crowded with dark flaps of purple seaweed. Blue squinted at it and realized that it was lit by a small light globe on the roof of the terrarium \u2014 they all were. Tiny flamesilk suns kept these plants alive.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Blue said. \"But I think they usually figure out which job to assign us after we finish school. Our lessons are things like the history of the LeafWing War, silk weaving, reading, web structure, and following directions. Lots of following directions.\"\n\n\"I wish I could go to your school for a day,\" Cricket said, her wings twitching as though she might fly out one of the skylights at any moment. \"I'd love to hear what other dragons are learning, wouldn't you? Are your teachers interesting? How big is your library? Do you have music classes? I wish we did; I don't understand music at all and I really want to. But our curriculum is very focused so we can all become farmers and gardeners. That's what this is all about.\" She waved her claws at the corridor walls. \"Every student is assigned a terrarium for practice.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Blue said. \"You \u2026 don't seem like a farmer to me.\"\n\n\"I'd be an awesome farmer if I wanted to be,\" she said, \"which I don't. I want to be a librarian or a scientist or an inventor. But I'm a terrible farming student. Apparently there's only one way to do things and that's how it's always been done and there's no point in trying to 'innovate,' Cricket, it's a waste of seeds and oh dear why can't you just grow potatoes like a useful dragon.\" She paused at one of the terrariums and tapped it lightly with her claw. \"This is mine.\"\n\nBlue was pretty sure he could have guessed that on his own. Unlike the other, orderly terrariums, this box was a riot of leaves and color, as though a host of sunflowers had thrown a gala and some marauding butterflies had crashed it. Velvety orange petals jostled for space with elegant trailing spider plants; sapphire-blue bulbs peeked out from behind heart-shaped leaves with pink edges.\n\n\"It's like your brain as a garden,\" Blue said wonderingly.\n\nCricket laughed. \"And equally popular with my teachers,\" she said. \"Cricket, what a disaster. Why didn't you use one type of seed like all the other students? Why must everything you touch be such a mess?\"\n\nBlue stepped closer and peered through the tangle of foliage. Deep in the heart of her terrarium, well hidden by the other plants, there was a tiny tree. It was no taller than the length of two claws, but it had a trunk and miniature branches and little perfect tufts of forest-green needles all over it. It was beautiful.\n\n\"That's \u2014\" he breathed. \"That's a real \u2014 How did you \u2014?\"\n\n\"I found the seed on one of our gathering field trips. I had no idea what it was until it started to grow.\" She smiled at it wistfully. \"I had a feeling you'd see it. Most dragons don't. They think my terrarium is too messy to look at for very long; it offends their eyes or something. But my botany teacher finally spotted it last week. He wants me to uproot it and throw it away.\" She sighed. \"Poor little innocent tree.\"\n\nShe turned and kept walking and Blue followed her, although he wished he could stay and stare at the tree a bit longer. He couldn't believe it was real. Surely Cricket loved it. It looked like a loved little tree.\n\n\"That's so sad,\" he said. \"What an awful thing to ask you to do. You brought it to life.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to let my tree die,\" she said firmly. \"But where can I hide it? Somewhere with light, where I can visit, but no one will find it. I'll figure something out.\"\n\nShe pushed open a door at the end of the hall, revealing a room with long desks covered in glass beakers and small pots of soil. A metal cabinet at the back of the room was lit by a tiny globe inside, and the shelves were lined with neatly labeled bottles of liquid, organized by color. The top shelf ranged from a bright ruby red to a pale pink; the two middle shelves were shades of lemon and emerald and lime; and the bottom shelf held a few milky-white bottles and several with nearly colorless liquids in them. Blue crouched to look at one of them and realized it was slightly aquamarine when the light hit it in a certain way. He didn't understand any of the labels printed on the bottles \u2014 there were letters and numbers and some obscure squiggle symbols in between, but none of them formed recognizable words.\n\n\"This is our chemistry lab,\" Cricket said. \"We use some of these to help plants grow; others will kill certain weeds, if you apply them the right way. But a lot of these have other non-botanical uses, too. How many do you think I can take without Professor Earthworm noticing?\"\n\n\"Take?\" Blue said, startled. \"You can't steal from your school!\"\n\nShe paused with a vial the color of chamomile tea in her claws. \"But \u2026 Blue, these will help us. Don't you want to get your friend?\"\n\n\"Yes, but \u2014 but stealing is wrong \u2014\" he stammered. He imagined the chemistry teacher coming in tomorrow morning and finding bottles missing. Wouldn't she be upset? Wouldn't she feel guilty and worried about who had taken them and what might be done with them? She might blame her students; someone might get in trouble unfairly.\n\n\"You really are good at following the rules, aren't you?\" Cricket said, intrigued. \"Like, you really believe in them.\"\n\n\"Don't you?\" he said. \"Doesn't everyone?\"\n\nShe thought about that for a moment. He liked the way she stopped and thought carefully about the things he said. Most dragons already had their ideas settled in their heads; if they paused to think before responding, it was only about how to explain to you that you were wrong. But Cricket seemed to take in information and questions and hold them up against the things she thought she knew, to see if there was anything new she'd missed.\n\n\"Weird,\" she said finally. \"I usually think of rules as things that get in the way of all the stuff I really want to know. I mean, how can don't ask questions ever be a good rule? Or only borrow one book at a time from the library. That's just ludicrous. No one ever explains rules like that in a sensible way. But don't hurt other dragons \u2014 that's a rule I think everyone believes in, right? So \u2026 I guess I believe in some rules, and I think rules in general can be useful, but I also think it's all right to stop and question some of the rules sometimes, if they feel wrong to you. Doesn't that make sense?\"\n\n\"But don't steal is a rule everyone agrees on, too, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\"I think that help dragons who need help might be more important than don't steal,\" Cricket said. \"I mean, turn over fugitives to Queen Wasp when she's looking for them is probably a rule, too, you know? But I don't think you're dangerous. And I want to know more about flamesilks and SilkWings. And I think I can help you. I'd \u2014 I'd like to help you.\"\n\nBlue looked back at the citrus-colored vials. He didn't want to drag her into more danger than he'd already put her in, but he did need help. And more important, Swordtail and Luna needed help.\n\nThis isn't the first rule I'm breaking, he thought. The first rule I broke was running even after the guards told me to stop. He still felt shaken all the way through his scales at the memory of disobeying HiveWing orders.\n\nBut if I'm going to rescue Luna \u2026 or, at least, get Swordtail to rescue Luna \u2026 then this won't be the last rule I break either.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh my goodness,\" she said, looking genuinely startled. \"No one has ever said that to me!\"\n\n\"Then the dragons you know haven't been listening to you very well,\" he said. \"I bet you're right about almost everything.\"\n\n\"Oooo, the perfect title for my memoir,\" she said, grinning. \"Right about Almost Everything, by Cricket.\"\n\nHe laughed, letting her smile chase away his nerves. She carefully selected six vials from the back rows, rolled them in a thick black cloth, and tucked them into a bag she tied sideways across her chest.\n\n\"One more stop,\" she said. They hurried through the school again. Blue unfurled his antennae at each corner, but he couldn't sense any other dragons anywhere in the building. The hunt for him had moved on \u2026 or maybe paused for the night, he hoped without much optimism.\n\nThe next room Cricket took him into was huge and abutted the side of the Hive, because there was an enormous glass window all along one side of it. Outside it was very dark, with only fragments of the savanna grass shifting silver in bits of moonlight; the three moons and most of the stars were hidden by thick clouds.\n\nAfter a few moments of blinking around, Blue realized this was the art room he had glimpsed briefly through the cracks in the tunnels. Here was the easel with its perfectly perpendicular lines of blue and black; in fact, there was an entire row of easels with exactly the same painting on each one. Blue wasn't sure it was a painting; it seemed more like a plan for a gardening plot. In another corner of the room, a long table was lined with large sheets of paper, each one with a nearly exact replica of an orange painted in the center. The orange that had merited all this attention was still posed nonchalantly on a stool in front of the table.\n\nBlue looked around, but none of the artwork looked like Cricket's glorious terrarium. \"Where's yours?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh, I'm not allowed to take art classes anymore,\" Cricket said with a kind of carelessness he was pretty sure she was faking. \"You can proooooobably guess why.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, Cricket,\" he said, putting on the voice she'd used several times already. \"No one has ever used that many colors on one piece of paper before. Look at this mess. Why can't you just draw a normal blue blueberry like every other dragon?\"\n\nShe laughed so much he had to catch her before she fell into one of the easels.\n\n\"Were you there?\" she gasped, wiping tears from her eyes. \"That's exactly what Principal Lubber sounded like!\"\n\n\"I bet your art was beautiful,\" he said.\n\n\"A beautiful pile of shredded scraps when she was done with it,\" she said with a half shrug. \"I had dreams for a while that bee eaters and weaver birds found the pieces and tucked them into their nests all across the grasslands.\" She wrestled another cabinet open, this time revealing rows of color-coded paint pots and drawers of the cleanest paintbrushes Blue had ever seen, most of them as thin as his antennae.\n\n\"Um,\" he said as she started selecting brushes and paint. \"Do I want to know what's happening?\"\n\n\"We're going to disguise you!\" she said with delight. \"What color have you always wanted to be? I mean, I think your scales are perfect, but like you said, you can't wander the Hive looking like yourself, can you? That's a purple anyone would spot from the next Hive over. For a moment I thought it would be so cool to disguise you as a HiveWing, but then I was like, silly Cricket, that won't work, there are no wingless HiveWings. So what do you think \u2014 orange? Our cook is mostly orange.\"\n\n\"You're going to paint me?\" Blue said.\n\n\"Or you could paint yourself, but I think I'd better do it, unless you're good at it \u2014 are you?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" he said. \"I've never painted a dragon before.\"\n\n\"Me neither,\" she confessed, \"but I think it'll work if we use the right paint. Do you mind? Can I try?\"\n\n\"You think,\" he echoed nervously.\n\n\"Maybe a darker color, to be sure it'll cover yours,\" she said. \"Are there any sort of darkish SilkWings?\"\n\n\"Swordtail has mostly dark blue scales,\" Blue said. \"I've seen dark greens and reds and all shades of brown \u2026\"\n\nCricket pulled out a range of chocolate, maroon, and navy paints. \"All right,\" she said, herding him onto a drop cloth that covered part of the floor. \"Stay really still.\"\n\nBlue closed his eyes and froze. I'm putting myself in her talons, he thought. I really, really hope she knows what she's doing.\n\nBecause if she doesn't, and someone recognizes me, and we get caught \u2026 we're both going to be in worse trouble than I can imagine.\n\n\"I don't see how this could work,\" Blue protested as Cricket dipped a brush into paint the color of the sea during a storm. \"Won't I just look like a SilkWing with paint all over me?\"\n\n\"Not unless they look closely, and no one looks closely at SilkWings.\" She started dabbing paint lightly across the purple scales on his back. It felt like salamanders prowling over him, tiny wet toes sliding along each individual scale. It felt like purrs and whispers and ferns full of dewdrops trailing along his nerves.\n\nCricket switched to a sponge to smooth out the paint, then to another brush for a different color. She hesitated, lightly touching his shoulder. \"I'm going to paint around your wingbuds, but I won't touch them, all right?\"\n\nHe nodded. It was hypnotizing, the gentle brushing touch sweeping over him. He felt half-bewitched, as though the toxin from his wristband might still be running through his veins.\n\n\"Cricket, why are you helping me?\" he asked.\n\nHer talons stilled for a moment, then kept going. \"I don't know \u2026 maybe because I know what it's like to hide while everyone is mind-controlled. And because I've never met a flamesilk and I'd love to know more about you. And because you're \u2026\" She paused, struggling for a word.\n\n\"Pathetic?\" he offered. \"Desperate? A tragic story?\"\n\n\"No!\" she said. \"Not that at all. You're \u2026 \" She trailed off again.\n\n\"Aha,\" he said. \"Devastatingly handsome.\"\n\nShe laughed and poked his neck with the other end of the paintbrush. \"Stop it! You mustn't make me laugh while I'm wielding paint at you.\" He smelled cinnamon as she leaned in to paint around his ears. After a moment, she said, \"I mean, you're not not \u2026 but what I was trying to say is interesting. You're interesting, and I usually spend all day with dragons like Bombardier and Earthworm, who are definitely not interesting.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" he said. She wants to study me, he caught himself thinking. I'm one of the forbidden library books come to life, that's all. A chance for her to learn more about my tribe and flamesilk. It's not really about me.\n\nWhich is better. Safer. For both of us.\n\nHe sighed and closed his eyes. He imagined a thousand moths weaving a web of silk around him, shrouding him in a second skin. The paint felt like tiny beetle shells as it dried, glossy and thin and hard.\n\nAfter a while, Cricket said, \"Hmmm. What do you think?\"\n\nBlue half expected to see something like her terrarium when he opened his eyes. He was a little afraid he'd look like a rose garden on fire. But the dragon looking back at him from the cabinet mirror was a nondescript SilkWing in dark blues and the browns of dead leaves, with touches of deep red barely visible along his spine and snout. There were a few blobby spots around his claws, and his brighter blue peeked through here and there, but for the most part the paint was even. He looked like a dragon no one would glance at twice.\n\nHe blinked. \"Wow. Thank you, Cricket.\"\n\n\"It's not perfect, but hopefully it'll at least get you out of the Hive,\" she said apologetically. \"Especially if everyone is still looking for you.\"\n\nOut of the Hive, he thought with a shiver. He'd never gone any farther than the webs around Cicada Hive. Unlike Luna, he'd never even wanted to.\n\n\"I guess I'm ready to go find Swordtail,\" he said uncertainly. He'd never walked the streets of the Hive alone at night before. He always went home to the webs before dark. Burnet and Silverspot must be so worried about him.\n\nWhich made him think \u2026 \"Cricket, don't you have to go home?\"\n\nShe glanced out at the dark savanna and the twinkling lights of other Hives in the distance. \"I doubt my father will notice one way or another. Katydid will, but \u2026 she knows I sometimes hide for a while after Queen Wasp takes over everyone. I get nervous that it'll happen again right away. And it's \u2026 hard to be around dragons, even Katydid, after seeing that.\" She started cleaning away the paints and brushes. Blue moved to help her, but she stopped him. \"No, stay still until you're completely dry. Anyway, she's the only one who cares where I am, and she'll cover for me.\"\n\nFor how long? he wondered. How far would Cricket's curiosity take her before she decided to leave him to his fate? All the way to Wasp Hive? To Luna? Did he dare hope for that much?\n\n\"Where do you think Swordtail is?\" Cricket asked, tucking the last pot of blue paint into place. Blue noticed that she'd put two of the pots in the wrong order \u2014 one was darker than the other, so it should come later in the line \u2014 and reached past her to switch them.\n\n\"My only guess is Misbehaver's Way,\" Blue said. \"He doesn't like being told what to do, so he's been there before. But I'm afraid \u2014 I mean, he's never actually attacked a HiveWing like he did today.\" He felt a fizzing twist of anxiety in his stomach. What would the HiveWings do with Swordtail if they decided he was really dangerous?\n\n\"It's still the first stop, even if he'll be moved to prison after that,\" Cricket said. \"So that's probably where he is. I've never been to Misbehaver's Way.\" She leaned forward and lightly tested the paint on his snout. \"Although Father is always saying that's what my teachers should do with me. Like, we all know it's inevitable, just stick her there now. That kind of thing.\"\n\n\"You've never \u2014 haven't you at least walked along it?\" he asked. He was flummoxed when she shook her head. \"But \u2014 really? It's only a couple levels up from here. My school has two field trips there every year.\"\n\n\"Field trips?\" Cricket echoed, fluttering her wings back. \"What for? What can they possibly teach you there? Isn't it kind of scary for little dragonets?\" She glanced around, making sure all traces of their activity were gone, and started for the door.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said fervently. \"I found it terrifying every time.\" I still do. \"That's, um, kind of the point, I think.\" His scales felt crackly and strange as he walked behind her, but kind of cool, too, like wearing a mask fitted exactly to his face.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"So it's to teach you to follow the rules? Poor little SilkWing dragonets. Do all your schools do that?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"Do they spend a lot of time scaring you?\" she asked. \"Like, on purpose?\"\n\nHe shrugged. It was hard for him to concentrate on their conversation because they had reached the front door of the school. Through the narrow windows on either side, he could see slivers of the prehistoric shapes of the playground structures outside \u2014 the ones that he'd last seen swarming with dragons trying to attack him. Now it looked deserted, like the bones of a whale graveyard at the bottom of the sea.\n\nCricket stopped and peered out, pressing her face to the window so she could see as far in each direction as possible.\n\n\"I don't see anyone,\" she whispered. She hesitated, her tail flicking back and forth uncertainly as she stared out at the playground.\n\nBlue's heart was beating like a trapped insect throwing itself at the glass walls of its prison. But he had a sudden bolt of understanding: She felt the same way. Cricket had never gone outside while the mind control was happening. She was as scared as he was.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Really?\" She glanced at him, her eyes darting worriedly over his painted scales. \"But \u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I have my awesome disguise, remember?\" he said. \"If the HiveWings are still under Queen Wasp's control, they'll notice that you're not right away \u2014 but with luck they won't notice a random SilkWing wandering the park. I'll signal once I know if it's safe for you to come out or not.\"\n\nShe hesitated again before nodding. He took a deep breath, pushed open the heavy door, and slipped down the stairs.\n\nBlue walked cautiously through the park, glancing around for dragons but seeing no one. He made his way to the ledge and looked out at the cloud-covered moons and rustling savanna.\n\nWhat had happened to Io? Did she get away?\n\nBut there were no signs, no clues. Nothing in the quiet around him indicated that a massive dragon hunt had started here earlier that evening.\n\nHe ducked his head and started back toward the school. Halfway there, he saw a dragon hurrying out of a side street. Half in shadows, the stranger picked up a toy that had been left on one of the structures and paused, squinting at Blue.\n\n\"You'd better get back where you belong,\" he called in a sharp voice. \"The hunting parties will be leaving at dawn tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Blue said, trying to walk like he had a destination and study the dragon at the same time. The stranger grumbled something and left, and in the glow of the streetlights Blue caught a glimpse of black stripes across his back.\n\nA HiveWing. One with his own eyes and his own mind. The queen had released her tribe, for now.\n\nBlue waited until the HiveWing was out of sight, then beckoned to Cricket. She slipped out of the school and together they hurried down one of the deserted streets toward the outer spiral. Inside a few of the houses, Blue saw lights glowing or moving around. He wondered how long ago the queen had let them go. He wondered how long it had taken all the families to reunite and how they were all feeling. Were any of them resentful of the queen? Or did they blame him for disrupting their evening instead? Or perhaps they all felt as if they'd been useful and important helpers in the search for a dangerous criminal.\n\nMe, a dangerous criminal. When all I've ever wanted is to stay out of trouble.\n\nWait \u2026\n\n\"That HiveWing,\" Blue said softly. \"He said something about hunting parties leaving at dawn.\"\n\n\"To look for you?\" Cricket asked. \"Uh-oh. That means we need to move fast if we want to get a head start on them.\"\n\nThere were guards slumped at the entrance to the spiral, but their eyes glanced over Blue's muted colors, noted the haughty tilt to Cricket's snout, and slanted away, uninterested. Cricket went first, and Blue followed, keeping his head low, acting the part of a humble servant following his mistress's midnight whim for a stroll.\n\nShe paused a few levels up and glanced back at him.\n\nHe nodded. \"Through there.\" This was one of the only levels with a gate, although it wasn't locked. There was no risk of anyone escaping, after all. Blue suspected the gate was there so HiveWings wouldn't have to accidentally see the prisoners on their way between levels.\n\nCricket pushed open the gate and they emerged onto a path that was roughly cobbled with chunks of sharp stones. She winced as one stabbed her feet, then looked up at the columns that lined the walkway.\n\nNormally, Blue came here in a crowd of other dragons, young SilkWings all wide-eyed and hushed with terror. He always tried to stay near the back so he wouldn't have to look at the prisoners too closely. But they were impossible to miss, mounted on stone pedestals for all the world to stare at, looming over the heads of the visiting students.\n\nThe stony path wound all around the level, in and out and over roughly shaped hills until it connected back with itself at the beginning again. In between the prisoner pedestals were engraved tablets listing the rules of the Hives, the consequences for breaking them, odes to the greatness of Queen Wasp, and quotes from historical figures about obedience, safety, and community. Some of the quotes were from Clearsight herself. Blue had always liked that she sounded like she cared about the rules as much as he did.\n\nAbove each prisoner hung a small spotlight, and on each pedestal there was always a list posted of that prisoner's crimes, described in dramatic detail.\n\nTonight, the first few pedestals on Misbehaver's Way were empty, but as they walked the path, they saw figures on the ones up ahead. Cricket gave a start, jumping back to crash into Blue, when she noticed the first one a few paces away.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she whispered. \"Is that \u2014 is it real? A real dragon, I mean? Or is it a statue? But I can hear it breathing \u2026 can't I?\"\n\n\"That's a dragon,\" Blue confirmed. \"A SilkWing, but not Swordtail.\" The colors were all wrong, mostly white and brown with flecks of green.\n\nShe watched the immobile prisoner for a long, wary moment. \"It's not moving at all.\"\n\n\"She can't,\" Blue pointed out. \"None of them can move.\" They drew closer to the occupied pedestals and looked up at the trapped criminals.\n\nMisbehaver's Way had no need for cages or chains. Instead, Queen Wasp used an elite unit of HiveWing soldiers, all recruited to the job because they had a nerve poison in their claws or tail stinger. Once the criminal \u2014 or \"misbehaver\" \u2014 was stabbed, that dragon wouldn't be able to move for an entire day.\n\n\"I read about this,\" Cricket said, shifting her wings uncomfortably, \"but \u2026 it's not what I pictured.\"\n\nBlue kept walking. He could see the colors of the prisoners with a glance, but it was hard to avoid getting caught by their expressions. So many of their faces were frozen in a rictus of rage or fear. Most of them had been paralyzed while trying to run or fight, so they were contorted in odd positions, stuck there until the toxin wore off.\n\nThey passed a pale pink SilkWing with long rose-petal wings, his talons outstretched as though he'd been pleading for mercy, his snout still wet with tears. They passed a snarling scarlet HiveWing in a defensive crouch, teeth bared. Another SilkWing in shades of turquoise and tan looked as though she'd been trying to leap into flight when she was caught. Her neck strained hopelessly toward the ceiling; her wings were in an awkward, half-open position that would probably feel awfully sore when they could move again.\n\n\"I thought they'd be asleep,\" Cricket said in a small voice. \"I thought the toxin knocked them out, like putting them in a temporary coma.\" She glanced up at the next frozen dragon and flinched away. \"But these dragons \u2014 are they awake in there? So they can see everyone watching them? Do you think it hurts?\"\n\n\"It does,\" Blue said. \"Swordtail says getting stabbed feels like fire burning every nerve in your body. Eventually the pain fades, but you're still paralyzed, so all you want to do is run or fly or even blink, but you can't move a single muscle until the toxin wears off.\" Everything about Misbehaver's Way featured in his recurring nightmares.\n\n\"I didn't know,\" she said. \"I can't believe this was right here and I had no idea. I'm a terrible dragon.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Blue said. He inhaled sharply as they rounded a bend in the path. \"There! That's Swordtail!\" He darted forward, skidding to a stop at the base of Swordtail's column.\n\nSwordtail's paralyzed wings were spread wide, his tail frozen as it lashed back and forth. One of his front talons was outstretched, the claws curved as though he was about to slash someone's face. It was a little scary, honestly, seeing his friend on the attack like that. Swordtail's expression was determined and desperate, as though this was his very last chance to save the world.\n\n\"Hey,\" Blue said softly up at him. Swordtail couldn't react, but Blue knew he could still hear. \"It's me, Blue. This is Cricket. We're going to \u2014 what are we going to do?\" he asked Cricket. \"Pick him up and carry him out of here?\"\n\nShe wrinkled her snout at him, a glimmer of her cheerful side sneaking through for the first time since they'd stepped onto Misbehaver's Way. \"I'm sure that would be very inconspicuous.\" She crouched on the cobblestones, took off her bag, and unrolled the pouch of vials. They gleamed like raindrops on flower petals in the light shining from above.\n\n\"I don't know if this will work,\" she said, pushing her glasses higher on her snout. \"I thought we needed to wake him up \u2026 but maybe this one would be better \u2026 \" Cricket selected a liquid the color of grass and gave Blue a wry, nervous look. \"At least, we use this to save plants that have been poisoned.\"\n\n\"On plants?\" he said. \"Is it safe for dragons?\"\n\n\"I think so?\" she said. \"Have I ever tried it on a dragon? Not exactly. But it shouldn't make things worse, anyway.\"\n\nThis was not the most comforting answer. Blue looked up at Swordtail, wishing his friend could give him some sort of sign. Was Swordtail willing to risk a mysterious, unproven possible antidote from a strange HiveWing? Or would he rather be left alone?\n\nWho am I kidding? Swordtail would risk anything to save Luna. I'm the one who would find it too scary.\n\n\"Do you want me to try it on him?\" Cricket said. \"I understand if you don't.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Blue said. \"I think we have to.\" He glanced back along the deserted path. He had a feeling that everyone in the Hive was at home recovering from the queen's mind control earlier, and that was why they'd seen so few dragons out. But he was also afraid that Wasp might seize control of them again at any moment. He couldn't imagine trying to fight his way out of the Hive alongside Cricket \u2014 but with Swordtail, they might stand a chance.\n\nAnd Swordtail would be able to rescue Luna. He was strong and brave and not afraid of HiveWing soldiers.\n\n\"All right,\" Cricket said. \"How am I going to do this? Let's think.\" She poked through the vials and drew out the tweezers she'd used on the flamesilk in the library. Blue hadn't even noticed that she'd brought them along. \"Find me a big rock,\" she said to Blue.\n\nThat wasn't too hard here. Blue found a loose cobblestone and kicked it until he could wobble it free. He brought it to Cricket and she beat her wings once, twice, three times, just enough to lift her up to the light over Swordtail's head. Here she hesitated, glancing down.\n\n\"Can you cover his eyes for me?\" she asked Blue. \"And keep yours closed, too.\"\n\nBlue climbed up to balance awkwardly on the corner of the pedestal, where he could lean sideways and put his talons over Swordtail's eyes. Obediently, he closed his own as well.\n\nThere was a smashing sound from above him, and tiny bits of glass pattered down all over him and Swordtail. He shook his head and squinted open his eyes into the new brightness.\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" Cricket said. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nHe nodded. She was using the tweezers to work the flamesilk thread out. He couldn't look straight at her or the thread without getting a headache.\n\nA moment later, she had it free. He hopped down to the ground and she took his place on the pedestal. With a few careful strokes, she burned through Swordtail's wrist cuff in the same way she'd burned off Blue's. Blue met Swordtail's eyes as the heavy band clunked to the ground. He didn't think he was imagining the spark of jubilation in them.\n\n\"All right, moment of truth,\" Cricket said. \"Would you mind passing me the vial? Very very carefully?\"\n\nHe uncorked it and held it high, keeping his claws as steady as he could while she reached down for it.\n\n\"Now you might want to hold your breath,\" she said. \"Clearsight only knows what this could do to us. Eep, this is such a cool experiment! I feel like a real scientist, don't you?\" She took a deep breath herself and dropped the flamesilk into the vial.\n\nThe liquid started bubbling furiously. Cricket clamped the tweezers around the vial and held it out under Swordtail's snout. Green smoke boiled up from the top of it, enveloping Swordtail's face in a thick emerald cloud.\n\nBlue stared up at them, his heart pounding.\n\nPlease work, Blue prayed. Please, please be all right, Swordtail. Clearsight, if you're listening, please set him free.\n\nThey waited several long, agonizing moments, all three dragons frozen in place.\n\nAnd then Swordtail twitched suddenly, violently, knocking Cricket off the pedestal with one flailing wing. Blue jumped to break her fall. The vial shattered on the stone path, spilling what was left of the hissing green chemical. Cricket scrambled over to pick up the flamesilk in her tweezers again, tucking the thread into a small stone jar with a tight lid that she'd also had hidden in her bag.\n\nSwordtail let out a gasp. His jaw clenched. His eyelids closed. And slowly, he lowered his reaching talon, shaking it hard as though it had been asleep.\n\n\"Swordtail?\" Blue said.\n\n\"Blue,\" Swordtail croaked. He opened his eyes and gingerly inched his head around to look down at them. The poison seemed to be wearing off gradually, from his face through his wings and back and at last to his tail.\n\n\"Do you feel all right?\" Cricket asked him. \"Anything weird? How's your nose? Did that hurt? I hope it didn't hurt, but it might have, I don't know, the plants can't exactly tell us if it does. Are you dizzy? How are your lungs?\"\n\nSwordtail raised one talon to feel the trickle of dried blood on his neck. \"All right,\" he said thickly.\n\n\"Cricket,\" Blue whispered. \"Are his eyes supposed to be turning green?\"\n\nThe whites of Swordtail's eyes, around his normally dark blue irises, were turning a shade of emerald green only slightly paler than the liquid from the vial.\n\n\"Oh, fascinating,\" Cricket said. \"Why would that happen? Is it affecting your vision? Can you see all right?\" she asked Swordtail.\n\nHe blinked a few times. \"Bit greenish,\" he offered. \"No, wait. Uh-oh. Definitely bad. Blue is all the wrong colors.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Blue said. \"That's just paint, don't worry.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Swordtail said. \"Sure. Sounds normal.\"\n\nSwordtail crouched, then arched his back into a stretch like a jungle cat. He flared his wings and leaped down from the pedestal, landing in a wobbly sprawl.\n\n\"Ooop,\" he said. \"Legs. Disagreeing with me.\" He sat down heavily and frowned at his feet. \"Whoa. Very demanding legs.\"\n\n\"Cricket, you're a genius!\" Blue said. \"I can't believe that worked!\"\n\n\"Neither can I,\" she said. \"I should write a paper about this! No, a book! I mean, it's a real scientific breakthrough, right? We could \u2014\" She stopped, realizing what she was saying. \"Oh \u2026 no, I guess I can't do that.\"\n\n\"The queen probably wouldn't appreciate it,\" Blue agreed.\n\nSwordtail looked at them, a gleam in his newly green eyes. \"But I know some dragons who would be very interested,\" he said. His voice was only a little bit slurred now. \"Very very very ever so very interested.\"\n\nDoes he mean the Chrysalis? Blue wondered. He glanced back along the path, at the other frozen figures. Would they set all these prisoners free, if they knew how Cricket did it?\n\nAnd if they did \u2026 what would happen then? He imagined all the prisoners staggering off their pedestals, green-eyed like Swordtail, all of them angry and free at the same time. Would they attack HiveWing soldiers? Or would they all run away? What does the Chrysalis want, exactly?\n\nSwordtail shook his wings out again. \"Blue! Wow. I can't believe it's you! I mean, it's amazing that it's you. You here, all kinds of amazing.\" He opened and closed his mouth a few times as if trying to make all his muscles work again. \"That is, I mean, of all the dragons I might have expected to come rescue me,\" he said, \"you and a strange little HiveWing are probably the last on the list. But thank you. Did I say thank you? I've been thinking thank you very loudly, probably should say it a few times.\" He touched Blue's shoulder with one of his talons, then let go and gave an odd hop sideways. Swordtail's whole body seemed to be vibrating just a little bit.\n\n\"Io tried to get me away,\" Blue said, \"but we had to split up. Cricket saved me.\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Cricket asked Swordtail. \"What are you feeling right now?\"\n\n\"What happened to Luna?\" Swordtail asked, all his manic energy suddenly focused on the question.\n\nBlue shook his head. \"I'm not sure \u2014 but we think they've taken her to where the queen keeps all her flamesilks. We think it might be in or near Wasp Hive.\"\n\n\"So that's where we're going next,\" Cricket interjected.\n\nBlue blinked at her. That sure sounds like she's coming, too. He didn't want to ask; he was afraid to jinx it. But he smiled at her when she looked his way, and she smiled back.\n\n\"I should get help,\" Swordtail said. His tail had started lashing back and forth, like a whip, but he didn't seem to notice. His claws extended and closed; his ears flicked up and down. Even his antennae were fully unfurled and waving around. \"Help is a useful thing! There are dragons I can reach out to \u2014\"\n\n\"The Chrysalis?\" Cricket asked. \"How will you find them? What can they do?\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes at her. \"How do you know about the Chrysalis?\"\n\n\"She doesn't,\" Blue said quickly. \"She knows as much as I do, which is pretty much nothing.\"\n\n\"Then it should stay that way,\" Swordtail growled. His shoulders twitched, making his wings flutter up and back. \"Let's see. It would take a while. Leave a message, wait for a response. We'd have to find a safe place to hide.\"\n\n\"Blue doesn't have time to wait for other dragons,\" Cricket said. \"He needs to get as far away from this Hive as possible before dawn. That's when the queen is going to take over everyone again and send them out looking for him.\"\n\n\"You can stay and contact the Chrysalis if you want,\" Blue said.\n\n\"But we're leaving right now,\" Cricket finished.\n\nWe are, Blue thought with a little glow of happiness. Cricket and me.\n\n\"To find Luna?\" Swordtail asked.\n\nBlue nodded.\n\n\"Then I'm coming with you,\" he said. \"Yes. To save her! That is the most me thing to do. I am most definitely coming with you.\" He flexed his claws and bounced in place for a moment. And then Swordtail suddenly ran at the stone pedestal and smashed his shoulder into it.\n\n\"Swordtail!\" Blue yelped.\n\nSwordtail looked at him, grinning. Large cracks had appeared all along the stone. \"Look what I did!\" he said. \"I feel like I could knock over everything! All the columns! Any building! The whole Hive!\"\n\n\"Shhh,\" Blue said with alarm. \"Cricket? Is this normal?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" she said, wide-eyed. \"What I gave him is sort of a stimulant \u2014 and it does make the plants grow bigger and faster.\"\n\n\"I feel bigger!\" Swordtail declared at a horrifying volume. \"I feel FASTER!\" He turned and sprinted away down the path.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Cricket said. \"Um. Any chance he's always like this?\"\n\n\"No!\" Blue cried. \"This is definitely weird!\"\n\n\"Hmmm,\" she said. \"How long do you think it'll last?\"\n\n\"How would I know?!\"\n\nCRASH! went something up ahead of them. THUD! SMASH!\n\n\"Ha HA!\" Swordtail shouted.\n\nBlue bolted after his friend, Cricket close behind him.\n\nThey found Swordtail merrily lifting enormous rocks and throwing them at the wall of the Hive. Even paralyzed, the two nearest prisoners somehow managed to look alarmed.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Blue yelped, catching Swordtail's arm.\n\n\"Making us a door!\" Swordtail answered. \"I'm in construction, you know! This is totally my job!\" He lifted another boulder, which looked much heavier than anything Blue could have picked up, and hurled it at the wall. The treestuff was already splintered and cracked, with several small holes in it. \"Hey, GRASSHOPPER!\" Swordtail shouted, making Blue jump. \"Look how hard I'm working! Are you happy NOW?\"\n\n\"Swordtail, please be quiet,\" Blue begged.\n\n\"It's probably too late for that,\" Cricket said, glancing back along Misbehaver's Way.\n\n\"Take THAT!\" Swordtail yelled. He heaved an entire stone tablet out of the ground and threw it as hard as he could. It smashed right through the side of the Hive and plummeted out of sight.\n\nBlue stared at the gaping hole that was left. Fragments of treestuff feathered out on all sides of it and wood-smelling dust hazed the air. This is vandalism! he thought. And destruction of Hive property! There are definitely rules about this! Possibly on that tablet Swordtail just hurled through the wall!\n\nOn the other side of the hole he could see clouds rimmed with moonlight and the far-off lights of another Hive. Where other dragons are having a perfectly normal evening that doesn't involve getting painted, hiding from soldiers, or watching their friends lose their minds.\n\n\"Let's go!\" Swordtail cried, charging toward the opening.\n\n\"I can't,\" Blue said. \"We're too high. I don't have wings, remember?\"\n\n\"I'll carry you,\" Swordtail said enthusiastically. \"I can do it! I'm as strong as ten dragons! I can carry BOTH of you! At the same time!\"\n\n\"Absolutely not, thank you,\" Cricket said. \"My own two wings work perfectly fine.\" She turned toward Blue. \"I think we have to go out this way, don't you? We can't go back. There must be guards coming to investigate the noise.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you want to come?\" Blue said. \"You could go home now. You could be safe and stay out of this whole mess.\"\n\n\"And never find out what happens?\" She adjusted her glasses and smiled at him. \"Are you kidding me?\"\n\nSwordtail flapped his wings at Blue. \"Time to fly, short stuff!\" he shouted.\n\n\"By all the Hive, Swordtail, what is happening to you?\" Blue asked.\n\nInstead of answering, Swordtail shot a long strand of silk at him and snared Blue's shoulders. He tugged Blue closer and wove several more strands into a quick harness to bind them together. Blue noticed that Swordtail's silk had also turned a strange new shade of pale green.\n\n\"I'm not sure this is a good idea,\" Blue said nervously as Swordtail clasped his front talons around Blue's chest. This close to the hole, he could see the rippling grass far, far below him. \"I'm not that light and it's a long way dow \u2014\"\n\n\"TO THE MOONS!\" Swordtail hollered, leaping out into the air. Blue felt a terrifying plummeting feeling in his stomach as they lurched awkwardly for a moment, down and down again toward the savanna, and then suddenly up, sideways, and up, and finally away, beating forward at a steady pace.\n\nThe wind whipped in Blue's face. It was cold out here in the dark, after the close warmth of the Hive. He peeked backward and saw Cricket soaring alongside them.\n\n\"Get it?\" Swordtail said conversationally. \"Because Luna is like lunar, which means moons, so 'to the moons' is like 'to Luna' but in code, so, awesome. I thought that was clever.\" He kept chattering as he flew, as though he couldn't stop the flow of words coming out of him.\n\nBlue looked back again, this time at the vast shape of Cicada Hive and the silvery tangles of the webs far overhead. He thought of Burnet and Silverspot, sleeping alone in their cell for the first time since Luna had hatched. Could they sleep? Or were they lying awake, wishing they'd been wrong about Admiral, worrying about Luna and Blue?\n\nWill I ever see them again?\n\nHis home was disappearing behind him. He didn't know what was ahead.\n\nHe only knew he couldn't turn back, and so he looked out toward the dark savanna and let his friends carry him forward into the night.\n\nThey flew all the rest of that night, swooping low to the savanna whenever the moons breached the clouds, just in case anyone was watching for them.\n\nSwordtail charted a course straight across the circle toward Wasp Hive, which made sense, but quickly brought them to a part of the savanna where dragons rarely ventured. The grass was long and wild, and shapes prowled below them. Growls and shrieks and curling hoots rose from the darkness, slicing through the constant hum of the insects.\n\nOnce he got over his fear, Blue found the rhythm of Swordtail's wings lulling him into a kind of doze. His friend seemed tireless, soaring on and on without stopping. Blue hoped Cricket was all right. He tried to call to her a few times, but the wind whipped his voice away.\n\nAfter a long time, Blue noticed that he could see the outlines of shrubs below him, gray and ghostly. He glanced up and saw an expanding band of pale yellow light along the edge of the sky.\n\n\"It's almost morning,\" he called up to Swordtail.\n\n\"We should hide for the day, that's what I think,\" Swordtail answered. \"It's still half a day's journey to Wasp Hive, and they'll be out looking for us in force today, and it would be better to get there at night anyway. Night! An excellent time of day for heroics!\"\n\n\"Cricket?\" Blue called, trying to twist around to see her.\n\n\"Hide,\" she panted behind them. She looked exhausted, but her wings beat valiantly. \"Yes. Good. Where?\"\n\nWhere \u2026 Blue studied the savanna as far as he could see in each direction. The yellow grass rippled, broken only by gnarled little shrubs, patches of barren dirt, or the winding path of dry riverbeds. The rainy season was coming soon, so the ground below them was dry. There was nothing large enough to hide in or under or behind. Hunting parties of HiveWings would spot them from the air with no trouble at all.\n\n\"Disguise ourselves as grass?\" Swordtail suggested. \"Disguise ourselves as shrubs! DISGUISE OURSELVES AS ELEPHANTS THAT'S IT LET'S DO IT.\"\n\n\"That stuff still hasn't worn off,\" Blue called to Cricket.\n\n\"Or I can build us a web!\" Swordtail said. \"A giant web! And we hide underneath it and they'll think there must be some massively enormous spiders colonizing the savanna! THIS WILL TOTALLY WORK.\"\n\n\"Let's fly \u2026 a bit \u2026 farther,\" Cricket said between breaths. \"Try to find somewhere.\"\n\nBlue barely blinked, he was staring so intently at the ground. Off to his left, he saw a herd of teeny tiny deer with enormous ears bounding through the grass, which was shorter and scrubbier here. A tall, long-necked gray-and-white bird stalked slowly along one of the sunbaked riverbeds, ignoring the smaller birds that perched on its back or flew down to poke the barren soil.\n\nThere was nowhere to hide. Blue's heart sank as they flew on and the sky grew brighter. This was a mistake. The savanna was the worst place they could have gone.\n\nAnd then, as the sun peeked over the horizon, he saw the vast looming shape of a Hive in the distance.\n\nWasp Hive.\n\nHis heart kicked hard in his chest.\n\nThe home of Queen Wasp. The grandest and wealthiest of all the Hives. The location of the temple, where the Book of Clearsight was worshipped and protected by generation after generation of Librarians. A Hive full of power and soldiers and secrets.\n\nWhere the queen might be hiding his sister \u2026 and his father, and other flamesilks.\n\nAre we really doing this? he thought with sudden crashing anxiety. WHAT are we doing? Do we think we can sneak into WASP HIVE, of all places, and find something the queen wants to stay hidden?\n\nSwordtail banked around, making Blue's stomach drop, and swooped back to Cricket. \"We shouldn't get any closer,\" he said. \"She might send out hunters from her own Hive to search for us, too, if she's paranoid, which she is, which she should be, because \u2014\" He cut himself off abruptly and nodded a few times. \"Because REASONS.\"\n\n\"But where?\" Cricket spiraled in the air. \"There's nothing out here. I didn't know it would be like this.\" She looked tired and worried, and Blue felt a surge of guilt for dragging her into his mess. He tried to imagine what it must be like for her: far from home, helping two runaway SilkWings, knowing how much trouble she'd be in if she was caught with them.\n\n\"Is that something over there?\" Blue asked, pointing.\n\nThere was a dark slash in the unending sea of cracked earth and yellow grass.\n\n\"Let's find out, let's find out,\" Swordtail said. He beat his wings and soared toward it.\n\nIt's a hole, Blue thought as they drew closer. A really big hole. It looked as though the earth had suddenly dropped away here, a long time ago, leaving a cavernous shaft lined with moss-covered rocks and long, green plants trying to clamber out into the sunshine. It was impossible to see the bottom, even when they landed on the rim and tried to peer down into it. Outcroppings of rock blocked most of their view, and where they could see past those, all they saw was more darkness, disappearing down and down.\n\nSwordtail used his claws to cut away the silk connecting him and Blue. Blue took a few wobbly steps, shaking out his legs and trying to get the feeling back into them.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked Cricket, who was crouching on the edge of the sinkhole, holding her glasses on with one talon while she peered down.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" she said. \"What is this? How deep do you think it goes? What's at the bottom? How did it get this way? Have you ever seen anything like this?\"\n\n\"I haven't been out on the savanna much either,\" he admitted. \"I didn't know it had sinkholes.\"\n\n\"Are we going down it?\" she asked, turning to Swordtail. \"Can we?\" Her eyes were shining, as though her tiredness had evaporated in the excitement of a new discovery.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said, hopping from one foot to another with restless energy. \"This seems like the most obvious place to hide, so I assume they'll check here, and then we'll be trapped at the bottom of a hole with no way to escape. I still think my elephant plan is the best! Elephants are great! I can look like an elephant, no problem!\" He struck an odd, dramatic pose, which Blue guessed was supposed to look elephantesque.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Cricket asked Blue.\n\nSwordtail had a point. But where else could they hide? He turned to look over his shoulder at the distant shape of Wasp Hive.\n\nFor a moment, he thought his vision had gone blurry; then he thought, fleetingly, that a swarm of insects had surrounded the Hive. But finally, with a chill of terror, he realized that the buzzing motion around the city came from the wings of dragons, pouring out of every window and door and shaking the webs with the wind they raised.\n\nDawn was here. The hunt had begun.\n\n\"We go down,\" he said. \"Quickly, right now!\"\n\nCricket didn't hesitate; she dove over the edge and vanished. Swordtail hooked his front talons under Blue's arms again and leaped off as well.\n\nThey dropped down and down, pushing off from the craggy, lichen-covered walls when they got too close and maneuvering around bulbous outcroppings. The air got cooler and more damp as they descended. The shaft was narrow, leaving barely enough room in places for Swordtail to keep his wings spread.\n\nWhat if there is no bottom to this hole? Blue worried. Or what if the HiveWings get here before we find the bottom?\n\nDid they know about this sinkhole? How long before they came to search it?\n\nFinally, below his claws, Blue saw the rocks converge onto a kind of ground, although it was really just more rock. But at least he could stand on it, and it seemed to be the bottom of the hole. Swordtail let him down gently and hopped onto a ledge to stretch his wings. Blue glanced up at the tiny strip of sunlight far overhead, then around for Cricket.\n\nThe rock under his feet slanted down and away from the shaft into a dark tunnel. It was the only way Cricket could have gone, so he followed uneasily. After a few steps, the tunnel widened into a cave, although by now the light was so dim that he couldn't tell how big it was. He heard the faint drip-drop of water somewhere up ahead.\n\n\"Cricket?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Right here.\" She materialized out of the dark and brushed his shoulder with her wing. \"This cave is enormous! And watch your step, because there's a lake that starts a little ways down this slope. A lake, Blue! Under the savanna! Would you have guessed? Isn't that wild? And there's something else strange, come see, or I guess, feel; seeing isn't really an option down here!\" She nudged him through the dark until he felt water lapping at his claws, and then, a few steps later, something bumped against his leg.\n\nHe jumped back, thinking it was alive \u2014 but Cricket reached for it and guided it into his talons, so he could feel that it was a large object floating on the surface of the lake. And there was a rope tied to one end of it, which led to a stalagmite that jutted from the rocky floor.\n\nA rope. Which meant someone had been here before them.\n\n\"What do you think it is?\" she whispered to him.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"Someone must have left it like this,\" she said. \"Maybe to carry things across the lake? But why not just fly across with whatever they had to carry? This is so mysterious!\"\n\nBlue heard the rustle of wings as Swordtail ducked into the cave with them. \"I think I heard voices up above,\" he whispered. \"Can we go deeper?\"\n\n\"Let's see,\" Cricket whispered back, barely a breath on the air.\n\nThey felt their way deeper into the cave, staying close to the wall and skirting the edge of the lake. Soon that became impossible, as they ran out of shoreline, and they had to wade into the cold, still silk of the water. It was terrifying, wading into the dark and ever-deepening water, but not as terrifying as the thought of the HiveWings behind them.\n\nBlue shivered as the water climbed up his legs, lapped at his underbelly, and soon covered his wingbuds. He'd seen the ocean in the distance from the top of the webs, but he'd never been submerged in water and he certainly had no idea how to swim. If the water got any deeper, he wasn't sure he'd be able to go on.\n\n\"There's a passage here,\" Cricket whispered, \"or an alcove or something, I think.\"\n\nRipples flickered around Blue as Cricket ducked away, then came back to tug on his arm. He held out his tail for Swordtail to catch, then let Cricket guide him under a dip in the roof.\n\nNow he could feel walls on either side of him, and to his surprise, here and there he saw what looked like sticky trails of light webbing across the roof above, or sliding down the walls. Cricket paused and brought her nose closer to one of these, studying it curiously for a moment before moving on.\n\nThey waded forward for what felt like an eternity. And then the passage curved \u2014 and ahead of them, reflecting off the slick wet walls, was the glow of firelight.\n\nBlue froze, touching Cricket's wing. She stopped, too, with a little gasp.\n\nFire.\n\nIs this it? Did we find where Queen Wasp is hiding the flamesilks?\n\nOr \u2026 what are we about to walk into?\n\nBlue glanced back toward Swordtail, whose face was dimly visible in the phosphorescent glow from the walls. Swordtail edged past them to take the lead, and they all inched forward, step by careful step.\n\nThere was a cavern ahead. Stalactites bubbled down from a high ceiling. Streaks of orange and white marbled the stone walls, shot through with veins of glittering black-and-gold ore. The water lapped against the shore here before continuing into another, wider tunnel. Rock formations twisted up in shapes like dragon tails, making the cavern look like a weird forest of petrified trunks.\n\nThe firelight wasn't coming from any flamesilk dragons. It flickered from a small pile of burning sticks, not far from the water.\n\nAnd next to the fire, sitting with its back against one of the stalagmites, was a creature Blue had never seen in any animal studies in school.\n\nIt looked a little bit like a monkey, but bigger and not quite so hairy, apart from a patch of floppy brown fur on top of its head. It had nimble little paws, which were holding something that it was gazing at intently. Parts of it were wrapped in something like a cocoon made of jaguar fur and deep red silk.\n\nAt first, it didn't notice the three dragons emerging from the tunnel; it was too immersed in whatever it was looking at. Blue and Cricket exchanged wondering glances. She looked as bewildered as he felt, but also enchanted.\n\nThen Blue stepped on a rock that turned under his talons, and he lurched forward with a small splash.\n\nThe creature's head popped up and its eyes, as brown and big in its face as Cricket's, went wide. It jumped to its feet, revealing that it stood on two paws instead of four, dropped whatever it had been looking at, and drew a long knife from its cocoon.\n\nBlue and his friends stopped and stared at it. It stared at them.\n\nWhat is it thinking? Blue wondered. Can it think? What does it know about dragons? Is it just scared, or is it having other emotions? What a sweet little face it has. Like a marmoset \u2014 but I've never seen a monkey with a knife before.\n\nSometimes a monkey wandered up into the webs by accident, long black spidery limbs racing up the Hive vines and out onto the silvery bridges. Blue remembered one that Io had played with for an entire day. She'd wanted to keep it, but her parents made her take it back to the savanna and release it. They told her that if the HiveWings found it, they might eat it, and that would be much more upsetting. It was hard to argue with that.\n\nThis monkey's limbs seemed the wrong shape for climbing vines or swinging from trees. And its coiled energy was more like a panther's, poised to spring at them.\n\n\"Do you think it's really going to try stabbing us with that thing?\" Cricket whispered.\n\nHer voice broke the spell. The creature spun around and fled between the stalagmites, disappearing through a crack in the wall behind it.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Cricket cried. \"Wait, come back!\" She floundered through the water up onto the shore and scrambled after the little animal. But the crack was too small for a dragon to fit through. She crouched beside the opening, trying to peek inside. \"I promise we won't hurt you, little monkey. What are you? Please come back!\"\n\n\"That was really cute,\" Blue said. He waded onto the shore, carefully skirting the fire so he wouldn't accidentally put it out. After the darkness of the previous caves, it was nice to be able to see \u2014 and much warmer near the fire than in the lake.\n\n\"I thought it was freaky,\" Swordtail said. \"Weird little thing. Did you see how it was looking at us? It was \u2014 I don't \u2014\" He interrupted himself with an absolutely enormous yawn.\n\n\"I really want to know what it was,\" Cricket said, stamping one foot with frustration. \"I thought I'd studied all the flora and fauna around here, even the prehistoric stuff. I don't remember any pictures that looked like that.\" She tipped her head up, staring into space as though she was flipping through pages in her mind. \"Not a gorilla. Not an orangutan. Not a chimpanzee. What in the Hive\u2026?\"\n\nBlue picked up the object the creature had been looking at. \"Oh wow. Cricket, check this out.\"\n\nShe wound her way back through the stalagmites toward him. He turned the thing over in his claws. The outside was flexible leather, the inside was many layers of smooth beaten paper, and there were little marks all over each page.\n\n\"What?\" Cricket said, astonished. She took it from him and flipped through it gently. \"Is this a book? It can't be! Monkeys can't write books! Or read them!\"\n\n\"It's not a dragon book. It didn't come from a Hive,\" Blue pointed out. \"Look how tiny it is.\"\n\n\"A dollhouse book?\" Cricket tried. \"Which the monkey found somewhere?\" She shook her head. \"No, you're right. This is the monkey's book. When we came in, I thought its expression looked familiar \u2014 and that's because it was reading.\" She hugged the book to her chest. \"Mystery animals in a cave under the savanna \u2014 who can READ! Blue, this is the biggest scientific discovery of our lifetime! I wouldn't have to be a gardener if I told the queen about this. I'm sure she'd let me change disciplines so I could study them. Don't you think?\"\n\n\"I'm a little worried she'd have them all rounded up and eaten,\" Blue admitted.\n\nCricket looked horrified. \"No way! Is that really what you think of HiveWings? That because we eat meat, we're heartless monsters? Do all SilkWings think that?\"\n\n\"Um,\" Blue said, \"I mean \u2026 I wouldn't have said 'heartless.' But eating animals does seem kind of unnecessary.\"\n\nCricket frowned and rubbed her head, as though she'd never spent any time thinking about whether eating animals was \"necessary.\" \"We don't eat everything,\" she said after a while. \"We don't eat lizards or snakes, since they're probably related to us. And I'm sure nobody would eat a species that can read and write and might be as smart as we are.\"\n\nA loud rumbling sound broke into their conversation before Blue could answer. They both spun around in a fright \u2014 and discovered that it was the sound of Swordtail snoring.\n\nThe handsome SilkWing was passed out by the fire, wings flopped across the stone as though he'd staggered out of the water and collapsed in the first dry place he found.\n\n\"Well, that makes sense,\" Blue said. \"He did carry me halfway across the savanna. He probably needs to sleep for a week to recover.\"\n\nHe caught himself. It was only a joke, but who knew what would happen to Swordtail as the stimulant wore off? They couldn't afford to have Swordtail sleep for a week \u2014 they needed to get to Luna as soon as possible, before she emerged from her cocoon all alone.\n\n\"Do you want to sleep, too?\" Cricket asked. \"I can keep an eye out, in case any HiveWings come all the way down into the cave, find the passage, and follow it through to here \u2026 which I don't think they will \u2026\"\n\n\"No, you should sleep, and I'll take first watch,\" Blue said. \"You were flying all night, too.\" He could easily imagine how tired her wings must be. If he were in her scales, he knew he'd be feeling very anxious and emotional as well \u2014 given the stress of running away from her own tribe and upending her safe HiveWing life. Surely even the excitement of discovering a new intelligent species couldn't outweigh the danger she'd put herself in.\n\nWhich she did for me. To help me.\n\n\"All right,\" Cricket said with a yawn. \"If you're really sure, I wouldn't mind sleeping a little bit.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He watched her stretch her wings and curl up on the rock, close enough for him to touch her talons, if he needed to wake her. Her orange-gold scales rose and fell, slower and slower as she drifted off to sleep. The firelight flickered little shadows across her back, as though the inkblot splatter patterns were spreading and shrinking and dancing.\n\nMaybe she's not as scared as I would be, he thought. Maybe for her, finding out new things is enough to drive out her fear. Maybe this feels like an adventure to her.\n\nBut that was hard for him to imagine, especially when he pictured the army of mind-controlled HiveWings far above them, combing the grasslands stalk by stalk. Who wouldn't be afraid of that?\n\nMaybe Swordtail. His best and bravest friend. He was a dragon who'd face that entire army to save Luna or Blue. His courage had always seemed foolish and dangerous and impulsive to Blue \u2014 but now he wished he had even a tenth of it himself.\n\nHe lay down with his chin on his front talons and thought about everyone who'd become entangled in this web. Io, who could be anywhere right now. Burnet and Silverspot, alone and worrying about their children. Katydid, wondering where her sister was. All the HiveWings who were being forced to hunt for him, whether they understood why or not.\n\nAnd somewhere in the center of that web, Queen Wasp, stealing the flamesilks and using her subjects like puppets. Was she angry right now? Or coldly certain that she'd find him soon?\n\nAt least Luna was unaware of all of this. Somewhere deep in her cocoon, she was asleep, growing her wings in peace. She had no idea what kind of chaos her Metamorphosis had set off \u2026 or what strange new prison she was going to wake up in.\n\nI'm coming, Luna, he thought fiercely. Swordtail and I will find you. You're not going to wake up alone. I promise.\n\nBlue stood at the bottom of the sinkhole, looking up. He could just barely see the glow of moonlight reflecting off some of the rocks far overhead. His tail flicked a damp patch of moss on one of the rocks and he shivered.\n\n\"Do you think it's safe to go up?\" Cricket asked.\n\n\"HiveWings prefer to hunt by day,\" Swordtail pointed out. \"Their night vision is poor and they're lazy and arrogant, so I'm sure they're at home asleep, confident they'll catch us tomorrow.\"\n\nCricket blinked at him, looking slightly hurt. \"I'm not at home asleep,\" she observed.\n\n\"Right,\" Blue said. \"That's not fair, Swordtail. They're not all lazy and arrogant. They're dragons, just like you and me and everyone we know, some bad and some good.\"\n\n\"Dragons who've stolen your sister and spent the last day hunting you so they can throw you in their secret prison, too,\" Swordtail said sharply.\n\n\"That's Queen Wasp making them do that,\" Blue said. \"They're not all like her.\"\n\n\"So what? They let her be like that and never complain or speak up, because it means they get to be comfortable,\" Swordtail said. \"Sorry, Blue, I'm not in the mood to feel sorry for the bad guys right now.\" He spread his wings and launched himself up the shaft. \"I'll go check if the coast is clear.\"\n\nBlue sighed as Swordtail flew away. The strange frenetic energy of the stimulant had worn off, and after sleeping almost the entire day, Swordtail had woken up pretty much his normal self again. Which was great, except for how his normal self could sometimes be a big honking rhinoceros trampling over everyone else's feelings.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said to Cricket.\n\n\"Don't be,\" she said. \"He's right. I never worried about how we treat SilkWings or what happens to flamesilks before.\"\n\n\"Neither did I, really,\" Blue admitted. \"But you're helping us now. You're not like the others.\"\n\n\"If Queen Wasp could control my mind, I probably would be,\" she said. \"It's just luck or some kind of mystery science that it doesn't work on me.\"\n\nSwordtail swooped back down toward them. \"All quiet, as far as I can see and hear,\" he said. \"If we fly now, we should make it to Wasp Hive before morning.\"\n\n\"And then what?\" Cricket asked.\n\n\"Then we figure something else out,\" he said.\n\nThat sounds like a Swordtail kind of plan, Blue thought, but he didn't have anything better to offer, so he kept quiet.\n\nSwordtail spun a harness around Blue again and braced his forearms around Blue's chest. \"All right!\" he said. \"Off we \u2014\" He vaulted into the air and immediately lost his balance, smacking into the side of the canyon and thudding to the ground again. Blue's claws barked painfully against the stone and he yelped.\n\n\"Ooof,\" Swordtail grunted. \"Sorry. Let me just \u2014\" He braced his legs and shoved himself aloft again, clutching Blue even more tightly.\n\nNo luck. Blue could feel himself slipping, even with the harness, and Swordtail's muscles were clearly straining to hold him. His wings beat as hard as he could, but a moment later he had to drop back down.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Cricket said, hovering above them.\n\nBlue glanced up at the far, far distant top of the hole again. Uh-oh was a bit of an understatement.\n\nSwordtail sliced away the silk connecting them and crouched, gasping for breath.\n\n\"If you can't carry him anymore,\" Cricket said, \"how are we going to get Blue out of this cave?\"\n\n\"I don't understand why I can't!\" Swordtail protested. \"I carried him all DAY yesterday and it was no trouble at all!\" He flexed his arms and winced. \"I guess I do feel a little sore now \u2026\"\n\n\"It was the stimulant,\" Cricket said. \"It made you stronger and gave you energy, but only until it wore off. That is so interesting. I wonder if anyone has any idea that it has that effect on dragons, or if other scientists have only ever used it on plants.\" Her eyes went a little dreamy. \"Maybe for the science fair next year \u2026\"\n\n\"Do you have any more of it?\" Swordtail asked, eyeing the pouch tied around her chest.\n\nShe shook her head. \"No \u2026 and I wouldn't suggest taking it from a normal state,\" she said. \"Not without some dilution experiments and animal studies first. I mean, you started off completely paralyzed, and look what it did to you.\"\n\n\"What it \u2014 what did I say?\" Swordtail asked. \"Did I sound like a total idiot?\"\n\n\"You were fine,\" Blue assured him. \"It was adorable.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" Swordtail grumbled. \"Adorable is just the look I was going for on our heroic mission.\"\n\n\"So what else can we do?\" Cricket said, studying the rocks around them. \"Blue, could you climb out?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Swordtail answered for him. \"SilkWings are all great climbers.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe, but \u2026 all that way?\" Blue said, his courage failing. \"I mean, I don't mind the climbing part, but the maybe-falling part and the very-long-way-to-fall and the certain-death-if-I-fall parts, those I'm kind of less excited about.\"\n\n\"Plus there's no way he'll make it to the top before morning,\" Swordtail said. \"And then what do we do? Climb back down? Risk the open savanna again?\"\n\n\"There might be another option \u2014 hang on,\" Cricket said. She spread her wings and flew away, up and up till Blue could hardly see the shimmer of her sunlight-colored scales. He had a horrible moment of imagining that she might not come back \u2026 that she'd reach the top, realize she could just go home, and leave them and all their messy, troublesome danger behind.\n\n\"Blue,\" Swordtail said in a low voice.\n\nBlue glanced at him and saw pity in his friend's dark blue eyes.\n\n\"Remember how you warned me once about falling in love with Luna?\" Swordtail said, folding his wings back. \"You said we might not be partnered together. You said it would be better for both of us if we could wait to fall in love until we knew who our partners would be.\"\n\nBlue looked down at his claws. That felt like a very foolish thing to say now. As though a dragon could inject a nerve toxin into his feelings and leave them paralyzed until they might be usable. But he'd imagined how Luna and Swordtail would feel if Queen Wasp separated them, and it had been so awful. He'd been trying to protect them from that.\n\n\"This is much worse, Blue,\" Swordtail said. \"She's a HiveWing. You can never, never be with her. You should tell her to go home now, before it's too hard to say good-bye.\"\n\n\"I think it already is,\" Blue said softly. \"At least, for me.\"\n\nSwordtail put one wing over Blue's back and rested his head against Blue's. \"I was afraid of that,\" he said.\n\nCricket came swooping back down in a flapping of wings and landed on an outcropping a little ways above them. \"There's a crevice near the top,\" she said. \"It's not very big, but I think Blue could hide in it. If we can get him to it by morning, he could wait out the day there, and then we'd keep going to Wasp Hive tomorrow night.\"\n\nBlue felt the tension ripple through Swordtail's body. He knew what he was feeling: another day's delay; a whole night wasted on one wingless dragon climbing out of a hole. When Luna was out there and needed their help now.\n\n\"You can go on without me, if you'd rather,\" he said to Swordtail.\n\nHe could see that Swordtail was tempted. After all, what use was Blue going to be in a rescue anyway? He couldn't exactly fight. And if they had to escape in a hurry, he would massively slow them down.\n\n\"No, don't do that,\" Cricket said. \"I was hoping you'd use your silk to help Blue climb out.\" She pointed up. \"To catch him if he falls.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Swordtail said, light dawning in his eyes as he saw what she meant. \"Of course. That's a good idea.\"\n\n\"Cricket is full of good ideas,\" Blue said. She ducked her head and smiled at him, and he felt his heart explode.\n\nDefinitely too late. I can't say good-bye to her. Even if it means it'll hurt more later, I still want to be with her for as long as I can.\n\n\"All right, let's try this,\" Swordtail said, again shooting silk from his wrists, this time the thicker, stronger strands that were usually used for building web bridges. He wound it around Blue, leaving his limbs free to climb, then leaped up to the ledge above Cricket, still holding the other end of the silk. \"Go ahead!\" he called.\n\nAll right, this is happening, Blue thought. He sent up a silent prayer to Clearsight and started up the side of the rocky canyon.\n\nIn fact, it was easier to climb than he'd expected. There were a lot of little crevices and nooks for him to dig his talons into, and the stone overall felt much sturdier than the webs he'd grown up clambering around on. At least the rocks didn't bounce and sway in the wind.\n\nAnd when he did stumble, losing his footing for a moment, he felt the strength of the webbing catch him \u2014 the strength of Swordtail, just above him, braced to save him before he fell. And Cricket was beside him the whole way, suggesting the easiest paths, pointing out places for him to rest.\n\nNot for the first time, Blue felt very, very grateful for his friends.\n\nEven though the climbing went well, it still seemed to take forever \u2014 it was a really deep hole, after all. Blue's whole body was aching before he was halfway up. He found himself daydreaming wistfully about honey drops and tiny sugar bees and silk hammocks.\n\nAnd when at last Cricket said, \"It's here, it's just above you,\" he looked up and saw that the sky was already pale gray and most of the stars had disappeared. Cricket was right; they were near the top, and he'd be able to climb out early the next night. If he wasn't caught by then.\n\nWith one last heave, he hauled himself onto the ledge next to Cricket, letting Swordtail help lift him with the webbing. He sprawled there, breathing hard and wondering if his legs would ever work again.\n\nSwordtail poked his head over the rim of the sinkhole and squinted in the direction of Wasp Hive. \"I don't see anyone yet,\" he said, flying back to them. \"But you should still get hidden, to be safe.\"\n\n\"Back here.\" Cricket flicked her tail at the rippling stone of the rock wall. Blue crawled over and saw how the bend of the rock and the dangling plants hid a narrow crack, just big enough for him to squeeze through. He was amazed that Cricket had even found it in the first place.\n\nShe held the green leaves aside so he could wedge himself in, and he discovered that the crack extended into the rock, like a small cave, so he could go farther in, squishily turn around, and lie down.\n\nCricket poked her head in and watched him settle. \"Do you want company, which would be kind of cramped, or do you want the whole space, but alone?\"\n\n\"Company,\" Blue said. \"If \u2014 if you don't mind.\"\n\n\"I don't mind if you don't mind my wings in your face,\" she said. She wriggled back out to tell Swordtail, and Blue heard the whoosh of his friend's wingbeats retreating back down to the safety of the lake cave.\n\nThen Cricket was wedging herself in through the gap, making little squeaking noises as she tried to keep her wings clear of the rough stones. Blue pressed himself back as far as he could, and after a minute she managed to get all the way in and lie down facing him.\n\n\"Thank you for your delightful invitation,\" she said in a pretend lordly voice, adjusting her glasses. \"I adore what you've done with the place. I'll be expecting tea and sliced avocados, of course.\"\n\nBlue put his chin on his talons and chuckled. \"Don't make me think about food.\"\n\n\"I can't STOP thinking about food,\" she said. \"I'm STARVING. Those fish I caught for breakfast were so small! And super weird; did you see that they didn't have eyes? Oh, right, I showed you. Fish with no eyes! Do you think that's because there's no light down there? I guess I wouldn't rather eat something with eyes. But you should have tried them anyway; I could have caught more.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Blue said with a smile. \"I can wait for something in the vegetable family.\"\n\nCricket studied him. \"What will you do with Luna?\" she asked. \"I mean, if you can set her free. Where will you go? Queen Wasp isn't going to stop looking for you.\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Blue said slowly. Honestly he'd been imagining getting Luna and going home to their mothers. A part of him still felt as though this was a big misunderstanding, and if he could only convince Queen Wasp of how harmless they were, she'd let them go back to their normal lives.\n\nI wish we could do that. Why can't there be a way?\n\nAlthough \u2026 would it ever feel the same, now that I know about the flamesilks and the mind control?\n\nWould we ever feel safe again?\n\n\"Maybe you could go live in the caves with the reading monkeys,\" Cricket said with a dreamy smile in her voice, as though she was making a joke, but actually thought that sounded amazing.\n\n\"That one we saw did look very welcoming.\" Blue laughed. \"In a stabby kind of way.\"\n\n\"But \u2026 I'd go farther away, if I were you,\" she said. \"As far from Queen Wasp as you can.\"\n\n\"Like one of the peninsulas?\" he asked. \"I thought they were too dangerous for dragons.\"\n\n\"That's what we're told,\" Cricket said, nodding. \"But maybe it's not true.\"\n\nBlue wasn't so sure. He'd seen drawings of some of the plants in the Poison Jungle, and they certainly looked as if they'd be happy to eat a few dragons. Or impale some dragons. Or melt some dragons and convert their bone sludge into nutrients.\n\n\"You could go farther than that, though,\" Cricket said hesitantly.\n\n\"I could?\" he said. \"How?\"\n\n\"Maybe \u2026 across the ocean,\" she said.\n\nHe stared at her with wide eyes. Her body blocked most of the dim light from outside, so he couldn't really see the expression on her face. Was she joking?\n\n\"Are you joking?\" he asked. \"The Distant Kingdoms aren't real.\"\n\nThe tilt of her head said she was puzzled. \"Of course they are. That's where Clearsight came from.\"\n\n\"Yes, but \u2014 but Clearsight was magic.\" Blue had always imagined the night-black seer dragon as a mythological figure, like a star becoming a dragon and flying down to visit them. \"We say she came from the Distant Kingdoms, but we might as well say she came from the moons or the sky.\"\n\n\"The moons and the sky are real places, too,\" Cricket pointed out.\n\n\"Not places we can go,\" he protested.\n\n\"But we could go to the Distant Kingdoms,\" Cricket said. \"I'm sure of it. It's just another big island, somewhere out to the east, full of other dragons.\"\n\nHe stared at her silhouette, thinking of how different their educations had been. At Silkworm Hall, he'd learned to revere Clearsight and accept the wisdom she'd passed down in the Book without question. He'd never been taught to think of her as a regular dragon like him, from a normal kingdom like his.\n\n\"Other dragons like Clearsight?\" he asked. \"Is it a whole continent full of dragons who can see the future?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Cricket said. \"Maybe! Wouldn't it be so interesting to find out? Can you imagine being the first dragons to cross the ocean in thousands of years? I mean, what kinds of tribes live over there? Do they look like us? Do they have other powers? Do THEY have reading monkeys?\"\n\n\"But if it is real and it's that easy to get there,\" Blue argued, \"then Clearsight wouldn't be the only one to have done it in all that time.\" He shook his head. \"I think it's a myth.\"\n\n\"I think it's the perfect place to hide if Queen Wasp is looking for you,\" Cricket said. \"But you're right that it wouldn't be easy to get there. We'd have to find out how Clearsight did it.\"\n\n\"Magic,\" Blue said promptly.\n\nCricket leaned forward and bopped his nose with hers. \"Magic is just science we don't understand yet,\" she said. \"So maybe we can figure out her science.\"\n\n\"How, exactly?\" he asked.\n\n\"With BOOKS,\" Cricket said, as though that was obvious. \"There must be clues in a book somewhere!\"\n\nHe unfurled his antennae, sensing danger, and put one of his talons over hers. \"Shhhhhh.\"\n\nThere were sounds coming from outside.\n\nBlue and Cricket waited in tense silence.\n\nWingbeats. Voices. A whoosh and then a cracking sound, like an antelope's neck being broken, and munching noises as it was devoured. Blue shivered.\n\n\"Who said you could eat?\" said one of the voices, deep and sharp and female.\n\n\"I didn't eat all day yesterday!\" another voice answered, whiny and male. \"You know. She never lets us, while she's in control. So I figure, as long as we're out here and in charge of our own skulls for once, we can hunt breakfast and runaway SilkWings at the same time.\"\n\nThe other HiveWing growled, but there was a noise of ripping meat, as though she'd taken a chunk of the prey for herself.\n\n\"This is a waste of time,\" she muttered, chewing. \"Who cares about one stupid dragonet who might or might not have fire in his silk? He probably got eaten by a pack of lions or fell down a hole and died already.\"\n\n\"A hole like this one?\" The voices drew nearer and Blue felt Cricket's wings trembling. \"Should we check down there?\"\n\n\"Ugh,\" said the first dragon. \"My patrol went down there yesterday. It's dark and wet and haunted. I think we can skip it.\"\n\n\"HELLO!\" the second dragon shouted down the chasm, making Blue jump. \"HELLOOOOOOO, ANNOYING WINGLESS DRAAAAAAGON. ARE YOU DEAD AT THE BOTTOM OF THESE ROCKS? OR ALMOST DEAD? COULD YOU CROAK 'YEAH, I'M HERE, TOTALLY DEAD, CARRY ON' SO WE CAN ALL GO HOME AND SAY WE FOUND YOU?\"\n\nHis companion actually laughed, which was the most surprising part of the conversation so far from Blue's point of view.\n\n\"Come on, finish your intestines so we can get going,\" she said. \"There are some scrub thickets over by Tsetse Hive that I think are worth checking out.\"\n\nIt felt like a long time and a lot of chewing noises later when they finally flew away. Blue let out a breath and wondered how long he'd been holding it. His limbs were aching and heavy from the long night of climbing. And now that the danger had passed, he felt his eyelids drooping. It seemed safe enough to sleep. If anyone found him, he couldn't exactly escape in a hurry anyhow.\n\nHe rested his chin on the ground and closed his eyes and slept.\n\nBlue slept for most of the day, drifting in and out when there were sounds of the hunt overhead; but each time he woke, Cricket was there, and he felt safe enough to sleep again.\n\nAt last she nudged him awake and they squeezed out of the hidden crevice onto the ledge outside. The sky was just turning purple blue and a few stars were out. Blue stretched out all his cramped muscles while Cricket flew down to get Swordtail.\n\nAfter that, it took only a little more climbing before he reached the top of the sinkhole and scrambled onto safe, flat ground. It was strange how dry it felt up here, after the dampness of the deep cave. Dust billowed up between his claws as he cut off the silk harness and threw it down the hole.\n\nNow that he wasn't flying, though, Wasp Hive looked horribly far away. Could they possibly make it there before dawn? Even if they did, would there be anywhere else to hide as safe as the sinkhole?\n\n\"I'll scout ahead,\" Swordtail called, soaring away. His deep blue wings were soon swallowed up by the night, and all Blue could see of him were the little flickers of white along his back, like a flurry of snow moths.\n\nCricket landed to walk beside Blue, between the tufts of grass and stabby little thornbushes. He glanced down at his talons and realized that a lot of the paint had flaked off, probably from wading in the lake and scraping against the rocks. His real colors were showing through all over his body, glints of aquamarine and violet shimmering like buried jewels.\n\nThey went as fast as they could, although sometimes they had to detour around particularly dense shrubs or anthills as big as they were. At one point a scorpion ran across Blue's foot and he nearly shrieked, but managed not to. The air was full of buzzing and zipping and the tall grass rustled as snakes glided out of their way.\n\nTwo of the moons were full; the other was barely a sliver behind a veil of clouds. Cricket tipped her head back to look up at them.\n\n\"Did you see the comet about half a year ago?\" she asked. \"The one that looked like an extra moon in the sky? It was so big. I wished so much that I had a telescope to study it with, but there's only one in Cicada Hive, and Lady Scarab won't lend it to anyone.\"\n\n\"You know Lady Scarab?\" Blue asked.\n\n\"You know Lady Scarab?\" she replied skeptically.\n\n\"No, we just \u2014 we ran into her, in The Sugar Dream, early on Luna's Metamorphosis Day. She was \u2026 I feel like nice is the wrong word, but she was sort of fiercely not awful to us.\"\n\n\"That sounds like her,\" Cricket said ruefully. \"Fiercely not awful.\"\n\nBlue sensed there was more to Cricket's connection with the old dragon, but she didn't seem to want to talk about it. He changed the subject to astronomy, and they happily discussed constellations and her theories about other planets until Blue realized they were reaching the outskirts of Wasp Hive.\n\nThey crested a small hill and studied the structures laid out below them. Wasp Hive was not quite like the other Hives \u2014 it was bigger, for one thing, and the oldest Hive on Pantala, so it was built in a heavier, more ornate style. There were carvings of cruel-eyed wasps adorning the entrances, brandishing the wealth of the Hive in their excess wood and onyx inlays. An enormous marble statue of Queen Wasp loomed over the ground-floor doors, so anyone entering that way would have to pass under her merciless gaze.\n\nBut most dragons would enter at a higher level. Blue glanced up at the moonlit webs twining overhead. He could see the dark forms of SilkWing family clusters up there, hundreds of sleeping dragons, like stones seen through water. Did any of them know about flamesilks? Did any of them help imprison and feed dragons like Luna and his father \u2014 and did they hate it every day, or was it just a normal job to them? He wondered if the Chrysalis extended across Hives, and whether any of them were in it.\n\nAll around the Hive were neatly laid-out rows of enormous greenhouses \u2014 at least thirty of them \u2014 in concentric circles surrounding the base of the Hive. Some were wild with growth, leaves rioting against the glass roofs. Others were quieter, with orderly rows of vegetables and soil boxes visible inside.\n\nThat many greenhouses \u2026 so much glass. She needed fire to make that glass to build these, Blue thought. Fire she took from SilkWings. From my dad. Flamesilk was necessary to everything the queen did.\n\nShe wasn't going to let them go easily.\n\nSwordtail landed softly beside them. \"The main door is barred for the night, and possibly guarded inside as well. There's no way in there.\" He tipped his head back to study the Hive.\n\n\"Let's think. Could we climb to one of the ledges?\" Cricket asked. \"Using the vines and your silk for Blue?\"\n\nBlue eyed the smooth walls of the Hive uncertainly. It looked like a much more treacherous climb than the one out of the sinkhole, and the nearest opening was a very long way up.\n\n\"Or \u2026 \" he said slowly. \"Could we hide in one of the greenhouses? At least until we know a little more?\"\n\n\"That's a good point,\" Cricket said. \"If we go into the Hive, we might get trapped in there, and it might not even be the right place to look, right? But if we find a place to hide, tomorrow I can go in and ask around about where the flamesilks might be.\"\n\nBlue gave her an alarmed look. \"By yourself?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said. \"You two are probably all over the wanted posters by now. But who cares about me? I'm just a HiveWing, doing normal HiveWing things.\"\n\n\"Like suddenly appearing in a Hive that's not your own?\" Blue said. \"Asking obvious questions about the very thing that's got the queen running dragon hunts all over the savanna?\"\n\n\"They won't be OBVIOUS questions,\" Cricket objected. \"They will be VERY SUBTLE. I am an EXCEPTIONALLY subtle dragon, sir.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" Blue said dubiously.\n\n\"Besides, it won't be suspicious because everyone will be talking about flamesilks right now,\" she pointed out. \"And someone has to know where they are.\"\n\nSwordtail was shaking his head. \"That's another day wasted,\" he said. \"Luna's only going to be in her cocoon five days. We have to find her before she comes out. And before Blue starts his own Metamorphosis.\"\n\nBlue twitched, startled. His own Metamorphosis! Swordtail was right. That was \u2026 soon. Very VERY soon.\n\nWhere am I supposed to have my Metamorphosis, if I can't go back to the Cocoon? And how can I help Luna if I'm stuck inside my own silk?\n\n\"I say we storm the Hive right now,\" Swordtail went on. \"I fly in, start knocking over guards, force them to tell me where she is.\"\n\n\"I'd call that a splendid plan,\" Cricket said, \"if it resembled a plan in any way.\"\n\n\"You'll end up on the Wasp Hive version of Misbehaver's Way before the sun is over the horizon,\" Blue agreed.\n\n\"And the Wasp Hive version might be more like Headless Corpses Way,\" Cricket added.\n\nSwordtail stamped his feet. \"I can't sit around all day again.\"\n\n\"We're not sitting around,\" Cricket said. \"We're spying. And gathering information. And thinking. You'd be surprised what a useful step that is when it comes to plans.\"\n\nShe started down the hill toward the greenhouses and the two SilkWings followed her, Swordtail grumbling under his breath. Blue felt guilty for being on Cricket's side. Of course he wanted to rescue Luna just as much as Swordtail did. But he didn't want to fight any guards or demand answers or rush in all teeth-bared. He kind of wanted to do whatever would get him in the least trouble that would also help Luna.\n\nThe greenhouses were all the same size, which was remarkably large, and divided from one another by neat gravel paths. Stakes with signs and arrows printed on them pointed the way to particular types of plants, and a list was affixed to the door of each greenhouse: CARROTS, BEANS, EGGPLANTS on one; CLEMENTINES, LIMES on another; PAPYRUS, BAMBOO on a third.\n\nThey avoided the greenhouses that were too tidy, where every corner was visible, and headed for the ones that looked the most overgrown.\n\n\"These are probably tended every day,\" Blue realized as they walked between the towering glass walls. He was starting to feel anxious about his plan. \"Gardeners will come in to water the plants and find us.\"\n\n\"I will BONK THEM AND CONK THEM OUT,\" Swordtail declared.\n\nPoor dragons, just trying to do their jobs and take care of some plants. They don't deserve a day of being knocked unconscious plus a massive headache, Blue thought.\n\nWell, said his brain unexpectedly, YOU don't deserve to be chased across the savanna and treated like a mass murderer, so perhaps there's a little unfairness to go around.\n\nHe wrinkled his forehead, thinking about that. Did their injustice toward him mean that he'd be justified in hurting them?\n\nHe wasn't the kind of dragon who ever hurt other dragons. But he could imagine what Luna would say. You're allowed to fight back. You should, when the world is like this.\n\n\"Look,\" Cricket whispered, pointing to one of the last greenhouses, in the innermost circle near the back of the Hive. The plant growth inside was dense and leafy, but what was even more interesting was the fact that the door was covered with a silk-spun web barrier.\n\nThey crossed to it and read the sign beside the door: DO NOT ENTER, BY ORDER OF QUEEN WASP. PROPERTY OF THE QUEEN. TRESPASSING PUNISHABLE BY MAIMING, DISMEMBERMENT, IMPALING, AND DEATH, IN THAT ORDER.\n\nBlue lightly tapped the silk with one of his claws and the threads vibrated. \"This is here so she'll know if anyone tries to break in.\"\n\n\"Can you re-create it?\" Cricket asked Swordtail. \"From inside? Seems like a perfect place to hide, if no one can come in here.\"\n\n\"Except, you know, Queen Wasp,\" Blue pointed out.\n\n\"Yeah, but \u2026 she probably won't?\" Cricket guessed.\n\n\"This sign is really clear, though,\" Blue said anxiously. \"No trespassing at all. Maiming and impaling and death! I mean. This sign seems to think it's a really serious rule.\"\n\n\"I think 'keep Blue safe from brainwashed HiveWings' is a more serious rule,\" Cricket said firmly.\n\n\"Yeah, I can do this,\" said Swordtail, who'd been studying the web. \"It might not be an exact match, but it should look convincing enough from a distance.\"\n\nAs Blue watched nervously, Swordtail carefully dismantled the web enough for Cricket to open the door. She stepped inside and let out a small gasp.\n\n\"It's really hot in here,\" she whispered back to them. \"How does she keep it this hot?\"\n\n\"I have a guess,\" Swordtail hissed. He scowled at the silk spiraling out of his wrists as he started reweaving the door cover.\n\nBlue squeezed in behind Cricket and felt the humidity hit him along with several flapping wet leaves. It was like walking into a storm cloud. He glanced down and wondered if the stone floor was lined with flamesilk to keep it this temperature.\n\n\"Why do you think Queen Wasp keeps everyone out of here?\" Cricket whispered to him. \"Do any of these plants look unusual to you? I recognize some of them, but not all of them. Huh.\" She brushed his shoulder with her wing and they moved farther into the tangle of greenery.\n\nThat was a good question, Blue realized \u2014 one he hadn't thought about because he was so tangled up in anxiety about breaking the rules. What was in here that Queen Wasp wanted to keep secret? Why was this place so forbidden?\n\nNow he could see that there were beds of dirt edged with boulders, and something like a path between them, but the plants had grown so wild that they vaulted over the paths, twined their branches together, and flung down curtains of hanging moss and trailing vines to disrupt any possible order. He and Cricket had to duck and weave through the greenery, and he kept getting his claws snagged on roots and unexpected runners.\n\nThere were flowers everywhere, too: glorious purple exploding stars, delicate pale orange orchids, clusters of petals the color of bananas, and odd little globes in ruby red and sapphire blue.\n\n\"What are these?\" Cricket whispered, mostly to herself, fingering a vine of bright pink tendrils. \"And those? Why haven't we studied these? How did she get these two to grow next to each other? Whoa, is that a new kind of fern?\" She wandered ahead, murmuring questions, while Blue stopped to watch a really surprisingly cute snail sauntering slowly up a tree trunk.\n\nSuddenly Cricket's voice cut off with a shriek that was quickly muffled. Blue's head jerked up. Was Queen Wasp here? Inside the greenhouse? Had she caught Cricket?\n\nHe ran after her, stumbling as he fought through vine tangles and got smacked in the face by eighty more large, wet leaves. He had to explain to the queen that none of this was Cricket's fault! He had to turn himself in!\n\nHe pushed through a curtain of moss and felt himself seized by strong claws. They threw him to the floor, flipped him onto his back, and tied all his talons together before he could even blink. He opened his mouth to yell for Cricket, and another vine immediately looped around his snout, snapping his jaw shut. It felt as if barely a moment had passed, but there he was, lying on the ground, completely helpless.\n\nBlue craned his neck to look for Cricket and spotted her, tied up the same way he was and propped against a tree. Standing over her was a wiry dark green dragon.\n\nSo, not Queen Wasp, he thought. Could that be the SilkWing who covers the door for her?\n\nHe tried to twist around to see his own attacker and realized there were three of them altogether. All of them had scales in shades of dark green, and they were all poised and waiting to catch Swordtail, who was blundering toward the noise Blue and Cricket had made.\n\nAnd then.\n\nBlue noticed something.\n\nTheir captors \u2026 they had two wings each, not four.\n\nLong, graceful, swooping wings shaped like leaves.\n\nLeafWings!\n\nThey weren't extinct. They were HERE. In Queen Wasp's greenhouse! Attacking dragons! Real actual LeafWings! The posters were right!\n\nI should alert a HiveWing authority immediately! Blue thought, feeling a little hysterical. But I can't because they'll arrest me!\n\nBut LEAFWINGS! This close to Wasp Hive!\n\nHe tried to grunt loudly to warn Swordtail, but it didn't do any good. The trio of LeafWings moved with ruthless efficiency, and within a few heartbeats Swordtail was tied up next to Blue, blinking with similar bewilderment.\n\n\"Are there any more?\" one of them asked.\n\n\"I'll check,\" said another, and he quietly melted off into the trees.\n\nThere was a long moment of silence. Blue glanced over at Cricket again. She was watching the LeafWings with the same wide-eyed expression she'd had when she saw the reading monkey in the cave.\n\nThis is not an exciting scientific discovery, Cricket! he wanted to shout. These are VERY DANGEROUS DRAGONS! The LeafWings had tried to wipe out both their tribes in the last war. Wasn't she deathly afraid of them?\n\nHe tried to look at the LeafWings with Cricket's eyes. Maybe he would be less scared that way. Maybe he just needed to see them as fascinating and unusual, instead of deadly and really extremely deadly.\n\nThe two that had stayed were both female, and their faces were similar enough that he wondered if they were related. The one standing by Cricket looked no older than he was \u2014 about six years old \u2014 although he had no idea if LeafWings grew differently than SilkWings. Small gold scales were speckled along the edges of her wings and talons and across her snout, crinkled up in her scowl.\n\nThe other one was a lot older and bigger, with an air of authority about her that made Blue instinctively want to hide or say he was sorry or both. Her scales were lighter green with patches of brown, and she had strange pale burn scars splattered across her talons and up her forearms. Her scowl was also pretty terrifying. Both dragons had several small pouches hung about them, woven from long grass or fashioned from leaves. Blue wondered what was inside but had a sinking feeling that he would regret finding out.\n\nWhat are they thinking? he wondered. The matching scowls were a pretty good clue that whatever it was, the general sentiment was hostile. How long have they been here? What are they here for? Are they glad they caught us, or annoyed that we stumbled into their hiding place?\n\nMost important, what are they going to do with us?\n\nThe leaves rustled and the male LeafWing returned. He was a green dark enough to disappear into shadows and wore a small white seashell on a cord around his neck. He shook his head at the others. \"No one else.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said the older female. \"Did they break the web on the door?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"but rebuilt it.\"\n\n\"Useful of them,\" she said.\n\nHuh, Blue thought, momentarily distracted from his panic. How did the LeafWings get in? They can't spin silk, so they couldn't have covered the door themselves. Could \u2026 could Queen Wasp know they're here?\n\nHe doubted that. Queen Wasp hated LeafWings for refusing to accept her rule. Why would she keep three of them stashed in a greenhouse?\n\nAcross from him, Cricket flicked her tail, trying to get the smaller LeafWing's attention, but the scowling dragonet ignored her.\n\nThe tall female \u2014 who seemed to be the leader of the group \u2014 scanned her three captives with calculating green eyes. At last she stepped forward and yanked the rope off Blue's snout.\n\n\"Ow!\" he yelped.\n\n\"Who are you,\" she demanded, \"and what are you doing here?\" She jerked her head at Cricket. \"Two SilkWings with a HiveWing. Do you work for her?\"\n\n\"No,\" Blue said. \"She's my friend.\"\n\nThe youngest LeafWing let out a scornful laugh, but Blue's interrogator looked intrigued. \"HiveWings don't befriend SilkWings,\" she said. \"They control you. They enslave you. They order you about. But then, that's what you signed up for, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 um,\" Blue said. \"I didn't sign up for anything? I think?\"\n\n\"True,\" said the male LeafWing. \"Too young.\"\n\n\"Don't be so literal, Hemlock,\" the leader scoffed. \"You. Tell me your names.\"\n\n\"I'm Blue,\" he said. \"And that's Cricket, and that's \u2026 \" He trailed off as he turned to Swordtail and found him furiously shaking his head. \"Uh. Someone else.\"\n\n\"Trying to keep secrets won't do any good at this point,\" the LeafWing said. \"I only see two ways for this to end: with you all helping us, or dead. In the former case, it'll be much easier if we know your names. Or we could skip to the latter case right now.\"\n\nSwordtail growled and the little LeafWing bared her teeth at him.\n\n\"W-What are your names?\" Blue tried, thinking that was astonishingly brave of him.\n\nThe LeafWing smiled slightly. \"I'm Belladonna, and that's Hemlock. Our daughter is Sundew.\"\n\n\"Why would you tell them that?\" Sundew snapped in a burst of fury. \"They can't help us! They'll turn us in the moment they get a chance! We should kill them now and leave their corpses somewhere that'll really scare those worms in the Hive.\" She lifted one of her wings and pulled a fiery red centipede out of a pouch. It flailed violently at the air, waving all its feet and hissing.\n\n\"Sundew,\" Belladonna said warningly. \"Save that for later. Corpses lying around will notify the queen we're here, which would make our mission harder. Remember?\"\n\nSundew dropped the centipede back into its pouch. Her scowl deepened.\n\n\"B-Besides,\" Blue said, \"killing us would probably make the queen very happy. And I think m-maybe you don't want to do that?\"\n\nBelladonna narrowed her eyes at him. \"The queen wants you dead? Why?\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said, but he'd never been a good liar, and he couldn't come up with anything fast enough, and he didn't know what the right thing to say might be, so he went with the truth. \"She wants me locked up in case I'm a flamesilk.\" He held out his wrists, which looked as ordinary as ever, other than being covered in flaking paint. \"And she probably wants Swordtail dead because he attacked some guards to save my sister and then he escaped Cicada Hive. Cricket \u2026 she doesn't know about Cricket yet.\" I hope. \"But if she did, she'd be mad because Cricket's been helping us hide from her.\"\n\n\"A helpful HiveWing?\" Belladonna said thoughtfully. She regarded Cricket in a way that made Blue think of quicksand and crawler vines at midnight. \"That does sound like a useful dragon to know.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a bunch of four-winged lies,\" Sundew spat. \"If Queen Wasp wanted you locked up, you'd be locked up.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily. She wants your whole tribe dead, and apparently you're, uh \u2026 not all that dead,\" Blue pointed out. \"By the way, how are you not dead? Are there a lot of you left? Where have you been living?\"\n\n\"None of your business,\" Sundew hissed. \"As if we'd tell you anything! Tree killers!\"\n\nTree killers, Blue thought, startled. What an awful name. Was that how LeafWings saw the other two tribes? Of course it must be. After all \u2026 that's what we did. Even the SilkWings, though? The SilkWings only cut down trees under orders. Mostly they stayed out of the way as much as they could. But if I were a LeafWing, all I would see is HiveWings destroying my home and SilkWings helping or standing by.\n\n\"If you are trying to hide from Queen Wasp,\" Belladonna interjected, \"what are you doing in her greenhouse?\"\n\nBlue hesitated again. Swordtail was shaking his head so hard Blue thought it might topple right off his neck. But so what if these LeafWings knew about Luna? The longer he talked, the longer they all stayed alive. And maybe if he explained, and promised not to tell anyone they'd seen the LeafWings, Belladonna would decide to let them go. After all, it had to be pretty clear that he and his friends wouldn't be talking to Queen Wasp or any HiveWing guards anytime soon.\n\n\"We're looking for my sister,\" he said. \"She's a flamesilk, and Queen Wasp took her. We think she's keeping all the flamesilks somewhere around here.\"\n\nBelladonna, Hemlock, and Sundew all glanced at one another, suddenly alert.\n\n\"That's \u2014\" Sundew started.\n\n\"Yes,\" Hemlock answered.\n\n\"Aha,\" said Belladonna.\n\n\"What?\" Blue asked. \"What aha?\"\n\n\"It seems,\" Belladonna said, taking a step closer to him, \"that we can be of use to one another after all.\"\n\n\"We \u2026 can?\"\n\n\"You see,\" Belladonna went on, \"we know where the flamesilks are.\"\n\nBlue's jaw dropped. Cricket sat up, her ears twitching and her eyes bright. Even Swordtail looked suddenly more excited than worried.\n\n\"Where are they?\" Blue asked. \"Did you see a new cocoon there? Was it all right?\"\n\n\"We can take you to their prison,\" Belladonna said. \"We can even help you sneak in to rescue your sister. You just have to do one thing for us first.\"\n\nBlue's heart sank. Whatever the LeafWings wanted, it couldn't be good. Or safe. Or smart.\n\n\"I won't hurt anyone,\" he said.\n\n\"You don't have to,\" Belladonna said with her quicksand smile. \"We're not here to attack the Hive or fight any dragons, no matter what your queen's propaganda says about us. We're here for one little thing, and since we've been having quite a lot of trouble figuring out how to accomplish our goal, I think you've come along just in the nick of time. A desperate SilkWing and a helpful HiveWing are just what we need.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Blue asked. \"What do you want us to do?\"\n\n\"If you want our help finding your sister,\" Belladonna said smoothly, \"all you have to do \u2026 is steal the Book of Clearsight for us.\"\n\nBlue felt a reverent shiver run through him even thinking the words Book of Clearsight. He'd spent a hundred nights lying in his hammock, gazing up at the silk-shrouded stars and imagining what it had been like to be her. The greatest seer who ever lived. The wisest of dragons. Grandmother to an entire tribe.\n\nThe legends said Clearsight had been able to see the future \u2014 but not just one future: all the possible futures. She had used that power to keep the tribes safe during her lifetime. They had survived hurricanes, forest fires, and a malevolent princess or four, thanks to Clearsight. Her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were protected from every danger, growing strong and powerful and more numerous as the years went on.\n\nThen, when Clearsight saw her peaceful death approaching, she left one last gift for her descendants: a book that foretold the future.\n\nIt warned them about everything in the years to come. The lightning strike that sheered away part of the sea cliff. The population explosion of sharks in the bay. The possible spread of a devastating bark disease in the forest. Clearsight wrote it all down, centuries of warnings, so that she could continue to protect her beloved HiveWing children, even long after her death.\n\nThe Book of Clearsight was the HiveWings' greatest treasure. It was the reason they were the most powerful tribe in Pantala. Queen Wasp had used it to defeat the LeafWings in the war. It made her invincible.\n\nAnd surely, Blue thought, cold tentacles trailing through his mind, surely it included warnings about any dragons stupid enough to try to steal it from her. She might even know they were here right now.\n\n\"I know,\" Belladonna said, studying his face. \"I thought the same thing. But we've made it this far, and we've been hiding in her own greenhouse for four days without anyone showing up to capture us. If the Book has warned her about us, she hasn't bothered to do anything about it.\"\n\n\"Yet,\" Hemlock added impassively.\n\nBelladonna shot him a look.\n\n\"We don't need them!\" Sundew cried. \"I can steal the Book of Clearsight by myself!\"\n\n\"You can't even get near the front door by yourself,\" Belladonna observed.\n\n\"Neither can we,\" Blue said. \"We're no use to your plan. We're wanted fugitives.\"\n\n\"She isn't,\" Hemlock said, flicking one claw at Cricket.\n\nThat was true. Cricket could \u2014 but Cricket was shaking her head. Blue's small flame of hope spluttered out.\n\nOf course she would say no. He couldn't blame her. She'd never even met Luna; she wouldn't risk her tribe's entire future to save a SilkWing she didn't know.\n\nHelping a pathetic dragon hide from hunters was one thing \u2014 an exciting adventure, complete with antiparalysis smoke and reading monkeys.\n\nStealing the Book of Clearsight, though \u2026 that was an unforgivable crime. She'd be betraying her whole tribe, not just her queen.\n\n\"No?\" Belladonna growled, suddenly furious. She darted across to Cricket and seized the HiveWing's jaw in her talons. \"You don't say no to me, HiveWing. You have no right, after everything your tribe has done to our homes and our dragons.\"\n\n\"Don't hurt her!\" Blue cried. He tried to pull his talons free, but they were bound tightly. \"Look, can't you understand why she'd refuse? She wants to protect her tribe, same as you. You say you're not here to hurt anyone, but then what are you planning to do with the Book once you have it?\"\n\nBelladonna hissed in Cricket's face and shoved her away. \"All we want to do is level the wind currents,\" she spat. \"Do you really think it's fair that the HiveWings have had this secret knowledge for so long? That they've abused it to dominate and destroy other tribes? Do you think that's what your precious Clearsight intended?\"\n\nCricket looked down at her feet, blinking rapidly.\n\n\"Queen Wasp has already read the whole thing,\" Belladonna went on. \"She probably even has a copy somewhere, unless she's an idiot. We just want to read it, too. Then we'll all know the same things; we'll have the same advance information. The LeafWings won't have anything more than what the HiveWings have had for generations. Equality. That's what we're looking for.\"\n\n\"Seems only fair,\" Hemlock agreed.\n\n\"But, um,\" Blue said nervously, \"but then won't you use that information to attack the Hives?\"\n\nBelladonna's eyes glittered. \"That depends on what the Book says.\"\n\n\"Stop being so nosy!\" Sundew said fiercely. Her talons twitched toward one of her pouches, but whatever was in there, she stopped herself from bringing it out. \"Either you help us, or you die. It's very simple!\"\n\nBlue glanced at Swordtail. He could see instantly that Swordtail was fine with this plan. He'd be happy to help even LeafWings if it meant saving Luna, and he didn't care what happened to the HiveWings afterward.\n\nBut Cricket \u2026 this was too much to ask.\n\nAnd yet the truth was, it would be impossible to pull off without her.\n\nBlue closed his eyes and took a deep breath. \"I need to talk to my friends,\" he said. \"Give us some time to think about it.\"\n\n\"To THINK about it?!\" Sundew growled. She picked up a fallen branch and started snapping it into jagged splinters. \"ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.\"\n\n\"You have until midday,\" Belladonna said, beckoning to her daughter. \"Then we start formulating our plan.\" She turned and disappeared into the leaves, with Sundew stomping furiously along behind her.\n\nHemlock untied the vine around Swordtail's snout, then stepped across and did the same for Cricket. He paused as the vine dropped away and met Cricket's eyes.\n\n\"Choose wisely,\" he said to her.\n\nAnd then he, too, slipped away into the foliage.\n\nBlue looked up. This section was so overgrown that he couldn't see the walls or the ceiling of the greenhouse; it was like they were in a cave made of leaves. But he could tell from the bright green color leaching into the plants that the sun was rising outside. He wondered if hunters were out already, looking for him.\n\nHad anyone noticed Cricket was missing yet?\n\nHe rocked himself onto his side and scooted awkwardly over the rocky ground until he was next to her. She gave him a halfhearted smile and nudged his neck with her nose.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said to her. \"I'm really, really sorry I dragged you into this.\"\n\nCricket looked very surprised. \"Did you?\" she said. \"I'm pretty sure I dragged myself into it. Or leaped into it, with all four feet and all four wings. I might have been yelling 'wheeee, adventure!' in my head, if I didn't say that out loud.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe,\" he said. \"But you couldn't have expected this.\"\n\n\"Neither could you,\" she pointed out reasonably. \"Being captured by LeafWings! It's kind of amazing, isn't it? I can't believe they're still alive! Where have they been all this time? I must say they're a little more belligerent than I would have imagined.\" She moved her jaw from side to side, wincing.\n\n\"Really?\" Blue said. \"We were taught that LeafWings would kill us on sight, so to me it seems quite friendly of them to postpone killing us until later.\"\n\nCricket gave him a rueful smile. \"Is there any chance they won't kill us at all?\" she asked.\n\n\"Maybe if we help them,\" Blue said. \"Or get away from them somehow.\"\n\nBlue glanced across at Swordtail, who was flailing around on the ground, trying to bite away the vines binding his talons.\n\n\"Um, Swordtail?\" he said. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I think they're listening to us,\" Swordtail growled, \"so it's no use trying to make any escape plans.\"\n\n\"True,\" Belladonna's voice called from somewhere up in the branches.\n\n\"But I think we should help them,\" Swordtail said. \"They have a point. The HiveWings did destroy all their trees. Queen Wasp used the Book's knowledge to nearly wipe them out. So why shouldn't they get to see the Book? I don't care, as long as they take us to Luna. The only thing I'm not sure of is whether we can trust them to help us after we do what they want.\"\n\n\"You can,\" Belladonna's voice called again.\n\n\"Of course you can, you ungrateful beetles!\" Sundew yelled from somewhere else. \"We're not lying, conniving HiveWings! We're LeafWings! We're honorable!\"\n\n\"If you want to be in this conversation,\" Blue shouted, \"just come back and be in it already.\"\n\nThere was a moment of rustling silence.\n\n\"No, no,\" said Belladonna's voice. \"Carry on. Pretend we're not here.\"\n\nSwordtail snorted.\n\n\"Well, I'm worried,\" Blue said to Swordtail. \"First of all, I'm sure it's impossible to steal the book. Secondly, even if we could, giving it to a tribe who tried to wipe us all out once upon a time seems like maybe a bad idea.\"\n\n\"THAT'S NOT WHAT WE \u2014\" Sundew bellowed.\n\n\"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.\" Belladonna hushed her.\n\n\"We're leaving anyway, aren't we?\" Swordtail said. \"We can't ever go home. You and me and Luna and Io, if we can find her \u2014 and you, too, if you want to come,\" he said to Cricket. \"We'll have to find a new place to live, far away from Wasp and the Hives and all her zombie hordes. So why should we care what happens to her or them after we're gone? We'll be safe, far away from here.\"\n\n\"But \u2014 what about everyone else?\" Blue asked. \"Burnet and Silverspot? Your parents? All the dragons we went to school with? All our teachers? Cricket's sister? Don't you care about any of them?\"\n\nSwordtail coiled his tail in close and spread his wings. \"I care about Luna,\" he said. \"That's it.\"\n\nBlue couldn't imagine that was true. Blue cared about all of them: every dragon he'd ever spoken to and all the ones he'd never seen. There were dragons out there eating blueberries and dragons laughing at clumsy tiger cubs and dragons learning to dance and dragons crying as though their hearts would break over missing homework. He'd been all of them in some way, and he couldn't just toss them into the talons of these angry, vengeful dragons and fly off.\n\nHe turned back to Cricket. She'd managed to snap off a twig from the bush behind her, holding it between her teeth and passing it to her bound talons. She caught Blue's eye and tapped the dirt with the stick.\n\n\"I'm not sure we have a choice,\" she said out loud.\n\nAwkwardly she wrote, PRETEND TO AGREE. ESCAPE LATER.\n\nBlue tilted his head at her. Could they do that? Say yes to the LeafWings' plan \u2026 agree to go after the Book \u2026 and then run off once they were inside the Hive?\n\nThey wouldn't have the LeafWings' help to find Luna, but with luck they could find her themselves.\n\nIt felt underhanded. He didn't like lying to anyone, or breaking promises.\n\nOf course, he didn't love stealing priceless artifacts either.\n\n\"It's like Sundew said, right?\" Cricket went on. \"We do what they want, or they'll kill us.\"\n\n\"I won't let them kill you,\" Blue said.\n\nSomething like a \"HA!\" came from the direction of Sundew's voice, followed by a \"SHHH\" and the sounds of a scuffle.\n\nCricket tapped her message again, watching him significantly. \"Let's hear their plan,\" she said. \"If stealing the Book means helping your sister \u2014 and not dying \u2014 I can do that. They're right that Queen Wasp and the Librarian already know everything that's in it anyway.\"\n\nSwordtail had given up on untying his vines and lay in an undignified heap on the path, frowning at them. From his angle, Blue was pretty sure Swordtail couldn't read what Cricket had written. But it didn't matter \u2014 once they were away from the LeafWings, he'd explain, and Swordtail would understand.\n\n\"Sounds like we're all in agreement,\" Swordtail said.\n\nBlue sighed and leaned forward to brush away Cricket's message. \"All right,\" he called. \"We'll steal the Book of Clearsight for you.\"\n\nCricket's plan began to fall apart immediately. In the first place, the LeafWings were adamant that Sundew had to go with them to sneak into the temple.\n\n\"What?\" Cricket said. \"How? There's no way to get her through the Hive unnoticed. The first guard who spots her will kill her \u2014 in fact, any HiveWing who sees her would probably do the same.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" Blue agreed. \"There are terrifying posters about you everywhere.\"\n\n\"We've been working on that,\" Belladonna said. Blue couldn't help thinking she seemed remarkably unconcerned about sending her daughter into danger. The tall LeafWing produced a pair of leaves that were similar in shape to the second, smaller pair of wings on a SilkWing. Sundew stood still, shooting daggers at Cricket with her eyes, while Belladonna and Hemlock fastened the fake wings below and behind her real ones, using a system of rigging them with vine ties under Sundew's many pouches.\n\n\"No flying,\" Hemlock said sternly, touching Sundew's snout.\n\n\"But as long as she keeps her wings folded, it should be convincing enough inside the Hive,\" Belladonna said. \"Walking up to the guards outside, in sunlight, with plenty of opportunity for them to watch her coming \u2014 that was the part we were having trouble with.\" She smiled at Cricket, a smile that went nowhere near her eyes. \"That's where you come in.\"\n\n\"She's still very green and leafy-looking,\" Cricket protested. \"Even her real wings look like leaves. And she's so green. Blue, there aren't any SilkWings that green, are there?\"\n\nHe spent a moment trying to remember all the green SilkWings he knew, before he realized that Cricket wanted him to say: \"Oh, no, never that green.\"\n\n\"We can fix that, too,\" Sundew said spiritedly. She dumped out one of her pouches, sending a rainstorm of flower petals to the ground. Without choosing carefully, she grabbed a scarlet flower and rubbed it on her shoulder, leaving a patch of reddish green.\n\n\"Let me,\" Hemlock said, gently taking the flower out of her talons. He sorted the petals quickly into piles by color, then started applying rubbings of yellow, red, and blue in an even pattern.\n\nCricket watched skeptically, but Blue was fairly impressed. It wasn't as thorough as the paint Cricket had put on him, but it did make Sundew look much less like a LeafWing by the time Hemlock was done. Although maybe not quite a SilkWing. She looked a little too furious to be a real SilkWing, and the combination of colors wasn't exactly beautiful. But Belladonna might be right; it was at least possible now that Sundew could pass through the corridors of Wasp Hive without getting caught.\n\nWait. That's bad, he remembered. We want to leave her behind. We'll never be able to escape with her watching us.\n\nBut there was no way to convince the LeafWings without raising their suspicions \u2014 and then it got worse.\n\n\"These two stay behind with us,\" Belladonna said, pointing to Blue and Swordtail.\n\n\"No way,\" Swordtail blurted.\n\nCricket folded back her wings and lifted her chin. \"I'm not going without them,\" she said. \"I won't do it. I don't trust you.\"\n\n\"And I don't trust you, HiveWing,\" said Belladonna. \"Which is exactly why they're staying where I can keep an eye on them. You can have them back when I have the Book.\"\n\n\"No,\" Cricket said, standing her ground. \"I can't do this alone.\"\n\n\"You'll have Sundew,\" Belladonna pointed out.\n\n\"Yeah!\" Sundew said. \"You'll have ME. That's like the opposite of being alone. I can do anything twenty dragons can do.\"\n\n\"I need my friends,\" Cricket said firmly.\n\nBelladonna and Hemlock exchanged a long, thoughtful look. Finally, Hemlock said, \"Just one.\"\n\n\"Both,\" said Cricket.\n\n\"One,\" said Belladonna. \"Choose which, or we'll kill one of them and make your choice very easy.\"\n\nCricket hesitated. Blue felt awful for her. How could they all escape if one of them was stuck in the greenhouse? But there wasn't anything she could do; he could see that.\n\n\"Blue,\" Cricket said in a subdued voice. \"I'll take Blue.\"\n\n\"You should take Swordtail,\" he said. \"He's a better fighter than me, if things go bad.\"\n\n\"I assume that's what she's for,\" Cricket said, nodding at Sundew. \"I really want you to come with me, Blue. Please?\"\n\nHe realized that she was scared, maybe even more scared than he was. She had gotten into this for him, and she felt safer with him than Swordtail, who she barely knew and who had a tendency to say mean things about HiveWings. Blue was afraid he'd be more than useless to her \u2014 but if she wanted him, he'd go to the ends of Pantala, or anywhere she asked.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. Maybe they'd have a chance to slip away from Sundew. Maybe they'd come up with a way to save Swordtail and get out of this \u2026 even if he couldn't think of any solutions right now.\n\nHemlock cut them loose and let Cricket use some of the flower dye to cover the spots where Blue's real colors were showing through. The result was lopsided and weird-looking, like he had some kind of scale disease where bits of him were flaking off. But maybe that would make other dragons, especially HiveWings, keep their distance from him.\n\nThe day felt endless and yet it was alarmingly soon when Belladonna said, \"It's dusk. Time to go.\"\n\nBlue took one of Swordtail's talons in his and squeezed. \"We'll come back for you,\" he said.\n\n\"I know,\" Swordtail said. \"With the Book. I know you can do it.\"\n\nHow do I tell him we're only pretending? Blue thought desperately. How do I warn him he needs to escape?\n\nThere was no way. Hemlock was standing next to him, watching them like a hawk.\n\n\"Right,\" Blue said. \"See you soon, Swordtail.\"\n\nSundew led them through the tangled greenery to the back of the greenhouse, facing away from the Hive. Carefully she tapped on a pane of the glass wall, then wedged her claws in the cracks around the edges and levered it out.\n\n\"Oh!\" Cricket said. \"I wondered what you did to get in. Oh dear, isn't that going to be bad for the plants?\"\n\n\"I don't care two frogs about the plants,\" Sundew snapped. \"Go on.\"\n\nCricket ducked through the opening. As Blue crouched to follow her, he saw Belladonna poke Sundew between the shoulders so she'd stand more upright.\n\n\"Make us proud,\" she said to her daughter. \"Do not fail. Remember this is what you were hatched to do. Remember how evil they are. Let your rage carry you.\"\n\n\"Yes, Belladonna,\" Sundew said firmly. \"I will not fail.\"\n\nAnd then Blue was outside, on one of the neat paths, standing next to Cricket under a whale-gray sky. Low clouds blotted out the moons and most of the stars. The rainy season was definitely upon them.\n\nSundew emerged a moment later, sliding the glass back into place behind her. They slipped silently between the greenhouses, weaving toward the front of Wasp Hive. As they got closer, Sundew held up one talon to stop them, then darted to the next corner and peered out at the Hive entrance.\n\n\"Two guards,\" she whispered. \"Then this should work.\" She dug into a pouch and carefully pulled out a wooden box, which she opened to reveal a flower the size of a stingray and the color of moonlight. \"Take this,\" she said to Cricket. \"CAREFULLY. Do NOT crush any part of it until you get close to the guards. Then make them look at it, and smash it under their noses.\"\n\n\"What will it do?\" Cricket asked, eyeing the beautiful white bloom. \"Is it poisonous? Where did it come from? I don't want to poison anyone.\"\n\n\"It won't poison them,\" Sundew said impatiently. \"It'll just knock them out for a while. Don't you inhale it, though, or you'll be useless to us.\"\n\nCricket held the flower as far away from her as she could, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the cluster of greenhouses. She moved slowly, cautiously hobbling on three legs so she could hold the flower up in one talon with infinite gentleness.\n\nIt hit Blue suddenly that this was a dangerous turning point for Cricket. Up until now, she hadn't been seen with the fugitives. She could have returned home at any moment, slipping back into her ordinary life with a shrug and an excuse about mind control and hunting, or something like that.\n\nBut now she was facing real HiveWing guards, who were likely to remember her. Whatever happened next, Cricket would be in trouble \u2014 probably really bad trouble.\n\nI'm so sorry, Cricket, Blue thought mournfully. I wish \u2026 His thoughts trailed off. He couldn't say \"I wish we hadn't met,\" because that was the furthest thing from the truth. He wished she was safe, that was all.\n\nBoth guards leaped to their feet when they saw her approaching.\n\n\"Halt!\" one of the guards called. Cricket stopped where she was, halfway to the door, and the guards started whispering to each other.\n\nBlue glanced over at Sundew, who was watching with tension humming from every bone in her body. She looked ready to sprint out there and stab the guards if they so much as sneezed funny.\n\n\"So,\" he said to her. \"Your mother said you were hatched for this \u2026 what's that all about?\"\n\nSundew looked over her shoulder at him incredulously. \"Are you seriously making small talk with me right now?\"\n\n\"No!\" he protested. \"That wasn't small talk! That was big talk. Actual talk? I actually want to know, I mean.\"\n\n\"It's nothing mystical,\" Sundew growled. \"She wanted a daughter to carry on our family's legacy. She trained me my whole life for one purpose: this.\"\n\n\"Stealing the Book of Clearsight?\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes and paused for a moment. \"Sure.\"\n\nThat didn't sound like the whole story, but now the guards were calling Cricket forward again.\n\n\"Who are you?\" one of them asked. \"Why weren't you back by curfew?\"\n\n\"And what have you got there?\" asked the other.\n\n\"I found something amazing,\" Cricket said. \"The queen will want to see it right away.\" It was hard to hear her from here; her voice was much quieter than the guards'. Blue strained to listen.\n\n\"Unless it's a map to that blasted flamesilk, she's going to bite your head off,\" said the first guard. \"I'd try the Librarian first if I were you, little dragon. She likes unusual things.\"\n\n\"And she's a bit less murdery than the queen,\" agreed the second guard, smiling.\n\nBlue felt a sharp twist of guilt. These guards were so friendly. And they were going to be in so much trouble if Blue and Sundew got into the Hive and Queen Wasp found out. Would they lose their jobs, or would their punishment be even worse? He worried at one of his claws. Why did it have to be such nice, friendly guards in their way?\n\nA voice in his head that sounded like Luna whispered, Maybe they're only friendly because they're talking to a HiveWing. Have you ever seen a guard be that nice to a SilkWing? Did you even know they COULD smile?\n\nThese same guards might have been out for the last three days hunting you. They might have been in the unit that came to shove me in a cage. They might spend their other shifts poking flamesilks with spears to make them burn faster.\n\nBlue shivered, trying to shake off the voice.\n\n\"So what is it?\" the first guard asked, craning his neck as Cricket approached.\n\n\"Isn't it beautiful?\" she said. \"And it smells like nothing I've ever smelled before.\" She held out the flower between the two guards, so they both leaned in to sniff it.\n\nAnd then Cricket squeezed her claws shut, crushing the petals in her grip.\n\nBlue couldn't see exactly when it hit them, but a moment later, the guards crumpled to the ground. One of them hit his head on the Hive wall as he fell and Cricket flinched, reaching toward him too late. She crouched over him, folding in his splayed wings and checking his pulse. The pearlescent flower lay where she'd dropped it on the dirt, its edges brown and wrinkled now.\n\nSundew sprinted toward the entrance and Blue scrambled to follow her.\n\n\"Leave them,\" Sundew snapped at Cricket. \"I don't know how much they got or how long it'll last. If I were you, I would have shoved it right up their snouts.\"\n\n\"Well, I wasn't going to do that,\" Cricket said crossly. \"And it worked fine, didn't it? What kind of flower is that? Is it related to nightshade?\"\n\nBlue bent over the second guard, surreptitiously making sure she was alive (she was) and that she'd fallen in a comfortable position. Sundew strode on without waiting, and both Cricket and Blue had to jump up and run after her, under the malevolent gaze of the giant Queen Wasp statue.\n\nThe ground-level doors to the Hive were massive and ostentatiously made of wood, with wasps carved all over them and a profile of the queen on each side. Sundew paused in front of one for a moment, then reached up and raked her claws across the queen's elegant snout, leaving splintery furrows in the wood.\n\n\"That was unnecessary!\" Cricket protested. \"You ruined a really nice carving!\"\n\n\"Wait until I get to her actual face,\" Sundew snarled. She yanked the door open a crack and peeked through, then shoved it a little farther and squeezed herself through the gap. Blue and Cricket went next, spilling out onto the streets of Wasp Hive's lowest level.\n\nWhat they saw was a deserted street of warehouses: rows and rows of blocky buildings, each a perfect beige cube reaching from floor to ceiling with one large door. Storage, Blue guessed, although of what exactly he wasn't sure. Each door was marked with a symbol, all of which were unfamiliar to him.\n\nHe only had a moment to think about it because Sundew had already started up the path that led to the next level. Blue ran after her and caught her shoulder.\n\n\"WHAT?\" she snapped.\n\n\"Let Cricket go first,\" he said. \"And walk like a normal SilkWing. We don't charge around with I-have-somewhere-to-be-and-someone-to-set-on-fire faces. Even if your disguise was way better than it is, walking and scowling like that will get you caught in a heartbeat.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, fuming. \"Show me how you walk.\"\n\nBlue turned to Cricket. \"Have you been here before?\" he asked her. \"Do you know where the temple is?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"My class visited the temple last year, and my dad took me a couple of times. It's up in the center of the Hive.\"\n\nHe nodded and stepped back so she could lead the way. Then he ducked his head and trailed after her, looking as harmless and inconspicuous as he could.\n\nSundew fell into step beside him, growling and muttering under her breath.\n\n\"Tuck your chin a little more,\" Blue suggested softly. \"Keep your eyes on the ground. Don't look directly at any HiveWings. Try not to make any noise.\"\n\nShe hissed at him. \"You're just like I always pictured SilkWings,\" she spat. \"Subservient worms.\"\n\nHe stopped midstep and frowned at her. \"We are not,\" he said. \"We're pacifists, yes. And we follow the rules. But it's kept us alive, hasn't it? There's a lot more SilkWings left in the world than LeafWings. I bet,\" he added hurriedly, since he wasn't actually sure. Up until this morning, he'd have guessed the number of LeafWings left was zero.\n\nBut he must have been right, because she spun and glared at him. \"If you'd been willing to fight with us, we'd all still be alive!\"\n\n\"Or we'd all be dead,\" he pointed out. \"The significantly more likely scenario.\"\n\n\"I don't know why Willow wants to save your tribe,\" Sundew snapped. \"You're as much of a problem as the HiveWings, with your nodding and smiling and agreeing to let them trample all over you. I'd throw you all into the sea if it were up to me.\"\n\nCricket came back around the bend in the tunnel. \"Can we try to be a little more quiet?\" she said. \"We'll be at the residential levels soon.\"\n\nWhich meant more dragons around, and more HiveWings who might overhear Sundew and Blue arguing. He bit back everything he wanted to say to the LeafWing and hurried after Cricket, walking like he normally did around HiveWings, which was a perfectly fine way to walk, he thought, in that it kept you out of trouble, and it was polite, and was Sundew right? Was he confusing obedience and good behavior with letting the HiveWings trample all over him?\n\nWhat else was I supposed to do, exactly? he wondered. Stare right at HiveWings, speak up, pick fights? End up on Misbehaver's Way all the time like Swordtail? I don't like being yelled at. Acting the way I do has been a good way to avoid that.\n\nWasp Hive was constructed much like Cicada Hive, but bigger, with wider hallways and tunnels and higher ceilings on each level. The walls of the tunnels were painted with black and yellow stripes or six-sided honeycomb patterns, alternating by level. Weavings and posters of Queen Wasp glared at them around every bend.\n\nThe tunnels became busier as they ascended, and Blue drew closer to Cricket with a nervous jittering in his chest. They passed a family of HiveWings arguing over where to go for dinner; a SilkWing carrying a basket of clean blankets; a pair of HiveWings singing and teasing each other about getting the words wrong. Everyone seemed so normal. Their lives were carrying on despite days spent under the queen's mind control. A few of them nodded politely at Cricket, but nobody even glanced at Blue or Sundew.\n\nAnd then Cricket slowed down, flicking her wings back as she stepped out of the tunnels and onto a polished floor made of real wood, not treestuff. Blue bit back a gasp as he followed her onto the smooth surface. It gleamed in waves of gold and amber and brown, all the way across the vast space in front of them, to the foot of the Temple of Clearsight.\n\nBlue had read that the Temple of Clearsight was the most beautiful structure in the world. He knew that it had been built by Clearsight's grandchildren, then partially destroyed hundreds of years later during the war with the LeafWings, and then moved to be reconstructed here, in the heart of Wasp Hive, where it could be kept safe.\n\nBooks had told him that it was made of sixty different kinds of wood, all polished and painstakingly fitted together so it looked like a perfect miracle.\n\nBut books couldn't describe the feeling of peace that hit him when he saw it.\n\nThe Temple wasn't an enormous towering structure, as he'd always imagined. It was no bigger than the Cocoon, but built with elegant balance and graceful proportions. The columns that lined the front of it were of a wood so dark it was almost black, embedded with tiny flecks of quartz that looked like distant stars. The roof swept into dragon-tail points at each corner, and a central dome was covered in curved golden wood tiles that looked like scales.\n\nIt sat quietly in the center of the vast wooden courtyard, surrounded by reflecting pools and little nooks lined with bookshelves. Even at this hour, Blue saw a few dragons curled here and there \u2014 on a bench, beside a pool, on a bamboo mat between shelves \u2014 all of them reading. Tiny flamesilk lanterns glowed beside them; a few floated on the water of the pools, and others hung from the rafters of the temple.\n\nAnother light glowed on the dome, and when Blue looked up, he realized there was a skylight overhead that pierced all the levels, all the way up to the top of the Hive. In the distance, he could see the stars, and the corner of one of the moons shining down on the temple. It must be covered with glass, to keep the rains out, but it was kept so clean it looked like a direct hole to the sky.\n\nThe effect was somewhere between magic library and peace garden, and Blue found himself consumed with sadness that he'd never been here before \u2026 and most likely would never be able to come here again. He wished he could live like these HiveWings, with this place at his claw tips every day. He wished he could work for the Librarian, taking care of the temple and all these books, sweeping the floors and feeding the koi and keeping it beautiful, and never getting yelled at by angry LeafWings or chased by angry queen-zombies.\n\nInstead he was here to destroy this peaceful place, by stealing the one thing it was built around.\n\nThey walked toward the temple as quietly as they could. A long carpet of dark blue silk stretched toward the temple door and muffled their talonsteps. Golden dragonflies and green lizards were woven in a subtle pattern through the carpet. It was more beautiful than even Blue's favorite Cocoon weavings, and it felt impossibly ancient.\n\nHe glanced sideways at Sundew, to see if the aura of the temple had calmed her down at all. She caught him looking and hurried a scowl back onto her face.\n\n\"Don't you think it's amazing?\" he whispered.\n\n\"No,\" she whispered back ferociously. She waved her tail at the carvings around them. \"How many trees had to die to make this place?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. He felt in his bones that the temple was worth everything it took to make it \u2014 but he could also imagine how hard it was for Sundew, mourning the vast forests of trees that used to cover Pantala. Queen Wasp and the HiveWings had destroyed all of that. Not just the LeafWings' homes, but the spirits of the trees they'd clearly loved, too.\n\nTwo HiveWing guards stood on either side of the arched temple door, holding long spears. Blue felt panic stirring in his chest. He tapped Cricket's wing and she paused, turning back to him.\n\n\"Sundew and I don't have wristbands,\" he said softly. \"These guards \u2014 I think they'll notice.\"\n\nCricket nodded as though he'd drawn her attention to an interesting fish. She strolled off the carpet path and over to one of the pools, sitting down beside it and beckoning for Blue and Sundew to do the same.\n\n\"Those aren't the only guards,\" she murmured when they were beside her. She crouched closer to the water. \"There's another pair guarding the inner door, and in the room with the Book itself, there's always either two more guards or the Librarian. The Book is in a wooden case, which is locked, and only the Librarian has the key.\"\n\n\"Where is the Librarian if she's not with the Book?\" Sundew whispered.\n\n\"She lives in a back room of the temple, so she can be near the Book at all times. Once a Librarian is chosen, she never leaves the temple again.\"\n\nBlue hadn't known that. Yikes. What would it be like to be a dragon who was never allowed to fly or see the sky? Even though the temple was perfect, he couldn't imagine anyone who'd be happy to be trapped in it forever.\n\n\"So possibly six guards, plus the Librarian,\" Sundew muttered. \"You know, it would have been quite helpful if you'd mentioned any of this earlier today, during the planning stages.\"\n\n\"I forgot until I saw the temple,\" Cricket said innocently. \"Sorry. I haven't been here in a while.\"\n\nSundew growled softly and started poking through her pouches. Cricket caught Blue's eye and gave him a small, nervous smile.\n\nBlue was sure Cricket had remembered the details of the guards all along, but she was still trying to find a way to get out of stealing the Book. He wished he could do something to help her. He wished he could think of a way to rescue Luna, protect the tribes from an invasion of LeafWings, save the Book of Clearsight, and escape with his friends. Ideally with a minimum of danger, violence, or dragons yelling at him.\n\nHis heart stopped suddenly.\n\nMaybe there was one possible way out of this. The problem was, it was risky and insane \u2026 but then, so was stealing the Book of Clearsight.\n\nWe could tell the guards, he thought. We could turn in Sundew and expose her disguise. We give her to Queen Wasp. We tell them where Belladonna and Hemlock are hiding, so the soldiers can swoop in and save Swordtail and catch them.\n\nWe'd be heroes.\n\nWouldn't we?\n\nSurely capturing three LeafWings and exposing a plot to steal the Book of Clearsight would be the greatest gift they could ever give Queen Wasp. She would HAVE to forgive them for everything else.\n\nWouldn't she?\n\nHe tried to follow that thought. Would she forgive Swordtail for attacking her soldiers? What about Io; could she be forgiven, too? Would Queen Wasp let Blue and Luna go back to their safe, ordinary lives with their mothers? (Maybe if they promised to give all their flamesilk to her?) Would she let Swordtail and Luna be partnered together?\n\nWhat about his father \u2014 would she set him free, too? (If he was even still alive?)\n\nWhat about all the other flamesilks, if there were others? Would she think three LeafWings were a fair trade for however many SilkWings she had trapped in her flamesilk factory?\n\nIf not, could he accept his own freedom and Luna's, knowing he'd left others behind?\n\nOr what if Queen Wasp took the information, destroyed the LeafWings, and then gave them nothing in return?\n\nHe might betray Sundew and break his promises, only to end up in a thousand times as much trouble as before. He'd be walking straight into the queen's clutches with no leverage.\n\nAnd how would we explain Cricket? he realized. What if telling the queen about the LeafWings \u2026 and how we found them, and where we've been for the last three days \u2026 means she figures out that Cricket can't be mind-controlled?\n\nHe needed to keep her out of this, if he did it. He had no idea how. He needed to ask Cricket for advice. He needed to think, but he didn't have time.\n\nSundew slipped something out of one of her pouches and palmed it. She nodded to Cricket. \"Walk straight inside. Don't look guilty.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" Cricket whispered.\n\n\"Something effective,\" Sundew hissed. \"Let's go!\"\n\nCricket led the way back to the silk path and headed toward the front door of the temple. One of the guards was watching them intently, while the other had his gaze focused on his spear. Blue found it harder and harder to breathe. Should he do it now? He could run forward and throw himself on the guards' mercy. If he was going to betray Sundew, he had to do it before they were caught, in order to earn Queen Wasp's gratitude.\n\nBut Cricket \u2026 is this what she would want?\n\nHe heard whisking sounds from behind him, like two tiny puffs of air. He glanced back at Sundew. She jerked her chin at him: Keep walking.\n\nCricket had reached the steps of the temple. This was it. The guards would step forward and demand to see their wristbands. They'd arrest him and Sundew on the spot, and it would only be a moment before they realized Sundew's second pair of wings was fake.\n\nTurn her in. Turn her in now.\n\nBlue took a deep breath and focused on the guard who'd been watching them.\n\nWhich is when he realized \u2026 the guard wasn't moving. His eyes were still fixed on the carpet where they'd been, several steps back. His black wings, spotted with large yellow and red splotches, were halfway raised and his mouth was slightly open as though he'd been about to speak.\n\nBut he was as still as the statue of Queen Wasp outside.\n\nAs still as the prisoners on Misbehaver's Way.\n\nBlue whipped his head around to the other guard. She was paralyzed the same way, frozen with her spear in her talons and a slight frown on her face.\n\nHow did Sundew do that? Only HiveWings had that kind of nerve toxin, and only a few of them. And as far as Blue knew, they could only wield it from up close by stabbing little stingers into their victims.\n\nBut Sundew had done it from a distance somehow, and so quietly that none of the dragons in the temple grounds had even looked up from their books. Unless someone looked carefully at the guards, it was possible no one would notice they were paralyzed at all for most of the night.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" Sundew whispered. \"You're both staring.\"\n\nCricket shook herself and stepped through the archway. Blue wished he could pull her aside and talk. She must be terrified. At least, he was terrified.\n\nThe room they stepped into was as tranquil as the grounds outside. To their left, a painting of Clearsight took up almost the entire wall, with small lanterns flickering on either side of it. She looked kind and wise, like Blue had always imagined. Offerings were piled below the painting: bundles of wilting marigolds, tiny silver sugar cakes, little weavings of poems.\n\nTo their right, the wall was divided into hundreds of small cubbyholes in a honeycomb pattern. Most of the holes held scraps of paper \u2014 wishes written by dragon claws, dreams for what they hoped the future would hold, folded and tucked inside. A desk stood in the corner with more paper for anyone who wanted to write one of their own.\n\nBlue imagined all the dragons who had come through here, all their shaking talons asking Clearsight for hope, for luck, for love. HiveWings and SilkWings alike visited the temple and believed in Clearsight. She helped them believe in a better future.\n\nWill they lose that faith without the Book? If we steal it, does this all fall apart? Will anyone come here anymore?\n\nHe knew what he wished he could write on one of those scraps of paper. Please keep my friends safe. Please tell me what to do.\n\nCricket didn't pause in the antechamber. She kept walking, toward the inner sanctum. Blue, who had slowed down to look around, was able to watch Sundew as she went past him. He saw her lift something to her mouth and swiftly blow into it. Once. Slight tilt to the right. Twice.\n\nShe had uncanny aim. He saw the moment each guard froze \u2014 spears slightly lifted, mouths ajar as though they'd sensed a threat and were about to order them to halt.\n\nWhatever she was shooting, the guards were no use to him now. He couldn't hand over Sundew to a pair of statues.\n\nHow are we going to get out of this?\n\nThere had to be more than just guards between them and the Book. Maybe the case would be impossible to get into. He really hoped it was.\n\nCricket stepped between the two guards, casting them each a nervous glance. Neither of them so much as twitched. With a deep breath, she opened the double doors and stepped into the final room.\n\nThis one was small and shadowy and perfectly square, like standing inside a wooden box. Blue squinted at the glimmering ceiling and realized that it was inlaid with moonstone stars. The only light in the room was a lantern that hung over the case that held the Book.\n\nBlue caught his breath. He knew it wasn't the Book itself, but the case was carved to look like a book, too \u2026 a book with dragons sweeping across the cover and clambering around the spine, tails twining into vines, wings spilling into clouds, eyes like suns. The podium holding up the case was shaped like a leafless tree, branches spreading to support the book. For a moment he couldn't understand why Queen Wasp had allowed that here, when trees were forbidden in all other art. Then he realized that the podium was probably as old as the temple, from a time long before Queen Wasp's decrees \u2026 a time before the forests were destroyed.\n\nHe stepped to Cricket's side, and she reached to brush his shoulder with her wing. He knew she felt it, too \u2026 the sacredness of this place. The magic of the Book of Clearsight.\n\nBut if Sundew felt it, she didn't let it slow her down. She shoved past them, darted to the podium, and grabbed the case.\n\nIt didn't move.\n\nFor a moment she wrestled with it furiously, trying to pick it up, but the case was inextricably joined to the podium \u2014 and when she tried to pick that up, she discovered it was as firmly rooted to the floor as though it had grown from the wooden planks.\n\nWith a growl of frustration, Sundew seized the lock and tried to yank it off. Blue realized that that, too, would fail, and then her next step was going to be smashing the ancient case.\n\nHe stepped toward her, trying to raise the nerve to argue with her. And then a voice spoke from the darkest patch of shadows at the back of the room.\n\n\"Stop. The Book of Clearsight is not for you.\"\n\nThe Librarian stepped into the light: a tall, bony dragon whose scales were the pale orange of unripe apricots, marked with a zigzagging triangle pattern of black along her spine and tail. She wore a dark silk veil that shrouded her face.\n\n\"Little dragons,\" she hissed. \"I've been expecting you.\"\n\nShe knows. She knows everything. The Book told her we would try to steal it, just like I knew it would.\n\nBlue's heart hammered loudly against his ribs. They were trapped.\n\nIf I talk fast, maybe I could still turn Sundew in. Maybe they don't know where Belladonna and Hemlock are. The queen might still have mercy on us, if we go quietly and tell her everything.\n\nIf I don't fight. If I follow orders. If I keep my head down and say I'm sorry.\n\nBut staring into the Librarian's hooded face \u2014 he knew he couldn't do any of that.\n\nHe couldn't hand the LeafWings over to the queen's cruelty. He couldn't bow his head and go back to being obedient, now that he knew about flamesilks and the mind control and the Chrysalis. After seeing the guards closing in on Luna, he knew he'd never trust the queen again.\n\nThe Librarian took another step forward and tilted her head toward Sundew. A hiss escaped from under the veil.\n\n\"You're a LeafWing,\" she snarled.\n\n\"You seem surprised,\" Sundew said mockingly. \"I thought you were 'expecting' us. Didn't your precious Book tell you I'd be a LeafWing?\"\n\n\"A LeafWing, a SilkWing \u2026 and a HiveWing,\" the Librarian mused, looking at each of them in turn. She seemed to stare at Cricket the longest, and then suddenly she reached up and ripped off her veil.\n\nHer eyes were blank and white as pearls.\n\nCricket gasped, flinching backward.\n\n\"What strange treason is this?\" the Librarian roared. \"Why can't I get inside your mind, worm?\"\n\nBlue jumped in front of her, not even really knowing what he was doing, only that he needed to be between Cricket and the queen who could see everything.\n\n\"I'm the one you're looking for!\" he cried. \"Blue \u2014 Luna's brother. The maybe-flamesilk.\" He rubbed at his arm so the paint flaked off a bit more and his true colors shone through. \"See? I'll turn myself in. Please just let them go.\"\n\n\"Never,\" the queen snarled in the Librarian's voice. She reached for them with long stingers sliding out from under her claws.\n\nAnd then Sundew cannoned into the Librarian's side and slammed her into the wall. The Librarian turned with a shriek and slashed at Sundew's face, but Sundew ducked and spun in the same movement, smashing her tail into the Librarian's chest.\n\nThe Librarian was bigger and stronger, but the LeafWing fought like a cornered tiger. They wrestled furiously around the tiny space, hissing and clawing and kicking at each other, until Sundew suddenly seized the Librarian's head and threw her to the floor. She caught one of the HiveWing's wrists as the stinging claws came for her again and snapped the arm bone with a brutal crack.\n\nThe Librarian screamed again and stabbed her back claws into Sundew's underbelly. They rolled into the wall, leaving a smear of blood along the floor.\n\nWhat would Clearsight think of us? Blue thought with despair. Fighting over her legacy like this. What did she see in this vision, and what did she think of it? Was she proud of the Librarian for defending the Book? Did she hate us for trying to steal it?\n\nHe looked up, as though her spirit might be in the moonstones above them, watching the scene unfold.\n\nI'm sorry, Clearsight, he thought. I never meant to cause trouble like this. I didn't ask for it. I tried to be good.\n\nSomething sparked in the stones, a bright reflection that dazzled his eyes for a moment. He looked down and saw where it had come from \u2014 an object on the floor that had caught the light of the lantern.\n\nA key.\n\nThe key.\n\nIt had been torn from the Librarian's neck in the struggle with Sundew.\n\nHe glanced at Cricket, but she was crouched by the door with her talons over her face, and he felt a wave of enormous guilt crash over him. The queen knew Cricket's secret now, and it was all his fault. Her whole life was going to change, even if they did somehow manage to escape this room. She could never go home. The queen would want to find her and figure out why she couldn't control her.\n\nQueen Wasp had taken Luna's life and Blue's life and Cricket's life; she'd taken the free will of her entire tribe; she'd taken the lives of thousands of LeafWings and their beloved trees.\n\nIt was time someone took something from her.\n\nBlue snatched up the key and leaped toward the case. With trembling claws, he fit the key in the lock and turned it.\n\nPlease forgive me, Clearsight.\n\nHe felt the weight of all the rules he'd never broken settling over his scales and sinking into his heart as he opened the lid of the case.\n\nThere it was. The real Book of Clearsight. It was much, much smaller than he'd expected, and it wasn't bound in gold either. The leather cover was dyed blue but had no other decoration; it was soft and worn, as though it had been read a million times. The pages inside were ancient, flaking around the edges and yellowed with age. It smelled like books and a far-off hint of pine forest.\n\nHe lifted it gently into his talons.\n\n\"Wait,\" Cricket said, and he turned quickly to her, but she wasn't speaking to him. She was talking to Sundew, who had the Librarian pinned against the wall.\n\n\"Don't kill her,\" Cricket said.\n\n\"Why not?\" Sundew demanded. Her stomach was bleeding and her fake wings had been torn off, along with a few of her pouches. She was breathing heavily, raggedly, as was the Librarian.\n\n\"Because she's not the one fighting you,\" Cricket said. She took a step closer and peered into the Librarian's eyes. \"The queen is. Does the queen control you \u2026 all the time? Is that why you always wear the veil?\"\n\nThe answering glare was as blank and white as ever.\n\n\"It would make sense,\" Cricket said softly. \"That's the one way to be sure the Librarian never reveals the Book's secrets. The tribe thinks two dragons share the Book's knowledge \u2014 but really, only the queen does, because the Librarian isn't herself anymore.\"\n\nBlue shuddered. He'd thought being trapped in the temple for her whole life was bad enough \u2014 but it was even worse. The Librarian was trapped in her own mind, unable to get out or make any of her own decisions ever again.\n\nSundew studied the dragon with sharp eyes. \"I heard rumors that the HiveWing queen could control her subjects. But I thought they were just stories the old ones made up to frighten us.\"\n\nThe queen in the Librarian barked a laugh. \"No,\" she said, \"it's all true. I can control all of them. That's why every dragon in the Hive is on their way to surround the temple right now. I can't move the guards you paralyzed, but I can reach everyone else. The moment you step outside this temple, they will kill you all.\"\n\n\"But you're not sending them inside,\" Cricket murmured, \"because you don't want them to know you control the Librarian this way.\"\n\n\"Let's try something,\" Sundew said. \"HiveWing.\"\n\n\"It's Cricket,\" Cricket corrected her.\n\n\"Cricket,\" Sundew amended, and something about using her name made the young LeafWing sound like a real dragon for a moment, not just a swiftly moving ball of fury. \"Find my pouch with a large A marked on the outside.\"\n\nCricket searched the pouches on the floor, then edged close enough to Sundew to poke through the pouches still clasped around her.\n\n\"Found it,\" she said.\n\n\"Open it very carefully,\" Sundew instructed, \"and take out the jar inside, but don't open that until I say so.\"\n\n\"Any chance you could be a little more ominous about this?\" Cricket asked wryly. She drew out the jar and held it between her front talons.\n\n\"Now,\" Sundew said, \"I want you to open it and shake it out on her tail, then get as far away as you can.\"\n\nCricket upended the jar over the Librarian and jumped back to Blue's side. Two small black ants fell out, landed on the Librarian's tail, and clung to it with their small wriggling legs. Their antennae searched her scales as though puzzled.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" the queen demanded.\n\n\"When you're inside a dragon,\" Sundew said, \"you can feel everything they can, can't you? Or else you wouldn't have screamed when I broke your arm.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Cricket answered for her. \"I know she leaves dragons when they're hurt or dying.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see your game,\" the queen scoffed. \"I can take a lot more pain than a broken arm, though. I'm not afraid of anything you can do to this body.\"\n\n\"That may be,\" said Sundew, \"but I'm guessing that's because you've never been bitten by a bullet ant before.\"\n\nBlue had never even heard of a bullet ant, and from her silence, he guessed the queen hadn't either. They all watched the tiny ants circle for a moment and then start climbing, up and up the Librarian's tail and along her spine. The Librarian didn't move and didn't move and didn't move \u2014 and then, as one of them ran toward her neck, she flicked her wing instinctively to knock it off her.\n\nInstead it latched on to the wingtip and bit down with little pincer jaws.\n\nThe scream that came out of the Librarian was like nothing Blue had ever heard before. She collapsed as though her bones had melted, and Sundew dropped her to the floor, where the dragon lay shaking all over and screaming that terrible scream.\n\nSundew stepped over the patches of blood on the floor, took the jar from Cricket, and neatly scooped up the two ants without letting them touch her. She screwed the lid back on very tightly and packed it away again in her pouch.\n\nThen she crouched by the Librarian's head and peeled open one of her eyelids.\n\n\"Had enough?\" she asked the white eyeball beneath. \"This pain is going to last half a day, just so you know. It's not stopping anytime soon.\"\n\n\"I'll kill you for this,\" the queen hissed, and then, abruptly, the eye rolled back and became a normal eye. Dark orange irises and dilated pupils stared up at Sundew.\n\nThe Librarian stopped screaming.\n\n\"You \u2014 you did it,\" she said in a strained voice. \"Ow. Ow. Owwww I know it's worth it but oowwww it's hard to really know that right now. I tried once before to hurt myself badly enough that she'd set me free, but it didn't work. This is so much worse, though.\" She sat up, holding her wing out at an awkward angle and moaning softly.\n\n\"Is she really gone?\" Sundew asked.\n\nThe Librarian nodded. \"Yes. For the first time in years.\" She inhaled and exhaled slowly, then glanced at her wing and winced again.\n\n\"If she's really gone, then here,\" Sundew said, digging out a pair of dark green leaves from another pouch. \"Chew this and spit it on the spot where the ant bit you. It'll deaden the nerve and should dull the pain for a while, at least.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" the Librarian said. She put the leaves in her mouth and started chewing.\n\n\"It'll also make your tongue feel very weird,\" Sundew added. \"Just to warn you.\"\n\n\"Hrmgrah,\" the Librarian agreed, making a face.\n\n\"Has the queen been controlling you all this time?\" Cricket asked.\n\nThe Librarian nodded, talking awkwardly around the leaves in her mouth. \"Ever since the initiation ceremony. I woke up from the ritual with her inside my head. When she sleeps, she makes me sleep. She's always in there.\" She shuddered. \"I was so proud to be chosen. I never knew what it would mean \u2014 I had no idea she did this.\"\n\n\"That's horrible,\" Blue said softly. The Book felt fragile and warm in his talons. He wanted to protect it with all his heart, and he was sure anyone who wanted to be the Librarian must feel the same way. They didn't need to be brainwashed into it. Queen Wasp didn't even give them a chance to show their loyalty; she forced it upon them instead.\n\n\"She'll be back in your head as soon as she thinks it's safe,\" Cricket pointed out.\n\n\"I know,\" the Librarian said, nodding. \"But even a moment to be myself is more than I ever thought I'd have again.\" She spread the leaf paste over the edge of her wing, and the pain lines around her eyes relaxed. \"Oh, thank Clearsight.\"\n\nSundew glanced across at Blue. \"So,\" she said. \"We have the Book, which is great. But we're surrounded by Hive zombies who would really like to kill us. Which is less great.\"\n\n\"Can you throw bullet ants at them?\" he asked. \"Or blow-dart them?\"\n\n\"I don't have many more blow darts,\" she said. \"Or enough bullet ants for everyone in the whole Hive, although that would be my kind of revenge.\" She started collecting the pouches she'd lost during the fight, checking their contents, and resettling them around her. She kicked the pair of fake wings into the corner.\n\n\"I'll help you,\" the Librarian said quietly.\n\n\"You will?\" Blue said, surprised. \"But we're stealing the Book. Your whole purpose in life is to keep it safe.\"\n\nThe Librarian looked at the Book in his talons, and her eyes were sadder than any dragon's he'd ever seen before.\n\n\"I think it's time someone else knew the Book's secrets,\" she said. \"And if the queen kills me for it, I'll still be better off than I was this morning.\"\n\n\"How can you help us?\" Sundew asked practically. \"Is there another way out of here?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" she answered. \"But I can get you up to the dome, at least.\"\n\nThe Librarian got to her feet, wincing from the other wounds Sundew had given her, and limped to the back corner where she'd first appeared. She couldn't put any weight on her broken arm, and Blue wondered if Sundew felt anywhere near as terrible as he did about that.\n\nA secret panel in the wooden wall slid aside at her touch, and they all followed her through into the Librarian's quarters. Compared to the other rooms of the temple, this one felt cold and empty. A bamboo mat in the corner and a small bookshelf were the only two items in the room.\n\nIt looks like a prison cell, Blue thought. The position of Librarian was supposed to be the tribe's greatest honor. But instead it was a trick, a snare set to trap one of the brightest minds of the HiveWings and keep her useless forever.\n\nAnother panel slid aside to reveal a spiral staircase going up. They climbed after the Librarian, rounding the last curve to find themselves in an attic that smelled of wood chips and boiled silk. The underside of the dome curved over their heads, and Blue saw a door on one side that led to a small balcony.\n\n\"What was this for?\" Cricket asked, blinking around at the dust and abandoned boxes. She picked up an odd-looking tool that looked a bit like a curved dragon tongue.\n\n\"I think Librarians used to make books up here,\" the Librarian said wistfully.\n\n\"Oh,\" Cricket said. She ran one claw along the top of a dusty table. \"That's what I thought they did, too.\"\n\n\"Not anymore. Not in a long time.\" The Librarian led the way to the balcony door and peeked out through the glass. \"Oh dear.\"\n\nSundew edged in beside her and looked out as well. \"Hrmph,\" she snorted. \"I can take them.\"\n\n\"Every HiveWing in Wasp Hive?\" Cricket said. \"You are terrifying, but I still find that a little hard to believe.\"\n\n\"Unless you have something else alarming in one of those pouches?\" Blue said hopefully.\n\nSundew tapped the floor thoughtfully with one claw. \"Maybe,\" she said. \"But I'd need fire to make it work.\"\n\n\"I have fire!\" Cricket said. She scrambled to pull out the little stone jar with the flamesilk thread inside and tipped it to show Sundew. \"Would this work?\"\n\nThe LeafWing's eyes gleamed. \"I think so.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" the Librarian pleaded as Sundew took the jar in her claws. \"Don't set the temple on fire. You can have the Book, but please leave the temple.\"\n\nSundew hesitated, as though she would have loved to set the whole Hive on fire. But after a moment, she nodded. \"Stand back.\"\n\nShe took a branch covered with long, waxy-looking, red-brown leaves out of another pouch. With careful, slow movements, she dipped the point of each one into the jar until it touched the flamesilk and caught fire. A bright flame flared for a moment on each leaf, then vanished into curls of reddish smoke. Sundew handed the jar back to Cricket and opened the door to the balcony, holding the burning branch out away from her.\n\nNow Blue could see the temple grounds \u2014 and the HiveWings who covered every inch of space between the temple and the door. Orange, yellow, red, and black scales rippled like a vast sea of poisonous snakes. As Sundew stepped onto the balcony of the dome, every head snapped toward her in unison, blank eyes latching on to her.\n\nOne branch of burning leaves seemed very small in the face of all those talons and teeth and claws. Blue shivered, and he felt Cricket put one wing over his back and lean against him.\n\nI should be comforting her, he thought. I'm the one who's ruined her life. But if she was still willing to be close to him, perhaps she forgave him \u2014 perhaps she still liked him anyway.\n\nSundew hissed at the crowd of HiveWings. Smoke was rolling off the leaves now, growing thicker and thicker and redder and darker. She glanced at it one more time, checking that it was all smoke and no flames, and then she threw it with all her might directly into the middle of the watching dragons.\n\nIt hit a yellow-black dragon, who shook it off and hopped away with a yelp. The dragons closest to him began coughing. They sank to the ground, one by one, hacking and wheezing, as the smoke billowed up and out, swallowing the dragons around it.\n\nBut it wasn't enough. For each HiveWing incapacitated by the smoke, there were five more still grimly standing between them and the only way out.\n\n\"Capture the flamesilk,\" they intoned. \"Kill the other two.\"\n\nThe buzz of their wings filled the chamber as dragon after dragon rose into the air and surged toward the dome.\n\nBlue's heartbeat surged with panic.\n\nWait \u2026 that's not the only way out.\n\nHe looked up. There was the skylight, and the stars far above them. The hole was barely large enough for a dragon to fit through, but he and Cricket and Sundew were all fairly small. If they could break the glass at the top, they could at least get outside the Hive.\n\n\"Up!\" he shouted, grabbing Cricket's arm and pointing. \"We can go out the skylight!\"\n\nShe followed his gaze, then looked back at him. \"What about you?\" she asked. \"How do we get you up there?\"\n\nOh. He twisted to look back at his wingbuds, as though perhaps they'd have magically turned into wings in the last several heartbeats.\n\n\"We'll carry him.\" Sundew threw open her wings and leaped up off the balcony. \"Let's go \u2014 and hold on to that book.\" She started smashing HiveWings aside with her tail and talons.\n\nHe clutched the Book to his chest. Cricket whirled around in a panic and grabbed a long, twisted silk rope from one of the tables. She and the Librarian threw it around Blue's shoulders and chest and tied it fast. They each took an end and ran to the balcony.\n\nI wish I had wings, Blue thought, closing his eyes. I wish I were more than a dead weight for my friends to drag around.\n\nThe rope jerked tight under his arms and he was dragged smack into the balcony railing, nearly tumbling over it, before the rope steadied and he felt himself lifted up, up into the air. He tilted sideways almost immediately as the Librarian's bigger wings soared ahead and Cricket faltered under his weight. Then Sundew swept up beside her and took the rope as well, tugging him upright.\n\nAll he could do was dangle helplessly, holding on to the Book for dear life. Right below his talons, the smoke still billowed and the seething mass of HiveWings snapped and churned. Three of them surged toward his feet and he kicked at them frantically.\n\n\"Ack! Help!\" he shouted.\n\nA cascade of little red centipedes poured down from above him. Each dragon they struck let out a shriek of alarm or pain and dropped away, clawing at his face.\n\nThe dome was shrinking below him. Blue looked up and saw Sundew, then Cricket duck into the skylight hole. The Librarian was hovering beside it, taking up the slack in his rope, waiting to let them go first.\n\nAnd then suddenly she looked down at him, and her eyes were white again.\n\n\"Nice try,\" she said.\n\n\"Cricket!\" Blue screamed. The Librarian's claws slashed through the rope connecting him to his friends. He tumbled sideways, jerking to a stop at the end of the severed rope, but feeling the knots start to slip loose around his chest.\n\nCricket shot back down the shaft and flew at the Librarian's face. The Librarian ducked away, gave her an evil grin, and let Blue's rope fall from her hands.\n\nHis stomach flipped as he started to plummet, then jerked to a stop again as Cricket caught the end of the rope. But she wasn't strong enough to lift him alone. Even with her wings beating as hard as she could, they were both sinking down toward the HiveWings.\n\n\"Cricket!\" he yelled. \"You have to go without me! They won't kill me, but they're under orders to kill you. Take the Book and go!\"\n\n\"I'm not \u2014\" she started to shout back, but he was already tossing the Book up toward her.\n\nShe had to drop the rope to catch it. She did it instinctively, as he'd known she would; she was as well trained to love the Book as he was. All their lives, they'd known it was the most precious object in their world. She'd reach for it without thinking, even if her conscious mind would have chosen to save Blue instead.\n\nAs he fell, as a thousand claws reached up to seize him, he saw Cricket clutch the Book to her chest and shout his name. He saw Sundew pummel the Librarian hard enough to knock the HiveWing out of the air. He saw Sundew grab Cricket's arm and pull her away, and he saw Cricket's last look back, and he saw their tails disappearing away up the skylight.\n\nAnd then all he could see was orange and yellow and black and red, as the talons closed around him, and the queen had him in her grasp at last.\n\nBlue was dragged roughly through the Hive tunnels. The queen had dispatched five dragons to take him away, which was four too many for a dragon as harmless as Blue. They kept stepping on one another's toes and growling and bumping wings and all trying to hold on to his elbows at once, which he definitely did not have enough elbows for them to do.\n\nTheir eyes were their own again, so the queen had apparently decided she didn't need to be concerned about Blue anymore. Which meant all the rest of her brainwashed subjects were off hunting for Cricket and Sundew.\n\nDid they get away? Are they all right?\n\nHe worried and worried about this as he was shoved between blustering HiveWings. They were descending through the levels, but to where, Blue had no idea. He kept expecting the queen herself to appear. He jumped each time they turned onto a level with black and yellow stripes.\n\nThey reached the bottom level with no sign of her, though. The guards pushed him out into the streets of warehouses he'd seen on the way in. One flicked her wings at him and he realized the tips were sharp little stingers, probably venomous. Another kept baring his fangs, so those could probably kill him with just a scratch, too.\n\nWhere are they taking me? Blue wondered, staring at the blank walls as they marched past. How am I going to be punished? He remembered the tortured faces on Misbehaver's Way and shivered.\n\nThis feeling \u2014 of being in trouble, of having done something wrong, of knowing so many dragons were angry at you \u2014 this was everything he'd tried to avoid his whole life. He hated it. He wanted to go back to his desk and get all the answers right on the quiz and have the teacher smile and say, \"Nice work, Blue.\" He wanted to dig out his Good Citizenship award and show it to these HiveWings to prove he wasn't as bad a dragon as they thought he was.\n\nBut \u2026\n\nI'm not. I mean, I've done all the things they think I have. But that doesn't make me bad.\n\nHe clung to that thought like it was a harness and someone was lifting him through the sky. Yes, I broke HiveWing rules. But I had good reasons to. I'm not trying to hurt anyone \u2014 I just wanted to find my sister and set her free. Queen Wasp didn't have to be so secretive and menacing and terrifying in the first place.\n\nThe HiveWings stopped suddenly in front of a blocky building that looked exactly the same as all the others. The only difference was a carving on the gray door, this time of a small lantern, little sparks coming off it to indicate it was glowing.\n\nBlue suddenly had a guess about where he was going.\n\nOne of the HiveWings pounded on the door in a series of knocks: three quick, four slow, two quick. After a moment, it was flung open, revealing a wizened, mostly orange dragon with black patches here and there. He gestured for them to come inside and slammed the door behind them.\n\nShapes loomed around them in the dim interior \u2014 giant crates, as far as Blue could tell, stacked up to the ceiling. They maneuvered between these: left, right, right, left again, until Blue lost track. But he thought they were about in the center of the warehouse when they reached a wide open, well-lit space surrounded by a circle of watchful HiveWing guards.\n\nAt first, Blue thought they were staring into empty space, or perhaps at one another across the way. It wasn't until he got closer that he realized they were looking down \u2026 down through an enormous sheet of glass at a stone cavern below the floor. That was also where all the light was coming from.\n\nThe dragon from the door shoved him past the guards before Blue could take a close look. But he caught a glimpse of cauldrons that seemed to be full of molten gold and dragons moving between them.\n\nShortly beyond the circle of guards, the old dragon shoved aside a crate and heaved open a trapdoor underneath, revealing a set of stairs descending into the earth. He started down and Blue's guards nudged him into following.\n\nLamps punctuated the turns of the stairwell, but they seemed unnecessary; the glow from the light at the bottom of the stairs could have illuminated a stairwell three times as long. Blue had to shield his eyes and blink hard for a moment when they reached the bottom. His head ached as though he'd walked right up to the sun.\n\n\"What's this?\" a gruff voice demanded while Blue's eyes were still adjusting.\n\n\"The flamesilk everyone's been looking for,\" came the answer.\n\n\"Can't be.\" Someone poked his shoulder. \"Wrong color. Aaaack! Did his scales just fall off?!\"\n\n\"It's \u2026 paint or something?\" said another dragon. She started scraping at his scales with her claws. \"Eeeeeyeesh, look, it comes off. Fetch a scrubber.\"\n\n\"Wait, this little scrap is the dragon we've been hunting across the savanna?\" someone else chimed in. \"He's not a flamesilk! He hasn't even got wings or silk yet.\"\n\n\"We knew that, idiot,\" said the first voice. \"He's just probably a flamesilk. We have to keep an eye on him in case he is.\"\n\n\"Oh, boring. When's his Metamorphosis?\"\n\n\"Dunno. Soon, I reckon.\"\n\nBlue's heart gave a nervous jump. It was soon \u2014 really, really soon. He kept forgetting to worry about it. His was supposed to start right after Luna's ended. Would he have to spin his cocoon here? Far away from his mother, his Hive, and the Cocoon where he'd always expected to transform?\n\nHe felt his wrists gingerly. They seemed normal \u2026 no pain, no burning feelings. What if he went through his Metamorphosis and wasn't a flamesilk? What would the queen do with him then?\n\nSending him back home to Burnet and Silverspot didn't seem like the most likely option, somehow.\n\nSomeone arrived with scrubbing brushes and briskly scoured the paint off his scales. He stood still and didn't struggle. There wasn't much point in being a different color now, after all.\n\nBesides, his eyes were finally adjusting to the light, and he was transfixed by his new surroundings. They were standing on a ledge at the bottom of the stairs, looking out over the cave he'd glimpsed from above. If he looked up, he could see the green-yellow-orange glow of the eyes watching through the glass ceiling.\n\nMore HiveWing guards were stationed down here, peering into the cauldrons and occasionally poking the working SilkWings with their tails or spears. Several of those SilkWings were ordinary dragons, doing ordinary work: transporting cargo, carrying food and water, cleaning, putting out fires.\n\nBut the rest \u2026\n\nThe rest were flamesilks.\n\nBlue counted nine at first glance. They were scattered across the cavern, each on his or her own rocky perch. Four of them were asleep; two were eating. The other three had their wrists extended, fiery silk threads spilling out into the massive stone cauldrons set below them.\n\nHe stared at them, trying to guess which one was his father. The large, bored one who looked like he might fall asleep and topple into his own silk fire? The lime-striped one who was nibbling a persimmon as though it had greatly offended him, but he'd decided to eat it anyway? The one with pale pink wings whose talons twitched constantly in his sleep?\n\nAnd then, at last, he saw what he most wanted to see: an incandescent gold cocoon, tucked in its own hollow on the far side of the cave.\n\nLuna.\n\nHe took a step toward her, hesitated, and looked back at the guards. The scrubbing brushes had been carted away. His original escorts had gone back up the stairs, leaving the one guard from the door and the three who'd come to investigate his arrival. These four were all leaning on their spears or chewing on strips of dried gazelle, chatting to one another.\n\nOne of them noticed his glance. She grinned at him with all her teeth.\n\n\"Go ahead,\" she said. \"Get used to the place. I gather you're going to be here for a while.\"\n\nThe others chuckled, although Blue didn't think it was really the most clever menacing comment she could have come up with.\n\nHe took another few steps away, but they all went back to their conversation and ignored him.\n\nI guess I really can walk around. He'd expected a cage, or a paralyzing nerve toxin, or some kind of beating, perhaps. But maybe this was the queen's way of letting him know how unimportant he was. Or how trapped \u2026 he could wander as far as he liked, because there was nowhere to go and no way out.\n\nBlue clambered down from the ledge, hopping from rocky foothold to craggy stalagmite until he reached the same level of the cavern as Luna's cocoon. Behind him, he heard the HiveWing guards laughing, and he wondered if they were mocking his winglessness.\n\nWell, I won't be wingless much longer. His biggest fear \u2014 his Metamorphosis \u2014 was only days away. It didn't seem fair that he'd have to deal with that, too, in the middle of everything else terrifying.\n\nHis route to the cocoon led him past the bored-looking flamesilk, who glanced up with a spark of interest in his eyes.\n\n\"Hey,\" said the flamesilk in a lazy but commanding voice. \"Who are you?\"\n\nBlue hesitated. He didn't want to alienate anyone who might be a friend down here \u2014 and for all he knew, this could be Admiral.\n\n\"I'm Blue,\" he said. \"My sister's in that cocoon over there.\"\n\n\"Ohhhhh,\" said the other dragon. He shook one of his wrists vigorously, watched the silk spool for a moment, then turned his gaze back to Blue. \"Right. The new blood.\"\n\n\"Did you know we were coming?\" Blue asked.\n\n\"Some of us hoped,\" he answered. \"Ad's been counting the days.\" He nodded over at Luna's cocoon, and Blue finally noticed that there was a dragon sitting next to it.\n\nAd \u2026 Admiral.\n\nBlue moved forward, studying his father. Admiral was a shimmering blue green, somewhere between Blue's bright morpho butterfly blue and Luna's elegant caterpillar color. He had darker purple streaks along his wings and matching spots of white on each one. His eyes were brown with a faint gold tinge to them, and he traced one claw around and around in an infinity loop on the ground as he watched Luna's cocoon.\n\nFor a long moment, he didn't look up, even when Blue stopped right across the cocoon from him. But at last Admiral raised his head and saw his son.\n\nHis eyes lit up.\n\n\"You're the other one!\" he said. \"You're early!\"\n\n\"Oh \u2026 yes,\" Blue said. He gestured vaguely at the guards on the entrance ledge. \"I was, uh \u2026 \" Well, captured, I guess.\n\n\"I'm so glad you're here,\" Admiral said warmly. \"I'm your father. I'm Admiral.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Blue said. \"My name's Blue. Wait \u2014 you're glad we're here?\" Glad that Luna and I are trapped down here, just like you?\n\n\"We have such an important job,\" Admiral said, rubbing his wrists. \"So important! When do you think she'll wake up?\"\n\nBlue calculated backward. \"Not tomorrow night, the night after that,\" he said. \"That would be five days from when she went in.\"\n\nAdmiral nodded. \"I can't believe one of mine is a flamesilk,\" he said. \"And maybe both! Clubtail was taken out to have eggs a year before me, but neither of his had any flame whatsoever.\" His chest swelled with pride.\n\n\"But \u2026 \" Blue looked around at the cavern again. \"Isn't it \u2026 sorry, but isn't it kind of terrible? Being a flamesilk?\"\n\n\"Terrible! Gosh, no,\" said Admiral. \"I mean. I'd make some changes. I'm working on that.\"\n\n\"Working on what?\" Blue asked. Was his father also part of a secret resistance?\n\nAdmiral waved at a rocky nest nearby, where piles of papers were neatly stacked along the stone shelves around it, each stack tied with a pale gold thread. \"Changing the system!\" he said. \"Solving problems!\"\n\n\"With \u2026 papers?\" Blue squinted at them.\n\n\"They're letters,\" Admiral said patiently. \"My copies of them, obviously. I write one to the queen every seven days, outlining the current problems I see and offering proposals for fixing them.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Blue said, impressed. That was a lot of letters. \"So she writes back? Or she comes to visit you?\"\n\n\"Well, neither,\" said Admiral. \"But she's very busy. Lots of Hives to run. Two tribes to manage. LeafWings to guard against. The dip in flamesilk production is just one of her many problems. Which I'm going to help solve!\"\n\n\"There's a flamesilk shortage?\" Blue said.\n\n\"No!\" said Admiral unconvincingly. \"And it's not a problem, because we're solving it. With her help,\" he added, nodding at Luna's cocoon, \"and hopefully yours!\"\n\nBlue stared at him in alarm. \"Was this your idea?\" he asked. \"Fathering potential flamesilks so more dragons could be trapped in this cave?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" his father admitted. \"The queen came up with that. Very clever. And works out well for me because (a) better company and (b) more signatures for my petitions!\"\n\n\"Petitions,\" Blue echoed.\n\n\"My suggestion was longer rest cycles between production and more citrus in our diet. Which we got! The citrus, I mean. Tangerines for everyone with every meal. Every. Meal. Really makes you wish for a lemon or a banana now and then. Good for us, though! She vetoed the longer rest cycles. That's all right.\"\n\n\"So \u2026 what else have you changed?\" Blue asked.\n\n\"Oh, lots of things,\" Admiral said with a modest shrug. \"I started almost as soon as I got here, once I realized there was a system and a way to accomplish real change within that system.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Blue was intrigued. Doing things inside the rules \u2026 that sounded like something he could handle a bit better than Swordtail and Luna's revolution. Maybe his father could teach him how to do it. Maybe there was a way to be a good dragon, stay out of trouble, and still make things better.\n\nAlthough. Tangerines were not quite the epic change Blue wanted to see in the world.\n\n\"Can I read some of your letters?\" Blue asked.\n\n\"Of course!\" Admiral leaped excitedly to his feet and bounded over to his alcove. He came back with an armful of papers and laid them out in front of Blue.\n\n\"Wait \u2026 is this flamesilk?\" Blue asked, touching the thread that tied one stack together. He squinted at it, puzzled. \"Why isn't it setting the letters on fire?\"\n\nAdmiral laughed. \"This is great!\" he said. \"I feel like such a dad! I get to teach you so much! There are different kinds of flamesilk, buddy. It wouldn't be much good to us if it only burned everything in sight. We need the kind for building webs, too. Something we can sleep on. Stickier silk for climbing with. We can choose which kind we produce.\" He tipped his wrists up, flexed his claws, and glanced at the nearest guard, who wasn't paying any attention to them. \"Um \u2026 I'll show you later. Not a good idea to waste any silk, you know.\"\n\nBlue flipped through the letters, thinking about this new information. It was quite a relief to hear that he wouldn't accidentally set the world on fire every time he used his silk. Maybe going through Metamorphosis with his flamesilk parent nearby actually was a good idea.\n\nMaybe the queen was trying to help me and Luna by bringing us here.\n\nAnd yet \u2026 he glanced around at the cavern. The flamesilk dragons looked fine. They didn't seem miserable. But if they were so important and the queen was willing to listen to them \u2014 why were they kept imprisoned in this cavern? Why were they such a big secret \u2014 at least, from most other SilkWings?\n\nWhy weren't they allowed to choose this life \u2014 or something else?\n\n\"Father,\" Blue said. \"Do any flamesilks ever leave this place?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Admiral said unexpectedly. \"I mean, I left, didn't I? Long enough to have you!\"\n\n\"Right, but \u2014 how long was that for?\" Blue asked. \"Did you get to decide when and where you went? Or who you were with?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" Admiral said. \"But it was a lovely visit. Cicada Hive is so pretty. That Mosaic Garden, wow.\"\n\n\"Have you gone anywhere else?\" Blue asked. \"How often do you leave?\"\n\n\"Ummmm.\" Admiral scrunched up his snout as though he was counting in his head. Blue leaned forward hopefully. \"Right. That was it, actually. That \u2026 one time.\"\n\n\"In your whole life?\" Blue asked, dismayed. \"You've spent your whole life in this one cave?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" said Admiral. \"I grew up in Hornet Hive. Didn't move here until my Metamorphosis. Went into my cocoon there, woke up here! Quite a surprise. Really delightful, once I realized how important we are and what an honor this is.\"\n\nBlue regarded him skeptically. \"Haven't you ever asked the queen if you could leave?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Admiral said. \"That stack on the end is vacation time requests and field trip proposals and some of my theories on how more flying might improve our silk production. Afraid I don't have any good evidence for that, though! More of a wishful-thinking kind of hypothesis. I realize that. Completely reasonable that she always says no.\"\n\nBlue picked up another letter. His father's handwriting was neat and very legible. His spelling was perfect, his sentences concise and convincing. This one was a politely worded outline of a proposal for a skylight or anything like a window, suggesting that a little sun on their scales might also be beneficial for their silk output.\n\nThere were several letters below it along the same lines, with modifications to the proposal to make it as cost-effective or easy to accomplish as possible. One even included a drawing of a sequence of mirrors that could bring the sunshine to them via a long path of reflections.\n\nBlue could clearly see, from looking at the cavern, that every one of these letters had been ignored.\n\n\"Who's the midget?\" one of the other flamesilks \u2014 the one with green stripes \u2014 shouted at Admiral. \"Is that your offspring? He's scrawny like you! Is he a vacuous earthworm, too?\"\n\n\"Mind your own business!\" Admiral roared. \"He doesn't need to hear your toad-sucking voice!\"\n\n\"Better than your millipedian claw-waving folderol!\" the dragon yelled. \"Are you poisoning his ears with your stupid ideas already? Did you tell him the queen chews up all your letters and spits them out? Because they're the dumbest things she's ever read?\"\n\n\"That's not true! And it would help if CERTAIN DRAGONS weren't such TROLLS about everything!\" Admiral yelled back. \"As IF anyone would EVER believe that LESS citrus might be helpful! I swear,\" he said to Blue, \"I think he sneaks over and reads my letters just so he can write ones arguing for the exact opposite of anything I propose.\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" Blue asked, wide-eyed. \"Why is he so mean?\"\n\n\"That's Fritillary,\" Admiral growled. \"He just wants everyone to hate the world as much as he does. Don't talk to him.\" He made an effort to smile at Blue. \"See, this is why I'm glad you're here. It'll be nice to have someone new to talk to! Someone with a little perspective. Someone who knows how to look on the bright side. You do know how to look on the bright side, don't you?\"\n\n\"I guess I do,\" Blue said. Wasn't that what he'd spent his whole life doing? Finding a silver lining to any cloud? Convincing himself that there was nothing wrong with how SilkWings were treated. Ignoring Luna's complaints. Assuming that their safety was worth sacrificing a few freedoms.\n\nHe looked down at the letters in his talons again.\n\nAfter all these years of trying to work with Queen Wasp's rules, in Queen Wasp's hive, under Queen Wasp's control, had his father accomplished no more than a handful of tangerines?\n\nHad he accepted the loss of all his freedom because he thought he could find a way to make it work?\n\nDidn't he want more out of his life? Didn't he want to fight back?\n\nDo I?\n\nIt was like Cricket said \u2014 some rules were unjust. And some things were more important than following the rules.\n\nHe put down the letters and rested his front talons on Luna's warm golden cocoon. It was very hot, but it didn't burn him.\n\nThis is not going to be our life, Luna, he promised silently. I won't spend the next hundred years writing fruitless letters. Father's way, obeying the system, hasn't worked.\n\nSo we'll find another.\n\nOr we'll burn it all down.\n\nAdmiral found a place for Blue close to his own nest: a hollow in the rock large enough for a dragon to settle into, with several crannies in the wall where he could keep things, if he ever had any things. (Apparently there was a request process involving a number of forms.)\n\nAt first the hollow seemed a little too big to Blue \u2026 and then he felt a shiver across his wings as he realized his father was thinking of Blue's future, and how much bigger he might grow. Admiral had chosen a nest where Blue could spend the entire rest of his life.\n\nBut I'm not going to. That's not going to happen.\n\nHe tried to believe it as he lay down to sleep, but his dreams were restless and unhappy. He dreamed of getting his talons stuck in a crevice and trying to pull them out. He dreamed of letters piling up around his claws. He dreamed of Clearsight, sitting on the steps of her temple, looking down at him with enormous disappointment.\n\nWhen he woke up, his wrists were itching.\n\nAm I going to be a flamesilk?\n\nThe cavern was quiet. Most of the regular SilkWings were gone, and seven of the flamesilks were asleep. Blue climbed down to Luna's cocoon and leaned against it. He wished he could talk to his sister. Or Cricket.\n\nIs Cricket all right? Did she escape?\n\nOr \u2026\n\nHis mind shied away from the alternative. He couldn't imagine the world without Cricket in it. He couldn't imagine his own life without Cricket in it.\n\nA HiveWing guard came stomping over and Blue sat up hopefully. Maybe this dragon could tell him something about what had happened.\n\nBut the guard went right past him and jabbed Admiral in the side with one of her sharp claws. Admiral woke up with a snort, blinking rapidly.\n\n\"Time to spin,\" the guard snarled. \"You're late.\"\n\n\"So sorry,\" Admiral said, rubbing his eyes. \"You're quite right. I've been a little discombobulated by the arrival of my children, of course. Otherwise I'm always on time, aren't I? Very punctual dragon, that's me. Very little reminding required. Don't you agree?\"\n\n\"Quit your yapping and excusin',\" the guard grumbled. \"Silk. Now.\" She dragged a cauldron out from under Admiral's nest and thunked it into place right below Admiral.\n\n\"Of course.\" Admiral held out his arms and closed his eyes. A long, dragging moment passed, and then a thread of flame emerged from one wrist. It spiraled down into the cauldron, pouring slowly, like cold honey. It was another long moment before a second thread appeared from the other wrist, and this one seemed dimmer than the first.\n\nThe guard scowled at the slow-moving silk, and Blue wondered what she was feeling. Was she worried about what would happen to the Hives if there was a flamesilk shortage? Or did the guards get punished if the flamesilks didn't meet a certain quota? Or was there any chance she was actually concerned about the dragons under her charge?\n\nWhat a weird life this would be, he thought. Every morning you wake up and go through a secret warehouse staircase into an underground cavern. You spend the day poking other dragons to make them work and standing guard so they can't leave.\n\nIsn't it boring? It must be boring. Especially for the ones sitting in a circle in the dark warehouse, staring through the glass all day.\n\nThe HiveWing turned to leave and Admiral's eyes popped open.\n\n\"Sandfly,\" he said quickly, \"have you met my son? This is Blue. He says my daughter's name is Luna. And she'll be coming out tomorrow night. With her wings! And silk to add to the quota. Isn't that wonderful?\"\n\nSandfly looked down at Blue and the gold cocoon. She didn't say anything for a few heartbeats. Her scales were pale yellow and speckled everywhere with tiny black spots, like a swarm of flies in the desert; it was easy to see how her parents had chosen her name.\n\n\"They're very young,\" she said at length.\n\nBlue couldn't tell if she was feeling sorry for them, with a life of imprisonment lying ahead, or if she was pleased at the idea of how much silk they'd be able to produce over the length of that life.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said. \"I'm sorry to bother you, but I was wondering \u2026 do you know what happened to the dragons who stole the Book of Clearsight yesterday?\"\n\nSandfly leaped backward as though he'd jabbed her with an electric eel. \"WHAT?\" she roared. Half of the sleeping heads in the cavern popped up and turned their way. \"That didn't happen! No one would dare!\"\n\n\"Oh \u2026 \" Blue trailed off. It hadn't occurred to him that the queen would lie to everyone about this \u2014 and make the Librarian lie, too \u2014 but now that he thought about it, he wasn't surprised. Losing the Book of Clearsight would be pretty terrible for morale. She could easily just close up the case and pretend it was still in there. That is, if Cricket and Sundew did escape with the Book.\n\n\"What a HORRIBLE thing to say!\" Sandfly barked. Behind her, Admiral gave Blue a pained \"fix this\" expression.\n\n\"I'm sorry!\" Blue said. \"I'm so sorry. I meant, the dragons who tried to steal the Book of Clearsight. Of course the Librarian stopped them. Of course it's safe. Um. Those dragons, though? Do you know if they got away?\"\n\nSandfly was shaking out her wings as though they were crawling with caterpillars. \"Ugh,\" she said. \"I'm going to have nightmares for days. What kind of traitor would steal the Book of Clearsight? That's so obviously wrong.\"\n\nSo obviously wrong. Blue stared down at his talons \u2014 the talons that had unlocked the case and lifted out the precious book. It was me. I'm the traitor. But the Librarian had wanted them to have it, when she was herself. She'd said it was time for other dragons to know the Book's secrets.\n\nHe decided not to mention that, in case Sandfly had another heart attack. He was also carefully avoiding the fact that one of the criminal dragons was a LeafWing, in case that wasn't public knowledge and might set off a riot.\n\n\"Right,\" he said, trying one more time. \"So the queen really wanted to catch them \u2026 but did she?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Sandfly said. She settled her wings again. \"I was down here until midnight last night. No one at home mentioned any public executions yesterday, but maybe they'll be held today or tomorrow.\"\n\nBlue managed not to gasp. Or burst into tears.\n\nShe assumes they were caught because she's a HiveWing. But she doesn't actually know. They might be safe.\n\nOr they might be in another prison somewhere, waiting to be executed.\n\nIf only he could escape and go look for them. But he didn't have Cricket's clever ideas or Swordtail's impulsive courage or Sundew's helpful pouches of weapons. He was just a little wingless dragon stuck in a cavern of flame.\n\nStill. He could at least try.\n\nBlue spent the rest of the day exploring every corner of the flamesilk cave. He walked the entire perimeter, clambering up and down the rocks wherever he needed to. The guards by the staircase gave him weird looks as he went by, but they didn't stop him. Nobody stopped him, although he got the distinct feeling that all the flamesilks were watching him whenever they thought he wasn't looking.\n\nThere were three female flamesilks and seven males, most of them quite a lot older than Blue. He guessed that Admiral might be the youngest one the queen had. A couple of them seemed to stay in their nests all the time, cycling between sleeping, eating, and producing silk, without ever moving from their spots. He saw a few others get up and fly around, although they couldn't go far. There was enough room to spread their wings, but they couldn't soar, and there wasn't any wind to ride.\n\nIf this is my future, will I never get to fly in the clouds? How will I even learn to fly properly, without any wind currents down here?\n\nThe guards and the flamesilks seemed to have a very precise schedule in their heads. They rotated production cycles and rest intervals in careful synchronization, so there were always at least three flamesilks working, even in the middle of the night.\n\nBlue had covered almost the entire cave by the time his father's turn at the cauldron was done. There were a few ledges and corners that he hadn't figured out how to climb up to yet, but he had walked between all the stalagmites and surreptitiously poked his nose in every large gap in the rocks. So far he hadn't found any secret passages, though.\n\nFrom across the cave, he saw Sandfly drop a bucket of food beside Admiral and roll the cauldron away. He started back, his head full of questions.\n\n\"Hello, dear,\" one of the flamesilks said, popping her head over the edge of her nest just as he was about to pass her. He jumped, and she giggled. \"I'm Danaid. My, aren't you a shiny one. We haven't had any visitors in so long \u2014 and now we'll have two new flamesilks! How delightful.\" She sighed happily. Her scales were so orange she almost looked like a HiveWing, but there was no black among them; instead, flecks of white dotted her spine and long streaks of white striped her wings. She looked old enough to be Blue's great-grandmother.\n\n\"I might not be a flamesilk,\" Blue said, checking his wrists again.\n\n\"Not to worry,\" she said. \"I'm sure you'll still be delightful company. Better than all these grousing old dragons anyhow. Some of them can't keep a secret.\" She shot an irritated look at the pale pink flamesilk. \"And SOME of them think VERY highly of themselves.\"\n\n\"I can HEAR you,\" Fritillary shouted from his nest.\n\n\"We all can!\" called another.\n\n\"I KNOW,\" Danaid shouted back. \"We're in a CAVE! But I'm having a PRIVATE CONVERSATION, so stick your snouts somewhere else!\"\n\n\"I told you, I thought you wanted me to tell Fritillary that you liked his stripes,\" the pink SilkWing said in a wounded voice. \"Aren't you ever going to forgive me?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't like them anymore!\" Danaid snapped. \"I think they make him look skinny and arrogant and potato-brained!\"\n\n\"You WISH you were as smart as a potato!\" Fritillary bellowed.\n\n\"Go suck a lime!\" Danaid shouted. \"I hope your face gets eaten by dung beetles!\"\n\n\"Now, now, settle down,\" said one of the HiveWing guards in a bored voice.\n\n\"Anyway, where were we?\" Danaid said to Blue, her voice suddenly all sweetness again.\n\n\"And it wasn't my fault that Festoon overheard me telling Heliconian that you thought he was stealing all the radishes,\" the pink dragon went on querulously. \"You should be mad at him for eavesdropping, not meeeeeee.\"\n\n\"I was,\" Danaid snapped, \"but he died five years ago, you half-wit.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\" The pink dragon flopped sideways in his nest.\n\n\"Ignore them, sweetheart,\" Danaid said to Blue.\n\n\"Is it always like this?\" Blue asked. He waved his hands at the flamesilks.\n\n\"Like what?\" Danaid asked cheerfully.\n\n\"The \u2026 arguing?\" he tried. He'd seen at least three other shouting matches erupt that morning, while he'd been searching the cave.\n\n\"Who's arguing?\" Danaid said. \"Was it old Fritillary? He's the worst. Don't talk to him. Xenica is terrible, too, always gossiping and bad-mouthing everyone. You already know you can't trust Pierid over here.\" The pink flamesilk let out a grumbling sigh and turned his head away from them. \"Clubtail is perfectly nice, but by all the Hives, he never stops talking. Heliconian ruins everything.\" She flipped her tail over the side of the nest and smiled at Blue. \"Really, I'm the only one worth knowing.\"\n\n\"Danaid, stop poisoning my son's mind,\" Admiral said, appearing at Blue's side suddenly. \"He's on my side, not yours.\"\n\n\"There are sides?\" Blue said, confused.\n\n\"No,\" Admiral said, \"but Danaid is definitely on the wrong one. Let me introduce you to the dragons you should be friends with.\"\n\nDanaid hissed at him. \"You can't keep the new friends all to yourself,\" she cried. \"New friends are for sharing! Let him decide for himself who he wants to talk to!\"\n\n\"Eat bugs, Danaid,\" Admiral said sharply. He led Blue away, his snout in the air. \"Isn't she dreadful?\" he said, loud enough for the orange SilkWing to overhear.\n\n\"She seemed all right to me,\" Blue said.\n\n\"No,\" Admiral said. \"She's dreadful.\"\n\n\"What is going on?\" Blue asked, bewildered.\n\n\"With what?\" Admiral paused to toss Blue a tangerine, smiling.\n\n\"It's just \u2026 you guys seems to spend a lot of time fighting with each other,\" Blue pointed out.\n\n\"Do we?\" Admiral looked surprised. \"No more than most dragons, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Way more than the dragons I know,\" Blue said.\n\nAdmiral flipped one of his wings dismissively. \"Well, I suppose we've all been stuck together for so long. There's bound to be a little tension here and there. Come meet Xenica, though. She's very sweet and always has clever things to say about the others.\"\n\nXenica shared her kale and kumquats with them and spent their entire conversation glancing around the cave to make sure everyone else saw that she was officially getting to meet the new SilkWing first. She also made a point of warning Blue away from Danaid and a few other flamesilks.\n\nThis went on with each dragon Blue met, and by the time he wound up back in his nest, he was exhausted. He couldn't keep track of who hated who, except they all seemed to hate Fritillary, which was mutual. The cavern was seething with petty rivalries, long-held grudges, and easily provoked tempers.\n\nHe flopped down next to Luna's cocoon and rested his head against it. He couldn't wait for his sensible, funny, normal sister to come out.\n\nNo wonder they're starved for new company. Being trapped in here for so long has turned them all super weird.\n\n\"Almost my turn again,\" Admiral said, shaking his wrists out. He tapped the insides of his arms with his claws, as though hoping it would wake up his silk glands.\n\n\"Father,\" Blue said, \"why do you all fight with each other? Aren't there more important enemies?\"\n\n\"Like who?\" Admiral asked.\n\n\"The queen. The HiveWings. The guards who imprison you here,\" Blue said, lowering his voice.\n\n\"Oh, tosh,\" said Admiral. \"The queen is our employer. The guards keep us fed and safe and on schedule.\"\n\nBlue shook his head. How could his father not understand that this was a prison? Maybe after you've been here for a while, you have to convince yourself you chose this so it all feels less awful.\n\nHe'd met two dragons among the flamesilks who he suspected weren't as resigned or falsely content as Admiral. Heliconian was restless and fidgety and glanced at the exits a lot; she also asked the only questions about the outside world and what was happening beyond the cavern. And Pierid seemed desperately unhappy, although he wouldn't say anything bad about the HiveWings.\n\nAlso Fritillary, with his everlasting bad temper \u2014 surely he wanted to escape.\n\n\"I just think it's silly to be so mad at each other,\" Blue said, \"when there are far worse things going on and dragons who are treating you far more terribly than Danaid. If you all could stop fighting and stand together, maybe you could actually change things.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Admiral said firmly. \"I would never work with Danaid or Clubtail or Whitespeck. They are selfish ignoramuses and wrong about everything. I can get things done through the queen.\"\n\nBlue sighed. He could see these dragons had baked their opinions of one another in a furnace and were determined to stick to their factions.\n\nHe slept poorly again that night, troubled by dreams of searching for Cricket through the dark halls of her school. No matter how many corners he turned or how many doors he opened, he never found the library. But he ran into Danaid and Fritillary and Pierid over and over again, all of them yelling over his head at someone else across the room. Then, just before he woke up, he found a room with Luna's cocoon in it \u2014 but the threads were cut open, and no one was inside.\n\nHe scrambled out of his nest before he was fully awake, stumbling over his claws as he hurried to her cocoon. It was still there, still safe, still warm. The silk walls seemed thinner than before, so he thought he could see the shadow of Luna on the other side. He leaned against it again and whispered, \"Luna. I miss you.\"\n\nThe silk moved against his scales, a slight push and give, as though the dragon inside was rolling over or nudging him back.\n\n\"She's coming out tonight,\" Blue said, grinning, when Admiral came over to check on him. Even in this peculiar place, he couldn't help feeling excited for Luna. She'd finally have wings, like she always wanted.\n\nBut would she ever get to really use them? His smile dimmed as the cocoon rocked again. Even though this was the last place he wanted to be, he was glad he'd be here for Luna when she came out. He was glad he'd be the one to explain everything, instead of a bunch of squabbling strangers.\n\n\"Dad,\" Blue said, \"what do you think will happen to me if I end up not being a flamesilk?\"\n\n\"You'll get one of the regular SilkWing jobs down here,\" his father said breezily. \"Moving cauldrons or chopping food or cleaning, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"But what if I want to go home?\" Blue asked, wishing he could stop his voice from trembling. \"Would I really have to stay here?\"\n\nAdmiral drummed his claws on the rocks below him. \"Well,\" he said, \"the queen doesn't exactly like to have SilkWings wandering around who know where this cavern is.\" Blue's shoulders slumped, and Admiral hurried on quickly. \"But tell you what, I'll write her a letter! Or lots of letters! If you're not a flamesilk, I'll think of some very good reasons why you should get to go home. I'll convince her. Don't worry. It might take a while. But then, maybe you'll decide you want to stay? It's quite nice here. And this is where I am,\" he finished with a wistful note in his voice.\n\n\"I know,\" Blue said. \"I'll think about it,\" he added, to make his dad feel better.\n\nThat day passed much like the one before. Blue prowled all the corners again, looking for loose stones or a breath of air from outside. He tried to avoid getting dragged into the fights between the flamesilks, but it was almost impossible. Every time he walked across the cave, someone would call him over, and then someone else would start shouting about how he shouldn't associate with worm-eating lowlifes like that, and soon they'd all be arguing over an offensive remark one of them had made ten years ago, and finally Admiral would have to come hustle Blue away to safety.\n\nBut he did find a spot \u2014 just one \u2014 that gave him a spark of hope. It was in the wall under the ledge where the HiveWings guarded the staircase. Here the rock slanted back a ways into a craggy corner, and when Blue ran his talons over the stone, he found a hole.\n\nIt wasn't a very big hole. It was just large enough for him to fit one of his arms through it, but when he did, he felt open space on the other side. Open space and a touch of chilliness, as though there was another big cave back there, or maybe even a passage. The rocks he could feel on the back of the wall seemed damp. He tried peering through, but he couldn't see anything but darkness.\n\nHe returned to his nest, trying to think like Cricket. How would she get through the wall, if she were stuck in here?\n\nIt was early evening when Luna's cocoon started squirming. He crouched beside it, touching the silk gently with his talons whenever it seemed as if it might rock too far away. Their father was there, too, watching with shining eyes.\n\nA crack appeared at one end of the golden cocoon. Blue held his breath as it widened, slicing off the tip. Claws appeared in the gap, pushing away the top of the cocoon, and then he could see Luna's head shoving her way out as well.\n\n\"Luna,\" he called. \"I'm here. You're doing great. You're almost done!\"\n\nShe couldn't answer yet, but he saw her antennae unfurl and wave at him. Luna wriggled and heaved and slowly dragged her whole body out, until finally she left the empty husk of the cocoon behind her.\n\n\"Whoosh,\" she said, collapsing on her stomach on the warm rocks. Her wings unfolded gracefully from her back and spread out to dry, like cascading petals of green sunlight. They were beautiful.\n\n\"You did it!\" Blue cheered. He lay down beside her and nudged her snout with his. \"Your wings are amazing! So amazing, Luna!\" His throat closed over everything else he wanted to say.\n\nShe smiled sleepily at him. \"Then why are you crying, little brother?\" she asked. \"Overwhelmed by my gloriousness?\"\n\n\"Pretty much,\" he said with a sniffly laugh. \"I missed you so much.\"\n\n\"Awww,\" she said, covering one of his talons with hers. \"It was only five days, silly.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but \u2026 they were really stressful days,\" he said.\n\nShe blinked at him for a long moment, and then her gaze slowly shifted to the cave walls behind him, and the glow of the light from all the flamesilk cauldrons, and the stranger watching them eagerly from extremely close by.\n\nShe rolled her wrists in and stared at them, then sat up abruptly.\n\n\"Hi!\" said Admiral. \"Oh wow! I can't believe this is happening! I'm so happy to meet you!\"\n\nLuna stared at him, then at Blue with an \"explain this\" face.\n\n\"This is Admiral,\" Blue said. \"Our dad.\" He felt a twinge of pain in his own wrists and glanced down. Uh-oh. Were those pinpricks of gold lava under his scales?\n\n\"This is the greatest day of my life!\" Admiral declared with the most enormous grin on his face.\n\n\"Enough smiling. Time to spin,\" Sandfly said, stomping up and poking him in the shoulder.\n\n\"I give them three days until they figure out that you're the most annoying dragon in here!\" Fritillary shouted from across the cavern.\n\nLuna glanced around frantically, her wings fluttering. She leaned forward and seized Blue's talons between hers.\n\n\"Blue,\" she said. \"Where are we?\"\n\n\"So Swordtail \u2026\"\n\n\"Might be nearby,\" Blue said. \"Or might have been captured.\"\n\n\"This is somehow too much information and absolutely not enough information at the same time,\" Luna said, rubbing her forehead.\n\n\"Tangerine?\" Admiral offered.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said, taking it and peeling it quickly. She'd been eating nonstop while Blue told her the whole story. Admiral, it turned out, had a stash of food tucked away in his nest, and he was surprisingly adept at tossing fruit while spinning flamesilk at the same time.\n\n\"But the queen hasn't come down to yell at you or anything?\" Luna asked.\n\n\"No,\" Blue said. \"I really thought she would. Or that I'd get dragged into her throne room and punished. But this seems to be it. She just \u2026 had me thrown in here.\"\n\n\"Like a lost thing that she found and put back in its place,\" Luna said grumpily. \"I mean, I'm glad you weren't punished, Blue. But the queen uses punishment mostly to send a message to the rest of her subjects. So I'm guessing she didn't want to draw attention to the fact that she has flamesilks \u2014 or that a little wingless SilkWing was able to hide from her for so long.\"\n\n\"That was only because I met Cricket,\" Blue said. \"She's the one who figured out how to hide me.\"\n\nLuna rolled her eyes at him affectionately. \"Trust you to find the one good HiveWing in the entire tribe. Now I'll never be able to convince you that they're all evil.\"\n\n\"Because they're not!\" he protested. \"There must be others as nice as Cricket. Maybe not as smart or pretty or funny or kind. But probably a few that are nice.\"\n\nLuna shook her head. \"I doubt it \u2014 but even if they are, they never get a chance to be, because of the queen's brainwashing.\" She shuddered from antennae to tail. \"That mind-control thing sounds so creepy.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Blue said.\n\n\"I hope Io's all right.\"\n\n\"Me too. I hope she found the Chrysalis. Luna, did you know about the Chrysalis?\"\n\n\"A little bit.\" Luna stood up, shaking out her wings and testing different positions she could hold them in. \"I knew Swordtail and Io had just met them. I was hoping to join once I had my wings. I didn't quite figure on waking up in here.\"\n\nBlue winced and she gave him a sharp look. \"Is your silk coming in? Does it feel hot?\" She took his talons and turned them over to study his wrists. It was hard to see if they were glowing, with all the light from the other flamesilk in the cave.\n\n\"I'm supposed to spin my cocoon tomorrow night,\" Blue said. \"I wish I didn't have to do it in here.\" He'd been nervous enough about his Metamorphosis when he knew it would happen in the tranquil, peaceful safety of the Cocoon. But it was much more unnerving to imagine spinning his silk here, in this too-bright place with its shouting dragons and stomping guards all staring at him.\n\n\"There must be a way out,\" Luna said. She looked up at the guards by the stairwell. \"How many guards do you think there are?\"\n\n\"Luna,\" Blue said, \"there's no way we can fight them. Just you and me? That's crazy.\"\n\n\"But now I can do this!\" she said. She held out one arm and a flaming silk thread burst from her wrist. It hit one of Admiral's piles of letters and instantly set it ablaze.\n\n\"Ack!\" Admiral cried. He leaped over and knocked the burning pile away from the others, then stamped it out with his talons. When it was a pile of ashes on the rocks, he picked up the fiery strand of silk and brandished it at Luna. \"This is not a toy! Look what you did! Now how will I remember what I've already written? The queen doesn't like repetition! This is terrible. You need to learn to be careful with your flamesilk, young lady.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Luna said innocently.\n\nBlue blinked at Admiral. \"Dad, you're \u2014 you're holding the flamesilk! In your talons! Why isn't it burning you?\"\n\nAdmiral climbed back into his nest and dropped Luna's flamesilk into his own cauldron. It glowed a much brighter orange gold than what was already in there. \"Flamesilk dragons can't be burned by flamesilk,\" he said. \"That would be absurd.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Blue said. \"Wait, so if some already burned me \u2026?\"\n\n\"No, it will still burn you until you've gone through Metamorphosis, whether you're going to be a flamesilk or not,\" Admiral said. \"Luna, come here and let me show you the different kinds you can make. Flamesilk is a big responsibility.\"\n\nLuna rolled her eyes at Blue, but she went over to their father and gave him her full attention.\n\nBlue sighed, rubbing his wrists. His wingbuds were tingling, too, in a way that was both exciting and uncomfortable. He wished he could go run through the savanna, under the stars, just breathing air that wasn't thick and hot and overly stuffed with oranges.\n\nHe scrambled down to the central floor of the cavern and made his way to the spot under the staircase ledge, where he'd found the hole earlier that day. He guessed it was close to the middle of the night. Only two guards were on the stairs and the regular SilkWing workers were gone, to a cramped apartment home in one of the warehouses, according to Admiral. Most of the flamesilks were asleep. Danaid, Admiral, and Fritillary were the only ones awake, pouring silk into their cauldrons.\n\nBlue could feel Danaid's eyes on him as he poked through the rocks. He was out of sight of the staircase guards here, but the ones up above the glass could still see him. He glanced up to confirm this, and the glow of at least six pairs of eyes stared back.\n\nSo even if he could chisel through the wall, he'd never get a chance to. There was no way to do anything surreptitious in here.\n\nHe found the hole again and slipped his claws through, reaching for that feeling of freedom. The dark open space on the other side that might lead anywhere \u2026 to the outside world \u2026 to the sky and all its stars \u2026\n\nOn the other side of the wall, unseen, something slipped gently between his claws and squeezed.\n\nBlue came this close to screaming his head off. But at the same moment, he heard someone whisper, \"Shhhhhhh.\" He bit down hard on his tongue and froze.\n\n\"Blue,\" the voice whispered.\n\nHe tilted his head closer to the wall. \"Cricket?\"\n\n\"Shhh. Yes. It's me.\"\n\n\"And me!\" someone else whispered fiercely.\n\n\"Is Luna all right?\" whispered a third voice \u2014 Swordtail.\n\n\"She's amazing,\" Blue said softly. \"I can't believe you're all \u2014\"\n\n\"Blue, don't talk,\" Cricket interrupted. \"They're watching you very closely. It's suspicious enough that you're over here with your arm in a hole; if you keep talking to the wall, someone's going to investigate.\" She squeezed his claws again and let go.\n\nReluctantly he pulled his talon back, although it felt emptier than ever now, as though it had found its missing half and now it had to be alone again. He wanted to reach for her once more, to be sure she was real and really there and really alive. But he could see how that might look a bit strange. Danaid was pretending to look at her wrists, but she was leaning so far toward him that she was in danger of toppling out of her nest. The eyes up above stared and stared. He wasn't sure they ever blinked. Was that a HiveWing power some guards had? No need for eyelids?\n\nHe sat down and started building a small pyramid of pebbles, trying to look harmless. That was something he was usually pretty good at.\n\n\"The LeafWings were trying to build a tunnel,\" Cricket said softly. \"To get into the Hive from below. That's how they found this place, by accident, as they were digging underneath. Did you find your father? Sorry, I know you can't answer. But Luna came out of her cocoon? Are there a lot of flamesilks down here? Oh, you can't answer that either. I can't believe how big this cave is.\"\n\nNot big enough, if you're trapped in it for your entire life, Blue thought. He thought he should be more horrified by the idea of LeafWings tunneling into the Hives. Six days ago, the image of LeafWings suddenly bursting out of the ground inside his city would have been the most terrifying thing he could possibly imagine.\n\nBut he'd met a few other more terrifying things since then.\n\n\"Listen,\" Sundew hissed. \"Cricket wants to get you out of there.\"\n\n\"I do, too!\" Swordtail chimed in.\n\n\"Right, but I don't care what he thinks,\" Sundew clarified. \"Cricket nearly died with me, though, so I kind of feel like I owe you guys one. My parents have more important things to do \u2026 but I might be able to come up with a plan. Can you be ready tomorrow night?\"\n\nBlue's heart sank. He shook his head and shifted himself around the rock pyramid, pretending to reach for another stone, but really angling so whoever was peering through the hole could see his wingbuds.\n\nHe heard Cricket let out a soft gasp. \"He's about to go into Metamorphosis,\" she whispered to Sundew. \"We have to get him out now. Tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, rotten bark beetles,\" Sundew grumbled. \"Fine. I'll do it the messy way. Blue, can you see a crack in the wall, near the bottom, that arches around in a half circle?\"\n\nBlue glanced casually at the wall. He spotted what she meant immediately \u2014 it looked like a sun setting.\n\n\"Can you and Luna fit through there, if I can knock out the chunk of rock underneath the crack?\"\n\nHe thought so, although he hadn't spent enough time with Luna's wings yet to be sure how big they were. He was a little more worried about how to fit Admiral through, but his father was quite skinny. He'd just have to squish.\n\nBlue gave a very slight nod, scattering his pebbles as though he'd gotten frustrated with his construction.\n\n\"Great. Go get her, and everyone be ready to run.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Blue,\" Cricket whispered.\n\n\"Tell Luna I'm here!\" Swordtail interjected. \"Very heroically!\"\n\n\"You sat around in a greenhouse and then followed me into a tunnel,\" Sundew observed. \"I'm not sure you qualify for a statue in your honor just yet.\"\n\n\"Shhh.\" Cricket scolded both of them.\n\nBlue picked up a pebble and pretended to peer at it closely, then set it down and headed back over to Luna.\n\n\"Everything all right?\" Danaid asked as he went by. She leaned her elbows on the edge of her nest, watching him with wide-eyed interest.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Blue said. \"Just some pretty rocks I think my sister would like.\"\n\n\"You will introduce her to me, won't you?\" Danaid said, and her voice was an odd mixture of pushy and wistful. \"No matter what your dad says?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Blue said, feeling guilty. He couldn't stay here just to keep these lonely flamesilks company, but he was sorry that escaping with Luna meant abandoning them to their endless quarrels.\n\nIs there any way to bring them along? Could they come with us?\n\nHe didn't know how to alert the other flamesilks without attracting the attention of the guards. And given what he knew about them so far, he was afraid even the idea of an escape plan would somehow trigger a screaming match that would give everything away.\n\nHe hurried back to Luna, worrying over the problem in his head. Rescuing her was everything; it was the whole reason he'd broken so many rules and gotten in so much trouble. It was the most important thing, getting her out of here.\n\nBut he wished there was a way to rescue all of them.\n\nLuna sat up as he approached, and her eyes gleamed when she saw the expression on his face. She'd always been able to read him, ever since they first hatched.\n\n\"You've found a way out,\" she whispered excitedly.\n\n\"Our friends are here,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"Then let's go!\" She jumped to her feet and looked up at Admiral.\n\n\"Hmm?\" he said, blinking down at them. \"I was just composing another letter in my head. To thank the queen for bringing you here, of course. My letters can't all be complaints, you know! Ho, no, that wouldn't do. I must also show my gratitude when she is so generous with us. My thank-you letter in regards to the tangerines was a work of art.\" He shot a regretful look at the pile of ashes, as though wondering how many more masterpieces had been lost to Luna's flamesilk.\n\n\"Father,\" Blue said softly, \"we have a way out of here. But we have to go right now.\"\n\n\"Go?\" Admiral echoed. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"We're going to escape,\" Luna said. \"All three of us. Come on, quick, while the guards are looking sleepy.\"\n\n\"But I'm in the middle of my spinning rotation,\" Admiral said. \"And I haven't made nearly enough for the quota. You're going to have to make it up with all your bright lovely silk. They'll probably give you a turn in the morning, once you've rested a bit.\"\n\n\"No,\" Luna said firmly. \"I'm not giving anyone my 'bright lovely silk.' It's mine. And I'm escaping with Blue right now.\"\n\nAdmiral twitched, as though the word escape was finally crawling into his ears. \"No, no,\" he said. \"The Hives need our silk. We're providing a great service. We're very important \u2014 you're very important. You can't \u2026 you can't leave. What are you even talking about? We're not allowed to leave. That rule is pretty clear.\"\n\n\"Come with us, please,\" Blue begged. \"This is no way to live, Father. We could be together and free, out there.\"\n\n\"Out where?\" Admiral scoffed. \"There's nowhere the queen doesn't control. No, no, we mustn't anger her with ungrateful stunts like escape attempts. Oh dear, oh dear. You'll get us all in trouble. It'll make everything worse!\"\n\n\"How could it be worse than this?\" Luna asked.\n\n\"In the beginning there were chains!\" Admiral said. \"On our ankles! I was the one who got rid of those! It only took me about four years and two hundred or so letters, but I finally convinced her we could be trusted without them. And now you want to break that trust!\"\n\n\"This is not a mutual relationship,\" Luna said. \"The queen is using you. She's giving you next to nothing, and you're letting her walk all over you instead of fighting back. We're not going to be part of that.\" She turned to Blue. \"I don't think this is going to work. We have to go without him.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Admiral cried. \"You can't! You'll undo all the progress I've made with the queen! We have rules for a reason, you know. And she'll be so disappointed.\"\n\n\"So escape with us!\" Blue couldn't give up. He couldn't just leave his father here. \"Father, you don't have to follow rules that are unjust, and you don't have to do everything the queen says. Don't you feel like there are rules in your heart that are more important? About helping other dragons, and standing up for anyone who's being treated badly, and loving whoever you want, and choosing to live your life in your own kind, peaceful way?\"\n\nHe glanced over and saw Luna staring at him in surprise. She reached out with one wing and pulled him into a hug.\n\n\"Wow,\" she said. \"It really was a long five days, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Well \u2026 I just understood it finally,\" he said. \"That there are dragons who aren't safe, and dragons I could help, and being a good little SilkWing who follows the rules was making my life easy, but also helping to keep a bad system in place. I didn't know before how bad it was for so many dragons. Like you, Father. Like all the flamesilks in here. This isn't right.\"\n\n\"And you shouldn't want it for your children,\" Luna said. \"If you want to stay, that's fine. But we're going.\" She turned Blue toward the center of the cave.\n\n\"No,\" Admiral said. \"No, no! It's wrong. I can't let you do this. GUARDS!\"\n\nBlue inhaled sharply. The HiveWings by the staircase whipped their heads toward them.\n\nHis father was sabotaging their escape \u2014 turning them in to keep them trapped here!\n\nThey had to run \u2026 but their escape route looked a whole continent away, and it wasn't even open yet.\n\n\"GUARDS!\" Admiral bellowed. \"Listen!\"\n\n\"Stop annoying the guards!\" Danaid shouted at Admiral, interrupting him. \"They don't want to hear your thoughts on potassium at this hour! Or ever!\"\n\n\"It's not that!\" Admiral yelled back. \"Although my thoughts on potassium are very well researched and relevant! But hey, guards! Guards! My dragonets \u2014\"\n\n\"Your brains are a pile of bananas!\" Fritillary hollered from his perch, never one to miss out on a fight. \"Your dragonets are boring!\"\n\n\"They are NOT!\" Danaid and Admiral roared in unison.\n\n\"I think they're charming!\" Danaid yelled.\n\n\"You don't even know them!\" Admiral shouted. \"They're MY dragonets and they're FASCINATING! But they're \u2014\"\n\n\"Well, then they're the opposite of YOU!\" Danaid bellowed.\n\n\"What is happening?\" Luna said to Blue, covering her ears.\n\nThere was something about the sparkle in Danaid's eyes \u2026 Blue wasn't sure if it was her usual spirited fury, or if maybe \u2026\n\n\"I think Danaid might be trying to help us,\" he said quietly. He glanced up at the guards. They were sitting down again, rolling their eyes at one another as though they'd heard fights like this a million times. \"Follow me. Walk, don't run. Act casual.\"\n\nHe climbed down through the stalagmites, trying to quiet his thudding heart.\n\n\"GUAAAAAAARDS!\" Admiral yelled again. But as Blue had hoped, Admiral didn't jump up and chase them. He would have to stop his silk spinning to do so, and that was yet another rule he'd never break.\n\n\"Shut UP!\" Pierid whined, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. \"Why are you making SO MUCH NOISE? It's the middle of the night!\"\n\n\"Yeah, some of us were SLEEEEEEEPING!\" Whitespeck shouted.\n\n\"You're not helping matters with YOUR bellowing!\" Heliconian chimed in from the nest closest to him.\n\nNow all ten of them were awake and shouting. It was perfect cover. The HiveWing guards looked like the last thing they wanted to do was come down and get involved in this. And no matter how much Admiral roared, they couldn't hear his accusations over the noise of everyone else.\n\nBlue paused at Danaid's nest. \"Thank you,\" he said, holding one talon up to her.\n\nShe took it and squeezed it with a wink. \"Whatever I'm doing, it's great fun.\"\n\n\"This is Luna,\" he said. \"Luna, this is Danaid. Who is definitely a dragon worth knowing.\"\n\nDanaid beamed over the edge of her nest at Luna. \"Nice to meet you,\" she said. \"Now scoot! I can see something exciting is about to happen!\" She nodded over at the wall, and Blue realized that the crack looked wider than before \u2026 and something seemed to be coming through it.\n\n\"You could come with us,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm not sure my old heart could stand running for my life,\" she said. \"But if you find a more sedate way to get us out of here, come back for me.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I will try. I promise.\"\n\nShe went back to shouting at the other flamesilks as he and Luna moved away. It was funny to think of Danaid wanting anything sedate, when she seemed so delighted in the middle of chaos.\n\nThe stone gave a low crack as they crouched beside it, and Blue realized that it was being pushed out of the wall. By \u2026 were those roots? He gingerly touched one of the thick brown fingers that were shoving their way through the crack. It felt like branches, woody and knobbly under his claws.\n\nSundew was growing something, somehow, faster than anything should be able to grow. And it was shoving the rocks apart, breaking through the crack.\n\nCreating an opening.\n\nHe dug his talons in around the boulder and yanked. Luna did the same, and with a lot of grunting and muscle-pulling, they felt it slowly give way, until it tumbled out at their feet.\n\nThe hole in the wall yawned at them, and on the other side, beyond the roots, he saw three faces crowding in to peer through.\n\nSwordtail reached toward Luna. \"You're safe!\" he whispered.\n\n\"And I have wings!\" she answered giddily. She shoved Blue in front of her. \"Go on, quick!\"\n\nSuddenly there was a furious pounding overhead, SMASH, SMASH, SMASH against the glass. They'd been spotted. That meant the guards were coming \u2014 all the guards.\n\nBlue dove into the hole and wiggled through into the dark, navigating a small thicket of leafy branches. He felt the warmth of Cricket's talons lifting him up and saw light glinting off her glasses.\n\n\"I'm so glad you're alive,\" he said breathlessly. \"I had a feeling you'd rescue me. Except I thought maybe I had to come rescue you. But I didn't know how.\"\n\n\"You did rescue me, just by being you,\" she said. \"Oh, gosh, that wasn't corny at all.\"\n\nLuna popped through and Swordtail swept his wings around her. \"My love!\" he cried.\n\n\"By the forest, all of you stop being sickening and run!\" Sundew cried. She took off in a whirl of green scales, disappearing rapidly into the dark.\n\nLuna produced a small wisp of flame that lit up the tunnel just enough for them to see, and they ran.\n\nBut before she did, for that moment in the dark, Blue had glanced down at his wrists.\n\nAnd saw tiny globes of fire under his scales.\n\nThey ran and climbed and ducked and slid down loose pebbly dirt slopes, following the flicker of Luna's silk and the flash of Sundew's tail up ahead. Their escape route smelled like earthworms and cut grass. Twice they had to squeeze through gaps so narrow, Blue was worried Swordtail wouldn't fit. Most of the time the ceiling was low enough to scrape their heads, and sometimes the dirt turned to damp mud, clogging up their talons.\n\nBut after a while they slowed down to listen, and they couldn't hear anyone behind them.\n\n\"Maybe they couldn't get through the hole from the cavern,\" Blue said. Maybe Sundew's fast-growing roots had blocked the way.\n\n\"Or they got stuck at the bottleneck gaps,\" Swordtail said, rubbing his shoulder.\n\n\"They'll be out searching for the other end of the tunnel,\" Sundew said. \"Good thing it's quite a long way from the Hive.\"\n\nShe turned to keep going and they followed, moving at a steadier pace now.\n\nSoon the dirt tunnel shifted up and released them into a stone cave, similar in size to the flamesilk cavern, but cold and dark and empty. From there on, they climbed through natural passages in the rocks. At one point, they hopped up the side of a trickling waterfall that sprayed their scales with mist. Blue thought he heard a river rushing somewhere close by.\n\nHe also heard odd whispering, chittering sounds inside the echoes, as though the caves were haunted by musical squirrels.\n\nOr reading monkeys, he realized. These caves could be connected to the ones where he and Cricket had seen the little monkey creature. Maybe there were lots of them living down here, like Cricket's science-project dream come true.\n\nAnd then, a long while later, he heard a sound like distant roaring.\n\n\"What's that?\" he whispered to Cricket.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" she answered. \"The smell is different, too, did you notice? Doesn't it smell like salt and \u2026 fish, maybe? Oh! Oh! I know what it is! Sundew, are we going to the ocean?\"\n\nJust then they rounded a corner of the tunnel \u2014 and there it was.\n\nThe ocean!\n\nThey were standing in an enormous cave that looked out onto the beach. It was early morning. Rivulets of water ran and branched and reconvened all through the sandy floor of the cave. Sea birds dove and wheeled in and out, visiting their nests near the rocky ceiling.\n\nCricket ran forward, her talons splashing in the wet sand, to the mouth of the cave. She opened her wings to the wind so they billowed out like pages flung into the sky. The waves roared cheerfully at her.\n\n\"Oh wow,\" Luna said, wading up beside her. She spread her wings, too, and they sat side by side for a moment, gold-orange-black and pale green, HiveWing and SilkWing, gazing out at the sea.\n\nBlue sidled up beside them and looked out at the beach. It stretched away beyond sight in each direction, with tall cliffs overlooking the beach as far as he could see. Up at the top of the cliffs, long grass tossed and waved in the wind.\n\nThe ocean was so big. He'd never quite imagined how big it could be, or how noisy, or how active. It never stopped moving \u2014 charging up the beach, sprinting away, rolling and churning blue-green-gray with sprays of white.\n\n\"Have you ever been here before?\" Cricket asked him. \"I haven't, but I've always wanted to visit the sea. Doesn't it feel like a promise? Like the night before an exciting journey? The Distant Kingdoms are out there, Blue. I know it.\" She squinted at the tossing waves, as though she might be able to glimpse the far-off continent on the other side of the world. \"Clearsight's home. We could learn so much if we could just figure out how to get there.\"\n\nLuna gave a rueful laugh. \"I'm afraid we have enough to deal with on this continent,\" she said. \"I'm all for exploring new worlds, but I think we have to save this one first.\"\n\n\"Or we could just leave,\" Cricket said in a quieter voice. \"If it's too dangerous here \u2014 maybe we'd be safer over there.\"\n\n\"Yes, we might be,\" Luna said. \"But the dragons we left behind would still be in danger.\" She turned as Swordtail and Sundew came up to join them.\n\nBlue realized it was raining. A quiet drizzle plip-plopped across the sand, turning the air misty in the pale dawn light. He held out his burning wrists so the raindrops could cool them down.\n\n\"Thank you for getting us out of there,\" he said to Sundew. \"Where are your parents?\"\n\n\"Sulking,\" she said. \"They didn't want me to reveal the existence of the tunnel to the HiveWings, even though we'd already decided we can't use it. Also they're mad that I haven't given them this yet.\" She tapped one of her larger pouches and it made a thunking sound. \"But they're not the boss of me, and I told them they could have it once you were free. I'll meet up with them tonight.\"\n\n\"And then what will you do?\" Swordtail asked.\n\n\"Go back to the other LeafWings,\" she said. \"Figure out our next plan. Since this one didn't go exactly the way we expected.\"\n\n\"Is that \u2026\" Luna started, pointing to the pouch. \"Do you really have \u2026?\"\n\nSundew reached in and drew out the Book of Clearsight. It looked even smaller and less mystical in the daylight. It just looked like a very old book that someone had sewn together a little crookedly.\n\nBut it holds the secrets of our future, Blue thought with a shiver of awe. And we could read it \u2026 we could read it right now and know everything that's going to happen!\n\n\"Can I show them?\" Cricket asked Sundew. The LeafWing nodded, passing the book to her. Cricket found a flat, dry boulder and swept off all the sand on it with her tail. Blue sat down beside her, and Cricket scooted closer to him so Luna could sit on her other side.\n\n\"It's not what we thought it was,\" Cricket said. \"It's \u2026 well, it's something else completely.\"\n\nShe opened the book to the first page.\n\n\u2002Dear grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, and all the many great-grandchildren to come,\n\n\u2002How funny it feels to know you so well, when there are so many of you I'm never going to meet. I see you all the time, especially when I'm just on the edge of falling asleep. The future is so clear, suddenly, now that I won't be able to change anything. My time is almost up, and yours is just beginning.\n\n\u2002I won't be able to control anything after this. I won't be able to use my visions to protect you, to keep you all safe.\n\n\u2002But then, one thing I've learned over my long, strange, lovely life is that I never could actually control the future as much as I thought I could.\n\n\u2002I should have learned that lesson with my first love, back home in Pyrrhia. But I kept trying anyway. And I did manage to keep you all alive. I battled the future for that much, and I won.\n\n\u2002But the future will always win in the end, because it continues on forever, to where I cannot go.\n\n\u2002So this is my last battle. The last thing I can do to try and keep my claws on the balance of the future \u2014 to keep you safe as long as I can.\n\n\u2002In this book are my visions of what is yet to come. Some of it seems small, but I have included everything, even if I can't tell yet why it's important. I leave you this in the hope that it will make life better for both our tribes. I hope you will use it to protect the dragons around you, especially the ones who are the most threatened, regardless of who they are and how you think you feel about them.\n\n\u2002There are some hard times ahead, as there always are, everywhere and for everyone. I'm sorry I won't be here to help you rebuild after the earthquake. I hope I've written down enough advice to get you through the famine.\n\n\u2002But most of what I see is joy. Your futures are full of joy. What a miracle it is to be a dragon, alive right now and part of this wonderful world. Do you ever stop to think about that? About what an odd and lucky thing it is to be this soul inside this body. To live in a world with so many marvels in it. I am so grateful to have known and loved you all.\n\n\u2002All the hurricanes and earthquakes and fires and storms cannot break you, if you remember a few things.\n\n\u2002We are here to love with our whole hearts.\n\n\u2002Lean into your kindness and empathy in the face of evil \u2014 but do not let evil win.\n\n\u2002You are the only dragon who can decide who you want to be. Don't let yourself get stuck on someone else's path. Search for what's true, and think for yourself.\n\n\u2002Over a hundred years ago, I thought my life was finished and there was nothing left to live for. I was so, so wrong. Keep going. The list of things to live for is limitless and it is possible to be happy again.\n\n\u2002And \u2014 this one is going to sound ridiculous coming from me \u2014 don't worry about the future so much. Or else you might miss out on the extraordinary present.\n\n\u2002Be happy, dragons of the future. You can change the world with your joy and your hope.\n\n\u2002All my love,\n\n\u2002Clearsight\n\nBlue glanced up and saw Luna wiping away tears.\n\n\"This is exactly how I imagined Clearsight,\" he said.\n\n\"Of course you did,\" Luna said with a catch in her voice. \"You have faith in other dragons. Whereas I thought she was a conniving manipulator who deliberately set up her descendants to be the most powerful tribe in Pantala.\" She shook her head.\n\n\"Yup, me too,\" said Sundew.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Blue said, shocked. \"She wasn't. She wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I see that,\" Luna said, waving her talon at the book. \"But at some point that's what her descendants decided to do. Why didn't she see that coming and stop them?\"\n\n\"Because,\" Cricket said softly, \"it turns out she wasn't all-knowing and all-seeing, after all.\" She started turning pages, pointing to the dates up at the top.\n\nAfter about two hundred years, the flow of visions slowed dramatically. A hurricane here. A tsunami ninety years later. A few more tiny notes, full of question marks.\n\nAnd then, on a date marked about nine hundred years after the first, she'd written: Take care of the trees. I think they might be in danger, but I can't see why. Help the LeafWings protect them.\n\nI love you. Good luck.\n\nCricket turned the page. The next spread was blank. And so was the next. And the next.\n\nThe last few pages of the book were empty.\n\nThe last vision from Clearsight was dated over a thousand years ago.\n\nBlue looked up at Cricket and Luna, blinking in confusion.\n\n\"Where's the rest of it?\" he asked. \"What about the Tree Wars? And us trying to steal the book? And everything Queen Wasp knows?\"\n\n\"She doesn't know anything,\" Luna said furiously. \"She was faking it the whole time. The power of the Book, everything that makes the HiveWings so superior \u2014 it's all lies.\"\n\n\"In case you're curious,\" Sundew interjected, \"this is my 'not at all surprised' face.\"\n\nCricket was nodding. \"Clearsight never saw this far ahead. She had no idea her book would be used this way.\"\n\n\"But \u2014\" Blue still couldn't wrap his head around it. \"But Queen Wasp said Clearsight wanted the tribes to unite under her rule. That was the whole reason Queen Monarch gave up her throne. Because if it was in the Book of Clearsight, it had to be important.\"\n\n\"It was a lie, Blue!\" Luna jumped up, and Swordtail came over to stand beside her. \"Wasp lied and used the Book to seize power.\"\n\n\"And to drive out the LeafWings,\" Sundew said. \"Queen Sequoia wouldn't agree to step down without seeing the Book first, which of course Wasp wouldn't allow. Our queen said if she'd seen it in Clearsight's own handwriting, she might have considered it. Which I think is insane in the first place. We don't need anyone else to be our queen!\"\n\n\"How could she?\" Blue said, closing the book and resting his claws on it. \"I don't understand. How could Queen Wasp read this and then decide to become the total opposite of what Clearsight says to be?\"\n\nCricket put her talon over his on the book. \"Some dragons care infinitely more about themselves than anyone else,\" she said. \"Which I think is hard for a dragon like you to imagine.\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said, \"I'm VERY ANGRY about this.\"\n\n\"Angry enough to do something about it?\" Sundew asked. She lifted her chin challengingly.\n\n\"Like what?\" Swordtail asked.\n\n\"We're going to take down the HiveWings,\" Sundew said. \"We could use some dragons on the inside.\"\n\nSwordtail snorted. \"You may not have noticed, but we're not exactly on the inside anymore.\"\n\n\"We know dragons who are, though,\" Luna said, giving him a significant look.\n\n\"Wait, what does 'take down' the HiveWings mean?\" Blue asked. \"Are you going to hurt them?\"\n\nSundew scowled at him. \"That is sort of the point of a revolution,\" she snapped. She snatched the book away from him and stuffed it back in her pouch. \"I thought you said you were mad!\"\n\n\"Yes! But no,\" Blue said. \"The HiveWings have also been lied to, and brainwashed and tricked. The queen is the problem. You have to fight her, not the whole tribe. I mean, we do. We have to stop her.\"\n\nHis wrists flared with pain, as though they were trying to remind him that he had slightly more urgent things to do first, such as for instance growing wings.\n\n\"Let's rest for a while,\" Cricket said, watching him with concern. \"Everyone thinks better after sleeping.\" She hopped down to a dry patch of soft sand, in a sheltered corner of the cave, and dug a small hollow. \"Blue?\"\n\nHe gratefully slid down and sank into the hollow next to her. His wingbuds were really starting to ache. And his head felt strangely fuzzy, too. He sort of wished he could spin his cocoon now and shut out the whole mess and all the decisions they might have to make. But the thought also terrified him. He didn't want to be cut off from Cricket and Luna for five days, with no way to know what was going on.\n\nAnd what if something went wrong with his Metamorphosis?\n\nWhat could go more wrong than turning out to be a flamesilk? he thought.\n\n\"Well, I don't need to sleep,\" Luna said. \"I'm going to test out my new wings! Want to come?\" she said, bumping Swordtail's side.\n\n\"Obviously yes!\" he said.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Sundew warned. \"The HiveWings will be out in force looking for us. It would be safer to stay inside until dark.\"\n\n\"Just a little flight,\" Luna wheedled. \"I finally have wings! And we're so far from the Hives. I promise we'll be careful.\"\n\nSundew shrugged. \"You're not my tribe,\" she said. \"But if you get caught, I'm not rescuing you again.\"\n\n\"Noted,\" Luna said, bounding to the cave entrance. \"Be back soon, Blue!\"\n\nShe soared up into the sky, scattering raindrops in all directions, with Swordtail in her wake. Blue sighed.\n\n\"I wish I were that excited about getting wings,\" he said. \"I mean, I am. I'm just \u2026 nervous, too.\"\n\n\"That sounds normal to me,\" Cricket said. \"But you'll be all right once it starts. How are you feeling? Do you have the same symptoms as Luna?\"\n\nHe lifted his wrists and she held them gently while she studied them.\n\n\"Your silk glands look very bright,\" she said.\n\n\"So did Luna's,\" he said. \"Kind of golden and fiery, just like this.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" she said. \"I might be best friends with a real flamesilk!\"\n\nHe couldn't squash down his smile. \"Best friends?\"\n\n\"Well, my circle of options is a little smaller than it used to be,\" she said, flicking her tail at the cave, and at Sundew, who was sorting through her pouches and grumbling. \"But the truth is, I'd want you to be my best friend even if I knew every dragon in Pantala.\"\n\n\"Same,\" he said, resting his head on his talons. \"That's how I see you. Best friend, best brain, best heart.\"\n\n\"Awwww,\" she said. She lay down and snuggled up next to him. \"Are you totally asleep yet? Before you fall asleep, can you tell me about the flamesilk cavern? How does it work? How many dragons live there? What are they like?\"\n\nBlue drowsily tried to answer her questions, but sleep pulled him down inexorably, chasing away the pain in his back and wrists. It was peaceful with Cricket by his side and the rain pattering on the rocks around them. He felt calm again for the first time in days.\n\nHe didn't know how long he slept, but he woke suddenly to the sound of screams from outside.\n\nAcross the cave, Sundew dropped a handful of twigs and leaped to her feet.\n\nThe three of them ran to the cave entrance and looked out.\n\nUp in the sky, a pair of HiveWings had Swordtail and Luna cornered. They circled like hawks, jabbing and feinting with claws and spears and stingers on their tails.\n\n\"Luna!\" Blue cried, starting forward and immediately stumbling over his talons. Sundew caught him, pulling him back into the cave.\n\n\"No way,\" she said. \"You can't fight in your condition. You can barely fight when you're not half-loopy on silk.\" She shoved him into Cricket's arms. \"Make him stay here.\"\n\nThe LeafWing took off into the sky. It was raining harder than before, with a strong wind whipping up the seas.\n\nBlue watched in a daze as Sundew smashed into the HiveWings, taking them by surprise. One wheeled around to grapple with her, and Swordtail broke away to tackle the other.\n\nThey struggled for several rain-soaked moments, talons slipping on wet scales. Blue had always thought of Swordtail as the best fighter he knew, but next to Sundew and the soldiers, he seemed badly outmatched. The HiveWing twisted to slash a claw along his side, and Swordtail roared with pain.\n\nAlone in the sky, Luna flung out her front talons. Blue could see that she was trying to protect Swordtail \u2014 that she was trying to set his attacker on fire.\n\nBut her silk whipped out faster and wilder than she'd expected. The wind seized the golden strands and flung them together, weaving knots over Luna's head. In a sudden heartbeat, a sail of flamesilk billowed out above Luna \u2014 and then the storm roared in, snared the sail, and blew her out to sea.\n\n\"Luna,\" Blue cried desperately. His sister seemed to be struggling with the silk, but she couldn't break free. Lightning flashed, and a moment later, the clouds had swallowed her up.\n\nSwordtail smashed his attacker in the face and flew after Luna, shouting her name. His wings beat frantically as he tried to catch up.\n\nThen he was gone, too. Sundew was left grimly battling the two HiveWings alone.\n\n\"We have to \u2014 we have to go after them \u2014\" Blue said. His whole body was starting to shake, and his wrists felt like they were literally on fire. \"Luna \u2014 Swordtail \u2014\"\n\n\"You can't go anywhere, Blue,\" Cricket said. She put her wings around him and guided him back into the cave, way to the back, toward the tunnels and secret passages. \"It's starting. We need to hide you somewhere safe. Let's think.\"\n\n\"But \u2014\"\n\n\"They'll come back,\" she promised. \"The storm will blow itself out and they'll fly back here and want to find you safe and sound. OK? You'll make things much worse if you go out there and get captured by HiveWings.\" She guided him down one of the passages, steering him around jutting spires of stone.\n\n\"Sundew \u2026 \" he mumbled.\n\n\"Can take care of herself,\" she said. \"In case you hadn't noticed, she's pretty fierce. Come on, I think I saw a cave this way \u2014 it's about as well hidden as we can get.\"\n\nHe couldn't argue. He couldn't think. Apparently his head was no longer connected to his body. The walls were shifting and rolling and kind of sparkling, too. He felt dizzy and sick and very hot.\n\nIt felt like an endless march before Cricket maneuvered him between two pillars into a small, curving cave with smooth walls. These ones really were sparkling, he thought, but actually, his eyes weren't to be trusted, so who knew.\n\n\"I wish I were in the Cocoon,\" he said, his teeth chattering. \"I wish I were home.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Cricket said sadly. \"I know, Blue. I'm so sorry you can't be.\"\n\nHe sank to his knees, and the silk started to pour from his wrists. It was bright and burning, flamesilk all the way through, and it wove swiftly around his tail and talons. Everywhere it touched him, his muscles relaxed, and a feeling of peace slowly swept over him, like a wave filling him up.\n\n\"I'll be right here, Blue,\" Cricket said. He lay down, looking up into her wonderful face, lit by the glow of his flamesilk. \"I'll be here the whole time. I'll be here when you wake up. You'll be safe. I promise.\"\n\nBlue was a dragon who didn't like change.\n\nBut in the last five days, he'd discovered that his whole world was very different than he'd imagined. His queen was a controller of minds, the Book of Clearsight was a lie, and his father was a prisoner in a flamesilk factory.\n\nAnd Blue was in love with a HiveWing.\n\nHe'd made it through all of those discoveries. He was stronger now; he saw things more clearly. Like Clearsight had written, he had to keep going and decide for himself what kind of dragon he wanted to be.\n\nAfter everything he'd been through, he knew he could handle a little thing like growing wings.\n\nThe gold fire wrapped around him.\n\nBlue closed his eyes and let the change begin.\n\nLuna opened her eyes.\n\nA seagull skittered away from her, cawing indignantly about dragons who pretended to be food and then weren't.\n\nShe was lying in wet sand. Wet sand was clumped between her talons and in her ears and in the cracks between her scales. Her face was half-buried in it. She was pretty much plastered with wet sand from horns to tail.\n\nA wave rushed up from behind her, swooshing under her back talons and tail, soaking her underbelly, and whisking away again.\n\nLuna pushed herself up to a sitting position with a groan of pain. She fanned out her wings to check them. One was badly bruised \u2014 she had a vague memory of being hit by a hailstone. And one of her back ankles twinged horribly when she tried to stand on it.\n\nShe dragged herself up the beach, away from the bustling waves.\n\nOw. Everything ached.\n\nShe squinted up at the aggressively cheerful sun.\n\nHow far had she been blown from Blue and Swordtail? This beach didn't look like the one where she'd started out. Instead of tall cliffs, the sand here rolled up into low hills with patches of shrubs. Luna could see quite far up and down the coast and inland, but she couldn't see any sign of caves or Hives.\n\nShe rubbed her head, trying to remember the map of Pantala. She'd been in the air for days, tangled in her silk balloon as the storm swept her along. She remembered nothing but white-capped waves below her.\n\nCould she \u2014 she couldn't be \u2014 surely \u2014\n\nTalons landed on the sand slightly uphill from her. Luna started back, lifting one wrist to shoot fire if her wing was a HiveWing.\n\nBut it wasn't.\n\nThis dragon was pale yellow with light brown triangle markings on her wings. Only two wings \u2014 just one pair, like a LeafWing, but with her coloring, she definitely wasn't a LeafWing. And her wings weren't leaf-shaped either; they looked closer to bat wings, but covered in scales instead of fur.\n\nThe dragon took a step toward her, and Luna realized there was something odd at the end of her tail \u2014 a barb like she'd only ever seen before on scorpions.\n\n\"What are you?\" Luna said fiercely.\n\n\"Oh, you speak Dragon,\" said the stranger. \"That's lucky.\"\n\n\"What else would I speak?\" Luna asked. \"Who are you? Where am I?\"\n\n\"I guess I thought your continent might have a different language,\" the yellow dragon said with a shrug. \"I'm Jerboa.\"\n\n\"My \u2026 continent?\" Luna echoed. She lowered her arm. \"Do you mean \u2026 did I really cross the ocean?\"\n\n\"It looks that way,\" Jerboa said wryly. \"But not entirely unscathed, I think. Are you injured?\"\n\n\"Just a little.\" Luna tried to take a step and winced. \"Yargh. That's \u2014 ow. My name's Luna.\"\n\n\"My hut is just around that bend,\" Jerboa said, coming over and levering her wing under Luna's. \"Hang on, we'll be there in no time.\" They started across the sand. Luna found it much more difficult to walk in than Jerboa did; her wing kept sagging unexpectedly under her claws or sucking around her talons.\n\n\"I have to get back,\" Luna said. \"My friends are over there. They need me. Especially my little brother.\" She tried to guess how long she'd been up in the storm. She was starving, but that wasn't much of a clue. Blue must have started his Metamorphosis by now. Was he still in his cocoon? Was he all right?\n\n\"Well, you're not going far on these wings today,\" Jerboa said. \"But help is coming. I have a feeling it'll be here soon.\"\n\nJerboa's hut was tucked into a cove, cozy and well built with a recently thatched roof made of palm fronds. Luna touched the wood of the door on the way inside. It was real wood, and she was startled to see it used for a house as small as this. Maybe Jerboa was wealthier and more powerful than she appeared.\n\nOr maybe it's different over here, she realized. Maybe there are still plenty of trees on this continent.\n\nJerboa helped her over to a bed made of more palm leaves and Luna collapsed onto it, surprised by how exhausted she was. She was sure she'd slept on the beach for a while after crash-landing \u2026 but the walk to the hut had tired her out again.\n\n\"Sleep for a bit,\" Jerboa said. \"I'll make fish stew.\"\n\nLuna wrinkled her snout. \"Um,\" she said, \"that's all right. Do you have any fruit? Or honey?\" she added hopefully.\n\nJerboa flicked her wings back with a thoughtful expression. \"Not a fish eater?\" she said. \"What about crabs? Or rabbits? Or seagulls?\"\n\nLuna shook her head. \"No animals, thank you,\" she said politely, and her stomach growled as if disagreeing with her.\n\n\"I'll see what I have.\" Jerboa glided off to another corner of the hut, and Luna felt herself slipping into a doze.\n\nSometime later, Jerboa shook her awake, talons gentle on her shoulder. \"Luna. Our guests are here.\"\n\nLuna blinked awake. The light had shifted outside, and there were quiet voices coming through the window.\n\n\"I'll go get them,\" Jerboa said. \"Don't be alarmed. This is who you need to talk to.\"\n\nShe went out the door. Luna tried to think, although her brain felt overwhelmed and still muddled with sleep. Who was here? How could they help her?\n\n\"To who?\" said a new voice, which was attached to a dragon ducking through the doorway. He was smaller than Jerboa, closer to Luna's size, but with the same kind of wings and tail as Jerboa. His scales were sand-colored like hers as well, and he wore a hoop earring in one ear.\n\nBut following him through the doorway was another dragon entirely. She was black from nose to talons, except for a few silver scales scattered under her wings and two teardrop silver scales in the corners of her eyes.\n\nA startled jolt ran through Luna, waking her up like a bolt of lightning.\n\nThis dragon looked like Clearsight.\n\nOr at least, the way Clearsight always looked in pictures.\n\nLuna sat up as the two of them came closer, with Jerboa behind them.\n\n\"Oh wow,\" said the one with the earring, noticing Luna.\n\n\"What \u2014\" said the Clearsight-looking dragon. \"How \u2014?\"\n\n\"I believe this is our first visitor from the lost continent,\" Jerboa said. \"She blew in with the storm.\"\n\nThe little black dragon sat down and tipped her head as though she was listening to something far away. \"I'm Moon,\" she said, \"and this is Qibli. Are you really from across the sea?\"\n\n\"I guess so,\" Luna said. \"It was kind of an accident, coming here. I'm Luna.\"\n\n\"Hi, Luna,\" said Qibli. \"This must be pretty weird for you, too. You have so many wings! I mean, that's cool. Is it hard to fly with all those wings? That's a silly question. I can't believe we're meeting a dragon from another continent! This is amazing!\"\n\n\"Are you like Clearsight?\" Luna asked Moon. \"Can you see the future?\"\n\nMoon's eyebrows shot up. \"You know about Clearsight?\"\n\n\"I know some things about her,\" Luna said, thinking darkly of the Book and the lies Queen Wasp had told about it. \"I know she came from here, and she had scales like yours. I always wondered if there were other dragons over here who could see the future, too.\"\n\n\"I can, sort of,\" Moon said. \"Not as well as she could. But I had a vision about you. That's why we're here.\"\n\n\"Was it about getting me home?\" Luna asked, sitting forward and flaring her wings. \"Do you know how I can get back there?\"\n\nMoon shot Qibli an uneasy look. \"Not exactly,\" she said, \"although we can work on it.\"\n\n\"I have some ideas!\" Qibli said brightly.\n\n\"Good,\" Luna said. She settled back into the palm fronds. She was suddenly sure that storm had brought her here for a reason. \"Let's figure out how to get me home, and you can all come with me. Especially you, vision dragon.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Moon said. \"Oh, I don't know \u2014 I haven't seen anything about \u2014\"\n\n\"You have to,\" Luna said. This dragon could be the secret weapon the SilkWings and LeafWings needed. \"My tribe needs your help.\"\n\nTriumph sizzled through her veins.\n\nWe're coming for you, Queen Wasp. And now we have a dragon who can really see the future.\n\nThe reign of the HiveWings is over."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Temeraire 2) Throne of Jade",
        "author": "Naomi Novik",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "alternate history",
            "adventure",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\ufeffThe day was unseasonably warm for November, but in some misguided deference to the Chinese embassy, the fire in the Admiralty boardroom had been heaped excessively high, and Laurence was standing directly before it. He had dressed with especial care, in his best uniform, and all throughout the long and unbearable interview the lining of his thick bottle-green broadcloth coat had been growing steadily more sodden with sweat.\n\nOver the doorway, behind Lord Barham, the official indicator with its compass arrow showed the direction of the wind over the Channel: in the north-northeast today, fair for France; very likely even now some ships of the Channel Fleet were standing in to have a look at Napoleon's harbors. His shoulders held at attention, Laurence fixed his eyes upon the broad metal disk and tried to keep himself distracted with such speculation; he did not trust himself to meet the cold, unfriendly gaze fixed upon him.\n\nBarham stopped speaking and coughed again into his fist; the elaborate phrases he had prepared sat not at all in his sailor's mouth, and at the end of every awkward, halting line, he stopped and darted a look over at the Chinese with a nervous agitation that approached obsequity. It was not a very creditable performance, but under ordinary circumstances, Laurence would have felt a degree of sympathy for Barham's position: some sort of formal message had been anticipated, even perhaps an envoy, but no one had ever imagined that the Emperor of China would send his own brother halfway around the world.\n\nPrince Yongxing could, with a word, set their two nations at war; and there was besides something inherently awful in his presence: the impervious silence with which he met Barham's every remark; the overwhelming splendor of his dark yellow robes, embroidered thickly with dragons; the slow and relentless tapping of his long, jewel-encrusted fingernail against the arm of his chair. He did not even look at Barham: he only stared directly across the table at Laurence, grim and thin-lipped.\n\nHis retinue was so large they filled the boardroom to the corners, a dozen guards all sweltering and dazed in their quilted armor and as many servants besides, most with nothing to do, only attendants of one sort or another, all of them standing along the far wall of the room and trying to stir the air with broad-paneled fans. One man, evidently a translator, stood behind the prince, murmuring when Yongxing lifted a hand, generally after one of Barham's more involved periods.\n\nTwo other official envoys sat to Yongxing's either side. These men had been presented to Laurence only perfunctorily, and they had neither of them said a word, though the younger, called Sun Kai, had been watching all the proceedings, impassively, and following the translator's words with quiet attention. The elder, a big, round-bellied man with a tufted grey beard, had gradually been overcome by the heat: his head had sunk forward onto his chest, mouth half open for air, and his hand was barely even moving his fan towards his face. They were robed in dark blue silk, almost as elaborately as the prince himself, and together they made an imposing fa\u00e7ade: certainly no such embassy had ever been seen in the West.\n\nA far more practiced diplomat than Barham might have been pardoned for succumbing to some degree of servility, but Laurence was scarcely in any mood to be forgiving; though he was nearly more furious with himself, at having hoped for anything better. He had come expecting to plead his case, and privately in his heart he had even imagined a reprieve; instead he had been scolded in terms he would have scrupled to use to a raw lieutenant, and all in front of a foreign prince and his retinue, assembled like a tribunal to hear his crimes. Still he held his tongue as long as he could manage, but when Barham at last came about to saying, with an air of great condescension, \"Naturally, Captain, we have it in mind that you shall be put to another hatchling, afterwards,\" Laurence had reached his limit.\n\n\"No, sir,\" he said, breaking in. \"I am sorry, but no: I will not do it, and as for another post, I must beg to be excused.\"\n\nSitting beside Barham, Admiral Powys of the Aerial Corps had remained quite silent through the course of the meeting; now he only shook his head, without any appearance of surprise, and folded his hands together over his ample belly. Barham gave him a furious look and said to Laurence, \"Perhaps I am not clear, Captain; this is not a request. You have been given your orders, you will carry them out.\"\n\n\"I will be hanged first,\" Laurence said flatly, past caring that he was speaking in such terms to the First Lord of the Admiralty: the death of his career if he had still been a naval officer, and it could scarcely do him any good even as an aviator. Yet if they meant to send Temeraire away, back to China, his career as an aviator was finished: he would never accept a position with any other dragon. None other would ever compare, to Laurence's mind, and he would not subject a hatchling to being second-best when there were men in the Corps lined up six-deep for the chance.\n\nYongxing did not say anything, but his lips tightened; his attendants shifted and murmured amongst themselves in their own language. Laurence did not think he was imagining the hint of disdain in their tone, directed less at himself than at Barham; and the First Lord evidently shared the impression, his face growing mottled and choleric with the effort of preserving the appearance of calm. \"By God, Laurence; if you imagine you can stand here in the middle of Whitehall and mutiny, you are wrong; I think perhaps you are forgetting that your first duty is to your country and your King, not to this dragon of yours.\"\n\n\"No, sir; it is you who are forgetting. It was for duty I put Temeraire into harness, sacrificing my naval rank, with no knowledge then that he was any breed truly out of the ordinary, much less a Celestial,\" Laurence said. \"And for duty I took him through a difficult training and into a hard and dangerous service; for duty I have taken him into battle, and asked him to hazard his life and happiness. I will not answer such loyal service with lies and deceit.\"\n\n\"Enough noise, there,\" Barham said. \"Anyone would think you were being asked to hand over your firstborn. I am sorry if you have made such a pet of the creature you cannot bear to lose him\u2014\"\n\n\"Temeraire is neither my pet nor my property, sir,\" Laurence snapped. \"He has served England and the King as much as I have, or you yourself, and now, because he does not choose to go back to China, you stand there and ask me to lie to him. I cannot imagine what claim to honor I should have if I agreed to it. Indeed,\" he added, unable to restrain himself, \"I wonder that you should even have made the proposal; I wonder at it greatly.\"\n\n\"Oh, your soul to the devil, Laurence,\" Barham said, losing his last veneer of formality; he had been a serving sea-officer for years before joining the Government, and he was still very little a politician when his temper was up. \"He is a Chinese dragon, it stands to reason he will like China better; in any case, he belongs to them, and there is an end to it. The name of thief is a very unpleasant one, and His Majesty's Government does not propose to invite it.\"\n\n\"I know how I am to take that, I suppose.\" If Laurence had not already been half-broiled, he would have flushed. \"And I utterly reject the accusation, sir. These gentlemen do not deny they had given the egg to France; we seized it from a French man-of-war; the ship and the egg were condemned as lawful prize out of hand in the Admiralty courts, as you very well know. By no possible understanding does Temeraire belong to them; if they were so anxious about letting a Celestial out of their hands, they ought not have given him away in the shell.\"\n\nYongxing snorted and broke into their shouting-match. \" That is correct,\" he said; his English was thickly accented, formal and slow, but the measured cadences only lent all the more effect to his words. \"From the first it was folly to let the second-born egg of Lung Tien Qian pass over sea. That, no one can now dispute.\"\n\nIt silenced them both, and for a moment no one spoke, save the translator quietly rendering Yongxing's words for the rest of the Chinese. Then Sun Kai unexpectedly said something in their tongue which made Yongxing look around at him sharply. Sun kept his head inclined deferentially, and did not look up, but still it was the first suggestion Laurence had seen that their embassy might perhaps not speak with a single voice. But Yongxing snapped a reply, in a tone which did not allow of any further comment, and Sun did not venture to make one. Satisfied that he had quelled his subordinate, Yongxing turned back to them and added, \"Yet regardless of the evil chance that brought him into your hands, Lung Tien Xiang was meant to go to the French Emperor, not to be made beast of burden for a common soldier.\"\n\nLaurence stiffened; common soldier rankled, and for the first time he turned to look directly at the prince, meeting that cold, contemptuous gaze with an equally steady one. \"We are at war with France, sir; if you choose to ally yourself with our enemies and send them material assistance, you can hardly complain when we take it in fair fight.\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" Barham broke in, at once and loudly. \"China is by no means an ally of France, by no means at all; we certainly do not view China as a French ally. You are not here to speak to His Imperial Highness, Laurence; control yourself,\" he added, in a savage undertone.\n\nBut Yongxing ignored the attempt at interruption. \"And now you make piracy your defense?\" he said, contemptuous. \"We do not concern ourselves with the customs of barbaric nations. How merchants and thieves agree to pillage one another is not of interest to the Celestial Throne, except when they choose to insult the Emperor as you have.\"\n\n\"No, Your Highness, no such thing, not in the least,\" Barham said hurriedly, even while he looked pure venom at Laurence. \"His Majesty and his Government have nothing but the deepest affection for the Emperor; no insult would ever willingly be offered, I assure you. If we had only known of the extraordinary nature of the egg, of your objections, this situation would never have arisen\u2014\"\n\n\"Now, however, you are well aware,\" Yongxing said, \"and the insult remains: Lung Tien Xiang is still in harness, treated little better than a horse, expected to carry burdens and exposed to all the brutalities of war, and all this, with a mere captain as his companion. Better had his egg sunk to the bottom of the ocean!\"\n\nAppalled, Laurence was glad to see this callousness left Barham and Powys as staring and speechless as himself. Even among Yongxing's own retinue, the translator flinched, shifting uneasily, and for once did not translate the prince's words back into Chinese.\n\n\"Sir, I assure you, since we learned of your objections, he has not been under harness at all, not a stitch of it,\" Barham said, recovering. \"We have been at the greatest of pains to see to Temeraire's\u2014that is, to Lung Tien Xiang's\u2014comfort, and to make redress for any inadequacy in his treatment. He is no longer assigned to Captain Laurence, that I can assure you: they have not spoken these last two weeks.\"\n\nThe reminder was a bitter one, and Laurence felt what little remained of his temper fraying away. \"If either of you had any real concern for his comfort, you would consult his feelings, not your own desires,\" he said, his voice rising, a voice which had been trained to bellow orders through a gale. \"You complain of having him under harness, and in the same breath ask me to trick him into chains, so you might drag him away against his will. I will not do it; I will never do it, and be damned to you all.\"\n\nJudging by his expression, Barham would have been glad to have Laurence himself dragged away in chains: eyes almost bulging, hands flat on the table, on the verge of rising; for the first time, Admiral Powys spoke, breaking in, and forestalled him. \"Enough, Laurence, hold your tongue. Barham, nothing further can be served by keeping him. Out, Laurence; out at once: you are dismissed.\"\n\nThe long habit of obedience held: Laurence flung himself out of the room. The intervention likely saved him from an arrest for insubordination, but he went with no sense of gratitude; a thousand things were pent up in his throat, and even as the door swung heavily shut behind him, he turned back. But the Marines stationed to either side were gazing at him with thoughtlessly rude interest, as if he were a curiosity exhibited for their entertainment. Under their open, inquisitive looks he mastered his temper a little and turned away before he could betray himself more thoroughly.\n\nBarham's words were swallowed by the heavy wood, but the inarticulate rumble of his still-raised voice followed Laurence down the corridor. He felt almost drunk with anger, his breath coming in short abrupt spurts and his vision obscured, not by tears, not at all by tears, except of rage. The antechamber of the Admiralty was full of sea-officers, clerks, political officials, even a green-coated aviator rushing through with dispatches. Laurence shouldered his way roughly to the doors, his shaking hands thrust deep into his coat pockets to conceal them from view.\n\nHe struck out into the crashing din of late-afternoon London, Whitehall full of workingmen going home for their suppers, and the bawling of the hackney drivers and chair-men over all, crying, \"Make a lane, there,\" through the crowds. His feelings were as disordered as his surroundings, and he was navigating the street by instinct; he had to be called three times before he recognized his own name.\n\nHe turned only reluctantly: he had no desire to be forced to return a civil word or gesture from a former colleague. But with a measure of relief he saw it was Captain Roland, not an ignorant acquaintance. He was surprised to see her; very surprised, for her dragon, Excidium, was a formation-leader at the Dover covert. She could not easily have been spared from her duties, and in any case she could not come to the Admiralty openly, being a female officer, one of those whose existence was made necessary by the insistence of Longwings on female captains. The secret was but barely known outside the ranks of the aviators, and jealously kept against certain public disapproval; Laurence himself had found it difficult to accept the notion, at first, but he had grown so used to the idea that now Roland looked very odd to him out of uniform: she had put on skirts and a heavy cloak by way of concealment, neither of which suited her.\n\n\"I have been puffing after you for the last five minutes,\" she said, taking his arm as she reached him. \"I was wandering about that great cavern of a building, waiting for you to come out, and then you went straight past me in such a ferocious hurry I could scarcely catch you. These clothes are a damned nuisance; I hope you appreciate the trouble I am taking for you, Laurence. But never mind,\" she added, her voice gentling. \"I can see from your face that it did not go well: let us go and have some dinner, and you shall tell me everything.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Jane; I am glad to see you,\" he said, and let her turn him in the direction of her inn, though he did not think he could swallow. \"How do you come to be here, though? Surely there is nothing wrong with Excidium?\"\n\n\"Nothing in the least, unless he has given himself indigestion,\" she said. \"No; but Lily and Captain Harcourt are coming along splendidly, and so Lenton was able to assign them a double patrol and give me a few days of liberty. Excidium took it as excuse to eat three fat cows at once, the wretched greedy thing; he barely cracked an eyelid when I proposed my leaving him with Sanders\u2014that is my new first lieutenant\u2014and coming to bear you company. So I put together a street-going rig and came up with the courier. Oh, Hell: wait a minute, will you?\" She stopped and kicked vigorously, shaking her skirts loose: they were too long, and had caught on her heels.\n\nHe held her by the elbow so she did not topple over, and afterwards they continued on through the London streets at a slower pace. Roland's mannish stride and scarred face drew enough rude stares that Laurence began to glare at the passersby who looked too long, though she herself paid them no mind; she noticed his behavior, however, and said, \"You are ferocious out of temper; do not frighten those poor girls. What did those fellows say to you at the Admiralty?\"\n\n\"You have heard, I suppose, that an embassy has come from China; they mean to take Temeraire back with them, and Government does not care to object. But evidently he will have none of it: tells them all to go and hang themselves, though they have been at him for weeks now to go,\" Laurence said. As he spoke, a sharp sensation of pain, like a constriction just under his breastbone, made itself felt. He could picture quite clearly Temeraire kept nearly all alone in the old, worn-down London covert, scarcely used in the last hundred years, with neither Laurence nor his crew to keep him company, no one to read to him, and of his own kind only a few small courier-beasts flying through on dispatch service.\n\n\"Of course he will not go,\" Roland said. \"I cannot believe they imagined they could persuade him to leave you. Surely they ought to know better; I have always heard the Chinese cried up as the very pinnacle of dragon-handlers.\"\n\n\"Their prince has made no secret he thinks very little of me; likely they expected Temeraire to share much the same opinion, and to be pleased to go back,\" Laurence said. \"In any case, they grow tired of trying to persuade him; so that villain Barham ordered I should lie to him and say we were assigned to Gibraltar, all to get him aboard a transport and out to sea, too far for him to fly back to land, before he knew what they were about.\"\n\n\"Oh, infamous.\" Her hand tightened almost painfully on his arm. \"Did Powys have nothing to say to it? I cannot believe he let them suggest such a thing to you; one cannot expect a naval officer to understand these things, but Powys should have explained matters to him.\"\n\n\"I dare say he can do nothing; he is only a serving officer, and Barham is appointed by the Ministry,\" Laurence said. \"Powys at least saved me from putting my neck in a noose: I was too angry to control myself, and he sent me away.\"\n\nThey had reached the Strand; the increase in traffic made conversation difficult, and they had to pay attention to avoid being splashed by the questionable grey slush heaped in the gutters, thrown up onto the pavement by the lumbering carts and hackney wheels. His anger ebbing away, Laurence was increasingly low in his spirits.\n\nFrom the moment of separation, he had consoled himself with the daily expectation that it would soon end: the Chinese would soon see Temeraire did not wish to go, or the Admiralty would give up the attempt to placate them. It had seemed a cruel sentence even so; they had not been parted a full day's time in the months since Temeraire's hatching, and Laurence had scarcely known what to do with himself, or how to fill the hours. But even the two long weeks were nothing to this, the dreadful certainty that he had ruined all his chances. The Chinese would not yield, and the Ministry would find some way of getting Temeraire sent off to China in the end: they plainly had no objection to telling him a pack of lies for the purpose. Likely enough Barham would never consent to his seeing Temeraire now even for a last farewell.\n\nLaurence had not even allowed himself to consider what his own life might be with Temeraire gone. Another dragon was of course an impossibility, and the Navy would not have him back now. He supposed he could take on a ship in the merchant fleet, or a privateer; but he did not think he would have the heart for it, and he had done well enough out of prize-money to live on. He could even marry and set up as a country gentleman; but that prospect, once so idyllic in his imagination, now seemed drab and colorless.\n\nWorse yet, he could hardly look for sympathy: all his former acquaintance would call it a lucky escape, his family would rejoice, and the world would think nothing of his loss. By any measure, there was something ridiculous in his being so adrift: he had become an aviator quite unwillingly, only from the strongest sense of duty, and less than a year had passed since his change in station; yet already he could hardly consider the possibility. Only another aviator, perhaps indeed only another captain, would truly be able to understand his sentiments, and with Temeraire gone, he would be as severed from their company as aviators themselves were from the rest of the world.\n\nThe front room at the Crown and Anchor was not quiet, though it was still early for dinner by town standards. The place was not a fashionable establishment, nor even genteel, its custom mostly consisting of countrymen used to a more reasonable hour for their food and drink. It was not the sort of place a respectable woman would have come, nor indeed the kind of place Laurence himself would have ever voluntarily frequented in earlier days. Roland drew some insolent stares, others only curious, but no one attempted any greater liberty: Laurence made an imposing figure beside her with his broad shoulders and his dress-sword slung at his hip.\n\nRoland led Laurence up to her rooms, sat him in an ugly armchair, and gave him a glass of wine. He drank deeply, hiding behind the bowl of the glass from her sympathetic look: he was afraid he might easily be unmanned. \"You must be faint with hunger, Laurence,\" she said. \"That is half the trouble.\" She rang for the maid; shortly a couple of manservants climbed up with a very good sort of plain single-course dinner: a roast fowl, with greens and beef; gravy sauce; some small cheesecakes made with jam; calf's feet pie; a dish of red cabbage stewed; and a small biscuit pudding for relish. She had them place all the food on the table at once, rather than going through removes, and sent them away.\n\nLaurence did not think he would eat, but once the food was before him he found he was hungry after all. He had been eating very indifferently, thanks to irregular hours and the low table of his cheap boarding-house, chosen for its proximity to the covert where Temeraire was kept; now he ate steadily, Roland carrying the conversation nearly alone and distracting him with service gossip and trivialities.\n\n\"I was sorry to lose Lloyd, of course\u2014they mean to put him to the Anglewing egg that is hardening at Kinloch Laggan,\" she said, speaking of her first lieutenant.\n\n\"I think I saw it there,\" Laurence said, rousing a little and lifting his head from his plate. \"Obversaria's egg?\"\n\n\"Yes, and we have great hopes of the issue,\" she said. \"Lloyd was over the moon, of course, and I am very happy for him; still, it is no easy thing to break in a new premier after five years, with all the crew and Excidium himself murmuring about how Lloyd used to do things. But Sanders is a good-hearted, dependable fellow; they sent him up from Gibraltar, after Granby refused the post.\"\n\n\"What? Refused it?\" Laurence cried, in great dismay: Granby was his own first lieutenant. \"Not for my sake, I hope.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord, you did not know?\" Roland said, in equal dismay. \"Granby spoke to me very pretty; said he was obliged, but he did not choose to shift his position. I was quite sure he had consulted you about the matter; I thought perhaps you had been given some reason to hope.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said, very low. \"He is more likely to end up with no position at all; I am very sorry to hear he should have passed up so good a place.\" The refusal could have done Granby no good with the Corps; a man who had turned down one offer could not soon expect another, and Laurence would shortly have no power at all to help him along.\n\n\"Well, I am damned sorry to have given you any more cause for concern,\" Roland said, after a moment. \"Admiral Lenton has not broken up your crew, you know, for the most part: only gave a few fellows to Berkley out of desperation, he being so short-handed now. We were all so sure that Maximus had reached his final growth; shortly after you were called here, he began to prove us wrong, and so far he has put on fifteen feet in length.\" She added this last in an attempt to recover the lighter tone of the conversation, but it was impossible: Laurence found that his stomach had closed, and he set down his knife and fork with the plate still half-full.\n\nRoland drew the curtains; it was already growing dark outside. \"Do you care for a concert?\"\n\n\"I am happy to accompany you,\" he said, mechanically, and she shook her head.\n\n\"No, never mind; I see it will not do. Come to bed then, my dear fellow; there is no sense in sitting about and moping.\"\n\nThey put out the candles and lay down together. \"I have not the least notion what to do,\" he said quietly: the cover of dark made the confession a little easier. \"I called Barham a villain, and I cannot forgive him asking me to lie; very ungentleman-like. But he is not a scrub; he would not be at such shifts if he had any other choice.\"\n\n\"It makes me quite ill to hear about him bowing and scraping to this foreign prince.\" Roland propped herself upon her elbow on the pillows. \"I was in Canton harbor once, as a mid, on a transport coming back the long way from India; those junks of theirs do not look like they could stand a mild shower, much less a gale. They cannot fly their dragons across the ocean without a pause, even if they cared to go to war with us.\"\n\n\"I thought as much myself, when I first heard,\" Laurence said. \"But they do not need to fly across the ocean to end the China trade, and wreck our shipping to India also, if they liked; besides they share a border with Russia. It would mean the end of the coalition against Bonaparte, if the Tsar was attacked on his eastern borders.\"\n\n\"I do not see the Russians have done us very much good so far, in the war, and money is a low pitiful excuse for behaving like a bounder, in a man or a nation,\" Roland said. \"The State has been short of funds before, and somehow we have scraped by and still blacked Bonaparte's eye for him. In any case, I cannot forgive them for keeping you from Temeraire. Barham still has not let you see him at all, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No, not for two weeks now. There is a decent fellow at the covert who has taken him messages for me, and lets me know that he is eating, but I cannot ask him to let me in: it would be a court-martial for us both. Though for my own part, I hardly know if I would let it stop me now.\"\n\nHe could scarcely have imagined even saying such a thing a year ago; he did not like to think it now, but honesty put the words into his mouth. Roland did not cry out against it, but then she was an aviator herself. She reached out to stroke his cheek, and drew him down to such comfort as might be found in her arms.\n\nLaurence started up in the dark room, sleep broken: Roland was already out of bed. A yawning housemaid was standing in the doorway, holding up a candle, the yellow light spilling into the room. She handed Roland a sealed dispatch and stayed there, staring with open prurient interest at Laurence; he felt a guilty flush rise in his cheeks, and glanced down to be sure he was quite covered beneath the bedclothes.\n\nRoland had already cracked the seal; now she reached out and took the candlestick straight out of the girl's hand. \"There's for you; go along now,\" she said, giving the maid a shilling; she shut the door in the girl's face without further ceremony. \"Laurence, I must go at once,\" she said, coming to the bed to light the other candles, speaking very low. \"This is word from Dover: a French convoy is making a run for Le Havre under dragon guard. The Channel Fleet is going after them, but there is a Flamme-de-Gloire present, and the fleet cannot engage without aerial support.\"\n\n\"How many ships in the French convoy, does it say?\" He was already out of the bed and pulling on his breeches: a fire-breather was nearly the worst danger a ship could face, desperately risky even with a good deal of support from the air.\n\n\"Thirty or more, packed no doubt to the gills with war mat\u00e9riel,\" she said, whipping her hair into a tight braid. \"Do you see my coat over there?\"\n\nOutside the window, the sky was thinning to a paler blue; soon the candles would be unnecessary. Laurence found the coat and helped her into it, some part of his thoughts already occupied in calculating the likely strength of the merchant ships, what proportion of the fleet would be detached to go after them, how many might yet slip through to safe harbor: the guns at Le Havre were nasty. If the wind had not shifted since yesterday, they had favorable conditions for their run. Thirty ships' worth of iron, copper, quicksilver, gunpowder; Bonaparte might no longer be a danger at sea after Trafalgar, but on land he was still master of Europe, and such a haul might easily meet his supply needs for months.\n\n\"And just give me that cloak, will you?\" Roland asked, breaking into his train of thought. The voluminous folds concealed her male dress, and she pulled the hood up over her head. \"There, that will do.\"\n\n\"Hold a moment; I am coming with you,\" Laurence said, struggling into his own coat. \"I hope I can be some use. If Berkley is short-handed on Maximus, I can at least pull on a strap or help shove off boarders. Leave the luggage and ring for the maid: we will have them send the rest of your things over to my boarding-house.\"\n\nThey hurried through the streets, still mostly empty: night-soil men rattling past with their fetid carts, day laborers beginning on their rounds to look for work, maids in their clinking pattens going to market, and the herds of animals with their lowing breath white in the air. A clammy, bitter fog had descended in the night, like a prickling of ice on the skin. At least the absence of crowds meant Roland did not have to pay much mind to her cloak, and they could go at something approaching a run.\n\nThe London covert was situated not far from the Admiralty offices, along the western side of the Thames; despite the location, so eminently convenient, the buildings immediately around it were shabby, in disrepair: where those lived who could afford nothing farther away from dragons; some of the houses even abandoned, except for a few skinny children who peered out suspiciously at the sound of strangers passing. A sludge of liquid refuse ran along the gutters of the streets; as Laurence and Roland ran, their boots broke the thin skim of ice on top, letting the stench up to follow them.\n\nHere the streets were truly empty; but even so as they hurried a heavy cart sprang almost as if by malicious intent from the fog: Roland hauled Laurence aside and up onto the pavement just quick enough he was not clipped and dragged under the wheels. The drover never even paused in his careening progress, but vanished around the next corner without apology.\n\nLaurence gazed down at his best dress trousers in dismay: spattered black with filth. \"Never mind,\" Roland said consolingly. \"No one will mind in the air, and maybe it will brush off.\" This was more optimism than he could muster, but there was certainly no time to do anything about them now, and so they resumed their hurried progress.\n\nThe covert gates stood out shining against the dingy streets and the equally dingy morning: ironwork freshly painted black, with polished brass locks; unexpectedly, a pair of young Marines in their red uniforms were lounging nearby, muskets leaned against the wall. The gatekeeper on duty touched his hat to Roland as he came to let them in, while the Marines squinted at her in some confusion: her cloak was well back off her shoulders for the moment, revealing both her triple gold bars and her by no means shabby endowment.\n\nLaurence stepped into their line of sight to block their view of her, frowning. \"Thank you, Patson; the Dover courier?\" he said to the gatekeeper, as soon as they had come through.\n\n\"Believe he's waiting for you, sir,\" Patson said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he pulled the gates to again. \"Just at the first clearing, if you please. Don't you worry about them none,\" he added, scowling at the Marines, who looked properly abashed: they were barely more than boys, and Patson was a big man, a former armorer, made only more awful by an eye-patch and the seared red skin about it. \"I'll learn them properly, never fret.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Patson; carry on,\" Roland said, and on they went. \"Whatever are those lobsters doing here? Not officers, at least, we may be grateful. I still recall twelve years ago, some Army officer found out Captain St. Ger-main when she got wounded at Toulon; he made a wretched to-do over the whole thing, and it nearly got into the papers: idiotic affair.\"\n\nThere was only a narrow border of trees and buildings around the perimeter of the covert to shield it from the air and noise of the city; they almost at once reached the first clearing, a small space barely large enough for a middling-sized dragon to spread its wings. The courier was indeed waiting: a young Winchester, her purple wings not yet quite darkened to adult color, but fully harnessed and fidgeting to be off.\n\n\"Why, Hollin,\" Laurence said, shaking the captain's hand gladly: it was a great pleasure to see his former ground-crew master again, now in an officer's coat. \"Is this your dragon?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, indeed it is; this is Elsie,\" Hollin said, beaming at him. \"Elsie, this is Captain Laurence: which I have told you about him, he helped me to you.\"\n\nThe Winchester turned her head around and looked at Laurence with bright, interested eyes: not yet three months out of the shell, she was still small, even for her breed, but her hide was almost glossy-clean, and she looked very well-tended indeed. \"So you are Temeraire's captain? Thank you; I like my Hollin very much,\" she said, in a light chirping voice, and gave Hollin a nudge with enough affection in it to nearly knock him over.\n\n\"I am happy to have been of service, and to make your acquaintance,\" Laurence said, mustering some enthusiasm, although not without an internal pang at the reminder. Temeraire was here, not five hundred yards distant, and he could not so much as exchange a greeting with him. He did look, but buildings stood in the line of his sight: no glimpse of black hide was to be seen.\n\nRoland asked Hollin, \"Is everything ready? We must be off at once.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, indeed; we are only waiting for the dispatches,\" Hollin said. \"Five minutes, if you should care to stretch your legs before the flight.\"\n\nThe temptation was very strong; Laurence swallowed hard. But discipline held: openly refusing a dishonorable order was one thing, sneaking about to disobey a merely unpleasant one something else; and to do so now might well reflect badly on Hollin, and Roland herself. \"I will just step into the barracks here, and speak to Jervis,\" he said instead, and went to find the man who was overseeing Temeraire's care.\n\nJervis was an older man, the better part of both his left limbs lost to a wicked raking stroke across the side of the dragon on whom he had served as harness-master; on recovering against all reasonable expectations, he had been assigned to the slow duty of the London covert, so rarely used. He had an odd, lopsided appearance with his wooden leg and metal hook on one side, and he had grown a little lazy and contrary with his idleness, but Laurence had provided him with a willing ear often enough to now find a warm welcome.\n\n\"Would you be so kind as to take a word for me?\" Laurence asked, after he had refused a cup of tea. \"I am going to Dover to see if I can be of use; I should not like Temeraire to fret at my silence.\"\n\n\"That I will, and read it to him; he will need it, poor fellow,\" Jervis said, stumping over to fetch his inkwell and pen one-handed; Laurence turned over a scrap of paper to write the note. \"That fat fellow from the Admiralty came over again not half-an-hour ago with a full passel of Marines and those fancy Chinamen, and there they are still, prating away at the dear. If they don't go soon, I shan't answer for his taking any food today, so I won't. Ugly sea-going bugger; I don't know what he is about, thinking he knows aught about dragons; that is, begging your pardon, sir,\" Jervis added hastily.\n\nLaurence found his hand shook over the paper, so he spattered his first few lines and the table. He answered somehow, meaninglessly, and struggled to continue the note; words would not come. He stood there locked in mid-sentence, until suddenly he was nearly thrown off his feet, ink spreading across the floor as the table fell over; outside a terrible shattering noise, like the worst violence of a storm, a full North Sea winter's gale.\n\nThe pen was still ludicrously in his hand; he dropped it and flung open the door, Jervis stumbling out behind him. The echoes still hung in the air, and Elsie was sitting up on her hind legs, wings half-opening and closing in anxiety while Hollin and Roland tried to reassure her; the few other dragons at the covert had their heads up as well, peering over the trees and hissing in alarm.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Roland called, but he ignored her: he was already halfway down the path, running, his hand unconsciously gone to the hilt of his sword. He came to the clearing and found his way barred by the collapsed ruins of a barracks building and several fallen trees.\n\nFor a thousand years before the Romans first tamed the Western dragon breeds, the Chinese had already been masters of the art. They prized beauty and intelligence more than martial prowess, and looked with a little superior disdain at the fire-breathers and acid-spitters valued so highly in the West; their aerial legions were so numerous they had no need of what they regarded as so much showy flash. But they did not scorn all such unusual gifts; and in the Celestials they had reached the pinnacle of their achievement: the union of all the other graces with the subtle and deadly power which the Chinese called the divine wind, the roar with a force greater than cannon-fire.\n\nLaurence had seen the devastation the divine wind wrought only once before, at the battle of Dover, where Temeraire had used it against Napoleon's airborne transports to potent effect. But here the poor trees had suffered the impact at point-blank range: they lay like flung matchsticks, trunks burst into flinders. The whole rough structure of the barracks, too, had smashed to the ground, the coarse mortar crumbled away entirely and the bricks scattered and broken. A hurricane might have caused such wreckage, or an earthquake, and the once-poetic name seemed suddenly far more apt.\n\nThe escort of Marines were nearly all of them backed up against the undergrowth surrounding the clearing, faces white and blank with terror; Barham alone of them had stood his ground. The Chinese also had not retreated, but they were one and all prostrated upon the ground in formal genuflection, except for Prince Yongxing himself, who remained unflinching at their head.\n\nThe wreck of one tremendous oak lay penning them all against the edge of the clearing, dirt still clinging to its roots, and Temeraire stood behind it, one foreleg resting on the trunk and his sinuous length towering over them.\n\n\"You will not say such things to me,\" he said, his head lowering towards Barham: his teeth were bared, and the spiked ruff around his head was raised up and trembling with anger. \"I do not believe you for an instant, and I will not hear such lies; Laurence would never take another dragon. If you have sent him away, I will go after him, and if you have hurt him\u2014\"\n\nHe began to gather his breath for another roar, his chest belling out like a sail in high wind, and this time the hapless men lay directly in his path.\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence called, scrambling ungracefully over the wreckage, sliding down the heap into the clearing in disregard of the splinters that caught at his clothing and skin. \"Temeraire, I am well, I am here\u2014\"\n\nTemeraire's head had whipped around at the first word, and he at once took the two paces needed to bring him across the clearing. Laurence held still, his heart beating very quickly, not at all with fear: the forelegs with their terrible claws landed to either side of him, and the sleek length of Temeraire's body coiled protectively about him, the great scaled sides rising up around him like shining black walls and the angled head coming to rest by him.\n\nHe rested his hands on Temeraire's snout and for a moment laid his cheek against the soft muzzle; Temeraire made a low wordless murmur of unhappiness. \"Laurence, Laurence, do not leave me again.\"\n\nLaurence swallowed. \"My dear,\" he said, and stopped; no answer was possible.\n\nThey stood with their heads together in silence, the rest of the world shut out: but only for a moment. \"Laurence,\" Roland called from beyond the encircling coils: she sounded out of breath, and her voice was urgent. \"Temeraire, do move aside, there is a good fellow.\" Temeraire lifted up his head and reluctantly uncurled himself a little so they could speak; but all the while he kept himself between Laurence and Barham's party.\n\nRoland ducked under Temeraire's foreleg and joined Laurence. \"You had to go to Temeraire, of course, but it will look very bad to someone who does not understand dragons. For pity's sake do not let Barham push you into anything further: answer him as meek as mother-may-I, do anything he tells you.\" She shook her head. \"By God, Laurence; I hate to leave you in such straits, but the dispatches have come, and minutes may make the difference here.\"\n\n\"Of course you cannot stay,\" he said. \"They are likely waiting for you at Dover even now to launch the attack; we will manage, never fear.\"\n\n\"An attack? There is to be a battle?\" Temeraire said, overhearing; he flexed his talons and looked away to the east, as if he might see the formations rising into the air even from here.\n\n\"Go at once, and pray take care,\" Laurence said hastily to Roland. \"Give my apologies to Hollin.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Try and stay easy in your mind. I will speak with Lenton even before we launch. The Corps will not sit still for this; bad enough to separate you, but now this outrageous pressure, stirring up all the dragons like this: it cannot be allowed to continue, and no one can possibly hold you to blame.\"\n\n\"Do not worry or wait another instant: the attack is more important,\" he said, very heartily: counterfeit, as much as her assurances; they both knew that the situation was black. Laurence could not for a moment regret having gone to Temeraire's side, but he had openly disobeyed orders. No court-martial could find him innocent; there was Barham himself to lay the charges, and if questioned Laurence could hardly deny the act. He did not think they would hang him: this was not a battlefield offense, and the circumstances offered some excuse, but he would certainly have been dismissed the service if he had still been in the Navy. There was nothing to be done but face the consequences; he forced a smile, Roland gave his arm a quick squeeze, and she was gone.\n\nThe Chinese had risen and collected themselves, making a better show of it than the ragged Marines, who looked ready to bolt at any moment's notice. They all together were now picking their way over the fallen oak. The younger official, Sun Kai, more deftly scrambled over, and with one of the attendants offered a hand to the prince to help him down. Yongxing was hampered by his heavy embroidered gown, leaving trailers of bright silk like gaily colored cobwebs upon the broken branches, but if he felt any of the same terror writ large on the faces of the British soldiers, he did not show it: he seemed unshaken.\n\nTemeraire kept a savage, brooding eye upon them all. \"I am not going to sit here while everyone else goes and fights, no matter what those people want.\"\n\nLaurence stroked Temeraire's neck comfortingly. \"Do not let them upset you. Pray stay quite calm, my dear; losing our tempers will not improve matters.\" Temeraire only snorted, and his eye remained fixed and glittering, the ruff still standing upright with all the points very stiff: in no mood to be soothed.\n\nHimself quite ashen, Barham made no haste to approach any closer to Temeraire, but Yongxing addressed him sharply, repeating demands both urgent and angry, judging by his gestures towards Temeraire; Sun Kai, however, stood apart, and regarded Laurence and Temeraire more thoughtfully. At last Barham came towards them scowling, evidently taking refuge from fear in anger; Laurence had seen it often enough in men on the eve of battle.\n\n\"This is the discipline of the Corps, I gather,\" Barham began: petty and spiteful, since his life had very likely been saved by the disobedience. He himself seemed to perceive as much; he grew even angrier. \"Well, it will not stand with me, Laurence, not for an instant; I will see you broken for this. Sergeant, take him under arrest\u2014\"\n\nThe end of the sentence was inaudible; Barham was sinking, growing small, his shouting red mouth flashing open and shut like a gasping fish, the words becoming indistinct as the ground fell away beneath Laurence's feet. Temeraire's talons were carefully cupped around him and the great black wings were beating in broad sweeps, up up up through the dingy London air, soot dulling Temeraire's hide and speckling Laurence's hands.\n\nLaurence settled himself in the cupped claws and rode in silence; the damage was done, and Laurence knew better than to ask Temeraire to return to the ground at once: there was a sense of true violence in the force behind his wing-strokes, rage barely checked. They were going very fast. He peered downward in some anxiety as they sped over the city walls: Temeraire was flying without harness or signals, and Laurence feared the guns might be turned on them. But the guns stayed silent: Temeraire was distinctive, with his hide and wings of unbroken black, save for the deep blue and pearlescent grey markings along the edges, and he had been recognized.\n\nOr perhaps their passage was simply too swift for a response: they left the city behind them fifteen minutes after leaving the ground, and were soon beyond the range even of the long-barreled pepper-guns. Roads branched away through the countryside beneath them, dusted with snow, the smell of the air already much cleaner. Temeraire paused and hovered for a moment, shook his head free of dust, and sneezed loudly, jouncing Laurence about a little; but afterwards he flew on at a less frantic pace, and after another minute or two he curled his head down to speak. \"Are you well, Laurence? You are not uncomfortable?\"\n\nHe sounded more anxious than the subject deserved. Laurence patted his foreleg where he could reach it. \"No, I am very well.\"\n\n\"I am very sorry to have snatched you away so,\" Temeraire said, some tension gone at the warmth in Laurence's voice. \"Pray do not be angry; I could not let that man take you.\"\n\n\"No, I am not angry,\" Laurence said; indeed, so far as his heart was concerned there was only a great, swelling joy to be once again aloft, to feel the living current of power running through Temeraire's body, even if his more rational part knew this state could not last. \"And I do not blame you for going, not in the least, but I am afraid we must turn back now.\"\n\n\"No; I am not taking you back to that man,\" Temeraire said obstinately, and Laurence understood with a sinking feeling that he had run up against Temeraire's protective instincts. \"He lied to me, and kept you away, and then he wanted to arrest you: he may count himself lucky I did not squash him.\"\n\n\"My dear, we cannot just run wild,\" Laurence said. \"We would be truly beyond the pale if we did such a thing; how do you imagine we would eat, except by theft? And we would be abandoning all our friends.\"\n\n\"I am no more use to them in London, sitting in a covert,\" Temeraire said, with perfect truth, and left Laurence at a loss for how to answer him. \"But I do not mean to run wild; although,\" a little wistfully, \"to be sure, it would be pleasant to do as we liked, and I do not think anyone would miss a few sheep here and there. But not while there is a battle to be fought.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Laurence said, as he squinted towards the sun and realized their course was southeast, directly for their former covert at Dover. \"Temeraire, they cannot let us fight; Lenton will have to order me back, and if I disobey he will arrest me just as quick as Barham, I assure you.\"\n\n\"I do not believe Obversaria's admiral will arrest you,\" Temeraire said. \"She is very nice, and has always spoken to me kindly, even though she is so much older, and the flag-dragon. Besides, if he tries, Maximus and Lily are there, and they will help me; and if that man from London tries to come and take you away again, I will kill him,\" he added, with an alarming degree of bloodthirsty eagerness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "They landed in the Dover covert amid the clamor and bustle of preparation: the harness-masters bellowing orders to the ground crews, the clatter of buckles and the deeper metallic ringing of the bombs being handed up in sacks to the bellmen; riflemen loading their weapons, the sharp high-pitched shriek of whetstones grinding away on sword-edges. A dozen interested dragons had followed their progress, many calling out greetings to Temeraire as he made his descent. He called back, full of excitement, his spirits rising all the while Laurence felt his own sinking.\n\nTemeraire brought them to earth in Obversaria's clearing; it was one of the largest in the covert, as befitted her standing as flag-dragon, though as an Anglewing she was only slightly more than middling in size, and there was easily room for Temeraire to join her. She was rigged out already, her crew boarding; Admiral Lenton himself was standing beside her in full riding gear, only waiting for his officers to be aboard: minutes away from going aloft.\n\n\"Well, and what have you done?\" Lenton asked, before Laurence had even managed to unfold himself out of Temeraire's claw. \"Roland spoke to me, but she said she had told you to stay quiet; there is going to be the devil to pay for this.\"\n\n\"Sir, I am very sorry to put you in so untenable a position,\" Laurence said awkwardly, trying to think how he could explain Temeraire's refusal to return to London without seeming to make excuses for himself.\n\n\"No, it is my fault,\" Temeraire added, ducking his head and trying to look ashamed, without much success; there was too distinct a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. \"I took Laurence away; that man was going to arrest him.\"\n\nHe sounded plainly smug, and Obversaria abruptly leaned over and batted him on the side of the head, hard enough to make him wobble even though he was half again her size. He flinched and stared at her with a surprised and wounded expression; she only snorted at him and said, \"You are too old to be flying with your eyes closed. Lenton, we are ready, I think.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Lenton said, squinting up against the sun to examine her harness. \"I have no time to deal with you now, Laurence; this will have to wait.\"\n\n\"Of course, sir; I beg your pardon,\" Laurence said quietly. \"Pray do not let us delay you; with your permission, we will stay in Temeraire's clearing until you return.\" Even cowed by Obversaria's reproof, Temeraire made a small noise of protest at this.\n\n\"No, no; don't speak like a groundling,\" Lenton said impatiently. \"A young male like that will not stay behind when he sees his formation go, not uninjured. The same bloody mistake this fellow Barham and all the others at the Admiralty make, every time a new one is shuffled in by Government. If we ever manage to get it into their heads that dragons are not brute beasts, they start to imagine that they are just like men, and can be put under regular military discipline.\"\n\nLaurence opened his mouth to deny that Temeraire would disobey, then shut it again after glancing round; Temeraire was plowing the ground restlessly with his great talons, his wings partly fanned out, and he would not meet Laurence's gaze.\n\n\"Yes, just so,\" Lenton said dryly, when he saw Laurence silenced. He sighed, unbending a little, and brushed his sparse grey hair back off his forehead. \"If those Chinamen want him back, it can only make matters worse if he gets himself injured fighting without armor or crew,\" he said. \"Go on and get him ready; we will speak after.\"\n\nLaurence could scarcely find words to express his gratitude, but they were unnecessary in any case; Lenton was already turning back to Obversaria. There was indeed no time to waste; Laurence waved Temeraire on and ran for their usual clearing on foot, careless of his dignity. A scattered, intensely excited rush of thoughts, all fragmentary: great relief; of course Temeraire would never have stayed behind; how wretched they would have looked, jumping into a battle against orders; in a moment they would be aloft, yet nothing had truly changed in their circumstances: this might be the last time.\n\nMany of his crewmen were sitting outside in the open, polishing equipment and oiling harness unnecessarily, pretending not to be watching the sky; they were silent and downcast; and at first they only stared when Laurence came running into the clearing. \"Where is Granby?\" he demanded. \"Full muster, gentlemen; heavy-combat rig, at once.\"\n\nBy then Temeraire was overhead and descending, and the rest of the crew came spilling out of the barracks, cheering him; a general stampede towards small-arms and gear ensued, that rush which had once looked like chaos to Laurence, used as he was to naval order, but which accomplished the tremendous affair of getting a dragon equipped in a frantic hurry.\n\nGranby came out of the barracks amid the cavalcade: a tall young officer dark-haired and lanky, his fair skin, ordinarily burnt and peeling from daily flying, but for once unmarred thanks to the weeks of being grounded. He was an aviator born and bred, as Laurence was not, and their acquaintance had not been without early friction: like many other aviators, he had resented so prime a dragon as Temeraire being claimed by a naval officer. But that resentment had not survived a shared action, and Laurence had never yet regretted taking him on as first lieutenant, despite the wide divergence in their characters. Granby had made an initial attempt out of respect to imitate the formalities which were to Laurence, raised a gentleman, as natural as breathing; but they had not taken root. Like most aviators, raised from the age of seven far from polite society, he was by nature given to a sort of easy liberty which looked a great deal like license to a censorious eye.\n\n\"Laurence, it is damned good to see you,\" he said now, coming to seize Laurence's hand: quite unconscious of any impropriety in addressing his commanding officer so, and making no salute; indeed he was at the same time trying to hook his sword onto his belt one-handed. \"Have they changed their minds, then? I hadn't looked for anything like such good sense, but I will be the first to beg their Lordships' pardon if they have given up this notion of sending him to China.\"\n\nFor his part, Laurence had long since accepted that no disrespect was intended; at present he scarcely even noticed the informality; he was too bitterly sorry to disappoint Granby, especially now knowing that he had refused a prime position out of loyalty. \"I am afraid not, John, but there is no time now to explain: we must get Temeraire aloft at once. Half the usual armaments, and leave the bombs; the Navy will not thank us for sinking the ships, and if it becomes really necessary Temeraire can do more damage roaring away at them.\"\n\n\"Right you are,\" Granby said, and dashed away at once to the other side of the clearing, calling out orders all around. The great leather harness was already being carried out in double-quick time, and Temeraire was doing his best to help matters along, crouching low to the ground to make it easier for the men to adjust the broad weight-bearing straps across his back.\n\nThe panels of chainmail for his breast and belly were heaved out almost as quickly. \"No ceremony,\" Laurence said, and so the aerial crew scrambled aboard pell-mell as soon as their positions were clear, disregarding the usual order.\n\n\"We are ten short, I am sorry to say,\" Granby said, coming back to his side. \"I sent six men to Maximus's crew at the Admiral's request; the others\u2014\" He hesitated.\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, sparing him; the men had naturally been unhappy at having no part of the action, and the missing four had undoubtedly slipped away to seek better or at least more thorough consolation in a bottle or a woman than could be found in busy-work. He was pleased it was so few, and he did not mean to come the tyrant over them afterwards: he felt at present he had no moral ground on which to stand. \"We will manage; but if there are any fellows on the ground crew who are handy with pistol or sword, and not prone to height-sickness, let us get them hooked on if they choose to volunteer.\"\n\nHe himself had already shifted his coat for the long heavy one of leather used in combat, and was now strapping his carabiner belt over. A low many-voiced roar began, not very far away; Laurence looked up: the smaller dragons were going aloft, and he recognized Dulcia and the grey-blue Nitidus, the end-wing members of their formation, flying in circles as they waited for the others to rise.\n\n\"Laurence, are you not ready? Do hurry, please, the others are going up,\" Temeraire said, anxiously, craning his head about to look; above them the middle-weight dragons were coming into view also.\n\nGranby swung himself aboard, along with a couple of tall young harness-men, Willoughby and Porter; Laurence waited until he saw them latched onto the rings of the harness and secure, then said, \"All is ready; try away.\"\n\nThis was one ritual that could not in safety be set aside: Temeraire rose up onto his hind legs and shook himself, making certain that the harness was secure and all the men properly hooked on. \"Harder,\" Laurence called sharply: Temeraire was not being particularly vigorous, in his anxiety to be away.\n\nTemeraire snorted but obeyed, and still nothing pulled loose or fell off. \"All lies well; please come aboard now,\" he said, thumping to the ground and holding out his foreleg at once; Laurence stepped into the claw and was rather quickly tossed up to his usual place at the base of Temeraire's neck. He did not mind at all: he was pleased, exhilarated by everything: the deeply satisfying sound as his carabiner rings locked into place, the buttery feel of the oiled, double-stitched leather straps of the harness; and beneath him Temeraire's muscles were already gathering for the leap aloft.\n\nMaximus suddenly erupted out of the trees to the north of them, his great red-and-gold body even larger than before, as Roland had reported. He was still the only Regal Copper stationed at the Channel, and he dwarfed every other creature in sight, blotting out an enormous swath of the sun. Temeraire roared joyfully at the sight and leapt up after him, black wings beating a little too quickly with over-excitement.\n\n\"Gently,\" Laurence called; Temeraire bobbed his head in acknowledgment, but they still overshot the slower dragon.\n\n\"Maximus, Maximus; look, I am back,\" Temeraire called out, circling back down to take his position alongside the big dragon, and they began beating up together to the formation's flying height. \"I took Laurence away from London,\" he added triumphantly, in what he likely thought a confidential whisper. \"They were trying to arrest him.\"\n\n\"Did he kill someone?\" Maximus asked with interest in his deep echoing voice, not at all disapproving. \"I am glad you are back; they have been making me fly in the middle while you were gone, and all the maneuvers are different,\" he added.\n\n\"No,\" said Temeraire, \"he only came and talked to me when some fat old man said he should not, which does not seem like any reason to me.\"\n\n\"You had better shut up that Jacobin of a dragon of yours,\" Berkley shouted across from Maximus's back, while Laurence shook his head in despair, trying to ignore the inquisitive looks from his young ensigns.\n\n\"Pray remember we are on business, Temeraire,\" Laurence called, trying to be severe; but after all there was no sense in trying to keep it a secret; the news would surely be all over in a week. They would be forced to confront the gravity of their situation soon enough; little enough harm in letting Temeraire indulge in high spirits so long as he might.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Granby said at his shoulder, \"in the hurry, the ammunition was all laid in its usual place on the left, though we are not carrying the bombs to balance it out; we ought to restow.\"\n\n\"Can you have it done before we engage? Oh, good Lord,\" Laurence said, realizing. \"I do not even know the position of the convoy; do you?\" Granby shook his head, embarrassed, and Laurence swallowed his pride and shouted, \"Berkley, where are we going?\"\n\nA general explosion of mirth ran among the men on Maximus's back. Berkley called back, \"Straight to Hell, ha ha!\" More laughter, nearly drowning out the coordinates that he bellowed over.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes' flight, then.\" Laurence was mentally running the calculation through in his head. \"And we ought to save at least five of those minutes for grace.\"\n\nGranby nodded. \"We can manage it,\" he said, and clambered down at once to organize the operation, unhooking and rehooking the carabiners with practiced skill from the evenly spaced rings leading down Temeraire's side to the storage nets slung beneath his belly.\n\nThe rest of the formation was already in place as Temeraire and Maximus rose to take their defensive positions at the rear. Laurence noticed the formation-leader flag streaming out from Lily's back; that meant that during their absence, Captain Harcourt had at last been given the command. He was glad to see the change: it was hard on the signal-ensign to have to watch a wing dragon as well as keep an eye forward, and the dragons would always instinctively follow the lead regardless of formal precedence.\n\nStill, he could not help feeling how strange that he should find himself taking orders from a twenty-year-old girl: Harcourt was still a very young officer, promoted over-quick due to Lily's unexpectedly early hatching. But command in the Corps had to follow the capabilities of the dragons, and a rare acid-spitter like one of the Longwings was too valuable to place anywhere but the center of a formation, even if they would only accept female handlers.\n\n\"Signal from the Admiral: proceed to meeting,\" called the signal-ensign, Turner; a moment later the signal formation keep together broke out on Lily's signal-yard, and the dragons were pressing on, shortly reaching their cruising speed of a steady seventeen knots: an easy pace for Temeraire, but all that the Yellow Reapers and the enormous Maximus could manage comfortably for any length of time.\n\nThere was time to loosen his sword in the sheath, and load his pistols fresh; below, Granby was shouting orders over the wind: he did not sound frantic, and Laurence had every confidence in his power to get the work completed in time. The dragons of the covert made an impressive spread, even though this was not so large a force in numbers as had been assembled for the Battle of Dover in October, which had fended off Napoleon's invasion attempt.\n\nBut in that battle, they had been forced to send up every available dragon, even the little couriers: most of the fighting-dragons had been away south at Trafalgar. Today Excidium and Captain Roland's formation were back in the lead, ten dragons strong, the smallest of them a middle-weight Yellow Reaper, and all of them flying in perfect formation, not a wingbeat out of place: the skill born of many long years in formation together.\n\nLily's formation was nothing so imposing, as yet: only six dragons flying behind her, with her flank and end-wing positions held by smaller and more maneuverable beasts with older officers, who could more easily compensate for any errors made from inexperience by Lily herself, or by Maximus and Temeraire in the back line. Even as they drew closer, Laurence saw Sutton, the captain of their mid-wing Messoria, stand up on her back and turn to look over at them, making sure all was well with the younger dragons. Laurence raised a hand in acknowledgment, and saw Berkley doing the same.\n\nThe sails of the French convoy and the Channel Fleet were visible long before the dragons came into range. There was a stately quality to the scene below: chessboard pieces moving into place, with the British ships advancing in eager haste towards the great crowd of smaller French merchantmen; a glorious spread of white sail to be seen on every ship, and the British colors streaming among them. Granby came clambering back up along the shoulder-strap to Laurence's side. \"We'll do nicely now, I think.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Laurence said absently, his attention all on what he could see of the British fleet, peering down over Temeraire's shoulder through his glass. Mostly fast-sailing frigates, with a motley collection of smaller sloops, and a handful of sixty-four- and seventy-four-gun ships. The Navy would not risk the largest first- and second-rate ships against the fire-breather; too easy for one lucky attack to send a three-decker packed full of powder up like a light, taking half-a-dozen smaller ships along with her.\n\n\"All hands to their stations, Mr. Harley,\" Laurence said, straightening up, and the young ensign hurried to set the signal-strap embedded in the harness to red. The riflemen stationed along Temeraire's back let themselves partly down his sides, readying their guns, while the rest of the topmen all crouched low, pistols in their hands.\n\nExcidium and the rest of the larger formation dropped low over the British warships, taking up the more important defensive position and leaving the field to them. As Lily increased their speed, Temeraire gave a low growling rumble, the tremor palpable through his hide. Laurence spared a moment to lean over and put his bare hand on the side of Temeraire's neck: no words necessary, and he felt a slight easing of the nervous tension before he straightened and pulled his leather riding glove back on.\n\n\"Enemy in sight,\" came faint but audible in the shrill high voice of Lily's forward lookout, carrying back to them on the wind, echoed a moment later by young Allen, stationed near the joint of Temeraire's wing. A general murmur went around the men, and Laurence snapped out his glass again for a look.\n\n\"La Crabe Grande, I think,\" he said, handing the telescope over to Granby, hoping privately that he had not mangled the pronunciation too badly. He was quite sure that he had identified the formation style correctly, despite his lack of experience in aerial actions; there were few composed of fourteen dragons, and the shape was highly distinct, with the two pincer-like rows of smaller dragons stretched out to either side of the cluster of big ones in the center.\n\nThe Flamme-de-Gloire was not easy to spot, with several decoy dragons of similar coloring shifting about: a pair of Papillon Noirs with yellow markings painted over their natural blue and green stripes to make them confusingly alike from a distance. \"Hah, I have made her: it is Accendare. There she is, the wicked thing,\" Granby said, handing back the glass and pointing. \"She has a talon missing from her left rear leg, and she is blind in the right eye: we gave her a good dose of pepper back in the battle of the Glorious First.\"\n\n\"I see her. Mr. Harley, pass the word to all the lookouts. Temeraire,\" he called, bringing up the speaking-trumpet, \"do you see the Flamme-de-Gloire? She is the one low and to the right, with the missing talon; she is weak in the right eye.\"\n\n\"I see her,\" Temeraire said eagerly, turning his head just slightly. \"Are we to attack her?\"\n\n\"Our first duty is to keep her fire away from the Navy's ships; have an eye on her as best you can,\" Laurence said, and Temeraire bobbed his head once in quick answer, straightening out again.\n\nHe tucked away the glass in the small pouch hooked onto the harness: no more need for it, very soon. \"You had better get below, John,\" Laurence said. \"I expect they will try a boarding with a few of those light fellows on their edges.\"\n\nAll this while they had been rapidly closing the distance: suddenly there was no more time, and the French were wheeling about in perfect unison, not one dragon falling out of formation, graceful as a flock of birds. A low whistle came behind him; admittedly it was an impressive sight, but Laurence frowned though his own heart was speeding involuntarily. \"Belay that noise.\"\n\nOne of the Papillons was directly ahead of them, jaws spreading wide as if to breathe flames it could not produce; Laurence felt an odd, detached amusement to see a dragon play-acting. Temeraire could not roar from his position in the rear, not with Messoria and Lily both in the way, but he did not duck away at all; instead he raised his claws, and as the two formations swept together and intermingled, he and the Papillon pulled up and collided with a force that jarred all of their crews loose.\n\nLaurence grappled for the harness and got his feet back underneath him. \"Clap on there, Allen,\" he said, reaching; the boy was dangling by his carabiner straps with his arms and legs waving about wildly like an overturned tortoise. Allen managed to get himself braced and clung, his face pale and shading to green; like the other lookouts, he was only a new ensign, barely twelve years old, and he had not quite learned to manage himself aboard during the stops and starts of battle.\n\nTemeraire was clawing and biting, his wings beating madly as he tried to keep hold of the Papillon: the French dragon was lighter in weight, and plainly all he now wanted was to get free and back to his formation. \"Hold position,\" Laurence shouted: more important to keep the formation together for the moment. Temeraire reluctantly let the Papillon go and leveled out.\n\nBelow, distantly, came the first sound of cannon-fire: bow-chasers on the British ships, hoping to knock away some of the French merchantmen's spars with a lucky shot or two. Not likely, but it would put the men in the right frame of mind. A steady rattle and clang behind him as the riflemen reloaded; all the harness he could see looked still in good order; no sign of dripping blood, and Temeraire was flying well. No time to ask how he was; they were coming about, Lily taking them straight for the enemy formation again.\n\nBut this time the French offered no resistance: instead the dragons scattered; wildly, Laurence thought at first, then he perceived how well they had distributed themselves around. Four of the smaller dragons darted upwards; the rest dropped perhaps a hundred feet in height, and Accendare was once again hard to tell from the decoys.\n\nNo clear target anymore, and with the dragons above the formation itself was dangerously vulnerable: engage the enemy more closely went up the yard on Lily's back, signaling that they might disperse and fight separately. Temeraire could read the flags as well as any signal-officer: he instantly dived for the decoy with bleeding scratches, a little too eager to complete his own handiwork. \"No, Temeraire,\" Laurence called, meaning to direct him after Accendare herself, but too late: two of the smaller dragons, both of the common P\u00eacheur-Ray\u00e9 breed, were coming at them from either side.\n\n\"Prepare to repel boarders,\" Lieutenant Ferris, captain of the topmen, shouted from behind him. Two of the sturdiest midwingmen took up stations just behind Laurence's position; he glanced over his shoulder at them, his mouth tightening: it still rankled him to be so shielded, too much like cowardly hiding behind others, but no dragon would fight with a sword laid at its captain's throat, and so he had to bear it.\n\nTemeraire contented himself with one more slash across the fleeing decoy's shoulders and writhed away, almost doubling back on himself. The pursuers overshot and had to turn back: a clear gain of a minute, worth more than gold at present. Laurence cast an eye over the field: the quick light-combat dragons were dashing about to fend off the British dragons, but the larger ones were forming back into a cluster and keeping pace with their convoy.\n\nA powder-flash below caught his eye; an instant later came the thin whistling of a pepper-ball, flying up from the French ships. Another of their formation members, Immortalis, had dived just a hair too low in pursuit of one of the other dragons. Fortunately their aim was off: the ball struck his shoulder instead of his face, and the best part of the pepper scattered down harmlessly into the sea; even the remainder was enough to set the poor fellow sneezing, blowing himself ten lengths back at a time.\n\n\"Digby, cast and mark that height,\" Laurence said; it was the starboard forward lookout's duty to warn when they entered the range of the guns below.\n\nDigby took the small round-shot, bored through and tied to the height-line, and tossed it over Temeraire's shoulder, the thin silk cord paying out with the knotted marks for every fifty yards flying through his fingers. \"Six at the mark, seventeen at the water,\" he said, counting from Immortalis's height, and cut the cord. \"Range five hundred fifty yards on the pepper-guns, sir.\" He was already whipping the cord through another ball, to be ready when the next measure should be called for.\n\nA shorter range than usual; were they holding back, trying to tempt the more dangerous dragons lower, or was the wind checking their shot? \"Keep to six hundred yards' elevation, Temeraire,\" Laurence called; best to be cautious for the moment.\n\n\"Sir, lead signal to us, fall in on left flank Maximus,\" Turner said.\n\nNo immediate way to get over to him: the two P\u00eacheurs were back, trying to flank Temeraire and get men aboard, although they were flying somewhat strangely, not in a straight line. \"What are they about?\" Martin said, and the question answered itself readily in Laurence's mind.\n\n\"They fear giving him a target for his roar,\" Laurence said, making it loud for Temeraire's benefit. Temeraire snorted in disdain, abruptly halted in mid-air, and whipped himself about, hovering to face the pair with his ruff standing high: the smaller dragons, clearly alarmed by the presentation, backwinged out of instinct, giving them room.\n\n\"Hah!\" Temeraire stopped and hovered, pleased with himself at seeing the others so afraid of his prowess; Laurence had to tug on the harness to draw his attention around to the signal, which he had not yet seen. \"Oh, I see!\" he said, and dashed forward to take up position to Maximus's left; Lily was already on his right.\n\nHarcourt's intention was clear. \"All hands low,\" Laurence said, and crouched against Temeraire's neck even as he gave the order. Instantly they were in place, Berkley sent Maximus ahead at the big dragon's top speed, right at the clustered French dragons.\n\nTemeraire was swelling with breath, his ruff coming up; they were going so quickly the wind was beating tears from Laurence's eyes, but he could see Lily's head drawing back in similar preparation. Maximus put his head down and drove straight into the French dragons, simply bulling through their ranks with his enormous advantage in weight: the dragons fell off to his either side, only to meet Temeraire roaring and Lily spraying her corrosive acid.\n\nShrieks of pain in their wake, and the first dead crewmen were being cut loose from harness and sent falling into the ocean, rag-doll limp. The French dragons' forward motion had nearly halted, many of them panicking and scattering, this time with no thought to the pattern. Then Maximus and they were through: the cluster had broken apart and now Accendare was shielded from them only by a Petit Chevalier, slightly larger than Temeraire, and another of Accendare's decoys.\n\nThey slowed; Maximus was heaving for breath, fighting to keep elevation. Harcourt waved wildly at Laurence from Lily's back, shouting hoarsely through her speaking-trumpet, \"Go after her,\" even while the formal signal was going up on Lily's back. Laurence touched Temeraire's side and sent him forward; Lily sprayed another burst of acid, and the two defending dragons recoiled, enough for Temeraire to dodge past them and get through.\n\nGranby's voice came from below, yelling: \" 'Ware boarders!\" So some Frenchmen had made the leap to Temeraire's back. Laurence had no time to look: directly before his face Accendare was twisting around, scarcely ten yards distant. Her right eye was milky, the left wicked and glaring, a pale yellow pupil in black sclera; she had long thin horns curving down from her forehead and to the very edge of her jaws, her opening jaws: a heat-shimmer distorted the air as flames came bursting out upon them. Very like looking into the mouth of Hell, he thought for that one narrow instant, staring into the red maw; then Temeraire snapped his wings shut and fell out of the way like a stone.\n\nLaurence's stomach leapt; behind him he heard clatter and cries of surprise, the boarders and defenders alike losing their footing. It seemed only a moment before Temeraire opened his wings again and began to beat up hard, but they had plummeted some distance, and Accendare was flying rapidly away from them, back to the ships below.\n\nThe rearmost merchant ships of the French convoy had come within the accurate range of long guns of the British men-of-war: the steady roar of cannon-fire rose, mingled with sulfur and smoke. The quickest frigates had already moved on ahead, passing by the merchantmen under fire and continuing for the richer prizes at the front. In doing so, however, they had left the shelter of Excidium's formation, and Accendare now stooped towards them, her crew throwing the fist-sized iron incendiaries over her sides, which she bathed with flame as they fell towards the vulnerable British ships.\n\nMore than half the shells fell into the sea, much more; mindful of Temeraire's pursuit, Accendare had not gone very low, and aim could not be accurate from so high up. But Laurence could see a handful blooming into flame below: the thin metal shells broke as they struck the decks of the ships, and the naphtha within ignited against the hot metal, spreading a pool of fire across the deck.\n\nTemeraire gave a low growl of anger as he saw fire catch the sails of one of the frigates, instantly putting on another burst of speed to go after Accendare; he had been hatched on deck, spent the first three weeks of his life at sea: the affection remained. Laurence urged him on with word and touch, full of the same anger. Intent on the pursuit and watching for other dragons who might be close enough to offer her support, Laurence was startled out of his single-minded focus unpleasantly: Croyn, one of the topmen, fell onto him before rolling away and off Temeraire's back, mouth round and open, hands reaching; his carabiner straps had been severed.\n\nHe missed the harness, his hands slipping over Temeraire's smooth hide; Laurence snatched at him, uselessly: the boy was falling, arms flailing at the empty air, down a quarter of a mile and gone into the water: only a small splash; he did not resurface. Another man went down just after him, one of the boarders, but already dead even as he tumbled slack-limbed through the air. Laurence loosened his own straps and stood, turning around as he drew his pistols. Seven boarders were still aboard, fighting very hard. One with lieutenant's bars on his shoulders was only a few paces away, engaged closely with Quarle, the second of the midwingmen who had been set to guard Laurence.\n\nEven as Laurence got to his feet, the lieutenant knocked aside Quarle's arm with his sword and drove a vicious-looking long knife into his side left-handed. Quarle dropped his own sword and put his hands around the hilt, sinking, coughing blood. Laurence had a wide-open shot, but just behind the lieutenant, one of the boarders had driven Martin to his knees: the midwingman's neck was bare to the man's cutlass.\n\nLaurence leveled his pistol and fired: the boarder fell backwards with a hole in his chest spurting, and Martin heaved himself back to his feet. Before Laurence could take fresh aim and set off the other, the lieutenant took the risk of slashing his own straps and leapt over Quarle's body, catching Laurence's arm both for support and to push the pistol aside. It was an extraordinary maneuver, whether for bravery or recklessness; \"Bravo,\" Laurence said, involuntarily. The Frenchman looked at him startled, and then smiled, incongruously boyish in his blood-streaked face, before he brought his sword up.\n\nLaurence had an unfair advantage, of course; he was useless dead, for a dragon whose captain had been killed would turn with utmost savagery on the enemy: uncontrolled but very dangerous nonetheless. The Frenchman needed him prisoner, not killed, and that made him overly cautious, while Laurence could freely aim for a killing blow and strike as best as ever he could.\n\nBut that was not very well, currently. It was an odd battle; they were upon the narrow base of Temeraire's neck, so closely engaged that Laurence was not at a disadvantage from the tall lieutenant's greater reach, but that same condition let the Frenchman keep his grip on Laurence, without which he would certainly have slipped off. They were more pushing at one another than truly sword-fighting; their blades hardly ever parted more than an inch or two before coming together again, and Laurence began to think the contest would only be ended if one or the other of them fell.\n\nLaurence risked a step; it let him turn them both slightly, so he could see the rest of the struggle over the lieutenant's shoulder. Martin and Ferris were both still standing, and several of the riflemen, but they were outnumbered, and if even a couple more of the boarders managed to get past, it would be very awkward for Laurence indeed. Several of the bellmen were trying to come up from below, but the boarders had detached a couple of men to fend them off: as Laurence watched, Johnson was stabbed through and fell.\n\n\"Vive l'Empereur,\" the lieutenant shouted to his men encouragingly, looking also; he took heart from the favorable position and struck again, aiming for Laurence's leg. Laurence deflected the blow: his sword rang oddly with the impact, though, and he realized with an unpleasant shock that he was fighting with his dress-sword, worn to the Admiralty the day before: he had never had a chance to exchange it.\n\nHe began to fight more narrowly, trying not to meet the Frenchman's sword anywhere below the midpoint of his sword: he did not want to lose his entire blade if it were going to snap. Another sharp blow, at his right arm: he blocked it as well, but this time five inches of steel did indeed snap off, scoring a thin line across his jaw before it tumbled away, red-gold in the reflected firelight.\n\nThe Frenchman had seen the weakness of the blade now, and was trying to batter it into pieces. Another crack and more of the blade went: Laurence was fighting with only six inches of steel now, with the paste brilliants on the silver-plated hilt sparkling at him mockingly, ridiculous. He clenched his jaw; he was not going to surrender and see Temeraire ordered to France: he would be damned first. If he jumped over the side, calling, there was some hope Temeraire might catch him; if not, then at least he would not be responsible for delivering Temeraire into Napoleon's hands after all.\n\nThen a shout: Granby came swarming up the rear tail-strap without benefit of carabiners, locked himself back on and lunged for the man guarding the left side of the belly-strap. The man fell dead, and six bellmen almost at once burst into the tops: the remaining boarders drew into a tight knot, but in a moment they would have to surrender or be killed. Martin had turned and was already clambering over Quarle's body, freed by the relief from below, and his sword was ready.\n\n\"Ah, voici un joli g\u00e2chis,\" the lieutenant said in tones of despair, looking also, and he made a last gallant attempt, binding Laurence's hilt with his own blade, and using the length as a lever: he managed to pry it out of Laurence's hand with a great heave, but just as he did he staggered, surprised, and blood came out of his nose. He fell forward into Laurence's arms, senseless: young Digby was standing rather wobblingly behind him, holding the round-shot on the measuring cord; he had crept along from his lookout's post on Temeraire's shoulder, and struck the Frenchman on the head.\n\n\"Well done,\" Laurence said, after he had worked out what had happened; the boy flushed up proudly. \"Mr. Martin, heave this fellow below to the infirmary, will you?\" Laurence handed the Frenchman's limp form over. \"He fought quite like a lion.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir.\" Martin's mouth kept moving, he was saying something more, but a roar from above was drowning out his voice: it was the last thing Laurence heard.\n\nThe low and dangerous rumble of Temeraire's growl, just above him, penetrated the smothering unconsciousness. Laurence tried to move, to look around him, but the light stabbed painfully at his eyes, and his leg did not want to answer at all; groping blindly down along his thigh, he found it entangled with the leather straps of his harness, and felt a wet trickle of blood where one of the buckles had torn through his breeches and into his skin.\n\nHe thought for a moment perhaps they had been captured; but the voices he heard were English, and then he recognized Barham, shouting, and Granby saying fiercely, \"No, sir, no farther, not one damned step. Temeraire, if those men make ready, you may knock them down.\"\n\nLaurence struggled to sit up, and then suddenly there were anxious hands supporting him. \"Steady, sir, are you all right?\" It was young Digby, pressing a dripping water-bag into his hands. Laurence wetted his lips, but he did not dare to swallow; his stomach was roiling. \"Help me stand,\" he said, hoarsely, trying to squint his eyes open a little.\n\n\"No, sir, you mustn't,\" Digby whispered urgently. \"You have had a nasty knock on the head, and those fellows, they have come to arrest you. Granby said we had to keep you out of sight and wait for the Admiral.\"\n\nHe was lying behind the protective curl of Temeraire's foreleg, with the hard-packed dirt of the clearing underneath him; Digby and Allen, the forward lookouts, were crouched down on either side of him. Small rivulets of dark blood were running down Temeraire's leg to stain the ground black, not far away. \"He is wounded,\" Laurence said sharply, trying to get up again.\n\n\"Mr. Keynes is gone for bandages, sir; a P\u00eacheur hit us across the shoulders, but it is only a few scratches,\" Digby said, holding him back; which attempt was successful, because Laurence could not make his wrenched leg even bend, much less carry any weight. \"You are not to get up, sir, Baylesworth is getting a stretcher.\"\n\n\"Enough of this, help me rise,\" Laurence said, sharply; Lenton could not possibly come quickly, so soon after a battle, and he did not mean to lie about letting matters get worse. He made Digby and Allen help him rise and limp out from the concealment, the two ensigns struggling under his weight.\n\nBarham was there with a dozen Marines, these not the inexperienced boys of his escort in London but hard-bitten soldiers, older men, and they had brought with them a pepper-gun: only a small, short-barreled one, but at this range they hardly needed better. Barham was almost purple in the face, quarreling with Granby at the side of the clearing; when he caught sight of Laurence his eyes went narrow. \"There you are; did you think you could hide here, like a coward? Stand down that animal, at once; Sergeant, go there and take him.\"\n\n\"You are not to come anywhere near Laurence, at all,\" Temeraire snarled at the soldiers, before Laurence could make any reply, and raised one deadly clawed foreleg, ready to strike. The blood streaking his shoulders and neck made him look truly savage, and his great ruff was standing up stiffly around his head.\n\nThe men flinched a little, but the sergeant said, stolidly, \"Run out that gun, Corporal,\" and gestured to the rest of them to raise up their muskets.\n\nIn alarm, Laurence called out to him hoarsely, \"Temeraire, stop; for God's sake settle,\" but it was useless; Temeraire was in a red-eyed rage, and did not take any notice. Even if the musketry did not cause him serious injury, the pepper-gun would surely blind and madden him even further, and he could easily be driven into a truly uncontrolled frenzy, terrible both to himself and to others.\n\nThe trees to the west of them shook suddenly, and abruptly Maximus's enormous head and shoulders came rising up out of the growth; he flung his head back yawning tremendously, exposing rows of serrated teeth, and shook himself all over. \"Is the battle not over? What is all the noise?\"\n\n\"You there!\" Barham shouted at the big Regal Copper, pointing at Temeraire. \"Hold down that dragon!\"\n\nLike all Regal Coppers, Maximus was badly farsighted; to see into the clearing, he was forced to rear up onto his haunches to gain enough distance. He was twice Temeraire's size by weight and twenty feet more in length now; his wings, half-outspread for balance, threw a long shadow ahead of him, and with the sun behind him they glowed redly, veins standing out in the translucent skin.\n\nLooming over them all, he drew his head back on his neck and peered into the clearing. \"Why do you need to be held down?\" he asked Temeraire, interestedly.\n\n\"I do not need to be held down!\" Temeraire said, almost spitting in his anger, ruff quivering; the blood was running more freely down his shoulders. \"Those men want to take Laurence from me, and put him in prison, and execute him, and I will not let them, ever, and I do not care if Laurence tells me not to squash you,\" he added, fiercely, to Lord Barham.\n\n\"Good God,\" Laurence said, low and appalled; it had not occurred to him the real nature of Temeraire's fear. But the only time Temeraire had ever seen an arrest, the man taken had been a traitor, executed shortly thereafter before the eyes of the man's own dragon. The experience had left Temeraire and all the young dragons of the covert crushed with sympathetic misery for days; it was no wonder if he was panicked now.\n\nGranby took advantage of the unwitting distraction Maximus had provided and made a quick, impulsive gesture to the other officers of Temeraire's crew: Ferris and Evans jumped to follow him, Riggs and his riflemen scrambling after, and in a moment they were all ranged defensively in front of Temeraire, raising pistols and rifles. It was all bravado, their guns spent from the battle, but that did not in any way reduce the significance. Laurence shut his eyes in dismay. Granby and all his men had just flung themselves into the stew-pot with him, by such direct disobedience; indeed there was increasingly every justification to call this a mutiny.\n\nThe muskets facing them did not waver, though; the Marines were still hurrying to finish loading the gun, tamping down one of the big round pepper-balls with a small wad. \"Make ready!\" the corporal said. Laurence could not think what to do; if he ordered Temeraire to knock down the gun, they would be attacking fellow-soldiers, men only doing their duty: unforgivable, even to his own mind, and only a little less unthinkable than standing by while they injured Temeraire, or his own men.\n\n\"What the devil do you all mean here?\" Keynes, the dragon-surgeon assigned to Temeraire's care, had just come back into the clearing, two staggering assistants behind him laden down with fresh white bandages and thin silk thread for stitching. He shoved his way through the startled Marines, his well-salted hair and blood-spattered coat giving him a badge of authority they did not choose to defy, and snatched the slow-match out of the hands of the man standing by the pepper-gun.\n\nHe flung it to the ground and stamped it out, and glared all around, sparing neither Barham and the Marines nor Granby and his men, impartially furious. \"He is fresh from the field; have you all taken leave of your senses? You cannot be stirring up dragons like this after a battle; in half a minute we will have the rest of the covert looking in, and not just that great busybody there,\" he added, pointing at Maximus.\n\nIndeed more dragons had already lifted their heads up above the tree cover, trying to crane their heads over to see what was going on, making a great noise of cracking branches; the ground even trembled underfoot when the abashed Maximus dropped lower, back down to his haunches, in an attempt to make his curiosity less obvious. Barham uneasily looked around at the many inquisitive spectators: dragons ordinarily ate directly after a battle, and many of them had gore dripping from their jaws, bones cracking audibly as they chewed.\n\nKeynes did not give him time to recover. \"Out, out at once, the lot of you; I cannot be operating in the middle of this circus, and as for you,\" he snapped at Laurence, \"lie down again at once; I gave orders you were to be taken straight to the surgeons. Christ only knows what you are doing to that leg, hopping about on it. Where is Baylesworth with that stretcher?\"\n\nBarham, wavering, was caught by this. \"Laurence is damned well under arrest, and I have a mind to clap the rest of you mutinous dogs into irons also,\" he began, only to have Keynes wheel on him in turn.\n\n\"You can arrest him in the morning, after that leg has been seen to, and his dragon. Of all the blackguardly, unchristian notions, storming in on wounded men and beasts\u2014\" Keynes was literally shaking his fist in Barham's face; an alarming prospect, thanks to the wickedly hooked ten-inch tenaculum clenched in his fingers, and the moral force of his argument was very great: Barham stepped back, involuntarily. The Marines gratefully took it as a signal, beginning to drag the gun back out of the clearing with them, and Barham, baffled and deserted, was forced to give way.\n\nThe delay thus won lasted only a short while. The surgeons scratched their heads over Laurence's leg; the bone was not broken, despite the breathtaking pain when they roughly palpated the limb, and there was no visible wound, save the great mottled bruises covering nearly every scrap of skin. His head ached fiercely also, but there was little they could do but offer him laudanum, which he refused, and order him to keep his weight off the leg: advice as practical as it was unnecessary, since he could not stand for any length of time without suffering a collapse.\n\nMeanwhile, Temeraire's own wounds, thankfully minor, were sewed up, and with much coaxing Laurence persuaded him to eat a little, despite his agitation. By morning, it was plain Temeraire was healing well, with no sign of wound-fever, and there was no excuse for further delay; a formal summons had come from Admiral Lenton, ordering Laurence to report to the covert headquarters. He had to be carried in an elbow-chair, leaving behind him an uneasy and restive Temeraire. \"If you do not come back by tomorrow morning, I will come and find you,\" he vowed, and would not be dissuaded.\n\nLaurence could do little in honesty to reassure him: there was every likelihood he was to be arrested, if Lenton had not managed some miracle of persuasion, and after these multiple offenses a court-martial might very well impose a death-sentence. Ordinarily an aviator would not be hanged for anything less than outright treason. But Barham would surely have him up before a board of Navy officers, who would be far more severe, and consideration for preserving the dragon's service would not enter into their deliberations: Temeraire was already lost to England, as a fighting-dragon, by the demands of the Chinese.\n\nIt was by no means an easy or a comfortable situation, and still worse was the knowledge that he had imperiled his men; Granby would have to answer for his defiance, and the other lieutenants also, Evans and Ferris and Riggs; any or all of them might be dismissed the service: a terrible fate for an aviator, raised in the ranks from early childhood. Even those midwingmen who never passed for lieutenant were not usually sent away; some work would be found for them, in the breeding grounds or in the coverts, that they might remain in the society of their fellows.\n\nThough his leg had improved some little way overnight, Laurence was still pale and sweating even from the short walk he risked taking up the front stairs of the building. The pain was increasing sharply, dizzying, and he was forced to stop and catch his breath before he went into the small office.\n\n\"Good Heaven; I thought you had been let go by the surgeons. Sit down, Laurence, before you fall down; take this,\" Lenton said, ignoring Barham's scowl of impatience, and put a glass of brandy into Laurence's hand.\n\n\"Thank you, sir; you are not mistaken, I have been released,\" Laurence said, and only sipped once for politeness's sake; his head was already clouded badly enough.\n\n\"That is enough; he is not here to be coddled,\" Barham said. \"Never in my life have I seen such outrageous behavior, and from an officer\u2014By God, Laurence, I have never taken pleasure in a hanging, but on this occasion I would call it good riddance. But Lenton swears to me your beast will become unmanageable; though how we should tell the difference I can hardly say.\"\n\nLenton's lips tightened at this disdainful tone; Laurence could only imagine the humiliating lengths to which he had been forced in order to impress this understanding on Barham. Though Lenton was an admiral, and fresh from another great victory, even that meant very little in any larger sphere; Barham could offend him with impunity, where any admiral in the Navy would have had political influence and friends enough to require more respectful handling.\n\n\"You are to be dismissed the service, that is beyond question,\" Barham continued. \"But off to China the animal must go, and for that, I am sorry to say, we require your cooperation. Find some way to persuade him, and we will leave the matter there; any more of this recalcitrance, and I am damned if I will not hang you after all; yes, and have the animal shot, and be damned to those Chinamen also.\"\n\nThis last very nearly brought Laurence out of his chair, despite his injury; only Lenton's hand on his shoulder, pressing down firmly, held him in place. \"Sir, you go too far,\" Lenton said. \"We have never shot dragons in England for anything less than man-eating, and we are not going to start now; I would have a real mutiny on my hands.\"\n\nBarham scowled, and muttered something not quite intelligible under his breath about lack of discipline; which was a fine thing coming from a man whom Laurence well knew had served during the great naval mutinies of '97, when half the fleet had risen up. \"Well, let us hope it does not come to any such thing. There is a transport in ordinary in harbor at Spithead, the Allegiance; she can be made ready for sea in a week. How then are we to get the animal aboard, since he is choosing to be balky?\"\n\nLaurence could not bring himself to answer; a week was a horribly short time, and for a moment he even wildly allowed himself to consider the prospect of flight. Temeraire could easily reach the Continent from Dover, and there were places in the forests of the German states where even now feral dragons lived; though only small breeds.\n\n\"It will require some consideration,\" Lenton said. \"I will not scruple to say, sir, that the whole affair has been mismanaged from the beginning. The dragon has been badly stirred-up, now, and it is no joke to coax a dragon to do something he does not like to begin with.\"\n\n\"Enough excuses, Lenton; quite enough,\" Barham began, and then a tapping came on the door; they all looked in surprise as a rather pale-looking midwingman opened the door and said, \"Sir, sir\u2014\" only to hastily clear out of the way: the Chinese soldiers looked as though they would have trampled straight over him, clearing a path for Prince Yongxing into the room.\n\nThey were all of them so startled they forgot at first to rise, and Laurence was still struggling to get up to his feet when Yongxing had already come into the room. The attendants hurried to pull a chair\u2014Lord Barham's chair\u2014over for the prince; but Yongxing waved it aside, forcing the rest of them to keep on their feet. Lenton unobtrusively put a hand under Laurence's arm, giving him a little support, but the room still tilted and spun around him, the blaze of Yongxing's bright-colored robes stabbing at his eyes.\n\n\"I see this is the way in which you show your respect for the Son of Heaven,\" Yongxing said, addressing Barham. \"Once again you have thrown Lung Tien Xiang into battle; now you hold secret councils, and plot how you may yet keep the fruits of your thievery.\"\n\nThough Barham had been damning the Chinese five minutes before, now he went pale and stammered, \"Sir, Your Highness, not in the least\u2014\" but Yongxing was not slowed even a little.\n\n\"I have gone through this covert, as you call these animal pens,\" he said. \"It is not surprising, when one considers your barbaric methods, that Lung Tien Xiang should have formed this misguided attachment. Naturally he does not wish to be separated from the companion who is responsible for what little comfort he has been given.\" He turned to Laurence, and looked him up and down disdainfully. \"You have taken advantage of his youth and inexperience; but this will not be tolerated. We will hear no further excuses for these delays. Once he has been restored to his home and his proper place, he will soon learn better than to value company so far beneath him.\"\n\n\"Your Highness, you are mistaken; we have every intention to cooperate with you,\" Lenton said bluntly, while Barham was still struggling for more polished phrases. \"But Temeraire will not leave Laurence, and I am sure you know well that a dragon cannot be sent, but only led.\"\n\nYongxing said icily, \"Then plainly Captain Laurence must come also; or will you now attempt to convince us that he cannot be sent?\"\n\nThey all stared, in blank confusion; Laurence hardly dared believe he understood properly, and then Barham blurted, \"Good God, if you want Laurence, you may damned well have him, and welcome.\"\n\nThe rest of the meeting passed in a haze for Laurence, the tangle of confusion and immense relief leaving him badly distracted. His head still spun, and he answered to remarks somewhat randomly until Lenton finally intervened once more, sending him up to bed. He kept himself awake only long enough to send a quick note to Temeraire by way of the maid, and fell straightaway into a thick, unrefreshing sleep.\n\nHe clawed his way out of it the next morning, having slept fourteen hours. Captain Roland was drowsing by his bedside, head tipped against the chair back, mouth open; as he stirred, she woke and rubbed her face, yawning. \"Well, Laurence, are you awake? You have been giving us all a fright and no mistake. Emily came to me because poor Temeraire was fretting himself to pieces: whyever did you send him such a note?\"\n\nLaurence tried desperately to remember what he had written: impossible; it was wholly gone, and he could remember very little of the previous day at all, though the central, the essential point was quite fixed in his mind. \"Roland, I have not the faintest idea what I said. Does Temeraire know that I am going with him?\"\n\n\"Well, now he does, since Lenton told me after I came looking for you, but he certainly did not find it in here,\" she said, and gave him a piece of paper.\n\nIt was in his own hand, and with his signature, but wholly unfamiliar, and nonsensical:\n\nTemeraire\u2014\n\nNever fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something.\n\n\u2014L.\n\nLaurence stared at it in some distress, wondering how he had come to write so. \"I do not remember a word of it; but wait, no; Allegiance is the name of the transport, and Prince Yongxing referred to the Emperor as the Son of Heaven, though why I should have repeated such a blasphemous thing I have no idea.\" He handed her the note. \"My wits must have been wandering. Pray throw it in the fire; go and tell Temeraire that I am quite well now, and will be with him again soon. Can you ring for someone to valet me? I need to dress.\"\n\n\"You look as though you ought to stay just where you are,\" Roland said. \"No: lie quiet awhile. There is no great hurry at present, as far as I understand, and I know this fellow Barham wants to speak with you; also Lenton. I will go and tell Temeraire you have not died or grown a second head, and have Emily jog back and forth between you if you have messages.\"\n\nLaurence yielded to her persuasions; indeed he did not truly feel up to rising, and if Barham wanted to speak with him again, he thought he would need to conserve what strength he had. However, in the event, he was spared: Lenton came alone instead.\n\n\"Well, Laurence, you are in for a hellishly long trip, I am afraid, and I hope you do not have a bad time of it,\" he said, drawing up a chair. \"My transport ran into a three-days' gale going to India, back in the nineties; rain freezing as it fell, so the dragons could not fly above it for some relief. Poor Obversaria was ill the entire time. Nothing less pleasant than a sea-sick dragon, for them or you.\"\n\nLaurence had never commanded a dragon transport, but the image was a vivid one. \"I am glad to say, sir, that Temeraire has never had the slightest difficulty, and indeed he enjoys sea-travel greatly.\"\n\n\"We will see how he likes it if you meet a hurricane,\" Lenton said, shaking his head. \"Not that I expect either of you have any objections, under the circumstances.\"\n\n\"No, not in the least,\" Laurence said, heartfelt. He supposed it was merely a jump from frying-pan to fire, but he was grateful enough even for the slower roasting: the journey would last for many months, and there was room for hope: any number of things might happen before they reached China.\n\nLenton nodded. \"Well, you are looking moderately ghastly, so let me be brief. I have managed to persuade Barham that the best thing to do is pack you off bag and baggage, in this case your crew; some of your officers would be in for a good bit of unpleasantness, otherwise, and we had best get you on your way before he thinks better of it.\"\n\nYet another relief, scarcely looked for. \"Sir,\" Laurence said, \"I must tell you how deeply indebted I am\u2014\"\n\n\"No, nonsense; do not thank me.\" Lenton brushed his sparse grey hair back from his forehead, and abruptly said, \"I am damned sorry about all this, Laurence. I would have run mad a good deal sooner, in your place; brutally done, all of it.\"\n\nLaurence hardly knew what to say; he had not expected anything like sympathy, and he did not feel he deserved it. After a moment, Lenton went on, more briskly. \"I am sorry not to give you a longer time to recover, but then you will not have much to do aboard ship but rest. Barham has promised them the Allegiance will sail in a week's time; though from what I gather, he will be hard put to find a captain for her by then.\"\n\n\"I thought Cartwright was to have her?\" Laurence asked, some vague memory stirring; he still read the Naval Chronicle, and followed the assignments of ships; Cartwright's name stuck in his head: they had served together in the Goliath, many years before.\n\n\"Yes, when the Allegiance was meant to go to Halifax; there is apparently some other ship being built for him there. But they cannot wait for him to finish a two-years' journey to China and back,\" Lenton said. \"Be that as it may, someone will be found; you must be ready.\"\n\n\"You may be sure of it, sir,\" Laurence said. \"I will be quite well again by then.\"\n\nHis optimism was perhaps ill-founded; after Lenton had gone, Laurence tried to write a letter and found he could not quite manage it, his head ached too wretchedly. Fortunately, Granby came by an hour later to see him, full of excitement at the prospect of the journey, and contemptuous of the risks he had taken with his own career.\n\n\"As though I could give a cracked egg for such a thing, when that scoundrel was trying to have you hauled away, and pointing guns at Temeraire,\" he said. \"Pray don't think of it, and tell me what you would like me to write.\"\n\nLaurence gave up trying to counsel him to caution; Granby's loyalty was as obstinate as his initial dislike had been, if more gratifying. \"Only a few lines, if you please\u2014to Captain Thomas Riley; tell him we are bound for China in a week's time, and if he does not mind a transport, he can likely get the Allegiance, if only he goes straightaway to the Admiralty: Barham has no one for the ship; but be sure and tell him not to mention my name.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Granby said, scratching away; he did not write a very elegant hand, the letters sprawling wastefully, but it was serviceable enough to read. \"Do you know him well? We will have to put up with whoever they give us for a long while.\"\n\n\"Yes, very well indeed,\" Laurence said. \"He was my third lieutenant in Belize, and my second in Reliant; he was at Temeraire's hatching: a fine officer and seaman. We could not hope for better.\"\n\n\"I will run it down to the courier myself, and tell him to be sure it arrives,\" Granby promised. \"What a relief it would be, not to have one of these wretched stiff-necked fellows\u2014\" and there he stopped, embarrassed; it was not so very long ago he had counted Laurence himself a \"stiff-necked fellow,\" after all.\n\n\"Thank you, John,\" Laurence said hastily, sparing him. \"Although we ought not get our hopes up yet; the Ministry may prefer a more senior man in the role,\" he added, though privately he thought the chances were excellent. Barham would not have an easy time of it, finding someone willing to accept the post.\n\nImpressive though they might be, to the landsman's eye, a dragon transport was an awkward sort of vessel to command: often enough they sat in port endlessly, awaiting dragon passengers, while the crew dissipated itself in drinking and whoring. Or they might spend months in the middle of the ocean, trying to maintain a single position to serve as a resting point for dragons crossing long distances; like blockade-duty, only worse for lack of society. Little chance of battle or glory, less of prize-money; they were not desirable to any man who could do better.\n\nBut the Reliant, so badly dished in the gale after Trafalgar, would be in dry-dock for a long while. Riley, left on shore with no influence to help him to a new ship, and virtually no seniority, would be as glad of the opportunity as Laurence would be to have him, and there was every chance Barham would seize on the first fellow who offered.\n\nLaurence spent the next day laboring, with slightly more success, over other necessary letters. His affairs were not prepared for a long journey, much of it far past the limits of the courier circuit. Then, too, over the last dreadful weeks he had entirely neglected his personal correspondence, and by now he owed several replies, particularly to his family. After the battle of Dover, his father had grown more tolerant of his new profession; although they still did not write one another directly, at least Laurence was no longer obliged to conceal his correspondence with his mother, and he had for some time now addressed his letters to her openly. His father might very well choose to suspend that privilege again, after this affair, but Laurence hoped he might not hear the particulars of it: fortunately, Barham had nothing to gain from embarrassing Lord Allendale; particularly not now when Wilberforce, their mutual political ally, meant to make another push for abolition in the next session of Parliament.\n\nLaurence dashed off another dozen hasty notes, in a hand not very much like his usual, to other correspondents; most of them were naval men, who would well understand the exigencies of a hasty departure. Despite much abbreviation, the effort took its toll, and by the time Jane Roland came to see him once again, he had nearly prostrated himself once more, and was lying back against the pillows with eyes shut.\n\n\"Yes, I will post them for you, but you are behaving absurdly, Laurence,\" she said, collecting up the letters. \"A knock on the head can be very nasty, even if you have not cracked your skull. When I had the yellow fever I did not prance about claiming I was well; I lay in bed and took my gruel and possets, and I was back on my feet quicker than any of the other fellows in the West Indies who took it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Jane,\" he said, and did not argue with her; indeed he felt very ill, and he was grateful when she drew the curtains and cast the room into a comfortable dimness.\n\nHe briefly came out of sleep some hours later, hearing some commotion outside the door of his room: Roland saying, \"You are damned well going to leave now, or I will kick you down the hall. What do you mean, sneaking in here to pester him the instant I have gone out?\"\n\n\"But I must speak with Captain Laurence; the situation is of the most urgent\u2014\" The protesting voice was unfamiliar, and rather bewildered. \"I have ridden straight from London\u2014\"\n\n\"If it is so urgent, you may go and speak to Admiral Lenton,\" Roland said. \"No; I do not care if you are from the Ministry; you look young enough to be one of my mids, and I do not for an instant believe you have anything to say that cannot wait until morning.\"\n\nWith this she pulled the door shut behind her, and the rest of the argument was muffled; Laurence drifted again away. But the next morning there was no one to defend him, and scarcely had the maid brought in his breakfast\u2014the threatened gruel and hot-milk posset, and quite unappetizing\u2014than a fresh attempt at invasion was made, this time with more success.\n\n\"I beg your pardon, sir, for forcing myself upon you in this irregular fashion,\" the stranger said, talking rapidly while he dragged up a chair to Laurence's bedside, uninvited. \"Pray allow me to explain; I realize the appearance is quite extraordinary\u2014\" He set down the heavy chair and sat down, or rather perched, at the very edge of the seat. \"My name is Hammond, Arthur Hammond; I have been deputized by the Ministry to accompany you to the court of China.\"\n\nHammond was a surprisingly young man, perhaps twenty years of age, with untidy dark hair and a great intensity of expression that lent his thin, sallow face an illuminated quality. He spoke at first in half-sentences, torn between the forms of apology and his plain eagerness to come to his subject. \"The absence of an introduction, I beg you will forgive, we have been taken completely, completely by surprise, and Lord Barham has already committed us to the twenty-third as a sailing date. If you would prefer, we may of course press him for some extension\u2014\"\n\nThis of all things Laurence was eager to avoid, though he was indeed a little astonished by Hammond's forwardness; hastily he said, \"No, sir, I am entirely at your service; we cannot delay sailing to exchange formalities, particularly when Prince Yongxing has already been promised that date.\"\n\n\"Ah! I am of a similar mind,\" Hammond said, with a great deal of relief; Laurence suspected, looking at his face and measuring his years, that he had received the appointment only due to the lack of time. But Hammond quickly refuted the notion that a willingness to go to China on a moment's notice was his only qualification. Having settled himself, he drew out a thick sheaf of papers, which had been distending the front of his coat, and began to discourse in great detail and speed upon the prospects of their mission.\n\nLaurence was almost from the first unable to follow him. Hammond unconsciously slipped into stretches of the Chinese language from time to time, when looking down at those of his papers written in that script, and while speaking in English dwelt largely on the subject of the Macartney embassy to China, which had taken place fourteen years prior. Laurence, who had been newly made lieutenant at the time and wholly occupied with naval matters and his own career, had hardly remembered the existence of the mission at all, much less any details.\n\nHe did not immediately stop Hammond, however: there was no convenient pause in the flow of his conversation, for one, and for another there was a reassuring quality to the monologue. Hammond spoke with authority beyond his years, an obvious command of his subject, and, still more importantly, without the least hint of the incivility which Laurence had come to expect from Barham and the Ministry. Laurence was grateful enough for any prospect of an ally to willingly listen, even if all he knew of the expedition himself was that Macartney's ship, the Lion, had been the first Western vessel to chart the Bay of Zhitao.\n\n\"Oh,\" Hammond said, rather disappointed, when at last he realized how thoroughly he had mistaken his audience. \"Well, I suppose it does not much signify; to put it plainly, the embassy was a dismal failure. Lord Macartney refused to perform their ritual of obeisance before the Emperor, the kowtow, and they took offense. They would not even consider granting us a permanent mission, and he ended by being escorted out of the China Sea by a dozen dragons.\"\n\n\"That I do remember,\" Laurence said; indeed he had a vague recollection of discussing the matter among his friends in the gunroom, with some heat at the insult to Britain's envoy. \"But surely the kowtow was quite offensive; did they not wish him to grovel on the floor?\"\n\n\"We cannot be turning up our noses at foreign customs when we are coming to their country, hat in hand,\" Hammond said, earnestly, leaning forward. \"You can see yourself, sir, the evil consequences: I am sure that the bad blood from this incident continues to poison our present relationship.\"\n\nLaurence frowned; this argument was indeed persuasive, and made some better explanation why Yongxing had come to England so very ready to be offended. \"Do you think this same quarrel their reason for having offered Bonaparte a Celestial? After so long a time?\"\n\n\"I will be quite honest with you, Captain, we have not the least idea,\" Hammond said. \"Our only comfort, these last fourteen years\u2014a very cornerstone of foreign policy\u2014has been our certainty, our complete certainty, that the Chinese were no more interested in the affairs of Europe than we are in the affairs of the penguins. Now all our foundations have been shaken.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The a llegiance was a wallowing behemoth of a ship: just over four hundred feet in length and oddly narrow in proportion, except for the outsize dragondeck that flared out at the front of the ship, stretching from the foremast forward to the bow. Seen from above, she looked very strange, almost fan-shaped. But below the wide lip of the dragondeck, her hull narrowed quickly; the keel was fashioned out of steel rather than elm, and thickly covered with white paint against rust: the long white stripe running down her middle gave her an almost rakish appearance.\n\nTo give her the stability which she required to meet storms, she had a draft of more than twenty feet and was too large to come into the harbor proper, but had to be moored to enormous pillars sunk far out in the deep water, her supplies ferried to and fro by smaller vessels: a great lady surrounded by scurrying attendants. This was not the first transport which Laurence and Temeraire had traveled on, but she would be the first true oceangoing one; a poky three-dragon ship running from Gibraltar to Plymouth with barely a few planks in increased width could offer no comparison.\n\n\"It is very nice; I am more comfortable even than in my clearing.\" Temeraire approved: from his place of solitary glory, he could see all the ship's activity without being in the way, and the ship's galley with its ovens was placed directly beneath the dragondeck, which kept the surface warm. \"You are not cold at all, Laurence?\" he asked, for perhaps the third time, craning his head down to peer closely at him.\n\n\"No, not in the least,\" Laurence said shortly; he was a little annoyed by the continuing oversolicitude. Though the dizziness and headache had subsided together with the lump upon his head, his bruised leg remained stubborn, prone to giving out at odd moments and throbbing with an almost constant ache. He had been hoisted aboard in a bosun's chair, very offensive to his sense of his own capabilities, then put directly into an elbow-chair and carried up to the dragondeck, swathed in blankets like an invalid, and now had Temeraire very carefully coiling himself about to serve as a windbreak.\n\nThere were two sets of stairs rising to the dragondeck, one on either side of the foremast, and the area of the forecastle stretching from the foot of these and halfway to the mainmast was by custom allocated to the aviators, while the foremast jacks ruled the remainder of the space up to the mainmast. Already Temeraire's crew had taken possession of their rightful domain, pointedly pushing several piles of coiled cables across the invisible dividing line; bundles of leather harness and baskets full of rings and buckles had been laid down in their place, all to put the Navy men on notice that the aviators were not to be taken advantage of. Those men not occupied in putting away their gear were ranged along the line in various attitudes of relaxation and affected labor; young Roland and the other two cadet runners, Morgan and Dyer, had been set to playing there by the ensigns, who had conveyed their duty to defend the rights of the Corps. Being so small, they could walk the ship's rail with ease and were dashing back and forth with a fine show of recklessness.\n\nLaurence watched them, broodingly; he was still uneasy about bringing Roland. \"Why would you leave her? Has she been misbehaving?\" was all Jane had asked, when he had consulted her on the matter; impossibly awkward to explain his concerns, facing her. And of course, there was some sense in taking the girl along, young as she was: she would have to face every demand made of a male officer, when she came to be Excidium's captain on her mother's retirement; it would be no kindness to leave her unprepared by being too soft on her now.\n\nEven so, now that he was aboard he was sorry. This was not a covert, and he had already seen that as with any naval crew there were some ugly, some very ugly fellows among the lot: drunkards, brawlers, gaol-birds. He felt too heavily the responsibility of watching over a young girl among such men; not to mention that he would be best pleased if the secret that women served in the Corps did not come out here and make a noise.\n\nHe did not mean to instruct Roland to lie, by no means, and of course he could not give her different duties than otherwise; but he privately and intensely hoped the truth might remain concealed. Roland was only eleven, and no cursory glance would take her for a girl in her trousers and short jacket; he had once mistaken her for a boy himself. But he also desired to see the aviators and the sailors friendly, or at least not hostile, and a close acquaintance could hardly fail to notice Roland's real gender for long.\n\nAt present his hopes looked more likely to be answered in her case than the general. The foremast hands, engaged in the business of loading the ship, were talking none too quietly about fellows who had nothing better to do but sit about and be passengers; a couple of men made loud comments about how the shifted cables had been cast all ahoo, and set to re-coiling them, unnecessarily. Laurence shook his head and kept his silence; his own men had been within their rights, and he could not reprove Riley's men, nor would it do any good.\n\nHowever, Temeraire had noticed also; he snorted, his ruff coming up a little. \"That cable looks perfectly well to me,\" he said. \"My crew were very careful moving it.\"\n\n\"It is all right, my dear; can never hurt to re-coil a cable,\" Laurence said hurriedly. It was not very surprising that Temeraire had begun to extend his protective and possessive instincts over the crew as well; they had been with him now for several months. But the timing was wretchedly inconvenient: the sailors would likely be nervous to begin with at the presence of a dragon, and if Temeraire involved himself in any dispute, taking the part of his crew, that could only increase the tensions on board.\n\n\"Pray take no offense,\" Laurence added, stroking Temeraire's flank to draw his attention. \"The beginning of a journey is so very important; we wish to be good shipmates, and not encourage any sort of rivalry among the men.\"\n\n\"Hm, I suppose,\" Temeraire said, subsiding. \"But we have done nothing wrong; it is disagreeable of them to complain so.\"\n\n\"We will be under way soon,\" Laurence said, by way of distraction. \"The tide has turned, and I think that is the last of the embassy's luggage coming aboard now.\"\n\nAllegiance could carry as many as ten mid-weight dragons, in a pinch; Temeraire alone scarcely weighed her down, and there was a truly astonishing amount of storage space aboard. Yet the sheer quantity of the baggage the embassy carried began to look as though it would strain even her great capacity: shocking to Laurence, used to traveling with little more than a single sea-chest, and seeming quite out of proportion to the size of the entourage, which was itself enormous.\n\nThere were some fifteen soldiers, and no less than three physicians: one for the prince himself, one for the other two envoys, and one for the remainder of the embassy, each with assistants. After these and the translator, there were besides a pair of cooks with assistants, perhaps a dozen body servants, and an equal number of other men who seemed to have no clear function at all, including one gentleman who had been introduced as a poet, although Laurence could not believe this had been an accurate translation: more likely the man was a clerk of some sort.\n\nThe prince's wardrobe alone required some twenty chests, each one elaborately carved and with golden locks and hinges: the bosun's whip flew loud and cracking more than once, as the more enterprising sailors tried to pry them off. The innumerable bags of food had also to be slung aboard, and having already come once from China, they were beginning to show wear. One enormous eighty-pound sack of rice split wide open as it was handed across the deck, to the universal joy and delectation of the hovering seagulls, and afterwards the sailors were forced to wave the frenzied clouds of birds away every few minutes as they tried to keep on with their work.\n\nThere had already been a great fuss about boarding, earlier. Yongxing's attendants had demanded, at first, a walkway leading down to the ship\u2014wholly impossible, even if the Allegiance could have been brought close enough to the dock to make a walkway of any sort practical, because of the height of her decks. Poor Hammond had spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade them that there was no dishonor or danger in being lifted up to the deck, and pointing at frustrated intervals at the ship herself, a mute argument.\n\nHammond had eventually said to him, quite desperately, \"Captain, is this a dangerously high sea?\" An absurd question, with a swell less than five feet, though in the brisk wind the waiting barge had occasionally bucked against the ropes holding her to the dock, but even Laurence's surprised negative had not satisfied the attendants. It had seemed they might never get aboard, but at last Yongxing himself had grown tired of waiting and ended the argument by emerging from his heavily draped sedan-chair, and climbing down into the boat, ignoring both the flurry of his anxious attendants and the hastily offered hands of the barge's crew.\n\nThe Chinese passengers who had waited for the second barge were still coming aboard now, on the starboard side, to the stiff and polished welcome of a dozen Marines and the most respectable-looking of the sailors, interleaved in a row along the inner edge of the gangway, decorative in their bright red coats and the white trousers and short blue jackets of the sailors.\n\nSun Kai, the younger envoy, leapt easily down from the bosun's chair and stood a moment looking around the busy deck thoughtfully. Laurence wondered if perhaps he did not approve the clamor and disarray of the deck, but no, it seemed he was only trying to get his feet underneath him: he took a few tentative steps back and forth, then stretched his sea-legs a little further and walked the length of the gangway and back more surely, with his hands clasped behind his back, and gazed with frowning concentration up at the rigging, trying evidently to trace the maze of ropes from their source to their conclusion.\n\nThis was much to the satisfaction of the men on display, who could at last stare their own fill in return. Prince Yongxing had disappointed them all by vanishing almost at once to the private quarters which had been arranged for him at the stern; Sun Kai, tall and properly impassive with his long black queue and shaved forehead, in splendid blue robes picked out with red and orange embroidery, was very nearly as good, and he showed no inclination to seek out his own quarters.\n\nA moment later they had a still better piece of entertainment; shouts and cries rose from below, and Sun Kai sprang to the side to look over. Laurence sat up, and saw Hammond running to the edge, pale with horror: there had been a noisy splashing. But a few moments later, the older envoy finally appeared over the side, dripping water from the sodden lower half of his robes. Despite his misadventure, the grey-bearded man climbed down with a roar of good-humored laughter at his own expense, waving off what looked like Hammond's urgent apologies; he slapped his ample belly with a rueful expression, and then went away in company with Sun Kai.\n\n\"He had a narrow escape,\" Laurence observed, sinking back into his chair. \"Those robes would have dragged him down in a moment, if he had properly fallen in.\"\n\n\"I am sorry they did not all fall in,\" Temeraire muttered, quietly for a twenty-ton dragon; which was to say, not very. There were sniggers on the deck, and Hammond glanced around anxiously.\n\nThe rest of the retinue were heaved aboard without further incident, and stowed away almost as quickly as their baggage. Hammond looked much relieved when the operation was at last completed, blotting his sweating forehead on the back of his hand, though the wind was knife-cold and bitter, and sat down quite limply on a locker along the gangway, much to the annoyance of the crew. They could not get the barge back aboard with him in the way, and yet he was a passenger and an envoy himself, too important to be bluntly told to move.\n\nTaking pity on them all, Laurence looked for his runners: Roland, Morgan, and Dyer had been told to stay quiet on the dragondeck and out of the way, and so were sitting in a row at the very edge, dangling their heels into space. \"Morgan,\" Laurence said, and the dark-haired boy scrambled up and towards him, \"go and invite Mr. Hammond to come and sit with me, if he would like.\"\n\nHammond brightened at the invitation and came up to the dragondeck at once; he did not even notice as behind him the men immediately began rigging the tackles to hoist aboard the barge. \"Thank you, sir\u2014thank you, it is very good of you,\" he said, taking a seat on a locker which Morgan and Roland together pushed over for him, and accepting with still more gratitude the offer of a glass of brandy. \"How I should have managed, if Liu Bao had drowned, I have not the least notion.\"\n\n\"Is that the gentleman's name?\" Laurence said; all he remembered of the older envoy from the Admiralty meeting was his rather whistling snore. \"It would have been an inauspicious start to the journey, but Yongxing could scarcely have blamed you for his taking a misstep.\"\n\n\"No, there you are quite wrong,\" Hammond said. \"He is a prince; he can blame anyone he likes.\"\n\nLaurence was disposed to take this as a joke, but Hammond seemed rather glumly serious about it; and after drinking the best part of his glass of brandy in what already seemed to Laurence, despite their brief acquaintance, an uncharacteristic silence, Hammond added abruptly, \"And pray forgive me\u2014I must mention, how very prejudicial such remarks may be\u2014the consequences of a moment's thoughtless offense\u2014\"\n\nIt took Laurence a moment to puzzle out that Hammond referred to Temeraire's earlier resentful mutterings; Temeraire was quicker and answered for himself. \"I do not care if they do not like me,\" he said. \"Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China.\" This thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. \"If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?\" he asked. \"Laurence, what would be particularly insulting?\"\n\nHammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loosed upon the world; Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy. Hammond was young for his work, and surely, however brilliant his talents, felt his own lack of experience; it could not help but make him over-cautious.\n\n\"No, my dear, it will not do,\" Laurence said. \"Likely they would only blame us for teaching you ill-manners, and resolve all the more on keeping you.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Temeraire disconsolately let his head sink back down onto his forelegs. \"Well, I suppose I do not mind so much going, except that everyone else will be fighting without me,\" he said in resignation. \"But the journey will be very interesting, and I suppose I would like to see China; only they will try to take Laurence away from me again, I am sure of it, and I am not going to have any of it.\"\n\nHammond prudently did not engage him on this subject, but hurried instead to say, \"How long this business of loading has all taken\u2014surely it is not typical? I made sure we would be halfway down the Channel by noon; here we have not even yet made sail.\"\n\n\"I think they are nearly done,\" Laurence said; the last immense chest was being swung aboard into the hands of the waiting sailors with the help of a block and line. The men looked all tired and surly, as well they might, having spent time enough for loading ten dragons on loading instead one man and his accoutrements; and their dinner was a good half-an-hour overdue already.\n\nAs the chest vanished below, Captain Riley climbed the stairs from the quarterdeck to join them, taking his hat off long enough to wipe sweat away from his brow. \"I have no notion how they got themselves and the lot to England. I suppose they did not come by transport?\"\n\n\"No, or else we would surely be returning by their ship,\" Laurence said. He had not considered the question before and realized only now that he had no idea how the Chinese embassy had made their voyage. \"Perhaps they came overland.\" Hammond was silent and frowning, evidently wondering himself.\n\n\"That must be a very interesting journey, with so many different places to visit,\" Temeraire observed. \"Not that I am sorry to be going by sea: not at all,\" he added, hastily, peering down anxiously at Riley to be sure he had not offended. \"Will it be much faster, going by sea?\"\n\n\"No, not in the least,\" Laurence said. \"I have heard of a courier going from London to Bombay in two months, and we will be lucky to reach Canton in seven. But there is no secure route by land: France is in the way, unfortunately, and there is a great deal of banditry, not to mention the mountains and the Taklamakan desert to cross.\"\n\n\"I would not wager on less than eight months, myself,\" Riley said. \"If we make six knots with the wind anywhere but dead astern, it will be more than I look for, judging by her log.\" Below and above now there was a great scurry of activity, all hands preparing to unmoor and make sail; the ebbing tide was lapping softly against the windward side. \"Well, we must get about it. Laurence, tonight I must be on deck, I need to take the measure of her; but I hope you will dine with me tomorrow? And you also, of course, Mr. Hammond.\"\n\n\"Captain,\" Hammond said, \"I am not familiar with the ordinary course of a ship's life\u2014I beg your indulgence. Would it be suitable to invite the members of the embassy?\"\n\n\"Why\u2014\" Riley said, astonished, and Laurence could not blame him; it was a bit much to be inviting people to another man's table. But Riley caught himself, and then said, more politely, \"Surely, sir, it is for Prince Yongxing to issue such an invitation first.\"\n\n\"We will be in Canton before that happens, in the present state of relations,\" Hammond said. \"No; we must make shifts to engage them, somehow.\"\n\nRiley offered a little more resistance; but Hammond had taken the bit between his teeth and managed, by a skillful combination of coaxing and deafness to hints, to carry his point. Riley might have struggled longer, but the men were all waiting impatiently for the word to weigh anchor, the tide was going every minute, and at last Hammond ended by saying, \"Thank you, sir, for your indulgence; and now I will beg you gentlemen to excuse me. I am a fair enough hand at their script on land, but I imagine it will take me some more time to draft an acceptable invitation aboard ship.\" With this, he rose and escaped before Riley could retract the surrender he had not quite made.\n\n\"Well,\" Riley said, gloomily, \"before he manages it, I am going to go and get us as far out to sea as I can; if they are mad as fire at my cheek, at least with this wind I can say in perfect honesty that I cannot get back into port for them to kick me ashore. By the time we reach Madeira they may get over it.\"\n\nHe jumped down to the forecastle and gave the word; in a moment the men at the great quadruple-height capstans were straining, their grunting and bellowing carrying up from the lower decks as the cable came dragging over the iron catheads: the Allegiance's smallest kedge anchor as large as the best bower of another ship, its flukes spread wider than the height of a man.\n\nMuch to the relief of the men, Riley did not order them to warp her out; a handful of men pushed off from the pilings with iron poles, and even that was scarcely necessary: the wind was from the northwest, full on her starboard beam, and that with the tide carried her now easily away from the harbor. She was only under topsails, but as soon as they had cleared moorings Riley called for topgallants and courses, and despite his pessimistic words they were soon going through the water at a respectable clip: she did not make much leeway, with that long deep keel, but went straight down the Channel in a stately manner.\n\nTemeraire had turned his head forward to enjoy the wind of their progress: he looked rather like the figurehead of some old Viking ship. Laurence smiled at the notion. Temeraire saw his expression and nudged at him affectionately. \"Will you read to me?\" he asked hopefully. \"We will have only another couple of hours of light.\"\n\n\"With pleasure,\" said Laurence, and sat up to look for one of his runners. \"Morgan,\" he called, \"will you be so good as to go below and fetch me the book in the top of my sea-chest, by Gibbon; we are in the second volume.\"\n\nThe great admiral's cabin at the stern had been hastily converted into something of a state apartment for Prince Yongxing, and the captain's cabin beneath the poop deck divided for the other two senior envoys, the smaller quarters nearby given over to the crowd of guards and attendants, displacing not only Riley himself but also the ship's first lieutenant, Lord Purbeck, the surgeon, the master, and several other of his officers. Fortunately, the quarters at the fore of the ship, ordinarily reserved for the senior aviators, were all but empty with Temeraire the only dragon aboard: even shared out among them all, there was no shortage of room; and for the occasion, the ship's carpenters had knocked down the bulkheads of their individual cabins and made a grand dining space.\n\nToo grand, at first: Hammond had objected. \"We cannot seem to have more room than the prince,\" he explained, and so had the bulkheads shifted a good six feet forward: the collected tables were suddenly cramped.\n\nRiley had benefited from the enormous prize-money awarded for the capture of Temeraire's egg almost as much as Laurence himself had; fortunately he could afford to keep a good table and a large one. The occasion indeed called for every stick of furniture which could be found on board: the instant he had recovered from the appalling shock of having his invitation even partly accepted, Riley had invited all the senior members of the gunroom, Laurence's own lieutenants, and any other man who might reasonably be expected to make civilized conversation.\n\n\"But Prince Yongxing is not coming,\" Hammond said, \"and the rest of them have less than a dozen words of English between them. Except for the translator, and he is only one man.\"\n\n\"Then at least we can make enough noise amongst ourselves we will not all be sitting in grim silence,\" Riley said.\n\nBut this hope was not answered: the moment the guests arrived, a paralyzed silence descended, bidding fair to continue throughout the meal. Though the translator had accompanied them, none of the Chinese spoke at first. The older envoy, Liu Bao, had stayed away also, leaving Sun Kai as the senior representative; but even he made only a spare, formal greeting on their arrival, and afterwards maintained a calm and silent dignity, though he stared intently at the barrel-thick column of the foremast, painted in yellow stripes, which came down through the ceiling and passed directly through the middle of the table, and went so far as to look beneath the table-cloth, to see it continuing down through the deck below.\n\nRiley had left the right side of the table entirely for the Chinese guests, and had them shown to places there, but they did not move to sit when he and the officers did, which left the British in confusion, some men already half-seated and trying to keep themselves suspended in mid-air. Bewildered, Riley pressed them to take their seats; but he had to urge them several times before at last they would sit. It was an inauspicious beginning, and did not encourage conversation.\n\nThe officers began by taking refuge in their dinners, but even that semblance of good manners did not last very long. The Chinese did not eat with knife and fork, but with lacquered sticks they had brought with them. These they somehow maneuvered one-handed to bring food to their lips, and shortly the British half of the company were staring in helplessly rude fascination, every new dish presenting a fresh opportunity to observe the technique. The guests were briefly puzzled by the platter of roast mutton, large slices carved from the leg, but after a moment one of the younger attendants carefully proceeded to roll up a slice, still only using the sticks, and picked it up entire to eat in three bites, leading the way for the rest.\n\nBy now Tripp, Riley's youngest midshipman, a plump and unlovely twelve-year-old aboard by virtue of his family's three votes in Parliament, and invited for his own education rather than his company, was surreptitiously trying to imitate the style, using his fork and knife turned upside-down in place of the sticks, his efforts meeting without notable success, except in doing damage to his formerly clean breeches. He was too far down the table to be quelled by hard looks, and the men around him were too busy gawking themselves to notice.\n\nSun Kai had the seat of honor nearest Riley, and, desperate to keep his attention from the boy's antics, Riley tentatively raised a glass to him, watching Hammond out of the corner of his eye for direction, and said, \"To your health, sir.\" Hammond murmured a hasty translation across the table, and Sun Kai nodded, raised his own glass, and sipped politely, though not very much: it was a heady Madeira well-fortified with brandy, chosen to survive rough seas. For a moment it seemed this might rescue the occasion: the rest of the officers were belatedly recalled to their duty as gentlemen, and began to salute the rest of the guests; the pantomime of raised glasses was perfectly comprehensible without any translation, and led naturally to a thawing of relations. Smiles and nods began to traverse the table, and Laurence heard Hammond, beside him, heave out an almost inaudible sigh through open lips, and finally take some little food.\n\nLaurence knew he was not doing his own part; but his knee was lodged up against a trestle of the table, preventing him from stretching out his now-aching leg, and though he had drunk as sparingly as was polite, his head felt thick and clouded. By this point he only hoped he might avoid embarrassment, and resigned himself to making apologies to Riley after the meal for his dullness.\n\nRiley's third lieutenant, a fellow named Franks, had spent the first three toasts in rude silence, sitting woodenly and raising his glass only with a mute smile, but sufficient flow of wine loosened his tongue at last. He had served on an East Indiaman as a boy, during the peace, and evidently had acquired a few stumbling words of Chinese; now he tried the less-obscene of them on the gentleman sitting across from him: a young, clean-shaven man named Ye Bing, gangly beneath the camouflage of his fine robes, who brightened and proceeded to respond with his own handful of English.\n\n\"A very\u2014a fine\u2014\" he said, and stuck, unable to find the rest of the compliment he wished to make, shaking his head as Franks offered, alternatively, the options which seemed to him most natural: wind, night, and dinner; at last Ye Bing beckoned over the translator, who said on his behalf, \"Many compliments to your ship: it is most cleverly devised.\"\n\nSuch praise was an easy way to a sailor's heart; Riley, overhearing, broke off from his disjointed bilingual conversation with Hammond and Sun Kai, on their likely southward course, and called down to the translator, \"Pray thank the gentleman for his kind words, sir; and tell him that I hope you will all find yourselves quite comfortable.\"\n\nYe Bing bowed his head and said, through the translator, \"Thank you, sir, we are already much more so than on our journey here. Four ships were required to carry us here, and one proved unhappily slow.\"\n\n\"Captain Riley, I understand you have gone round the Cape of Good Hope before?\" Hammond interrupted: rudely, and Laurence glanced at him in surprise.\n\nRiley also looked startled, but politely turned back to answer him, but Franks, who had spent nearly all of the last two days below in the stinking hold, directing the stowage of all the baggage, said in slightly drunken irreverence, \"Four ships only? I am surprised it did not take six; you must have been packed like sardines.\"\n\nYe Bing nodded and said, \"The vessels were small for so long a journey, but in the service of the Emperor all discomfort is a joy, and in any case, they were the largest of your ships in Canton at the time.\"\n\n\"Oh; so you hired East Indiamen for the passage?\" Macready asked; he was the Marine lieutenant, a rail-thin, wiry stump of a man who wore spectacles incongruous on his much-scarred face. There was no malice but undeniably a slight edge of superiority in the question, and in the smiles exchanged by the naval men. That the French could build ships but not sail them, that the Dons were excitable and undisciplined, that the Chinese had no fleet at all to speak of, these were the oft-repeated bywords of the service, and to have them so confirmed was always pleasant, always heartening.\n\n\"Four ships in Canton harbor, and you filled their holds with baggage instead of silk and porcelain; they must have charged you the earth,\" Franks added.\n\n\"How very strange that you should say so,\" Ye Bing said. \"Although we were traveling under the Emperor's seal, it is true, one captain did try to demand payment, and then even tried to sail away without permission. Some evil spirit must have seized hold of him and made him act in such a crazy manner. But I believe your Company officials were able to find a doctor to treat him, and he was allowed to apologize.\"\n\nFranks stared, as well he might. \"But then why did they take you, if you did not pay them?\"\n\nYe Bing stared back, equally surprised to have been asked. \"The ships were confiscated by Imperial edict. What else could they have done?\" He shrugged, as if to dismiss the subject, and turned his attention back to the dishes; he seemed to think the piece of intelligence less significant than the small jam tartlets Riley's cook had provided with the latest course.\n\nLaurence abruptly put down knife and fork; his appetite had been weak to begin with, and now was wholly gone. That they could speak so casually of the seizure of British ships and property\u2014the forced servitude of British seamen to a foreign throne\u2014For a moment almost he convinced himself he had misunderstood: every newspaper in the country would have been shrieking of such an incident; Government would surely have made a formal protest. Then he looked at Hammond: the diplomat's face was pale and alarmed, but unsurprised; and all remaining doubt vanished as Laurence recalled all of Barham's sorry behavior, so nearly groveling, and Hammond's attempts to change the course of the conversation.\n\nComprehension was only a little slower in coming to the rest of the British, running up and down the table on the backs of low whispers, as the officers murmured back and forth to one another. Riley's reply to Hammond, which had been going forward all this time, slowed and stopped: though Hammond prompted Riley again, urgently, asking, \"Did you have a rough crossing of it? I hope we do not need to fear bad weather along the way,\" this came too late; a complete silence fell, except for young Tripp chewing noisily.\n\nGarnett, the master, elbowed the boy sharply, and even this sound failed. Sun Kai put down his wineglass and looked frowning up and down along the table; he had noticed the change of atmosphere: the feel of a brewing storm. There had already been a great deal of hard drinking, though they were scarcely halfway through the meal, and many of the officers were young, and flushing now with mortification and anger. Many a Navy man, cast on shore during an intermittent peace or by a lack of influence, had served aboard the ships of the East India Company; the ties between Britain's Navy and her merchant marine were strong, and the insult all the more keenly felt.\n\nThe translator was standing back from the chairs with an anxious expression, but most of the other Chinese attendants had not yet perceived. One laughed aloud at some remark of his neighbor's: it made a queer solitary noise in the cabin.\n\n\"By God,\" Franks said, suddenly, out loud, \"I have a mind to\u2014\"\n\nHis seat-mates caught him by the arms, hurriedly, and kept him in his chair, hushing him with many anxious looks up towards the senior officers, but other whispers grew louder. One man was saying, \"\u2014sitting at our table!\" to snatches of violent agreement; an explosion might come at any moment, certainly disastrous. Hammond was trying to speak, but no one was attending to him.\n\n\"Captain Riley,\" Laurence said, harshly and over-loud, quelling the furious whispers, \"will you be so good as to lay out our course for the journey? I believe Mr. Granby was curious as to the route we would follow.\"\n\nGranby, sitting a few chairs down, his face pale under his sunburn, started; then after a moment he said, \"Yes, indeed; I would take it as a great favor, sir,\" nodding to Riley.\n\n\"Of course,\" Riley said, if a little woodenly; he leaned over to the locker behind him, where his maps lay: bringing one onto the table, he traced the course, speaking somewhat more loudly than normal. \"Once out of the Channel, we must swing a ways out to skirt France and Spain; then we will come in a little closer and keep to the coastline of Africa as best we can. We will put in at the Cape until the summer monsoon begins, perhaps a week or three depending on our speed, and then ride the wind all the way to the South China Sea.\"\n\nThe worst of the grim silence was broken, and slowly a thin obligatory conversation began again. But no one now said a word to the Chinese guests, except occasionally Hammond speaking to Sun Kai, and under the weight of disapproving stares even he faltered and was silent. Riley resorted to calling for the pudding, and the dinner wandered to a disastrous close, far earlier than usual.\n\nThere were Marines and seamen standing behind every sea-officer's chair to act as servants, already muttering to each other; by the time Laurence regained the deck, pulling himself up the ladder-way more by the strength of his arms than by properly climbing, they had gone out, and the news had gone from one end of the deck to another, the aviators even speaking across the line with the sailors.\n\nHammond came out onto the deck and stared at the taut, muttering groups of men, biting his lips to bloodlessness; the anxiety made his face look queerly old and drawn. Laurence felt no pity for him, only indignation: there was no question that Hammond had deliberately tried to conceal the shameful matter.\n\nRiley was beside him, not drinking the cup of coffee in his hand: boiled if not burnt, by the smell of it. \"Mr. Hammond,\" he said, very quiet but with authority, more authority than Laurence, who for most of their acquaintance had known him as a subordinate, had ever heard him use; an authority which quite cleared away all traces of his ordinary easy-going humor, \"pray convey to the Chinamen that it is essential they stay below; I do not give a damn what excuse you like to give them, but I would not wager tuppence for their lives if they came on this deck now. Captain,\" he added, turning to Laurence, \"I beg you send your men to sleep at once; I don't like the mood.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, in full understanding: men so stirred could become violent, and from there it was a short step to mutiny; the original cause of their rage would not even necessarily matter by then. He beckoned Granby over. \"John, send the fellows below, and have a word with the officers to keep them quiet; we want no disturbance.\"\n\nGranby nodded. \"By God, though\u2014\" he said, hard-eyed with his own anger, but he stopped when Laurence shook his head, and went. The aviators broke up and went below quietly; the example might have been of some good, for the sailors did not grow quarrelsome when ordered to do the same. Then, also, they knew very well that their officers were in this case not their enemies: anger was a living thing in every breast, shared sentiment bound them all together, and little more than mutters followed when Lord Purbeck, the first lieutenant, walked out upon the deck among them and ordered them below in his drawling, affected accent, \"Go along now, Jenkins; go along, Harvey.\"\n\nTemeraire was waiting on the dragondeck with head raised high and eyes bright; he had overheard enough to be on fire with curiosity. Having had the rest of the story, he snorted and said, \"If their own ships could not have carried them, they had much better have stayed home.\" This was less indignation at the offense than simple dislike, however, and he was not inclined to great resentment; like most dragons, he had a very casual view of property, saving, of course, jewels and gold belonging to himself: even as he spoke he was busy polishing the great sapphire pendant which Laurence had given him, and which he never removed save for that purpose.\n\n\"It is an insult to the Crown,\" Laurence said, rubbing his hand over his leg with short, pummeling strokes, resentful of the injury; he wanted badly to pace. Hammond was standing at the quarterdeck rail smoking a cigar, the dim red light of the burning embers flaring with his inhalations, illuminating his pale and sweat-washed face. Laurence glared at him along the length of the near-empty deck, bitterly. \"I wonder at him; at him and at Barham, to have swallowed such an outrage, with so little noise: it is scarcely to be borne.\"\n\nTemeraire blinked at him. \"But I thought we must at all costs avoid war with China,\" he said, very reasonably, as he had been lectured on the subject without end for weeks, and even by Laurence himself.\n\n\"I should rather settle with Bonaparte, if the lesser evil had to be chosen,\" Laurence said, for the moment too angry to consider the question rationally. \"At least he had the decency to declare war before seizing our citizens, instead of this cavalier offhand flinging of insults in our face, as if we did not dare to answer them. Not that Government have given them any reason to think otherwise: like a pack of damned curs, rolling over to show their bellies. And to think,\" he added, smoldering, \"that scoundrel was trying to persuade me to kowtow, knowing it should be coming after this \u2014\"\n\nTemeraire gave a snort of surprise at his vehemence, and nudged him gently with his nose. \"Pray do not be so angry; it cannot be good for you.\"\n\nLaurence shook his head, not in disagreement, and fell silent, leaning against Temeraire. It could do no good to vent his fury so, where some of the men left on deck might yet overhear and take it as encouragement to some rash act, and he did not want to distress Temeraire. But much was suddenly made plain to him: after swallowing such an insult, of course Government would hardly strain at handing over a single dragon; the entire Ministry would likely be glad to rid themselves of so unpleasant a reminder, and to see the whole business hushed up all the more thoroughly.\n\nHe stroked Temeraire's side for comfort. \"Will you stay above-decks with me a while?\" Temeraire asked him, coaxing. \"You had much better sit down and rest, and not fret yourself so.\"\n\nIndeed Laurence did not want to leave him; it was curious how he could feel his lost calm restore itself under the influence of that steady heartbeat beneath his fingers. The wind was not too high, at the moment, and not all of the night watch could be sent below; an extra officer on the deck would not be amiss. \"Yes, I will stay; in any case I do not like to leave Riley alone with such a mood over the ship,\" he answered, and went limping for his wraps."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The wind was freshening from the northeast, very cold; Laurence stirred out of his half-sleep and looked up at the stars: only a few hours had passed. He huddled deeper into his blankets by Temeraire's side and tried to ignore the steady ache in his leg. The deck was strangely quiet; under Riley's grim and watchful eye there was scarcely any conversation at all among the remaining crew, though occasionally Laurence could hear indistinct murmurs from the rigging above, men whispering to each other. There was no moon, only a handful of lanterns on deck.\n\n\"You are cold,\" Temeraire said unexpectedly, and Laurence turned to see the great deep blue eyes studying him. \"Go inside, Laurence; you must get well, and I will not let anyone hurt Riley. Or the Chinese, I suppose, if you would not like it,\" he added, though without much enthusiasm.\n\nLaurence nodded, tiredly, and heaved himself up again; the threat of danger was over, he thought, at least for the moment, and there was no real sense in his staying above. \"You are comfortable enough?\"\n\n\"Yes, with the heat from below I am perfectly warm,\" Temeraire said; indeed Laurence could feel the warmth of the dragondeck even through the soles of his boots.\n\nIt was a great deal more pleasant in out of the wind; his leg stabbed unpleasantly twice as he climbed down to the upper berth deck, but his arms were up to his weight and held him until the spasm passed; he managed to reach his cabin without falling.\n\nLaurence had several pleasant small round windows, not drafty, and near the ship's galley as he was, the cabin was still warm despite the wind; one of the runners had lit the hanging lantern, and Gibbon's book was lying still open on the lockers. He slept almost at once, despite the pain; the easy sway of his hanging cot was more familiar than any bed, and the low susurration of the water along the sides of the ship a wordless and constant reassurance.\n\nHe came awake all at once, breath jolted out of his body before his eyes even quite opened: noise more felt than heard. The deck abruptly slanted, and he flung out a hand to keep from striking the ceiling; a rat went sliding across the floor and fetched up against the fore lockers before scuttling into the dark again, indignant.\n\nThe ship righted almost at once: there was no unusual wind, no heavy swell; at once he understood that Temeraire had taken flight. Laurence flung on his boat-cloak and rushed out in nightshirt and bare feet; the drummer was beating to quarters, the crisp flying staccato echoing off the wooden walls, and even as Laurence staggered out of his room the carpenter and his mates were rushing past him to clear away the bulkheads. Another crash came: bombs, he now recognized, and then Granby was suddenly at his side, a little less disordered since he had been sleeping in breeches. Laurence accepted his arm without hesitation and with his help managed to push through the crowd and get back up to the dragondeck through the confusion. Sailors were running with frantic haste to the pumps, flinging buckets out over the sides for water to slop onto the decks and wet down the sails. A bloom of orange-yellow was trying to grow on the edge of the furled mizzen topsail; one of the midshipmen, a spotty boy of thirteen Laurence had seen skylarking that morning, flung himself gallantly out onto the yard with his shirt in his hand, dripping, and smothered it out.\n\nThere was no other light, nothing to show what might be going on aloft, and too much shouting and noise to hear anything of the battle above at all: Temeraire might have been roaring at full voice for all they would have known of it. \"We must get a flare up, at once,\" Laurence said, taking his boots from Roland; she had come running with them, and Morgan with his breeches.\n\n\"Calloway, go and fetch a box of flares, and the flash-powder,\" Granby called. \"It must be a Fleur-de-Nuit; no other breed could see without at least moonlight. If only they would stop that noise,\" he added, squinting uselessly up.\n\nThe loud crack warned them; Laurence fell as Granby tried to pull him down to safety, but only a handful of splinters came flying; screams rose from below: the bomb had gone through a weak place in the wood and down into the galley. Hot steam came up through the vent, and the smell of salt pork, steeping already for the next day's dinner: tomorrow was Thursday, Laurence remembered, ship's routine so deeply ingrained that the one thought followed instantly on the other in his mind.\n\n\"We must get you below,\" Granby said, taking his arm again, calling, \"Martin!\"\n\nLaurence gave him an astonished, appalled look; Granby did not even notice, and Martin, taking his left arm, seemed to think nothing more natural. \"I am not leaving the deck,\" Laurence said sharply.\n\nThe gunner Calloway came panting with the box; in a moment, the whistle of the first rising flare cut through the low voices, and the yellow-white flash lit the sky. A dragon bellowed: not Temeraire's voice, too low, and in the too-short moment while the light lingered, Laurence caught sight of Temeraire hovering protectively over the ship. The Fleur-de-Nuit had evaded him in the dark and was a little way off, twisting its head away from the light.\n\nTemeraire roared at once and darted for the French dragon, but the flare died out and fell, leaving all again black as pitch. \"Another, another; damn you,\" Laurence shouted to Calloway, who was still staring aloft just as they all were. \"He must have light; keep them going aloft.\"\n\nMore of the crewmen rushed to help him, too many: three more flares went up at once, and Granby sprang to keep them from any further waste. Shortly they had the time marked: one flare followed after another in steady progression, a fresh burst of light just as the previous one failed. Smoke curled around Temeraire, trailed from his wings in the thin yellow light as he closed with the Fleur-de-Nuit, roaring; the French dragon dived to avoid him, and bombs scattered into the water harmlessly, the sound of the splashes traveling over the water.\n\n\"How many flares have we left?\" Laurence asked Granby, low.\n\n\"Four dozen or so, no more,\" Granby said, grimly: they were going very fast. \"And that is already with what the Allegiance was carrying besides our own; their gunner brought us all they had.\"\n\nCalloway slowed the rate of firing to stretch the dwindling supply longer, so that the dark returned full-force between bursts of light. Their eyes were all stinging with smoke and the strain of trying to see in the thin, always-fading light of the flares; Laurence could only imagine how Temeraire was managing, alone, half-blind, against an opponent fully manned and prepared for battle.\n\n\"Sir, Captain,\" Roland cried, waving at him from the starboard rail; Martin helped Laurence over, but before they had reached her, one of the last handful of flares went off, and for a moment the ocean behind the Allegiance was illuminated clearly: two French heavy frigates coming on behind them, with the wind in their favor, and a dozen boats in the water crammed with men sweeping towards their either side.\n\nThe lookout above had seen also; \"Sail ho; boarders,\" he bellowed out, and all was suddenly confusion once more: sailors running across the deck to stretch the boarding-netting, and Riley at the great double-wheel with his coxswain and two of the strongest seamen; they were putting the Allegiance about with desperate haste, trying to bring her broadside to bear. There was no sense in trying to outrun the French ships; in this wind the frigates could make a good ten knots at least, and the Allegiance would never escape them.\n\nRinging along the galley chimney, words and the pounding of many feet echoed up hollowly from the gundecks: Riley's midshipmen and lieutenants were already hurrying men into place at the guns, their voices high and anxious as they repeated instructions, over and over, trying to drum what ought to have occupied the practice of months into the heads of men half-asleep and confused.\n\n\"Calloway, save the flares,\" Laurence said, hating to give the order: the darkness would leave Temeraire vulnerable to the Fleur-de-Nuit. But with so few left, they had to be conserved, until there was some better hope of being able to do real damage to the French dragon.\n\n\"Stand by to repel boarders,\" the bosun bellowed; the Allegiance was finally coming up through the wind, and there was a moment of silence: out in the darkness, the oars kept splashing, a steady count in French drifting faintly towards them over the water, and then Riley called, \"Fire as she bears.\"\n\nThe guns below roared, red fire and smoke spitting: impossible to tell what damage had been done, except by the mingled sounds of screaming and splintering wood to let them know at least some of the shot had gone home. On went the guns, a rolling broadside as the Allegiance made her ponderous turn; but after they had spoken once, the inexperience of the crew began to tell.\n\nAt last the first gun spoke again, four minutes at least between shots; the second gun did not fire at all, nor the third; the fourth and fifth went together, with some more audible damage, but the sixth ball could be heard splashing into clear water; also the seventh, and then Purbeck called,\" 'Vast firing.\" The Allegiance had carried too far; now she could not fire again until she made her turn once more; and all the while the boarding party would be approaching, the rowers only encouraged to greater speed.\n\nThe guns died away; the clouds of thick grey smoke drifted over the water. The ship was again in darkness, but for the small, swaying pools of light cast off by the lanterns on deck. \"We must get you aboard Temeraire,\" Granby said. \"We are not too far from shore yet for him to make the flight, and in any case there may be ships closer by: the transport from Halifax may be in these waters by now.\"\n\n\"I am not going to run away and hand a hundred-gun transport over to the French,\" Laurence said, very savagely.\n\n\"I am sure we can hold out, and in any case there is every likelihood of recapturing her before they can bring her into port, if you can warn the fleet,\" Granby argued; no naval officer would have persisted so against his commander, but aviator discipline was far more loose, and he would not be denied; it was indeed his duty as first lieutenant to see to the captain's safety.\n\n\"They could easily take her to the West Indies or a port in Spain, far from the blockades, and man her from there; we cannot lose her,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"It would still be best to have you aboard, where they cannot lay hands on you unless we are forced to surrender,\" Granby said. \"We must find some way to get Temeraire clear.\"\n\n\"Sir, begging your pardon,\" Calloway said, looking up from the box of flares, \"if you was to get me one of those pepper-guns, we might pack up a ball with flash-powder, and maybe give himself a bit of breathing room.\" He jerked his chin up towards the sky.\n\n\"I'll speak to Macready,\" Ferris said at once, and dashed away to find the ship's Marine lieutenant.\n\nThe pepper-gun was brought from below, two of the Marines carrying the halves of the long rifled barrel up while Calloway cautiously pried open one of the pepper-balls. The gunner shook out perhaps half the pepper and opened the locked box of flash-powder, taking out a single paper twist and sealing the box again. He held the twist far out over the side, two of his mates holding his waist to keep him steady while he unwound the twist and carefully spilled the yellow powder into the case, watching with only one eye, the other squinted up and his face half-turned away; his cheek was spotted with black scars, reminders of previous work with the powder: it needed no fuse and would go off on any careless impact, burning far hotter than gunpowder, if spent more quickly.\n\nHe sealed up the ball and plunged the rest of the twist into a bucket of water. His mates threw it overboard while he smeared the seal of the ball with a little tar and covered it all over with grease before loading the gun; then the second half of the barrel was screwed on. \"There; I don't say it will go off, but I allow as it may,\" Calloway said, wiping his hands clean with no little relief.\n\n\"Very good,\" Laurence said. \"Stand ready and save the last three flares to give us light for the shot; Macready, have you a man for the gun? Your best, mind you; he must strike the head to do any good.\"\n\n\"Harris, you take her,\" Macready said, pointing one of his men to the gun, a gangly, rawboned fellow of perhaps eighteen, and added to Laurence, \"Young eyes for a long shot, sir; never fear she'll go astray.\"\n\nA low angry rumble of voices drew their attention below, to the quarterdeck: the envoy Sun Kai had come on deck with two of the servants trailing behind, carrying one of the enormous trunks out of their luggage. The sailors and most of Temeraire's crew were clustered along the rails to fend off the boarders, cutlasses and pistols in every hand; but even with the French ships gaining, one fellow with a pike went so far as to take a step towards the envoy, before the bosun started him with the knotted end of his rope, bawling, \"Keep the line, lads; keep the line.\"\n\nLaurence had all but forgotten the disastrous dinner in the confusion: it seemed already weeks ago, but Sun Kai was still wearing the same embroidered gown, his hands folded calmly into the sleeves, and the angry, alarmed men were primed for just such a provocation. \"Oh, his soul to the devil. We must get him away. Below, sir; below at once,\" he shouted, pointing at the gangway, but Sun Kai only beckoned his men on, and came climbing up to the dragondeck while they heaved the great trunk up more slowly behind him.\n\n\"Where is that damned translator?\" Laurence said. \"Dyer, go and see\u2014\" But by then the servants had hauled up the trunk; they unlocked it and flung back the lid, and there was no need for translation: the rockets that lay in the padding of straw were wildly elaborate, red and blue and green like something out of a child's nursery, painted with swirls of color, gold and silver, and unmistakable.\n\nCalloway snatched one at once, blue with white and yellow stripes, one of the servants anxiously miming for him how the match should be set to the fuse. \"Yes, yes,\" he said, impatiently, bringing over the slow-match; the rocket caught at once and hissed upwards, vanishing from sight far above where the flares had gone.\n\nThe white flash came first, then a great thunderclap of sound, echoing back from the water, and a more faintly glimmering circle of yellow stars spread out and hung lingering in the air. The Fleur-de-Nuit squawked audibly, undignified, as the fireworks went off: it was revealed plainly, not a hundred yards above, and Temeraire immediately flung himself upwards, teeth bared, hissing furiously.\n\nStartled, the Fleur-de-Nuit dived, slipping under Temeraire's outstretched claws but coming into their range. \"Harris, a shot, a shot!\" Macready yelled, and the young Marine squinted through the sight. The pepper-ball flew straight and true, if a little high; but the Fleur-de-Nuit had narrow curving horns flaring out from its forehead, just above the eyes; the ball broke open against them and the flash-powder burst white-hot and flaring. The dragon squalled again, this time in real pain, and flew wildly and fast away from the ships, deep into the dark; it swept past the ship so low that the sails shuddered noisily in the wind of its wings.\n\nHarris stood up from the gun and turned, grinning wide and gap-toothed, then fell with a look of surprise, his arm and shoulder gone. Macready was knocked down by his falling body; Laurence jerked a knife-long splinter out of his own arm and wiped spattered blood from his face. The pepper-gun was a blasted wreck: the crew of the Fleur-de-Nuit had flung down another bomb even as their dragon fled, and hit the gun dead-on.\n\nA couple of the sailors dragged Harris's body to the side and flung him overboard; no one else had been killed. The world was queerly muffled; Calloway had sent up another pair of fireworks, a great starburst of orange streaks spreading almost over half the sky, but Laurence could hear the explosion only in his left ear.\n\nWith the Fleur-de-Nuit thus distracted, Temeraire dropped back down onto the deck, rocking the ship only a little. \"Hurry, hurry,\" he said, ducking his head down beneath the straps as the harness-men scrambled to get him rigged out. \"She is very quick, and I do not think the light hurts her as much as it did the other one, the one we fought last fall; there is something different about her eyes.\" He was heaving for breath, and his wings trembled a little: he had been hovering a great deal, and it was not a maneuver he was accustomed to perform for any length of time.\n\nSun Kai, who had remained upon deck, observing, did not protest the harnessing; perhaps, Laurence thought bitterly, they did not mind it when it was their own necks at risk. Then he noticed that drops of deep, red-black blood were dripping onto the deck. \"Where are you hurt?\"\n\n\"It is not bad; she only caught me twice,\" Temeraire said, twisting his head around and licking at his right flank; there was a shallow cut there, and another gouged claw-mark further up on his back.\n\nTwice was a good deal more than Laurence cared for; he snapped at Keynes, who had been sent along with them, as the man was boosted up and began to pack the wound with bandages. \"Ought you not sew them up?\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Keynes said. \"He'll do as he is; barely worth calling them flesh wounds. Stop fretting.\" Macready had regained his feet, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand; he gave the surgeon a dubious look at this reply and glanced at Laurence sidelong, the more so as Keynes continued his work muttering audibly about overanxious captains and mother hens.\n\nLaurence himself was too grateful to object, full of relief. \"Are you ready, gentlemen?\" he asked, checking his pistols and his sword: this time it was his good heavy cutlass, proper Spanish steel and a plain hilt; he was glad to feel its solid weight under his hand.\n\n\"Ready for you, sir,\" Fellowes said, pulling the final strap tight; Temeraire reached out and lifted Laurence up to his shoulder. \"Give her a pull up there; does she hold?\" he called, once Laurence was settled and locked on again.\n\n\"Well enough,\" Laurence called back down, having thrown his weight against the stripped-down harness. \"Thank you, Fellowes; well done. Granby, send the riflemen to the tops with the Marines, and the rest to repel boarders.\"\n\n\"Very good; and Laurence\u2014\" Granby said, clearly meaning to once again encourage him to take Temeraire away from the battle. Laurence cut him short by the expedient of giving Temeraire a quick nudge with his knee. The Allegiance heaved again beneath the weight of his leap, and they were airborne together at last.\n\nThe air above the Allegiance was thick with the harsh, sulfurous smoke of the fireworks, like the smell of flintlocks, cloying on his tongue and skin despite the cold wind. \"There she is,\" Temeraire said, beating back aloft; Laurence followed his gaze and saw the Fleur-de-Nuit approaching again from high above: she had indeed recovered very quickly from the blinding light, judging by his previous experience with the breed, and he wondered if perhaps she was some sort of new cross. \"Shall we go after her?\"\n\nLaurence hesitated; for the sake of keeping Temeraire out of their hands, disabling the Fleur-de-Nuit was of the most urgent necessity, for if the Allegiance was forced to surrender and Temeraire had to attempt a return to shore, she could harry them in the darkness all the way back home. And yet the French frigates could do far more damage to the ship: a raking fire would mean a very slaughter of the men. If the Allegiance were taken, it would be a terrible blow to the Navy and the Corps both: they had no large transports to spare.\n\n\"No,\" he said finally. \"Our first duty must be to preserve the Allegiance \u2014we must do something about those frigates.\" He spoke more to convince himself than Temeraire; he felt the decision was in the right, but a terrible doubt lingered; what was courage in an ordinary man might often be called recklessness in an aviator, with the responsibility for a rare and precious dragon in his hands. It was Granby's duty to be over-cautious, but it did not follow that he was in the wrong. Laurence had not been raised in the Corps, and he knew his nature balked at many of the restraints placed upon a dragon captain; he could not help but wonder if he were consulting his own pride too far.\n\nTemeraire was always enthusiastic for battle; he made no argument, but only looked down at the frigates. \"Those ships look much smaller than the Allegiance,\" Temeraire said doubtfully. \"Is she truly in danger?\"\n\n\"Very great danger; they mean to rake her.\" Even as Laurence spoke, another of the fireworks went off. The explosion came startlingly near, now that he was aloft on Temeraire's back; he was forced to shield his dazzled eyes with a hand. When the spots at last faded from his eyes, he saw in alarm that the leeward frigate had suddenly club-hauled to come about: a risky maneuver and not one he would himself have undertaken simply for an advantage of position, though in justice he could not deny it had been brilliantly performed. Now the Allegiance had her vulnerable stern wholly exposed to the French ship's larboard guns. \"Good God; there!\" he said urgently, pointing even though Temeraire could not see the gesture.\n\n\"I see her,\" Temeraire said: already diving. His sides were swelling out with the gathering breath required for the divine wind, the gleaming black hide going drumhide-taut as his deep chest expanded. Laurence could feel a palpable low rumbling echo already building beneath Temeraire's skin, a herald of the destructive power to come.\n\nThe Fleur-de-Nuit had made out his intentions: she was coming on behind them. He could hear her wings beating, but Temeraire was the faster, his greater weight not hampering him in the dive. Gunpowder cracked noisily as her riflemen took shots, but their attempts were only guesswork in the dark; Laurence laid himself close to Temeraire's neck and silently willed him to greater speed.\n\nBelow them, the frigate's cannon erupted in a great cloud of smoke and fury; flames licked out from the ports and flung an appalling scarlet glow up against Temeraire's breast. A fresh cracking of rifle-fire came from the frigate's decks, and he jerked, sharply, as if struck: Laurence called out his name in anxiety, but Temeraire had not paused in his drive towards the ship: he leveled out to blast her, and the sound of Laurence's voice was lost in the terrible thundering noise of the divine wind.\n\nTemeraire had never before used the divine wind to attack a ship; but in the battle of Dover, Laurence had seen the deadly resonance work against Napoleon's troop-carriers, shattering their light wood. He had expected something similar here: the deck splintering, damage to the yards, perhaps even breaking the masts. But the French frigate was solidly built, with oak planking as much as two feet thick, and her masts and yards were well-secured for battle with iron chains to reinforce the rigging.\n\nInstead the sails caught and held the force of Temeraire's roar: they shivered for a moment, then bulged out full and straining. A score of braces snapped like violin strings, the masts all leaning away; yet still they held, wood and sailcloth groaning, and for a moment Laurence's heart sank: no great damage, it seemed, would be done.\n\nBut if part would not yield, then all must perforce bend: even as Temeraire stopped his roaring and went flashing by, the whole ship turned away, driven broadside to the wind, and slowly toppled over onto her side. The tremendous force left her all but on her beam-ends, men hanging loose from the rigging and the rails, their feet kicking in mid-air, some falling into the ocean.\n\nLaurence twisted about to look back towards her as they swept on, Temeraire skimming past, low to the water. VAL\u00c9RIE was emblazoned in lovingly bright gold letters upon her stern, illuminated by lanterns hung in the cabin windows: now swinging crazily, half overturned. Her captain knew his work: Laurence could hear shouts carrying across the water, and already the men were crawling up onto the side with every sort of sea-anchor in their hands, hawsers run out, ready to try to right her.\n\nBut they had no time. In Temeraire's wake, churned up by the force of the divine wind upon the water, a tremendous wave was climbing out of the swell. Slow and high it mounted, as if with some deliberate intent. For a moment all hung still, the ship suspended in blackness, the great shining wall of water blotting out even the night; then, falling, the wave heeled her over like a child's toy, and the ocean quenched all the fire of her guns.\n\nShe did not come up again. A pale froth lingered, and a scattered few smaller waves chased the great one and broke upon the curve of the hull, which remained above the surface. A moment only: then it slipped down beneath the waters, and a hail of golden fireworks lit the sky. The Fleur-de-Nuit circled low over the churning waters, belling out in her deep lonely voice, as though unable to understand the sudden absence of the ship.\n\nThere was no sound of cheering from the Allegiance, though they must have seen. Laurence himself was silent, dismayed: three hundred men, perhaps more, the ocean smooth and glassy, unbroken. A ship might founder in a gale, in high winds and forty-foot waves; a ship might occasionally be sunk in an action, burnt or exploded after a long battle, run aground on rocks. But she had been untouched, in open ocean with no more than a ten-foot swell and winds of fourteen knots; and now obliterated whole.\n\nTemeraire coughed, wetly, and made a sound of pain; Laurence hoarsely called, \"Back to the ship, at once,\" but already the Fleur-de-Nuit was beating furiously towards them: against the next brilliant flare he could see the silhouettes of the boarders waiting, ready to leap aboard, knives and swords and pistols glittering white along their edges. Temeraire was flying so very awkwardly, labored; as the Fleur-de-Nuit came close, he put on a desperate effort and lunged away, but he was no longer quicker in the air, and he could not get around the other dragon to reach the safety of the Allegiance.\n\nLaurence might almost have let them come aboard, to treat the wound; he could feel the quivering labor of Temeraire's wings, and his mind was full of that scarlet moment, the terrible muffled impact of the ball: every moment aloft now might worsen the injury. But he could hear the shouting voices of the French dragon's crew, full of a grief and horror that required no translation; and he did not think they would accept a surrender.\n\n\"I hear wings,\" Temeraire gasped, voice gone high and thin with pain; meaning another dragon, and Laurence vainly searched the impenetrable night: British or French? The Fleur-de-Nuit abruptly darted at them again; Temeraire gathered himself for another convulsive burst of speed, and then, hissing and spitting, Nitidus was there, beating about the head of the French dragon in a flurry of silver-grey wings: Captain Warren on his back standing in harness and waving his hat wildly at Laurence, yelling, \"Go, go!\"\n\nDulcia had come about them on the other side, nipping at the Fleur-de-Nuit's flanks, forcing the French dragon to double back and snap at her; the two light dragons were the quickest of their formation-mates, and though not up to the weight of the big Fleur-de-Nuit, they might harry her a little while. Temeraire was already turning in a slow arc, his wings working in shuddering sweeps. As they closed with the ship, Laurence could see the crew scrambling to clear the dragondeck for him to land: it was littered with splinters and ends of rope, twisted metal; the Allegiance had suffered badly from the raking, and the second frigate was keeping up a steady fire on her lower decks.\n\nTemeraire did not properly land, but half-fell clumsily onto the deck and set the whole ship to rocking; Laurence was casting off his straps before they were even properly down. He slid down behind the withers without a hand on the harness; his leg gave way beneath him as he came down heavily upon the deck, but he only dragged himself up again and staggered half-falling to Temeraire's head.\n\nKeynes was already at work, elbow-deep in black blood; to better give him access, Temeraire was leaning slowly over onto his side under the guidance of many hands, the harness-men holding up the light for the surgeon. Laurence went to his knees by Temeraire's head and pressed his cheek to the soft muzzle; blood soaked warm through his trousers, and his eyes were stinging, blurred. He did not quite know what he was saying, nor whether it made any sense, but Temeraire blew out warm air against him in answer, though he did not speak.\n\n\"There, I have it; now the tongs. Allen, stop that foolishness or put your head over the side,\" Keynes said, somewhere behind his back. \"Good. Is the iron hot? Now then; Laurence, he must keep steady.\"\n\n\"Hold fast, dear heart,\" Laurence said, stroking Temeraire's nose. \"Hold as still as ever you may; hold still.\" Temeraire gave a hiss only, and his breath wheezed in loudly through his red, flaring nostrils; one heartbeat, two, then the breath burst out of him, and the spiked ball rang as Keynes dropped it into the waiting tray. Temeraire gave another small hissing cry as the hot iron was clapped to the wound; Laurence nearly heaved at the scorched, roasting smell of meat.\n\n\"There; it is over; a clean wound. The ball had fetched up against the breastbone,\" Keynes said; the wind blew the smoke clear, and suddenly Laurence could hear the crash and echo of the long guns again, and all the noise of the ship; the world once again had meaning and shape.\n\nLaurence dragged himself up to his feet, swaying. \"Roland,\" he said, \"you and Morgan run and see what odds and ends of sailcloth and wadding they may have to spare; we must try and put some padding around him.\"\n\n\"Morgan is dead, sir,\" Roland said, and in the lantern-light he saw abruptly that her face was tracked with tears, not sweat; pale streaks through grime. \"Dyer and I will go.\"\n\nThe two of them did not wait for him to nod, but darted away at once, shockingly small in and among the burly forms of the sailors; he followed after them with his eyes for a moment, and turned back, his face hardening.\n\nThe quarterdeck was so thickly slimed with blood that portions shone glossy black as though freshly painted. By the slaughter and lack of destruction in the rigging, Laurence thought the French must have been using canister shot, and indeed he could see some parts of the broken casings lying about on the deck. The French had crammed every man who could be spared into the boats, and there were a great many of those: two hundred desperate men were struggling to come aboard, enraged with the loss of their ship. They were four- and five-deep along the grappling-lines in places, or clinging to the rails, and the British sailors trying to hold them back had all the broad and empty deck behind them. Pistol-shot rang clear, and the clash of swords; sailors with long pikes were jabbing into the mass of boarders as they heaved and pushed.\n\nLaurence had never seen a boarding fight from such a strange, in-between distance, at once near and yet removed; he felt very queer and unsettled, and drew his pistols out for comfort. He could not see many of his crew: Granby missing, and Evans, his second lieutenant, too; down on the forecastle below, Martin's yellow hair shone bright in the lanterns for a moment as he leapt to cut a man off; then he disappeared under a blow from a big French sailor carrying a club.\n\n\"Laurence.\" He heard his name, or at least something like it, strangely drawn out into three syllables more like Lao-ren-tse, and turned to look; Sun Kai was pointing northward, along the line of the wind, but the last burst of fireworks was already fading, and Laurence could not see what he meant to point out.\n\nAbove, the Fleur-de-Nuit suddenly gave a roar; she banked sharply away from Nitidus and Dulcia, who were still darting at her flanks, and set off due eastward, flying fast, vanishing very quickly into the darkness. Almost on her heels came the deep belly-roar of a Regal Copper, and the higher shrieks of Yellow Reapers: the wind of their passage set all the shrouds snapping back and forth as they swept overhead, firing flares off in every direction.\n\nThe remaining French frigate doused her lights all at once, hoping to escape into the night, but Lily led the formation past her, low enough to rattle her masts; two passes, and in a fading crimson starburst Laurence saw the French colors slowly come drooping down, while all across the deck the boarders flung down their weapons and sank to the deck in surrender."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "...and the Conduct of your son was in all ways both heroic and gentlemanly. His Loss must grieve all those who shared in the Privilege of his Acquaintance, and none more so than those honoured to serve alongside him, and to see in him already formed the noble Character of a wise and courageous Officer and a loyal Servant of his Country and King. I pray that you may find some Comfort in the sure Knowledge that he died as he would have lived, valiant, fearing nothing but Almighty God, and certain to find a Place of Honour among those who have sacrificed All for their Nation.\n\nYours, etc.,\n\nWilliam Laurence\n\nHe laid the pen down and folded over the letter; it was miserably awkward, inadequate, and yet he could do no better. He had lost friends near his own age enough as a mid and a young lieutenant, and one thirteen-year-old boy under his own first command; even so he had never before had to write a letter for a ten-year-old, who by rights ought still to have been in his schoolroom playing with tin soldiers.\n\nIt was the last of the obligatory letters, and the thinnest: there had not been very much to say of earlier acts of valor. Laurence set it aside and wrote a few lines of a more personal nature, these to his mother: news of the engagement would certainly be published in the Gazette, and he knew she would be anxious. It was difficult to write easily, after the earlier task; he confined himself to assuring her of his health and Temeraire's, dismissing their collective injuries as inconsequential. He had written a long and grinding description of the battle in his report for the Admiralty; he did not have the heart to paint a lighter picture of it for her eyes.\n\nHaving done at last, he shut up his small writing-desk and collected the letters, each one sealed and wrapped in oilcloth against rain or sea-water. He did not get up right away, but sat looking out the windows at the empty ocean, in silence.\n\nMaking his way back up to the dragondeck was a slow affair of easy stages. Having gained the forecastle, he limped for a moment to the larboard rail to rest, pretending it was to look over at their prize, the Chanteuse. Her sails were all hung out loose and billowing; men were clambering over her masts, getting her rigging back into order, looking much like busy ants at this distance.\n\nThe scene upon the dragondeck was very different now, with nearly all the formation crammed aboard. Temeraire had been allotted the entire starboard section, the better to ease his wound, but the rest of the dragons lay in a complicated many-colored heap of entangled limbs, stirring rarely. Maximus alone took up virtually all the space remaining, and lay on the bottom; even Lily, who ordinarily considered it beneath her dignity to curl up with other dragons, was forced to let her tail and wing drape over him, while Messoria and Immortalis, older dragons and smaller, made not even such pretensions, and simply sprawled upon his great back, a limb dangling loose here and there.\n\nThey were all drowsing and looked perfectly happy with their circumstances; Nitidus only was too fidgety to like lying still very long, and he was presently aloft, circling the frigate curiously: a little too low for the comfort of the sailors, judging by the nervous way heads on the Chanteuse often turned skyward. Dulcia was nowhere in sight, perhaps already gone to carry news of the engagement back to England.\n\nCrossing the deck had become something of an adventure, particularly with his uncooperative and dragging leg; Laurence only narrowly managed to avoid falling over Messoria's hanging tail when she twitched in her sleep. Temeraire was soundly asleep as well; when Laurence came to look at him, one eye slid halfway open, gleamed at him deep blue, and slid at once closed again. Laurence did not try to rouse him, very glad to see him comfortable; Temeraire had eaten well that morning, two cows and a large tunny, and Keynes had pronounced himself satisfied with the present progress of the wound.\n\n\"A nasty sort of weapon,\" he had said, taking a ghoulish pleasure in showing Laurence the extracted ball; staring unhappily at its many squat spikes, Laurence could only be grateful it had been cleaned before he had been obliged to look at it. \"I have not seen its like before, though I hear the Russians use something of the sort; I should not have enjoyed working it out if it had gone any deeper, I can tell you.\"\n\nBut by good fortune, the ball had come up against the breastbone, and lodged scarcely half a foot beneath the skin; even so, the ball itself and the extraction had torn the muscles of the breast cruelly, and Keynes said Temeraire ought not fly at all for as long as two weeks, perhaps even a month. Laurence rested a hand upon the broad, warm shoulder; he was glad to have only so much of a price to pay.\n\nThe other captains were sitting at a small folding-table wedged up against the galley chimney, very nearly the only open space available on the deck, playing cards; Laurence joined them and gave Harcourt the bundle of letters. \"Thank you for taking them,\" he said, sitting down heavily to catch his breath.\n\nThey all paused in the game to look at the large packet. \"I am so very sorry, Laurence.\" Harcourt put the whole into her satchel. \"You have been wretchedly mauled about.\"\n\n\"Damned cowardly business.\" Berkley shook his head. \"More like spying than proper combat, this skulking about at night.\"\n\nLaurence was silent; he was grateful for their sympathy, but at present he was too much oppressed to manage conversation. The funerals had been ordeal enough, keeping his feet for an hour against his leg's complaints, while one after another the bodies were slipped over the side, sewn into their hammocks with round-shot at their feet for the sailors, iron shells for the aviators, as Riley read slowly through the service.\n\nHe had spent the remainder of the morning closeted with Lieutenant Ferris, now his acting second, telling over the butcher's bill; a sadly long list. Granby had taken a musket-ball in his chest; thankfully it had cracked against a rib and gone straight out again in back, but he had lost a great deal of blood, and was already feverish. Evans, his second lieutenant, had a badly broken leg and was to be sent back to England; Martin at least would recover, but his jaw was presently so swollen he could not speak except in mumbles, and he could not yet see out of his left eye.\n\nTwo more of the topmen wounded, less severely; one of the riflemen, Dunne, wounded, and another, Donnell, killed; Miggsy of the bellmen killed; and worst-hit, the harness-men: four of them had been killed by a single cannon-ball, which had caught them belowdecks while they had been carrying away the extra harness. Morgan had been with them, carrying the box of spare buckles: a wretched waste.\n\nPerhaps seeing something of the tally in his face, Berkley said, \"At least I can leave you Portis and Macdonaugh,\" referring to two of Laurence's topmen, who had been transferred to Maximus during the confusion after the envoys' arrival.\n\n\"Are you not short-handed yourself?\" Laurence asked. \"I cannot rob Maximus; you will be on active duty.\"\n\n\"The transport coming from Halifax, the William of Orange, has a dozen likely fellows for Maximus,\" Berkley said. \"No reason you cannot have your own back again.\"\n\n\"I ought not argue with you; Heaven knows I am desperately short,\" Laurence said. \"But the transport may not arrive for a month, if her crossing has been slow.\"\n\n\"Oh; you were below earlier, so you did not hear us tell Captain Riley,\" Warren said. \" William was sighted only a few days ago, not far from here. So we have sent Chenery and Dulcia off to fetch her, and she will take us and the wounded home. Also, I believe Riley was saying that this boat needs something; it could not have been stars, Berkley?\"\n\n\"Spars,\" Laurence said, looking up at the rigging; in the daylight he could see that the yards which supported the sails did indeed look very ugly, much splintered and pockmarked with bullets. \"It will certainly be a relief if she can spare us some supplies. But you must know, Warren, this is a ship, not a boat.\"\n\n\"Is there a difference?\" Warren was unconcerned, scandalizing Laurence. \"I thought they were simply two words for the same thing; or is it a matter of size? This is certainly a behemoth, although Maximus is like to fall off her deck at any moment.\"\n\n\"I am not,\" Maximus said, but he opened his eyes and peered over at his hindquarters, only settling back to sleep when he had satisfied himself that he was not in present danger of tipping into the water.\n\nLaurence opened his mouth and closed it again without venturing on an explanation; he felt the battle was already lost. \"You will be with us for a few days, then?\"\n\n\"Until tomorrow only,\" Harcourt said. \"If it looks to be longer than that, I think we must take the flight; I do not like to strain the dragons without need, but I like leaving Lenton short at Dover still less, and he will be wondering where on earth we have got to: we were only meant to be doing night maneuvers with the fleet off Brest, before we saw you all firing off like Guy Fawkes Day.\"\n\nRiley had asked them all to dinner, of course; and the captured French officers as well. Harcourt was obliged to plead sea-sickness as an excuse for avoiding the close quarters where her gender might too easily be revealed, and Berkley was a taciturn fellow, disinclined to speak in sentences of more than five words at a time. But Warren was both free and easy in his speech, the more so after a glass or two of strong wine, and Sutton had a fine store of anecdotes, having been in service nearly thirty years; together they carried the conversation along in an energetic if somewhat ramshackle way.\n\nBut the Frenchmen were silent and shocked, and the British sailors only a little less so; their oppression only grew more apparent over the course of the meal. Lord Purbeck was stiff and formal, Macready grim; even Riley was quiet, inclined to uncharacteristic and long periods of silence, and plainly uncomfortable.\n\nOn the dragondeck afterwards, over coffee, Warren said, \"Laurence, I do not mean to insult your old service or your shipmates, but Lord! They make it heavy going. Tonight I should have thought we had offended them mortally, not saved them a good long fight and whoever knows how many bucketsful of blood.\"\n\n\"I expect they feel we came rather late to save them very much.\" Sutton leaned against his dragon Messoria companionably and lit a cigar. \"So instead we have robbed them of the full glory, not to mention that we have a share in the prize, you know, having arrived before the French ship struck. Would you care for a draft, my dear?\" he asked, holding the cigar where Messoria could breathe the smoke.\n\n\"No, you have mistaken them entirely, I assure you,\" Laurence said. \"We should never have taken the frigate if you had not come; she was not so badly mauled she could not have shown us her heels whenever she chose; every man aboard was wholly glad to see you come.\" He did not very much wish to explain, but he did not like to leave them with so ill an impression, so he added briefly, \"It is the other frigate, the Val\u00e9rie, which we sank before you came; the loss of men was very great.\"\n\nThey perceived his own disquiet and pressed him no further; when Warren made as if to ask, Sutton nudged him into silence and called his runner for a deck of cards. They settled to a casual game of speculation, Harcourt having joined them now that they had parted from the naval officers. Laurence finished his cup and slipped quietly away.\n\nTemeraire was himself sitting and looking out across the empty sea; he had slept all the day, and roused just lately for another large meal. He shifted himself to make a place for Laurence upon his foreleg, and curled about him with a small sigh.\n\n\"Do not take it to heart.\" Laurence was aware he was giving advice he could not himself follow; but he feared that Temeraire might brood on the sinking too long, and drive himself into a melancholy. \"With the second frigate on our larboard, we should likely have been brought by the lee, and had they doused all the lights and stopped our fireworks, Lily and the others could hardly have found us in the night. You saved many lives, and the Allegiance herself.\"\n\n\"I do not feel guilty,\" Temeraire said. \"I did not intend to sink her, but I am not sorry for that; they meant to kill a great many of my crew, and of course I would not let them. It is the sailors: they look at me so queerly now, and they do not like to come near at all.\"\n\nLaurence could neither deny the truth of this observation, nor offer any false comfort. Sailors preferred to see a dragon as a fighting machine, very much like a ship which happened to breathe and fly: a mere instrument of man's will. They could accept without great difficulty his strength and brute force, natural as a reflection of his size; if they feared him for it, so might a large, dangerous man be feared. The divine wind however bore an unearthly tinge, and the wreck of the Val\u00e9rie was too implacable to be human: it woke every wild old legend of fire and destruction from the sky.\n\nAlready the battle seemed very like a nightmare in his own memory: the endless gaudy stream of the fireworks and the red light of the cannon firing, the ash-white eyes of the Fleur-de-Nuit in the dark, bitter smoke on his tongue, and above all the slow descent of the wave, like a curtain lowering upon a play. He stroked Temeraire's arm in silence, and together they watched the wake of the ship slipping gently by.\n\nThe cry of \"Sail!\" came at the first dim light: the William of Orange clear on the horizon, two points off the starboard bow. Riley squinted through his glass. \"We will pipe the hands to breakfast early; she will be in hailing distance well before nine.\"\n\nThe Chanteuse lay between the two larger ships and was already hailing the oncoming transport: she herself would be going back to England to be condemned as a prize, carrying the prisoners. The day was clear and very cold, the sky that peculiarly rich shade of blue reserved for winter, and the Chanteuse looked cheerful with her white topgallants and royals set. It being rare for a transport to take a prize, the mood ought to have been celebratory; a handsome forty-four-gun ship and a trim sailer, she would certainly be bought into the service, and there would be head-money for the prisoners besides. But the unsettled mood had not quite cleared overnight, and the men were mostly quiet as they worked. Laurence himself had not slept very well, and now he stood on the forecastle watching the William of Orange draw near, wistfully; soon they would once again be quite alone.\n\n\"Good morning, Captain,\" Hammond said, joining him at the rail. The intrusion was unwelcome, and Laurence did not make much attempt to hide it, but this made no immediate impression: Hammond was too busy gazing upon the Chanteuse, an indecent satisfaction showing on his face. \"We could not have asked for a better start to the journey.\"\n\nSeveral of the crew were at work nearby repairing the shattered deck, the carpenter and his mates; one of them, a cheerful, slant-shouldered fellow named Leddowes, brought aboard at Spithead and already established as the ship's jester, sat up on his heels at this remark and stared at Hammond in open disapproval, until the carpenter Eklof, a big silent Swede, thumped him on the shoulder with his big fist, drawing him back down to the work.\n\n\"I am surprised you think so,\" Laurence said. \"Would you not have preferred a first-rate?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Hammond said, oblivious to sarcasm. \"It is just as one could wish; do you know one of the balls passed quite through the prince's cabin? One of his guards was killed, and another, badly wounded, passed away during the night; I understand he is in a towering rage. The French navy has done us more good in one night than months of diplomacy. Do you suppose the captain of the captured ship might be presented to him? Of course I have told them our attackers were French, but it would be as well to give them incontrovertible proof.\"\n\n\"We are not going to march a defeated officer about like a prize in some Roman triumph,\" Laurence said levelly; he had been made prisoner once himself, and though he had been scarcely a boy at the time, a young midshipman, he still remembered the perfect courtesy of the French captain, asking him quite seriously for his parole.\n\n\"Of course, I do see\u2014It would not look very well, I suppose,\" Hammond said, but only as a regretful concession, and he added, \"Although it would be a pity if\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that all?\" Laurence interrupted him, unwilling to hear any more.\n\n\"Oh\u2014I beg your pardon; forgive my having intruded,\" Hammond said uncertainly, finally looking at Laurence. \"I meant only to inform you: the prince has expressed a desire of seeing you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Laurence said, with finality. Hammond looked as though he would have liked to say something more, perhaps to urge Laurence to go at once, or give him some advice for the meeting; but in the end he did not dare, and with a short bow went abruptly away.\n\nLaurence had no desire to speak with Yongxing, still less to be trifled with, and his mood was not much improved by the physical unpleasantness of making his halting way to the prince's quarters, all the way to the stern of the ship. When the attendants tried to make him wait in the antechamber, he said shortly, \"He may send word when he is ready,\" and turned at once to go. There was a hasty and huddled conference, one man going so far as to stand in the doorway to bar the way out, and after a moment Laurence was ushered directly into the great cabin.\n\nThe two gaping holes in the walls, opposite one another, had been stuffed with wads of blue silk to keep out the wind; but still the long banners of inscribed parchment hanging upon the walls blew and rattled now and again in the draught. Yongxing sat straight-backed upon an armchair draped in red cloth, at a small writing-table of lacquered wood; despite the motion of the ship, his brush moved steadily from ink-pot to paper, never dripping, the shining-wet characters formed up in neat lines and rows.\n\n\"You wished to see me, sir,\" Laurence said.\n\nYongxing completed a final line and set aside his brush without immediately answering; he took a stone seal, resting in a small pool of red ink, and pressed it at the bottom of the page; then folded up the page and laid it to one side, atop another similar sheet, and folded these both into a piece of waxed cloth. \"Feng Li,\" he called.\n\nLaurence started; he had not even noticed the attendant standing in the corner, nondescript in plain robes of dark blue cotton, who now came forward. Feng was a tall fellow but so permanently stooped that all Laurence could see of him was the perfect line running across his head, ahead of which his dark hair was shaven to the skin. He gave Laurence one quick darting glance, mutely curious, then lifted the whole table up and carried it away to the side of the room, not spilling a drop of the ink.\n\nHe hurried back quickly with a footrest for Yongxing, then drew back into the corner of the room: plainly Yongxing did not mean to send him away for the interview. The prince sat up erect with his arms resting upon the chair, and did not offer Laurence a seat, though two more chairs stood against the far wall. This set the tone straightaway; Laurence felt his shoulders stiffening even before Yongxing had begun.\n\n\"Though you have only been brought along for necessity's sake,\" Yongxing said coldly, \"you imagine that you remain companion to Lung Tien Xiang and may continue to treat him as your property. And now the worst has been realized: through your vicious and reckless behavior, he has come to grave injury.\"\n\nLaurence pressed his lips together; he did not trust himself to make anything resembling a civilized remark in response. He had questioned his own judgment, both before taking Temeraire into the battle and all through the long following night, remembering the sound of the dreadful impact, and Temeraire's labored and painful breath; but to have Yongxing question it was another matter.\n\n\"Is that all?\" he said.\n\nYongxing had perhaps expected him to grovel, or beg forgiveness; certainly this short answer made the prince more voluble with anger. \"Are you so lacking in all right principles?\" he said. \"You have no remorse; you would have taken Lung Tien Xiang to his death as easily as ridden a horse to foundering. You are not to go aloft with him again, and you will keep these low servants of yours away. I will set my own guards around him\u2014\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Laurence said, bluntly, \"you may go to the devil.\" Yongxing broke off, looking more taken aback than offended at finding himself interrupted, and Laurence added, \"And as for your guards, if any one of them sets foot upon my dragondeck, I will have Temeraire pitch him overboard. Good day.\"\n\nHe made a short bow and did not stay to hear a response, if Yongxing even made one, but turned and went directly from the room. The attendants stared as he went past them and did not this time attempt to block his way; he was forcing his leg to obey his wishes, moving swiftly. He paid for the bravado: by the time he reached his own cabin, at the very other end of the ship's interminable length, his leg had begun to twitch and shudder with every step as if palsied; he was glad to reach the safety of his chair, and to soothe his ruffled temper with a private glass of wine. Perhaps he had spoken intemperately, but he did not regret it in the least; Yongxing should at least know that not all British officers and gentlemen were prepared to bow and scrape to his every tyrannous whim.\n\nAs satisfying a resolution as this was, however, Laurence could not help but acknowledge to himself that his defiance was a good deal strengthened by the conviction that Yongxing would never willingly bend on the central, the essential, point of his separation from Temeraire. The Ministry, in Hammond's person, might have something to gain in exchange for all their crawling; for his own part Laurence had nothing of great importance left to lose. This was a lowering thought, and he put down his glass and sat in silent gloom awhile instead, rubbing his aching leg, propped upon a locker. Six bells rang on deck, and faintly he heard the pipe shrilling away, the scrape and clatter of the hands going to their breakfast on the berth deck below, and the smell of strong tea came drifting over from the galley.\n\nHaving finished his glass and eased his leg a little, Laurence at last got himself back onto his feet, and he crossed to Riley's cabin and tapped on the door. He meant to ask Riley to station several of the Marines to keep the threatened guards off the deck, and he was startled and not at all pleased to find Hammond already there, sitting before Riley's writing-desk, with a shadow of conscious guilt and anxiety upon his face.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Riley said, after offering him a chair, \"I have been speaking with Mr. Hammond, about the passengers,\" and Laurence noticed that Riley himself was looking tired and anxious. \"He has brought to my attention that they have all been keeping belowdecks, since this news about the Indiamen came out. It cannot go on like this for seven months: we must let them come on deck and take the air somehow. I am sure you will not object\u2014I think we must let them walk about the dragondeck, we do not dare put them near the hands.\"\n\nNo suggestion could have possibly been more unwelcome, nor come at a worse moment; Laurence eyed Hammond in mingled irritation and something very near despair; the man already seemed to be possessed of an evil genius for disaster, at least from Laurence's view, and the prospect of a long journey spent suffering one after another of his diplomatic machinations was increasingly grim.\n\n\"I am sorry for the inconvenience,\" Riley said, when Laurence did not immediately reply. \"Only I do not see what else is to be done. There surely is no shortage of room?\"\n\nThis, too, was indisputable; with so few aviators aboard, and the ship's complement so nearly full, it was unfair to ask the sailors to give up any portion of their space, and could only aggravate the tensions, already high. As a practical matter, Riley was perfectly correct, and it was his right as the ship's captain to decide where the passengers might be at liberty; but Yongxing's threat had made the matter a question of principle. Laurence would have liked to unburden himself plainly to Riley, and if Hammond had not been there, he would have done so; as it was\u2014\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Hammond put in, hurriedly, \"Captain Laurence is concerned that they might irritate the dragon. May I suggest that we set aside one portion for them, and that plainly demarcated? A cord, perhaps, might be strung; or else paint would do.\"\n\n\"That would do nicely, if you would be so kind as to explain the boundaries to them, Mr. Hammond,\" Riley said.\n\nLaurence could make no open protest without explanation, and he did not choose to be laying out his actions in front of Hammond, inviting him to comment upon them; not when there was likely nothing to gain. Riley would sympathize\u2014or at least Laurence hoped he would, though abruptly he was less certain; but sympathy or no, the difficulty would remain, and Laurence did not know what else could be done.\n\nHe was not resigned; he was not resigned in the least, but he did not mean to complain and make Riley's situation more difficult. \"You will also make plain, Mr. Hammond,\" Laurence said, \"that they are none of them to bring small-arms onto the deck, neither muskets nor swords, and in any action they are to go belowdecks at once: I will brook no interference with my crew, or with Temeraire.\"\n\n\"But sir, there are soldiers among them,\" Hammond protested. \"I am sure they would wish to drill, from time to time\u2014\"\n\n\"They may wait until they reach China,\" Laurence said.\n\nHammond followed him out of the cabin and caught him at the door to his own quarters; inside, two ground crewmen had just brought in more chairs, and Roland and Dyer were busily laying plates out upon the cloth: the other dragons' captains were joining Laurence for breakfast before they took their leave. \"Sir,\" Hammond said, \"pray allow me a moment. I must beg your pardon for having sent you to Prince Yongxing in such a way, knowing him to be in an intemperate mood, and I assure you I blame only myself for the consequences, and your quarrel; still, I must beg you to be forbearing\u2014\"\n\nLaurence listened to this much, frowning, and now with mounting incredulity said, \"Are you saying that you were already aware\u2014? That you made this proposal to Captain Riley, knowing I had forbidden them the deck?\"\n\nHis voice was rising as he spoke, and Hammond darted his eyes desperately towards the open door of the cabin: Roland and Dyer were staring wide-eyed and interested at them both, not attending to the great silver platters they were holding. \"You must understand, we cannot put them in such a position. Prince Yongxing has issued a command; if we defy it openly, we humiliate him before his own\u2014\"\n\n\"Then he had best learn not to issue commands to me, sir,\" Laurence said angrily, \"and you would do better to tell him so, instead of carrying them out for him, in this underhanded\u2014\"\n\n\"For Heaven's sake! Do you imagine I have any desire to see you barred from Temeraire? All we have to bargain with is the dragon's refusal to be separated from you,\" Hammond said, growing heated himself. \"But that alone will not get us very far without good-will, and if Prince Yongxing cannot enforce his commands so long as we are at sea, our positions will be wholly reversed in China. Would you have us sacrifice an alliance to your pride? To say nothing,\" Hammond added, with a contemptible attempt at wheedling, \"of any hope of keeping Temeraire.\"\n\n\"I am no diplomat,\" Laurence said, \"but I will tell you, sir, if you imagine you are likely to get so much as a thimbleful of good-will from this prince, no matter how you truckle to him, then you are a damned fool; and I will thank you not to imagine that I may be bought by castles in the air.\"\n\nLaurence had meant to send Harcourt and the others off in a creditable manner, but his table was left to bear the social burden alone, without any assistance from his conversation. Thankfully he had laid in good stores, and there was some advantage in being so close to the galley: bacon, ham, eggs, and coffee came to the table steaming hot, even as they sat down, along with a portion of a great tunny, rolled in pounded ship's biscuit and fried, the rest of which had gone to Temeraire; also a large dish of cherry preserves, and an even larger of marmalade. He ate only a little, and seized gladly on the distraction when Warren asked him to sketch the course of the battle for them. He pushed aside his mostly untouched plate to demonstrate the maneuvers of the ships and the Fleur-de-Nuit with bits of crumbled bread, the salt-cellar standing for the Allegiance.\n\nThe dragons were just completing their own somewhat less-civilized breakfast as Laurence and the other captains came back above to the dragondeck. Laurence was deeply gratified to find Temeraire wide awake and alert, looking much more easy with his bandages showing clean white, and engaged in persuading Maximus to try a piece of the tunny.\n\n\"It is a particularly nice one, and fresh-caught this very morning,\" he said. Maximus eyed the fish with deep suspicion: Temeraire had already eaten perhaps half, but its head had not been removed, and it lay gap-mouthed and staring glassily on the deck. A good fifteen hundred pounds when first taken, Laurence guessed; even half was still impressive.\n\nLess so, however, when Maximus finally bent his head down and took it: the whole bulk made a single bite for him, and it was amusing to see him chewing with a skeptical expression. Temeraire waited expectantly; Maximus swallowed and licked his chops, and said, \"It would not be so very bad, I suppose, if there were nothing else handy, but it is too slippery.\"\n\nTemeraire's ruff flattened with disappointment. \"Perhaps one must develop a taste for it. I dare say they can catch you another.\"\n\nMaximus snorted. \"No; I will leave the fish to you. Is there any more mutton, at all?\" he asked, peering over at the herdsmaster with interest.\n\n\"How many have you et up already?\" Berkley demanded, heaving himself up the stairs towards him. \"Four? That is enough; if you grow any more, you will never get yourself off the ground.\"\n\nMaximus ignored this and cleaned the last haunch of sheep out of the slaughtering-tub; the others had finished also, and the herdmaster's mates began pumping water over the dragondeck to sluice away the blood: shortly there was a veritable frenzy of sharks in the waters before the ship.\n\nThe William of Orange was nearly abreast of them, and Riley had gone across to discuss the supplies with her captain; now he reappeared on her deck and was rowed back over, while her men began laying out fresh supplies of wooden spars and sailcloth. \"Lord Purbeck,\" Riley said, climbing back up the side, \"we will send the launch to fetch over the supplies, if you please.\"\n\n\"Shall we bring them for you instead?\" Harcourt asked, calling down from the dragondeck. \"We will have to clear Maximus and Lily off the deck in any case; we can just as easily ferry supplies as fly circles.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir; you would oblige me greatly,\" Riley said, looking up and bowing, with no evident suspicion: Harcourt's hair was pulled back tightly, the long braid concealed beneath her flying-hood, while her dress coat hid her figure well enough.\n\nMaximus and Lily went aloft, without their crews, clearing room on the deck for the others to make ready; the crews rolled out the harnesses and armor, and began rigging the smaller dragons out, while the two larger flew over to the William of Orange for the supplies. The moment of departure was drawing close, and Laurence limped over to Temeraire's side; he was conscious suddenly of a sharp, unanticipated regret.\n\n\"I do not know that dragon,\" Temeraire said to Laurence, looking across the water at the other transport; there was a large beast sprawled sullenly upon their dragondeck, a stripey brown-and-green, with red streaks on his wings and neck rather like paint: Laurence had never seen the breed before.\n\n\"He is an Indian breed, from one of those tribes in Canada,\" Sutton said, when Laurence pointed out the strange dragon. \"I think Dakota, if I am pronouncing the name correctly; I understand he and his rider\u2014they do not use crews over there, you know, only one man to a dragon, no matter the size\u2014were captured raiding a settlement on the frontier. It is a great coup: a vastly different breed, and I understand they are very fierce fighters. They meant to use him at the breeding grounds in Halifax, but I believe it was agreed that once Praecursoris was sent to them, they should send that fellow here in exchange; and a proper bloody-minded creature he looks.\"\n\n\"It seems hard to send him so very far from home, and to stay,\" Temeraire said, rather low, looking at the other dragon. \"He does not look at all happy.\"\n\n\"He would only be sitting in the breeding grounds at Halifax instead of here, and that does not make much difference,\" Messoria said, stretching her wings out for the convenience of her harness-crewmen, who were climbing over her to get her rigged out. \"They are all much alike, and not very interesting, except for the breeding part,\" she added, with somewhat alarming frankness; she was a much older dragon than Temeraire, being over thirty years of age.\n\n\"That does not sound very interesting, either,\" Temeraire said, and glumly laid himself back down. \"Do you suppose they will put me in a breeding ground in China?\"\n\n\"I am sure not,\" Laurence said; privately, he was quite determined he would not leave Temeraire to any such fate, no matter what the Emperor of China or anyone else had to say about it. \"They would hardly be making such a fuss, if that were all they wanted.\"\n\nMessoria snorted indulgently. \"You may not think it so terrible, anyway, after you have tried it.\"\n\n\"Stop corrupting the morals of the young.\" Captain Sutton slapped her side good-humoredly, and gave the harness a final reassuring tug. \"There, I think we are ready. Good-bye a second time, Laurence,\" he said, as they clasped hands. \"I expect you have had enough excitement to stand you for the whole voyage; may the rest be less eventful.\"\n\nThe three smaller dragons leapt one after another off the deck, Nitidus scarcely even making the Allegiance dip in the water, and flew over to the William of Orange; then Maximus and Lily came back in turns to be rigged-out themselves, and for Berkley and Harcourt to make Laurence their farewells. At last the whole formation was transferred to the other transport, leaving Temeraire alone on the Allegiance once more.\n\nRiley gave the order to make sail directly; the wind coming from east-southeast and not over-strong, even the studdingsails were set, a fine and blooming display of white. William of Orange fired a gun to leeward as they passed, answered in a moment by Riley's order, and a cheer came to them across the water as the two transports drew finally away from one another, slow and majestic.\n\nMaximus and Lily had gone aloft for a frolic, with the energy of young dragons lately fed; they could be seen for a long while chasing one another through the clouds above the ship, and Temeraire kept his gaze on them until distance reduced them to the size of birds. He sighed a little then, and drew his head back down, curling in upon himself. \"It will be a long time before we see them again, I suppose,\" he said.\n\nLaurence put his hand on the sleek neck, silently. This parting felt somehow more final: no great bustle and noise, no sense of new adventure unfolding, only the crew going about their work still subdued, with nothing to be seen but the long blue miles of empty ocean, an uncertain road to a more uncertain destination. \"The time will pass more quickly than you expect,\" he said. \"Come, let us have the book again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "The weather held clear for the first brief stage of their journey, with that peculiar winter cleanliness: the water very dark, the sky cloudless, and the air gradually warming as they continued the journey southward. A brisk, busy time, replacing the damaged yards and hanging the sails fresh, so that their pace daily increased as they restored the ship to her old self. They saw only a couple of small merchantmen in the distance, who gave them a wide berth, and once high overhead a courier-dragon going on its rounds with dispatches: certainly a Greyling, one of the long-distance fliers, but too far away for even Temeraire to recognize if it was anyone they knew.\n\nThe Chinese guards had appeared promptly at dawn, the first day after the arrangement, a broad stripe of paint having marked off a section of the larboard dragondeck; despite the absence of any visible weapons they did indeed stand watch, as formal as Marines on parade, in shifts of three. The crew were by now well aware of the quarrel, which had taken place near enough the stern windows to be overheard on deck, and were naturally inclined to be resentful of the guards' presence, and still more so of the senior members of the Chinese party, who were one and all eyed darkly, without distinction.\n\nLaurence however was beginning to discern some individual traces among them, at least those who chose to come on deck. A few of the younger men showed some real enthusiasm for the sea, standing near the larboard end of the deck to best enjoy the spray as the Allegiance plowed onwards. One young fellow, Li Honglin, was particularly adventurous, going so far as to imitate the habits of some of the midshipmen and hang off the yards despite his unsuitable clothes: the skirts of his half-robe looked likely to entangle with the ropes, and his short black boots had soles too thick to have much purchase on the edge of the deck, unlike the bare feet or thin slippers of the sailors. His compatriots were much alarmed each time he tried it, and urged him back onto the deck loudly and with urgent gestures.\n\nThe rest took the air more sedately, and stayed well back from the edges; they often brought up low stools to sit upon, and spoke freely among themselves in the strange rise-and-fall of their language, which Laurence could not so much as break into sentences; it seemed wholly impenetrable to him. But despite the impossibility of direct conversation, he quickly came to feel that most of the attendants had no strong hostility of their own towards the British: uniformly civil, at least in expression and gesture, and usually making polite bows as they came and went.\n\nThey omitted such courtesies only on those occasions when they were in Yongxing's company: at such times, they followed his practice, and neither nodded nor made any gesture at all towards the British aviators, but came and went as if there were no other people at all aboard. But the prince came on deck infrequently; his cabin with its wide windows was spacious enough he did not need to do so for exercise. His main purpose seemed to be to frown and to look over Temeraire, who did not benefit from these inspections, as he was almost always asleep: still recovering from his wound, he was as yet napping nearly all the day, and lay oblivious, now and again sending a small rumble through the deck with a wide and drowsy yawn, while the life of the ship went on unheeded about him.\n\nLiu Bao did not even make brief visits such as these, but remained closeted in his apartments: permanently, as far as any of them could tell; no one had seen so much of him as the tip of his nose since his first coming aboard, though he was quartered in the cabin under the poop deck, and had only to open his front door and step outside. He did not even leave to go down below to take meals or consult with Yongxing, and only a few servants trotted back and forth between his quarters and the galley, once or twice a day.\n\nSun Kai, by contrast, scarcely spent a moment of daylight indoors; he took the air after every meal and remained on deck for long stretches at a time. On those occasions when Yongxing came above, Sun Kai always bowed formally to the prince, and then kept himself quietly to one side, set apart from the retinue of servants, and the two of them did not much converse. Sun Kai's own interest was centered upon the life of the ship, and her construction; and he was particularly fascinated by the great-gun exercises.\n\nThese, Riley was forced to curtail more than he would have liked, Hammond having argued that they could not be disturbing the prince regularly; so on most days the men only ran out the guns in dumb-show, without firing, and only occasionally engaged in the thunder and crash of a live exercise. In either case, Sun Kai always appeared promptly the moment the drum began to beat, if he were not already on deck at the time, and watched the proceedings intently from start to finish, not flinching even at the enormous eruption and recoil. He was careful to place himself so that he was not in the way, even as the men came racing up to the dragondeck to man its handful of guns, and by the second or third occasion the gun-crews ceased to pay him any notice.\n\nWhen there was no exercise in train, he studied the nearby guns at close range. Those upon the dragondeck were the short-barreled carronades, great forty-two-pound smashers, less accurate than the long guns but with far less recoil, so they did not require much room; and Sun Kai was fascinated by the fixed mounting in particular, which allowed the heavy iron barrel to slide back and forth along its path of recoil. He did not seem to think it rude to stare, either, as the men went about their work, aviators and sailors alike, though he could not have understood a word of what they were saying; and he studied the Allegiance herself with as much interest: the arrangement of her masts and sails, and with particular attention to the design of her hull. Laurence saw him often peering down over the edge of the dragondeck at the white line of the keel, and making sketches upon the deck in an attempt to outline her construction.\n\nYet for all his evident curiosity, he had a quality of deep reserve which went beyond the exterior, the severity of his foreign looks; his study was somehow more intense than eager, less a scholar's passion than a matter of industry and diligence, and there was nothing inviting in his manner. Hammond, undaunted, had already made a few overtures, which were received with courtesy but no warmth, and to Laurence it seemed almost painfully obvious that Sun Kai was not welcoming: not the least change of emotion showed on his face at Hammond's approach or departure, no smiles, no frowns, only a controlled, polite attention.\n\nEven if conversation had been possible, Laurence did not think he could bring himself to intrude, after Hammond's example; though Sun Kai's study of the ship would certainly have benefited from some guidance, and thus offered an ideal subject of conversation. But tact forbade it as much as the barrier of language, so for the moment, Laurence contented himself with observation.\n\nAt Madeira, they watered and repaired their supplies of livestock from the damage which the formation's visit had done them, but did not linger in port. \"All this shifting of the sails has been to some purpose\u2014I am beginning to have a better notion of what suits her,\" Riley said to Laurence. \"Would you mind Christmas at sea? I would be just as happy to put her to the test, and see if I can bring her up as far as seven knots.\"\n\nThey sailed out of Funchal roads majestically, with a broad spread of sail, and Riley's jubilant air announced his hopes for greater speed had been answered even before he said, \"Eight knots, or nearly; what do you say to that?\"\n\n\"I congratulate you indeed,\" Laurence said. \"I would not have thought it possible, myself; she is going beyond anything.\" He felt a curious kind of regret at their speed, wholly unfamiliar. As a captain he had never much indulged in real cracking on, feeling it inappropriate to be reckless with the King's property, but like any seaman he liked his ship to go as well as she could. He would ordinarily have shared truly in Riley's pleasure, and never looked back at the smudge of the island receding behind them.\n\nRiley had invited Laurence and several of the ship's officers to dine, in a celebratory mood over the ship's newfound speed. As if for punishment, a brief squall blew up from nowhere during the meal, while only the hapless young Lieutenant Beckett was standing watch: he could have sailed around the world six times without a pause if only ships were to be controlled directly by mathematical formulae, and yet invariably managed to give quite the wrong order in any real weather. There was a mad rush from the dinner table as soon as the Allegiance first pitched beneath them, putting her head down and protesting, and they heard Temeraire make a startled small roar; even so, the wind nearly carried away the mizzentop-gallant sail before Riley and Purbeck could get back on deck and put things to rights.\n\nThe storm blew away as quickly as it had come, the hurrying dark clouds leaving the sky washed shell-pink and blue behind them; the swell died to a comfortable height, a few feet, which the Allegiance scarcely noticed; and while there was yet enough light to read by on the dragondeck, a party of the Chinese came up on deck: several servants first maneuvering Liu Bao out through his door, trundling him across the quarterdeck and forecastle, and then at last up to the dragondeck. The older envoy was greatly altered from his last appearance, having shed perhaps a stone in weight and gone a distinctly greenish shade under his beard and pouched cheeks, so visibly uncomfortable that Laurence could not help but be sorry for him. The servants had brought a chair for him; he was eased into it and his face turned into the cool wet wind, but he did not look at all as though he were improving, and when another of the attendants tried to offer him a plate of food, he only waved it away.\n\n\"Do you suppose he is going to starve to death?\" Temeraire inquired, more in a spirit of curiosity than concern, and Laurence answered absently, \"I hope not; though he is old to be taking to sea for the first time,\" even as he sat up and beckoned. \"Dyer, go down to Mr. Pollitt and ask if he would be so good as to step up for a moment.\"\n\nShortly Dyer came back with the ship's surgeon puffing along behind him in his awkward way; Pollitt had been Laurence's own surgeon in two commands, and did not stand on ceremony, but heaved himself into a chair and said, \"Well, now, sir; is it the leg?\"\n\n\"No, thank you, Mr. Pollitt; I am improving nicely; but I am concerned for the Chinese gentleman's health.\" Laurence pointed out Liu Bao, and Pollitt, shaking his head, opined that if he went on losing weight at such a pace, he should scarcely reach the equator. \"I do not suppose they know any remedies for sea-sickness of this virulent sort, not being accustomed to long voyages,\" Laurence said. \"Would you not make up some physic for him?\"\n\n\"Well, he is not my patient, and I would not like to be accused of interference; I do not suppose their medical men take any kinder view of it than do we,\" Pollitt said apologetically. \"But in any case, I think I should rather prescribe a course of ship's biscuit. There is very little offense any stomach can take at biscuit, I find, and who knows what sort of foreign cookery he has been teasing himself with. A little biscuit and perhaps a light wine will set him up properly again, I am sure.\"\n\nOf course the foreign cookery was native to Liu Bao, but Laurence saw nothing to argue with in this course of action, and later that evening sent over a large packet of biscuit, picked-over by a reluctant Roland and Dyer to remove the weevils, and the real sacrifice, three bottles of a particular sprightly Riesling: very light, indeed almost airy, and purchased at a cost of 6s., 3d. apiece from a Portsmouth wine-merchant.\n\nLaurence felt a little odd in making the gesture; he hoped he would have done as much in any case, but there was more calculation in it than he had ever been used to make, and there was just a shade of dishonesty, a shade of flattery to it, which he could not entirely like, or approve of in himself. And indeed he felt some general qualms about any overture at all, given the insult of the confiscation of the East India Company ships, which he had no more forgotten than any of the sailors who still watched the Chinese with sullen dislike.\n\nBut he excused himself to Temeraire privately that night, having seen his offering delivered into Liu Bao's cabin. \"After all, it is not their fault personally, any more than it would be mine if the King were to do the same to them. If Government makes not a sound over the matter, they can hardly be blamed for treating it so lightly: they at least have not made the slightest attempt at concealing the incident, nor been dishonest in the least.\"\n\nEven as he said it, he was still not quite satisfied. But there was no other choice; he did not mean to be sitting about doing nothing, nor could he rely upon Hammond: skill and wit the diplomat might possess, but Laurence was by now convinced that there was no intention, on his part, of expending much effort to keep Temeraire; to Hammond the dragon was only a bargaining-chip. There was certainly no hope of persuading Yongxing, but so far as the other members of the embassy might be won over, in good faith, he meant to try, and if the effort should tax him in his pride, that was small sacrifice.\n\nIt proved worthwhile: Liu Bao crept from his cabin again the next day, looking less wretched, and by the subsequent morning was well enough to send for the translator, and ask Laurence to come over to their side of the deck and join him: some color back in his face, and much relief. He had also brought along one of the cooks: the biscuits, he reported, had worked wonders, taken on his own physician's recommendation with a little fresh ginger, and he was urgent to know how they might be made.\n\n\"Well, they are mostly flour and a bit of water, but I cannot tell you anything more, I am afraid,\" Laurence said. \"We do not bake them aboard, you see; but I assure you we have enough in the bread-room to last you twice around the world, sir.\"\n\n\"Once has been more than enough for me,\" Liu Bao said. \"An old man like me has no business going so far away from home and being tossed around on the waves. Since we came on this ship, I have not been able to eat anything, not even a few pancakes, until those biscuits! But this morning I was able to have some congee and fish, and I was not sick at all. I am very grateful to you.\"\n\n\"I am happy to have been of service, sir; indeed you look much improved,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"That is very polite, even if it is not very truthful,\" Liu Bao said. He held out his arm ruefully and shook it, the robe hanging rather loose. \"I will take some fattening up to look like myself again.\"\n\n\"If you feel equal to it, sir, may I invite you to join us for dinner tomorrow evening?\" Laurence asked, thinking this overture, though barely, enough encouragement to justify the invitation. \"It is our holiday, and I am giving a dinner for my officers; you would be very welcome, and any of your compatriots who might wish to join you.\"\n\nThis dinner proved far more successful than the last. Granby was still laid up in the sick-berth, forbidden rich food, but Lieutenant Ferris was bent on making the most of his opportunity to impress and in any direction which offered. He was a young officer and energetic, very lately promoted to Temeraire's captain of topmen on account of a fine boarding engagement he had led at Trafalgar. In ordinary course it would have been at least another year and more likely two or three before he could hope to become a second lieutenant in his own right, but with poor Evans sent home, he had stepped into his place as acting-second, and plainly hoped to keep the position.\n\nIn the morning, Laurence with some amusement overheard him sternly lecturing the midwingmen on the need to behave in a civilized manner at table, and not sit around like lumps. Laurence suspected that he even primed the junior officers with a handful of anecdotes, as occasionally during the meal he glared significantly at one or the other of the boys, and the target would hastily gulp his wine and start in on a story rather improbable for an officer of such tender years.\n\nSun Kai accompanied Liu Bao, but as before had the air of an observer rather than a guest. But Liu Bao displayed no similar restraint and had plainly come ready to be pleased, though indeed it would have been a hard man who could have resisted the suckling pig, spit-roasted since that morning and glowing under its glaze of butter and cream. They neither of them disdained a second helping, and Liu Bao was also loud in his approval of the crackling-brown goose, a handsome specimen acquired specially for the occasion at Madeira and still smug and fat at the time of its demise, unlike the usual poultry to be had at sea.\n\nThe civil exertions of the officers had an effect also, as stumbling and awkward as some of the younger fellows were about it; Liu Bao had a generous laugh easily provoked, and he shared many amusing stories of his own, mostly about hunting misadventures. Only the poor translator was unhappy, as he had a great deal of work scurrying back and forth around the table, alternately putting English into Chinese and then the reverse; almost from the beginning, the atmosphere was wholly different, and wholly amiable.\n\nSun Kai remained quiet, listening more than speaking, and Laurence could not be sure he was enjoying himself; he ate still in an abstemious fashion and drank very little, though Liu Bao, himself not at all lacking in capacity, would good-naturedly scold him from time to time, and fill his glass again to the brim. But after the great Christmas pudding was ceremoniously borne out, flickering blue with brandied flames, to shared applause, to be dismantled, served, and enjoyed, Liu Bao turned and said to him, \"You are being very dull tonight. Here, sing 'The Hard Road' for us, that is the proper poem for this journey!\"\n\nFor all his reserve, Sun Kai seemed quite willing to oblige; he cleared his throat and recited:\n\n\"Pure wine costs, for the golden bowl, ten thousand coppers a flagon,\n\nAnd a jade platter of dainty food calls for a million coins.\n\nI fling aside my bowl and meat, I cannot eat or drink...\n\nI raise my talons to the sky, I peer four ways in vain.\n\nI would cross the Yellow River, but ice takes hold of my limbs;\n\nI would fly above the Tai-hang Mountains, but the sky is blind with snow.\n\nI would sit and watch the golden carp, lazy by a brook\u2014\n\nBut I suddenly dream of crossing the waves, sailing for the sun...\n\nJourneying is hard,\n\nJourneying is hard.\n\nThere are many turnings\u2014\n\nWhich am I to follow?\n\nI will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy bank of clouds,\n\nAnd set my wings straight to bridge the wide, wide sea.\"\n\nIf there was any rhyme or meter to the piece, it vanished in the translation, but the content the aviators uniformly approved and applauded. \"Is it your own work, sir?\" Laurence asked with interest. \"I do not believe I have ever heard a poem from the view of a dragon.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Sun Kai said. \"It is one of the works of the honored Lung Li Po, of the Tang Dynasty. I am only a poor scholar, and my verses are not worthy of being shared in company.\" He was perfectly happy, however, to give them several other selections from classical poets, all recited from memory, in what seemed to Laurence a prodigious feat of recall.\n\nAll the guests rolled away at last on the most harmonious of terms, having carefully avoided any discussion of British and Chinese sovereignty regarding either ships or dragons. \"I will be so bold as to say it was a success,\" Laurence said afterwards, sipping coffee upon the dragondeck while Temeraire ate his sheep. \"They are not so very stiff-necked in company, after all, and I can call myself really satisfied with Liu Bao; I have been in many a ship where I should have been grateful to dine with as good company.\"\n\n\"Well, I am glad you had a pleasant evening,\" Temeraire said, grinding thoughtfully upon the leg bones. \"Can you say that poem over again?\"\n\nLaurence had to canvass his officers to attempt to reconstruct the poem; they were still at it the next morning, when Yongxing came up to take the air, and listened to them mangling the translation; after they had made a few attempts, he frowned and then turned to Temeraire, and himself recited the poem.\n\nYongxing spoke in Chinese, without translation; but nevertheless, after a single hearing, Temeraire was able to repeat the verses back to him in the same language, with not the least evidence of difficulty. It was not the first time that Laurence had been surprised by Temeraire's skill with language: like all dragons, Temeraire had learned speech during the long maturity in the shell, but unlike most, he had been exposed to three different tongues, and evidently remembered even what must have been his earliest.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Temeraire said, turning his head towards him with excitement, after exchanging a few more words in Chinese with Yongxing, \"he says that it was written by a dragon, not a man at all.\"\n\nLaurence, still taken aback to find that Temeraire could speak the language, blinked yet again at this intelligence. \"Poetry seems an odd sort of occupation for a dragon, but I suppose if other Chinese dragons like books as well as you do, it is not so surprising one of them should have tried his hand at verse.\"\n\n\"I wonder how he wrote it,\" Temeraire said thoughtfully. \"I might like to try, but I do not see how I would ever put it down; I do not think I could hold a pen.\" He raised his own foreleg and examined the five-fingered claw dubiously.\n\n\"I would be happy to take your dictation,\" Laurence said, amused by the notion. \"I expect that is how he managed.\"\n\nHe thought nothing more of it until two days later, when he came back on deck grim and worried after sitting a long while again in the sick-berth: the stubborn fever had recurred, and Granby lay pale and half-present, his blue eyes wide and fixed sightlessly upon the distant recesses of the ceiling, his lips parted and cracked; he took only a little water, and when he spoke his words were confused and wandering. Pollitt would give no opinion, and only shook his head a little.\n\nFerris was standing anxiously at the bottom of the dragondeck stairs, waiting for him; and at his expression Laurence quickened his still-limping pace. \"Sir,\" Ferris said, \"I did not know what to do; he has been talking to Temeraire all morning, and we cannot tell what he is saying.\"\n\nLaurence hastened up the steps and found Yongxing seated in an armchair on the deck and conversing with Temeraire in Chinese, the prince speaking rather slowly and loudly, enunciating his words, and correcting Temeraire's own speech in return; he had also brought up several sheets of paper, and had painted a handful of their odd-looking characters upon them in large size. Temeraire indeed looked fascinated; his attention was wholly engaged, and the tip of his tail was flicking back and forth in mid-air, as when he was particularly excited.\n\n\"Laurence, look, that is 'dragon' in their writing,\" Temeraire said, catching sight of him and calling him forward: Laurence obediently stared at the picture, rather blankly; to him it looked like nothing more than the patterns sometimes left marked on a sandy shore after a tide, even when Temeraire had pointed out the portion of the symbol which represented the dragon's wings, and then the body.\n\n\"Do they only have a single letter for the entire word?\" Laurence said, dubiously. \"How is it pronounced?\"\n\n\"It is said lung,\" Temeraire said, \"like in my Chinese name, Lung Tien Xiang, and tien is for Celestials,\" he added, proudly, pointing to another symbol.\n\nYongxing was watching them both, with no very marked outward expression, but Laurence thought perhaps a suggestion of triumph in his eyes. \"I am very glad you have been so pleasantly occupied,\" Laurence said to Temeraire, and, turning to Yongxing, made a deliberate bow, addressing him without invitation. \"You are very kind, sir, to take such pains.\"\n\nYongxing answered him stiffly, \"I consider it a duty. The study of the classics is the path to understanding.\"\n\nHis manner was hardly welcoming, but if he chose to ignore the boundary and speak with Temeraire, Laurence considered it the equivalent of a formal call, and himself justified in initiating conversation. Whether or not Yongxing privately agreed, Laurence's forwardness did not deter him from future visits: every morning now began to find him upon the deck, giving Temeraire daily lessons in the language and offering him further samples of Chinese literature to whet his appetite.\n\nLaurence at first suffered only irritation at these transparent attempts at enticement; Temeraire looked much brighter than he had since parting from Maximus and Lily, and though he might dislike the source, Laurence could not begrudge Temeraire the opportunity for so much new mental occupation, when he was as yet confined to the deck by his wound. As for the notion that Temeraire's loyalty would be swayed by any number of Oriental blandishments, Yongxing might entertain such a belief if he liked; Laurence had no doubts.\n\nBut he could not help but feel a rather sinking sensation as the days went on and Temeraire did not tire of the subject; their own books were now often neglected in favor of recitation of one or another piece of Chinese literature, which Temeraire liked to get by rote, as he could not write them down or read them. Laurence was well aware he was nothing like a scholar; his own notion of pleasant occupation was to spend an afternoon in conversation, perhaps writing letters or reading a newspaper when one not excessively out of date could be had. Although under Temeraire's influence he had gradually come to enjoy books far more than he had ever imagined he could, it was a good deal harder to share Temeraire's excitement over works in a language he could not make head or tail of himself.\n\nHe did not mean to give Yongxing the satisfaction of seeing him at all discomfited, but it did feel like a victory for the prince at his own expense, particularly on those occasions when Temeraire mastered a new piece and visibly glowed under Yongxing's rare and hard-won praise. Laurence worried, also, that Yongxing seemed almost surprised by Temeraire's progress, and often especially pleased; Laurence naturally thought Temeraire remarkable among dragons, but this was not an opinion he desired Yongxing to share: the prince scarcely needed any additional motive to try and take Temeraire away.\n\nAs some consolation, Temeraire was constantly shifting into English, that he might draw Laurence in; and Yongxing had perforce to make polite conversation with him or risk losing what advantage he had gained. But while this might be satisfying in a petty sort of way, Laurence could not be said to enjoy these conversations much. Any natural kinship of spirit must have been inadequate in the face of so violent a practical opposition, and they would scarcely have been inclined towards one another in any case.\n\nOne morning Yongxing came on deck early, with Temeraire still sleeping; and while his attendants brought out his chair and draped it, and arranged for him the scrolls which he meant to read to Temeraire that day, the prince came to the edge of the deck to gaze out at the ocean. They were in the midst of a lovely stretch of blue-water sailing, no shore in sight and the wind coming fresh and cool off the sea, and Laurence was himself standing in the bows to enjoy the vista: dark water stretching endless to the horizon, occasional little waves overlapping one another in a white froth, and the ship all alone beneath the curving bowl of the sky.\n\n\"Only in the desert can one find so desolate and uninteresting a view,\" Yongxing said abruptly; as Laurence had been on the point of offering a polite remark about the beauty of the scene, he was left dumb and baffled, and still more so when Yongxing added, \"You British are forever sailing off to some new place; are you so discontented with your own country?\" He did not wait for an answer, but shook his head and turned away, leaving Laurence again confirmed in his belief that he could hardly have found a man less in sympathy with himself on any point.\n\nTemeraire's shipboard diet would ordinarily have been mostly fish, caught by himself; Laurence and Granby had planned on it in their calculations of supply, cattle and sheep intended for variety's sake, and in case of bad weather which might keep Temeraire confined to the ship. But barred from flying because of his wound, Temeraire could not hunt, and so he was consuming their stores at a far more rapid pace than they had originally counted upon.\n\n\"We will have to keep close to the Saharan coastline in any case, or risk being blown straight across to Rio by the trade winds,\" Riley said. \"We can certainly stop at Cape Coast to take on supplies.\" This was meant to console him; Laurence only nodded and went away.\n\nRiley's father had plantations in the West Indies, and several hundred slaves to work them, while Laurence's own father was a firm supporter of Wilberforce and Clarkson, and had made several very cutting speeches in the Lords against the trade, on one occasion even mentioning Riley's father by name in a list of slave-holding gentlemen who, as he had mildly put it, \"disgrace the name of Christian, and blight the character and reputation of their country.\"\n\nThe incident had made a coolness between them at the time: Riley was deeply attached to his father, a man of far greater personal warmth than Lord Allendale, and naturally resented the public insult. Laurence, while lacking a particularly strong degree of affection for his own father and angry to be put in so unhappy a position, was yet not at all willing to offer any sort of apology. He had grown up with the pamphlets and books put out by Clarkson's committee all about the house, and at the age of nine had been taken on a tour of a former slave-ship, about to be broken up; the nightmares had lingered afterwards for several months, and made upon his young mind a profound impression. They had never made peace on the subject but only settled into a truce; they neither of them mentioned the subject again, and studiously avoided discussing either parent. Laurence could not now speak frankly to Riley about how very reluctant he was to put in at a slave port, though he was not at all easy in his mind at the prospect.\n\nInstead he privately asked Keynes whether Temeraire was not healing well, and might be permitted short flights again, for hunting. \"Best not,\" the surgeon said, reluctantly; Laurence looked at him sharply, and at last drew from Keynes the admission that he had some concern: the wound was not healing as he would like. \"The muscles are still warm to the touch, and I believe I feel some drawn flesh beneath the hide,\" Keynes said. \"It is far too soon to have any real concern; however, I do not intend to take any risks: no flying, for at least another two weeks.\"\n\nSo by this conversation Laurence merely gained one additional source of private care. There were sufficient others already, besides the shortage of food and the now-unavoidable stop at Cape Coast. With Temeraire's injury as well as Yongxing's steadfast opposition precluding any work aloft, the aviators had been left almost entirely idle, while at the same time the sailors had been particularly busy with repairing the damage to the ship and making her stores, and a host of not unpredictable evils had followed.\n\nThinking to offer Roland and Dyer some distraction, Laurence had called the two of them up to the dragondeck shortly before the arrival in Madeira, to examine them in their schoolwork. They had stared at him with such guilty expressions that he was not surprised to find they had neglected their studies entirely since having become his runners: very little notion of arithmetic, none at all of the more advanced mathematics, no French whatsoever, and when he handed them Gibbon's book, which he had brought to the deck meaning to read to Temeraire later, Roland stuttered so over the words that Temeraire put back his ruff and began to correct her from memory. Dyer was a little better off: when quizzed, he at least had his multiplication tables mostly by heart, and some sense of grammar; Roland stumbled over anything higher than eight and professed herself surprised to learn that speech even had parts. Laurence no longer wondered how he would fill their time; he only reproached himself for having been so lax about their schooling, and set about his newly self-appointed task as their schoolmaster with a will.\n\nThe runners had always been rather pets of the entire crew; since Morgan's death, Roland and Dyer had been cosseted still more. Their daily struggles with participles and division were now looked on by the other aviators with great amusement, but only until the Allegiance's midshipmen made some jeering noises. Then the ensigns took it on themselves to repay the insult, and a few scuffles ensued in dark corners of the ship.\n\nAt first, Laurence and Riley entertained themselves by a comparison of the wooden excuses which were offered them for the collection of black eyes and bleeding lips. But the petty squabbling began to take a more ominous shape when older men started to present similar excuses: a deeper resentment on the sailors' part, founded in no small part in the uneven balance of labor and their fear of Temeraire, was finding expression in the near-daily exchange of insults, no longer even touching upon Roland and Dyer's studies. In their turn, the aviators had taken a reciprocal offense at the complete lack of gratitude that seemed to them due to Temeraire's valor.\n\nThe first true explosion occurred just as they began to make the turn eastward, past Cape Palmas, and headed towards Cape Coast. Laurence was drowsing on the dragondeck, sheltered by the shadow of Temeraire's body from the direct force of the sun; he did not see himself what had happened, but he was roused by a heavy thump, sudden shouts and cries, and climbing hurriedly to his feet saw the men in a ring. Martin was gripping Blythe, the armorer's mate, by the arm; one of Riley's officers, an older midshipman, was stretched out on the deck, and Lord Purbeck was shouting from the poop deck, \"Set that man in irons, Cornell, straightaway.\"\n\nTemeraire's head came straight up, and he roared: not raising the divine wind, thankfully, but he made a great and thundering noise nonetheless, and the men all scattered back from it, many with pale faces. \"No one is putting any of my crew in prison,\" Temeraire said angrily, his tail lashing the air; he raised himself and spread wide his wings, and the whole ship shivered: the wind was blowing out from the Saharan coast, abaft the beam, the sails close-hauled to keep them on their southeast course, and Temeraire's wings were acting as an independent and contrary sail.\n\n\"Temeraire! Stop that at once; at once, do you hear me?\" Laurence said sharply; he had never spoken so, not since the first weeks of Temeraire's existence, and Temeraire dropped down in surprise, his wings furling in tight on instinct. \"Purbeck, you will leave my men to me, if you please; stand down, master-at-arms,\" Laurence said, snapping orders quickly: he did not mean to allow the scene to progress further, nor turn into some open struggle between the aviators and seamen. \"Mr. Ferris,\" he said, \"take Blythe below and confine him.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Ferris said, already shoving through the crowd, and pushing the aviators back around him, breaking up the knots of angry men even before he reached Blythe.\n\nWatching the progress with hard eyes, Laurence added, loudly, \"Mr. Martin, to my cabin at once. Back to your work, all of you; Mr. Keynes, come here.\"\n\nHe stayed another moment, but he was satisfied: the pressing danger had been averted. He turned from the rail, trusting to ordinary discipline to break up the rest of the crowd. But Temeraire was huddled down very nearly flat, looking at him with a startled, unhappy expression; Laurence reached out to him and flinched as Temeraire twitched away: not out of reach, but the impulse plainly visible.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" Laurence said, dropping his hand, a tightness in his throat. \"Temeraire,\" he said, and stopped; he did not know what to say, for Temeraire could not be allowed to act so: he might have caused real damage to the ship, and aside from that if he carried on in such a fashion the crew would shortly grow too terrified of him to do their work. \"You have not hurt yourself?\" he asked, instead, as Keynes hurried over.\n\n\"No,\" Temeraire said, very quietly. \"I am perfectly well.\" He submitted to being examined, in silence, and Keynes pronounced him unharmed by the exertion.\n\n\"I must go and speak with Martin,\" Laurence said, still at a loss; Temeraire did not answer, but curled himself up and swept his wings forward, around his head, and after a long moment, Laurence left the deck and went below.\n\nThe cabin was close and hot, even with all the windows standing open, and not calculated to improve Laurence's temper. Martin was pacing the length of the cabin in agitation; he was untidy in a suit of warm-weather slops, his face two days unshaven and presently flushed, his hair too long and flopping over his eyes. He did not recognize the degree of Laurence's real anger, but burst out talking the moment Laurence came in.\n\n\"I am so very sorry; it was all my fault. I oughtn't have spoken at all,\" he said, even while Laurence limped to his chair and sat down heavily. \"You cannot punish Blythe, Laurence.\"\n\nLaurence had grown used to the lack of formality among aviators, and ordinarily did not balk at this liberty in passing, but for Martin to make use of it under the circumstances was so egregious that Laurence sat back and stared at him, outrage plainly written on his face. Martin went pale under his freckled skin, swallowed, and hurriedly said, \"I mean, Captain, sir.\"\n\n\"I will do whatever I must to keep order among this crew, Mr. Martin, which appears to be more than I thought necessary,\" Laurence said, and moderated his volume only with a great effort; he felt truly savage. \"You will tell me at once what happened.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to,\" Martin said, much subdued. \"That fellow Reynolds has been making remarks all week, and Ferris told us to pay him no mind, but I was walking by, and he said\u2014\"\n\n\"I am not interested in hearing you bear tales,\" Laurence said. \"What did you do?\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014\" Martin said, flushing. \"I only said\u2014well, I said something back, which I should rather not repeat; and then he\u2014\" Martin stopped, and looked somewhat confused as to how to finish the story without seeming to accuse Reynolds again, and finished lamely, \"At any rate, sir, he was on the point of offering me a challenge, and that was when Blythe knocked him down; he only did it because he knew I could not fight, and did not want to see me have to refuse in front of the sailors; truly, sir, it is my fault, and not his.\"\n\n\"I cannot disagree with you in the least,\" Laurence said, brutally, and was glad in his anger to see Martin's shoulders hunch forward, as if struck. \"And when I have to have Blythe flogged on Sunday for striking an officer, I hope you will keep in mind that he is paying for your lack of self-restraint. You are dismissed; you are to keep belowdecks and to your quarters for the week, save when defaulters are called.\"\n\nMartin's lips worked a moment; his \"Yes, sir,\" emerged only faintly, and he was almost stumbling as he left the room. Laurence sat still breathing harshly, almost panting in the thick air; the anger slowly deserted him in spite of every effort, and gave way to a heavier, bitter oppression. Blythe had saved not only Martin's reputation but that of the aviators as a whole; if Martin had openly refused a challenge made in front of the entire crew, it would have blackened all their characters; no matter that it was forced on them by the regulations of the Corps, which forbade dueling.\n\nAnd yet there was no room for leniency in the matter whatsoever. Blythe had openly struck an officer before witnesses, and Laurence would have to sentence him to sufficient punishment to give the sailors satisfaction, and all of the men pause against any future capers of the sort. And the punishment would be carried out by the bosun's mate: a sailor, like as not to relish the chance to be severe on an aviator, particularly for such an offense.\n\nHe would have to go and speak with Blythe; but a tapping at the door broke in upon him before he could rise, and Riley came in: unsmiling, in his coat and with his hat under his arm, neckcloth freshly tied."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "They drew near cape coast a week later with the atmosphere of ill-will a settled and living thing among them, as palpable as the heat. Blythe had taken ill from his brutal flogging; he still lay nearly senseless in the sick-bay, the other ground-crew hands taking it in turn to sit by him and fan the bloody weals, and to coax him to take some water. They had taken the measure of Laurence's temper, and so their bitterness against the sailors was not expressed in word or direct action, but in sullen, black looks and murmurs, and abrupt silences whenever a sailor came in earshot.\n\nLaurence had not dined in the great cabin since the incident: Riley had been offended at having Purbeck corrected on the deck; Laurence had grown short in turn when Riley refused to unbend and made it plain he was not satisfied by the dozen lashes which were all Laurence would sentence. In the heat of discussion, Laurence had let slip some suggestion of his distaste for going to the slave port, Riley had resented the implication, and they had ended not in shouting but in cold formality.\n\nBut worse by far than this, Temeraire's spirits were very low. He had forgiven Laurence the moment of harshness, and been persuaded to understand that some punishment was necessary for the offense. But he had not been at all reconciled to the actual event, and during the flogging he had growled savagely when Blythe had screamed towards the end. Some good had come of that: the bosun's mate Hingley, who had been wielding the cat with more than usual energy, had been alarmed, and the last couple of strokes had been mild; but the damage had already been done.\n\nTemeraire had since remained unhappy and quiet, answering only briefly, and he was not eating well. The sailors, for their part, were as dissatisfied with the light sentence as the aviators were with the brutality; poor Martin, set to tanning hides with the harness-master for punishment, was more wretched with guilt than from his punishment, and spent every spare moment at Blythe's bedside; and the only person at all satisfied with the situation was Yongxing, who seized the opportunity to hold several more long conversations with Temeraire in Chinese: privately, as Temeraire made no effort to include Laurence.\n\nYongxing looked less pleased, however, at the conclusion of the last of these, when Temeraire hissed, put back his ruff, and then proceeded to all but knock Laurence off his feet in coiling possessively around him. \"What has he been saying to you?\" Laurence demanded, trying futilely to peer above the great black sides rising around him; he had already reached a state of high irritation at Yongxing's continued interference and was very nearly at the end of his patience.\n\n\"He has been telling me about China, and how things are managed there for dragons,\" Temeraire said, evasively, by which Laurence suspected that Temeraire had liked these described arrangements. \"But then he told me I should have a more worthy companion there, and you would be sent away.\"\n\nBy the time he could be persuaded to uncoil himself again, Yongxing had gone, \"looking mad as fire,\" Ferris reported, with glee unbecoming a senior lieutenant.\n\nThis scarcely contented Laurence. \"I am not going to have Temeraire distressed in this manner,\" he said to Hammond angrily, trying without success to persuade the diplomat to carry a highly undiplomatic message to the prince.\n\n\"You are taking a very short-sighted view of the matter,\" Hammond said, maddeningly. \"If Prince Yongxing can be convinced over the course of this journey that Temeraire will not agree to be parted from you, all the better for us: they will be far more ready to negotiate when finally we arrive in China.\" He paused and asked, with still more infuriating anxiousness, \"You are quite certain, that he will not agree?\"\n\nOn hearing the account that evening, Granby said, \"I say we heave Hammond and Yongxing over the side together some dark night, and good riddance,\" expressing Laurence's private sentiments more frankly than Laurence himself felt he could. Granby was speaking, with no regard for manners, between bites of a light meal of soup, toasted cheese, potatoes fried in pork fat with onions, an entire roast chicken, and a mince pie: he had finally been released from his sickbed, pallid and much reduced in weight, and Laurence had invited him to supper. \"What else was that prince saying to him?\"\n\n\"I have not the least idea; he has not said three words together in English the last week,\" Laurence said. \"And I do not mean to press Temeraire to tell me; it would be the most officious, prying sort of behavior.\"\n\n\"That none of his friends should ever be flogged there, I expect,\" Granby said, darkly. \"And that he should have a dozen books to read every day, and heaps of jewels. I have heard stories about this sort of thing, but if a fellow ever really tried it, they would drum him out of the Corps quick as lightning; if the dragon did not carve him into joints, first.\"\n\nLaurence was silent a moment, twisting his wineglass in his fingers. \"Temeraire is only listening to it at all because he is unhappy.\"\n\n\"Oh, Hell.\" Granby sat back heavily. \"I am damned sorry I have been sick so long; Ferris is a right'un, but he hasn't been on a transport before, he couldn't know how the sailors get, and how to properly teach the fellows to take no notice,\" he said glumly. \"And I can't give you any advice for cheering him up; I served with Laetificat longest, and she is easy-going even for a Regal Copper: no temper to speak of, and no mood I ever saw could dampen her appetite. Maybe it is not being allowed to fly.\"\n\nThey came into the harbor the next morning: a broad semicircle with a golden beach, dotted with attractive palms under the squat white walls of the overlooking castle. A multitude of rough canoes, many with branches still attached to the trunks from which they had been hollowed, were plying the waters of the harbor, and besides these there could be seen an assortment of brigs and schooners, and at the western end a snow of middling size, with her boats swarming back and forth, crowded with blacks who were being herded along from a tunnel mouth that came out onto the beach itself.\n\nThe Allegiance was too large to come into the harbor proper, but she had anchored close enough; the day was calm, and the cracking of the whips perfectly audible over the water, mingled with cries and the steady sound of weeping. Laurence came frowning onto the deck and ordered Roland and Dyer away from their wide-eyed staring, sending them below to tidy his cabin. Temeraire could not be protected in the same manner, and was observing the proceedings with some confusion, the slitted pupils of his eyes widening and narrowing as he stared.\n\n\"Laurence, those men are all in chains; what can so many of them have done?\" he demanded, roused from his apathy. \"They cannot all have committed crimes; look, that one over there is a small child, and there is another.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"That is a slaver; pray do not watch.\" Fearing this moment, he had made a vague attempt at explaining the idea of slavery to Temeraire, with his lack of success due as much to his own distaste as to Temeraire's difficulty with the notion of property. Temeraire did not listen now, but kept watching, his tail switching rapidly in anxiety. The loading of the vessel continued throughout the morning, and the hot wind blowing from the shore carried the sour smell of unwashed bodies, sweating and ill with misery.\n\nAt length the boarding was finished, and the snow with her unhappy cargo came out of the harbor and spread her sails to the wind, throwing up a fine furrow as she went past them, already moving at a steady pace, sailors scrambling in the rigging; but full half her crew were only armed landsmen, sitting idly about on deck with their muskets and pistols and mugs of grog. They stared openly at Temeraire, curious, their faces unsmiling, sweating and grimy from the work; one of them even picked up his gun and sighted along it at Temeraire, as if for sport. \"Present arms!\" Lieutenant Riggs snapped, before Laurence could even react, and the three riflemen on deck had their guns ready in an instant; across the water, the fellow lowered his musket and grinned, showing strong yellowed teeth, and turned back to his shipmates laughing.\n\nTemeraire's ruff was flattened, not out of any fear, as a musket-ball fired at such a range would have done him less injury than a mosquito to a man, but with great distaste. He gave a low rumbling growl and almost drew a deep preparatory breath; Laurence laid a hand on his side, quietly said, \"No; it can do no good,\" and stayed with him until at last the snow shrank away over the horizon, and passed out of their sight.\n\nEven after she had gone, Temeraire's tail continued to flick unhappily back and forth. \"No, I am not hungry,\" he said, when Laurence suggested some food, and stayed very quiet again, occasionally scraping at the deck with his claws, unconsciously, making a dreadful grating noise.\n\nRiley was at the far end of the ship, walking the poop deck, but there were many sailors in earshot, getting the launch and the officers' barge over the side, preparing to begin the process of supply, and Lord Purbeck was overseeing; in any case one could not say anything on deck in full voice and not expect it to have traveled to the other end and back in less time than it would take to walk the distance. Laurence was conscious of the plain rudeness of seeming to criticize Riley on the deck of his own ship, even without the quarrel already lingering between them, but at last he could not forbear.\n\n\"Pray do not be so distressed,\" he said, trying to console Temeraire, without going so far as to speak too bluntly against the practice. \"There is reason to hope that the trade will soon be stopped; the question will come before Parliament again this very session.\"\n\nTemeraire brightened perceptibly at the news, but he was unsatisfied with so bare an explanation and proceeded to inquire with great energy into the prospects of abolition; Laurence perforce had to explain Parliament and the distinction between the Commons and the Lords and the various factions engaged in the debate, relying for his particulars on his father's activities, but aware all the while that he was overheard and trying as best he could to be politic.\n\nEven Sun Kai, who had been on deck the whole morning, and seen the progress of the snow and its effects on Temeraire's mood, gazed upon him thoughtfully, evidently guessing at some of the conversation; he had come as near as he could without crossing the painted border, and during a break, he asked Temeraire to translate for him. Temeraire explained a little; Sun Kai nodded, and then inquired of Laurence, \"Your father is an official then, and feels this practice dishonorable?\"\n\nSuch a question, put baldly, could not be evaded however much it might offend; silence would be very nearly dishonest. \"Yes, sir, he does,\" Laurence said, and before Sun Kai could prolong the conversation with further inquiries, Keynes came up to the deck; Laurence hailed him to ask him for permission to take Temeraire on a short flight to shore, and so was able to cut short the discussion. Even so abbreviated, however, it did no good for relations aboard ship; the sailors, mostly without strong opinions on the subject, naturally took their own captain's part, and felt Riley ill-used by the open expression of such sentiments on his ship when his own family connections to the trade were known.\n\nThe post was rowed back shortly before the hands' dinner-time, and Lord Purbeck chose to send the young midshipman Reynolds, who had set off the recent quarrel, to bring over the letters for the aviators: nearly a piece of deliberate provocation. The boy himself, his eye still blacked from Blythe's powerful blow, smirked so insolently that Laurence instantly resolved on ending Martin's punishment duty, nearly a week before he had otherwise intended, and said quite deliberately, \"Temeraire, look; we have a letter from Captain Roland; it will have news of Dover, I am sure.\" Temeraire obligingly put his head down to inspect the letter; the ominous shadow of the ruff and the serrated teeth gleaming so nearby made a profound impression on Reynolds: the smirk vanished, and almost as quickly so did he himself, hastily retreating from the dragondeck.\n\nLaurence stayed on deck to read the letters with Temeraire. Jane Roland's letter, scarcely a page long, had been sent only a few days after their departure and had very little news, only a cheerful account of the life of the covert; heartening to read, even if it left Temeraire sighing a little for home, and Laurence with much the same sentiments. He was a little puzzled, however, at receiving no other letters from his colleagues; since a courier had come through, he had expected to have something from Harcourt, at least, whom he knew to be a good correspondent, and perhaps one of the other captains.\n\nHe did have one more letter, from his mother, which had been forwarded on from Dover. Aviators received their mail quicker than anyone else, post-dragons making their rounds from covert to covert, whence the mail went out by horse and rider, and she had evidently written and sent it before receiving Laurence's own letter informing her of their departure.\n\nHe opened it and read most of it aloud for Temeraire's entertainment: she wrote mainly of his oldest brother, George, who had just added a daughter to his three sons, and his father's political work, as being one of the few subjects on which Laurence and Lord Allendale were in sympathy, and which now was of fresh interest to Temeraire as well. Midway, however, Laurence abruptly stopped, as he read to himself a few lines which she had made in passing, which explained the unexpected silence of his fellow-officers:\n\nNaturally we were all very much shocked by the dreadful news of the Disaster in Austria, and they say that Mr. Pitt has taken ill, which of course much grieves your Father, as the Prime Minister has always been a Friend to the Cause. I am afraid I hear much talk in town of how Providence is favoring Bonaparte. It does seem strange that one man should make so great a difference in the course of War, when on both sides numbers are equal. But it is shameful in the extreme, how quickly Lord Nelson's great victory at Trafalgar is Forgot, and your own noble defense of our shores, and men of less resolution begin to speak of peace with the Tyrant.\n\nShe had of course written expecting him to be still at Dover, where news from the Continent came first, and where he would have long since heard all there was to know; instead it came as a highly unpleasant shock, particularly as she gave no further particulars. He had heard reports in Madeira of several battles fought in Austria, but nothing so decisive. At once he begged Temeraire to forgive him and hastened below to Riley's cabin, hoping there might be more news, and indeed found Riley numbly reading an express dispatch which Hammond had just given him, received from the Ministry.\n\n\"He has smashed them all to pieces, outside Austerlitz,\" Hammond said, and they searched out the place on Riley's maps: a small town deep in Austria, northeast of Vienna. \"I have not been told a great deal, Government is reserving the particulars, but he has taken at least thirty thousand men dead, wounded, or prisoner; the Russians are fleeing, and the Austrians have signed an armistice already.\"\n\nThese spare facts were grim enough without elaboration, and they all fell silent together, looking over the few lines of the message, which disobligingly refused to offer more information regardless of the number of times they were re-read. \"Well,\" Hammond said finally, \"we will just have to starve him out. Thank God for Nelson and Trafalgar! And he cannot mean to invade by air again, not with three Longwings stationed in the Channel now.\"\n\n\"Ought we not return?\" Laurence ventured, awkwardly; it seemed so self-serving a proposal he felt guilty in making it, and yet he could not imagine they were not badly needed, back in Britain. Excidium, Mortiferus, and Lily with their formations were indeed a deadly force to be reckoned with, but three dragons could not be everywhere, and Napoleon had before this found means of drawing one or the other away.\n\n\"I have received no orders to turn back,\" Riley said, \"though I will say it does feel damned peculiar to be sailing on to China devil-may-care after news like this, with a hundred-and-fifty-gun ship and a heavy-combat dragon.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, you are in error,\" Hammond said sharply. \"This disaster only renders our mission all the more urgent. If Napoleon is to be beaten, if our nation is to preserve a place as anything more besides an inconsequential island off the coast of a French Europe, only trade will do it. The Austrians may have been beaten for the moment, and the Russians; but so long as we can supply our Continental allies with funds and with resources, you may be sure they will resist Bonaparte's tyranny. We must continue on; we must secure at least neutrality from China, if not some advantage, and protect our Eastern trade; no military goal could be of greater significance.\"\n\nHe spoke with great authority, and Riley nodded in quick agreement. Laurence was silent as they began to discuss how they might speed the journey, and shortly he excused himself to return to the dragondeck; he could not argue, he was not impartial by any means, and Hammond's arguments had a great deal of weight; but he was not satisfied, and he felt an uneasy distress at the lack of sympathy between their thinking and his own.\n\n\"I cannot understand how they let Napoleon beat them,\" Temeraire said, ruff bristling, when Laurence had broken the unhappy news to him and his senior officers. \"He had more ships and dragons than we did, at Trafalgar and at Dover, and we still won; and this time the Austrians and the Russians outnumbered him.\"\n\n\"Trafalgar was a sea-battle,\" Laurence said. \"Bonaparte has never really understood the navy; he is an artillery-man himself by training. And the battle of Dover we won only thanks to you; otherwise I dare say Bonaparte would be having himself crowned in Westminster directly. Do not forget how he managed to trick us into sending the better part of the Channel forces south and concealed the movements of his own dragons, before the invasion; if he had not been taken by surprise by the divine wind, the outcome could have been quite different.\"\n\n\"It still does not seem to me that the battle was cleverly managed,\" Temeraire said, dissatisfied. \"I am sure if we had been there, with our friends, we should not have lost, and I do not see why we are going to China when other people are fighting.\"\n\n\"I call that a damned good question,\" Granby said. \"A great pack of nonsense to begin with, giving away one of our very best dragons in the middle of a war when we are so desperate hard-up to begin with; Laurence, oughtn't we go home?\"\n\nLaurence only shook his head; he was too much in agreement, and too powerless to make any alteration. Temeraire and the divine wind had changed the course of the war, at Dover. As little as the Ministry might like to admit it, or give credit for a victory to so narrow a cause, Laurence too well remembered the hopeless uneven struggle of that day before Temeraire had turned the tide. To be meekly surrendering Temeraire and his extraordinary abilities seemed to Laurence a willful blindness, and he did not believe the Chinese would yield to any of Hammond's requests at all.\n\nBut \"We have our orders\" was all he said; even if Riley and Hammond had been of like mind with him, Laurence knew very well this would scarcely be accepted by the Ministry as even a thin excuse for violating their standing orders. \"I am sorry,\" he added, seeing that Temeraire was inclined to be unhappy, \"but come; here is Mr. Keynes, to see if you can be allowed to take some exercise on shore; let us clear away and let him make his examination.\"\n\n\"Truly it does not pain me at all,\" Temeraire said anxiously, peering down at himself as Keynes at last stepped back from his chest. \"I am sure I am ready to fly again, and I will only go a short way.\"\n\nKeynes shook his head. \"Another week perhaps. No; do not set up a howl at me,\" he said sternly, as Temeraire sat up to protest. \"It is not a question of the length of the flight; launching is the difficulty,\" he added, to Laurence, by way of grudging explanation. \"The strain of getting aloft will be the most dangerous moment, and I am not confident the muscles are yet prepared to bear it.\"\n\n\"But I am so very tired of only lying on deck,\" Temeraire said disconsolately, almost a wail. \"I cannot even turn around properly.\"\n\n\"It will only be another week, and perhaps less,\" Laurence said, trying to comfort him; he was already regretting that he had ever made the proposal and raised Temeraire's hopes only to see them dashed. \"I am very sorry; but Mr. Keynes's opinion is worth more than either of ours on the subject, and we had better listen to him.\"\n\nTemeraire was not so easily appeased. \"I do not see why his opinion should be worth more than mine. It is my muscle, after all.\"\n\nKeynes folded his arms and said coolly, \"I am not going to argue with a patient. If you want to do yourself an injury and spend another two months lying about instead, by all means go jumping about as much as you like.\"\n\nTemeraire snorted back at this reply, and Laurence, annoyed, hurried to dismiss Keynes before the surgeon could be any more provoking: he had every confidence in the man's skill, but his tact could have stood much improvement, and though Temeraire was by no means contrary by nature, this was a hard disappointment to bear.\n\n\"I have a little better news, at least,\" he told Temeraire, trying to rally his spirits. \"Mr. Pollitt was kind enough to bring me several new books from his visit ashore; shall I not fetch one now?\"\n\nTemeraire made only a grumble for answer, head unhappily drooping over the edge of the ship and gazing towards the denied shore. Laurence went down for the book, hoping that the interest of the material would rouse him, but while he was still in his cabin, the ship abruptly rocked, and an enormous splash outside sent water flying in through the opened round windows and onto the floor; Laurence ran to look through the nearest porthole, hastily rescuing his dampened letters, and saw Temeraire, with an expression at once guilty and self-satisfied, bobbing up and down in the water.\n\nHe dashed back up to the deck; Granby and Ferris were peering over the side in alarm, and the small boats that had been crowding around the sides of the ship, full of whores and enterprising fishermen, were already making frantic haste away and back to the security of the harbor, with much shrieking and splashing of oars. Temeraire rather abashedly looked after them in dismay. \"I did not mean to frighten them,\" he said. \"There is no need to run away,\" he called, but the boats did not pause for an instant. The sailors, deprived of their entertainments, glared disapprovingly; Laurence was more concerned for Temeraire's health.\n\n\"Well, I have never seen anything so ridiculous in my life, but it is not likely to hurt him. The air-sacs will keep him afloat, and salt water never hurt a wound,\" Keynes said, having been summoned back to the deck. \"But how we will ever get him back aboard, I have not the least idea.\"\n\nTemeraire plunged for a moment under the surface and came almost shooting up again, propelled by his buoyancy. \"It is very pleasant,\" he called out. \"The water is not cold at all, Laurence; will you not come in?\"\n\nLaurence was by no means a strong swimmer, and uneasy at the notion of leaping into the open ocean: they were a good mile out from the shore. But he took one of the ship's small boats and rowed himself out, to keep Temeraire company and to be sure the dragon did not over-tire himself after so much enforced idleness on deck. The skiff was tossed about a little by the waves resulting from Temeraire's frolics, and occasionally swamped, but Laurence had prudently worn only an old pair of breeches and his most threadbare shirt.\n\nHis own spirits were very low; the defeat at Austerlitz was not merely a single battle lost, but the overthrow of Prime Minister Pitt's whole careful design, and the destruction of the coalition assembled to stop Napoleon: Britain alone could not field an army half so large as Napoleon's Grande Arm\u00e9e, nor easily land it on the Continent, and with the Austrians and Russians now driven from the field, their situation was plainly grim. Even with such cares, however, he could not help but smile to see Temeraire so full of energy and uncomplicated joy, and after a little while he even yielded to Temeraire's coaxing and let himself over the side. Laurence did not swim very long but soon climbed up onto Temeraire's back, while Temeraire paddled himself about enthusiastically, and nosed the skiff about as a sort of toy.\n\nHe might shut his eyes and imagine them back in Dover, or at Loch Laggan, with only the ordinary cares of war to burden them, and work to be done which he understood, with all the confidence of friendship and a nation united behind them; even the present disaster hardly insurmountable, in such a situation: the Allegiance only another ship in the harbor, their familiar clearing a short flight away, and no politicians and princes to trouble with. He lay back and spread his hand open against the warm side, the black scales warmed by the sun, and for a little while indulged the fancy enough to drowse.\n\n\"Do you suppose you will be able to climb back aboard the Allegiance?\" Laurence said presently; he had been worrying the problem in his head.\n\nTemeraire craned his head around to look at him. \"Could we not wait here on shore until I am well again, and rejoin the ship after?\" he suggested. \"Or,\" and his ruff quivered with sudden excitement, \"we might fly across the continent, and meet them on the opposite side: there are no people in the middle of Africa, I remember from your maps, so there cannot be any French to shoot us down.\"\n\n\"No, but by report there are a great many feral dragons, not to mention any number of other dangerous creatures, and the perils of disease,\" Laurence said. \"We cannot go flying over the uncharted interior, Temeraire; the risk cannot be justified, particularly not now.\"\n\nTemeraire sighed a little at giving up this ambitious project, but agreed to make the attempt to climb up onto the deck; after a little more play he swam back over to the ship, and rather bemused the waiting sailors by handing the skiff up to them, so they did not have to haul her back aboard. Laurence, having climbed up the side from Temeraire's shoulder, held a huddled conference with Riley. \"Perhaps if we let the starboard sheet anchor down as a counterweight?\" he suggested. \"That with the best bower ought to keep her steady, and she is already loaded heavy towards the stern.\"\n\n\"Laurence, what the Admiralty will say to me if I get a transport sunk on a clear blue day in harbor, I should not like to think,\" Riley said, unhappy at the notion. \"I dare say I should be hanged, and deserve it, too.\"\n\n\"If there is any danger of capsizing, he can always let go in an instant,\" Laurence said. \"Otherwise we must sit in port a week at least, until Keynes is willing to grant him leave to fly again.\"\n\n\"I am not going to sink the ship,\" Temeraire said indignantly, poking his head up over the quarterdeck rail and entering into the conversation, much to Riley's startlement. \"I will be very careful.\"\n\nThough Riley was still dubious, he finally gave leave. Temeraire managed to rear up out of the water and get a grip with his foreclaws on the ship's side; the Allegiance listed towards him, but not too badly, held by the two anchors, and having raised his wings out of the water, Temeraire beat them a couple of times, and half-leapt, half-scrambled up the side of the ship.\n\nHe fell heavily onto the deck without much grace, hind legs scrabbling for an undignified moment, but he indeed got aboard, and the Allegiance did not do more than bounce a little beneath him. He hastily settled his legs underneath him again and busied himself shaking water off his ruff and long tendrils, pretending he had not been clumsy. \"It was not very difficult to climb back on at all,\" he said to Laurence, pleased. \"Now I can swim every day until I can fly again.\"\n\nLaurence wondered how Riley and the sailors would receive this news, but was unable to feel much dismay; he would have suffered far more than black looks to see Temeraire's spirits so restored; and when he presently suggested something to eat, Temeraire gladly assented, and devoured two cows and a sheep down to the hooves.\n\nWhen Yongxing once again ventured to the deck the following morning, he thus found Temeraire in good humor: fresh from another swim, well-fed, and highly pleased with himself. He had clambered aboard much more gracefully this second time, though Lord Purbeck at least found something to complain of, in the scratches to the ship's paint, and the sailors were still unhappy at having the bumboats frightened off. Yongxing himself benefited, as Temeraire was in a forgiving mood and disinclined to hold even what Laurence considered a well-deserved grudge, but the prince did not look at all satisfied; he spent the morning visit watching silently and brooding as Laurence read to Temeraire out of the new books procured by Mr. Pollitt on his visit ashore.\n\nYongxing soon left again; and shortly thereafter, his servant Feng Li came up to the deck to ask Laurence below, making clear his meaning through gestures and pantomime, Temeraire having settled down to nap through the heat of the day. Unwilling and wary, Laurence insisted on first going to his quarters to dress: he was again in shabby clothes, having accompanied Temeraire on his swim, and did not feel prepared to face Yongxing in his austere and elegant apartment without the armor of his dress coat and best trousers, and a fresh-pressed neckcloth.\n\nThere was no theater about his arrival, this time; he was ushered in at once, and Yongxing sent even Feng Li away, that they might be private, but he did not speak at once and only stood in silence, hands clasped behind his back, gazing frowningly out the stern windows: then, as Laurence was on the point of speaking, he abruptly turned and said, \"You have sincere affection for Lung Tien Xiang, and he for you; this I have come to see. Yet in your country, he is treated like an animal, exposed to all the dangers of war. Can you desire this fate for him?\"\n\nLaurence was much astonished at meeting so direct an appeal, and supposed Hammond proven right: there could be no explanation for this change but a growing conviction in Yongxing's mind of the futility of luring Temeraire away. But as pleased as he would otherwise have been to see Yongxing give up his attempts to divide them from one another, Laurence grew only more uneasy: there was plainly no common ground to be had between them, and he did not feel he understood Yongxing's motives for seeking to find any.\n\n\"Sir,\" he said, after a moment, \"your accusations of ill-treatment I must dispute; and the dangers of war are the common hazard of those who take service for their country. Your Highness can scarcely expect me to find such a choice, willingly made, objectionable; I myself have so chosen, and such risks I hold it an honor to endure.\"\n\n\"Yet you are a man of ordinary birth, and a soldier of no great rank; there may be ten thousand men such as you in England,\" Yongxing said. \"You cannot compare yourself to a Celestial. Consider his happiness, and listen to my request. Help us restore him to his rightful place, and then part from him cheerfully: let him think you are not sorry to go, that he may forget you more easily, and find happiness with a companion appropriate to his station. Surely it is your duty not to hold him down to your own level, but to see him brought up to all the advantages which are his right.\"\n\nYongxing made these remarks not in an insulting tone, but as stating plain fact, almost earnestly. \"I do not believe in that species of kindness, sir, which consists in lying to a loved one, and deceiving him for his own good,\" Laurence said, as yet unsure whether he ought to be offended, or to view this as some attempt to appeal to his better nature.\n\nBut his confusion was sharply dispelled in another moment, as Yongxing persisted: \"I know that what I ask is a great sacrifice. Perhaps the hopes of your family will be disappointed; and you were given a great reward for bringing him to your country, which may now be confiscated. We do not expect you to face ruin: do as I ask, and you will receive ten thousand taels of silver, and the gratitude of the Emperor.\"\n\nLaurence stared first, then flushed to an ugly shade of mortification, and said, when he had mastered himself well enough to speak, with bitter resentment, \"A noble sum indeed; but there is not silver enough in China, sir, to buy me.\"\n\nHe would have turned to go at once; but Yongxing said in real exasperation, this refusal at last driving him past the careful fa\u00e7ade of patience which he had so far maintained throughout the interview, \"You are foolish; you cannot be permitted to remain companion to Lung Tien Xiang, and in the end you will be sent home. Why not accept my offer?\"\n\n\"That you may separate us by force, in your own country, I have no doubt,\" Laurence said. \"But that will be your doing, and none of mine; and he shall know me faithful as he is himself, to the last.\" He meant to leave; he could not challenge Yongxing, nor strike him, and only such a gesture could have begun to satisfy his deep and violent sense of injury; but so excellent an invitation to quarrel at least gave his anger some vent, and he added with all the scorn which he could give the words, \"Save yourself the trouble of any further cajolery; all your bribes and machinations you may be sure will meet with equal failure, and I have too much faith in Temeraire to imagine that he will ever be persuaded to prefer a nation where discourse such as this is the civilized mode.\"\n\n\"You speak in ignorant disdain of the foremost nation of the world,\" Yongxing said, growing angry himself, \"like all your country-men, who show no respect for that which is superior, and insult our customs.\"\n\n\"For which I might consider myself as owing you some apology, sir, if you yourself had not so often insulted myself and my own country, or shown respect for any customs other than your own,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"We do not desire anything that is yours, or to come and force our ways upon you,\" Yongxing said. \"From your small island you come to our country, and out of kindness you are allowed to buy our tea and silk and porcelain, which you so passionately desire. But still you are not content; you forever demand more and more, while your missionaries try to spread your foreign religion and your merchants smuggle opium in defiance of the law. We do not need your trinkets, your clockworks and lamps and guns; our land is sufficient unto itself. In so unequal a position, you should show threefold gratitude and submission to the Emperor, and instead you offer one insult heaped on another. Too long already has this disrespect been tolerated.\"\n\nThese arrayed grievances, so far beyond the matter at hand, were spoken passionately and with great energy; more sincere than anything Laurence had formerly heard from the prince and more unguarded, and the surprise he could not help but display evidently recalled Yongxing to his circumstances, and checked his flow of speech. For a moment they stood in silence, Laurence still resentful, and as unable to form a reply as if Yongxing had spoken in his native tongue, baffled entirely by a description of the relations between their countries which should lump Christian missionaries together in with smugglers and so absurdly refuse to acknowledge the benefits of free and open trade to both parties.\n\n\"I am no politician, sir, to dispute with you upon matters of foreign policy,\" Laurence said at last, \"but the honor and dignities of my nation and my country-men I will defend to my last breath; and you will not move me with any argument to act dishonorably, least of all to Temeraire.\"\n\nYongxing had recovered his composure, yet looked still intensely dissatisfied; now he shook his head, frowning. \"If you will not be persuaded by consideration for Lung Tien Xiang or for yourself, will you at least serve your country's interests?\" With deep and evident reluctance he added, \"That we should open ports to you, besides Canton, cannot be considered; but we will permit your ambassador to remain in Peking, as you so greatly desire, and we will agree not to go to war against you or your allies, so long as you maintain a respectful obedience to the Emperor: this much can be allowed, if you will ease Lung Tien Xiang's return.\"\n\nHe ended expectantly; Laurence stood motionless, breathtaken, white; and then he said, \"No,\" almost inaudibly, and without staying to hear another word turned and left the room, thrusting the drapery from his way.\n\nHe went blindly to the deck and found Temeraire sleeping, peaceful, tail curled around himself; Laurence did not touch him but sat down on one of the lockers by the edge of the deck and bowed his head down, that he should not meet anyone's eyes; his hands clasped, that they should not be seen to shake.\n\n\"You refused, I hope?\" Hammond said, wholly unexpectedly; Laurence, who had steeled himself to face a furious reproach, was left staring. \"Thank Heaven; it had not occurred to me that he might attempt a direct approach, and so soon. I must beg you, Captain, to be sure and not commit us to any proposal whatsoever, without private consultation with me, no matter how appealing it may seem. Either here or after we have reached China,\" he added, as an afterthought. \"Now pray tell me again: he offered a promise of neutrality, and a permanent envoy in Peking, outright?\"\n\nThere was a quick predatory gleam in his expression, and Laurence was put to dredging the details of the conversation from his memory in answer to his many questions. \"But I am sure that I do not misremember; he was quite firm that no other ports should ever be opened,\" Laurence protested, when Hammond had begun dragging over his maps of China and speculating aloud which might be the most advantageous, inquiring of Laurence which harbors he thought best for shipping.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Hammond said, waving this aside. \"But if he may be brought so far as to admit the possibility of a permanent envoy, how much more progress may we not hope to make? You must be aware that his own opinions are fixed quite immovably against all intercourse with the West.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Laurence said; he was more surprised to find Hammond so aware, given the diplomat's continuing efforts to establish good relations.\n\n\"Our chances of winning Prince Yongxing himself over are small, though I hope we do make some progress,\" Hammond said, \"but I find it most encouraging indeed that he should be so anxious to obtain your cooperation at such a stage. Plainly he wishes to arrive in China fait accompli, which should only be the case if he imagines the Emperor may be persuaded to grant us terms less pleasing to himself.\n\n\"He is not the heir to the throne, you know,\" Hammond added, seeing Laurence look doubtful. \"The Emperor has three sons, and the eldest, Prince Mianning, is grown already and the presumptive crown prince. Not that Prince Yongxing lacks in influence, certainly, or he would never have been given so much autonomy as to be sent to England, but this very attempt on his part gives me hope there may yet be more opportunity than we heretofore have realized. If only\u2014\"\n\nHere he grew abruptly dismal, and sat down again with the charts neglected. \"If only the French have not already established themselves with the more liberal minds of the court,\" he finished, low. \"But that would explain a great deal, I am afraid, and in particular why they were ever given the egg. I could tear my hair over it; here they have managed to thoroughly insinuate themselves, I suppose, while we have been sitting about congratulating ourselves on our precious dignity ever since Lord Macartney was sent packing, and making no real attempt to restore relations.\"\n\nLaurence left feeling very little less guilt and unhappiness than before; his refusal, he was well aware, had not been motivated by any such rational and admirable arguments, but a wholly reflexive denial. He would certainly never agree to lie to Temeraire, as Yongxing had proposed, nor abandon him to any unpleasant or barbaric situation, but Hammond might make other demands, less easy to refuse. If they were ordered to separate to ensure a truly advantageous treaty, it would be his own duty not only to go, but to convince Temeraire to obey, however unwillingly. Before now, he had consoled himself in the belief that the Chinese would offer no satisfactory terms; this illusory comfort was now stripped away, and all the misery of separation loomed closer with every sea-mile.\n\nTwo days later saw them leaving Cape Coast, gladly for Laurence's part. The morning of their departure, a party of slaves had been brought in overland and were being driven into the waiting dungeons within sight of the ship. An even more dreadful scene ensued, for the slaves had not yet been worn down by long confinement nor become resigned to their fate, and as the cellar doors were opened to receive them, very much like the mouth of a waiting grave, several of the younger men staged a revolt.\n\nThey had evidently found some means of getting loose along their journey. Two of the guards went down at once, bludgeoned with the very chains that had bound the slaves, and the others began to stumble back and away, firing indiscriminately in their panic. A troop of guards came running down from their posts, adding to the general melee.\n\nIt was a hopeless attempt, if gallant, and most of the loosed men saw the inevitable and dashed for their personal freedom; some scrambled down the beach, others fled into the city. The guards managed to cow the remaining bound slaves again, and started shooting at the escaping ones. Most were killed before they were out of sight, and search parties organized immediately to find the remainder, marked as they were by their nakedness and the galls from their former chains. The dirt road leading to the dungeons was muddy with blood, the small and huddled corpses lying terribly still among the living; many women and children had been killed in the action. The slavers were already forcing the remaining men and women down into the cellar, and setting some of the others to drag the bodies away. Not fifteen minutes had gone by.\n\nThere was no singing or shouting as the anchor was hauled up, and the operation went more slowly than usual; but even so the bosun, ordinarily vigorous at any sign of malingering, did not start anyone with his cane. The day was again stickily humid, and so hot that the tar grew liquid and fell in great black splotches from the rigging, some even landing upon Temeraire's hide, much to his disgust. Laurence set the runners and the ensigns on watch with buckets and rags, to clean him off as the drops fell, and by the end of the day they were all drooping and filthy themselves.\n\nThe next day only more of the same, and the three after that; the shore tangled and impenetrable to larboard, broken only by cliffs and jumbled rockfalls, and a constant attention necessary to keep the ship at a safe distance in deep water, with the winds freakish and variable so close to land. The men went about their work silent and unsmiling in the heat of the day; the evil news of Austerlitz had spread among them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Blythe at last emerged from the sick-berth, much reduced, mostly to sit and doze in a chair on the deck: Martin was especially solicitous for his comfort, and apt to speak sharply to anyone who so much as jostled the makeshift awning they had rigged over him. Blythe could scarcely cough but a glass of grog was put in his hand; he could not speak slightingly of the weather but he would be offered, as appropriate, a rug, an oilskin, a cool cloth.\n\n\"I'm sorry he's taken it so to heart, sir,\" Blythe told Laurence helplessly. \"I don't suppose any high-spirited fellow could have stood it kindly, the way them tars were going on, and no fault of his, I'm sure. I wish he wouldn't take on so.\"\n\nThe sailors were not pleased to see the offender so cosseted, and by way of answer made much of their fellow Reynolds, already inclined to put on a martyr's airs. In ordinary course he was only an indifferent seaman, and the new degree of respect he was receiving from his company went to his head. He strutted about the deck like cock-robin, giving unnecessary orders for the pleasure of seeing them followed with such excess of bows, and nods, and forelock-pulling; even Purbeck and Riley did not much check him.\n\nLaurence had hoped that at least the shared disaster of Austerlitz might mute the hostility between the sailors and the aviators; but this display kept tempers on both sides at an elevated pitch. The Allegiance was now drawing close to the equatorial line, and Laurence thought it necessary to make special arrangements for managing the usual crossing ceremony. Less than half of the aviators had ever crossed the line before, and if the sailors were given license to dunk and shave the lot of them under the present mood, Laurence did not think order could possibly be maintained. He consulted with Riley, and the agreement was reached that he would offer a general tithe on behalf of his men, namely three casks of rum which he had taken the precaution of acquiring in Cape Coast; the aviators would therefore be universally excused.\n\nAll the sailors were disgruntled by the alteration in their tradition, several going so far as to speak of bad luck to the ship as a consequence; undoubtedly many of them had privately been looking forward to the opportunity to humiliate their shipboard rivals. As a result, when at last they crossed the equator and the usual pageant came aboard, it was rather quiet and unenthusiastic. Temeraire at least was entertained, though Laurence had to shush him hastily when he said, very audibly, \"But Laurence, that is not Neptune at all; that is Griggs, and Amphitrite is Boyne,\" recognizing the seamen through their shabby costumes, which they had not taken much trouble to make effective.\n\nThis produced a good deal of imperfectly suppressed hilarity among the crew, and Badger-Bag\u2014the carpenter's mate Leddowes, less recognizable under a scruffy mop-head for a judicial wig\u2014had a fit of inspiration and declared that this time, all those who allowed laughter to escape should be Neptune's victims. Laurence gave Riley a quick nod, and Leddowes was given a free hand among both sailors and aviators. Fair numbers of each were seized, all the rest applauding, and to cap the occasion Riley sang out, \"An extra ration of grog for all, thanks to the toll paid by Captain Laurence's crew,\" producing an enthusiastic cheer.\n\nSome of the hands got up a set of music, and another of dancing; the rum worked its effect and soon even the aviators were clapping along, and humming the music to the shanties, though they did not know the words. It was perhaps not as wholeheartedly cheerful as some crossings, but much better than Laurence had feared.\n\nThe Chinese had come on deck for the event, though naturally not subjected to the ritual, and watched with much discussion amongst themselves. It was of course a rather vulgar kind of entertainment, and Laurence felt some embarrassment at having Yongxing witness it, but Liu Bao thumped his thigh in applause along with the entire crew, and let out a tremendous, booming laugh for each of Badger-Bag's victims. He at length turned to Temeraire, across the boundary, and asked him a question: \"Laurence, he would like to know what the purpose of the ceremony is, and which spirits are being honored,\" Temeraire said. \"But I do not know myself; what are we celebrating, and why?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Laurence said, wondering how to explain the rather ridiculous ceremony. \"We have just crossed the equator, and it is an old tradition that those who have never crossed the line before must pay respects to Neptune\u2014that is the Roman god of the sea; though of course he is not actually worshiped anymore.\"\n\n\"Aah!\" Liu Bao said, approvingly, when this had been translated for him. \"I like that. It is good to show respect to old gods, even if they are not yours. It must be very good luck for the ship. And it is only nineteen days until the New Year: we will have to have a feast on board, and that will be good luck, too. The spirits of our ancestors will guide the ship back to China.\"\n\nLaurence was dubious, but the sailors listening in to the translation with much interest found much to approve in this speech: both the feast, and the promised good luck, which appealed to their superstitious habit of thought. Although the mention of spirits was cause for a great deal of serious belowdecks debate, being a little too close to ghosts for comfort, in the end it was generally agreed that as ancestor spirits, these would have to be benevolently inclined towards the descendants being carried by the ship, and therefore not to be feared.\n\n\"They have asked me for a cow and four sheep, and all eight of the remaining chickens, also; we will have to put in at St. Helena after all. We will make the turn westward tomorrow; at least it will be easier sailing than all this beating into the trades we have been doing,\" Riley said, watching dubiously a few days later: several of the Chinese servants were busy fishing for sharks. \"I only hope the liquor is not too strong. I must give it to the hands in addition to their grog ration, not in its place, or it would be no celebration at all.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to give you any cause for alarm, but Liu Bao alone can drink two of me under the table; I have seen him put away three bottles of wine in a sitting,\" Laurence said ruefully, speaking from much painful experience: the envoy had dined with him convivially several more times since Christmas, and if he were suffering any lingering ill-effects whatsoever from the sea-sickness, it could not be told from his appetite. \"For that matter, though Sun Kai does not drink a great deal, brandy and wine are all the same to him, as far as I can tell.\"\n\n\"Oh, to the devil with them,\" Riley said, sighing. \"Well, perhaps a few dozen able seamen will get themselves into enough trouble that I can take away their grog for the night. What do you suppose they are going to do with those sharks? They have thrown back two porpoises already, and those are much better eating.\"\n\nLaurence was ill-prepared to venture upon a guess, but he did not have to: at that moment the lookout called, \"Wing three points off the larboard bow,\" and they hurried at once to the side, to pull out their telescopes and peer into the sky, while sailors stampeded to their posts in case it should be an attack.\n\nTemeraire had lifted his head from his nap at the noise. \"Laurence, it is Volly,\" he called down from the dragondeck. \"He has seen us, he is coming this way.\" Following this announcement, he roared out a greeting that made nearly every man jump and rattled the masts; several of the sailors looked darkly towards him, though none ventured a complaint.\n\nTemeraire shifted himself about to make room, and some fifteen minutes later the little Greyling courier dropped down onto the deck, furling his broad grey-and-white-streaked wings. \"Temrer!\" he said, and butted Temeraire happily with his head. \"Cow?\"\n\n\"No, Volly, but we can fetch you a sheep,\" Temeraire said indulgently. \"Has he been hurt?\" he asked James; the little dragon sounded queerly nasal.\n\nVolly's captain, Langford James, slid down. \"Hello, Laurence, there you are. We have been looking for you up and down the coast,\" he said, reaching out to take Laurence's hand. \"No need to fret, Temeraire; he has only caught this blasted cold going about Dover. Half the dragons are moaning and sniffling about: they are the greatest children imaginable. But he will be right as rain in a week or two.\"\n\nMore rather than less alarmed by these reassurances, Temeraire edged a little distance away from Volly; he did not look particularly eager to experience his first illness. Laurence nodded; the letter he had had from Jane Roland had mentioned the sickness in passing. \"I hope you have not strained him on our account, coming so far. Shall I send for my surgeon?\" he offered.\n\n\"No, thank you; he has been doctored enough. It'll be another week before he forgets the medicine he swallowed and forgives me for slipping it into his dinner,\" James said, waving away the request. \"Any road, we have not come so very far; we have been down here flying the southern route the last two weeks, and it is a damned sight warmer here than in jolly old England, you know. Volly's hardly shy about letting me know if he don't care to fly, either, so as long as he doesn't speak up, I'll keep him in the air.\" He petted the little dragon, who bumped his nose against James's hand, and then lowered his head directly to sleep.\n\n\"What news is there?\" Laurence asked, shuffling through the post that James had handed over: his responsibility rather than Riley's, as it had been brought by dragon-courier. \"Has there been any change on the Continent? We heard news of Austerlitz at Cape Coast. Are we recalled? Ferris, see these to Lord Purbeck, and the rest among our crew,\" he added, handing the other letters off: for himself he had a dispatch, and a couple of letters, though he politely tucked them into his jacket rather than looking at them at once.\n\n\"No to both, more's the pity, but at least we can make the trip a little easier for you; we have taken the Dutch colony at Capetown,\" James said. \"Seized it last month, so you can break your journey there.\"\n\nThe news leapt from one end of the deck to the other with speed fueled by the enthusiasm of men who had been long brooding over the grim news of Napoleon's latest success, and the Allegiance was instantly afire with patriotic cheers; no further conversation was possible until some measure of calm had been restored. The post did some work to this effect, Purbeck and Ferris handing it out among the respective crews, and gradually the noise collected into smaller pockets, many of the other men deep into their letters.\n\nLaurence sent for a table and chairs to be brought up to the dragondeck, inviting Riley and Hammond to join them and hear the news. James was happy to give them a more detailed account of the capture than was contained in the brief dispatch: he had been a courier from the age of fourteen, and had a turn for the dramatic; though in this case he had little material to work from. \"I'm sorry it doesn't make a better story; it was not really a fight, you know,\" he said apologetically. \"We had the Highlanders there, and the Dutch only some mercenaries; they ran away before we even reached the town. The governor had to surrender; the people are still a little uneasy, but General Baird is leaving local affairs to them, and they have not kicked up much of a fuss.\"\n\n\"Well, it will certainly make resupply easier,\" Riley said. \"We need not stop in St. Helena, either; and that will be a savings of as much as two weeks. It is very welcome news indeed.\"\n\n\"Will you stay for dinner?\" Laurence asked James. \"Or must you be going straightaway?\"\n\nVolly abruptly sneezed behind him, a loud and startling noise. \"Ick,\" the little dragon said, waking himself up out of his sleep, and rubbed his nose against his foreleg in distaste, trying to scrape the mucus from his snout.\n\n\"Oh, stop that, filthy wretch,\" James said, getting up; he took a large white linen square from his harness bags and wiped Volly clean with the weary air of long practice. \"I suppose we will stay the night,\" he said after, contemplating Volly. \"No need to press him, now that I have found you in time, and you can write any letters you like me to take on: we are homeward bound after we leave you.\"\n\n...so my poor Lily, like Excidium and Mortiferus, has been banished from her comfortable clearing to the Sand Pits, for when she sneezes, she cannot help but spit some of the acid, the muscles involved in this reflex (so the surgeons tell me) being the very same. They all three are very disgusted with their situation, as the sand cannot be got rid of from day to day, and they scratch themselves like Dogs trying to cast off fleas no matter how they bathe.\n\nMaximus is in deep disgrace, for he began sneezing first, and all the other dragons like to have someone to blame for their Misery; however he bears it well, or as Berkley tells me to write, \"Does not give a Tinker's Dam for the lot of them and whines all the day, except when busy stuffing his gullet; has not hurt his appetite in the least.\"\n\nWe all do very well otherwise, and all send their love; the dragons also, and bid you convey their greetings and affection to Temeraire. They indeed miss him badly, though I am sorry to have to tell you that we have lately discovered one ignoble cause for their pining, which is plain Greed. Evidently he had taught them how to pry open the Feeding Pen, and close it again after, so they were able to help themselves whenever they liked without anyone the wiser\u2014their Guilty Secret discovered only after note was taken that the Herds were oddly diminished, and the dragons of our formation overfed, whereupon being questioned they confessed the Whole.\n\nI must stop, for we have Patrol, and Volatilus goes south in the morning. All our prayers for your safe Journey and quick return.\n\nEtc.,\n\nCatherine Harcourt\n\n\"What is this I hear from Harcourt of your teaching the dragons to steal from the pen?\" Laurence demanded, looking up from his letter; he was taking the hour before dinner to read his mail, and compose replies.\n\nTemeraire started up with so very revealing an expression that his guilt could be in no doubt. \"That is not true, I did not teach anyone to steal,\" he said. \"The herdsmen at Dover are very lazy, and do not always come in the morning, so we have to wait and wait at the pen, and the herds are meant for us, anyway; it cannot be called stealing.\"\n\n\"I suppose I ought to have suspected something when you stopped complaining of them being always late,\" Laurence said. \"But how on earth did you manage it?\"\n\n\"The gate is perfectly simple,\" Temeraire said. \"There is only a bar across the fence, which one can lift very easily, and then it swings open; Nitidus could do it best, for his forehands are the smallest. Though it is difficult to keep the animals inside the pen, and the first time I learned how to open it, they all ran away,\" he added. \"Maximus and I had to chase after them for hours and hours\u2014it was not funny, at all,\" he said, ruffled, sitting back on his haunches and contemplating Laurence with great indignation.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" Laurence said, after he had regained his breath. \"I truly beg your pardon, it was only the notion of you, and Maximus, and the sheep\u2014oh dear,\" Laurence said, and dissolved again, try as he might to contain himself: astonished stares from his crew, and Temeraire haughtily offended.\n\n\"Is there any other news in the letter?\" Temeraire asked, coolly, when Laurence had finally done.\n\n\"Not news, but all the dragons have sent you greetings and their love,\" Laurence said, now conciliatory. \"You may console yourself that they are all sick, and if you were there you certainly would be also,\" he added, seeing Temeraire inclined to droop when reminded of his friends.\n\n\"I would not care if I were sick, if I were home. Anyway, I am sure to catch it from Volly,\" Temeraire said gloomily, glancing over: the little Greyling was snuffling thickly in his sleep, bubbles of mucus swelling and shrinking over his nostrils as he breathed, and a small puddle of saliva had collected beneath his half-open mouth.\n\nLaurence could not in honesty hold out much hope to the contrary, so he shifted the subject. \"Have you any messages? I will go below now and write my replies, so James can carry them back: the last chance of sending a word by courier we will have for a long time, I am afraid, for ours do not go to the Far East except for some truly urgent matter.\"\n\n\"Only to send my love,\" Temeraire said, \"and to tell Captain Harcourt and also Admiral Lenton it was not stealing in the least. Oh, and also, tell Maximus and Lily about the poem written by the dragon, for that was very interesting, and perhaps they will like to hear of it. And also about my learning to climb aboard the ship, and that we have crossed the equator, and about Neptune and Badger-Bag.\"\n\n\"Enough, enough; you will have me writing a novel,\" Laurence said, rising easily: thankfully his leg had at last put itself right, and he was no longer forced to limp about the deck like an old man. He stroked Temeraire's side. \"Shall we come and sit with you while we have our port?\"\n\nTemeraire snorted and nudged him affectionately with his nose. \"Thank you, Laurence; that would be pleasant, and I would like to hear any news James has of the others, besides what is in your letters.\"\n\nThe replies finished at the stroke of three, Laurence and his guests dined in unusual comfort: ordinarily, Laurence kept to his habit of formal decorum, and Granby and his own officers followed his lead, while Riley and his subordinates did so of their own accord and naval custom; they one and all sweltered through every meal under thick broadcloth and their snugly tied neckcloths. But James had a born aviator's disregard for propriety coupled with the assurance of a man who had been a captain, even if only of a single-man courier, since the age of fourteen. With hardly a pause, he discarded his outer garments on coming below, saying, \"Good God, it is close in here; you must stifle, Laurence.\"\n\nLaurence was not sorry to follow his example, which he would have done regardless out of a desire not to make him feel out of place. Granby immediately followed suit, and after a brief surprise, Riley and Hammond matched them, though Lord Purbeck kept his coat and his expression fixed, clearly disapproving. The dinner went cheerfully enough, though at Laurence's request, James reserved his own news until they were comfortably ensconced on the dragondeck with their cigars and port, where Temeraire could hear, and with his body provide a bulwark against the rest of the crew's eavesdropping. Laurence dismissed the aviators down to the forecastle, this leaving only Sun Kai, as usual taking the air in the reserved corner of the dragondeck, close enough to overhear what should be quite meaningless to him.\n\nJames had much to tell them of formation movements: nearly all the dragons of the Mediterranean division had been reassigned to the Channel, Laetificat and Excursius and their respective formations to provide a thoroughly impenetrable opposition should Bonaparte once again attempt invasion through the air, emboldened by his success on the Continent.\n\n\"Not much left to stop them from trying for Gibraltar, though, with all this shifting about,\" Riley said. \"And we must keep watch over Toulon: we may have taken twenty prizes at Trafalgar, but now Bonaparte has every forest in Europe at his disposal, he can build more ships. I hope the Ministry have a care for it.\"\n\n\"Oh, Hell,\" James said, sitting up with a thump; his chair had been tilted rather precariously backwards as he reclined with his feet on the rail. \"I am being a dunce; I suppose you haven't heard about Mr. Pitt.\"\n\n\"He is not still ill?\" Hammond said anxiously.\n\n\"Not ill in the least,\" James said. \"Dead, this last fortnight and more. The news killed him, they say; he took his bed after we heard of the armistice, and never got out of it again.\"\n\n\"God rest his soul,\" Riley said.\n\n\"Amen,\" Laurence said, deeply shocked. Pitt had not been an old man; younger than his father, certainly.\n\n\"Who is Mr. Pitt?\" Temeraire inquired, and Laurence paused to explain to him the post of Prime Minister.\n\n\"James, have you any word on who will form the new government?\" he asked, already wondering what this might mean for himself and Temeraire, if the new Minister felt China ought to be dealt with differently, in either more conciliatory or more belligerent manner.\n\n\"No, I was off before more than the bare word had reached us,\" James said. \"I promise if anything has changed when I get back, I will do my best and bring you the news at Capetown. But,\" he added, \"they send us down here less than once in a sixmonth, ordinarily, so I shouldn't hope for it. The landing sites are too uncertain, and we have lost couriers without a trace here before, trying to go overland or even just spend a night on shore.\"\n\nJames set off again the next morning, waving at them from Volly's back until the little grey-white dragon disappeared entirely into the thready, low-hanging clouds. Laurence had managed to pen a brief reply to Harcourt as well as appending to his already-begun letters for his mother and Jane, and the courier had carried them all away: the last word they would receive from him for months, almost certainly.\n\nThere was little time for melancholy: he was at once called below, to consult with Liu Bao on the appropriate substitute for some sort of monkey organ which was ordinarily used in a dish. Having suggested lamb kidneys, Laurence was instantly solicited for assistance with another task, and the rest of the week passed in increasingly frantic preparations, the galley going day and night at full steam, until the dragondeck grew so warm that even Temeraire began to feel it a little excessive. The Chinese servants also set to clearing the ship of vermin; a hopeless task, but one in which they persevered. They came up to the deck sometimes five or six times in a day to fling the bodies of rats overboard into the sea, while the midshipmen looked on in outrage, these ordinarily serving, late in a voyage, as part of their own meals.\n\nLaurence had not the least idea what to expect from the occasion, but was careful to dress with especial formality, borrowing Riley's steward Jethson to valet him: his best shirt, starched and ironed; silk stockings and knee-breeches instead of trousers with his polished Hessian boots; his dress coat, bottle-green, with gold bars on the shoulders, and his decorations: the gold medal of the Nile, where he had been a naval lieutenant, on its broad blue ribbon, and the silver pin voted recently to the captains of the Dover battle.\n\nHe was very glad to have taken so many pains when he entered the Chinese quarters: passing through the door, he had to duck beneath a sweep of heavy red cloth and found the room so richly draped with hangings it might have been taken for a grand pavilion on land, except for the steady motion of the ship beneath their feet. The table was laid with delicate porcelain, each piece of different color, many edged with gold and silver; and the lacquered eating sticks which Laurence had been dreading all week were at every place.\n\nYongxing was already seated at the head of the table, in imposing state and wearing his most formal robes, in the deep golden silk embroidered with dragons in blue and black thread. Laurence was seated close enough to see that there were small chips of gemstones for the dragons' eyes and talons, and in the very center of the front, covering the chest, was a single dragon-figure larger than the rest, embroidered in pure white silk, with chips of rubies for its eyes and five outstretched talons on each foot.\n\nSomehow they were all crammed in, down to little Roland and Dyer, the younger officers fairly squashed together at their separate table and their faces already shining and pink in the heat. The servants began pouring the wine directly everyone was seated, others coming in from the galley to lay down great platters along the length of the tables: cold sliced meats, interspersed with an assortment of dark yellow nuts, preserved cherries, and prawns with their heads and dangling forelegs intact.\n\nYongxing took up his cup for the first toast and all hurried to drink with him; the rice wine was served warm, and went down with dangerous ease. This was evidently the signal for a general beginning; the Chinese started in on the platters, and the younger men at least had little hesitation in following suit. Laurence was embarrassed to see, when he glanced over, that Roland and Dyer were having not the least difficulty with their chopsticks and were already round-cheeked from stuffing food into their mouths.\n\nHe himself had only just managed to get a piece of the beef to his mouth by dint of puncturing it with one of his sticks; the meat had a smoky, not unpleasant quality. No sooner had he swallowed than Yongxing raised the cup for another toast, and he had to drink again; this succession repeated itself several times more, until he was uncomfortably warm, his head nearly swimming.\n\nGrowing slowly braver with the sticks, he risked a prawn, though the other officers about him were avoiding them; the sauce made them slippery and awkward to manage. It wobbled precariously, the beady black eyes bobbing at him; he followed the Chinese example and bit it off just behind the attached head. At once he groped for the cup again, breathing deeply through his nose: the sauce was shockingly hot, and broke a fresh sweat out upon his forehead, the drops trickling down the side of his jaw into his collar. Liu Bao laughed uproariously at his expression and poured him more wine, leaning across the table and thumping him approvingly on the shoulder.\n\nThe platters were shortly taken off the tables and replaced with an array of wooden dishes, full of dumplings, some with thin cr\u00eape-paper skins and others of thick, yeasty white dough. These were at least easier to get hold of with the sticks, and could be chewed and swallowed whole. The cooks had evidently exercised some ingenuity, lacking essential ingredients; Laurence found a piece of seaweed in one, and the lamb kidneys made their appearance also. Three further courses of small dishes ensued, then a strange dish of uncooked fish, pale pink and fleshy, with cold noodles and pickled greens gone dull brown with long storage. A strange crunchy substance in the mixture was identified after inquiry by Hammond as dried jellyfish, which intelligence caused several men to surreptitiously pick the bits out and drop them onto the floor.\n\nLiu Bao with motions and his own example encouraged Laurence to literally fling the ingredients into the air to mix them together, and Hammond informed them by translation that this was intended to ensure good luck: the higher the better. The British were not unwilling to make the attempt; their coordination was less equal to the task, however, and shortly both uniforms and the table were graced by bits of fish and pickled greens. Dignity was thus dealt a fatal blow: after nearly a jug of rice wine to every man, even Yongxing's presence was not enough to dampen the hilarity ensuing from watching their fellow-officers fling bits of fish all over themselves.\n\n\"It is a dashed sight better than we had in the Normandy's cutter,\" Riley said to Laurence, over-loud, meaning the raw fish; to the more general audience, interest having been expressed by Hammond and Liu Bao both, he expanded on the story: \"We were wrecked in the Normandy when Captain Yarrow ran her onto a reef, all of us thrown on a desert island seven hundred miles from Rio. We were sent off in the cutter for rescue\u2014though Laurence was only second lieutenant at the time, the captain and premier knew less about the sea than trained apes, which is how they came to run us aground. They wouldn't go themselves for love or money, or give us much in the way of supply, either,\" he added, still smarting at the memory.\n\n\"Twelve men with nothing but hard tack and a bag of cocoanuts; we were glad enough for fish to eat it raw, with our fingers, the moment we caught it,\" Laurence said. \"But I cannot complain; I am tolerably sure Foley tapped me for his first lieutenant in the Goliath because of it, and I would have eaten a good deal more raw fish for the chance. But this is much nicer, by far,\" he added, hastily, thinking this conversation implied that raw fish was fit only for consumption in desperate circumstances, which opinion he privately held true, but not to be shared at present.\n\nThis story launched several more anecdotes from various of the naval officers, tongues loosened and backs unstiffened by so much gluttony. The translator was kept busy rendering these for the benefit of the highly interested Chinese audience; even Yongxing followed the stories; he had still not deigned to break his silence, save for the formal toasts, but there was something of a mellowing about his eyes.\n\nLiu Bao was less circumspect about his curiosity. \"You have been to a great many places, I see, and had unusual adventures,\" he observed to Laurence. \"Admiral Zheng sailed all the way to Africa, but he died on his seventh voyage, and his tomb is empty. You have gone around the world more than once. Have you never been worried that you would die at sea, and no one would perform the rites at your grave?\"\n\n\"I have never thought very much about it,\" Laurence said, with a little dishonesty: in truth he had never given the matter any consideration whatsoever. \"But after all, Drake and Cook, and so many other great men, have been buried at sea; I really could not complain about sharing their tomb, sir, and with your own navigator as well.\"\n\n\"Well, I hope you have many sons at home,\" Liu Bao said, shaking his head.\n\nThe casual air with which he made so personal a remark took Laurence quite aback. \"No, sir; none,\" he said, too startled to think of anything to do but answer. \"I have never married,\" he added, seeing Liu Bao about to assume an expression of great sympathy, which on this answer being translated became a look of open astonishment; Yongxing and even Sun Kai turned their heads to stare. Beleaguered, Laurence tried to explain. \"There is no urgency; I am a third son, and my eldest brother has three boys already himself.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, Captain, if I may,\" Hammond broke in, rescuing him, and said to them, \"Gentlemen, among us, the eldest son alone inherits the family estates, and the younger are expected to make their own way; I know it is not the same with you.\"\n\n\"I suppose your father is a soldier, like you?\" Yongxing said abruptly. \"Does he have a very small estate, that he cannot provide for all his sons?\"\n\n\"No, sir; my father is Lord Allendale,\" Laurence said, rather nettled by the suggestion. \"Our family seat is in Nottinghamshire; I do not think anyone would call it small.\"\n\nYongxing looked startled and somewhat displeased by this answer, but perhaps he was only frowning at the soup which was at that moment being laid out before them: a very clear broth, pale gold and queer to the taste, smoky and thin, with pitchers of bright red vinegar as accompaniment and to add sharp flavor, and masses of short dried noodles in each bowl, strangely crunchy.\n\nAll the while the servants were bringing it in, the translator had been murmuring quietly in answer to some question from Sun Kai, and now on his behalf leaned across the table and asked, \"Captain, is your father a relation of the King?\"\n\nThough surprised by the question, Laurence was grateful enough for any excuse to put down his spoon; he would have found the soup difficult eating even had he not already gone through six courses. \"No, sir; I would hardly be so bold as to call His Majesty a relation. My father's family are of Plantagenet descent; we are only very distantly connected to the present house.\"\n\nSun Kai listened to this translated, then persisted a little further. \"But are you more closely related to the King than the Lord Macartney?\"\n\nAs the translator pronounced the name a little awkwardly, Laurence had some difficulty in recognizing the name as that of the earlier ambassador, until Hammond, whispering hastily in his ear, made it clear to whom Sun Kai was referring. \"Oh, certainly,\" Laurence said. \"He was raised to the peerage for service to the Crown, himself; not that that is held any less honorable with us, I assure you, but my father is eleventh Earl of Allendale, and his creation dates from 1529.\"\n\nEven as he spoke, he was amused at finding himself so absurdly jealous of his ancestry, halfway around the world, in the company of men to whom it could be of no consequence whatsoever, when he had never trumpeted it among his acquaintance at home. Indeed, he had often rebelled against his father's lectures upon the subject, of which there had been many, particularly after his first abortive attempt to run away to sea. But four weeks of being daily called into his father's office to endure another repetition had evidently had some effect he had not previously suspected, if he could be provoked to so stuffy a response by being compared with a great diplomat of very respectable lineage.\n\nBut quite contrary to his expectations, Sun Kai and his countrymen showed a deep fascination with this intelligence, betraying an enthusiasm for genealogy Laurence had heretofore only encountered in a few of his more stiff-necked relations, and he shortly found himself pressed for details of the family history which he could only vaguely dredge out of his memory. \"I beg your pardon,\" he said at last, growing rather desperate. \"I cannot keep it straight in my head without writing it down; you must forgive me.\"\n\nIt was an unfortunate choice of gambit: Liu Bao, who had also been listening with interest, promptly said, \"Oh, that is easy enough,\" and called for brush and ink; the servants were clearing away the soup, and there was room on the table for the moment. At once all those nearby leaned forward to look on, the Chinese in curiosity, the British in self-defense: there was another course waiting in the wings, and no one but the cooks was in a hurry for it to arrive.\n\nFeeling that he was being excessively punished for his moment of vanity, Laurence was forced to write out a chart on a long roll of rice paper under all their eyes. The difficulty of forming the Latin alphabet with a paintbrush was added to that of trying to remember the various begats; he had to leave several given names blank, marking them with interrogatives, before finally reaching Edward III after several contortions and one leap through the Salic line. The result said nothing complimentary about his penmanship, but the Chinese passed it around more than once, discussing it amongst themselves with energy, though the writing could hardly have made any more sense to them than theirs to him. Yongxing himself stared at it a long time, though his face remained devoid of emotion, and Sun Kai, receiving it last, rolled it away with an expression of intense satisfaction, apparently for safe-keeping.\n\nThankfully, that was an end to it; but now there was no more delaying the next dish, and the sacrificed poultry was brought out, all eight at once, on great platters and steaming with a pungent, liquored sauce. They were laid on the table and hacked expertly into small pieces by the servants using a broad-bladed cleaver, and again Laurence rather despairingly allowed his plate to be filled. The meat was delicious, tender and rich with juices, but almost a punishment to eat; nor was this the conclusion: when the chicken was taken away, nowhere close to finished, whole fish were brought out, fried in the rich slush from the hands' salt pork. No one could do more than pick at this dish, or the course of sweets that followed: seedcake, and sticky-sweet dumplings in syrup, filled with a thick red paste. The servants were especially anxious to press them onto the youngest officers, and poor Roland could be heard saying plaintively, \"Can I not eat it tomorrow?\"\n\nWhen finally they were allowed to escape, almost a dozen men had to be bodily lifted up by their seat-mates and helped from the cabin. Those who could still walk unaided escaped to the deck, there to lean on the rail in various attitudes of pretended fascination, which were mostly a cover for waiting their turn in the seats of ease below. Laurence unashamedly took advantage of his private facility, and then heaved himself back up to sit with Temeraire, his head protesting almost as much as his belly.\n\nLaurence was taken aback to find Temeraire himself being feasted in turn by a delegation of the Chinese servants, who had prepared for him delicacies favored by dragons in their own land: the entrails of the cow, stuffed with its own liver and lungs chopped fine and mixed with spices, looking very much like large sausages; also a haunch, very lightly seared and touched with what looked very like the same fiery sauce which had been served to the human guests. The deep maroon flesh of an enormous tunny, sliced into thick steaks and layered with whole delicate sheets of yellow noodles, was his fish course, and after this, with great ceremony, the servants brought out an entire sheep, its meat cooked rather like mince and dressed back up in its skin, which had been dyed a deep crimson, with pieces of driftwood for legs.\n\nTemeraire tasted this dish and said, in surprise, \"Why, it is sweet,\" and asked the servants something in their native Chinese; they bowed many times, replying, and Temeraire nodded; then he daintily ate the contents, leaving the skin and wooden legs aside. \"They are only for decoration,\" he told Laurence, settling down with a sigh of deep contentment; the only guest so comfortable. From the quarterdeck below, the faint sound of retching could be heard, as one of the older midshipmen suffered the consequences of overindulgence. \"They tell me that in China, dragons do not eat the skins, any more than people do.\"\n\n\"Well, I only hope you will not find it indigestible, from so much spice,\" Laurence said, and was sorry at once, recognizing in himself a species of jealousy that did not like to see Temeraire enjoying any Chinese customs. He was unhappily conscious that it had never occurred to him to offer Temeraire prepared dishes, or any greater variety than the difference between fish and mutton, even for a special occasion.\n\nBut Temeraire only said, \"No, I like it very well,\" unconcerned and yawning; he stretched himself very long and flexed his claws. \"Do let us go for a long flight tomorrow?\" he said, curling up again more compactly. \"I have not been tired at all, this whole last week, coming back; I am sure I can manage a longer journey.\"\n\n\"By all means,\" Laurence said, glad to hear that he was feeling stronger. Keynes had at last put a period to Temeraire's convalescence, shortly after their departure from Cape Coast. Yongxing's original prohibition against Laurence's taking Temeraire aloft again had never been withdrawn, but Laurence had no intention of abiding by this restriction, or begging him to lift it. However Hammond, with some ingenuity and quiet discussion, arranged matters diplomatically: Yongxing came on deck after Keynes's final pronouncement, and granted the permission audibly, \"for the sake of ensuring Lung Tien Xiang's welfare through healthy exercise,\" as he put it. So they were free to take to the air again without any threat of quarreling, but Temeraire had been complaining of soreness, and growing weary with unusual speed.\n\nThe feast had lasted so long that Temeraire had begun eating only at twilight; now full darkness spread, and Laurence lay back against Temeraire's side and looked over the less-familiar stars of the Southern Hemisphere; it was a perfectly clear night, and the master ought to be able to fix a good longitude, he hoped, through the constellations. The hands had been turned up for the evening to celebrate, and the rice wine had flowed freely at their mess tables also; they were singing a boisterous and highly explicit song, and Laurence made sure with a look that Roland and Dyer were not on deck to be interested in it: no sign of either, so they had probably sought their beds after dinner.\n\nOne by one the men slowly began to drift away from the festivities and seek their hammocks. Riley came climbing up from the quarterdeck, taking the steps one at a time with both feet, very weary and scarlet in the face; Laurence invited him to sit, and out of consideration did not offer a glass of wine. \"You cannot call it anything but a rousing success; any political hostess would consider it a triumph to put on such a dinner,\" Laurence said. \"But I confess I would have been happier with half so many dishes, and the servants might have been much less solicitous without leaving me hungry.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014yes, indeed,\" Riley said; distracted, and now that Laurence looked at him more closely, plainly unhappy, discomfited.\n\n\"What has occurred? Is something amiss?\" Laurence looked at once at the rigging, the masts; but all looked well, and in any case every sense and intuition together told him that the ship was running well: or as well as she ever did, being in the end a great lumbering hulk.\n\n\"Laurence, I very much dislike being a tale-bearer, but I cannot conceal this,\" Riley said. \"That ensign, or I suppose cadet, of yours; Roland. He\u2014that is, Roland was asleep in the Chinese cabin, and as I was leaving, the servants asked me, with their translator, where he slept, so they might carry him there.\" Laurence was already dreading the conclusion, and not very surprised when Riley added, \"But the fellow said 'she,' instead; I was on the point of correcting him when I looked\u2014well, not to drag it out; Roland is a girl. I have not the least notion how she has concealed it so long.\"\n\n\"Oh bloody Hell,\" Laurence said, too tired and irritable from the excess of food and drink to mind his language. \"You have not said anything about this, have you, Tom? To anyone else?\" Riley nodded, warily, and Laurence said, \"I must beg you to keep it quiet; the plain fact of the matter is, Longwings will not go into harness under a male captain. And some other breeds also, but those are of less material significance; Longwings are the kind we cannot do without, and so some girls must be trained up for them.\"\n\nRiley said, uncertainly, half-smiling, \"Are you\u2014? But this is absurd; was not the leader of your formation here on this very ship, with his Longwing?\" he protested, seeing that Laurence was not speaking in jest.\n\n\"Do you mean Lily?\" Temeraire asked, cocking his head. \"Her captain is Catherine Harcourt; she is not a man.\"\n\n\"It is quite true; I assure you,\" Laurence said, while Riley stared at him and Temeraire in turn.\n\n\"But Laurence, the very notion,\" Riley said, grown now appalled as he began to believe them. \"Every feeling must cry out against such an abuse. Why, if we are to send women to war, should we not take them to sea, also? We could double our numbers, and what matter if the deck of every ship become a brothel, and children left motherless and crying on shore?\"\n\n\"Come, the one does not follow on the other in the slightest,\" Laurence said, impatient with this exaggeration; he did not like the necessity himself, but he was not at all willing to be given such romantical arguments against it. \"I do not at all say it could or ought to answer in the general case; but where the willing sacrifice of a few may mean the safety and happiness of the rest, I cannot think it so bad. Those women officers whom I have met are not impressed into service, nor forced to the work even by the ordinary necessities that require men to seek employment, and I assure you no one in the service would dream of offering any insult.\"\n\nThis explanation did not reconcile Riley at all, but he abandoned his general protest for the specific. \"And so you truly mean to keep this girl in service?\" he said, in tones increasingly plaintive rather than shocked. \"And have her going about in male dress in this fashion; can it be allowed?\"\n\n\"There is formal dispensation from the sumptuary laws for female officers of the Corps while engaged upon their duties, authorized by the Crown,\" Laurence said. \"I am sorry that you should be put to any distress over the matter, Tom; I had hoped to avoid the issue entirely, but I suppose it was too much to ask for, seven months aboard ship. I promise you,\" he added, \"I was as shocked as you might wish when I first learned of the practice; but since I have served with several, and they are indeed not at all like ordinary females. They are raised to the life, you know, and under such circumstances habit may trump even birth.\"\n\nFor his part, Temeraire had been following this exchange with cocked head and increasing confusion; now he said, \"I do not understand in the least, why ought it make any difference at all? Lily is female, and she can fight just as well as I can, or almost,\" he amended, with a touch of superiority.\n\nRiley, still dissatisfied even after Laurence's reassurance, looked after this remark very much as though he had been asked to justify the tide, or the phase of the moon; Laurence was by long experience better prepared for Temeraire's radical notions, and said, \"Women are generally smaller and weaker than men, Temeraire, less able to endure the privations of service.\"\n\n\"I have never noticed that Captain Harcourt is much smaller than any of the rest of you,\" Temeraire said; well he might not, speaking from a height of some thirty feet and a weight topping eighteen tons. \"Besides, I am smaller than Maximus, and Messoria is smaller than me; but that does not mean we cannot still fight.\"\n\n\"It is different for dragons than for people,\" Laurence said. \"Among other things, women must bear children, and care for them through childhood, where your kind lay eggs and hatch ready to look to your own needs.\"\n\nTemeraire blinked at this intelligence. \"You do not hatch out of eggs?\" he asked, in deep fascination. \"How then\u2014\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, I think I see Purbeck looking for me,\" Riley said, very hastily, and escaped at a speed remarkable, Laurence thought somewhat resentfully, in a man who had lately consumed nearly a quarter of his own weight again in food.\n\n\"I cannot really undertake to explain the process to you; I have no children of my own,\" Laurence said. \"In any case, it is late; and if you wish to make a long flight tomorrow, you had better rest well tonight.\"\n\n\"That is true, and I am sleepy,\" Temeraire said, yawning and letting his long forked tongue unroll, tasting the air. \"I think it will keep clear; we will have good weather for the flight.\" He settled himself. \"Good night, Laurence; you will come early?\"\n\n\"Directly after breakfast, I am entirely at your disposal,\" Laurence promised. He stayed stroking Temeraire gently until the dragon drifted into sleep; his hide was still very warm to the touch, likely from the last lingering heat of the galley, its ovens finally given some rest after the long preparations. At last, Temeraire's eyes closing to the thinnest of slits, Laurence got himself back onto his feet and climbed down to the quarterdeck.\n\nThe men had mostly cleared away or were napping on deck, save those surly few set as lookouts and muttering of their unhappy lot in the rigging, and the night air was pleasantly cool. Laurence walked a ways aft to stretch his legs before going below; the midshipman standing watch, young Tripp, was yawning almost as wide as Temeraire; he closed his mouth with a snap and jerked to embarrassed attention when Laurence passed.\n\n\"A pleasant evening, Mr. Tripp,\" Laurence said, concealing his amusement; the boy was coming along well, from what Riley had said, and bore little resemblance anymore to the idle, spoiled creature who had been foisted upon them by his family. His wrists showed bare for several inches past the ends of his sleeves, and the back of his coat had split so many times that in the end it had been necessary to expand it by the insertion of a panel of blue-dyed sailcloth, not quite the same shade as the rest, so he had an odd stripe running down the middle. Also his hair had grown curly, and bleached to almost yellow by the sun; his own mother would likely not recognize him.\n\n\"Oh, yes, sir,\" Tripp said, enthusiastically. \"Such wonderful food, and they gave me a whole dozen of those sweet dumplings at the end, too. It is a pity we cannot always be eating so.\"\n\nLaurence sighed over this example of youthful resilience; his own stomach was not at all comfortable yet. \"Mind you do not fall asleep on watch,\" he said; after such a dinner it would be astonishing if the boy was not sorely tempted, and Laurence had no desire to see him suffer the ignominious punishment.\n\n\"Never, sir,\" Tripp said, swallowing a fresh yawn and finishing the sentence out in a squeak. \"Sir,\" he asked, nervously, in a low voice, when Laurence would have gone, \"May I ask you\u2014you do not suppose that Chinese spirits would show themselves to a fellow who was not a member of their family, do you?\"\n\n\"I am tolerably certain you will not see any spirits on watch, Mr. Tripp, unless you have concealed some in your coat pocket,\" Laurence said, dryly. This took a moment to puzzle out, then Tripp laughed, but still nervously, and Laurence frowned. \"Has someone been telling you stories?\" he asked, well aware of what such rumors could do to the state of a ship's crew.\n\n\"No, it is only that\u2014well, I thought I saw someone, forward, when I went to turn the glass. But I spoke, and he quite vanished away; I am sure he was a Chinaman, and oh, his face was so white!\"\n\n\"That is quite plain: you saw one of the servants who cannot speak our tongue, coming from the head, and startled him into ducking away from what he thought would be a scolding of some sort. I hope you are not inclined to superstition, Mr. Tripp; it is something which must be tolerated in the men, but a sad flaw in an officer.\" He spoke sternly, hoping by firmness to keep the boy from spreading the tale, at least; and if the fear kept him wakeful for the rest of the night, it would be so much the better.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Tripp said, rather dismally. \"Good night, sir.\"\n\nLaurence continued his circuit of the deck, at a leisurely pace that was all he could muster. The exercise was settling his stomach; he was almost inclined to take another turn, but the glass was running low, and he did not wish to disappoint Temeraire by rising late. As he made to step down into the fore hatch, however, a sudden heavy blow landed on his back and he lurched, tripped, and pitched headfirst down the ladder-way.\n\nHis hand grasped automatically for the guideline, and after a jangling twist he found the steps with his feet, catching himself against the ladder with a thump. Angry, he looked up and nearly fell again, recoiling from the pallid white face, incomprehensibly deformed, that was peering closely into his own out of the dark.\n\n\"Good God in Heaven,\" he said, with great sincerity; then he recognized Feng Li, Yongxing's servant, and breathed again: the man only looked so strange because he was dangling upside-down through the hatch, barely inches from falling himelf. \"What the devil do you mean, lunging about the deck like this?\" he demanded, catching the man's flailing hand and setting it onto the guideline, so he could right himself. \"You ought to have better sea-legs by now.\"\n\nFeng Li only stared in mute incomprehension, then hauled himself back onto his feet and scrambled down the ladder past Laurence pell-mell, disappearing belowdecks to where the Chinese servants were quartered with speed enough to call it vanishing. With his dark blue clothing and black hair, as soon as his face was out of sight he was almost invisible in the dark. \"I cannot blame Tripp in the least,\" Laurence said aloud, now more generously inclined towards the boy's silliness; his heart was still pounding disgracefully as he continued on to his quarters.\n\nLaurence roused the next morning to yells of dismay and feet running overhead; he dashed at once for the deck to find the foremainsail yard tumbled to the deck in two pieces, the enormous sail draped half over the forecastle, and Temeraire looking at once miserable and embarrassed. \"I did not mean to,\" he said, sounding gravelly and quite unlike himself, and sneezed again, this time managing to turn his head away from the ship: the force of the eruption cast up a few waves that slopped against the larboard side.\n\nKeynes was already climbing up to the deck with his bag, and laid his ear against Temeraire's chest. \"Hm.\" He said nothing more, listening in many places, until Laurence grew impatient and prompted him.\n\n\"Oh, it is certainly a cold; there is nothing to be done but wait it out, and dose him for coughing when that should begin. I am only seeing if I might hear the fluid moving in the channels which relate to the divine wind,\" Keynes said absently. \"We have no notion of the anatomy of the particular trait; a pity we have never had a specimen to dissect.\"\n\nTemeraire drew back at this, putting his ruff down, and snorted; or rather tried to: instead he blew mucus out all over Keynes's head. Laurence himself sprang back only just in time, and could not feel particularly sorry for the surgeon: the remark had been thoroughly tactless.\n\nTemeraire croaked out, \"I am quite well, we can still go flying,\" and looked at Laurence in appeal.\n\n\"Perhaps a shorter flight now, and then again in the afternoon, if you are still not tired,\" Laurence offered, looking at Keynes, who was ineffectually trying to get the slime from his face.\n\n\"No, in warm weather like this he can fly just as usual if he likes to; no need to baby him,\" Keynes said, rather shortly, managing to clear his eyes at least. \"So long as you are sure to be strapped on tight, or he will sneeze you clean off. Will you excuse me?\"\n\nSo in the end Temeraire had his long flight after all: the Allegiance left dwindling behind in the blue-water depths, and the ocean shading to jeweled glass as they drew nearer the coast: old cliffs, softened by the years and sloping gently to the water under a cloak of unbroken green, with a fringe of jagged grey boulders at their base to break the water. There were a few small stretches of pale sand, none large enough for Temeraire to land even if they had not grown wary; but otherwise the trees were impenetrable, even after they had flown straight inland for nearly an hour.\n\nIt was lonely, and as monotonous as flying over empty ocean; the wind among the leaves instead of the lapping of the waves, only a different variety of silence. Temeraire looked eagerly at every occasional animal cry that broke the stillness, but saw nothing past the ground cover, so thickly overgrown were the trees. \"Does no one live here?\" he asked, eventually.\n\nHe might have been keeping his voice low because of the cold, but Laurence felt the same inclination to preserve the quiet, and answered softly, \"No; we have flown too deep. Even the most powerful tribes live only along the coasts, and never venture so far inland; there are too many feral dragons and other beasts, too savage to confront.\"\n\nThey continued on without speaking for some time; the sun was very strong, and Laurence drifted neither awake nor asleep, his head nodding against his chest. Unchecked, Temeraire kept on his course, the slow pace no challenge to his endurance; when at last Laurence roused, on Temeraire's sneezing again, the sun was past its zenith: they would miss dinner.\n\nTemeraire did not express a wish to stay longer when Laurence said they ought to turn around; if anything he quickened his pace. They had gone so far that the coastline was out of sight, and they flew back only by Laurence's compass, with no landmarks to guide them through the unchanging jungle. The smooth curve of the ocean was very welcome, and Temeraire's spirits rose as they struck out again over the waves. \"At least I am not tiring anymore, even if I am sick,\" he said, and then sneezed himself thirty feet directly upwards, with a sound not unlike cannon-fire.\n\nThey did not reach the Allegiance again until nearly dark, and Laurence discovered he had missed more than his dinner-hour. Another sailor besides Tripp had also spied Feng Li on deck the night before, with similar results, and during Laurence's absence the story of the ghost had already gone round the ship, magnified a dozen times over and thoroughly entrenched. All his attempted explanations were useless, the ship's company wholly convinced: three men now swore they had seen the ghost dancing a jig upon the foresail yard the night before, foretelling its doom; others from the middle watch claimed the ghost had been wafting about the rigging all night long.\n\nLiu Bao himself flung fuel onto the fire; having inquired and heard the tale during his visit to the deck the next day, he shook his head and opined that the ghost was a sign that someone aboard had acted immorally with a woman. This qualified nearly every man aboard; they muttered a great deal about foreign ghosts with unreasonably prudish sensibilities, and discussed the subject anxiously at meals, each one trying to persuade himself and his messmates that he could not possibly be the guilty culprit; his infraction had been small and innocent, and in any case he had always meant to marry her, the instant he returned.\n\nAs yet general suspicion had not fallen onto a single individual, but it was only a matter of time; and then the wretch's life would hardly be worth living. In the meantime, the men went about their duties at night only reluctantly, going so far as to refuse orders which would have required them to be alone on any part of the deck. Riley attempted to set an example to the men by walking out of sight during his watches, but this had less effect than might have been desired by his having to visibly steel himself first. Laurence roundly scolded Allen, the first of his own crew to mention the ghost in his hearing, so no more was said in front of him; but the aviators showed themselves inclined to stay close to Temeraire on duty, and to come to and from their quarters in groups.\n\nTemeraire was himself too uncomfortable to pay a great deal of attention. He found the degree of fear baffling, and expressed some disappointment at never seeing the specter when so many others had evidently had a glimpse; but for the most part he was occupied in sleeping, and directing his frequent sneezes away from the ship. He tried to conceal his coughing at first when it developed, reluctant to be dosed: Keynes had been brewing the medicine in a great pot in the galley since the first evidence of Temeraire's illness, and the foul stench rose through the boards ominously. But late on the third day he was seized with a fit he could not suppress, and Keynes and his assistants trundled the pot of medicine up onto the dragondeck: a thick, almost gelatinous brownish mixture, swimming in a glaze of liquid orange fat.\n\nTemeraire stared down into the pot unhappily. \"Must I?\" he asked.\n\n\"It will do its best work drunk hot,\" Keynes said, implacable, and Temeraire squeezed his eyes shut and bent his head to gulp.\n\n\"Oh; oh, no,\" he said, after the first swallow; he seized the barrel of water which had been prepared for him and upended it into his mouth, spilling much over his chops and neck and onto the deck as he guzzled. \"I cannot possibly drink any more of it,\" he said, putting the barrel down. But with much coaxing and exhortation, he at length got down the whole, miserable and retching all the while.\n\nLaurence stood by, stroking him anxiously: he did not dare speak again. Keynes had been so very cutting at his first suggestion of a brief respite. Temeraire at last finished and slumped to the deck, saying passionately, \"I will never be ill again, ever,\" but despite his unhappiness, his coughing was indeed silenced, and that night he slept more easily, his breathing a good deal less labored.\n\nLaurence stayed on deck by his side as he had every night of the illness; with Temeraire sleeping quiet he had ample opportunity to witness the absurd lengths the men practiced to avoid the ghost: going two at a time to the head, and huddling around the two lanterns left on deck instead of sleeping. Even the officer of the watch stayed uneasily close, and looked pale every time he took the walk along the deck to turn the glass and strike the bell.\n\nNothing would cure it but distraction, and of that there was little prospect: the weather was holding fair, and there was little chance of meeting any enemy who would offer battle; any ship which did not wish to fight could easily outrun them. Laurence could not really wish for either, in any case; the situation could only be tolerated until they reached port, where the break in the journey would hopefully dispel the myth.\n\nTemeraire snuffled in his sleep and half-woke, coughing wetly, and sighed in misery. Laurence laid a hand on him and opened the book on his lap again; the lantern swaying beside him gave a light, if an unreliable one, and he read slowly aloud until Temeraire's eyelids sank heavily down again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "\"I do not mean to tell you your business,\" General Baird said, showing very little reluctance to do so. \"But the winds to India are damned unpredictable this time of year, with the winter monsoon barely over. You are as likely to find yourselves blown straight back here. You had much better wait for Lord Caledon to arrive, especially after this news about Pitt.\"\n\nHe was a younger man, but long-faced and serious, with a very decided mouth; the high upstanding collar of his uniform pushed up his chin and gave his neck a stiff, elongated look. The new British governor not yet arrived, Baird was temporarily in command of the Capetown settlement, and ensconced in the great fortified castle in the midst of the town at the foot of the great flat-topped Table Mount. The courtyard was brilliant with sun, hazy glints cast off the bayonets of the troops drilling smartly on the grounds, and the encircling walls blocked the best part of the breeze which had cooled them on the walk up from the beach.\n\n\"We cannot be sitting in port until June,\" Hammond said. \"It would be much better if we were to sail and be delayed at sea, with an obvious attempt to make haste, than to be idle in front of Prince Yongxing. He has already been asking me how much longer we expect the journey to take, and where else we may be stopping.\"\n\n\"I am perfectly happy to get under way as soon as we are resupplied, for my part,\" Riley said, putting down his empty teacup and nodding to the servant to fill it again. \"She is not a fast ship by any means, but I would lay a thousand pounds on her against any weather we might meet.\"\n\n\"Not, of course,\" he said to Laurence later, somewhat anxiously, as they walked back to the Allegiance, \"that I would really like to try her against a typhoon. I never meant anything of the sort; I was thinking only of ordinary bad weather, perhaps a little rain.\"\n\nTheir preparations for the long remaining stretch of ocean went ahead: not merely buying livestock, but also packing and preserving more salt meat, as there were no official naval provisions yet to be had from the port. Fortunately there was no shortage of supply; the settlers did not greatly resent the mild occupation, and they were happy enough to sell from their herds. Laurence was more occupied with the question of demand, for Temeraire's appetite was greatly diminished since he had been afflicted by the cold, and he had begun to pick querulously at his food, complaining of a lack of flavor.\n\nThere was no proper covert, but, alerted by Volly, Baird had anticipated their arrival and arranged the clearing of a large green space near the landing ground so the dragon could rest comfortably. Temeraire having flown to this stable location, Keynes could perform a proper inspection: the dragon was directed to lay his head flat and open his jaws wide, and the surgeon climbed inside with a lantern, picking his way carefully among the hand-sized teeth to peer down into Temeraire's throat.\n\nWatching anxiously from outside with Granby, Laurence could see that Temeraire's narrow forked tongue, ordinarily pale pink, was presently coated thickly with white, mottled with virulent red spots.\n\n\"I expect that is why he cannot taste anything; there is nothing out of the ordinary in the condition of his passages,\" Keynes said, shrugging as he climbed out of Temeraire's jaws, to applause: a crowd of children, both settlers and natives, had gathered around the clearing's fence to watch, fascinated as if at a circus. \"And they use their tongues for scent also, which must be contributing to the difficulties.\"\n\n\"Surely this is not a usual symptom?\" Laurence asked.\n\n\"I don't recall ever seeing a dragon lose his appetite over a cold,\" Granby put in, worriedly. \"In the ordinary line of things, they get hungrier.\"\n\n\"He is only pickier than most about his food,\" Keynes said. \"You will just have to force yourself to eat until the illness has run its course,\" he added, to Temeraire, sternly. \"Come, here is some fresh beef; let us see you finish the whole.\"\n\n\"I will try,\" Temeraire said, heaving a sigh that came rather like a whine through his stuffed nose. \"But it is very tiresome chewing on and on when it does not taste like anything.\" He obediently if unenthusiastically downed several large hunks, but only mauled a few more pieces about without swallowing much of them, and then went back to blowing his nose into the small pit which had been dug for this purpose, wiping it against a heap of broad palm leaves.\n\nLaurence watched silently, then took the narrow pathway winding from the landing grounds back to the castle: he found Yongxing resting in the formal guest quarters with Sun Kai and Liu Bao. Thin curtains had been pinned up to dim the sunlight instead of the heavy velvet drapes, and two servants were making a breeze by standing at the full-open windows and waving great fans of folded paper; another stood by unobtrusively, refilling the envoys' cups with tea. Laurence felt untidy and hot in contrast, his collar wet and limp against his neck after the day's exertions, and dust thick on his boots, spattered also with blood from Temeraire's unfinished dinner.\n\nAfter the translator was summoned and some pleasantries exchanged, he explained the situation and said, as gracefully as he could manage, \"I would be grateful if you would lend me your cooks to make some dish for Temeraire, in your style, which might have some stronger flavor than fresh meat alone.\"\n\nHe had scarcely finished asking before Yongxing was giving orders in their language; the cooks were dispatched to the kitchens at once. \"Sit and wait with us,\" Yongxing said, unexpectedly, and had a chair brought for him, draped over with a long narrow silk cloth.\n\n\"No, thank you, sir; I am all over dirt,\" Laurence said, eyeing the beautiful drapery, pale orange and patterned with flowers. \"I do very well.\"\n\nBut Yongxing only repeated the invitation; yielding, Laurence gingerly sat down upon the very edge of the chair, and accepted the cup of tea which he was offered. Sun Kai nodded at him, in an odd approving fashion. \"Have you heard anything from your family, Captain?\" he inquired through the translator. \"I hope all is well with them.\"\n\n\"I have had no fresh news, sir, though I thank you for the concern,\" Laurence said, and passed another quarter of an hour in further small talk of the weather and the prospects for their departure, wondering a little at this sudden change in his reception.\n\nShortly a couple of lamb carcasses, on a bed of pastry and dressed with a gelatinous red-orange sauce, emerged from the kitchens and were trundled along the path to the clearing on great wooden trays. Temeraire brightened at once, the intensity of the spice penetrating even his dulled senses, and made a proper meal. \"I was hungry after all,\" he said, licking sauce from his chops and putting his head down to be cleaned off more thoroughly. Laurence hoped he was not doing Temeraire some harm by the measure: some traces of the sauce got on his hand as he wiped Temeraire clean, and it literally burnt upon the skin, leaving marks. But Temeraire seemed comfortable enough, not even asking more water than usual, and Keynes opined that keeping him eating was of the greater importance.\n\nLaurence scarcely needed to ask for the extended loan of the cooks; Yongxing not only agreed but made it a point to supervise and press them to do more elaborate work, and his own physician was called for and recommended the introduction of various herbs into the dishes. The poor servants were sent out into the markets\u2014silver the only language they shared with the local merchants\u2014to collect whatever ingredients they could find, the more exotic and expensive the better.\n\nKeynes was skeptical but unworried, and Laurence, being more conscious of owing gratitude than truly grateful, and guilty over his lack of sincerity, did not try to interfere with the menus, even as the servants daily trooped back from the markets with a succession of increasingly bizarre ingredients: penguins, served stuffed with grain and berries and their own eggs; smoked elephant meat brought in by hunters willing to risk the dangerous journey inland; shaggy, fat-tailed sheep with hair instead of wool; and the still-stranger spices and vegetables. The Chinese insisted on these last, swearing they were healthy for dragons, though the English custom had always been to feed them a steady diet of meat alone. Temeraire, for his part, ate the complicated dishes one after another with no ill-effects other than a tendency to belch foully afterwards.\n\nThe local children had become regular visitors, emboldened by seeing Dyer and Roland so frequently climbing on and about Temeraire; they began to view the search for ingredients as a game, cheering every new dish, or occasionally hissing those they felt insufficiently imaginative. The native children were members of the various tribes which lived about the region. Most lived by herding, but others by foraging in the mountains and the forests beyond, and these in particular joined in the fun, daily bringing items which their older relations had found too bizarre for their own consumption.\n\nThe crowning triumph was a misshapen and overgrown fungus brought back to the clearing by a group of five children with an air of triumph, its roots still covered with wet black dirt: mushroom-like, but with three brown-spotted caps instead of one, arranged one atop the other along the stem, the largest nearly two feet across, and so fetid they carried it with faces averted, passing it among one another with much shrieking laughter.\n\nThe Chinese servants took it back to the castle kitchens with great enthusiasm, paying the children with handfuls of colored ribbons and shells. Only shortly thereafter, General Baird appeared in the clearing, to complain: Laurence followed him back to the castle and understood the objections before he had fairly entered the complex. There was no visible smoke, but the air was suffused with the cooking smell, something like a mixture of stewed cabbage and the wet green mold which grew on the deck beams in humid weather; sour, cloying, and lingering upon the tongue. The street on the other side of the wall from the kitchens, ordinarily thronged with local merchants, was deserted; and the halls of the castle were nearly uninhabitable from the miasma. The envoys were quartered in a different building, well away from the kitchens, and so had not been personally affected, but the soldiers were quartered directly by and could not possibly be asked to eat in the repulsive atmosphere.\n\nThe laboring cooks, whose sense of smell, Laurence could only think, had been dulled by the week of producing successively more pungent dishes, protested through the interpreter that the sauce was not done, and all the persuasion Laurence and Baird together could muster was required to make them surrender the great stew-pot. Baird shamelessly ordered a couple of unlucky privates to carry it over to the clearing, the pot suspended between them on a broad tree branch. Laurence followed after them, trying to breathe shallowly.\n\nHowever, Temeraire received it with enthusiasm, far more pleased that he could actually perceive the smell than put off by its quality. \"It seems perfectly nice to me,\" he said, and nodded impatiently for it to be poured over his meat. He devoured an entire one of the local humpbacked oxen slathered in the stuff, and licked the insides of the pot clean, while Laurence watched dubiously from as far a distance as was polite.\n\nTemeraire sprawled into a blissful somnolence after his meal, murmuring approval and hiccoughing a little between words, almost drunkenly. Laurence came closer, a little alarmed to see him so quickly asleep, but Temeraire roused at the prodding, beaming and enthusiastic, and insisted on nuzzling at Laurence closely. His breath had grown as unbearable as the original stench; Laurence averted his face and tried not to retch, very glad to escape when Temeraire fell asleep again and he could climb out of the affectionate embrace of the dragon's forelegs.\n\nLaurence had to wash and shift his clothes before he could consider himself presentable. Even afterwards, he could still catch the lingering odor in his hair; too much to bear, he thought, and felt himself justified in carrying the protest back to the Chinese. It gave no offense, but it was not received with quite the gravity he had hoped for: indeed Liu Bao laughed uproariously when Laurence had described the effects of the mushroom; and when Laurence suggested that perhaps they might organize a more regular and limited set of dishes, Yongxing dismissed the notion, saying, \"We cannot insult a tien-lung by offering him the same day in and day out; the cooks will just have to be more careful.\"\n\nLaurence left without managing to carry his point, and with the suspicion that his control over Temeraire's diet had been usurped. His fears were soon confirmed. Temeraire woke the next day after an unusually long sleep, much improved and no longer so congested. The cold vanished entirely after a few days more, but though Laurence hinted repeatedly that there was no further need for assistance, the prepared dishes continued to come. Temeraire certainly made no objections, even as his sense of smell began to be restored. \"I think I am beginning to be able to tell the spices from one another,\" he said, licking his claws daintily clean: he had taken to picking up the food in his forelegs to eat, rather than simply feeding from the tubs. \"Those red things are called hua jiao, I like them very much.\"\n\n\"So long as you are enjoying your meals,\" Laurence said. \"I can hardly say anything more without being churlish,\" he confided to Granby later that evening, over their own supper in his cabin. \"If nothing else at least their efforts made him more comfortable, and kept him eating healthily; I cannot now say thank you, no, especially when he likes it.\"\n\n\"If you ask me, it is still nothing less than interference,\" Granby said, rather disgruntled on his behalf. \"And however are we to keep him fed in this style, when we have taken him back home?\"\n\nLaurence shook his head, both at the question and at the use of when; he would gladly have accepted uncertainty on the former point, if he might have had any assurance of the latter.\n\nThe Allegiance left Africa behind sailing almost due east with the current, which Riley thought better than trying to beat up along the coast into the capricious winds that still blew more south than north for the moment, and not liking to strike out across the main body of the Indian Ocean. Laurence watched the narrow hook of the land darken and fade into the ocean behind them; four months into the journey, and they were now more than halfway to China.\n\nA similarly disconsolate mood prevailed among the rest of the ship's company as they left behind the comfortable port and all its attractions. There had been no letters waiting in Capetown, as Volly had brought their mail with him, and little prospect of receiving any word from home ahead, unless some faster-sailing frigate or merchantman passed them by; but few of those would be sailing to China so early in the season. They thus had nothing to anticipate with pleasure, and the ghost still loomed ominously in all their hearts.\n\nPreoccupied by their superstitious fears, the sailors were not as attentive as they ought to have been. Three days out of port, Laurence woke before dawn out of an uneasy sleep to the sound, penetrating easily through the bulkhead that separated his quarters from the next cabin, of Riley savaging poor Lieutenant Beckett, who had been on the middle watch. The wind had shifted and risen during the night, and in confusion Beckett had put them on the wrong heading and neglected to reef the main and mizzen: ordinarily his mistakes were corrected by the more experienced sailors, who would cough meaningfully until he hit upon the right order to give, but more anxious to avoid the ghost and stay out of the rigging, no one had on this occasion given him warning, and now the Allegiance had been blown far north out of her course.\n\nThe swell was rising some fifteen feet in height under a lightening sky, the waves pale, green-tinted, and translucent as glass under their soapy white lather, leaping up into sharp peaks and spilling down again over themselves in great clouds of spray. Climbing to the dragondeck, Laurence pulled the hood of his sou'wester further forward, lips already dry and stiff with salt. Temeraire was curled tightly in upon himself, as far from the edge of the deck as he could manage, his hide wet and glossy in the lantern-light.\n\n\"I do not suppose they could build up the fires a little in the galley?\" Temeraire asked, a little plaintively, poking his head out from under his wing, eyes squinted down to slits to avoid the spray; he coughed a little for emphasis. This was quite possibly a piece of dramatics, for Temeraire had otherwise thoroughly recovered from his cold before their leaving port, but Laurence had no desire to risk its recurrence. Though the water was bathwater-warm, the wind still gusting erratically from the south had a chill. He marshaled the crew to collect oilskins to cover Temeraire and had the harness-men stitch them together so they would stay.\n\nTemeraire looked very odd under the makeshift quilt, only his nose visible, and shuffling awkwardly like an animated heap of laundry whenever he wished to change position. Laurence was perfectly content so long as he was warm and dry, and ignored the muffled sniggering from the forecastle; also Keynes, who made noises about coddling patients and encouraging malingering. The weather precluded reading on deck, so he climbed a little way under the covers himself to sit with Temeraire and keep him company. The insulation kept in not only the heat from the galley below but the steady warmth of Temeraire's own body as well; Laurence soon needed to shed his coat, and grew drowsy against Temeraire's side, responding only vaguely and without much attention to the conversation.\n\n\"Are you asleep, Laurence?\" Temeraire asked; Laurence roused with the question, and wondered if he had indeed been asleep a long time, or whether perhaps a fold of the oilskin quilt had fallen down to obscure the opening: it was grown very dark.\n\nHe pushed his way out from under the heavy oilskins; the ocean had smoothed out almost to a polished surface, and directly ahead a solid bank of purple-black clouds stretched across the whole expanse of the eastern horizon, its puffy, windswept fringe lit from behind by the sunrise into thick red color; deeper in the interior, flashes of sudden lightning briefly limned the edges of towering cloud masses. Far to the north, a ragged line of clouds was marching to join the greater multitude ahead of them, curving across the sky to a point just past the ship. The sky directly above was still clear.\n\n\"Pray have the storm-chains fetched, Mr. Fellowes,\" Laurence said, putting down his glass. The rigging was already full of activity.\n\n\"Perhaps you should ride the storm out aloft,\" Granby suggested, coming to join him at the rail. It was a natural suggestion to make: though Granby had been on transports before, he had served at Gibraltar and the Channel almost exclusively and did not have much experience of the open sea. Most dragons could stay aloft a full day, if only coasting on the wind, and well-fed and watered beforehand. It was a common way to keep them out of the way when a transport came into a thunderstorm or a squall: this was neither.\n\nIn answer, Laurence only shook his head briefly. \"It is just as well we have put together the oilskins; he will be much easier with them beneath the chains,\" he said, and saw Granby take his meaning.\n\nThe storm-chains were brought up piecemeal from below, each iron link as thick around as a boy's wrist, and laid over Temeraire's back in crosswise bands. Heavy cables, wormed and parceled to strengthen them, were laced through all the chain links and secured to the four double-post bitts in the corners of the dragondeck. Laurence inspected all the knots anxiously, and had several redone before he pronounced himself satisfied.\n\n\"Do the bonds catch you anywhere?\" he asked Temeraire. \"They are not too tight?\"\n\n\"I cannot move with all of these chains upon me,\" Temeraire said, trying the narrow limits of his movement, the end of his tail twitching back and forth uneasily as he pushed against the restraints. \"It is not at all like the harness; what are these for? Why must I wear them?\"\n\n\"Pray do not strain the ropes,\" Laurence said, worried, and went to look: fortunately none had frayed. \"I am sorry for the need,\" he added, returning, \"but if the seas grow heavy, you must be fast to the deck: else you could slide into the ocean, or by your movement throw the ship off her course. Are you very uncomfortable?\"\n\n\"No, not very,\" Temeraire said, but unhappily. \"Will it be for long?\"\n\n\"While the storm lasts,\" Laurence said, and looked out past the bow: the cloudbank was fading into the dim and leaden mass of the sky, the newly risen sun swallowed up already. \"I must go and look at the glass.\"\n\nThe mercury was very low in Riley's cabin: empty, and no smell of breakfast beyond the brewing coffee. Laurence took a cup from the steward and drank it standing, hot, and went back on deck; in his brief absence the sea had risen perhaps another ten feet, and now the Allegiance was showing her true mettle, her iron-bound prow slicing the waves cleanly, and her enormous weight pressing them away to either side.\n\nStorm-covers were being laid down over the hatches; Laurence made a final inspection of Temeraire's restraints, then said to Granby, \"Send the men below; I will take the first watch.\" He ducked under the oilskins by Temeraire's head again and stood by him, stroking the soft muzzle. \"We are in for a long blow, I am afraid,\" he said. \"Could you eat something more?\"\n\n\"I ate yesterday late, I am not hungry,\" Temeraire said; in the dark recesses of the hood his pupils had widened, liquid and black, with only the thinnest crescent rims of blue. The iron chains moaned softly as he shifted his weight again, a higher note against the steady deep creaking of the timber, the ship's beams working. \"We have been in a storm before, on the Reliant,\" he said. \"I did not have to wear such chains then.\"\n\n\"You were much smaller, and so was the storm,\" Laurence said, and Temeraire subsided, but not without a wordless grumbling murmur of discontent; he did not pursue conversation, but lay silently, occasionally scraping his talons against the edges of the chains. He was lying with his head pointed away from the bow, to avoid the spray; Laurence could look out past his muzzle and watch the sailors, busy getting on the storm-lashings and taking in the topsails, all noise but the low metallic grating muffled by the thick layer of fabric.\n\nBy two bells in the forenoon watch, the ocean was coming over the bulwarks in thick overlapping sheets, an almost continuous waterfall pouring over the edge of the dragondeck onto the forecastle. The galleys had gone cold; there would be no fires aboard until the storm had blown over. Temeraire huddled low to the deck and complained no more but drew the oilskin more closely around them, his muscles twitching beneath the hide to shake off the rivulets that burrowed deep between the layers. \"All hands, all hands,\" Riley was saying, distantly, through the wind; the bosun took up the call with his bellowing voice cupped in his hand, and the men came scrambling up onto the deck, thump-thump of many hurrying feet through the planking, to begin the work of shortening sail and getting her before the wind.\n\nThe bell was rung without fail at every turn of the half-hourglass, their only measure of time; the light had failed early on, and sunset was only an incremental increase of darkness. A cold blue phosphorescence washed the deck, carried on the surface of the water, and illuminated the cables and edges of the planks; by its weak glimmering the crests of the waves could be seen, growing steadily higher.\n\nEven the Allegiance could not break the present waves, but must go climbing slowly up their faces, rising so steeply that Laurence could look straight down along the deck and see the bottom of the wave trenches below. Then at last her bow would get over the crest: almost with a leap she would tilt over onto the far side of the collapsing wave, gather herself, and plunge deep and with shattering force into the surging froth at the bottom of the trench. The broad fan of the dragondeck then rose streaming, scooping a hollow out of the next wave's face; and she began the slow climb again from the beginning, only the drifting sand in the glass to mark the difference between one wave and the next.\n\nMorning: the wind as savage, but the swell a little lighter, and Laurence woke from a restless, broken sleep. Temeraire refused food. \"I cannot eat anything, even if they could bring it me,\" he said, when Laurence asked, and closed his eyes again: exhausted more than sleeping, and his nostrils caked white with salt.\n\nGranby had relieved him on watch; he and a couple of the crew were on deck, huddled against Temeraire's other side. Laurence called Martin over and sent him to fetch some rags. The present rain was too mixed with spray to be fresh, but fortunately they were not short of water, and the fore scuttlebutt had been full before the storm. Clinging with both hands to the life-lines stretched fore and aft the length of the deck, Martin crept slowly along to the barrel, and brought the rags dripping back. Temeraire barely stirred as Laurence gently wiped the salt rims away from his nose.\n\nA strange, dingy uniformity above with neither clouds nor sun visible; the rain came only in short drenching bursts flung at them by the wind, and at the summit of the waves the whole curving horizon was full of the heaving, billowing sea. Laurence sent Granby below when Ferris came up, and took some biscuit and hard cheese himself; he did not care to leave the deck. The rain increased as the day wore on, colder now than before; a heavy cross-sea pounded the Allegiance from either side, and one towering monster broke its crest nearly at the height of the foremast, the mass of water coming down like a blow upon Temeraire's body and jarring him from his fitful sleep with a start.\n\nThe flood knocked the handful of aviators off their feet, sent them swinging wildly from whatever hold they could get upon the ship. Laurence caught Portis before the midwingman could be washed off the edge of the dragondeck and tumbled down the stairs; but then he had to hold on until Portis could grip the life-line and steady himself. Temeraire was jerking against the chains, only half-awake and panicked, calling for Laurence; the deck around the base of the bitts was beginning to warp under his strength.\n\nScrambling over the wet deck to lay hands back on Temeraire's side, Laurence called reassurance. \"It was only a wave; I am here,\" he said urgently. Temeraire stopped fighting the bonds and lowered himself panting to the deck: but the ropes had been stretched. The chains were looser now just when they were needed most, and the sea was too violent for landsmen, even aviators, to be trying to resecure the knots.\n\nThe Allegiance took another wave on her quarter and leaned alarmingly; Temeraire's full weight slid against the chains, further straining them, and instinctively he dug his claws into the deck to try and hold on; the oak planking splintered where he grasped at it. \"Ferris, here; stay with him,\" Laurence bellowed, and himself struck out across the deck. Waves flooding the deck in succession now; he moved from one line to the next blindly, his hands finding purchase for him without conscious direction.\n\nThe knots were soaked through and stubborn, drawn tight by Temeraire's pulling against them. Laurence could only work upon them when the ropes came slack, in the narrow spaces between waves; every inch gained by hard labor. Temeraire was lying as flat as he could manage, the only help he could provide; all his other attention was given to keeping his place.\n\nLaurence could see no one else across the deck, obscured by flying spray, nothing solid but the ropes burning his hands and the squat iron posts, and Temeraire's body a slightly darker region of the air. Two bells in the first dog watch: somewhere behind the clouds, the sun was setting. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a couple of shadows moving nearby; in a moment Leddowes was kneeling beside him, helping with the ropes. Leddowes hauled while Laurence tightened the knots, both of them clinging to each other and the iron bitts as the waves came, until at last the metal of the chains was beneath their hands: they had taken up the slack.\n\nNearly impossible to speak over the howl; Laurence simply pointed at the second larboard bitt, Leddowes nodded, and they set off. Laurence led, staying by the rail; easier to climb over the great guns than keep their footing out in the middle of the deck. A wave passed by and gave them a moment of calm; he was just letting go the rail to clamber over the first carronade when Leddowes shouted.\n\nTurning, Laurence saw a dark shape coming at his head and flung up a protective hand only from instinct: a terrific blow like being struck with a poker landed on his arm. He managed to get a hand on the breeching of the carronade as he fell; he had only a confused impression of another shadow moving above him, and Leddowes, terrified and staring, was scrambling back away with both hands raised. A wave crashed over the side and Leddowes was abruptly gone.\n\nLaurence clung to the gun and choked on salt water, kicking for some purchase: his boots were full of water and heavy as stone. His hair had come loose; he threw his head back to get it out of his eyes, and managed to catch the descending pry-bar with his free hand. Behind it he saw with a shock of recognition Feng Li's face looming white, terrified and desperate. Feng Li tried to pull the bar away for another attempt, and they wrestled it back and forth, Laurence half-sprawling on the deck with his boot-heels skidding over the the wet planks.\n\nThe wind was a third party to the battle, trying to drive them apart, and ultimately victorious: the bar slipped from Laurence's rope-numb fingers. Feng Li, still standing, went staggering back with arms flung wide as if to embrace the blast of the wind: full willing, it carried him backwards over the railing and into the churning water; he vanished without trace.\n\nLaurence clawed back to his feet and looked over the rail: no sign of Feng Li or Leddowes, either; he could not even see the surface of the water for the great clouds of mist and fog rising from the waves. No one else had even seen the brief struggle. Behind him, the bell was clanging again for the turn of the glass.\n\nToo confused with fatigue to make any sense of the murderous attack, Laurence said nothing, other than to briefly tell Riley the men had been lost overboard; he could not think what else to do, and the storm occupied all the attention he could muster. The wind began to fall the next morning; by the start of the afternoon watch, Riley was confident enough to send the men to dinner, though by shifts. The heavy mass of cloud cover broke into patches by six bells, the sunlight streaming down in broad, dramatic swaths from behind the still-dark clouds, and all the hands privately and deeply satisfied despite their fatigue.\n\nThey were sorry over Leddowes, who had been well-liked and a favorite with all, but as for a long-expected loss rather than a dreadful accident: he was now proven to have been the prey of the ghost all along, and his messmates had already begun magnifying his erotic misdeeds in hushed voices to the rest of the crew. Feng Li's loss passed without much comment, nothing more than coincidence to their minds: if a foreigner with no sea-legs liked to go frolicking about on deck in a typhoon, there was nothing more to be expected, and they had not known him well.\n\nThe aftersea was still very choppy, but Temeraire was too unhappy to keep bound; Laurence gave the word to set him loose as soon as the crew had returned from their own dinner. The knots had swelled in the warm air, and the ropes had to be hacked through with axes. Set free, Temeraire shrugged the chains to the deck with a heavy thump, turned his head around, and dragged the oilskin blanket off with his teeth; then he shook himself all over, water running down in streams off his hide, and announced militantly, \"I am going flying.\"\n\nHe leapt aloft without harness or companion, leaving them all behind and gaping. Laurence made an involuntary startled gesture after him, useless and absurd, and then dropped his arm, sorry to have so betrayed himself. Temeraire was only stretching his wings after the long confinement, nothing more; or so he told himself. He was deeply shocked, alarmed; but he could only feel the sensation dully, the exhaustion like a smothering weight lying over all his emotions.\n\n\"You have been on deck for three days,\" Granby said, and led him down below carefully. Laurence's fingers felt thick and clumsy, and did not quite want to grip the ladder rails. Granby gripped his arm once, when he nearly slipped, and Laurence could not quite stifle an exclamation of pain: there was a tender, throbbing line where the first blow from the pry-bar had struck across his upper arm.\n\nGranby would have taken him to the surgeon at once, but Laurence refused. \"It is only a bruise, John; and I had rather not make any noise about it yet.\" But then he had perforce to explain why: disjointedly, but the story came out as Granby pressed him.\n\n\"Laurence, this is outrageous. The fellow tried to murder you; we must do something,\" Granby said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence answered, meaninglessly, climbing into his cot; his eyes were already closing. He had the dim awareness of a blanket being laid over him, and the light dimming; nothing more.\n\nHe woke clearer in his head, if not much less sore in body, and hurried from his bed at once: the Allegiance was low enough in the water he could at least tell that Temeraire had returned, but with the blanketing fatigue gone, Laurence had full consciousness to devote to worry. Coming out of his cabin thus preoccupied, he nearly fell over Willoughby, one of the harness-men, who was sleeping stretched across the doorway. \"What are you doing?\" Laurence demanded.\n\n\"Mr. Granby set us on watches, sir,\" the young man said, yawning and rubbing his face. \"Will you be going up on deck then now?\"\n\nLaurence protested in vain; Willoughby trailed after him like an overzealous sheepdog all the way up to the dragondeck. Temeraire sat up alertly as soon as he caught sight of them, and nudged Laurence along into the shelter of his body, while the rest of the aviators drew closed their ranks behind him: plainly Granby had not kept the secret.\n\n\"How badly are you hurt?\" Temeraire nosed him all over, tongue flickering out for reassurance.\n\n\"I am perfectly well, I assure you, nothing more than a bump on the arm,\" Laurence said, trying to fend him off; though he could not help being privately glad to see that Temeraire's fit of temper had at least for the moment subsided.\n\nGranby ducked into the curve of Temeraire's body, and unrepentantly ignored Laurence's cold looks. \"There; we have worked out watches amongst ourselves. Laurence, you do not suppose it was some sort of accident, or that he mistook you for someone else, do you?\"\n\n\"No.\" Laurence hesitated, then reluctantly admitted, \"This was not the first attempt. I did not think anything of it at the time, but now I am almost certain he tried to knock me down the fore hatch, after the New Year's dinner.\"\n\nTemeraire growled deeply, and only with difficulty restrained himself from clawing at the deck, which already bore deep grooves from his thrashing about during the storm. \"I am glad he fell overboard,\" he said venomously. \"I hope he was eaten by sharks.\"\n\n\"Well, I am not,\" Granby said. \"It will make it a sight more difficult to prove whyever he was at it.\"\n\n\"It cannot have been anything of a personal nature,\" Laurence said. \"I had not spoken ten words to him, and he would not have understood them if I had. I suppose he could have run mad,\" he said, but with no real conviction.\n\n\"Twice, and once in the middle of a typhoon,\" Granby said, contemptuously, dismissing the suggestion. \"No; I am not going to stretch that far: for my part, he must have done it under orders, and that means their prince is most likely behind it all, or I suppose one of those other Chinamen; we had better find out double-quick who, before they try it again.\"\n\nThis notion Temeraire seconded with great energy, and Laurence blew out a heavy sigh. \"We had better call Hammond to my cabin in private and tell him about it,\" he said. \"He may have some idea what their motives might be, and we will need his help to question the lot of them, anyway.\"\n\nSummoned below, Hammond listened to the news with visible and increasing alarm, but his ideas were of quite another sort. \"You seriously propose we should interrogate the Emperor's brother and his retinue like a gang of common criminals; accuse them of conspiracy to murder; demand alibis and evidence\u2014You may as well put a torch to the magazine and scuttle the ship; our mission will have as much chance of success that way as the other. Or, no: more chance, because at least if we are all dead and at the bottom of the ocean there can be no cause for quarrel.\"\n\n\"Well, what do you propose, then, that we ought to just sit and smile at them until they do manage to kill Laurence?\" Granby demanded, growing angry in his turn. \"I suppose that would suit you just as well; one less person to object to your handing Temeraire over to them, and the Corps can go hang for all you care.\"\n\nHammond wheeled round on him. \"My first care is for our country, and not for any one man or dragon, as yours ought to be if you had any proper sense of duty\u2014\"\n\n\"That is quite enough, gentlemen,\" Laurence cut in. \"Our first duty is to establish a secure peace with China, and our first hope must be to achieve it without the loss of Temeraire's strength; on either score there can be no dispute.\"\n\n\"Then neither duty nor hope will be advanced by this course of action,\" Hammond snapped. \"If you did manage to find any evidence, what do you imagine could be done? Do you think we are going to put Prince Yongxing in chains?\"\n\nHe stopped and collected himself for a moment. \"I see no reason, no evidence whatsoever, to suggest Feng Li was not acting alone. You say the first attack came after the New Year; you might well have offended him at the feast unknowingly. He might have been a fanatic angered by your possession of Temeraire, or simply mad; or you might be mistaken entirely. Indeed, that seems to me the most likely\u2014both incidents in such dim, confused conditions; the first under the influence of strong drink, the second in the midst of the storm\u2014\"\n\n\"For the love of Christ,\" Granby said rudely, making Hammond stare. \"And Feng Li was shoving Laurence down hatchways and trying to knock his head in for some perfectly good reason, of course.\"\n\nLaurence himself had been momentarily bereft of speech at this offensive suggestion. \"If, sir, any of your suppositions are true, then any investigation would certainly reveal as much. Feng Li could not have concealed lunacy or such zealotry from all his country-men, as he could from us; if I had offended him, surely he would have spoken of it.\"\n\n\"And in ascertaining as much, this investigation would only require offering a profound insult to the Emperor's brother, who may determine our success or failure in Peking,\" Hammond said. \"Not only will I not abet it, sir, I absolutely forbid it; and if you make any such ill-advised, reckless attempt, I will do my very best to convince the captain of the ship that it is his duty to the King to confine you.\"\n\nThis naturally ended the discussion, so far as Hammond was concerned in it; but Granby came back after closing the door behind him, with more force than strictly necessary. \"I don't know that I have ever been more tempted to push a fellow's nose in for him. Laurence, Temeraire could translate for us, surely, if we brought the fellows up to him.\"\n\nLaurence shook his head and went for the decanter; he was roused and knew it, and he did not immediately rely upon his own judgment. He gave Granby a glass, took his own to the stern lockers, and sat there drinking and looking out at the ocean: a steady dark swell of five feet, no more, rolling against her larboard quarter.\n\nHe set the glass aside at last. \"No: I am afraid we must think better of it, John. Little as I like Hammond's mode of address, I cannot say that he is wrong. Only think, if we did offend him and the Emperor with such an investigation, and yet found no evidence, or worse yet some rational explanation\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014we could say hail and farewell to any chance of keeping Temeraire,\" Granby finished for him, with resignation. \"Well, I suppose you are right and we will have to lump it for now; but I am damned if I like it.\"\n\nTemeraire took a still-dimmer view of this resolution. \"I do not care if we do not have any proof,\" he said angrily. \"I am not going to sit and wait for him to kill you. The next time he comes out on deck I will kill him, instead, and that will put an end to it.\"\n\n\"No, Temeraire, you cannot!\" Laurence said, appalled.\n\n\"I am perfectly sure I can,\" Temeraire disagreed. \"I suppose he might not come out on deck again,\" he added, thoughtfully, \"but then I could always knock a hole through the stern windows and come at him that way. Or perhaps we could throw in a bomb after him.\"\n\n\"You must not,\" Laurence amended hastily. \"Even had we proof, we could hardly move against him; it would be grounds for an immediate declaration of war.\"\n\n\"If it would be so terrible to kill him, why is it not so terrible for him to kill you?\" Temeraire demanded. \"Why is he not afraid of our declaring war on him?\"\n\n\"Without proper evidence, I am sure Government would hardly take such a measure,\" Laurence said; he was fairly certain Government would not declare war with evidence, but that, he felt, was not the best argument for the moment.\n\n\"But we are not allowed to get evidence,\" Temeraire said. \"And also I am not allowed to kill him, and we are supposed to be polite to him, and all of it for the sake of Government. I am very tired of this Government, which I have never seen, and which is always insisting that I must do disagreeable things, and does no good to anybody.\"\n\n\"All politics aside, we cannot be sure Prince Yongxing had anything to do with the matter,\" Laurence said. \"There are a thousand unanswered questions: why he should even wish me dead, and why he would set a manservant on to do it, rather than one of his guards; and after all, Feng Li could have had some reason of his own of which we know nothing. We cannot be killing people only on suspicion, without evidence; that would be to commit murder ourselves. You could not be comfortable afterwards, I assure you.\"\n\n\"But I could, too,\" Temeraire muttered, and subsided into glowering.\n\nTo Laurence's great relief, Yongxing did not come back up on deck for several days after the incident, which served to let the first heat of Temeraire's temper cool; and when at last he did make another appearance, it was with no alteration of manner at all: he greeted Laurence with the same cool and distant civility, and proceeded to give Temeraire another recitation of poetry, which after a little while caught Temeraire's interest, despite himself, and made him forget to keep glaring: he did not have a resentful nature. If Yongxing were conscious of any guilt whatsoever, it did not show in the slightest, and Laurence began to question his own judgment.\n\n\"I could easily have been mistaken,\" he said unhappily, to Granby and Temeraire, after Yongxing had quitted the deck again. \"I cannot find I remember the details anymore; and after all I was half-stunned with fatigue. Maybe the poor fellow only came up to try and help, and I am inventing things out of whole cloth; it seems more fantastic to me with every moment. That the Emperor of China's brother should be trying to have me assassinated, as though I were any threat to him, is absurd. I will end by agreeing with Hammond, and calling myself a drunkard and a fool.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll call you neither,\" Granby said. \"I can't make any sense of it myself, but the notion Feng Li just took a fancy to knock you on the head is all stuff. We will just have to keep a guard on you, and hope this prince doesn't prove Hammond wrong.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "It was nearly three weeks more, passing wholly without incident, before they sighted the island of New Amsterdam: Temeraire delighted by the glistening heaps of seals, most sunbathing lazily upon the beaches and the more energetic coming to the ship to frolic in her wake. They were not shy of the sailors, nor even of the Marines who were inclined to use them for target practice, but when Temeraire descended into the water, they vanished away at once, and even those on the beach humped themselves sluggishly further away from the waterline.\n\nDeserted, Temeraire swam about the ship in a disgruntled circle, then climbed back aboard: he had grown more adept at this maneuver with practice, and now barely set the Allegiance to bobbing. The seals gradually returned, and did not seem to object to him peering down at them more closely, though they dived deep again if he put his head too far into the water.\n\nThey had been carried southward by the storm nearly into the forties and had lost almost all their easting as well: a cost of more than a week's sailing. \"The one benefit is that I think the monsoon has set in, finally,\" Riley said, consulting Laurence over his charts. \"From here, we can strike out for the Dutch East Indies directly; it will be a good month and a half without landfall, but I have sent the boats to the island, and with a few days of sealing to add to what we already have, we should do nicely.\"\n\nThe barrels of seal meat, salted down, stank profoundly; and two dozen more fresh carcasses were hung in meat-lockers from the catheads to keep them cool. The next day, out at sea again, the Chinese cooks butchered almost half of these on deck, throwing the heads, tails, and entrails overboard with shocking waste, and served Temeraire a heap of steaks, lightly seared. \"It is not bad, with a great deal of pepper, and perhaps more of those roasted onions,\" he said after tasting, now grown particular.\n\nStill as anxious to please as ever, they at once altered the dish to his liking. He then devoured the whole with pleasure and laid himself down for a long nap, wholly oblivious to the great disapproval of the ship's cook and quartermasters, and the crew in general. The cooks had not cleaned after themselves, and the upper deck was left nearly awash in blood; this having taken place in the afternoon, Riley did not see how he could ask the men to wash the decks a second time for the day. The smell was overpowering as Laurence sat down to dinner with him and the other senior officers, especially as the small windows were obliged to be kept shut to avoid the still-more-pungent smell of the remaining carcasses hanging outside.\n\nUnhappily, Riley's cook had thought along the same lines as the Chinese cooks: the main dish upon the table was a beautifully golden pie, a week's worth of butter gone into the pastry along with the last of the fresh peas from Capetown, accompanied by a bowl of bubbling-hot gravy; but when cut into, the smell of the seal meat was too distinctly recognizable, and the entire table picked at their plates.\n\n\"It is no use,\" Riley said, with a sigh, and scraped his serving back into the platter. \"Take it down to the midshipmen's mess, Jethson, and let them have it; it would be a pity to waste.\" They all followed suit and made do with the remaining dishes, but it created a sad vacancy on the table, and as the steward carried away the platter, he could be heard through the door, talking loudly of \"foreigners what don't know how to behave civilized, and spoil people's appetite.\"\n\nThey were passing around the bottle for consolation when the ship gave a queer jerk, a small hop in the water unlike anything Laurence had ever felt. Riley was already going to the door when Purbeck said suddenly, \"Look there,\" and pointed out the window: the chain of the meat-locker was dangling loose, and the cage was gone.\n\nThey all stared; then a confusion of yells and screams erupted on deck, and the ship yawed abruptly to starboard, with the gunshot sound of cracking wood. Riley rushed out, the rest of them hard on his heels. As Laurence went up the ladder-way another crash shook her; he slipped down four rungs, and nearly knocked Granby off the ladder.\n\nThey popped out onto the deck jack-in-the-box fashion, all of them together; a bloody leg with buckled shoe and silk stocking was lying across the larboard gangway, all that was left of Reynolds, who had been the midshipman on duty, and two more bodies had fetched up against a splintered half-moon gap in the railing, apparently bludgeoned to death. On the dragondeck, Temeraire was sitting up on his haunches, looking around wildly; the other men on deck were leaping up into the rigging or scrambling for the forward ladder-way, struggling against the midshipmen who were trying to come up.\n\n\"Run up the colors,\" Riley said, shouting over the noise, even as he leapt to try and grapple with the double-wheel, calling several other sailors to come and help him; Basson, the coxswain, was nowhere to be seen, and the ship was still drifting off her course. She was moving steadily, so they had not grounded on a reef, and there was no sign of any other ship, the horizon clear all around. \"Beat to quarters.\"\n\nThe drumroll started and drowned out any hope of learning what was going on, but it was the best means of getting the panicking men back into order, the most urgent matter of business. \"Mr. Garnett, get the boats over the side, if you please,\" Purbeck called loudly, striding out to the middle of the rail, fixing on his hat; he had as usual worn his best coat to dinner, and made a tall, official figure. \"Griggs, Masterson, what do you mean by this?\" he said, addressing a couple of the hands peering down fearfully from the tops. \"Your grog is stopped for a week; get down and go along to your guns.\"\n\nLaurence pushed forward along the gangway, forcing a lane against the men now running to their proper places: one of the Marines hopping past, trying to pull on a freshly blacked boot, his hands greasy and slipping on the leather; the gun-crews for the aft carronades scrambling over one another. \"Laurence, Laurence, what is it?\" Temeraire called, seeing him. \"I was asleep; what has happened?\"\n\nThe Allegiance rocked abruptly over to one side, and Laurence was thrown against the railing; on the far side of the ship, a great jet of water fountained up and came splashing down upon the deck, and a monstrous draconic head lifted up above the railing: enormous, luridly orange eyes set behind a rounded snout, with ridges of webbing tangled with long trailers of black seaweed. An arm was still dangling from the creature's mouth, limply; it opened its maw and threw its head back with a jerk, swallowing the rest: its teeth were washed bright red with blood.\n\nRiley called for the starboard broadside, and on deck Purbeck was drawing three of the gun-crews together around one of the carronades: he meant them to point it at the creature directly. They were casting loose its tackles, the strongest men blocking the wheels; all sweating and utterly silent but for low grunting, working as fast as they could, greenish-pale; the forty-two-pounder could not be easily handled.\n\n\"Fire, fire, you fucking yellow-arsed millers!\" Macready yelling hoarsely in the tops, already reloading his own gun. The other Marines belatedly set off a ragged volley, but the bullets did not penetrate; the serpentine neck was clad in thickly overlapping scales, blue and silver-gilt. The sea-serpent made a low croaking noise and lunged at the deck, striking two men flat and seizing another in its mouth; Doyle's shrieks could be heard even from within, his legs kicking frantically.\n\n\"No!\" Temeraire said. \"Stop; arr\u00eatez!\" and followed this with a string of words in Chinese also; the serpent looked at him incuriously, with no sign of understanding, and bit down: Doyle's legs fell abruptly back to the deck, severed, blood spurting briefly in mid-air before they struck.\n\nTemeraire held quite motionless with staring horror, his eyes fixed on the serpent's crunching jaws and his ruff completely flattened against his neck; Laurence shouted his name, and he came alive again. The fore- and mainmasts lay between him and the sea-serpent; he could not come at the creature directly, so he leapt off the bow and winged around the ship in a tight circle to come up behind it.\n\nThe sea-serpent's head turned to follow his movement, rising higher out of the water; it laid spindly forelegs on the Allegiance's railing as it lifted itself out, webbing stretched between unnaturally long taloned fingers. Its body was much narrower than Temeraire's, thickening only slightly along its length, but in size its head was larger, with eyes larger than dinner platters, terrible in their unblinking, dull savagery.\n\nTemeraire dived; his talons skidded along the silver hide, but he managed to find purchase by putting his forearms nearly around the body: despite the serpent's length, it was narrow enough for him to grasp. The serpent croaked again, gurgling deep in its throat, and clung to the Allegiance, the sagging jowly folds of flesh along its throat working with its cries. Temeraire set himself and hauled back, wings beating the air furiously: the ship leaned dangerously under their combined force, and yells could be heard from the hatchways, where water was coming in through the lowest gunports.\n\n\"Temeraire, cut loose,\" Laurence shouted. \"She will overset.\"\n\nTemeraire was forced to let go; the serpent seemed to only have a mind to get away from him now: it crawled forward onto the ship, knocking askew the mainsail yards and tearing the rigging as it came, head weaving from side to side. Laurence saw his own reflection, weirdly elongated, in the black pupil; then the serpent blinked sideways, a thick translucent sheath of skin sliding over the orb, and moved on past; Granby was pulling him back towards the ladder-way.\n\nThe creature's body was immensely long; its head and forelegs vanished beneath the waves on the other side of the ship, and its hindquarters had not yet emerged, the scales shading to deeper blue and purple iridescence as the length of it kept coming, undulating onwards. Laurence had never seen one even a tenth the size; the Atlantic serpents reached no more than twelve feet even in the warm waters off the coast of Brazil, and those in the Pacific dived when ships drew near, rarely seen as anything more than fins breaking the water.\n\nThe master's-mate Sackler was coming up the ladder-way, panting, with a big sliver spade, seven inches wide, hastily tied onto a spar: he had been first mate on a South Seas whaler before being pressed. \"Sir, sir; tell them to 'ware; oh Christ, it'll loop us,\" he yelled up, seeing Laurence through the opening, even as he threw the spade onto the deck and hauled himself out after.\n\nWith the reminder, Laurence remembered on occasion seeing a swordfish or tunny hauled up with a sea-serpent wrapped about it, strangling: it was their favorite means of seizing prey. Riley had heard the warning also; he was calling for axes, swords. Laurence seized one from the first basket handed up the ladder-way, and began chopping next to a dozen other men. But the body moved on without stopping; they made some cuts into pale, grey-white blubber, but did not even reach flesh, nowhere near cutting through.\n\n\"The head, watch for the head,\" Sackler said, standing at the rail with the cutting-spade ready, hands clenched and shifting anxiously around the pole; Laurence handed off his axe and went to try and give Temeraire some direction: he was still hovering above in frustration, unable to grapple with the sea-serpent while it was so entangled with the ship's masts and rigging.\n\nThe sea-serpent's head broke the water again, on the same side, just as Sackler had warned, and the coils of the body began to draw tight; the Allegiance groaned, and the railing cracked and began to give way under the pressure.\n\nPurbeck had the gun positioned and ready. \"Steady, men; wait for the downroll.\"\n\n\"Wait, wait!\" Temeraire called: Laurence could not see why.\n\nPurbeck ignored him and called out, \"Fire!\" The carronade roared, and the shot went flying across the water, struck the sea-serpent on the neck, and flew onwards before sinking. The creature's head was knocked sideways by the impact, and a burning smell of cooked meat rose; but the blow was not mortal: it only gargled in pain and began to tighten still further.\n\nPurbeck never flinched, steady though the serpent's body was scarcely half a foot away from him now. \"Spunge your gun,\" he said as soon as the smoke had died away, setting the men on another round. But it would be another three minutes at least before they could fire again, hampered by the awkward position of the gun and the confusion of three gun-crews flung together.\n\nAbruptly a section of the starboard railing just by the gun burst under the pressure into great jagged splinters, as deadly as those scattered by cannon-fire. One stabbed Purbeck deep in the flesh of the arm, purple staining his coat sleeve instantly. Chervins threw up his arms, gargling around the shard in his throat, and slumped over the gun; Dyfydd hauled his body off onto the floor, never flagging despite the splinter stuck right through his jaw, the other end poking out the underside of his chin and dripping blood.\n\nTemeraire was still hovering back and forth near the serpent's head, growling at it. He had not roared, perhaps afraid of doing so close to the Allegiance: a wave like that which had destroyed the Val\u00e9rie would sink them just as easily as the serpent itself. Laurence was on the verge of ordering him to take the risk regardless: the men were hacking frantically, but the tough hide was resisting them, and in any moment the Allegiance might be broken beyond repair: if her futtocks cracked, or worse the keel bent, they might never be able to bring her into port again.\n\nBut before he could call, Temeraire suddenly gave a low frustrated cry, beat up into the air, and folded his wings shut: he fell like a stone, claws outstretched, and struck the sea-serpent's head directly, driving it below the water's surface. His momentum drove him beneath the waves also, and a deep purpling cloud of blood filled the water. \"Temeraire!\" Laurence cried, scrambling heedless over the shuddering, jerking body of the serpent, half-crawling and half-running along the length of the blood-slippery deck; he climbed out over the rail and onto the mainmast chains, while Granby grabbed at him and missed.\n\nHe kicked his boots off into the water, no very coherent plan in mind; he could swim only a little, and he had no knife or gun. Granby was trying to climb out to join him, but could not keep his feet with the ship sawing to and fro like a nursery rocking-horse. Abruptly a great shiver traveled in reverse along the silver-grey length of the serpent's body which was all that was visible; its hindquarters and tail surfaced in a convulsive leap, then fell back into the water with a tremendous splash; and it lay still at last.\n\nTemeraire popped back out through the surface like a cork, bouncing partway out of the water and splashing down again: he coughed and spluttered, and spat: there was blood all over his jaws. \"I think she is dead,\" he said, between his wheezing gasps for air, and slowly paddled himself to the ship's side: he did not climb aboard, but leaned against the Allegiance, breathing deeply and relying on his native buoyancy to keep him afloat. Laurence clambered over to him on the fretwork like a boy, and perched there stroking him, as much for his own comfort as Temeraire's.\n\nTemeraire being too weary to climb back aboard at once, Laurence took one of the small boats and pulled Keynes around to inspect him for any signs of injury. There were some scratches\u2014in one wound an ugly, saw-edged tooth lodged\u2014but none severe; Keynes, however, listened to Temeraire's chest again and looked grave, and opined that some water had entered the lungs.\n\nWith much encouragement from Laurence, Temeraire pulled himself back aboard; the Allegiance sagged more than usual, both from his fatigue and her own state of disarray, but he eventually managed to climb back aboard, though causing some fresh damage to the railing. Not even Lord Purbeck, devoted as he was to the ship's appearance, begrudged Temeraire the cracked banisters; indeed a tired but wholehearted cheer went up as he thumped down at last.\n\n\"Put your head down over the side,\" Keynes said, once Temeraire was fairly established on the deck; he groaned a little, wanting only to sleep, but obeyed. After leaning precariously far, and complaining in a stifled voice that he was growing dizzy, he did manage to cough up some quantity of salt water. Having satisfied Keynes, he shuffled himself slowly backwards until his position on the deck was more secure, and curled into a heap.\n\n\"Will you have something to eat?\" Laurence said. \"Something fresh; a sheep? I will have them prepare it for you however you like.\"\n\n\"No, Laurence, I cannot eat anything, not at all,\" Temeraire said, muffled, his head hidden under his wing and a shudder visible between his shoulder-blades. \"Pray let them take her away.\"\n\nThe body of the sea-serpent still lay sprawled across the Allegiance: the head had bobbed to the surface on the larboard side, and now the whole impressive extent of it could be seen. Riley sent men in boats to measure it from nose to tail: more than 250 feet, at least twice the length of the largest Regal Copper Laurence had ever heard of, which had rendered it thus capable of encircling the whole vessel, though its body was less than twenty feet in diameter.\n\n\"Kiao, a sea-dragon,\" Sun Kai called it, having come up on deck to see what had happened; he informed them that there were similar creatures in the China Sea, though ordinarily smaller.\n\nNo one suggested eating it. After the measurements had been done, and the Chinese poet, also something of an artist, permitted to render an illustration, the axes were applied to it once more. Sackler led the effort with practiced strokes of the cutting-spade, and Pratt severed the thick armored column of the spine with three heavy blows. After this its own weight and the slow forward motion of the Allegiance did the rest of the work almost at once: the remaining flesh and hide parted with a sound like tearing fabric, and its separate halves slid away off the opposite sides.\n\nThere was already a great deal of activity in the water around the body: sharks tearing at the head, and other fishes also; now an increasingly furious struggle arose around the hacked and bloody ends of the two halves. \"Let us get under way as best we can,\" Riley said to Purbeck; though the main- and mizzen sails and rigging had been badly mauled, the foremast and its rigging were untouched but for a few tangled ropes, and they managed to get a small spread of sail before the wind.\n\nThey left the corpse drifting on the surface behind them and got under way; in an hour or so it was little more than a silvery line on the water. Already the deck had been washed down, freshly scrubbed and sanded with holystone, and sluiced clean again, water pumped up with great enthusiasm, and the carpenter and his mates were engaged in cutting a couple of spars to replace the mainsail and mizzen topsail yards.\n\nThe sails had suffered greatly: spare sailcloth had to be brought up from stores, and this was found to have been rat-chewed, to Riley's fury. Some hurried patchwork was done, but the sun was setting, and the fresh cordage could not be rigged until morning. The men were let go by watches to supper, and then to sleep without the usual inspection.\n\nStill barefoot, Laurence took some coffee and ship's biscuit when Roland brought it him, but stayed by Temeraire, who remained subdued and without appetite. Laurence tried to coax him out of the low spirits, worried that perhaps he had taken some deeper injury, not immediately apparent, but Temeraire said dully, \"No, I am not hurt at all, nor sick; I am perfectly well.\"\n\n\"Then what has distressed you so?\" Laurence at length asked, tentatively. \"You did so very well today, and saved the ship.\"\n\n\"All I did was kill her; I do not see it is anything to be so proud of,\" Temeraire said. \"She was not an enemy, fighting us for some cause; I think she only came because she was hungry, and then I suppose we frightened her, with the shooting, and that is why she attacked us; I wish I could have made her understand and leave.\"\n\nLaurence stared: it had not occurred to him that Temeraire might not have viewed the sea-serpent as the monstrous creature it seemed to him. \"Temeraire, you cannot think that beast anything like a dragon,\" he said. \"It had no speech, nor intelligence; I dare say you are right that it came looking for food, but any animal can hunt.\"\n\n\"Why should you say such things?\" Temeraire said. \"You mean that she did not speak English, or French, or Chinese, but she was an ocean creature; how ought she have learned any human languages, if she was not tended by people in the shell? I would not understand them myself otherwise, but that would not mean I did not have intelligence.\"\n\n\"But surely you must have seen she was quite without reason,\" Laurence said. \"She ate four of the crew, and killed six others: men, not seals, and plainly not dumb beasts; if she were intelligent, it would have been inhuman\u2014uncivilized,\" he amended, stumbling over his choice of words. \"No one has ever been able to tame a sea-serpent; even the Chinese do not say differently.\"\n\n\"You may as well say, that if a creature will not serve people, and learn their habits, it is not intelligent, and had just as well be killed,\" Temeraire said, his ruff quivering; he had lifted his head, stirred-up.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Laurence said, trying to think of how he could give comfort; to him the lack of sentience in the creature's eyes had been wholly obvious. \"I am saying only that if they were intelligent, they would be able to learn to communicate, and we would have heard of it. After all, many dragons do not choose to take on a handler, and refuse to speak with men at all; it does not happen so very often, but it does, and no one thinks dragons unintelligent for it,\" he added, thinking he had chanced on a happy example.\n\n\"But what happens to them, if they do?\" Temeraire said. \"What should happen to me, if I were to refuse to obey? I do not mean a single order; what if I did not wish to fight in the Corps at all.\"\n\nSo far this had all been general; the suddenly narrower question startled Laurence, giving the conversation a more ominous cast. Fortunately, there was little work to be done with so light a spread of sail: the sailors were gathered on the forecastle, gambling with their grog rations and intent on their game of dice; the handful of aviators remaining on duty were talking together softly at the rail. There was no one likely to overhear, for which Laurence was grateful: others might misunderstand, and think Temeraire unwilling, even disloyal in some way. For his own part he could not believe there was any real risk of Temeraire's choosing to leave the Corps and all his friends; he tried to answer calmly. \"Feral dragons are housed in the breeding grounds, very comfortably. If you chose, you might live there also; there is a large one in the north of Wales, on Cardigan Bay, which I understand is very beautiful.\"\n\n\"And if I did not care to live there, but wished to go somewhere else?\"\n\n\"But how would you eat?\" Laurence said. \"Herds which could feed a dragon would be raised by men, and their property.\"\n\n\"If men have penned up all the animals and left none wild, I cannot think it reasonable of them to complain if I take one now and again,\" Temeraire said. \"But even making such allowance, I could hunt for fish. What if I chose to live near Dover, and fly as I liked, and eat fish, and did not bother anyone's herds; should I be allowed?\"\n\nToo late Laurence saw he had wandered onto dangerous ground, and bitterly regretted having led the conversation in this direction. He knew perfectly well Temeraire would be allowed nothing of the sort. People would be terrified at the notion of a dragon living loose among them, no matter how peaceable the dragon might be. The objections to such a scheme would be many and reasonable, and yet from Temeraire's perspective the denial would represent an unjust curtailment of his liberties. Laurence could not think how to reply without aggravating his sense of injury.\n\nTemeraire took his silence for the answer it was, and nodded. \"If I would not go, I should be put in chains again, and dragged off,\" he said. \"I would be forced to go to the breeding grounds, and if I tried to leave, I would not be allowed; and the same for any other dragon. So it seems to me,\" he added, grimly, a suggestion of a low growling anger beneath his voice, \"that we are just like slaves; only there are fewer of us, and we are much bigger and dangerous, so we are treated generously where they are treated cruelly; but we are still not free.\"\n\n\"Good God, that is not so,\" Laurence said, standing up: appalled, dismayed, at his own blindness as much as the remark. Small wonder if Temeraire had flinched from the storm-chains, if such a train of thought had been working through his imagination before now, and Laurence did not believe that it could be the result solely of the recent battle.\n\n\"No, it is not so; wholly unreasonable,\" Laurence repeated; he knew himself inadequate to debate with Temeraire on most philosophical grounds, but the notion was inherently absurd, and he felt he must be able to convince Temeraire of the fact, if only he could find the words. \"It is as much to say that I am a slave, because I am expected to obey the orders of the Admiralty: if I refused, I would be dismissed the service and very likely hanged; that does not mean I am a slave.\"\n\n\"But you have chosen to be in the Navy and the Corps,\" Temeraire said. \"You might resign, if you wished, and go elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Yes, but then I should have to find some other profession to support myself, if I did not have enough capital to live off the interest. And indeed, if you did not wish to be in the Corps, I have enough to purchase an estate, somewhere in the north, or perhaps Ireland, and stock the grounds. You might live there exactly as you liked, and no one could object.\" Laurence breathed again as Temeraire mulled this over; the militant light had faded a little from his eyes, and gradually his tail ceased its restless mid-air twitching and coiled again into a neatly spiraled heap upon the deck, the curving horns of his ruff lying more easily against his neck.\n\nEight bells rang softly, and the sailors left their dice game, the new watch coming on deck to put out the last handful of lights. Ferris came up the dragondeck stairs, yawning, with a handful of fresh crewmen still rubbing the sleep from their eyes; Baylesworth led the earlier watch below, the men saying, \"Good night, sir; good night, Temeraire,\" as they went by, many of them patting Temeraire's flank.\n\n\"Good night, gentlemen,\" Laurence answered, and Temeraire gave a low warm rumble.\n\n\"The men may sleep on deck if they like, Mr. Tripp,\" Purbeck was saying, his voice carrying along from the stern. The ship's night settled upon her, the men gladly dropping along the forecastle, heads pillowed on coiled hawsers and rolled-up shirts; all darkness but for the solitary stern lantern, winking far at the other end of the ship, and the starlight; there was no moon, but the Magellanic Clouds were particularly bright, and the long cloudy mass of the Milky Way. Presently silence fell; the aviators also had disposed of themselves along the larboard railing, and they were again as nearly alone as they might be on board. Laurence had sat down once more, leaning against Temeraire's side; there was a waiting quality to Temeraire's silence.\n\nAnd at length Temeraire said, \"But if you did,\" as if there had been no break in the conversation; although not with the same heat of anger as before. \"If you purchased an estate for me, that would still be your doing, and not mine. You love me, and would do anything you could to ensure my happiness; but what of a dragon like poor Levitas, with a captain of Rankin's sort, who did not care for his comfort? I do not understand what precisely capital is, but I am sure I have none of my own, nor any way of getting it.\"\n\nHe was at least not so violently distressed as before, but rather now sounded weary, and a little sad. Laurence said, \"You do have your jewels, you know; the pendant alone is worth some ten thousand pounds, and it was a clear gift; no one could dispute that it is your own property in law.\"\n\nTemeraire bent his head to inspect the piece of jewelry, the breastplate which Laurence had purchased for him with much of the prize-money for the Amiti\u00e9, the frigate which had carried his egg. The platinum had suffered some small dents and scratches in the course of the journey, which remained because Temeraire would not suffer to be parted from it long enough for them to be sanded out, but the pearl and sapphires were as brilliant as ever. \"So is that what capital is, then? Jewels? No wonder it is so nice. But Laurence, that makes no difference; it was still your present, after all, not something which I won myself.\"\n\n\"I suppose no one has ever thought of offering dragons a salary, or prize-money. It is no lack of respect, I promise you; only that money does not seem to be of much use to dragons.\"\n\n\"It is of no use, because we are not permitted to go anywhere, or do as we like, and so have nothing to spend it upon,\" Temeraire said. \"If I had money, I am sure I still could not go to a shop and buy more jewels, or books; we are even chided for taking our food out of the pen when it suits us.\"\n\n\"But it is not because you are a slave that you cannot go where you like, but because people would naturally be disturbed by it, and the public good must be consulted,\" Laurence said. \"It would do you no good to go into town and to a shop if the keeper had fled before you came.\"\n\n\"It is not fair that we should be thus restricted by others' fears, when we have not done anything wrong; you must see it is so, Laurence.\"\n\n\"No, it is not just,\" Laurence said, reluctantly. \"But people will be afraid of dragons no matter how they are told it is safe; it is plain human nature, foolish as it may be, and there is no managing around it. I am very sorry, my dear.\" He laid his hand on Temeraire's side. \"I wish I had better answers for your objections; I can only add to these, that whatever inconveniences society may impose upon you, I would no more consider you a slave than myself, and I will always be glad to serve you in overcoming these as I may.\"\n\nTemeraire huffed out a low sigh, but nudged Laurence affectionately and drew a wing down more closely about him; he said no more on the subject, but instead asked for the latest book, a French translation of the Arabian Nights, which they had found in Capetown. Laurence was glad enough to be allowed to thus escape, but uneasy: he did not think he had been very successful in the task of reconciling Temeraire to a situation with which Laurence had always thought him well-satisfied."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Allegiance, Macao\n\nJane, I must ask you to forgive the long gap in this Letter, and the few hasty Words that are all by which I can amend the same now. I have not had Leisure to take up my pen these three weeks\u2014since we passed out of Banka Strait we have been much afflicted by malarial Fevers. I have escaped sickness myself, and most of my men, for which Keynes opines we must be grateful to Temeraire, believing that the heat of his body in some wise dispels the Miasmas which cause the ague, and our close association thus affords some protection.\n\nBut we have been spared only to increase of Labor: Captain Riley has been confined to his bed since almost the very first, and Lord Purbeck falling ill, I have stood watch in turn with the ship's third and fourth lieutenants, Franks and Beckett. Both are willing young men, and Franks does his best, but is by no means yet prepared for the Duty of overseeing so vast a Ship as the Allegiance, nor to maintain discipline among her Crew\u2014stammers, I am sorry to say, which explains his seeming Rudeness at table, which I had earlier remarked upon.\n\nThis being summer, and Canton proper barred to Westerners, we will put in at Macao tomorrow morning, where the ship's surgeon hopes to find Jesuit's bark to replenish our supply, and I some British merchantman, here out of season, to bear this home to you and to England. This will be my last Opportunity, as by special dispensation from Prince Yongxing we have Permission to continue on northward to the Gulf of Zhi-Li, so we may reach Peking through Tien-sing. The savings of time will be enormous, but as no Western ships are permitted north of Canton ordinarily, we cannot hope to find any British vessels once we have left port.\n\nWe have passed three French merchantmen already in our Approach, more than I had been used to see in this part of the World, though it has been some seven years since the occasion of my last visit to Canton, and foreign Vessels of all kinds are more numerous than formerly. At the present hour, a sometimes obscuring Fog lies over the harbor, and impedes the view of my glass, so I cannot be certain, but I fear there may also be a Man-of-War, though perhaps Dutch rather than French; certainly it is not one of our own. The Allegiance is of course in no direct danger, being on a wholly different Scale and under the Protection of the Imperial Crown, which the French cannot dare to slight in these Waters, but we fear that the French may have some Embassy of their own in train, which must naturally have or shortly form the Design of disrupting our own Mission.\n\nOn the subject of my earlier Suspicions, I can say nothing more. No further Attempts have been made, at least, though our sadly reduced Numbers would have made easier any such stroke, and I begin to hope that Feng Li acted from some inscrutable motive of his own, and not at the Behest of another.\n\nThe Bell has rung\u2014I must go on Deck. Allow me to send with this all my Affection and Respect, and believe me always,\n\nYr. obdt. srvt,\n\n[ Wm. Laurence, June 16, 1806 ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The fog persisted through the night, lingering as the Allegiance made her final approach to Macao harbor. The long curving stretch of sand, circled by tidy, square buildings in the Portuguese style and a neatly planted row of saplings, had all the comfort of familiarity, and most of the junks having their sails still furled might almost have been small dinghies at anchor in Funchal or Portsmouth roads. Even the softly eroded, green-clad mountains revealed as the grey fog trailed away would not have been out of place in any Mediterranean port.\n\nTemeraire had been perched up on his hindquarters with eager anticipation; now he gave up looking and lowered himself to the deck in dissatisfaction. \"Why, it does not look at all different,\" he said, cast down. \"I do not see any other dragons, either.\"\n\nThe Allegiance herself, coming in off the ocean, was under heavier cover, and her shape was not initially clear to those on shore, revealed only as the sluggishly creeping sun burnt off the mists and she came farther into the harbor, a breath of wind pushing the fog off her bows. Then a nearly violent notice was taken: Laurence had put in at the colony before, and expected some bustle, perhaps exaggerated by the immense size of the ship, quite unknown in these waters, but was taken aback by the noise which arose almost explosively from the shore.\n\n\"Tien-lung, tien-lung!\" The cry carried across the water, and many of the smaller junks, more nimble, came bounding across the water to meet them, crowding each other so closely they often bumped each other's hulls and the Allegiance herself, with all the hooting and shouting the crew could do to try and fend them off.\n\nMore boats were being launched from the shore even as they let go the anchor, with much caution necessitated by their unwelcome close company. Laurence was startled to see Chinese women coming down to the shore in their queer, mincing gait, some in elaborate and elegant dress, with small children and even infants in tow; and cramming themselves aboard any junk that had room to spare with no care for their garments. Fortunately the wind was mild and the current gentle, or the wallowing, overloaded vessels would certainly have been overset with a terrible loss of life. As it was they somehow made their way near the Allegiance, and when they drew near, the women seized their children and held them up over their heads, almost waving them in their direction.\n\n\"What on earth do they mean by it?\" Laurence had never seen such an exhibition: by all his prior experience the Chinese women were exceedingly careful to seclude themselves from Western gaze, and he had not even known so many lived in Macao at all. Their antics were drawing the curious attention of the Westerners of the port also now, both along the shore and upon the decks of the other ships with which they shared the harbor. Laurence saw with sinking feelings that his previous night's assessment had not been incorrect: indeed rather short of the mark, for there were two French warships in the harbor, both handsome and trim, one a two-decker of some sixty-four guns and the smaller a heavy frigate of forty-eight.\n\nTemeraire had been observing with a great deal of interest, snorting in amusement at some of the infants, who looked very ridiculous in their heavily embroidered gowns, like sausages in silk and gold thread, and mostly wailing unhappily at being dangled in mid-air. \"I will ask them,\" he said, and bent over the railing to address one of the more energetic women, who had actually knocked over a rival to secure a place at the boat's edge for herself and her offspring, a fat boy of maybe two who somehow managed to bear a resigned, phlegmatic expression on his round-cheeked face despite being thrust nearly into Temeraire's teeth.\n\nHe blinked at her reply, and settled back on his haunches. \"I am not certain, because she does not sound quite the same,\" he said, \"but I think she says they are here to see me.\" Affecting unconcern, he turned his head and with what he evidently thought were covert motions rubbed at his hide with his nose, polishing away imaginary stains, and further indulged his vanity by arranging himself to best advantage, his head poised high and his wings shaken out and folded more loosely against his body. His ruff was standing broadly out in excitement.\n\n\"It is good luck to see a Celestial.\" Yongxing seemed to think this perfectly obvious, when applied to for some additional explanation. \"They would never have a chance to see one otherwise\u2014they are only merchants.\"\n\nHe turned from the spectacle dismissively. \"We with Liu Bao and Sun Kai will be going on to Guangzhou to speak with the superintendant and the viceroy, and to send word of our arrival to the Emperor,\" he said, using the Chinese name for Canton, and waited expectantly; so that Laurence had perforce to offer him the use of the ship's barge for the purpose.\n\n\"I beg you will allow me to remind you, Your Highness, we may confidently expect to reach Tien-sing in three weeks' time, so you may consider whether to hold any communications for the capital.\" Laurence meant only to save him some effort; the distance was certainly better than a thousand miles.\n\nBut Yongxing very energetically made clear that he viewed this suggestion as nearly scandalous in its neglect of due respect to the throne, and Laurence was forced to apologize for having made it, excusing himself by a lack of knowledge of local custom. Yongxing was not mollified; in the end Laurence was glad to pack him and the other two envoys off at the cost of the services of the barge, though it left him and Hammond only the jolly-boat to convey them to their own rendezvous ashore: the ship's launch was already engaged in ferrying over fresh supplies of water and livestock.\n\n\"Is there anything I can bring you for your relief, Tom?\" Laurence asked, putting his head into Riley's cabin.\n\nRiley lifted his head from the pillows where he lay before the windows and waved a weak, yellow-tinged hand. \"I am a good deal better. But I would not say no to a good port, if you can find a decent bottle in the place; I think my mouth has been turned down forever from the godawful quinine.\"\n\nReassured, Laurence went to take his leave of Temeraire, who had managed to coax the ensigns and runners into scrubbing him down, quite unnecessarily. The Chinese visitors were grown more ambitious, and had begun to throw gifts of flowers aboard, and other things also, less innocuous. Running up to Laurence very pale, Lieutenant Franks forgot to stutter in his alarm. \"Sir, they are throwing burning incense onto the ship, pray, pray make them stop.\"\n\nLaurence climbed up to the dragondeck. \"Temeraire, will you please tell them nothing lit can be thrown at the ship. Roland, Dyer, mind what they throw, and if you see anything else that may carry a risk of fire, throw it back over at once. I hope they have better sense than to try setting off crackers,\" he added, without much confidence.\n\n\"I will stop them if they do,\" Temeraire promised. \"You will see if there is somewhere I can come ashore?\"\n\n\"I will, but I cannot hold out much hope; the entire territory is scarcely four miles square, and thoroughly built-up,\" Laurence said. \"But at least we can fly over it, and perhaps even over Canton, if the mandarins do not object.\"\n\nThe English Factory was built facing directly onto the main beach, so there was no difficulty in finding it; indeed, their attention drawn by the gathered crowd, the Company commissioners had sent a small welcoming party to await them on shore, led by a tall young man in the uniform of the East India Company's private service, with aggressive sideburns and a prominent aquiline nose, giving him a predatory look rather increased than diminished by the alert light in his eyes. \"Major Heretford, at your service,\" he said, bowing. \"And may I say, sir, we are damned glad to see you,\" he added, with a soldier's frankness, once they were indoors. \"Sixteen months; we had begun to think no notice would be taken of it at all.\"\n\nWith an unpleasant shock Laurence was recalled to the memory of the seizure of the East India merchant ships by the Chinese, all the long months ago: preoccupied by his own concerns over Temeraire's status and distracted by the voyage, he had nearly forgotten the incident entirely; but of course it could hardly have been concealed from the men stationed here. They would have spent the intervening months on fire to answer the profound insult.\n\n\"No action has been taken, surely?\" Hammond asked, with an anxiety that gave Laurence a fresh distaste for him; there was a quality of fear to it. \"It would of all things be most prejudicial.\"\n\nHeretford eyed him sidelong. \"No, the commissioners thought best under the circumstances to conciliate the Chinese, and await some more official word,\" in a tone that left very little doubt of where his own inclinations would have led him.\n\nLaurence could not but find him sympathetic, though in the ordinary course he did not think very highly of the Company's private forces. But Heretford looked intelligent and competent, and the handful of men under his command showed signs of good discipline: their weapons well-kept, and their uniforms crisp despite the nearly sopping heat.\n\nThe boardroom was shuttered against the heat of the climbing sun, with fans laid ready at their places to stir the moist, stifling air. Glasses of claret punch, cooled with ice from the cellars, were brought once the introductions had been completed. The commissioners were happy enough to take the post which Laurence had brought, and promised to see it conveyed back to England; this concluding the exchange of pleasantries, they launched a delicate but pointed inquiry after the aims of the mission.\n\n\"Naturally we are pleased to hear that Government has compensated Captains Mestis and Holt and Gregg-son, and the Company, but I cannot possibly overstate the damage which the incident has done to our entire operations.\" Sir George Staunton spoke quietly, but forcefully for all that; he was the chief of the commissioners despite his relative youth by virtue of his long experience of the nation. As a boy of twelve, he had accompanied the Macartney embassy itself in his father's train, and was one of the few British men perfectly fluent in the language.\n\nStaunton described for them several more instances of bad treatment, and went on to say, \"These are entirely characteristic, I am sorry to say. The insolence and rapacity of the administration has markedly increased, and towards us only; the Dutch and the French meet with no such treatment. Our complaints, which previously they treated with some degree of respect, are now summarily dismissed, and in fact only draw worse down upon us.\"\n\n\"We have been almost daily fearing to be ordered out entirely,\" Mr. Grothing-Pyle added to this; he was a portly man, his white hair somewhat disordered by the vigorous action of his fan. \"With no insult to Major Heretford or his men,\" he nodded to the officer, \"we would be hard-pressed to withstand such a demand, and you can be sure the French would be happy to help the Chinese enforce it.\"\n\n\"And to take our establishments for their own once we were expelled,\" Staunton added, to a circle of nodding heads. \"The arrival of the Allegiance certainly puts us in a different position, vis-\u00e0-vis the possibility of resistance\u2014\"\n\nHere Hammond stopped him. \"Sir, I must beg leave to interrupt you. There is no contemplation of taking the Allegiance into action against the Chinese Empire: none; you must put such a thought out of your minds entirely.\" He spoke very decidedly, though he was certainly the youngest man at the table, except for Heretford; a palpable coolness resulted. Hammond paid no attention. \"Our first and foremost goal is to restore our nation to enough favor with the court to keep the Chinese from entering into an alliance with France. All other designs are insignificant by comparison.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hammond,\" Staunton said, \"I cannot believe there is any possibility of such an alliance; nor that it can be so great a threat as you seem to imagine. The Chinese Empire is no Western military power, impressive as their size and their ranks of dragons may be to the inexperienced eye,\" Hammond flushed at this small jab, perhaps not unintentional, \"and they are militantly uninterested in European affairs. It is a matter of policy with them to affect even if not feel a lack of concern with what passes beyond their borders, ingrained over centuries.\"\n\n\"Their having gone to the lengths of dispatching Prince Yongxing to Britain must surely weigh with you, sir, as showing that a change in policy may be achieved, if the impetus be sufficient,\" Hammond said coolly.\n\nThey argued the point and many others with increasing politeness, over the course of several hours. Laurence had a struggle to keep his attention on the conversation, liberally laced as it was with references to names and incidents and concerns of which he knew nothing: some local unrest among the peasants and the state of affairs in Thibet, where apparently some sort of outright rebellion was in progress; the trade deficit and the necessity of opening more Chinese markets; difficulties with the Inca over the South American route.\n\nBut little though Laurence felt able to form his own conclusions, the conversation served another purpose for him. He grew convinced that while Hammond was thoroughly informed, his view of the situation was in direct contradiction on virtually all points with the established opinions of the commissioners. In one instance, the question of the kowtow ceremony was raised and treated by Hammond as inconsequential: naturally they would perform the full ritual of genuflection, and by so doing hopefully amend the insult given by Lord Macartney's refusal to do so in the previous embassy.\n\nStaunton objected forcefully. \"Yielding on this point with no concessions in return can only further degrade our standing in their eyes. The refusal was not made without reason. The ceremony is meant for envoys of tributary states, vassals of the Chinese throne, and having objected to it on these grounds before, we cannot now perform it without appearing to give way to the outrageous treatment they have meted out to us. It would of all things be most prejudicial to our cause, as giving them encouragement to continue.\"\n\n\"I can scarcely admit that anything could be more prejudicial to our cause, than to willfully resist the customs of a powerful and ancient nation in their own territory, because they do not meet our own notions of etiquette,\" Hammond said. \"Victory on such a point can only be won by the loss of every other, as proved by the complete failure of Lord Macartney's embassy.\"\n\n\"I find I must remind you that the Portuguese prostrated themselves not only to the Emperor but to his portrait and letters, at every demand the mandarins made, and their embassy failed quite as thoroughly,\" Staunton said.\n\nLaurence did not like the notion of groveling before any man, Emperor of China or no; but he thought it was not merely his own preferences which inclined him to Staunton's opinion on the matter. Abasement to such a degree could not help but provoke disgust even in a recipient who demanded the gesture, it seemed to him, and only lead to even more contemptuous treatment. He was seated on Staunton's left for dinner, and through their more casual conversation grew increasingly convinced of the man's good judgment; and all the more doubtful of Hammond's.\n\nAt length they took their leave and returned to the beach to await the boat. \"This news about the French envoy worries me more than all the rest together,\" Hammond said, more to himself than to Laurence. \"De Guignes is dangerous; how I wish Bonaparte had sent anyone else!\"\n\nLaurence made no response; he was unhappily conscious that his own sentiments were much the same towards Hammond himself, and he would gladly have exchanged the man if he could.\n\nPrince Yongxing and his companions returned from their errand late the following day, but when applied to for permission to continue the journey, or even to withdraw from the harbor, he refused point-blank, insisting that the Allegiance should have to wait for further instructions. Whence these were to come, and when, he did not say; and in the meantime the local ships continued their pilgrimages even into the night, carrying great hanging paper lanterns in the bows to light their way.\n\nLaurence struggled out of sleep very early the next morning to the sound of an altercation outside his door: Roland, sounding very fierce despite her clear, high treble, saying something in a mixture of English and Chinese, which she had begun to acquire from Temeraire. \"What is that damned noise there?\" he called strongly.\n\nShe peered in through the door, which she held only a little ajar, wide enough for her eye and mouth; over her shoulder he could see one of the Chinese servants making impatient gestures, and trying to get at the doorknob. \"It is Huang, sir, he is making a fuss and says the prince wants you to come up to the deck at once, though I told him you had only gone to sleep after the middle watch.\"\n\nHe sighed and rubbed his face. \"Very good, Roland; tell him I will come.\" He was in no humor to be up; late in his evening's watch, another visiting boat piloted by a young man more entreprenurial than skilled had been caught broadside by a wave. Her anchor, improperly set, had come flying up and struck the Allegiance from beneath, jabbing a substantial hole in her hold and soaking much of the newly purchased grain. At the same time the little boat had overturned herself, and though the harbor was not distant, the passengers in their heavy silk garments could not make their own way to safety, but had to be fished out by lantern-light. It had been a long and tiresome night, and he had been up watch and watch dealing with the mess before finally gaining his bed only in the small hours of the morning. He splashed his face with the tepid water in the basin and put on his coat with reluctance before going up to the deck.\n\nTemeraire was talking with someone; Laurence had to look twice before he even realized that the other was in fact a dragon, like none he had ever seen before. \"Laurence, this is Lung Yu Ping,\" Temeraire said, when Laurence had climbed up to the dragondeck. \"She has brought us the post.\"\n\nFacing her, Laurence found their heads were nearly on a level: she was smaller even than a horse, with a broad curving forehead and a long arrow-shaped muzzle, and an enormously deep chest rather along greyhound proportions. She could not have carried anyone on her back except a child, and wore no harness but a delicate collar of yellow silk and gold, from which hung a fine mesh like thin chainmail which covered her chest snugly, fixed to her forearms and talons by golden rings.\n\nThe mesh was washed with gold, striking against her pale green hide; her wings were a darker shade of green, and striped with narrow bands of gold. They were also unusual in appearance: narrow and tapered, and longer than she was; even folded upon her back, their long tips dragged along the ground behind her like a train.\n\nWhen Temeraire had repeated the introductions in Chinese, the little dragon sat up on her haunches and bowed. Laurence bowed in return, amused to greet a dragon thus on an equal plane. The forms satisfied, she poked her head forward to inspect him more closely, leaning over to look him up and down on both sides with great interest; her eyes were very large and liquid, amber in color, and thickly lidded.\n\nHammond was standing and talking with Sun Kai and Liu Bao, who were inspecting a curious letter, thick and with many seals, the black ink liberally interspersed with vermilion markings. Yongxing stood a little way apart, reading a second missive written in oddly large characters upon a long rolled sheet of paper; he did not share this letter, but rolled it shut again, put it away privately, and rejoined the other three.\n\nHammond bowed to them and came to translate the news for Laurence. \"We are directed to let the ship continue on to Tien-sing, while we come on ahead by air,\" he said, \"and they insist we must leave at once.\"\n\n\"Directed?\" Laurence asked, in confusion. \"But I do not understand; where have these orders come from? We cannot have had word from Peking already; Prince Yongxing sent word only three days ago.\"\n\nTemeraire addressed a question to Ping, who tilted her head and replied in deep, unfeminine tones which came echoing from her barrel chest. \"She says she brought it from a relay station at Heyuan, which is four hundred of something called li from here, and the flight is a little more than two hours,\" he said. \"But I do not know what that means in terms of distance.\"\n\n\"One mile is three li,\" Hammond said, frowning as he tried to work it out; Laurence, quicker at figuring in his head, stared at her: if there was no exaggeration, that meant Yu Ping had covered better than 120 miles in her flight. At such a rate, with couriers flying in relays, the message could indeed have come from Peking, nearly two thousand miles distant; the idea was incredible.\n\nYongxing, overhearing, said impatiently, \"Our message is of highest priority, and traveled by Jade Dragons the entire route; of course we have received word back. We cannot delay in this fashion when the Emperor has spoken. How quickly can you be ready to leave?\"\n\nStill staggered, Laurence collected himself and protested that he could not leave the Allegiance at present, but would have to wait until Riley was well enough to rise from his bed. In vain: Yongxing did not even have a chance to protest before Hammond was vociferously arguing his point. \"We cannot possibly begin by offending the Emperor,\" he said. \"The Allegiance can certainly remain here in port until Captain Riley is recovered.\"\n\n\"For God's sake, that will only worsen the situation,\" Laurence said impatiently. \"Half the crew is already gone to fever; she cannot lose the other half to desertion.\" But the argument was a compelling one, particularly once it had been seconded by Staunton, who had come across to the ship by prior arrangement to take breakfast with Laurence and Hammond.\n\n\"Whatever assistance Major Heretford and his men can give Captain Riley, I am happy to promise,\" Staunton said. \"But I do agree; they stand very much on ceremony here, and neglect of the outward forms is as good as a deliberate insult: I beg you not to delay.\"\n\nWith this encouragement, and after some consultation with Franks and Beckett, who with more courage than truth pronounced themselves prepared to handle the duty alone, and a visit to Riley belowdecks, Laurence at last yielded. \"After all, we are not at the docks anyway because of her draft, and we have enough fresh supplies by now that Franks can haul in the boats and keep all the men aboard,\" Riley pointed out. \"We will be sadly held up behind you no matter what, but I am much better, and Purbeck also; we will press on as soon as we can, and rendezvous with you at Peking.\"\n\nBut this only set off a fresh series of problems: the packing was already under way when Hammond's cautious inquiries determined that the Chinese invitation was by no means a general one. Laurence himself was from necessity accepted as an adjunct to Temeraire, Hammond as the King's representative only grudgingly permitted to come along, but the suggestion that Temeraire's crew should come along, riding in harness, was rejected with horror.\n\n\"I am not going anywhere without the crew along to guard Laurence,\" Temeraire put in, hearing of the difficulty, and conveyed this to Yongxing directly in suspicious tones; for emphasis he settled himself on the deck with finality, his tail drawn about him, looking quite immovable. A compromise was shortly offered that Laurence should choose ten of his crew, to be conveyed by some other Chinese dragons whose dignity would be less outraged by performing the service.\n\n\"What use ten men will be in the middle of Peking, I should like to know,\" Granby observed tartly, when Hammond brought this offer back to the cabin; he had not forgiven the diplomat for his refusal to investigate the attempt on Laurence's life.\n\n\"What use you imagine a hundred men would be, in the case of any real threat from the Imperial armies, I should like to know,\" Hammond answered with equal sharpness. \"In any case, it is the best we can do; I had a great deal of work to gain their permission for so many.\"\n\n\"Then we will have to manage.\" Laurence scarcely even looked up; he was at the same time sorting through his clothing, and discarding those garments which had been too badly worn by the journey to be respectable. \"The more important point, so far as safety is concerned, is to make certain the Allegiance is brought to anchor within a distance which Temeraire can reach in a single flight, without difficulty. Sir,\" he said, turning to Staunton, who had come down to sit with them, at Laurence's invitation, \"may I prevail upon you to accompany Captain Riley, if your duties will allow it? Our departure will at one stroke rob him of all interpreters, and the authority of the envoys; I am concerned for any difficulties which he may encounter on the journey north.\"\n\n\"I am entirely at his service and yours,\" Staunton said, inclining his head; Hammond did not look entirely satisfied, but he could not object under the circumstances, and Laurence was privately glad to have found this politic way of having Staunton's advice on hand, even if his arrival would be delayed.\n\nGranby would naturally accompany him, and so Ferris had to remain to oversee those men of the crew who could not come; the rest of the selection was a more painful one. Laurence did not like to seem to be showing any kind of favoritism, and indeed he did not want to leave Ferris without all of the best men. He settled finally for Keynes and Willoughby, of the ground crew: he had come to rely on the surgeon's opinion, and despite having to leave the harness behind, he felt it necessary to have at least one of the harness-men along, to direct the others in getting Temeraire rigged-out in some makeshift way if some emergency required.\n\nLieutenant Riggs interrupted his and Granby's deliberations with a passionate claim to come along, and bring his four best shots also. \"They don't need us here; they have the Marines aboard, and if anything should go wrong the rifles will do you best, you must see,\" he said. As a point of tactics this was quite true; but equally true, the riflemen were the rowdiest of his young officers as a group, and Laurence was dubious about taking so many of them to court after they had been nearly seven months at sea. Any insult to a Chinese lady would certainly be resented harshly, and his own attention would be too distracted to keep close watch over them.\n\n\"Let us have Mr. Dunne and Mr. Hackley,\" Laurence said finally. \"No; I understand your arguments, Mr. Riggs, but I want steady men for this work, men who will not go astray; I gather you take my meaning. Very good. John, we will have Blythe along also, and Martin from the topmen.\"\n\n\"That leaves two,\" Granby said, adding the names to the tally.\n\n\"I cannot take Baylesworth also; Ferris will need a reliable second,\" Laurence said, after briefly considering the last of his lieutenants. \"Let us have Therrows from the bellmen instead. And Digby for the last: he is a trifle young, but he has handled himself well, and the experience will do him good.\"\n\n\"I will have them on deck in fifteen minutes, sir,\" Granby said, rising.\n\n\"Yes; and send Ferris down,\" Laurence said, already writing his orders. \"Mr. Ferris, I rely on your good judgment,\" he continued, when the acting second lieutenant had come. \"There is no way to guess one-tenth part of what may arise under the circumstances. I have written you a formal set of orders, in case Mr. Granby and myself should be lost. If that be the case your first concern must be Temeraire's safety, and following that the crew's, and their safe return to England.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Ferris said, downcast, and accepted the sealed packet; he did not try to argue for his inclusion, but left the cabin with unhappily bowed shoulders.\n\nLaurence finished repacking his sea-chest: thankfully he had at the beginning of the voyage set aside his very best coat and hat, wrapped in paper and oilskin at the bottom of his chest, with a view towards preserving them for the embassy. He shifted now into the leather coat and trousers of heavy broadcloth which he wore for flying; these had not been too badly worn, being both more resilient and less called-on during the course of the journey. Only two of his shirts were worth including, and a handful of neckcloths; the rest he laid aside in a small bundle, and left in the cabin locker.\n\n\"Boyne,\" he called, putting his head out the door and spying a seaman idly splicing some rope. \"Light this along to the deck, will you?\" The sea-chest dispatched, he penned a few words to his mother and to Jane and took them to Riley, the small ritual only heightening the sensation which had crept upon him, as of being on the eve of battle.\n\nThe men were assembled on deck when he came up, their various chests and bags being loaded upon the launch. The envoys' baggage would mostly be remaining aboard, after Laurence had pointed out nearly a day would be required to unload it; even so, their bare necessities outweighed all the baggage of the crewmen. Yongxing was on the dragondeck handing over a sealed letter to Lung Yu Ping; he seemed to find nothing at all unusual in entrusting it directly to the dragon, riderless as she was, and she herself took it with practiced skill, holding it so delicately between her long taloned claws she might almost have been gripping it. She tucked it carefully into the gold mesh she wore, to rest against her belly.\n\nAfter this, she bowed to him and then to Temeraire and waddled forward, her wings ungainly for walking. But at the edge of the deck, she snapped them out wide, fluttered them a little, then sprang with a tremendous leap nearly her full length into the air, already beating furiously, and in an instant had diminished into a tiny speck above.\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, impressed, watching her go. \"She flies very high; I have never gone so far aloft.\"\n\nLaurence was not unimpressed, either, and stood watching through his glass for a few minutes more himself; by then she was wholly out of sight, though the day was clear.\n\nStaunton drew Laurence aside. \"May I make a suggestion? Take the children along. If I may speak from my own experience as a boy, they may well be useful. There is nothing like having children present to convey peaceful intentions, and the Chinese have an especial respect for filial relations, both by adoption as well as by blood. You can quite naturally be said to be their guardian, and I am certain I can persuade the Chinese they ought not be counted against your tally.\"\n\nRoland overheard: instantly she and Dyer stood shining-eyed and hopeful before Laurence, full of silent pleading, and with some hesitation he said, \"Well\u2014if the Chinese have no objection to their addition to the party\u2014\" This was enough encouragement; they vanished belowdecks for their own bags, and came scrambling back up even before Staunton had finished negotiating for their inclusion.\n\n\"It still seems very silly to me,\" Temeraire said, in what was meant to be an undertone. \"I could easily carry all of you, and everything in that boat besides. If I must fly alongside, it will surely take much longer.\"\n\n\"I do not disagree with you, but let us not reopen the discussion,\" Laurence said tiredly, leaning against Temeraire and stroking his nose. \" That will take more time than could possibly be saved by any other means of transport.\"\n\nTemeraire nudged him comfortingly, and Laurence closed his eyes a moment; the moment of quiet after the three hours of frantic hurry brought all his fatigue from the missed night of sleep surging back to the fore. \"Yes, I am ready,\" he said, straightening up; Granby was there. Laurence settled his hat upon his head and nodded to the crew as he went by, the men touching their foreheads; a few even murmured, \"Good luck, sir,\" and \"Godspeed, sir.\"\n\nHe shook Franks's hand, and stepped over the side to the yowling accompaniment of pipes and drums, the rest of the crew already aboard the launch. Yongxing and the other envoys had already been lowered down by means of the bosun's chair, and were ensconced in the stern under a canopy for shelter from the sun. \"Very well, Mr. Tripp; let us get under way,\" Laurence said to the midshipman, and they were off, the high sloping sides of the Allegiance receding as they raised the gaff mainsail and took the southerly wind past Macao and into the great sprawling delta of the Pearl River."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "They did not follow the usual curve of the river to Whampoa and Canton, but instead took an earlier eastern branch towards the city of Dongguan: now drifting with the wind, now rowing against the slow current, past the broad square-bordered rice fields on either side of the river, verdant green with the tops of the shoots beginning to protrude beyond the water's surface. The stench of manure hung over the river like a cloud.\n\nLaurence drowsed nearly the entire journey, only vaguely conscious of the futile attempts made by the crew to be quiet, their hissing whispers causing instructions to be repeated three times, gradually increasing to the usual volume. Any occasional slip, such as dropping a coil of rope too heavily, or stumbling over one of the thwarts, brought forth a stream of invective and injunctions to be quiet that were considerably louder than the ordinary noise would have been. Nevertheless he slept, or something close to it; every so often he would open his eyes and look up, to be sure of Temeraire's form still pacing them overhead.\n\nHe woke from a deeper sleep only after dark: the sail was being furled, and a few moments later the launch bumped gently against a dock, followed by the quiet ordinary cursing of the sailors tying-up. There was very little light immediately at hand but the boat's lanterns, only enough to show a broad stairway leading down into the water, the lowest steps disappearing beneath the river's surface; to either side of these only the dim shadows of native junks drawn up onto the beach.\n\nA parade of lanterns came towards them from further in on the shore, the locals evidently warned to expect their arrival: great glowing spheres of deep orange-red silk, stretched taut over thin bamboo frames, reflecting like flames in the water. The lamp-bearers spread out along the edges of the walls in careful procession, and suddenly a great many Chinese were climbing aboard the ship, seizing on the various parts of the baggage, and transferring these off without so much as a request for permission, calling out to one another cheerfully as they worked.\n\nLaurence was at first disposed to complain, but there was no cause: the entire operation was being carried out with admirable efficiency. A clerk had seated himself at the base of the steps with something like a drawing-table upon his lap, making a tally of the different parcels on a paper scroll as they passed by him, and at the same time marking each one plainly. Instead Laurence stood up and tried to unstiffen his neck surreptitiously by small movements to either side, without any undignified stretching. Yongxing had already stepped off the boat and gone into the small pavilion on the shore; from inside, Liu Bao's booming voice could be heard calling for what even Laurence had come to recognize as the word for \"wine,\" and Sun Kai was on the bank speaking with the local mandarin.\n\n\"Sir,\" Laurence said to Hammond, \"will you be so good as to ask the local officials where Temeraire has come to ground?\"\n\nHammond made some inquiries of the men on the bank, frowned, and said to Laurence in an undertone, \"They say he has been taken to the Pavilion of Quiet Waters, and that we are to go elsewhere for the night; pray make some objection at once, loudly, so I may have an excuse to argue with them; we ought not set a precedent of allowing ourselves to be separated from him.\"\n\nLaurence, who if not prompted would have at once made a great noise, found himself cast into confusion by the request to play-act; he stammered a little, and said in a raised but awkwardly tentative voice, \"I must see Temeraire at once, and be sure he is well.\"\n\nHammond turned back at once to the attendants, spreading his hands in apology, and spoke urgently; under their scowls, Laurence did his best to look stern and unyielding, feeling thoroughly ridiculous and angry all at once, and eventually Hammond turned back with satisfaction and said, \"Excellent; they have agreed to take us to him.\"\n\nRelieved, Laurence nodded and turned back to the ship's crew. \"Mr. Tripp, let these gentlemen show you and the men where to sleep; I will speak with you in the morning before you return to the Allegiance,\" he told the midshipman, who touched his hat, and then he climbed up onto the stairs.\n\nWithout discussion, Granby arranged the men in a loose formation around him as they walked along the broad, paved roads, following the guide's bobbing lantern; Laurence had the impression of many small houses on either side, and deep wheel-ruts were cut into the paving-stones, all sharp edges worn soft and curving with the impression of long years. He felt wide-awake after the long day drowsing, and yet there was something curiously dream-like about walking through the foreign dark, the soft black boots of the guide making hushing noises over the stones, the smoke of cooking fires drifting from the nearby houses, muted light filtering from behind screens and out of windows, and once a snatch of unfamiliar song in a woman's voice.\n\nThey came at last to the end of the wide straight road, and the guide led them up the broad stairway of a pavilion and between massive round columns of painted wood, the roof so far overhead that its shape was lost in the darkness. The low rumbled breathing of dragons echoed loudly in the half-enclosed space, close all around them, and the tawny lantern-light gleamed on scales in every direction, like heaped mounds of treasure around the narrow aisle through the center. Hammond drew unconsciously closer to the center of their party, and caught his breath once, as the lantern reflected from a dragon's half-open eye, turning into a disk of flat, shining gold.\n\nThey passed through another set of columns and into an open garden, with water trickling somewhere in the darkness, and the whisper of broad leaves rubbing against one another overhead. A few more dragons lay sleeping here, one sprawled across the path; the guide poked him with the stick of the lantern until he grudgingly moved away, never even opening his eyes. They climbed more stairs up to another pavilion, smaller than the first, and here at last found Temeraire, curled up alone in the echoing vastness.\n\n\"Laurence?\" Temeraire said, lifting his head as they came in, and nuzzled at him gladly. \"Will you stay? It is very strange to be sleeping on land again. I almost feel as though the ground is moving.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Laurence said, and the crew laid themselves down without complaint: the night was pleasantly warm, and the floor made of inlaid squares of wood, smoothed down by years, and not uncomfortably hard. Laurence took his usual place upon Temeraire's forearm; after sleeping through the journey, he was wakeful, and told Granby he would take the first watch. \"Have you been given something to eat?\" he asked Temeraire, once they were settled.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Temeraire said drowsily. \"A roast pig, very large, and some stewed mushrooms. I am not at all hungry. It was not a very difficult flight, after all, and nothing very interesting either to see before the sun went down; except those fields were strange, that we came past, full of water.\"\n\n\"The rice fields,\" Laurence said, but Temeraire was already asleep, and shortly began to snore: the noise was decidedly louder in the confines of the pavilion even though it had no walls. The night was very quiet, and the mosquitoes were not too much of a torment, thankfully; they evidently did not care for the dry heat given off by a dragon's body. There was very little to mark the time, with the sky concealed by the roof, and Laurence lost track of the hours. No interruption in the stillness of the night, except that once a noise in the courtyard drew his attention: a dragon landing, turning a milky pearlescent gaze towards them, reflecting the moonlight very much like a cat's eyes; but it did not come near the pavilion, and only padded away deeper into the darkness.\n\nGranby woke for his turn at watch; Laurence composed himself to sleep: he, too, felt the old familiar illusion of the earth shifting, his body remembering the movement of the ocean even now that they had left it behind.\n\nHe woke startled: the riot of color overhead was strange until he understood he was looking at the decoration upon the ceiling, every scrap of wood painted and enameled in brilliant peacocky colors and shining gilt. He sat up and looked about himself with fresh interest: the round columns were painted a solid red, set upon square bases of white marble, and the roof was at least thirty feet overhead: Temeraire would have had no difficulty coming in underneath it.\n\nThe front of the pavilion opened onto a prospect of the courtyard which he found interesting rather than beautiful: paved with grey stones around a winding path of reddish ones, full of queerly shaped rocks and trees, and of course dragons: there were five sprawled over the grounds in various attitudes of repose, except for one already awake and grooming itself fastidiously by the enormous pool which covered the northeast corner of the grounds. The dragon was a shade of greyish blue not very different from the present color of the sky, and curiously the tips of its four claws were painted a bright red; as Laurence watched it finished its morning ablutions and took to the air.\n\nMost of the dragons in the yard seemed of a similar breed, though there was a great deal of variety among them in size, in the precise shade of their color, and in the number and placement of their horns; some were smooth-backed and others had spiked ridges. Shortly a very different kind of dragon came out of the large pavilion to the south: larger and crimson-red, with gold-tinted talons and a bright yellow crest running from its many-horned head and along its spine. It drank from the pool and yawned enormously, displaying a double row of small but wicked teeth, and a set of four larger curving fangs among them. Narrower halls, with walls interspersed with small archways, ran to east and west of the courtyard, joining the two pavilions; the red dragon went over to one of the archways now and yelled something inside.\n\nA few moments later a woman came stumbling out through the archway, rubbing her face and making wordless groaning noises. Laurence stared, then looked away, embarrassed, she was naked to the waist. The dragon nudged her hard and knocked her back entirely into the pond. It certainly had a reviving effect: she rose up spluttering and wide-eyed, and then yammered back at the grinning dragon in a passion before going back inside the hall. She came out again a few minutes later, now fully dressed in what seemed to be a sort of padded jerkin, dark blue cotton edged with broad bands of red, with wide sleeves, and carrying a rig made also of fabric: silk, Laurence thought. This she threw upon the dragon all by herself, still talking loudly and obviously disgruntled all the while; Laurence was irresistibly reminded of Berkley and Maximus, even though Berkley had never spoken so many words together in his life: something in the irreverent quality of their relations.\n\nThe rig secured, the Chinese aviator scrambled aboard and the two went aloft with no further ceremony, disappearing from the pavilion to whatever their day's duties might be. All the dragons were now beginning to stir, another three of the big scarlet ones coming out of the pavilion, and more people to come from the halls: men from the east, and a few more women from the west.\n\nTemeraire himself twitched under Laurence, and then opened his eyes. \"Good morning,\" he said, yawning, then, \"Oh!\" his eyes wide as he looked around, taking in the opulent decoration and the bustle going on in the courtyard. \"I did not realize there were so many other dragons here, or that it was so grand,\" he said, a little nervously. \"I hope they are friendly.\"\n\n\"I am sure they cannot but be gracious, when they realize you have come from so far,\" Laurence said, climbing down so Temeraire could stand. The air was close and heavy with moisture, the sky remaining uncertain and grey; it would be hot again, he thought. \"You ought to drink as much as you can,\" he said. \"I have no notion how often they will want to stop and rest along the way today.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Temeraire said, reluctantly, and stepped out of the pavilion and into the court. The increasing hubbub came to an abrupt and complete halt; the dragons and their companions alike stared openly, and then there was a general movement back and away from him. Laurence was for a moment shocked and offended; then he saw that they were all, men and dragons, bowing themselves very low to the ground. They had only been opening a clear path to the pond.\n\nThere was perfect silence. Temeraire uncertainly walked through the parted ranks of the other dragons to the pond, rather hastily drank his fill, and retreated to the raised pavilion; only when he had gone again did the general activity resume, with much less noise than earlier, and a good deal of peering into the pavilion, while pretending to do nothing of the sort. \"They were very nice to let me drink,\" Temeraire said, almost whispering, \"but I wish they would not stare so.\"\n\nThe dragons seemed disposed to linger, but one after another they all set off, except for a few plainly older ones, their scales faded at the edges, who returned to basking upon the courtyard stones. Granby and the rest of the crew had woken over the intervening time, sitting up to watch the spectacle with as much interest as the other dragons had taken in Temeraire; now they roused fully, and began to straighten their clothing. \"I suppose they will send someone for us,\" Hammond was saying, brushing futilely at his wrinkled breeches; he had been dressed formally, rather than in the riding gear which all the aviators had put on. At that very moment, Ye Bing, one of the young Chinese attendants from the ship, came through the courtyard, waving to draw their attention.\n\nBreakfast was not what Laurence was used to, being a sort of thin rice porridge mixed with dried fish and slices of horrifically discolored eggs, served with greasy sticks of crisp, very light bread. The eggs he pushed to the side, and forced himself to eat the rest, on the same advice which he had given to Temeraire; but he would have given a great deal for some properly cooked eggs and bacon. Liu Bao poked Laurence in the arm with his chopsticks and pointed at the eggs with some remark: he was eating his own with very evident relish.\n\n\"What do you suppose is the matter with them?\" Granby asked in an undertone, prodding his own eggs doubtfully.\n\nHammond, inquiring of Liu Bao, said just as doubtfully, \"He says they are thousand-year eggs.\" Braver than the rest of them, he picked one of the slices up and ate it; chewed, swallowed, and looked thoughtful while they waited his verdict. \"It tastes almost pickled,\" he said. \"Not rotten, at any rate.\" He tried another piece, and ended by eating the whole serving; for his own part, Laurence left the lurid yellow-and-green things alone.\n\nThey had been brought to a sort of guest hall not far from the dragon pavilion for the meal; the sailors were there waiting and joined them for the breakfast, grinning rather maliciously. They were no more pleased at being left out of the adventure than the rest of the aviators had been, and not above making remarks about the quality of food which the party could expect for the rest of their journey. Afterwards, Laurence took his final parting from Tripp. \"And be sure you tell Captain Riley that all is ship-shape, in those exact words,\" he said; it had been arranged between them that any other message, regardless how reassuring, would mean something had gone badly wrong.\n\nA couple of mule-led carts were waiting for them outside, rather rough-hewn and clearly without springs; their baggage had gone on ahead. Laurence climbed in and held on grimly to the side as they rattled along down the road. The streets at least were not more impressive by daylight: very broad, but paved with old rounded cobblestones, whose mortar had largely worn away. The wheels of the cart ran along in deep sloping ruts between stones, bumping and leaping over the uneven surface.\n\nThere was a bustle of people all around, who stared with great curiosity at them, often putting down their work to follow after them for some short distance. \"And this is not even a city?\" Granby looked around with interest, making some attempt to tally the numbers. \"There seem to be a great many people, for only a town.\"\n\n\"There are some two hundred millions of people in the country, by our latest intelligence,\" Hammond said absently, himself busy taking down notes in a journal; Laurence shook his head at the appalling number, more than ten times the size of England's population.\n\nLaurence was more startled for his part to see a dragon come walking down the road in the opposite direction. Another of the blue-grey ones; it was wearing a queer sort of silk harness with a prominent breast-pad, and when they had passed it by, he saw that three little dragonets, two of the same variety and one of the red color, were tramping along behind, each attached to the harness also as if on leading-strings.\n\nNor was this dragon the only one in the streets: they shortly passed by a military station, with a small troop of blue-clad infantrymen drilling in its courtyard, and a couple of the big red dragons were sitting outside the gate talking and exclaiming over a dice game which their captains were playing. No one seemed to take any particular notice of them; the hurrying peasants carrying their loads went by without a second glance, occasionally climbing over one of the splayed-out limbs when other routes were blocked.\n\nTemeraire was waiting for them in an open field, with two of the blue-grey dragons also on hand, wearing mesh harnesses which were being loaded up with baggage by attendants. The other dragons were whispering amongst themselves and eyeing Temeraire sidelong. He looked uncomfortable, and greatly relieved to see Laurence.\n\nHaving been loaded, the dragons now crouched down onto all fours so the attendants could climb aloft and raise small pavilions on their backs: very much like the tents which were used for long flights among British aviators. One of the attendants spoke to Hammond, and gestured to one of the blue dragons. \"We are to ride on that one,\" Hammond said to Laurence aside, then asked something else of the attendant, who shook his head, and answered forcefully, pointing again to the second dragon.\n\nBefore the reply could even be translated, Temeraire sat up indignantly. \"Laurence is not riding any other dragon,\" he said, putting out a possessive claw and nearly knocking Laurence off his feet, herding him closer; Hammond scarcely had to repeat the sentiments in Chinese.\n\nLaurence had not quite realized the Chinese did not mean for even him to ride with Temeraire. He did not like the idea of Temeraire having to fly with no company on the long trip, and yet he could not help but think the point a small one; they would be flying in company, in sight of one another, and Temeraire could be in no real danger. \"It is only for the one journey,\" he said to Temeraire, and was surprised to find himself overruled at once not by Temeraire, but by Hammond.\n\n\"No; the suggestion is unacceptable, cannot be entertained,\" Hammond said.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Temeraire said, in perfect agreement, and actually growled when the attendant tried to continue the argument.\n\n\"Mr. Hammond,\" Laurence said, with happy inspiration, \"pray tell them, if it is the notion of harness which is at issue, I can just as easily lock on to the chain of Temeraire's pendant; as long as I do not need to go climbing about it will be secure enough.\"\n\n\"They cannot possibly argue with that,\" Temeraire said, pleased, and interrupted the argument immediately to make the suggestion, which was grudgingly accepted.\n\n\"Captain, may I have a word?\" Hammond drew him aside. \"This attempt is of a piece with last night's arrangements. I must urge you, sir, by no means agree to continue on should we somehow come to be parted; and be on your guard if they should make further attempts to separate you from Temeraire.\"\n\n\"I take your point, sir; and thank you for the advice,\" Laurence said, grimly, and looked narrowly at Yongxing; though the prince had never stooped to involve himself directly in any of the discussions, Laurence suspected his hand behind them, and he had hoped that the failure of the shipboard attempts to part them would at least have precluded these efforts.\n\nAfter these tensions at the journey's outset, the long day's flight itself was uneventful, except for the occasional leap in Laurence's stomach when Temeraire would swoop down for a closer look at the ground: the breastplate did not keep entirely still throughout the flight, and shifted far more than harness. Temeraire was considerably quicker than the other two dragons, with more endurance, and could easily catch them up even if he lingered half-an-hour in sight-seeing at a time. The most striking feature, to Laurence, was the exuberance of the population: they scarcely passed any long stretch of land that was not under cultivation of some form, and every substantial body of water was crammed full of boats going either direction. And of course the real immensity of the country: they traveled from morning to night, with only an hour's pause for dinner each day at noon, and the days were long.\n\nAn almost endless expanse of broad, flat plains, checkered with rice fields and interspersed with many streams, yielded after some two days' travel to hills, and then to the slow puckering rise of mountains. Towns and villages of varying size punctuated the countryside below, and occasionally people working in the fields would stop and watch them flying overhead, if Temeraire came low enough to be recognized as a Celestial. Laurence at first thought the Yangtze another lake; one of respectable size but not extraordinary, being something less than a mile wide, with its east and west banks shrouded in a fine, grey drizzle; only when they had come properly overhead could he see the mighty river sprawling endlessly away, and the slow procession of junks appearing and vanishing through the mists.\n\nAfter having passed two nights in smaller towns, Laurence had begun to think their first establishment an unusual case, but their residence that night in the city of Wuchang dwarfed it into insignificance: eight great pavilions arranged in a symmetric octagonal shape, joined by narrower enclosed halls, around a space deserving to be called a park more than a garden. Roland and Dyer made at first a game of trying to count the dragons inhabiting it, but gave up the attempt somewhere after thirty; they lost track of their tally when a group of small purple dragons landed and darted in a flurry of wings and limbs across the pavilion, too many and too quick to count.\n\nTemeraire drowsed; Laurence put aside his bowl: another plain dinner of rice and vegetables. Most of the men were already asleep, huddled in their cloaks, the rest silent; rain still coming down in a steady, steaming curtain beyond the walls of the pavilion, the overrun clattering off the upturned corners of the tiled roof. Along the slopes of the river valley, faintly visible, small yellow beacons burnt beneath open-walled huts to mark the way for dragons flying through the night. Soft grumbling breath echoing from the neighboring pavilions, and far away a more piercing cry, ringing clear despite the muffling weight of the rain.\n\nYongxing had been spending his nights apart from the rest of the company, in more private quarters, but now he came out of seclusion and stood at the edge of the pavilion looking out into the valley: in another moment the call came again, nearer. Temeraire lifted up his head to listen, the ruff around his neck rising up alertly; then Laurence heard the familiar leathery snapping of wings, mist and steam rolling away from the stones for the descending dragon, a white ghostly shadow coalescing from the silver rain. She folded great white wings and came pacing towards them, her talons clicking on the stones; the attendants going between pavilions shrank away from her, averting their faces, hurrying by, but Yongxing walked down the steps into the rain, and she lowered her great, wide-ruffed head towards him, calling his name in a clear, sweet voice.\n\n\"Is that another Celestial?\" Temeraire asked him, hushed and uncertain; Laurence only shook his head and could not answer: she was a shockingly pure white, a color he had never before seen in a dragon even in spots or streaks. Her scales had the translucent gleam of fine, much-scraped vellum, perfectly colorless, and the rims of her eyes were a glassy pink mazed with blood vessels so engorged as to be visible even at a distance. Yet she had the same great ruff, and the long narrow tendrils fringing her jaws, just as Temeraire did: the color alone was unnatural. She wore a heavy golden torque set with rubies around the base of her neck, and gold talon-sheaths tipped with rubies upon all of her foreleg claws, the deep color echoing the hue of her eyes.\n\nShe nudged Yongxing caressingly back into the shelter of the temple and came in after him, first shivering her wings quickly to let cascades of rain roll away in streams; she alloted them barely a glance, her eyes flickering rapidly over them and away, before she jealously coiled herself around Yongxing, to murmur quietly with him in the far corner of the pavilion. Servants came bringing her some dinner, but dragging their heels, uneasily, though they had shown no such similar reluctance around any of the other dragons, and indeed visible satisfaction in Temeraire's presence. She did not seem to merit their fear; she ate quickly and daintily, not letting so much as a drop spill out of the dish, and otherwise paid them no mind.\n\nThe next morning Yongxing briefly presented her to them as Lung Tien Lien, and then led her away to breakfast in private; Hammond had made quiet inquiries enough to tell them a little more over their own meal: \"She is certainly a Celestial,\" he said. \"I suppose it is a kind of albinism; I have no idea why it should make them all so uneasy.\"\n\n\"She was born in mourning colors, of course she is unlucky,\" Liu Bao said, when he was cautiously applied to for information, as if this were self-evident, and he added, \"The Qianlong Emperor was going to give her to a prince out in Mongolia, so her bad luck wouldn't hurt any of his sons, but Yongxing insisted on having her himself instead of letting a Celestial go outside the Imperial family. He could have been Emperor himself, but of course you couldn't have an Emperor with a cursed dragon, it would be a disaster for the State. So now his brother is the Jiaqing Emperor. Such is the will of Heaven!\" With this philosophical remark, he shrugged and ate another piece of fried bread. Hammond took this news bleakly, and Laurence shared his dismay: pride was one thing; principle implacable enough to sacrifice a throne for, something else entirely.\n\nThe two bearer dragons accompanying them had been changed for another one of the blue-grey breed and one of a slightly larger kind, deep green with blue streaks and a sleek hornless head; they still regarded Temeraire with the same staring awe, however, and Lien with nervous respect, and kept well to themselves. Temeraire had by now reconciled himself to the state of majestic solitude; and in any case he was thoroughly occupied in glancing sidelong at Lien with fascinated curiosity, until she turned to stare pointedly at him in return and he ducked his head, abashed.\n\nShe wore this morning an odd sort of headdress, made of thin silk draped between gold bars, which stood out over her eyes rather like a canopy and shaded them; Laurence wondered that she should find it necessary, with the sky still unrelieved and grey. But the hot, sullen weather broke almost abruptly during their first few hours of flight, through gorges winding among old mountains: their sloping southern faces lush and green, and the northern almost barren. A cool wind met their faces as they came out into the foothills, and the sun breaking from the clouds was almost painfully bright. The rice fields did not reappear, but long expanses of ripening wheat took their place, and once they saw a great herd of brown oxen creeping slowly across a grassy plain, heads to the ground as they munched away.\n\nA little shed was planted on a hill, overlooking the herd, and beside it several massive spits turned, entire cows roasting upon them, a fragrant smoky smell rising upwards. \"Those look tasty,\" Temeraire observed, a little wistfully. He was not alone in the sentiment: as they approached, one of their companion dragons put on a sudden burst of speed and swooped down. A man came out of the shed and held a discussion with the dragon, then went inside again; he came out carrying a large plank of wood and laid it down before the dragon, which carved a few Chinese symbols into the plank with its talon.\n\nThe man took away the plank, and the dragon took away a cow: plainly it had been making a purchase. It lifted back up into the air at once to rejoin them, crunching its cow happily as it flew: it evidently did not think it necessary to let its passengers off for any of the proceedings. Laurence thought he could see poor Hammond looking faintly green as it slurped the intestines up with obvious pleasure.\n\n\"We could try to purchase one, if they will take guineas,\" Laurence offered to Temeraire, a little dubiously; he had brought gold rather than paper money with him, but had no idea if the herdsman would accept it.\n\n\"Oh, I am not really hungry,\" Temeraire said, preoccupied by a wholly different thought. \"Laurence, that was writing, was it not? What he did on the plank?\"\n\n\"I believe so, though I do not set myself up as an expert on Chinese writing,\" Laurence said. \"You are more likely to recognize it than I.\"\n\n\"I wonder if all Chinese dragons know how to write,\" Temeraire said, dismal at the notion. \"They will think me very stupid if I am the only one who cannot. I must learn somehow; I always thought letters had to be made with a pen, but I am sure I could do that sort of carving.\"\n\nPerhaps in courtesy to Lien, who seemed to dislike bright sunlight, they now paused during the heat of the day at another wayside pavilion for some dinner and for the dragons to rest, and flew on into the evening instead; beacons upon the ground lit their way at irregular intervals, and in any case Laurence could chart their course by the stars: turning now more sharply to the northeast, with the miles slipping quickly past. The days continued hot, but no longer so extraordinarily humid, and the nights were wonderfully cool and pleasant; signs of the force of the northern winters were apparent, however: the pavilions were walled on three sides, and set up from the ground on stone platforms which held stoves so the floors could be heated.\n\nPeking sprawled out a great distance from beyond the city walls, which were numerous and grand, with many square towers and battlements not unlike the style of European castles. Broad streets of grey stone ran in straight lines to the gates and within, so full of people, of horses, of carts, all of them moving, that from above they seemed like rivers. They saw many dragons also, both on the streets and in the sky, leaping into the air for short flights from one quarter of the city to another, sometimes with a crowd of people hanging off them and evidently traveling in this manner. The city was divided with extraordinary regularity into square sections, except for the curving sprawl of four small lakes actually within the walls. To the east of these lay the great Imperial palace itself, not a single building but formed of many smaller pavilions, walled in and surrounded by a moat of murky water: in the setting sun, all the roofs within the complex shone as if gilded, nestled among trees with their spring growth still fresh and yellow-green, throwing long shadows into the plazas of grey stone.\n\nA smaller dragon met them in mid-air as they drew near: black with canary-yellow stripes and wearing a collar of dark green silk, he had a rider upon his back, but spoke to the other dragons directly. Temeraire followed the other dragons down, to a small round island in the southernmost lake, less than half-a-mile from the palace walls. They landed upon a broad pier of white marble which jutted out into the lake, for the convenience of dragons only, as there were no boats in evidence.\n\nThis pier ended in an enormous gateway: a red structure more than a wall and yet too narrow to be considered a building, with three square archways as openings, the two smallest many times higher than Temeraire's head and wide enough for four of him to walk abreast; the central was even larger. A pair of enormous Imperial dragons stood at attention on either side, very like Temeraire in conformity but without his distinctive ruff, one black and the other a deep blue, and beside them a long file of soldiers: infantrymen in shining steel caps and blue robes, with long spears.\n\nThe two companion dragons walked directly through the smaller archways, and Lien paced straightaway through the middle, but the yellow-striped dragon barred Temeraire from following, bowed low, and said something in apologetic tones while gesturing to the center archway. Temeraire answered back shortly, and sat down on his haunches with an air of finality, his ruff stiff and laid back against his neck in obvious displeasure. \"Is something wrong?\" Laurence asked quietly; through the archway he could see a great many people and dragons assembled in the courtyard beyond, and obviously some ceremony was intended.\n\n\"They want you to climb down, and go through one of the small archways, and for me to go through the large one,\" Temeraire said. \"But I am not putting you down alone. It sounds very silly to me, anyway, to have three doors all going to the same place.\"\n\nLaurence wished rather desperately for Hammond's advice, or anyone's for that matter; the striped dragon and his rider were equally nonplussed at Temeraire's recalcitrance, and Laurence found himself looking at the other man and meeting with an almost identical expression of confusion. The dragons and soldiers in the archway remained as motionless and precise as statues, but as the minutes passed those assembled on the other side must have come to realize something was wrong. A man in richly embroidered blue robes came hurrying through the side corridor, and spoke to the striped dragon and his rider; then looked askance at Laurence and Temeraire and hurried back to the other side.\n\nA low murmur of conversation began, echoing down the archway, then was abruptly cut off; the people on the far side parted, and a dragon came through the archway towards them, a deep glossy black very much like Temeraire's own coloring, with the same deep blue eyes and wing-markings, and a great standing ruff of translucent black stretched among ribbed horns of vermilion, another Celestial. She stopped before them and spoke in deep resonant tones; Laurence felt Temeraire first stiffen and then tremble, his own ruff rising slowly up, and Temeraire said, low and uncertainly, \"Laurence, this is my mother.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Laurence later learned from Hammond that passage through the central gate was reserved for the use of the Imperial family, and dragons of that breed and the Celestials only, hence their refusal to let Laurence himself pass through. At the moment, however, Qian simply led Temeraire in a short flight over the gateway and into the central courtyard beyond, thus neatly severing the Gordian knot.\n\nThe problem of etiquette resolved, they were all ushered into an enormous banquet, held within the largest of the dragon pavilions, with two tables waiting. Qian was herself seated at the head of the first table, with Temeraire upon her left and Yongxing and Lien upon her right. Laurence was directed to sit some distance down the table, with Hammond across and several more seats down; the rest of the British party was placed at the second table. Laurence did not think it politic to object: the separation was not even the length of the room, and in any case Temeraire's attention was entirely engaged at present. He was speaking to his mother with an almost timid air, very unlike himself and clearly overawed: she was larger than he, and the faint translucence of her scales indicated a great age, as did her very grand manners. She wore no harness, but her ruff was adorned with enormous yellow topazes affixed to the spines, and a deceptively fragile neckpiece of filigree gold, studded with more topazes and great pearls.\n\nTruly gigantic platters of brass were set before the dragons, each bearing an entire roasted deer, antlers intact: oranges stuck with cloves were impaled upon them, creating a fragrance not at all unpleasant to human senses, and their bellies were stuffed with a mixture of nuts and very bright red berries. The humans were served with a sequence of eight dishes, smaller though equally elaborate. After the dismal food along the course of the journey, even the highly exotic repast was very welcome, however.\n\nLaurence had assumed there should be no one for him to talk to, as he sat down, unless he tried to shout across to Hammond, there being no translator present so far as he could tell. On his left side sat a very old mandarin, wearing a hat with a pearlescent white jewel perched on top and a peacock feather dangling down from the back over a truly impressive queue, still mostly black despite the profusion of wrinkles engraved upon his face. He ate and drank with single-minded intensity, never even trying to address Laurence at all: when the neighbor on his other side leaned over and shouted in the man's ear, Laurence realized that he was very deaf, as well as being unable to speak English.\n\nBut shortly after he had seated himself, he was taken aback to be addressed from his other side in English, heavy with French accents: \"I hope you have had a comfortable journey,\" said the smiling, cheerful voice. It was the French ambassador, dressed in long robes in the Chinese style rather than in European dress; that and his dark hair accounted for Laurence not having distinguished him at once from the rest of the company.\n\n\"You will permit that I make myself known to you, I hope, despite the unhappy state of affairs between our countries,\" De Guignes continued. \"I can claim an informal acquaintance, you see; my nephew tells me he owes his life to your magnanimity.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, sir, I have not the least notion to what you refer,\" Laurence said, puzzled by this address. \"Your nephew?\"\n\n\"Jean-Claude De Guignes; he is a lieutenant in our Arm\u00e9e de l'Air,\" the ambassador said, bowing, still smiling. \"You encountered him this last November over your Channel, when he made an attempt to board you.\"\n\n\"Good God,\" Laurence said, exclaiming, distantly recalling the young lieutenant who had fought so vigorously in the convoy action, and he willingly shook De Guignes's hand. \"I remember; most extraordinary courage. I am so very happy to hear that he has quite recovered, I hope?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, in his letter he expected to rise from his hospital any day; to go to prison of course, but that is better than going to a grave,\" De Guignes said, with a prosaic shrug. \"He wrote me of your interesting journey, knowing I had been dispatched here to your destination; I have been with great pleasure expecting you this last month since his letter arrived, with hopes of expressing my admiration for your generosity.\"\n\nFrom this happy beginning, they exchanged some more conversation on neutral topics: the Chinese climate, the food, and the startling number of dragons. Laurence could not help but feel a certain kinship with him, as a fellow Westerner in the depths of the Oriental enclave, and though De Guignes was himself not a military man, his familiarity with the French aerial corps made him sympathetic company. They walked out together at the close of the meal, following the other guests into the courtyard, where most of these were being carried away by dragon in the same manner they had seen earlier in the city.\n\n\"It is a clever mode of transport, is it not?\" De Guignes said, and Laurence, watching with interest, agreed wholeheartedly: the dragons, mostly of what he now considered the common blue variety, wore light harnesses of many silk straps draped over their backs, to which were hung numerous loops of broad silk ribbons. The passengers climbed up the loops to the topmost empty one, which they slid down over their arms and underneath the buttocks: they could then sit in comparative stability, clinging to the main strap, so long as the dragon flew level.\n\nHammond emerged from the pavilion and caught sight of them, eyes widening, and hastened to join them; he and De Guignes smiled and spoke with great friendliness, and as soon as the Frenchman had excused himself and departed in company with a pair of Chinese mandarins, Hammond instantly turned to Laurence and demanded, in a perfectly shameless manner, to have the whole of their conversation recounted.\n\n\"Expecting us for a month!\" Hammond was appalled by the intelligence, and managed to imply without actually saying anything openly offensive that he thought Laurence had been a simpleton to take De Guignes at face value. \"God only knows what mischief he may have worked against us in that time; pray have no more private conversation with him.\"\n\nLaurence did not respond to these remarks as he rather wanted to, and instead went away to Temeraire's side. Qian had been the last to depart, taking a caressing leave of Temeraire, nudging him with her nose before leaping aloft; her sleek black form disappeared into the night quickly, and Temeraire stood watching after her very wistfully.\n\nThe island had been prepared for their residence as a compromise measure; the property of the Emperor, it possessed several large and elegant dragon pavilions, with establishments intended for human use conjoined to these. Laurence and his party were allowed to establish themselves in a residence attached to the largest of the pavilions, facing across a broad courtyard. The building was a handsome one, and large, but the upper floor was wholly taken up by a host of servants greatly exceeding their needs; although seeing how these ranged themselves almost underfoot throughout the house, Laurence began to suspect they were intended equally as spies and guards.\n\nHis sleep was heavy, but broken before dawn by servants poking their heads in to see if he were awake; after the fourth such attempt in ten minutes, Laurence yielded with no good grace and rose with a head still aching from the previous day's free flow of wine. He had little success in conveying his desire for a washbasin, and at length resorted to stepping outside into the courtyard to wash in the pond there. This posed no difficulty, as there was an enormous circular window little less than his height set in the wall, the lower sill barely off the ground.\n\nTemeraire was sprawled luxuriously across the far end, lying flattened upon his belly with even his tail stretched out to its full extent, still fast asleep and making occasional small pleased grunts as he dreamed. A system of bamboo pipes emerged from beneath the pavement, evidently used to heat the stones, and these spilled a cloud of hot water into the pond, so Laurence could make more comfortable ablutions than he had expected. The servants hovered in visible impatience all the time, and looked rather scandalized at his stripping to the waist to wash. When at last he came back in, they pressed Chinese dress upon him: soft trousers and the stiff-collared gown which seemed nearly universal among them. He resisted a moment, but a glance over at his own clothes showed them sadly wrinkled from the travel; the native dress was at least neat, if not what he was used to, and not physically uncomfortable, though he felt very nearly indecent without a proper coat or neckcloth.\n\nA functionary of some sort had come to breakfast with them and was already waiting at table, which was evidently the source of the servants' urgency. Laurence bowed rather shortly to the stranger, named Zhao Wei, and let Hammond carry the conversation while he drank a great deal of the tea: fragrant and strong, but not a dish of milk to be seen, and the servants only looked blank when the request was translated for them.\n\n\"His Imperial Majesty has in his benevolence decreed you are to reside here for the length of your visit,\" Zhao Wei was saying; his English was by no means polished, but understandable; he had a rather prim and pinched look, and eyed Laurence's still-unskilled use of the chopsticks with an expression of disdain hovering about his mouth. \"You may walk in the courtyard as you desire, but you are not to leave the residence without making a formal request and receiving permission.\"\n\n\"Sir, we are most grateful, but you must be aware that if we are not to be allowed free movement during the day, the size of this house is by no means adequate to our needs,\" Hammond said. \"Why, only Captain Laurence and myself had private rooms last night, and those small and ill-befitting our standing, while the rest of our compatriots were housed in shared quarters and very cramped.\"\n\nLaurence had noticed no such inadequacy, and found both the attempted restrictions on their movement and Hammond's negotiations for more space mildly absurd, the more so as it transpired, from their conversation, that the whole of the island had been vacated in deference to Temeraire. The complex could have accommodated a dozen dragons in extreme comfort, and there were sufficient human residences that every man of Laurence's crew might have had a building to himself. Still, their residence was in perfectly good repair, comfortable, and far more spacious than their shipboard quarters for the last seven months; he could not see the least reason for desiring additional space any more than for denying them the liberty of the island. But Hammond and Zhao Wei continued to negotiate the matter with a measured gravity and politeness.\n\nZhao Wei at length consented to their being allowed to take walks around the island in the company of the servants, \"so long as you do not go to the shores or the docks, and do not interfere in the patrols of the guardsmen.\" With this Hammond pronounced himself satisfied. Zhao Wei sipped at his tea, and then added, \"Of course, His Majesty wishes Lung Tien Xiang to see something of the city. I will conduct him upon a tour after he has eaten.\"\n\n\"I am certain Temeraire and Captain Laurence will find it most edifying,\" Hammond said immediately, before Laurence could even draw breath. \"Indeed, sir, it was very kind of you to arrange for native clothing for Captain Laurence, so he will not suffer from excessive curiosity.\"\n\nZhao Wei only now took notice of Laurence's clothing, with an expression that made it perfectly plain he was nothing whatsoever involved; but he bore his defeat in reasonably good part. He said only, \"I hope you will be ready to leave shortly, Captain,\" with a small inclination of the head.\n\n\"And we may walk through the city itself?\" Temeraire asked, with much excitement, as he was scrubbed and sluiced clean after his breakfast, holding out his forehands one at a time with the talons outspread to be brushed vigorously with soapy water. His teeth even received the same treatment, a young serving-maid ducking inside his mouth to scrub the back ones.\n\n\"Of course?\" Zhao Wei said, showing some sincere puzzlement at the question.\n\n\"Perhaps you may see something of the training grounds of the dragons here, if there are any within the city bounds,\" Hammond suggested: he had accompanied them outside. \"I am sure you would find it of interest, Temeraire.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Temeraire said; his ruff was already up and half-quivering.\n\nHammond gave Laurence a significant glance, but Laurence chose to ignore it entirely: he had little desire to play the spy, or to prolong the tour, however interesting the sights might be. \"Are you quite ready, Temeraire?\" he asked instead.\n\nThey were transported to the shore by an elaborate but awkward barge, which wallowed uncertainly under Temeraire's weight even in the placidity of the tiny lake; Laurence kept close to the tiller and watched the lubberly pilot with a grim and censorious eye: he would dearly have loved to take her away from the fellow. The scant distance to shore took twice as long to cover as it ought to have. A substantial escort of armed guards had been detached from their patrols on the island to accompany them on the tour. Most of these fanned out ahead to force a clear path through the streets, but some ten kept close on Laurence's heels, jostling one another out of any kind of formation in what seemed to be an attempt to keep him blocked almost by a human wall from wandering away.\n\nZhao Wei took them through another of the elaborate red-and-gold gateways, this one set in a fortified wall and yielding onto a very broad avenue. It was manned by several guards in the Imperial livery, as well as by two dragons also under gear: one of the by-now-familiar red ones, and the other a brilliant green with red markings. Their captains were sitting together sipping tea under an awning, their padded jerkins removed against the day's heat, and both were women.\n\n\"I see you have women captains also,\" Laurence said to Zhao Wei. \"Do they serve with particular breeds, then?\"\n\n\"Women are companions to those dragons who go into the army,\" Zhao Wei said. \"Naturally only the lower breeds would choose to do that sort of work. Over there, that green one is one of the Emerald Glass. They are too lazy and slow to do well on the examinations, and the Scarlet Flower breed all like fighting too much, so they are not good for anything else.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to say that only women serve in your aerial corps?\" Laurence asked, sure he had misunderstood; yet Zhao Wei only nodded a confirmation. \"But what reason can there be for such a policy; surely you do not ask women to serve in your infantry, or navy?\" Laurence protested.\n\nHis dismay was evident, and Zhao Wei, perhaps feeling a need to defend his nation's unusual practice, proceeded to narrate the legend which was its foundation. The details were of course romanticized: a girl had supposedly disguised herself as a man to fight in her father's stead, had become companion to a military dragon and saved the empire by winning a great battle; as a consequence, the Emperor of the time had pronounced girls acceptable for service with dragons.\n\nBut these colorful exaggerations aside, it seemed that the nation's policy itself was accurately described: in times of conscription, the head of each family had at one time been required to serve or send a child in his stead. Girls being considerably less valued than boys, they had become the preferred choice to fill out the quota when possible. As they could only serve in the aerial corps, they had come to dominate this branch of the service until eventually the force became exclusive.\n\nThe telling of the legend, complete with recitation of its traditional poetic version, which Laurence suspected lost a great deal of color in the translation, carried them past the gate and some distance along the avenue towards a broad grey-flagged plaza set back from the road itself, and full of children and hatchlings. The boys sat cross-legged on the floor in front, the hatchlings coiled up neatly behind, and all together in a queer mixture of childish voices and the more resonant draconic tones were parroting a human teacher who stood on a podium in front, reading loudly from a great book and beckoning the students to repeat after every line.\n\nZhao Wei waved his hand towards them. \"You wanted to see our schools. This is a new class, of course; they are only just beginning to study the Analects.\"\n\nLaurence was privately baffled at the notion of subjecting dragons to study and written examinations. \"They do not seem paired off,\" he said, studying the group.\n\nZhao Wei looked blankly at him, and Laurence clarified, \"I mean, the boys are not sitting with their own hatchlings, and the children seem rather young for them, indeed.\"\n\n\"Oh, those dragonets are much too young to have chosen any companions yet,\" Zhao Wei said. \"They are only a few weeks old. When they have lived fifteen months, then they will be ready to choose, and the boys will be older.\"\n\nLaurence halted in surprise, and turned to stare at the little hatchlings again; he had always heard that dragons had to be tamed directly at hatching, to keep them from becoming feral and escaping into the wild, but this seemed plainly contradicted by the Chinese example. Temeraire said, \"It must be very lonely. I would not have liked to be without Laurence when I hatched, at all.\" He lowered his head and nudged Laurence with his nose. \"And it would also be very tiresome to have to hunt all the time for yourself when you are first hatched; I was always hungry,\" he added, more prosaically.\n\n\"Of course the hatchlings do not have to hunt for themselves,\" Zhao Wei said. \"They must study. There are dragons who tend the eggs and feed the young. That is much better than having a person do it. Otherwise a dragonet could not help but become attached, before he was wise enough to properly judge the character and virtues of his proposed companion.\"\n\nThis was a pointed remark indeed, and Laurence answered it coolly, \"I suppose that may be a concern, if you have less regulation of how men are to be chosen for such an opportunity. Among us, of course, a man must ordinarily serve for many years in the Corps before he can be considered worthy even to be presented to a hatchling. In such circumstances, it seems to me that an early attachment such as you decry may be instead the foundation of a lasting deeper affection, more rewarding to both parties.\"\n\nThey continued on into the city proper, and now with a view of his surroundings from a more ordinary perspective than from the air, Laurence was struck afresh by the great breadth of the streets, which seemed to almost have been designed with dragons in mind. They gave the city a feeling of spaciousness altogether different from London; though the absolute number of people was, he guessed, nearly equal. Temeraire was here more staring than stared-at; the populace of the capital were evidently used to the presence of the more exalted breeds, while he had never been out into a city before, and his head craned nearly in a loop around his own neck as he tried to look in three directions at once.\n\nGuards roughly pushed ordinary travelers out of the way of green sedan-chairs, carrying mandarins on official duties. Along one broad way a wedding procession brilliant with scarlet and gold were winding their shouting, clapping way through the streets, with musicians and spitting fireworks in their train and the bride well-concealed in a draped chair: a wealthy match to judge by the elaborate proceedings. Occasional mules plodded along under cartloads, inured to the presence of the dragons, their hooves clopping along the stones; but Laurence did not see any horses on the main avenues, nor carriages: likely they could not be tamed to bear the presence of so many dragons. The air smelled quite differently: none of the sour grassy stench of manure and horse piss inescapable in London, but instead the faintly sulfurous smell of dragon waste, more pronounced when the wind blew from the northeast; Laurence suspected some larger cesspools lay in that quarter of the city.\n\nAnd everywhere, everywhere dragons: the blue ones, most common, were engaged in the widest variety of tasks. In addition to those Laurence saw ferrying people about with their carrying harnesses, others bore loads of freight; but a sizable number also seemed to be traveling alone on more important business, wearing collars of varying colors, much like the different colors of the mandarins' jewels. Zhao Wei confirmed that these were signifiers of rank, and the dragons so adorned members of the civil service. \"The Shen-lung are like people, some are clever and some are lazy,\" he said, and added, to Laurence's great interest, \"Many superior breeds have risen from the best of them, and the wisest may even be honored with an Imperial mating.\" Dozens of other breeds also were to be seen, some with and others without human companions, engaged on many errands. Once two Imperial dragons came by going in the opposite direction, and inclined their heads to Temeraire politely as they passed; they were adorned with scarves of red silk knotted and wrapped in chains of gold and sewn all over with small pearls, very elegant, to which Temeraire gave a sidelong covetous eye.\n\nThey came shortly into a market district, the stores lavishly decorated with carving and gilt, and full of goods. Silks of glorious color and texture, some of much finer quality than anything Laurence had ever seen in London; great skeins and wrapped yards of the plain blue cotton as yarn and cloth, in different grades of quality both by thickness and by the intensity of the dye. And porcelain, which in particular caught Laurence's attention; unlike his father, he was no connoisseur of the art, but the precision in the blue-and-white designs seemed also superior to those dishes which he had seen imported, and the colored dishes particularly lovely.\n\n\"Temeraire, will you ask if he would take gold?\" he asked; Temeraire was peering into the shop with much interest, while the merchant eyed his looming head in the doorway anxiously; this at least seemed one place even in China where dragons were not quite welcome. The merchant looked doubtful, and addressed some questions to Zhao Wei; after this, he consented at least to take a half-guinea and inspect it. He rapped it on the side of the table and then called in his son from a back room: having few teeth left himself, he gave it to the younger man to bite upon. A woman seated in the back peeped around the corner, interested by the noise, and was admonished loudly and without effect until she stared her fill at Laurence and withdrew again; but her voice came from the back room stridently, so she seemed also to be participating in the debate.\n\nAt last the merchant seemed satisfied, but when Laurence picked up the vase which he had been examining, he immediately jumped forward and took it away, with a torrent of words; motioning Laurence to stay, he went into the back room. \"He says that is not worth so much,\" Temeraire explained.\n\n\"But I have only given him half a pound,\" Laurence protested; the man came back carrying a much larger vase, in a deep, nearly glowing red, shading delicately to a pure white at the top, and with an almost mirrored gloss. He put it down on the table and they all looked at it with admiration; even Zhao Wei did not withhold a murmur of approval, and Temeraire said, \"Oh, that is very pretty.\"\n\nLaurence pressed another few guineas on the shopkeeper with some difficulty, and still felt guilty at carrying it away, swathed in many protective layers of cotton rags; he had never seen a piece so lovely before, and he was already anxious for its survival through the long journey. Emboldened by this first success, he embarked on other purchases, of silk and other porcelain, and after that a small pendant of jade, which Zhao Wei, his fa\u00e7ade of disdain gradually yielding to enthusiasm for the shopping expedition, pointed out to him, explaining that the symbols upon it were the start of the poem about the legendary woman dragon-soldier. It was apparently a good-luck symbol often bought for a girl about to embark upon such a career. Laurence rather thought Jane Roland would like it, and added it to the growing pile; very soon Zhao Wei had to detail several of his soldiers to carry the various packages: they no longer seemed so concerned about Laurence's potential escape as about his loading them down like cart-horses.\n\nPrices for many of the goods seemed considerably lower than Laurence was used to, in general; more than could be accounted for by the cost of freight. This alone was not a surprise, after hearing the Company commissioners in Macao talk about the rapacity of the local mandarins and the bribes they demanded, on top of the state duties. But the difference was so high that Laurence had to revise significantly upwards his guesses of the degree of extortion. \"It is a great pity,\" Laurence said to Temeraire, as they came to the end of the avenue. \"If only the trade were allowed to proceed openly, I suppose these merchants could make a much better living, and the craftsmen, too; having to send all their wares through Canton is what allows the mandarins there to be so unreasonable. Probably they do not even want to bother, if they can sell the goods here, so we receive only the dregs of their market.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they do not want to sell the nicest pieces so far away. That is a very pleasant smell,\" Temeraire said, approvingly, as they crossed a small bridge into another district, surrounded by a narrow moat of water and a low stone wall. Open shallow trenches full of smoldering coals lined the street to either side, with animals cooking over them, spitted on metal spears and being basted with great swabs by sweating, half-naked men: oxen, pigs, sheep, deer, horses, and smaller, less-identifiable creatures; Laurence did not look very closely. The sauces dripped and scorched upon the stones, raising thick wafting clouds of aromatic smoke. Only a handful of people were buying here, nimbly dodging among the dragons who made up the better part of the clientele.\n\nTemeraire had eaten heartily that morning: a couple of young venison, with some stuffed ducks as a relish; he did not ask to eat, but looked a little wistfully at a smaller purple dragon eating roast suckling pigs off a skewer. But down a smaller alley Laurence also saw a tired-looking blue dragon, his hide marked with old sores from the silk carrying-harness he wore, turning sadly away from a beautifully roasted cow and pointing instead at a small, rather burnt sheep left off to the side: he took it away to a corner and began eating it very slowly, stretching it out, and he did not disdain the offal or the bones.\n\nIt was natural that if dragons were expected to earn their bread, there should be some less fortunate than others; but Laurence felt it somehow criminal to see one going hungry, particularly when there was so much extravagant waste at their residence and elsewhere. Temeraire did not notice, his gaze fixed on the displays. They came out of the district over another small bridge which led them back onto the broad avenue where they had begun. Temeraire sighed deeply with pleasure, releasing the aroma only slowly from his nostrils.\n\nLaurence, for his part, was fallen quiet; the sight had dispelled his natural fascination with all the novelty of their surroundings and the natural interest inherent in a foreign capital of such extents, and without such distraction he was inescapably forced to recognize the stark contrast in the treatment of dragons. The city streets were not wider than in London by some odd coincidence, or a question of taste, or even for the greater grandeur which they offered; but plainly designed that dragons might live in full harmony with men, and that this design was accomplished, to the benefit of all parties, he could not dispute: the case of misery which he had seen served rather to illustrate the general good.\n\nThe dinner-hour was hard upon them, and Zhao Wei turned their route back towards the island; Temeraire also grown quieter as they left the market precincts behind, and they walked along in silence until they reached the gateway; there pausing he looked back over his shoulder at the city, its activity undiminished. Zhao Wei caught the look and said something to him in Chinese. \"It is very nice,\" Temeraire answered him, and added, \"but I cannot compare it: I have never walked in London, or even in Dover.\"\n\nThey took their leave from Zhao Wei briefly, outside the pavilion, and went in again together. Laurence sat heavily down upon a wooden bench, while Temeraire began to pace restlessly back and forth, his tail-tip switching back and forth with agitation. \"It is not true, at all,\" he burst out at last. \"Laurence, we have gone everywhere we liked; I have been in the streets and to shops, and no one has run away or been frightened: not in the south and not here. People are not afraid of dragons, not in the least.\"\n\n\"I must beg your pardon,\" Laurence said quietly. \"I confess I was mistaken: plainly men can be accustomed. I expect with so many dragons about, all men here are raised with close experience of them, and lose their fear. But I assure you I have not lied to you deliberately; the same is not true in Britain. It must be a question of use.\"\n\n\"If use can make men stop being afraid, I do not see why we should be kept penned up so they may continue to be frightened,\" Temeraire said.\n\nTo this Laurence could make no answer, and did not try; instead he retreated to his own room to take a little dinner; Temeraire lay down for his customary afternoon nap in a brooding, restless coil, while Laurence sat alone, picking unenthusiastically over his plate. Hammond came to inquire after what they had seen; Laurence answered him as briefly as he could, his irritation of spirit ill-concealed, and in short order Hammond went away rather flushed and thin-lipped.\n\n\"Has that fellow been pestering you?\" Granby said, looking in.\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said tiredly, getting up to rinse his hands in the basin he had filled from the pond. \"Indeed, I am afraid I was plainly rude to him just now, and he did not deserve it in the least: he was only curious how they raise the dragons here, so he could argue with them that Temeraire's treatment in England has not been so ill.\"\n\n\"Well, as far as I am concerned he deserved a trimming,\" Granby said. \"I could have pulled out my hair when I woke up and he told me smug as a deacon that he had packed you off alone with some Chinaman; not that Temeraire would let any harm come to you, but anything could happen in a crowd, after all.\"\n\n\"No, nothing of the kind was attempted at all; our guide was a little rude to begin, but perfectly civil by the end.\" Laurence glanced over at the bundles stacked in the corner, where Zhao Wei's men had left them. \"I begin to think Hammond was right, John; and it was all old-maid flutters and imagination,\" he said, unhappily; it seemed to him, after the long day's tour, that the prince hardly needed to stoop to murder, with the many advantages of his country to serve as gentler and no less persuasive arguments.\n\n\"More likely Yongxing gave up trying aboard ship, and has just been waiting to get you settled in under his eyes,\" Granby said pessimistically. \"This is a nice enough cottage, I suppose, but there are a damned lot of guards skulking about.\"\n\n\"All the more reason not to fear,\" Laurence said. \"If they meant to kill me, they could have done so by now, a dozen times over.\"\n\n\"Temeraire would hardly stay here if the Emperor's own guards killed you, and him already suspicious,\" Granby said. \"Most like he would do his best to kill the lot of them, and then I hope find the ship again and go back home; though it takes them very hard, losing a captain, and he might just as easily go and run into the wild.\"\n\n\"We can argue ourselves in circles this way forever.\" Laurence lifted his hands impatiently and let them drop again. \"At least today, the only wish which I saw put in action was to make a desirable impression upon Temeraire.\" He did not say that this goal had been thoroughly accomplished and with little effort; he did not know how to draw a contrast against the treatment of dragons in the West without sounding at best a complainer and at worst nearly disloyal: he was conscious afresh that he had not been raised an aviator, and he was unwilling to say anything that might wound Granby's feelings.\n\n\"You are a damned sight too quiet,\" Granby said, unexpectedly, and Laurence gave a guilty start: he had been sitting and brooding in silence. \"I am not surprised he took a liking to the city, he is always on fire for anything new; but is it that bad?\"\n\n\"It is not only the city,\" Laurence said finally. \"It is the respect which is given to dragons; and not only to himself: they all of them have a great deal of liberty, as a matter of course. I think I saw a hundred dragons at least today, wandering through the streets, and no one took any notice of them.\"\n\n\"And God forbid we should take a flight over Regent's Park but we have shrieks of murder and fire and flood all at once, and ten memoranda sent us from the Admiralty,\" Granby agreed, with a quick flash of resentment. \"Not that we could set down in London if we wanted to: the streets are too narrow for anything bigger than a Winchester. From what we have seen even just from the air, this place is laid out with a good deal more sense. It is no wonder they have ten beasts to our one, if not more.\"\n\nLaurence was deeply relieved to find Granby taking no offense against him, and so willing to discuss the subject. \"John, do you know, here they do not assign handlers until the dragon is fifteen months of age; until then they are raised by other dragons.\"\n\n\"Well, that seems a rotten waste to me, letting dragons sit around nursemaiding,\" Granby said. \"But I suppose they can afford it. Laurence, when I think what we could do with a round dozen of those big scarlet fellows that they have sitting around getting fat everywhere; it makes you weep.\"\n\n\"Yes; but what I meant to say was, they seem not to have any ferals at all,\" Laurence said. \"Is it not one in ten that we lose?\"\n\n\"Oh, not nearly so many, not in modern times,\" Granby said. \"We used to lose Longwings by the dozen, until Queen Elizabeth had the bright idea of setting her serving-maid to one and we found they would take to girls like lambs, and then it turned out the Xenicas would, too. And Winchesters often used to nip off like lightning before you could get a stitch of harness on them, but nowadays we hatch them inside and let them flap about for a bit before bringing out the food. Not more than one in thirty, at the most, if you do not count the eggs we lose in the breeding grounds: the ferals already there hide them from us sometimes.\"\n\nTheir conversation was interrupted by a servant; Laurence tried to wave the man away, but with apologetic bows and a tug on Laurence's sleeve, he made clear he wished to lead them out to the main dining chamber: Sun Kai, unexpectedly, had come to take tea with them.\n\nLaurence was in no mood for company, and Hammond, who joined them to serve as translator, as yet remained stiff and unfriendly; they made an awkward and mostly silent company. Sun Kai inquired politely about their accommodations, and then about their enjoyment of the country, which Laurence answered very shortly; he could not help some suspicion that this might be some attempt at probing Temeraire's state of mind, and still more so when Sun Kai at last came however to the purpose for his visit.\n\n\"Lung Tien Qian sends you an invitation,\" Sun Kai said. \"She hopes you and Temeraire will take tea with her tomorrow in the Ten Thousand Lotus palace, in the morning before the flowers open.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir, for bearing the message,\" Laurence said, polite but flat. \"Temeraire is anxious to know her better.\" The invitation could hardly be refused, though he was by no means happy to see further lures thrown out to Temeraire.\n\nSun Kai nodded equably. \"She, too, is anxious to know more of her offspring's condition. Her judgment carries much weight with the Son of Heaven.\" He sipped his tea and added, \"Perhaps you will wish to tell her of your nation, and the respect which Lung Tien Xiang has won there.\"\n\nHammond translated this, and then added, quickly enough that Sun Kai might think it part of the translation of his own words, \"Sir, I trust you see this is a tolerably clear hint. You must make every effort to win her favor.\"\n\n\"I cannot see why Sun Kai would give me any advice at all in the first place,\" Laurence said, after the envoy had left them again. \"He has always been polite enough, but not what anyone would call friendly.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not much advice, is it?\" Granby said. \"He only said to tell her that Temeraire is happy: that's hardly something you couldn't have thought of alone, and it makes a polite noise.\"\n\n\"Yes; but we would not have known to value her good opinion quite so highly, or think this meeting of any particular importance,\" Hammond said. \"No; for a diplomat, he has said a great deal indeed, as much as he could, I imagine, without committing himself quite openly to us. This is most heartening,\" he added, with what Laurence felt was excessive optimism, likely born of frustration: Hammond had so far written five times to the Emperor's ministers, to ask for a meeting where he might present his credentials: every note had been returned unopened, and a flat refusal had met his request to go out from the island to meet the handful of other Westerners in the town.\n\n\"She cannot be so very maternal, if she agreed to send him so far away in the first place,\" Laurence said to Granby, shortly after dawn the next morning; he was inspecting his best coat and trousers, which he had set out to air overnight, in the early light: his cravat needed pressing, and he thought he had noticed some frayed threads on his best shirt.\n\n\"They usually aren't, you know,\" Granby said. \"Or at least, not after the hatching, though they get broody over the eggs when they are first laid. Not that they don't care at all, but after all, a dragonet can take the head off a goat five minutes after it breaks the shell; they don't need mothering. Here, let me have that; I can't press without scorching, but I can do up a seam.\" He took the shirt and needle from Laurence and set to repairing the tear in the cuff.\n\n\"Still, she would not care to see him neglected, I am sure,\" Laurence said. \"Though I wonder that she is so deeply in the Emperor's counsel; I would have imagined that if they sent any Celestial egg away, it would only have been of a lesser line. Thank you, Dyer; set it there,\" he said, as the young runner came in bearing the hot iron from the stove.\n\nHis appearance polished so far as he could manage, Laurence joined Temeraire in the courtyard; the striped dragon had returned to escort them. The flight was only a short one, but curious: they flew so low they could see small clumps of ivy and rootlings that had managed to establish themselves upon the yellow-tiled roofs of the palace buildings, and see the colors of the jewels upon the mandarins' hats as the ministers went hurrying through the enormous courtyards and walkways below, despite the early hour of the morning.\n\nThe particular palace lay within the walls of the immense Forbidden City, easily identifiable from aloft: two huge dragon pavilions on either side of a long pond almost choked with water-lilies, the flowers still closed within their buds. Wide sturdy bridges spanned the pond, arched high for decoration, and a courtyard flagged with black marble lay to the south, just now being touched with first light.\n\nThe yellow-striped dragon landed here and bowed them along; as Temeraire padded by, Laurence could see other dragons stirring in the early light under the eaves of the great pavilions. An ancient Celestial was creeping stiffly out from the bay farthest to the southeast, the tendrils about his jaw long and drooping as mustaches. His enormous ruff was leached of color, and his hide gone so translucent the black was now redly tinted with the color of the flesh and blood beneath. Another of the yellow-striped dragons paced him carefully, nudging him occasionally with his nose towards the sun-drenched courtyard; the Celestial's eyes were a milky blue, the pupils barely visible beneath the cataracts.\n\nA few other dragons emerged also: Imperials rather than Celestials, lacking the ruff and tendrils, and with more variety in their hue: some were as black as Temeraire, but others a deep indigo-washed blue; all very dark, however, except for Lien, who emerged at the same time out of a separate and private pavilion, set back and alone among the trees, and came to the pond to drink. With her white hide, she looked almost unearthly among the rest; Laurence felt it would be difficult to fault anyone for indulging in superstition towards her, and indeed the other dragons consciously gave her a wide berth. She ignored them entirely in return and yawned wide and red, shaking her head vigorously to scatter away the clinging drops of water, and then paced away into the gardens in solitary dignity.\n\nQian herself was waiting for them at one of the central pavilions, flanked by two Imperial dragons of particularly graceful appearance, all of them adorned with elaborate jewels. She inclined her head courteously and flicked a talon against a standing bell nearby to summon servants; the attending dragons shifted their places to make room for Laurence and Temeraire on her right, and the human servants brought Laurence a comfortable chair. Qian made no immediate conversation, but gestured towards the lake; the line of the morning sun was now traveling swiftly northward over the water as the sun crept higher, and the lotus buds were unfolding in almost balletic progression; they numbered literally in the thousands, and made a spectacle of glowing pink color against the deep green of their leaves.\n\nAs the last unfurled flowers came to rest, the dragons all tapped their claws against the flagstones in a clicking noise, a kind of applause. Now a small table was brought for Laurence and great porcelain bowls painted in blue and white for the dragons, and a black, pungent tea poured for them all. To Laurence's surprise the dragons drank with enjoyment, even going so far as to lick up the leaves in the bottom of their cups. He himself found the tea curious and over-strong in flavor: almost the aroma of smoked meat, though he drained his cup politely as well. Temeraire drank his own enthusiastically and very fast, and then sat back with a peculiar uncertain expression, as though trying to decide whether he had liked it or not.\n\n\"You have come a very long way,\" Qian said, addressing Laurence; an unobtrusive servant had stepped forward to her side to translate. \"I hope you are enjoying your visit with us, but surely you must miss your home?\"\n\n\"An officer in the King's service must be used to go where he is required, madam,\" Laurence said, wondering if this was meant as a suggestion. \"I have not spent more than a sixmonth at my own family's home since I took ship the first time, and that was as a boy of twelve.\"\n\n\"That is very young, to go so far away,\" Qian said. \"Your mother must have had great anxiety for you.\"\n\n\"She had the acquaintance of Captain Mountjoy, with whom I served, and we knew his family well,\" Laurence said, and seized the opening to add, \"You yourself had no such advantage, I regret, on being parted from Temeraire; I would be glad to satisfy you on whatever points I might, if only in retrospect.\"\n\nShe turned her head to the attending dragons. \"Perhaps Mei and Shu will take Xiang to see the flowers more closely,\" she said, using Temeraire's Chinese name. The two Imperials inclined their heads and stood up expectantly waiting for Temeraire.\n\nTemeraire looked a little worriedly at Laurence, and said, \"They are very nice from here?\"\n\nLaurence felt rather anxious himself at the prospect of a solitary interview, with so little sense of what might please Qian, but he mustered a smile for Temeraire and said, \"I will wait here with your mother; I am sure you will enjoy them.\"\n\n\"Be sure not to bother Grandfather or Lien,\" Qian added to the Imperial dragons, who nodded as they led Temeraire away.\n\nThe servants refilled his cup and Qian's bowl from a fresh kettle, and she lapped at it in a more leisurely way. Presently she said, \"I understand Temeraire has been serving in your army.\"\n\nThere was unmistakably a note of censure in her voice, which did not need translation. \"Among us, all those dragons who can, serve in defense of their home: that is no dishonor, but the fulfillment of our duty,\" Laurence said. \"I assure you we could not value him more highly. There are very few dragons among us: even the least are greatly prized, and Temeraire is of the highest order.\"\n\nShe rumbled low and thoughtfully. \"Why are there so few dragons, that you must ask your most valued to fight?\"\n\n\"We are a small nation, nothing like your own,\" Laurence said. \"Only a handful of smaller wild breeds were native to the British Isles, when the Romans came and began to tame them. Since then, by cross-breeding our lines have multiplied, and thanks to careful tending of our cattle herds, we have been able to increase our numbers, but still we cannot support nearly so many as you here possess.\"\n\nShe lowered her head and regarded him keenly. \"And among the French, how are dragons treated?\"\n\nInstinctively Laurence was certain British treatment of dragons was superior and more generous than that of any other Western nation; but he was unhappily aware he would have considered it also superior to China's, if he had not come and already seen plainly otherwise. A month before, he could easily have spoken with pride of how British dragons were cared for. Like all of them, Temeraire had been fed and housed on raw meat and in bare clearings, with constant training and little entertainment. Laurence thought he might as well brag of raising children in a pigsty to the Queen, as speak of such conditions to this elegant dragon in her flower-decked palace. If the French were no better, they were hardly worse; and he would have thought very little of anyone who covered the faults in his own service by blackening another's.\n\n\"In ordinary course, the practices in France are much the same as ours, I believe,\" he said at last. \"I do not know what promises were made you, in Temeraire's particular case, but I can tell you that Emperor Napoleon himself is a military man: even as we left England he was in the field, and any dragon who was his companion would hardly remain behind while he went to war.\"\n\n\"You are yourself descended from kings, I understand,\" Qian said unexpectedly, and turning her head spoke to one of the servants, who hurried forward with a long rice-paper scroll and unrolled it upon the table: with amazement, Laurence saw it was a copy, in a much finer hand and larger, of the familial chart which he had drawn so long ago at the New Year banquet. \"This is correct?\" she inquired, seeing him so startled.\n\nIt had never occurred to him that the information would come to her ears, nor that she would find it of interest. But he at once swallowed any reluctance: he would puff off his consequence to her day and night if it would win her approval. \"My family is indeed an old one, and proud; you see I myself have gone into service in the Corps, and count it an honor,\" he said, though guilt pricked at him; certainly no one in the circles of his birth would have called it as much.\n\nQian nodded, apparently satisfied, and sipped again at her tea while the servant carried the chart away again. Laurence cast about for something else to say. \"If I may be so bold, I think I may with confidence say on behalf of my Government that we would gladly agree to whatever conditions the French accepted, on your first sending Temeraire's egg to them.\"\n\n\"Many considerations besides remain\" was all she said in response to this overture, however.\n\nTemeraire and the two Imperials were already coming back from their walk, Temeraire having evidently set a rather hurried pace; at the same time, the white dragon came walking past as she returned to her own quarters with Yongxing now by her side, speaking with her in a low voice, one hand affectionately resting upon her side. She walked slowly, so he could keep pace, and also the several attendants trailing reluctantly after burdened with large scrolls and several books: still the Imperials held well back and waited to let them pass before coming back into the pavilion.\n\n\"Qian, why is she that color?\" Temeraire asked, peeking back out at Lien after she had gone by. \"She looks so very strange.\"\n\n\"Who can understand the workings of Heaven?\" Qian said repressively. \"Do not be disrespectful. Lien is a great scholar; she was chuang-yuan, many years ago, though she did not need to submit to the examinations at all, being a Celestial, and also she is your elder cousin. She was sired by Chu, who was hatched of Xian, as was I.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, abashed. More timidly he asked, \"Who was my sire?\"\n\n\"Lung Qin Gao,\" Qian said, and twitched her tail; she looked rather pleased by the recollection. \"He is an Imperial dragon, and is at present in the south in Hangzhou: his companion is a prince of the third rank, and they are visiting the West Lake.\"\n\nLaurence was startled to learn Celestials could so breed true with Imperials: but on his tentative inquiry Qian confirmed as much. \"That is how our line continues. We cannot breed among ourselves,\" she said, and added, quite unconscious of how she was staggering him, \"There are only myself and Lien now, who are female, and besides Grandfather and Chu, there are only Chuan and Ming and Zhi, and we are all cousins at most.\"\n\n\"Only eight of them, altogether?\" Hammond stared and sat down blankly: as well he might.\n\n\"I don't see how they can possibly continue on like that forever,\" Granby said. \"Are they so mad to keep them only for the Emperors, that they'll risk losing the whole line?\"\n\n\"Evidently from time to time a pair of Imperials will give birth to a Celestial,\" Laurence said, between bites; he was sitting down at last to his painfully late dinner, in his bedroom: seven o'clock and full darkness outside, and he had swelled himself near to bursting with tea in an effort to stave off hunger over the visit which had stretched to many hours. \"That is how the oldest fellow there now was born; and he is sire to the lot of them, going back four or five generations.\"\n\n\"I cannot make it out in the least,\" Hammond said, paying no attention to the rest of the conversation. \"Eight Celestials; why on earth would they ever have given him away? Surely, at least for breeding\u2014I cannot, I cannot credit it; Bonaparte cannot have impressed them so, not secondhand and from a continent away. There must be something else, something which I have not grasped. Gentlemen, you will excuse me,\" he added, distractedly, and rose and left them alone. Laurence finished his meal without much appetite and set down his chopsticks.\n\n\"She did not say no to our keeping him, at any rate,\" Granby said into the silence, but dismally.\n\nLaurence said, after a moment, more to quell his own inner voices, \"I could not be so selfish to even try and deny him the pleasure of making the better acquaintance of his own kindred, or learning about his native land.\"\n\n\"It is all stuff and nonsense in the end, Laurence,\" Granby said, trying to comfort him. \"A dragon won't be parted from his captain for all the gems in Araby, and all the calves in Christendom, too, for that matter.\"\n\nLaurence rose and went to the window. Temeraire had curled up for the night upon the heated courtyard stones once again. The moon had risen, and he was very beautiful to look at in the silver light, with the blossom-heavy trees on either side hanging low above him and a dappled reflection in the pond, all his scales gleaming.\n\n\"That is true; a dragon will endure a great deal sooner than be parted from his captain. It does not follow that a decent man would ask it of him,\" Laurence said, very low, and let the curtain fall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Temeraire himself was quiet the day after their visit. Laurence went out to sit with him, and gazed at him with anxiety; but he did not know how to broach the subject of what distressed him, nor what to say. If Temeraire was grown discontented with his lot in England, and wished to stay, there was nothing to be done. Hammond would hardly argue, so long as he was able to complete his negotiations; he cared a good deal more for establishing a permanent embassy and winning some sort of treaty than for getting Temeraire home. Laurence was by no means inclined to force the issue early.\n\nQian had told Temeraire, on their departure, to make himself free of the palace, but the same invitation had not been extended to Laurence. Temeraire did not ask permission to go, but he looked wistfully into the distance, and paced the courtyard in circles, and refused Laurence's offer to read together. At last growing sick of himself, Laurence said, \"Would you wish to go and see Qian again? I am sure she would welcome your visit.\"\n\n\"She did not ask you,\" Temeraire said, but his wings fanned halfway out, irresolute.\n\n\"There can be no offense intended in a mother liking to see her offspring privately,\" Laurence said, and this excuse was sufficient; Temeraire very nearly glowed with pleasure and set off at once. He returned only late that evening, jubilant and full of plans to return.\n\n\"They have started teaching me to write,\" he said. \"I have already learned twenty-five characters today; shall I show you?\"\n\n\"By all means,\" Laurence answered, and not only to humor him; grimly he set himself to studying the symbols Temeraire laid down, and copying them down as best he could with a quill instead of a brush while Temeraire pronounced them for his benefit, though he looked rather doubtful at Laurence's attempts to reproduce the sounds. He did not make much progress, but the effort alone made Temeraire so very happy that he could not begrudge it, and concealed the intense strain which he had suffered under the entire seeming endless day.\n\nInfuriatingly, however, Laurence had to contend not only with his own feelings, but with Hammond on the subject as well. \" One visit, in your company, could serve as reassurance and give her the opportunity of making your acquaintance,\" the diplomat said. \"But this continued solitary visiting cannot be allowed. If he comes to prefer China and agrees of his own volition to stay, we will lose any hope of success: they will pack us off at once.\"\n\n\"That is enough, sir,\" Laurence said angrily. \"I have no intention of insulting Temeraire by suggesting that his natural wish to become acquainted with his kind in any way represents a lack of fidelity.\"\n\nHammond pressed the point, and the conversation grew heated; at last Laurence concluded by saying, \"If I must make this plain, so be it: I do not consider myself as under your command. I have been given no instructions to that effect, and your attempt to assert an authority without official foundation is entirely improper.\"\n\nTheir relations had already been tolerably cool; now they became frigid, and Hammond did not come to have dinner with Laurence and his officers that night. The next day, however, he came early into the pavilion, before Temeraire had left on his visit, accompanied by Prince Yongxing. \"His Highness has been kind enough to come and see how we do; I am sure you will join me in welcoming him,\" he said, with rather hard emphasis on the last words, and Laurence rather reluctantly rose to make his most formal leg.\n\n\"You are very kind, sir; as you see you find us very comfortable,\" he said, with stiff politeness, and wary; he still did not trust Yongxing's intentions in the least.\n\nYongxing inclined his head a very little, equally stiff and unsmiling, and then turned and beckoned to a young boy following him: no more than thirteen years of age, wearing wholly nondescript garments of the usual indigo-dyed cotton. Glancing up at him, the boy nodded and walked past Laurence, directly up to Temeraire, and made a formal greeting: he raised his hands up in front of himself, fingers wrapped over one another, and inclined his head, saying something in Chinese at the same time. Temeraire looked a little puzzled, and Hammond interjected hastily, \"Tell him yes, for Heaven's sake.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Temeraire, uncertainly, but said something to the boy, evidently affirmative. Laurence was startled to see the boy climb up onto Temeraire's foreleg, and arrange himself there. Yongxing's face was as always difficult to read, but there was a suggestion of satisfaction to his mouth; then he said, \"We will go inside and take tea,\" and turned away.\n\n\"Be sure not to let him fall,\" Hammond added hastily to Temeraire, with an anxious look at the boy, who was sitting cross-legged, with great poise, and seemed as likely to fall off as a Buddha statue to climb off its pediment.\n\n\"Roland,\" Laurence called; she and Dyer had been working their trigonometry in the back corner. \"Pray see if he would like some refreshment.\"\n\nShe nodded and went to talk to the boy in her broken Chinese while Laurence followed the other men across the courtyard and into the residence. Already the servants had hastily rearranged the furniture: a single draped chair for Yongxing, with a footstool, and armless chairs placed at right angles to it for Laurence and Hammond. They brought the tea with great ceremony and attention, and throughout the process Yongxing remained perfectly silent. Nor did he speak once the servants had at last withdrawn, but sipped at his tea, very slowly.\n\nHammond at length broke the silence with polite thanks for the comfort of their residence, and the attentions which they had received. \"The tour of the city, in particular, was a great kindness; may I ask, sir, if it was your doing?\"\n\nYongxing said, \"It was the Emperor's wish. Perhaps, Captain,\" he added, \"you were favorably impressed?\"\n\nIt was very little a question, and Laurence said, shortly, \"I was, sir; your city is remarkable.\" Yongxing smiled, a small dry twist of the lips, and did not say anything more, but then he scarcely needed to; Laurence looked away, all the memory of the coverts in England and the bitter contrast fresh in his mind.\n\nThey sat in dumb-show a while longer; Hammond ventured again, \"May I inquire as to the Emperor's health? We are most eager, sir, as you can imagine, to pay the King's respects to His Imperial Majesty, and to convey the letters which I bear.\"\n\n\"The Emperor is in Chengde,\" Yongxing said dismissively. \"He will not return to Peking soon; you will have to be patient.\"\n\nLaurence was increasingly angry. Yongxing's attempt to insinuate the boy into Temeraire's company was as blatant as any of the previous attempts to separate the two of them, and yet now Hammond was making not the least objection, and still trying to make polite conversation in the face of insulting rudeness. Pointedly, Laurence said, \"Your Highness's companion seems a very likely young man; may I inquire if he is your son?\"\n\nYongxing frowned at the question and said only, \"No,\" coldly.\n\nHammond, sensing Laurence's impatience, hastily intervened before Laurence could say anything more. \"We are of course only too happy to attend the Emperor's convenience; but I hope we may be granted some additional liberty, if the wait is likely to be long; at least as much as has been given the French ambassador. I am sure, sir, you have not forgotten their murderous attack upon us, at the outset of our journey, and I hope you will allow me to say, once again, that the interests of our nations march far more closely together than yours with theirs.\"\n\nUnchecked by any reply, Hammond went on; he spoke passionately and at length about the dangers of Napoleon's domination of Europe, the stifling of the trade which should otherwise bring great wealth to China, and the threat of an insatiable conqueror spreading his empire ever wider\u2014perhaps, he added, ending on their very doorstep, \"For Napoleon has already made one attempt, sir, to come at us in India, and he makes no secret that his ambition is to exceed Alexander. If he should ever be successful, you must realize his rapacity will not be satisfied there.\"\n\nThe idea that Napoleon should subdue Europe, conquer the Russian and the Ottoman Empires both, cross the Himalayas, establish himself in India, and still have energy left to wage war on China, was to Laurence a piece of exaggeration that would hardly convince anyone; and as for trade, he knew that argument carried no weight at all with Yongxing, who had so fervently spoken of China's self-sufficiency. Nevertheless the prince did not interrupt Hammond at all from beginning to end, listened to the entire long speech frowning, and then at the end of it, when Hammond concluded with a renewed plea to be granted the same freedoms as De Guignes, Yongxing received it in silence, sat a long time, and then said only, \"You have as much liberty as he does; anything more would be unsuitable.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Hammond said, \"perhaps you are unaware that we have not been permitted to leave the island, nor to communicate with any official even by letter.\"\n\n\"Neither is he permitted,\" Yongxing said. \"It is not proper for foreigners to wander through Peking, disrupting the affairs of the magistrates and the ministers: they have much to occupy them.\"\n\nHammond was left baffled by this reply, confusion writ plain on his face, and Laurence, for his part, had sat through enough; plainly Yongxing meant nothing but to waste their time, while the boy flattered and fawned over Temeraire. As the child was not his own son, Yongxing had surely chosen him from his relations especially for great charm of personality and instructed him to be as insinuating as ever he might. Laurence did not truly fear that Temeraire would take a preference to the boy, but he had no intention of sitting here playing the fool for the benefit of Yongxing's scheming.\n\n\"We cannot be leaving the children unattended this way,\" he said abruptly. \"You will excuse me, sir,\" and rose from the table already bowing.\n\nAs Laurence had suspected, Yongxing had no desire to sit and make conversation with Hammond except to provide the boy an open field, and he rose also to take his leave of them. They returned all together to the courtyard, where Laurence found, to his private satisfaction, that the boy had climbed down from Temeraire's arm and was engaged in a game of jacks with Roland and Dyer, all of them munching on ship's biscuit, and Temeraire had wandered out to the pier, to enjoy the breeze coming off the lake.\n\nYongxing spoke sharply, and the boy sprang up with a guilty expression; Roland and Dyer looked equally abashed, with glances towards their abandoned books. \"We thought it was only polite to be hospitable,\" Roland said hurriedly, looking to see how Laurence would take this.\n\n\"I hope he has enjoyed the visit,\" Laurence said, mildly, to their relief. \"Back to your work, now.\" They hurried back to their books, and, the boy called to heel, Yongxing swept away with a dissatisfied mien, exchanging a few words with Hammond in Chinese; Laurence gladly watched him go.\n\n\"At least we may be grateful that De Guignes is as restricted in his movements as we are,\" Hammond said after a moment. \"I cannot think Yongxing would bother to lie on the subject, though I cannot understand how\u2014\" He stopped in puzzlement and shook his head. \"Well, perhaps I may learn a little more tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Laurence said, and Hammond absently said, \"He said he would come again, at the same time; he means to make a regular visit of it.\"\n\n\"He may mean whatever he likes,\" Laurence said, angrily, at finding Hammond had thus meekly accepted further intrusions on his behalf, \"but I will not be playing attendance on him; and why you should choose to waste your time cultivating a man you know very well has not the least sympathy for us is beyond me.\"\n\nHammond, answered with some heat, \"Of course Yongxing has no natural sympathy for us; why should he or any other man here? Our work is to win them over, and if he is willing to give us the chance to persuade him, it is our duty to try, sir; I am surprised that the effort of remaining civil and drinking a little tea should so try your patience.\"\n\nLaurence snapped, \"And I am surprised to find you so unconcerned over this attempt at supplanting me, after all your earlier protests.\"\n\n\"What, with a twelve-year-old boy?\" Hammond said, so very incredulous it was nearly offensive. \"I, sir, in my turn, am astonished at your taking alarm now; and perhaps if you had not been so quick to dismiss my advice before, you should not have so much need to fear.\"\n\n\"I do not fear in the least,\" Laurence said, \"but neither am I disposed to tolerate so blatant an attempt, or to have us submit tamely to a daily invasion whose only purpose is to give offense.\"\n\n\"I will remind you, Captain, as you did me not so very long ago, that just as you are not under my authority, I am not under yours,\" Hammond said. \"The conduct of our diplomacy has very clearly been placed in my hands, and thank Heaven: if we were relying upon you, by now I dare say you would be blithely flying back to England, with half our trade in the Pacific sinking to the bottom of the ocean behind you.\"\n\n\"Very well; you may do as you like, sir,\" Laurence said, \"but you had best make plain to him that I do not mean to leave this prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of his alone with Temeraire anymore, and I think you will find him less eager to be persuaded afterwards; and do not imagine,\" he added, \"that I will tolerate having the boy let in when my back is turned, either.\"\n\n\"As you are disposed to think me a liar and an unscrupulous schemer, I see very little purpose in denying I should do any such thing,\" Hammond said angrily, coloring up.\n\nHe departed instantly, leaving Laurence still angry but ashamed and conscious of having been unfair; he would himself have called it grounds for a challenge. By the next morning, when from the pavilion he saw Yongxing going away with the boy, having evidently cut short the visit on being denied access to Temeraire, his guilt was sharp enough that he made some attempt to apologize, with little success: Hammond would have none of it.\n\n\"Whether he took offense at your refusing to join us, or whether you were correct about his aims, can make no difference now,\" he said, very coldly. \"If you will excuse me, I have letters to write,\" and so quitted the room.\n\nLaurence gave it up and instead went to say farewell to Temeraire, only to have his guilt and unhappiness both renewed at seeing in Temeraire's manner an almost furtive excitement, a very great eagerness to be gone. Hammond was hardly wrong: the idle flattery of a child was nothing to the danger of the company of Qian and the Imperial dragons, no matter how devious Yongxing's motives or how sincere Qian's; there was only less honest excuse for complaining of her.\n\nTemeraire would be gone for hours, but the house being small and the chambers separated mainly by screens of rice paper, Hammond's angry presence was nearly palpable inside, so Laurence stayed in the pavilion after he had gone, attending to his correspondence: unnecessarily, as it was now five months since he had received any letters, and little of any interest had occurred since the welcoming dinner party, now two weeks old; he was not disposed to write of the quarrel with Hammond.\n\nHe dozed off over the writing, and woke rather abruptly, nearly knocking heads with Sun Kai, who was bending over him and shaking him. \"Captain Laurence, you must wake up,\" Sun Kai was saying.\n\nLaurence said automatically, \"I beg your pardon; what is the matter?\" and then stared: Sun Kai had spoken in quite excellent English, with an accent more reminiscent of Italian than Chinese. \"Good Lord, have you been able to speak English all this time?\" he demanded, his mind leaping to every occasion on which Sun Kai had stood on the dragondeck, privy to all their conversations, and now revealed as having understood every word.\n\n\"There is no time at present for explanations,\" Sun Kai said. \"You must come with me at once: men are coming here to kill you, and all your companions also.\"\n\nIt was near on five o'clock in the afternoon, and the lake and trees, framed in the pavilion doors, were golden in the setting light; birds were speaking occasionally from up in the rafters where they nested. The remark, delivered in perfectly calm tones, was so ludicrous Laurence did not at first understand it, and then stood up in outrage. \"I am not going anywhere in response to such a threat, with so little explanation,\" he said, and raised his voice. \"Granby!\"\n\n\"Everything all right, sir?\" Blythe had been occupying himself in the neighboring courtyard on some busy-work, and now poked his head in, even as Granby came running.\n\n\"Mr. Granby, we are evidently to expect an attack,\" Laurence said. \"As this house does not admit of much security, we will take the small pavilion to the south, with the interior pond. Establish a lookout, and let us have fresh locks in all the pistols.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Granby said, and dashed away again; Blythe, in his customary silence, picked up the cutlasses he had been sharpening and offered Laurence one before wrapping up the others and carrying them with his whetstone to the pavilion.\n\nSun Kai shook his head. \"This is great foolishness,\" he said, following after Laurence. \"The very largest gang of hunhun are coming from the city. I have a boat waiting just here, and there is time yet for you and all your men to get your things and come away.\"\n\nLaurence inspected the pavilion entryway; as he had remembered, the pillars were made of stone rather than wood, and nearly two feet in diameter, very sturdy, and the walls of a smooth grey brick under their layer of red paint. The roof was of wood, which was a pity, but he thought the glazed tile would not catch fire easily. \"Blythe, will you see if you can arrange some elevation for Lieutenant Riggs and his riflemen out of those stones in the garden? Pray assist him, Willoughby; thank you.\"\n\nTurning around, he said to Sun Kai, \"Sir, you have not said where you would take me, nor who these assassins are, nor whence they have been sent; still less have you given us any reason to trust you. You have certainly deceived us so far as your knowledge of our language. Why you should so abruptly reverse yourself, I have no idea, and after the treatment which we have received, I am in no humor to put myself into your hands.\"\n\nHammond came with the other men, looking confused, and came to join Laurence, greeting Sun Kai in Chinese. \"May I inquire what is happening?\" he asked stiffly.\n\n\"Sun Kai has told me to expect another attempt at assassination,\" Laurence said. \"See if you can get anything more clear from him; in the meantime, I must assume we are shortly to come under attack, and make arrangements. He can speak perfect English,\" he added. \"You need not resort to Chinese.\" He left Sun Kai with a visibly startled Hammond, and joined Riggs and Granby at the entryway.\n\n\"If we could knock a couple of holes in this front wall, we could shoot down at any of them coming,\" Riggs said, tapping the brick. \"Otherwise, sir, we're best off laying down a barricade mid-room, and shooting as they come in; but then we can't have fellows with swords at the entryway.\"\n\n\"Lay and man the barricade,\" Laurence said. \"Mr. Granby, block as much of this entryway as you can, so they cannot come in more than three or four abreast if you can manage it. We will form up the rest of the men to either side of the opening, well clear of the field of fire, and hold the door with pistols and cutlasses between volleys while Mr. Riggs and his fellows reload.\"\n\nGranby and Riggs both nodded. \"Right you are,\" Riggs said. \"We have a couple of spare rifles along, sir; we could use you at the barricade.\"\n\nThis was rather transparent, and Laurence treated it with the contempt which it deserved. \"Use them for second shots as you can; we cannot waste the guns in the hands of any man who is not a trained rifleman.\"\n\nKeynes came in almost staggering under a basket of sheets, with three of the elaborate porcelain vases from their residence laid on top. \"You are not my usual kind of patients,\" he said, \"but I can bandage and splint you, at any rate. I will be in the back by the pond. And I have brought these to carry water in,\" he added, sardonic, jerking his chin at the vases. \"I suppose they would bring fifty pounds each in auction, so let that be an encouragement not to drop them.\"\n\n\"Roland, Dyer; which of you is the better hand at reloading?\" Laurence asked. \"Very well; you will both help Mr. Riggs for the first three volleys, then Dyer, you are to help Mr. Keynes, and run back and forth with the water jugs as that duty permits.\"\n\n\"Laurence,\" Granby said in an undertone, when the others had gone, \"I don't see any sign of all those guards anywhere, and they have always been used to patrol at this hour; they must have been called away by someone.\"\n\nLaurence nodded silently and waved him back to work. \"Mr. Hammond, you will pray go behind the barricade,\" he said, as the diplomat came to his side, Sun Kai with him.\n\n\"Captain Laurence, I beg you to listen to me,\" Hammond said urgently. \"We had much better go with Sun Kai at once. These attackers he expects are young bannermen, members of the Tartar tribes, who from poverty and lack of occupation have gone into a sort of local brigandage, and there may be a great many of them.\"\n\n\"Will they have any artillery?\" Laurence asked, paying no attention to the attempt at persuasion.\n\n\"Cannon? No, of course not; they do not even have muskets,\" Sun Kai said, \"but what does that matter? There may be one hundred of them or more, and I have heard rumors that some among them have even studied Shaolin Quan, in secret, though it is against the law.\"\n\n\"And some of them may be, however distantly, kin to the Emperor,\" Hammond added. \"If we were to kill one, it could easily be used as a pretext for taking offense, and casting us out of the country; you must see we ought to leave at once.\"\n\n\"Sir, you will give us some privacy,\" Laurence said to Sun Kai, flatly, and the envoy did not argue, but silently bowed his head and moved some distance away.\n\n\"Mr. Hammond,\" Laurence said, turning to him, \"you yourself warned me to beware of attempts to separate me from Temeraire, now only consider: if he should return here, to find us gone, with no explanation and all our baggage gone also, how should he ever find us again? Perhaps he might even be convinced that we had been given a treaty and left him deliberately behind, as Yongxing once desired me to do.\"\n\n\"And how will the case be improved if he returns and finds you dead, and all of us with you?\" Hammond said impatiently. \"Sun Kai has before now given us cause to trust him.\"\n\n\"I give less weight to a small piece of inconsequential advice than you do, sir, and more to a long and deliberate lie of omission; he has unquestionably spied on us from the very beginning of our acquaintance,\" Laurence said. \"No; we are not going with him. It will not be more than a few hours before Temeraire returns, and I am confident in our holding out that long.\"\n\n\"Unless they have found some means of distracting him, and keeping him longer at his visit,\" Hammond said. \"If the Chinese government meant to separate us from him, they could have done so by force at any time during his absence. I am sure Sun Kai can arrange to have a message sent to him at his mother's residence once we have gone to safety.\"\n\n\"Then let him go and send the message now, if he likes,\" Laurence said. \"You are welcome to go with him.\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Hammond said, flushing, and turned on his heel to speak with Sun Kai. The former envoy shook his head and left, and Hammond went to take a cutlass from the ready heap.\n\nThey worked for another quarter of an hour, hauling in three of the queer-shaped boulders from outside to make the barricade for the riflemen, and dragging over the enormous dragon-couch to block off most of the entryway. The sun had gone by now, but the usual lanterns did not make their appearance around the island, nor any signs of human life at all.\n\n\"Sir!\" Digby hissed suddenly, pointing out into the grounds. \"Two points to starboard, outside the doors of the house.\"\n\n\"Away from the entry,\" Laurence said; he could not see anything in the twilight, but Digby's young eyes were better than his. \"Willoughby, douse that light.\"\n\nThe soft click-click of the guns being cocked, the echo of his own breath in his ears, the constant untroubled hum of the flies and mosquitoes outside; these were at first the only noise, until use filtered them out and he could hear the light running footsteps outside: a great many men, he thought. Abruptly there was a crash of wood, several yells. \"They've broken into the house, sir,\" Hackley whispered hoarsely from the barricades.\n\n\"Quiet, there,\" Laurence said, and they kept a silent vigil while the sound of breaking furniture and shattering glass came from the house. The flare of torches outside cast shadows into the pavilion, weaving and leaping in strange angles as a search commenced. Laurence heard men calling to each other outside, the sound coming down from the eaves of the roof. He glanced back; Riggs nodded, and the three riflemen raised their guns.\n\nThe first man appeared in the entrance and saw the wooden slab of the dragon-couch blocking it. \"My shot,\" Riggs said clearly, and fired: the Chinaman fell dead with his mouth open to shout.\n\nBut the report of the gun brought more cries from outside, and men came bursting in with swords and torches in their hands; a full volley fired off, killing another three, then one more shot from the last rifle, and Riggs called, \"Prime and reload!\"\n\nThe quick slaughter of their fellows had checked the advance of the larger body of men, and clustered them in the opening left in the doorway. Yelling \"Temeraire!\" and \"England!\" the aviators launched themselves from the shadows, and engaged the attackers close at hand.\n\nThe torchlight was painful to Laurence's eyes after the long wait in the dark, and the smoke of the burning wood mingled with that from the musketry. There was no room for any real swordplay; they were engaged hilt-to-hilt, except when one of the Chinese swords broke\u2014they smelled of rust\u2014and a few men fell over. Otherwise they were all simply heaving back against the pressure of dozens of bodies, trying to come through the narrow opening.\n\nDigby, being too slim to be of much use in the human wall, was stabbing at the attackers between their legs, their arms, through any space left open. \"My pistols,\" Laurence shouted at him; no chance to pull them free himself: he was holding his cutlass with two hands, one upon the hilt and another laid upon the flat of the blade, keeping off three men. They were packed so close together they could not move either way to strike at him, but could only raise and lower their swords in a straight line, trying to break his blade through sheer weight.\n\nDigby pulled one of the pistols out of its holster, and fired, taking the man directly before Laurence between the eyes. The other two involuntarily pulled back, and Laurence managed to stab one in the belly, then seized the other by the sword-arm and threw him to the ground; Digby put a sword into his back, and he lay still.\n\n\"Present arms!\" Riggs yelled, from behind, and Laurence bellowed, \"Clear the door!\" He swung a cut at the head of the man engaged with Granby, making him flinch back, and they scrambled back together, the polished stone floor already slick under their bootheels. Someone pushed the dripping jug into his hand; he swallowed a couple of times and passed it on, wiping his mouth and his forehead against his sleeve. The rifles all fired at once, and another couple of shots after; then they were back into the fray.\n\nThe attackers had already learned to fear the rifles, and they had left a little clear space before the door, many milling about a few paces off under the torches; they nearly filled the courtyard before the pavilion: Sun Kai's estimate had not been exaggerated. Laurence shot a man six paces away, then flipped the pistol in his hand; as they came rushing back on, he clubbed another in the side of the head, and then he was again pushing back against the weight of the swords, until Riggs shouted again.\n\n\"Well done, gentlemen,\" Laurence said, breathing deeply. The Chinese had retreated at the shout and were not immediately at the door; Riggs had experience enough to hold the volley until they advanced again. \"For the moment, the advantage is ours. Mr. Granby, we will divide into two parties. Stay back this next wave, and we shall alternate. Therrows, Willoughby, Digby, with me; Martin, Blythe, and Hammond, with Granby.\"\n\n\"I can go with both, sir,\" Digby said. \"I'm not tired at all, truly; it's less work for me, since I can't help to hold them.\"\n\n\"Very well, but be sure to take water between, and stay back on occasion,\" Laurence said. \"There are a damned lot of them, as I dare say you have all seen,\" he said candidly. \"But our position is a good one, and I have no doubt we can hold them as long as ever need be, so long as we pace ourselves properly.\"\n\n\"And see Keynes at once to be tied up if you take a cut or a blow\u2014we cannot afford to lose anyone to slow bleeding,\" Granby added to this, while Laurence nodded. \"Only sing out, and someone will come to take your place in line.\"\n\nA sudden feverish many-voiced yell rose from outside, the men working themselves up to facing the volley, then a pounding of running feet, and Riggs shouted, \"Fire!\" as the attackers stormed the entryway again.\n\nThe fighting at the door was a greater strain now with fewer of them to hand, but the opening was sufficiently narrow that they could hold it even so. The bodies of the dead were forming a grisly addition to their barrier, piled now two and even three deep, and some of the attackers were forced to stretch over them to fight. The reloading time seemed queerly long, an illusion; Laurence was very glad of the rest when at last the next volley was ready. He leaned against the wall, drinking again from the vase; his arms and shoulders were aching from the constant pressure, and his knees.\n\n\"Is it empty, sir?\" Dyer was there, anxious, and Laurence handed him the vase: he trotted away back towards the pond, through the haze of smoke shrouding the middle of the room; it was drifting slowly upwards, into the cavernous emptiness above.\n\nAgain the Chinese did not immediately storm the door, with the volley waiting. Laurence stepped a little way back into the pavilion and tried to look out, to see if he could make anything out beyond the front line of the struggle. But the torches dazzled his eyes too much: nothing but an impenetrable darkness beyond the first row of shining faces staring intently towards the entryway, feverish with the strain of battle. The time seemed long; he missed the ship's glass, and the steady telling of the bell. Surely it had been an hour or two, by now; Temeraire would come soon.\n\nA sudden clamor from outside, and a new rhythm of clapping hands. His hand went without thought to the cutlass hilt; the volley went off with a roar. \"For England and the King!\" Granby shouted, and led his group into the fray.\n\nBut the men at the entry were drawing back to either side, Granby and his fellows left standing uneasily in the opening. Laurence wondered if maybe they had some artillery after all. But instead abruptly a man came running at them down the open aisle, alone, as if intent on throwing himself onto their swords: they stood set, waiting. Not three paces distant he leapt into the air, landed somehow sideways against the column, and sprang off it literally over their heads, diving, and tucked himself neatly into a rolling somersault along the stone floor.\n\nThe maneuver defied gravity more thoroughly than any skylarking Laurence had ever seen done; ten feet into the air and down again with no propulsion but his own legs. The man leapt up at once, unbruised, now at Granby's back with the main wave of attackers charging the entryway again. \"Therrows, Willoughby,\" Laurence bellowed to the men in his group, unnecessarily: they were already running to hold him back.\n\nThe man had no weapon, but his agility was beyond anything; he jumped away from their swinging swords in a manner that made them seem accomplices in a stage play rather than in deadly earnest, trying to kill him; and from his greater distance, Laurence could see he was drawing them steadily back, towards Granby and the others, where their swords could only become dangers to their comrades.\n\nLaurence clapped on to his pistol and drew it out, his hands following the practiced sequence despite the dark and the furor; in his head he listened to the chant of the great-gun exercise, so nearly parallel. Ramrod down the muzzle with a rag, twice, and then he pulled back the hammer to half-cocked, groping after the paper cartridge in his hip pouch.\n\nTherrows suddenly screamed and fell, clutching his knee. Willoughby's head turned to look; his sword was held defensively, at the level of his chest, but in that one moment of incaution the Chinese man leapt again impossibly high and struck him full on the jaw with both feet. The sound of his neck snapping was grisly; he was lifted an inch straight up off the ground, arms splaying out wide, and then collapsed into a heap, his head lolling side-to-side upon the ground. The Chinese man tumbled to the ground from his leap, landed on his shoulder, rolling lightly back up, and turned to look at Laurence.\n\nRiggs was yelling from behind him, \"Make ready! Faster, damn you, make ready!\"\n\nLaurence's hands were still working. Tearing open the cartridge of black powder with his teeth, a few grains like sand bitter on his tongue. Powder straight down the muzzle, then the round lead ball after, the paper in for wadding, rammed down hard; no time to check the primer, and he raised the gun and blew out the man's brains, barely more than arm's reach away.\n\nLaurence and Granby dragged Therrows back over to Keynes while the Chinese backed away from the waiting volley. He was sobbing quietly, his leg dangling useless; \"I'm sorry, sir,\" he kept saying, choked.\n\n\"For Heaven's sake, enough moan,\" Keynes said sharply, when they put him down, and slapped Therrows across the face with a distinct lack of sympathy. The young man gulped, but stopped, and hastily scrubbed an arm across his face. \"The kneecap is broken,\" Keynes said, after a moment. \"A clean enough break, but he won't be standing again for a month.\"\n\n\"Get over to Riggs when you have been splinted, and reload for them,\" Laurence told Therrows, then he and Granby dashed back to the entryway.\n\n\"We'll take rest by turns,\" Laurence said, kneeling down by the others. \"Hammond, you first; go and tell Riggs to keep one rifle back, loaded, at all times, if they should try and send another fellow over that way.\"\n\nHammond was visibly heaving for breath, his cheeks marked with spots of bright red; he nodded and said hoarsely, \"Leave your pistols, I will reload.\"\n\nBlythe, gulping water from the vase, abruptly choked, spat out a fountain, and yelled, \"Sweet Christ in Heaven!\" and made them all jump. Laurence looked around wildly: a bright orange goldfish two fingers long was wriggling on the stones in the puddled water. \"Sorry,\" Blythe said, panting. \"I felt the bugger squirming in my mouth.\"\n\nLaurence stared, then Martin started laughing, and for a moment they were all grinning at one another; then the rifles cracked off, and they were back to the door.\n\nThe attackers made no attempt at setting the pavilion on fire, which surprised Laurence; they had torches enough, and wood was plentiful around the island. They did try smoke, building small bonfires to either side of the building under the eaves, but through either some trick of the pavilion's design, or simply the prevailing wind, a drifting air current carried the smoke up and out through the yellow-tiled roof. It was unpleasant enough, but not deadly, and near the pond the air was fresh. Each round the one man resting would go back there, to drink and clear his lungs, and have the handful of scratches they had all by now accumulated smeared with salve and bound up if still bleeding.\n\nThe gang tried a battering ram, a fresh-cut tree with the branches and leaves still attached, but Laurence called, \"Stand aside as they come, and cut at their legs.\" The bearers ran themselves directly onto the blades with great courage, trying to break through, but even the three steps that led up to the pavilion door were enough to break their momentum. Several at the head fell with gashes showing bone, to be clubbed to death with pistol-butts, and then the tree itself toppled forward and halted their progress. The British had a few frantic minutes of hacking off the branches, to clear the view for the riflemen; by then the next volley was more than ready, and the attackers gave up the attempt.\n\nAfter this the battle settled into a sort of grisly rhythm; each round of fire won them even more time to rest now, the Chinese evidently disheartened by their failure to break in through the small British line, and by the very great slaughter. Every bullet found its mark; Riggs and his men had been trained to make shots from the back of a dragon, flying sometimes at thirty knots in the heat of battle, and with less than thirty yards to the entryway, they could scarcely miss. It was a slow, grinding way to fight, every minute seeming to consume five times its proper length; Laurence began to count the time by volleys.\n\n\"We had better go to three shots only a volley, sir,\" Riggs said, coughing, when Laurence knelt to speak with him, his next rest spell. \"It'll hold them all the same, now they've had a taste, and though I brought all the cartridges we had, we're not bloody infantry. I have Therrows making us more, but we have enough powder for another thirty rounds at most, I think.\"\n\n\"That will have to do,\" Laurence said. \"We will try and hold them longer between volleys. Start resting one man every other round, also.\" He emptied his own cartridge box and Granby's into the general pile: only another seven, but that meant two rounds more at least, and the rifles were of more value than the pistols.\n\nHe splashed his face with water at the pond, smiling a little at the darting fish which he could see more clearly now, his eyes perhaps adjusting to the dark. His neckcloth was soaked quite through with sweat; he took it off and wrung it out over the stones, then could not bring himself to put it back on once he had exposed his grateful skin to the air. He rinsed it clean and left it spread out to dry, then hurried back.\n\nAnother measureless stretch of time, the faces of the attackers growing blurry and dim in the doorway. Laurence was struggling to hold off a couple of men, shoulder-to-shoulder with Granby, when he heard Dyer's high treble cry out, \"Captain! Captain!\" from behind. He could not turn and look; there was no opportunity for pause.\n\n\"I have them,\" Granby panted, and kicked the man in front in the balls with his heavy Hessian boot; he engaged the other hilt-to-hilt, and Laurence pulled away and turned hurriedly around.\n\nA couple of men were standing dripping on the edge of the pond, and another pulling himself out: they had somehow found whatever reservoir fed the pond, and swum through it underneath the wall. Keynes was sprawled unmoving on the floor, and Riggs and the other riflemen were running over, still reloading frantically as they went. Hammond had been resting: he was swinging furiously at the two other men, pushing them back towards the water, but he did not have much science: they had short knives, and would get under his guard in a moment.\n\nLittle Dyer seized one of the great vases and flung it, still full of water, into the man bending over Keynes's body with his knife; it shattered against his head and knocked him down to the floor, dazed and slipping in the water. Roland, running over, snatched up Keynes's tenaculum, and dragged the sharp hooked end across the man's throat before he could arise, blood spurting in a furious jet from the severed vein, through his grasping fingers.\n\nMore men were coming out of the pond. \"Fire at will,\" Riggs shouted, and three went down, one of them shot with only his head protruding from the water, sinking back down below the surface in a spreading cloud of blood. Laurence was up beside Hammond, and together they forced the two he was struggling against back into the water: while Hammond kept swinging, Laurence stabbed one with the point of his cutlass, and clubbed the other with the hilt; he fell unconscious into the water, open-mouthed, and bubbles rose in a profusion from his lips.\n\n\"Push them all into the water,\" Laurence said. \"We must block up the passage.\" He climbed into the pond, pushing the bodies against the current; he could feel a greater pressure coming from the other side, more men trying to come through. \"Riggs, get your men back to the front and relieve Granby,\" he said. \"Hammond and I can hold them here.\"\n\n\"I can help also,\" Therrows said, limping over: he was a tall fellow, and could sit down on the edge of the pond and put his good leg against the mass of bodies.\n\n\"Roland, Dyer, see if there is anything to be done for Keynes,\" Laurence said over his shoulder, and then looked when he did not hear a response immediately: they were both being sick in the corner, quietly.\n\nRoland wiped her mouth and got up, looking rather like an unsteady-legged foal. \"Yes, sir,\" she said, and she and Dyer tottered over to Keynes. He groaned as they turned him over: there was a great clot of blood on his head, above the eyebrow, but he opened his eyes dazedly as they bound it up.\n\nThe pressure on the other side of the mass of bodies weakened, and slowly ceased; behind them the guns spoke again and again with suddenly quickened pace, Riggs and his men firing almost at the rate of redcoats. Laurence, trying to look over his shoulder, could not see anything through the haze of smoke.\n\n\"Therrows and I can manage, go!\" Hammond gasped out. Laurence nodded and slogged out of the water, his full boots dragging like stones; he had to stop and pour them out before he could run to the front.\n\nEven as he came, the shooting stopped: the smoke so thick and queerly bright they could not see anyone through it, only the broken heap of bodies around the floor at their feet. They stood waiting, Riggs and his men reloading more slowly, their fingers shaking. Then Laurence stepped forward, using a hand on the column for balance: there was nowhere to stand but on the corpses.\n\nThey came out blinking through the haze, into the early-morning sunlight, startling up a flock of crows that lifted from the bodies in the courtyard and fled shrieking hoarsely over the water of the lake. There was no one left moving in sight: the rest of the attackers had fled. Martin abruptly fell over onto his knees, his cutlass clanging un-musically on the stones; Granby went to help him up and ended by falling down also. Laurence groped to a small wooden bench before his own legs gave out; not caring very much that he was sharing it with one of the dead, a smooth-faced young man with a trail of red blood drying on his lips and a purpled stain around the ragged bullet wound in his chest.\n\nThere was no sign of Temeraire. He had not come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Sun kai found them scarcely more than dead themselves, an hour later; he had come warily into the courtyard from the pier with a small group of armed men: perhaps ten or so and formally dressed in guard uniforms, unlike the scruffy and unkempt members of the gang. The smoldering bonfires had gone out of their own accord, for lack of fuel; the British were dragging the corpses into the deepest shade, so they would putrefy less horribly.\n\nThey were all of them half-blind and numb with exhaustion, and could offer no resistance; helpless to account for Temeraire's absence and with no other idea of what to do, Laurence submitted to being led to the boat, and thence to a stuffy, enclosed palanquin, whose curtains were drawn tight around him. He slept instantly upon the embroidered pillows, despite the jostling and shouts of their progress, and knew nothing more until at last the palanquin was set down, and he was shaken back to wakefulness.\n\n\"Come inside,\" Sun Kai said, and pulled on him until he rose; Hammond and Granby and the other crewmen were emerging in similarly dazed and battered condition from other sedan-chairs behind him. Laurence followed unthinking up the stairs into the blessedly cool interior of a house, fragrant with traces of incense; along a narrow hallway and to a room which faced onto the garden courtyard. There he at once surged forward and leapt over the low balcony railing: Temeraire was lying curled asleep upon the stones.\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence called, and went towards him; Sun Kai exclaimed in Chinese and ran after him, catching his arm before he could touch Temeraire's side; then the dragon raised up his head and looked at them, curiously, and Laurence stared: it was not Temeraire at all.\n\nSun Kai tried to drag Laurence down to the ground, kneeling down himself; Laurence shook him off, managing with difficulty to keep his balance. He noticed only then a young man of perhaps twenty, dressed in elegant silk robes of dark yellow embroidered with dragons, sitting on a bench.\n\nHammond had followed Laurence and now caught at his sleeve. \"For God's sake, kneel,\" he whispered. \"This must be Prince Mianning, the crown prince.\" He himself went down to both knees, and pressed his forehead to the ground just as Sun Kai was doing.\n\nLaurence stared a little stupidly down at them both, looked at the young man, and hesitated; then he bowed deeply instead, from the waist: he was mortally certain he could not bend a single knee without falling down to both, or more ignominiously upon his face, and he was not yet willing to perform the kowtow to the Emperor, much less the prince.\n\nThe prince did not seem offended, but spoke in Chinese to Sun Kai; he rose, and Hammond also, very slowly. \"He says we can rest here safely,\" Hammond said to Laurence. \"I beg you to believe him, sir; he can have no need to deceive us.\"\n\nLaurence said, \"Will you ask him about Temeraire?\" Hammond looked at the other dragon blankly. \"That is not him,\" Laurence added. \"It is some other Celestial, it is not Temeraire.\"\n\nSun Kai said, \"Lung Tien Xiang is in seclusion in the Pavilion of Endless Spring. A messenger is waiting to bring him word, as soon as he emerges.\"\n\n\"He is well?\" Laurence asked, not bothering to try and make sense of this; the most urgent concern was to understand what might have kept Temeraire away.\n\n\"There is no reason to think otherwise,\" Sun Kai said, which seemed evasive. Laurence did not know how to press him further; he was too thick with fatigue. But Sun Kai took pity on his confusion and added more gently, \"He is well. We cannot interrupt his seclusion, but he will come out sometime today, and we will bring him to you then.\"\n\nLaurence still did not understand, but he could not think of anything else to do at the moment. \"Thank you,\" he managed. \"Pray thank His Highness for his hospitality, for us; pray convey our very deep thanks. I beg he will excuse any inadequacy in our address.\"\n\nThe prince nodded and dismissed them with a wave. Sun Kai herded them back over the balcony into their rooms, and stood watching over them until they had collapsed upon the hard wooden bed platforms; perhaps he did not trust them not to leap up and go wandering again. Laurence almost laughed at the improbability of it, and fell asleep mid-thought.\n\n\"Laurence, Laurence,\" Temeraire said, very anxiously; Laurence opened his eyes and found Temeraire's head poked in through the balcony doors, and a darkening sky beyond. \"Laurence, you are not hurt?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Hammond had woken, and fallen off his bed in startlement at finding himself cheek-to-jowl with Temeraire's muzzle. \"Good God,\" he said, painfully climbing to his feet and sitting back down upon the bed. \"I feel like a man of eighty with gout in both legs.\"\n\nLaurence sat up with only a little less effort; every muscle had stiffened up during his rest. \"No, I am quite well,\" he said, reaching out gratefully to put a hand on Temeraire's muzzle and feel the reassurance of his solid presence. \"You have not been ill?\"\n\nHe did not mean it to sound accusing, but he could hardly imagine any other excuse for Temeraire's apparent desertion, and perhaps some of his feeling was clear in his tone. Temeraire's ruff drooped. \"No,\" he said, miserably. \"No, I am not sick at all.\"\n\nHe volunteered nothing more, and Laurence did not press him, conscious of Hammond's presence: Temeraire's shy behavior did not bode a very good explanation for his absence, and as little as Laurence might relish the prospect of confronting him, he liked the notion of doing so in front of Hammond even less. Temeraire withdrew his head to let them come out into the garden. No acrobatic leaping this time: Laurence levered himself out of bed and stepped slowly and carefully over the balcony rail. Hammond, following, was almost unable to lift his foot high enough to clear the rail, though it was scarcely two feet off the ground.\n\nThe prince had left, but the dragon, whom Temeraire introduced to them as Lung Tien Chuan, was still there. He nodded to them politely, without much interest, then went straight back to working upon a large tray of wet sand in which he was scratching symbols with a talon: writing poetry, Temeraire explained.\n\nHaving made his bow to Chuan, Hammond groaned again as he lowered himself onto a stool, muttering under his breath with a degree of profanity more appropriate to the seamen from whom he had likely first heard the oaths. It was not a very graceful performance, but Laurence was perfectly willing to forgive him that and more after the previous day's work. He had never expected Hammond to do as much, untrained, untried, and in disagreement with the whole enterprise.\n\n\"If I may be so bold, sir, allow me to recommend you take a turn around the garden instead of sitting,\" Laurence said. \"I have often found it answer well.\"\n\n\"I suppose I had better,\" Hammond said, and after a few deep breaths heaved himself back up to his feet, not disdaining the offer of Laurence's hand, and walking very slowly at first. But Hammond was a young man: he was already walking more easily after they had gone halfway round. With the worst of his pain relieved, Hammond's curiosity revived: as they continued walking around the garden he studied the two dragons closely, his steps slowing as he turned first from one to the other and back. The courtyard was longer than it was wide. Stands of tall bamboo and a few smaller pine trees clustered at the ends, leaving the middle mostly open, so the two dragons lay opposite each other, head-to-head, making the comparison easier.\n\nThey were indeed as like as mirror images, except for the difference in their jewels: Chuan wore a net of gold draped from his ruff down the length of his neck, studded with pearls: very splendid, but it looked likely to be inconvenient in any sort of violent activity. Temeraire had also battle-scars, of which Chuan had none: the round knot of scales on his breast from the spiked ball, now several months old, and the smaller scratches from other battles. But these were difficult to see, and aside from these the only difference was a certain undefinable quality in their posture and expression, which Laurence could not have adequately described for another's interpretation.\n\n\"Can it be chance?\" Hammond said. \"All Celestials may be related, but such a degree of similarity? I cannot tell them apart.\"\n\n\"We are hatched from twin eggs,\" Temeraire said, lifting up his head as he overheard this. \"Chuan's egg was first, and then mine.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have been unutterably slow,\" Hammond said, and sat down limply on the bench. \"Laurence\u2014Laurence\u2014\" His face was almost shining from within, and he reached out groping towards Laurence, and seized his hand and shook it. \"Of course, of course: they did not want to set up another prince as a rival for the throne, that is why they sent away the egg. My God, how relieved I am!\"\n\n\"Sir, I hardly dispute your conclusions, but I cannot see what difference it makes to our present situation,\" Laurence said, rather taken aback by this enthusiasm.\n\n\"Do you not see?\" Hammond said. \"Napoleon was only an excuse, because he is an emperor on the other side of the world, as far away as they could manage from their own court. And all this time I have been wondering how the devil De Guignes ever managed to approach them, when they would scarcely let me put my nose out of doors. Ha! The French have no alliance, no real understanding with them at all.\"\n\n\"That is certainly cause for relief,\" Laurence said, \"but their lack of success does not seem to me to directly improve our position; plainly the Chinese have now changed their minds, and desire Temeraire's return.\"\n\n\"No, do you not see? Prince Mianning still has every reason to want Temeraire gone, if he could render another claimant eligible for the throne,\" Hammond said. \"Oh, this makes all the difference in the world. I have been groping in the dark; now I have some sense of their motives, a great deal more comes clear. How much longer will it be until the Allegiance arrives?\" he asked suddenly, looking up at Laurence.\n\n\"I know too little about the likely currents and the prevailing winds in the Bay of Zhitao to make any accurate estimate,\" Laurence said, taken aback. \"A week at least, I should think.\"\n\n\"I wish to God Staunton were here already. I have a thousand questions and not enough answers,\" Hammond said. \"But I can at least try and coax a little more information from Sun Kai: I hope he will be a little more forthright now. I will go and seek him; I beg your pardon.\"\n\nAt this, he turned and ducked back into the house. Laurence called after him belatedly, \"Hammond, your clothes\u2014!\" for his breeches were unbuckled at the knee, they and his shirt hideously bloodstained besides, and his stockings thoroughly laddered: he looked a proper spectacle. But it was too late: he had gone.\n\nLaurence supposed no one could blame them for their appearance, as they had been brought over without baggage. \"Well, at least he is gone to some purpose; and we cannot but be relieved by this news that there is no alliance with France,\" he said to Temeraire.\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said, but unenthusiastically. He had been quite silent all this time, brooding and coiled about the garden. The tip of his tail continued flicking back and forth restlessly at the edge of the nearer pond and spattering thick black spots onto the sun-heated flagstones, which dried almost as quickly as they appeared.\n\nLaurence did not immediately press him for explanation, even now Hammond had gone, but came and sat by his head. He hoped deeply that Temeraire would speak of his own volition, and not require questioning.\n\n\"Are all the rest of my crew all right also?\" Temeraire asked after a moment.\n\nLaurence said, \"Willoughby has been killed, I am very sorry to tell you. A few injuries besides, but nothing else mortal, thankfully.\"\n\nTemeraire trembled and made a low keening sound deep in his throat. \"I ought to have come. If I had been there, they could never have done it.\"\n\nLaurence was silent, thinking of poor Willoughby: a damned ugly waste. \"You did very wrong not to send word,\" he said finally. \"I cannot hold you culpable in Willoughby's death. He was killed early, before you would ordinarily have come back, and I do not think I would have done anything differently, had I known you were not returning. But certainly you have violated your leave.\"\n\nTemeraire made another small unhappy noise and said, low, \"I have failed in my duty; have I not? So it was my fault, then, and there is nothing else to be said about it.\"\n\nLaurence said, \"No, if you had sent word, I would have thought nothing of agreeing to your extended absence: we had every reason to think our position perfectly secure. And in all justice, you have never been formally instructed in the rules of leave in the Corps, as they have never been necessary for a dragon, and it was my responsibility to be sure you understood.\n\n\"I am not trying to comfort you,\" he added, seeing that Temeraire shook his head. \"But I wish you to feel what you have in fact done wrong, and not to distract yourself improperly with false guilt over what you could not have controlled.\"\n\n\"Laurence, you do not understand,\" Temeraire said. \"I have always understood the rules quite well; that is not why I did not send word. I did not mean to stay so long, only I did not notice the time passing.\"\n\nLaurence did not know what to say. The idea that Temeraire had not noticed the passage of a full night and day, when he had always been used to come back before dark, was difficult to swallow, if not impossible. If such an excuse had been given him by one of his men, Laurence would have outright called it a lie; as it was, his silence betrayed what he thought of it.\n\nTemeraire hunched his shoulders and scratched a little at the ground, his claws scraping the stones with a noise that made Chuan look up and put his ruff back, with a quick rumble of complaint. Temeraire stopped; then all at once he said abruptly, \"I was with Mei.\"\n\n\"With who?\" Laurence said, blankly.\n\n\"Lung Qin Mei,\" Temeraire said, \"\u2014she is an Imperial.\"\n\nThe shock of understanding was near a physical blow. There was a mixture of embarrassment, guilt, and confused pride in Temeraire's confession which made everything plain.\n\n\"I see,\" Laurence said with an effort, as controlled as ever he had been in his life. \"Well\u2014\" He stopped, and mastered himself. \"You are young, and\u2014and have never courted before; you cannot have known how it would take you,\" he said. \"I am glad to know the reason; that is some excuse.\" He tried to believe his own words; he did believe them; only he did not particularly want to forgive Temeraire's absence on such grounds. Despite his quarrel with Hammond over Yongxing's attempts to supplant him with the boy, Laurence had never really feared losing Temeraire's affections; it was bitter, indeed, to find himself so unexpectedly with real cause for jealousy after all.\n\nThey buried Willoughby in the grey hours of the morning, in a vast cemetery outside the city walls, to which Sun Kai brought them. It was crowded for a burial place, even considering the extent, with many small groups of people paying respects at the tombs. These visitors' interest was caught by both Temeraire's presence and the Western party, and shortly something of a procession had formed behind them, despite the guards who pushed off any too-curious onlookers.\n\nBut though the crowd shortly numbered several hundreds of people, they maintained an attitude of respect, and fell to perfect silence while Laurence somberly spoke a few words for the dead and led his men in the Lord's Prayer. The tomb was above-ground, and built of white stone, with an upturned roof very like the local houses; it looked elaborate even in comparison with the neighboring mausoleums. \"Laurence, if it wouldn't be disrespectful, I think his mother would be glad of a sketch,\" Granby said quietly.\n\n\"Yes, I ought to have thought of it myself,\" Laurence said. \"Digby, do you think you could knock something together?\"\n\n\"Please allow me to have an artist prepare one,\" Sun Kai interjected. \"I am ashamed not to have offered before. And assure his mother that all the proper sacrifices will be made; a young man of good family has already been selected by Prince Mianning to carry out all the rites.\" Laurence assented to these arrangements without investigating further; Mrs. Willoughby was, as he recalled, a rather strict Methodist, and he was sure would be happier not to know more than that her son's tomb was so elegant and would be well-maintained.\n\nAfterwards Laurence returned to the island with Temeraire and a few of the men to collect their possessions, which had been left behind in the hurry and confusion. All the bodies had been cleared away already, but the smoke-blackened patches remained upon the outer walls of the pavilion where they had sheltered, and dried bloodstains upon the stones; Temeraire looked at them a long time, silently, and then turned his head away. Inside the residence, furniture had been wildly overturned, the rice-paper screens torn through, and most of their chests smashed open, clothing flung onto the floor and trampled upon.\n\nLaurence walked through the rooms as Blythe and Martin began collecting whatever they could find in good enough condition to bother with. His own chamber had been thoroughly pillaged, the bed itself flung up on its side against the wall, as if they had thought him maybe cowering underneath, and his many bundles from the shopping expedition thrown rudely about the room. Powder and bits of shattered porcelain trickled out across the floor behind some of them like a trail, strips of torn and frayed silk hanging almost decoratively about the room. Laurence bent down and lifted up the large shapeless package of the red vase, fallen over in a corner of the room, and slowly took off the wrappings; and then he found himself looking upon it through an unaccountable blurring of his vision: the shining surface wholly undamaged, not even chipped, and in the afternoon sun it poured out over his hands a living richness of deep and scarlet light.\n\nThe true heart of the summer had struck the city now: the stones grew hot as worked anvils during the day, and the wind blew an endless stream of fine yellow dust from the enormous deserts of the Gobi to the west. Hammond was engaged in a slow elaborate dance of negotiations, which so far as Laurence could see proceeded only in circles: a sequence of wax-sealed letters coming back and forth from the house, some small trinkety gifts received and sent in return, vague promises and less action. In the meantime, they were all growing short-tempered and impatient, except for Temeraire, who was occupied still with his education and his courting. Mei now came to the residence to teach him daily, elegant in an elaborate collar of silver and pearls; her hide was a deep shade of blue, with dapplings of violet and yellow upon her wings, and she wore many golden rings upon her talons.\n\n\"Mei is a very charming dragon,\" Laurence said to Temeraire after her first visit, feeling he might as well be properly martyred; it had not escaped his attention that Mei was very lovely, at least as far as he was a judge of draconic beauty.\n\n\"I am glad you think so also,\" Temeraire said, brightening; the points of his ruff raised and quivered. \"She was hatched only three years ago, and has just passed the first examinations with honor. She has been teaching me how to read and write, and has been very kind; she has not at all made fun of me, for not knowing.\"\n\nShe could not have complained of her pupil's progress, Laurence was sure. Already Temeraire had mastered the technique of writing in the sand tray-tables with his talons, and Mei praised his calligraphy done in clay; soon she promised to begin teaching him the more rigid strokes used for carving in soft wood. Laurence watched him scribbling industriously late into the afternoon, while the light lasted, and often played audience for him in Mei's absence: the rich sonorous tones of Temeraire's voice pleasant though the words of the Chinese poetry were meaningless, except when he stopped in a particularly nice passage to translate.\n\nThe rest of them had little to occupy their time: Mianning occasionally gave them a dinner, and once an entertainment consisting of a highly unmusical concert and the tumbling of some remarkable acrobats, nearly all young children and limber as mountain goats. Occasionally they drilled with their small-arms in the courtyard behind the residence, but it was not very pleasant in the heat, and they were glad to return to the cool walks and gardens of the palace after.\n\nSome two weeks following their remove to the palace, Laurence sat reading in the balcony overlooking the courtyard, where Temeraire slept, while Hammond worked on papers at the writing-desk within the room. A servant came bearing them a letter: Hammond broke the seal and scanned the lines, telling Laurence, \"It is from Liu Bao, he has invited us to dine at his home.\"\n\n\"Hammond, do you suppose there is any chance he might be involved?\" Laurence asked reluctantly, after a moment. \"I do not like to suggest such a thing, but after all, we know he is not in Mianning's service, like Sun Kai is; could he be in league with Yongxing?\"\n\n\"It is true we cannot rule out his possible involvement,\" Hammond said. \"As a Tartar himself, Liu Bao would likely have been able to organize the attack upon us. Still, I have learned he is a relation of the Emperor's mother, and an official in the Manchu White Banner; his support would be invaluable, and I find it hard to believe he would openly invite us if he meant anything underhanded.\"\n\nThey went warily, but their plans for caution were thoroughly undermined as they arrived, met unexpectedly at the gates by the rich savory smell of roasted beef. Liu Bao had ordered his now well-traveled cooks to prepare a traditional British dinner for them, and if there was rather more curry than one would expect in the fried potatoes, and the currant-studded pudding inclined to be somewhat liquid, none of them found anything to complain of in the enormous crown roast, the upstanding ribs jeweled with whole onions, and the Yorkshire pudding was improbably successful.\n\nDespite their very best efforts, the last plates were again carried away almost full, and there was some doubt whether a number of the guests would not have to be carted off in the same manner, including Temeraire. He had been served with plain, freshly butchered prey, in the British manner, but the cooks could not restrain themselves entirely and had served him not merely a cow or sheep, but two of each, as well as a pig, a goat, a chicken, and a lobster. Having done his duty by each course, he now crawled out into the garden uninvited with a little moan and collapsed into a stupor.\n\n\"That is all right, let him sleep!\" Liu Bao said, waving away Laurence's apology. \"We can sit in the moon-viewing terrace and drink wine.\"\n\nLaurence girded himself, but for once Liu Bao did not press the wine on them them too enthusiastically. It was quite pleasant to sit, suffused with the steady genial warmth of inebriation, the sun going down behind the smoke-blue mountains and Temeraire drowsing in an aureate glow before them. Laurence had entirely if irrationally given up the idea of Liu Bao's involvement: it was impossible to be suspicious of a man while sitting in his garden, full of his generous dinner; and even Hammond was half-unwillingly at his ease, blinking with the effort of keeping awake.\n\nLiu Bao expressed some curiosity as to how they had come to take up residence with Prince Mianning. For further proofs of his innocence, he received the news of the gang attack with real surprise, and shook his head sympathetically. \"Something has to be done about these hunhun, they are really getting out of hand. One of my nephews got involved with them a few years ago, and his poor mother worried herself almost to death. But then she made a big sacrifice to Guanyin and built her a special altar in the nicest place in their south garden, and now he has married and taken up studying.\" He poked Laurence in the side. \"You ought to try studying yourself! It will be embarrassing for you if your dragon passes the examinations and you don't.\"\n\n\"Good God, could that possibly make a difference in their minds, Hammond?\" Laurence asked, sitting up appalled. For all his efforts, Chinese remained to him as impenetrable as if it were enciphered ten times over, and as for sitting examinations next to men who had been studying for them since the age of seven\u2014\n\nBut, \"I am only teasing you,\" Liu Bao said good-humoredly, much to Laurence's relief. \"Don't be afraid. I suppose if Lung Tien Xiang really wants to stay companion to an unlettered barbarian, no one can argue with him.\"\n\n\"He is joking about calling you that, of course,\" Hammond added to the translation, but a little doubtfully.\n\n\"I am an unlettered barbarian, by their standards of learning, and not stupid enough to make pretensions to be anything else,\" Laurence said. \"I only wish that the negotiators took your view of it, sir,\" he added to Liu Bao. \"But they are quite fixed that a Celestial may only be companion to the Emperor and his kin.\"\n\n\"Well, if the dragon will not have anyone else, they will have to live with it,\" Liu Bao said, unconcerned. \"Why doesn't the Emperor adopt you? That would save face for everyone.\"\n\nLaurence was disposed to think this a joke, but Hammond stared at Liu Bao with quite a different expression. \"Sir, would such a suggestion be seriously entertained?\"\n\nLiu Bao shrugged and filled their cups again with wine. \"Why not? The Emperor has three sons to perform the rites for him, he doesn't need to adopt anyone; but another doesn't hurt.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to pursue the notion?\" Laurence asked Hammond, rather incredulous, as they made their staggering way out to the sedan-chairs waiting to bear them back to the palace.\n\n\"With your permission, certainly,\" Hammond said. \"It is an extraordinary idea to be sure, but after all it would be understood on all sides as only a formality. Indeed,\" he continued, growing more enthusiastic, \"I think it would answer in every possible respect. Surely they would not lightly declare war upon a nation related by such intimate ties, and only consider the advantages to our trade of such a connection.\"\n\nLaurence could more easily consider his father's likely reaction. \"If you think it a worthwhile course to pursue, I will not forestall you,\" he said reluctantly, but he did not think the red vase, which he had been hoping to use as something of a peace-offering, would be in any way adequate to mend matters if Lord Allendale should learn that Laurence had given himself up for adoption like a foundling, even to the Emperor of China."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"I t was a close-run affair before we arrived, that much I can tell you,\" Riley said, accepting a cup of tea across the breakfast table with more eagerness than he had taken the bowl of rice porridge. \"I have never seen the like: a fleet of twenty ships, with two dragons for support. Of course they were only junks, and not half the size of a frigate, but the Chinese navy ships were hardly any bigger. I cannot imagine what they were about, to let a lot of pirates get so out of hand.\"\n\n\"I was impressed by their admiral, however; he seemed a rational sort of man,\" Staunton put in. \"A lesser man would not have liked being rescued.\"\n\n\"He would have been a great gaby to prefer being sunk,\" Riley said, less generous.\n\nThe two of them had arrived only that morning, with a small party from the Allegiance: having been shocked by the story of the murderous gang attack, they were now describing the adventure of their own passage through the China Sea. A week out of Macao, they had encountered a Chinese fleet attempting to subdue an enormous band of pirates, who had established themselves in the Zhoushan Islands to prey upon both domestic shipping and the smaller ships of the Western trade.\n\n\"There was not much trouble once we were there, of course,\" Riley went on. \"The pirate dragons had no armaments\u2014the crews tried to fire arrows at us, if you can credit it\u2014and no sense of range at all; dived so low we could hardly miss them at musket-shot, much less with the pepper-guns. They sheered off pretty quick after a taste of that, and we sank three of the pirates with a single broadside.\"\n\n\"Did the Admiral say anything about how he would report the incident?\" Hammond asked Staunton.\n\n\"I can only tell you that he was punctilious in expressing his gratitude. He came aboard our ship, which was I believe a concession on his part.\"\n\n\"And let him have a good look at our guns,\" Riley said. \"I fancy he was more interested in those than in being polite. But at any rate, we saw him to port, and then came on; she's anchored in Tien-sing harbor now. No chance of our leaving soon?\"\n\n\"I do not like to tempt fate, but I hardly think so,\" Hammond said. \"The Emperor is still away on his summer hunting trip up to the north, and he will not return to the Summer Palace for several weeks more. At that time I expect we will be given a formal audience.\n\n\"I have been putting forward this notion of adoption, which I described to you, sir,\" he added to Staunton. \"We have already received some small amount of support, not only from Prince Mianning, and I have high hopes that the service which you have just performed for them will sway opinion decisively in our favor.\"\n\n\"Is there any difficulty in the ship's remaining where she is?\" Laurence asked with concern.\n\n\"For the moment, no, but I must say, supplies are dearer than I had looked for,\" Riley said. \"They have nothing like salt meat for sale, and the prices they ask for cattle are outrageous; we have been feeding the men on fish and chickens.\"\n\n\"Have we outrun our funds?\" Laurence too late began to regret his purchases. \"I have been a little extravagant, but I do have some gold left, and they make no bones about taking it once they see it is real.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Laurence, but I don't need to rob you; we are not in dun territory yet,\" Riley said. \"I am mostly thinking about the journey home\u2014with a dragon to feed, I hope?\"\n\nLaurence did not know how to answer the question; he made some evasion, and fell silent to let Hammond carry on the conversation.\n\nAfter their breakfast, Sun Kai came by to inform them that a feast and an entertainment would be held that evening, to welcome the new arrivals: a great theatrical performance. \"Laurence, I am going to go and see Qian,\" Temeraire said, poking his head into the room while Laurence contemplated his clothing. \"You will not go out, will you?\"\n\nHe had grown singularly more protective since the assault, refusing to leave Laurence unattended; the servants had all suffered his narrow and suspicious inspection for weeks, and he had put forward several thoughtful suggestions for Laurence's protection, such as devising a schedule which should arrange for Laurence's being kept under a five-man guard at all hours, or drawing in his sand-table a proposed suit of armor which would not have been unsuited to the battlefields of the Crusades.\n\n\"No, you may rest easy; I am afraid I will have enough to do to make myself presentable,\" Laurence said. \"Pray give her my regards; will you be there long? We cannot be late tonight, this engagement is in our honor.\"\n\n\"No, I will come back very soon,\" Temeraire said, and true to his word returned less than an hour later, ruff quivering with suppressed excitement and clutching a long narrow bundle carefully in his forehand.\n\nLaurence came out into the courtyard at his request, and Temeraire nudged the package over to him rather abashedly. Laurence was so taken aback he only stared at first, then he slowly removed the silk wrappings and opened the lacquered box: an elaborate smooth-hilted saber lay next to its scabbard on a yellow silk cushion. He lifted it from its bed: well-balanced, broad at the base, with the curved tip sharpened along both edges; the surface watered like good Damascus steel, with two blood grooves cut along the back edge to lighten the blade.\n\nThe hilt was wrapped in black ray-skin, the fittings of gilded iron adorned with gold beads and small pearls, and a gold dragon-head collar at the base of the blade with two small sapphires for eyes. The scabbard itself of black lacquered wood was also decorated with broad gold bands of gilded iron, and strung with strong silk cords: Laurence took his rather shabby if serviceable cutlass off his belt and buckled the new one on.\n\n\"Does it suit you?\" Temeraire asked anxiously.\n\n\"Very well indeed,\" Laurence said, drawing out the blade for practice: the length admirably fitted to his height. \"My dear, this is beyond anything; however did you get it?\"\n\n\"Well, it is not all my doing,\" Temeraire said. \"Last week, Qian admired my breastplate, and I told her you had given it to me; then I thought I would like to give you a present also. She said it was usual for the sire and dame to give a gift when a dragon takes a companion, so I might choose one for you from her things, and I thought this was the nicest.\" He turned his head to one side and another, inspecting Laurence with deep satisfaction.\n\n\"You must be quite right; I could not imagine a better,\" Laurence said, attempting to master himself; he felt quite absurdly happy and absurdly reassured, and on going back inside to complete his dress could not help but stand and admire the sword in the mirror.\n\nHammond and Staunton had both adopted the Chinese scholar-robes; the rest of his officers wore their bottle-green coats, trousers, and Hessians polished to a gleam; neckcloths had been washed and pressed, and even Roland and Dyer were perfectly smart, having been set on chairs and admonished not to move the moment they were bathed and dressed. Riley was similarly elegant in Navy blue, knee-breeches and slippers, and the four Marines whom he had brought from the ship in their lobster-red coats brought up the end of their company in style as they left the residence.\n\nA curious stage had been erected in the middle of the plaza where the performance was to be held: small, but marvelously painted and gilded, with three different levels. Qian presided at the center of the northern end of the court, Prince Mianning and Chuan on her left, and a place for Temeraire and the British party reserved upon her right. Besides the Celestials, there were also several Imperials present, including Mei, seated farther down the side and looking very graceful in a rig of gold set with polished jade: she nodded to Laurence and Temeraire from her place as they took their seats. The white dragon, Lien, was there also, seated with Yongxing to one side, a little apart from the rest of the guests; her albino coloration again startling by contrast with the dark-hued Imperials and Celestials on every side, and her proudly raised ruff today adorned with a netting of fine gold mesh, with a great pendant ruby lying upon her forehead.\n\n\"Oh, there is Miankai,\" Roland said in undertones to Dyer, and waved quickly across the square to a boy sitting by Mianning's side. The boy wore robes similar to the crown prince's, of the same dark shade of yellow, and an elaborate hat; he sat very stiff and proper. Seeing Roland's wave, he lifted his hand partway to respond, then dropped it again hastily, glanced down the table towards Yongxing, as if to see if he had been noticed in the gesture, and sat back relieved when he realized he had not drawn the older man's attention.\n\n\"How on earth do you know Prince Miankai? Has he ever come by the crown prince's residence?\" Hammond asked. Laurence also would have liked to know, as on his orders the runners had not been allowed out of their quarters alone at all, and ought not have had any opportunity of getting to know anyone else, even another child.\n\nRoland looking up at him said, surprised, \"Why, you presented him to us, on the island,\" and Laurence looked hard again. It might have been the boy who had visited them before, in Yongxing's company, but it was almost impossible to tell; swathed in the formal clothing, the boy looked entirely different.\n\n\"Prince Miankai?\" Hammond said. \"The boy Yongxing brought was Prince Miankai?\" He might have said something more; certainly his lips moved. But nothing at all could be heard over the sudden roll of drums: the instruments evidently hidden somewhere within the stage, but the sound quite unmuffled and about the volume of a moderate broadside, perhaps twenty-four guns, at close range.\n\nThe performance was baffling, of course, being entirely transacted in Chinese, but the movement of the scenery and the participants was clever: figures rose and dropped between the three different levels, flowers bloomed, clouds floated by, the sun and moon rose and set; all amid elaborate dances and mock swordplay. Laurence was fascinated by the spectacle, though the noise was scarcely to be imagined, and after some time his head began to ache sadly. He wondered if even the Chinese could understand the words being spoken, what with the din of drums and jangling instruments and the occasional explosion of firecrackers.\n\nHe could not apply to Hammond or Staunton for explanation: through the entire proceeding the two of them were attempting to carry on a conversation in pantomime, and paying no attention whatsoever to the stage. Hammond had brought an opera-glass, which they used only to peer across the courtyard at Yongxing, and the gouts of smoke and flame which formed part of the first act's extraordinary finale only drew their exclamations of annoyance at disrupting the view.\n\nThere was a brief gap in the proceedings while the stage was reset for the second act, and the two of them seized the few moments to converse. \"Laurence,\" Hammond said, \"I must beg your pardon; you were perfectly right. Plainly Yongxing did mean to make the boy Temeraire's companion in your place, and now at last I understand why: he must mean to put the boy on the throne, somehow, and establish himself as regent.\"\n\n\"Is the Emperor ill, or an old man?\" Laurence said, puzzled.\n\n\"No,\" Staunton said meaningfully. \"Not in the least.\"\n\nLaurence stared. \"Gentlemen, you sound as though you are accusing him of regicide and fratricide both; you cannot be serious.\"\n\n\"I only wish I were not,\" Staunton said. \"If he does make such an attempt, we might end in the middle of a civil war, with nothing more likely for us than disaster regardless of the outcome.\"\n\n\"It will not come to that now,\" Hammond said, confidently. \"Prince Mianning is no fool, and I expect the Emperor is not, either. Yongxing brought the boy to us incognito for no good reason, and they will not fail to see that, nor that it is of a piece with the rest of his actions, once I lay them all before Prince Mianning. First his attempts to bribe you, with terms that I now wonder if he had the authority to offer, and then his servant attacking you on board the ship; and recall, the hunhun gang came at us directly after you refused to allow him to throw Temeraire and the boy into each other's company; all of it forms a very neat and damning picture.\"\n\nHe spoke almost exultantly, not very cautious, and started when Temeraire, who had overheard all, said with dawning anger, \"Are you saying that we have evidence, now, then? That Yongxing has been behind all of this\u2014that he is the one who tried to hurt Laurence, and had Willoughby killed?\" His great head rose and swiveled at once towards Yongxing, his slit pupils narrowing to thin black lines.\n\n\"Not here, Temeraire,\" Laurence said hurriedly, laying a hand on his side. \"Pray do nothing for the moment.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Hammond said also, alarmed. \"I am not yet certain, of course; it is only hypothetical, and we cannot take any action against him ourselves\u2014we must leave it in their hands\u2014\"\n\nThe actors moved to take their places upon the stage, putting an end to the immediate conversation; yet beneath his hand Laurence could feel the angry resonance deep within Temeraire's breast, a slow rolling growl that found no voice but lingered just short of sound. His talons gripped at the edges of the flagstones, his spiked ruff at half-mast and his nostrils red and flaring; he paid no more mind to the spectacle, all his attention given over to watching Yongxing.\n\nLaurence stroked his side again, trying to distract him: the square was crowded full of guests and scenery, and he did not like to imagine the results if Temeraire were to leap to some sort of action, for all he would gladly have liked to indulge his own anger and indignation towards the man. Worse, Laurence could not think how Yongxing was to be dealt with. The man was still the Emperor's brother, and the plot which Hammond and Staunton imagined too outrageous to be easily believed.\n\nA crash of cymbals and deep-voiced bells came from behind the stage, and two elaborate rice-paper dragons descended, crackling sparks flying from their nostrils; beneath them nearly the entire company of actors came running out around the base of the stage, swords and paste-jeweled knives waving, to enact a great battle. The drums again rolled out their thunder, the noise so vast it was almost like the shock of a blow, driving air out of his lungs. Laurence gasped for breath, then slowly put a groping hand up to his shoulder and found a short dagger's hilt jutting from below his collarbone.\n\n\"Laurence!\" Hammond said, reaching for him, and Granby was shouting at the men and thrusting aside the chairs: he and Blythe put themselves in front of Laurence. Temeraire was turning his head to look down at him.\n\n\"I am not hurt,\" Laurence said, confusedly: there was queerly no pain at first, and he tried to stand up, to lift his arm, and then felt the wound; blood was spreading in a warm stain around the base of the knife.\n\nTemeraire gave a shrill, terrible cry, cutting through all the noise and music; every dragon reared back on its hindquarters to stare, and the drums stopped abruptly: in the sudden silence Roland was crying out, \"He threw it, over there, I saw him!\" and pointing at one of the actors.\n\nThe man was empty-handed, in the midst of all the others still carrying their counterfeit weapons, and dressed in plainer clothing. He saw that his attempt to hide among them had failed and turned to flee too late; the troupe ran screaming in all directions as Temeraire flung himself almost clumsily into the square.\n\nThe man shrieked, once, as Temeraire's claws caught and dragged mortally deep furrows through his body. Temeraire threw the bloody corpse savaged and broken to the ground; for a moment he hung over it low and brooding, to be sure the man was dead, and then raised his head and turned on Yongxing; he bared his teeth and hissed, a murderous sound, and stalked towards him. At once Lien sprang forward, placing herself protectively in front of Yongxing; she struck down Temeraire's reaching talons with a swipe of her own foreleg and growled.\n\nIn answer, Temeraire's chest swelled out, and his ruff, queerly, stretched: something Laurence had never seen before, the narrow horns which made it up expanding outwards, the webbing drawn along with it. Lien did not flinch at all, but snarled almost contemptuously at him, her own parchment-pale ruff unfolding wide; the blood vessels in her eyes swelled horribly, and she stepped farther into the square to face him.\n\nAt once there was a general hasty movement to flee the courtyard. Drums and bells and twanging strings made a terrific noise as the rest of the actors decamped from the stage, dragging their instruments and costumes with them; the audience members picked up the skirts of their robes and hurried away with a little more dignity but no less speed.\n\n\"Temeraire, no!\" Laurence called, understanding too late. Every legend of dragons dueling in the wild invariably ended in the destruction of one or both: and the white dragon was clearly the elder and larger. \"John, get this damned thing out,\" he said to Granby, struggling to unwind his neckcloth with his good hand.\n\n\"Blythe, Martin, hold his shoulders,\" Granby directed them, then laid hold of the knife and pulled it loose, grating against bone; the blood spurted for a single dizzy moment, and then they clapped a pad made of their neckcloths over the wound, and tied it firmly down.\n\nTemeraire and Lien were still facing each other, feinting back and forth in small movements, barely more than a twitch of the head in either direction. They did not have much room to maneuver, the stage occupying so much of the courtyard, and the rows of empty seats still lining the edges. Their eyes never left each other.\n\n\"There's no use,\" Granby said quietly, gripping Laurence by the arm, helping him to his feet. \"Once they've set themselves on to duel like that, you can only get killed, trying to get between them, or distract him from the battle.\"\n\n\"Yes, very well,\" Laurence said harshly, putting off their hands. His legs had steadied, though his stomach was knotted and uncertain; the pain was not worse than he could manage. \"Get well clear,\" he ordered, turning around to the crew. \"Granby, take a party back to the residence and bring back our arms, in case that fellow should try to set any of the guards on him.\"\n\nGranby dashed away with Martin and Riggs, while the other men climbed hastily over the seats and got back from the fighting. The square was now nearly deserted, except for a few curiosity-seekers with more bravery than sense, and those most intimately concerned: Qian observing with a look at once anxious and disapproving, and Mei some distance behind her, having retreated in the general rush and then crept partway back.\n\nPrince Mianning also remained, though withdrawn a prudent distance: even so, Chuan was fidgeting and plainly concerned. Mianning laid a quieting hand on Chuan's side and spoke to his guards: they snatched up young Prince Miankai and carried him off to safety, despite his loud protests. Yongxing watched the boy taken away and nodded to Mianning coolly in approval, himself disdaining to move from his place.\n\nThe white dragon abruptly hissed and struck out: Laurence flinched, but Temeraire had reared back in the bare nick of time, the red-tipped talons passing scant inches from his throat. Now up on his powerful back legs, he crouched and sprang, claws outstretched, and Lien was forced to retreat, hopping back awkwardly and off-balance. She spread her wings partway to catch her footing, and sprang aloft when Temeraire pressed her again; he followed her up at once.\n\nLaurence snatched Hammond's opera-glass away unceremoniously and tried to follow their path. The white dragon was the larger, and her wingspan greater; she quickly outstripped Temeraire and looped about gracefully, her deadly intentions plain: she meant to plummet down on him from above. But the first flush of battle-fury past, Temeraire had recognized her advantage, and put his experience to use; instead of pursuing her, he angled away and flew out of the radiance of the lanterns, melting into the darkness.\n\n\"Oh, well done,\" Laurence said. Lien was hovering uncertainly mid-air, head darting this way and that, peering into the night with her queer red eyes; abruptly Temeraire came flashing straight down towards her, roaring. But she flung herself aside with unbelievable quickness: unlike most dragons attacked from above, she did not hesitate more than a moment, and as she rolled away she managed to score Temeraire flying past: three bloody gashes opened red against his black hide. Drops of thick blood splashed onto the courtyard, shining black in the lantern-light. Mei crept closer with a small whimpering cry; Qian turned on her, hissing, but Mei only ducked down submissively and offered no target, coiling anxiously against a stand of trees to watch more closely.\n\nLien was making good use of her greater speed, darting back and away from Temeraire, encouraging him to spend his strength in useless attempts to hit her; but Temeraire grew wily: the speed of his slashes was just a little less than he could manage, a fraction slow. At least so Laurence hoped; rather than the wound giving him so much pain. Lien was successfully tempted closer: Temeraire suddenly flashed out with both foreclaws at once, and caught her in belly and breast; she shrieked out in pain and beat away frantically.\n\nYongxing's chair fell over clattering as the prince surged to his feet, all pretense of calm gone; now he stood watching with fists clenched by his sides. The wounds did not look very deep, but the white dragon seemed quite stunned by them, keening in pain and hovering to lick the gashes. Certainly none of the palace dragons had any scars; it occurred to Laurence that very likely they had never been in real battle.\n\nTemeraire hung in the air a moment, talons flexing, but when she did not turn back to close with him again, he seized the opening and dived straight down towards Yongxing, his real target. Lien's head snapped up; she shrieked again and threw herself after him, beating with all her might, injury forgotten. She caught even with him just shy of the ground and flung herself upon him, wings and bodies tangling, and wrenched him aside from his course.\n\nThey struck the ground rolling together, a single hissing, savage, many-limbed beast clawing at itself, neither dragon paying any attention now to scratches or gouges, neither able to draw in the deep breaths that could let them use the divine wind against one another. Their thrashing tails struck everywhere, knocking over potted trees and scalping a mature stand of bamboo with a single stroke; Laurence seized Hammond's arm and dragged him ahead of the crashing hollow trunks as they collapsed down upon the chairs with an echoing drum-like clatter.\n\nShaking leaves from his hair and the collar of his coat, Laurence awkwardly raised himself on his one good arm from beneath the branches. In their frenzy, Temeraire and Lien had just knocked askew a column of the stage. The entire grandiose structure began to lean over, sliding by degrees towards the ground, almost stately. Its progress towards destruction was quite plain to see, but Mianning did not take shelter: the prince had stepped over to offer Laurence a hand to rise, and perhaps had not understood his very real danger; his dragon Chuan, too, was distracted, trying to keep himself between Mianning and the duel.\n\nThrusting himself up with an effort from the ground, Laurence managed to knock Mianning down even as the whole gilt-and-painted structure smashed into the courtyard stones, bursting into foot-long shards of wood. He bent low over the prince to shield them both, covering the back of his neck with his good arm. Splinters jabbed him painfully even through the padded broadcloth of his heavy coat, one sticking him badly in the thigh where he had only his trousers, and another, razor-sharp, sliced his scalp above the temple as it flew.\n\nThen the deadly hail was past, and Laurence straightened wiping blood from the side of his face to see Yongxing, with a deeply astonished expression, fall over: a great jagged splinter protruding from his eye.\n\nTemeraire and Lien managed to disentangle themselves and sprang apart into facing crouches, still growling, their tails waving angrily. Temeraire glanced back over his shoulder towards Yongxing first, meaning to make another try, and halted in surprise: one foreleg poised in the air. Lien snarled and leapt at him, but he dodged instead of meeting her attack, and then she saw.\n\nFor a moment she was perfectly still, only the tendrils of her ruff lifting a little in the breeze, and the thin runnels of red-black blood trickling down her legs. She walked very slowly over to Yongxing's body and bent her head low, nudging him just a little, as if to confirm for herself what she must already have known.\n\nThere was no movement, not even a last nerveless twitching of the body, as Laurence had sometimes seen in the suddenly killed. Yongxing lay stretched out his full height; the surprise had faded with the final slackening of the muscles, and his face was now composed and unsmiling, his hands lying one outflung and slightly open, the other fallen across his breast, and his jeweled robes still glittering in the sputtering torchlight. No one else came near; the handful of servants and guards who had not abandoned the clearing huddled back at the edges, staring, and the other dragons all kept silent.\n\nLien did not scream out, as Laurence had dreaded, or even make any sound at all; she did not turn again on Temeraire, either, but very carefully with her talons brushed away the smaller splinters that had fallen onto Yongxing's robes, the broken pieces of wood, a few shredded leaves of bamboo; then she gathered the body up in both her foreclaws, and carrying it flew silently away into the dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Laurence twitched away from the restless, pinching hands, first in one direction then the other: but there was no escape, either from them or from the dragging weight of the yellow robes, stiff with gold and green thread, and pulled down by the gemstone eyes of the dragons embroidered all over them. His shoulder ached abominably under the burden, even a week after the injury, and they would keep trying to move his arm to adjust the sleeves.\n\n\"Are you not ready yet?\" Hammond said anxiously, putting his head into the room. He admonished the tailors in rapid-fire Chinese; and Laurence closed his mouth on an exclamation as one managed to poke him with a too-hasty needle.\n\n\"Surely we are not late; are we not expected at two o'clock?\" Laurence asked, making the mistake of turning around to see a clock, and being shouted at from three directions for his pains.\n\n\"One is expected to be many hours early for any meeting with the Emperor, and in this case we must be more punctilious than less,\" Hammond said, sweeping his own blue robes out of the way as he pulled over a stool. \"You are quite sure you remember the phrases, and their order?\"\n\nLaurence submitted to being drilled once more; it was at least good for distraction from his uncomfortable position. At last he was let go, one of the tailors following them halfway down the hall, making a last adjustment to the shoulders while Hammond tried to hurry him.\n\nYoung Prince Miankai's innocent testimony had quite damned Yongxing: the boy had been promised his own Celestial, and had been asked how he would like to be Emperor himself, though with no great details on how this was to be accomplished. Yongxing's whole party of supporters, men who like him believed all contact with the West ought to be severed, had been cast quite into disgrace, leaving Prince Mianning once more ascendant in the court: and as a result, further opposition to Hammond's proposal of adoption had collapsed. The Emperor had sent his edict approving the arrangements, and as this was to the Chinese the equivalent of commanding them done instantly, their progress now became as rapid as it had been creeping heretofore. Scarcely had the terms been settled than servants were swarming through their quarters in Mianning's palace, sweeping away all their possessions into boxes and bundles.\n\nThe Emperor had taken up residence now at his Summer Palace in the Yuanmingyuan Garden: half a day's journey from Peking by dragon, and thence they had been conveyed almost pell-mell. The vast granite courtyards of the Forbidden City had turned anvils under the punishing summer sun, which was muted in the Yuanmingyuan by the lush greenery and the expanses of carefully tended lakes; Laurence had found it little wonder the Emperor preferred this more comfortable estate.\n\nOnly Staunton had been granted permission to accompany Laurence and Hammond into the actual ceremony of adoption, but Riley and Granby led the other men as an escort: their numbers fleshed out substantially by guards and mandarins loaned by Prince Mianning to give Laurence what they considered a respectable number. As a party they left the elaborate complex where they had been housed, and began the journey to the audience hall where the Emperor would meet them. After an hour's walk, crossing some six streams and ponds, their guides pausing at regular intervals to point out to them particularly elegant features of the landscaped grounds, Laurence began to fear they had indeed not left in good time: but at last they came to the hall, and were led to the walled court to await the Emperor's pleasure.\n\nThe wait itself was interminable: slowly soaking the robes through with sweat as they sat in the hot, breathless courtyard. Cups of ices were brought to them, also many dishes of hot food, which Laurence had to force himself to sample; bowls of milk and tea; and presents: a large pearl on a golden chain, quite perfect, and some scrolls of Chinese literature, and for Temeraire a set of gold-and-silver talon-sheaths, such as his mother occasionally wore. Temeraire was alone among them unfazed by the heat; delighted, he put the talon-sheaths on at once and entertained himself by flashing them in the sunlight, while the rest of the party lay in an increasing stupor.\n\nAt last the mandarins came out again and with deep bows led Laurence within, followed by Hammond and Staunton, and Temeraire behind them. The audience chamber itself was open to the air, hung with graceful light draperies, the fragrance of peaches rising from a heaped bowl of golden fruit. There were no chairs but the dragon-couch at the back of the room, where a great male Celestial presently sprawled, and the simple but beautifully polished rosewood chair which held the Emperor.\n\nHe was a stocky, broad-jawed man, unlike the thin-faced and rather sallow Mianning, and with a small mustache squared off at the corners of his mouth, not yet touched with grey though he was nearing fifty. His clothes were very magnificent, in the brilliant yellow hue which they had seen nowhere else but on the private guard outside the palace, and he wore them entirely unconsciously; Laurence thought not even the King had looked so casually in state robes, on those few occasions when he had attended at court.\n\nThe Emperor was frowning, but thoughtful rather than displeased, and nodded expectantly as they came in; Mianning stood among many other dignitaries to either side of the throne, and inclined his head very slightly. Laurence took a deep breath and lowered himself carefully to both knees, listening to the mandarin hissing off the count to time each full genuflection. The floor was of polished wood covered with gorgeously woven rugs, and the act itself was not uncomfortable; he could just glimpse Hammond and Staunton following along behind him as he bowed each time to the floor.\n\nStill it went against the grain, and Laurence was glad to rise at last with the formality met; thankfully the Emperor made no unwelcome gesture of condescension, but only ceased to frown: there was a general air of release from tension in the room. The Emperor now rose from his chair and led Laurence to the small altar on the eastern side of the hall. Laurence lit the stands of incense upon the altar and parroted the phrases which Hammond had so laboriously taught him, relieved to see Hammond's small nod: he had made no mistakes, then, or at least none unforgivable.\n\nHe had to genuflect once more, but this time before the altar, which Laurence was ashamed to acknowledge even to himself was easier by far to bear, though closer to real blasphemy; hurriedly, under his breath, he said a Lord's Prayer, and hoped that should make quite clear that he did not really mean to be breaking the commandment. Then the worst of the business was over: now Temeraire was called forward for the ceremony which would formally bind them as companions, and Laurence could make the required oaths with a light heart.\n\nThe Emperor had seated himself again to oversee the proceedings; now he nodded approvingly, and made a brief gesture to one of his attendants. At once a table was brought into the room, though without any chairs, and more of the cool ices served while the Emperor made inquiries to Laurence about his family, through Hammond's mediation. The Emperor was taken aback to learn that Laurence was himself unmarried and without children, and Laurence was forced to submit to being lectured on the subject at great length, quite seriously, and to agree that he had been neglecting his family duties. He did not mind very much: he was too happy not to have misspoken, and for the ordeal to be so nearly over.\n\nHammond himself was nearly pale with relief as they left, and had actually to stop and sit down upon a bench on their way to their quarters. A couple of servants brought him some water and fanned him until the color came back into his face and he could stagger on. \"I congratulate you, sir,\" Staunton said, shaking Hammond's hand as they at last left him to lie down in his chamber. \"I am not ashamed to say I would not have believed it possible.\"\n\n\"Thank you; thank you,\" Hammond could only repeat, deeply affected; he was nearly toppling over.\n\nHammond had won for them not only Laurence's formal entr\u00e9e into the Imperial family, but the grant of an estate in the Tartar city itself. It was not quite an official embassy, but as a practical matter it was much the same, as Hammond could now reside there indefinitely at Laurence's invitation. Even the kowtow had been dealt with to everyone's satisfaction: from the British point of view, Laurence had made the gesture not as a representative of the Crown, but as an adopted son, while the Chinese were content to have their proper forms met.\n\n\"We have already had several very friendly messages from the mandarins at Canton through the Imperial post, did Hammond tell you?\" Staunton said to Laurence, as they stood together outside their own rooms. \"The Emperor's gesture to remit all duties on British ships for the year will of course be a tremendous benefit to the Company, but in the long run this new mind-set amongst them will by far prove the more valuable. I suppose\u2014\" Staunton hesitated; his hand was already on the screen-frame, ready to go inside. \"I suppose you could not find it consistent with your duty to stay? I need scarcely say that it would be of tremendous value to have you here, though of course I know how great our need for dragons is, back home.\"\n\nRetiring at last, Laurence gladly exchanged his clothes for plain cotton robes, and went outside to join Temeraire in the fragrant shade of a bank of orange trees. Temeraire had a scroll laid out in his frame, but was gazing out across the nearby pond rather than reading. In view, a graceful nine-arched bridge crossed the pond, mirrored in black shadows against the water now dyed yellow-orange with the reflections of the late sunlight, the lotus flowers closing up for the night.\n\nHe turned his head and nudged Laurence in greeting. \"I have been watching: there is Lien,\" he said, pointing with his nose across the water. The white dragon was crossing over the bridge, all alone except for a tall, dark-haired man in blue scholar-robes walking by her side, who looked somehow unusual; after a moment squinting, Laurence realized the man did not have a shaved forehead nor a queue. Midway Lien paused and turned to look at them: Laurence put a hand on Temeraire's neck, instinctively, in the face of that unblinking red gaze.\n\nTemeraire snorted, and his ruff came up a little way, but she did not stay: her neck proudly straight and haughty, she turned away again and continued past, vanishing shortly among the trees. \"I wonder what she will do now,\" Temeraire said.\n\nLaurence wondered also; certainly she would not find another willing companion, when she had been held unlucky even before her late misfortunes. He had even heard several courtiers make remarks to the effect that she was responsible for Yongxing's fate; deeply cruel, if she had heard them, and still-less-forgiving opinion held that she ought to be banished entirely. \"Perhaps she will go into some secluded breeding grounds.\"\n\n\"I do not think they have particular grounds set aside for breeding here,\" Temeraire said. \"Mei and I did not have to\u2014\" Here he stopped, and if it were possible for a dragon to blush, he certainly would have undertaken it. \"But perhaps I am wrong,\" he said hastily.\n\nLaurence swallowed. \"You have a great deal of affection for Mei.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Temeraire said, wistfully.\n\nLaurence was silent; he picked up one of the hard little yellow fruits that had fallen unripe, and rolled it in his hands. \"The Allegiance will sail with the next favorable tide, if the wind permits,\" he said finally, very low. \"Would you prefer us to stay?\" Seeing that he had surprised Temeraire, he added, \"Hammond and Staunton tell me we could do a great deal of good for Britain's interests here. If you wish to remain, I will write to Lenton, and let him know we had better be stationed here.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, and bent his head over the reading frame: he was not paying attention to the scroll, but only thinking. \"You would rather go home, though, would you not?\"\n\n\"I would be lying if I said otherwise,\" Laurence said heavily. \"But I would rather see you happy; and I cannot think how I could make you so in England, now you have seen how dragons are treated here.\" The disloyalty nearly choked him; he could go no further.\n\n\"The dragons here are not all smarter than British dragons,\" Temeraire said. \"There is no reason Maximus or Lily could not learn to read and write, or carry on some other kind of profession. It is not right that we are kept penned up like animals, and never taught anything but how to fight.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"No, it is not.\" There was no possible answer to make, all his defense of British custom undone by the examples which he had seen before him in every corner of China. If some dragons went hungry, that was hardly a counter. He himself would gladly have starved sooner than give up his own liberty, and he would not insult Temeraire by mentioning it even as a sop.\n\nThey were silent together for a long space of time, while the servants came around to light the lamps; the quarter-moon rising hung mirrored in the pond, luminous silver, and Laurence idly threw pebbles into the water to break the reflection into gilt ripples. It was hard to imagine what he would do in China, himself, other than serve as a figurehead. He would have to learn the language somehow after all, at least spoken if not the script.\n\n\"No, Laurence, it will not do. I cannot stay here and enjoy myself, while back home they are still at war, and need me,\" Temeraire said finally. \"And more than that, the dragons in England do not even know that there is any other way of doing things. I will miss Mei and Qian, but I could not be happy while I knew Maximus and Lily were still being treated so badly. It seems to me my duty to go back and arrange things better there.\"\n\nLaurence did not know what to say. He had often chided Temeraire for revolutionary thoughts, a tendency to sedition, but only jokingly; it had never occurred to him Temeraire would ever make any such attempt deliberately, outright. Laurence had no idea what the official reaction would be, but he was certain it would not be taken calmly. \"Temeraire, you cannot possibly\u2014\" he said, and stopped, the great blue eyes expectantly upon him.\n\n\"My dear,\" he said quietly, after a moment, \"you put me to shame. Certainly we ought not be content to leave things as they are, now we know there is a better way.\"\n\n\"I thought you would agree,\" Temeraire said, in satisfaction. \"Besides,\" he added, more prosaically, \"my mother tells me that Celestials are not supposed to fight, at all, and only studying all the time does not sound very exciting. We had much better go home.\" He nodded, and looked back at his poetry. \"Laurence,\" he said, \"the ship's carpenter could make some more of these reading frames, could he not?\"\n\n\"My dear, if it will make you happy he shall make you a dozen,\" Laurence said, and leaned against him, full of gratitude despite his concerns, to calculate by the moon when the tide should turn again for England and for home.\n\n\u2002Selected extracts from\n\n\u2002\"A Brief Discourse upon the Oriental Breeds, with Reflections upon the Art of Draconic Husbandry\"\n\n\u2002Presented before the Royal Society, June 1801\n\n\u2002by Sir Edward Howe, F.R.S.\n\n\u2002The \"vast untrammeled serpentine hordes\" of the Orient are become a byword in the West, feared and admired at once, thanks in no small part to the well-known accounts of pilgrims from an earlier and more credulous era, which, while of inestimable value at the time of their publication in shedding light upon the perfect darkness which preceded them, to the modern scholar can hardly be of any use, suffering as they do from the regrettable exaggeration which was in earlier days the mode, either from sincere belief on the part of the author or the less innocent yet understandable desire to satisfy a broader audience, anticipatory of monsters and delights incalculable in any tales of the Orient.\n\n\u2002A sadly inconsistent collection of reports has thus come forward to the present day, some no better than pure fiction and nearly all others distortions of the truth, which the reader would do better to discount wholesale than to trust in any particular. I will mention one illustrative example, the Sui-Riu of Japan, familiar to the student of draconic lore from the 1613 account of Captain John Saris, whose letters confidently described as fact its ability to summon up a thunderstorm out of a clear blue sky. This remarkable claim, which should thus arrogate the powers of Jove to a mortal creature, I will discredit from my own knowledge: I have seen one of the Sui-Riu and observed its very real capacity to swallow massive quantities of water and expel them in violent gusts, a gift which renders it inexpressibly valuable not only in battle, but in the protection of the wooden buildings of Japan from the dangers of fire. An unwary traveler caught in such a torrent might well imagine the skies to have opened up over his head with a thunderclap, but these deluges proceed quite unaccompanied by lightning or rain-cloud, are of some few moments' duration, and, needless to say, not supernatural in the least.\n\n\u2002Such errors I will endeavor to avoid in my own turn, rather trusting to the plain facts, presented without excessive ornamentation, to suffice for my more knowledgeable audience...\n\n\u2002We can without hesitation dismiss as ridiculous the estimate, commonly put forth, that in China one may find a dragon for every ten men: a count which, if it were remotely near the truth and our understanding of the human population not entirely mistaken, should certainly result in that great nation's being so wholly overrun by the beasts that the hapless traveler bringing us this intelligence should have had great difficulty in finding even a place to stand. The vivid picture drawn for us by Brother Mateo Ricci, of the temple gardens full of serpentine bodies one overlapping the other, which has so long dominated the Western imagination, is not a wholly false one; however, one must understand that among the Chinese, dragons live rather within the cities than without, their presence thus all the more palpable, and they furthermore move hither and yon with far greater freedom, so that the dragon seen in the market square in the afternoon will often be the same individual observed earlier in morning ablutions at the temple, and then again, some hours later, dining at the cattle-yards upon the city border.\n\n\u2002For the size of the population as a whole, we have I am sorry to say no sources upon which I am prepared to rely. However, the letters of the late Father Michel Beno\u00eet, a Jesuit astronomer who served in the court of the Qianlong Emperor, report that, upon the occasion of the Emperor's birthday, two companies of their aerial corps were engaged to overfly the Summer Palace in performance of acrobatics; which he himself, in company with two other Jesuit clerks, then personally witnessed.\n\n\u2002These companies, consisting of some dozen dragons apiece, are roughly equivalent to the largest of Western formations, and each assigned to one company of three hundred men. Twenty-five such companies form each of the eight banner divisions of the aerial armies of the Tartars, which would yield twenty-four hundred dragons acting in concert with sixty thousand men: already a more than respectable number, yet the number of companies has grown substantially since the founding of the dynasty, and the army is at present a good deal closer to twice the size. We may thus reliably conclude that there are some five thousand dragons in military service in China; a number at once plausible and extraordinary, which gives some small notion of the overall population.\n\n\u2002The very grave difficulties inherent in the management of even so many as a hundred dragons together in any singular and protracted military operation are well known in the West, and greatly constrain for practical purposes the size of our own aerial corps. One cannot move herds of cattle so quickly as dragons, nor can dragons carry their food with them live. How the supply of so vast a number of dragons may be orchestrated plainly poses a problem of no small order; indeed, for this purpose the Chinese have established an entire Ministry of Draconic Affairs...\n\n\u2002...it may be that the ancient Chinese practice of keeping their coins strung upon cords is due to the former necessity of providing a means of handling money to dragons; however, this is a relic of earlier times, and since at least the Tang Dynasty, the present system has been in place. The dragon is furnished, upon reaching maturity, with an individual hereditary mark, showing sire and dame as well as the dragon's own rank; this having being placed on record with the Ministry, all funds due to the dragon are then paid into the general treasury and disbursed again on reception of markers which the dragon gives to those merchants, primarily herdsmen, whom it chooses to patronize.\n\n\u2002This would seem upon the face of it a system wholly unworkable; one may well imagine the results were a government to so administer the wages of its citizenry. However, it most curiously appears that it does not occur to the dragons to forge a false mark when making their purchases; they receive such a suggestion with surprise and profound disdain, even if hungry and short of funds. Perhaps one may consider this as evidence of a sort of innate honor existing among dragons, or in any event family pride; yet at the same time, they will without hesitation or any consciousness of shame seize any opportunity which offers of taking a beast from an unattended herd or stall and never consider leaving payment behind; this is not viewed by them as any form of theft, and indeed in such a case the guilty dragon may be found devouring his ill-gotten prey while sitting directly beside the pen from which it was seized, and ignoring with perfect ease the complaints of the unhappy herdsman who has returned too late to save his flock.\n\n\u2002Themselves scrupulous in the use of their own marks, the dragons are also rarely made victims of any unscrupulous person who might think to rob them by submitting falsified markers to the Ministry. Being as a rule violently jealous of their wealth, dragons will at once on arriving in any settled place go to inquire as to the state of their accounts and scrutinize all expenses, and so quickly notice any unwarranted charge upon their funds or missing payment; and by all reports the well-known reactions of dragons to being robbed has no less force when that theft occurs in this manner indirectly and out of their view. Chinese law expressly waives any penalty for a dragon who kills a man proven guilty of such a theft; the ordinary sentence is indeed the exposure of the perpetrator to the dragon. Such a sentence of sure and violent death may seem to us a barbaric punishment, and yet I have been assured several times over by both master and dragon that this is the only means of consoling a dragon so abused and restoring it to calm.\n\n\u2002This same necessity of placating the dragons has also ensured the steady continuance of the system over the course of better than a thousand years; any conquering dynasty made it nearly their first concern to stabilize the flow of funds, as one can well imagine the effects of a riot of angry dragons...\n\n\u2002The soil of China is not naturally more arable than that of Europe; the vast necessary herds are rather supported through an ancient and neatly contrived scheme of husbandry whereby the herdsmen, having driven some portion of their flocks into the towns and cities to sate the hungry dragons, returning carry away with them great loads of the richly fermented night-soil collected in the dragon-middens of the town, to exchange with the farmers in their rural home districts. This practice of using dragon night-soil as fertilizer in addition to the manure of cattle, almost unknown here in the West due to the relative scarcity of dragons and the remoteness of their habitations, seems especially efficacious in renewing the fertility of the soil; why this should be so is a question as yet unanswered by modern science, and yet well-evidenced by the productivity of the Chinese husbandmen, whose farms, I am reliably informed, regularly produce a yield nearly an order of magnitude greater than our own..."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "A Dragon and Her Girl",
        "author": "Joe Monson (ed)",
        "genres": [
            "dragons",
            "short stories"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Style: foreword",
                "text": "[ The Dragonlady of Crandall House West ]\n\nThe science fiction symposium, Life, the Universe, & Everything, wasn't the only amazing thing to come out of the \"Class That Wouldn't Die\" at Brigham Young University. The same group of organizers also created their very own semi-pro science fiction magazine, The Leading Edge (now simply Leading Edge).\n\nFrom its first issue in 1981 to the latest (issue 75 in February 2020), it published\u2014and continues to publish\u2014some amazing fiction by pros and amateurs alike. It even won a Chesley Award for its April 2001 issue (edited by Brandon Sanderson, no less), featuring cover art by James C. Christensen.\n\nFor many years, TLE (as it was affectionately nicknamed) was housed in Crandall House West, a former residence-turned-Humanities-\u00adPublication-\u00adCenter located to the west of the iconic Centennial Carillon on campus. One of the driving forces behind the \"HumPub\" was Linda Hunter Adams.\n\nLinda always reminded me of weyrwomen such as Moreta and Lessa in Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, though I don't know that I ever discussed the series with Linda. The weyrwomen in those stories were strong leaders, compassionate (in many cases), and basically ran everything in the weyrs. They knew what they were doing and were happy to help others learn what needed doing. Everyone in the weyrs looked up to them and respected them. The HumPub was Linda's weyr.\n\nLinda was fiercely protective of her weyr. She handled no end of political wrangling with the leaders of various other weyrs at the university. She stood up for what the students thought was best for the books and journals produced at the HumPub, gently guiding her students and interns through the ins and outs of the publishing business. With expert skill and grace, she walked the line between professional/academic advisor and the slightly-eccentric aunt everyone wishes they had. During the time I worked on TLE (off and on from 1993 to 1998), Linda was a constant fixture there. Her passing in 2016 had a huge impact on all TLE and LTUE alumni.\n\nThe stories selected for this volume of the LTUE Benefit Anthologies were selected with Linda in mind. We picked stories we think Linda would have loved. These stories feature strong women and girls doing hard things, going on difficult adventures, making tough decisions, and interacting with dragons in various ways. Basically, women like Linda, fighting the good fight\u2014whatever the odds\u2014in order to make sure their important people and places are protected and guided.\n\nAs with Trace the Stars (2019), all of the stories were donated by the authors (and the cover art by the artist) to help LTUE continue to let students attend for a greatly reduced price. If you see these creators anywhere, please thank them for their generosity. We couldn't do this without them. We hope you enjoy the stories in A Dragon and Her Girl as much as we did.\n\nBefore you go, I recently found this filk song in my archives (translation: I was cleaning a room). It has no attribution, but it appears to have been written on the occasion of Linda's retirement from BYU. Whoever the author is, thank you! This song is wonderful! If you see this, feel free to contact me on the Hemelein website and I'll update any future editions with proper attribution.\n\n\"Linda Hunter Adams\"\n\n(sung to the tune of \"Maria\" from Sound of Music)\n\n\u2003She'll dot the i's and cross the t's\n\n\u2003And give the words a stare.\n\n\u2003Then briskly rolling up her sleeves,\n\n\u2003She'll plant a comma there.\n\n\u2003In this whole world, there's never been\n\n\u2003An editor to compare\n\n\u2003With BYU's own Linda Hunter Adams!\n\n\u2003She has a reputation for\n\n\u2003Enhancing people's prose.\n\n\u2003And with her own panache and flair,\n\n\u2003She teaches what she knows.\n\n\u2003And day and night, she never stops\u2014\n\n\u2003She goes and goes and goes.\n\n\u2003We're going to miss our Linda Hunter Adams!\n\n\u2003I'd like to say a word before we're through:\n\n\u2003She opened a pub at BYU!\n\nChorus:\n\n\u2003You are a legend, Linda Hunter Adams.\n\n\u2003No one would dare to try to take your place.\n\n\u2003One of a kind, that's Linda Hunter Adams.\n\n\u2003A style of your own, with a splash of flamboyance and grace.\n\n\u2003Think of the published authors you have nurtured.\n\n\u2003Think of the generations you have blessed.\n\n\u2003And think of the students who\n\n\u2003Admire and worship you.\n\n\u2003You're like a mother hen upon her nest.\n\n\u2003Oh, you are a legend Linda Hunter Adams.\n\n\u2003Now, cherished colleague, you deserve a rest.\n\n\u2003In her office there's no space\n\n\u2003For her guests to have a place.\n\n\u2003She's been known at times to even lose her keys.\n\n\u2003And her phone just rings and rings.\n\n\u2003Sometimes she is late for things.\n\n\u2003And to send her emails, well, it ain't a breeze.\n\n\u2003Student journals\u2014see them grow,\n\n\u2003For she never can say no.\n\n\u2003And she always is surrounded by her \"kids.\"\n\n\u2003She's a mentor. She's a guide\u2014\n\n\u2003With disciples at her side.\n\n\u2003She's inspiring! She's untiring! She's a whiz!\n\n(Repeat Chorus)\n\nThank you for your support of the symposium.\n\n\u2014Joe Monson, February 2020\n\nA Game of Stakes\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Departure by Max Florschutz ]\n\n\"Ah, Victoria,\" her father said as she lifted the last of her luggage into the coach. \"It pains my heart to see you go.\"\n\n\"I know, Papa,\" she said as she turned to look at him. \"But it will only be for a short time. A few months, half-a-year at most. The length of a short campaign, nothing more.\" She wrapped her arms around her father, hugging him through the stiff, black greatcoat he always wore.\n\n\"I know, Victoria. But this is different. With those, I left you. When you deigned to let me do so, that is.\" His arms wrapped around her, holding her close.\n\nShe wanted to bury her head in his chest. Not that it was easy to do so, not since she'd inherited her mother's height. She had to settle for resting her head on her father's shoulder instead and smiled.\n\n\"Do you remember the Sicarian campaign?\" she asked.\n\n\"How could I forget?\" Her father's chest shook with a short laugh. \"Your mother was furious. I thought she'd never speak with me again. But this...\" He finally unwrapped his comforting arms, stepping back and resting his hands on her shoulders. \"This is still different. This time, my Victoria, you are leaving me.\" He smiled. \"And on a campaign of your own.\"\n\n\"Papa, seeking a husband is hardly a campaign.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, shaking his head with a laugh. \"It isn't. It is far more difficult.\" For a moment a faint look of sadness slipped across his face, whether at her departure or at the mention of her late mother, she couldn't say. \"But Victoria, are you... certain... that this is how you wish to go about it? Hiring a dragon?\"\n\n\"It's a novel prospect, Papa,\" she said, taking one of his massive hands in hers and pulling it gently from her shoulder. \"I'll be fine. Nothing is set in stone, you know that.\"\n\nHer father nodded quietly. \"Aye, I do.\" One of the first lessons he'd taught her. \"But, are you sure you could not do the same here? My Victoria, you'll be putting your fate in the claws of a dragon.\"\n\n\"My fate will be in my own hands, Papa,\" she said. \"The dragon is just a means to an end. A way to let the world know that the daughter of the famous Count Artares is seeking a companion.\"\n\n\"You could do that here, my daughter,\" he said, stepping back and giving her a better view of the honor guard around them. \"You don't have to go to this dragon.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"No, Papa, I must. It is because I am the daughter of Count Artares, the Wolf of Artares, that I must go.\" She stepped back, up onto the footstep of the coach that would take her away. \"Don't you see, Papa?\" She let out a little laugh. \"Men are more ready to meet with a dragon than they are with the Wolf.\"\n\nHer father smiled back at her, though she could see the tears in his eyes. \"I know,\" he said. \"But I want you to be safe, my Victoria. Give the word, and your guard will stay with you and this dragon.\"\n\n\"I know, Papa.\" She set a palm at the hilt of the sword that hung at her hip. \"But I will be fine. I love you, Papa.\"\n\n\"I love you too, Victoria. Stay safe. And, good luck.\"\n\n\"I will, Papa. And thank you.\" She swung open the door of the carriage, but didn't climb in, instead hanging from the side of the coach, looking out over her father's estate and the guard arrayed there. They'd likely be on the move soon, hired for another campaign. There was only one thing left to do.\n\nShe threw up a fist. \"For honor, and for victory!\" she cried.\n\nThe guard, three dozen strong including the ones on horseback behind her, threw their own fists up. \"For honor, and for victory!\" The coach began moving forward, but she stayed hanging in the open door from the side, as was custom, until she had cleared her father's estate. At last, when the hills outside the coach gave way to farmland, she ducked inside and sat down, her mind and heart both racing.\n\n\"For honor, and for victory,\" she repeated quietly. \"I will not let you down, father.\"\n\nThe dragon was waiting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Arrival",
                "text": "The lair of Dostoy the Mighty was nothing like the name, or popular stories, suggested. The coach moved up a well-cared for gravel road, which in turn led to what could have been a simple estate home carved into the rocky face of the mountain itself. In fact, Victoria thought as the coach came to a stop, it likely hadn't, but the architects had taken great pains to ensure that it looked as though it had. But her eyes could see the faint jutting changes in the rock, the distant seams that could be used to perhaps find a weakness to exploit.\n\nDraconic architecture, she thought, eyeing the high-vaulted windows and wide doorways. Or human? It certainly wasn't one of the other races, not that they had much to do with humans outside of border trade with the edges of the empire. The stone had been carved with simple reliefs, repeating patterns that added a pleasing aesthetic. She almost could have forgotten that it was home to a dragon, if not for the large size.\n\nAnd, of course, the dragon himself standing by the front doors, waiting to receive her.\n\nHe was smaller than she'd expected. She gauged him to be somewhere between ten and eleven feet long\u2014maybe a dozen at most\u2014though it was only a rough estimate given the distance between them, and it was hard to tell with him sitting on his haunches, tail wrapped tightly around him. The tail would easily add another ten feet, maybe more. He held his wings tightly folded against his back, and while she knew dragons used magic to fly, she'd heard more than one old campaigner mention that their span was often larger than it appeared to be at first glance. She looked up at the dragon's raised muzzle\u2014\n\nAnd stopped in surprise. His eyes were looking right back at her and her coach, keen and inquisitive. More than one of her father's soldiers had spoken of dragons as \"dumb brutes,\" but there was no mistaking the way those eyes were picking over her retinue, pausing here and there before moving on. This was a thinking, intelligent, aware being.\n\nHer coach pulled to a halt, halfway across the wide open gravel clearing before the dragon's home. She took a deep breath. This was it. She stood, hunched in the interior of the coach, and then with great care opened the door. The dragon's eyes met her own as she stepped out, once again displaying a depth of intelligence and awareness that was surprisingly human, and then to her shock he bowed, spreading his wings as he bent low.\n\n\"Lady Victoria Artares.\" His voice was not quite as deep as she'd been expecting either, and bore an accent with traces of the northern nobility. \"I welcome you to my lair and home. It is a pleasure to meet you.\"\n\nShe smiled. Most would have said \"with the daughter of the Wolf\" rather than \"you.\" It was a small difference, but it helped ease her heart that she'd made the right choice.\n\n\"Dostoy the Mighty,\" she said, holding her voice steady at the title. \"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last.\" For some reason, when she'd exchanged letters with him, she'd been envisioning a mighty, commanding figure of red. But in truth, he was more a light tan, like faded tree-bark. \"Was my payment received?\"\n\n\"It was, Lady Victoria,\" Dostoy replied, coming out of his bow at last.\n\nFrom the corner of her eyes Victoria saw several of her guard sitting in ready positions, their hands within easy reach of their muskets and crossbows.\n\n\"Will your guard be joining us?\"\n\nHe had, she realized, noticed as well. Of course he would have, she thought. It's been only thirty years since things were put to rest between our species. As well as they could. There were soldiers in her father's army\u2014likely in her own guard\u2014that had gone against dragons during what the dragons called the Bad Days, when they were little more than pillagers and looters, blights across any kingdom that found itself beset by one. Before the dawn of the New Age when inventions had leveled the battleground between them, and forced a truce. The dragon himself would likely not remember those days, given that he was three years her junior and hatched after the truce, but the scars of those centuries ran deep.\n\n\"Guard,\" she called. \"Ease. We aren't among foes here.\" Several of her followers nodded, lowering their hands. Good. They would follow her orders. \"And no, Mr. Dostoy\u2014\"\n\n\"Just 'Dostoy,' if you please,\" he said quickly. \"Just Dostoy.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" She nodded. \"Dostoy, they will not be joining us. They will, however,\" she said, turning and gazing at them, \"be camped some miles away, just to serve as a precaution against overenthusiastic suitors.\" There were towns with inns nearby, of course, but that would mean a higher public profile, and neither she, nor her father, wanted that.\n\n\"Very well,\" Dostoy said with a nod of his head. She wondered how many remnants of other similar camps her guard were likely to find out in the forest. \"Do you have any attendants or ladies-in-waiting?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"None. I can take care of myself.\"\n\n\"Very well. Do you require aid with your luggage? I am willing to lend a claw.\"\n\n\"That would be...\" She glanced at the trunks atop her coach. \"Very kind. Thank you.\"\n\nDostoy simply shook his head. \"It is in my interests that you are as cared for as possible and have your needs met.\" He dropped to all fours and strode forward. Despite her height, she still had to look up at him. \"Your guard, of course, may be of use as well. I can show you to your room, and once you are settled, give you a tour.\"\n\nHis words seemed to shock her guard, who began to dismount, no doubt with intentions to help with her luggage. She let them, stepping up on the sideboard of her coach and motioning toward one of the heavier trunks. \"This one, if you please,\" she said, grabbing a trunk of her own. Dostoy complied, carefully and quite skillfully picking up the trunk and sliding it onto his back, where it lay held between wings. To her surprise, he then waited until she was ready before walking with her back toward the front doors.\n\n\"Your residence will be on the second floor,\" he said, his head angling in the direction of a set of windows. \"From there, you will have a clear view of any suitors that come to complete your challenges.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I look forward to it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Dostoy's home was, as expected, tailored to suit his needs rather than hers. The halls were large and wide, the ceilings lifted. Stairs elongated to suit a quadrupedal gait, like small terraces rather than steps. Her rooms were both wide and spacious, and far nicer than what she was accustomed to at home. Built for princesses, rather than a seasoned campaigner's daughter. She suspected that the wooden floor would be more comforting to her than the soft bed.\n\nBut there were other rooms available to her as well. A kitchen, for cooking needs. Human-styled facilities\u2014magic, no less. Extra rooms for servants\u2014not that she had brought any\u2014and even a study with wide windows and a collection of books, everything from histories to children's stories. She'd raised her eyes at the selection, and Dostoy had admitted with a very human shrug that\u2014after several complaints\u2014he'd simply stocked a little bit of everything, but could acquire more if there was something specific she required.\n\nBefore long her trunks had been delivered, and she dismissed the guard, watching as they rode after the coach.\n\nThis is it, she thought, turning to look at Dostoy's home once more. The dragon himself was waiting by the entrance. Now, we talk business.\n\n\"So, Dostoy,\" she said. \"Let us see how you are at a game of Stakes.\"\n\nStakes was an old game\u2014centuries old, in fact\u2014but it was why she was here. Stakes was a game of strategy, played on a board with near-infinite combinations and methods of play. It involved careful tactical consideration and warfare, and she'd been playing it since she was a child. As the daughter of the one of the most famous mercenary leaders who'd ever lived, how could she not? It was a primer across kingdoms everywhere for budding generals and captains.\n\nAnd Dostoy was a dragon who played Stakes. Even more, from what he'd said, he was respectable at it. Which, for what she required, was key.\n\nIn the old days, a dragon's seizing the children\u2014often daughters\u2014of nobility had been a common enough tactic. They would take them someplace remote, demand a ransom, and wait. A prime method for a young dragon to acquire a horde.\n\nIn response, tradition had sprung up regarding the fate of those who were able to rescue one so kidnapped, not through monetary means but by besting a dragon in combat. Those who could do so, regardless of lineage or upbringing, were rewarded for their deeds. Knighthood, usually. A place in a noble's guard. Quite often the hand of the one rescued.\n\nWhen the truce had been established, suddenly that avenue of success to some had been closed. At least, until one enterprising dragon had arrived at a king's court to announce a \"matchmaking service\" whereby he would serve as a challenge for potential suitors. For a small fee, of course.\n\nNevertheless, the new method let the old traditions live, while even allowing for the one-time \"victim\" to set their own terms of \"combat,\" giving them the power to narrow their potential field of suitors from \"good with a blade\" to other areas of interest.\n\nSuch as Stakes and military strategy. As the sole heir to her father's company, control of his forces would be passed to her in due time. If she ever was to be married, she wanted someone who could live up to the legacy her father had built, someone who could command his armies alongside her with the skill and shrewd strategy the company was known for.\n\nShe needed an equal who could command. And Dostoy would help her draw one out.\n\nThe dragon led her to what she assumed was his own study, where an ornate wooden Stakes table sat near one long, broad window. A fire crackled nearby, though she could smell no smoke, and the other three walls were covered in shelves, each filled in turn with book after book.\n\n\"You enjoy reading?\" she asked as she spotted a human-sized seat sitting next to the Stakes table.\n\n\"Studying,\" Dostoy replied, lying down on the floor across the table from her almost like a cat. His faintly inhuman\u2014but bright and welcoming\u2014eyes met hers. \"Reading for pleasure as well, but when not otherwise occupied with my responsibilities around the mountain, I enjoy learning.\"\n\n\"An admirable trait.\" She looked down at the wooden tiles, marveling at their careful craftsmanship. Rivers, mountains, fords, roads, and cities were all carved into them in painstaking detail. Dostoy opened a compartment at the side of the table and began carefully picking out impressively detailed pieces. Pieces that were both expensive, she noted, and well-worn with use.\n\n\"I hope this isn't your only copy of Stakes?\" she ventured, taking some of the pieces and setting them in place. \"A table such as this shouldn't be left out in the rain.\"\n\nDostoy laughed. \"Not a chance, Lady Victoria. This is my personal table. I have a travel set I will be testing your suitors with.\" The wooden pieces clacked against one another as he placed them with the ease of a seasoned player.\n\n\"Good. A work of art such as this deserves to be cared for\u2014and played,\" she added, picking up more of her pieces. They were larger than she was used to, but then it made sense given who they had been made for. \"When will the first suitors begin arriving?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Dostoy answered. \"At least, that is the first day announced that challengers may arrive. Between the appropriate times, of course. Ruleset?\"\n\n\"Full,\" she answered without pause as the last pieces went into place. \"Flip.\"\n\nDostoy nodded, a single claw tapping a spinner carved into the wood at the side of the table, a more luxurious option than the common coin flip. A dragon's head carved into one side of the coin represented, she guessed, his chosen token.\n\nThe other side of the piece came up, and she made her first move. A straightforward, if slightly complicated, opening gambit. To her satisfaction, Dostoy caught it immediately, reacting in kind. Excellent. His claims were not in boast, then.\n\nPlay proceeded for several turns in silence before Dostoy spoke. \"You know, Lady Victoria, forgive my saying so if you find it indelicate, but you are already unlike most of the clients I've served before.\"\n\n\"Really?\" She lifted one eyebrow at him while moving a formation of infantry in a very aggressive bait. \"How so?\"\n\nDostoy blinked, and she had the distinct impression that her reply had surprised him. \"Well,\" he began, choosing instead to send scouts across her flanks. \"You're tall for a human woman, for starters. No offense meant, but many of my other clients have been... thin. Waifish, really. You, on the other paw, carry a sword.\"\n\nHer hand went to her hip, eyes going wide as she realized the truth of his statement. \"My apologies,\" she said quickly. \"I neglected to leave it in my room.\" To carry a blade in the home of one who had invited her\u2014\n\nBut Dostoy was shaking his head. \"I meant no slight. By all means, wear it wherever you wish. My home is open to you. I merely meant it as an observation. That is all.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" she replied, moving a few more of her forces in response to his latest push. Dice rolled in a wooden cup, assigning casualties as his tokens charged forward. \"Thank you for taking no insult. I have worn a blade ever since I was a small child. In the future, I will leave it in my room until it is needed. No disrespect was meant.\" She pulled her forces back in the face of his attack, pressing them together.\n\n\"You also apologize with much more readiness and sincerity. Are you practiced with it? Your blade, I mean,\" he added quickly.\n\nHer forces looked on the verge of loss. She pulled them further back. \"Of course,\" she replied. \"Hence the third challenge.\" The first was that a suitor had to be fleet of foot enough\u2014or clever enough\u2014to make it to the Stakes board with Dostoy defending it. The second was that they must beat him in a game. And the third was that she herself would duel them\u2014openly as a test of their personal skill with combat, but privately as a test of their mettle, honor, and dignity. Only then would she consider giving them her hand. Victory in all three was not a promise.\n\n\"Your challenges are unique as well,\" Dostoy replied, leading his forces forward. Victory appeared imminent. Both went silent as he completed his movements. \"I believe I will be quite interested to see what sort of suitors respond.\"\n\n\"Capable ones, one would hope,\" Victoria replied, checking the board carefully. Perfect. She flipped over one of the wooden cards, exposing her cannons, hidden in the forest from his view, as they unleashed a blistering salvo that cut deep into the side of Dostoy's army. Half his pieces were gone from the board in an instant.\n\n\"That was impressive,\" Dostoy replied, eyes wide with surprise as she moved the rest of her pieces forward, cutting into what was left of his pieces and wiping many more of them from the board. \"I didn't even suspect there was something there.\"\n\n\"I've been playing Stakes since I was a child, too,\" she replied, ending her turn. Dostoy reached out with a single talon and knocked over the piece representing his commanding officer, a sign of surrender. \"A grasp of strategy and tactics is vital, considering what I stand to inherit. Hence the challenge. If I could find someone who could be a match for me at Stakes, or even defeat me, then the company's future will be in good hands.\" She glanced at his remaining pieces, noting the count. \"What was your hidden piece?\" He smiled and flicked the barrier down.\n\n\"A dragon?\"\n\n\"A personal favorite of mine,\" he replied. \"I almost never play without it. Powerful in the right claws\u2014or hands\u2014but prone to weakness in the wrong place.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, dismantling her pieces. \"Perhaps a second chance to prove yourself?\"\n\n\"It would be my pleasure.\"\n\n\"In fact,\" she added as they began to set the board up once more, flipping and moving tiles to new locations. This time the battlefield became a long, narrow valley. \"If you don't mind, I suggest we play nightly, to hone one another's skills.\"\n\n\"And further test those suitors who come calling?\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" She spun the spinner, the dragon's head coming up. \"Your move.\" Dostoy's claws came down, and the second game began."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Two",
                "text": "By midday of the second day after her arrival, she was already bored.\n\nNot a single suitor had shown up, potential or otherwise. She had gotten her hopes up when she'd seen a young man approaching up the road, but he'd turned out to have been one of the local farmers Dostoy watched over, there to discuss something to do with crops on the eastern side of the mountain. Tedium had returned with his departure, and she'd retreated to one of the books she'd pulled from the shelves.\n\nBut by midday, she was through with it. Her muscles were already sore from an extended sword practice the night before and that morning, and she was growing tired of reading about ancient kings. Surely there must be more to occupy myself with. She left her rooms behind her, wandering about the \"lair\"\u2014she was starting to think of it more as an estate\u2014and looking for something or someone to pass the time with.\n\nShe found Dostoy lying in his study, bent over a large book and reading intently. To her surprise, a pair of glasses were perched across his muzzle, and she tried to keep her expression neutral as he turned to look over them at her. \"Yes, Lady Victoria? Did you need something?\"\n\n\"Nothing more than a change of pace,\" she said. \"I needed to get out and do something other than read.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Dostoy said, plucking the glasses from his face with surprising care and placing them atop the book. \"I believe that is usually why so many of my clients decline to come alone. Then again, sharp minds require constant stimulation. Would you care for another game of Stakes?\" He'd yet to beat her, and she suspected he was building a grudging admiration of her talent at the game.\n\n\"No no,\" she said quickly, shaking her head. \"I wouldn't want to take time away from your studies. They are yours after all. What... are you studying, actually? I don't believe I've asked.\"\n\n\"Magic,\" Dostoy replied. \"Primarily.\"\n\n\"Magic?\" She stepped forward, taking a quick look at the pages of the book he'd left open. \"Are you a wizard?\"\n\nDostoy let out a laugh, the tone surprisingly bright for one so large. \"No,\" he said. \"As far as I know, there never has been a dragon wizard. But that doesn't mean there couldn't be.\" He held up two of his talons, and a soft glow began to pulse from between them. \"That also doesn't mean that there have not been dragons who have used magic. We are, after all, creatures of innate magic. But become a wizard? Apply at a formal academy?\" He shook his head. \"Perhaps if fate led me that way. I merely find the study of magic interesting. And it gives me something to do and learn when not attending to my other duties.\"\n\nHis words made sense. Magic was a discipline of great effort, like any other, but to a being that was already infused with it... \"Are you proficient at it?\"\n\n\"A bit. Nothing like your skill with strategy. Or with the sword. But I know more than a few spells. Many of them are simple, practical things, such as light, heat, or even taking away pain so that a healer can do their work. But I have tried my hand at more complicated spells. Or ones that are mostly useless. For example...\" He held up his talons, and a moment later, without warning, his tan scales became a bright, vivid purple.\n\n\"Hah!\" The laugh was free of her before she had a chance to catch it, but there was no calling it back. \"That's incredible!\" It was, but she also had to admit the shade of purple he'd chosen looked ridiculous. Thankfully, Dostoy was smiling as well.\n\n\"Of limited use save amusement,\" he said, his scales returning to their usual shade. \"Or perhaps distraction. I've made some progress with illusion as well.\" She blinked, and there were two Dostoys lying before her. Then the one to her left stood and began to grow, filling his half of the room. \"But I can't mix them with sound yet, nor maintain them very far,\" the first Dostoy said as the second vanished.\n\n\"Even so, I am impressed,\" she said. \"I've never had a chance to learn magic myself. What few wizards we've employed have been quite expensive and very secretive. Overly so, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Dostoy said, turning and motioning to the book lying at his desk. \"Which was one reason why I purchased these books. It was far cheaper to learn on my own and make my own discoveries than to pay a wizard to teach me a few tricks. Thus, I gain understanding.\"\n\n\"Is there anything you'd like to do with it?\" she asked.\n\nHe shrugged. \"As of yet, I am unsure. There are a myriad of uses detailed across the various tomes I have collected, and I must admit some curiosity to various schools on my own part. Much of it is powerful magic, some of it is not, but...\"\n\n\"You are Dostoy the Mighty, after all.\"\n\n\"I prefer Dostoy, myself,\" he said. \"But true nonetheless, if only by my innate magical ability. Would you like to study here for a change of pace? I was in the middle of something, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes.\" If nothing else, reading magical theory would be interesting. \"I'll leave you to it. Where would you recommend I start if I wished to learn a little about magic?\"\n\n\"'Adricarle's Treatise Magicka,' on the second shelf,\" Dostoy said, his tail pointing at the row in question. \"It provides a thorough and mostly concise overview.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\" The dragon returned to his study of his tome, and she in turn picked out the book he'd pointed her toward, heavy in her hands. A light spell would be useful. As would an illusion, or a spell that reduced pain. Her curiosity aroused, she sat down, her back against the wall, and began to read."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Five",
                "text": "It had taken until the third day for a potential suitor to show up. He'd been turned away by Dostoy without even reaching the Stakes table. To no one's surprise, even the suitor, who admitted upon surrendering that he'd not expected much, but felt obligated to try. Not a strong start, not a strong suitor.\n\nThe fourth saw the appearance of two more suitors, both of which had made it to the Stakes table before being soundly outmaneuvered by Dostoy. She had to admit, he was a very capable player with a clear talent for thinking ahead and trapping his opponents. Their nightly games had grown longer, though he'd yet to beat her. But it put a high requirement on those who came pursuing her.\n\nThus far the fifth day had been silent. She set down the treatise she'd been reading, taking a brief break and glancing at the clock. Dostoy wasn't there at the moment, having been called away to deal with something on one of the local farms, leaving her alone in the study. After the second day, she'd moved some of the spare chairs from her rooms down to the study to give her some additional seating options for when she wanted to read about magic.\n\nThe book was a tome, there was no doubt. Wordy and detailed, she had to admit it gave her a far better grasp on how magic worked than any of her tutors had ever taught her. The myriad of notes scrawled in the margins had helped. It wasn't until she'd spotted Dostoy dipping a claw in ink and making notes in the margins of the tome he was currently reading that she realized who had penned them. Or in this case, clawed them.\n\nI should go prepare something to eat. Dostoy's larder was well stocked, her kitchen well equipped, and she'd been making her own meals since she arrived. She rose and moved across the room. Something simple but\u2014 \"Oh, Dostoy,\" she said as she spotted the dragon coming down the hall. \"I was not aware you'd returned. What was going on?\"\n\n\"Animal attack,\" Dostoy replied, coming to a stop. His paws were damp\u2014recently washed. \"Something, likely a bear, attacked and ate several sheep. If it happens again, I'll need to go looking for it.\"\n\n\"Is that common around here?\"\n\n\"Common enough,\" he said with a nod. \"It's why this land wasn't settled and my ancestors were able to possess it. Local legends say the place is cursed. Personally, if it was, magic fades, but every now and again something strange occurs, so there may have been some truth to it. In any case, I must eat. By your leave, Lady Victoria.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" she said, her voice halting his turn as an idea occurred to her. \"I've been eating alone for days now. Would you care to share lunch?\"\n\nDostoy thought for a moment and then nodded. \"Your company would not be unwelcome. I would honored if you would join me. You may want to bring your own food, however.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Several minutes later, she joined him in his dining room, setting her sandwiches down across from a large, cold roast of mutton, if her guess was right.\n\n\"I must admit this is a first,\" Dostoy said, tearing a bite out of his meat with his teeth and swallowing. \"But your company thus far has been nothing if not pleasant. Which does make my mind wander a bit. If my inquiry is not too forward, tell me: Why did you feel you needed my services in acquiring a companion? I have been under the impression that most human societies value the traits you've demonstrated thus far.\"\n\n\"Truthfully? Because of my father.\" It was no secret, so there was no shame in telling him. \"Don't misunderstand: I love my Papa dearly, and he's never been anything but the best father he can be, which given his responsibilities is no small feat, but... He is the Wolf of Artares. Men that have expressed interest in me have found themselves at the end of his glare, and by extension that of his entire company.\"\n\n\"Such as your guard.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Exactly. I love my Papa, but he is... overwhelming. And while yes, I suppose many would say my 'traits',\" she smiled, \"are of value, it becomes something else when choosing a partner. Sometimes our values, despite our claims, are not as highly prized as some would say. Though it doesn't help that my upbringing in some ways goes against the standards and expectations of polite society.\"\n\n\"Such as carrying a sword through someone's home?\" Dostoy suggested with a toothy smile, and she nodded.\n\n\"Like that. In many places a woman carrying a sword is a rare sight of its own, in others, a shame. And there are the requirements of the company.\"\n\n\"Could you not marry someone from the company? Surely there are plenty of skilled tacticians to choose from.\"\n\nShe let out a little laugh. \"No, because that's missing the point entirely.\"\n\n\"Enlighten me?\"\n\n\"If I were to marry,\" she said, setting her sandwich down. \"I would want to marry someone who was capable at strategy and command, but not defined by it. My father, for example, paints and runs the estate, as well as a school of learning. To many, he is the Wolf, but to me, the Wolf is only part of who he is.\"\n\n\"I see. You desire someone more than just a military figurehead.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes. Which is why I came up with the tests I did. Besting you at Stakes speaks to one aspect of their character, but how they behave afterward and for the third test, another.\"\n\n\"Very wise. What does your mother make of all this? I noticed you haven't spoken of her, only your father.\"\n\n\"I hope she approves,\" Victoria said, taking another bite. \"She passed some ten winters ago. In childbirth. My younger brother didn't survive either.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" His words sounded both heartfelt and genuine. \"That is a great loss.\"\n\n\"It was,\" she said, pausing for a moment, her meal forgotten. \"I still miss her. She used to take me stargazing on clear nights, point out all the constellations. She's gone, but she's not gone. Not entirely. I do regret that she did not get to see me find someone who cared and loved me as much as Papa loved her, but, all things in their proper time.\"\n\n\"Was she a soldier?\"\n\n\"Of a sort. She could be, when the time called for it, but preferred to be a mother. And she was wonderful at it.\" Memories spilled through her mind like warm embers. \"She was a very capable woman.\"\n\n\"And it would seem you've followed in her footsteps.\" Dostoy swallowed the last of his roast, then licked the platter clean.\n\n\"Maybe,\" she offered, and changed the subject. \"Your notes have been most helpful, by the way. In learning about magic.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your gratitude,\" Dostoy said, seeming somewhat surprised. \"I hadn't considered their effect when giving you access to my books. They were written from my own mind and with my observations. I am glad to hear that they were helpful.\"\n\n\"They are, especially along some of the drier passages.\"\n\nDostoy smiled. \"Adricarle is indeed quite dry. Sometimes I wonder if his intent was to make the study of magic rarer still by putting those who would wish to follow in his footsteps to sleep. Nevertheless, his observations are most detailed and useful... if one can stay awake.\"\n\n\"Your notes help with that.\"\n\n\"Have you attempted any magic of your own yet?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. I'm still immersed in theory.\"\n\n\"Well, if you do, please let me know. It would be a delight to see someone other than myself master a basic spell.\" She nodded, and he rose, picking up his platter in one paw. \"Thank you, Lady Victoria, for the pleasure of your company during this meal. It was enjoyable. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm fairly certain I saw another suitor coming up the road on my way back.\"\n\nThere was, and Dostoy beat him at Stakes just as soundly as he'd beaten the others."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Eight",
                "text": "One week, Victoria thought, looking out the window of what she'd come to think of as \"her\" drawing room. One week, and not a single successful suitor yet.\n\nThere had been several more that had tried since the day she'd shared lunch with Dostoy. One had even beaten the dragon, employing a very aggressive charge that had routed the his pieces and forced him back, capturing his command post, only to lose when she herself had come out to meet the final challenge. His skill with a blade had been respectful, but not enough.\n\nEspecially not after she'd seen him backhand one of his servants for offering the wrong blade. Prince or not, she had no desire to wed or even court someone so dishonorable. She'd met his smirking stance with a devastating rush that she'd only restrained out of the expectation that it would have been too much a blow to his ego to find himself thrown to the ground. As it was, she had disarmed him in moments, and he'd slunk away in disgrace.\n\nSince then there had been fewer suitors, but Dostoy assured her that this was normal. \"The challenge thins those out who doubt themselves as time goes on,\" he had said. \"In the beginning, when the challenge is fresh, many can convince themselves that they can overcome it because few understand it. With each fallen suitor, however, the difficulty of a challenge is better understood, and fewer that are honest with themselves attempt it, as they know they have no chance.\"\n\nNot that she would have minded those who had no chance trying. There was something to be said for perseverance after all. If they displayed an aptitude for humility and a willingness to learn...\n\nShe frowned. Unfortunately, humility seems to be trait few of my potential suitors possess. Her mind slid to the night before, when a prince from a fairly wealthy province had shown up in a grand announcement, and had actually declared to Dostoy that he should be able to skip portions of the challenge because he was 'no peasant.' Dostoy had thankfully seen no reason to do so, and the prince had been beaten by him in a quick, ruthless game of Stakes. He'd demanded the \"right\" to the third challenge. It had been denied. His comments as he had slunk away had given her cause to suspect that to him, she'd been nothing more than access to her father's company and his own military designs anyway.\n\nI could never love a fool such as that, she thought, staring down at the empty gravel clearing. Dostoy was nowhere to be seen, likely in his study once more, leaving her with a clear view of the mountainside stretched before the manor and the tall pines flanking it. The sky was a crisp, clear blue, devoid of any clouds. As she watched, the tops of the pines waved slowly from side to side in some faint breeze. Would there be another suitor today? There was no way to tell, but there hadn't been one so far.\n\nWhat to do with my time...? She hadn't fully considered just how much waiting there could be in such a situation. Even with Dostoy's kindness in allowing her to study his precious tomes of magic, there was only so long she could read through Adricarle's lengthy, flowered prose before she felt like her brain was overburdened. I should have asked my guard to leave a horse. At least then I could go for a ride, or\u2014\n\nMovement at the front door caught her eye, and she leaned forward to see Dostoy walking out, a small pack of some kind strapped across his back. What is he up to?\n\nThere was one way to find out. She opened the window, ignoring the harsh bite of the mountain's spring air across her cheeks, and leaned out. \"Dostoy!\"\n\n\"Lady Victoria,\" he said, his head turning on his flexible neck to look up at her. \"Is all well?\"\n\n\"Fine, thank you. What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Going hunting,\" he replied as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. \"One of the farmers informed me of a small herd of elk nearing my lair, and I spotted them during my early morning flight. A few of them will restock my larder nicely, and it will only take a short time. I will return \u2013\"\n\n\"Wait!\" she called as he began to spread his wings. She chose to ignore the suddenness of her outburst. \"Would it be all right with you if I were to accompany you? I have hunted many times before, and it would be nice to see more of the mountain.\"\n\nFor a moment Dostoy simply stared at her, his expression unreadable, caught in surprise or consideration, she couldn't tell. But after a few moments, he spoke again. \"It would be some distance,\" he replied. \"You would need to walk, as you do not have a horse.\"\n\n\"I'm no stranger to long hikes,\" she replied. The thought that she could ride atop his back occurred to her, but she dismissed it almost immediately. He had not offered, and he was a sapient being. It would be rude of her to ask as if he were some beast of burden. \"That is, if you're open to the company.\"\n\nThis time his reaction came with more swiftness. \"Of course, Lady Victoria. As I stated the other day, I have found your company quite pleasant so far. You are more than welcome to join me in my hunt.\"\n\n\"Then if you please, could you wait several moments while I prepare? I won't be long.\" She ducked back from the window at his nod, almost forgetting to close it in her hurry. A hunt! That was something she enjoyed, and was no stranger to. Often her father's forces hunted while on the campaign, seeking out extra supplies of food for the camp followers. She herself had learned at a young age, and her father had coached her personally, along with several of his best trackers. She was no master, but it was something she could enjoy with any of them, and did from time to time.\n\nAnd it was the perfect way to stave off a little boredom. Several minutes later, she met Dostoy at the front door, a little harried from her quick change into attire more suited for hunting.\n\n\"There,\" she said, giving the dragon a grin. \"I hope you weren't kept waiting long.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Dostoy said, looking at her with evident surprise. \"You brought a bow?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, holding the recurved item in question in her hand. Her quiver was already across her back. \"I wouldn't travel without one.\"\n\n\"Lady Victoria, you continue to prove to be a pleasant surprise among all my clients,\" he said, letting out a soft chuckle. \"Now then, we'd best get walking if we're going to catch up to the herd. This way,\" he said, turning and pointing with his head toward a break in the trees. \"I'll keep my pace slow as to not\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't,\" she replied briskly, already striding at his side. There was a reason she'd chosen to change into thick trousers and a good pair of boots. Years moving with her father's forces had left her more than capable of handling a stiff hike. And if the winter had seen her lose some of her capacity, then that was simply something she'd need to deal with. \"Not unless I need it,\" she added quickly. \"But I should be able to keep up, provided you don't intend to run to the hunt.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Dostoy replied. \"And no, I did not.\" They entered the forest, trees looming even over Dostoy's large form, rich scents flooding her senses, from the smell of fresh pine stinging at her nose, to the earthy moss underfoot. She took a deep breath, a smile on her face as she let Dostoy lead the way, and followed.\n\nSeveral hours later they returned to the clear space in front of his manor, leaving the comfort of the woods behind but returning with several dead carcasses, already cleaned. Between her bow and Dostoy's incredible speed and bulk they'd been able to down five elk from the herd, gutting them in place before loading them aboard a small, collapsible sledge Dostoy had brought in his pack. It hit the gravel with a raspy thud, and Dostoy dropped to his belly, letting out a faint whoosh of breath.\n\n\"That was quite a haul,\" he said, looking at her as she stood panting, her legs burning. True to her request, he'd kept his speed up on the way back, though it appeared he'd perhaps overestimated his own pace slightly. \"My thanks for your assistance, Lady Victoria.\" He set his head down atop his forepaws for a moment, a satisfied rumble emanating from his chest. \"My larder will be well-stocked with elk for the next few weeks.\"\n\n\"It was my pleasure,\" she replied, shrugging and dropping to the gravel with her legs crossed. \"I enjoyed it. Though if you feel inclined to share, I do know of a few ways to prepare elk. Including flame-roasted.\"\n\n\"I may be able to help there, Lady Victoria,\" Dostoy said, lifting his head with a smile. A small lick of flame left his lips.\n\n\"Call me Victoria, please,\" she said, leaning back on her hands, base of her quiver prodding the ground. \"A good hunt shared between friends is reason enough for you\u2014for us\u2014to forgo formalities in one another's company, wouldn't you think?\"\n\n\"Very well, Victoria,\" Dostoy said, nodding. Then he paused, staring at something down the road. \"Oh. It would appear that we have company.\"\n\n\"What?\" It took a moment for his words to register, her mind caught on the sight of five gutted elk atop Dostoy's sledge. They would need to be fully butchered\u2014 \"Company?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Dostoy said, rising and untangling himself from the sledge. \"A coach.\" She could see it too, now that he'd drawn her attention to the road. \"A suitor, I would guess.\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" And here she was with her hair tightly bound back, dirt and sweat covering her body, and bloodstains on her hands. There was definitely no time to change or freshen up, but maybe she could rush inside and stay out of sight\u2014no, the coach was moving swiftly, hoofbeats thundering up before it. She glanced at Dostoy, staying silent as the ornate carriage drew closer and closer.\n\nAnd it was ornate, festooned with gold filigree and carved, painted wood. The crest upon the door identified it as that of the Rietillian Royal Family, and its occupant thereby one of the inheritors of one of the wealthiest of the kingdoms of man. At least two dozen knights, each clad in armor that gleamed under the sun, followed in the coach's wake, arraying themselves out to the sides with banners and lances held high. The coach came to a swift stop, kicking up gravel and rock as its driver pulled the reins back, stopping it perfectly in the center of the yard. A herald rose from the seat next to the driver, his voice booming across the clearing.\n\n\"Announcing his royal highness, Prince Teravin Rietillian of the Royal Kingdom of Rietillian, long may it stand!\" The door of the coach swung open, the prince stepping out with a dramatic flourish of his cape.\n\nVictoria felt her breath catch in her throat. If nothing else, the prince was handsome, his chin sculpted like it was the work of a master artist. His eyes were bright and welcoming, and his smile was stunning. Then he spoke, and his voice was surprisingly light, with only a bare hint of resonate deepness.\n\n\"Dragon,\" he said, smiling at Dostoy. \"If you would be so kind to inform the Lady Victoria Artares that I, Prince Teravin Rietillian, have come to fight for her hand, that she may see our contest!\"\n\n\"Prince Rietillian,\" Dostoy said, bowing. \"There is no need. She is already present.\"\n\n\"Your highness,\" Victoria said, opting for a bow. She caught a gasp of surprise from someone atop the coach, driver or herald she couldn't say, then rose to see a curious sort of shock on the prince's face.\n\n\"I... see,\" he stammered at last, perfect jaw closing. \"On second thought... Dragon? Lady Victoria? I... um...\" He gave them both a quick nod, then turned and ducked back into his coach, almost shutting the door on his cape.\n\nWith a cry of \"Hyah!\" the coach leapt forward, completing its tight turn and heading back down the road from whence it had come, the knights falling in behind it without so much as a backward glance.\n\nShe and Dostoy simply stood in silence for a minute watching the coach depart. Then, just as it began to move out of sight, they turned and looked at one another. A smile teased at her lips, and she could see Dostoy's shoulders shaking.\n\nLaughter exploded out of them like a storm, echoing across the clearing in the wake of the prince. She couldn't say how long they laughed, only that she was clutching at her sides, tears leaking from her eyes and chest aching for breath by the time both of them settled down to small titters. \"I suppose,\" she said, her voice breaking for another giggle. \"I suppose that he wasn't the right one either.\"\n\n\"No,\" Dostoy said, his voice echoing between larger laughs. \"Not at all.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath as they finally quieted, glancing down at the disheveled state of her clothing. \"So,\" she said at last. \"Shall we butcher the elk?\"\n\n\"Butcher the elk,\" Dostoy agreed, hitching up the sledge once more. \"Let's see to it.\"\n\nThe rest of the day passed with light spirits."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Twelve",
                "text": "\"Hah!\" The loud shout echoed across the clearing. \"I have you now, dragon!\"\n\nHis opponent did, too, even she could see that. The knight had taken Dostoy by surprise, his cavalry charge a feint for his real strike. Unless Dostoy had a counter of some kind in store, the game would be over in several turns.\n\nShe could see his side of the board. He did not have any such plan at the ready. With a sigh, she turned away from Adricarle's tome and moved to the bed, where her sword hung in its scabbard from the footboard. She changed quickly, and from down below she heard the knight's triumphant cries as the game came to its forgone conclusion. She'd need to teach Dostoy how to read such a feint and react to it, assuming she still was a guest in his home after the next part of the challenge. But for some reason, she felt she would be.\n\n\"Victory is mine, dragon, though you fought well. And now for the third challenge!\"\n\n\"The Lady Victoria will be here momentarily,\" she heard Dostoy say. She left the window open as she strode out of the room. The day was warm enough that it wouldn't matter.\n\n\"Ah,\" the knight said as she strode out the front door. \"The Lady Victoria.\" He knelt, extending a hand toward her. \"I long for the\u2014\"\n\n\"This is not a poetry competition, Sir Pendel,\" she said, cutting him off. \"There's no sense in wasting time. Take up your blade.\" Dostoy had already moved to one side, taking his board with him, so she raised her blade in challenge, waiting on the knight.\n\n\"You wish to proceed with haste?\" The knight nodded, raising his own blade. \"Very well. You've been here some time already. I can see why you would be impatient, lady.\" He was wearing light armor for mobility, and she could see that he was exaggerating his own movements, playing at being slower than he was.\n\nTwo can play at that game, she thought. And I wager I can do it better than you, Sir Pendel. \"Then let us begin,\" she said, and moved forward.\n\nPendel charged, as she had expected he would, bringing his blade around in a flash. Like hers, the edge was covered in padded leather, to keep a blow from being truly dangerous, but the impact could still hurt. She blocked his probing slash, countering and sending out a probing poke of her own, which he pretended to appear almost too slow to block.\n\nAlmost, but she could see the way he held himself. The block was too neat, his footwork too precise. He was trying to goad her into being too aggressive.\n\nShe could work with that. She took the offensive, striking out and\u2014like lightning, the knight retaliated, springing forward with sudden speed to batter her blade aside and make a killing blow.\n\nSave that their blades never connected. At least, not as he had intended. Her sword was already out of reach, darting back and then forward to mirror his own strike, slapping it aside right when his balance was at its weakest point. He all but fell forward, the padded tip of her sword striking him right in the chest.\n\nHe froze there for a moment, on one knee, eyes locked in surprise first on her blade, then moving up to her. Then he smiled. He was handsome, in a rugged sort of way, but...\n\n\"My admiration for your skill, Lady Victoria,\" he said, recovering his balance and rising. He gave her a sheepish grin. \"I don't suppose two out of three would be appropriate?\"\n\nShe considered it for a moment before shaking her head. \"No,\" she said. \"My apologies, Knight Pendel, but you have failed this test.\" The knight's face fell, as did that of his squire's, watching from the clearing. \"You fought with honor, but you did not pass the third challenge.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Pendel sheathed his sword at his hip and bowed. \"You are an impressive sort, Lady Victoria. May your quest bring you what you seek. I shall return to the road.\"\n\nShe watched him go, her sword sheathed at her side. After a few minutes, Dostoy spoke up. \"I thought he might be the one, if I am honest, Victoria. I'm surprised you let it end so quickly.\"\n\n\"I thought so too, at first,\" she said, finally turning from the road. \"But his character did not impress me.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The ridge of scales between Dostoy's horns furrowed. \"What was it that he did, if I may ask?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't call you by name,\" she said, moving for the front doors. \"That was all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Eighteen",
                "text": "She awoke to hear loud shouts, hand already grasping for her sword. The ground beneath her was hard but warm, where was she\u2014?\n\nHer mind caught up with her. Dostoy's manor. The challenges. Her sleeping atop the rug due to the softness of her bed. And she had been dreaming something, though she couldn't quite remember what. Only that she had felt safe and warm. And there had been the scent of cinnamon.\n\nShouts. Calls of alarm. They were not normal. She threw her bedding back, ignoring the chill of the room as she grasped her sword and ran to the window in her undergarments.\n\nThe front door had been thrown wide open, light spilling across the yard. Dostoy was silhouetted by it, hastily trying to calm whomever he was speaking to. She cracked the window.\n\n\"\u2014wolves. Fell wolves, led by that bear. They're slaughtering the flocks. They've killed four men already. They're going to go for the homes!\" The speaker was obviously out of breath, as was the wheezing horse standing behind him, both heaving for air.\n\nThe bear. She remembered Dostoy's comments about the mountain. And now wolves. And it was Dostoy's duty to protect his people. Already she could see him spreading his wings, preparing to take to the air.\n\n\"Dostoy!\" she called. \"Wait!\"\n\n\"Victoria?\" he cried, looking up at her. \"Wolves and that bear have attacked!\"\n\n\"I heard!\" she called, her eyes catching a glimmer up the road. \"My guard and I will help! Just wait!\"\n\n\"The watchman will guide you!\" he shouted, pointing at the man who'd brought the message and then launching himself into the sky with a mighty beat of his wings. He vanished into the dark in seconds.\n\nShe dressed in moments, her leather cuirass falling over her form with practiced ease. By the time she reached the door, hair waving behind her but sword and bow in hand, her guard were already almost at the clearing, thundering up the road in response to the commotion. She took one look at the farmer's horse and discounted it immediately. It was a draft animal, heavily winded. Not a warhorse like she was familiar with.\n\n\"Lady Victoria,\" the captain of her guard called as they neared. \"What\u2014!\"\n\n\"Fell creatures!\" she cried, running for them. \"Attacking Dostoy's people! We ride to their aide!\" Just as she had expected, her guard had come with a spare horse and ready for combat. She swung herself into the saddle with practiced ease.\n\n\"You!\" she shouted at the farmer as she urged her horse toward him. She held out a hand as she came close, pulling the man up behind her. \"Guide us to your home!\"\n\nThen she turned, guard following with a cry. The wind whipped at her hair, and she took advantage of the ride to bind it down, out of the way. Her guide seemed hesitant to wrap his arms around her until she took one arm in hers and pulled it around her gut, urging her mount on faster. The road they were on wound through the forest, at times so narrow she doubted two wagons could pass one another, and at other times so twisting she thought the very act of turning would pull her from the saddle.\n\nSoon she could hear roars ahead, and her blood began to pound even harder. Dostoy!\n\nThey burst free from the trees into what looked to be small pastures and farmland, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Ahead of them, she saw a small cluster of homes bunched together behind a low wall, lit only by scattered torches and lamps. And past that, Dostoy, breathing fire that burned against the night. Something howled in pain as his flames licked across the ground.\n\nShe could make out several groups of locals bunched together as well, trying to hold the wall against dark, twisted forms that darted in and out of the night, snarling. As she watched, one of them locked its jaws around someone and pulled them away, out into the darkness. Screams rent the air.\n\n\"Guard!\" she called, eyes flicking over the village. \"Five squads! Assist those defenders, get them to their homes, then hold those streets!\" She brought her sword up, the hands around her waist vanishing as the watchman jumped from her charger. \"For honor, and for victory!\"\n\nThe company's oath rang through the air after her as her horse leapt into motion, thundering down the road toward the village center. She sheathed her sword, switching to her bow and firing as soon as a target presented itself. A fell wolf that had been leaping for one of the villagers crashed to a stop, an arrow jutting from its throat.\n\nHer guard roared as they swept down on the wolves, their horses crushing skulls beneath their hooves and the soldiers hacking with blades. A sharp explosion filled the air as one fired a pistol, the musket ball tearing through a wolf in a spray of hot gore.\n\nShe left them to their work, galloping for Dostoy's position. He was surrounded by wolves on all sides, lashing out with claws, teeth and flame. Her charge caught them by surprise, and she let out a roar as her blade bit through a wolf's flesh, cleaving its head from its body. Hot ichor, foul and wrong leaked out of its corpse, hissing smoke as it struck the air. Fell creatures indeed. It was magic. Evil magic.\n\n\"Haaah!\" she cried, skewering another wolf on her blade. Claws tore at her mount's sides, cutting deep wounds into its flank. She dove free before it could go down, landing atop one of the wolves and driving her blade through its skull with a sharp crack. Blackness stained the blade.\n\nThen she was beside Dostoy, guarding his side as more wolves rushed forth out of the darkness. She'd never seen so many.\n\nAll of them would die. Her blade was a shimmer in the light of Dostoy's flames. He fought with a ferocity she'd never seen him exhibit, claws tearing wolves asunder and flames burning them to ash. With each breath, she could feel the flash of heat even on his other side, and she gave the world a grim smile.\n\nIchor and blood in equal parts splattered her armor and her face, but she fought on, cutting and stabbing until the tide of wolves slowed. It had felt like hours, but her own experience told her that it had been a minute or two at most, the world slowing during the haze of battle.\n\nThen something roared and crashed into Dostoy from the side, throwing him to the ground. His wing came out reflexively and slammed into her back, throwing her through the air to land in the baked soil. A bear of titanic size stood over Dostoy, roaring as it brought its front paws down on his head.\n\nDostoy slumped, dazed, and the bear opened its jaws, bending down toward Dostoy's neck.\n\n\"Light!\" The word tore free of her throat as she leapt to Dostoy's defense, her open hand coming up with a white blaze so bright it made her eyes water. The bear recoiled, blinking and howling in agony as she blinded it. She stabbed with her sword, driving the blade deep into the bear's gut, black ichor oozing around the hilt.\n\nSomething slammed into her shoulder with the force of a war-maul, throwing her into the air even as she cried out in pain. She hit the ground and rolled, her shoulder throbbing, sword torn from her hand by the force of the impact. The bear had hit her. She pushed herself up with her good arm as the beast fell to all fours, rushing toward her. First rule: Get your feet under you! But the bear was too close.\n\nDostoy's entire weight slammed into it from behind, shoving it into the ground with an impact that made the world shake. He roared, driving his claws deep into the bear's back and rending flesh. It tore at the earth, trying to push itself up and fight back, but Dostoy's size held it down.\n\nVictoria pulled her bow from her back, threaded an arrow in one smooth, practiced motion, and fired. It struck the thrashing beast in the cheek, drawing out another roar. She fired again, this time striking it in the neck. Still it fought, pushing up and rocking Dostoy back and forth.\n\nHer next arrow found its mark, catching the bear in the eye with a spray of black goo. For a moment the bear slowed, in shock, surprise, or pain, she didn't know, but it was all Dostoy needed. Flame spewed forth from his maw, bathing the bear's head in flames and scorching it until nothing was left but a charred, brittle skull, shrouded in ash.\n\nSilence fell across the battlefield for a brief moment, almost as if the fallen beast had been the standard-bearer of its army, and then with howls the remaining wolves began to flee. A series of shots from her guard said that none of them would make it very far, and as she watched one of the fleeing wolves was cut down, its leg shattered.\n\n\"You...\" Dostoy moved off of the body of the bear, speaking as she turned toward him. \"You did magic.\"\n\n\"I... I did,\" she said, looking down at her hand in shock. \"It was all I could think of. That dumb light spell.\"\n\n\"It might have just saved my life, Victoria,\" Dostoy said as the last of the wolves was cut down. The farmers began to cheer, doors opening and light spilling over the ground as they hurried out with lamps and aid. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" she said, before stepping over and pulling her blade free of the bear's corpse. \"Now let's burn these bodies before they cause any more trouble.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Twenty-three",
                "text": "Things had settled again, since she and her guard had rushed to the defense of Dostoy's people. A few of her soldiers had been wounded, but not seriously, and the mount she'd ridden would need care for some time, as would her right arm where the bear had struck her. It was swollen, but a healer had pronounced nothing broken, and she'd returned to Dostoy's manor to clean up and return to her wait.\n\nStill, she thought as she sat in her room, eyes fixed on the darkness outside the window. We did a good thing. Her arm would be stiff and sore for another week or so, limiting her swordplay, but the collection of prospective suitors had slowed as well, only one beating Dostoy in the last week, and mostly by luck, before being easily bested by her, so it didn't seem as though it would be a problem.\n\nAt least if the hunt for a suitor wasn't going well, nothing else seemed to be going wrong. The locals had thrown her and her guard a celebration in thanks for their help in thwarting the fell attack. Her skill with her magic was growing, as if her sudden success had opened the dam in her mind to\u2014not a flood, or even a river, but at least a creek. And Dostoy himself had been most appreciative of their aid, paying her guard handsomely for the help. She'd turned down her own part of the payment. Taking it had felt... wrong, and not just because she'd saved his life. He didn't owe her. And besides... He saved my life as well, she thought.\n\nThe hour was late, and she turned from the window, about to draw her shirt over her head when a knock at the door brought her to a stop.\n\n\"Victoria?\" It was Dostoy. She snapped her shirt back down. He had been quieter than normal during their game of Stakes that night, though his performance had improved. Perhaps he felt guilty for something? Maybe I should have taken that payment, she thought. Or maybe he feels guilty over nearly losing a charge. Or he was starting to suspect as she was: that her search for a suitor wasn't working.\n\nOr maybe he was just quiet because I beat him so soundly when he thought he was winning, she thought as she moved to the door. \"Yes?\" she called, opening it.\n\nDostoy stood in the hall, looking down at her with an unreadable expression on his face. \"Are you busy? If you're not, I would like to show you something. Dress warm.\"\n\n\"That's... cryptic,\" she said. She gestured at her clothes. \"But very well.\" His face was neutral now, but she could see from the faint twitches of his wings and the way his tail was sweeping back and forth that he was hiding something. She had quickly learned that he often made the same motions when was setting up an ambush in Stakes. She still hadn't told him.\n\nShe threw on another layer of clothing, and then at Dostoy's urging, added a coat. \"This is... quite warm,\" she said as she followed him through the manor.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" came his reply. \"It will be quite cool in a moment.\" He led her out of the front door, out into the night. It was almost black outside, the sky overcast with low, heavy clouds, and the only light coming from the windows of the manor.\n\n\"All right,\" he said kneeling. \"Now, I'm going to have to ask you to climb onto my back.\"\n\n\"What? Onto your back?\"\n\n\"It's a great honor I wouldn't give to just anyone,\" he said, still kneeling. \"But you... You have earned it, Victoria.\"\n\n\"I... Flying?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, and smiled. \"That's not it. But we'll need to in order to... Well, to get there, so...\" Slowly, hardly believing what was about to happen, she climbed onto his shoulders, just forward of his wings. His scales were smooth and warm to the touch.\n\n\"Wrap your arms around my neck if you need to,\" he said, rising. \"I won't let you fall.\" His wings unfurled, gave a mighty downward push\u2014and suddenly the earth was falling away beneath them, her stomach falling into her gut as they rose into the dark night. She let out a faint gasp of surprise, her arms and legs tightening by reflex.\n\n\"Ouch,\" Dostoy said with a faint chuckle. \"Not so tight.\" The night air whipped against her clothes, and suddenly she was grateful for his warning to dress warm. She loosened her grip as the air became damp, and she realized they were in the clouds.\n\n\"It won't take long,\" he said as they climbed through the darkness. Her ears popped. \"Not long at all.\"\n\nThen with a rush they broke through the clouds, and she let out a gasp as she saw the night sky sprawled out before them, hundreds of thousands of pinpricks of light shining in all directions, backed by a misty stellar cloud that filled the horizon and ran from east to west.\n\n\"There,\" Dostoy said, his massive wing-beats slowing, and she tore her eyes away from the sky around her to see the peak of the mountain ahead of them. He set himself down atop it so lightly she didn't even realize they had landed until he folded his wings and knelt, and she slid off, eyes already drawn back to the stars around her.\n\n\"Levindias' Daughters,\" she said, her eyes alighting on a distant constellation. Then another. \"The Sword of the Creator.\"\n\n\"I remember that you said you enjoyed stargazing when you were younger,\" Dostoy said from behind her. \"And I've been up here myself on a few cloudy nights when the conditions are right. I wanted to do something to repay you for saving my life and helping my people, so\u2014\"\n\nShe spun around and wrapped her arms around his neck, her face pressed against his warm chest even as she blinked away tears. \"It's perfect,\" she said. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThey sat in silence for some time, watching the stars shine."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Thirty",
                "text": "He's good, Victoria thought as she watched her latest\u2014and likely last, the way she was feeling lately\u2014suitor maneuver against Dostoy. Very, very good. She'd already seen Dostoy try several of the tricks she'd taught him, only for his opponent to read and counter every one. She'd even glanced at the knight's team of squires and apprentices, watching them to make sure they weren't aiding him in any way. But they weren't. He was simply that good.\n\nAnd yet... while she could feel a glimmer of excitement, the way she had been the first few times a suitor had come, something just felt... off. She watched as the knight, Sir Artur Kines, made another brilliant move at the game, cutting off two of Dostoy's attempt to counter it simultaneously. The move was brilliant. It should have had her gasping. Instead she just felt... intrigued, certainly. Impressed. But all the same...\n\nWhat's wrong with me? she wondered as she watched Dostoy play a furious defense that nevertheless fell steadily to his opponent's careful strikes. He's not bad looking. Sure, there's that scar, but it makes him look dignified. And he's only six years my senior. Educated, and he treats his squires well. His was even a name she'd heard of before. His reputation is of a man who values honor and right, she thought as she watched Dostoy's last pieces fall. Why am I so... unaffected?\n\nDown below, the defense she'd taught Dostoy failed at last, and he surrendered, tipping over his command post before Kines could do it for him. \"You have won,\" he said, his voice echoing across the clearing. \"And I don't think I've seen a more splendid game.\"\n\n\"You deserve commendations yourself, Dostoy,\" Kines said, rising from his seat and offering his hand with a smile. \"That was an impressive defense. I've not had to play that carefully in years! You're truly remarkable!\" They shook, and Dostoy began to gather up the board, the knight helping him, and even discussing their game.\n\nI should be ecstatic right now, Victoria thought as she turned and walked to her sword, making sure that the leather guard was in place. Papa would love him. His reputation is astounding. He's kind, certainly good\u2013looking, and brilliant at strategy.\n\nWhy do I feel like he's just an ordinary suitor?\n\nNo answer came to her as she walked through the manor, down the long steps and wide halls she'd spent the last month in. All she felt was apprehension. She put on a smile as she walked out the front door, accepting Kines bow of respect and responding in kind. She settled into a combat stance, ready to duel, when Kines held up a gauntleted hand.\n\n\"Wait,\" he said. \"What's wrong with your arm?\"\n\n\"I injured it a week ago,\" she said. \"It's still a little stiff.\"\n\n\"Well that's not fair.\" Kines shook his head, gesturing to one of his squires. \"Penua, grab some of the stiff training leathers. I'll bind my arm so that we're not unfairly matched. Please, a moment,\" he said in her direction.\n\nHonorable, she thought as he began binding his arm with the stiff leathers, limiting his movement. Certainly a trait worthy of admiration. And yet she felt nothing but respect. Respect... and that was it.\n\n\"There!\" Kines said, his arm bound tightly. \"Now that we're evenly matched, Lady Victoria, we can have a proper, fair duel.\"\n\nI...\n\n\"Are you ready?\"\n\nI...\n\nKines held his blade up.\n\nShe couldn't do it. She had her honor. To duel him now, when she felt so... strangely... about it, would be a slight against him, as well as a mark against her. \"I yield,\" she said, lowering her blade. \"I cannot.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\" Kines seemed mystified\u2014as did Dostoy\u2014by the sudden drop of her blade.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Sir Knight Kines. You are a brilliant tactician, and I have no doubt you would best me with a blade, but even if you were, I could not\u2014\"\n\nKines held up a hand, forestalling what she was about to say, though she didn't even know what it was to be. \"I understand,\" he said quietly. \"I see the look in your eyes. You and I...\" He shook his head, a soft smile on his face. \"We are not meant for one another. You know this already.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said quickly, but he shook his head again.\n\n\"Say no more,\" he said, lowering his blade and bowing. \"I am not so without honor I would be unable to admit that I have lost this challenge, but the truth of it is in your eyes. May the Creator be with and bless you, Lady Victoria, and may our paths cross again.\" He saluted, albeit with a stiff arm, smiled, then turned on his heel and strode back to his squires. Many of them were giving him looks of confusion, but he held out a hand, and they were silent.\n\n\"Victoria?\" Dostoy was looking at her in confusion. \"What...?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I... he...\" Then, unable to think of what to say, she turned and walked back into the manor, leaving his confused expression behind her.\n\nIt was almost evening when she ventured down to his study, still feeling as confused as she had been earlier. Kines was everything I should have wanted. Everything Papa would have wanted.\n\nAnd she'd turned him away. For some reason, some cause, she'd said no. Her insides felt twisted.\n\n\"Dostoy,\" she said as she entered the study. He was lying at his desk, several books in front of him, though his eyes were fixed on none of them. \"I... apologize for my behavior earlier. It was rude. After all you've gone through, and that amazing game of Stakes, to simply turn Knight Kines down so abruptly, and without explanation...\"\n\n\"It was a good game,\" Dostoy said quietly. He reached out and closed his books. \"Never fear, Victoria. As I believe I have said before, you are far from being my worst client. In fact, I would readily say that you have been the best, and I find your company truly delightful. If it takes another month, two, or even three, I'll gladly continue to test suitors for you. At a discount, even.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but... I'm not sure I should.\"\n\n\"Really?\" he asked, moving to the Stakes table. She'd miss it when she was gone. It was such a beautiful board.\n\n\"Really,\" she answered, taking a seat opposite him and helping set up the pieces. It was an old, familiar practice now. \"When I came to the idea, I thought for certain it would be a way to help me find a partner, not just in the company, but in love. But after this afternoon...\" She let out a sigh. \"I worry I may have been looking for the wrong thing.\" Pieces set, they flipped, and she made her move.\n\n\"You could change the test,\" Dostoy said as the pieces began to move back and forth between them. He'd gotten better under her tutelage. He was good. Very good. \"Try something else. It's been done before.\"\n\nShe shook her head as she exposed an ambush and reacted. \"Maybe, but I think... I think that while it was a worthy test, and I will treasure my time here, I don't know if changing the test will be enough. Somehow... Sometimes...\" Her words trailed off. Why is this so hard to explain?\n\n\"Sometimes we know what we think we want, but not what we need?\" Dostoy offered. She nodded. \"My mother used to tell me that,\" he said, letting out a light chuckle even as his forces moved forward. He was trying to bait her with a surprise assault again, cut through her forces with cavalry or cannon fire. \"So you would... leave, then?\"\n\n\"I would,\" she said, her chest letting out an aching pang. She would miss the manor, with its sweeping halls and tall windows. And the mountain scenery. And the warm, cinnamon scent that seemed to pervade it. \"Back to Papa and the campaigns.\" She moved her forces forward building a defense around the lee of a cliff.\n\n\"I will miss you, you know,\" Dostoy said. \"As I said, I have enjoyed your company immensely. You've brightened my home with your curiosity and...\" He moved a few pieces, engaging her forces. \"You've taught me much about Stakes, among other things.\"\n\nHis words brought a smile to her face. \"I've enjoyed your company a great deal,\" she said, gathering her forces to punch through his. It would be a slugging match, but she held the upper hand. Her chest let out another pang. \"I'll miss you as\u2014\"\n\nHer words stopped as Dostoy reached out and picked up one of his few remaining hidden pieces, revealing it to be the dragon. It moved across the board, soaring over the battle... and came down to rest on her command tent. She froze, her jaw hanging open as he looked at her with a sad smile\u2014happy because he'd won at last, but sad to see her go\u2014and suddenly everything in her mind, everything her heart, clicked.\n\n\"Victoria,\" Dostoy said, looking down at her with that same expression, with his wide, bright eyes she'd battled against every night, fought beside, and spoken with. \"I think I just\u2014\"\n\nShe almost burst from her seat, clasping his cheeks with her hands as she pulled his lips into hers. For a moment, Dostoy seemed frozen, stiff with surprise. A flash of panic darted through her like a bolt of lightning. And then his lips melted into hers with a fiery passion.\n\nThe world seemed to sing around her, an electric thrill cascading all the way down to her toes, everything alight in a single, perfect moment that stretched on like it would never end.\n\nAt last she pulled away, short of breath, looking him right in the eyes, and found her voice. \"I was wrong,\" she said. She knew now why she had been so hesitant, so listless, during Kines' challenge. \"Someone did pass: You.\" She bent down, his stunned eyes following her every move, and tipped her command post over. \"You. Will you accept?\"\n\n\"I...\" Dostoy seemed at a loss for words, his wings almost fully extended. \"But I... Dragon... human... I mean, yes\u2014\"\n\nThe world rippled, something in her chest burning and leaping with joy.\n\n\"\u2014but how\u2014?\"\n\nShe kissed him again, this time more slowly, then pulled back and smiled. She already had an answer. \"The people can say what they want,\" she said. \"I know what I want. I've heard wizards speak of the magic of shifting shape before. Father even once hired one who could make himself a crow and scout a battle. Think you can make a dragon a man... or a woman a dragoness?\"\n\nIt seemed to take Dostoy a moment to find his voice. That wonderful, lightly deep voice. \"For you?\" he asked. \"I'd give you the stars.\"\n\n\"You already did. But I'll settle for a second viewing. You?\"\n\n\"Whenever you want.\"\n\nShe wrapped her arms around his neck, holding him close against her, even as his wings wrapped around her. She felt warm and safe, and his scales smelled of cinnamon.\n\nThe listless feeling in her chest had been burned away by something grand."
            },
            {
                "title": "One Week Later",
                "text": "\"Papa!\"\n\nVictoria leaped from her coach into his arms, an exuberant smile on her face as she rocked Federico Artares, the Black Wolf, back on his feet.\n\n\"Victoria!\" It was all he could get out before her arms clasped against him so tightly he could hardly breathe. But finally she let go, stepping back with a bright, beaming smile that said as much as he had suspected when he'd received her short letter. Her search had been successful, and she had found a prospective husband.\n\nHe felt his suspicions rise slightly at the thought. Whoever his daughter wed had better be a great man indeed, to stand beside such a daughter. Not in front, or behind, but beside. He knew his Victoria.\n\n\"You return bearing good news,\" he said, smiling. She looks so happy, he thought. Ah, my angel. If only you could be here to see this.\n\nVictoria's smile only grew, and she nodded.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, extending a hand to the coach. \"Let him come out!\"\n\n\"Oh, he didn't ride in the coach, father,\" she said, and he frowned in confusion. \"Nor did I, save the last mile or so.\"\n\n\"What? But\u2014?\"\n\n\"Father,\" she said, turning as a large whooshing sound began to fill the air. \"I'd like you to meet my fianc\u00e9, Dostoy the Mighty.\"\n\nFederico's jaw dropped as the tan dragon landed beside his daughter, tucking his wings in and bowing. \"Count Artares,\" he said, his words holding a trace of a northern accent. \"My name is Dostoy, and I love your daughter Victoria. It would be my greatest pleasure to stand beside her as a husband, and as your son-in-law.\"\n\nFederico continued to stare, words failing him as Victoria leaned over and kissed the dragon on the lips, right in full view of everyone around. A hundred different thoughts boiled to his head, teasing at the edge of his tongue... and then he laughed.\n\nHis daughter had returned with a dragon. One she intended to wed, no less. And as far as grandchildren were concerned, well... he could see the look in their eyes. Wizards were expensive... but he had money. And of course, that would be why Victoria mentioned learning magic in her final letter. It came together in his mind like a battle plan, every piece revealed, and he spread his arms.\n\n\"Welcome, Dostoy, soon-to-be-husband of my Victoria, and my future son-in-law!\"\n\n\"Huzzah!\" the cry went up from all his guard, filling the air.\n\n\"You two!\" he cried, stepping forward and wrapping his arms around both of them. Or as close to it as he could with his left trying to wrap around the large body of a dragon. \"You must be tired from your journey. Go inside. Freshen up. We have much to talk about! I'll see to the guards. Go! Go!\" He stepped back and shooed the pair away, watching as they walked up the steps to his home, Victoria's arm wrapped around one of the dragon's\u2014Dostoy's\u2014forelegs.\n\nHe smiled and clapped his hands together. He could see the joy radiating between the couple. Dostoy would make a fine son-in-law, species notwithstanding. He was already sure of that. Victoria was wise beyond her years.\n\nAnd when the time comes, he thought as he began ordering the guard back to their posts. The Black Wolf of Artares will step down.\n\nAnd the Dragoness of Artares will take my place.\n\nHe had to admit, it was not at all what he had expected. But Victoria was happy.\n\nAnd that was all he could ask.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dragon Soap by M. K. Hutchins ]\n\nGran never did like it when I used the Winchester to deal with dragons\u2014so I went and did a damn fool thing and set out to hunt them in the dead of night. It wasn't hard to sneak by Gran. She snored twice as loud as she barked, which was saying something.\n\nI clambered down the hill from our farm and into the swamp. A half-moon glowed above the trees, casting strange shadows over the curtains of moss and standing pools of water. It almost made the mud look like opals, but that didn't change the smell.\n\nI kept the rifle at a ready carry. The smooth, well-worn wood felt solid in my grip, despite the apothecary's anti-mange lotion I'd slathered on my hands\u2014and every other inch of exposed skin on my body. I wasn't keen on coming home riddled with bug bites.\n\nSomething splashed behind me. I whirled. But it wasn't no dragon\u2014just my ten-year-old little brother Ted, tripping into a pool and soaked half-way up his britches.\n\n\"Tarnation, Ted! You shouldn't be here!\" I slung the gun over my back. Not my favorite way to carry it, or the quickest draw, but at least with it pointed straight up I could guarantee Ted wouldn't run in front of my muzzle. Probably.\n\n\"You shouldn't be here, either.\"\n\nTen-year-olds are all smart-mouths. \"Get on home.\"\n\n\"Send me home, and I'll wake up Gran. I'm the man of the house, Maisy. I belong out here,\" he said.\n\nHe tried so hard to be grown-up, but if he were a man, he'd know how to swallow his pride and do what was important. If Gran woke, she'd froth herself into a right fit with us both gone. If Ted had stayed, she'd at least have a body to complain to. \"Your pants are wet.\"\n\nHe did his best to walk forward in a dignified-like manner. \"You're not sending me away. We've got to cull the dragons back. I know one of them tore up a row of radishes and made off with a chicken last night. You and Gran ain't good at hiding nothing from me.\"\n\nMaybe even more pressing, we needed the money. The apothecary in town didn't pay much for a swamp-dragon\u2014but she paid something. I'd been planning on selling that chicken to get Gran more of her tonic. Now we only had one, and we needed her bad for eggs and eating up grubs in the garden.\n\n\"Fine. Be quiet. And stay behind me. I'll be shooting things in front.\"\n\nTed pulled a face. \"I'm not an idiot.\"\n\nHe was almost adorable when he pouted like that. Would have been, if he'd been five years younger.\n\nI couldn't see much in the way of tracks, but I could smell the blood-rust tang of mange eggs. I followed it. The little mange-bugs would bite anything that moved, but they needed fresh dragon blood to hatch their eggs.\n\nTed seemed to trip over every branch and stick behind me. Man of the house, indeed.\n\nWe walked and walked, the mange-stench getting stronger with every step. With this kind of reek, we had to be coming to a dragon's nest or something. Couldn't be less than twenty of them ahead. I pulled my shirt over my nose, but I still didn't see nothing.\n\n\"M-Maisy?\" Ted asked nervously, like he'd just realized he was afraid of the dark.\n\nI brushed more moss aside, mud sucking at my boots. Water stretched ahead of me\u2014we'd have to go around. It was at least thirty feet wide, practically a pond.\n\n\"Maisy?\" he tried again.\n\nI squinted. Three, maybe four, lithe adult dragons, each a bit bigger than a raccoon, wriggled in the shallows on the far side of the pond. Strange. Four dragons couldn't make a mange-stink this bad. Maybe I just couldn't see the others in the moonlight.\n\n\"I'm going to get a closer look.\" If I sold a whole mess of dragons into the apothecary, I could buy Gran's tonic and a new flock of chickens. Maybe we could finally really get on our feet and I wouldn't have to sneak out to shoot dragons. \"You stay here.\"\n\nI wasn't particularly worried about getting bit or clawed by the critters. I knew what I was doing\u2014but Ted didn't and thought he did.\n\n\"I'm all itchy.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Wet pants'll do that to a man.\" I started off.\n\nA slap. Another slap. He was hitting himself, swatting at bugs. \"I keep getting bites. It hurts, Maisy.\"\n\nI turned round. Even in the bad light, I could tell this wasn't good. Wasn't no mere mosquitoes. The blisters on his face and hands were turning black.\n\n\"Ted. Did you follow me without rubbing down with anti-mange?\"\n\n\"I... I didn't want to lose you. You move fast through the swamp.\"\n\nIdiot. \"We've got to get you back.\"\n\n\"Back where?\" he asked, but he was already wobbling on his feet.\n\nI put my arm around his shoulder\u2014the arm without the Winchester slung around it\u2014and dragged him along. \"The longer we wait, the worse it'll be. Trust me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "We didn't have none of the apothecary's anti-mange soap, so I sent Ted out with the lye stuff to wash by the rain barrel. I left him the lotion\u2014it worked best as a repellent, but it might help some. He stumbled back inside soon enough, curled up, and went to sleep.\n\nI woke to Gran screeching, \"What the devil, Ted!\"\n\nThe mange got him bad. The bites were still black, and the skin round them had turned purple. I felt like I was looking at a boy who'd suddenly grown a hundred tiny black eyes.\n\nAfter that, it didn't take long for the story to come out.\n\n\"Neither of you got more sense than a newborn chick!\" Gran ranted. \"What were you thinking, trying to shoot up dragons? And at night?\"\n\nI'd been thinking that she wouldn't have to know a lick about it. Her gnarled old hands were already trembling, and it wasn't noon. She must've started rationing her tonic down.\n\nGran knelt next to Ted and rubbed a cut-open radish over his bites, to help with the pain and the itch. Poor kid. Laying groaning on his pallet with his sweaty hair plastered to his head, he looked a lot younger. Like he did before Ma and Pa went up to heaven.\n\n\"They're tearing up the radishes, they've eaten most of the chickens, and we needed a couple corpses to sell in town,\" I said. \"Looks like we'll need more than a few now. He has to have the anti-mange soap, Gran. Lotion ain't strong enough.\"\n\n\"Ask Beth to sell us her soap on credit,\" Gran said.\n\nI choked on air, laughing. Credit?\n\n\"I won't have you shooting no more dragons. It's killing dragons what brought this horrible mange plague. Spilling their blood everywhere.\"\n\n\"Gran.\" I didn't outright say she was plain dead wrong. I didn't know how the mange had gotten so bad so quickly, but it'd surely be worse if folks weren't shooting their breeding ground.\n\n\"Don't you Gran me, young lady. You really think it's coincidence that as soon as Beth offers to buy up corpses, the mange gets ten times worse than it's ever been? Used to be you'd get a dragon maybe once every other year sneaking out of the swamp and tearing up radishes to rub on himself for a bad case of mange. But now!\"\n\nI shook my head. \"That doesn't account for the chickens.\"\n\n\"So long as you're going to hike for a radish, why not snatch a snack?\"\n\nShe had a point there.\n\n\"Beth's so proud of her apothecary skills, so proud she found some way to make use of lesser dragon bones. But if folks round here had a lick of sense, they'd stop selling carcasses to her. Including you, Maisy!\"\n\nShe'd worked herself up and was scrubbing Ted like he was a pile of Saturday laundry.\n\n\"Can you stop trying to skin me?\" he groaned. \"I'm not a rabbit. I'm your grandson. Promise.\"\n\nGran took herself a deep breath and calmed down, but I still spoke slow and careful. For Ted's sake. I had no love for that stuck-up Beth, but Gran could blame bad weather on the woman. \"Honestly, I can't feel bad about selling dragons to her. Even if I wish someone else were profiting by it, the medicine she makes out of the bones seems to do a world of good for all those folks up north with coal miner's lung.\"\n\n\"Folks up north,\" Gran muttered it like she was cussing. \"What about folks here? Beth's medicine probably doesn't even work.\"\n\nBased on how many fancy new clothes she'd been able to buy lately, I doubted that. \"Do you have some other idea of how to make quick money?\"\n\nGran pursed her lips. Of course she didn't. \"Beth ought to be right ashamed of herself and all this mange she's caused. All this damage to people's farms. You tell her she owes us, then come back with that soap.\"\n\n\"I can say that, but it won't do a lick of good. Beth ain't just giving us soap.\" Gran thought about it for a second. Then she snatched a wooden carving of a bird off the mantle\u2014Pa had made it. \"Take this.\"\n\nIt felt heavier than lead in my hands. \"It's not worth nothing.\" Not except to us. I remembered watching Pa make it\u2014his long, calloused fingers gently turning the wood in his hands. Ted moaned again. I don't know if he was just in pain, or if he was protesting, too.\n\n\"It's not to pay her. It's collateral for our loan.\"\n\nThat might actually work. Beth would get a kick out of taking something we cherished. She'd probably burn it as soon as I left.\n\n\"Maisy,\" Gran prompted sharply.\n\nI'd just been standing there, looking at it and dawdling. If my folks were still around, we wouldn't be like this\u2014me and Gran and Ted scratching just to get by. \"Yes, Gran. I'm going.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Beth had a nice spot in town, between the tinsmith and the leather-worker. The wooden sign was painted in garish red, with letters so flourished they were hard to read: Madame Jade's Apothecary. Best Tonics, Medicines, and Restoratives.\n\nI pushed inside, setting off a small bell hanging from the door. The inside was worse than the out\u2014every inch covered either in bottles or in red-and-gold tassels and posters. Usually it reeked like pickled cabbage in here, but today the air was thick with the smell of rendering tallow.\n\nBeth strode out of the back, dressed-up in a silk robe with her hair stuck on top of her head with sticks and a lot of make-up all over her face\u2014like she was really from the East, where they had the world's most brilliant apothecaries. They'd figured out how to use dragon bones in the first place, and out there, they had proper dragons bigger than houses.\n\n\"Greetings and welcome to my humble store,\" she said, giving a bow that reeked of arrogance.\n\nI casually stuck my hands in my pockets. \"Heya Beth. How you been?\"\n\nBeth bristled. She hated it when people didn't play along with her, when they didn't bow and scrape and call her Madame Jade. But she wasn't from the East any more than I was, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise. She pursed her red-painted lips. \"I don't see any carcasses, Maisy. Do you actually have business here?\"\n\n\"Need some anti-mange soap. Ted's covered in bites.\"\n\nBeth gave me a flat glare and held out her hand for coin. I'd already outstayed my welcome.\n\n\"Gran wants you to take it on credit. We'll pay you back.\"\n\n\"I don't take credit from customers.\"\n\n\"We're not customers. We're family.\"\n\nShe let out a bark of a laugh. \"I think that makes it worse. I know exactly what your Gran thinks of me.\"\n\nWell. It's not like Gran ever claimed to be discreet or mild-tongued. I liked that about her. You never could say she didn't speak her mind. \"It's for Ted, not her. And I brought some collateral.\"\n\nI pulled out that fine little bird.\n\nBeth smirked. \"I'm not in the business of storing other folks' trash. It looks like something an owl vomited up. Your Pa make that?\"\n\nShe was trying to rile me up, but I hadn't expected Beth to stoop so low as to insult the dead. I wanted to give her an earful until her skull burst, but the weight of the bird helped me remember why I was there. I could waste my breath insulting Beth when Ted was better.\n\n\"I'm one of your best dragon-suppliers. Cut me a half bar of soap and I'll get you a carcass within the week.\"\n\n\"I only sell whole bars and I'm not about to make exceptions. Go shoot me a pair of dragons and bring them back here. Then we can trade like civilized people,\" Beth sniffed.\n\nSurely even Beth could have compassion for a kid. \"Ted's already bruising. He needs it bad.\"\n\n\"So go hunting, Maisy. Stop wasting time here.\"\n\nA new scent prickled my nose. \"Something burning back there?\"\n\nBeth gasped and ran. I followed her a few paces. She did in fact have a pot full of white tallow, trimmed and cubed, rendering down on her fancy pot-bellied stove. She snatched a pair of towels and pulled it off the heat.\n\n\"You gotta do some kind of magic apothecary thing during the rendering to make the lotion or soap work? Cause if not, you really should've let the butcher do that.\" Old Carson charged a fair price, and he had a pot big enough to do half a cow at a time.\n\nBeth ignored me, red lips pursed as she poked at her tallow with a spoon.\n\n\"Is that whole batch ruined?\" I asked hopefully\u2014it'd serve her right.\n\n\"It's fine,\" she snapped. \"I only render it myself to ensure my ingredients are quality. Unfortunately, I have much less control over the caliber of my customers. Get out, swamp rat. Now. Or do I need to chase you with a broom?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "I walked back home parallel along the canal, but a good ways from it. Townfolk had cut it a decade ago so they could let the swamp compost their trash instead of doing it themselves. Corn husks and chicken bones bobbed downstream with considerably less-attractive human waste. Right then, I hated folks who were too good for a normal latrine like everyone else. People like Beth. She was worse than most, pretending to come from a noble place she'd never even seen.\n\nStill, I should've begged better. Bowed and scraped and put on a show, calling her Madame Jade and everything, but I've got too much Gran in me for my own good.\n\nI veered from the canal and up the hill to our little farm. The succulent smell of boiling chicken filled the air. I frowned, then jogged the rest of the way.\n\n\"Gran?\" I pushed the door open. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Cooking.\"\n\nI groaned. \"Tell me we've still got a chicken.\"\n\n\"Liars go to hell, Maisy, and while my old bones wouldn't mind some warmth, I'm fixing on spending my afterlife with your folks.\" Gran nodded toward Ted. \"Look at him. He needs all the help he can get, and chicken broth is good for any ailment. We don't have the luxury to think about tomorrow\u2014we have to survive today first. You got the soap?\"\n\nI stepped all the way inside and knelt by Ted's mattress. His skin shone feverish, and his bites glittered. They were already transforming into tiny scales.\n\nTarnation. I should have begged Beth nice. I set the bird carving next to him, hoping it might bring him some comfort or luck.\n\nTed blinked at me, like he couldn't quite focus. \"Maisy?\"\n\nI took his hand and squeezed it, his scales scratching my skin. He must be allergic. Most cases never got this bad. The anti-mange lotion might slow it, but without soap, the scales would just keep spreading, until his whole body was locked down stiff in them. And when a body can't move, it eventually wastes away into a skeleton.\n\n\"You'll be right as rain soon, Ted.\" I brushed his hair out of his eyes, then grabbed the Winchester off the wall.\n\nGran glared at me. \"I won't have you shooting no dragons! That's what caused this in the first place.\"\n\nI pointed at Ted and spat her own words back at her. \"We don't have the luxury to think about tomorrow\u2014we have to survive today first.\"\n\nGran's face wrinkled up tight like she was sucking down a sour pickle. Her right hand started to tremble. She had to be rationing her tonic. \"I don't like it.\"\n\n\"Got any other ideas? You want me to take this gun into town, shoot Beth, and steal the soap instead?\"\n\nGran paused.\n\n\"I wasn't serious, Gran.\"\n\n\"I know, I know. I just need time to think. I left the chicken head and guts out by the stump. Go take care of them. I'll come up with something before you finish.\"\n\nI slung the gun over my back, headed outside, and grabbed a shovel. I dug a two-foot hole and dumped the feather, skin, guts, and head into it. Then I turned our compost pile overtop\u2014that would ensure critters wouldn't smell the carcass and go digging for it. The compost itself smelled good\u2014warm and earthy. Real. I wasn't no town-dweller, sneering at others because I was too self-important to work up a sweat.\n\nBy the time I finished, Gran hadn't come outside with any brilliant ideas. So I rubbed on some anti-mange lotion and headed down the hill to the swamp. I'd need two dead dragons to buy the soap, and more than that for Gran's tonic.\n\nI prayed that I really had found a nest last night. I'd worry about spilled blood spreading the mange and itchy dragons tearing up the farm in search of produce latter."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Soon as I reached the swamp, I switched to a two-hand carry, ready to shoot quickly. I ducked around moss and watched my step. Long before I reached the pond, though, I caught a wiff of rust. Had a mangy dragon been this way recently?\n\nI slowed down. I watched the sunlight and shadows over the stagnant pools of water. Not a ripple.\n\nCarefully, I stepped over a rotten log. Right onto a dragon's tail.\n\nI stumbled back, too slow. The dragon burst from the log, hissing. Claws raked into my calf. That burned something fierce.\n\nI cracked the butt of the Winchester against its scaly face. It screeched in anger, flopping backwards. Giving me just enough time to get my feet under me proper.\n\nI shot. The Winchester cracked the air, making my ears ring. I pumped another cartridge into the chamber, but I didn't fire. Dragon wasn't moving. I'd gotten him clean between the eyes.\n\nWell, that was one carcass I could haul in. One more and I could buy the soap. I hobbled over to a nearby rock to get a proper look at my injured calf. Little beast had torn through my boots and shredded the bottom of my pants. I ripped the bottom of the latter clean off and tied it tight around the gashes. They weren't deep enough to threaten bleeding out, but they hurt like the devil. And with part of my leg exposed, I was sure to get some mange on it.\n\n\"Thanks, big fellow. Just what I needed today.\"\n\nHe didn't respond of course, what with blood running down his snout from that third eye I'd given him. The little flurries of mange all around him clouded to his head, licked it up, and began laying eggs. The white froth looked just like soap scum\u2014it matched the patches already on his back and forelegs. The little bugs must not have realized he was dead, yet. Mange liked fresh blood\u2014they always left soon as a carcass bloated open or other critters tore into it.\n\nGran was wrong. This fatal wound wasn't any different than one he could take from a fall or fighting another dragon. No reason why it ought to make the mange spread.\n\nI didn't want to haul him to the pond with me, so I slung his carcass up into the branch of a tree. Not real professional, but I hoped it would prevent scavengers from dragging him off.\n\nSomething itched my calf. I slapped at it, then swore as pain flared across my wound. Sooner I got this done, the better.\n\nI hurried as fast as it was wise across the swamp. My whole leg throbbed by the time I reached the pond. With an open wound, I was probably going to need anti-mange soap as bad as Ted.\n\nOnce we healed up, we'd figure out how to get Gran's tonic. And replace the chickens. And eat when winter came, given the dragons had torn up so much of the garden looking for radishes.\n\nMy leg better heal up right quick. I was going to spend the rest of my life in this swamp, hunting dragons so we could survive.\n\nI edged along the pool, trying to find a better vantage. Once again, I pulled my shirt over my nose, trying not to gag on the sharp, metallic reek of mange. There was swamp-reek, too, and something sickly sweet and potent in the hot afternoon.\n\nBut I only found six dragons, nosing around several largish shapes bobbing in the water, not the huge nest my nose had led me to believe there would be. I found a tree not too far away that looked solid and clambered up. Then I crawled out along one long branch and aimed the Winchester.\n\nBut there were those uncanny shapes in the water. The dragons were whimpering and pushing them around. And was that\u2014half a pumpkin? Then I spotted a brown rum bottle. Other bits of floatsam bobbed in that curve of the pond.\n\nThe trash from the canal must gather here. Were the dragons eating it up, like pigs taking to slop?\n\nI held still, ignoring my hurt leg and the uncomfortable angle of the branch digging into my stomach. A pair of dragons managed to flip one of the large, bobbing things up onto the bank.\n\nIt was another dragon. The corpse of one. All flayed open. Had to be one Beth had butchered\u2014no animal teeth made those kind of nice cuts. And it was covered\u2014tail to snout\u2014in the pale froth of mange-eggs. I thought it might be a trick of the light, but then I spotted another dozen carcasses on the shore. No wonder this place stank so bad.\n\nThe live dragons sent up a mournful, haunting wail and rubbed up against their dead fellows. That only got them covered in its blood and guts and eggs. The mange swarmed thick around them and the open carcasses.\n\nWhat had Beth done to those bodies, to make the mange take to dead dragons like that? Had she done it on purpose, so more people would need to buy her soap and lotion? She should have just hired someone to compost them for her. I'd have done it, if she threw in some of her soap.\n\nBut as the dragons nestled their fellow and grieved, I saw the reason for her secrecy. They rubbed away the guts and slime, showing bones sticking out. All the bones.\n\nBeth wasn't buying those carcasses because she'd figured out how to use the skeletons of lesser dragons. She wasn't making medicine for no miners up north. I'd been a damned fool. I should have realized something was wrong when I caught high-and-mighty Beth rendering her own tallow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "I hauled the fellow I'd shot earlier back home, then asked Gran to help me butcher him up.\n\n\"Weren't you going to sell this?\" she asked, sitting next to me outside.\n\n\"I think I can do better for Ted than that.\"\n\nGran didn't ask more questions. She was old, but when her hands weren't shaking, she was one deft butcher. Soon we had nice, white-yellow chunks of dragon fat. I asked her to start rendering them into tallow inside, while I buried the messy leftovers with the chicken carcass.\n\nI scooped up some water from our leeching barrel and boiled it down into right strong lye. By then it was long past dark, but neither me nor Gran had any thoughts of going to sleep. Gran cooked the lye and the tallow together until we had something that looked like mashed potatoes. Gran crammed most of it into our soap mold. Some she just plopped onto a plate so it'd cool faster.\n\n\"Anti-mange soap,\" I said. \"The bugs might like dragon blood, but they apparently can't abide dragon fat. That's why they stick with live dragons\u2014all their fat is still safely inside.\"\n\nButcher out all the fat and dump the rest of the carcass in the swamp, and you'd create the perfect mange breeding ground.\n\nGran poked at the lump on the plate. \"Looks like fine soap. You sure?\"\n\n\"Do you think Beth's a no-good lazy charlatan?\"\n\n\"Right. Let's try it on your leg first, then.\"\n\nThe soap would have been harder and better with more time to cure. It stung like the devil, but the itch disappeared as soon as we rinsed my calf off.\n\nWe sponge-bathed Ted's limbs. Half the little scales flaked off him, and the swelling went down. He groaned softly at first, but then started protesting out loud.\n\n\"Ain't natural to wash a body so often,\" he mumbled, slurring the words, eyes still closed.\n\nI tried to reassure him. \"We're helping you get better.\"\n\n\"Get offa me, or I'll kick you in the shins, Maisy.\"\n\n\"You'd have to stand up first. Besides, we're done now,\" I said. Gran was already taking away the rags.\n\n\"You're done 'cause you're scared of me.\"\n\nI gently brushed the hair from his eyes. \"That's right. You're terrifying. Now shut up and go back to sleep, sweat pea.\"\n\nFor once, Ted listened. The feverish sheen to his skin had gone away, and he was breathing slow and regular. Looked like he'd be fine.\n\n\"Come eat,\" Gran said, filling two bowls with chicken soup. \"Shouldn't go to bed on an empty stomach.\"\n\nI joined her by the fire. My eyes felt dry as cotton and my bones ached with tired, but my soul finally felt light.\n\nGran was smiling, too. \"Beth caused this mange outbreak, throwing dragon carcasses in the swamp like that. Whether she's daft or whether she did it on purpose to prey on innocent folks so they'd buy more soap, I figure we can get her run out of town by tomorrow night.\"\n\nFor an old woman who couldn't abide a soul shooting dragons, she sure had a mean streak. \"Gran. Then everyone'll be shooting up dragons for tallow. You think all of them are going to handle their carcasses any better than Beth?\"\n\nGran's face puckered again. Nope. \"Beth deserves it. She's family and she left Ted to rot.\"\n\n\"We can do better than a mob, Gran. Once that soap is hard enough to cut, I'll start selling it in town at half Beth's price. I'll buy carcasses for double.\"\n\nI'd make lotion, too. That was easy\u2014just add a little oil to the tallow so it spread easy.\n\n\"But the mange\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll compost the dead dragons proper ourselves. That'll get the mange under control, eventually. Dragons will stop bothering folks' farms for radishes all the time, we'll cut Beth out of what I suspect is her best business, and we'll make a tidy profit on the side. Once the mange is back to normal, I'll stop paying for carcasses and just go hunting myself\u2014just enough to keep folks supplied with what little lotion and soap they'll need.\"\n\nBy then, we'll have more than enough money to replace our chickens and buy Gran a mess of tonic. We wouldn't be scraping by anymore\u2014we could plan for tomorrow. Though I might have to hike to the city for tonic, if Beth was feeling disagreeable with us.\n\nGran took a few more spoonfuls of soup, thinking it over. \"Beth will watch her business wither away?\"\n\n\"Yup. Much worse than being driven clean out of town.\"\n\nGran nodded. \"I like your plan, Maisy. Just promise me you'll sell the soap right in front of her store, where she can watch.\"\n\n\"Yes, Gran.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Li Na and the Dragon by Scott R. Parkin ]\n\nLi Na felt her body break in the fourth hour of her labor as she squatted down and curled tightly around her swollen belly, screaming for her reluctant seventh child to come quickly.\n\nNot the sharp pang and long sting of skin tearing to make way for the baby, but a sudden snap and release deep within her body, as if jabbed in the spine between her hips with a blunt pole. Almost before the dull thud registered came a sudden heat spreading outward and taking her strength as it moved into her chest and face, arms and legs, ears and fingers and toes.\n\nShe fell backward against her rest chair but was too weak to catch hold of its shallow arms. She slid sideways and flopped to the floor as the midwife reached out with fingers that flailed at empty air. Hands tugged her away from the plain wooden chair and laid her flat on the lacquered floor, pressed down on her belly, and tugged at the baby as it emerged.\n\nLi Na heard voices, but words fled behind an insistent ringing, like the thin metallic voice of Huanglong, the yellow dragon whose shrine she served.\n\n\"Let the child be a boy,\" she whispered, her leaden lips fighting to form each word. \"Great Huanglong, guardian of rivers and master of words, give my husband a son to carry on his name. Bless my long service to your shrine with this one comfort. Please.\"\n\nBut as she felt her life spill onto the pale yellow floorboards, she knew it would not be. This was the curse of her family\u2014that the women of her house would bear only daughters. Penance for the sin of a long-forgotten ancestor who had angered Huanglong's master and doomed the family name to extinction.\n\nShe should have told her husband, Li Zhou, of the curse in the very beginning so he could release her and find a wife able to fulfill that most basic duty. But they had been so much in love, and the idea of parting seemed so much deeper a pain...\n\nThe midwife brought the baby to her, and Li Na saw that she was right; her seventh and last child was indeed a girl. She tried to lift her hand to caress her beloved daughter, but her arm would not obey. Li Na tried to whisper a blessing of comfort to this child who would suffer both the burden of her own curse and the blame for her mother's death, but her lips would no longer move.\n\nSo Li Na gazed at her daughter as she stole rapid, shallow breaths until first whiteness, then darkness took even this simple joy from her.\n\nShe wept silently that the only gift she could bestow on this, her last child, was a memory of sorrow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Li Na awoke to the soft tickle of her daughter's breath on her neck, the baby's reassuring weight pressing against her breast. She lay quietly, eyes closed, and enjoyed the moment.\n\nShe had not died, after all. Still, she would bear no more children. It was for the best.\n\nThough her face still felt flushed, her hands were icy, even beneath the thick blanket that covered her. A dull ache pulsed deep inside, an insistent throb that flared with each breath. Her mouth was sticky-dry and tasted of the bitter herbs Li Na recognized as lei gong teng laced with a powerful narcotic meant to keep her still and asleep so she could heal.\n\nShe heard the rustling of slippered feet and felt hands tug at her blankets and adjust her headrest. She caught the sharp scent of cinnamon and ginger and cloves\u2014her husband. He had left the care of his warehouse to others so he could watch over her. Of course.\n\nLi Na felt light pressure on her chest and probing fingers checking her daughter's wrap. When he began to lift the infant away, Li Na reached up to stop him and gasped as sharp pain sliced through her core. Her eyes snapped open, and Li Zhou knelt over her, his own eyes wide in surprise.\n\n\"Let me hold her,\" Li Na croaked from a dry throat.\n\n\"You should be asleep,\" Li Zhou said and gently touched her cheek. He reached above her head and brought back a dark green wu lou gourd. He tipped its long neck toward her mouth so that thick, bitter potion spilled onto her lips. She swallowed three sips before she let the potion pool and run off her lips, and he took the medicine away.\n\n\"Water,\" she said.\n\nHe lifted a yellow, dust-colored gourd, and Li Na let cool water soothe her dry mouth and parched throat. She emptied two gourds and still wanted more. It was no surprise, considering how much she had bled.\n\n\"Hui-Ying, bring more water!\" Li Zhou hissed over his shoulder.\n\nA moment later, light, hurried footsteps announced her oldest child's arrival, and cool water again touched her lips. The narcotic potion had begun to take effect and dulled her pain enough so she could turn her head and see her tall, slightly built, eleven-year-old daughter kneeling at her father's elbow, the young girl's eyes wide and her lips tightly pressed.\n\nLi Na finished the third gourd and smiled at Hui-Ying as Li Zhou pressed the dark green bottle on her and bitter potion again washed her lips. She dutifully swallowed three more times and saw her daughter's expression soften. Hui-Ying studied the healing arts and was quite adept even at such a young age. She had most certainly created this unfamiliar potion as the fruits of her own study and talents and was clearly relieved to see it work.\n\nLi Zhou reached out again and snatched the baby from her chest, handing her off to Hui-Ying. \"Take that away and change the wrapping; it's soaking wet.\"\n\nLi Na wanted to protest, but the potion had taken what feeble strength remained and she could only watch as Hui-Ying hurried away.\n\n\"Sleep, dearest,\" Li Zhou whispered, and she struggled to focus on his face. Though his eyes were now tender and his manner gentle, she had seen the hard look on his face and felt the harsh tug when he snatched the baby away.\n\nAs forced sleep took her, Li Na wondered how it was possible that her husband could love her in the same moment that he clearly despised her precious daughter. Were they not the same flesh, each created in her own time from love and hope?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The baby's cries from the next room woke Li Na. Not the simple fuss of wetness or the long wails of hunger, but the sharp, strangled shrieks of pain or abandonment. Why was her daughter in the dragon temple? That was Li Na's personal stewardship; no one entered except in her company.\n\nShe struggled to sit, then stand as she heard the angry rumble of Li Zhou's voice beneath the cries of her daughter. Pain pulsed in her center, but it was still dulled by the bitter potion, and she was able to tolerate it, though it stole her breath away.\n\nLi Na staggered to the small room's single door. It was deep night and only the light of a single, small lamp wavered on the low teak table at the end of the short hallway to her left. She stumbled forward, gripping the door frame, then lurching to the side and leaning heavily on the small table. There was wetness on her thigh; she had begun to bleed again.\n\n\"...ignored her pleas and let this mistake happen.\" Li Zhou's voice was hard, his words clipped and spat out as though hurling stones at an enemy. \"You have stolen her time and devotion from me, yet given nothing in return.\"\n\nShe leaned against the wall beside the narrow doorway and gasped against the lightness in her head, the weakness in her legs, and the rising pain deep in both body and soul. She gazed through the curtain of amber beads that separated the bright light of the great yellow dragon's temple from the darkness of her husband's house.\n\nLi Zhou knelt before the simple cedar and river stone shrine, his hands raised as if in prayer, but his fingers were clenched into tight fists. Her newborn daughter lay naked on the shrine's offering board, tiny arms and legs shivering in the chill of the late-night breeze from off the great Huang He River. Her skin was mottled purple and white from cold and distress as she shrieked without cease.\n\nHer husband stood suddenly, and she saw the long, white linen wrap that should be protecting her daughter wadded in a heap on the floor.\n\n\"If you will not grant her wish, then hear my demand.\" He snatched up the linen and shook it at the brass statue of Huanglong that stood atop the small shrine. \"I have no use for a living daughter, a dying wife, or a dragon shrine that wastes my resources to no benefit.\"\n\nShe heard a high, rich metallic sound like the pure ring of a bell and recognized it as the voice of Huanglong. The great yellow dragon was growling, a sound she had heard only once in her life\u2014years ago, when Huanglong had used the word of its power to vanish a mischievous tortoise after it had damaged the dragon shrine.\n\nHer husband seemed unaware of the sound.\n\n\"This is my bargain and my oath,\" Li Zhou spat through clenched teeth. \"Change that mewling thing into a son or else take it away and use it to restore my wife's health. If you fail to do one of these things by sundown tomorrow, I will tear this temple from off my house and cast its parts into the great river.\"\n\nHe flung the wad of linen at the small brass dragon statue and stalked through the temple's open front gate and out into the cold night.\n\nLi Na gathered the remains of her paltry strength and stepped forward, despite the growing pain. Huanglong's ringing metal growl never abated, and she stumbled through the curtain of amber beads. Her heavy feet knocked into each other, and she sprawled forward toward the dragon shrine where she lay still, her face flat to the worn wooden floor. Though her daughter shivered and shrieked only two arm's-length away, Li Na knew Li Zhou was in greater danger.\n\n\"Great Huanglong,\" she whispered, \"guardian of rivers and master of words, please forget the foolish words of my husband.\"\n\n\"It is unforgivable!\" the tiny metallic voice cried. The ringing growl grew louder and more resonant. \"To deny the worth of creation in which he had part\u2014\"\n\n\"He is afraid,\" Li Na said, her voice thin. \"His one great hope lies unfulfilled on your offering board; his one great comfort lies broken before you. It has made him desperate.\"\n\n\"It has made him stupid!\" Huanglong shouted and sailed down off the top of the cedar shrine, its small brass body moving with fluid grace. It plucked the linen wrap from its tiny horns and draped it over the shrieking baby, then gazed down on Li Na.\n\n\"If he is stupid, great Huanglong, it is because I have lied to him these fifteen years. He knows nothing of the curse that your master rightly breathed out against my ancestor, and so does not understand that what he asks is impossible.\"\n\nThe ringing growl suddenly stopped and heavy silence filled the small temple, broken only by the distant rush of the mighty Yellow River\u2014the Huang He\u2014and the soft susurrus of night wind. Even her daughter's shrieks ceased for a moment.\n\n\"He wishes your daughter dead and has named her a mistake,\" the yellow dragon said as the infant's cries rang out again. \"To imagine that a dragon would seek the life of an infant in exchange for anything... How can I forgive such disrespect?\"\n\nLi Na gathered her arms under her and pushed up. Sharp pain arced through her hips and gut and brought bile to her throat, but she faced Huanglong.\n\n\"I don't... I can't...\" Tears streamed from her eyes. \"His dying hopes have driven him mad in this moment of frustration. I know Li Zhou to be loving and kind and generous.\"\n\n\"And yet.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, her voice stronger. \"No. He wishes for my health, not her death. If he has spoken vainly, it only proves the depth of his fear.\"\n\nHuanglong gazed down at Li Na, and she gazed back, unfazed. \"He feels nothing at all for her,\" the dragon said, though its mouth did not move. \"That much is true.\"\n\n\"Can you protect her?\" she asked, then quirked the barest hint of a smile that faded instantly. Words had power and meaning, especially to the great Huanglong who had taught the secret of writing to Humanity. \"Will you protect her?\"\n\n\"If your daughter asks, I will answer. Whether she hears is hers to choose.\"\n\nNo promise of protection, then. No detail as to how the great dragon would answer\u2014whether by direct word or by indirect symbol. Li Na bowed her head. It was the best she could hope for. It was not in the nature of a dragon to give a specific answer when an indistinct one was possible.\n\n\"And Li Zhou?\" she asked.\n\n\"I will grant neither of his demands.\"\n\nWill not rather than cannot. It was still possible, then.\n\nLi Na took a deep breath and gathered her feet under her. Pain screamed throughout her body and made spots dance before her eyes. Blood flowed freely; it streaked her simple gray shift and slicked both her thighs and ankles. Her life would end here this night\u2014that much was clear\u2014but there were still tasks to perform.\n\nShe clasped her hands above her and bowed low until her head touched the floor. \"Great Huanglong, guardian of rivers and master of words, please forgive the vain words spoken by my husband, Li Zhou, who is in anguish.\"\n\nThe baby shrieked louder and kicked at the thin linen covering her.\n\n\"Your daughter needs you,\" the dragon said.\n\n\"Great Huanglong, guardian of rivers and master of wor\u2014\" She gasped again, and her arms began to shake. The potion had failed, and she felt the slow tear of her own flesh deep inside her body. \"Master of words, please forgive... both me and my husband.\" Her voice was the barest whisper.\n\nLi Na waited for the dragon to speak, but the only sound she heard was her daughter's abandonment crying into the chill night. She made to repeat her prayer a third time, but her strength had fled and all she could do was wait. As she listened for the sound of the dragon's high, tinny voice, her daughter's cries began to fade.\n\nYet even as her sorrow welled up at the dragon's silence, she could not blame Huanglong either for her lies or for the terrible oath Li Zhou had made. Her husband's misunderstanding was her own fault; in her reverence of the dragon, she had kept too many things to herself.\n\nHer breath came slower now, and the pain began to ebb, first to a dull ache and then vanishing altogether. So this was the sensation of dying; not unpleasant. Li Na felt a touch on her head and was surprised that she had the strength to sit back.\n\nHuanglong stood before her, its golden body no longer a tiny brass statue, but fully twice the length of a man and made of iridescent flesh that pulsed with life. Where the statue was smooth and vague, the true shape of Huanglong clearly revealed each tawny hair on its long, camel's face with its scant beard and branching, golden stag's horns. Each of the glistening amber carp's scales on its wingless, serpentine body spoke of perfect balance between necessary opposites\u2014yin and yang, discipline and compassion, thought and deed. Even down to the five hand-length eagle's talons that protruded from each of its soft lion's paws.\n\nIt was the first time Li Na had seen the dragon's true form, and it quietly spoke of so much more power than even she had ever imagined.\n\nThough its body curled back and around the small cedar shrine, its head was level with her own, and it looked her straight in the eye with its piercing amber gaze. In its upturned right paw rested her daughter, quiet now and snugly wrapped in linen. Li Na took the child from the dragon and hugged her tightly to her breast.\n\n\"I cannot undo your injury, but I can ease your pain,\" the dragon said in the same high, tinny voice she had always known. \"I have heard your words and they are true. So by the word of my power, I declare the oath of Li Na's husband forgotten.\"\n\nShe bowed low. \"Thank you, great Huanglong.\"\n\nWhen she raised her head, the dragon spoke again. \"While I can forgive your husband his words, I cannot change his heart. He has called this child a 'mewling thing' and a mistake; he sees her only as a failed promise.\"\n\nIf only she had more time. But the dragon could not undo her injuries, so she could not explain to Li Zhou that no promise had ever been made to her.\n\nShe nodded her understanding. \"Is it possible at least to remove my family's curse from this child? She will bear enough burdens without this additional weight.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon closed its eyes. \"I did not speak those words; I cannot rescind them.\"\n\nLi Na wept, and a wave of fatigue washed over her. Her time had come. She reached down and gently kissed her last child on the forehead. \"I'm sorry, little one. Find peace as you can.\"\n\nShe lay down carefully on her side and pressed the child to her face. As her eyes fluttered closed, she heard a voice. Not the high, tinny voice of Huanglong, but a deep, rich voice that echoed in every part of her being. Not loud, but penetrating.\n\n\"The curse declared against the line of Pang Ji is ended,\" the voice said.\n\nLi Na opened her eyes, but saw only Huanglong, who now bowed its head and crouched low to the ground. She tried to sit up so she, too, could give honor to this unseen dragon to whom even the mighty Huanglong bowed, but her body refused to obey.\n\n\"Can you give my daughter peace, great dragon?\" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.\n\n\"I can watch over her,\" the encompassing voice said. \"If that is your wish.\"\n\n\"What must I do to earn this great blessing?\" she asked. \"I have little left to offer.\"\n\n\"Any bargain is between you and me alone; not even your husband may know of it.\"\n\n\"But he is my love and my strength, and he has already suffered so much for my secrets. Is there no other way?\" Silence. No, then. \"Then I will hear the costs, great dragon.\"\n\n\"This child will live in loneliness until the last days of her life. She will be buffeted by forces and powers she can neither see nor imagine. Her destiny is to be utterly forgotten in this world.\"\n\n\"Must you heap such misery upon her?\" Li Na asked.\n\n\"I do nothing; such are the natural consequences of choices already made,\" the penetrating voice said, and she knew it to be true. The nature of dragons was to aid, not interfere; to give counsel, not direct; to buoy up, not crush down.\n\nThough she felt no pain, her strength had gone. There was no more time.\n\n\"But you will watch over her,\" Li Na said, \"if I consent?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nFootsteps sounded on the sandy ground outside the front gate, and Li Na struggled to keep her eyes open. Li Zhou stepped into the temple holding a bowl of rice and a cinnamon stick\u2014the same offering she made every day in this temple. He stopped when he saw her lying on the ground before the shrine, clutching their daughter, her dress streaked with her own blood. He dropped the bowl and rushed to her.\n\nLi Na saw that Huanglong had returned to its perch as a brass dragon atop the simple shrine and smiled. She wondered if her husband could even have seen a dragon in its natural form. He clearly could not hear their voices. Of course, he did not serve them, and so did not earn their blessing; she was their messenger at this time and in this place.\n\n\"Choose her name,\" the penetrating voice said.\n\nLi Zhou knelt by her side, oblivious to the great dragon's powerful voice. \"Forgive me,\" he said. \"I've made a terrible mistake.\"\n\nShe wanted to pull him close, to whisper comforts into his ear. She wanted to ease his pain and soften his heart. But it was too late. All she could do now was answer the dragon and believe in both the dragon's power and her husband's good heart.\n\n\"My child shall be called Kai,\" Li Na said and let her eyes droop closed.\n\n\"Don't leave me,\" her husband cried and bent over her, clutching her close. \"I need you.\"\n\nThe great dragon's voice echoed throughout her being.\n\n\"You act with compassion and wisdom. Serve me here, and I will not only watch over Li Kai, the last child of Li Na, but I will ensure that she chooses her own fate\u2014though destiny must still have its due. Yours is the power of creation; ours is the magic of inspiration. By this pact, Li Kai shall know and wield both.\"\n\nAnd while she knew her husband would misunderstand her words as speaking to his bargain and not her own\u2014that he would be injured by them every day until his heart grew cold and hard\u2014it was a necessary thing. She had chosen her daughter's name carefully, knowing the words of Li Zhou's vain oath.\n\n\"The bargain is accepted,\" Li Na said with her last breath as her husband wailed out his grief.\n\nHe had demanded that either Li Na live or the child be made into a boy. Though such was impossible in this life, she nonetheless chose a man's name for her daughter\u2014at first to give her husband peace, but later to give her daughter hope.\n\nThis last creation of her flesh would be called Kai, which meant victory. She would choose her own fate by the power of her own soul and with the aid of dragons who alone among creation were honorable in all things.\n\nThere could be no other choice.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ High Noon at the Oasis by Jaleta Clegg ]\n\nThe first ray of sun kissed the top of the dunes. Phaedra shook her mane, lifted one black hoof. She paused. Hoof? Mane? Sand cascaded from her black hide as she scrambled to her feet. She stood, legs splayed, sides heaving. Her head hung low, horn brushing the sand. Her shadow stretched down the dune.\n\nShe took a tentative step. Her front hoof sank into the loose sand. She shifted a back hoof forward, sliding a step down the side of the dune. She planted her feet to stop the slide. Her body felt awkward, her center of mass shifted oddly.\n\nA breath of air stirred her mane. She raised her head, nostrils flaring at an unfamiliar scent. Images of cool water and green grasses nudged her toward it. The errant breeze died, but not before she fixed the direction in her mind. Down the dune, over the next, angled away from the blazing sun climbing over the horizon.\n\nPhaedra attempted another step. Coordinating four slender legs took all her concentration.\n\nShe tossed her head. Where had that thought come from? Four legs? She swished her tail in frustration. If she focused, the thoughts scattered. She couldn't remember anything before waking up in the sand. But those little tastes of memories floated loose as she concentrated on other things.\n\nShe moved without thinking, her legs managing quite well on their own. Until she realized she was walking down the slippery dune slope. A back leg kicked into a front hoof, shattering her rhythm. She flailed with all four legs, her tail rising in her panic. She tumbled down the dune in a tangle of long legs, ending in an undignified heap at the bottom.\n\nA high whinny escaped. She huffed a couple of breaths, then scrambled back to her feet. The packed sand at the base of the dune made balancing easier. She tapped her front hoof, testing the hard crust. Her foot clacked on a rock. She took a step, feeling for the rhythm of four legs. If she let go and just let her body move, her gait was smooth and even. When she tried to consciously think about it, she faltered.\n\nLike breathing.\n\nNo voice, then, nothing but a neigh. She'd turned into a horse, somehow, although she couldn't remember what she had been before.\n\nShe trotted toward the scent of water, moving easily while her mind chewed over other things. Her hip muscles twitched at a sudden itch on her flank. She whipped her head around to bite whatever had caused the itch and almost impaled herself with her horn.\n\nHorn? On her head. She crossed her eyes trying to see it. Glimpses showed a gleaming obsidian spike.\n\nI'm a unicorn.\n\nShe wanted to laugh, but all that came out was a bray of horse noises.\n\nSomeone turned me into a freaking unicorn. Once I remember who that is, I'm going to skewer them on my horn, then use all four feet to stomp them into the dust.\n\nHer hooves clattered over stones as she rounded the dune. This time, she heard a distinct metallic clatter. She stopped, then backed slowly until she heard it again. She kicked experimentally with her back hoof. Yep, definitely metal somewhere down there.\n\n\"Do you mind? I just got things settled and now you're knocking everything sideways!\"\n\nPhaedra reared, twisting to face the source of the feminine voice. Her front hooves came down on either side of a plume of fuchsia smoke.\n\n\"Never fails. I get all relaxed, ready for a break for a few decades, then wham! Someone knocks on the lamp again.\"\n\nThe smoke resolved itself into a very curvaceous dark-haired beauty in a skimpy harem outfit. She blinked at the black unicorn, her full lips compressed in consternation. \"Who are you?\"\n\nPhaedra. And someone turned me into a unicorn.\n\nShe tried to speak, but her mouth only nickered.\n\nThe woman grinned, then leaned on a puff of smoke that settled into a divan underneath her. \"You're not from my usual clientele, obviously. The horn and the whole 'I'm a unicorn' thing kind of give that away. Well, you summoned me so the rules say I have to give you three wishes.\" She spread her hand, examining her flawless manicure. \"You got a limit, though. New rule. You can only summon me three times. Some lawyer got hold of a djinn and abused the system until headquarters got involved and changed up the rules.\" She flicked a glance at Phaedra. \"Not much for words, are you? Well, we've got time. I'm here until you make your wishes. Landscape hasn't changed much,\" she said as she glanced at the towering dunes.\n\nPhaedra made frustrated noises and stamped one hoof. You talk too much. Listen, please!\n\n\"Are we going to lounge here all day? It's going to get extremely hot soon and I'd rather not be out in the sun. I believe there is an oasis that way.\" She pointed with one lacquered nail. \"Just pick up my lamp and carry it. I'm rather attached to it. Literally.\" She laughed at her own bad joke.\n\nPhaedra rolled her eyes. It wasn't very effective as a horse. Too much like panic and not enough like contempt. Not horse, unicorn. Whatever. She wrapped her lips around the handle of the lamp to work it out of the sand before she clamped down with her square teeth.\n\n\"Nicely done. I always thought unicorns were smarter than horses. You just proved it, sweetie. Name's Jadwiga, by the way. It would be nice if you could tell me yours. Maybe I should try guessing. I can't grant any wishes until you speak, though, rules are rules.\"\n\nYou talk enough for both of us.\n\nPhaedra hated the taste of metal in her mouth but didn't dare drop the lamp. Jadwiga might be the only chance she had of being something other than a black unicorn in an increasing hot desert. The promised oasis had better appear soon.\n\nOr what? I'll die of thirst. If her chattering doesn't make me kill myself first.\n\nJadwiga kept up her rambling monologue as she drifted on her vaporous cushions. \"I've only been a djinn for maybe three centuries now. Long enough to get bored, let me tell you. Lying around, buried in sand, with nothing but that lamp, that gets old in a hurry. It's roomy enough inside, pocket dimension you know, but you can only do so many things by yourself for days on end. A little company is nice, but rules are rules. We get one week every ten years when we can go visit the other djinn in the grand stone city hidden in the heart of the desert.\"\n\nPhaedra's ears pricked. She remembered stone streets, clusters of strange people made of smoke and moonlight, staring at her, shouting at her. Cursing her.\n\nShe almost dropped the lamp. The djinnis had done this to her, made her into a unicorn. And they could just undo it. Somehow. She could wish herself back to her natural form, if she could speak.\n\nHer hoof clacked on red stone as she stamped.\n\n\"There's shade at the oasis. But,\" Jadwiga fanned herself, \"we're never going to get there if you keep stopping. Come on, pick up the pace.\"\n\nPhaedra let a string of drool drip down the lamp. She had been holding her horse instincts back, but now, she let her tongue explore the odd metal.\n\n\"Ew! Stop that. You're getting spit in my kitchen. It's messing up all my linens.\"\n\nServe you right, you magical cow. See how you like the tables turned.\n\nJadwiga shouted muffled curses as she smoked back into her lamp. Her chatter faded until the only sounds left were the susurration of sand grains rolling as the wind pushed them and the occasional clack of hoof against stone.\n\nPhaedra flapped her tail and trotted between the dunes, wending her way toward the scent of fresh water and palm trees.\n\nThe terrain grew more rocky, less sandy. At least a unicorn's body was built for running. Similar to a horse's build, but with longer, more slender legs, sleeker body, and of course, the horn. She tried to hug what little shade the stone banks offered as she wound between dunes that were halfway to being hills. Clumps of thorny bushes began to dot the ground. Sand drifted in long tongues out from their bases, pointing where the restless wind blew.\n\nAnd there, between two hills, a glint of deeper green caught her eye. Like an emerald set in a brooch, the tops of palm trees shivered in the heat, brilliant green against the red of the cliffs that had grown to replace the dunes. Her hooves fairly danced through the heat waves. It wasn't just a mirage. She drew in the scent of wet stone, flowing water, and green grass.\n\nI can see color.\n\nRandom thought, but a strange one. Did horses see in color? She didn't know. And didn't really care. She was a freaking unicorn, at least until she could figure out how to turn back into whatever she'd been before.\n\nHer sides glistened with sweat long before she reached the first hint of shade. The sun was brutal and that hint of green farther than she thought. She twisted through another narrow wash. Tough grass grew in cracks in the red stone. Her horse instincts urged her to snatch a bite, but she'd have to drop the lamp to do that. No, not yet. She wanted, needed, those three wishes. Unicorns could survive in the desert, but she'd never thrive here.\n\nThe sun was sliding toward the west before she finally reached the bushes marking the outskirts of the oasis. It was a small one, a tiny trickle of water over stone that flowed into a larger pool. A dozen palm trees marked the spot. Their fronds drooped in the still air. An insect buzzed past Phaedra's nose. She blew it away absently, focused on the water.\n\nShe trotted into the tiny stream, her hooves barely splashing in the shallow flow. She deliberately kicked up what spray she could as she approached the pond. Her mouth was dry and tasted of brass from the lamp. She waded into the pool until water touched her knees.\n\nShe would have smiled, if her unicorn lips could bend that way. In order to drink, she had to drop the lamp. Where better than into the pool? The water was clear enough she could see the sand on the bottom, see the tiny fish darting away from her shadow. Jadwiga's lamp could use a good wash. She opened her mouth, let it tumble into the pool, then carefully planted one hoof on top. It wouldn't do to lose her best hope of becoming herself again.\n\nBut what am I? All I can think of is four hooves, a horn, long tail. The longer I'm a unicorn, the more it feels natural. What was I before this morning?\n\nShe watched her reflection for a minute, then dipped her head toward the water. Sand fountained up in a bubbling froth. She jerked her head back. The lamp slipped away in the sudden vortex of erupting water. Her hooves pawed frantically at the sand as she searched for it again. A plume of magenta water spread and dissipated across the pool. The air suddently smelled of roses. A spout hit Phaedra square in the face. She closed her eyes, shaking her head to clear the water away.\n\n\"What have you done?\" Jadwiga's ear-splitting shriek echoed off the cliffs. She lay half in the water, large fish tail flopping behind her. \"You flooded my house. And\u2014Augh! I'm a mermaid?!\"\n\nThe sand settled. Phaedra quit panicking. The lamp was not far off, on its side in the clear water. The pink hue and the rose smell faded away.\n\nServes you right for babbling so much. Now we're matched. I'm a unicorn, a black unicorn in the desert heat, and you're now an aquatic creature in a land with very little water.\n\nJadwiga splashed water with furious fists. \"I should have smelled the magic, but the stench of sweaty horse was too strong. I think this might be a shape-changing spring.\" She narrowed her eyes, still half-hidden under the filmy head scarf and bead fringe. \"Wait just one moment. You've been here before. You were changed into a unicorn, weren't you?\"\n\nPhaedra shook her head, paused in confusion, then nodded.\n\nJadwiga backed away from the bobbing horn as rapidly as her fishy bottom half would allow. \"Let me guess, you want me to use your first wish to turn you back.\"\n\nPhaedra whinnied agreement.\n\n\"Sorry, sweetheart, horse noises don't count. You have to use words or I can't grant the wish. Rules are rules, you know.\" Jadwiga scooted backwards into a deeper puddle. \"Besides, I'm a mermaid now, temporarily, not a djinn, so it's a moot point. The change spell doesn't feel very strong. Very temporary change. May as well get comfortable and enjoy it. Hey, I've got an idea. Take a nice long drink and we'll see what you change into. Might be something useful, might be something not. These things are completely random. But at least it would be entertaining. And while you're at it, you can fish out my lamp and set it on the shore to dry. Pour out the water first, otherwise the carpets might mildew.\" She flopped onto her belly and slid into the deeper stretches of the oasis pool. With a flip of her tail, she disappeared under the water.\n\nThis doesn't seem to be your first transformation, sweetheart. What were you before you became a djinn?\n\nPhaedra eyed the water. She was beyond thirsty and it looked very cool and refreshing. She lowered her head, nostrils flared. It smelled like water, nothing more. With a mental shrug, she sucked in a long drink. The cool water slid down her throat, easing the dust of the sandy trek. When she didn't change, she kept drinking until her thirst was satisfied.\n\nShe stood, fetlock deep, and waited while the water cleared. The lamp lay a few steps away, submerged on its side. A thin stream of fuchsia smoke leaked from the spout to dissipate in the pool. Maybe she'd caused the change spell when she'd dropped the lamp. If something of Jadwiga's had spilled and contaminated the oasis, it would explain a lot.\n\nHow do I know so much about magic? Was I a sorceress?\n\nPhaedra closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as a human. Two legs, two arms, hands, fingers, eyes facing forward. Her tail flicked a fly from her rump and broke her concentration. Try as she might, she couldn't forget four legs and the horn on her head, although the idea of hands seemed strangely familiar. She pawed the sand with her front hoof. Definitely not a hand, but still useful.\n\nBlazes, but it's hot out here. Strange, I don't remember heat bothering me.\n\nShe trotted toward the stand of palm trees and the promise of shade. She splashed through the water up to her knees, then kicked up more. The cool droplets rained across her back alleviating some of the heat.\n\nShe passed from light to shade, then stopped dead. What was that smell? Strange, but familiar and not quite pleasant. She planted her legs and drew a deep breath through flared nostrils. Her ears twitched, alert for any sound. Something crouched under a bush, breath heaving though whatever it was tried to stifle it. She took one slow step toward the creature, teeth bared in threat.\n\nIt bolted along the edge of the oasis. Her teeth clamped shut on a ragged robe that tasted of rancid goat.\n\nDelicious.\n\nShe planted her feet, staring in shock. She wanted to eat rancid goat?\n\nThe man she had caught shrieked, high and thin. He waved limbs so coated in dust he looked gray. He shimmied up and down in the robe trying to escape her hold.\n\nShe shook him until he stopped shrieking and wiggling. He hung limp, too heavy for her teeth. She dropped him into the water.\n\nHe screamed again, then stopped abruptly. He splashed as he sat in the shallow water, frowned, then splashed again. \"No magic now? Where is the fish woman?\" He glared at Phaedra.\n\nShe blew air through her lips, huffing loudly. It was as close as she could come to laughing. His hair framed his face in a most comical way, long and shaggy on one side, looking like he'd been sheared on the other side by a drunken shepherd. She stamped one hoof, then kicked toward the far end of the pool.\n\n\"Did I hear correctly that she is one of the all-powerful, mighty djinni of the desert?\" His glare changed to an expectant look. \"At least when she is not half-fish?\"\n\nPhaedra rolled her eyes.\n\nThe man rose to his feet. \"If she is indeed a most magical djinn, then whoever holds her lamp is assured three wishes. Where is the lamp?\"\n\nIt was Phaedra's turn to glare. She lowered her horn until it pointed at the man's throat.\n\nHe pushed it aside with an impatient brush of his hand. \"You do not appreciate our opportunity, o most magnificent of stallions. I am Ach\u00admineedees, a scholar of no small renown. But alas, I have fallen on difficult times. The Sultan of Raisinetti did not approve of my sense of humor. And neither did his thirty-seven wives. He had me banished to the desert to perish of thirst. But fortunately, I carried a waterskin. I stumbled on this oasis not long ago but did not dare drink, especially not after seeing your companion transformed into a partial fish.\"\n\nPhaedra tapped one foot in a most menacing manner. He thought she was a stallion and he still had the nerve to call himself a scholar? She lowered her horn again, letting the light gleam along its length, to sparkle off the end. It was a most pointed horn.\n\n\"Yes,\" Achmineedees continued after pushing the horn aside again, \"as I was saying, we have an opportunity here. If you show me the lamp, once she turns back into a djinn, I shall be the one holding the lamp. I shall wish you to be human\u2014\"\n\nPhaedra snorted. Something about being human didn't sit right.\n\n\"\u2014for my first wish,\" Achmineedees continued as if she had not interrupted him. \"Then I shall pass the lamp to you for your three wishes. But,\" he held one finger in the air, \"you must return the lamp to me for my remaining two wishes or you will revert back to this form. I will make that a condition of my first wish. You make a magnificent unicorn, but I sense it is not your true form.\"\n\nWhat if I'm getting to enjoy it? If I could speak, it would be quite a nice form to keep. She swished her tail, enjoying the slide of hair across her back. Built in flyswatter, nice for traveling, a horn for menacing \u00adpeople. Really, what downside is there to being a unicorn? Aside from the penchant for virgins and the inability to speak. Why did unicorns want virgins anyway? They are rather tender and tend to be quite juicy with a nice crunch\u2014\n\n\"I said,\" Achmineedees said quite loudly, \"do we have a deal?\"\n\nShe hadn't been listening, she'd been remembering the taste of virgins sliding down her throat, their screams still lingering. Or was that sheep? Same difference. What had the silly man proposed? Ah, yes. He'd make her human so she could have three wishes. If she were human, she could speak and make wishes. Then she'd give the lamp to him for his wishes. She smiled inside where he couldn't see, not that unicorns could smile. They mostly stood in regal poses with the wind blowing their manes. Foolish beasts. That was the downside of being a unicorn, everyone else laughed at their boorish airs.\n\nShe whinnied and lifted one hoof.\n\n\"Close enough to a handshake,\" Achmineedees said as he touched her hoof. \"Now, where is that lamp?\"\n\nPhaedra gave him her best \"follow me\" look, then turned to trot back across the oasis. The lamp lay on its side in the clear water, which had a decided pink tint again. The air smelled faintly of roses. Phaedra sneezed.\n\nAchmineedees clapped his hands in delight then plunged them toward the lamp. He started shrieking as they dipped into the pinkish water. He kept shrieking while the spell wound up and around him, like a dancer teasing with her veils. The scent of roses waxed stronger until it became a cloying stench.\n\nPhaedra turned her head, backing away and trying not to breathe. She didn't look back until the screaming subsided. It ended on a high and decidedly feminine note. Achmineedees was no longer a scrawny, unimpressive man. He was now a most buxom and shapely young woman. His, no her, hair was still a wild tangle sheared short on one side, long on the other. Even in the rancid goat rag of a tunic, she was quite becoming.\n\n\"What villainy is this?\" Achmineedees clapped hands over her voluptuous lips. \"Is that my voice?\" She sang a trilling melody, then giggled. Then clapped her hands over her mouth again.\n\n\"Who is messing with my spells?\" Jadwiga marched out of the deeper water, not quite back in her djinn form but much less of a fish and more of a human, albeit a male one now. She stopped short at the sight of Achmineedees. \"You didn't! How did you?\"\n\n\"I have no idea what you're babbling about.\" Achmineedees stamped her shapely foot, sending up a spray of pinkish rose-scented water.\n\nPhaedra backed away quickly. She had no desire to be caught in whatever shape-shifting, gender-swapping magic Jadwiga kept in her home.\n\nAchmineedees and Jadwiga dove for the lamp at the same time. Achmineedees held it triumphantly above her head. Her sleeves slid down to reveal slender arms. Jadwiga bellowed, deep and masculine, and reached for the lamp.\n\nAchmineedees clutched it to her large bosom. \"I wish for everything to be as it was!\"\n\nPhaedra ducked her head and charged forward, horn aimed for the loop of handle. She barreled between the two humans, knocking them both backwards into the water. The lamp clanged onto her horn just as everything slowed.\n\nIt was as if the world had suddenly been coated in honey. Jadwiga's bellow of rage dragged out as he tumbled in a spray of water. Ach\u00admineedees fell the other direction. Phaedra stumbled in the water on legs suddenly clumsy. The scent of roses thickened to an almost tangible level.\n\nThe sandy bed of the oasis pool rose to meet her. Slowly. Oh, so slowly. Her legs tingled, an itch that spread rapidly until every inch of hide shivered. She reached forward with one forefoot to catch herself from her fall. What landed in the water was not a horse's hoof. Not even close. Five very large clawed and scaled toes smashed into the sand.\n\nThe honey cleared. The rose smell shifted to sun, sand, water, and date palms with a thick overlay of wet rancid goat. Phaedra's second front foot smashed down. Five large claws dug into the bottom of the pool. Something metallic clanged against her forehead. She'd managed to catch the lamp on one of her horns.\n\nHorns? Yes, horns. Five of them in a crown across my skull.\n\nThe weight of them was all too familiar. She whipped her massive tail and let loose a long bellow. She wasn't surprised to see flames shooting from her mouth.\n\n\"This is more like it.\" She turned to find Achmineedees sprawled on the bank of the pool, looking like a fish gasping for breath. She plucked him up with one front claw. He hung from his tunic, too shocked to move while she inspected him. He was as grubby and unkempt as when she first startled him from the bushes. She snorted a smoke ring into his face, then dropped him in a coughing heap on the shore.\n\n\"Your turn,\" she said, rounding on the djinn.\n\nJadwiga floated on her fuchsia smoke cloud at Phaedra's eye level. \"You wouldn't dare hurt me. We have a treaty. Dragons don't interfere with djinnis and we leave your hoards alone.\" She folded her arms and tried to look defiant. Her nervous twitching destroyed the effect.\n\n\"Oh, I don't intend to interfere, but I'm still holding your lamp.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't get wishes.\" Jadwiga's voice squeaked and her lips trembled but she held eye contact.\n\n\"You offered me wishes when I was a unicorn. They are not allowed wishes, either, as part of the nonproliferation of magic treaty, unless my memory is false. Which it might be since someone turned me into a unicorn!\" The last came out in a wreath of fire.\n\nJadwiga waved her hand, turning the flames to a shower of rose \u00adpetals. \"I was bored. Unicorns can't talk and so can't make wishes. Nothing would have come from it. And besides, I wasn't the one who turned you into a unicorn.\"\n\nPhaedra narrowed one of her giant green eyes. \"Are you sure about that? You seem to have plenty of transformation spells inside your lamp.\"\n\nJadwiga's face paled, color draining to leave even her smoke cloud white. \"He made me do it!\"\n\n\"Who?\" The water around Phaedra began to steam.\n\n\"I have a theory,\" Achmineedees spoke.\n\n\"No one asked you.\" Phaedra kept her glare focused on the djinn as she reached behind to pluck the scholar from the sand. She dangled him from his tunic. \"Shut up, silly little man.\"\n\nAchmineedees snapped his mouth shut.\n\n\"He made me do it. I'm sorry I made you a unicorn. You were a very pretty one, too. I especially liked the black\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop babbling and tell me his name!\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Achmineedees said as he waved a finger at Phaedra. \"You're a mare, not a stallion?\"\n\nPhaedra spat out a stream of fire. The oasis boiled energetically.\n\nAchmineedees let out a high-pitched scream as Jadwiga shouted a name.\n\nPhaedra snapped her mouth shut then dunked Achmineedees toward the boiling water until he shut up. She stopped just shy of the surface. He tried to climb up her claw away from the steam. She shook him off onto the sandy beach.\n\n\"My own brother did that to me?\" she said when it was finally quiet again.\n\n\"He said he'd arrange a fate worse than death for me if I didn't do it.\" Jadwiga cringed away from the angry dragon, but not very far. Phaedra still held her lamp. \"He was going to make me marry him.\"\n\n\"The traitor who turned himself human and declared himself the Sultan of Raisinetti?\"\n\nAchmineedees gasped.\n\nJadwiga blushed. \"He used all three wishes. I didn't have a choice!\"\n\nPhaedra chuckled. \"Oh, this is rich. He was going to make you wife thirty-eight if you didn't turn me into a unicorn?\"\n\n\"He was going to smash my lamp first. And the Lord of the Djinn was going to allow it.\" Jadwiga's voice trailed off into a mumble.\n\n\"What was that? I'm pretty good at smashing things, too.\" Phaedra reached for the lamp with two very large talons.\n\nJadwiga sagged into her pink cloud. \"He said I'd overstepped my bounds and needed to be taught a lesson.\"\n\n\"You definitely need a lesson,\" Phaedra said. \"Do you have a love potion in your lamp, by any chance?\"\n\n\"What for?\" Jadwiga lowered her eyebrows in a suspicious glare.\n\n\"Do you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The djinn's shoulders slumped. \"Your brother is horrid. I don't want to marry him. Not even a love potion will make me want him.\"\n\n\"It isn't for him. And I agree he's a toad. He's also about to be deposed.\" Phaedra smiled the frightening and toothy smile of a dragon. \"For my first wish, Achmineedees here needs to be young, handsome, and a lot more muscular. And he needs to smell like something other than a rancid goat.\"\n\nJadwiga screwed up her face, fighting the wish. She finally sighed. \"Since I promised you wishes, I have to grant them, despite the treaty. Done.\" She waved her hand.\n\n\"Hey!\" Achmineedees cut his protest short when he caught sight of his new, much improved profile and haircut. He used a large scale on Phaedra's rump as a mirror, posing in front of it. She ignored him.\n\n\"Now it's time for that love potion.\" Phaedra pinched the lamp off her horn, then carefully turned it upside-down and shook it.\n\n\"Watch out for the china,\" Jadwiga shrieked. \"It's Wedgwood. And probably smashed,\" she finished as Phaedra gave the lamp an extra hearty shake.\n\nA small bottle of pink liquid tumbled to the sand.\n\n\"What's your third wish?\" Jadwiga asked.\n\n\"Second,\" Phaedra corrected. \"The love potion was not a wish. And don't try arguing semantics with me.\" She hissed a long streamer of smoke.\n\n\"Second,\" Jadwiga agreed.\n\n\"Achmineedees, pick up the potion and drink half. Then give it to Jadwiga.\" Phaedra smiled. \"And when you have both drunk and looked deeply into each other's eyes until the spell takes full effect, I wish for us to appear at the palace of the Sultan of Raisinetti.\"\n\nThe dragon watched as the human and the djinn drank the potion, gazed at each other, and became totally smitten. She had to interrupt the kissing with a loud harrumph.\n\nJadwiga, enveloped in Achmineedees strong and muscular arms, waved her hand. \"Done.\"\n\nAir rushed past as they were whisked across the desert to the sumptuous palace of the Sultan of Raisinetti. They landed in the courtyard amid a screaming scatter of terrified guards.\n\nPhaedra waved one clawed hand. \"Citizens, behold your new Sultan and his Sultana.\"\n\n\"What about your brother?\" Achmineedees whispered.\n\n\"Leave him to me,\" Phaedra answered. She blew a long stream of fire up the walls to set the blue and yellow flags ablaze. \"For my third and final wish\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Jadwiga tore herself away from the loving gaze of Achmineedees, but only for a moment.\n\n\"I wish you a long and happy life,\" Phaedra said, \"as a human.\"\n\n\"Done. Wait!\"\n\n\"Too late.\"\n\nThe lamp shattered. The fuchsia cloud of smoke disappeared with a loud pop. Jadwiga staggered on two legs. Achmineedees caught her in his arms. She blushed. They both smiled. The guards cheered hesitantly.\n\n\"Brother!\" Phaedra stamped forward. \"You are no longer Sultan here. Quit cowering in your palace and face your sister. You've got a lot of payback coming.\" She turned to look at the couple. \"Rule well and wisely. And never meddle in the affairs of dragons.\"\n\nShe gave them one last toothy grin before snatching her brother from his balcony perch and flapping off into the sky. Her voice echoed behind her.\n\n\"A unicorn? Seriously? You are going to pay for years for that insult.\"\n\nThe Sultan's screams faded into the distance as the dragon disappeared into the maze of red rock and sand dunes.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Wild Ride by Christopher Baxter ]\n\nThe dragon, a lumpy Redspine, shot out of its enclosure into the canyon. It swerved, barreled, and bucked, trying to throw off the rider that clung to its back. The audience cheered as it belched gouts of flame and oily smoke. Its rider held himself too stiff, fighting against the dragon's movement instead of letting it lead, and was quickly flung free of his saddle. He crashed into the canyon wall just beneath the spectator galleries. From her spot at the edge of a stone platform on the lip of the canyon, Niketa winced and shook her head.\n\n\"How'd that fella even manage to qualify for the Dragon Ride?\" Creyne muttered beside her, tugging his hat down over his eyes.\n\nNiketa elbowed him, aiming for his ribs but only reaching his gut. \"Be nice,\" she said. \"You wasn't any better when you started.\"\n\n\"I heal quicker 'n most. Kid's gonna get hisself killed. Shoulda stuck to the Gryphon Ride for a few more years.\"\n\nThe rider, now unconscious, slid from the canyon wall and plummeted toward the enchanted white safety nets thousands of feet below. When he hit, an iron rod glowing with a faint blue light tumbled from his jacket to the red rocks and squat dry shrubs along the canyon floor. Niketa felt Creyna tense beside her.\n\n\"Oh, here we go,\" Creyne muttered. \"Fella had a dragon prod on him.\" He crossed his arms with a glance down at Niketa.\n\nShe raised an eyebrow and watched the scene below. The two of them had been arguing about this for almost a month now\u2014somehow, her fool husband had got it in his head that just carrying a dragon prod was enough to get someone disqualified from a rodeo. Niketa had told him time and again that it was only a disqualifying offence if you had to use the prod during a ride.\n\nDown in the canyon, the rodeo imps darted around the Redspine, distracting it from turning on the unconscious rider below. One imp caught the dragon in the eyes with a soaked sponge, sending up a gout of steam. The dragon swerved, snarling, and snapped at the imp.\n\nA glowing golden lasso arced out into the canyon and snapped around the Redspine's neck, reeling it toward the edge of the cliffs. The rodeo imps slipped away to fish the rider out of the safety net and onto a waiting flying carpet. One of them swooped down to the canyon floor, retrieved the iron rod, and returned it to the rider's jacket.\n\n\"See there?\" Niketa said. \"They don't care none. Only a flamin' idjit rides dragons without a prod. Just in case.\"\n\nCreyne tugged his hat even lower over his eyes. His hair was dark and shaggy and his skin was deeply tanned, though still several shades lighter than hers. He worked his jaw like he was chewing on something unpleasant, which made his small tusks jut out over his upper lip\u2014he had a spot of troll blood somewhere back in his family tree. Niketa usually thought it was cute when he was stubborn, but the man could draw things out too far.\n\n\"Just 'cause they didn't steal the man's property don't mean he ain't disqualified,\" he finally muttered. \"You'll see\u2014they won't post a time.\"\n\nNiketa growled slightly and shook her head. Stubborn mule.\n\nThe sorcerers coaxed the Redspine into its enclosure, where it was given a haunch of beef to gnaw on while its caretakers removed its harness and checked it for injuries. The imps flew the unconscious rider up to the edge of the canyon, where healers rushed to revive him and tend to his wounds\u2014it looked to Niketa like the kid's leg was twisted in a bad direction, and he almost certainly had a few broken ribs after hitting the canyon wall that hard. She knew just what the kid would feel like when he woke up.\n\nA clacking sounded from the huge wooden scoreboards on the canyon walls; the gleaming numbers there spun over until they showed the kid's time. He'd stayed in the saddle for six-and-a-half seconds\u2014one-and-a-half short of earning a score. Tough luck.\n\nBut it was a time, not a disqualification. \"What did I tell you?\" Niketa said, pointing at the scoreboard.\n\nCreyne hunched his shoulders and shook his head. \"He'd a gotten run off from a backcountry rodeo for that,\" he muttered, turning away.\n\nBelow the scoreboards were the galleries, carved into the walls of the canyon and shielded by ensorcelled netting. The crowd clapped politely for the rider, some with sympathetic awws and some with mocking whoops and jeers. Peddlers took advantage of the lull between rides to move through the galleries, offering spyglasses, fans, and a range of food from roasted bloodflower seeds to flaming salamander. Hucksters moved through the crowd as well, taking bets and hawking good luck charms of dubious quality. A few goblins climbed up onto the netting for a better view, only to be pelted with shouts and rocks by the portion of the audience whose line of sight they'd blocked.\n\nThe crowds cheered as the countdown began for the next rider. In the center gallery, the rodeo master stepped forward and blew a quick, high-pitched blast on his dragon-spine horn. A grey Deuschalin Cragger burst from an opening below the galleries, carrying another young buck as new as the last one.\n\nNiketa didn't pay the show any more mind, though; her attention was focused on her husband. \"Well?\" she said. \"I was right, wasn't I?\"\n\nCreyne turned and spat into the canyon. Then he shrugged. \"Suppose you were. What of it?\"\n\nNiketa reached up under her coat and pulled her own dragon prod from the sheath on her back. \"They're legal,\" she said, pointing the glowing rod at her husband, \"and we're gettin' you one.\"\n\nCreyne batted the rod away. \"Put that away,\" he growled, glancing around the canyon at the other riders' platforms.\n\n\"What... you think they don't all have prods, too?\" Niketa said, poking him with the rod. \"We may not flaunt 'em, but you're the only one here fool enough not to carry one.\"\n\nCreyne shook his head and squared his shoulders, looking out over the rodeo again. \"Never needed one before, don't need one now.\"\n\nNiketa clenched her teeth, glaring up at the man, but he didn't meet her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something that she already knew wasn't well thought out. But a deep, rumbling horn blast cut her off, shaking rocks and dust from the wall of the canyon. The audience's cheers doubled in volume.\n\nThe Northwestern Migration was nearly here. It was time to prepare for the Wild Ride."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Creyne watched the imps and sorcerers hurry to ensure that all of the rodeo's dragons were secure in their enclosures. On dozens of stone platforms along the lip of the canyon, the men and women who would compete in the Wild Ride hurried to make last-minute equipment checks and to hurl a few extra insults or bets back and forth.\n\nHe simply tipped his hat back and turned to face his wife. Their preparations were a little different from the other riders'.\n\n\"We're gettin' close,\" he said, smiling at her. \"We do well enough this ride, and the next few... we could be buyin' our ranch by the time the season closes.\"\n\nNiketa nodded, but she didn't smile. She didn't seem angry; just disappointed. She wasn't cursing and she hadn't even tried to hit him. That meant that this whole dragon prod thing was well and truly bothering her.\n\nCreyne sighed and brushed a stray strand of his wife's black hair from her face. The rest was pulled back in a tight braid that was hidden by the hat hanging on her back. She wore riding leathers, just like his\u2014protective jackets that laced up to cover the throat, heavy riding chaps, and tall boots with steel spurs. The clothing was deep brown, a shade darker than her skin. Her ears and eyebrows came to a slight point, a mark of her elfin ancestry\u2014as was the vibrant violet shade of her eyes.\n\nCreyne held up a small crystal sphere. Niketa glanced at the sphere with an eyebrow raised. As she studied it, the intense color of her irises faded to a pallid gray, and the crystal clouded over from clear to purple.\n\n\"I'm takin' the color of your eyes,\" Creyne said with a slight grin. \"You can have it back after the ride.\"\n\n\"Where'd you get that?\" Niketa asked, tapping the sphere.\n\n\"Won it in that card game with the sorcerers last week\u2014the one you told me I couldn't win.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're just so proud of yourself, ain't ya?\" Niketa poked him in the chest, and the corner of her mouth twitched, holding back a smile. Creyne grinned. That was more like it; there was no sense getting bothered over a disagreement just before a ride.\n\nHis wife reached up and ran a gloved hand along the stiff stubble on his chin; then, to his surprise, her finger slipped into his mouth and came to rest on one of his longer teeth that jutted out from his lower jaw. Her glove tasted odd. It had a faint metallic tang to it\u2014a sign of magic. Before he could ask what was going on, she grabbed his tooth between her fingers and wrenched it out of his mouth.\n\n\"Flamin' shit!\" Creyne shouted, grabbing his jaw and stumbling back.\n\nNiketa grinned and held up his tooth. \"I'm takin' your tusk hostage for this match, handsome.\"\n\n\"Ain't a tusk, woman,\" he mumbled, rubbing his jaw. \"How the hell'd you do that?\"\n\n\"Got me a special glove.\" She peeled the gray glove from her hand and dropped it and the tooth in a pouch at her waist.\n\n\"So you decided to take my flamin' tooth?\" He spat the blood from his mouth. \"I thought women were supposed to be romantic n' stuff.\"\n\n\"Damn straight,\" she said, poking him in the chest. \"And I love your tusks\u2014they're cute.\" Her expression went all disappointed again, and she needlessly adjusted his riding coat. \"You be sure to make it back from this ride so we can find a way to put that back in.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" Creyne grunted. \"This ain't my first ride.\" His lip pulled over his teeth oddly now, but he'd manage; it was hardly the first time he'd lost a tooth. The pain was already starting to fade. He pulled her close, resting his chin on her head. \"You just worry about gettin' yourself back in more-er-less one piece, hear? This crystal ain't near as pretty to look at as the real thing.\"\n\nShe nodded and squeezed him tight. He could just feel that blasted prod under her jacket. He shook his head, still flabbergasted. When had those become allowable? He couldn't believe he'd never heard it before. If his pa could have seen it, the old man would have raised hell against all these soft city slickers. If a rider was really talented, then they didn't need extra help. Most rodeo injuries happened too quickly for a dragon prod to do any good, anyway.\n\nThe horn sounded again\u2014the Wild Ride was about to begin. He slipped the crystal into his jacket, and Niketa stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. That was good; that was how a ride should start.\n\nThey turned and stepped to the edge of the platform. In unison, they pulled on their magic rigging gloves and their riding goggles. Niketa pulled her flat, wide-brimmed hat into place on her head, and Creyne pulled his hat down over his eyes.\n\nA rust-red cloud of dust rose not far up the canyon from them, in the direction of the distant mountains. Down below, the crowds in the galleries began to murmur with anticipation. Creyne buckled the strap that would hold his hat in place, and Niketa cinched hers up under her chin.\n\nThey watched the distant cloud of dust as it drew near. When it reached the closest curve of the canyon, a swarm of wild dragons burst into view. They churned down the ravine like a flood, some skirting the sagebrush on the canyon floor while others darted up above the rim for a few moments and then back down.\n\nThe first of the dragons shot past the galleries below Creyne and Niketa's feet, and the audience began to cheer. The noise was quickly drowned out by the beating of wings, the rush of wind, and the snarls and roars of wild dragons.\n\nCreyne pulled his bandana over his mouth and squinted through the dust to pick out the different breeds. Most common were lithe golden Sun Serpents, squat scarlet Redspines, and spindly brown Dirtnappers, but here and there he noticed more unusual colors. Spots of deep blue marked what had to be Northern Sea Skimmers come south for the migration; vibrant green Treetalons pressed through the mass, knocking smaller dragons aside with ease; and the occasional blotch of inky shadow even hinted at the presence of a few Blackflames darting along the edges of the canyon. Several packs of cloud-gray serpents were either Deuschalin Craggers or Stormchasers; those were impossible to tell apart from this distance.\n\nWithout looking away from the chaotic swarm, he reached out and took Niketa by the hand. She squeezed his hand in return. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the other Wild Riders leaning over the edges of their platforms, ready. They waited.\n\nThe rumbling horn shook the canyon. Creyne released his wife's hand, and they jumped.\n\nCreyne was lucky; he had a clear line to one of the lumbering Treetalons. The green brutes were vicious mounts, which would mean higher marks for him when he rode it out. He twisted to avoid getting clipped by a Dirtnapper's wing, and then he hit the Treetalon's flank with his arms outstretched.\n\nHe'd landed on its shoulder behind the wing, just to the right of the long needles that ran down its spine. Leather straps whipped out of his Rigging Gloves, snapping around the dragon's neck quick as spit. Then the real ride began.\n\nThe Treetalon immediately arched its back. Creyne was tossed up and then slammed back down against its flank. It knocked the wind from him, but he held tight to his rigging; if he relaxed his grip, the line would unravel. The dragon barrelled upward, spinning Creyne away from its body, and then twisted back to throw out a gout of sapphire flame that singed his boots. That was unusual; he'd seen Treetalons that breathed yellow or green fire, but never quite full-on blue. Fortunately, it couldn't quite twist far enough to burn him. He was in the one safe spot on its back, out of range of flame, teeth, talons, and tailblades.\n\nHis mount swerved back down into the canyon and slammed against the wall, prompting screams and cheers from the galleries above. Creyne got a faceful of dust and rocks; but once again, he was safe, protected by the dragon's spines and wing from the cliff proper. Under his bandana, he grinned; he'd landed this one perfect. Then a stray stone struck his still-tender jaw, and he cursed loud enough for a deaf mule to hear it.\n\nThe dragon spun away from the cliff. Creyne heard a scream as a rider fell past him, burning. He glanced back to see if he knew the man, and then blinked when his mount's tail thrashed into his view. This dragon didn't have any tailblades. All Treetalons had blades along their tails for hacking through overgrown forests.\n\nCreyne suddenly became aware of an electric crackle in the air around him. Blue flames, no blades\u2014this wasn't a Treetalon. It was an Emerald Shifter.\n\nEverything seemed to slow for a moment; the air warped around him. Through the chaos of the swarm, he caught a glimpse of Niketa clinging to the side of a silvery Deuschalin Cragger. She looked in his direction with a frown.\n\nHe didn't have time to let go; he didn't even manage to curse. A flash of green light blinded him, and the rodeo was gone.\n\nEmpty silence rang in his ears, broken only by the thudding beat of the dragon's wings and the creak of his leather rigging. The Shifter bucked again, once, twice, trying unsuccessfully to dislodge him.\n\nCreyne blinked, trying to encourage his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The air was cool and moist, and it smelled like a meadow in the rain. An endless expanse of teal clouds roiled beneath him; above, a slate-gray sky sparkled with golden stars that left blazing fire-trails as they swirled through the heavens. He was in the Aethereal Lands.\n\nMentally, he cursed his misfortune. Never in his entire life had he seen a Shifter flying with the Northwestern Migration\u2014he'd never even heard of one living on this continent. How in the lost hells had he managed to land on such a rarity?\n\nThe dragon dove and jackknifed, still trying to dislodge him. But to his surprise, Creyne found himself smiling. This wasn't bad, not one bit. All he had to do was hold on until the dragon shifted back over to his world, and he would be fine. In fact, he'd probably get the highest marks in history for being the only man to ride an Emerald Shifter into the Aethereal Lands and back. He closed his eyes and pictured it, completely content. A perfect one hundred. The highest prize ever paid out. A dragon ranch in the high mountains. Just him, Niketa, and their hatchlings.\n\nHis mount swung around abruptly, and Creyne lost his grip on the rigging. He opened his eyes as the leather straps withdrew back into his gloves, confused. Part of him was shouting that this was bad thing, but he couldn't figure out why. He was falling toward the clouds, sure\u2014but he was falling slowly, gently. He would be fine. It was just a shame that he didn't have Niketa here by his side.\n\nAbove him, the Emerald Shifter vanished with a flash."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Niketa clung to her Deuschalin Cragger as it bucked, trying to look around. Part of her wanted to believe that her eyes had deceived her\u2014her husband hadn't actually disappeared, she'd just lost sight of him in the chaos. But she knew better. Somehow, impossibly, Creyne had landed on an Emerald Shifter. He was in the Aethereal Lands.\n\nHer dragon spun. She clenched her teeth, fighting nausea, but refused to close her eyes. If the Shifter reappeared, she needed to see it. Creyne could ride it out. He could make it back. As long as he knew to hold his breath\u2014the air in the Aethereal Lands was poison to mortals. Mentally, she cursed. She'd grown up there, among the elfin people; she knew the dangers of those lands. But she didn't speak of those times often. Did Creyne know what he faced?\n\nThe Deuschalin Cragger suddenly swerved, slamming her hard against its side. She cursed, gritting her teeth, and then reached for her dragon prod. Using it would disqualify her from a prize; but if Creyne didn't come back, no prize would matter anyway.\n\nShe jammed the prod against the Cragger's back and felt a hum as the magic began to flow. Be calm, she willed the beast. The dragon's flight immediately leveled out. With another thought, she sent the dragon climbing up out of the canyon for a better view.\n\nThe rest of the swarm barreled past them, with a few dragons thrashing about with riders still clinging to their backs. She could see a few flashes of green passing through, but none with a rider.\n\nThen a brilliant green flash caught the corner of her eye. She swerved her mount around to find the Emerald Shifter had returned and rejoined the flow of dragons down the canyon\u2014and it was riderless. She clenched her teeth, blinking back sudden tears.\n\nNo. No, she would not lose her husband. Not today. Not when they'd just been fighting.\n\nShe willed the Cragger to pursue the green dragon. When they were just above the Shifter, she took a deep breath and jumped.\n\nShe landed higher than she normally would, on the Shifter's neck just behind the head. The spines there caught her in the stomach, knocking the wind from her lungs. As the dragon began to rear, she thrust the prod against its scales, just at the joint of the neck and head.\n\nThe dragon calmed as she willed it. She took a moment to find better seating\u2014she couldn't use the rigging gloves with the prod in her hand\u2014and then closed her eyes, preparing herself.\n\nShift us over, she thought. To the Aethereal Lands.\n\nThe green light flashed through her eyelids, and the air was suddenly cool. The scent of it was achingly familiar; she hated it. She opened her eyes to find the rolling teal clouds of the Aether below her, and golden stars above her.\n\nFind him, she willed, picturing Creyne in her mind's eye. Take me to my husband.\n\nThe dragon snorted and then swerved around. She held her breath as it dove toward the clouds; she'd been to these lands before, and the air wouldn't affect her like it would Creyne... but that didn't mean it wouldn't have any effect.\n\nThey pierced the clouds, sinking deeper and deeper. As her lungs began to burn, a shadow appeared ahead. She almost gasped in relief as it resolved into her husband, drifting gently with his eyes closed and a peaceful little smile on his face.\n\nShe stretched forward as the dragon approached, grabbing Creyne by the front of the coat. She pulled him across the Shifter's neck, just in front of her, and then willed the dragon to take them away from this wretched place.\n\nWith an emerald burst, they appeared beneath pale blue sky once again, the sun mercilessly bright. The bitingly cold wind hit them like a wall, sending Creyne tumbling away. She lunged to the side and caught him by the sleeve, barely managing to keep her legs wrapped around the dragon's neck.\n\nShe panted, gasping for air as she strained to keep hold of her husband and still keep the dragon prod in place. There didn't seem to be enough air. They were up too high, she realized. Thin ribbons of cloud whipped past them. The canyon was a narrow crack far, far below.\n\nCreyne was blinking, beginning to wake. She willed the Shifter to pull around so that she could get her seat back. And then a sudden cross breeze pulled Niketa farther than her arms could stretch, and the dragon prod lifted off of the Shifter's neck.\n\nThe dragon immediately bucked, smashing Niketa's arm against her side. She felt her arm crack, and her vision flashed white. The prod went spinning from her suddenly numb fingers, and she and her husband went tumbling away into the open sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Creyne blinked, trying to wake up. His head throbbed with the worst hangover he'd ever felt. What had happened?\n\nHe'd been falling, he remembered. He was still falling. Someone was shouting. He looked down to find his wife clutching his sleeve, her teeth clenched and her other arm curled tight against her chest. She was pulling him... he looked down, over his shoulder, and realized that she was trying to angle them toward the canyon below, which was growing larger with every second.\n\nSlowly, his mind began to grind into gear. He knew that even the enchantments of the safety nets wouldn't be enough to save them, falling from this height. How in the world had they gotten here?\n\nA roar shattered through the wind, and Creyne looked up\u2014past his feet\u2014to find the Emerald Shifter bearing down on them with sapphire flames billowing from its maw. His mind finally snapped into full wakefulness. He grabbed his wife, twisting to shield her from the dragon's fire. Then he blinked. There, whistling through the air just a few feet away, was a dragon prod. He snatched it and turned to face the dragon.\n\nFire enveloped them. Creyne felt his bandana wither away in the heat. Through the shimmering flames, he glimpsed a forked, lashing tongue. Vicious teeth surrounded them. He slammed the rod up into the roof of the dragon's mouth and felt it touch flesh.\n\n\"Stop your flame!\" he shouted. He'd never actually used a dragon prod before; it was supposed to communicate your commands to the dragon, though. Sure enough, the dragon's fire bled away in an instant. He and his wife were halfway into the dragon's mouth, but it didn't bite down on them.\n\n\"Slow us down!\" Niketa screamed in his ear, clinging to his back. He looked over his shoulder and saw the canyon walls almost within spitting reach.\n\n\"Pull up!\" he shouted at the dragon. \"Level out!\"\n\nThe Shifter immediately complied, spreading its wings and straining against the wind. Creyne and Niketa slammed against its lower jaw and held onto its teeth as it streaked into the canyon; he kept the prod firmly against its gums the whole way. Rodeo imps scattered out of their way, screaming in otherworldly languages. The dragon slowly began to curve upward again, and Creyne felt himself slipping down toward its throat.\n\nNiketa grabbed his arm with her good one and braced her feet against the dragon's teeth. Then, with a heave, she threw them both free of its mouth. Creyne felt its teeth tug at his boot as he fell.\n\nThey slammed into the safety nets and each other. Once again, Creyne had the wind knocked out of him, this time by his wife's hip connecting with his stomach. Above them the imps darted and teased the Emerald Shifter. Snarling and hissing, it vanished with a flash.\n\nThey lay there panting. Creyne worked his arms free of the net and wrapped them around his wife. She rested her head against his chest.\n\n\"How's yer arm?\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Prob'ly broken,\" she replied. \"Just a little crack, though. You injured?\"\n\nHe stretched slightly. His face stung and his side was throbbing. \"I'm a mite singed. A little bit, but I've had worse. Maybe a broken rib or two.\"\n\n\"Nothin' else?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I'm all right.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Niketa whispered. Then she thumped him on the head with her fist. \"You don't have to speak your commands with a dragon prod, idjit,\" she growled, yanking off her goggles. \"You just think 'em\u2014it's faster and easier.\"\n\nCreyne stared at her. Her leathers were singed black and there was a sooty outline from her goggles around her gray eyes. Her cheeks were singed with a faint flush. He coughed up a brief laugh. \"Give me my tusk back, woman.\"\n\nNiketa blinked at him. Then she smiled. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head against her chest while she fished the tooth out of the pouch at her waist.\n\n\"There you go, idjit,\" she said, shoving it into his hand. \"Now make my eyes pretty again.\"\n\nCreyne pulled the crystal sphere from his jacket and held it up before her eyes. The color faded from it and drifted in wisps back to her eyes until the irises gleamed violet again. She blinked, smiled, and then pulled him into a kiss."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The imps helped them onto a magic carpet. As they raised into sight of the galleries, the crowds began to cheer. Niketa smiled; every spectator was standing, and many were jumping up and down. She'd never heard a rodeo crowd cheer so loudly or so wildly. Creyne squeezed her shoulder, and she hugged him back.\n\n\"Well that's nice, isn't it?\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah.\" He looked down at the dragon prod in his hand. \"Pretty sure they're still gonna disqualify us 'cause of this thing, though.\"\n\nNiketa looked at the prod, then at him, and snorted. She wasn't getting into this again. \"Don't expect an apology from me.\"\n\n\"Never crossed my mind.\" He shook his head and pulled his hat back onto his head. \"Just a shame to miss that prize.\"\n\nShe rested her head on his arm. \"Prizes at the Coasttown Rodeo next month are bigger, anyway.\" But even as she said it, she wondered if another rodeo was the best idea.\n\nCreyne nodded absentmindedly, and she wondered if he was thinking the same thing. Then he hefted the dragon prod. \"How much, uh... how much does one of these cost? We should prob'ly get another'n before we move on.\"\n\nNiketa looked up at him. He didn't meet her eyes, and was instead intensely studying the glowing prod. She smirked and nodded, leaning her head against his chest. \"Damn straight.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Rising Star by Michaelene Pendleton ]\n\nI was plunging in a wind-shrieking dive, wings snicked in close to my back, riding the fine edge of control, claws spread, working my ribs like bellows to pump up my fire, anticipation dripping from both tips of my tongue, and dropping like fate on a frizzly-haired old mage robed in tatty blue velvet, when\u2014BAM!\u2014he slammed me with a bolt of magical dragonbane stronger than hammered lightning and twice as bright.\n\nThe blast fried all my senses, blinded and deafened me, flung me spinning down a long, dark tunnel, my wings flailing for lift and not finding any air to grab. Tumbling in a lightless void, sparked here and there with the tracks of stars. Freezing from a cold sharper than a Viking's nightmare of Hel, damping my fire to faint tendrils of smoke oozing out of my nostrils, icing over both sets of eyelids and turning my wing membranes as brittle as rime frost on a still pond.\n\nThe battle was a mistake from the beginning, a defamation of character leading to inevitable confrontation. I'd been accused of taking a young virgin girl. That was a long-bearded lie. I will admit that when I was not long out of the shell I appreciated the delicate savor of virgin flesh, boy's or girl's, but after laying my first egg clutch, my taste turned to full-grown males. Their meat was richer, stronger-flavored\u2014in truth, gamier\u2014than the pale flesh of young women. Anyway, the local maidens keep themselves starved down to skin and bone until they attract a mate. After that, well, while it is grudgingly permitted to take breeding females, my line has always had more care for our honor. There's not much sport in harvesting a woman too pregnant to run, or too concerned with protecting her young to have the sense to hide. And children aren't worth the bother unless you round up a gaggle of them.\n\nI hadn't tormented and dined on anyone but full-grown males for two or three centuries, usually the ones who came proudly shouting what they thought was my true name, riding fat juicy horses and encased in metal shells which sizzled a nice crust on them.\n\nNow there was true sport! Dodging their sharp, pointy little lances, huffing great gouts of dusky smoke, fending off swords with my claws, and finally broiling them medium-rare with one good blast of flame after enough tormenting to get their sap fully risen. Tasty, oh my, yes.\n\nUnfair that I was banished from life and light for something I didn't even do.\n\nTime had no meaning in the void, only emptiness and a great, aching loneliness that gnawed and rended my soul with fangs more terrible than any beast magical or mundane. Abandoned, my life ripped out of time, I floated through the beginnings and endings of worlds unknowing, alone and unmade, reined back from the black rage of berserker despair only by the raw, desperate need to survive. I am Draconis Verdigris. We do not give up."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "With a concussion that rattled my brain inside the wedge of my skull, I dropped from the void into a night sky overwhelming with sound and color and scent. The sudden transition shocked my senses. I plummeted like a hunk of granite, falling, not flying, terrorized by the rush of warm and sudden life. By the time I got my wits about me, I was too close to the ground to do more than flare my wings and brace for impact.\n\nI hit the ground hard enough to knock my wind out and snap two spines at the end of my tail. But I was alive.\n\nThe scents were alien to my nostrils, revealing a hot, dry, barren place instead of the forested fjords of home. A slice of moon showed me a land of blasted, jagged rock, sand still warm from the day's sun, strange twisted bushes and trees armored with thorns, powdered with dust. Unknown tracks patterned the sand and disappeared over rock, to reappear again in the next patch of sand. I recognized nothing.\n\nI could hear the skritch of wind-shifted twigs against rock, the whisper of sand moving over itself, claw-scuttlings of tiny creatures, and once a wild wailing that could have issued from the stretched throat of a wolf. But no birdsong, no rill of water or the slow, cold conversations of salmon, no thrashing of brush as elks beat the velvet from their antlers.\n\nMy fire was almost out. I lay still, saving what energy remained to me. I can fast for a century or so if necessary but the lethargy in my long-sinewed muscles and the vast emptiness in my belly told me my time in the void had been much longer than two, three or even four hundred years.\n\nI was too weak to hunt, too weak to even move. I lay with one wing crumpled under my body and couldn't shift enough to free it. I pumped my ribs and exhaled. No fire, just a whisper of smoke, not enough heat to warm a leftover snack.\n\nSomething moved across the sand in front of my nose. A blunt-tailed lizard, beaded black and orange across its back, moving slowly, its tail in counterpoint to its torso as it waddled cautiously closer, drawn by the fading heat of my body.\n\nA lizard. A relative. An ancestor, if you believe the legends of the beginnings of our race. Which made eating it uncomfortably close to cannibalism.\n\nDamn ethics, I was starving. I scooped it off the sand with my tongue. One crunch and it was gone. Barely a tidbit to my hunger, but its brief taste gave me hope. I cast out my senses, pushing back the creeping cold of death.\n\nThere were sparks of warm life all around me. I lay still and let mammalian curiosity bring the creatures within range of my glance. Once under my basilisk stare, they marched obligingly into my jaws. Rabbits, a porcine creature much smaller than the wild boars of home, a thin, slab-sided wolflike thing with dirty gray-yellow fur, each one renewed my strength, stoked the coals in my fire-chamber.\n\nI didn't torment any of them. There is no honor in tormenting a creature too simple to fully realize what it has to fear. For tormenting to be honorable, as well as pleasurable, you need prey that can imagine its own demise, which leaves us with only humans, magpies, foxes, and two species of swine.\n\nI couldn't yet fly, but I could stand and shake out my cramped wings, flex my talons, and stretch hindlegs and forelegs, surveying my length for serious hurt, and finding none. Able to move, I could hunt.\n\nCattle are the same the world over. Brainless and toothsome. I stalked a herd and killed four while they were still entranced, a quick slash of claw, eating two of them raw, choking down their uncooked flesh, feeling their meat and blood flood my muscles with life, fueling my fire. Three deep breaths. I raised my head, flexing my neck to clear the passage, and belched out a stream of fire that lit t he night sky and splashed liquid flame over rock and sand. I was alive! I shrieked my challenge to this world, a long ringing clarion that refuted death and said to all, \"Beware. Hic est draconis!\"\n\nWhen the echoes of my cry died away, the night was utterly silent. Nothing moved, or hardly breathed. Life huddled close to the earth, frozen in terror, knowing with the memory of long-dead forebears that its only protection lay in invisibility.\n\nI seared the other two dead cows and ate my first civilized meal by the graying light of dawn, relishing the hot, herbivore-scented meat, picking my teeth clean with splinters of leg bones.\n\nAs the sun tipped a horizon jagged with the backbones of mountains, I spread my wings, flexing the long vanes and stretching their prismed green-gold plates that lay flat along the reptilian curves of my body. The acid-washed bronze of spines, talons and the two spiraled horns that swept back from my wide triangular brow were gilded in the early light. From the egg, I knew that I was beautiful, but only now, after surviving the worst that magic could do, after eons in the void, rebirthed weak and helpless into a new world, only now did I know my own true strength. In this world or any other, I am fear. I am why men flinch and look up at the shadow of a crow.\n\nWith a strong downthrust of wing, I sprang into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "The ascending sun gave the air substance. I rose and soared, riding the warm currents with barely the flick of a wingtip for control, then diving, twisting, rollicking in the freedom of flight.\n\nWhen I settled, I found myself looking down upon a very strange land. Not a forest in sight, no water, no villages or farmsteads, just sere, barren earth spiked with sharp upthrusts of gray and yellow rock as far as I could see.\n\nIn the cantilevered bone over my eyes, the pits that read the magnetic currents of the world swirled with nausea, telling me that, wherever I was, it was untold leagues away from my northern forests, a long way south and farther west than any seafarer had dared venture. In fact, if the men of my time who considered themselves learned were right, I should have been either in the middle of Oceanus Incognita or off the edge of the earth. Well, all Draconi know that the earth is not flat, but as round as a Saxon's skull, and I wasn't swimming. So much for learned men. The one thing I was sure of was that I had better come to like this place because it was going to be my new home.\n\nAfter flying for most of the day, I was certain it was a home I would not have chosen. Too empty. Several times I saw flying things, never close enough to challenge, nor even to be sure that they were Draconi, especially since they flew with no beat of wing, incredibly fast and unbelievably high.\n\nThe ground below me was streaked here and there with straight paths of smooth gray stone. Along the lines moved what looked to be scarabs or possibly pill bugs, large beetles of ugly, flat colors. Bugs are not fit prey for an adult of my Line, but these were very large beetles. I cirdled down to have a closer look. Two of them stopped beneath me. One was a bilious brown and the other solid white with blue and red fires flashing on its back. They reeked of burning lamp oil, forge-hot metal, and some acrid effluvia that stung my nostrils. A man got out of the white one.\n\nI went into a stall, forgetting to flap, in my amazement. What kind of world is this where men encase insects in armor and ride inside them?\n\nThe man walked up beside the brown beetle. I heard two loud pops and he sprawled on the ground. The brown beetle roared and ran away.\n\nIt's hard to resist running prey. I chased off after the beetle, overflying it, then flaring down in front of it. It shrieked and stopped. Two men leaped out, shouting in a tongue I had never heard but, with the inborn knowledge of all Draconi, could understand. They weren't being complimentary about my ancestry, nor were they offering me a proper challenge. In truth, they were downright insulting. They pointed their hands at me. I heard more popping sounds and something stung my breastbone.\n\nWell, if they had no honor, I had no obligation. I charred them with one blast, setting the beetle aflame as well. As I reached to skewer dinner, the damned bug exploded! It blasted me muzzle over mead kettle, rolling me like a puffball along the ground. A piece of its armor whacked me between my horns and knocked me cross-eyed. It also burned my dinner to two lumps of cinder.\n\nI settled for beef again that evening. Obviously I was going to have to learn more about this place before I could safely hunt humans here."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "It took several days to find a cave. My new lair wasn't much of a cave, only a deep hollow in dirty gray sandstone rather than an arching granite cavern, mined smooth by dwarfs. Unwelcoming, too, with no seeping water for a bathing pool, and no heaps of shining gold to cozy it up a bit.\n\nIn truth, I was beginning to suspect that gold might be hard to come by in this country. There was no smell of it on the two men I hadn't eaten, and no lovely aroma in the air of new-mined gold freshly brought to light.\n\nI had to keep reminding myself that I was fortunate to be alive. Despair became a new taste on my tongue. No honorable prey proclaiming challenge, no gold to be found. And in this world, I found I did not rule the skies.\n\nOne darkmoon night, I was frolicking in the air, playing with the winds rather than having a care for my safety.\n\nThe creature was on me before I was even aware of it. It came at me with a banshee shriek, riding the rumble of Ragnarok thunder, spewing a tail of fire, tossing me like a mayfly in its turbulent wake. It left behind a reek of oil and metal that told me it was akin to the ground beetles.\n\nI lost a lot of sky before I got lift under my wings again. That may be what saved me. It had circled around at me, fire sparking from its rigid, back-swept wings. Something ripped through my right wing, shredding one membrane panel, flipping me over on my back. It was lunging down on me. Flailing at the air, all control gone, I was helpless. We were less than sixty rods above the broken ground, and I was looking Death in her cold eye, when it suddenly pulled up, screaming high into wider air.\n\nI flared into a stall, and twitched down into a good-sized gully in the desert floor, making the best speed my wounded wing would allow. I could hear it above me, searching, but fearing to fly too low. When it was gone, I ascended and limped back to my lair.\n\nMy pride was badly dented that night. In the long hours before dawn, I wrestled with the demon of realization that I was no longer the most powerful being in the air. No griffin, no winged Sphinx, no Valkyrie of my time could have withstood me\u2014any more than I could stand up to the unholy amalgam that had attacked me.\n\nWhen it was coming straight for me, I had seen that men rode inside the armored flying insect. Could it be that in this place men had handfasted with the enemies of mammals and warm-blooded reptiles alike, and used them for steeds? What price had they paid, I wondered, for that evil alliance?\n\nThat was when I knew despair.\n\nI took cattle for my hunger and stayed on the ground after dark, wrapped in self-pity, angry anew at my fate. Restless, wanting the world that was gone, trying to make sense of this new world.\n\nI was lonely. No trembling wizards braving my hunger, outstretched hands offering jewels from Far Aegyptus in return for the knowledge they asked of me. No dwarfs bringing rough-hewn gold in worshipful tribute. No fields of harvesters to swoop down on just for the fun of watching them scatter. No long evenings of philosophical dispute with learned witches clothed in bone amulets and rivers of dark hair. No ritual challenge and combat.\n\nNo mate.\n\nThe hot nights stirred my blood. For the first time I understood the rampages of my southern kin among the men of the desert who wore curved swords and braided their beards for Allah. We Draconi of the northern mists and chilling rains are slower in our passions, but they are deep, deep as the black waters of the Ice Sea. Once aroused, we do not waver.\n\nI kept a tight hold on my yearnings. Going berserker in my injured condition would be dog-stupid. But there is no challenge in preying on cattle, skinny deer, and the odd razorback or rabbit. Men are really the only fit prey, and I wasn't having much success hunting men. The rules had changed, and I didn't know the new ones."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "One morning I woke to a low rumble and the insect reek. My first instinct was to burst from my cave, belching flame and ready to attack the creature that dared invade my domain. My recent experiences, however, counseled caution. I crept from the shadows into the lemon-yellow light of dawn. The rocky ground before my lair sloped down some way then leveled out into a smooth sand floor. Sitting on the sand, surrounded by its own stench, emanating waves of heat, was a bulky, blue-carapaced snout beetle almost as large as I am. Beside it, leaning on its long nose, stood a man.\n\nBoth my hearts hammered in my breast. He smelled of gold.\n\nI couldn't take him while he was protected by the insect. With gold at stake, I didn't want the cursed thing exploding and destroying the beginnings of my hoard.\n\nTo lure him away, I stretched my jaws, tightened my throat, and began to sing. It was a song I had learned from the Rhine Loreleis, a wordless flow of music in a minor key, complete with two dark-hued harmonies that hinted of sensual twinings in the night, of love and lust and unearthly delight. The Loreleis always could weave a good tune.\n\nIt caught him. He turned his head, listening, not yet understanding. He drank from a glass bottle and I smelled the sharp bite of brandywine. One hand went to his mouth, a spark glowed, and smoke drifted from his nostrils.\n\nSmoke? From a human?\n\nHe looked wholly human, and if he was a mage, he didn't dress the part. His trews were close-fitting dark-blue cloth, and his tunic was black leather, pigskin by its smell, open down the front. Under it he wore something white that came up close around his neck, but no sign of a weapon, not even a bodkin. I drew in a suppressed breath: gold glinted from his throat and one wrist. Saliva dripped from my tonguetips and I almost lost the thread of my song.\n\nHis boots scraped on the rock. When I saw the crown of his head, I reared up to my full height and fixed him with one baleful golden eye.\n\nHe stumbled to a stop, dropping the bottle, his mouth sagging agape, his limbs suddenly frozen. The insect didn't explode, no curses magical enveloped me. Finally something was going properly in this strange world.\n\nI called him to me. He came, moving in the stiff-jointed way of the entranced. I studied him carefully while I held him in thrall\u2014I'd had enough surprises. He seemed as human as men of my time. He wore his hair longer than the short helmet-cut of a cataphract, his jaw was beardless, and his eyes were covered by two round black pieces of glass. I was familiar with glass of magical properties, but this glass, whatever its purpose, gave off no arcane aroma. I touched him with the tips of my tongue, and he shuddered in a most human fashion.\n\nI backed him against a slab of rock and curved both wings to fence him round before I released him from my stare.\n\nFor a really satisfactory tormenting, it's wise to wait them out in silence, let them speak first. Often those first words reveal their deepest fears, giving you a direction for the torment.\n\nHe was quiet for a goodly time, weaving a bit as if he were having trouble with his balance. He reached up and removed the glass things from his face, then ran a hand down his chin. His eyes, dark, bagged, and red-rimmed, touched me, slid away, then crept back. His voice was broken into bits like gravel in a streambed, hissing and rattling. \"Oh man, I have got to lay off the booze, I'm losing it.\" He scuffed his hands at me. \"Well, you just piss off. I don't need very large, lovely green dragons on top of everything else.\"\n\nObviously this man wasn't understanding his situation.\n\nHe put one hand against the rock to steady himself. \"Go on, beat it. The rest of my life may be going down the toilet, but I refuse to have DTs, too. There are no dragons. I'm asleep. I'm dreaming you.\"\n\nI chuckled and he cringed away from the sooty heat. I stretched out one foreclaw and delicately nicked the back of his hand. I licked a scarlet drop from the point of my claw. \"Dreaming, are you?\"\n\n\"Shit,\" he said.\n\nHe put the glasses back on his face. \"All right, if you're going to kill me, do it. Get it over with.\"\n\nHe wasn't cooperating. Yes, he was scared, but by now he should have been down on his knees, babbling to various divine beings to intercede and save his paltry little life, which, in my experience, they never do. Circling deep in the currents under his surface fear was an urge to die almost draconian in its bleak intensity. A human with a Death wish? I'd thought that reserved for higher forms of life. This man piqued my interest. \"Are you so eager to die?\" I inquired.\n\nHis mouth twisted into a sour line. \"That was my intent, yes. Why else come to the Mojave-godforsaken-Desert?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You tell me. The production company folded, I can't pay my bills, the producer's assistants' assistants won't return my phone calls, and my last decent client just went over to William Morris. Next thing you know, headwaiters won't seat me during rush hour. I'm not waiting around for the luncheon postmortems on poor old Terry Pierce's career, nice guy, just couldn't cut it, heard he slunk back into the Great Flyover somewhere, all that bullshit. A bottle of Halcyon, a quart of Stoli, and the whole problem fades away.\" He creaked out a laugh. \"I sure as hell didn't expect to end up fried by a dragon, a mythical beast that doesn't even exist, which must mean that I'm crazy, too.\"\n\nAlthough that didn't make a whole lot of sense, I was a little irked that he still didn't believe in me. \"I am not mythical,\" I said. \"I am an adult female Draconis of the Verdigris Line. I was thrown into your world by the magic of a second-rate wizard who got lucky.\"\n\n\"Magic? Not even a hack scriptwriter would believe that one. The only magic these days is in the movies.\" He went still, as if every muscle in his body were suddenly frozen. \"Movies. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if you are real\u2014\" He pulled off his glasses and took a step toward me.\n\nI hissed and backed up. \"You will find that I am very real. Pray to whatever gods you revere, man. I will give you that time.\"\n\nHe raised his hands. \"Wait a minute. Stop. Can't we cut a deal here?\"\n\nBargaining is an honorable reaction to tormenting. I raised my head and vented a little flame into the cool morning air. \"What did you have in mind?\"\n\nFire always shakes them. He managed to keep most of the fear out of his voice. \"You don't kill me, and I make us both so filthy rich we'll puke.\"\n\nNot exactly a revolutionary bargaining point, and rather indelicately stated, but he was trying. \"You promise gold?\"\n\n\"Gold? If that's how you want it, sure. Here,\" he tore the gold from his neck and wrist, \"you want gold, take these. The Rolex alone is worth six thousand. Consider it a down payment.\"\n\nI could feel a new wish for life born in him. That's what tormenting is all about, the rising and dashing of hope. The pleasure flowed through my body like sex or flight. \"How will you get this gold you offer?\"\n\n\"Just by signing papers, babe. You let me represent you, do an exclusive contract with me, and I'll have every major studio begging to use you. Shit, Spielberg and Lucas will go fucking nuts! You'll be the biggest thing to hit the movies since Godzilla!\"\n\nHe continued in a language just as arcane as any first-water mage. His words didn't matter. I felt his excitement, the hot rush of his human desires, the need in his blood not only to live, but to succeed at this plan he was concocting. Humans are most interesting when they are fired with that singular drive to create. His life force burned more brightly the longer he talked.\n\n\"So,\" he finished, \"have we got a deal?\" He rubbed his palms together. His aura was vivid with life.\n\nI looked down at him, holding my silence until both color and hope faded from his face. His shoulders sagged. \"I think not,\" I said.\n\nHis eyes flinched but he stood his ground. \"Nothing I can say will change your mind?\"\n\nI turned my head to fix him with the balefire of one hungry eye. In the act of inhaling a fire-breath, I hesitated. He was really quite brave, facing me with no weapons, almost as cast adrift from his referents as I had been in the void, yet controlling his fear. He had the desperate courage of a dragonet facing a phalanx of lancers. His visage was even faintly draconic, long and thin, bone-edged along its planes and hollows. His eyes and hair were black and shining like the scales of Draconis enbonii, the Line of my first chosen egg-mate.\n\nAnd in truth, I was very lonely. My Line is more solitary than most, but here in this place of so many unknowns, I needed a touchstone to link me to sanity, even if it was only the limited conversation of a human. I had the suspicion I wasn't going to find another of my own kind.\n\nI hadn't answered his question. When I released him from the entrancement of my gaze, he slumped against the rock at his back. \"Okay,\" he rasped, \"I get it.\" He dragged one hand over his face. \"Can I smoke first?\"\n\nSo I hadn't imagined it. It was against all reason, but I knew I had seen it. In the strange ages of change I'd missed, could humans and Draconi somehow have become kin? \"Please do,\" I said.\n\nHe reached into his clothes and brought out a thin white stick. He put it between his lips, holding his other hand to its tip. I heard a small snick. And suddenly his fingers were aflame. It startled me, raising a wild hope, until I saw that he held in his palm a small metal device that actually produced the fire. He inhaled deeply, then let tendrils of blue smoke drift out of his nostrils.\n\nDisappointment was as deep as the hope that had been vaulting. Not kin, then, not real fire. Still, it was something to note that down the ages, humans had retained enough memory of us to preserve our ways. To show that I accepted his reverence, I politely breathed some of my own smoke to join his.\n\nHe coughed. He looked up at me, a slash of smile pulling his mouth askew. \"Go for it, babe. At least 'Death by Dragon' makes a better headline than 'Small-time Agent OD's.' Too bad no one will ever read it.\"\n\nI sucked in a great draft of air, arching my neck, raising the points of my wings. White-hot the flame roared, incandescent heat, hissing and crackling, searing up my throat, out between my long jaws, to splash harmlessly over rock and sand, because at the last instant, I couldn't do it. I didn't want to kill him. I'd found food to sustain my body, uninteresting food, true, but enough to keep me alive. Now I needed sustenance for my mind. This man had the courage to pretend to laugh at Death. How could I kill a being capable of that?\n\n\"How much gold?\" I said.\n\nHe opened his eyes. Dark hair stuck sweat-slicked to his cheeks. His voice was a whisper. \"To tell the truth, I don't think I could figure your take of a ten-million-dollar contract and three percent of the gross, after my commission of course, right at this particular moment.\"\n\nWhat amount of gold is honorable in this age? I suppose, like any other age, as much as you can get. In some ways, the world does not change. His two pieces of gold lay before me, throwing back the light with a soft gleam. Centuries of tradition named him prey, life to be tormented and taken. But the mind must rule the blood. I did not want to kill him. In this new world I could make my own rules.\n\nI settled back on my haunches, tucking in my wings. As the sun rose to bake us in a welcome heat, between us we reasoned a bargain that would allow me to let him live. Against all sensible argument, I put my trust in him, agreeing to his plans, even telling him my True Name to seal the bargain, although he said we'd have to change it because Sigrigrantharisis was too long for something called billboards. There was much I did not fully understand in his words, but I could feel his eager interest in me.\n\nBy the time we parted, I was hungry enough that I had to stop looking at him. To hold me over until I could find acceptable prey, I asked for the insect.\n\n\"The what?\"\n\nI pointed with my snout. \"The insect that carries you in its belly. The blue one down there, may I take it for prey?\"\n\nHis teeth flashed white as he grinned. Strong, sharp canines, I noted. \"It's not an insect, it's a machine.\"\n\n\"A mechanical device? Like a catapult or a wormscrew?\" My voice held doubt.\n\n\"Sort of. Let me explain cars to you another time. Right now I've got the media event of the century to promote.\" He patted my slanting shoulder, a little hesitantly. \"Babe, we are going to make so much money, it'll be indecent.\"\n\nJust before climbing into his insect-car, he said, \"Why didn't you waste me right off?\"\n\nIf I correctly understood the idiom, some questions lie best unanswered. I hacked a blotch of smoke at him. He didn't ask again.\n\nHe had the courage to talk to me instead of immediately trying to skewer me with something sharp, and he was only the second human in my experience to recognize that, in truth, I am an exceedingly lovely green dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "In less than a quarter moon, Terry completed the arrangements for his \"media event.\" On the agreed day, just as sunset turned to dark, he gathered a large assembly of humans known as flacks on a high butte of rock not far from my lair.\n\nI followed Terry's instructions as if I were, in truth, born to what he called \"show business.\" In the afternoon I ate several fat cows to curb my instinct to prey on humans, since even I could understand the consequences of such an action. I preened my scales and burnished my horns, spines, and claws until they shone like sea-gold. Then I lay hidden, waiting for Terry's signal.\n\nIn his parlance, we blew their socks off. Gliding silently, I swooped down on them from the rear, blasting a long stream of fire as I passed, then circling to hover, wings flared, spitting sparks and roaring in my most ferocious voice.\n\nIt was like stirring a nest of mice. Some froze in terror, some ran in wild panic. The running ones I turned back, showing off my acrobatic skill, diving and dancing in the air, huffing just enough flame to scare them without really hurting anyone. When they were all herded together again, I landed among their cowering forms, let off one last gout of flame into the black sky, then lowered my head so Terry could stand with his arm around my neck while he convinced the flacks that I was not, after all, going to eat them en brochette. When they found that I talk, they went wild, all yelling at once, popping flashing lights in my eyes. Terry controlled their questions, only allowing me to respond to the ones for which we had created answers that Terry thought would be acceptable to the media.\n\nIt was a stupendous success.\n\nSo here I am, the hottest star in Hollywood. I have my own dressing room, a converted semitrailer with my stage name in red uncial Gothic letters on the side. I get a hundred thousand per speaking appearance, my price for a cameo role is higher than Brando's, and the Koreans are negotiating for my endorsement on a theme park called DragonLand. Kitty Kelly is writing my unauthorized biography.\n\nTerry makes all the deals. I can't fit inside the offices. Though if the negotiations aren't going well, we often arrange for me to stick my head in the window and huff a little smoke now and then. That usually simplifies the bargaining process.\n\nMy last feature was an FX film, with me playing two roles, good dragon versus bad dragon. I reluctantly allowed them to dye my scales, but only because Terry convinced me that I needed to be able to play against type for career longevity. He's now working on some deal where I get a \"love interest.\" I've explained the draconian way of these things, but Terry insists that humans will like me better, and spend more at the box office, if they can anthropomorphize me. I'd rather be feared, but if it makes Terry happy and keeps the gold flowing in, I'll be lovable. For a couple of movies, anyway. Then I want Terry to buy an option on Beowulf so we can tell the truth of that story.\n\nIt's a fat, comfortable life. No knights trying to puncture me, no magicians hurling spells at me, no priests cursing my name for eternity. All the treasure any dragon could want, beautiful people sucking up to me and wanting their pictures with me in all the tabloids. I take my rest on a hard, lumpy pile of bright yellow gold. My own chef presents me with the tenderest pedigreed Japanese beef on the hoof and ready for broiling.\n\nStill, I do miss the thrill of the hunt and the occasional torment. Terry is adamant that, no matter how toothsome, I'm not allowed to eat any more of my co-stars. I did charbroil that hairy little rat dog that supposedly saved the world from me in my first feature. Terry took care of the bad press and explained that it would be really hard to get parts if I kept that up, so I promised I wouldn't do it again.\n\nBut I don't suppose they'd miss an extra now and then, would they? Maybe a stuntman or a bit player? And, I promise, only after the production is wrapped.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Diamond-Spitting Knight by S. E. Page ]\n\nAll of Millet's troubles began when she freed the fairy. Pixie Mab's wings were caught in the dewy cobwebs covering a mulberry bush until the orphan girl gave it a good shake.\n\n\"I am not your godmother, but I suppose I might spare you a small fairy's blessing,\" Pixie Mab said as she smoothed the torn gossamer ruffles of her gown. \"How would you like to become a changeling and learn how to howl like an ogre and run wild with the unicorns?\"\n\nBut Millet shook her head, very certain that she would prefer silver platters of tarts bathed in honey, satin dancing slippers, and chandeliers with more crystals than a starry sky. \"Make me a princess, please, with a castle and a crown and everything\u2014\"\n\n\"Boring,\" Pixie Mab interrupted, rolling her eyes, \"but as you wish.\" She waved a tiny rowan splinter of a wand before vanishing in a puff of periwinkle sparkles.\n\nMillet patted the top of her head and was sorely disappointed to find only the usual tangle of red curls. Yet there was no time to search for her missing tiara as a royal hunting party charged into the meadow where she stood quite in the way. Millet opened her mouth to cry out a warning before their stallions trampled her under hoof, but found it impossible as something hard and cold rolled up her throat and clinked against her teeth. A torrent of sapphires slipped from her surprised lips and mixed with the clover.\n\n\"Halt!\" King Wulfram shouted, and his hunters reeled their steeds to a sudden stop. A sharp glint filled the king's eyes as he glanced down at the dazzling mess of jewels and then back up at the orphan girl. \"What a lovely little gem you are,\" he said. The new name stuck, and he promptly pronounced her his princess on the spot.\n\nKing Wulfram brought Little Gem back to his castle where she continued to spit out jewels faster than melon seeds: one bucket of rubies as large as a bear's eyes Monday through Thursday, a barrel of sapphires as bright as morning stars Friday through Saturday, and a ladle-full of pearls as blue as dove's eggs on Sunday. The daily jewels that Little Gem coughed up kept a very particular schedule, unless of course, she sneezed.\n\nIn such an emergency, Ole Maid Gertie unfurled a kerchief at the first hint of a scrunching nose, and Little Gem filled the cloth with emeralds and now and then, the odd peridot.\n\n\"Bless you, poppet,\" the old woman said after a particularly powerful sneeze. She dumped the glimmering stones caught in the kerchief into a scale and weighed them with a practiced hand.\n\n\"No thanks!\" Little Gem said as she pinched her nose to keep from sneezing again. \"One blessing is quite enough.\"\n\nLittle Gem supposed the fairy's blessing would be rather nice if only being a princess didn't come with so very many rules: never tell anyone of her gift, never give a single jewel away, but mostly, stay in the Iron Room.\n\n\"It's for your own good, my little gem,\" King Wulfram had assured her as he'd unlocked the black metal door and ushered her into the iron-walled room. \"This is the safest place in the castle for a treasure as truly precious as yours.\"\n\nLittle Gem didn't mind spending her days in the Iron Room at first, for every corner of the treasury overflowed with peculiar splendors: a harp that played music even when no finger touched the golden strings, tapestries of snow white stags that galloped as if alive instead of silk thread beasts, and Faerie books that told new stories every night no matter how many times she turned the pages. How could she dare complain when she'd traded a dirty straw pallet and cold porridge for a downy pile of goose-feather pillows, and three hot meals brought to her by Ole Maid Gertie every day?\n\nBut as her time rolled by in a gilded haze, Little Gem felt a deepening pang of loss; she'd almost forgotten the springy feel of grass and how a clean slant of sunlight was so much brighter than the wink of gold.\n\nKing Wulfram came to visit Little Gem at noon, as he always did to tally and inspect the day's bounty of jewels.\n\n\"No diamonds today?\" he asked, frowning at the silver pail brimming over with Tuesday's rubies as if it was a bucket of squirmy salamanders.\n\nLittle Gem bowed her head, for she'd never been able to spit out a single diamond, though she'd tried a thousand times. \"No, Your Majesty.\"\n\nKing Wulfram kicked the pail over and rubies tinkled into every corner. \"This humble pile of jewels is not nearly enough for my kingdom,\" he seethed. \"I need diamonds, Little Gem, mountains of them! After all I have done for you, is it so hard to show me your gratitude?\"\n\n\"No!\" Little Gem said, her shoulders slumping under the weight of her own failure. \"Perhaps I shall have better luck tomorrow...\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" the king agreed.\n\nAlone once more, Little Gem picked up the empty pail and stared fiercely at the bottom. \"Surely I can make just one tiny diamond,\" she whispered, but her tears were the only kind of jewel that plunked inside.\n\nShe fell asleep clutching the empty pail only to be startled awake by a loud growl at precisely midnight. The door to the Iron Room swung open as two guards entered and wheeled a large cage inside. Little Gem gawked in amazement at the young dragon the size of a pony snarling behind the bars. A tight silver collar pinched the emerald green scales on his neck.\n\n\"Beware you well, little lady!\" one of the guards snickered. \"That collar may keep the dragon from belching flames, but touch the vicious beast and he'll have your fingers for supper.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" the second guard cackled. \"And clean his fangs with your bones.\"\n\nThe door to the Iron Room shut on Little Gem and her perilous new companion with a deafening slam. Tucking her hands deep into her robe's pockets\u2014it didn't hurt to be too cautious as she was rather fond of her fingers, after all\u2014Little Gem hid behind her pile of pillows and studied the monster. He stared back at her with equally curious amber eyes.\n\n\"I stole ten bushels of ripe summer pears,\" the dragon said, licking his dagger-length fangs with a satisfied smack. \"That's how I got caught in the king's trap in the royal orchard. But what did a wee damsel like your self do to get thrown into this fancy dungeon?\" he asked.\n\nHer pillows scattered as Little Gem stood up and glared at the dragon. \"I am no prisoner, I live here. I am the princess of this castle, beast!\" She grabbed a tiara hanging from the horns of a marble faun and crowned herself just to prove her point. Yet her hands clenched into fists as she wondered if the sly monarch hadn't tricked her, too, trapping her in the Iron Room with fine promises of being his fair princess.\n\nThe dragon snorted. \"Well, you have very coarse manners for a princess; my name is 'Emeril,' not beast.\"\n\nLittle Gem's cheeks burned. \"Forgive me, Emeril. I haven't always been a princess, only since I started spitting jewels.\" Coughing once, she spat up an oval Wednesday ruby in her palm. \"Would you like one? I've heard that dragons are particularly fond of shiny things.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you, but I fear my treasure hoarding days are over.\" Emeril curled his body in tight winding circles until he was one big scaly ball. \"King Wulfram has decreed a glorious tournament tomorrow! Knights from all corners of the kingdom will joust in noble combat, and the champion will win the chance to slay a legendary monster at noon.\" The dragon gave a mournful sigh. \"I suppose that's me.\"\n\n\"How dare King Wulfram make such cruel sport of you!\" Little Gem said. She vowed never to give the king one measly gem ever again\u2014or to let a knight harm a single scale on Emeril.\n\n\"No one may slay you if I free you first,\" Little Gem said. Seizing one of the many jewel-encrusted swords lining the walls, she hacked at the dragon's cage with all her strength, but her blows left only scratches in the strong black iron.\n\n\"You made a valiant effort,\" Emeril said after her seventh blade chipped and cracked, \"but perhaps it's time to admit the truth: nobody ever rescues a dragon.\" A tiny flame slipped from his left eye and snuffed into cinders. \"It simply isn't done.\"\n\nA rebellious thought hardened inside Little Gem's heart, no bigger than the millet seed that once was her name: Why not?\n\nWhen the guards came for Emeril in the morning, Little Gem stuck her nose in the air and pretended she was quite glad to be rid of her reptilian companion. But she hid a smile as their armor gave her an idea. The instant the lock on the Iron Room twisted tight, Little Gem ransacked every corner of the treasury for everything a knight might wear\u2014a silver helmet, golden gauntlets, a lion-embossed breastplate and a wide-bladed broadsword. Her search took hours as only chain mail hammered by the hands of Faerie Folk had spells in the metal that would shrink it to fit her size. Donning her mismatched suit of armor, Little Gem stood by the door and waited for Ole Maid Gertie to bring her luncheon plate. She held her breath as the door unlocked barely ten minutes before noon.\n\n\"I brought toasted buns and cheese curds today!\" the old woman said. She shuffled over the threshold and blinked in puzzlement. \"Poppet?\"\n\nLittle Gem slid swiftly behind her and slipped into the hallway. Dread pushed her feet faster as she wondered\u2014was there still enough time to save Emeril from the despicable knights? Servants and nobles shot her odd glances as the short and strangely armored warrior clanked past them, but no guards stopped Little Gem as the helmet hid her face. She dragged her broadsword behind her as she followed the cheers of the tournament crowd to the courtyard.\n\nTapping the nearest man on the shoulder, Little Gem lowered her voice to a gruff pitch. \"Where do I enter the tournament, Sir?\"\n\n\"You're too late,\" the man said, pointing forward. \"The champion kills the foul beast now!\"\n\nChains fastened to rings in the ground kept Emeril trapped at the center of the courtyard. A knight with an ostrich-plumed helmet stood with his sword raised over the dragon's neck.\n\n\"Stop!\" Little Gem commanded. Dropping the heavy sword, she pushed past the crowd and charged the knight. She tossed aside her helmet as the hard, stubborn shine inside her heart swelled and rose upwards to push against her teeth. She spat it out with all her strength and a radiant stone the size of an acorn smacked the knight's hand.\n\nRelief filled her as he dropped his sword, but Little Gem froze as every gaze swung to the mismatched knight who had spat a flawless diamond with the force of a sling shot.\n\nKing Wulfram's eyes bulged with fury. \"Get back to the Iron Room at once, Little Gem!\" he bellowed.\n\n\"No.\" The girl spat another diamond lightning-quick that knocked the legs from the king's seat and sent him tumbling into the dirt. \"That is not my name anymore. I am the Diamond-Spitting Knight!\"\n\nTurning to the dragon, she spat something bright and sharp as a star. Her diamond's aim was true and shattered his silver collar. Emeril shot a fire bolt that melted his shackles into a boiling puddle. Bursting free with a roar, he dove straight at the girl.\n\n\"Are you done playing princess?\" he asked.\n\n\"Quite,\" she said.\n\nEmeril dropped her between his wings. Together, the Diamond-Spitting Knight and dragon soared off on an adventure entirely of their own making.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Am\u00e9lie's Guardian by Bryan Thomas Schmidt ]\n\nLong ago in a land known as Glendon, there lived a young girl, whose name was Am\u00e9lie. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a soldier, a Captain in the Kingdom Guard, who'd been seven moons at war. They lived in a small village on the banks of the mighty River Rhi, surrounded by woods. They led a quiet life of farming and simple trades, far from the capitol.\n\nHer mother's name was Mara, and her father's name was Ramon. Mara and Am\u00e9lie had huddled together as Ramon and his men rode out one fateful day, straight down the main street, amidst the straw roofed cottages. Their horses whinnied with excitement as the villagers felt the vibration of their pounding hooves, and choking clouds of dust rose up, carried on the Autumn breeze.\n\nAm\u00e9lie buried her face in her mother's well-worn apron, her shoulder rising and falling to the rhythm of her sobs. Her mother kept a brave face, but Am\u00e9lie knew she was worried, too. Late at night, as she lay restless, Am\u00e9lie heard her mother's own sobs through the thin walls of their cottage.\n\nThe village itself, Tallerive, had not known conflict in many years and the surrounding woods were known to be safe and quiet. To keep her daughter occupied and avoid her sitting around worrying, Mara sent Am\u00e9lie out each morning on a daily quest. One day might be to gather berries in the nearby woods, another to pick up freshly fallen apples. Am\u00e9lie delivered eggs to the inn and gathered cloth from the weaver's. All the while Mara stayed home to feed the chickens, work on her sewing, and kept the cottage clean."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "On one of these quests I met Am\u00e9lie. I'd been watching her for a long while and found her intriguing. Her blonde curls bounced as she walked which was a kind of rhythmic loping with a spring in her steps. Her demeanor was one of curiosity and playfulness, yet I detected a sadness beneath it, echoed in her brown eyes. It touched me. She looked lonely, and that was something I understood well.\n\nFor years, I had occupied a mountaintop near the village, but because I never bothered the village, the humans never came to trouble me. I rarely approached humans because of their reaction. Adult humans would scream and hurl rocks or spears when I got too close.\n\nBut Am\u00e9lie was a wee child, and except for worry about her father, she seemed quite fearless. My heart ached for her on the times I glimpsed her sobbing beneath the apple trees. Other times she talked or sang to herself as she gathered the fruit. Her lilting voice was a delight to my ears.\n\nI chose to meet her one day atop a hill beside the apple trees. I went early, for Am\u00e9lie always came mid-morning, and I wanted time to prepare so I could present myself well. I heard her singing first as she approached. The gentle wind seemed to amplify it somehow through the woods. I could make out every syllable long before I heard her feet rustling in the fallen leaves and brush.\n\nIn a few moments, she bounced into view. I saw her golden locks first, then her silky white skin and red cheeks. She began gathering the apples lying at the base of the trees. She seemed in better spirits than I'd seen her previously.\n\nAs she worked her way through the trees, I considered again how best to make my presence known. My kind are not known for their subtlety, of course, but at the same time, startling her didn't seem wise. So, as she continued singing and gathering, I decided to join her song. I'd heard her repeat the refrain several times already, so I waited until she finished the verse she was on, cleared my throat as softly as I could, and joined her on the refrain.\n\nMy voice, I'll admit, was rough from disuse. I lived alone atop a mountain, after all. Nonetheless, it wasn't the total disaster I'd feared. It took a few moments for her to realize she was no longer singing alone. As soon as she did, she stopped and whirled around, her eyes searching, until finally they found their way to the top of the hill.\n\nFinishing the refrain's last line alone, I curved my lips into smile, taking care not show my sharp teeth lest I frighten her. I didn't speak, wanting to be sure I said the right thing. I feared she would run away, but her eyes never showed the fear which was most human's normal reaction. Instead, her head tilted slightly as her eyes took me in, and she set down her basket, She stepped closer to get a better view.\n\n\"You're a dragon, aren't you?\"\n\nI nodded, the smile frozen on my long narrow snout.\n\n\"Are you going to eat me?\"\n\nI shook my large head. \"No.\"\n\n\"In my uncle's stories, dragons either eat you or burn you,\" Am\u00e9lie said, her face twisting in a quizzical way as she thought. \"You don't look so scary to me.\"\n\nI laughed, relieved. I couldn't help myself, but the sheer volume made her step back toward the woods, looking as if she might run. \"No, I won't eat you, I promise. I came here to meet you.\"\n\n\"Meet me?\" She stepped forward again, clearly intrigued. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I've been watching you for some time now. You're quite fascinating.\"\n\nShe shook her head, an amused smile crossing her face. \"I'm just a little girl.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I'm just an old dragon, but still, I find you interesting.\"\n\nAm\u00e9lie laughed, a charming high pitched sound which warmed my heart. The sound was filled with joy and a sense of freedom I longed to know, as if she had not a care in the world. Oh to know such freedom! I was rapt with fascination.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Am\u00e9lie started slowly climbing the grassy hillside toward me.\n\n\"My name is hard to translate into human,\" I told her, trying to come up with something she could understand. \"You can call me whatever you'd like,\" I finally said.\n\nShe smiled as she stopped beside me, then moved slowly around, examining me without fear. \"You're very green, you know. And very big, too.\" She crinkled her nose. \"You smell funny, too.\"\n\n\"I smell like all dragons, I suppose.\" I tried not to be offended, reminding myself she meant no harm. Besides, she smelled odd to me, too.\n\n\"Perhaps I should name you something grand.\" She put a finger on her mouth thinking.\n\nI smiled, liking the sound of it. I wasn't familiar with human names, but I hoped it was grand. \"I like that.\"\n\nAm\u00e9lie giggled. Her face took on a serious look. \"I think I shall name you Johannes. Okay?\"\n\n\"Johannes?\" I thought it over, trying it on for size. It did sound somewhat regal to me, very formal and proper it seemed. \"Okay, Johannes it is.\"\n\nShe nodded with approval and smiled again. \"My name is Am\u00e9lie. I'm from Tallerive. Do you know it?\"\n\nI nodded and smiled back. \"Indeed. I live atop the Mount to the East.\"\n\n\"Shadow Mount?\"\n\nSo that's what the humans called it! As I considered the meaning I remembered it did cast shadows over their village in late morning, before the sun rose to its afternoon peak and started its descent. \"Shadow Mount, yes.\" I nodded.\n\n\"Is it scary? Father and Mother told me stories of large creatures and people who disappeared there long ago.\" She shuddered at the memory of them.\n\nMy mind raced to find words I could tell her which wouldn't make her fear me. Dangerous creatures dwelled there\u2014direwolves and bats and trolls\u2014and the few human adventurers who'd tried to climb it usually died at the hands of one or the other. Only one had made it to the top and confronted me but that had been long in the past. I'd meant to spare him but he came at me with a sword, and I'd had to defend myself. The stench of burning flesh haunted my memory causing me to cringe. I'd always tried to live in peace with the world around me. It gave me no pleasure watching him die.\n\n\"It's been my home for many generations,\" I explained. \"It's not scary to me, but there are creatures about who might do harm to someone like you.\"\n\nHer lower lip curled up over its companion a moment, then she shook her head and spread her legs in a defiant stance. \"I'm not afraid. My daddy would protect me.\" She paused, her eyes turning sad and looked at her feet. \"If he were here.\"\n\nMy heart melted at seeing her pain. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but one of my hands was twice her size and I feared crushing her by accident, so I sat where I was.\n\n\"He's gone to war,\" she told me, not knowing I already knew. Sadness darkened her face like a shadow. \"But he's coming back to visit soon. My Mother got a letter today.\" At the mention of it, her smile returned and she did a little dance, sending her brown skirt fluttering around her long, skinny legs.\n\nI laughed as I watched her. Such a delightful sight to behold. \"You miss him a lot.\"\n\nShe nodded, glancing back at her apples. \"I have to go back soon. My Mother will worry. She's waiting to make fresh apple pie.\" Her tongue slid quickly across her lips at the mention of it. From her face I could see it was something delicious. \"But I enjoyed meeting you, Johannes.\"\n\n\"I enjoyed meeting you, too, Am\u00e9lie.\"\n\n\"Will I see you again?\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" I said as I watched her turn and bounce back down the hill the way she'd come. She went straight to her basket and picked it up, glancing back at me with a smile before returning to her gathering.\n\nWe visited daily from then on. I landed in a glen near the berry bushes or a brook near the path to the weaver's; somewhere close to wherever she was headed for the day. I made sure to avoid other villagers or their animals. Drawing too much attention would put an end to our visits, and Am\u00e9lie appeared to enjoy them as much as I did. In fact, since we'd met, I hadn't seen her sob in the woods once. It was as if somehow my companionship made her feel less alone. I know my time with her had that effect on me. Both of us enjoyed each other's company, the only difficulty being the times she begged me to take her for a flight.\n\n\"What's it like to fly?\"\n\n\"It's freeing.\" It was all I could think of.\n\n\"I wish I could fly.\" She looked up toward the puffy white clouds with a dreamy look. \"It must be wonderful.\"\n\n\"It is until...\" I stopped. Perhaps she was too young to know the dark truth of her people's relations with my kind.\n\n\"Until what?\" Her eyes held the sense of wonder common to all younglings. Wide and brown, they looked at me as if I were the core of wisdom. It was impossible to resist them, as much as I tried.\n\n\"Sometimes people see me and they become afraid.\" I watched her for a reaction. \"They try and attack me.\"\n\nHer eyes watered and she ran toward me, wrapping her arms around my lower arm. It was so large her outstretched arms could only stretch part way around. \"Why would anyone want to hurt you? You're so kind.\"\n\nI closed my eyes at the warmth of her body pressed against mine. She softly stroked my scales.\n\n\"Your scales are soft,\" she said in wonder. \"They look so hard.\"\n\nI smiled. \"They're my protection against enemies. They hold up very well when I need them, but they're like my skin, Am\u00e9lie.\"\n\nShe smiled as she caressed them. \"I like them.\" She stepped back so our eyes met. \"Take me flying with you, Johannes!\"\n\nFearing she might fall, I politely refused her. \"I'm sorry. I can't.\"\n\n\"I'll be careful, I promise. Just a little flight. Not even very high. I want to know what it's like.\"\n\nEach time I refused from then on, she had the same sad eyed expression she'd had whenever she spoke of her father. After several tries, she turned away and looked back down the hill toward her village. \"Friends do things for each other,\" she half accused.\n\nMy heart ached to fulfill her wish, but how would she hold on? I couldn't risk it. I didn't know what to say, and, after a few heartbeats, she simply started her bouncing lope down the hill, not looking back at me, as she usually did when we parted.\n\nThe next day, she returned to her old self, running to hug me when she saw me in the glen near the berries. She chased me as I hopped and skipped just out of reach, using my wings for short bursts of flight, making her laugh and laugh as she kept trying to outsmart me. In the end, I let her catch me, and the joy on her face gave me a happiness I had never known. My life as a dragon had been so lonely. Am\u00e9lie was the first true friend I'd had since I was a youngling, and had other dragons as my companions. I thought of her like family, although I tried to guard my heart.\n\nAs the day approached for her father's expected arrival, the energy radiating from Am\u00e9lie grew more and more joyful. It felt as if all her cares had suddenly vanished. She spoke often of her father\u2014how he used to tell her stories as he tucked her in at night, stories of knights and castles and princesses and battles. She knew her daddy was as brave as the men in those stories. She spoke of him as gentle and kind and wise and honorable. Hearing her describe him, I wished I could meet him, but then I remembered my previous encounters with human adults which hadn't turned out well.\n\nIt made me sad to only share a small part of her world. I'd grown quite fond of her and she of me. But Am\u00e9lie herself seemed to enjoy our secret friendship. It was something of her own she didn't have to share with anyone, she said once. She called me her best friend, her guardian, making me promise I would look out for her until her father came home. I always promised when she said it, although I started worrying her father's arrival might bring an end to our encounters.\n\nFinally, the week came for her father's homecoming. I watched from the woods as she and her mother waited anxiously outside their cottage. Smoke rose from the chimney and I smelled the scent of fresh baked bread, a smell I always associated with the village.\n\nHer mother kept busy sweeping and doing laundry, but Am\u00e9lie sat patiently on a wooden bench, watching the road, her eyes anxious and excited. I sniffed the wind, searching for a scent of human sweat and approaching horses. For several daylight hours I kept vigil with her. But no one came.\n\nHer mother's face grew more and more concerned, her eyes darkening with worry as her face dropped into a frown. She went behind the house twice, wiping tears on her stained apron where Am\u00e9lie couldn't see her. And finally, as the sun arced overhead, preparing to start its descent in the west, she called Am\u00e9lie to her, handed her a basket and motioned toward the woods.\n\nI found her near the apple trees, landing on the hill where we'd first met. She paid me no attention, sniffling as she gathered apples, her shoulders drooping, her eyes fixed on the ground near her feet. I ached with all my heart to reach out and comfort her, but the trees kept me from drawing near, and it seemed obvious she wanted to be left alone.\n\nAs she returned to the village, the basket half-full, I made a decision and launched myself with a running start. I soared high amongst the clouds, following the road leading from the village, the route she'd told me her father would come. The wind caressed me as I soared, a pleasant feeling I always enjoyed. I flew what seemed like a long time, but, from the sun's lack of movement, I could tell little had passed. I heard them before I saw them\u2014the sharp clash of swords, the high screams of horses. I could smell their sweat and hear their shouting. I knew the sounds of battle and willed my wings to move more swiftly.\n\nI found them at a crossroads, fighting face to face, dozens of companions dying all around. Her father looked tired and older than I remembered him. I knew then their fighting had been long and terrible. He and one of his soldiers stood outnumbered by the enemy, who had three archers on horseback firing at them from a rise, while five others surrounded them with swords.\n\nOne of the enemies, who appeared to the leader, raised his arm and his men stopped waiting. \"If you surrender now, your lives will be spared,\" the leader shouted.\n\n\"If we surrender now, our lives are worthless,\" Am\u00e9lie's father answered. \"Honor and glory to the King!\" He raised his sword and his companion did likewise.\n\nThe enemy soldiers laughed. \"Your honor will be your end,\" the enemy leader responded. He lowered his arm and his men moved in.\n\nSwords clanged and men grunted. I could see Am\u00e9lie's father was exhausted and could barely lift his sword. His companion took a sword through the stomach and fell to his knees, his life's blood watering the parched dirt.\n\nThey needed me! Swooping down from behind, I blasted the archers with fire from my mouth. They shrieked as their clothes caught fire and uselessly tried to escape into the woods. I continued down toward the others. Spotting me, the enemy soldiers yelled and swung their swords over their heads in desperation, ducking as I flew past. I turned my head and blasted two of the enemies with flames. I then swung back up to circle around.\n\nAs I came in the second time, I saw some of the enemy mounting their horses. Apparently they'd done the damage they intended and had no desire to stick around and fight a dragon as well. Am\u00e9lie's father collapsed in a heap, as if his legs could no longer hold him. I dropped down and landed nearby. He turned his head toward me, his face showing resignation to whatever fate might bring.\n\n\"I have no strength left to fight you dragon,\" he said. \"I'm at your mercy.\"\n\nI looked him over, trying to decide what to do. Then I took a running start, reaching down to grab him with my talons. I arched back up into the clouds, returning the way I'd come toward Tallerive where my sweet friend would be waiting. He relaxed in my grip, hanging there as if he'd fallen asleep, but I glanced down once and saw his eyes examining me.\n\nAs I flew, my mind raced, trying to decide how I could return him to Tallerive without raising alarms. If I left him in the woods, Am\u00e9lie and her mother wouldn't know to find him there. But if I took him to the village, the men might attack me on sight. In the end, I knew I had no choice, so I flew over the village once, before I came in for landing on the main road near his family's cottage.\n\nTwo women removing clothes from a line screamed and ran as they saw me, calling for their husbands. I set Am\u00e9lie's father gently on the dirt and prepared to take off again as Am\u00e9lie and her mother appeared in their doorway. Her mother's face filled with fear as she saw me standing over her husband, but Am\u00e9lie brightened, her face lighting up with a smile as she ran toward me. Her mother and father both called for her to stop, but she didn't listen. She embraced her fallen father.\n\nHis arms wrapped around her. I heard men shouting as they came up the road. I had only moments before they'd arrive to engage me, so I smiled at Am\u00e9lie as she hugged her father.\n\nShe looked up at me, tears streaming down her face. \"Thank you, Johannes. I love you.\"\n\nI choked back my own tears as I nodded and ran up the road, launching myself into the air.\n\nI heard her father ask: \"Who's Johannes?\" behind me as I disappeared over the trees into the woods, heading for my mountain home.\n\nFor the next week, I saw Am\u00e9lie only from a distance. She did her usual chores, but I kept my distance for fear the adults might be nearby to protect her from me. It was always the same, in every town, with every race of humans. Dragons were feared and hated\u2014the enemy. No matter how she explained it, they'd never understand. I had to prepare myself for the loss of her companionship. I hoped I was wrong, but I had to be ready."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "\"Johannes! Where are you?\"\n\nHer voice echoed through the trees and cut through my fears like a sword through flesh. I circled down in an arc toward the glen near the berries. It sounded like her voice had come from there and my nose detected the scent of humans. I peered through the trees trying to spot those golden locks, but with the first snowfall, the canopy was layered in white, covering the gaps in the trees.\n\nSetting aside my worry, I swung down and landed in the glen near my usual spot. As I turned toward the now bare trees, Am\u00e9lie came racing toward me, a thick shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Her curls bounced as bounded toward me and smiled with delight.\n\nShe swung her arms around my neck as she reached me, caressing my scales. \"I missed you, Johannes!\"\n\n\"I missed you, too.\" And then I saw them. Her parents stepped out from behind the thick trunks to watch us cautiously.\n\nSensing my concern, Am\u00e9lie stepped back to look me in the eye. \"It's all right. They came here to meet you. I told them all about us.\" She patted my neck. \"Don't be afraid.\"\n\nAs she waved at them, her parents approached with trepidation. \"You saved my life, dragon,\" her father said as he drew near.\n\nI nodded. \"Your family needs you.\"\n\n\"We're so grateful,\" Am\u00e9lie's mother wiped moisture from her eyes.\n\n\"It is I who am grateful. For the friendship of your daughter.\"\n\nHer father smiled. \"Dragons and humans are not known to be friends.\"\n\n\"Johannes is a good dragon,\" Am\u00e9lie said. \"He's my guardian.\" She smiled at us, as if dragons and humans should always have been friends.\n\nThe adults and I laughed.\n\n\"We know that, dear.\" Her mother tousled Am\u00e9lie's hair as she placed an arm around her shoulders.\n\n\"But he never let me fly with him.\" Am\u00e9lie frowned.\n\n\"It's quite amazing,\" her father teased.\n\n\"No fair!\"\n\nHer parents and I shared a laugh again.\n\n\"I don't want you to fall and my talons might crush you.\"\n\n\"I have an idea about that,\" her father said. \"Meet us here tomorrow.\"\n\nThe next day, they returned with a leather horse harness her father had modified. It fit Am\u00e9lie securely and had a handle where I could clasp on with my talons and carry her safely. Their confidence amazed me. \"You would trust me with her life?\"\n\n\"You proved trustworthy with mine.\" Her father nodded as he finished helping Am\u00e9lie into the harness. Lovingly, he snapped the last fitting and made sure her shawl was secure around her. \"Everything is fine,\" he reassured Mara, who stood nearby, looking slightly worried.\n\nAm\u00e9lie smiled, then hurried over beside me, waving. \"Come on! I'm ready!\"\n\n\"As you wish, little one.\"\n\nAnd with that I lifted off, hovering just above the ground as her father rushed in, ducked underneath and held the harness handle up so I could grasp it. My talons closed tightly around it and I tugged gently. It moved with me.\n\nWith a nod from her father and wave from her mother, I took off, carrying Am\u00e9lie into the clouds. She laughed with delight, pointing at the village as she saw it beneath us. She pointed at the mountain I called home, at the river, and the hill where we'd met. I told her stories about all of them, recollections from the hundreds of years I'd lived here. When she grew quiet, I guessed perhaps she was overwhelmed. I flew in silence, letting her ponder what she'd heard and seen.\n\nI returned her safely after a daylight hour to where her parents waited in the glen. Our daily visits resumed after that, and although she occasionally brought her parents, mostly she came alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Long ago in a land known as Glendon, there lived a girl, whose name was Am\u00e9lie. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a soldier, and her best friend was a dragon.\n\nShe came to see him every day, introducing him to her husband before they married, and bringing her children to play with him. As she grew, their relationship transitioned from mere companionship to a sort of mentoring.\n\nThe loneliness which had once haunted the dragon was never known again. Even the villagers welcomed him with open arms, calling him \"Am\u00e9lie's Guardian.\" Their friendship became legendary. He became part of the family, and he protected the girl and her village for all of his days.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Aer'Vicus by Jodi L. Milner ]\n\nDeep within the rich earth, under layers of rock and mineral, beyond the understanding of the men who dwelt above, slept Phaedra, the red dragon. The marbled walls of her immense cavern had been blasted smooth with the heat and the fire of the dragons who had come before. Veins of rose quartz threaded around and through the walls, pulsing with the beat of the dragon's heart. In the center of the cavern stood an immense shining pillar of rose quartz.\n\nCentury after century, Phaedra the Red had protected the settlement that turned to village, that turned to town, that turned to city, that turned to the gleaming prince among cities, the citadel of Chalsis. Century after century, she listened to the trembles of the earth, the vibrations of the air, and the whispers of the stones above her, ensuring that the harmonies of life blended properly, and all was well.\n\nUntil it wasn't. A dulling, a dimming of the earth's vibrations, shook her from her pleasant dreaming. Something had changed, something small, something large. The great red dragon breathed onto the wide fire-polished stone floor and summoned a spell. Magic wove into the veins of crystal and gathered before her into a hovering sphere. She peered into the sphere and saw her city, far above her. Bright white marbled cathedrals and tall proud libraries were flanked by pockets of green. Gardens filled with statues and walkways rested peacefully as they breathed in the warm spring air and soaked in the early morning light. Still, the errant vibration, the wrongness buzzed in Phaedra's ear like a gnat.\n\nShe studied the sphere, following the path of wrongness, the trail of misaligned noise, of disharmonious music, until she reached the wide circle marking the citadel's heart. The proud glowing crystal Aer'Vicus rose up from its centermost point. It was the very same crystal that stretched its roots reached deep into the ground and pierced the center of her cavern. Aer'Vicus had stood long before the druids had wandered in the deep forests, long before memory.\n\nAer'Vicus's song had changed. No longer did the great crystal vibrate in tune with the earth. The two melodies now fought against each other and the crystal grew weaker because of it. Should Phaedra allow it to continue, the great crystal would fracture and shatter. Phaedra's cavern would collapse. The gleaming citadel of Chalsis would crumble and fall.\n\nWithin her mind, a fragment of memory stirred from a thousand years before, dull and half forgotten. The crystal required a sacrifice and it was Phaedra's legacy to complete the task. Another memory floated to the surface, this one broken into pieces like a dry leaf crumpled inside a fist. She could not do this alone, her own rumbling vibration that sung with the earth had changed when Aer'Vicus had changed. The raw edges of her melody ached where a part had been torn away.\n\nIn the distance, the piece of broken melody called to her, wanting to return. The vision within the sphere led her deep within the library, behind the long dusty shelves of scrolls and leather-bound tomes, across the beautiful hand-tiled floors, to an alcove lit by a single candle. There she saw a girl bent over an ancient crumbling book. A smudge of ink stained her chin and cheek. A paper filled with line after line of tidy notes rested under her outstretched hand.\n\nThe girl lay fast asleep, still clutching a quill in her delicate hand. A dark drop of ink dripped from its sharp tip onto the table. Her unnaturally white hair spilled around her head in a halo. Embedded within the girl's heart, Phaedra's missing melody sang a mournful tune.\n\nAwake, girl. Come to me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Within the sleeping girl's dream, words echoed, entering her mind like a worm. Like a summons. A deep stirring, unlike one she had ever heard or felt before, vibrated within her, ringing her bones with their song. And with it, the stern face and long pointed nose of a great red dragon.\n\nIanthe bounded awake, gasping and reeling. The weight of the solid marble bench kept her from tipping backward to the floor. A sheen of drool had worked its way under her face. She rubbed the wet off with an ink-stained sleeve and blinked. Something had woken her. She blinked again, trying to grasp the wisps of the dream already slipping away, a red dragon, an urgent need, breaking, discordant music, and bitter melancholy. She struggled to make sense of it.\n\nThe open tome before her related the history of the city, of the origins of the ancient buildings and their eccentric architects. Her task was to find evidence of secret rooms and passages between the five massive structures that ringed the citadel's central plaza and shining rose-colored obelisk. There, in the detailed margins of the book, mostly filled with ivy and birds, hid a carefully detailed red dragon. She wiped the nib of her quill and set back to work. The library warden, Master Timon, demanded she finish before the end of the day. Lord Kyril of Stormhold had waited long enough for the answer to his query, and patrons like him kept her fed and kept her candles lit.\n\nCome to me, Ianthe.\n\nThe sound in her head rang as clear as the iron bells hanging in the tower of the Cathedral on the opposite side of the great circular plaza, mixed with the rough grating of one heavy stone being dragged over another. It pulled at her, lifting her to her feet, guiding her through the long shelves of the library, across the cupolaed study hall filled with color from the ring of stained-glass windows high above, and past the head librarian's book-stacked desk. Master Timon hunched over a book no larger than his palm with his glasses perched on the tip of his abnormally long nose. His many layers of sweaters, cloaks, and scarves poked out at all angles like feathers, making him appear like a long-legged, long-billed water bird, all bones and beak. She prayed he wouldn't notice her passing.\n\nCome to me.\n\nAgain, the voice drew her through the looming doors of the library and tugged her down the stairs and into the great circle. It guided her steps, leading her around to the garden space stretching between the library and the House of Justice. Within the garden, a white marble statue of a dragon, with its wings outstretched and its eyes shining, stood tall in the center of a trickling fountain.\n\nShe stopped in front of the statue, taking in its terrible majesty, its noble wisdom. \"It is you who called me, great statue?\"\n\nThe statue said nothing.\n\nCome, child.\n\nThe pull came once more, guiding her past the fountain and the statue and down a narrow footpath that wound between arching beech and alder trees. It plunged deeper into the wilder, untamed garden, through choking bushes to a small clearing no wider than her outstretched arms. A wall covered in moss and ivy bordered the far end. Between strands of ivy, a marble dragon's head peeked out. A stream of water bubbled from its mouth and poured into a scalloped basin. Again, the pull guided her steps. She pushed past an overgrown cypress to the area behind the wall where she uncovered a narrow opening and a set of equally narrow stairs.\n\nThe pull led her down dark, twisting stairs deeper and deeper until she could no longer see. She pressed her hand against the rough dry wall beside her to keep from losing her balance on the stairs as she plunged ever deeper into the earth.\n\nThe base of the stairs opened into a small empty chamber where the air hung heavy with dust and a sharp smell Ianthe didn't recognize. She followed a small trail of light, shining from an unknown source ahead. The small chamber opened into a vast cavern, so big that Ianthe hugged her arms to her chest to not feel so small. A crystal shaft stood tall and domineering before her in the center of the space, larger than her imagination allowed. She hugged her arms tighter and stepped closer, again drawn by an invisible thread. Glowing crystal flowed away from the top and bottom of the crystal pillar like the branches and roots of a great tree and spread across the floor and up the walls in intricate rings and graceful knots.\n\nThe color of the crystal triggered a vision of the grand plaza somewhere high above her. It couldn't be, surely this wasn't the same crystal as the great Aer'Vicus that stretched from the center of the plaza to the sky.\n\nA dry sliding rattle echoed from the shadows on the far side of the chamber, along with a sound that reminded her of the great heaving bellows in the iron works where Master Timon had once taken her. A great scaled head shifted, not ten paces from where she stood, and a great glowing amber eye opened and blinked.\n\n\"Hello, little one,\" the same granite scraping voice from her dream greeted her.\n\n\"Impossible.\" Ianthe tripped and fell to the smooth glassy floor as she retreated away from the dragon's massive head with its knife-like teeth and hungry tongue. The hard edges of the mournful song within her softened in the presence of the dragon and grew quiet and content.\n\nThe dragon regarded her carefully with its golden eye. \"You feel it, don't you? There is a rightness when we are close. Don't be afraid. I'm called Phaedra.\"\n\nIanthe crossed her legs beneath the fabric of her loose-fitting dress. While the cavern wasn't cold, being in the presence of this great dragon sent shivers through her. \"I am Ianthe.\" She bowed her head.\n\n\"You have been schooled by the masters themselves, spending your time in the histories, and had your nose embedded in books. Have you read of me? Of my ancestors?\"\n\nIanthe thought carefully, fearful that an incorrect answer might anger the great beast. \"There's not much in the histories about dragons.\" She swallowed. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Pity.\" The immense head gave an imperceptible nod, seen only in the eyes and the slightest dip of the jaw. \"This great city has stood for thousands of years, far longer than any city in existence. Have you ever wondered why?\"\n\nThe presence of the great crystal pillar captured Ianthe's attention. She imagined it thrusting up through the earth to where its tip breached the center of the plaza. \"The Citadel of Chalsis has never been defeated, never seen the ravages of war. Its citizens have protected it and preserved it.\"\n\n\"Oh, the arrogance.\" The dragon rolled her eyes and huffed. \"This city is protected by more than the efforts of man. This obelisk contains the power to repel ill, war mongers, plagues, pestilence, and tremors. It strengthens the walls, firms the foundations, and keeps the fresh waters flowing.\" The mighty beast shook her head and exhaled through her nose. The warm blast tossed Ianthe's pale hair.\n\n\"Why have you summoned me? Why am I here?\" Ianthe asked, feeling small and highly edible near the immense dragon.\n\n\"The Aer'Vicus is weakening.\" Phaedra lifted a taloned claw and gently wiped the side of the column. A smear of glittering fragments stuck to her scales. \"I cannot strengthen it alone. Its song has changed. If something is not done, this fair city will fall to ruin.\"\n\nIanthe uncurled from where she was sitting and approached the glowing pillar. She placed her palm against it and for a moment thought she heard strained harsh tones. \"That can't be true. Everyone knows Aer'Vicus is eternal, unchanging. Priests pray to it morning and night. At the feast of Mlinzi we leave offerings and raise our voices in song.\" She removed her hand from the pillar and studied it. Tiny flakes of crystal sparkled in the rosy light. Ianthe shook her head. If Aer'Vicus was not eternal, if it could fail, then everything she had built her life around could fail and fall as well. She felt as if she were falling, as if someone had shoved her from the highest peak of the looming spire of the cathedral. \"I can see it, feel it even, but my mind does not want to accept it. It should be impossible.\"\n\n\"Sometimes the impossible happens. It's why I'm here. My task is to strengthen the crystal when the time comes.\" Her voice grew softer. \"That time is here, but I don't know how.\" Phaedra lowered her head. \"In this we are bound. I need you so together we can correct the imbalance and strengthen the crystal. I can't do it alone.\" Her burning golden eyes closed. \"There is something in you, something special. I know you can feel it.\"\n\nThe dragon closed the gap between them and allowed the tip of her nose to brush Ianthe's arm. The song that felt broken inside Ianthe when she stood alone felt whole here next to the dragon. They were as two pieces of a puzzle, meant to be together.\n\n\"I'll go back to my master, tell him what's happening. Maybe he will know what must be done.\"\n\nPhaedra bowed her head. \"Go then, but be quick. Each passing hour the crystal's song grows more desperate.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "She found Master Timon in his tiny cluttered office, perched on a tall stool to reach the top of the stack of books piled one on top on another. A thick layer of dust obscured the titles on the spines. Ianthe stifled a sneeze that threatened to erupt. She told him about the dragon and the crystal. He listened on, expressionless and unamused as he searched through the volumes. He selected a slender volume from the stack and slid it out with great care before returning to his upholstered desk chair and sinking down into it. \"I have no time or patience to deal with this dragon fantasy you've concocted to get out of your work.\" He studied the cover of the book in his hands. \"I just had an exhausting discussion with Lord Kyril. You haven't finished your report for him yet.\"\n\nIanthe rested her forehead against the worn wood of the doorframe. \"Please. You must believe me. I've never tried to get out of my work before. Why would I do it now?\" She studied the palm of her hand for any trace of the glittering flakes she'd seen down in the cavern. Nothing.\n\n\"You've become a young woman. Perhaps a gentleman has captured your attention and you wanted to spend an afternoon with him.\" Master Timon peered at her from over the piles of books stacked on his desk with a twinkle in his eye. \"How should I know what youth get up to these days?\" He snatched his quill from its stand along with a sheet of paper. \"Get the report for Lord Kyril done before nightfall and I won't have you scrub out the library's collection of inkwells.\"\n\nShe wanted to snatch the quill from his hands. \"I'm telling you the truth. You must help me. There must be a book that talks about where the Aer'Vicus comes from, about dragons. Are you even curious in the least bit?\" She leaned on her knuckles on the edge of his desk, being cautious to not disrupt any of the stacks of books. \"Why won't you believe me?\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Because you are a no one. You have no titles, no influential parents, no riches, no standing.\" He set down the quill and wove his fingers together over his feathered layers of clothes. \"It's as if you are a mouse standing on a corner of the road squeaking as loudly as it can about the surprising lack of cheese in its life. No one listens because no one cares about the well-being of mice.\" He sighed and looked out the grimy window. \"It's the same for you. No one cares about what you have to say.\"\n\nHis words withered her like a fallen leaf under the hot sun. As an abandoned child, she knew she was no one important. If it wasn't for Master Timon taking her in, she would have lived and died on the streets. He had served as the only parent she had ever known and a poor one at that. She knew her place; he didn't need to remind her, but the melancholy song haunted her thoughts. Phaedra needed her. \"It doesn't matter what you think about me. What matters is that you help me find the information I need. Please, at least tell me if there is mention of where Aer'Vicus came from. I'll do the rest.\"\n\nMaster Timon adjusted the narrow spectacles that had slid down his long nose. \"As much as I would like to believe you, none of the histories support your claims.\" His tone softened. \"There isn't mention of a dragon beneath the stones, let alone one who can sense the state of our fair city. Put the matter out of your mind. This fascination of yours was all a dream.\" He tapped a sheet of paper perched on top of one of the piles of books. \"Finish your report tonight or you'll have to answer to Lord Kyril personally.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master. Right away,\" she answered through clenched teeth. The dragon wasn't a dream, this song inside her wasn't imagined. She would search the library herself, the second she finished her duties, until she found something.\n\nShe returned to her alcove and cleaned the nib of her quill and quickly set to work copying passages and drawing conclusions as Master Timon had taught. Darkness came and plunged the pages before her into shadow. She lit her candle and continued to write.\n\nReturn, Ianthe.\n\nOne page remained, only one more until she finished her task. Ianthe pushed away the dragon's call and pressed on, scratching the quill across the paper faster, all while trying to keep her script neat enough that it could still be read. Rushing meant errors, and errors meant she would be punished. Master Timon would make her scrub the floors for a week or dust the endless shelves of books from top to bottom if there were too many.\n\nPhaedra's call grew stronger, making her quill slip and scratch on the page. She cursed and wiped the nib clean once more. The dragon had been silent for hours and could surely wait another few minutes for her to finish. With a final neatly dotted period, she dusted the page to set the ink and blew it clean.\n\nCome to me, Ianthe.\n\nThe call pulled her from her chair. She dashed, papers in hand, through the long, winding shelves and toward Master Timon's desk. He wasn't there. She hurried to his cramped office and found it empty. He couldn't have gone far, the large front doors had not been locked for the night.\n\nA noise from outside caught her attention. A crowd gathered around the great Aer'Vicus. She pushed her way through, stomach sinking. Should the mighty crystal have already broken or crumbled to pieces, no force on earth could repair it. Master Timon stood in the center of the crowd next to the crystal, his hand resting on its shining surface.\n\nIanthe forced her way through the dozens of people separating her from the obelisk and her master. He opened his eyes and stared at her with a grunt. \"During the evening devotion a piece came free from the base here.\" He opened his hand to reveal the tiniest piece of crystal, no bigger than a fingernail. \"Come with me.\"\n\nPhaedra's summons filled her mind, making her head feel as if it were splitting in two. \"No. The dragon is calling me. I must go.\"\n\n\"What is this nonsense?\" Master Timon glowered down at her.\n\n\"I must return to her.\" Ianthe gripped her head. \"Do not try to stop me.\"\n\nHe pulled a dingy handkerchief from his pocket and tucked the tiny crystal fragment into it. \"I'm coming with you.\"\n\nThis sudden change stopped Ianthe short. While her words had done nothing, the fleck of crystal in his pocket must have scared him. \"Follow me.\" She hurried back through the winding garden and down the dark spiral stair.\n\n\"What took you so long, little one? Our time is fast running out. Splinters of the Aer'Vicus are beginning to rain down. What have you found?\" Phaedra stood tall, her movements agitated and sharp, almost snakelike, as her neck twisted back and forth.\n\nMaster Timon shuffled into view, eyes suddenly wide, hands reaching for something solid to hold onto. \"In all my years. The legends are really true.\" He gripped Ianthe's arm to steady himself before bowing low. \"You must forgive me, Great Dragon. I didn't believe the girl.\"\n\nPhaedra shuffled back, her claws raking the glasslike stone at her feet with a screech. She did not respond to Master Timon but spoke to Ianthe instead. \"He doesn't belong here. He's not part of the music. He must be destroyed.\" Her eyes flashed dark and she opened her mouth wide. Blue flame curled in the back of her throat.\n\nIanthe jumped in front of Master Timon and spread her arms wide, blocking him with her body. \"Stop! He might have the answer we are looking for,\" she shouted over the flailing mass of dragon. \"I forbid you to roast him alive. We cannot succeed without him.\"\n\nMaster Timon didn't shrink back from Phaedra's display. If anything, it awakened his curiosity. \"I assure you, I want to help, nothing more. Please don't cook me.\" The gleam of discovery shone in his eyes as he traced the rose-colored threads extending from Aer'Vicus and wrapping around the great subterranean vault.\n\nPhaedra's noise and stomping caused more glittering flakes to fall like gentle snow. Tiny cracking noises filled the air. She calmed and settled on her haunches still breathing hard. \"Forgive me, my fear got the best of me.\"\n\nMaster Timon approached the wide crystal pillar reverently, as a supplicant would approach deity. \"It is forgiven. I haven't made things easier. I'm sorry.\"\n\nIanthe didn't dare break the quiet. While near Phaedra, their twin songs hummed in harmony together and were complete. Another tiny flake of crystal floated down from the lofty ceiling. Waiting wasn't an option. \"How long do we have?\"\n\nThe red dragon closed her eyes and sound filled the air, vibrating the soles of their feet. \"A day, maybe two. Please hurry.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Master Timon led Ianthe through the wide halls of the library, oil lamp held high above his head. With each turn the halls grew narrower, unfamiliar. In the many years Ianthe lived in the great building, she had never been down this way. Judging from the chipped plaster and dusty cornices, no one else had either.\n\nFrom deep within the lower levels of the library a new song filled Ianthe's mind. It pulled her and guided her much like Phaedra had done the first time Ianthe had been summoned.\n\nMaster Timon faltered at a junction of two identical hallways. \"I know it's down here. My blasted memory is not what it used to be.\"\n\nIanthe didn't listen. Her feet followed the trail of song turn after turn until she was stopped by a door. On the door, in a piece of cunning carved relief, was a curled dragon. She set her hand on the door, searching for a knob or latch, but found none.\n\nShe rested her head against the carving, trailing a fingertip along the dragon's spine. \"How do we open it?\"\n\nMaster Timon patted at the pockets draped around him until he was rewarded with a jingle of metal keys. \"Here, it has to be one of these.\"\n\nIanthe took the heavy ring, but when she returned her attention to the door, she found it was missing a keyhole as well. \"No, it's something different.\" She leaned against the door, pressing her ear to hear the sound, feel the vibration of its song. As soon as she did, the door creaked inward and opened a fraction. She pushed harder, the scales of the relief biting into her palms, until it had opened enough for her to pass through.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Ianthe asked as she entered the tiny room. Like in Phaedra's cavern, the walls curved into a circle. At the centermost point a white marble pillar held a single rose-colored crystal the length of Ianthe's forearm and about as thick. One end was pointed, much like the obelisk in the center of the great plaza.\n\nMaster Timon stayed in the doorway, not moving to set even a single foot into the space. \"No one remembers when this came, it has always been here. I think it might have been here since before the great library was built over it.\"\n\nThe crystal continued its song, urging her to touch it, to pick it up. She brushed her finger against the smooth hard edges, the sharp point. A gentle glow shone beneath her hand and the crystal warmed under her touch. With the greatest care, she picked it up.\n\nThe vision came without warning, catching her in its grasp with such force she had to grab the edge of the pillar to keep her knees from buckling out from underneath her. In an instant, understanding washed over her. This process had happened before, girls like her had existed throughout time. Even before the city had been built, a temple of the dragon had been built around the rose obelisk by the druids who first found it. All the memories were there, locked into the crystal in Ianthe's hands.\n\nShe felt a rush of power awaken within her, a raw energy, a dragon energy. The vision opened to show her the girl who came before, Ianthe's predecessor. She watched on as the girl used the crystal to bond with the dragon and together, they formed a bond that strengthened the Aer'Vicus for another 1000 years. The vision took her breath away. She knew what had to be done, and how to do it. With the lesser crystal in hand, Ianthe made her way back to her dragon.\n\nMaster Timon rushed after her. \"What is it, girl? What must be done?\"\n\nIanthe didn't stop to talk to him, didn't dare. The knowledge the lesser crystal gave her filled her with such energy and fear she was afraid to stop and risk letting her nerves get the better of her. If so, she wouldn't be able to start again.\n\n\"You must tell me.\" He had fallen behind, his old creaky joints slowing him down.\n\nAgain, Ianthe could not answer. The weight of the crystal pulled her back to the dragon, to her fate, to her death. This would be the end of her and in a way, she had been prepared for it since her birth. Holding the crystal made it real. Master Timon needed to stop shouting at her, to be silent.\n\n\"You may watch, but do not interfere. The fate of the entire city depends on it.\" The words sounded hollow and distant in her own head.\n\nBack in the cavern, Phaedra lifted her head as if a great weight held her down. \"You found it. I felt it. Heard it. The song was so beautiful.\" Her eye shimmered with a tear. \"Aer'Vicus returned my memories to me, as well as the memories of those who came before. Those memories hold me down, I can't bear it. I know what must be done.\"\n\nMaster Timon hung back in the smaller chamber leading in from the spiral stairway. Ianthe couldn't take time to explain. The wrongness of the vibrations filled her with unrest, with an itching that couldn't be scratched. The disharmony needed to me made right.\n\n\"May I see it?\" Phaedra asked, lowering her great head. \"May I see the lesser crystal?\"\n\nIanthe held the long crystal in front of her. Another cracking filled the air, louder, and more insistent. Small stones fell from the ceiling, clattering on the glassy smooth floor. Master Timon drew back further into the safety of the smaller chamber, his stork-like outline barely visible.\n\nPhaedra touched the crystal in Ianthe's outstretched hand with the tip of her nose and took a deep breath with her eyes closed, as if contact with the stone filled her with a greater awareness, with a sense of peace and solidarity. \"You know what to do, don't be afraid.\"\n\nIanthe climbed astride the great dragon's back and crawled forward to where the head met the neck. In front of her, at the base of Phaedra's neck was an indentation and a series of missing scales. The crystal in Ianthe's hands grew warm in anticipation, the warmth spread up her arms and blossomed at the hollow in the back of her own neck. The warmth soon turned to fire, piercing Ianthe, and burning at her bones.\n\n\"Why do you hesitate? This must be. Waiting will prolong the agony for both of us.\" Phaedra's voice was breaking. Tremors shook her body and her breath came in tight gasps.\n\nIanthe set the point of the crystal against the center of the indentation. Phaedra held her breath, her muscles locking rigid in anticipation. The burning intensified. The stone in Ianthe's hands began to glow white, its heat too much for her hands. Aer'Vicus glowed white in response.\n\n\"Make the bond Ianthe. All will be well, I promise,\" Phaedra ordered. The words pierced Ianthe's mind.\n\nWith one confident motion, Ianthe clenched the stone and plunged it through the dragon's skin. The world turned white and stood still. The flecks of crystal raining down froze in place, and the bright light of the twin crystals filled the space, filled Ianthe, filled the dragon beneath her.\n\nIanthe clung to the crystal embedded in Phaedra head, knowing if she were to let go everything would fail, all would die, the city and the thousands living there would not see another morning. All turned to brilliant light, the stone, the pillar, the dragon, and Ianthe. The mark of the dragon spread down from the back of Ianthe's neck, down her arms, down her chest, her legs. Scales appeared. She was falling, flying, changing.\n\nPhaedra's memories flowed through the crystal and became a part of Ianthe. As Ianthe grew, Phaedra changed, the vibrant red of her scales faded, resembling blood tinged water, matching the rose crystal, matching the floors and ceiling of the great chamber. The pulse of her heart echoed along the stone, echoed in the obelisk, echoed in the swirling and branching threads of crystal lacing through the walls and floor of the cavern.\n\nA bright white stream of flame burst from Phaedra, heating the brilliant obelisk. Immense power flowed from her into the stone. The room grew hotter and hotter until Ianthe thought she would burn and turn to nothing.\n\nShe kept her hold on the lesser crystal even as her hands began to change into claws. Her awareness was dimming, there was too much heat, too much magic, too much sheer power flowing through the room. Phaedra's pulse beat within her, keeping her heart moving when Ianthe was sure it would fail.\n\nAnother jet of white flame, and another, and then the flecks of stone stopped falling. The room grew white hot and surged with the power pulsing between them.\n\nPhaedra's deep red scales turned entirely white, and then even the whiteness began to fade until the pulsing glow of the crystal threads in the floor were visible through her. Another jet of white flame, weaker this time, lit the room. They were coming further and further apart. The white-hot glow of the walls cooled back to the swirls of glittering marble.\n\nStill, the tones and vibrations clashed. Ianthe's task was not yet complete. She opened her maw and released a jet of white flame toward the great Aer'Vicus, marking it as hers. The flames wrapped around the crystal and shot along the webbing network of threads along the ceiling and floor. The discordant tones of the crystal, so wrong in her ears, realigned and straightened to once again form the tones of beautiful music of an earth well-tended, and a city well-protected. In her golden scaled claws she gripped the lesser crystal.\n\nAn immense fatigue struck Ianthe. Phaedra was gone, having fulfilled her destiny in giving her magic to the great crystal, and transforming Ianthe into the new guardian of Aer'Vicus. And yet, Phaedra was not gone, as her experience, her memories, and her life were now one with Ianthe.\n\nSoft footsteps approached. Master Timon crept forward, his hands gripping one end of a scarf that worked loose. Ianthe yawned and tucked her wings around her. Her eyes refused to stay open.\n\n\"Sleep now, sweet Ianthe.\" He slipped the lesser crystal from her claws. \"I'll keep this safe for you.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Loyalties by Josh Brown ]\n\nJinari stood at full attention, back straight, chin down. Her hands were at her sides\u2014her right hand resting on her thigh armor, her left palm lightly brushing over her leather scabbard. The armor she wore was a mix of items that were mostly pulled from dead bodies in the wake of battle.\n\nLeader of her clan, the Kur-hik, a human tribe known for being skilled warriors in battle, Jinari didn't look particularly threatening herself. In fact, strip away the armor and weapons, and she might be mistaken for a nursemaid, a far cry from warrior and clan leader. Not at all athletic-looking, she had soft features, smooth skin, brown shoulder-length hair, round cheeks, caring eyes, and a warm smile. The softness continued down her body, which was quite womanly, with gentle, round curves, enough to make any male, no matter his race, linger his stare. The only things about her that were not soft were her feet, which had known countless days of travel throughout her life, and her hands, which had gripped many a weapon in many a battle throughout her life.\n\nJinari stood in front of Gar-Dum, an Orc, and the leader of the Vulgar-kin. Gar-Dum was High Orc Chieftain of the Empire of the Black Moon banner, and had succeeded in bringing together the strongest clans of the trolls, goblins, giants, and \"evil\" men, Jinari's clan among them. He was old, but still very capable, and still able to defeat giants and trolls in one-on-one combat rather easily. He sat upon a stone throne on a rigid platform, brownish-green trolls on either side of him, his personal bodyguards.\n\nGar-Dum's head and face were completely hairless, and he wore no crown, helm, or any other type of headdress. Gar-Dum was missing his right ear, presumably lost in combat of some sort, and the remaining ear was so notched and ragged it looked to be only half there. He wore only a fur loincloth and boots, presumably made of the same fur. He slouched in his throne, as if this whole affair was of little interest to him. A human female, wearing nothing but a thin, white slip of fabric wrapped around her waist, glided up the stairs and handed him a dark chalice. It looked to be iron, but Gar-Dum held it as if it were a feather. He took a sip, and addressed Jinari.\n\n\"I need you to travel to the eastern caverns,\" he said, tilting the chalice in his hand, still seemingly disinterested.\n\n\"Yes, Lord Gar-Dum,\" Jinari bowed slightly. She waited for him to say more, but he did not. \"May I inquire on the nature of the mission, my Lord?\"\n\nGar-Dum looked up from his chalice and met Jinari's eyes. A chill shot down her back. She stood perfectly still, doing her best to resist the urge to shudder.\n\n\"There is a weapon in the caverns,\" Gar-Dum said. \"If found by the Man-kin it could be used against us. I need you to find it, and destroy it.\"\n\n\"My Lord,\" Jinari said, \"the eastern caverns have quite extensive tunnels, and having never traveled there myself, I am not familiar with its layout.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Gar-Dum said, waving his hand dismissively. \"I have arranged for a guide to travel with you.\"\n\nAs if on cue, a stunted, grotesque figure waddled the room. He had an oval-shaped head with a tuft of coarse black hair sitting in a mess on top. He wore a dark green cloak that was thrown back over his shoulders, revealing a thin layer of hair that swept across the majority of the blue-gray skin of his egg-shaped body.\n\nThe hair was thickest at his midsection, a large matted triangle completely covering the space between his thighs. In fact, Jinari questioned if it was indeed his own hair, or if it was perhaps fur or a garment of some sort. His bulbous eyes studied Jinari in a way that made her feel uncomfortable.\n\n\"A goblin?\" Anger flared in Jinari's voice. Her statue-like stance was broken as she took a half-step forward, her arms coming up.\n\n\"Is that a problem?\" Gar-Dum asked, raising an eyebrow, still slouched. He took another sip from his chalice, keeping his eyes fixed on Jinari.\n\nJinari let her arms fall back to her sides and retreated a step. She shrank back and looked to the stone floor. \"No, my Lord.\" She said sheepishly.\n\n\"Good,\" Gar-Dum said over his chalice. \"This is Uskor. He will be guiding you through the eastern caverns.\"\n\nJinari carefully regarded him and inclined her head slightly.\n\n\"He knows exactly where and how to find what we are looking for,\" Gar-Dum continued.\n\nJinari waited a long beat before speaking. \"Which is what, my Lord?\"\n\nGar-Dum glanced over at Uskor, wild grin still plastered across his face, then back at Jinari. \"Uskor will allow you the details of the mission as they are needed.\"\n\nJinari did not like that one bit. But what was she to do? She could not defy Gar-Dum. \"Very well, my Lord.\"\n\n\"Very well indeed.\" Gar-Dum tossed his chalice aside. The muscles in his chest quivered as he moved. \"Choose three members from your clan. Make sure they are your best. You will set out with Uskor at daybreak.\"\n\nJinari bowed deeply, then backed away, exiting Gar-Dum's chambers, a rotten feeling swelling in the core of her stomach."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Jinari waited for Uskor at the camp fire, three of her most trusted Kur-hik clansmates, all female, silently accompanying her. Anessi was older than Jinari, her long mane of silver hair belaying that fact. She wore dark red robes. Around her waist was a fur belt fashioned from a wolf that Anessi had killed herself. On the belt hungadorned with several small leather pouches, each containing some sort of powder or herb used in her magic. She leaned on her staff, which was roughly half a head taller than her, and had runes carved deep all up and down it.\n\nAnessi was a magic user. At one time, her magic was used only for healing, but after joining with the Vulgar-kin, Jinari had utilized her skill more and more for destructive things such as bringing fire down on the enemy in battle, calling a swarm of insects, firing lightning form her staff, conjuring force fields, and so on. Jinari had even asked Anessi to use a death curse on occasion. Jinari knew that the death curse was something that Anessi did not like doing, but she complied with Jinari's requests nonetheless. She always did.\n\nJinari sighed. It was simpler times before the war. Before she had made the decision for her clan to join the Vulgar-kin. She could see the fear and confusion in many of their eyes, but all Kur-hik followed her without question. Always. Before the war, there was peace. The Kur-hik clan spent most of their time farming the land, tending to their animals... tending to their families. Today, the lands were dry and barren, the animals have died of disease or famine, and most everyone in the clan have lost at least half their family, including Jinari.\n\nJinari's own family had included five children with her three male consorts, her eldest two daughters so close to partaking in the rituals of adulthood. Now they were dead. All her children were dead. Slaughtered like animals by a neighboring tribe of humans, the Darhatlor. But Jinari had staged a brutal retribution. She gathered the remains of her Kur-hik and struck down a retaliating blow the very next morning, crushing the surprised Darhatlor.\n\nAs she stood over Omarothu, the Darhatlor Chieftain, she asked him why they had attacked her. He coughed blood, and his reply was simply: \"Man-kin.\" Since then, Jinari has turned the Kur-hik into a tribe of fearsome warriors, joining the Vulgar-kin in a shaky alliance to further her crusade in obliterating the Man-kin\u2014the humans aligned with them, the elves, the dwarves, and whoever else got in the way of her mission of vengeance.\n\nNext to Anessi were Tutia and Kelen, Jinari's most skilled warriors. Like Jinari, Tutia and Kelen were dressed in a mish-mash of armor and clothing mostly stripped from fallen soldiers in battle. They both looked quite interesting, with the mix of furs and skins, bronze, and rusted steel. Tutia carried a heavy two-handed broadsword, while Kelen had a bow and quiver strapped across her back, and several daggers sheathed around her belt.\n\nThe four of them stood silently around the fire, taking in the smell of the damp, burning wood and the crackling sounds. A coarse voice came from behind.\n\n\"All ready, I see?\"\n\nThey all turned in unison to see Uskor, cloak wide open, hands perversely placed on his hips.\n\n\"Yes,\" Jinari said evenly. \"This is Anessi, Tutia, and Kelen.\" The three women did not move.\n\nUskor was all nose and ears as he looked the three of them up and down, taking his time to study their every last feature head to toe. Jinari had no doubt they felt every much as violated by his eyes as she did when he first looked upon her.\n\n\"Very well, we shall go then.\" Uskor turned to leave, his long ears flapping ever so slightly, and Jinari and her three Kur-hik followed.\n\nThe first leg of their journey was made in silence. Uskor walked, Jinari and her Kur-hik followed. Sometimes Uskor used roads or trails, other times he cut directly through a forest or large clearing. It made no difference to Jinari, she and her Kur-hik were accustomed to traveling through all types of terrain, from mountains high to valleys low.\n\nUskor abruptly stopped at dusk, threw his pack down, and announced they were making camp for the night. He told Jinari to start a fire, then disappeared into the brush.\n\n\"Where's he going?\" Tutia asked.\n\n\"Who cares, as long as I don't have to stare at his back any longer,\" Kelen said as she began looking around for sticks.\n\n\"Or smell him,\" Anessi added.\n\nJinari smiled to herself as she began to help look for wood for the fire. Tutia dug out a small fire pit while the rest managed to gather quite a bit of wood, enough for the night at least. Jinari piled some into the pit and looked at Anessi. Anessi stepped forward, lifted her right hand palm up, and whispered something so soft it was inaudible. She blew into her palm, and black dust swirled in front of her and floated to the fire pit. Fire erupted with a whoosh.\n\nAnessi stepped back and looked at Jinari, who felt Anessi's eyes burn into her own. Anessi didn't care for using her magic on such trivial things, things that didn't really need magic. Jinari looked to the ground. looked away.\n\nThe four sat around the fire trading wine skins, bread, and light conversation. \"When will we know what it is we are looking for?\" Tutia asked.\n\n\"Soon enough,\" Uskor's raspy voice came from the shadows as he materialized in front of the fire. He threw three rabbits down at his feet. \"I brought dinner.\"\n\nThe Kur-hik and the goblin sat in silence as they cooked the rabbits. Jinari wanted very much to prod him for information, but waited until he was finished eating.\n\n\"This weapon,\" Jinari began. \"Is it enchanted?\"\n\n\"In a way,\" Uskor replied, holding his gaze into the fire.\n\n\"Is it large?\" Jinari asked.\n\nUskor let silence hang for a moment before he replied. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"How are we to destroy it?\" Kelen asked.\n\nUskor lifted his eyes from the fire and looked at Kelen, then to Jinari. He reached into his cloak and pulled out what appeared to be a flattened rock. He held it up for all to see. It was about the size of Jinari's hand, and was covered with small, raised bumps. It was deep crimson in color, and occasionally flashed a reflection of the fire, curiously, as it did not appear to be smooth or shiny in any way.\n\nUskor grunted, and tossed the rock into Jinari's lap. She picked it up, and immediately had a sinking feeling in her gut. Her head felt light, almost dizzy. Her face felt flush, her fingers and toes began to tingle. She thought she knew what it was, but refused to allow herself to believe. She looked to Anessi, whose eyes were as wide as she's ever seen them.\n\n\"Is this a...\" Jinari's voice cracked, and she couldn't even finish her own sentence.\n\n\"A dragon scale,\" Uskor said, a proud grin plastered across his misshapen face. He looked around, waiting for the reactions.\n\n\"Are you saying we're looking for a dragon?\" Tutia said, a twinge of disbelief in her voice.\n\nUskor did not answer, instead holding a stare in Jinari's direction.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Jinari said, meeting Uskor's stare. \"Dragons haven't existed for hundreds of years. The last dragons died out with fall of the Migar, during the Age of Winds.\"\n\nJinari remembered when she was a young girl, listening to the elders' stories of dragons and Ages past. There were stories of heroes such as Yerik the Whitehood riding dragons into battle, defeating armies of giants or trolls in one fell swoop. Giants and trolls, Jinari thought solemnly, the very creatures she had now aligned her clan with.\n\n\"It exists,\" Uskor said, shooting a quick glance to each that sat around the fire. \"I've seen it myself. We must destroy it before it is discovered by the Man-kin. They have a ways of controlling it, a way to use it against us in the war. If that were to ever happen, if they had just one dragon in their favor, we would surely be defeated.\"\n\n\"Control it?\" Anessi arched an eyebrow. \"How so? Through magic?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Uskor replied.\n\n\"Why do we have to kill it?\" Kelen inquired. \"If it can be controlled why can't the Vulgar-kin use it?\"\n\nUskor gave her an even look. \"Dragons would not trust the Vulgar-kin. Giants, orcs, trolls,\" he paused for a beat, \"and goblins, among other things, are a dragon's enemy. Only humans who are pure of heart have been known to ride a dragon. I've heard stories of dragons aligning with elves, but as far as I'm concerned they are stories, nothing more. Could we try? Sure, but Gar-Dum would rather not take the risk, since, as it is, we seem to be winning the war at the moment.\"\n\nJinari let out a quiet sigh and studied the red-orange flames of the fire. She had given up so much when she made the decision to join her clan to the Vulgar-kin. It seems she could add her humanity and the respect of her Kur-hik to that list.\n\n\"This is wonderful,\" Tutia burst in, rising to her feet. \"We get to kill a dragon? We'll be heroes! Legends! They'll write songs about us!\" She threw a fist into the air.\n\n\"Uskor, tell us more about the dragon, and how you propose we kill it,\" Jinari said.\n\n\"Killing it is your job,\" Uskor said with an awkward snicker. \"Did Gar-Dum not make that clear? But I will offer you more information as you need it. In truth, I am simply your humble guide. I get you in, and get you out, provided you remain in one piece after accomplishing your mission.\" He paused and looked around, smiling. \"As for the dragon itself, what's to tell? It's big, it has wings, its scales are hard as rock, and it breathes fire.\"\n\nSilence held. Jinari looked form the fire to Anessi, who was looking at the fire, glanced up at Jinari and held her gaze briefly, then shifted her attention back to the fire. Jinari looked back to Uskor, who was already rolling over and stretching out on the ground. \"I'll take first watch,\" she said. \"The rest of you get some sleep.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "The next morning Jinari opened her eyes to find everyone else packing up camp in silence. She looked at Uskor, who was standing about twenty paces apart from the rest of the group, looking impatient.\n\n\"Are we ready?\" Jinari said to her Kur-hik.\n\n\"Yes, my lady,\" Tutia replied. And their journey continued.\n\nAgain, they traveled mostly in silence. Kelen passed around some more bread, and they ate as they walked. Uskor seemed to be walking in erratic patterns, making a sharp left or right turn, but they followed all the same. When the sun was directly overhead, Jinari noticed the ground was becoming moist.\n\n\"You're leading us into a marsh,\" she called up to Uskor.\n\nUskor made no reply. Jinari looked to Anessi, who returned a concerned glance. They continued to follow the goblin. Soon, the grass sloshed under their feet. Not long after that, their feet were immersed in water up to their ankles. Eventually, the cold, murky water nearly reached their knees.\n\n\"Uskor, enough of this,\" Jinari halted and her companions followed suit. Uskor also stopped, and turned to regard her. \"Do you intend for us to swim to the eastern caverns?\"\n\nUskor's mouth contorted into a crooked sneer. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but before he formed any words there was a shriek at Jinari's back. As she turned she heard splashing, and saw Kelen struggling to hold her balance. Tutia drew her sword, and Anessi balled her fist, drawing energy within.\n\n\"Kelen!\" Jinari shouted over the splashes. \"What's got you?\" Jinari turned her head back to glance at Uskor, who was hastily climbing up the nearest tree.\n\n\"It's a hand!\" Kelen shouted in return. \"With claw\u2014\"\n\nBefore Kelen could finish she was pulled all the way down with a mighty splash. The chilly, dingy water of the marsh sprayed up into everyone's faces. Everyone except for Uskor, whom was busy getting as high as he could in that tree.\n\nTutia fished her left hand into the water, her broadsword tightly gripped in her right. She pulled up with a grunt, and Kelen burst out of the water gasping for breath. Jinari heard the muffled sound of Uskor shouting something in the distance. His shouts were muffled by high-pitched hissing and spitting sounds. Jinari's breath shortened. She whirled around to see four Lizardmen facing her. One was holding a crude wooden spear; the other two simply bore their large talons and swung their thick, spiky tails menacingly behind them.\n\nJinari looked to Kelen and Tutia, and saw two more Lizardmen stalking near them. That made five in all, and four of them, not including Uskor, who was now about fifteen lengths up in a tree shouting something Jinari could not fully hear.\n\nKelen pulled her bow and notched an arrow. Jinari slowly pulled out her axe. The Lizardmen drew nearer as they continued with their menacing hissing sounds. Jinari nodded in Anessi's general direction. Anessi shot her arms straight above her into the air and shouted, \"Sangazae!\"\n\nIn a course of a split second, everything became dark, then was illuminated in a brilliant flash of light. Jinari blinked spots away from her eyes, and saw the three Lizardmen nearest her staggering. The one had dropped his spear, and was bent over with his claws in the water, trying to fish it out. Jinari moved, a cry of defiance singing out as she lunged forward and cocked her axe behind her head. She came down with all her strength and momentum, taking the Lizardman's head off, and its left arm as well.\n\nJinari then dropped to one knee with a plunging splash. She brought her axe parallel with the ground and brought her torso around in a fierce twisting motion. Once she had nearly made a full rotation, she released the grip on her axe, allowing it to sail through the air with a mighty hum. Jinari's axe buried itself deep in the chest of a Lizardman, much to its surprise. The Lizardman staggered back, looked down at his chest, then dropped, dead before he hit the water.\n\nWithout even thinking, Jinari shouted again and charged the third Lizardman. The scaly foe staggered back, a little due to fear, but mostly in surprise. Just before Jinari reached him, however, and arrow pierced its neck. The Lizardman reached up to touch the arrow, attempted to make a hissing sound that sounded more like a choking gurgle, and fell to its death. Jinari stood and pivoted to look at Kelen and Tutia. Two Lizardmen lay in the waters near them, two arrows protruding from each their bodies. Kelen held her bow at her side, one hand near her quiver, ready to grab another arrow. Tutia's blade was clean. She resheathed it, looking disappointed.\n\n\"Well done! Well done, indeed!\" Uskor was already bounding over from the tree he had taken refuge in. He was visibly excited. \"You see,\" he said as he rejoined the group, struggling to catch his breath, \"that dragon should be no problem at all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "After the group had emerged from the swamp, they built a fire to get warm and dry. There was not much time to spare, and Uskor kept pushing to move on, so their clothes really only got about half dry. But half dry was far better than soaking wet.\n\nThe sun had fallen, and Uskor led with torchlight. Jinari found herself surprised when Uskor announced they had reached the caverns. She expected them to be at the base of a mountain or along a hilltop at the least, but they were in the middle of a forest, not surrounded by mountains but rather the tallest trees she had ever seen.\n\nUskor beckoned for help as he began clearing foliage. Tutia and Kelen lent a hand, while Jinari and Anessi stood back and watched, both with folded arms. Before long, palms and vines were cleared, and a large, dark opening stood before them. Tutia and Kelen stepped back to fall in line with Jinari and Anessi. Uskor looked back, gave a small grunt, and entered the cavern mouth. Jinari followed, Anessi behind her, then Kelen, with Tutia last.\n\nThe light vanished almost immediately, though it did not seem to bother Uskor, who continued along as if everything was perfectly visible. Anessi whispered something to herself, and the top of her staff began to glow with a blue light. It gave off a tremendous amount of light, though there was not much to look at. The cavern walls were reddish brown and damp, streaks of water occasional seeping through a crack or small fissure. There was no sound, save the faint scrapes and shuffling of their feet. Jinari didn't speak for she did not know how far the sound might carry.\n\nUskor moved along at a brisk pace, not pausing or hesitating when the tunnel came to a fork. He knew exactly where he was going; or, at least, he certainly gave that impression. They continued along like this, moving in a single file line in total silence, for what seemed like hours. Jinari felt they were moving at a slight downward angle all the while. She began to worry about finding their way out.\n\n\"How much further,\" Jinari whispered to Uskor, her soft voice carrying faint echoes.\n\nUskor turned to face her. His bulging eyes looked almost luminous in the blue light of Anessi's staff. He nodded, and pointed ahead, and continued walking. Jinari took that to mean that they were close, and indeed, after a few more paces, she could see a faint light. She signaled for Anessi to dim the light on her staff. Uskor stopped and the mouth of some sort of opening, and Jinari came up alongside him.\n\nWhat she saw made her heart skip two beats. The cavern opened into an enormous space, with other tunnels and openings surrounding the large cavern, some smaller than the one they were standing in, others over fifty times larger. A large fire burned at the far end. Jinari saw the glint of gold and silver, the sparkle of fine jewels, all piled in heaps and heaps throughout the cavern. Everything had a brilliant shine, nothing was dull. In the middle of it all she saw the dragon, curled up and sleeping as if he were an old dog curled up at his master's feet.\n\nThe dragon was enormous, Jinari estimated him to be at least on hundred lengths from head to tail. His body was covered in rigid-looking brown-red scales, his midsection beneath his folded leathery wings rising and falling slightly with his sleeping breaths. Jinari drew in a breath\u2014his head was covered in boney spikes that protruded out the top and sides. Large pointed teeth and fangs were also visible, even though its mouth was fully closed.\n\n\"You and your two warrior girls will climb down here,\" Uskor said in a whispered tone. \"The mage and I will remain here. We will create a distraction. When the dragon looks up, strike him high on the neck, where the jaw ends and the neck begins. This is a vulnerable spot.\"\n\n\"The only vulnerable spot?\" Jinari asked, raising her brow, not taking her eyes of the massive creature.\n\n\"The most vulnerable spot, and easiest for us to access,\" Uskor replied. \"You could poke it in the eye, but that's not going to kill it, only upset it greatly. Stab and cut high on the neck, and he not only loses its ability to breathe fire, he eventually dies as well.\"\n\nJinari blinked. \"Eventually?\"\n\n\"It will take some time, yes. How long, I do not know.\"\n\nJinari took a deep breath and summoned Anessi, Tutia, and Kelen to her. She gave instructions, and motioned Tutia and Kelen to follow her down the cliff into the dragon's main chamber.\n\nJinari took short, slow steps, being very careful to make as little noise as possible, No noise at all was ideal. Tutia and Kelen followed silently, and closely, behind. The closer they came to the dragon, the more her heart raced. She gripped her axe tight, and close to her body. Soon they were within twenty paces of the dragon's head. She could feel the warmth of its breath. One of its wings twitched a bit. Jinari froze, holding her breath, terrified. She looked back to Tutia and Kelen. Both were frozen like statues. She craned her neck a bit more to look further back and up at Anessi and Uskor. Uskor motioned with his hand as if he wanted Jinari to move a closer. The dragon's wing twitched again. Jinari swallowed, and slowly continued forward.\n\nAfter six or seven steps, Jinari froze again when she heard what sounded like a muffled screech. It seemed to have come from the direction of the dragon, but it did not sound like something that would come from so large a creature. She looked around, then back to Tutia and Kelen. Tutia's expression was unreadable, Kelen simply shrugged. Jinari turned back and took another step forward, and that's when she saw it.\n\nFrom underneath the dragon's wing emerged a small creature, no bigger than Jinari's own torso. Its skin was smooth and of a dark-purplish hue. It walked on all fours and had two protruding lumps on its back. Two more creatures, exactly the same features, also came out from beneath the dragon's wing. Jinari's heart sank at the sudden realization that the dragon was not a he at all; it was a she, and these were her offspring.\n\nJinari glanced back, giving Uskor and Anessi a frightened look. Uskor smiled and said something to Anessi, who raised her staff. They were about to create the diversion. Jinari was sure they had not seen the baby dragons. In a panic, she shouted, \"Wait!\"\n\nHer voice echoed loudly, causing everyone's shoulders to tense. Anessi stood motionless, her staff high in the air. Jinari heard the baby dragons' screeching sounds again. She turned and saw the large, open eyes of the dragon staring directly at her, Tutia, and Kelen. The baby dragons were playfully wrestling with each other near the dragon's nose. The dragon lifted her head, her eyes still trained on Jinari. Jinari felt a puff of hot air as the dragon exhaled.\n\n\"NOW!\"\n\nIt was Uskor's voice, and before his voice's echo could bounce there was a crackle and a brilliant flash of light. The dragon wailed, and brought her head back down in an apparent effort to protect her babies. Tutia called a battle cry and ran toward the dragon, broadsword held high. Kelen stood her ground, her bow notched and trained in the general direction of the dragon.\n\n\"Tutia, wait, no!\" Jinari called after Tutia but it was too late. The dragon simply effortlessly brushed her head to the side, catching Tutia on one of its boney spikes, impaling her. Blood spurted in all directions. Tutia cried in agony as the dragon lifted her head and tossed Tutia aside in a motion akin to a nod. Tutia was dead before she came back down to the cavern floor.\n\nJinari did the only thing she could do at that moment\u2014she turned and ran, grabbing Kelen's arm and pulling her along. Uskor and Anessi were not retreating, however. They were in fact running toward the dragon. Her feet still moving, Jinari turned to look back. The dragon was bringing her head down to her babies, not paying the intruders any mind at the moment. \"We have to get out of here!\" she shouted as they met Uskor and Anessi.\n\n\"No!\" Uskor shouted back. \"We have a task to complete! Kill the dragon, and its offspring!\"\n\n\"I will not!\" Jinari said firmly.\n\n\"You will kill the dragon and its offspring, or die trying! That is your mission.\" Uskor trembled, visibly upset.\n\nJinari took a breath. She looked to Kelen, then to Anessi. Uskor drew a long dagger, and moved past Jinari in the direction of the dragon.\n\n\"Uskor, no!\" Jinari's head swirled. She wanted to grab Kelen and Anessi and run, but found her feet unmoving. The dragon saw Uskor coming, and her eyes narrowed in anticipation. Before she could think of what to do next, Jinari felt something hiss past her ear. Kelen had fired an arrow, and it struck the dragon in her eye.\n\nThe dragon roared in pain, and brought her head up, exposing the babies. Uskor raised his dagger, and made directly for them. Kelen notched and drew back another arrow, but Jinari used the handle of her axe to knock the bow out of her hands. Kelen grunted in frustration, fumbling to reach for it on the ground.\n\n\"Anessi, we have to stop him!\" Jinari gave Anessi a pleading look, and Anessi nodded in understanding.\n\nJinari moved after Uskor, a good ten paces behind him, and heard Anessi's low voice chant something. Mere steps before he reached the baby dragons, magic wind blew Uskor backward off his feet, landing in front of Jinari. Without hesitation, she lifted her axe, then brought it down onto Uskor's neck. He was dead before he even knew what was happening.\n\n\"Jinari!\" Anessi's voice came from behind, and when Jinari turned, she saw Kelen aiming an arrow directly at her. Jinari heard the dragon's roar once again. On the ledge, Anessi wrestled Kelen, each attempting to overpower the other. Jinari ran back to them, but before she could reach them, Kelen pulled her dagger and stuck it into Anessi's side. Anessi staggered back. Jinari raised her axe as she came closer, hesitated for a brief moment, then buried her weapon between Kelen's shoulder blades. Kelen stumbled forward and fell face first on the rocky cavern floor. Her axe still buried in Kelen's back, Jinari knelt to Anessi's side.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" Anessi grunted, trying to get up, dagger protruding from her hip.\n\n\"Stay down,\" Jinari gently pushed Anessi back down, simultaneously pulling the dagger out of her side. Anessi groaned, but fished a pouch from her belt, and sprinkled the contents onto her wound.\n\nThe hair on the back of Jinari's neck stood up, and she whirled around to see the dragon's head, complete with an arrow protruding from her eye, a mere five paces from them. The dragon was unmoving. Jinari moved toward it.\n\n\"Jinari!\" Anessi's cry was pleading.\n\n\"Stay there,\" Jinari said calmly, slowly moving toward the dragon. \"Don't move.\"\n\nThe dragon remained still as Jinari walked right up to her and gently put a hand on her snout. The dragon's hot breath caused beads of sweat to form on her neck and forehead. Jinari reached up and grabbed the arrow, pulling it out. The dragon winced and wailed in pain, letting out several short breaths with hints of smoke from her nostrils. The dragon turned her head and looked down to her babies, looked back to Jinari, then brought her head down right in front of the human's face. Jinari again gently put her hand on the dragon's snout.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said in a soothing tone, stroking the dragon's snout as if it were a kitten on her lap. \"I am Man-kin, not Vulgar-kin. Thank you for reminding me of this.\"\n\nThe dragon puffed, then turned to retrieve her babies, who were still squealing and wrestling with each other, seemingly oblivious to the entire situation.\n\nJinari turned and walked back to Anessi, who was now standing. \"What will you tell Lord Gar-Dum?\" Anessi asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Jinari replied. \"We're not reporting back to Gar-Dum. We will retrieve our clan, the Kur-hik, and seek out the rest of our people\u2014the Man-kin.\"\n\n\"How will we get out of these caverns?\" Anessi asked. \"Without Uskor, I fear we will not be able to backtrack out steps. We could end up walking for days before we find out way out.\"\n\nJinari looked over to the dragon, whose babies were crawling back into the safety and comfort of her wing. \"Why walk,\" she said, her lips curling into a grin, \"when we can fly?\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ash and Blood by Hannah Marie ]\n\nEva coughed up ash and dust as she fought her way out of the cellar. The heavy oak door crumbled between her fingers, singeing the rough skin of her palms. Even after three days, the embers burned hot against her hands. The house had collapsed on top of the cellar door and had it been any other disaster\u2014a hurricane, tornado, flood\u2014she would have been buried alive.\n\nShe was fortunate it had been fire.\n\nShe pushed her way through the crumbling wood and stepped into the sunlight.\n\nGray. Gray and red and orange. Everywhere. Ash coated everything that wasn't still burning. What once had been a thriving village full of tailors, farmers, weavers, and bakers now drifted away on the wind.\n\nThe Queen's judgement was swift and terrible, riding the sky on wings and breathing fire. This village, Eva's village, would be a warning to the others who wished to disobey.\n\nEva turned around and looked at the wreckage of her house. In the cellar, she had heard the screams of her mother and sisters, had felt the blazing heat of the flame, and done nothing. What could she have done?\n\nShe bent and pulled at a board. It came away in pieces.\n\nThey were still under there. Buried by fire and wood and ash.\n\nTears ached in her throat, but she shoved them back down, bundling her emotions into a tight ball in the middle of her chest. There would be time enough for tears after.\n\nShe slipped back into the cellar and collected a few items in a bag. Things she would need for a journey. Things she would need for revenge.\n\n\"Hello?\" The voice trembled on the air.\n\nEva flinched, her hand tightening around the pack.\n\n\"Is anyone alive?\" It was a man's voice, laced with shock and fear. \"Is anyone alive?\"\n\nNo. They were all gone. Every last villager burned alive in their homes, in the streets, and in the market. Everyone was ash and bone.\n\nEva scrambled out of the cellar. The voice came from what was once the town square. She padded down the cobblestones, stepping around wood and bones.\n\nA man stood by the small fountain full of gray water, thick with sludge, his arms hanging limply at his sides. He stared at what was once the marketplace. His patched brown coat and purple felt hat didn't belong in this world of soot and smoldering flames.\n\nEva approached, her shoes noiseless. \"Who are you?\" The words were born from a throat ravaged by screams and smoke.\n\nWith a shout of surprise, the man jumped backwards, almost falling into the fountain. Eva watched dispassionately as he regained his balance and braced himself against the stone ledge. He stared open-mouthed at the apparition. Eva knew she looked a sight. With pale gray hair, clothes, and skin, she looked more dead than alive.\n\n\"I'm Timas the tinker.\" He pointed at the pack on the ground. Tin pots, pans, and cups spilled out of it. \"I come to Rose Haven every year for the Reina Day Celebration.\"\n\nEva blinked ash out of her eyes and then turned her head, taking in the devastated village. \"We won't be celebrating the Queen's birthday this year.\"\n\n\"But the festival next week... I mean...\" The man tugged at his beard. \"What... what happened?\"\n\nEva shouldered her pack, already dismissing the tinker. \"Some of our men joined Huru's army. The Queen found out.\"\n\nHis face paled. \"Traitors?\"\n\nEva turned her head sharply and stared at him. \"Traitors or no, judgment has been rendered.\" She waited until he lowered his eyes before she looked away. \"Don't stay here. It may come back.\" She moved through the square.\n\n\"Wait!\" he called.\n\nEva paused and looked over her shoulder. Memories of laughter and kisses and love assaulted her, choking her in a way that the ash never could. They were dead. All of them. And maybe she was, too.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" the tinker asked.\n\nEva took a good long look at the square, committing it to memory. She would need this later. When she could feel again.\n\n\"To kill a dragon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "The Queen preferred solitude after a raid.\n\nMorley balanced the tray on one hand and knocked gently on the ornately carved door. Leaves and flowers and small woodland creatures grazed his knuckles, frozen in the grain of the wood. As always, he searched the carvings until he found the mouse. He swore it was alive, darting between vines and hiding behind the larger animals. But no one believed him. It was just a wooden mouse, carved into the Queen's door.\n\nHe knocked once more for good measure, just loud enough to make his presence known, then bent to place the tray on the ground. The china and silver rattled gently, rippling the soup and shifting the plate of grape tomatoes, before settling against the flagstones. The Queen preferred solitude, but she also expected supper to be served promptly at ten o'clock.\n\nHe straightened and his eyes darted once more to the door. There! Just behind the griffin's talon. He leaned forward to confirm. Yes, he could just make out the small rump and the long, skinny tail.\n\nThe door slammed open.\n\nMorley snapped into a bow, the Queen a blur of red, black, and white. \"Your Majesty!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"Is it finished?\" Her voice was tired, wispy, and her words fluttered in the air like moths around a flame. \"Has it spread?\"\n\nMorley raised his head slightly and stared fixedly at the black embroidery adorning her red skirt. Has it spread? Like wildfire. Rose Haven was no more, burned to ash and dust, and haunted by the ghosts. The city hissed the fate of the traitors beneath dark eaves and in seedy taverns. The courtiers murmured behind painted faces and gilded fans. And when whispers of the fiery dragon wreaking death and destruction, leaving no survivors, finally reached Morley's ears, he knew it to be finished. The dragon did its job well.\n\nHe made sure to keep his voice level as he answered. \"The entire country now understands what happens to those who oppose Your Majesty. The tale was carried by the witness of a tinker, or so I understand,\"\n\n\"And Huru?\" She bit the name and it snapped in her mouth.\n\nMorley straightened just a bit more. \"No word.\"\n\n\"Our men remain under his command?\"\n\nMorley's throat dried and he nodded.\n\n\"I see.\" The skirt moved out of his line of sight, leaving the door wide open.\n\nUnderstanding the unspoken order, Morley retrieved the tray and slipped into the Queen's room.\n\nWhen she was younger, and happier, she had resided in the royal apartments on the third floor. Morley remembered games and laughter. He remembered chasing the young princess down the hall, catching her in his arms, and lifting her onto his shoulders. He remembered the Queen standing at the window with one hand on her belly and the other caressing her King's cheek. He remembered how fond she was of her people. And most of all, he remembered the kindness of those days.\n\nThat was then, in the Before.\n\nHe placed the tray on the blackened surface of the table and stepped back, surveying the small, cramped quarters of the tower room. It was meticulously neat and clean, but a far cry from the majestic rooms downstairs. The circular space held a small, canopied bed, a table and two chairs, a wardrobe, and a locked trunk. The one and only window opened onto a balcony barely big enough to fit two people.\n\nIt was closer, the Queen had insisted when she moved in. And she needed to be closer.\n\nNo one had asked closer to what.\n\n\"Morley?\"\n\nHis heart ached at the sound of her voice. \"Yes, my Queen?\"\n\nShe stood at the window, gazing out over the city. She used to wear her hair loose and soft, piled on top of her head or cascading down her back. The honeyed waves were a magnificent compliment to the golden crown balanced on her brow. She still wore the crown, but the hair was scraped away from her face and held captive in a bun at the nape of her neck. A black snood ensured that the strands stayed in place. It was too severe for Morley's Queen. It made her older, harsher, more... hateful.\n\nHer eyes slid to him, as though she could hear his thoughts. \"Are you mine, Morley?\"\n\nHe placed a hand on his heart. \"Always, my Queen.\"\n\nShe nodded, her eyes softening. And just for a moment, she was herself again. She opened her mouth to say something and paused, her attention captured by movement outside. Morley stiffened.\n\n\"Leave us.\"\n\nThe command came cold and harsh, accompanied by the blossoming scent of scorched earth and metallic blood. Morley's skin tightened around his eyes and he bowed, backing slowly out of the room. As he shut the door, he saw the Queen on the balcony, one hand stretched into the night sky. A huge golden talon curved around the eaves as the dragon nestled onto the roof.\n\n\"Are you mine?\" the Queen whispered to the beast.\n\nOne golden eye peered into the room, lighting on the Queen and burning with an inner fire. Tendrils of smoke spiraled from nostrils as the dragon peeled back its lips to answer.\n\nMorley shut the door."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "One of Huru's soldiers found her on the fourth day. She didn't mean to kill him, but he rushed at her with a sword. She ducked under his swing and jammed her mother's second-best kitchen knife under his arm. He made a gurgling noise, his eyes widening, and backed up a step. Eva's hand still gripped the knife and she stumbled with him. His arms came down around her like a hug, his sword point scraping the dirt behind her. Warm blood pulsed over her hand. She tightened her hold and tugged at the knife.\n\nThe soldier opened his mouth to say something and coughed. Blood splattered across Eva's face. He fell to his knees, taking her with him, and they knelt face to face. It could have been a kind face, with wide, child-like eyes, and full cheeks. But right now, his face was smeared with tears, blood, and fear.\n\n\"I'm... I'm sorry,\" she said, but it was too late.\n\nHis head tilted back and his sightless eyes focused on the sky.\n\nShe knelt with him, supporting his weight, frozen in this moment.\n\nShe killed this man.\n\nShe wondered if she should have felt anything. But she just felt... tired.\n\nShe shrugged out of his bloody embrace and crouched by his body, her hand still attached to the knife buried in his side. It wouldn't come out. It went in so easily, parting the skin and muscle just below his armpit, and now it wouldn't release its hold.\n\nShe used both hands, braced her feet against the dead man's side and pulled. The knife scraped free with a fresh river of blood. It poured over her hands, warm and wet.\n\nEva's heart raced and her lungs gasped for air. Her stomach clenched.\n\nFunny how the terror hit after the danger had passed.\n\nShe stumbled away, dropping the knife, and vomited. She emptied her stomach of her meager breakfast and then continued spitting up yellow, foamy bile. She wiped her mouth, shuddering as the blood transferred from her hands to her lips.\n\nA rustle in the brush drew her attention from the dead man at her feet.\n\nA soldier, his sword aimed high, stepped forward. And another, this one holding a halberd. And one more with two knives.\n\nEva held out her bloodied hands, defenseless.\n\nThe man with the sword approached cautiously. \"Gavin?\"\n\nEva closed her eyes.\n\nGavin.\n\nThe name burned across her skin. His name was Gavin.\n\nThe swordsman growled and Eva opened her eyes to see the sword swing down. She stared at the blade glimmering in the sunlight and waited for it to bite into her neck.\n\n\"Hold!\"\n\nThe command had an immediate effect. The swordsman pulled back and turned, stiffening his posture.\n\nA man approached and Eva had heard enough stories to know him. The lightning blazing across his chest and the heavy double blades in his hands identified him as General Huru himself.\n\nHis eyes glittered darkly in the shadows of his helmet.\n\n\"Gavin?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Dead.\" The swordsman jerked his head at Eva. \"Her doing.\"\n\nHuru considered Eva for a long moment. In one motion, he sheathed the double swords at his sides. \"Bring the Blood-Wraith.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "They tied her to a tent pole in full view of the camp. Both Huru's soldiers and Rose Haven's traitors gave her a wide berth, their expressions ranging from angry to fearful and everything in between. Someone spat at her and it landed in her hair. Eva didn't care. She leaned forward, her shoulders and wrists pulling against her bonds. She embraced the sensation. But even the pain was dull.\n\n\"Blood-Wraith.\" The voice was soft and familiar.\n\nEva blinked. She tilted her head back and peered through the curtain of her hair at Brodie Hammond. He stood in front of her, a cord of wood in his arms.\n\nTwo months ago, he had let his forge grow cold as he packed a bag and said goodbye to his wife and three sons. Two months ago he had followed Huru's red flag and the promise of gold and mercy. Two months ago, he had left, believing that by joining Huru's army, his family and village would be protected from the coming battle. And for two months, they were.\n\nEva stared at his wide, honest face. He knew. Somehow, he knew that Rose Haven was gone.\n\n\"Blood-Wraith,\" he said again, \"were there any--\" He paused and swallowed. \"Were there any survivors?\"\n\nHow much had she changed to become so unrecognizable? She had played with his boys all her life. He had mended more than one of her scrapes as a child. And last year at the Harvest Festival, she had shared her first kiss with his youngest, Uther.\n\nThe urge to shout his name and throw herself into his familiar arms became unbearable. She opened her mouth to identify herself as the only survivor, but bit her tongue before she could speak.\n\nBrodie's family had burned to ash in an instant.\n\nHow could she be the only survivor? How could she tell this man that his entire family was destroyed, that his entire village was destroyed, leaving only one empty girl alive?\n\nEva met his eyes. The bleak shadows lurking behind his gaze told her that Brodie already knew that they were gone. But he needed to hear someone say it aloud. He needed her to say it aloud.\n\nHer chest ached with guilt and sorrow. She gripped the emotions tightly to herself, but they burned their way up her throat, forming words.\n\n\"No,\" Eva croaked. \"No survivors.\"\n\nBrodie held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded. Without another word, he turned and moved to the pyre in the middle of camp. He placed his cord of wood carefully in place and then stepped back, staring at the unlit pyre. By the slope of his shoulders and the shaky breaths, she knew he was thinking of his wife and children and their painful death.\n\nDragon's fire was, at least, quick. Eva doubted anyone had suffered very long.\n\nHer eyes slid to the pyre.\n\nUnlike whoever was going to burn on that.\n\nThe tent flap behind her flicked open and General Huru stepped forward. Out of the corner of her eyes, Eva could see the edges of his hauberk and his black boots. She tensed.\n\n\"It's time,\" he said, and strode to the pyre.\n\nA woman followed close behind. The feathers braided in her white hair and cloak of multi-colored fur declared her to be the General's Sibyl. She moved through the gathering soldiers and stopped at the head of the pyre.\n\n\"Bring the fallen,\" General Huru commanded.\n\nEva let out a breath as four men carried a shroud-wrapped body to the pyre.\n\nShe had heard of the barbaric practice of burning the dead, but had never witnessed it herself. She watched as they carefully laid the body on the pyre and lit it. Her skin crawled with a burning sensation as flames licked at the body. She felt as though she were on the pyre, slowly burning. Eva doubled over, her shoulders and wrists straining at the ropes, and gasped with pain.\n\nThere, in that moment, she heard the Sibyl's voice begin a familiar prayer. She lifted her head and met the Sibyl's eyes across the distance. She heaved a breath as the holy woman spoke the final phrase.\n\n\"From ash we were born and to ash we return.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "They left her tied to the tent until the pyre burned to dusty white embers.\n\nEva thought she would have been accustomed to the smell of burning flesh. She leaned against the pole and stared into the night sky. The scent clung to her hair and coated her skin. She would never be rid of it. Death had found her four days ago and she feared it would never let her go.\n\nA movement at her periphery drew her attention as General Huru stepped into view. He had removed his helmet and his hair was pulled back in a knot of braids. The black paint smeared across his eyes and temples did nothing to disguise his glittering gaze.\n\n\"Blood-Wraith,\" he said, dipping his head slightly, \"are you satisfied? Or do you require more sacrifice?\" He gestured to the glowing pyre behind him.\n\nEva's eyes slipped past him to the dying fire. \"Why do you call me that?\"\n\nHe grinned, feral in the moonlight. \"I'll show you.\"\n\nHis knife nicked her wrist as he cut through the rope. She didn't react and he didn't apologize. With his hands on her shoulders, he drew her into the tent and deposited her on a roughly-cut chair.\n\n\"Look.\" He held a small mirror in front of her face. \"A Blood-Wraith.\"\n\nThe creature in the mirror drew back in dismay. Wild hair surrounded a gaunt, wide-eyed face, both caked in ash. Dried blood painted the mouth, chin, and cheeks. Angry red burns glowed through the ash on collar bones and forearms.\n\nThis wasn't Eva. It was a monster born of flames and fury. Eva fisted her hands in her lap. And if that's all she was, then she would do what she must.\n\nHuru nodded in satisfaction, as though he understood her grim acceptance. \"A Blood-Wraith,\" he said again. He settled in an equally-uncomfortable chair and stared at her. \"Why are you following my army? Why did you kill one of my men?\"\n\nEva's gaze snapped to him. He didn't appear angry, merely curious. For a brief moment, she wondered what her punishment would be for killing one of his soldiers.\n\nNot that it mattered. How could he punish her if she were already dead?\n\nWhen she didn't answer, he leaned forward. \"What do you want, Blood-Wraith?\"\n\nHe held intelligence in his gaze, and a fierceness that would have frightened her had she not already survived a dragon.\n\n\"I...\" She trailed off as the tent opened, admitting the Sibyl.\n\n\"The questions can wait,\" the wise woman said. \"First, let's see what we are dealing with.\"\n\nGeneral Huru sat back as the Sibyl retrieved a wash basin and rag and proceeded to clean every inch of Eva's exposed skin. The Sibyl worked in silence with Huru looking on. Eva cringed in pain as the rag found the burns on her forearms and the back of her neck. The feathers in the Sibyl's hair brushed against Eva's clothing and came away gray. After several painful minutes, the Sibyl straightened, glanced at her ash-dusted clothes, and sighed.\n\n\"Well?\" Huru asked.\n\nThe Sibyl moved to the side, revealing Eva to his curious gaze. \"Not a Blood-Wraith. At least, not yet.\"\n\nHuru nodded. \"Just a girl. For now.\"\n\nEva found her voice. \"What do you want with me?\"\n\nThe general and the Sibyl exchanged glances. Huru nodded and the Sibyl turned back to Eva.\n\n\"What do you know about the Queen's dragon?\"\n\nEva paused, the screams of her family echoing in her ears. Her hands trembled. Days ago she was consumed with household chores and the best way to get Uther to ask her to the Reina Day festival. And then, as she sat in the cellar peeling potatoes for the feast, the Queen's dragon struck. One moment the house above her echoed with footsteps and chatter and the next it was filled with the roar of fire and the dying shrieks of her family. And the dragon waited. For three days it waited in the square, flaming anything that moved. And Eva waited, frozen in the cellar, listening to the dying cries of the townspeople, listening to the terrified screams of the few survivors as they broke free to encounter a dragon face to face, and listening to a dragon breathing in and out, patient and calm.\n\nWhat did she know about the Queen's dragon?\n\n\"Everything,\" she whispered.\n\nThe Sibyl nodded and untied a small scroll from her belt. \"The stars speak to us, did you know?\" She unrolled the scroll, pressing it flat against the table. \"They told Huru to take command and they told us when to march on the capital. The scourge of the Queen's dragon cannot stand. Our people have suffered long under this beast. Too many sons and daughters have been lost to its appetite. Too many mothers have cried for vengeance. And now we march on your land, to defeat your Queen and her dragon.\"\n\nEva watched as she traced the patterns on the scroll. It was full of swirls and lines, like writing, but much more complicated than anything Eva had learned from her mother. Instead of forming distinct words and sentences, the marks flowed into each other, like one never-ending word.\n\n\"The stars spoke to us of a Blood-Wraith, paving our path to victory, the only one to defeat a dragon.\" The Sibyl pushed some long, gray hair behind her ear, her eyes intently fixed on Eva. \"The stars spoke of you.\"\n\nEva shook her head. \"I'm not a Blood-Wraith.\"\n\nHuru stood up, his dark gaze locked on the gray girl. \"Not yet. But you could be.\" He squatted in front of her. \"And so I ask, Blood-Wraith, what do you want?\"\n\nEva stared at the general and his Sibyl and licked her lips. She still tasted ash.\n\n\"I want to kill the dragon.\"\n\nHuru didn't scoff. Instead, he leaned forward. \"Is that so?\"\n\nEva's fingers clenched at her skirt. It had once been a pale yellow, made of the softest wool, crafted by her mother's own hands. Eva's mother had made matching skirts for all three of her daughters, because yellow was her favorite color.\n\nEva thought of the other two skirts, with delicate pink roses embroidered on the hem, now burned to ash, and took a deep breath.\n\nThe knot in her chest pulsed with anger and guilt, but she forced it back down. \"It is.\"\n\nHe stood and held out his hand. \"Then you'll need something better than a knife.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Morley had proven himself a coward years ago in the Before and he did so again now as he stood just outside the entrance to the throne room, waiting for the screams and crying to stop. Once they did, he straightened his doublet, nodded curtly at the soldier standing guard, and slipped through the doorway.\n\nThe room held remnants of past opulence\u2014the giant chandelier hanging from three stories above, the hand-cut marble floor, and the heavy iron-wood throne\u2014but they were mostly obscured by the damage to the room. The throne sat at the far end, in front of what used to be large windows overlooking the valley. The windows and part of the walls to either side had been removed some time ago to allow a larger entrance for the Queen's dragon. The flying buttresses and two thirds of the balcony seating had also been removed to allow the dragon room to stretch wings and turn around. The remaining walls and ceiling were braced with hastily-constructed columns of wood and rocky remnants of the stone wall.\n\nIn the Before, courtiers had crowded the throne like cloying flowers reaching for the sun. But now... Morley deliberately kept his eyes on the Queen, ignoring the courtiers huddled at the back of the room, clinging to the walls like dying vines.\n\nThe Queen watched him approach and beckoned him to her side. Morley climbed the three steps of the dais, doing his best to ignore the sounds of rending flesh and breaking bones coming from behind the throne. He placed a hand on his heart and bowed, his eyes desperately searching for a single stone not stained with blood.\n\n\"Morley.\" His name exited her lips as a sigh. \"Rise.\"\n\nHe straightened and focused on the fresh droplet of blood staining the dove-gray silk of her collar. \"My Queen. I have news.\"\n\nHer eyes brightened despite the massacre taking place behind her. \"Of General Huru?\"\n\nMorley tilted his head to one side. \"Related, yes.\"\n\nShe leaned forward. \"Don't leave me in suspense.\"\n\nHe glanced unnecessarily over his shoulder. With the sound of a masticating dragon and weeping courtiers on the other side of the room, there was little chance of being overheard.\n\nYet he still whispered the news.\n\n\"There have been reports of a Blood-Wraith.\"\n\nThe Queen's eyes widened and she slowly rose to her feet. \"A what?\"\n\nMorley didn't repeat himself. He knew his Queen too well to make that mistake. \"It joined Huru's company last night.\"\n\nThe Queen's mouth opened and when she spoke, it was a scream. \"Get out!\"\n\nMorley bowed again, letting her anger wash over him and splash against the courtiers at the other end.\n\nMorley remained in place while the courtiers scrambled to exit the room. Once the doors slammed shut, he lifted his head. His Queen stared at him with tears in her eyes. His breath caught in his chest. She was still so young. He longed to wrap her in an embrace, as he did many times in the Before, and press his lips to her hair. He wanted to tell her that despite the sorrow and the pain, she was strong enough to bear it.\n\n\"Where is it?\" she demanded.\n\nMorley returned his eyes to the floor. It would never be the way it was in the Before. His Queen wasn't his anymore.\n\n\"In Huru's camp. In Einsburg.\"\n\nShe whirled, robes flapping wetly against the flagstones. \"Find it!\" She commanded. \"Fly!\"\n\nMorley kept his eyes averted as the dragon swallowed its final morsel and spread its wings.\n\n\"Wait!\" The Queen rushed around the throne, heedless of the fresh offal soaking her slippers.\n\nMorley moved back, unwilling to eavesdrop on her whispered words. As he stepped off the dais, his foot kicked something down the steps. He bent to pick it up and froze.\n\nIt was a small, pink slipper with pearl beading sewn into the shape of a flower.\n\nLess than an hour ago, he had met the owner of that slipper. The child had been so excited to meet the Queen and had lifted the hem of her dress to display her new slippers. She had informed him that she brushed her fiery red hair and chose her pale blue dress all by herself. She had wanted to know if the Queen was nice, if she was pretty, if she would like her new shoes. Morley had ignored the anxious mother and chatted with the girl as he escorted her, her mother, and her two older brothers to the throne room.\n\nAnd now...\n\nHis eyes darted around the dais, taking in the scraps of fabric soaking in pools of blood, the chunks of bone and flesh littering the floor, and the strands of fiery red hair caught in the arm of the throne, where a child had tried to hide.\n\nWith trembling hands, he lifted the slipper from the floor and cradled it.\n\nHe didn't realize he was shaking until the Queen placed a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"They were traitors, Morley,\" she said, her voice pitched to affect stern sorrow. \"Their father and husband attempted to flee to Huru's army. They had to be punished.\"\n\nMorley kept his head bowed. \"Even the children?\"\n\nThe Queen's breath shuddered, but when she spoke, the words flowed like water. \"They were traitors all, and had to be an example for the court. I can't make allowances for anyone, no matter their age. You understand, don't you, Morley? I can't allow traitors to go unpunished, children or no. You understand, don't you? Tell me you understand.\"\n\nMorley took a deep breath and looked his Queen in the eyes. \"I understand, my Queen.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Now go, bring me word of the Blood-Wraith's death.\"\n\nMorley bowed and turned to go.\n\n\"And, Morley?\"\n\nHe paused and turned. \"Yes, my Queen?\"\n\n\"Are you mine, Morley?\"\n\nHe clutched the slipper behind his back as he bowed. The pearls, smooth and wet against his palm, felt like tears. \"Always, my Queen.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Alone in his room, Morley put his head in his hands and cried. It was a relief to find out that he still could. He cried for the children he had led to slaughter, for the bloody future that lay ahead, and for his Queen, for the child she once was and for the monster that she became.\n\nAfter his tears were spent, Morley dried his eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief and, despite the summer heat, started a small fire in the brazier. When the coals were hot and red, he gently lowered the pink, blood-stained slipper into the brazier. As the scent of burning silk filled the air, he knelt before the brazier and watched the flames consume the small shoe. His throat burned with the urge to pray, but he resisted. There would be no forgiveness for his part in this child's death. There would be no forgiveness for any of them.\n\nWhen the slipper was nothing more than ashy flakes on the coals, he stood and crossed to the shelf at the head of his bed. He paused, listening for footsteps, and, after hearing none, carefully retrieved the book from its hiding place.\n\nIt was bound in green leather, barely bigger than his hand, and slim enough to be concealed within the pages of another book. The word \"Draxoni\" blazed across the cover in slightly raised letters.\n\nDismissed by historians and scholars alike, Gurye's Draxoni was filed next to myths and legends. The ancient language in which it was written was full of misspellings and punctuation errors. Most libraries had removed the book altogether, finding no value in a poorly-written dragon tale.\n\nMorley moved to the desk at the window where he had better light, and a view of the Queen's room across the courtyard. The dragon had built an aerie on the roof of her tower, lined with torn silks and shiny gold coins that winked in the sun.\n\nNothing but the best for the Queen's dragon, everyone said. Probably better than its meager horde in the mountains or across the desert.\n\nMost of the courtiers suspected what Morley knew for a fact; the nest was also filled with bones, most of them human. The constant diet of traitors and cattle seemed to fill the dragon's belly, but never satiate its appetite. No one knew what would satisfy the dragon, not even the Queen.\n\nMorley squinted at the aerie.\n\nAnd that was the problem, wasn't it? No one really knew anything about the dragon. It had just appeared one day, unexplainably bound to the Queen and her will. Morley recalled the day the Queen had exited the chapel, a horse-sized dragon at her side. She had been dazed, confused, and couldn't tell Morley where she had found it. And, since that day, it had grown in size and power. Some days, Morley wasn't entirely certain who was in control, the Queen, or her dragon.\n\nWith his attention split between the southern sky and the book, Morley did his best to concentrate on the words scrawled across the page. Behind each slash of ink was another, lighter mark, dismissed and unrecorded by history. Morley had first noticed the pale marks years ago as he read the tales to a young princess. He began studying them in earnest when she found her dragon. They told a very different story, one unfit for children's ears. Instead of the bumbling adventures of Yulrick the squire, it was a desperate tale of war, bloodshed, and pain.\n\nMorley had forced himself to learn the archaic language in which it was written. The process of translation mired now and again by his lack of knowledge and was constantly interrupted by trips to the library and careful\u2014oh, so careful\u2014discussions with the clergy.\n\nHe found his place toward the end of the book and followed the words with his fingertip. It took him almost an hour, but he managed to translate the next paragraph, recording it on rough, hand-made paper.\n\nWhen the paragraph was complete, he stared at the words struggling to understand what he had written.\n\nHe bowed in his grief. And his tears hardened to anger. And his anger turned to fury. And when he lifted his head, behold, a dragon stood before him. He put forth his hand and the dragon did again likewise. For the dragon was him and he was the dragon and together in their guilt and hatred, they raged.\n\nMorley looked out the window to the Queen's tower.\n\nTears, anger, guilt...\n\nHis eyes slid from the tower to the grand chapel at the other end of the bailey. In the middle of the chapel, carved in pure white marble, lay the reason for all of it. For a week after their death, the Queen remained in the chapel, caressing the stone face of her husband and kissing the marble cheek of her toddler son.\n\nFury and hatred...\n\nThe dragon had appeared one week after they were buried.\n\nHe looked down at his translation.\n\nFor the dragon was him and he was the dragon and together in their guilt and hatred, they raged.\n\nStanding alone in his room, staring at the Queen's tower and her dragon's aerie, Morley whispered, \"Together they raged.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "The Sibyl smeared ash from the funeral pyre across Eva's face. She was a Blood-Wraith, and as such, would wear a dead man's bones.\n\n\"It is fitting,\" the Sibyl said as she ground the dust into Eva's hair, \"that you wear your first kill into battle. His ghost will frighten your enemies.\"\n\nEva trembled in the early morning air. The Sibyl had bathed her, fed her, and let her sleep in a warm cocoon of furs and wool blankets before waking her early this morning with whispered instructions to follow. She exchanged Eva's worn dress for loose trousers, a gauzy shirt, and a fitted leather jerkin with bone plates, all dusted with the same ashy gray from the pyre. The ashes coated her skin, her hair, her clothes, working its way into every crack and crevice in her skin. But this time she was coated with a stranger instead of her family and friends.\n\nPieces of Gavin's bones still burned with residual heat from the pyre. Ordinary fire was not as hot as dragon fire, Eva found, and so the bones took longer to break down. A long arm bone and half of his jawbone glowed with heat, but the rest had dissolved into ash.\n\n\"And if his ghost does not frighten your enemies, he will, at the very least, hide your scent.\" The Sibyl lifted a bowl of blood, collected from a recently slaughtered goat, and plunged her fingers into the viscous liquid.\n\nEva shuddered as she smeared the blood across her eyes, and down her chin. To be a Blood-Wraith, she had to look the part. And Blood-Wraiths were, by their very nature, bloody.\n\nThe Sibyl stood back to observe her handiwork. \"There. Now you are a true Blood-Wraith.\" The Sibyl placed her hands on Eva's shoulders. \"Do you understand what you must do?\"\n\nEva stepped out of her hold and rubbed at her eyes. \"Yes.\" She whispered the word. If she said it any louder, she thought she might scream.\n\nFor a moment, the Sibyl's eyes softened. \"You will be with them soon.\"\n\nEva nodded. There was nothing more certain. \"I know.\"\n\nThe Sibyl bent her head and whispered a prayer. Eva let the words slip off her skin where they pooled at her feet, forgotten. She stared through the camp at the horizon. The sun was rising, but she was just as dead as before. Nothing had changed.\n\nHuru was suddenly at her elbow, one hand holding a shortsword, and the other holding the reins to a horse. The horse, too, was covered with ash. It stood placidly, tilting its head this way and that, and ash drifted to the ground with each movement.\n\n\"Is the Blood-Wraith ready?\" Huru's eyes kept sliding past her, as though she was gone already.\n\nEva placed a hand over the small pouch tied to her waist. After three years of study, the Sibyl said that this was the only way to kill a dragon. Poison of the foulest kind lay on her hip, all she had to do was administer it. It would work. Or it wouldn't. Either way, her problems were solved.\n\n\"I'm ready.\" Her voice was reed-thin, like the wail of the wind through trees.\n\nHe boosted her onto the horse without another word, handing her the shortsword to buckle at her hip. He stepped back and turned his face to the sun. Eva took this moment to study him. Without his warpaint, he appeared younger, more vulnerable, despite his size. She wondered if his entire campaign rested on her shoulders. She wondered if she failed, if he would die.\n\nA part of her was slightly dismayed to discover that she didn't care either way.\n\n\"We will be right behind you.\" The Sibyl handed Eva the reins. \"You will succeed.\"\n\nThere was a lie in those words, carefully layered over with good intentions. But Eva just nodded and tugged at the reins, directing the horse north. The Sibyl may have waved farewell, but Eva didn't look back to see.\n\nA few scattered soldiers stood as she rode by to watch her pass. Sometime in the night, the main body had broken camp and moved on, but they would not be accompanying her to the Queen's castle. Blood-Wraiths traveled alone.\n\nShe kept her eyes straight ahead, ignoring the blessings and curses tossed her way. Revenge would not be had by exchanging words with these men. Revenge would be had by killing the dragon.\n\nAnd the only way to kill a dragon was not by meeting it head-on. It was through subterfuge and cunning.\n\nAnd this was why, when the dragon descended on the camp, spewing fire and shrieking in rage, Eva hardened herself against the screams, stiffened her shoulders, and rode hard with flames chasing her back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "After two days of hard riding, her horse finally collapsed. She slit his throat and left him in some poor farmer's field, the blood watering a fresh crop of wheat. She continued the rest of the way on foot. The Sibyl's directions skirted around the town to the north side of the curtain wall where the forest slowly encroached on the castle. Beneath a bramble of thorns, she found the crumbling hole in the stone and crawled inside. There, the muted sounds of soldiers training lulled her into a dreamless slumber.\n\nThe lack of sound woke her. She crept into the open bailey, finding it deserted. The sun had gone down while she slept and the stars twinkled brightly in their dark bed. With a hand on the pouch at her hip, and the other clutching the short sword, she darted into the deeply shadowed crevice between a chicken coop and a pig pen. The animals were missing, nothing more than a few drifted feathers to indicate that they were here at all.\n\nEva waited one hour, then two, as the clouds chased each other across the moon. When she was certain the castle was asleep, she emerged from her hiding space and hurried across the open yard.\n\nThe southern tower was her goal. The dragon slept there each night. If Eva could make it to the roof, her task would be accomplished.\n\nLocked.\n\nEva leaned her head against the door and tried the handle again. It still wouldn't budge.\n\nThe ache in her chest threatened to unravel.\n\nOf course it was locked. She was a fool to think that the Queen wouldn't safeguard her dragon.\n\nThe knot of emotions began to loosen and she stepped back, pressing her hands to her chest, her head bowed.\n\nThere would be a way. There had to be a way.\n\nThe sound of a door opening behind her forced her into the shadows. She held her breath and watched as a man made his way across the yard, illuminated by a single candle on a tray held with both hands. The dishes on the tray and the key ring on his belt clicked and chimed with every step on the cobblestones. Eva's eyes narrowed. His halting walk and thinning white hair indicated an advanced age. But his shoulders were broad and his limbs strong. It was unlikely that she could subdue him and take the keys.\n\nHe approached the door to the southern tower and paused, his eyes lifted toward the sky. He mumbled what sounded like a prayer, and balanced the tray with one hand, unlocking the door with the other. As he hooked the keys back to his belt, he paused, noticing a smudge mark on the door.\n\nEva clutched her sword.\n\nIt was the ash from her forehead.\n\nShe had killed a soldier with nothing more than a butcher knife. She could certainly kill an old man with a sword.\n\nHe muttered something and rubbed at the mark with his sleeve, buffing it from the wood. When it was cleaned to his satisfaction, he opened the door and stepped inside, the tray rattling with each step.\n\nEva waited a moment, then followed.\n\nThe winding stairs were tall and narrow, but Eva managed them easily, taking long strides as she climbed. The flickering candlelight above her wavered in the darkness, and then paused. A moment later, the man knocked on a door.\n\nEva froze as the door opened and a woman's voice echoed down the stairs.\n\n\"Morley.\"\n\nThe tone, the sigh, the emotion, felt familiar. Eva crept upwards, keeping to the shadows, and peered at the landing.\n\nThe old man bowed at the waist, the tray carefully shifting in his grip. \"My Queen.\"\n\nShe was beautiful. Standing in the soft glow of candlelight and framed by an intricately carved doorway, she was everything Eva imagined the Queen to be. Her eyebrows arched above wide, purple eyes. Full, pink lips lent a softness to a face with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin. The crown on her head was heavy and golden, inset with bold red jewels. Her heavy brocade gown brushed the floor in perfect pleats.\n\nBut there was... something else. A darkness clouded her eyes and pulled her lips into a frown. And there, like a shadow, it stood behind the Queen, wrapping tendrils around her heart.\n\n\"Are they routed? Do we have them?\" She demanded answers and the man delivered.\n\n\"Yes, my Queen. What is left of Huru's army is being led here as we speak.\" Morley straightened and the tray rattled again. \"With Huru himself in chains.\"\n\nThe Queen smiled and withdrew into the room. After a moment's hesitation, the man followed and the light dimmed.\n\nEva fingered the pouch hanging from her waist. The poison was like a pulsing heartbeat, urging her upwards. She quickly crossed the landing, and hurried up the next flight of stairs. These led to a small hatch in the roof that opened easily at her touch. The hinges were well-oiled and well-used. She clambered onto the roof and stood with her arms outstretched, facing the aerie.\n\n\"Dragon,\" she called, her voice strong against the night wind.\n\nNothing.\n\nThe pouch burned at her side and the fury in her chest boiled, aching for release.\n\nShe crept towards the nest, her breath hitching with every step.\n\nIt was empty.\n\nSticks, silks, and gold formed the nest, with bones scattered across the floor.\n\nShe looked up. If the dragon wasn't here, where was it? The starry sky was empty of all but the stars, moon, and a few wispy clouds. She frowned and turned back to the nest.\n\nA scrap of yellow caught her eye.\n\nWith halting steps, she walked around the pile of sticks, silks, gold, and bones, and touched the scrap of yellow wool. It was a torn strip of a skirt, with delicate pink roses embroidered on the hem.\n\nWith controlled horror, she lifted it from the nest.\n\nIt belonged to one of her sisters.\n\n\"Cara,\" she whispered, her gaze taking in the broken bones scattered around her. \"Hamar.\"\n\nThere was no answer. Of course there was no answer. She stood on nothing but bones.\n\nShe turned her face to the sky, rage boiling in her chest.\n\nA large hand covered her mouth, muffling her scream, and pulled her down to the roof. She stiffened and attempted to reach the short sword, but his arm pinned hers to her side.\n\n\"Quiet, Blood-Wraith,\" the old man said, holding her tight against his chest. \"The dragon comes.\" He released his hold and tilted his head to the sky. \"Quiet, or we're both dead.\"\n\nEva followed his gaze and saw on the horizon a pale shape gliding silently through the stars.\n\nThe old man placed a finger on his lips. \"Stay silent, and follow me.\" He turned to go.\n\n\"Why?\" Eva's whisper came out harsh and raw. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"What do I want?\" His eyes closed for a moment, and when he opened them, they glared fiercely. \"To kill a dragon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Morley stared at the girl sitting on the bed across from him, her legs drawn up to her chest, a scrap of embroidered wool clutched in her hands. She was gray. Everywhere gray. From the top of her head to the soles of her boots. The only break in color was the rusty brown stripe running across her eyes from temple to temple and the stain covering her chin and dripping down her neck.\n\nShe was a Blood-Wraith. But was she the Blood-Wraith? The one Huru's people prophesied would defeat the Queen's dragon? Looking at this girl, Morley didn't believe it.\n\n\"Did that...\" He gestured to the yellow cloth in her grip. \"Someone you know?\"\n\nShe lifted her eyes and nodded.\n\nMorley closed his eyes. Another added to his sins.\n\n\"Sometimes it\u2014the dragon\u2014brings someone home to...\" He bit his lip and sighed. Explanations wouldn't help. \"I'm sorry for your loss,\" he said finally.\n\nShe wrapped the fabric around her wrist, knotting it tightly. \"You serve her. The Queen.\"\n\nMorley nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\"Why?\" The question snapped against the wall. \"Why do you serve her and her dragon? They have murdered women, children, innocent people. Everyone I care about is dead because of them. So, why? Why do you serve them?\"\n\nIt would take far too long to explain. The years and years he spent watching over and guiding a young princess engendered a love and loyalty that even when tested at its breaking point, held firm. How could he explain that watching that princess become a just and benevolent Queen brought him more joy than he could possibly contain? And that watching her descend into madness with a dragon on a leash brought immeasurable sorrow? How could he explain? He didn't try.\n\nInstead, he stood and opened his cabinet, retrieving some wine. He poured it into two tin cups and handed one to the girl. He sat down at the desk and took a small sip. The girl watched warily, so he took a bigger draught, raising an eyebrow meaningfully. She glared, but still did not drink.\n\nMorley leaned forward and laced his hands together, elbows propped on his knees. \"I am looking for redemption, for me and my Queen.\"\n\nThe girl slid her legs off the edge of the bed and mimicked his pose. \"And I am looking for revenge.\"\n\nMorley nodded. \"Then perhaps we can help each other.\"\n\nHe held his breath as the girl stared at him, examining his face and deciding whether or not to trust him.\n\nFinally, she nodded and, with eyes fixed on him, took a sip of wine.\n\nAnd Morley's heart sank."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "The Blood-Wraith walked to the throne room in chains.\n\nThe shackles on her wrists chafed and, as Morley pulled her along, finally broke through her skin. Blood appeared and oozed down her wrists, staining her hands. Morley pretended he didn't see it and the girl made no sounds of distress.\n\nMorley glanced back at her to see her eyelids heavy and her limbs weighed down. She had yet to fully wake up from her drug-induced slumber. He had stripped the girl of her sword and, more importantly, of the pouch of poison on her belt. But he left the ash and blood. The Queen would want a good show.\n\nFor a moment, he thought about turning back. He could go back to his room, let the girl recover, and set her free. There was no need to go through with this.\n\nAnd then he thought of his Queen, carelessly striding through puddles of blood and around piles of bones to stroke her dragon's cheek.\n\nThe story in the Draxoni book had ended badly. He had finished translating it last night while the girl slept. He couldn't leave his Queen to that fate.\n\nHe tightened his grip on the chains. He told himself that it was better this way. He told himself that she wouldn't feel anything.\n\nHe'd tell himself anything to make this seem like less of a betrayal.\n\nThe two guards outside the door stepped in front of Morley, blocking his way.\n\n\"What have you here, Morley?\" Connor asked, his voice pitched low.\n\nMorley tugged the Blood-Wraith forward, ignoring her stumble and slurred curse. \"A gift for the Queen and her Dragon.\"\n\nConnor stared at the girl, his face paling. He never could handle the sight of blood very well, and with the stains on the girl's face and the new blood dripping from her wrists, the guard looked positively ill. Morley always thought it odd that he became a palace guard instead of a blacksmith like his father. He jerked his head at Nicko, the other guard, and stepped back to his post.\n\nMorley, his heart pounding in his chest, tugged the girl forward.\n\nThe throne room was full. Courtiers lined the walls, their expensive, finely-wrought garments muted and plain. The Queen's soldiers and guards stood in a ring just in front of the courtiers, their uniforms dusty and stained from battle.\n\nThe Queen stood on the dais in front her throne, addressing the room. Behind her stood her dragon, wings folded across its serpentine body and arched neck stretched high. Its golden eyes scanned the room, passing quickly over Morley and his prisoner, and its tail twitched and curled around the dais steps.\n\nAnd lined in rows and rows in the middle of the room stood the dirty, bloody, beaten soldiers of Huru's army.\n\nSkirting the edge of the room, Morley led the Blood-Wraith through the courtiers, earning a few wide eyes, but no exclamations. No one dared make a sound while the Queen spoke. As they approached the throne, he could better hear the Queen's words.\n\nShe always did have the talent for diction.\n\n\"--who have thought to murder me, you who have longed to destroy my kingdom, you traitors, look where your general has led!\" She flung back her long sleeves and walked to the edge of the dais. \"Do you believe in mercy?\" Her harsh whisper echoed through the room.\n\nMorley halted at the edge of the dais. Huru himself was in front of his army. He knelt, clutching a bleeding wound in his side, but his head was held high. This man had pride and it would take more than a dragon to take it from him. His Sibyl knelt at his side, her left side badly burned. Most of the hair on her head was missing and she wheezed when she drew breath.\n\n\"Mercy?\" the Sibyl croaked. \"Mercy will never be had from one such as you.\"\n\nThe Queen paused and her Dragon lowered its head, drawing even with its Queen. She reached out a hand and placed it on the Dragon's cheek, eyes pinned to the Sibyl. \"You are right.\" She addressed the entire room. \"Anyone who opposes me will not receive mercy!\"\n\nThe dragon's lips peeled away from its teeth and Morley stepped forward, dragging the Blood-Wraith with him. He bowed, placing a hand over his heart.\n\n\"My Queen.\"\n\nShe paused and the dragon turned to stare down at them.\n\n\"Morley, what do you have?\"\n\nMorley raised his head, tugged the chain, and flung the girl to the floor. \"I have your Blood-Wraith.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Eva's knees hit hard, drawing blood. She caught herself on her hands and struggled to lift her head. The man, Morley, had drugged her, and she couldn't shake the dense fog clouding her mind. She heard the Queen and Morley exchanging words, something about the dragon and a Blood-Wraith and a celebratory drink.\n\nShe blinked at her gray hands, wrists shackled and bloodied. Everywhere she looked was gray and red. She stretched out her fingers on the stone and the shackles shifted. A scrap of yellow caught her eye. She focused on it, noticing the embroidered roses soaking the blood from her wrist.\n\nThe fog cleared.\n\nCara and Hamar. One of her sisters was eaten by the dragon and her skirt used to line its bed. Her village was burned to the ground, taking her family, her friends, and her life with it. And she was here, a prisoner in chains on the cold floor.\n\nThe Queen and Morley laughed above her and she heard the clink of silver on glass. The dragon's hot breath blew down, flattening her hair and clothes. If she looked up, she would see the maw of the dragon. She wondered if her sister was frightened when she faced those teeth. Did she shriek and cry? Or did she submit to her fate?\n\nEva bowed her head to the floor and felt the knot in her chest burst. Emotions poured out of her. Guilt, grief and anger swirled together and became rage. She hated the Queen and her dragon. They would both suffer.\n\nShe was here as a prisoner, but she was also here for revenge.\n\nWith her head bowed and her eyes squeezed shut, she screamed in fury and grief.\n\nAn answering wail echoed above her, combined with the cries from the crowd and the shriek of the Queen's Dragon.\n\nEva lifted her head.\n\nThere, between her and the Queen's dragon, stood another dragon, ashy gray, with red eyes and snout, snarling in rage."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Morley dropped the pitcher of wine and it shattered against the stones. At the sound, the smaller dragon leapt.\n\nThe entire room held its breath as the gray dragon latched onto the larger dragon's neck. The golden dragon roared and flung itself into the air, crashing against the ceiling.\n\nOne dragon was frightening, but two were terrifying. The crowd descended into madness, clawing at each other to exit the room.\n\nMorley dragged the Queen off the dais and hurried to the wall, positioning his body in front of hers. She stared upwards, her wine-stained lips parted, goblet in her hand.\n\n\"Morley, what... what...\" She was again a bewildered child.\n\nThis was the second time Morley had observed her like this. The first was in the Before, when she lay curled against her husband and child's tomb, wondering what happened. Then, Morley had the painful task of explaining to the young Queen that her King and husband had been loyal all along and that the real traitor was the snake of a chamberlain whispering in her ear. Morley told this wide-eyed child that the traitor had confessed hours after the King had succumbed to the poison his wife had carefully slipped into his wine, unknowing that he sometimes gave sips to their child.\n\nAnd now, he had another unenviable task. His chest caved as he slipped the now empty pouch out of his pocket.\n\n\"My Queen.\" He shouted to be heard over the screaming crowd.\n\nShe ignored him, staring at the dragons raging in the rafters above her. \"My dragon is injured. Look!\" She pointed a finger at the golden dragon.\n\nMorley spared a glance at the battle above them. The gray dragon had positioned itself on the bigger dragon's back, claws digging into scales and its teeth latched on the back of the golden dragon's neck. Droplets of blood rained down on the crowd, sizzling where they landed. He dropped his gaze to the Blood-Wraith. She stood still, her hands outstretched, eyes closed, ignoring the dragon blood dripping down her face and hair, burning away the ash rubbed into her skin.\n\nThe Queen dropped the goblet of wine and grabbed his arm. Morley closed his eyes at the feel of the red wine soaking his trousers. One more task. One more explanation.\n\n\"Stop them, Morley! Stop them!\" The Queen shrieked as loud as her dragon.\n\nMorley grabbed her shoulders and shook her. \"My Queen! Listen to me! You don't have much time!\"\n\nShe froze, her eyes widening on his. \"What... do you mean, Morley?\"\n\n\"You've been\u2014\" He swallowed once, twice, then managed to get the words out. \"You've been poisoned, my Queen.\"\n\nShe stared at the pouch in his hands, then touched her tongue to her lip. \"The wine.\"\n\nHe nodded, blinking away tears.\n\nThe Queen sagged and Morley stretched out a hand.\n\n\"Why?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I had to, my Queen. I had to.\" He gathered her into his arms and sank to the ground. He cradled her as he had for many years, tight against his chest, with her ear pressed to his heart. \"Do you believe in mercy, my Queen?\"\n\nShe coughed, wet and bloody against his chest. \"For you?\"\n\nMorley bent his head to hers and let the tears fall, flowing down his cheeks and washing her face. \"For all of us.\"\n\nThe Queen convulsed in his arms, her hands clawing at his shoulders. When she spoke, her voice was broken and small. \"I thought you were mine, Morley. I thought you were mine.\"\n\nHe tightened his hold on the child he had loved for so many years and ignored the dragons raging above them.\n\n\"Always, my Queen. Always.\"\n\nBut she was already gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "They buried the Queen next to her husband and child in the chapel, an effigy carved out of pure white marble atop her tomb. The remaining lords and ladies attended, each one wearing somber grays and blacks, with white roses in their grip. The funeral didn't last long and even the Bishop exited the chapel when it was done.\n\nEva watched the funeral procession from atop the southern tower, her dragon at her side. The aerie had been cleared of the gold, scraps of fabric, and bones, but remained a perfect perch for the ashy gray dragon with the blood-red eyes.\n\nEva stretched out a hand and her dragon bowed its head, leaning into her touch.\n\nShe was afraid to learn her name. She was afraid it would be her own. They were connected in ways that she didn't understand. Every time she touched the smooth gray scales she felt boiling emotions just under the surface, but Eva herself felt calm and detached.\n\nIt didn't make any sense.\n\nBut nothing about this made sense.\n\nThe door in the roof clicked open and the dragon turned its head. General Huru held out a placating palm.\n\n\"Easy, dragon.\"\n\nEva placed a hand on her dragon's neck and she settled. \"She won't eat you.\"\n\nHuru winced as he climbed onto the roof. \"I was talking to you.\"\n\nEva scowled, then paused. Irritation was the first real emotion she had felt since the dragon appeared.\n\nHuru carefully picked his way across the roof and then stepped into the nest, sitting down next to Eva. He watched the chapel for a moment, then turned and stared at the pyre in the bailey. They had gathered wood and cut down trees for three days to make one big enough, piling the wood high on top of the dragon where it had fallen. Eva's gray dragon would light the pyre later this evening, when the people had gathered to watch. It wasn't every day that the soldiers and courtiers and village-folk received vengeance for the death of their loved ones.\n\n\"My people will finally have peace.\" Huru said, his face hard.\n\nEva thought of Rose Haven, burned to ashes. \"So will mine.\"\n\n\"Your Queen became a monster, Blood-Wraith.\" Huru turned, eyeing her and the dragon at her side. \"My Sibyl may have passed through the veil of death, but I learned a great many things from her. Namely, how to kill a dragon.\"\n\nEva nodded, but her fingers curled against her dragon. The beast hissed at the General, then returned its gaze to the chapel.\n\n\"I know,\" Eva said.\n\nHuru ran his hands down his face, smearing the blackened stripe around his eyes. \"And I will know where to find you.\"\n\n\"That you do,\" Eva agreed.\n\nHe nodded and clapped her on the shoulder. \"Good luck, Blood-Wraith. I hope we never meet again.\"\n\nLater, as the pyre burned, Eva leaned against the wall in the bailey. Her dragon lay curled at her feet, tail twitching as it watched the fire. Morley approached from the shadows, giving the dragon a wide berth, and stood next to her.\n\n\"They want you crowned.\" He watched the blaze for a moment, then said, \"The title of Queen comes with many responsibilities.\" He turned toward her. \"Your people come first. No matter what.\"\n\nEva nodded in agreement. \"I will remember.\"\n\nShe examined him, taking in his somber clothing and the white rose pinned to his jacket. She thought of the Sibyl throwing herself in front of a dragon to save the life of General Huru. And she thought of Morley taking the Queen's life to save her soul. And a phrase rolled around in her head. She tasted the words in her mouth, disliking the flavor. But she said them anyway.\n\n\"Are you mine, Morley?\"\n\nThe old man froze, his eyes drifting to the chapel doors. In the flames reflected in his eyes, Eva thought she saw a deepening sorrow.\n\n\"No,\" Morley finally answered. \"No, I'm not.\" He met her eyes and took a deep breath. \"But I will help you. To the best of my abilities, I will help you become a good Queen.\"\n\nEva nodded and his honesty warmed something in her chest. She squatted beside her dragon and ran a hand down its crest. Emotions boiled beneath the scales, but the rage was fading. She stood, squaring her shoulders and the dragon lifted her head.\n\n\"Then let's begin.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Therapy for a Dragon by Sam Knight ]\n\nThe dragon would creep into my room every night and whisper to me,\" Majorie said distantly. It was strange to be able to look back on such terrible times fondly. She had never dreamed those nights, filled with such fear and danger, would be the ones she treasured most, the only ones when she had been allowed to be a little girl.\n\n\"And what would it say?\"\n\nThe bespectacled man impatiently tapped his pencil against the side of his clipboard. The rapid ticking sound echoed in the small green-tiled room, making it feel even more closed in than it had before. They had been over this many times before. He didn't even ask her about the dragon anymore, only the words.\n\n\"That words were magic,\" she finally answered. \"That they had power.\"\n\n\"What kind of power?\" he asked. It was one of his standard questions. They had been over this a dozen times at least.\n\n\"Every kind of power that matters.\" One of her standard answers.\n\nThe man sighed heavily, blowing the air out through pursed lips. His frustration was showing through. Today, for the first time, he had sat where Majorie could actually get a good look at him.\n\nBut she didn't bother.\n\nShe had been in this room too long to care. When he had first come to ask questions, weeks or maybe months ago, she had strained to see him at the edge of her sight, fighting against the restraints to turn her head far enough to see his form in her peripheral vision. But now she didn't care what he looked like. It wasn't worth irritating the bedsores to turn her head and see.\n\n\"Your words didn't have the power to save your family.\"\n\nMajorie blinked, becoming aware again of the crack in the ceiling that looked like a wilted lily. Though she had stared at it for what seemed like an eternity, she hadn't actually seen it for a long time now.\n\nHe had mentioned her family before, but never so directly. So... accusingly.\n\nSomething had changed.\n\nShe turned her head and met his steel gray eyes.\n\nHe was losing his temper.\n\n\"Words killed my family.\" It was impossible for her not to see the images of the soldiers dressed in black, claiming to be peacekeepers.\n\n\"Bullets killed your family.\" His voice was cold. Not merely distant as his tone had been in the past, but cold and heartless. Hateful.\n\n\"Bullets fired by men because of words said to them,\" she countered.\n\n\"So yours are not the only words of power?\" The man raised his eyebrow, seemingly genuinely interested in what she had to say for the first time in a long time.\n\n\"All words are power.\"\n\n\"Are my words power?\"\n\nIn his eyes, Majorie thought she finally saw what this man was looking for.\n\n\"Are they?\"\n\n\"I was asking you the question.\"\n\nMajorie resisted the temptation to respond with another question. There was something in his eyes, in the desperate way he suddenly needed to know the answer to this question when all the rest of the questions had been asked with such a clinical affect for so long now.\n\nHow long had she been here? She looked back to the crack in the ceiling. It seemed to her that once it had not been a wilted flower, but a blooming one. Nonsense, she knew, but how long had she been here?\n\n\"Why do you not answer me? Do you have no respect for your elders? Is that why your family died? Because you went against their wishes and spoke your traitorous words to anyone who would listen?\"\n\nMajorie almost felt the cold emotions stir to life within her. Almost. It wasn't time for them yet. For now, she still needed to remain numb.\n\n\"My family died, as did so many others, not because they listened to my words, but because the monster who controls this country is afraid of my words,\" she said.\n\n\"The words of a little girl. Why should anyone be afraid of the words of a little girl?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Why should they?\" Majorie gave in and returned questions. \"Who should be afraid of someone who is too young, the wrong gender, the wrong religion, the wrong race? What words could someone so worthless possibly speak that could impact anyone or anything?\"\n\n\"You are still so insolent. Even after all that has happened to you. To your family. Do you really think these words that you speak are so powerful? Who is here to hear them? What can they do?\"\n\n\"You are here. And you are hearing them. They will eventually free me. They will eventually free everyone.\" Majorie tried to shift on the bed, but against her restraints she was only able to move millimeters. \"Can you not feel them affecting you?\"\n\nThe man chuckled humorlessly. \"I became immune to the tears of little girls many years ago.\"\n\n\"I am not crying. Nor am I begging. But your claim that I am does not surprise me. I would expect no less from the lapdog of a lying, murderous, petty dictator.\"\n\nThe room seemed to hold its breath as the echoes of those words faded.\n\n\"I am no lapdog. And your great leader is no petty dictator.\"\n\n\"But you admit he is a liar and murderous?\"\n\nThe man stood. \"I think perhaps you need more time alone with your words so that you can learn to choose them more wisely.\"\n\n\"That might not be wise on your part. I may finally come up with the words to free myself.\"\n\nWalking to the edge of the bed, he looked down at her with cold eyes. \"You really don't understand your predicament, do you?\n\n\"I guess I expected too much from a little girl. I should have realized that it was all coincidental. A confluence of events. There is no way anyone could have planned such an uprising against me, let alone a silly little girl and her family.\" He dropped the clipboard and pencil upon her bound legs. \"I have no further use for you.\"\n\nMajorie looked away from the crack to meet his eyes.\n\n\"Ah. So now you see who I am. Your deceitful words could never have turned me against myself. They are not so magic after all.\"\n\nMajorie smiled and a giggle escaped her cracked lips.\n\n\"You have gone insane? Good.\"\n\n\"No.\" Majorie shook her head. \"I finally figured out the magic words to free this country. The magic words to be rid of you.\"\n\nThe man snorted. \"Words are just words. They are not magic.\"\n\n\"But they are. And so are dragons. And the right magic word, said to the right dragon, is all I need.\"\n\n\"Then say your magic word, stupid child. Say it now, for tomorrow I will have you publically executed for treason.\"\n\nMajorie nodded. \"Please,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Please?\" he snapped angrily. \"Do you think you can beg of me now?\"\n\n\"Oh, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the dragon. And that is the magic word. Please.\"\n\n\"Bah!\" The man spun on his heel and into the jaws of the waiting beast, which snapped down violently, with an echoing chomp.\n\nMajorie smiled at the shimmering outline of the dragon as it chewed. \"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Taking Wing by Julia H. West ]\n\nSofria sat on one corner of the widest street in Tarnisi, on the plaza right outside the Guild Hall. Papa Matteo carried her there every morning, sat her down on a piece of old sacking, and arranged her twisted, stick-thin legs in front of her. Then he set her cup near her, growled, \"You'd best make more today than you did yesterday, or no supper for you,\" and left.\n\nA fine drizzle dampened the plaza. It always rained in Tarnisi, it seemed to Sofria. She pulled a rag over her head to try to keep dry, or maybe get slightly warmer, but the cloth was already soaked through. She leaned back against the building, to take advantage of the overhang of the Guild Hall's roof, but that didn't help much. The Guild Hall was very tall\u2014taller than the Cathedral across the plaza. There was too much rain, and not enough shelter.\n\nPeople hurried past her, women holding shawls over their heads, men with capes and broad-brimmed hats to keep them dry. Some even spattered water onto Sofria as they splashed through puddles, but acted as if they didn't see her sitting there. She was used to that. The fine ladies holding their gowns out of puddles paid her no heed. Only people like the stout woman with three small children trailing behind her, all holding hands, noticed her.\n\nThe stout woman stopped in front of Sofria. \"You're soaked through, child,\" she said.\n\nSofria just nodded. Of course she was\u2014it was raining.\n\n\"Don't you have a shawl? Nothing but that old rag?\"\n\n\"It's all I got,\" Sofria said. \"Papa can't spare nothing for a shawl.\"\n\n\"You poor thing.\" The woman reached into her skirt and pulled something from the pocket hidden underneath. \"Here, at least you don't have to starve while you're wet.\"\n\nIt was a whole bread bun. Sofria looked up at her and smiled. \"Thank you so much, my lady!\" she said. Sofria had discovered that everyone liked to be called \"my lord\" or \"my lady.\" It made them feel important, even if they had red chapped hands from doing laundry, like the stout woman did.\n\nThe woman blushed. \"Eat it quickly now, child. Don't let it get all soggy.\" She tugged at the children, who had stared at Sofria's twisted legs in their much-mended stockings the whole time, and bustled off across the plaza.\n\nSofria ate most of the bun, and hid the rest under her skirt where she hoped it wouldn't get too wet. She liked it when people gave her food. If she ate it before Papa Matteo came back, he'd never know about it, and couldn't take it away or say she had already eaten, so he didn't need to give her supper.\n\nIt started raining harder. The water that fell on the roof of the Guild Hall dripped from the mouths of monsters, one on each corner of the building. They decorated the Guild Hall, but also kept water from cascading off the roof and soaking people beneath. Or so Osanna the storyteller said. Channels on the roof gathered rain water and sent it to the monsters, who spewed it into gutters like the one not far from where Sofria sat. Sofria didn't like that gutter\u2014it stank of rotting vegetables and old fish, and chamberpots people emptied into it. Papa Matteo said the smell was a blessing to her. No one else wanted a corner that stank. So she sat in a place where many of Tarnisi's people passed every day, and some might feel pity for her and drop coins in her cup.\n\nThe monster nearest Sofria was fat and round, with clawed feet and a very wide mouth. Its wings were folded along its back, and its back legs gripped the edge of the roof far above her. She couldn't see many details of the monster\u2014it was too far up\u2014but she had sat beneath it for eight years, looking up at it until it seemed like a friend. She sometimes imagined that wide mouth, when water wasn't pouring from it, saying things like, \"I'm watching you, Sofria. Someday I'll take you away from Tarnisi.\"\n\nBut now the water dripping from the monster's mouth became a heavier stream, splashing into the gutter near Sofria. She couldn't imagine it talking when so much water poured from its mouth, so she sat sadly, shivering a little, as people dashed past and paid her no heed.\n\nNear midday the rain slackened. Sofria sat up from her miserable wet huddle in time to see a man in brightly embroidered clothing, with a sword at his hip, hurry past. Even though he seemed not to see her, he dropped a coin in her cup. Sofria smiled. She would have at least one coin for Papa Matteo. Maybe he wouldn't beat her tonight.\n\nThe sun broke through the clouds, and Sofria raised her face to its warmth. Above her, the stream of water falling from the fat monster's mouth dwindled, and Sofria imagined it licking its lips and saying, \"That was a fine meal.\" She imagined it shifting its wings a little, getting more comfortable on its perch atop the Guild Hall. Does the monster have a name? Sofria thought. What can it see from up there? The golden statues in the Cathedral? The Duke's Palace? Heaven? Sofria didn't know much about heaven. Sometimes men in black gowns stood in the middle of the plaza. She remembered everything they said, though it never made much sense. They shouted about how good people went to heaven when they died, and wicked people went to hell. It seemed heaven was above her, higher than the top of the Guild Hall. Hell sounded like where she lived with Papa Matteo\u2014hot, crowded, and stinking. She didn't want to go there.\n\nWith the sun out, and the streets drying, people slowed their steps as they crossed the plaza. The storyteller, Osanna, took up a place on the rim of the fountain. Soon children\u2014and some older people\u2014gathered around her, sitting cross-legged on the cobbles. Today the story was about a hero who had gone through many trials to find and kill a dragon. Osanna's words came clearly to Sofria as she described the dragon. Tall as a cottage, with scaly back and wings. It had claws on its four legs, and a mouth full of sharp teeth. It opened its mouth wide to breathe fire.\n\nSofria considered the monster far above her on the roof of the Guild Hall. It had wings, and four clawed legs, and a mouth that opened wide to... spout water. Was the monster above her a dragon, then? A dragon that breathed water instead of fire? She imagined asking it that. \"Are you a dragon?\"\n\nIt laughed, a great bellow of a laugh. \"I can be a dragon if you want me to, Sofria,\" it said.\n\nBut the dragon in Osanna's story was wicked, and killed people and ate their sheep and cattle. \"You're not wicked, are you?\" she imagined asking the monster above her.\n\n\"Not all dragons are wicked. Do you want me to be wicked?\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Sofria had seen enough of wickedness in her life, and didn't like it. She liked good people, such as the stout woman who gave her the bun, and the man with the sword who dropped a coin in her cup.\n\n\"Then I will not be wicked. I will be a good dragon for you, Sofria.\" Sofria smiled, and realized she had missed the rest of Osanna's story while talking with her dragon.\n\n\"Do you have a name?\" she imagined asking her dragon.\n\nIt made a gruff noise, as if clearing its throat. \"I have been called many things.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"When I drip water on people's heads, they look up at me and yell things like,\" the dragon paused, then said a few words that Sofria knew were not very nice. Papa Matteo yelled them at her and the other children when he was angry.\n\n\"Those are not good names,\" said Sofria solemnly. \"My name is Sofria. You need a good name, like that.\"\n\n\"When I was being carved, my maker called me\u2014\"\n\nA woman with a wrinkled face and a threadbare green shawl came up to Sofria, smiling. \"I have something for you, little girl,\" she said. \"My own little girl grew up and doesn't need it anymore.\" She took a red ribbon, rather frayed but quite long, from her pocket and put it into Sofria's hand. \"Such a cheerful color, red,\" the woman said. \"I hope it makes you happy.\"\n\nSofria stared up at the woman, lips trembling. \"It is beautiful,\" she whispered. \"I've never had anything beautiful. Thank you, my lady.\"\n\n\"Shall I tie it in your hair?\" the woman asked.\n\nSofria was about to say no, that if Papa Matteo saw it he would take it away to sell, and then decided she could wear it for part of the day. \"Yes, please,\" she said.\n\nThe woman smoothed Sofria's hair, put the ribbon around the back and over the top, wrapped it twice, then tied it atop Sofria's head. \"There. May it bring you joy.\" She patted Sofria's shoulder and hurried away before Sofria could thank her again.\n\nThat was the last pleasant thing that happened to Sofria for most of the rest of the day. Two boys splashed water from the stinking gutter onto her, laughed, and ran away. A man with puffy sleeves and very tight trousers told her beggars shouldn't sit in front of the Guild Hall, that it cheapened the building in people's minds. A puppet show set up in the plaza, but since the stage faced toward the Cathedral, all she could see was the curtain covering the people who made the puppets move.\n\nAs evening drew near, Sofria took the ribbon from her hair and stuffed it up her sleeve so Papa Matteo wouldn't see it. She was certain the bread the stout woman had given her would be her only food for the day. She had one coin in her cup\u2014the one the man with the sword had given her. Papa Matteo would curse at her and give her no supper.\n\nShe bit her lips, hoping that Papa Matteo wouldn't beat her, and looked up at her dragon. It had been telling her something when the kind woman came up. They had been talking of... names.\n\n\"Dragon,\" she imagined saying to it. \"I'm sorry. I've ignored you.\"\n\n\"Most of the city ignores me,\" it answered. \"I am far above their heads. But you, so small below me, you have watched me for a long time.\"\n\n\"You have wings! You could fly away from here. I... I can't walk. I have to be carried.\"\n\n\"But I am bound to this building. My wings are for nothing but show.\"\n\nSofria sighed. \"Then we are both bound here. I'm glad I can talk to you. Now... what were you saying, that your maker called you?\"\n\n\"Pietra,\" said the dragon. \"But he laughed when he called me that.\"\n\nThat was not one of the bad words that Papa Matteo shouted. It sounded nice. Pi-e-tra. Pi-e-tra. \"I like that name,\" said Sofria. \"May I call you Pietra?\"\n\n\"Of course you may.\" Was it the sun in her eyes, or did the dragon\u2014Pietra\u2014shift its wings? She knew it could not, for it was stone. But she could imagine. And she imagined that it stretched its smooth\u2014not feathery like a bird's\u2014wings a bit, then settled them against its back again.\n\nA man in brown brocade with huge sleeves, slashed so gold showed through, dropped a coin into Sofria's cup, never meeting her eyes. He walked up to the great doors of the Guild Hall, pulled them open, and entered. Moments later, a woman with very wide skirts and sleeves dropped another coin into Sofria's cup. \"Thank you kindly, my lady,\" Sofria called after her. Three coins. Perhaps she would get supper tonight after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "The next day was sunny, and Sofria gained far more coins than she had on the wet day before. People stopped and talked to her, and the stout woman came by again and shared sugar candy with Sofria.\n\n\"What's your name, child?\" the woman asked. When Sofria told her, the woman introduced herself. \"I'm Betani, and these are Ercoli, Luania, and Vinela.\" She pointed to her three children, who stood staring at Sofria's legs.\n\nErcoli, the boy, took a deep breath and then asked, \"What-happened-to-your-legs?\" all in a quick breath, as if he was afraid she might bite him for asking.\n\n\"I was born this way,\" Sofria said. \"I've never been able to walk.\"\n\n\"Oh, you poor thing,\" said Betani, the stout woman. \"How do you get here?\"\n\n\"Papa Matteo carries me.\"\n\n\"And just leaves you? A little girl like you? My boy Ercoli is eleven, and you look much younger.\"\n\n\"I don't know how old I am, but I might be eleven too,\" said Sofria. \"I remember eight years here in the plaza, after my mama died, and before that when I was little I begged with her.\"\n\n\"Eight years here! Well, I'll watch out for you if I can. I collect and deliver laundry all over this part of the city. Be well.\" She took her children by the hands and they threaded between people, crossing the crowded plaza.\n\nSofria made the sugar candy last most of the day, sucking on it little by little. As the day waned, a man sitting on the rim of the fountain throwing bread to the pigeons gave her the last piece. He must have seen her watching him, wishing she were a pigeon. The bread wasn't even stale.\n\nAfter she thanked the man and he left, smiling, she leaned back and looked up at her dragon, Pietra. \"Today was a better day, Pietra,\" she imagined saying.\n\n\"I like the sunshine, too, although I fulfill my function when it rains.\"\n\n\"What does that mean, 'fulfill my function'?\" Sofria asked.\n\n\"I was made to drain water off the roof. It makes me feel good when it rains and I can do what I was made to do.\"\n\n\"Do you think I was made to be a beggar, because of my twisted legs?\" The idea did not make Sofria feel good. In fact, it made her sad.\n\n\"No, because you are more than your legs. You have a mind, and you are good at imagining things. See how you have learned to talk to me.\"\n\nSofria turned that idea over in her mind. If she imagined she talked to Pietra, and Pietra told her nice things, was it just herself telling herself nice things? Those thoughts just confused her, so she stopped thinking about it. She would just enjoy talking to Pietra.\n\n\"Do you ever wish you could do something besides what you were made to do?\" Sofria asked. \"You have wings, and they were made to be a part of you. Do you wish you could fly?\"\n\nPietra was quiet for a long time. Sofria thought about how marvelous it would be to fly above the city, looking down at the people walking through the plaza. She had never been outside the city. If she could fly she could see forests, farms, and other cities besides Tarnisi\u2014things she heard of in Osanna's stories.\n\nFinally Pietra said in a husky voice, \"I would love to fly. To feel wind beneath my wings, to soar over the city, to see something besides the people below me and the Cathedral across the plaza\u2014that is my dream. I was not made to fly, but I wish to fly.\"\n\nA huge idea bubbled up in Sofria. \"If you fly, I can ride you and fly, too! It would be wonderful. Far above the stinking gutter, and the boys that splash me or steal my coins.\"\n\n\"If you imagine us flying, we can fly.\"\n\nOf course that was true. But before Sofria could try to imagine flying, a crowd of boys ran past and she had to sweep her cup under her skirts to keep them from kicking it over. Then two women in bright-colored gowns bustled past, dropping coins into the cup she had just replaced near her feet, without even looking at her.\n\nThe sun disappeared behind the Guild Hall and Papa Matteo was coming across the plaza toward her, so Sofria shoved the last of the bread the pigeon man had given her into her mouth. It was gone by the time Papa Matteo strode over, looked down at Sofria's cup, and grunted.\n\n\"You did well today, girl,\" Papa Matteo said. He emptied Sofria's cup into his pocket, handed it to her, then bent to pick her up.\n\nThat night, supper was stale bread and a few vegetables floating in broth that might once have had meat in it, before it was served to the children. After supper, Papa Matteo sent the children to bed. Sofria lay on her straw pallet listening to the other three girls breathing. She tried to imagine how Pietra would fly. The dragon had a round, wide body, and the smooth, ribbed wings grew from its shoulders. Yesterday she had imagined it lifting those wings, spreading them a little bit. If Pietra spread its wings all the way, they would each be as long as its body. Sofria had watched pigeons hopping about on the plaza, spreading and flapping their wings. Pietra's wings had no feathers. How would that change how it flew?\n\nPigeons fluttered about a lot. Sofria couldn't imagine Pietra fluttering. Those sleek wings would rise and fall smoothly, quietly, without all the bother that pigeons made. She imagined Pietra flexing its clawed toes, the ones clutching the roof so tightly. Little by little the tight hold it had on the roof loosened. It spread its wings wide in the night. Sofria imagined the stars shining down, and maybe moonlight\u2014though she couldn't see moonlight, for she slept in a cellar room with no windows. With a push of its strong legs, Pietra released its hold on the roof of the Guild Hall.\n\nPietra's wings spread even wider as they caught the air. Although its body was round, and made of stone, it wasn't fat or heavy. Somehow Sofria knew that. Its wings held it up easily. Could it hold her, too, if she sat on its back? She didn't weigh much.\n\nStrong wings flapped slowly, and Pietra circled over the plaza. Lights shone from Cathedral windows below. Pietra turned, then flew in a straight line toward where more lights blazed, farther away in the city. Was that the Duke's Palace? The dragon flew without making a sound, the long wings only flapping enough to keep Pietra aloft. When it reached the lights, it circled, watching people in fabulous costumes dancing in a courtyard below.\n\nSince Pietra had never used its wings before, it was getting tired. It swooped back toward the Guild Hall and dropped quietly to the roof. Its strong back claws gripped the edge, it folded its wings, and once more became a motionless monster looming over the plaza in the center of Tarnisi."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "A drizzle met Sofria when Papa Matteo carried her out of the lodgings the next morning. The cobbles were already wet when he set her down next to the gutter outside the Guild Hall. There wasn't enough rain yet for water to pour from Pietra's mouth, but occasional drips into the gutter splashed stinking water onto the cobbles. Sofria pulled the rag over her head and sighed. Today would not be as good as yesterday.\n\nShe huddled close to the Guild Hall's stone wall to keep from getting splashed by people hurrying past, and looked up at Pietra far above her. \"Did you enjoy flying last night, Pietra?\" she imagined herself saying to the dragon.\n\n\"Yes, yes!\" came Pietra's joyful reply. \"It is better than I ever imagined! To see more of the city than just the Cathedral, to move on my own, to be free of the Guild Hall's roof. Thank you, Sofria.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you are happy,\" Sofria said. She paused a moment, biting her lower lip, then said, \"Do you think I might fly with you some time?\"\n\n\"I'm sure you could,\" said Pietra. \"You are small and I am large, and my wings are very strong.\"\n\n\"But what if someone saw us?\"\n\n\"Do you want them to see us?\"\n\n\"No! This should be a secret. Everyone would point and stare. 'See the stone monster from the roof flying about the city!' they would call, and the city guard would no doubt shoot arrows at us.\" The idea of all those people staring at her frightened Sofria. She didn't mind people stopping and talking to her, in her place against the Guild Hall's wall. But having them all stare at her as she did something they had never seen before\u2014no, that would be too scary.\n\n\"If you don't want them to see us, they won't see us,\" said Pietra, and Sofria knew it was true. This was her imagining, things she didn't want to happen would not.\n\n\"When can we fly?\" she asked Pietra. \"I don't think I can get out at night. Papa Matteo locks the cellar door.\"\n\n\"Right now would be good. No one is paying attention to you, so they won't notice if you're gone. Who would look up at the roof in the rain to see that I'm not there?\"\n\n\"Right now?\" Sofria took a deep breath, and her heart started pounding with excitement.\n\n\"Right now.\" Pietra slowly spread its smooth, ribbed wings, then pulled first one, then the other clawed back foot from the roof. It swooped downward, circling the plaza, and came to rest on the cobbles in front of Sofria.\n\nSofria could hardly breathe, her heart was beating so fast. She reached out to touch one of Pietra's feet. This close up she saw webbing between the claws. The dragon spread one of its wings over her head to shield her from the rain.\n\n\"How do I get onto your back? I can't stand on my own.\" Had she been able to stand, she might be able to reach over Pietra's back and pull herself up.\n\n\"Crawl onto my foot,\" Pietra said. The dragon flattened itself to the ground, and when Sofria dragged herself onto its foot, she found herself lifted toward its back.\n\n\"Grab the base of my wing and pull yourself up on my neck.\"\n\n\"Will it hurt you?\" Sofria asked breathlessly.\n\n\"I'm made of stone. You cannot hurt me.\"\n\nWith arms strengthened from dragging herself everywhere she wasn't carried, Sofria grabbed Pietra's wing and pulled herself onto the dragon's neck. It took her some time to arrange her legs astride the dragon, as she could only move them with her hands. But finally she sat atop Pietra, just in front of its wings.\n\n\"Lean forward and grasp my neck. I don't want you to fall.\"\n\nSofria leaned forward and put her chin on the top of Pietra's head, between its eyes, and wrapped her arms around its neck. It didn't feel like stone, but smooth, warm skin. She was shaking with excitement, but trying to take in every detail of the moment.\n\n\"Ready?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\nPietra pushed upward with strong legs, and began to beat its wings. With every beat, Sofria and the dragon rose above the plaza. Soon they were higher than the top of the fountain, then higher than the statues atop the Cathedral's great doors. When Sofria realized she could see the roof of the Cathedral itself she wanted to shout, 'We're flying!' but it came out in a shaky whisper. \"We're flying.\"\n\nRain misted around them, and Pietra said, \"I don't want to fly much higher, or we'll end up in the middle of a cloud.\"\n\n\"A cloud! You can fly into a cloud?\" She had never imagined such a thing before.\n\n\"I can, but we don't want to. It's cold and wet, and I can't see anything.\"\n\n\"Have you been in a cloud before?\"\n\n\"When clouds settle low over the plaza, I've sometimes been inside one for hours. I don't find it exciting.\"\n\nPietra circled over the plaza one more time, so Sofria, peeking over its shoulder, could see how tiny the people below looked. Then it flew in the direction it had gone last night.\n\n\"Is that the Duke's Palace?\" Sofria asked, as they flew over a building much larger than most in the city, with towers and porticos and many windows. Last night its courtyard had been lit up and glittering with people in colorful clothing. This morning it was empty and wet.\n\n\"Yes. It is one of the most beautiful buildings in the city\u2014besides the Cathedral, of course.\"\n\nIt seemed to Sofria that the dragon's wings were beating slower. \"Are you getting tired?\"\n\n\"I haven't used my wings in all the years since I was made. Until I strengthen them, short flights like this are all we can make.\" Pietra lifted a wingtip to turn and Sofria watched people, carriages, and horses, like tiny dolls, in the streets below them.\n\nThere was bustle and activity at the edge of the city, though she couldn't see much besides movement. \"What's over there?\" she asked Pietra.\n\n\"I don't know. We'll have to explore that another day.\"\n\nBack at the plaza Pietra waited, flapping its great wings, for people to move away from where Sofria usually sat. Then it settled to the ground with hardly a bump, but the wind from its wings blew hats off men halfway across the plaza.\n\nSofria slid from Pietra's back, then crawled back to where her now thoroughly soaked piece of sacking still lay on the cobbles against the side of the Guild Hall. \"Thank you, Pietra,\" she said. \"That was the best thing I've ever done.\"\n\nPietra turned its head, smiled at her in a wide-mouthed grin that\u2014rather to Sofria's surprise\u2014revealed no sharp fangs, and said softly, \"I am always ready to help you, Sofria.\" Then it hopped into the air and flew back to its place on the edge of the Guild Hall's roof.\n\nFor the rest of the day, Sofria hardly noticed if it rained or the sun shone. She re-lived the pictures of Tarnisi from the sky over and over, reveling in soaring above the city she had seen so little of in her life. When Papa Matteo came to pick her up, she was so quiet that he said sharply, \"Are you getting sick? I can't support a useless beggar in my household.\"\n\n\"No,\" Sofria said dreamily. \"Just tired. It was cold today, and I shivered a lot.\" She was used to telling lies like this to Papa Matteo.\n\nHe rattled the coins as he poured them from her cup. \"You got enough coins. Good. You can warm up at the lodgings.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "A few days later it was sunny in the morning, but then clouds blew in and rain started misting down. \"Can we fly again?\" Sofria asked Pietra, looking up at it on the edge of the roof. \"What happens if you are not here to 'fulfill your function' and gather water from the roof?\"\n\nShe imagined she saw Pietra's shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. \"My fellows on the other corners will have to drain more water. I'll be back before anyone notices I'm not there, unless it rains very hard, and I don't think you will want to be flying through that much rain.\"\n\n\"You're right.\"\n\nPietra dropped to the cobbles near Sofria and she pushed her battered cup, which already held two coins, into the pocket tied around her waist under her skirt\u2014and felt the red ribbon the kind woman had given her. She crawled across the ground to Pietra and onto its foot. It was difficult to pull herself up onto the dragon's back. \"Would it hurt you if I tied something around your neck to help me climb up?\" she asked once she had settled in front of its wings.\n\n\"As I told you before, I am made of stone. You can't hurt me.\"\n\nSofria took the ribbon from her pocket and looped it around the dragon's wide neck. It was barely long enough. She tied a good tight knot. That should do. She held on as Pietra hopped into the air, wings spread. This way she didn't have to sprawl over Pietra's head, holding onto its neck. She could see more when she sat up straighter.\n\nPietra flew toward the edge of Tarnisi, where they had seen so much bustle two days before. It was even busier today. She thought of how an ant hill between two cobblestones had looked when a boy kicked it and the ants swarmed everywhere. People ran about, setting up booths rather like the one for the puppet show. There were horses and wagons, people carrying great bundles and boxes, and so many other things Sofria nearly fell off Pietra's back trying to see it all. \"What is this?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's the fair,\" Pietra said. \"People come to Tarnisi from all around to buy and sell. It lasts for two weeks, and is one of the most exciting times of the year for the city.\"\n\nSofria had heard of the fair before. Papa Matteo sent all the other children there to pick pockets, but he never took her. The others brought in so much during fair time that Papa Matteo never seemed to mind much when her cup was nearly empty.\n\n\"There are acrobats!\" she cried. \"And jugglers! How I would like to go to the fair.\"\n\n\"You had best not,\" Pietra said with sadness in its voice. \"There are so many people that we would certainly be seen.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Sofria was disappointed, but she was used to not getting what she wanted. \"Maybe when I'm older.\"\n\nPietra soared on past the fair, to where the muddy pasture land ended and something dense, green, and mysterious began. \"What's that?\" asked Sofria.\n\n\"The forest,\" the dragon said, swooping lower so she could see it more clearly. \"Many, many trees. Animals live there, and birds. Tarnisi gets much of its wood from this forest.\"\n\nSofria had heard of forests before, in Osanna's stories. There were magical creatures who could grant wishes or steal everything you owned. There were dangerous people and talking animals. The forest sounded as interesting as the fair.\n\n\"Can we land so I can see what it's like from the ground?\" asked Sofria. \"All I see now are leaves, waving in the wind and covered in raindrops.\"\n\n\"That sounds safer than the fair,\" said Pietra, and angled lower in the sky. It found a clearing in the trees and set down neatly, not catching its wings on any of the trees' branches.\n\nImmediately Sofria found wildflowers growing in the clearing, and looked up to see a bird\u2014not a pigeon!\u2014watching her from a branch. \"This is better than the fair,\" she told Pietra. \"There everyone would stare and think of me as the crippled beggar. Here... I can be whatever I think of!\"\n\nPietra chuckled, a gruff sound from its stone throat. It hopped toward the trees, where Sofria heard a sound like the fountain in the plaza's center. But this was no fountain. Water ran along the ground, then gathered into the biggest puddle she had ever seen. There were little animals beside the puddle.\n\n\"What are those?\" she asked Pietra.\n\nThe dragon put its head down slightly to look at them, and Sofria leaned past its eyes to see better. The animals were small greenish creatures with big mouths and eyes. When Pietra's shadow fell over them, they hopped into the water.\n\n\"Sofria, those are... those are my kin.\" Its voice sounded strange.\n\n\"Dragons?\" Sofria asked, astonished. \"I always thought they were much bigger, like you.\"\n\nPietra shook its head from side to side, nearly dumping Sofria on the ground. \"No, these are frogs.\"\n\nThere were frogs in some of Osanna's stories. Something magical always seemed to happen to frogs. \"Did a witch make you into a dragon?\"\n\n\"No, I was made to look like a frog. A frog with wings, like no natural frog has.\"\n\nSofria thought about that. \"Do other dragons look different from you?\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"The monsters on the Guild Hall and the Cathedral all look different, so if they are all dragons, that makes sense.\" She paused, then added, \"But you are the best dragon of all, Pietra.\"\n\nIt rumbled something shyly at her, then said in a sharp whisper, \"Someone's coming. Stay perfectly still, and don't make any noise.\" Pietra crouched, staring at two trees on the other side of the clearing.\n\nThree men leading a donkey appeared from between the trees. The donkey was piled high with bundles, all tied together so they wouldn't fall off the donkey's back. Sofria wondered if they were making their way to the fair and became lost. They crossed the clearing, stepped over a fallen log near where Pietra crouched, and then disappeared into the forest again.\n\nPietra didn't move, so Sofria remained quiet, though her mind was full of questions. Why was Pietra so concerned? Who were the men? After what seemed a very long wait, Pietra finally said, \"Those are thieves. All those bundles on the donkey were stolen from merchants on their way to the fair.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Sofria whispered.\n\n\"I have watched thieves from my perch on the roof for many years. I... know how they act, how they move.\"\n\n\"What should we do?\"\n\n\"Follow them,\" said Pietra. \"Find out what they're doing with their takings.\"\n\n\"An adventure!\" breathed Sofria. Osanna told stories about adventures. Sofria had never thought she might have one.\n\nSofria didn't ask Pietra how it knew where the thieves were going. She just sat on its back, holding onto the ribbon around its neck so she wouldn't fall off when it hopped. When they came to a tumbledown little house in another clearing, Pietra stopped in the shelter of the trees. The donkey was tethered outside the house, but the men were not with it. \"The thieves are in that hut,\" Pietra whispered. \"Stay perfectly quiet, and don't move.\"\n\nSofria slumped down between Pietra's eyes, staring at the hut. She could hear voices and movement. She wanted to ask Pietra what it thought the thieves were doing, but it had said 'stay perfectly quiet,' so she said nothing.\n\nA thumping sound, more talking, then the splintered door swung open and the three men she had seen before came out. They were arguing. \"And I tell you again that we can't sell it now, with the fair here. Everyone would know where we got it,\" said a stocky gray-haired man.\n\n\"Just a few things, so I've got coin to spend at the fair,\" wheedled the youngest man, with tangled dark hair and a face smudged with dirt.\n\n\"Leono says no, we don't do it,\" said the third man, medium sized and wearing a stained smock. \"Move on out now, let's get home so no one knows we been here.\"\n\nThe youngest man, his mouth pursed obstinately, led the donkey off and the oldest pushed the door shut behind them.\n\nAfter waiting quietly for the thieves to get some distance away, Pietra hopped over to the door. It shot out its tongue, grabbed the door, and pulled it open.\n\n\"That's a good trick,\" Sofria told the dragon.\n\nOne of the hut's walls had collapsed inward, and there were gaping holes in its roof. The floor was dirt, now quite muddy and churned up.\n\n\"They didn't do a very good job of hiding their takings,\" said Pietra.\n\nSofria looked around, but couldn't see the bundles from the donkey anywhere in the tumbledown hut. She was about to ask Pietra what it meant when it hopped over to where the wall had collapsed into the hut. With its tongue, it lifted the piece of wall, made of sticks with straw and dried mud flaking out from between them, enough to show Sofria a pit hidden beneath it.\n\n\"There's more here than they brought in just now,\" said Pietra. It carefully pushed the crumbling wall up until it stood propped against one of the remaining walls. \"Look there.\"\n\nThe hole was lined with coarse cloth so the bags of goods wouldn't get dirty. There were bundles of clothing, rolls of cloth, pots, and wooden plates. Sofria saw a green shawl and thought of the woman who had given her the ribbon. Wouldn't it be lovely to exchange that tattered old shawl with this bright new one? And that roll of cloth. There should be enough there for clothing for all Betani's children.\n\n\"Can we take some of it?\" Sofria asked. \"I want to give it to people who have helped me.\"\n\n\"Don't you want anything?\"\n\n\"Papa Matteo would notice and take it away to sell.\"\n\nWith Sofria directing, Pietra hooked the cloth, the shawl, and a man's cap from the pit with its tongue. It flipped the goods back up over its head to Sofria, who arranged them carefully along the dragon's neck so nothing would fall when they flew. Then it carefully replaced the fallen wall the way the men had left it, and went back outside.\n\nThe rain had stopped, and Sofria worried that she wouldn't get back to her place in the plaza in time to collect more coins. She didn't want her day of adventure to end with a beating from Papa Matteo. They were over the city before she wondered how she would get her gifts to the women\u2014and the cap to the man who had been feeding the pigeons.\n\n\"I can't keep these things with me,\" she told Pietra, gazing down at the people in all their colorful clothing crowding the streets now that the sun had come out. \"Papa Matteo will take them.\"\n\n\"I'll get them to the proper people.\" Pietra circled over the Duke's Palace, then followed the street to the Cathedral plaza.\n\n\"How do you know where to take them?\"\n\n\"I see and hear much, up there on the Guild Hall's roof.\"\n\nWhen Sofria slid from Pietra's back to the cobbles in front of the Guild Hall, she left the shawl, the bolt of cloth, and the cap behind. Once Pietra had returned to its place, she could see the cloth, one edge flapping gently in the breeze, still draped across Pietra's neck.\n\nThat night, lying on her mat with the other girls, Sofria imagined Pietra flying across the city. The dragon found the lodgings where Betani and her children lived, eased their door open with its tongue, and set the bolt of fabric inside. The old woman who had given the ribbon to Sofria lived in an upper room, and she slept so close to her open window that Pietra could spread the shawl across her. The man who fed the pigeons was a baker, and Pietra left the new cap on the counter in his shop.\n\nWhen the fair opened, the city became a different place. The plaza was quieter; most people, including the storyteller and the puppet show, were at the fair. The old woman with her new green shawl brought Sofria a bit of cheese, and Betani stopped by every evening after she delivered the laundry she had washed, to tell Sofria of what she had seen at the fair in the few moments she had been able to attend.\n\nSofria and Pietra flew over the city every day, but for very short flights. They circled the fair to watch acrobats and jugglers, see the strangely-dressed merchants from all across the land, and listen to the music wafting up from far below.\n\n\"There are farms, towns, and cities beyond Tarnisi that we can visit when we have more time.\" Pietra circled the fair once again and veered off to go back to the plaza.\n\n\"I'll need a warm shawl if we do that,\" said Sofria. \"It gets cold high in the sky, especially when it's raining.\"\n\n\"We could go back to the thieves' hoard. There should be something warm there.\"\n\nThe next day when rain started misting down Sofria and Pietra flew to the tumbledown hut in the forest. They landed in the clearing just as the young man with the tangled dark hair came out of the forest whistling, with an axe over his shoulder. He nearly fell over backward when he saw Pietra. \"A demon from hell!\" he screamed, and swung his axe at the dragon.\n\nPietra hopped backward, raising its wings to keep them out of the way of the axe. Sofria held on tight to the ribbon around the dragon's neck, thinking, Why can that man see us? But when she was imagining people not seeing them, it had been crowds of people, the people in the city. Whatever it was that made people not see Pietra once it left the roof of the Guild Hall, it must not work here. Or she had been careless. The other children at Papa Matteo's lodgings teased Sofria about being careless.\n\nThe young man ran at them again, swinging the axe. Its wicked sharp edge caught Pietra's wing tip, and a piece shattered off.\n\nPietra tried to hop into the air, but it had backed too far into the forest, and its wings caught in the branches above them. The dragon shook itself, and Sofria lost hold of the ribbon about its neck. She slid to the ground near a tree's trunk and her hair tangled in bushes growing at its base.\n\nJust as the axe came down again, Pietra hopped forward, so the side of the axe's head bounced off its rounded shoulder. Sofria yanked her hair free from the branches and began crawling, making sure she was not in Pietra's path as it hopped out of the way of the axe.\n\nA branch she grasped to pull herself along came free of the leaves and twigs littering the forest floor. It was twice as long as her forearm and rather stout, so she held onto it as she awkwardly pulled herself forward.\n\nShe could not fight the young man\u2014he moved fast, and she couldn't even stand up. But the heroes in Osanna's stories often used trickery. The next time the man lunged toward Pietra, Sofria shoved the branch in between his feet, tripping him. The axe flew from the man's hands as he flung his arms out to catch himself, and the blade came down right between Pietra's bulging eyes.\n\nWhile the man was down, Sofria dragged herself quickly to him, and rolled to one side so she could prop herself up on an elbow. With the branch in the other hand, she smashed its knobby end down on his head. He moaned and twitched, then lay still. Had she killed him? She did not want to kill him, but he was attacking Pietra.\n\nSofria used the branch to push herself to a sitting position and turned to look at Pietra. The axe had hit the dragon in the middle of its head and shattered it. Pietra's wide mouth and eyes were in pieces on the ground, with the axe lying atop them.\n\n\"Pietra!\" Sofria screamed. She crawled forward, pulling herself up on one of its webbed feet, and touched the side of its neck. It no longer felt like soft, warm skin\u2014it was stone, cold stone, a headless body of a monster crouched in the forest. Sofria sobbed, leaning against a stone knee, all her hopes of adventure shattered along with her only friend.\n\nThe sun breaking through the clouds reminded her that she had no way to get back to the city. She could die out here in the forest. There was no way for her to get food, and it would take days to crawl as far as the edge of the fair. There were blankets and clothing\u2014maybe even food\u2014in the hoard of stolen goods in the hut behind her, but without Pietra to lift the fallen piece of wall, she could not get to them. If the thief she had hit woke up to find her here, he would probably kill her. She should leave quickly, as he was starting to groan.\n\nThe red ribbon was still tied around Pietra's neck. It was rather grubby by now, and even more frayed than when Sofria had received it, but it might be her only link with Pietra now. She untied it, and was about to put it into her pocket, when she decided that she wanted Pietra to have it after all. She started searching through the grass, picking up pieces of Pietra's head and finding where they fit, with the thought that maybe she could hold them together with the ribbon. All the while her memories of the many times she had talked to Pietra, and flown on its back, played through her head.\n\nShe got Pietra's head re-assembled, though there were still small pieces of stone missing, powdered into the grass beneath the dragon. She wound the ribbon around its jaw, trying to hold the wide mouth together, keep the bulging eyes from slipping downward. She ran her fingers along the cracks, smoothing them.\n\nThe young man groaned louder and struggled to push himself to a sitting position. Sofria crouched low behind Pietra's body so the man couldn't see her. He put a hand up to run through his hair, where he probably had a knot the size of a goose's egg, and opened his eyes. He looked straight into Pietra's shattered face.\n\nWith a terrified scream, the man wavered to his feet and stumbled off into the forest, leaving his axe behind. Would he bring his companions back? She did not want to stay here long enough to find out.\n\nSofria turned to say goodbye to Pietra. She reached out to touch its shattered face and saw that the break lines were closing up, almost as if they healed.\n\n\"Pietra,\" she whispered. She ran her fingers along the breaks, feeling them smooth out and fill in. Moments later Pietra's wings began to twitch, and then the dragon shuddered and blinked its eyes. Sofria had never noticed before that the eyelids moved up when its eyes closed.\n\n\"Pietra!\" She flung her arms around the dragon's neck and began sobbing again, in relief and joy this time. One of its wings came down to shelter her until she sat up and wiped her face on her sleeve.\n\n\"Hmmmphg.\" Tears turned to giggles as Sofria realized she had bound Pietra's mouth shut. She untied the ribbon and the dragon opened and closed its mouth, blinked a few times, and then cautiously shook its head. \"Sofria, what happened? I felt myself shatter.\"\n\n\"That man hit you with his axe. Then I hit him with a stick, and when he woke up he ran away.\"\n\n\"But how did I...?\" Pietra tilted its head sideways, lifted its front legs and looked at its feet. Then it peered up toward its wings, spreading them to their fullest span. \"I am whole. I am not shattered.\"\n\n\"You were, but... I think this ribbon is magical, Pietra! When I tied it around your head, it put all the pieces back together.\"\n\nPietra laughed\u2014a shaky laugh, but with a note of the booming amusement it had shared with her when she asked if it was a dragon. \"That would be the way it worked in one of Osanna's stories.\"\n\nHearing Osanna's name reminded Sofria that she must get back to the city. The sun moved westward, and she had no coins for Papa Matteo today. \"We should go back,\" she said.\n\n\"We came to get you a shawl, and that we shall do.\" Pietra hopped to the hut's door and pulled it open. It took but a moment to prop the broken wall up, and then Pietra did something Sofria had not expected. With tongue and front legs it gathered up the heavy cloth lining the pit into a great bag, which it pulled out of the hole. \"See if there is rope in here,\" it directed Sofria. She pawed through the bundles and packages until she found one tied with rope. She untied it, dumping the contents of the bundle in with everything else without even looking at it.\n\n\"Now find yourself a shawl.\" She had seen one\u2014a pretty blue one, with beads at the hem\u2014and quickly found it and draped it over her shoulders. Pietra bunched the top of the cloth together again. \"Take this rope and tie up the top good and tight, so I can carry this big bundle with my feet.\"\n\nShe did that, weaving the rope through holes she found in the cloth and knotting it tightly. Then she tied the ribbon around Pietra's neck again. It dragged the big bag of goods from the hut, leaving the wall propped up and the door open.\n\n\"Let's fly!\" said Pietra. Sofria pulled herself onto its back and held onto the ribbon as it pushed upward with its strong hind legs. Between its front feet it held the bundle.\n\nSofria leaned over Pietra's head, between its eyes, and looked down at the forest below them. She stroked the soft skin that did not feel like stone. All there were to show for the dragon being shattered were some thin lines, like scars, across its face.\n\nAt the edge of the forest Pietra found a great tree, taller than its neighbors, and hung the bundle from a high branch, close to the trunk so it couldn't easily be seen. Then the dragon glided across the city toward the plaza.\n\nRemembering how the young man had seen them, Sofria thought very hard about not being seen as they flew over shops and houses, the Duke's Palace, and a church not nearly as fancy as the Cathedral. Sofria slipped from Pietra's back at her usual place on the plaza as the sun sank behind the Guild Hall.\n\nShe had just pulled her cup from the pocket under her skirt when she saw Papa Matteo across the plaza near the Cathedral steps, talking to a man. When she lifted her arm to run her fingers through her hair, tangled from branches and flying, she remembered the pretty blue shawl over her shoulders. There was no time to hide it. Papa Matteo turned, saw her, and strode across the plaza toward her.\n\n\"Where have you been, girl?\" he bellowed.\n\nAll thought fled from Sofria's mind. He had come to the plaza before she got back with Pietra. He knew she had not been in her place. What could she tell him? \"I had to pee,\" she blurted.\n\n\"I would have seen you if you were at the gutter.\" Papa Matteo stood over Sofria, tapping a stick he held in his right hand against his left fist. His gaze moved up and down her body, then he reached out with the stick to lift the shawl from her shoulders. \"And where did you get this?\"\n\n\"It was a gift.\"\n\n\"Why would anyone give you a gift? You're a broken, worthless piece of trash.\"\n\n\"I am not worthless.\" The caution that usually kept her silent had left her today. \"I bring in coins for you every day. What do I get for that? Many times you don't even feed me, and you beat me for things that aren't even my fault.\"\n\n\"Don't sass me.\" Papa Matteo raised the stick.\n\nSofria lunged for the stick. Caught off guard, Papa Matteo wasn't holding it tightly, and she wrenched it from his hand. Remembering the man in the forest, how she had hit his head, she brought the stick down with all her strength on Papa Matteo's right arm. He howled and cursed when it hit, and seized the stick with his left hand and pulled it away from her. Though not regretting what she had done, Sofria cowered, hoping he wouldn't hit as hard using the left hand.\n\n\"You worthless beast!\" he screamed. \"I don't need you. No one needs you.\" He lifted the stick again... and it was seized from behind and pulled away from him a second time.\n\n\"Leave that child alone!\" Betani stood there, holding the stick out of Papa Matteo's reach. Behind her crowded many more people, all of them glaring at Papa Matteo.\n\nA huge argument began, with people shouting, and Papa Matteo cursing. Sofria sat up straighter, listening as Betani told Papa Matteo that he had no claim on Sofria, and she wouldn't allow the child to live another day with such a bully. With the crowd booing him, Papa Matteo strode off across the plaza, holding his right arm close against his chest.\n\n\"Thank you for watching out for me,\" Sofria said to Betani, her voice shaking more than she had thought it would.\n\n\"I never liked the looks of that man,\" the stout woman said. \"I was sure he beat you.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Sofria found she was shaking all over. Papa Matteo was gone, but now what would she do? Could she live in the forest, and have Pietra bring her food?\n\nMost of the crowd had left now, laughing at how they had got the better of Papa Matteo. Betani turned toward the fountain, and Sofria saw that the woman's three children sat there, probably to keep them safe if there was fighting. Betani waved at them to come, and they did.\n\nErcoli, the boy, pulled a little wagon behind him. The youngest girl was riding in it, but when they reached Sofria, the child hopped out. \"I washed every scrap of clothing and linen in my neighbor's house,\" said Betani, \"and he built this for me. Do you like it, Sofria?\"\n\nThere was a cushion in the bottom, made of some of the cloth Sofria and Pietra had left at Betani's house. \"May I?\" Betani asked. Sofria wasn't sure what she meant, until she reached toward Sofria, and the girl realized Betani wanted to lift her into the wagon.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Sofria, breathing quickly, excited and scared both at once.\n\nWhen she was settled in the wagon to Betani's satisfaction, the woman said, \"Would you like to live with us? We don't have a lot, but it sounds like it's more than you are used to.\"\n\n\"Live... with you? I think I would like that. I can pay my way. You can bring me out here every day, same as Papa Matteo did.\"\n\n\"No more begging,\" said Betani. \"I'm sure there are other things you can do. Can you sew?\"\n\n\"No, I never learned how. I don't know anything except begging.\"\n\n\"Well, no time like now to learn.\" Betani tugged on the wagon's rope, and it began bumping over the cobblestones of the plaza.\n\nSofria turned to look at Pietra, clinging to the roof of the Guild Hall. It lifted a wing, as if to wave to her, and tears filled her eyes. Would she be able to have adventures with Pietra again? \"When I'm old enough, I'll come back for you, Pietra, and we will travel the world.\"\n\n\"I am made of stone. I will be here for you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Osanna the storyteller sat on the rim of the fountain, her back to the Cathedral, waiting as children gathered at her feet. Something caught her attention\u2014something fluttering in the breeze, high above her head, She looked to the top of the Guild Hall to see something bright, perhaps a ribbon, about the neck of the nearest gargoyle. How\u2014and why\u2014had anyone climbed that high to tie a ribbon on one of the great stone statues? That was a story she would someday like to tell.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lullaby by John D. Payne ]\n\nAs plaintive cries from the nursery chamber intruded on the unconscious bliss of slumber, I curled up in a ball, wrapped my wings more tightly around myself, and squeezed my eyes shut. \"Go back to sleep,\" I whispered to myself. And to the children.\n\nNo good. Their voices kept rising, both in pitch and in volume, until the shrieks stabbed their way into my skull and banished sleep completely. Maybe permanently. With a heavy sigh, I gathered the strength to heave myself up and out of bed.\n\n\"Sweetheart,\" Sam asked, \"why do you do this to yourself?\" He had the uncanny ability to jump in an instant from deep sleep to coherent conversation. It was perhaps the second worst thing about him.\n\n\"Unngggh,\" I replied. Well put, I told myself. You truly are a gifted communicator. A real wordsmith.\n\n\"Just let them cry,\" Sam said. In the darkness, I could hear him shifting his weight to prop himself up, accompanied by the ringing, watery tinkle of precious metals and jewels being displaced by his movements. At this sound, the cries from the children grew louder. More heart-wrenching. More insistent.\n\n\"I'm coming, I'm coming,\" I grumbled. I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Poor things. They didn't mean to wake me. They didn't know, couldn't know. They were so small, so helpless.\n\n\"It won't kill them to wait,\" Sam said. I couldn't really see him, but I could sense him lying close to me in the darkness. His recumbent form was the one source of warmth in the otherwise frigid sleeping chamber.\n\n\"It might kill me.\" It ought to get easier to ignore their crying when I was more tired myself. But if anything, exhaustion made it worse. At this point, as sleep deprived as I was, it was a special kind of torture. It must have been, or I never would have considered getting out of my warm bed and onto the cold floor.\n\nOur chambers should have been warm, since they were built into the side of a fire mount that still had a few active lava tubes. But we had given the warmest room to the children. It was the right decision, but it meant that my floors were always cold. That annoyed me.\n\nI stoked this spark of annoyance until the flames in my belly grew bright and hot. Then I opened my mouth and uncorked a spray of fire on the floor until the stones gave off a dull, red glow. There. Much better. I got out of bed and put my feet down, and enjoyed the warmth.\n\nSam shook his head. \"We've talked about this. Every time we get up\u2013\"\n\n\"Every time I get up.\"\n\n\"Hey, now. You know that's not fair.\"\n\nMy head whipped around and in an instant I was facing him on all fours, wings spread and tail lashing from side to side. In the faint but growing glower, the light tinged an angry red by its journey outward through my flesh and my scales, I could see him lift his forelimbs in surrender.\n\n\"Fine.\" He rolled his eyes. \"Every time you get up\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I murmured, my belly fires slowly cooling.\n\n\"\u2014it reinforces the pattern. Behavior rewarded is behavior repeated.\" He took a deep breath. \"I'm sorry, sweetheart. But there's only one way out of this cycle, and at some point we're going to have to grit our teeth and do it.\"\n\nI considered that for a moment, but renewed cries from the next chamber interrupted my train of thought.\n\n\"At some point, fine. But not now.\"\n\n\"If that's your decision,\" he said, \"then I'll go. It's my turn.\" He heaved himself upright, which set off a new cascade of gems and precious metals.\n\nI reached over and gave him a pat. \"No, I will.\"\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n\"Stay,\" I said. \"I mean it. Go back to sleep.\"\n\n\"Well, that's hardly fair to you.\"\n\n\"If you go, I'll lay awake anyway. One of us might as well get some rest.\"\n\nHe chewed on this for a moment, and then said, \"Okay. But I take the next shift.\" Then he rolled over and was instantly asleep. Which is the very, very worst thing about him.\n\nI checked the larder and found nothing that would soothe the brood. So instead of going straight to the nursery, I popped outside briefly to scoop up a few morsels. All the while, I cursed the past version of myself from the last time they woke up.\n\n\"You could have set something aside for next time,\" I muttered, feeling more than a little hungry myself. \"But no, you wanted to go back to bed. Lazy cow. Think of someone else for a change.\" My future self nodded in approval, taking my side. But my past self didn't even bother to respond. She just slept.\n\nFlying through the nearby valleys as quickly as possible, I tried to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted looking at the scenery. The children were still hungry and crying, after all. But I couldn't help noticing that our pest problem was back.\n\nHumans, it looked like. Or maybe Elves. Either way, it was quite a big colony from the look of things. And it seemed like Sam had just cleared out the dratted things, but of course you never really got rid of them permanently. Like a persistent rash or a chronic cough, the infestation just kept recurring.\n\nI made a mental note to mention it to Sam when I went back to bed. He would handle it; he always did. And come back covered with scratches and bites all over, every time. Poor dear. He was so cute when he complained about his little wounds. Thinking of it brought an involuntary smile to my face and a warmth to my belly.\n\nHe really was very sweet, I thought, turning a dreamy and languorous spiral in the air. A good provider, a doting father, a fierce protector. A fine mate. And nearly my size. Well, at least three-quarters my size. Very respectable, for a male.\n\nThe warm summer breeze felt good in my wings, and I felt lighter and lither than I had in ages. Part of me yearned to climb and soar and ride the winds until I became one with them, floating like a cinder in the smoke.\n\nBut the children needed feeding. So I swooped back home, limbs and jaws laden with delectable nibblets. Sam was absent from our sleeping chamber, but I found him in the nursery. From the look of things, he had tried in vain to appease the children with the meager scraps he had been able to scrounge and now was attempting to pull rank on them, silly thing.\n\n\"I am Shamel-Shesha, the Enduring One,\" he cried, sounding more desperate than commanding, \"I rule all things from the molten core beneath to the empty void above. Please stop biting me!\"\n\nSuppressing a smile, I rushed in to Sam's aid. Murmuring to them in my most soothing tone, I pulled each of the little dears off of their father, which in most cases elicited a shriek from both parties.\n\nThe babies were, by and large, easy to mollify. They didn't have long memories. You popped something sweet in their mouths and they would latch right on and forget why they had been crying in the first place.\n\nSam was somewhat more difficult to appease. Instead of going back to bed, he just stood there rubbing his wounds and heaving pained sighs. The faint light coming up from the lava tubes left much of his face in shadow, but it wasn't hard to see that he was upset.\n\nI wanted to go to him, to take him in my arms, or at least to run my claws along his dorsal spines, the way he liked. But I was lying on the floor of the nursery, encircling the brood with my body and tail and cuddling them close with one wing. They had stopped crying, but if I put them down, we'd be right back where we started in a heartbeat.\n\nSo I gave Sam what I hoped was a sympathetic smile. \"I'm sorry, dear. They really got you good this time, didn't they?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He sucked in his breath as he craned his neck to examine a particularly nasty-looking bite under his left forelimb. \"Those little teeth. So very sharp.\"\n\n\"Well, they're at a curious age,\" I said. \"Maybe they just want to know what Daddy tastes like.\"\n\nWith my attention on Sam, one of the little ones decided to make a break for it, and attempted to wriggle free. I quickly swept her back with my free wing, which she bit.\n\n\"Mommy, too, apparently,\" he said.\n\n\"Apparently.\" I pried the scamp loose and plugged her little mouth with a half a cow's head that one of the others had dropped. Soon, she was happily (and noisily) enjoying her treat and seemed to have no more interest in escaping. \"It's a phase. They're less than a century old. They'll grow out of it.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nFor a while the only sound was the slurping and smacking and crunching of the children feeding. Very messy, of course, but also very cute.\n\nI looked up to see Sam still standing there, watching me.\n\n\"I...\" He hesitated, then threw his forelimbs up in the air. \"I thought you were going to feed them.\"\n\nWith my free wing, I gestured expansively at myself and the children, a mute answer to his accusation.\n\n\"Yeah, now you are. But I thought you were going right then to feed them. And instead, you went I don't even know where, while they just got hungrier and madder and louder. So, there I am, lying there listening to this and wondering what in the name of Alala is going on because you told me to go back to sleep because you were going to handle it. If you wanted me to take a turn, you could have just said so. I offered, if you remember.\"\n\nHe shot me an accusing glare.\n\nI glared back. \"We didn't have anything to feed them. I stepped out for literally less than two weeks to grab them something to eat.\"\n\n\"Two weeks is a really long time for them. And they don't like waiting.\"\n\n\"What should I have done instead?\"\n\n\"You could have said something. Let me know. I would have been happy to go in and entertain them while you were out.\"\n\n\"Evidently not, since that's what you did and you aren't happy.\"\n\nHe flexed his claws in frustration and exhaled a stream of bright orange flame.\n\nI shook my head, searching for the words that would help Sam see how ridiculous he was being. But before I could unleash the stinging rebuke I was carefully constructing, I noticed that the children had grown noisy again.\n\nLooking down, I realized that in my irritation I had unconsciously let my belly fires grow hot, and it was making the brood restless. Some of them were trying to climb out of the protective ring I had made with my body, others cried plaintively, and one seemed intent on chewing my wing to shreds. The whole point of coming in here was to soothe them, and instead we were stirring them up with our argument.\n\n\"Sweetheart,\" he began, sounding very, very tired.\n\n\"One moment, please,\" I said.\n\nWith some effort, I tried to calm myself and cool my temper down from a boil to a simmer. As the scales on my abdomen grew less scalding, the children once again let me draw them in close. Feeling them wriggling happily in my limbs, snuggling up tight, it was easy to let go of the anger.\n\nSam stepped closer, his neck and head hanging low and his wings dragging on the rough stone floor of the chamber in mute apology. Looking abashed, he leaned down and placed a kiss on my forehead.\n\n\"Forget I said anything,\" he said. \"Stupid of me to pick a fight.\"\n\nI lifted my head to rub the dorsal spines slowly against the sensitive skin under his chin, eliciting an involuntary shudder of pleasure and a low rumble of satisfaction. \"Don't give it another thought,\" I said. \"We're both exhausted. That always has us at each other's throats.\"\n\n\"True.\" After a pause he nipped at my neck playfully.\n\nI smiled. \"Go back to bed, dear. I'll get the children to sleep.\"\n\nHe hesitated, looking for a moment as if he were about to say something, then nodded and left.\n\n\"All right,\" I said to the children. \"Who's still hungry?\"\n\nThey all were, of course. I did my best to distribute the livestock equally, so that everyone got a nice, full tummy, but some of the brood were more aggressive and so got more than their share.\n\nIn scarcely more than a few days, all the food was gone. Most of the brood were stuffed up nice and plump, their eyes heavy and their limbs limp and languid. They hardly stirred as I lowered them back down into an inactive lava tube to sleep. There they curled up in a heap, one on top of one another, sharing their warmth as their unconscious bodies struggled to digest the massive feast.\n\nSoon, there was just one left, the littlest. Having fed poorly, she fussed and cried and would not be contented.\n\n\"Now, now,\" I said, stroking her as she writhed in my limbs. \"You're just fine. No need to cry. Everything will be just fine.\"\n\nA pang of guilt struck me as I uttered the words, because in truth I was worried about her. We both were. Sam had said that she wouldn't last long enough to get her wings. I hadn't said as much out loud, but couldn't help but share his opinion.\n\nThat's why I had already given her a name. Belinda. Bright One. She was less than half the size of her brothers and sisters, but her eyes were sharp and attentive. More than any of the others, she made me wonder how much she understood.\n\n\"I know you want more,\" I said, lifting her up to my face, \"but there is nothing left for you.\"\n\nShe stopped crying for a moment and leveled a gaze at me that was nothing short of a unspoken accusation.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Next time I'll bring more. And I'll make sure you get your share.\"\n\nScrewing up her little face, Belinda wailed in a voice that was louder than I could have believed from such a tiny creature. I held her close and jiggled her up and down lest her cries wake Sam, or the rest of the brood.\n\n\"Hush now, hush.\"\n\nAfter what seemed like years, but was certainly no more than a week, Belinda finally quieted down. But she wasn't sleeping peacefully in my arms, her face wore a look of such terrible betrayal that it absolutely broke my heart.\n\n\"All right, all right. We'll go grab something.\"\n\nHolding tiny Belinda close to my heart, I went outside to see about something to eat. I couldn't see anything right away, which was irritating because all I really wanted to do was get this little one fed so I could go back to sleep. Nursing my irritation into a flame, I burned back the vegetation creeping up the sides of our mountain and immediately spotted a crispy herd of blackened deer.\n\n\"Mmm!\" I murmured to the bundle of wiggles in my forelimbs. \"Roasty-toasty treats. Let's give them a try, shall we?\"\n\nBelinda tried the deer, and loved them. But despite her evident pleasure and my own impatient coaxing, she seemed determined to take her sweet time eating them. Not wanting to waste the time, I looked around to see if there was anything else that needed doing while I was outside.\n\nMy gaze was drawn once again to one of the pest colonies, just outside the circle of burned-back vegetation and apparently completely unscathed. Annoying, but easy to fix.\n\nI blew an experimental jet of flame at the nest, but it was made of stone and didn't combust well. So all I really did was stir things up. A whole host of the nasty critters came boiling out of every crack and crevice, many of them headed straight for me.\n\n\"Oh, no, you don't.\" I put my foot down and squashed several of the ugly things flat. \"No itchy bites or scratches for me, thank you.\"\n\nThis made little impression on them, so after a few more desultory stomps, I decided to let Sam handle this once he was up. Suppressing a yawn, I scooped up Belinda along with the rest of the charred herd of deer, and headed back inside.\n\nCradled in my forelimbs, she was asleep before we got back to the nursery chamber. Asleep, and adorable. A delicate little baby snore whispered out of her slightly-parted mouth. Her long tail drooped, the tip occasionally twitching. And somehow the most adorable thing of all was her grotesquely swollen belly\u2013 her skin stretched, her scales straining to contain a meal that probably doubled her mass.\n\n\"Aw. You finally got a good meal, didn't you?\" I stroked her little nose, and the ghost of a smile flitted across her face. \"That's all you needed. Just a tummy full of yummy food, and now we can all have a good rest.\"\n\nI stooped to lay her down amid her siblings, and she instantly awoke, crying lustily.\n\nOf course.\n\nI sank down to the floor of the nursery chamber. And maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but I felt like having a bit of a cry myself. I'd been up for weeks now\u2013 maybe months. It had been nearly a century since I got a decent sleep. Why had I sent Sam back to bed?\n\n\"All right,\" I told Belinda, jiggling her up and down. \"You're as tired as I am. So why are you still awake? What's wrong? You're not sick. Do you want something? It can't be food. We already took care of that.\"\n\nShe slapped petulantly at me and hissed.\n\n\"What are you mad at me for? I'm trying to help, here. If I knew what you wanted, I'd give it to you. Believe me. There's nothing I'd like more. If I only knew what was going on in that little head of yours.\"\n\nShe whined and struggled, shaking her head rapidly back and forth like she had a sheep in her mouth and was trying to break its neck.\n\nI laughed. \"Or is there nothing going on at all? I mean, you're not even a century old yet. There are humans that live that long. I think. And they're certainly not intelligent.\" I sighed. \"Maybe you're so young you can't even really comprehend your own self. You don't know if you're hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy, or hurt. You're just unhappy, so you cry. That's all there is to it.\"\n\nAs if on cue, she started crying again. I got up and walked around with her, which seemed to help.\n\n\"Here am I, one who has ascended beyond the realm of the clouds, to touch the Boundless and hear the music of the stars. And what defeats me? An unhappy child.\"\n\nWait.\n\nThe music of the stars?\n\n\"Do you want to hear a song?\"\n\nInstantly she quieted, her bright eyes wide and looking right at me.\n\n\"I guess you do.\"\n\nAnd so I sang.\n\nAt first it was wordless. But at some point, I'm not even sure when, words came. I sang about a little baby named Belinda, and her mother and father who loved her. I sang about brothers and sisters, sleeping cozy and warm all together. I sang about the safety and strength of the mountain all around us.\n\nAnd then I sang about the humans. I don't know why. It was stupid. They were pests. I probably still had some stuck to the bottom of my feet. But holding this little one, this youngling, I couldn't help but think about other tiny creatures, whose lives were measured by the spastic flickering of day and night instead of the graceful, steady cycles of sunspots.\n\nI sang about a baby human, and the mother who held her and rocked her in their own little home of stone. I sang about the baby being tucked in with all the other children, resting warm and safe and quiet.\n\nFor whatever reason, it did the trick. She stopped fussing, closed her eyes, and slept. She never stirred, even when I put her down in the lava tube with her siblings and one of them rolled right on top of her. Thank goodness for small miracles.\n\nI made my way back to bed. It felt indescribably wonderful to be off my feet and lying down. There was a pleasant clinking as the piles of precious stones and metals shifted to accommodate me. Sam stirred.\n\n\"How'd it go?\"\n\n\"They're down, all of them. Hopefully that's the last disturbance.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Well, whether they sleep a long time or not, I've got next.\"\n\n\"All yours.\"\n\nHe leaned over and kissed me.\n\n\"Is there something for them to eat?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I yawned. \"Near a whole herd of deer.\"\n\n\"Good. Anything else I should know about?\"\n\n\"No, nothing.\" I turned over, wrapping my wings around myself. \"Oh, except for... Have you seen the human colonies out there?\"\n\n\"Humans? Looked like elves to me.\"\n\n\"Whichever.\"\n\n\"Already on my list. I'll get rid of them first thing.\"\n\n\"Actually, I was thinking that maybe we could leave them there. Just for a while.\"\n\n\"You want me to\u2014?\" He cut himself off and blew out a long breath. Then he shrugged. \"Whatever you say, dear. Sweet dreams.\"\n\n\"Sweet dreams.\"\n\nHe, of course, was snoring almost instantly. It really was unfair. Especially since I was wide awake, despite the peace and quiet that reigned in our chambers once more.\n\nFor some reason, my mind kept going back to our pest infestation. What would it really be like to live a life so brief? To feel yourself dying from the very moment you were born? Even if they were intelligent, how could they possibly care about each other, about their young, the way we did? Such a creature simply didn't have the time to invest in the raising of a child, especially given how fragile they all were.\n\nYet I couldn't help but think of that human mother from my song, rocking her own little babe to sleep. The image haunted me, no matter how I told myself that this was only a lullaby made up on the spot to calm a restless child.\n\nNow it was my turn to be restless, my poor, exhausted mind seizing upon disturbing impossibilities. I rolled over and thought about waking Sam for a moment, but then told myself not to be silly.\n\n\"Settle down. Go to sleep.\"\n\nI closed my eyes and listened to Sam's slow and steady breathing. After an increasingly fuzzy eternity, I at last felt myself drifting off. As sweet slumber came to claim me, two last thoughts crept in to trouble my dreams.\n\nIf humans really could sing songs to their young, what would they sound like? And if they could tell tales, what would they say\u2014about us?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Rain Like Diamonds by Wendy Nikel ]\n\nThe queen hoarded the barrels of seed, keeping them locked within her coffers among the diamonds and gold and strings of perfect pearls, remnants of the former days of prosperity and excess. The seeds would receive neither sun nor water nor nutrients from the soil until unlocked by the shining key strung around her neck. Day after day, she sat upon her throne, and the villagers lined up before her, pleading. It was only her loyal guards, with their sharp swords glimmering, who kept the villagers from severing her neck to get at that key.\n\n\"Have mercy!\" They cried as though their tears might change her mind.\n\n\"Our children need nourishment!\" They shouted as if she, too, hadn't been watching her own son grow thin and wan and dull.\n\n\"Just one barrel! One barrel will keep us alive for a few days longer!\"\n\nShe held her chin high, her eyes downcast and sorrowful. \"I cannot.\"\n\nThough it broke her heart, she spoke the truth. It was true, the meager meal would sustain them for a day or two. But that would be one less barrel to plant when the famine ended, when those that remained stood a chance.\n\nNothing had grown for many seasons, till all the people's cupboards, barns, storehouses, and cellars were empty. All that remained within them were empty jars, dust-lined shelves, and\u2014if one breathed in deeply\u2014the haunting memory of the scent of food.\n\nYet even if the queen had thrown the seeds to those standing beneath her balcony, had given the seeds to the kingdom's best farmers, it was futile. Nothing would grow, and their hunger would not be satiated. Nothing would grow until the dragon-scorched earth was healed.\n\nA messenger burst into the throne room. His gait, once like a thoroughbred's, was now the spindly stumble of one whose legs were too thin, whose ankles too prone to turn.\n\n\"My queen! The sorceress has spoken!\"\n\nThe queen rose from her throne, for this news was long-awaited. Since first the crops refused to grow, the sorceress had been locked in her tower, spending countless hours staring into her scrying pools and crystal balls, searching for an answer.\n\n\"Well? What is it?\" the queen demanded.\n\n\"You must see her, in her tower.\"\n\nThe queen climbed the spiraling stairs to the castle's dreary north tower. Though winded, she pressed on, for the task of climbing a staircase was so small compared with what her people had already suffered.\n\n\"Sorceress!\" she called as she entered the chamber. \"Sorceress! What am I to do?\"\n\nThe sorceress's voice echoed through the chamber, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. \"One shall weep at the foot of the tree, and the rain shall fall like diamonds on the earth.\"\n\nThroughout the kingdom, the queen sent the order, and on the following morning, every man, woman, and child arrived at the palace gates. The captain of the guard barked out directions, and the queen led the procession. The feeble and sick were carried or slung into carts. Their loved ones pulled them along, for throughout the entire kingdom not a single horse or donkey remained that hadn't been made into soup. The queen led the mourners from tree to tree, pausing at each one to tearfully recall those who had succumbed to the famine, until they'd traversed the entire kingdom and their eyes were as dried-out as the parched earth. Yet still, the rain refused to fall. Defeated, the queen turned away and locked herself up in the palace.\n\nThat night, the men, restless with no fields to tend, gathered at the tavern, though they'd long ago brewed the last of the hops. They muttered and grumbled against the weather, the fields, and even the queen herself.\n\n\"The dragon,\" Thummander said, raking his hand through his beard. \"The dragon was the beginning of this trouble; nothing has grown since it scorched our fields.\"\n\n\"Let's do away with it,\" Leverett said. He slammed his fist on the table. Their voices, hoarse with thirst, rose in agreement and they conspired together all night. The dragon, they agreed. There was nothing else for them to do, nothing else they could do, except to kill the dragon.\n\nThough the hour was late, the men requested an audience with the queen. They told her of their plan, and she reluctantly consented.\n\n\"It will do no good,\" she warned, but allowed them to proceed through the once-lush forest that now stood like an oversized bramble-bush, full of thorns and prickers. At least, she considered, this quest would make them feel useful.\n\nIn the inky blackness of night, with their torches burning brightly, they crept to the dragon's lair. The beast exhaled smoke with each sleeping breath, and if the villagers could only overlook its enormous size, they might have seen how the creature was really quite peaceful, like the cats that had once dozed at their hearths, before the rats had all been killed and the cats became more valuable for their meat than for their ability to hunt.\n\nThe men had disguised their scent by carrying pine branches, native to the hill near the dragon's cave. Carefully, they dropped the branches and the strongest of the men clamped an iron band snugly around the dragon's snout. The dragon woke with a start, its pupils like coals in its fiery eyes, but the men held tight to the chains and together dragged the creature down to the castle.\n\nThe villagers' triumphant cries rose with the morning sun, and golden light trickled through the brittle branches of the rosewood. The queen looked out from the balcony at the crowd below her.\n\n\"We've captured the dragon!\"\n\n\"Come, watch it die!\"\n\nThe queen felt the heat of their anger and shivered at the coldness in their voices. The enormous eye of the ensnared dragon stared at her, knowing. Yet what was she to do? She raised her scepter to give the command, but at the last moment, a small boy rushed forward and fell upon the beast. The queen gasped. It was the prince.\n\n\"Please, mother,\" he begged. \"Please, don't kill it. Will there ever be a more wonderful creature? Please, spare its life. Send it away from this place, if you must, but don't kill it. I beg you! Please, show it mercy.\"\n\nGlistening tears crept down his face and landed at the base of the tree. They darkened the soil as the roots soaked them in. The crowd stared as green life burst forth from the tree. First, tiny specks of color, then long, lush leaves spread across the tree's outstretched branches. They were so startled by the transformation that they loosened their grasp on the dragon.\n\nSeeing its only opportunity, the beast lunged forward, flapped its wings, and launched itself skyward with the prince still clinging to its back.\n\n\"My son!\" the queen called, but the dragon rose into a dark, heavy cloud. Just as they disappeared, the sky burst open and rain poured down. The crowd cheered and danced about, splashing in the puddles and laughing, seeing only the rain. They rushed to the castle and broke into the queen's coffers, but she made no move to stop them, for she saw only the final glimpse of her son, her son who had saved the kingdom. The son she'd never see again.\n\nAnd her tears fell like diamonds on the earth.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Here by Choice by Gerri Leen ]\n\nTien Shen watched as Kuan Yin lounged by the waterfall, trailing her hand back and forth through the water as she stared up at the clouds overhead. A subtle odor of lotus surrounded her, reaching him where he sat. She gleamed like an emperor's pearl, if a distressed one. She cocked her head, listening for some sound and frowning deeply.\n\n\"What do you hear?\" he asked. He heard nothing, not even with his dragon-keen ears.\n\nShe didn't answer him, so he tried to assess her mood. Her eyes glinted and for a moment, he thought he saw tears, but then she seemed to force a smile as she laid her head back onto the hard ground. But he could tell she was still listening, that not even the waterfall could drown out whatever it was that called to her.\n\n\"What is it you hear?\" he asked again.\n\nShe finally looked over.\n\n\"Everyone.\"\n\nThis was how she was. This was how she answered. As if she could not spare the breath she no longer needed. She had achieved enlightenment; Nirvana waited. Why was she wasting time lying by this river not answering him?\n\n\"You don't have to stay, dragon.\" She sounded as if she wished he'd go.\n\n\"It is my honor to guard those who will enter Nirvana.\" Although in this case, it was rather a pain as well.\n\nShe lifted her head and gave him a look that could only be considered amused\u2014at his expense. Then she lay back again and closed her eyes.\n\nHe made sure no one would threaten her before settling down some distance away, and she glanced at him, as if checking that he hadn't gotten too close. He seemed to make her unhappy, had since he'd told her he was her guide to paradise's door, but he didn't know why that distressed her. So many were striving for Nirvana; she'd achieved it, but no joy lit her face.\n\nLetting his head come to rest on the softer scales of his side, Tien Shen listened to the water. The roaring sound of the river crashing over the rocks lulled him into sleep.\n\nHe woke slowly, blinking to clear his eyes. Then he blinked again, not believing what he saw\u2014or didn't see: the woman he was supposed to protect was gone.\n\nHe closed his eyes, trying to find a trace of her with his inside-eyes. Nothing.\n\nHe listened, heard only the cry of the hawk, the grunt of the tiger, and the swish-snap of a squirrel in the underbrush.\n\nHe sniffed, breathing in the scent of evergreen; of hard, sandy soil; the blue smell of water; the hot, red odor of the pepper flowers he loved to eat. But no scent of pearls and lotus, no trace of the woman who had ridden the wheel of life until she'd earned paradise.\n\nTaking to the air through force of will, he soared, annoyed by an eagle that flew near and peered at him, as if unsure how an un-winged thing like Tien Shen could live in its world. He roared at the bird, and the eagle flew away, but not without a defiant cry.\n\n\"Kuan Yin?\" He formed the words slowly, sending them out into the world. They fell to the earth as rain, the drops merging to form the symbol for her name.\n\nShe didn't appear. She didn't call out. He still couldn't smell her. And the earth didn't give her up, didn't whisper to him that she'd been there. So he flew on.\n\nHe called for her over and over. Frogs echoed her name, but they were just playing. A deer bolted from a thicket as Tien Shen's calls grew more frantic.\n\nOne woman, ready for paradise, and he had lost her.\n\n\"Dragon,\" he heard in his inside-ears, and then he saw her with his inside-eyes. She was with a group of women who were studying a writing of a kind he'd never seen before. Curious, he settled on the ground just beyond them.\n\nOne of the women let out a little squeak, but the rest went on writing, not even looking over. The first woman stared at him, as if she could not believe what she was seeing.\n\n\"Chao Ma, pay attention to the lesson,\" Kuan Yin said softly, and the woman bowed and went back to creating the simple letters, so long and angular compared to traditional writing.\n\nTien Shen inched toward Kuan Yin, until he was right next to her, and she turned to look at him. He found he couldn't meet her eyes. But what did he have to feel guilty for? He was only trying to do what he'd been told. To see her safely to her rightful reward.\n\n\"I worried you, dragon?\" The lotus smell changed, grew spicy, and he imagined it was regret that caused it.\n\n\"You did.\" He sighed and wished he could tell what she was thinking.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I don't wish to cause pain, even to you.\"\n\nHe accepted her apology\u2014weak as it was\u2014with a nod of his head. \"It's time to go, my lady.\"\n\n\"Do you know why they're here?\" She glanced down at the feet of one woman. They were bound, and Tien Shen knew the woman would hobble a little as she walked.\n\n\"They're bored?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" Kuan Yin laughed, and her laughter was cold and hard and full of pain he didn't expect. She glanced again at the feet of the woman. \"I think it's less cruel to simply cut them off.\"\n\nTo his shock, he felt her hand on his back. \"The language is called Nushu.\" She rubbed his neck softly, her fingers hitting spots he hadn't even realized were itching. \"It's a language only for women.\"\n\nHe knew women were denied education. \"You taught them this?\"\n\n\"As I was taught.\"\n\n\"Who first handed you the brush?\"\n\n\"I don't remember. So many lives. So many first lessons.\"\n\nBut he suspected she remembered every one of those lessons. His look must have told her he didn't believe her, because she laughed, and this time her laughter was like a brook as it bubbled over smooth stones or like the sound the sun made as the clouds tickled it.\n\nThe sounds of paradise\u2014why was she waiting? She leaned against him, her fingers still working their magic on his scales.\n\n\"Why are we here?\" he asked her.\n\n\"I'm here because I want to be. Why are you here, dragon?\"\n\n\"To serve you.\"\n\nShe looked displeased. \"That's the wrong answer.\" And like that, she was gone.\n\nHe sighed, and Chao Ma left her writing and walked over to him. She reached out, then jerked her hand back.\n\n\"It's all right.\"\n\n\"You don't bite?\"\n\n\"Well, I won't. This time.\" He let out a little rumble of pleasure as she traced the pattern of his scales. Her touch moved him almost as much as Kuan Yin's. He was used to spirit creatures, insubstantial and fey, with touches just as light, not this more substantial rubbing.\n\n\"Why do you study the language?\" he asked her.\n\nShe swallowed hard. \"Because it gives us some measure of freedom. It allows us to have secrets. No man can read it.\"\n\n\"Why do you need secrets?\" Secrets were never a good thing among dragons. They usually meant something bad was going to happen.\n\n\"My husband is cruel to me. Tan Lao's husband cheats on her. Mei Ling's brother sold her to an old man she doesn't love.\"\n\n\"How is your husband cruel?\" Tien Shen did not care about the others. But this woman who was scratching his back deserved better.\n\n\"He yells. Hits, sometimes. Not all the time. Just... when he's angry.\"\n\nTien Shen sensed Kuan Yin reaching for him, the sound of her voice loud in his inside-ears. He heard the creak of the door between the worlds being opened, the rustle of a beaded curtain being pulled back. \"I have to go.\"\n\n\"All right.\" But Chao Ma held on to him.\n\nHe rested his snout on her arm for a moment, was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She pulled away, but one of her tears fell onto his leg, and it burned as it sank into his scales.\n\nKuan Yin called again, and he forced himself away from Chao Ma and appeared where he felt his charge calling from.\n\nKuan Yin stood in front of the brightest light imaginable. It was so beautiful\u2014Tien Shen never tired of seeing the sight, but then it wasn't one he saw very often. Those who attained Nirvana were few.\n\nSoft breezes blew out of the light. A subtle smell of flowers and spices wafted over to him. Kuan Yin's scent seemed to grow in reaction, sweet and strong and still distinct even among such glory.\n\n\"Dragon?\" Her voice was so small.\n\n\"You must go.\" But then he heard it: a small sob. And another. And another. His leg where Chao Ma's tear had fallen began to burn again.\n\nKuan Yin turned and stared out at the world, her back to Nirvana. Her eyes welled up, then she blinked, and the tears ran freely down her cheeks. He moved closer, lifted his leg and let her see that the scales where the woman's tear had fallen were turning silver.\n\n\"I hear them all, Tien Shen,\" she whispered. \"The cries of the whole world.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I hear them now, too.\" He looked past her, at the beauty that was Nirvana. At the peace it promised. It was everything this remarkable woman had worked for.\n\nIt was what Tien Shen wanted for her.\n\nAnd yet...\n\n\"I can't go just now.\" She took a deep breath. \"I'm needed here.\"\n\nThe beaded curtain fell back, dimming the light. The breeze died, and the smell of Nirvana's flowers became fainter and fainter, as the scent of Kuan Yin grew.\n\nCompassion. This was what compassion smelled like.\n\nShe turned to look at the door. \"I'm needed here.\"\n\nIt slammed shut.\n\nBut the light remained. Growing brighter and brighter, and Tien Shen realized it was coming from her.\n\n\"My Goddess,\" he murmured, bowing his head. As he looked down, he realized the silver patch on his leg was reflecting her glow.\n\n\"There's much to do,\" she said, pulling the light around her like a cloak. It finally dimmed, drawn inside her. But he knew she could call it back if she wanted to.\n\nHe studied his leg; it still shone just a little. Even with no light to reflect.\n\nShe began to walk back into the world.\n\nHe hurried to get in front of her, and her eyes flashed with annoyance. Then he knelt, and said, \"You should ride. I can be of help to you.\"\n\nShe touched his head before hugging him hard, her face pressed against his. Then, without a word, she jumped on his back and waited.\n\nHe listened and heard the loudest cries to the east. Without asking her, he flew for the rising sun.\n\nHer hand tightened on his neck, and she sang a song he didn't know, her voice beautiful in its rawness.\n\n\"You gave up paradise,\" he said softly.\n\n\"How could I go there when even one person suffers?\"\n\nHe had no answer to that. Only, he'd seen others do it. Perhaps Nirvana wasn't for the perfect. Maybe it was for the almost perfect. And someday they'd be back again to find perfection by helping those who still strove\u2014and hurt.\n\n\"But it was beautiful, wasn't it?\" she murmured. \"And it smelled good.\"\n\nHe knew it was the last she'd ever say about it.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dragon's Hand by David VonAllmen ]\n\nThe Chained King. Flaming Goat. Moon of Day.\n\nJane pinched the squares of heavy paper hard enough to turn her fingertips white. She'd finally drawn the hand of cards that would end her years of searching.\n\nOr she'd drawn the hand of cards that would damn her to a lifetime of sorrow. She couldn't say which it'd be just yet.\n\n\"Make your play, Indian woman,\" the graying soldier across the table grumbled, just loud enough to be heard above the string quartet playing in one corner of the saloon.\n\nJane studied the illustrations' hard black lines and whirling brushstrokes of color. Her eye could almost make out all manner of stars and charms that promised fortune but never delivered. That was nothing new to Jane. Fate had dragged her along one dusty horse trail after the next for near on two years, always whispering that what remained of her tribe was just one more town away, always promising that her daughter was almost within reach.\n\nShe placed Moon of Day face down on the table but didn't take her fingers off it just yet. The card was powerful, but mighty unpredictable.\n\nJane looked up, hoping to read something in the expressions of her opponents. The soldier wore a tattered cavalry jacket and a six-shooter on his hip. His dark eyes darted endlessly around the room and every time the batwing doors thumped open his hand jumped to his gun. To Jane's left was an emaciated man whose slim suit hung loose, as if God forgot to add meat and fat before stretching skin over his bones. He sat still as a corpse. The woman to her right wore a schoolmarm's buttoned-up navy blue dress, her hair in a tight bun. She dabbed tears from her eyes with a lace handkerchief, but smiled relentlessly, like a showgirl on stage. The players' faces gave away nothing.\n\nJane started to pull back the Moon of Day card, but stopped herself. If she didn't play it, she'd never get a chance this good again. The game was the last hope she had to find her six year-old... No. Her daughter would be seven by now, wouldn't she?\n\nJane and her three opponents flipped their cards face up. The others eyed Jane with the flat look of practiced gamblers, surely surprised the quiet Indian woman in britches and shirtsleeves was crazy enough to lead with Moon of Day. What did they expect? None sat down for a hand of cards in Gideon's Saloon unless desperation had driven them at least halfway down the road to madness.\n\nThe game was seven-card Sorte. The stakes were luck itself.\n\n\"You look like you've been on the trails for a long time, dearie,\" the schoolmarm said, her tone so polite and friendly it was impossible to believe it was sincere. Jane reckoned the woman intended it that way. \"What tribe are you?\"\n\n\"Guachichil,\" Jane lied with practiced ease. It was an instinct every member of her tribe grew up with. Fortune hunters were always on their tail, looking to cash in on the riches to be had from selling their blood to those who knew the ways of spells and conjuring.\n\nThe dealer flicked another card to each player. Their table sat in the middle of a crowded saloon furnished as if it was a betting parlor for European royalty. A score of oil lights shone from each of the chandeliers floating a dozen feet above their heads and plush green velvet cushioned their seats. The d\u00e9cor matched nothing else in the border town of El Perdido, its humble buildings painted burnt red by dust that hung so thick you could taste iron in the air.\n\nJane picked up her card. Black Flower. Her jaws tightened.\n\n\"Guachichil...\" The emaciated man's voice was never more than a whisper. \"From dead in the center of Mexico, isn't that right?\"\n\nJane nodded. She tilted the brim of her gaucho hat to keep the light off her pupils. If you looked real close, they weren't quite round, weren't quite human. They pointed, every so slightly, at the top and the bottom, as if she'd had a reptile for a grandmother. And that wasn't too far from the truth.\n\n\"Well it is such an unexpected delight to have you join us,\" the schoolmarm said. \"Many saloons don't allow your kind inside.\" She plucked a card from her hand and placed it face down in front of her.\n\nJane pulled The Chained King from her hand and laid it face down. The four players flipped over their cards. As the last round was dealt, Jane struggled to sort out the ranks and realms and trumps her opponents might be working toward. Her head swam. There were too many possibilities.\n\nShe reached for her final card, praying the fates might smile on her just this once.\n\nA voice like a cannon blast rang out across the saloon.\n\n\"You dumb sumbitch!\"\n\nGideon himself, owner of the saloon and just about everything else in El Perdido, held some confused-looking sap by the lapels. A cigarillo bit between his teeth, he stood atop a dais three steps above the rest of the saloon and smashed a handful of cards over the fellow's head. He wore a red silk shirt, busy with embroidery, over a hairy body thick with muscle and fat. He put Jane to mind of a costumed circus bear she'd seen once. No amount of dressing up would ever rid the beast of the killing instinct coursing through its veins.\n\nGideon pitched the man backwards, right off the edge of the dais. By all rights, the fellow should have tumbled feet-over-rear and cracked the back of his skull open on the hardwood below. Instead, the fellow's heels caught each step, then his feet wheeled and danced him across the room, body titled too far to catch his balance. His clumsy jig took him to the far end of the saloon and out the batwing doors.\n\nThe dealer and the soldier chuckled in an easy sort of way that told Jane they'd seen this kind of thing before.\n\n\"Doesn't much care for losing, does he?\" the emaciated man said.\n\n\"Losing ain't been a problem for him for, oh, going on six years now,\" the soldier said. \"It's all the winning that's made him so ornery.\"\n\n\"He'd be the first I've ever met who grew tired of winning,\" Jane said.\n\n\"He lived for the thrill of the wager,\" the soldier said. \"And then he trumped a Thirteenth rank Endeavor set. He won't never lose another hand of cards so long as he lives. No thrill to be had in that.\"\n\nThe luck of the Thirteenth rank was powerful and unending. The Endeavor realm ruled over any kind of effort or undertaking. If Jane had that kind of luck, whatever direction she picked to go searching for her daughter would turn out to be the right one, and before she knew it her little girl would all but fall out of the sky into her arms.\n\nShe picked up her final card. Dreamer in Mourning. The schoolmarm had played Three-Tailed Fox followed by Half Coin, and looked to be building a mid-rank set in the Opportunity realm. Jane would have to play her Dreamer in Mourning card to win.\n\nIn Sorte, the cards were both the game and the wager. If Jane's set outranked the schoolmarm's, she'd win that Opportunity luck, and the schoolmarm would lose it in equal measure. It was exactly the kind of luck Jane needed to provide a clue where her tribe had disappeared to. But she'd be laying down high-rank Coincidence set. If the schoolmarm's third card trumped her, Jane would likely spend years narrowly missing her tribe at every turn.\n\nJane squeezed her right hand into a fist, trying to fight off the tremble that had overtaken it. She pulled Black Flower from her hand. It stood little chance of winning, but if she lost her bad luck wouldn't be so terrible.\n\n\"You know, I heard a number of those poor reds down in Mexico were slaughtered two years back when blood hunters came through those parts,\" the schoolmarm said, her smile beaming as she played her final card face down. \"They were chasing rumors one of the tribes down there were dragons.\"\n\nJane froze with Black Flower between her fingers. The woman had seen the shape of her pupils. She knew what Jane was.\n\nThe dealer, the soldier, and the emaciated man all studied Jane. Surely, they could hear her heart pounding like the gallop of unbroken horses. Surely, they realized what she was. She had to run, while she still could. The saloon was full of desperate men, and it wouldn't be long until one of them tried to collect her blood.\n\nBut wasn't the whole world full of desperate men? If she didn't take this last chance to find her daughter, how long until one of them caught up to her child?\n\nAre you okay, my precious girl? Are you still alive?\n\nI'm okay, momma. Grandpa's taking care of me. I miss you.\n\nHer daughter's voice in her head was just imagination, nothing more than that. But hearing her daughter say she was alive and unhurt was the only thing that'd kept Jane from losing her mind to madness, even if it was only make believe.\n\nJane replaced Black Flower in her hand. She drew out Dreamer in Mourning and laid it face down on the table. The schoolmarm watched the change of cards and her tear-strained eye took on a gleam of satisfaction.\n\nThe four players flipped their final cards. The schoolmarm had played Cracked Lantern. Jane had her outranked. The schoolmarm's smile twisted into something savage.\n\n\"Well...\" the schoolmarm said, her voice hollow.\n\nThe ink burned off her cards, illustrations disappearing as wisps of colored smoke rose from them and faded into the air. The Opportunity luck Jane took was Fourth rank, which meant her luck would only last until sunrise, but that luck would be powerfully strong.\n\nThe schoolmarm stood abruptly, backing into a man walking past. The whiskey he'd been carrying splashed across the front of her dress, his glass clanked across the varnished floor.\n\n\"And there I had you figured for a lady who scares easy,\" the schoolmarm said. She wiped at the whiskey stain with her handkerchief as she strode away. The schoolmarm hadn't figured out what Jane was. She'd just been poking, trying to unnerve her.\n\n\"You really Guachichil?\" the soldier asked.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jane said. \"Hadn't heard of that trouble the lady was talking about. Was she trying to play me?\"\n\n\"Probably,\" the soldier said. \"Had other Guachichil come through here some months back.\"\n\nEvery muscle in Jane's body locked up. Her people had come through this very town. It had to have been them. Her newly-won Opportunity luck had struck already. She dug fingernails into her palms to keep tears from pooling in her eyes.\n\n\"Haven't seen another Guachichil since I left home,\" Jane said, fighting to keep her voice steady. \"Happen to know which way they went?\"\n\n\"Heh.\" The man's eyes landed on her for just a second, then bounded away again. \"You just won the strongest set I've seen in a while, and you're looking for a favor from me?\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Jane said, in a way she hoped sounded friendly. \"We'll help each other out. What is it I can do for you?\"\n\n\"Gimme some time to think it over while I try to win some luck of my own,\" the man said.\n\nAnother gambler slid into the chair the schoolmarm had occupied. The dealer looked at the deck and frowned.\n\n\"Only fifteen cards,\" he said. \"Someone dropping out?\"\n\n\"I'm done for the night,\" Jane said, standing. She looked to the soldier. \"I'll be waiting out front when you're ready to ask your favor.\"\n\nThe man met her eyes just long enough to nod. Jane made for the door. She could only hope that whatever the soldier knew, it would finally put an end to her years of searching. She'd grown weary of lying, of stealing, of doing terrible things just to survive.\n\nPomogi mne.\n\nThe voice in Jane's head wasn't her daughter this time. It was the voice of a man she'd known two years back. A withered man, his limbs as thin and pale as the branches of a birch sapling in winter. A man she shared no language with, but had been forced to share a cage with. A man whose eyes had begged her for help. A man she had left to die.\n\nShe hadn't had a choice. She had to keep moving until she found her daughter. She'd only done what she had to.\n\nI will find you, my precious girl. I've won strong luck to help me. Just stay hid until I get there. Promise me you will.\n\nOkay, momma. I promise. I'll hide where the hunters won't ever find me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Jane waited outside the saloon for hours, watching stars inch across the sky, too rigid with excitement and fear to sit. The night air returned the heat it had soaked up all day. Sweat and grit lined the cracks of her skin. It seemed nearly every patron stumbled down the saloon's porch steps before the soldier in the battered cavalry jacket hurried past.\n\n\"I know a place we can talk,\" he said, with barely a glance in her direction.\n\nShe rushed to catch him. \"Hold up, now. Where are we going? Do you even know where those Guachichil went?\"\n\nThe man turned down the alley between Gideon's saloon and the next building over. As soon as she rounded the corner, Jane knew she was in trouble. The worst kind of trouble.\n\nThe soldier stood between two thugs, one holding a pistol, the other a length of iron. Jane faded back. A blow like the kick of a mule stuck her full in the back. She collapsed face down in the dirt, blood rising in the back of her throat. Head dizzy with pain and lungs refusing to draw breath, Jane's only thought was for regaining her feet. She got no further than hands and knees before the toe of a boot cracked her ribs and she flopped belly down again.\n\n\"Stay down,\" the soldier commanded. \"Ain't no point in fighting. Told Gideon what you was and he sent us to corral you, and you know Gideon's endeavors can't never fail.\"\n\nEyes blurry from tears, Jane could see one thing plainly enough: the thugs coming for her with a rope, like she was runaway cattle. Her only chance was to shift shape.\n\nShe never truly felt her body grow, never felt the wings sprout from her shoulder blades or talons rip through the leather of her boots. Instead, it was as if the fangs and red-brown scales and all the rest were always there, only she'd forgotten about them, and now her senses were waking up to them once again. Feeling her weight was like standing up after a long sleep, feeling the power of her muscles was like suddenly waking from a dream.\n\nIf the thugs had been able to hold onto their bravado, they would've laid into her the second her first scale appeared. But Jane had yet to meet the man who didn't cower back upon seeing a woman transform into a dragon. A moment later, she'd gained her full height \u2013 triple that of the largest quarter horse \u2013 and her wingtips scraped the alley walls.\n\nThe thug with the pistol fired a shot. It struck her neck, cracking a scale. She howled in pain and lunged forward, swiping at the man with her front claws. The fellow had been smart enough to stay out of reach, but couldn't help jumping back. Just as he did, the man with the iron bar darted forward. But he didn't have an iron bar anymore.\n\nThe man flung a handful of white powder, fine as flour, up into Jane's face. She reared back, but not fast enough. Fine-ground salt bit into her eyes. To a human, it would have been irritating, painful even. To a dragon, it was like being splashed with acid. The salt stung her scales and worked its way between them, stabbing her skin. Each draw of breath sucked more of the salt into her lungs, where it tore at her insides like the bites of a thousand tiny spiders.\n\nThe salt wouldn't kill her, but that wasn't the point. All they were trying to do was get her to shift back to human form. No matter how much she fought the urge, she wouldn't last but a few seconds until she did just that.\n\nBlinded and panicking, Jane roared and flung her tail about, smashing the man who had snuck up behind her against the saloon wall. She tromped forward, hoping to feel one of the men crushed beneath her claws. Like the inhale of a man who'd been underwater too long, Jane could do nothing to stop her body from shifting and shrinking. With only a second or two left, she drew a lungful of air and exhaled an orange blaze of fire.\n\nFlames crackled up the saloon wall as Jane lay face-down, naked in the dirt, her human body trying to cry the salt out of her eyes. When she managed to look up, all three thugs were closing on her. By the scowls on their faces, she figured they were going to give her some extra bruises before tying her up.\n\nA rapid thumping of boots raced up behind her. Painful as it was, she managed to swing her head around to see a pale man running her way, hauling a bucketful of water. He was aiming to save Gideon's saloon from going up in flame.\n\nNo. His eyes were fixed right on her. The water was meant for her.\n\nJust as he skidded to a stop and reared back to heave that water, the bottom fell out of the bucket and every last drop splashed to the ground.\n\n\"Asher, you miserable ol' loser...\" the soldier growled. \"What the hell do you think you're doing?\"\n\nThe man named Asher stood blinking, a look of shock on his face, as if he'd been sleepwalking and suddenly woke to find he'd stumbled into a wolf's den. His distraction gave Jane the only chance she was likely to get. Biting her teeth against a cry of pain, she leapt to her feet and ran like the devil himself was just a step behind her.\n\nA gunshot hammered her ears. One stride later, Jane reached the end of the alley and dodged behind the corner of the saloon.\n\nWhatever Asher's source of water, the trail of spills he'd left were big enough to be seen in the moonlight, she could follow along and find it herself. The thugs wouldn't be but a few steps behind. As soon as they rounded the corner, they'd have a clear shot at her.\n\nJust as another shot exploded, she saw it, and it was better than she could've hoped for. A watering trough. Jane didn't slow one tick before diving in head-first. The warm water stank of horse hair. She snorted it up her nose, hoping to take in just enough to clear her nostrils. Jane gagged and choked, but the burn left her skin as the salt washed clear.\n\nBullets thunked into the side of the trough, one after another. It was too late. The trough shattered with a crack like thunder. Jane exploded up into dragon form, waves of water and shards of wood scattering a score of paces in every direction.\n\nIf the thugs had any salt left, they'd lost the nerve to give it another try. They turned tail and ran. Jane spit a burst of fire after them to make sure they knew what they'd get if they somehow found that nerve again.\n\nJane let her dragon body unform. The sensation of her tail whipping behind her faded into a ghost of itself, then disappeared completely. Bit by bit she lost any sense of touch in her wings and claws, until she dropped into a human body and her mind almost couldn't imagine the feel of any other.\n\nDripping wet, she sagged with exhaustion. Only rage kept her on her feet.\n\nDamn those bastards. That was supposed to have been her Opportunity. She'd won the luck, and Sorte cards never failed to deliver luck to the winner.\n\nPain stabbing her ribs with every movement, Jane pulled the duster off the thug she'd smashed against the wall and tugged it on. She had neither the time nor inclination to check if he was still breathing.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she demanded, glaring at Asher. \"Why'd you try to save me?\"\n\nAsher curled in on himself, shoulders hunched and head down, like a dog with a cruel master who expected another blow to come at any second.\n\n\"I'm nobody,\" he said. He turned to walk away.\n\nJane caught his arm and spun him around.\n\n\"How come roping me didn't work out for Gideon?\" she asked.\n\n\"It weren't him doing the deed,\" Asher said. \"His luck falls off sharply when it ain't him actually doing the endeavoring.\"\n\nAn alarm bell clanged and folks rushed from their homes to see the bright blaze crawling up the side of Gideon's saloon. Jane slapped her gaucho hat back on her head. She stared at Asher, a deep frown pulling down her mouth.\n\n\"This weren't no business of yours,\" she said. \"Why'd you go risking your life to help a stranger?\"\n\nDancing firelight lit up one side of Asher's trembling face. \"What's it matter?\" he sputtered in a burst that was a bark of laughter and a cry of anguish both at the same time. \"My life ain't worth living. Only hope I got left is that Gideon'll get angry enough to shoot me dead.\"\n\nJane stared at him a moment longer while the gears in her mind clicked into place.\n\n\"You were on the losing side, weren't you?\" she said. \"When Gideon won that Endeavor luck, he won it from you. Now anything you try to do fails. Even when all you're trying to do is end your own life.\"\n\nAsher said nothing, just stood there fighting to hold back tears. And like everything else the man aspired to do, he failed.\n\nFor a flash, his eyes were those of another man. A man Jane had left to die in a cage.\n\nPomogi mne.\n\nThey'd been the only words he'd uttered, almost too weak to hear. Though she didn't speak a word of Russian, there was no mistaking when a man was begging for his life.\n\nJane turned from Asher and set out walking with purpose. The voice of the Russian followed her.\n\nPomogi mne.\n\nThey'd shipped him across the Atlantic in an iron cage, to sell to the highest bidder. It had been darn near impossible to believe he could turn himself into one of those fearsome dragons they say terrorized the Ural Mountains so many years ago. Frail as a water reed and halfway starved to death, dragging him along would have slowed her down too much. She'd had to leave him behind. Her daughter needed her.\n\nWhy'd you leave him to die, momma?\n\nI only did what I had to, sweet girl. It won't matter once we're together again. You'll never know the horrible things I had to do to get to you.\n\nThe townspeople all stood lined up on either side of the road, gawking like Jane was lead horse in a circus caravan parading itself through town. She met the stare of a tall fellow still dressed in his nightclothes.\n\n\"Gideon,\" she growled.\n\nThe man pointed down the road to a castle of a house, so tall and wide it seemed to be pushing the neighboring buildings aside. Jane marched for it. She'd pull her Opportunity right out of Gideon's hide if that's what it took.\n\n\"Gideon!\" she bellowed up at the balcony jutting out from the second floor of Gideon's mansion. \"Come face me yourself, you coward!\"\n\nA moment later, Gideon stormed out onto the balcony. He stared into the distance, where men ran in circles around his saloon, shouting and throwing water on the dwindling flames. Gideon's eyes shifted, glaring down at her as if he couldn't believe she had the nerve to still be alive.\n\n\"You want a real game of cards?\" she called out. \"I got some Opportunity luck I need to use up before sunrise. Come face me in a game of thirteen-card Sorte.\" Jane turned, then shouted back over her shoulder. \"That is, if your place ain't burnt up, yet.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "It must have been the whole town that packed in Gideon's saloon, crowded around the playing table, come to see the woman crazy enough to play Gideon in a hand of thirteen-card Sorte. The stakes were higher than seven-card by a mile. And then some. That was the point. Jane was going to use her Opportunity to win enough luck that she couldn't help but find what remained of her tribe. She could only pray her daughter was still alive and with them.\n\nLingering smoke filled the room, the scent of charred wood thick enough to give Jane a headache. She sat wearing nothing save her hat and the oversized duster, dirt rubbing in the cracks between her bare toes. Gideon stared at her as he lit a cigarillo and blew a cloud of sweet tobacco smoke across the table. He didn't smile, but his eyes shone, wild and alive. The soldier and the other thugs who attacked her stood behind Gideon like he was their shield. Asher hid among the crowd, where Jane wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been looking for him.\n\nThe dealer fanned out twenty-six cards into two rows representing the thirteen realms of luck and the thirteen ranks of luck. They were simple, single-color icons, but once the dealer flipped them face down and started shuffling, they mixed like shades of paint. Hidden from every eye in the room, each became a unique combination of realm and rank, 169 different possibilities. Somewhere during the shuffling, it was impossible to watch close enough to say exactly when, the number of cards changed, so the deck wound up with exactly enough cards for everyone at the table.\n\nThe dealer flicked three cards to each of them and Jane scooped hers up. The Dancing Madman. Skeleton Knife. Candle of Memory. They didn't add up to much. Skeleton Knife was easily the highest rank, so she played it face-down on the table in front of her. Gideon looked up at her and frowned. Annoyed by how fast she made her decision, she had to guess. What did he expect? She wasn't going to beat him with strategic thinking. Her Opportunity luck was either strong enough to give his Endeavor luck a run for his money or it wasn't.\n\nGideon laid down his card. They both turned over. He'd played Golden Fish. He had her outranked. But it was only the first card.\n\nThe dealer tossed another card to each of them, adding Liar's River to the two cards she still held. What matched up strong with the Skeleton Knife she'd already laid down? It didn't take but a second before the answer hit her.\n\nGideon had led with Golden Fish. That almost always built a set in the Endeavor realm. She already had a high trump for that realm in her hand. She just had to play Liar's River next, then Candle of Memory the last round.\n\nWas it possible Gideon might draw a combination to come back over the top? Hell, the man was playing with all the luck in the world in his pocket, the long odds against that didn't make a whit of difference. But morning would break soon, and the luck she'd won promised to deliver by sunrise. This had to be her Opportunity. It had to be. Fate was laying it out clear as day right in front of her: he had the beginnings of a high-rank Endeavor set and she had the three best cards in the deck to win it from him.\n\nGideon laid down his card. Jane played Liar's River face-down behind her Skeleton Knife card. They flipped.\n\nEmpty Mirror. He'd played Empty Mirror. It was exactly what she'd hoped for. He was building an Endeavor set and she had him trumped. There was only one card in the whole 169 that could save him now.\n\nJane's hands shook. Gideon looked up at her with a smirk. He thought she was nervous about the cards. Years of perfect fortune had robbed him of his instincts. He couldn't see she'd already all but won. She wasn't shaking from nerves. She was...\n\nWhy exactly was she shaking?\n\nWhen you come back to me, who will you be, momma?\n\nWho will I be?\n\nYou stole from them that had nothing to spare. You let a man die in his cage.\n\nI only did what I had to. To find you. So I can protect you. When we're together again I won't have to do such things anymore. You'll never have to know what I've done these past couple years.\n\nLife ain't gonna get any easier, momma, not for us. A time'll come that you'll hurt someone and I'll see it. I'll know what you've become.\n\nNo. I...\n\nYou can't return to me, momma. Not like this.\n\nBut I have to. This luck will be gone by sunrise. This right here's gotta be my Opportunity. It's gotta be. 'Cause if this ain't it... what is?\n\nThe trembling in Jane's hands threatened to shake her cards free. She slapped them face-down on the table and intertwined her fingers, squeezed as hard as she could. The shaking wouldn't stop. She stood, knocking her chair over. The crowd whispered and snickered.\n\n\"This ain't poker,\" Gideon said. He lifted a snifter of whiskey to smiling lips. \"Can't fold and walk.\"\n\nShe would play away from the trump. That's what she'd do. Whatever card she drew next, she'd make the lowest set she could, take whatever bad luck was her punishment. She didn't have another choice. She couldn't face her daughter now. Not like she was.\n\nJane fought to smooth out her lungs' jagged gasps. They stared at her, every last soul in the crowd. Some with amusement, the more kindly folks with sympathy or even horror, guessing from her expression she was about to get loaded down with a terrible affliction of bad luck.\n\nHer eyes stopped when they met Asher's. Though she would have sworn it was impossible, those eyes carried even more sorrow than when she first saw them. This time, the sorrow was not for his own plight. It was for hers.\n\nPomogi mne.\n\nFate was offering her an Opportunity all right. But it wasn't the chance to win luck off Gideon.\n\nJane's hands stopped shaking. The dealer tossed her last card to her, but she didn't pick it up. Still standing, she lifted the Candle of Memory card off the table and held it out, back side facing Gideon.\n\n\"I've got the Candle of Memory,\" she taunted, forcing her smile wide. \"And you're working on an Endeavor set. I have you trumped.\"\n\nFury wasn't the only emotion that duked it out for control of Gideon's face, but it was the clear winner.\n\n\"You're lying, red woman,\" he said, voice tightly reined in. \"Trying to fool me into playing away from the Endeavor realm 'cause you ain't got the cards to beat it.\"\n\n\"Then lay it down if you got the guts. But I know you don't.\"\n\nGideon bared teeth bit together in anger.\n\n\"Even with more luck than any other man alive, you're too cowardly to play at me. That's why you sent thugs to ambush me, 'cause you were too cowardly to try and rope me yourself.\"\n\nGideon's face burned red and his cheeks trembled. Whatever he was itching to say, his temper had boiled the words right out of his mouth.\n\nJane placed the Candle of Memory card face down on top of her other unplayed cards. She couldn't play it, yet. Not if she wanted her trick to work.\n\nThen she did something she'd never done before, something she'd have no faith in trying if luck weren't on her side. She started a shape shift she had no intention of finishing. Just enough to get scales growing across her chest. Just enough so that her eyes burned bright orange and her pupils melted to black slits and bone fangs snapped inches from Gideon's face when she leaned forward with a wicked smile and whispered, \"Your move.\"\n\nGideon threw himself back from the table, jumped to his feet, and fired a shot from his six-gun before anyone else in the room had a chance to so much as blink.\n\nThe bullet shattered a scale on Jane's chest, a sharp point of pain exploding across her torso. Goading Gideon into firing on her had been Jane's aim, but still the shock swept her legs out from under her. Forehead pressed against the hard varnish of the floor, she fell back into fully-human shape and coughed blood into her hand. Likely as not, she had a fractured rib.\n\nAfter the screams and gasps faded away, the crowd closed in to see whether Jane was dead. The dealer knelt to speak to her.\n\n\"Are you alive?\" he asked. \"Can you continue?\"\n\nJane groaned and gave a slow, slight shake of her head, made like she was trying to speak but couldn't quite manage. \"Asher...\" she said.\n\n\"Asher?\" the dealer asked. With that, every head in the crowd spun about until they locked on Asher. Startled as he was, the man's usual hunched-shoulder posture momentarily disappeared.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Gideon bellowed.\n\n\"A game of Sorte can't be stopped before the final cards are played,\" the dealer said. \"If she can't continue, she's allowed to pick her replacement.\"\n\nGideon's face fought with itself again. This time, he wrestled a confident smile into place.\n\n\"What's the point in letting him finish her hand?\" Gideon laughed. \"I can't lose and he can't win.\"\n\nAsher looked at Jane, unsure. Jane herself wasn't so sure of her plan. She had to trust that this was the moment her Opportunity luck had brought her to.\n\nAsher shambled forward, lowered himself into the seat, and picked up the cards. Jane had to stifle a whimper as a pair of men hooked their arms under hers and hefted her into a chair.\n\nAsher didn't hesitate. He plucked the Candle of Memory card and laid it face down behind the two Jane had already played. Gideon paused just long enough to scowl, caught himself, and smacked his final play card down with a tight-lipped smile. The two players flipped their cards face-up.\n\nGideon had played Orphan of Night. The overconfident fool had actually completed the Thirteenth rank Endeavor set. The color burned off his cards, turning them white. But not nearly so white as Gideon's face.\n\nThe stunned crowd didn't make a sound as Asher stood, plucked a cigarillo from Gideon's shirt pocket, and bounced a match off the table. The match lit when it struck the wood surface and popped right up into Asher's hand. The new king of El Perdido puffed his cigarillo to life.\n\nGideon yanked his six-gun from its holster and aimed the barrel at his temple. Asher slammed his fist on the table, bouncing the opposite side up and knocking the gun from Gideon's hand.\n\n\"Fate ain't gonna let you off that easy,\" Asher said. \"All you woulda done is hurt yourself bad enough to spend the rest of your life regretting the attempt. But thank your lucky cards I'm gonna be a damn sight kinder to you than you ever was to me.\"\n\nJane stood, painfully, one hand over her ribs. She limped toward the door.\n\n\"Why'd you do that?\" Asher called after her.\n\n\"Got my reasons,\" she said without looking back.\n\nJane stepped out into the night. The first dim hints of dawn lightened the horizon. Asher followed, as did most of the crowd. He hustled to get in front of her.\n\n\"I owe you a debt, now,\" Asher said. \"A mighty big one. What is it you're doing here? What is it you want?\"\n\nJane struggled to hold back tears as she met his eyes.\n\n\"My people came through here a few months back, with my little girl. All I want is to find them.\" She nodded toward the soldier. \"I think that fella may know something about where they went.\"\n\nAsher turned his gaze to the soldier, who startled back.\n\n\"We gonna do this the hard way, or you gonna tell this lady everything you know?\" Asher asked.\n\n\"They asked the way to Las Cruces, that's all I know,\" the soldier said in a rush. From the fear pulling his eyes wide, there was little doubt he was telling the truth.\n\nJane dropped her gaucho hat in the dirt and let the borrowed duster fall to the ground. She stood naked in the middle of the road, staring over the hilltops to the west, where bright stars sparkled against the indigo sky.\n\nI'm so sorry, my beautiful girl.\n\nIt's okay, momma.\n\nCan you hang on just a little longer?\n\nYes, momma, I think I can.\n\nScales sprouted from Jane's skin. Toenails grew into talons. The ground receded in her view, the crowd gasping and backing away as she gained her full height.\n\nJane leapt into the air and beat her wings, picking up speed until the ground below became a blur.\n\nI will find you soon. I promise.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Take out the Trash by Melva L. Gifford ]\n\nHere I am, the ideal student, sitting at my easel, treating the scroll before me like the priests' holy wine. I'm in my second year of magic school. I'm studying a levitation spell, nibbling away on a mecca root when ol' Stop-and-Go Pordal struts in.\n\n\"Shantell, your turn to take out the trash.\"\n\nThen he strides off before I can say anything. He's been giving me the dirtiest jobs ever since I caught him spying in the girls' quarters. I had just learned how to stun and froze him in position by the window for all to see.\n\nSome of the sorceresses started calling him Peekee after that. I still call him Stop-and-Go. It fits better.\n\nThe masters assigned him kitchen duty for a full moon for his punishment.\n\nHe hasn't forgiven me since.\n\nHe thinks I'm nothing but a chambermaid because I'm only a second-level sorceress. Until I claim my wizard sense, I'm treated like the former. So what could I do? I wish I could find some kind of personal project to keep me busy.\n\nEmptying the trash wouldn't be so bad if it was just the scrap spells from the more experienced trainees. But no, they also have to dump the first yearlings' rejects in as well. Have you ever smelled a half-conjured demon fermented for over a week?\n\nNo wonder so many of the masters' beards are white. The Psi nets are never strong enough. They're always leaking or losing something along the way to the vac pit.\n\nI walk into the room, and just as I expected, the bag's filled to overflowing. The area is a mess. There are demons, zaps, fireballs, whammies, giants, dragons, potions, and Hades knows what else. Most are spells that never came into full realization. There's a monstrous tentacle weaving itself lazily above the rim of the net. Its acting like it's already high from the demons' fumes. After taking one whiff myself, I'm sure of it.\n\nWhy me?\n\nNothing to do but throw the lot of them in the vacuum pit. The tricky part is getting the thing to the pit, especially with weak Psi nets.\n\nBecause of Stop-and-Go's harassment, I'm now an old pro. Too many incidents from other apprentices' trips to the vac have taught me to take precautions. I step up to the net, keeping my skirt hem clear of possible entanglements. It's taller than me and almost reaches the high ceiling. A good reduction spell should cut the thing down to size. So, I cast the spell and watch as the occupants shrink to the size of a chair.\n\nThe thing keeps moving since some of the spells within it haven't fully deactivated.\n\nI bend over the bag and quickly lean back to let one particularly powerful wisp of odor pass. Hades, it's strong. Whammies and zaps almost spill out of the bag, some barely hanging over the edge. When I begin to close the top, several fall out. They immediately activate, stinging and singeing my feet. My resulting list of obscenities would impress a warlock. They're all centered on Pordal. Thankfully most of the zaps fall back into the bag when I shake the net.\n\nZaps and whammies, in their solid state, look much like frozen lightning bolts. They always seem to find a way to poke you in the ribs. I seal the bag with an echo patch\u2014the most powerful sealing spell I know.\n\nSeeing how the potions and powders seem to always settle at the bottom, I try to put as much echo underneath the bag as over the top. Feeling reasonably protected, I touch the net's surface, probing with my fingers. Every kind of spell seems to be in there. Yep, they must have gone through a full session of Wizardry 101 to get all these rejects. It takes me only a minute to find what I'm searching for.\n\nHe's a big one, and only partially deflated.\n\nA Giant.\n\nWhy can't everyone deflate their Giants fully before throwing them away? A Giant is eighty percent air. If you have a deflated Giant in the trash, it can help you with the lifting. All you have to do is give it a gentle tap on the head\u2014just enough to aggravate it so it'll puff up. When the Giant rises, then, the entire bag will rise, too. Makes it easier to carry the thing outside.\n\nOf course, you have to watch that you don't hit them too hard. Heard a story once where a first yearling was taking out the trash. Made the mistake of giving the Giants a royal whack and it got 'em mad. Puffed 'em up all the way\u2014all of them. Got the rest of the spells activated too. The yearling soon found himself floating up in the air, hanging onto that bag for dear life. He was yelling at the top of his lungs.\n\nWhat a sight!\n\nThe Giants were having a grand old fight up there.\n\nThankfully, a couple of apprentices were also archers. Got their bows out and started shooting. Said it was great to have a moving target like that. 'Course the bag came down, and the yearling came after and got tangled in the tree.\n\nIt took a week for the school to clean up and catch all the mess. Made a school project of it.\n\nSo anyway, I lift the bag. Can't levitate it. You can only levitate stationary objects. The dragons inside keep shifting from side to side as if they're sitting on a hot pile of gold. It's hard getting a firm hold on the net. The Psi shield is already wearing thin in some areas, especially at the bottom. I would try to add another echo patch, but I have to see what I'm doing and the bag's in my way. Hades, I remember what happened the last time a bag broke open.\n\nThere was a student once who took out the trash without trying to patch up any leaks. There was an unusual amount of love potion at the bottom. He went almost the entire length of the path before he got a whiff. Then it was too late. He went under. It was love at first sight. A guy looks kind of silly kissing the ground like that. Took the Masters a while to get him under control. They repaved the path. Got rid of the soil by putting it under the mattress of a man who complained of insomnia. He loves to sleep now.\n\nKeeping the bag in my arms isn't a problem yet, even though Giants and monsters can complicate things if they are too close together. If they start fighting they'll wake the dragons, and you'll end up weaving all over the place trying to get to the vac pit.\n\nOh, no! A cool dampness presses from inside the bag, kinda soggy and mushy. It's beginning to seep through onto my arm. My heartbeat quickens. If it's a fireball, I'm in trouble. Improperly deactivated fireballs turn into a cold liquid which acts as a powerful adhesive. It took the masters several days to separate a student's leg from the Psi net when some fire juice leaked onto her.\n\nNot knowing the most dignified way to panic, I slowly move my hand away from the wet spot.\n\n\"Ribbit.\"\n\nOh, Hades!\n\nI contemplate fainting from relief, but the trash is in the way. I'll faint later. I probe the bag's surface, recognizing the outline of a frog\u2014several frogs. There must be a mini-course on witchcraft going on at the school.\n\nMaybe there's something to my classmates' increasing complaints about warts. Though they shouldn't leap to conclusions.\n\nI start up the path in a reasonably straight line (dragons permitting) when I hear something.\n\nA voice?\n\nWhat now?\n\nIt comes from the trash bag. Clutching the container against me, I place my ear next to the bag. It's a voice and he is quoting\u2014\n\nPhilosophy?\n\nWell, this little frog is still trying to turn into a prince. It would seem that the mind was willing but the body\u2014it wouldn't make it. Guess it's trying to find a good role model.\n\nI press on, ignoring the frog as he proclaims, \"There were two peasants walking down a street...\"\n\nA dragon hiccups and shifts and I lunge to the right, trying to keep my balance. I'm getting annoyed.\n\nNot too much farther to go. I try to hurry but then, just as I'm on the verge of reaching the vac pit\u2014\n\nThe Giant lets out a burp and down goes the bag.\n\nThat thing's heavy when you have to rely on your own strength. With the Giant's levitating air gone, mass returns, and I almost gag when the Psi net tears as it hits the ground. I hear protests from the dragons and another Giant wakes up, along with two more monsters. I don't take time to see what kind. The contents of the bag begin attacking one another.\n\nThe rip in the net widens. If anything gets even partially outside the net, it'll return to normal size. Then the real trouble will begin.\n\nThe bag moves of its own accord. I hear the outcries of several monsters and Giants as they wallow at the bottom. A dragon bellows. The escalating battle shakes the entire bag. It starts to lean.\n\nHades!\n\nI pray for a miracle.\n\nNothing happens. Panic appears to be the only alternative. If I try to touch the bag, I'm certain the netting will totally dissolve.\n\nIf I can convince the monsters and Giants that they're being challenged by something fiercer then them\u2014\n\nI levitate; a wind is tugging at my hair. I'm glad I braided it. Floating to the center of the pit, I bellow at the bag, imitating the occupants' various calls. But my verbal challenge can hardly be heard over the din.\n\nI strain my voice to its full capacity, lowering it to sound more fierce.\n\nThe bag turns, moving toward me, closer and closer until\u2014\n\nDown it goes, into the vac.\n\nWhat a relief.\n\nI float carefully back to the edge, glad to stand on firm earth again. There is a silvery liquid shining on the edge of the hole. I'll avoid that. Then realization dawns. I've finally found something to do with my spare time until I acquire my wizard sense. I can work on something that could make me rich and famous!\n\nI'll create a double-ply Psi net with an echo in between trash bags. That could hold nearly anything, guaranteed never to leak. The apprentices would certainly be Glad\u2014so would my money pouch.\n\nWith a new purpose, I start back to the study room.\n\nI now have some spell casting to do.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Burying Treasure by Alex Shvartsman ]\n\nThe wizard rode a cart full of gold into the village.\n\nThe wooden cartwheels creaked, protesting the enormous weight of coins and miscellaneous trinkets that filled the cart to the point of almost overflowing. The coins shifted and jingled as the horse pulled the cart forward on an uneven road, their sweet sound summoning gawkers much faster than any magic could have.\n\n\"Now that's something you don't see every day,\" Hurlee said to her twin sister as the two of them watched the cart make its way down the road.\n\nBurlee grunted assent, the straw she was chewing on teetering at the edge of her lip, then got up and headed over for a closer look.\n\n\"Careful,\" said Hurlee. \"Anyone flaunting such riches is either very dangerous or dangerously stupid. Or both.\"\n\nBurlee turned back for a moment, straightened the iron-studded jacket of her old military uniform, and nodded at Hurlee, who was wearing the same outfit. \"When did that ever stop us?\"\n\nHurlee reached toward her sister, wanting to hold her back, but thought better of it. She lowered her hand, and reluctantly followed Burlee instead.\n\nThe cart came to a stop. The entire village gathered to see what the wizard would do next. A pile of coins, jewelry, and small trinkets glimmered in the sun, awing the onlookers. A small gargoyle rested atop the treasure. It glared at the villagers, making sure no one got any ideas.\n\nHurlee hung back, close enough to observe, but far enough to quietly retreat in case there was trouble.\n\n\"I need a pair of guides,\" declared the wizard. \"Young people who know the nearby woods. A gold coin is offered in payment.\"\n\nThere was no shortage of volunteers. Villagers jostled each other for a chance at earning the princely sum.\n\nBurlee pushed and shoved her way to the front of the crowd. And although Hurlee was still conflicted, she followed right along.\n\n\"What do you seek in the woods, Sir Wizard?\" asked one of the village elders.\n\n\"A place to bury this treasure,\" said the wizard. His gargoyle purred loudly and shifted to find a more comfortable spot. It cuddled up to a jewel-encrusted chalice.\n\n\"Why would you do such a thing?\" asked Burlee, devouring the gold with her eyes.\n\n\"The Emperor decrees it,\" said the wizard, \"to help the economy.\"\n\nThe villagers murmured.\n\n\"I thought them dragonses liked to hoard treasure,\" said Olaf. A tall, lanky youth, he made up for what could be generously described as below-average wit with excess enthusiasm.\n\n\"Quiet, fool.\" An elder glared at Olaf. \"Don't disrespect the Emperor in front of our esteemed guest.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said the wizard. \"His Majesty is long-lived, and his complexion is, perhaps, a little scaly, but vicious rumors of dragon blood in his lineage are falsehoods told by anarchists and malcontents. You would do well to discourage such talk.\"\n\n\"Won't happen again,\" said the elder.\n\n\"The Emperor plans ahead,\" said the placated wizard. \"Word of the treasure will spread. Knights and adventurers from other lands will come to seek it. They'll spend coin in taverns and inns, patronize blacksmiths and apothecaries. They'll pay a special tax levied on all seekers. This is called tourism.\"\n\nHurlee was well-familiar with the Emperor's eccentricities. The new ruler signed a peace treaty with the orcs, inconveniently interrupting the conflict that had been successfully ongoing for over a hundred years.\n\nHurlee and Burlee had enlisted and were just finishing their training when the Emperor had cut down the size of the army. They were sent back home with nothing to show for their effort but a pair of hand-me-down oxhide uniforms. Thousands of young men and women who counted on the war for their employment were now back in their villages, struggling to adjust to this new peace, and to find work. Still, dumping gold into the ground like some storybook pirate was highly unusual, even for the Dragon Emperor.\n\n\"You,\" the wizard turned to Olaf. \"Do you know these woods well?\"\n\nOlaf nodded enthusiastically.\n\n\"You're hired.\" The wizard scanned the crowd for another recruit.\n\nHurlee thought that the wizard wasn't particularly discriminating. Drawing his attention might be enough to be picked. She wasn't thrilled about getting involved in this crazy scheme, but there was no other work to be had in the village that didn't involve tending the fields, and she and her sister needed the money.\n\n\"Won't the adventurers stop coming once the treasure is found?\" Hurlee asked.\n\n\"That's why I need guides. The treasure must be hidden so well, it'll take decades to find.\"\n\n\"My sister and I know the best hiding spots,\" said Hurlee. \"Our father was a famed hunter. He showed us places so remote even the wild beasts would have a difficult time finding them.\"\n\nHurlee stood still, praying that none of the other villagers would speak up and tell the wizard that their father was actually a cabbage farmer. But others knew better than to incur the ire of the sisters.\n\nThe wizard sized them up. \"Twins, eh?\"\n\n\"Idontical,\" said Olaf.\n\n\"Don't you mean identical?\" asked the wizard.\n\nOlaf scratched his head. \"I mean, I don't know how to tell them apart.\"\n\nThe wizard chuckled. \"I'll hire the two of you for the price of one. Do we have a deal?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "The wizard and his three guides wandered in the forest all day, looking for a perfect spot.\n\nDespite their exaggerated claims, Hurlee and Burlee did know the land very well. They'd spent their entire childhood exploring the nearby groves, picking mushrooms and berries, and snaring an occasional hare.\n\nThe three young villagers shared the secrets of their forest with the wizard. They followed deer paths to small clearings, far away from where any people might tread. They pointed out holes created by generations of woodpeckers, deep enough to conceal a purse of coins. They showed him uprooted trees with tangled roots that formed perfect hiding places for a larger cache. The wizard rejected them all, and urged his poor horse ever deeper into the woods.\n\nIt was slow going. The wizard's cart did not navigate easily through the wild growth of the forest. The gold pile jingled precariously each time a wheel hit a protruding tree root. On several occasions the wizard was forced to unharness the horse and levitate the cart over a particularly rough patch of terrain. Hurlee watched in awe. This was real magic, far more impressive than the healing salves and love potions brewed by the local hags.\n\nAs they walked, Burlee passed the time planning on how to spend the gold they'd been promised.\n\n\"We should buy new clothes,\" she said. \"I'm sick of wearing this ratty uniform. I want to wear green again.\"\n\n\"Green does not flatter your skin tone,\" said Hurlee. \"And besides, we should invest the money into something more practical. We could buy a horse. That way we could try for jobs guarding nobles' carriages and merchant caravans.\"\n\n\"I'm going to buy a goat,\" said Olaf. \"It's cheaper than a horse, and I'll get all the milk and wool for free.\"\n\nHaving not found a satisfactory location by nightfall, they were forced to set up a makeshift camp under the open sky. Burlee started a fire and the four of them shared an evening meal.\n\n\"I still don't understand,\" Hurlee said, exploiting the chance to chat up the wizard. \"Can't the Emperor make better use of his gold than to leave it lying around in some ditch? You know, hire more soldiers, pave the roads, that sort of thing?\"\n\n\"His Imperial Majesty has thought of everything.\" The wizard poured himself some wine from a large flagon he produced from the back of the cart. He did not offer any to his companions. \"Since the gold will be hidden, rather than spent or lost, the exchequer will issue paper money backed by its value.\"\n\n\"Coins made out of paper?\" Burlee snorted. \"That's a wild thought. They'd be ruined by the first rain. Besides, paper isn't worth very much.\"\n\n\"The value of the paper money is guaranteed by the Emperor,\" explained the wizard. \"So each note will be worth exactly as much as a gold coin. It's a novel concept and it may take some time for people in the countryside to get used to, but we're already having some success introducing the new currency in the capital.\"\n\n\"City folks might be too stupid to tell paper from gold, but we ain't,\" said Olaf. \"You best plan on paying us with the real deal.\"\n\nThe wizard promised that they'd be paid with actual coins, and didn't seem interested in any further conversation.\n\nThat night, Olaf tried to steal some of the treasure.\n\nHurlee had known this would happen. She could tell from the way Olaf kept glancing at the cart, his face alight with greed. So, when the fire went out and everyone settled in for the night, Hurlee willed herself to remain awake.\n\nBoth Burlee and the wizard were fast asleep, exhausted by the day's journey. Even the wizard's horse was snoring lightly. Hurlee pretended to be asleep, but instead watched out of the corner of her eye as Olaf got up, checked to make sure his companions weren't alert, and crept toward the cart.\n\nThe gargoyle was curled up atop a gilded plate, covering its face with a winged paw. Asleep it looked like a big, gray cat. Very quietly, Olaf reached into the cart and palmed a large nugget. The gargoyle was up immediately, hissing and screaming and clawing at Olaf with its sharp talons. Olaf dropped the nugget and staggered back, clutching at the shallow, bleeding cuts along the length of his right arm. The gargoyle perched at the edge of the cart and hissed at Olaf until the wizard, roused by the noise, waved it off.\n\n\"You're lucky Maynard didn't rip off your face,\" the wizard told Olaf. \"Go clean yourself up. Next time you try to steal, or interrupt my sleep, I'll turn you into something unpleasant.\"\n\nOlaf skulked off toward the nearby stream. Hurlee finally allowed sleep to claim her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "By the late following afternoon Hurlee feared they'd be spending yet another night in the forest. But to her great relief, the wizard found what he decreed to be a perfect hiding place, far from where any hunters or gatherers might roam.\n\nThe wizard produced a pair of shovels from the bottom of the cart and instructed his guides to dig a hole. He rested in the shade while Olaf, Hurlee, and Burlee worked, sweated, and cursed.\n\n\"Look at us,\" said Burlee, \"reduced to digging around in the dirt. If we wanted to do this sort of filthy work, we could have remained on Father's farm.\"\n\n\"It's paid work,\" said Hurlee. \"It's not perfect, but we need the money to see us through until we can find something better.\"\n\n\"There is nothing better,\" Burlee said bitterly as she drove her shovel deep into the moist earth. \"We might as well get used to handling a shovel, because there's no room for our skill set in this weird new age of peace treaties and paper money.\"\n\n\"You can't give up hope,\" said Hurlee. \"We're young, and we're smart. We'll adjust.\"\n\n\"Your problem is, you're too picky,\" said Olaf. \"Shovelin' is good work, when you can get it.\" He put his back into it to underscore the point.\n\n\"Shut up, Olaf,\" said Burlee. She turned to her sister. \"Take the shovel. It's your turn to dig.\"\n\nWhen the hole was deep enough, the wizard placed a few handfuls of gold into a sack and lowered it to the bottom. He then motioned for the others to begin refilling the hole.\n\n\"That's it?\" asked Burlee, eyeing the lion's share of the treasure that remained on the cart.\n\n\"Our empire is vast,\" said the wizard. \"Hiding smaller amounts of treasure across the land will serve the Emperor's plans better than a single large trove.\"\n\nCovering the hole with freshly dug earth was easier work than digging. Afterward, the wizard made Olaf collect some leaves and twigs to cover up the recently disturbed patch of ground."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Halfway back to the village, the wizard stopped the cart. \"Now that the treasure is hidden, I must remove your memories of its location with a spell. Then you'll be paid.\"\n\nHurlee had expected something like this to happen. After all, burying treasure would be pointless if one left behind three greedy and highly motivated locals who knew exactly where to look. If anything, Hurlee was relieved that the wizard hadn't planned on a more severe and permanent solution to this problem.\n\n\"This won't hurt very much,\" the wizard promised. He beckoned Olaf to him.\n\nThe wizard touched Olaf's forehead and recited a spell that he said would drain away the memories of the past few days. Olaf lumbered off like a drunk, looking like he just got hit in the head with a rake. He appeared to be stupefied by the experience, but with Olaf it was rather difficult to tell.\n\nBurlee was up next. Hurlee watched her sister step forward, and an inkling of a plan began to formulate in her mind. Burlee was right; they couldn't just wait around and hope for their circumstances to improve. She saw an opportunity, and she was going to act on it.\n\nWhile the wizard was reciting his spell for the second time, Hurlee touched Olaf's shoulder and pointed at the cart.\n\n\"Look. Gold,\" Hurlee whispered.\n\nOlaf's eyes grew wide as he discovered the treasure. Without the memory of Maynard to restrain him, Olaf stumbled toward the cart. The gargoyle hissed in warning, baring its teeth at the hapless villager. And while the wizard, who had just finished enchanting Burlee, was distracted by the commotion, Hurlee traded places with her twin sister.\n\nHurlee counted on the wizard not being able to tell the two of them apart. Their army uniforms hadn't helped the sisters land the cushy bodyguard or sentry jobs they had hoped for in the past, but in this one instance, the matching garments might help them secure their future.\n\nHaving made certain that the treasure was safe from Olaf, and Olaf was safe from the gargoyle, the wizard turned his attention back to the sisters. He gently nudged Hurlee, who was standing in front of him with as blank an expression on her face as she could muster, out of the way, and grabbed Burlee.\n\nHurlee watched as the wizard zapped her poor sister with another forgetting spell. She wondered if Burlee would lose a few extra days' worth of memory, or just forget their forest adventures that much more thoroughly. Either way, she reckoned it was well worth keeping the memory of where the treasure was. Even the small portion of the cart's riches that the wizard had left behind was enough to set them up for life.\n\nThe wizard let his guides rest for a few minutes, until they regained their senses. Their old memories of the forest were unaffected and so they had no trouble finding the way back to the village. There, the wizard paid them, just like he promised. He was even kind enough to let the other villagers know that the guides' memories had been erased. That way no one would think of trying to force the treasure's location out of them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "Hurlee waited for over a day, to make sure the wizard was gone and not coming back, before she shared the secret with her sister. Burlee was so excited by the news that she didn't even grumble too much about being made into the lightning rod for the wizard's forgetting spell. The twins immediately decided that such information was best kept away from Olaf. So it was just the two of them sneaking out of the village to claim the treasure.\n\nThey traveled back to the site, dug up the still-fresh earth, and retrieved the sack. But when they opened it, there was no gold at all. The sack was filled with rocks.\n\nBurlee examined one of the rocks and tossed it aside. \"That treacherous wizard must've enchanted these rocks to look like treasure, and kept the real gold for himself,\" she said.\n\n\"For his purposes, the rumor of hidden treasure is as good as the real thing,\" reasoned out Hurlee. \"This way, the Emperor can keep his riches and still get adventurers to come searching for them.\"\n\nFrustrated, Burlee kicked some dirt back into the hole. \"But then, why bury the rocks in the first place?\"\n\nHurlee mulled it over. \"The old warlock must've suspected that some of our memories might eventually return. If so, he couldn't risk not going through with the charade.\"\n\n\"What a cheat!\" Burlee continued to rile herself up. \"We should go back home and let everybody know the truth. Screw up his convoluted plan. That'll show him!\"\n\n\"No,\" said Hurlee, after thinking hard for a while. \"No, we shouldn't. I have a better idea.\"\n\nHurlee picked up a shovel and began to fill the hole again. \"Let people think that the treasure is buried somewhere in these woods,\" she said as she worked. \"We aren't supposed to remember exactly where, but we're the local guides, and we're the ones who showed the wizard all the likely hiding spots. This information will be worth something, once the adventurers come.\"\n\nBurlee was beginning to understand, annoyance and disappointment draining from her face as she listened to Hurlee's plan. \"The Emperor wants these treasure hunts to help spur the local economy? Well, we're part of the local economy, too. There's no reason why we can't cash in.\"\n\n\"It won't be long until the adventurers show up,\" said Hurlee. \"There will be no shortage of demand for guides, then.\"\n\n\"There must also be other ways to profit from this,\" said Burlee. \"Let's get some parchment and start drawing maps. Two... No, three silver coins for a genuine treasure map sounds about right.\"\n\n\"That's the spirit, sister,\" Hurlee clapped Burlee on her leather-clad shoulder. \"Who needs the dangers of the orc wars, or the tedium of sentry duty? We're getting into the tourism trade.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dragon in Distress by Mercedes Lackey and Elisabeth Waters ]\n\n\u2003\"Ah, my heart, and a-a-a-ah my heart,\n\n\u2003My heart it is so sore,\n\n\u2003Since I must needs from my love depart,\n\n\u2003And know no cause wherefore...\"\n\nThe light tenor voice wafted into the cave with the spring breeze from the ledge outside where the prince had been spending his days for the past two weeks. Unfortunately, since both of the cave's occupants were tone deaf, the melody was wasted on them. The words, however, were another matter.\n\nPrincess Rowena, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor going out of her mind with boredom, looked up at her companion. \"Do you suppose that means he's going away now?\" she asked hopefully. \"He's been out there for quite a while.\"\n\nThe dragon smiled, an expression that did not look as forbidding as one might suppose. Her life had become much more amusing since Rowena had moved in with her, following the receipt of a birthday gift from her Aunt Frideswide which had been chosen with more poetic license than common sense. Boredom was the bane of a near-immortal's existence, which was probably why the dragon had agreed to foster Rowena when the princess had decided she did not wish to return home. So far the arrangement was working out quite well for both of them, although there were occasional drawbacks\u2014such as the prince outside.\n\n\"I'm afraid not,\" the dragon replied calmly, using two foreclaws to pick up a particularly fine emerald from the pile of gems in the girl's lap and twist it so that it sparkled in the light from the fire in the back of the cave. \"He's been here only two weeks, and he strikes me as the persistent type. He could be here all summer\u2014perhaps even until the snow falls.\" Her voice was wise with centuries of experience. \"Princes as a whole talk a lot, sing romantic ballad after romantic ballad\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014after romantic ballad. Maybe he'd like to perish gallantly for love,\" Rowena suggested brightly, then sobered under the dragon's glare. \"All right, it's not all that funny, but I'm getting very tired of being cooped up in here.\"\n\nShe sighed, which added an opal to the pile of gold coins and jewels in her lap. \"Unrequited love is hell. And if he finds out about this\u2014\" she gestured at the gems which fell from her lips with each word she spoke, \"he'll never leave.\"\n\n\"Just don't ask me to kill him,\" the dragon said tartly. \"Those stupid princes taste dreadful, and they're difficult to digest.\"\n\nRowena giggled. \"Especially if you eat their armor.\" Then she sobered. \"You don't think he knows about the spell, do you?\"\n\nThe spell in question was the birthday gift which had resulted in Rowena's sudden desire to leave home. Originally it had been the standard fairy tale version, where every word spoken produced a flower or a jewel. After Rowena left home and moved in with the dragon (that afternoon), the dragon, who had given Frideswide the original spell, had modified it somewhat, substituting gold coins for the flowers. Unlike roses, gold coins had no thorns, so Rowena was relieved by the change and more than happy to give the dragon the coins for her bed.\n\nThe young prince outside sang on. He could scarcely have found a less appreciative audience.\n\n\"It's not that I want him dead,\" Rowena sighed. \"And I know that knights don't cook evenly and they're hard to digest. But still, it's a pain to be stuck here inside for weeks on end, especially when the weather is so beautiful outside. And if he doesn't go away soon, all the berries will be gone, and I wanted to pick a lot of them before the season ends. It's not fair!\"\n\n\"True,\" the dragon agreed. \"It's not as if he is a real guest. We're not obliged to entertain him or arrange our schedules to suit him.\"\n\n\"And it's all so pointless. Why did he come here to 'rescue' me?\" Rowena frowned fiercely. \"I don't need to be rescued! I'm much happier here than I ever was at home.\"\n\n\"You might wish to marry someday,\" the dragon offered, sounding amused, \"and you don't get many opportunities to meet young men living alone here with me.\"\n\n\"If I were ever to marry, which I don't plan on,\" Rowena said firmly, \"I'm sure I would want a husband who had some sense of self-preservation. Camping out on a ledge just outside a dragon's lair does not betoken any great degree of intelligence.\"\n\nThat actually provoked a snicker from the dragon. \"You might try explaining that to him.\"\n\n\"Sure I could,\" Rowena said sarcastically. \"I tried that four\u2014or was it five\u2014princes ago. That particular idiot insisted that I was bewitched and begged me to come away with him so that I could be freed from the nonexistent spell you have me under.\"\n\nShe grinned up at the dragon, in a lightning change of mood. \"Besides,\" she pointed out, \"It's very difficult to talk to anyone face to face without having him find out about Aunt Frideswide's birthday present.\"\n\nIt had been quite a shock for Rowena to wake up in this condition on her fourteenth birthday. The gems were all right, but the rose-thorns hurt. And she had known immediately what her fate would be if anyone discovered that she was producing something more rewarding than flowers; she'd have been locked in the palace treasury and forced to talk herself into exhaustion. Ordinarily, Rowena was something of a chatterbox, but there were limits!\n\nFortunately the dragon had carried her off that afternoon, before anyone at the castle realized why Rowena had locked herself in her room and was refusing to talk.\n\n\"There's a full moon tonight,\" Rowena said, still trying to find a way out of her current trap. \"And I think he goes somewhere else at night to sleep, because I never hear him on the ledge after dark.\" She looked up at the dragon again with a touch of defiance. \"I'm going to sneak out tonight and pick some berries; there's enough light for that at full moon. And if I don't get out of here for a little while, I am going to lose what's left of my mind!\"\n\n\"Very well,\" the dragon agreed. \"Just be sure that you're back before dawn.\"\n\n\"I shall,\" Rowena said grimly, \"I've no desire to be carried off by anyone or anything, let alone some stupid prince.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Rowena left that night, and the dragon, listening carefully, heard no sounds of pursuit. But the girl was not back the next morning. This was enough to worry any foster-mother, of whatever species. The dragon left the cave two hours after dawn and flew a search pattern until midday. She couldn't see Rowena anywhere, and she knew that her search had covered more area than a human on foot could have gone in the time since Rowena left. There was also no sign of the prince or his horse. This could only mean one thing.\n\nIt was time to panic."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Rowena sat in the corner of a small, damp, uncomfortable cave and glared at her captor. Her wrists and ankles were firmly tied, although he had at least had the consideration to tie her wrists in front of her. And even with her ankles tied together she could still kick well enough to make him keep his distance from her. In fact, his shins were bruising nicely, and Rowena felt a certain amount of satisfaction in that.\n\n\"I am sorry for the lack of comfort in our accommodations, your highness,\" he said, \"but if we leave this cave the dragon is certain to find us.\"\n\nRowena bit her lips. She would have loved to tell this idiot what she thought of him, his ancestry, his morals, and his singing, but she didn't dare open her mouth. He didn't know about the spell, and she needed to keep it that way. It had been dark when he grabbed her, so he hadn't seen the pearl that appeared when she screamed, and she'd kept quiet ever since. Of course, she had struggled and tried to run, which was why he had tied her up. So now she was wedged into this cave with him and his horse, until either the dragon found them or he felt safe enough to try to leave it.\n\n\"But you are safe with me,\" he continued, \"and as soon as possible I shall take you home and ask your father for your hand in honorable marriage. I am Prince Florian of Astrefiore, at thy service, Princess.\" The prince stepped forward to make his bow, keeping a wary eye on Rowena's bound feet. \"My eldest brother was among the guests at your birthday party when you were carried off, and he came home and told us of your abduction\u2014and of how your own father forbade all of the princes gathered there to attempt your rescue!\" He looked thoroughly indignant. \"As it is the clear duty of a prince to rescue such an innocent victim, and as King Mark's unnatural command was not binding on me, I set out for the mountain where the dragon laired.\" He smiled sheepishly. \"I'm a better minstrel than a fighter, so I'm just as glad that you were able to creep away without my having to fight the dragon. Of course,\" he added hastily, \"I would fight the beast if it were necessary to insure your safety.\"\n\nChivalry is dead, Rowena thought morosely. It's been replaced by total idiocy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Two women, one dark and one amber-haired, guided their horses on a barely-perceptible deer-track that threaded its way between decidedly unnatural trees. Fortunately, this set of trees whimpered and shrank away from the riders. They could, all too easily, have been reaching towards the women and their mares with avid hunger.\n\nThe last lot had, after all.\n\n\"I thought you knew your way around the Pelagirs,\" the dark-haired one said, rather crossly. Her companion didn't answer, but then, the remark had not been aimed at her.\n\n<I did,> came a purely mental reply, in a tone of affronted dignity. <It is not my fault that the forest has changed. That is the nature of Pelagir territory that has no Hawkbrother Vale nearby. You never asked me if I thought I could still find my way around this area.>\n\nThe head of the speaker emerged from the underbrush, and the bushes there squeaked with alarm and pulled away. He was tall, dark, would have told you himself that he was a handsome fellow, and he was not human.\n\nNor was he a male in the strictest accounting. Warrl was a kyree neuter, a magically-made species with the coat and heads of wolves, the bodies of the great hunting-cats of the plains, the size of a young calf, and all of the intelligence of a human.\n\nOf course, Warrl would have insisted that he was far more intelligent than any human.\n\nRight now, his spirit-bonded friend, the Shin'a'in warrior Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, would have argued for the superior intelligence of the calf.\n\n\"Let it be, she'enedra,\" her companion, the sorceress Kethry, advised. \"We're not in any danger.\"\n\n\"Now,\" Tarma replied darkly, though she did not elaborate. She didn't have to; Kethry already knew what the Pelagirs were like. This was not the first time that they had penetrated the wild lands where magic wars of long ago had warped and twisted the plants, the animals, and even the land itself into something strange, unrecognizable, and often deadly.\n\nIt wouldn't have been so bad if they had actually been in the forest on purpose\u2014but they weren't. They were supposed to be on the way to Kata'shin'a'in, but the familiar road had inexplicably dwindled to a track, then a path, and now had become nothing more than a game-trail. Trying to turn around hadn't worked either; the trail vanished altogether when they tried that. Clearly, something wanted them to go in this direction, something magical. Tarma was hardly pleased. It was bad enough that much of their time was spent satisfying the demands of Kethry's mage-sword, Need\u2014but to have some unknown magician trying to herd them to a completely unknown destination was intolerable! She was beginning to feel like some poor character in a play, bullied towards a confrontation known to the audience, but not to her.\n\nShe did not particularly like the feeling.\n\nSuddenly the track opened up into a clearing. She urged her battlemare into it, disliking the whimpering trees and eager to put some distance between herself and them\u2014and then reined the mare in abruptly when she saw what stood in the center of the clearing.\n\nIt was a doorway without a building, a beautifully formed arch of white stone taller than three tall men, and wide enough for a cart to pass through with space on either side. There was only one problem.\n\nIt shouldn't be here. There wasn't a single sign of the hand of man for leagues and leagues around.\n\nWarrl stood directly in front of the portal, staring at it as if caught in a spell of fascination. All around the clearing, the whimpering trees with their thick, palm-sized leaves pulled their branches towards their trunks and shivered.\n\nKethry brought her mare up beside her partner's, surveyed the clearing, and wrinkled her brow in consternation. \"The path ends here, doesn't it,\" she stated.\n\nTarma nodded gloomily. \"And I'll bet you that if we try to retrace our steps, there won't be a path. We've been herded here like a couple of sheep\u2014\"\n\nShe would have said more, except that the space inside the doorway suddenly changed. Instead of the other side of the clearing, there was nothing there but darkness, a black void that Tarma shrank from without knowing why she did so. Whatever that thing was, she wanted no further part of it!\n\nShe started to turn her horse's head, determined to ride through and even over whatever animate plants wanted to get in her way\u2014\n\nBut suddenly Kethry gave an all-too-familiar cry of pain, and spurred her mare straight at the archway. Warrl was right on her horse's heels, and in a heartbeat, the two of them were swallowed up in the blackness between the white stone pillars.\n\nWith a heartfelt curse, Tarma spurred her horse after, and followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "\"Warrl, I don't think we're in the Pelagirs anymore\u2014\" Tarma said weakly, looking around at the rocky and mountainous slope ahead of her. Sunlight blazed down from a sun near the zenith on the graveled path where their horses stood\u2014it had been near sunset in the clearing.\n\nWarrl did not dignify the observation with even a snort of derision.\n\nIt was possible to deduce some of what had just happened; Tarma had heard about magical doors into other places, often called Gates or Portals\u2014obviously that doorway back in the clearing had been one such device. Something had made it active\u2014and once active, whatever was on the other side had called to Kethry through the medium of the sword she wore, a blade called Need.\n\nThe sword responded to women in crisis, as the runes on her blade explained <Woman's Need calls me/As woman's Need made me./Her Need must I answer/As my maker bade me. Kethry had accepted a kind of soul-bonding with the sword as the price of the aid the blade gave her\u2014Kethry, though completely untrained as a swordswoman, became an expert when the blade took over, and if she was wounded, the blade could and would heal just about anything. As a result, the greater the urgency of the woman in trouble, the worse the sympathetic pain Kethry would experience, unless and until she rode to that woman's aid.>\n\nVery nice for the women they helped, but not too damned convenient for Tarma and her partner.\n\nNo point in trying to throw the sword away, either; the farther Kethry got from it, the more it would call to her, and much too strongly to be denied. Relief would only come when Kethry found a successor to pass the blade on to\u2014and even then, the sword would have to accept the new candidate.\n\n\"Where?\" Tarma asked her partner curtly. Kethry shook her head as if to clear it, closed her eyes for a moment, and pointed up the slope.\n\n\"There,\" she said, her soft voice giving no hint to the firm will behind her pretty face and emerald eyes. \"Whoever's in trouble, she's up there, and she is\u2014must be\u2014practically out of her mind with it. She's also a mage, but not of a kind that I recognize; that must be how she brought us here.\"\n\n\"Lovely,\" Tarma muttered. She stood up in her stirrups, and surveyed the countryside again. It was singularly unprepossessing. The rocky slopes boasted nothing much in the way of vegetation except for thick patches of blackberry bushes. At least, Tarma assumed they were blackberry bushes. There were berries in various stages of ripeness, from yellow-green to darkest plum, showing clearly against the foliage. If they were like the blackberry bushes of home, they'd be as thick with thorns as with berries. Tarma's long-dead love had called them \"wait-a-moment bushes,\" because that was what anyone who tried to force his way through them was reduced to calling out, over and over again.\n\nThere appeared to be a path of sorts ahead of them, leading up to a cave with a generous ledge outside it. That was the direction Kethry was pointing.\n\nThere were no armies camped outside that cave, no signs of horses or other beasts of burden, no fires; whoever was in that cave was probably alone, or if captive, guarded by one or two people at the most. There was nothing to be lost in riding straight up to the cave-mouth and taking a look. Very few people outside the Shin'a'in Clans knew just what it was that Tarma and her partner rode\u2014battlesteeds were easily the equivalent of two ordinary human fighters apiece, and when you added in Warrl, you had a force of the equal of any seven fighters. So if there was anyone nasty up there, he was going to get a major shock if he tried a direct confrontation. And just at the moment, Tarma rather hoped he would. She was truly in a mood to kill something.\n\n\"Let's go,\" she said, \"I want to get this over with.\" And as her partner blinked in surprise at her apparent impulsiveness, she sent her mare trotting up the path to the cave.\n\nShe had been supposing all this time that her adversaries would, of course, be human, so when the monster snaked its head and neck out of the cave-mouth, all she could do for a moment was to freeze in place.\n\nThe monster seemed just as surprised as she was; it stared at her with its mouth\u2014a mouth well-appointed with dagger-like teeth\u2014dropping wide open in shock. Unfortunately, that only gave Tarma a much better look at all those teeth.\n\nWhatever it was, it wasn't a creature like anything she had ever heard of before\u2014except, perhaps, a cold-drake. This thing was the wrong color, but the size was right, and the long neck, and of course, all the teeth.\n\nThere was, presumably, a female being held captive somewhere in that cave. Maybe the monster was saving her for dinner, later; maybe it was just there to guard her. Whatever, the woman's distress held Kethry here until she was freed\u2014and that held Tarma and Warrl. Tarma did the only thing a Swordsworn warrior could, under the circumstances.\n\nShe drew her sword, and with a Shin'a'in battle-cry, spurred her horse into a charge while the monster was still caught off-guard. That is, she started to charge. Kethry's shriek made her rein her mare in so quickly that the poor beast's hooves skidded and she slid to a most undignified stop.\n\n\"Tarma! Stop!\" Kethry cried in real pain. \"Don't! Need wants us to help the dragon!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "\"Dragons,\" Tarma muttered, staring at their hostess in disbelief over a nice hot cup of tea. \"Tea-drinking dragons. I must be out of my mind.\"\n\nThe dragon ignored her, as she had ignored Tarma every other time she had muttered something similar. It\u2014she\u2014was a very polite dragon, although a deeply distressed dragon.\n\nShe had every right to be distressed, though how that distress and the spell she had cast to bring her some help had interacted to open a portal between her world\u2014which was obviously not the one that held Shin'a'in, since there were no such things as dragons in Tarma's world\u2014and their world was a mystery White Winds Adepts would probably be debating for the next century or more. That didn't matter. What did was what she and Kethry were going to do about the situation that brought them here, since obviously the magic that had done so would not release them until they had.\n\n\"I'm dreadfully sorry now that I built the spell that way,\" the dragon was saying, apologetically, \"But I thought I would probably be dragging in some reluctant knight or other, and well\u2014historically my kind and theirs do not exactly get along. I built in coercions, and now I can't get rid of them.\"\n\nKethry nodded wisely, as Tarma sighed. \"At least the track isn't even cold by Warrl's standards,\" Tarma put in. \"I have to admit that you couldn't have deliberately selected anyone more fit to get Rowena back to you in a reasonable amount of time if you'd tried.\"\n\nWarrl nodded. <I really should get on the scent now,> he said, his tone as sympathetic as Tarma had ever heard. <Rowena is probably terribly frightened\u2014>\n\n\"Rowena is probably furious,\" the dragon corrected. \"And if she starts telling him what she thinks of him\u2014\"\n\nThe dragon's voice broke on a sob, and her talons tightened on her own oversized mug until it broke, period. Tarma did not finish the sentence, for the dragon had revealed Rowena's \"little talent\" to explain why they were going to have to find the girl quickly. Princes are always hard up for cash, especially younger princes. Once he finds out he has the equivalent of a mint and a mine in his hands, he'll lock her up so tight they'll have to send daylight to her by messenger.\n\n<I'm on my way,> Warrl said hastily, not wanting to be subjected to another bout of draconic tears and hysteria. The last bout had been quite enough for him.\n\nI would never have guessed that dragons could cry.\n\nWarrl vanished with alacrity, and Tarma decided to change the subject before the dragon broke down again. \"Look, this idiot can't have gotten far with her. She isn't going to cooperate, and he is going to be far too gallant and polite to knock her over the head and bundle her off unconscious.\"\n\n\"That\u2014that's true,\" the dragon sniffled. \"Rowena didn't think much of him before, and by now, her estimate of his character has probably placed him somewhere below spotted newts. If he's lucky, she hasn't done anything to him that's permanent.\"\n\n\"Well, given that, how do you want us to get her loose?\" Tarma asked. \"I don't think you ought to appear; he might try something desperate.\"\n\nThe dragon winced, but nodded.\n\n\"We need to be smart about this,\" Kethry mused. \"I\u2014\"\n\nThen she flushed, and grinned. \"You did say that her father forbade anyone to go after her?\"\n\nThe dragon nodded again.\n\n\"Well,\" Kethry said slyly. \"I have an idea that would provide the perfect explanation for why he did that, and possibly even prevent anything like this from happening in the future. Provided, of course, that your fosterling doesn't mind her reputation being totally destroyed.\"\n\nTarma looked closely at her partner, and as often happened, realized precisely what the sorceress meant; after all, it was an assumption\u2014incorrect as it happened\u2014that was often applied to her and Kethry. Oh my ears! If she's thinking what I think she's thinking\u2014\n\nThe dragon lifted her head high, and cocked it to one side. \"I don't think she would mind if it kept princes off the ledge, but what\u2014\"\n\n<I've found her,> Warrl trumpeted in their minds. <They aren't far away at all. Hurry up, though, I think His Highness is getting impatient.>\n\n\"Let's go,\" Tarma said, jumping to her feet. \"I want to get this over with. We'll explain on the way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "This prince, if not a complete idiot, was certainly the most incompetent person Tarma had ever seen. He hadn't left any kind of a guard on the trail outside the cave he'd hidden in, he'd picked a hiding place barely an hour away from the dragon's own cave, and he wasn't paying any attention to anything going on outside. I guess this just proves that the gods watch out for fools and the mad, she thought in disgust, as Warrl drove his horse off. I can't think of any other reason why he's still alive.\n\nThe sound of his horse galloping off\u2014the fool hadn't even hobbled it!\u2014finally brought him out of the entrance of the cave. He stared in shock at the sight of two grim-faced, armed women\u2014with swords drawn\u2014waiting for him.\n\nTarma was going to be the one challenging him, because Need had a tendency to over-react and they didn't want to kill or even hurt him. And right now, caught between the distress of the female dragon hidden out of sight behind them and Rowena's emotional state in the cave in front of them, Kethry would not be able to restrain the sword if she had to fight the boy.\n\nOf course, there was the chance that he was a much, much better fighter than they thought. He could even be better than Tarma. In that case, they were not going to play fair. Kethry would move in and deal with him. Hopefully, she would be able to keep Need from inflicting anything too permanent.\n\n\"Stand forth, kidnapper!\" Tarma growled menacingly. \"I, Tarma shena Tale'sedrin, do challenge you as a cad and a miscreant. I challenge you for the welfare of the lady you have stolen. I challenge you to single combat for the hand of my lady and my love, the Princess Rowena!\"\n\nThe look on the boy's face when she got to those final few words was almost enough to make her break out laughing. His eyes bulged, and his mouth dropped open, giving him an uncanny resemblance to a startled frog. The green surcoat he wore only heightened the resemblance.\n\n\"I\u2014ah\u2014\" His mouth moved, but nothing more came out of it.\n\nTarma took advantage of his mental state to advance on him. He barely got his blade up in time to deflect her first move; he never saw the second. Her blow to the side of his head laid him out flat.\n\n\"Now what?\" Kethry asked.\n\nTarma shrugged. \"Go free the girl and explain the situation to her. She's the injured party. Let her decide what she wants to do with him. Personally, all I want is out of here.\"\n\n<He is a very good musician,> Warrl put in wistfully. <Truly a marvelous minstrel. I don't suppose\u2014>\n\n\"NO!\" snapped Tarma, Kethry, and the dragon, all together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "From her position in the cave, Rowena had been able to hear clearly everything that was going on, but it didn't make much sense to her. First that incredibly odd looking animal had crept in and scared off the horse. She had seen it quite clearly, although she hadn't recognized it. It was like nothing she had ever seen before.\n\nWarning the prince about what was happening to his horse was not something she was going to do; she didn't owe him any favors. She was prepared to watch the horse gnawed to bare bones before she opened her mouth, but she was just as happy when it was merely chased away\u2014after all, none of this was the horse's fault.\n\nBut her mouth dropped open in astonishment when she heard the challenge. Who is Tarma shena Tale'sedrin? she wondered. And what does she mean \"my lady and my love\"\u2014I've never even met her!\n\nThen a very pretty young woman with amber hair came into the cave, cut her loose, helped her to her feet and held her up until the numbness wore off and Rowena could walk again. \"It's all right, Rowena,\" she said soothingly. \"My name is Kethry, my partner is Tarma, and I think you may have seen Warrl earlier. Your foster-mother hired us to rescue you.\"\n\nRowena had several questions about this 'rescue party' but she didn't know if it was safe to talk yet. So she remained silent as she followed Kethry out of the cave into the sunlight. The prince lay on the ground, but Rowena didn't spare enough attention to determine whether he was dead or merely unconscious. Kethry had obviously been telling the truth about who hired them; the dragon was perched on the trail just beyond the cave. Rowena ran to her and flung both arms around as much dragon as she could reach, which was most of one foreleg.\n\nA scaly chin dropped down to pat the top of her head and then pulled back. \"My poor child,\" the dragon said. \"Have you managed to keep your mouth shut all this time?\" Rowena nodded, her head still pressed firmly against the dragon's leg. \"I'm impressed,\" the dragon chuckled. \"I know it wasn't easy for you. But you can talk now. He's unconscious\u2014\"\n\n\"Not dead?\" Rowena asked in mock disappointment, carefully palming two jewels.\n\n\"Rowena!\" the dragon reproved her. \"And Tarma and Kethry and Warrl know about your peculiar talent.\"\n\nRowena turned to look at them. Kethry smiled sympathetically. \"It must be awkward sometimes,\" she said.\n\nRowena nodded. \"But it's not so bad since the Lady Dragon modified the spell to get rid of the flowers,\" she said, carefully catching the jewels and coins in her cupped hands. \"The rose thorns in the original spell really hurt!\" She looked at Tarma. \"Why did you call me your lady and your love? I don't understand that part\u2014we've never met before, have we?\"\n\nTarma chuckled. \"That was to discourage further royal attempts at 'rescuing' you,\" she explained. \"If you are thought to be a lover of women, most princes won't want you.\"\n\n\"What's a lover of woman?\" Rowena asked, still puzzled.\n\nTarma sighed, and Kethry giggled. \"Oh,\" Rowena said, realizing the class of information involved. \"That's one of those 'you'll understand when you're older' things, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Something like that,\" Kethry replied. \"The idea is that when the prince tells this story, people won't bother you anymore.\"\n\n\"There's just one problem with that,\" Rowena said. \"He's a minstrel\u2014he's not going to tell anything accurately\u2014or even close to it!\"\n\n\"Damn,\" Tarma said. \"She's right. We know how strange a story can become when a minstrel gets hold of it.\"\n\nThe prince stirred and groaned. \"What happened?\" He looked around, saw the dragon, and promptly fainted.\n\nRowena sighed. \"He's a frog,\" she said firmly.\n\nPop! Everyone blinked at the sound, then looked at the figure on the ground. The prince was gone, replaced by a frog.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" the dragon asked in surprise.\n\nRowena shrugged. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"He just seemed like a frog to me.\"\n\nThe dragon sighed. \"I guess I'll have to start giving you lessons in magic. Wild talents are dangerous.\"\n\n\"So are some tame ones,\" Rowena retorted. \"Look at my Aunt Frideswide.\"\n\n\"Can you change him back?\" Kethry asked.\n\nRowena shrugged again. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"I don't particularly want to change him back, either\u2014not after the way he treated me!\"\n\n\"Well, you have to do something with him,\" Tarma said, \"or he'll be outside your cave every time you look.\"\n\nRowena looked up at the dragon. \"Can you do something with him?\"\n\nThe dragon thought for a minute. \"I'll set up a transport circle, and send him to wherever he's wanted or needed.\"\n\nRowena nodded. \"Let's hope there's somebody who wants him then.\" She turned to Kethry. \"You said that you were hired to rescue me. Did you,\" she looked from them to the dragon, \"agree on a price?\"\n\n\"We're actually getting paid?\" Tarma said incredulously.\n\nRowena handed Tarma the jewels that had fallen into her hands with every word she had spoken since they had rescued her. \"Would you prefer coins for the rest?\" Tarma nodded, apparently unable to speak. Rowena cupped her hands in front of her face and chanted softly. When she lowered her hands, they were full of gold coins. She handed them to Kethry, who put them into her belt pouch. Tarma, still staring at the jewels, followed her example."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "\"Are you sure this is going to work?\" Kethry asked the dragon anxiously, as she, Tarma, Warrl and their horses took their places in the carefully scribed magic circle.\n\nThe dragon could only shrug. \"I can only hope. I am not entirely certain how I brought you here in the first place.\"\n\n\"Just get on with it,\" Tarma said, addressing a private and fervent prayer to the Star-eyed. The dragon closed her eyes, and inscribed a complicated figure in the air with one talon.\n\nThen the world went black.\n\nBut instead of reappearing in the clearing in the Pelagirs, Tarma found herself standing alone, in a place of softly glowing mist, on a path of light. The Moonpaths! she thought, startled, But why\u2014\n\n\"So,\" said a familiar voice, a hollow tenor, pleasant enough, but echoing as if the speaker stood in the bottom of a well. \"Finally, we find you. Your spirits have been wandering, Younger Sister\u2014wandering quite out of our world.\"\n\n\"What?\" she asked, startled.\n\n\"You have traveled in spirit to a very distant place,\" her leshy'a Kalendral teacher told her. \"Oh, do not mistake me, your venture was quite real, and as you know, you affected the world in which you walked quite decisively\u2014but your true body was lying in your camp, where you were overcome by the dust of gade'shata. You, and your she'enedra both, your horses and your kyree.\" He tilted his head to one side. \"We bent a rule for you, we, your teachers, and guarded you while you walked.\"\n\nTarma blanched. Gade'shata mushrooms produced a cloud of spores which were incredibly potent. Shamans sometimes used them to walk through other worlds and times, though at their peril. If she and Kethry had survived an encounter with those potent fungi, they were fortunate indeed!\n\n\"I shall not ask where you walked,\" the spirit-Kal'enedral continued. \"You could only have been drawn to one who needed you profoundly. I will only say that you have been fortunate to have escaped this with a whole soul, and if I were you, I should be very careful to watch where I stepped in the future.\"\n\nAnd before she could reply, the world vanished again. Only this time, she found herself lying cramped and cold on wet grass, soaked from head to toe by a sudden rainfall. She dragged herself to her feet with the help of a nearby sapling, scraping her wet hair out of her eyes as she looked around.\n\nThe mares were tethered nearby, shaking their heads as if dazed, the imprint of their bodies still marking the grass beside them. Kethry was blinking and sitting up; Warrl scrubbing at his eyes with his paws. It looked as if they had just made camp, for the remains of a fire smoldered in the light rain\u2014and just beyond the fire, Tarma spotted the flattened shapes of decomposing fungi, their spores depleted. The mushrooms, she thought dazedly. We camped next to the mushrooms, and the heat of the fire set their spores loose. Oh, the gods watch over fools and the mad!\n\n\"What\u2014was it a dream?\" Kethry asked, dazedly.\n\n\"Yes\u2014and no,\" Tarma croaked. \"Let's get out of here while we can. I'll explain it to you on the road.\"\n\nKethry sighed. \"It figures. Any job involving Need where we get paid would have to be a dream.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Summer King 3) A Shard of Sun",
        "author": "Jess Owen",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "griffin",
            "nonhuman protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "The Cave",
                "text": "Shard crouched against the inner wall of the crystal dragon, digging at an edge where the diamond-hard scales met the ground. He'd already worn two talons dull against the hard earth and volcanic rock. His back ached from his prolonged crouch and he made sure to open and stretch his curved, gray wings and his hind legs often.\n\nHe could see, vaguely, beyond the walls\u2014only light and shapes, and he paused to check for movement outside.\n\nThe glimmer of ten thousand false stars filled a cavern massive enough for two dozen dragons to fly. The cavern was the hollow center of a mountain peak, which griffins called the Horn of Midragur.\n\nShard knew where he sat within the cavern, knew what any other creature would see. Near one edge of the floor rose a pedestal of stone, squat and oval, and on top of the pedestal coiled the crystal form of an enormous, serpentine dragon of the Sunland.\n\nThe crystal dragon's body formed a dome, sealing two creatures inside, one of whom was Shard.\n\nI need a better plan, he thought, stopping to stare at the meager groove he'd created along the crystal dragon's body. He'd discovered that it wasn't connected to the ground, that given time, if he had the strength, he might tunnel underneath and escape the chamber. And he desperately needed to escape. Food was running low and the only water to be had was whatever condensed along the walls of the crystal.\n\nA low, thrumming thunder shuddered the ground under his body and he swiveled, peering again through the crystal. That time he saw warped, winged, dark shapes that loomed beyond. There would be a consequence for escaping, one that he hadn't yet thought through.\n\nBut it was not only for his sake that he needed to escape, no matter the peril beyond.\n\n\"Shard!\"\n\nHe startled, scooped loose dirt back into his shallow tunnel, and sat up. \"You're done eating?\"\n\nHikaru bounded forward in rolling leaps, his shining black scales catching the eerie light of the million glow worms far, far above them. When the little dragon had hatched he'd been no larger than an arctic hare. Now he was a third Shard's size. They would starve if they didn't escape, or Hikaru would grow so large that Shard feared he would crush them both against the walls. Shard hadn't yet told him of their danger, and didn't want him to know of the tunnel.\n\n\"I have a new question,\" Hikaru announced, and sat.\n\n\"All right,\" Shard said, happy that the dragonet still didn't understand their peril, and hoping he wouldn't ask why they could only eat so much food at a time. Hikaru's mother had left them a store of dried, smoked fish but now there was only enough for a few more days. Shard had lost track of the time in the unchanging light of the cave, but two things kept him aware. One was their hunger. The other was the wyrms, most of which left at night to hunt, and returned at daybreak. All told, by counting their comings and goings, Shard and Hikaru had been in the chamber just under a fortnight.\n\nHikaru displayed his small, long wing, growing in shape like a swan's, the tips of the black feathers gleaming like the translucent edge of volcanic glass. \"Why have I different\u2026different\u2026\"\n\n\"Feathers?\" Shard offered.\n\n\"Yes.\" Large serpent eyes of luminous gold met Shard's. Hikaru would eventually realize that Shard's moss-green eagle eyes were different than his own as well. \"Why have I different feathers than you? And no feathers on my tail, as you do?\"\n\n\"Because you're a dragon,\" said Shard quietly, but reassuringly. \"And I'm a griffin.\" He tried to stay calm, but the young dragon had grown so swiftly, and was growing still, speaking, learning more quickly than any young creature he'd ever seen. The mother dragon had said as much, that her son would grow faster than Shard could imagine, like a bird, and would need guidance. As he doubled in size so rapidly, it was becoming critical that they find a way out of their sanctuary before it became their grave.\n\nShard wondered if Amaratsu had thought that far ahead, either. The store of food she'd left, that he hadn't noticed in the heat of their last confrontation with the dragons, hinted that she'd planned to remain in the mountain for some time.\n\nA dull, far away sound swept a chill down Shard's back. Hikaru flicked his soft, roe-like ears toward the crystal walls.\n\n\"What is that?\" he whispered. The long whiskers that sprouted from his snout quivered in the air. He hadn't been able to hear the outside noises before. Shard imagined how rapidly the dragonet's senses would improve to levels possibly higher than his own.\n\n\"Dragons,\" he said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Hikaru's soft ears perked fully forward. Shadows swooped around the chamber like enormous ravens. They had tried to break in, with no luck, and the walls muffled their horrible, blood-lusting roars to dull rumbling.\n\n\"Dragons like me? Like my mother?\" He peered at his own body, then sat up and arched his head back like an egret. He offered his bird-like, five-toed forepaws for Shard's inspection.\n\n\"No,\" said Shard, forcing his gaze from the glimmering walls of their haven. Soon Hikaru would fill it to overflowing, but escaping it held just as many problems. \"Not like you or your mother at all. Those are dragons of the Winderost. Voiceless, angry. Other creatures call them wyrms. Your mother was from the Sunland at the bottom of the world. A place of snow and light and peace.\" He tried to speak as if he'd seen it himself, to assure Hikaru of his noble birth. Truly though, all he knew of the Sunland or of dragons was what Amaratsu had told him in the last hours of her life.\n\nShe had begged him to care for her son. Begged him, in the face of attacking wyrms who wished to steal her egg, or worse. Shard didn't know what they wanted. He'd tried to speak to the wyrms once, tried and failed.\n\nThat lingering fear and threat hovered like a storm at the forefront of their quiet time within Amaratsu's coils.\n\nPerhaps still thinking of his mother, Hikaru walked to the wall of the chamber. He touched it gently, as if afraid to mar the scales, though the wyrms of the Winderost had failed to chip or even scratch it from the outside.\n\n\"Mother,\" whispered the dragonet, stroking the unfeeling scales. \"Earth.\" He touched both delicate forefeet to the ground. \"Sky\u2026\" He tilted his graceful, wedge-shaped head back to peer through the crystal. He wasn't staring at the false sky that was the roof of the cavern, laced with clusters of glow worms and lichens, but at a far, high hole near the top that Shard had once pointed out to him. A crack near the pinnacle of the Horn of Midragur led to the sky. Shard followed his gaze, his wings aching to fly.\n\nHe didn't realize he'd opened his wings until he saw that Hikaru's black wings also stretched wide, opening and fanning in exercise.\n\n\"Flight.\" Hikaru's voice was breathless with hunger. One of the first things they'd spoken of was flight, of the sky, of freedom and joy in the wind.\n\nHikaru continued reviewing words and objects, like a lullaby. He did it often, usually putting himself to sleep that way. Relief filled Shard that the dragon had no more questions, and he simply watched, correcting here and there and thinking of how Hikaru's voice differed from Amaratsu. Her quiet, winding voice had the strange accent of a bird from a land he had never seen and didn't know. Hikaru's voice lovingly mimicked a griffin's, more rasping, with the soft rolling rhythm of a cluster of islands in the starward corner of the world. Shard's home.\n\n\"Fish,\" Hikaru said, touching the dry, smoked planks of meat on the ground. Shard saw his eyelids slipping and so he settled himself, stretched out on the ground on his belly, and opened a wing. Hikaru slithered forward, purring, and curled against Shard's warm flank. Shard closed his wing around the dragonet.\n\n\"Feathers,\" Hikaru murmured, combing Shard's wing feathers with gentle talons. \"Talon. Pebble. Rib.\" He yawned widely, then his jaws snapped shut. He bared his tiny, sharp teeth in what Shard had learned was an expression of amusement. \"Tired.\" It reminded him of Catori, his closest wolf friend in the Silver Isles, and he longed for home.\n\n\"Friend.\"\n\nShard waited, knowing it was the last word that Hikaru uttered each night, a word that brimmed with affection and admiration Shard wasn't sure he deserved. Small, articulate dragon talons curled around his foreleg and Hikaru nuzzled his head against Shard's feathered shoulder. His final word for the evening rolled from between his little teeth in a warm sigh.\n\n\"Shard.\"\n\nA dream bore him a vision of a snowy valley lit by a celestial green glow. He'd never seen the valley or mountains in the Silver Isles, nor the Winderost. In the center of the valley, he beheld a ring of stones. A pale star glowing down on the earth darted to and fro amongst the stones, and then away toward the mountains on the far side of the valley.\n\nBefore Shard could explore the vision further, something grabbed his wings, shaking him, demanding his attention.\n\n\"I'm awake,\" Shard grumbled, grasping Hikaru's forelegs and wrestling him off. \"I'm awake!\"\n\nHikaru laughed and coiled his tail around Shard's chest, baring his teeth in challenge. Groggy, but determined not to lose a playful spar to a dragonet half his size, Shard rolled to his back and Hikaru fell with him, scrambling to stay on Shard's stomach. Shard arched up to kick his hind legs against Hikaru's belly, lifting him off the ground. The dragonet loosed a long, laughing scree like a seabird and flared his wings. At full spread they were as long as Shard's, despite his smaller size.\n\n\"I'm flying!\"\n\n\"Well done!\" Shard laughed, still holding Hikaru's forefeet. The dragonet uncoiled his tail and set his hind feet on Shard's paws and his front feet in Shard's talons, so he stood braced against an imaginary wind, flapping his wings hard. Shard gripped the little forepaws firmly, encouraging this exercise. The only way they would escape the cavern was to fly, and Hikaru would be too big for him to carry. He had to build his strength.\n\nAfter another moment of \"flying,\" Hikaru broke free with a shove and leaped, gliding the small expanse from their side of the chamber to the other. Shard flopped over to his belly and watched the little dragon glide, flap and flare. He looked to have the instinct for it, though he flared too late and smacked into the far wall instead. Shard rolled to his feet and trotted over as Hikaru crawled to a sitting position.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Oh. No.\" He ran his little talons nervously down his belly scales, and Shard detected a flush at the end of his soft nose, which was more like a deer's nose, and had no scales. \"Mother caught me.\"\n\nShard lifted a foot, taken aback, then chuckled gently. \"Yes she did. Well done though. Next time\u2014\"\n\n\"I know.\" Hikaru's eyes slitted and he lashed his tail against the dirt, \"If I think it's time to turn or stop, it's already too late.\"\n\nShard nodded once. \"Well remembered.\"\n\n\"Next time I will.\"\n\nA tremor vibrated the earth under their feet. Pebbles shivered on the rock, and pure cold washed Shard's skin.\n\nHikaru perked his ears at the ground. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"Earthquake,\" Shard said. The tremor stilled, and he managed to keep his voice calm. \"This is an ancient volcano, a hollow mountain. It's not uncommon for that to happen.\"\n\nHikaru patted his paw against the ground, as if to make the earth shake again. \"Is it dangerous?\"\n\nShard hoped not, and to answer he said only, \"It won't matter if we get out, soon. Don't worry. I've felt small earthquakes in the Silver Isles. Are you hungry?\"\n\nShard hated such an obvious change of subject, hated to deter Hikaru from his questions or seem to be lying, but he didn't want the dragon to fear things over which they had no control. For the first time, Hikaru hesitated at the question. He glanced at the dwindling stash of meat. \"Should we save it?\"\n\nShard drew a deep breath. \"No, Hikaru. You're growing fast and you need to eat.\"\n\nHikaru's eyes narrowed further, the delicate ridges drawing down in a reptilian frown. \"When did you eat last?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Shard said firmly. \"Eat a fish.\"\n\nHikaru's tail twitched again, then he did as Shard told him. Shard tried to remember the last time he had eaten, himself, and when he couldn't, decided he'd better have something. He ate a smaller fish as well, watching how Hikaru made an effort to chew slowly and savor the meal.\n\nI can't wait to show him a true meal. A real fish. Real meat. Judging by his wings, Shard guessed Hikaru might be able to dive and fish, and the prospect of teaching the young dragon excited him.\n\nFirst things first. He waited for Hikaru to get sleepy, as he usually did, after eating. Then he could work on the hole to get them out. But Hikaru didn't curl up right away. As if he'd been thinking of something for a while, he left the fish pile and pressed his paw to the crystal wall, angling his head to watch Shard closely.\n\n\"My mother gave her life for me. And for you.\" He searched Shard's face. \"Why?\"\n\n\"She was your mother,\" Shard said, struggling to answer the new, more complicated question. The previous days all Hikaru had asked about were the names for things, and when they might have fresh fish. At last Shard sat, fidgeting his talons against the rock. \"She wanted me to teach you of the world, and of dark and light, and the songs, and of her.\" He took a deep breath, watching Hikaru's quiet, eager expression. He'd known the moment would come, and he'd already decided what to do. Shard's own past had been a mystery to him his entire life, with others secretly hoping for and expecting things that he might do without telling him everything he needed to know.\n\nHe had vowed never to do that to Hikaru.\n\n\"Hikaru, the dragons of your kind have kept to themselves for many years in the Sunland, not visiting the rest of the world as they once did. Your mother hoped that by bringing you here and letting you befriend other creatures, you might help to change things.\"\n\nHikaru tilted his head. \"How could I change things? And why would she want me to?\"\n\nShard tilted his head in an unconscious echo of the dragonet, and flicked his long, feathered tail against the ground. \"I'll tell you, but it's a long story.\"\n\nHikaru nodded gravely, then, stretching his wings, said, \"I shall like to hear it. But could I have one more fish?\"\n\n\"I knew you were hungrier than that.\" Shard laughed, and reached forward, slipping his talons gently under the dragon's wings to lift and spread them wide. \"Yes, but just one more or you'll get too plump to fly!\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Hikaru squirmed back and flapped once, hopping away. A sudden memory blinked through Shard's mind so swift he almost missed it. Himself, being swept through the air, as a laughing, deep, male voice praised the shape and health of his wings, proclaiming that he would be a fine flier.\n\nBut the voice in his memory wasn't his true father's voice, Baldr the Nightwing, dead king of the Silver Isles.\n\nShard caught a breath, and realized Hikaru had wanted him to chase, so he did, pouncing forward. The dragonet squealed in delight and leaped back to the dried fish, his wings still stretched wide.\n\nShard scrambled for the memory again while Hikaru picked through the fish. He'd been so young\u2014why didn't I remember this before? Strong talons had swung him through the air, and when he looked down, he met the fierce, guarded eyes of his nest-father, Caj. Caj, one of the conquering Aesir, wingbrother to the Red King who had committed so many crimes against Shard's pride. Caj, who had also kept the secret of Shard's true parentage from the king himself, and raised Shard as his own.\n\nA number of regrets surged forth and Shard shook himself of them. He had enough things to focus on, namely, feeding Hikaru, and escape. After that would come decisions.\n\nSo many decisions.\n\nThe weight of his own birthright sat more than ever like stones across his wings, the amount of wrongs to set right and matters to settle.\n\n\"I'm ready for the tale,\" Hikaru announced, dragging a long strip of fish back to Shard.\n\nShard fluffed his wings, focusing on the one thing that was important in that moment.\n\n\"The story of our being here,\" he began, lifting his gaze to the crystal wall and the shadows beyond, \"begins a much longer time ago. In a place called the Dawn Spire.\"\n\nHikaru watched him, entranced, and Shard met his eager gaze.\n\n\"And a young prince named Kajar.\"\n\n[ Flotsam ]\n\nWaves smashed against sharp, wind-battered rocks along the inner curve of a crescent coastline. The worst of the storm had already passed, but pale clouds still gusted low, raining on the ruined shore. The rocks hugged small patches of gravel beaches, some ten leaps long, others wide enough for only a single griffin to stand. Dead and dying sea creatures littered the small beaches, tangled in mats of seaweed or sprawled on the sand. Fish, seals, a handful of unfortunate seabirds.\n\nFour scavengers ranged among the sea-wrack\u2014three winged, and one on four paws. The painted wolf found the first fish and, with an eye to the griffins above him, bolted it down without offering to share. If they found out, it would be his hide. But they wouldn't find out. He chuckled to himself and picked up to a lope, stretching his full belly and licking his jaws.\n\nThe griffins shouted above and he saw the source of their excitement. A dead seal. Large enough to feed three starving, rogue griffins, and one painted wolf. The storm had been the worst one all season, but it left riches for those who knew where to hunt.\n\nA scent on the wind distracted him. As the griffins fell on the dead seal, the wolf turned back into the wind, ears perked. Downwind, he raised his nose and followed it.\n\nRocks scattered at the edge of the beach and lanced out to sea, forming a barrier between him and the next beach. But the scent came from the next beach. Gingerly, not wanting to slip, the wolf climbed up the rocks, ignoring griffin shouts for him to come and eat. He spotted his quarry crammed in the rocks unnaturally, not as if it had washed up, but as if it had swam, or desperately crawled, at low tide, into the shelter of the tide pools. Oh, he'd been correct. The scent was worth following.\n\nHe quirked his head, thinking.\n\n\"What's all this?\" demanded Rok, winging up to hover over the wolf. \"Ha. A fallen exile? We could use more talons. Is he alive?\"\n\nRok didn't land at first, eyeing the griffin warily, and the wolf shifted, lowering his head to sniff. Both of them studied the washed-up griffin in the rocks. Large, big-boned, with golden feathers micah-bright against the stone and seawater.\n\n\"Breathing,\" Rok confirmed. He landed near the wolf, carefully gripping the stones. \"Healthy. Big. Looks to be outcast from the Dawn Spire, if I had to wager. This could be good for us. Can you haul him out?\"\n\nThe wolf tilted his head the other way, studying. \"Halfway,\" he grunted. Words were always an effort. He roamed Nameless so often these days\u2026\"You can pull him the rest.\"\n\n\"Good enough.\" Rok looked back over his shoulder. \"Hey, you worthless, lice-infested vultures,\" he called affectionately to the other two in their band, \"over here!\"\n\nThe two griffins, a young female of plain brown coloring and a male her age with feathers like sand, ignored him to continue eating. Meanwhile, the painted wolf negotiated his way down to the hollow, to the water, and the washed-up griffin.\n\nAs he drew close, something brighter than the feathers caught his eye. He thrust his face under the feathers to loop the strange material over his nose, and tilted his head toward Rok.\n\n\"Rok. What is this?\"\n\nThe gangly rogue cocked his head. \"Hm. Is it metal? I think it's called\u2026a chain.\" A strange light brightened his eyes.\n\nThe wolf wrinkled his nose. \"A chain? What does it do?\" He shook his head free of the delicate metal and clamped his jaws on the griffin's scruff. True to his estimation, he was able to haul the limp body halfway back up the rocks by standing on his hind legs, then Rok caught the griffin under the forelegs and dragged him over the rocks to the beach.\n\n\"A chain,\" the rogue confirmed, his expression guarded. \"Gold. I've heard stories of it.\" The wolf's hackles prickled. He knew when Rok was scheming. \"I know a few creatures who might have an interest. Fraenir!\" He barked over his shoulder, \"Frida! Come over here now.\"\n\n\"Can you eat it?\" The wolf sniffed again at the gold griffin and the chain, curious at his foreign scent, his size, and the bright coloring of his feathers.\n\n\"No. It's metal. Don't be foolish. You'd just as well eat rocks.\"\n\nThe wolf bared his fangs, then the unconscious griffin's tail flipped up and smacked his face, just as the other two of their band walked up beside Rok.\n\nRok slipped his claws through the chain to tug it free from the unconscious griffin's neck.\n\nTalons locked on Rok's foreleg and the golden griffin coughed seawater. \"\u2026that\u2026is mine.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" Rok growled, lifting his wings in surprise at the challenge. \"Why, I'll skin you and line my nest with gold feathers. Everything that washes up on this shore's mine, including your chain there.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked the wolf of the gold griffin, almost remembering his own name\u2014realizing, just then, that he had forgotten it. It slipped away again and he let it, unworried. With the name came some dark memory, a fear greater than he wanted to remember.\n\nThe griffin hacked again and Rok chuckled, lifting his ears. \"Kjorn,\" wheezed the griffin. \"Son-of-Sverin. Prince of\u2026of\u2026\" Either he couldn't remember, or couldn't decide, but he didn't finish, and his gaze slid between the three griffins. Fraenir stepped in front of Frida as if to shield her from his gaze, and she dipped her head, peering at the stranger with narrowed eyes.\n\n\"Ha! Hear that, my friends?\" Rok looked at all of them to make sure. Fraenir chuckled, Frida didn't and Rok looked back to the stranger. \"Lucky for you, I'm a prince too. Prince of all you see here on the border of Vanheim. Prince of this mudding cranny between the high-beaks of the Reach and the stuff-beaked Vanhar. What brings you here?\" He chuckled, as if it were a delightful conversation on a sunny afternoon.\n\n\"Starfire,\" whispered the griffin who called himself Kjorn. \"Shard. Have you seen\u2026?\"\n\n\"Shards?\" Rok repeated. \"What kind? Rocks? We've got plenty.\"\n\nShard. The wolf twitched one ear back as something nagged his mind, like a flea. He sat, scratching vigorously as if that could relieve his head. A name, not his own name, which he couldn't recall, but another. He remembered a rainstorm and a thick sense of terror. He shut it out, stood, and shook himself of drizzle.\n\nNothing to be frightened of, there. Nothing he needed to remember. He had food and a pack, even if his pack was made of griffins.\n\nKjorn tilted his head back, gaze rolling to behold the littered shore. Then he looked up and down the three griffins, and the wolf. His eyes narrowed. He uttered something. The wolf heard it, and laid his ears flat. Rok didn't, and leaned forward.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Poachers,\" Kjorn croaked again. \"You're part of no pride. That I can see.\" He tried to push himself up, quivered, and fell again. The wolf saw blood oozing from a wound behind one wing. He must've been dashed against the rocks before finding his safe hollow.\n\nRok's hackle feathers lifted at the word, and his tail lashed. \"Oh, is that the way of it? Well, son-of-Sverin.\" He grabbed the golden chain again and yanked, snapping the delicate links and making Kjorn grunt in pain. \"Consider yourself poached.\" He stalked off, the chain in his fore claws, and said over his shoulder, \"Take him.\"\n\nThe wolf exchanged a look with Fraenir, and they braced for a fight\u2014but the large golden griffin had fallen unconscious again on the sand.\n\nKjorn opened his eyes. He lay on cold rock inside a cave that reeked of old fish and brine. Swiveling his ears, he determined the sea now lay below him, that he'd been hauled to a cliff-side den near the shore. Bright moonlight washed everything, showing him mostly rock and a night sky.\n\nVoices made him alert, and his instinct for danger flared. He recalled the exiles.\n\n\"He's awake!\" reported a female.\n\nKjorn tried to sit up, but something bound his forelegs and his hind paws. By the scent, it had to be thick ropes of seaweed. He squirmed and twisted his talons but he was tied so closely to the digits that he could neither slice through the thick vines nor pull free. He managed to scoot up to a half-sitting position, leaning on his bound forefeet, by the time the leading male approached him from the back of the cave. Kjorn, his eyes adjusted to the dark and moonlight, looked around to see the female who'd spoken. He was surprised to see that she stood smaller, compact and thin, built almost like a Vanir. Her eyes, when she met his, were guarded and hard.\n\n\"Welcome awake, Your Highness,\" said the lanky male.\n\nKjorn growled low, spying his chain, tied roughly and glinting around the arrogant poacher's neck. \"Release me. I have no quarrel with you.\"\n\nThe griffin tilted his head, then sputtered a laugh and mantled his wings, mocking. \"And I have no quarrel with you.\" He mimicked Kjorn's speech\u2014his own was rough, but his eyes were keen. \"But I do have a use for you.\"\n\n\"Return that chain. It was my father's.\"\n\n\"Oh? Well now it's mine. The price for saving your carcass. You'd have bled out or drowned at high tide if not for us.\"\n\nKjorn growled, trying to flare his wings, and found they, too, were bound by seaweed. He knew he'd been foolish to take anything from his father's old nest, especially a golden chain that was an icon of the very war that had started all the wrongs Kjorn hoped to right. But he'd seen Sverin wear it often, the gold against the crimson chest, and it helped to have a little piece of his father close by.\n\nServes me right. He took a slow breath. At first, no one had wanted him to go, seeking Shard, except perhaps for Ragna. When it became clear that Sverin would likely not return to threaten the pride, that everyone was weary of fighting, and that Thyra and Ragna could handle any disputes which arose, Kjorn had decided to go. He had to find Shard, and make amends, and decide, together, the future of their prides.\n\nHe decided it would not do to make enemies his first day in the Winderost. Though he was bound, he was alive, and perhaps what the outcast said was true, and he would've died without help.\n\nHe managed to keep his voice neutral. \"I do thank you for your help. You have my gratitude. But the chain is of no use to you and neither am I. I'm here\u2026seeking a friend.\" He decided not to tell them the rest. If he'd had his wits about him before, he wouldn't have named himself a prince at all. He'd let them decide if that was true or part of sea-washed delirium. Kjorn shuddered at the memory of the storm closing on him over the sea when he'd been at the end of his strength, and the final wind that had shoved him into the sea.\n\nBut bright Tyr bore me to my homeland. At least part of the way. The rest, it seemed, would be up to him.\n\n\"What friend?\"\n\nKjorn could see no harm in telling them that, at least. Knowing Shard, he might very well have made allies of scoundrels like these. \"His name is Shard. Rashard. A gray griffin, about your height.\" He nodded to the female, who darted her gaze away, tail flicking. \"A Vanir.\"\n\n\"Vanhar? No, they don't come this close to the Reach.\"\n\n\"No,\" Kjorn said, curious at the similarity. He didn't want to test Rok's patience by asking, though. He felt he had a limited number of questions the rogue might answer. \"Vanir. From a group of islands far starward, the Silver Isles.\"\n\nRok looked suspicious. \"Never heard of them. Or your friend. You?\" He asked the female, who shrugged her wings. Kjorn saw another male, closer to the back of the cave. He merely grunted a negative.\n\nPerfect. The wolf seer said Shard landed and found my kin, was welcomed into the Dawn Spire with open wing, and I land among scruffy, honor-less thieves.\n\nKjorn tried to fluff his feathers and look proud, though he was certain he looked no better than any of the dead creatures that had washed up on the shore. \"Take me to the Dawn Spire. They'll give you a reward for me there.\" He wasn't strictly certain that was true, but all that mattered was what he could make them believe.\n\nThat gained the big male's attention. \"Food?\"\n\n\"Of course. Lots of food. More and fresher than you'd find here. Red meat, not fish.\"\n\nThe leader cocked his head, calculating. \"What about this?\" He slid his talon along the gold chain, admiring it against his dull brown feathers. \"Is there more of this?\"\n\nKjorn switched his tail, meeting the hard, keen gaze. \"No. My pride took all the gold from the Winderost. You hold all that's left.\"\n\n\"Ha! So why should they give me anything for you at the Dawn Spire? Hm? Are you high tier? A good warrior? Not from what I've seen.\"\n\n\"Look at his eyes, Rok,\" burst out the female, as if she couldn't stand the big griffin's ignorance any longer. \"You fool. Look at his eyes.\"\n\nRok snapped his beak at her, lifting his wings, then settled in front of Kjorn and peered at his face in the moonlight. Kjorn knew what he saw. Gold feathers, bedraggled but true in breeding, and the rare eye color of bright sky blue. What it meant to them, he didn't know.\n\n\"I see,\" Rok murmured. \"I see now. I thought it was a trick of the ocean.\"\n\n\"What do you think the queen will give for him?\" the female asked eagerly, and Kjorn wished she'd stayed silent after all.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Rok stood, stretched luxuriously, and scraped his talons across the rock floor of the cave.\n\nKjorn's tail twitched. \"Enough to satisfy you, I'm sure. Take me there and I'll reward you myself.\"\n\n\"You're alone,\" Rok said. \"You washed up half-dead. I don't think the Dawn Spire even knows you're here and alive, and I don't know if they'll want you.\" His eyes glittered. \"But I'll let others figure that out. I think I know someone who'll pay more.\"\n\nKjorn's belly dropped out.\n\n\"Don't look so forlorn, Your Highness. Consider the good part\u2014we don't have to travel as far as the Dawn Spire.\"\n\n\"Where will you take me?\" Kjorn demanded. \"To whom?\"\n\n\"Feed him,\" Rok said to the female, stalking away. \"Let it never be said that I was responsible for letting a prince go without his supper.\"\n\nThe female eyed Kjorn, then tossed a fish at him. It smacked him in the face before he could snap his beak to catch it. Rok and the other male broke into coarse laughter, taking up the game and pelting him with small fish.\n\n\"Stop this!\" Kjorn roared, flinging himself against his bonds but succeeding only in throwing himself to ground. The younger male exploded into laughter again, and Rok strode forward, planting his talons on Kjorn's shoulder.\n\n\"You should stay down for a while.\"\n\n\"I have no fight with you. I've earned no disrespect. Free me and I'll help you hunt, and you can help me find\u2014\"\n\n\"I've no desire to help you with anything,\" Rok snarled, squeezing his talons against Kjorn's shoulder. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight, and for the first time, Kjorn recognized not just a desire for food and gain, but true contempt. And recognition. \"You, or any other relation to the Dawn Spire.\"\n\nKjorn hesitated, studying the griffin's hard, bitter expression. \"Why\u2014\"\n\n\"Check his binds often,\" Rok said, and shoved away toward the back of the cave. Kjorn watched him go, then tried to catch the female's eye. She looked away, leaving Kjorn to consider his situation, half buried in fish in the moonlight. Not quite idly, he wondered what Shard would say, to see him bound and treated so, and wondered, with apprehension, if his once-wingbrother wouldn't think he deserved it.\n\n[ The Star Dragon ]\n\n\"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?\"\n\nShard jumped at the voice, bashing his head against the hard, gleaming scales of Amaratsu's side. \"Hikaru. I thought you were sleeping.\"\n\n\"What are you doing? Are you digging? Are you digging out?\" The young dragon slipped forward, peering at the shallow beginning to Shard's escape route.\n\n\"That was my idea. I don't want you near it, though. The wyrms might get a better scent of you.\"\n\nHikaru sat up on his haunches, arching his head back. Shard marveled at his size. In another two days, he would be as large as a griffin. Their sanctuary grew crowded indeed.\n\n\"I want to help.\"\n\n\"You don't need to help.\"\n\nThe ground under them shivered and they both tilted their heads back, looking toward the shadows outside. The wyrms, back from hunting a meal, filled the cavern again. Their muffled roars pressed against the walls and Hikaru reared up to place his paws against the shining scales.\n\n\"What do they want, Shard? Can they speak like us? Can we talk to them?\" His large eyes searched hard against the shadows, then he tilted his head to look at Shard, waiting for all his answers. Shard wished he had more to give.\n\n\"I don't know. I tried to speak to them once\u2026\" That horrible night. He ruffled his feathers. \"I know they want you, and they hate me.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Hikaru relaxed back to sitting, his long tail twitching. He narrowed his eyes. Shard tried not to look surprised at the new, growing depth of his voice. \"Will they try to kill us? They seem so angry.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I told you everything that passed between them and the griffins, and the dragons of the Sunland. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"Nameless,\" Hikaru murmured, not to Shard in particular. \"Voiceless. It's not right, is it? It's not right for them.\"\n\n\"No,\" Shard said quietly. \"It's not. Tyr and Tor gave all creatures under their sky life and purpose.\"\n\n\"I want to help them,\" Hikaru said firmly, and love and fear strained against each other in Shard's heart. He briefly forgot that the dragonet was only two weeks old, and would live only one year.\n\nHow his heart must race. Shard thought of all that had befallen him in only a year\u2014not even a year yet\u2014and understood a little how a dragon of the Sunland must think they lived a long, rich life indeed.\n\n\"So do I,\" Shard said belatedly. \"And I'm certain we can. And if we can help them, I know it will help all the struggles I've told you about in my own islands, the Winderost, and maybe even your homeland.\"\n\nHikaru turned large eyes to him, scrutinizing with frightening maturity. \"Truly?\"\n\nShard straightened, opening his wings. \"Truly. Together, we can. Maybe I couldn't make them hear me, alone, but together, I know we'll find a way.\"\n\nHikaru nodded once, then his ears turned back and he lowered himself to the ground, crawling toward Shard and looking quite young again. \"I'd like a song. A new song. A dragon song.\"\n\nShard flexed his talons against the rock, thinking. They'd gone through his entire knowledge of griffin songs, into wolf songs Shard had learned over his short autumn before flying to the Winderost, and the Song of the Summer King, the songs of First and Last Light. He struggled to think of a dragon song.\n\nA rich, wry, gravelly voice came into his head. He shut his eyes, trying to block it and the sadness that came with it. Distracted by Hikaru and their predicament, he had managed not to think of it. Now it threatened to push him to the brink of sorrow.\n\n\"I've told you how stars form the history of the world in the sky?\" Shard began, his voice quavering. In his mind he saw a cliff overlooking a cold starward sea. He saw bright stars sweeping across a black sky and heard a low voice telling him the tales of each one. The remembered voice threatened to break his strength.\n\n\"Yes?\" Hikaru asked, hungry for knowledge.\n\nThe dragonet's face and curiosity dragged Shard from the brink, and he focused on him.\n\n\"I remember,\" Hikaru said, inching forward, swiveling his head to peer out of their chamber toward the hole in the top of the mountain, past the glowworms and glowing lichens where Shard had promised him the real sky existed, filled with real stars and the light of the sun. \"And how they turn in their season, and hunt each other across the sky, how we may use them to guide our flights, and how bright Tyr burns away the dark, and Tor protects us when Tyr is away. And you followed a starfire to find my mother and me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Shard said, proud and a little sad. So much joy and eagerness, and so short a life.\n\nIt is Tor who commands the sea, rang an indignant, growling voice in his head, a black griffin under a star-swept sky, teaching a more ignorant Shard all the things he hadn't learned. She who brings the thunder when Tyr brings the wind and rain, Tyr's mate.\n\nThe memory of the griffin who'd first told Shard that tale threatened to push him to the brink of mourning again, and so he focused back on Hikaru.\n\n\"Tyr and Tor guide us. And the stars tell all our future and our past,\" Shard managed, \"all the way back to the First Age when the First creatures came from the Sunlit Land, learned their names, and made the world.\"\n\nHikaru coiled up at Shard's side and watched him with so much hungry adoration that guilt gnawed at him. He wasn't so special. All Hikaru knew of the world was what Shard could tell him, and he seemed to think Shard knew everything when he knew very little at all.\n\nBut I can tell what little I know.\n\n\"Across the sky,\" Shard continued, \"you'll see a serpent of stars, a bright band that wraps all the way around the world.\" In the telling, he found himself calming down. \"It's my favorite, actually. The star dragon is called Midragur.\" He paused, surprised for a moment. He realized, in that heartbeat, that the myth he told couldn't be from the Sunland or the Winderost, as he'd once thought. The timbre of the name was wrong, different than Amaratsu and Hikaru. He wondered where the myth came from\u2014griffins, or dragons. Or perhaps the wyrms themselves.\u2026\n\nHikaru tugged his wing, impatient for the tale. Shard flexed his talons against the ground and shook his head.\n\n\"Those who believe that the earth was born from Tyr and Tor also believe that a great dragon coils around it, protecting it as a mother dragon would her egg.\" Inspired, Shard retrieved the broken halves of Hikaru's pearly, discarded eggshell, lying all that time near the wall of the chamber. Hikaru perked his ears as Shard fitted the two largest pieces back together, and leaned forward.\n\n\"The wise say that the egg that is the world will still hatch one day.\" He turned the egg slowly, like the world turned, as if he and Hikaru were the sun and the moon, with all the stars of existence behind them. Shard leaned closer as Hikaru held his breath.\n\n\"That day, that glorious and terrible day when the egg of Midragur hatches, will be the end of the world.\"\n\nHe popped the eggshells apart.\n\nHikaru jumped.\n\nShard laughed and the dragonet shrieked, romping away in long, rolling leaps around the chamber.\n\n\"I am Midragur!\" he cried, his wild laughter echoing around and around the chamber like bird calls. The loud, overwhelming sound of joy smoothed a balm over Shard's heart. \"I am the dragon made of stars!\"\n\nWhen the echoes of laughter faded, Shard's ears twitched back and forth at a strange sound. No, not a sound. A lack of sound. He angled his head to peer out of the crystal walls. He still saw the dark, stalking shadows of the wyrms, but they were silent.\n\nChilled, Shard wondered if they'd fallen silent to hear Hikaru's laughter. Shard watched him playing, coiling around his own eggshell as Midragur, then \"hatching\" the egg as Shard had done, and rolling away into oblivion at the end of the world.\n\nAmaratsu had hoped that somehow her son would help to form peace with her wrathful cousins in the Winderost. If they fell silent in the face of his laughter, perhaps that could be a start.\n\n\"The Nameless shall know themselves,\" Shard whispered, watching Hikaru turn his eggshell around to hatch it again. \"And the Voiceless will once again speak\u2026\"\n\nThe boom and crack of a wyrm's roar split the dark. Shard flinched, the ground shuddered and tiny bits of eggshell skipped across the chamber. Hikaru fell still, then cast a petulant glare upward, his luminous eyes narrowed to slits.\n\nWe have to escape, Shard thought, bleakly following the black dragonet's gaze.\n\nHikaru reared up on his hind legs, flaring his narrow wings to their full length, and bellowed at the shadows outside.\n\n\"I AM MIDRAGUR!\"\n\nA shock thrilled down Shard's spine. He could only stand, amazed.\n\n\"I am the mountain born, son of the earth, son-of-Amaratsu of the Sunland! I stand with the Summer King, the mighty Shard of Sun, and I don't fear you!\"\n\nHope and worry curled in Shard's chest. Somehow, Hikaru was learning courage, if only from the songs they sang. The mighty Shard of Sun. Amaratsu had told Shard he seemed like a shard of sunlight in the cave, when he couldn't remember his own name. He'd told Hikaru all of it. All that had passed. How large and powerful Shard must seem to him now. How small and pathetic he would seem, soon, when they faced the large world outside.\n\nTo Shard's surprise, the roars fell silent for a few heartbeats again, perhaps in shock that any sound came from the crystal at all.\n\nA rumble shook the cavern, but it was not wyrms.\n\n\"Earthquake!\" Hikaru cried, and laughed as if thrilled, perhaps thinking he'd caused it.\n\nShard looked at the ground as the tremor grew, shaking the crystal chamber so that the seam where it met the ground rattled, but it didn't move from its place. He feared what the quakes might mean, since the Horn of Midragur had once been a volcano.\n\nThe ground stilled. Then, as if fueled by the knowledge that Hikaru was growing strong within, the wyrms shrieked and fell upon the chamber, smashing claws and horns against it, biting, ramming, to no avail.\n\nShard sat slowly, eyeing the walls, and the shallow groove he'd dug. Hikaru crouched a moment more, wings wide, jaws open in a low hiss. Another wyrm smashed its body against the chamber. Hikaru winced and fell back, folded his wings and slunk over to Shard, twining up to coil around him and perch on his shoulders as he'd done when he was smaller.\n\nShard braced against his weight even though he was lighter than he looked, like a bird or griffin, his bones light as any flying creature. Shard didn't discourage him, wanting the dragon to feel safe as long as he could.\n\n\"I am the star dragon,\" Hikaru said again, his coils loose and gentle around Shard's wings and chest, his delicate claws nervously combing the feathers of Shard's neck. Shard closed his eyes, letting Hikaru's voice soothe out all others in his memory, the dragon coiled warm around Shard like the stars around the earth.\n\n\"I am Midragur,\" whispered Hikaru. \"And Shard, you are the world.\"\n\nA nightmare.\n\nShard knew it wasn't real, yet could not fly out of it. He veered through a chaos of wings, talons, and massive snapping jaws, the wyrms smashing into the towers and arches of the Dawn Spire, killing. Black feathers rained around him and he shouted for his uncle. He shouted for Stigr, then for Asvander, for Brynja. For a moment the ruddy gryphoness winged beside him, and his heart thrilled, beating hard, but when she looked at him, her pale golden eyes only condemned.\n\nHe thought he saw Kjorn, below, sprinting across the plain with a pack of painted wolves behind him.\n\nHe screamed for Tyr to intervene, begged for the sun to rise. A sharp, high pitched voice answered him, calling his name.\n\nShard rolled and bumped into a warm, scaled body.\n\nHikaru loomed over him, wings hunched around them both in a protective mantle.\n\nThe world seemed to tilt and reel as Shard found his breath. Real wyrms, not his nightmare, screamed out in the dark and beyond them, the silent, false sky glowing with splashes of the glowworms.\n\nShard lay on his side, panting, staring up at Hikaru, now the size of a mountain cat\u2014much larger than a griffin fledge. His length made him seem larger. When he saw that Shard was awake, he lowered from his crouch to coil his body in a circle around him.\n\n\"What did you dream?\" His voice flicked like a winter wind, warming toward a new depth. Shard yearned to hear the accent of the Sunland, Amaratsu's warm accent, but Hikaru had learned his speaking from Shard, and his speech was the half-lilted, rough burr of a griffin. \"You were crying out so loudly I thought the wyrms had broken in.\"\n\nShard shut his eyes. \"I dreamed the battle at the Dawn Spire, when the wyrm cut down my uncle.\" He stood slowly, stretching inside Hikaru's coil. \"Or maybe it was a battle to come.\"\n\n\"I hope not.\" Hikaru loosed a strained chuckle. \"It sounded horrible.\"\n\n\"It was,\" Shard agreed, closing his eyes briefly as he remembered Stigr, motionless in the red mud.\n\n\"I'm glad you're awake,\" Hikaru said, averting his gaze and seeming, Shard thought, to purposefully change the subject. \"I want to show you something.\" Hikaru slipped out of his coil, and Shard realized he was losing some of his youthful awkwardness, coming into the strength and grace of his delicate bones and his serpentine body. He tried to determine if it had only been another day or if he was losing track of time entirely.\n\n\"What is it?\" Shard followed him to the crystal wall, to the shallow groove Shard had managed to create by wearing his talons dull.\n\nHikaru crouched, and, his eyes on Shard, dug his paws against the dirt and rock.\n\n\"Don't,\" Shard said quickly. \"I know you want to help, but let me. You'll wear your claws dull and then where would we be? Hikaru\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off as Hikaru's gaze became sly. He held up a paw, full of dirt and rock, then dropped the dirt to the ground. Where Shard struggled to carve the shallowest groove in the ground, Hikaru dug steadily. Easily, he scooped another paw full of dirt, and another. Shard stared, then grasped one of the dragon's forelegs, holding it up to examine the claws.\n\nIn the false star light they gleamed, sharp as shaved obsidian.\n\n\"I think,\" Hikaru murmured with suppressed delight, \"my talons are stronger than yours now.\"\n\n\"I think you're right,\" Shard breathed. He'd been a fool. Of course Hikaru's claws would be sharper, stronger, and Shard needn't have been so protective.\n\n\"We can escape,\" Hikaru said quietly, his gaze moving to the dark beyond the walls.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Shard. \"Let's fill the hole again. I don't want the wyrms to suspect. Not all of them leave when they hunt. A few stay, to wait, but they do sleep. We'll wait for them to sleep, and dig more.\" He pressed his own talons to the rock, relieved and then terrified. He shivered, brightening his voice. \"Are you ready for the rest of the world, Hikaru?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Every little pointed fang showed. \"I'm ready for everything.\"\n\n[ Mourning ]\n\n\u2003\"Only the long day brings rest\n\n\u2003Only the dark of night, dawn.\n\n\u2003When the First knew themselves, the wise will say\n\n\u2003They took their Names to the Sunlit Land\n\n\u2003But their Voice in the wind sings on.\"\n\nGriffin And Wolf Voices rose with the gusts of winter wind on the smallest, barren island of the Silver Isles, called Black Rock. Snow covered most of the surface of the isle, which was true to its namesake. On a high slope amid a half ring of broken boulders stood an odd gathering, a mix of Vanir, Aesir, half-blooded griffins born from each, and several wolves from the Star Isle.\n\nCaj stood at the back of the gathering, more keenly aware than ever how his feathers stood out against the snow, unnatural in that land\u2014unnatural in any land, feathers the blazing hue of a sea in summer. Other Aesir stood just as bright, their feathers somehow divinely or sorcerously stained in outlandish hues. Supposedly it was a sign of their right to rule, their forefathers' victory in a war with dragons at the bottom of the world. Caj had begun to doubt, and wondered if anything that he'd ever been told was true.\n\n\"Einarr's voice will sing on.\" Ragna's declaration carried across the wind, and Caj shuddered at the sight of her. Gone was the false humility, the meekness, the quiet Widow Queen. Standing before the gathering now was the ruling regent, proud and powerful as the moon. She commanded the Vanir of the Sun Isle until their king returned.\n\nUntil Shard returned.\n\nAnd what will I be then? Caj wondered, unsure how his nest-son felt about him, in his deep heart. When first he'd heard that Shard survived his plunge into the sea, he'd felt relief and joy. Now, only doubt. Everything was doubt.\n\nRagna called out the other names, those who had fallen that winter, either to starvation, the cold, or the final clash with the mad Red King. Caj lowered his gaze to behold the bodies laid out in the snow, their wings stretched out as if they might, at any moment, lift from the snow and fly to the Sunlit Land. Pitiful keening made his ears twitch, and he looked over furtively to see Einarr's widowed mate, white Astri, huddled between her wingsister Kenna, and Einarr's mother, a full-blooded Aesir.\n\nCaj looked away before any of them lifted their eyes to see him. He had failed the pride, failed to restrain his own wingbrother, and now they stood singing songs of mourning for the dead.\n\nSigrun pressed to his side, offering wordless reassurance. Caj shifted his wing against his mate, attempting comfort, then flinched at the pain. Hard mud and splint still bound his wing to form, the break not yet fully healed. He'd had to walk, following Sigrun and a wolf through the labyrinth of underground tunnels that connected all the islands. At least Sigrun had walked with him. At least he hadn't borne the humiliation of being ground bound alone.\n\nHis gaze flicked to the wolves on the far side of the group. If not for them, he too would be among the dead.\n\nRagna finished her recognition of the fallen\u2014Einarr, another elder of the Vanir who'd succumbed to hunger, another who'd died in the sea attempting to fish. She turned her attention to the largest wolf of the gathering, a tall, strapping male with black shoulders that blended down into gold and cream on his chest. Two griffin feathers, braided into the thick fur of his neck, flicked in the breeze, gray and gold.\n\nThe feathers of future kings, Caj thought, poetically, and managed not to scoff. It seemed a vain tradition, the wearing of griffin feathers, that was growing in popularity among the younger wolves, but there were many things about wolves that Caj still didn't understand. Still, they had saved his life that winter, and had asked only for his friendship in return. He supposed he didn't need to understand them completely to befriend them. His sense of honor begged tolerance and curiosity for their ways, rather than disdain.\n\nRagna mantled to the young wolf king. \"We thank you, Great Hunter, for attending our farewell. It honors our fallen. We hope you'll join us for feasting on the Sun Isle. We know your hunting has been not much better than ours on land, but now that we've returned to the sea, we eat well.\"\n\nAhanu, the wolf king, dipped his head.\n\nRagna cast a look to several fledges, who straightened to attention, then with her nod they trotted away to fetch something from behind the tall boulders at Ragna's back. \"And we also offer you a gift.\"\n\nAhanu raised his head, as did the other wolves. The fledges reappeared from behind the boulder, dragging heavy pelts. Wolf pelts. Ahanu's gaze drifted to them, then back to Ragna's face, neutral, reserving judgment.\n\n\"The act of skinning was a desecration of your fallen kin,\" Ragna said, her gaze slashing over the Aesir griffins in the gathering. \"We return these to you to lay to rest as you will. All those who fell under the conquerors' reign.\"\n\nShe will never stop punishing us, Caj thought, meeting her gaze when it swept by him. He wondered how Shard would act when he returned\u2014if he did return\u2014if he would work toward restoration and harmony. He had grown up with the Aesir, after all. It was, apparently, what his true father had wanted, for Shard to be raised among the Aesir as a brother, so that when he learned his birthright, he could bring peace to the prides. Privately, Caj thought Baldr a coward, leaving his son a legacy he himself couldn't bring to pass.\n\nI made him strong, Caj thought, a sense of injustice heating his chest. I lied to Sverin and to Per, and took him under my own wing as my son, even if he never recognized it.\n\nIf Shard thought that justice would mean exiling Aesir who had made the Silver Isles their home, or more likely, kill them, Caj knew it would only be the vengeance of war. But, when he thought more reasonably about it, he couldn't see Shard giving an order like that.\n\nHe wasn't so sure about Ragna.\n\nCaj couldn't read wolf faces well, but thought Ahanu's looked deeply troubled at the sight of the skins, but moved by the gesture nonetheless.\n\n\"Thank you,\" murmured Ahanu. After a moment, as if he listened to some suggestion from the wind on the rocks, he said, \"Let them rest here.\" His gaze searched the face of the Widow Queen, then drifted to each wolf and griffin gathered. \"Let it all rest here. All that has passed. Black Rock is a place for the dead. Let our enmity be dead, here.\"\n\nThe fledges exchanged glances, then respectfully bore the wolf skins to lay beside the dead griffins. Caj shifted his feet, chilled without the warm down of a Vanir.\n\nA waste, all of it. A dead wolf had no use for its skin and they'd done better lining griffin nests.\n\nBut then, he reasoned, how would I feel to know that my father's feathers lined a wolf den?\n\nThe wolves raised their voices, and the griffins shifted uncomfortably as the long, low notes soared through the air. Caj wondered how many, wolf or griffin, would actually lay their prejudice to rest on that black isle. He'd had to leave his in the snows of Star Island, that night he'd awoken among caring wolves to find that they'd saved his life.\n\n\"Let us return,\" Ragna said. \"Those who wish to learn fishing, or still remember the ways and would help me, come to the Star Cliff. Others, shelter and keep warm. I fear another storm brews.\"\n\nWith that dismissal, Ragna opened her wings and bounded into the sky. The fledges followed, eager for the adventure of the seashore and the strange art of hunting fish, as did several of the old Vanir. Caj noted, with interest, that Einarr's mother left with them, after a last comforting word to Astri.\n\nA coldness grew in Caj's chest, the tight, horned discomfort of unfinished business.\n\nThe pride was well in wing, sorted out enough that Caj needn't worry about anyone starving, nor fights breaking out. The Aesir who were left followed his daughter, Thyra, who carried Kjorn's heir in her belly. The Vanir followed Ragna, Shard's true mother. Though tensions and uncertainty strained them, Caj felt confident there would be no violence.\n\nIt was time. He took a deep breath, hoping it wasn't too late.\n\n\"Will you make the rounds with me?\" Sigrun murmured, brushing fondly against his feathers. \"Your presence calms the females.\"\n\nShe was happy, no longer torn between loyalties, relieved that she could provide the pregnant females of the pride with hearty meals of fish, though the regular hunting remained poor. A healer's dream, Caj thought. Peace time, good hunting. He wished he could feel at peace, too.\n\nPerhaps soon.\n\nWhen he didn't answer, she drew back to look at him. He studied her dove-brown feathers, her face, an older, more refined version of Thyra's, her brown eyes strained from long years of worry. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"I won't be going back to the nesting cliffs with you.\"\n\nSometimes, he thought she could see inside his thoughts. Her expression darkened. \"What are you planning? Your wing isn't fully healed. Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Some of this is my doing, Sigrun. I have to make right what I can.\"\n\n\"You have. We're at peace!\"\n\n\"Not all of us,\" he said quietly, his gaze lifting to the sky.\n\nHer gaze followed his, and she drew a sharp breath. \"No. Leave it be. It's folly, it's too dangerous. He's witless and mad with grief, my mate, please, it's too dangerous. There's a reason that Ragna has not sent warriors after him. Let him return to you instead, if he ever comes back to his right mind.\"\n\nCaj rounded on her, raising his wings sternly. \"What would you do, if it were Ragna? I don't forget Sverin's sins and mistakes. But I also can't forget that he's my wingbrother, my friend, and that I also left him alone and I lied. What part I played in his madness, I'll never know. We all have mistakes to accept.\"\n\n\"You're too good for him,\" she whispered. A few griffins paused to watch their argument openly, then, at Caj's sharp look, they moved along, either to walk with the wolves or lift into the sky. Sigrun butted her head against his chin. \"Please\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm going to find him,\" Caj vowed, ears swiveling forward in determination. \"On whatever isle he shelters, or out at sea, or if he flies all the way back to our homeland. I cannot leave my wingbrother again, just as you would never betray Ragna.\" He drew back to meet her eyes, firm. \"I stood by you while you remained loyal to her.\"\n\nIt was the right thing to say, though he felt it was cheating. She looked struck, then the cool, controlled look of the healer stole over her face. \"Then, I'll come with you\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHer hackle feathers ruffed slowly, showing her displeasure.\n\n\"My mate,\" Caj murmured. \"You see the sense of it. The females of the pride need you. And it's better if I'm alone. If Sverin is witless, he would see two griffins coming to attack. If he's not, he sees you, who he\u2026who\u2026\"\n\n\"He hates,\" Sigrun supplied, matter-of-fact.\n\n\"Yes. And you're not to send anyone else, either.\" At her incredulous look he added, \"I know it would be faster. But say someone spies him from the air, he could see and be gone, or attack. He sees only enemies, only threat. I'm his wingbrother. I have a chance, and I won't risk anyone else in this.\"\n\nShe was quiet for a moment, and Caj could nearly hear her trying to think of another way in. She almost found it. \"What about Halvden?\"\n\nCaj flexed his talons against the snow and rock, a growl bubbling in his throat. \"I would be very glad to meet Halvden again.\"\n\nShe wasn't impressed. \"How will you search, then? You can't fly yet.\"\n\n\"I'll use the tunnels to reach the different islands. The wolves are happy enough to lead us through.\"\n\nAfter another moment looking grim, he watched her expression relax. She realized, he knew, that he'd been planning to go ever since he learned that Sverin had flown, mad and Nameless, away from the pride.\n\nShe reached up to run talons gently over his mending wing. \"Be cautious.\" Her voice rose in pitch, trying too hard to sound light. \"I won't have my good work go to waste. I would hate to have to break your wing again.\"\n\nCaj laughed weakly and began to lift his wing, then thought better of it. \"As would I.\"\n\nBefore, when they'd all thought him killed by a boar, Caj's wing had started to fuse wrong. To force it to heal correctly, Sigrun had to break it again. He would still fly again, but only if he let her splints do their work.\n\n\"I'll stay,\" she murmured. \"But please, if it comes to a choice between danger and safety, between risk and caution\u2014\"\n\n\"Between him, and you?\" Caj offered, glancing at her sidelong. Twilight dimmed the day. It would take Caj most of the night to walk, through the tunnels underneath the islands, to the next isle where he could search. It was time to get moving. \"Only think what you would do in my place, and try to understand.\"\n\nSigrun looked away. She had chosen her wingsister over him, once. Surely she couldn't begrudge him this quest to find and save his wingbrother. She slipped her head under his chin and Caj nuzzled down, aware of wolf eyes on them, and the laughing calls of ravens in the distance.\n\n\"Just return to me,\" she whispered. \"I lost you once\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll return,\" he promised, and savored another moment close to her before drawing away, letting the cold come between them, and walking away.\n\n[ Earthfire ]\n\nShard pressed his ear against the crystal and closed his eyes, listening for the faintest scratch or rumble. Hikaru, sitting behind him, peered through the ceiling of their chamber. Already his senses grew sharper than Shard's own, and Shard relied on his hearing.\n\n\"I think they're asleep,\" Hikaru murmured, his tail sweeping slowly across the ground. He lowered himself to a crouch on all fours, pressing his paws against the earth. \"Does the ground feel warm to you, Shard?\"\n\n\"It's from you, I think,\" Shard said quietly, pulling back from the wall. Hikaru shed warmth like a fire, and the ground had warmed steadily under their feet for the last few days. The other possibility, that the volcano was waking, wouldn't matter once they fled the mountain.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Hikaru said. \"I think it's something else. You said that volcanoes sometimes make earthquakes.\"\n\nThe short feathers between Shard's wings stood on end like wolf hackles, as if skyfire crackled near.\n\nNerves, he thought.\n\n\"It won't matter in a few moments.\" Shard crept to their tunnel and began drawing out the dirt as quietly as he could. \"We'll be out of here soon.\"\n\n\"You're sure we shouldn't leave at night, while they're gone hunting?\"\n\n\"No. The moment they realize we're gone, they'll hunt us all night. In the day, they won't follow. We'll have a head start.\"\n\nShard slipped his talons down through the loose dirt, and dug it back out. They'd tunneled through to the other side of the crystal wall and refilled the dirt each day so the dragons wouldn't suspect their plan. The last of their fish was gone. With Hikaru shedding heat, the air dried up and they needed water. Even if Shard had wanted to wait another day, they couldn't risk losing more strength to hunger and thirst.\n\n\"Only in the stillness the wind,\" Hikaru was murmuring, eyes closed, \"only from ice the flame.\"\n\n\"Are you ready?\" Shard asked as he pulled dirt from the tunnel. \"We'll have to be swift.\"\n\nQuietly Hikaru answered, \"I'm ready.\" Hikaru's claws clicked together. A new habit, a nervous habit of threading his digits together and wringing his paws. \"Shard?\"\n\nShard paused at the note of fear in his voice, and wriggled back out of the tunnel to meet his gaze.\n\n\"What is it?\" He shook dirt from his head. \"Don't worry, we have a plan.\"\n\nHikaru's gaze drifted up. \"What if\u2026what if I can't fly? What if I'm not strong enough?\"\n\nShard flicked his ears, moved by the earnest, nervous expression on the young dragon's face. He trotted forward and butted his head against the scaled chest. When Hikaru sat up on his haunches, as he was then, he already stood a good half-length taller than a griffin.\n\n\"Never fear, Amaratsu's son.\" He drew back, opening his wings to draw Hikaru's gaze back to him. \"We are born to fly.\"\n\n\"Born to fly,\" Hikaru echoed. He nodded, his gaze locked on Shard's face. \"Born to it.\" His breath seemed short as he opened his wings.\n\nThe ground trembled under them and Shard looked down, perking his ears.\n\n\"That's not wyrms,\" Hikaru murmured, a serpentine hiss creeping into his voice. At once, Shard realized his hind paws and forefeet did feel hot, as if the subterranean floor had baked for a day under summer sun.\n\nThe ground shuddered. Then a larger tremor made Shard stumble, and Hikaru's eggshell rolled across the ground. The scent of hot rock and sulfur suffused Shard's next breath.\n\n\"Bright Tyr,\" he breathed. \"It's\u2014\"\n\n\"Earthfire!\" Hikaru's tail whipped and he perked his ears at the ground. \"Shard\u2014\"\n\n\"Out, now!\"\n\nShard dove into the tunnel, talons flailing to throw dirt out of his way. He broke through to the other side and shoved his head out, shaking it free of dirt. He forced his breaths to stay shallow and silent. The wyrms slumbered on, at least a dozen of them, great hulking shapes ringing Amaratsu's body. Shard had hoped for fresh air, but their thick, reptilian scent drenched him and the cavern felt hot and thick. Something nudged his rump and Shard wriggled forward to give Hikaru room.\n\n\"Ready?\" Shard whispered, and lifted his beak to point out their escape. Hikaru slithered out beside him, shook off dirt, and peered around. High at the top, far away, gleamed a narrow beacon of sunlight. A dull-gray, male wyrm shifted, loosing a giant huff of air. The ground shivered and, within the crystal chamber, Shard thought he heard cracking stone.\n\n\"Shard, I think it's going to erupt. The air smells bad.\" Hikaru looked around at the hulking beasts. \"If they don't wake, they'll die.\"\n\nA low thrumming and a great wash of heat made Shard lift his talons. \"We have to fly, Hikaru. We have to fly, now. They'll wake at the commotion and they can leave through the tunnel.\"\n\n\"The heat,\" Hikaru mumbled, his gaze darting around the sleeping wyrms. \"I think the heat lulls them.\"\n\n\"Hikaru!\" Shard snapped. All around, the great wyrms shifted, but, like the sick, drugged by herb or weariness, they did not wake. True reptiles, Shard thought, lulled by heat or cold. \"Follow me.\"\n\nShard lifted to his hind legs and leaped nimbly into the air, wings nearly as silent as an owl's. A sense of freedom and joy shimmered from his heart to his wingtips to leave the ground, to push down the air and feel the stretch of feather and sinew. For a little time, he'd almost forgotten what it was to fly.\n\nHikaru bared his teeth in excitement and watched Shard rise, then crouched, opening his wings to fly for the first time.\n\nThen the earth exploded.\n\nA blast of air and noxious gas knocked Hikaru against the crystal wall.\n\n\"Don't breathe!\" Shard ordered, diving to land hard next to the dragon. Hikaru clamped his jaws shut, eyes huge. \"Are you\u2014\"\n\n\"Not hurt,\" Hikaru grunted, and flexed his wings.\n\nPanicked, Shard looked past Hikaru into the crystal chamber. An second explosion of gas rocked Amaratsu's form. Earthfire bubbled up from a widening crack in the ground inside the chamber. A rush of sulfur, air, and fire shot straight up and smashed against the crystal dragon.\n\nThe heat shattered Amaratsu's body.\n\nTwinkling scales and ice-sharp fragments shot in every direction and sent Shard and Hikaru rolling away. Shard grabbed at Hikaru's legs, curving his wings to shield the dragon.\n\n\"Jump jump jump!\" Shard lunged into the air, wings beating hard. Hikaru followed, liquid fire lashing at his heels. Lulled by heat, the wyrms slumbering on the ground shifted and growled but didn't stir. Poisoned air rolled toward them. Where the crystal form had rested, now glowed a long crack of roiling lava. Shard gulped for the cleaner air above the wyrms. His wings, at first stretching and working with joy and relief, threatened to cramp. Hikaru bobbed beside him, staring at the mess below.\n\nThe crack in the earth engorged with fire and sulfur.\n\n\"Follow me!\" Shard commanded. \"Don't panic.\" He circled Hikaru once as the young dragon struggled first against the dead air of the cave, then the strange currents of heat created by the fire below. \"Work your wings smoothly, pretend it's a spring day\u2014\" Shard gagged against the noxious fumes of the earthfire. The hole of sunlight in the mountain seemed leagues and leagues away. With a glance over he saw that Hikaru was managing to figure out his wings and a good rhythm to undulate his long body, and looked as if he could swim through the air. \"Don't look down. Only the sky\u2026\"\n\n\"The sky,\" Hikaru gasped, but he did look down, his gaze raking over the Winderost wyrms. Shard banked, turning a long arc to look down also, and a knot twisted his chest. Hikaru beat his wings hard, looking up to meet Shard's gaze, and Shard knew they had the same thought. The wyrms couldn't die like this. No creature deserved that.\n\n\"We'll warn them,\" he called to Hikaru, his voice pitched in attempt only to carry to the young dragon. \"But let's get a little higher\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Hikaru agreed, and flapped up to follow Shard.\n\nThey were halfway to the top and escape and Shard glanced back again to see smoke pluming and fire splitting from the earth.\n\n\"Hikaru, now!\" Shard loosed an eagle cry that echoed around the cavern and Hikaru dipped below Shard, and his deepening voice boomed.\n\n\"Cousins! Wake up! Wake up or die!\"\n\nA wyrm stirred, blinking up at them in confusion. Then a splattering of earthfire splashed his wings. His roar shook the cavern. He looked up again, saw Shard and Hikaru, and screamed his rage. The others woke in a daze, panicked by the liquid fire around them, and lumbered to their feet. Enormous, leathery wings flared and flapped and the wyrms rose in a furious swarm.\n\n\"There,\" Shard panted to Hikaru. \"They're awake. They've got a chance. Fly. Now.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Hikaru gasped, and they turned together. The hole gleamed closer, a circle of sunlight.\n\nBelow, the writhing mass of wyrms split toward the tunnel halfway up the cave wall, and others, toward Shard, Hikaru, and the sunlight at the top of the cavern.\n\n\"Faster!\" Shard shouted, as the wyrms with their powerful wings lunged higher, closing the deep gap.\n\nHikaru shrieked with the terror and thrill of it and shot up and ahead, wings pumping fast and deep like a swan.\n\nShard gave his wings a mighty stroke\u2014but claws snapped shut around his tail and yanked him down. Long days and nights of fighting practice made him relax his body rather than struggle. He let himself fall with a battle scream onto the face of the dragon who'd grabbed him.\n\nHikaru wheeled in a circle. \"Shard!\"\n\n\"Fly!\" Shard commanded, raking talons against the leathery paw that gripped him. A heavy, sour scent washed him. Then, odd familiarity. Shard's gaze locked on the wyrm's, then flicked down the length of her. Dark brown hide. A dead, baleful stare.\n\nStigr, cut down by a lashing spade tail.\n\n\"You,\" Shard hissed. His feathers stood on end in fury and he sank every talon and hind claw and the razor edge of his beak into the stone-hard hide.\n\nHer angry roar sang in Shard's bones.\n\nA wild, higher, musical shriek followed it. In a daze, overcome by the stench of death in the dragon's jaws and the fumes from the earthfire below, Shard saw Hikaru diving.\n\n\"Release him!\" Hikaru slammed into the wyrm's shoulder, slashing his talons through the leather hide. Dark blood welled and dripped down toward the earthfire explosions below. Her grip loosened and Shard broke free, soaring up to gain height for a dive. The wyrm swung her freed claws around to lash at Hikaru. He yelped and flapped straight up, shooting quick as a salmon through water. Claws caught his hind leg, sending a few black scales sprinkling down like rain, but he jerked free.\n\nShard dove to attack, but the wyrm tore away with a sudden, surprised bark of pain.\n\nShard flared to a hard stop in confusion, to hover between the wyrm and Hikaru. Blood dripped from the young dragon's hind leg, blood that steamed even in the hot air. Shard saw with shock that blood had splashed in a crescent under one of the wyrm's eyes, and every spot it touched now gleamed a rich, iridescent red.\n\n\"Bright with dragon's blood,\" Shard couldn't help but choke out the words he'd heard before.\n\nShe dropped and wheeled away, clutching her eye as if it burned, and melded into the tumult of wyrms that blustered toward a tunnel on the far wall of the cavern.\n\nShard grasped a tendril of clean air and caught himself, flapping hard. Hikaru winged in beside him.\n\n\"Shard\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Shard panted. \"Are you? You're bleeding\u2026\" But it looked as if Hikaru's wound had already closed and begun to scar.\n\n\"I think I'm fine too.\"\n\nShard looked toward the fleeing wyrms at the far wall, and those wheeling in confusion around and below them. A fiber of him longed to chase down the cold she-wyrm and avenge his uncle or die trying.\n\nLikely the latter, he knew grimly, and Stigr would not want that.\n\nHe turned and soared high, Hikaru close behind. \"Up, up, now! The mountain!\"\n\nEarthfire swelled and shot up in great geysers, and the air grew thick with poison. The Winderost wyrms flocked madly around the cavern, some crowding toward the top entrance with Shard and Hikaru, others for the tunnel through which they and Shard had first come.\n\nHikaru's flight was awkward but they were still smaller and swifter than the wyrms. They raced up, and up. The wyrms' breath heated the air behind them and the poisonous earthfire swelled.\n\nTheir escape beckoned, a gleaming crack of sky.\n\nFor half a breath Shard feared it wouldn't be large enough.\u2026\n\nThen they burst through into cool, open air with a feather's breadth to spare, breaking rocks loose, and the glowworms that clung to the roof of the mountain.\n\nThe frosty air shocked Shard's body and sunlight dazzled pain over his eyes.\n\nBeside him, Hikaru shrieked, blinded, thrashing, assaulted by cold and light as if he were hatching all over again.\n\nShard fumbled for and grabbed the dragon's foreleg. \"Close your eyes.\"\n\nHikaru whimpered agreement. They wheeled together, blind, flying higher and higher in the already high, thin air. The sudden rush of clean, cold wind knocked the blackness and stench of the cavern away from them. Shard tugged Hikaru to follow the scent of trees, gliding back down. They had to fly in lower air or risk falling unconscious, for they had emerged at the very peak of the Horn of Midragur.\n\nThey soared down along the mountain face, high enough to be safe, low enough to take great gulps of cool, clean wind. Shard's eyes streamed but he kept them shut against the daze of sunlight on white snow.\n\n\"I want to see it,\" Hikaru panted.\n\n\"Soon,\" Shard promised, and released his grip. \"Follow my voice. This way!\"\n\nThe mountain thundered behind them. They heard the wyrms of the Winderost break through the top of the mountain and scream in their own pain at the sunlight. Shard didn't dare look back, didn't dare open his eyes yet. The sun would stop the wyrms. Or the mountain would.\n\n\"Don't stop,\" he called to Hikaru. \"This way!\"\n\nThey turned from the dazzling sun, banking in a long turn until Shard felt sun at their backs, and soared nightward, leaving the erupting mountain and the raging wyrms behind. Shard waited to hear roars again, but they remained in the distance. He kept their flight nightward. Windward, he knew, lay the Dawn Spire and more problems than he had answers for. They wouldn't go there. Not yet. Shard had no plan beyond fleeing the mountain and getting Hikaru to safety.\n\nAfter another moment, the blaze beyond his eyelids darkened as clouds passed over the sun. Shard risked peeking, found his eyes beginning to adjust, and studied the land below them.\n\nOut in front of them and as far as he could see nightward, the land slowly crawled away from the desert of the Winderost and rolled back into grassy foothills lined with juniper and pine forest. Shard squinted, scanning the far horizon. When he'd first flown there he'd been lost, Nameless and bent only on survival and following a small inner tug toward Amaratsu. He hadn't paid attention to the land. He did now.\n\nFar starward, beyond the Horn, rose another low mountain range, white with snow, and a cold wind buffeted them from that quarter. Nightward, far in the distance, it looked as through the land grew more lush, wooded and hilly. Windward, and dawnward, lay the Winderost, plains of grass and red rock, canyons and the ruined Outlands where the wyrms usually dwelled. Shuddering, he turned his gaze away. They would fly nightward.\n\nThe sun still stood within first-quarter mark. The wyrms would be distracted by the volcano and the sunlight, and would have no time to pursue until night, if at all. Shard thought of the she-wyrm, wondered if she'd escaped\u2014if he would have a chance to avenge his uncle or if the mountain had claimed her.\n\nWind buffeted them from all sides. Wind, sunlight, and a view of endless land.\n\nAfter a moment, when the fresh wind hit his face again, Shard laughed in hysterical relief, brushing other worries aside. He looked over to Hikaru, feeling triumphant.\n\n\"So, now we\u2026\" He closed his beak slowly, watching the young dragon's face.\n\nHe stared at everything, everything, eyes huge and glowing in the light. With every breath the black dragon took in the bright sky, the roll of sweet scented trees and the brown, waving grass, the ring of white mountains on the starward horizon. He looked hungrily in every direction, gasping, ears perking, his talons stretching now and then as if to point out a new wonder. Shard looked again, and through the dragon's awe, saw everything for the first time.\n\n\"It's even better than I thought it would be,\" Hikaru whispered.\n\n\"The land?\"\n\n\"The world.\" Hikaru swiveled to look again at the sky, the spires of trees, the pale light slanting on the sides of the mountains. \"Everything you said is true.\"\n\nA warm tightness closed Shard's throat, the same as the day Hikaru had first broken out of his eggshell. \"Yes. And welcome to it, Amaratsu's son.\"\n\nOn impulse, they glanced back at the Horn of Midragur.\n\nThey saw that it wasn't clouds that had covered the sun, but smoke and ash. Shard stared at the column of heavy, white and black clouds that crowded into the sky. Now and then red fountains leaped and fell from new cracks in the slopes, earthfire splashing out of the depths. He couldn't see any of the Winderost wyrms, and a strange part of him hoped they'd all escaped. Bleakly he thought of the Dawn Spire, but was sure in his heart that their sky would only be dimmed, that they were nearly four days' flight from the mountain and would see no poison or fire.\n\nAsh and smoke closed over the sun. \"We have to keep going,\" Shard said, drawing Hikaru's attention. \"We have to fly as far as we possibly can before you tire.\"\n\n\"I could fly forever!\" Hikaru beat his wings, soaring around Shard in a loop, then settling alongside him again. He seemed to have grown even since leaving the cavern, as if his body knew he had more room.\n\n\"Let's hope so.\" Shard laughed as the cold breeze picked up, giving them a strong tailwind. They lifted high again, to cover more ground, and Hikaru followed him without question, nightward. Shard harkened to a small, quiet instinct that drew him away from the mountain, also away from the Dawn Spire and the wyrms, away from all of it, as the sky darkened and ash flurried around their wings like snow.\n\n[ Shard of Memory ]\n\nKjorn watched as rok peered at the horizon, making a low, grumbling noise.\n\nThey'd kept Kjorn bound, trussed like a fly in a spider's web, with long ropes of seaweed tying his wings to his body, and separate binds wrapping his forefeet and hind feet together, respectively. Unable to fly with him bound thus, they all traveled on foot, and dragged Kjorn across the ground using more seaweed tied in knots to the main binding on his wings.\n\nFor days they'd trekked roughly windward across the barren coast, beset by cold rain and salty wind. It reminded Kjorn of spring in the Silver Isles. Spring. Thyra\u2026All the females of his pride would whelp in spring, of course, but only one of them was his mate. Only one had made him vow, under threat of talon, to return in time to behold the birth of his kit.\n\nKjorn managed to flop onto his belly and see what the poacher saw. A thick haze hung over the far, distant horizon, strangely pale and dark at the same time, more like fog than cloud. His heart seemed to thicken in his chest.\n\n\"Storm?\" The female, whose name, Kjorn had gathered without official introduction, was Frida, walked up beside Rok and cocked her head.\n\n\"No,\" said Rok in a low voice, and his feathers prickled up.\n\n\"Earthfire,\" Kjorn offered, and the other male griffin of the band, Fraenir, growled a warning.\n\nKjorn snapped his beak in return, weary of being treated as a lowly prisoner, as a fledge who should remain silent. This land is my birthright. My great grandfather's father ruled the Dawn Spire and all the griffin clans of the Winderost.\n\nSo the elder Aesir in the Silver Isles had told him. More than his father had ever told him. Sverin's version of their leaving the Winderost, since Kjorn's kithood, was that they'd left with honors to conquer new lands and claim them in the name of the Aesir. Now he knew the truth. Kajar had lost his war with the dragons, stolen what treasures he could, and brought a blight upon his kingdom in the form of Nameless, Voiceless, terrorizing beasts. Per, Sverin, and all those whose families bore the curse had fled the beasts to live in exile.\n\nMy birthright, Kjorn thought. He shifted his talons against the tight seaweed binds. He'd hoped as it dried it would become brittle, but the long ropes only grew rubbery and tough, and if any of the band of poachers caught him gnawing at it, either he received no food, or a sharp cuff to the side of the head that left him reeling.\n\n\"Rok,\" Fraenir began, in a note of complaint. \"His Highness won't stay still.\"\n\nBut Rok was still gazing at the far horizon. \"Earthfire, you say. Yes. An eruption. I've never seen the like.\"\n\n\"What does it mean?\" Frida sounded breathless, and opened her wings.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Kjorn said, shortly. Like his father, he put little stock in omens\u2014or perhaps his father did, and hid the superstition from him. Kjorn didn't know anymore. He felt he didn't know his father at all, had never known him, and swallowed a bitter taste. Kjorn had followed one sign. A starfire sign that led him to the Winderost.\n\nOr maybe it was only Shard's sign, he thought. Maybe I stole that from him too, as I stole the Silver Isles. Perhaps so, but he had come to make things right, in his once-homeland, with his wingbrother, if he ever found him again.\n\n\"Volcanoes erupt,\" Kjorn went on when Frida cast him an irritated look. \"It's the way of the earth.\"\n\n\"The Horn of Midragur,\" Rok murmured, as if none of them were there. \"Has to be. It hasn't erupted in\u2026well.\" He faced them, raising his wings. \"At least an Age. Not in the history I know of. Perhaps it is a sign.\"\n\n\"Of what?\" Fraenir asked, ears perked.\n\n\"Who knows. The world's end, maybe.\" He shrugged his wings, as if he were either prepared for such an event, or unconcerned about it. \"Let's move on. I can see His Highness is growing weary.\"\n\nHe strode forward, looped seaweed around his own chest, and tossed some to Fraenir. In that way, they dragged Kjorn across the ground. The thick ropes of seaweed cushioned Kjorn from the worst of it, though the griffins didn't take much care to avoid large rocks or uneven footing. Frida walked alongside to make sure Kjorn didn't try to chew through the binds. When he tried to talk to her, to reason, she only huffed and looked away. It seemed a lot of work and trouble. Kjorn wondered what Rok thought he could gain.\n\nHe ducked his head as they dragged him over a series of short, sharp rocks.\n\nThey traveled windward along the coast and Kjorn lost track of the sunmark under the cold gray cover of rain. He tried to track his surroundings and how far they had gone, but much of it just rolled on in wind-swept cliff tops that reminded him of the Sun Isle.\n\nAfter a rest at one point near mid-day, Kjorn managed to roll to his other side and instead of the inland scenery, he watched the sea bump and drag by. Eventually the cliff top sloped down in a hill that graduated into a long, sandy shoreline.\n\nIt was then that the painted wolf returned.\n\nKjorn had nearly forgotten about him. Upon hearing the wolf's greeting warble, Fraenir dropped his seaweed vine and flapped away to meet him. Kjorn wriggled, managing to prop up on his side, and watched with interest as the wolf and griffin greeted like pride mates, or wingbrothers, pressing their shoulders together and laying their heads briefly on the other's back.\n\n\"Lazy oaf,\" Rok snapped, stumbling forward against Kjorn's dead weight. Kjorn took note of the fact that Rok couldn't haul him on his own. He hadn't had a chance to stand up next to Rok but suspected he was taller than the rogue, and heavier. If he could take leadership of the bedraggled band, it could be a great help. But it had to happen before they reached wherever they were going, before Rok traded off Kjorn to whoever he planned to meet.\n\nThe elder Aesir back in the Silver Isles had reminded Kjorn of the borders, the different claims and boundaries. Once, they'd all been united under a single rule, a single bloodline of powerful kings that stretched back to the first griffin to claim a kingship in the Second Age. Kjorn's bloodline. But with Kajar's quest came the madness of the dragons, the Dawn Spire splintered, and the clans broke away and returned to their own lands, under their own rule. Kjorn couldn't count on a warm welcome anywhere, not even the Dawn Spire. Perhaps especially not the Dawn Spire. But if Shard had gone there, then Kjorn would too.\n\nAs Rok, Fraenir and the wolf exchanged news, Frida watched over Kjorn. He sat still, thinking. If loyalties and schemes and tier-climbing and poachers infested the Winderost, then Rok thought he could take advantage of Kjorn's tie to the Dawn Spire. As near to the coast as they were, Kjorn could think of only one place the poacher would be headed, and that was the Vanheim Shore.\n\nWhat kind of griffins dwelled there, and what link or enmity they had with the Dawn Spire, Kjorn didn't know. His father had left him nothing of his true birthright, no knowledge, no heritage. Only a false kingship in a conquered land. A creeping, hollow sense of insecurity carved its way into his chest when he realized that finding and reconciling with Shard would mean that Kjorn himself would have no true place in the Silver Isles.\n\nIf we are friends, what then? I can't still claim his land as my own.\n\nRather than mire in a line of dark questions, Kjorn knew it would be wiser to focus on the situation at present.\n\nThe wolf's return seemed to signal their stop for the day, and they dragged Kjorn down to a scant shelter along the shore. The rain slacked as the sky dimmed toward evening.\n\n\"We'll start fresh tomorrow,\" Rok declared. \"Make a good impression.\" He stalked a quick patrol around the area, checking for rogue griffin or other threatening scents. Fraenir and Frida left to hunt or fish, whichever yielded better food. The wolf cleaned his paws some leaps away.\n\nRok returned from his brief patrol and sat a wing length from Kjorn, gazing out to sea, and Kjorn watched him quietly.\n\n\"When I asked of Vanir, you mentioned Vanhar. I thought they might be the same as my friend, but I don't think so. Tell me about them.\"\n\nRok gave him an incredulous look. \"For a prince, you've got very little idea what's going on.\"\n\n\"Tell me about them, then,\" Kjorn challenged.\n\nRok huffed and shook his feathers of drizzle. \"Not my duty to tell you. I don't owe you anything.\"\n\nDuty. Kjorn perked his ears. No born-and-bred poacher would use a word like duty. \"That's true,\" Kjorn said slowly. \"You don't owe me anything. But perhaps we can help each other. Will you tell me why you hate the Dawn Spire? What crime did they commit against you?\"\n\nKjorn managed to keep his tail from twitching. He attempted Shard's method\u2014not jumping to a conclusion but instead, hearing out the other, taking his side. In his own pride, Kjorn's word was law. Here, as far as he could see, there was no law except what griffins made for themselves. And wolves. Feeling watched, he peered around and saw the painted wolf had stretched on his belly, his gaze locked on Kjorn. His head tilted round a fraction, as if studying a riddle.\n\nKjorn looked back to Rok, who appeared mildly surprised at the question. For a moment, he thought he'd broken through Rok's shell.\n\nThen the rogue scoffed, and his tail switched back and forth. He lifted his beak to the wind, sniffing. \"The usual. Nothing to concern yourself with.\"\n\n\"What's the usual?\" Kjorn asked. \"I'm trying to make a peace. We've never met, I've committed no crime against you.\"\n\n\"Be quiet. I've had enough of your smug voice. Windbrother,\" he called to the wolf, who stood and shook himself, padding over. \"Watch our prince. I'm going to fish.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nKjorn tried to catch Rok's eye again but he turned away, shoved up, and glided out over the water. For a moment Kjorn watched him. Then he sighed, and let his gaze drift along the wet shoreline.\n\n\"Son-of-Sverin.\"\n\nJolted by the address, Kjorn swiveled to stare at the wolf, eyes wide. He hadn't seen him since the day they took him prisoner, and had barely heard him speak then. \"You remembered my name?\"\n\nThe wolf tilted his head, the strange whorls of white and brown like snow and mud across his flashy pelt. A black mask over his face gave him a shadowed, sinister look, but his eyes gleamed bright, aware, and knowing. \"Yes. I remember everything now.\"\n\nKjorn just watched him, wary, and waited for him to say more.\n\n\"The first day,\" said the wolf. \"The first day we found you. You said you were looking for Shard.\"\n\nKjorn shifted, his blood quickening. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"You're a friend of Shard?\" the wolf asked. \"The Star-sent, the wolf and lion brother?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Kjorn said cautiously, thinking Shard had been busy indeed. \"Though we've made mistakes against each other, he was my closest friend and my wingbrother. I've come to find him and make amends. I am a friend of Shard,\" he confirmed again, since it was what the wolf had asked.\n\nThe wolf's gaze flicked in the direction Frida and Fraenir had gone, then toward the water, where Rok was now a distant speck over the gray waves. Kjorn's muscles bunched, ready for anything. The wolf stretched out on his belly so that his powerful jaws were a talon's breadth from Kjorn's throat.\n\n\"I am Makya, of the Serpent River pack.\" Dark eyes considered Kjorn's face. \"I, too, am a friend of Shard, though I forgot myself for a time.\"\n\n\"I'm honored,\" Kjorn managed, smelling old meat on the wolf's teeth. \"How did you know Shard?\"\n\n\"I watched as he faced down a great wyrm and tried to avenge the death of my leader and pack mate, Nitara. Then fear overcame me and I forgot myself, and I ran. But now I remember,\" the wolf said quietly, \"and I remember Shard, and I hope he survived.\"\n\nKjorn shuddered at the mention of a great wyrm, recalling a nightmarish vision he'd had earlier that winter, and tried to picture Shard standing against such a foe. Cautiously he said, \"Then we are friends, you and I.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mayka agreed, baring his teeth wider. \"Now, you must do exactly as I say.\"\n\nHe bent his head in, jaws opening to reveal long, sharp fangs. Kjorn flinched\u2014then perked his ears as Makya set his teeth to the seaweed binds.\n\n[ The Nightward Coast ]\n\nShard and Hikaru huddled under a sprawling pine, escaping the worst of the rain. It turned out that Hikaru couldn't fly forever, though he'd done his best. It was Shard who had called a halt, when it was clear Hikaru might drop from the sky in exhaustion. Ash coated the air for leagues and leagues, though they'd flown for an entire quarter into the early afternoon. Shard caught a rabbit, and now they waited for Hikaru's wings to stop aching, and the rain to slack.\n\n\"This is delicious,\" the dragonet purred, again, crunching the last of the rabbit bones. Shard watched him, certain he needed five times the food. \"Much better than dry fish, much better.\" He sat back on his haunches, licking his front toes and claws clean.\n\nShard watched him in a weary, mesmerized daze. Everything about him was like watching water\u2014liquid and graceful. Or fire. Shard remembered the sight of the dragon's blood, steaming in the hot air, and how it had burned the murdering wyrm's hide bright red.\n\nHas he grown larger? It seemed impossible.\n\n\"Thank you, Shard.\" Hikaru dipped his head to bump against Shard's wing.\n\n\"Of course.\" Shard blinked to alertness, realizing he'd almost dozed. \"And don't worry. We'll find much more food.\" He didn't know quite where, for the forest so far had only boasted small game, but if they both hunted they'd do better.\n\nHikaru's eyes seemed to glow at him through the dim light, and Shard felt keenly, once again, that he did not deserve the young dragon's admiration. \"I'm not worried.\"\n\nShard fluffed his wings and chuckled. \"I'm glad one of us isn't. Why don't you take a little rest? I'll wake you before long, and if you feel like pressing on, we'll fly more.\"\n\n\"Or walk,\" Hikaru said, even as he rolled himself into a neat coil around Shard. He had grown larger. \"If we really must keep moving, then I am happy to walk, and learn everything about the ground that you know.\" He laid down his head and shut his eyes.\n\nShard sat within his coils and peered out into the gray. Under the large pine the ground was dusty, dry, and cool. Gray mud, tainted by volcanic ash, slithered in rivulets around the rest of the forest floor. They did need to keep moving, to stay ahead of the wyrms if they eventually tried to follow. Shard could not lead them to the Dawn Spire again. The land starward seemed barren and inhospitable. He would follow his instinct nightward, hope it was Tyr and Tor who led him, and teach Hikaru as quickly as he could.\n\n\"Shard?\" the dragon murmured. Shard looked down, but Hikaru's eyes were still closed.\n\n\"Yes,\" Shard said, at first thinking the dragon only wanted to be assured Shard still sat within his coils.\n\n\"I don't understand something.\"\n\n\"Ask anything,\" Shard said quietly.\n\nA great sigh heaved the black-scaled ribs, but Hikaru's eyes remained closed. \"When you spoke of meeting my mother, you said she told you the Tale of the Red Kings, the tale of Kajar that you told to me.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Shard cocked his head, listening to the forest for danger with one ear and Hikaru with the other.\n\n\"You said you didn't understand why Kajar chose power over friendship, but then when my mother offered you the choice, you hesitated.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026\" Shard remembered the moment. He looked down.\n\nHikaru's eyes were open now, watching him. \"Why?\"\n\nShard pressed his talons to the earth, then sat back and raised them to gently stroke Hikaru's wing. \"That's a very good question. I think it sounded easy when it was happening to someone else. We think we know what we'll do in any challenge. But then when it happens\u2026\" Shard recalled multiple times he'd made decisions that may or may not have been the right decisions. Speaking to the wyrms. Lying to his wingbrother.\n\nReleasing Sverin and diving into the sea.\n\nHikaru's whole body reverberated with a warm, rolling sound that mimicked a griffin's purr as Shard combed talons through his feathers, but his gaze was intent on Shard's face, waiting for a better answer.\n\n\"When something like that happens,\" Shard said, \"you realize it's harder to make the choice than you thought it would be. You realize all the things that could go wrong, you realize how your choice will affect other things.\"\n\nHikaru shifted, his gaze flitting out toward the rain. \"You thought she might deceive you.\"\n\n\"Yes. In the moment she challenged me, I doubted everything. But I decided to trust her.\"\n\nHikaru raised his head so quickly that Shard jumped. He loomed over Shard, his whiskers twitching, testing the air. \"I'm glad you did.\"\n\nShard chuckled, resettling his feathers. \"So am I.\"\n\nHikaru's lips pulled back in fanged amusement like a wolf, then he dipped his head low, looking worried. \"Shard. What are we? That is, I know that I am Amaratsu's son, but you were the one I saw when I hatched. What are we?\"\n\nShard shifted, lowering his talons to the earth. Rain pattered on the boughs above, only a few drops slipped through to hit the ground, or their backs. \"You and I?\" Hikaru's head bobbed once in a nod. \"Well, it wouldn't really do to call you my nest-son, although that's what griffins do. In few months you'll be able to pick me up off the ground with one paw!\"\n\nHikaru laughed, then the concerned expression returned.\n\nShard let his laughter fade. \"You and I,\" he said firmly, \"are brothers.\"\n\n\"Brothers,\" Hikaru said. Pleased with the word, he laid his head down again and for all Shard could tell, surrendered to sleep, satisfied with his new answers.\n\nShard remained awake in the dragonet's black coils, staring out into the rain, listening for the sound of anything, anyone, who might wish them harm.\n\nFreed from the mountain and his primary concern of escape, his thoughts delved toward difficult things, friends he'd left behind, the choices he'd made that were wrong. He wondered what had happened to Brynja, the huntress to whom he'd offered his heart. He could see her face, bright as morning, with fierce eyes and freckles of vermillion on the pale feathers under her eyes. Sometimes, she fluffed with laughter at his wit or her wingsister's antics before returning to quiet dignity again. Vividly Shard recalled her voice, the night he had tried to pledge to her, to offer her everything he had if she would stay by his side until the end of their days. He also recalled her voice, regretful, saying it couldn't be. She had duties, and she was promised, like a rabbit pelt in a trade, to another.\n\nBut she had also spoken of caring for him.\n\nI've fought for my family, for my islands, for my friends. I will fight for her, if I must.\n\nHe drew his talons through the pine needles, knowing that wouldn't be easy, for the griffin who was promised to Brynja was also a friend. Asvander, First Sentinel of the Dawn Spire.\n\nHe wondered what had become of all of them\u2014the griffins who'd aided him and Stigr, who'd offered even to betray their own king\u2014Valdis, Asvander, Dagny.\n\nAnd Stigr. Shard closed his eyes for a moment, seeing it again. For one brief moment, his uncle laughing, triumphant in battle, then felled by the brown wyrm. His wing, sliced clean from his shoulder. They'd called healers.\n\nShard opened his eyes, curling his talons into the pine needles.\n\nIf they'd called healers, there was a dim, distant chance that his uncle was alive. That would be reason enough to return to the Dawn Spire. When the time was right. Shard looked down at Hikaru's peaceful face.\n\nFor the moment, he had other responsibilities, and Stigr would not want him to shirk a promise he'd made.\n\nFor three days they traveled through the expanse of forest nightward of the Horn of Midragur. Alone, Shard would have covered twice the distance\u2014but they went at Hikaru's pace. The young dragon flew valiantly during the day, sometimes as long as three marks of the sun before he tired or grew ravenously hungry. During the day, they flew and hunted. Shard knew the dragons of the Winderost hated the sun, or were shamed by Tyr, and wouldn't travel during the day. At night, he and the young dragon walked as far as they could before their muscles gave out and they slept until dawn.\n\nShard taught him the basic hunting that he knew, though he sensed that Sunland dragons, like Vanir, were built better for fishing. They found a single deer on their trek, ran it down and killed it. Shard taught Hikaru to honor any creature he killed, whether for food, or in battle.\n\n\"Do you think I will ever see a battle?\" Hikaru consumed most of the deer before a mark of the sun had passed.\n\n\"I hope not.\" Shard ate his fill and was amazed at the dragon's appetite. His body from shoulder to rump had grown to twice the length of a griffin, and his neck and tail stretched well beyond that. His whiskers drooped handsomely from his snout and the budding horns between his ears shone silver in sunlight.\n\nThey sat in a sunny clearing ringed by towering cedars. The forest\u2014Shard recalled an eagle of the Winderost mentioning the Forest of Rains\u2014boasted dense ferns, crawling greenery and bright songbirds. Shard smelled a fox trail here and there, but no wolves, no griffins or other large predators. No wyrms.\n\nAfter appearing to think about Shard's answer, Hikaru asked, \"Why not? They seem exciting.\"\n\n\"Some creatures like to fight, and they're good at fighting.\" Shard thought of his rival, Halvden, who before Shard's self-exile had become a deadly foe. \"Some think it's better to do everything possible to avoid a fight.\"\n\n\"What do you think, Shard?\"\n\nThe weight of Shard's answer sat heavy in his chest, for by Hikaru's bright gaze, he knew that whatever he answered could become Hikaru's answer too.\n\n\"I think it's important not to fight for the sake of fighting.\"\n\nHikaru bobbed his head, as if that made sense. \"Because you could be hurt.\"\n\n\"Yes. Or you could hurt another, and that's another kind of pain.\"\n\n\"Then,\" Hikaru began slowly, \"if you don't fight for the sake of fighting, what do you fight for?\"\n\nThe question was so innocent, yet so wise, Shard laughed, then butted his head against Hikaru's shoulder. The sunlight of the clearing felt good after the dark cave and the cold rain, the dense trees like a green cavern over their heads. \"That's a good question, and no one has the truest answer.\"\n\nHikaru shook his short mane. \"What do you fight for, Shard?\"\n\nShard thought back. \"I have fought for my honor\u2014which isn't always worth it, depending on who you're fighting. I fight to defend the weaker, I fight for my family and my friends.\"\n\n\"Your griffin pride,\" Hikaru said eagerly, and Shard fluffed his feathers. \"Because you're a prince.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Shard had a pride waiting for him, hoping for his return so that he could be their king. With that thought and the sun shining on him and Hikaru's gaze shining at him, he did feel like a prince, though his pride was far away. \"Well, yes, that's right. My pride.\"\n\n\"And you fight for truth.\"\n\nShard tilted his head. \"Truth?\"\n\n\"Yes. You told me you hoped to find the truth of why the wyrms are angry and hateful, that you've argued for them. You fight for truth. I will, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, Hikaru. You're brave. Your mother hoped you could bring peace and friendship to the Winderost wyrms, but it won't be easy. They seem more interested in fighting and spreading fear, and we don't know why.\"\n\n\"They're angry,\" Hikaru said. \"I wish they would say why, instead of just attacking. But I will learn the truth, with you.\"\n\nShard picked at a bit of bone from the meal. \"I'll need all the help I can get. I tried to speak to them once, but they didn't listen, or they didn't understand.\" The stormy night came back to him, the terror, the attacking wyrms and their pursuit of him all the way to the Dawn Spire.\n\nHikaru's tail coiled around Shard's feet\u2014to comfort Shard, or himself, Shard wasn't sure. \"They didn't listen to me either,\" the dragon murmured, \"in the cavern.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Shard said, ruffling off the memory of the battle. The last time he'd seen his uncle, his friends, and Brynja. \"You might endure a battle yet. Aesir griffins like battle. They win acclaim and honor, and titles.\"\n\nHikaru considered that. \"I don't want all that. I just want to be with you, and to help the wyrms find peace.\" He lowered his head on level with Shard's. \"But I would fight for you, Shard.\"\n\nShard touched his beak to Hikaru's nose. \"I would fight for you, too.\"\n\nIt occurred to Shard he'd never sparred with the dragon or attempted to teach him anything about it. He made a plan to do so.\n\nHikaru lifted his head, then stood and stretched his wings. After glancing at what was left of the deer carcass, scraps of hide and the bones sucked clean of their marrow, he looked at Shard. \"What should we do with her?\"\n\nShard twitched his tail, surprised. \"Do?\"\n\nHikaru hesitated. \"Yes. It doesn't feel right to eat of her flesh and then just leave her there.\" His brows scrunched down, as if he was trying to remember something.\n\n\"Oh.\" Moved, Shard stood and looked down at the bones. \"It's all right. She'll feed the crows and return to the earth in her own time. It is the way. In the Silver Isles, the Vanir leave their dead on the isle called Black Rock.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Hikaru considered his own toes for a moment. \"Do we return to the earth when we die?\"\n\n\"All flesh does. Our Voice sings on, in the winds, in the sky. Our spirit flies to the Sunlit Land of Tyr.\"\n\nHikaru sat back, considering the bones of the deer, then the clear circle of sky far above. \"I don't know if dragons go to the Sunlit Land.\"\n\nShard cocked his head. All spirits went to the Sunlit Land. It was a very strange thing to say. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHikaru folded his claws together. \"I feel as if\u2026well, I don't know if I can explain. But I feel as if I'm remembering things from\u2026from other times I've lived.\" His large eyes focused on Shard. \"I think dragons are born again, and again. I think our spirits dwell here forever.\"\n\nShard flexed his wings, and tilted his head, indicating that they should walk on, under the cover of trees. He didn't know what to say at all, so he spoke carefully. \"That could be, Hikaru. I know that dragons are different. Your blood is like fire. You\u2026well, what kinds of things are you remembering?\"\n\nHikaru walked by his side, in graceful, undulating movement like a rising and falling wave. \"Songs, mostly. Songs you didn't teach me. Sometimes I remember other dragons, or things. I had a dream of a red stone gilded with bright gold.\"\n\nShard navigated a path through the damp ferns, shaking off the dew every few steps and pondering. Privately, he thought that Hikaru might be a seer, like himself, that they weren't memories but visions. But dragons were very different, and who was he to say?\n\n\"What songs do you remember?\" Amaratsu had said that the songs of the Sunland would be in Hikaru's blood. Shard hadn't realized he would actually remember them, from a past life, through what power he didn't know. If he was remembering them at all, and not hearing them through some power in the wind. It had happened for Amaratsu, and for Shard himself.\n\nHikaru's warm voice broke the silence like a deep birdsong.\n\n\"The noble draw wind from the water\n\nThe brave will call fire from stone.\n\n[ The foolish seek gold in the mountain ]\n\nThe last know that wood grows from bone.\"\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" Shard murmured. \"I've never heard it before.\"\n\n\"It's a dragon song,\" Hikaru said, certain of himself. Shard wasn't going to argue. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"Nightward.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Hikaru trailed him through the ferns, up a long slope through the hulking, ancient cedars. \"But where?\"\n\nShard climbed, opening his wings and checking the position of the sun that glinted through the pine needles high above. \"For now, just away.\" He pondered whether to tell Hikaru his true destination yet, for he wasn't certain how to get there, or if it was the best idea. At that moment, it was the only idea he had. \"Away from the Winderost,\" he continued, \"away from the wyrms, and the Dawn Spire.\"\n\n\"And then?\" Hikaru rolled and hopped after him, seeming to enjoy the freedom to stretch and work his growing body.\n\n\"And then\u2026\" Shard wove around a tumble of moss-covered boulders. Perhaps, if they crested the slope, they'd have a good view of what lay beyond the forest. He paused, looking at Hikaru.\n\nI promised myself I wouldn't keep things from him.\n\n\"We can't speak to the wyrms. I have more enemies than friends in the Winderost now. We know that the wyrms are angry with griffins and Sunland dragons alike, so\u2014\"\n\n\"You want to go to the Sunland,\" Hikaru said eagerly. \"Yes, I think that will be a good plan. There will be answers there, and friends.\"\n\nShard chuckled, relieved. \"Let's hope so. But I don't know the way.\"\n\n\"I'm certain I can find it, when I remember more.\"\n\n\"It may be a very long flight.\"\n\nHikaru fluffed his wings. \"I'm growing strong.\"\n\nShard stepped forward to butt his head affectionately against Hikaru's shoulder. \"I knew you wouldn't be afraid.\"\n\nHe was glad Hikaru agreed with his plan, though he couldn't shake his own feeling that he was just running away.\n\nIt'll be best for Hikaru to see his homeland, and he's right, Shard tried to convince himself, we may have friends there.\n\nTogether they turned and trekked up the remainder of the slope, where a line of trees marked a low ridge. Shard paused at the top. The ground swept back down in a wash of shale, toward yet more forest. Beyond, in the blue haze, he made out a long, flat plain with marsh grasses, and beyond that, more forest. He didn't want to walk through a marsh, and Hikaru had eaten an entire deer. He looked up at the dragon.\n\n\"Ready to fly?\"\n\nHikaru laughed and launched from the ridge, shooting ahead like a serpent. Shard leaped and glided after, soaking in the warm sun after the chill of the woods. Every so often he checked over his shoulder. The wyrms must have been hunkered down away from the sun. There was another possibility, though Shard guarded his hope. It was possible that the wyrms may have lost them completely when the volcano erupted, and hadn't followed at all.\n\n\"Let's race!\" Hikaru challenged, looping back around Shard.\n\n\"Ha! All right.\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Shard narrowed his wings and shot ahead, twisting his body like a falcon to streamline his muscles and feathers. Hikaru took a sharp breath, then loosed a warbling shriek of glee. They raced.\n\nShard gained height and then darted ahead, using altitude and wind for his advantage, working as he had never worked before, holding nothing back. Hikaru, forced to keep up with the swiftest griffin known in the Silver Isles or the Winderost, tested his wings to the utmost. In that way, without words, Shard helped Hikaru learn what he was capable of, and pride warmed him every time the young dragon pulled ahead of him by a nose.\n\nNow and then they laid back, gliding on high winds to save energy, then they resumed the race and mocking, challenging calls.\n\nFar below, the birds chattered about them. Alternatively racing and gliding, they crossed the rolling cedar forest and the long, flat marsh. The land bumped up into wooded hills again, and though it was winter the plants bloomed green and Shard spotted flowers. They smelled only earth and rain, not snow, and thought the mountain ranges must affect the weather and create a bowl of warmth.\n\n\"I'm getting tired,\" Hikaru said, and it had been almost a quarter mark. The sun slanted low toward afternoon.\n\n\"A little farther,\" Shard urged. \"You can do it. You won't be able to rest at sea, when we fly to the Sunland.\"\n\nHikaru looked uncertain, then narrowed his eyes and set his gaze forward.\n\nThey flew another mark, and Shard was about to call a rest when he caught a familiar scent. Sharp longing ached in his every muscle. Hikaru smelled it too.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\nShard shook himself and answered, as calmly as he could manage, \"The sea.\"\n\nAt last he understood what instinct had guided him nightward, what pulled him from the Winderost. The vast land did have an end, after all.\n\nThey came to a silent agreement to keep flying until they reached the shore. The young dragon followed Shard doggedly through the final, long stretch. The sun lay across their backs, then sat in front of them by the time they reached the promised shore. The scent was so woven into the strange, ancient green woods, infused in the trees and in the sticky, warm mist that shrouded the temperate land that Shard had expected to see the ocean over every ridge. But it was long in coming.\n\nAt last, when Shard thought he only dreamed the tantalizingly familiar scent, the evergreen forest broke.\n\nHills and cliffs stopped short and lunged down toward a crashing sea. The sky stretched beyond, gray and pink with sunset.\n\nBreathless, exhausted, Shard keened in pure joy and dove, tucking his wings to glide and roll along the faces of the foreign cliffs. Confused gulls scattered and scolded him. Waves crawled onto the broad, sandy beach before the battered rock abutting the sandstone cliffs. Juniper trees clung stubbornly to the shoreline, roots mixing with mountain and salt water.\n\nWithout thinking, Shard snapped his wings out and soared over the water. The scent of fish clouded the air. He searched for only a few moments to find a school, dive, gulp down a fish, and dive again.\n\nAfter a moment he remembered that he'd left Hikaru behind.\n\nBlinking saltwater from his eyes with chagrin, Shard spun in the air. Water flew from his wings in silver drops that turned gold in the light of the dying sun. A fat fish wriggled in his talons. He could have eaten three more, but this one was for Hikaru.\n\nThe black dragonet sat on the shore, his forepaws in the sand just where the littlest waves would roll over his front toes. His tail was coiled around his haunches, his wings open against his back, but drooping, his head dipped down to stare at the water. Shard raced back to him and thumped in the sand, laughing as he offered the fish.\n\n\"Hikaru, eat!\" Shard sank his talons into wet sand and the feel of it brought a rush of bittersweet memories of his home.\n\nHikaru swung his head and stared at the fish, blinking. Shard realized the young dragon hadn't been studying the water, he was simply so exhausted that he couldn't raise his head. Then his jaws snapped out to gulp down the fish in one bite.\n\nShard made a sympathetic noise. \"I'm sorry. I should have let you rest. You'll feel better if you eat.\"\n\nHikaru smacked his jaws together, tasting fresh fish for the first time, then turned his gaze toward the setting sun. His soft, deer-like ears perked. \"The sea,\" he whispered. \"I wanted to reach the sea. I know you missed it.\" His talons flexed against the sand. \"The sea. Sand. Water. The sun.\" He dipped his head low, but his gaze lifted to the clouds of pale pink and marigold, feathered across the pale blue horizon. Shard listened quietly as Hikaru reviewed, leading himself to sleep. His wings trembled.\n\n\"Let's go up shore,\" Shard murmured, leaning into Hikaru's shoulder. \"The tide will be in by dark.\"\n\n\"Tide?\" Hikaru murmured, absorbing everything as fast as he could.\n\nHe has to learn enough to keep up with his size, Shard thought wryly. So Shard explained the tides and the moon as they walked up the beach to one of the cliffs, and climbed it to curl up in the shelter of a squatting juniper grove. Hikaru coiled around Shard, creating a warm, black nest of his scaled body. His enormous eyes barely blinked as he stared at the sunset. Every word from their travels was quietly reviewed as Shard let himself be lulled by the dragon's voice.\n\n\"Earthfire\u2026flight. Fear. Ash. Forests\u2026\" He yawned, jaws stretching and snapping shut. \"Brother,\" he mumbled, resting his head on the ground, eyes closing. The words rolled on and on and finally the last, always the last. \"Shard.\"\n\n\"Rest well.\" Shard turned his face to the setting sun, and closed his eyes to breathe in the rich smell of the ocean. With that scent came a desperate longing for the Silver Isles, the crowding thoughts of the family and friends he'd left behind, and the resolve to do whatever he must to finish his growing quest and return home.\n\n[ A Cold Welcome ]\n\nSnow blinded Caj as he dragged himself across the frozen peat fields of Crow Wing. Named for its shape from above, the isle actually had very few crows that Caj had seen. Rather, the scent of wild horses wafted with every breath, and their round, sliced tracks stamped the snow in every direction. The packed snow made for slick walking, but it was easier than wading through chest-high drifts, so against his better judgment, he followed the horse trails.\n\nHis wing ached. His muscles protested in sharp twitches and melted snow soaked the fine feathers of his face. He needed the warm down and long winter feathers of a Vanir for this kind of expedition\u2014but he didn't have that. Only his will. Only his need to find and redeem his brother.\n\n\"Sverin!\" He ducked his head against a blast of wind that rattled his core. Snow stung like tiny stones. He thought of Sigrun and Thyra, cuddled up in their family den to wait out the blizzard.\n\nCurse you, Sverin. Or curse me.\n\nBut he'd found the red feathers. His first day exploring the open, nearly featureless isle, and he'd found feathers near a pile of snow-covered boulders, where his once-king had obviously found shelter. To his relief, he'd found no green feathers\u2014though perhaps Halvden knew to carry his away to avoid being tracked, if he'd dropped any at all. If so, Caj reasoned, he would've picked up Sverin's as well. Or not. He could never tell if he gave the arrogant young warrior too much credit, or too little. A spasm shot through his wing.\n\nToo little, he though ruefully. A growl built in his throat as he shoved forward against the wind and snow. The next rush of wind drew the breath from him in a gasp.\n\nTime to shelter out the storm.\n\nCaj paused, waiting for the wind to calm before he peered around. A gray mass stood out in the dimness of the snow, and he trudged toward it. Rock, tree, giant drift\u2014it didn't truly matter, as long as it blocked the wind.\n\nThe scent assaulted him in the same instant he realized what the shape was.\n\n\"All winds,\" he breathed, staggering forward, ears lifted. At the top of a short rise, the mangled remains of a pony yearling marred the snow. Its short, fluffy mane ruffled with every shift of the wind, giving it the illusion of life. Caj climbed the rise and looked down at the carcass. Normally his appetite gnawed at the sight of a kill, but not since the vow. He and the others had vowed, before Ragna, Tyr, and each other, to take no more red meat from the land of the Silver Isles, unless it was for special reason with the wolves' blessing, and unless they properly honored the animal they killed. There were only two who had not taken that vow.\n\nCaj opened his good wing, his stomach roiling not in hunger but an eerie nausea he'd never felt before at the sight of a dead creature of prey.\n\nDid this young hoof beast have a name? Awareness? Fear?\n\nSurely, fear. Long talon marks slashing the hide gave no doubt as to the breed of killer, and Caj knew of only one who would hunt on the Crow Wing Isle.\n\n\"Oh, my king,\" he murmured. If Sverin was still mad, still Nameless, of course he would be hunting on land. Of course he would have no awareness that their sun had set, the tide turned on the Aesir and what was once the only acceptable hunting was now forbidden by conscience and by law. The creatures of the Silver Isles already hated them. Caj feared what more damage this might do.\n\nA strange drumming, a warm, thundering sound lifted his hackles. Yes, the yearling had a name\u2014and a family.\n\nSlowly Caj turned, his good wing still open but in a gesture that he hoped looked peaceful, as a dark line of horses pounded toward him through the storm. His instinct roared at him to ramp up, to flare, to challenge, to intimidate the ground-pounding foe.\n\nTry my ways, Sigrun had asked of him after he took the vow. Try our ways. I have tried yours. There can be balance yet.\n\nThe indistinct line became individual beasts, flashing all different colors\u2014gray, dun, red, splashes of black and spots, all coats shaggy and soft for winter. They broke into two lines and drummed in opposing rings around Caj, trumpeting challenges, tossing their heads. Their eyes rolled to reveal white rings when they caught a whiff of the blood of their fallen yearling.\n\nCaj realized he looked challenging, not welcoming, and closed his wing. For a moment he stood very still, only breathing, noting with relief that their warlike dance at least blocked the wind from him for a few moments. They spoke a different tongue, a guttural, whickering, whistling language. Caj closed his eyes, listening to the throbbing of their hooves on the packed, frozen earth.\n\nThen he bellowed from the earthy part of his heart, in a language he knew they would hear. \"I come here peacefully!\" He crouched back, lifting his talons to show they were clean. \"I didn't kill this young one!\"\n\nA mare nickered her disbelief, and all of their anger washed over Caj in waves. He shuddered, mantling his good wing as if he could block it. \"Hear me! I seek out the one who did this, to bring him to justice.\"\n\n\"Lies!\" screamed a plump, spotted mare, whose coat matched the dead colt at his feet. \"You killed my son! Poacher, thief, blasphemy under the eye of Tor!\"\n\nCaj lunged aside as the hysterical mare broke the ring and charged him. He whirled, ready to dodge again, but she shied at the sight of her own dead son, then her knees buckled and she bowed before the carcass, whinnying grief toward the earth.\n\n\"I will find the one who did this,\" Caj said, raising his voice again over the thunder of the hoof beats. \"If you can tell me if you've seen him. Him, with feathers like blood, or a younger, with feathers like spring grass\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Another broke from the ring, a tall, well-muscled stallion that Caj judged to be middle years for a hoof beast. At his word, the horses began to slow, and turned inward, forming a dangerous wall of hooves and teeth. He tossed his pale head. \"You are not welcome here. Not welcome to hunt, not welcome to walk, to fly, or to speak.\" He stamped a hoof.\n\nCaj curled his talons against the snow, savoring the feel of them breaking through the frozen pack.\n\nA mare, older and the color of mountain stone, joined the stallion. To her, all the others bowed their heads.\n\nSo, Caj did too.\n\nHer voice sounded like wind in a pine bough, high and breathy. \"The Red Scourge has done enough here and on every other isle. You are not welcome.\"\n\n\"I am friend to the Vanir,\" Caj began, and the mare flipped her forelock out of her eyes in what he could only think was an expression of disdain.\n\n\"The Vanir are weak for allowing you here, and they are not welcome either. I will grant you this chance to leave and to never return.\"\n\n\"Honorable\u2026friends. I\u2026\" He swallowed hard against a lifetime of knowing a certain way of things, and a lifetime of pride. \"Allow me to search this island. I'll rid you of the\u2026the Red Scourge. I am friend to Vanir, and to you. To the Silver Isles. I am Caj, son-of-Cai. Honor me with your name.\"\n\n\"So humble!\" trumpeted the mare, and her male consort nickered. A rustle of stamps and tail flicks indicated the herd's agreement. Black, large, cold eyes focused on him, a ring of contempt. \"So humble, when you cannot fly\u2014yes, I see the mud cast on your wing. I hear from the birds that the son of Lapu would have killed you, if not for the mercy of wolves. So humble, when you have nowhere to run, Caj, son-of-Cai. So humble, when you have no friends.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't run from you.\" Anger ate away at his calm. He smothered it. What did I expect? They would fall to my feet and make peace? At least he had tried. Perhaps he should've brought Sigrun after all. But these hard-headed beasts didn't seem to hold the Vanir in high regard, either.\n\n\"A proud and bragging poacher from the Sun Isle,\" said the mare. \"If you will not leave, and you will not run, then you will die fighting. We don't need your help ridding our isle of the Red Scourge. We don't fear him, and we don't fear you.\"\n\n\"My lady\u2014\"\n\nShe ramped, hooves flashing, and three half grown stallions whinnied their approval, broke from the ring, and charged Caj.\n\n\"I offered friendship!\" he bellowed. \"I offered peace!\"\n\n\"We refuse,\" shouted one of the half-growns, surging into a hard gallop. Caj judged distance, the horse's height, and if he could make the leap and take his throat.\n\nHe crouched, muscles tight and ready, tensed\u2014then thought of Sigrun's face if she heard he'd killed an island horse.\n\nWith a grunt he rolled aside as the stallion trampled past. The second stallion, dusty gray, pivoted and charged Caj's new position. The lead mare encouraged them, promising them glory and honor for a lifetime if they killed an Aesir conqueror.\n\nCaj held his ground, breath short, and when the gray's hooves touched down close enough, he shoved himself straight up, wings closed. He slapped a forefoot against the gray's back, talons flat to leave no injury, his hind paws hit and he launched himself off the horse's back toward the third attacker.\n\nThat one had less stomach for a full-grown griffin warrior flying at him, broken wing or no. He shied away and instead of landing on a running horse's back, Caj hit the snow and rolled. He groaned as pain shot up three different ways across his wing. No time for that. He spun and flung out his good wing, hissing warning at the three young stallions, who minced uncertainly, tails whisking, heads bobbing in challenge.\n\n\"I thought you wanted to kill an Aesir today!\" Caj slashed his tail through the air. At his back and all around, the double ring of the giant herd hit their hooves against the snow to encourage the stallions. \"Well? Shall we have words, instead?\"\n\nFor a moment, Caj thought they were ready to speak, thought they acknowledged that he could have killed the young male horse, and hadn't.\n\nThen the wind stirred the scent of the dead colt.\n\n\"Never,\" said the queen mare from afield. Her voice imbued the stallions with new vigor. They exchanged glances and murmurs, then split, readying a triad attack. Caj waited, but they did not charge. A silence that sounded strange after all the shouting and drumming settled over the herd, and they all held still. Caj did too. They were prey beasts, their senses heightened. They'd heard or smelled something he hadn't.\n\nThen, he did.\n\nAnd he never, in life up to that day, had been more glad to hear the low, long howl of a wolf in the distance.\n\n\"Don't panic,\" commanded the queen mare. Her consort left the ring and butted his head against the others, giving them confidence, encouraging them with his powerful height and his strength.\n\nCaj couldn't think of a single wolf in the Isles who would be stupid enough to charge a herd of horses in search of a meal, when deer were more easily gotten on the Star Isle, and the Vanir offered shares of their fish. Unless the wolf was not there for meat. Unless it had come for some higher purpose, some duty beyond instinct.\n\nUnless Sigrun, in her worry, had sent someone after him.\n\nCaj strained to hear the calls of more wolves, but heard only the one, and his relief soured. One wolf. One wolf against a vengeful herd of warrior horses. He watched though, amazed that they reacted as if it was a giant pack. Eyes rolled. Muscles twitched to flee. The next low howl sent three yearlings thundering away into the blizzard. They caught a scent and more fled, leaving an open space through which the wolf could enter.\n\nAnd he did, appearing out of the snow and springing through the broken ring lithely as a fox.\n\nHis long, almost mocking howl sent another shiver through the herd, though Caj admired the queen mare for standing her ground, then stepping forward.\n\n\"This is no affair of yours,\" she told the wolf. \"Go back to your island.\"\n\n\"Proud fools,\" sang the wolf, a young male.\n\nCaj tried and failed to remember where he'd seen him before, or if he just looked familiar because most wolves looked the same to Caj. His pale, golden coat repelled the snow as he padded up to the queen, who, lock-legged, met his friendly bow with a curt jerk of her head.\n\n\"Do you not know the nest-father of Rashard, prince of the Sun Isle?\" The wolf stared around the ring. \"Do you not know Noble Caj the Just, friend to Vanir, to wolves, nest-father of Shard, the Summer King?\"\n\nDon't overdo it, Caj thought, watching the mare's dark eyes.\n\nShe looked unimpressed. \"I know poachers,\" she declared. \"Murderers, thieves\u2014\"\n\n\"Harm him,\" snarled the wolf in a different tone, \"and I will name you an oath breaker.\"\n\nCaj's talons clenched unconsciously against the snow, and probably would always clench at the sound of a wolf growl. But he didn't interrupt.\n\nThe mare shifted, tail whisking uncertainly against her flank. \"Of what oath do you speak?\"\n\n\"Your allegiance to the caribou Aodh of the Sun Isle, your dam's and her dam's vows to Aodh's father, and him, and his sons to always stand where the cloven-hoofed stand when needed, as one herd.\"\n\nShe tossed her forelock out of her eyes, and the certainty slipped from her voice. \"What do you know of our oaths?\"\n\nThe wolf bared his fangs as if amused, but Caj thought it was not entirely on accident that this put the mare further on edge. \"I know everything.\"\n\n\"I have not heard from Aodh since the Conquering. I know not where he stands.\"\n\n\"He stands with the Summer King.\"\n\nThis sent a flurry of disbelief, head-shaking, and hoof-stamping through the herd. \"Ask the wind, ask the birds,\" said the young wolf, \"if you think I have a reason to lie to you. But until you know for sure, I would not kill this warrior. He's here to help you.\"\n\nThe mare snorted steam. The blizzard began to wear itself out, and instead of wind, only heavy, fat flakes of snow fell around them. The mare considered Caj, then the wolf, and Caj heard her teeth grinding.\n\n\"Very well. You have our leave to stay. But you will hunt no game on this island, and you will leave if it's clear your Red Scourge is no longer here.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Caj said, mustering as much respect as he was able. It wasn't much, but it was enough to mollify her. With a piercing whistle, she ordered the herd away.\n\nThe grieving mother, lying all that time beside her dead colt, rose unsteadily to her feet.\n\n\"I will avenge him,\" Caj called to her.\n\nShe shook her head hard, tossing snow from her mane, then stared at Caj, her eyes dark and searching. \"If you do,\" she said, \"then count me a friend.\"\n\nCaj lowered his head. Thunder beat around him, and when he looked up again, the herd had vanished into the snow, and the young gold wolf was panting in his face, then sniffing along his flank.\n\n\"You're not hurt, I hope? I'm not too late? You look as if you need a meal, and a sleep.\"\n\n\"No.\" Caj ruffled his feathers against the snow, his muscles nearly seizing at the wolf's proximity. \"No, I'm not hurt. Yes, I need a meal\u2026and a sleep. Who are you?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" The wolf closed his mouth and tilted his head, then displayed his teeth. \"I am Tocho. Friend to Shard. And to you.\"\n\n\"I see. And why are you here, alone?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said again, and he sounded even younger, and uncertain. \"I've come to help you?\"\n\nOh, how merry, thought Caj. \"It's too dangerous.\"\n\nTocho was unmoved. His face broadened again into a pant. \"I won't face Sverin. I'll only help you hunt, or bring you food. I'm fast, so you don't have to travel so far between your hunts.\"\n\nBeyond the danger, Caj could think of no good reason to refuse the help\u2014but he could also think of no good reason Tocho was offering. Time enough to figure that out later. \"Fine then. Let's find shelter until this snow lets up.\"\n\n\"Already done!\" He turned about and padded away. \"This way.\"\n\nCaj broke into a trot to follow as the curtain of snow swallowed them up with the rest of the island.\n\n[ The Vanhar ]\n\nDarkness cloaked the shoreline and the wind rose, driving a chill through Kjorn's damp feathers and straight to his bones. He remained on the ground, still as he could manage, as Rok and his band hunted well into evening.\n\n\"I should break now,\" he grumbled to the wolf Mayka.\n\nMayka slowly laid his ears back, and in the darkening, drizzly gloom, Kjorn could see his lip twitch to reveal the point of one fang. \"No. No. We must do nothing at night. Remain still. In the morning. I'll take the last watch, and wake you as the sky lightens.\"\n\n\"I trust you,\" Kjorn reminded him. \"I'll do what I can to repay you for your help.\"\n\nThe ears perked again, twin outlines in the dark. \"I ask only that you would do the same for me, if needed. When you see Shard, tell him I remember him, and thank him.\"\n\nBefore Kjorn could respond, they heard griffin voices in the wind. Mayka rolled up to his feet and chirruped a warning, sounding almost like a griffin. Fraenir answered him, and Kjorn listened as all three griffins landed, feathers rustling, murmuring darkly about the storm and the volcanic ash raining farther inland.\n\nA warm hunk of red meat rolled across the ground and struck him in the shoulder.\n\nKjorn looked up to see Rok. \"Thank you.\" He sniffed the meat, found it fresh, and ate as Rok lumbered forward to stand over him.\n\n\"Don't say we didn't treat you well.\"\n\nKjorn paused, swallowing a strip of meat and furtively taking the griffin's measure again. He decided he could best the rogue, in a fight. \"Say to whom? Those at the Dawn Spire? These new captors you're taking me to? Those who know my father would have been heir to rule this land?\"\n\nRok shifted, then scoffed. \"I know who you are, exile. They masked it with pretty tales of exploration, conquering, and glory, but I know the truth.\"\n\nKjorn's heart thumped. He scarcely knew the truth himself, but the elders of the Aesir in the Silver Isles told him what they knew, and he could guess it. \"You believe Per fled.\"\n\nRok stretched his broad wings, for a moment hiding the stars from Kjorn's sight. \"Per fled with the cursed. And all those who would have served him loyally in this land were left to the usurper.\"\n\nKjorn's appetite fell away and he bunched his muscles to stand, then remembered he was still supposed to appear bound. He shifted instead, feigning discomfort. \"Was your family loyal to my grandfather? Is that why you're in exile? I can\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not in exile!\" The rogue's tail lashed. \"I was born free of the Dawn Spire. My father refused to serve the new kings.\" He put a sour twist on the word, and Kjorn's mind soared. If he could play it right, here could be an ally instead of a foe.\n\n\"Rok\u2014\"\n\n\"Stay quiet, Highness. It's what princes are good at.\"\n\n\"Your father would've served mine.\" Kjorn tried one last time. \"Will you not make amends, and be my ally?\"\n\nRok's head tilted in the dark, then he chuckled. \"No.\"\n\n\"Why? What happened to make you so bitter?\"\n\n\"Eat your food. We'll arrive at Vanheim in the morning. You'll want your strength to argue with them, instead.\"\n\nHe turned, tail flicking across Kjorn's face before he could say another word. Stifling frustration, Kjorn clenched his talons into the mud, and ate. He would need his strength in the morning, though not for arguing.\n\n\"Were you being honest?\"\n\nHe nearly jumped out of his binds as Fraenir slipped forward. Kjorn hated the dark. \"I'm always honest.\"\n\nHe spoke, hushed, head tilted as if listening for Rok's return. \"He tried to return to the Dawn Spire, a long time ago. They wouldn't have him. King Orn called his family disloyal, oath breakers, exiles, and never gave him a chance.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Kjorn. Then, \"You care about him?\"\n\n\"Of course I do,\" he growled. \"He's like my brother. He practically raised me.\" At Kjorn's silence, Fraenir continued. \"He's good, but because of his father's act, he's stuck with this life. He could have been a great warrior at the Dawn Spire, honored.\"\n\nKjorn peered forward, trying to see Fraenir's face, but clouds hid even the stars, and they spoke in blackness. The only other sound was the crash of the sea below. \"It's for all of us, in this life, to either live up to, or to redeem the acts of our fathers.\" He inched closer to Fraenir through the mud. \"You could talk to him for me.\"\n\nA moment of hesitation. \"No, I can't do that. You have nothing. You can't promise him anything. Even if you really are the grandson of Per, you're in exile too. You've got no pride with you, no warriors, nothing to prove who you are or what you could give him if you succeed.\"\n\n\"Honor means keeping your oaths, Fraenir, not for gain, but for the sake of your own heart. Loyalty means following those you've pledged to, even if they have nothing to offer. He'll understand it as a matter of honor. Tell him that,\" Kjorn urged. \"If what you've told me is true, tell him, and he'll understand that.\"\n\nFrom afield, Rok called Fraenir's name. The younger griffin drew back a step.\n\nKjorn tried to keep him close. \"Fraenir\u2014\"\n\nFraenir hesitated, watching Kjorn, one ear turning back. \"I shouldn't have told you.\"\n\nWind brought the smell of more rain, and Kjorn braced himself for a long, chilly night.\n\n\"Fraenir,\" Rok barked again from closer by. \"First watch.\" He seemed in a black mood, and didn't bring up any kind of plan to look for shelter. Fraenir edged away a few steps, watching. Perhaps he, or Rok, would have a change of heart, but Kjorn didn't set store in it. He would be gone by morning anyway.\n\nEven through the cold, wet night, he managed a little sleep, chaotic with dreams of shadowy, fanged beasts and multiple griffins who all looked like Shard, but spoke with frightening, voiceless howls.\n\nTrue to his word, Mayka woke Kjorn at the first dull light of morning, when the wolf was on watch. Before moving, Kjorn looked around to get a bearing on the other rogues. Frida and Fraenir huddled, asleep in a tight pile like siblings, and Rok had curled up alone a single leap away.\n\nMayka nudged Kjorn, assuring him they were fast asleep. Kjorn slithered forward out of the seaweed binds. They fell and flopped away with soft thumps on the ground. Kjorn paused, ears twitching. Fraenir grumbled in his sleep before nuzzling in closer to Frida. Kjorn let his breath out.\n\nThe dull light glinted off the delicate golden chain that Rok wore around his neck, though brown feathers hid much of it from sight. Kjorn stared at the chain. Perhaps he could slip it loose, and still creep away without risking a fight against three griffins. He took a step toward Rok.\n\n\"Son of Sverin,\" Mayka breathed. \"Don't be foolish.\"\n\nKjorn's tail twitched, then he turned away. It was only a thing. Only metal. It wasn't his father. He looked up. Above him, the sky stretched cloudless and dark, still pricked with stars. A rosy gray over the sea marked Tyr's horizon. For the first time in many days, he opened his wings. Wary of debilitating cramps, he extended them slowly, feeling the long muscles uncoil and warm. He crept away, still stretching his wings so that when he lifted off the draft wouldn't wake his captors.\n\n\"Fly,\" Mayka urged, padding up beside him, a soft whine creeping into his words. \"Fly!\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kjorn said, crouching. \"If I ever have a chance to repay you\u2014\"\n\nMayka butted his head against Kjorn and he shoved up, flapping hard in the cool air. He would fly inland. He knew that the Dawn Spire lay inland, and if he flew high he'd either spot it, or be spotted by a patrol. Beyond that, he could only have faith.\n\nShouts drew his gaze down. Rok had woken. Fraenir and Frida shot into the air like falcons and Kjorn wheeled up high, finding a sliver of warm air to help him.\n\nFraenir, faster than he appeared, gained air and snagged Kjorn's tail feathers in his claws. Kjorn tucked down and stooped, his battle cry piercing the morning. Fraenir ducked, yanking free and sending one golden feather fluttering toward the ground.\n\nRok barreled up toward them, wing beats hard and deep. Frida climbed the sky a leap above Kjorn, surely planning to dive on him.\n\n\"I offered you a chance!\" Kjorn shouted, banking sharply away as Rok leveled with him, fury in his eyes. \"I still offer you redemption and a chance to serve with honor.\"\n\nRok only hissed. Fraenir fell away in deference, and Kjorn, refusing to flee, flared his wings to meet the lanky griffin's charge. He had a longer reach than Kjorn, but Kjorn was heavier, better nourished and muscled.\n\nIf I'm to prove I'm a prince, let it be here.\n\nHe hissed, and thrust his talons out as Rok crashed into him. They locked claws, wings beating at each other, and Kjorn's muscles thrilled at the challenge. After a long, helpless, restless winter and a solitary flight over an endless ocean, now was battle.\n\nHe would show these rogues the line of Kajar.\n\nRok shoved his weight forward, trying to turn Kjorn upside down. Kjorn obliged, relaxing and falling back, then kicked the big griffin's stomach as they toppled wing over tail. He kicked again as Rok gasped and knocked a wing toward the rogue's head, slicing flight feathers toward his eyes. Rok threw his head back and the strike caught his neck, making him cough. His talons loosened.\n\nThey fell fast, Rok's wings beating Kjorn's sides as he strained to keep flying. Kjorn yanked on their locked talons to throw Rok off balance, then let go as Rok flared to keep from bowling forward. Kjorn wrenched his talons free, flapped twice and twisted around to land on Rok's back.\n\nFraenir and Frida had hung back, wary of impeding their leader, but now the gryphoness screeched and shot forward, aiming for Kjorn. He clung, talons dug into Rok's shoulders as the big griffin writhed and sank with each wing stroke, unable to bear Kjorn's weight and unable to throw him.\n\nWhen Frida was a mere leap from them, Kjorn rolled off Rok's side, kicking Rok's ribs hard to send him toward Frida.\n\nFraenir dropped toward him and Kjorn managed not to laugh like a maniac. Caj never thought to make us spar three-against-one, mid-air. He'd be proud.\n\nA long warning call broke through their fight. Just as Kjorn whirled to meet Fraenir, voices pierced wind, and a strong scent chased them.\n\n\"Halt, trespassers!\"\n\n\"Halt, poachers!\"\n\n\"Land and answer for your presence!\"\n\nRok shouted an obscenity. By silent agreement Fraenir and Kjorn turned from their own impending duel to see the newcomers.\n\nTen griffins soared at them fast in a precise formation like geese. Just as Kjorn looked at them, the sun broke the edge of the earth and the first rays of light dazzled his eyes. He shook his head hard. Surely bright Tyr had seen him face the first challenge with honor and courage. Kjorn didn't pretend he could face ten healthy griffins alone. He glided toward the ground, heart thumping. The voices who'd called to them sounded disciplined, firm, like griffins who belonged to a pride, not rogues. Kjorn thought that explaining himself would be better than attempting to flee. He would have more success with honorable griffins than with Rok and his ilk.\n\nThe arriving griffins shouted again at Rok and his company. Fraenir hesitated, and followed Kjorn down. Frida pleaded with Rok, but the rogue shouted challenge and five of the new griffins broke off to wrestle him down. Kjorn didn't watch, and was surprised when Frida didn't attempt to help, but stooped and landed meekly beside Kjorn, as if they all went together.\n\n\"We would only get injured,\" she said defensively, to answer Kjorn's curious glance. He looked around as five of the new griffins landed, reforming into a semi-circle around them. The second half of the group, shoving a bruised and disgruntled Rok up against Fraenir, closed the circle.\n\nKjorn gazed at the new griffins. They were not Aesir. The tallest of them stood a head or two shorter than himself, and he watched as they folded their wings, the long, sculpted wings of sea eagles. Their colors ranged from gray to a variety of pale hues, almost white, and soft, dove browns. They weren't Vanir either, he knew at once, there was something quite different, but a resemblance lingered.\n\nPerhaps, Kjorn thought as a pale female stepped forward, eyes narrowed, the Vanir did originate from the Winderost after all, sometime long ago. His mind spun, but that was wonder for another time.\n\n\"I am Nilsine, daughter-of-Nels, huntress and sentry of the Vanhar.\" Her voice dipped in a rolling dialect, like the native griffins of the Silver Isles, but much stronger, older, Kjorn thought. \"Declare yourself.\"\n\n\"I am Fraenir\u2014\"\n\n\"You are known, thief,\" snipped a male from the ring of griffins. \"Fraenir, son-of-Lars. Frida, daughter-of-Frey. Rok, son\u2014\"\n\n\"So you know us,\" Rok said. Two griffins held him pinned. Nilsine looked mildly from him, back to Kjorn. Her eyes shone almost red, like the forest falcons he'd seen on rare occasion back home.\n\nHome.\n\nThis was my home, he thought again. My true home. This was the first place my talons touched earth, this was the first air I breathed.\n\n\"You are known.\" Nilsine looked at Rok again coolly. \"I speak to the stranger.\"\n\nKjorn inclined his head to her. \"I am Kjorn. Son-of-Sverin, who is the son of Per.\"\n\nHer ears perked, tail twitched, but otherwise she gave no expression. \"If that is so\u2026\" Her gaze traveled between Rok and Kjorn, surely wondering at the story\u2014but she had to have seen them fighting, known that Kjorn had meant no trespass, was not banded with the rogues. \"It's an interesting claim.\"\n\n\"My lady,\" one of the griffins holding Rok said. \"Nilsine, look\u2026\"\n\nShe looked over and so did Kjorn, and saw that the warrior had lifted the gold chain in one talon. Rok snarled.\n\n\"Well.\" Nilsine looked back to Kjorn. \"Perhaps. Time will tell. If it's true, then welcome home.\"\n\nNot feeling entirely welcome, Kjorn stood tall under her searching look.\n\nHer gaze rolled to the sky, searching. \"I see no warriors with you. Lost at sea?\"\n\nThe cutting edge of her voice didn't seem mocking, but Kjorn couldn't name the tone. It almost sounded like disappointment. That gave him a little hope. Perhaps there are some who would be happy to see me\u2026\n\n\"I'm alone,\" Kjorn said.\n\nOne ear laid back, then she cocked her head. \"This land is in turmoil. Your forefathers chose to forsake it in the hour of need, and others have taken your place. Now you return, declaring your true name and heritage as if you expect to deserve something.\"\n\n\"I don't expect anything,\" Kjorn said. The female's cool, powerful demeanor reminded Kjorn of Thyra, and his heart ached for home. His old home\u2014the Silver Isles. Or at least his mate. \"I'm looking for my wingbrother, Shard, also of the Silver Isles.\"\n\n\"I don't know that name. If he was traveling alone, he might've passed this way like a rogue and we wouldn't have known.\"\n\n\"You would have known,\" Kjorn said wryly, \"if he'd come this way. He's memorable.\" At her un-amused look, he dipped his head again, remembering that he was not a prince here. \"I've come only to search for him and I ask leave to do so in your lands.\"\n\nNilsine regarded him again, as if to determine whether he was telling the truth. \"It's not my leave to give. The council will deal with you. You'll come with us.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Kjorn said. \"Yes, take me to your king.\"\n\nNilsine eyed him sideways and laughed. \"King?\"\n\nKjorn hesitated. \"Your\u2026leader.\"\n\nShe shook her head, opening her wings. \"You have much to learn.\"\n\n[ By the Shore ]\n\n\"ShARD! I WENT SWIMMING!\"\n\nShard blinked out of a dream. In the dream, he'd stared into a pair of blind eagle eyes, staring hard through him, and had heard a voice whispering, asking if he was the Summer King.\n\nHe hadn't been able to answer, in the dream, but he felt as if the milky, un-seeing eyes searched his heart still.\n\nHe sat up and shook himself. \"Did you?\"\n\nHikaru undulated around him, flicking water from every scale and off his silver mane. \"It was wonderful! But I don't like this taste. Is it salt?\" He smacked his jaws. \"Sea salt? Here.\"\n\nProudly, the young dragon deposited a fish in front of Shard's beak.\n\n\"Oh!\" Shard shook his head of the dream and the whispering voice, invigorated by Hikaru's happiness. Eyeing the horizon, he got his bearing on dawn, still a mark or so off. Like Shard, it seemed Hikaru enjoyed those few dark hours before the sun came up, as if all the earth held its breath and waited. \"Well done. Did you go very far out?\"\n\n\"No!\" Hikaru coiled around him and told the tale of his early morning fishing, while Shard picked apart the fish. He savored the meat. After their ordeal in the cave, he would always be grateful for fresh meat. Silently, he thanked the fish for its life.\n\n\"Must we go?\" Hikaru asked when Shard had finished and stood to stretch his legs and wings. \"It's so wonderful here, and the more I think of it, the worse it sounds everywhere else, with wars and Nameless wyrms and lies, and all of that.\"\n\n\"It is wonderful here, Hikaru.\"\n\n\"Can we stay?\"\n\n\"For a little while. So you can get stronger.\" He eyed Hikaru's growth, the strong muscles forming under his feathers after long days of flying, the long curve of his neck and budding horns. Equal in strength and energy to a griffin fledge, Shard thought. Soon he would be ready for a flight over the sea.\n\nHikaru seemed satisfied with staying a \"little while\" longer, and ruffled his wings happily. \"I remembered another song.\"\n\n\"Sing it to me,\" Shard said, and Hikaru did.\n\nA chilly wind crisscrossed them from the shore, and Shard thought of the warm fires of the Dawn Spire. Perhaps the dragons of the Sunland would know more about fire\u2014if they were even willing to share the information. The memory of Amaratsu's story about the dragons troubled Shard. If they had indeed sequestered themselves away from the world to avoid greed and violence, Shard didn't know what they would think of a griffin coming to them again. But for Hikaru's sake\u2026\n\n\"Come fly, Shard,\" said the dragon, his face looming down in front of Shard's. \"You look worried. And you always look happy after we fly.\"\n\nShard ducked his head, and chuckled. \"Yes, you're right. You're right of course.\"\n\nHikaru warbled and uncoiled, slithering around into a long line before leaping from the cliff where they nested. Shard watched him take off. Still a little rough, finding the wind, and controlling his strokes. Shard leaped out after him, then climbed higher. He soared up, and up, with Hikaru laughing below and encouraging him on.\n\nShard's purpose was not mere practice or fun. He stroked up until the air grew thin and he could see the vast lay of the forest and the line of the marshland beyond. All lay dark in morning starlight still, and Shard relaxed his gaze, scanning only for movement.\n\nA grim haze still clung to the farthest horizon, the ash and smoke from the Horn of Midragur. He saw no sign of the wyrms. Tilting his wings to bank around, he scanned the distant sea for land or flying creatures, or some other vision he might not expect, but the waves and sky lay empty as far as he could perceive.\n\nWith a breath of relief, he tucked his wings and fell down through the cool air. Hearing Hikaru's squeal of delight, Shard folded himself like a falcon so the wind wouldn't stall his wings. Showing off his speed, he adjusted his angle to aim for the water, far out from shore. A sea dive still quickened his heart. Any number of things could go wrong. But he'd done it before. He closed his eyes and stretched out his talons.\n\nThe water shocked him, the force like breaking through hard rock. Molded to a compact dive, he shot down through the water like a tern.\n\nBubbles exploded beside him as Hikaru plunged in beside him, shoving him back in a wave. Shard oriented to the dim light and swam up, up, broke the surface and gasped, streaming salt water. Hikaru's head popped out of the water a leap or two away from him, riding a big wave, laughing. Shard sucked in a breath, and shook water from his head.\n\n\"Well done, Hikaru!\"\n\nThe dragon laughed and made toward Shard with surprising speed. Something large bumped up under him. Hikaru's tail. Shard gripped and climbed up to grasp the dragon's wings gently, for Hikaru folded them and swam like a serpent through the waves. In that manner, he transported Shard back to the shore and bucked him off into the sand.\n\nShard rolled, snarled playfully and leaped back at him. Hikaru reared his head back, shook the water from his mane and displayed his long, fine teeth. When Shard kept charging, the young dragon whipped around into a coil, using his tail to deflect and shove Shard away.\n\n\"Good work,\" Shard said, prowling around him. Hikaru weaved his head, tracking Shard warily. \"But many foes won't attack from the ground.\" He shoved up and lashed at Hikaru's face, only to catch his claws on a hard, bright horn. Hikaru had ducked his head. \"Well done!\"\n\nShard broke off, and they sparred until they were hungry. After another swim in deeper water, with Hikaru giving him a ride to shore, they watched the sunrise. They preened the salt from each other's feathers as Tyr warmed and dried them. Shard combed his talons through Hikaru's wings and mane, and the dragon vibrated with warm noise like a griffin purring. Shard wondered if dragons did that naturally, or if Hikaru was imitating him.\n\n\"Shard,\" Hikaru began hesitantly. \"It's so nice here. What if we stayed here forever?\"\n\n\"Forever?\" Shard twitched his tail, feeling edgy, for the dragon echoed a thought he'd had before.\n\n\"Yes, we could stay here, eating fish and swimming and flying, just us, with no wyrms to harry us. I know there's a larger world, but I like it just fine here.\"\n\nShard was quiet for a few moments, and Hikaru didn't interrupt his thoughts.\n\nThe clear, windy morning should've eased his heart, but it only reminded him of the growing unease in the world. There were things he needed to do, or try, and he didn't know what would happen if he waited or\u2014as he'd thought more than once\u2014didn't do anything at all. But that was a cowardly, selfish idea. He'd thought once of trying to leave Hikaru behind, but the dragonet could help him in the Sunland. More than that, Hikaru's destiny was not Shard's decision, and he'd made a promise to Amaratsu. When he truly pictured the idea of staying at least the single year of Hikaru's life on that safe shore, he knew it might have been wonderful.\n\nBut it was also impossible to leave things, forever, as he had. He'd made promises.\n\nSharp determination swooped through him. He would see Kjorn again and resolve their differences, their kingdoms, and the wyrm's silent war on the Aesir.\n\nHe would avenge Stigr. He would see Brynja again.\n\nCold waves crawled over their hind feet and tails.\n\n\"We have to go,\" Shard said quietly.\n\nHikaru's claws went still against Shard's feathers. \"I understand,\" he said. \"I know we do. But I don't understand why. We have peace here.\"\n\n\"I know, Hikaru.\" He craned his neck to meet the young dragon's large eyes. \"We do have peace. You and I. But not everyone does. And that is why we must go.\"\n\nHikaru lowered his head, considering that.\n\nAfter long moments, broken by the unnerving cries of sea birds that sounded, to Shard's ear, like griffin kits, the dragon raised his head to a proud angle. Sun broke the horizon in silver and gold, outlining the waves, the cliffs, and Hikaru in light.\n\n\"I know you're right. And I'll make you proud, Shard. We'll speak to my kin in the Sunland, and they'll help. They'll know what to do. We'll make everything right. I had a nightmare of the wyrms last night and I was being cowardly, but I know you're right.\"\n\nShard nodded once. Not so very long ago, he'd had fine, simple plans like that, too. He didn't dare dim the fire in Hikaru's heart by suggesting it might not be all that simple. He would need every bit of that fire to make the long journey, to keep his hope bright, to say what he needed to say.\n\n\"Remember, when we meet the other dragons, you are Amaratsu's son, Hikaru. She told me that's how dragons introduce themselves.\"\n\nHikaru's head bobbed, eyes gleaming. Then he stilled. \"And I shall introduce you as my brother. I want them to know. I want everyone to know.\" The dragon extended one long black wing, and a jolt skipped down Shard's spine as he met Hikaru's gaze. \"Since we are not brothers by blood, then we'll be brothers by vow. I remember.\"\n\n\"You remember?\" Shard didn't open his wing yet, though Hikaru watched him expectantly.\n\n\"The wingbrother vow. It was one of the first rhymes you taught me when I hatched.\"\n\nShard had no memory of saying it. He must've sung all the songs and tales he knew and unknowingly included the wingbrother pledge.\n\nBut Hikaru was right. If anyone, anywhere, asked him, Shard would say without hesitation that they were brothers.\n\nAnd there in Tyr's light, he would swear it.\n\nHaltingly, thinking briefly of Kjorn, he opened his wing to eclipse Hikaru's narrow black feathers. In no history or tale that he knew of did a griffin have two wingbrothers\u2014but neither did any history or tale say he couldn't. Nor did any say he couldn't pledge to someone who wasn't a griffin.\n\n\"Wind under me when the air is still.\"\n\nHikaru watched his face solemnly. \"Wind over me when I fly too high.\"\n\n\"Brother by choice,\" Shard said.\n\n\"Brother by vow.\"\n\nTyr's light glowed around them, and Shard pressed his wing to Hikaru's.\n\n\"By my wings,\" they said together, eyes locked, \"you will never fly alone.\"\n\n[ Talon's Reach ]\n\n\"You haven't asked me why I search for Sverin, after all he's done.\"\n\nCaj followed the wolf, Tocho, through a stone tunnel so narrow it threatened to scrape his feathers bare. He pressed to one side, wary of damaging the splint on his broken wing.\n\nAhead, Tocho paused to snuffle at the cold rock and Caj stopped short of bumping into him. \"I understand the wingbrother pledge.\"\n\nDo you? Caj's tail twitched, but he managed not to say it aloud. The wolf had proven to be literally worth his weight in food. Rather than having to journey back through the tunnels or hunt when he grew hungry, Caj counted on Tocho departing to either hunt on his own for small game, or return with fish from the Vanir. Without him, the chase would've been much more difficult, and much longer.\n\n\"Why do you help me?\" Caj caught a whiff of fresh air and pressed forward, urging Tocho to go faster. Knowing that an entire island of earth and rock pressed over his head shortened his breath, but he pressed forward stubbornly.\n\nTocho quickened his pace. \"Your nest-son saved my life.\"\n\nCaj perked his ears. \"I didn't know that.\"\n\nTocho laughed. He laughed often, and Caj wished he had a little of the wolf's good humor. \"And, I help you because we're in troubled days. At the end of them, I hope to have proven myself well.\"\n\nLight and wind rushed down the tunnel when Tocho crawled free, and Caj burst out behind him, grateful even as snow blasted his face. \"Trying to impress someone, are you?\"\n\nTocho shook himself and didn't answer.\n\nCaj perked his ears. \"Ha, that's it. You're trying to impress your king. Do wolves have ranks and favor as we do?\"\n\nTocho looked over at him, earnest. \"I help you from my own heart. I owe your family the kind of debt that can't be repaid. If I impress someone along the way, then that's fine.\" He looked away again, sniffing at the snow.\n\n\"It's a female, isn't it.\"\n\nTocho's ears flattened, and Caj broke into a rough laugh. Laughing felt strange, impossible, after the long winter. \"It is. Well, that's fair enough. I didn't know that helping griffins was impressive to she-wolves.\"\n\n\"I don't know what's impressive to her,\" Tocho muttered, and Caj laughed again.\n\nAt least he knew not everything about griffins and wolves was so different. He wasn't sure if it was flattering or simple madness that Tocho thought helping him would gain favor with some she-wolf. Of course, there was Shard, the great champion of wolves, and of peace in the isles\u2014Shard, Caj's son.\n\nNest-son, he corrected himself. Funny to think he had favor because of Shard, when it had been the other way around not so very long ago.\n\nThey walked forward in quiet through the snow, heading inland. Caj knew that Sverin would keep as far from the ocean as possible, except if he crossed islands. They knew he was no longer on Crow Wing. They'd searched the entire span and after a few days one of the horses deigned to find them and say they'd confirmed he was gone, and the birds murmured of Talon's Reach.\n\nCaj shook snow from his face, his mood darkening.\n\nThe winter hadn't eased when Sverin fled and Thyra and Ragna took command of the divided pride. Some had muttered that indeed, Tyr was not happy with the arrangement, but deep in the pit of himself, Caj felt that all was not right with the world itself. Kjorn, his own prince, had left, perhaps to perish in the sea before ever reaching the windland. No one knew of Shard, if he lived, had fled, or was dead somewhere far from home.\n\nWithout warning, Tocho licked the side of Caj's head.\n\n\"Ah\u2014\" he jerked away with a hiss, lifting his good wing to shove the wolf back.\n\nTocho flattened his ears and stretched out on his belly, curling his lip. \"I'm sorry. You looked so troubled. If you were a wolf, I'd\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not a wolf,\" Caj growled.\n\nTocho pressed himself to the ground and rolled to his side. \"I meant no disrespect, Noble Caj.\"\n\nCaj huffed and shook himself. Snow pelted his face, stinging away the dank, closed feeling of the cave. \"Just don't\u2026comfort me again. And stand up. Tyr's wings. This will be a long hunt if you do that every time there's a misunderstanding.\"\n\nTocho rolled to his feet, sniffing forward into the blizzard. \"I don't know Talon's Reach. We should ask.\"\n\n\"Ask?\" Caj just looked at him. \"Ask who?\"\n\n\"Anyone,\" Tocho said, lifting his head to peer around.\n\nCaj followed his gaze. Dull light filtered through the blizzard, promising that the snow might spend itself soon.\n\n\"Birds,\" Tocho continued. \"A hare, if you call in Tor's name and they know you aren't hunting, might answer.\"\n\n\"I don't speak with creatures like that. I don't understand them. They flee.\"\n\nBright, hungry wolf eyes focused on him. \"You spoke to the horses. You only have to listen.\" He padded forward.\n\n\"I don't need help to find my own wingbrother,\" Caj called after him, then broke into a lope to catch up. Wolves were swift on the ground. Caj was not, though his strength grew. If he could fly, the whole hunt would've been done by now.\n\nHis own father used to say that \"if\" was the most useless word under the sky.\n\n\"They won't help me.\" Caj caught up to Tocho, caught his bushy tail in his talons. Tocho paused to look at him. \"They won't help a griffin, not me, of the Aesir. Not after everything.\"\n\nTocho tilted his head. \"Of course they will. You seek your brother, out of love. All creatures understand that. You seek redemption for the Aesir. You love a Vanir. Two actually.\" He chuckled. \"Give the islands a chance, and they will give you one.\"\n\nCaj huffed, lashing his tail. He caught a scent\u2014red deer? He whirled, ears perking, and saw her, frozen as if her ruddy winter pelt might blend in with the snow. He tried to remember the feeling of speaking to the horses, feeling his feet firmly on the earth, unable to fly, as this creature was unable to fly.\n\n\"You there!\"\n\nHer ears perked, face blank and shocked, then she wheeled and bounded away into the snow. Caj swore and leaped after her, but Tocho's laughter stopped him.\n\nHe whirled and bore down on the wolf. \"This is funny to you?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Tocho dodged away when Caj swiped at him. \"I mean it was a good try. But maybe try someone closer to yourself, first. And maybe not so loudly.\"\n\n\"Closer to\u2026\"\n\nTocho tilted his head back. Through the pelting snow Caj thought he made out the form of a bird, flapping fast to seek shelter.\n\n\"You there!\"\n\n\"Would you answer if someone shouted at you like that?\" Tocho's quiet question burned under Caj's skin. He splayed his good wing, digging his talons against the frozen ground under the snow just to feel them breaking into something.\n\n\"Hail! Little sky brother!\"\n\nThe bird disappeared into the blizzard.\n\nCaj loosed a breath, and had just turned a glare on Tocho, when the bird swooped back with stunning speed and landed before Caj, looking as surprised as Caj himself did. The sleek, small, sparrow hawk peered up at him and he realized he'd make a mistake calling her a brother.\n\n\"You called to me, lord?\"\n\nWell that's more like it. Caj blinked in surprise at the little falcon, and she stared at him. \"Yes, I did. You live on Talon's Reach?\"\n\n\"My whole life.\" She looked back and forth between Tocho and Caj. \"So it's true! You seek the Red King.\"\n\nRelieved that she hadn't called him the Red Scourge, and feeling more hopeful, Caj lowered himself to her level, sinking to his belly in the snow. \"I do.\" He didn't even ask how she knew. News of his quest was traveling faster than he was. He glanced at Tocho, smothered his pride, and continued. \"And I need help. I mean to redeem Sverin.\" Caj met the falcon's small, shining eyes. He recalled how Tocho had won over the horses. \"In the name of\u2026the Summer King, in the name of Shard, prince of the Vanir\u2026will you help me?\"\n\n\"It would be my honor.\"\n\nThe quick answer surprised Caj, and he didn't try to hide his gratitude. \"What is your name?\"\n\nShe loosed a little chirruping laugh. \"We of the winds have no names.\"\n\nCaj's ear twitched, and he tried not to be irritated. \"Then what will I call you?\"\n\n\"Call me friend. Come, come, then, slow ones.\" She hopped into the air and hovered. \"We have a large island to search.\"\n\n[ At the Vanheim Shore ]\n\nSunset edged the Vanheim Shore in gold and red.\n\nKjorn stood on the edge of a cliff within the stronghold of the Vanhar, ringed by their council of twelve elders, half of them male, half of them female, and in their center a thirteenth. She was the oldest, tough and wiry as a falcon, with sharp, orange eyes.\n\n\"Kjorn, Son-of-Sverin. I am high priestess of the Vanhar. My council and I share wisdom, seek guidance from Tyr and Tor, and look for signs from the Four Winds, but it is I who have the final say in matters of our law. Do you understand this?\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Kjorn bowed low, looking around the half circle of faces. No wonder Nilsine had laughed when Kjorn mentioned a king, but they'd been anything but hostile. His wings were unbound, at his back lay the sea. They trusted that he would not fly. Anything he didn't understand could surely be clarified at a later time. \"It's my honor to meet you. I wish only that I could have come upon this shore first, and met you in a better way.\"\n\nOne ear slanted incredulously, but she appeared amused. The dozen elders remained quiet, only exchanging skeptical looks. \"You understand that you are here to face judgment for keeping company with the criminal Rok, for trespassing, and to answer for your claim of being Kajar's heir.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nThe elders conferred among themselves, and Kjorn took a deep breath, casting a brief look to the landscape beyond the half circle of griffins.\n\nThe stronghold of the Vanhar was quarter mark's flight along the coast from where the sentries had come upon Rok and his band. The land changed from barren rock with sparse plant growth into lusher grass slopes that nudged into dunes and slipped into the sea. The Vanhar nested not in rock dens but in those dunes and tall grasses, and now and again Kjorn glimpsed a curious griffin face peering their way from a distance, or a fledge popping up to practice flight. Wind waved the grasses and sea wheat, seabirds cried, and sunlight sparkled gold over the water.\n\nIn all, the effect soothed Kjorn's mood and gave him a hopeful outlook.\n\nHe'd been treated\u2014if not like a prince\u2014at least like a guest, fed and respected and trusted not to fly away, while Rok, Fraenir and Frida were guarded more closely. The Vanhar had taken time to reasonably explain their law to Kjorn, taking his word for the moment that he was indeed the grandson of Per and had little knowledge of how things fared in the Winderost.\n\n\"What proof do you have that you are Per's grandson, Kajar's heir?\"\n\nKjorn looked to the gnarled, dusty gray male who'd spoken. \"My coat and feathers are like my mother's, who was the sister of a gryphoness who remained at the Dawn Spire. She would vouch for me.\"\n\nThe high priestess gave him a keen look. \"You speak of Queen Esla. Mate to Orn, now.\"\n\n\"Then she fares well,\" Kjorn said, controlling his surprise. \"I didn't know she was queen.\"\n\nA female hacked a cough. \"Didn't know? That's likely. She clawed up to the top to avoid being associated with her sister who fled with a coward\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll ask you not speak of my kin that way.\" Kjorn's tail flicked and he rolled his shoulders, re-settling his feathers and pressing his talons to the grass. \"Respectfully. I will answer for any cowardice.\"\n\n\"Alone,\" said the high priestess. \"Why do you come alone?\"\n\n\"I came alone to seek my wingbrother, Shard. A gray Vanir also from the Silver Isles.\" He searched their faces, but as with Nilsine, saw no sign of recognition. Disappointment twisted in his chest, and he shifted his talons against the ground. So Shard hadn't landed on this shore.\n\nA couple of the elders nodded, accepting his reason. Two gryphonesses bent their heads together, whispering furiously. One broke away from the other to say, \"What brought your wingbrother to this land?\"\n\n\"Tell us your tale,\" said the priestess.\n\n\"It starts much earlier,\" Kjorn said, glancing around the circle again. The priestess merely dipped her head.\n\nSo Kjorn told them all he knew, including what he'd been told that was a lie\u2014that Per led others away to conquer new lands, to expand their pride. He told them of his own mother's death, and with a halting tongue, his father's descent toward madness which even Kjorn couldn't explain, except that he surely harbored secrets, guilt and shame about the way they'd left the Winderost. He told them about Shard, how he'd befriended the wolves and other creatures of the Isles, learned he was the son of the dead Vanir king, exiled himself from the pride. He told them everything.\n\n\"What other proof?\" demanded a male at the end of the half ring of griffins. \"Anyone could have been groomed up with this story and claimed to be Kajar's heir. We owe him nothing. Just another big outcast from the Dawn Spire, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"With those feathers, Mirsk? Those eyes?\"\n\n\"Trickery! I wouldn't trust him on our lands. I'll not\u2014\"\n\n\"Rok wears a chain,\" Kjorn said. \"A golden chain of dragon craft. It was my father's. It's the only proof I can offer other than my word and my family's story.\"\n\nThe priestess considered that. \"We shall return it to you, then\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Kjorn surprised her and himself. \"Let him keep it, when or if you release him. It gives him some dignity and I think he has none left.\"\n\nFor a moment they asked no questions, and Kjorn closed his eyes to listen to the cool wind in the grass. The elders conferred in quiet voices.\n\nAfter long moments, the priestess opened her wings to silence the others. \"Son of Sverin.\"\n\nHe inclined his head.\n\n\"My elders have given me their opinions, and the Starwind whispers of new tidings.\" She studied him closely. Kjorn almost felt as if the gods looked at him, at length, through her old eyes. \"It is my opinion that you were raised well, courageous and true. It is my opinion that you're telling the truth, that you were fed lies about Per's history and, the very moment you learned the truth, you wished to make things right. Whether coming here is honorable or foolhardy, I'm not certain, but certainly you are brave. Our trusted sentry told us the very first moment she saw you, Tyr shone on your face. This is not a sign we take lightly. You say your only intention here is to seek your wingbrother to make amends?\"\n\nKjorn's tail flicked against the grass. \"It is. With your leave, I'll search your lands and make no trouble here.\"\n\nThe elders muttered among themselves and the priestess fanned her wings to silence them. She folded them neatly on her back again and considered. For a moment, her dignity and strength reminded Kjorn of Shard's mother, Ragna, the Widow Queen. It gave him some hope, for Ragna was a force to reckon with. She was only recently an ally, but a strong one.\n\n\"Very well. You have our blessing to pass through this land.\"\n\nThe wind rushed across their backs and bent the grass into shimmering waves. Kjorn shivered at the sensation, then became aware that more Vanhar had crept through the grass to spy on the gathering. Young warriors, older mated parents, fledges\u2014dozens of griffin eyes gleamed in the last light, watching him, watching the elders.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kjorn said, his hackle feathers prickling as if something watched him from behind. He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder toward the water.\n\n\"You don't know this land well.\" The priestess cast a look over her shoulder, lifting her wings once again as if to encompass all of the Vanhar who stood behind her. \"If there are any who wish to aide the prince in his quest, you have my leave.\"\n\nA few whispers twittered through the grass.\n\nNilsine stepped forward from those gathered. \"I will help him. I will, and any from my sentries who wish.\"\n\nKjorn tried to read her reserved expression, wondered at her reasons, and noted the priestess's look of approval. He dipped his head. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe priestess raised her voice once again, addressing Kjorn. \"Hunt, if you need to. Rest where you will.\" A deeper, keen look came into her eyes as she watched him. \"Do no harm, and none will come to you.\"\n\nKjorn felt a sensation as of warmth on his wings, but now the air was still, the sun lowering enough to allow the cold of night. \"Thank you,\" he murmured again, the only response he could make.\n\n\"You have our welcome,\" said the priestess. \"We shall watch with great interest what will happen, now that the line of Kajar has returned to the Winderost.\"\n\n[ Sea Wolves ]\n\nHigh, thin night air sucked every breath from Shard's throat. Stars embraced their flight like thousands of distant torches of white fire. That high, the icy ocean below appeared to be only another distant sky, calm and flat with reflected stars.\n\nShard shook his head, breathing slowly, and looked over to Hikaru. The dragon, now seven times Shard's length from nose to tail, soared alongside him. Free to eat his fill, he seemed to grow as Shard took breath.\n\nIt had been Hikaru's idea to fly higher, to cover the leagues faster, and despite his shortness of breath, Shard had to agree. But he saw the dragon's head nod.\n\n\"Hikaru.\"\n\nThe dragon flapped his wings once, almost invisible in the dark but for the edges picked out in the starlight, and for the budding silver horns and mane.\n\n\"Hikaru!\"\n\n\"I'm here.\" He shook his head, Shard heard him gasp. \"I'm awake. There's ice on the water. Shard, look, ice!\"\n\n\"Ice in the air, too,\" Shard said, breathing deeply again. He had trained himself to high flying, challenging himself always, but he watched Hikaru as sharply as a falcon minded its eggs. He'd taught Hikaru the dynamic soaring flight of seabirds that he'd learned from an albatross named Windwalker, but once mastered, Hikaru had tired of it and insisted on high flight. Now he often drifted in and out of attention, and occasionally dipped in flight so Shard had to slap him awake. \"I fear a storm,\" Shard said loudly to get Hikaru's attention.\n\n\"No, it means we're close!\" Hikaru scanned the dark horizon eagerly, as if land and friendly dragons and the answers to all their troubles perched just beyond the waves. \"We may even see the shore by dawn!\"\n\nHikaru looked up then, at the stars, naming them quietly to himself. Shard kept an eye on the dragon's wings, on his forepaws tucked alertly to his chest, not drooping. \"We must keep following Midragur,\" Hikaru said. \"That will lead us. I know it will.\"\n\n\"I believe you. Hikaru, we should save our breath for now.\"\n\nBelow, clouds piled in slowly from the dawnward quarter. If Shard and Hikaru maintained their current height, the storm posed no threat and they could fly over, above it all, if their strength held out. Shard suppressed a shiver at the memory of his last storm at sea.\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" Hikaru announced, and without leave, turned and dove.\n\n\"Hikaru! Hikaru, slowly!\" Shard shook his head, gasping a breath, and folded his wings to dive. He readied himself for the warmer air, the richer breath, timed his breathing, streamlined his wings to the freezing wind in his face. Hikaru flew well enough, but seemed more eager to get to the places he was going than to perfect his flight. Shard feared for him.\n\n\"Hikaru!\"\n\nYoung, rolling laughter answered him, and Hikaru shot down like a falling star. The first layer of denser air was a relief, a shock, and Shard saw the dragon's wings falter. Like surfacing from deep water, diving too fast posed its own dangers for the novice fledgling.\n\nFledgling, Shard scolded himself. He's only a fledgling. I should've kept him closer, shouldn't have agreed to this high flight.\n\nShard saw the moment when the wind stalled the dragon's wings\u2014he'd never had so much room to gain speed, never felt the air stall against him.\n\n\"Hikaru straighten out! Slow down!\"\n\nHe saw Hikaru try, lashing his long body to flare, but throwing himself off balance instead. Chest aching, Shard plummeted, hoping to catch him and force him into a flare. The ocean shimmered before him, reflected stars spinning in dizzying array, and he narrowed his focus to the shadow that was Hikaru. Shard knew panic, knew what it was when the world tilted and it was impossible to sort out.\n\n\"Use your tail to straighten out! I'm above you, ocean below! Point your nose to the horizon\u2014\"\n\nAs Shard yelled, he saw Hikaru following his instructions. Relieved, he called encouragement, pushing open his wings a little to slow his own dive. With an awkward, final thrash Hikaru pulled out of the dive, straightening into a glide.\n\nShard swooped down alongside him and slapped talons against his tail with a hiss. \"Never do that again! Do you understand me?\"\n\nHikaru laughed breathlessly. \"I had to try it. You told me about all the diving you've done, and I wanted to try.\"\n\nShard clenched his talons. \"I understand, believe me. And\u2026\" He forced himself to calm down, to not act like a mother ptarmigan. They were both fine, after all, and Hikaru had corrected in plenty of time. A wind picked up and the waves sparkled, now only the width of ten griffin leaps below them. \"You did well. You were very brave, and you did just fine.\"\n\nHikaru's eyes shone with pride. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Just remember, I've been flying for many more years than you, and I'd been flying for many years before I ever tried diving into the sea from such a height.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Hikaru looked over at him. \"But I have a much shorter time to practice.\"\n\nShard huffed a breath, and could not answer that. By this time next year, he will be gone from the world. From my world.\n\nThe thought was enough to make him cringe that he'd scolded the young dragon at all.\n\nThe wet, frozen scent of snow filled the air. After a moment he managed to answer Hikaru's trusting stare. \"You did well. I'm proud of you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Shard. That means everything to me.\" Dragon teeth gleamed in the star light. \"Though I am still hungry.\"\n\nShard eyed the storm clouds rushing in. \"We may have to wait. It's safer if we go high again, until the storm has passed.\"\n\n\"But you've flown in a storm, you told me!\"\n\n\"Not by choice. And I escaped it by flying out, remember?\"\n\n\"I have to eat,\" Hikaru declared, a growl coming into his voice, \"or I shall fall out of the sky.\"\n\n\"Hikaru\u2014\"\n\nHikaru's gaze darted over Shard and, perhaps realizing Shard couldn't stop him, he spiraled lower toward the waves. Indignity and surprise were a waste of time, Shard supposed, in the face of a hungry young dragon. He angled his wings to follow, keeping his gaze on the storm as Hikaru hunted for fish. Relieved that he seemed to be finding them, if only small ones, Shard relaxed a little.\n\nHikaru's earlier observation had been correct. Thin, small islands of ice floated around them. Shard watched alternately as Hikaru dove beneath the waves, stopping Shard's heart until he emerged again and either slithered onto an ice floe to eat his catch, or break out of the waves to fly up again.\n\n\"You're doing really well,\" Shard forced himself to call. \"I couldn't do that when I was your age.\"\n\nWhatever his age is. Shard could only compare him to a griffin by his skill and his range of thinking. A fledge of two or three, at best, and how soon would it be until he seemed to be Shard's age, and older, like Amaratsu?\n\nShard's own belly snarled in protest at watching someone else eat all the fish. Before he could dive, Hikaru swooped up before him, offering a fresh, wriggling herring.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Shard clenched the fish, flight dipping with the weight of it. Hikaru met his eyes silently and dipped his head. By no means an apology, but Shard remembered what it was to be challenged by an adult as a fledge, the frustration of being told what to do, and let him go again.\n\nThe wind picked at the waves and they rose, choppy and large, scattering the reflection of the sky. Clouds covered the true sky, scattering the true stars and turning the ocean black and unfathomable. Shard could barely see his charge. He thought Hikaru had perched on an ice floe to eat, but it was hard to tell in the muddy dark.\n\nHe finished as much of the fish as he could, thanked its spirit, and tossed the bones into the water. Squinting, he knew for sure he saw the black dragon clinging to an ice floe, hunched over the water. \"Hikaru! We should go.\"\n\nHikaru didn't move.\n\n\"Hikaru.\" Shard's voice bounced over the waves, his patience snapping. \"Now!\"\n\n\"Shard, there are creatures!\" He sounded breathless, not angry or petulant, but breathless with glee. \"Shard, huge creatures under the water! What are they? I can see them easily as I can see you.\"\n\nShard strained for patience as the first drops of sleet hit his face. \"Hikaru, that's wonderful. I have no doubt you'll see in the dark, and through water, and even underwater in the dark. You must fly with me now. We can't risk a storm. We'll have time to explore the ocean when there isn't a storm. I promise.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nHikaru shoved up from the ice floe, rejoining Shard, who drew a great breath of relief. \"Up, high now\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, look, Shard!\"\n\nSleet and snow slashed against them, and the freezing wind gnawed at Shard's core, even under the long feathers and down of a Vanir.\n\nHe whirled to see what Hikaru saw.\n\nGreat beasts lunged out of the water with squeals and clicks. Their faces, painted in stark, neat whorls of black and white, seemed to match the patches of ice and darkness in the water. Shard, flapping hard against the storm, closed his eyes with a growing sense of dread.\n\n\"What are they?\" Hikaru cried, full of awe and joy at seeing something new.\n\nShard strained to understand their voices, so different from a griffin, a bird or creature of the earth. He thought of the waves, of salt water streaming around his face when he swam. A memory of a dream came to him, a pale blue king.\n\nJaarl. Perhaps even Shard's own ancestor, a Vanir king who'd befriended\u2026\n\n\"Whales,\" Shard whispered. But not this kind of whale.\n\nTheir voices mingled up from the waves as they breached, crashing against ice and blowing great spurts of air and water against the storm.\n\n\"They're calling to me.\" Hikaru looped around him, seemingly unaware of the driving wind and snow. \"Do you hear them? Shard, are they friends?\"\n\n\"No,\" Shard gasped against the wind. \"Not these. Hikaru, there are some wise sea creatures, but these\u2026\" He struggled to breathe against the freezing air, the wind, and could only concentrate on keeping aloft. He'd seen the black and white whales once, as a kit. He'd asked Sigrun about them and she called them sea wolves.\n\n\"Sea wolves,\" Shard said. \"Not friends. They could be dangerous. Hikaru, fly higher.\"\n\n\"But you said wolves are friends.\"\n\n\"Hikaru, not these,\" Shard snapped, his voice cracking. For Sigrun had told him a tale once of her own youth, of seeing the sea wolves for the first time, apparently playing a game in the water. Tossing something back and forth between them. She and Ragna had flown out to meet them, to welcome them to the waters of the Silver Isles.\n\nThen Sigrun had seen what they threw in the water between them. Shard had never seen it happen, himself. But he could imagine it. He could see whales tossing a crying seal pup between them as a game.\n\nShard couldn't even tell Hikaru. Despite all the tales he'd told the young dragon of his own life, he couldn't yet explain to him the concept of taking amusement in another's pain.\n\nHe strained against the storm, running short of breath, his belly aching from the fish and the sudden exertion. \"Hikaru, please fly with me, please\u2026\" His voice sounded weak and far away to his own ears. He probably wouldn't have listened to himself, either. Hikaru dipped lower, calling out to the whales, unable to contain his curiosity. Shard flew after him, trying to stay close and not fall in the water.\n\nPerhaps they are capable of love as well as cruelty, Sigrun had said, always wary of prejudicing him against any creature unjustly. Just as a griffin is capable of great love and great cruelty. Perhaps you could speak to one. But I would not trust them in the water as I would not trust a fox in its den.\n\nHikaru landed again on an ice floe and Shard, against his better judgment, dropped hard beside him.\n\nThe waves tossed the chunk of ice high and Shard dug in his talons, scrabbling for purchase as they rode down the back of a dark wave. Hikaru looped around him, holding him fast. The dragon's claws dug into the ice as they had dug into stone. As Shard caught a relieved breath, pressed to Hikaru's warm scales, Hikaru loosed a series of whistles and clicks, imitating the whales.\n\nOne broke the surface, chattering madly. To Shard it sounded like laughter. Then words.\n\n\"Ho, here, what have we?\"\n\nA long, creaking note laughed behind Shard and he spun, blind in the freezing dark, his wings drenched. Their voices sounded static, broken, he feared he might never understand them as well as an animal of the land or the air. Half of their conversation took place under the water, and the other half barely audible in the storm, barely recognizable as speech.\n\n\"Playmates for my calf?\"\n\n\"No!\" Shard shouted. \"Stay away! Hikaru we must go.\"\n\n\"Where is your calf?\" Hikaru bobbed as the ice floe surged up and over another wave.\n\n\"In the water, lovely sky snake. Here in the water.\"\n\nShard sucked in a breath against the sleet. Water loomed over them. He ducked under Hikaru's wing as fast water flowed over their little ice raft.\n\n\"Hikaru, they will kill us\u2014fly, now!\" Though when Shard lifted his wings they felt heavy, sodden, stripped. I am a son of Tyr. I will fly. A son of Tor. I don't fear the sea.\n\n\"They won't kill me,\" Hikaru scoffed.\n\nArrogant fledge, Shard thought wildly, angry, wondering where his sweet, adventurous, obedient dragonet had gone.\n\n\"As one!\" sang one of the massive, black whales.\n\n\"What?\" Hikaru cried, \"I don't understand y\u2014\"\n\n\"As one,\" echoed the others.\n\nShard turned in time to see a strange wave bulging toward them. It wasn't natural. \"Hikaru, fly! Fly now!\"\n\nAt last Hikaru heeded and crouched, opening his wings\u2014but four whales shoved a wave over the ice floe, smashed their noses under to up-end it and knocked dragon and griffin off the ice into the thrashing water.\n\nSomething slammed into Shard, driving him under. In the blackness and cold he kicked and flung his talons against anything that felt solid. The taste of salt water mingled with blood. The black waves roiled with whales and Shard clawed through them, seeking the surface. Their voices laughed and shrilled around him, filled the ocean with murderous glee.\n\n\"See how he squirms, little one!\"\n\nShard stepped on a slick, muscled back and shoved, breaking the surface for a raw breath. A desperate look around showed him Hikaru, snaking through the water. He tried to make a sound so the dragon could find him. A calf the size of a full grown Aesir flung itself out of the water, laughing, and landed in the middle of Hikaru's back, dragging him under the water.\n\n\"Stop it! Stop this now, we're peaceful travel\u2014\"\n\nA fin slapped him to silence, driving him backward under the water again. Teeth clamped his hind leg. Shard screamed, shocked by the pain. The whale dragged him through the water by his leg and tossed him into the air. The relief of air almost countered the dazzling pain in his leg. Shard flung out his wings and his muscles nearly snapped in protest from the cold. Water soaked him, too heavy to fly. He smacked into the water again like a stone. Frothing waves rocked him back and slapped his face.\n\n\"Hikaru! Get out! Get out if you\u2026\" He lurched back as a whale welled up in front of him and surfaced, water spilling down his face, jaws splayed. Shard dove forward and threw himself against the laughing face, slapped his talons out and raked the monster's eye.\n\nWith a long squeal the whale thrashed away, shaking Shard off to dive deep again. He could not find Hikaru against the black waves, amongst the black, swimming bodies all around.\n\n\"Coward! Let us be! Hikaru, where\u2014\"\n\nA female knocked into him. \"Wicked, wicked birdie! Come play!\"\n\n\"Shard, no!\" The last sight he had was Hikaru, lashing toward him, only to be driven back by a laughing whale.\n\nThe female drove Shard down under the water, down, on the blunt of her nose, until he thought his chest would collapse and his head break from the pressure and the cold.\n\nLights flickered. He saw strange things. The red she-wolf Catori, sprinting toward him through the dark, howling his name, calling him toward moonlight above the clouds. He saw Stigr falling beside him, then turning, both wings intact, to give him a baleful, challenging stare.\n\nThen he saw the dead. In the ice dark, he saw his father, pale Baldr, lit by a sun Shard couldn't see. The whale shoved her nose against him, nearly breaking his back, and he saw Helaku the wolf king, his son Ahote, saw old griffin and wolf kings and queens of the Silver Isles. With a shudder he saw the scarlet flash of Per the Red, laughing.\n\nThen, oddly, Einarr. \"My friend,\" Shard whispered, seemingly in his mind alone, surprised. His body, shoved about by the furious whale, seemed a distant thing.\n\nShard! Einarr appeared to shout.\n\nWhy do you stand with the dead? Shard wondered, calmly. And why, he wondered, did there appear to be a vast, sunlit plain just beyond the bottom of the sea\u2026\n\nMy prince, he heard the younger griffin say. My king. My king. Einarr opened his copper wings and a strange rush of air came to Shard, sweet as summer, and he took a single breath.\n\nPain lanced into his awareness. The whale was trying to kill him, which meant he was still alive.\n\nHe thrashed around, dragging his talons as deeply as he could through the thick, hard flesh. A squeal of pain filled the ocean, drowning on and on as if it were not water but a vast, echoing cavern. She rolled her massive body away from Shard and he kicked, rising. His head ached. His chest squeezed against itself. Nothing gave him any indication of a surface. He felt he would burst.\n\nMy king, my king. The voice called him upward.\n\nHikaru, he thought desperately. If he never made it alive back to the Silver Isles, he at least had to make sure Hikaru flew out of this cursed place.\n\nThen, just as black and scarlet ringed his vision and it seemed the sea would break him, Shard broke the surface.\n\nSleet-filled air was the sweetest thing he'd ever tasted. He turned in the water, seeking Hikaru.\n\nA strange sound pierced the storm, a long, hollow, harmonious roar like a lion and many eagles calling together. For a moment, Shard reeled and he thought griffins flew at them on the wind, for those were the only creatures Shard could conceive of in that moment. But when they called again, he realized the sound was not even close.\n\nA new, unnatural wind chopped up the water around the thrashing bodies of the whales and the chunks of ice all around. Wing beats. Great wings, stirring the wind.\n\n\"Petty blackfish,\" boomed a male\u2026a male\u2026Shard shook his head hard, squinting up into the night. Could it be?\n\n\"Back to the depths with you!\" snarled a female\u2026\n\nIt hit Shard like a slap.\n\n\"Dragons! Hikaru! Hikaru, dragons!\"\n\nHe heard no answer. The whales laughed and Shard was aware only of pounding wings, enormous clawed forepaws raking the water. He threw himself across the waves toward a floating chunk of ice.\n\n\"H-help,\" he gasped, at once aware of everything wrong with his body. One hind leg was surely broken, and ached with a wicked pain. The ice beneath him darkened from blood. He dragged himself out of the water, nearly splitting his talons on the ice. \"Help! There's a young dragon\u2026\"\n\nBut it seemed they knew. Whether sentries far out from shore, or dragons fishing and caught in the storm like them, they must have heard Hikaru and come. Shard hugged the ice, fighting the waves and rising nausea. Their beautiful voices, like giant birds, like Amaratsu's, flickered around him.\n\n\"Witless bullies! I should skin them.\"\n\n\"None of that, now. They're gone. Where is he?\"\n\n\"There he is.\"\n\n\"Come, little lost one. Come home. You're lucky we flew out in this storm.\"\n\n\"Shard!\"\n\nShard's ears perked in relief. He tried to cry out again, to respond to Hikaru, but his chest clamped, his body wanted only to breathe. As long as Hikaru was safe, it didn't matter. His charge, his brother. He gripped the ice.\n\nOne of the dragons laughed. \"He's not so little!\"\n\n\"Winterborn, but growing strong. That's good. Come now, young one.\"\n\nFrom the commotion and wing beats, Shard knew they dragged the young dragon from the water.\n\n\"Wait!\" Hikaru cried.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Shard, my\u2026my brother.\" Hikaru coughed. At least he was speaking. Speaking, safe, and surrounded by his own kind.\n\n\"Did Amaratsu have a second egg?\"\n\n\"Only one.\"\n\n\"He's delirious. Come home. You need a meal, and fire, look at the state of you. Like a witless, wild beast.\"\n\n\"What of that?\"\n\nSomehow by the tone, Shard knew the dragon spoke of him. He tried to move but it felt so good to be still, to let the ice cool his wounds. The whales were gone. The storm was passing. Or perhaps the dragons, with their power, drove it away. He bobbed and floated on a calming sea.\n\n\"That's Shard. He must come with us,\" Hikaru pleaded. Shard tried to open his eyes, then didn't bother. It was dark. He couldn't see the dragons anyway. \"Please!\"\n\n\"We can't just leave it to the whales,\" a female argued, and Shard was grateful to her.\n\n\"They won't come back. And the land isn't so far off.\"\n\n\"Yes, he'll drift in. Don't trouble yourself.\"\n\n\"Please, he's my brother!\"\n\n\"Shhh, you've had a difficult time. Ooh, there you are, heavy young one. You're lucky your wing's not broken, but let us carry you.\"\n\n\"Wing breakers!\"\n\n\"They don't understand the crime. They're of the sea. Besides, it's not broken.\"\n\n\"I'll break their tails and see how they fare!\"\n\n\"Calm yourself, Natsumi.\"\n\n\"Shard!\"\n\n\"No more,\" rumbled the male. \"Mind your elders.\"\n\n\"He takes after his mother.\"\n\nSome halting laughter. Waves splashed at Shard's heels and he clung to the ice, shivering.\n\n\"What of the\u2026Shard?\" The female again, the one called Natsumi.\n\n\"Leave it.\"\n\nThat was the final decision, and the last Shard heard of them, except for Hikaru's low, angry howls piercing higher and higher into the night air.\n\n[ Isle of Earth and Fire ]\n\nThe thick smell of sulfur and something akin to sun-baked rock stung all of Caj's senses as he crawled out of the cave.\n\nDespite the falcon's help, they had found no trace of Sverin on Talon's Reach. Wary, Caj peered around for any marks of life, for Pebble's Throw was one of the most dangerous islands.\n\nA raven glided in happy circles above him, riding the buoyant warm air above the lava flows. Caj watched, one ear slanting back. Silently, the bird dipped down and lighted on an outcropping of dusty black rock, watching Caj in return. Ravens were wolf birds, Vanir birds, and he realized he waited with held breath to see if this one might somehow carry a message from Shard.\n\nBut the raven hopped up and flew away, almost oddly silent, into the mist. Caj sensed a presence behind him in the tunnel and crawled forward to make way.\n\n\"I will not go here,\" whispered the golden wolf, Tocho, still crouched in the entrance of the cave. He'd shown Caj the particular tunnel under the islands that brought them out again to the surface of one of the scattered little isles of Pebble's Throw.\n\nCaj blew a long breath out through his nostrils, drew in again to satisfy himself that the air wouldn't poison him, and turned to the wolf. \"I won't ask you to. But I have to search.\"\n\nTocho took a moment to watch him, nose quivering. \"Be careful. If I don't hear from you by the evening mark\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" Caj murmured, surprised at Tocho's concern and at his own growing sense of affection. In many ways, the young wolf reminded him of a griffin fledge\u2014bold, eager, a bit foolhardy. His help had been invaluable. \"Go to your family, take a rest, and thank you. You've done enough today. I remember the way.\"\n\nTocho's ears flicked warily back and forward again, scanning the air, then he dipped his head to Caj and wriggled back down underground.\n\nWith another slow sigh, Caj turned to face the ragged heap of black rock and smoke. The heat seeping to him from all points soothed the ache in his mending wing and put him in a better humor than he'd been in for a while. Without the wolf, whose scent would either spook Sverin or put him on the offensive, Caj could afford to be less subtle.\n\n\"Sverin!\" he shouted, and was answered by the hissing of steam somewhere several leaps off as searing earthfire trickled into the cold sea. \"Son-of-Per, my wingbrother!\"\n\nYou will know yourself again if it's the last thing I do, Caj swore silently. A bit of red caught his eye. He swung around, carefully favoring his wing, but the red was only bright trickles of lava. They wormed down from fissures in a jagged peak across a narrow river of seawater, glowing red in the low, gray light. Caj huffed, but was not disheartened. They'd searched Talon's Reach, then tried the Star Isle on the word of a fishing eagle. Then a crow informed them that Halvden and Sverin had fled, driven off the starward edge of that isle by the snow wolves. All the isles, it seemed, knew of Caj's hunt for the mad king, and seemed eager to help him.\n\nFor what it's worth, he thought, wondering if the crow had tricked them for some reason.\n\nHe walked forward across the surface of the rock on which he'd emerged. It appeared to be the largest chunk of the broken scatter that the Vanir called an island. Caj recalled the final flight of Per the Red. Caj and Sverin had borne the dead king over the other isles and, with the entire pride circling above, cast him into the large lava flow. The red feathers caught and burned, bones flowing down with the lava, burning, and what didn't burn before they hit were buried in the sea, frozen in black rock. Perhaps in his feral state, Sverin had felt called to the last place he would've remembered seeing his father.\n\nCaj shook himself and walked forward, calling Sverin's name. The swirl of seawater between the broken rock islands, the hiss of steam, and the blast of poisonous gases from cracks on distant shores drowned out his calls. Voice hoarse, he finally fell silent. Then he reached the end of his little island.\n\nWary, he tried to gauge the depth of the narrow channel between the ground on which he stood and the next more ragged, slanting face of rock.\n\nNothing for it, he thought. He turned and loped several leaps back, reminding himself sternly to keep his wings closed or suffer pain and Sigrun's ire. Then he bolted forward, sprinting to gain speed and momentum, bunched the powerful muscles of his hindquarters and launched himself over the channel of water.\n\nHis talons hit the stone, his belly smashed against the curve where the rock broke down into the sea and he gasped. Hind legs scrabbling for purchase, Caj growled and strained, his shoulders cramping and wings screaming to open.\n\nAm I getting old at last? A little jump is enough to do me in? With a final, raw shove, he surged onto the island and rolled, voice cracking out in pain when he crunched his injured wing. The ache faded to dullness after a moment and he hoped he hadn't done too much damage.\n\nWhen he caught his breath and turned at last to look behind him, he felt satisfied, fairly certain not even the young warriors under his training could have made the leap with wings closed. It would be easier going back, for he realized now he had mis-judged the height of this isle to the next, and he now stood on higher ground.\n\nA blast of steam brought him back to his surroundings and he stared around warily, tail swinging.\n\nThe snow that coated the other islands melted against the heat of Pebble's Throw and turned to chilly, misty drizzle. Caj enjoyed the way the drizzle slipped from his newly oiled wings\u2014the wings of a Vanir who fed on fish, he thought wryly\u2014but the moisture dimmed his vision and deadened his calls. Ahead of him the island broke into a series of cracks and small gorges, and out of these, every few heartbeats, issued a blast of noxious steam. The cracks were large enough to stumble over, not fall into, but he knew the steam would be deadly. He watched it for a few moments, counting in alternate rhythm with his breaths and the steam. He could wait and time his leaps around them.\n\nGrumbling, he strode forward, trying to catch a scent of Sverin against the harsh smells of the oozing magma and listening hard for any sound of life.\n\nBlinking against the drizzle, he caught a new scent through the sulfuric air. Immediately he crouched, laying himself as flat against the black rock as he could, though there was no way to disguise his feathers, he slunk along the ground to lower himself behind a ridge of stone.\n\nThe low breeze, warm from steam and heavy with sulfur, brought him the new scent again. Feather and fur, warmth and life. It was a scent Caj knew well. It was a griffin scent, one of his pride.\n\nBut it wasn't Sverin.\n\nThe memory of battle stiffened his wing and Caj suppressed a growl. He climbed up the stone ridge, silent and low as a ghostly mountain cat around the hissing fissures and shallow gorges. The rock sloped down abruptly into a face of black glass slag for about four leaps, then flattened into a walkable surface again. Surprisingly, the ground there was scattered with pale green and gray lichen, the only growing thing Caj had seen thus far.\n\nCrouched in the lichen, gnawing fiercely at the glistening thigh bone of a red deer, was Halvden. The young warrior who had turned Sverin against him, whose father had stirred trouble with the wolves and died for it, who had harried Shard at every turn and who Caj had for so long dismissed merely as healthy competition for his nest-son. Halvden, the fluffed up jaybird who, in his blackest, and stupidest, and bravest moment, had tried to murder Caj. Had it not been for the mercy of the Star Island wolves, he would have succeeded.\n\nHalvden had always been the best looking, the best fighter, the best pupil of his age. The price of that was arrogance.\n\nThere was only one cure for arrogance.\n\n\"Son-of-Hallr,\" Caj whispered into the drizzle, heart leaping up with hunting thrill. His tail dusted back and forth against the rock behind him. \"Time for your next lesson.\"\n\n[ The First Plains ]\n\n\"WAKE, YOUR HIGHNESS.\"\n\nKjorn opened his eyes to the voice of Nilsine, the huntress who'd first met him. Her hushed tone gave him pause. For the last several days she had acted as his personal bodyguard\u2014or perhaps chaperone was more accurate. He wasn't always sure if she meant to protect him, or others from him.\n\n\"What is it?\" Cold had dropped the night before. Though Kjorn was snuggled deep in one of their best grass hollows, the chill wind off the sea smelled lightly of snow, and there was frost on the grass just beyond his nest.\n\nNilsine huffed a disgusted sigh. \"Rok and Frida have escaped. I don't know how he did it so quietly. My guards aren't stupid.\"\n\nKjorn cursed softly and stood, stretching his wings to warm them. He thought of the painted wolf Mayka who'd helped him escape in near silence, but didn't mention it. He owed the wolf a debt. \"Will you go after him?\"\n\n\"No.\" Nilsine stepped away and looked out over the hills of the Vanheim. \"It isn't worth it to hunt him. Not now, when we have more important things to do.\" He gave her a sideways look and she inclined her head. \"We're planning to depart today, and lead you to the First Plains. The high priestess believes that if anyone in the Winderost would know of one foreign griffin, it would be the lions. And if you want my opinion\u2026\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"We should also try to meet with the eagles of the Voldsom Narrows. The elders claim there was a time they had peace with the Dawn Spire, but I'll believe it when it happens. Who knows. They might be willing to help you, anyway.\"\n\nKjorn chuckled. \"Maybe. Thank you. I'll take your advice, and I trust you to the routes. I'd like to avoid any scouts or patrols from the Dawn Spire for now.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Her eyes glittered in the gloom of predawn. \"If they know of your presence here, it could complicate your search for your friend.\"\n\nKjorn laughed. \"Something like that.\" He liked the fierce border guard, and he hoped she liked him. It would be good to have friends in the Winderost.\n\nShe dipped her head. \"We leave at first light, but I woke you early because Rok's other companion didn't flee with him.\"\n\n\"Fraenir?\" Kjorn's tail twitched.\n\nNilsine shrugged her wings. \"He asked to speak to you.\"\n\n\"I thought about what you said.\" Fraenir glanced uncomfortably between the two humorless Vanhar who stood on either side of him. It was breakfast, and all around, Nilsine's volunteers, the high priestess herself, and younger, stronger griffins chosen by the elders to represent their council ate fresh fish, waiting for Kjorn's word to depart.\n\n\"What, exactly?\" Kjorn asked. It had been several days since he arrived, since the Vanhar elders agreed to assist him in his search for Shard.\n\nFraenir looked embarrassed. \"What you said of duty, and honor.\"\n\n\"So you stayed?\" He sensed Nilsine walk up on one side of him, and Fraenir crouched back.\n\nBut he found his courage to respond. \"Yes. I tried to convince Rok, but he wouldn't listen.\" Fraenir drew himself up, looking first to Nilsine, then Kjorn. \"I want to help. I want to\u2026to join you.\"\n\nNilsine's tail lashed. \"You have yet to recompense for your acts of thievery and mischief.\"\n\n\"He can recompense,\" Kjorn said without taking his eyes from Fraenir, \"by helping me.\"\n\n\"Your Highness.\" Nilsine glowered at Kjorn. \"With all respect, the Vanheim Shore is not your domain.\"\n\nKjorn looked down at her, and lifted his wings. \"I know that. But he asks to serve me. I'd like to let him try to pay for his crimes and find some sense of honor. He's seen what Rok has become, and surely we don't want him to follow in those foot steps.\"\n\nNilsine's expression didn't change. Abruptly she turned back to Fraenir. \"I know you better than the prince does, and I have less faith in you. For his sake, you may accompany us, and serve, but the first sign of mischief, the first betrayal, and you'll answer to me.\"\n\nWhen Fraenir only glared, Kjorn said quietly, \"Yes, my lady.\"\n\nStartled, Fraenir flattened one ear and echoed him. \"Yes. My lady.\"\n\n\"Release him,\" Nilsine ordered the two guards, and they stepped away far enough that Fraenir could spread his wings and fly if he wished. Kjorn more than half expected him to. But he didn't.\n\nBright young eyes gleamed at Kjorn. \"What now?\"\n\nKjorn eyed the glowing horizon. \"Breakfast.\"\n\nThe guards left with Fraenir to seek their share of fish, and Nilsine sidled closer to Kjorn. \"You have a good heart, son-of-Sverin, but I don't know if that one does. He could mean to spy for Rok, or take information to the Dawn Spire in return for I don't know what. I recommend you watch him.\"\n\nWatching the light rise over the sea, Kjorn said, \"I thought that's what you were here for. To watch my back. Or watch me?\"\n\nIt took her a moment to chuckle, but she did. \"Aye, my lord. And so I will\u2014watch both of you. See you get something to eat, it's a long flight to the starward border of the First Plain.\"\n\n\"These lions,\" Kjorn said slowly, \"what should I expect from them?\"\n\n\"Hard to say. They follow only Tor. They believe they are older than us, that Tor placed them first in the world. They dream deeper, and they choose their friends carefully.\"\n\n\"And their enemies?\"\n\nShe spread her wings in another shrug. \"I suggest you focus on becoming their friend.\"\n\n\"If they're honorable, as you say, that shouldn't be difficult.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said, sounding doubtful. \"Just remember as you speak with them that they hunt at night. That is their realm. And for the last two generations the nights have been ruined by the screams of the enemy, the danger and fear of them always lurking.\" Her gaze fixed steadily on him, inscrutable as a sea hawk. \"And it was your great grandfather who brought them here.\"\n\nThey reached the border of what Nilsine called the First Plains by late afternoon, and she ordered them to walk, rather than fly, into the lions' territory, out of respect. A low haze hung like mist across the stretch of land, smelling sourly of smoke, and Kjorn marveled that the effect of the volcano had drifted so far windward.\n\nDespite the haze, vague memory and restlessness circled Kjorn's mind the more scents he caught and the deeper inland they went. Though he didn't remember any of it distinctly, a sense lingered.\n\nAs he landed and beheld the long, grass plain and took in the distinct scent of the big, hunting cats that saturated the area, he wondered at Shard's coming here. Perhaps he'd come to find the true history of the Aesir and the Conquering, and why Per fled. Perhaps, Kjorn thought, beholding the long plain, he'd had other plans in mind.\n\nIf he is, after all, prince of the Vanir and plans to make his claim once again, where does he plan for that to leave me?\n\nOnly finding Shard would tell.\n\nNilsine ordered her scouts to fan out and find lions so that they might announce Kjorn properly.\n\nHis thoughts lost in the Silver Isles and Shard\u2014he still couldn't truly imagine his wingbrother as a prince\u2014Kjorn jumped to discover Fraenir standing next to him.\n\n\"What should I do, sire?\"\n\nHe seemed to delight in calling Kjorn by a title, as if he'd craved leadership and now had something on which to focus the high energies of his youth. Kjorn managed not to sigh. \"Pick a group, and search for lions with them. Keep your head down and be respectful.\"\n\nDisappointment flashed in Fraenir's face but Kjorn didn't budge. The young griffin needed to learn discipline and rank, not act as Kjorn's personal errand pigeon.\n\n\"What about her?\" Fraenir asked of Nilsine, who strode toward them, ears constantly ticking back and forth, on high alert in the high grass and smoky air.\n\n\"Your Highness,\" she said to Kjorn, and he wondered that she seemed to be genuine, and began to wonder more why she'd volunteered to help. She didn't acknowledge Fraenir. \"With your leave, I'll have you search with me. The lions will have gone to ground until nightfall, but my scouts have the scent of a pronghorn herd where the lions might go to hunt.\"\n\n\"Lead on,\" Kjorn said, following her. Over his shoulder he said, \"Fraenir, you have your orders.\"\n\nThe younger griffin huffed, fluffed his wings, then called to a group of the departing scouts to wait for him.\n\nBeside Kjorn, Nilsine's cool countenance broke and she scoffed. \"You shouldn't waste your time. He's exile stock, born and bred. A thief with no discipline, no honor. I warn you, he will betray you in the end, maybe not directly, but through cowardice or some other thievish\u2014\"\n\n\"I appreciate your concern,\" Kjorn said, lifting his head high to catch the scents on the wind. \"But I'll handle him.\"\n\nThey waded through waving, golden grass, and as the sun dipped, so did the warmth of the day. Kjorn felt a chill, but it was nothing compared to winter in the Silver Isles.\n\n\"Will you tell me something?\" Kjorn asked. \"I didn't wish to ask back at the Vanheim Shore and seem too ignorant, but I thought you might indulge me.\"\n\n\"I might,\" Nilsine answered blandly.\n\n\"What did the priestess mean when she spoke of the Four Winds?\"\n\nNilsine loosed a soft breath. \"Not a belief the Aesir recognize anymore? It is the oldest of traditions. Before griffins knew Tyr and Tor, they knew only the earth, wind, sea and sky. The Four Winds\u2014 Star, Night, Sun and Dawn\u2026they all have their own purpose, their own messages.\"\n\n\"I see.\" He considered the four directions. \"And what wind does your priestess think is blowing now?\"\n\nNilsine squinted, ears twitching. \"Before we left this morning she told me that the air is still.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"That means no one knows what will happen.\"\n\nKjorn's tail twitched but he maintained a neutral expression. His father had little patience with prophecy, and he was beginning to understand why. But he couldn't dismiss their beliefs. \"Well then. Perhaps we shall stir the winds with our own wings.\"\n\nShe looked amused at that. \"Perhaps. We could do with a change.\"\n\n\"What kind of change?\"\n\nNilsine dipped her head, sniffing at an imprint in the grass. \"All I know is why I patrol our borders. The exiles, rogues, and poachers run amok throughout the plains, the Dawn Reach, and the Outlands surrounding the Dawn Spire. They have no order, though if I had to pick a leader among them, it would be Rok.\" Her expression soured, and Kjorn kept his opinions to himself. \"The families of the Reach remain at the Dawn Spire. The Aesir clans of the Ostral Shores have left the Dawn Spire and keep their own borders. Obviously, the Vanhar have left. Some families, refusing to serve the new king and unable to go home without his support for fear of the wyrms, live in exile, but scattered.\"\n\n\"The Ostral Shores\u2026\" Kjorn wracked his memory of why the name was familiar, but his father had spoken so little of their homeland. \"Caj,\" he blurted, and Nilsine watched him, bemused. \"I just recalled\u2014my father met his wingbrother at the Ostral Shores. Caj, son-of-Cai.\"\n\n\"Then you may have allies starward of the Dawn Spire, if you can make it there in one piece. Perhaps they know of your friend.\"\n\n\"They well might. Caj is Shard's nest-father.\"\n\n\"They might also be enemies,\" she added bluntly. \"We don't know how their feelings might fly toward your family now.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your honesty,\" Kjorn said dryly. Nilsine merely inclined her head. Kjorn considered the fractured land and griffin clans, and the great enemy that threatened them at night. He wondered, almost idly, what might have happened if Per hadn't fled, and if this land was his birthright, still.\n\nBut he did flee.\n\nThe sun was dying, wind and dim purple light washed the First Plains. Kjorn still shuddered instinctively at being out in the open at night. Since he was a kit his father had forbidden flying at night, and now that Kjorn knew there was a great, real enemy in the Winderost which hunted at night, he began to understand why. A cry went up, and Nilsine perked her ears. \"They've found lions! Come.\"\n\nShe bounded forward and Kjorn followed at pace. Grass scratched at his face and whipped his eyes until he mastered a rolling lope, his head tilted back above the stems.\n\nGriffin shouts and lion snarls cracked the evening, and dread swarmed Kjorn's chest at the sound of a skirmish.\n\nWhen he saw the combatants, his temper flashed.\n\n\"Fraenir!\" he shouted, bounding toward the fight. \"You fool!\"\n\nNilsine tried to snag Kjorn's tail to keep him from entering the fray, but he had to. The younger griffin fought two larger, young male lions and would surely lose. Kjorn took them in with a glance, their size that nearly matched an average griffin, golden, muscular feline forms and short, bristly dark manes flying in the fight\u2014saw an opening, and slammed into his target, shouting, \"We're here in peace!\"\n\n\"You've broken the borders,\" rumbled the young lion Kjorn had knocked to the ground. He whipped to his feet and prowled in a cautious circle as he took in Kjorn's size, and Kjorn did not pursue. He stood still, wings folded, tense in case the lion leaped again, but didn't advance. Vanhar surrounded them and the lions drew back. Nilsine's warriors dragged Fraenir back from his opponent and that lion stalked away, prowling back and forth behind the one who spoke to Kjorn.\n\n\"A gross trespass of our agreements with the Vanhar. Or are you poachers?\"\n\n\"I am no poacher.\" Nilsine trotted up next to Kjorn. \"You should know me. Nilsine, daughter-of-Nels, of the Vanhar. And by your scent I guess you to be Ajali, brother to Ajia the Swiftest.\"\n\nHe bared his long yellow fangs. \"And this?\" His ears flicked forward toward Kjorn. Fraenir limped up behind Kjorn, looking sullen, and Kjorn gave him a brief, sharp look before turning to the lion.\n\n\"I am\u2014\"\n\n\"Kjorn,\" said a liquid, female voice from the grass. They all turned, and the male lions made way for six lionesses who rose from the grass. The wind shifted and Kjorn caught their scent at last, and the sight of them was surprising, not the least because of their abrupt appearance.\n\nLike the wolves of the Star Isle, they wore feathers knotted into the fur of their necks. Kjorn took that as a hopeful sign, because the feathers had obviously belonged to griffins. The leading lioness, long and muscled, had a pale, tawny coat. She inclined her head to Kjorn, and the feathers that ringed her neck stood a little like an eagle's. It was then he saw that knotted near the base of the display of feathers were also broken talons and tiny bones.\n\nHis sense of hope cooled.\n\n\"Kjorn,\" she repeated, as if familiar. \"The long awaited heir of Kajar.\" Her golden eyes found Nilsine, in the last dim light of day. \"You were right to bring him to us, daughter of the Vanhar. He is the last of three\u2014three who we knew would follow the starfire to our land.\"\n\n\"Three?\" Kjorn asked, mantling belatedly when he saw that Nilsine bowed to the lioness. \"Of whom else do you speak?\"\n\n\"First, a dragon, bearing hope.\" Her gleaming eyes searched them all, and Kjorn held his breath. \"Second, the Summer King, bearing truth. And you. The third and last.\"\n\nAnd what do I bear? Kjorn wanted to ask, but kept silent for another moment. She seemed to be measuring him, and he stood as still as he could as darkness fell.\n\n\"Wise Ajia,\" Nilsine murmured. \"We come seeking only help. Kjorn has come to find his wingbrother, Shard, of the Silver Isles.\"\n\n\"We know Rashard, the Summer King.\"\n\nKjorn's heart quickened and he stepped forward, then when Nilsine made a negative grunt, backed up again respectfully. \"You've met with him? Is he well? I wish to find him and reconcile. Can you tell me what's become of him? I would owe you a great debt.\"\n\nAjia tilted her head and Kjorn gave the feathers another furtive glance, searching for any gray, or a talon of pale color. He was relieved not to see any.\n\n\"We know him. He met with us, spoke and listened. He listened and spoke with a heart of earth, like a lion, like a true son of Tor. He walked with us to behold the enemy.\"\n\n\"The enemy,\" Kjorn said quietly. \"I believe I had a vision of them. Great beasts with wings like storms, all dark, and greedy and violent.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is their nature. This vision of yours, in it, did you fight them?\"\n\nWith a sideways glance at Nilsine he said, \"I rose victorious from their darkness and chaos.\"\n\nAjia watched him for a long moment as final night enclosed them. Not one other lion spoke or moved, and Kjorn understood that she was a leader among them. Not even between griffins had he seen such perfect stillness and obedience.\n\n\"You have returned, son-of-Sverin, at the height of your strength and power, knowing the truth of your family's flight from this, your homeland, only to find your wingbrother?\"\n\n\"That is my intention, yes.\" It was a simple question, yet Kjorn felt he was being challenged.\n\nAjia looked at Nilsine, whose passive expression, as far as Kjorn could tell in the new dark and starlight, did not change.\n\nAfter another stretch of silence Kjorn could bear the scrutiny no longer. \"With all respect, yes. I have no other aims here. You said you'd met with my wingbrother. You know Shard. Do you know what's become of him?\"\n\nAjia glanced to the lioness beside her, who lowered her head and lay back her ears. Ajia returned her gaze to Kjorn. \"We know him, and consider him a friend. But we do not know you. Why should we tell you what we know?\"\n\n\"Wise Ajia,\" Nilsine began, and Kjorn stepped in front of her, knowing it would appear aggressive, but he felt some aggression was needed, some show of strength. Ajia tilted her head back to study him.\n\nKjorn spoke to her alone. \"I am Shard's closest friend since kithood. We had a falling out. We mistrusted and lied and did poorly by each other, and I hope to find him and make amends.\"\n\nAs if she hadn't even heard him, the lioness spoke thoughtfully. \"Shard hoped to understand the great enemy that stalks the Winderost, and perhaps help us rid our lands of them. Do you mean to help him with this?\"\n\nTaken aback, Kjorn considered his answer, and stood as tall as he was able. With some satisfaction he noticed two of the younger, male lions draw back. \"If he wishes for my help, I will do it. If the Winderost wishes my help, I will give it.\"\n\n\"Bold words. You have never seen the enemy.\"\n\nHe turned his ears back. \"I would face them. I had a vision and was victorious. If Shard wishes to fight them, I will fight and die beside him if needed. I must find him first, of course.\" He hoped that was a strong enough hint.\n\nAjia studied him, then looked at Nilsine, whose expression remained guarded, though she slanted an ear Kjorn's way, as if surprised by his words.\n\n\"Why should we trust your words? You could be an enemy of Shard. He fled a troubled land, seeking truth.\"\n\n\"Why should I trust you?\" Kjorn growled, growing weary of riddles and unanswered questions. \"I walked respectfully into your lands and sought you out before searching, hunting\u2014why, scarcely before we even bent the grass with our feet. Tell me, those feathers on your neck, are those signs of friendship, or battles won?\"\n\nAjia tilted her head and Nilsine sucked a sharp breath, but Kjorn stood firm. Starlight sparkled through the haze above, and after a moment, Ajia threw back her head and roared with laughter. Then she trotted forward, bowing her head so the feathers stood in intimidating display like a mane, though her eyes lifted to remain locked on Kjorn's.\n\n\"Perhaps they are both. Tell me, isn't winning a difficult friendship sometimes like a battle won?\"\n\nKjorn opened his beak, and when he had no answer, she laughed again and circled away, speaking over her shoulder. \"Come, walk with us. You will hunt with us on the next egg moon, and if you do well under the bright eye of Tor, perhaps we will tell you what we know of the Summer King.\"\n\n\"I don't have time to\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't refuse her,\" Nilsine hissed, stepping abreast of him again. \"It would be a great insult. You would make an enemy.\"\n\n\"I thought I already had,\" Kjorn muttered, watching Ajia walk away, looking fully confident he would follow.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Nilsine murmured, as the lions gathered around Ajia and she led a trail through the grass. \"An invitation to hunt is a wonderful honor.\"\n\n\"It sounded more like a test to me.\"\n\n\"Come,\" Nilsine said impatiently. \"Don't risk their good mood by dallying.\"\n\n\"Good mood?\" Kjorn mused. \"I would hate to see her in a bad mood.\"\n\nNilsine snapped her beak, and at last Kjorn fell in, following the lions deeper into the grassy plain. Ajia had challenged him. If she considered friendship a battle won, then this was a battle he didn't intend to lose.\n\n[ Halvden's Lesson ]\n\nSheets of sharp, black, volcanic scree cascaded down the slope toward Halvden, with Caj riding down the largest rock. He knew he wouldn't have been able to stalk down the hill without upsetting the loose rocks, nor make the long jump for the element of surprise. So in the dimming light he used the slope and the rocks to his advantage.\n\nFlaring his good wing to steer somewhat, Caj relished the look of shock on Halvden's face before the first rocks struck him, threatening to bury the green warrior under black, razor edges.\n\nHalvden dragged away from the small avalanche and beat his wings hard, trying to escape. Caj judged the distance and leaped, flinging his entire weight against Halvden's hindquarters and slamming the younger griffin to the ground.\n\n\"You're dead!\" Halvden shrieked, scrabbling away as the wave of rocks skittered toward them.\n\n\"No, guess again.\" Caj reared up to his hind legs and forced Halvden down, rolling him with hard shoves away from the last of the sliding rocks.\n\n\"You're a ghost!\" Halvden loosed a strangled noise, gained his feet and turned tail, kicking up dust and pebbles in Caj's face with both hind paws.\n\nCaj ducked his head to shield his eyes even as he leaped forward, swiping blindly for Halvden's hind legs. \"No such thing,\" he growled.\n\n\"Stay back!\" Halvden sprang away and whirled, flaring his wings.\n\nCaj crouched, tail whipping.\n\nSlowly Halvden's eyes narrowed, his expression growing clear as he realized Caj was real, alive, and coming for him. Caj had vowed never to underestimate him again, so before Halvden could gather his thoughts, Caj lunged.\n\nThey clashed, fell together, and fought like witless mountain cats, Halvden's movements powerful, but wild and desperate, Caj's calculated and cold. He gave no quarter. Every swipe of his talons to Halvden's flesh and wings felt like redemption for the foolishness of his entire winter. Green feathers littered the black rock.\n\nThey whipped around the steaming fissures and across the broken, treacherous ground. When the ground evened out again, Halvden reared to his hind legs and Caj rose to meet him\u2014they locked and yanked each other to the ground. Caj hit first and warm pain coiled up his broken wing as they rolled. He heard the mud casing crack. Halvden wrestled him across the ground, and the mud cast crumbled away with each twist of their bodies.\n\nGrowing weary and short of breath from the poor air, Caj knew he had to win the fight soon. Halvden could wear him down first if Caj allowed it. He would not. Halvden had no armor, he was still bewildered, and alone. It was time to end the fight.\n\nFeigning worse pain from his broken wing, Caj broke away, fell back and twisted as if preparing to flee, leaving Halvden a false opening. The young griffin should have known better. That time, Halvden lunged forward in attempt to knock him over.\n\nCaj whipped about to meet the charge, sat up on his hindquarters, snaked his forelegs around Halvden's chest, and drove his own shoulders forward against the impact as the big griffin slammed into him. Halvden snarled, caught, beak snapping, seeking an opening. Caj thrust forward, driving them both up to stand on their hind legs, toppled Halvden off balanced and slammed him backward. Halvden's back and wings smashed against the ground, and Caj pinned him there, crushing him into the rock. He pressed his talons deep under his green feathers, against the young griffin's throat.\n\nFor a moment he reveled in Halvden's realization that he'd lost, in the perfect look of shock and defeat flashing in his eyes.\n\n\"Are you going to kill me?\"\n\nThere was still no humility in Halvden's voice, no regret, no apology. He pressed harder and Halvden shut his eyes, taking a gurgling breath.\n\nAfter a moment Caj muttered, \"Do you think I want to face Kenna if I kill you?\"\n\nHalvden's eyes snapped open, again bewildered, as if he didn't know whether to laugh or curse. \"Are you mocking me? What do you want from me?\"\n\nHe knows, Caj realized. He knows he chose poorly and acted foolishly, and that he must pay a price for his choices. But still, like his father, Halvden couldn't let go of his arrogance.\n\n\"Admit you were wrong.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nA deep, warning snarl curled in Caj's throat. \"You weasely, mud-covered vulture. Admit you were wrong!\"\n\n\"No.\" Halvden dragged a breath against Caj's talons. \"I did as any of you. I did what I thought was right. I served Sverin. I\u2014\"\n\n\"You did what you could to seize the most power, you bullied, divided, and endangered the pride, and you tried to murder me.\"\n\n\"The strong endure,\" Halvden rasped.\n\n\"Your father was strong,\" Caj growled.\n\nAround them, three plumes of poisonous steam shot up, hissing. The drizzle deepened to freezing rain. They continued their stare-down, Halvden's beak open in a pant. Caj remained frozen, pressing. Not again. He would not falter and lose to Halvden again.\n\n\"You could be great,\" Caj said. \"You could be everything you dream of being, everything your father wanted but could never be\u2014if you will only let go of this insufferable pride.\"\n\nHalvden struggled, but Caj held him locked to the rock at every joint.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Halvden whispered at last. His muscles sagged under Caj and he broke eye contact, staring beyond Caj at the black rock of Pebble's Throw.\n\nLoosening his talons a little, Caj said, \"First, you're going to tell me what happened to Sverin, and where he is.\"\n\nHalvden looked back at him with an incredulous glower. \"And then?\"\n\n\"And then,\" Caj took a breath, calming at last, \"you're going to admit you were wrong, beg forgiveness, and apologize.\"\n\n\"Apologize,\" Halvden scoffed, \"to whom?\"\n\n\"Everyone.\"\n\n[ The Sunland ]\n\nThe ice floe rocked and smacked against something hard, jarring Shard awake and nearly tipping him back into the water. He stared up at a towering cliff of ice.\n\nHis first sight of the Sunland was nothing but a rock-hard, white and azure wall stretching for leagues to either side. Forcing his stiff muscles to move, Shard gripped his ice floe with quivering claws and peered up again, then around. Land was near, indeed, as the dragons had promised, but not in the way he'd envisioned. At his back, icy ocean lapped on for leagues, for the moment, calm.\n\nFool, he thought, grabbing at the wall of ice to drag himself along it and find some friendlier place to crawl onto land. After two days floating\u2014or it might've been three, he wasn't sure\u2014he still seethed over the whales and the dragons taking Hikaru without him.\n\nI should've shouted. I should have gone with them. My wings weren't broken, what's the matter with me? He briefly forgot he'd been almost dead from drowning, tossed about by whales, frozen, and losing blood. Still, he felt he could've tried harder. Idiot twice-over, what would Stigr say?\n\nHe paused, talons digging against the ice floe as it rocked and bumped the ice wall. He'd had a vision of griffins and wolves he'd known who were dead.\n\nEinarr\u2026\n\nShard shook himself. There was no way to know if it was real. He'd had raven dreams before, and found them untrue.\n\nHe opened his wings, and aside from mild twinges, found them whole and ready. Crouching back, however, sent flashing heat up one hind leg and he barked in pain. Twisting his head, he examined the limb, and when he beheld the strips of torn flesh from the whale's teeth, the ooze of blood, and the bone itself, split and angled, his stomach curled. The ice, at least had kept the bleeding low, and the salt water cleaned it. He still had the leg, at the very least, could work through the pain and perhaps mend it, even if he moved with a limp from then on.\n\nShard drew a deep breath. One step at a time. He'd had enough of floating, enough of the sea, which was usually his ally and provider. He gave the ice floe a friendly pat in thanks for bearing him, leaned on his good hind leg and launched himself into the cold, clear sky. The bobbing motion of flight drummed a steady, nauseating ache through his broken leg, and he could only try to block it from his mind. Anything he tried to do would hurt, so he had to do the sensible thing, which was to fly away before he fell in the water, or whales attacked again and the situation grew worse.\n\nThe air along the ice wall shifted unpredictably before falling dead, and Shard worked cold, stiff wings to soar over the top, where he found a strong headwind and worked into it to rise. He stroked up as far as he could bear to go.\n\nThe sweeping landscape rolled and crested into hills and mountains and back into long plains much like the Sun Isle of home, except all of it shone white, white, white. Shard shook his head, eyes dazzled, and peered around in search of sign of any kind of forest or grass.\n\nThe land swept back from him in all directions, enormous and white. Upon that second inspection, he saw the dark edges of rock in the far mountains, and long patches of dirt along the nightward shoreline. Far at the end of his vision along that coast, the wall broke into arches, towers and slides of ice, translucent white and blue.\n\nDistant splashes and high-pitched calls drew his attention to his own shoreline.\n\nFor a moment, having felt entirely alone in the world, he breathed in relief, and looked to the water. Life thrived. Gulls nattered in the distance. Larger splashes told him of seals, and he thought he spied the starkly black and white snowrock birds that he'd only ever seen once, on the starward most coast of the Star Isle.\n\nWith no better ideas, but relieved to find life, Shard angled inland and flew a course that matched the one he and Hikaru had taken over the sea, parallel to the back of the constellation of Midragur. He couldn't see it in the day of course, but he knew its path across the sky as well as a vein in his own wings.\n\nFor a time, flying, he felt at peace.\n\nEvening fell shockingly swift around him.\n\nHe'd thought he was airborne for perhaps only a sunmark, then realized the sun was setting. He remembered the short days of winter in the Silver Isles, but during his time in the Winderost, he'd grown used to longer stretches of daylight. Now the whole landscape glowed dull silver in the weak sun. Shard flapped high again and studied his choices. Weariness crept up from the ache in his leg and washed his entire body as the sky darkened. Plains, mountains, coast. He chose the mountains, where he might find shelter from the night wind.\n\nA whisper trickled through his mind.\n\n\"What?\" Shard shook his head, looking around for a bird, or an earth creature below, but saw nothing. The whisper nudged again, like wind, no words that he could make out, but calling. Something felt distantly familiar about it.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he whispered. The dark mountains, patched with snow, ringed a small bowl of a valley. Recognition darted through his mind. Shard dipped lower toward the pass that entered the valley, and then the whispering seemed not in his mind, but ahead.\n\nThe sun departed. Stars glowed to life and pulsed in the huge sky. A cold wind swept up and stroked Shard's wings. Adjusting his flight path to it sent a jolt through his injured leg and he ground his beak to stifle a snarl of pain, peering up to see that he now flew perpendicular to Midragur. No matter, I'll get back on course tomorrow.\n\nThe mountains stood silent, gleaming white and abyssal black under the impossible stars. Shard dove into the pass, soaring over a frozen river toward the valley he'd seen. The whisper itched now, as if in his left ear. Shard growled and turned, flared to a halt and landed on a ledge that overlooked the pass and the little valley. He caught his breath, listening, and stared.\n\nThe wind rushed through the pass, squeezed in by the walls of mountain, and Shard flicked his ear toward the sound of water. Perhaps the river wasn't entirely frozen. The whisper had faded and Shard's heart thumped in fear that he'd lost it, that it wasn't just his lonely, tired mind, that it was something he was supposed to heed.\n\nHe stood on the cliff, breathing in the wet scent of snow, the mineral smell of the mountain and somewhere underneath, frozen earth. Closing his eyes, his listened, as closely as he'd listened when he was first learning to speak the language of the earth and the birds. Wind flitted through the mountains, combed and played with his feathers. Shard leaned again onto his good leg, shutting out the pain of the other.\n\nA wavering, distant noise chimed, one that felt more in his mind than in his ears. He flicked his ears, breathing softly. Like the notes of a choir of many birds, the noise pulsed, wavered, folded over itself and faded only to resume again. It was not the whisper Shard had heard. The whisper, he thought deeply, had faded in the face of the new sound. He opened his eyes, and sucked a sharp breath.\n\nThe Wings of Tor unfolded all across the sky, ribboning sheets of violent green, magenta, and blue light, ever shifting. Shard had seen the lights in the Silver Isles, but never as he saw them now.\n\nThe chiming, weird notes pulsed from the light. The very voice of the sky, of Tor, of a world Shard glimpsed only in dreams, sang through his skin. Cramped on his little ledge, he still managed a trembling bow.\n\nGuide me, he pleaded.\n\nThe wind flitted around him and he remembered the dream he'd had before. The white star in the little valley. The circle of stones. He looked up at the majestic lights, then down to the valley. Though the first whisper had faded, he knew it had called him to the valley, and that it could be the one from his dream.\n\nWith a slow, building thrill in his heart, Shard plunged from the ledge and soared through the pass, exalting under the lights of Tor. When he neared the center of the valley, the orientation of the mountains and the pale gleam of snow all looked familiar. It was as in his dream. He stooped to land, and heard a small voice cry out.\n\n\"Hello?\" Shard called in reply, gingerly setting down in the snow without putting weight on his broken leg. \"Hello? I've come!\"\n\nThe night was not dark. Between the stars and the great shifting lights, Shard saw everything in a bright twilight. From above and in the odd light, the circle of stones had looked like odd pockets in the snow, but indeed they were there, Shard had landed right in their center. Again a voice cried out, this time in glee.\n\n\"Hello! You've come! She dreamed you would!\"\n\nShard turned, folding his wings and hobbling, to see a snow fox plunging toward him from outside the circle of stones. He thought of the white star in his dream, and how the dragon Amaratsu had taught him that sometimes, a dream thing meant another thing.\n\nThe white fox before him, Shard decided, was the star from his dream, and was the guidance he had asked for.\n\n\"I'm Shard,\" he said, dipping his head. \"It's good to see you.\" And as strange as it all felt, it was good to see the fox, to hear another voice, to see a face happy to see him. \"Who dreamed I would come?\"\n\n\"Nest-mother.\" The fox padded forward and sniffed Shard all over by way of introducing himself, discovered the broken leg with a little yip, and returned to face Shard in front again. \"But you're injured.\"\n\n\"Yes. Can you help? Who is your nest-mother?\" Shard had never heard of a fox using that term. It was a griffin word, for a parent who hadn't birthed a kit, but raised it as her own if something happened to the birth mother. \"And, what is your name?\"\n\n\"I am Iluq.\" He perked his ears, his black, narrow eyes glittering. \"Come, Shard, Mother will help you with your leg, and she'll be very pleased to see you, very happy indeed.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\nMischief stole over the fox's face. \"You'll see. Come. We will have food and maybe songs.\"\n\nTingling relief threatened to make him collapse. \"Yes, I would like that very much.\"\n\nIluq laughed and trotted a circle around him, his wide, flat paws not breaking the crust of snow. \"Come with me. You can fly above if it's easier. We must go to the mountain.\"\n\n\"I'll fly,\" Shard said, following the point of Iluq's nose to see that he indicated the far wall of mountains. It would take two marks for him to hobble there. Much swifter if he flew and Iluq ran.\n\nThe lights wavered into pure, summer green as they traveled to the mountain. Shard wondered, with tingling anticipation, who the fox's nest-mother might be, and then he remembered the milky eyes from another dream, eagle eyes.\n\nGriffin eyes? Shard would've thought it impossible, but he was learning to use that word carefully.\n\nHe followed Iluq's darting form across the valley until they reached the foot of the mountains, where Shard landed. There he had to walk, for Iluq led him up a narrow trail that cut into the mountain, and he would've been unable to follow by wing. Shard continually slipped and tripped on the snow, biting back curses he'd learned from Stigr, until at last they reached a crack in the mountainside.\n\n\"Home!\" Iluq announced.\n\nShard's first instinct would've been to carefully smell the entrance and be wary of danger or a trap, but he only stared at the familiar, orange light that glowed from deep within the cave.\n\n\"Iluq,\" he said hesitantly, \"is that\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" gushed the fox, \"it is fire! Mother and I keep it alive. Mother learned from the dragons how to make it, but we must feed constantly, because it's so difficult for her to make, now, and I cannot make it at all.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Shard breathed, and they stepped inside. The scent of wood smoke sent his mind reeling back to the Winderost, the bonfires, and, with a warm thrill, the memory of the gryphoness Brynja.\n\nFor a moment he closed his eyes, for with the smell of wood smoke came the memory of her scent. He savored his last good memory of her, her eyes bright as he showed her a sky brimming with stars, her voice warm as she confessed to admiring him. With determination he pictured her standing at his side on the Copper Cliff, as queen of the Silver Isles, and tried not to think of all the reasons why that part couldn't be.\n\nHe didn't know what became of her after he fled, Nameless, from the Dawn Spire.\n\n\"Shard?\" Iluq nosed a talon.\n\nShard shook his head. \"Lead on.\"\n\nThey walked into the stone cave, and the warmth overwhelmed him. The thick smoke overpowered any scent of animal, and so he had to wait for any hint about Mother until Iluq led him from the tunnel into a cozy chamber. It was roundish, with a crackling fire in the center and an enormous stack of wood along one wall. Two wooden poles stood upright like bare trees near the wood stack, with smaller poles rising between them in rungs, bound at the meeting points with sinew. On those rungs hung drying, smoked fish. Shard tilted his head, studying the clever frame, and Iluq slipped past him toward the fire.\n\nLittle bones littered the edges of the cave, some fish, some hare, some bird, and some larger, perhaps seal. They looked ancient and dusty, as if larger game hadn't been brought to the cave in a very long time.\n\nOne pile of bones in the corner beyond the fire looked to be a wolf or some other larger creature, but Shard couldn't identify them through the smoke, and then, something else caught his attention.\n\nA ring of wood hung on the rock wall behind the pile of bones, a long sapling branch warped into a circle, holding together a strange web that looked woven of thin animal sinew. Bits of shell dangled from it, and several long feathers, some griffin, one enormous one that Shard recognized from his first dream of the fox. The work was too clever for fox paws. Maybe dragon, raven or, perhaps\u2026\n\n\"Welcome.\"\n\nA voice drifted, like the smoke, to Shard's ears, though it was so faint he could've dreamed it, like the noises from Tor's Wings, or the whisper at the head of the valley. Startled, he blinked, peering through the smoke. The whisper. It was the same, only it had become words. She had called to him. Shard stepped fully into the cave and sideways, out of the stream of smoke that followed the tunnel out. Peering across the fire, he saw the milky, blind eagle eyes from his dream.\n\nHe almost fell back, so surprised to see her sitting across the fire from him. Distracted by the fish, the fire and the bones and the strange false web on the wall, he hadn't even noticed her, and realized too that she blended perfectly with the color of the cave around her. Now, he tried not to stare. Never had he seen a creature so ancient, so thin that her feathers, which no longer held their hue, seemed only draped over her skeletal frame.\n\nFoolish words came out despite himself. \"You're a griffin.\"\n\nA dry, wispy chuckle. \"Welcome, Summer King. My, how you shine. Like sunlight.\"\n\nIluq padded around the fire and settled next to the ancient gryphoness, looking pleased with himself.\n\nThe gryphoness seemed oddly still\u2014but then, Shard thought, it probably took every bit of strength she had just to keep breathing.\n\n\"Tell me about yourself, Summer King. Your name. Your land. What brings griffins back to the Sunland.\" She shivered. Iluq perked his ears, leaped to the woodpile and snatched up a few sticks in his teeth to deposit them into the fire.\n\nShard took a careful seat at the fire, favoring his injured leg. He would have to set it later. Hopefully they would let him use a few of their gathered sticks and perhaps, if there was no clay to be had, some sinew to bind the sticks to his leg. \"I'm Rashard, son-of-Baldr. I'll tell you everything. But first, please tell me about you. This\u2026I don't even know what to ask. Who are you? Why are you here?\"\n\nA soft, dusty wind shuddered through the cave, somehow, making the fire dance and their shadows flicker to life. \"I am Groa, daughter-of-Urd.\" She took a breath. The names sounded old, like something from a legend. \"I flew here seeking treasure, seeking adventure. I followed a starfire.\" Shard bit back a sound of disbelief. The ghostly creature looked ready to disintegrate. There was no conceivable way she'd flown, following the same starfire he had.\n\nUnless she hadn't followed the same\u2026\n\nHe guarded his voice. \"I, too, followed a starfire. How did you\u2026\" He didn't want to insult her, and stopped.\n\nAmusement crinkled the corners of her blind eyes. \"You don't understand. I didn't follow the same starfire as you, this autumn past.\"\n\nShard watched her face, his amazement and understanding growing. Wind whispered and flittered through the cave and Shard tried to determine where it was coming from, then shifted closer to the fire. \"Others have told me that it only flew once before.\"\n\nGroa fixed her blind eyes on him steadily as if, through the fire, she truly saw him. \"Yes. I flew when last the starfire soared. I flew with the first band of griffins to come here and meet the dragons.\"\n\nA quiver encompassed Shard's entire body. \"You mean\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The fire shivered as Shard met her unseeing gaze. \"I flew with Kajar.\"\n\n[ Stirring the Wind ]\n\nThe warm, red, meat scent of pronghorn floated to the spot where Kjorn crouched in the grass. Flanked by Nilsine and the lioness Ajia, he waited, grateful he had some practice hunting on land in the Silver Isles.\n\nAs Ajia wished, they had waited for the egg moon, bright and nearly full. They had waited, as Ajia wished, for an infuriating three days. All the while, Nilsine assured Kjorn that even the Vanhar were rarely invited to hunt with the lions. He didn't want to make an enemy of someone who claimed to be a friend of Shard's and might know his whereabouts, so Kjorn accepted their hospitality and waited. Now at last, the hunt.\n\n\"The herd,\" Ajia said, her voice a warm purr. \"The herd grazes under the moon, and now the dark is high. The herd grazes under the moon, and one knows its time is nigh.\"\n\nThe other lionesses echoed her, and they fell into a hunting chant.\n\nAjia's voice woke something in Kjorn's heart and muscles, a thrill along his back that made him not want to fly, but to leap and sprint along the ground.\n\n\"The eye of Tor watches, her light guides us on.\"\n\n\"The breath of Tor whispers, we follow her song.\"\n\nOnly he, Nilsine, and the other female Vanhar with them had been allowed on the hunt. The male lions did not hunt with them, and Fraenir and the male Vanhar remained behind as well. Beside Kjorn, even Nilsine seemed caught up in the chant, and just as she began to hum along, the lionesses fell silent. It was time to close in, time for quiet.\n\nWithout a word Ajia crept forward, and Kjorn blinked as she disappeared in the grass. Ever shifting to remain downwind, he crept forward to remain within earshot of the lions. He could see a little in the moonlight, but not like the lions, who saw, he knew, as if it were day. The pronghorns wouldn't see them at all, but would hear or smell if they made a wrong move, possibly spot movement under the moon if they emerged from the grass.\n\nRemembering all he'd learned of ground-hunting from Thyra, Kjorn stalked forward, placing his talons carefully, lifting his beak to smell through the hazy air. He spotted the herd, outlined in white moonlight. Several lookouts stood poised at the edge, and when they lowered their heads to crop a quick bite of grass, other heads raised, ears turning, ever alert.\n\nA quiver slipped through Kjorn, a silent knowing. Tuned to the lionesses, he sensed and saw them fanning out. Ajia had chosen a target.\n\nKjorn saw it. An aged male with a crooked hind leg, a lookout at the far end of the herd. He and the Vanhar followed wordless cues from the lionesses and took up stations to flank the pronghorn.\n\nNilsine had told him they would not fly, that they were to hunt as lions. Another quiver trailed down his spine, some voiceless understanding that all the lionesses were in place. A liquid movement caught his eye, and he met Ajia's glowing stare through the grass.\n\nThe great honor of running down and killing the pronghorn was to be Kjorn's.\n\nUnder the piercing light of the moon, feeling suddenly as if perhaps the goddess Tor did watch his hunt with interest, Kjorn slipped forward. His breath tightened. He resisted the urge to hold it and breathed deeply and silently. Something larger seemed to poise on this hunt and his performance, and he meant to show well.\n\nThe old pronghorn's head flew up. Kjorn froze. The pronghorn's ears wagged back and forth. The wind shifted, bringing the scent of haze and meat, and Kjorn bellied forward. The pronghorn's head turned, and he bleated a warning.\n\n\"Mudding\u2026\" Kjorn swore. The herd broke into a springing run in all directions. Kjorn locked on his prey, bounding fast and dodging panicked pronghorn who leaped around him.\n\nOne sprang over Kjorn, caught a hoof on Kjorn's wing and went sprawling. Kjorn nearly turned to take that beast instead, but an electric bolt of pride shot through him. No. He would take the one the lions had chosen.\n\nThe old pronghorn had frozen rather than run, perhaps thinking Kjorn would lose him in the chaos. The lionesses hadn't moved from their stations. Kjorn bolted forward again, bowling through pronghorn like an avalanche, knocking aside any who crossed him. The old one spotted him and broke into a sprint.\n\nHunt thrill shot down Kjorn's chest and he surged to take chase. The pronghorn was fast, but Kjorn ate ground with huge, long leaps\u2014wings closed\u2014and the elder hoof beast tired fast.\n\nWith a chaos of bleating and leaping animals and the sudden blur of the lionesses and Vanhar falling in on all sides, Kjorn shoved into a final jump and crashed into his prey. He dug his talons into the hindquarters and yanked to one side, bringing down the beast and rolling with him to avoid a cloven hoof to the head.\n\nThrowing his body on top of the pronghorn, Kjorn went for his throat. A splash of moonlight caught the creature's eye. For a moment it glowed silver, meeting Kjorn's eyes with terror, and knowing.\n\nFlustered, Kjorn hesitated only a moment to stammer, \"You ran well.\"\n\nThe pronghorn closed his eye, and offered his throat.\n\nWarm voices rolled behind Kjorn as blood and life spilled over his beak.\n\n\"The herd grazes under the moon, and now the dark is high.\n\nThe herd grazes under the moon, and one knows his time is nigh.\n\nThe eye of Tor watches, her light guides us on.\n\nThe breath of Tor whispers, we follow her song.\n\nOne goes now to the Sunlit Land\n\nBut his Voice in the wind sings on.\"\n\nKjorn wiped his beak in the grass, and stepped back from the carcass. He mantled as Ajia slunk forward. \"For you, my lady.\"\n\nShe dipped her head, rustling the feathers braided there. \"You did well.\"\n\n\"Not to offend, but this task was not hard. I don't see the point of making me wait here for days, only to kill an old, simple hoof beast.\"\n\nHe distinctly heard Nilsine sigh, and the Vanhar huntress emerged with the others from the grass.\n\n\"It was not the task itself,\" Ajia said, \"but how you carried it out.\" When Kjorn said nothing, she confirmed, \"You have proven yourself humble, and honorable. Let us feast.\"\n\nAfter eating, they walked toward a grove of stunted trees, their shadows stretching long under the low moon.\n\nAjia walked beside Kjorn. \"The last we knew of Shard, he brought the enemy down on the Dawn Spire, and fled starward. After that we cannot say.\"\n\n\"Starward.\" Kjorn looked that direction, then to Nilsine.\n\nShe murmured, \"The eagles dwell there. The Voldsom Narrows are a great network of canyons, starward, and bordering the Outlands. If Shard isn't still there, perhaps the eagles will know of him. The Vanhar have no quarrel with them, but neither have we any special friendship.\"\n\nKjorn wondered if he would have to perform a task for the eagles as well, but bit the thought back. \"Then, starward we go. Thank you,\" he said to Ajia, stifling frustration that after all that, he'd gained so little information. But he stopped walking and mantled low as if to a queen.\n\n\"Be wary,\" murmured Ajia, lifting her nose toward the sky. \"You have returned to a land that is cursed by the curse of your forefathers. You must tread and fly very lightly here.\"\n\nKjorn sensed a threat. \"Tell me what you mean by that.\"\n\nA low rumble emanated from the chests of all the lions, as if they warned off some greater danger, as if they guarded against the very curse of which she spoke. Ajia shook her head, rattling the talons and feathers. \"Until the return of the first Red King, there were no wyrms who terrorized the night. Your ancestor drew them here.\"\n\n\"If that is true, then it may be my destiny to help rid the land of them. But first I must find my wingbrother.\"\n\n\"It won't be so easy,\" Nilsine said, and Kjorn looked at her through the dark. \"Fighting the wyrms. Their very presence breeds fear and panic. No one flies at night anymore, for it draws their hateful eyes. I've never met a griffin who has seen them and not forgotten his name.\"\n\n\"I have,\" Ajia murmured, and when they looked at her, she dipped her head to Kjorn. \"Your wingbrother. Rashard. The Summer King. Perhaps if you stand together, you will stand a chance.\" She flicked her ears, and looked upwards again as Kjorn enjoyed a flush of pride at knowing that Shard had stood his ground against this supposedly unbeatable enemy. Ajia's low voice drew him back to the moment. \"The Horn of Midragur is broken and breathes fire. This, too, is a sign, though only more time will tell.\"\n\nHaving proven himself, and sensing a moment when he could ask a question, Kjorn spoke slowly. \"The dragon,\" he said, wanting desperately to understand her and fearing she wouldn't speak in any plainer terms, \"when we first arrived, you spoke of a dragon who bore hope, and the Summer King, Shard, who brought truth. You said you knew that three of us would come, and I was the third. What do I bring?\"\n\n\"You don't know what you've brought?\"\n\nFeeling hollow, thinking of the gold that he'd brought and lost, Kjorn lifted his wings. \"I\u2026brought nothing.\"\n\n\"That is right. You bring nothing.\" The breath seemed to drain from the group, and Kjorn narrowed his eyes. Does she mean to make me look like a fool? Ajia's eyes glinted in the moonlight. \"You brought nothing, but with your wings you will stir the still air, with your wings you will raise the Sunwind.\"\n\nKjorn glanced around, discomfited by the sudden, worried expressions of the Vanhar. That she used his own words about stirring the winds also unnerved him. She couldn't have known he'd said that\u2014unless she'd been listening, spying, unseen in the grass that day, and said it on purpose. Somehow he doubted that was what happened.\n\nHesitantly, he asked sideways of Nilsine, \"You told me of the Sunwind, but not what it means to you.\"\n\n\"Change,\" she murmured, eyes locked on Ajia. \"Sacrifice, and violent change.\" She turned to Kjorn with a new, cautious, measuring look in her eyes. \"Kjorn, the Sunwind is the wind of war.\"\n\nFor a moment every gaze was on him, and the air smelled thickly of ash, and though he had come to the Winderost with peace in his heart, he felt as if a secret purpose even he hadn't known had just been laid bare under the white, silent moon.\n\n[ Groa of the Vanhar ]\n\n\"Kajar?\" Shard lurched to his feet, wincing at the pain that shot up his hind leg, and the fire rippled with the wind of his movement. \"That's not possible!\"\n\nIluq whined, nose wrinkling in a worried expression.\n\nShard settled slowly, embarrassed at his outburst before the old, dignified gryphoness. \"Forgive me. But how are you still alive?\"\n\n\"Iluq keeps me young,\" Groa said with a laugh. \"My Voice in the wing sings on.\"\n\nShard glanced over his shoulder, back the way he'd come, but thought better of it. To think that she'd flown with Kajar, followed the first starfire, wasn't any stranger than anything else he had seen since the last wild spring when he'd first met Catori and learned of the Summer King.\n\n\"I see,\" he said, still mulling it over. A still, small flame of understanding flicked to life in his mind. He remembered Amaratsu's tale of the dragons. He remembered her telling of a feast the great emperor gave for his griffin guests, but one gryphoness didn't trust him, and fled, never to be heard from again.\n\nHe watched Groa quietly.\n\n\"Here now,\" said the ancient gryphoness. \"Let us tend to that leg. Legend says the Summer King will be a healer as well as a leader\u2026are you a healer?\"\n\nA spark popped and the fire sent up a plume of smoke. The little cave and Groa herself seemed to waver before Shard's eyes. He'd underestimated his weariness. What she said had to be true. He could think of no reason she would lie to him, or why else she would be there, alone, and so ancient, in the land of the dragons. Slowly, with surety, he began to believe that she was that last gryphoness from Amaratsu's tale, that she alone had escaped the curse of Kajar and his band.\n\nRealizing she'd asked a question, Shard attempted to gather his thoughts again and form an answer. \"I learned a bit of healing from my nest-mother. Yes.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" She sighed deeply and the fire glowed hotter. \"The vala are never wrong.\"\n\n\"Vala?\"\n\n\"Prophets of the Vanhar. Enough now.\" She tapped talons on the stone floor and it sounded like brittle bones. \"Iluq, help Shard fetch strong, supple twigs from our supply for a splint. Shard, if you need sinew for the binding you may pull it from the dream net.\" She tilted her head back to indicate the strange, round web over her head.\n\n\"Oh. No,\" Shard said, eyeing the intricate pattern of woven sinews. \"No, I can use mud to pack and hold it and the torn flesh, until I reach the dragons. They should be able to help me if I need to redo it.\"\n\nGroa turned her ears toward him, then laughed, and laughed, and the sound was oddly strong and true for such an aged creature. \"Dragons? Help a griffin? No, my young friend, better to stay here. Better to stay and learn the ways of dream catching, as befits a seer and a healer such as the Summer King. Are you a seer?\"\n\n\"Sometimes.\" Shard watched Iluq, who pawed diligently through the pile of kindling for good splint material. \"I don't have much control over it, though.\"\n\n\"Many do not. But I learned much from Iluq, here, and the windward-most dwelling ravens of the Sunland, about dreams. With a net such as mine, you may see almost anything, any time you wish.\"\n\n\"Were you trying to find me? Is that why I saw Iluq? He appeared to me as a white star.\"\n\n\"You saw Iluq because you are the Summer King and your dreams guide you where you should go. Later, I saw you because I wished to. Yes, I was trying to find you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nShe made a low, strange noise that Shard recognized after a moment was a purring chuckle. \"Because you seek the truth, and I possess it. I can tell you what you need to know about the dragons of the Sunland.\"\n\nShard leaned forward. \"I would like to hear that. And you can teach me about this dream catching? How to see things in my dreams on purpose?\" Shard wasn't even sure if his own father had been able to do that. He'd never asked Stigr, and regret speared him.\n\n\"See,\" Groa confirmed, \"and speak to others so they hear.\"\n\nShard marveled, and he almost stood again. A dancing pain shot up his leg. \"It would be an amazing gift. Let me set this leg, and we'll talk more.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Groa simply. \"Iluq will help you.\"\n\nThat said, Iluq brought his selection of strong pine sticks to Shard. First would be to set the bones straight. Because Iluq had no way to grip and Shard suspected Groa didn't possess the strength to do it right on the first try, he had to do it himself. Gingerly, he wrapped his talons around the broken ends of the bone, sucked a breath, and with a yank, a twist, and a bright, stunning pain, his leg was straight again.\n\n\"Iluq,\" Shard gasped, every muscle trembling. \"I need mud. And, the skin must be set back over the muscle.\" Tenderly, the little fox helped Shard to correct the torn flesh and muscle, cleaned by salt water but still ripped. A trickle of water ran down a sliver in the rock in the back of the cave, and Iluq clawed enough mud to pack around the splints and the damaged skin, as Sigrun had taught Shard. That done, Shard stretched out, with his throbbing leg toward the fire, hoping the mud dried hard enough to hold it in place.\n\nWhen that was finished at last, Iluq brought him smoked fish. With food in his belly he could think clearly, and he hoped Groa would indeed be able to remember all and tell him of Kajar, and the dragons.\n\n\"Lady Groa, I would like very much to hear what you know of dragons, and to learn dream catching from you. But how long might it take? I must find the dragons, find my nest-son and be sure he's well.\"\n\nHer delicate ears flicked back. \"The dragons will not help you as I can help you, but because you already posses the power to see in your dreams, I could teach you in perhaps two nights. Perhaps one, if your strength holds out.\"\n\n\"One night?\" He ground down and swallowed the last of his fish. \"If you can do that, then I would be grateful.\"\n\n\"Then I will teach you, even as I tell you my tale of Kajar. I will show you in a dream, the way you may learn to show others images in dreams, if you possess the knack.\" Her milky eyes narrowed in concentration, though she stared just beyond Shard in the wrong direction to be looking at him. \"First, tell me what you know of Kajar and what you think you know of the dragons.\"\n\nSo Shard told all he knew, which was very little, ending with, \"...then the emperor of the dragons issued them a challenge to choose friendship or more power and riches, and Kajar said he needed to think it over. But when a friendly dragon went to find Kajar, he and the other griffins betrayed and killed her. Then they gathered what treasures the dragons had given them and left the Sunland.\" Shard yawned, sleepy in the warmth, and Iluq curled up at his flank as if they were old friends.\n\nGroa didn't say anything, and so Shard continued, watching her expression. \"One gryphoness didn't face the emperor dragon's challenge. She thought it was a trap. She fled, and no one knew what became of her.\" Shard lifted his head, raising his voice. \"It's true, isn't it? And you're her.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said at last. \"I was the gryphoness who fled the dragon emperor, I who never returned home, I who avoided the bright curse of Kajar and his followers. And what became of them, do you know?\"\n\nFeeling hesitant, Shard told the end of the story as he knew it. \"Their descendants were forced to leave the Winderost when the wyrms\u2014Voiceless, Nameless cousins of the dragons, invaded.\"\n\n\"Invaded,\" Groa echoed. \"And why, I wonder?\"\n\n\"I've wondered the same thing,\" Shard confessed. \"I was told that they were jealous of the Sunland dragon's love for the griffins, of their esteem, jealous that they were given treasures and it drove them to anger and hatred.\"\n\nGroa scoffed. \"And where did you hear this story?\"\n\nAgain, Shard hesitated, sensing that Groa grew more frustrated, or angry, at the account, though he didn't know why. \"A dragon,\" he said. \"A Sunland dragon. A friend. She saved my life and in return I hatched her son.\"\n\n\"It's such a simple tale,\" Groa said disdainfully. \"Almost like a kit's story, don't you think?\" She seemed to weave before him and Shard wondered if he was succumbing to the heat of the fire. \"So simple. Passed down for a hundred dragon generations. They lead such short lives. And you don't think some parts might have changed in the telling? You heard this story one hundred times removed from a dragon who was not there.\"\n\nShard hadn't considered that, when first he'd met Amaratsu, but now he did, and wondered. Groa lifted herself up and Shard felt like he should rush to her side and assist, but he was so weary. The pain in his leg had finally eased a little with the stability of the splint, the warm fire crackled and he only stared as she opened drab wings to frame the dream net above her head.\n\n\"I will tell you the true account, and you may judge after. Let yourself grow tired, young prince. Let yourself succumb to sleep, and listen to me. I will see you in a dream, and you will see me, as you have once before. Listen and dream as I tell you all as I remember it. I, Groa of the Vanhar, I who was there.\"\n\nShard's gaze trailed up her ancient feathers and then along the spiral web of the dream net until he felt caught, the hot fire and his weariness overcame him. The whisper of Groa's voice that had drawn him to the valley drew him into the dream she wove for him. Together they followed a familiar starfire to a Sunland day that had dawned a hundred years before Shard was born.\n\n[ A New Tale ]\n\n\"I flew with Kajar to represent the Vanhar on the glorious flight windward, the flight that followed the starfire.\" In the dream, Shard saw everything as if he and Groa flew side by side. As if she called up ghosts, griffins and dragons appeared and moved before them to show Shard the tale.\n\n\"The beginning was, perhaps, much as the dragon told you. We met the dragons when we came to the Sunland and, yes, we were all taken with each other. You've seen how majestic, how impressive, how powerful the dragons are. Of course Kajar, who was young and had an eye for strength and opportunity, was captivated by them.\"\n\n\"As the dragon told you, we settled there for some time, learning of fire\u2014though they never told us how to make it, only feed it. We saw them turn raw metals into liquid fire and back into metals again. They possessed great stores of jewels which, with their talons, they could cut into any shape they like.\"\n\n\"The dragon kit I'm helping,\" Shard said, and his voice sounded far away to his own ears. \"His claws can dig through stone.\"\n\nGroa's blind eyes seemed to flicker. \"Yes. And much more when he is grown. I saw dragon claws cut diamond.\"\n\nShe laughed at the memory and as she laughed, her age faded and he saw a young, fit huntress the shape and size of a Vanir.\n\n\"The hardest stone imaginable, you know, a relic from the First Age, and precious to dragons. Their most prized gems were the ones of the brightest colors, the ones that reflected their beautiful scales\u2014their scales, which change to at least four miraculous hues through the course of their lifetime. A new skin for each season. They used metal and stone to create adornments which flattered their scales, and it was Kajar who asked if they could make armor. Intrigued, they forged gauntlets, collars, and helms to\u2014\"\n\n\"Helms?\"\n\n\"To protect the head. Crafted specially for a griffin's face. Did Kajar not take any of those home?\"\n\n\"No,\" Shard said. \"Or I've never seen them. Maybe they were already so burdened it would've been too heavy to take over the sea.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. It would make sense.\" They hovered effortlessly in the half light of the dream place she had created, a Sunland from long ago. She swept her talons through the air, sculpting a shape from the wind, and held out to Shard a headpiece of gleaming bronze. It was shaped to fit over a griffin head, contoured around the ears and eyes and with a clasp under the chin easy for talons to manage. Shard studied the vision, intrigued, and then Groa flicked her talons open, and it disintegrated. \"Oh, Shard, you should have seen Kajar in the full armor they cast for him. Glorious, young prince. It was glorious, though cumbersome to fly in. There would be no enemy who could defeat him in that dragon armor.\"\n\n\"The wyrms of the Winderost\u2014\"\n\n\"If you will listen quietly,\" Groa said with all the patience of a mother, \"I will tell all I remember, and then you may ask your questions at the end, if I haven't answered them.\"\n\nShard dipped his head in apology, and in the dream she could see the gesture. \"Pardon me.\"\n\nGroa continued, and though Shard smelled smoke, he saw only her vision. Enormous dragons soared through his vision. As she wove the dream he also watched what she did, and thought he understood how she led him from one image to the next.\n\n\"They would not teach us how to make fire. It was then I began to suspect they weren't as enlightened and flawless as we first thought.\" The half light of the dream darkened to a hazy red with her change in mood, like sunset just before a storm, and Shard shuddered.\n\n\"And worse, something changed in us at the sight of sparkling gems and moonlight shining on gold. The treasures also began to seep into the minds and hearts of many of Kajar's warriors, and they competed with each other to see who could charm the more elaborate or bejeweled bit of gold or silver or armor from the dragons. Oh, the dragons found us amusing. We would host games and contests of skill to show off, to impress them.\"\n\nShard saw fighting arenas nestled in the valleys of vast, snowy mountains. The arenas, built to accommodate dragons sparring, filled with competing griffins.\n\n\"These games grew fiercer and more dangerous with each passing turn of the sun until, at last, the unthinkable happened. A griffin, in the midst of mock-battle, lost himself in the fight, blinded by the prospect of winning, of treasure, deafened by the encouraging roars of the dragons. He killed his own wingbrother.\"\n\nShard closed his eyes against the sight\u2014against Groa's vivid memory of the battle. Almost afraid to know, he asked, \"Who?\"\n\nGroa stared below. \"The murderer was Kajar. And his wingbrother, his closest sworn ally and friend, was my brother. To kill one's own wingbrother\u2014unthinkable. That was the first blood to stain Kajar's name.\"\n\nEyes narrowed, his heart cold, Shard looked toward the arenas. \"What happened then?\"\n\n\"All grieved after the death of my brother,\" Groa said at length. \"The dragons felt terrible\u2014or acted so\u2014that their encouragement had led to the accident. They made us more gifts. More things,\" she said, her voice sharpening, \"as if metal and stones could replace my brother. They burned his body, the highest honor of their kind. But our hearts were turning cold. I longed for home. Kajar, I could tell, longed for home, for his family.\n\n\"Our band was splitting into those who sympathized with him and those who desired revenge, though on Kajar himself or the dragons no one could decide. There was so much anger and fear. It had been nearly a year at that point, mind you. I should have been there for him, Shard, but I never spoke to him again. I know what it is to become Nameless in the hunt, to forget yourself in a fight, but I never thought it would happen to Kajar. Not his noble bloodline, the blood of the very first kings to ever rise out of the dust of the Winderost.\n\n\"Kajar began asking more questions. Where did all the gold come from? For we'd kept exploring and found no tunnels or the mines of which the dragons spoke. He demanded to know where the riches came from, why the dragons were so powerful, why they led such brief lives. Why wouldn't they teach us how to make fire? Oh, they didn't like the questions. They thought he was being greedy.\"\n\n\"He was curious,\" Shard said softly, more to himself then her. Amaratsu's story was much simpler, more misguided, or, as Groa had said, kit-like in its portrayal of the events. For a moment the vision of the Sunland faded, and he saw only mist, and her voice in his mind. \"I would have been curious too, after that.\"\n\n\"Yes. Anyone would have been. Certainly a prince like Kajar. I don't know what they say of him in the Winderost now, Shard, but I wish you could have known him as I did.\"\n\nShard thought of Kjorn, and was able to imagine what Kajar might have been like. \"I do too.\"\n\nGroa seemed to gather herself, re-appearing as her young self in the dream and flinging her wings out. The vision of the Sunland and the dragons and griffins unfurled before Shard again.\n\n\"Kajar, disgusted with himself and with the dragons, disillusioned, made preparations to leave.\" Groa's voice swelled with a distant passion, and for the last part of the tale she looked and sounded young again, as if it had only happened the day before. \"The dragon emperor was displeased. Perhaps he feared we would try to take revenge later, or would spread tales of the sad events through our homeland.\" A mountainous dragon whose scales shimmered like pearl flashed before Shard's eyes.\n\n\"He invited Kajar and all his warriors to a feast, and Kajar agreed, mostly to make sure his band was well-fortified for the flight home, and to make as peaceful an end possible.\n\n\"The dragons laid out every extravagant manner of food you could imagine, Shard. Fish from the deepest sea, seabird eggs boiled in water using fire, mussels, seal, great carcasses of snow bear and penguin and reindeer.\" Shard saw the feast, and through Groa's memory, smelled it too. \"Much of it they roasted using fire, but we never cared for the taste of it. It appeared to be a gesture of honor and friendship.\n\n\"Kajar knew better. We knew better. We ate politely, made conversation, spoke of our homeland while not exactly saying which direction it was. Near the end of feast, the emperor rose, and, looming enormous over the rest of the gathering, asked Kajar's forgiveness. It was then that he told us from whence all the jewels and metal ore had come.\n\n\"He spoke of other dragons in a green land in the far, far, Nightward Sea, a land rich with metals and jewels. He spoke of those dragons, but called them wyrms, more like beasts than Named allies, who toiled happily in exchange for shining things. All the Sunland dragons had to do was promise them ornaments, and they dug in their mines, took orders, submitted to discipline. A reward here and there, for the wyrms are much longer lived than any other being, with an ancient memory.\n\n\"Do they also battle for your entertainment? Kajar asked him. I nearly choked, Shard, while Kajar continued. Do you dangle pretty pieces of metal at them rather than teach them the ways of honor, friendship, the light of Tyr, and use their own greed against them? Why do they toil for you, if not out of ignorance or fear? For Kajar could see the dragons had no love for those nightward wyrms, no respect, only contempt.\n\n\"All they care for in the world is gold, the emperor responded. Will you be like them? Or will you accept our true friendship?\"\n\nA dark sense of foreboding and revelation sat heavily over Shard's heart, and he gazed, rapt at the scene Groa painted for him. But it wavered and faded before him. Then he remembered that part in Amaratsu's version of the tale. \"That's when you left. You knew it was some kind of test.\"\n\n\"I admit, Shard, I was a coward then. I could feel the tension gathering like a thunderstorm. I claimed the cooked meat made me ill and fled the gathering. I left the dragon's grounds and waited outside the limit of their territory, where I could see if the rest of my companions made flight, and join them home.\n\n\"But instead of a great host of griffins flying, after a time I saw them walking out of the dragon's territory, toward where I hid in the foothills beyond the mountains where the dragons nest. A single dragon joined them. I knew her. She'd only just hatched the summer before we arrived, and had lived her whole short life knowing griffins\u2014and she was besot with Kajar from the moment we'd arrived, whether as a brother or in some other way I never knew. They came close to me, but I didn't trust the dragon, and I stayed hidden in a cluster of rocks, eavesdropping.\n\n\"She told Kajar she'd never met the wyrms but that she felt as Kajar did, that there had to be another way of mining their gems, or a more equal partnership. She knew the emperor took advantage of the wyrms' hunger for gold and thought it was wrong. She admired Kajar, and feared for him, for standing up to the emperor. And it was there, in front of all his gathered warriors, and I who wouldn't come out of hiding, that this now old and withered dragoness told Kajar that she loved him, and that she had a gift for him, a true gift.\n\n\"Help me die, she asked of him. I am old, she said, and I don't want to live in this land without you. I hurt, and I cannot bear the greed of my brothers and sisters any more.\n\n\"Kajar said she could fly with them and she only laughed and answered that she was too old, that she would fall in the ocean and die there.\n\n\"'I give you the gift of my love,' she told Kajar, and the others. 'I am summerborn, and my element is fire. With my death and the fire of my blood you will see yourselves as I see you. The world will see you as I see you and your descendants for all time will bear the strength and beauty of the Sunland in their blood. But be warned, with a dragon's blessing, everything that you are will be more so. If you are strong, you will be stronger. If you are arrogant, you will be more so, and if you are fearful and dishonest, you may lose yourself and your very name. If you are kind and honorable, there will be no creature alive to match you, and the blessing on you will serve as something to aspire to, or as a warning against arrogance and greed.\n\n\"'Take the gifts my kin and I made for you, to remember us by, but remember they are not us, they are not our friendship or our time together. Only remembrances, only rocks and metal. Kajar,' she begged him them, 'now let me die.'\n\n\"I looked away, Shard. I knew Kajar would do as she asked. I heard great gasps from the rest of the warriors and I looked back, expecting to see them covered in dragon blood\u2014but oh\u2026I cannot tell you how it looked. Her body had burned into shining red flames like fire, but so much brighter, and washed Kajar and the others in that fire. Then it faded, and they stood there with her ashes and the snow. They looked radiant, like cut jewels. The colors that had once been natural were now impossible hues. Kajar himself, once ruddy like a Winderost hawk, now blazed the red of a dying fire.\n\n\"I'm sure the rest of the tale is much as your friend Amaratsu said. I fled after that, fearing for Kajar and the others, fearing for myself. I couldn't bear to go home without my brother, without the blessing of the dragon on my feathers and in my blood. I have been here ever since, learning of the other creatures here, of dream catching, of fire\u2026and at last, at long last, I heard a bit of silver in the wind. I heard a song of summer, and I sought you.\"\n\nAs the dream images melted into a vague, starry twilight around them, Shard tried to gather his scattering awe. He had no words.\n\nGroa laughed softly. \"Shall I teach you dream catching and weaving? Then you may seek visions of your own, or send dreams to others, to any who dream.\"\n\n\"I watched you,\" Shard murmured. \"I think I understand.\"\n\nThey stood on a familiar cliff, and the thick scent of seawater and pine drew a loose breath from Shard's throat. The Silver Isles.\n\nGroa shimmered before him. \"Is this your home?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" As she had done, he opened his wings, and felt in that place that he could gather and send his thoughts and his heart ever outward for all the dreaming world to hear. From his wingtips burst an apparition of Stigr, and the black griffin wisped in front of them like smoke before fading.\n\n\"Well done,\" Groa murmured. Her voice sounded old again, breathless, and he noticed that she was blind again in the dream. It was now his dream. \"Again.\"\n\nThrough her eyes he saw the dream net, and understood at once how the spirals echoed in the waking world\u2014the winds and star light and the darkness of night tilted and turned in patterns repeated by leaves, shells, unfurling wings and beating hearts. He saw how he could soar along a strand and find a friend's dream, and weave an image for them.\n\nSo Shard did it again, folding together the salt wind, the stars and earth to show Groa all the things that he loved. He showed her the pride, his birth mother Ragna, his nest-sister, Thyra, now a queen. Stern Caj and practical, caring Sigrun. For her he wove wolves rushing through the dark forest, and Aodh the graying caribou king, and the laughing ravens, Hugin and Munin. He showed her Brynja, the huntress's wings broad and ruddy as fire in the dream light, and Groa laughed in delight to his desires displayed.\n\n\"I thought you might have the knack.\"\n\n\"You see why I have to go,\" Shard said, and drew forward all his memories of Kjorn, and his new and dear memories with Hikaru. \"You see why I have to try.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Groa said. \"And I wish you all luck and the blessings of each wind. But I urge you to be wary about the dragons. They are not all that they seem. There will be one dragon among them who keeps separate the truth and the lies. A storyteller, I can't recall\u2026\"\n\n\"Do you know that dragon's name?\"\n\n\"In my time it was a dragoness called Umeko, and she was my friend. She gave me a silver chain. But she had a title too, I can't\u2026I can't recall. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I will find a dragon to tell me the truth. Thank you.\" They stood on a dream of the Copper Cliff, near the King's Rocks. \"Thank you for all of this.\"\n\nGroa seemed bright, and he realized he could see the sea and the sky behind her, through her. She was waking, leaving his dream. \"I have told you all I can, and I grow weary.\"\n\nA sound made him aware of his body, of the cave, the smell of smoke. He was waking, too. For a moment he strained to remain there, to find Catori or his mother or a raven and tell them he was well.\n\n\"It is morning, young prince, and time to fly.\"\n\nGroa seemed to speak in his heart, not his ears. \"Shard. I have two last gifts for you, Shard.\"\n\nShard curled tighter on himself, eyes closed. Bitter wind gusted beyond the warm cave.\n\n\"Shard,\" she whispered, and he made a soft sound of acknowledgement, unable to open his eyes, still trying to see her in the dream. He was so weary, the story was almost too much to take in, and his leg ached from too long in one position.\n\n\"Come over to me, Rashard. I have two gifts for you. The first is a set of fire stones. A raven stole them from the dragons for me. You need only strike them together to make a spark, and if you have dry tinder ready, you will have fire. The second is the only dragon treasure that I bothered to keep.\"\n\nHer words overlapped the very last dregs of his dream, she seemed to call him from across the waves.\n\n\"Shard. Shard, come over to me.\"\n\nCome over to me.\n\nShard.\n\nShard jerked awake. As he opened his eyes, the dream still felt more real, for a moment, than the cave. Dull silvery light touched the entrance, and the last warmth was seeping out into the rock. The cave was empty.\n\nThe fire was dead.\n\nTrembling, Shard pushed himself to his feet, favoring his leg. \"Groa?\" He peered around. She could not have left without him hearing. Really, she couldn't have left without crawling over him. \"Iluq? Groa!\"\n\nHe spun around. She was only just here, just speaking to me!\n\nAfter shaking himself hard enough to jolt his injured leg, Shard limped around to the other side of the fire ring, and stopped, looking closely.\n\nThere lay the bones he couldn't identify before, from behind the smoke and fire. There, where the ancient, blind, impossible gryphoness had sat weaving her dream tale, lay the bones he'd thought were wolf bones. But as Shard looked closer he saw that the dusty skeleton had the unmistakable skull of a griffin, and two tucked sequences of bones had once been wings, now coated by dust and the decay of ancient feathers just barely preserved in the cold.\n\n[ The Queens' Decree ]\n\nThe wide but low-ceilinged den where Ragna dwelled, alone, faced the starward sea and boasted a view of the Star Isle. A respectably sized cave for a small griffin family, or one queen, it was now filled to cramping with Caj, Sigrun, Ragna herself, Thyra, Halvden and his mate Kenna, and her wingsister, Astri.\n\nCaj watched the Widow Queen. After the first bustle of outrage at Halvden's return, the chaos of Aesir, Vanir and half-bloods alike demanding Halvden pay for his crimes, the Vanir queen had ushered them away for private council.\n\nUnlike Sverin, Ragna preferred to deal with large matters privately, not loudly before the pride.\n\nIt was Thyra, however, who allowed Astri and Kenna to be present.\n\nCaj, Sigrun, Astri, and Kenna sat ringing the back of the den like an audience, while Halvden stood before Ragna and Thyra, who blocked the exit and were outlined in sunlight. They'd let him sleep through the night in a guarded, empty den.\n\n\"Halvden, son-of-Hallr,\" Ragna said quietly. \"You stand ready to admit your crimes and atone?\"\n\nHalvden looked at her, then turned and addressed Thyra. \"I do, my lady.\"\n\nBeside Caj, Sigrun tensed at the affront to Ragna. He nudged her with a wing, trusting their daughter to handle the situation.\n\n\"You will show respect,\" Thyra said, \"to the regent of the Sun Isle.\"\n\n\"You are my queen,\" Halvden said, voice low. \"If Sverin is restored to his senses, he will be my king. If not, then when Kjorn returns, I will bow to him alone, and atone for my crimes to him.\"\n\nCaj had to admire that he held his tail still, didn't show his agitation. Young Astri, star-white but brighter than Ragna in the way of a half-blood Aesir, let out a muffled, whimpering snarl. Kenna tapped her beak in warning.\n\nRagna remained unruffled, cool and still as marble. She turned her head to face Thyra as well. \"What will you then, my lady?\" Her voice sounded too amused at the idea that Halvden thought he had any choice in his punishment at all, or who he would respect, and not.\n\n\"Halvden, as usual, you spew bold and arrogant words,\" Thyra said coldly. Even though her belly bulged, she stood tall and fair in the dim afternoon light, and Caj could have fluffed with pride. \"My father led me to believe that you were willing to show humility, that you were ready to ask forgiveness. Of all the warriors in this pride, it is his forgiveness you should seek. You tried to murder him. You lied. You covered your lies with further, cowardly lying, and when Kjorn himself returned and presented himself to Sverin, you tried to discredit him. Him, the very prince you now claim to wish to serve. Tell me why we should allow you to live, much less to atone for these unforgiveable crimes?\"\n\nKenna made a quiet noise and Caj glanced to her, unable to tell if the violet huntress approved of, or feared, Thyra's questioning.\n\nWith a quick, seeking glance at Caj, Halvden shifted, his gaze flickering with the first sign of doubt. Then, to the surprise of all, he mantled low.\n\n\"For the sake of my unborn kit. For your own sense of honor.\" There was a long, cold silence, thick with gathering anger. Head bowed, Halvden lifted only his fierce golden eyes to Ragna, and to Caj's surprise, addressed the Widow Queen again. \"Now you may prove that you're a better and more merciful queen than Sverin was king, that the Vanir are all you say they are.\"\n\n\"Let it never be said you aren't clever,\" Ragna murmured, and Caj had to agree. He exchanged a dark look with Sigrun, and feared he may have been soft and foolish in sparing Halvden's life.\n\nThe green warrior bowed his head again. Ragna and Thyra looked to Kenna, and Ragna spoke. \"You chose Halvden as your true mate this summer last. Tell me, do you still desire him, after all that has happened? He begs for his life in the name of his unborn kit. Do you wish for him to be father to your young, if he changes as he promises?\"\n\nKenna's beak opened slightly, perhaps stunned to be asked such questions. Her gaze rested on Halvden and for the first time, he appeared hesitant. But he did lift his eyes and in that look, Caj saw with some reassurance that he was at the mercy of at least one gryphoness there. When Kenna hesitated to answer, Caj saw in Halvden's flattened ears and widened eyes that he loved her, that he actually felt regret, that he was afraid. And, it seemed, so did Kenna.\n\n\"I do,\" she said, low but clear, for hers was not a whispering nature. \"I hope he will atone for everything and make himself better for the pride and for his family.\"\n\nThyra nodded. \"Then he will have his chance\u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" Astri rose, having endured all she could. Sigrun stood with her, making a soothing sound, and Caj saw that she feared for the young gryphoness. \"No, how could you? It was he who goaded Sverin, he who tried to kill Caj! He faked Kjorn's death, he bullied my mate! He is wicked, my queens, I beg you, he must die.\"\n\nCaj stood, seeing that Astri was ready to leap and murder Halvden herself. Her white wings raised like gleaming sheets of ice, beak opened in a pant, her eyes pinpointed in disbelief and feral panic. \"You cannot let him get away with this.\"\n\n\"Calm yourself,\" Sigrun said, her own expression guarded. \"Think of your kit.\"\n\n\"I am! I am thinking of my kit, and my mate whose blood is not just on Sverin's talons, but on his!\"\n\nShe leaped. Caj barreled between her and Halvden even as Kenna caught the smaller gryphoness around the chest to restrain her.\n\n\"I didn't kill Einarr!\" Halvden shouted, his temper and pride at last unleashed.\n\n\"You as good as did,\" Astri cried. \"You wretch. My queen,\" she begged first of Thyra, then Ragna, both of whom remained where they were, fearing perhaps that Halvden would take the chance to flee the cave. \"Please, you cannot let his crimes go unpunished. He doesn't deserve your mercy.\"\n\n\"Enough now,\" Ragna said quietly. \"This will not do. We have all been injured. We have all suffered loss. He will not go unpunished. Contain yourself.\"\n\n\"Astri,\" Thyra murmured. \"My friend. We have hunted together, shared injury. Laughed, and wept. We chose our mates on the same Daynight. You must trust in me now, and remember that shedding more blood will not bring Einarr back.\"\n\nAstri crumpled in Kenna's grip. Her wings fell to her sides, Kenna loosened her hold, and Astri sat back, touching gentle talons to her belly.\n\n\"Tyr watches you,\" she whispered to Halvden. \"You may say pretty things to appease those here, but there is one who knows your true heart and you will atone in the end\u2014here, or in the Sunlit Land.\"\n\nHalvden laid back his ears, but wisely said nothing.\n\n\"Wingsister,\" Kenna murmured.\n\n\"No.\" Astri broke away, stumbling on her own wing before folding it, and brushed by Ragna, who allowed her to pass. \"No. I'm not. Not anymore. You severed that vow by choosing him.\"\n\n\"If it were Einarr,\" Kenna began, and Caj thought she couldn't have chosen a poorer comparison, \"wouldn't you choose him?\"\n\nAstri paused in the entrance, looking like a snowflake in the low light. \"I am,\" she breathed, and left with a whimper, climbing out of sight.\n\n\"Sigrun,\" Caj began, but his mate knew her work well, and was already following.\n\n\"With your leave,\" she murmured to both queens.\n\n\"Take care of her, Mother,\" Thyra said quietly.\n\n\"I will.\" Sigrun turned a wicked glare to Halvden, who actually looked struck by Astri's pain. \"You. If you have it in your greedy, conniving heart to speak an honest word or do one genuine thing for another, now is the time to begin. Then, maybe, you will see forgiveness.\"\n\nAfter giving Caj a measuring look, as if to gauge his intelligence for letting Halvden live, she left.\n\n\"I should go too,\" Kenna said, and walked close to Halvden. \"She's right. Now is the time to begin.\"\n\nHalvden met her gaze, then lowered his head.\n\nKenna search his face, laid her ears back in a warning look, and left the cave to help tend Astri.\n\nCaj stood. \"If you're done with my presence, my ladies, I must resume my search.\"\n\n\"Your search,\" Ragna said thoughtfully. She drew herself up, watching him. \"Caj, it's taking too long. It's becoming a wolf hunt.\" Ever since Sverin's obsession with hunting wolves that winter, \"wolf hunt\" was a phrase the Vanir used for any pursuit that could be deemed mad or fruitless.\n\nCaj fought against a growl.\n\nRagna lifted her wings in warning. \"I know you fear it will harm your efforts but I must insist on sending warriors. Halvden can tell them where Sverin is sheltering, and they will restrain him until you arrive and can try to restore him to his senses. This is what we should have done from the start. In honor of you and of Sigrun, I didn't act when she told me of your search. I must act now.\"\n\nCaj kept silent until he had something to say. The decision was not brash\u2014he could see she meant no harm or disrespect. On the surface the idea sounded sensible, but he could think of nothing more foolish than to send more griffins into Sverin's path.\n\n\"Father,\" Thyra said quietly, and he looked at her, feeling betrayed to see that she agreed. \"You see the sense of it. It will take you too long, and when you reach him, you'll be alone.\"\n\n\"I must be alone,\" Caj said, looking between them. Halvden watched, looking relieved that the focus was off him for a moment. \"He will attack any other. I won't risk that.\"\n\n\"And if he attacks you?\" Thyra asked, and her gaze fell on his broken wing. \"You couldn't possibly hope to overcome him.\"\n\n\"I'm the only one who could hope to overcome him, daughter.\" Caj managed to keep the growl from his voice. He dipped his head. \"My ladies. You must allow me to continue. You must leave him to me.\"\n\n\"In your condition,\" Ragna said, \"you could not best him.\"\n\nCaj could tell she hadn't meant it to insult him, but it pierced his pride nonetheless, and for a moment it was all he could do to restrain his temper.\n\n\"He bested me.\"\n\nThey all looked at Halvden.\n\n\"In his condition,\" he clarified when Ragna and Thyra only stared at him, and he nodded to indicate Caj's wing. \"I'm not Sverin, but still, he bested me. Forgive me for interrupting, but I have seen Sverin most recently. Caj is the only one who can hope to make him see reason. He'll feel threatened by anyone else, he'll\u2026\" He looked between the two gryphonesses and a keen look came into his eyes. \"Ah, but you don't mean for Sverin to return alive, do you?\"\n\n\"Don't goad him,\" Ragna warned, and Caj realized it was exactly was Halvden was trying to do.\n\nThyra stepped forward, answering Caj's quiet growl. \"Father, he's wrong. Of course we do want him alive. If it's possible.\"\n\n\"If it's possible,\" Caj echoed flatly.\n\nThyra watched him warily, and behind her, Ragna remained quiet, deferring. \"Father, Sverin threatened me with exile and death even knowing I carry Kjorn's kit. He killed Einarr, who tried to serve loyally until it became clear that Sverin was mad. Before he left me, Kjorn was resigned to let us do what we needed to do if his father could not be contained nor brought to see reason.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea what will happen?\" Caj looked between both queens. \"He could kill anyone you send. Do you want more weeping gryphonesses to tend to? More injuries, more death?\"\n\n\"Not even Sverin could best a number of young, healthy warriors,\" Ragna murmured.\n\n\"He's not Sverin anymore,\" Halvden said. \"My lady. He's not a king, not an Aesir even. He's Nameless.\" He looked to Thyra. \"He's a wild, starving beast, desperate to survive. He has no sense of honor. He won't spare them for the sake of their families.\" He looked at Caj. \"Or they'll kill him. Something has driven him mad, and mad he remains.\"\n\n\"Be silent,\" Ragna snapped, showing a temper at last. Caj agreed, though he recalled earlier that winter during the Long Night, when Ragna hinted she knew something about Sverin that Caj himself didn't, some guilt. Something enough, perhaps, to drive a king mad. Ragna shook her head. \"It's no business of yours, now.\"\n\n\"But it is.\" Halvden inclined his head when she fixed her cool green eyes upon him. \"He is my king. More than that, I swore a wingbrother vow. Though he wasn't in his right mind, I was, and I will be true to it.\"\n\nSurprised, Caj appraised Halvden's expression and found it genuine.\n\n\"Very well,\" Ragna said. \"Then you may help by leading our chosen warriors to him. And restrain him, by any means necessary, until Caj can arrive.\"\n\n\"If I could suggest, instead, that I serve Caj. My greatest crime was against him, and it's to him I wish to make amends.\"\n\nHalvden looked sidelong at Caj, and both Thyra and Ragna looked momentarily bewildered by the suggestion.\n\n\"Father?\" Thyra asked. \"It's your decision.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Caj said, tail twitching, \"if Halvden wishes to make amends with me, I will have work enough for him.\"\n\n\"Then let it be so,\" Ragna said. \"Thyra and I will choose warriors. Halvden, tell them where you know of Sverin last sheltering. They will find and restrain him, then fetch you to him so you can attempt to restore him. Does this satisfy all?\" She looked from Thyra to Caj, and Caj could only incline his head. Any other argument would be fruitless.\n\n\"Let it be so,\" Thyra said.\n\n\"Thank you, my lady,\" Halvden murmured graciously, and Caj watched him with growing suspicion.\n\n\"Go make your preparations, and Thyra and I will choose warriors to seek out Sverin.\"\n\n\"They what?\" Sigrun looked dismayed, later in their den when Caj told her. She packed new mud around his wing. \"I shouldn't have left you. I could have convinced Ragna\u2014\"\n\n\"No, they were set. But at least I'll have Halvden,\" he said blandly.\n\n\"Halvden.\" Sigrun nearly spat the name. \"Watch your back.\"\n\n\"He knows I can best him. What's more, I think he genuinely wishes, at least, to prove himself to Kenna. How is Astri?\"\n\n\"Well enough.\" The short answer suggested he shouldn't pursue the matter. Sigrun continued muttering as she combed gentle talons through the feathers of his wing, followed by a cool pack of fast-drying mud. \"Do try not to break this one.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nShe sighed, frustrated, but her soft touched eased Caj's heart. \"All this business with two queens, it does nothing to serve the pride. Everything feels split, disjointed.\"\n\n\"It will be well again, when the princes return.\"\n\nThat thought quieted them both for a moment. Then, at the same time they asked each other, \"What will you do\u2014\"\n\n\"...when Shard returns,\" Sigrun said.\n\n\"...when Kjorn returns,\" Caj said.\n\nThey both paused, then broke out in long, rueful, weary laughter. Very quietly Sigrun said, \"I cannot see Shard exiling anyone, but if it's to be so, then I will go where you are, my mate. If the Aesir return to the windward land, you will have a daughter, her mate and kit and your lost kin there\u2014\"\n\n\"I have a son here, too.\" He stretched out a foreleg, flexing his talons against the rock floor. \"Or maybe that remains to be seen, if he'll even allow Aesir in the Silver Isles.\"\n\nSigrun's voice grew tight. \"Caj\u2026\"\n\n\"It's a possibility we must consider.\" He didn't meet her eyes.\n\n\"I will go where you are,\" she said again, firmly, and finished rebuilding the cast. \"There. That's as well as I can make it. I suppose you won't wait until it's dry to set out.\"\n\n\"I can't. I must try to keep up with Ragna and Thyra's warriors, though they'll be flying. Halvden's already told them where he knew Sverin to be nesting. I can only hope he doesn't kill any of them or fly again before I arrive.\"\n\n\"Be safe,\" Sigrun whispered, touching her beak just behind his ear. Caj tucked his head against hers for a moment, then a rush of wings drew them up.\n\n\"Ready?\" Halvden asked, not entering, but beating his wings hard to hover just outside the den.\n\n\"Show respect,\" Sigrun snipped, and Halvden landed, folding his wings.\n\n\"I'm ready.\" Caj stood.\n\n\"Take care of\u2026each other,\" Sigrun said, tightly acknowledging Halvden. He inclined his head and Sigrun looked back to Caj. \"I will do what I can to help you from here. Don't stray from your path.\"\n\nCaj tilted his head curiously, wondering what she could do from there, but she looked past them toward the entryway and flicked one ear back, indicating she didn't wish to elaborate. He stepped forward to touch his beak just behind her ear. \"I'll see you soon.\"\n\n\"You'd better,\" she murmured. He chuckled, and followed Halvden from the den.\n\nThey walked in silence from the nesting cliffs, and Caj felt eyes on them, pride members watching their departure. They walked nightward, which he found odd, but Halvden had sworn to help him. Gradually, a half mark later, when Caj noticed they were out of sight of the nesting cliffs, Halvden turned starward to follow the Nightrun River.\n\n\"We must move quickly,\" Caj reminded him, alert for betrayal and wary of Halvden's meandering course. \"We must try to find Sverin before Ragna's warriors do. For all her talk of only restraining him, I fear what will happen if they find him first.\"\n\n\"Oh that won't be a problem.\"\n\nCaj stopped walking. They stood under the spindly cover of birch trees, and heard but didn't yet see the river. \"You lied to them.\"\n\nHalvden looked up at the naked, grasping trees. \"Ragna's warriors are heading to the nightward shore as we speak, to search those cliffs there. Far away from the last place I saw Sverin.\" He met Caj's gaze squarely. \"My debt is not to those warriors, but you. And I will take you, alone, to Sverin. We both understand that's best.\"\n\nCaj stared at him, and finally collected himself. It was not his first choice to lie, but the deed was done and he was not above taking advantage of it. \"Then lead on.\"\n\nHalvden nodded once, and turned to lead the way upriver, toward the White Mountains.\n\n[ Mountains of the Sea ]\n\nShard backed away, tail lashing.\n\nHe swallowed hard. It felt as if he swallowed his own heart.\n\nHis hind paw pressed on something sharp. Lifting his foot, Shard peered back, then edged to the side. There, by the fire, lay a small skeleton, and the grinning skull of a fox.\n\nShard fought to keep his breath calm.\n\nTwo gifts, Groa had said. Come over to me.\n\nGulping down his horror and the slow, eerie cold of understanding, Shard crept back to the griffin skeleton.\n\nGrasped within the cracked talons was a pouch of rabbit skin tied shut by two long cords of leather. Inside, Shard found two oddly straight stones. Or not stones exactly. One was metal, the other flint.\n\nFire stones. He looped it over his head by the leather cords for safekeeping.\n\n\"What else?\" he murmured. The only treasure I kept. At first he saw nothing, then when he shifted and faint light shone through the entrance, it caught on a thin, tarnished silver chain that still hung around the skeleton's neck. There was nothing else, no jewel, no thick and gaudy pendant, just a simple, silver chain. If she wanted him to have it so badly, Shard thought, he should take it.\n\nDrawing a breath and murmuring a respectful thank you, he drew the long chain carefully through the neck bones, examined it in the dim light, then slipped it over his head with the pouch. It promptly disappeared beneath his long winter feathers. He'd never been honored with any dragon crafted treasures before, and he found that it didn't make him feel much different.\n\nShard rested his talons briefly on the brow of the skull, wishing her well in the Sunlit Land. He wondered with no small dismay if part of being a Summer King meant that the dead would be speaking to him often, now.\n\n\"Oh,\" said a voice from the entrance, and Shard turned, lifting his wings. Iluq stood there, outlined by the dim and rising light. \"You're awake! I'm sorry I let the fire die.\"\n\nShard didn't know if he'd moved in a dream for the entire night, a dream woven by a long-dead gryphoness, but certainly he was awake now. \"Iluq\u2026\"\n\n\"I know,\" the little spirit said, and Shard tried to catch a scent, realizing, then, that he'd never smelled either of them, and had thought it was only because of the smoke. \"You want to go.\"\n\n\"You should go, too.\" Shard drew a deep breath. \"You should go on, to the Sunlit Land.\"\n\n\"I promised my nest-mother I would wait for you. I promised I would guide you here.\"\n\n\"Thank you for everything,\" Shard said, wondering how long the fox had waited. \"For the fish, and the warmth and the splint. Do you know how I can find the dragons?\"\n\nIluq bared his teeth. \"Oh yes.\" As the dawn light grew, it shone through him until all Shard saw was a beam of sunlight on stone, but he clearly heard Iluq laugh and say, \"Follow Midragur.\"\n\nThe great Wings of Tor spread above Shard as he soared across the Sunland night. After flying all day, the light died and waves of green and trembling pink rippled across the sky. Through them he followed the clustered line of stars of Midragur.\n\nAfter Groa's story he worried for Hikaru, and feared that he'd taught the young dragon a false tale, one that showed griffins in a poor light.\n\nBut what was I to do? He thought, talons flexing. Amaratsu was the only link I had.\u2026\n\nTo know that Kajar had been more honorable, had spoken out against the Sunland dragons using the wyrms to dig their gems, made Shard glad. It would be a good thing to tell Kjorn. A good thing, a tiny part of him thought, to tell Sverin, if the violent Red King would even hear him.\n\nPerhaps I could send him a dream, Shard thought with a chuckle, then sobered, considering it more seriously. But he would not send the king lies. He understood now how Munin had once created false images to trick him. He hadn't dreamed of the Silver Isles since fleeing the Horn of Midragur, and realized it was because he feared what he might see.\n\nThe vision he'd had of Einarr during the whale attack unnerved him. In his heart, he knew that his friend was dead, which meant things were still unwell in the Silver Isles. If he could help to resolve the situation in the Winderost, he could return swiftly home and restore order. That would mean facing the wyrms again.\n\nThe Sunland dragons have their claws in this too and they must help.\n\nSurely the next generation would see reason, would see that perhaps it was only they who stood a chance of speaking sense to the wyrms, of perhaps restoring their hearts and minds.\n\nI wonder, Shard thought with distant hope, if even now Hikaru has managed to convince them.\n\nFlat, icy air forced him to focus on his flight and work hard for lift. The muscles in his wings and chest ached. A dull throbbing pulsed up from his broken leg and eventually pounded through his skull. The landscape below glowed as if under a false, colorful sun and he soared high over rolling hills of snow, plains, and black rock.\n\nAt last, as dawn whispered in the sky, he saw a hard coastline of ice cliffs plunging into the sea. Inland, the cliffs surged into a jagged jaw of dark mountains, their snow swept peaks so high he couldn't see over the top of them, and Shard flew over their foothills.\n\nThe constellation of Midragur dove down beyond the mountains, looking as if it plunged into their heart.\n\nTalons tucked up under his downy chest feathers, wings straight out to soar, Shard peered forward, looking for any sign of the mountain range's inhabitants.\n\nSign of them was obvious, and startling.\n\nUniform, precise shapes formed the face of the mountain and as Shard flew closer, he realized they were ornate pillars and arches carved into the faces of stone. Only dragon claws could have done the work.\n\nSpilling air from his wings, Shard dipped lower, coming upon the mountains at mid-level as he sought an entry. The foot of the mountains looked as any do\u2014rough hills of rock, ice, snow and straggling trees\u2014but about halfway up, long balconies were carved into the sheerest section of the faces, supported by towering columns, and each appeared to lead into a hall carved into the mountain. The dragons had shaped roofs over each balcony, pointed at the top and sweeping down like the bows of a pine tree.\n\nJust as Shard spied what looked like a main entryway, a flash of unnatural blue caught his eye.\n\nA dragon.\n\nAmazement glowed through him. He'd almost expected not to see them, that Amaratsu was a dream, that Hikaru was a dream.\n\nBut he watched as a fully grown dragon of the Sunland slithered out of one of the stone tunnels and whipped out pearlescent, feathered wings, undulating through the air toward Shard in quick, graceful movements. Its scales glittered rich blue, reminding Shard of the sky at midnight.\n\n\"Greetings, great one!\" Shard called, attempting a mid-air bow. \"I am\u2014\"\n\nA rush of wind bowled him forward and he kicked out a hind leg, flaring to a hard stop as another dragon, this one flame-orange, shot overhead from behind him.\n\nShard flapped back, trying to take in their size and majesty. The blue was smaller than the orange, but still enormous. Every scale gleamed like polished sapphire, and gold jewelry glittered from its ears, branching silver horns and nimble fore claws. A long silver mane flickered like flame around its face and in a stiffer ridge down its back.\n\nHe tried again to greet them. \"I am Shard, the son of Baldr, prince of the Silver Isles! I seek Hikaru, and\u2026\"\n\n\"You will come with us,\" boomed the blue dragon Shard could only assume was a sentry.\n\n\"This way,\" said the orange dragoness\u2014Shard knew once she spoke that she was female\u2014and every bit of her also dripped with gold and adornments of polished stone.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nThey fell in on either side of him, dwarfing Shard as a griffin dwarfed a hare. \"Is Hikaru here, and safe? I know some of your number recovered him from the sea\u2014\"\n\n\"You will come with us,\" said the orange again, her voice like crackling flame, \"and be silent.\"\n\nFeeling small, Shard closed his beak and stared down the length of both dragons, trying to determine how many griffins would be able to stand along their backs. Muscled, enormous serpents, they glided straight alongside Shard as gracefully as eels in water. Shard thought of how different the wyrms of the Winderost were, with their thicker bodies more like enormous boar than reptiles, though had had long necks and tails. Their broad wings were bat-like and veined, not feathered, their heads horned and square, their colors dull, earthy. The wyrms had their own kind of majesty, but they were nothing like the winged serpents of the Sunland.\n\nHe noticed the orange dragoness returning his curious stare, and he flicked his ears forward in a friendly gesture. She looked away. Disheartened, Shard looked toward the mountain again. Up close, the stone pillars and sweeping roofs spread dizzyingly high and wide around him. Of course, it was built to a scale that would be comfortable to dragons.\n\nThe dragons dipped under Shard to fly ahead, leading the way across one large, main balcony of stone. Shard had to bob and glide in swift, falcon-like swoops to keep up. Upon entering the mountain, darkness swallowed up the sunlight and huge torches mounted on the pillars lit their way. The floor was so distant, Shard couldn't see it in the dark, for they flew into the middle of the mountain. It reminded him immediately of the Horn of Midragur, and he saw where tunnels on different levels led from outside, and all into the main, hollow expanse.\n\nFar, far away, the distant, twinkling of torches told him the entire mountain was carved and hollowed into dragon dwellings.\n\nWhispers of wind and the shushing rush of wings that sent the torches dancing told him of other dragons, but he didn't have time to look around and see all of them.\n\nHis escorts soared across the great, central cavern and Shard followed, trying to take in as much as he could and remember which way they'd come. Looking up, he saw that little daylight leaked in from outside, but the cavern was so vast the light was swallowed up without brightening the interior, and firelight alone lit the dark hall.\n\nHe'd never seen anything like it before.\n\n\"Are those dens?\" he asked the dragoness, pointing toward archways carved into various tiers of the cavern, and forgetting that he was supposed to remain silent.\n\nThe orange flicked a look to him, then the blue dragon, who rumbled an answer. \"Some. Some are exits. Or workshops. Some are treasure rooms.\"\n\n\"It won't matter to you,\" said the orange.\n\n\"Oh, but it does,\" Shard said. \"I think it's incredible. I want to learn all I can about you.\"\n\nThey exchanged another look. \"You don't understand,\" the dragoness began, but the blue male interrupted her.\n\n\"Be silent now. We are already getting too much attention.\"\n\n\"Are we?\" Shard looked around and behind them. Then he saw the blue was correct. Silent, curious eyes glittered in the firelight from all levels, dragons peering out from behind various pillars, from archways and even crawling in from outside.\n\nA thrill shivered through Shard's chest. \"Hello!\"\n\nThe blue dragon snapped his jaws in warning.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Shard mumbled. \"But I'm so honored and excited to meet you. I never dreamed your home would be like this.\" He paused. \"I would like to know where we're going.\"\n\n\"To the empress,\" answered the blue. \"She will know what to do with you.\"\n\nAt that, his twinge of misgiving deepened. Recalling both versions of Kajar's venture in the Sunland, he realized that the dragons might not be pleased to see him at all, despite his having helped Hikaru. Amaratsu had spoken of them as closing themselves off, disheartened at the greed and shallowness of others.\n\nBut if Groa's version of the story is true, then they might very well see me as a threat, or worse, an outright enemy.\n\nShard folded his talons together and followed his escorts in silence, taking in the lay of the hollow mountain and trying to make out the rest of the dragons who watched them in the dark. If Hikaru was among them, Shard could not see him, and he didn't come forward.\n\nAfter a flight across the mountain cavern, they reached the far side, where only torches lit the stone halls. The blue dragon turned up and slipped under an archway that led into a longer tunnel lined with torches. The orange followed, and instructed Shard to fly just beneath her. He thought the tunnel must be cramped for them, but he could've fit a whole hunting party of griffins side by side and as many above and below him. The floor below them was polished smooth by ages of dragon feet walking, and the ceiling fanged with stalactites.\n\nAhead, the torches ended, and a strange, blue light took their place, an eerie, cool glow around the next bend in the tunnel.\n\nNervous, Shard held his breath as they banked and flew around a long curve.\n\nThey emerged into a cavern of ice, and Shard gasped with delight.\n\nThe faraway sun reached faintly through a mountain of ice to the new cavern, smaller but similar in structure to the first stone hall. Archways and pillars and polished tunnels glowed\u2014translucent white at the top and deepening to turquoise and blue toward the bottom. Fresh, frosty air filled Shard's senses and he fought the urge to shoot ahead of his escorts and dive and play in the strange, magical place.\n\nThe ice columns boasted intricate reliefs of dragons and foreign, decorative patterns. Shard imagined the stone pillars of the first cave also had such carvings, but he hadn't been close enough to see them in the dimmer light.\n\nUpon entering the hall of ice, the dragons turned and glided down, and down to the floor, so far below that Shard's ears crackled as they descended. They must've been flying near the top of the mountain.\n\n\"Land,\" instructed the blue dragon, touching down himself. The flame dragon landed beside him, and Shard between them. He tilted his head back to see the open stretch of ice and air above, as tall as a mountain. The scale of the place nearly sent him reeling, and made him feel the size of a cricket in a griffin den.\n\nJewel-toned dragon heads poked out of various archways and around pillars, either new observers or having followed them from the first cavern. The blue and orange ignored them and walked across the oblong ice floor toward the far end. Shard followed, staring ahead, placing his feet gingerly so as not to slip on the slick ground. His broken leg presented a challenge, forcing him to hobble slowly, with as much dignity as he could muster.\n\nThe great, towering wall of ice at the far end of the cavern was carved into massive reliefs of dragons, eagles and other creatures in a precise pattern that Shard recognized, after a moment, as the layout of the constellations. Twined above all was the great form of a dragon, arching over every beast like a massive rainbow. Midragur.\n\nShard, with the sentries now at his back, walked down the hall of ice, breathing the dry, cold air, and staring.\n\nAt the far end of the hall, framed by pillars and a sweeping roof, was a giant dais of hard packed, crystalline snow and ice.\n\nOn that dais, coiled in layer upon layer of radiant golden scales, waited a dragoness who could only be the empress. Shard couldn't tell where her scales ended and her gold adornments began. Colorful jewels glimmered on each of her five toes, her horns, in rings that pierced her soft deer-like ears, and even in delicate chains and bands on the end of her tail. Parts of her silken, white mane flared free, and in other places, was braided into tight plaits, woven here and there with more jewels, bright feathers and polished gold. A large, liquid red cabochon ruby the size of Shard's head winked and shone from a collar at her throat.\n\nThe blue dragon nudged Shard with a talon and he realized he was staring like a witless magpie. He mantled as low as he ever had, beak tapping the frozen floor, wingtips pressed to the ice. Beside him, both sentries did the same.\n\n\"Rise.\" Her voice slipped through the cavern, deep and rich.\n\nShard stood, leaving his wings open if only to feel slightly larger. \"I'm so honored to be in your presence, my lady. I am Rashard, son-of-Baldr, prince of the Silver Isles in the Starland Sea.\"\n\n\"Welcome, Rashard, to the dragon dwelling of Ryujan, the Mountains of the Sea.\" An almost imperceptible twitch of her claws sent Shard's sentries away. They slipped around themselves, long bodies leaving and re-coiling near an entrance there on the ground level, though they never turned their faces fully from the empress. Shard looked back to the golden dragoness before him.\n\n\"I am Empress Ai, the Radiant. The two-thousand-and-tenth daughter of the First Emperor of Ryujan. Ruler of the Sunland and all the Windward Sea.\"\n\nShard bowed again.\n\n\"You are he,\" the empress began incredulously, \"who Amaratsu's son calls the Shard of Sun?\"\n\n\"I am.\" Shard could imagine her thoughts. Shard of Sun indeed, with my dull gray feathers? I must be nothing to them, unimpressive. What will Hikaru think of me now, too, now that he's seen his own kind?\n\nAs if reading his thoughts, the empress asked, \"Why does he call you this?\"\n\nShard felt the burning of her eyes, all their eyes, all their listening ears. He was the first griffin they had seen in a hundred years. No, he thought. The first griffin any of them had seen. They would've all been born within the last year.\n\nTo them, everything he did would be what griffins did. Everything he said, everything he was, would be the very definition of griffin, to them.\n\nHe inclined his head, mustering more respect. \"He calls me that, because Amaratsu called me that.\" Shard put every ounce of strength in his voice that he could, despite growing apprehension. \"She said I was like a shard of sunlight in the darkness of the cave where we met. Please, is Hikaru well? We encountered blackfish, in the sea, and he\u2014\"\n\n\"He is well.\" The empress shifted, leaning back against her own coils and toying with a long chain that sparkled with at least one thousand cut diamonds. \"It is good you thought to bring him home. If that is your business, you may leave with our blessing. My sentries will show you out, and the best way back across the sea.\"\n\nShard tapped his beak closed for a moment, speechless. \"Thank you. But that isn't the only reason I've come. And I would like to see Hikaru, to speak to him.\"\n\nHer ears flicked, and her black, slit pupils contracted. \"What other reason could you possibly have for coming here? We have nothing for you. And you, I'm quite certain, have nothing for us. You must go. Hikaru, you must know, is quite happy here. Seeing you again will only confuse what he is learning now.\"\n\nShard met her suspicious look with narrowed eyes. \"Will it? What is he learning now, exactly, my lady?\"\n\nWith a soft rumble, the empress unfolded layer upon layer of shining coils, opened her long swan wings and loomed above Shard with a huge, piercing stare. \"Our ways.\"\n\nThough anger began to heat his skin, it would not do to show her disrespect, or temper. \"Please, you must let me speak to him. We're friends. And I have come for other reasons. I think you can help me.\" In trying to sum up all of the reasons he'd come, it was all Shard could say. No wings rustled, not one spying dragon moved. The vast, frigid hall of ice felt like sudden, crushing weight.\n\n\"We have nothing for you,\" she repeated. \"And as for Hikaru, he is better off not\u2014\"\n\n\"Shard!\" A joyous shout cracked through the ice cavern.\n\nBefore the empress could react, Shard found himself knocked to the ice floor in a roiling tumble of polished black scales, feathers and gentle claws.\n\n\"Hikaru!\" He laughed, dizzy with relief even as pain shot up his leg.\n\n\"I told them you'd come, I knew you would find me! I knew you were all right!\" Hikaru butted his head against Shard's and then coiled around him, and Shard stared up at the dragonet who had grown to nearly four times Shard's size during their separation, not even including the length of his neck and tail.\n\n\"Careful, Hikaru, my leg is broken. Of course I found you.\" He freed his forelegs from Hikaru's coil and swiveled to see the empress, who regarded Hikaru with the patience of a gryphoness watching a fledge chase grasshoppers.\n\n\"Forgive me, Ai-hime, Radiant and Gracious One.\" Hikaru bowed his head to the empress and splayed his wings, still hugging Shard in his coils. \"I didn't know if my wingbrother was still alive, and here he is, and well. Forgive me for bursting into your hall.\"\n\n\"It is to be expected,\" the empress said, watching them with an indulgent look, \"from the young.\"\n\nWhispers and mutters broke out through the dragons who peered at them from the various levels and archways, speculating in un-amused tones. Shard's belly tightened and he pressed his talons to Hikaru's scales to remind himself why he was there. The empress twitched her soft ears and the hall fell silent again.\n\n\"Rashard of the Silver Isles, we understand you have come to see Hikaru. But we have no other interest in affairs outside our mountains, and we can be of no help to you. You may shelter with us, and heal, as long as Hikaru takes responsibility for you. You will not wander alone in our tunnels, nor hunt in our waters or surrounding lands without supervision. You will not seek out our treasure rooms or forges. You will not pester any dragon who does not seek your company. You are here for Hikaru's sake and because of my good will and in honor of Hikaru's father and Amaratsu. Do you understand?\"\n\nShard, taken aback, began to speak a protest, but Hikaru squeezed him gently, and his liquid-gold eyes hooded with warning.\n\n\"Yes,\" Shard said slowly, turning back to the empress. \"Yes, my lady. As you wish.\"\n\n\"I will look after him,\" Hikaru said, and the nearly adult depth of his voice, so serious in tone, sent a shiver through Shard. \"Thank you for your generosity, Radiant One.\" Dipping his head low, he murmured to Shard, \"Come with me. Please stay silent. I'll explain everything.\"\n\nShard inclined his head deeply, to show Hikaru he'd heard, to hide a new wash of frustration, and to show respect to the empress. Hikaru uncoiled from Shard and they bowed again, and Shard followed Hikaru's lead when he backed toward the ground-level exit, not turning his face from the empress. He ground his beak, wanting to ask when he could see her again, speak his piece and ask for assistance. But the young dragon promised him an explanation.\n\nAs they neared the exit, Shard's feathers prickled with unease. He took a final, quick look up and around and realized, with a growing chill, that it was not curiosity with which most of the dragons regarded him. He met the stare of one young, gleaming red male, and was easily able to read the expression on his face, but it was not curiosity. It was not even anger, and as Shard looked around he saw that every dragon wore the same expression.\n\nEvery dragon who watched him leave with Hikaru was watching with disgust.\n\n[ Allies Old and New ]\n\n\"Vanhar to me!\" Nilsine shouted over the wind. \"Keep alert!\"\n\nKjorn flew at her right, forming a wedge with four other griffins and Nilsine, on point as they soared high and toward the vast network of canyons they called the Voldsom Narrows. They'd left the lions of the First Plains a day after Kjorn's hunting trial, with a promise of friendship should they ever need shelter, and the blessing to cross their lands if needed, again.\n\nAjia promised to mind her dreams and the winds for sign of Shard, and Kjorn thanked her, though he wasn't sure what that was worth.\n\nI will raise the Sunwind, indeed.\n\nFlexing his wings, Kjorn snorted. His father would've rejected such nonsense, and Kjorn did the same. Aesir made their own destiny. He had no intention of bringing war to the Winderost, only of finding Shard, reconciling, and returning to the Silver Isles and Thyra before spring, before his kit was born.\n\n\"Keep alert,\" Nilsine said again, and Kjorn realized he'd drifted out of the formation. He flapped twice, steering back into the wedge. Nilsine looked ahead again with an expression of approval.\n\nA thick haze of smoke clung to the rim of every canyon wall and they had to rise high to see over it. Great jagged mazes of golden and red rock split into deep crevices and splintered off from one main artery, at the bottom of which ran a silver slip of river.\n\nThe Serpent River Pack\u2026Kjorn recalled the painted wolf Mayka and wondered if this had been his home, then refocused as Nilsine called orders. He peered forward through the haze, amazed that the smoke from the Horn had drifted so far windward. The wall of haze blocked any view of the horizon, the distant Dawn Spire that Nilsine told him lay a day's flight dawnward, or the lands they'd crossed to reach the Voldsom over the last days.\n\n\"Eagles!\" reported one of Nilsine's warriors.\n\nKjorn snapped to attention, and admired the scout's good eye. He saw a smudge of movement through the haze, then it clarified into an entire flight of eagles, formed in a swan wedge similar to their own. Quickly Kjorn sized them up. A third the size of a griffin, they had broad wings and colors ranging from golden brown to ruddy and spotted cream on the juveniles.\n\n\"That doesn't look like a greeting party,\" Kjorn said to Nilsine.\n\n\"Don't be so quick to seek battle,\" she answered, though Kjorn saw clearly that the leading eagles' expressions were narrow, fierce and hostile, and they began to break into smaller formations he was sure meant imminent attack.\n\n\"Hark!\" Nilsine called to them. \"Eagles of the Voldsom, we are of the Vanhar, and we\u2014\"\n\nAn eagle dropped from nowhere and landed on her back with a battle scream. The other griffins fell away in surprise, realizing at the same time that the eagles out front had been a diversion, and now they were under attack from above and from the sides.\n\nKjorn lunged through the air and swiped at the eagle attacking Nilsine.\n\n\"We come peacefully!\" he snarled, just as two others shot at them from the sides. All around, the sentries fell under attack, and Kjorn saw that they fell on the griffins in threes, making up for size with numbers and angles.\n\n\"Pair up!\" he shouted to the griffins, still wrestling with the eagle on Nilsine's back as she worked to stay aloft and Kjorn tried not to beat her with his wings. \"One above, one below at angles!\"\n\nHe didn't know if they heard, but it was the only way to prevent the eagle's three-pronged attacks of one from above and two from the sides.\n\nWhat felt like a boulder slammed into him and knocked him into Nilsine, crushing the eagle between them. The bird shrieked and wriggled free, rasping taunts as he dove away. Kjorn, locked between two struggling griffins, realized the new griffin who'd knocked into them was attacking him, not fleeing attack from the eagles nor trying to help him.\n\nMore rogues? He thought wildly, rogue griffins, allied with the eagles?\n\n\"Desist,\" he growled. He grabbed his opponent's foreleg and a scruff of russet feathers and wrenched back, dragging them both away from Nilsine. A huntress's battle scream rang in his ears.\n\n\"These are no longer Dawn Spire hunting grounds,\" declared the female, a stocky, sturdy gryphoness, and snapped at his face. Kjorn shoved her away, trying to see her face clearly.\n\n\"We aren't from the Dawn Spire. We've come from the Vanheim Shore, and I from the Silver Isles, we\u2014\"\n\n\"Silver Isles?\" his attacker relaxed for half a breath.\n\n\"Prideless wretch!\" shouted Nilsine, having doubled back. She grabbed the rogue gryphoness and they tumbled away from Kjorn in a knot of beating wings and slashing talons.\n\nAn eagle smacked into Kjorn from below, scrabbling at his belly, and he flipped down, grabbing for the smaller bird's wings. Another landed on his back and a beak sliced at his ears, seeking his eyes. He grasped the first and managed to fling it away, kicking with a hind leg for good measure. Another two eagles shot in at him from the sides. All around griffins shrieked, the haze stirred by thrashing wings, and eagles zipping in to attack from all sides.\n\nWeighted by his attackers, Kjorn sank, desperate to dislodge the eagles before they delivered serious injury or drove him into the river, but he couldn't lift his head, or the eagle on top would have his eyes.\n\n\"Get off of him!\" shouted a young male voice, and someone tore the eagle from Kjorn's back. Freed of that threat, Kjorn twisted and grabbed the first eagle foot he found, yanked, and flung it and the bird it belonged to away.\n\n\"Fraenir,\" Kjorn panted as the young rogue dipped lower. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" he chirped, seeming thrilled with the fight.\n\n\"Where is Nilsine?\" Kjorn circled, taking in the scene, and realized that the eagles were falling back. He didn't think it was because the Vanhar had overpowered them. Someone called them off. A female voice. The gryphoness who'd attacked him.\n\n\"Fall back! Brightwing eagles fall back, these are not from the Dawn Spire!\" The russet gryphoness soared above the scene, calling them off. \"Fall back, these are allies! Hildr, call them off!\"\n\nTo Kjorn's surprise, a female eagle broke from the scattered group and called in shrieking tones. At first, Kjorn heard only witless bird sounds, then he listened more closely, as he'd learned to listen to the wolves of the Silver Isles and the lions of the First Plains, and understood that she called orders, and the others answered with respect. Grateful, Kjorn watched warily as the gryphoness winged back toward him.\n\nNilsine flew up through the haze and joined her, face lit with triumph. \"Kjorn!\" She quickened pace to reach him first, and Fraenir circled protectively. \"You're all right?\"\n\n\"I am. And you?\" When she nodded, Kjorn motioned around. \"What's all this?\"\n\n\"A misunderstanding. I think we have friends here after all.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" breathed the strange gryphoness as she caught up, meeting them in the air. \"You are him. You are\u2026\"\n\n\"Kjorn,\" he said. \"Son-of-Sverin.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, and made an awkward midair bow. \"I see now. Forgive us. There's been so much\u2026but you have friends here. We've been waiting, and Shard said\u2014\"\n\n\"Shard?\" Hope flared that maybe his search was coming to an end. \"I'm seeking him. Is he here? We came to speak with the eagles. You're a friend of Shard's?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\" She gazed at him as if she'd awakened to find either that a long nightmare had ended, or a great dream come to life. \"But forgive me, I haven't introduced myself.\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Kjorn said.\n\n\"I'm Brynja,\" she said breathlessly. \"Brynja, daughter-of-Mar.\"\n\n\"I see the blood of the Red Kings in you.\" Brynja flew on Kjorn's right, and he on Nilsine's right, as the eagles led them to their nesting grounds. Fraenir glided just behind them, and Kjorn was certain he eavesdropped, but didn't see the harm in it. Brynja watched Kjorn thoughtfully. \"Though you favor your mother. Shard spoke of you.\"\n\n\"I hope it wasn't all bad.\"\n\nShe chuckled and shook her head. To hear another voice speak Shard's name at last warmed Kjorn's heart like the sun. It made his wingbrother feel closer, and alive. For months he'd thought Shard was dead.\n\nBrynja tucked her talons up into the paler feathers of her chest, her gaze set forward in determination. \"Though thin in blood, we are cousins, by your distant kin and mine. I'll help you however I can.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful for your friendship.\" They followed the eagles lower, dipping into the largest of the broken canyons, flying in columns over the winding river below. \"Can you tell me what's passed? What happened while Shard was here, and where he's gone? There's so much I don't know.\"\n\nBrynja told him her account of Shard and his uncle's time at the Winderost, their integration and success within the pride\u2014until the wyrms attacked the Dawn Spire. Kjorn's cautious hope that he might see his wingbrother soon quickly faded.\n\n\"Stigr fell,\" Brynja said quietly. \"Cut down, a wing severed. King Orn and his warriors would've imprisoned or killed Shard for accidently leading the wyrms to the Dawn Spire, so we told him to flee.\" She looked over at Kjorn, and the worn lines around her eyes and her angled ears told him of distressing memories. \"I saw his face at the end of the fight, when he flew toward the Outlands. I don't know if he knew himself, knew us, or even where he meant to go.\"\n\n\"Nameless,\" Kjorn said, feeling raw.\n\n\"Ashamed.\" She tilted her wings as the columns of eagles and griffins turned a bend in the canyon and slipped lower. The haze thickened within the canyon walls, and Kjorn trusted the eagles to know where they were going. \"Grief-stricken. I don't know what became of him. Then, after a fortnight, the Horn erupted and\u2026Well, the only good thing I can say is that we haven't see the enemy since that day, nor heard them hunting in the night.\"\n\n\"The enemy?\"\n\n\"The wyrms.\"\n\n\"And your other allies you spoke of? Your aunt Valdis, Asvander? What of Shard's uncle, does he live too?\"\n\nFor a moment she closed her eyes, wind ruffling the feathers of her neck. \"I don't know. Orn turned on all of us and we scattered. If Valdis didn't remain with Stigr, she probably would've gone to the Dawn Reach to find her estranged kin. She told me to flee just as Shard did. Asvander's family reside at the Ostral Shores and if he wasn't captured as a traitor then he may have gone there. I'm ashamed that I fled but what could I do? They would've imprisoned or killed us, and I thought\u2026\" She sighed, ears laying flat. \"I thought there was hope Shard would find whatever he was seeking, or that he would find you and return. And I intended to be ready either way.\"\n\nA little ember of hope glowed again within him. \"And are you?\"\n\nShe looked sidelong at him, a new spark in the golden eyes that reminded him of his father. \"For anything, my lord. My wingsister, my huntresses, and the others who feared Orn would suspect them of treason followed me, and they await good news. Now I have it.\"\n\n\"If I can help you, I will.\"\n\n\"As will we.\"\n\nKjorn looked over at Nilsine and she merely inclined her head, though she'd been listening with interest.\n\nAfter another few moments, they reached the eagle's nesting cliffs. Brynja bid the eagles farewell there and led Kjorn, Nilsine and the Vanhar band down to the canyon floor, where a series of larger caves and dens riddled the rock face. The scent reminded Kjorn of Mayka, the painted wolf, and it was oddly comforting if only by its familiarity.\n\n\"You can sleep in the dens here,\" Brynja said as she landed. \"The painted wolves who used to dwell here have disappeared. Maybe the wyrms' blatant attack on the Dawn Spire frightened them or they drove the wolves out, but whatever the reason, they're gone, and their dens are comfortable enough if you don't mind the smell. The eagle Hildr who leads this clan knows Shard as well, and has allowed us to remain for now.\" She lifted her wings, looking amused. \"Strange days make for strange allies.\"\n\n\"Strange allies to you,\" Nilsine said as she settled her wings. \"The Vanhar have always been friendly with all creatures of the Winderost.\"\n\nBrynja seemed to take a deep breath, her gaze darting from Kjorn to Nilsine, then Fraenir, whose eyes brightened at the prospect of an impending fight. But Brynja inclined her head.\n\n\"Perhaps, someday, we of the Dawn Spire will enjoy the same friendships.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Nilsine said, tail flicking. \"Where may my band rest?\"\n\n\"These dens are unclaimed. My huntresses are farther down.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Nilsine looked to Kjorn, offering a half mantle, a quick courtesy. \"With your leave.\"\n\n\"Go, thank you. We'll meet at dawn, speak with the eagles and make a plan.\"\n\nNilsine dipped her head, gave Brynja one last, measuring look, and called her warriors off to find resting places before night fell.\n\n\"Go with them,\" Kjorn instructed Fraenir, who looked disappointed, but trotted away. After a moment, Brynja chuckled, and walked toward the riverbank. Kjorn followed her to the water. \"What's funny?\"\n\n\"Now I know why my aunt calls the Vanhar 'stuffy.'\"\n\n\"The Vanhar have been a great help to me.\"\n\nBrynja waded into a slow pool, close to the bank, and dipped herself, ruffling to remove dust and flecks of blood from the brief fight. \"I meant no disrespect. I'll do whatever I can to help you find Shard, and as long as you trust my intentions, I'm not worried about Nilsine.\"\n\n\"You were good friends with Shard?\"\n\nShe gave him a sharp look, and he thought he detected a flush of pink about her nares, but perhaps it was the cold water. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then I trust your intentions.\" He waded into the water and closed his eyes a moment before following suit to wash himself clean of blood, dust and the haze and ash. Evening gathered quickly in the canyon, between the smoky air and the sun dipping below the rim, and with it came a cold wind that reminded them it was still winter.\n\nAfter a moment, Brynja spoke again, her gaze traveling along the canyon wall. \"I can't believe you're here, really. Shard spoke so little of his homeland it seemed imaginary, because we had to keep up the pretense that he and his uncle were Outlanders. So the king wouldn't think they had come to roust him.\" She paused, studying Kjorn's face.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Just\u2014something Shard said. Anyway it's good to know he has friends such as you.\"\n\n\"What did he say about me?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not as much as he could've. He said that you were wingbrothers, and I respect Shard, so that says enough. Though you are much taller than I thought.\"\n\nKjorn laughed. \"My father's side, I suppose.\"\n\n\"The mighty line of Kajar,\" she said quietly. \"I thought the stories exaggerated. But I see not.\"\n\nKjorn shifted, feeling as if she expected something from him.\n\nBut she looked away, and Kjorn didn't push her. \"I wonder if you could tell me more about the Silver Isles, about yourself, and Shard?\" When she looked back to him there was curious hunger in her gaze, and at once he began to understand her a little better, and what Shard might mean to her.\n\n\"I would be glad to.\"\n\nThey waded from the water and shook themselves before stretching out on the bank. Brynja dug a talon into the sand. \"Begin wherever you remember.\"\n\n\"You're in luck,\" Kjorn murmured, watching the swirls and eddies of the river. \"For all of my life is tied up with his. I was newborn when my grandfather led our pride from the Winderost. My mother carried me, in her talons, across the sea.\" He tilted his head and closed his eyes. \"They conquered the pride there. And when I was still a squalling kit, my father's wingbrother, Caj, took the only other living kit in the pride, and they placed him in the nest beside me, to comfort me. They raised us together.\" He opened his eyes, looking toward the sky. \"They raised us as brothers.\"\n\nDarkness closed on the canyon as he told Brynja of his life and Shard's, and with darkness came a reminder of winter cold and a light layer of frost. Stars pierced feebly through the gloom of haze just as Kjorn reached the tale of he and Shard's initiation hunt.\n\n\"And then, Shard began calling ridiculous insults, goading him to attack\u2014\"\n\nA hollow, discordant roar cracked through the night.\n\nKjorn startled to his feet and flared, staring around, while Brynja leaped up beside him.\n\nA second roar, metallic and grating, bounded along the canyon rim, so thunderous it reverberated in Kjorn's chest and the ground under their feet. Kjorn could see nothing, smell nothing, the canyon was a cold, murky void.\n\nHe looked at Brynja, feeling breathless as a hollow, witless fear squirmed in him at the noise.\n\n\"We must get under cover,\" she said. \"Now.\"\n\nKjorn didn't argue. They bounded toward the canyon wall. Just as they ducked into the safety of a cave, a rush of wind from massive wings whistled above the canyon and a sour, reptilian scent drenched the air, blotting out the fresh smell of the river.\n\nKjorn murmured, \"The enemy?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Brynja's voice was tight with contained horror. \"They've returned.\"\n\n[ Dwelling of Ice and Stone ]\n\nAs they left the ice cavern, Hikaru gusted a breath in relief. \"Oh Shard, there is so much to tell you, to show you!\"\n\n\"Hikaru\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, you're injured.\" He looped around Shard and snaked his head under Shard's belly, and with a quick, rolling bump, had landed Shard neatly across his shoulders. \"First I'm taking you to the healer, for your leg. Tell me all that happened since the blackfish attacked us.\" He sucked in a breath and paused, one forefoot lifted, and twisted his neck to look at Shard fully.\n\n\"And forgive me. If I had listened to you, we wouldn't have gotten in the fight. And you wouldn't have been hurt. And we wouldn't have been separated.\" He flicked his ears forward, tilting his head to see Shard's leg more closely. Then he hung his head. \"Forgive me, brother.\"\n\nShard settled himself more comfortably and drew a tight breath against the ache in his leg. \"It's all right now. I learned some very important things in the time we were separated, and I have a feeling you did too. I'll tell you my tale first.\"\n\n\"On the way to the healer,\" Hikaru confirmed, and turned forward again.\n\nRiding Hikaru felt awkward at first, then comfortable, and Shard told of his journey and tried to keep track of the tunnels and halls of ice and stone. After a while he gave up, and trusted that Hikaru would take him where he needed to go.\n\nFeeling watched, he lowered his voice when he re-told Groa's tale, certain for the moment that Hikaru was the only dragon interested in hearing it, possibly the only one who would believe him. Spreading it around, Shard sensed, could be more dangerous than he'd realized.\n\n\"That is good,\" Hikaru said, thoughtfully, his body undulating in warm, rolling movements that lulled Shard to calmness. \"Though I don't like the way the emperor treated Kajar. We should tell the empress now, tell everyone, so that they know.\" His voice quieted with worry. \"Shard, they don't like griffins, here. They only know the story my mother told you, and they don't understand that you're not greedy and foolish and barbaric as the old story says.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Shard said. \"Maybe we can change their minds. But let us bide our time a little.\" They passed through a broad tunnel laced with trickles of silver. The constant torchlight, flickering with the movement Hikaru brought to the tunnel, turned the silver to life with dancing light. It seemed the only fit dwelling for the magnificent dragons that Shard could imagine. \"Only while we seek out the dragon that Groa spoke of. Then, when we have more information, and perhaps another dragon who knows the truth, we'll approach the empress again.\"\n\n\"Yes. That would be wise.\"\n\nHe walked on, turning down another silver gilt corridor. In that place the silver was carved into visions of dragons performing various tasks, Shard realized, that had to do with healing. After a moment Hikaru murmured, \"I will ask Natsumi if she knows of this dragon who keeps separate the truth and lies.\"\n\nShard perked his ears. \"Natsumi?\"\n\nIn the firelight, he detected a flush at the end of Hikaru's velvet nose. \"She's a new friend. She tried to help you when the warriors in training were out at sea. That's who found us\u2014warrior class dragons of my year and their masters, learning to fly during storms, learning to fly out at sea.\" He fluffed his wing feathers around Shard. \"I told them you were the greatest flier ever, dragon or griffin, that you had battled a powerful tyrant during a storm at sea.\"\n\nShard sensed a change of subject. He did recall a female voice after the whale attack. \"And this Natsumi, is she\u2014\"\n\n\"Here we are!\" Hikaru said brightly, and sat up so that Shard was forced to gently slide to the stone floor in front of a carved stone entryway. \"You first,\" Shard said, eyeing the tall, tall archway. A reassuring scent of herbs wafted from the archway that reminded him of Sigrun's den.\n\n\"Of course,\" Hikaru murmured, and led the way inside.\n\n\"Well it was messy, very messy indeed.\" The healer coiled around Shard, an older dragoness the color of iron ore, with a bristly, short, white mane. Having broken away his makeshift cast and splint with an air of disdain, she gently examined Shard's leg while Hikaru curled in the corner, watching with his usual curiosity.\n\nThe healer lifted larger silver eyes to meet Shard's. If she was disgusted by him the way the other dragons were, she hid it behind a healer's practicality and appeared only to care about his injuries. \"You set it yourself, you say?\" She looked sideways at Hikaru, who tilted his head, listening.\n\nShard glanced between them. \"I set it and held it with splint and mud,\" he said. \"It was the best I could do at the time. It's mostly the flesh I'm worried about.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Hmmm.\" The dragoness glanced at Hikaru once again before prodding Shard's leg. He flinched and flattened his ears, stifling a hiss. \"Forgive me for that. The bone looks to be in good order. The flesh, I'm afraid, will always tell the tale.\"\n\n\"A scar!\" Hikaru exclaimed with relish, as if it was the best outcome possible. \"A battle scar.\" He laid his head on his forepaws, his whiskers drooping on the ground, making him look forlorn that he hadn't won a scar, too.\n\nShard wasn't as thrilled with the idea of scarring, but was just glad to have his leg. Though perhaps, he thought with a fledge-like glimmer of hope, such a scar would impress Brynja. Someday. When we see each other again. The thought was enough to make him sit straighter. He had battled grown blackfish in the middle of the ocean, in a storm, and lived. He would enjoy telling Brynja the tale. As the healer examined the torn flesh, Shard imagined creating a warm fire to gather around, and watching Brynja's face as he told of his travels. And Asvander. He would tell the tales with Asvander present. And Kjorn. Someday, when he saw his wingbrother again, they would make amends, and he would love to see Kjorn's face when he spoke of all he'd done.\n\nIf only, he thought with sharp, lancing regret, if only I could tell Stigr.\n\nThe healer spoke after a moment, apparently unworried about scarring one way or the other. \"I will sew the skin, and administer new splints and an ointment with soothing herbs to help the pain.\"\n\nSo saying, she uncoiled half her length from around Shard to reach for her store of herbs. Her den reminded Shard of Sigrun's, though many times larger, and she stored her herbs not open on rock ledges, but in clever wooden and silver bowls.\n\nHikaru sat up. \"Dragon medicine is wonderful, Shard. They helped my wing, and there was hardly any pain. I don't want to see you in pain, and it will help you rest too.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Shard said to him, and to the dragoness.\n\nShe made an affirmative huff and leaned back over him, holding a bowl of herbs crushed and mixed into a paste. \"This will help you sleep while I recast the leg and apply an ointment.\"\n\nShard sniffed the bowl. He had been raised by a healer. Pain was part of healing, and so was managing the pain to the best of one's ability, but he often didn't trust such treatments if over-used. Perhaps it was Caj who had instilled that\u2014enduring pain took strength\u2014and simple caution. He knew Sigrun possessed knowledge of powerful herbs that could dull pain, but he recognized only two out of nearly six different scents in the bowl of paste.\n\nThe healer met his curious gaze. \"Normally you will eat it with food. But this will help you sleep more quickly.\"\n\nShe uncoiled from him entirely and set the bowl before him. He glanced to Hikaru, who nodded once in encouragement.\n\n\"All of it,\" the healer said. \"Then, when you're drowsy, I will begin.\"\n\nShard's stomach growled as he tasted the herb paste. Sharp, bitter odors washed down his nostrils and the taste and texture left his tongue sticky. He ate obediently, with Hikaru creeping forward and the healer weaving before him like a serpent.\n\n\"What did you put in\u2026\" He thought the rest of the words, but didn't hear himself say them. Hikaru caught him in a strong embrace, and Shard trusted his dragon brother to hold him as he fell into sleep.\n\nHe thought he saw the dream net spiraling before him, and grasped at a strand.\n\nThe Sunland felt too far away for him to dream of his home, his family, or of the Winderost and his friends there. He drifted, instead, on icy ocean winds, feeling now and then a twist of pain in his leg. When he twitched, strong claws held him fast, and he dipped once more over the sea. Perhaps if he couldn't travel far enough on his own, he might travel farther with help.\n\nHe heard a daydream, an albatross alone at sea. So he swept along on the wings of an albatross for a time, though not the one he had once met and named Windwalker. When the albatross veered away from where Shard wished to go, he soared to a tern\u2026to a gull\u2026hopping through the threaded dreams of floating sea birds until he saw a jagged shore.\n\nThere he dove into the dreams of an eagle who hunted in the Winderost, and lately dreamed only of fire.\n\n\"Show me,\" Shard said in the dream, and the eagle said, \"Since you are the Star Sent.\u2026\"\n\nHaze clouded the air, and the sour reek of smoldering ember and smoke. The Horn. The smoke from the fires of the Horn of Midragur. It clouded the Forest of Rains, the Winderost, the Dawn Spire.\n\nShard wondered if what he saw was only fearful thinking, or if this was a true vision. If it was true, then it was exactly what he wanted to see, though the awful smoke left a sour taint in his throat. He left the eagle and found one who could bear him farther, a magpie with clever and shifting dreams like a raven.\n\nThe magpie took him to a carcass where he hopped to a crow, and the crow took him high, high above the haze.\n\nHe met Munin there.\n\n\"Ah! You've found me, my prince. I didn't think any griffin could outfly myself, the dream walker, the\u2026\"\n\n\"Show me my friends,\" Shard said firmly before Munin began talking too much, feeling the dizzy tug of his body, hearing concern in Hikaru's voice beyond the dream.\n\n\"Ah, yes\u2026\"\n\nMunin snagged him in spindly claws and bore him with unnatural swiftness across the plains, past the Dawn Spire, which Shard missed in a blink, the broken canyons of the Voldsom, another sweeping plain full of rocks, and spun him about to show him a golden griffin, huddled in the dark, alone. He'd lost control of the dream. He didn't know if Munin showed him something false or true, and he heard Hikaru, trying to wake him.\n\n\"Kjorn,\" Shard breathed, grasping at the dream. \"Is he truly in the Winderost?\"\n\nMunin laughed, tossing other dreams to Shard with his beak, and he fought against them like a spider web, unable to sort the true from the false.\n\nCaj, pinned to the ground by a mad and Nameless red griffin.\n\nWhite Ragna, a fierce, terrifying expression of vengeance on her face.\n\nWyrms, hunting along a canyon. White wings flared before his eyes and he thought of Amaratsu, then the white owl. She tried to say something to him but he couldn't hear. Then there was only fire, fire, fire\u2014\n\nFreezing water doused his face and he woke with a gasp.\n\n\"We must fly!\" he shrieked. \"I\u2026\" He blinked when Hikaru whipped away from him in surprise, eyes wide. \"Hikaru. I was dreaming. What happened?\"\n\n\"You didn't wake up,\" Hikaru said, his eyes slitted with what Shard thought was worry, then when the young dragon's gaze shifted to the healer, realized it was suspicion.\n\nThe healer peered at Shard, nonplussed. \"Perhaps the dose of sleep was too strong, for one of your size.\"\n\n\"It seems so,\" Shard said, and looked down at his leg, now bound properly with strong splints of wood and, he noted, fine, metal wire. Fine threads of sinew tied the torn flesh together. A pale paste was smoothed over all, and he felt a pleasant, cool tingling in his skin. \"I'm not a dragon, after all. Thank you. This feels wonderful.\"\n\n\"Eat a bit of this with every meal, to help with the pain and to quicken the pace of the healing.\" The dragoness handed him another bowl of the paste. \"Be sure you don't eat too much.\"\n\nHikaru took the bowl from Shard, showing his teeth in amusement when he saw Shard's look of distaste. \"I'll make sure. Thank you, healer.\" He bowed his head, and Shard did the same. \"Come, Shard, I'll show you my den. And I'll tell you all I've learned here, and then we'll see the forges, and the arenas where the other warrior class learn\u2014\"\n\n\"First, you will let him sleep.\" The healer slipped away from the entryway to let them pass, and Shard thought he read distress in the scaled lines around her eyes, but it was hard to discern reptilian emotion. \"He'll need rest, Hikaru. Lots of rest.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Come with me, Shard.\"\n\nThat time, the healer assisted Shard with climbing onto Hikaru's back, and as they walked, Shard worked to find things to remember about the stone halls through which they passed while also listening to Hikaru's story.\n\n\"They said I was lucky my wing wasn't broken.\" They passed back through the halls of silver that led to the healer's dens and into the first, massive cavern Shard had entered with the sentries. \"And they fixed all the scrapes and cuts with ointments and now it's as if I was never hurt. I don't even have a scar.\" His voice rang a bit with disappointment.\n\nThough Shard suspected it would've been faster to fly, Hikaru remained on the ground level, twining around the pillars and flicking them with the end of his tail in a seemingly unconscious habit. Shard tried to ignored the stares and the occasional hiss from other dragons walking or passing overhead.\n\n\"They gave me the den that was my mother and father's, and told me that because of my mother, I am of the warrior class.\"\n\n\"Class?\" Shard asked, staring up, and up, at the mountain cavern and the torches lining the stone pillars. Winking jewels adorned some of the carved reliefs, forming eyes, or suns, or stars, in the images on the pillars.\n\n\"Yes. What we are destined to do. My mother's ancestors follow the warrior way, my father was crafts class. Those who work with the gold and treasures. But I wanted to be a warrior,\" he turned to look at Shard, \"like you.\"\n\nShard ruffled, unable to help feeling pleased that despite the wonder of Hikaru's home and the magnificence of the dragons there, Hikaru still wanted to be like him. \"Tell me about this warrior way.\"\n\n\"Oh, the warriors are very honorable, like you\u2014like griffins.\"\n\nShard flicked his tail thoughtfully, pleased that Hikaru thought that, but also knowing it could be folly. \"Hikaru, honor is individual to everyone. I'm glad you think of griffins that way, but remember that there are wicked griffins and good ones, just as there are wicked dragons and good ones. And probably wicked blackfish, and good ones.\"\n\nHikaru huffed. \"I'll believe a good blackfish when I see it.\"\n\n\"Why don't you tell me about the warrior dragons?\" Shard had genuine interest in them. If they were honorable and their purpose was war, then he may find the help he needed after all. Not to destroy the wyrms of the Winderost, but, perhaps, at least have a show of strength so they would consider listening.\n\nSo Hikaru, still walking along the ground of the seemingly endless mountain floor, told him of the warrior way.\n\n\"There are eight virtues. I've had to catch up, since the others of my year have been learning since autumn, when Natsumi hatched. So far I've studied justice, courage, and mercy.\"\n\n\"Those sound like good things,\" Shard said quietly. \"I think it's wonderful you've found your place.\" Wonderful, and terrifying. What if he wants to stay? \"Tell me what the dragons think of justice.\"\n\nAs Hikaru spoke, Shard leaned out to study the pillars, and realized they were created in sets, in lines that led to and framed specific exits from the mountain hall. Each line of pillars had a series of images carved into it that told of a way of life. One showed dragons forging and creating. One, he recognized as the healers again, and noted that it led back the way they'd come, toward the healers' hall. Another showed dragons dueling, great battles and victories, and Shard realized Hikaru followed this line of pillars through the mountain toward an archway at the far end. Perhaps once he learned of the different dragon occupations, he could find the one of which Groa had spoken.\n\n\"\u2026so justice is the wisdom to decide,\" Hikaru said after some dragon history of the warrior class, \"to use reason without wavering. It is the bones beneath the warrior skin.\" He paused mid-step to swipe his claws through the air. \"It's the ability to strike when it is right to strike. And to die when it is right to die.\"\n\nShard thought first that Caj and Stigr would get along well with the warrior dragons, and then he thought of Amaratsu, who had carefully chosen the moment she would die.\n\n\"You have a mighty legacy,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Yes,\" Hikaru said, raising his head to a high angle.\n\n\"And what of courage? Your second virtue? What do dragons consider courageous?\"\n\nHikaru slipped around a pillar, touching his claws to an image of a dragon rising through what looked like flames to face an encroaching storm cloud. \"Courage,\" he recited, \"is doing what is right.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Shard said, and could think of no truer definition. \"That does often take courage.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Hikaru said, and bared his teeth at a dragon of his year who stared for too long.\n\nDespite the dragons who halted their business to stare at Shard, eyes narrowing, or claws lifting to clutch protectively at their gems, he listened quietly as Hikaru told him more of the Sunland dragon virtues of justice, courage, and mercy.\n\n[ The Red Scourge ]\n\nThe white mountains of the Sun Isle soared up in ragged grandeur from low, forested foothills and sweeping plains. Several narrow passes made it easier for griffins to fly through if they wished, but Caj's broken wing forced them to take the long way, on foot through the deepest and widest of the narrow canyons. Flying, it took only a sunmark to reach the mountains.\n\nWalking, it turned out, took days, alternating in long lopes, a steady trot, and more walking. Now and then Halvden flew ahead to scout, though it was with silent, odd, mixed relief that both of them realized that the only true danger they might face was Sverin himself.\n\n\"You might've been better off serving your punishment with the pride,\" Caj observed at the end of the second day as they took shelter in the lee of a great hump of rock and snow. The peaks of the mountains glittered white under the rising moon, and the night promised to remain clear and cold. The rock cut the worst of the wind and Caj sat, hoping to press on later in the night after a rest.\n\n\"I think I'm better off with you,\" Halvden said. \"I owe you a debt, and the queen bears me ill will.\"\n\n\"Which one?\"\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nCaj huffed a sigh. \"When the warriors sent after Sverin discover your ruse, you'll have explaining to do.\"\n\n\"I trust you'll help with that,\" Halvden said, \"Since you're taking advantage of my ruse.\"\n\nCaj flattened one ear, and had to nod once. They'd seen no sign of the griffins chosen to hunt down and restrain Sverin, so either they still searched diligently where Halvden had sent them, or they'd returned to the queens to tell them of the deception.\n\n\"I could fly on,\" Halvden said, changing the subject, pacing away from the rock and perking his ears toward the mountains. \"If you're anxious about time I could scout ahead, and see if he's even still where I last saw him.\"\n\n\"You could,\" Caj said, watching him carefully.\n\nHalvden looked over his shoulder and flattened his ears. \"You think I mean to flee.\"\n\n\"Now why would I?\"\n\nGreen feathers prickled up along Halvden's back and he opened his wings. \"I won't run again. I'm not a coward, I won't betray the pride. I made a mistake, and I'll admit it. Are you pleased now?\"\n\n\"Not especially. My wing is still broken, and that was your doing. You finally confessing it doesn't change that. If you think it isn't too dangerous for you to fly ahead and seek Sverin, or run into Ragna's warriors and have them think you're fleeing or worse\u2026\" Caj lifted his wing in a shrug. \"By all means. Go. Otherwise, rest here and follow my orders as you promised to do.\"\n\nHalvden looked again toward the mountains, then walked to Caj and sat beside him, sharing warmth. Caj lay down in the snow, regretting their scant shelter, but there was nothing for it. Grudgingly, he appreciated Halvden's warmth at his back as the younger griffin settled.\n\nJust as Caj slipped toward sleep, Halvden's voice pulled him back. \"Did you mean what you said before, when we fought, when you said I could be great? Or were you trying to distract me?\"\n\nCaj lifted his head, and weighed his words. \"I did mean it. But a great warrior has no need to announce his greatness, nor especially, the need to use it against those weaker. It's your heart, Halvden, that should be strongest. Not your talons, and not your pride.\"\n\nFor a moment it was quiet, and wind whistled against the rock. Stars glittered fiercely in the moonlit sky, and Caj found his gaze resting on the cluster the wolves called the First Pack.\n\n\"My father said the heart is like any other vital organ,\" Halvden ventured. \"To leave it open is to risk death. Pride and strength, he said, are a warrior's greatest shield.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Caj said. \"You've heard my opinion.\"\n\nIt was all Caj could say. For how can I argue with a warrior's dead father? Hallr's death speaks for itself.\n\nHalvden didn't say anything else.\n\nA low, deep howl sang across the snow. Caj perked his ears, recognizing it, and blinked as Halvden surged to all fours, wings opening. \"Wolves!\"\n\n\"Don't fret. This is a friend.\" Caj stood, and called out Tocho's name. The wolf bounded into sight under the moon, raced a circle around their stone shelter and then tossed a hare at Caj's feet.\n\n\"I found you at last, my friend! Who is this with you? I thought you would at least rest a few days with your pride, but no, they told me\u2026\" Tocho stopped and the moonlight picked out the edge of his hackles rising when he looked more closely at Halvden. He sniffed the air and Caj heard a low, thrumming sound he realized was a growl. He hadn't heard a wolf growl in some time. \"What is your name?\" he demanded of Halvden.\n\nHalvden lifted his head high. \"Halvden, son-of\u2014\"\n\n\"Hallr,\" Tocho snarled, and leaped with a roar, his jaws bared wide.\n\n\"Oh, no you don't\u2014\" Caj charged between them and shoved Tocho back with his good wing. \"Not here. Not now. Hallr's attack on you is already avenged.\"\n\nTocho showed Caj his shining teeth. \"Halvden would've helped! If not for Shard\u2014\"\n\n\"I stopped,\" Halvden snapped. \"Stopped, instead of attacking, you mud-covered\u2014\"\n\n\"You chased. You would've attacked!\"\n\n\"Mudding fool, your pelt should be lining my nest\u2014\"\n\nTocho darted around Caj, growling and snapping his fangs. Instead of retreating, Halvden lunged to meet him. Caj ramped to his hind legs and twisted, lashing out with his talons and his one good wing. He caught Halvden's face, swiping a quick cut near his eye, and raked Tocho's cheek just before flinging up his wing to again shove the wolf away.\n\n\"This ends now!\" Caj fell to all fours again as wolf and griffin fell back from him, shocked.\n\n\"My eye!\" Halvden swiped at the cuts, wiping away blood.\n\n\"I missed your eye,\" Caj snarled, \"on purpose. Next time I will not. I've dealt worse to misbehaving fledges. I'm better off alone than dealing with this. You will put your enmity aside, as I have, or leave me to my task alone.\"\n\nHalvden sank down and pressed the side of his head to the snow, still gasping at the pain and then the sight of dark blood staining the moonlit snow. Tocho did likewise, burying his head briefly under the snow before shaking briskly. Both wounds were shallow, as Caj had meant them to be. Warnings.\n\nFor a moment they were silent under the stars. Tocho stood slowly and shook himself again. He lowered his head deeply to Caj.\n\n\"Forgive me, my friend. But just like your wing, mine is a wound that has not yet healed. I will not run with the son of Hallr.\"\n\nBefore either griffin could answer, Tocho turned about and padded away. Caj watched until he couldn't make out the wolf's form against all the other odd shapes in the dark. Halvden made no noise.\n\nHalvden, Caj thought. See what other trouble your arrogance has wrought. Tocho could have been a great help to them. Caj picked up the rabbit the wolf had left and split it down the middle, tossing one half to Halvden.\n\n\"Eat. And don't tell me you won't eat the food a wolf brought.\"\n\nHalvden seemed to swallow an argument, and the rabbit swiftly after that.\n\nCaj ate in silence, with deliberate slowness, and felt he had a responsibility to instruct Halvden somehow on what he should have done, but he grew weary of it. A grown griffin should know better on his own. Caj tossed the last bit of rabbit fur away and curled up again by the stone.\n\n\"I apologize.\" Halvden's voice was stiff as the cold wind. Caj twitched an ear his way. \"I'm sorry,\" he said more loudly, and, Caj thought, more honestly, \"that my actions caused trouble for you.\"\n\nCaj waited for Halvden to add an argument about Tocho's behavior, but he did not, and Caj flicked his tail. \"I accept. Now get some rest. We'll travel again at middlemark of the moon.\"\n\nAfter a moment, Halvden lay down, and with the extra warmth beside him, Caj slept a little. A part of him hoped that Tocho might too realize he could've acted better and they would hear him return, but no wolf howl broke the night, no crunch of paws in snow. They rose again at midnight and traveled on without him.\n\nAnother half day of walking, keeping mostly along the more sheltered banks of the Nightrun, and Halvden and Caj stared up at the peaks of the pass the river had cut through the mountains in the First Age. Rock and stubborn pines showed here and there but otherwise, snow coated the land and the mountains, making distance difficult to judge.\n\n\"It's strange to be on the ground so much,\" Halvden said, in a hollow tone.\n\nCaj heard fear and said casually, \"You can always fly if you want to.\"\n\nThe green warrior's ears slipped back and he strode forward, head held proudly.\n\nThe river widened, leaving them only a thin trail on which to travel the pass. Halvden remained on point, testing the treacherous, snow-covered banks for steady footing before he would let Caj proceed.\n\nQuiet, grateful but alert, Caj let Halvden lead and earn back his sense of pride through honest work. Walking tested him. Caj could feel it. The river, half frozen but roaring where it wasn't, splashed and licked at their heels like a hungry animal whenever their narrow path took them too close to the water. The empty, open air above, though tricky with shifting winds from the canyon, constantly drew Halvden's eyes, and Caj noted his wistful looks.\n\nCaj paused as Halvden once again signaled a stop by fanning his tail, creeping ahead like a stalking mountain cat, pressing his talons firmly to the snow.\n\n\"If you want to fly\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want to fly,\" Halvden snapped, swiveling to glare at Caj. \"Let me do this.\" He looked forward again. \"I promised to help you. I can do this.\"\n\nIf I can do it, you can do it, is that it? Caj kept quiet and tried to wipe any pleasure from his expression any time Halvden looked back at him. Maybe there's hope. Whether he's trying to prove something to me, or to himself\u2026Maybe there's hope.\n\n\"It's fragile here.\" Halvden tapped his talons against the bank. \"We might try climbing a bit or\u2026\" He scanned the area but there was no \"or.\" Sheer, frozen rock face on one side, the river on the other, and their narrow trail. \"This way,\" he said.\n\n\"Halvden, if it's not sturdy ground we'll go back and find another way.\"\n\n\"It's sturdy enough. Stay close to the cliff, that's all.\"\n\nCaj shifted his feet, then stepped forward after Halvden. The young warrior wouldn't be so desperate to prove himself that he risked his own skin\u2014someone else, perhaps, but not his own, not while he was leading. They hugged the cliff face and sure enough, the ground held, though Caj suspected they walked on ice, not earth, and his ears flicked back and forth at every creak under his feet, and every splash of water.\n\n\"You say Sverin's made a den on the far side of the pass?\"\n\n\"Yes. Across a valley ringed by forest.\" Halvden squinted ahead, still patting every few steps to listen for cracking or to feel soft ground. \"Of course, when I fled from him at last, at the end, I was flying. I would say another day walking in this direction will see us there.\"\n\n\"And he was\u2026\"\n\nHalvden didn't look back at him. \"He was lost. I did try. You must believe that I tried, that I was loyal, as loyal as a wingbrother could be, but he would have killed me. We fought at last, and the fighting made it worse. He wasn't angry, he was just\u2014possessed by survival. I fled. And then I couldn't return to the pride, so\u2026\"\n\n\"And now here you are,\" Caj reminded him. \"And serving your queen,\" he didn't specify which one, \"and repaying your debt to me.\"\n\nWhen Halvden glanced back, Caj was grateful to see that his usual smug expression was gradually fading to one of determination and focus. \"Yes. Look, the trail widens ahead\u2014\"\n\nA warped, feral scream shattered through the canyon.\n\nFor a moment, the blood seemed to go out of Caj's head, then he came to himself with a growl, and looked up to see a stain of scarlet in the sky. His heart crammed into his throat and he ramped high, reaching talons outward.\n\n\"Sverin! My brother\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't!\" Halvden crouched, pressing to the rock face.\n\nThe exiled king's cry sounded again, this time deepening to a lion's roar, a warning. A threat to anyone invading his territory.\n\n\"Son of Per!\" Caj shouted.\n\n\"It isn't him,\" Halvden hissed. \"This isn't the way, you have to listen to me.\"\n\nSverin banked hard and wheeled once, scanned the area, focused on them, and chose his target. Caj.\n\n\"Oh yes, I dare you!\" Caj called, falling back to all fours and bracing himself. \"I could beat you in a spar with both wings tied\u2014as a matter of fact\u2026\" Breathless, trying to make his tone light, to call Sverin back to himself, Caj refused to see the emptiness in the sharp gold eyes, the talons splayed, the powerful red warrior hurtling toward him, without recognition, at killing speed.\n\nBut it wasn't Sverin who struck him and sent him rolling. It was Halvden. Sverin smashed into the bank where Caj had stood before Halvden shoved him out of the way, and a high-pitched crack resounded over the roar of the water. Caj gasped for a breath as Halvden whirled, flaring his wings as if to shield Caj from Sverin. For half a breath, Caj wished Ragna's warriors would find them and assist.\n\nBut Halvden said fighting made it worse.\n\nFighting\u2026\n\n\"Step aside,\" Caj growled, dragging to his feet. Once again, his mud splint was ruined. There was no time to wonder if he would ever fly again, for Sverin stood before them at his full height, wings open, ears flat to his skull and eyes so empty he looked more like a crimson viper than a griffin who had been a king.\n\n\"I won't,\" Halvden said. \"Look at him. He'll kill you.\"\n\nSverin crouched, tail swiping across the snow, his gaze darting between them. His beak opened in a long hiss.\n\n\"He will not,\" Caj said, trying to shove around Halvden. \"I know him. I trust him, and he's in there somewhere. Shame and fear have hidden his name. You said fighting makes it worse. Move.\"\n\nHalvden didn't\u2014partly because there was nowhere to go between the cliff and the river.\n\n\"My brother,\" Caj called. \"My king. This is not you. Your heart is\u2014\"\n\nThe griffin that was once the Red King lunged. Halvden fell back, smashing into Caj, and Sverin hit them like a boulder, beak snapping for Halvden's throat. They rolled, and with a sickening crack, the ice broke.\n\nAt the first touch of frigid water, Sverin shrieked and his great scarlet wings slapped at the river, then Halvden and Caj as he shoved out with brute power. He flapped up high, retreating deep into the canyon again.\n\nCaj grabbed for the rocks of the bank, then saw that the current had swept Halvden out to the middle of the river. He swore, shoved from the bank and let the river rush him toward the green griffin. It took only two breaths for the freezing water to slip under his feathers, to soak his oiled fur and squeeze the wind from his chest.\n\n\"Halv\u2014\" water splashed into his face and he gave up calling out. Halvden fought to swim, but churning swirls of water dragged him under again and again. Caj had not the skill of a Vanir for swimming, but he faired better than Halvden, and managed to struggle to Halvden's side. He grabbed the green scruff and dragged Halvden's head out of the water. The green warrior hacked and sputtered but his head lolled. The cold was overtaking him. Caj kicked his hind legs hard and used his good wing to help remain afloat, grateful the freezing water numbed any pain from his broken wing.\n\nDeciding that the far bank had a broader shoreline and would be an easier swim, he kicked out that way. Downstream about fifty leaps, rocks kicked the river into a wrath of foaming rapids and spinning chunks of ice. Caj swam diagonally, as Sigrun had once taught him, trying to let the current assist him toward the shore.\n\nAhead, a long, thin dead birch stretched over the water, as if the tree or the mountain itself was offering help. Desperate, dragging Halvden along while trying to keep his own head above water, Caj strained toward the branches. Two more leaps and they would be swept past it.\n\nHis hind paw kicked the river bottom and sharp pain broke through the numbness\u2014but Caj laughed madly. The bottom. He let his head dunk under, scrabbled both feet against the gravel and shoved his body toward the branch. He caught it in his talons and with his beak and clung hard, holding Halvden close by the scruff between his shoulders.\n\nNow what.\n\nThe birch shifted at the weight of them and Caj's belly lurched. Beak clamped around the branch, he reached out with his talons and pulled them farther in, alternating beak then talons. His foreleg strained against Halvden's weight and he shook the younger griffin, trying to rouse him, but he must've gotten a chest full of water.\n\nThe birch shifted again, loosening, and Caj groaned against the bark, clawing forward.\n\nA blur of animal movement caught his eye, and his gaze darted downstream. A wolf raced toward the birch tree.\n\nCaj tried to shout Tocho's name but it came as a guttural gurgle around the birch. The wolf sprinted nimbly up the snow-covered bank, splashing through water where he needed to, but leaping out too quickly for the river to catch him. Caj's tree lurched, almost loose of the rocks. Caj felt the current grabbing at them.\n\nTocho burst forward and leaped the last distance, skidding through rocks and snow like a goose coming in to land. He lunged up and pounced the birch trunk, wedging it firmly back between the rocks.\n\nWith the tree once again anchored, Caj was able to drag himself and Halvden out. Tocho helped him bring Halvden onto the shore, and when they rolled him to his side and Caj slapped him between the wings, he gurgled up river water.\n\n\"I'm glad you're back,\" Caj muttered to the wolf, and they both curled around Halvden to warm him, and themselves.\n\n\"I had a feeling,\" Tocho murmured. \"A bad feeling for you. And I realized you were right. I sought guidance from Tor, and under the moon, I understood and decided that if Halvden will put his judgments aside, so will I.\"\n\n\"We saw Sverin,\" Caj told him. \"He's witless. He didn't know me, but I know I can reach him. If you two will stand with me, I know I can bring him around.\"\n\nHalvden coughed, and Caj took that as confirmation.\n\nA feather prickled and Caj bent his head to straighten it, then realized it was near broken, and he plucked it out with his beak. After pausing a moment to consider, he dropped it and pushed it to Tocho. The gold wolf perked his ears at the feather, then at Caj.\n\n\"It's for you,\" Caj said gruffly.\n\n\"I thought you didn't like it when wolves wore griffin feath\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't understand why, before. Now I do.\" Caj lifted his good wing and draped it over a shivering Halvden and Tocho, and felt renewed warmth in his own skin. \"I'm\u2026proud, to call you friend. I want everyone who sees you to know what you've done for me, to know that I owe you my life.\"\n\nTocho, not taking his eyes from Caj, bent his head to sniff the feather, then laid his head over it protectively and averted his eyes. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Halvden.\" Caj nudged him. Halvden groaned. \"Will you survive?\"\n\n\"You could have let me drown,\" he stammered through cold, \"and saved yourself.\"\n\n\"Well if you're talking, that's a good sign.\"\n\n\"No one would've known,\" Halvden snarled. \"An accident. You could have, and the pride would've been rid of me.\"\n\n\"Don't be stupid.\" Caj gave him a firm shake to snap him out of it. \"Tocho saved us both. I take it you don't mind his company now?\"\n\nHalvden shivered, and managed to lift his head. \"Thank you,\" he mumbled to the snow, then looked sideways at the wolf. \"I owe you a debt.\"\n\nTocho showed his teeth in a not-unfriendly expression. \"Let us consider all our debts paid.\"\n\n\"We'll rest,\" Caj said, \"warm up, hunt, and then we will finish this.\"\n\nThey all lifted their gazes to the canyon, and stared down the frozen pass in the direction Sverin had flown.\n\n[ The Brightwing Aerie ]\n\nThe air hung damp with melting frost as the first hazy sunlight broke over the edge of the canyon. Kjorn gathered with Nilsine, Brynja, and four eagles. Two leading females, and their favorite male consorts.\n\n\"This is all your fault,\" one of the males accused Kjorn.\n\nKjorn lifted his head. \"How does that follow? I wasn't here when the wyrms left the region, and I only just arrived. I don't know them, they don't know of me.\"\n\n\"Your pride is cursed. I can see by your bright feathers you are part of the cursed family who fled\u2014\"\n\n\"That will be quite enough, Arn,\" said Hildr, the leading she-eagle Brynja had named on the first day. Kjorn had met her briefly, as they gathered near the river at first light. Grunna, a sleek auburn eagle Kjorn gauged to be of middle years, watched quietly, and her consort beside her.\n\n\"He draws them near,\" Arn said, edging in a last word, \"I'm sure of it. We of the Brightwing should never have allowed griffins to nest here.\"\n\nKjorn suppressed a low rumble in his chest.\n\nArn opened his beak and his feathers pricked up high, giving him the illusion of size. \"Do you think I fear you, giant, lumbering\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you prefer wyrms nesting here?\" Brynja asked with a touch of ice. \"We're happy to go and leave you to them.\"\n\n\"As if you've done anything about them,\" Arn said. \"Your kind brought the enemy to this land, and you flee when they become too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Arn.\" Hildr nipped his wing with her beak. \"If you won't be silent, then leave.\" She dipped her head, eyeing Kjorn. \"I allow these gryphoness huntresses to remain because they showed respect and humility after being cast out of their home. I allow you to remain because you were a friend of Shard, who was the first griffin I met to bother asking my name. So I'm curious about you, though you look like typical Dawn Spire ilk to me.\"\n\nIt had taken Kjorn a few moments, at first, to understand the eagles, for they spoke in slightly different tones. But as he'd learned to understand the wolves of the Silver Isles, he listened carefully.\n\nNow, finally given a chance to speak, Kjorn lowered his head so he was not towering over the eagle, who stood on the ground and barely reached his chest. \"I was raised in the Silver Isles, with Shard. Only recently have I begun to understand how arrogant my kind can be, and how much we might learn from others. I hope we can be friends, your aerie and my pride.\"\n\n\"I see no pride with you.\"\n\n\"In spirit,\" Kjorn said evenly, \"friends of mine are allies of my pride.\"\n\nShe swiveled to peer at him with one eye, sizing him up, then looked to the older eagle, Grunna.\n\nGrunna lifted one taloned foot and set it down firmly, as if testing the ground between them. \"Words mean nothing. It is what you do. Time will tell. Do you have any intention of ousting the enemy that plagues us all? The enemy your forefathers drew here?\"\n\n\"It has never been proven to me one way or another that these beasts came here because of my ancestors,\" Kjorn said. \"I won't take responsibility for that. But Brynja tells me my wingbrother wished to help them see reason, or wished to help rid the Winderost of them if possible. If that's his wish, then I will help too, and perhaps make friends of the Brightwing aerie and renew my ties to the Dawn Spire as well.\"\n\nGrunna considered him, then said again, \"Time will tell.\"\n\nNilsine spoke, abruptly. \"And if griffins rose against the great enemy of us all, would eagles fly at our side?\"\n\nKjorn and Brynja watched the Vanhar curiously. She nudged Kjorn covertly with a hind foot.\n\n\"If that happened,\" Hildr said, while her consort Arn made disgruntled noises, \"we would consider it. Depending on the intelligence and courage of the griffins involved.\"\n\n\"I believe we can all prove ourselves on those accounts,\" Nilsine said calmly, even as Brynja and Kjorn flattened their ears, feathers prickling with indignation.\n\n\"Then prove yourself,\" Hildr said. \"Face the enemy.\"\n\n\"Gladly,\" Kjorn said.\n\nNilsine scoffed. \"You said courage and intelligence. It's foolhardy to barge forward against the wyrms just to satisfy you.\"\n\n\"Who said anything about barging?\" Kjorn stood. \"I just want to get a look at them.\"\n\nBrynja and Nilsine stared at him.\n\n\"Well?\" Kjorn looked between them, and the eagles. \"Didn't you say they sleep during the day? That they avoid the sun?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nilsine said quietly.\n\nBrynja stepped forward, tail lashing. \"This is foolhardy. You said you were here to seek Shard. You must trust that it's a fool's mission to seek out the wyrms merely for a look, to satisfy your curiosity.\"\n\n\"Shard faced them,\" Kjorn said, meeting her stern face. \"A lioness told me that Shard faced them, and the first time he saw them he didn't lose himself in fear. Do you think I can do less?\"\n\n\"No one is questioning your bravery,\" Brynja said, and Kjorn noticed the light of admiration in her gaze at his mention of Shard's courage. \"I question your timing. If you mean to help Shard, to help us in dealing with this enemy, the time will come. Let us continue the search, instead. He may have answers we don't know.\"\n\n\"He may be dead,\" Hildr said flatly. \"We saw him not, after the attack on the Dawn Spire. I can't say that no small, gray griffin wandered Nameless into the Outlands, but he is certainly not sheltering near the Voldsom. If I had to judge, I would call him reckless.\"\n\n\"You were just surprised,\" Brynja said, \"by how well he flew and that he spoke to you.\"\n\nHildr fluffed and looked toward the sky, repeating only, \"He may be dead.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kjorn said tightly. \"If so, then I will find where his body rests and bear it home.\"\n\n\"If not in a wyrm's belly,\" chuckled Arn. Hildr pecked at his neck but didn't send him away. Kjorn began to understand how strained griffin-eagle relations were.\n\n\"Midragur breathes fire,\" Nilsine murmured, diffusing a few of the choice, heated remarks rising in Kjorn's head. \"Could your Shard have something to do with that?\"\n\n\"Shard? Set off a volcano?\" Kjorn paced. \"I suppose at the moment anything is possible. If I can go about raising Sunwinds, then why shouldn't he set off a volcano?\"\n\n\"I mean,\" Nilsine said, \"could he have gone to the Aslagard Mountains?\"\n\nThat silenced them for a moment and Kjorn walked back and forth thoughtfully, restless. He was weary of hearing about the great, wrathful enemy which supposedly followed his great grandfather back from the dragon kingdom to wreak havoc. He was weary of having his mettle questioned by creatures his own father would consider lesser. Weary of being without his wingbrother who, he had to admit, knew him better than his own father after all.\n\nKjorn stopped walking, tail twitching, and saw that all gazes were on him.\n\nI came here with one purpose.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said to Brynja. \"I must stay on my course.\" He turned to Hildr and Grunna, and ignored Arn's smug look. The eagle probably thought him a coward, but Kjorn told himself he didn't care. \"If it's within my power to help rid the land of these wyrms or strike a truce, I'll do so after we find Shard.\"\n\n\"I think that's wise,\" Grunna said softly. \"If he passes this way or we hear of him, we will tell you.\" She studied Kjorn quietly. \"If you remain here long enough, you will face the wyrms. And all who face them feel fear.\"\n\n\"I've felt fear,\" Kjorn said.\n\n\"Not like this,\" said Arn, challenging.\n\nGrunna ignored him, focused on Kjorn. \"The only trick is, to feel that fear, and face them anyway.\"\n\nKjorn studied her fierce, wise face, and dipped his head. \"When I face them, I'll remember that.\"\n\nBrynja spoke. \"If I could make a suggestion?\"\n\n\"Please,\" Kjorn said, turning to face her fully.\n\nThe ruddy gryphoness stood, stretching her broad, flecked wings. \"If Shard went as far as the Aslagard Mountains, for whatever reason, and then the Horn erupted, I think he would've fled like any other creature. Would he not have sought shelter with possible friends? Not at the Dawn Spire, but somewhere he might have allies who've heard of him or his family?\"\n\nKjorn tilted his head at her. \"You mean Caj's kin, at the Ostral Shores.\"\n\nBrynja nodded. The eagles listened quietly and Nilsine examined her talons, looking thoughtful while Brynja continued. \"It's most likely our friend, Asvander, would've gone there if he wasn't taken prisoner, and Shard knew he hailed from there, knew Caj's family was from there. Might he go there, seeking friends?\"\n\n\"Are Dawn Spire griffins not on poor terms with the Ostral Shores?\" Nilsine asked.\n\nBrynja shook her head. \"Not my family. I'm\u2026I was meant to be pledged to Asvander, to unite our families. They've split ties with the Dawn Spire, but we are exiled from there as well now, as far as King Orn is concerned. If nothing else, we may find at least one friend in Asvander, and he may know more of Shard than us.\" Her expression darkened, frustrated at being split from her strongest friends, Kjorn knew.\n\n\"The Ostral Shores then?\" Kjorn glanced at Nilsine. \"I'd like to avoid the Dawn Spire, for now.\"\n\nThe Vanhar remained seated, and contemplative. \"I don't know the way. We could venture windward, pass back through the First Plains and the Vanheim Shore, up to the Dawn Reach and around.\"\n\nIt sounded like a bleakly long distance to Kjorn, to circle all the way back from where he'd first washed ashore.\n\n\"Faster to cut across,\" Hildr said, ruffling her feathers. \"Across the unclaimed hills and plains twixt here and the Ostral Shores.\"\n\n\"We don't know what we might encounter,\" Kjorn murmured, thinking.\n\nBrynja raised her head. \"As far as you've come, it would be much faster to cut a straight path, as she says.\" She looked between him and Nilsine. \"It's a solid two days of flying, but faster and less likely to meet rogues, or any griffin from the Dawn Spire. Of course, we won't want to be airborne at night, with the wyrms out hunting.\"\n\n\"We?\" Kjorn asked.\n\nBrynja angled her head, ears perking. \"I thought I was clear. I'm coming with you. I know the way. I know what routes the scouts of the Dawn Spire fly, and I told you I would help.\" She looked around at the eagles, then Nilsine, before her gaze settled on Kjorn again. \"We've been waiting here for a sign, a call to action, or some sense of hope. You're it. You also seek Shard,\" her voice took on a new, challenging note, \"and I have unfinished business with him.\"\n\nKjorn couldn't argue with her firm statement nor the bright determination in her eyes. \"You said we shouldn't fly at night. Do the wyrms range that far from the Outlands?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nilsine answered before Brynja could. \"They eat prey beasts just as we do, but they will range, seek the scent of griffin on the wind and hunt them down at night, kill them, and leave their flesh wasted in the dirt.\" Her voice remained quiet, her expression cool, but her red eyes sparked warning in Kjorn's heart. \"The Vanhar learned this at great cost.\"\n\nHe dipped his head, thinking of his father's fear of the dark. \"Then, we'll fly with the sun on our backs, and walk at night.\" He looked to the eagles, and mantled. \"Thank you for sharing your canyons with us for the night. I hope to meet again, in better circumstances, and prove myself to you.\"\n\nHildr appraised him, having listened quietly to their plans. \"I will look forward to that day.\"\n\n\"I thank you also,\" Brynja said. \"My wingsister and the rest of my huntresses will leave with me. Your hospitality will never be forgotten.\"\n\n\"Nor your courtesy,\" said Hildr, not quite grudgingly. She lifted her wings, then hesitated, looking at Kjorn. \"When you find Rashard, let him know he still has my respect, and, should he need it, my friendship.\"\n\nKjorn dipped his head. \"I will.\"\n\nWith a final word of farewell, the eagles lifted from the ground, beating their wings against the haze to lift away into the canyon.\n\n\"A common enemy,\" Brynja said beside him, \"can sometimes make the greatest allies.\"\n\n\"Or a common friend,\" Kjorn said, and her expression quirked in amusement. \"I'm glad you're coming. I'm glad to have both of you,\" he looked to Nilsine, \"and any you bring with you. This is further than I think you intended to go, and I'll understand if you don't come to the Ostral Shores.\"\n\n\"I'm at your service,\" she said, unblinking.\n\nKjorn nodded, trying not to look surprised, wondering at her motive. Brynja's was clear, though he'd just met her, but he wondered if perhaps the priestess of the Vanhar had suggested that Nilsine go with Kjorn\u2026\n\nTo what end?\n\nHe looked at both of them. \"Then we leave as soon as your bands are gathered.\"\n\n[ A Question of Honor ]\n\nSunlight glanced white and gold off mountain peaks and the broad, flat valley where the young warrior dragons trained. Clear sky, pale with frost in the air, yawned above.\n\nShard wondered what Stigr would've thought of the dragon training grounds, and their method. They prized accuracy and form just as much as winning, if not more. Everything was precise and worked according to a certain order. The dragons kept the valley clear of the deepest snows to make room for their practices.\n\nAncient black boulders defined five sparring rings, arranged in a spiral and growing smaller with each succession, with the smallest ring at the center. The idea, Shard learned, was to keep the fight within the ring of stones. Breaking out of the line with wing, tail, or other limb, was equal to losing the spar.\n\nHikaru had explained that each circle represented a state of mastery, for as the circles grew smaller the fighting became more challenging. Very few dragons, he'd said, actually mastered the fifth circle, where it was scarcely possible for a fully grown dragon to move without breaking the circle.\n\nNo dragon but Hikaru had expressed an interest in sparring with Shard, and his first day out, when Shard had tried to join Hikaru in the largest circle, one of the masters of fighting had barred him.\n\n\"Not this day,\" was all she said, and didn't speak to him again. Rather than dishonor Hikaru by arguing, Shard contented himself with studying dragon fighting. Every day, Hikaru asked if Shard might participate, but every day, no matter who oversaw the training, the answer was, \"Not this day.\"\n\nSo it went, too, when Shard asked anyone about speaking to the empress again. Hikaru was reluctant to pester his elders about it, and Shard assured him he didn't have to.\n\nDays stretched into a fortnight, and Shard maintained his patience only in the interest of letting his leg heal. Now the bone had knit and the skin formed into smooth, firm scars with magical speed. He would have to learn more about their herbs, to tell Sigrun when he returned home.\n\nHome. He stretched his leg in the cold, warming the taut muscles and relieved to be free of the splint.\n\nHe breathed slowly in the thin, icy air, watching Hikaru spar with a dragoness four months his senior and twice his size, her scales the same pale, shifting rainbow of color as the inner wall of an oyster shell.\n\nDragon-sized tiers were carved into the foothills of the cliffs and barren rock mountains, into the ice and snow. Shard sat on a low tier of rock nearest the sparring rings. The first three rings were filled with dragons fighting. Shard found it ironic that the older and more skilled they grew, the smaller their circle became. Perhaps that was the point. Other dragons lined the stone tiers, watching, preening, waiting their turn, while the master dragons walked or circled above, calling out corrections or admonishments.\n\n\"Kagu, tail out!\" barked the hulking blue dragon Shard had met on the first day. He was a training master as well as sentinel, named Isora. Immediately, Shard could think of nothing but Caj, patrolling among the fledges as they sparred.\n\nKagu, who Shard gauged to be five or six months old, with scales like yellow buttercups, stopped, landed, and bowed to his opponent. Then he slunk from the ring and back toward the sitting tiers.\n\nThinking of Caj, and home, made Shard restless. He looked anxiously back to Hikaru's spar, hoping one or the other of them would win quickly and they could resume their search for the dragon Groa had spoken of, a dragon who knew the truth. He reached up to tuck a talon into the silver chain, to reassure himself it had all happened. Once he had the truth, he could take it to the empress.\n\nHikaru hadn't been able to speak with his friend, Natsumi, since Shard's arrival. When Hikaru had sought out her parents, they'd forbidden her from being near Hikaru and Shard, and that was that.\n\nIt would be difficult to find anything the dragons wanted to hide, though, even another dragon. The Mountains of the Sea and the dragons' dwelling within was so vast Shard could easily see that a dragon could be kept away. Secrets could be kept away. And truths.\n\n\"Rashard of the Silver Isles.\"\n\nShard turned, then stood up and bowed his head, in the dragon manner, to Kagu. The yellow dragon didn't return the favor. \"Kagu.\"\n\n\"Still spying, I see?\" His large, serpent eyes looked nearly all gold, the pupils slitted against the brilliant day.\n\nThough he was only a few months older than Hikaru, Shard had trouble thinking of him as nearly fully grown. In another three months the dragons would consider him a seasoned adult, so now, Shard thought of him as an initiate, nearly grown but a ways to go, a bit younger than Shard himself.\n\nSo Shard would treat him appropriately. \"I'm learning,\" he corrected, and managed not to flick his tail. A steady, soft wind filtered around the valley, and the brush of it felt good against his leg, for the scars still felt warm. \"I love to watch how all of you fly, and fight.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you do.\" Kagu raised his head, looking toward the largest fighting ring where Hikaru spiraled in the air around his opponent, seeking an opening. \"Hikaru has suffered from lack of training, both of his body and his mind. That will be fixed.\"\n\nShard ignored the barb. If he'd known anything of dragon ways, he would've taught Hikaru. \"Why do you train to fight, if Sunlanders remain sheltered, away from war?\"\n\nKagu's head whipped back to glare at him, then he drew himself together, with fine discipline. \"It is a waste of our gifts not to train.\"\n\nShard had wondered, more than once, if he might be able to interest the younger generation in the rest of the world. \"Have you ever seen real battle?\"\n\n\"Are you questioning my honor?\"\n\nShard lifted his wings. \"No, I'm asking if you've ever seen a real battle.\"\n\n\"Our spars are real enough.\" He reared his head back, sitting up to his full height. Half the size of an adult, he still towered over Shard.\n\n\"What have you fought for? Your honor? An insult? I've fought battles,\" Shard said quietly. \"Battles for real things. Protecting my home and family. I've fought and killed wyrms your size in the Winderost.\" He didn't mean for it to sound like a threat, but it must have, for Kagu's ears flattened against his head.\n\n\"Those are lies,\" he said, then laughed pointedly. \"It's not possible.\"\n\nShard narrowed his eyes. \"Courtesy,\" he reminded, for that was another of the warrior virtues Hikaru was learning.\n\n\"I won't be courteous to a liar. To a spy. What's the point of your questions?\"\n\n\"What I'm asking you,\" Shard said quietly, \"is if you've ever fought when it mattered.\"\n\nKagu bared his teeth, shuddering at the implied insult. Instead of attacking, however, he sat up to his full height and opened his pale wings. \"Training master!\" he bellowed over the training field. Shard flinched as the spars ceased and blue Isora, circling above, glided nearer. \"How long will this be allowed to continue?\" Kagu gestured to Shard. \"He continues to spy and learn our ways. What other reason than to bring honorless, dangerous thieves like himself here once again?\"\n\n\"I am trying to learn your ways,\" Shard said, \"out of respect and curiosity. Spy? No. Never. I have no reason.\"\n\nFrom the corner of his eye Shard saw Hikaru leap from his ring and fly toward them, fury lighting his face. The black dragon landed hard between Kagu and Shard. Shard ambled back, his leg still stiff in the cold.\n\n\"Leave Shard alone,\" Hikaru growled. \"He has ten times the honor and skill you ever will.\"\n\nShard eyed the big yellow dragon warily, wishing Hikaru didn't believe in him quite so much.\n\n\"Stand back both of you.\" Isora remained aloft, circling, but his tone was sharp and warning. \"Stop this snapping like hatchlings.\" Hikaru and Kagu glared at each other and backed a pace away, bowing to their training master. \"You,\" Isora said to Shard. \"You will leave. Every day you're here you disrupt our work and unsettle the younger dragons.\"\n\n\"They need to be unsettled,\" Shard said, and Hikaru lifted his wings in approval. It was dangerous, challenging the master in front of the others, but Shard was no fledge, no training dragon, no dragon at all. He could respect their ways, but he didn't plan to cower before them. \"Why train to fight, if not for some purpose?\"\n\n\"We are ready to defend. We are ready to keep our homes and families safe\u2014\"\n\n\"From griffins?\" Shard asked mildly, spreading his wings wide to remind them of his small size. \"What threat\u2014\"\n\n\"You threaten our way of life by coming here, by spreading your lies, spying, who knows what schemes you have to\u2014\"\n\n\"You know nothing about me!\" Shard shouted, since the dragon refused to land and speak on the ground.\n\n\"We know enough about your kind,\" he rumbled, and a dangerous murmur of agreement wove through the younger onlookers. \"Our history tells us so.\"\n\nAny plans Shard had to remain civil were dashed in the face of the dragon's willful ignorance and accusations. \"You know nothing, except that in good faith I helped Hikaru to hatch safely and escape the wyrms who would've captured or killed him, or maybe even raised him\u2014but raised him Nameless and wild and hateful. You know nothing but that I nearly died trying to bring him home, to you. You know only that I searched this wretched land to find him and make sure he was well, and that I sit here, sometimes, to try and learn more about you, and because I've been banned from wandering alone. So I stay close to Hikaru.\"\n\nAs Shard spoke his heart at last, Hikaru backed down further from Kagu, who stared, unblinking. Uncertainly, both young dragons looked at the training master.\n\n\"All this,\" rumbled the great, blue serpent, \"we know you have done in order to further your own ends.\"\n\nA hollow, burning heat filled Shard's chest, for a small part of that was true. Hikaru looked at him with huge eyes.\n\nShard shook his head. \"I won't deny that I hoped Hikaru could help me here, help me to work with you and get to know you. But everything else, I did because I love him. Everything else, I did for my brother.\"\n\n\"Brother?\" Kagu curled his lip to reveal startlingly long, white and pointed fangs. \"That's ridiculous.\" He raised his voice. \"It's obscene.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" Hikaru snarled. \"Shard has been a better family to me than any of you. At least he is trying to be friends.\"\n\n\"Be silent,\" said Isora. \"Your heart must be stronger. Right now, it shifts like water.\" His great, pearly wings beat a constant, cold wind on them. \"And you, Kagu. You have too much fire. Learn to temper it.\"\n\nKagu's gaze darted from Isora to Shard, and he latched onto his opportunity of shared prejudice. \"But how can I, Master Isora, in the face of this lying, bragging\u2014\"\n\n\"Bragging?\" Shard demanded. The same restless, indignant energy that sent him after the starfire, that sent him to speak with the wyrms, that drew him to take Hikaru across the sea, kindled under his skin.\n\n\"He's not bragging,\" Hikaru said, bristling, now fully coiled around Shard to shield him even as he defended his strength. \"He's done everything he said.\"\n\nEvery dragon in the fighting arenas, a dozen at least, had stopped to watch them.\n\n\"Enough,\" said Isora. \"You will leave,\" he said to Shard.\n\nShard's tail lashed. \"I've done nothing wrong.\"\n\n\"Your very presence disrupts our very short time to practice.\"\n\n\"My presence does nothing. His arrogance caused this.\" He lifted his beak to point to Kagu, and couldn't seem to stop the next words. \"If he believes me to be a lying braggart, then let me prove myself. I challenge him to a spar.\"\n\nTo their credit, none of them laughed, except Hikaru, who exclaimed, \"Ha!\"\n\nAnd as soon as he said it, Shard knew both that he couldn't take it back, and that it was the stupidest thing he'd done since drawing the wyrms to the Dawn Spire. In his brief days there he'd learned that dragon honor was like a vital organ. It spanned their mind, their spirit, their family, all the way to their ancestors since the First Age. He might as well have stabbed an icicle to Kagu's belly and expected to walk away with no consequence.\n\n\"I accept,\" the yellow dragon said gravely, showing all his teeth. \"And let us fight in the fourth ring, since you claim to be a master.\"\n\n\"I never claimed that,\" Shard said. \"But I'll fight wherever you like.\"\n\n\"Fifth ring,\" declared Isora.\n\nKagu's head jerked up, eyes bright with surprise, his soft nose flushing with pleasure. \"You think I'm ready? But, he has a clear advantage in size\u2014\"\n\n\"I have an advantage in size?\" Shard wondered. Standing, the yellow dragon was eight times the height of a griffin. From nose to tail Shard could've stood twenty griffins along his length.\n\n\"The spar isn't to blood,\" Hikaru reminded him. \"It's form, precision. You have only to drive or throw him from the ring.\"\n\n\"Ah, good,\" Shard said. \"I'll just throw him from the ring.\"\n\nKagu bared his teeth wider. \"This will be a pleasure.\"\n\nMaster Isora spiraled high and his voice rang like iron striking iron across the training valley. \"Kagu's honor has been questioned by the intruder, Rashard.\" No one dared to laugh, as Shard had been laughed at in the Dawn Spire for challenging their First Sentinel, Asvander. The mood here was much more dignified, more serious, curiosity reigned and the training dragons gathered in the tiers to watch. \"They will settle this matter now, in the ring of Sky.\"\n\n[ Hunters Hunted ]\n\nRegret and curiosity burned through Kjorn for not having taken the chance to see the great wyrms, but he knew it would've been a fool's errand, and put him further behind in his search for Shard.\n\nA day of flying saw them to a long sweeping plain, studded with uneven hills. As the sun sank, so did Brynja and Nilsine's motivation to keep airborne.\n\nThey'd risen above the haze and as the sky darkened and stars twinkled, they dove in a loose formation toward the ground. Kjorn liked to think they would've been able to see the great lake from that height, if there were no smoke and ash clouding the air, but such as it was it could have been days and days away.\n\n\"Look there,\" said Brynja, gliding in neatly on his left, and pointing roughly dawnward. \"You can barely make out where the hills turn into the Dawn Spire territory. You can't quite see the Spire itself, but\u2026\"\n\n\"I see.\" Kjorn tilted his head, staring hard until his eyes smarted against the smoke, and in the dimming light, made out the small, ghostly outline of rock towers on the horizon.\n\n\"Do you remember any of it? My father says you were just weeks old when Per and his allies left the Winderost.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Kjorn murmured, then raised his voice over the wind of their flight. \"Some scents bring a rough familiarity. But that's all.\"\n\n\"Did you ever think you would return?\"\n\n\"No.\" Kjorn shifted his wings as the wind picked up, catching scents as they descended. \"My father and his father's story was that we'd left with honor to conquer new lands, and we did. The Silver Isles was my home. It always has been.\"\n\nBrynja twined her talons, watching him thoughtfully. She seemed about to say something else, then extended a foreleg to point down. \"We could shelter in those hills. No creature claims this part of the land that I know of.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Kjorn called to Nilsine and together they all glided in to land. The low, bumpy rises gave little shelter from the cooling, constant wind, and only stunted grass grew. The haze, turning gray with evening, covered most scents, though Kjorn thought it caught a faint, old trace of pronghorn.\n\n\"Too late for hunting now,\" Brynja said, trotting up to him as she tucked her wings.\n\n\"From the air,\" he agreed, and looked over as Nilsine approached. \"Though we might hunt as lions do. I could use a meal.\"\n\nA rare look of approval shone on Nilsine's face, and Brynja dipped her head, chagrined. \"Yes, we could do that.\"\n\nThey gathered the griffin band, now a hearty two dozen in all.\n\n\"We should split up,\" said Dagny, Brynja's wingsister. The younger, quick gryphoness nearly disappeared in the near-dark, with her richly sable brown feathers, but she spoke clear and bright. \"Range in at least three directions, since we don't know the land, and converge again if anyone scents prey.\"\n\nBrynja and Nilsine nodded at this plan, and Kjorn deferred to the huntresses' wisdom.\n\n\"We can use bird calls,\" Brynja said. \"Raise a call if you find prey. It will be less conspicuous to them and to anything else.\" She didn't say wyrms, but they all thought it.\n\nKjorn looked at her. \"Shard used bird calls, in the Silver Isles.\"\n\nHer ears flicked back, self-aware, and she nodded once. \"He worked with the huntresses here. It works well.\"\n\n\"I know a blue jay call,\" Kjorn said.\n\n\"I learned a magpie,\" Dagny said, excited for the hunt.\n\n\"I, a red hawk,\" Brynja said, and they looked to Nilsine.\n\n\"I suppose a gull would be conspicuous, this far inland.\" Brynja looked uncertain and Nilsine tossed her head. \"Honestly.\" With that they realized she was joking, they laughed, and she dipped her head, seeming more comfortable. \"I can make the sound of prairie owl.\"\n\n\"What shall I do?\" Fraenir, sitting too close to Kjorn and quivering with the excitement of all his strange new adventures, seemed to Kjorn to be too excitable just then to go hunting.\n\nKjorn flicked his tail, and paced to the top of the small hill. \"Fraenir, I want you to stay here, to relay calls\u2014\"\n\n\"Stay?\" He flared his wings. \"But we're only hunting! We're so far from the wyrms, from any danger. Why am I being punished?\"\n\n\"Punished?\" Kjorn shook his head. \"I need you to stay here. We don't know these hills. If anyone gets lost, they can't fly to find this spot again for fear of attracting wyrms. You're the center point. I'm not punishing you, I'm asking you to do this task, to serve me as you wished to.\"\n\nFraenir's ears flattened. The other griffins remained silent, and Kjorn noted a touch of smugness on Nilsine's face. \"But I'm a good hunter. I hunted with Rok.\"\n\n\"No one doubts you,\" Kjorn said evenly, resisting the urge to snap and simply order him. Fraenir served him out of some sense of whimsy, not true duty, and Kjorn had to remember he was not a prince here. He remembered the times Caj and his own father had calmly explained their reasons for asking him to do things, rather than just snapping orders. He walked down the hill to stand tall in front of Fraenir, who stepped back. \"This is what I ask of you. If you cannot do this, tell me what larger task I should entrust to you?\"\n\nChilly wind buffeted around them, raising an eerie, whistling song from the stunted grass and dead, dry flowers. Fraenir huffed. \"What bird sound shall I make?\"\n\nKjorn fluffed in a shrug. \"A crow.\"\n\nThat done, Brynja and Nilsine divided their bands into four groups, and Kjorn went with Brynja, since he had hunted at night and he didn't know if she had.\n\nShe climbed the low hill and looked down at the groups. Kjorn could barely see her now in the murky evening. \"Range,\" Brynja said. \"If you catch a scent, call twice. If you become lost, call three times. Fraenir, if you hear a thrice call, respond. No one is to fly. No one.\"\n\nThe wind picked up and they set out.\n\nCold laced Kjorn's bones. It wasn't the wet, snowy cold of the Silver Isles, but a dry and constant wedge against his skin and his chest. The smoky air blotted out the scent of prey. Walking seemed to take ages, careful smelling, trotting along hoof trails only to watch them scatter and then fade. They found old scat here and there, but that was all. Kjorn was ready to call the hunt and sleep a little hungry when they came across the day-old scent of a painted wolf, and tracks.\n\n\"Odd,\" Brynja remarked, setting her talons into a paw print to confirm its size. It had been nearly a full mark of wandering after half dead trails. Kjorn discerned gray moonlight filtering down through the haze. \"I didn't think there was a painted wolf pack in this area.\"\n\n\"I wonder if\u2014\"\n\nA crow croaked faintly in the dark.\n\nBoth stood silent. Brynja's huntresses gathered close, ears perked, and they all heard the crow again. Then a third time. A fourth time, louder and more like a griffin.\n\n\"Come,\" Brynja said, \"That's\u2014\"\n\nThe fifth crow call broke into an eagle's piercing scream, then Fraenir's frantic voice, distantly shrieking in panic.\n\nThen, nothing.\n\nThe singing wind brought them a faint, sour scent.\n\nBrynja and Kjorn looked at each other, and without speaking, their hunting band broke into a sprint, running hard back to the hills.\n\n[ The Ring of Sky ]\n\nIsora made his formal announcement to the young trainees, and Kagu left them to lope down to the fighting rings.\n\nShard looked at Hikaru. \"I thought you said the rings were named after the elements. The first four are earth, wind, fire, water?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Hikaru uncertainly.\n\n\"What is sky?\"\n\nHikaru uncoiled from him, ears flattening back into his mane. \"I\u2026I don't know. I haven't learned yet.\"\n\n\"Well, it can't matter,\" Shard said, though surely it did. \"It's just about the size, isn't it? It's harder because it's smaller?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Hikaru said, and they turned to walk down from the sitting tiers toward the flat stretch of the valley and the fighting rings. \"It's much more. Each ring has a principle to learn. In the ring of earth, we learn to stand strong and defend. Wind, to move quickly, to evade. Fire teaches us to be aggressive and to attack. Water, to flow around, to use our opponent's energy against them.\"\n\nShard considered that, and studied the massive, spiraling rings. The snow in the ring of sky was untouched by fighting, but combed by dragon claws into a uniform, spiraling design that echoed the great spiral of the rest of the rings. In the sunlight, for half a breath, Shard saw Groa's dream net, then a shell, a fern leaf, a great spiraling wing of stars.\n\nShard blinked hard, looking back to Hikaru. \"So each ring has a technique. But you don't know what it takes to win in the ring of sky?\"\n\nHikaru shook his head. \"No. I'm sorry, brother. But you'll be fine.\" He bared his teeth. \"You're a master.\"\n\nShard wished he felt the same. As custom dictated, Shard followed Kagu through each ring, showing a moment of respect. The ground was a mix of mud and snow, churned by dragon claws. He considered what Hikaru said. Defend, evade, attack, flow.\n\nI'll bet Stigr would've known what the last principle was.\n\nKagu stepped into the fifth ring, his claws breaking the perfect design in the snow. A look of bliss overtook the young dragon's face. Shard supposed it was a high honor, to be deemed fit for the ring of the masters, even if his opponent was a griffin.\n\nThat must mean it's a high honor for me, too.\n\nShard entered the ring. While Kagu reveled in the ring itself, Shard tested the ground with a couple soft pats. The snow within was groomed, smooth-packed but not frozen to ice, soft enough to grip with hind claws and talons for decent footing.\n\nShard drew a breath, staring up at the dazzling yellow length of his opponent, for the first time truly appreciating the long muscles under his scales, the narrow wings, perfect for precision flying, the articulate, nimble forepaws, perfect for snatching one small griffin and tossing him from the ring.\n\nThey bowed to each other.\n\nI've seen him fight, but he's never seen me. So I do have that advantage. The challenge would come in remaining aware of the ring, and Shard made a quick note of the diameter. Only five leaps. Worse for Kagu than him, but still a small space to fight a dragon.\n\n\"Begin,\" commanded Isora, and the only sound, for half a heartbeat, was wind in the valley.\n\nKagu whipped forward, head and horns down as if to simply butt Shard from the ring. Shard swallowed his first impulse, mind racing to the rings.\n\nDefend.\n\nHe held his ground for two heartbeats, then leaped hard, flapping fast for height. Evade.\n\nCircling tightly in the ring, Shard hoped Kagu would simply barrel out by mistake, but the yellow dragon was no fledgling. Whipping around the very instant Shard leaped, Kagu circled the inner perimeter of the ring, eyeing Shard with a new spark.\n\nAttack.\n\nShard took the dragon's moment of curiosity and turned down, plummeting toward the shining target of Kagu's eyes. Kagu stood his ground, offering his face. Shard ground his beak, forcing himself to hold the dive. Surely Kagu would dodge. Surely\u2026when Shard was within striking distance, the dragon flung his jaws wide open.\n\nWith a yelp of surprise Shard threw himself to the side. Kagu caught him in the crook of his foreleg and surged up to throw him from the ring.\n\nFlow.\n\nRather than try to fight free, Shard let the dragon toss him toward the border of stones. Head over tail, he flared upside down and halted short of the line, shut his wings and dropped to the ground, throwing himself onto his own back. Gasping once, he rolled as Kagu darted forward again, and scrambled directly under the yellow dragon's belly, trying to dizzy him.\n\nKagu circled about, swiping for Shard's tail.\n\nWith a surge of hope Shard quickly noted his advantages. If not speed, then size, in this ring at least. Kagu might lose track of him for brief seconds, or the stone border. If not strength, then strategy. Kagu had spars, Shard had fought battles, and had studied their fighting for days. With what Hikaru told him, he recognized each movement as Kagu used it.\n\nAs they circled, snapped, and tried to drive or outsmart each other from the ring, Shard's mind spun with the sequence, and he realized Kagu met each of his attacks with a principle of the elements. Defend, evade. Attack. Defend. Attack, flow, defend.\n\nEver aware of the stones at their heels, they grew more distracted by trying not to cross out of the ring than by trying to attack.\n\nUnable to outwit each other on the ground, and with a low buzzing growing in his ears and an ache in his leg, Shard shoved from the earth into the air. Kagu followed. Shard realized the buzzing was a churring murmur among the dragons, the rustle of wings, audible tension.\n\nThey flew narrowly, twining around each other with swipes and shoves, Shard almost feeling choreographed as they matched movement to movement.\n\nSpirals of yellow dazzled before Shard's eyes as he looped through Kagu's coils, trying to fool him into flying outside the now invisible but still real barrier of the fighting ring. They were allowed to fight in the air, but crossing beyond the stones still meant losing. Distracted, neither of them brought strong attacks, and Shard's flight suffered from constantly checking down for the position of the stones.\n\nDefend. Evade. Attack. Flow.\n\nDefend, evade, he looped under Kagu, leading him on an artful twist upwards. They pursued, looped, twisted, swiped, neither winning, both failing.\n\nDefend, evade, attack, flow\u2026what comes after flow? What great technique does a master have to fight with that I don't?\n\nShard flapped higher, eyeing the ring below them as it seemed to shrink. How have I won my greatest battles? He thought of Sverin, of fighting in the storm, of plunging into the sea. He thought of fighting the wyrm. He thought of Stigr at his side, mad with laughter, remembered how he'd dived straight at the ground, straight, unwavering, certain that he could lead the wyrm to its death but stop his own dive in time.\n\nCertain.\n\nDefend, evade, attack flow\u2026he thought of the ring of stones. They'd flown, fought, circled. Shard realize now that he felt how far he could go to one side or the other. Without looking now, Shard knew the parameters of the circle around him. He knew. With certainty, he knew.\n\nShard flapped hard, and high, and Kagu chased.\n\nDefend, evade, attack, flow.\n\nShard gasped into the cold, frost gathering on his face, chest tightening around dry, thin wind. He turned to face Kagu as the dragon leveled with him. The yellow dragon spiraled, flared\u2014and glanced down to check his position.\n\nShard swept in toward his face, talons splayed. Kagu flapped back, once, and braced for Shard's attack.\n\nBut Isora's voice pierced the wind from far below.\n\n\"Kagu! You've broken the ring. The spar is won.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon sucked in a breath, his serpent eyes white-ringed and furious. \"How?\" His breath sounded short. \"How did you know, without looking?\"\n\n\"I just knew,\" Shard said. Kagu shook his head, unsatisfied. \"And I trusted that I knew,\" Shard added quietly.\n\nKagu gazed at him, eyes deadly pale, as if he might ask ten more questions\u2014or attack. Then, mute, he turned to glide down. Shard followed, slowly spilling air and taking deep breaths.\n\nWhen they landed on the ground outside of the rings, Kagu turned and bowed to Shard. Then he lifted his head to the see the training masters and the other dragons who flocked down to stare and to confirm that, indeed, a griffin had just beaten one of their own, in their own highest ring.\n\n\"Thank you for the spar,\" Kagu said, surprising Shard with a quiet, respectful tone. \"You have proven your skill and perhaps I've learned something today.\"\n\n\"From a master,\" Hikaru said, drawing forward to coil around Shard. Kagu eyed him sidelong, and dipped his head again, the long muscle in his jaw flexed, biting back comment.\n\n\"Enough,\" said Master Isora. \"Well enough. Back to your spars. Hikaru, you are dismissed for the day, for your impudence. Go to the warrior shrine and reflect upon your disobedience, and how you might have better honored your mother's memory.\" Hikaru bowed and Isora looked to Kagu. \"Kagu, you will groom the snow in the ring of sky.\"\n\nKagu's gaze flickered, his ears flattened, and Shard assumed this was the loser's chore. \"Yes, Master,\" he murmured, dipping his head low. Isora stepped away to answer the eager questions of the younger dragons.\n\nKagu's claws whipped out to grab Shard's foreleg, though his head was still bowed, wings hunched to hide his movements from Isora. Shard hissed, ears flattening.\n\nKagu's eyes burned molten. \"I will not forget this humiliation.\"\n\n\"Release me,\" Shard growled, shaking his head once to warn Hikaru from interfering.\n\n\"You may fly well, but I will show everyone what you really are. I will show everyone that griffins, like Kajar, are not to be trusted.\" His gaze snapped to the side when Hikaru hissed, low. \"And you, winterborn, stay away from me. I don't need your ill luck.\"\n\nHe backed away suddenly, as Isora's shadow fell over them. \"Now, Kagu. To your task.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master.\" He bowed low and slithered back to the ring of sky.\n\nIsora watched him go, then looked at Shard. \"You did spar honorably, and you proved your skill. The empress did not command that you couldn't be here, but left it to our judgment. You may watch our practices and learn more.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Shard said, bowing deeply to him and draping his wings in a mantle. Then he straightened. \"But I don't think I need to.\"\n\n[ A Fearful Legacy ]\n\nThough Kjorn and Brynja had resisted the urge to fly, the rest of their band had not. Kjorn heard Dagny shouting from above even as Nilsine barreled toward them from the opposite direction. The Vanhar, at least, had remained land bound as instructed. All had heard Fraenir's frantic cries, all returned.\n\n\"Wyrms!\" Dagny shouted. \"I smell\u2014\"\n\n\"Get down,\" Brynja commanded, running hard at Kjorn's left, their small band behind her. \"Land, now!\"\n\nA rush of unnatural wind struck them along with the scent of old meat and sour flesh. Kjorn fell rolling and realized Brynja had struck him from the side, shoving him from the path of a massive tail. The wyrm tail ended in a spade that struck the ground and gouged a trench before the wyrm flapped higher.\n\n\"Fraenir!\" Kjorn shouted, regaining his feet and staring upward. \"Where are you? Everyone, to me!\"\n\n\"Be still,\" Brynja panted, trotting up to him. The wyrms had flown impossibly fast to have caught them there. Or not all had returned to the Outlands, Kjorn realized, feeling foolish. They might be scattered everywhere. They could be anywhere, anywhere, hunting and waiting for griffins.\n\nGradually, he better understood the terror they'd wrought.\n\nBrynja shouldered him into the shadow of a hill, though he was certain the beasts saw in the dark, if that's when they hunted. The rest of their two dozen griffins gathered toward Brynja's soft, urgent jay calls.\n\nThe wyrms circled, wing beats flattening the grass, roars soaring through Kjorn's bones and sending the rest of the group pressing together with soft whimpers.\n\nKjorn sank to his belly in the low grass and crawled forward, ignoring Nilsine's hissing to return, and peered up. Though the night laid dark on them, and the haze diffused any moonlight, he discerned the wyrm's shape, and that there were only two.\n\nKjorn sucked a sharp breath, and held it, grasping to his courage.\n\nTheir leathery wings stretched taut to the wind, membranes dull and dark and blotting out the stars. Their heads were nearly as large as Kjorn's entire body, with wide, wedged jaws, sprouting thick crests of horns around their faces and down the long necks. Limbs as thick as tree trunks hung down, bearing thick, curving claws, and the great heads swerved back and forth as they gusted great breaths in and out, smelling. Kjorn eyed the sharp, spade end of their tails.\n\nHis heart twisted into his throat, his ears twitched back. Their size could crush him. They could kill him with a blow. One claw could take his head. The tail could sever, the horrible roar deafen, and the hide looked thick enough to repel the sharpest talon, should he be stupid enough to fight.\n\nEverything about them overpowered his natural senses and told the deepest, animal part of him to flee.\n\nKjorn forced himself to remain where he was. They were only flesh, blood and bone like him.\n\nThe vision he'd had in the underground pool rose before him and for a moment he closed his eyes. The vision, brought by the wolf seer and a raven. He saw the dark, shadow versions of the wyrms crowding around him, saw Tyr's light spread from his own wings, letting him rise above them.\n\nWith slow, beating surety, Kjorn knew it was not the wyrms he was meant to overcome, after all, but his own fear. It could be done. He knew it, because Shard had done it.\n\nHe stood, not meaning to fly or attack, but only prove that he could, in their terrible presence, still be himself. To know that he could stand, as Shard had stood, and face them.\n\nHe knew now what terror haunted his own father's nightmares, and he refused to inherit it.\n\nBreathing slowly, he found that their scent could wash over him without instilling mindless terror, that he could stare hard at them without succumbing to mindlessness. Their size, their witless, savage rolling snarls plucked at the Nameless instinct in him, but he refused to give in.\n\nInstead, he narrowed his eyes, watching their roving, circling flight, and saw that they drew gradually away. Brynja hissed at him to lie back down, but Kjorn remained still. He knew the wyrms saw him, and threatened him by gaping their jaws and roaring.\n\nHe stood still, and after a moment, was able to speak.\n\n\"They aren't attacking,\" he observed, and saying it out loud, was able to breathe normally again.\n\nBrynja crept out beside him, still flat in the grass, and Nilsine joined her. Behind them, the rest of the group pressed to the hillside, watching.\n\n\"Threatening,\" Brynja whispered in agreement, and Kjorn heard her swallow hard; her voice had cracked. \"But not attacking. They're leaving.\"\n\nNilsine edged up on Kjorn's other side, also staying low. \"We scented a herd, just before Fraenir started his caterwauling. A pronghorn herd. Perhaps they mean to keep us from it.\"\n\n\"If they want the herd,\" Kjorn murmured, \"then we need only remain here, still.\" He had to force the words out, for it sounded like cowardice. \"And they'll continue away.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Brynja growled. \"I don't understand why they attacked so willfully at the Dawn Spire, as if they had a grudge, and now\u2026I know they saw us. They tried to kill you. They see you even now.\"\n\n\"Perhaps these are different,\" Kjorn said. \"Perhaps they weren't part of the attack, and they're only acting as witless beasts about their prey.\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" Brynja said.\n\n\"Do you count them all as a single creature?\" Nilsine asked, her voice cutting. \"Not all griffins act the same, why should all these?\"\n\n\"They all hate griffins,\" Brynja insisted.\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Why don't you go speak to them,\" Brynja offered, \"and see how you fare? You said yourself they sought out griffins who fly at night.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Kjorn murmured, gaze still following the strange, roving flight of the wyrms. And indeed, they were drawing further away, downwind, in the direction Nilsine and her hunters had returned from. \"There, see. They've gone. No one take flight. We remain here, without hunting.\"\n\n\"And Fraenir?\" Nilsine asked.\n\nKjorn shook his head.\n\nThey rested through the night, posting a watch, and resumed a search for Fraenir in the daylight. They found no blood, no shed feathers, no sign of a fight or that he'd been injured or seen battle at all.\n\n\"He's gone,\" Kjorn confirmed after wasting a sunmark searching and calling.\n\n\"Fled,\" Nilsine said. \"As I told you he would.\"\n\nKjorn couldn't meet her gaze. He had so wanted to be right about the eager young rogue, to give him a chance. \"He was alone when the wyrms came. None of us could say we wouldn't have done the same.\"\n\nNilsine only shook her head. \"And now?\"\n\nKjorn looked starward. \"Press on.\"\n\n[ The Raven's Game ]\n\nThe side of the riverbank where Caj, Tocho and Halvden hunted was wider than the opposite shore where they'd first entered the pass, and they traveled at a good pace after their encounter with Sverin. Tocho and Halvden managed to cooperate well enough to hunt down a red deer within the canyon, and they ate well the first night, enough to keep them going through the day.\n\nCaj told Tocho of the warriors Ragna and Thyra had sent out.\n\n\"I imagine they're onto us by now,\" Halvden said.\n\nCaj checked the sky, heavy with trundling clouds. \"But they won't know where to look.\"\n\nTocho flattened one ear. \"It was easy for me to find you. There has been no fresh snow, so I followed your tracks. If I'd known, I would have covered them.\"\n\n\"You didn't know,\" Caj said, to mollify the young wolf as he grew distressed.\n\n\"There, look.\" Halvden paused mid-step, jutting his beak forward. \"We're almost to the valley. Walking, it will take at least another day to cross it. Perhaps slower still, since the snows are deep.\" He looked at Caj. \"Though if Sverin goes out hunting, you might meet him sooner.\"\n\nCaj looked toward the valley. From there he could see it was long and narrow, as if carved by the claw of Tyr, bare of trees in the center but bordered on all sides.\n\nIn silence, they walked, the opening of the pass beckoning, silent and cold under clouds. Caj's muscles slowly tightened and he moved his gaze and ears continually from the sky to the rock cliffs towering above, to the shadowy line of trees on either side of the valley.\n\nAt any moment he expected to see Sverin's bright wings against the leaden sky, to hear again that awful, mindless shrieking.\n\nTocho whined at the gathering tension, and Caj shook himself of imaginary fears.\n\nThey all halted at the sound of a griffin call.\n\nTocho went still, quivering and lifting his muzzle to the gray sky. \"No scent of other griffins.\"\n\nHalvden's ears flicked to and fro and Caj stilled, searching the sky just above the river. He saw no sign of Sverin or other movement but for a pair of ravens, mucking about over the water. Tocho eyed the ravens, nose twitching.\n\n\"Ragna's warriors?\" Halvden asked, sounding unconvinced.\n\nCaj shook his head. \"If it is, they're distant, or not well. Their calls sound strained.\"\n\n\"I think it's them,\" Tocho said, thrusting his nose toward the ravens.\n\nCaj looked over, perking his ears. \"What reason would they have?\"\n\n\"Or it is griffins, giving bird calls,\" Halvden said. \"You know, the idea Shard gave us last summer\u2026\" He trailed off, ears laying back. Caj hid his own expression by looking away. \"Is it true that Shard is coming back?\"\n\n\"He will if he can,\" Caj said, turning to face the narrow deer trail, a neat line of packed snow along the riverbank that led them deeper into the canyon. They were almost to the valley\u2014he could see it opening out ahead, ringed with pines. \"Anyway, let's get under cover in case they are on our trail. You'll have questions to answer for lying, and I'll have to convince them to stay well back. I don't think either of us will do very well.\"\n\nThankfully, Halvden offered no further questions or opinions on Shard, or the pursuit of Ragna's warriors.\n\nAs they trotted forward Tocho murmured to Halvden, \"Shard will return. He is the rightful prince of the Sun Isle, and the Summer King.\"\n\n\"Summer King,\" Halvden snorted. \"Vanir nonsense.\"\n\n\"You should think carefully what you'll say when he returns,\" Caj said quietly. \"He will be your king.\"\n\n\"Sverin is my king.\"\n\nCaj sighed, and turned away. He didn't know if Sverin, even returning to his senses, would ever be anyone's king again.\n\n\"Oh, look there.\" Tocho sprang to one side before standing straight and still, his long nose pointed up the canyon. Caj and Halvden stopped, looking up. At first he only saw clouds, then discerned three griffins in a wedge formation, flying high. By their movement, Caj guessed they hadn't seen them yet. Halvden loose a reverberating growl. Tocho whined. \"I'm sorry, Caj. The wind was wrong, I didn't smell\u2014\"\n\n\"No fault of yours,\" Caj rumbled, edging under the scant cover of overhanging rock and hoping it would be enough. \"Get to the trees, now.\"\n\n\"You get to the trees,\" Halvden said, and before Caj could stop him, the younger warrior turned tail and sprang away, leaping thrice and then into the air, to wing fast back the way they'd come.\n\n\"Coward,\" Tocho said.\n\n\"No,\" Caj said. \"See, he's going toward them.\" Quietly, Caj cursed.\n\nTocho turned, perking his ears. It was true. Halvden soared up high, shouting, and the wedge of griffins paused and banked to see him. All of them turned with a chorus of furious yells when they realized it was Halvden, and dove.\n\nAs the trio fell lower, Caj recognized orange Vald, a full blood Aesir and friend of Halvden's, an older Vanir named Ingmer, and a female half-blood, nicknamed Rowan for her deep brown feathers edged with red. Strong warriors all, a good mix to represent both queens, Caj thought, and for a moment, he was transfixed by Halvden's brazenness and stupidity.\n\n\"Come!\" Tocho urged. \"He's giving you a chance to get to the valley. You know where Sverin nests, you can still reach him first, come.\"\n\n\"I thought the queens sent five,\" he muttered, more to himself than Tocho, and searched the strip of sky above the canyon again.\n\nTocho padded a circle around him, snuffling at the ground, though his gaze was locked on the sky. \"Perhaps they're still lost, or ranging behind. Come, my friend. Don't waste Halvden's diversion.\"\n\nCaj wavered. Halvden would suffer punishment for helping him and for lying about Sverin's location. After a moment, he knew he had to press forward. Halvden risked himself to give Caj a chance, and he wouldn't waste it. Trusting Thyra's orders, Ragna, and the discipline of a Vanir warrior and two who had trained under Caj himself, he turned and loped, hugging to the rock face, toward the valley and the cover of trees. Halvden would suffer punishment\u2014but not death.\n\nAnd honestly he could use a little more punishment, Caj thought.\n\nA cacophony of shouts and snarls filled the canyon and Caj nearly stumbled in surprise. He stopped and stared up and around, searching for the source.\n\nTocho burst into laughter at the seemingly invisible voices, sprinting ahead, then circling back and sniffing, ears turning about.\n\n\"Oh, look, what games? What it this? Caj, it's ravens!\"\n\nAgain, the small, strange griffin cries scattered around the canyon. Glancing back showed that Ragna's warriors had broken their formation and pursuit of Halvden to circle and look around. Caj pressed to the rock, holding still in the wet shadow of the towering cliff face.\n\nHalvden taunted the warriors from down near the river, landing on the bank and flashing his emerald wings against the backdrop of rock and snow. \"All right, you've caught me! Follow and I'll take you to Sverin's den!\"\n\nA laughing raven echoed him, the black bird spiraling down in flashy loops from above, and calling out in griffin tones.\n\nNoticing the ravens, Halvden mockingly called, \"Which way?\" to which the ravens responded gleefully with, \"This way!\" as they split in five separate directions.\n\nCaj slanted one ear forward, and the other back. He heard Vald shouting curses at the birds, and got the feeling that the ravens had been pestering the griffin warriors for their entire hunt.\n\nBut why?\n\nHe knew he should run, but for a moment he stood mesmerized, wondering why ravens would care about distracting the warriors, would care about helping him at all.\n\nSoon the air filled with them. Ravens swooped and circled above the canyon, calling first in their own guttural voices, then, with laughing caws they each loosed a perfect, seemingly faraway mimic of a grown griffin male. One had even nearly perfected Sverin's own, deep-chested snarl.\n\nThen Caj remembered Sigrun's promise to help.\n\nSigrun, daughter-of-Hrafn. Hrafn, another name for Raven. In all their years together, Sigrun had avoided doing anything to make Caj uncomfortable or remind anyone overtly that her father had been a powerful, Vanir healer with mysterious ties to the nature of the isles\u2014or that she herself possessed those same ties.\n\nDid she call these ravens forward to help me? To trick Ragna's warriors?\n\n\"No this way!\" cried a cackling female raven. \"He shelters in rocks past the river of night.\"\n\n\"He cowers from darkness and flies only in light.\"\n\n\"He listens to none, and by none is heard\u2014\"\n\n\"The Red War King is nothing but a bird.\"\n\nEven though they taunted Ragna's warriors, not him, Caj felt locked to ground as the raven jeers began to heat his temper. Tocho brushed against him, reassuring. Caj grunted acknowledgement, staring at the storm of ravens.\n\nKnowing that Sigrun would stand against her own wingsister to help him stoked the determination in his chest. She believed in him. She believed that Sverin could be restored and she had done what she could to help him.\n\nTheir calls echoed on. \"I have seen him, I have seen the Red King! He flies and shelters round and round and I have watched him up wander uphill\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014and down!\"\n\n\"Silence, tricksters,\" shouted the Vanir, Ingmer. \"We've had enough of you.\"\n\nThe ravens laughed on and on and scattered, still calling, mimicking griffin growls and shrieks.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Tocho pleaded, and thrust his cold nose under Caj's neck feathers to his skin.\n\n\"Ah!\" Coming to his senses with a quick, breathless laugh, Caj butted his head against the wolf, feeling an affection and gratitude he would've never thought possible. He realized the other reason he'd hesitated, and met the wolf's amber eyes.\n\n\"No. I will go on alone. Help Halvden distract them, and don't let him do anything too foolish. It's Sverin they want, not him, and certainly not you.\" Tocho looked ready to argue. \"Now go. I won't let you face Sverin or come close. You've done enough, Tocho, for ten wolves, and I hope it brings you the esteem you desire.\"\n\nTocho studied him, ears perked, and appeared to resist the urge to lick Caj's face in deference, which Caj appreciated.\n\n\"I wish you luck my friend. Good hunting to you.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Fair winds.\"\n\nThey parted, Tocho breaking into a run back down the canyon, Caj slinking quickly along the rock face.\n\nAs Caj had hoped, the ravens soon clotted the air so thickly the warriors were forced back, higher, and away, and raw, laughing calls bounded through the mountain pass. Tocho's howl joined Halvden's voice, calling out to the warriors. Caj kept running, cold air cutting his chest, his broken wing aching. No matter. Soon this will end, one way or another.\n\nAfter a few moments of breathless running along the river, the pass broke open, the mountains widening out at last. The river wound off and grew wider, cutting an icy trail down the middle. The walls of the mountains sloped into gentle sweeps of snowy fields, the foothills darkened by snow-covered evergreens.\n\nCaj waded through snow, out of the pass and directly along the foothills to the tree line. He would've preferred to cut across the valley to the far side, but realized that not only was the snow neck-deep, but any of Ragna's warriors would've spotted him easily from the air, if they ever made it past the ravens and Halvden.\n\nWith one last glance over his wing, he plunged under the cover of trees. Under the pine boughs, the untouched snow came only to his belly, and he slogged through the woods.\n\nThe valley beside him was silent, empty of bird, game, or rival predators. Only wind moved, rushing around in hurried gusts, now and then raising funnels of dry, sparkling snow.\n\nCaj set his gaze toward the far end of the valley, showing through the trees. At last, as he had intended from the outset, he went on to meet the mad king, to meet his wingbrother, alone.\n\n[ At the Shrine ]\n\nOver the course of an Age, the dragons had hollowed the mountain range they called Ryujan, or the Mountains of the Sea, and their dwellings, workrooms, tunnels and intricate architecture of ice and stone stretched for an area larger than the Silver Isles. Everything was molded to their size and comfort, and Shard always felt tiny when he followed Hikaru through the vast caverns, tunnels, or between mountains.\n\nNow they flew to the warrior shrine, for Hikaru to do his reflection, and then Shard planned to search for Groa's dragon. He slipped talons under his feathers to touch the fire stones, to make sure they hadn't fallen off during the spar.\n\nThanks to Hikaru, he understood their use, and how he would make fire. The once bright pyres of the Dawn Spire had been doused during the battle with the wyrms, and Shard planned to relight them when he returned, as a sign of his friendship, and other reasons.\n\nFirst he pictured Kjorn's face. Then he imagined, with relish, what Brynja's reaction might be to see him wield and create fire, not just feed a skyfire spark, as the Dawn Spire griffins had done. Brynja loved fire. She had thrilled to see him fly with torches, expertly lighting pyres without putting them out, without singing his wings, and had taught her to do the same.\n\nHe remembered foolishly thinking that such a display would be enough to win her. To ask her to leave her obligations and ties. To have her break a promise, to become his queen\u2014for truly, that's what he asked of her\u2014to leave her birthplace and family and begin a family of her own far from home, all for him.\n\nShard took a deep breath. It was much to ask. It was too much to ask of anyone, and he didn't know if love was enough to offer her. Rubbing a talon over the rabbit skin pouch and the stones within, Shard wondered what, if anything, would be enough.\n\nOne wing stroke, then another.\n\nOne foot in front of the other.\n\nStigr's advice calmed his agitated thoughts.\n\nIt was still a distant thing, and many other obstacles stood in the path between them, no matter what way he looked at it. Shard tucked his talons together and laid his ears back, fiddling with the silver chain Groa had given him.\n\nHe and Hikaru winged in silence across the long, main mountain cavern, the quickest shortcut to the next mountain. Shard ignored the dragons who stared at them\u2014still, though it had been weeks, and caught the scent of smoke and hot metal from one female who whipped by overhead, her claws overflowing with long golden chains.\n\nWith a shudder, he recalled the forges\u2014a network of caverns and tunnels so hot and moist Shard was surprised there was any snow left in the Sunland.\n\nGlimpses inside the stone caves showed him fire\u2014fire and gold so hot it flowed like water, and the scent of hot metal and warm dragon flesh clotted the air. Smoke seeped out through cracks in the mountains but still clouded the forges, and any dragon who spoke to them had a voice rough with the months they'd spent breathing it.\n\nStill, the dragons seemed content in the miserable conditions, doing their work. Shard had marveled how they, like the warrior dragons and the healers, performed each task, no matter how small, with careful, ceremonial attention.\n\nHikaru had shown him on the third day there, despite the empress's warning. They'd been ordered away from the forges, but Hikaru saw no punishment from it, and Shard doubted anyone told the empress. Shard noticed how reluctant dragons were to truly punish their young, at least one as young as Hikaru.\n\nOr perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was Hikaru.\n\nAnd you, winterborn, stay away from me.\n\nHe is winterborn, Amaratsu had said. Already a difficult fate.\n\n\"Shard, there!\"\n\nThey burst from the exit in the main cavern and fresh cold wind brightened Shard's thoughts as the sun glared down on them. He followed Hikaru's pointing claw to behold the azure sea, stretching away and away beyond the mountain peaks. Shard breathed deeply, smelling mostly snow, but a whiff of salt air. It tempered his longing for home, and his determination to finish his business with the dragons as soon as possible.\n\nFrom there they winged to a smaller, icy peak Shard had never entered.\n\nThey landed in the center of the mail cavern, and Hikaru led the way. \"Each way of life has a shrine,\" he explained, for Shard. \"The warriors, the crafters and healers and so on. And the highest, of course, to Tyr and Tor and Midragur, is beyond the valley in another mountain.\"\n\n\"Midragur is a god, here?\"\n\n\"No, not like that exactly. Midragur is\u2026the First.\"\n\n\"The first dragon?\"\n\n\"Yes. But we call him Ryu, the first son of Tyr and Tor.\"\n\nShard looked around, wondering if the wyrms considered Midragur the First dragon also. If they thought of him all. If they thought at all. He hoped the dragon Groa had spoken of would know much more about them. His quest to find out about the Aesir had rewarded him greatly and let him better understand Sverin, Kjorn and the others. Shard was certain if he could learn more about the wyrms he could understand and either befriend, or know how to fight them.\n\nThe small, quiet mountain was mostly empty of dragons and immediately Shard felt calm, beholding the quiet patterns carved into the pillars of the main cavern. Natural tunnels and carved openings let in long shafts of sunlight from above, shining in great rough circles on the floor. Shard felt, oddly, the same as he did when wandering the deepest forest of the Star Isle.\n\nHikaru led him to an archway that bore an image of a Sunland dragon rampant, which Shard recognized now as the warrior dragons' emblem.\n\n\"We must be quiet, in the shrine,\" Hikaru said, though Shard had guessed, and they both bowed to the dragon image above the arch, and entered the passageway.\n\nAfter walking for a moment Shard realized there had been no torches in the main cavern, only the shafts of sun, and none lining the tunnel where they walked. Instead, a familiar, pale light glowed from up ahead.\n\nThey emerged into an ice cavern much smaller than the empress's throne room, but on a dragon scale nonetheless. Life-sized reliefs of battling dragons blazed on the curving wall. Now Shard recognized each principle of a dragon defending, evading, attacking, and flowing like water. He looked for a dragon to represent the principle of sky, but saw none. At the far end a raised dais was littered with herbs, smooth stones, carved gems, and other offerings, all overseen by an eternally glaring dragon carved from the stone and ice above the dais.\n\nShard would have marveled at the detail and light of the cold shrine, but as they stepped inside, they saw they were not alone.\n\nA dragoness sat coiled to one side of the shrine, head bowed in meditation. Smaller horns told Shard she was female, only a couple of months Hikaru's senior, leanly muscled under scales the delicate hue of an apple blossom.\n\nHikaru sucked in a breath, his wings lifted, and the dragoness raised her head at the commotion.\n\nWarm breath misted in front of her silver eyes as she exhaled in surprise. \"Hikaru?\"\n\nShard ventured, \"Is this\u2014\"\n\n\"Natsumi!\" Hikaru cried, shattering the reverence of the shrine and barreling forward, only to slip, slide on the ice and crash into her in a fit of laughter and flaring wings. As Shard tread more carefully forward on the ice floor and watched the two young dragons dissolve into the chatter of catching up, he thought this happy bit of serendipity was a much better way for Hikaru to spend his time than reflecting on his \"disobedience,\" as Isora had instructed.\n\n\"\u2026and this is Shard,\" Hikaru said as Shard approached. \"Of course.\" Perhaps realizing the introduction of the only griffin in the Sunland was unnecessary, Hikaru slanted one ear, looking chagrined.\n\n\"I'm honored to meet a friend of Hikaru's, Natsumi.\" Shard bowed, and she bowed her delicate head in return.\n\n\"And I'm honored to meet you at last, Shard of Sun, of the Silver Isles.\" Her voice sounded like wind in autumn leaves, bright, crisp and intelligent. \"I hoped I would meet you before you left us.\"\n\nShard found her to be uniquely beautiful, and in response to her beauty and courtesy, sorrow clutched him. She would die so young. No wonder Hikaru was so thrilled to see her, so unbridled in his joy. They had so little time. Shard looked from Natsumi to Hikaru, and wondered how much more wondrous and beautiful they must seem to each other.\n\nBut more than that, Shard at last heard genuine respect and curiosity, was proud to know Hikaru chose his friends well.\n\nHikaru broke back in, his reason for coming to the shrine happily forgotten. \"Natsumi, I'm so happy to see you, and I've missed you, but, and I'm sorry to be blunt, but we need your help.\"\n\nBy her bright, admiring gaze, Shard thought the young dragoness didn't mind. \"Of course I'll help you if I can.\"\n\n\"Didn't your parents forbid you from\u2026\" Shard trailed off when she turned a serene look to him.\n\n\"I'm certain you have enough to worry about, without including me in your cares.\" Her nose crinkled in amusement. \"I benefit from being the youngest of three. My parents might indulge me one more bit of disobedience. Tell me, Hikaru, what I can do.\"\n\nHikaru sat back on his haunches, coiling his tail around his own feet. \"Shard is looking for a dragon who a spirit told him would tell the truth. A storyteller. Do you know who that would be?\"\n\n\"Hm.\" Not questioning that Shard had spoken to a spirit, Natsumi re-coiled herself with such neatness and precision it looked like a dance movement, and thought.\n\nHikaru waited, and Shard shifted on the ice.\n\nSunlight filtered into the ice cavern and Shard glanced to the shrine, thinking he might make a tribute to the warrior dragon, for Stigr, when Natsumi spoke again.\n\n\"Yes, I think it must be the chronicler.\"\n\n[ The Serpent River Pack ]\n\nRolling hills dotted with dwarfish trees and tough, scraggly undergrowth varied little as they flew. Brynja and Nilsine each assigned one of their own to scout ahead and behind for wyrm sign, and to watch for possible scouts from the Dawn Spire or the Ostral Shores. If the attack on the Dawn Spire had been as horrific as Brynja said, Kjorn couldn't imagine any griffin venturing far from their home, but they scouted all the same.\n\nLow haze still clung and a soft rain did nothing to lighten the mood or pretty the landscape, only leaving the ground slimy with ashy mud when they rested.\n\nThe weather slowed their progress and they knew they wouldn't reach the lake until the following morning.\n\nOnce again, they landed at near-dark, though that time they were sluggish, wet and hungry. If it were not for the wyrms, Kjorn would've gladly pressed on to the great lake during the night. A chill wind gusted and their only shelter was a mere stand of hawthorn saplings, scarcely wide enough to shelter five griffins, much less over twenty.\n\n\"Almost there,\" Dagny said, sounding too cheerful. \"By tomorrow we'll sup with the Lakelanders and perhaps see Asvander again.\" A bright note warmed her voice, and Kjorn wondered at it.\n\n\"A fine thing,\" Nilsine said. \"I will be glad to see water again, and eat fish.\"\n\n\"Shall we hunt?\" Kjorn asked them, generally.\n\nBrynja ruffled her feathers, looking around skeptically. Before she offered an answer, the wind shifted, and they all caught a scent at the same time. Painted wolf.\n\n\"I'll meet them,\" Kjorn said, stretching and re-folding his wings. \"I have dealings with wolves in the Silver Isles.\"\n\nBrynja remained back, and at Kjorn's word, so did Nilsine, though the Vanhar claimed to be friendly with all creatures of the Winderost. Fewer griffins would look less threatening, in his mind.\n\nKjorn left the stand of trees and walked to the crest of a low hill, smelling the area and looking around.\n\nA female wolf appeared first, at the top of an adjacent hill. Her face was painted in a black mask, whorls of white and brown streaking her sides as if wind had blown on her colors while they were still wet.\n\n\"Hail!\" called Kjorn. \"We mean to pass through these hills peacefully, and hunt only if you allow it. We thought no one claimed this land, but we honor yours.\"\n\nA big male crested the hill beside her, perked rounded ears at the sight of Kjorn, bared his fangs, and barreled down the hill. Kjorn kept his high ground, but the wolf lumbered forward.\n\nBrynja and Nilsine raced towards him even as Kjorn leaped into the air to avoid a fight, and the rest of the painted pack rushed over the hill behind the female, howling and snapping their jaws.\n\n\"Stop!\" Kjorn shouted. The big male turned, jaws wide to warn Brynja and Nilsine away, and the gryphonesses circled warily.\n\nKjorn landed hard, between them, as the rest of the pack swarmed in. Most of the pack milled behind their leader, but before anyone could move, another male rushed forward and barreled into Kjorn.\n\nA familiar scent came with him and Kjorn, his limbs tangled with the wolf's, found his face not bitten, but vigorously sniffed, before the wolf leaped away again.\n\n\"Mayka,\" Kjorn grunted in surprise, and relief, shoving to his feet again. \"You've traveled far.\"\n\n\"As have you, Shard's friend.\" The painted wolf circled back, watching Kjorn with a mouth full of gleaming teeth. \"And I have found my pack, who left the Voldsom when the Horn of Midragur breathed fire.\" He ducked his head as the bigger male stepped forward, ears flicking with interest. \"Please, my leader, a word. Please meet Kjorn, of the Silver Isles, who was a friend to Shard, who was friend to your sister, Nitara.\"\n\n\"Greetings,\" said the big wolf, glancing from Mayka to Kjorn, wary.\n\nRelieved, Kjorn felt he should offer some respect, and mantled.\n\nMayka looked pleased at the gesture, offered to his leader. \"Kjorn, this is Ilesh, leader of the Serpent River Pack. Please, my leader, these are allies. Let them be welcome here.\"\n\nIlesh regarded Kjorn, then looked to Nilsine. \"You are of the Vanhar?\"\n\nShe dipped her head. \"I am. We have only respect and honor for the painted hunters of the Winderost.\"\n\nThe wolf shook himself of drizzle as his pack milled around him. \"Then you may pass through these lands that we now claim.\"\n\n\"Shall they hunt with us?\" Mayka suggested, nosing his leader's shoulder. Ilesh showed him one fang, and Mayka chuckled and tucked his tail, padding away.\n\n\"You may,\" said Ilesh, \"because I know that your friend Shard was with my sister when she was killed, and tried to avenge her. You may hunt with us, only if you do not fly. This attracts our great enemy.\"\n\n\"We won't,\" Kjorn said, impressed with this account of his wingbrother, and grateful for the path of friendship Shard had left in his wake through this land.\n\n\"Then, come. We have scented a herd of wild pigs this way. With your strength we may very well feast tonight.\"\n\nWith no more ceremony he turned, head low, and loped back over the hill.\n\nKjorn looked at Brynja and Nilsine, hesitant, but hungry.\n\n\"I like wild pig,\" Dagny called from the shelter of the trees, and that decided it. Somewhat bewildered by their change in fortune, the griffins gathered themselves up and fell in behind Brynja, Nilsine and Kjorn.\n\nAs they picked up their pace and moved as one large, wolf and griffin pack, Mayka trotted in next to Kjorn. \"Now, tell me what has befallen you, and what became of my rogue friends since the Vanhar came and took all of you away, and where you mean to go, and if you found Shard, after all.\"\n\nIn brief, Kjorn told him all that had passed. \"Thank you for stepping in, back there. For your friendship, and help.\"\n\n\"I'm happy to help a friend of Shard.\"\n\n\"You speak of Shard highly. What did he do, that you honor him so?\"\n\nMayka opened his mouth in a happy pant, thinking, then watched Kjorn seriously. \"You heard Ilesh. First, Shard spoke to us. Honored us. And, he did what no one has yet done.\" In the muddy light of the moon, Mayka's eyes were like black, haunted pools. \"He faced the enemy, offered them honor and friendship, and when they bellowed their mindless hate, he did not run.\"\n\nKjorn, proud to called Shard his wingbrother in that moment, shuddered at the memory of wyrms. He'd stood tall himself, but not spoken or challenged them. \"Let's hope, when the time comes, we can all do the same.\"\n\n\"I ran, when first the wyrms roared, and I lost my name for too long.\" He showed Kjorn his teeth. \"When the time comes, I will not run again.\"\n\n[ Secrets in Fire and Gold ]\n\n\"It will have to be at night,\" Natsumi said. \"And alone.\"\n\nThey sat near the fire in Hikaru's den, picking at the last of a pile of fish Hikaru had caught. The dragon dens were tidier than griffin dens on the whole, carved to almost perfect roundness, with smooth, flat floors of stone. A hearth on one wall heated the den to summer warmth, and three torches that ringed the walls shed bobbing light. Carved channels in the stone guided the smoke out of the den, where it could vent naturally in the massive cavern outside.\n\n\"He isn't supposed to wander alone,\" Hikaru said after a moment.\n\n\"Nor am I supposed to talk with you,\" Natsumi said mildly, her pale scales taking on a mesmerizing, amber hue in the firelight.\n\n\"I'll be less noticeable alone,\" Shard said, picking up on her thought. \"And Hikaru, you won't get in trouble by showing me dragon secrets.\"\n\nHikaru tilted his head down stubbornly. \"But the empress will find out anyway, when you go to tell her what you find.\"\n\nShard considered the fire. \"Yes, but it's different. I'll have the information I need, and hopefully she'll listen to that rather than focus on my trespassing.\"\n\n\"She'll have to listen,\" Hikaru agreed, running talons down his belly scales in his old, nervous habit.\n\n\"I can tell you the way.\" Natsumi sat up a little in her coil and stretched her wings.\n\n\"Why haven't I met this chronicler?\" Hikaru asked, glancing toward the entryway as if he expected someone to be spying. One ear flicked to the side. Shard flicked his ears, but heard nothing.\n\n\"We usually only go in our second season,\" Natsumi said reassuringly, averting her gaze. \"After you shed your first scales.\"\n\nHikaru dipped his head down near Shard. \"Oh, Shard, it's so exciting! I didn't tell you about our shedding. For each new season, we become new, we have new scales, and new strength.\"\n\nShard nodded. \"It sounds wondrous.\" He would've compared it to griffin molting, but he was sure it was nothing like.\n\n\"I will have new scales by the Halflight, when winter turns to spring. Kagu says I will always have black, though, because I am winterborn.\"\n\n\"Kagu doesn't know anything,\" Natsumi said, a growl in her delicate voice. \"And even if you do, what does it matter? I like your scales.\"\n\n\"My uncle had black feathers,\" Shard said quietly. \"All his life. He was very handsome.\"\n\nThat soothed Hikaru and he considered his scales in the firelight, while Shard looked to Natsumi. \"Can you tell me something about the elements?\"\n\n\"Of course, Shard.\" She sat up attentively, ears perked forward.\n\n\"Isora said something to Kagu about having too much fire, and everyone says that to be winterborn is ill luck. Why? What does it mean?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Natsumi looked at Hikaru, her gaze shadowed. Then she sat back, neck arching, and explained. \"It is unfortunate because winterborn are ruled by their element. Hikaru knows this now. The winterborn tend to have very difficult lives.\"\n\n\"Everyone says that,\" Hikaru said darkly, \"but no one will tell me why, as if I should already know.\"\n\nShard tossed fish bones into the fire. They popped and crackled and sent up a delicious, oily aroma into the den. \"Amaratsu said the same thing. Why do you believe that, Natsumi?\"\n\n\"Because of how water rules them.\" She didn't quite look at Hikaru. \"We really don't have to talk about it. I want to hear about where you came from, the wyrms, and all of it. When night falls, I will tell you the way to the chronicler.\"\n\nHikaru coiled near the fire and began to clean his claws. \"But I would like to hear about water, and being winterborn. I still don't know much about the elements.\"\n\nNatsumi looked between them, and stretched her wings in a graceful motion of surrender. \"Each season has an element. Springborn take elements of the earth, being steadfast and grounded. Summerborn are like fire, aggressive and dominant.\" She fluffed her wings. \"I am autumnborn, wind-ruled, and my mother says that means I like change, and adventure. That is true enough.\" Looking to Hikaru, she finished apologetically. \"Winterborn are\u2026\"\n\n\"Ruled by water,\" Shard said, following the progression.\n\nNatsumi nodded.\n\n\"But water isn't bad,\" Hikaru said. \"Isora taught that water is one of the strongest elements.\"\n\n\"They are all strong,\" Natsumi said quickly. \"But water is difficult. To be born in the dark winter of the year, and to die then, is to be ruled by water, which means you are ruled by your heart.\"\n\nHikaru chuckled, nudging Shard with a wing tip. \"That's not so awful.\"\n\nNatsumi stroked her own flight feathers, looking uncomfortable. \"It isn't awful\u2014that is, it doesn't mean you're awful. It's just difficult. The heart doesn't always want easy things. To be ruled by the heart is to be terribly vulnerable. That's what my father says. But he was springborn.\"\n\nThat made Hikaru look thoughtful, and he glanced to Shard, who considered the many times his heart had been split, and he'd had to decide between two equally important things.\n\n\"I see,\" Shard said, then butted Hikaru's flank. \"Well I think you're strong, Hikaru, and you have a strong heart. I think it will rule you well.\"\n\n\"I do too,\" Natsumi said softly, gazing at him. Hikaru dipped his head, though his brow ridge furrowed down, ears back in contemplation.\n\nFor a moment they all looked at the fire, as if seeing their own hearts as displayed by the elements. In dragon estimation, nearly all griffins were springborn, so should be ruled by the earth. Shard found that ironic, as much as most griffins valued the sky, and seemed to forget the earth.\n\n\"Well now,\" Natsumi said, drawing them out. \"Let me tell you the way. Soon it will be dark, and most resting, and you're so small you should pass unnoticed, if you go the way I tell you.\"\n\n\"But don't take too long,\" Hikaru warned, eyes glowing with firelight, \"Or I'll come find you.\"\n\nTrue to Natsumi's word, Shard found the caverns and passageways quiet and deserted. He was so small and plain of feather, he blended with the mountain, and any dragons passing high above him took no notice. He avoided the torchlight the best he could, and followed Natsumi's directions, guided by the carvings over each archway and along the walls of the tunnels.\n\nHe knew he'd passed under one mountain into another, caught a whiff of the forges, and then ducked away into another tunnel. He would've liked to fly, but it might have gained attention.\n\nOnce or twice he thought he heard a whisper of wings behind him, or saw the flash of another's shadow along the wall. Every time he paused to look, he was alone. He hoped it was just nerves.\n\nAt last he found himself in a long, wide tunnel, where sparse torchlight reflected off winding veins of gold in the rock. Natsumi had said he would be close when he came to the halls of gold.\n\nWishing only that Hikaru was with him, but knowing the necessity of going alone, Shard picked up to a lope through the glimmering tunnel.\n\nFollowing a bend, the passage opened before him into a shining display of gold and silver.\n\nShard stopped short, staring up, staring around, beak open.\n\nIt was the most massive hall he'd seen thus far, larger than the main cavern he'd first entered. Larger than the Dawn Spire, large enough, Shard thought with a dizzy thrill, to fit around the White Mountains from the Sun Isle. It yawned so long and wide that the torches winking from the far end seemed to be distant, golden stars.\n\nReverently, Shard stepped forward, realizing he could see as well as if it were daylight, not night, underground in a mountain.\n\nHe quickly understood why.\n\nTorches bounced warm light around the endless hall where the wide pillars were not mere stone or ice, but sheathed in hammered gold. They stretched all the way up to the ceiling far away, and depicted scenes of dragon lore.\n\nDistracted by the shining pillars, Shard walked a few more steps in, only to look behind him and see that hundreds and hundreds of dens were carved into the walls, ringing the cavern in neat tiers, level upon level.\n\nHe peeked over to see the inside of a den on his level, and his skin prickled to see that the walls were entirely lined with translucent, honey-colored amber. Raw stones of all colors piled within the room, waiting to be polished or cut.\n\nFeeling distinctly like a trespasser, Shard backed away quickly and looked around again, realizing that every room must be stacked with precious gems and treasure.\n\nHe turned his attention back to the pillars. Slowly he realized these were not simply art or fancy, but tales with clear beginnings, middles and endings.\n\nDragon history.\n\nGrowing excited, he followed a story that ran its course in images across the bases of several pillars. A dragon emerged from a wild sea and encircled the earth like Midragur. The same dragon raised mountains from the sea, which, on the golden pillar, were inlaid with pearl that looked like snow, so Shard knew it was the Sunland and the Mountains of the Sea.\n\nThe sun and moon rose and set on the Ages across the pillars and Shard saw war, peace, famine and abundance. He saw the Sunlanders learning how to bend gold and jewels into their crafts, saw them swimming, fishing, flying.\n\n\"Like griffins,\" he murmured, touching a talon to the gold. \"Dragons dwell in earth and sky.\"\n\nEagerly, Shard wound around the pillars, seeking the Tale of the Red Kings.\n\n\"You enjoy history, I see.\"\n\nShard yelped and sprang into the air, whirling about and flapping two leaps high.\n\nThe withered voice, female, came from above him. \"I thought the empress expressly forbid you from entering the treasure rooms.\" Shard spotted her, peering out of a den four tiers off the ground level\u2014an enormous, aged dragoness with scales the same soft hue of a fading aster.\n\nFor a moment Shard couldn't respond, for he saw that she sat coiled in a den lined, like the one in amber, with nothing but panels of polished emerald. Firelight glowing off the precious stone wall cast green warmth around her and the den like a summer day in the woods. The dragoness, sitting comfortably in the den and with a sheet of thin, hammered gold before her, watched him curiously as he stared. \"But then I suppose it is a griffin's nature to ignore such a command?\"\n\nShard heard irony in her voice, not condemnation, but he tread carefully as he re-gathered his voice. \"I think griffins are very misunderstood here.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you do.\"\n\n\"I'm Shard,\" he said, flying up to her level. \"Son-of-Baldr.\" Dwarfed by dragon treasure and the dragoness herself, he felt he should add more. \"Prince of the Silver Isles in the Starland Sea.\"\n\n\"Yes. I've heard. You may land, there.\" She pointed to a ledge just outside where she lounged. \"It wearies me to watch you hover so.\"\n\nShard touched down on the rock, taking another look around the gleaming den, then mantled to her. Her soft, shifting gray-violet scales had lost their shine, but light brightened her eyes and her mane and whiskers seemed to drift about in their own invisible breeze. He was sure he stood before a springborn dragon, one near the end of her life, a strange mix of ancient knowledge, swift growth and na\u00efve wisdom.\n\nTaking a breath when he beheld her more closely Shard blurted, \"You're beautiful.\"\n\nShe chuckled, taken aback. \"Oh? Among my kind, I am considered plain. I would return the compliment but I don't know how your looks fare, among griffins.\" She seemed pleased, embarrassed that she was pleased, and she carefully set her sheet of gold aside to make room for Shard. Glancing at it furtively, Shard saw she'd been in the middle of tracing out images. He wondered if he was in any of them.\n\n\"I fear I'm also considered plain,\" he confessed, and the scales around her eyes crinkled. \"I hope you don't find me disrespectful. Everything seems wondrous here.\" He settled his wings. \"Are you the chronicler?\"\n\n\"Yes. I am Sora's daughter, Ume.\"\n\nShard mantled again, bowing low. \"Honorable Ume. A spirit told me of a dragon who keeps separate the truth from lies, who keeps the stories. She gave me this token, from a dragon who was once her friend, long ago.\" He lifted the silver chain and she bent her head to examine it. \"She said you might be able to help me.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Yes, I know this work. These links are signature of my family. To what spirit did you speak?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you everything,\" Shard murmured. She smelled of earth and warm dragon flesh, mineral and sharp. He had a feeling she didn't often leave this vast cavern. \"I have so many questions for you.\"\n\n\"And I you.\" She leaned forward, sniffing the air about him, then backed away into the emerald cave to give him more space. \"You've stirred the winds of Ryujan with your arrival, no doubt about that. And I hear something in your voice I haven't heard since I hatched.\" She looked beyond him, to the long, endless hall of history and treasure. Then her large eyes settled on Shard's face. \"I didn't think I would know it when I did, but I do. Amaratsu heard it, and followed it, and now I know it too.\"\n\n\"What do you hear?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes, ears lifting. \"I hear the summer. I hear life and truth and hope. I hear the Silver Wind.\"\n\n[ The Chronicler ]\n\nUme led Shard through the golden pillars, explaining their history as she went, and pointing out details of particular interest within the shimmering reliefs.\n\nShard had told her his tale, and she appeared unsurprised by any of it. \"Why are all the other dragons repulsed by griffins, without even knowing me?\"\n\n\"Ah, well it has to do with Kajar,\" she said dryly, looking away toward a distant end of the cavern. \"And the Great Betrayal.\"\n\n\"I've heard two versions of that story,\" Shard reminded her, searching her face, but her eyes had grown distant. Boldly, with respect, he touched his talons to her forefoot to draw her attention back.\n\nShe swiveled her head with a flash of surprise, then lowered her head to regard him closely. \"Yes. You may have.\"\n\nShard stepped back, tail flicking. \"If the chronicler keeps separate the truth from the lies, I would like very much to hear your version, and if it's different, why it's been hidden all these years.\"\n\n\"How I wish young Hikaru had come with you.\"\n\n\"Me too. But we couldn't risk it. His friend Natsumi is convinced we would all suffer great punishment if he was caught showing these things to me.\"\n\n\"Great punishment,\" she echoed thoughtfully. \"How much greater could the empress punish us? How much greater than to be trapped here for our short lives, repeating our same lies to ourselves again and again, the moment we hatch? Telling our tales until they seem to us true, and are only a way to hide from the rest of the world?\"\n\nShard looked from the golden pillars to her, and dipped his head low. \"I hope to help you change that. Hikaru does. Amaratsu did.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She sighed, and resumed walking in sinuous undulation through the pillars. \"I hope to learn from your brave example. Come with me, Rashard of the Silver Isles. I know you have particular questions, but first I must show you something.\"\n\nWithout warning she bounded forward twice and jumped up, pale wings beating the still, warm air to fly high where the pillars were not yet covered in metal.\n\nShard spiraled up with her, and she showed him to a golden panel that covered only half of one of the pillars. Shard circled around it, taking in the images.\n\n\"Why, that's Amaratsu flying to the Winderost, Hikaru, and\u2026\" He paused, staring at an image in gold. \"Is that\u2026?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Ume murmured.\n\n\"A griffin?\" Shard flew closer to examine the relief of a small griffin in gold, the wingtips edged with silver.\n\n\"Yes. The first griffin in our halls since the time of Kajar.\" She watched him, her eyes seeming to flicker with fire as the torches dodged and danced with their wing beats.\n\n\"What's that in the background. Wind? Fire?\" Shard flapped forward, studying the swirls and slashes around the griffin's wings, and realizing they looked familiar.\n\n\"That is sky.\"\n\n\"Sky,\" Shard breathed, recalling the combed swirls of snow within the fifth ring, and seeing that Ume's marks were the same.\n\n\"Yes. The highest, the lowest, the first and last, all in one.\"\n\n\"I learned a little of it, with Hikaru, in the warrior rings.\"\n\n\"I know. All that happens in Ryujan makes its way to me.\"\n\n\"What does it mean? Hikaru couldn't tell me, and I won against Kagu but I still don't understand.\"\n\nUme seemed to hover without effort, but Shard had to bank and circle slowly, watching her as she explained. \"You learned, perhaps, only of the four elements born in the First Age. Sky has always been, will always be, like the Silver Wind, is between us, around us.\" She stretched her claws upward, then swept her foreleg around in a graceful movement.\n\n\"A great crafter may wield sky as he works with gold to create art. A warrior may fall into sky when she does battle. Or a master of flight.\" She dipped her head to Shard. \"It carries our songs to those who listen. It is not the wind that carries your dreams, it is sky. You were springborn, prince of the Silver Isles, which keeps you grounded. But I think your true element is not earth, but sky, for you seem not to seek the easiest path like water, nor to forge brashly ahead like fire, or to remain still, like earth\u2014but to seek the path between them all. That is the way of sky.\"\n\nShard remembered the feeling he touched when he flew high, or when he dove fast and trusted that the sea would catch him, when he'd trusted himself within the fifth ring. \"I don't think I'm worthy of that element.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Ume. \"But you must be.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because for us to move into a new Age, we must be more than we are, and we must be shown. One must\u2014\"\n\n\"Fly higher,\" Shard whispered. \"I know the song. Did you make this panel?\"\n\n\"I did.\" She gazed fondly at her work. \"This will be my legacy, which all chroniclers will preserve until we are no more, until the end of Ages when great Ryu, whom you call Midragur, uncoils and the egg of the earth hatches, and the end of the world returns us all to sky.\"\n\nShard took a slow, hard breath. \"And this griffin is me?\"\n\n\"That is my hope.\"\n\n\"There's nothing after,\" Shard said, winging up higher.\n\n\"Of course not,\" she murmured, watching him. \"For we have only reached now.\"\n\nShard circled once more around the column, then glided down to land. Ume followed, settling in tidy coils upon the ground.\n\n\"Our time is short,\" Shard said quietly. \"I hope that I can fulfill all you want, but I need help. I need to know the truth about the Red Kings, and I need to know all you know about the wyrms and why they are in the Winderost.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Her gaze shadowed. \"They are woven together.\"\n\n\"I thought as much. What do you know of the wyrms?\"\n\nUme's gaze traveled along the pillars. \"They are an ancient race, with an ancient memory. A relic of the First Age. They seem ever Voiceless, but they do have names\u2014or at least, ways of knowing and addressing themselves. They may never speak, but we must not treat them lesser because of this. Oh, if only the others would listen as you do.\"\n\nShe uncoiled and slid past Shard to gaze out into the massive cavern and the tier upon tier of precious rooms adorned in jewel and metal. \"They understand us, or did once, but they do not speak the way we do. They live to be very old.\"\n\n\"My uncle taught me that whales are the oldest living creatures in the earth or sea.\"\n\nWith a kind, pointed look Ume said, \"I doubt your uncle knew of the wyrms.\"\n\n\"No\u2026I suppose he didn't really know much about them.\" Something tight caught in Shard's throat when he thought of Stigr, and he forced himself to focus on his questions. \"You say they have names. How do you know, if they can't speak?\"\n\n\"They are in the histories. But their names are not like our names. They are\u2026sounds. When we met them, we turned their sounds into proper names. They responded, it seemed, and they appeared honored. So we know they can understand. But they don't speak. The last named wyrm was called rhydda.\"\n\nIt sounded like a growl. When Shard repeated it, it felt natural at the back of his throat. \"Rhydda.\" The name, for some reason, made him think of stone, and of Brynja. \"Does it mean red?\"\n\n\"Yes. So you see, there is something in us which recognizes them. So just as creatures of the earth may speak to birds of the air and sea dwellers beneath the waves, we can talk to them. But they, perhaps, are not ready to speak. Who knows if they will ever be. They age as slowly as we Sunlanders do quickly. Like the earth, they are slow to move, to learn, to act, and, apparently, to forgive.\"\n\n\"Forgive what?\" Shard asked, stepping closer. Ume looked deeper in the cavern, toward the age of Bronze and Stone. \"Ume? Amaratsu said they like nothing but treasures and hoarding and that when Sunland dragons tried to enlighten them, they turned away. Is that true?\"\n\n\"We know only what is told in our tales, and on the pillars here. How can we truly know, if we were not there? How can we know their hearts, if we have never faced them?\"\n\nHe felt she was keeping something from him, and sought around the edges of her words. \"I've faced them.\" Shard looked toward the entryway, feeling strangely watched. \"And I fear what she said might be true, though I would still like to find out why.\"\n\n\"It might be.\" Ume, too, glanced toward the entrance, but it was still. \"But, perhaps, we all have our own truth too. Since the Second Age it has been the duty of the Chronicler to remember that we can only ever understand the past through the stories that are left for the future. Those stories are the truth as the storytellers saw it. That is why one must rise higher\u2026\"\n\n\"And see farther,\" Shard said quietly. \"I know the song. I've tried to see farther, to learn why the Aesir acted as they did. I learned they fled the wyrms. And now, I'm trying to learn why the wyrms are in the Winderost, and whether Kajar was honorable, or a murderer and a thief as Amaratsu said. That has led me here.\"\n\nUme bowed her head a moment, then collected herself. \"For those answers, we turn to the Tale of the Red Kings. Come with me.\"\n\nThey walked through the pillars which felt to Shard like a towering forest of gold, and he blinked to realize, after a few moments of walking, that they now walked in pillars of silver. The light changed with the metal, the forest of silver more ghostly and pale with the torch fire, like icicles lit by sunrise.\n\nShard looked up, and up, cramping his neck to realize he couldn't see the ceiling of the mountain chamber. \"Why the change to silver?\"\n\n\"We mark our cycles thus,\" Ume said, stopping to wind herself around one silver pillar in particular. \"Though we repeat our origin story at the bottom of each new set of pillars. Right now, we are in the Age of Gold. You see thus, farther back, Silver, Bronze, Iron, Stone.\"\n\nShard narrowed his gaze, staring hard toward the back of the cavern, and marveled to think how much better dragon eyesight must be than his. He could vaguely discern a shift in color where the metal wrapping on the pillars changed, but far away, wherever the Age of Stone began, was too dark for him to see.\n\n\"What happens when you run out of room in this mountain?\" Shard asked, and the question made Ume laugh with surprise.\n\n\"We will start again. A new mountain. A new age. Look here, now.\"\n\nShard looked, and saw a continuation, in silver, of the beginning of the world, but in this Age the stories were more detailed, and wound up a single column in distinct rows, rather than stretching across multiple pillars.\n\nShard told himself he was ready, ready to hear the truth, good or bad, about Kajar and the dragons, and what it would mean for Kjorn, Sverin, and the other Aesir.\n\nJust as Ume turned to another row of silver columns, Shard heard a shout from the entryway.\n\n\"Shard!\"\n\nHe whirled. \"Hikaru? What are you doing?\"\n\nThe young dragon hopped into the air and whipped between the columns to the Age of Silver to land beside Shard. \"You were taking too long . Oh\u2026\" His eyes grew huge as he took in his surroundings. \"Oh, it's so beautiful. Shard, isn't it amazing? Much more beautiful that I thought. I wonder why do we wait until our second season? Oh, greetings, Honorable Chronicler,\" he added, mantling to Ume, whose eyes squinted in amusement and fondness. \"I was worried. We had to come.\"\n\n\"We?\" Shard looked, dismayed, to see Natsumi following on foot, more dignified in her approach.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" she said when she reached them. \"I couldn't stop him.\"\n\n\"Natsumi,\" Ume said, looking just as pleased at their arrival as if her own kin had come to visit. \"How lovely you've grown.\"\n\n\"Mistress Ume.\" She bowed, lifting her pale wings. \"Forgive the intrusion.\"\n\n\"How I wish more young dragons would intrude,\" Ume said. \"You've come just in time.\" When she noted Shard's expression she said, \"They're already here, you know. They might as well hear along with you.\"\n\nShard eyed Hikaru with a stern glare, but it had no effect.\n\n\"Yes, we might as well hear. Are you going to tell the truth?\" Hikaru demanded, and Ume's loud laugh leaped around the silver columns.\n\n\"As well as I can.\"\n\nDespite his worry, Shard was pleased that Hikaru and Natsumi would see the tale alongside him. No matter what, they would see it together, and no dragon could say that Shard was lying to Hikaru, whatever the truth turned out to be.\n\n\"You have joined us just in time,\" Ume said again, her voice carrying the note of an instructor, \"for me to reveal the truth to Rashard about the tale of Kajar.\"\n\n\"Oh good,\" Hikaru said with relish.\n\nAs they wound through the pillars, Ume explained to Hikaru everything she'd told Shard about the pillars and the history.\n\nWhich was why, when they were still well within rows of silver columns, Hikaru looked indignant when Ume stopped before a pillar of gold.\n\n\"This one doesn't match.\"\n\n\"Because it is the Tale of the Red Kings,\" Natsumi said, touching Hikaru's wing. \"It's important, it must stand out.\"\n\nHikaru began reading the column, and his expression narrowed to concern. \"Shard, this looks just as my mother told you.\"\n\nUme nodded. \"The arrival of Kajar, as it is told to every young dragon today, as it was told to Amaratsu, as she told it to you, Shard.\"\n\nShard, his hopes shrinking with each step around the golden tale, saw that the chronicler of Kajar's time had recorded the details faithfully, and it was as Amaratsu had first told him. The griffins were turned by the treasure into witless, fighting beasts, mad with greed. Kajar betrayed a dragon, and killed her.\n\nAfter all that had happened, after speaking with Groa's spirit, Shard could barely believe it.\n\nHe didn't believe it.\n\nHe looked around. The golden tale was standing in the middle of a host of silver columns, in the Age of Silver. It didn't make sense.\n\nUnless\u2026\n\nHe looked to Ume with growing understanding, and she rose slowly to her full height, three times as tall as both the young dragons and towering like one of the pillars over Shard.\n\n\"Natsumi, you were told, as all young ones are told, that this tale is in gold, and all others in silver, because it must stand out. And perhaps we chroniclers feared for ourselves too greatly, and would not stand up to the emperors throughout the ages. But I am near the end of my life. I have nothing left to fear. And you were right, Shard. It is the duty of the chronicler to keep separate the truth,\" she set a claw against the highest golden panel she could reach, \"from the lies.\"\n\nIn one fluid movement she slashed through the gold and they saw it was only thin, delicate gilt, not as thick as the panels in the Age of Gold. It fell away like peeled birch bark and underneath, in aged silver, glittered a completely different tale.\n\n[ The Ostral Shore ]\n\nThey bid farewell to the painted wolves at dawn.\n\n\"Good hunting to you,\" Kjorn said to Ilesh, bowing his head.\n\n\"It has been interesting.\" The painted wolf tilted his head. \"Meeting griffins so willing to befriend and hunt with us.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we'll meet again,\" Kjorn said.\n\n\"I would not be opposed,\" Ilesh said. \"Brynja, of the Dawn Spire, and Nilsine, of the Vanhar, you are also considered friends of the Serpent River Pack. You, and those who fly with you. Fair winds, as you say.\"\n\n\"Good hunting to you,\" said Nilsine.\n\n\"When you see Shard again,\" Mayka said, slipping forward from the pack, \"tell him I remember his courage.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Kjorn murmured, and hoped that would be soon.\n\nAs the griffins turned and took to the air, wolf howls followed them aloft, a warbling song on the chilly dawn wind.\n\n\"Impressive,\" Nilsine said to Kjorn, soaring up to his level, \"how you've befriended the creatures you've met so far.\"\n\n\"It was needful,\" Kjorn said, turning his gaze starward.\n\n\"It was impressive,\" Nilsine said. \"The Vanhar will be glad to know that not all Aesir are as arrogant and closed minded as we thought them to be.\"\n\nKjorn glanced at her sidelong. \"Thank you?\"\n\nShe dipped her head, expression quirking. He realized her joke, and laughed, and Brynja flapped up ahead to lead them to the Ostral Shore.\n\n\"Hail! Hover and state your business!\"\n\nThe griffin sentry called from a good twenty wing strokes away.\n\nThey flared, wings beating in the smoky air.\n\nFrom where they flew, Kjorn could see the great, mud-red lake that griffins of the Dawn Spire called the Ostral Shores, but that was all. Deep, smoky haze hung low, obscuring the rest of the landscape, and Kjorn marveled to think that the fire and ash of Midragur still fell. With a chill, he looked starward to the mountains he couldn't see through the smoke, and he wondered about the wyrms. And Shard.\n\n\"State your business in the Ostral Shores, Outlanders!\"\n\n\"We're no Outlanders,\" Kjorn called, though they all looked a mess after hunting, eating, and sleeping in the mud with Mayka's pack of painted wolves. Still the encounter and the time spent had been worth strengthening their friendship, he thought.\n\n\"We are Kjorn, son-of-Sverin, Brynja, daughter-of-Mar and her huntresses, once of the Dawn Spire, and Nilsine daughter-of-Nels, and her warriors of the Vanheim Shore.\"\n\nThe sentry, flanked by two others, glided forward, looking them over skeptically. \"What's your business here?\"\n\nIn the distance, Kjorn made out another patrol of three griffins, winging toward them in the haze. They must look threatening, their ragged band of two score warriors and huntresses.\n\n\"We seek Asvander,\" Brynja called, circling slightly below Kjorn, for it was difficult to maintain a hover just for conversation. \"We're friends, allies.\"\n\n\"Friends also to Caj, who is the son of Cai, once of the Ostral Shore,\" Kjorn added, feeling it couldn't hurt, especially if Asvander was still estranged from his family as Brynja had hinted. \"Is his name known here?\"\n\nThe sentry's eyes widened and he looked them over again. Before he could speak though, a strong male voice boomed from the haze, and they all looked to the newly arrived sentries.\n\n\"His name is known, and he has friends. And so do you.\"\n\nBelow Kjorn, Brynja laughed breathlessly as the head of the new wedge of sentries emerged from the haze, long, broad wings sending the smoke swirling away.\n\n\"Asvander!\" Only it was not Brynja, but Dagny who whipped forward from the hunting band to collide with the big griffin and send them both toppling down through the air.\n\n\"I thought Brynja was his betrothed,\" Nilsine murmured, winging up beside Kjorn.\n\nBrynja looked more amused than jealous at the display, which strengthened Kjorn's suspicions.\n\n\"I have a feeling her heart is elsewhere,\" he said quietly, but was glad enough to have a friendly welcome. \"But it looks as though Asvander won't suffer for it.\"\n\nThe sentries made room for Asvander as he and Dagny recovered and flew back up to join Kjorn, Brynja and Nilsine.\n\n\"Greetings, honored friend,\" Kjorn said.\n\nAsvander took his measure, and his gaze flickered. Kjorn had a feeling the big warrior rarely saw a griffin larger than he was, but Kjorn had him by a head and was a bit broader besides.\n\n\"Did I hear correctly, the son of Sverin? Grandson of Per?\" Asvander looked from Brynja, expression softening, back to Kjorn, as if calculating. \"Did Shard bring us a new king, after all?\"\n\n\"Asvander,\" Brynja said quickly when Kjorn made a surprised noise, \"we have much to discuss, and much to tell if the Lakelanders will offer us shelter.\"\n\n\"Of course we will.\" Asvander chuckled, his gaze roving over their assorted band, and banked to lead to the way to the lake.\n\n\"So I've been here,\" Asvander said quietly. \"I fled just as you did, Brynja, and my family accepted me back after hearing of the wyrm's attack on the Dawn Spire.\"\n\nThey rested at the edge of the great, red lake, and watched Nilsine and her Vanhar band swoop and dive over the water in the morning light.\n\nBrynja nodded. \"And do you know if Shard\u2014\"\n\n\"There's been no word,\" Asvander said, and Kjorn pushed himself up to pace along the damp, pebbly sand. \"No word at all of Shard. I believe Valdis lives, but she wouldn't leave Stigr's body. He was in a bad way\u2014the blood, the wing. I don't know if Orn let the healers treat him, or not.\" He watched Kjorn. \"I sent out scouts to the Dawn Reach to see if Valdis perhaps went there, if she was not taken prisoner for treason, but I haven't heard back.\"\n\nBrynja sighed in frustration, gazing out over the lake. \"I should have gone to the Reach myself, but I thought Shard would come back from the Outlands, so I stayed\u2026\"\n\n\"You did the right thing,\" Dagny said. \"The only thing we knew to do at the time. And now, we've met Kjorn! What better outcome?\" The brown gryphoness sat closest to Asvander, Kjorn noted, and he wondered exactly how strong Brynja's betrothal to Asvander remained, now that they were all exiles from the king who'd arranged it.\n\n\"She's right, Brynja.\" Asvander extended a wing to lay against Brynja's back. \"And I expect the scouts back any day with word. I expect they might even bring more scattered exiles. I hear Orn was on a spree of exiling and threatening executions, though most escaped his wrath.\"\n\n\"Most?\" Brynja asked, and Dagny left Asvander's side to nuzzle her wingsister.\n\n\"It will all be well in the end. We have strong friends,\" Dagny murmured. \"Strong families. And I believe that Shard will find us again, and I believe that he had a plan.\"\n\n\"Should we travel to the Reach ourselves?\" Brynja asked, with a glance to Kjorn.\n\nBefore he could answer, Asvander stood, with a sharp grunt of negation.\n\n\"No. You've only just arrived, and look at the state of all of you. Rest here. Be patient. We must stay together, now that we've found each other again.\" His gaze traveled from the Vanhar over the lake to Dagny, Brynja and Kjorn. \"Do you agree? Now is not the time to scatter again on the wind. Stay here. Eat well, be safe. We'll know more soon.\"\n\nKjorn stretched. \"I hate to wait, but I believe you're right. And while we wait,\" he said, looking from Brynja to Asvander with narrowing eyes, \"I'd like to hear more about this new king Shard promised you.\"\n\nBrynja's gaze darted away, and Asvander's booming laugh rolled across the water.\n\n[ Wingbrothers ]\n\nSnow drifted down as Caj crept toward the slash in the rock face that he knew was a cave. A cave where, if Halvden was right, Sverin still sheltered. The mountain rose up sharply from the clustering boulders and the hump of rock cliff, the Nightrun river flowed sluggishly two leaps away, and Caj imagined the whole area would flood with the spring runoff. The steep mountain face cut the wind and terraces of overhanging rock created an area of shelter in front of the cave where the snow rose only ankle deep.\n\nGood ground to defend, Caj thought admiringly, then less cheerfully, Good ground for a fight.\n\nHe paused, ears flicking forward as wind whispered on the rock and, more distantly, rushed through the pine boughs.\n\nHis plan was simple. Without other griffins to make Sverin feel threatened, Caj would not offer a fight, but speak reasonably, calmly, until Sverin came to himself again. He wouldn't engage, but defend, retreat, and keep talking until Sverin came to.\n\nDeer bones and frozen clumps of fur littered a wide swath around the cave in the manner of a wild thing, messy and uncaring. The memory of Sverin's blank, dead stare made Caj shudder.\n\nHe had never seen a griffin so far gone, so fully witless and lost. There had to be something that drove him to that other than grief. During the Long Night, Ragna had hinted there was something that had passed which Caj knew nothing about, some secret that haunted Sverin not with fear or anger, but with guilt.\n\nIf only Sverin would trust him.\n\nTrust me, he thought, bellying forward like a mountain cat, his every movement muffled by snow, ears perked and every sense taut. Snow curtained the entrance to the cave with white and deadened any sound.\n\nIt wouldn't do to surprise him. So Caj, a safe three leaps from the entrance where the snow became less deep, stood tall, shook the snow from his body and called out.\n\n\"Son of Per! Sverin, my wingbrother. Father of Kjorn. Come out and face me.\"\n\nWind sent the falling snow into swirls and Caj ducked his face against it, stepping forward into the scant shelter of the rock, though not near enough to the cave to appear threatening.\n\nHe checked over his shoulder, wary that Ragna's warriors might finally have gotten the true location out of Halvden, but the valley lay empty and white. Too, he checked that the Red King was not stalking him from behind or above.\n\nIt had taken him a full day and a half to travel the length of the valley and he'd meant to watch the cave entrance to confirm Sverin's presence, but fallen asleep, dead to the world, until a raven woke him. So he wasn't sure if Sverin was even in the cave.\n\n\"I'll own my part,\" he said. \"I haven't been the wingbrother I should have. I lied to you and I withdrew, and I confess that and ask forgiveness. Sverin,\" he called, \"let's make amends. Let us be the friends and wingbrothers we once were. The two fledges who spread our wings on the lake shore\u2014\"\n\nA low, warning hiss cut him off.\n\nCaj forced himself to remain still, his tail low, his wings closed. He had to remind himself it was a good thing Sverin was in the cave, but he had never fully realized the fear a griffin of such size and might could instill, for Sverin had always been Caj's trusted friend.\n\nIs this how the young half-bloods felt? How Shard felt?\n\n\"I hear you. Now hear me. Hear my voice, and remember your own.\" Snow coated his wings. Another quick hiss, then a rumbling growl. Caj detected movement within the dull black of the cave and he lowered his voice further, as if soothing a witless thing, or a nestling.\n\n\"I'm not here to fight, and I will trust you not to. I trust you, Sverin, as I haven't allowed myself to since we conquered these isles.\"\n\nHe'd had enough time to ponder the problems between them on his long hunt, and he poured it out to Sverin, speaking as he hadn't for years. \"Your father's stubbornness, our own fears, this strange land, and torn loyalties made us fearful of even each other, of being honest with each other. But no more.\"\n\nThe movement took form, stalking forward. Wind gusted and pelted the red griffin with snow as he emerged, less aggressive than cautious and curious, like a wild cat, his ears twitching at Caj's voice.\n\nCaj stood perfectly still, not advancing, not retreating. \"Sverin.\" In vain he searched for a sign of recognition, of comprehension. In all his years he'd seen nothing as terrifying as the blank stare which greeted him. \"Brother. Tell me what haunts you. Trust me, as I couldn't, but should have, trusted you with the truth about Shard.\"\n\nSverin's gold eyes held on him, empty, watching. Fearful, Caj realized. As fearful as a wild thing.\n\n\"Tell me now,\" Caj said softly, \"what Ragna knows, but that you could not tell me before.\" At those words, something kindled in Sverin's gaze. Catching a careful breath, Caj forced himself not to step forward. \"Whatever it is, my king, my friend, I am your servant. I am your wingbrother. We'll fly this wind together.\"\n\nHe fought not to raise his voice, to plead, to fly forward and pound Sverin's head until he came to recognition.\n\n\"You know me. Stop hiding in fear. I thought you'd be glad to see me. Halvden told you I was dead, but that was a lie. You see me here, whole and alive.\"\n\nHe clung to the fact that Sverin did not advance, did not attack, rather seemed attentive to the careful, low timbre of his voice. So he kept talking.\n\n\"Oh, Sverin, I've been thinking for days what to say to you, to make you remember yourself. Do you remember, our third summer as wingbrothers, when your father forbade us from returning to the Ostral Shores to watch the mating flights? He said the celebration was too wild, but I think he feared you and Elena would wing off together without another word. Too young, too feckless,\" he parroted Per's rough words, the memory fresh and alive from their time as initiates. Something flickered in Sverin's face at the mimic of his father's voice.\n\n\"So\u2026\" Caj edged a step closer and Sverin bent his head low, ears flat. Caj stopped, but did not retreat. \"You don't frighten me. You remember the story. You drenched poor old Ringvul in chokecherry juice to dye him red, fruit that you'd made me smash, and swore him to silence. My talons and his feathers were stained for a fortnight. You commanded him to your sentry post at sunset, and he looked red enough to fool your father for as long as it took us to sneak away\u2014and off we went. Do you remember?\" Caj murmured, and when he slipped another two, slow steps forward, Sverin didn't move or growl. \"Do you remember Elena, sunrise by the lake? She told me once, that was the very moment she knew she would be your mate. Not because you were a prince, not because she thought you were handsome, strong, or brave, but because you dyed a poor old sentry red and disobeyed your father so you could have an adventure together.\"\n\nSverin advanced one step, then another, out of the shadow of the rock, watching Caj. Caj was within leaping distance, and he held his ground there. \"Have you ever told Kjorn that story?\"\n\nThe light in the valley did not change, but a warmth seemed to come to Sverin's face, as if the sun touched his eyes, as if Tyr awakened the knowing part of him.\n\nThen a warrior cry cracked the frozen air.\n\nTwo half-blood Vanir, whom Caj hadn't seen blended with the rock and snow, lunged out and dove at Sverin.\n\n\"For Einarr!\"\n\n\"For the Queen!\"\n\nThe light winked out of Sverin's eyes and his ears laid flat to his skull.\n\nThey'd waited there, waited for Sverin to be distracted and emerge fully from the cave. Caj knew them. His own students, young, vigorous, honorable. Stupid.\n\nSverin snarled. Even through his fury, Caj thought he discerned words.\n\n\"A trap?\"\n\nThe Red King ramped up to meet their dive, hissing shrilly with fury.\n\n\"No!\" Caj broke out of his shock and surged forward. \"Andor, Tollak, fall back!\"\n\nFor half a breath he and Sverin stood side by side, flared wings eclipsing.\n\nTollak, lean, mottled gray and falcon-faced, banked hard, surprised by Caj and Sverin's mixed ferocity. Andor, heavier and near black in color, swerved, but came around to redouble and aim for Sverin.\n\n\"Leave him!\" Caj screamed, voice cracking, with frustration. \"You fools!\"\n\nHe flared his good wing defensively, trying to block Sverin from Andor as he swooped down.\n\n\"Leave him!\" He realized he could no longer command in Sverin's name, or on any of his own rankings. Sverin crouched to meet the diving warrior, for a moment seeming oblivious to Caj. Caj could not let them engage, but couldn't ignore Sverin to beat them off himself.\n\nInstead he turned, ramming into Sverin's side. His only element was surprise and Sverin staggered from it and fell, sprawling, sliding on the icy rocks into a deep, wet embankment of snow.\n\nAndor cursed and circled tightly. Thankfully, younger Tollak flapped up higher, watching, looking toward the pass as if he expected reinforcement. Caj hoped he didn't, and looked up at Andor.\n\n\"Leave him, I beg you\u2014in\u2014in the name of the Summer King, in Tor's name,\" he checked behind him to see Sverin recovering, shaking snow from his wings, and flared as if he could block him from Andor's sight. \"Don't fight. Leave him to me.\"\n\nPerhaps the surprise of Caj calling on both the goddess the Aesir never recognized and the Summer King he didn't believe in was as good as a strike. The dark warrior dropped to the ground a leap from Caj, staring uncertainly. \"The queens ordered\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. I beg you leave him to me.\" Caj fell again to all fours, and had only the sight of Andor's eyes widening to warn him that Sverin's focus had changed. He spun and threw up his talons in time to lock with Sverin and shoved, rolling through the snow.\n\n\"Stay back,\" he shouted when he sensed the young warrior darting forward. \"Stay away.\" Talons clenched against Sverin's, Caj managed only to twist and avoid crushing his broken wing again as Sverin shoved him down.\n\nSucking in cold breaths of air and desperately kicking in attempt to dislodge his massive wingbrother, Caj uselessly recalled Halvden's warning that fighting made it worse.\n\nBut now there was no other way.\n\nSunlight gleamed through breaking clouds, littering the snow with brilliant patches of white. Sverin yanked his talons free of Caj's grasp and swiped for his face. Caj caught Sverin's wrist joint in his beak and resisted the battle urge to crunch down and break bone, fearing it would only worsen his fury.\n\nTyr, Tyr, make me strong.\n\nWhen Sverin tugged, Caj released, and grasped for the leg again with his talons.\n\n\"I didn't come to fight,\" he grunted, slapping talons against Sverin's chest to keep him from snapping at his throat.\n\nYet I do\u2026I do fight. I fear.\n\nFor ten years he had feared. Sverin had feared. They had not trusted each other, and it had broken them both.\n\nSverin reared up to slash talons at Caj's throat and rather than defend, Caj wrenched over to his belly, shoved to all fours and blundered away through the deep snow.\n\nSverin plunged after him, then launched into the sky, wings slapping gouges into the snow.\n\n\"That's just like you!\" Caj shouted, relieved that Sverin circled him, apparently forgetting about the younger warriors who stared from the rocks. \"Knowing I have a disadvantage and using it! You miserable cheat.\"\n\nCaj dragged forward through snow as deep as his chest, challenging, drawing Sverin away from the den, out into the valley. Perhaps he should've drawn him to the tree line but it might help him catch sight of the young warriors again, and if he flew at them, Caj couldn't stop him.\n\n\"You know you can't best me in a grapple, so you'll fly and dive, is that it?\" Caj gasped, finding the deep snow almost a greater challenge than the fight. But it would hamper Sverin too, and give Caj some cushion.\n\nThe baiting worked. If he didn't understand the words, he understood the tone, and with a fierce cry, Sverin dove. Caj whirled about to meet him, ramping high. Out of instinct he thrust open both wings\u2014and barked in pain at the hot, snapping sensation that lanced up his injured bones.\n\nSverin smashed into him and Caj's scream rang into the sky, bounding off the rock and mountainside.\n\n\"Stop,\" he panted, delirious with pain and sudden despair.\n\nIf only they hadn't intervened. If only\u2026if.\n\n\"Sverin, you must stop\u2014I know you don't want to kill me\u2014\"\n\nSverin pressed, his razor beak gaping wide, his eyes locked on Caj's neck.\n\n\"You know me,\" he grunted as Sverin rocked down on him like a bear trying to disable a threat. Caj, flat on his back, talons locked on Sverin's forelegs, managed a hard breath, and laughed as blood stung his own eye. \"There, brother, first blood. You win. Are you happy? You won't kill me, I know it.\"\n\nSun lanced across them between the racing clouds, sun and stinging, gusting snow. Throbbing pain in his wing seem to weaken his grip and he tightened his talons, shoving against Sverin, giving him a shake.\n\n\"It's me,\" he growled. \"Me. Trust me. We must trust as we once did. I know your true heart. I know you to be honorable, merciful\u2014\"\n\nSverin shrieked and Caj winced as it rang in his ears.\n\nStill holding Sverin back with the last of his strength, he gazed through a bright fog at the lashing beak, at the blood-red feathers in the scattered sunlight.\n\nFighting makes it worse. Fighting.\n\nFighting.\n\nBlood pounded the warning through his ears, his own racing heart.\n\nWith the whirling delirium of pain and the certainty of death suddenly striking each other in his mind, Caj realized with bright clarity what he had to do. The only thing left he could do.\n\n\"You must trust me,\" Caj growled again to the mad creature who could be the end of him, \"as I trust you.\"\n\nWith a shuddering breath, he loosened his grip, and Sverin leaned into his weight, eyes glassy with a killing light.\n\n\"I submit,\" Caj rumbled, locking eyes. \"My brother. My king.\"\n\nWith final resolve he let his grip fall slack. He let fall his wings, his limbs, and relaxed against the ground. He turned his face toward the blinding, sunlit snow, and offered Sverin his throat.\n\nRed lashed in the corner of his eye, Sverin's face swooping in. Talons pressed against his chest, pinning. Caj didn't wince as the beak squeezed tight against his neck.\n\nAll he saw was white, winking with glittering motes of gold, and he thought his death had been swift and painless. He waited to see his father.\n\nWind sifted against his flight feathers.\n\nNo dead came to greet him, no shining warriors of Tyr, and he realized he was cold.\n\n...As cold as if he still laid there, aching, crushed into the snow under the weight of an enormous opponent.\n\nHis wing throbbed with pain. The brightness in his eyes was sunlight on snow. The dim, distant shapes he saw were mountains and trees, the very mountains and trees of the Sun Isle.\n\nSverin's weight was real, and the red griffin had not killed him.\n\nCaj didn't move. Still Tollak and Andor hung back, staring and uncertain, mercifully still, and the first sound to break the silence did not come from them.\n\n\"Caj.\"\n\nHis voice, raw from animal screaming, rough and guttural from many turns of the moon without use, sounded like the purest birdsong to Caj.\n\nWarily Caj shifted, turning his face again and blinking back the sunbursts from his eyes. \"Sverin.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Still he hesitated, pinning, measuring his options with a lost, exhausted expression on his face.\n\nLost and exhausted, but present, aware, and knowing. Caj had been right. His near sacrifice had worked to awaken Sverin to himself.\n\n\"You're alive,\" the Red King croaked.\n\n\"I am, Sverin. I am.\"\n\n\"Why did you come here?\" With a sort of calm horror Sverin appeared to realize that he'd almost killed his own wingbrother.\n\n\"To find you,\" Caj said firmly. With a heavy, slow weariness that alarmed him, Sverin climbed back, letting Caj rise to all fours again. \"To speak to you.\"\n\n\"Halvden told me you were dead.\" His eyes narrowed.\n\nCaj spoke quickly. \"It's past, my brother. He's made amends, and I have. And I'm\u2026\" He found himself without words, suddenly dizzy, as if the entire journey caught up to him in that moment. \"I am so glad to see you.\"\n\nSverin made a rough noise, and cast a sideways look to the half-blood warriors waiting, now looking completely unsure what to do. \"The Widow Queen sends her regards, I see.\"\n\n\"Thyra too,\" Caj said. Sverin, thinking perhaps of the last time he'd seen Caj's daughter, when he'd tried to exile her from the pride, lowered his head.\n\n\"Andor,\" Caj called over his shoulder. \"Tollak. I have him. Go find Ingmer and the others, and tell them.\"\n\nThey hesitated, and Caj lifted one wing with a growl.\n\nYears of training and obeying under Caj appeared to overcome them, especially now that Sverin ceased to attack, and they moved quickly.\n\nSverin eyed them as they flapped hard overhead, toward the pass at the far end of the valley.\n\n\"Sverin,\" Caj murmured.\n\nThe red griffin looked back to him, seeming ten years older and at the end of his strength. \"You should have left me here. You should have let me die wild, and Nameless, as I deserve.\"\n\nNot since they were fledglings had Caj seen Sverin express self-pity, and he rustled his wing feathers in disapproval. \"That's not what you deserve. And you will face your fate with honor and courage. Did you hear all of what I said, before we fought?\"\n\n\"I did.\" Sverin rustled against the cold wind and turned toward the shelter of the rocks. Caj followed him, wading through the trail he'd blazed earlier in the snow. \"You're sorry you lied. You're sorry about Shard.\" He stepped into the shallow snow near the cave, and turned again to face Caj. \"Why did you lie to me?\"\n\nCaj had had time to think about that, too. \"I wasn't afraid of you, but Per.\"\n\n\"You took Shard as your nest-son. I would have protected you both.\"\n\nHeat closed Caj's throat for a moment. \"I know that now. I didn't then, and when Per died, it seemed too late.\"\n\n\"You should have known.\" Recovered to his senses, Sverin's gold eyes pierced him hard, knowing, aware. \"I never trusted the Vanir, but I did trust you. Though of course, now\u2026\" he trailed off and looked pointedly at Caj, and they both thought of Shard, now prince of the Vanir, surely planning on returning and claiming his Isle.\n\n\"While we're speaking of lies,\" Caj said evenly, keeping his temper only because he was happy to argue with words all day rather than with beak and claw, \"what have you kept from me?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter now.\"\n\n\"It's over, Sverin,\" Caj said quietly. \"During the Long Night, when we could all see you slipping from us, Ragna told me something.\" At the sudden, guarded expression on Sverin's face, Caj knew he was close to something important. \"Sverin, it's done. It's over. Ragna rules as regent, Thyra waits for Kjorn\u2014\"\n\n\"Waits for Kjorn?\" he asked sharply, ears perking. \"Where has he gone?\"\n\nCaj sat, carefully folding his wing. \"Home. To the Winderost.\"\n\n\"No,\" Sverin whispered, looking stunned.\n\n\"There's nothing you can do,\" Caj said firmly. \"He's gone to find Shard, and he'll return or he won't. Your line is secure, in Thyra.\"\n\n\"I always hated your lack of tact,\" Sverin said, ears laying back. With the same expression he said, \"And admired your honesty.\"\n\nFeeling struck, Caj merely shook his head. \"Now, I'll tell you all you like about what's happened since you left, after you answer my question. What secrets do you hold from me, still? What passed between you and Ragna? What secret does she know that you could not tell me? Tell me what drove you to this, what split the trust between us. I've owned my lies.\"\n\nSverin looked at him, and a quick, burning gratitude flashed across his features so quickly Caj almost mistook it for sadness. \"I know I owe you that. I will tell you everything, though most of it you know. My failure as a king, as a father. But you don't know where my failure began.\"\n\n\"You didn't fail as a father\u2026\" Caj fell quiet at another hard look.\n\n\"And I will not tell you here,\" Sverin said, raising his head as sunlight reached over the valley and fell across his broad, red chest. \"I will go with you,\" he said, gazing across the snow field, \"you and the others, as their prisoner, if that is necessary.\" He looked to Caj. \"And I will confess everything, for I have committed worse crimes than you know, and I must confess it all, before the pride, before you, Sigrun, Thyra, and Ragna.\"\n\n\"Sverin\u2026\"\n\nSverin's gaze grew distant and shadowed. \"And I must ask her forgiveness, though I fear it's too late. My fear of you and Kjorn learning the truth\u2014both of our coming here, and what came after\u2014was so great that it drove all else from my mind, Caj. I wore my broken honor like a shield. But after all I've done to you, to Shard, to the pride, my offense to her was greatest of all, and it has lasted these ten long years. I can bear it no more, and surely she can't either.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Caj asked, frustrated that he wouldn't be plain, but relieved that he would no longer fight. \"Whose forgiveness must you ask before we can leave this behind us?\"\n\nThe weary golden eyes met Caj's glare. \"Ragna.\" His voice was quiet. Broken. \"White Ragna, who has more courage than ever I had, and made me a promise I never deserved.\"\n\n[ A Silver Tale ]\n\nThe truth was wrought in silver before their eyes.\n\nAnd it was as Groa had told him.\n\n\"I knew it!\" Hikaru said shrilly. \"I knew that all those terrible things about griffins couldn't be true.\" He slipped around Shard in a protective coil, as Natsumi, wide-eyed, peered at the new account.\n\nUme bobbed her great head. \"The emperor of that time didn't like being portrayed honestly, and commanded that the chronicler disguise the tale. So Umeko did, but it has passed from one of us to the next to remember, to know, that the truth was beneath.\" She looked at Shard, ears perked. \"And to wait until the right time to reveal it.\"\n\nShard did note that the tale in silver was a bit more equal between Amaratsu's and Groa's stories. He noticed a bit more fault on the part of the griffins than in Groa's tale\u2014more greed, more boasting, but the tragic ending was the same, with Kajar falsely accused of murdering a dragon and he and his band driven out with some of the treasures they'd been given. Neither side fully villainous, neither side fully wrong.\n\nShard thought of the Aesir and the Vanir, his divided family in the Silver Isles.\n\n\"See there,\" Ume said to Natsumi as the younger dragoness read the tale, tracing intricate lines drawn into the background. \"That is to show the elements at play\u2014here is fire, and air, a volatile mix that ended in great sadness.\"\n\nShard spotted a figure unlike any other. \"There,\" he said, opening his wings with excitement, \"is that a wyrm, there?\" He patted Hikaru's coil and climbed out, peering up to see the higher panel.\n\n\"Yes,\" Ume said. \"You see here, after the Aesir left the Sunland, when we closed ourselves away.\"\n\nShard followed the intricate reliefs in silver, marveling at the detail of the wyrms, the thick horns, the deadly tail. \"It looks like a wyrm came to the Sunland?\"\n\n\"That was Rhydda,\" Ume murmured, touching a claw to the wyrm, flying over plains of pearl. \"The last named wyrm. A year after Kajar left.\"\n\n\"And then?\" Shard asked. \"Why did she come? What became of her?\"\n\nUme rose higher, touching the silver panel as she opened her mouth to explain\u2014then her ears laid back and she looked quickly toward the entrance.\n\n\"There!\" shouted a new voice.\n\nHikaru and Natsumi's heads whipped up, and Shard slipped around Hikaru, ears lifting.\n\nKagu charged into the far entryway, yellow scales blazing in the torch light, bouncing dazzling reflection off the golden pillars.\n\n\"I told you I saw them leading the intruder here!\"\n\nBlue Isora and two more fully grown sentries wound their way into the cavern behind him.\n\n\"I told you!\" boomed Kagu.\n\nA rolling growl began to build itself in Hikaru's chest. Shard felt it thrumming against his whole body.\n\n\"Hikaru don't,\" Ume murmured. \"Be still. Natsumi, be still. Show restraint and your youth may earn you some lenience.\"\n\n\"You've been spying!\" Hikaru burst out anyway, quivering with rage. Natsumi laid a forepaw on his wing, but he remained crouched and tense.\n\n\"Take the griffin,\" said one of the sentries, a sinuous jade female with a mane of lustrous gold. The other was flame orange, the same Shard had met on the first day.\n\nUme rose to her full height, spanning her wings as if to embrace them all. \"Welcome, honored dragons of the warrior way. What may I do for you? Family histories, perhaps?\" She bobbed her head once, watching them with hooded eyes.\n\nKagu snorted, and cobalt Isora silenced him with a look. He shrank back, but met Shard and Hikaru's glare with a smug, fanged grin.\n\n\"Chronicler,\" said the jade sentinel, dipping her head, though her gaze was hard. \"You have much to answer for. The griffin was not to see our treasures or our histories.\"\n\n\"I cannot feel bound by an arbitrary rule,\" Ume said. \"We've had no rules about griffins until the day Rashard entered our halls, and now rules come only by the empress's whim. Tell me, how does your own upbringing console you to blindly following an unjust\u2014\"\n\n\"Be silent,\" snapped the jade, her teeth gleaming in the torchlight. She reared up, but was still a head shorter than Ume. \"I am loyal to the empress until my end.\"\n\n\"Show them,\" Hikaru cried, stretching up to point to the pillar. \"Show them the truth, about Kajar, about the emperor\u2014\"\n\n\"Be still, hatchling,\" Isora rumbled, and true to his new training, Hikaru huddled down, edging closer to Shard.\n\n\"Enough.\" The jade dragon snapped her jaws. Her golden gaze traveled from Hikaru and Shard, back up to Ume. \"You will all answer to the empress.\"\n\nThe hall of ice glowed liquid amber in the light of only a few torches, held by careful young sentries who stood well away from the walls or supporting columns.\n\nIsora tossed Shard on the ground in front of the empress's great ice throne. He tumbled, scrambled to his feet and slipped, only for Hikaru to whip forward and catch him in gentle claws. He helped Shard stand upright while the golden dragoness watched in cold, beautiful silence. She'd been given word, apparently, and risen for the occasion, but Shard suspected she'd been asleep, for her mane looked wild, as if wind-tossed, and she wore no jewels but for the great collar of gold and ruby. She looked more mortal than the first time he'd seen her. Shard felt braver, but someone spoke before he could.\n\n\"Radiant One,\" said Ume, walking sedately forward with Natsumi at her side. \"Wise, just, and benevolent Ai.\" She bowed deeply, her nose nearly touching the floor. \"It is my honor to stand in your presence. I hope you will see it in your great heart to allow me to explain.\"\n\n\"Explain,\" Empress Ai said, with the barest flick of her tail, \"quickly.\"\n\nHikaru tugged Shard back and they stood side by side with Ume.\n\nUme paused only a moment to note that other dragons had risen at the commotion of them all being escorted through the mountain to the throne room. They had a silent, but large audience gathering.\n\n\"Radiant Empress, I would have hoped that the next generation would be more welcoming to the first outsider our land has seen in so many\u2014\"\n\n\"I said quickly,\" Ai said. \"Don't waste your breath on flattery or sentiment.\"\n\nUme bowed her head, but Shard stepped forward.\n\n\"I'll explain, because it's all my doing.\"\n\n\"You will be silent,\" growled the empress, and the light from the torches bobbed as the younger dragons holding them edged away.\n\n\"I won't be silent,\" Shard said. \"I've been silent before, and always with regret. You will listen to what I say, then do as you will.\"\n\n\"Shard,\" Hikaru murmured, but Shard only dipped his head to the young dragon before stepping forward.\n\nHe bowed, mantling to the empress, who looked surprised enough to hear him out. \"I came here to seek and offer friendship, to ask your help in resolving a mortal feud between wyrms and griffin kind that I know now began in the time of Kajar.\"\n\nHer mane, though long and thick, seemed to stand higher, and it made her look feral and fierce, but she didn't interrupt him yet.\n\nShard inclined his head. \"I assume you are much wiser and more knowledgeable than your forebears, so of course I don't hold you at fault for the problems between Kajar and the emperor of that time. As I expect that none of you would hold me at fault,\" he glanced around as motion caught his eye, and saw that their audience had tripled, \"for the deeds of griffins nearly one hundred years dead.\"\n\n\"I won't bear your insults,\" Ai said, her voice now a steady, thrumming growl.\n\n\"He hasn't insulted you,\" Ume said, \"nor anyone. If you will only come with me, come to the hall of histories, I will show you the truth, as I should have shown you in your second season.\"\n\n\"The truth,\" said Ai, \"as the chronicler of Kajar put it down? Umeko, so beguiled by griffins that she slandered her own kind? No. I will not believe it.\"\n\n\"You have never seen it. There is no slander but truth, only truth. Fault on both sides, redemption, acts of selfishness and love.\"\n\n\"You should have asked my permission,\" Ai said to Shard, turning from Ume.\n\n\"I would have,\" Shard growled, \"if only I'd been allowed to see you.\"\n\n\"None of this is necessary. We know the ways of the world beyond our pure mountains and waters.\"\n\n\"Do you?\" Shard asked softly. \"I don't think you do, and I don't think your mountains are so pure.\"\n\n\"The world is terrible,\" Hikaru said, loudly, more to the dragons around them than to the empress. \"But it's even more wonderful. I know, I have seen it.\"\n\nAi rose, the breath of the movement setting the torches flickering and casting translucent shadow dragons on every wall. She raised her voice, addressing all those who now stared from every level. \"We want no part of it. You have corrupted one of our own. You will not take honest responsibility for the greedy actions of your kind, and I will not trouble myself with affairs that no long matter to us. These wyrms in the Winderost, they're not my concern.\"\n\n\"I think they are your concern. There were never wyrms in the Winderost before the time of Kajar, not until he returned from the Sunland. They won't hear me. I don't know what they want. You might be able to get through to them.\"\n\n\"At this, Amaratsu failed.\"\n\nShard's tail lashed, he raised his wings. \"We must try again! What of your honor? What of a warrior's responsibility? What of compassion, justice, mercy?\"\n\nShe bared her teeth, paused and collected herself, rearing back to a more dignified pose. \"I will not hear dragon teachings growled into my face by an uncivilized beast from a backwards, broken land.\"\n\nShard felt as if his feathers had caught fire, so hot was he with amazement and rage. \"You're not even listening!\"\n\n\"Great Empress, Ai-hime.\" Natsumi's autumn wind voice whispered delicately. \"Please, hear him. On behalf of us, the new born, on behalf of Amaratsu, who was his friend\u2014\"\n\n\"Friend?\" Empress Ai turned with liquid grace and lowered her head to address Natsumi. \"Or victim? How do we know he didn't assist in her death and hatch Hikaru only to find his way here? Natsumi, you're too young to\u2014\"\n\n\"You're all young,\" Shard shouted, losing hold of his anger. He whirled, slipping a little on the ice, to behold the dragons staring from the higher tiers. \"I've lived ten years. I should be a wizened elder by your reckoning, but you treat me like a witless beast, a kit, or spy. I know more of the world than any one of you ever will, if you stay on this wind.\"\n\nThe torches fluttered. Shadows shifted.\n\nShard turned back to Empress Ai. \"I have no interest in your rocks and metal. I care for Hikaru. I care for my pride. I need your help, and all you care about is peace, quiet, and gold.\"\n\n\"I will hear no more of this. Your assumptions and insults are too much to bear.\" Ai planted her forepaws on the ice, head rearing back. \"Honored Chronicler Ume, you will be punished for indulging this behavior in the young ones, and for enabling the griffin's acts of spying and attempts at thievery.\"\n\n\"My radiant empress,\" Ume began, but Ai laid back her ears, warning her to silence.\n\n\"I will not be accused of ignorance, so you will show me to this tale you claim is the true account of the Red Kings.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Hikaru. \"Then you\u2014\"\n\n\"Be silent, winterborn. You've been indulged too far, and not to your betterment.\" Ai raised her great swan wings, looking aflame in the torchlight. \"Isora, you will take the griffin away from here, and see that he cannot return. We may educate ourselves in our own time, without arrogant interference.\"\n\n\"No,\" Hikaru said. \"You can't! Shard hasn't done anything wrong\u2014\"\n\n\"Be still.\" The jade dragoness who had come upon them in the hall of histories slithered forward to contain Hikaru. \"Be silent now, young warrior. We must be better in your discipline.\" Hikaru was not fast enough to keep her from snaking him in her coils, and closing her claws around his snout.\n\nIsora came at Shard in the same moment, and before Shard could twitch a feather, the dragon grabbed him, rolled him up in careful azure talons and surged into the air, bearing Shard as easily as a griffin would its nestling.\n\n\"Shard!\" Hikaru shouted, twisting his head free of the jade dragon's grasp. The orange sentinel fell in to help restrain him, and the empress called in others to contain Ume and Natsumi if needed. \"Stop!\" Hikaru called, then his cries were muffled again.\n\nShard managed to shout, \"I'm all right, Hikaru\u2014\"\n\nBut Isora had flown out of the ice cavern, winging through the halls and tunnels with the speed of a serpent whipping through the grass. At least the dragon was careful to hold Shard tightly without piercing his skin, and so Shard held as still as he could to avoid the appearance of struggling. It would do no good anyway. By the time he craned his neck to see where they were he was lost, utterly lost in the inner mountains.\n\nHe tried to track where they were going but was only able to note the change when they flew into the halls of ice. The air felt cold and still on his face.\n\nThey flew through long tunnels, through one expanse of open night air between mountain peaks that lasted a blink and smelled of seawater, and dove again into a rougher, unrefined series of rock and ice caves.\n\nThrough the dull dark and phantom moonlight that suffused through the ice into the caves, Shard saw a glimmering, subterranean lake.\n\n\"Breathe,\" Isora warned, and Shard sucked a sharp breath in the same instant the giant dragon plunged underwater.\n\nPure ice seemed to grasp Shard's feathers, his muscles, his eyes, and he was grateful for the warmth of the dragon's paws wrapped around him.\n\nThe dragon wound and twisted under the water, swimming fast. Through blurred bubbles and stinging eyes, Shard made out dark, underwater passageways and dead-ends. Just when Shard's chest burned for a breath, Isora lunged out of the water.\n\nThere, he dumped Shard on the ground. Shard shook himself quickly, getting his bearings. He stood in a cramped, dark cave of ice, with a pool of slushy water before him just wide enough for Isora's head to emerge. He bobbed there, checking the walls to make sure Shard had no other exits but the water. Satisfied, he looked to Shard.\n\n\"You'll stay here.\"\n\nShard eyed the water, and Isora set his claws on the ice around the pool.\n\n\"I don't recommend trying to swim out. It's a labyrinth. You'll freeze or drown before you find the right tunnel out.\"\n\n\"How long will I be here?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Isora watched him, and Shard seized on the fact that he hadn't yet abandoned him.\n\n\"You've seen me more than the others have, Master Isora. You've seen me with Hikaru. You've seen me fly and spar, surely you don't think everything you've learned about my kind is true? Or that you can judge all of us based on a single event involving a few griffins, that isn't even remembered truthfully?\"\n\nIsora's rumble vibrated the water into ripples around him. \"I will not disobey my empress.\" He sank lower in the water.\n\n\"Wait!\" Shard jumped forward, poised at the edge of the pool. \"What will happen to Hikaru and the others? You must know that Natsumi didn't do anything wrong, nor Ume. If you must, put all the blame on me, but not them.\"\n\n\"I will let it be known you said this.\"\n\n\"Thank you. What will the empress do?\"\n\nThe blue dragon paused, his claws tightening on the ice ledge around the pool. \"Hopefully,\" he said, \"she will only forget about you.\"\n\nWith that, the blue dragon plunged below, leaving Shard alone in the small, icy prison.\n\n[ Exiles of the Reach ]\n\nFor several days they rested at the Ostral Shore.\n\nThough rested was not quite the right word.\n\nKjorn ramped to his full height and slashed talons at Asvander's flank, scoring just deep enough to draw blood.\n\nThe Lakelander swore, whipping around to see that he'd lost, for they fought to first blood. A crowd of fledges cheered, or hissed if they'd hoped for Asvander to win, but all were well entertained. A cloudy evening brought gloom on the lake, and Kjorn smelled rain.\n\n\"That's the third time,\" Dagny grumbled, shoving past Kjorn before he could move out of her path. \"Isn't that enough?\"\n\n\"He's the one who wishes to spar,\" Kjorn said, unable to contain his pride at winning. Again. \"Ask him.\"\n\nThe Lakelanders were a sturdy, hearty pride of griffins whose focus and point of honor was their skill in fighting. In general tall with a long reach, or stocky with big muscle, they ranged in colors from seabird grays to more dusty, hawk-like hues. Their clear lines stretched back to the Second Age, and during his stay, Kjorn had listened more than once to old timers' tales of their own fights and great battles of their ancestors, told in such detail they might've been there themselves.\n\n\"I will figure out how in all winds you do it,\" Asvander said, glaring at the spot of blood on his flank.\n\n\"I had a good teacher,\" Kjorn said, and raised his voice to add, \"a warrior once from the Ostral Shore.\"\n\nOlder males and females called their approval, and a gaggle of younger initiates crowded forward to interrogate Asvander and Kjorn on how he'd won, if they could spar, and what technique Kjorn was using.\n\n\"Give him a rest,\" Asvander said. \"I'm sure he'll be happy to humiliate all of you in due time.\"\n\nKjorn chuckled. \"Perhaps in the morning. It's growing dark.\"\n\nA chorus of groans answered him, but before Asvander or Kjorn could offer one more lesson or spar, they heard Brynja shouting.\n\n\"Kjorn!\" the red gryphoness bounded toward the cleared sloped where the fledges trained. \"Asvander, Dagny, oh\u2014the scouts have returned.\"\n\n\"They've brought word?\" Asvander asked.\n\nBrynja stopped beside Kjorn, breathless, almost laughing. \"They've brought more than word. Come!\"\n\nAsvander looked at Dagny, then Kjorn. Dagny was the first to hop forward, and they followed Brynja toward the lake.\n\nA crowd of Lakelanders had gathered at the dawnward shore, the farthest border of their territory in that direction. Asvander had to shout and shoulder his way through, driving a trail for Brynja, Kjorn and Dagny to follow. From the excited chatter, Kjorn gathered that a large number of Aesir, exiled from the Dawn Spire, had arrived with the returning scouts.\n\n\"Why did they take so long?\" Asvander demanded. \"I sent scouts a whole moon ago, and the Reach is less than three days' flight.\"\n\nHis question was answered not by a particular griffin, but as word spread through the throng that, for some reason, they had walked the entire way.\n\nLoud talk, laughter, and old acquaintances calling each other's names overwhelmed Kjorn until at last they broke through the crowd to behold the newcomers.\n\n\"Valdis,\" Brynja cried. \"Kjorn, I see my aunt, come and meet her!\" She sprang from Kjorn's side, shouting. \"Oh, Valdis!\"\n\nKjorn turned, watching her greet an older gryphoness of similar bearing and color. His hope burned. Perhaps Shard had not gone to the Outlands. Perhaps he'd gone to the Dawn Reach and would be here even now.\n\nHe strained up, searching the sea of griffin faces in the fading light, seeking gray feathers and green eyes.\n\n\"So,\" snarled a gruff voice. \"You're Kjorn. Son of Sverin.\"\n\nSurprised, Kjorn turned, looking for whomever had addressed him. \"I am.\"\n\n\"You're the famous, just, kind, golden prince Shard nearly killed himself in loyalty to.\"\n\nIn the growing dark, an older griffin separated from the throng, coming forward through the shadow only to reveal feathers black as shadow.\n\nKjorn couldn't speak as he found himself sized up, and the griffin snorted, ruffled, and smoothed his feathers again. \"I thought you'd be taller.\"\n\n\"I know you,\" Kjorn said quietly. \"You're\u2026\" he found himself staring, speechless, into the griffin's single, moss-green eye.\n\n\"You know me. Now, you tell me where, in all great blazes, is my nephew?\"\n\n[ Endless Night ]\n\nWhen enough light glowed under the water that Shard knew morning had come, he made his first attempt at escape.\n\nFilling his chest with air, he dove into the freezing pool. At first it shocked him where his feathers were thin, and he kept moving, stroking his wings like fins, peering through the sullen blue. He'd thought a clear source of daylight would make it easy to find his way out, but now from under the water he saw multiple tunnels equally aglow with promising turquoise water.\n\nAfter surfacing for a breath, he dove again, trusting the thick down under his feathers for at least three chances before he went completely numb.\n\nHe followed one tunnel, keeping track of the pool behind him. Pale blue brightened to white. Diffused rays of sunlight lanced down through the water up ahead.\n\nShard swam fast in a wake of bubbles, only to strike a wall of clear ice. He slashed and kicked against it, then, throat tight, whirled and swam back to his pool. To his prison. After warming up, he would try again.\n\nThe light shifted to late day as he made more attempts, rested, then leaped circles around the pool to warm his muscles again. When the water became dull he knew it to be evening, or a gathering storm, and he knew it would be wisest to rest.\n\nHe settled as far from the cold water as possible, scrunching himself against the cold rock that formed his prison, and worked very hard not to panic.\n\nHe closed his eyes, feeling that the rock was shrinking in around him.\n\nThe ice creaked and groaned. Scrabbling up, Shard stared around, ears flicking. Slowly he realized it was an echo, that the ice shifted or expanded or tightened elsewhere, but was not about to crack beneath him.\n\nSettling again, he gazed at the darkening pool of water.\n\nWhen he at last closed his eyes, the world seemed to lurch and the rock at his back tighten in, holding him fast so that he couldn't fly or even move. Then it all tipped upside down and he stood on the rock with a roof of ice and water gushing on him from the pool, and he was drowning, crushed under chunks of ice.\n\nShard jerked awake. He squeezed his talons against the rocks around him.\n\nThe cavern was still. The ice was hard under him, the rock hadn't moved.\n\nSomewhere, water dripped.\n\n\"It's not real,\" he said quietly, to the rock. He'd never been trapped in a place so small, with no hope of leaving. He shut his eyes, and thought of the sky.\n\nThat only made it worse, knowing that he might never see it again. Knowing that the empress might well forget him so that he died there, knowing that he couldn't swim out, knowing that Hikaru might be punished or worse, forget about Shard as he grew up. Sunland dragons would never rejoin the world. The Winderost would remain prey to the wyrms, he wouldn't be able to help, and his own pride at home would only know that he left them, and was lost.\n\nHe would never see his family. He would never see Brynja, never get a second chance. He would never see Kjorn again.\n\nHe would die there\u2026if he didn't do something.\n\nIn the very last dregs of gray light left, Shard rolled to his feet and dived back into the pool.\n\nHe knew three directions that led to dead ends, and only two choices remained. A wide, open expanse that went on and on into abysmal, icy darkness, and a dragon-sized tunnel that was not quite midnight blue.\n\nShard surfaced once more, taking a huge breath, and chose the tunnel.\n\nAs he swam, he yanked tiny feathers from his own shoulder and set them to float against the ice over his head, leaving a little trail behind him.\n\nThe light brightened, rich blue and silver. Moonlight. He heard a dull, pounding roar that was the ocean, rocking under the swollen moon. He kicked, pumped his wings, swam hard through the water as the cold slipped squeezing talons around him. He knew he'd emerged from the caves into another, wider cavern, or perhaps the open sea ice.\n\nBelow him yawned a fathomless, featureless blue.\n\nHe didn't look down again.\n\nA slow, threatening burn heated his chest. He released a huff of bubbles and turned slowly, looking for an opening.\n\nIs this the lake where Isora entered? It wouldn't have frozen over so quickly\u2026and there was no moonlight this bright\u2026\n\nHe'd chosen the wrong way.\n\nForcing himself to stay calm, Shard searched for an opening. He didn't have the breath to return to his prison.\n\nI will die here.\n\nI will die...\n\nI will NOT die\u2014\n\nWasting breath with a furious, terrified shriek, Shard whirled in a twist of silver bubbles, kicking hard and squinting.\n\nA circle of light drew his desperate eye, two leaps away. He struggled for it, his limbs beginning to lock and jerk from the cold. The water shifted, rippling in the little circle ahead. Moving, splashing. An opening.\n\nShard thrust his head out, sucking down hard, painful, breaths. He wasn't sure he would even have the strength to drag himself from the water. Then he realized with hot, crawling dread that he hadn't found an escape, but only a bubble in the ice, a little pocket of air, perhaps a snow bear's old hunting hole that had frozen over.\n\nTreading water, he breathed.\n\nThe liquid ice seeped under his feathers, trailing silky cold across his skin. He'd been there too long. The ice seemed to penetrate and close around his hindquarters so that his steady kicks became weak and loose.\n\nShard gulped air, shutting his eyes.\n\nGo back. Go back. One more breath, then back.\n\nBack where?\n\nA violent tremble overtook his muscles and he slipped under water, then shoved himself back up, panting for a breath.\n\n\"Go back,\" he rasped to himself, turning sluggishly. Rippling shivers overcame him and his beak slapped the water, then his muscles calmed. \"Go back\u2026\"\n\nHe kicked, shivering, wings sliding slower and slower until he wasn't sure if he was moving them or floating.\n\nHe would dive soon. One more breath.\n\nOne more breath.\n\nHis shivers faded.\n\nAt once he felt warm, and he was floating comfortably on warm water.\n\nThen on warm air.\n\n\"The world is in danger, son-of-Baldr.\"\n\nShard flew under the moon with a snowy white owl. \"My friend,\" he cried, but there was no joy in her. \"Tell me what to do, where to go. Everything I've done has failed.\"\n\nShe had guided him before.\n\n\"You must not fail. A longer winter than you know threatens all creatures. The wyrms of the Winderost have begun to feed on fear, and so they will spread it as far as they can. Fly high, my prince, to see.\"\n\nA strange, hot wind swelled under their wings, lifting them beyond the Sunland and the world. That high, he saw the black rim of a forever night sky touching the blue of day, saw that the world curved softly like a robin's egg.\n\nThe owl circled him, drawing his eye.\n\n\"If they spread their terror further, all will be Nameless with it. You are borne high by the Silver Wind. Look beyond, look at things as they were before, as they may be again.\"\n\nHe saw a great battle of Nameless beasts, the First creatures who came from the Sunlit Land beyond the Dawnward Sea who, entering the dark, broke into points of light that creatures of the world called stars. They fought like savage, witless animals, like creatures who had no love or knowledge of Tyr and Tor.\n\nThe stars wheeled and swelled in front of him and became great griffins, wolves, boar, mountain cats and caribou and bizarre beasts from other lands whose names Shard didn't know.\n\nIt was not honor or courage that drove them, but fear. Nameless, empty fear such as Shard had only felt staring into the baleful eyes of the wyrms of the Winderost.\n\n\"Fly high, Shard,\" whispered the owl, bright as starlight, and her voice sounded like all the voices he loved. Then she winked out like an ember, and he was alone.\n\nHe fell, gliding fast over the world, and grasped for the spiraling dream net. There he snagged his talons around the dream of a red wolf who slept beneath a distant, deep, snow-covered forest.\n\n\"Catori,\" he called with relief, with joy, with sudden, immeasurable sorrow. A part of him felt there was some reason he might never see her again.\n\n\"My prince!\" She bounded forward and then her happy expression darkened. \"My friend, where are you? I search for you on the wind, and there comes no word, no dream, no song, nothing at all.\"\n\n\"I've failed you, Catori. I've failed all of you. It wasn't meant to be me. Hikaru, the dragon, or Kjorn\u2026\"\n\nHe had trouble speaking, breathing, and felt that something choked him. He tried to wade toward her in the snow and had to swim, to kick and glide as if he were in water.\n\n\"Hikaru may be a Summer King to his mother,\" Catori said, her fur blazing like flame against the snow, \"Kjorn may be king to the pride in the Winderost.\" She was in front of him, and Shard strained for her familiar scent. \"But you are Summer King to us, son-of-Baldr. You must fly higher. And you must come home.\"\n\n\"I'm not strong enough. I failed\u2014I'm dying, Catori\u2014\"\n\nShe leaped, fangs bared and snarling, and bowled him over as easily as if he were a kit. Shard gasped, thrashing, lost his grasp on the dream net. The wolf became enormous, and he the size of a wolf pup. She clamped jaws on the looser skin between his wings and shook him, and the moon glowed huge in the sky.\n\nA voice like Catori's, but not like hers, boomed around him. \"You answered the call, son of the Vanir. You are meant to right the wrongs. They will call you the Summer King, and this will be your song.\"\n\n\"I can't!\" Shard screamed into the dream light that was swiftly dissolving to chaotic snow and stars. Catori was gone, and in her place stood a tall, golden-eyed wolf whose pitch black coat glittered with stars, and who smelled of the hot ozone after skyfire struck the air. \"I'm weak! I failed!\"\n\n\"You must not fail,\" the wolf snarled, and flung Shard away. Her long, piercing howl split the stars.\n\nFear closed Shard's throat, and lack of breath swept him with dizziness. Cold locked his muscles. He fell. He fell fast, screaming eagle's terror into the endless night above the world.\n\nAir, ice and water roiled around him. Shard seemed to land in a waterfall of ice, falling upward.\n\nThe howl of the black wolf warped into a different cry, desperate, angry cries splitting the air around him.\n\nThen he realized he wasn't falling, but that something was pulling him up out of the water. Sweet, icy breath swept into him and he came fully awake to a very real crashing of breaking ice and surging sea. Strong claws grasped him, tugging him away from the hole in the ice. Wings beat the air around him, he was rolling, rolling from the water, held fast to a warm, scaled body.\n\nShard fell limp as Hikaru's scent filled his nose.\n\n\"Please be alive,\" Hikaru moaned, shaking his head hard to send water flying from his mane. \"Oh please, Shard\u2014\"\n\n\"Al-ive,\" Shard croaked, coughing, seizing into hard breaths as Hikaru scooped him closer.\n\n\"I found you,\" the dragon breathed, shoving up to fly from the sea ice, carrying Shard almost as easily as Isora had done.\n\nShard let his head loll, and pressed to Hikaru's scales as the dragon bore him toward the mountains.\n\nHikaru clutched Shard close to his chest, which felt as warm as a fire. \"I have you, my brother. I have you.\"\n\n[ Hikaru's Choice ]\n\n\"Isora told me where to find you.\" Hikaru and Shard rested on a ledge overlooking the sea, a good distance from Ryujan. \"I think he took pity on us both.\"\n\nShard flicked his ears, nodding once, still coming back to his senses.\n\nHikaru tightened his coils. \"When I realized you'd swam down the wrong way, trying to escape, I thought I would find you dead. But I saw your feathers and followed\u2026\"\n\nHe took a trembling breath, and bumped Shard gently with his nose. Shard ran his talons through the silver mane on Hikaru's back, trying to calm the dragon, and himself. The warmth from Hikaru's scales helped to soothe his frayed nerves and trembling muscles. His body felt achy, light, as if no amount of fish or red meat could fill him again.\n\nA part of him curled in that icy cave still, a small, cold piece of him that would never escape that prison, would always try to panic at a space that was too small.\n\nShard's stomach was not so panicky, and snarled.\n\nHikaru laughed, ears perking, and shifted. \"I'll get you some fish.\"\n\n\"No.\" Shard grabbed for his foreleg. \"No. Just\u2014stay with me, Hikaru. Stay and rest.\" He twitched his ears, and drew a breath of the wide, starry night. \"What happened after they took me away?\"\n\nHikaru shook his head in disgust. \"The empress was merciful, at least, because we are young. Natsumi was sent to her family. I'm to remain in my den. She thinks I'm still there.\" He showed his teeth, then gusted a sigh. \"Isora told me that Empress Ai did go with Ume to see the pillar and the Tale of the Red Kings, but still denies the truth of it. They've been lying to themselves too long.\"\n\nShard shook his head slowly, and closed his eyes, listening to the wind against the snowy plains, and the wash of the sea. For a moment, he pretended they were in the Silver Isles, and all was peaceful.\n\nHikaru glared out at the sea. \"I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that she didn't have me killed or exiled to the white waste, and that no one else was exiled or\u2026\" His ears twitched and a spasm of irritation tightened his whole body around Shard for a moment. \"She said we had been misguided. I don't understand, Shard, how she can say those things, when the truth was plain in silver on the wall. A dragon who was there left it for everyone to remember, but they don't want to.\"\n\nShard shook himself, ruffling his feathers. \"I don't understand either. I suppose Sverin and Per did the same thing, retelling history, making themselves out to be conquerors. But we don't know what else is in her mind.\"\n\n\"How can you only say that? Aren't you angry?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Shard said quietly. \"But I've also seen what anger without intent of justice can do. Your empress won't hear me, but I know the truth about Kajar now, and I know a little more about the wyrms. I can tell Kjorn that his great grandfather was honorable, and courageous. I can help him to reclaim his own birthright, do what needs to be done for my pride, and then\u2026\"\n\n\"You're going to face them again,\" Hikaru said. \"You're going to face the wyrms.\"\n\n\"I have to try.\" The owl's vision circled around him like a vulture. He crawled from Hikaru's coils, his muscles warming and anxious to stretch. \"I tried to talk to the wyrms in a way that I understand. It's time to approach them in a way that they understand.\"\n\nHikaru perked his ears as he unfurled his full, lengthy body. \"How?\"\n\nAt that, Shard ground his beak. The stark, terrifying nightmare of Nameless beasts and endless night weighed on his heart. \"I don't know yet.\"\n\nHikaru loosed a breathy laugh. \"I admire you.\"\n\nShard flashed him a grateful look. \"I admire you. You saved my life, Hikaru.\"\n\n\"You would have escaped.\"\n\n\"No.\" Shard met his eyes. \"I would have died. Without you, I would have died.\"\n\n\"So would I,\" Hikaru whispered, and bent his head forward. Shard leaned in, and pressed his brow to Hikaru's broad, delicate face.\n\nAccepting his close moment of near death, Shard backed away with sudden vigor, tail lashing. \"You mentioned fish?\"\n\nHikaru laughed, drawing up, but didn't open his wings.\n\n\"Race you.\" Shard leaped, shooting free of Hikaru's coils and risking cramps by flinging himself from the mountain face and throwing open his wings. The harsh wind battered against him and he gasped, laughed, made a full, sweeping turn in the night air to clear his head before winging back to Hikaru, who waited, bunched on a ledge outside the tunnel.\n\nShard hovered, and the dragon joined him in flying out to sea, though Hikaru insisted that Shard let him do the fishing. Shard did, gratefully, and watched, realizing how quick and graceful the young dragon had become\u2014both in body and in heart.\n\nHikaru caught two wriggling herring, and Shard joined him back on the mountain ledge, where Shard consumed both fish, to Hikaru's satisfaction.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Shard said, flicking scales from his talons.\n\nHikaru bent his head and gently touched his nose to Shard's brow. \"Of course, my wingbrother. Of course. I wish I could do more. I wish the empress would help you.\"\n\n\"You've done enough. Don't risk yourself for my sake again. I can only hope that now that the seed has been planted, curiosity will grow. Perhaps one day\u2026\" Shard huffed, shook himself, and looked around in attempt to gain his bearing. \"But now, Hikaru, we must fly this very night. Too much pulls me away, and I can't risk being captured again. For your sake, or mine.\"\n\n\"No,\" Hikaru said hesitantly, \"I know you can't.\"\n\nA strange note touched his voice, and Shard studied his face, and his eyes, with dawning sadness.\n\n\"But you're not coming with me, are you.\"\n\nHikaru lowered himself to his belly, forelegs on the ground, like a mountain cat, so that he was more at Shard's level. \"No.\"\n\nThe relief Shard felt at his escape tightened back to anxiety. \"Why, Hikaru? There's nothing for you here. The dragons don't care about the truth, and if you make another mistake, who knows what the empress will do?\"\n\n\"I know. But you're wrong\u2014there is something for me here. Many things. Some of us do care about the truth, Shard, and I must find those who do and we must stand together and rejoin the rest of the world. That is what my mother wanted. That's why she left the Sunland, and why she left me with you.\"\n\nShard swallowed against his dry, tightening throat. \"I had so many more things to teach you.\"\n\n\"You taught me the most important things first.\" Hikaru huffed a cloudy silver breath and laid his head on the ground near Shard. It was nearly as large as Shard's whole body. \"I thought I would fly beside you always. But I think Mother knew this would happen. That we would become brothers and through that, my heart would be stronger, that I would need a good heart because I am winterborn.\"\n\n\"You have one of the strongest hearts I know,\" Shard said softly. \"I hope you will let it guide you. I only wish you would come with me. You can always return here.\"\n\n\"Maybe, or not. Journeying out into the world isn't quite safe, either. I learned that the hardest way.\" He winced, perhaps thinking of the whales. \"Besides, now griffins are in everyone's thoughts. They've seen you, the young are curious, and I might have a chance at opening their minds.\" He showed his teeth in attempt at an amused expression.\n\nShard couldn't laugh, and Hikaru sobered. The wind tickled them, icy and unsympathetic, the stars piercing like eyes above.\n\n\"Shard, do you remember when you told me that we always think we know what we'll do, but then when we really face a decision, it's not as easy as we thought?\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Shard murmured.\n\nHikaru closed his eyes. \"This moment is like that for me. One of the warrior virtues is loyalty. I must be loyal, and help my kin here if I can. I was disappointed to find out what they think of you, to know that they wouldn't help us. But now I understand that they needed my help. They shouldn't be secluded or ignorant any longer. Shard, I owe you a great debt for all you did for me\u2014\"\n\n\"No you don't,\" he said sharply. \"You owe me nothing, do you understand?\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Hikaru tilted his head. He looked as if he might speak, but his large, liquid gold eyes only studied Shard thoughtfully, gently, as if to memorize him.\n\nShard watched him in return, his gaze traveling each black scale in the moonlight, the wispy mane and growing silver horns, the black wings. His thoughts drifted to Amaratsu and his promise, to the other dragons, the help they could have been, the help Hikaru could have been.\n\nThen, simply, he knew with a hollowing pang how much he would miss Hikaru's bright laughter and the dragon's presence at his side.\n\nHe knew, with hard certainty, that Hikaru's short life meant this would likely be the last time they saw each other.\n\nBut he couldn't linger any more. The stars in the black sky reminded him of the black wolf in his chaotic dreams. Cold wind brushed against the rock and snow and with it, her words.\n\nYou are the Summer King, and this will be your song.\n\nHe stepped forward and rested his talons on Hikaru's scaled brow. \"Fair winds, little brother.\"\n\nHikaru shut his eyes and whispered, \"Fair winds.\"\n\nThey stood there a moment, then Hikaru raised his head, his expression clearing as he turned to the sky. \"I've learned the stars you can follow from here to take you to the Silver Isles, if you wish.\"\n\nThe Silver Isles. He could go home.\n\n\"Do you know the stars,\" Shard asked quietly, \"that would lead me back to the Winderost?\"\n\n[ The Red King's Sorrow ]\n\nTwilight fell as the pride gathered on the Copper Cliff.\n\nDays after their final confrontation, Caj, Sverin and the rest of the warriors returned to the nesting cliffs. Sverin had refused to fly since Caj could not, and so the whole procession, including now Halvden, Tocho, and Ragna's five warriors, had walked all the way from the White Mountains back to the pride, arriving near sunset on the fifth day.\n\nAt Sverin's request, Ragna gathered the entire pride. Grudgingly, Caj thought it a sign not only of her honorable nature, but her sense of security, that she allowed his request and didn't simply imprison him. She did not require the old to attend, or those gryphonesses with kit who felt too weary or ill\u2014but all of them came anyway. All of them wished to hear what the fallen king could possibly have to say.\n\nRagna stood on top of the King's Rocks, dove-white against the clear dome of delicate blue sky.\n\nFor so many years Per and Sverin had stood there. Caj watched Ragna quietly, for she had said nothing about Sverin's fate. There had been no time. Now the red griffin sat behind her, awaiting his turn to speak and flanked by two large, fully grown Aesir who would not look directly at him.\n\nCaj sat with Sigrun on a lower ledge of the King's Rocks, not as Sverin's honored wingbrother now, but as Thyra's honored father. The father of the queen. The noble warrior who had captured, restored, and returned the Mad Red King.\n\nRather than watch the pride gather and read the expressions of revulsion and fear, Caj sought out Thyra, who stood the same level with Ragna but well back, letting the Vanir queen rule this moment. Sensing his look, Thyra glanced at Caj and lifted her beak reassuringly.\n\nCaj inclined his head to her, and looked back to the Widow Queen.\n\nWhen all appeared settled in the snow, Ragna spread her pale wings. \"Sons and daughters of Tyr, of Tor, mixed blood of Aesir and Vanir, conquerors who are now mates, family\u2026friends. We gather as one pride, healing, to hear the confession of one who would have divided and ruined us.\"\n\nCaj eyed Sverin, but the fallen king's expression remained distant, neither angry nor arguing.\n\nRagna addressed the pride, telling of Caj's bold initiative to find and bring Sverin to his senses, and to justice, telling of Halvden's redemptive actions and the warriors who sought out Sverin, in the end. All watched her, rapt, her voice like balm after long years of the aggressive Red King.\n\nAll the while, Caj watched Sverin, desperately seeking some reaction, some hint of what he might say. He looked better than when Caj had found him, preened and eyes alert, as if finally aware of everyone and everything around him, a prisoner of war.\n\n\"Come forth, son of Per,\" Ragna said. Her voice carried across the frozen field. Every ear perked. Caj shifted, and Sigrun made a low, reassuring noise beside him. \"You are here to answer for your crimes against the Vanir, the wolves of the Star Isle, every other creature of the Silver Isles bullied and abused under your and your father's reign. Come forth, and speak, as you wished to.\"\n\nSverin drew himself up, and with a sour pang of regret, Caj saw that he was truly defeated. The arrogance had drained from him, his once-proud stride dragged, limbs liquid and slow as if he walked to his death, not his confession.\n\nRagna swept back and stretched her wings as if to present him to the pride, and all drew a breath as the War King turned his back to them, and bowed before her. \"This chance to speak is more than I deserved.\"\n\n\"Use it well,\" Ragna said, her voice now flat and neutral.\n\nCaj's blood quickened more than before he'd faced Sverin in the valley, and he perked his ears.\n\nSverin turned to face the pride, as he had so many times before. His wings remained closed, his tail low, his ears slanted back as if to continue regarding Ragna, behind him. \"I stand before you, defeated. I pass on my right to rule to my son, and to his mate.\" He lowered his head toward Thyra, who still would not look at him. His ears twitched, and he turned back as the older Aesir mumbled amongst themselves.\n\n\"Why did I not fight openly?\" His tail lashed, showing some of his old aggression, but he didn't move otherwise. He struck a harsh, red outline against the sky, like an open wound. \"Why did I not call out the enemies of my rule and deal with them honorably?\" He paused, his voice checked, then he closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the sky, as if asking strength of Tyr. Caj fought the urge to leap up and stand at his side, to give Sverin whatever strength he needed. But he remained close to Sigrun. She also grew tense, for Ragna had kept secrets from her, too.\n\nCaj had never seen Sverin hesitate before, and he almost wished he wouldn't confess\u2014though certainly his rule failed at the end, some part of him was chilled to see the king brought so low.\n\nAfter a moment Sverin lowered his gaze again to the assembled. \"I should have, but I did not, because I was afraid\u2014not of my foe, or of the Vanir king's son.\" He paused, corrected himself. \"Rashard. Your prince. No, not because I was afraid to fight, but because I was afraid if I broke a certain promise, then my own worst secrets would be revealed. I was a coward, and a liar, and this brought suffering on the Vanir and on you, and your families, and ate away at me until I was no longer king, brother, or father to anyone.\"\n\nCaj gazed at him in wonder and confusion, then around at the pride. Ears flicked. Glances exchanged, no one stirred otherwise or spoke.\n\n\"Two things I've kept in my heart, and they poisoned it slowly. The first concerns our coming here, of which the Aesir who flew with us know only half.\"\n\nHe looked to Caj. \"We came here under the guise of conquering new lands, expanding the rule of the Aesir in the windward land. The Winderost.\" He said the name as if it tasted bitter. \"But those who flew with us know that we left a great scourge behind us there. You know we left the enemies of Kajar to terrorize the land. Perhaps my father thought our leaving would draw them away.\"\n\nHe hesitated, his gaze now locked on Caj. \"Perhaps he thought this, and his intentions were honorable. I can only hope, for it means my line isn't entirely ruled by cowardice.\" His beak remained parted, holding words, as he stared at Caj. Then he broke the stare, and gazed at the rocks. \"But his true reason for leaving, was me.\"\n\nA long, rasped breath led to his next words. \"I begged my father that we might flee. I couldn't stand their horrible screams in the night. I couldn't stand knowing they haunted our borders. I could not fight them, and I couldn't bear the thought of my son growing up to the same nightmare. More than anything, I didn't want Kjorn to know the terror I had known.\"\n\nHe raised his voice, declaring his confession to the cold winter air, to Tyr's light, to the pride. \"I was afraid. I was afraid, and I spent every moment of our reign here working to convince all of you, and my son, and myself, that I was a true king.\"\n\nA light, frozen wind brushed their feathers up. Caj shuddered. Sverin would not look at him now, but his gaze settled on the middle distance of the White Mountains. No one moved. His voice grew hard.\n\n\"Ragna.\"\n\nThe Widow Queen, who had been watching the pride, turned her gaze to Sverin. He lowered his head.\n\n\"Please step forward.\"\n\nHer ear flicked back. \"You've said enough. This is unnecessary.\"\n\n\"No, they must know, they must understand that it was not greed or anger or arrogance that drove me mad.\"\n\n\"What more?\" Caj breathed, so softly only Sigrun heard him, and she touched her beak gently to his ear. He'd known Sverin feared the great wyrms in the homeland. Everyone did. But never had he imagined that the reason they'd all left to conquer new lands was because Sverin had asked his father to flee.\n\nRagna and Sverin watched each other a moment longer, sharing some silent history Caj knew nothing about, then Ragna came forward, and Sverin retreated a step as if to present her. \"All of you know that my mate died the first, bitter winter in the Silver Isles, drowned in the sea.\"\n\nLow, disgusted grumbles washed through the pride, and Sverin snapped his beak to demand silence. It worked. His power still held the pride in thrall.\n\n\"For so many years I cast blame on the sea, on the winter, on the Vanir and then on Ragna herself.\" He watched Ragna's face, and it was like pale stone. \"For so many years I did this, telling myself and the pride that the Vanir, that Ragna, had taunted and driven Elena to her death.\" The name of Sverin's dead mate, so long unspoken, struck like a bolt of skyfire. \"I did this for so long that I began to believe it was true.\"\n\nRagna looked at Sverin, ears perked forward, and said nothing.\n\n\"But it was not the Vanir.\" Sverin's voice boomed and cracked, broken, over the pride. \"It was not Ragna who pushed Elena past her limit and skill, it was not Ragna who demanded that Elena try to match the hunting skills of the Vanir, not Ragna who fought viciously with her because arrogance, hunger and terror of that first winter had driven all the Aesir nearly mad.\" He closed his eyes, as if unable to look at them and say the words at the same time. \"It was me.\"\n\nSverin looked at Caj, and he began to understand at last the true horror of his wingbrother's confession.\n\n\"It was I who demanded that she try, that she prove herself equal to the conquered huntresses. I taunted her, I drove her out, and I watched when she fell, but I was too terrified to fly out and try to save her. And I watched as Ragna\u2026\" He straightened, lifted his wings, and forced out the last words. \"\u2026as Ragna, the only witness, calling for me to help, dove down to try and save my mate. But she couldn't do it alone, the water was too rough and freezing, and Elena drowned still calling my name.\"\n\nNo one breathed.\n\nCaj could bring no expression to his face at first, no sympathy, no reaction at all. His stomach felt hot and hollow.\n\nSverin's ears laid back slowly, watching him for some reaction. Caj drew a breath, managed to raise his beak, lift his wings slightly to acknowledge him.\n\nYou will never fly alone, he thought, fiercely, hoping his wingbrother knew, hoping he saw it in Caj's face.\n\nI promise you will not fly this wind alone.\n\nEverything became clear. Everything washed over Caj in a blazing, fresh new light. Their flight from the Winderost, Sverin's stern rule, his unreasonable hatred for the Isles.\n\nHe had never hated the Islands, or the Vanir. He had hated himself.\n\nCaj stood, slowly, not intending to go to him, but to show that he would not abandon him now, or ever again.\n\nSverin looked again beyond the pride, toward the mountains.\n\nBefore any other griffin could close their beak or make a noise, Ragna took mercy on Sverin by speaking, for all could see that he had no more words. \"We made a pact, that I would tell no one of what had happened, and Sverin would never allow me to be exiled from the pride.\"\n\nNo wonder she never seemed afraid of him, Caj thought, with a mix of bitterness and pity for them both. He wondered how much pain could have been avoided, if\u2026if.\n\n\"It was wrong of me,\" Ragna said to all, though she watched Sverin, \"to hold that terrible secret. Wrong of both of us, and it has brought nothing but ruin, guilt, and pain.\"\n\nSverin's wings closed slowly and he turned his face from the pride, who sat as frozen as rocks in the snow. \"Forgive me,\" he said quietly to Ragna. \"I beg your forgiveness.\"\n\n\"Since you ask it, I give it,\" Ragna said, though her voice remained cold. \"For my own part, for I see how you suffer from our agreement still, I forgive you, for I agreed to silence as well. But for the rest\u2026\"\n\nShe raised her voice, and Caj watched her expression grow icy. \"For your crimes against the Vanir, wrought by your own dishonorable acts of cowardice and lying, for the exiles you sent to die, the scorn you showed my own son and the Isles\u2026for that, you will await judgment, and beg the new king for forgiveness yourself.\"\n\n\"The new king,\" Sverin murmured, staring at his own talons as if in a dream. \"Shard.\"\n\n\"Shard,\" Ragna said. Her voice grew from ice to heat, and as she spoke, the pride realized that her forgiveness did not mean mercy or friendship. \"My son. The son of Baldr and the rightful prince of the Silver Isles who once loved you, you who returned that love and loyalty with scorn, mistrust and fear. When he returns, he will decide your fate. Thyra has agreed to this. Your own son said we should do with you what we saw fit.\"\n\nSpeaking only to Sverin as if they were alone, and not in front of the entire pride, she finished.\n\n\"Until their return, I declare you a prisoner of war, charged with crimes against my pride and all the creatures of the Silver Isles. You will be imprisoned as we have been imprisoned these ten years.\"\n\nLooking dazed as the pride thought on that change of fortune, it seemed Sverin could only bow his head. Older Aesir in the crowd began to shift, rustle as if preparing to speak, but Thyra raised her head, staring them down. Caj himself could not move, could not argue with the queen's statement nor sentence, grateful only that it was not a sentence of death.\n\nRagna called the names of four warriors loyal to her. \"Take him to his nest. Bind his wings with the gold chains so precious to him, set a guard on him at all times, and let him await the return of the king.\"\n\n\"What will become of him?\" Caj demanded, at last breaking his silence.\n\nWhen Ragna's cool look switched to him, Sigrun stepped forward also, as if to shield him.\n\n\"Now?\" Ragna watched Caj, he thought, with a mix of anger and pity. \"Now that the truth is known, let him at last grieve his mate honestly, and face his failed rule. Let him hope that my son has mercy. Let him beg bright Tyr,\" she looked to Sverin, ears flat on her skull, \"for the pity and mercy that he never gave.\"\n\n[ End of the Hunt ]\n\n\"Would he think to come here, Asvander?\" Kjorn mused.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nThey'd gathered at the water's edge, under the moon. The earlier clouds had cleared without dropping rain or snow. They had no fires, but stars and moonlight and the brightness of happy news and finding living friends made the shore seem light. A low murmur from the rest of the Ostral pride, talking in their various dens and hollows, underscored their quiet conversation.\n\nKjorn paced, tail lashing. \"Or if your scouts found him, would they know him, and think to bring him back here?\"\n\nAsvander lifted his wings, sitting with Dagny and Brynja. \"The last we saw of him\u2014\"\n\n\"We know the last anyone saw of him,\" Stigr growled. \"We don't need to hear it again.\"\n\n\"It's been a long search,\" Kjorn said, eyeing the black griffin. \"With challenges and heartache for all of us. We're just talking it through, trying to think of things we haven't yet.\"\n\n\"Pretty words.\" The black Vanir shifted, stretching out on his belly and leaning against Brynja's aunt, Valdis. She didn't intervene, but seemed content to watch Kjorn be challenged and to let them argue. \"I heard your father was good with pretty words, too.\"\n\n\"I know you're afraid for Shard,\" Kjorn said evenly. \"And I am too. Now is not the time to argue about it.\"\n\n\"Don't presume to know how I feel about anything,\" Stigr warned, \"much less Shard.\"\n\n\"Do you know how hard I've been searching for him?\" Kjorn demanded. \"Do you think I care less than you?\"\n\n\"I think you care about yourself. What's the worst outcome for you\u2014that he's dead and you get to be king of both the Winderost and the Silver Isles?\"\n\n\"He said nothing like that,\" Asvander broke in. \"You surprise me, Stigr. Did your good judgment get severed with your wing?\"\n\n\"Asvander,\" Brynja gasped, her gaze shifting to Stigr's mangled shoulder and the thick, raw scar there.\n\nKjorn laid his ears back. \"I have no quarrel with you, Stigr.\"\n\n\"Don't you?\" he asked shrewdly.\n\nKjorn did, once. It was Stigr who'd told Shard he was a prince, who had told him everything about being a Vanir. It was Stigr who had turned Shard against the Aesir. Against Kjorn.\n\n\"I've put it aside,\" Kjorn said, shortly. \"Can't you, for Shard?\"\n\n\"Everything I've done the last ten years was for Shard.\"\n\n\"He's my wingbrother,\" Kjorn growled.\n\nStigr stood slowly, and ignored when Valdis tapped her tail against his hind leg. \"You don't know the meaning of the word.\"\n\n\"This isn't helping,\" Dagny said, stepping between them, her wings lifting. Her voice raised in pitch. \"Can't we all take a moment to remember how we felt when we thought the rest of us were dead?\"\n\nStigr's ears flattened, Valdis snorted, and Kjorn ground his beak.\n\nAsvander paced around all of them, and stretched his wings. \"She's right, you know.\"\n\n\"Dagny is right,\" Brynja agreed. She looked from Kjorn to Asvander, and Stigr. \"We mustn't fight amongst ourselves. Shard hoped for peace between all of us. We can honor that, at least. And you mustn't give up hope, Kjorn.\"\n\nWhen he remained silent, Brynja spread her wings, outlined in the hazy moonlight against the lapping waves of the lake. \"You mustn't. Shard wanted more than anything to see you again and reconcile. He believed in you. You must believe in him.\"\n\n\"Brynja,\" Asvander began hesitantly. \"You must be prepared to accept if\u2014\"\n\n\"He lives.\" She turned, her gaze hard and bright. She stepped back from them. \"I know that he lives. He had so much to live for, and I\u2026\" Drawing a tight breath, she composed herself, folding her wings. \"I believe that if he hasn't yet returned, it's because he had some purpose. Some greater purpose to attend to, some task, some reason not to return to us. He had larger designs than we might know.\"\n\nThe waves lapped, and wisps of fog gathered over the water.\n\n\"What task?\" Asvander asked at last, gently. \"What task could be more important than finding his friends again, his allies, his wingbrother? If he came to his senses, what could be more important?\"\n\nKjorn stared across the lake, and saw no answer in the dark.\n\nStigr broke the silence, his voice low and gravelly. \"I know of one thing.\"\n\n[ Shard's Beacon ]\n\nIt had become too easy to slip into Namelessness, to exist within his instincts and feel only the wind on his feathers and fur. He didn't count the days flying from the Sunland back to the Winderost, he slipped away from himself and became wind, became his feathers and his breath. After the dark, cold hole of his imprisonment, flying free and wild was a relief.\n\nHe landed on a rock cluster and fished there, eating his fill. Then he flew on, following the line of two stars above him, two stars that shone like the wingtips of a swan in flight under the moon.\n\nFollow Sig's wingtips, echoed a soft memory, a voice he knew he loved. They will guide you.\n\nOne day, a new scent wafted to him under the constant wash of brine and fish.\n\nSage.\n\nIt brought many memories licking up like flames. Red rock. Hunting. Laughter. The face of a gryphoness with keen, gold eyes and freckles of russet on the pale feathers of her face.\n\nBit by bit as the winter sea passed under him, he rebuilt the memory of his loved ones, his purpose, and his name.\n\nBy the time he saw, almost with surprise, the ragged, wind-nightward coast of the Winderost, he knew again that he was Rashard, son-of-Baldr, and remembered all the reasons he'd returned.\n\nBrynja. Kjorn. Stigr.\n\nAnticipation kindled in his breast to think of Brynja, to see her again, to speak his heart again.\n\nStigr, he tucked in the same corner of his heart as his father.\n\nMoving from sad thoughts, he pictured Kjorn, who was surely in the Winderost, if his own visions were true, and what they might accomplish together if they could reconcile.\n\nSkirting along the coast, he kept a hard watch for any creature in the air or on the land. He scented and smelled no wyrms, no griffins. Only gulls watched his lonely arrival.\n\nHe worked to recall the lay of the land as Brynja had told it to him nearly a season ago, and angled his flight accordingly. The landscape lay different from the coast where he'd first landed, different from the land he'd first flown over with Brynja and her huntresses.\n\nNot planning on returning yet to the Dawn Spire without a plan or allies, he soared high over unfamiliar rolling hills, toward a different destination, and a task more important than his own reunions.\n\nHe turned inland, and starward, toward the Outlands.\n\nA long lay of gray, cracked earth stretched beneath him. A half day's flight and the land changed after a range of gray, wolf-teeth mountains that showed little sign of life.\n\nShard saw no movement but for an occasional silent vulture. He hoped that meant the wyrms remained starward of the Voldsom Narrows, perhaps hoping to catch him and Hikaru coming from the Horn, or for other reasons he couldn't understand.\n\nA great gash delved into the earth, neatly dividing the dead spread of earth from the rest of the Winderost. Shard remembered it. He remembered from when he'd flown, ashamed and Nameless, away from the Dawn Spire\u2014wandering, lost and out of his head, he'd traveled a canyon. He soared low now, searching the landscape. He'd been witless, but he remembered flashes of the landscape. And he remembered griffins.\n\nA female griffin and her son had met him, fought him away from their den. Then, she'd recognized him. She'd recognized him and called out to him in his father's name. Shard hadn't even known his own name, much less Baldr's, but he remembered now, and he knew what it meant.\n\nThere were Vanir in the Outlands of the Winderost.\n\n\"Hail!\" He shouted to the empty, flat land. The sun hung high and warm on his back, though a chill winter wind still ruffed his feathers. \"Vanir of the Silver Isles! If you shelter here, come forth! Vanir!\"\n\nHe shouted himself raw, and no answer came. In the hottest part of the day\u2014so odd, he reflected, to feel hot in winter, but such was the landscape\u2014he landed in a shelter of rocks and collapsed. For a while he lay out of the heat, waiting for evening to cool the air and fiddling with the silver chain around his neck.\n\nHe'd thought that any griffins there would come, curious at his voice, or the name of their homeland. But maybe they didn't recognize it, or maybe they were gone. Or dead. Or simply too far away. Maybe the gryphoness had been a hallucination when he'd traveled near the Outlands. He touched the silver chain, and his talons bumped the pouch that held Groa's fire stones.\n\nOr maybe, he thought, pushing himself back to all fours, I'm going about it wrong.\n\nDespite the heat of the afternoon, he knew the night would grow chill. Perhaps instead of wearing himself down and flying for leagues and days across the Outlands searching, he could draw any exiled griffins to him instead.\n\nSo, as the afternoon crawled toward evening, Shard hunted not for griffins, but kindling.\n\nIt was well after dark before he'd gathered a large enough supply. He flared to land, dropping the last bit of kindling on his pile of brush and dead wood as tall as himself and twice as wide.\n\nRavenous again, thirsty, he planned to the light the blaze and find food and water, letting the fire attract the curiosity of the Outlanders in the night.\n\nShard sat in darkness, tail dusting back and forth in concentration. He wound a bit of dead grass into a little nest, as Hikaru had shown him. That nest, he tucked under a pyramid of grass and brittle twigs. Then he drew out the fire stones, and recalled with a soft chuckle how Hikaru had shown off and created sparks by merely swiping his own claws across rock.\n\nFor a moment, as a cool breeze flicked around him, Shard closed his eyes. He pushed hunger from his mind\u2014and his fear that the fire would have the wrong effect, that it would not draw griffins, but his enemy.\n\nStill he had to try.\n\nThinking of dragon claws, he swiped the flint across the stone. The surprising rain of sparks made him drop both stones, but he laughed, ears perking. After collecting the firestones again, he sat on his haunches near his little tinder nest, and swiped again. Sparks flashed, lighting on the tinder. Pinpoint embers glowed.\n\nAgain he slashed the stones together, sparks showering like Tyr's bright breath from his own talons. Laughing, bristling with glee, Shard struck the stones again and again until at last the tinder caught, flickered to life, and burned. Carefully he nudged the tinder nest under the kindling under the fire caught and crawled, leaping high on the dry brush pile.\n\nThe heat forced him to back away and he did so laughing, eyes stinging from the smoke. Like a fledge, for a moment he was rushed with energy and he frolicked around the fire in leaps and rolls.\n\n\"The brave will call fire from stone,\" he breathed, recalling Hikaru's dragon rhyme. He skidded to a stop in the dust. \"Ha! I did it, I\u2026\" He looked around, almost expecting to see others come out of the dark into his ring of light. It felt absurd that Stigr was not there, Catori and Kjorn and all those he loved were not there.\n\nHe was alone. There was no one to hear. No one to share the moment with him, see the miracle, behold the crackling beast he had created and tamed. In that heartbeat, he knew all he wanted was to go home, to see his family, assorted as they were, to have peace.\n\nShard forced himself to calm down, to remember that he must save his energy for hunting food, wood, and water. He tucked the stones back into the safety of the pouch and tugged it closed.\n\nAnd then, he was not alone.\n\nTurning once more toward the fire, he saw a griffin face appear in the orange light, a feline form slinking forward from the dark. At first the other didn't look at Shard, only the waving fire, ears lifted. Shard stood very still, hoping to recognize the face, to see the female or her son who had called to him when he was Nameless, but it was not. He feared that the exiles would be lost and witless as he had been, but he saw immediately that the griffin, an old male, was aware, knowing, Named.\n\nHe was not witless, but he was afraid. Wiry, too thin, and pale brown in coloring. Still, he looked like a Vanir.\n\n\"What is this?\" whispered the old griffin. \"Tyr's flame\u2026\"\n\nShard straightened, lifting his wings in welcome. \"A beacon.\"\n\nThe old griffin's gaze darted to him and his eyes widened, scouring Shard with a look. As if no longer able to support his own weight, he sank to his belly on the dry ground. \"So I have finally succumbed. Are you here to greet me, my king, who I watched fall into the sea, slain by Per the Red? Have I reached the Sunlit Land, at last?\"\n\nShard's throat caught. \"You're alive and well, and we're still in the Outlands of the Winderost. I'm not Baldr, but his son, Rashard. Tell me your name?\"\n\n\"Frar, son-of-Eyvar. And if you are Baldr's son\u2026\" Understanding lightened his gaze, and he stood quickly, only to mantle low, but his hungry eyes locked on Shard's face. \"My prince. You lived. You live. I never gave up hope. And you've come, you've come\u2026\" his voice broke and he lowered his head, shaking it slowly. \"I knew\u2026\"\n\nShard walked to him, set talons on his wing and murmured for him to stand. \"Yes, I've come.\" He met the old Vanir's eyes. \"I've come to bring you home.\"\n\n[ Fairer Winds ]\n\nCaj sat alone on a cliff overlooking the sea, staring out toward the windward quarter. Toward home.\n\nIt had been days since Sverin's confession, Ragna's sentence, and the former king's imprisonment. They would not allow Caj to stay all the time in the den with him\u2014even Ragna's trust in him had limits, though Thyra had vouched for him. But he went to see the king every day, to assure Sverin that he would not abandon him, he wouldn't hold old faults against him.\n\nThe Red King remained quiet, but sane, and would sometimes even speak of Elena.\n\nPerhaps, as Ragna had said, now that he could grieve openly and honestly about all that had passed, he could heal.\n\nThe pride continued to do their hunting, their fishing, for winter and hunger would not relent to give time for their shock and grief.\n\nCaj couldn't have fooled himself into believing that all would be forgiven, all peaceful, that Sverin would wait idly by while they waited for Kjorn and Shard's return and that it wasn't needful to imprison him. Logically he knew Sverin must be imprisoned, but neither had he expected Ragna's vehemence.\n\nPerhaps he should have.\n\nSigrun found him there, sitting at the edge of the cliff. The sea crashed on icy banks far below them, and great hunks of frozen sea ice jutted from the waves. Caj couldn't help but think of the milder, rainy winters of the Winderost.\n\n\"How do you fare, my mate?\" Sigrun asked, landing beside him as evening fell.\n\n\"Well enough. I'll see Sverin when the hunters return with supper.\"\n\nShe nodded once, crisply, and both of them glanced in the direction of the red griffin's den.\n\nSigrun folded her wings, her gaze distant. \"What do you think will happen?\"\n\nHe knew she meant in general. To the pride, to any of them, to their lost princes\u2014whose return seemed as distant and fragile a promise as the spring.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Caj said quietly, opening his wing to invite her to his side. She ducked in against him, and Caj drew a deep breath. Gulls cried, and farther out, they saw Vanir, swooping over the waves in the last gray light.\n\n\"Shard won't be the only Vanir to return in spring,\" Sigrun reminded him, though after Sverin had first fled, she'd told him everything. Einarr's brother Dagr had flown to seek their exiled father and other lost Vanir, and Halvden's mother, Maja, had done the same. They'd been gone the long winter too, and would return in spring. The healer's gaze searched the far horizon. \"I wonder what those who were exiled will think of us who stayed, and those Aesir who are now our friends.\"\n\n\"Some chose their exile,\" he reminded her quietly. \"I know he did send many away, but some left rather than be ruled by Per.\"\n\n\"Did you think I forgot that?\" Her tail twitched. \"Or are you speaking of Stigr?\"\n\n\"Of any of them,\" Caj said mildly, though she knew him too well. He had indeed been thinking of Stigr, who would've been Sigrun's mate but for the Conquering. Or not. He'd gathered that the Vanir warrior had never quite committed to mating, and in the meantime Sigrun had waited, and waited for him. He preened gently behind Sigrun's ears. \"Whatever happens, I vow that we will face it together.\"\n\nShe swiveled to meet his eyes, hers soft, brown, and keen. \"I vow that, too.\"\n\n\"And I will fight for you again, if needed. I will take his other eye.\"\n\nShe sighed, and lifted her talons to tap against his restored cast, as if to remind him that she was weary of his fighting. \"Hear me. No matter what friends, what family, what lost Vanir return to this pride, you are my true mate. I will stand with you. You don't have to fight for me. You've won. I choose you, Caj, son-of-Cai.\"\n\nAdmonished, Caj dipped his head against her neck.\n\nA scuffling drew their attention to the foot of the rocks, and Sigrun perked her ears to see Thyra, climbing up from the cliff trails to meet them. She looked as Caj knew he must often look, a strong facade of stone masking other fears.\n\n\"Mother, Father,\" she said quietly, gaze averted. \"May I nest with you tonight? I'd rather not be alone anymore, until Kjorn returns.\"\n\nIn answer, Sigrun opened her wing. Still Thyra hesitated, though her posture was proud. \"Father, about sending the sentries to hunt him, I hope you can\u2014\"\n\n\"It's done,\" Caj said to stop her, then more warmly, \"my daughter.\"\n\nWith relief, Thyra stepped forward and stood next to them.\n\n\"How fairs my grandson?\" Caj asked, ears perking toward Thyra's round belly.\n\n\"Or granddaughter,\" Sigrun said.\n\nThyra laughed, seeming surprised, and nipped the air. \"Feisty.\" Wryly she added, \"He, or she, likes when I eat fish.\"\n\nCaj grumbled as if the very idea of fish offended him, Sigrun fluffed between them, and despite all that had passed, they spoke only of the next day's fishing, how each pregnant gryphoness fared, and the curious customs of the wolves who came and went on the Sun Isle now like extended members of the pride.\n\nA scent filtered to them on the rising evening breeze.\n\n\"Speak of a creature and he appears,\" Caj murmured, turning to see Tocho loping toward them across the sweeping plain of snow.\n\n\"Caj, my friend! They told me where to find you.\" He trotted up and turned a quick circle, showing off a flash of blue in his neck fur. \"A raven tied it for me. What do you think?\"\n\n\"Very handsome,\" Caj said, and it did look dramatic, the cobalt feather against his pale gold fur. \"Tocho, this is my family. Queen Thyra, and the pride's healer, Sigrun.\"\n\n\"Yes, I have heard of you both.\" Tocho dipped his head low, showing just the points of his teeth. \"It's an honor.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Sigrun murmured, \"for all you did to help Caj.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" Thyra said. \"The feather does look very handsome. You'll surely be the only wolf, ever, to sport a blue one.\"\n\n\"Ever?\" Tocho looked hopeful, and Caj glanced sidelong at Thyra.\n\nThyra looked at him, her expression still one of deep admiration. \"My father chooses his friends very carefully.\"\n\n\"But did it impress your lady?\" Caj wondered, catching Thyra's gaze. She looked amused.\n\nTocho huffed. \"I haven't seen her yet.\"\n\n\"When you see her, show confidence,\" Caj instructed, and felt Sigrun giving him a sideways look. \"And dignity.\"\n\n\"Confidence.\" Tocho's ears flicked, and he lifted his tail. His nose quivered, and his ears flattened. \"Oh\u2026\"\n\nHe turned just as Caj caught the same scent, another wolf on the wind, then appearing against the snow, using Tocho's trail. This was a she-wolf, long and lean and with fur like cedar bark, and sprinting toward them from the river.\n\n\"I fear why she's running,\" Sigrun said, ears laying back as she watched the wolf's swift approach.\n\n\"Some news,\" Caj said vaguely. He was distracted by the sight of her, certain by Tocho's sudden, low whine that this was the object of his affections. He had to admit to himself that she must be very striking, for a wolf.\n\n\"Queen Thyra!\" she called, her voice a warm, low alto, \"Hrafn's daughter, and Noble Caj. If only Ragna were here, I have such news! Such tidings\u2026\" She slowed to a canter, then a trot. Caj noticed feathers braided into the shaggy fur of her neck, one pale gray, one rich black.\n\n\"Catori!\" Tocho turned in another circle, then Caj could've sworn he heard the young wolf mutter, \"dignity,\" to himself as he straightened and waved his tail in greeting.\n\n\"Tocho.\" She paused and they greeted each in wolf fashion, sniffing delicately. She seemed to take particular interest in the feather, looking from Caj to Tocho again, her ears flickering. \"I see perhaps the rumors of your recent adventures are true?\"\n\n\"All true,\" Tocho said, ears perked. One ear flicked back to Caj, and the gold wolf stepped forward, nosing behind Catori's ear. \"I will tell you the tale of it, tonight, if you wish.\"\n\nCatori shook her self and considered him, head tilted, as if they'd only just met. \"I would like that.\"\n\nCaj saw the quiver of happiness that took Tocho's body, saw him repress it and move back, stiff-legged. \"Good. We'll hunt together, tell stories, and sing.\" He broke into a pant, Caj suspected to relieve his nerves, then calmed. \"But you brought news. Forgive me.\"\n\nShe chuckled, taken aback, considered Tocho again, then bowed before the griffins.\n\n\"Wait,\" Sigrun said, poised to fly. \"I'll fetch Ragna first. If it's something she should hear?\"\n\nCatori pawed the snow, full of energy. \"Yes, fetch the queen! I've dreamed, a vision that I trust to be true, and I have news.\" When she raised her head, her amber eyes glittered with joy. \"At last, I have news of Shard.\"\n\n[ The Lost Vanir ]\n\nThey worked deep into the night. Frar agreed to tend the fire while Shard flew to hunt food. A brief flight away, he found a thin trickle of a spring that tasted of mud and mineral, but it was good enough. Good that it was close, and it drew prey.\n\nThere, Shard waited, with the bonfire winking reassuringly in the distance, until a hare came to the stream to drink. Shard struck, but took that first meal to Frar. Then he went back again and again, hunting small game and taking it to the fire so that should more Vanir arrive, there would be food and welcome for them.\n\nAt last, he ate, after felling a starving greatbeast calf that had somehow lost its herd. Shard thanked it for its life but was almost glad to end its suffering. He ate his fill of the red meat, then dragged the rest to the fire, calling to Frar for help.\n\nThe old Vanir remained mostly silent, as if he couldn't believe how his fate had turned. Shard shared the sentiment and didn't invite conversation. His body was weary, but his heart alight. If Frar was the only Vanir he found, it would be enough to justify his journey.\n\nBut he was not.\n\nWhen the moon hung nightward, a band of three gryphonesses crept into the firelight, their gazes on the food, then on Shard. One was his mother's age, two of them perhaps a year older than Shard. By their size and bearing and color, he knew at least two of them were from the Silver Isles.\n\n\"Welcome.\" He stood, raising his wings.\n\n\"What is this?\" asked the eldest female, whom Shard was certain was a Vanir. Frar confirmed it by coming around the fire to address her.\n\n\"Ketil,\" said the old griffin, and she looked to him in surprise. \"Yes, I still live.\" He lowered his voice, though it brimmed with mischief. \"My old friend. Do you not know your own prince?\"\n\nThe Vanir gryphoness started, stepping fully into the light and looking Shard up and down again. With a soft sound, she mantled. \"Rashard, so it is, little Rashard\u2014my lord, I knew your mother. I knew Sigrun, too. I am Ketil, daughter-of-Var. This is my daughter, Keta, and Ilse, a huntress of the Winderost, though her family was exiled from the Dawn Spire.\" She nodded to the third gryphoness, who looked indeed like an Aesir. Firmly, she said to Shard, \"She is like another daughter to me.\"\n\n\"You're all welcome.\" Shard inclined his head. \"I've come to gather you, to find all of you that I can. Others have flown nightward and starward from the Isles to find the other lost Vanir, and we will all return home.\"\n\nKetil's ears swiveled forward. \"Does this mean the conquerors are overthrown?\"\n\n\"The conquerors\u2026\" Shard chose his words carefully. \"The tyranny of the Red Kings has ended. But their prince, Kjorn, is my wingbrother, and I hope we will have peace with them from now on. I'll tell you all that's passed, but please, eat now. Rest. We have much to do.\"\n\nKetil bowed to him again, as did Keta and Ilse.\n\nHe answered their questions, and told his tale. He told them even of Stigr, for Ketil and Frar had known him, and told them that Ragna was well, and Sigrun was mated to an Aesir and their daughter was Kjorn's queen.\n\nHe told them everything.\n\n\"Tell us how we may serve you,\" said Ketil after they'd eaten, her pale eyes taking in Shard's face, his wings, his whole body. In a motherly fashion, she seemed to disapprove of his state of health.\n\n\"You can hunt,\" Shard said. \"Bring food. We'll need it if more come. Bring food, and find others.\"\n\nThey bowed to him, even the young Aesir, who didn't appear bothered by the differences between them, or that Shard was a prince she'd probably never heard of.\n\nMore came in the night.\n\nIt was like a dream. Shard's plan was working. For a long while he paced and searched the skies for signs of wyrms. Far off, he thought he heard roars, but they never came, so he might have dreamed them. He didn't leave to hunt again, for now that they had help, Frar had insisted Shard remain by the fire to greet the new arrivals, as their king.\n\nPrince, he thought. I've earned no kingdom yet.\n\nYet as they came, they cried out in joy and disbelief to see him, and bowed, and pledged their loyalty. And he promised to take them home.\n\nHe told them all what had passed in the Silver Isles. He told the tale each time a new griffin came, told them of his travels until his voice gave out, and was stunned at how many Vanir had lived, barely lived, there in the Outlands.\n\nThe more who came, the more went to search and spread the word, the more left to hunt. By the time dawn brushed the sky, they'd run out of tinder, and more than fifty griffins slumbered around the dying embers of the fire.\n\nShard looked at them\u2014very old Vanir like Frar, some his mother and uncle's age, and some younger who had been only kits during the Conquering. Kits like him, but whose parents carried them away from the conquered Isles in search of a new life.\n\nThere were males his age, and a few females, young and hopeful Vanir huntresses, who beheld him shyly. Shard had once thought there might be a Vanir female for him among the exiles, but when he met their gazes, he could think only of Brynja.\n\n\"These are as many as we could gather,\" Frar told him, speaking quietly so as not to wake those still resting. Shard had managed some fitful sleep and eaten plenty, but the night had wrung them out, all of them.\n\n\"There's someone missing,\" Shard said, searching each face. \"We must stay longer. I met a gryphoness here, and her son, when I wandered Nameless. Who else fled here?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I didn't know there were this many.\" Frar watched him, one ear swiveling to track their little pride.\n\n\"A gryphoness of middle years,\" Shard insisted, recalling her more clearly. \"A son my age. They were here in the Outlands. I won't leave them. I won't leave any Vanir who still breathes.\"\n\n\"My king,\" Frar murmured, and dipped his head. \"We will find her.\" He gestured with a wing. \"Perhaps in the those fanged mountains\u2014\"\n\n\"Not the mountains. It was starward. Farther, almost to edge of the Outlands, starward of the Voldsom.\"\n\nFrar flattened his ears uncertainly. \"The wyrms are sheltering there. It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Then I'll go alone,\" Shard said.\n\n\"Please,\" Frar said. \"We've just gotten you back. You can't leave us now. You must let others search.\"\n\n\"No,\" Shard said. \"It must be me. I'll remember the way once I get closer, and I'll find their den.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Frar tried, one last time, stepping forward.\n\n\"Watch over them for me,\" Shard murmured. \"Stoke the fire. Keep it burning. Any exile is welcome here\u2014Vanir, Aesir, painted wolf, starving eagle. They are all welcome.\" He opened his wings. \"Tell the Vanir where I've gone. And tell them I'll return.\"\n\nFrar dipped his head, and when Shard looked back from a greater height, saw that the Vanir was still watching, and would watch, until they could no longer see him.\n\n[ Oaths Renewed ]\n\nOn Asvander's suggestion and Stigr's insistence, Kjorn himself led a warrior party to the Outlands. By putting together all they knew of Shard's ultimate mission, they could only assume that he had gone there to track down any lost Vanir who, over the course of time, had ended up in the wasted fringes of the Winderost.\n\nThey didn't know what they would face there, but Asvander convinced the clans of the Ostral Shore to assist, for what glory there might be, for any warriors who faced the wyrms again.\n\nBrynja and her huntresses, Dagny, Nilsine and the Vanhar and fifty assorted warriors of the Ostral Shore flew in a layered formation back over the hills.\n\nWith what Kjorn had seen of the wyrms, he felt better with nearly a hundred griffins at his back. With what Brynja and Asvander had told him about the attack on the Dawn Spire, he knew it was not nearly enough.\n\nHopefully we won't see them at all, but hide in the night, fly in the day, find Shard and his Vanir and be gone.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind a few more talons,\" he'd said hopefully to Asvander just as they set out.\n\nThe Lakelander had shaken his head. \"I wouldn't say that too loudly, or the ones you have will feel unwelcome. I truly wish I could do more, Kjorn, but these are all the volunteers I could muster.\"\n\n\"And well needed. I didn't mean any insult.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Asvander said. \"Anyway, I agree with you.\"\n\nBut that had been the last word on the topic. They left the large pride at the Ostral Shore with what volunteers could be had from the young and eager, those who wished to see the wyrms, and some older, who felt a drifting sense of loyalty to Kjorn's bloodline, from the old days.\n\nThey settled for the first evening in the same spot he and the others had met with the painted wolves. No sooner had they landed than a shout went up from one of the sentries Kjorn had posted around the outskirts of their camp.\n\n\"Painted wolves?\" Kjorn expected the warning to be about the pack, but there was no scent of Ilesh, Mayka or the others on the wind.\n\n\"No,\" the sentry called. \"Griffins, nightward.\"\n\nKjorn spotted them, a whole band of griffins flying fast toward them.\n\n\"Ready up,\" Asvander ordered.\n\nThey formed a circle on the ground, faces up and out, every warrior crouched and ready to fly. Brynja fell into the formation by Kjorn, talons digging into the scrubby grass. Kjorn readied himself for a fight, then paused, peering at the approaching band of griffins.\n\n\"Nilsine,\" he called uncertainly. The Vanhar was on the other side of the circle. \"Isn't that\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, we surrender, mighty warriors!\" called a wry voice from the approaching band.\n\n\"Rok,\" Nilsine barked, half in recognition, half in surprise. \"You devil, what's the meaning of this?\"\n\n\"We've come to help!\" called a younger, brighter voice. Behind the lanky rogue, but flapping fast to catch up, was Fraenir.\n\n\"Quiet, traitor,\" Rok ordered, in good humor.\n\nKjorn spied Frida, and at least twenty scruffy, ill-fed griffins besides. He stood straight, watching as the band of rogues landed. Before Kjorn could speak, Nilsine broke their circle formation and trotted up to Rok, wings and feathers raised.\n\n\"You haven't had enough of poaching the Vanheim?\" She demanded, in his face, and Kjorn tried not to be amused for she stood a head and a half shorter than him. \"Now you bring your scoundrels to hunt this land? I doubt you can count on the Lakelanders to be more merciful than us.\"\n\n\"You're looking well, daughter-of-Nels,\" he said, smoothing his feathers from his flight. \"For the romp you've all been having with His Highness, there, I mean. Pardon me, but I'm not here to speak to you and unless I'm mistaken, you have no say, here.\"\n\nHe inclined his head, and stepped past her to see Kjorn. \"Your Highness. A pleasure to see you again, and drier this time.\"\n\nNilsine turned to keep watching him, half-crouched and ready to spring.\n\n\"What is the meaning of all this?\" Kjorn strode forward with Asvander behind, and the rest of his band fanned out from a circle to form two lines, facing the rogues with admirable restraint.\n\n\"Friends of yours?\" Asvander wondered.\n\n\"We'll see,\" Kjorn said shortly.\n\nBefore Rok could answer, Fraenir trotted forward, bowing to Kjorn. \"I shouldn't have run, but I'd never seen the wyrms so close, and they surely would have killed me. I know I was a coward, but look, I've brought friends, and Rok, and he's a fine fighter, Kjorn\u2026\"\n\nKjorn glanced past Fraenir to Rok, who watched him with a gleaming look.\n\n\"My young friend is convinced,\" Rok said, more seriously, his look challenging, \"that we might be of service, and for that, we might be pardoned of our crimes and taken back with open wing to the clans we've hailed from.\" He extended a wing to point to his rabble. \"There are many more than these, believe me, but these are who I found on the way to you. And I promise you, all can fight.\"\n\nNilsine's response to this was a snort, and she paced away, studying the assorted griffins who'd flown with Rok.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Asvander said thoughtfully, while Kjorn remained quiet. \"It has been done before. I have a little say at the Ostral Shore, and could speak for any who serve bravely.\"\n\n\"And I at the Vanheim,\" Nilsine said, her beak raised high, \"though why I would speak for any of you\u2014\"\n\n\"Yet I have no power at the Dawn Spire,\" Kjorn said evenly, \"and that is where your father was exiled from, isn't it, Rok?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" Fraenir said brightly. \"But you will.\"\n\n\"Will I?\"\n\nRok looked at the sky. \"He's convinced you mean to return and take your\u2014what did you call it, Frae? Rightful destiny? Kingdom? Something like that.\" He shook his head and watched Kjorn, expectantly.\n\nKjorn flicked an ear to Fraenir. The quiet question in his heart about his own destiny pulsed, like an ember, like a heartbeat. \"Whatever gave you that idea? I've come here to find Shard.\"\n\n\"The signs,\" Fraenir insisted. \"The starfire last autumn, the volcano, and then, what the lioness said about the Sunwind\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" Rok said. \"Make of all that what you will. Anyway, if there is genuine honor to be had and glory won, we're here to serve.\"\n\nAt a loss, Kjorn appraised the rogues. Some watched him with ironic suspicion, like Rok, some with an empty sort of surrender, and some, like Frida and Fraenir, with true hope. He wondered how many more there might be, if these were only the swift bunch Rok had gathered before finding Kjorn again.\n\n\"I can't promise you anything,\" he said quietly.\n\nRok ruffled his feathers. \"When I was captive, the Vanhar told me, with no small disdain, mind you, that you told them to let me keep this chain, when you might've had it back from me. Is that true?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\nRok looked Kjorn over, perhaps gauging what sort of griffin he'd been before he washed up on the shore of the Winderost.\n\nThen he answered, quietly, for only Kjorn to hear. \"Long ago, my father swore an oath to serve Per, but that duty was taken from him. From my family.\" His gaze slid to Fraenir. \"And a naive young griffin recently reminded me that keeping your oaths is a matter of honor, not gain. Though I can't imagine where he got the idea.\u2026he's right.\" The rogue inclined his head, but didn't lower his gaze from Kjorn's eyes. \"So I will help you find your wingbrother. Then, after that, if I think you're worth serving, consider me your loyal subject.\"\n\nKjorn could say absolutely nothing. He couldn't help but glance at Nilsine, and though he could tell she seethed, she had no argument. She'd said Fraenir would turn against him or disappoint him, but already he proved her wrong, and quite.\n\nStill, she managed her bite. \"If Kjorn cannot restore you to the Dawn Spire,\" she said to Rok, \"I suggest you find your new place not at the Vanheim, but the Ostral Shore, where they know less about you.\"\n\nRok's laugh was thunderous, and Nilsine laid her ears back. \"I'm flattered that I bother you so much, my lady. Well, Your Highness,\" he said to Kjorn, and shifted, displaying the chain that Kjorn had left him, \"what say you?\"\n\nHe saw Nilsine give a slight shake of her head. Then he considered young Fraenir, the other rogue griffins, young and old, with talons splayed and ready. He thought of when, seemingly so long ago, he'd told Fraenir his own definition of honor, and saw now that it had truly taken hold.\n\n\"I accept your fealty,\" he declared, formally, as he had seen Per do, and Sverin. \"And will return that fealty with reward as I can, with protection, and loyalty.\" He raised his head and spread his golden wings wide, looking over the ragged band. \"That goes for all of you.\"\n\nFraenir, nearly beside himself at the scant ceremony, bowed deeply. A few more bowed more cautiously, a few only murmured a wary response.\n\n\"Well enough,\" Rok said. \"Now, where are we headed?\"\n\nThe morning light remained dim enough that they saw the flicker of fire across the broadest part of the canyon that divided the Outlands from the Winderost.\n\n\"Kjorn,\" Nilsine said.\n\n\"I see it.\"\n\n\"It is griffins,\" Brynja confirmed, swooping ahead. \"A whole gathering of them, and they have fire.\" Her voice warmed with relish. She'd told Kjorn of the fires they used to burn, until the wyrm attack that had destroyed their pyres and doused them. They had no way to make new flames unless they were lucky and skyfire struck again.\n\nEvidently, it had.\n\nA griffin flew up to meet them, halfway over the canyon.\n\n\"Hail!\" Kjorn called, and introduced himself. \"We seek Rashard, son-of-Baldr.\"\n\n\"He was here,\" called the female. Her gazed took in the war band warily. \"And has gone.\"\n\nDisappointment and wild, lancing frustration almost drove Kjorn to a fit right there in the sky, but he managed to contain himself and only mutter, \"Of course he has. Where has he gone?\"\n\nShe looked nervous. \"Come and meet with us at the fire.\"\n\nThey did. Kjorn's band winged over the canyon that marked the border. Many nervous gazes peered down at the yawning, bleak canyon, as if wyrms might lunge up from the murky depth and devour them in a gulp.\n\nWithout incident, they all set foot on the dusty ground of the Outlands, standing around the fire of the exiled Vanir. Kjorn noted also a few scruffy, bony, painted wolves, and ragged eagles. Bones of prey animals lay scattered and stripped, and he smelled water, faintly.\n\nImpressed with his wingbrother's strategy, Kjorn let the Vanir gryphoness lead him to the fire, which burned low but steady. Haunted, hollow griffin eyes stared at him from around the fire, and he knew what they saw.\n\nAesir. Conqueror. Son of the Red Kings.\n\nFor the not first time that winter, Kjorn laid his ears back in uncertainty and shame. Then, he bowed his head to them.\n\n\"I seek my wingbrother, Shard, who is your rightful king. Who among you leads while he's away? Who knows where he's gone?\"\n\n\"Starward,\" said an old male. His wings hung wearily from his sides, ribs sticking out against his dull pelt. \"That's all I know.\"\n\n\"Not to face the wyrms? Alone?\" Not even Shard is that naive. He tried once, and failed.\n\n\"Seeking more Vanir,\" the old male growled. Tension flickered as sure as the flame.\n\nKjorn kept his head low, and inclined it. \"Of course, I understand. But do you know\u2014\"\n\n\"I've told you all I know. Leave us. We want nothing more to do with you.\"\n\n\"We've come to help Shard,\" entered Brynja's silver-smooth voice. \"To help you. He has made peace with the Aesir, and hopes to keep ties between us. Let us help.\"\n\n\"Find our prince if you want to help.\" Ears flat to his head, the old male didn't move nor soften.\n\nThe wind stirred the ashes of the fire and the ash on the ground, and Kjorn took a deep breath of the thick air.\n\nA hesitant, young male voice spoke up from the group. \"You said he went starward, seeking Vanir?\" He looked at the old one, and his voice rose, almost in accusation. \"You didn't say that's why he'd gone! You should've told me\u2014\"\n\n\"You've only just arrived,\" growled the old Vanir. \"Settle down.\"\n\nThe young male stepped forward, a Vanir almost exactly Shard's age. \"Frar, you don't understand! If he went starward seeking Vanir, he had be looking for me.\" He looked between the old one he'd called Frar, and Kjorn. \"For me, and my mother. We're the only griffins I know of who still nest starward of the Voldsom.\"\n\n\"But you came alone,\" said Frar.\n\nHe bowed his head. \"I fled when the wyrms came back from the mountains, but Mother refused. She told me to get to safety, and insisted she wait.\" He looked around, perhaps fearing disapproval for leaving his mother alone. \"She insisted. She thought he would come back if she waited...\"\n\n\"Where is she now?\" Kjorn asked, lifting his head. \"Can you take us to where Shard might be?\"\n\n\"It's wyrm territory. But I will show you.\" The young Vanir looked grim, and opened his wings.\n\n\"Wait,\" said Brynja, looking to Kjorn, then the bonfire, which gleamed reflected in her eyes. \"I have an idea.\"\n\n[ Rhydda ]\n\nShard reached the starward border of the Outlands before dawn of the second day he'd flown from the Vanir and the bonfire.\n\nWhen he'd heard the cracked screams of the wyrms in the night, he'd landed and ranged along the ground, wanting desperately to shout but knowing it would only draw them to him. Now in the deep hour before dawn, he trotted along the rim of the vast canyon that divided the Voldsom Narrows from the Outlands. He knew the canyon stretched deep into the earth and split off into the Narrows, but he saw little of it through the dark and the ash. That far starward, haze still blanketed the air, obscuring his vision and his sense of smell.\n\nHis hearing though, remained sharp. Guttural wyrm snarls and shrieks from high above and across the broad canyon warned him to remain low. When he found a pile of rocks, he ducked into its shadow and waited for the sun to rise and the wyrms to go to ground. His eyes stung from the haze, and exhaustion. The brief nap at midnight near the bonfire did little to help him. He stretched out on his belly, ears perked toward the yawning canyon before him, and waited.\n\nDim sunlight suffused the haze. The air glowed golden, then amber. Gradually the wyrms fell silent as they went to their nests. Shard rose, ears twitching back and forth, and crept to the cliff edge, his talons curled over the rocks before the face plunged down into the hazy deep.\n\nShard held his breath a moment, tail flicking as he squinted across the canyon, which was a good fifty leaps. The dim humps of rock and stunted trees looked passingly familiar. If that was where he'd wandered, Nameless, then he could find the old Vanir gryphoness and her son again.\n\nAs surer rays of light beamed through the gloom, Shard leaped, gliding over the vast, dead canyon. Dust filled the air, joining the haze, and he sneezed, then resisted the urge to cough. The sound bounded down and through the canyon. His feathers prickled and he paused, hovering between cliffs, ears perked.\n\nNothing. Either the wyrms had not heard, or they avoided the morning light. Shard flew on across and landed.\n\nHe knew then that he'd been there before. The very shape of the trees looked familiar, and the layout of rocks. Head low like a wolf, searching for any scent or sign of life, he trotted on. That part of the Voldsom looked no better than the Outlands, with dry, baked earth all coated in dull ash, the grim haze, and no scent of water or life.\n\nAhead he saw a stack of boulders that he knew, and perked his ears before breaking into a sprint.\n\n\"Hail!\" he called, trotting up to the boulders. \"I've returned, Shard, son-of-Baldr.\" He circled around the den, wary, trying to catch a fresh scent. \"You called to me. A moon or two ago, I came this way, lost.\" Shard stepped forward hesitantly, poking his head into the dark cave. \"...Hello?\"\n\nAsh swirled in eddies around his talons. \"Hello? I come peacefully\u2026\"\n\nBut there were no griffins in the den.\n\nOut hunting, he told himself. The wind shifted, bringing him the faint, distant scent of wyrm flesh and old blood. He shuddered, unsure if it was the blood of wyrm, pronghorn or griffin. They couldn't be dead. He wouldn't be frightened off. The Vanir gryphoness had called to him, and he owed it to her to bring them home again.\n\nThey'd gone hunting, and they would return.\n\nHe sat down to wait.\n\nAfternoon stretched to evening. Shard shifted anxiously in the fading light, his energy sapped out into the dead land, the dry ground, the thick coat of ash everywhere, and a nagging sense of foreboding. He curled in the den for a time and rested, rousing again near evening. At last he could wait no more, and struck out in the direction of the strongest griffin scent.\n\nCatori and Stigr had taught him the best way to track on the ground, and he'd learned a little from Thyra, as well. Because of all the dangers flying in the Outlands posed, he thought the best course for any griffin who lived there might be to hunt on foot. Sure enough he came upon a faint griffin track in the ash, perked his ears, and trotted forward, head low as he followed the trail.\n\nA few times he lost the footprints where wind had kicked up the dust and ash, but followed a faint scent and, here and there, a bit of down or tuft of fur caught on the brittle twigs in the ground. A gryphoness had passed that way, hunting.\n\nMaybe I should've waited for her at the den. What if, even now, she's returned?\n\nThe wiser, deep part of him knew that was wrong. The tiny, silver whisper in his heart knew that he would have waited forever. The part of him that the dragoness Ume would've called sky knew what he would find at the end of the trail. Still, stubbornly, he followed it as darkness closed a wing around him.\n\nHe coughed against the haze, and his steps slowed to a reluctant drag as the scent grew fresher, and it was not the proper scent of griffin with a fresh kill.\n\nIn the last evening light, Shard rounded a tumble of rocks that stank of wyrm flesh, old blood, and rotting meat.\n\nDeer bones littered the ground. The gryphoness had hunted, indeed, but too far. Too close to the wyrm's nesting ground within the walls of the canyon.\n\nShard saw her.\n\nFor a moment he couldn't look, then, feeling it was his duty, he walked to her body. The rising night wind brushed up feathers from the still flesh, giving her the brief illusion of breath.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he whispered, smoothing the feathers back down over the wicked wound across her chest. He gently arranged her body into a dignified pose, wings outstretched, and knew she'd only died a day or so earlier. They hadn't fed on her. They'd killed her, taken the deer, leaving only its bones, and left her body in the ashes.\n\nShard spoke again, his voice pebbly and cracked. \"I'm sorry that I didn't come, that I didn't hear you when you called my name.\"\n\nHis voice grew ragged and dangerously loud in his own ears.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he choked again, thinking of her empty den, of the wyrms entering the scrap of territory she'd called home. He imagined how she'd stood her ground. She'd stood her ground, waiting.\n\nWaiting for him. Waiting for her king.\n\n\"No more,\" Shard pleaded, pressing his talons to her shoulder, and tilted his head to the hazy sky through which he saw no stars. \"No more of this!\"\n\nA dry, wicked rumble trembled distantly in the air, from the canyon.\n\nShard whipped his head around, ears laying back.\n\n\"No more,\" he hissed, and lunged into the air. He had failed to be a prince, a king, for this gryphoness once.\n\nHe would not fail again.\n\nA shriek shattered the haze.\n\n\"Yes I'm here!\" he shouted. \"You'll fight an old, sick huntress and steal her kill? Well, she was one of mine, my pride! Now, fight me!\"\n\nEverything he'd plan to do, to try, to get through to them fell away in sick, righteous anger.\n\nHe heard them coming. Wings rushed the air. They'd heard. They'd heard his challenge from a league off and it would take them no time at all to reach him. Shard soared high, breaking the haze, letting the first starlight and the final glow of sunset declare his presence for all to see.\n\nBelow him, the haze swirled and, as if he stared through water, he saw shadows squirming as the wyrm horde gathered, rose, and burst from the haze. One, two, ten\u2014he tried to count them all and failed.\n\nThen he only saw one.\n\nThe bloodstained skin around her eye sparkled scarlet for half a breath in the last light, then the sun was gone and they all looked the same, dull color.\n\nShard made himself as huge as possible, flaring his wings wide with each stroke, bellowing with his dry, broken voice.\n\n\"You cannot ignore my words forever! Griffin slayer, wrathful one, you will hear me and answer. Tell me why you're so full of hate!\"\n\nThe wyrm's head ticked to one side. At first Shard thought she understood. Then he realized she'd caught sight of the silver around his neck.\n\n\"Or is this truly all you want?\" He yanked the delicate chain from his neck and brandished it in the star light. \"Are you only ignorant, greedy and jealous as the dragons believe?\"\n\nThe wyrm's head flew up and she blared a roar.\n\n\"Is this what's so precious to you you've forgotten honor, and your name, and your voice? Well have it!\"\n\nShard flung the silver chain away. Rage pumped hot through his wings and kept him strong, and he flapped higher, away from the larger horde. All the wyrms squealed with greed and threw themselves after the dainty chain as it fell. All but her.\n\n\"Or is it this you want?\" Shard shouted, and tugged the firestones from their pouch. Keeping an iron grip, he struck them together. Sparks flared and died, tiny and useless.\n\nThe wyrm gnashed her teeth, almost seeming frustrated at her companions, squabbling over the tiny chain, below them. She turned with a shattering roar and dove upward at Shard, wing strokes hard and fast. For a heartbeat, Shard stared. She hadn't gone after the chain.\n\nHe knew he should dodge, or charge, or do something, but he only stared, mesmerized by her baleful eyes and jaws, slowly grinning wide. The meat stench on her breath snapped him from it.\n\nFumblingly he stowed the fire stones and whipped up higher, grasping to remember all he'd learned.\n\nThey are an ancient race.\u2026\n\nA strange, warm light rose from somewhere. As if his sparks had set the haze alight, Shard saw an orange glow suffusing the shroud below them, a league off from where he'd flown and shouted his challenge.\n\n.\u2026with an ancient memory.\n\nShard gasped for air and for clarity, darting up as jaws snapped near his tail. He banked and fell to one side and the wyrm tilted to follow.\n\nThrowing himself around to face her, Shard beat his wings hard, hovering. \"This cannot be all that you are!\"\n\nThe wyrm flapped her massive wings, hunching up to his level and bearing her great fangs again. Sharp, snapping roars and squeals grated up from the greedy wyrms below, a storm of thrashing wings and wrestling reptilian bodies in the haze.\n\nFor a moment, their eyes met. With a sharp breath, Shard saw a familiar light there, one he'd seen during the battle of the Dawn Spire. First he'd thought it was like a serpent gaze, meant to snare and hold him. And he was held.\n\nHe gazed deep as their wings stirred the wind. Shard felt breathless, as if he could dive straight into her black, gleaming eyes, seeking that one point of light. For half a breath, he saw broad, rolling moors carpeted with reddish purple heather, and beyond that, constant, drizzling gray skies and hills brighter green than the emerald room of the chronicler.\n\nA shriek from below yanked him from the vision, and he shook his head hard. Above him the stars blazed, the back of Midragur, the star dragon. Shard felt the dream net and thought, maybe, he could speak to her. He thought of the Copper Cliff, the nesting cliffs, the Sun Isle, laying the Silver Isles over the images of green hills and rain.\n\nMy home, he thought desperately, painting it for her as he had for Groa. If she saw his dream, or understood, she gave no indication. A low, hideous snarl began in her throat. Shard scrambled for all the chronicler had told him.\n\nThey live to be very old.\n\n\u2026the last named wyrm was called Rhydda.\n\nRhydda.\n\n\"Rhydda?\" He barely realized they both still hung in the air, staring at each other, his shoulders cramped from hovering.\n\nHer jaws closed, nostrils flaring with gusts of heavy breath.\n\nA snapping howl from one of the fighting wyrms drew her gaze down and a growl curled again in her huge chest.\n\nShard flung out the name again like a weapon. \"Rhydda!\"\n\nShe sank down, tossing her horns with a snarl.\n\n\"Rhydda,\" Shard called again, extending his talons as if to implore her. \"I name you! Are you the same? Have you lived, did you live, in the time of Kajar? Do you seek justice for some wrong?\"\n\nShe didn't attack, didn't flee, didn't respond, but beat her broad, veined wings to hover again.\n\nRisking all, Shard winged forward again, within striking distance, to see her eyes.\n\n\"Rhydda. Did you once fly to the Sunland\u2026\"\n\nShe'd stopped listening. Something else drew her gaze.\n\nThe glowing haze. Shard looked too.\n\nThe golden light grew beneath them like a second sunrise, too bright and orange to be a trick of the moon.\n\nIt looked like\u2026\n\n\"Fire,\" Shard whispered, shocked, wondering if his sparks had caught on something below. But that was impossible. Foolish. He'd needed a tinder bundle and kindling to start one before.\n\nThe wyrm he'd named Rhydda hesitated, baleful gaze sliding between the growing wash of light and Shard, then to her band of wyrms who still fought over the chain like buzzards with a hare. The cacophony washed over them and the land like a thunderstorm.\n\nThen she chose. She opened her jaws in a roar that felt as if it split Shard's bones, her wings stroking forward. Shard held fast to his strand of wind, opened his chest and screamed wordlessly in challenge, breaking into a lion's roar at the end.\n\nHis every feather stood on end. He stretched his talons wide as if to embrace her.\n\nThe wyrm closed, fanged jaws yawning wide, and her huge, bloody claws reached up toward him.\n\nShard scooped his wings, readying to dive.\n\nThen, as if his roar had summoned the very flames and warriors of Tyr himself, the haze below them exploded upward in fire and griffin screams.\n\n[ The Battle of Torches ]\n\nShock bolted through Shard and he tucked a wing to roll away as Rhydda thundered past, jaws snapping hard enough to crunch stone. Shard circled tightly underneath her as she re-grouped, and he tried to make sense of the lashing smoke, confusion of wings, shouts, and fires everywhere.\n\nThrough the thrashing bodies, whirling flames and smoke, he realized with stupid glee that an entire war band of griffins had appeared, bearing torches.\n\nAmong them, he heard a familiar voice calling commands.\n\nImpossible hope leaped through him at that voice. Kjorn.\n\nFire flashed off of golden feathers. \"Kjorn!\"\n\nA chorus of shouts and familiar voices answered him, and five griffins shot higher skyward, two bearing torches.\n\n\"Brynja!\" His own voice sounded high and coarse.\n\nBriefly, he saw her\u2014like a dream, he saw Brynja and Dagny, bearing torches and seeking him against the sky.\n\n\"I'm here!\" he shouted, and sucked a breath as he plummeted down to meet them, Rhydda turning her huge body above them and readying to dive.\n\nThen, Kjorn was before him.\n\nShard flared to hard stop and they stared at each other a moment, even as the murderous wyrm circled above them, checked only for a moment by the surprising sight of fire.\n\n\"I've been all over Tyr's creation to find you,\" shouted the big, gold prince over the roiling battle, \"and where should I, but here in a pack of\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll make it up to you,\" Shard offered, breathless. \"Later!\"\n\nGriffins winged up to them with torches\u2014Dagny, then he saw Asvander, and another, lanky brown griffin he didn't know, wearing a thin gold chain.\n\n\"Is this him?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" laughed a familiar voice, and Shard flapped around to see Brynja, on his level. Brynja, bright with torchlight\u2014flying with fire as he had taught her.\n\nShe met his eyes, and said, \"Shard, just like the eagles.\"\n\nShard shook his head. \"What\u2014?\"\n\n\"Now!\" Asvander shouted, and he and Kjorn swung up higher into the sky. \"Shard!\"\n\nJolted, Shard joined them, with a last look at Brynja, but she was back to her task of drawing the wyrm's gaze with her fire. The brown male Shard didn't know swung off to one side, joined by two more griffins. He saw a third triad winging toward them from the orange haze and the squirming, thunderous chaos below.\n\nThe wyrm Rhydda seemed to have lost track of Shard, and chose her new target\u2014the flicking torches, Brynja and Dagny. Shard flew snug to Kjorn and Asvander. It was as if he'd never left either them, and none of them needed to speak. He understood what Brynja meant, and why she'd said it, with no time to explain.\n\nLike the eagles.\n\nRhydda swooped down. Brynja and Dagny dove, their torches threatening to gutter out, the uncertain light drawing her furious attention.\n\nBy silent understanding, Kjorn, Asvander and Shard shot down after them, an arrow with Kjorn on point. Like the eagles of the Voldsom, they would attack above and from the sides, to bring down a much more massive foe.\n\nBrynja and Dagny brought the wyrm up short by flaring to sudden stops and bearing the torches high, threatening her gaping jaws with fire. Rhydda flared with a hollow grunt, whipping her spade tail toward the gryphonesses\u2014but they scattered away.\n\nKjorn slammed down between her shoulders. Shard landed hard on her haunch, Asvander on a thrashing wing.\n\nShe wailed in rage, then a long, low bellow Shard suspected was to summon help.\n\nShard focused on digging his talons into her leathery hide, timing quick, hard shoves with Kjorn to push her down. They were one single, fighting mind. His body rocked with her hard, deep wing strokes. He felt her jerking with the impact of more griffins, from the sides, from below. Like the eagles.\n\n\"Your idea?\" he shouted at Kjorn, and the golden prince shrieked a laugh, wings flashing wide.\n\n\"I think Caj would be proud, don't you?\"\n\nRhydda's head flailed at the end of her muscled neck, the thick, sharp horns seeking any target. Shard heard a scream, and knew a griffin had fallen. Blood pounding, he dug in, shoving. Rhydda's spade tail curved, seeking targets but ruining her flight coordination. They fell, a knotted, writhing mess of griffin and wyrm, leathery hide and claw and talon.\n\nHaze and fire whirled around them.\n\nThey fell into the larger, squirming mass of battling wyrms and griffins.\n\nA smaller wyrm of near black coloring darted in, claws splayed toward Asvander. The Lakelander shoved off and away. The black wyrm ignored him, circling tightly to seek another target without harming the larger she-wyrm.\n\nKjorn roared a challenge, still dug into Rhydda's shoulders. He clamped his beak on her neck. The smaller wyrm's spade tail lashed toward him, but he didn't move. With a roar, Shard leaped, throwing his body against the non-lethal muscle near the spade.\n\n\"Fly, Kjorn!\"\n\nLooking stunned by his near-death, Kjorn disengaged and fell away, swearing.\n\nThe griffins holding Rhydda peeled off as other wyrms thrashed away from their fights and closed in to save her.\n\nShard let the wyrm fling him off his tail, and rolled through the air, flaring only when he sensed enough room for his wings.\n\nThe wyrms screamed in renewed fury, and as Shard righted himself and glided fast, seeking Kjorn, he saw why. Through the fire he made out smaller, darting, winged shapes pelting toward the wyrm's heads, their faces, their eyes.\n\n\"Eagles!\" Dagny's bright voice was unmistakable through the din. The unexpected assistance drove the griffins to fight with fresh vigor, reform their triad attacks, and drive at the wyrms.\n\nAnd the doubled assault was too much for the foe.\n\nShard saw Rhydda, clear of her attacks, bleeding but whole, flying up over the clash.\n\nHer bone-rattling roar sliced through the fighting. The wyrms broke off. One by one, they broke from the knot of battle. And fled.\n\nYounger warriors, hot with the energy of battle, sped after them.\n\n\"Stay!\" roared Kjorn. \"Don't pursue! Let them flee like cowards!\"\n\nShe got away, Shard thought, trying to gain his breath and his thoughts. He had no time for his maddening frustration and disappointment. She escaped my words, and she escaped vengeance. But he had not imagined the vision in her eyes, the dream of that green land.\n\nMaybe, yet, he could get through to her. But not that night.\n\nA ragged cheer rose, lion roars, eagle screams. Voices shouted Shard's name, Kjorn's name, a dozen voices, then more, calling for their prince, and he didn't know which one they meant.\n\nHe landed hard on the ground, leaving his wings open, and at a loss. All around, griffins stooped and landed, propping their torches against rocks, calling out for their friends. Eagles glided fast over the scene, seeking the wounded.\n\nStill bewildered by the turn of events, Shard decided he would go where he was needed, to help the injured. He turned to follow the alarmed cry of an eagle.\n\n\"Shard,\" said Kjorn's voice behind him. Shard stopped, holding a breath. During the battle, it had felt like another vision, a dream. But when he turned around, Kjorn stood there in the orange half light of the torches, bloody, disheveled, and majestic, like something from a legend. A warrior prince. \"Shard, come with me, my brother. You have a duty.\"\n\nShard gazed at him, with so much to say, but when Kjorn shoved back into the sky, Shard could only join him.\n\nThey flew high into the fire lit haze.\n\nA torch bearer caught sight of them and followed, so all could see.\n\nThey flew until they could see all the war band scattered below. Shard saw Aesir, Vanir, ragged exiles and sleek, lean griffins who reminded him of Vanir, but were not. He saw many of his own gathered pride, those healthy enough to fight. His heart beat a cautious rhythm of victory.\n\nAt Kjorn's first, triumphant roar, all halted and turned their faces upward.\n\nWhen his roar died away, Kjorn looked at Shard.\n\n\"They need to see you,\" he urged. \"Shard, they came for you. They need to see and hear you.\"\n\nEvery muscle in his body shook, but hungry, hardened, battle-shocked eyes stared at him. Shard shook his head, then gathered his breath, and echoed Kjorn's roar.\n\n\"Victory!\" he shouted.\n\nKjorn laughed, and joined with his deep voice. \"Victory!\"\n\nThe cry took up. \"Victory!\"\n\n\"Victory!\"\n\nAs the chant rose, Shard and Kjorn glided in a circle around the warriors, then landed in their rough center.\n\nThey stared at each other. Kjorn appeared taller than Shard remembered, brighter, and older. Shard wondered if he looked the same, and Kjorn answered the unspoken question.\n\n\"You grew, brother.\"\n\nLooking at him, Shard thought of all that bonded them, and the lies and mistrust and divisions that had parted them. Now, they seemed a distant thing, the problems of two other griffins who no longer existed. \"And we are, still?\"\n\nIn Kjorn's eyes Shard saw the hard winter, his flight, his trials in hunting him through the Winderost. He saw their own lies and revelations. He realized that Kjorn wanted forgiveness and friendship just as much as he did, and saw doubt that Shard would give it.\n\nKjorn stepped forward. \"Always, Shard.\"\n\n\"You came all this way to find me?\"\n\nKjorn gave a weak, broken laugh. \"What else was I to do?\"\n\nTilting his head, Shard extended his wing, and with a grateful look, Kjorn stretched his own to eclipse it.\n\nAesir believed important things best done under the light of Tyr. But they had the blazing light of fire around them, and the white light of Tor above, and the stars of Midragur.\n\n\"Wind under me when the air is still,\" Kjorn said. At first Shard thought he had raised his voice over the clamor, then realized all the others had fallen silent to watch them.\n\n\"Wind over me when I fly too high,\" Shard said, quietly, only for Kjorn.\n\nKjorn's wing pressed to his. \"Brother by choice.\"\n\n\"Brother by vow.\"\n\nEyes locked, voices nearly breaking with disbelief, together they ended, \"By my wings, you will never fly alone.\"\n\nShard let loose a breath he felt he'd held all winter. Kjorn laughed and swept his wing over Shard's head, running the feathers the wrong way. Someone raised a happy cry, and Shard thought it was Brynja. Then a new cheer began.\n\n\"Hail, Kjorn!\" Firm voices of Aesir.\n\n\"Hail, Rashard!\" Ragged, devoted Vanir.\n\n\"Victory!\"\n\n\"Victory! Hail Kjorn! Hail Rashard!\"\n\nThe cry swept them, thundered in rolling roars and eagle cries through the canyon, chased the fleeing wyrms, and pounded across the dead Outlands, their torches glowing like the light of dawn.\n\n\"VICTORY!\"\n\n[ A New Wind ]\n\nThey remained encamped right where they were, to tend the wounded, to rest.\n\nBefore anything, Shard found and took the Vanir to his mother's body. Together they sang the Song of Last Light. He offered to burn her body in the way of the dragons, but the Vanir, named Toskil, declined. He stood just taller than Shard, his feathers warm brown and gray, with a paler, flecked face.\n\n\"This land was her home for ten years, as harsh as it was. She raised me here.\" His gaze lifted up over his mother's body to the dawnward horizon. \"She would be glad to rest here. With my father.\" He looked at Shard with a half glad, half puzzled expression. \"You and I were born the same spring, my lord. We would have grown up together.\" His ears flicked back, and he looked again at his mother's body.\n\nShard watched him quietly. \"We'll come to know each other now.\"\n\nThe Vanir dipped his head in acknowledgement.\n\nShard nodded, hesitated, then saw it best to leave him alone.\n\nHe found Kjorn first.\n\nThe gold prince was conferring with a huntress of the sleek, shore dwelling griffins who called themselves Vanhar, but when he spotted Shard, he drew away.\n\nEars perked their way and whispers fluttered as they walked out to the edge of the fire light. They'd made bonfires to light the area, to warn against wyrms, and to warn them away.\n\nShard turned to Kjorn. Away from the fires the night was chilly, frost gathered on the rocks and his breath misted between them. A question nagged him, and he dug a talon against the hard ground.\n\n\"How did you do it? Asvander said the warriors always lose themselves in fear, that they've never been able to use a strategy before. But you did. It was amazing.\"\n\n\"We remembered ourselves,\" Kjorn said simply, his blue eyes near gold in the firelight, searching Shard's face.\n\n\"How?\" Shard demanded. \"They fell apart at the Dawn Spire.\"\n\n\"They were surprised at the Dawn Spire. And we were prepared.\" Kjorn's gaze grew shrewd. \"And a wise old warrior suggested that before the battle, we all take a moment to think of what we love. And remembering what we love,\" he said quietly, his gaze hard on Shard's face, \"we would not forget ourselves.\"\n\nShard nodded, almost wanting to laugh. So simple, and yet. \"What warrior was that?\"\n\nKjorn draped his wing over Shard's shoulders. \"Walk with me, Shard.\"\n\nDawn saw them gathering to return to the Ostral Shores.\n\nYour uncle is alive.\n\nIt pounded through Shard's skull, Kjorn's simple words, over and over. He saw the spade tail lash, saw Stigr crash to the dirt. His nightmares of blood and black feathers overlapped the memory.\n\n\"Vanir to me!\" he called as the great band of griffins rose on the wind. They all turned their faces dawnward, to the Ostral Shores. Distantly, they'd heard the wyrms in the night, so knew they hadn't fully fled the Winderost, but Rhydda and her horde did not return for them.\n\nStigr is alive, Shard.\n\nHe saw the black griffin, lying in the red mud, bleeding, his wing severed.\n\nYour uncle is alive.\n\n\"Aesir of the Dawn Spire to me!\" Kjorn's voice echoed in the fragile dawn chill. \"Company of Rok, son-of-Rokar, to me!\"\n\nThe sleek huntress Kjorn had been speaking to the night before called, \"Vanhar to me!\"\n\n\"Lakelanders!\" boomed Asvander, simply.\n\nShard shook his head, hard. They flew in clean, divided formations so they could keep track of their numbers. The Vanir insisted to Shard they were all healthy enough to fly, and that it was time. If, in two days, no more had come to Shard's beacon, nor to the fires after the Battle of Torches, as they called it, they knew no more would come.\n\nThe outcast eagles who'd found Shard's beacon remained at the Voldsom with Hildr and the Brightwing aerie. She'd laughed when Shard expressed surprise at them coming to the griffins' aide, and told him only that he was behind the times.\n\nThe few Outland painted wolves ran beneath the flying griffins, for a young rogue named Fraenir seemed convinced they would be accepted into the Serpent River pack, who now dwelled near the Ostral Shores.\n\nA warm scent drifted to him, then her voice.\n\n\"You seem pensive, my lord.\"\n\nShard flapped once, turning to see Brynja gliding neatly beside him. He'd seen and imagined her vividly so many times that it felt natural to see her there, her broad, ruddy wings brushed by cold wind, her face touched by pale light.\n\nIt seemed natural, but not real.\n\n\"Brynja,\" he whispered, and knew his beak remained open.\n\nShe searched his face. \"I didn't seek you last night, because I knew you had much to do.\"\n\n\"I would've found you,\" Shard said, \"but\u2026\" She'd already said it. Shard closed his talons, trying to remember what it was he'd said in all his daydreams of her that had worked. \"I've missed you, Brynja. I can't change the way I fled and left all of you, but I am sorry for it, and I'll make it up to all of you.\"\n\nStupid. Not all of you. Just you, just you.\n\n\"You already have.\" Her gaze darted around to the joined flocks of griffins, and her expression quirked in amusement. \"Shard\u2026\" her ears flattened, and she looked forward toward the dawn. \"Kjorn told you of Stigr?\"\n\nShard held a breath, then loosed it. \"He did.\"\n\n\"He doesn't blame you, you know. No one does.\"\n\n\"Except King Orn.\"\n\n\"Well.\"\n\nThey flew in silence. Shard could feel the host of Vanir at their backs, watching him.\n\nI should choose a Vanir. One of my own. Accepting her would be too much to ask of them, after they've lived ten years in exile in a wasteland. Because of Aesir.\n\nBut it was not their mate he was thinking of. It was his own. He drew a breath, narrowing his eyes. And their exile was not because of Brynja. They needed a strong queen. He needed a strong queen. His thoughts flung in all sorts of useless directions, most of which were chilled with doubt.\n\n\"Shard,\" she said, and he looked at her. \"I missed you, too.\"\n\nHer eyes were bright with the dawn, with the same light he'd seen the night he told her his heart. It had faded then, overshadowed by duty and poor timing. It didn't fade now. He thought of all that he would have to ask of her. Leaving her home, her obligations, her family. He couldn't ask it of her.\n\n\"And Asvander?\" he asked tightly, looking forward.\n\n\"Asvander missed you too.\"\n\nShard barked a laugh, glancing forward toward the host of Lakelanders who led their formation. \"Brynja\u2026\"\n\n\"Rashard.\" Her eyes gleamed like dragon gold. \"I'm not letting you fly away from me, ever again.\"\n\nWhen he looked at her, he realized that the worst of his struggle had been trying to make decisions that were not his to make, and his doubts melted now in the warmth of realizing that she had already decided.\n\n\"Now,\" she said, when he only stared, and tucked her talons under her feathers, \"why don't you tell me about that new scar on your leg?\"\n\nNo one grudged Shard flying a little faster as they approached the Ostral Shores, creeping a bit ahead every sunmark, until he outpaced the rest of the band by a few leagues, and was the first to arrive at the Ostral Shore, sunset on the second day. A lakeland sentry saw him, and would have questioned, but then he spied the distant mass of griffins behind.\n\n\"You're Rashard?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"There's someone waiting for you.\" The sentry banked, stretching a wing toward the water, and Shard's blood beat fast in his ears as his gaze roved, searching.\n\nThen a shout from the ground. \"Shard!\"\n\nA black wing flared, drawing his eye.\n\nWith a sharp sound, Shard dove, his heart clutching, diving as fast as if he meant to attack the black griffin who ramped and called to him from the shore of the lake.\n\nHe landed hard and graceless near the lapping waves, talons crunching the wet pebbles. He managed a breath, and looked up.\n\nStigr bounded to him, and stopped. Stigr. His uncle.\n\nYour uncle is alive.\n\nSo Kjorn had said, and so, there he stood. Taller than Shard. Onyx of feather. A single, fierce green eye, like Ragna's\u2014the other, scarred shut from his battles in the Conquering. Before Shard could form words, his gaze dragged to Stigr's shoulders. One wing was perfectly whole. Where the other had been lay a raw, gnarled scar, and a longer, thin line, still mending, ran from the base of his neck to his hip. Sorrow hollowed his joy at finding his uncle alive, for Stigr, who had taught Shard all he knew about sea flight, night flight, and the gifts of the Vanir, would never leave the ground again.\n\n\"Shard,\" the black griffin murmured.\n\nA quivering wave of nausea, a wash of the whole winter and all his trials buckled Shard at every joint. He sank to his belly in front of his uncle and touched his beak to the wet pebbles.\n\n\"Oh, Uncle. Please forgive me. Forgive my foolishness. Forgive me for running. I thought\u2026I thought you were dead. I fell witless. I thought\u2014I didn't think I would ever see you again. It's all my fault. Please forgive me. I would take your wound if I could.\"\n\nThe shush of lapping waves and quick cries of distant lake gulls thundered in Shard's ears.\n\nThen Stigr bowed forward and thrust his brow against Shard's, pressing, warm, as if to prove he was alive. They shared breath, so silent Shard heard the strong beat of his uncle's heart. He knew in that moment Stigr had thought him dead too, and for them both, nothing mattered but knowing the other had survived.\n\nThere was no blame. There could be no regret.\n\n\"My prince,\" Stigr said quietly. \"You've done so well. Your father would be proud of you. I'm proud of you.\"\n\nHe drew back, and Shard lifted his head. They could hear the rest of the formation approaching. There would be much to do, to discuss, to plan. Shard shook himself. \"You'll tell me everything that happened.\"\n\n\"There isn't much to tell,\" Stigr said. \"They imprisoned us, but Orn set his healers on me, at least. When I was well enough, Valdis and I escaped.\"\n\n\"Valdis?\" Shard recalled that he had seen the gryphoness at the Battle of Torches, but he'd seen so much, and so many, that he hadn't thought of it. Stigr glanced toward the water, tail twitching.\n\n\"We fled to the Dawn Reach, and others did too. She took care of me there.\" He watched Shard's face carefully. Black ears twitched back. \"I suppose it will be easier, now, to tell you that I'm staying, since there's not much choice.\"\n\n\"Staying?\" The idea didn't take hold quickly. In all of Shard's hopes for the future Stigr had been there, fishing, hunting, flying openly under the moon, and advising him. \"What do you mean, easier to tell me?\"\n\n\"Before the wyrm attack on the Dawn Spire, I had planned to tell you, Shard\u2026that you were right. I have seen a different side of the Aesir than those who conquered us.\" His gaze twitched to the approaching bands of griffins.\n\nSunset faded toward twilight.\n\n\"Valdis?\" Shard asked again, feeling slow, then sure. He thought of the long autumn and winter and Brynja's strong-willed aunt, who had admired and challenged Stigr. He hadn't thought what the attention meant to his uncle, then.\n\n\"That obvious, was it? Well.\" He added nothing further, and flicked a pebble toward the water.\n\nShard knew there was no choice. Stigr could never make the flight home, and no number of griffins could bear him over the sea for that distance. He just hadn't realized his uncle had made the decision before losing his wing.\n\n\"I'm glad for you,\" Shard said at last, and meant it. \"You deserve all the honor that you've gained here, and all the happiness of a new mate.\"\n\nOnce, it might have been Sigrun, but then came the Conquering, and Caj, and they loved each other as true mates. Shard hadn't even realized what it would mean for Stigr to return with him and live among the mixed pride, if Caj remained.\n\n\"That means everything to me, my prince,\" Stigr murmured. \"My king. And I'm still your loyal servant, whether you're close or far. Know that.\"\n\n\"I know. I know you always have been.\"\n\nStigr stood, stretching, and Shard tried not to flinch at the sight of the raw injury flexing with each movement. \"I think it's about to get busy here,\" he rumbled.\n\n\"I have so much to tell you,\" Shard said, though now the rush of wings and laughing voices and boasts clattered down like falling rain.\n\n\"Don't worry, nephew.\" Stigr raised his voice over the commotion. \"We have time now.\"\n\nDespite their clean formations while flying, the warrior band landed haphazardly, nearly crashing into relieved family members and friends who came out to meet them, shouting, boasting, their wings stirring dust.\n\n\"Go on,\" Stigr said, and Shard touched his beak to his uncle's shoulder once more before turning to find Kjorn, Asvander, and Brynja, and see about building some fires.\n\n\u2003\"A new wind, a bright wind, a silver wind is blowing.\n\n\u2003The winds will whisper, one and all,\n\n\u2003To those they know are listening.\n\n\u2003Raise your wings, young fledging, and hark so you will know them.\n\nA song of the Vanhar, a rhyme of the old Four Winds, rolled in hopeful, shivering tones through the Ostral Shores.\n\n\u2003\"Star shines bright with future light\n\n\u2003Sun fills all bold hearts with might.\n\n\u2003A Nightwind, fly with warning\n\n\u2003At Dawn, with hope come singing.\n\n\u2003But now a high wind, a true wind, a silver wind is blowing.\"\n\nShard alone stood in the shallow water of the lake shore, letting the waves slip over his feet and tail feathers. Breathing the strange salted air of the landlocked lake, he was able to pretend, for a few moments, that he stood at the shore of the sea.\n\nBonfires dotted the nesting hollows and hills around the great salt lake, sparks and smoke twisting high into the night. All around there was laughter, singing, bragging, the scent of meat, sparring fledglings re-enacting the battle according to the stories being told.\n\n\"Too much light for a Vanir?\" Kjorn walked up beside him. \"I know you prefer moonlight now.\"\n\nShard chuckled, dragging his talons absently through the sand under the water. \"Not exactly.\" Tiny minnows, having come to investigate his legs, scattered and flashed away into the darker water.\n\n\"I would have left you alone,\" Kjorn murmured, dipping a foot into the cold water, then shaking it before stepping back to dry land. \"But everyone is just begging to know more about the dragons, and I know for certain you haven't eaten since before the battle.\"\n\n\"I'll come.\" Shard filled his chest and held the breath, looking toward the sky for strength. There was something that had to be said, before they went on any longer. \"Kjorn\u2014\"\n\n\"I know.\" Still, it took him a long time to say it. \"There cannot be two kings in the Silver Isles.\"\n\nShard released the breath, and looked at him. He'd forgotten how large, how well built, and kingly his wingbrother was. Or perhaps he'd grown more so.\n\nBe warned, with a dragon's blessing, everything you are will be more so.\n\n\"I heard rumors that you had some grand design for all that.\"\n\n\"I did think of something,\" Shard said cautiously.\n\nKjorn paced behind him, tail flicking. \"Let me see if I have it right\u2014you thought I could return here as Kajar's heir, unite the divided prides of the Winderost, make allies of the painted wolf packs and the eagles and all of us could drive off the wyrm scourge and live peacefully thereafter, and I could take my rightful place as king of the Dawn Spire?\" He stopped, standing behind Shard as Shard look up toward the moon. \"Then, you would return with the Vanir and claim your birthright as king of the Silver Isles, make peace again between griffins and the other Named creatures of the Isles, and all would go on happily there too?\"\n\nLooking out over the black, glistening lake, Shard said, \"More or less.\"\n\n\"Did you have a more specific plan?\"\n\nShard stepped out of the water. \"Not really.\"\n\n\"Well.\" Kjorn drew a long breath, let it out, and glanced over his shoulder at the fires and feasting. Then he met Shard's eyes. \"We'd better make one.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Wings of Fire 9) Talons of Power",
        "author": "Tui T. Sutherland",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons",
            "young adult"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2003Beware the darkness of dragons,\n\n\u2003Beware the stalker of dreams,\n\n\u2003Beware the talons of power and fire,\n\n\u2003Beware one who is not what she seems.\n\n\u2003Something is coming to shake the earth,\n\n\u2003Something is coming to scorch the ground.\n\n\u2003Jade Mountain will fall beneath thunder and ice\n\n\u2003Unless the lost city of night can be found."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The Royal Hatchery was supposed to be a warm, safe, peaceful place for eggs to rest quietly until it was time to hatch.\n\nIt was not supposed to be a death trap that gave you the creeps.\n\n\"It's not a death trap!\" Coral would protest whenever Gill brought this up. \"SeaWing princesses and princes have been hatching there for thousands of years. I hatched there, and it was safe and beautiful. It's part of our heritage. It's a SeaWing tradition. There's nothing wrong with the hatchery \u2014 the problem is our useless guards.\"\n\n\"They're doing their best,\" Gill objected. \"You can only expect so much of a dragon.\"\n\n\"I'm not expecting the three moons in a bowl,\" Coral growled. \"All they have to do is protect my eggs until an heir hatches. WHY IS THAT SO HARD?\"\n\nGill didn't know the answer to that. He didn't know why they'd lost six female eggs in the last five years. He didn't know how his other three daughters had died. Coral was sure there was an assassin in the palace, but Gill didn't understand who would want to kill so many little princesses.\n\nHis heart ached as he swam through the Deep Palace, thinking about all the dragonets they had lost. Coral was trying so hard to hatch an heir that she was having eggs every year now. The palaces were overflowing with all the sons who had survived the many hatchings. SeaWing princes were everywhere, to the point where an entire wing of the Deep Palace had been set aside for them to live in.\n\nGill tried hard to remember all their names and tell them apart \u2014 Coral didn't bother \u2014 but there were twenty-four of them already, plus three more waiting to hatch. He sometimes wished they didn't have the animus-touched balance that indicated male versus female eggs. He wondered if they were making it easier for the assassin, separating the eggs so clearly in the hatchery. But then he wondered if it didn't matter; without a way to tell them apart, perhaps the assassin would just have destroyed all the eggs.\n\nHis wings took him toward the hatchery, as they did all the time now, sometimes five times a day. So far Coral's latest plan had been working \u2014 it wouldn't be much longer before the eggs hatched, safe and sound. And then they could be taken out of the Royal Hatchery, which would be a relief to Gill \u2026 although, given what happened to the other princesses, he wasn't really sure they would be safe anywhere.\n\nThe new Council Chief of Dragonet Care was nervous but dedicated. Abalone had a deputy chief to help him, and together they rotated in and out of the hatchery, so someone was watching the two princess eggs at every moment. Abalone and Snapper were two of Gill's most loyal soldiers; he had talonpicked them himself.\n\nAnd yet, and yet \u2026 he couldn't stop checking on them. Just to be sure. Just to be safe.\n\nHe slid open the door and swam inside the dark, egg-shaped room. His wings fluttered in the bursts of warm water that bubbled through the hatchery, keeping it at the perfect temperature for the eggs.\n\nAbalone? he flashed in Aquatic. It was very quiet. The marble statue of his daughter Orca loomed over the nests, watching over her future brothers and sisters. Gill wished the statue could protect them as fiercely as her face suggested. He wished Orca were still alive, so she could protect them herself.\n\nBut if she were alive, Coral would be dead. He shook his head. He would never understand why Orca challenged her mother for the throne at such a young age. If she had only waited \u2026 they could have had so many more years together as a family.\n\nUnless the assassin killed her, too. He shivered and swam farther into the room.\n\nAbalone was slumped over the nest with the two princess eggs in it, his wings covering them.\n\nAbalone? Gill hurried over, worried. Abalone never slumped; he hardly ever even sat down. He was always on full alert, always a model soldier.\n\nGill shook his friend's shoulder. With a soft groan, Abalone sat up, and Gill realized that the council chief was a strange white color around his gills. His eyes were bloodshot and there were flecks of foam rising from his scales.\n\nI'm sorry, Abalone flashed with the phosphorescent scales under his wings. I've been waiting for someone to come. But I won't leave the eggs \u2014 I won't \u2014 they'll be safe, I promise. He reached to cover them with his wings again and staggered sideways.\n\nYou're sick, said Gill, catching him before he could land on the eggs. You shouldn't be here. I'll go get help.\n\nYes \u2014 no! Abalone flashed. Afraid I'll \u2026 drift off \u2026 everything spinning.\n\nCan you make it to the healing room on your own? Gill asked. If I stay here to guard the eggs?\n\nMaybe. Abalone tried to paddle forward, shifting his wings, and instantly violent tremors shook his whole body. He gasped and curled into a small ball on the smooth floor of the hatchery.\n\nAll right, stay here. Watch the eggs and don't fall asleep. I'll grab someone and send for help. Gill swam to the door as fast as he could and powered up the ramp to the main floor of the palace.\n\nThree little dragonets, all about two years old, were wrestling in the entrance hall, kicking and squeaking gleefully. Three of his sons, Gill realized \u2014 the ones from two hatchings ago. (There was only one female egg in that group, and she didn't even make it halfway through incubating, he remembered with a fresh stab of grief).\n\nHe flashed his scales at full brightness to get their attention. They turned toward him, blinking, and he flashed, I need help. Who's going to help me?\n\nThe princes glanced at one another nervously, and then one of them paddled forward a little bit.\n\nMe! he flashed. I'll do it, Father!\n\nGood, said Gill. Thank you \u2026 He hesitated.\n\nTurtle, the dragonet flashed. I'm Turtle.\n\nI know, Gill answered, although he hadn't been sure. Turtle, this is very important. I need you to go find Snapper and send her to the Royal Hatchery. Tell her to hurry as fast as her wings can swim. Can you do that?\n\nSure. Turtle nodded, his green eyes wide.\n\nI'm counting on you, Turtle, Gill said, touching his son's shoulder. It's really important. I know you can do this. I'll be waiting. All right?\n\nYes, sir, Turtle answered, shivering a little.\n\nGo, then. Hurry!\n\nTurtle swam away toward the kitchens with what felt like agonizing slowness. Gill reminded himself that Turtle was a prince. He wouldn't fail. He'd find Snapper, Abalone's deputy chief, who could watch the eggs while Gill took Abalone to the healing room.\n\nGill rushed back down to the hatchery. Abalone was still awake, crouched by the eggs with his front talons pinned across his chest. Gill realized with alarm that there was now a growth on Abalone's neck \u2014 a large, round lump that hadn't been there a few moments ago. He touched it lightly and Abalone flinched away. It was blazingly hot.\n\nGill had no idea what kind of disease this was. Is it safe for him to be here? Could he infect the eggs?\n\nHe needed to get Abalone out of the hatchery. For the safety of the eggs, but also because Abalone looked closer and closer to death every moment.\n\nHurry up, Turtle.\n\nThey waited in painful silence.\n\nWas the growth getting bigger?\n\nTurtle, where are you?\n\nCome on, come on.\n\nThe lump was expanding, little by little, pushing Abalone's silvery blue scales into strange jagged shapes. It looked as if it might explode any moment now.\n\nYou'll be all right, Gill flashed at Abalone. Help is coming.\n\nHelp didn't come. Time crept by, dragging its long, long tail. Nobody came.\n\nAbalone started making a low whimpering sound, ragged, like claws scrabbling up the inside of his throat. His gaze was fixed on the eggs and he kept his wings tucked in close to him, rocking softly.\n\nTurtle, Gill thought with helpless fury. This was his own fault. What a useless command he'd given. He should have sent all three dragonets to find Snapper. No \u2014 he should have told them to find any other adult dragon, or to summon one of the healers. Or he should have swum straight to the healing chambers the moment he saw that Abalone was ill. Now he could see there would have been time to make it there and back with a healer. But with each moment that passed, Abalone looked closer and closer to collapse.\n\nThe truth was he should have done anything other than what he did. He'd made a terrible mistake.\n\nBut where was Turtle? Couldn't he figure out a smarter option, if he couldn't find Snapper?\n\nSomebody come. Please, please, somebody \u2026\n\nFinally it became unbearable. Abalone would die if he didn't reach a healer soon \u2014 it might already be too late. Gill couldn't wait any longer.\n\nDon't leave, Abalone flashed weakly as Gill moved toward the door.\n\nI can't let you die like this, Gill flashed back. Just stay awake until I get back. He hesitated in the doorway, worrying. Abalone was no match for an assassin in this condition. But Gill would only be gone a short time \u2014 it would be truly uncanny terrible luck for the assassin to show up during those few moments.\n\nHe swam. He swam for Abalone's life, and his daughters'. He burst through the palace like a typhoon, swooping up to the healing chambers. His sons were gone from the main hallway; he saw no sign of Turtle or Snapper anywhere.\n\nHELP, he flashed at full brightness as he reached the healing floor. Dragons came pouring into the hall, curious, and a flurry of bubbling gasps went up as he explained Abalone's condition to the healers. Three of them grabbed their kits and swam after him, back down, down, down to the Royal Hatchery.\n\nThey found Abalone unconscious, his wings drifting in the current of the jets. For a moment Gill thought his neck had been slashed; then he realized that the blood running down Abalone's scales came from the growth, which had burst.\n\nThe healers hurried toward him, then stopped, turning heartbroken faces to Gill.\n\nNo. Gill's scales flashed without him realizing it. No. No.\n\nThe two eggs had been crushed, apparently by huge, heavy talons. The dragonets inside were dead.\n\nTwo more lost princesses.\n\nGill roared his pain and fury, roared until his throat gave out, and then he whirled and swam away. He never wanted to see the Royal Hatchery again.\n\nFind my son Turtle, he snarled at one of the gawking dragons in the hallway.\n\nUpstairs, he saw a group of dragons approaching through the gardens \u2014 Queen Coral, returning from the Summer Palace and her meeting with Blister.\n\nHow could he tell her what had happened \u2026 what had happened again?\n\nBut she saw it on his face as he swam out the door toward her. She sank suddenly, as if a boulder had been dropped on her, touching down amid the coral and anemones. Her wings came forward and she covered her eyes with her talons. She didn't want to see him spell it out in Aquatic.\n\nI'm sorry, he flashed anyway. I'm sorry.\n\nShe didn't move, didn't look up.\n\nA movement caught Gill's eye and he turned. Some distance away, there was Turtle, swimming slowly through the garden of the wounded, peering at each recuperating dragon's face. His brothers were behind him, joking and laughing and shoving one another back and forth.\n\nGill tore across the gardens, seized Turtle's wing, and flung him around to face him.\n\nWHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Gill roared.\n\nTurtle flinched and shielded his eyes from the intensity of Gill's scales. I can't find her, he flashed nervously. I'm \u2014 I'm still looking.\n\nOut HERE? Gill waved his talons at the nearly empty section of the coral reef, where injured soldiers were taken to rest and recover surrounded by color and beauty. Gill wanted to rip that beauty to shreds; he wanted to tear apart the coral reef and kill all the creatures that lived on it.\n\nWell, I \u2014 I couldn't find her in the palace so I \u2014 I didn't know where to look! I'm trying!\n\nIt's too late, Gill growled. Your new sisters are dead, and it's your fault.\n\nTurtle blanched. But \u2014 how \u2014 I didn't \u2014\n\nYou were too slow. Gill backed away, glaring at the other two princes, who were huddling behind an outcropping to watch with wide eyes.\n\nI'm sorry. Turtle bowed his head, fiddling with a piece of coral in his claws. I \u2026 I don't know what Snapper looks like. And nobody knew where she was \u2014\n\nYou shouldn't volunteer for things you're incapable of doing, Gill said harshly. You shouldn't offer to help if you're going to be useless.\n\nI really tried, Turtle said, wringing his talons. I really, really did. I promise, Daddy.\n\nYou failed. Gill stared down at him. He felt a small pang of guilt at the crushing despair on the dragonet's face \u2014 but his anger was too strong to hold back right now.\n\nI am very disappointed in you, he said.\n\nMaybe one day he would forgive Turtle. Maybe one day he'd be able to think clearly again. Even now, he knew deep down that blaming a two-year-old dragonet for his own mistakes was wrong. One day, when his grief had subsided, maybe he could find the words to tell his son that.\n\nBut not today.\n\nGill turned away from Turtle's stricken face and swam back to Coral. She was watching him with vacant, sad eyes.\n\nWhat did he do? she asked dimly.\n\nI sent him for help, and instead he flapped around looking in all the wrong places and goofing off.\n\nHe's only a prince, she said. What can you expect? She reached out and seized one of Gill's talons. The next one is going to live, Gill.\n\nOh, Coral, he said. Maybe we shouldn't \u2014\n\nI'll stay with her this time, Coral said fiercely. No one else can do it except me. I was right about our incompetent guards.\n\nIt wasn't Abalone's fault, Gill protested.\n\nDoesn't matter, she said, flicking a claw at the palace. I sent word to have him and Snapper both executed.\n\nCoral! Gill cried, appalled. He tried to pull away, but she gripped his talons even tighter.\n\nI'm going to keep our next daughter alive, Coral said. I'll stay in the hatchery with the egg to keep it safe. But I need you to run the kingdom for me.\n\nI'll do anything, he promised sadly. He couldn't argue with her in this state, not right now.\n\nI'll keep her by my side all the time. Her whole life, if I have to. Coral's eyes glowed, reflecting her scales as she spoke. I'll never leave her alone. She's going to be perfect, Gill, you'll see.\n\nShe glanced down at the spot where she had landed, at the sea anemones waving long, pinkish-blue tendrils over her claws.\n\nAnd we're going to call her Anemone.\n\nThe nightmare rose out of the mountain, vast and glittering.\n\nTurtle had never seen a dragon so large; he'd never seen eyes so sharp. He knew instantly that this dragon could and would happily kill him in a heartbeat.\n\nTerror pounded through him like waves in a storm, building higher and higher.\n\nI need to hide. I need to hide.\n\nHe desperately wanted to disappear, to vanish into the dark sky as if he'd never been there. He wished he could melt away like a camouflaged RainWing.\n\nWhy did I ever let anyone notice me? I'd be safe if I'd stayed boring and forgettable. This is what happens \u2014 when someone sees you, soon everyone will see you.\n\nAnd one day that \"everyone\" will include a dragon who wants to kill you.\n\nHe couldn't have explained how he was so sure. Darkstalker was smiling at the dragonets below him. In fact, he looked absolutely delighted, not particularly murderous.\n\nAnd yet \u2014 as his eyes darted past Turtle, Turtle thought he saw a flash of hatred there, deep and fierce.\n\nFor some reason, this legendary dragon, the most powerful NightWing who'd ever lived, loathed Turtle with all his heart. Turtle was sure of it.\n\nHe's going to kill me the first chance he gets.\n\nThis wasn't how he'd expected his story to end.\n\nTurtle had always loved stories. He loved histories and animus tales and stories of war, of skyfaring pirates or enchanted treasure, of scavengers who could speak the language of dragons, of lost tribes in faraway lands.\n\nBut his favorite stories were about heroes \u2014 especially the ones in the scrolls his mother wrote. Since she was so busy with running the kingdom, writing her scrolls, and protecting her heirs, Queen Coral didn't have much time or interest to spare for any of her thirty-two sons. Reading her stories was as close as Turtle could ever get to her.\n\nHe loved scrolls about brave dragons who saved the day and stopped the forces of evil. One of his favorites was about a dragon named Indigo, who'd rescued the entire tribe from a deranged killer. Another starred an insignificant gardener named Droplet, who'd discovered a secret invasion of MudWings and fought them off before they found the hidden palaces.\n\nThe more Turtle read these stories, the more he imagined a story of his own: a story where Turtle was the hero.\n\nA story where Turtle battled squadrons of SkyWings and storms of SandWings all on his own. A story where Turtle stood at the gates of the palace and swung his spear in ferocious arcs, stabbing their enemies, as strong as a whale, while his older brothers and the rest of the tribe cowered inside.\n\nA story that ended with his parents cheering and hugging him. And then his mother would write a scroll that was all about him.\n\n\u2002Turtle the Strong and Mighty\n\n\u2002Turtle: A Tale of a Hero Heroically Doing Hero-Type Things\n\n\u2002How Turtle Saved the Entire Kingdom with His Awesomeness\n\nSometimes, when Turtle had a moment alone, or when he wasn't paying attention in class, he would secretly write pieces of this story on scraps of slate he kept hidden in his room. He dreamed that one day he'd have a whole manuscript to show his mother, and then she might say, \"Oh, son, I know one of my daughters will run the kingdom eventually \u2014 but you are the true heir I've been waiting for: the next writer in the family.\"\n\nA hero or a writer. Or both, why not? That would be Turtle's place in the world.\n\nBut then, too soon and disguised in a confusing shape, his chance came. His one opportunity to save the day and be a hero in his parents' eyes \u2014 but he didn't even know it until it was over, and he'd failed.\n\nHe failed, and they hated him, and he'd never get that chance again.\n\nThat night when he'd failed to find Snapper and save his unhatched sisters, Turtle destroyed every bit of writing he'd ever done and swore he would never write again. He'd stop dreaming; he'd stop imagining that a useless dragon like him could ever save the day or make something wonderful.\n\nHe wasn't the hero, and he wasn't the storyteller. He was the idiot who fell over his claws in the first chapter, had to be rescued in the fourth, nearly ruined the whole plan in the ninth, and ran away at the end, or died, if he was really extra stupid.\n\nSo he hid his one power and stayed exactly where he was supposed to: under the surface of the water, in the middle of his pack of brothers. Ordinary, unmemorable. A dragon nobody would expect anything from, and so nobody could ever be disappointed by him again.\n\nAnd that had worked for quite a long time, until he made the mistake of caring about some other dragons and trying to do a couple of little things to help them, and where did that lead him?\n\nRight to the feet of the most terrifying dragon the world had ever known.\n\nThis is the part where I die pointlessly. The one who gets sacrificed so the real heroes can get on with saving the day.\n\nHis wings were shaking so hard he couldn't stay in the air. He dropped down beside Moon and Qibli, clutching the ground with his talons. Winter and Peril were still hovering in the sky, their wings beating, silver and gold flashing in the moonlight.\n\nI need to hide, Turtle thought. But how could anyone hide from the most dangerous dragon in the world \u2014 a mind reader, an animus, and a seer who knew the future?\n\nHe can't read my mind, though. Turtle's gaze dropped to the three remaining skyfire stones in his armband, which shielded him from mind readers. Maybe he had a millisecond to do something, anything, before Darkstalker foresaw it and stopped him.\n\nHe scrabbled his talons along the ground, keeping his eyes on the towering NightWing. His claws closed around something small and rough \u2014 a broken stick from one of the trees that had fallen when the mountain cracked open.\n\nHide me, Turtle thought at it frantically. Hide me from Darkstalker.\n\nDarkstalker stretched his vast wings and grinned at Peril. \"Ah, that's infinitely better,\" he said. \"Nice to finally meet you, Peril. Thank you so much for your help.\"\n\nPeril roared furiously and threw herself at him, claws outstretched and flames blazing from her mouth.\n\n\"Peril!\" Moon shrieked as fire engulfed Darkstalker's face.\n\n\"Oh, no, no, no,\" Darkstalker said, waving away the smoke. He pressed one of his front talons into Peril's chest and held her at arm's length while she struggled and tried to bite him. \"Peril, very brave, but tsk-tsk. First of all, I'm your friend, although I realize you're new to that whole concept. Second of all, invulnerable scales over here! Didn't you know that? Surely that detail came up at some point in the great scary legend of Darkstalker. There's nothing you can do to me, little firescales. So settle down and let's start over.\"\n\nPeril fell back, breathing heavily and brushing at her scales where Darkstalker had touched her. The smoke rising from her wings twisted into the thin clouds in the sky overhead.\n\nTurtle's heart was still pounding. Darkstalker turned toward Moon, and his eyes went right past Turtle as though the SeaWing prince was not there. But Turtle still didn't feel safe, not completely hidden, not yet.\n\nDarkstalker paused with a slight frown. \"Weren't there \u2026 more of you?\" he asked, touching his temple. \"Wasn't there someone I particularly wanted to see?\"\n\nMoon glanced around, confused.\n\n\"Particularly wanted to see\" \u2014 does he mean ME? I need a better spell, Turtle thought in a panic. He gripped the stick harder. As long as this stick is near me or touching me, I enchant it to hide my entire existence from Darkstalker. That means he cannot see me or hear me; he cannot remember that he's ever heard of me; he cannot hear about me in other people's minds or conversations; and he cannot see me anywhere in his futures. I enchant this stick to completely erase the dragon holding it from Darkstalker's awareness.\n\nThe furrow disappeared from Darkstalker's forehead. \"Moon!\" he cried, beaming at her. \"We're finally meeting! Isn't this amazing? Wow, you're a lot smaller than I thought you'd be.\"\n\n\"That's you, actually,\" Qibli said, finally finding his voice. \"You're \u2026 a lot bigger than you probably remember.\"\n\nDarkstalker looked down at the ground, held out his talons, and flicked his massive tail, knocking a shower of boulders down the slope. He wasn't really as big as the entire mountain, although it had seemed that way to Turtle at first. But he was at least three times as big as the biggest full-grown dragons Turtle had ever seen.\n\n\"I really am,\" Darkstalker said, delighted. \"Two thousand years of slowly growing. I must be the hugest dragon that ever lived. Also the oldest \u2014 by all the shining moons, I'm ancient, aren't I?\"\n\n\"Beware the darkness of dragons,\" Moon said, taking a step back. \"Beware the stalker of dreams \u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, that's not me!\" Darkstalker said. \"Moon, come on, you know that. I don't slither about in the dreams of other dragons, apart from fixing your nightmares. I'm guessing that part of the prophecy was about Queen Scarlet, who, you might remember, was chock-full of darkness. On the other talon, 'something is coming to shake the earth' \u2014 that's totally me! Watch this.\" He stomped one foot on the ground so hard that tremors shuddered out in all directions. Turtle stumbled, and the closest small tree fell over.\n\nDarkstalker grinned at Moon. \"Pretty impressive, right?\" He paused, thinking. \"I guess being this big is the upside of being alive for two thousand years, even if I slept through it all. BY THE CLAW-SHAPED MOONS, I am SO HUNGRY. Does anyone have any food?\"\n\n\"How did you get out?\" Winter demanded.\n\nThe look Darkstalker shot at Winter was as unfriendly as the one he'd given Turtle. He doesn't like IceWings either, Turtle realized.\n\nBut Darkstalker's answer was cordial. \"Oh, that was all Peril here,\" he said, tapping the SkyWing on the head. Peril's blue eyes were blinking fast and her claws kept clenching and unclenching.\n\n\"When she set my scroll on fire,\" Darkstalker explained, \"all my magic returned to me, so I could use it to free myself. Wasn't that kind of her?\"\n\nPeril's wings slumped. She looked as though she'd just rescued a baby dragonet from a trap only to watch it immediately get eaten by a great white shark.\n\nTurtle wished he could make her feel better. He wanted to fly up and tell her this wasn't her fault, but his wings were still shaking too hard for him to take off. Also, he hadn't completely convinced himself that the magic was working. What if Darkstalker could see him, after all? He didn't want to draw the NightWing's attention, just in case.\n\n\"Wait,\" Moon said. \"That means \u2014 you lied to me.\" She unfurled her wings and pointed at Darkstalker. \"You told me to destroy the scroll if it looked like it would fall into evil talons. You made it sound like then you'd be trapped forever, but it would be worth it to protect everyone else. But you wanted me to destroy the scroll all along. You knew that would send your power back to you! You were tricking me!\"\n\n\"Yes, that's true,\" said Darkstalker, \"but lucky for me that I did, right? Otherwise you might never have freed me. Not very kind, Moon. I'd say I did the right thing.\" He looked at her without a smile for the first time, his eyes odd and glittering.\n\n\"You called us friends,\" Moon said in a low voice. \"You shouldn't trick your friends.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, you also shouldn't leave your friends trapped under a mountain for the rest of their immortal lives,\" Darkstalker said briskly. \"Good point, Darkstalker. Listen, I can't even talk anymore, I'm so hungry. Let's all catch something to eat and then you can show me around Jade Mountain! There are some dragons there I can't wait to meet.\" He lifted off into the air, then turned to beckon at Moon. \"Come on, Moon! I just want to have friends again, to use my voice, to hunt and fly. Can't we save the 'oh, no, but you're so sinister and evil' talon-wringing for later? What do you say \u2014 give me a chance?\"\n\nMoon glanced at Qibli, looking torn.\n\n\"I'm not going with you,\" Peril said. \"You're not the queen of me!\"\n\n\"Me neither,\" said Winter. \"The IceWings have legends about you. We know what you did to us. And I don't take orders from \u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not ordering you to do anything, Prince Winter,\" Darkstalker said, turning to look at Winter. The IceWing fell silent. \"But I think you know that those old legends don't tell the whole truth. You know that a dragon should not be judged by what other dragons say about him. And the more time you spend with me, the more I think you'll find that I'm really an absolutely wonderful dragon.\" He smiled with all his teeth.\n\nWinter touched his temples for a moment, then stared at Darkstalker with something new in his blue eyes.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said. \"Let's start over.\"\n\n\"Winter?\" Qibli said sharply. He darted into the sky and up beside Winter, brushing the silver dragon's wings with his own. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Winter. He tipped his head toward Darkstalker. \"I am trying not to judge dragons too quickly anymore. Let's hear him out.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound like the Winter I know,\" Qibli said to Moon. \"Does this seem weird to you?\"\n\n\"You don't know me that well,\" Winter objected, snorting a tiny cloud of ice crystals. \"Dragons can change! I've changed. Maybe he has, too.\"\n\n\"Without question,\" Darkstalker said, nodding. \"I've had a lot of time to think about my mistakes.\"\n\nQibli backed away from them, worry spilling across his face. \"Moon \u2026\" he said carefully, as though he were reaching for the only island in a vast, empty sea. She flew up beside him, ducking her head to look into Winter's eyes.\n\n\"Did you do something to him?\" Moon asked Darkstalker.\n\n\"Of course I didn't!\" Darkstalker protested, and, \"No! He didn't!\" cried Winter at the same time.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Moon said. \"You have to promise me \u2014 you cannot put spells on my friends.\"\n\n\"I'm really offended by this,\" Winter said haughtily. \"I'm such an open-minded dragon.\"\n\nPeril and Qibli snorted in unison.\n\n\"Moon,\" Darkstalker said reasonably. \"I wouldn't waste my animus magic \u2014 and my soul \u2014 on some tiny hush-up-an-IceWing spell. I mean, seriously. Don't you remember the whole point of my scroll? That I made?\"\n\n\"To keep your soul safe,\" Moon said hesitantly. She swooped around Winter, studying him. \"But \u2014\"\n\n\"Stop worrying so much!\" Darkstalker nudged her with one of his giant wings. \"Boy, you remind me of someone I used to know. Can't you be excited for me? This is a great day! Let's go celebrate! Tell you what, I promise if I feel the need to use animus magic, I'll let you know.\"\n\n\"And you promise not to hurt my friends?\" Moon asked.\n\nDarkstalker sighed gustily, sending a hurricane of leaves swirling around Turtle's feet. \"I'm hurt that you even need to ask me that,\" he said. \"But of course. If it makes you feel better, I promise that these three are officially the safest dragons in Pyrrhia.\" He waved his talons at Qibli, Winter, and Peril.\n\nMoon opened her mouth, then closed it. She and Qibli simultaneously looked down at Turtle.\n\nTurtle crouched lower, pressing his underbelly into the ground, and shook his head at them.\n\n\"Let's hunt now, as Darkstalker suggests,\" Qibli said, nudging Moon, \"and figure out what to do next after that.\" He shot a significant glance at Turtle.\n\nOh no. That glance had a meaning, a message. Qibli was expecting Turtle to do something, and Turtle had a bad feeling that \"something\" wasn't \"Turtle flying all the way back to the Kingdom of the Sea, finding a deep trench, and staying there forever.\" A queasy, tense feeling started bubbling through Turtle's stomach.\n\n\"Good idea,\" said Winter.\n\nMoon nodded, and then she gave Turtle a meaningful look, too.\n\nBy all the moons, what did they think he was going to do? Attack Darkstalker, like Peril had? Obviously that wouldn't work. If Peril couldn't hurt him, Turtle certainly wouldn't be able to.\n\nDid they want him to hide them as well? He winced. He should have thought of that sooner. A good friend, a better dragon \u2014 a hero \u2014 would have thought to protect everyone instead of just hiding himself. But they all wanted to talk to Darkstalker, didn't they? I just wanted to hide. That's what I always do.\n\nAs the dragons flew away, veering southwest, Qibli twisted in a spiral, looked at Turtle again, and flicked his tail in the direction of Jade Mountain.\n\nOh, Turtle realized. They want me to go warn the school.\n\nI can probably do that without messing it up.\n\nI think.\n\nFor a moment, Peril hovered mutinously in the sky behind them, and then she swooped down to Turtle.\n\n\"Aren't you coming, too?\" she asked. \"Don't we all have to follow his grand mighty lordship SinisterFace?\"\n\nTurtle shook his head and held out the stick. \"He can't see me,\" he whispered. \"I hid myself from him.\"\n\nPeril's face lit up. \"Of course!\" she said. \"That's awesome! You have animus magic! You can kill him!\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Turtle, flustered. \"No, I \u2014 I don't really \u2014 kill anyone.\" A brief flash of scales and blood darted through his mind, and when he looked down, he saw his claws curling dangerously. He jumped and shook them out until they looked like his own talons again. \"That's not my thing,\" he said, tamping down a wave of panic.\n\n\"I know, I know, it's my thing,\" Peril said, \"but I can't kill him, because of his stupid magic, GROWL. So you have to. Don't worry, it's not that hard, and it would be such a relief \u2014 for me, I mean \u2014 because I'm having this feeling \u2014 I don't know what to call it, but it's kind of big and heavy and annoying? And it's filling me all up inside like everything is awful and it's all my fault? Like maybe all the bad things in the world are my fault? I really don't like it, so if you can make it stop, that would be the greatest.\"\n\n\"I think what you're describing is what we call guilt,\" said Turtle, \"but it's not your fault he tricked us. I still think you did the right thing, burning the scroll.\"\n\n\"Well, thanks, but the universe disagrees with you,\" Peril said, jerking her head at the enormous crack in the side of the mountain.\n\n\"Peril!\" called one of the dragons in the distance.\n\n\"Good luck,\" Peril whispered. \"Make it something really cool, like his insides exploding. Or his face falling off. I'm kidding! I'm a little bit kidding. I mean, insides exploding would be pretty cool, right? Never mind, it's up to you! Destroy him and save the world! Three moons, I wish I could do it!\" She took off and flashed away, fast as a firework.\n\nTurtle shivered.\n\nSave the world?\n\nThat's not my thing either. I would definitely mess it up. That's way, way too much pressure.\n\nI'm clearly not a hero.\n\nHe raised his eyes to the shadowy peaks of Jade Mountain.\n\nBut I know where I can find some.\n\nThe sun was starting to sneak over the mountains, nervously spilling little beams around the peaks as if it were making sure Darkstalker was gone. Clouds were visible in the north, with the gray haze of distant rain below them, but Jade Mountain was still dry and clear and sunlit.\n\nTurtle tucked the broken stick \u2014 knobbly and half-stripped of its bark, the most ordinary, insignificant-looking thing in the world \u2014 carefully into the pouch around his neck. He tied the pouch shut twice as tightly as usual and put his front claws over it as it rested on his chest. Anxiety twisted inside him.\n\nI'd better not lose this.\n\nHe'd lost other animus-touched objects before. It was a little embarrassing, actually. When he was three, his (many, many) older brothers used to make fun of him for being the slowest SeaWing prince in the ocean. \"Guess somebody gave you the right name, ha ha!\" \"Careful, or a clownfish will catch you!\" \"You swim like a sea cucumber!\"\n\nSo Turtle had enchanted a strand of purple kelp, wound three times around his upper arm, to make him just a bit faster than some of his brothers. He couldn't make himself the fastest \u2014 that would attract attention. Attention was the last thing he wanted. But he could be faster than the other two from his hatching, Octopus and Cerulean. He could be a tiny bit faster than a couple of the four-year-olds, and that's where he'd stop. Then he'd be nothing remarkable, and his brothers would move on to teasing someone else.\n\nIt worked \u2014 they got bored and left him alone after a couple more races. But he still wished he hadn't lost the kelp a few weeks later; it drifted off in his sleep one night, and he often wondered if there was a startled sea horse tangled up in it somewhere out there, speeding along the ocean floor.\n\nHe knew he should be smarter about what he enchanted \u2014 he should pick things he couldn't lose, things that would last a while. But usually he didn't spend enough time thinking about his spells beforehand to plan them that carefully. His spells were all so little, just small magic to make his life easier, and he generally used whatever he could grab with his claws when he needed one.\n\nLike the very ordinary-looking river stone in his pouch, bumping along with the stick. It could heal surface wounds and aches and pains, and he'd enchanted it to make himself feel better after a long day of flying. But it was a silly thing to enchant; Peril was right about that. If he ever lost it, he'd never find it again. Same with this stick \u2026 so he had to be careful.\n\nHe flew toward the main entrance of Jade Mountain, where he had landed on his first day as a new student. He remembered how excited he had been. A new school! Nobody knew him here. It was the perfect place to be a background character in other dragons' stories. No one would expect anything of him. He'd be far away from Octopus and Cerulean, who knew about his biggest failure and surely must think about it all the time, even if they never mentioned it.\n\nHere he could blend in, be ordinary \u2026 and keep an eye on his little sister Anemone, who had been acting strangely ever since the attack on the Summer Palace.\n\nNone of that had quite worked out the way he'd planned. It was his own fault. If he hadn't chased after the other dragons in his winglet, he could be sound asleep with the rest of the SeaWing students right now.\n\nA splash and a peal of laughter caught his attention, and he soared over Jade Mountain, following the sound to an opening in the roof of a cave.\n\nDown there was the underground lake \u2014 and there were dragons swimming in it even now, at the crack of dawn. Turtle never woke up early if he could help it. But Anemone was often up at sunrise, which meant one of those swimming dragons might be her.\n\nI should warn her \u2014 her more than anyone.\n\nHe tucked his wings into a dive and arrowed through the hole, but he somewhat misjudged his speed, and ended up smacking into the cold lake like a hippo dropped from a great height.\n\n\"Yow!\" he yelped, surfacing and rubbing his eyes, his scales stinging from the shock.\n\n\"Turtle?\" said a voice nearby. \"Turtle! You're back!\" Wet wings were flung around his shoulders, dunking him underwater in a cascade of bubbles. Anemone's glow-in-the-dark scales flashed happily at him in Aquatic as she dragged him up into the air again.\n\n\"Hi,\" he sputtered at his sister.\n\n\"Hey! You nearly landed on the princess!\" Pike shouted in his ear. The skinny gray-blue SeaWing had always been a little louder and more aggressive than Turtle thought was strictly necessary. But he'd been much worse since they'd arrived at Jade Mountain Academy, thanks to some secret instructions from Queen Coral. Turtle knew from eavesdropping that Pike was here specifically to be a covert bodyguard for Princess Anemone.\n\nAnemone, of course, had no idea. She never seemed surprised that Pike was so easy to boss around. In her mind, that was how all SeaWings were supposed to behave around her.\n\n\"Oh, shush, I'm fine.\" Anemone splashed water up Pike's snout and he backed off, shaking his head irritably. \"Turtle, where have you been? I had the weirdest nightmare just before I woke up \u2014 I thought there was an earthquake, but nobody else felt it. Did you find your winglet? Are they here, too?\"\n\nTurtle seized her front claws in his. \"Anemone, I need to talk to you.\"\n\n\"You are talking to me, fishface,\" she said. \"Did you find the RainWing you were moping about?\"\n\n\"You mean Kinkajou?\" A little RainWing was sitting in the shallows of the lake, tilting her ears toward them. Her scales were spiraling pale peach and citrus green, except where they were covered by swathes of bandages and streaks of black scorch marks. A poultice of damp leaves was tied over her eyes. \"Is Kinkajou all right?\"\n\n\"I'm sure she's absolutely fine, Tamarin,\" Pike said kindly. He jabbed Turtle in the shoulder with one claw, much less kindly, and jerked his head toward Tamarin, scowling.\n\nTurtle hesitated. The last time he'd seen Kinkajou, she was lying in a hospital bed in the town of Possibility, unconscious. Her usually bright, shifting rainbow scales had turned white and still. She had hardly looked like Kinkajou at all.\n\nBut how could he say that to her best friend \u2014 to Tamarin, who was suffering from her own injuries after the explosion that rocked Jade Mountain Academy?\n\n\"She was alive when I saw her a few days ago,\" he hedged. \"I'm sure she'll come back to Jade Mountain just as soon as she can.\"\n\nIf it's still here when she wakes up.\n\n\"Oh,\" Tamarin said softly. \"Good.\"\n\n\"Anemone,\" Turtle said. \"Come flying with me?\"\n\n\"You are being such a jellyfish right now,\" Anemone sighed. \"I don't want to fly; I want to swim. Can't you just say whatever it is right here? Pike and Tamarin won't care.\"\n\nOh, they might, thought Turtle. But he could see that Anemone wasn't moving. This was Anemone's new stubborn, petulant personality, the princess who'd risen to the surface after she was cut free from Mother's harness. This Anemone made him feel nervous.\n\nThis Anemone made him feel guilty.\n\n\"All right, fine,\" he said. \"You're in danger, and you need to leave Jade Mountain right now.\"\n\n\"What danger?\" Pike barked, swiveling his head to glare around the dark cave.\n\n\"And go where?\" Anemone demanded. \"Home? Back to harnesses and boredom and Mother staring at me all the time? No, thank you, I'm staying here.\" She scrambled up on one of the boulders that jutted out of the water and coiled her tail around her talons.\n\n\"But there's a big, scary dragon coming,\" Turtle protested.\n\nAnemone looked archly down her snout at Turtle. \"Who are you talking about?\" she asked. \"I thought our illustrious teachers defeated all the bad dragons.\"\n\n\"This is a new one.\" Turtle glanced anxiously up at the sky above them, which was shifting closer and closer to full daylight. \"His name is Darkstalker and he's been trapped underground for two thousand years and he just escaped \u2014 I don't really understand the whole story, but I know he's a mind reader and an animus and he seems nice on the surface but \u2014\"\n\n\"An animus!\" Anemone cried, interrupting him. She stood up, flaring her wings. \"Really? A real animus?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Turtle said cautiously. \"But a bad one, like Albatross.\"\n\n\"Oh, how would you know?\" Anemone scoffed. \"I've been dying to meet another animus! I visited the old fossil living in this mountain and he was useless. His great helpful advice was that an animus dragon should never use her power. I mean, come on! He was all, 'but look what happened to meeeeeee,' wheeze moan glug, and I wanted to be like, 'didn't you put this dopey stone-scales spell on yourself? What use is your perfect soul if you can't move a muscle?' So pathetic. If there's a real animus coming here, I want to meet him!\"\n\n\"No!\" Turtle protested. \"He'll probably kill you! He's really smart! He'll see another animus dragon as a threat!\"\n\n\"If he's really smart, he'll see that I'm awesome and want to get to know me,\" Anemone said, tossing her head.\n\n\"Princess, I think your brother is right,\" Pike interjected. \"This sounds like a dangerous situation. You should hide while I assess this stranger.\"\n\n\"What?!\" Anemone threw her wings up in disbelief. \"I'm not going to hide like some kind of nervous shrimp! Three moons. Turtle, did you actually see him kill anyone?\"\n\n\"No, but according to history he killed his dad and \u2014\"\n\n\"'According to history,'\" she said dismissively. \"Has he hurt anyone since he 'escaped'?\"\n\n\"No \u2014 but he probably will \u2014 he doesn't like IceWings and he doesn't like me.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not an IceWing, and I'm not the most boring prince on the planet,\" she said, \"so I think he'll like me just fine. Pike, shut up.\" Pike closed his mouth and ducked his head. Anemone clapped her front talons together. \"This is so exciting! Another animus to talk to!\"\n\nGuilt wormed through Turtle's heart again. He had thought about telling his sister his secret a hundred times. If he had ever admitted that he was a fellow animus \u2026 would she be more willing to listen to him?\n\nShould he tell her now? Would that stop her from wanting to meet Darkstalker?\n\nProbably not.\n\nAnd to tell her in front of Pike and Tamarin \u2026 it just didn't seem like a good idea. Pike was one of Queen Coral's most loyal followers; he'd definitely report back to her the first chance he got. Even Anemone \u2026 would she keep his secret?\n\nHe wasn't ready. Better to stay hidden and keep quiet. Safer that way.\n\nAnemone dove off her rock and paddled to the tunnel that led back to the school. \"Last one to the main hall is a rotten oyster!\" she called, galloping away into the dark.\n\nPike hissed softly, twisting between the disappearing princess and the injured RainWing by the lake.\n\n\"It's all right, Pike,\" Tamarin said. She waded out of the water, limping, and rested one talon lightly on the wall. \"I can find my way back to the infirmary on my own.\"\n\n\"Can you go with her?\" Pike asked Turtle. He was halfway to the tunnel already. \"Make sure she gets safely to the infirmary?\"\n\n\"I can take care of myself,\" Tamarin said through gritted teeth, limping another few steps.\n\nTurtle nodded, and Pike leaped out of the lake to run after Anemone.\n\n\"I know you two were making secret faces at each other,\" Tamarin said as Turtle climbed out of the lake beside her. \"I don't like it when dragons do that around me.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Turtle said. \"I was only responding to his secret faces.\"\n\n\"So is Kinkajou really all right, or were his faces making you lie to me?\" she asked. She set off toward the tunnel, stepping cautiously but confidently along the rocky lakeshore.\n\nTurtle winced. \"She did get hurt,\" he admitted, following her. \"Pretty badly \u2014 she's still unconscious, as far as I know. But the doctors in Possibility thought she'd be all right, if she wakes up soon.\"\n\n\"Oh, poor Kinkajou!\" Tamarin cried. She stopped and pressed her talons to her face. \"I knew it was too dangerous for her out there. She's always running straight at the bad things instead of hiding, or at least thinking first.\"\n\nThat's true, Turtle realized. That was one of the things he liked about Kinkajou \u2026 that she was nothing like him.\n\n\"Queen Glory sent RainWing healers to watch over her,\" he said. \"She's not alone.\"\n\n\"I wish I could go to her,\" Tamarin said with a sigh. She set off along the main passageway. After a moment, she said quietly, \"I didn't know Anemone was an animus.\"\n\nTurtle felt like an idiot. He'd been so worried about hiding his own powers, he'd forgotten that Anemone's were supposed to be kept secret, too. \"The other tribes aren't supposed to know,\" he said. \"Tsunami's friends do, but they swore not to tell anyone.\"\n\n\"I won't say anything,\" Tamarin promised. \"That must be hard on Anemone, keeping a secret like that.\"\n\n\"I guess,\" Turtle said uncomfortably. He'd been keeping the same secret his whole life, but from everyone. Was it hard? Maybe sometimes \u2014 like whenever something happened that he knew his magic could fix, but he had to go ahead and leave it broken.\n\nLike Tamarin's eyes. I could fix them. I could do it right now \u2026 I could enchant that bandage so when she takes it off, she could see for the first time in her life. That was the kind of thing he wished he was free to do, and it felt awful to have to stop himself.\n\nBut he still figured it was a lot easier to be a secret animus than an animus everyone knew about.\n\n\"I wouldn't want to be an animus,\" Tamarin said. She paused at a spot where the tunnel branched into three directions. \"I don't know how anyone could stay a good dragon with all that power.\"\n\n\"What if they only used it for good things?\" Turtle asked, a little stung.\n\n\"But who gets to decide what's a good thing?\" Tamarin asked. \"Dragons would always be asking for spells, or telling you your choices are wrong. And I think sometimes it's hard to tell what's good and what's just easy.\"\n\nTurtle gave her a puzzled look. \"Aren't those the same? What's wrong with trying to make life easier?\"\n\n\"It depends,\" Tamarin said. \"For instance, an animus dragon might think, I'll make all our medicinal herbs appear magically in the healers' treehouse, so we never have to go looking for them again. That seems obviously good, right? But then we'd stop learning how to look for them, and we'd stop experimenting with new ones to see how those might help dragons in different ways. We'd stop thinking about it at all, because everything would be too easy. Don't we lose something when everything is done for us?\"\n\nTurtle blinked at her, confused. \"I thought RainWings were all lazy,\" he said. \"I thought your lives were easy and you liked them that way.\"\n\n\"Not mine,\" Tamarin said, gesturing to her eyes. \"Not Kinkajou. Maybe we're a little different from the others.\" She shrugged. \"Anyway, I can see why Anemone wants another animus to talk to about it.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Turtle. His thoughts had snagged on Kinkajou and how she wasn't anything like the RainWings he'd read about in Mother's stories. He hadn't thought about that before, because he didn't think RainWing when he saw her; he only thought Kinkajou.\n\n\"I'm really fine from here,\" said Tamarin, flicking her tail at one of the side tunnels. \"You go find Clay or Tsunami with your news.\" She strode off to the left, limping as fast as she could, as if she wanted to prove she didn't need help.\n\nTurtle took the path all the way to the right, winding up through the mountain toward the Great Hall. Halfway there, he heard voices coming from one of the caves.\n\nInstinctively, he slowed down and snuck closer on quiet talons. He'd always been good at eavesdropping. It made his life easier, knowing what other dragons whispered about behind closed doors. He'd avoided several palace scandals and feuds that way.\n\nThis might be the kind of thing Tamarin is talking about, he realized uncomfortably. A way I make my life easier that's not exactly \"good.\"\n\n\"Mother feels terrible,\" said one of the voices quietly. \"She can't figure out how they escaped.\"\n\n\"Can she trust her guards?\" asked another voice, which Turtle recognized as his sister Tsunami. \"Maybe she needs to replace them all with Outclaws \u2014 everyone knows their undying loyalty to Thorn.\"\n\n\"But she needs her best Outclaws in other parts of the kingdom,\" said the first voice. That must be Sunny, Turtle realized. \"There was an explosion at one of our western oases a couple of days ago. Two dragons were killed, and we have no idea why.\"\n\n\"Was it one of those viper-licking cactus bombs like the one here?\" asked Tsunami, growling.\n\n\"Seems like it.\" Sunny sighed. \"But it makes no sense that a SkyWing would be out that far west or targeting these dragons. Anyway, Mother has enough problems, and now she's worried that Glory will be mad at her. She won't be, right? Glory knows how tough it is being a new queen.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Tsunami. \"On the other talon, Thorn did promise to hang on to those prisoners for her. And who knows what they'll do now that they've escaped. I bet they'll go try to kill Glory. Or you! They hate you, too, don't they?\"\n\n\"See, this is why I come to you with my problems,\" Sunny said. \"Because you're always so comforting.\"\n\n\"I can make a stab at comforting!\" Tsunami joked. \"Let me try \u2026 um \u2026 hey, it's only two dragons, right? Ah, they won't be able to do anything. Deathbringer will totally stop them if they go anywhere near her. I mean, that is his entire purpose in life, as far as I can tell. And if they kill him, Glory will take them down with her magical death spit. So don't worry, pat pat pat.\"\n\n\"Hmmm,\" said Sunny. \"That was very \u2026 stabby comforting.\"\n\nThere was the scrape of claws against rock, and Turtle realized they were coming toward the cave entrance. He backed up to act as though he was walking along the corridor when the two dragons emerged.\n\n\"Turtle!\" Tsunami's face lit up with such delight that he felt ashamed of spying on her. \"By all the moons, Sunny, look \u2014 a student from the Jade Winglet is actually HERE! At SCHOOL, where they're SUPPOSED to be! What a glorious honor. Is it my hatching day? Or am I hallucinating?\"\n\n\"All right, enough sarcasm,\" Sunny said, elbowing her in the chest. \"Turtle, we've been really worried! Is everyone else back, too?\"\n\n\"Well \u2026 they're coming,\" he said. \"I'm here to warn you \u2014 they're coming with someone else. Maybe a bad someone else. Have either of you ever heard of Darkstalker?\"\n\nSunny jumped and gave him a startled look. \"I have! When I was chasing Fierceteeth and the others \u2014 I heard them talking about this ancient NightWing legend, a dragon called Darkstalker. They were crazy scared of him, like he might actually be hunting them right that minute even though he died, like, centuries ago.\"\n\n\"Um. So. That's the thing,\" said Turtle. \"He didn't so much \u2026 exactly die.\"\n\n\"What?\" Tsunami demanded, lashing her tail.\n\n\"He's woken up,\" Turtle said. \"And he's on his way here right now.\"\n\nThere was a gasp from farther up the tunnel. They all turned and found a NightWing dragonet standing there, staring at Turtle, with his face contorted in terror.\n\n\"Mightyclaws,\" Sunny said, holding out her talons. \"Wait, don't overreact. We don't even know \u2014\"\n\n\"I have to warn the others!\" he cried. He bolted up the tunnel toward the main hall.\n\n\"Oh, good,\" said Tsunami. \"School-wide panic. We haven't had any of that in at least two days.\"\n\n\"Mightyclaws!\" Sunny called, running after him. \"Wait!\"\n\n\"Tell me everything,\" Tsunami said to Turtle. He hurried to keep up with her as they strode along the winding stone tunnel. The violet and rose glass lights overhead reflected off her thoughtful expression.\n\nHe didn't tell her everything. He didn't tell her about his own magic. He sort of skimmed over the part where he hid from Darkstalker, implying that tall bushes and fallen trees were involved. But he had to tell her about Moon's powers, although he felt as though that should have been Moon's secret to share. Still, there was no other way to explain the prophecy and how Moon had been communicating with Darkstalker.\n\n\"Arrgh, no,\" Tsunami said, sweeping her tail across the floor. \"More powers and prophecies? Seriously? I thought we were all done with that!\"\n\nTurtle had told Sunny about Moon's prophecy before, after his winglet left, but he'd left it up to her to decide who else to tell. Apparently Tsunami hadn't been on that list.\n\n\"I hate prophecies,\" Tsunami muttered darkly. \"All cryptic and demanding. Most useless way to communicate in the history of the world. Is Darkstalker as terrifying as he sounds? That NightWing student looked like he'd just been bitten by a ghost shark.\"\n\n\"He scared me,\" Turtle admitted. He felt a little better now, here in Tsunami's shadow. The dragonets of destiny could deal with Darkstalker. He didn't have to do anything. He could leave saving the world in their talons.\n\n\"Let's swing by the library and ask for a lecture,\" Tsunami said, grinning at Turtle. \"It'll make Starflight's day.\"\n\nThey took another branch of the tunnel and soon came to the wide, open cave lined with scrolls. One of the leaf windows had been torn apart when Icicle leaped out of it, and it still hadn't been fixed, allowing a burst of bright sunbeams to cut across the otherwise cool green light. Starflight was behind his desk with Fatespeaker, nudging scrolls into three different piles. His forehead was creased with worry, as it often was.\n\nTurtle liked Starflight. He was quiet, and better yet, he let other dragons be quiet. After the rest of Jade Winglet left the school, Turtle would often sit in the library by himself, and Starflight never asked questions or made him talk.\n\n\"Hey, Starflight.\" Tsunami tapped the desk lightly so the blind librarian would know where she was. \"Don't explode with joy or anything, but I have a historical question for you.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Starflight's face lit up, turning toward the sound of her talons. \"Which era?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Tsunami snorted. \"Is there an Era of Sinister Bad Guys? What do you know about a dragon called Darkstalker?\"\n\nSomething clattered to the floor across the room, and Turtle realized there was a trio of IceWings studying over by the windows. They'd dropped their scroll when they heard Tsunami's question, and now they were leaning toward Starflight with sharp, curious expressions.\n\n\"He was a very powerful animus NightWing who disappeared over two thousand years ago,\" Starflight said cautiously. \"The stories say he was betrayed by his friend, a SeaWing animus named Fathom, and perhaps also by his girlfriend, Clearsight. But nobody knows exactly what happened to him.\"\n\n\"He didn't really disappear,\" said one of the IceWings. \"He spent years lurking in the shadows and killing IceWings.\"\n\n\"And you're leaving out the part about him killing his own father,\" said another IceWing, flicking her wings back. \"Who was an IceWing prince, by the way.\"\n\n\"Whoa, really?\" Tsunami said, giving Turtle a worried look.\n\n\"That story has been highly oversimplified,\" said Darkstalker, poking his head in through the broken window. \"I mean, don't any of the scrolls mention that he totally deserved it?\"\n\nThe IceWings shrieked in unison, loud enough to break glass. They scrambled over one another to get away from the oversized NightWing, knocking down an entire shelf of scrolls in the process. Paper unfurled across the cave in cascading fountains.\n\nTurtle froze, trying to sink into the floor. How had Darkstalker gotten here so fast? Was he already done hunting? Where were Turtle's friends?\n\n\"What's happening?\" Starflight cried. \"Who was that?\"\n\n\"A really, really, really big NightWing,\" Fatespeaker yelped, clutching his arm. \"I haven't had any visions about this! This seems seriously vision-worthy! Powers, help me out!\" She closed her eyes. \"Oh, no! I see \u2026 darkness ahead!\"\n\n\"That's because you have your eyes closed, you ninny,\" Darkstalker said pleasantly.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Tsunami demanded.\n\n\"You already know,\" he said, startled. \"This is amazing. How in Pyrrhia did you know I was coming?\" He paused. \"I can't even find the answer to that in your mind. What in the world? A fascinating mystery.\"\n\nDon't think about it too hard, Turtle prayed. Don't figure out there's a secret to uncover here.\n\n\"So you are Darkstalker.\" Tsunami lashed her tail. \"You'd better not hurt any of my students.\"\n\n\"What?\" Starflight sputtered. \"Darkstalker? How?\"\n\n\"Why would I hurt any of your students?\" Darkstalker protested. \"There's literally zero motivation for me to do that. Dragons today, so full of mistrust and hostility. Now, in my time \u2014 no, wait, we were exactly the same.\" He poked at the ragged green edges of the leaf windowpane. \"That's one of the many problems I was going to fix.\"\n\n\"It's the Darkstalker!\" shouted one of the IceWings. \"Die, you monster!\" She leaped across the cave, blasting frostbreath in Darkstalker's face, landed in a roll right in front of his snout, and slashed her serrated claws across his nose.\n\nAll of which, of course, did nothing to him. The IceWing staggered back, shaking her arm as if she'd just smashed it into a rock.\n\nDarkstalker gave her a bored look, then reached one of his long talons through the window and casually pinned her to the floor.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"Now I'm a little motivated to hurt somebody.\"\n\nTsunami started toward him and he chuckled. \"Oh, I won't,\" he said. \"I promise! No need to get all ferocious with me, Tsunami. But you might want to add a manners class to your curriculum. Or is it fine with you if your students attack innocent visitors?\"\n\n\"Let her go,\" Tsunami growled.\n\nDarkstalker lifted his claws and the IceWing scrambled away. All three ice dragons bolted out of the cave as fast as they could run.\n\n\"I don't think I'll fit through the tunnels to get in here,\" Darkstalker said regretfully, glancing around the library. \"But I love what you've done with the space, Starflight. Could you please bring any scrolls you have about Clearsight and meet me in the main entrance hall?\"\n\n\"Scrolls about Clearsight?\" Starflight echoed. \"Your, uh \u2014 the dragon you \u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Darkstalker. \"The dragon I loved. Specifically about what happened to her after \u2026 well, after our \u2026 unfortunate misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"But nobody knows,\" Starflight blurted. \"She disappeared at the same time you did.\"\n\n\"Maybe there's a clue somewhere,\" Darkstalker said. \"You're a terrific librarian. If anyone can find it, you can.\" His eyes narrowed. \"Perhaps it would also be useful to bring any scrolls about what happened to Fathom.\"\n\n\"I \u2014 I \u2014\" Starflight stammered, moving his claws along the desk. Fatespeaker grabbed one of his talons and leaned in to him.\n\n\"Thanks ever so much,\" said Darkstalker. \"Now, if you'll excuse me, someone is trying to attack my tail.\" He swung his head out the window and Turtle heard him say, \"Seriously? You too? Does everyone believe everything they read these days?\"\n\nTsunami hurried over to the window. Turtle managed to breathe again, managed to move one foot slowly in front of the other to follow her.\n\nOutside, two small NightWings were dive-bombing Darkstalker, shooting trails of flame across his scales. Turtle saw his friends hovering in the sky not far away. Moon was trying to call to the NightWings, but they weren't listening to her.\n\nDarkstalker lifted off from the mountainside and turned in a large, slow circle, watching the NightWings without fighting back. He looked faintly amused.\n\n\"Tiny dragons,\" he boomed. \"Listen, I'm impressed, but this really isn't necessary.\"\n\n\"We're not going to let you hurt our tribe!\" shouted one of the dragonets. It was hard to tell from a distance, but Turtle thought that was Mightyclaws.\n\n\"By the shining moons, I'm not planning to hurt the tribe,\" said Darkstalker. \"It's my tribe, too, isn't it? I'm a loyal NightWing. Don't the stories ever mention that? Come on now, NightWings are usually so clever; you must have noticed this isn't working.\" He caught Mightyclaws gently in his talons and set him on a ledge.\n\nThe other NightWing darted in and wrapped herself around Darkstalker's neck, trying to plunge her claws in between the scales of his underbelly.\n\n\"I don't mean the attack itself,\" Darkstalker went on, as if he barely noticed his new violent scarf. \"Although that's not working either. I mean the distraction. It's not actually possible to distract me, because, guess what, mind reading! Plus also visions of the future. But good try.\" He whipped around, dove toward the forest, and emerged a moment later with a third NightWing dragonet struggling between his talons.\n\n\"No, no.\" Darkstalker shook his head at her. \"Listen, I understand; if I were you, I'd want to sneak off and warn the rest of the tribe, too. But you know what they'll do then? I do; I saw it in a vision. They'll run away and try to hide from me again! Without even giving me a chance to introduce myself.\"\n\n\"We know all about you!\" Mightyclaws yelled. \"We know you've been trying to break free for two thousand years so you can get revenge on our tribe!\"\n\n\"That makes no sense,\" Darkstalker said reasonably. \"I did just escape a two-thousand-year trap, but the tribe didn't deceive me and stick me underground. That was two foolish dragons, using magic \u2014 it was nothing to do with the other NightWings. I adore my tribe. I'm wildly excited to rejoin you and let everyone see the real me.\"\n\nHe set down the NightWing next to Mightyclaws and unwrapped the other one from his neck as though she were a harmless sloth. \"So we're not going to ruin the surprise, all right? We can all go together to tell the tribe I'm back. Trust me, it'll be great! Much less bloody and horrifying than what you all have in your minds. More \u2026 feasting and rainbows! Hang on, where did that come from? Ah, I know.\"\n\nDarkstalker turned toward the landing area that led to the main school entrance. Clay and Sunny stood there, both of them breathing heavily, as though they'd been running.\n\n\"Feasting,\" Darkstalker said, pointing at Clay. \"And rainbows.\" He pointed at Sunny and grinned.\n\n\"Step. Away. From my students,\" Sunny hissed.\n\n\"Sunny!\" Darkstalker cried with enormous delight. He swooped down to land facing her. \"You're so tiny for such a shaker of worlds! Don't you know who I am?\"\n\n\"I do. You're the Darkstalker,\" she said.\n\n\"It's just Darkstalker,\" he corrected her. \"Not sure where this 'the' came from. That makes me sound like some kind of lurking kraken-type monster.\"\n\nClay cleared his throat. \"Isn't that, um \u2026 kind of what you are?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Darkstalker said with a laugh. \"Sunny! Get this. I'm your great-great-great-great-great-okay-I'm-losing-count-many-greats-great-uncle!\" He bowed. \"Surprise! More funny-looking family for you.\" He spread his wings and Turtle realized he had a line of silvery scales against the black, along the curve under his wings where they met his body. Those must be from his IceWing father.\n\nSunny hesitated, glancing around at all the listening dragons lit by the pink-orange sunrise sky. The three NightWings stood close together on the ledge where Darkstalker had put them, shivering but unharmed. Overhead, the sunlight glinted off the scales of Turtle's companions: Winter's bright white, Qibli's pale yellow, and Peril's fiery copper.\n\nMoon landed beside Sunny, and they brushed wings for a moment, each reassuring the other silently.\n\nTurtle wished he could read minds like Moon did. What did Sunny think of Darkstalker? She'd obviously prepared to defend her students from a monster, only to find a charming relative instead. Beside him in the library window, Tsunami was lashing her tail as though she couldn't decide whether to go out and attack him or not.\n\n\"Uncle?\" Sunny asked Darkstalker. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Great-Uncle Darkstalker.\" The huge NightWing shook his head, chuckling. \"That sounds SO weird. Like I'm a thousand years old \u2014 I mean, I know I'm technically ancient, but I sure don't feel that way. Did Whiteout end up marrying that glassblowing dragon with the spectacles? I'll have to ask Starflight; I bet he knows. Sunny, you have my sister's eyes. Hers were bluer, of course, not so green, but the same shape. You would have loved her.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\" Sunny asked. \"You don't know me.\"\n\n\"Of course I do,\" said Darkstalker. \"I can read your mind and see your futures, remember? I woke up several months ago to find myself under a mountain and twenty centuries older than I was when my friends betrayed me. Since then I've had nothing to do except read all your minds and dream of freedom.\"\n\n\"All our minds?\" Clay asked. \"That's kind of \u2026 nosy, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Literally nothing else to do,\" Darkstalker said apologetically. \"But don't worry, Clay, your thoughts are all very sweet. Especially when it comes to certain dragons.\" He winked, and Clay managed to look embarrassed, alarmed, and confused all at the same time.\n\n\"But wait, what makes you think we're related?\" Sunny asked.\n\n\"Your father's a NightWing animus,\" Darkstalker pointed out. \"So he must be descended from me or Whiteout, and I know I didn't have any dragonets \u2026 although I was supposed to.\" He caught a fragment of cloud between his talons and watched it fade into empty air.\n\n\"So \u2026 your sister, Whiteout, was my great-great-great-something-greats-grandmother?\" Sunny asked.\n\n\"She must have been,\" Darkstalker said, shaking himself. \"But there's so much I don't know. All my friends and family are gone, Sunny. I miss them, and I have no idea what happened to them. So I've asked Starflight to find some scrolls for me \u2014 just to fill in the gaps and answer my questions. I hope that's all right.\" He smiled, but his eyes were sad.\n\nTurtle glanced over his shoulder. Starflight was hurrying around the library, pulling out scrolls and putting them back, checking their titles with his claws. He kept slipping on the loose scrolls and catching himself. Every once in a while he paused and gave a scroll to Fatespeaker, who wrote the title down on a slate.\n\nMaybe this really is all Darkstalker wants, Turtle thought. A few answers about what happened all those hundreds of years ago. Maybe he's as friendly and harmless as he seems.\n\nAnd yet \u2026 and yet \u2026 the way he'd looked at Turtle and Winter. That flash of darkness deep inside him, peering out.\n\nNot to mention the ominous prophecy, of course.\n\nTurtle touched the pouch that rested against his heart. Don't be noticed. He would stay hidden until he was absolutely, positively sure it was safe.\n\n\"Darkstalker!\" a voice called from above. A peal of thunder boomed off the clouds like an echo.\n\nTurtle looked outside again, and up, just like everyone else, including Darkstalker.\n\nLightning flashed, illuminating the outline of a dragon against a sky that was suddenly and rapidly getting darker. She spread her front talons, and wind rushed up behind her with a howling force that made even the giant NightWing stagger back a few paces. Her wings twitched, and the thunder rolled again, louder and closer and more menacing than before.\n\nDarkstalker gathered his wings and planted his feet, watching the dragon overhead. A slow smile spread across his face.\n\n\"Anemone,\" he said. \"Just the dragon I was looking for.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" Turtle breathed.\n\n\"Me?\" Anemone echoed, sounding as young as she was and heartbreakingly delighted. She flicked her claws to make the lightning flash again, now illuminating her face. \"You were looking for me?\"\n\nAnd you made it more than easy for him to find you, Turtle thought. Not to mention announcing your power to everyone else who didn't know the SeaWings have an animus. Now every tribe in Pyrrhia would know about Anemone's magic. Apart from all the dragons outside, he could see faces watching from nearly every window in the school \u2014 students roused from their beds either by the commotion outside or by the panicked IceWings.\n\nOh, Anemone. Why would anyone ever draw so much attention to themselves?\n\nTsunami snapped her tail, hissing. \"What is she doing?\" she cried.\n\nBefore Turtle could answer \u2014 not that he had any sort of answer, unless maybe losing her mind counted \u2014 Tsunami was out the window and flying up toward Anemone.\n\n\"One moment, big sister,\" Anemone said, holding out her talons. The wind spiraled up and around, spinning Tsunami away from her. Below them, Clay and Sunny both started forward with a gasp, but Tsunami caught herself on the second spin and hovered where she was.\n\n\"Why were you looking for me?\" Anemone asked Darkstalker.\n\n\"Because I sensed a kindred spirit,\" he said, gesturing at the storm rising around her. \"I've been listening to your mind since you arrived at Jade Mountain and I saw instantly how special you are. A dragon as smart and practical as I am. And, of course, a fellow animus.\"\n\nDid he know about me before I hid myself? Turtle wondered. Only Winter, Qibli, Peril, and Moon knew about his animus power \u2026 but neither Peril nor Moon wore skyfire to protect their thoughts. Darkstalker could have lifted that information from either of their minds. Or he could have seen it in a vision of the future, if there was a crazy future where Turtle used magic in front of him.\n\n\"That's me,\" Anemone said, lifting her front claws into the air. Lightning sizzled down from the clouds and gathered in her webbed talons like deadly trapped moons. The light gave her face an eerie glow, shining over her scales like an Aquatic birthmark, making sure everyone could see how different she was. \"Finally. Someone who understands me.\"\n\n\"Anemone,\" Tsunami said, her voice cracking.\n\n\"Oh, I know you love me,\" Anemone said to her. \"Plenty of dragons love me. But understanding me \u2026 see, that takes another animus.\"\n\nI'm not sure it does, Turtle thought. He'd never felt further from understanding her than he did right this moment.\n\nI did this all wrong. Like I always do. I should have told her the truth about me, or I should have lied about Darkstalker. I should have come up with something that could have stopped this from happening.\n\n\"I'm very impressed, Anemone,\" Darkstalker said, spreading his wings at the churning, stone-colored sky. \"You know, I've never tried controlling the weather. What a clever idea. What did you enchant?\" Dark clouds now blotted out the sunrise, bloated with rain that was forbidden to fall. Small flickers of lightning curled in the depths of the clouds like the breath of newly hatched SkyWings. The air smelled like the sea was hiding overhead, ready to drown everyone.\n\n\"These,\" Anemone said, displaying two beaten copper armbands on her wrists, the metal rippling like waves of fire. \"I wanted you to see what I could do,\" she said proudly.\n\n\"But Anemone,\" Tsunami choked out. \"Your soul \u2014\"\n\n\"I feel fine, Tsunami,\" Anemone said, flicking her tail. \"I mean, we are supposed to use our powers sometimes, right?\" she asked Darkstalker. \"Like when it's really important? And couldn't these be totally useful?\" She reached up again and opened a small hole in the clouds for the sun to pour through.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Darkstalker agreed. \"They're brilliant. Don't worry, Tsunami; Anemone is many spells away from massacring anyone. And now I'm here to help her with that soul problem. Come on down, Princess, and let's talk.\"\n\nAnemone soared down to him with no hesitation. Turtle watched her go with the same sick, sinking feeling that had hit him the day he heard his father had been captured by Queen Scarlet's troops.\n\nThere's nothing I can do.\n\nHe could feel Peril watching him, but he couldn't meet her eyes.\n\nDon't wait for me to fix this. I can't. I don't know where to start and I don't have any good ideas and whatever I tried, I'd do it wrong anyway.\n\nAs Anemone and Darkstalker stepped into the main entrance cave, Anemone looked back up at her sister and the other dragons still outside.\n\nShe smiled, and the rain began to fall.\n\nHeavy droplets pelted Turtle's wings as he flew up to where his friends were gathered in the sky.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said as soon as he was close enough to speak. \"I did try to warn the school, but I guess it didn't make any difference.\"\n\n\"Warn the school about what?\" Winter asked.\n\n\"The \u2026 giant two-thousand-year-old superdragon that just climbed out of a mountain?\" Turtle answered.\n\n\"Oh, he's not here to hurt anyone,\" said Winter. \"I know, I was worried at first, too, but Darkstalker's not a monster. He just wants to make friends and start over.\"\n\n\"See, I feel like that's true,\" said Qibli, \"but then Winter, of all dragons, says something like that, and I get nervous.\"\n\n\"Call off the exploding-guts plan, Turtle!\" Peril called cheerfully, swooping around them with her wings carving paths of steam through the pelting rain. \"He's not evil after all!\"\n\n\"Wait, really?\" Turtle tried to blink away the rain that kept pooling on his snout. \"Are we sure? What happened to change your mind so fast?\"\n\n\"Well, he's been super nice to me,\" said Peril. \"Which kind of never happens, so he's obviously more awesome than the average dragon. And he pointed out that animus powers and firescales are the same, because other dragons are always scared of us, but they shouldn't be. Totally true, right? I mean, I wouldn't want MY insides exploded by magic just because someone thinks I'M scary.\"\n\n\"You are scary,\" Qibli said to her. \"But I'm also in favor of you staying in one piece.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you,\" she said, pleased. \"So it makes sense, right, Turtle? If we deserve a chance to prove ourselves good, then why doesn't Darkstalker?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Qibli. \"That's a good point.\"\n\n\"But didn't he already have that chance?\" Turtle asked. \"And didn't it end with killing his own father?\"\n\n\"Oh, that's a good point, too.\" Qibli scrunched his eyes shut as though his head hurt. \"My brain feels like it's trying to swim through honey.\"\n\n\"That father business is ancient history,\" said Winter. \"We don't know exactly what happened. I'm sure he has a good explanation.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" said Peril.\n\n\"So we're all \u2026 we're not worried anymore?\" said Turtle. \"Welcome back, Darkstalker, carry on, do all the magic you'd like?\"\n\n\"You just need to spend a little time with him and you'll see,\" Winter said. \"Are we done with this boring conversation? I'd like to go get dry, if you please.\" He shook off his wings and dove toward the caves without waiting for an answer.\n\n\"Never tell him I said this,\" said Peril, \"but I agree with the chilly prince. Off with your hiding spell, Turtle, and onward with your face!\"\n\nShe gestured toward Turtle's pouch and he shied away from her, covering it with his talons.\n\n\"Or you can keep skulking around,\" she said with a shrug. \"Whatever you want. I'm going to go say hi to Clay! I mean, to uh, him and his friends. So I can tell him what I did to Scarlet! I mean, tell all of them. What Ruby did, technically. But with my help! He's going to be so excited. Don't you think? So excited? I mean, not that it's any big deal. Well, I guess it's kind of a big deal that I stopped his, like, super worst enemy from coming after him. He'll be happy about that. Right? Not that it matters. Why am I nervous? I'm not! STOP BEING NERVOUS, PERIL. Ha ha! That'll work.\"\n\n\"Three moons, just go talk to him, you unexpected flutterhead,\" Qibli said with a laugh.\n\n\"I will! I'm going!\" Peril said. \"Don't wish me luck because I don't even need it because why would I because who cares!\" She shook herself from horns to tail, wiped raindrops off her snout, and spiraled down to the school.\n\n\"Wow,\" said Qibli. \"Am I like that around Moon?\"\n\n\"Are you?\" Turtle asked, only half-listening. Peril did seem like the kind of dragon who could change her mind about someone at a moment's notice. So maybe this was normal, and maybe Darkstalker was as great as they all thought and Turtle was wrong to be so anxious. But something didn't feel right.\n\n\"Just kidding,\" Qibli said quickly. \"Forget I said that. Um, Turtle \u2026 I think, actually, don't unhide yourself yet.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Turtle twisted toward him in the air. Raindrops kept splashing in his eyes and making it hard to see. It felt as if the clouds were gathering lower and lower, as though they might all pile on top of his wings at any moment.\n\n\"My instincts tell me I can trust Darkstalker,\" Qibli said, tilting his claws to watch the raindrops slide in different directions. \"But my head says to be more careful. So maybe it's smart to have one dragon who can watch him without being seen for a little while. Can you do that? Watch him and then tell me what you see?\"\n\n\"I guess.\" Turtle tugged the webs between his talons nervously. \"But like what? What if I miss something? What am I looking for?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Qibli admitted. \"But whatever you see, come talk to me about it, all right? We'll figure it out together.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Turtle said uncomfortably.\n\nHe stayed in the air for a moment as Qibli flew away. At least I'm not the only one who's worried.\n\nBut he couldn't shake the dread that crept along his wings. It was a lot of pressure, being the one who had to keep an eye on Darkstalker. Being the only one who could, really. He didn't like the feeling that Qibli was relying on him.\n\nI don't want to be the spy. In all the stories, spies are competent and quick-thinking and clever, and I'm none of those things. Or else they're incompetent, and then they get caught, and their part of the story ends in a dungeon or a quick death.\n\nNot exactly the character arc I was hoping for.\n\nI'm not the right dragon for this.\n\nHe followed his friends slowly, listening to the thunder roll overhead, and wondering where the lightning would strike.\n\nInside the main entrance cave, Turtle crept around the small groups of gathered dragons until he was huddled behind the bronze gong. Nobody noticed him. He'd perfected the art of moving slowly, of being boring and forgettable and ordinary.\n\nAnd it certainly helped that everyone had a much bigger, flashier dragon on their minds at the moment.\n\n\"It's such a vague threat,\" Darkstalker was saying to Anemone as Turtle curled into his hiding spot. \"I mean, what is a soul? How do you really know if someone's losing theirs or it's going bad or whatever the big danger is supposed to be?\"\n\n\"Right!\" Anemone said, as though she were pouncing on a scuttling crab. \"I mean, there haven't been that many animus dragons in history, have there? What if Albatross was already bad and it had nothing to do with his magic at all?\"\n\nTurtle shivered. He'd had these thoughts himself, many times, but it was unsettling to hear them spoken aloud. He wanted to believe that his soul would be fine no matter what he did. He would still be the one making all the choices, good or bad, wouldn't he? And he was a good dragon \u2014 a perfectly nice, harmless dragon with no reason to hurt anyone.\n\nA plume of blood flickered through his memory. Was it only two days ago? Or three? He remembered the clammy feeling of mud between his talons as they confronted that dragon, Peril's father \u2014 Soar or Chameleon or Shapeshifter, the one with many names. He'd been holding Darkstalker's scroll, and Turtle had used animus magic to take it from him.\n\nThe truth was, he hadn't just taken the scroll; he'd attacked Chameleon with it, bashing him in the face and probably breaking his nose. It was the only violent spell he'd ever cast.\n\nOnce more, he noticed his talons were clenched against his will, and he had to force them straight. Deep breaths. I am in control of my own self. I am not a bad dragon.\n\nHe'd never done anything like that before in his life. He certainly wouldn't be able to do it with his own claws. But with magic it was different. It didn't feel like he was really hurting someone else. Except for now, in his memories, where the screaming dragon kept appearing over and over again.\n\nBut he hurt Kinkajou, Turtle reminded himself. He put her in a coma. He also tricked Peril and put a spell on her to make her work for Scarlet again.\n\nHe deserved it.\n\nHe brushed his front talons together as though he were wiping off wet sand. Was this what it felt like to lose part of his soul? Was this the first step toward darkness? He still felt like himself \u2026 but maybe a slightly more powerful version of himself. Was that bad?\n\n\"I know what you did,\" Darkstalker rumbled softly, and for a moment Turtle's heart stopped. \"I know what you worry about.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Anemone whispered.\n\nTurtle peeked out and saw that the cave was almost empty now. Only Darkstalker, Anemone, Tsunami, and Moon remained.\n\n\"She was protecting us,\" Tsunami said quickly. \"She was saving us.\"\n\nTurtle felt a flash of panic. What did Anemone do? Something terrible? When? How did he miss it?\n\n\"I agree,\" said Darkstalker. \"You shouldn't feel guilty, Princess.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Anemone said, lifting her chin. \"He deserved it.\"\n\nTurtle heard the echo of his own thought and winced. Who was she talking about?\n\n\"But did it change you?\" Tsunami asked. \"Do you feel \u2026\"\n\n\"Soulless?\" Anemone laughed a little too brightly. \"No way. I think I have a pretty normal soul for a dragon.\"\n\n\"But you won't ever have to worry again if we protect that soul, like I protected mine.\" Darkstalker flicked his tail. \"With a different spell this time, though. We're going to need something to enchant. None of my talismans survived the two thousand years underground with me.\"\n\n\"I can find us something!\" Anemone said, jumping to her feet. \"I have some great treasure! Mother always gives me the best jewels.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have to be fancy,\" Darkstalker said. \"It just has to be sturdy, so our souls will be safe forever.\" He smiled at Moon. \"I know that would make certain dragons here a lot happier.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Moon, studying him with a wary expression. \"Your soul was 'protected' before and you still killed your father.\"\n\n\"Oh, by all the moons,\" Darkstalker said crossly. He reared up, filling the cavern with his giant wings. \"Listen, Arctic was about to betray the whole tribe. He was trying to sell my sister to the IceWings in exchange for his own safety. He would have made her marry an IceWing and live in their kingdom forever, and he was mind-controlling her. If I hadn't stopped him, Sunny wouldn't even exist! And maybe the NightWings wouldn't either, because Arctic was going to help the IceWings wipe us out. He was a traitor who had to die.\" Darkstalker pointed at Moon. \"I was protecting you and all the tribe's future descendants. I'm shocked that everyone has completely forgotten about that.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Moon, \"watching a dragon disembowel himself probably has kind of a traumatizing effect on one's memory.\"\n\n\"Wait, WHAT?\" said Tsunami. \"Disem-what now?\"\n\n\"Did you really do that?\" Anemone said, looking up at Darkstalker. But Turtle didn't like her expression. There wasn't nearly enough disgust or horror there. He didn't like it at all.\n\n\"Did I say disembowel?\" Darkstalker waved one talon. \"I was exaggerating. It was a simple honor suicide. Even he knew he deserved it.\"\n\nMoon crossed her front talons, arching her brows at him skeptically.\n\n\"Wow,\" said Darkstalker. \"Are we sure Clearsight didn't have dragonets after I was gone? Because you do an uncanny impression of my true love's disapproving face.\"\n\n\"I'm only trying to make sure you don't overuse your power, go crazy, and hurt someone,\" Moon said.\n\n\"Moon,\" Darkstalker said reproachfully. \"I can see the future, remember? I know how to stop myself from doing that. Do you want me to show you where our paths are going?\" He held out one of his talons to her. \"I can take you along the whole timeline for the next hundred years, if you like.\" His tail nudged her mischievously. \"Want to see which one of them you should choose? I can show you what the future looks like with both options. Although, frankly, I think neither of them are good enough for you.\"\n\n\"No, no, no, thank you,\" Moon said quickly, covering her ears. \"I don't want to hear it. I have no idea who you're talking about \u2014 I mean, what you're talking about \u2014 stop thinking about them! LA LA LA ignoring you.\"\n\n\"Hey, what about me?\" Anemone interjected. \"I want to see the future! Will you show me what's going to happen to me?\"\n\nTsunami looked from her sister to Darkstalker, her expression wavering between concern and curiosity.\n\nA vision could show us that Anemone turns out all right, Turtle thought. We wouldn't have to worry about her soul anymore if we saw a peaceful future ahead for her.\n\n\"Anything you want,\" Darkstalker said, expanding his wings to their full width. \"You both have so many possible amazing futures. And now that I'm here, if you trust me, we can make sure you get exactly the right future for you.\"\n\nAnemone's eyes were shining like the skyfire comet. Even Turtle couldn't help thinking It would be nice to know my future \u2026 to have someone who could tell me the right steps to follow to make sure my life turns out all right. Which spells are safe to cast, how to protect myself and my soul. What I'm here for.\n\nDarkstalker raised one of his talons and Turtle nearly ducked behind the gong again, out of sight. But he managed to stay put, sinking into a crouch, and so he was watching as Darkstalker lifted a claw to gently touch the earring in his ear, pale against the black scales.\n\nAn earring \u2026\n\nHad that been there before? Turtle tried to think back, to remember what Darkstalker had looked like when he rose from the earth. He thought he remembered no jewelry \u2026 and didn't Darkstalker just say that nothing had survived the two thousand years underground with him?\n\nBut now he was wearing an earring \u2014 a plain white half-loop stabbed through his earlobe.\n\nTurtle squinted at it. It looked as though it was made of bone.\n\nLike a bone one might get from one's prey after hunting.\n\nCould Darkstalker have made the bone earring and enchanted it today, while Turtle was flying to Jade Mountain to warn the school?\n\nAnd more important: If it was animus-touched \u2026 what was the spell?\n\nA short while later, Tsunami and Moon went off to separate parts of the school. Turtle crouched in the shadows, watching them leave. He felt like stalagmites were growing through his talons, pinning him to the floor. He didn't want to be left alone here, the only one keeping an eye on Darkstalker.\n\nWho would ever think that was a good idea? He couldn't be trusted to do anything right.\n\nMaybe I need to enchant someone else to be hidden with me. Someone who could be a better observer, a better spy. A real hero.\n\nHe thought about that while Anemone brought Darkstalker several pieces of treasure from her travel chest. Turtle remembered that chest, because he'd had to help carry it here from the Kingdom of the Sea, and it was ridiculously heavy. Now, seeing the ropes of pearls, bulky silver neckbands, and sapphire-laden tiaras she laid out on the cave floor, Turtle could understand why.\n\nAlthough he still wasn't entirely clear on why she needed any of this for history lessons and math classes.\n\nTogether, Darkstalker and Anemone picked through the jewels, discussing the merits of each. It was difficult to find anything that fit Darkstalker's enormous size, but they eventually settled on a piece that was supposed to be a metal breastplate for Anemone, fitting around her entire chest to protect her from attacks. It clicked neatly around one of Darkstalker's wrists.\n\n\"Mother is always giving me ridiculous things like that,\" Anemone said. \"As if I need armor to protect me when I have magic like ours.\"\n\n\"She has no idea what it's like to be an animus,\" Darkstalker said sympathetically. He passed Anemone a necklace. \"Maybe this one for you? If you think you'd be happy wearing it all the time.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2026 sure,\" said Anemone, taking the heavy silver band in her talons. \"I mean, I never liked it before, but if you think it would work, then I like it, too.\"\n\n\"It's up to you,\" said Darkstalker. \"It should be something you love.\"\n\n\"I love this,\" Anemone said emphatically. She snapped it around her neck with a sound like eggs cracking. Turtle's stomach twisted as though it were full of rotten shrimp.\n\n\"Now the enchantment,\" Darkstalker said. He touched his wristband with one claw, gazing thoughtfully up at the vines draped between the stalactites. In a slightly deeper voice, he intoned, \"I enchant this bracelet to protect my soul from the effects of animus magic forever.\"\n\nThere was a pause.\n\n\"Is that it?\" Anemone asked. \"Seriously? It's that simple?\"\n\nSurely not, thought Turtle. It can't be.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Darkstalker twitched his wings back and held out his arm to study the bracelet. \"I guess we'll have to see if it works.\" He squinted. \"My visions of the future seem to indicate that it does. Yup. Yup. I'm still a pretty awesome dragon fifty years from now.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Anemone with a giggle. \"Well, three moons, I can do that! I could have done that months ago. Why hasn't every animus done something like this?\"\n\n\"They haven't always known to worry about these things,\" Darkstalker observed. \"Or perhaps they did have objects like this, and we just don't know about them.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Anemone touched her necklace with one claw, mirroring Darkstalker's movement.\n\n\"Wait,\" said Darkstalker. \"My soul is safe now. Let me use my magic to enchant yours, so you don't have to waste any more of your soul.\"\n\nNo! Turtle thought. Don't let him! Anemone, don't trust him!\n\n\"Great idea!\" Anemone said happily.\n\nShould he stop this? Could he stop this? What can I do? I have to do something, don't I? Like what? I need more time to think!\n\nBut Turtle couldn't think of anything he could do without Darkstalker noticing, and it was already too late.\n\n\"I enchant this necklace to protect Anemone's soul from the effects of animus magic forever,\" said Darkstalker, tapping the silver collar lightly with his claws.\n\nIt sounded safe. It sounded exactly like the spell on Darkstalker's own talisman. But Turtle knew all too well that spells could be cast without speaking. Had Darkstalker added anything to the spell with his mind?\n\nOh, Anemone. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.\n\n\"This is so cool,\" said Anemone. \"Now we can do anything we want!\"\n\n\"That,\" said Darkstalker with a grin, \"is the whole idea.\"\n\nDarkstalker spent the rest of the day in the main entrance cave, reading through scrolls and talking to any students who were brave enough to approach him. By the middle of the day, it began to feel quietly normal to have him there. He didn't do anything sinister. He didn't use any magic. He acted like a friendly visitor who just needed to use the library on his way through the mountains.\n\nAnemone sat beside him with her chin lifted, looking as royal as she did when she sat beside Mother at council meetings. Every once in a while Darkstalker would pass her a scroll and ask her to read it out loud to him, or to check it for references to Fathom, and she would do so, beaming.\n\nThe school gradually returned to its usual activities. From his spot, hidden behind the bronze gong, Turtle saw MudWings pass through on the way to the art room; he saw SandWings carrying musical instruments; he saw RainWings with baskets heading out to pick berries.\n\nThere was no sign of the IceWings. Turtle wondered if they were hiding somewhere.\n\nHe also wondered why nobody came to make Anemone go to whichever class she was supposed to be in. Pike stalked through a few times, eyeing Darkstalker suspiciously, but didn't try talking to him.\n\nAt one point, around midday, Turtle watched Clay gather the SkyWings to hear Peril's story of the duel between Queen Scarlet and Queen Ruby. Soon they came back through the cave, all of them with relieved expressions, knowing that Scarlet was dead and Ruby was safely their queen for certain now.\n\nOne of them paused not far from Darkstalker and gazed enviously at the treasure Anemone had swept into a messy pile. He was the one with the badly scarred face, from the Gold Winglet. He had a black leather pouch around his neck, like most of the students, but no other accessories \u2014 nothing like Anemone's confections of sparkles from the sea. Turtle couldn't remember speaking to him; the SkyWing always looked as if he was in a murderous mood.\n\n\"Hello, Flame,\" Darkstalker said politely. He put a rock down on the scroll he'd been reading to hold his place.\n\n\"Stay out of my head,\" Flame snarled at him.\n\n\"With pleasure,\" said Darkstalker.\n\n\"I know you were poking around in my mind before.\" Flame lashed his tail and glared up at the NightWing. \"I felt it. I hated it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Darkstalker said thoughtfully. \"Indeed. It's quite dark in there.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" Flame demanded.\n\n\"Like, evil-dark?\" Anemone asked curiously. \"Or there's-nothing-going-on-inside dark?\"\n\nFlame hissed at her and Darkstalker gently stepped between them.\n\n\"You know, I have an idea, Flame,\" he said. \"I could fix your face.\"\n\nThe SkyWing dragonet started back and touched his venom-slashed snout, scowling. \"Don't lie to me,\" he said. \"I already asked an animus to do that, and he said he wouldn't. Or couldn't. Slithering toadstool worm.\"\n\n\"You mean Stonemover?\" Darkstalker said with a surprised expression. \"I wonder why he said no. It wouldn't be that hard, or take very much out of him.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Flame looked even more furious. \"He moaned and griped and acted like it would kill him. He said he couldn't cure all the wounded dragons in Pyrrhia, so why even start. Festering rotted lungfish!\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Darkstalker, shaking his head. \"Well, I'm sure he has his reasons. But I could certainly do it \u2026 if you want.\"\n\nFlame hesitated. Turtle could see his talons trembling slightly, although his face was fixed in a state of permanent rage. Finally he said, \"Why would you do that for me? What do you want in return?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all.\" Darkstalker caught a deep indigo flower that was drifting down from one of the banners overhead and cupped it in his claws. He took a step toward Flame, who held his ground. \"I am currently trying to prove to certain dragons that I'm not the villain they think I am. I can be trusted. I'm here to help others. So why shouldn't you be one of the ones I help?\"\n\n\"No strings attached?\" Flame said. \"Ha. I don't buy it.\"\n\n\"I have a lot to make up for,\" Darkstalker said. \"What's that word \u2026 oh, I'm atoning. I need M \u2014 everyone to see that.\"\n\n\"I don't need your pity and I don't want to be your experiment,\" Flame growled.\n\n\"It's a simple good deed, Flame. There's no need to be so suspicious.\" Darkstalker stopped in front of him, his head nearly brushing the fire globes on the ceiling. Flame stared up at him as though he was frozen in place, paralyzed by wanting something and not believing he could truly have it. \"I've seen in your mind how badly you need this. Just accept it.\"\n\nDarkstalker reached out and brushed the flower across Flame's face, tracing the scar from one end to the other. \"I enchant this flower to heal Flame the SkyWing, without pain, erasing his scars and returning his face to the way it was before the accident with the SandWing.\"\n\nHe lifted the flower away and Flame jerked back. Turtle watched, awestruck, as Flame's scales writhed and rippled over his snout like snakes suddenly rising up and shaking off their skins. Flame let out a yell, clapped his talons over his eyes, and wrapped his wings around his head.\n\nIn the ensuing silence, Darkstalker quietly plucked the petals off the flower and let them drift down to the stone floor.\n\nFinally Flame folded back his wings and lifted his face toward the light.\n\nTurtle stifled a gasp. He'd expected it to work, but it was shocking to see the smooth, unblemished ruby scales and the perfect shape of Flame's face. The SkyWing dragonet looked years younger and infinitely more innocent. Turtle wondered with a stab of shame whether he had judged Flame by his damaged looks, assuming he was a scarier dragonet than he truly was.\n\nFlame's claws touched his snout, brushing over the new scales with disbelieving care, as though they were made of the thinnest ice and might shatter at any moment.\n\n\"Wow!\" Anemone blurted. \"You look totally different! Darkstalker, that's amazing!\"\n\nFlame glanced up at Darkstalker, then turned and bolted from the cave.\n\n\"Oh, right, don't bother saying thank you!\" Anemone called after him. \"Some dragons,\" she said to Darkstalker, shaking her head. \"You know, I offered to cure Starflight's blindness once, but Tsunami said no, my soul was too valuable, whatever whatever.\" She touched her neckband. \"But now I can! Or you can! One of us can. Won't Starflight be excited?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Darkstalker said kindly. \"It's a generous idea, but in my visions, he's reluctant to accept a magic cure from us. Maybe if we give him a little time to get used to the idea.\"\n\n\"Reluctant? Why?\" Anemone demanded. \"We can fix everybody now!\"\n\nDarkstalker didn't respond. His eyes were on a tunnel across the cave, where, a moment later, Moon emerged, leading the other three NightWing students.\n\n\"Well, this is exciting,\" said Darkstalker with a smile.\n\n\"I thought a better introduction might be in order,\" Moon said. She glanced at the other NightWings anxiously. \"All right? Everyone, this is Darkstalker. He promises he's not as bad as all the stories say he is. Darkstalker, this is Mightyclaws, Mindreader, and Fearless.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Darkstalker said. \"I've been looking forward to meeting you all face-to-face. It seems like the NightWing tribe has changed a lot since I was around.\"\n\nFearless was the first to speak. Turtle peeked out and saw her claws nervously picking at the rock below her. \"What was it like in your day?\" she asked.\n\n\"Amazing,\" said Darkstalker. \"We were without question the most powerful and sophisticated tribe. Our kingdom had a remarkable library, a huge training arena where we hosted all the tribes for tournaments, a museum with the most beautiful art in Pyrrhia, and a new music festival every full moon. It was glorious.\"\n\n\"It was?\" said Mindreader wistfully.\n\n\"I can't believe it's all gone,\" Darkstalker said, shaking his head. He touched the scroll beside him as though all his memories had vanished into it.\n\n\"Do you know where we've been living all these years?\" Mightyclaws asked. Turtle noticed that he was the only one with a note of hostility in his voice.\n\n\"I can see it in your memories,\" said Darkstalker. \"The island, the volcano \u2014 it looks terrible.\"\n\n\"It was terrible,\" Mightyclaws said accusingly.\n\n\"In a place of such darkness and danger,\" Darkstalker mused, \"the NightWings who are left must have been very strong to survive.\"\n\nThe dragonets hesitated, glancing at one another. The sound of the rain pouring down outside filled in the silence. It sounded like claws running overhead, like the waterfalls in the Summer Palace, like hurricanes closing in as the waters rise.\n\n\"I guess,\" Mightyclaws said thoughtfully. \"But we live in the rainforest now.\"\n\n\"That's much better,\" Mindreader interjected. \"Now we're not starving or sick anymore, and we can breathe.\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" said Darkstalker, \"although \u2026 now you don't have a queen.\"\n\n\"We do!\" said Moon. \"We have Queen Glory.\"\n\nThe other three nodded \u2014 Mindreader first, Turtle noticed, and the other two more slowly.\n\nDarkstalker's eyebrows twitched, but he didn't say anything for a moment. \"And I understand no one in the tribe has powers anymore,\" he observed.\n\n\"Were those really real?\" Fearless asked. \"Could NightWings really do all those things, once?\"\n\n\"Some of them could,\" he said. \"If they hatched at the right time. We had mind reading and prophecy classes for the gifted in my school.\"\n\n\"Oh, wow,\" Mindreader breathed. \"Not just classes on pretending to read minds and how to make up believable prophecies?\"\n\nDarkstalker chuckled. \"No, it was all real.\"\n\n\"I wish I could really read minds,\" she said sadly.\n\n\"Do you have any jewelry on you?\" Darkstalker asked.\n\n\"Um \u2026 this?\" Mindreader held out her arm to display a bracelet of green and silver glass beads strung along a twisted black wire. Turtle guessed she had made it here, in art class.\n\n\"Heads up, Moon,\" Darkstalker said, sliding the bracelet off Mindreader's arm. \"Exciting things about to happen!\"\n\n\"Is this a good idea?\" Moon said anxiously.\n\n\"We can't leave this poor dragonet with a name that's a lie, can we?\" he asked. Darkstalker held the bracelet between his claws for a moment, with something glimmering in his dark eyes. Finally he passed it back to Mindreader.\n\n\"Wish granted,\" he said, smiling again.\n\n\"What \u2014 oh!\" She gasped as the bracelet touched her scales. She looked up at him, eyes wide with wonder. \"I can \u2014 I can hear what everyone's thinking! I really can! Is this real? Three moons! Let's see \u2014 the SeaWing princess is thinking I don't deserve a gift like this. Moon is worried about whether it'll be too much for me, hearing everything all at once. Mightyclaws and Fearless are both super jealous. Ha! This is amazing!\" She did a little jump into the air, fluttering her wings.\n\n\"Moon's right,\" said Darkstalker. \"It's a lot to handle at first. But Moon can help you if you feel overwhelmed.\"\n\n\"Moon can?\" said Mightyclaws. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Darkstalker \u2014\" Moon started.\n\n\"Have a little faith in your fellow NightWings, Moon,\" Darkstalker said. \"Don't you think it's fair for them to know that you have mind reading and prophecy powers?\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" Fearless cried. They all looked at Moon as though she had suddenly sprouted six extra heads.\n\n\"But I was going to tell them,\" Moon protested. \"I mean, eventually. Soon. When I figured out how.\"\n\n\"Well, now we're even for you telling your friends about skyfire,\" Darkstalker said cheerfully. \"Besides, I promise nobody's going to hate you, the way you were so worried everyone would. Right, my friends?\"\n\n\"I don't hate her,\" Mindreader said with a touch of smugness, admiring her bracelet.\n\n\"How could you keep something like that a secret?\" Fearless demanded.\n\n\"That's not fair!\" Mightyclaws cried. \"She got to grow up in the rainforest, safe and fed and happy, and she gets all our lost powers?\"\n\n\"Ooooo, he's thinking, why couldn't it be ME?\" Mindreader announced gleefully.\n\n\"All right, genius, anyone could guess that,\" Fearless snapped at her. \"Does your mother know?\" she asked Moon. \"I'm assuming yes, since lying apparently runs in your family.\"\n\n\"How could I tell anyone when I knew you'd react this way?\" Moon confronted her. \"Exactly the way I expected?\"\n\n\"Hey now, hey now,\" Darkstalker said. He reached out with one massive talon and nudged Fearless back a few paces, away from Moon. \"That's right, I forgot one little step. Sorry, Moon.\" He turned to Mightyclaws and tapped the miniature diamond stud embedded in the dragonet's earlobe. It was so small that for a long time Turtle had thought it was a tiny silver scale, but now he could see that it was an earring.\n\n\"Tell me, Mightyclaws, if you could have any power, what would you choose?\" Darkstalker asked.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Moon said warily. \"Shouldn't you be thinking about your soul?\"\n\n\"All taken care of,\" Darkstalker said, waving one of his wings at her. \"Right, little princess?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Anemone flared her wings and looked imperious. \"So you can quit acting like you know everything, Moon. Darkstalker and I are just fine.\"\n\nMoon gave her a puzzled sideways look.\n\n\"So, Mightyclaws.\" Darkstalker's eyes glittered at the young NightWing. \"What do you think? Any power at all.\"\n\n\"I guess \u2026 prophecy?\" he said. \"I mean \u2026 to be different from Mindreader.\"\n\n\"You're thinking too small.\" Darkstalker grinned with all his teeth. \"Don't limit yourself to traditional NightWing powers. What if you could do anything? Any power you can imagine!\"\n\n\"Oh, Darkstalker,\" Moon said, starting to pace up and down the cave. \"I'm really not sure about this.\"\n\n\"Oooo, she's imagining all sorts of terrible things!\" Mindreader reported enthusiastically.\n\n\"Shouldn't we check with Sunny or Tsunami or Queen Glory, at least?\" Moon asked.\n\n\"Do you think they'd really stop me from improving these dragons' lives?\" Darkstalker asked. \"Look how happy Mindreader is now.\"\n\n\"Yes \u2026 but \u2026\" Moon trailed off.\n\n\"But you want all the power for yourself, is that it?\" Mightyclaws asked, lashing his tail. \"You don't like the idea of other dragons being special, too?\"\n\n\"Powers like these can be hard to live with,\" Moon said fiercely. \"I'm just worried for you all.\"\n\n\"I'll take yours if you want to give them up,\" Mightyclaws suggested.\n\n\"Me too!\" Anemone said. \"Ooo, then I'd be just like Darkstalker!\"\n\n\"Moon is sensible to worry,\" Darkstalker said soothingly, \"but luckily I am here to make sure everything turns out fine. Mightyclaws, what have you decided?\"\n\n\"And me?\" Fearless interjected. \"Am I getting a power, too?\"\n\n\"Do you have anything to enchant?\" Darkstalker asked, looking her up and down.\n\n\"I will!\" Fearless whirled and ran out of the cave.\n\n\"I have one idea,\" Mightyclaws said hesitantly. \"But it might be stupid.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" said Darkstalker. \"I can see what you're thinking. It's very creative.\"\n\n\"What?\" Anemone demanded. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"I don't get it,\" said Mindreader. \"He wants to draw things and then make them real?\"\n\n\"Like, if I draw a sword, then I could touch it and it would become a real sword,\" Mightyclaws said, glowing a little with excitement. \"And if I drew a pond, I could touch it and it would become a real pond. Or if I drew a banana, then I could touch it and, and, um \u2026 have a real banana to eat.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's what he really wants,\" Mindreader giggled. \"An endless supply of food.\"\n\n\"Would have been pretty useful back on the volcano,\" Mightyclaws bristled. \"You wouldn't be making fun of me then! You'd be kissing my claws for a banana!\"\n\n\"We don't live on the volcano anymore,\" Mindreader pointed out. \"We live in basically the banana capital of the universe. We don't need a magic banana-maker.\"\n\n\"It's not just for bananas!\" Mightyclaws cried.\n\n\"Well, I think it's extremely clever,\" Darkstalker said, and Mindreader subsided at once. \"Let me think for a moment about how exactly to word the spell.\" He tapped his chin pensively for a few long, silent seconds, and then he touched Mightyclaws' earring again, whispering under his breath.\n\n\"There we go,\" he said.\n\n\"Did it work?\" Mightyclaws asked.\n\n\"Run to the art cave and see,\" Darkstalker suggested.\n\n\"Bring me back a banaaaaaaana!\" Mindreader called after him as Mightyclaws darted away.\n\n\"Darkstalker, why are you doing this?\" Moon asked. She stopped pacing and sat down with her tail around her talons. Turtle wished he were brave enough to stand next to her, taking strength from her strength. He wished she could tell him what to think about any of this. The more he watched Darkstalker, the more confused he felt.\n\nBecause this was a good thing Darkstalker was doing, wasn't it? Giving other dragons powers?\n\nThat's what you want to think, his conscience whispered.\n\n\"Our tribe needs help, Moon,\" Darkstalker said earnestly. \"They've fallen so far. I want to restore them to the powerful tribe I remember, and if I can do that by sharing my gift, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\"Because \u2026 are you sure you won't turn evil?\" Moon asked. \"And these are huge decisions \u2014 shouldn't you think about them a little more?\"\n\n\"I have been thinking about them,\" Darkstalker assured her. \"I've been thinking nonstop since I woke up, and I've checked all the possible futures. This is the best path, believe me. A happy NightWing tribe. Talons of power for everyone!\"\n\n\"Talons of power?\" Moon echoed, her eyes wide. \"Like the prophecy? The whole 'beware' part?\"\n\n\"I'm just joking,\" said Darkstalker. \"Try not to worry so much.\"\n\n\"I'm back!\" Fearless ran into the room, panting. \"I'm here! I have something!\" She thrust out her arm. A pair of silver and black wires had been hastily twisted into a rough bracelet, barely visible on her wrist. She smiled up at Darkstalker in a frighteningly worshipful way.\n\n\"Superstrength, please,\" she said breathlessly.\n\nDarkstalker smiled back at her. \"Anything you wish.\"\n\nHe touched her wrist and muttered something. When he finished, she turned her talon over, then spun around and slammed her tail into a stalagmite. It instantly crumbled into a cascade of tiny rocks.\n\nFearless let out a shriek of delight. \"Did you SEE that?\" she cried.\n\nMindreader toyed with her own bracelet, frowning. \"Well,\" she said. \"It's cool, I suppose, if you like that kind of thing. I mean, a bit obvious, but all right.\"\n\nDarkstalker suddenly sat up, lifting his head as though he could see monsters crawling out of the stalactites. He stared into space for a moment with faraway eyes. The other dragons all held their breath and watched in silence.\n\n\"Did you sense something?\" he said finally, looking down at Moon.\n\nShe shook her head. \"What was it? A vision?\"\n\n\"More of a premonition,\" he said. His expression was troubled \u2014 and if this was an act, Turtle thought, then Darkstalker was really good at it. Even Turtle felt his anxiety jump a few notches higher. \"Someone's in danger. Can you feel it?\"\n\nMoon closed her eyes. Mindreader saw her do it and immediately closed her eyes, too, putting on a deeply pensive look.\n\n\"Hmm, yes,\" said Mindreader, nodding. \"The princess who smells like fish is thinking maybe she should give herself some cool powers like ours. Ha ha, copycat. Oh, and there's Sunny's mind \u2014 coming this way with a squirrel for Darkstalker, wondering what he's found out about Clearsight.\"\n\nTurtle felt a flash of worry that she'd hear his mind, hiding nearby, and give him away. But then he remembered the skyfire, which shielded him from all mind readers. He felt for his armband with a sigh of relief. Only three stones left; the other three holes marked the stones he'd given to Winter, Qibli, and Kinkajou. Would Moon want a stone for herself, now that there were two other mind readers around? Maybe not; he wasn't sure she'd still be able to read other minds if she was holding a skyfire rock.\n\n\"It's Stonemover!\" Moon cried suddenly, her eyes flying open. She leaped to her feet, wings spread wide, and turned toward Sunny as she entered the cave. \"Sunny, your father \u2014 someone's trying to kill him!\"\n\nThere was a sudden rush of wings, like a million seagulls taking flight at once. Sunny, Darkstalker, and Moon dove out into the storm; Anemone pivoted in a circle, as though startled that they'd left without her, then flew after them. Mindreader and Fearless exchanged a glance and finally followed as well.\n\nTurtle hurried out from behind the gong and stood in the cave entrance for a moment, dithering. It would be hard to sneak along behind them; but then, he wanted to know what was happening; on the other talon, it was raining quite a lot; but then again, Qibli had asked him to keep an eye on Darkstalker, so that was really what he had to do, wasn't it?\n\n\"Rrrgh,\" he growled softly, and then he was out in the rain, instantly drenched, flying through flashes of lightning. He chased the dragons around the mountain to the cave Stonemover had chosen to live in for the rest of his life, like a petrified hermit crab.\n\nTurtle had never visited the old NightWing animus during his time at Jade Mountain. He had a weird, irrational fear that the dragon would somehow recognize him as a fellow animus and reveal his secret. Although if he searched deeper, he'd also have to admit that he was afraid of seeing what an animus could become when he used his magic too much.\n\nHe heard Darkstalker roar, angry and earthshaking, sending a slide of rocks clattering down the mountainside. Turtle wobbled down to the ledge outside the cave and slid himself into the very edge of the shadows inside.\n\nHe sucked in a sharp breath as he suddenly realized how close he was to Darkstalker's scales. The enormous dragon filled the mouth of the cave, leaning in toward the others. His smooth ebony side rose and fell only a thin slice of air away from Turtle's nose.\n\nIf I touch him, will he notice me then? Or will he wonder why he can touch something that he cannot see?\n\nTurtle held himself tensely frozen, wings pinned to the wall behind him like stingrays caught on a SeaWing's sharp claws. From his position, he could just see a sliver of the cave beyond: Stonemover's gray, fossilized arm; a tangle of NightWing tails; a pool of blood slowly creeping across the stone floor.\n\n\"Father!\" Sunny cried, was crying, had cried several times over, the word echoing around the cave.\n\n\"Who did this?\" Moon's voice, then a glimpse of her teardrop scales as she turned to Darkstalker. \"You must know.\"\n\n\"He went into the tunnels,\" Darkstalker said, pointing, his wings shifting warm, fire-smelling breath past Turtle's face. \"Otherwise I'd chase him down myself.\"\n\n\"I'll do it!\" Anemone yelped from her spot at Darkstalker's talons. She seized a loose prey bone on the floor. \"Lead me to Stonemover's killer.\"\n\n\"Anemone, no!\" But Sunny was too late; Anemone's pale blue tail flashed a trail through the blood, and she was gone.\n\n\"Why didn't you see this coming?\" Moon asked Darkstalker. \"I thought you could see everything, all the futures.\"\n\n\"There are billions upon billions of futures,\" Darkstalker answered. \"I'm sorry; even I can't study all of them, especially when something small can set off a sharp turn. Sunny, is he still alive? It seems like I can still hear a glimmer of life in his mind.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2014 so can I!\" Moon gasped.\n\n\"Um, yeah, ME TOO,\" Mindreader declared quickly.\n\nDarkstalker squeezed forward another few steps, and as he ducked his head, Turtle could see a slash of dark red beads dripping across Stonemover's neck.\n\nIf Stonemover was still alive \u2014 Turtle's healing rock could save him. This was a wound like Winter's, on the surface, where the enchantment Turtle had crafted so thoughtlessly could actually help.\n\nBut to bring it out now would be suicidal. Not only would everyone discover that Turtle was an animus, but Darkstalker would want to know where the rock came from \u2014 who'd enchanted it, and how he didn't know about it.\n\nNo, there was no way to help. Once again, Turtle had to sit on his claws and do nothing. He had to stay useless if he wanted to stay safe.\n\n\"He's alive,\" Darkstalker said firmly. \"I can save him.\" He reached up and snapped a stalactite off the roof with casual, terrifying strength.\n\n\"But \u2014 you shouldn't \u2014 should you?\" Sunny asked.\n\n\"He's my family, too.\" Darkstalker wrapped his front talons around the spear of rock. \"Enchant this stalactite to heal the wounds of any dragon it touches,\" he said in a deep voice.\n\nA little deeper than necessary, Turtle thought. A little theatrical, let's be honest.\n\nBut it seemed to have the intended effect on the dragons watching. All their eyes followed Darkstalker's movements as he reached down and tapped Stonemover lightly on the chest.\n\nA hushed moment passed, and then Stonemover let out a sigh. The slash of red on his neck knitted together and vanished. He rolled his head back with a groan of pain, opened his eyes, and saw Darkstalker.\n\n\"Hello,\" Darkstalker said. \"You're all right now.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" Stonemover croaked in his dust-covered voice.\n\n\"An ancestor of yours,\" said Darkstalker. \"Returned from the dead. So we have that in common! My name is Darkstalker.\"\n\n\"No,\" whispered Stonemover, his eyes widening.\n\n\"Don't be scared,\" Moon said quickly. \"He's not here to hurt us.\"\n\n\"He saved your life,\" Sunny added. She rested one of her small talons on Stonemover's petrified shoulder, a tiny island of gold among all the black scales in the cave.\n\n\"With magic?\" Stonemover said, sounding half-panicked. \"No. You can't. It's wrong, it's wrong \u2014 my claws! They're not mine!\" His eyes rolled wildly toward his talons and Turtle saw the stone cracking all along his arms, crumbling back to release the scales underneath.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Sunny asked. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"These aren't my claws!\" Stonemover shrieked. \"What are they doing? Stop them! Somebody stop them!\"\n\nBewildered, Sunny pounced on one of his front talons. Darkstalker dropped the stalactite and gently pinned the other.\n\n\"Don't panic,\" he said. \"You've had a shock. Someone tried to kill you, but you're safe now. Your petrified scales are healing, that's all \u2014 you're not used to being able to feel your limbs anymore. In a moment all the rock will be gone and you'll be back to normal.\"\n\n\"They're not mine,\" Stonemover said again, in a low, desperate voice. Tension radiated through his muscles, down his arms to the claws that twitched and twitched, breaking free. \"No. No, I gave mine up. My talons are gone. These are monsters crawling out of the earth and they will rend the sky and crush the wings of small dragons and I can't let them I won't I won't I won't let them be used again!\"\n\nHis voice rose and rose to an agonized roar. The head-splitting sound pounded images of blood and death and slashing claws through Turtle's brain: Do you trust YOUR talons do you trust them do you?\n\n\"Stop him!\" Moon shouted to Darkstalker. \"He's trying to use his magic to hurt himself!\" Mindreader had her talons over her ears and was huddled in a ball on the cave floor.\n\nDarkstalker took Stonemover's head in his claws and forced the roaring dragon to meet his gaze. \"CALM DOWN,\" he said in a voice that shook the mountain.\n\nStonemover's voice dropped away. He stared back at Darkstalker.\n\n\"I'm healing you,\" Darkstalker said. \"That's all.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Stonemover whispered. \"It's not safe.\"\n\n\"You don't have to punish yourself for being an animus.\" Darkstalker flicked his tail, frowning. \"You're allowed to be whole, to be happy.\"\n\nI agree with Darkstalker, Turtle thought. Is that a bad sign?\n\nI don't want to spend my life in terror of my powers. I want to be happy, too.\n\nDoes that mean I'm in danger of turning out like Darkstalker? Would I rather end up like him or Stonemover?\n\nHe couldn't imagine willingly fossilizing himself \u2026 but he looked down at his clenched talons and wondered what he would do to stop them from hurting anyone. Did Stonemover have flashes of blood and screaming in his head, too, before he cast his spell?\n\nStonemover rolled his eyes toward his tail, where more rock was crumbling away. \"I can't be free,\" he said. \"I don't know what I might do. Cage me again. Leave me in stone. It's the only way to be safe.\"\n\n\"He means it,\" Moon said to Darkstalker. She edged around the pool of blood to catch some of the falling pebbles from the old dragon's wings. \"He's terrified of his power, of his own claws, of any dark magic. His mind is shredding itself to pieces.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and it's giving me the worst headache,\" Mindreader complained.\n\n\"All this fear,\" Darkstalker said with a sigh. \"I've seen it before.\" He brightened. \"Maybe I can fix it! The right spell could take away all his worry \u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" Sunny and Stonemover said at the same time, looking equally alarmed.\n\n\"No spells on my brain,\" Stonemover said, his voice rising toward panic again.\n\n\"Why not?\" Darkstalker asked with genuine bewilderment. \"If it would make you happier?\" He turned to Moon. \"Isn't it all right to make other dragons happier, if you can?\"\n\n\"Not if they don't want you to,\" she said gently.\n\n\"But they should want me to,\" he said. \"It makes no sense.\" He lifted his wings in a shrug that nearly whacked Turtle in the nose. \"Fine, all right, I'll leave him in his misery.\"\n\n\"And put me back the way I was,\" Stonemover asked, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes.\n\n\"Dragons who wallow in their own tragedy,\" Darkstalker muttered. \"So pointless.\" He scooped up a talonful of rocks and crushed it in his claws, then blew the stone dust all over Stonemover's wings, tail, and arms. A moment later, the cold gray of the cave began creeping over Stonemover's scales again, embedding him into the walls and floor once more.\n\n\"There you go,\" Darkstalker said. \"May you always be as thoroughly unhappy as you want to be.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Stonemover whispered, relief printed all over his face.\n\nDarkstalker wrinkled his snout at Moon and she shook her head at him. Turtle wondered if they were communicating telepathically. Did Moon really like Darkstalker?\n\nIf she did \u2026 did that mean Turtle was wrong about him?\n\nHealing Flame, saving Stonemover, protecting Anemone's soul, giving powers to the NightWings. Darkstalker hadn't exactly spent his day spreading evil and doom.\n\nAm I worrying about nothing?\n\nSunny wrapped her arms around her father's neck and hugged him. Blood from the healed wound smeared her scales, but she didn't seem to notice.\n\nA few minutes passed in silence, and then they all heard footsteps coming up through the tunnels. Sunny sat up and arranged her wings as though she was trying to match an image of a queen in her head.\n\n\"I found him,\" Anemone announced, coming into the cave. A dragon edged into the space behind her. The sharp edge of the broken prey bone pressed into the crevice below his jaw, enchanted to threaten him forward.\n\nIt was Flame, guilt and shame written all over his new, perfect face.\n\nSunny stared down at him without comprehension for a long moment, not understanding who he was.\n\n\"Flame?\" Darkstalker said at last. \"Why would you do this?\"\n\n\"Especially when Darkstalker just healed your face!\" said Anemone. \"I thought you'd be dancing and flying around. It's not exactly normal to celebrate by killing some random old dragon.\" She noticed Stonemover's eyes open and jumped back. \"Yikes! And you didn't even do it right! You guys, the fossil is still alive!\"\n\n\"We know,\" Fearless said. \"Darkstalker saved him.\"\n\n\"Flame, why would you do something like this?\" Sunny asked.\n\n\"He lied to me,\" Flame said through clenched teeth. \"He could have healed me, but he chose not to.\"\n\n\"Oh, wow,\" said Mindreader, squinting at Flame. \"Moon, are you hearing this, too? This dragon seriously hates everyone.\"\n\n\"Stay out of my mind!\" Flame shouted at her.\n\nMindreader jerked back with a yelp.\n\n\"But you are healed,\" Sunny said to him wonderingly. \"So why would it matter who did it? Enough to kill someone for it?\"\n\n\"He lied to me,\" Flame growled, sinking closer to the floor.\n\n\"That's an interesting complaint coming from a dragon with his own secrets,\" said Darkstalker. He beckoned with one claw, and Flame's leather pouch ripped free and floated into Darkstalker's talons.\n\n\"Give that back!\" Flame roared, but when he tried to leap forward, Anemone stood in his way, glittering with self-righteousness. The bone pressed itself harder into his neck, conjuring a jeweled drop of blood, and Flame stopped with a gasp of pain.\n\n\"Wow, he is so angry,\" Mindreader reported. \"Oooo, he wants to horribly kill all of us!\"\n\nDarkstalker shook the pouch and caught two objects as they tumbled out:\n\nFlame's library card, and \u2026\n\n\u2026 a blue sapphire, shaped like a long, elegant star.\n\n\"The third dreamvisitor!\" Sunny gasped.\n\n\"That's right,\" said Darkstalker, holding it up to catch the light. \"This is what I've suspected since I first heard Moon's prophecy. Flame is the darkness of dragons \u2026 and he's the stalker of dreams.\"\n\nBeware the darkness of dragons \u2026 beware the stalker of dreams.\n\nA breath of cold air shivered along Turtle's wings. Was Darkstalker right? Was one of the dangers of the prophecy seething under their noses this whole time?\n\n\"I'm not any of that!\" Flame snarled. \"What does that tripe even mean?\"\n\n\"You must have stolen this from Starflight on the NightWing island,\" Sunny said, pointing to the dreamvisitor. \"But how did you hide it all this time? While you were injured and everything?\"\n\n\"I had help,\" spat Flame. \"Idiot help, but that's all I had to work with.\"\n\n\"He's thinking about a dragon with a weird name. Ogre? Okra?\" mused Mindreader. \"Who he also hates, by the way.\"\n\n\"Stop sticking your snout in my brain,\" Flame hissed. \"Or I'll slice it off.\"\n\n\"I wish I could,\" flared Mindreader. \"You're a miserable dragon and your thoughts are like nasty boiling tar.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do with you?\" Sunny asked Flame. \"I'll have to tell Queen Ruby what you did \u2026 but until she sends someone for you, it's not like we have somewhere to lock you up.\"\n\n\"Really? What kind of respectable school doesn't have a dungeon?\" Darkstalker asked. Fearless and Mindreader turned toward him with wide eyes, and he chuckled. \"I'm just kidding. Sunny, I can take care of this for you.\"\n\n\"How, exactly?\" she asked warily.\n\nDarkstalker took Flame's library card and touched it to one of Flame's front talons. Instantly it flipped over and outward, transforming into an iron band that clamped around Flame's forearm. A thick metal chain sprouted from the band like a coiling snake. It plunged into the rock, trapping Flame in place.\n\nFlame roared his fury, but he couldn't move, couldn't reach any of the throats he was clawing for.\n\n\"There,\" Darkstalker said. \"He's not going anywhere now.\"\n\nHe backed out of the cave. Turtle pressed himself tightly against the wall, closing his eyes, as the mass of ebony scales rippled by. Giant claws scraped the stone perilously close to his own pitifully small webbed talons.\n\nSunny circled Flame, her expression uncertain, until she noticed that she was leaving tracks of Stonemover's blood across the floor. With a sigh, she bowed her head and slipped away into the tunnels.\n\n\"That was awesome!\" Anemone danced out of the cave and spread her wings, looking up at Darkstalker where he stood in the rain. If she noticed Turtle as she went by him, she didn't acknowledge his presence. \"Let's solve some more mysteries! Catch some more bad guys! Be even more awesome!\"\n\n\"You should have an early night,\" Darkstalker said to her. He swept his wings toward Mindreader and Fearless, who were huddled under the cave overhang looking severely displeased about the weather. \"You all should, because tomorrow we're going to the rainforest, and it's a long flight. Moon!\" he called as she slipped out of the cave. \"Come flying with me!\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"Qibli and I told Starflight we'd help him clean up the library and look for more scrolls for you. Maybe later?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Darkstalker said. \"No problem.\" He watched her fly away, raindrops slithering down his sides. His expression reminded Turtle of someone, but he couldn't think who.\n\n\"I'll go flying with you!\" Anemone chirped. \"I'm way more interesting than Moon and I'm not tired!\"\n\n\"You will be tomorrow,\" Darkstalker said. \"And we're not stopping on the way to the rainforest. Thank you, Princess, but I'll be fine by myself tonight.\" He spread his wings, and Turtle realized who Darkstalker had reminded him of: the soldiers in the garden of the wounded. The ones who couldn't swim anymore, who'd lost a tail or a limb or a wing and didn't quite know yet how to go on living without them.\n\nThat was the expression he'd glimpsed, very briefly, on Darkstalker's face.\n\nThe enormous NightWing turned and flew away, higher and higher into the gray, glowering clouds until the storm seemed to melt into his scales and swallow him whole.\n\nTurtle thought about following him, but his wings felt coated in thick sand. He hadn't slept all night, and he'd spent the entire day before flying across the continent as fast as he could. His fear of Darkstalker had kept him awake for most of the day, but now his eyes were desperate for sleep.\n\nHe hasn't done anything terrible yet, he told himself as he flew back to the entrance hall. And I have to sleep sometime. He dragged his tail through the tunnels. I can't watch him every second of his life forever.\n\nHe paused in the doorway to his own sleeping cave.\n\nIt was so empty. Like a giant, hollowed-out oyster shell, the walls rose around him, bare and scraped of all life.\n\nIn the Kingdom of the Sea, the sons of Queen Coral were almost always together \u2014 they shared rooms, classes, prey. They filled the palaces with their wrestling matches and shouting games.\n\nSo when one of them did something wrong \u2014 and if someone was paying attention to them long enough to notice \u2014 their punishment was almost always isolation.\n\nSometimes it was imposed from above, by someone like their uncle Shark or cousin Moray. Sometimes it came from within, when the brothers banded together to exile one of their own.\n\nTurtle's punishment for failing his father was chosen and carried out by his own brothers. The older ones caught wind of the news that Gill was furious about something, and they finally pried the whole story out of Octopus and Cerulean. Turtle was shut out completely for a month. Nobody spoke to him. He was left to sleep in an empty room, and his brothers all behaved as though he didn't exist.\n\nTurtle had felt his sense of dragonhood drifting away, dissolving into the ocean like a mist of ink. If no one could see you, were you real? If no one spoke to you, how long could you go on existing before disappearing completely?\n\nWhich was why he'd finally used his magic on them. An enchanted seagull egg, cracked into their fish stew one night, and forgiveness was suddenly his.\n\nBut it left him with an unshakeable sense of doubt. Would they ever have forgiven him on their own? Or would he have been alone forever?\n\nHe knew he hadn't earned it, this beguiled friendliness, this false tide of mercy that had washed away his sins.\n\nEmpty caves always reminded him of that feeling \u2014 first the loneliness, and then the guilt. He'd had trouble sleeping in his school cave ever since his clawmate Umber had run away with Sora. Umber had all the warmth and energy that Turtle didn't have, and as a MudWing, he needed brothers and sisters around him, too. From the first night, they had dragged their reed mats together and slept back to back, feeling as if the world was really still there as long as there were other scales close by.\n\nUmber had felt like a new brother right away. Turtle missed him.\n\nHe glanced along the hall, then slipped quietly down to Qibli and Winter's room.\n\nIt looked a lot bigger without Winter's scavenger cage taking up half the space. Winter was tinkering with a new wire construction, muttering, while Qibli sat curled on a ledge, surrounded by scrolls, a pensive look in his black eyes.\n\n\"Hey,\" Turtle said, poking his head inside. \"Can I sleep in here tonight?\"\n\nQibli snapped back to the world immediately. \"Of course!\" He jumped off the ledge and hurried over to Turtle.\n\n\"Oh, hello, yes, there is another dragon in here,\" Winter observed. \"I wonder if HE has an opinion about extra snoring in his sleeping cave.\"\n\n\"What's happened?\" Qibli asked Turtle, ignoring his clawmate. \"What have you seen?\"\n\n\"Not much,\" Turtle said. \"Darkstalker's been really quiet all day. He read a bunch of scrolls, fixed Flame's face, made talismans to protect his soul and Anemone's, and then gave powers to the NightWing students. And then Flame tried to kill Stonemover and \u2014\"\n\n\"Wait, whoa,\" said Qibli. \"That doesn't sound like not much. Start from the beginning.\"\n\nSo Turtle told him and Winter as much as he could about Darkstalker's activities that day. Both dragons looked horrified when they heard what happened to Stonemover, but Winter seemed even more horrified by the news that Darkstalker was handing out superpowers to the NightWings.\n\nWinter threw his silver-blue wings up in the air. \"We only just found out that those powers were fake \u2014 and now they're real again?\"\n\n\"You don't have to worry, though,\" Turtle reminded him. \"You still have the skyfire, so no one can read your mind.\"\n\n\"I can be a little worried about superstrength,\" Winter growled. \"And whatever that other one can do.\"\n\n\"Make bananas,\" Qibli filled in. \"Absolutely terrifying. Run for your life.\"\n\nWinter narrowed his eyes at his clawmate.\n\n\"So what is Darkstalker up to?\" Qibli said thoughtfully. \"What does he want?\n\n\"Seems obvious to those of us whose brains work,\" Winter snapped at him. \"He wants to make friends and help dragons.\"\n\n\"That is what it looks like,\" said Turtle. \"It's really confusing \u2026 he's only done good things all day.\"\n\n\"As far as we can see,\" Qibli pointed out. \"We don't know what he might be doing in secret. That being the entire point of secrecy.\"\n\n\"Why do you have to be so suspicious?\" Winter flared. \"Darkstalker is the one who saved Stonemover! He's a good dragon with a good heart!\"\n\n\"Also that,\" said Qibli. \"Does that sound like our Winter at all? Remember yesterday when he was yelling at Moon about how you could never trust Darkstalker? Wouldn't he normally be more suspicious than anyone else?\"\n\n\"I've changed and grown!\" Winter protested. \"I'm a much more open-minded dragon since my parents decided to sacrifice my life in exchange for my brother's place on a wall.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you are, Winter, but still \u2026\" Qibli spread his front talons. \"Listen, I'm just picturing myself as Darkstalker, right? So I pop out of a mountain, and yikes, here's a fierce, smart, excessively shiny IceWing prince with an ego the size of an iceberg and a million potential great futures. I'm pretty sure I'd think, hmm, that dragon could be a serious threat. And then I'd think, first thing I'd better do is neutralize you. I'm just wondering if that's what he did.\"\n\nWinter fluffed his wings as though he wasn't sure whether to be flattered or offended. \"Well, stop wondering. I would know if I was under a spell.\"\n\n\"Right. Of course,\" said Qibli. \"With your \u2026 magic IceWing brain? How exactly would you know, Lord Genius?\"\n\n\"I don't have to stay and listen to this,\" Winter said, flouncing out of the cave.\n\nQibli poked his head out the door to watch until Winter was gone, then came back inside and sat down in front of Turtle with a rueful expression. \"I have a really bad feeling that he's gone to tell Darkstalker about this conversation.\"\n\n\"He can't tell him about me, though,\" said Turtle. \"Or if he does, Darkstalker won't hear it. My enchantment hides me completely from him.\" I hope. I hope I hope I hope. If I did it right. Which seems unlikely, knowing me. Ack.\n\n\"That's clever,\" said Qibli. \"How did you think of that?\"\n\n\"I used this brainstorming method called pure terror,\" Turtle admitted. \"It wasn't so much clever as deeply cowardly.\"\n\n\"How does your soul feel?\"\n\n\"Like it's still there,\" Turtle said with a shrug. He wasn't going to talk about the flashes of screaming Chameleon in his head. Or the way his heart sped up when he thought about how he'd do the same thing again to anyone else who hurt Kinkajou.\n\n\"Would you be willing to do a couple more spells?\" Qibli asked. \"If I had any powers of my own, I wouldn't ask \u2026\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Turtle. \"I mean, yes, I suppose so. The problem is I don't know what. I've been thinking about it all day. I should be able to do something useful, shouldn't I? If I can just figure out the exact right thing. Peril wanted me to kill Darkstalker, but I don't think that's possible, and I'm just \u2026 not the kind of dragon who kills other dragons. I don't want to be.\"\n\nThe flashes again; the enchanted scroll case smashing into Chameleon's face, the blood flying. The power tingling in Turtle's claws. The power to punish those who deserved punishing. The power to cause violence with a twitch of one talon.\n\nNo. No, no, no, that's not me.\n\n\"Plus what if he actually is good?\" he hurried on, pushing the images away. \"Winter's not the only one who thinks so \u2014 Peril does and I think Moon does, too. Then it would be really wrong to kill him. So then I wondered if I should do something to protect Anemone from him, right? Just in case? But I don't want to do anything he might notice. You know? That's the most important thing. I don't want him to suspect there's another animus out here. Just in case he's evil. I don't want him to have any clues that I exist.\"\n\nHe shifted his tail, thinking of all the heroes his mother had ever written about, and how none of them would have ever said anything like that.\n\n\"I understand,\" said Qibli. He took a deep breath. \"This is something small. I was hoping you could tell me if there's a spell on me.\"\n\n\"On you?\" Turtle said, startled.\n\n\"Remember that little fight I just had with Winter?\" Qibli said wryly. \"Applies to me, too. The thing that bothers me is, I like Darkstalker. He's funny and charming and he does seem helpful and he acts like I'm an important, valuable dragon. Why aren't I more suspicious? I can think logically of all these doubts and worries, but none of them seem to change the way I feel. And that makes me crazy, because I've always trusted my mind to figure things out for me when my gut is wrong.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Turtle. \"But the spell might not be on you. It might be on something else, like the earring Darkstalker is wearing, and it might apply to everyone around him.\"\n\nQibli frowned. \"I hadn't thought of that.\" He tapped his claws. \"Then what else can we do? Could you \u2014\" He hesitated. \"You probably wouldn't want to do this.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nQibli traced a crack in the cave wall with one of his claws. \"Could \u2026 could you turn me into an animus dragon, too?\"\n\nTurtle's stomach gave a guilty lurch. \"I shouldn't,\" he said. \"You wouldn't want that. You think you do, but you really don't.\"\n\n\"I'd be careful,\" Qibli insisted. \"I'd protect my soul first thing, I promise. For my very first spell, I'd enchant something to make sure my soul was always good, or that I always made the kind and right choice that helped the most dragons. Doesn't that make sense?\" He looked down at his claws. \"That's what I would have done with Darkstalker's scroll, too. In case you were wondering.\"\n\nTurtle remembered the fight Winter and Qibli had had, over who could keep Darkstalker's scroll and use it for themselves. It had scared him \u2014 but not as much as Darkstalker did. What would the world look like if either Winter or Qibli now had all this power instead?\n\n\"I believe you,\" he said, \"but I still don't think it's a good idea.\" Making him an animus would put Qibli in danger in too many ways. Turtle would always feel responsible for whatever happened to him.\n\n\"Sure, that's all right,\" Qibli said quickly. \"Sorry I asked. I'd probably feel weird about making more animus dragons if I were one, too.\"\n\n\"It's not \u2014\" Turtle started. \"I mean, it's not you. I'm not trying to \u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Qibli said, fiddling with his earring. \"Maybe something else would make more sense anyway. Can you make me immune to animus spells?\"\n\nIt was strange to be discussing his power openly with another dragon. Strange to be taking someone's advice, and to know that the other dragon would never be able to stop wanting things from him, even if it was a friend like Qibli.\n\n\"All animus spells?\" asked Turtle. \"Are you sure? I mean, some spells are good, aren't they? Like my healing rock, or the dreamvisitors \u2014 being immune means those wouldn't work on you anymore. And if you're completely immune, then an animus couldn't even change you back if you changed your mind.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" said Qibli. \"What if you just made me immune to Darkstalker's spells, then?\"\n\n\"Don't you think he'd notice?\" Turtle fretted. \"If he suddenly couldn't control you, or he tried to cast a spell and you didn't react \u2026 he'd get really suspicious, wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"I'll take that risk,\" Qibli said. He tapped his claws against the floor in a nervous drumbeat rhythm. \"As long as he can't use magic against me, I can handle anything else he does.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Turtle said, feeling like even more of an inchworm. \"I meant \u2014 yes, of course, suspicious of you, too, but then he'd know it's a spell, and that could lead him to me. Which \u2026 I guess I'm not sure I can handle anything else he does.\"\n\nQibli picked up a scroll that had rolled across the cavern and tucked it back into one of the racks by the door. \"You are some kind of worrying expert, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Turtle said, his wings drooping. \"I'm sorry. I like to think through everything as much as possible before making any big decisions.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Qibli reassured him. \"It's smart. As long as you can also make decisions even when there's not enough time to think about them.\"\n\nTurtle didn't like that idea. It gave him a scrunching feeling in his chest.\n\n\"Listen, Turtle, it's your magic. You're the boss of whether you want to use it. But I look at Winter and I think, that is NOT the normal behavior of Her Majesty Queen Glacier's nephew. And then I think, what about me? What if I'm acting like a hallucinating sunbaked lizard and I have no idea?\"\n\n\"You seem normal to me,\" Turtle said. \"Does that help?\"\n\nQibli shrugged and turned away, rolling up another scroll. \"I need to know my mind is my own. That's all. It's all I have. No superpowers, no firescales, no royal family. Just me and my brain, if it's working.\"\n\nI am the lowest of cowards. How can I say no to the one dragon who's still willing to think twice about Darkstalker? To my friend, who needs protection?\n\n\"I'll do it,\" Turtle said. \"Of course I will. Immune to Darkstalker's spells \u2014 that's what you want?\"\n\n\"Really?\" Qibli said, his face alight. \"Yes! That would be amazing. Here, enchant my earring.\" He took it off and dropped the small gold and amber earring into Turtle's palm. \"Do you know what you're going to say? Want me to write down some ideas?\" He seized a scroll and a pot of ink before Turtle could answer and started scribbling on a blank corner.\n\n\"If this works,\" he went on, \"we could do a spell like this for Winter, too, couldn't we?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Turtle said uncomfortably. Here I go again. Helping my friends, which could mean getting noticed, which will surely lead to getting caught and slowly dismembered by a giant nightmare dragon from the past.\n\nThere weren't any stories in the scrolls like this. He didn't know quite what role Qibli saw Turtle playing. Helpful wizard? Those often died by the end, too. Or maybe in Qibli's story, Turtle was the enchanted fish who granted three wishes if you caught him. You've got two left, Qibli, Turtle thought wryly. Then I think I turn your nose into a sausage and escape back into the sea.\n\n\"Wait,\" Qibli said, lifting his ink-stained claw from the scroll. \"Have you made something to protect your soul yet?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 no,\" Turtle said. \"I mean, I think it's fine.\"\n\n\"You should do that first,\" Qibli said. He started absentmindedly drawing a series of concentric circles around the words he'd written on the scroll. \"Something like what Darkstalker and Anemone have. That's more important than this.\"\n\n\"Let's do this first,\" Turtle said, reaching for the scroll. \"Since it's all ready to go. It could take me all night to decide how to do the soul spell.\" He tried to return Qibli's grin.\n\n\"If you're sure \u2026\" Qibli said. \"And you're feeling totally nonviolent \u2026\"\n\nTurtle read the words carefully a few times, then focused on the small amber teardrop in his palm, glowing like sunlight against the dark green. \"Enchant this earring to make the wearer immune to any spell Darkstalker has cast or will cast, whether past, present or future.\"\n\nQibli inspected the earring like a poorly drawn map, then picked it up between two claws to squint at it. \"I thought it would get all sparkly or something,\" he said.\n\n\"See if it makes you feel any different,\" Turtle suggested.\n\nThe SandWing slipped it back through the hole in his ear and blinked a few times. \"Huh,\" he said. \"I think so.\"\n\n\"You think so?\" Turtle echoed, somewhat disappointed. If he was going to use his magic, he wanted it to make a big obvious cool helpful difference.\n\nQibli started pacing, tipping his head from side to side as though he was resettling everything inside his skull. \"Let's see. I still think Darkstalker is funny and charming. But I definitely feel more anxious about that. There was this calm trusting feeling I had before, and that's vanished.\"\n\n\"Could be a coincidence,\" Turtle observed. \"Like, all psychological.\"\n\n\"No.\" Qibli stopped in front of him and met Turtle's eyes. \"I feel like my mind and my instincts are linked up again. Which is really important to me. Thank you.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" Turtle said. This didn't seem like a particularly useful use of his magic, honestly. He guessed Qibli hadn't been under a spell at all. Darkstalker was charming and convincing enough to win everyone over without magic.\n\n\"I can help you figure out your soul spell!\" Qibli offered. \"I know how I'd phrase mine, if I could protect my soul with magic.\"\n\n\"You've thought about it that much?\" asked Turtle. \"When have you ever had to worry about your soul? Aren't you one of those naturally heroic dragons?\"\n\nQibli let out a startled laugh. \"No way,\" he said. \"I grew up in the Scorpion Den, remember? I was stealing before I could fly. My mother was an assassin who tried to teach me garroting and poisons instead of reading and writing. I've done lots of bad things, and the problem is, I know I'd do more if it was for \u2014 for, um, Queen Thorn.\"\n\n\"I guess I could make you a soul spell, too,\" Turtle offered, trying to hide his reluctance. What was wrong with him? Darkstalker was giving out powers all over the place, helping other dragons he barely knew. Why couldn't Turtle be equally willing to share with his closest friends?\n\nWas it just that he was afraid of being exposed? Or was he worried about how the magic might affect his friends?\n\n\"Thanks,\" Qibli said, pinning down the scroll he'd been writing on. \"But let's make sure yours is safe first.\"\n\nMaybe that's it, Turtle thought anxiously. Maybe my soul isn't as fine as I think it is. Maybe using my magic has made me selfish and a terrible friend.\n\nQibli blew a small flame on the corner where he'd written the first spell. As it burned away, he checked the other side of the scroll and made a face.\n\n\"I probably shouldn't have used my history reading for this,\" he said. \"Well, too late now! It was really boring anyway. All right, one soul spell, coming right \u2014\"\n\nA sudden thud from above shook the caves. Qibli and Turtle looked up, then at each other as more thuds followed, and then the scraping of scales and claws against rock echoed down the tunnels.\n\n\"What is \u2014\" Qibli started toward the door, but before he could get there, black scales blotted out the fire globes and Darkstalker was squeezing his head and shoulders through the narrow space to peer into Qibli's room.\n\nTurtle scrambled to the back wall, as far away as he could get. Why is he here? WHY IS HE HERE? It took all his willpower not to close his eyes and curl up completely. He stood perfectly still as Darkstalker's sharp gaze scoured the cave.\n\n\"That looks uncomfortable,\" Qibli said to Darkstalker in a friendly voice. \"I can't believe you squashed yourself into our tunnels.\"\n\n\"Not a problem,\" Darkstalker said, a bit breathlessly. \"I'm surprisingly squishy.\" He grinned at Qibli, but there was something a little forced about his smile. \"This is your cave? I thought it might be Anemone's. What were you just doing in here?\"\n\n\"Looking at scrolls,\" Qibli said, waving at the ripples of paper that covered his sleeping ledge. \"Trying to figure out if I should bother studying. Accidentally setting history on fire. The usual.\" He waved at the thin trail of smoke that was still rising from the scroll on the floor.\n\nDarkstalker studied each outcropping, each shadow with such slicing intensity that Turtle was sure he'd be seen, and not just seen, but peeled and flayed from horns to tail by those searching eyes.\n\n\"Is something wrong?\" Qibli asked.\n\n\"Was Anemone in here a moment ago?\" Darkstalker asked.\n\n\"No,\" Qibli said cautiously. \"I haven't seen her.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Darkstalker demanded. \"Or maybe passing by? She might have been talking to herself or doing something unusual?\"\n\nA lightning bolt of fear scorched through Turtle's body.\n\nThe spell on Qibli's earring. Darkstalker showing up only moments later, asking about Anemone.\n\nHe was looking for the source of a spell. Somehow he knew magic had happened here, and he came immediately to find out what Anemone was up to.\n\nDarkstalker's given himself the power to sense animus magic.\n\nIf Darkstalker can tell when an animus casts a spell, Turtle realized, his heart floundering wildly around in his chest, then I can never use my magic again.\n\nTurtle couldn't tell from Qibli's expression whether he'd figured it out as well. But then Qibli said, \"Oh, Anemone \u2014 yeah, she might have gone by a little while ago. I'm not totally sure,\" and Turtle knew that he must have made the same connections.\n\n\"Interesting,\" Darkstalker mused. \"If you see her, please tell her I wish to speak with her as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Qibli. \"You bet. I'll do that.\"\n\nDarkstalker gave him another appraising look. \"Qibli,\" he said, \"please order that scroll to roll itself up.\"\n\nQibli laughed. \"Don't you think I've spent my whole life hoping magic would suddenly pop out of my claws?\" he said. \"Hey, scroll, roll yourself up.\" The scroll lay there, inert and uninteresting. Qibli shrugged at Darkstalker. \"Disappointed again.\"\n\n\"I think that's for the best,\" Darkstalker said, smiling at him a bit more genuinely. \"With your mind, you'd be a very formidable animus.\" He backed out of the cave. \"See you in the morning.\"\n\n\"You too,\" Qibli answered. Darkstalker disappeared down the hall, with the sound of scraping scales jittering through the walls behind him.\n\n\"He knew,\" Turtle whispered \u2014 not because Darkstalker might hear him, but because his voice didn't quite seem to be working the way it should. \"He knows when someone is using animus magic. He must have enchanted something to warn him.\"\n\nQibli waited until the vibrations of Darkstalker's passage had faded away. \"Lucky you cast your hiding spell before he did that.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Turtle said fervently.\n\n\"You're also lucky he didn't cast the enchantment to tell him exactly what the spell was,\" Qibli mused. \"That's what I would have done. But he didn't act like he knew what we did.\"\n\nTurtle couldn't speak for a moment, he was so appalled. He'd come so close to getting caught! In a way he hadn't even imagined worrying about! What other spells did Darkstalker have in place that might tangle him up?\n\n\"Now I can't use my magic anymore!\" he finally managed to say. \"Or else he'll figure out I'm out here, hiding from him.\"\n\n\"His spell seems to be location-based,\" Qibli pointed out. \"Maybe if you were standing near Anemone or Stonemover when you cast it, he'd think it came from one of them.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but then wouldn't he ask them what spell they just cast? And if they say they didn't use their magic, what then? Would he think they're lying? I don't want him to think Anemone is secretly using her magic, maybe against him.\" He worried the edge of a wing between his claws. \"I don't want to get her in trouble. I don't want him to blame her for what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" said Qibli. \"Yeah, that could be bad.\"\n\n\"Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh,\" Turtle groaned, lying down and covering his head with his wings.\n\n\"Look, I know it's terrible, but it's smart, too,\" said Qibli. \"If you got trapped underground by an animus spell, wouldn't you want to keep a pretty close eye on any new spells after you got out? He's not going to let himself be fooled again. I'm sorry you didn't get to cast a spell to protect your soul, though.\"\n\n\"I'm going home,\" Turtle said, leaping up and whirling toward the door. \"I'm going back to the Kingdom of the Sea to hide in the Deep Palace. He can't follow me there. Unless he can! He could enchant something to let him breathe underwater. Or something to make the entire ocean evaporate! HE COULD DO ANYTHING.\"\n\n\"Moons above, stop panicking!\" Qibli jumped in Turtle's way. \"It's not the end of the world. This doesn't prove he's evil. All we know for sure is he's protecting himself. So we keep watching him like you have been.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Turtle said. \"He's going to the rainforest tomorrow with the other NightWings.\"\n\n\"All the NightWings?\" Qibli asked. \"Including Moon?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Turtle answered. \"I think so.\"\n\nQibli thought for a moment, drumming his claws again. \"I don't have a good excuse to go along with them,\" he said. \"It'll have to be you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Turtle said, startled. \"You mean follow him to the rainforest?\"\n\n\"So we can see what he does next,\" Qibli said. \"I can watch things here \u2014 you know, keep an eye out for any thunder and ice coming to destroy the school. Then we'll report back to each other and see what we think. If only we had a dreamvisitor, too, so we can send each other messages \u2026 maybe Sunny would let me use hers \u2026\"\n\nOh, Turtle realized. I'm not his enchanted fish. He thinks we're in some kind of detective team story. Solving crimes together; investigating strange behavior. Or maybe I'm his sidekick. But the sidekick doesn't get sent on the crazy dangerous mission alone, does he?\n\nHe was dangerously tempted by this vision. In detective stories, it was all right for one of the partners to be incompetent and unreliable, because the other one would make up for it. In that kind of story, Turtle's character wouldn't have to make all the decisions. No one would be waiting for him to save the day.\n\nThat was the kind of story he might actually survive.\n\n\"I might have something we could use,\" he said hesitantly.\n\nHe checked and triple-checked that Darkstalker was long gone from the hallways, then led Qibli back to his own lonely cave. Tucked under his woven-reed sleeping mat was the small satchel of belongings he'd brought to the school \u2014 a significantly lighter burden than Anemone's sparkle extravaganza.\n\nTurtle tugged it out and shook the contents onto the floor.\n\nA broken piece of coral. A pair of small, cracked writing slates with a slate pencil. Three pieces of curved wood that slotted together to form a weathered, food-stained bowl.\n\nQibli regarded the tiny pile with an extremely polite expression. \"Well,\" he said. \"Honestly, I've seen weirder treasure in the Scorpion Den.\"\n\nTurtle checked the corridor again. \"These are the things I've animus-touched,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Oh,\" Qibli said, his eyes alight. \"What do they do? Protect your loved ones from harm? Smite your enemies? Make everybody love you?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026 no,\" Turtle said awkwardly. He touched the coral. \"This one helps me find things I've lost.\" He assembled the bowl and tipped it toward Qibli. \"This doubles the amount of food you put in it \u2014 I just drop it in and say 'twice as much, please!' Then instead of two mussels, I'd have four, or instead of a ladleful of clam soup, I'd have twice that amount \u2014 that kind of thing.\"\n\nQibli tipped his head to the side. \"Aren't you a prince? I thought that meant you'd have plenty of food.\"\n\n\"Well \u2026 yes,\" Turtle admitted. \"But I was still competing with all my brothers for it. And I'd get hungry between meals and wouldn't feel like hunting. You know?\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Qibli. \"What about those?\"\n\nThe slates clattered like falling seashells as Turtle picked them up and passed one to Qibli. \"With these, if you write a note on one, it'll appear on the other.\"\n\nHe took the pencil and wrote \"Hi Qibli\" on the smaller slate. The message appeared simultaneously in his looping, scraggly handwriting on the other slate. When Turtle erased his slate, the message stayed in place on Qibli's.\n\nQibli turned his slate over in his talons, as though he were hoping to discover a better spell on the other side. \"Huh,\" he said.\n\n\"So we can use these to communicate, I think,\" Turtle said. \"I've never used it across a really big distance before. Oh, and it only works one way. But at least I can send you panicked 'help, he's got maaaaarggghh' messages.\"\n\n\"It only works one way?\" Qibli echoed. His face seemed to be struggling with the concept of a world in which amazing magic could be given to a dragon like Turtle instead of him.\n\n\"Well,\" said Turtle, \"yeah. I mean, I never thought I'd use it with anyone else.\"\n\nQibli, to his credit, managed to restrain his reaction to a slow blink. \"Then \u2026 what in the world did you use this for?\"\n\n\"It's a little embarrassing,\" Turtle admitted.\n\nMore embarrassing than a bowl that doubles your royal meals? said Qibli's expression.\n\n\"I used to think I wanted to be a writer,\" Turtle said. \"So sometimes when I was out hunting or training or whatever, I'd have a great idea or think of how I wanted to phrase something, but I'd always forget it by the time I got home. With these, I could take notes on the slate I carried with me, then erase it quick before my brothers saw it \u2014 but the notes would be there waiting on the other slate once I got home.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Qibli said, finally looking sympathetic. \"I had siblings who picked on me, too. A writer! So fancyscales.\"\n\n\"Oh, I gave that up a long time ago.\" Turtle shook his head. \"I wasn't any good anyway.\" He nudged the other items. \"I keep these kind of for sentimental value. I don't use them very much, since I don't want anyone to notice me using them.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Qibli said. He tipped his slate up to the light. \"But this is a great idea. I'll hang on to this one, and you can send me notes on what Darkstalker is doing. Or anytime you need me. Or if Moon needs me. Or anyone, I mean, hypothetically Moon, but anyone. I'll come flying, all right?\"\n\nTurtle nodded. It made him a little nervous to let half of one of his animus-touched objects out of his sight \u2014 what if it fell into the wrong claws? On the other talon, it was reassuring to have someone he could call for help.\n\nI guess I just agreed to follow Darkstalker to the rainforest, he realized.\n\nA clatter of talons came from the hallway, followed by a whooshing sound, a yelp of fury, and the distinct smell of something burning.\n\n\"Think I can guess who that is,\" Qibli said with a grin.\n\nTurtle peeked out the door and found Peril jumping around trying to stomp out a small fire, except every time she touched it the flames got higher. A few sleepy faces peered out from their caves and immediately withdrew when they saw her.\n\n\"Ack!\" she yelped. \"Stop! Buckets of gizzards! Go OUT already!\"\n\n\"Back back back,\" Qibli said, hurrying over and flapping her away with his wings. \"I got it.\" He pulled one of the message chalkboards off the wall and smothered the fire, then trampled out the last few glowing sparks as they tried to scuttle away.\n\n\"WHAT KIND OF JERK leaves scrolls lying around in the HALLWAY where ANYONE COULD SET THEM ON FIRE?\" Peril demanded. \"Someone is TRYING to pick a fight with me, is that it?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 that was my homework,\" mumbled a RainWing nervously from the nearest doorway.\n\n\"Oh,\" Peril said. She drew her wings back in, eyeing the hapless dragonet, who was half her size and a nervous fizzy green color. \"Um.\" She shot a glance at Turtle, of the \"there's a right thing to say here, isn't there?\" variety. \"Well, next time, keep your mess in your own cave, all right?\" she said, with what Turtle knew was about as much gentleness as she could muster.\n\n\"S-s-sorry,\" stammered the RainWing.\n\nTurtle cleared his throat. \"I'm sure Peril is sorry, too,\" he offered.\n\nShe tilted her head at him.\n\n\"For burning up this dragon's homework. Which he probably worked very hard on.\" Turtle tipped his head at the dragonet.\n\n\"Ah, okay, sure,\" Peril said, nodding vigorously. \"I'm sorry your scroll got under my claws and met a fiery end,\" she said to the RainWing. \"On the plus side, at least it was a scroll and not, say, your tail.\"\n\nHe turned an even paler shade of green and vanished into his cave.\n\n\"Good idea!\" she called after him. \"You shouldn't leave tails lying around the hallways either!\"\n\n\"That's our Peril,\" Turtle said to Qibli. \"Spreading a little terror before bedtime.\"\n\n\"Was I?\" she said. \"Hrmph. I thought that was a very nice apology myself.\"\n\nTurtle liked the dragon he was when he was with Peril, although he hadn't quite figured out how their stories fit together. He might be her sidekick, although she wasn't exactly a normal hero. Or he might be her voice of reason, like the dragon assigned to take care of a mad prophet or something.\n\nThe closest parallel he could think of, though, was this scroll he'd once read about a dragonet who'd been lost and raised by a pack of orcas. So when she returned to her tribe, she had to be taught everything about language and relationships and how to interact with other dragons, and occasionally she would have furious fits and bite someone. With Peril, he sometimes felt like that wild dragon's foster brother \u2014 a minor character, but one of the few willing to risk hanging out with her.\n\nHe was pretty sure they were friends, though. Which was crazy; never in a million years would he have guessed that he might end up friends with the SkyWing queen's deadliest weapon.\n\nShe followed him and Qibli back into his sleeping cave, where he hurriedly scooted his sleeping mat to the far end of the room, away from Peril. He could move it to Qibli and Winter's cave later. He packed the smaller slate, the slate pencil, and the coral into his pouch to take with him to the rainforest. The pieces of the bowl were too big to fit, so he repacked them in his satchel and hid it under Umber's sleeping mat.\n\n\"How was your meeting with Clay?\" Qibli asked Peril.\n\n\"Fine!\" she blurted. \"Fine, normal, great, weird, totally fine, why, what did you hear?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all,\" he assured her. \"Just wondering.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said. \"He was very pleased to hear about Quee \u2014 about Scarlet.\" She paused, looking like she'd swallowed an exploding cactus for a moment. \"There was hugging!\" she finally burst out. \"I mean, he gave me a hug. No big deal. Normal stuff, I'm sure. Dragons probably hug you guys all the time.\"\n\nOh, Peril. Turtle kind of wished he could hug her, to let her know he understood.\n\n\"Clay likes you, too,\" Qibli said to Peril.\n\n\"Really?\" Peril glowed like molten glass. \"He does? How do you know?\"\n\n\"I can tell. He just doesn't know quite what to do about it yet,\" Qibli said. \"Give him some time to figure it out. Like, lots and lots and lots of time.\"\n\n\"I have lots and lots of time,\" Peril said, exhaling. \"That's totally all right with me.\" She beamed at Turtle. \"Qibli thinks Clay likes me,\" she said in a loud whisper.\n\n\"I heard.\" Turtle smiled back at her.\n\n\"I was a little worried he'd hate me after I burned the magic scroll and released a giant bad guy,\" Peril admitted, \"but I guess Darkstalker's not bad, so everything's all right?\" She squinted at the items Turtle was packing. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I'm going to follow Darkstalker to the rainforest tomorrow,\" Turtle said. \"Just \u2026 to see what happens.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Peril said, her wings drooping. One of them nearly caught on one of the scroll racks by the door, and Qibli quietly dragged it out of her reach. \"You're leaving?\"\n\n\"Only for a little while. I hope,\" Turtle said. \"I wish you could come with me.\"\n\nPeril held out her front talons. \"I wish I could, too. But no firescales in the rainforest, by order of the queen,\" she said haughtily. \"I'll miss your boring face, though,\" she said to Turtle. \"Not, like, a LOT. But I'll miss it a little bit.\"\n\n\"You won't miss me at all,\" he said. \"You'll have Clay to hang out with.\"\n\n\"True,\" she said. \"True true.\" She tried to squash back her smile, but it kept sneaking out.\n\nI really do wish she could come with me, Turtle thought. Her unpredictable, hilarious company was the only thing that had made him able to leave Jade Mountain in the first place. He'd been able to think of their adventure as her quest to find Scarlet. No pressure on him. Nothing enormously major he could mess up. Nobody expecting anything of him.\n\nNot like tomorrow, when he'd be following Darkstalker to the rainforest alone.\n\nWithout the option of using his magic.\n\nAlone, powerless, useless \u2026 this story couldn't possibly end well.\n\nThe rainforest was an ocean of leaves below Turtle, tossing and rippling in the wind like a dark green sea. A spray of bright yellow birds flew out of it, squawking and diving and looping back down again to sink beneath the surface. But the smell here was nothing like the ocean: wild fruit and monkey droppings, heat and rich dirt, and roots growing in thick tangles in place of fish, salt, wide open air.\n\n\"I have no idea why you decided to come,\" Anemone said, sweeping up on Turtle's left. He started, then glanced around at Darkstalker, but the large dragon was far in the lead, scanning the forest below. Anemone had been so close to him all morning that Turtle hadn't had a chance to speak to her \u2014 or try to convince her not to come.\n\n\"I could say the same about you,\" he pointed out. \"Shouldn't you be in school? Mother wouldn't want you wandering around Pyrrhia like this.\"\n\n\"I can learn far more from Darkstalker than from a crusty old shipwreck like Webs,\" Anemone snorted. \"And Mother doesn't have me on a leash anymore. I can go wherever I like.\"\n\n\"Wasn't Pike worried about you leaving?\" Turtle tried. His pouch thumped lightly against his chest as he twisted in the air to keep Anemone in sight. \"I'm surprised he didn't insist on coming with you, at least.\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't tell him,\" she said, tossing her head. \"He was sleeping outside my cave, which he often does, because he's such a weirdo, and I snuck right past him. Not much of a guard, if that's what he was trying to do! Ha ha!\"\n\nPoor Pike, waking up to find the princess had disappeared on his watch. He'd feel like such a failure. Turtle knew what that was like.\n\n\"But what's your excuse?\" Anemone demanded. \"I thought you were terrified of Darkstalker. You said he doesn't like you, but he never even looks at you.\"\n\n\"I just \u2026 want to see what he does,\" said Turtle. His claws itched to reach for his pouch, to make sure the stick was still there, but he fought back the urge.\n\n\"In case he does something SUPER EVIL?\" Anemone teased, pouncing at him. Turtle flinched away. \"You jellyfish. He's going to rescue his tribe, that's all.\"\n\n\"Queen Glory already rescued his tribe,\" Turtle pointed out. \"They're not on the volcano anymore. They're perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"Right, safe to be the crushed seashells under the talons of the RainWings.\" Anemone rolled her eyes. \"Think about it, big brother. Imagine if Mother died and I was too spineless to take the throne, so all the SeaWings decided to go live in the Mud Kingdom and let Queen Moorhen boss us around. Is that any way for a self-respecting tribe to live?\"\n\nTurtle noticed Fearless listening to them with a scowl on her face. He decided it might be a good idea to change the subject.\n\n\"Did you get in trouble with Darkstalker last night?\" he asked. \"I mean, I heard he was looking for you.\" He needed to know what was going on in Darkstalker's head. Did he suspect there was another animus around?\n\n\"Oh, that was the most ridiculous thing,\" Anemone said with a laugh. \"He asked me if I cast a spell without his permission. I said, 'oh, PERMISSION, is that how this is?' and he said, 'without my brilliant advice, then.' I said I didn't think so, but sometimes I've used my power accidentally without noticing. Like, you'd think an animus would learn not to yell at her stuff, but sometimes I forget and do it anyway. I made a pearl necklace explode that way once. Anyway, no, of course I'm not in trouble! He knows I'm a princess and can do whatever I want.\"\n\nOh, does he? Turtle thought. But he didn't have a chance to respond. Up ahead, Darkstalker shot a burst of flame into the sky and beckoned to Anemone and the NightWings. They darted over to him as though he was the sun and they all wanted to fall into it.\n\n\"Time for our grand entrance!\" Darkstalker announced. He dove into the canopy and the others followed, one by one.\n\nTurtle sighed and flapped along behind them. He wondered what would happen if Anemone figured out that Darkstalker couldn't see or hear Turtle. She tended to accept that the world revolved around her, so it would probably be a while before she noticed.\n\nAnd then \u2026 will I tell her the truth?\n\nHe dropped from the hot-sun sky down and down into dappled green light that reminded him of the Summer Palace, before it was destroyed. Long-limbed creatures of fur flurried out along the branches as he maneuvered carefully between the thick vines and grasping spider webs. The trees were interwoven like living nets, lying in wait for their prey.\n\nFar below them, on the rainforest floor, the entire NightWing tribe was gathered in a clearing, looking up. All around them were grass huts and ramshackle wooden structures, many of them only half built. The scent of crispy boar meat rose from a fire pit that glowed in the center of the village, carefully lined with rocks.\n\nQueen Glory stood on a mahogany platform, facing the tribe. She was the only RainWing present, or at least visible, and her scales were set in an intricate overlapping leaf pattern of bright green, gold, and black. Beside her, as close as her shadow, was a NightWing with a worried expression. Turtle guessed that was Deathbringer, from the stories he'd heard about the young RainWing queen and her loyal, self-appointed bodyguard.\n\nGlory watched Darkstalker descend without a hint of emotion on her face, nor even the slightest color change in her scales. Turtle wondered if she'd ever been afraid of anything in her life.\n\nHe perched on a branch overhead, where the tooth-shaped leaves matched the dark green of his scales. Below, Darkstalker soared down to land next to Glory, instantly dwarfing her and Deathbringer. A muffled gasp rustled through the crowd of NightWings. Deathbringer sidled a step closer to Glory, but the queen herself neither flinched nor moved.\n\nAnemone hovered for a moment at Darkstalker's shoulder, but there was no room on the platform for anyone else. Huffing grumpily, she landed on the ground close by, then spent several minutes pointedly scraping all the muddy leaves out of her little patch of dirt.\n\n\"Darkstalker, I presume,\" said Glory. She nodded to Moon and the other three NightWing dragonets as they slipped into the tribe. Turtle saw each of them find their parents; he saw Moon's mother wrap her wings around her daughter. He saw Mindreader whispering excitedly to a tall male NightWing, holding out her bracelet.\n\n\"I see Sunny used the dreamvisitor to tell you we were coming,\" Darkstalker said. \"Even though I asked her very nicely not to. Interesting.\"\n\n\"The tribe prefers not to be surprised,\" Glory said, indicating the sea of black dragons below them. \"But as you can see, despite your prediction, no one has run away. They chose to be brave, to stand together and face you.\"\n\nThat wasn't entirely accurate; Turtle had seen a few dragons bolt into the forest as Darkstalker flew down. But he didn't blame them, considering Darkstalker had been the tribe's worst nightmare for the last two thousand years. He was amazed so many of them were able to hold their ground. He wondered what Queen Glory had said to them to give them that strength.\n\nDarkstalker smiled his dazzling smile. \"There's no need to be brave,\" he said. \"I'm no monster. The history you've been fed is all a pack of lies.\" He opened his talons palm up toward the tribe, as if revealing all his secrets to them. \"They told you I was evil, that I was about to do terrible things, and that I was locked away to protect you. None of that is true, my fellow NightWings.\n\n\"I had a majestic future planned for our tribe. Power and security and wealth and peace for every dragon. No running, no hiding, no lying or starving or living in fear. But there were dragons who didn't trust my vision for us. They feared what our tribe could become.\"\n\nHe swept one wing open in an arc as though he were flinging diamond dust over the entire crowd. Turtle wondered how much Darkstalker had rehearsed this speech, alone in the dark, deep under layers of rock.\n\n\"I was betrayed on the brink of changing everything.\" Darkstalker took a breath, as if he could feel daggers stabbing into his back. \"Dragons I thought I could trust trapped me underground, where I've been asleep against my will for the last two thousand years. Meanwhile, our tribe fell apart \u2014 lost its power, its home, its position in Pyrrhia. And history scrolls were written about me by deceitful dragons who feared my powers.\n\n\"Am I evil? No. Murderous? Not even remotely. Dangerous? Not to my own tribe, or to my friends.\"\n\nHis eyes went to Moon, and a few other NightWings turned to look at her as well.\n\n\"Here's the real truth. I love our tribe.\" Darkstalker looked alive in a way Turtle hadn't seen yet. He looked \u2026 happy. \"The NightWings were once the most powerful, most respected and creative tribe in Pyrrhia. And I can show you the way to become that tribe again.\"\n\nHe paused, perhaps expecting applause, but the only sound was the wind in the trees and a jaguar roar in the distance.\n\n\"These dragons have been working hard to build their new home,\" Glory said, her calm voice carrying across the clearing. \"They have security and peace here. They are smart, fierce, determined, and full of surprising ideas. They don't need any help to become a great tribe \u2014 they already are one.\"\n\nNow there was a reaction \u2014 a rustling as several NightWings stood up straighter, tipped their wings back, lifted their chins.\n\n\"I'm sure they are,\" said Darkstalker. \"But I know what they could be. I can see the shining future ahead, if everyone follows me.\"\n\n\"Follows you?\" Deathbringer jumped in. Glory gave him a quelling look, but he barreled on. \"Follows you where?\"\n\n\"Back to our old kingdom, of course,\" said Darkstalker. He gazed down at Glory, a slow smile spreading across his face.\n\n\"Queen Glory,\" he said, and there was a lilt to his voice that hinted at how amusing he found that phrase. \"I'm here to challenge you for the throne of the NightWing tribe.\"\n\nTurtle wasn't sure why he was so shocked \u2014 after all, wanting to become king of the NightWings certainly fit in with everything else Darkstalker had done so far. But it still hadn't occurred to him. No tribe had ever had a king in the history of Pyrrhia, as far as Turtle knew. He never could have imagined this scene, or how Queen Glory could suddenly look as though she were made of spun glass.\n\nIf he could be king, then I could be a king, too.\n\nWhere did that thought come from? Turtle would never want to be king in a million years \u2014 and he would never be able to do what it took to become one.\n\nEven after what I did to Chameleon?\n\nHe frowned down at his twitching talons. That was not the real him. These thoughts were not the real him, either.\n\nMoon broke away from her mother and started pushing forward through the crowd.\n\n\"You can't do that,\" Deathbringer spat at Darkstalker. Glory didn't stop him; she was staring at Darkstalker as though he'd upended eighty million words on her head and she was trying to put them in the right order to make a scroll.\n\n\"Why not?\" Darkstalker asked.\n\n\"For one thing, you're male,\" said Deathbringer. \"And for another, you're not royalty, so you have no right to the throne.\"\n\n\"In case you hadn't noticed, she's not exactly of royal NightWing blood either,\" Darkstalker said, flicking his tail at Glory. \"And just because we've never had a king before doesn't mean we shouldn't have one now.\"\n\n\"Pyrrhia has only had queens for the entirety of dragon history,\" said Deathbringer. \"Male dragons cannot rule their tribes. That's just the way it is.\"\n\n\"Things can change,\" Darkstalker said airily. \"We're dragons, not ants. We can do things differently if we choose to.\"\n\nTurtle had a flash of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu and touched his claws to his head. Where had he heard that before? From one of the teachers at Jade Mountain?\n\n\"Darkstalker!\" Moon hissed from the front of the crowd, and he looked down at her. \"What are you doing? You promised not to hurt my friends!\"\n\n\"Feel free to check on your friends,\" said Darkstalker in an unsettlingly gentle voice. \"I'm sure you'll find that they're all safe and perfectly unharmed.\"\n\n\"But Glory's my friend, too,\" Moon said, her voice wobbling. \"I don't want you to kill her.\"\n\nWas that real sympathy in Darkstalker's eyes? \"Oh, Moon,\" he said. \"The truth is you don't want me to kill anybody. And neither do I \u2026 but we are dragons. There's a way these things have to be done.\"\n\n\"I cannot accept your challenge,\" Glory said, and Darkstalker turned back to her, leaving Moon with her talons helplessly outstretched. \"The RainWings need me, too. If I fought you, I'd be putting their tribe and throne at risk.\"\n\n\"Maybe I could be king of both tribes!\" Darkstalker said. \"Ha ha, just a joke. I have no interest in ruling a bunch of snoozy colorful vegetarians.\"\n\nTurtle wasn't sure if he was imagining it, but he thought a few of the NightWings actually looked a bit offended by that comment.\n\n\"There's another alternative,\" Darkstalker went on. \"You could just give me the NightWing throne.\" He shot a glance at Moon, as if to say, Look, I'm making an effort! Now do you approve?\n\n\"That would not be fair to the dragons here who swore loyalty to me,\" said Glory.\n\n\"Well,\" said Darkstalker, \"let's all remember that they had a volcano pointed at their heads at the time. You're certainly more appealing than death by lava, but if there were a charming, handsome, superpowered NightWing as an option instead \u2026\"\n\nQueen Glory looked out at the gathered NightWings.\n\nWhat are they thinking? Turtle wondered. Would they rather be ruled by a RainWing or by a legendary monster?\n\nHe remembered the stories he'd read about Albatross, the SeaWing animus who massacred most of his family. If Albatross somehow came back to life, and he acted like a sane, friendly dragon, and Turtle had to choose between him or, say, Queen Glacier to rule the Kingdom of the Sea \u2026 who would he pick?\n\n\"Oh,\" said Darkstalker, nodding at Glory. \"Very interesting idea, Your Majesty.\"\n\nGlory looked at him sharply.\n\n\"Let the NightWings choose for themselves,\" he said. \"Indeed. I could agree to that.\"\n\n\"I haven't offered it to you yet,\" said Glory. \"In this time period, it's considered bad manners to read another dragon's thoughts.\"\n\n\"My apologies. But you had such a good idea. A peaceful transition of power \u2014 maybe dragons have evolved in the last two thousand years after all! What do you think?\" Darkstalker said to the assembled NightWings. \"Shall we put it to a vote, like some enormous sprawling mess of a council? King Darkstalker or Queen RainWing?\"\n\n\"No,\" Queen Glory said, stepping forward into a bar of sunlight that lit up every brilliant scale. \"Not a vote. I don't want my tr \u2014 any NightWing to be forced to live somewhere or under someone they are unhappy with.\" She studied the ebony dragons below her. \"Those who wish to stay in the rainforest with me, in the village you've built with your own talons, are welcome here forever. Those who would rather follow Darkstalker to the old kingdom are free to go.\"\n\nDarkstalker looked down at the crowd, too, from a considerably greater distance, and he did not look pleased with what he saw \u2014 or what he was hearing in their minds, Turtle realized.\n\n\"But you don't have to decide right now,\" Darkstalker said quickly, slippery-smooth. \"You should get to know me first! I presume Queen Glory won't mind if I spend a day or two in the rainforest, reacquainting myself with my tribe.\"\n\n\"Be our guest.\" Glory rested her quiet gaze on him for a moment \u2014 just a moment, while something puzzled flickered behind her eyes. Then she turned to Deathbringer, and the two of them hopped down from the stage to walk among the NightWings.\n\nA hubbub of voices rose, hushed and panicked at the same time. Who would stay? Who would go? What would become of them?\n\nDarkstalker's eyes went to Moon. \"See?\" he said softly. \"I knew I wouldn't really have to kill Glory. But I had to present myself as a strong leader, Moon. That's what dragons understand.\"\n\nMoon gave him a wounded look and turned away, back toward her mother's wings.\n\nTurtle watched Darkstalker watching her go.\n\nI think I've found one true thing about Darkstalker, he thought. He actually cares about Moon.\n\nBut how does she feel? She's the one who's been helping him so far \u2014 will she follow him to the Night Kingdom? Or will she choose Queen Glory \u2026 and if she does, how is he going to react?\n\nQueen Glory stayed in the NightWing village until midafternoon, answering questions and talking with any dragon who approached her. Darkstalker installed himself on a flat boulder by the river and did the same, while Anemone splashed and swam in the fish-flickering water.\n\nIt all seemed very peaceful. Entirely open. Nothing suspicious or underhanded. Turtle wrote a quick note on his slate to Qibli:\n\nThen he wiped it clean and tried not to fall asleep while Darkstalker droned on about parliamentary procedures in the ancient Night Kingdom.\n\nBut then Glory left, flying back to check on her RainWings. Darkstalker saw her go. He waited a few minutes, swirling his tail in the river as he listened to a sly-looking dragon named Obsidian complain about rainforest insects.\n\nFinally Darkstalker said, \"That does sound dreadful. You know, the Night Kingdom doesn't have any mosquitoes.\" He sat up and called \"Mindreader!\" touching his head as though summoning her by telepathy as well.\n\nA few moments later, the dragonet came scampering through the village with an older, significantly more reluctant-looking NightWing limping behind her.\n\n\"Here!\" she said breathlessly, skidding to a stop below Darkstalker. \"Come on, Father, you have to meet him. He's got amazing powers.\"\n\n\"So I hear,\" Mindreader's father said gruffly.\n\n\"But don't you understand that he's sharing them?\" she said. \"If you could have any power in the world, what would you want, Father?\"\n\nHe snorted. \"To be an animus, of course. Is there anything more powerful?\"\n\nMindreader turned to Darkstalker with shining eyes, but Darkstalker was shaking his head with a regretful expression. \"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"That is the one gift which is beyond my abilities to grant. An animus dragon cannot make other animus dragons.\"\n\nHuh, thought Turtle. He knew that was a lie. Does Darkstalker know he's lying, or does he believe that?\n\n\"That's not the only thing Father wants,\" Mindreader said quickly. \"I can hear it in his head! He wants the ability to heal instantly from any wound. Not just new wounds, but all the old aches and weak bones and clouded lungs he got from living on the volcano. Aw, Father, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were always in pain like that.\" She twined her tail around his, and Turtle found himself liking her for the first time.\n\n\"You're not supposed to know these things,\" her father said with a wince. \"I'm not sure it's going to be good for you, little one, hearing everyone's thoughts this way. Dragons like to keep their secrets.\"\n\n\"I know, it's incredible how many secrets there are,\" Mindreader said, her eyes widening. \"If I were a blackmailing sort of dragon, I could get so much treasure! But I'm not, of course; of course I'm not, and I wouldn't.\" She let out a little laugh. \"Enough about me! Darkstalker?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure about this,\" said her father, edging away as Darkstalker reached toward him. \"I don't trust anyone to put a spell on me.\"\n\n\"So we'll use something temporary,\" Darkstalker said winningly. He sliced a vine off the tree branch overhead and wove it into a simple loop, which he dropped over the other dragon's neck. \"I'll enchant this to heal you, and when it rots away, come back and let me know if you liked it and want something more permanent.\" He hooked one claw in the vine necklace and muttered something under his breath.\n\nMindreader's father let out a startled gasp. He stretched his wings and tail; he turned his head from side to side. He looked forty years younger just from the way he was suddenly standing and the way his eyes were shining.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said. \"Three moons! I couldn't even remember what it was like to feel this way!\"\n\n\"I'm here to help,\" said Darkstalker with his charming grin. \"Now \u2026 go tell all your friends.\"\n\nUh-oh, thought Turtle.\n\nUh-oh was right. The first trickle of curious NightWings became a waterfall once word spread that Darkstalker was handing out superpowers.\n\nThe ability to catch any prey \u2014 done.\n\nFlight speed faster than any SkyWing, or indeed, any other dragon on Pyrrhia \u2014 done.\n\nCamouflage scales like the RainWings \u2014 Darkstalker chuckled and talked that dragon out of his choice. \"Why would you want to blur the lines of what you really are? Be a NightWing and proud of it. If I give you advanced warrior skills, you'll never need to hide again anyway.\"\n\nAdvanced warrior skills \u2014 done.\n\nThe ability to go for days without sleep \u2014 done.\n\nAnd then Darkstalker announced that powering up five dragons per day was his limit. \"But this way you can think about it overnight,\" he said. \"What do you each really want? What would be the best possible power for you? I promise you, I'll share my gift with five more dragons tomorrow \u2014 on the way to the old Night Kingdom.\"\n\nWow, Turtle thought. He's not messing around. Follow me, and I'll make you special. Or stay here \u2026 and remain your own ordinary self.\n\nWhat dragon could resist an offer like that?\n\nWhat chance does Glory have, when that's the alternative?\n\nHe pulled out his slate and thought for a moment, then wrote to Qibli:\n\nTurtle could feel the tides shifting in the village: dragons whispering about another side to Darkstalker, about how the history scrolls could have been wrong, about how NightWings should stick with their own and stop mingling with lazy vegetarians.\n\nI should tell Glory. Shouldn't I? She has no idea who I am. But she'd want to know what Darkstalker is doing. Wouldn't she?\n\nHe worried for a while, watching Darkstalker tell stories of the old days to a rapt audience of dragons. Finally he scooted back along his branch and set off in the direction Glory had gone.\n\nA short distance beyond the NightWing village, all the trees began to look the same.\n\nNot long after that, Turtle realized he didn't exactly know where he was going. He stopped, hovering in midair, and glanced around at the dense, never-ending greenery. Lost in the rainforest \u2014 that sounded exactly like what would happen to the Turtle character in a story. While the heroic heroes battled onward, wondering vaguely where he'd gone.\n\nExcept in this case, there were no heroic heroes battling, because they were all too busy making friends with the potential supervillain.\n\nTurtle sighed. So I can't be lost in the rainforest, he thought. I can't be the inept best friend right now. I have to be someone else \u2014 the messenger, perhaps, who warns the heroes of the danger and then fades back into the background.\n\nWhat would a successful, determined messenger do about being lost in the rainforest?\n\nHe found a very fat tree with comfortable wide branches to sit on. All around him the bright red flowers danced, the leaves twitched, the shadows and sunlight darted and glimmered as wind pushed the treetops around.\n\n\"Hello?\" he said. \"Any chance I'm being followed?\"\n\nIf he was, no one answered.\n\nHe tried again. \"I have an urgent message for Queen Glory. She'll want to hear it, I promise. But \u2026 I don't know how to find her.\"\n\nMore silence. More trees flapping their leaves at him dismissively.\n\nSo. That didn't work. He wasn't quite lucky enough to have any camouflaged RainWings spying on him right now.\n\nHis immediate instinct was to use his magic. That would be the easiest solution. That was always the easiest solution. Whenever he felt a little sick or too tired for anatomy class or needed help finding something, he'd reach for a magical solution \u2014 as long as it was small enough for no one to notice.\n\nBut he couldn't do that now, because Darkstalker would notice any spell, no matter how small.\n\nHis talons went to his pouch. Wait \u2026 maybe he already had what he needed.\n\nHe slipped the pouch open with careful claws, tipping it so his animus-touched treasures clicked and tumbled together.\n\nNear the bottom, wrapped in leaves to protect it, was the piece of coral. It was shaped like a small, lacy red tree with little bubbles all along its branches. Turtle remembered the night he'd enchanted it \u2014 the night he'd realized he was an animus.\n\nQueen Coral's sons were rarely invited to royal functions, as there were simply too many of them. But when Turtle, Octopus, and Cerulean were all one year old, their father managed to get them invited to their first grand ball. Turtle's brothers were excited; Turtle was mostly nervous. Would he say the right things? Would he remember all the rules about when to eat (and more important, when not to eat)?\n\nGill had sent matching earrings for all the princes to wear: each one a heavy gold ring with a pearl hanging from it. Octopus and Cerulean clipped theirs on easily, but Turtle could not figure his out. He'd never worn an earring before. His claws felt too big and awkward to work the catch open far enough and the earrings kept slipping out of his grasp and floating slowly down to the seaweed-carpeted floor of his room.\n\nOctopus and Cerulean laughed at him as he scrabbled in the seaweed, which had swallowed one of the earrings completely. It's not that hard! Octopus teased, his phosphorescent scales flashing. By all the whales, Turtle, do you have tentacles for talons?\n\nThey turned to swim out of the room. See you there! Cerulean called mockingly.\n\nIf you ever make it! Octopus agreed, and they cackled their way down the hall.\n\nGrimly, Turtle glared at the remaining earring, pinched between his claws.\n\n\"AAAAAARRRRRGH! Earring,\" he snarled, shaking it, \"get on my ear right now and stay there.\"\n\nThe earring moved, shimmying in Turtle's grasp.\n\nStartled, he let go, and the earring confidently made a beeline straight for Turtle's ear. A moment later, he felt a nudging pinch, and when he looked in the mirror \u2014 there it was, hanging from his ear exactly where it was supposed to be.\n\nDid I do that?\n\nHe felt terrified and elated at the same time. If he did that, there was only one explanation.\n\nHe'd heard the stories about Albatross, the ancient animus SeaWing \u2014 although that particular story didn't end very well. There were fewer stories about other animus SeaWings, like Fathom, who were much more cautious with their powers.\n\nDespite the horror stories, a part of Turtle had always wondered what it would be like to be an animus, with all that power in his claws.\n\nHe had to test it out \u2014 to find out if it was real. One of the walls of their room was made of coral, and he'd noticed a small piece that was nearly broken off. He swam over and carefully snapped it free, then clasped it between his talons.\n\nI enchant this piece of coral to help me find whatever I'm looking for.\n\nHe peeked at the coral, but it looked exactly the same. Hmmm. My other earring, he flashed at it in Aquatic. He caught himself wondering whether coral could speak Aquatic just as the little red tree twitched and twisted in his claws. It tugged him down to the seaweed carpet, where it poked through the flapping overlapping strands until it bumped against his missing earring.\n\nThat might have been the most glorious moment of Turtle's life. (It was certainly all downhill from there, if you asked him.)\n\nHe was an animus! His brothers couldn't laugh at him now! His mother and father would have to pay attention to him! He'd be the star of the whole palace!\n\nThat was kind of a frightening thought, actually. Everyone looking at him? Everyone wanting him to perform? Everyone waiting for him to mess up?\n\nBut the truth was, only one thing stopped him from swimming straight into the ball and announcing his discovery to everyone.\n\nStories. Turtle knew how stories worked. He knew that a dragon with strange powers could be a hero or a villain, and a lot depended on how everyone found out what he or she could do. The best heroes were the ones who took everyone by surprise in their hour of need. Just when all hope was lost, the unexpected hero would swoop in and save the day! And if Turtle revealed his power that way, when it was really needed, then no one would be scared of him. He'd clearly be a hero.\n\nDrama, excitement, and the chance to do something wonderful when no one saw it coming \u2014 that's what Turtle wanted in his story.\n\nSo he hid his power, waiting for the perfect moment of revelation. The tribes were all at war; surely it would come soon.\n\nBut then it came, when his father needed him, and he didn't recognize it, and then it was gone.\n\nIn the rainforest, far from home, Turtle sighed and turned the coral over in his claws. The last time he'd used it was the day Gill sent him searching for Snapper. Turtle had had to be very surreptitious, since Octopus and Cerulean insisted on following him around and giggling over how incompetent he was. At first he thought he'd been very clever to think of using the coral \u2014 but it hadn't worked. Something was wrong with it. It kept trying to lead him out of the Deep Palace, which was why he was uselessly prowling the gardens when Gill found him.\n\nHe should have enchanted something else, even with Octopus and Cerulean watching. He should have realized that finding Snapper was the great thing he was meant to do; he should have revealed his secret right then and saved the day.\n\nIn fact, he should have used his magic to find the assassin who was killing off the princesses. It was embarrassing and awful that he'd never even thought of that until years later, when Tsunami showed up and figured out who it was.\n\nBut after Turtle's failure, he didn't know how to tell anyone he was an animus. He'd lost the plot of his story. He kept imagining his father saying, \"But if you had magic the whole time, why didn't you find Snapper? Why didn't you save your sisters? What kind of dragon has this power and doesn't use it to help his family? I'm more disappointed in you than ever.\"\n\nAnd the longer he hid it, the worse it got. Why didn't he use his magic to rescue his father from the SkyWings? Why didn't he use his magic to stop the attack on the Summer Palace?\n\nWhy was he such a useless, wretched excuse for a dragon?\n\nTurtle realized he was gripping the coral so tightly that it was leaving an imprint in his palm. He unclenched his fist and looked at it. He wasn't even sure why he'd kept the thing after it failed him. Maybe because it was the first real enchantment he'd ever cast. It reminded him of that brief moment when he'd been so happy and excited about his future.\n\nMost likely it wouldn't work now either. But he couldn't enchant anything new, he didn't have many other options, and it was worth a try.\n\n\"Queen Glory,\" he whispered.\n\nThe coral twitched and hummed softly, then tugged him northward. He spread his wings and flew, paying attention to the signals it gave, turning him this way and that and upward through the forest toward the canopy.\n\nI could have used this to help Peril find Scarlet, he realized. Or to find my friends in Possibility. Instead he had left it behind at school with his other animus-touched objects. It hadn't even occurred to him to try using it. He wouldn't have expected it to work, and he wouldn't have wanted Peril to notice it.\n\nBut it certainly would have been useful, he thought ruefully. Add that to the list of ways I could have helpfully used my magic and didn't.\n\nSoon enough, there was Glory \u2014 there, in fact, was the entire RainWing village, tucked into the treetops. As Turtle flew closer, he saw more and more shapes emerge from the leaves: hammocks and walkways, pavilions and dwellings, silver-furred sloths and beautiful dragons of all colors everywhere.\n\nQueen Glory was on one of the highest pavilions, bathed in sunlight, with her wings spread wide. She was asleep, but Deathbringer sat watchfully beside her, scanning the undergrowth for any threats.\n\nThreats seemed hard to imagine here, in this peaceful place \u2014 but Turtle thought of Darkstalker and his five new superpowered NightWings, only a short flight away, and he shivered.\n\nThe coral tugged him stubbornly toward the platform. Deathbringer saw him coming and sat up with a sharply curious, but not unfriendly, expression.\n\n\"Halt!\" he called when Turtle was only a short distance away. \"What business do you have with the queen?\"\n\nThe animus-touched coral did not like it at all when Turtle stopped and hovered in midair. It jabbed painfully at his palm, trying to move him forward.\n\nA bit late, Turtle remembered the coral's weird habit: It would not stop searching for the thing he wanted to find until he actually touched the object with the coral. It wouldn't fly away on its own, but every time he picked it up, it would squirm and poke him until it reached its goal. This had been confirmed rather gruesomely when it dragged him through the palace the night after his failure, just so it could bump itself against the side of Snapper's corpse, in a way that Turtle thought was entirely too smug for a malfunctioning scrap of coral.\n\n\"Um,\" Turtle said, clapping his other talon around the one that held the coral. \"I've been watching Darkstalker since you left the NightWing village, and I thought the queen should know what he's been up to.\"\n\n\"What's a SeaWing doing in the rainforest in the first place?\" Deathbringer asked doubtfully. \"Are you here with Darkstalker, like the princess?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Turtle said. \"I mean \u2014 I'm just watching him. Anemone is my sister,\" he fumbled, but apparently that was enough of an explanation for Deathbringer.\n\n\"I see,\" he said. \"Well \u2026 I'm reluctant to wake the queen during her suntime. Is it urgent?\"\n\n\"Um,\" said Turtle. Probably not? If Darkstalker wasn't going to enchant any more dragons today, did it make any difference?\n\n\"Deathbringer,\" Queen Glory said with a sigh, opening her eyes. \"I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of ears and how they work. But most normal dragons would find it very difficult to sleep through your loud interrogations.\"\n\n\"I was giving you the opportunity to pretend to sleep through them,\" Deathbringer objected. \"You're usually much better at it.\"\n\n\"I nearly gave myself away by laughing when you said 'halt,' though,\" Glory said, stretching and sitting up. \"I mean, who says 'halt,' seriously?\"\n\n\"I thought it sounded dignified and commanding,\" said Deathbringer.\n\n\"Indeed. Or like a pretentious NightWing,\" Glory observed.\n\n\"I AM a pretentious NightWing. It's part of my appeal.\"\n\n\"All right, hush, you,\" said Glory, patting Deathbringer's talons with her tail. \"Come here, SeaWing. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Turtle, Your Majesty,\" he said. The coral was kind of going berserk as he landed beside her, and she shot a curious look at his squirming talons. \"I'm Tsunami's brother \u2014 one of them. I'm nobody, really.\" The messenger. Here to tell someone who can actually save the world. \"I just thought you should know that Darkstalker has given a few NightWings special powers.\"\n\n\"Special powers?\" Deathbringer echoed. \"Like what?\"\n\n\"Mindreading,\" Turtle listed off. \"Superstrength. Fighting skills, the power to catch any prey, instant healing \u2014 that kind of thing.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" said Glory. \"It's going to be hard to compete with that.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't leave you, even for a superpower,\" Deathbringer said loyally.\n\n\"I think that is your superpower,\" Glory said to him. \"Extreme heroic idiocy.\" She arranged her face to look serious again and turned to Turtle. \"Well, if that means all the NightWings decide to go with Darkstalker, I suppose my job around here will get a lot easier.\" She looked wistfully out at the rest of the village, where many of the RainWings were asleep in their leaf hammocks and sunlit nests.\n\n\"That's true,\" said Deathbringer. \"Much less grumbling and complaining to deal with.\"\n\n\"They were kind of growing on me, though,\" Glory admitted. \"They're impressively \u2026 resilient.\"\n\n\"Not to mention obsessed with scrolls and learning and stuff,\" said Deathbringer. \"All your favorite things.\"\n\n\"I did think the NightWings and the RainWings could be good for each other, once they had some mutual respect and trust in place.\" Glory lifted her wings up and down in a soft sigh. \"Ah, well.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Turtle. \"You're not going to do anything? To stop him?\"\n\n\"We have an agreement,\" Glory said, surprised. \"Why would I stop him?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 maybe because he's turning his tribe into kind of a super army? Doesn't that worry either of you?\"\n\n\"Huh,\" said Deathbringer. \"I guess you could look at it that way.\"\n\nIsn't it your job to look at it that way? Turtle thought, frustrated.\n\n\"Maybe if it was anyone else,\" Queen Glory agreed. \"But I mean, Darkstalker's such a great dragon. I just trust him \u2014 don't you?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Deathbringer said, nodding. \"I like him.\"\n\nTurtle couldn't speak. His head felt as if it was full of squirming, flashing electric eels. All his suspicions coalesced into one diamond-bright conviction.\n\nThis was not a normal reaction. Not to Darkstalker, nor to any dragon who came in to steal the tribe you were ruling. None of the dragons who'd spoken to Darkstalker were reacting to him in a normal way.\n\nQibli was right, after all. He had been under a spell. That \"calm trusting feeling\" he'd had about Darkstalker \u2014 that was the work of magic. This was why everyone was behaving so weird and unworried.\n\nDarkstalker had crafted some kind of spell \u2014 something that affected every dragon who met him. It made dragons like him and trust him, and perhaps worse. What if it made everyone obey him? Or willing to sacrifice their lives for him?\n\nIf Darkstalker wanted to, he could turn all the dragons of Pyrrhia, one by one, into his own personal puppets \u2026 and nobody would be able to stop him, because nobody would even know anything was wrong.\n\nSo \u2026 maybe now it's time to run and hide, Turtle thought. Back to the Kingdom of the Sea; back to the anonymity of his pack of brothers. Back to a world so distant that Darkstalker might never come there; back to the only place that might be safe, at least for a little while.\n\nThis was too big for him to handle. He sort of had Qibli \u2014 but what if something happened to Qibli, or Darkstalker figured out how to ensnare him again? Turtle could end up as the only dragon in Pyrrhia who saw Darkstalker the way he really was \u2014 and then what? Spend the rest of his life as the unbalanced invisible dragon, trying to convince his friends they were bewitched by a sinister magician?\n\nThe mad prophet of doom \u2026 not exactly the role I ever saw myself in.\n\nBut the alternative was \"coward who sits and waits for the inevitable apocalypse.\" If he scurried off back to the ocean, would anyone ever notice what Darkstalker was doing? Would anyone ever be able to stop him?\n\nSo if he couldn't run away and he couldn't change anyone's mind and he couldn't fight Darkstalker himself \u2026 what could he do?\n\nI need help.\n\nHe touched the cord of his pouch, tied around his neck. Should he write to Qibli? Ask him to come here?\n\nHe could feel his worrying reflex kicking into action. His scales felt hot and clammy at the same time.\n\nWas he sure that Qibli was free of any Darkstalker spells? What if Darkstalker had enchanted his spell to be irreversible, even by other magic?\n\nOr what if he'd enchanted Qibli to stay at Jade Mountain, so seeing him in the rainforest would make him suspicious? Everything Qibli did might give Darkstalker a clue that his spell wasn't working on him anymore. Turtle's safety would be in danger if Qibli and Darkstalker spent too much time near each other.\n\nI wish I could get his advice, though. Turtle dropped his talons, frustrated. Too bad the slates don't work both ways. Thanks to me being a shortsighted idiot again.\n\nWho else could help him?\n\nI need someone who hasn't met Darkstalker yet.\n\nSomeone who'll believe me. Someone who can actually be the hero.\n\nHis mother? Would Queen Coral believe him if he went to her with this story? Would she be able \u2014 or willing \u2014 to fight Darkstalker?\n\nHe couldn't really imagine her trusting him that much. And if she did and brought the SeaWings out to fight Darkstalker, wouldn't that put Turtle's entire tribe in danger?\n\nSo perhaps one of the other queens. Glacier, Ruby, Moorhen, or Thorn \u2026 would any of them listen to a SeaWing? And wouldn't they fall under Darkstalker's spell the moment they met him?\n\nNot to mention, in order to convince them his story was true, he'd have to tell them everything.\n\nAs in, oh, yes, and I'm an animus everything.\n\nHe shuddered, and his hold on the coral loosened, and it darted forward in a flash and bopped Queen Glory on the side of her tail.\n\nShe turned to stare at him. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"Nothing! Nothing,\" he said. \"My talons slipped. Sorry.\"\n\nShe raised one eyebrow. \"You're an odd dragon, Turtle.\"\n\n\"That's what my friends tell me,\" he said, and his friends rose up in his mind, and a possibility shot through him, shining with hope.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" he said. \"May I ask \u2014 how is Kinkajou?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Glory said, her wings drooping. \"The healers can't understand why she hasn't woken up yet. They don't know what to do for her. We all thought that once she was back in the rainforest, around the smells and sounds and sun that she grew up with, she'd \u2014\"\n\n\"Back in the rainforest?\" Turtle interrupted. \"She's here?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Queen Glory flicked her tail, knocking loose a shower of yellow blossoms. \"I wasn't going to leave her alone on the other side of the continent. The healers got back with her yesterday.\"\n\n\"Can I see her?\" Turtle asked. His claws were tingling. Kinkajou hadn't met Darkstalker. Kinkajou would believe him. He could trust her with his secret.\n\nAnd Kinkajou was much more cut out for heroism than he was.\n\nGlory gave him directions to the healers' pavilion, not far away, tucked into a little alcove of the rainforest that seemed even more peaceful than the rest of the village. Turtle could smell healing herbs and oranges as he flew to the opening.\n\nInside, sunlight poured through the rooms from skylights that had been opened in the roofs. A pair of pale blue healers were asleep in one corner; another was neatly folding cobwebs and moss into bundles on one of the shelves. She looked up as Turtle came in, but seemed only mildly surprised to see a SeaWing in her pavilion. She swept one wing toward the bed where Kinkajou slept, and Turtle nodded, unconsciously flashing his scales in Aquatic, yes, that's who I'm looking for.\n\nKinkajou lay in a sunbeam that outlined every scale with gold. She was still as white as an IceWing \u2014 white being the color of pain or shock to the RainWings \u2014 but in this sun it was the white of opals, jeweled and glinting with hints of hidden colors, pearl-pinks and sparks of green.\n\nIt wasn't the color of her scales that made her look so unlike Kinkajou. It was her complete stillness. Turtle had never seen Kinkajou sit still for a moment. Even in class, her wings always twitched or her claws fidgeted or her face would make sideways expressions at him or Moon: WHAT did he say? I knew that answer! Is it time to eat yet are you starving I'm starving! Isn't school AMAZING?\n\nTurtle sat down beside her bed and curled his tail in, missing her in a way that filled him with heavy seaweed from nose to tail. He knew this was ridiculous; he didn't even know her that well. They'd had barely four days at Jade Mountain before everything went wrong. Before Kinkajou left to find Winter's brother, defeat Scarlet, and save the world from Moon's prophecy \u2026 while Turtle chose to slink back to the safety of the school instead.\n\nThat was exactly why he needed her. \"Kinkajou,\" he whispered. \"Can you hear me? I need you to wake up.\"\n\nKnowing Kinkajou, he half expected her to open her eyes and joke, \"Oh, well, if you need me to, then sure! I was just taking a really long nap, but let's go fight some bad guys!\"\n\nShe didn't, though.\n\nHe'd already tried this, back in Possibility, but now he fumbled his healing river stone out of his pouch again. His stupid, shortsighted enchantment that only healed surface wounds. Still, he brushed it lightly along Kinkajou's bruised spine, over the bandages on her broken ribs, and gently around her fractured skull.\n\nIn Possibility, they'd watched the bruises fade and all the scrapes and cuts disappear. But it didn't work any deeper, and Kinkajou did not wake up. This time wasn't any different. Kinkajou still lay quietly, quietly breathing, eyes closed.\n\nTurtle had wanted to enchant something right then that could wake her, but he was afraid that one of the Possibility doctors would notice. And Moon had been worried for his soul. She'd suggested waiting two more days, at least, to see if Kinkajou woke up on her own. But then they'd flown off to find Peril, which had led them to the scroll, and then the release of Darkstalker, and now here they were, and now he couldn't use magic to help her.\n\nHe crushed a bright orange flower between his claws, frustrated. If only he'd been brave and stubborn enough to heal her earlier!\n\nBut then she would have met Darkstalker along with everyone else. She'd be under his spell, too.\n\n\"Kinkajou,\" he said sternly. \"Enough sleeping. Time to get up and save the world.\"\n\nNo reaction.\n\n\"You know you've always wanted to,\" he wheedled. \"Think how impressed Queen Glory will be! All you have to do is wake up. And figure out how to stop the most powerful dragon in the history of Pyrrhia. No problem, right?\"\n\nNo reaction from Kinkajou, but he got a very odd look from the healer at the other end of the pavilion.\n\nAll right, he couldn't talk her awake, and he couldn't use his magic \u2026\n\nWait.\n\nHe couldn't use his magic.\n\nTurtle thought for a long time, his brow furrowed into serious wrinkles. Five iridescent purple butterflies settled on his tail and fluttered serene butterfly thoughts at one another without him even noticing they were there.\n\nFinally Turtle blinked and sat up, scattering indigo wings in all directions. He had a plan. Possibly a terrible plan, but the only one he could think of.\n\nHe flew out of the pavilion and used his coral again to navigate the rainforest and find his way back to Anemone. The SeaWing princess was swimming in a pool several lengths upstream from Darkstalker's gathering. Her pale shape flickered like a dolphin below the water, in and out of the shadows.\n\nTurtle landed with a squelch in the mud, let the coolness sink into his claws, and waited for her to surface.\n\n\"Oh, hi!\" she said cheerfully when she finally saw him. \"I was wondering where you went! Darkstalker's stories are great, but I'm kind of not so interested in ancient NightWing history. Blah blah eight million years ago they had a cool library YAWN. I was like, so what were the SeaWings up to back then? and he was all, 'getting massacred.' So THAT was cheerful. I would say come on in, but I should warn you there are all kinds of weird sticky plants under the surface here.\"\n\n\"Thanks anyway,\" Turtle said. \"Hey, Anemone \u2026 is it true you can do as many spells as you want now?\"\n\n\"Yup!\" His sister ducked under the water and surfaced again, shooting a spray of water at a grumpy-looking frog on the riverbank. \"Thanks to my cool enchanted silver necklace.\" She tapped the collar with one claw. \"I'm going to cast so many spells, it'll be like the sea is full of magic! I could rebuild the Summer Palace! Or make us a new palace, maybe. I can stop hurricanes! I could make Uncle Shark's scales turn bright pink and all his teeth fall out, ha ha. I could enchant every pearl in the ocean to come rolling up to our door!\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Turtle said, bewildered by this rush of ideas. \"But \u2026 the pearl divers like their jobs.\"\n\n\"It's just an example, Turtle,\" Anemone said scornfully. \"I'm just saying, when we get home, things are going to be pretty different in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\n\"You're not \u2026 you're not going to try to take the throne, are you?\" Turtle asked. He hadn't quite thought ahead to what might happen if Anemone decided to use her magic against their mother in a challenge duel. It didn't seem fair; although Queen Coral had somehow defeated Orca, who had turned out to be an animus, too, but a secret one. Like me.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Anemone said with a laugh. \"I want to have a lot more fun before I get stuck in a boring old palace making decisions all day. And I want to learn everything Darkstalker can teach me about being an animus. Isn't he cool? Don't you feel like an idiot for being so worried?\"\n\n\"Right.\" Turtle glanced downstream, realizing that Darkstalker might come looking for Anemone any moment now. \"So \u2014 since you're so superpowerful now \u2014 could you do something for me?\"\n\nAn irritated look briefly flitted across Anemone's face, and Turtle winced, knowing exactly how she felt. Other dragons wanting to use your magic \u2026 it was like they were asking to wear your scales.\n\n\"Like what?\" Anemone asked.\n\n\"It's Kinkajou,\" Turtle said. \"I wouldn't ask for me, but \u2014 she's really hurt, and she won't wake up, and I'm afraid only magic can save her.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Anemone said, her frown clearing like the tide pulling away from the beach. \"Awww. You want me to save the cute little RainWing you're in love with!\"\n\n\"I'm not in love with her!\" Turtle protested. \"But she's \u2014 you know, she's awesome \u2014 and I just want her to get better.\"\n\n\"I can totally do that,\" Anemone said gleefully, splashing out of the pool toward him. He bopped her lightly with the wriggling coral as she went by, but she didn't notice. \"But I am going to tease you about it forever. You think she's cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute, you totally loooooooooooooove her.\"\n\n\"ANEMONE.\" Turtle swatted at her with his tail and she danced away, giggling.\n\nIn the palace, Anemone had been a distant figure. Always attached to the queen by a harness, she was never allowed to wander freely or associate with her rough-and-tumble brothers. Turtle had only known her as the beloved princess who got all their mother's love. He'd seen her at royal gatherings or at Queen Coral's scroll readings, sitting quietly beside her, soaking up all that attention.\n\nBut then Tsunami came and caught the assassin, and a new princess finally hatched, and Anemone was released from the harness at last. She began visiting her brothers out of curiosity, and Turtle watched her closely, wondering what her life was like as a known animus. She seemed funny and happy much of the time \u2014 but there was a dark streak to some of her jokes, along with an imperious certainty that she deserved all of her princess privileges.\n\nIt worried him, and it worried him more the more he found he liked her.\n\n\"All right, take me to your sleeping beauty,\" Anemone said dramatically.\n\n\"Oh, brother,\" Turtle said, rolling his eyes.\n\nHe tucked the coral back into its pouch and lifted off into the trees. Anemone followed him, singing, \"Turtle and Kinkajou, flying in the sky, Getting all K-I-S-S-Y \u2014\"\n\nHe clapped his talons over his ears and kept them there the rest of the way to the RainWing village.\n\nAnemone fell silent as they crossed the threshold into the healers' pavilion. She gazed around at the other patients: a RainWing with a head wound and a NightWing with a jagged tear in one of his wings. Both of them were unconscious, probably tranquilized. Turtle wondered if their injuries made Anemone think of all the wounded SeaWings who'd survived the war and the bombing of the Summer Palace. Maybe instead of collecting pearls and turning their unfriendly uncle shades of fuchsia, Anemone might think about healing some of her fellow dragons instead.\n\nNot that I'm one to judge. How many dragons have I ever helped with my magic?\n\nTurtle stopped next to Kinkajou, and Anemone went around to her other side, studying the pale little RainWing. Kinkajou was older than Anemone, but they were not very different in size. Anemone lifted one of Kinkajou's drooping talons.\n\n\"Wow,\" she said softly. \"She does look terrible. I'm sorry for teasing you, Turtle.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" he said.\n\n\"I mean, I'm going to keep doing it,\" she added. \"But not until she's well again. OK, let me think for a minute.\" Anemone scrunched up her snout. \"Oops! I was supposed to tell Darkstalker if I decided to do any more spells. He doesn't really want me trying new things on my own yet.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" said Turtle. \"Haven't you been doing spells on your own pretty much your whole life?\"\n\n\"That's TRUE,\" said Anemone. \"And I mean, what does he care if I heal some random RainWing, right?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Turtle. He held his breath.\n\n\"I'll tell him about it when we get back,\" Anemone said, flicking one of her wings and startling a cluster of dragonflies in the leaf roof.\n\n\"What are you going to enchant?\" Turtle asked, exhaling with relief.\n\nAnemone glanced around dubiously at the flowery vines, the leaves, the wooden bowls of herbs; all the biodegradable rainforest things that wouldn't last very long. Her eyes fell on the black leather pouch that was tied to Kinkajou's ankle.\n\n\"Maybe something in here?\" she said, poking it open.\n\n\"Wait \u2014\" Turtle started to say, but already Kinkajou's library card was tumbling into Anemone's palm, along with one of the skyfire rocks from Turtle's armband. A gift to protect her thoughts from Moon \u2014 or any mind reader \u2014 although Anemone had no way of knowing that.\n\nHis sister peered at the rock for a moment, then looked up at him with wide eyes, apparently noticing the holes in his armband for the first time.\n\n\"Ha! You gave her one of your rocks from the sky!\" she crowed. \"You love her SO MUCH!\"\n\n\"Can we please get on with this?\" he demanded. It was going to be a hilarious day whenever she discovered that he'd also given matching rocks to Winter and Qibli.\n\n\"Well, this should work,\" she said, curling her claws around the star-speckled rock. She closed her eyes.\n\nThis is it, Turtle. One chance. Perfect timing. Right \u2026 NOW.\n\n\"I enchant this rock to heal Kinkajou of all her injuries so she can wake up, as happy and healthy as she's ever been,\" said Anemone.\n\nAnd at the same moment, Turtle thought with all his might, Enchant this skyfire to make Kinkajou immune to any spell Darkstalker has ever or will ever cast, and enchant it to make her completely insignificant in his eyes \u2014 not worth thinking about, not visible in his futures, not in any way a threat to him.\n\nHe wasn't sure how many times over you could enchant an object, or if one animus touch might cancel out another, so he added hurriedly, and enchant it to heal all her injuries as well.\n\nThis was the key; casting his spell in the same moment as Anemone's. He didn't know the details of Darkstalker's warning system, but he hoped one spell would obscure the other, like Qibli thought. He'd considered the phrasing of his spell as carefully as he could, borrowing Qibli's words and adding more of his own. He hoped Darkstalker would forgive Anemone for using her spell to help Kinkajou \u2014 that was why he couldn't hide Kinkajou the way he'd hidden himself \u2014 and he hoped Darkstalker wouldn't think too hard about what else might have happened here.\n\nAnemone opened her eyes and gave Turtle a sly smile. \"And while we're at it,\" she said, her voice playful, \"I also enchant this rock to make Kinkajou love Turtle just as much as he loves her.\"\n\n\"What?\" Turtle cried, horrorstruck. \"Anemone! You can't do that!\"\n\n\"I so absolutely can,\" she said triumphantly, already sliding the skyfire back into Kinkajou's pouch. \"My magic can do anything!\"\n\n\"But that's awful! You can't enchant someone's feelings! Anemone, please take that spell off.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can,\" Anemone said with a shrug. \"Squids and sea monsters, you should be thanking me. I just did such an awesome nice thing for you.\" She reached over Kinkajou and patted one of his talons, grinning. \"I'm the best sister ever.\"\n\n\"But I don't want her to like me because of a spell!\" Turtle felt as if he was caught in one of the rainforest's enormous, spider-laden cobwebs. He couldn't undo the enchantment himself \u2014 if that was even possible \u2014 or else Darkstalker would notice. But he couldn't take the skyfire away from Kinkajou either. She needed it to be safe from Darkstalker.\n\n\"You'll thank me later,\" Anemone said confidently. \"When you're maaaaaaaaaaarried and have lots of little pink dragonets with webbed talons!\"\n\nTurtle buried his face in his claws. Poor Kinkajou. This was so wrong, so wrong.\n\n\"Who's getting married?\" said a soft, hoarse voice.\n\nHe looked up and saw colors rising slowly into the scales all across Kinkajou's back, like the time he'd spilled five different ink bottles over his blank scroll, back when he still dreamed of being a writer. Sunrises drifted into her wings, pale peaches and yellows strengthening into glorious bands of orange and gold.\n\nHer green eyes were open, and her head was turned, pillowed on her arms. She was looking at him.\n\n\"Hey, Turtle,\" she said sleepily. \"We missed you on our heroic quest.\"\n\n\"I missed you, too,\" he said, a lump rising in his throat.\n\n\"At least, I think it was a heroic quest,\" she said. \"I'm a little bit fuzzy on whether we actually succeeded.\"\n\n\"You did!\" he said. \"You saved Winter's brother and stopped Queen Scarlet.\"\n\n\"I did?\" she said. \"Really? Like, how? In my sleep? Am I so amazing that I can save the world and nap at the same time?\" She laughed and her gaze drifted up to the ceiling. She sat up, startled. \"Whoa! This place looks exactly like the rainforest!\"\n\n\"It is the rainforest,\" Turtle said. \"You're home. There's \u2026 a lot to explain.\"\n\n\"Hiiiii,\" Anemone said, elbowing Turtle out of the way. \"I'm Princess Anemone. I don't think we officially met at school. I'm the one who totally just saved your life.\" She fluffed her wings and stretched her neck a little longer.\n\n\"Oh, wow. Thank you,\" Kinkajou said earnestly. \"Um \u2014 saved my life from what?\"\n\n\"You got clobbered by a bad guy,\" Anemone said. \"You've been unconscious for, like, days. You might never have woken up except that Turtle begged me to heal you.\" She poked Turtle's backside meaningfully with her tail.\n\n\"What bad guy?\" Kinkajou cried. \"Did we clobber her back? Three moons, did I miss all the excitement AGAIN?\" She flared her wings, then did a double take at one of them and jumped. \"Hey! My venom splash scars are gone!\"\n\nTurtle remembered the triangle of black spots that had dotted Kinkajou's wing. He shifted uncomfortably on his talons. \"I guess Anemone's spell healed those along with your other injuries,\" he said.\n\n\"SPELL?\" Kinkajou yelped. \"You healed me with magic? That is AMAZING!\"\n\n\"I know, it really is,\" said Anemone, preening.\n\n\"I did like those scars, though,\" Kinkajou said a little wistfully. \"They made me seem all battle-hardened and tough.\"\n\nTurtle bit back a laugh. As much as he adored her, it would never in a million years have occurred to him to use those adjectives to describe Kinkajou.\n\n\"Ah, well,\" she said with a shrug. \"Thanks again, Anemone. Oooo, I'd love to be an animus. Is it fun?\"\n\n\"It is now,\" Anemone said. \"Now that I'm the one in charge of my spells and nobody's telling me what to do all the time.\"\n\nThere was a crash outside, like a tree falling not too far away. Anemone's face brightened and she darted to the doorway.\n\n\"Don't be scared,\" Turtle said to Kinkajou quickly in a low voice. \"A very big, scary-looking dragon is about to show up, but he can't hurt you. And he can't see me or hear me, so don't be confused by that. I'll explain everything when he's gone.\"\n\nKinkajou's eyes were shining with excitement. \"I feel like I fell asleep in one adventure and woke up in a totally different one! What is happening! This is amazing!\"\n\n\"Anemone,\" rumbled Darkstalker's voice outside the pavilion. \"Have you been doing more magic?\"\n\n\"Just a little healing spell,\" Anemone said cheerfully. \"Kinkajou, come here.\"\n\n\"I don't know if you should be walking yet \u2014\" Turtle said, but Kinkajou was already bouncing off the bed.\n\n\"Whoo,\" she said, wobbling on her talons for a moment. \"Guess I haven't stood up in a few days! Here we go.\" She flared her wings for balance and hopped over to the opening, where Anemone was holding the flower curtain aside.\n\nKinkajou stuck her head outside. \"YIKES!\" she yelped. \"Who are you? You are SO BIG!\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Darkstalker, his voice immediately softening. \"Moon's friend. That's all right. I was planning to heal her myself, in fact. But Anemone, please remember to run your spells by me first.\"\n\nThe three healers had all disappeared somewhere, perhaps scattering at the sight of Darkstalker. Turtle crept to the window and peeked out. The great NightWing had landed on a pavilion outside, and all around him were flurries of leaves-that-weren't-leaves and branches-that-weren't-branches as alarmed RainWings tried to hide and spy and sidle away at the same time.\n\n\"I don't like being bossed around,\" Anemone said, lifting her chin. \"I know what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"Of course you do,\" he said. \"But a second eye on your spells can be helpful. I wish I'd had someone to give me advice about my scroll, for instance \u2014 so I could enchant it to be used only by me, or to return to me if it was stolen. Wouldn't that have been smart? I can give you advice like that, because I've already made my mistakes.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Anemone said, considering. \"Sure, that makes sense.\"\n\nTurtle breathed a sigh of relief. Darkstalker wasn't angry, and he didn't seem to have noticed Turtle's spell underneath Anemone's. Apart from the horrible fact that Kinkajou was now bewitched into loving him, the plan had worked.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Darkstalker called. Turtle saw Glory and Deathbringer gliding through the treetops toward them. They landed on a branch nearby and Glory studied Darkstalker thoughtfully.\n\n\"How did you find our village?\" she asked.\n\n\"I followed the sounds of RainWings thinking,\" he said, tapping his head. \"Or at least, what passes for thinking in a RainWing these days. This tribe has really gone soft.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Kinkajou objected. \"We defeated YOUR stupid tribe, didn't we?\"\n\nDarkstalker didn't bother to respond; he didn't even bother to look at her. \"I came to deliver a warning, Your Majesty.\" He glanced around at the whispering trees. \"There are five dragons on their way here to kill you. They will most likely attack tonight, and unless I stop them, they will succeed.\"\n\nThe trees gasped.\n\n\"I'll stop them,\" Deathbringer said, lashing his tail. \"I've stopped assassins before.\"\n\n\"I have bad news for you,\" said Darkstalker. \"I'm the one who can see the future. I've seen the part where you get stabbed by a SandWing tail.\"\n\n\"SandWings?\" Glory asked. \"Why would SandWings want to attack me?\"\n\n\"They're working with a pair of NightWings you misplaced,\" Darkstalker said. \"Does that ring a bell?\" Glory exchanged a glance with Deathbringer, and Turtle remembered the missing prisoners he'd heard about while eavesdropping \u2014 the ones who'd escaped from the SandWing stronghold.\n\n\"You know what you need?\" Darkstalker went on. \"A nice strong prison of your own. Wouldn't that solve a lot of problems?\"\n\n\"RainWings are not really a prison kind of tribe,\" Glory started to say, but Darkstalker was already snapping a branch off one of the trees overhead.\n\n\"Branch,\" he commanded, \"grow into a fine, strong, indestructible prison, with room for at least ten prisoners, that no dragon could ever break out of.\"\n\nHe flung the branch down toward the ground, and as it fell it began to grow, snapping outward and up, smashing through everything it hit as it plummeted. When it finally crashed to earth, far below them, it was a massive, dense cube of some unfamiliar material, with no windows. The last few blocks slammed into place, and then it fell silent, apparently finished.\n\nThe RainWings all stared down at it. Turtle could see Kinkajou leaning over the edge of the walkway outside the healers' hut, her face a picture of outrage.\n\nThe prison was gray and solid, large and forbidding. It hulked on the rainforest floor like a sinister cloud that had been dragged to earth and chained down. Everything about it exuded wrongness.\n\n\"Perfect,\" said Darkstalker. A ring of metal keys had appeared in his talons, and he tossed them to Queen Glory. \"You're welcome.\"\n\nGlory caught the keys and held them at arm's length like a talonful of slugs. \"I don't see any windows on that \u2026 thing,\" she said. \"It would be cruel to put any RainWings in there, shut off from the sun. And ten seems like far more prisoners than we'll ever have.\"\n\nDarkstalker shrugged. \"You never know,\" he said. \"But use it however you like. At least you can get Mastermind out of the quicksand now. Or give him to me and I'll take him far away; it's up to you.\"\n\nGlory lifted her chin. \"He still has to answer for his crimes against RainWings.\"\n\n\"Oh yes?\" said Darkstalker. \"Does this tribe have a terribly complex justice system, or what's taking so long?\"\n\n\"It's \u2026 a work in progress,\" Glory said.\n\n\"Let's visit your new prison, which should be a safe place to wait for the assassins,\" Darkstalker suggested, spreading his wings, \"and meanwhile I can tell you all about the courts and trials and laws we had in the old Night Kingdom. It was a fascinating process, really, beginning and ending with the queen's judgement, of course \u2026\" He spiraled down to the rainforest floor, his voice fading as he dropped. Queen Glory, Deathbringer, and Anemone all flew after him.\n\nTurtle took a step back into the pavilion. His heart was beating anxiously. What if his spell didn't work, and Kinkajou was as bewitched by Darkstalker as anyone else? Or what if Darkstalker wasn't using a spell after all, and everyone else genuinely liked him, and Turtle was just wrong?\n\nKinkajou ducked back inside, catching a delicate lavender orchid on one of her frills, and sauntered over to him.\n\n\"So, that dragon's totally evil,\" she said.\n\n\"You think so? You really do?\" said Turtle. He felt as though he could collapse right here and nap for three days. He wasn't imagining things. And he wasn't alone anymore.\n\n\"He's acting like the boss of Anemone, he's making creepy unnecessary un-RainWing-y things with his magic, and he's clearly trying to manipulate everyone with stuff like 'I'll save you from assassins!' and 'oh, I was going to heal her myself, actually.' The good news is, Queen Glory and Deathbringer will see right through him. They're probably planning some clever way to drive him out of the rainforest right now.\"\n\n\"Um,\" said Turtle. \"Unfortunately, they're not. They like him \u2014 or they think they do. See, I think he's using his magic on everyone. I don't know the details of the spell, but it seems like everyone who meets him or talks to him ends up thinking he's perfectly nice, harmless, and trustworthy.\"\n\n\"Everyone?\" said Kinkajou.\n\n\"Even Winter,\" said Turtle. \"Winter worst of all.\"\n\n\"Holy coconuts.\" Kinkajou scratched her nose, turning a thoughtful shade of deep blue. \"I'm really surprised. That NightWing seems like the kind of dragon who believes he's super charming \u2014 like he wouldn't need magic to win dragons over.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Turtle, \"but it's failed him once before, so I think he wants the extra security of the magic.\" He explained Darkstalker's history to Kinkajou, at least as much as he knew of it. That led him to Darkstalker's animus scroll, so then he had to explain what had happened with Peril and Scarlet, and then as much as he knew of the story with Hailstorm. It was getting dark by the time he finished.\n\n\"Bah!\" Kinkajou grumbled, flicking her wings as orange starbursts went off across her scales. \"I really did miss everything. That's so unfair.\"\n\n\"Well, you're not missing this crisis,\" Turtle pointed out. \"You and I are the only dragons here who are safe from Darkstalker. Which means\"\u2014 he took a deep breath \u2014 \"you're the only one who can stop him.\"\n\n\"You mean WE'RE the only ones who can stop him, right?\" Kinkajou said.\n\n\"I was sort of hoping you would do it,\" Turtle admitted.\n\n\"Turtle!\" She nudged him so he teetered sideways. \"I totally would, but I'd rather do it with you! Saving the world is more fun plus also less terrifying with friends.\" She gave him a sweet smile that made him extremely nervous about what Anemone's love spell might be doing to her brain.\n\n\"I am not a heroic dragon,\" Turtle protested. \"I don't have good ideas, I'm lazy, and I hide when bad things happen.\"\n\n\"Waking me up was a good idea!\" Kinkajou said brightly. \"And look, you're not hiding. You're right here, where the bad things are. And you left Jade Mountain to find me and Moon and the others \u2014 that's not lazy or hiding either.\"\n\n\"I was following Peril,\" Turtle pointed out. \"If I'm anything in the story, I'm maybe the hapless sidekick.\"\n\n\"Awesome!\" Kinkajou leaped to her feet, beaming. \"I've always wanted a hapless sidekick! OK, I don't know what hapless means! But it sounds like happy, so I bet it's awesome! Let's go take him down!\" She made a beeline for the door.\n\n\"Wait, now?\" Turtle said. \"What's the plan? Is there a plan? You know the hapless sidekick is the one who dies, right?\"\n\n\"Not in our story!\" Kinkajou called.\n\n\"Kinkajou, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?\" Turtle shouted as she barged through the hanging orchids into the dusk.\n\n\"I'm going to go study him,\" Kinkajou explained as he emerged behind her, as though this were all perfectly obvious, \"so we can figure out what he's enchanted to hypnotize everybody, and then we're going to steal it or break it, and then everyone will be all, 'AAAAAH THERE'S A MONSTER DRAGON TRYING TO MANIPULATE US!' and they'll rise up and stop him. Done! The day is saved!\"\n\nTurtle was beginning to wonder whether his problem-solving approach and Kinkajou's might be completely incompatible.\n\n\"I don't think it'll be that easy,\" he said, rubbing his forehead.\n\n\"Why not? You said he can't hurt me,\" Kinkajou pointed out. \"Wait, why can't he hurt me?\"\n\n\"Because of the spell I put on you,\" said Turtle.\n\nKinkajou stared at him.\n\n\"Oh, right,\" he said. \"There's one more thing I should probably have mentioned.\"\n\nShe bundled him back inside the healers' pavilion. \"You're an animus?\" she hissed softly.\n\n\"Kind of a secret one?\" he said with a shrug. \"Like, please don't tell anybody? I went through this already with Peril and Moon and Winter and Qibli.\"\n\n\"Three moons!\" Kinkajou cried. \"Why am I always the last to know everything?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" he said. \"That would make you fifth. The fifth to know, out of all the dragons in Pyrrhia, or sixth I suppose if you count me.\"\n\nKinkajou considered that for a moment with her snout scrunched up. \"Cool,\" she said finally. \"All right, that's not too bad. But NEXT time you have a major enormous secret, tell me first, OK?\"\n\n\"OK,\" he said. \"Maybe I should mention that I've cast a spell to hide myself from Darkstalker?\" He pulled out his stick and explained what it did, and how he couldn't cast any more spells because Darkstalker would sense them, except for the one he'd managed to hide under Anemone's.\n\n\"So you see,\" he finished, \"I'm not actually 'here in the middle of all the bad things,' because I'm really actually hiding. I'm hiding all the time.\"\n\n\"OOOOOOOO,\" Kinkajou said, her eyes shining. \"Totally invisible to Darkstalker! That is an excellent spell. Another great idea, see? We'll be an awesome team. You can be the idea dragon and I can be the WHAM BAM SHOVE A PINEAPPLE UP HIS SNOUT dragon!\"\n\n\"No, no, that won't work. I think his snout is enchanted,\" Turtle pointed out.\n\n\"To be invulnerable to pineapples?\" Kinkajou asked, and burst into giggles.\n\nOh dear. An image of tiny, rainbow-colored Kinkajou lobbing fruit at Darkstalker popped into Turtle's head. Maybe he hadn't entirely thought through his choice of hero.\n\n\"Don't worry so much,\" Kinkajou said, brushing his wing with hers. \"Your forehead will get stuck that way. My plan will totally work, I swear! Or if it doesn't, we'll come up with a new amazing plan. Oooo, I bet this is EXACTLY how Glory felt when she was about to save the world!\"\n\nShe bounded off to the doorway again, and Turtle found himself thinking that he couldn't imagine Queen Glory bounding, or in fact getting this excited about anything.\n\nOutside, the sky was fading into purple-dark, shadows hurrying into all the gaps between the trees. Turtle felt the brush of soft fur as a sloth clambered by right over his head. He could hear snoring coming from a few hammocks already, and the air hummed with the hungry buzz of dusk-happy insects.\n\nFar below them, a ring of fire smoldered on the forest floor, encircling the shadowy figures of Darkstalker, Queen Glory, and the others. Kinkajou let out a small growl when she saw it.\n\n\"Queen Glory doesn't usually allow that much fire in our forest,\" she whispered. \"There are strict rules for the NightWings about how and when and how carefully to use it. She's definitely fallen for that baboon butt's act.\"\n\n\"Spell,\" Turtle reminded her. \"It's a spell.\"\n\n\"Let's get closer.\" Kinkajou wafted down toward the gathered dragons as softly as a falling leaf, navigating the interlocking branches with ease. Turtle realized that RainWings must have some ability to see in the dark, just as SeaWings did.\n\nHe followed her, less gracefully and with a bit more noise, but he knew Darkstalker couldn't hear him.\n\nThey settled near the prison, outside the fiery circle but close enough to hear the dragons inside it. Damp leaves flapped in their faces and things scuttled away beneath their claws. Kinkajou shuffled in closer to Turtle. He could feel her wings brushing his, her scales cool and camouflaged to a dark black-blue.\n\nWas she really in love with him now? She was acting exactly the same as she always had. But maybe that's the way she was with everyone, no matter how she felt about them?\n\nOr maybe she already felt this way about you, way back at the school.\n\nTurtle shook off that highly unlikely thought. He was not a dragon anyone would notice or fall for \u2014 especially when he was standing next to funny Qibli or handsome Winter or kindhearted Umber.\n\nHe felt a pang at the thought of his clawmate. If this is ever over, maybe I could use my magic to find Umber and make sure he's all right.\n\n\"Did you hear something?\" Glory asked, turning to look out at the dark, in the direction of Turtle and Kinkajou.\n\n\"Just an orangutan,\" said Darkstalker with a flick of his tail. \"I'll be able to hear the killers' minds approaching.\"\n\n\"I heard a noise,\" said Deathbringer, sounding disgruntled, \"but of course I can't see anything because there's a fire in the way.\"\n\n\"Trust me, this will keep your queen safe,\" said Darkstalker. \"They'll have to run through the fire to get to her, which they are not brave enough to do \u2014 or fly over it, which will let us hear them coming. Although I'll hear them coming my way first, of course.\" He lifted his head and stared piercingly into the dark.\n\n\"He looks like he's posing for a portrait,\" Kinkajou whispered to Turtle. \"Pompous Sneerdagard the Magnificent Awaits His Legions of Doomed Enemies.\"\n\nTurtle smothered a laugh. He realized that his wings were less tense than they'd been in days and that this, perhaps, was the best part of sharing his burden with someone else. He hadn't thought of Chameleon or seen any flashes of blood in his mind since Kinkajou woke up. His constant, pulsing anxiety had ebbed just a little and cracks of hope were sliding in.\n\n\"Shhh,\" he said anyway. \"He could still hear you.\"\n\n\"But he won't care,\" she answered. \"I'm less than nobody to him.\" She paused. \"Yeeeek. I don't know if I like the sound of that \u2014 being less than nobody. Being unimportant to the future. I want to be somebody. Somebody dragons notice and remember.\"\n\nNope, Turtle thought. Nope nope nope. I gave up on that idea a long time ago. If no one notices you, you can't let anyone down.\n\nKinkajou was watching him expectantly.\n\n\"Oh!\" he said. \"Um. You're somebody to me.\"\n\nShe clasped her front talons over her snout to hide her giggles. \"Right line,\" she said, \"but you need to work on your timing. And believability.\"\n\n\"You are,\" he protested. \"I was thinking about something else.\"\n\n\"Oh, now I feel very fascinating,\" she joked.\n\n\"I'm not sure you're taking this seriously enough,\" he said sternly.\n\n\"Here they come,\" Darkstalker rumbled suddenly, in a voice like the first breath of a snowstorm. \"I will take care of them, Your Majesty.\"\n\nHe stepped over the fire with his towering legs. The flames lapped at his scales but left no marks. Turtle shivered.\n\nThe powerful NightWing stalked away into the night, the ground trembling with every footstep.\n\n\"Ha!\" Anemone said merrily from her spot in the center of the circle, as far away from the flames as she could get. \"I feel sorry for those assassins! I wouldn't want to run into him in a dark forest.\"\n\nIn a startlingly brief amount of time, Darkstalker came back, accompanied by the noise of clanking chains. As he approached the fire, Turtle realized that he was dragging four dragons behind him, all of them linked by chains around their necks and ankles.\n\nOne of them was a young female NightWing, and she was spitting mad.\n\n\"Let us go!\" she hissed at Darkstalker. \"Who do you think you are? Are you a NightWing or not? Whose side are you on?\"\n\n\"Chains,\" Glory murmured. \"We don't usually do chains in the rainforest.\"\n\n\"They're very effective, though,\" Deathbringer pointed out. \"I much prefer seeing your enemies this way.\"\n\n\"Queen Glory,\" Darkstalker said. \"Here are the dragons who were planning to kill you.\" He stopped and blew out most of the fire in one long breath, leaving only a small section of flames. Turtle blinked away the dancing orange spots in his vision as his eyes adjusted back to the dark.\n\n\"Would you like me to dispose of them?\" Darkstalker's voice asked, deep and eerie in the shadows overhead.\n\n\"Oh, wonderful,\" said the female prisoner bitterly. \"Fat lot of use you were,\" she hissed at the two SandWing captives. The last was another NightWing, a solidly built male, who shuffled toward her and reached his tail to rest gently on hers.\n\n\"Wait,\" said Glory. \"I want to talk to them. You're Fierceteeth, aren't you? And this must be Strongwings.\"\n\nThe female only glared back, but the male nodded.\n\n\"Listen,\" said Glory, \"what you did cannot easily be forgiven. You kidnapped Sunny and you planned to betray us to Burn in the hope that my friends and I would die \u2014 including your own brother.\"\n\nTurtle blinked at Kinkajou, then back at the other dragons. Brother? Was this hissing ball of fury related to Starflight?\n\n\"No,\" Fierceteeth snapped. \"I would have kept him out of it.\"\n\nGlory regarded her for a moment as though she wasn't sure what to believe. \"Well, that's something, at least,\" she said. \"What was your plan here tonight?\"\n\n\"To take the throne for a true NightWing, so our tribe can have its pride back.\" Fierceteeth tried to lift her shoulders under the weight of the chains.\n\n\"Oh, already taken care of,\" said Darkstalker. He gave a little tug on the chain he held and Strongwings stumbled forward into an accidental bow. \"I'm going to rule the NightWings now.\"\n\n\"The ones who choose to go with him,\" Glory interjected.\n\n\"You can't,\" Fierceteeth said. \"You're male. And where did you come from? You weren't with us on the volcano, that's for sure. What gives you the right to rule us?\"\n\n\"Size, power, timing, charm, and a whole bunch of dragons who think it's a great idea,\" said Darkstalker with a grin. \"My name is Darkstalker.\"\n\nStrongwings let out a whimper and covered his head with his wings. \"We're going to die,\" he said in a muffled voice. \"It was all true. It was, I knew it. He's come back to kill us all.\"\n\nBut Fierceteeth held her ground, staring up at Darkstalker. \"Really,\" she said. \"From the ghost stories. You.\"\n\n\"In the scales,\" he said.\n\n\"Right,\" she scoffed. \"That's a pretty clever trick. Show up, pretend to be everyone's worst nightmare, and scare them into giving you the crown. Well, it's not going to work on me, you scaly worm. I'm not even a little bit afraid of you.\"\n\nDarkstalker chuckled, rustling the leaves in the trees.\n\n\"Fierceteeth,\" Strongwings whispered. \"Stop. It's him! Don't make him mad!\"\n\n\"It is Darkstalker,\" Anemone said loudly from behind Glory and Deathbringer. \"And he could crush you with one flick of his claw!\"\n\n\"Maybe he should, given what you were planning to do to the queen,\" Deathbringer added.\n\n\"If you're so powerful, then you can handle a challenge,\" Fierceteeth said to Darkstalker, ignoring the others. \"I want the NightWing throne. I think I should get to be queen. I'm female and I know my tribe; I'd be better at it than some lying stranger.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Turtle whispered to Kinkajou. \"Maybe I'm wrong about Darkstalker's spell. She doesn't seem affected by it at all.\"\n\n\"Actually, I think this is how she talks to dragons she likes,\" Kinkajou said ruefully.\n\n\"Brave little Fierceteeth,\" said Darkstalker.\n\n\"Don't call me little!\" she interrupted him. \"Just because you're overgrown doesn't mean you can patronize me!\"\n\n\"I was going to say I like your spirit,\" Darkstalker started.\n\n\"Can you make that a bit more condescending?\" Fierceteeth snapped back.\n\nHe paused, and Turtle got the distinct impression that he was trying not to laugh.\n\n\"All right,\" he said at length. \"You're not a dragon who likes compliments, I see. So I'll be blunt. I don't want to begin my reign as king of the NightWings by killing one of my subjects, especially one who could be such a valuable asset in rebuilding our tribe.\" He turned to Glory. \"Given the utter failure of all her schemes so far, and her relationship to Starflight, my proposal is this: Grant her your mercy and give her to me. Tomorrow I'll take her to the Night Kingdom with me, where she'll have no reason to bother you anymore. She can be my problem instead.\"\n\n\"I WILL be your problem!\" Fierceteeth growled. \"No one gives me to anybody! I'll go to the Night Kingdom only if I WANT to.\" She paused, narrowed her eyes suspiciously, and added, \"What Night Kingdom? Where?\"\n\n\"The old one,\" said Darkstalker, \"where the tribe should have been for the last two thousand years. You'll love it. We'll find you something important to do.\"\n\n\"Hang on,\" said Deathbringer. \"She tries to assassinate Glory, and her 'punishment' is she gets to be part of your court, ruling the NightWings?\"\n\n\"Makes sense to me,\" said Glory thoughtfully. \"She wouldn't be a threat to me anymore, once she has what she wants. Right, Fierceteeth? And then I don't have to have Starflight's entire family behind bars.\" She took a step closer to Fierceteeth. \"Would you leave my rainforest, my friends, and my tribe alone if we give you this second chance?\"\n\nFierceteeth glared sideways at Darkstalker. \"Are you lying?\" she demanded. \"Would I really be in charge of something?\"\n\n\"All you want is a little power and a lot of respect,\" Darkstalker observed. \"I can give you those.\"\n\n\"And Strongwings,\" she interjected. \"He stays with me.\"\n\nDarkstalker gave Strongwings an unimpressed look and shrugged. \"If you insist.\"\n\nFierceteeth tapped her claws on the ground thoughtfully. Strongwings still had his head covered, looking very much like a dragon who regretted all his life choices so far.\n\n\"Think about it overnight,\" Darkstalker suggested. \"In our lovely new accommodations for troublemakers.\" He swept one wing toward the prison, where, Turtle was sure, even a few minutes would convince any dragon to accept alternate offers.\n\n\"Hey! What about us?\" grunted one of the SandWings.\n\n\"Queen Thorn gets to decide your fate,\" Glory said, drawing herself up regally. \"In the meanwhile, you're going in there, too.\" She tossed the keys to Darkstalker.\n\nDarkstalker twitched the chain and Strongwings stumbled back to his feet. Wings drooping as they marched inside, all four prisoners disappeared into the forbidding gray block behind Darkstalker.\n\nGlory shuddered. \"That was awful,\" she said. \"I always thought I'd like dispensing justice more than that.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't call that justice,\" Deathbringer grumbled.\n\n\"We're looking for what brings peace to our rainforest,\" Glory pointed out, \"and for whatever gives dragons a chance to be their best selves.\" She hesitated, glancing around at Anemone, who had curled up drowsily under a mammoth fern. \"Something does feel weird, though,\" she added in a lower voice. \"Like I'm not entirely sure I trust my decisions right now.\"\n\nShe's feeling what Qibli felt, Turtle guessed. Torn between Darkstalker's spell and what her own intelligence is telling her.\n\nDarkstalker emerged from the prison, closing the heavy metal door with a grim clunk behind him. Turtle noticed that he didn't return the keys to Glory, but neither did she ask for them.\n\n\"Now that's taken care of,\" he said, \"and your life has been saved and everything, I'll return to my tribe and get some sleep. We have a long flight ahead in the morning!\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Glory said \u2014 a little reluctantly, Turtle thought, or maybe he just hoped so.\n\n\"Cheer up, Your Majesty!\" Darkstalker said cheerfully. \"We stopped some bad guys tonight! Isn't that fantastic? Just think what kind of teamwork our tribes might have ahead of us.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Deathbringer, tilting his head. \"Didn't you say there were five dragons coming to attack Glory tonight? Why were there only four prisoners?\"\n\nWas that a moment of hesitation from Darkstalker?\n\n\"I didn't want to alarm you,\" he said slowly. \"There was a third SandWing \u2026 but he fought back, and I was forced to kill him.\"\n\nIf that's true, he did it very quickly, Turtle thought. And silently.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Deathbringer. \"Well. Good.\"\n\n\"That's unfortunate,\" said Glory at the same time. \"We should find out his name from the other two. I'm sure Queen Thorn will want that information.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Very wise,\" said Darkstalker, nodding. \"And I'll take care of the body for you, don't worry.\"\n\nKinkajou jabbed Turtle in the side and he nearly jumped out of his scales.\n\n\"Lying,\" she whispered, pointing one claw at Darkstalker. \"Lying lying super liar.\"\n\nHe agreed with her, but he couldn't see the point of this lie. What was Darkstalker hiding now?\n\n\"Very well. We'll see you in the morning,\" said Glory, spreading her wings. She and Deathbringer flew off to the treetops, leaving Darkstalker and Anemone alone in the dying glow of the embers.\n\nDarkstalker looked down at the sleeping SeaWing princess. Something glinted in his eyes \u2014 something that made Turtle want to throw hiding spells all over his sister, no matter the risk. He crouched closer to the damp earth, wishing he were smarter, braver, bolder \u2014 really any other kind of dragon than the kind he was.\n\n\"Not much longer, Princess,\" Darkstalker whispered. \"Soon it'll be your turn to change the world.\"\n\nTurtle and Kinkajou spent the night in the healing pavilion, where the healers were pinkly atwitter with delight when they discovered Kinkajou was awake. While they checked her for any remaining injuries \u2014 and freaked out when they found none \u2014 Turtle wrote another note to Qibli.\n\nHe thought for a moment, then added,\n\nHe hoped that was enough information as he erased it, although he wasn't sure what good it did for Qibli to know all that.\n\nBefore he fell asleep, Turtle made Kinkajou promise not to go \"deal with Darkstalker\" without him, however she might interpret that phrase: no \"sneaking, stealing, attacking, thwacking, or pineapples,\" he begged. He also asked her not to tell Queen Glory anything.\n\n\"I have to let her know I'm all right!\" Kinkajou insisted.\n\n\"That's fine,\" he said, \"but don't say anything about me, or our suspicions about Darkstalker, or how much you know about him, or what we might do next.\"\n\n\"Jumping poison frogs,\" Kinkajou said, looking exasperated. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because he can read Glory's mind,\" Turtle pointed out, \"and we don't want him to hear anything that might make him nervous or suspicious.\"\n\nAfter much arguing, she agreed, and Turtle fell asleep feeling maybe a tiny iota less nervous than before.\n\nAt daybreak, Kinkajou woke him and they flew to the NightWing village. As they soared through the trees, Kinkajou tossed mangoes and bananas to Turtle, chattering busily.\n\n\"I visited my close personal friend Queen Glory last night,\" she said. \"Just to let her know I'm totally fine now. She was SO MAD and so happy and SO MAD at the same time. I got a seriously serious lecture about staying away from dangerous dragons from now on. La la la, irony. But she'll forgive me when we save the world, right? Right? Turtle?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, sure,\" he said through a mouthful of banana. He hadn't realized this was a conversation he'd have to take an active part in.\n\n\"I told her I want to go back to Jade Mountain,\" said Kinkajou. \"Which is true. I do want to go back there. I'm just going to take a quick detour to the new Night Kingdom on the way and not mention that part to her until later, like, way much later, like maybe when we're a hundred.\"\n\n\"Do we have to go to the Night Kingdom?\" Turtle asked. \"Maybe there's another way to stop Darkstalker \u2026 from here?\"\n\n\"No, I figured it out!\" Kinkajou said. \"I was thinking about it last night. This is all about Moon's prophecy! It's right there in the words. He's the thing that shakes the earth and scorches the ground, right? So we have to save Jade Mountain by finding the lost city of night, and that's where Darkstalker is going, so we just follow him there and BOOM, catastrophe averted! Everybody safe! Why are you rubbing your forehead again?\"\n\n\"No reason,\" said Turtle. He'd read enough scrolls to know that no heroic quest was ever that easy \u2014 but he'd also spent enough time with Kinkajou to realize that it wouldn't do any good to tell her that.\n\nDarkstalker had been busy in the night. When they arrived at the village, they discovered that he'd already packed (or made someone pack) several nets full of food from the rainforest. He stood on Glory's platform, counting the supplies gathered below him, as NightWings gradually filled the clearing in whispering clumps of twos and threes.\n\n\"I wonder how many of them are going with him,\" Kinkajou said, swooping down to land at the back of the crowd. Turtle touched down beside her, folding in his wings and ducking his head to avoid the funny looks he was getting from the rest of the NightWings.\n\n\"I bet most of them,\" he said. \"Wouldn't you follow a king who could give you superpowers?\"\n\n\"No way,\" Kinkajou said with fierce loyalty. \"Queen Glory is perfect. I want her to be my queen forever and always. MOON!\" she shrieked suddenly, spotting her clawmate as Moon passed by with her mother.\n\nMoon jumped nearly the height of a small tree and turned around. Her face lit up like a thousand dragons shouting in Aquatic at once. \"Kinkajou?\" she cried.\n\nThey barreled into each other, wings overlapping in a ferocious hug, voices overlapping as they both tried to talk at once.\n\n\"You're awake!\" Moon yelped through tears. \"You're all right! I've been so worried!\"\n\n\"You did everything cool without me!\" Kinkajou said at the same time. \"I can't believe all the amazing things you've been doing! Without me!\"\n\n\"I was going to come check on you today,\" Moon said, wiping her eyes. \"After Darkstalker leaves. I would have come yesterday, but I've been busy trying to convince as many NightWings as I can to stay here in the rainforest.\" She sighed. \"I'm not exactly the best spokesdragon, though. Nobody particularly liked me before, and they don't like me much better now that I've returned with mind reading powers and 'the Darkstalker.'\"\n\n\"I like you enough to make up for ten thousand grumpy dragons,\" Kinkajou promised. Moon smiled at her shyly, like that was still hard for her to believe.\n\n\"What did you tell them?\" Turtle asked. \"I thought you liked Darkstalker.\"\n\n\"I do!\" Moon said. \"He's been great so far. But Queen Glory is the best thing to happen to this tribe in two thousand years. She's fair and generous and she's given them a safe place to live. NightWings have always been afraid of living somewhere the IceWings could find them, in case the old war flares up, but Queen Glory made sure there was a truce with Queen Glacier first thing, to keep the tribe safe.\" She shook her head. \"I think Queen Glory has proven herself to be a just and kind queen. We don't know anything about Darkstalker or what kind of king he would be. I feel like this is all happening too fast.\"\n\nTurtle noticed that several NightWings had edged closer, pretending not to listen but clearly listening to Moon.\n\n\"And plus also,\" Kinkajou chimed in, \"don't forget the part where he's totally evil.\"\n\nMoon raised her eyebrows. \"He's not evil,\" she said. \"Not like Scarlet was. If he were evil, wouldn't I have seen it in his thoughts?\"\n\n\"You've seen the thoughts he wanted you to see,\" said Kinkajou. \"Right? He can totally shield the rest of them, can't he? The EVIL thoughts?\"\n\nMoon lifted her head to look over the crowd at Darkstalker. He had his head bowed and was absentmindedly shredding a mauve flower that had grown up at the edge of the stage.\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said. \"But I think he's really trying to help, even if I wouldn't do it the way he's doing it. I think he just wants his tribe back, the way it was before.\"\n\nKinkajou opened her mouth and Turtle stood on her foot to hush her up. If Moon were under a spell, telling her about it wouldn't do any good. It was encouraging, though, that she could choose Glory over Darkstalker, despite whatever spells he was using on her.\n\n\"Was Darkstalker upset when you told him?\" he asked.\n\n\"He said he understands,\" she said. \"And that he expects me to change my mind.\"\n\n\"Ha! Not likely!\" Kinkajou gave Moon another hug. \"So what are you going to do now?\"\n\n\"Go back to school,\" Moon said with a sigh. \"It feels a little weird, with everything happening \u2026 but that's what Queen Glory wants me to do. And that's where Qibli and Winter are \u2014 and you guys will be there, too, right?\"\n\n\"Sure, eventually, but don't you want to see the old Night Kingdom first?\" Kinkajou asked. \"Maybe just a quick visit before we go back to Jade Mountain?\"\n\n\"Why would we do that?\" Moon asked.\n\n\"No reason!\" Kinkajou glanced around and whispered loudly. \"Except maybe a prophecy reason.\"\n\nMoon flicked a fat green beetle off her tail and tipped her head at Kinkajou. \"I kind of do want to see it,\" she said. \"I mean \u2026 I have been thinking about the prophecy \u2026 but I don't understand how going there will stop anything from happening.\"\n\n\"You never know until you try!\" Kinkajou said brightly. \"That's settled, then. We'll all go to the Night Kingdom. Not with Darkstalker, though. Definitely not with him. More like \u2026 right behind him. Yes? Yes. Settled. Whew, I thought it was going to be much weirder to try explaining why I was in the Night Kingdom, but if I'm there with you, my gifted and awesome clawmate, then it makes total sense.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure \u2014\" Moon began, but the crowd suddenly parted and Darkstalker came striding through, straight toward their little group.\n\nTurtle felt himself shrinking as the NightWing loomed over them. Kinkajou, on the other talon, seemed to be trying to make herself look bigger. She spread her wings and puffed up her chest and fixed Darkstalker with her fiercest stare.\n\n\"Moon,\" Darkstalker said quietly. \"Last chance. Come with us.\" He hesitated, dipped his head toward her, met her eyes. \"Please.\"\n\n\"Darkstalker \u2026\" Moon said. \"You're my friend. You are. But Glory is my queen.\"\n\n\"Then come as my friend,\" he said. \"I could use a friend there. And I know you will soon anyway. I've had visions of us flying around the Night Kingdom together.\"\n\n\"Maybe soon,\" Moon said. \"But not this way.\" She gestured at the dragons around them. \"I have to make my loyalty clear.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"All right, it's up to you. But come soon. I'll be there, waiting for you.\" He leaned down and bumped noses with her, then turned and strode briskly back to the platform.\n\nStanding behind him, revealed by his exit, was Anemone. She lifted her snout haughtily at Moon. \"You don't deserve his friendship. You're not loyal at all. I say never come to the Night Kingdom. He'll be better off without you!\" She stuck out her tongue and stomped away.\n\n\"Sorry about my sister,\" Turtle said sheepishly. \"She doesn't like competing for attention. She's not used to it.\"\n\n\"She can HAVE all HIS attention, if you ask me,\" Kinkajou said.\n\nTurtle looked sideways at Moon. Her face was somber, but resolved. If Moon were under Darkstalker's control, then Darkstalker wouldn't have had to plead with her to come with him. She wouldn't have been able to say no.\n\nHad she escaped his spell somehow? Or did it work differently on her? Or was this all part of a larger plan of Darkstalker's?\n\n\"Hello, my fellow NightWings,\" Darkstalker boomed out over the crowd. \"Is everyone here? Are you ready to follow me to the greatest place in the world?\" He beckoned to a black dragon in the front row. She leaped up onto the platform, and Turtle realized that it was Fierceteeth.\n\n\"Whoa,\" he whispered to Kinkajou. \"She's out of the jail already? Do you think Glory knows?\"\n\nKinkajou hissed softly.\n\nFierceteeth positioned herself at Darkstalker's side, nudging Anemone off to a corner of the platform, which earned her a glare from the SeaWing princess.\n\n\"My new lieutenant, Fierceteeth, will be organizing volunteers to carry our supplies. We'll have a feast when we get there! Wait until you see our kingdom!\"\n\nA murmur of excitement eddied around the tribe.\n\nDarkstalker swept his wings wide to encompass the entire crowd. \"Our wonderful kingdom is not too far away. Our glorious future is on the horizon! Come with me, NightWings!\" He rose into the air just as Glory and Deathbringer appeared from the trees. They swooped down to the platform and looked up at him as he hovered above them.\n\n\"Time for all true NightWings to go, Your Majesty,\" Darkstalker said to Glory. \"Thank you for watching over them for me until I could get here. I wish you luck with your own tribe.\"\n\nHe ascended into the sky with powerful wingbeats that shook the treetops. And dragons began to follow him.\n\nOne by one, NightWings lifted off, until the sky was full of beating black wings, lashing tails, and flashing silver scales. The sound of the tribe in flight rolled like a thunderstorm across the rainforest.\n\nTurtle watched them in despair. He couldn't believe so many dragons had fallen for Darkstalker already. Barely three days free, Darkstalker now had an army at his claw tips and an entire kingdom to serve him. He became more unstoppable with every passing moment.\n\n\"There's nothing we can do,\" he whispered. \"He's too powerful.\"\n\n\"But not all-powerful,\" Kinkajou whispered back, nudging him. \"Look.\" She pointed to the NightWings who were still on the ground. Moon and Deathbringer, of course, but also at least fifty others \u2014 including, to Turtle's surprise, Mightyclaws and his mother.\n\n\"I guess some of them actually like us,\" Kinkajou said proudly. \"The smart ones can see how awesome it is here.\"\n\n\"Or they're just terrified of Darkstalker,\" Turtle suggested.\n\nKinkajou whacked him with her tail.\n\nStill, compared to the mass exodus overhead, what remained was nothing that could be called a tribe. The few NightWings left shuffled closer together, glancing around as though the forest had suddenly grown bigger and darker. They looked like refugees from a disaster. Which they are, Turtle realized. From the disaster of the volcano, first, and now from the disaster of a king stealing their tribe.\n\n\"Maybe we should go back to Jade Mountain after all,\" Turtle said, a sense of hopelessness creeping over him. \"It's probably one of the safer places to be, with Tsunami and Clay there.\"\n\n\"Until it falls beneath thunder and ice!\" Kinkajou protested. \"Because we were too boring to save the world! No way, not me. You go if you want to. Moon and I can do everything.\"\n\n\"Um \u2014 I think a bit more definition of 'everything' might be in order,\" Moon said, sounding a little alarmed.\n\n\"No,\" Turtle said glumly. \"I'm staying with you. I promised.\"\n\n\"Nice to see that you're completely thrilled about that,\" Kinkajou said with a laugh. \"Don't worry, I'm sure it won't take long. We'll be back at school learning math in no time.\"\n\nHow does she do that? Turtle wondered. How can she look at the same exact thing I'm looking at, but think, \"oh, here's a problem I can solve,\" instead of \"everything is hopeless\"?\n\nThey waited until later in the morning to leave; Moon and Kinkajou said their good-byes to Glory, and Mightyclaws told them he'd meet them back at school in a few days. Fearless and Mindreader and their families had gone with Darkstalker, and Glory wasn't sure whether they'd be returning to Jade Mountain.\n\nTurtle wrote another note to Qibli.\n\nThat was some advanced wishful thinking there. But maybe if he wrote it down, it would end up coming true. He brushed his talons over the slate, remembering how he used to write down everything \u2014 every passing idea or observation, as though they were pools of genius he had to capture before they evaporated. He liked the feeling of the slate pencil in his claws again.\n\nMaybe if I survive all of this, I could try writing again.\n\nIt wasn't hard to follow Darkstalker and the NightWings, even with half a morning's lead; the tribe in flight was like a dark cloud in the sky ahead of them. At one point as they flew through the mountains, Turtle looked down and spotted what appeared to be a small, abandoned scavenger encampment. He imagined being one of those little creatures looking up to see literally hundreds of dragons suddenly thundering by overhead. If he were one of them, he'd find a rock to hide under and stay there for the next month.\n\nDarkstalker led them south of Jade Mountain, over the delta where the Winding Tail River spilled into the southern sea, and westward along the coast. Below them, waves pounded against a rocky shoreline and the ocean was dark gray with hints of brilliant green where the sun slipped through.\n\nTurtle couldn't help thinking how easy it would be to dive into those waves. He could disappear into the watery depths and leave all these dangers behind. But he looked over at Kinkajou's gray-blue-sky scales and determined expression, and he knew he couldn't leave her.\n\nDarkstalker flew without stopping, and so the tribe did, too, although as the day wore on, they became more spread out across the sky, with the weakest fliers dropping farther and farther behind. The landscape along the coast shifted from mountains to scrub-covered hills and then desert as they reached the southern edge of the Kingdom of Sand. The wind up this high was chilly, but the sun beat down mercilessly on their scales.\n\nTurtle tried to remember the map of Pyrrhia in his head, so he could figure out where they were going. There wasn't anything in this direction except more sand, as far as he knew, and then the western ocean. Another island?\n\nThe sun was slipping down the sky ahead of them, shining right into Turtle's eyes, when Darkstalker suddenly dove toward the land. Like a flock of hungry crows, the NightWings swept after him.\n\nTurtle sensed Moon hesitating beside him. \"I don't want to join them,\" she explained when she caught him looking at her. \"I don't want them to think I've chosen Darkstalker. This is just a visit.\"\n\n\"I don't want to hang out with those dragons either!\" Kinkajou said firmly. \"Or listen to another endless windbag speech. Let's find a spot to sleep where they can't see us.\"\n\n\"But where are they going?\" Turtle asked, screening his eyes and squinting west. \"Why stop now? How much farther can it be?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Moon answered. They both hovered in the air for a moment, watching the faraway cloud of NightWings settle across the dunes and pebbled beach, like a black carpet flung over the ground.\n\nKinkajou found a small cave facing the ocean that the three of them could just barely squeeze into, and Moon caught them a few crabs to eat. It was a relief to stop and rest his wings; Turtle immediately brought out his healing stone to erase the ache in his shoulders. But it also made Turtle anxious that he couldn't see Darkstalker and he had no idea what the ancient animus would do next. What if he wasn't really leading the NightWings to their old kingdom? What if he was planning to smash the entire tribe into a cliff?\n\nThat delightfully morbid image wouldn't leave Turtle's brain as he tried to lie down and sleep. Moonlight poured into their cave from the night sky and from the silver reflections in the sea below. Kinkajou and Moon already had their eyes closed, their tails intertwined. He wondered if he'd imagined it that Kinkajou had maneuvered to be the one sleeping next to him. Her scales were warm, as though she'd been collecting sunshine in them all day, and in her sleep they'd turned indigo and gold, with flecks of citrus green.\n\nCarefully, reluctantly, he eased himself away from Kinkajou's side, and slid out of the cave onto the beach. Sand crumbled around his webbed talons and sharp edges of broken seashells poked his tail. The waves looked as though they were trying to reach out and drag him in, hissssss shhhhhhhh hissssss shhhhhhhh safe shhhhhhhh hide shhhhhhhhhh.\n\nHe turned his head north, toward the NightWing encampment, and watched. He didn't know how long he sat there, staring at that small patch of stars, but sometime later, he saw a vast shadow blot them out, then soar away west.\n\nDarkstalker's going somewhere. By himself, in the middle of the night.\n\nWhich means I have to follow him.\n\nTurtle glanced up the beach at the cave where his friends slept. But this was just a spying mission. He was the only one Darkstalker couldn't see. Whereas if Darkstalker caught Moon and Kinkajou trailing after him in the middle of the night, there would be some explaining to do, insignificance spell or no insignificance spell.\n\nHe rose into the air and followed Darkstalker, feeling as if his heart and stomach had traded places. Don't be a coward, he scolded himself. This is nothing. Eavesdropping with a cloak of invisibility. Sneaking around, which is the one thing you're good at.\n\nHe thought of Peril's fierce lack of stealth, the way she always made the most noise or picked a fight or accidentally blew something up. He missed her. He wondered what she was doing now. Their adventure together, setting out to stop Scarlet and find the rest of Jade Winglet, had felt a lot safer and more fun than this \u2014 maybe because he'd known her firescales could protect him, or because his magic had still been a secret from everyone back then.\n\nThe three moons lit up a ridge of jagged mountains stabbing into the clouds ahead of them. For a moment Turtle was disoriented, and he turned to look back over his shoulder \u2014 but no, there were the Claws of the Clouds Mountains behind him. The ones up ahead rose out of the desert like a wall made of shark's teeth, ending at sheer cliffs along the ocean.\n\nOh, Turtle thought, remembering the map of Pyrrhia. There was a small peninsula that jutted out at the southwest corner of the Kingdom of Sand. If the continent was a dragon, and that peninsula was a talon reaching out, these mountains were sort of like Turtle's armband. And nobody has crossed them in hundreds of years? Turtle wondered. They were quite forbidding; he wasn't sure he particularly wanted to cross them himself.\n\nBut that was clearly where Darkstalker was going. At one point, as they flew over land that began sloping up into hills, Turtle felt a sudden buzzing shock, like he'd accidentally grabbed a baby electric eel.\n\nWhat was that?\n\nThere was no way to know, and it was over in a moment. Turtle glanced uneasily down at the ground below him and hoped he was imagining the pale flash of what looked like bones sticking out of the earth.\n\nUp ahead, Darkstalker tipped his wings to soar high over the peaks and Turtle followed, gasping in the thin air.\n\nAnd there was the Night Kingdom.\n\nSpread out below them, outlined by moonlight, were the ruins of an ancient city that sprawled across the peninsula. Much of it was hidden within canyons and cliff faces, but at the foot of the mountain, partially built into it, stood a palace, or what was left of a palace. In front of it was an overgrown square paved in marble and studded with bits of toppled columns; a kind of platform had collapsed in the center of it and was nearly submerged in a wild tangle of vines. All around the square were more ruins: once-elegant buildings whose roofs had caved in, statues missing heads, talons, tails, or all three, sculptural details worn away by weather.\n\nDarkstalker's wingbeats faltered as he took in the devastation below him. He slowed to a stop, hovering outside the palace, staring down at the square. Bats flitted in and out of the windows behind him, like dark thoughts scattering into the air.\n\nHe feels like he was just here, Turtle guessed. It's like if I returned to the Kingdom of the Sea tomorrow and found that everything I knew my whole life has been destroyed, apparently overnight. And my tribe was scattered, weakened, with no queen.\n\nAnd everyone I ever loved was dead.\n\nThe giant NightWing put out one talon and touched the overgrown wall of the palace. Abruptly he turned and flew toward one of the other stately buildings that flanked the square.\n\nTurtle spread his wings to follow and felt a sudden strange chill along his spine.\n\nAs though someone was watching him.\n\nHe twisted in the air, searching the palace windows. Every shadow was full of eyes, every stirring of air the quiet breath of a hidden dragon.\n\nWas someone still living here? Had some NightWings never left, all those hundreds of years ago?\n\nBut no one emerged, and no sound came from within the palace walls.\n\nMaybe he was imagining things. This place was creepy enough to make anyone's scales crawl.\n\nTurtle flew after Darkstalker as fast as he could. At first he couldn't figure out what this new building was. It had at least three entrances, on different levels, although one was blocked by fallen rubble. Turtle also counted five towers, three of them half-tumbled away, and a trickle that looked as though it might once have been a waterfall. Darkstalker flew to the uppermost entrance and paced inside, ducking his head slightly to avoid cracking it on the high ceiling.\n\nAnd here, in the spiral hallways, there were clues: large rooms lined with tables, broken slates on the floor, displays of awkward, crumbling clay statues that looked as though they'd been molded by dragonets.\n\nBecause they were, Turtle realized. This is a school.\n\nWhy would Darkstalker come to a ruined NightWing school in the middle of the night? If he was searching for something of power, wouldn't it be at the palace? Or if he was looking for something of his own, something he missed, wouldn't it be \u2026 wherever he used to live?\n\nTurtle realized that he had no idea how old Darkstalker had been when Clearsight put the sleeping spell on him. He'd always imagined an older dragon, close to the age of the queen he was trying to replace.\n\nDarkstalker stopped at a turn in the corridor, brushed aside cobwebs and dust, and uncovered a painting. It was hard to make out the subject under the accumulated dirt of centuries, but Turtle thought it might have been a portrait of someone.\n\nDarkstalker traced the outer edge of it with his claws for a moment, and then he put one talon on the center of the canvas. Centuries of dust swirled away in a sudden blast, making Turtle's eyes water. He clapped his talons over his snout to stop himself from sneezing.\n\nWhen he looked up again, blinking away tears, he saw that Darkstalker had used his magic to restore the painting. Now it looked the way it must have looked in his time: brand-new, the colors and lines still sharp.\n\nIt was a portrait of a female NightWing, seated with her wings folded back, gazing out at the viewer. Behind her, a web of fiery lines crisscrossed the sky, like a pattern in the stars, with smaller falling stars in between the lines. For the most part, it was not a great portrait; the proportions were all wrong, particularly in the undersized talons and oversized head.\n\nBut there was something in her eyes that made you look twice. Something that made you think this dragon truly loved the painter.\n\nCould that be Clearsight? Turtle wondered.\n\nDarkstalker stared at her for a long moment before pulling himself away and continuing on. Turtle followed him through the spiraling labyrinth of the school until finally they emerged in a central courtyard. Classrooms looked out on the courtyard on all sides, and it wasn't hard to imagine being a student here, eating lunch under the trees or practicing your flying.\n\nTurtle had to navigate the tangles of vines, shrubs, and tall grass carefully to avoid getting stuck, but Darkstalker's huge talons crushed all the undergrowth in his path as he strode to a spot under a towering pine tree.\n\nHere he stopped. He bowed his head. His wings slowly drifted down to droop beside him.\n\nLong heartbeats passed.\n\nWhat is he thinking about? Turtle wondered. And \u2026 why here?\n\nHe inched closer, although it made his scales run cold to step through Darkstalker's shadow. It was an eerie, unsettling kind of spying, to stand right in front of a dragon and know he couldn't see you. Also that if he did, you'd be dead.\n\nA silver scale shone on Darkstalker's face, then slipped down his snout to splash on the ground.\n\nOh, Turtle realized with an awful twist in his heart. He's crying.\n\nHe did NOT know how to feel about that. Sympathy for Darkstalker \u2026 he couldn't afford that, could he? Not if he wanted to stay strong enough to stop him.\n\nBut this is the real Darkstalker. He's not performing for anyone right now.\n\nHe's just \u2026 really sad.\n\nTurtle glanced around, wishing he knew what to do. Here, perhaps, was a dragon who could be reasoned with. Here was a dragon who might tell the truth, if he had the right audience to say it to.\n\nThat idea, combined with the eerie experience outside the palace, led Turtle to a crazy thought.\n\nThere was another kind of story Turtle used to read when he was younger.\n\nGhost stories. Spirits of the dead coming back to haunt those who wronged them. Lost loves lingering around the ones who held their heart in life.\n\nDid Darkstalker believe in ghosts?\n\nTurtle backed cautiously away, scanning the ground for something he might be able to use. Darkstalker couldn't see him or hear him as he moved around \u2014 but he'd be able to see something Turtle left behind.\n\nThe moonlight glinted off something small and shiny, tucked in the hollow of a nearby tree. Turtle reached in, digging through the moss, and found a stash of beautiful marbles in different colors: blues and greens and silvery blacks. He glanced back at Darkstalker and chose a white marble with a sea-blue heart. It looked like a tiny moon, and he thought it would be the most visible in the dark grass.\n\nIs this stupid? Is this the stupidest thing I've ever done?\n\nHe hesitated. But all he wanted to do was see how Darkstalker reacted, if at all; he'd still be as hidden as ever. He'd be careful. Darkstalker might just think he hadn't noticed it before.\n\nHe crept forward on trembling talons until he was almost under Darkstalker's nose. He waited until the huge NightWing wiped his eyes and glanced up at the sky. In a flash, Turtle set the marble down an inch from those massive claws and backed away.\n\nNothing happened for a moment; Darkstalker was still looking at the moons. But then he lowered his head again with a sigh \u2014 which caught in his throat when he saw the marble.\n\nHe snatched it up in his claws and stared around the garden. His gaze passed right through Turtle, making Turtle feel like a skewered moth.\n\n\"Clearsight?\" Darkstalker whispered. He cleared his throat and tried again, a little stronger. \"Clearsight?\"\n\nThe wind murmured through the shadows, scattering pine needles across Darkstalker's wings and breathing evergreen air in Turtle's direction.\n\n\"Clearsight,\" Darkstalker said, stepping out into the moonlight, \"if you're here, speak to me. Please, please speak to me.\" He waited with an expression of such hope that Turtle was filled with guilt.\n\n\"Then listen,\" Darkstalker said after a while. \"I won't hurt you. I would never hurt you. I forgive you. I know you were scared. I saw everything you were afraid of in that last moment when you \u2014 when you put the bracelet on me.\" He hesitated, and his voice cracked as he added, \"I'm sorry I put that spell on you.\" He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his talons.\n\nWhat spell? Turtle wondered. What kind of dragon puts a spell on someone he loves?\n\nThen he remembered the love spell on Kinkajou and wanted to claw his own face off.\n\n\"If you come back to me,\" Darkstalker said sadly, softly, to the shadows, \"I promise I'll never enchant your mind again. I promise I'll listen to you this time. We can choose the best future together.\" He let out a small laugh. \"I could use your help with what you've left me. A ruined city, a weak and broken tribe. You'd be their Queen Clearsight \u2014 doesn't that sound all right now? When you can have the crown without anyone having to die? It was just waiting for us, Clearsight.\"\n\nHe started to pace. \"You should have to help fix this. Do you see what you did when you betrayed me? It's all gone \u2014 our tribe's power, our kingdom. Our beautiful future. You did this to our whole tribe, not just to me.\"\n\nDarkstalker's breath was ragged, his jaw clenched, and his claws ripped at the plants and grass, killing everything in his wake. \"Clearsight,\" he said. \"I \u2014 I keep looking at all my new possible futures. Millions of possibilities, but they're all empty. They're empty without you. I have no one, Clearsight. All I can see around me, as far as the future unrolls, are slaves and soldiers.\"\n\nTurtle shivered involuntarily. Slaves and soldiers. Is that how he sees his own tribe?\n\nDarkstalker paused again for a long moment, and then said, so quietly that Turtle almost couldn't hear him, \"I know you can't be out there. You're not in any of my futures. But please, Clearsight \u2014 please come back and tell me there's still hope for us.\"\n\nThe next pause lasted forever and another ten forevers. Turtle's talons were starting to fall asleep, but he didn't dare move while Darkstalker was still listening so intently.\n\nFinally Darkstalker lifted the marble up to glare at it, then clenched his fist shut around it. \"I'm a sentimental idiot. You're not here,\" he muttered. \"You could have been, if you'd waited another day or two. I would have made you immortal, Clearsight. We could have been together forever.\" He turned to pace back and forth under the spreading pine branches.\n\nHe is immortal, then. Turtle had suspected it, but now he knew for sure. Invulnerable scales, immortal life. The first spells that any young animus would think of. But no one would actually do them, between the cost to your soul and the unforeseen risks. At least, that's what I always thought.\n\n\"So what did you do instead?\" Darkstalker hissed softly. \"Did you go back to Fathom? Did you two laugh at the wonderful trick you played on me? Did you let him cast spells for you?\" He clawed at his neck as though something sticky was clinging to it. \"That sneaking serpent of a SeaWing. All high and mighty about protecting his soul and keeping his oath \u2014 until it comes to betraying his best friend. Then it's sure, why not. It's full speed ahead to sleeping spells and conniving and lies.\"\n\nHe stopped, his sides heaving. \"No,\" he said. \"You loved me. I know that was true. Fathom talked you into doing this to me. He's the traitor. He's the one I'll never forgive.\"\n\nDarkstalker hurled the marble at the nearest tree with such force that the trunk split down the middle. Turtle had to scramble out of the way of falling branches, and when he was able to look up again, Darkstalker had vanished into the night sky.\n\nMoon was awake when Turtle got back. She was sitting on the beach, staring out to sea, tracing shapes in the sand without looking at what her claws were doing. A thin thread of light on the horizon hinted at the sunrise about to come, but the cold air smelled like rain.\n\n\"Why aren't you sleeping?\" Turtle asked, landing beside her.\n\nShe gave him a rueful look. \"I never sleep well at night. In the rainforest, I mostly slept during the day, and I haven't quite adjusted to a normal dragon schedule.\" She hesitated. \"Although Darkstalker says I'm the one who's normal, and it's the other NightWings who need to fix themselves to match.\" Her tail flicked sand across the patterns she'd drawn. \"And I had a nightmare. The nightmare. The one I always have.\"\n\n\"About Jade Mountain falling?\"\n\nMoon nodded. \"Fire and death and screaming and death. It's not awesome.\"\n\n\"You can't see anything about how to stop it?\" Turtle asked. \"Any clues?\"\n\n\"Like something we might find in 'the lost city of night'?\" Moon suggested with a sigh. \"Not so far. Where have you been?\"\n\nTurtle discovered that he didn't want to tell her about what he'd seen \u2014 especially about Darkstalker's crushing sadness. She already sympathized with him too much. She didn't need more reasons to want to give Darkstalker a hug. She needed to see him as bad and dangerous so that she'd help Kinkajou when the time came for whatever heroics were necessary.\n\n\"Just scouting out the NightWings,\" he said evasively. \"Checking on Anemone.\" This was partly true; as he flew over them, he had peered down at the NightWings, their black scales blanketing the dunes and the beach where they slept. He'd spotted Anemone down by the ocean, sleeping as close to the sound and scent of the waves as she could get.\n\n\"You're a good brother,\" Moon said.\n\n\"No, I'm not!\" he protested, and she looked startled at his vehemence. \"Don't say that. I'm a terrible brother.\"\n\n\"Great heavens, Turtle,\" Moon said, blinking. \"That's not true at all. You're following her to the ends of the continent, aren't you? To make sure she's all right?\"\n\nI'm following Darkstalker. I know Anemone's not all right. And that's my fault, and there's nothing I can do about it.\n\n\"Trust me,\" he said. \"I'm the worst brother a dragon could possibly have.\"\n\nMoon studied him for a long moment with a faint frown on her face. \"I had a vision about you once,\" she said.\n\n\"About me?\" Turtle snorted. \"Was I hiding at the bottom of the ocean? Because that's what I see in most of my possible futures.\"\n\n\"No \u2026 I'm not sure whether to tell you about it,\" she said. \"It was a little scary.\"\n\nTurtle dug one of his talons into the beach and let the sand fill in over it until it disappeared. With Darkstalker around, probably everyone had a scary future ahead. \"I think you should tell me,\" he said.\n\n\"You were on a beach,\" she said, her voice getting softer, nearly swallowed by the rush of the waves. \"And you were attacking Anemone.\"\n\nTurtle stared at her. \"Why would I do that?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"You had her pinned down. That's all I saw.\"\n\n\"Why are you just telling me now?\" he asked.\n\nOne of the crescent moons was reflected in her eyes. \"I didn't want to scare you. I was worried it might happen because you use your magic too much and lose your soul.\"\n\nTurtle's claws twitched as though they were reaching for someone's throat. He tried to imagine them sinking into Anemone's scales, drawing his sister's blood. The screaming, battered NightWing flashed through his mind again, along with a whisper: You have violence in you.\n\nBut that was different. I would never hurt my own sister.\n\nHis claws curled inward as though they disagreed with him.\n\n\"It might not come true,\" Moon said. \"Darkstalker says our visions are only the most probable futures \u2014 but things can always go in a different direction.\"\n\nTurtle jumped to his feet, clenching and unclenching his talons. \"I'm sure it won't happen. I'm a bad brother, but not that terrible.\" He didn't want to think about this anymore. He didn't need one more thing to worry about.\n\nMovement on the horizon caught his attention and he looked up to see black wings ascending into the sky. \"They're moving. I'll get Kinkajou.\" Turtle ran up the beach and poked his nose into the cave, nudging Kinkajou in the side.\n\n\"Nnnnnnnnnnooooooooo,\" Kinkajou mumbled from under her wings.\n\n\"Time to go, Kinkajou,\" he said.\n\n\"Go awaaaaaaay, Bromeliad,\" Kinkajou grumped in her sleep. \"You smell like FISH and I don't WANNA train today.\"\n\nTurtle felt a stab of affection for her \u2014 for this grouchy, sleepy side of her he hadn't seen before. She was so real and so kind and so present. She was the opposite of a terrifying vision of his future. \"It's me, Turtle,\" he said, brushing one of his wings over hers. \"Come on, Kinkajou, wake up.\"\n\n\"Turtle,\" Kinkajou sighed dreamily, and clouds of light pink started drifting through her scales.\n\nTurtle pulled his wing back, feeling sick. So Anemone's spell really was working. He knew this wasn't how Kinkajou actually felt about him. She'd be so furious and embarrassed when she found out it was all magic.\n\nBut I can't tell her. What if it makes her so angry she takes off the skyfire? And then Darkstalker notices her and terrible things happen?\n\nIs this why I attack Anemone on some future beach? Because I'm angry with her about the spell on Kinkajou?\n\n\"We have to go,\" he said gruffly and whacked her with his tail.\n\n\"Who's that?\" she yelped, leaping to her feet and turning red with stripes of pale green. \"You want my venom, I'll show you ven \u2014 oh, hi, Turtle.\" She shook herself from head to tail. \"Whoa, that was a weird dream. My old teacher turned into the NightWing who used to study us.\" She shook herself again, harder. \"Two of my least favorite dragons. Yeesh, anyone would think I'm worried about something.\"\n\n\"The NightWings are moving,\" Turtle said. \"We should get going, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure.\" Kinkajou rubbed her face and then stretched, shifting her scales through a dazzling cascade of colors, from purple to aquamarine to saffron, where they settled. \"Turtle, you're looking at me as though I've been stabbed by a stalactite but haven't noticed yet.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said, backing out of the cave quickly.\n\nThey watched the NightWings gather in the sky like storm clouds until the tribe finally wheeled away west, and then Turtle, Moon, and Kinkajou lifted off and followed them.\n\nThe landscape looked much the same in the light as it had the night before, and Turtle felt the same strange zap of energy as they flew over that spot in the hills.\n\n\"Did you \u2014\" he asked his friends, just as Kinkajou yelped, \"OW! What was THAT?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Moon said, glancing down. She fell silent, and Turtle wondered if she had seen the shapes of bones below them, too.\n\nThey waited until all the NightWings had vanished over the peaks before flying after them. But as they came up and over the last mountain, they found a dragon waiting for them in the sky.\n\nDarkstalker.\n\n\"Moon!\" he cried with genuine delight. \"I thought my visions were messing with me, but you did come after all!\" He did a joyful flip in the air, spreading his wings toward the city. \"Isn't this amazing? Look at our beautiful kingdom!\"\n\n\"Oh wow,\" Moon said faintly.\n\nIn the gray sunlight, Turtle could see that the city was even larger and more ornate than he'd realized the night before \u2014 but he could also see more clearly how broken it was, and how time had eaten away at it. The rest of the tribe had swooped down into the ruins, diving through the canyons, exploring their new home.\n\n\"That's the Great Diamond down there,\" Darkstalker said eagerly to Moon, pointing at the overgrown square. \"On one side is the museum; over there is the school; and that building is the library. The library, Moon! I can't wait to show it to you. It makes Starflight's little cave at Jade Mountain look like a toad's den. Although it's not in the greatest shape now \u2026 but surely some of our scrolls must have survived.\" He poked Moon with his tail, grinning. \"I was hoping my visions were right and you'd come. This is great!\"\n\n\"I'm not staying,\" Moon said quickly. \"I'm going back to Jade Mountain. I just \u2026 wanted to see it.\"\n\n\"Me too!\" Kinkajou volunteered, popping up behind Moon and waving at Darkstalker. \"I'm here to see it, too! Moon's best friend, remember?\"\n\n\"Yes, right,\" Darkstalker said dismissively. \"Well, sure, Moon, if you want to go back to Jade Mountain, that's fine, but you might find that our school is much better and more perfect for you. After all, it's where I went to school! We had classes in all kinds of things they'll never get to at Jade Mountain. I just have to rebuild it a little, clean it up \u2026 find some decent teachers.\" He frowned down at the scattered NightWings below him. \"I suppose I could enchant some of them into becoming good teachers,\" he said thoughtfully.\n\n\"But \u2026 would your school be only for NightWings?\" Moon asked. \"Or would you invite students from other tribes, like Sunny did at Jade Mountain?\"\n\n\"Sunny is very sweet,\" Darkstalker said, \"but you saw how that turned out. It doesn't work to throw tribes together and just hope they'll get along, because they won't \u2014 they can't. Dragons don't work that way, no matter what tribe they're from.\"\n\n\"I get along with dragons from other tribes!\" Kinkajou objected. \"Moon is my best friend! Our winglet is awesome!\"\n\n\"I kind of like meeting the other tribes,\" Moon said to Darkstalker. \"They're not all like Icicle or Flame \u2026 or poor Sora.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Darkstalker said, flicking his tail, \"maybe one day you can organize an exchange program. But for now we need to focus on educating our own dragonets. We have a tribe to rebuild! There's so much they need to learn. Perhaps once we've solved all the problems within our tribe, we can start thinking about reaching out to \u2026 other tribes. Anyway, let me give you a tour of the palace!\" He tugged on one of Moon's wings and flashed away.\n\nMoon gave Turtle and Kinkajou an apologetic look and went after him. They followed a few wingbeats behind.\n\n\"He pays no attention to me at all!\" Kinkajou grumbled. \"It's like I'm not even there!\"\n\n\"That's good, Kinkajou,\" Turtle reminded her. \"You don't want him to pay attention to you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said with a sigh. \"But I don't like feeling as though I've disappeared. Like I'm not important enough to even look at.\"\n\n\"You're very important,\" Turtle said reassuringly. \"You're the hero of the story, remember? You have to fulfill Moon's prophecy.\"\n\n\"That's right!\" she said, brightening. \"We're here! In the lost city of night!\" She glanced around as though she expected a parade of cheering dragons to pop out of the mountain. \"We did it! So \u2026 did it work? Is the world saved?\" She poked his shoulder experimentally. \"Does the world feel saved to you?\"\n\n\"Not even remotely,\" Turtle admitted, watching Darkstalker and Moon land on one of the balconies of the palace.\n\n\"Thaaaat's the right attitude,\" Kinkajou said.\n\nThey swept down to land on the same balcony, carefully avoiding the parts of the balustrade that had caved in. Inside, Darkstalker was walking around what appeared to be a giant bedroom, eight times the size of any sleeping cave Turtle had ever been in.\n\n\"These were the queen's rooms,\" Darkstalker said to Moon. \"They're mine now, of course. It looks like she took most of her treasure with her when she left.\" He blew some dust off an enormous mirror and frowned at it. \"It all used to be so clean and \u2026 perfect. There were grand parties every other night! And things you would actually like, too, Moon \u2014 salons and scientific lectures and readings \u2026\" His voice trailed off as he wandered into one of the side rooms of the suite, where he started overturning empty chests and opening all the cabinets. Moon disappeared after him.\n\n\"Darkstalker!\" Anemone appeared in the doorway to the hall, her talons covered in white stone dust. \"I couldn't find the rooms you were talking about. All the doors look the same!\" She spotted Turtle and her mouth dropped open. \"What are you doing here?\" she hissed. \"I thought you were going back to school. Stop following me!\"\n\n\"He's not following you,\" Kinkajou said haughtily. \"He's with me.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Anemone's snout crinkled into a wickedly sly grin. \"Aw, that's wonderful. That's so, so cute. You guys are so cute together.\" She lowered her voice, although not far enough, and whispered to Turtle, \"You're welcome.\"\n\nMoon heard this as she came back into the room. She gave him and Anemone a surprised look. Turtle hoped the floor was about to collapse and take him with it.\n\n\"Wait, you're here, too?\" Anemone said to Moon, lashing her tail. \"Do you just keep changing your mind about who you're loyal to? He doesn't need you, you know. He has me.\"\n\n\"We're not staying long,\" Moon said uncomfortably.\n\n\"What is it, Anemone?\" Darkstalker asked, slithering back into the main room. Turtle wondered if he was imagining the hint of weary impatience in Darkstalker's voice.\n\n\"You said there was a perfect suite for me, remember?\" Anemone said, in her wheedling-whining princess voice. \"But I couldn't figure out your directions and I can't find it.\"\n\n\"Oh dear, I'm so sorry for straining your tiny SeaWing brain,\" he said. Anemone didn't even look offended; the insult seemed to sail right past her. \"Come on, I'll just show you.\" She jumped out of his way as he thumped past and Turtle noticed that the doors in this palace were so big, Darkstalker didn't even have to duck as he went through.\n\nThey all trailed after Darkstalker through the long black marble halls of the palace, many of which opened onto courtyards or balconies or grand halls far below them. Turtle had always thought the Deep Palace of the SeaWings was the most luxurious, imposing castle in all of Pyrrhia, but he guessed that at least five of them would fit inside this place.\n\nAnemone might have been thinking the same thing, because she said jealously, \"You know, our palace has a lot more artwork. And treasure. Lots of jewels everywhere.\"\n\nDarkstalker paused and ran one claw through the dust on one of the walls. \"There used to be artwork and treasure here, too,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I'm surprised the queen was able to take so much of it with her.\" He paused. \"Unless she didn't.\" His eyebrows drew down menacingly. \"Unless another tribe came in here later and looted the palace.\"\n\nHe whirled toward Moon. \"Which tribe would you say is the wealthiest?\"\n\n\"The wealthiest?\" Moon said. \"I don't know \u2014 I mean, how would anyone know that?\"\n\n\"Which tribe has the most treasure?\" he asked edgily. \"What would you guess? I don't need exact numbers. In all those scrolls of yours, which queens buy the most extravagant things? Which castles are the most full of jewels?\" He shot Anemone a suspicious look.\n\n\"Um \u2026 all of them, except the RainWings,\" Moon said awkwardly, \"but maybe the SkyWings have a lot, because of Scarlet \u2014 and the SandWing treasury was supposed to be one of the greatest in the world, before the war and the whole lie about the scavengers stealing all of it.\"\n\n\"SandWings,\" Darkstalker hissed. \"They barely had any treasure in my time. It must have been them.\" He rapped the wall with one claw and turned away again. \"All right, Anemone, come along.\"\n\n\"Princess Anemone,\" she said, tossing her head.\n\nDarkstalker sped up, whisked around a corner, and threw open a huge set of black doors.\n\n\"Here you go,\" he said with a strange gleam in his eyes. \"The perfect suite for you. Decorated with a SeaWing in mind, two thousand years ago. In fact, your own ancestor stayed in these very rooms.\"\n\n\"Fathom?\" Turtle blurted.\n\nAnemone looked curiously from him to Darkstalker, expecting an answer. Kinkajou jumped in quickly. \"Was that Fathom?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Darkstalker said. He glanced at Moon and steeled his face, as though hiding his true feelings from her. He stepped through into the main bedroom, his black eyes studying every inch of the space. \"This is where our queen put him when she brought him over from the Kingdom of the Sea. To 'educate' me about the perils of animus magic.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Anemone stepped around him and sneezed. \"Huh. This is it? It's not what I pictured.\" She peered into a dry, cracked pool in the floor. Her tail bumped one of the tattered, moth-eaten cushions, sending up a halo of dust, and she sneezed again.\n\n\"So use your magic to clean it up,\" Darkstalker said impatiently. \"Or better yet, learn how to use a mop and your own claws.\"\n\n\"Where does Moon get to stay?\" Anemone demanded.\n\n\"Wherever she likes,\" Darkstalker answered. \"If she decides to stay, that is.\" He turned to Moon with a smile. \"Let's go see how the gardens have turned out!\"\n\nHe bounded out the door again, but Moon lingered for a moment after he left. \"I think the room's really nice, Anemone,\" she said. \"It has a balcony and everything.\"\n\n\"You would think it's nice,\" said Anemone. \"You grew up in a gross muddy fern gully in a rainforest. I am a princess. I have always lived in a palace and I've never had to clean my own room! The idea!\"\n\n\"I've never had to clean my room either!\" Kinkajou volunteered. \"I mean, I don't have a room. But I have a hammock! Sometimes I shake it really hard to get all the leaves and bugs out. Does that count?\"\n\n\"Moon!\" Darkstalker called.\n\nAnemone stamped her foot. \"Why doesn't he want to show me the gardens?\" She scowled at Moon. \"The minute you show up, suddenly you're the only dragon he wants to talk to. I don't see what's so special about you.\"\n\n\"Nothing at all,\" Moon said. \"I'm just the first dragon he met when he woke up. I'd better go.\" She took a step backward.\n\n\"No!\" Anemone barked. \"If you're so wonderful and amazing, why don't you clean my room!\" She grabbed a talonful of loose pebbles from the floor. \"Turn into a bucket of water and a mop,\" she ordered, and instantly a long mop and a pail of water appeared in her claws.\n\nShe held up the mop and pointed at Moon. \"Now go hit that dragon really hard until she starts using you to clean this place \u2014 and don't let her stop until I say it's done.\"\n\n\"What?!\" Kinkajou yelped.\n\n\"Anemone!\" Turtle cried.\n\nThe mop sailed across the room and rapped Moon sharply on the snout as she tried to back away.\n\n\"Ow!\" Moon cried, fending it off. \"Stop!\" The mop evaded her talons and whapped her again. Tears of pain sprang into Moon's eyes and she grabbed the handle, wrestling it down to the floor. \"What are you doing?\" she shouted at Anemone. \"I'm not going to let you hurt me!\"\n\n\"Neither am I!\" Kinkajou yelled. She dashed over and threw herself on the mop, helping Moon pin it to the ground.\n\n\"Anemone,\" Turtle said helplessly. \"Stop this.\"\n\nBut his sister was busy scooping up another talonful of pebbles. \"Turn into opals and sapphires,\" she ordered them. \"And go distract Darkstalker so he doesn't come looking for her.\" She opened her claws and a glittering constellation of blue and iridescent gems shot out the door, tumbling over one another in the air.\n\n\"There,\" Anemone said, satisfied. \"Now he won't come rescue you. And hey, he did say I should use my magic to clean up. Just stop fighting and do it!\" She made a sweeping gesture with one talon and the mop's long handle shot upright, cracking Kinkajou in the jaw.\n\n\"Yowch!\" Kinkajou roared.\n\nTurtle jumped forward, but he didn't know what to do. Should he cast a spell? Would it be hidden by Anemone's other magic in here? What could he do? Enchant the mop \u2014 or enchant Anemone? But then she'd know he was an animus. This seemed like perhaps not the best time to reveal that.\n\nStill, he had to do something to help Kinkajou and Moon. What would the hapless sidekick do in this situation?\n\nA heartfelt speech! There was always a right thing to say, wasn't there? Even the sidekick sometimes got a decent useful speech. He could talk her down. She was his sister, after all.\n\n\"Anemone, think about what you're doing,\" he started, his voice cracking.\n\n\"Blah blah blah,\" Anemone said, flapping her claws at him. \"Quit your jellyfishing, Turtle. I'll let your girlfriend and her annoying friend go in a minute. I just don't get what Darkstalker sees in Moon, do you? She's nobody special. Not like me.\" A slow smile spread across her face. \"Maybe I just need to make him realize that.\"\n\nAnemone swept over to the dry fountain and fished something out of it \u2014 some kind of small device that looked like a telescope and an hourglass stuck together. \"What in the moons is this?\" Anemone turned it over in her claws for a moment, shrugged, and tossed it aside. She plucked a piece of broken tile out of the pool.\n\n\"Turn into an earring,\" she commanded the tile. \"Something really sparkly and cool that Darkstalker would like.\" A twisty silver snake with ruby eyes appeared in her talon. \"Perfect. Now \u2014 earring, as soon as Darkstalker puts you on, I want you to make him stop caring about Moon at all. She'll be just another random dragon bothering him. And I'll be the only dragon he finds interesting.\"\n\n\"You can't do that to him!\" Turtle said. \"Can you?\" Would a spell like that even work on Darkstalker?\n\nIf it did, maybe it would be a good thing \u2014 maybe it would help Turtle get Moon away from Darkstalker's influence. Maybe it would keep her safer from him than she would otherwise be.\n\nI should enchant that earring, too! he realized suddenly. But with what spell? What's the right spell to put on Darkstalker if I had the chance? Another sleeping spell? Or something to make other dragons see him the way he really was? A spell to make him reveal all his secret plans?\n\nOr \u2026 a spell that could kill him?\n\nCould I really do that? Is that what he deserves? His brain offered up a flash of lonely Darkstalker in the school gardens last night, missing his lost love.\n\nAnd then another flash of blood staining his own claws.\n\nAm I a dragon who could kill someone \u2014 anyone? Even him?\n\nIf I did, would that tip my soul into darkness? Is that the choice I make that leads to me attacking my sister on a beach?\n\n\"You \u2014 you jackdaw!\" Kinkajou yelled at Anemone, coiling her tail around the mop and leaning on it with all her weight. \"You overripe melon!\" Next to her, Moon was struggling silently. \"You're being absolutely horrible!\" Kinkajou yelled. \"Oh! Turtle, is this her losing her soul? Is she turning evil?\"\n\nIs it? Turtle thought with horror. He'd stopped worrying about that after she put on the silver necklace. But if it didn't work \u2026 or if the spell on it wasn't quite what she thought it was \u2026\n\n\"Ha!\" Anemone cried. \"I'm not evil! My soul is protected, remember? I've seen evil \u2014 this isn't evil at all. This is just a princess dealing with one of her pesky problems.\" She held up the earring and dangled it in Moon's direction. \"What else should I do with my magic, do you think? Ooooo, I could make him give me the queen's rooms. Or I could make him build me my own palace, right next to this one!\" She breathed out a contented sigh and touched her necklace. \"Life is so much easier now that I can do anything I want.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be so sure of that,\" Moon said, looking over Anemone's shoulder.\n\n\"Anemone.\" Darkstalker's menacing voice rumbled like an earthquake rising through Turtle's claws. \"Explain yourself.\" The enormous NightWing stepped through the door and made a gesture toward Moon. The mop clattered to the ground, harmless once more. Kinkajou put one wing around Moon.\n\nAnemone swung around to Darkstalker with a sweet, practiced smile on her face. \"There you are! Oh, this is nothing, don't worry. I was trying to clean up and the mop went a bit haywire and these two decided to tackle it. So weird! But look, I found this really cool earring in one of the side tables. Isn't it perfect for you?\"\n\n\"Liar!\" Kinkajou yelled, but Darkstalker ignored her.\n\nHe stepped forward to loom over Anemone and she backed into a wall, babbling. \"I mean, the king of the NightWings should really wear the best jewelry, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I don't accept gifts from animus dragons,\" he growled. \"Especially from deceitful, conniving SeaWings. What kind of an idiot do you think I am, that I would fall for a trick like that?\"\n\n\"It's not a trick,\" Anemone protested. \"It's just a pretty earring. Squid guts, you don't have to be so paranoid.\" She laughed nervously.\n\n\"Spare me your lies,\" Darkstalker spat. \"I heard everything.\" He uncurled his talon, scattering the dust of gemstones at her feet. \"You thought these baubles would distract me so you could hurt Moon.\" He snatched the earring out of her claws. \"You planned to manipulate my emotions. To cast a spell on me.\"\n\n\"J-just a little one,\" Anemone stammered. \"I just want you to be my mentor and only pay attention to me, that's all.\"\n\n\"Don't be angry at her, Darkstalker,\" Moon said, her sides heaving as she caught her breath. \"She's young. It was just a mistake. And I'm fine.\"\n\n\"I will not have dragons stolen from me,\" Darkstalker snarled. \"Not ever again.\" He reached one talon toward Moon and Kinkajou and made an odd circling motion with his claws. Instantly Moon stopped moving as though she'd been frozen, staring forward blankly with unblinking eyes.\n\nKinkajou let out a small gasp and reached toward her friend.\n\nOh no, Turtle thought frantically. That spell is supposed to be on Kinkajou, too! Darkstalker's going to notice that his magic doesn't work on her!\n\nDarkstalker frowned at Kinkajou, then down at his talon. Turtle hissed, catching Kinkajou's attention, and pretended to freeze in place.\n\nLight dawned in her eyes. When Darkstalker reached toward her again, she immediately froze where she was, mimicking Moon's blank stare.\n\nGood, Turtle thought, although his heart was still pounding. Now hold that. Don't give yourself away.\n\nLuckily, Darkstalker turned his back on Kinkajou almost immediately, focusing his attention on Anemone. \"It's time for you to go, Princess,\" he growled.\n\n\"What do you mean, go?\" Anemone cried. \"Go where?\"\n\nShe glanced anxiously at Moon and Kinkajou. \"What did you do to them?\"\n\n\"They don't need to hear this part,\" Darkstalker said softly. \"It's time for you to go back to the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\nWhat is he doing? Turtle thought in a panic. Is he putting a spell on my sister?\n\n\"But I don't want to!\" Anemone stamped her foot. \"I hate it there! I want to stay with you and learn about being an animus!\"\n\n\"You know all you need to know,\" Darkstalker said. His voice seemed to be getting colder and darker, like water from the deepest ocean depths curling slowly into Turtle's ears. \"You know what Albatross did. You know how easily you could be queen. You know that nobody can stand in your way if you decide to go take the SeaWing throne right now.\"\n\n\"Is \u2026 is that what you want me to do?\" Anemone asked.\n\n\"I don't care what you do,\" said Darkstalker. \"I was beginning to think you could be a worthy student. That perhaps I should keep you around, after all. I thought you might be someone who could work alongside me.\" He glanced at Moon, then fixed his cold black eyes on Anemone. \"But I was an idiot to let any affection for you creep in. You are truly Fathom's descendant. You're just as bad as he is. And I don't want you anywhere near me.\"\n\n\"I can't help being Fathom's descendant!\" Anemone cried. \"I'm sorry, all right? I won't try to cast any more spells on you, I promise!\"\n\n\"It wouldn't have worked anyway,\" Darkstalker said, flicking the earring at her. It bounced off her forehead and skidded across the floor. \"None of your spells will ever work on me. I've protected myself from your magic. Now get out. Go kill your mother, if you want. Feel free to kill any other dragons who stand in your way.\"\n\nHe made the circling motion with his claws again. Moon took a breath in, glancing around as though mildly puzzled, and Kinkajou imitated her a moment later.\n\n\"You won't be able to hurt Moon anymore,\" Darkstalker said, sweeping one wing toward the doorway. \"So don't even try.\"\n\n\"This isn't fair!\" Anemone yelled. \"It's not fair!\" She bolted toward the balcony instead, then turned back, framed by the gray light outside. \"I'll show you how special and important I am! You'll see!\" She flung herself into the air.\n\nAnemone. Turtle's chest ached, as though all his guilt had become boulders piled on his heart. This is my fault. This is my fault.\n\n\"I can't believe she did that!\" Kinkajou said. \"Moon, are you all right?\"\n\n\"Did she cast any spells on you?\" Darkstalker asked gently.\n\n\"Not on me, no,\" Moon said in a shaky voice. \"I don't think so. Just on the mop and the earring. Three moons. I didn't realize how upset she was with me. Did you see that in her mind?\" she asked Darkstalker.\n\n\"A little, but I didn't think it would escalate so quickly either,\" he said.\n\n\"Are you having a vision?\" Moon touched her temples. \"I have a vision headache, but nothing clear is coming through.\"\n\n\"Or maybe you have a headache because you just got whacked in the head with a mop handle,\" Kinkajou suggested sensibly.\n\n\"No, it's \u2014 I think it's some danger in the Kingdom of the Sea,\" Moon said. Her worried eyes met Turtle's.\n\nCold terror ran through him. Was Anemone really going back home? Right now? To kill Mother and steal the throne?\n\nShe wouldn't do that, he thought, and at the same moment, this new Anemone might. This Anemone who wants everything, who believes it should be hers \u2014 this Anemone who uses her magic for selfish reasons, who wants to impress Darkstalker \u2026 this Anemone, who acts as though her soul is damaged after all.\n\nThe enchantment Darkstalker did on her necklace \u2014 what if it was a lie? What if it didn't protect her soul; what if she'd been losing it, bit by bit, with each spell she cast?\n\nIncluding the one I asked her to cast on Kinkajou, Turtle thought with a wince.\n\nIf that was true, the same thing could be happening to Anemone that happened to Albatross, their murderous ancestor all those centuries ago.\n\nAnd she could be flying home to follow in his footsteps right now.\n\n\"I have to go after her,\" Turtle said. \"My tribe \u2014 my family \u2014\"\n\nKinkajou took a step toward him, but Darkstalker was already folding his wings around her and Moon. \"Now let's go see the gardens,\" he said. \"And put all this unpleasantness behind us.\"\n\n\"But what if Anemone does something terrible?\" Moon said to him. \"Shouldn't we follow her?\"\n\nHe looked down at her with sad eyes. \"In all the futures I see, following her only makes it worse. You and I are the last dragons she wants to see right now. But there's a good chance she'll get tired after half a day of flying, stop at Jade Mountain, and stay there \u2014 safe and harmless. I think that's the most likely future.\"\n\nTurtle's pounding heart disagreed. What if everything Darkstalker said to her was a spell and I didn't recognize it? What if Darkstalker has enchanted Anemone to kill Mother?\n\nTo punish us all for being Fathom's descendants \u2026\n\nIf that's true, there's no way I can stop her.\n\nThere's almost certainly no way I can stop her anyhow.\n\nBut I'm the only one who can even try.\n\n\"Stay with him,\" Turtle said to Kinkajou, although his voice was shaking. \"You have to watch him. I'll go after Anemone.\"\n\nBy yourself? his mind screamed. Do you want everyone to die?\n\nHe didn't have time to write to Qibli \u2014 and Qibli wouldn't be able to help him anyway. Neither Qibli nor Kinkajou could follow him into the ocean, if that was really where Anemone was headed. Only SeaWings could go as far underwater as the Deep Palace.\n\nHe stepped onto the balcony and glanced back. Another part of him was screaming don't leave Kinkajou here! It's not safe! What if he notices there's a spell on her? What if she's not the same when I get back?\n\nThe three dragons were heading out through the main doors of the room. At the same moment, Kinkajou turned to look back at him. She gave him a reassuring smile and flared her wings, letting them turn pink along the edges.\n\nThen she followed Moon out the door and was gone.\n\nAnd Turtle was aloft. Flying, flying higher, beating his wings as hard and fast as he'd ever flown before.\n\nCould he catch Anemone? If he did, could he stop her from whatever she was planning?\n\nShe was smaller than him, but fast, and she might use her magic to make herself faster.\n\nBelow him the NightWing city fell away and the mountains whipped past, craggy and jagged like a dragon's spine, peaks reaching out like claws to snag his wings. The air currents were strange in these mountains, falling away in odd places, and he had to concentrate more than usual to stay aloft.\n\nWhy couldn't he see her in the sky up ahead? Because she was too small, because she blended in with the pale gray-blue clouds? Where was she?\n\nHe burst out of the mountains and veered east, following the same route they'd taken that morning. His wings were tiring already at this pace; there was no way he could keep it up all the way back to the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\nThe sea \u2014 Turtle looked down at the dark waves pounding the beach below him. Maybe he could swim part of the way home. Maybe that's what Anemone was doing.\n\nHe tucked himself into a dive, plunging into the water and nearly caving in his skull on an underwater boulder.\n\nCareful! Careful, careful, be more careful \u2026 mustn't die before I get there \u2026 although I might die when I get there.\n\nHe found a rip current moving swiftly east and slipped into it, spreading his wings to catch as much of its speed as possible.\n\nWould Anemone actually kill me? Her own brother?\n\nKilling Queen Coral was one thing \u2014 that was the only way for the next queen to take the throne, so every princess grew up with that possibility in her mind.\n\nBut the rest of the family \u2026 if she attacked them, that would have to mean she'd lost her soul, or she was under Darkstalker's control.\n\nMy family, Turtle thought, powering himself forward with talons and tail. My mother. Coral had never loved him, or been at all interested in him, but he still loved her \u2014 the idea of her and the stories she wrote.\n\nMy brothers. The whole restless, wrestling, teasing pack of them.\n\nAunts and uncles and cousins.\n\nMy littlest sister. Tiny Auklet.\n\nHe couldn't imagine anyone hurting a dragonet so small.\n\nDon't do this, Anemone.\n\nShould he use his magic? Now? Should he try to stop her? Darkstalker might think he was sensing Anemone's magic \u2014 but what if he realized it wasn't? What if it made him suspicious?\n\nDrumbeats of panic were thudding around and around in Turtle's head.\n\nHe knew this feeling.\n\nHe hated this feeling.\n\nThe pressure pounded in rhythm with his wingstrokes.\n\nEverything is resting on me. On me. On me. And I will fail. Again. Again. Again.\n\nSearching and searching for Snapper. Knowing his father was waiting. Knowing his father was counting on him. Knowing he couldn't do it. Knowing now what his father's disappointed face looked like, and how all that disappointment would crush Turtle into a nobody.\n\nThis was exactly the same, except the disappointed faces would be Moon's and Kinkajou's and Qibli's, and the dragons who died because of him would be his entire family, maybe more; maybe everyone, if Anemone couldn't be stopped.\n\nThe current veered north and he went with it, realizing he couldn't see land off to his left anymore.\n\nI want to run away. I want to hide forever.\n\nBut he had no choice. Anemone was his responsibility.\n\nAnemone was his biggest mistake.\n\nOnce a year, in the Kingdom of the Sea, every two-year-old dragon in the tribe is brought together for a particular ceremony.\n\nAt least, it is called a ceremony \u2014 the Talons of Power ceremony \u2014 but really, it is a test, and smart dragonets who've been listening closely know that's what it is.\n\nSmart dragonets also know exactly what the ceremony is looking for.\n\nWhen he was two years old, a week before the ceremony, Prince Turtle went out and caught two large fish and a talonful of shrimp. He flew them to a rocky ledge on a deserted island and left them to rot in the sun.\n\nFive days later, he returned and ate them, holding his nose and forcing them down his throat.\n\nThe night before the ceremony, Prince Turtle was dramatically, violently ill in the dining room of the Deep Palace.\n\nIt was pretty horrifying.\n\nNo one wanted to go anywhere near the vomiting prince. He was sent to recover on a small island far away from civilized society, which meant, of course, that he missed the Talons of Power ceremony that year.\n\nQueen Coral wasn't concerned. He was just one of her many little princes, and if he really had any magic in his claws (which was statistically very unlikely), someone would figure it out sooner or later. She decreed that he could be included in the ceremony the following year, when he was three.\n\nBut the year Turtle turned three was the year his father went missing \u2014 captured by the SkyWings, according to Coral's spies. Queen Coral had spent every moment of that year guarding her new egg so that a princess could finally hatch unharmed. She got her wish: a living daughter \u2026 but she lost her husband.\n\nThe Talons of Power ceremony was canceled that year.\n\nSo Prince Turtle was four by the time the next Talons of Power ceremony rolled around. No one had said anything to him about it in over a year. He believed they'd forgotten about testing him. Because why bother? If he were an animus dragon, someone would have noticed by then.\n\nAt least, that's what everyone thought.\n\nOn the day of the ceremony, Turtle was on his way out of the Summer Palace with a pearl-gathering party when a dark green dragon blocked his path.\n\n\"Prince Turtle,\" the dragon said in an oily voice.\n\n\"Whirlpool,\" Turtle answered evenly, hiding his dislike. Queen Coral adored this particular advisor, and Turtle couldn't figure out why, except perhaps that Whirlpool was an expert at fawning over everything Coral did.\n\n\"Have you forgotten what today is?\" Whirlpool asked. \"Your presence is required at the Talons of Power ceremony.\"\n\nTurtle's heart thudded hard against the walls of his chest. \"Me?\" he said. \"Isn't it pretty clear by now that I'm not an animus?\"\n\n\"Still,\" said Whirlpool, \"every SeaWing must undergo the test, especially those in the royal family. If animus power should happen to resurface now, when it is so direly needed, we cannot let it slip past our noses, can we?\"\n\nDoes he know? Turtle wondered. But Whirlpool always sounded like a know-it-all, even (maybe especially) when he knew nothing.\n\n\"All right,\" he said with a shrug. \"Seems like a waste of time is all. I thought the queen really wanted these pearls for Anemone's new necklace.\"\n\n\"The test will be over by midday. Plenty of time for pearl-gathering after that,\" Whirlpool said, ushering Turtle into the tunnel that led out of the pavilion.\n\nTurtle swam along beside him, his mind paddling frantically. There had to be some way out of this.\n\nHe couldn't take that test.\n\nHe couldn't let them find out what he was.\n\nIf his mother found out \u2014 what would she make him do?\n\nTurtle had read every scroll he could find on animus magic. There weren't many, and most of the ones that existed were about Albatross, his ancestor from centuries ago.\n\nAlbatross, the one who built the Summer Palace with his power.\n\nAlbatross, who went mad and massacred half his family before he was stopped.\n\nTurtle had often tried to imagine what it would be like if everyone knew he was an animus. Would they be terrified of him? Would they always be wondering if he'd suddenly snap and start killing dragons?\n\nOr would they think he could be a useful tool in the Great War that was raging across the sea? What if Queen Coral forced him to use his magic against her enemies? What if she wanted him to do something he didn't want to do?\n\nWhat if he tried to do it and failed, and dragons died because of him?\n\nOne thing was for sure: Everyone would know who he was. Everyone would always be looking at him. He'd never be able to hide or blend in; he would always have eyes on him, waiting and judging and expecting.\n\nThat scared him a lot more than the idea of losing his soul. He wasn't terribly worried about that. His soul felt fine; he certainly didn't feel like killing anyone, ever. He wasn't even sure he believed the theory that animus dragons lost their souls when they used their magic too much. Maybe Albatross had been naturally crazy and homicidal all along, but nobody noticed.\n\nStill, better safe than sorry. Better a quiet nobody than a big-deal-center-of-attention dragon that everyone thought would do great things.\n\nI'll have to fool the test, Turtle realized. He was four now; surely he was smart enough to do that.\n\nWhirlpool led him a long way, to an island where Turtle had never been before. As they approached, he saw other dragons swimming toward it \u2014 parents with their two-and three-year-olds or members of Queen Coral's council who had come to watch.\n\nHe wasn't sure why. There hadn't been an animus dragon found in the tribe in centuries, as far as he knew. Surely it would be a very boring ceremony.\n\nThe dragonets were gathered on a beach on the eastern side of the island. As Turtle waded up onto the sand, he realized with surprise that there were dragon-made structures around him. The remains of an old pier jutted into the water. Most of the wooden walkway had rotted away, but a few of the pylons still stood, and it clearly led out to where a pavilion had once balanced over the sea.\n\nFarther up the beach, overgrown by jungle vines, ruins rose out of the greenery \u2014 walls, a tower, here and there a dragon statue.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Turtle asked Whirlpool.\n\n\"Oh, don't you know?\" Whirlpool said in his insufferably superior way. \"What do your tutors spend their time on, I wonder. Use your brain, little prince: Don't you remember anything about an ancient SeaWing palace, abandoned nearly two thousand years ago?\"\n\nTurtle looked around again, resisting the urge to smack Whirlpool in the snout with his tail. Two thousand years ago \u2026 that was around the time of the massacre.\n\n\"The Island Palace,\" he breathed.\n\n\"It's the Island \u2014 oh,\" said Whirlpool, realizing what Turtle had said. \"Yes. That's correct.\" With a faint air of disappointment, he oozed off toward the top of the beach, where Turtle's uncle Shark was pacing and glowering at everyone.\n\nThis was where the massacre had taken place. Turtle felt an eerie chill flood through his scales. Nine dragons had died here, the victims of Albatross's magic, most of them members of the royal family \u2014 his ancestors. If anywhere in the kingdom was haunted, this would be the place. He imagined restless ghosts, stepping through puddles of blood on the verandas, reaching with translucent talons toward the living \u2026\n\n\"Hey,\" Octopus said, breaking Turtle's trance. \"What's she doing here?\"\n\nQueen Coral came swooping down from the sky, but Turtle knew that wasn't the \"she\" his brother meant. Octopus was talking about their sister, little Princess Anemone, the dragonet clinging to Coral's neck. A harness bound the two of them together; Turtle had never seen them without it.\n\n\"She goes everywhere Mother goes,\" Cerulean whispered. \"You know that. They're here to watch the ceremony, like everyone else.\"\n\nBut he was wrong about that. Coral landed on the sand, shook her wings, and looked around triumphantly at the assembled council members.\n\n\"I want Anemone to be tested with the other dragonets today,\" she announced.\n\n\"Anemone!\" protested Turtle's cousin Moray, who was old and on the Council. \"She's not even one year old yet!\"\n\nQueen Coral smiled fondly at her daughter. \"Yes, but she's very precocious. And I have a feeling about her. I just know how this story should go.\"\n\nPrincess Anemone slid off the queen's back in a move that was almost graceful, except she got tangled up in the harness and ended up flopping onto her side in the sand. Growling softly, she struggled to her feet and wrestled the harness back out of her way.\n\nNext to Turtle, a three-year-old dragonet twitched forward, as if he wanted to go help her but he wasn't sure he was allowed to. His scales were grayish-blue and there was a nick on one of his ears which Turtle recognized. That was Pike, who had a reputation for fighting too hard in training classes and hurting himself by accident.\n\n\"All right, here we go,\" Whirlpool said, smacking his front talons together wetly. \"A coconut for each dragonet, please.\"\n\nA few older dragons moved between the dragonets, passing out coconuts. Turtle looked warily down at his. This could be the instrument of my destruction, he thought. This harmless-looking snack could betray me and change my life forever.\n\n\"We'll start on this end,\" Whirlpool said, stepping over to the line of dragonets. \"You three, loud and clear: Tell your coconuts to float into the air, then return to your claws.\"\n\nThe three dragonets on the end dutifully spoke in unison, issuing commands to their coconuts.\n\nNothing happened.\n\n\"You may go,\" Whirlpool dismissed them.\n\nAs they slipped back into the water with their parents, Turtle felt his heart racing as fast as his mind. Whirlpool would be looking right at him. He'd have to say exactly what he'd been commanded to say. How could he fool the test?\n\nEnchant it now, he thought. Before he gets here.\n\nHe sank his claws into the coconut shell. Coconut, he thought, don't move. No matter what I or anyone else says to you, you are now a completely normal coconut who can never be enchanted.\n\nWould that work? He had experimented so little with his power, because of the need to keep it secret. He knew he could enchant things by thinking about it, without having to speak aloud. But he wasn't sure if spoken spells were stronger and might overpower a thought spell. He also wasn't sure it was possible to enchant an object to be enchantment-resistant.\n\nWhat else can I do to distract them?\n\nHis gaze fell on Anemone, sitting up the beach, beside their mother. She held a coconut, too, studying it and turning it between her talons like a large opal. Queen Coral was watching her as though Anemone had been carved out of sea glass, perfect and shimmering and sharp. Her eyes were full of all the things Turtle feared: grand plans, dreams, ambitions, expectations.\n\nIn Queen Coral's story of the world, of course her one surviving daughter would be magical. Of course she would be the first animus dragon to hatch in hundreds of years. She would be chosen \u2014 she would be a savior for the whole tribe.\n\nThat's it. An idea hit Turtle like a lightning bolt.\n\nIf the tribe already has an animus \u2026 then they won't need me.\n\nAs quickly as it had struck, his excitement faded. The type of enchantment he was imagining \u2014 no one had ever tried it before, as far as he knew. It was probably impossible. Almost certainly impossible. Insane, in fact. Especially since he couldn't touch her or speak out loud \u2014 it would have to be a thought spell from a distance, and those were difficult enough, even when they weren't immensely powerful requests.\n\nBut the words were forming in his head, unbidden, and he realized he was going to try. If it was impossible, it wouldn't work, and he'd be in the same current as before.\n\nIf it did work \u2026 Whirlpool would be happy, Anemone would be even more special, Queen Coral would be ecstatic \u2026 and Turtle would be safe.\n\nI enchant my sister Anemone to become an animus dragon, too.\n\nAnemone, become an animus dragon.\n\nI enchant you to have talons of power.\n\n\"Turtle!\" Whirlpool barked in his ear. Turtle jerked back, catching his tail painfully on a giant conch shell.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Turtle said. \"What?\"\n\n\"It's your turn.\" Whirlpool nodded at the coconut, and then at the two dragons beside him. \"Pike and Octopus are waiting.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\" Turtle fumbled his coconut out in front of him and took a deep breath. He heard the other two mumbling along as he spoke to it. \"Coconut, float into the air and then return to my claws.\"\n\nWas the coconut trembling, or was that his own fear traveling through his arms? Did it feel lighter in his talons, as if it was about to lift off?\n\nOh, please, Anemone, use your magic, Turtle wished desperately.\n\nA piercing shriek suddenly cut the air, making half the dragonets jump and drop their coconuts.\n\nIt was Moray, one talon outstretched to point at Anemone \u2014 and the coconut that was slowly drifting up into the air over her head.\n\nWhirlpool turned to stare, and Turtle took the moment to grip his coconut forcefully once more. Stop moving, you hairy idiot. I enchant you to be a normal coconut! A coconut that would never float anywhere, by all the whales!\n\nThe coconut seemed to nestle closer, warm and heavy and still in his claws.\n\n\"I was right!\" Queen Coral cried. \"Anemone! You're an animus! You really are!\"\n\nNo one looked more surprised than Anemone, who stared up at the coconut in awe. With the sun shining behind it, it seemed to be glowing, and so did all the pinkish-white and pale blue scales all over Anemone.\n\n\"I'm magic,\" she whispered.\n\n\"The test is over!\" Coral called. \"Whirlpool, we've found our animus! Look!\"\n\n\"But shouldn't we \u2014\" Whirlpool gestured faintly at the remaining dragonets, then shrugged. \"Quite right, Your Majesty. All of you are dismissed!\"\n\nTurtle exhaled softly.\n\nHe couldn't believe it. It worked. He'd turned his sister into an animus dragon.\n\nSo now he was safe. His magic was his own. He could keep being quiet, ordinary Turtle on the outside.\n\nBut had he done the right thing? What if he had ruined Anemone's life by protecting himself?\n\nHe hesitated at the edge of the water, watching his sister. She certainly looked pretty happy. Queen Coral threw her wings around Anemone as her council crowded closer, murmuring excitedly.\n\nWould the queen have reacted the same way to finding out he was an animus? Would he suddenly be the one she loved, the center of attention all the time?\n\nWould he have ended up with a harness like Anemone's?\n\nHe shook a crab off one of his talons. Remember, that's exactly what I don't want, he told himself.\n\nThis would have been Anemone's life anyway. Really, it wouldn't be any different; she'd still be special and beloved. She'd probably adore having animus powers.\n\nWhat about her soul? a part of him whispered.\n\nHe pushed away the guilt. Probably a myth, he told himself. Someone will make sure she's careful with her magic, he told himself. She'll be fine, he told himself.\n\nTurtle slipped into the water quietly, unnoticed by anyone, and swam away, leaving barely a ripple on the surface of the ocean.\n\nTurtle thought of Kinkajou, of Qibli and Winter, of Peril, as he flew and swam, flew and swam without stopping. He wished he had his friends with him. Peril would be able to stop Anemone, either with her firescales or her blunt honesty. Qibli would have some brilliant plan, or Winter would be able to fight her.\n\nNot him. He had no plan, no fighting skills, no firescales.\n\nI could try honesty. I've never given Anemone the truth before.\n\nI'm not sure she'd be very grateful for it.\n\nThe current took him north to a river, which turned out to be Winding Tail River, snaking through the mountains. Whenever it was too shallow to swim, he flew; when the night unleashed brutal gusting winds, he swam.\n\nThe windstorm was still going when he had to leave the river sometime the next day; it was hard to tell whether it was morning or afternoon, with the sun swallowed up by clouds, and only a dim gray light filling the sky from horizon to horizon. The landscape below him was equally monotonous; this was the Mud Kingdom, dreary and swampy and bog-riddled.\n\nHe let himself stop for a moment in a grove of mist-shrouded trees, so he could use his healing stone on his exhausted wings. Then he replaced it in his pouch and flew on. He was starving, but he couldn't stop to eat. He had to catch his sister.\n\nAnother night passed in flying, and the next morning Turtle found himself over the ocean, sunlight sparkling on waves as blue as Tsunami's scales.\n\nGratefully he dove into the warm water and found a current that was going in the direction of the Deep Palace. As it swept him along, he was able to catch a fish hurtling by and eat it in two snaps of his jaws.\n\nA sense of enormous relief washed over him as he came in sight of the Deep Palace. For one thing, it was home: familiar and comforting in every twist and crevice. For another, it did not look like the site of an ongoing massacre. SeaWings swam peacefully, busily, in and out of the various entrances. Dragonets played around the fins of the soldiers in the gardens. The usual glow of Aquatic conversations danced over the coral and reflected through the palace windows.\n\nNo clouds of blood rising from the palace; no dragons fleeing in panic.\n\nIf Anemone was here, she hadn't started killing yet.\n\nWhat if she isn't here? he thought, touching down at the main palace entrance. He'd look like kind of an idiot if he'd chased her all the way back home for no reason.\n\nBut then everyone would be safe, and he wouldn't mind looking like an idiot to make that true.\n\nOne of his older brothers was swimming out of the palace as Turtle approached. Fin blinked in surprise when he saw Turtle.\n\nI thought you'd gone off to fancy hugging school, he joked with flashing scales.\n\nI did. I'm just stopping by to say hi, Turtle said. He couldn't stop himself from adding, And what does that even mean, hugging school?\n\nWhere all the tribes of Pyrrhia will learn to hug out their problems, of course, said Fin, grinning like a comedic barracuda. Who are you here to say hi to? Nobody's even noticed you're gone. He laughed and thumped Turtle's shoulder hard enough to make Turtle spin in the water.\n\nOh, thanks very much, Turtle responded, righting himself. Have you seen Anemone today?\n\nHERE? Fin looked alarmed. She's supposed to be with you! Do not tell me Pike has lost her. Mother will pop off all his scales one by one.\n\nNo, no, Turtle said. She snuck away from school and I thought she might have come here. But you haven't seen her?\n\nFin shook his head.\n\nWhere's Mother? Turtle asked. Maybe he should warn her. Although he didn't want her to kill Anemone on sight, which would be the logical reaction. Could he explain everything that had happened? Darkstalker and everything else?\n\nIn Auklet's favorite place, Fin said, rolling his eyes and nodding at one of the gardens beyond the palace. As usual. He spread his wings to swim away.\n\nFin \u2014 Turtle started. His brother turned to look at him. If you do see Anemone in the next day or two \u2026 maybe keep your distance. Just in case.\n\nYou're freaking me out, little brother, Fin said, frowning.\n\nI'm worried about her soul, Turtle admitted. But I hope I'm wrong.\n\nFin blanched, no doubt remembering all the Albatross stories as well. I've been meaning to do a mapping excursion to the Outer Isles, he said. Maybe now would be a good time for that.\n\nMaybe, Turtle said, adding the sequence of glowing scales that indicated high anxiety. Maybe take our brothers with you.\n\nAll of them? Three moons, Fin flashed, a shadow of a grin reappearing on his face. It'll be more like an invasion than a scouting trip. The grin vanished again. Thanks, Turtle.\n\nHe swam off at top speed and Turtle headed for Auklet's garden.\n\nAs he got closer, he realized why this spot was her favorite. Here, a few vents in the ocean floor sent jets of warm bubbles shooting toward the surface. When he was a little dragonet, he'd loved playing in them, too.\n\nQueen Coral sat beside the bubble sprays, watching her littlest daughter with a smile on her face. She held a slate loosely in her talons, but she wasn't writing on it. At the end of her harness, Auklet was somersaulting and giggling and pouncing at the bubbles as they shot by.\n\nMother, Turtle flashed as he sidled up beside her.\n\nOh, hello, she flashed back, glancing at him briefly. She didn't seem to recognize him as the prince who was supposed to be at Jade Mountain.\n\nTurtle sat down beside her, at a loss for words. Where should he start? Would it be wise to warn her about Anemone? What if his sister wasn't really planning to challenge her? After all, she should have easily gotten here before he did. So where was she?\n\nMaybe Darkstalker was right and Anemone was back at the Jade Mountain Academy right now, eating fish and bossing the other SeaWings around.\n\nIf so, he didn't want to get her in trouble with the queen.\n\nBut if Coral and Auklet were in danger \u2026 shouldn't he warn them? He looked up at the dark ocean overhead, wondering if a soulless Anemone was out there somewhere, circling like a shark.\n\nIsn't she perfect? his mother flashed. It took Turtle a moment to realize she was talking about Auklet. The queen nodded at the happy dragonet. I was convinced I was cursed. I thought I'd never get even one living daughter \u2014 and now I have three. She caught a wayward bubble in her talons and smiled. And I'm not afraid anymore. That's the most amazing part. I know the assassin is gone, so I can just \u2026 be happy to be with Auklet, instead of being terrified every minute that I'm about to lose her.\n\nI never told you how sorry I was, Turtle blurted. He clapped his wings shut. This was not at all what he had meant to say.\n\nFor what? the queen asked.\n\nFor the eggs that died, he said miserably. When I was looking for Snapper. When the other guard got sick, and I couldn't find Snapper anywhere, and Dad was so upset with me.\n\nThat was you? She looked at him more closely and he flinched back. But it wasn't anger in her eyes, or even disappointment.\n\nWas it \u2026 pity?\n\nYour father felt terrible about that, she said. Especially once we found out that Snapper had snuck off to the Summer Palace and wasn't even here. Oh, I made sure her death was a little extra painful for that.\n\nWhat? Turtle wasn't sure he'd followed her Aquatic correctly. Snapper wasn't \u2014 what?\n\nShe was supposed to stay in the Deep Palace in case she was needed, but she left, Queen Coral said. That's why you couldn't find her here. Didn't you know that?\n\nNo, Turtle said. No one ever told me that.\n\nI thought Gill was going to tell you, Coral mused. Maybe he didn't get a chance before \u2026 She trailed off.\n\nTurtle's mind was spinning as if it was caught in a whirlpool. He couldn't have found Snapper that day. Not in time to help his father, if she was all the way at the Summer Palace.\n\nIt wasn't his fault. It wasn't his failure. And his father knew it before he died.\n\nMaybe he forgave me, Turtle thought, the first hopeful thought he'd had about his father in years.\n\nSorry nobody told you, his mother said unexpectedly. You were such a little dragonet, and you tried so hard. And then, even more unexpectedly, she put one wing around his shoulders and pulled him closer.\n\nTurtle's heart was definitely going to explode.\n\nWhat's your name again? she asked. Which almost wrecked the moment, except that nothing could do that.\n\nTurtle, he said. It's Turtle.\n\nShe smiled down at him. I'll remember it this time.\n\nHe smiled back. Holy mother of scavengers. She knows who I am. She cares about my feelings.\n\nAnd I didn't even have to be a hero. I'm just me, Turtle. Her dragonet who tried his best.\n\nHe leaned into her and thought about heroes and stories and misunderstandings. He knew he still had to go find Anemone to do something heroic and possibly impossible. He knew Darkstalker was still out there, and he hadn't yet tried his best to stop him, but he would.\n\nBut for now, for this moment, he let himself just be Turtle, under his mother's wing, where he'd always wanted to be.\n\nAll too soon, a SeaWing messenger came from the palace looking for Queen Coral. A dragon from the Talons of Peace is here to see you, he reported. News about changes in the Sky Kingdom, he says.\n\nThe queen made a face at Turtle and Auklet. Official business, she said. We have to get back to the palace, Auklet.\n\nOK! The little dragonet spun through the bubbles one last time and swam over to her mother. Turtle! she cried, recognizing him. Auklet threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight.\n\nHe hugged her back, thinking, I won't let anyone hurt you, little sister.\n\nSee you soon, his mother flashed. Turtle watched them swim inside. His heart ached but his wings felt stronger than ever. He was going to find Anemone and stop her, no matter what it took.\n\nI know the truth now. The coral was trying to take me to Snapper \u2014 it only seemed like it didn't work, because it was trying to get to the Summer Palace.\n\nThe coral! He could use that to figure out where Anemone was. A thought that really should have occurred to him a couple of days and a very long flight ago.\n\nHe prayed that it would point south, toward Jade Mountain. Maybe it would lead him all the way back to the safety of school.\n\nThe tiny red tree felt fragile and brittle in his talons, as though it might snap at any moment. \"Anemone,\" he whispered to it. \"Where is my sister?\"\n\nIt wriggled in his talons, pointing up and away from the Deep Palace, but not south. He let it pull him into one of the swift currents that spiraled out to the islands.\n\nFor a while he swam steadily, and his spirits rose with every wingstroke away from the palace. She wasn't lurking there, lying in wait for his mother. Whatever Anemone was up to, maybe no one had to die.\n\nLeft! The coral suddenly insisted, tugging him up out of the current and up, up, up to the surface. Turtle had to pinwheel fast with his wings and tail to stay with it. Cascades of green-blue bubbles exploded around him.\n\nIt was leading him to an island. He could see the shape of the land ahead of him, but he didn't recognize it \u2014 not until he popped out of the water and saw the ruins jutting out of the jungle.\n\nThe Island Palace. The place where the animus test had taken place.\n\nWhere he'd cursed his little sister with his own power, so he could stay hidden.\n\nAnd there was Anemone, digging a hole in the beach with her claws, muttering furiously to herself. Wet sand covered her webbed talons and plastered her tail so she looked half\u2013MudWing.\n\nTurtle floundered forward in the surf as the waves tried alternately to toss him onto the sand or to drag him back into their arms. The sun was unexpectedly bright in his eyes. Somehow he'd expected to confront Anemone deep underwater, or in the rain; this idyllic beach scene didn't fit his idea of an animus showdown.\n\n\"Anemone,\" he gasped, staggering onto the beach. The coral practically dragged him forward so it could tap Anemone's tail.\n\nHis sister whirled around, her face contorted with fury.\n\n\"You BORING LUMP OF KELP!\" she yelled at him. \"You ruin EVERYTHING! Why can't you leave me ALONE?!\"\n\n\"You're my sister,\" he said. He let his wings rest on the sand and tried to catch his breath as he tucked the coral away. \"I'm worried about you.\"\n\n\"Are you?\" she scoffed. \"Or are you worried about what I might do?\"\n\n\"Um,\" he said. \"That too?\"\n\n\"Well, you can't stop me,\" she said mockingly, \"so there's really no point in you being here. Go back to your loser friends and your hypnotized girlfriend.\"\n\n\"You're the one who put that spell on her!\" Turtle flared. \"I didn't ask you to!\"\n\n\"Because you're a wimp who's afraid to even try for what he wants,\" Anemone said. \"But I'm not like you. I'm getting exactly what I want and deserve, and I'm getting it today.\" She turned back to her digging.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" Turtle asked.\n\n\"Something Whirlpool said he hid for me here,\" she said. \"Go away, Turtle.\"\n\n\"Anemone,\" he said, \"I'm afraid Darkstalker's put a spell on you.\"\n\nShe laughed bitterly. \"Well, that would be ironic.\"\n\n\"I mean, I think he's enchanted you to kill Mother and maybe Auklet and the rest of our family,\" Turtle explained.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said and laughed again. \"I don't need to be enchanted to want to do that, big brother. I think anyone who met you all would feel the same way.\"\n\n\"But I think this is his vengeance,\" Turtle said desperately. \"For what Fathom did to him.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Anemone said with a shrug. \"But if I do it, I'll be Queen of the SeaWings, and then he'll have to respect me \u2014 and if that's what he was hoping for, maybe he'll be proud of me, too.\"\n\n\"How can you not care?\" Turtle demanded. \"Is it your soul? Maybe he didn't enchant that necklace to protect it, after all. Maybe you've been losing it all along, piece by piece.\"\n\n\"That whole idea of the soul is ridiculous,\" Anemone snapped. \"Good dragons do bad things and bad dragons do good things all the time. Nobody has an entirely good soul to start with. It's just stupid to think that it's like a block of stone and my magic is chipping away at it. It doesn't make sense.\" She smashed her tail into the sand, cracking seashells and frightening small crabs in every direction. \"Where IS it? If he was lying to me, I swear I'm going to hunt down Whirlpool's drifting corpse and kill him again.\"\n\n\"Again?\" Turtle's ears twitched. \"What? Again? Anemone, what do you mean?\"\n\n\"I'm the one who killed him the first time.\" She gave him a scornful look. \"Did you really think he 'accidentally' fell into that pool of eels? We figured out that he'd been trying to kill Tsunami. And then he realized how powerful I was and he was going to tell Mother and Blister.\" She shrugged. \"So I took care of him.\"\n\nThree moons. Turtle had been worrying about Anemone all this time \u2014 worrying about what she might do, about how the magic he'd given her might affect her \u2014 and yet when she did do something big and terrible, he'd missed it completely.\n\n\"Oh!\" she said, spotting a gleam of metal in the sand underfoot. She pounced on it, digging furiously, and finally reared back with a triumphant \"Aha!\"\n\nIn her talons was a dagger as long as her forearm, curved like a claw and gleaming wickedly sharp along every edge.\n\n\"Three moons,\" Turtle whispered. \"Anemone.\"\n\n\"Whirlpool wanted to be king pretty badly,\" she said, turning the dagger to catch the sunlight. \"I think he was hoping to shape me into a darker dragon by making me cast all those 'practice' spells. He wanted me to go evil and try for the throne. He told me he'd hidden a perfect weapon here, ready for whenever I needed it \u2014 for whenever I wanted to challenge Mother.\" She smiled at it. \"I think it'll work fine on little sisters, too, don't you? And big ones, for that matter.\"\n\n\"But you can't,\" Turtle said, feeling sick all through his scales and bones and muscles.\n\n\"Sure I can,\" she said, widening her blue eyes at him. \"I won't make Orca's mistakes. I'll enchant this thing right now to be a perfect killing machine. It'll never miss. It'll go straight for Mother's throat first. Then Auklet, Tsunami, you \u2026\" Her eyes narrowed. \"Moon. Maybe Kinkajou, too. Why not? He did say anyone who gets in my way.\"\n\nThis was it; this was the breaking point. His speeches weren't working. He had to do something. Even if it meant Darkstalker found out about him. He had to do something.\n\nHis talons closed around the nearest seashell, fan-shaped, pale pink and white like Anemone's scales. \"I enchant you to break every spell Darkstalker has cast on Anemone the moment you touch her,\" he said, and flung the seashell with all his might. It bounced off Anemone's side and she jumped back, blinking and startled.\n\n\"What the \u2014\" Anemone yelped. \"Are you out of your mind?\"\n\n\"Necklace,\" he said, reaching out one arm. \"Come to me.\" The silver collar around Anemone's neck snapped off and flew into his talons. \"I enchant you to be powerless from now on,\" he said to it, and threw the necklace as far out to sea as he could.\n\nAnemone's claws went to her throat. \"But \u2014\" she said. \"How \u2014\"\n\n\"Dagger,\" Turtle commanded. \"Turn to sand forever.\"\n\nThe dagger collapsed in Anemone's talons and scattered into the wind.\n\nAnemone stared at him.\n\n\"I'm an animus, too,\" said Turtle. \"I'm sorry, I should have told you sooner.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Anemone cried. \"You? You're nobody! I'm the SeaWing animus!\"\n\n\"You are \u2026 but that's because of me,\" Turtle said. \"I'm so sorry, Anemone. I'm the one who made you an animus. Right here, the day of the Talons of Power ceremony. I didn't want anyone to find out about me, so \u2026 I distracted them with you. And everything that's happened to you since then is all my fault.\"\n\n\"No!\" Anemone screamed. \"It's my power! You can't just take it; you can't just say it's yours! You did not create me!\"\n\nShe launched herself at Turtle and slammed him onto his back in the waves. Her claws slashed the side of his throat and pain blistered through his gills.\n\n\"You didn't make me and you can't stop me! I can still kill her!\" she yelled. \"I can kill her with my bare claws! I can kill her with anything! I can make daggers out of seashells; I can poison the drops of water around her snout! I can enchant her pearls to choke her or her stupid narwhal horn to stab her in the heart!\"\n\nIn shock, Turtle fought back, throwing her off him. She skidded onto the beach and he leaped after her, pinning her down into the sand.\n\nThis is what Moon saw, he realized. This fight.\n\nA jolt of relief made his heart pulse wildly. But I haven't lost my soul. I still don't want to hurt Anemone.\n\nHer scales were slippery under his claws and sand sprayed up into his eyes, stinging and blinding him. She sank her teeth into one of the webs on his front talons and he roared with pain.\n\nHe'd thought breaking Darkstalker's spells would change her. He'd thought he was setting her free. Why didn't it work? Anemone thrashed and stabbed at his underbelly, sending more fiery bolts of agony along his scales.\n\n\"Knock my brother off me!\" Anemone shouted, flinging one talon out at something behind Turtle.\n\nHe turned and saw a huge rock lever itself out of the sand. It shot toward him like an attacking SkyWing.\n\nTurtle ducked and rolled off Anemone, covering his head. \"Disappear!\" he shouted at the rock. With an odd thudding sound, the boulder vanished out of the air.\n\nAnemone leaped to her feet with her wings spread. \"All the crabs on this beach!\" she shouted. \"Attack Turtle! Do it now!\"\n\nThe sand erupted as hundreds of crabs came swarming out of their burrows, from tiny hermit crabs up to massive talon-sized red monsters with snapping claws. Blue-gray pincers popped out of the sand right below him and clamped down sharply on one of his front talons. Turtle yowled and jumped back and felt more explosions of pain as claws dug in all along his tail.\n\n\"Waves!\" he called desperately. \"Wash these crabs out to sea!\"\n\nThe sea pulled back, as if mildly offended by the order, then came rushing in all at once in a huge tidal wave. Turtle felt himself slammed to the sand and through the water he saw Anemone clawing to stay on the beach. All the crabs were caught up and tumbled about and carried away, sucked out into a hissing, foaming ocean.\n\nHe didn't have a moment to catch his breath before seashells began pelting him, each one aiming to stab between his scales. Death by a thousand cuts, he thought, trying to wipe away the blood running into his eyes.\n\nTurtle tried to duck away, scrabbling through the sand for something he could work with. Here \u2014 and here \u2014 two sand dollars washed up by the wave. \"Protect me from the shells,\" he said to them, and they shot into the air, warding off the attacking seashells like tiny flying shields.\n\n\"Anemone, I don't want to fight you!\" he yelled.\n\n\"Then you shouldn't say stupid things that make me want to kill you!\" she yelled back. \"Swallow him up!\" The sand suddenly collapsed under him, dropping him into a sinkhole, and then immediately began pouring back over his head. Turtle flailed around in a panic. He did not want to die by drowning in sand. He did not want to be buried and forgotten here on this beach. Leaving Auklet and Mother unprotected from Anemone. And the rest of my friends enchanted by Darkstalker. And Kinkajou under that awful spell forever.\n\nHe reached out with his magic and wrenched an entire palm tree out of the ground. It came skidding across the sand toward him, nearly plowing through Anemone before she jumped out of the way, and stopped with its fronds hanging over the hole. Turtle sank his claws into the sharp-edged leaves and dragged himself out, talon over talon.\n\nThe sand behind him made an ominous GLOORRRP sound and tried to suck him back down. \"Let me go!\" Turtle shouted at it. A flurry of sand exploded upward, then settled into a normal, noncarnivorous beach dune.\n\nTurtle clutched the trunk of the palm tree, panting heavily. This fight was uneven; she was willing to use lethal force, and he was not. He refused to kill his little sister.\n\nA faint whistling in the air warned him to look up.\n\nSomething enormous was crashing down toward him \u2014 a piece of stone wall from the ruins of the Island Palace.\n\n\"Crush him!\" Anemone screamed. \"Don't stop until you hit him!\"\n\n\"Stop!\" Turtle shouted.\n\nThe projectile wobbled for a moment, but it didn't stop. It kept coming, faster and faster.\n\n\"Shield me,\" Turtle cried to the palm tree. He leaped off and covered his head.\n\nThere was a muffled smashing, cracking sound, and when Turtle looked up, he saw pieces of tree raining down around him. The wall rebounded off the broken palm and leaped for him again.\n\nIt won't stop until it hits me. That's the spell. Turtle grabbed the nearest thing he could reach \u2014 a shell that once housed a hermit crab \u2014 and whispered, \"Make my scales as hard as diamonds. Make my bones unbreakable. Make me impossible to hurt, no matter how hard that thing lands on me.\" He wrapped his claws around the shell and crouched with his eyes screwed shut.\n\nI'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die.\n\nThe block of stone slammed into him with such force that it left an imprint in the sand. It felt like the entire Deep Palace landing on him. For a moment, he couldn't breathe.\n\nBut he felt no pain \u2014 and he was still alive.\n\n\"Get \u2026 off \u2026 me,\" he croaked at the stone block when he could form words again.\n\nIts original mission complete, the block obligingly lifted away and clunked down in the sand beside him.\n\nSeaweed, Turtle thought dizzily, wondering if he was about to lose consciousness, go wrap Anemone's mouth shut so she cannot cast any more animus spells \u2014 neither by voice or thought, as long as you are touching her. But make sure she can still breathe.\n\nFrom the muffled shrieks he could hear, he guessed that his spell succeeded, but he couldn't move yet. He had to lie there, waiting for everything in his body to realize that it still worked.\n\nA moment later, claws raked viciously across his nose and he jerked up to find Anemone standing over him. She had so much seaweed wrapped around her snout that she couldn't see over it; she kept turning her head from side to side to glare at him with one eye and then the other. Only her nostrils were still visible, and they were flaring with fury. She clawed at him again and he stumbled back \u2026 before realizing that he'd barely felt them.\n\nHe blinked down at his scales, which were a mess of blood from the seashell cuts.\n\nHis sister leaped forward again and tried to slice her claws across his throat \u2014 but they ricocheted off as though \u2026 as though my scales are as hard as diamonds.\n\nTurtle's talons were empty. Where was the shell he'd enchanted? Why was the spell still working on him if he wasn't holding it?\n\nBecause I wasn't that specific, he realized. With most of his spells, he worded the enchantment to work as long as he was holding or touching or wearing the animus-touched object. But with this one, I just told it to make me impossible to hurt. It was like the healing spell on Kinkajou, or the feather that fixed Flame's scar. The effects were permanent, no matter what happened to the object afterward.\n\nHe'd never really thought about the difference before. His mind spun to the spells Darkstalker had cast on his NightWings. They were all object-dependent. If Darkstalker took away their objects, his subjects would lose those powers.\n\nHe must know he could make them permanent, but he's choosing not to.\n\nWith a sickening lurch in his stomach, he tried to remember how Anemone had worded the spell on Kinkajou.\n\nDid she say \"as long as she has this rock\"? Or did she just say \"make her love Turtle\"?\n\nWas the enchantment permanent? Even if Kinkajou took off the skyfire?\n\nHe couldn't remember.\n\nI'm so sorry, Kinkajou, he thought with a wrench of agony.\n\nTurtle realized that Anemone was glowering at him. Her sides were heaving, slick with sweat and sand and seawater.\n\n\"Anemone,\" he said carefully. \"Please listen to me.\"\n\nShe gestured to her snout like, Have you given me any choice?\n\n\"I'm not going to kill you,\" he said, \"and I would really like you to not kill me. Can we talk without attacking each other?\" He sidled a step toward her. \"I'd like to think we can work this out with words instead of violence or magic.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him. Which wasn't a very reassuring yes.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, \"let's try this. Seaweed, I want you to wrap around Anemone's arm instead \u2014 but still, as long as you're touching her, she cannot use her magic in any way. And stay put until I remove you,\" he added hurriedly.\n\nThe long strands of dark wet seaweed began smoothly unrolling from his sister's snout and transferring to one of her forearms instead. Anemone scowled down at the makeshift handcuff as though she was thinking about cutting off her arm to get her magic back.\n\n\"You are so annoying,\" she snapped at Turtle as soon as she could speak again.\n\n\"And you're very powerful,\" he said. \"But I can't let you go kill Mother. Or Auklet, or Tsunami, or anyone else. I don't believe you're that kind of dragon.\"\n\nAnemone threw her wings up in the air. \"Of course I am! I have to be! It's my stupid destiny to kill the queen. That's what princesses do. And I'm even worse because I'm an animus so I'm going to turn evil anyway, no matter what I do! I should just do it and be evil and be done with it already.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be evil!\" Turtle cried, appalled. \"Not every animus is evil. I'm not evil!\"\n\n\"But you will be,\" Anemone said accusingly. \"We both will be. That's what happens to animus dragons. Unless you're Darkstalker and you're sooooooooooooo smart.\"\n\n\"Fathom wasn't evil,\" Turtle pointed out.\n\n\"We don't know that,\" Anemone said. \"First of all, what he did to Darkstalker wasn't exactly the kindest thing in the world. And then he disappears from history \u2014 who knows what else he did with his power?\"\n\n\"There were lots of animus IceWings who didn't go evil either,\" Turtle said stubbornly. \"And the SandWing from thousands of years ago who disappeared \u2014 Jerboa \u2014 as far as we know anyhow. And Stonemover.\"\n\n\"So my choices are evil, missing, or fossilized?\" Anemone said. \"That's appealing.\"\n\n\"I think a spell to protect your soul could work,\" Turtle said. \"I just don't trust Darkstalker to cast it for you.\"\n\n\"It won't work. It's already too late for me.\" Anemone shook her head. \"Ever since Whirlpool died, I see him all the time \u2014 in my dreams, in the faces of strange dragons, everywhere. I keep seeing those eels going after him. I see all the dragons I've hurt. Now Moon's there, too, and I hate what I did to her but I also feel proud of it. Isn't that twisted? Whatever soul I had, it's long gone, so protecting it wouldn't be much use.\"\n\n\"Maybe losing your soul isn't the right way to describe it,\" Turtle said. \"Maybe it's more like \u2026 the more you use your power for bad things, the more you feel like you're entitled to use your power for anything. It makes it harder to go back \u2014 only forward into more bad things.\" He hesitated. \"But \u2026 I think you can go back. I think anyone can choose to do good, or be good, no matter what happened before. I think you just have to try really hard. And that means stopping yourself before you do even worse things.\"\n\nShe growled softly. \"I suppose you mean like killing a bunch of family members.\"\n\n\"Well, yeah,\" he said. \"That's one example.\"\n\nShe looked down at her talons. \"So what do I do instead? What if I can't stop myself and you're not here next time to wrap me in enchanted seaweed?\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"Do you want me to take it away again? Your power? I don't know if it'll work \u2026 but I could try. If you don't want to be an animus anymore.\"\n\n\"But then what would I be?\" She spread her wings and talons, leaving a trail of droplets from the dripping seaweed. \"Animus dragons are rare and special. I like knowing that I'm powerful. I want to be that powerful. Who would give away their own magic like that? I'm just \u2026 scared of it, too.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"I feel the same way.\"\n\n\"Really?\" she said. \"Because you don't act like you want to be powerful.\"\n\nTurtle opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. She was right. He didn't act that way. But he did want to be an animus. It was the one thing that made him special, even if only in secret. He'd never give it up either.\n\n\"I've cast a spell to hide myself from Darkstalker,\" he said. \"I think we should do the same for you, in case he does try to enchant you to do something evil.\"\n\n\"Ohhhh,\" she said. \"That explains a lot. I mean, I was like, sure, Turtle is boring, but Darkstalker really acts like he doesn't exist at all! So weird! Now I get it.\"\n\n\"Aren't I less boring now that you know I'm an animus?\" Turtle protested. He poked at his armband to pop out one of the last skyfire rocks. \"You'll need this, too, so he can't read your mind.\" She took the rock and held it up so the deep sparkles in it could catch the light.\n\nThere was a strange twitch in the air, like someone pinching the world around them. Turtle glanced up at the sky nervously. \"Maybe we should also enchant something to make Darkstalker forget about our explosion of animus spells. He must be wondering what's going on.\"\n\n\"He \u2014 is that how he always catches me doing magic?\" Anemone trailed off with a shiver.\n\n\"He can sense animus spells being cast,\" Turtle said, nodding.\n\n\"Then let's do that first,\" Anemone said, alarmed. She grabbed a palm frond. \"Hey, leaves, erase all the \u2014 yikes!\" she shrieked as the entire beach shuddered violently underneath them. \"Erase all our spells from Darkstalker's memory!\" she shouted as fast as she could.\n\nThe air was suddenly pressing in on them, as though they were being squeezed into an invisible chest. Turtle's ears popped painfully and he staggered toward Anemone.\n\n\"Did it work?\" she yelled, and Turtle realized there was a dark, high-pitched whistling sound drowning out all other noises.\n\n\"I don't know \u2014 I don't see why \u2014 it should \u2014\" Turtle's gaze fell from the gathering clouds to his sister, and he was hit by a sinking realization. \"The seaweed!\" he cried. He leaped forward and sliced through the wrapping of seaweed around Anemone's arm. \"It didn't work because your magic was blocked!\" There seemed to be infinite thick sticky layers of seaweed and they wouldn't come off fast enough, no matter how he stabbed and peeled at them.\n\n\"You do the spell!\" Anemone shouted, but the wind was now screaming along with the sound and sand was blowing fiercely in their faces like the entire beach was rising up to attack them. Turtle clasped his sister's talons, folded his wings around her, and held on tight.\n\nSuddenly there was a bending, warping feeling to the universe, and Turtle heard Darkstalker's voice as clearly as if he were standing right next to them.\n\n\"Bring them here,\" Darkstalker growled. \"Every animus dragon in all the seven tribes. Bring them here to my throne room right now.\"\n\nThe world collapsed inward, into darkness, and unfolded again into pale sunlight streaming through tall narrow windows across a vast black marble hall.\n\nOutside the windows: the mountains of the Night Kingdom.\n\nInside the hall, staring down at them: Darkstalker, wearing a crown made of twisted metal with sharp points.\n\nTurtle gave a startled gasp and glanced around. All the way across the continent. He just summoned us like a tray of shrimp.\n\nThere were still cracks of darkness in the air, like it was a scroll that had been folded and wrinkled too many times. The cracks hissed and sparked, spitting out Turtle, Anemone, Stonemover, and right behind Darkstalker, an unfamiliar SandWing.\n\nThe SandWing met Turtle's eyes, her face a mask of startled terror, and then she vanished again in less than a heartbeat. She was gone so quickly that Turtle thought he might have hallucinated her \u2014 that perhaps she was a double image accidentally reflected by the teleporting cracks. Especially since no one else acted as if they'd seen her, too.\n\nWas that real? He sat down, rubbing his eyes. A splitting headache was trying to splinter his skull into small pieces.\n\n\"I enchant this room so that no one can cast any spells while they're in here except me,\" Darkstalker growled. He loomed over Anemone. \"Where is your neckband?\" he asked.\n\n\"I lost it,\" she said. \"I'll make another one, don't worry.\"\n\n\"Someone gave you skyfire, I see,\" he said, tapping the top of her skull. \"Did you kill your mother?\" Turtle guessed from his tone that he already knew the answer.\n\n\"No,\" Anemone said, lifting her chin defiantly. \"What do you care anyway? Why'd you drag me back here after you just ordered me to go away?\"\n\nDarkstalker hissed. \"Who were you fighting, Anemone?\" he asked. Turtle flinched guiltily. A scratch behind her ear was bleeding and there were scratches along her sides from Turtle's claws.\n\n\"No one important,\" she said. \"I was winning until you interrupted, though, by the way.\"\n\n\"Those were battling animus spells,\" Darkstalker said. \"And every animus in Pyrrhia should be here. Which means \u2026\" He whipped his head toward Stonemover. The NightWing lay awkwardly on his side, still encased in stone, but looking very odd without his cave around him. His talons twitched feebly as though he might be trying to right himself.\n\n\"Stonemover,\" Darkstalker said. He tipped Stonemover onto his talons and leaned over to hiss in his ear. \"Tell me the truth. How many dragons are in this room right now?\"\n\nTurtle tried to wave frantically, to get his attention, to hold up three claws or mime to keep his secret or something, but he wasn't fast enough, or Stonemover was too slow.\n\n\"Four,\" Stonemover said, sounding puzzled.\n\n\"I knew it,\" Darkstalker cried. \"There's another one. There's someone hiding from me!\" He seized a sword that was hanging on the wall. \"Bring me a dragon our hidden animus cares about very much. Alive, for now.\"\n\n\"No!\" Turtle cried, but the sword was already whipping out the door. What can I do? I can't cast any spells in here. Do I have anything I can use? He scrabbled open his pouch, all banged up and covered with sand, and searched inside, trying to think. The coral finder. The slate. The healing stone. His hiding stick.\n\nThe slate \u2014 Qibli! He pulled it out and wrote as quickly as he could.\n\nAs soon as he'd written it, he erased it. He couldn't risk Darkstalker finding out he'd sent a message. Please see it soon, Qibli, he prayed.\n\n\"Hidden?\" Stonemover coughed, bewildered.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Darkstalker. \"One of the dragons you can see is a coward. Planning against me in secret.\"\n\n\"I think he's smart,\" Anemone said sharply. \"He knew right away not to trust you. He knew there was something seriously wrong with you. You think everything you do is right. You think you're so perfect that you don't even care about the dragons around you. You're the only one who gets to decide what happens to everyone else.\"\n\n\"By all the MOONS,\" Darkstalker growled. He pointed at Anemone. \"Enchant this dragon to obey my every command. Now shut up,\" he barked at her.\n\nAnemone's mouth snapped closed. She touched her snout, looking startled and outraged and terrified all at once.\n\nNo! Turtle felt the cold marble hall pressing in on him. That's the same spell he put on his father. He can make Anemone do anything he wants now.\n\n\"That's better,\" Darkstalker said. He paced around her slowly. \"You know, I've always had so many questions about animus power. Maybe now, with you and Stonemover both under my control, I can test out some of my theories. For instance, is there a limit to how many spells one can cast in a day? What happens when two animus dragons try to enchant something at the same time? And of course \u2026 how many spells does it take for a dragon to turn evil?\" He stopped in front of Anemone, smiling down at her. \"For you, my dear, I'm guessing it won't be very many more.\"\n\nTurtle was transfixed with horror. This was exactly what he'd been trying to save Anemone from. It hadn't even occurred to him that Stonemover was one of Darkstalker's puppets already. Maybe that's what he meant when he said his talons weren't his own \u2014 maybe he sensed Darkstalker taking them over.\n\nOh, Anemone. How can I save you?\n\nA clattering sound came from the hall outside and they all could hear a voice coming closer.\n\n\"This better be important! Summoning a dragon with a sword in the middle of suntime, I mean, someone has the manners of an orangutan! I am MOVING, quit pointing that \u2014 yourself at me!\"\n\nOh no, Turtle thought. Despair poured over him like wet sand.\n\nKinkajou bounded into the throne room with the sword hovering menacingly in the air behind her. She was indignantly tangerine from horns to tail, and Turtle's heart leaped at the sight of her.\n\n\"Hello, King Bossy,\" she said to Darkstalker, flicking her wings back. \"You could have sent a dragon to ask me nicely. It's pretty rude to wake someone up with sharp weapons, I have to say.\"\n\nDarkstalker slid over and stared at her thoughtfully for a moment. \"Really?\" he said. \"Somebody cares about this dragon?\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Kinkajou squeaked. \"That's so unnecessary!\"\n\n\"All right,\" Darkstalker said with a shrug. \"Cowardly animus,\" he said, raising his voice. \"You see that I have your \u2026 unimpressive little RainWing.\" Kinkajou scowled at him. \"So now would be a good time to reveal yourself, unless you want to see her sliced to pieces.\" He hooked the sword out of the air and swept it around to point at Kinkajou's throat in one graceful move.\n\n\"No!\" Turtle shouted, taking a step toward her.\n\n\"Don't do it,\" Kinkajou said. She closed her eyes. \"Stay hidden. You can stop him \u2014 you have to stop him.\"\n\n\"Not by myself,\" Turtle said. \"Not without you.\"\n\n\"Yes, without me,\" she said. \"I know you can. Oh, monkey brains \u2014 does this mean I'm the hapless sidekick? Blorg, that is so lame. Better than the wailing victim who needs rescuing, though. Make sure nobody writes me that way when this story becomes an epic poem, all right? And I would definitely like to be the hero next time, please.\" She glanced down at the sword and shivered slightly. \"I mean \u2026 in my next life, I guess.\"\n\n\"Kinkajou.\" Turtle couldn't breathe. Was this what drowning felt like for other dragons? \"The story doesn't make sense without you. You're the whole point of it, for me.\"\n\n\"Do please stop talking,\" Darkstalker said to her. \"Last chance, animus. In ten seconds, this babbling dragonet dies.\"\n\nTurtle took his hiding stick out of his pouch. It was so ordinary. Unremarkable, boring, nothing anyone would ever notice. Kind of like him.\n\nBut it held some of the most powerful magic in this room.\n\nAnd it was the only thing that might still be able to save the world.\n\nThis wasn't the heroic story he'd dreamed of as a dragonet. He wasn't standing at the gates to the palace fighting off attacking hordes with a spear. He wasn't defending his kingdom with valiant strength, and he might still be the idiot who died while the real heroes saved the day.\n\nBut this was his chance \u2014 a chance to be a different kind of hero. One who stood in the way; one who got noticed, so that someone else could live. Heroes don't have to stab the bad guy in the heart or save the whole world. Maybe it was enough \u2014 more than enough \u2014 to save his sister and Kinkajou.\n\nAll he had to do was stop hiding.\n\n\"Anemone,\" he said urgently. \"I don't know if this will work, but if it does \u2014 get out of here as fast as you can. Go find Qibli and make him help you.\" He closed his claws around the stick and took a deep breath. \"I'm not going to leave you in danger anymore while I hide. But it means you have to be the hero now.\"\n\nTurtle glanced down at the stick again; his heart was pounding and his insides were threatening to dissolve into sand. But he couldn't hide anymore. For Kinkajou, for Anemone, for everyone.\n\nHe tossed the stick through the air to his sister.\n\nFor a moment, as it was airborne, Darkstalker's head snapped up. Perhaps a thousand new futures were crowding into his mind; perhaps he knew for a moment what was about to happen, and he saw what he was about to lose, and where it might lead.\n\nBut then Anemone caught the stick in her front talons.\n\nAnd then Darkstalker saw Turtle, and whatever future he had been looking at was forgotten as his eyes flashed with fury.\n\n\"Fathom!\" he snarled. A blast of flame shot out of his mouth and enveloped Turtle in fire.\n\nBlistering heat scorched over Turtle. He threw himself to the ground with his wings over his head. \"I'm not Fathom!\" he shouted. \"I'm Turtle!\"\n\nKinkajou screamed and leaped at Darkstalker's head. Her talons wrapped around his snout, her wings beat at his ears, and she reared back, opening her mouth wide. Jets of black venom shot from her fangs and landed splat sizzle ssss across Darkstalker's face and in one of his eyes.\n\nDarkstalker roared and threw her off. Kinkajou landed on the floor and skidded halfway across the room.\n\n\"OW! MOONFIRE AND STAR VOMIT!\" Darkstalker shouted, clutching his face. \"HEAL, by all the snakes!\" He lifted his talons away and Turtle saw that his scales were undamaged, but there was a black hole where his eyeball had been. A moment later it filmed over, and a new eye started to grow into the spot.\n\nMy accidental invulnerability spell worked, too, Turtle realized, stretching out his wings. The fire had not burned him. He was unharmed.\n\nHe stood up and looked around frantically.\n\nAnemone was gone.\n\nShe'd escaped in the chaos, small enough to fit out one of the narrow windows. He hoped she was on her way to Jade Mountain right now, clutching his stick, erased from Darkstalker's memory. He hoped it would keep her safe. If Darkstalker didn't know she existed, he couldn't control her. As long as she stayed hidden, she could still be free.\n\nHe also hoped he could trust her. Would she do the right thing, now that she was free? Would she know what the right thing was?\n\nHe darted over to Kinkajou, who was struggling back to her feet. \"Are you all right?\" he asked, trying to help her up.\n\n\"Oh, you're not a pile of ash!\" she said. She collapsed to the floor again. \"That is such a relief. I'm going to lie here and be relieved for a minute. Don't mind me.\"\n\n\"I wish you would stop getting yourself hurt,\" Turtle whispered.\n\n\"Me too!\" she said. \"Talk to the bad guys! Tell them to stop hurting me!\" She tried to move one of her wings and winced. \"Ow ow ow.\"\n\n\"Here,\" Turtle said, giving her the healing rock. \"This might help.\" He glanced over his shoulder, saw that Darkstalker was still holding his eye shut, and pressed the entire pouch into her talons. \"Pretend this is yours,\" he whispered. \"Maybe something in here can help.\"\n\n\"I'm scared for you,\" she whispered back.\n\n\"Just making sure you get to be more than the dead sidekick,\" he said. \"You're a lot more than that to me.\"\n\n\"I love you, Turtle,\" she whispered, softer than ripples in a still pool.\n\n\"You don't really,\" he said, feeling his heart break a little more. \"Anemone put a spell on you to love me. I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"That's \u2026 not cool. But I feel like I love you, and I'm afraid this is our tragic good-bye, so don't argue with me.\"\n\n\"My apologies, Kinkajou,\" Darkstalker rumbled behind Turtle. \"I didn't mean to hurt you. Although, in my defense, you did melt my eyeball.\"\n\nTurtle turned and found himself face-to-face with Darkstalker. Those black eyes were seeing him for the first time since Darkstalker swarmed out of the mountain.\n\n\"It's all coming back to me,\" Darkstalker rumbled. \"Turtle. Yes. Moon's friend. Fathom's descendant. You look exactly like him. I believe I had a whole plan for you, before you muddled it up by hiding like that.\" He tapped Turtle lightly on the nose. \"Surprisingly clever, especially for you. I would never have guessed you had it in you.\"\n\n\"Whatever you're going to do to me,\" Turtle said, \"please let Kinkajou go.\"\n\nDarkstalker chuckled. \"I would never hurt a ball of fluff like her.\"\n\n\"Ball of fluff!\" Kinkajou protested. \"I just melted your eye! I'm totally terrifying!\"\n\n\"Kinkajou, shhh,\" Turtle said, nudging her sharply.\n\n\"No, I promised Moon I wouldn't hurt her friends,\" Darkstalker said thoughtfully, \"and she's very fond of both of you. Of course, she doesn't know where you are,\" he said to Turtle, \"so, for the time being, let's stick you in the dungeon, until I decide how you can be useful.\"\n\nDarkstalker bent down and took Kinkajou's chin in his talons, looking into her eyes. \"As for you: I enchant you to forget about everything that happened in this throne room today. You'll wake up from your suntime in an hour and carry on with your day as though everything is normal and Turtle is not here.\"\n\nKinkajou went very still. Her eyes flicked from Darkstalker to Turtle.\n\nHis spells don't work on her, Turtle remembered. This might be the one thing he'd done right.\n\nShe nodded slowly and took a step back. Her expression was full of questions, but Turtle knew she couldn't ask any of them without giving away that Darkstalker's spell hadn't worked.\n\n\"Go on now,\" Darkstalker said. \"Turtle and I need to have a little talk.\"\n\nKinkajou gave Turtle an agonized look, bowed her head, and flew away. She still had Turtle's pouch. Maybe something in there would help her, if she could figure out what any of it did.\n\n\"It's unfortunate for you,\" Darkstalker said to Turtle, \"that you look so much like Fathom.\" He spread one wing around Turtle and steered him toward one of the side doors. \"I have very good reasons to hate him, you know. It's going to make it hard to look at you. Although I suppose if you're locked away deep in my darkest dungeon, we can avoid that problem.\"\n\nWhen we leave the room I can cast a spell, Turtle thought. But what? Something to help me escape \u2026 His mind raced.\n\nBut just before they reached the exit, Darkstalker paused and regarded Turtle pensively for a moment. \"I wouldn't normally do this,\" he said. \"I always think an animus could be useful in some way, if handled correctly. But you managed to trick me once, and that makes me a bit nervous about you, so, I'm sorry.\"\n\nDarkstalker cupped his talons around Turtle's face. \"Enchant this dragon to lose all his animus power right now,\" he said, \"so that he shall never be able to cast a spell again.\"\n\nTurtle caught his breath, and caught it again, gasping with disbelief. A strange sensation scraped over his scales, like a powerful scrubbing brush scouring him clean.\n\nIt was gone. The faint tingling in his claws that had been there from the second he hatched. He'd never even known what it was \u2014 never guessed that it was a sign of animus magic. And now it had vanished forever.\n\nHe'd always thought he was ordinary, but he'd never been completely ordinary until this moment.\n\n\"Don't be too sad,\" Darkstalker said. \"To be the most powerful animus in the world, you have to be the smartest \u2014 and that was never going to be you anyway, was it? Now all the pressure is off. You don't have to come up with something brilliant to stop me. Isn't that a bit of a relief, really?\"\n\nTurtle's tail dragged on the floor as two NightWing guards led him away to the dungeon.\n\nCaught by Darkstalker. Imprisoned, just as he had feared his story would end for so long. And worst of all, stripped of his magic as well.\n\nBut Anemone was safe. Turtle had finally atoned for the Talons of Power curse he gave her on the beach.\n\nAnd Kinkajou was safe. And Qibli was out there, ready to help.\n\nBetween the three of them, maybe they could stop Darkstalker.\n\nHe had to cling to the thin hope that they could, because if they didn't \u2026 there was no one else.\n\nIn the Kingdom of Sand, three explosions rocked the markets at three different oases, timed to go off simultaneously. Dragons wearing black hoods and gold medallions stamped with a bird symbol were spotted fleeing the scenes. In the streets and tents and towns of the kingdom, SandWings muttered and growled to one another. Who is doing this? Why isn't Queen Thorn keeping us safe?\n\nIn the Kingdom of the Sea, a class of young dragonets on an overnight trip was terrified half to death by a pale phantom that dove from the sky. It swept around the island where they were camped, hissing and snapping, and at least five of the dragonets swore it glared at them with beady black eyes. Rumors spread quickly that the tribe was being haunted \u2026 by the vengeful ghost of Albatross.\n\nAnd far to the north, in the Ice Kingdom, in the midst of a blizzard, Winter's brother Hailstorm stood before the wall of rankings, shivering with fever. His claws brushed over the last spot, where Winter's name had been not long ago.\n\nWhy is this happening to our tribe?\n\nAre we being punished for what happened between me and Winter?\n\nA dragon trudged through the snow toward him but had to stop halfway, his body wracked with deep, lung-churning coughs.\n\n\"Is there news?\" Hailstorm asked. \"Are my parents any better?\"\n\n\"No,\" the other IceWing wheezed. \"They're getting worse. But there's something else \u2014 someone else.\"\n\nHailstorm waited through another storm of coughs. \"What is it?\" he said finally. \"What's happened?\"\n\n\"It's Queen Glacier,\" said the other dragon. \"She got the plague first, three days ago.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Hailstorm. The world was swimming before his eyes. Heat blurred his vision, pounded through his blood.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. It's over,\" said the messenger. Snow covered his wings, his tail; snow piled up around his talons, consuming him from all sides. He bowed his head as though he was ready to sink into it and become a part of the frozen landscape forever.\n\n\"The queen of the IceWings is dead.\"\n\n\"There's a storm coming. Does that make a difference to your moon superstitions?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, but it doesn't matter. He'll be out before it gets here. Look how strong he is.\" A moment, a pulse where they almost shared the same emotion, and then she added, \"They're not superstitions, by the way. You don't have to be a rhinoceros nostril just because you don't understand something.\"\n\nThe danger flashed before him again. Time to fight harder. He dug in his claws and squirmed, pushing in every direction at once.\n\nThe light, the light, the light wanted him out, wanted to run its talons over his wings, drip through his scales, fill him with silver power. He wanted that power, too, all of it, all of it.\n\nCRACK-CRACK-CRACK.\n\nThe walls fell away.\n\nThe moons poured in.\n\nThree silver eyes in the sky, huge and perfectly round, with darkness all around them. It felt as if they were sinking into his chest, melting into his eyes. He wanted to scoop them into his talons and swallow them whole.\n\nHe was in a carved stone nest lined with black fur, at the peak of a sharp promontory. Another egg sat quietly in the nest, nearly camouflaged against the fur and the shadows.\n\nBelow him stretched a vast landscape of caverns and ravines, glowing with firelight and echoing with the flutter of wings. It looked as though a giant dragon had raked the ground with her claws, digging secret canyons and caves into the rock all across the terrain, some of them stretching toward the starlit sea in the distance.\n\nAfter several heartbeats he realized there were two large dragons behind him, their wings drawn tight against the wind that buffeted them all. One was black as the night, one pale as the moons. He glanced down at his scales, but he didn't have to see their color to know he belonged with the dark one. That was Mother. She sparked with anger from snout to tail, but there was immense room inside her for love, and she adored him already, heart and soul. He could feel it. It filled him like the moonlight did, setting the world quickly into understandable shapes in his head. He loved her, too, immediately and forever.\n\nThe danger came from the white dragon. This was Father, some kind of partner to the dragon who cared. The newly hatched dragonet could hardly look at him without seeing a spiral of confusing flashes: pain, fury, screaming dragons, and blood, everywhere, blood. This white dragon had done something terrible that haunted him, and he might do worse someday. Father's mind had patches of damp, rotten vileness all over it.\n\nThe dragonet immediately wanted to turn him into a fireball and blow his ashes away. But inside Father, hidden under layers of ice, pulsed a small, warm ember of love for Mother. That was the thing that saved him.\n\nWait and see, thought the dragonet. He did not understand yet that he could see the future. He had no idea what the flashes meant. He couldn't follow the paths that were unfolding in his brain; cause and effect and consequences were all still beyond him. But in his mother's mind he found the idea of hope, and in his father's mind he traced the outline of something called patience.\n\nHe could wait. There was much still to come between him and this father-shaped dragon.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" said Mother. \"Hello, darling.\" She held out her talons and he climbed into them willingly, content to be closer to that warmth.\n\n\"Darkstalker?\" Father snorted. \"You must be joking. That's the creepiest name I've ever heard.\"\n\n\"It is not,\" she snapped, and the dragonet bared his teeth in sympathy, but neither of them noticed. \"The darkness is his prey. He chases back the dark, like a hero.\"\n\n\"Sounds more like he creeps through the dark. Like a stalker.\"\n\n\"Stop being horrible. It's not up to you. In my kingdom, mothers choose their dragonets' names.\"\n\n\"In my kingdom, the dragon with the highest rank in the family chooses the dragonets' names and the queen must approve them.\"\n\n\"And of course you think your 'rank' is higher than mine,\" she snarled. \"But we're not in your kingdom. My dragonets will never set foot in your frozen wasteland. We are here, whether you like it or not, and he is my son, and his name is Darkstalker.\"\n\nFather's eyes, like fragments of ice, studied Darkstalker's every scale, and Darkstalker could feel the cold, congealing weight of Father's resentment.\n\n\"He looks every inch a NightWing,\" Father growled. \"Not a shred of me in him at all.\"\n\nSuspicion, hatred, outrage flashing on both sides, but none of it spoken.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Father at last. \"You can have your sinister little Darkstalker. But I want to name the other one.\"\n\nMother hesitated, glancing at the unhatched egg, which was still black. Darkstalker listened as her mind turned it over, already half detached. She wasn't sure anyone would ever come out of that egg. She was ready to give all her love to Darkstalker, her perfect thrice-moonborn dragonet. All of it, and he was ready to take it.\n\nBut Darkstalker knew his sister was in that egg. Alive, but not restless. Quiet. She didn't care for the moons that had called him forth. She couldn't hear them.\n\nSomething tingled in his claws.\n\nHe could change that.\n\nHe could touch her egg and summon her. He knew it, somehow; he could see in his mind how her egg would turn silver under his talons, how it would splinter and crack open as she scrambled out. He could see the beautiful, odd-looking dragonet that would come out, and he could see the moons sharing their power with her, too.\n\nThen they would be the same. She would be born under three moons as well. She would have the same power as him \u2026 and the same love from Mother.\n\nWhich he already had to share with the undeserving ice monster across from him.\n\nNo. This was his. All he had to do was nothing. His sister would come out in her own time, tomorrow when the moons were no longer full. Then he would be the only special one.\n\n\"All right,\" said Mother. \"If that egg hatches, you can name the dragonet inside. Only \u2026 remember she has to grow up in the NightWing tribe. It'll be hard enough \u2014 just, try to be kind, is all. Think of her future and how she'll need to fit in.\"\n\nFather nodded, seething internally at being instructed like a low-ranked dragonet in training.\n\nShe'll be all right, Darkstalker thought. A thousand futures dropped away before him as he made his first choice. Futures where his sister joined his quest for power; futures where she fought him and stopped him; futures where they were best friends; futures where one of them killed the other, or vice versa. As Darkstalker folded his talons together, choosing to keep them still for tonight, every possible future with a thrice-moonborn sister disappeared.\n\nHe saw them blink out, and although he didn't know exactly what it meant, he felt somehow a tiny bit safer, a tiny bit bigger and stronger.\n\nSorry, little sister, he thought, not in so many words, but with visions of his future cascading through his mind. This is my mother. Those are my full moons.\n\nThis is my world now."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Remembered War 1) A Dragon's Chains",
        "author": "Robert Vane",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "I wanted to eat a human.\n\nNot just any human, of course. One of the plump ones with a bulging belly. A lord would be the best. They came frequently to visit the king's city of Eladrell, wearing colorful clothing and shiny metal trinkets. My fellow dragons and I carried many of these oversized humans on our backs, helping them cross the sea from their keeps on the scattered islands of the kingdom, so they could appear before the king to rub their knees and hands on his polished marble floor (which then had to be cleaned by other, skinnier humans).\n\nDuring their visits, these lords feasted on the best that the royal larder had to offer: baby lambs from the plains of Harcourt, huge kingfish pulled each day from the Thunder Straights, and roasted goats from the Northern Range. They drank cup after cup of dark ale until they belched out foul wind arising from their bellies as if it was dragon fire.\n\nRich, delicious, exquisite, ale.\n\nThe Keepers who lived with us on DragonPeak never shared their ale. Even our ryders withheld that secret pleasure drink from our bottomless stomachs. But two moons ago, I got lucky. A stray barrel had fallen off the back of a supply wagon, shattering on the winding cobblestone pathway outside Lord Big Gut's keep (that might not have been the lord's actual name), while I was waiting for my ryder to return with the lord himself. The wagon driver hadn't stopped. I, helpfully, cleaned up the mess with my massive tongue. None of the lord's human servants had bothered to thank me for ensuring that Lord Big Gut's pathway was dry.\n\nOne barrel was all it had taken for me to understand why humans spent so much time drinking from their cups each day. After I'd finished every last drop (and chewed the broken wooden barrel into pulp) my belly sang and my head swirled.\n\nThe return flight with Lord Big Gut on my back was a hazy memory. As I lay on the rocky ground of my cave on DragonPeak, I remembered only two things clearly: one was the sharp commands of Jona, my ryder, echoing in my head as I tried to keep steady in the unusual winds that had been shaking the sky that afternoon and the other was Lord Big Gut puking onto Jona's feet the moment he slid out of the saddle that had secured him to my back during the flight. I had rolled away from the stink, lying on my back, trying to determine why the sky still shook even though I was on land. My ryder thought me mad, or at least sick. He was wrong on both counts.\n\nFor weeks before that night, the human voices that echoed in my head had been fading, but after my binge of ale, the unwanted clamor was finally silenced. My mind hadn't been addled by the fine drink\u2014it had been cleared. Despite the binding rune carved onto my chest, no human commanded me. That morning, I vowed I would never go back to what I had been almost since birth: a slave dragon. Somehow, I had been set free.\n\nToday was not as fine a day as that one had been.\n\nForemost among my complaints: there was no ale. I missed it. Next, I had a human on my back rather than in my mouth. Even if he had been in my mouth, all that metal armor would've made him a lousy meal, and I doubted this particular human was worth eating anyway. He was my ryder, Jona. He knew as much about fine dining as a fish did about flying. Despite having access to the privileges of a dragon ryder, instead of tasty meat, Jona often ate strange protrusions that grew from the ground\u2014the tiny greens stalks that looked like stunted trees and misshapen brown orbs that resembled giant goat crap that human farmers dug out of the dirt (the humans called them potatoes). To top it all off, Jona often stank of the sour aroma of pommice fruit, which he constantly ate even though its bitter flesh made even hungry chickens waddle away in terror. I suspected that Jona would taste no better than chicken feathers. Not that I wanted to eat those, either.\n\nIn addition to not being my lunch, Jona also yelled at me to do things, none of which I particularly wanted to do. He often did that. He thought he was my master. He wasn't\u2014not since that day of my great ale celebration\u2014but Jona didn't know what had happened to me and I couldn't let him find out. That would mean my death, or worse. Jona was a dragon ryder sworn to King Mendakas, and all the king's dragons were slaves. Except me.\n\nJona's penetrating voice screeched at me. \"Bayloo, dive!\"\n\nHumans called me Bayloo. I knew it wasn't my real name because it sounded so strange to me. I had to stretch my jaw to say it properly. Humans didn't think about the trouble they caused when they named us. Of course, there were plenty of noises dragons could make that humans couldn't have uttered if their lives depended on it. For example: our roar. Humans sounded ridiculous when they tried. A human roar was less fearsome than a dragon's fart.\n\nStill, I had to keep playing my part. There had been a raid on the Kingdom of Rolm\u2014an attack on the humans' precious grain stores\u2014and Jona and I had been sent by King Mendakas to find and destroy the interlopers.\n\nI dipped my head, tilted my wings, and dove just as Jona ordered, heading toward the rolling waves of the Oren Sea beneath me. I'd made steeper dives, but the wind was picking up, and I wanted to keep things smooth. Jona never appreciated how considerate I was of his well-being. Even though a dragon saddle included sturdy leather straps, humans\u2014even specially conditioned dragon ryders\u2014tended to overestimate their own ability to remain seated and conscious during attack dives.\n\nI couldn't see Jona as we flew, but I knew his face as well as I knew the look of any human\u2014he had a pair of tiny eyes with gray centers that never changed color, a squashed nose that only made noise when he was sick, and a mouth with teeth so small he had to eat asparagus, potatoes, and pommice fruit because he couldn't chew bones. A bit of black fur grew on his head and he seemed to think the length and direction of the fur's growth mattered. He fussed over his hair like a mother hen tending chicks. Like all humans, he lacked a tail and couldn't breathe anything but a bit of stinky air (not that every creature needs to breath fire to be worthy). He was condescending to me and my kind and believed himself far more capable in battle than was merited, but at least he wasn't cruel to me or other dragons. That hadn't been the case with my other ryders.\n\nThe runes that had been sculpted onto Jona's chest, in a pattern that resembled my own markings, made him my ryder\u2014the human who commanded me. At least they had until recently. When Jona spoke, his voice echoed inside my head, which was particularly horrible because he also had the annoying habit of speaking every instruction as if it was the decisive action in a great war. The runes on each of our bodies created a link between us. I'd never known life without a human in my thoughts. Like all slave dragons, I'd been carved during the first moon of life. Three moons was the longest time that the malicious Sculptors could put control-runes on a dragon. After that, our scales were too hard, our will too strong, and bad things happened to Sculptors who tried to control mature dragons. Humans could be carved at any time because they were soft (or perhaps because they weren't being enslaved by the runes). Jona was my fifth ryder, but he was the first that I didn't need to obey.\n\n\"The lead ship is our target!\"\n\nIt was another brilliant tactical decision by my ryder; there were only two ships. Still, I kept my opinions closely guarded. Even if that hadn't been essential for my own safety, I would've done to avoid hurting Jona's feelings. I realized he meant well. He just didn't realize that I knew more about fighting than he did.\n\nHumans get excited in battle; they behave as if they have a major role in the actual fighting, as if they were able to fly or do something useful like that. The two-legged beasts could barely manage to travel from one island to another within their own kingdom without us, much less destroy anything. This engagement was no different.\n\nA pair of warships plied the rolling waters beneath me. From my perspective in the clouds, the vessels appeared as tiny specks on the vastness of the sea. As I plunged through the air, the targets grew larger and I could make out more details. Both were twin mast vessels, forty oars to each ship. They flew no flag. That could've meant they were raiders with no allegiance to any kingdom, but I've seen more than my share of raiders, and these ships didn't have the look. Their hulls were too well cared for, their decks too orderly. Each also had a shiny rotating ballista mounted on their foredecks. Even the pirate king, Halfhand, didn't have such weapons; these ships had been built by skilled shipwrights, their ballista made in large shipyard forges. Definitely not pirate ships.\n\nOnce I got us close, even Jona's tiny human eyes spotted the dangerous weapons. \"Bayloo, take out the rear vessel instead. Come at them low and from behind. Their own sails will shield our approach.\"\n\nAgain, Jona thought he was helping me with this advice, but the lead ship had already spotted me and fired its first arc-bolt. I banked left. Jona grabbed one of the hard spikes on my mane to steady himself. I hated when he did that, but I understood\u2014I ripped through the sky at tremendous speed while the closest thing Jona had to wings were two hairless ears that protruded from his skull. At this range, I doubted if one of those arc-bolts could've pierced my scales, but there was always the possibility of a lucky (or unlucky, from my perspective) shot finding its way into one the gaps in my armor. Even if it hit my well protected belly, those things hurt.\n\nThe projectile missed me by the length of two dragon tails. I came out of my turn fast and angry; if the ships' captains hadn't realized their peril the moment my shadow first passed over them, they did now. Oars splashed frantically as the vessels attempted to put space between each other, hoping that at least one would escape. I resumed my dive, swerving as I plunged. The more distant of the two ship had its own ballista poised but held its fire. It wanted me closer. Wish granted.\n\nI turned again, circling around the first of the imposter-raiders. Bowmen lined the deck in neat, disciplined lines. I didn't care about them or their puny little stick hurlers.\n\nJona chimed in with another of his astute observations. \"Beware their arrows!\"\n\nHe might as well have commanded the archers to fire. As he spoke, dozens of projectiles flew at me. I twisted my belly toward the fusillade of prickly sticks, beating my wings with as much force as I could muster. The gusts of wind my effort generated disrupted the trajectory of the arrows hurtling toward me. Most missed, dropping into the ocean. The few that reached me barely tickled my scales.\n\n\"The ballista is the threat, not the archers.\" I told Jona, speaking with my mind through our rune-link rather than my mouth. Since my ale-awakening, I'd tried to avoid using the link as much as possible. I sensed certain emotions from Jona when he spoke to me using the magic of the rune-link and I worried the reverse might be the case as well.\n\nJona shifted in his saddle. I'd been flying humans around long enough to recognize his purpose\u2014he was pulling himself to his feet to stand in the stirrups and fire his bow. A moment later, Jona loosed an arrow. It moved through the sky with the speed of a diving hawk, its path straight and true. The projectile's tip passed through the ballista trigger-man's neck. Jona had already launched a second shot before the first had even struck. That arrow took out the second ballista operator. Humans weren't always useless, just most of the time. I had no complaints about Jona's archery. Those little fingers were adept at plucking their clever little contraptions, even if they lacked the strength of a dragon's claw-tipped digits.\n\nWithout the threat of the ballista's arc-bolts to hold me at bay, the ship didn't have much of a chance. I circled around my floating prey, flexing my claws in anticipation. I gave my wings a modest flap as I went in for the kill. My ideal attack speed matched that of a diving owl\u2014fast but not too fast. A few of the crew jumped overboard before I even got there. I was flattered by their fear. I hadn't even roared.\n\nI sank the claws of my forelegs into the wooden hull of the ship. I could've squeezed and crushed parts of the upper deck into a collection of toothpicks, but that wouldn't sink the ship. I would've had to circle all the way around again and make a second attack on the vessel, during which time I'd be a target for the other ship's ballista. Not to mention that I didn't feel like flying in unnecessary circles listening to Jona make obvious comments. Instead, I dug my claws deeper, gripping the hull. Then I beat my wings\u2014hard. The ship jerked violently as I yanked one side upwards. Or at least, I tried to yank it. The ship was heavier than I'd anticipated\u2014its cargo hold must've been full, or the crew were particularly plump. For a quick moment I felt myself dropping toward the deck. I beat my wings hard enough to create a squall of wind. The sea trembled violently; water flew into the sky. Finally, the vessel yielded to my strength. I tipped the ship onto its side, its keel coming out of the water like a hooked fish. The remaining crew spilled into the waves. I could've plucked a couple of big humans out of the water for tasting, but that would've given the game away to Jona. Slave dragons didn't feast on humans due to a reasonable fear of starting bad habits. Fine.\n\nI soared upward, spinning as I went, tucking my wings in close to my body after each heave to make myself a smaller target. I needn't have bothered. The remaining ship had gone into a full flee-for-our-lives operation. Its first tactic was trying to hide. A distinctive yellow smoke emitted by billow-stones rose into the air on the eastern horizon. The rising smog was thick and acrid enough to burn a dragon's lungs when inhaled. Big, beautiful dragon eyes like mine were particularly sensitive to its effect. The fleeing ship turned directly into the wind, hoping to escape behind the rapidly expanding smoke wall.\n\n\"Perhaps we should let them go,\" Jona said, speaking more to himself than me. \"Let them crawl away with a bit of the grain in their holds. They paid a heavy price in blood for whatever booty they managed to steal in this raid.\"\n\nI decided to answer honestly, glad not to use our rune link. \"Raiders wouldn't have billow-stones or ballistae on their ships.\"\n\nHad I shown too much independent thought?\n\nJona didn't notice. \"Yes, they are almost certainly King Galt's men. They row hard, moving east, in the general direction of their home in Oster.\"\n\n\"I'm faster, and I do not fear their yellow smoke.\" That's what a slave dragon would've said. I had no idea why I said it. Old habits faded slowly. Why did I care if the Osterans managed to sulk off with a bit of King Mendakas' precious grain in their hold? I wasn't even sure why the humans cared so much about that stuff. I knew they made bread out of it\u2014which tasted slightly better than asparagus and potatoes\u2014but it still wasn't meat or ale. Certainly, it wasn't worth getting killed over.\n\n\"They'll be past the outer atolls soon, into the open sea. The Osterans may have other ships out there, their best four mast warships.\"\n\nI didn't see his point.\n\n<Just stay out of it,> I reminded myself. <There are worse things than flying back to Eladrell before dark.> The Keepers would have goat scraps for me to eat. It would be mostly bones, of course, because the humans took the best parts for themselves, but still better than being hit with an arc-bolt. I was about to turn back toward Eladrell when Jona opened his little mouth again.\n\n\"Those Osteran ships might even have furies aboard. You're not a fire-breather, so I don't want to risk a solo confrontation against a fleet at sea.\"\n\n<Oh. That.>\n\nBoth of my hearts began pumping fiery blood through me. I'd heard similar words all my life. I was the only ash dragon who couldn't breathe fire. Always that was thrown at me, as if I was somehow less than the others. Now, even Jona joined the chorus of doubters. I turned my head in the direction of the fleeing vessel. \"I can see the other ship. They're alone, no other fleet in sight,\" I said.\n\nI lied. I couldn't see the fleeing ship, or anything else, but Jona didn't know that. Dragons have far better sight than humans, and slave dragons can't lie. It turned out I could lie, and apparently, I was good at it.\n\nPretending that Jona's silence was the same as his approval, I flew toward the smoke shield. I never would've done that with any other ryder even if I could've, but Jona was a gentler sort of human. I thought I could get away with it. I flew as if I cared about the Osterans stealing my king's grain. While I couldn't spit flames out of my mouth, I was faster than my brethren. My wingspan was wider than almost any other dragon\u2014nearly as wide as the highest spire in Eladrell was tall. I could out-fly any dragon, even mighty Traxis. My claws were sharper, my digits more versatile, and my eyesight superior to theirs, particularly at night. Also, my farts smelled better than theirs. The other dragons could keep their fire. I didn't need it.\n\nI punctured the perimeter of the curtain of yellow smoke with a burst of speed. I could barely see within the cloud\u2014the dense fumes made my eyes a stinging mess. That wasn't the worst of it, however. Usually, I didn't need to see to fly\u2014if I'd been to a place once, I could find it again. But billow-stone smog fouled my directional abilities. I had no idea where I was going, despite my speed. However, I still had an excellent plan: wait for the humans to panic.\n\nJona was probably correct that whoever had planned this raid on Rolm would have considered the possibility of being pursued by one of King Mendakas' dragons. There was also a decent chance that Jona was right about those Osteran ships waiting out at sea and having furies aboard. A part of me acknowledged that it was rather decent of him to give any consideration to the danger furies posed to me\u2014none of my other ryders would've done that.\n\nDragons hated furies\u2014the creatures had been bred specifically by Oster to kill us. Once released, the deadly bug-like fliers flew faster than arc-bolts. If a fury caught a dragon, they latched onto our scales and bored through our armor until they reached our soft flesh. Then they used their poison stingers. I'd once heard a ryder described furies as massive killer bees, except that the bug-hybrids lacked the important benefit of producing honey (which humans also never shared with dragons).\n\nI guessed the captain of the fleeing ship would sail for what he believed to be the protection of the Osteran navy. So, where would King Galt's ships anchor themselves?\n\nThe most direct route between Rolm and Oster would be to sail southeast. However, those waters were filled with rocky shoals where colonies of nearly invisible ghastrays made their home. Better to bathe in dragon fire than sail into a pod of ghastrays. Any sensible ship's captain would avoid those waters. I reasoned a better place to anchor a fleet would be in the open sea east of Rolm's outer isles. Pretending I could see the fleeing ship, that's where I headed\u2014flying in the opposite direction of the dropping sun.\n\nI dove down near the water, flying close enough that my claws could've scraped the waves if I'd stretched them. I could barely see, but that wasn't necessary. Those holes on the side of my head allowed me to hear far more than human ears ever could, and they didn't stick out like the silly side sails attached to humans. All I had to do was glide and listen for the sound of oars being rowed by frightened sailors. It took about ten beats of my hearts before I found them.\n\nTheir swift little ship had covered more sea than I had expected. I adjusted my course based on the sounds of splashing oars. A wiser captain would've taken a different course so he could use his sails, sacrificing speed for stealth. Like I said, count on humans to panic.\n\nWhen I swooped out of the billow-stone generated cloud, I was so close to the ship I could see the terrified expressions on the crew's little faces. I hadn't realized human eyes could get that big. They were all so stunned they stopped rowing. My experience destroying the previous ship made me wary of trying to flip this one over. Also, its ballista was poised and ready. I saw no fury cages on deck, so I made the machine my priority. On my first pass, I extended my claws as far as I could and tore the ballista off the deck. I accidently grabbed the man trying to fire it as well. He screamed as I dropped him and his machine into the sea. I made an arcing loop back toward the ship. A portion of the vessel's crew was already jumping in the water. Given my size, they probably assumed I was a fire-breather. Only a few intrepid archers readied themselves to meet my next pass.\n\nJona eventually noticed the arrows. \"Beware the arrows.\"\n\nI flew in low, this time smashing my foreleg's claws into the side of the ship. I also tore the top off the mast. That was the end for the ship and its crew, unless another vessel sailed into the area to rescue them. They were taking on water and had lost their sail. I could've left it at that. I should've left it at that., but instead, I made one more pass, intending to make an even larger hole in the ship's hull. A fire-breather wouldn't have allowed the ship to survive; I didn't intend to either.\n\nI swooped down. There was no one left on deck to oppose me; the surviving sailors were all splashing in the ominous green water. With all the noise they were making, they better hope there wasn't a leviathan nearby. I hit the ship again, this time dragging the claws of my hind legs through the wood of its hull. The timbers shattered. I flew upward, satisfied with my work.\n\n\"Arc-bolt!\" Jona shouted.\n\nI banked, twisting my body in an effort to change my course and avoid the projectile. I hadn't seen it\u2014the damn thing had not come from the fleeing vessel but rather had been fired by some other ship hiding in the billow-stone haze. Not all humans are stupid; Some are cunning. The bolt clipped my tail. It hurt, but it could've been worse. I'd been sloppy. A volley of arrows followed the arc-bolt. I turned again, avoiding about half of the incoming wave of projectiles. The rest bounced off the scale armor of my back and tail. I still didn't know the location of the enemy ship or if there was more than one. I beat my wings with purpose, heading straight up toward the clouds. Ten powerful flaps put me high enough to be out of range of any arc-bolts. Even furies couldn't fly as high as I could.\n\nOnce back in comparative safety above the clouds, I waited for Jona to tell me to return home. We'd accomplished our mission. There was no point in attacking the Osteran navy through clouds of billow smoke. That was what he should've told me. But he didn't speak.\n\n\"Jona?\"\n\nNo answer.\n\nI tried the rune-link. Still nothing.\n\n<Uh-oh.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "I flew for home.\n\nOnce I'd crossed back into the safety of Rolman waters, I twisted my neck around to get a better look at Jona. He had an arrow sticking out of him. The tip had found the gap between his helm and chest plate and lodged itself into the soft flesh beneath. Blood covered Jona's neck and chest; His eyes were shut. Only the leather saddle straps kept him from falling off my back. The sound of his labored breath told me lived, for now. I turned my attention back to the sky ahead, pushing myself for speed. If the winds cooperated, I could be back at Eladrell\u2014home of the best healers in Rolm\u2014by sunset.\n\nRacing against the fading day, I cut through the sky, something akin to panic surging through me. Jona irked me like a stubborn fly constantly buzzing around my nostrils, but I didn't want him to die. To my surprise, the worry was a throbbing ache in my hearts. I wondered if I should care about a human or not. I had my doubts. Is my concern for Jona caused by our link or is it really me?\n\nI kept pushing for ever more speed. Whether my worry for my ryder was a legacy of the magic runes that bonded us, the result was that I did little but fret about Jona as the sea rolled beneath me, my mind consumed by his welfare. I had lost ryders before, so I knew the horror of the death of one linked to me. But as the eastern most island of what had once been the Free Cities of Toth came into view, a singular thought crept into my head, stealthy and dark: <Why should I care about a human?>\n\nI pushed the notion away, but the idea was persistent. My blood heated as this forbidden feeling tickled the inside my head. This was something a slave could not even consider \u2026 yet, I could.\n\nI contemplated the race that had enslaved me, shackling me with invisible chains so terrible that I had not even suspected the horror that had been done to me and my kind. These humans could not fly, they could barely see, and they grew hair from their noses and ears. I could kill any man with the flick of my tail. Yet because of their magic, the humans dominated us. Was that right?\n\nI didn't think so.\n\nHuman voices have echoed inside my head from the time of my earliest memories. Almost every meal was brought to me by human Keepers on DragonPeak. I listened to them speak, laugh, and argue year after year from the confines of my cave. I knew humans better than I knew my own kind. Some humans\u2014my ryders\u2014were almost extensions of myself. With a newly free mind, I considered these two-legged creatures. I found them lacking.\n\nFour ryders had preceded Jona, each coming to an untimely end (none were my fault). Hadrial had been first. He taught me Avian, the language that we used to communicate with our human masters because their common tongue was impossible for dragon mouths to mimic. The memory of his brutal mind was like a searing hot branding iron that had imprinted itself inside me. To Hadrial, I was a hound to be trained, to be taught obedience, to be used and to be sacrificed when necessary. My inability to breathe fire had been a slight to him, one for which he had never forgiven me. He'd died in the flames of a dragon's breath on the high peaks of the island of Veralon, the island from which all my brethren were stolen, while trying to take a hatchling from its mother's nest. Only now did I appreciate the justice in the manner of his death.\n\nTwo other ryders followed Hadrial over the next two years: Geron and Ladrel. Geron was careless with a harpoon during a fight with a large leviathan. I was told that Ladrel had died in an alley in Eladrell during a dispute over weighted dice. Who knew those little number cubes could be so dangerous? Both men had been equal parts cruel and condescending.\n\nNext was Karthus. The man had lived for battle. I was a slave to his commands, but over the years, through the link that eroded my will, his purpose had become mine as well: to kill. I could still hear his favorite words echo in my mind: \"I give the mercy of death.\"\n\nHe said it every time we fought.\n\nTogether, Karthus and I won some great victories. In my eighth year, we helped smash the Free Cities of Toth, bringing their shattered remnants into the domain of Rolm. Karthus had laughed at the screams as each of the three cities burned, speaking his favorite words as I, his instrument, circled overhead. Five years after that, we had fought the mighty nation of Ulibon and its so-called Highstar, conquering that land in a vicious campaign that had cost the lives of no less than six of my fellow ash dragons, and twice that number of smaller horned dragons (who can't breathe fire either). Karthus had cursed the dragon deaths, but mourned none of them. He finally met his end in the first of the Hunger Wars with Oster, fighting against its new king, Gillian Galt, and the mighty beasts that had been bred in the dark depths of the Pits of Gargen. Oster's lethal furies were new then, and we hadn't been ready. It had been a costly defeat, but the world was a better place without Karthus.\n\nAfter those ryders came Jona. He was a better man than Karthus or any of the rest, although I hadn't realized that until very recently. Often, he would visit me in my cave on DragonPeak, bringing me large smoked king fish from the Thunder Straits. Why had he done that? He didn't need to win my affection\u2014I was a slave. The runes ensured my obedience; indeed, they made me want to please my master above all else. Jona also spent far more time talking to me than any ryder before him. As I ate his fish, he would ask me strange questions about my memories as a hatchling and if I remembered my mother (I had no memory of any of these things). The Keepers on DragonPeak had whispered about the idiocy of Jona wasting his gold on expensive fish to give to a dragon. I hadn't thought it unusual at the time because an enslaved dragon did not question the actions of his master. Only once my mind became free could I recognize the oddity of Jona's behavior toward me, particularly when compared to those who had preceded him. I huffed to myself as I flew, struggling with unfamiliar emotions. I wanted to save this human. It wasn't the rune link that drove my concern. Jona was a decent human.\n\nMy brethren and I didn't deserve to be slaves. The ryders were part of that, even if it was the Keepers who stole the hatchlings and the Sculptors who did the actual carving. Yet, somehow, Jona was different than the others. Had it been Karthus or any other ryder strapped into my saddle right now, I would have let them die. With Jona, I couldn't do it. I knew him in a way I hadn't known the others. With my mind secretly free, the link between us allowed me to glimpse what was in his mind. I had shared his emotions. I realized Jona cared about me\u2026 and it was not just that regard that set him apart. There was even more to him that I still didn't understand. I reached out to Jona as I flew, trying to push into his mind though our link, to find answers I should've sought weeks ago. I could sense nothing. His mind was somewhere else.\n\nI dreaded returning to Eladrell, but I didn't change my course. If I had been wounded in battle, and Jona had the opportunity to save me, I knew he would have done it. I had deceived him so I could pursue those Osteran ships. If I had been paying attention to my mission instead of trying to act like I was better than a fire-breather, I would've seen those arrows in time to avoid them. I was responsible for his injuries. If he died, it was I who had killed him. I didn't know if dragons were supposed to have a conscience, but it seemed that I did.\n\nFreedom wasn't all ale and goats."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The Kingdom of Rolm passed beneath me.\n\nKing Mendakas' domain consisted of three greater islands, including the conquered land masses that had once been the kingdoms of Aramath and Ulibon, as well as perhaps a hundred smaller islands, although most of these were tiny land specks that were little more than atolls. Harcourt, the great island that was home of Rolm's capital city of Eladrell, was the largest land mass in the known world, bigger than all the isles of Oster put together. That's where I headed. I crossed the east coast of Harcourt, with its rocky, scarred mountains that had been ravaged for the metal ore hidden in their depths ages ago. Some of the peaks were now healed enough for patches of weed and grass to sprout, attracting delicious white-coated mountain goats. I hungered, and it took considerable self-control to avoid diverting for a quick meal. Jona didn't have time for such diversions.\n\nQuickly, the mountains gave way to the lush lands at the heart of the Harcourt, where Rolman farmers grew their foul-tasting crops in the dark soil. As the twilight deepened, I finally gazed upon the spires of Eladrell in the distance. I flew still faster, and the city drew near, as did its stink. Eladrell was the greatest collection of humans in the known world, unrivaled anywhere else in Rolm or Oster. Its streets teemed with humans packed so tight they rubbed against each other along its narrow streets as they made their way between homes, shops, and taverns. Near the center of the city was the great Temple of the Sculptors, a soaring pyramid capped by a golden apex that glowed like a lit beacon as night began to fall. As I looked upon the nest of the slave-masters, I vowed that there would come a day when I returned to that place, and I would offer them the same mercy as my former ryder Karthus had offered his foes (death).\n\nOverlooking the sprawling masses of Eladrell like a vigilant mother was DragonPeak, a lonely mountain rising up against the coast, its steep western face dotted by dragon caves intersected by narrow paths of man-carved steps. There were easily a hundred caves, but most were empty. Nestled against the peak was King Mendakas' citadel, a fortress of thick stone walls built around a central keep capped by five spires as of varying heights arranged in manner that gave the castle its name: The Fist.\n\nNormally, when I returned from a mission, I landed at DragonPeak. That was where our keepers, and sometimes even our ryders resided. The Keepers usually kept a nice supply of meaty treats there as well. However, the king's healers weren't on the mountain, and it was a long journey to the dragon caves for Eladrell a human on foot. Waiting for a healer on DragonPeak would probably mean Jona would die and I would've wasted my chance to escape Rolm for nothing. So, I needed to land closer to the healers\u2014inside the city of Eladrell itself.\n\nFor twenty-three years, humans have forced me to serve them. They captured me before I was ready to fight, stealing me as a hatchling from a nest on Veralon made by a mother I never knew. They took all of us that way\u2014usually before a single moon had passed. Stealing babies wasn't fair at all, and neither was this world. A lesson to me from the humans that I intended to remember.\n\nJona's injury gave me the opportunity to indulge in terrifying a particularly large number of humans without subjecting my actions to undue scrutiny. Indeed, I was going be both a hero and get to scare the humans. If everything went well, Jona would get healed and I'd get fed a fat sheep.\n\nI began my descent, wary, as all creatures must be when flying above the skies of Eladrell. Here, the wind and air behave like no place else. A combination of the DragonPeak and the warm waters of Boiling Sea to the west conjured unpredictable weather patterns, as well one other unique phenomenon: the lift-steam. I didn't completely understand it, but some ryder I didn't remember had once claimed that the strange confluence of wind and warmth was caused by air being forced through the caves of DragonPeak from the waters to the west. Whatever the truth, the result was that a steady gust of warm, light air, flowed upward just outside the city. It allowed for easy flights and low hanging clouds. The problem was that just above those clouds, colder air from the north caused the formation of dangerous, crystalized ice that could rip even a dragon's wings. For this reason, or maybe because of the dragons that lived nearby, no other creature dared frequent the skies above Eladrell. But I had lived with the lift-stream my whole life, and it posed little danger to a skilled flier like me.\n\nThe citizens of Eladrell were accustomed to dragons. They saw us fly to and from the nearby mountain on a regular basis. Still, we usually avoided flying over the city because the lift-stream could cause unpredictable shifts in the wind there. Also, the humans disliked having a giant winged creature blot out the sun over their city on a regular basis.\n\nI ignored the unspoken rule about flying over Eladrell. It was an emergency, after all.\n\nI came in low, my tail shifting from side-to-side, wary of unexpected wind shear. The skies felt calm. I spread my wings into their full, glorious, span. I figured I'd probably only get to fly into the city like this once, so I might as well make the most of the opportunity. My passage kicked up sand from the streets, my shadow stretched long as the sun's light faded on the western horizon. Even the jaded residents of Eladrell turned their heads upward as I swept over their homes. I heard the shrieks of children\u2014some frightened, others delighted\u2014as I passed. A group of sailors gathered around a barrel on the harborside raised their cups skyward at me, as well they should've\u2014my kind frequently drove off the leviathans that harassed Rolm's sailing fleet, in addition to keeping the ghastray swarms away from Rolm's shores. Their praise pleased me, although I would've preferred to share their drink.\n\nThe best place to land in Eladrell without crushing a building was the city's central plaza\u2014the Grandquell. The expansive public space was the location of the greatest market in all of Rolm each Lastday, but at all other times it was a gathering place for the citizenry of city. It was also flat, paved with stone, and close to both the Fist and the districts of the city with the largest homes, but not too close to the Sculptors' Temple. The presence of coin-rich humans in that portion of the city meant there would also be healers nearby.\n\nI didn't want to kill anyone else today, so I was careful to hover above the Grandquell beating my wings for long enough for the space to clear below me before I landed. That happened quickly\u2014humans moved promptly when motivated. I set down gently on the pavement. My tail bumped into a marble statue of some human with a crown on his head and a sword in his hand standing beside a pet wolf who was constantly spitting water out his mouth into a reflecting pool below. I heard a cracking sound, but the statue didn't fall. It would've been better if it had; it looked ridiculous: Wolves couldn't breathe water from their mouths and the human had been carved all wrong, with big parts in the wrong places.\n\nJona was still breathing. I'd gotten him back to his own kind, but now I needed a healer to help him. The digits of my forelegs were nimble enough that I could've plucked Jona off his saddle, but I didn't see the point in risking that.\n\n\"Come forth!\" I roared out, loud enough that even the people in the Fist must've heard me. \"My ryder is in need of aid!\"\n\nThe few humans who remained in the Grandquell ran away instead of coming to me as I asked, despite my having spoken in my clearest Avian. The people of Eladrell couldn't even follow basic directions.\n\nI really didn't see why my landing caused such a ruckus. It had been many years since a dragon had gone berserk\u2014indeed it had been decades since a dragon had gone on an actual killing spree in Eladrell, and that was the humans' own fault. The Sculptors should have known better than try to carve runes of control on a dragon after its third moon. The only other dragon I knew of who had turned on his masters had been old Jaxis during the war with Oster, and the circumstances had been very different. The humans were really overreacting to my unexpected arrival.\n\nI behaved with complete courtesy. I even smiled with my mouth in the human fashion as I looked around the Grandquell for someone to help Jona, my teeth gleaming (a dragon's true smile was made with our eyes\u2014we used our teeth for more important things like eating and killing). Still, no healer came forth. I wondered if coming to the city had been a mistake.\n\nFinally, I spotted one of my brethren flying down from the mountain. I stared hard until I recognized her\u2014Jemila. She was a horned dragon, not more than half my size, but she carried three humans on her back. Even though they were a smaller sub-species, horned dragons' thick wings allowed them to carry almost as much weight as a larger ash dragon, so the humans often used them for transportation. My sister (as I called her, we weren't really related as far as I knew) set down next to me, glancing around the Grandquell with unsettled eyes.\n\n\"I bring our masters,\" she announced, unnecessarily. Shortly after my mind had been freed, I'd realized that the control-runes made dragons into conversational dullards; We were so focus on our human masters, we rarely had anything remotely interesting to say to each other.\n\n\"My ryder is injured. He needs a healer.\"\n\nThere were two Keepers among the arrivals, along with Jemila's ryder, a human whose name I had forgotten. I rarely spoke to horned dragons. I certainly had no interest in her ryder.\n\nThe two Keepers climbed onto my back to examine Jona, while the ryder ran off, hopefully to fetch a real healer. The Keepers unstrapped Jona from his saddle and began to lower him to the ground. I thought they should've waited for the healer before moving him, but that wasn't something a slave dragon would've said. Dragon's didn't tell humans what they should be doing, even though it would've improved things considerably if we did. Once they'd laid Jona onto the hard cobblestone ground, the arrow still stuck in his chest, they turned their attention to me.\n\nOf the two Keepers, one was considerably older than the other. I knew this because humans' skin wrinkles as they age. Also, the old ones often lose the fur on the top of their heads but compensate by growing more out their nose and ears. This keeps the cold air form getting inside their heads in winter, thus reducing the need for a furry head.\n\nThe old hairy-nosed one stood close to my head and held up two fingers on his hand, which was a signal that he should have my attention. I forced myself to raise my neck and regard him like an obedient slave.\n\n\"Bayloo, who did this to your ryder?\"\n\nDragons weren't expected to give elaborate answers. Most humans wanted to think our intellect was inferior to theirs. They were wrong, but I kept up the charade of being an idiot. \"The enemy.\"\n\nI figured even a grouchy old Keeper would have a hard time finding much fault with that answer, but this one wasn't easily satisfied. I tried to remember his name. He spent most of his time with the horned dragons. I was relatively sure the other humans called him Jakobo.\n\n\"How did your ryder get shot by arrows?\"\n\n<Let the idiot game commence!>\n\n\"The enemy used longbows.\"\n\nI smiled with my teeth. I sensed the Keeper's impatience, so I broadened my fake grin even further, showing close to all eighty of my magnificent teeth. Jakobo's frown deepened.\n\n\"Where were the archers with these longbows?\"\n\n\"On a hidden ship.\"\n\n\"Hidden?\"\n\nI closed my eyes, as if struggling to answer his question. \"We sunk the two raiders who had stolen from the king. But they had billow-stone smoke. Within the smoke hid another ship.\"\n\nAs much as I disliked speaking Avian, I could've done a much better job than these fragmented answers. Not to brag, but I was rather eloquent compared to my fellow dragons. But I'd never spoken to this Keeper, and he wouldn't know my abilities. He was probably used to dragons who could barely talk. Horned dragons were considerably less intelligent than ash dragons.\n\n\"Your ryder chose to pursue ships equipped with billow-stones even though you were alone?\"\n\nThis was getting more complicated than I'd anticipated. \"Thieves. They took the king's grain. They didn't escape us.\"\n\nJakobo grunted unhappily. \"Jona will have much to answer for. If he lives.\" The Keeper glanced at my fallen ryder's bloody body. \"We don't have so many dragons remaining that we afford such rash decisions. Every ash dragon is precious, even the misfits.\"\n\nI snorted with annoyance\u2014rather loudly. I shouldn't have done that. The Keeper's eyes narrowed. I put on my best dumb-obedient face. I learned that look from the dogs who live on DragonPeak\u2014I opened my mouth slightly and breathed heavily. I didn't wag my tail. Humans don't like the odor of my breath, and in the past few moons I'd discovered that heavy breathing helped end undesirable conversations (by which I mean every conversation with a human). The Keeper made a sour grimace as he turned his head toward new arrivals.\n\nStriding toward me was a woman attired in the ivory robe of a human healer, along with the ryder who'd fetched her. The healer wore her cloud-colored hair in a braided tail behind her head. She made big eyes at me but began to run when she caught sight of Jona's bloody body spread on the paved ground of the Grandquell.\n\n\"Who moved this man here?\" I was familiar with the tone of human annoyance and that's how this woman sounded. I kept my mouth shut, but it would've been satisfying to tell her that I hadn't wanted him moved. Keepers know less than they think they do about everything, including healing and dragons.\n\nNeither of the Keepers confessed. I wasn't surprised.\n\nThe healer got to work. She removed Jona's armor, cutting the straps with a dangerous knife she wielded with a soldier's proficiency. After a cursory examination of the wound, she took a vial of a reddish liquid from her satchel, punctured the wax seal, and poured the entirety of the contents around the protruding arrow. Without pausing, she placed both hands on the shaft and yanked it out. Jona convulsed, his body spasming even as his eyes remained closed. My tail smacked against the cobblestones, breaking several. The healer didn't take her eyes off Jona. Another vial came out of her satchel, this one containing a thick, clear substance that looked like sap. She poured three drops on Jona's lips. I liked the poise of this healer. I'd not seen her before. The healers sent to DragonPeak were generally of the very old hair-in-ears-and-nose variety of human.\n\nThe healer continued to work until the next group of humans arrived. The man in the lead wore the black ring mail of a dragon ryder. Hair the color of rust covered much of his face and head, with two pearly black eyes shining behind his bangs. I recognized him: Aleman Brindisi, First Sword of the king. He was also the ryder of Traxis. Whenever King Mendakas went to war, it was Brindisi at the vanguard of the fighting. I'd seen the man put an arrow into the eye of an Osteran griffin from two-hundred yards away while in flight. Brindisi knew how to kill. He also got other humans and dragons killed.\n\nBrindisi barely glanced at Jona as he strode through the cautiously growing crowd occupying the center of the Grandquell. Instead, he fixed his attention on the Keepers. Brindisi growled like an angry hound. \"The king demands to know why there are two dragons squatting in the great plaza of his capital.\"\n\nHeat flowed to Jakobo's face. \"This ryder was injured in battle. His desperate dragon brought him here.\"\n\nBrindisi arched a brow. \"Into the Grandquell?\"\n\n\"It's a flat, open landing area. There aren't healers on the mountain. After all these years as a ryder you should know that the beasts are capable of independent thought on occasion.\" I didn't like the way Jakobo said that. My independent thought was to bite off his smug head.\n\nBrindisi grunted as he looked at me. \"Some dragons maybe. Traxis isn't known for his intelligence.\"\n\nI was offended on my dragon brother's behalf. This human had been Traxis' ryder for over fifteen years. While it was true that Traxis had slipped in the past years, he had won no small number of victories for his human. Brindisi owed him respect.\n\nJakobo was wise enough not to engage in a disagreement with a man such as Brindisi. I wasn't the only one who knew about the ryder's propensity for killing. Instead, the Keeper shifted the subject. \"The dragon said that they were pursuing the raiders who attacked old Toth. The escaping ships had billow-stone aboard. Jona took an arrow in the engagement.\"\n\nBrindisi scoffed. \"Those ships that raided into Toth were no more raiders than I am a ballerina. They were sent by Oster, and I tire of Galt spitting in our faces. Something must be done to end these raids.\"\n\n<Tough words from a human who couldn't even fly.>\n\n\"Two of their ships were sunk.\" The Keeper raised his chin with pride, as if he'd had anything to do with my work. \"They cannot match our dragons.\"\n\n\"Famine makes Oster desperate. The raids will continue until we send enough of their ships to the bottom of the sea and they realize they cannot feed their people by sending ships to raid for grain. Only then will King Galt come in force.\" To my ears, Brindisi didn't sound alarmed at the prospect of another war with Oster. Quite the opposite\u2014he relished it.\n\nJakobo didn't share the enthusiasm. \"The dragons are so few, the griffins many. Each of our losses are irreplaceable.\"\n\nIf Brindisi heard the Keeper, he gave no acknowledgement of it. Instead, he strolled up to me. He reached out a hand and placed it flat onto my side, rubbing my scales as if I was a puppy. I wasn't his pet, but I forced myself to keep still. Pretending to be a slave grated on me, although I also knew defying Brindisi would be a mistake. I'd seen other men do that in battle. It didn't turn out well for them. No, if I was going to fight Brindisi, I best ensure I kill him quickly.\n\nHe turned abruptly. \"Healer, what is the condition of the dragon's ryder?\"\n\nThe woman looked up at Brindisi only once she'd finished wrapping Jona's wound. \"His injuries are serious. Too much blood has leaked out. It was fortunate the dragon brought him here so quickly.\" Those words made me feel a lot better about myself than they should have. \"I think he has a chance.\"\n\nBrindisi made a guttural sound of skepticism from deep in his throat. \"You are not among the king's healers. What is your name?\"\n\nThe woman stood slowly, her hand bloody, but her head held high. She was nearly tall as Brindisi. \"Aurora of the Menders Guild, at your service.\"\n\n\"Why are you here and not one of the usual healers?\"\n\n\"I was nearby. A man was in urgent need.\" She shrugged. \"And it seems the king's soldiers move faster than his healers.\"\n\nBrindisi grimaced. \"The king's steward will arrange for payment for your services. The royal healers will see to this man now.\"\n\n\"I will stay until they arrive.\" Aurora informed him. \"No fee is necessary.\"\n\nBrindisi kept his sour expression but didn't challenge her. He turned back to me. I cringed at the prospect of Brindisi touching me again, but he kept his fleshy hands to himself. Instead, he fixed me a hard, appraising stare, moving his gaze from my head to my tail then back again. The spikes of my mane stood up with my discomfort. Brindisi stepped closer, speaking in an ugly whisper that only I could hear.\n\n\"Now I must decide what to do with you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "I got chicken scraps dinner.\n\nNot even the whole chicken. Just some torn bones with a bit of meat still sticking to the ends. Apparently, sinking two ships and getting my ryder back to Eladrell fast enough to save his life (possibly) didn't merit an improvement in rations. I sniffed unhappily at the meal the Keepers had deposited inside my cave before they closed and locked the gate behind them. Chicken was the vegetable of meats. The scrawny little creatures' flesh tasted like their dirty, bitter feathers, while the bones were a slimy, marrow-less disgrace that splintered in my mouth. The humans must've been angry with me. Or meat was getting too valuable.\n\nI'd heard several Keepers grumbling about how much food we dragons ate while humans didn't have enough. Those sentiments surprised me. I understood famine. I'd lived through the Long Summer when the ghastray swarms ravaged the fishing waters of Rolm. I'd done my part during that terrible summer\u2014the supreme sacrifice of eating potatoes for two of my daily meals.\n\nThings weren't that desperate now. On the rich land of central Harcourt, crops and livestock thrived. The waters around the conquered nation of Ulibon should've offered the opportunity for better fishing. Stinting on dragon food was stupid. Dragons were the source of Rolm's power. Without us, it wouldn't just be Oster that would be a threat, but pirates and sea monsters, as well the mysterious Mizu raiders who appeared periodically in their strange ships from the other side of the Wall of Fire. The Keepers might think we ate too much, but there would be less to go around, if not for us.\n\nLack of decent food wasn't my only complaint. The day that followed my dramatic landing in the Grandquell had been worse than dull. No one came to tell me about Jona's condition. With no ryder, I was mostly left locked up in my cave (the steel gates were supposedly for our protection). The long stretch of isolation left me plenty of time to think, something slave dragons don't do. Or at least I couldn't remember doing much of it before I became free. With my newfound ability to focus my thoughts on anything I desired, my mind decided to spend a good part of the endless day worrying about things I could do nothing about.\n\nI fretted about Jona. Aurora, the healer woman, seemed to have helped him, but even she wasn't sure if he'd live or not. I'd sacrificed a rare opportunity to fly away, and I wanted it to mean something. If I had to pretend to be a slave and I had to have a ryder, it would be best that it was Jona. If he died, I decided that I would have to flee. I wasn't going to risk being bonded to still another human. I had no idea what the re-bonding process would do to my newly freed mind.\n\nMy other worry was the possibility of war.\n\nThe chicken bones were just one more indication of the troubled times. A dozen fishing boats had been lost over the past moons. The dragons who had been sent out to investigate found shattered wreckages or nothing at all. Hungry leviathans were generally believed to be responsible, though the massive creatures didn't leave much behind when they attacked. Fish was becoming as scarce as animal flesh. Even if the situation was not yet as severe as during the Long Summer, empty bellies were always dangerous. The last great famine had led to the first of the Hunger Wars with Oster. King Mendakas' injured pride at his defeat had caused a second, smaller war several years later. The losses had been terrible, including the horrible death of my dragon brother Jaxis. I didn't want to fight Oster again. The humans' war had nothing to do with me or mine.\n\nThis was a fresh thought.\n\nDragons were used by our masters as tools of war. The minds of men like Karthus made us crave battle. Freed from that human pollution, I understood the folly of fighting Oster, at least for my kind. The beasts of Oster were the most formidable enemies Rolm had ever faced, as demonstrated by the continued independence of that land. I feared no griffin, no war wolf, no fury, nor any other of the diabolical creatures that the Pale Wrights of Oster bred in their dark pits, but dragons gained nothing from fighting those creatures. In a conflict, my kind would die and gain nothing. Humans bred like rabbits, with the stink of their teeming masses rising from packed houses of Eladrell, but too many dragon caves were empty. In my two decades as a slave, far more dragons had died than arrived on DragonPeak. I had been the last ash dragon taken from Veralon. Rarely, if ever, had I heard a human speak of that. No one cared for the future of my race.\n\n<Perhaps that was a duty that fell to me.>\n\nThat notion echoed in my head as the sun moved across the sky. I didn't like how it felt in there. It was a responsibility, a burden. I had no idea how to help my fellow dragons.\n\nEventually, night fell on DragonPeak. I still could think of no place for a free dragon in this world. I also didn't know if Jona lived or not. I reached out to him through our link but found only a numb void. Alone, that told me nothing. I had felt the same nothingness as I carried him back to Eladrell. I paced about my inadequate cave, unwilling to sleep. For the first time in my life, I realized that this was not my home\u2014it was a cage. I didn't like being imprisoned. I was a dragon, meant for the sky. The humans had done that to me, and all my kind. I snarled at the thought.\n\nWith anger in my blood, I stared at the only exit. As far as I knew, no dragon had ever tried to break the gate. The steel bars appeared dauntingly thick, even if they were old. A human-sized door had been built into the larger gate, so the Keepers could enter and exit without lifting the opening wide enough for a dragon to escape. I sniffed the gate, probing gently with a claw. There was no rust, no obvious weakness. The mechanism that lifted the gate was far out of my reach. It wasn't worth the risk trying to knock out the bars tonight. Eventually, the Keepers would come to let me out to fly or stretch my wings in the sun. That would be my opportunity to escape, if I decided to do that. But first, I needed to know what happened to Jona.\n\nThe night ended and a new day came. I'd slept little and awoke agitated, my tail flailing into the stone wall of my cave. This space was oppressive. Hearing human footsteps on the stairs leading toward my cave was a relief. My hearts beat with anticipation, which annoyed me because I shouldn't be so anxious, but I wasn't used to spending long days in my cave contemplating freedom and warfare\u2014so much thinking hurt.\n\nThe short and squat form of a familiar Keeper arrived at the gate of my cave dressed in the dusty red tunic of his kind, a sour frown on his face. The man's name was Kelum. As Keepers went, he wasn't the worst\u2014Kelum was lazy but usually not cruel. He held up a thick metal dragon collar with a metal link chain attached. He stared at me expectantly.\n\nSuppressing a snort, I shuffled obediently to the front of my cave, lowering my neck so he could secure the metal collar around my neck.\n\n<They treat us like dogs.>\n\nThere wasn't any reason for the collar and chain. Even though they weren't our ryders, slave dragons almost always obeyed the spoken commands of the Keepers, even if we had no fondness for their kind. The instinct to obey had been imprinted in us by our first linked humans when we were still little more than hatchlings. Only in instances of extreme fear or danger would a Keeper's command be insufficient. The collar clicked shut around my neck. Its hard edges rubbed against my scales. Without the rune link to cloud my mind, I realized I could snap the chain of the collar if I tried. It couldn't hold me or my brethren\u2014the device was about superiority, nothing else. I'd been blind to the humiliation before this moment.\n\nKelum placed a worn metal key in the large gate's lock, then pushed it open. With a yank on my chain, he urged me out of the cave. The links of my leash dragged behind him as we made our way along the ledge outside my cave. Far below was Eladrell and the mighty walls of the Fist. I followed the Keeper, annoyed at every clink of the metal chain. I kept my eyes low, lest Kelum see the anger in them. Why did the dogs who wore these things act so happy? Perhaps because dogs can lick themselves in places dragon cannot, so they are simply happier creatures by nature.\n\n\"Bayloo, to the Shelf.\" Kelum said, confident in being obeyed, as if I couldn't swallow him in a single bite. At least we would be going someplace easy to depart from, if I chose.\n\nWe ascended along one of pathways that had been carved in the mountainside by the toil of men in ages past. It had been made wide enough for a dragon\u2014barely. But even if I slipped, I could just fly back to the peak. It was the Keepers who had to be careful.\n\nThe path led upward, spiraling around the width of the peak. Along the way, we passed the caves of several of my brethren. The first was that of my lithe sister, Narsis, whose scales were an elegant shade of gold. As we passed, she lifted her long neck high enough that we might see her eyes glowing in greeting from the darkness of her cave, although I think the greeting was more for the human Keeper than I. Kelum ignored her, but I offered a low trill of my tongue and throat, a sound too soft for human ears, but a call every dragon knew\u2014it was how we found each other when we flew in formation, letting each other know our positions, and that none of us was alone. It wasn't something I would've done before I found my own will inside of me, but it wasn't obviously rebellious either.\n\nNarsis flashed caring eyes at me, a hint of gentleness I hadn't bothered to see in her previously. I paused to regard my sister, but Kelum yanked on my chain. \"On with you.\"\n\nNarsis showed no sign of being concerned at my treatment. I didn't blame her. Two moons ago I'd been like Narsis. I wouldn't have cared either.\n\nWe passed the home-prison of Traxis next, the eldest among us and largest, save for the king's own dragon, Triton. Traxis lay back in the furthest reaches of his den, his bulk resting against the wall. Human eyes couldn't have pierced the black void separating us, but I had no trouble gazing upon my massive brother. Even though his scales had frayed at their edges, there was no mistaking the majesty of Traxis. Or his power. In the battle for Ulibon, his fire had melted the stone of the Highstar's tower. On that day, there was no creature in Rolm mightier than Traxis. He was not the same now. Time was a worthy adversary.\n\nTraxis offered no greeting, but when our eyes met, a surge of amber came into his gaze, which he allowed to dim only gradually, expressing his sympathy for my injured ryder in the dragon way. This sort of display was rare among my kind, but the peril to a ryder was a concern all slave dragons understood, even more so than when one of our kind fell. As I passed Traxis' cave-prison, I remembered watching his egg-brother, Jaxis, die horribly in Oster, years ago. No dragon had mourned that death, although it had been uniquely horrible, and few among us even knew the full terrible truth of it.\n\nI thanked Traxis for his concern with a sharp flash of my own eye. Kelum remained oblivious to our exchange. Humans cared only for themselves, if that.\n\nAfter another steep climb, we came to the so-called Shelf, an outcropping of rock on the north side of DragonPeak. It extended the length of three dragons with a surface pounded and scarred by the treading of my kin over decades. The Shelf also afforded a magnificent view of the Thunder Straits. It was here that hatchlings, newly maimed by the Sculptor's control-runes, were sent to their first flight. Kelum hooked my chain on a line of iron spikes that had been driven into the mountain just for this purpose. I could've snapped the chain anytime I wanted, and the Keepers knew it, yet they persisted in degrading us. I wondered at the origins of these rituals. Perhaps the first Keepers had realized that even if a dragon had an inkling of free will inside, the chains and locked gates and humiliation would keep our true self suppressed.\n\n\"Stretch your wings, or they will stiffen,\" Kelum told me. \"Breathe the mountain air. I'll return before the sun leaves the sky.\" Kelum held up a stern finger. It reminded me of a pale asparagus. \"Do not leave the ground upon which you stand. No flying.\" He waddled off down another path, glancing back over his shoulder as if expected to catch me hovering over the edge like some errant child.\n\nOne other dragon shared the Shelf with me, a lesser horned beast the humans had named Crema. Her scales were the color of an oyster's pearl, smooth and elegant. She was the youngest dragon on the mountain, her twisting horns not yet half of the full adult length they would one day achieve. Crema took note of me, but offered no greeting, keeping to herself on the far side of the rocky expanse, a long trough of water separating us.\n\nA stiff wind pushed across the Shelf. On it was the smell of sea, but also something foul\u2014the odor of a death tide. At least that's what sailors called it. I knew of no better term. It was a layer of muck that sometimes came to the shores of Rolm, killing marine creatures in its path. Even leviathans weren't safe from its poison. Any who dared to eat the flesh of dead creatures caught in the tide would sicken. The odor tainted the fine view. It also overwhelmed any other smells carried on the air, leading me to the belief that I was alone on the Shelf with only my lesser cousin. I was wrong.\n\nI walked over to the water trough, the sound of the metal chains grating in my head. I savored the sensation of the cool liquid as it ran down my throat into my belly. I kept a careful eye on Crema as I drank, but she paid me no mind, her attention focused on the horizon. I wondered what slave dragons thought about during these moments. I had been on the Shelf for countless afternoons, yet I could barely recall anything about those visits before my mind awoke. The Sculptors' runes had stripped me of even my own memories.\n\nI studied the carved symbols of magic on Crema's chest. The inscriptions were similar to my own\u2014a series of five interlocked circles, themselves contained within a greater circle, with a series of intricate symbols that combined to resemble a pair of spread wings in the center. There was an unmistakable message in the pattern, a message that was just beyond the edge of my understanding. Crema's markings were smaller than mine, with one less circle. Still, they were equally hideous.\n\nThe wind shifted and so did the scent in the air. I raised my head as I heard the footsteps of a human. I pretended to share Crema's interest in the horizon. Oh, how blue! And big! Did I mention blue already? What in the Abyss was Crema staring at for so long?\n\nThe human stepped onto the Shelf from a little used path above the outcropping. I knew the way she'd come. It led to nowhere except a small, isolated ledge from which the humans tried to speak to their gods above in Haven, occasionally leaving offerings of flowers, animals, or other trinkets. I'd also seen Keepers peeing from the same locale on occasion, presumably to appease some god of the sea below. Human deities had strange preferences.\n\nI recognized the human\u2014a female. They were rare enough among the denizens of DragonPeak that I knew her name: Bethy Rann, the ryder of Crema. Only three human females had successfully triumphed during the Rite and won the opportunity to become a ryder of a newly arrived hatchling. Of those, only Rann still drew breath.\n\nShe wore a longbow on her back and a curved blade at her side. Even the most fearsome of other ryders\u2014men like Brindisi and Del Quickblade\u2014respected Rann's accuracy with that bow. A few even called her Longshot, both because of her aim and how unlikely it was that she was still alive. I had trouble understanding human naming conventions. By their logic, if Rann was Longshot then Kelum-the-Keeper should've been called Short Annoyance and my sister Adriel's ryder should've been known as Garlic Stink. That would've made more sense, but humans rarely made sense.\n\nRann had the look of a dragon about her, with a wonderfully longish nose (at least by human standards), dark olive skin and eyes the color of the sun, not unlike those of an ash dragon. Her movements were catlike, sparse and quick.\n\nCrema shifted her attention to her newly-arrived ryder, her eyes flickering with an azure glow that was the equivalent of smile for my kind. To my surprise, Rann seemed to understand the expression\u2014her own lips stretched on her face. Few people on DragonPeak recognized a dragon's smile. Of course, Crema's gesture meant nothing because it wasn't given freely. I was the only dragon that could bestow a true smile, and there wasn't any human worthy of it, Bethy Rann included.\n\nShe laid a hand on Crema's neck. \"Sorry I kept you waiting. The Sisters in Haven must have their due.\" Rann gazed out toward the north. \"We travel to Greater Toth Isle tomorrow to fetch some fat lord with business in Eladrell.\"\n\nThe horned dragon dipped her head obediently, as if this information pleased her. As if she had any choice about where she would fly. Rann pulled a pair of pommice fruits from her pocket and fed them to Crema, whose eyes glowed with satisfaction at the sour treat.\n\nThat was just gross. I had thought only Jona enjoyed those things.\n\nThe fruit made me think of my ryder, how his flesh stunk of the pungent odor of that fruit. The single sample Jona had given to me after becoming my ryder had made my tail curl and my bowels move so fast that the Keepers had forbade him from ever offering pommice fruit to me again.\n\nWhile Crema delighted in her foul treat, Rann took her hand from the smaller dragon and gazed at me. The white of her eyes were polluted by thin lines of hot red, as if upset or angry (it was hard to tell with human eyes). I pretended to be newly fascinated by a wispy cloud passing overhead that resembled a chicken's beak, but Rann didn't relent. The stare she directed at me had force\u2014cold and dark, in stark contrast to the kinder look that she had laid upon her own dragon. I didn't understand why any human would be more pleased by an adolescent horned dragon than a fine specimen of adult prowess like me. Not that I cared about human opinions.\n\nRann wasn't satisfied merely staring at me. She walked toward me, her jaw tight. I had to be a respectful dragon and grant my undivided attention to her, of course, so I tore myself away from the sky, craning my neck down to look at her (which we weren't supposed to do because humans were our masters). Rann's forehead crinkled as her eyes scoured my face as if searching for something.\n\n\"Bayloo, to heel,\" Her command reminded me of a whetstone rubbing a sword. The spikes of my mane stood higher. I hoped she didn't notice.\n\nI forced myself to obey, lowering my neck so that the bottom of my lower jaw rested on the ground, which also put my eyes beneath those of the human who addressed me. The rest of my body pressed against the stone of the Shelf. Even hounds sat upright when called to attention, but dragons weren't even left that dignity.\n\n\"Are you cursed, Bayloo?\" Rann's voice grated as she said it.\n\n\"Cursed, honorable ryder?\"\n\n\"Your ryders fall like leaves at the onset of winter. No other dragon has had so many die. Not even Traxis who has lived your lifetime several times over.\"\n\nOh. That.\n\nIt wouldn't have been proper of me to tell Rann that those deaths weren't my fault. Also, depending on what had happened to Jona, one of them might end up being my fault. I offered stupid slave platitudes in place of truth, hoping that this conversation ended quickly. \"I served as best I am able, master.\"\n\n\"But one human is much the same as another?\" Rann's tone was raw, but slowly heating with anger. Her ignorance stung me. I had forsaken a flight to join my brethren on Veralon so that I might carry Jona back among his kind, to save his life. I'd made a mistake with the ships, but I'd also sacrificed to try to set it right. I wanted to growl the truth to this human. It took all my newfound will to restrain myself.\n\n\"To fail in service hurts us. We wish only to honor our masters.\" I managed to keep my tone respectful, barely. I could grovel only so much.\n\n\"Service,\" Rann spat, her temper seemingly growing hotter. \"Honoring your masters. Is that really all you felt for your ryders, Bayloo?\"\n\nSince my awakening, I'd had several encounters with strange humans, but this was the champion of them all. Did this human, to whom I'd never spoken more than a word or two before this day, somehow suspect of me of being a killer?\n\nMy hearts thundered as I weighed the risks this strange ryder posed to me. A surging current of hot blood ran through up my neck to my head. I ached to speak the truth, to tell her what they called service was slavery. But that moment of satisfaction surely would bring about the end of the real me. I struggled to keep the crimson shade of anger from seeping into my eyes. That could be the end of me. \"What else would you have me do, master?\"\n\nRann's eyes widened. Despite my steady voice, Rann might've noticed the crimson entering my gaze. The fur on top of her eyes (which seems to serve no useful purpose in combating cold, unlike human ear hair) rose up on her face. \"You are angry?\" she asked. \"So am I. You are supposed to keep your ryders alive, Bayloo. But five are dead.\"\n\nMy hearts hit the inside of my chest.\n\n<Five?>\n\nI forgot myself, forgot how a dragon was supposed to speak to a human.\n\n\"Is he dead?\"\n\nRann reacted as if I'd struck her. She took a step back, staring at me through a narrow slit of barely open eyes. Her lips twitched. I thought she was outraged at my tone, at the emotion surging in my eyes, but that wasn't it. Rann was surprised by something else. \"They didn't even tell you.\" Her words contained more bitterness than any pommice fruit. Rann shook her head. \"You killed another of us. Jona is dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "The night tormented me.\n\nThat wasn't very dragonlike. After drinking and eating, sleeping ranked as my favorite activity. But unwelcome images came unbidden into my head whenever I closed my eyes. I stirred restlessly, my hearts feeling like rocks as Jona's fate haunted me.\n\nI'd killed him. Not directly, of course. But my vanity and my carelessness had ended him. One of my first acts as a free dragon had been to get a person killed. How very human of me.\n\nI resented the torment that haunted me. Humans enslaved us. Jona was part of that. I owed him nothing. But the night grew long, and I could not put the troubling sensations aside. Guilt ailed me without causing physical pain. I'd never experienced anything like it before\u2014I'd have preferred straight agony. I knew how to deal with that. This rattling of my mind and body was far more relentless. I hated it.\n\nAs Rann had cruelly pointed out, I had seen the death of four other ryders before Jona. After each, I'd eaten a full dinner and slept soundly. Perhaps that was because my ryders before Jona had been different men\u2014those others were creatures of contempt and fury who thought themselves masters of a mere beast. The more I thought of Jona, of his lopsided grin, of his sour stink, of the fish he had brought me deep in the night, the more the wound inside me festered. I couldn't avenge him because I was his true killer.\n\nRann's anger on the Shelf had been fresh. She must've learned of the death of her fellow ryder just before she'd spoken to me. For some reason she had been particularly upset about Jona's death. I found that strange. No one had been angry after the death of my other ryders. I was responsible for Jona's death, but Bethy Rann couldn't know that. Why was she so upset?\n\nI had seen human warriors weep at the side of their comrades fallen in battle. At such moments, I'd been relieved that my kind didn't have leaky eyes. I suspected Bethy Rann's emotions had been deeper than that though. Were she and Jona mates?\n\nThat might explain Rann's behavior, but I had rarely seen them together. Jona had never mentioned a mate, nor had I ever sensed that he possessed any special regard for Bethy Rann through our link. I wasn't aware of any mated pairs among the ryders, but I also hadn't bothered to pay much attention to such things. Perhaps Jona had been more to Rann than a fallen comrade. If so, it made her even more dangerous to me. She might seek revenge if Jona had been her mate.\n\nI already suspected that Rann had noticed my un-dragonlike reactions to her provocation: my flash of anger and my direct question about Jona's fate. Bethy Rann wasn't just the voice of my guilt, she might also expose what I had become. She was like chicken feathers mixed into a bowl of vegetables\u2014trouble.\n\nOnce Rann realized that I hadn't even been told of my ryder's death, much of her temper had faded. She'd stared off into the sky like some slave dragon. Eventually, she'd been ready to question me further, but Kelum had returned to fetch me before she could resume her interrogation. It had been one of the only times I'd been relieved to see a Keeper. He brought me back to my cave, leaving me with another disappointing meal of chicken bones.\n\nI considered fleeing DragonPeak as I walked down the mountain with Kelum to my cave-prison. Even with my neck wrapped in a collar and chain, I could have broken free. I could have flown off \u2026 to somewhere. Why hadn't I done it?\n\nMy excuse to myself was that my fellow dragon, Cornethius, had been brought to the Shelf by his ryder. He would've come after me almost immediately. Even though I was faster, where would I go? If King Mendakas knew what I was, he'd have all his dragons hunt me. He couldn't risk a freed slave on the loose. One free dragon could lead to others. Mendakas wouldn't risk letting Oster believe such a thing was possible.\n\nIt would've been a risky time to escape anyway, in the daylight, my chain held by a Keeper. I told myself that it was better to wait until I could slip away unnoticed. All that was true. But as I lay in my cave alone with my thoughts, I knew the real reason I stayed: I wasn't quite ready to believe Jona was dead.\n\nMy last thoughts turned to my old ryder before I finally closed my eyes to rest. To whisper an apology. Dragons had no gods. We did not speak to the unseen. We didn't believe in Haven or the Sisters who supposedly dwelled there. Still, I think Jona had believed in some higher power. For his sake, I hoped he had made it to the Haven the humans talked about and was having a fine meal there, including pommice fruit if it suited him.\n\nThe Keepers came for me at first light. For a fleeting moment I dared to hope that Rann had been mistaken, and that Jona would be with the arrivals. He wasn't.\n\nIn place of my ryder, one of my least favorite humans appeared on the ledge outside my cave: Lisaam Payne, the Chief Keeper. He resembled a dry stick given life; his thin lips wrapped around his teeth in a bitter pucker. Payne reeked of decay, and maybe chicken livers. By the look of him, he could've been as old as Traxis, but even the grumpy old dragon was kinder. It was Lisaam Payne who had insisted that dragons be saddled with their heads on the ground and that we lay our necks flat when speaking to humans. He enjoyed being the master, calling us beasts or dragons, but never by our names (and even those were made up by humans). Seeing Payne outside my cave made me unhappy. His companion made me even more so.\n\nBeside the walking collection of flesh covered bones that was Lisaam Payne stood a human boy stretched into the body of man. That human looked as if he had been dressed up by a vain mother to resemble a warrior: A pair of eyes as blue as the clear winter sky dominated an unblemished face framed by golden curled hair, but that was the least of his finery. He wore scaled armor in the style of ryders, but enameled with a tint that matched his pretty eyes. Three rings of gold, each studded with sapphires, cluttered the fingers of the hand nearest to a sword pommel studded with similar gems.\n\n\"Bring him out, Payne.\" There was nothing boyish about the voice, which reeked of the expectation of obedience. I waited for the foul-tempered Payne to rebuke the command, but the old stick merely grimaced as he unlocked the gate to my cave with a golden Keeper's key.\n\nI realized then who had come to visit me, even though I had never before laid eyes on Payne's companion. I had heard the ryders speak of King Mendakas' second son, Dayne\u2014the so-called Sapphire Prince\u2014and never kindly (but always very softly). Indeed, I'd once heard my fellow dragon Lothar's ryder say that the boy's mother had shoved several of the glittering stones up her son's ass to convince everyone that even his crap was precious.\n\n\"Onto the ledge outside, dragon.\" Payne ordered.\n\nI tucked in my wings and obeyed, my tail twitching.\n\nThe prince stood with a rigid back outside my cave, his eyes hungry, his fingers dancing about. The sparkle of the sapphires drew my gaze to the prince's hand. Like everything the boy had, the rings had supposedly been given to him by his mother, Queen Florin. Dayne wore a ring for each of the great islands of Rolm. I heard that Prince Horace, Dayne's old brother by way of the king's first wife, received no gifts from his stepmother. But neither of the royal sons' issues had mattered a lick of a chicken's backside to me before this moment.\n\n\"A great beast,\" Dayne said with his jeweled hand on his chin. \"That beautiful mane sets it apart from the others. Truly a mount fit for royalty. It will serve nicely.\"\n\n<I was an \"it\" to him?> Deep inside me, my hate for this human bubbled hot.\n\nThis prince could've at least learned my gender. I would've enjoyed showing him\u2014this little boy thought three little gems were impressive. He hadn't seen anything yet.\n\n\"Jona was the beast's fifth ryder, my lord. The Sculptors advise that it would be wise to call for a Rite, to let the Sisters of Haven above choose a new ryder to be bonded to him.\"\n\nDayne's lips puckered like a babe given sour milk. \"The Rite is to choose new ryders to train with a hatchling.\"\n\n\"The Rite and the Tell is for all dragon ryders.\" Payne struggled to keep his tone respectful. \"Every ryder must climb to the top of Arrow Peak, out racing all contenders, retrieving a bone of the ancient dragon that lies there, thereby defeating the other, less worthy suitors under the gaze of Haven. Even then, the victor has only completed the Rite of Bonding by surviving the consumption of dragon bone essence. Only in this way are they judged worthy of linking with a dragon, thereby bringing a deadly menace prone to slaughter into service of humanity. The final step is the Tell\u2014the binding pledge of loyalty to Rolm and its monarch.\"\n\nDayne waved his jewels at the Keeper as if he were a pesky fly. \"Spare me your talk and your excuses, Payne. I've been onto your precious Arrow Mountain, where the wind is so hard and cold it blows the skin off a man's bones. I breathed the thin air of the peak without a care. I plucked a bone from that picked over skeleton of the long dead creature that sits on the plateau\u2014part of its leg, I think. The queen's own personal seer, Jaresh, oversaw the preparation of the brew which I drank. There can be no doubt of my loyalty, of course. My Tell is my blood. I've done more than the Rite. Do you now need to hear what I dreamed before I pissed and crapped the essence from my body?\"\n\nPayne's faced became the same shade as snow.\n\nPrince Dayne paid the Keeper no further attention. He looked at me with shining eyes. \"I am chosen. This is my dragon. This was the arrangement.\"\n\nPayne's breath became laden with unease as he shifted his weight between his feet. \"A hatchling, my prince\u2026 the arrangement was for the next hatchling. You were to win the Rite fairly, not make your own\u2026 pilgrimage\u2014\"\n\nDayne cut him off. \"There hasn't been a new hatchling in years. Every one of your expeditions to Veralon that my mother supported has failed. The female dragons are all gone; soon the rest may be as well. Our patience is exhausted. I have the blessing of the Sisters. I survived drinking the dragon bone brew\u2014the foul taste and the stomach pain. I'm as blessed by Haven as any ryder. Even more so, for I'm the blood of the king. What I haven't had is dragon.\" A snake-like tongue slipped out Dayne's mouth and wet his lips. \"But now I do.\"\n\nPayne gazed up at me, then back at the prince. I didn't doubt that he regretted whatever bargain he had made with this arrogant prince and his mother, but the restlessness in his eyes and the speed of heart's beat told me that he also feared something. Not this overdressed, overgrown boy, certainly. More likely his mother, the queen, who was by all accounts as formidable as her husband.\n\n\"It would be unprecedented for someone who has not competed in a Rite to be named a ryder of a dragon, much less an adult creature, an ash dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"You are wrong.\" Dayne nearly shouted. \"It is not without precedent. I know history. During the Hunger Wars, and the conquest of Ulibon, fallen ryders were immediately replaced, carved in camp by the Sculptors. Another war with Oster threatens. They raid our farms, harry our ships. As ever, they seek to steal what belongs to my family. Do not try to evade my point, Lisaam Payne, or you shall regret it.\"\n\nPayne blinked several times, his sour expression betraying unease. \"This is not my decision alone,\" Payne said finally, his voice dropping to a near whisper. \"I will speak to the Seers who advise the king on these matters. I will tell them that\u2026 I believe no Rite is necessary, and there is urgency to linking this dragon. This will leave you as the only person who has survived a Rite \u2026 of some kind \u2026 who is not already linked with a dragon. The rest is up to you and your mother. Are we agreed?\"\n\nThe prince wasn't even listening anymore. He was staring at me, an ugly smile on his face."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "I was cursed.\n\nFive ryders dead. Now, the Sapphire Prince conspired with Lisaam Payne to become my sixth. If he tried, he would likely become the first ryder that I had intentionally murdered.\n\nIt was hard to accept that the Sculptors would bond me to a human fool whose primary attribute was being the current queen's eldest hatchling. He wasn't even the true heir to Rolm under human law\u2014Dayne's stepbrother had that distinction, as he was the older sibling. Alone once again in my cave, my blood boiled hot enough that I expected I could've breathed fire if I'd tried. This royal pup and his mother seemed to have bargained with Lisaam Payne for me, as if I was an oxen to be bought and sold at the market.\n\nI stalked about the tiny confines of my cave snorting and whipping my tail about. No ryder would have been acceptable, but this selection was humiliating. The Rite to choose a new ryder was supposedly ordained by the human gods\u2014the Sisters of Haven. Ryders had to demonstrate uncanny stamina, as well as the ability to perform at high altitudes by scaling the highest peak in Rolm. The winner was considered the elite of the kingdom, but even that wasn't enough. Dragon flesh is deadly to humans if consumed, so digesting the poisonous essence of that poor dead dragon on Arrow Peak supposedly demonstrated the favor of the Sisters of Haven for the winner of the Rite. Apparently, none of that actually mattered. Nothing was sacred to humans\u2014even the things they themselves had declared to be sacred in the first place. How had such a species risen to dominate dragons?\n\nAfter a few turns more in my tiny cave, I settled back down on the ground. I sucked wind in through my throat, struggling to calm myself. Smashing the walls of my cave would just get me discovered and re-enslaved or killed. I comforted myself with the notion that being bonded to one human wouldn't be that different than any other. I would still be me. Or would I?\n\nI didn't fully understand how I had become free. I remembered the day with the broken ale barrel vividly. That was when I realized what had happened to me. But the shackles on my mind had started to unlatch earlier than that. I just hadn't noticed what was happening before the Great Ale Day. Having been awakened, I found it difficult to accept that any new ryder could dominate me. I was no hatchling with soft scales and a weak mind. But I couldn't be sure. It would be better to leave now. I knew with certainty that Jona was dead. There was no reason to remain here, even if I still didn't know where else to go. I would escape at the next opportunity. Unfortunately, the Keepers didn't cooperate with my plan.\n\nAfter the prince left, I was kept in my cave, the gate locked, food pushed through the bars. Each approach of footsteps made me think that the Sculptors had arrived, but each time it was just the Keepers coming to feed me. I distracted myself by looking out at the sky, watching my brothers and sisters fly, soaring on the warm air of the lift-stream, dancing in the clouds. I envied their flight, but not the burdens of the humans on their back or shackles on their mind.\n\nJust before nightfall, I spied a sight I'd not seen in nearly a year: my brother Triton, flying westward, back from the far coast and who knew where else. On his back flew his illustrious ryder, King Mendakas himself, a speck of a hairy human next to the massive bulk of Triton. Indeed, no other dragon equaled the king's mount in size. Triton's head alone was equal to nearly two of mine. His breath was the deadliest of all the dragons, a flame so hot it was tinged white. Some called him the last balefire dragon\u2014drawing on an ancient legend that in the early days of this world, my kind had once breathed a magical fire that could unmake anything it touched, even mountains or the sea itself.\n\nAlongside Triton flew the beautiful and mighty Lothar, his cobalt scales glowing in the fading western sunset. I wondered from where they came. What had been important enough for the king himself to take the flight? Dozens of important islands lay to the east, as well as the enemy kingdom, Oster.\n\nThe king landed at the Fist, rather than DragonPeak. Darkness fell across the now empty sky. The Keepers brought me a disgrace of a meal consisting of poorly plucked raven, which soured my mood further (and my stomach as well). I examined the bars of my cage again. There was no chance of escaping quietly. The starlit sky mocked me, tantalizingly close, but impossible to reach without a Keeper coming to open the cave gate with their metal key.\n\nAs I gazed into the sheet of stars on their black field, another omen appeared, this one ill according to humans and their superstitions. Rima, the so-called Scarred Eye of the Sky, appeared, her dark, pock-marked form illuminated in blue-tinged starlight as she moved rapidly across the sky, outpacing the moon. Unlike the sun and moon, Rima appeared seemingly at random intervals. The human Seers claimed Rima was sent by Wrath, overlord of the Abyss, to watch for souls to bring into his dark domain. Some humans went weak-kneed at the very sight of Rima, crossing their hearts with shaking fingers. I gazed at the object for the first time with free eyes.\n\nI understood how she had gotten her legend\u2014Rima had the shape of a slightly crushed human eye with ugly cracks running all along her surface. One of its ends had a jagged edge which reminded me of a chewed goat bone. I suspected that the human Seers had no more idea what Rima meant than I did, although I had to agree that it looked like something that belonged to the Abyss rather than the sky. Almost as quickly as it appeared, the apparition vanished, as if swallowed by the night. I'd heard many explanations of this strange behavior, but the most sensible one was that the object was often present, but only visible when a certain combination of star and moonlight struck its strange surface.\n\nI didn't sleep. I knew the humans would come in morning, and I was anxious. As it turned out, they didn't even wait that long. In the depths of night, men came. That was a bad sign. The only human who had ever visited me so late had been Jona.\n\nBy their footfalls, I guessed five humans came for me. That was too many to be anything other than what I dreaded. If I had to, I could kill five humans easy enough. One of them would be a Sculptor, but I could think of no reason they wouldn't die like other men if I ripped their heads off.\n\nI didn't get the chance.\n\nThe humans entered my cave one after the other through the smaller Keepers' entrance through which humans but not dragons could enter, bringing their burning torches inside my space. Prince Dayne was not among them, but that brought me no comfort. The first to enter were the same Keepers I'd encountered on Gandquell\u2014Jakobo and his younger companion whose name I still didn't know. Although I disliked Keepers, the pair were the least unwelcome of my visitors.\n\nBehind them strode a pair of Sculptors, their face concealed by masks of enamel. The face coverings were painted to demark their respective ranks in the Order of Sculptors\u2014crimson for the ArchSculptor, ivory for the acolyte. The face covering revealed only their eyes, with tiny slits for their nostrils and mouths. The faces behind the masks must have been hideous indeed if they believed the covering improved their appearances. The acolyte carried an iron box cradled in both hands. That box contained trouble for me. The final entrant to my prison cave was the worst surprise: Aleman Brindisi. Seeing him again was about as welcome as seeing goat bones after they made the long journey through my bowels. The ryder wore an arrogant smirk of satisfaction, but that wasn't what drew my attention\u2014his disgusting human nipples did (yes, male humans have nipples). The man was bare chested, his front side emblazoned with rune-scars of a ryder. Why was he here, bare and ugly? Why was Brindisi here rather than Dayne?\n\nMy stomach suddenly felt as if I'd eaten stones for dinner rather than chicken bones. I'd made a fool's mistake. Prince Dayne had been out maneuvered.\n\nBrindisi's face split into a hungry smile as he gazed at me. \"He shall do nicely.\" Brindisi rubbed his chest, as if his calloused palms should rub away the runes on his chest. \"He is a third of Traxis' age. Strong, fit. I shall have him.\"\n\nMy stomach churned unhappily.\n\n<Did Brindisi truly intend to become my ryder?>\n\nMy first instinct was idiotic outrage that Brindisi would abandon Traxis. Disgust surged through me. Yes, the great dragon was old, but he had carried Brindisi to victory in countless battles. My elder dragon-brother was owed more than such treatment. But those were the residual thoughts of a slave dragon. Did it really matter who rode Traxis? My great brother's mind was trapped and addled by the control-runes. He wouldn't care.\n\nMy next thought was about my own situation.\n\nPrince Dayne repulsed me with his arrogant ignorance. All his talk of deserving a dragon, as if I was another ring for his fingers, made my scales shake. But I had been arrogant as well. I had been outraged at being presented with an unworthy ryder like Dayne. I'd had chicken feathers in my head. Dayne was a fool, but his inexperience and pretensions would've made him easy to manipulate. Brindisi was an altogether different matter. He'd been bonded to Traxis for decades; he knew dragons, and he was a warrior born and bred. The man had killed more humans that I had.\n\n<Goat guts. I should have taken my chances flying from the Shelf yesterday.>\n\nTen human eyes stared at me in the blank, colorless manner of humans. Brindisi spoke first, his voice harsh. \"Let us be quick about it, Sculptor. Time grows short. It would be best to have this over with before the boy-prince awakens and cries to his mother.\"\n\nJakobo frowned like Brindisi had stolen his dinner. \"You go too far in mocking Prince Dayne.\"\n\nThe warrior snorted. \"You have nothing to fear from the pretty Prince of Sapphires. He'll whine but do little else.\"\n\nJakobo's unhappy expression didn't change. \"His mother is formidable.\" In a softer voice, he added, \"And vengeful.\"\n\n\"Do not fear the woman,\" Brindisi assured the Keeper. \"This is the king's wish, as I have told you. I spoke to him as soon as he returned this evening. He is not blind to his second son's limits. He still favors Horace as heir despite the older boy's mishap. What he has seen in Dayne troubles him more than an angry wife. War with Oster is once again upon us, and we cannot afford to waste a dragon with a hapless ryder.\"\n\nThe young Keeper's eyes had become steadily wider as the others spoke. \"We are to take the blame for defying the queen?\"\n\nBrindisi shrugged with a carelessness that seemed to surprise the other humans. \"Her ire will fall upon me. She will suspect I acted at the king's orders, but that is my burden. Tonight, we solve two of King Mendakas' problems: We keep his dragons in fighting conditions for the coming war with Oster, and we keep him from having to endure the full might of his wife's outrage.\"\n\n\"The latter is a noble undertaking indeed.\" Jakobo's lips twisted down further. \"But will he protect us from Queen Florin's wrath?\"\n\nBrindisi growled with impatience. \"You have worked with these great beasts all your life. You know them, you know those who ride them. Every ryder is chosen under the gaze of Haven, each of us the legitimate champion of a Rite. Would you see some boy who was carried to the top of the highest peak by his mother's minions and drank some soup laden with chicken bones become a ryder of a dragon?\"\n\nBoth Keepers bobbed their head in agreement at this. Jakobo spoke for both of them. \"The boy is unworthy.\"\n\nIt seemed as though the humans had convinced themselves they served a higher purpose in depth of the night. I wondered if Brindisi would have been so anxious to be righteous if he hadn't been hungry for a new dragon to ride.\n\nI kept my jaw clenched, but my eyes clear. These humans would notice if I behaved oddly.\n\nBrindisi walked closer to me. \"Then let us begin. Otherwise, this morning might well end with the little Prince of Sapphires falling off a dragon.\"\n\n\"Who shall become ryder to Traxis?\" Jakobo asked. I wanted to know that as well.\n\nBrindisi shook his head, full of regret, as if he cared about the dragon's fate. \"Traxis weakens. His sight fails him, his wings are unsteady. He tries to hide it, but I can feel it through our link.\" He gazed down as his chest with a dour grimace. \"Traxis is still remarkably strong, but even that will fade. He has perhaps a year or two before he needs be put down, maybe less. Let one of the horned dragon ryders claim him if they wish, but I must have one of the greater dragons, and there are no others but Bayloo.\"\n\n\"Might we offer Traxis to Prince Dayne?\" suggested the younger Keeper.\n\nJakobo looked upon his fellow Keeper with outrage, but it was Brindisi who answered. \"The prince wouldn't take him. Dayne knows Traxis' time grows short. Once linked to an ash dragon, it is rare for a ryder to have another chance to claim a different dragon. Then there is the matter of the boy's pride, and that of his mother. They feast on grievances and do not accept scraps.\"\n\nIt pained me to hear Traxis' ryder speak of him so. Was it even true? Traxis didn't exactly confide in me, and he was indeed old. But there was no doubting his strength. I chose to think that Brindisi underestimated my brother.\n\n\"Enough talk,\" Brindisi said. \"Sculptor, it is time to do what you must.\"\n\nThe man in the crimson mask walked the length of my body. He wore a toga that matched his mask along with black gloves on his hands that together concealed almost all of his form. He moved slowly; his breathing labored. When the Sculptor finally spoke, his voice reminded me of the crackling of a fire. \"All must leave, save Brindisi.\"\n\nJakobo frowned but didn't argue. The Sculptors permitted none to witness their work. Obediently, the two Keepers departed, locking the gate of my cage behind them.\n\nThe Sculptor listened to their departing footsteps before turning back to me. There was something dreadful in the man's voice. \"Bayloo, hear my words and obey: Roll onto your side, so that the runes of power face toward Brindisi and I.\"\n\nThe force of the Sculptors command hit me like a great fist inside my head. A chill ran through my bones. I wasn't sure if I could have resisted the order, and I didn't try. Even if I could have killed these humans, the gate of the cave was closed and locked. I couldn't get out of here. This travesty was going to happen. I would be forced to match my mind against Brindisi. Not having any other choice, I assumed the instructed position, turning awkwardly on the stone floor of my cave, those hideous circles and slashes carved into the scales of my chest protruding as if I was proud of them.\n\n\"Head down, shut your eyes,\" the Sculptor commanded. \"You are not to open your eyes until I expressly allow it.\"\n\nNot even dragons were permitted to witness the carving. Hatchlings had hoods placed over their heads, but for already carved slave dragons, that wasn't necessary. Or, that's what the Sculptors believed.\n\nI lowered my snout to the floor as I'd been commanded, relieved that my shut eyes concealed the black hate that filled them. The Sculptors were the true slavers of my race. They alone held the power of the control-runes. These were the enemy that I had to kill.\n\n\"You must wear this as well, Brindisi,\" the ArchSculptor said. Even without looking I knew he handed the ryder a blindfold. The Sculptors were so jealous of their secrets, it made me increasingly curious. Was their power to delicate that a bit of forbidden knowledge could threaten them?\n\n\"Really, Sculptor?\" Brindisi huffed mockingly. \"You think I don't know what you do? I know of the Flux; I know of your carvings.\"\n\nThe Sculptors both hissed like angry serpents in a choir. \"Hold your tongue,\" said the senior. His chest, with its single heart, thumped hard enough that I could hear it. \"You follow the rules or there shall be no carving this night.\"\n\n\"As you say, Sculptor,\" Brindisi said, a hint of mockery in his tone, as he placed the black cloth over his eyes.\n\nThere was a satisfied grunt from the Sculptor. \"We begin with you, Brindisi. Are you ready?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nA scoff of skepticism followed Brindisi's assurance. \"It is rare to break the link between a living dragon and ryder. Only after a ryder's death is a dragon re-bonded. Here we must break the bond, and it is strong. There shall be pain.\" The Sculptor said the last with relish.\n\n\"I do not fear your cuts.\"\n\n\"Ah, but worse than pain shall be the emptiness you shall feel,\" the Sculptor promised. \"Your mind dominated another for decades. It will feel like losing an arm. Even more, it shall be like losing a part of yourself, at least until the new bond is formed.\"\n\n\"Enough with your talk. Move your hands not your mouth.\"\n\nThe Sculptor blew an annoyed breath through his mask. \"Get on your knees, Brindisi.\"\n\nI heard him comply. The sounds also told me the Sculptors focused their attention on Brindisi rather than me. I cracked open a slit of my left eye, an opening so narrow that I doubted a human would realize I could take in all the sight I needed through the gap. I watched what no other dragon had ever seen.\n\nThe Sculptor removed his gloves, revealing a pair of burnt, scaly hands that resembled the flesh of a molting lizard, but for the black inked runes painted onto them. He motioned for his acolyte to approach. Using a key concealed on a chain around his neck, the ArchSculptor unlocked the metal box held by this assistant. From it the Sculptor first withdrew a stylus of carved bone inlaid with enchanted golden runes. Its gleaming tip pulsed, as if a heart pumped within the bone shaft. The Sculptor examined his instrument in the torchlight, a faint exhale of pleasure escaping his lips.\n\n\"Bring forth the Flux.\"\n\nThe acolyte reached inside the box and withdrew a small device, forged of gold and covered with strange writings. It resembled an ink pot, similar those that I'd seen the Keepers use when recording their supply tallies. The ArchSculptor flicked his thumb to open its top and dipped the stylus into the container. When he withdrew it, the pulsing bone tip had disappeared, replaced by a void of black. The Flux went back into the golden box, and the acolyte backed away.\n\nThe Sculptor studied the great rune carved into the center of Brindisi's chest as he whispered unintelligible sounds that could've been mistaken for the wind's howl. He touched the stylus to Brindisi's chest. A spark flew into the air, as if he'd struck flint rather than flesh. Brindisi's jaw bulged, but he kept his teeth locked together. More sparks flashed as the Sculptor traced the pattern of the existing rune. Brindisi's body trembled, but still he made no sound. When the Sculptor finished his work, Brindisi's chest was an angry slate of red flesh. The rune that had been there had been erased but for a single remaining symbol near the center.\n\nThis was something I had not thought possible. Ryders sometimes died, and dragons were re-bonded, but that was usually to a new ryder who had won a Rite, not to an existing ryder. In the rare case where a ryder outlived his dragon (humans being rather fragile creatures), that ryder usually left DragonPeak. Only during the great wars with Ulibon or Oster had there been an opportunity for a dragonless ryder to be re-bonded to an available dragon. As a slave, I'd never given any thought to the process of how a ryder was joined to a new dragon. Only the Sculptors knew those secrets. I was so enthralled with what I had witnessed that I didn't anticipate that the Sculptor would turn his attention to me.\n\nThe masked figured moved with surprising alacrity, shifting his gaze from Brindisi's chest to mine. I clamped my eye shut again, my hearts surging in my chest. If humans could hear like dragons, I'd have been discovered, but those useless skin-wings protruding from their skulls were so clogged with hair and wax, they barely functioned.\n\n\"Bayloo, you are to keep absolutely still,\" he commanded, his harsh whisper echoing like a piercing roar inside me.\n\nUp until that moment, I'd believed I was a free being, that the chains that held me were broken forever. But, as I lay there at the mercy of this masked human, I realized a terrible truth: My mind was free, but the power of the runes that once bound me had not been destroyed. My prison could be re-forged, and this man had the power to do it.\n\nMy blood turned so cold I might have been frozen. I wasn't entirely sure if it was due to fear or some power that the Sculptor possessed. He wasn't linked to me, but when he spoke, I could feel his will inside of me as I could with a ryder. Even with my eyes shut, I could sense his motions and feel the heat of his flesh.\n\nThe Sculptor brought his grim instrument so close to my chest I thought he intended to press it to the runes on my body as he had with Brindisi, but he stopped a finger's length from touching me. Instead, he waved the stylus over the symbols in a series of circles that I think mimicked the inscriptions carved into me. While he worked, he whispered; his voice was so low no human could've heard him, but I did. The words were not from a language I knew, but they fit together, nonetheless, like pieces of a child's puzzle; the sound of each word resembled the initial sound of the next, the tones rising, falling and repeating in a pattern, like some terrible song conjured from the darkness of the Abyss. The carvings on my chest heated, with the crossed claws at center, so hot they felt like fire. The beats of my hearts became erratic, leaving me dizzy. For a brief, fleeting moment, I glimpsed at something indescribable\u2014another reality beneath this one, a deeper world of brilliant, interlocking patterns of light. It was as if all of the cave, all of the humans, and even I, were weavings within a great quilt which had been sewn together with a pulsing thread that linked all of existence together. It was grand, it was perfect. Then it was gone.\n\nThe Sculptor had turned away from me.\n\nTo be free of that human's attention was equal to the relief of passing a jagged dagger through my bowels (that had only happened once, but that was plenty). The chilling song still echoed in my head. As awful as the Sculptor's magic had felt, I was elated: I was still me. Whatever he had done, I had survived. So far.\n\nI dared to crack open an eye once again. The Sculptor's back was toward me.\n\n\"Bring it,\" he said to acolyte.\n\nAgain, the Sculptor withdrew the ink pot\u2014the Flux\u2014as Brindisi had called it, coating the bone stylus in its impenetrable blackness. Once he was satisfied with the tip of his instrument, the Sculptor started carving Brindisi's flesh.\n\nFlashes of light ignited each time the stylus contacted skin. I've heard the toughest of ryders hollering in pain as they were joined to their dragons, their cries so piercing that other men cringed. Jona had cried out too. But not Brindisi. Though it all, his jaw remained hard, even as sweat dripped down his forehead. Still, I knew Brindisi was in agony, and this pleased me. Until I felt the link.\n\nIf my mind was a cave, having a new ryder bonded to me was like a tunnel being dug through the walls. It started as an itching vibration, a premonition of dread before turning to something more tangible; a steady drumbeat of pain followed, growing until the sensation became akin to having the shrill cry of an angry seagull squawking in my ear. The physical discomfort ended only when the mental passage was complete, and a tunnel had been carved into my mind. Brindisi was on the other side of the new link that had been formed by the Sculptor. But it wasn't the same as my previous link. The bridge to me had been formed, but my own runes no longer enslaved my mind. For now, I hid my strength from my new ryder.\n\n\"It is done.\" The Sculptor pronounced, pleased with himself. He returned the stylus to its container, holding the lid closed until the lock clicked. The acolyte scurried away, his purpose complete.\n\nBrindisi unleashed a howl of satisfaction as he opened his eyes, the sound more wolf than human. A shiver ran through me, although it wasn't the noise that shook me. Rather his utter delight in having a new dragon to control surged through the link between us and through to me. <Such power!> I fought to keep myself from spreading my wings in a triumphant celebration that matched Brindisi's own delirious satisfaction.\n\n\"Rise, dragon.\" My new ryder's voice echoed through my cave and in my head. The power of that command\u2014and the steely will behind it\u2014struck me harder than a ballista's arc bolt. I'd become accustomed to Jona, whose desires were motivated by reason rather than force. This human before me was not him.\n\nBefore this moment, I had never feared any of my ryders. Perhaps as a hatchling taken from his mother, I had been scared of Hadrigal at first, but I didn't recall that. Now, with my mind clear and free, I experienced true fear of the man to whom I was joined. The beats of my twin hearts rang in my head. In my precious days of freedom, I'd come to believe that Jona could not command me. I'd believed that being self-aware and resisting his will meant I was free forever. That was foolishness on my part. Brindisi showed me otherwise.\n\nNot even the terrifying force of the Sculptor's commands matched the will of this human. Brindisi's desires leaked through from his side of the link that bound us like water through a sieve. Through the magical bond, he showed me his thirst for blood, his hunger for power. There was no bend in this human. He did not desire friendship or a partner. He only wanted obedience. I was an animal, his to command. I wondered what he could sense from me, and it added to my fear.\n\nBrindisi's eyes bored into me. As tiny as he was, he had a dragon's stare. He ordered me to move. I did, rolling onto my feet while telling myself it was my choice, part of my deception, not because I had to obey. Yet a chilling voice inside me wondered if a slave who thought he obeyed freely was any less a slave.\n\n\"Keepers, open this gate.\"\n\nFootsteps answered Brindisi's call. Jakobo put his key into the lock and my prison door opened.\n\nBrindisi was anxious to play with his new pet. \"Outside, Bayloo.\"\n\nMy ryder led me in the open air, through the gate to see the distant horizon just as the dawn came. I met my new master meekly. Brindisi's chin rose and fell in satisfaction as he examined me in the light of the new day, much as a cook might admire a newly slaughtered lamb before roasting.\n\n\"He may not be as large as Traxis, but I sense his vigor, his youth.\" The manacles of will tightened about me, and I dreaded that I might disappear in that moment. Mercifully, Jakobo spoke, and the intensity of my ryder's hold on me lessened.\n\n\"His is a fine beast. Agile in the air. He is among the cleverest of his kind.\"\n\nBrindisi nodded. \"If only he could breathe fire, he would be even more formidable.\"\n\nIf I hadn't hated my new ryder before that moment, I did after his words. Always with the fire thing. Why not bind me with chains and piss in my eye?\n\nJakobo shrugged without concern. \"His first ryder may have damaged him in some way, or perhaps his affliction is somehow related to scarcity of new dragons. His defect may have been a sign of what would come. Bayloo was the last great ash dragon recovered. All the beasts that were to follow him were smaller and weaker. The dragons dwindle, and times grow desperate.\"\n\nAnnoyance surged through Brindisi, but it wasn't directed at me. \"That is your concern, Keeper. Make no excuses for your own failings. I'm here to win the king's battles.\"\n\n\"To do that, we need dragons.\"\n\n\"What would you have me do, Keeper?\" Brindisi's shadow loomed over Jakobo. \"Must I go to Veralon and sire a new clutch of beasts?\"\n\nI was careful not to snort, but I would've traded a barrel of ale to see Brindisi give that a try.\n\nThe Keeper's lips twitched with a retort, but he held his tongue in check. Instead, he forced his version of a human smile onto his face. It made Jakobo's face look like a cracked tree branch. \"We are not yet facing such a need, I hope. But coins are needed, another expedition to Veralon to explore\u2014\"\n\nBrindisi waved him away. \"Bring your petitions to the king.\"\n\n\"But you have his ear, as we all know. After this, he should owe you a favor.\"\n\nThe warrior showed his teeth. \"Careful, old man. Careful. The king owes no one.\" He turned his back on the keeper, focusing again on only me. The strength of his will surged through the runes inscribed on my body. If I could've spit fire, I would've sprayed it upon my breast, where the hideous runes were inscribed. \"A fine, powerful, beast.\"\n\nI spread my wings, perhaps because I wished it, perhaps because Brindisi did. The sky had brightened as the humans spoke. Soon, it became a welcoming shade of blue, the horizon clear. My thoughts turned to escape: I could fly away from this place \u2026 or could I? Something held me in place. Brindisi's will was not only a means of control\u2014it was a tether. He did not want me gone, so I could not go. I considered fighting, to make my struggle at that moment, but I hesitated. I might not break free. And if I flew, other ryders on dragons would pursue me. I doubted myself.\n\n\"A saddle!\" Brindisi voice echoed up the peak. \"Keepers! Haul your lazy bottoms from your bed and bring me a saddle.\"\n\nAs Brindisi shouted, the dark presence of the Sculptor emerged from my cave. \"The runes are complete, but you should let the link flow for a time before you fly, Brindisi.\" His voice was no less terrible without the echo of the cave. \"Let your new carving have a night to heal before you press fabric or metal onto yourself.\"\n\nBrindisi waved the words away as he waited impatiently for a Keeper to come to fix me with a saddle. His chest throbbed, and even with the chill of the heights Brindisi paid the wind and temperature no mind.\n\nThe Sculptor and his acolyte said no more. They melted away down a narrow pathway, their locked chest clutched tightly. As the Sculptors departed, Kelum appeared with a dragon saddle. Brindisi sucked in the wind with ugly zeal.\n\n<He intends to ride me now.>\n\n\"Bayloo, to heel.\"\n\nThe words traveled through me like someone rang a bell inside beside my head, the command shaking me. I couldn't lie to myself this time. I had no choice. Or perhaps I was a coward. I lay flat on the ground.\n\nThe Keeper strapped the giant saddle onto me with deft hands. My new ryder climbed onto my back.\n\nWhen Brindisi ordered it, I flew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Prince Dayne raged.\n\nNo one had to tell him Brindisi had become my ryder rather than him. He saw it in the sky above his royal suite when he awoke. Brindisi made sure of that. He had me do a circuit of the tower, not once, but three times that first morning until the outline of a curly haired figure appeared behind a window of stained glass. Dayne's mouth dropped as he watched, the realization of what had happened coming slowly and painfully. Finally, the prince released the piercing cry of a spoiled (human) toddler. Only then did Brindisi order me to fly eastward.\n\n\"Better he finds out this way,\" Brindisi said, more to himself than me. \"We likely saved a servant's head. Prince Dayne must learn that the greatest prizes must be won in battle. They cannot be stolen.\"\n\nI hated my new ryder, but he had a passion to fly. He knew the winds as well as any human, he kept a tight seat, and he feared nothing. His business with Prince Dayne concluded, we set off over the skies of Rolm. I flew past the rising air of the lift-stream, making a course along the length of the island of Harcourt all the way to Arrow Peak in the west, then back again. Brindisi wanted to test my speed and I showed it to him. He laughed with mad delight as I soared along the underside of the clouds, then plunged downward like a falcon seeking prey. At one point, we flew so close to the water of the Thunder Straits that a cresting wave splashed onto my belly. The wind gusted at my back, propelling us to greater speeds. In the moment, I forgot anything except the glory of flight and the song of the wind until it was time to head back to DragonPeak, to my cave with the locked gate. The door shut, reminding me that I was a slave again.\n\nOr at least it felt that way. For the next few days, I flew when Brindisi climbed on my back; I went where he directed me. Every moment I was out of my cave, he was with me, his will holding me. To assuage myself, I snuck the occasional glance in the direction of Veralon whenever I could, but that was all. I ate, I obeyed. At night, when I might have at least made the effort to shatter the bars of my cave, I did nothing but stare. I told myself I was merely biding my time, waiting for the right opportunity, but I was really waiting for someone to come to tell me what to do. I still had a slave's mentality. My greatest fear, the one that inevitably found me in the depth of the nights, was that I might be losing myself.\n\nThe more time I spent obeying Brindisi, the more I became accustomed to his commands. Each day, my own thoughts became more addled. A fog marshalled at the edge of my consciousness and I struggled to hold it at bay. I wondered how long I could keep up this fight or if I would even know when it was too late for me. It was like no other battle I had ever fought; instead of facing an enemy of flesh and blood, it was my own mind that threatened me. Or perhaps it was just my imagination.\n\nI both dreaded and anticipated each morning when Brindisi came. The dread was easy to understand because Brindisi was a terrifying human. Through the link between us leaked an inkling of the man who was now my ryder. He had a singular focus, which he pursued without fear or doubt. At the moment, he desired to make me an extension of himself, a weapon to be used against his enemies. I should've cringed at this, raged against it, but it was not that simple. My mind may have somehow pried itself free of the rune-prison, but Brindisi had shown me that my liberation remained incomplete. When he was on my back, his focus was my own. His direction flowed to my mind. I turned, I dove, and I wanted to impress him. I had no worries, no cares. I merely did as I was bid. I should've been more ashamed of the comfort I took from that feeling.\n\nFor three days and nights, Brindisi was my constant companion (mercifully, he'd resumed wearing his dark scale armor over his chest runes after that first, horrible bare skin morning). Sometimes, in the evening, when I was free from the intensity of Brindisi's will, I vainly listened for any sign of Jona, even though I knew he was dead. During the long nights, I wondered if he had truly died of his injuries or if Brindisi had killed him so that he might claim me. I kept a wary eye out for Bethy Rann or her horned dragon Crema, but the smaller dragons were kept lower on the peak, and Brindisi kept me flying about for much of the daylight hours.\n\nOn the fourth night following that dark evening when Brindisi claimed me, footsteps approached in darkness. A single man climbing from below. I knew it wasn't Jona\u2014even if he were alive, the cadence of his steps was different. This man climbed along the narrow, rocky paths of DragonPeak with caution or even fear. The figure appeared at my gate was none other than Prince Dayne.\n\nHe wore no finery on this visit, no rings or enameled mail, just a simple tunic. He carried a lantern in one hand. By its flickering light, I saw that the prince's lips were turned down and a crease ran across his forehead.\n\n\"Come here, so that I can see you, dragon.\"\n\nI snorted my displeasure. It was an indulgence to show defiance, but this boy knew too little of my kind to suspect such disrespect. I pulled myself over to the gate, moving sluggishly. Let the little prince wait for me.\n\nWhen I had come close enough for Dayne's satisfaction, he spoke through the bars. \"I came here to make a promise.\" He looked at me expectantly. I stared back, doing my best to seem as vacant of thought as this young human. His frown deepened. \"Do you wish to know what that promise is?\"\n\nThe little human didn't speak Avian very well, so I deliberately answered him in that language, even though I can also speak the common tongue of Rolm better than any other dragon. \"If that is your desire, Master.\" I snorted again as I spoke the human honorific.\n\nI didn't know if Dayne understood me. He just assumed I'd said whatever he wanted, I supposed. I imagine he'd done a lot of that in his life. \"You were stolen from me. No one steals from me. I have sacrificed to claim you. So, the promise I make now, under Haven and before you as well, is that you shall be mine one day, dragon. <Mine.> Together, we shall be a force in the sky like this kingdom has never seen. When I rule Rolm, it shall be I who choose the ryders, and we shall win conquests the likes of which neither my brother nor even my father ever dreamed.\"\n\nI thought it more likely the chickens would become the new occupants of DragonPeak. Still, I moved my head ever so slightly downward, as if acknowledging the gravity of the prince's promise. I was tempted to release the gas in my bowels at that solemn moment while the prince's pledge hung in the air, but that would've been a waste of some fine flatulence, as well as a unique opportunity. I needed to escape from this place. I had no allies or friends or even confidants in Eladrell. But I had a mind, and I needed to start using it. My plan required a fool, and he had delivered himself to me.\n\nI flashed my eyes at Dayne. I can't do sapphire, but I managed my darkest shade of amber. I put on a display of my finest Rolman speech. \"Destiny.\"\n\nDayne's eyes bulged as a malevolent grin split his face. \"Aye, destiny. You feel it too, dragon. Excellent.\" He looked about suddenly with suspicion, as if worried about the unexpected success of his late-night jaunt. \"Tell no one of this. Tell no one.\"\n\nI wondered how a slave dragon would respond to a command from one human to lie to another. A dragon couldn't lie to its ryder, but I wasn't sure about the rest. For me, lying was easy. I bestowed my version of a human nod, flashing my eyes, as if I understood.\n\nThe prince left me, still wearing his wicked grin. I had no idea what he planned, but I had little doubt that it would not be pleasing to Brindisi, and that could only help me. I slept soon afterwards, believing that I'd finally hit upon the first stirrings of plan to free myself from my new ryder. My satisfaction lasted only until the morning.\n\nBrindisi arrived at first light, as was his custom, but I knew immediately something was different. Usually, he carried my saddle with him and wore armor only over his chest. On this morning, metal scales covered all of his body, while his quiver bulged with fletched arrows. At first, I feared he had somehow learned of my scheming with the silly prince, but when the Keepers arrived with additional supplies, I knew this had nothing to do with Dayne. The humans filled the saddle's flaps with skins of water, dried meat and fruit (but no ale). Brindisi wore a look that seemed both grim and pleased, his jaw pulsing, his eyes alight with an excited glint.\n\n\"We journey to Maricopa with haste, Bayloo. You know the way, I trust?\"\n\nIt was the first time he'd asked me a question, even a condescending one. I answered through our link, wary. \"I know Maricopa.\"\n\n\"We had a message arrive by white pigeon last night. It was from one of our ships, reporting an attack near there. Raiders, it seems.\"\n\nI almost asked why anyone would bother with Maricopa, but, of course, I couldn't do that. I wasn't supposed to be curious. Still, something about the information bothered me. Maricopa was a puny island. Indeed, it was little more than a broken mountain shell, its only settlement a tiny fishing village that existed in the peak's shadow. I knew the place only because it had once been part of Ulibon, and I'd helped to conquer it. None of the island's few inhabitants had fought; they seemed to barely even know they were part of Ulibon, so joining Rolm didn't matter. Before the Highstar had claimed their land, the island had been too remote, inaccessible, and poor to bother with. Its inhabitants were fishermen, and not very prosperous ones. They might have a bit of food tucked away, but not enough to even fill the hold of a ship. It wasn't worth any raider's effort. I didn't share any of this information. I just played my part as a dutiful slave, speaking the kind of words my ryder wished to hear. \"The wind favors speed. We can be there before the sun reaches the lowest cloud on the horizon.\"\n\nBrindisi also doubted that raiders were responsible. \"Oster must be desperate after their recent losses to choose such a remote island. But all of Rolm is ours to protect. If it was them, we shall make them pay for their mistake.\" Brindisi said it aloud, with relish, as if I'd be impressed. He sounded idiotic, even for a human. Humans really should learn how to muster a decent roar.\n\nTogether we flew off toward Maricopa. The island lay to the southeast, an outlying hunk of rock well off any major sea lane. My route took me south, across Harcourt, over its rich pastures of cows and sheep, then to the coast. Below, fishermen climbed into their boats to risk their lives trying to harvest the bounty of the Saltstorm Channel between Ulibon and Harcourt. I flew west over the sea, passing close enough that my eyes could peer south and see the Twisted Keep of Ulibon, once the seat of the Highstar. Karthus and I had survived that battle, but many had not. Once I left Ulibon in my wake, there was only sea to the horizon. I glided with the wind for a time, soaring and drifting downward again according to whim. Brindisi paid my flight path no mind. His eyes were fixed on the water below, ever vigilant for signs of his prey.\n\nEven with the gusts at my back, the afternoon had passed by the time the island of Maricopa finally came into view. I dropped closer to water to ensure I would spot any fleeing ship, but I saw nothing on the sea that had been created by the hands of men. Instead, my eyes fixed upon the familiar shape of an armored dorsal fin breaking the surface.\n\nI dutifully reported the sighting like a good dragon. \"Leviathan below. Headed toward the Saltstorm Channel.\"\n\n\"Not our concern. Find the Osterans.\" Brindisi's tone told me that he cared even less about humans than I did. The leviathan would destroy any fishing boat it came across and kill its crew. The creatures surfaced only when they attacked or for air. By letting this opportunity pass, we were essentially condemning some hapless fisherman to death. Such was the way of the world. I beat my wings, leaving the giant beast to its hunt while I focused on my own.\n\nMaricopa came upon us soon afterward. It was just as I remembered it: rock with some more rock piled on top. A cluster of three peaks congregated on the north side of the island, as if one had sprouted from the other, but only one was worth mentioning: The Kraken. The great mountain soared so high it almost reached the clouds, its far slope covered with koa trees while the opposite side, and most of the rest of the island, was scrub and bare rock. But what made the Kraken truly unlike any other peak I'd known was its inside: the mountain had partially collapsed onto itself far in the distant past, allowing a lake of clear, fresh water to form inside. I'd drank from the lake when last I'd visited, as it was the only source of freshwater on the island except for the erratic rains. I had heard it said by some of the ryders that the mountain had once been an inferno peak, much like those that made up the Wall of Fire, but its heat had fled, and the rains that had once fallen with regularity around Rolm had filled its belly with water instead.\n\nI made a slow circuit of the island, flying at height almost equal to the summit of the Kraken. The shores of Maricopa were a treacherous maze of jagged rocks and deadly shoals waiting just beneath the shallow waters, which was another reason no humans bothered with this place. The island had no resources, no arable land, and was near nothing; there was only a single navigable harbor on the eastern side. The island's primary settlement was clustered there, clinging to a narrow patch of land large enough for a few simple dwellings made of hacked koa wood mixed with mud. As I flew toward the village, even Brindisi's inadequate eyes could spot the smoke rising from the ground.\n\nHe wasn't sentimental. \"The raiders have already done their work\u2014the village burns. Yet I see no ships in the harbor. Let us search the seas before they escape.\"\n\nI brought us lower, searching the waves for signs of the Osteran raiders. It didn't take long before I was confident that no ship sailed on the waters nearby. I made several slow circles, moving a bit closer to the water each time for Brindisi's benefit. It was on the last of these circuits that I spotted the debris. I tilted my wings to change course so that we could investigate further. I had destroyed enough ships to know pretty well what the remains of a decimated vessel looked like upon the water\u2014this flotsam had once been a ship. Scattered scraps of wood bobbed with the waves. I spotted a broken mast and the scraps of a sail. And, of course, bodies.\n\n\"Bring us as close as you can, Bayloo.\"\n\nI obliged, angling myself into position opposite the westerly wind, which allowed me to almost hover, seemingly frozen above the most concentrated collection of wreckage.\n\n\"This looks more like the work of a dragon than an engagement between ships,\" Brindisi muttered.\n\nHe was right, except there was no sign of fire. But a clash of human warships wouldn't have resulted in this type of destruction. The hull was a splintered mess. There was another explanation though. \"A leviathan could have done this.\"\n\n\"A leviathan wouldn't have left bodies.\"\n\nIndeed, it wouldn't have. Leviathans didn't waste food. I didn't have an answer for that.\n\n\"Pluck a body out of the water and take it with us to Maricopa.\"\n\nI grabbed a human from the sea with my foreclaws, carrying the bloated mess with me back to the smoking village on Maricopa's shore. I set down on a narrow slice of rock beside the sea. The fishing boats that had once moored nearby had been burned. Most of the simple structures in the village had been toppled or torn apart. Bodies were strewn across the landscape, many with arrows sticking from their flesh. The place stunk of the dead, the slaughter, and the sea in equal measure. But there was something else as well. I sniffed at the air, trying to glean the scent.\n\nBrindisi interrupted me. He slid from my back toward the corpse I'd dropped on the shore. \"Let us attend to this man first.\"\n\nHe bent over the decaying man. Seawater did nothing to make humans more appealing. This one was an ugly mess. Brindisi searched the dead man's clothing and pulled out some metal coins from the corpse's pocket. He stared at them only briefly before tossing them back onto the ground.\n\n\"Coins of Rolm. He was a man of the kingdom. That was the king's ship they sank.\" He ground his jaw. Brindisi might not care about the men themselves, but he was angered by the loss of Mendakas' ship. One less boat to sail to Oster.\n\nBrindisi conducted a hasty reconnoiter of the rest of the paltry village, moving from hovel to hovel with a scowl on his face. He glanced at the bodies and wrecked structures and little else. \"Why would anyone want to live in this place?\" he wondered.\n\nI watched from just beside the water, trying to decide if I should care about any of this. I didn't know any of these humans and they didn't know me. If the raiders escaped, perhaps it made war with Oster less likely.\n\nBrindisi moved from corpse to corpse. \"There are only a dozen bodies, but dwellings enough for three times that number to live here. Something is missing.\"\n\nHe kept searching, examining the soil, looking at prints in the dirt, his scowl deepening as he moved. Brindisi's demeanor changed when he reached the settlement's largest structure. Unlike the other buildings, its walls were dark, basalt rock pulled from the great mountain, while its scorched roof was supported by the bones of a long dead leviathan. He stopped, staring at what he found inside: food. There were other supplies as well. Brindisi hacked open three storage barrels with his long sword, revealing stores of smoked fish, salted goat meat, and even a bit of grain. Two barrels were filled with stinky pommice fruit\u2014some of it dried. Naturally, there was no ale. This island was desperately uncivilized.\n\n\"They didn't take the food.\" Brindisi said unnecessarily because I also had eyes. \"Nor did they bother to burn it.\"\n\nJust because I didn't care that much about any of this, didn't mean I didn't understand what Brindisi was talking about. Oster was starving\u2014leaving behind this much food just wasn't something that King Galt's raiders would've done. There was no way this tiny village had such a bounty of treasure that their ship didn't have enough space in its hold to carry it all. Nor did it make sense that Osteran raiders could blast a Rolman warship to pieces.\n\nBrindisi turned away from the storehouse, hurrying back to the nearest body. It was a woman. I knew because the hair on her head grew past her shoulders, but she didn't have any fur on her face or ears. She'd been shot between her shoulders with an arrow as she tried to run away. Brindisi placed his heel on her back, put a hand on the shaft of the arrow sticking out of her, then yanked. Congealed blood splattered onto his mailed chest. He wiped a bit of the dark crimson off of the tip of the arrow, his eyes squinting. I was further away, but I saw the same thing he did. I made the same conclusion he did\u2014that the arrow that killed that woman hadn't been made in any forge of Oster. Brindisi flicked the arrowhead with a finger to be sure. Snarling, he snapped the shaft into two pieces.\n\n\"Not metal. It's just as hard, just as sharp, but it's something else. Treated wood or whatever in the Abyss they do to make their weapons.\"\n\nHe said \"they\", but I knew he meant the Mizu.\n\n\"Mizu ships move swiftly.\" Brindisi knew that as well as I did, but I wanted him to know I was paying attention. \"They could've come and gone.\"\n\n\"A waveship.\" Brindisi grunted at his own conclusion. \"That is why we saw no sign. That is why our warship wasn't just sunk, it was annihilated. They must've had a wizard aboard.\"\n\nThis didn't please me. The mysterious wizards of the Mizu supposedly had powers none in Rolm or Oster understood or could match. It was said they could command the wind and sea. I had never faced one, for Mizu ships were rare, but I had heard plenty of stories from ryders who had.\n\nBrindisi searched the horizon, as if his eyes could somehow spot a ship that I couldn't see from the air. Of course, he saw nothing. \"There hasn't been a Mizu attack on Rolm in two years. Now, they return \u2026 here. What would the Mizu want in a miserable little place like this?\" He looked around again, straining to find something new in the ruins of the village. \"They are metal hunters, but there are no mines here. These people had few, if any, steel weapons. There is nothing on this island that the Mizu value.\"\n\nIt was arrogant for Brindisi to assume that he understood the Mizu, but he was an arrogant man, even for a human. The Mizu were mysterious, appearing from their lands beyond the Wall of Fire, a barrier of smoke and fire beyond which even dragons could not fly. Their waveships moved almost as fast through the water as a dragon flew through the air, but the sleek vessels had no sails or oars. When the Mizu came, they usually came in search of metal\u2014any metal. Weapons to be sure, but they weren't picky. They'd take coins, or door hinges or jewelry or farm hoes. Once they had their booty, they sped away, back beyond the barrier of fire that hid their kingdom. No Mizu had ever been captured alive. Even my kind were wary of the Mizu. I wasn't sorry we'd missed them.\n\nI expected Brindisi to be angry, both because the Mizu were gone and that he hadn't gotten his chance to start a war with Oster. Definitely a rough morning for an aggressive, conniving human like him. But he didn't seem angry. Instead, he kept doing a very un-human thing\u2014he kept thinking.\n\n\"This place had a more than ample store of food in a time of famine.\" Brindisi returned to the warehouse. I reluctantly got to my feet as well so I might see what he saw. This mystery of the Mizu made me curious. More importantly, my current spot near the shore had a lot of sharp rocks that were itching my hindquarter.\n\nBrindisi hacked into more storage barrels, this time making his way to a cluster in the rear of the storehouse. There was no food inside. Instead, when the wood shattered, out came gold ingots, quantities of fine, white sand, bits of flint, mortar and pestle sets, and other assorted instruments made for small, five-fingered hands that I didn't recognize.\n\n\"Not the tools of fishermen,\" Brindisi whispered. He kneeled down, letting the fine grains of white sand stream through his fingers. Then he picked up a small instrument that resembled two tiny blades fused together at one end. \"I've seen devices like this. In the Twisted Keep on Ulibon after the Highstar died.\" He snarled. \"It seems that the enchanters of Ulibon still live. Or at least they did until recently.\" Brindisi stood, his expression unusually thoughtful. \"We thought we slew the last of them when their leader, Anatar, lost his head, but it seems not. Perhaps the legend of the lost heir is not all legend. Perhaps some enchanters are even now with the Mizu as prisoners.\"\n\nI added my useless, obvious observation. \"None of these things came from this island.\"\n\n\"They could've been brought here before the Twisted Keep of Ulibon fell. Or perhaps these enchanters traded with other kingdoms, or even the pirate king.\"\n\nI disliked the enchanters I'd met. Their servants shot magical arrows with golden tips that could pierce dragon armor, and their magic had made the Twisted Keep impervious to the breath of the fire-breathers. Taking Ulibon had been an ugly battle.\n\nBrindisi kept talking, although I didn't think any of his words were meant for me. Yet, still, the Mizu didn't bother with any of these things. Not even the gold.\" My ryder's teeth flashed like those of a hungry predator. \"They didn't even search for these materials\u2014they left them in the building. The Mizu brought a wizard, perhaps because they knew that enchanters inhabited this place, yet they ignored the spoils of conquest. They killed, then they moved. They were in a hurry, looking for something more even precious to them than gold or other metals.\"\n\n<Uh-oh.>\n\n\"You believe the Mizu are still here?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm certain of it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "I hunted the Mizu.\n\nThere were wild goats on this island begging (bleating actually) to be eaten, but rather than indulging their pleas, I flew the length of Maricopa searching for some of the most dangerous humans on this world. I had two explanations: The first was that I was genuinely curious about what the Mizu wanted on this desolate island. The second was that I wasn't sure if I could disobey Brindisi. His will spread into my mind like a pestilence. The tendrils of his desires mingled with mine such that I couldn't be entirely certain of my own decisions. Even my interest in the Mizu might've been influenced by him. The longer I stayed linked to him, the worse the situation would become. I needed this mission to end, and I needed to get away from Brindisi.\n\nDespite its small size, Maricopa had plenty of places to hide. The most obvious spot was the eastern side of the Kraken, where the koa trees were so thick they concealed the ground beneath their lush canopy of leaves. Twisting pummice trees dominated the lower elevations of the mountain. A group of humans on foot could hack their way through the forest, but it would take time. If the Mizu were on Maricopa, they could still be ascending the mountain. They might also be hiding in the caves of the mountainside, both on the Kraken, and the smaller peaks that hugged it, but I couldn't think of a reason for them to do that.\n\nI began my search by ruling out the rest of the island. I swept the ground so low I sent dust into the air, before soaring to glimpse at the glittering lake within the Kraken's summit. I spotted goats and the tracks of some four-legged predator\u2014perhaps wolves. But no humans. The stink of ripening pummice fruit overpowered most other scents, making the search more difficult.\n\nBrindisi became impatient with my methodical approach. \"They must be traveling beneath the cover of the trees. Traxis could hear a mouse scurrying around the castle while circling above its highest tower. Even if you can't see them, you should be able to hear them. Prove yourself worthy, Bayloo.\"\n\nI don't know if other dragons grind their teeth when they're angry, but I apparently do. My ryder's words tasted like the potatoes served with a side of rancid seaweed. I was fortunate Brindisi couldn't see the crimson flashing in my eyes. To calm myself, I pretended that I had Brindisi in my jaw as I bit my teeth together. I needed to keep my anger in check. Even if he couldn't see my eyes, my emotions might leak through the rune-link. I sucked in a gust of air, then I did as I had been told.\n\nI flew almost as slow as a man could walk over the tops of the koa trees that grew on the mountain slope. Beneath the canopy of tall branches, the spidery limbs of the smaller trees intermingling with the older, larger growths. Many of the sickle-shaped koa leaves had browned, but I still saw plenty of green as well. I listened and watched as I flew. I didn't believe that Traxis had sharper hearing than me.\n\nI heard the calls of birds, the buzzing of insects. I detected a few larger creatures lurking about\u2014the kind that crushed leaves underfoot\u2014but not many. These weren't humans. I detected no sound of marching feet; I smelled none of the ugly sweat stink that I often associated with men. Still, the mountain was vast, and I continued my search, moving gradually from the hinterlands closest to the village, further up the gently sloping side. I began to hope that Brindisi was mistaken about the Mizu still being on this island.\n\nHe had no doubts. \"They are here. I can feel it. They came for something, and they don't have it yet. Which means we have a chance to stop them, to kill them. Maybe even question one.\"\n\nEven I cannot stay aloft indefinitely. My wings ached, my neck throbbed, and my belly rumbled (it often did that). I didn't want to tell Brindisi that I needed a break, but I doubted he was giving any thought to my fatigue. He could just eat and even piss in the saddle if he wanted. I needed meat and didn't want to scare the fauna below with a steaming yellow rain when I unlocked my bowls.\n\nFinally, I could wait no more. \"I must soon rest. To fly in this manner is tiresome.\"\n\n\"Not as tiresome as a whining dragon. Traxis never complained about being tired.\"\n\n<Traxis never hovered over a forest for most of a day after flying from Eladrell.> After a bit more gnawing of my teeth, I replied aloud. \"Traxis is mighty.\"\n\n<You should go back to being his ryder.>\n\n\"Mighty old, perhaps. He sees worse than me and can barely out fly a swift pigeon.\" Brindisi made a sound like a dog's bark. \"How much longer can you stay aloft?\"\n\nI wanted to tell him I needed to land soon\u2014as in now\u2014but I had nagging doubts about being able to lie directly to him without him sensing my deception. I answered honestly.\n\n\"Perhaps until the sky begins to darken, but it will take longer to recover if I push myself so far.\"\n\nBrindisi snorted with disdain, as if he could flap his arms for an entire afternoon. \"Go eat your dried goat meat and rest your wings.\"\n\nSnide remarks aside, I was about to do that, when I smelled something that definitely wasn't a goat. I was far enough up the mountain slope that the pommice stink had faded. I inhaled another deep gust of the wind to be sure. It had distinct notes of sour, sweat, and a hint of stupid. The sink of large animals, most likely men.\n\n\"Why do you wait, dragon?\"\n\nI answered through the rune-link. \"Two-legged creatures are nearby.\"\n\nBrindisi shifted on my back, likely notching an arrow into his bow.\n\nI reached out with all of my senses. The footfalls drew close. I glided toward the sound of the motion, making tight circles as I floated above the canopy. I still couldn't see anything through the trees. The movement stopped. They knew I was above them. Even when I try to fly quietly, I still make a fair bit of noise, and my wingspan tends to block the sun.\n\nI spoke through the link again. \"They are beneath us, hiding under the trees. They know I am here.\"\n\n\"Flush them out. My bow is ready.\"\n\nI flexed the claws on my forelegs. My wings burned with fatigue, but I had enough strength for this. I dropped without warning; my legs outstretched. I locked onto two of the largest koa trees in the vicinity, one with each of my hind legs. I gave a mighty beat of my wings, ripping both trees up from the ground, roots as well. It reminded me of the way human farmers harvested potatoes, only way more impressive because I was doing it. The trauma to the dirt from the roots being torn up also felled several of the smaller trees nearby, leaving an ugly, open scar in the canopy that revealed the dark soil of the mountain's slope.\n\nTwo forms dashed for fresh cover beneath the trees that still stood, like rabbits fleeing their collapsing burrow. The animals ran swift as wolves, but with only two legs, their bodies clad in suits of armor painted in the colors of fall leaves: Mizu. Brindisi loosed his arrow. It caught the slower of the pair in the back just as he reached the tree line. He didn't fall, nor did he cry out. Mizu armor was almost as tough as anything the forges of Rolm produced, even if it was made from resin-treated wood rather than metal.\n\nI dropped the two boles I held, preparing to repeat my prior gardening exercise with two more unlucky koa trees. Bad decision.\n\nMy tail started to tickle, a bizarre sensation that felt as if a dozen rats had decided there was something delicious under my armored scales. I twitched in discomfort, which changed my flight path ever so slightly\u2014maybe the length of two human arms\u2014but that probably saved my life. A single dark cloud had silently appeared above me, a foreigner in the otherwise clear day. I hadn't noticed its appearance, and even if I had, I wouldn't have given it a second though. A bolt of lightning came from the errant cloud of darkness, streaking through the sky with such ferocity that it felt as if the air itself had been torn by its passage. The blast blinded me; the thunderous echo that followed its passage shook my bones. It missed my neck, but not by much. That strange itch had saved me, but only temporarily. The lightning wasn't natural. A wizard lurked nearby.\n\nEven before my sight returned, I swept higher into the sky, zigging and zagging as I executed a wide turn that put plenty of distance between me and the Mizu wizard's summoning. My sight gradually returned. Wary, I searched the sky for more unnatural storm clouds.\n\nBrindisi was delighted by my near roasting. \"I knew they were here.\" The satisfaction in his voice tempted me to flip over and see how sturdy those saddle straps really were. \"We shall deal with that wizard first.\"\n\nI heard Brindisi, but I kept flying on my previous course anyway, putting more and more distance between us and the Mizu. I didn't know how far the wizard could send forth his lightning blasts or what else the Mizu had in their arsenal, but being far away seemed like a good idea. I also knew I would have to go back. Brindisi wanted to fight. That was as much a part of him as eating was a part of me. He hungered for a kill so badly, I didn't need for him to say it to me.\n\n\"Grab some more trees. Drop them from above\u2014way above, then dive hard behind them. If that wizard shows his face, I'll put an arrow through his skull.\" Brindisi made it sound like something appealing.\n\nFine. I'd risk my life again. But he'd better not make another fire-breather comment after this.\n\nI circled again, diving to rip up two more koa trees from the furthest edge of the slope, then I climbed back into the sky, wary for lightning clouds. Brindisi probably thought dropping twenty-foot long trunks was easy. It wasn't. Even while circling over an area, I had to keep myself steady while the wind was gusting. Furthermore, trees, with all their twisty branches and leaves, aren't made for flight. They don't go where they are supposed to go. Explaining that to Brindisi would've been a waste. I just dove. When I became confident that I had a decent feel for the wind, I dropped my wooden projectiles. I spread my wings to slow my own descent, letting the trees lead the way, hopefully providing a distraction.\n\nThe giant boles smashed into the ground with as much force as I could've hoped, their branches shattering on impact, sending debris flying all about. I came in hard behind the shield of mayhem while Brindisi shot arrows from my back. I was impressed at how quickly he fired, particularly given the dangerous angle of my descent. Even with the saddle straps, it was no easy feat to fire a bow from his position, much less with accuracy. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any of the Mizu as I flew, so I doubted that Brindisi could either. He was firing blind, hoping to hit something. I pulled out of my dive as I came upon the tree canopy, whipping my tail into the treetops and creating a rain of leaves and koa pods.\n\nA man cried out in pain from below as one of Brindisi's arrows found a soft target. I doubted it was the wizard\u2014I wasn't lucky. I flapped my wings for more speed and began to pull up, intending to create more distance between myself and the Mizu. I felt the itch again, a sensation on either side of my head rather than my tail this time. I swerved hard, diving away from the clouds. The air tingled. Lightning flashed again, originating from an unknown point high in the sky.\n\nI changed my course again, spinning like a dancer in the air while tucking my wings as close to my body as I could to make myself a smaller target. For a brief moment I even thought I'd escaped. Then the world exploded and a searing pain unlike any I'd ever experienced enveloped me.\n\nI tumbled toward the trees.\n\nI crashed with all the elegance of one of the trees I'd dropped on the Mizu.\n\nI smashed into the forested slope, falling through the canopy, snapping branches as I fell. My wings made the descent only slightly less painful than a complete free fall. I landed on a cluster of saplings, crushing their trunks, before rolling indignantly onto the dirt. A steady rain of sickle-shaped pods dropped onto my head, echoing through the woods like clattering drums. The smell of seared flesh was in the air. Unfortunately, I was the source. The wizard's lightning had hit my right wing, tearing the membrane just above the first joint. It felt like I was being roasted in a fire. Wings were comparatively soft. My armor had protected the rest of me from the fall. Of course, I'd landed on my feet. Cats had learned how to fall from dragons (probably).\n\nI lifted my wing. That made it hurt even more. I'd had worse injuries, but wing damage was always serious. Dragons were excellent healers, but the precious flesh of our wingspan was prone to permanent damage. A severe enough injury might never properly regenerate. Luckily, it wasn't that bad. I expected that I would fly again, if I lived through this.\n\nBrindisi interrupted my self-indulgent meditation of sorrow. He'd survived the fall too and was still strapped to my back. I really had no luck at all. A slave dragon's first instinct would've been the fate of his ryder. Brindisi was an afterthought to me, which I took as a reassuring sign of my independence.\n\nBrindisi unlatched himself, slipping to the ground with a thud. He tumbled onto his knees, barely avoiding planting his face into the dirt. I had come down rather fast, and the tree branches had probably hurt as well. Brindisi puked the contents of his stomach out. It stunk, but I hoped his forthcoming hunger would make him a little less condescending about my own stomach's legitimate needs.\n\nBrindisi struggled back upright, then promptly shut his eyes and teetered backward like a poorly built castle tower. He would've fallen over. Maybe he would've hit his head. Maybe one the sharp edges of a shattered tree trunk would've impaled him. I would never know because I panicked when I saw him fall, my blood racing with distress as if this human was my hatchling. I whipped my tail around and caught him before he struck the ground. I laid him flat on the ground. His breathing was steady, his heart strong. He seemed shaken from the crash, but I didn't see any reason he wouldn't recover. <Why had I done that?>\n\nIt had to be the link. What in the Abyss had those Sculptors done to me?\n\nAs I stared at Brindisi's inert form, I considered my unpalatable situation. I'd crashed further down the mountain from the location where the brief battle with the Mizu had taken place. They'd have to retrace their previous progress if they wanted to finish us off. I didn't think they'd bother to do that. Whatever the Mizu had come here for, they seemed to be in a rush. Also, the longer they lingered on this island, the greater the chance another dragon would arrive to investigate why Brindisi and I hadn't returned. All of which meant that we were probably safe where we were.\n\nWith my ryder unconscious, the poisonous force of his will that flowed through our link weakened but didn't disappear. I'd acted to help him, perhaps save him. It seemed I couldn't trust myself.\n\nMy injured wing made leaving this place nearly impossible. Even if I could get off the ground, trying to fly any distance risked creating an injury that would render me flightless forever. A free dragon that couldn't fly would be a dead dragon soon enough. I stretched my wings again. It hurt like bathing inside an inferno mountain. I growled in frustration. But I did nothing. I just stayed where I was. I'm rather good at that\u2014maybe as adept as a human. There were supplies in the dragon saddle, but I needed Brindisi to get at those.\n\nI tried to sleep, even as my wing throbbed. I managed a slight doze, but pain and anxiousness denied me any real rest. Light faded from the sky, and the stars and moon appeared. I thought I caught Rima's ill shape, but the vision disappeared so quickly I could've been mistaken.\n\nIt turned out that not sleeping was for the best. Sometime that night, the Mizu came. The attackers crept through the forest deliberately, avoiding twigs and other debris that might make too much noise. But they couldn't help that they were human and I was a dragon. I could hear better than them and my nose was way more impressive. Size matters, despite what some humans claim.\n\nI laid my neck on the ground, hoping that this would make it look like I was asleep. But I wasn't a fool. I turned my face away from the direction of the interlopers\u2014I really didn't want to learn what an arrow up my nose or shot into my eye would feel like. As the humans neared, I heard every step, every breath. When they got really close, I could hear their hearts beating against their chests. There were only two.\n\nI didn't wait to let them get all the way into the clearing where Brindisi and I lay. If they realized I was alive they might run, and I wasn't in any condition to chase them. I needed to make this quick and get it done without further damage to my wing. The interlopers made my task a bit more difficult by separating before they came as close as I would've liked. When the first one notched his bow, I struck.\n\nI shoved myself off the ground in the direction of the first Mizu, moving like a pouncing cat. My neck sprang forward. The human had positioned himself behind two trees that were thick with branches, but the scale armor on my head was strong. I just shoved myself through the obstacle until my jaw reached the Mizu, cracking any branches in my way. The Mizu screamed in agony as my teeth shut on him, his armor making a satisfying crunch as my mouth closed. The salty taste of blood leaked into my mouth before I released the dead man. His companion would die next.\n\nI expected the other Mizu to run. That's what any other soldier would've done. However, the Mizu stood his ground. He crouched behind an interwoven cluster of trees, his bow ready. I smashed down the obstacles with a few powerful swipes of my forelegs. He fired\u2014at my eyes. I dodge his first arrow. The second landed beneath my snout. It didn't fully penetrate my armor, but it sunk deep enough to lodge itself there. It hurt, and when I get hurt I also get angry.\n\nI snatched the little archer into my mouth, but I didn't crush him; I didn't want to kill him. I just wanted to scare the piss out of him\u2014which is what happened. After that warm liquid had all dribbled out, he dropped his bow. At first, the Mizu squirmed, but once he realized that moving around made my teeth sink further into him, he stopped wriggling. I brought the Mizu back to the clearing, spit him onto the ground, then placed my right foreleg on top of him with my claws on either tide of his head. His eyes opened so wide he might have been trying to shoot his eyeballs at me. The man's pupils were as black as his hair, while his skin was a shade darker than the humans of Rolm.\n\nI put my nostrils next to his face and exhaled my hottest, moistest, snarl. That got me a choking howl of terror. Now came the really hard part. Dragon jaws just weren't built to speak standard Rolmish.\n\n\"Why\u2026 here?\"\n\nIf the Mizu's eyeballs had been capable of rolling out of his head, they definitely would've. They must've been securely fastened. Too bad. Blind men were less likely to try to run away.\n\nI said it again.\n\nThis time the Mizu tried to speak, at least in the sense he made some sounds that might've been words of a language. But I couldn't understand him.\n\n\"Let me try.\" It was Brindisi. In the excitement, I hadn't noticed my ryder bestir himself. He looked paler than normal, but otherwise in reasonably decent condition (apart from still having only two legs and a two-holed thumb on his face instead of a real nose that could actually smell things).\n\nBrindisi positioned himself such that his eyes stared directly into the terrified face of the captive Mizu.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" He said it in Avian. Why did he think to speak to the Mizu in the language of dragons? Brindisi doubtlessly knew more of the Mizu than I did. Did his words mean the Mizu also had dragons back in their home, beyond the Wall of Fire?\n\nSeeing a human above him\u2014even one as mean and ugly as Brindisi\u2014actually seemed to reassure the Mizu. The shape of his face went from twisted-terror to twisted-defiance (this involved smaller eyes, tighter lips and a wrinkled nose). It was clear he wasn't going to answer.\n\nI pushed my head closer to my little captive once again. This time I gave him a shot of hot breath (I don't spit out fire, but it still stinks so much it can be scary). I could feel his terror. I did it again. The Mizu squirmed beneath my leg, doubtlessly believing he was about to be roasted. Brindisi caught on.\n\n\"You had best answer.\"\n\nThe Mizu remained defiant. \"May you follow me into the Abyss.\"\n\nMy hearts surged in surprise. He did speak Avian. What did that mean?\n\nBrindisi plunged the tip of his sword into the man's neck. He convulsed, then died. I lifted my leg off his chest.\n\n\"He wasn't going to talk,\" Brindisi said. \"He is Mizu.\"\n\nBrindisi spoke as if his words were reason enough to kill the captive\u2014as if killing that man had been as logical as crushing a roach underfoot. Maybe to Brindisi, that was the case. I wondered what else my ryder knew about the Mizu. Supposedly, none had ever been taken prisoner in battle. Perhaps that wasn't true. The mystery of their presence on this island became ever more intriguing to me.\n\nI had nothing to add to Brindisi's conclusion, so I didn't speak. Dragons were different from humans in that way\u2014we know when to keep our mouths shut.\n\nBrindisi stared into the night. The mountain was mostly invisible in the dark, but I knew that was what he gazed at. \"It seems reasonable the rest of them are climbing for the summit.\"\n\n\"I have been to the top. There is nothing there but a great lake. Its water is fresh and clear, but it has little else of value to the Mizu.\"\n\n\"We must get there,\" Brindisi insisted. \"The saddle is damaged, but I don't need it.\"\n\nI dreaded my next confession. \"I am injured.\"\n\n\"You can't fly?\" Brindisi was incredulous.\n\n\"I am uncertain if I can fly or not.\" I tried to sound like a slave dragon. \"I must share that with you that if my wing tears further, the damage may be irreversible.\"\n\nBrindisi grunted with frustration. \"I could climb the mountain myself, but that wizard and his soldiers\u2026 I need you to go with me. You must fly.\"\n\nThe brutal force of Brindisi's will seeped through our link. He intended to reach the summit. He intended to discover why the Mizu had come. If he had to have my runes scraped from his chest and replaced with others, that was a price he was more than willing to pay. Strangely, I understood. Part of my mind was his mind. Within the world of Brindisi, others were mere objects. Only the goal mattered.\n\n\"You must try to fly.\"\n\nI wanted to know why the Mizu had come as well. Even more, I wanted to know if they had dragons back in their homeland. Why else speak Avian?\n\n\"As you will it, I will do.\" That sounded very slave dragon. \"But it will be much more dangerous at night. I am still exhausted from the day. And hungry.\"\n\nBrindisi rolled his eyes. \"You sound like my wife.\" At that, a rare pang of sympathy for a human ran through me\u2014for the poor woman who was mated to this man. He opened the dragon saddle and pulled out a bit of dried meat. \"Start with this.\" Brindisi grabbed his bow from the ground and notched an arrow. \"Stay and rest yourself, little pup. I'll find you a more substantial meal to eat.\"\n\nHe disappeared into the woods.\n\nBrindisi meant to humiliate me with the gesture, I suppose. No chance of that. Fresh meat was medicinal for dragons. I hoped he would find a goat. Rabbits were too little. The only thing better would be if he encountered a mountain lion, and it ate him. Then I could eat the mountain lion. But I doubted that this island had any of those.\n\nI gazed upward at the peak hidden behind a veil of night, its outline barely visible even to my eyes. A great gust of wind ran through the forest, rustling the leaves of the koa trees and sending more pods to the ground. When the wind subsided, a sound remained\u2014a humming, faint and distant. It was a song. Something natural, without words; peaceful, yet powerful. I strained to listen, the tone soothing. It was unlike anything I've heard before, yet so familiar. The melody seeped into me and the exhaustion of this day fell away. My eyes slowly shut, and I drifted to sleep, only to be awakened by Brindisi's noisy return. The song had vanished.\n\nMy ryder had a small boar draped over his shoulders; three arrows still protruded from the creature's body. He threw the carcass down before me. \"We can't risk a fire tonight so it's all yours. It's also the last time I hunt for you.\"\n\nI ate hungrily, without a word to the human. The meat was fresh, bloody, and delicious. I spit out the bones, savoring the choice flesh usually taken by the humans. Despite the unexpected feast, my mind still lingered on the strange sounds I had heard. They hadn't been my imagination. I knew I'd actually heard something. Perhaps it was magic of some kind. I wanted to experience it again. I had heard the sounds coming from above, from high up on the mountain.\n\nTo get up there, I would need to fly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Rays of morning light woke me.\n\nAfter my feast, sleep had come easily, as if something within me knew the immediate danger had passed. The rest helped me regain some strength, although not enough.\n\nBrindisi was already awake when I raised my neck. He rubbed his blade with a whetstone, carefully honing its edge, although it was already rather sharp. A strip of dried meat hung out of his mouth. On the ground lay a waterskin. I would've eaten as well if there had been anything fresh left to consume, but I didn't require it. Last night's meat would keep me satiated until tomorrow.\n\nDragons heal quickly, but not immediately. My wing ached; the torn flesh still throbbed. Even greater pain awaited if I dared fly. I glanced up at the Kraken, massive and silent. We had to reach the top. I stretched my wings. I hadn't underestimated the agony that followed, but I kept at it, pushing against the pain. Once I'd fully extended both wings, I folded them again and repeated the process. After the second stretch, I flapped them about hard enough to rustle the leaves of the remaining trees.\n\n\"Are you ready to fly, little bird?\"\n\nThe things I wanted to say wouldn't have been helpful. Brindisi didn't care about me, only his mission. Only killing for his king. But I wasn't sure if I could fly with my wing in that state. Worse, if I did fly, I couldn't be sure it wouldn't be the last time\u2014wings were temperamental. What kind of dragon would I be if I could neither fly nor breath fire? I feared that fate.\n\nI stared at the sky, feeling the wind. I thrashed my tail, checking my balance. It was all useless stalling. I too wanted to know what was atop that mountain. To do that, I needed to fly. The only way I'd know if I could fly would be to actually try to do it. Only afterward would I'd discover the price I'd pay.\n\nFor all Brindisi's harsh mocking, he understood dragons. \"Try first without my weight. If you are able, return for me.\"\n\nThe words surprised me. First, he went hunting for me, now he showed concern about my wing. It all seemed very non-human, very unlike Brindisi. Of course, it was in his interest as well. He needed me to fight the Mizu and he probably didn't want to experience another crash if it turned out I couldn't fly.\n\nI shifted uneasily. I would've preferred to take off from a high cliff or mountain. That was what young dragons did when they learned to fly. Launching from the ground took a lot more strength, and it placed more strain on the wing's membrane, but I didn't have a choice. I backed up to create as much open space in front of me as I could in the small clearing, then hurled myself forward, first with my legs, then with a great flap of my wings.\n\n<That first bit hurt.>\n\nIf I'd laid on my back and let a human chip away at my scales with the edge of a carving knife until he managed to create a slice as long as my claw, then if he poured boiling pitch in the wound, that was close to equaling the pain of returning to the air. Belatedly, I realized that I probably had done some healing last night, with a portion of the membrane reattaching itself as I slept on a full stomach; then I'd gotten up this morning and torn all the new sinew to shreds, along with I'm not sure what else.\n\nOn the brighter side, the second flap hurt less than the first, and each successive beat caused me even less pain. That wasn't necessarily a good sign. Dragon nerves dull pain to allow us to continue in a fight. The lack of agony just made it more likely I'd injure myself. I glided in a circle, trying to find any sign of the Mizu. I saw nothing and heard nothing. I doubted they would've risked climbing in the dark, but I couldn't be sure. They had a wizard of unknown abilities with them.\n\nI set back down on the ground beside Brindisi. He wore a hungry grin\u2014like a wolf who knew who was going to get a chance to feast.\n\n\"Ah, so it was just a scratch after all. Have a bit more faith in yourself.\" Brindisi climbed onto me. \"I trust there is nothing wrong with your teeth or claws. We are going to need them.\"\n\nI didn't bother to try to explain about wing injuries or pain. Brindisi didn't care about any of those things. I merely showed him my teeth\u2014long and sharp\u2014and my claws, which were more of the same. There was nothing wrong with them.\n\nOnce Brindisi was on my back, I lifted off again. My wing hurt less this time, even with Brindisi's added weight. I flapped with caution, gaining altitude more gradually than usual.\n\n\"Beware that wizard, Bayloo.\"\n\nI needed no reminder to be wary of the spellcaster. I'd chosen to ascend on the far side of the Kraken, where the terrain was barren rock. The Mizu would stay in the woods, under cover. I hoped that even their wizard couldn't see and cast spells around a mountain side.\n\nIt took me longer than it should have, but I reached the top. I landed on the western side of the ridgeline that encircled the hollow crater below. Beneath me was a magnificent sight. A massive lake spread out across the center of the hidden valley, its surface glittering like diamonds in the morning light. Only the slightest ripples of a tide rolled onto the dark rock of the Kraken's belly. Vines, moss, and other assorted greenery clung to the mountain's inner walls encasing the hidden treasure. Even a few koa trees had taken root on the eastern portion of the valley. Weeds and wildflowers had sprouted throughout the rest of the enclosure. This place was a giant bowl of hidden beauty. A solitary goat drank from the lake's waters, but the rest of the hidden sanctuary appeared empty.\n\nThe song that had enticed me yesterday was absent, but something else drifted on the air, a familiar scent almost lost in the rising pollen of the wildflowers and the stink of the unwashed human on my back. But not quite. My nose continued to search, though my eyes found nothing.\n\nThe peace of the valley held no allure for Brindisi. \"What is here that the Mizu want so badly?\"\n\nHis words startled the goat (or it might've caught a glimpse of me). The creature looked up, saw a big dragon looming overhead, then bolted. The startled animal dashed toward the sheer wall of the crater, but not in the direction of any of the trees or bushes that might've provided shelter had I been on the hunt. I wondered where it intended to go. My only thought was that there was a cave or crevice hidden in the mountain's wall. Or it was a dumb goat, even by goat standards. It ran along on its stick-legs, then disappeared. Not disappeared into a thicket of trees of anything like that. It just vanished. A moment later it reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, its pace even more frantic.\n\nI didn't mention anything to Brindisi. Perhaps he hadn't seen it. Keeping silent about the disappearing goat was much easier than trying to explain what I'd seen to my ryder, but unfortunately the goat's strange behavior hadn't escaped Brindisi.\n\n\"That was \u2026 unusual.\" Through our link I felt a hunter's anticipation rise in him. \"Take us down to the floor of the valley.\"\n\nI glided down from my perch, still taking care with my injured wing. I set down beside the shore of the lake. Brindisi climbed down off my back and drew his blade. He headed toward the spot where the goat had vanished.\n\nThe familiar odor I'd detected on the ridge grew far stronger within the valley. My neck tightened; my tail was restless. I followed behind Brindisi, moving as softly as I could manage (which wasn't all that softly). I kept hoping he'd stop. He didn't, of course. Instead, he moved faster as he neared his prey. Even if he couldn't see the prize, Brindisi sensed it. I hung back. I sensed danger, but I had no regrets about not warning him.\n\nA disembodied tail whipped out from nowhere, its scales a blend of crimson and gold. It smacked into Brindisi, the force of the blow knocking him from his feet. He lay on the ground, his eyes half opened, his arms limp. He'd dropped his sword. A moment later claws appeared from nowhere, curved and sharp and deadly. They reached for my ryder. I had the sudden urge to help him, but I fought that. Something more important than Brindisi was going on here. The huge claws didn't impale him, at least not immediately. Instead, five claw-tipped digits that seemed to extend out of the air itself scooped him up and held him in a fist. Then Brindisi disappeared along with the claws that held him, just like the goat. Unlike the goat, he didn't emerge again.\n\nThe urge to protect my ryder surged through me like an unwelcome shiver. The feeling grew until all of my body shook. We were linked, whether I liked it or not. I felt his life force through the rune. The magic that bound us commanded me not to abandon him, but this time I fought back.\n\n<I owed Brindisi nothing.>\n\nWell, maybe I owed him some meat, but that was all. Definitely nothing more than that. Yet the pulling didn't stop. My head throbbed. I growled at the compulsion, not willing to give in.\n\n<I will decide my own destiny. Not the magic of the human Sculptors.>\n\nThose were fine sentiments. They didn't banish the power that had been carved into my scales and my mind shortly after my birth. But I'd sucked on the sweet taste of freedom for nearly three moons. I would not surrender myself. I would be free. I would be a true dragon.\n\nEven if I wasn't going to rescue Brindisi, I decided I still needed to find out what happened to him. There was magic here, and I wanted to know what was beyond this wall of illusion. I had my suspicions based on what I'd seen, but that wasn't enough. I needed to see with my eyes. For something this important, I needed to be certain.\n\nI walked to that place that appeared to be mere scrub brush but must've been something else. I passed through the unseen barrier between the life I had lived and the one I desired. The air tickled my scales as I passed through the magic curtain of concealment. Something tingled at the edge of my consciousness, a tick in my head of something familiar but forgotten. I didn't have time to dwell on that thought. I became ever more certain that on the other side of the illusion awaited the joyous and the impossible. I was right.\n\nI stared at the magnificent form of a fellow dragon.\n\nShe looked really angry."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "I stared at a near reflection of myself.\n\nThe other dragon was prettier than me, of course. Even though we were of a similar size, with matching eyes of glittering amber, magnificent wings, and beautiful, long jaws filled with rows of wicked teeth, she was far more striking. Her scales dazzled in a manner mine did not. Beneath her neck was a beautiful m\u00e9lange of crimson and gold, not a single scale marred by the hideous runes of a human Sculptor. I rejoiced at the sight. One of my kind lived free. In that moment, I knew that I too could live as this dragon did. This dragon must have answers about my kind\u2014and perhaps she had great power as well. She was surrounded by magic.\n\nThe female dragon stood outside a tunnel that had been dug into the rock of the valley floor\u2014the entrance to a concealed cave. Animal bones lay scattered around her feet. Two pillars of gleaming gold, each as tall as my head with my neck fully extended, soared from the ground into the sky as if marking the entrance to a grand palace. Symbols were carved into their surface\u2014not completely unlike those on my chest. I had never seen their like, but I guessed they were connected to the magic illusion that concealed the dragon from view. Based on their shape and size, I doubted a dragon had made those artifacts.\n\nI craned my neck about. I could still see the great lake a short distance away, as well as the sky above, although my vision was slightly distorted, as if I peered at the edge of mirage on a sweltering day. The illusion was apparently a one-way barrier: the dragon could still see beyond the magic. It was a creation beyond anything known in Rolm or Oster. The mystery of this place deepened.\n\nI expected the other dragon to kill Brindisi. Presumably, she'd been hiding here to avoid detection by humans like him. But she hadn't done the deed yet. Instead, she'd pinned him under the claws of her digits just as I'd done when I'd tried to question the Mizu. Brindisi lay on the ground, helpless, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. My ryder's eyes fluttered open, his previous stupor suddenly banished. Shock surged through the link between us, followed by something that might have been fear. The female dragon's eyes shifted color as she gazed upon Brindisi, the amber turning to crimson. Brindisi broke her stare, turning his attention toward me. He knew he needed me. The surge of his will struck me. I flinched at the power, at the stabbing pain of compulsion in my head. My eyes closed as my head dipped. I fought against Brindisi as well as the magic of the runes that held me.\n\nBrindisi spoke to me through the link. \"Aid me, Bayloo!\"\n\nA choice confronted me. I could no longer hide from what I'd become. I took a single step toward him, but not a big one. Finally, I had found another of my kind\u2014a free dragon. Finally, I saw an opportunity to truly shake my bonds. Here I could find answers and maybe assistance. It was time to stop hiding what I was. That choice should've been easy. But the rune link made it a struggle. Still, I did it. \"I will not be a slave. I am not a slave.\"\n\nBrindisi gasped aloud at my resistance, but I felt as if I was flying. There was no going back to hiding. I sensed the shock fade within Brindisi, to be replaced with fury; a raw anger powerful enough to make me shudder through the link. \"You obey!\"\n\nMy mind was a mountain, but Brindisi was steel, and he had the advantage of the control-runes. The magic carvings concentrated the force of his will. Brindisi's mind hacked at me; his orders felt like daggers in my head. The pain came hard, but I did not yield. My days of slavery were over.\n\nBrindisi twisted his head to regard me with a look of utter hate. He felt betrayed. I could've told him that he and his kind never should've enslaved us, but I didn't have time to bother with Brindisi. It was the other dragon who mattered to me.\n\nThe female dragon examined me, her eyes turning a faint shade of emerald, the color of regret. I didn't understand at first, not until she shifted her gaze to the runes carved into my scales. Her eyes became a darker shade of green, as if it was she who had lost something precious.\n\n\"Not. A. Slave.\" I spat out each word. Yet the language of my declaration belied my defiant words: I spoke in Avian, the language devised for us by the human masters.\n\nAt my declaration, the gloom in the dragon's eyes exploded into a blaze as fierce as the afternoon sun. The power of it made my chest feel even bigger than it already was. <She understood!>\n\nA thousand questions raced through my mind. Before me\u2014finally\u2014stood the opportunity of answers: An adult dragon, free and surrounded by magic. She must have an amazing story to share. I had the chance to learn about my kind, my history, maybe even more of who I was \u2026 The heat of my need for knowledge surged through my body. My eyes glowed as brightly as hers. But I was being a selfish idiot. I'd spent too much time around humans. I needed to think of bigger things: We were in danger\u2014this dragon was in danger. The Mizu were here with their wizard.\n\n\"Humans\u2014dangerous ones\u2014they have come to this island,\" I told her. \"They must be searching for you.\"\n\nThe dragon sniffed at the air. There was a hint of alarm at first, but then she seemed to calm herself. I, too, sampled the wind. No scent of human fouled the air. But the Mizu's stink had been how I'd found them yesterday. They might have figured that out. If Mizu had come to this place to hunt dragons, they'd have come prepared.\n\nI shared my suspicions. \"They hide their scent. A wizard comes with them.\"\n\nThe female dragon showed her teeth. We both craned our necks toward the lush portion of the valley. I saw nothing. All was still and quiet. The only noise was that of a steady wind gusting and the soft lapping of the lake water on the shore. Even the trees were still.\n\nToo still.\n\nLike all dragons, I knew winds. The shifting gusts had been part of us since we were babes. I fixed on each nuance of the breeze like humans obsessed with the hair on their heads. The trees shouldn't have been so motionless. A dozen different scents should've carried to my nostrils, yet these gusts smelled dull, lifeless. Like something made by humans.\n\n<Magic.>\n\nThe other dragon realized it as well. She reared upwards; her wings spread as if in preparation for flight. I expected her to lift off the ground at any moment, swooping in to roast the interlopers who'd dared venture into her domain, but she hesitated for some reason. Instead of taking to the safety of the air, the dragon stayed close to her cave. Her eyes flicking back toward the tunnel that led to her home. Her hesitation was costly.\n\nA furious attack erupted from the deceptive sky; A bolt of lightning came at the dragon, somehow coaxed by an unseen power from weather that should never have spouted such a force. Apparently, the barrier of illusion that had shielded the dragon's lair from view was no match for the Mizu wizard. The sizzling light struck her in the belly. The golden pillars toppled. We were exposed to the enemy.\n\nThe dragon roared, an awesome cry of defiance that echoed through the valley. My own hearts jumped in alarm. The dragon's scale had been broken and seared by the attack. She lifted her leg and tossed Brindisi's tiny form away from us, throwing him into the lake with as much concern as a human might show a chewed bone. I wasn't sure the depth of the lake. The dragon launched herself skyward, her wings trembling as she rose. She was hurt. I worried for her as much as I had for any other being in all my life.\n\nThe Mizu appeared like a pack of predators conjured from the air. Whatever magic their wizard had used to allow them to approach us undetected was gone. I counted ten smelly humans formed into a well-spaced line, bows at the ready, their bodies encased in resin armor from head to foot. It wouldn't protect them from me. From us. I had no doubt these Mizu had come to harm my fellow dragon, but now they had two to contend with. My anger flared. Battle called me. <Finally, a battle for me, for dragons.>\n\nI came at the Mizu head-on, charging forward with a dog's gait, using my wings only to catch a bit of wind and make each leap quicker. I sought the wizard. He was the real danger. I could kill the rest of the humans later. Slowly, if I wished.\n\nI found him behind the line of archers. Among these Mizu, the most powerful stood in the back\u2014so very human. The wizard wore no armor, just a shimming robe of silver so shiny it reflected the terrain around him. Inked images and arcane symbols covered his deeply tanned skin, His eyes, black as a moonless night, stared out at me without emotion. The wizard clasped his hands together, his finger interlocked. The dark void of his eyes flashed like sparked flint. His palms turned outward toward me.\n\n<Chicken piss incoming.>\n\nI didn't stop. I'd committed myself to this attack; there was no place else I could go. I could survive one of those lightning strikes \u2026 maybe. Either I'd kill that wizard, or he'd kill me. As I closed, an arrow struck me\u2014not bounced off me, but struck me. It hurt, but those pricks were nothing compared to what I knew the wizard could unleash. I roared, the anger of a lifetime of human-induced slavery reverberating in my cry.\n\nThe wizard flinched. Indeed, he went to a knee, pointing his hands and head at the sky as he did so. For a moment I thought my terrible roar had caused that, but then the shadow of my fellow dragon passed overhead. She descended upon him, her claws outstretched, her jaws open. She intended to end this human, but wizards do not die easily.\n\nThe air around the Mizu wizard crackled and the chill of winter storm shot through me. Tiny flames, no bigger than the light of a firefly flashed around the dark-robbed Mizu. In the next instant, a wall appeared between the attacking dragon's claws and wizard's soft body. The barrier was one of ice and flame, its structure pulsing as the confluence of forces clashed within. The dragon smashed into the magically summoned barrier with a terrific force that would've shattered a ship's hull, but the wizard didn't flinch. His black gaze flashed with a shiny gloss, and his hands glowed as he summoned more energy for the shield. The dragon scraped and bit before retreating back into the air. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, moving with the swiftness of a hawk. A streak of lightning flash, and for a terrifying moment I thought all was lost, but the latest bolt did not strike the dragon nor me. It plunged into the shield protecting the wizard.\n\n<A wizard-dragon!>\n\nThe barrier didn't buckle. The mage stood his ground, his face set with determination.\n\nI lunged to attack. Another arrow found its way into my scales as I moved but my fury whipped my pain. This wizard had to die. I just had to get to him, and he would\u2014assuming that his protective barrier only worked in one direction at a time. When I was close enough, I leapt, coming down with both my forelegs targeting the Mizu's face.\n\nThe wizard was faster. He hadn't turned his head as I came at him, but he somehow knew my intent. I collided with another of his conjured shields. I hit and chomped and scratched at the barrier. Its surface burned with the intensity of freezing ice, biting through even my scales, yet it was as slick as wet glass. I smashed my tail into the wall, but the magic shield defied my strength. I paused, staring through the translucent barrier at the wizard, my blazing eyes letting him know that I intended to transform his bones in powder via a slow grind of my teeth. The mage took note of me. The shield grew hot. So hot, my claws heated and smoked as I attacked, but I didn't stop pushing. A bead of sweat dripped down the wizard's face; this wasn't easy for him either. His lips moved, his eyes glowed, and a new force awakened. I felt the wind surge around me. Tendrils of an intense whirlwind wrapped around me. Like an invisible hand, the summoned torrent hurled me into the air, flinging me toward the opposite side of the valley. I spun out of control, unprepared for the ferocity of the force marshalled against me. No human deserved such power as this.\n\nI unfurled my injured wings, but even that wasn't enough to right myself; I spun, plunging into the lake tail first, my hind legs following. I barely escaped falling backward onto my wings. I twisted at the last second, keeping the essential parts of me dry. I beat my wings hard in an effort to keep myself out of the lake. I felt my injured wing tear again. Dread bubbled inside me, but I didn't have time to dwell at the severity of my latest damage. I had to keep flapping\u2014I could neither swim nor breathe water. Pain ripped through me, but I managed to steady myself. With my jaw clenched, I beat my wings, lifting myself into the air. I struggled to balance myself, but I did it. I flew to the battle, toward the wizard. If I had to die, this would be the right day for it.\n\nThe female dragon had been thrown off the shield as well, although not as far as I. She righted herself and was closing again at high speed, her eyes fixed on that deadly Mizu wizard. I thought she would unleash her fire. That is what I would've done, if I could've. I wondered how the magic shield would fare against the power of dragon breath. But she let loose no flames. Instead, when the dragon opened her mouth something far more magnificent came forth: a song.\n\nIt wasn't the soothing tone I'd heard on the mountain. To a human, it probably would've sounded something like a soft roar, but human hearing is limited. To me, to a dragon, it was like the call of the wind mingled with the answer of the rustling trees and the soft echo of thunder in the distance. I sensed the power in that song. The dragon's eyes flashed with determination. The air buzzed as if a thousand invisible bees swarmed around us. The female dragon's eye flashed a brilliant indigo in triumph. The wizard's shield trembled for an instant before it disappeared. He froze, not realizing\u2014not believing\u2014what had happened. The time of his death approached.\n\nThe dragon bore down on him. She roared a single word. \"Drasu!\"\n\nThe Mizu wizard moved his hands, trying desperately to muster another spell. The dragon had too much momentum though. It looked as though she would land on top of him, squashing the wizard into the rock, but at the last moment her head jerked upwards, as if something impossibly urgent in the distance demanded her attention. The triumph in my fellow dragon's eyes became panic. She veered right, changing her course. She managed to swipe the wizard with a single claw as she passed overhead, slashing his side up to his face and sending him to ground, but it was far less than she intended. I looked to see what had panicked her. In that moment, I finally understood why the Mizu had come here and risked so much. It was the cave.\n\nThe Mizu archers we'd mostly ignored in our desperate fight against the wizard had reached the tunnel where I'd first encountered the female dragon. All but a pair had slung their bows. Six of the Mizu held a net\u2014a huge one, with golden laces.\n\nTrapped inside was a baby dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "I released an echoing roar like none other I have ever uttered.\n\nFrom the depths of my being poured my despair at this unjust world, my fury as it became worse before my eyes; raw emotion passed into the world from my cry. The other dragon's roar intermingled with my own. I trembled at the misery in the companion cry\u2014a mother's desperation for her hatchling.\n\nOur combined roars became more than mere noise. Ten solders surrounded the newborn dragon. All ten fell, knocked from their feet by a gust of raw fury unleashed by air itself. The mother dragon came at the Mizu warriors faster than any other creature of the sky. I continued toward the fallen wizard (I've noticed bad humans have a tendency to cling tenaciously to life), but with an eye on the hatchling as well. My fellow dragon was swifter to her target than me. She rammed a claw through the heart of the first Mizu soldier just as he struggled to his feet, slamming him into a second soldier, skewering both. She grabbed another Mizu by the head with her hind leg, separating his body into a small and large section as she passed, picking up just a bit of altitude as she made a tight circle back toward her hatchling, intending to land amidst the recovering soldiers. Three Mizu had managed to scramble back to their feet with bows ready, but there was no way that arrows were going to stop an angry mother dragon.\n\nAs I'd guessed, the wizard lived. Lines of bloody crimson intermingled with the ink symbols on his face, but his eyes were focused as he struggled to a knee. The mage saw me bearing down on him, his gaze a sea of black calm despite my threat. I showed him my teeth and that my unspoken promise about grinding his bones into small particles remained valid. The mage spoke some hasty words, once again summoning the unseen hand of wind that had recently hurled me into the lake. Except it wasn't as powerful this time, or perhaps I was more prepared. The wizard's power slammed into me, but I slammed back. The gusts slowed me, grabbing at me. I wanted to keep going, but my mangled wings failed me. The wind drove me to the ground, with my legs being forced to battle for each step on the rocky ground. I wouldn't stop. Step by step I moved closer, or, more accurately, my jaws moved closer. <Crunch your bones, bones, bones, little human.>\n\nAn arrow pierced my hind quarter, right into the gap around my left leg. Blood leaked from the wound, dripping onto my limb and the ground. My hind leg weakened. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the marksman\u2014a Mizu who had fled from the mother dragon and taken cover behind a koa tree.\n\nThe wizard exploited my added distress. The whirlwind of magic wind surged. The unseen hand of air grasped me, tossing me backward. I fell about halfway between the tunnel and the wizard. A second spell followed\u2014a net of some kind, its coils formed of the same translucent ice-and-fire as the shield, fell onto top of me. The trap pinned me to the ground, my legs facing upward. I wiggled and twisted to turn myself, to have leverage against the spell's weight. The magic net tightened in response, its tendrils burning on my scales. My injured right wing exploded with pain. The intensity of my utter failure was the worst of this. Darkness mingled with the anger in my heart.\n\nThe wizard flexed his fingers as his eyes gleamed black. My bones shook. My throat tightened; my chest felt as if I was falling from the sky once again. My final fate came for me.\n\n<No. No. No.>\n\nIt happened anyway. Power doesn't care about justice. Or contrary opinions.\n\nThe wizard unleashed his lightning. The deadly bolt wasn't directed at me, but I wished that it had been, so I wouldn't have had to witness its aftermath. The mother dragon had devastated the Mizu soldiers while I'd been locked in combat with the wizard; only two still stood, spread apart and desperate, their net abandoned, although the baby dragon remained entangled within it. The wizard's new blaze of magic energy struck the mother dragon in the flank. She roared in pain as her legs failed her and she sank to the ground. I shared her agony. I too roared. Oh, how I roared. For all the good it did.\n\nBut the dragon wasn't beaten. She raised her neck even as her body failed. No fear showed in her crimson-tinged eyes. From her came another song, this one formed of the sound of anger. It started as a rumble but rose to a scream. The surviving Mizu dropped their bows so they might cover their ears. All except the wizard, who stood defiant. At least until the ground beneath him shook; his eyes grew wide, and I dared to hope. A crack opened beneath the wizard's feet\u2014small at first, but rapidly spreading in both directions. The wizard darted to his left, fleeing the spreading hole that threatened to swallow him. He stumbled, falling to the ground. He rolled, frantically fleeing the abyss chasing him. I thought he would attempt some spell to seal the chasm, but instead he focused again on the mother dragon. With some poisonous words and a flick of his hand, he summoned his lightning once again. He could muster only a small bolt from the charred color sky, but it was enough for his purpose. The bolt stuck the mother dragon's neck. Her song stopped and so did the spread of the cracking ground. My fellow dragon lay still in dirt. I was empty.\n\nThe wizard stumbled on his feet, bloodied and battered, but still far too alive. He barked at the surviving Mizu soldiers, who scrambled back toward the net and the trapped baby dragon. Once that happened, the wizard turned his attention back to me. His dark eyes were faded, circles of exhaustion beneath them.\n\nWhile the wizard had dueled with the mother dragon, I'd managed to flip myself over onto my legs. The net that held me seemed to weigh as much as a small castle, but I still moved, bearing its weight on my back. Only three of my legs worked properly, but I dragged the fourth along. I moved at a snail's pace, but still I moved. I didn't know what I could do even if I'd managed to reach this wizard, but I came at him.\n\nMy adversary shook his head, weariness in his motion. He spoke some words in a language I didn't understand; they weren't words of anger. They sounded more like regret. He bowed his head toward me, deeply. I kept marching toward him. When the wizard's head rose, he slowly raised a palm toward me.\n\nThe wizard spoke in Avian. His words surprised me. \"I am sorry.\"\n\nHis hand trembled, but I knew he still intended to kill me. So be it. The Abyss was better than watching that helpless hatchling get dragged off to become a Mizu slave. Death was mercy.\n\nThe wizard's invisible hand came for me, its grasp feeble. The spell betrayed his fatigue; he had barely triumphed against us, but he had won. The Mizu mage still had enough magic to command his wind-hand to lift me from the ground and toss me into the lake, the magic net still entangling me. I crashed into the cold darkness.\n\nI'd sometimes heard humans speak of the afterlife, of journeying to live forever amongst their Sisters in Haven\u2014some kind of promised land of delights, where the desires of heart, stomach, and mind were forever satiated. I'd wondered if dragons had anything similar.\n\nI would know soon enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "I tumbled through the watery depths.\n\nI didn't know how to swim. Dragons didn't voluntarily get into the water, and no one was stupid enough to try to force us. I'd seen humans swim though. I had also watched ducks traverse the ponds in the gardens of Eladrell, and I'd eaten plenty of fish. Swimming didn't look hard. I probably could've done it if I hadn't been stuck in the magic net. The wizard's cage had stopped glowing as I sank further into the water, loosening slightly, but not enough for me to free myself. I twisted, and kicked, and bit, and thrashed. It all just made me sink faster. We dragons were made to fly in the clouds, so we can hold our breath and don't need as much air as humans, but we weren't fish. I expected to drown, alone and in the dark.\n\nBrindisi saved me.\n\nThe mother dragon had hurled him far into the great lake when the Mizu arrived. He'd apparently survived, shed his armor, and began the swim back toward the shore. Either it'd been a long distance, or he'd bided his time until his adversaries killed each other. Brindisi had only his dagger with him. It wasn't much use against dragons or Mizu, but it was enough to cut the ropes of the no-longer-unbreakable net. Indeed, the net disappeared\u2014vanishing completely\u2014shortly after Brindisi sliced the first coil, perhaps because the mage that had conjured it was no longer present.\n\nBrindisi helped free me, but he couldn't teach me how to swim. I thrashed about, I swished my tail, I moved my three non-crippled legs. None of it did much except tire me. Swimming wasn't as easy as I'd thought. I kept sinking. Somewhere, a duck was gloating.\n\nThe solution came when I hit the bottom. My feet dug into the rocky floor. The water made me light. I still had plenty of air inside me. I simply started walking toward the shore. Let a duck try that. But I made it only a few steps before I realized this wasn't going to be so easy.\n\nI kept losing my tenuous grip on the lake bed and floating upward. Each time my claws left the bottom, I would kick my legs frantically and get nowhere; Brindisi tried to keep me moving in the correct direction, swimming to the surface for air then returning to try to guide me. It was more than annoying how easily he navigated in the water, while I could barely make any progress at all.\n\nI would've drowned before I reached the surface trying to walk the whole way, but I soon figured out I could use my folded wings to propel myself forward. Somehow, it hurt less than trying to fly. With an awkward dance of pushing with my wings and crawling with my legs, I managed to reach water shallow enough that I could extend my neck above the surface. I got there just before I ran out of air. I gasped into the sweet daylight, filling my lungs, before resuming my journey. Even with the certainty that I wasn't going to drown, it took me a frustratingly long time to get to shore. I eventually dragged myself out of the lake, my wings dragging on the ground, soaked and damaged beyond any hope of healing. I doubted I'd ever fly again. What was a dragon who could neither fly nor breathe fire?\n\nThe desolate shore shattered my hearts. The Mizu were gone, as was the hatchling. The sun had passed the apex of the sky and was sinking toward the horizon. The mother dragon still lay on the ground, her eyes shut, ugly black holes in her scales. Brindisi followed me, silent for now, but I was still all too aware of his presence.\n\nI dragged myself to sit beside my fellow dragon. She didn't stir, yet there was warmth inside her still. The Abyss had not yet claimed her.\n\nI could've tried words of Avian, but that seemed so inadequate. She'd shown me another way. I open my mouth, pushing out sounds that none of my kind of DragonPeak ever uttered. The noises I made were awkward and clumsy, neither roar, nor growl, nor speech, but the emotion was there. Quickly, I adjusted my tone. I sang my sadness to her as well as my longing to speak with one of my own kind. If she could hear me, I'm sure she would have understood. My hearts hit against the inside of my chest hard enough to make it ache. One of her eyes opened followed by the other, although both were a sickly shade of yellow, the color laced with veins of blood.\n\nThe mother dragon cooed with relief.\n\n\"The Abyss calls to me \u2026 but I held on \u2026 kept hoping for you...\" She spoke in a language close to Avian, except that the sounds were more elegant, as they were meant to be. I had no trouble understanding.\n\nMy eyes flashed a smile of joy that she still lived, but it was a tainted gladness. I didn't understand why this noble creature would've placed hope in me. There was nothing I could do except watch her die. My flash of happiness quickly faded to despair. She saw it.\n\n\"You must believe.\" She made a difficult swallow. \"You must believe, my child.\"\n\nMy chest nearly exploded upon hearing those words. I couldn't breathe; I forgot my pain. I must've not understood her. <My child. My child.> But there was no mistake, no delirium. With a single sniff, my nose confirmed that I sat beside my own blood. The world spun as my mind raced. <I had found my mother!>\n\nMy eyes spoke because no other part of me was able to move. \"How?\" ask the confused light there.\n\nMy mother answered me in a manner that was unknown to me until that instant, sending to me raw emotion of the most wondrous and powerful character. Her eyes pushed away the ugly yellow that marred them, shifting to a soft violet, tinged by an amber that gleamed so bright that it resembled gold. Only the veins of blood spoiled her gaze. A scent surrounded me, sweeter than any other I had experienced, something beyond the ripest fruit or the choicest honey. It made my hearts ache, but in a good way. For the first time in my life, I knew the kinship of another being. This was my mother.\n\nI struggle with my mouth. The words came drenched in conflicting emotion. I found my mother. \"But \u2026 you're still here. After all this time.\"\n\n\"You mean to ask how I am here. I carry a great burden, and I hold true to the Way. But I am a mother as well. I never gave up on you after you were taken\u2014you and all the other dragons who are our brethren. We are all kin, we dragons. We are all beings of destiny.\"\n\nAt the precipice of the most profound loss, I now experienced an unrestrained joy without equal. <I had a mother, and she hadn't forsaken me. She had never forgotten me.> A hole in my being, of which I'd been only vaguely aware, was suddenly filled. There was nothing a child lost in the dark desired more than this, and here it was laid before me. Perhaps today was a good day to die after all, but for a different reason\u2014today I could die happy. Of the infinite questions that flooded in my mind, I asked the most mundane, indulging the unanswered mystery that had lingered since I'd become aware of my true self: \"What is my name?\"\n\n\"Only humans would think it the place of the parents to give a name that carries through a lifetime. Dragons\u2014free dragons\u2014earn their names. Our name changes over our lives, as we change. A true dragon's name will grow over time, a failure will be called less. The greatest of us have many names. Earn yours.\"\n\n\"What are you called, Mother?\"\n\nHer eyes flashed and a trilled song escaped her mouth\u2014or part of one. It was a melody of sounds, conjured from deep in her throat. I shivered at its power, its reassurance, but most of all its determination. Just hearing the sound made me want to roar with hope. This was her true name. It was a song of light against the void.\n\n\"In Avian, it would be perhaps, 'Bring Forth the Dawn', or something like it. Even Avian cannot capture the true meaning of a dragon name.\"\n\n\"Where is your mate\u2014my father?\"\n\nMy mother allowed her eyelids to close. I thought she might not answer me, but finally her eyes opened again, and she spoke. \"He was on Veralon, if he still lives, but do not bother to seek him. What is left of our kind there is just a wild, lost colony, driven to madness. He is one of those now, a wild creature without thought. His spirit has left him, as it has left the others. Their minds did not survive the shattering that changed magic. I thought I could help them, but they are beyond my power. Perhaps there will be a way to restore them one day, but I will not live to see that dawn.\" Her eyes which had glowed so brightly faded. My throat clenched as the unspeakable pain she felt, which I could do nothing to salve.\n\n\"But if my father is this way, then why would you\u2026 you know\u2026 mate with him\" I wasn't sure if this was a polite question among free dragons.\n\nI think she would've laughed if she had the strength. \"We females are the more generous gender, but there is no time to teach you that lesson. Let me say simply, there were none other suitable. No other dragon would understand my path on the Way other than those lost ones clinging to life on Veralon.\" An ugly cough came from her throat as she spoke the last. After sucking in a long, pained breath, my mother spoke again. \"We are the last of our kind, my son. The last of the ember dragons. The remaining light of this world is slowly dying. Everything depends on us, as it always did.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\nMy mother's eyes fluttered shut, even as she struggled to keep them open. Both my hearts stopped until her eyelids rose again. \"Save them\u2014your sister, the other dragons, the other life of this world, even the humans \u2026 they are all in peril.\"\n\n\"Humans?\" I said the word with contempt. They were the cause of all of this.\n\nDespite what had just happened, my mother had more kindness in her than I did. Even though her hatchling daughter had just been stolen. <Her daughter, my sister.> She drew on some deep reserve of will. Her voice strengthened, her eyes glowed a bit brighter. \"They are not all evil. Some helped me. Some helped you. The humans here tried their best \u2026 risked much to try to free you. Without humans, you would still be enslaved.\"\n\nI couldn't believe that. Humans cared only for themselves. Certainly, none ever risked their lives for a dragon. \"A human helped me?\"\n\n\"More than helped\u2014sacrificed,\" my mother told me. \"Those runes on your chest \u2026 they were a secret of dragons, stolen by humans.\"\n\n\"Stolen?\"\n\n\"The magic was stolen from our kind, now it is used to enslave and destroy. It is part of something vast, something for us. But the rune magic, such a powerful magic, even I didn't suspect \u2026 It took so long to find a way to undo it. Even then, I could only give you a chance at freedom with the thorns. I didn't understand their power either \u2026 but that is not important now. You had to claim your chance, and you did. But the humans made it possible. One most of all.\"\n\n\"Who?\" I dreaded her reply. Already I suspected.\n\nMy mother hesitated, as if she suspected she was about to cause me pain. \"Jona.\"\n\nThe air in my nostrils became sour and poisonous. I'd killed the man who had tried to save me. A human who had known my mother, and I'd killed him. It couldn't be true. I didn't want it to be true. \"He was like the others. A bit kinder, but still a ryder,\" I insisted. Even as I spoke, I knew I was wrong, but still I kept speaking like the idiot I'd shown myself to be. \"His kindness was only to bring me food and drink. To even be a ryder, he would've had to have passed the Tell. He could not have been there to help me.\"\n\n\"I sense such powerful emotion in you\u2014grief, fear, and much else besides.\" I couldn't tell if she approved or not. A twinkle seeped into my mother's stricken gaze. \"The humans of Rolm may think themselves masters of the rune magic, but they would be wrong in that vanity. These Sculptors are mere imitators\u2014we are the masters. When Jona submitted to the Tell of the human Sculptors, he carried an item of magic made by the enchanters of this island that shielded his thoughts. He is bound by nothing. With this and the aid of my magic, Jona easily ascended the Arrow Peak to win the Rite to replace your dead ryder. Only once he had won the right to be bound to you could we risk him trying to free you. Any other ryder would've sensed your mind awakening and told the Sculptors.\"\n\n\"Jona never spoke of any of this.\" I said it desperately.\n\n\"Of course not. You were a slave. If it didn't work, you would've exposed him, and he'd have been killed. The sacrifices we made would've been for nothing.\"\n\n\"Even if the Tell could be beaten, the runes are carved into us \u2026 these chains of magic that control us. How is such power defeated?\"\n\n\"Not defeated, but... reduced for a time. To give you a chance.\" My mother paused. This time, not from pain. I think she was reluctant to continue, but she did. \"A very special material\u2014it resembles a plant\u2014was brought here \u2026 at great cost.\" Her voice failed her. Only after a painful breath did my mother speak again. \"The humans call it aurathorn. The archive speaks of it by a different name \u2026 it is said to be ancient as this world, infused with the power of the last one... a relic that can dampen the power of magic. I hoped it might work on the control-runes where no other magic could. The people of this island have some knowledge, some lore of our kind. They knew where to obtain aurathorn, when even I thought it lost forever, when even the great archive offered no clues.\" My mother sucked in a breath that must've been painful. \"They agreed to help.\"\n\n\"This aurathorn can break the control-runes?\"\n\n\"Maybe in its true, original form it could do this.\" I didn't understand what she meant, but I didn't dare interrupt. \"The aurathorn vine I obtained for you only gave you an opportunity\u2014a chance for your will to assert itself. The rest was up to you. For years, we failed. Some thought we had been tricked, that aurathorn wouldn't work after the initial light of its thorns faded in those first days. But I believed there was enough power left for you to break free.\"\n\nI thought of Jona's late night visits, of fish he had brought me. How he'd tried to engage me in conversation, in stories and history. It hadn't worked. My mind had been stuck. Had he slipped the aurathorn into my food even before that? It seemed likely. But nothing had made a difference to my trapped mind, until the ale.\n\nIt was too much. \"Why would humans help free dragons?\"\n\nMy mother stared at me, a look that carried a lifetime of regret. \"What is important is that they did. It was a great risk for both those who volunteered and our kind, as well. The decision I made... know that I had to follow the Way. Such a price \u2026\" The breath left her, and a dribble of blood leaked from her mouth. Both her eyes fixed upon me. \"But here you are. Free.\"\n\nA hole had opened in my stomach so large that every scrap of food I'd eaten for the past two days should've been pouring out of it. \"At what price?\"\n\nMy mother's eyes faded. I was losing her. \"The Way dragons follow demands that we do what we must for something greater than ourselves.\"\n\n\"The Way?\"\n\nHer eyes shut again. \"It is not for you. Your mind is different. You must find your own path. It is destiny that you return to me now, just as your sister has been stolen.\"\n\nI had almost forgotten the hatchling. My sister!\n\nMy mother sucked in a noisy, difficult breath. \"Save her. In the clutches of the worst among us \u2026\" Her voice trailed off and again her eyes shut. I knew she was not gone, though. Her chest heaved with effort, but she still had strength. \"Only you can save her now.\"\n\nI still didn't understand that part. And I was no use to anyone. \"I'm nothing, Mother. I can't fly, I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"You have power, my child. You are an ember dragon.\"\n\nI knew my mother drew upon an incredible will just to keep herself alive, to give me this time with her. There was so much I wanted to ask, and even some things I wanted to tell. I cursed time, as it escaped. I raged that I'd been denied the opportunity to know the remarkable being beside me. She knew so much; she had such power. \"That song\u2014you have magic, but I know nothing of it.\"\n\nMy mother's eyes became dark as the night, with only a faint light shining near the center. \"You can be\u2014\"\n\nShe never finished. She never spoke again.\n\nAn arrow plunged through my mother's eye, an arrow that stole the last of her life and robbed me of whatever knowledge she would've had time to pass onto me. The arrow of a human. Fired by Brindisi.\n\nI spun in a mad spasm of fury, an anger without equal. The human was crouched a hundred human paces away, a Mizu bow in his hand. I leapt across the distance, roaring with hatred so intense that my limbs trembled. My eyes burned with the light of the flaming sun. From my tail to my nose, I was rage given form. I was death.\n\n\"Bayloo, stop!\"\n\nA force as strong as the Mizu wizard's lightning struck me; carved into my body was my vulnerability, a chink in my armor that I could not mend. Brindisi had poured every bit of his will into the command, the power surging across the inseverable link between our minds. He held the chain of my collar. His mind choked my will, struggling for a master's dominance over his wayward slave. But I fought. I was a dragon. I faced his onslaught of will. I'd beaten back his commands earlier. I could do so again.\n\nI think Brindisi knew I wouldn't break from force alone, so he spoke to me, his words echoing inside of me. \"The twisted lies of that other dragon have confused you. Remember your mission. Remember your duty. You exist to serve.\"\n\nTo serve. Always, I had served. I remembered my service, my training, and the humiliation that came with it: the heeling, the saddle, the locked cave-prison, the scraps they fed us. I remembered the battles and the deaths of my brethren as they fell in service to their masters.\n\nI had no duty to humans.\n\nSlaves knew only the brute force of a master's command. I managed to slip from the fog of slavery that held so many of us. Others had died so that I might be reborn. Jona had died. If I bowed, all they had given would be for nothing. I pushed myself; Brindisi's will was like an avalanche, a constant pounding on my exhausted mind. Still, I struggled toward him. I moved a mountain with each step. Closer and closer.\n\n\"Bayloo, stop.\" I didn't obey.\n\nHe yelled it again, with just a hint of fear. \"Stop.\"\n\nPain coursed through me, my blood was fire, my eyes bled. But still I came at him\u2014this human who had killed my mother\u2014this human who may have also killed Jona rather than allowed him to heal.\n\nMy shadow fell over Brindisi. He didn't stop trying to bring me to heel, but he was also no fool. Through the bridge that joined us, I sensed his desperation. He raised the Mizu bow, taking aim at my face.\n\nI stopped. Not because I had to, or because he commanded me, but because at that moment, I wished to stop.\n\n\"Why do you enslave us?\"\n\nI watched Brindisi's eyes, his hand, the tension of his pulsing jaw. His mouth stayed clamped shut; his chest heaved. I thought he might just fire his arrow, but something stayed his attack. I forced myself to be patient. Eventually, this servant of the human king answered me. \"Your kind are destroyers. You would set the world ablaze, as you did before.\"\n\nIt wasn't the answer I expected.\n\n\"How would you know this?\"\n\n\"It is written in the Book of Ages. We humans can write, we can record our knowledge. We know history, which gives us wisdom. The Sisters of Haven saw the evil of your kind and so granted us the power to control you. And controlled you must be, all of you. But you can still be useful. In service you can find honor. It is not too late, even for you.\" He lowered his bow. He tried to tempt me with an offer. \"I know you want to get that hatchling. So do I. We must pursue the Mizu. They may be at sea already, but we must stop them. They must not escape beyond the Wall of Fire. Together we can do it.\"\n\nThat was as close as Brindisi could come to decency: A mission to kill. He pushed at me once again, a last, desperate surge of will commanding me to drop to the ground, to kneel to him. To be ridden once again.\n\nThat wasn't going to happen.\n\n\"Did you kill Jona?\" I came closer. \"Did you kill him so you could claim me as your slave?\"\n\nBrindisi's eyes narrowed. His lips said no, but the link between us allowed me to sense that he hid something from me. I pushed for the truth he wanted to conceal, but he laughed at me. His thoughts remained clouded.\n\nBrindisi gritted his teeth. \"I hadn't thought it possible. You attempt to read my mind \u2026 clever beast.\"\n\nI came at him again with my own will, seeking his protected memories, but he was on his guard. Whatever secret he held about Jona, he wished to deny it to me. But I knew Brindisi well enough to know that he would kill to get what he wanted\u2014even a fellow ryder. In a flash I saw it, and I knew what Brindisi had done. It had been so easy to snuff out the ember of Jona's life, helpless as he was on the sickbed where my own selfishness had put him. A hate hotter than any inferno mountain ignited inside me. Brindisi sensed my blood lust, my desire to kill the slayer of those I cared for, and he realized he would never again command me. In that moment, he attacked.\n\nI moved faster than he did, coming down on him with my open jaw. He tried to raise his bow, but I had my teeth around him before he could pull back the arrow. I bit down, crushing his ribs between my teeth. I did it again and again. Thankfully, he had lost his armor in the lake. Brindisi's blood gushed into my mouth. I ground his bones and his flesh until there was nothing recognizable about my former ryder. Then I swallowed him.\n\nAfter all my waiting, it turned out that humans tasted like chicken.\n\nWhat a disappointment."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "I returned to my mother's side.\n\nIt hurt even to look at her, but I did. Dried blood stained her face; the warmth of life had fled her body. The enormity of my loss paralyzed me. How quickly I'd gone from a place of sublime hope to bottomless despair. I nudged my mother gently, not quite believing that she was truly gone forever. She stayed dead.\n\nI released a deafening roar, a sound of mourning and loss, of longing for what might have been. I hollered until my lungs were empty. At the very end, my rage turned to something like a song, my tone turning from grief to anger about what had been taken from me\u2014stolen by the humans. When I finally stopped, and the valley became quiet again, I realized I was not alone. Other creatures had gathered. A dozen wolf-eagles, their heads a beautiful shade of silver, perched above on the rim on the mountain, staring down at the scene. Those birds were dangerous, even to a dragon if they attacked as a pack, but these seemed to have no interest in fighting. From the trees came boars and goats, and even a mountain lion, which should've sent the other less fearsome animals to flight but had not. I didn't understand quite what had drawn them here\u2014lesser creatures, all of them\u2014but I was nevertheless grateful for the respect on my mother's behalf. I bowed my head in acknowledgement.\n\nI stared once at the body of my mother. She had given me so much during the scant time we'd had together. I was grateful for the knowledge and the lore, and to finally have heard her name spoken. To have her ripped from me was a pain unrivaled in the world. I lay flat on the ground next to her, wishing I could be even closer. I was a child in need of warmth, but there was none to be had here. Instead, I sang a farewell, a melody deep and sad. At the end, I learned something else: Dragons' eyes do sometimes leak water.\n\nI rose to take a last look at my mother. She had freed me, but my kin were not so fortunate. They would live out their lives as slaves, unless I changed that.\n\nIf I'd been a fire-breather I would've set my mother alight. That seemed the right thing to do, the proper thing for a dragon. But I lacked the ability, as did she. We were something else. In our brief time together she'd given me that precious knowledge. I wasn't a freak or a misfit. I wasn't an ash dragon at all. I was an ember dragon (or at least half of one, since I didn't know my father). I had never heard of such a thing before this day, and apparently neither had the human Keepers. We were something different, something special.\n\nUsing the last of my strength, I dragged my mother's body to the lake, bringing her as deep as my claws allowed. The gentle water covered her. She deserved better, but at least it was something better than being left in the open for the bird scavengers.\n\nWhat now?\n\nI possessed free will. I'd proven it against everything Brindisi had thrown against me. No human, nor any other creature, would ever command my mind again. I could choose my course, but I lacked a guide.\n\nWhat would my mother have wanted me to do?\n\nShe would not have wanted me to waste time mourning her. She had spoken of The Way of dragons. I didn't understand precisely what she meant, but I sensed it was some kind of code of conduct for my kind. Leaking water was unlikely to be part of its teaching. I would spend no more time this day dwelling on my loss.\n\nI would honor the dead with my actions. I would give meaning to my mother's last words, and what I knew to be her first wish of me: I would save my sister. I would not allow another dragon to fall into slavery. The sweet vengeance of killing the wizard and all the other humans who had been a part of murdering my mother was just a convenient benefit.\n\nThere was the matter of my battered body to contend with. Reluctantly, I forced my wing to move as I stretched my neck to examine the tear. What had begun as a tiny injury, no bigger than a human pinky finger, had grown to a length of twice that of one of my claws. I could do nothing about that. I tended to the other wounds I could reach.\n\nI plucked as many of the arrows from my scales as I could manage, yanking them out with my digits or my teeth. I accidently broke one shaft but got the others, except for two implanted on my backside. There was nothing to be done about my injured hind leg. Either I would survive, and it would heal, or I wouldn't.\n\nI took a bit of water from the lake to wet my throat, then dragged myself with my three good legs to the end of the valley. With my jaw clenched, I started to climb the rock face using my working legs. The mountain's surface was more brittle than that of the cliffs above Eladrell, and it didn't offer the benefit of carved staircases. I had to sink my claws deep into the stone crevices to pull myself upward. The pain inside somehow gave me strength. Each moment I delayed made the chances of finding my sister more remote. A trail of blood leaked behind me, but I would not fail to reach the top. Claw after claw I climbed until I was there.\n\nOnce atop the Kraken, I had a vantage point to search the seas in every direction. My eyes remained intact. I hunted my quarry.\n\nI hoped the Mizu would be delayed leaving the island. There had been no ship within sight when I'd arrived, which meant there must have been a prearranged retrieval time. Or the wizard was able to signal the ship. With any normal vessel that would've given me plenty of time. They'd be below at the sole harbor, waiting my pleasure to destroy them, or die trying. But Mizu ships were different from all others\u2014they moved with uncanny swiftness. No one knew how they did it, but having experienced the strength of their wizard's power, I guessed it had to do with magic. But as fast as the Mizu waveships could travel, they couldn't match the speed of a dragon in flight. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fly at the moment.\n\nI reached my desired vantage point and realized that my speed (or lack of it) didn't matter. I saw no ship, Mizu or otherwise, only the monotonous churn of the sea's waves. I kept searching, scrutinizing every current, every shadow, every ripple of water in each direction. There was nothing. I unleashed an ugly roar of frustration. Even the Mizu could not have moved so quickly. They were still men, wingless, and therefore shackled to the ground or the ocean.\n\nThe wolf-eagles who had come to my mother's vigil flew out from behind me. They squawked as they plied the sky. I could only guess if they spoke to me or each other. The pack moved with an easy grace, their feathered wings barely moving as they rode the wind to whatever place they called home. The darkness of my mood lessened slightly at their passage. To my surprise, they chose a flight path closer to sea, rather than toward the clouds as I would've expected, breaking their tight formation as they flew. The birds moved in a southern direction, each keeping in a tight pack formation worthy of their land-bound wolf cousins. I had thought of these birds as lesser creatures, because they did not think as I could, but they knew their task better than I in this instance. Of the dozen wolf-eagles, eleven continued on their path without interruption. One disappeared into nothingness. No predator had claimed her\u2014one moment she flew, the next she had vanished into the horizon. Then she appeared again, untouched and seemingly unaware of what had just transpired. But I knew: Another of the wizard's illusions.\n\nOne of the birds circled back toward me. I thought it bowed its head, or maybe I imagined it. But I preferred to believe the bird had acted intentionally. Even a feathered flier understood the need for vengeance.\n\nI fixed on the point where the lone wolf-eagle had disappeared, imagining the distance from that point to where she had reappeared. Within that area I knew I'd find a ship and a wizard. The vessel would be moving swiftly, so I didn't give it more thought than that. I intended to destroy that ship and every human aboard. Some portion of my mind struggled to remind me I could barely move my wings; and even if I could glide to the vessel, there would still be the matter of getting back to shore again. Those pesky details arose from the cowardly part of me. I had no time for such thoughts. Needles of fiery pain erupted as I attempted to unfurl my wings. The agony swept through me. I fought it off with an image of my mother's corpse. That pain was nothing compared to what I planned to inflict on the Mizu wizard. I spread my wings as far as I could, then I leapt from the mountain toward the sea.\n\nI made full use of the altitude of the Kraken's peak to angle myself toward the unseen target. I pulled my wings back and straightened my neck, becoming an arrow in the sky. The pain intensified, then numbed\u2014an advantage of being a dragon. It also meant the injury worsened further still. I didn't care. I would be fury.\n\nThe emerald water drew closer quickly. No ship had yet been revealed. Anyone watching would've thought me mad as I fell toward the depths. I didn't consider changing my course. I couldn't have slowed myself without further damaging my wing anyway.\n\nAbout three heartbeats before I hit the water, the elusive Mizu ship appeared, as if someone had ripped a veil from my eyes. I gave silent thanks to the wolf-eagle who'd assisted me with my prey. I intended to make this opportunity count. Unfortunately, speed had a cost that sheer willpower could not overcome. My trajectory was going to send me into the sea rather than give me an opportunity to crash into the ship, as I'd intended. I shifted and twisted and did all the things that I'd been born to do. If my wings had both been whole, if one of my hind legs hadn't been shambles, I might've been able to make the necessary adjustment. My injured body couldn't do it. I had enough time to glance at the grim faces of the Mizu archers on deck as I smashed into the cold waves.\n\nUnlike my previous unintentional swim in the lake, I was prepared this time. Rather than flail about as I had in the water of Maricopa, I took full advantage of my speed and momentum. I had missed destroying the Mizu, but their ship's hull was directly in front me in the water\u2014its unprotected hull. Even better, beneath the surface, there was no ballista, no archers, no mage. I was like a leviathan hunting in the depths (except leviathans were decent swimmers). With my wings tucked to my back, I pointed my head toward the Mizu ship.\n\nEven with the tremendous force accumulated from my dive off the mountain, I was barely faster than the ship, and my speed was fading. Fortunately, my entry angle had sent me at the Mizu's starboard side, otherwise they would've outrun me. Even leviathans couldn't match the speed of a Mizu waveship. I was certain that I was the first human or dragon to ever confront a Mizu vessel from beneath the surface. I was also the first to discover the secret of their waveship's speed: slaves.\n\nFrom the bow of the craft extended two chains of enchanted gold, each a twin of the other in thickness and length. Secured to the far end of each of the tethers were ghastrays. The creatures were almost invisible, their skin and most of their internal organs translucent in the murky water. Only the glow of their eyes and edge of their fins revealed their eerie presence. And the noise.\n\nBefore this moment, I'd only seen pieces of the ghastrays I'd killed in battle. None of those had involved me diving in the sea because I hadn't really been interested in swimming, particularly with things that wanted to kill me. Seeing the creatures alive and moving did nothing to improve their appearance. I figured the powers of Haven probably made them nearly invisible for a reason. Except for their stealthy coloring, ghastrays bore some resemblance to giant mundane stingrays with the notable exception of their heads, which were like nothing else to be found on sea, land, or air. They had the mouths of gigantic worms (round and large), the eyes of spiders (six altogether), and the esthetic beauty of sea squids (none). Each of the slave-ghastrays had a tail longer than mine, but as thin and fearsome as a whip. From prior encounters, I knew those things shot poison, in the sea and into the air. These creatures were more dangerous than leviathans because they came in packs, and they were far more cunning. I'd not imagined that they could ever be made into slaves, much less the equivalent of underwater oxen to pull a ship. Perhaps someone had once thought the same of dragons. Humans excelled at stealing the power of others.\n\nThe sea vibrated with the ghastrays' calls or cries or whatever it was that the creatures did with those hideous mouths. The noise made my throat clench\u2014it was worse than a drunken human singing about the wondrous taste of potatoes. One of the ghastrays moved its head in my direction as I neared and at least three of its bulging eyes fixed upon me. My own gaze was on those deadly tails. Those were formidable weapons against even an airborne adversary. In the water, I wouldn't have any chance. But they didn't attack. Slaves did as they were told, nothing more.\n\nI closed on the ship, maneuvering myself toward the surface just as I reached it. I jumped out of the water with a kick of my legs, getting enough lift to sink my claws onto the vessel's low-lying deck. It wasn't an elegant pose; I probably resembled a dog trying to climb onto a table to grab dinner scraps, except my jaws weren't cute. The first thing I grabbed was a Mizu sailor between my teeth. I bit him in half and flung the carcass into the sea. Other Mizu scrambled to either side of the deck. I kicked the hull with my functional hind leg, expecting to punch a hole, but the planks held\u2014that damn Mizu resin. I tried again before giving up. There were plenty of other ways to take this ship down.\n\nA ballista on the foredeck swung around in my direction. I was ready for that. My tail came up from the depths, curling behind the men trying to put an arc bolt into my head, knocking their feet out from under them with a single swipe. On the way back, I swept them off the deck into the sea. Archers fired as I pulled the rest of my bulk onto the deck. It was a testament to the fine construction of the vessel that my weight neither sunk nor capsized the ship, but the arrows kept coming and I wasn't enjoying it. Three sharp tips stuck into my scales. A few intrepid fighters had even drawn swords, but there was still no sign of the wizard. Or my sister.\n\nI went after the Mizu crew before they organized themselves. My tail swept to the rear, as I bit and clawed at a concentration of seamen and archers massed on the foredeck. That was too easy. I crushed two more Mizu in my jaws, perforated three with my claws, and knocked most of the rest into the sea. My tail bashed at the deck and anyone foolish enough to approach me from behind. I roared as I fought. There was anger in that cry, but I also hoped my sister was near, and she would hear me and answer. The only reply I got were the noises of panicked humans as I devastated their ship.\n\nI spun on the deck to face a final group of archers. I blocked an arrow headed for my eye with a foreleg, but another struck me just above the jawline before I bit the archer's head off. I was going to look like a porcupine at the end of this\u2014if there was an end to this. I kept inflicting carnage.\n\nThe waveship wasn't large. Soon the deck was empty except for bodies, abandoned weapons, and some debris that had once been the railing and wheelhouse of the vessel. I smashed my tail into the deck. It held for three strikes, but even the Mizu's resin-treated wood wasn't indestructible; it gave way to my furious strength. My claws finished the work, peeling back the planks the way the humans ate oranges (I like them too, except I hated the outer skin, and nobody would peel them for me).\n\nI was thorough\u2014I didn't just rip up the center deck. I ravaged the bow and stern as well. As I methodically searched the Mizu ship, I came across its unusual steering mechanism (I'd destroyed enough ships to have an understanding of the general construction of human vessels). Apart from being located at the bow of the ship, the wheel of the Mizu ship wasn't a wheel at all. Instead, the ship's controls appeared to be a pair of rods that intersected to form a single handle near the top. The instrumentation glittered with what I presumed to be some kind of enchantment\u2014this was how the humans commanded the captive ghastray-slaves chained below. I gazed back toward Maricopa, barely visible even to me in the distance. My digits are agile enough that I could've used the controls to turn the vessel. But I didn't. Touching those mechanisms meant controlling creatures that didn't want to be controlled, the same way I'd been controlled. Ghastrays might be a bunch of vicious killers, but I liked slavers even less. I stared at the helm and vowed never to become what I hated most in this world, whatever the cost. If I died, I would do so free, with\u2026 well, if not honor, then a clear conscience. Instead, I ripped off more of the deck around the control mechanism, exposing the golden chains that led from the ship's bow down to the ghastrays. These were the Mizu version of control-runes. With an angry snort, I shoved a claw from each leg into two of the interlocking rings and ripped it apart. The chain broke easily. I enjoyed the taste of bestowing liberation, even if the first creatures I'd set free were ghastrays who would kill me if I gave them the chance. This noble task completed, I resumed ripping the Mizu ship apart.\n\nThere were living quarters below the main deck, but no humans and no sign of my sister. I kept destroying, smashing the vessel piece by piece even as my hearts wobbled with fear about what I wasn't finding. After disassembling the crew quarters, I ripped still more deck away, accessing the ship's main hold. It was filled with weapons, nets, chains, and human foodstuffs. Finally, in a dark corner of the hull, hid the wizard. His mirror-like robe shown even in the faint light, not that he could've hidden from me anyway. Live humans smell differently than dead ones.\n\nHe was bent over a chest made of a black wood that I'd never previously encountered, a black orb of glass in one hand. For a moment, I thought it was some kind of weapon, but he dropped it as soon as he realized he'd been discovered. He couldn't hide. It was time to fight.\n\nThe wizard's hand twirled and his eyes glowed. I had no intention of enduring another lightning strike. I struck with force, intended to smash the wizard before he could end me. The little man was quicker. He dove out the way just my claw collided with the spot he stood in a moment earlier. I hit the outer hull instead. The wood cracked and I lurched downward, off balance. My attack had been quick, but sloppy. Now, I was vulnerable.\n\nThe wizard waved his hands and the air heated. A tendril of wind came at me\u2014a small one. Nothing like what I'd experienced on Maricopa. Indeed, I can fart a bigger gust. The spell washed over me without noticeable effect. I snarled in contempt, realizing the only thing this cowardly Mizu mage had in common with the more powerful wizard I'd faced on Maricopa was a similar robe. His eyes were the wrong color, and they were filled with fear. I knocked him from his feet with my tail, then pinned him to the ground with a claw. Sea water was coming through the hole I'd made in the bottom of the ship. It surrounded him up to his ears.\n\nI lowered my head close to my prisoner.\n\n\"Where is the hatchling?\"\n\nI let my saliva drip all over him.\n\nThe minor wizard closed his eyes, mumbling some sounds I couldn't decipher. The words sounded memorized. He wasn't trying to speak to me. I asked my question once again. When he failed to answer, I stuck a claw through his belly. His quivered violently as he died, a fate he deserved. This one had barely been worth my time to kill.\n\nWhere is the real wizard?\n\nThere wasn't much left of the ship but debris. I had no place left to look. I'd failed. Again.\n\nI roared my grief. This one was probably loud enough to be heard in Eladrell. It might have been my final farewell. My wings were broken. I was stuck on this sinking ship."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "My sister was gone.\n\nOr she'd never been on the ship at all. That Mizu wizard had beaten me again, and probably for the last time. I would soon be testing my swimming prowess again and this time I didn't like my chances.\n\nMy experience in the lake had taught me a few things, mostly that I wasn't as adept a swimmer as I'd fancied myself when my only experience had been watching ducks. I'd survived the lake, but the sea was considerably deeper, and it had big waves along with strong currents. Running and gliding along the bottom wasn't going to work this far from shore. I probably shouldn't have set those ghastrays free. They could've pulled the ship back to Maricopa.\n\n<Isn't it perfect that my one selfless act is going to end up getting me killed?>\n\nThe only choice was to try to fly. I wasn't optimistic about how that would work out, but it was fly or die. For my sister, I would endure the pain of trying.\n\nI climbed out of the ship's hold, back onto the remnants of the deck. The highest, driest part was the foredeck, where the ballista had once been situated. I stood upon the rotating mount of the giant weapon and judged the distance back to Maricopa. I could've flown there easily if I'd been my usual self, but I wasn't.\n\nI tried spreading my wings. The pain had been mostly turned off, but even without the constant agony to remind me, I knew that my right wing was a disaster. The jagged tear stretched almost a third of its entire length. I closed my eyes, feeling the wind. The gusts were at my back at least, but I doubted I could even lift myself. If I'd been on this ship a day ago, I'm not sure I would've cared if I died. Meeting my mother and my sister had changed that. I had an inkling of who I was. I had blood kin that needed me. I had a purpose. I didn't want to die, which was just so human.\n\nI clenched my jaw and thrust my wings. Or at least I tried. I got airborne\u2014a little. I flapped as best I could, struggling to lift myself. I pushed desperately, but with all my efforts I only managed to lift myself a tail length above the waves. I wasn't going to make it, but I tried anyway. I pushed until my chest burned and my head spun. I thought of my mother and sister, and all my brethren back in Eladrell who would be condemned if I failed. I fed on the anger; I didn't quit, but my body had its limits. I tired, slowing until there was nothing left to give. Then, I fell into water, too exhausted to repeat my futile attempts at swimming. I sank, falling through the depths, the water growing colder and darker as I went down. The chill seeped to my body, banishing the burning fire in my wings.\n\nIt was a relief to not have to fight anymore.\n\nAt the very end, my mind failed me. I saw visions of the unreal, of frightening creatures coming up beneath me, of moving through the water into the light, of land, of rock and solid ground. Finally, I succumbed to darkness.\n\nI awoke to someone tickling my nose.\n\n<Who in the Abyss does that?>\n\nI opened my eyes to find a tail in my face, and not a pretty dragon tail. It was a ghastray's tail, stinger and all. I brought up my own tail ready to fight, but I faced no adversary. I lay on a rocky beach, the massive form of the Kraken looming nearby. Stars lit the sky. A ghastray floated in the shallows of the beach, it strange body seeming to hover within the glittering waves, somehow unaffected by the tides. All six of its eyes stared at me, unblinking. I stared back. It no longer was shackled with the golden Mizu slave chain, but I had no doubt this was one of the ghastrays I had freed from the waveship. Otherwise, it would have been feasting on my carcass.\n\nThe ghastray's frightening head rose above the water. \"A life for a life, dragon.\" It spoke Avian, although its voice sounded like a very old human talking with a mouth full of stones. I wondered how the creature came to understand the language. It seemed the ghastrays were far more formidable than anyone\u2014including me\u2014had thought.\n\nI tried to be polite. \"My thanks for saving me.\"\n\nGhastrays weren't into polite. \"When next we meet, I will consume your hearts.\"\n\nIt seemed that this would not be a lasting friendship. I didn't care. This creature had knowledge I desperately needed.\n\n\"Where is the other dragon\u2014the hatchling?\" I had trouble speaking, but the ghastray understood well enough.\n\nThe nearly invisible creature before me sounded like it was choking on fishbones for a moment. Perhaps, I'd insulted it by asking it a question. Its mouth twitched, and each eye opened and shut in succession. \"Two man-boats, dragon.\"\n\nIt was my turn to choke. I'd had attacked the wrong vessel. \"That wizard has many tricks.\"\n\n\"Drasu.\" Even by the standard of a talking ghastray, the word came out with chilling hatred. \"I shall eat his heart and that of his children. He and all the slavers will die.\"\n\n<Drasu.>\n\nMy mother had said the same word. It was a name\u2014the name of her killer. She had known the wizard. That was important. It told me my mother had once dwelled across the Wall of Fire.\n\nThere could be no mistaking the creature's malevolence toward the mage. I was okay with that. \"I will help you find him, and you may have him to feast upon. Humans taste like old chicken.\"\n\nMore choking noises followed from the six-eyed creature. \"We are done, dragon.\"\n\nHe sunk beneath the water. I hurried toward him even though it hurt to move, splashing into the shallow water. \"Wait.\"\n\nThe ghastray raised its tail out of the water, warning me to keep my distance. The poison tip twitched. I was in no condition to fight, but my need was great. \"The ship heads west, back to the home of the Mizu. How do you intend to cross the Wall of Fire?\"\n\nThe ghastray's tail twirled in a circle, reminding me of an angry hornet. It took all of my self-restraint to remain still. After the third circuit of its poisonous stinger, the ghastray's head came back to the surface, its' beady eyes opening and shutting one after the other. \"For this answer, a debt is owed to us. You agree, dragon?\"\n\nIt was just my luck that I had freed a ghastray who could not only speak but was a mercenary trader of its knowledge. I couldn't imagine what this sea creature might ask of me, but I needed its information. If I couldn't cross the Wall of Fire, my sister was lost forever. \"Agreed.\"\n\n\"Seek out the crescent island changed by the lost humans. To find it, fly from here directly toward the tip of the setting sun. That place\u2026 is different than the others. There, the billowing smoke of the fire peaks is false. It may smell the same to your stretched dragon snout, you may feel peril, but it is only your mind tricking you. In that place only, you may pass through the so-called Wall of Fire.\" It dipped its head beneath the water. I thought our conversation concluded, but it rose once again. \"Remember, dragon. A debt is owed.\" Its eyes looked at the horizon. \"Your kin come for you. Through the night they fly. Our time is at an end, but first I would know your name, dragon.\"\n\nI thought of my mother's words, about how we dragons earned our names. Had I earned anything? I was free, but even that might not have been something I had done on my own. I'd failed to free my sister, or even find her. My greatest accomplishment in my life was freeing two ghastrays, and I wasn't going to name myself that. I wasn't yet worthy of a dragon name.\n\n\"The humans call me Bayloo.\" I dipped my head slightly (very slightly). \"Have you a name?\"\n\nThe noise that came from the ghastray's mouth was a horrific mix of a cock's crow and the crash of a great wave against a sheer cliff. \"In human-speak, I can be called Vengeance.\"\n\nI had to admit, it was an excellent name, particularly for a freed slave. One day, I would earn myself something even better (and more original).\n\nVengeance blinked his many eyes at me, then submerged. A moment later, the waves of the sea were my only companion on the shore. I craned my neck, searching the skies for the dragons that Vengeance had foretold. I didn't have to wait long before I heard them coming from the north\u2014the magnificent sound of dragon wings pushing through the air. I stared anxiously at the giant form of the Kraken until they appeared above it: two giant ash dragons set against the night's low clouds, human ryders on their backs. As graceful as they looked in flight, sadness came along with them. These were my brethren, and they were slaves. They had barely known any other life.\n\nI would change that, but only if the humans were stupid enough to rescue me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "I blacked out.\n\nThat was how my brother Lothar found me\u2014face down on the beach. My sister Narsis accompanied him, along with their ryders. I always liked Narsis. Slave dragons weren't usually social with each other, but there was something in her manner that gave me the impression that she would've been kind, but for the runes carved into her.\n\nThe scent of dragon pulled me from my stupor. In the moment before I opened my eyes, I dared to hope that my mother's death had been a terrible dream, but the grim scene around me was all too real. A pair of humans with different colored hair but nearly identical scowls stared at me as their slave dragons looked obediently behind their masters.\n\nThe blond ryder's eye fixed on the blood dripping on my torso. \"Bayloo, what happened here?\"\n\nI wasn't ready to answer that question, particularly from a ryder. I closed my eyes again, intending to feign unconsciousness. Instead, I really did slip back into a void of delirium as my body shut down, devoting all its energy to healing.\n\nI have some recollection of my fellow dragons carrying me in their claws back to DragonPeak, which must've been a challenging display of flying. I wouldn't have thought Narsis and Lothar could've managed by themselves. Another dragon must have assisted, but I didn't remember that part.\n\nI awoke in my cave, battered, but not yet broken. Pain roused me from my slumber, the sour odor of humans clogging my nostrils. I kept my eyes shut. More sniffing and listening told me that three humans scurried about nearby.\n\nWhile all humans stink, they do it differently. I recognized Lisaam Payne's distinctive rotting onion scent, but the other humans weren't familiar to my nose. One reeked of the sour-sweet fragrance of alaga flowers, which grow in higher attitudes and are prized by female humans. The other person smelled of blood\u2014my blood. A few sharp stabs of pain on my wing later, I realized that someone was sewing my wing with a needle and sutures made of sheep guts. Apparently, I'd bled all over the place. The work being performed hurt, but compared to what I'd been through, that pain was a mere nuisance. The fact my body was again letting me feel pain meant I'd been healing.\n\nSweet-Flower stood near the sewing person. Based on the various sensations, I deduced that Sweet-Flower's role in all this was rubbing an ointment on the newly mended wing sections. This substance was the source of alaga flower odor I detected. Since it had been generously lathered onto my wing, I would be smelling a lot of it for the foreseeable future. Excellent.\n\nThe humans toiled without speaking, sewing and rubbing, their lone heartbeats steady until finally they finished their task. My wing had been stitched back into a single, contiguous piece. Even without moving, I knew there was no way that those sutures would hold if I stretched or tried to fly.\n\n\"Will this truly work on a dragon's wing, Elkra?\" I recognized Payne's rasp of a voice, but it sounded unusually concerned\u2014almost as if he cared about what happened to me. Considering he'd tried to sell me to Prince Dayne, I didn't want his concern.\n\n\"I've never seen damage this severe.\" A human sighed so hard the dragon in the next cave could've heard it; no good news would follow. \"The rip is through the muscle and almost across all of the wing's surface. Even if it mends, it is uncertain if the dragon will be able to use it to fly again. Their wings are complex things, frames of cartilage and hardened skin, propelled by breast muscle, but also the strength of\u2014\"\n\n\"I understand dragon flight, healer. That wasn't my question. I need to know if your mending will be successful. A dragon that cannot fly or breathe fire is just a very inconvenient way to waste meat.\"\n\nHesitation followed. \"I cannot guarantee\u2014\"\n\nPayne cut him off. \"Your excuses bore me, Elkra. You claim to be a master of your art. The test of a true master is results.\"\n\nThe other human spoke. The voice of a female, softer and calmer than the others \"Elkra's stitches are close and tight. The essence of the alagra flower will ward off infection and speed the healing. If we were to compare this damage to an injury to a human arm, there would be scarring and likely some permanent impairment of mobility due to muscle damage.\" A low growl emerged deep in Payne's throat, but the woman kept speaking. \"However, dragons' ability to regenerate themselves vastly exceeds ours. I have hope that the dragon will heal completely, Master Payne.\"\n\n\"Hope.\" He said it with distaste. \"The tides of war are coming to Rolm's shores. Hope is useless, whoever you are.\"\n\n\"I am Valis, Master Payne. And while I am still a senior apprentice, I take my master examination on the next moon.\"\n\nPayne's displeasure gurgled in his throat. Elkra heard it as well. \"Master Payne, leave it to us.\"\n\nThe Keeper only grunted. \"What about the rest of the dragon's injuries?\"\n\nA human hand ran over several scales on my neck. I didn't like it, but I managed not to shiver in distaste. \"A few arrows made their way into the gaps between his scales\u2014I've never seen so many fired with such accuracy. They have unusual tips. We cleaned the wounds, removing any debris. Those pricks are nothing for a dragon of this size. Apart from the wing, we expect he will regain his strength quickly, so long as he is properly fed.\"\n\n<Properly fed.> Finally, some real healing talk.\n\n\"His life would not be endangered by\u2026 further stress?\"\n\nI didn't like the sound of that at all.\n\nElkra answered with caution. \"I'm not sure I understand.\"\n\n\"You don't need to understand. You only need to answer.\"\n\n\"Except for the damage to his wing, he'll be as strong as ever within three days or so.\"\n\nValis interrupted. \"Unless the wing injury is so severe it slows his other healing. Dragons aren't immune to infection either. These injuries must be kept clean.\"\n\n\"I think you must do a better job training your assistants, Elkra,\" Payne sounded dangerous. I was familiar with that tone. \"You said three days, healer. You had best be correct.\"\n\n\"It will be as I said,\" Elkra replied.\n\n\"Excellent.\" When Lisaam Payne sounded pleased, it worried me. \"Send word to me when he awakens. We still need answers about what happened on Maricopa. And what happened to Brindisi too, I suppose.\" There was no mistaking Payne's lack of distress about my late ryder's demise, although he might have felt differently if he knew that at this moment the man's remains were moving from my stomach to my ass, and not very smoothly.\n\nI relaxed slightly at the sound of the cave's gate opening and the foul smell of the Payne disappearing. My gate locked behind him. Even with Payne gone, the scent in my cave still bothered me. Humans were bad enough, but my head began to ache from inhaling the powerful odor of those fragrant flowers. I had expected the other humans to follow Payne outside. I wanted my solitude.\n\n\"Valis, there is nothing more for us to do here. I'll ask one of the Keepers to check in on the dragon. We just need to ensure he doesn't tear the stitches when he wakes.\"\n\nThe female healer replied immediately. \"I will stay. The Keepers are lax.\"\n\nIt's hard to hear a shrug, but I was almost sure that I did. \"As you wish. I must return to the guild house. Have the Keeper send for me if I'm needed. I don't fancy another climb up those stairs soon, but the hoist has broken its ropes again.\"\n\nElkra called for a Keeper to let him out of my cave. Soon afterward, I was alone with the female human. One human is better than three, but it turned out that this Valis was a talker. Worse, she was also toucher.\n\nValis laid a hand on my side, then actually pressed her ear against my scales. She might've heard some gurgling. Fortunately, Brindisi wouldn't be spilling any secrets from in there.\n\n\"Your heartbeats are amazing \u2026 they work in such harmony that I barely hear that there are two.\" Two soft fingers glided down my body to my tail. \"Such a remarkable creature, like none other in this world.\"\n\nAn excellent observation. I'd prefer she leave, but at least this Valis was perceptive.\n\n\"The perfect fighting machine, but intelligent as well.\"\n\nYeah, I liked her more than most humans.\n\nValis went to my damaged wing next, careful not to touch anywhere near the stitches. \"Elkra did an excellent job with the needle.\" I was glad to hear that. However, she released a heavy sigh afterward. \"But dragon wings are so unique. It is impossible to know the outcome of our work.\"\n\nThis time I wished she'd keep talking about my wing, but she didn't. After completing her examination, Valis backed up to the edge of the cave, from where she seemed to just watch me, humming an annoying melody that reminded me of frogs trying to whistle. Eventually, she allowed herself to sink to the floor. I pretended to be asleep through all of this, but keeping my eyes shut became tedious. I tried to focus on my own plan, specifically, how I was going to get out of here before the Sculptors returned to give me yet another ryder. I found the human's presence distracting. Or maybe it was the flower smell. My head spun every time I tried to focus. I didn't like people in my cave. I realized the only way to get rid of her was to give her what she wanted. I opened one eye slowly, as if my eyelid was heavy.\n\nValis bolted to her feet. Tiny even by human standards, her skin lacked almost all color, which matched the stringy snow-color strands that hung down from her head to her shoulders. I knew white was popular with humans in the summer. Valis was probably well liked by other humans during that season. Only her eyes had color\u2014a smoky blue tint. For a moment, I thought she had dyed the left side of her face to add a bit more color as some humans inexplicably do with the hair atop their heads (but not the ear or nose hair for some reason, which might indeed make them more attractive), but I quickly realized I was mistaken. Her skin was simply a different shade\u2014a not unpleasant crimson that ran from beneath her eye down to her neck. The contrast made her face more interesting than other humans, much as my magnificent mane further enhances my own irresistible attractiveness.\n\nHer Avian was excellent. \"I am Valis.\"\n\nI glowed a smile at her with my open eye. I couldn't help it\u2014she was only the second human who had introduced themselves when they first met me. Jona had been the other, but I didn't want to think of him now. I needed information from Valis.\n\n\"That was a smile!\" Valis' voice squeaked with excitement.\n\nI held back a compliment about her fine Avian. A slave dragon would never presume to evaluate a human. Instead, I craned my head to make it obvious I was studying the stitches on my wing, even as I took great care not to move any part of my body except my neck.\n\nValis jumped like a startled squirrel. \"Please do not extend your wing. Do not move it at all.\" She placed both her tiny hands on me, as if she had the ability to stop me moving it if I chose.\n\nI kept it simple. \"Is it healed?\"\n\n\"We have rejoined the tear\u2014mended it like sewing a tunic, but with special thread. That should allow the cartilage and skin to fuse back together without too much scarring. That is all we healers can do. It is up to you to do the real healing.\"\n\nShe spoke in a warm tone without condescension. I risked another question. \"How long until I can fly?\"\n\nShe pursed her lips. \"I don't know.\"\n\nAh, honesty. So useless.\n\nBut Valis wasn't done. \"On a human, it might take up to a week for the skin to mend, and even longer if there was muscle damage. But dragons heal quickly, overcoming injuries that would be fatal to any other\u2026 well, to any other living creature.\"\n\nShe had no idea if I'd fly again, and neither did I. But I did know that Lisaam Payne had plans for me that involved pain. He also had a debt to pay to a furious prince and his dangerous mother, the queen. It wasn't hard to put those pieces together: Payne intended for me to be joined with Prince Dayne. That didn't appeal to me, but I would be far more prepared than I had been before Brindisi. I knew my strength. No mind would ever dominate my will again. I was free, now and forever.\n\nI also had far more knowledge of my kind than I'd ever had before. I was an ember dragon\u2014a unique breed of our species. My mother had commanded magic like a human wizard, which meant I too might have such power. I was ready to take on Prince Dayne or any other human. The problem was my mangled wing. I needed humans to help fix that.\n\nI focused all of my senses on Valis. She looked different than most other humans due to her coloring, but that was only superficial. Her heart beat faster than normal. By her own admission, she didn't have much experience with dragons. I think she was excited to be speaking to me. I took a risk. \"I have no ryder.\"\n\nValis tilted her head as she considered my words. I held my breath, fearing I had alarmed her, but instead her voice changed to something even softer, its tone dripping with human sympathy. \"I am sorry about that. I know it must be terribly difficult to lose Brindisi. Master Payne wanted me to send word as soon as you were awake to learn more about how that happened.\"\n\nThis woman actually believed I cared about losing Brindisi. Clearly, she hadn't known the man.\n\n\"Our ryders are joined to us,\" I told her. Then I steeled myself for the huge lie. \"I have a great void within me.\"\n\nValis's eyes actually shook. For a moment, I feared water might leak from them. \"Is there any way I can help you?\"\n\nI began to understand why humans lied so much. It helped them get what they wanted far more easily than the truth. \"Crema's ryder has always been very kind.\" Actually, she'd never been anything like that, but I still needed to speak with Bethy Rann. My hearts thundered as I spoke the last. No slave dragon would've spoken as I did, nor make this request. Any Keeper would have known something was amiss, as would most healers, but only this one particular healer mattered. I studied Valis' eyes, her breath, even the beating of her heart, for signs of distress, but there was none. She acted almost as if she was speaking to another human. I dared to hope.\n\nValis smiled using her mouth in the human fashion. \"I shall go to her myself if that would give you comfort. With my kind, comfort and the proper company often make a difference in their healing. Let us hope the same is true of dragons.\"\n\nThis woman had to be the kindest (and most naive) human in all the world. I considered asking for a bit of ale as well, but it seemed too great a risk. Instead, I flashed Valis another dragon smile before I laid my head back down on the floor. She left my cage to attend to the errand I'd given her. I took some satisfaction in that as well. It seemed like the more natural way for the dragon-human relationship to flow.\n\nMy wing hurt, my neck ached, and I was running out of time to escape before the Keepers discovered that I had disposed of Brindisi via my stomach. My tail ticked with impatience as I stared at the entrance to my cave, waiting and listening. The sun had set so I hoped Valis would take her time before sending word to Lisaam Payne that I was awake.\n\nTo my relief, Bethy Rann arrived before anyone else. Ryders often spent their nights on the huts built on top of the peak, while a man like Lisaam Payne would be more likely to be sleeping in his warm bed in Eladrell.\n\nRann came to the gate of my cave, a torch in one hand, her curved blade at her side, and suspicion in her eyes. It was safe to assume Rann had never been summoned by a dragon before. I moved closer, but not too close.\n\nI let her speak first. I didn't want to show too much initiative. She was already spooked.\n\n\"The healer, Valis, came to speak to me. Apparently, you would heal better with my company?\" Her voice dripped with suspicion. Perhaps she thought I wanted to cuddle, which I didn't\u2014she didn't even have a tail.\n\nI sniffed the air to confirm there was no Keeper nearby to overhead us. Satisfied we were alone, I told myself to be patient, to act more like what she expected as I tried to determine if I'd concocted a plan of genius or madness. \"The honorable healer asked if there was any other master that might be with me while I am without a linked ryder. She thought it might aid the healing process. It seemed important to her that I answer.\"\n\nI had learned some valuable lessons from listening to humans lie to each other. Blaming the person that wasn't present was among them. My words seemed to have the desired effect. Some of the tension in Rann's shoulders eased\u2014but only some\u2014and in her eyes I saw something else: disappointment. It flashed in the form a flicker of her eyes toward the floor, but I was sure of what I'd seen.\n\n\"Healers can be as strange as any creature bred in the depths of the Pits of Gargen,\" Rann said, placing her hands on the bars of my prison door. \"Is my being here helping you feel better?\"\n\nShe mocked me. I stared at her and she at me. Rann's eyes were tinged red, the edges swollen. I didn't know how long we had before Lisaam Payne arrived. My behavior was odd for a dragon, but she wasn't acting like a typical ryder, either. I'd made some guesses about her, and I was almost certain now, but there's a chasm of consequences between almost and correct. At least she'd come alone. I'd have to try to kill her through the bars if I'd misjudged her. After my last meal of Chicken-ala-Brindisi, that was hardly an incentive to mess this up. The silence between us stretched. I decided to break it by gambling my life.\n\n\"You miss Jona.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Bethy Rann's eyes grew wide with shock.\n\nHer hand moved to her blade. As if that piece of metal would save her. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to hold still. She pursed her lips, calming herself. Finally, she nodded. \"Yes. I miss him. He and others who have died.\"\n\nThe thunder of my beating hearts was so loud Rann should've been able to hear it in the cave. I understood her meaning. \"You and Jona are both from Maricopa.\"\n\nRann tilted her head, her gaze narrowing. \"Why do you believe that?\"\n\nMy eyes pulsed with satisfaction. \"That terrible pummice fruit\u2014only you and Jona could stand it, but it's all over Maricopa.\" Rann's lips formed a tight smile, an expression I'd not seen on her before. \"And it made sense there would more than one of you.\"\n\nShe pressed her head against the gate, her eyes still locked with mine. Her voice cracked when she spoke next. \"At least my brother did not die in vain.\"\n\nI sniffed her scent, paying closer attention than I ever had in the past. I had previously ignored those humans who rode horned dragons. That had been a mistake. \"You are his blood sister.\"\n\nAs soon as I said it, I knew it made sense\u2014it explained her emotion out on the Shelf. Bethy Rann had been mourning her brother, who I'd gotten killed.\n\n\"Yes.\" Rann sounded relieved to admit it. \"My dead brother. Already word of what happened on Maricopa has spread through DragonPeak.\"\n\nMy inside wobbled with guilt. First her brother, now this. Still, Rann was strong. I did not try to hide the truth. She deserved that. \"Your people on Maricopa are dead. They tried to help my mother. Now they are dead.\" I could've apologized, and that might have been the human thing to do\u2014but what purpose did it serve? Those people would still be dead. Instead, I spoke as a dragon. \"My mother is dead as well,\"\n\n\"Oh, Great Dawn \u2026\" Rann whispered it. It took me a moment to realize she spoke of my mother, using something like her Avian name.\n\nI made a vow as a dragon should. \"I shall hunt the killers of your people and my mother to the ends of this world.\"\n\n\"They were not my people,\" Rann said. This surprised me. \"Jona and I came to Maricopa as refugees. Those people took us in. They gave us sanctuary.\"\n\n\"You were not born there?\"\n\nRann spoke in a distant voice. \"No, but our people were related to those of the island, so they accepted us. The people of Maricopa, like my own people on Ulibon, originally fled the Empire of Ni-Yota. We fled the tyranny of the Mizu during a great purge\u2014or so I was told.\"\n\nMy understanding of Avian must have failed me. \"You are from beyond the Wall of Fire?\"\n\n\"Not me, but my grandfather came from there. Our ancestors were known as the Illugar in our homeland. But those are only stories to me\u2014my brother and I were born on Ulibon.\"\n\nThis surprised me. \"Ulibon?\" I had many memories of Ulibon, none of them fond. \"The humans there were fierce. The magic of their enchanted weapons killed many of my brethren in the battle for the Twisted Keep. You and Jona are from that land of enchanters?\"\n\n\"Only the Highstar and few others know the craft of enchantment. Jona and I fled the aftermath of Mendakas' war there. After the last Highstar of Ulibon was killed, there was chaos across the land as Mendakas burned the countryside along with the keep of any lord who dared to remain loyal to the Highstar. Like many others, I fled as far away as possible. We went to Maricopa.\"\n\n\"That is an odd choice.\"\n\nRann shrugged. \"It was a forgotten island no one cared about. The people there were my distant kin. They once even dwelled on Ulibon. They were more likely to accept us than Oster or the pirate king.\"\n\nI thought of Brindisi's discovery in the devastated village. \"There were enchanters on Maricopa. The same magic that allowed the Highstars of Ulibon to conquer that island.\"\n\nRann wore a hard glare and deep frown as I mused at these revelations. \"Let us not waste time with histories. You fought at the battle of the Twisted Keep. You know our magic\u2014my people know the art of enchantment. But even that was not enough to save the Highstar and Ulibon. Nor was it enough to save your mother or the people who lived on Maricopa. It wasn't enough to preserve my brother's life either.\" The end of Rann's mouth curled even further downward. \"Tragedy stalks you, Bayloo. I hope their sacrifices were worth it.\"\n\nShe had the truth of it. But I had no assurances to offer. Instead, I told her my name.\n\n\"I am the First of the Free, also known to humans as Bayloo. Jona gave me a chance at real life. I mourn his death, and my role in it, but his bravery and sacrifice shall be sung loud through the skies when dragons are again free.\"\n\nRann opened her mouth to reply, then closed it without uttering a sound. Her lips were tight. She nodded curtly. \"Welcome to the world, Bayloo, First of the Free. I think you have a story to tell me, of a battle and more.\"\n\nI did. I had a story, and I had a plan, but there was no time to share any of that. I had only time to give a warning: Lisaam Payne had returned."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Rann fled.\n\nShe ran up the peak as Payne and his companions made their way down the winding mountain path that led to my prison. There were many humans\u2014more than on Payne's previous visit. Indeed, enough heavy footfalls scraped along the path that descended from the Shelf that I feared a parade would soon arrive at my cave. To come from above in such numbers meant that a horned dragon had flown the humans to DragonPeak (the highest point accessible by winch lift was below the location of my cave). I backed myself against the rear of my cave as I waited in the gloom for these humans who deemed themselves too august to climb with their own feet.\n\nLisaam Payne stepped inside first. His face told me trouble followed in his wake. And so it did.\n\nA soldier clad in heavy mail came next, followed by two fighters in matching armor, the image of a rearing fire-breather beneath a pair of crossed dragon claws emblazoned upon the metal that covered their chests. I recognized the crest of the human who called himself the King of Dragons. These men-at-arms fixed their gaze upon me as they took up position against the wall, their faces chiseled with wariness. The king himself followed.\n\nLian Aradrel Mendakas moved with presence. He stood a head beneath the tallest of his soldiers and wore no armor, only a doublet of lush purple. Yet there was no doubt he was the more formidable man. His frame looked to have been carved from the stone of a mountain, with wide shoulders and thick, powerful arms. He wore a beard of sheer black that matched the hair of his head, but I smelled the tell-tale odor of the dye that humans used to stain away their graying wisps.\n\nMendakas' eyes were unique among his kind\u2014hard orbs of silver that pierced like the tip of a sword. Only at corners did the spidery wrinkles of his skin give evidence that men did not live forever. The king wore a single circle of gold atop his head, but he didn't need it to proclaim himself ruler. In Mendakas, the humans had found a true specimen.\n\nBut even the greatest of men were not without rivals. King Mendakas' equal in presence entered my cave just in his wake. Queen Florin had a swan's grace, moving beside the lion that was her husband, although her eyes told of the deadly cunning that lurked behind a beautiful facade. Her skin was almost as pale as Valis's and her head was covered by flowing waves of golden hair that glittered beside the king's silvery eyes.\n\nThe rest of the royal party numbered six, but Lisaam Payne directed the rest to remain outside, allowing only the healer, Elkra, within the cave, while the others lined the narrow ledge beyond my prison. I was pleased that the Prince of Sapphires hadn't been included in the party, but slightly disappointed that Valis wasn't here. That left me surrounded by humans I didn't like\u2014pretty much as always.\n\nMendakas stared at me as if he expected me to bow to him as other human supplicants might. The intensity of his gaze pushed at me in the way that a ryder might command me through our link\u2014except Mendakas needed no runes to do it. His will was tangible even without evident magic, although not nearly as strong as the bond of a control rune. Still, I sensed his demand for respect and supplication. I held myself still, waiting. That was the advantage of being a slave. I merely needed to react.\n\n\"Bayloo, to heel,\" Payne commanded.\n\nI did it even though I hated it. The top of my head was level with the king's when I pressed my neck to the ground.\n\n\"Bayloo.\" Every eye focused on the king when he spoke, including mine. His voice echoed in the cave, deep and powerful even the second time I heard it. \"You flew with Triton and I at Ulibon at the Battle of the Twisted Keep.\"\n\n\"I have that honor, master.\"\n\n\"Triton praised your speed. You moved with such swiftness, even their enchanted arrows could not catch you in the sky. And last year in the Thunder Straights you tore the back fin off a leviathan and then lifted the rest of the beast halfway out of the sea to save one of my warships that had foolishly ventured too close.\"\n\nI remembered that great beast. It ate a fisherman's boat whole. I didn't understand leviathan appetites; wood was just a bunch of splinters bunched together\u2014it was like eating trouble.\n\nI puffed up at the king's praise, and it wasn't an act. \"You and Triton are both too kind, the honor is too much. The power of my brother's breath has no equal.\"\n\nThe king's eyes darkened. \"Perhaps that was once true. But all creatures under Haven fade.\" I got the impression he wasn't just speaking about Triton. \"You know this well, as you've now seen the death of five ryders. Some of whom were more precious to me than others.\" His eyes flickered to the queen; whose face grew colder. The king fought a battle of his own on that front.\n\n\"Tell me of the death of my great general and friend, Brindisi.\"\n\nI hadn't spent any time concocting my story, which meant I'd have to adhere as close to the truth as possible\u2014without actually telling it.\n\n\"He died in battle, Master, as he would've wanted. A great warrior. His foe was the Mizu.\"\n\nThe assembled gasped in near unison, except for Mendakas whose face might as well have been a painting for all the reaction he showed. \"That is a result, but not an explanation. I wish to know how he died.\"\n\nLisaam Payne edged his skinny body forward a step. \"Your majesty, if I may, their minds are limited. It is best to ask one question about a single matter to them, one that requires only a simple response.\"\n\nMendakas' didn't acknowledge the words of his Chief Keeper, but the queen had a reply. \"Do not think to instruct the king, Payne. My husband knows the nature of each of his dragons. He was riding when you were still wetting your bed sheets.\" Her voice was a dagger of jagged ice. \"He needs no further guidance from you how to ask questions.\"\n\nIf I was a human, I would've rather eaten chicken feathers than shared a meal with the royal mated couple. No wonder the little prince wanted to lose himself in the sky.\n\nMendakas' face told me he didn't intend to repeat himself, but he still expected an answer to his question. I strained my mind to produce a worthy lie. \"With the Mizu traveled a wizard of tremendous power. The wizard was able to call lightning from the sky. Brindisi and I did battle with them and their wizard, but the Mizu were too many. The arrows of the Mizu archers ended the life of my ryder, master.\"\n\nThe king's jaw rolled slowly, chewing on my words. \"Yet you survived. How is that?\"\n\nIf I told him the truth, he wouldn't have believed me. \"I tried to attack their ship as they fled. The wizard's magic struck me. They thought me dead in the sea. I thought I was as well.\"\n\nMendakas' stony gaze lessened as his face assumed a more thoughtful pose. \"The lightning wizard.\" He spoke mostly to himself. The queen seemed far less interested in my words. Her eyes remained upon me, but they were there to evaluate a piece of chattel.\n\nAnother man entered the cave at the king's summons. He was an old human, his skin worn, his ear hair at full bloom\u2014as good a measure of human wisdom as any that I've found. The ugly yellow color of his teeth further portended the august knowledge that his shriveled head likely held.\n\nThe old man spoke with a graveled, well-worn voice. \"A spellcaster who could summon the power of Haven you say, dragon?\"\n\n\"It is so, master.\"\n\n\"Tell me of his eyes.\"\n\nThose I would never forget. \"They were as black as a raven's wing, master.\"\n\nThe old man turned to his liege. \"The eyes of night. It must be Drasu. There cannot be two with such power. Only the greatest of prizes would tempt one such as he to leave Ni-Yota to come to our shores.\"\n\nThe king regarded me again. \"What did the Mizu want?\"\n\nIt's often painful to be thought a fool by those who are themselves fools, but there were times I was grateful for the human ego\u2014such as now. The existence of my mother and sister would remain locked in my hearts, a secret forever unknown to these creatures if I could help it. \"I do not understand, master.\"\n\n\"Simple minds, your majesty,\" Lisaam Payne said, before he could help himself. The queen frowned but didn't rebuke him. \"Bayloo, what did the Mizu take with them?\"\n\nI tried to think of something plausible, something unrelated to dragons or the lake within the Kraken. \"Barrels from the village storehouse, although they left many behind as well. Brindisi thought the items inside unusual, masters. There was gold, flint, a strange white sand, and other creations that I did not understand. Brindisi called them items of enchantment, though he did not speak to me of what they were.\"\n\nUgly-Yellow-Teeth tugged on a dropping lobe that hung low from his right ear. This gesture may have stimulated the old human's mind, for a somewhat-correct notion actually spewed out of his mouth afterward. \"That desolate rock was once part of Ulibon\u2026 before that, it had been recorded as uninhabited. Sometime in the not-so-distant past, people came there and settled that place. We do not know their origins. It seems they chose that desolate place for a reason. They were not just simple fish-folk as they appeared.\"\n\nThese words caused the king to furrow his thick brow. \"Anatar of Ulibon was a formidable man. His enchanters were worthy adversaries. And there is the matter of his heir.\"\n\nThe queen's eyes lifted off me and flicked upward to inspect the inside of her skull at her husband's pronouncement. \"The dead heir.\"\n\nI knew the story to which King Mendakas referred because I had been there. After the great battle for control of the Twisted Keep of Ulibon had been won and its Highstar sent to the Abyss, the soldiers of Rolm had searched for the dead leader of Ulibon's wife and young son, his sole heir. Hundreds of humans had died fighting their way up the spiraling walls of the Twisted Keep, until they'd reached the residence of the ruling family. The Highstar's wife and son had supposedly leapt from a tower window rather than be captured. Two days later, a pair of bloated, mutilated bodies had washed onto the rocky beach beneath the tower. The face of Egriss Mare, wife of Anatar had still been distinguishable, but the boy who came ashore nearby had been mauled by some beast of the sea. His clothes had been right, but some said that was merely a clever deception, that loyalists of the late ruler had spirited away the true heir, and his mother had taken the child of a servant to ensure her own son would live to seek revenge upon his father's killers. I had no opinion on the matter. Before this moment, I hadn't cared about the fate of some human boy without whiskers. I still didn't, except to the extent this tale kept the humans from searching for my mother.\n\nWhen the queen next spoke, the sound that flowed out reeked of contempt \"Always wary of the imagined danger of the dark while ignoring the actual threat in front of you.\" She directed her withering gaze to the old man beside the king. \"Gedrick, do you believe that the son of Anatar has been on Maricopa all these years, and has become a man grown?\"\n\nThe king's counselor shuffled his weight between his feet. \"I believe the king suggests one possibility for what might bring the greatest of Mizu wizards beyond the Wall of Fire to the shores of one of the most isolated and desolate islands in the domain of Rolm.\"\n\nThe queen greeted Gedrick's evasion with a contemptuous smile. \"Perhaps if the dragon had a ryder linked to it again, we could glean more useful information from it. What say you to that, Keeper Payne?\"\n\nMy sensitive ears allowed me to hear the actual blood draining from Lisaam Payne's face. His eyes flicked between the king and queen. Here was a man who wanted to please all masters. \"A ryder's link is indeed far superior to anything we can glean from their limited speech in Avian. A ryder could tell us more.\"\n\nFlorin beamed with triumph. \"By the fortune of Haven we have an impeccable man who has already undergone the Rite and shown his worth, a young man of pure blood. Surely this is the time to fulfill the will of Haven, my king?\"\n\nMendakas appeared as pleased by this prospect as I do when presented with a meal of asparagus and chicken feathers. Queen Florin was a dagger poised to strike and her mate understood danger.\n\nGedrick spoke into the silence. \"We might send another ryder to Maricopa to search the village again. And the rest of the island as well.\"\n\nMendakas didn't hesitate. \"Do this. Send Del Quickblade.\"\n\nThat wasn't what I wanted to hear. Humans never seemed to do what they were supposed to do.\n\nEven after the king issued his command, the queen did not relent in her expectant gaze. She moved closer to Mendakas. \"What of our son?\"\n\nMendakas looked at me rather than his mate. His voice took on a determined edge. \"I know what you seek for my younger son.\" The unspoken accusation was there.\n\nFlorin didn't back down. \"It is the right thing.\"\n\nThe king's face remained frozen. \"To mount a dragon is a sacred thing. The power\u2014\"\n\nThe queen's scoff cut him off. \"Do not talk to me like some drug-addled Seer. It is a beast. It is to be ridden. Left alone, these dragons would devour all the food and starve every person in Rolm and beyond. They would slaughter each other like those mad beasts on Veralon. It is not anyone's fault but your own that your son Horace fell off one of them. My boy will not fall. Dayne can handle this creature.\"\n\nThis human had been hatched in a cold nest.\n\nThe other occupants of the cave shuffled about uneasily. All except the king. \"This dragon has buried five ryders, Florin.\"\n\n\"All the more reason for one with the right blood to hold his reins.\"\n\nGedrick moved closer to his liege. \"The beast's wing is injured. It may not fly again. It would be a tragic thing to mar Prince Dayne for the sake of a flightless beast.\"\n\nMendakas offered a regal (but relieved) nod at this. \"Gedrick speaks wise counsel to us.\"\n\nThe queen was unimpressed. \"Then this too shall be another indication of your son's dedication and bravery.\"\n\nMendakas turned to face his wife. The paramount couple of Rolm locked gazes in a contest of wills, their stares like unseen horns attempting to drive the other to submission. Mendakas looked away first. \"If Dayne is bonded to Bayloo, there will be no other dragon for him. The dragons fade from this world. No other can be spared. The Pale Wrights of Oster breed ever stronger beasts for their ruler while our strength fades. We must defeat Oster soon.\"\n\nQueen Fiona's eyes hardened so much I thought they might crack, but instead she dipped her chin in acknowledgement of the king's bargain. Just like that, I'd been given away.\n\n\"Chief Payne, Bayloo shall be bonded to my son, Dayne. Send word to the Sculptors to prepare the ceremony for whenever the dragon is deemed ready.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "I waited like a captive bride.\n\nI didn't have a choice but to wait, because I didn't have a way out of my cave-prison. Also, my wing was damaged. I needed Bethy Rann to return soon. Prince Dayne would be coming. Once he knew he could be my ryder, he would use every means to his disposal to make that happen as soon as possible.\n\nRann had fled in haste when I told her that Lisaam Payne and the others approached. She'd vowed to return, but there hadn't been time to discuss when. I hoped it meant tonight, but Rann didn't know about Prince Dayne. She didn't know how badly my wing was injured or what I had done to Brindisi on Maricopa. She didn't know that my time was leaking away.\n\nMy next visitor wasn't Rann. It was Valis.\n\nShe smiled at me when she arrived at my door. A bored Keeper allowed her inside.\n\n\"I'm here to reapply the ointment,\" she explained.\n\nI didn't like the smell, but I'd tolerate anything that would help my wing heal.\n\n\"Your healing is remarkable. No infection, and already the muscle seems to be rejoining.\"\n\nI liked hearing this. \"How long till I fly?\"\n\nValis considered as she carefully probed the area around the tear with a gentle finger. \"At this rate, the wing may be mended in two days, as far as my eyes can tell. What I see is superficial. Only you know when it is truly mended. You must move it, feel it. My advice is not to rush. There is plenty of time.\"\n\nShe was very mistaken. Del Quickblade had been sent to Maricopa. There was no telling what he would find.\n\n\"I'll be back in the morning to check again.\" She rubbed her hand against the scales on my side. I think she meant it kindly, as if she could pet me. Why do humans do that? I didn't do petting. \"Goodnight, Bayloo. Get some rest, it should help you heal.\"\n\nI considered asking her to fetch Bethy Rann again, but I didn't think she'd fall for my sorrow act again. I let Valis leave. Then I could only wait.\n\nRann returned to my cave in the depth of the night. I hadn't slept\u2014my wing ached\u2014and her noisy human footsteps would've woken me in any case. I was relieved to see her. I needed her help. She placed her hands on the metal of the gate that held me. I made my way over so that we might speak quietly, without waking a Keeper.\n\nRann didn't bother with greetings. \"You're to be joined to Prince Dayne.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nMaybe she expected me to panic, to need her help. I did, but not with escaping the little prince. The skin on her forehead crinkled as she stared at me. \"You don't seem worried. Perhaps you should be.\" Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, \"Many have sacrificed to free you.\"\n\nI snorted at the notion of Prince Dayne's mind overwhelming mine. \"Brindisi was steel. The Prince of Sapphire is rabbit fur. I will not be a slave again.\" More gently, I added, \"I do not forget those whose aid to my kind cost them their lives, Bethy Rann.\"\n\nRann's angled brow softened, but she didn't say anything.\n\n\"I made a mistake in failing to protect Jona. It is a scar that I will carry with me, Bethy Rann.\n\n\"It would've brought Jona great joy to know you are free, Bayloo. He would've given his life for that, and it seems he did. He was the better of us. He believed in what your mother was trying to do\u2014to free you. And more, I think.\" She took a hard swallow.\n\n\"My mother died trying to protect my sister. She failed in that. I shall right that wrong. Her purpose is now mine.\"\n\nRann arched a brow. \"Do you even know her purpose?\"\n\nIt was a fair question. I blew a sigh out from my nostrils. \"Not completely. My own freedom, and the recovery of her daughter, shall be the start.\" Reluctantly, I added, \"She seemed concerned about humans as well for some reason\u2014until the wizard killed her. Drasu is his name. He shall die.\"\n\nA whisper came back at me. \"I understand the need for vengeance on behalf of a lost mother.\"\n\nI heard the smoldering anger in her voice, but this wasn't the time to ask about that. I needed to understand what my mother had been doing on Mariciopa. \"After the fall of the Twisted Keep, I flew to that village on Maricopa. Those who lived there displayed no outward sign of magic. Their village was poor, almost completely devoid of metal or wealth. How is it that they were enchanters who made an alliance with a dragon?\"\n\n\"I told you of my ancestors, the Illugar. When their ships fled Ni-Yota and landed on Ulibon, there were some among the original refugees who disagreed about using enchantment to construct weapons, to use magic for conquest. They split from the rest, leaving Ulibon. In Maricopa, they found a land no one wanted, a place they could live in peace, or so they thought. My mother told me about these lost people, which is how I knew to go there. The elders of the island kept their knowledge well hidden, and those that lived there had little interest in the affairs of others. They wanted no bloodshed. They believed in the Ka, that all creatures are bound together by some unseen force that held together a fragile world. To kill was to disrupt that tenuous balance.\" Rann's bitterness was as subtle as a rooster's crow.\n\n\"You don't approve of them or this Ka.\"\n\n\"There is nothing delicate about this world. It is brutal. The strong rule the weak.\" Rann's face flushed and she looked as if she would say more but held her tongue at the last instant. I had no interest in her human grievances at that moment anyway. I needed to know more if I was to help my own kind.\n\n\"How is it that my mother came to your island?\"\n\nRann emptied her tiny lungs in a deep sigh. \"After Mendakas and his dragons destroyed Ulibon and claimed Maricopa, the refugees on Maricopa feared the King of Rolm would discover what they were and kill or enslave them for the knowledge of enchantment that the elders still possessed. They went to work on something\u2014I believe it was an illusion like the one that shielded your mother's cave. The elders worked for years, journeying up the mountain to perform their works of enchantment. They exhausted their supplies many times and had to trade for more. I'm not sure with who. I was young. Perhaps the pirates. Perhaps Oster, or another distant people. In any case, strange sand, metals, petrified wood, herbs, other things I didn't recognize, would mysteriously appear in the village, then be brought up the mountain. Whether your mother's arrival was connected to what the elders tried to do, I am unsure. She didn't reveal herself to the village. Rather, she came in depth of night, in silence, to the great lake within the crater of the Kraken. Only a few of us were permitted up there. I was not among those until I was needed.\"\n\n\"And the villagers did not fear having a dragon in their midst?\"\n\nRann looked at me, her lips tight. \"Among the Illugar, and in my ancestors' home of Ni-Yota, the attitude toward dragons is very different than that of the people of Rolm. They are feared, yes, but also revered. Jona was captivated by your kind. Perhaps that was why he was anxious to do what he did.\" She shrugged, indicating she had no more to say about this. \"I only know that a bargain was struck with the Great Dawn. Your mother wanted help to free a dragon\u2014you. To do that end, she needed something that only the elders on Maricopa could provide. Some kind of strange vine. Aurathorn they called it. In exchange, I believe she offered the elders assistance with the magic they had been toiling to create. Or perhaps it was something else\u2014something to do with the Ka\u2014the balance they so desperately believed in. Whatever the promise, they devoted themselves to the task.\"\n\n<Aurathorn. That was the key to unlocking our chains. That is what I must find.>\n\n\"But even with the magic your mother and the elders created, they still needed help to free you\u2014it is not easy to get close to a dragon and live. Jona volunteered.\" Rann rolled her eyes. \"He was such a believer, my brother. Despite all he knew of the ugliness of this world, he thought that freeing you would make a difference. Just like the elders.\"\n\nI was offended by Rann's skepticism. \"And you?\"\n\n\"I know my destiny.\" I wasn't sure what she meant, and she didn't give me a chance to ask before continuing. \"Over two years passed after Jona became a ryder. There is no reliable means of communication between Maricopa and DragonPeak. Twice a year we sent a messenger, to meet and bring back news. And always, that message was failure. Then came yet another war with Oster, where Jona was gone from DragonPeak for months. Even after the fighting ended, we didn't hear from him. We feared he had been killed. I was asked by the elders to find out what had happened, and, if necessary, to take his place. I was asked by your mother to help free you, her child.\"\n\n\"You did not want to become a ryder.\"\n\n\"Do not take offense, for I did not know you then, but at the time I did not have Jona's strength of belief in this task. The elders considered me rebellious. An outsider. However, I was best suited to win the Rite\u2014there were few youths on tiny Maricopa, and among those, I was the quickest, the best with a bow, and I cared the most about Jona. Even with Dawn's assistance, only I could triumph in the Rite and earn the right to ride a dragon. So, I came to be a spy. I was relieved to find my brother still alive. But he was fearful that Lisaam Payne suspected he was a spy, and so Jona had to be particularly careful in his movements and how we behaved around each other.\"\n\n\"What else did my mother promise you?\" I asked. \"Merely asking you does not seem like it would be enough.\"\n\nRann actually laughed, but it was a cold, rocky sound. \"You do not think mere benevolence motivated me?\" She pursed her lips. Then Rann held up the metal bracelet she wore on her arm. \"She told me about this. It was a gift from my mother before she died. But great Dawn explained to me what my own mother could not before her death.\"\n\nI guessed the bracelet was magic\u2014enchanted. \"What does it do for you?\"\n\nRann's lips hardened with annoyance. \"It steadies my arm when I wield my blade.\" She didn't pretend to be telling me the truth. \"I did what I have done for my own reasons, my own quest. That is all you need know.\"\n\nRann's secrets did not concern me as much as the imminent return of the Sculptors and the loss of my sister. I needed her help. \"You have sacrificed to be here. I know that. What is it that you do seek, now that your people are gone?\"\n\nThe question seemed to surprise her. When she did answer, it was with a request for the impossible. \"I want my brother back.\"\n\n\"If I could do such a thing, I would,\" I told her truthfully. \"Jona was a good man. Even your Sisters of Haven cannot pierce the Void of the Death, is that not so?\"\n\nRann smiled like a jackal. \"You cannot bring back a life, this I already knew. But I wish to kill someone as well.\"\n\n\"Who do you wish to kill?\"\n\nRann lips barely parted. She answered in a whisper, so low only a dragon could hear. \"King Mendakas.\" Her eyes were cold with determination. \"Now we're bound together.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Not that I disagreed that Mendakas deserved a painful end, but her voice and expression told me that it seemed very personal to Rann.\n\n\"Does it matter to you?\"\n\n\"No,\" I admitted. Her reasons were her own, so long as I got what I needed. \"In this we have a common purpose. He who has enslaved my kind shall have no mercy from me.\"\n\nRann's eyes flashed with the hunger of a wolf. \"I will help you, because that is what my brother would have wanted. And it will help me get what I want.\" She pushed at the bars of my cage. \"To open this, I need a Keeper's key. Easily accomplished, but you must be ready to fly once I do that. When I let you out of this cave, we fly first to the Fist, to find Mendakas, to kill him.\"\n\nThis sounded like a stupid plan, and Bethy Rann wasn't stupid. \"What then?\"\n\n\"Take me to a place of my choosing, leave me there, go find your sister.\"\n\n\"Where shall I take you?\"\n\nRann's eyes were cold. \"I shall reveal that once Mendakas is dead.\"\n\n\"My wing is injured. I cannot fly.\"\n\n\"We can wait, but time is short,\" Rann said. \"War with Oster comes. The ryders can speak of nothing else. Any day we will fly into battle.\"\n\nI need Rann's help, but I wasn't prepared to do as she asked. \"I must do more than merely kill Mendakas and find my sister.\"\n\nRann eyes squinted in displeasure. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"My kind will not be slaves anymore. I need the aurathorn that you spoke of. I need it to free the rest of the dragons, and I need your help to deliver it. Once that has been done, I shall kill Mendakas and I shall go to free my sister.\"\n\n\"That is impossible.\"\n\nHeat flared from my nostrils. \"Why do you say this?\"\n\n\"Jona used the last of the aurathorn two months before he died. The aurathorn we had is long gone. And even if it was not, only your mother knew the alchemy that went into preparing it for consumption. Something about reactivating the essence within thorns. That's what Jona told me, but I had no idea how to do it, even if we had more thorns.\"\n\nThis must be what it felt like to be struck in the face with a dragon's tail. My breaths became labored, but I wasn't ready to give up. \"Where did aurathorn come from? It is a small island; you must have some idea how it arrived there.\"\n\nRann pressed her lips together hard enough that they became white. \"I could make a guess where it came from, but that would be all, and it would do you no good.\" She shook her head. \"Even if you could get more, your mother did something to the thorns with the help of the elders. The people that might have known are all dead. You cannot save the rest of the dragons. You can save your sister though. You can help others.\" Rann stared at me with pitiless eyes. \"The aurathorn is gone.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "I roared from my gut.\n\nI shouldn't have done that.\n\n\"You giant fool!\" Rann hissed. \"Even the laziest Keeper can be roused from his bed if the cause is important enough. You make enough noise to shake Dragonpeak!\"\n\nShe was correct, but my blood still boiled. I growled because I could not yet bring myself to answer with words.\n\n\"Dragons have endured for generations like this,\" Rann hissed at me. \"Find you sister first, as your mother wanted.\"\n\nI gathered my wits, battling anger in my mind for control. \"Are my kind to be condemned to slavery because you can't find the thorns of some plant?\"\n\nRann held her ground in the face of my barely controlled rage. It helped that she stood outside the bars of my cave. \"Even if we had more of the aurathorn, it only worked on you. We'd tried for years with you, and even a few other dragons with no results. Jona wasn't even certain that it was the leaves that allowed your mind to escape. He said you got drunk, and only then did he notice the difference. After all those years of trying.\"\n\nThe spikes of my mane pricked up. \"I wasn't drunk.\"\n\n\"He said you were rolling around in your cave, singing about sheep bones. Badly. At one point you began dodging non-existent potatoes.\"\n\nI had a vague recollection of those potatoes. The memory helped cool my frustration.\n\n\"I tried the aurathorn on Crema, of course. I even got her drunk once.\" Rann allowed herself a smirk at the memory. \"Other dragons don't share your particular appetite for brew. Crema doesn't sing, thankfully. I think it made her dizzy but had no other effect that I could see. You seem to be unique, Bayloo.\"\n\nWhat is true? Did this have to do with my heritage as an ember dragon?\n\nI didn't want to hear about my uniqueness. Freedom could not only belong to ember dragons. I needed to find another way to free my kin. Having the assistance of Crema and Bethy Rann would be important.\n\n\"Would Crema fly with you anywhere?\" I asked.\n\nRann chewed on her lip as she considered. \"I could get her to fly almost anywhere, I think. But she will not knowingly betray Rolm. That is seared into her by the runes\u2014I can feel it anytime I've probed such things. There is a wall in her mind, a boundary that I fear to cross. If I tried to force her to act against Rolm, I'm not sure what would happen.\"\n\nI did know what happened. Rann was right to be cautious about forcing a dragon to commit treason. To push a slave dragon beyond the limits permitted by the Sculptor's magical carvings brought horrific results. \"The control-runes form a block in our mind,\" I confirmed for her. \"The rune link weakens our will, substituting the desires of our ryder. But they also impose upon us an overriding duty to Rolm.\" I spoke even as I explored the reaches of my own mind, struggling to remember the fog of my enslavement. \"Before my mind awoke, I wasn't even aware of the barrier within me. I simply could have never contemplated betraying Rolm. If a ryder tried to force a dragon to go against the magic of the rune, it would shatter the dragon's mind, possibly the mind of the ryder who attempted such a thing as well. I have seen it.\"\n\nRann's eyes bulged out at me. \"A ryder betrayed Rolm?\"\n\nI huffed out a long snort. \"Not willingly. There is the Tell that all must survive before being linked with their dragon. The ryders are pathetically loyal, except Jona and you. But, in the first Hunger War with Oster, when Karthus still rode me, one among us\u2014my brother Jaxis\u2014fell in battle. He was captured, as was his ryder, Dorane.\"\n\nRann's brow furrowed. \"No dragon has ever been captured. According to the Keepers, Jaxis died from the poison of a fury's sting while fighting at the Shard. Is that not true?\"\n\nI closed my eyes, struggling for the distant memory that was both vivid and elusive. The images came reluctantly. \"I remember that morning. We flew at the heart of Osteran power\u2014the Shard\u2014that shining diamond mountain, impenetrable and undefeatable. We thought ourselves so powerful, Triton at our lead. But it was a trap.\"\n\n\"The furies awaited,\" Rann said.\n\nThis part of the story every ryder knew. Before that day at the Shard, we hadn't seen the furies in battle. It was on that day we understood the awesome power of the Pale Wrights of Oster to breed ever more deadly beasts to send against us.\n\n\"Yes, but what isn't known is what followed. As I think on it now, I think King Galt wanted us to come,\" I told her. \"The songs of the human minstrels say Galt wanted to kill his rival king\u2014he wanted to murder Mendakas. But I think Oster's true aim was to capture a dragon for the use of its mysterious breeders\u2014the Pale Wrights. And they succeeded. That is a secret that is not told and known by only a few.\"\n\n\"How does one capture a dragon?\" Rann asked.\n\n\"After we fled the Shard, grateful for our escape, we realized Jaxis was not among us.\"\n\nRann peered around her on the dark ledge, looking for Keepers. She needn't have bothered. I would've heard any one approach. \"He was captured inside the Shard?\"\n\nI grunted my confirmation. \"We thought him dead. That is what the ryders believed. The introduction of the furies to the battlefield changed Mendakas's calculations for the war\u2014he could no longer rely on surprise and dragons. The next morning, most of the dragons flew west to rendezvous with the Rolman fleet. But five of us remained.\"\n\n\"You went back to Oster to find Jaxis?\"\n\n\"No, we all thought Jaxis and his ryder, to be dead. We returned to Oster to destroy their fleet, to clear the way for the Rolman ships that would be coming to harry and burn the Osteran coast. But most of all, we came to scout the approaches to the Pits of Gargen.\"\n\nRann grimaced. \"Even the most arrogant ryders don't want to go near the Pits.\"\n\n\"We knew the Pits were where the breeders of Oster toiled, hatching their griffins and breeding war wolves. Deep underground where no dragon can venture, none in Rolm dared attack, but with the emergence of these furies, Mendakas's thinking changed. But we never got that far. I flew with my brother Lothar in the depths of night toward the isle south of the Shard, to the near lifeless clay flats where the boreworms dwell. It was there, traveling across that desolate expanse, where it was thought no land creature could venture, that we saw Jaxis. He walked, slowly and deliberately, his head hung low. Osteran soldiers marched around him like ants escorting a queen.\n\n\"At first, we didn't understand. There was nothing in my experience that explained Jaxis meekly plodding along with Osterans. Then Karthus focused on the wagon trailing behind my poor brother\u2014his ryder Dorane sat tied between a pair of Osteran soldiers with long knives in their hands.\n\n\"A hostage?\" Rann arched a brow. She sounded more interested than horrified.\n\n\"As slaves, we would rather die than cause harm to our ryders. Meek submission was Jaxis' only choice.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I was a slave, I did as I was ordered,\" I reminded Rann. \"Karthus, however, did not hesitate once he understood the situation. We went to kill the Osterans. Jaxis tried to stop us.\"\n\nRann choked in surprise. \"Impossible.\"\n\n\"No, the Osteran's held his ryder hostage. A Osteran soldier kept a knife on his throat. I will spare you the details of the battle. It ended when my ryder Karthus gave me orders and I followed them. I killed Dorane.\"\n\nI felt no shame at the time, but as I recounted the tale aloud, I found guilt clawing at my insides. It had been a merciless act.\n\n\"Karthus had you murder a fellow ryder.\" Rann said it in a whisper, as if that made it better.\n\n\"Dorane's death didn't calm Jaxis. Instead, it sent Jaxis into a frenzy of madness. My brother did not come easily or painlessly. That is among the reasons the story was kept secret.\"\n\nRann was silent, her breaths deep as she thought. \"Then it is as we thought. Aurathorn seems to be the only way to free a dragon, and it only works on you.\"\n\nI would not accept that. I could not. And that hadn't been my purpose in reliving those memories. I had another idea. \"I believe Galt's plot went deeper.\"\n\nRann brows lowered. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Do you remember your carving, when Crema was first linked to you?\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Rann said immediately. \"They give you some potion to dull the pain, but it's nothing compared to the intensity of the experience. It is not something I could ever forget, even though I was blindfolded.\"\n\n\"Dragons are not permitted to watch either. As hatchlings, a hood is placed over our heads, and when a ryder is re-linked to a carved dragon, we are ordered to stare downward with our eyes shut. Besides the Sculptors, none but ryders and Keepers are never permitted to witness a carving, and none have\u2014until me.\"\n\n\"I had not given it thought before now. Crema's eyes were indeed covered. What did you see during the carving?\"\n\n\"Do you remember a small pot with a dark liquid inside?\"\n\nRann shook her head tentatively. \"I heard something like a box open. There were sounds like a ceramic lid. That is all I know, until a sharp object as hot as any fire struck my flesh.\"\n\n\"In the box they keep a black substance that they use to carve the runes. Brindisi called it the Flux. Have you heard of it?\"\n\n\"No, but that's typical for the Sculptors. The magic of the runes is the most precious secret in Rolm\u2014the key to its very existence. No one but the Order of Sculptors, and perhaps the royal family, is privy to those secrets.\"\n\n\"I find it curious that the Sculptors are meticulous to not let dragons see what they are doing\u2014even dragons that have already been enslaved by the runes.\"\n\nRann eyes locked on me. \"You believe this Flux may offer a chance to free dragons as well as enslave them?\"\n\n\"A Sculptor used it to erase the rune on Brindisi's chest\u2014the ones that linked him to Traxis. Then new runes were carved for my link.\"\n\nA spark of excitement entered Rann's eyes. \"The rune can be removed?\"\n\n\"From human flesh at least. Dragon scale may be different.\" I mashed my teeth as I searched my memories. \"In the days before Mendakas attacked Oster, there was a great fire in Eladrell. Houses near the Grandquell were set alight, along either part of the Guildquarter and the area near the Sculptor Temple.\"\n\n\"The King accused an agent of Oster of trying to burn the city,\" Rann confirmed. \"Some said they saw a griffin rise from the smoke, flying into the night. King Mendakas himself rode Triton out to look for the supposed intruder, but no sign was ever found. But the Sculptor temple was damaged in that fire, part of its golden roof destroyed, and the ArchSculptor Dananak killed.\"\n\nMy eyes glowed as hope rose within me. \"What if men from Oster started those fires as a diversion? What if their true objective was the Sculptor temple and this Flux? Then they lured us to the Shard, where the furies awaited, where they hoped to trap a group of dragons. Why use such a weapon and why else take such risk to capture Jaxis if not to change his control runes? To have a dragon of their own.\"\n\n\"A risky ploy.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Oster found a way to wipe out the control-runes. Perhaps the Flux is the key to it all.\"\n\nRann rubbed the bottom of her chin. \"If that is so, it seems even your mother did not suspect it.\"\n\n\"She had never been a slave. No dragon knew of the Flux. The Sculptors are meticulous about their secrets. As a dragon, how would she have known?\"\n\n\"Even if the Flux can somehow remove what it has created, it is in possession of the Sculptors, kept within their temple, except for a small amount they bring out to do a carving. How would you get it in sufficient quantities to free all of the other dragons?\"\n\nI released a reluctant growl. I didn't like the path before me, but it was the only one that offered hope to my kind. \"There is a way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The prince came for me the next morning.\n\nDayne stepped into my cave, his greedy eyes alight like a child expecting presents. His mommy wasn't with him, but that brought me little solace. In her place walked a crimson cloaked Sculptor, his acolyte trailing like a ghostly shadow. Lisaam Payne entered last, completing the quartet of crappy humans. I guessed Prince Dayne (or perhaps his mother) had deliberately kept his entourage small. When the carving began, I was pretty sure he would be a screamer.\n\nHad the rune link already been established, I might not have been able to fully conceal my contempt for Prince Dayne, although I was partly to blame for the prince's idiotic behavior\u2014I had encouraged him in his misguided belief that it was our destiny to be joined. Now, I would have to deal with the results.\n\nThe other humans were almost as unwelcome as Dayne. The mask of the ArchSculptor was identical to that of the one worn by the man who'd done the carving for Brindisi, but I was fairly sure this was a different person. The face covering sloped on this human's forehead and his eyes were smaller and meaner. The acolyte was relatively young, with drooping eyes and uneven shoulders. He bore the locked box with the Flux inside with a puffed chest and skinny arms.\n\nI had experience with carvings. As soon as the Sculptor ordered Lisaam Payne out of the cave, I decided to play good dragon, rolling myself into position even without being told. That surprised the Sculptor and put a sloppy grin on Prince Dayne's face. The smile lasted until the carving started.\n\nI surreptitiously kept one eye open again. I wanted to search for additional details I might have missed the first time I'd watched a carving, but also, I wanted to witness Dayne's agony.\n\nThe Sculptor opened the iron box with his key from around his neck and withdrew the implements of his trade. He wielded a similar stylus to the one I'd seen earlier, but this time I studied it even closer. My mother had told me of duplicitous origins of the Sculptors' rune-magic. With that knowledge, I recognized the stylus anew: It was a dragon claw, honed and worked and maybe with some enchantment cast upon it, but I had no doubt that it had come from one of the corpses of my kind.\n\nThe acolyte withdrew the small pot that contained the Flux from the metal box. Once that had been done, the Sculptor dipped the bone instrument's tip into the mysterious magical liquid and began to carve on the prince's bare chest (he resembled a plucked chicken). I took the terrible risk of raising my neck to get a better look at the Flux while the Sculptors were focused on mutilating Dayne's flesh. I sniffed at the air. My suspicions of the origins of the Flux grew, but I still could not be sure.\n\nThe carving was a noisy affair. Prince Dayne had lived a life of privilege and pleasure, protected by his heredity and his mother, so screaming and crying were natural to him. I would've thought that the son of a man like Mendakas would've at least tried to control himself, but if Dayne made any attempt to hold onto his dignity, there was no sign of that in his childish wailing. He commanded the Sculptor to stop.\n\n\"To leave a half complete rune upon you would mean your death, my prince.\"\n\nThe Sculptor resumed his work. I expected to enjoy Dayne's agony, but by the end, I wanted the carving to end as much as Dayne. My ears were rather sensitive, and his cries pathetic. At least Dayne hadn't called for his mother. Unfortunately, his damp pants and the small pool of stinking, yellow liquid that had pooled at Dayne's feet by the time the Sculptor had finished his work lessened the meaningfulness of even that small accomplishment. The Prince of Sapphires, better known as the Prince of Pee-Pee. How could I not be proud to carry such a man upon my back?\n\nIf Dayne's performance embarrassed him, he gave no sign of it. He didn't even order anyone to clean up my cave. When the Sculptor pronounced the carving complete and the pain stopped, Dayne rose to his feet with a triumphant glow in his eyes, as if his extensive wailing had been a fever dream, and just as easily forgotten. He stared alternately at me and his chest with a look of wonderment\u2014as if he'd been bestowed with another appendage of supreme maleness.\n\n\"Bayloo, we are joined!\"\n\nI didn't like his terminology or his excitement, but I gave him a fake smile with teeth that humans expected and dipped my head. But Dayne also spoke the truth. The rune had indeed linked us. I sensed Dayne's presence through the magic corridor between our minds. His emotions leaked into me: satisfaction, pride, but most of all, ambition. It was a part of him as much as my tail was a part of me. This boy wanted to rule, and not just that. He desired respect, and revenge upon those who had defied him and ridiculed him through his life. Most of all, Dayne nursed a bitter resentment of his elder brother that was never far from being foremost in his twisted mind. The hate was potent.\n\nI'd expected the prince to be weak-willed. His actions had always seemed clumsy, his mother's shadow lingering over him. I didn't expect that his desires would be a challenge to me the way Brindisi's had been\u2014and I was still fairly certain in that judgment. But there was more to Dayne than a spoiled prince. There was a darkness in him that took me by surprise. And surprises from humans were almost always bad.\n\nLisaam Payne rejoined us, sliding into the cave. Dayne indicated he should leave the gate open. My new ryder motioned me toward him. \"We must take to the sky.\"\n\nI would've liked that as well, albeit on a solo flight. Instead of answering, I lifted my healing wing as much as I could within the confines of the cave. An ugly crease still ran along its surface, but at least the flesh had been rejoined. My wing's muscle felt strong but stiff. I might have been able to glide, but to truly fly was another matter.\n\nLisaam Payne intervened. \"As we spoke about earlier, my prince, we must ensure the wing is fully healed, lest the dragon be permanently damaged.\"\n\nDayne scowled with petulance. \"I bet that Bayloo could fly, if I willed it.\"\n\nHis desire surged through our link. Dayne was smitten. That was to my advantage. \"I'm yours to command, master.\" I made myself want to puke, but the words pleased the prince.\n\nThe Chief Keeper's eyes grew panicked. \"I must send for the healer, Prince Dayne. Your father's enemies are upon us. We dare not lose this dragon from our forces for a meaningless flight of fancy.\"\n\nDayne laughed, as if his fervent desire had been a mere jest. \"Relax, Payne. We shall just get a bit of air. My dragon has been in this cave for too many days. I feel his longing to return to the sky.\"\n\nPayne scowled with annoyance, but he stood aside as the prince and I made our way through the gate to the ledge outside my prison. The Keeper's hateful eyes bore into me, as if I cared.\n\nI rejoiced at being under the open skies. The sun shone and clouds sailed across an azure background. A thousand scents flowed through the late morning air. I heard the sound of one of my brethren in flight before I saw her\u2014Saba soaring overhead, riding the wind with her magnificent silvery wings pulled back for extra speed.\n\nDayne noticed her as well. \"The dragon flies east, in the direction of Oster. Toward the warships that raid the outer islands, killing our farmers, stealing our livestock.\"\n\nLisaam Payne and the Sculptors had left us, so I risked a snort, letting my new ryder know I shared his disdain for the island kingdom that raided Rolm's shores, although, in fact, I had far more respect for King Galt of Oster than for Dayne or even his own father. Rolm's power was derived from the stolen magic used to enslave my kind.\n\n\"War is coming, Bayloo. Our war. This will be my opportunity to show my father he needs a true dragon ryder for an heir. Horace was thrown from his dragon, an unworthy pretender. Just as he is unworthy to take my father's place. But I shall be the new king of dragons. I alone of the royal line have the strength to rule.\"\n\n<To rule.> The words echoed from Dayne's mind to my own. This boy wanted the throne as much as I wanted to find my sister. Maybe even more. My quest was newly born. For Dayne, the fire had been building inside him his entire life; every slight had fed the flames, every honor that went to his brother was kindling. His mother had stoked the inferno. I'd underestimated Dayne. He was formidable in his own way. His desires tugged at me, amplified by the magic of the runes.\n\nI reared up and unfurled my wings as if anxious to take to the skies and do Dayne's bidding. In truth, I wanted to fly. I beat my wings, cautiously. The area around the tear was taut, and uncomfortable. There was pain when I stretched. As badly as I wanted to be in the air, away from this place, now was not the time. Another few days would see me healed. But that was only part of it.\n\n<We shall rule the skies, master,> I told him through our link.\n\nHis human teeth shined white at my words. \"Bayloo, destiny has brought us together: The greatest of men and the greatest of dragons. The fools say you are somehow less because you do not spit flame. But I sense the power in you.\"\n\n<Could that be true, that he senses my power?> I hoped he was just deluding himself. But delusions could be useful to me.\n\n\"Let the healers come, master. I ache to fly.\"\n\n\"As do I, Bayloo.\" Dayne gazed outward, drawing a great breath into his lungs. I presumed human smell was so limited that he could ignore the urine that stained his breeches. I couldn't. Dayne's hands formed themselves into fists.\n\n\"I shall return. We need be only a bit more patient.\" He walked off, leaving me outside my cave. For a moment, I thought I'd actually be left outside to my own ends, but Lisaam Payne was more diligent than Prince Dayne. The Keeper appeared soon after the prince stalked off, ensuring I made it back into my homey prison. Before returned to my cave, I caught sight of another dragon in the sky. I recognized the pale sun-colored scales of Organa. On her back was her surly ryder, Del Quickblade. They headed toward the DragonPeak, flying home from the direction of Maricopa.\n\nI was out of time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "What did the humans know?\n\nIn the devastated village on Maricopa, they would find implements of magic and plenty of bodies. A lazy human might stop upon discovering those items of enchantment, but ryders weren't typical humans. A more diligent person would take the time to explore the island, including the Kraken. There, they would find the bodies of the Mizu warriors (or at least the bones if the scavengers had been there first). They might even find my mother's cave, although what would be left there?\n\nI considered the ryder who had been sent to Maricopa. Del Quickblade had earned his name from his sword arm, but his skill didn't end there. Quickblade was precise. He made no mistakes. I didn't think he would be lax in his search.\n\nI really needed to learn to lie better. Or heal faster.\n\nI wondered how long it would take the ryder to make his report and who would show up at my cave after that happened. Indeed, I wondered on that question deep into the night. To my surprise, no humans came. I saw dragons flying around the peak even after dark and heard noises from below, but that was all. I finally slept, only to be awakened by Valis at my cave entrance at first light, a Keeper at her side.\n\nShe entered; her eyebrows scrunched together in a look of concern.\n\n\"Prince Dayne is your new ryder?\"\n\n\"I have that honor.\" I twisted my tongue as I said the last.\n\n\"I do hope you'll be more cautious with him than your other ryders, Bayloo. He is loved by the people.\"\n\nI hadn't known that. Well, there is no accounting for taste, is there? \"Nothing is more important than the safety of my ryder.\"\n\nValis forced a smile. \"He does so much for those of us who live in the city. He sponsors a kitchen for the needy in the Beggar's Quarter, and at Deliverance Day, he supplies free wine for the city watch.\"\n\nThat didn't sound like my Prince Dayne. I suspected his mother's hand in such supposed largess. Still, I saw no harm in allowing Valis to keep her illusions. \"Generous and brave. I have felt those things in him.\"\n\nThe lies were coming easier. Excellent. I would need that skill.\n\nSatisfied, Valis walked over to inspect my wing. \"This is remarkable. There's a bit of scarring, but it's largely mended from what I can see. How does the wing feel when fully extended?\"\n\n\"It is not normal. Too rigid. It does not feel fully a part of me.\"\n\n\"I will remove the sutures.\" Several edged metal instruments appeared out a satchel Valis had slung over her sounder. \"Please hold still.\" She cut and plucked the sewing from my wing. It hurt more than I thought it would. \"Keep still.\" I did\u2014mostly.\n\n\"Is movement easier now?\"\n\nAlas, it wasn't, and I told her so.\n\nValis tapped her teeth together. The sound irritated me. \"There may be damage inside I cannot see. Scarring. We don't know as much about dragons as we should.\" After a pause she added, \"You may just need to give it a bit more time.\"\n\n\"Time is precious.\"\n\n\"Prince Dayne sent a royal messenger to Master Elkra and I.\" She seemed impressed, even though a royal messenger just meant that the human parchment carrier wore an itchy tunic. \"Prince Dayne was most insistent that you fly as well.\" Valis took another long look at my wing, running her hand along its length, tracing a line parallel to the healing wound. \"There is a poultice I've seen Elkra use\u2014a cloth soaked in the essence of Mitar root, which grows only in Oster. He tried to use it on Fortax, during the war with Oster. It may be of some help, although Elkra will be hesitant to part any of his remaining root.\"\n\nI'd never heard of Mitar root\u2014which wasn't surprising, since I wasn't a healer\u2014but I knew that my brother Fortax had died from the arc-bolt that had pieced his belly scales, despite the efforts of the human healers. I wasn't fond of strange, human concoctions, but I also wasn't fond of getting called out for my lies about what happened on Maricopa. I'd take any help I could get.\n\n\"The honorable prince will help you convince Elkra, if you let him know the situation.\"\n\n\"You wish me to speak to Prince Dayne?\" She seemed both terrified and enthralled by the prospect.\n\n\"Get a message to him that you have an idea to help me fly. On this matter, I am certain he will do all he can.\"\n\nValis nodded as if she understood, leaving me soon after. As I waited in my cave, dragons came and went from the peak. I heard Lothar's growl and Albion's hiss, and there were sounds of other dragons I couldn't identify as well. So many of my brethren in flight could only mean an engagement with Oster. <It is beginning.>\n\nThe afternoon came and went. I had an inkling of hope that more urgent matters of impending war might distract from Organa and Quickblade's discoveries on Maricopa. Valis returned with the Mitar root after midday. It smelled like a mix between Prince Dayne's piss and rotten Leviathan flesh. Valis applied it to my wing as if it were treasure. She probably enjoyed eating vegetables, too.\n\n\"Prince Dayne truly cares for you.\" Valis practically gushed.\n\nI didn't reply, saving my stomach for more important lies.\n\nThe Mitar root warmed my wing, but beyond that I didn't know if it had any other effect besides stinking up my cave. Valis seemed to enjoy applying it anyway. \"Elkra is furious and is taking it out on me. He's given me a list of chores that'll take me days to finish. I need to get back to the city, but I'll return tomorrow to check on you. Try not to move the wing when the medicine dries.\"\n\nAs she left, I caught sight of a horned dragon\u2014Presta, I think was her human name\u2014flying upward, likely headed to land at the Shelf. On her back were humans I didn't recognize. I had a bad feeling in my belly.\n\nI made one more request as a Keeper opened the gate to allow Valis to depart. \"Will you please ask Prince Dayne if he would come lay his hands upon my wing?\"\n\nValis' eyes grew wide. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I beg you to tell him that the bond between ryder and dragon may help heal me.\"\n\nValis scrunched her nose with skepticism. \"It grows late, and he has already done so much for you. I don't think we could ever dare ask more.\"\n\nI couldn't let her go. \"Tell him I ache to fly this very night. I hear my brethren in flight, and I wish to join them in the battle. Prince Dayne will understand, I promise. He will be grateful to get this message.\"\n\nI was really reaching on this one but Dayne's gratitude seemed to impress her. Her eyes glazed over for a brief moment.\n\n\"I will try. I'll send\u2014\"\n\nI was too impatient to even let her speak. Other humans were coming. \"Seek out Crema and Bethy Rann. Crema will fly to the Fist and carry you and Prince Dayne back here with haste.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\" Valis squinted at me. \"Why such a rush?\"\n\n\"Please, Valis. I need to fly. The need for my ryder is even stronger. I know you will have Prince Dayne's gratitude for this. You are the only person who understands.\"\n\nValis' face flushed. \"Very well, but don't move that wing till I get back.\"\n\nI didn't move it. I tried to imagine myself healing. I even tried to sing to it a bit, trying to mimic the sounds my mother had made. My voice echoed back to me in the cave, mundane and rough. I didn't have my mother's talent for it, and time had run out on me. Heavy footsteps made their way down the peak. The humans who arrived at my cave came laden with grim purpose.\n\nPayne and the royal counselor who'd I'd met before\u2014Gredrick-Of-Many-Ear-Hairs\u2014shuffled into my cave. A masked Sculptor accompanied them, albeit without an acolyte. He moved with a slight limp, dragging a foot that didn't seem to quite cooperate with the rest of his body. The last man to enter was Del Quickblade, his long gray hair pulled back into flowing mane, his skin so weathered it resembled the dark scale armor he wore on his chest. He alone wore a blade, the hilt so worn that I could see the imprint of Del's hand.\n\nLisaam Payne was the first to speak. \"Bayloo, to heel. Allow Aylin of the Order to inspect you.\"\n\nThat couldn't be good. They must have suspected a problem with the link. Payne expected instant obedience. If I was going to kill these humans, I had best do it before I laid myself out before them. But there was still the problem of getting out of my cave and escaping now would mean the failure of the rest of my plan.\n\nI let the moment pass. I obeyed Payne's order.\n\nThe Sculptor\u2014Aylin\u2014approached, his steps awkward. He bent over before me, staring hard at the runes that had been carved into me. He squinted so hard I thought he might be simultaneously pushing a particularly troublesome stool from his bowels. The Sculptor withdrew a stylus from inside his robe\u2014definitely a dragon bone\u2014and poked me several times with its end. I wondered which of my kin it had been taken from. Was it the bone of an ember dragon like me? Was this how the humans had stolen our magic?\n\n\"There is no flaw in the carvings,\" Aylin declared. \"As I said, it is quite impossible for anything to be amiss with the control-runes.\"\n\nLisaam Payne made a rumbling sound in his throat. \"What about the other side of the link. What about the runes inscribed into Brindisi?\"\n\n\"We do not have a body to examine,\" the Sculptor pointed out. \"But even in the case of a flawed carving on a ryder\u2014another impossibility\u2014it would not change the power of the original control-rune placed upon Bayloo when he was a hatchling.\" He pointed to my chest. \"The five sections of the holy circle, symbolic of the human hand, bind him to our race, the crossed claws at its center ensure loyalty to the Kingdom of Rolm, the ancient symbol of our order at the center of it all. The circle itself is the conduit by which the dragon is linked to it ryder. The greater size of the human circle on the ryder's chest ensures that the will of the ryder is concentrated as it flows into the dragon's mind, like a mountain stream narrowing as it flows downward. The system is intricate, perfect, and unbreakable.\"\n\n\"Nearly unbreakable.\" It was Quickblade who spoke, his voice sharp like his blade. \"I've seen dragons go mad, lose control. I know of Jaxis.\"\n\nAylin tensed at the reply. \"The occasional errant behavior of a controlled dragon is not because the rune's power has been broken. Once carved, a dragon is changed forever.\" The Sculptor spoke with such arrogant certainty that I laughed inside. \"The sculpting cannot be undone any more than you could re-form the bark of a tree after it has been felled and crafted into a longbow. But just as even the best trained, most loyal hound can succumb to the madness of the frothing mouth disease, so can dragons. In very rare cases, they can have their minds damaged by the same powerful magic that binds them. But that leads to madness, not betrayal. All dragons serve Rolm as their foremost duty.\"\n\nQuicksilver stroked a finger beneath his chin. \"Borolon burned half of Eladrell. He circled the city, killing, until Traxis tore open his neck. That dragon wasn't mad. He knew exactly what he was doing.\"\n\n\"Borolon had been carved in his fourth month of life. The control was never firm. We know better now.\" The Sculptor turned away from him toward the humans. \"Look elsewhere for your explanations. There is nothing wrong with this dragon. Doubt whatever discoveries you made that prompted you and Gedrick to summon me. But do not doubt the craft of my order, ryder.\"\n\nThe Sculptor's conviction made me worry about my own hope to free my people. I needed the Sculptor to be wrong about more than just me. But first, I needed to lie my way out of the mess my earlier lies had landed me in.\n\nThe ugly purple vein in Lisaam Payne's thin neck stopped throbbing at the Sculptor's reassurance. He focused on me. \"Bayloo, you may rise.\"\n\nI did so with relief. It would be a lot easier to kill these humans now, if I must.\n\nLisaam Payne glanced at Quickblade before his eyes found my own. \"On Maricopa, did you encounter another dragon?\"\n\nMy mind raced as I debated how to answer. I felt the Sculptor's eyes on me. Despite his tone and his arrogant manner, the masked human's heart beat quicker than the others. I suspected he was far less confident than he let on. Lisaam Payne's question told me that Quickblade had likely found my mother's cave and the evidence of the battle with the Mizu. I decided there was no way to reconcile my earlier story with that omission. I needed to survive this interrogation.\n\n\"I was the only dragon on Maricopa, honored ryder.\"\n\nSomething within me ached as I boldly lied to my former masters. However, one of the many great things about dragons is that we don't sweat.\n\nQuickblade stepped closer. \"I found the cave. The corpse. The bodies of the Mizu soldiers.\" He took another step, his eyes as hard as dragon scales. \"The cracked egg.\"\n\nI've never been so grateful for the inadequacies of human hearing as at that moment. My hearts wanted to escape my chest. \"I do not understand, master. The Mizu we fought were in the village and at sea.\"\n\n\"Yet there were no Mizu bodies near the water. Only in the great crater.\"\n\nOh. That. \"I do not understand, master. I am sorry.\"\n\nQuickblade dared to come even closer. He could probably feel my breath from my nostrils from where he stood. You'd think he'd be backing away. Didn't he realize I was dangerous? He might be fast to draw his blade, but I could chomp metal if it came to it. Crapping that metal out was a whole other matter, however. \"You never flew with Brindisi up to the crater within the Kraken?\"\n\nI smelled trouble coming\u2014I just wasn't sure what I could do about it. If I didn't answer, they would know. Behind his mask, the Sculptor's eyes danced nervously.\n\n\"We flew over the crater,\" I offered carefully.\n\n\"Ah, but you never landed there, never landed beside the great lake at the mountain's heart?\"\n\n\"No, master.\"\n\nThe ryder's sword was in his hand an instant later. Fast indeed. My instinct was to defend myself, of course. I could crush him, bite his head off. That was what he wanted though. A slave dragon would never do that. I flinched but kept myself in place.\n\n\"This dragon lies,\" Quickblade declared, his sword poised to strike.\n\nLisaam Payne's mouth had dropped open, Aylin's eyes were wide with fear, and the king's counselor had edged himself toward the exit of the cave (the wisdom of the old hairy-eared).\n\n\"Explain yourself, ryder,\" the Sculptor demanded.\n\nStill holding his sword with one hand, and without taking his eyes from me, Del Quickblade pulled three objects from his pouch. I recognized them immediately. I cursed my own stupidity. Lies were only useful when there was at least some possibility the listener thought they were true. The contents of Quickblade's hand made my false tales useless.\n\nIn his open palm, he held three arrowheads, taken from the quiver of my late ryder, Brindisi. His bow had been lost in the lake, but the quiver easily could've washed ashore. When I'd concocted my lies, I'd thought of the fight of my mother and I versus the Mizu, but I hadn't considered Brindisi or his weapons.\n\n\"I found these among the dead, washed up on the edge of the lake within the heart of the Kraken. I found the remains of a longbow as well. They belong to Brindisi.\"\n\nThe other humans stared at me, still not quite believing. Even Lisaam Payne's hands trembled. He'd been deceived by a dragon. I think they all wanted me to have an explanation for it. But I had no more words to offer. I was done lying.\n\nI'd fallen into the ryder's trap."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The first to die had to be Del Quickblade.\n\nHe was the only warrior. But there was also the Sculptor to contend with. I didn't know the scope of their magic. I would have to be quick. Four humans were no match for a dragon. Still, I hesitated. My wing was improved with the application of the Mitar root, but I wasn't sure if I could outfly my pursuit. Also, killing them meant I had failed my fellow dragons and my sister.\n\nI was trapped in a nest infested with humans while my brethren were still enslaved. Once I'd slain the occupants of this cave, I'd have to flee\u2014destroying any hope for the others. Unfortunately, I didn't see any other way out of this prison except by tearing every one of these humans to shreds. The cave door was closed, and none would be able to run out in time.\n\nQuickblade and I stared at each other. I dropped the veil of ignorance from my eyes. The standoff lasted for mere heartbeats but felt much longer. My claws should've already been covered in human blood, but I hadn't moved. Neither had Quickblade, though his hand remained on the hilt of his sword.\n\nThe clattering of feet approaching saved these hapless humans. I counted at least ten humans and no sounds of dragons. A familiar tickle in my mind confirmed my suspicions. These new arrivals meant me no harm. Quite the opposite. When an indignant voice commanded some lounging Keeper nearby to stand aside, Lisaam Payne's expression turned from confusion to distress. I savored that change nearly as much as a sip of ale.\n\nInto my cave came my unlikely savior: Prince Dayne. Resplendent in his gem-studded black scale armor, sapphires flashing on his hand, my ryder arrived with heat in eyes and royal guardsmen in his wake. The newly arrived soldiers had smooth skin on their faces and eyes that brimmed with the impatience of youth. They moved with arrogance that mirrored the prince they served. Valis slid inside as well, although she hung at the back of the group. The cave was crowded with the human stink, but they all made room for Prince Dayne as he approached me and Del Quickblade. Dayne's confident gait made it obvious that he'd never seen Quickblade in a fight.\n\nThe prince spoke to Del as if he addressed a wayward servant. \"What are you doing with my dragon?\"\n\nQuickblade could've carved Dayne into pieces before the prince could've managed to get his bejeweled blade from its scabbard, yet I sensed not a trace of fear in the young prince. How could it be that stupidity so easily substituted for courage? Had I been going about life the wrong way?\n\nQuickblade's chin twitched as he returned his blade to its scabbard. His voice was as tight as a bowstring. \"My prince, I fear this dragon belongs to nobody.\"\n\nDayne uttered a haughty scoff. \"My father calls his dragon ryders to battle and here you are, wasting time telling me about my dragon.\"\n\nLisaam Payne found his voice. \"My prince, I fear there is indeed something amiss here.\"\n\n\"Amiss you say, old man?\" Dayne turned upon the Keeper like he'd bitten the prince's tail. \"I smell jealousy in this cave.\"\n\nLisaam's dead eyes darted to the Sculptor. I think it was a plea to intervene, but the masked purveyor of the stolen magic said nothing.\n\n<Humans always think of themselves and their own desires first and foremost.>\n\nInto the breech stepped Gedrick, his voice graveled but firm. \"Prince Dayne, what I have heard this day troubles me as well. All is not as it should be here. It must be reported to the king, for your own safety and that of the kingdom.\"\n\nDayne flushed at the unexpected rebuke from his father's advisor. A rush of uncertainty surged through him, and into me through our link. Three humans had spoken against me, with only the Sculptor remaining silent. I worried Dayne's arrogance might have a limit.\n\n<I can't lose him.>\n\nI had hoped to wait before attempting what I had to do. I had hoped to be certain that I could fly before endangered myself, so at least I could still escape if I was wrong about my own strength, but I had no other choice.\n\nSince that fateful day when my mind had awoken, I'd been scrupulously careful about revealing my own true thoughts to my ryder. I had kept the secret of the power of my own will buried deep inside me. I could sense my ryder's emotions, but I had guarded against their sensing mine, forcing the bridge created by the control-runes to be a one-way channel. Indeed, that was the way the link was supposed to work. The magic of the runes fed me the concentrated will of my ryder, allowing him to control me, but it didn't work the opposite way. However, even in the current of the strongest river, a determined fish can travel upstream. That's what I needed to do.\n\nIf I tried such a thing with an experienced ryder\u2014a man like Quickblade\u2014he'd have tried to slice off my head. It was one thing to defy a human's command, it was quite another to attempt to reverse the roles, to attempt to invade the mind on the other end of the link. But Dayne wasn't any ryder. He hadn't really won the Rite. He had no experience in using his mind to control a dragon. I doubted he had truly transmuted the bone of a dragon. He'd cheated to become a ryder. His will wasn't the same as the others. That's why I'd encouraged his attention to me, letting him believe our link was his destiny. Humans were more receptive to being told what they wanted to hear, and Dayne was particularly receptive.\n\nI began cautiously, playing on Dayne's own dark suspicions.\n\n<Beware your brother's schemes,> I told him through our link. <He covets that which belongs to you.>\n\nOnly it wasn't just words I sent across the magical bridge that joined us. I also fed my ryder my best imitation of the suspicion I'd already felt emanate from Dayne himself. I gave back to him his own fears, and his own hate of his brother.\n\nDayne's eyes widened. He sucked in a sharp breath. He went completely still.\n\n<Had I gone too far?>\n\nA moment later, Dayne's eyes filled with a new wariness\u2014not at me, thankfully. His suspicion focused on the men who tried to reason with him, who tried to make him see the truth. The poison seed I'd planted in his mind grew quickly. The prince's gaze hardened.\n\n\"More lies.\" His venomous voice was my sweet music. \"I see through your plots.\"\n\nGedrick tried again. \"I assure you, my prince\u2014\"\n\n\"A new era will dawn!\" Dayne shoved a bejeweled finger toward me. \"Dragons are our power, and I shall have it. No one will keep me from my destiny.\" Dayne's face shone red as he stepped even closer to Lisaam Payne. \"Not even my dear brother. He couldn't handle a dragon. I shall show my father and the kingdom that I am worthy!\"\n\nQuickblade's hand flexed on the hilt of his sword, but he didn't draw it from its scabbard. This was his prince, and he was a sworn ryder of Rolm. Also, if Quickblade had started to yank out his steel, I would've bitten his head off. That's what any good slave dragon would've done.\n\n\"Oster has invaded!\" Dayne declared. That caused several audible gasps. \"My father calls his dragon ryders for the great battle to come. Bayloo and I shall be among their number. What of you, Quickblade?\"\n\n\"Invaded?\" The ryder repeated. He glanced at each of the other men who had accompanied him to the cave but found none willing to fight by his side with either words or deeds. Gedrick might still bring the matter to the king, but for now, he held his tongue, which was likely how he had remained alive and in service to a man like Mendakas so long. The news of Oster's actions had shifted priorities.\n\n\"I fly where my king commands,\" Quickblade offered through a clenched jaw. He snapped his head back toward me and added, \"Battle may bring finality to this matter.\"\n\nPerhaps he referred to my slew of dead ryders. He probably meant it as an insult. I took no offense.\n\nPrince Dayne basked in his triumph, his giddy relief spilling into my mind. I was surprised how easily the stupidest human in the room dominated the others. \"Bayloo, come to me. Let us fly.\"\n\nOh. Flying.\n\nI'd been hoping for more time. It would be cruelly painful to escape this cave, only to plunge to my death. Or suffer irreparable damage to my wing. Still, this was the gamble I'd made. I wanted Dayne to get me out of there, and here was the opportunity.\n\nI moved toward the exit. Quickblade hesitated before standing aside. Lisaam Payne, Gedrick, and Dayne's soldiers quickly followed. Valis, too, gaped as she stood against the wall. I winked at her as I passed.\n\nJust like that, I, Bayloo-the-Liar, walked out the cave-prison and into the swirling wind above Eladrell.\n\nThen, the real trouble began."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Rolm prepared for war.\n\nBeneath me, soldiers marshalled inside and outside of the Fist. Light footmen with swords and pikes gathered along with a large contingent of archers. Separately, the king's elite harriers\u2014human scouts who could run at near preternatural distances at speed\u2014gathered nearby. Accompanying support and supply wagons were being hooked to oxen in long rows in staging areas beyond the keep's walls. Great banners had been unfurled. I had no idea what purpose those served, but humans really liked them.\n\nWhatever King Mendakas had planned, it would be big. There were too many troops mustering to be carried by all the horned dragons in Rolm. Some must be planning to travel by ship or by foot. The day was quickly slipping away as the army prepared. Even if the soldiers marched immediately, it would take several days for the foot soldiers to travel across to the far coast. But soldiers carried on the back of my horned cousins could be there before daylight left the sky. The ash dragons could be there even quicker, flying faster and higher than their smaller kin.\n\nDayne strode up beside me as I stood on the ledge outside my cave, as if we were friends sharing the view. His pet soldiers crowded behind us. I think he sensed my curiosity, or at least guessed it.\n\n\"The Osterans tire of the cat and mouse game of raid and chase. Particularly since our dragons have roasted four of their ships. Yesterday, we received word that they arrived in force\u2014at least a dozen ships laden with soldiers and war wolves along with griffins have landed on the far coast. Lord Azdraw's keep at Hartspass is under siege. Maatrex with his ryder Nitan Giles was sent to scout and report but haven't returned.\"\n\nAt a primal level, the news angered me\u2014the Osteran had no right to this land. They deserved their fate. Nor could they stand against dragons. I ached to fly, but not for the correct reasons. I had to remind myself that the legacy of the runes made me think this way. My true loyalty had to be to my own kind. \"The Osteran are formidable. They will have furies with them as well.\"\n\n\"They are not as powerful as we are,\" Dayne said with his ignorant confidence. \"My father will lead the main wave, but an advance force leaves now to relieve the sorely pressed defenders at Hartspass. Are you ready to retake your place in the sky, Bayloo?\"\n\nValis came up behind us at that moment. \"My lord prince, the dragon \u2026 We still don't know if his wing can withstand the rigors of flight.\"\n\nDayne scoffed. \"I know my dragon, girl. If he didn't think he could fly, I'd sense it. Be off with you. There is a war to fight.\"\n\nKnowing how Valis felt about the prince, his dismissal must have stung. Still, the healer didn't shy away. \"Bayloo has no idea if he can fly or not. It's our responsibility to take care of these creatures.\"\n\nDayne's anger flashed. \"As I said, I know my dragon. I lose my patience quickly, little one.\"\n\nI didn't like Dayne's tone. Valis meant well. She had the good sense to care about me. What more could I ask of a human? Still, I knew there was no choice. If I didn't fly now, I might never get the chance again. Dayne had surprised Lisaam Payne and the rest, but Gedrick would speak to the king. Mendakas would soon hear of all that had transpired in the cave. Unlike his youngest son, Rolm's ruler was no fool. I needed to act for the sake of my kind and my own freedom.\n\nI spread my wings, but not easily. \"As you say, my prince, we must return to the sky.\"\n\nDayne spun toward me, his teeth gleaming with delight. He wasn't the only one. Pleasure surged through that part of me that was compelled to want to please my human. I hated that part of me. Even with my mind freed, I loathed having these runes on my body. I wanted them gone.\n\nAt Lisaam Payne's signal, several Keepers hurried to place a saddle on my back. Dayne slipped off the first time he tried to climb onto me, landing on his rump on the rocky ground. Payne barked for a Keeper to attend him, but Dayne was having none of it. The prince got himself onto the saddle on the second attempt. I felt him fumble around with the saddle straps that would keep him from falling off my back should I have to perform tricky maneuvers. It wasn't long before he was ready to take to the sky. Given the lack of assistance by the Keepers, I suspected that Dayne had secured himself incorrectly. Lisaam Payne did as well.\n\n\"Shall I have a Keeper come up to confirm that everything is in order, my prince?\"\n\n\"I need no help. I was born for this.\"\n\nSure, and I was born to raise potatoes. Dayne had likely trained on the back of other dragons, but he'd never been in the sky alone. That experience couldn't be replicated, and nothing was quite like flying with me.\n\nI couldn't decide if Lisaam Payne cared if Prince Dayne died on his first dragon flight or not, but I had no intention of letting anything happen this ryder. I would protect him. For now, I needed him.\n\nI tested my wings as best I could on the ground, extending, retracting, and flapping. There was no pain. The root-based medicine Valis procured for me seemed to have made a difference. However, there was still stiffness. My maneuvering would suffer. I thought I could deal with that. The bigger question was if the mended tear would hold or would I fall out of the sky, permanently damaged.\n\nDayne had his eyes on the horizon. \"The others move at speed, Bayloo. Now is our time. We fly with the vanguard, but we must fly!\"\n\nOne way or the other, Dayne had the right of it. There was nothing further to be gained by waiting. His desire tugged at me. I launched myself skyward, but not for long. My injured wing dropped. I lost control of my flight, careening into an uncontrolled turn as my wings balked. It wasn't just the stiffness\u2014I wasn't able to move them the way I should have. I panicked, beating my wings and twisting my body, barely avoiding a collision with the sheer face of DragonPeak. Dayne's fear fed my own distress, his raw human emotion mingling with my own. I struggled to clear my head even as we fell in an uncontrolled spin.\n\nFor the first time in my life, I had to think about how to fly. It had always been something I just did, like breathing, chewing food, or emptying my bowels. I was aware of the mechanics, of course, but I'd never really needed to focus on them before. Dayne's surging fear made trying to do so now challenging. I started simple: calm down. After that, I forced my legs to stop wiggling about. They were useless except for landing and impaling enemies, but for some reason I had the urge to move them about like some silly human. Why did they keep wanting to move as though I was on the ground? I forced my wings to straighten, even though they wanted to flap. Like a hatchling, I need to learn to glide first. Having already fallen half the height of the Peak, it was frightening to hold myself still, but failure meant death. I had too much to accomplish to die right now.\n\nI got it done. No pee-pee either. I hoped Prince Dayne paid attention to that kind of courage.\n\nOnce I steadied myself and the ground stopped racing toward me, I relaxed. The taste of the wind flowed through my nostrils, granting me a certain peace. Humans have their mother's milk to nurture them. I'd never had a mother or milk, but I'd had the wind. As a hatchling, it had sung to me, it had caressed my body, it had awakened a primal instinct within me. It did so again now. I glided, I calmed, I quieted Dayne's unpleasant echo inside my head, and eventually I truly flew. The first time I flapped my wings, I broke into an unwanted turn, but this time I didn't panic. I glided, and tried again, gently, as if I was a hatchling. I learned the contours of my new, mangled wing. I flapped again, gaining altitude. Gradually, I picked up speed and confidence. I regained the height of the peak, then went further. I found the winds of the lift-stream and soared upward on its warm air toward the clouds. Dayne became giddy on my back, his own terror turning to elation, just like a hatchling who had survived his first jump from the mountain. I beat my wings harder, keeping us away from the rigid air of the clouds lurking above the lift-stream, instead turning us in the direction of my brethren.\n\nThe sky was mine again.\n\nOne of my brothers flew toward me\u2014it was Lothar, the giant fire breather ridden by Amos Gilder, who circled back to meet us. He had seen my distress. Lothar was a fearsomely handsome beast, his scales a dark cobalt that was nearly black, although his eyes shone a dazzling amber. His ryder couldn't have been uglier, even by human standards: Gilder's chin stuck out beyond the tip of his nose and his head, face, and ears were all devoid of hair. Usually, the ryders used hand signals to communicate with each other, or, if there was time, they could relay commands to their dragons, who could better communicate the same to their fellows. Gilder was motioning to the prince, but I had no idea if Dayne even knew the ryders' signals or not, nor could I see his response, if any. However, I understood: Gilder wanted us to follow him into the formation ahead.\n\nI trilled my understanding back to Lothar. My fellow dragon swept under and around me in a loop, before heading back toward the larger flock ahead of us. Lothar flew slower than he was able, keeping a careful watch on me, which I found annoying. He behaved as if I couldn't keep up with him. Worse, Lothar's presence made it impossible for me to break ranks and fly back to Eladrell without being noticed. I didn't want to fight Oster, but there wasn't any way to avoid flying east toward battle at the moment. I took my proper position off Lothar's wing as we flew back toward the rest of the formation.\n\nWhen we joined the others, it was Joren-El, the ryder of Apex, in command. Our force was four ash dragons (including me) and three horned dragons. We tore across the sky, while Triton and the king remained behind as the larger force of ash dragons and horned dragon mustered. The foot soldiers would be last to arrive, if they were needed. I wasn't sorry for the king's absence, nor was Prince Dayne, although he grumbled even at accepting Joren's authority.\n\n\"Joren-El is close to my brother,\" Dayne whispered to me, although he could've used our link. \"We cannot trust him.\"\n\nI sent a surge of agreement to Dayne. That we were placed on the rear flank of the formation only added to the prince's paranoia.\n\nWe traveled over the great expanse of the Island of Harcourt, Dayne's unfettered exhilaration fading only slightly as the land of his father's kingdom passed beneath us. I kept pace with Lothar in my assigned position on the flank, but occasionally lagged behind to gauge how closely I was being watched. Each time I slowed, so did Lothar. There would be no easy escape from this. Battle awaited, but also the solace was that I would have an opportunity to fight alongside my kin. I wanted no losses, at least among the dragons.\n\nThe sun was headed rapidly for the horizon when Hartspass came into view. Dayne and the rest of the humans could not yet see the fortress, but their dragons would already be feeding them information about the terrain ahead. What I saw made me wary.\n\nThe keep at Hartspass sat on a plateau overlooking the valley passage that led from the sandy far coast of Harcourt, through the eastern mountains, to the lush heartland of the Kingdom of Rolm in the interior of the island. There were other passes, but Hartspass was the largest and most accessible, and the other routes inland were also defended by stout keeps. Attacking this castle was a sensible decision for an army that had no horned dragons to ferry its soldiers by air and was desperate to reach the plains on the other side of the peaks, where all the terrible vegetables and other food crops lurked. The Osterans' true strength was in their war wolves, their furies, and most of all, their griffin flocks. I spotted a small pack of war wolves among the Osteran soldiers, each as big as an oxen, but there was no sign of either griffins or furies. Which meant they concealed themselves somewhere, because invading Rolm without these beasts was suicide.\n\nThe Osteran army had set up a siege line beneath the keep and had wheeled several trebuchets up the winding mountain paths that led into the plateau. It seemed a pathetic arrangement. I counted less than two-hundred soldiers and perhaps a dozen great wolves. They had no hope of anything except dying if this was the entirety of the Osteran force.\n\nDayne finally saw the interlopers, and immediately hungered to attack. \"So few! We shall send their entrails back to the Shard.\"\n\nI could've told him how we were once ambushed at the Shard by King Galt, long ago. I could've told him what a war wolf's bite could do to his soft flesh, I could've told him about the sheer numbers of griffins that Oster could deploy, but I knew that would be a waste of my effort. Instead, I blamed everything on Joren-El, reminding Dayne of his orders. For the sake of my fellow dragons, I was relieved that Joren had more battle savvy than Dayne.\n\nWe kept in formation as we drew nearer to the Osteran force. The invaders looked terribly vulnerable down in the valley. Yet Maatrex had not returned from her reconnaissance to the east, which likely meant she was dead. Danger lurked.\n\nRather than indulge in the temptation to devastate the entirety of the Osteran force while it sat in the valley, Joren-El passed the command for the formation to keep its distance, circling the keep from far above, but not attacking. But we couldn't remain in the clouds indefinitely. Dragons tired, just as humans did, and there was the matter of the horned dragons. My cousins had less endurance than an ash dragon, and they carried armored soldiers on their backs.\n\nApex swooped downward, Renfax on his flank. I chafed at that. I had always been the fastest. I should've gone in the vanguard, although I recognized my recent injury precluded that. My inexperienced ryder probably played a part in Joran-El's decision as well.\n\nI'd almost forgotten about Dayne until he spoke his nonsense. \"The Osteran army is trapped in that valley. They cannot advance through the pass without being devastated by Hartspass' defenders. Why does the fool not attack?\"\n\n\"Joren is wary of an ambush. The Osterans know about dragons. They are too savvy to leave themselves so exposed. We have far less space to maneuver if we fly into the valley. The caves and peaks offer many places for furies or griffins to hide.\"\n\nDespite my words, nothing untoward occurred as Apex flew into the gap between the mountains, dipping below the peaks where I'd expect any ambush would've been set. Arrows rose from Osteran soldiers encamped below, a ballista hidden among the rocks fired, but nothing that posed a true threat to a dragon. Apex responded with a blech of fire that sent a group of Osteran soldiers scurrying. It wasn't until Apex and Renfax passed directly over the walls of the keep itself, that the Osterans sprang their trap.\n\nFuries launched skyward\u2014originating not from the valley or even the crevices of the surrounding mountains, but rather from the keep itself. Hartspass had already fallen. The siege below was a ruse, the first trigger in some Osteran trap that had yet to fully reveal itself.\n\nThe initial wave of insect-like projectiles came at my brother and sister. Each turned in opposite directions, but the looming mountains that flanked Hartspass limited their space to maneuver anywhere but upwards\u2014and the furies seemed to recognize that. The creatures made their trajectory more vertical than the evading dragons, seeking to trap my brethren in the valley. Amos Gilder shouted as Lothar plunged into the fray. The rest of my kin followed. That was what the Osterans wanted.\n\nI roared a warning. A single horned dragon heeded me; the rest didn't.\n\nA horn sounded from within the keep, a deep, ominous sound that echoed through the valley. I beat my wings, moving to join the fray as a dozen griffins appeared from east, soaring over the mountain. I was wary. I awaited a greater storm behind this first wave, but no more appeared. A mere twelve griffins versus an almost equal number of dragons was no contest. Where were the other griffins? Oster had hundreds at its command.\n\nThis formation of giant birds carried in their talons a cage of wood, dragging the container through the sky as if they were beasts of burden in the field. It took four griffins to hold the contraption aloft. Inside, furies buzzed about, straining against the coils of the net that the griffins carried. The formation rose ever higher into the sky until the net was above the altitude of the dragons who had plunged into the emerging fray near Hartspass.\n\nI roared again, a warning and plea, even as I knew it would be too late.\n\nAs I beat my wings, pushing through a stab of pain in my wing, another horn blast sounded in the valley. At the command, the griffins obediently released their cage. I shot toward the still-trapped furies as the contraption fell, coming apart as it dropped through the air. Streams of grey-skinned furies poured from the cage's openings. Perhaps half of a hundred had been inside, anxious to follow the scent of creatures they had been specially bred to kill. I pinned back my wings and stretched my neck. Dayne's panicked thoughts pounded inside my skull.\n\n\"What in the Abyss are you doing?\"\n\nI blocked him out, extending my claws, the wind pushing through my nostrils. I was too late to stop the furies from escaping the cage, but the creatures were still clustered when I finally reached them. Dayne screamed as I plunged into the fury stream, swiping with my claws, biting with my teeth, and thrashing with my tail.\n\nMy tactic seemed insane to a human, but I had a plan (sort of). Furies were deadly, bred with a poison that paralyzed and killed dragons, but even their stingers couldn't penetrate dragon armor. They needed to lock onto us with their jagged hooked claws to give their mandibles time to burrow a hole to our soft flesh before their stingers could be jabbed into us. Usually, furies came at us like arc bolts or arrows, while we defended ourselves by maneuvering to avoid them until they exhausted themselves, or they were killed by bathing them with fire. The price of furies' speed was a severe shortage of endurance. The creatures picked a target, a path, and mostly had to keep on that trajectory or they would exhaust their fleeting bust of strength. They were the mayflies of aerial combat. I took this group of furies by surprise, exploiting these weaknesses.\n\nI crushed, skewered, and tore a dozen of the buzzing creatures, twisting through their midst into a furious plunge. Despite my evasions, several clattered against my scales, but I didn't have time to worry if they'd locked on. I wanted to kill as many furies as I could, but disrupting their intended flight path would be almost as worthwhile. I needed only to give my kin a chance. When I emerged from the deadly stream of furies, half their number were dead, and at least a dozen others flew erratically in directions away from my fellow dragons. The rest continued onward, but at least the dragons and their ryders would be aware. Even Dayne managed to survive my maneuver\u2014furies craved only dragon blood. Although he seemed to have passed out. At least it kept him quiet and my mind clear.\n\nI glided for a long moment, my wing aching, but it was the arrival of another sensation that I feared: The distinctive gnawing of fury mandibles on my scales. I had picked up two furies, one on my belly, another on the side of my neck. They had locked onto me. I smacked at my underside with my tail. I missed on the first hit but managed to snare the creature with a hind claw on my next attempt. The fury fell from my body, but its stinger still attached. The other creature on my neck was out of easy reach for me but would've been an easy target for a competent ryder. Unfortunately, I had Dayne on my back, and he was still unconscious anyway. I twisted my neck awkwardly trying to reach the second fury. I could almost get at it, but not quite.\n\nI was about to try again when eight sharp talons raked across my back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Distraction had consequences.\n\nIn this case, the fiery pain spreading across my back was the price for ignoring the griffins while I dealt with the fury attached to my neck.\n\nI reacted quickly to the attack, dropping into a free-fall dive just as a second giant bird sliced through the airspace I had occupied a moment earlier. Two more griffins came at me. I could've tried to evade them as well, but griffins did have their uses. Instead of veering off, I gave a hard flap of my wings, diving directly at the onslaught. Birds squawked with ire as we closed. At the last possible moment, I dipped a wing and twisted my neck, shoving myself directly into a griffin's feathered torso. It cried out in shocked pain, flapping its wings to escape. I plunged a foreclaw into its body, yanking the griffin toward me. When I was near enough, I grabbed the stricken bird with my other foreclaw and pulled the mangled creature's corpse along the length of my neck, using it as a bloody washcloth to wipe the fury off my body.\n\nThe stink of the carnage aroused Dayne from his stupor. \"By Haven, Bayloo, the blood!\"\n\nI didn't enjoy soaking myself in griffin innards, but it worked. The fury was gone.\n\n\"It's just a dead griffin, my prince.\" I sensed his disgust, so I diverted his attention. \"Your bravery was admirable in your first engagement. No other ryder handled themselves in such a manner.\"\n\nIt was true\u2014Dayne was the only one of my ryders to pass out the first time he entered combat. The prince didn't get the insult, instead reacting with predictable pride. I didn't have to see him to know his chest was pumping outward on my back. With my ryder mollified, I flew at speed, circling back toward the valley of Hartspass and the rest of my brethren.\n\nChaos reigned in the skies as the other dragons flew about in a swirling maelstrom of griffin, fury, and fire. I neared the conflagration warily, reminding myself that I had a task to accomplish back in Eladrell. But I could not abandon my fellow dragons, either. Each one that fell would be one less I could save. I counted them, finding all but two accounted for of those who flew with us, but two among such a dwindling population was a grievous wound. I held out hope for the missing until my eyes caught sight of a bloodied corpse sprawled out over a jagged outcropping of rock just above the valley floor. The size and scales of the dead dragon told me that it was Apex. A second of my kin\u2014one of my horned cousins\u2014lay beneath the walls of the keep, her neck cracked. In the sky, most of the furies were gone, and those that remained barely had the strength to fly. Several griffins stubbornly continued to engage, but they were no match for the ash dragons. Still, there was no true victory to be had in this place. It was a trap that we had only partially evaded.\n\n\"We should return to Eladrell,\" I advised Dayne.\n\nPrince Dayne was appalled. \"Retreat before victory? They still hold the keep\"\n\nI'd forgotten his ego, but it could also serve me. \"I fear you were correct about Joren-El and your brother, my prince. He may have led us into this trap. Perhaps he even killed Apex. The keep is nothing. We must get back to Eladrell to report this treachery.\"\n\nOnly a fool like Dayne\u2014with some help from my own will twisting him\u2014would've believed such a thing, but he did. I was deep in Dayne's mind now. I sensed his perception of the situation change as I desired. Suddenly, a disastrous engagement in which two dragons had died was an opportunity for him.\n\n\"Back to Eladrell!\" Dayne screamed loud enough to make my head ache. \"By order of your prince, we return to Eladrell!\"\n\nI swept in among by brothers and sisters, sinking my claws into the backside of a griffin as I did so. I roared to gather their attention as Dayne again shouted his commands to the other ryders. In the absence of a man like Joren-El with a clear mandate from the king to command, the rest followed us, setting a course back to the west.\n\nI led my fellow dragons, and I enjoyed it. I had that in common with my ryder. As a slave dragon, I'd often been relegated to lesser roles due to my inability to belch fire, but being at the forefront seemed my natural place. I kept a close watch on the formation that followed me. There were plenty of injuries, but none seemed fatal for a dragon. Three ryders had been lost during the melee, which didn't bother me at all. They were slave drivers.\n\nThe first sign of trouble came when Lothar fell out of formation. He was among the ryderless dragons, and my brother had several torn, bloody wounds from his engagement with the Osteran griffins. Lothar hadn't communicated any distress, but that wasn't surprising from an ash dragon.\n\nCornethius, my gray-scaled brother with wings of mismatched sizes moved with his ryder to investigate even before I asked it. A roar of distress from my brother followed. I turned immediately to tend to Lothar even though I sensed Dayne's disapproval of my course change. He hungered to accuse Joren-El of conspiring with his elder brother in some treason\u2014everything else was secondary. I ignored his clamoring in my head. Lothar's flight had become erratic. He was in serious trouble.\n\n\"The scent of poison is on him,\" Cornethius told us.\n\nThe sour stink detected by my brother filled my nostrils as I neared. Lothar's eyes seeped with the pale milkiness of sickness. He could manage only to glide now, his wing shaking.\n\n\"There must be a fury on him,\" Cornethius' ryder called out, sounding like he actually cared. His name was Gathus. \"He took several griffin strikes\u2014the blood and injuries may have cloaked the greater danger.\"\n\n\"Another damn fool,\" Dayne muttered, although it was unclear if he spoke of Lothar or Gathus.\n\nCornethius nimbly adjusted his course, positioning himself under Lothar before unleashing a controlled burst of fire onto the injured dragon's belly, just beneath his foreleg. Dragon fire would destroy the fury singer, but the poison's damage had been done.\n\nLothar's strength failed. One wing dipped precipitously as he fell into a tumbling spin. Cornethius and I dove after him. I reached Lothar first, wrapping my digits around his foreleg. My strength alone wasn't enough to stop his fall, but Cornethius joined me a moment later. Together, we stabilized Lothar enough, bringing him to the ground in the midst of some hapless farmer's field. I sniff the air. It was a potato field, which I took as an ill omen.\n\nGathus slid down off his dragon to examine Lothar. The injured dragon's eyes drifted open, but they showed only confusion. It didn't take Gathus long to find the wound, a gap in a single scale. \"The fury dug through, sure enough,\" Gathus announced. \"But the opening is far narrower than others I've seen. Perhaps the fury that did this was weakened or injured. I think the gap isn't wide enough for the stinger, which is why he was able to fly for as long as he did. He must not have gotten a full dose of poison.\"\n\n\"The death of this brave dragon is on Joren-El's hands,\" Prince Dayne declared haughtily. \"He and those who put him up to this must face punishment.\"\n\nGathus kept his face blank. \"Lothar isn't dead.\"\n\nDayne seemed disappointed. \"Well then, he shall be safe enough in this field. I will have a healer flown out to him. If we stay here, the others will reach the Fist before us. We must go now so I may speak with my father.\"\n\nGathus frowned. I could tell he didn't like the idea of leaving a dragon alone and untended in some farmer's dirt in the middle of nowhere. I agreed, for those reasons and more. If my suspicions about the Osteran plan were correct, I couldn't be sure when a healer would be able to return here. But even more, Lothar's injury provided me with an opportunity. I wanted Lothar with us, even if it meant carrying him, but Dayne would need a push to agree with that.\n\nI passed images of Dayne being hailed as the Hero of the Battle of Hartspass and Savior of the Last Dragons through the link. Nothing too strong a first, but enough I hoped to plant a seed. Cheering crowds were good. I added young human women throwing roses to the image. Dayne's mind stirred, but it wasn't enough. I added a scene of King Mendakas bestowing upon his younger son the king's own sword as a token for saving a precious ash dragon from the battle. To top it off, I imaged Dayne's brother Horace alone in a cell crying as the adoring masses cheered his younger half-brother. A thin crown of gold encircled Dayne's head in that one. Finally, he got it.\n\n\"Cornethius and Bayloo can him carry back to DragonPeak,\" Dayne declared. \"We aren't far now.\"\n\nI looked away, pretending to focus on the horizon as my eyes flashed a bright smile. The little prince was becoming easier to manipulate as I better understood how his mind functioned.\n\n\"Can Bayloo handle the weight?\" Gathus asked, as if Dayne had any idea what I could and couldn't do. \"His wing was badly injured.\"\n\n\"Bayloo can outfly any dragon in the sky,\" Dayne proclaimed without hesitation or consideration. \"It is Cornethius' lame, deformed wing you should worry about.\"\n\nI felt the shame that my brother dragon would never display openly. Cornethius' modestly undersized left wing probably bothered him the way not breathing fire had once irked me. Gathus' jaw tensed, but he only said, \"Let us make for the DragonPeak.\"\n\nLothar was heavy. I couldn't have lifted him on my own, and it wasn't easy even with Cornethius' assistance. We flew low, stopping to rest no less than five times, with each break bringing a rebuke from Dayne. \"The other ryders will speak to my father before me,\" he complained as we rested.\n\nIt took everything I had to keep the prince's impatience in check, subtly reminding him of the importance of returning with a wounded dragon that others may have thought lost. Surely, there could be no greater gift to his father, and no more obvious evidence of the prince's grandness. I might've slipped in a new potential title for him to salivate over: Prince of Dragons.\n\n\"Let the others speak of what you have done. It will merely make your father even more anxious for your triumphant return.\"\n\nThat seemed to please him. \"Legends are made swiftly, but spread slowly,\" he muttered to himself.\n\nWhatever. Fools are made slowly but die swiftly.\n\nIt was the longest, hardest flight I ever made, but together with Cornethius, I did it. We reached the city. But when Eladrell finally came into sight, it did not offer the welcome Dayne expected. Instead, fires burned in the city, but not in celebration. Dragons flew in the sky, their fiery breaths blazing, but not in greeting. The explanation for the scarcity of griffins at Hartspass was now apparent: They had been waiting for the departure for as many dragons as possible before attacking Eladrell and the Fist.\n\nIf Dayne was going to pee himself again, this would've been the moment.\n\nHe stayed dry. Until the first griffin came at us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "I counted nearly seventy vicious birds dancing in the sky.\n\nIt could well be that the bulk of the Osteran griffins had been committed to this battle.\n\nDayne hissed at the scene. \"Devious scoundrels.\"\n\nI had to agree. The Osteran trap had been well executed\u2014consistent with King Galt's cunning. They'd lured out not only the vanguard dragons of which I'd been part, but most of Rolm's horned dragons had already flown east along the coast as well, its best soldiers on their back. Even though they weren't fire breathers, half of Rolm's dragons were absent, along with a good number of her best soldiers.\n\nSurveying the scene, I guessed that the Osterans had used the absence of any dragon patrol to land their ships on the coast under cover of darkness, sending their griffins and war wolves against the Fist, along with at least three hundred soldiers. While that number might seem paltry against the defenders of the Fist, the wolves were all the difference. When fighting in a pack, those vicious beasts were worth ten men in a melee. The Osteran force had reached the citadel's walls, although they didn't yet appear to be attacking. A night attack could be perilous for humans, who couldn't see much in the night. The city of Eladrell itself didn't seem to be under direct assault\u2014the mayhem there appeared to be a reaction to the fighting going on in the air in and around the Fist.\n\nAbout ten dragons were being sorely pressed trying to fend off the horde of griffins. I recognized King Mendakas and mighty Triton in the heart of the fray, supported by the dragons who had returned ahead of me from Hartspass. A huge flock of griffins surrounded Mendakas, kept at bay by Triton's blue tinged fire. Elsewhere, Organa and her ryder Del Quickblade roasted a pair of griffins flying beneath them, even as three other birds swept across her backside. Proteus and Bilig circled closer to the citadel, killing anything with feathers that came too close to the inner courtyard. Torches lit the top of the Fist's walls, revealing the presence of Rolman archers, most of whom were understandably hesitant to fire blindly into the night. I studied the battle, the arrangement of the forces. The dragons seemed to be holding their own, if barely. My presence would make a difference in the fight, but not a decisive one. At least that's what I told myself, because there were other things for a scheming dragon to do.\n\nThis attack was at least partly a gift in disguise\u2014a far better distraction than anything I could've mustered. A wise dragon once said that only a fool walks away from ale or opportunity (actually, that was me). Now, I needed to seize my chance. I'd already succeeded in planting ideas in Dayne's head to manipulate him, strengthening his own paranoid inclinations. Just as I hoped when I'd encouraged his attention, Dayne's twisted thoughts made him more malleable than any true ryder, but I needed to go further. For my plan to succeed, to free my people, I had to get the prince to do something that benefited only me. He wouldn't want that. Which meant I needed to make Dayne my slave.\n\nBefore whipping the little prince, I had to get Lothar to safety. The logical course would've been to take him to DragonPeak, where there would be healers to tend to his wounds, but I didn't do that because I had need of Lothar for my plan. After what had happened in my cave earlier, I wasn't sure what the Keepers would do to me if I approached DragonPeak. Lisaam Payne probably knew full well what I was by now.\n\n\"They need you, brother,\" I said to Cornethius as the desperation of the battle became apparent. \"Let us set him down here. It is too dangerous to fly to DragonPeak. I will get Lothar to safety.\"\n\nGathus hesitated, doubting my ability to carry a dragon alone. Yet, he wanted to be fighting. The other dragons were sorely pressed. Cornethius' instinct, too, was to fight. The pair fed on each other.\n\n<We don't want them with us,> I told Dayne through our link. <We will have our own glory.>\n\n\"Go Gathus,\" Dayne ordered like an obedient puppy. \"Aid my father.\"\n\nThat push was enough. Cornethius and I lowered Lothar to the ground in a field beside the main road leading to Eladrell. His eyes opened as his claws touched the grass, which I took to be a good sign. He hadn't gotten a full dose of fury poison or he'd be dead already. The fact that he wasn't gave me hope that he would recover. Cornethius released his grip, soaring immediately toward the fray.\n\n\"We leave him here?\" Dayne wondered. At night, the road was empty, the field desolate.\n\n\"For now,\" was all I said.\n\nI sniffed at my wounded brother's injury. I was no healer, but I could smell the foul odor of fury poison mixed with his blood. He'd taken some of stinger's venom, but not a lethal dose. I trilled at Lothar. \"Can you hear me, brother?\"\n\nLothar's eyes brightened momentarily in acknowledgement, which was enough to give me hope. He wasn't going to die. Indeed, I intended that he should live, and live well.\n\n\"Hold on, brother. I must leave you for a time, but I shall return. For now, rest and heal as best you can.\"\n\nI took off, but flew a circuitous route, not toward the battle, but toward the northern side of Eladrell, where I once again landed. I didn't want to attempt my next attack while trying to fly. I hoped this spot was far enough from the battle over the Fist that I wouldn't attract a griffin.\n\n\"You should dismount, my prince,\" I pushed at him. I wanted to see him for this part, to match my stare with his. \"It is important.\"\n\nDayne obliged my request, suspicions brimming. With his feet on the ground he glared at me. \"What in the Abyss are you doing?\"\n\nRather than answer with words, I turned the full force of my will against my ryder. Dayne was agitated, which made him harder to control, but with the prince, a conspiracy was the best way to engage his faithless mind.\n\n\"The Sculptors are part of this devious plot against you, my prince.\"\n\nDayne already hated the masked men. In his twisted mind, they had conspired to keep him from attaining a dragon of his own for most of his life. This gave me an opening.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked through our link.\n\nDigging through the recesses of Dayne's mind, I encouraged the perceived injustices he suffered from the Sculptors. Within him, I found dark memories, strengthened them, manipulated them, then turned them back to him. Whatever task he completed, the Sculptors always said it wasn't enough. Many times, they had dared to claim he lacked the stamina to climb Arrow Peak. A masked Sculptor had said he wanted to witness Dayne consuming a dragon bone. There were dozens of nights where the Sculptors had crept into the Fist to conspire with his brother. They whispered plots against Dayne. Oh, such injustice. Such jealousy against him!\n\nI fed Dayne suspicion like he was a greedy pig. His mind swallowed it eagerly. When I thought he was near full, I laid on the biggest plot of them all: <The Sculptors seek to sever the link between the ryders and their dragons.>\n\nDayne's mind recoiled as if I placed his consciousness on a fire. I had gone too far, too fast. Dayne was paranoid, but not stupid. \"That \u2026 how could the Sculptors do such a thing as that?\" His will strengthened, pushing back at me, aided by the rune link's amplification. \"How could you\u2014a mere dragon\u2014possibly know that?\"\n\nI only would have one chance to do this. I shot my demands at him as if they were arrows, hoping to plant more seeds in his ripe mind. \"You saw the confusion over Hartspass. Dragons hesitating, confused, vulnerable to furies.\" I shoved the modified memories at Dayne. I showed him dragons flying erratically. \"It was a trap. The Sculptors intended to lure the dragons from Eladrell to their doom! They want to get rid of you, because they fear you.\"\n\nSuspicion still inundated the jungle of Dayne's mind. \"Why would they do this?\"\n\n\"Your brother.\" I knew those words had magic for Dayne. I coaxed all the latent childhood slights to the surface of Dayne's perception, a lifetime of injustice flooding his mind. \"Horace fears what you are becoming. He cannot ride, so he seeks to replace all the ryders with his own loyalists. Horace has made a treacherous bargain with Oster.\"\n\nDayne wanted to believe me. He ached to find flaw in his half-sibling. Somehow, over the years, his elder brother had become a fount from which all terrible events flowed. It appealed to Dayne that every setback in his life was because of the jealousy of another, a belief nurtured by his domineering mother. I sensed Dayne's vulnerability, but surprisingly, a rational bulwark of his mind resisted me.\n\n<How could you know this?> he demanded.\n\n\"My fellow dragons told me.\" Lying came so naturally to me now. \"The others fear losing their links. We dragons love our ryders. They believe only you can help them.\"\n\nDayne ached to be a savior. A hundred dark evenings had been spent in his bed within the Fist, dreaming of winning the adoration of others when they finally saw his heroic acts. Within him swirled the pulling vortex of righteousness and revenge. It would all be his. I pushed my will onto his\u2014fueling the thoughts that were already rooted within him. It was like pushing a boulder uphill with my snout. My head ached as I fought against the very nature of the rune-link that should've functioned in the opposite direction that I desired. Visions flashed within my mind as I concentrated, glimpses of another place, a reality of power just beyond my grasp. I heard my mother.\n\n<You are an ember dragon.>\n\nI slammed my will into Dayne's mind as if it were a sword. The prince's hands clutched either side of his head. \"It's all\u2026\" He shook, but something within him continued to fight me. Or it was the rune magic itself trying to protect him? \"You're my dragon. You can't...\"\n\nI intensified my assault on his free will. \"We were meant to be joined. Our destinies are linked. Only the Sculptors seek to keep us apart. We must go there now\u2014to their grand temple in the city. Within it is the secret to their magic, and its undoing.\" I stabbed at him again, sending him images of dragons bowing their heads as he strode before them, a crown of gold perched atop his head.\n\nDayne sucked in a breath at seeing my illusions in his mind. He gazed toward the city. I thought I had him, but when he turned back toward me, his eyes were ablaze with anger. His voice trembled \"You lie. You \u2026 you are in my head.\"\n\n<Oh, chicken piss.>\n\nDayne's will came at me in a violent spasm, its power intensified by the rune-link that joined us. His mind was different from any of my other ryders; they had been men of self-control, who commanded themselves and others with discipline and will. Dayne, however, was raw emotion, his untethered desires striking like the tip of a rapier. He finally realized I had tricked him. I had betrayed him. And worst of all, I had humiliated him. His wrath came at me hot and powerful. I reeled, momentarily giving ground in this contest of wills. As I did, the fog of images and fake memories I'd inundated him with burned away, and Dayne realized the full extent of my deception.\n\n\"What are you?\" He seethed.\n\nI took pleasure in my reply. \"I am not your slave. I am a dragon, the First of the Free.\"\n\nWith that, the lying was done. This would be a duel of wills. Dayne had the rune. I had the desperation of a freed slave, and whatever my heritage as an ember dragon bestowed upon me. I'd resisted Brindisi, I had manipulated Dayne, but I'd never tried to actually control a human mind, as I did now. If I failed, everything I had done would be for nothing.\n\nThe link created by the Sculptors' runes was a funnel, with the big side for the human. It took all of their will and concentrated it, making it far more potent when it came out the far end\u2014allowing it to flow into a dragon's mind like a knife, sharper and stronger than anything a person could've managed without the magical enhancement. I needed to make the rune link do the opposite of what its creators intended. I needed to be a needle of power, concentrating my will through the link. I was that, and more.\n\nI poured my desperation to be free, to think for myself, to restore the pride of my race, into my assault. I rammed it through the link between us like I was jamming a claw up Dayne's ass. Dragons would fly free. This human would help make it happen. Rage and desperation blended to enhance my will. It wasn't enough.\n\nDayne screamed. He fell to his knees. But he didn't break. The architects of the runes were clever. It was one thing to resist will, it was quite another to impose it on another sentient being. My raw desire wasn't enough. I didn't quit. I suspected there was another way.\n\n<This magic was stolen.>\n\nThe more I understood the runes, the more I thought about the magic my mother had used, and the more I realized I could reclaim part of my kind's legacy. I was trying to act like a human\u2014trying to direct the desire inside me with my mind, the way the Sculptors intended the ryders to act. But I wasn't a ryder or a human. I could be more. I was of the race that had created this magic. I could manipulate it in ways no human could.\n\nIn that moment, I perceived the link itself. I sensed the tunnel of magic, I glimpsed its structure\u2014a strange weaving of glowing chords and threads glittering against a backdrop of the wider, unimaginable world. This was the reality of magic. I thought I heard an echo of my mother:\n\n<The Latticework,> she whispered.\n\nI didn't understand what I was seeing. I couldn't conceive of the power of the mind that had forged this weaving of magic. But I didn't need to. I needed only to change it, and something within me instinctively knew how. I was an ember dragon!\n\nIn an instant, I did what I must. The conduit that joined the control-runes between slave and master stretched, distorted, and evened. The magic that a moment before had protected Dayne became a level battleground in our battle for power. I poured in the same will and passion with which I almost broke Dayne. It was a glorious thing; as I let go of the false chains of human communication, I found power inside me. Even as I directed my will, I felt stronger, as if I was finally whole. I was a creature of power. I wanted my heritage, and I was going to crush anyone who tried to stop me.\n\nDayne toppled from his knees onto the ground, wriggling in mindless pain like a snake that had been cut in half. His eyes leaked their human tears. He cried in agony. One of my hearts might have tugged at me. I'd thought I'd be glad to lord over a person who wouldn't have hesitated to use me or any of my kind as a tool, but that wasn't the case. To turn someone who had been free into a slave wasn't pleasant. With the ghastrays, I'd sworn never to do it. But I had no choice. He'd done it to me first. I didn't stop until I had control.\n\nThat didn't take very long. Dayne was mine to command, so I did.\n\n\"Take me to the Sculptors.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "I flew low over the walls of Eladrell.\n\nDayne rode on my back, appearing just like any other ryder in command of their dragon. Indeed, he thought this had been his idea; he hungered for the revenge he now thought was owed against the Sculptors. Dayne's mind had become his prison, just as his kind had done to mine. I felt no guilt; I'd been around humans long enough to know that they were happiest living in their fantasies.\n\nOrdinarily, a dragon flying low over the buildings and plazas of the city would've raised an alarm, but pandemonium already reigned in the streets. The people on Eladrell's streets were either men of the city watch trying to maintain control or citizens intent on fleeing in the city. The rest of the populace hid indoors. Only the most intrepid or the most foolish ventured outside for the purpose of viewing the fearsome battle unfolding nearby at the Fist. For a renegade dragon, it was a perfect moment to fly into the city. People, including the city watch, would likely assume my presence was part of the battle, or have more important things to occupy themselves with.\n\nEladrell was a sprawling m\u00e9lange of structures, bridges, parks, and monuments, but I had eyes for only one edifice: the great temple of the Sculptors. The redoubt of the mysterious order was a magnificent construction of perfect squares stacked upon each other, each level slightly smaller than the one beneath, and topped with a golden spire on which an eternal flame blazed. Nestled into the far end of the city, within the shadow of the Fist above, it was separated from the rest of Eladrell by manicured gardens that included a quaint man-dug lake intersected by arching bridges, under which swam little golden fish. I landed on a trimmed grassy space beside the water. The fish glittered near the surface, their scales reflecting in the starlight. It was a strangely peaceful oasis in the storm of torment around me. Since no one was looking (or if they were, there was nothing they could do about it), I plunged my head into the lake, snatching two na\u00efve fish who'd spent their entire lives in the safety of that watery playpen. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I got. They tasted bitter\u2014worse than chicken feathers. I swallowed anyway, because I didn't want to be wasteful. My hunger would have to wait to be satiated. I walked toward the temple.\n\n\"Get what you need from these false prophets, my prince,\" I said to Dayne as he climbed down from my back. \"This will soon be your kingdom. Let us take from the Sculptors their instruments of magic so that the power can be wielded by your wise hand alone.\"\n\nDayne was long past resisting, but his mind was still conscious. \"They will resist.\"\n\n\"If they are foolish enough to refuse, then these Sculptors shall face our wrath.\"\n\nPrince Dayne approached the golden gates of the Sculptors' temple with his self-important strides. I kept pace close behind, looking fearsome as only a dragon can. For the first time, this prince carried out my mission. I intended for him to succeed.\n\nNone challenged us as we walked the tree lined path to the temple. I heard the griffins squawk and saw the fire of my fellow dragons, but that battle was not mine\u2014not yet. Dayne wrapped a fist against the grand metal doors. The sound echoed within the halls of the temple. I heard movement in the passage behind the portal, but no one answered Dayne's knock.\n\nI fed the prince outrage. \"Open up in the name of Prince Dayne,\" he bellowed. No human projected self-entitled fury better than my dear ryder. Still, no one opened the door. I had no more patience. Time was too precious.\n\nI moved closer, smashing the twin doors inward with a single shove of my forelegs. They fell easily\u2014the portals hadn't been built to withstand the stress of an attack. I heard the cries of a man struggling out from underneath. He really should've just opened the doors instead of lurking behind in the passageway.\n\nI peered inside the torchlit corridor beyond the shattered doorway. The passage leading inside the temple stretched as wide as three dragons, but entering would've made me too vulnerable. I considered destroying the roof of the temple, but it was a rather large structure of sturdy stone construction, so that would take more time that we had available. Ever helpful, I used my digits to pull away the door that had fallen upon the Sculptor attendant. The man still drew breath, but he didn't move even when I prodded him with the tip of one of my claws.\n\n\"This one will not be a useful messenger,\" I said to Dayne.\n\nFortunately, the noise of our entrance hastened other occupants of the temple to come to greet us.\n\nSculptors pretty much look alike in their big ugly masks and matching robes, but the limping gait of the figure running toward Dayne and I told me that this was Aylin, the Sculptor who'd been present at my interrogation earlier with Del Quickblade. He wasn't likely to be helpful. I decided to kill him quickly if things didn't go well.\n\nA bigger, fatter, Sculptor trailed behind Aylin. He wore an amulet of gold over his neck. There were several acolytes coming as well. I thrashed my tail back and forth as I waited for these two-legged creatures to reach me.\n\n\"What's the meaning of this?\" The fat Sculptor demanded, his mask hanging slightly askew, revealing the edges of round, pudgy face that resembled a pale hog.\n\nDayne dedicated himself to my purpose, as if it had been his own. His voice was harsh and commanding. \"Where is the Flux?\"\n\nThe Fat Sculptor panted for several long moments before he spoke. \"How do you even know about the Flux?\"\n\nAylin maneuvered beside his hefty companion, his wary eyes staring more at me than Dayne from behind his mask. This one had heard Quickblade's accusations. He didn't want to believe I was somehow free, but deep down, I was sure he knew.\n\n\"Honored Abbot,\" Aylin said to the fat Sculptor. \"This is Prince Dayne and his bonded dragon, Bayloo.\"\n\nThe hefty Sculptor's eyes widened. \"My prince, it is an honor, of course, but I do not understand why you are here.\"\n\nI wasn't mollified by honorifics or manners, so neither was my prince. \"Did you not hear me? Where. Is. The. Flux?\"\n\nI couldn't have said it better myself, at least not in human speech.\n\nHumans often develop a slight tremor in their knees and voices when they become scared. The greater the fear, the greater the tremor. The grand Abbot was shaking\u2014legs and voice\u2014like a crystal wine glass in a winter squall, and doing a poor job of hiding it.\n\n\"I'm unsure what you are speaking about.\" He was a terrible liar.\n\nDayne yanked out his blade, pointing it at the Sculptor's neck. Aylin leaned toward the fat Sculptor's ear. The prince couldn't hear his words, but I could.\n\n\"The bond between these two may be corrupt,\" was the secret he shared.\n\nThe fat Abbot's eyes widened so much it appeared as if someone was trying to push them out of his skull from behind. The smell of fear coming off the men grew stronger, but it mingled with something else: determination. Four beady human eyes regarded me. Maybe some of the acolytes behind the two Sculptors stared as well, but I was concerned with the eyes attached to humans who truly understood power. These two did.\n\n\"Kaza!\" the Abbot screamed as reached into his robe and withdrew a fisted hand. He held a dragon-claw stylus like the one that had carved Brindisi.\n\nPain ripped through me, inside to out. In that way, the agony was unique from other wounds I had suffered. Even the magic of the Mizu wizard had been an external force, its torture an attack like others, albeit far more powerful. The Sculptor's assault ripped at something within me, tearing at cords that bound me with the rune. My scale armor provided no protection. That magical carving that had been a part of me since I was a hatchling blazed like a hot furnace of pain. Nor was I the only victim. Dayne joined me in misery judging by his screams. He fell, wriggling about on the floor. The rune link burned on both ends. But that wasn't enough to stop me. Pain couldn't deter me anymore.\n\nI rumbled into the corridor, taking the fool Abbot into my jaws, squeezing only tight enough to let the silly creature know that if he tried to escape, I was going to bite him in half. I swept Aylin's legs out from under him with my tail. The Abbot dropped his stylus. The pain ceased. Dayne scrambled to his feet, his face hot with anger. He spoke my demands on my behalf.\n\n\"The Flux, now. Or I shall feed your heart to the dragon.\"\n\nThe last flourish hadn't been my idea. I doubt human hearts tasted any better than the rest of them, but I went with it. I pressed a tooth into the Abbot's ample tummy. Perhaps fat humans taste better than the others?\n\nHe got my message. \"The Flux is stored deep underground. In the ancient catacombs, a sacred pool, established by our ancestors.\"\n\nOh, ancestors my painted ass. I knew what that sacred pool contained. I'd seen enough of the liquid when they'd carved Brindisi, I'd felt the pain inflicted by their stylus. My mother had told me the source of the rune magic. It wasn't a big leap to know that the Flux was dragon blood. It was all part of the magic they had stolen from my kind. I wondered how long they'd had it and what magic they used to keep the ancient blood in liquid form and potent. I wanted to know how they obtained it, how they learned to use it in such a manner. But I had time for none of those things.\n\nI sent my command for Dayne to deliver. \"Bring it forth or be consumed.\"\n\n\"I-it cannot just be moved so easily. It is a great pool, and it can only be moved in special containers, enchanted\u2014\"\n\nI'd feared that. \"Four pots like those used by the acolytes will be sufficient for now,\" I told him through Dayne.\n\nAylin's bulging eyes transitioned from fear to sheer terror. His head shook. \"Abbot, you mustn't. The dragon\u2014\"\n\nI smacked the mouthy Sculptor with my tail again. I didn't need him blabbing some crazy theory about out-of-control dragons to the rest of the masked crowd. They thought their magic flawless, their carvings irreversible. Perhaps they were correct, perhaps not. But I was much more likely to get what I wanted if no one was considering if the impossible was indeed possible.\n\nI couldn't really see the Abbot's face given the placement of my jaw around his torso, but I felt him wiggle his neck a bit. \"Hosrick, fetch the Flux pots for Prince Dayne. Be quick about it.\"\n\n\"Very quick,\" Dayne confirmed. \"Bayloo is a hungry beast. And ill-tempered with those who defy me.\"\n\nI couldn't fault the prince's delivery. A white-masked acolyte scurried off, leaving a tense assembly of just under a dozen Sculptors and underlings standing about in appalled horror at the scene in the main corridor of their temple. I imagined the Abbot was the least pleased of the whole lot. I worried a bit that another of the Sculptors would attempt an attack, but the imminent peril of their Abbot stayed their hand.\n\nThe apprentice-messenger didn't dally. Quicker than I dared to hope, Prince Dayne had two containers of dragon blood in each of his greedy hands. I released the Abbot from my mouth, letting him crumple to the ground, his body soaked from my saliva. Lucky him. I tapped a claw on his chest and told Dayne what to say.\n\n\"Your life has been spared, this time. But I will brook no further interference of my orders, no further failures or defiance from this temple.\"\n\nWith that pronouncement, we departed, the prizes cradled in Dayne's arms like a newborn babe.\n\nI took to the air, anxious to free the first of my brothers."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Lothar waited where I'd left him.\n\nThe battle over the Fist continued, with the sky scorched by dragon fire and the screeching of griffins. An ominous crackle of something that resembled thunder, but definitely wasn't, rolled off the battlefield as I came to the field where Lothar lay. He still lived. He even lifted his neck slightly as I approached\u2014an encouraging sign.\n\nMy hearts beat against my chest as I moved beside him. Something ominous was afoot, but I was so close to my own goal, I couldn't afford to pay mind to anything else. My fellow dragons came first.\n\nDayne climbed off my back after I landed. I told him to place one of the Flux pots on the ground between Lothar and me. The rest he left in the dragon saddle that I wore. I prodded the pot Dayne had laid on the ground with my claw. It was small, made for human hands, not the far larger digits of a dragon. I fumbled about; perhaps I even shook it a bit. This pot was precious, laden with a desperate hope, but I didn't want human hands on it anymore. I wanted to be done with Dayne and all other humans. Awkwardly, I managed to grab the Flux pot between two digits of my foreleg.\n\nPrince Dayne had fulfilled his purpose, as I needed. I had the Flux. The echo of my old, ruthless ryder, Karthu,s echoed in my memory, urging me to give this useless prince the mercy of death.\n\n\"Dayne, stand before me,\" I ordered through the link.\n\nThe boy prince went rigid. For a moment something within him struggled, but not for long. My will had been tested and triumphed. I was the blade that had already won the battle. Dayne did as I commanded. I enjoyed the power. It was far better to be master than slave.\n\n\"Dayne, to heel.\"\n\nMy command surged through the link into his mind and this so-called prince obeyed as countless dragons had before this day. He fell to his knees.\n\nA notion slithered into my mind like a serpent with a devious message. I could punish Mendakas for what he had done to me and mine. I looked down anew at my former ryder, the Prince of Rolm. I remembered my encounter with the king and queen in my cave. This near-boy was the most precious thing in this world to his mother. To slay her son would kill a part of her and wound her husband as well. For however long Mendakas lived, he would bear the agony of the loss of his child, a prince who died a slave. Oh, that would be a cold vengeance for the servitude we dragons had been forced to endure.\n\nIt would be easy. The prince just stood there, mine to command. My mouth grew hot and my hearts cold. I imagined myself ripping Dayne's head from his body. I pictured the anguish of his mother. Karthus would've done it, had he been in my position. Brindisi was the same. Only gentle Jona would've stayed the hand of vengeance. There was also the future to consider. I didn't need any more blood enemies. I decided to be better than my former human masters.\n\n\"Take shelter within the city, my prince. You are too valuable to your people to be lost in battle today.\"\n\nPrince Dayne blinked several times at me, confused. He turned his head toward the Fist, at the griffins, and the battle raging above before coming back to regard me. He expected to join that battle. He opened his mouth as if to speak but closed it before any words came out.\n\nHe was an unworthy creature, pathetic with an inside full of hate. But to slay him only to bring pain to another would make me worse than that. I chose to be worthy of the sky. I was First of the Free, and I would use my newly won will to be better than the race that had enslaved me.\n\n\"Go now!\"\n\nThis time, Prince Dayne ran. Toward the city, preserving his life. I hoped some good would come from that life one day. He quickly disappeared into the night and my attention shifted to the cause that mattered. The time had finally come to free the dragons. Lothar would be the first.\n\nLike with all slave dragons, the Sculptors' runes disfigured my brother's chest just below his neck. The pattern of the magical carvings differed from my own, but only slightly. Their effect was the same: They made him a slave in mind and body.\n\nThe Sculptors believed their magical bonds unbreakable, but they were wrong. I was proof enough of that. I hoped I wasn't unique. I had some cause for hope: Jaxis' torment at the hand of Oster had been evidence that the link was not all powerful. The other stories of so-called mad dragons were cause for some scant hope. I didn't want to drive Lothar mad, though. I wanted to save him. When the other dragons had lost control, it had been in times of great stress. Their minds had been broken by the trauma that damaged the rune link. I hoped for a better result with my brother, Lothar. This would be a clean break without harm to Lothar's mind. The Flux, the stylus, and even the runes themselves had all been taken from dragons. These instruments created the bond that held us. I hoped that same magic could free one of us.\n\nI approached my brother Lothar slowly, my eyes urging him to be calm, that all would be well. I came closer than I ordinarily would have to another dragon, but he didn't seem alarmed. He was already exhausted and we all served a common cause, or so he thought.\n\n\"What I do, I do for our kind. Please know that I love you, brother.\"\n\nThese were strange words for one dragon to speak to another. Lothar eyes dimmed in confusion. The venom made him weak. That provided me with an opportunity. I ripped my claws across his chest, the tips digging deep into his scales, scraping across the runes that had been carved there since Lothar's days as a hatchling. I'd only have this one chance to take him with complete surprise at such close quarters and I made the most of it. My blow mangled his chest scales, and blood seeped out of the gouges I'd made in Lothar's armor. My brother bellowed in a rage of betrayal. I couldn't blame him, but I couldn't quit either. I hurled a Flux pot at him as he lay on his side. The Sculptor's concoction spattered over the wounds I'd inflicted, over the desecrated runes. Inside my head, pain flashed, like a knife's blade cutting within my skull. In that precious moment when the hurt subsided, I glimpsed again at that which I'd felt when I'd bested Dayne's mind\u2014a glimpse of the vast magic of my kind that my mother had mentioned. <The Latticework.> In that moment, I saw the world for the first time, but it vanished with my brother's roar.\n\nLothar let loose a sound laced with a heartiness that belied his injuries. He struggled onto his feet, his eyes seething with anger. I held my ground, neither attacking nor retreating from my bloody brother. I peered at his eyes, searching for a sign he'd changed, that the pain I'd inflicted upon him hadn't been in vain. Instead, rage greeted me. Despite his injuries, I'd awakened some hidden reservoir of strength within Lothar. He attacked, snapping his neck toward me, his jaws wide. I danced backward, readying my wings for a quick launch in case he resorted to fire. He did. A tight spit of flame came at me, clawing for my chest as I beat my wings. I hovered, hoping Lothar would calm himself, hoping he'd come to his senses. Instead, he sent a second, larger breath of fire at me. The burst spread wide and high. I flew higher, but not quick enough to escape entirely. The flames bit at my scales; the pain was a mere trifle, and fire wasn't much of a threat to me as long as my scales were intact. Still, this wasn't going the way I'd hoped.\n\n\"Lothar, my brother, I seek not to harm you, but rather to wake you.\"\n\nHe replied with still more fire. I rose in the air, completing a low circuit around my fellow dragon. What had I done wrong? I'd been so certain I had the key to it all. I'd damaged the runes; I'd used blood of dragons to cleanse his flesh. His ryder was already dead. Yet it still hadn't been enough. Worse, from the direction of the Fist, I saw a group of ugly dots flying toward me\u2014griffins. I stared back down at Lothar, snarling below me, barely able to move but his eyes fixed upon me. In those eyes there was nothing but madness. My hearts were lead, but I came at him yet again, knowing that I'd face his fire. But I had to try. This might be the last chance I ever would have at this.\n\nI roared with desperation at him. I needed Lothar's mind to break the chains that held it. The sound tore through the air, and it said: <Let us not be a race of slaves.>\n\nI was certain Lothar heard me. He froze\u2014or at least he stopped breathing fire at me. I came closer, roaring my urgent need yet again. Within my brother, something changed. A pallor I hadn't realized existed lifted from his eyes. For a fleeting moment, I dared to hope. Had I done it?\n\nThen my brother's gaze shifted again. I felt the presence of an immeasurable force magic\u2014countless interconnected links in an impossible web that surrounded me and my brother. It connected us, I realized, with invisible bonds of unknown origin and purpose. I saw Lothar as part of the pulsing web of energy as he turned his head about, starting at the sky, the battle around the Fist, then finally at me. Lothar seemed like a puppet within the vastness of the Latticework. His eyes seethed in an unquenchable rage, a look without thought or reason. Within Lothar's gaze, my hope for my kind fell away.\n\nMy brother's stare hurt more than his fire. He leaped at me. I moved just a bit too slow. My hearts were heavy with disappointment, my reflexes numbed by the slow ache of despair; Lothar's claws caught my flank. I spun away, but he came at me with a speedy anger. His jaws locked on my foreleg. I howled, but not really from the pain. His bite hurt, but it was the realization of what I had to do that really crushed me. I'd been wrong about the Sculptors' runes. I was wrong about my brother. The bonds of slavery went deeper than the magic that had been carved into him. I should've thought about that. I realized he was held by something deeper. Now, I had to pay the price for my failure. The Flux pots in the saddle on my back shattered as we struggled, as did my hope for freeing more of my kind, at least on this night.\n\nI whipped my tail into Lothar's wounded right wing and kicked at his damaged scales. Lothar's body shuddered in pain, but he didn't unlock his jaws. I hit my brother again, harder this time, but with the same result. Again, I misjudged mighty Lothar. He was a fighter. That was in his blood. The protective armor of my legs cracked as Lothar's jaw tightened, even as I continued to dig my claws into his exposed flesh, even as my tail beat at his side. I had no choice. I snapped at his neck. There was already a chink in his scales from the battle with griffins. I made that the focus of my attack. As I expected, the scales were weakened there. My teeth drew blood. His airflow became erratic. I didn't stop squeezing. Finally, the pressure on my leg relented. I thought he'd had enough. That he'd realized he couldn't win this. I didn't want to kill my brother. I too released my jaw. I was a fool.\n\nA gaze of mad hate came at me. There was no quit within Lothar. Whatever drove him could not be silenced while he lived. A lifetime of slavery could not be easily unraveled. Something about the magic of the runes made its victims unable to win their freedom. The magic leash was both carved onto our bodies and connected to something far greater.\n\nLothar shot his fire at my wounded wing. It was my most vulnerable surface. If he could ground me, I was dead. Sooner or later, one way or another, the griffins or the slave dragons would find me. This had gone on too long. The griffins I'd seen were almost upon us. I had to finish the fight. So, I did.\n\nI attacked, straight at Lothar's fire. Eyes closed, I surged into his flame, my wings tucked as close to my body as I could pull them. The heat of his breath surged over my face, spilling onto my neck and torso. My scales handled it well enough. Much of Lothar's strength had left him and I didn't let his assault persist. My jaw found my brother's neck. This time I didn't hesitate, I didn't offer mercy. I bit, sinking my teeth into his shattered scales. Lothar wriggled about, trying to dislodge me. He couldn't. I was stronger. My teeth passed through into his flesh, the top and bottom of my jaw meeting each other within Lothar's neck. With a single anguished yank, I tore most of the center of my brother's throat away from the rest of his body. Lothar's blood gushed from my mouth as I watched him fall to the ground. His tail shook in a final frenzy, then crashed down with the rest of him.\n\nFinally, Lothar was free. For the second time in my life, I leaked water from my eyes.\n\n\"Your death shall not be for nothing, brother,\" I vowed. \"I do not have the answer today, but I now know I must look deeper. What my mother knew, I shall know as well. What was stolen from our kind, will be ours again. And you will have made it possible.\"\n\nMy words were desperate and laced with grief, but they were also born of an ember of knowledge growing within me. I had sensed the great magic that held my kind in slavery. I knew there was a way I could free my kind. I had hope.\n\nIt didn't last."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Griffins swarmed me.\n\nThe trauma of knowing that I'd killed Lothar momentarily dulled my self-preservation instincts. I wanted that bloody corpse to open his eyes again. I wanted him to be alive again, even as a slave. But that wasn't going to happen. I tried to remind myself that there was still hope. I just needed time to understand, but if I stayed where I was, I would end up as dead at Lothar.\n\nThe griffins had caught me still on the ground, where I lost the advantage of my maneuverability. There were three and they dove at me, talons twitching. I snapped at the lead beast, causing it to break off its dive at the last moment, my jaws closing around the empty air where it had flown a moment before. Two of its companions followed closely. I dodged one, but the other raked its talon across my neck. The sensational pain that followed shocked me\u2014I've been scratched by many griffins in past battles, but the strength of this attack was different. My scales should've been better able to resist griffin claws. The beast's talons plunged into me, slicing three parallel tracks through a portion of the armor on my back, just below my neck. The wound stung like fire on a tongue. I roared, as much in surprise as pain though. <That shouldn't happen.> Yet my damaged scales weren't the worst of it. The sheer force of the blow had rattled my bones as if I'd been struck by a mountain. What kind of griffin had the Pale Wrights of Oster wrought from their breeding pits this time?\n\nI watched the trio circle in a tight formation barely above me. The next attack was inevitable. I heard Narsis cry out in pain from somewhere in the distance, but there was nothing I could do for my fellow dragons for now.\n\nDark griffin eyes peered at me with hate. The three killers dipped their wings and I braced for more pain. I might even have died in that spot beside my brother, Lothar, but for the return of my kin. The high-pitched roar of a horned dragon cracked the air, follow of another and these were among most welcome sounds I'd ever heard. From the east came my cousins. I could make out the outlines of the flock returning from the far coast, where they had been lured by the Osteran deceit. Bethy Rann and Crema would be with them. The horned dragons swept through the sky at speed despite the load of useless humans on their backs. Horns sounded from around the Fist\u2014a deep rumbling claxon made by the signal masters within the army of Oster. They too recognized the danger that approached. The griffins who hunted me broke off their attack, obeying the call of their imperiled masters. I took to the sky, climbing quickly into the crisp night.\n\nOnce I regained the clouds, I craned my neck to watch as my kin engaged Oster's mighty horde of beasts above and around King Mendakas' fortress. Smoke polluted the sky, but it didn't hide the desperation of the battle. While I had been occupied with freeing my brethren, the battle had turned against Rolm. The high tower of the Fist had been toppled and a portion of the outer wall battlements had collapsed into the courtyard. Griffins swarmed about the keep like bees around their hive. One gripped the hind leg of Narsis in its beak as she desperately fought\u2014ryderless\u2014to keep four more beasts at bay with erratic sprays of fire. The weight of the griffin attached to her leg dragged her ever lower in the sky even as she beat her wings. My remaining kin fared little better. Triton had been driven northward away from the primary melee by a dozen griffins. One of his hind legs hung at an unnatural angle. On Triton's back, King Mendakas had an arrow notched in his bow, but held his fire, his quiver nearly empty. Cornethius and his larger companion, Organa, flew in formation above the Fist, pursued by more griffins. When they paused to fight, they did so in tight formation, with each enabling the other to concentrate on a smaller area, without concern with enemies coming from behind. I saw no furies left in the air, but even against the griffins alone, my brethren struggled.\n\nI had no love for Rolm, nor its king, but I could not help but count my fellow dragons who remained in the sky\u2014there were but six ash dragons. It shouldn't have been this way. There should have been more than sufficient dragons to fight off the assault, even with the surprise Oster had achieved. But the new griffins' strangely sharpened talons that pierced our armor made the difference. The tension around my hearts lessened only slightly as the horned dragons entered the fray. One group of my kin kept to the air, their ryders launching a fusillade of arrows at the feathered attackers, while other dragons landed to offload the soldiers they carried against Oster's ground forces. I ached to be with them. I consoled myself that the tide was already turning. While the battle had swayed on the tip of claw before the horned dragons' return, now it was Rolm with the clear advantage. Still, I wanted to be among my own kind. I flew closer to the melee, grinding my jaw, looking for an opportunity to strike. I shouldn't have been so sentimental.\n\nThe putrid smell of griffin assaulted my nostrils just before I saw it\u2014a griffin had hidden itself in a patch of dark clouds above, hoping to strike me unaware again. It probably feared my fire\u2014which I didn't have. I watched it cut the air, hungry for my death. I could discern no physical difference between this beast and any other griffin, yet it came far quicker than the rest of its kind.\n\nThere was no point in running from this strange griffin. It was too fast, and it was alone. I could beat any bird. I turned upward to meet it in the air. That was when I saw what made this griffin different: something was attached to the left side of the giant bird's neck. It wasn't feathery, and it didn't resemble anything a human could've made. Indeed, the attached passenger was no bigger than human hand, slimy, with shiny moss-colored skin\u2014like a giant leech had somehow secured itself to the griffin.\n\n<Not somehow. Deliberately,> I realized. The Osteran healers had symbiotic creatures they laid onto their soldiers and beasts to help mend their wounds. I wondered if this thing was something similar\u2014except instead of healing a wound it granted greater strength and stamina. Or something like that.\n\nThe griffin's beak shot at my face. It wanted to ram me\u2014fast and suicidal. I yanked my neck away at the last moment, getting one of my foreclaws in the griffin's path. Its beak tore into my digits, puncturing my claw. That hurt, but it also slowed the griffin. I saw the leech-like creature thumping like an attached heart on the griffin's neck. I tried to swipe the bird with my tail, but the griffin twisted away, back into higher airspace before I struck.\n\nI dove, picking up speed. Below, I saw the Osteran force beneath its walls seemed to be withdrawing. Yet the carnage was not concluded for my kind. The griffins covered the escape of the Osteran army. I saw Narsis' left wing had a hole in it, and blood leaked out from Cornethius' underside as if it was piss. I unleashed a sound of fury. It had the desired effect of drawing the attention of several symbiont-enhanced griffins who had been harrying my brethren. I flew toward them and they at me. It then occurred to me that I had no idea how I was going to fight off three of these things. Could I tire them out like a fury? Whatever that leech on their necks was doing to them, it couldn't last forever. I suspected that the beasts' great stamina came at a price.\n\nThe griffins were on me before I thought of anything cleverer than to bite them before they bit me. The leading griffin came right at my face, expecting to gouge my eyes, blind me, pick my nose, whatever. A snap of my jaws forced a course correction, leaving me with a gash on the top of my head and a single griffin feather in my mouth. The other beasts flew close behind. I twisted, thrashing my tail. I got a cut near my hind leg without anything to show for it. This wasn't a fight I would win. I twisted down, flying fast toward the ground, heading for the sprawl of Eladrell. Ordinarily, drawing a bunch of griffins toward the most densely populated area in Rolm wouldn't have been compatible with my slave dragon mission, but I figured it was time for some payback for all I'd done for these humans.\n\nThe three griffins followed me, of course. Like dogs, if you run, they chase. This lot was fast. I pushed my wings as hard as I could. I passed over the outer wall of Eladrell, the eyes of every guardsmen fixed upon me. I hoped the open-mouthed humans had the sense to take note of the creatures behind me. They did. I heard the sound of bows and ballista from the city's defenders open fire in my wake, aimed at the low flying griffins pursuing me. I craned my head back to assess the damage the human's managed to inflict. It was pathetic. Of the dozens of projectiles hurled, I saw only two arrows sticking out of the one of the three pursuers. The injured beast didn't slow. Out of a corner of my eye I saw even more griffins coming. The Osterans weren't done.\n\nMy fellow dragon saved me, and a human too. The human archers on the walls of Eladrell might not be able to aim, but Bethy Rann could. She swooped in on Crema and put an arrow through the eye of one of the griffins. Its companion squawked at the new threat: three horned dragons coming at her, with Crema in the lead, and Rann standing up in the saddle with a bow in her hand. A second arrow took a griffin in the wing. That slowed the beast enough for me to skewer it with a claw.\n\nThey came after Crema and Rann, of course. Two griffins, then two more that seemed to appear from nowhere. A hidden reserve of several more griffin had arisen from within the Osteran army ranks to attack the other arriving dragons. I couldn't tell if these had leeches or not. The fight got bloody, quickly. Horned dragons' scales aren't nearly as tough as those of their greater kin; the griffins' beaks and claws didn't just tear into my smaller brethren\u2014they sliced them apart. I did my best to help. I flew, bit, and clawed. I killed more than half a dozen griffins more quickly than I dared hope. Unfortunately, the easiest kills came against vicious birds gouging on dragon blood. The screams of falling ryders mixed with the agonizing calls of my battling kin.\n\nCrema wasn't spared in the carnage. Rann did her best to keep the griffins at bay, the course of battle pulling her way from the city into the hinterlands beyond. Seeing the peril, I followed them, but there were griffins in my path. Bethy Rann put an arrow in one giant bird and shoved her blade through the eye another that got a hold of Crema's wing. It wasn't enough. Crema's cry rang in my head as I chomped a griffin head. I turned toward the sound in time to see the dragon falling in a downward spiral, Rann still on her back, firing arrows as they went down. Crema vainly flapped her remaining intact wing and the bloody shreds of the other as I dove for them. The effort only drew the attention of another griffin. It rammed its beak into Crema's throat before I could do a thing about it. The beautiful dragon's neck slumped, and her body went deathly still. Rann's anguished gaze locked with mine. I put everything I had left into my dive, my pain and damaged wings be damned.\n\nRann called to me over the wind. \"Get closer.\"\n\nAs much as it pained me, I couldn't save Crema. As I drew beside her, I was sure that there was nothing left to save except a broken shell. I let loose the anguished song as I had when my mother passed even as I matched Crema's fatal dive, although this rendition was neither as long nor as sorrowful as she deserved given the circumstances. Rann leapt from Crema onto me. Once she secured herself, I broke out of my dive, my roar still ringing through the sky. The other dragons noticed. They stared at me. Something about the song had touched them even through the haze of their bonds. At least, that is what I hoped. It lasted only a moment. For the other dragons, there was still a battle to win. I lost sight of Crema in the melee. I hoped she somehow survived her wounds\u2014she was a dragon after all\u2014but I doubted it. The wound in her neck was deep.\n\nEven with their reserve griffins, Oster's forces could only hope to save themselves from total annihilation. Despite being smaller and fireless, the smaller dragons were agile and their ryders' bows were deadly. Only a handful of griffins remained, and a few strength-giving leeches couldn't change the numbers. A sorrowful horn blast sounded from amidst the Osteran army. Every griffin in the sky turned to the sound. The battle was done\u2014almost.\n\nThe Osterans continued retreating. Narsis, Cornethius, and Triton offered no mercy. A snaking line of soldiers hurried back toward the sea. Only when one of my brethren came close enough to attack the fleeing invaders did the few remaining griffins attack.\n\nI was content to let the Osterans leave. There was no telling what else the Pale Wrights had bred in their pits to send against us. I hoped the human ryders who commanded my remaining brethren would have the good sense to feel the same way, but of course my hope didn't last for even ten beats of my wings. King Mendakas had not reigned as long as he by letting enemy armies escape from his grasp. He had already (with my considerable assistance) devastated most of Oster's griffins. Of course, he would look to finish them and their fleet. The more Oster lost here, the weaker she would be when King Mendakas led the armies of Rolm against the Shard once again. He ordered his remaining dragons to attack.\n\nA wave of Triton's fire sent the remains of the Osteran army to flight in every direction. Their spirit broke along with their lines. Men ran all about, wolves howled in pain, but these posed no real threat. They had nothing left to offer. Galt's gambit had failed terribly.\n\nI sped through the sky, banking west once I'd reached my desired altitude. I soared around DragonPeak to investigate the Osteran fleet. I saw most of their ships had already sailed, with only a pair of intrepid vessels daring to remain to pick up any stragglers.\n\nThere was enough starlight reflecting off the waves for Rann to see the ship fleeing as well. \"Should we go after them?\"\n\nI didn't need to think on that question. \"There's been enough death. Let them go their way. I shall go mine.\"\n\n\"Where is that?\"\n\n\"To the Mizu, to find my lost sister, if I can. To find the secrets my mother didn't have time to share.\" Or die trying. I'd failed my brethren here in Rolm; if I failed my sister as well, what use was I to anyone? But I wouldn't fail.\n\n\"What about the Wall of Fire?\"\n\nI thought of the ghastray, Vengeance. Dare I trust such a creature? \"I know the way through.\"\n\nI sensed Rann's surprise, but she didn't question me. She took a hard swallow. \"I understand, you must care for your blood. I must do the same.\"\n\nHer words sent a surge of guilt through me. Rann and her brother had risked their lives to try to free me and my fellow dragons, although I still didn't completely understand why. I spoke impulsively. \"Come with me.\"\n\nI could hardly believe what I had said. Rann was handy with a bow and sword, but I wasn't sure if I wanted her or any human with me.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You seem to know about that land across the Wall of Fire.\"\n\n\"My destiny is here,\" Rann said firmly. \"I have someone to kill, and much else to do, besides.\"\n\n\"I intend to come back,\" I assured her. \"This is not over. There is hope for my fellow dragons still. We shall be free. My sister shall be flying beside me when I return to liberate my race. Come fly with us. You are worthy.\"\n\nBefore Rann could give me an answer, an ominous shadow crossed the sky: Triton and King Mendakas."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "I didn't change my course.\n\nI flew toward the horizon, away from Rolm, and away from the fleeing Osteran fleet. For a brief moment I still hoped that perhaps the King of Rolm would leave me to my own journey and focus on seeking his prey in the distant sea. Stupid hope\u2014he did not. Triton turned toward me, coming fast. He was old, but still swift. In my current condition, I didn't think I could outfly him.\n\nWhen the king and his slave dragon were close enough, Mendakas called out. \"Bayloo, who is riding you?\"\n\n\"Bethy Rann, your majesty.\" She said the title with bitterness. Surely, the king had guessed what I was by now.\n\n\"Where is my son, Bayloo?\"\n\nI beat my wings harder, but Triton kept pace. \"I don't know.\"\n\nThe giant dragon's shadow passed over me. He was so close I could feel the wind coming off his wings. \"Bayloo, what happened to my son?\"\n\nIt made no sense to fight Triton if I could avoid it. I told the best story I could muster. \"He is in Eladrell. He is unharmed.\" I could've told him I'd spared his son's life when I could have easily taken it, but I knew that wouldn't help me here.\n\nIf the king had more questions, he didn't bother with them at that moment. He was fixed on this battle, this victory. \"Bayloo, we must fly to destroy the Osteran ships. When we finish them, Oster will fall to its knees before our dragons even arrive.\"\n\nI stole a glance at Triton, at his muscled chest, his massive teeth. He had some broken scales but I'd fared worse than he in the battle. I wasn't going to be able to fly away fast enough.\n\nI probably should've said nothing. I should have just pushed myself for more speed to try to escape. Instead, I gave in to my longing to speak to this king of humans. \"I'm not yours to command.\"\n\nI don't know if Mendakas replied. After I spoke, I dove toward the sea, picking up speed from the descent. Then I beat my wings as hard as I could, trying to separate from Triton. The sound of the wind and the beating of my hearts surrounded me. The distance between Triton and I grew for a brief time. I'd given Mendakas a choice: Go after me or the Osteran fleet.\n\nI knew that the king salivated for victory over Oster. They had invaded his kingdom, killed so many of his dragons, and besieged his fortress. A man like Mendakas should pursue the enemies of his kingdom.\n\nInstead, he came for me. So much for his final victory. Perhaps he figured he could do both\u2014that the other dragons would destroy the Osterans. More likely he knew a free dragon was a far greater threat than an already weakened Oster.\n\nTriton flew at me. I could've pressed myself for more speed, truly testing my endurance against his, but that would've just delayed the inevitable. I was already tired and in pain. The longer this went on, the worse for me. I needed to conserve some strength to fight Triton.\n\nI spoke to Rann since we had no link. \"I do not want to kill my brother dragon, which means you need to kill Mendakas.\"\n\n\"I shall do so with pleasure. I've been waiting most of my life for this.\"\n\nI didn't understand Rann's hunger for this human's death, but I wasn't going to question it now. Rann wasn't finished talking though\u2014humans never were. \"I want something in return, before you go. You must return me to Rolm, to one particular spot of my choosing.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"First, your promise. Anyplace I ask.\"\n\nI growled in annoyance. \"Is this the time to bargain?\"\n\nRann wasn't intimidated. \"Isn't it?\"\n\nI grunt my agreement. I'd made too many promises, but this couldn't be avoided. Triton closed in. Mendakas would die.\n\n\"Aim true and I shall carry you where you wish, so long it is not beyond the known lands of Rolm. I make no promises beyond that.\"\n\n\"Done.\" I heard Rann notch an arrow. \"Word has it that his armor is dragon scale. Impenetrable. Only the gap between the neck and helm is vulnerable. A tough target, but I can make it if you can get me a clear, steady shot.\"\n\nMy answer was to bank as sharply as I could. Triton and I came toward each other, nose to nose. But I didn't attempt a direct pass. It didn't want Rann to get roasted by his fire; also, passing a bit high on either side would give Rann the best angle for a shot. Of course, I had to hide the game I played, so I had to pretend that I was actually willing to engage in a straight on engagement with Triton. Since I wasn't a fire breather, that's what he'd think I wanted\u2014to get close enough for us to tear each other to pieces with claws and teeth.\n\nMy brother's jaw drooled saliva as we flew at each other. I knew he'd be anxious to use his flames. Fire breathers think they're so superior. I held my course, giving Triton what he thought he wanted. Of course, Mendakas was no fool, nor was he one to wait for his enemy to take the initiative. He unleashed Triton's breath earlier than I expected\u2014at too distant a range to do any real damage, but in as wide an arc as the dragon could manage. The flames couldn't harm me, particularly at that distance, but they would've roasted Rann. I couldn't let that happen. I banked left, maneuvering sooner than I'd intended. As I changed my direction, Triton's fire stopped. He dipped his neck, giving Mendakas a clear shot at me. The king knew how to use a bow as well as any of his ryders. His arrow punched right through my wing, with a speed and force I didn't expect. I wondered if Mendakas had enchanted magic arrows of some kind\u2014spoils of the war with Ulibon that he'd kept for himself.\n\nHe and Triton probably expected me to dive or try to change my course again, but I didn't. The ferocity of the arrow actually saved me. The puncture was a clean one, the hole only the size of the arrow tip. I could still fly, and I did. I had to give Rann her shot. Triton realized what I planned a moment before Rann fired her own arrow. It was a good shot, straight and true. It might even have been lethal if Triton hadn't swerved at the very last moment. The arrow struck Mendakas in the center of his chest, just below his neck. It would've killed most men, but his dragon scale armor saved him. Rann might as well have hit him with a pebble for all the impact it had.\n\nTriton came after me again, positioned for another blast of flame. I tried to keep above him, keeping only my underside exposed and Rann safe on my back. He unleashed his breath; it hurt where I'd been cut and gashed by the griffins. I just didn't have the maneuverability to out dance Triton in the sky anymore. Eventually, he'd get a shot at my backside and Rann would die. I risked a desperate strike. As Triton's fire faded, I dove back toward him, spinning as I did it. I hoped Rann had the sense to hold on tight instead of trying to use her bow while upside down.\n\nI intended to take a bite of Triton's wing, to maim him so badly he'd have to return to land or risk the death of his ryder. My injuries slowed me. Or maybe Triton was faster than I anticipated. In any case, instead of getting his wing, Triton's tail smacked me in my face\u2014hard. Nothing hits with the force of a dragon tail. My head shook. For a moment I lost all sense of direction. A sharp pain indicated that Mendakas had put another hole in the scales of my hind leg. He was trying to cripple me. Likely he sought to understand what had happened and to make me a slave again. I didn't know how bad the new wound was, but it hurt, and I knew this fight wasn't going my way. I tucked in my wings and grabbed Triton, trying to sink my claws into my larger kin. He wriggled and spun, but I managed to get a front and rear claw on him. With my extra weight attached, we sank in the air. He grunted and snarled, and I did the same. Triton scraped my belly with his claws, yanking several scales off my body. A blast of nearly blinding pain shot through me.\n\nTriton's huge jaws closed on my neck. I thrashed, but he had me. His teeth sunk through my armor. I'd be dead in another few moments. I could've ripped his wings with my own claws, but that just would've meant two dead dragons instead of one. I stopped struggling and waited for my brother to finish me.\n\n\"Triton, release him.\" It was Bethy Rann. \"Release him or your ryder dies.\"\n\nMy brother's teeth relaxed but didn't leave my neck. We continued to fall from the sky and it took several precious heartbeats for me to realize that Rann had leapt from my back during the melee and taken King Mendakas by surprise. With the king strapped in his dragon saddle, Rann had been able to outmaneuver him, despite his armor. At the moment, she had a dagger to his throat. Triton didn't crane his neck to look at the situation, but he didn't need to. The link would enable him to sense Mendakas' peril.\n\nWe slowed our fall. Rann pressed her advantage. \"Last chance, Triton.\"\n\nMendakas reeked of venom. \"You'll burn slowly for this, girl.\"\n\n\"But my death will mean yours as well, a fate you are so deserving of. Do as I say, or we all die in the sea.\"\n\nThe runes that bound my brother meant that Mendakas would decide his own fate and mine. The king decided to live. The command came through their link. Triton's jaws opened, releasing me. I shoved away into the sky. My injured wing hurt and balked. I managed to keep myself aloft, but not much more than that. There was no way I could outrun Triton and Rann knew it.\n\nWithout my weight dragging him, Triton quickly steadied himself in the air.\n\nRann spoke loud enough that I could hear. \"Triton, take us back to Rolm. Let Bayloo go on his way. Then I'll release your precious king.\"\n\n<No,> I screamed inside. <I can't allow another sacrifice.>\n\nJona had already died for me. Now Rann would as well. Mendakas and Triton would never let her live after this. Because of me. Yet I also didn't see any other way out. I needed to save my sister and I was selfish of my own life.\n\nI let out a roar of frustration. Rann understood me.\n\n\"Make this count, Bayloo. Fulfill the quest Great Dawn set you upon. Afterwards return, for a debt is still owed, and this land still has need of you.\"\n\nI was to go on alone. Something gnawed at my hearts. Did I fear to be alone? I had never been without a ryder, not truly. I had never had my own desires or controlled my own destiny. It was harder than I expected.\n\nPerhaps Rann sensed my hesitation. \"You carry hope with you, Bayloo. Now fly, noble dragon. With courage. Find you sister. Then return to us. I too believe there is hope.\"\n\nI didn't want this gift or this burden, but I took it.\n\n\"You have my promise to return. I will not forget you, Bethy Rann.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You have much to learn, Bayloo. I'm sorry I've not the time to teach it all to you. Fly true.\" Rann kicked Triton's flank. The dragon understood her message even without a rune link.\n\nI craned my neck to watch Triton fly toward Rolm, leaving me in a lonely sky.\n\nAlone, I flew west, to the Wall of Fire and the lands of the Mizu beyond. There I would find my sister. There I would find the magic source of the magic that enslaved my race.\n\nI flew to my destiny."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Age of Fire 3) Dragon Outcast",
        "author": "E.E. Knight",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Hatchling",
                "text": "\u2002\"A BAD START IS STILL A START.\" \u2014Tyr FeHazathant\n\nNo pleasant dream, this. Discomfort and darkness, cold and cramp, clinging tendrils binding. The restrictions vexed him.\n\nThe hatchling struggled against his torment, twisting his neck to a more comfortable position, for his head kept jerking uncontrollably.\n\nSuddenly his nose tore free of its bonds with a startling crack that ran down his body to the tail-tip. A membrane gave way, air tickled at his nose, and his lungs greedily pulled in its enticing freshness and a comforting, musky odor that filled him with longing.\n\nA weight dragged at his belly, and he knew he had to be free of it. He reached up a rear claw and tore it away, the small pain worth the greater freedom.\n\nThe pain brought an additional benefit: His mind cleared of dreams and confusion and doubt. Instinct took over his little body, from deepest fiber to smallest hatchling scale. He pushed in every direction at once, head twisting and battering at the gap as his nose worked out.\n\nThen it all gave way and he sprawled, whipping his tail around and fighting to right himself in a mass of clinging membrane and white shards. He opened his eyes, but the light pained and confused him, so he shut them again.\n\nA wet web hung on him. It stuck everywhere in his scales, in the folds of hide and bone behind his jaw, his crest, his claws.\n\nStrange, strange, strange. No clouds or currents or friendly sun, yet he was not frightened at the newness. The musky smell told him that all was well. He was safe.\n\nHe brought up a forelimb and wiped the web away from his eyes and off his crest. Now he could go to work with his long, flexible neck and sharp teeth, getting it off his limbs.\n\n\"We've done it; oh, thank Susirion and the four shapers, he lives.\" The voice, the mind, more than half his own, had spoken to him in the egg. Through it he had seen brilliant sunlight and hot, flowing gold, blended and poured into his consciousness. This was the voice of his dreams, the spinner of images bright but vague around the edges, sunlight, crashing ocean waves, herds of blotch-backed beasts thundering below, leathery wings flapping and a proud, booming voice shaking the mountainside with song.\n\n\"Open your eyes, my jewel. See your mother and your world!\"\n\nMother!\n\nHe opened his eyes, and it took a moment for his vision to clear. Too much to take in: a wall of green scale, curled-down head with its sniffing nostrils and shining, wide-open eyes, darkness filled with strange columns bathed in a glow from pools of light gathered on the floor, even a gentle, probing tail-tip as thick as his midwaist flicking bits of\u2026of\u2026shell, his brain supplied\u2026flicking bits of shell off his haunches.\n\nWave after wave of love, delight, contentment rolled out of her and over him. This was better than any of the dreams before. The hatchling basked in it, a tiny thrumming deep in his throat answering her powerful one. They prrumed to each other. The ground almost vibrated with the low, resonant thrumming.\n\nTwo other eggs stirred. One rolled into the other with a soft tap.\n\nThe shifted egg opened like a jagged-toothed mouth, and a powerful red form spilled out. Its back legs outdrove its front, and it collapsed forward for a moment, jaw flat against the hard ground.\n\nIt squawked. He listened to the echoes and determined that they were in a confined space, but a very large one, and that a vast distance\u2014to his few moments of experience\u2014yawned behind, like his body, far longer than it was high.\n\nThe hatchling hardly noticed its smaller forelegs, its powerful neck, the clinging goo trailing from its rear limbs and bits of egg flying off its whipping tail. He had eyes only for its crest, a short rise of flattened horn sweeping back from its eyes.\n\nEvery instinct screeched: Threat, threat, threat!\n\nThe Red snorted liquid out of his nose. He opened his eyes and blinked. The tiny sharp spur crowning his nose turned toward the hatchling. The Red gathered himself, short flaps of armored skin behind his jawline rattling angrily against the base of his crest.\n\nThe hatchling found his own flaps answering the sound.\n\nTchkka-tchak tchkka-tchak tchkka-tchak!\n\nThe Red lowered his head and exploded toward him in a flash of glittering scales, mouth agape, fans wide and menacing.\n\nHe shifted to dodge him, but the clumsy new body didn't react the way it did in dreams. They reared up on hindquarters, claws scrabbling and mouths biting\u2014\n\n\u2014suddenly they were suspended in space.\n\nFalling, but not for long.\n\nThey hit hard, the hatchling atop the Red, the Red's crest striking first and absorbing much of the blow.\n\nThe hatchling brought up a rear limb and raked the Red's flank. When the Red shifted he bit, but his jaws closed on air as the Red lurched away.\n\nThe Red swung around, rushed him, used his weight to roll the Copper, got atop him. Bit down\u2014\n\nHe put up his left forelimb to protect his neck, and the Red's jaws closed on it rather than his neck and they rolled again. They clawed and scratched at each other's scales. He tried to push the Red away and right himself. A tearing pain in his forelimb, and the Red tightened his grip, braced those massive rear haunches, and began to pull, jerking his head back and forth, rending muscle and joints as the hatchling squawked and tried to bite at the Red's neck.\n\nCraack!\n\nThe hatchling didn't know what caused the Red to drop his limb. Then the Red jumped off him and climbed up, up, toward the eggs and another crested head.\n\nThe hatchling jumped after him\u2014no foe is getting away that easy!\u2014but he sprawled as he took his first step, hurt forelimb not where it should be. It seemed to be folding itself against his breast, claw turned inward.\n\nHe wobbled on three limbs and tried to climb, but fell on the first attempt. He heard high-pitched, angry cries from the vicinity of the eggs.\n\nHis second attempt at a climb went a little better, as he braced himself with his tail. But he fell again when he shifted his rear limbs and his tail slipped on the hot, wet liquid dripping from his limb.\n\nThe third time he used his jaws, gripping a projection with his teeth when his tail could no longer support his weight. Panting, he heaved himself over the edge, up among the eggs again.\n\nHis vision blurred a moment and he felt dizzy from the climb. When it cleared again\u2026\n\nThe Red fought another hatchling, a slight gray thing compared to the Red's bulk. It had leathery skin rather than scales. The Red used his weight to upset the Gray and managed to get his jaws around the Gray's neck.\n\nThe hatchling saw his chance. He coiled and jumped, throwing himself on the Red's back with his powerful back limbs. He got his jaws around the Red's neck, where it was thinnest just under the jaw\u2026.\n\nThe Red thrashed, used his weight to knock him over, and scrabbled. The hatchling bore down, feeling the Red's panting breath and pounding neck hearts through his teeth\u2026.\n\nThe Red stiffened, every muscle in his body aquiver, and went limp. The hatchling closed his teeth on his throat, feeling the neck hearts rattle and die.\n\nThe hatchling went as limp as the Red.\n\nMovement. The Gray was on his feet, facing him crest-to-crest.\n\nKill it! Kill and eat!\n\nThe Gray sidestepped to get around the corpse of the Red and rushed him, aiming straight for the bloody wound on his injured limb. The hatchling shifted to protect it, and the Gray drove his crest into his side, pushing, pushing\u2026.\n\nHe squawked as he went over a second time, grabbed for the Gray, but the hatchling danced out of the way of his rear claw and he fell\u2026.\n\nRight on his bad forelimb.\n\nThe pain blinded him; it took him a moment to recover, and when he opened his eyes again he was alone at the base of the egg shelf, listening to more cracking sounds.\n\nMore?\n\nHe couldn't even beat the lighter Gray. Suppose another such as the Red\u2026?\n\nBut though he did not know it, he was the son of a powerful line, and his young hearts knew no despair. And he had his mother's wit still intact. He rested, gathering strength. He'd let the others weary themselves tearing one another to bits and then come up fresh\u2026.\n\nExcept he felt so weak. He licked at his wounded limb, and the blood-tang left him both hungry and revolted.\n\nNo cries of battle greeted his ears. Maybe they were all bled out. He examined the wall to the egg shelf first, looked for an ascent with plenty of good grips.\n\nThis time, when he began to slip, he just tightened his grip and searched for a rest for his tail until he found the strength to climb on. He passed over the lip\u2026.\n\nNothing. Just two sprawled green hatchlings, uncrested and therefore innocuous, digging into the corpse of the Red. The blood smell inflamed his appetite.\n\nMy victory! My feast!\n\nOthers enjoyed his kill. He jumped on the Red's corpse, claiming it, baring his teeth at the hapless Greens.\n\nOne, shorter of length and powerfully built like the Red, backed away. The other, longer and thinner even than the Gray, tripped, thrashed weakly.\n\nDrive her away, his appetite roared.\n\nHe jumped on her, pushing, nipping her at the shoulder and hip points. She squeaked in alarm, pulled away.\n\nHe tore free a piece of fleshy tail she'd been gnawing at.\n\nThe other Green intervened with a growl, opening her jaws, glaring at him like the combative Red.\n\nHe caught a flash of motion off his weak side. It was the Gray again, bounding up from a trickle of water at the other end of the egg shelf.\n\nThe Green advanced, covering her sister with her own bulk.\n\nHe couldn't fight them both at once. He mouthed the chunk of tail and fled, finding he could use the elbow of his injured forelimb when running, though it pained him. He jumped back off the egg shelf. If they tried to jump down after him, he'd get them at a disadvantage when they alighted.\n\nThe Gray yapped down at him, but showed no sign of plunging to the cave floor. The Copper gnawed at the meaty tail, feeling the energy entering his bloodstream from the swallowed hunks of tissue.\n\nThe Gray's head disappeared, and the battle fury left the Copper. He felt cold, alone, and wandered over to the trickle and lapped a little water. He cooled his injured limb in the pool. Above, Mother started to sing. He crept closer so he could catch the end of the song:\n\n\u2026and the long years of dragonhood are sure to be thine.\n\nHe tried to climb up to the egg shelf, but failed, the pain in his throbbing limb overcoming him. He lay in the cold, hearing Mother's soft throat music, half song and half prrum.\n\nHe made one more attempt at the climb. Not to fight this time, but to be by Mother, safe and warm, wrapped in music and belly heat. Mother's great tail dropped over the edge and pushed him down. She looked down at him from the heights of her neck.\n\n\"No, little one, Auron has won the egg shelf. If you come up again he will kill you.\"\n\nHe tried to reply, but the only noises he seemed to be able to make were squeaks, not words. He tried, came close, tried again:\n\n\"Fwhy?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, hatchling. You are an outcast. You must learn to overcome on your own.\"\n\nHe huddled against the base of the egg shelf, cold and alone.\n\nNo pleasant dream, this.\n\nLoneliness was a constant companion to the outcast. Often hunger tagged along throughout the day, gnawing at him from belly to tail-tip, but hunger wandered off at night as he dreamed of warm, rich feasts. Loneliness would not be so easily seen off.\n\n\u2003Only loneliness is mine to hold,\n\n\u2003Scalel-edge sharp and dreadful cold.\n\nThe outcast rhymed to himself, in imitation of the songs he heard from the egg shelf.\n\nHe made his first kill almost by accident. While sleeping, tucked into a crack lest the Gray attack him again with a pounce and a triumphant squawk, he felt an odd tickle at his tail. A wide, flat thing, rather like his tongue save for a questing projection that stuck up from its front\u2014he knew the front judging by the direction it slurped\u2014had touched his tail and recoiled.\n\nHe fell on it without really knowing what he was doing and tore it open as he landed. It still writhed, so he batted it about some more before biting off the head. It mindlessly crept down his throat, seeking tight, wet safety, and he instinctively swallowed.\n\nIt tasted vile and slimy, but filled his belly. He ate the other half and suffered no ill effects save for a hunger that came back all the fiercer for having once been assuaged.\n\nHunger drove him out into the cave when his belly sagged, empty, and loneliness forced him back to the crevices under the egg shelf.\n\nHe explored the cave from the egg shelf to the entrance hole, knew its drains and its hollows and its patches of shining green moss that brought light to the blackness, thriving on dragon waste and bat droppings.\n\nOften he clung to the side of the egg shelf, straining to pick up mind-pictures from Mother as she taught the rest of her clutch. Stories, lessons, songs, rhymes, she bubbled like the trickle at the other end of the egg shelf whenever she didn't sleep.\n\nThe Gray was named Auron, he knew. His noisy sisters were Wistala and Jizara.\n\nAnd then he met his father.\n\nFather was a massive bronze mass, frightening in the quiet with which he moved. One moment the outcast was following a slug trail in the hope of another ephemeral meal of slug meat, and the next it seemed as though the cave wall had shifted next to him, a startling mass of sliding scales approaching the egg shelf.\n\nHe keened up at Father, tried to form words, sat up on his hindquarters and yapped until his head swam.\n\nFather stared at his stiff, maimed limb, snorted, and continued his journey toward the egg shelf. He had to dodge Father's swinging tail by retreating into a crevice.\n\nOf course, he and Mother began to discuss Auron, the Gray Rat. To the Copper his brother was rather like an oversized rat: quick, quiet, and vicious.\n\nThus the pattern of his days was set.\n\nHe managed a grubby sort of survival, living off slugs, rats, and the bit of hoof or tail that he could sometimes filch by sneaking up onto the egg shelf when the others were sleeping.\n\nHow he longed to join them, basking in Mother's heat!\n\nOnce he tried to settle up against them, under Mother's protective wing, but she began to shift and rumble and woke Auron. He had to scramble off the egg shelf, pursued by his brother's angry yaps.\n\nHe sat at the base of the egg shelf, picking up a stray mind-picture or two from Mother as she taught the others in dreams. He hugged the memory of Mother's attention at his hatching. Would it be too much for her to stretch her neck and give him a lick, breathe a few bars of one of the long songs she sang to him in the egg\u2026?\n\nTell him his name?\n\nLittle crying coughs escaped his body.\n\nHe learned to differentiate his sisters. Wistala was quick of tongue, Jizara long, elegant, and with a melodious voice.\n\nHe avoided Auron. The Gray seemed vulnerable, with a thick, pebbly skin instead of scales, but was fast and alert and hard to hear coming. And he was growing strong on what he and the sisters hunted and the choicest bits of whatever Father brought back.\n\nBut soon the Copper realized he only thought he knew unhappiness and longing.\n\nIt happened during one of Father's longer visits to the cavern. Every now and then he spent a period between hunting trips inspecting every nook and cranny with eyes, ears, and nose. Coming to a crack that the outcast knew contained nothing but dark, Father nevertheless stuck his nose deep inside and drew a long breath. He snorted out dirt and mucus.\n\n\"What do, Fazer?\" the Copper said, greatly daring. The dragon-smell made his hearts pound against his skin.\n\nThe huge, six-horned head lifted and turned. \"Ah. It's you.\"\n\nWhich wasn't much of an answer.\n\n\"What name I? I name how?\"\n\n\"You're not of the nest, cripple. You don't need to be named. I'm not even sure you can be called a dragon in the lifesong.\"\n\nThat just made him miserable, and he lowered his head.\n\n\"That's no way to look, hatchling. You're unique, as far as my family memory goes. None of my line of sires ever saw a second male survive. You're not of the clutch, yet you're of our kind, and the cave's so big Auron can drive you away, but not out, so to speak. Neither scale nor claw, son nor stranger.\"\n\nThe Copper formed his next words carefully, and they came out better. \"You my father. That prove me your son!\"\n\n\"You may be lame in body, but your wit's quick enough. That's your mother speaking with your tongue. If you've got her brains, I expect you'll survive at least until you leave the cave.\"\n\n\"To light?\" The Copper knew that tidbit from egg-dreams.\n\n\"Yes. The Upper World is a dangerous place, and your wings are still a full clawset of winters off. Look at your scales! Poor little blighter. You need a bellyful of coin. Follow me.\"\n\nThe Copper almost danced in Father's wake, the dragon's dangerous smell no longer terrifying but thrilling. Father approached a small ledge, descended, and approached a heavy stone resting in a small sink. A dead trickle of water was thick with dried dark moss.\n\nFather grasped the stone with his front sii and wrestled it out of the rock.\n\n\"I've been meaning to give the girls some play-pretties. But you need something more substantial. Can't do more; there's little enough as it is.\"\n\nHe stuck his head down the hole, and the Copper smelled something he'd never experienced before: an aroma hard and rich and metallic. He felt his scales bristle and his griff descend and flutter against his jaw and neck, giving a faint rattle.\n\nFather's head came back up. His eyes burned.\n\n\"Indeed, little enough! Why should I part with any to a wretched nothing? Cripple! Outcast!\"\n\nThe Copper backed up, half-terrified and half-furious. The gold smell made him want to leap and claw.\n\nFather tilted his head back and forth as though gauging distance; then he suddenly relaxed. \"Serves me right for depriving myself.\" He swallowed something that clinked. Then his bristling scale relaxed and he gave a brief, satisfied prrum. He reached down again and spit out a few gold and silver coins, thick with slime.\n\n\"That's to get you started. All there'll be, I'm afraid, unless I get lucky.\"\n\nThe Copper sniffed a silver disk. He needed its light, its brightness. His mouth went thick and wet all over. He gobbled it down, and then the others, quickly, as though they were a nest of rats about to escape.\n\nFather's feet stamped restlessly.\n\n\"I suppose no harm's done. Auron won't need it, after all.\" Father exhaled in a whoosh that flattened the Copper's scale. \"Maybe we'll have better luck with males in another clutch.\"\n\nThe Copper smelled more gold down the hole. He hurried toward it, following the smell, which seemed to have seized hold of his brain.\n\nThe boulder came down, and he ran nose-first into it.\n\n\"A dragon must win his own hoard, outcast,\" Father said, moving off toward the egg shelf.\n\nThe Gray Rat and he made a sort of peace. The Gray kept to his hunting perches, keeping an eye out for slugs, and as long as the Copper avoided the usual spots they'd go long stretches without seeing each other. Wistala, the chatterer, seemed always to be talking to her mother or brother or sister, and was the most successful hunter.\n\nOf course, they were usually hunting the best spots, so the Copper had to make do with trying to catch the white, long-whiskered cave rats in the offal pile while the others slept. They were smart, quick, and vicious, and to get on he had to be smarter, quicker, and even more vicious. He tried piling bones and loose rocks in such a way that they loomed over a juicy bit of dragon-waste, then toppling them when he heard noises in the pile, but he found that the rats would worm through the bones and hooves easier than if he tried to catch them on the hop.\n\nHe found that if he smeared himself first with slime from the receding pools and then with dragon-waste, they couldn't smell him, thanks to the wet, and would often get within a jump's distance. But he learned an enervating lesson when he overhunted the garbage pile, for the rats quit coming. He took to visiting it only after the other hatchlings ate something Father brought back, for sometimes they missed a tail or an ear or a bit of marrow. Then he hunted the pile with an appetite that would have taken many, many rats to fill, but took away only one or two for all the filth and bother.\n\nOf course, this necessitated a good deal of washing afterward.\n\nWhile scrubbing off after one meal he heard a high, pleasant trilling coming from the egg shelf above. The words and tune warmed him like the sunlight he dreamed of. The running, splashing water devoured the words, so he climbed up the egg shelf and peeked over.\n\nFarther down the egg shelf, almost out of the mosslight, his mother slumbered, and he saw the tail of the Gray Rat wrapped around her tail-tip. Wistala's nose peeped from under Mother's tail.\n\nThe longer and thinner of his two sisters lay across the trickle, arching her back in the water cascading down the side of the cave, warbling to herself:\n\n\u2003Paint my wings, as a stranger in paradise,\n\n\u2003Take me not from the city's light,\n\n\u2003through white towers I long to soar\u2026\n\n\"Oh,\" she squeaked, seeing him. She shrank against the cave wall.\n\n\"Why did you stop?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do you want to use the trickle?\"\n\n\"Use it?\"\n\n\"The cascade. It's marvelous for cleaning under the scales, especially that bit that falls all the way from the ceiling.\"\n\n\"Your name is Jizara,\" he said, marveling at how easily the word formed in his mouth.\n\n\"That's just for songs and such. Zara rolls off the tongue so much easier. You don't speak very well. I suppose you don't get much chance for talking.\"\n\n\"Will you sing more?\" He felt the clumsiness of his words.\n\nShe uncoiled a little. \"You like my singing?\"\n\n\"It's beautiful.\" He edged up on the other side of the trickle.\n\nShe turned a little deeper green as her scales rose and fell. \"You won't\u2026you won't jump on me?\"\n\n\"Why should I?\"\n\n\"Auron does it all the time.\"\n\nIt felt so good to talk, he was wondering if he wanted a song to interrupt. \"I'll stay on this side of the trickle.\"\n\n\"What do you want to hear?\" she finally asked.\n\n\"What was that you were singing before?\"\n\n\"A song of Silverhigh, the ancient. They made such beautiful songs. I can only sing them when I'm alone.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You sound just like Auron! Mother said it was a wicked place full of foolish dragons.\"\n\n\"But they made beautiful songs. Sing.\"\n\nShe went on, and he found himself relaxing, joint by joint, claw by claw, lulled by the music. Then he was asleep.\n\nHe woke in glorious warmth. Jizara lay wrapped right around him, nose-tip to tail-point. But then she had an extraordinarily long neck.\n\nA golden eye opened. She yawned. \"You're rather small. Almost like a new hatchling of my own,\" she said. \"You fell asleep, so I came over to your side.\" She looked away. \"Oh, Mother is stirring. I'd better get back. She gets angry when we wander while she sleeps.\"\n\n\"When will you sing to me again?\" he asked.\n\nShe retreated from the intensity of his words, jumping across the trickle. \"I don't know. A day? Another day after that?\"\n\nWhy couldn't she be more precise? Day had no real meaning in the Lower World. \"I'll wait for you.\"\n\n\"And I'll sing for you, brother. A-la, now.\"\n\nHer voice calling him brother settled in his head like a mother dragon on an egg perch.\n\nHe lurked about the base of the egg shelf too much, waiting for her to return, growing even hungrier. They met twice more, but one hardly counted, for Auron woke and the Copper had to run as soon as he saw him stretching his neck. After each meeting he hugged the moments to himself, played them in his mind so it seemed they'd never parted. They had played a game as they talked, trying to mirror their tail-tips, and he would go to his pool and play against himself, pretending the vague reflection was his sister.\n\nSister. Brother. Such lovely words to a lonely little dragon.\n\nBut the fourth time he saw her, she looked down into the water between them and wouldn't meet his eyes.\n\n\"I'm not to sing to you anymore,\" she said.\n\nHe was shocked into speechlessness. Everything appeared as usual at the other end of the egg shelf, Mother apparently asleep\u2014\n\n\"You're nameless. Outcast.\"\n\nHe found his voice. \"Zara, you are all I have.\"\n\n\"She says that if I truly care for you, I'll do this and you'll go up out of the cave on your own and find more food and grow strong. Don't you see how weak you are? You look positively hag-ridden. You've no chance at metals. Your scales are thin as an eyelid!\"\n\nA glubbing sound came out when he tried to reply.\n\n\"Mother says Auron is growing. He may kill you in an attempt to drive you out of the cave.\"\n\n\"I hate being alone! I'd rather die.\"\n\n\"Mother has a message for you.\"\n\n\"She does?\"\n\n\"She told me that you can overcome this. You've got a gift, in a way, a chance to establish your own line. A whole new family of dragons, all tracing their songs back to you! Not even Auron has that. Go, and maybe one day we'll meet again in the Upper World.\"\n\nHe lingered in the cave, however, keeping to the edges, avoiding the others. Once or twice he ventured up the passage Father used on his hunting trips, but they smelled of old dragonblood, and he found broken pieces of scale.\n\nHe was tempted to try eating it for the metals it contained, but the smell disgusted him and he wondered what the sharp edges would do to his insides.\n\nThe trickles of the cavern dried up into practically nothing, and the slugs ceased roaming. He became hungrier than ever\u2014his appetite grew and thrived and seemed to tap insistently at the backs of his eyes, and he worried the edges of his claws with sharp little teeth, pulling up dead skin until he bled.\n\nHe drank and bathed at a little pool in a far corner of the cavern. Once it had been fed by a fall that made the trickle on the egg shelf seem like a rainy bit of nothing, but now even the cascade had dried to a thick dampness on the cave wall.\n\nWhile licking at it one day he noticed air moving around a projection. Even better, the air carried with it the smell of slugs.\n\nHe squeezed around the rock and found a crack, a jagged projection that narrowed at the bottom like a claw. Some water trickled from the bottom, carrying a more definite slug smell. He wormed through the crack and heard a few loose scales\u2014it seemed all his scales were loose these days\u2014fall into the water.\n\nThe air in here was wetter, and the cave moss still grew thickly in a ring around the pool, offering some light and playing on the bubbles that popped up now and then through the pool, which had spongy pads growing on the surface. He saw slugs squeezing themselves between rocks and under the pads and fell on them, and upset one of the pads in his thrashing.\n\nThe other side of the pad held little white spheres, clustered together so it was hard to tell where one began and the next ended. He sniffed them and they smelled delicious.\n\nHe tried swallowing one and almost immediately felt better. Eggs! They were probably slug eggs; they certainly smelled like the slugs. He devoured six more before he remembered how he had overhunted the rats in the offal pile. Eat up too many eggs and there'll be no slugs\u2026.\n\nHe tongued down two more anyway, and let out a soft burp. His blood flowed with new life.\n\nHe watched the water flow into the pool from a crack at a slightly higher level, less of a waterfall than a water step, and a little flowed out into \"his\" pool on the other side of the crack. The volume coming in and the volume going out seemed out of balance; a torrent came in but a trickle flowed out.\n\nOf course\u2014the bubbles. Water was going down, as it always did, and air wandered up, each always looking for company of its own kind.\n\nHe dove, followed the bubbles, hoping for another chamber with more slug eggs to raid. Though so little light filtered down that it was the next thing to black, he couldn't get lost; the bubbles would guide him back up. He found another shelf, with the bubbles gathering momentarily before sliding up and out.\n\nBut a distinct glow came, not from the source of the bubbles, but from deeper within the shelf. He swam toward it, his whole body moving in an easy, back-and-forth manner, though the cold made his hearts beat hard.\n\nThen the light burned above him and he rose.\n\nThe pool top had more of the spongy pad growths, but only partially covering the pool, like a half-closed eye. He grabbed onto one of the pad stalks to arrest his rise and stuck his nose out among the pads.\n\nInstinct made him take a small, cautious nostrilful. The air smelled good. He half emptied his lungs and drew in fresh air, then examined the scents of the room. He smelled mosses and some slug trail and rats and a strange rich, dry smell and dirt and a dirtier, sweaty smell, like horse hoof and\u2026metal!\n\nHe took three more breaths and found some more slug eggs under the pads. Then he risked popping the ridge of his head up.\n\nCave moss, brighter than any growths he'd ever seen, lit the room from a big mound next to the pool. The chamber was shaped rather like a dragon's head and neck, with the pool resting at neck level, a high rise above that had air moving up it, and then it seemed to narrow off in one direction, like his snout. The pool next to the chamber had been cleared of the spongy pads, and a metal tube like his own neck rose out of the pool and turned at the top.\n\nThe metal came from what looked like flats and pits carved into the stone. The artificially straight lines on the metal and the worked stone set off some inner alarm.\n\nGo back. This is not for you.\n\nBut the maddening, metallic smell made his mouth go thick and slimy. He had to find it.\n\nHe swam across the pool and heard rat claws scritch as he rose dripping from the water, sniffing and listening. The passage led off downward, narrowing even further. The sounds of anything coming up it would be forced in a single direction toward him, and he'd have plenty of warning, so he relaxed a little.\n\nThe metallic column rising from the water smelled delicious, but was too big to swallow. It made a loop above and turned back down over a big stonework hollow. It had a vaguely greasy smell to it, like food.\n\nStrange, fashioned objects of a rough, dry, wholesome-smelling substance\u2014wood, some old memory echo told him\u2014held growth of some kind. The wood had bits of metal embedded into it.\n\nAh, here's the metal. And here. And here.\n\nThe flats and pits of the chamber had bits of metal, some with wooden handles, many of them redolent of meats and scorching, and even better, a few were small enough to be swallowed. He found a hollow tube sealed at one end, the same color as his scales, and found that if he stood on it he could crush it. He folded it in half and smashed it down again\u2014he enjoyed compacting the metal more than he'd enjoyed anything since listening to Zara sing\u2014and soon he had it in a shape that could fit down his throat.\n\nMost satisfying.\n\nNow food.\n\nWhere the moss grew thickly there was a garbage pile so rich in tidbits it felt like a gift. He broke up a few bones and extracted the marrow, found several chunks of rat-gnawed gristle and delicious, charred skins with the hair conveniently burned down to a stubble.\n\nNow, this is a feast worthy of a dragon!\n\nWith nothing but some gassy burps to keep him company, he explored a pit where some kind of fire had burned recently and found more wooden holders, some with metal bands. He decided the vaguely greasy, dirty smell was some manner of hominid. Didn't dwarves spend a lot of time tunneling and mining?\n\nHe heard a clattering echo from deep down the passage and decided to leave the chamber, filching one more tube of metal on his way out. He'd have fun flattening and devouring it later.\n\nWhile hunger gnawed at him back in the home cave, he argued with himself about going back. Certainly the metals he'd eaten would be missed, and the dwarves, if they were dwarves, would be put on their guard.\n\nHe visited the cave a second time, and lurked long in the pool before emerging. He spent most of the time rooting in the garbage heap and hunting rats. He very much doubted the dwarves would miss a few rats. He did find a single coin, fallen and rolled into a shadow behind one of the wooden boxes, and gobbled it eagerly. Coins were a perfect size to slide comfortably down a hatchling's gullet.\n\nBut the metallic tang nagged at him, wanting company. He worked one of the metal talons driven into the wood loose with his teeth\u2014there were so many others he didn't see how one would be missed.\n\nSince the second trip went so well he planned a third, though he waited what felt like ages, just in case. He kept himself in practice hunting up slugs. The trickles into the egg chamber increased day by day\u2014evidently the dry period above was ending. The other hatchlings had all grown substantially, ranging over almost the whole cave now, and he couldn't avoid them with his usual paths. Luckily he could hear Wistala, for she was always talking to Jizara.\n\nQuick, quiet Auron was something else entirely. The Gray Rat almost killed him with a pounce and chased him all the way across the egg cavern, and the Copper had to dive into the rising pool to escape him by wiggling through the crack, now underwater again.\n\nAuron wasn't satisfied with having Mother and Zara and the chatterer and food and Father's horded gold. Rich in everything, he wanted even the lightless edges and holes and cold corners of the egg cave.\n\nBut Auron had a weakness, and in his arrogance didn't see his own faults. The Gray Rat had no scales. If the Copper could build up his strength a little, thicken his scales, he could close with Auron and take back the clutch.\n\nThe thought made his fire bladder boil.\n\nWith the waters rising again it meant a little longer swim to the treasure chamber. He took extra time smelling the air and certainly smelled no dwarves, though there was a dirtier scent, of the kind he associated with bits brought down from the Upper World.\n\nThe garbage pile had some meaty tidbits, and he lingered at the edge of the pool, ready for a fast dive, slowly nosing drier garbage aside while he extracted the meaty joints.\n\nThen he smelled the silver.\n\nIt wasn't a strong smell, and leather masked the aroma. He investigated next to the benches and cubbyholes\u2014they smelled of the recently cooked meat\u2014listening, always listening, and probing with eye and ear before he placed a foot.\n\nThe silver-and-leather smell came from pegs driven into a wooden wall hung with bits of woven fabric, most of which smelled like either grease or charcoal. Farther down the tunnel were stacks of fragrant wood, and many roots and herbs hung up and drying\u2014perhaps the dwarves were replenishing supplies as the season changed above.\n\nHe found the source of the enticing smell. A leather bag containing a few coins\u2014copper, silver, and even a faint aroma of gold\u2014hung there. The top had some kind of binding on it, evidently to close it, and had been left loose, allowing the smell of coin to escape.\n\nThe Copper salivated. The dwarf would pay for his forgetfulness\u2026.\n\nHe nosed the bag off the peg.\n\nKa-thunk!\n\nThe peg, relieved of the coin's weight, sprang up in its wooden slot.\n\nHairy masses of rope engulfed him. Festoons dropped from the cave roof, weighted with chains, and his eyesight went white as one of them struck him across the snout. The boxes to either side exploded open, throwing more lines that sprang from them. He felt weights and hooks and slick little circles of metal skittering across the floor.\n\nWhen his eyesight returned he saw shadows all around, their beards glowing faintly. He felt tugs at his limbs as they attached lines.\n\nHe'd never been so terrified. His hearts felt as though they'd burst out of his chest or from behind his griff. Auron's leaps and sudden pins were nothing to this.\n\nOne was trying to extract the purse from his mouth, grunting as he pulled. The Copper sawed at the purse strings and the dwarf fell back. Defiantly, he swallowed the silver. The dwarves might win a three-limbed hatchling, but they'd lose their silver.\n\nThe dwarves made noises that all seemed to be some variety of yak or grumt or phmumph.\n\nThey drove metal claws into the rocks and tied him, snout and tail, and set bands of leather about his limbs. A massive dwarf with an ax watched the whole thing, gurgling to his companions, ready to sever his head if he wiggled free.\n\nBut the dwarvish hands seemed made of rock and iron, and he was soon covered with their greasy smell.\n\nThen the beatings began.\n\nThey took iron bars and smashed them against his vulnerable pinioned tail. The pain ran up his body, fired in each digit, sparked yellow in his eye sockets, whirled about his organs so that each breath brought agony.\n\nHe whimpered; he cried; he sent mind-pictures begging them to stop.\n\nThat pain was nothing to what came when they stopped, gave him time to sleep and heal, and then started in on his tail again. During the second beating his teeth came together and tore at mouth edge and tongue until he spit blood.\n\nEven through the pain a clarity took over and he wondered at the dwarves. What sort of creatures cause pain just for the sake of pain? There was no contest for control of a cavern, and they weren't killing him to eat him. The torture was its own end.\n\nBy the third beating the pain wasn't so bad, just dull warmth with the occasional jolt, like a fading cramp.\n\nHe heard a heavy step and shifted his body, felt scales give way. His skin had stuck to the floor with his own dried blood.\n\nHe did his best to tuck his tail. It moved clumsily, stiff and heavy, unable to curl. He rolled an eye upward, saw a vague sort of shadow, a hominid huge and dark looming above. The hominid smelled of dogs.\n\nThe tall one grunted and turned away, almost as an afterthought giving him a swiping kick to the nose with the side of his heel. Pain shot across both eyes.\n\nA warbling broke out, and another hominid fell to its\u2014no, her\u2014knees in front of him. Her flat face was scarred on one side, and she wore an eye patch. A light brown eye, with just a touch of Mother's gold and a hint of green, looked into his.\n\n\"Oh, how they've hurt you, young one,\" she said in intelligible Drakine. \"Poor thing.\"\n\nHis hearts woke to the words, the sympathy of her tone, even if the Drakine was nasal and harsh. She reached out and rubbed him between the eyes. If his snout hadn't been tied shut, he would have brushed her with the tip of his tongue, so grateful was he for the sympathy.\n\n\"Worthless little scut,\" the tall, broad, dog-scented man said in far worse Drakine. He lifted his boot again, and the Copper shut his eyes.\n\nThe one-eyed one interposed her body, and he noticed that she had leaves in her hair. That should mean something, he felt, but the aches in his body kept whatever vestigial memories he'd received in the egg deep and dark.\n\n\"The dwarves blame you for the crimes of your parents,\" she whispered. \"They've been hunting a very wicked pair, a bronze and his mate, who've betrayed and stolen from the dwarves. Dwarves will move mountains to reclaim their own, if you don't know.\"\n\nShe looked at her companion, off on the other side of the tunnel talking to the dwarves. One leaned on one of the iron rods they'd used to beat him. Another, more potbellied than the rest, pulled at his dim-glowing beard as the man spoke, making noncommittal hmpf sounds at the pauses. The tall man unrolled some kind of map, and the potbellied dwarf sneezed.\n\n\"I don't hold with blaming offspring for the crimes of their parents, do you?\"\n\nHe hesitated a moment before answering. Was it wise to talk to a\u2026a\u2026leaf-hair? Elf! So satisfied was he that he had finally summoned the name that he croaked, \"No.\"\n\nThe elf showed her teeth when he answered, even though the word was muffled by the binding about his snout.\n\nThe tall man came over and talked to the other in their unknown barking tongue. Casually, while he spoke, he brought his heel down on the Copper's tail. The agony made him whimper and writhe, and the elf finally pushed him away.\n\nShe yelled at the others until they shrank away from her fury. If only Mother had been this protective of her own hatchling.\n\nThen she knelt beside him again. \"Little one, I'm here hunting hatchlings. The dwarves have a buyer willing to pay a princely sum for healthy males or females. That was your sire's bargain with the dwarves, a set of eggs in exchange for much gold and silver. But they reneged and fled.\n\n\"I know dragons. I suspect you were driven out of the nest by the stronger male. Let me capture your brother and sisters, if any, and I'll see to it you get enough copper\u2014silver even\u2014to stuff yourself for a year.\"\n\nShe reached into a bag on her belt and extracted some coins and let him sniff. Even in his shattered and weakened state, the smell turned his mouth slick.\n\nShe put the coins back, looked at the others. The man approached, drawing a long sword, an evil carved blade extending from the wide-open jaws of a dragon.\n\n\"Some king and queen of dragons, this hatchling's sires,\" the man said. \"If my babe disappeared from his home, I'd drag the sky down into the deepest corners of the earth to find him.\"\n\nThe elf snarled something to him in their tongue.\n\nHe ignored her. \"Just what you'd expect from dragons, leaving their hatchling in the hands of some vengeful dwarves. I'll take his griff as a trophy and the dwarves can finish him.\"\n\nAnother dwarf picked up an iron rod.\n\n\"No!\" the elf protested in Drakine. The Copper would wonder, much later, how and where she learned the tongue. Even hate himself for not being suspicious at their use of Drakine in their arguments. \"I can make a bargain with him. Even the dwarves will accept a bargain.\"\n\nShe turned to him, caressed him under the chin. \"Little one, you must let me help you. Show me to the egg shelf. We'll take your brother and siblings. They'll be well treated and prized by their eventual owner, and the feud between your parents and the dwarves will be over. You'll have the egg shelf.\"\n\nThe Copper didn't care what they did with his brother. Or the chatterer\u2014they could drag them both off, for all he cared. But Jizara\u2026\n\n\"I have two sisters,\" he said. \"One goes. One stays. Her name is Jizara; she's got the longer neck and tail. She stays.\"\n\nThe elf's eye widened and he saw her teeth again. She barked at the others. The potbellied dwarf lowered his face and stamped, then grunted something in return.\n\n\"Bargain!\" she said, and untied his jaws.\n\nThe Copper felt better than he had since the first iron-rod blow to his tail. In all likelihood Mother and Father would kill these wretched, torturing dwarves. Even if they didn't, the Gray Rat would be dragged off and have his snout tied. As for the chatterer, she could do with a bit of enforced quiet. He almost smiled at the thought.\n\nMother told me to overcome. She left out any details of how to do it.\n\nAfter he told her how to find the home cave, she gave him a purse full of silver pieces to seal the bargain.\n\nTheir plan had the virtue of simplicity. The dwarves would storm the egg shelf, restrain Mother with holding poles, and bind up his siblings.\n\nThey showed him the straps and poles and snout cage that would be used on Mother, yet worms of regret were wiggling at the back of his mind. But they gave him no chance to escape, keeping chains on him from the point where he swam through the underwater tunnel with a guideline for the dwarves to the moment tunnelers arrived to widen the cracks.\n\nThe dwarves lit their way with hissing firework torches that burned bright blue even underwater and created a minichamber from a polished shell as big as a dragon's head. They cleverly fed the air bubble within the shell with a pair of leather hoses worked by bellows back at the scullery, constantly substituting good air for bad.\n\nThe trick, as the Copper saw it, was to have the dwarves make off with Auron and Wistala the chatterbox. If a few of the rod-carrying poghti got burned in the process, so much the better.\n\nHe thought he knew how.\n\nAll three of the other hatchlings explored and hunted within the egg cavern. Auron always scurried around over a wide range, Wistala had a few predictable perches where slugs were likely to pass, and Jizara kept closer to Mother and the garbage pile.\n\nHe could take care of Auron. Thanks to the dwarves' meals and generous amounts of metal, his new scales were coming in thick and fast. He could tell the dwarves where to find Wistala, then immobilize Auron somewhere far from the egg shelf\u2014but not too far to be heard\u2014and scare him into trumpeting a warning. The dwarves would not be so foolish as to attack an alerted dragon, and at the first sign of alarm Wistala would certainly hide by Mother.\n\nSo pleased was he with the plan, he found himself giving off a slight prrum.\n\nThe day finally came. They timed it with Father leaving on a hunt.\n\nHe met the dwarves and the missing-eyed elf in the now dry chamber behind the waterfall. The dwarves had cleverly diverted the water into a metal tube that carried it off down the cavern of the scullery, save for a little leaking that dropped into a bubbling pool.\n\nTunnel dwarves were marking the wall behind the waterfall with chalk, muttering quietly to others who carried spikes and hammers.\n\nBehind them warrior dwarves gathered with their holding poles and lines and straps, the potbellied dwarf at the front. Eye Patch, looking tired and smelling of wood smoke from the Upper World, stood off to one side, armed only with a small knife at her belt.\n\nThe Copper was rather relieved that the big, cruel man who liked to step on his broken tail was absent. There'd been some talk, he was told, about having a guard outside the cavern in the event Father returned unexpectedly. Perhaps he was in the Upper World. The farther off, the better. Once the bargain was struck, the dwarves had become elaborately polite to him, always bowing and tossing him greasy half-eaten joints of lamb or broken old bits of metal. But that man\u2026Every time he stared down into the Copper's eyes with those cold, unfeeling round eyes, his griff fluttered nervously.\n\nThe man meant to kill him. What was holding him back? He doubted even Eye Patch or the dwarves could stop him\u2014even if they wanted to.\n\nAnd he smelled like dogs. Dog smell awoke an ancient fear in the Copper. In any case, it was time for a few last words. He'd have the egg shelf and his sister at last, or be dead.\n\n\"I keep my bargain. Two hatchlings,\" he said, using a rehearsed speech in the Dwarvish that Eye Patch\u2014for he never learned her name\u2014had taught him.\n\nThe potbellied dwarf started at that. Eye Patch chuckled to herself and said some lilting words to the dwarf, who grumbled into his beard.\n\n\"He says no good's ever come from teaching others Dwarvish,\" Eye Patch said in her bad Drakine.\n\n\"Tell him I'm going into the cavern now. I'll come back in a moment.\"\n\nEye Patch translated: \"He says you'd better, or he'll skin you personally.\"\n\nHe squeezed out through the cracks\u2014just\u2014and swam across the pool. The egg cavern seemed vast now, a great expanse filled with comforting smells but doubtful shadows and the echoes of the waterfall. He returned to the dwarves and gave them that strange up-and-down waggle of the head that hominids used.\n\nThe dwarves began to tap at their chalk marks, timing their strikes to the splashes outside. The work went fast, as it always did when the dwarves had a plan to follow. They spent a good deal of time before and after each job arguing amongst themselves in their glottal tongue, but when in action together they were swift and efficient.\n\nHe slipped back out through the crack and felt his hearts hammering. He found a patch of dark well away from the now thriving cave moss and waited, every nerve alert.\n\nAuron passed soon enough, sniffing as he hunted. The Copper fell in behind his rival, stopping when he stopped, moving when he moved. Auron paused for a taste of water at the waterfall pool and cocked his head in that odd way of his, listening. He slipped into the water. He'd heard the dwarves tapping!\n\nClever, my brother.\n\nBut not as clever as I.\n\nAuron would head for the egg shelf; he was sure of it. He positioned himself on a low ridge of stalagmites at an alley the Gray Rat would use\u2026.\n\nThe cave wall fell away, almost silently, toppling inward into netting the dwarves had ready to receive it. Auron hurried from the pool, swimming like an arrow toward Mother.\n\nHe mustn't reach the egg shelf or things would go ill. The Copper would terrify Auron into screaming his unprotected lungs out!\n\nThe Copper jumped, landing full-weight on his brother's scaleless back. Mother's green gleam could just be seen in the distance.\n\n\"Got you! Death has come for you, softling,\" he hissed in Auron's ear.\n\nThe Gray Rat protested, clawed uselessly at the Copper's scales as he whined about intruders. The Copper bit him in the soft tissue behind the griff to shut him up. He gave the rehearsed speech, but couldn't help pouring a little extra resentment into it:\n\n\"I've lived in hunger and hiding since the day I came out of the shell, thanks to you. So you'll die now, as you should have died out of the egg. Two brothers, both stronger, and you ended up with the nest. It's time to right a great wrong. Nearly time, that is. First you get to watch Mother and the chatterer skinned. Stop writhing, you lizard\u2014you're worse than a snake! Too bad you won't see me gorge myself on Father's gold.\"\n\nHe let the Gray Rat have a good look at Mother. He'd call out a warning and\u2014\n\nBlinding pain flashed up from his snout, and his vision burned white. He lurched away from the pain and Auron wriggled free. He bit at where he sensed his brother stood and got only air, and when he could see again, he and Auron were snapping at each other.\n\nWhy wasn't the fool screaming out a warning to Mother? The dwarves would be on him any moment! What did he have to say to get the Gray Rat to shriek out a warning? He heard a splashing and a clatter behind\u2014the dwarves were gathering.\n\nAuron wasted more time in speech making: \"You live this day if you trouble me no further. Though when I tell Father of this, he may feel differently. He'll pull the mountains down to find such as you, who'd lead assassins to the egg shelf.\"\n\nThe words hurt almost as much as the tail-crack. Auron spun and hurried off toward the egg shelf at a dash, finally sounding a warning. A thrown net just missing as his brother ran.\n\nWell, the dwarves would have to deal with that. He'd smelled his sister around somewhere; if he could find her he could hold her down until the dwarves could get a loop around her snout.\n\nHe turned and saw the dwarves advancing, widely spaced across the egg cavern.\n\nBehind them he saw a gleaming helmet, two upraised wings, and polished black scale\u2014dragonscale!\u2014about the shoulders. The huge man was down here after all, carrying a spear that glowed and sparked like a log in the concentrated heat of a dwarf hearth.\n\nWhat was this? The dwarves weren't carrying restraining poles and ropes. Instead they bore great bowed machines balanced across their broad backs, two carrying the bulk with another lifting the fletched end. Others had climbing ladders and spears, spears, and more spears, each with a thick crossbar to keep a pinioned dragon from pulling itself down the shaft toward the wielder.\n\nHe marked Wistala climbing toward a hole in the cavern roof above the egg shelf. Mother flung Auron up after her, then nosed at Jizara.\n\nBut Jizara stared out across the cavern, met his eyes.\n\nBrother! Look out for the dwarves! We must escape!\n\nThe dwarves ignored him as they charged\u2014later he thought it would have been kinder if one had split his skull with one of the broadaxes they carried across their backs\u2014and he searched for Eye Patch. Where was she? He saw the potbellied dwarf, hanging on to the top of a stalagmite, giving orders and pointing with a gnarled bit of polished wood.\n\nThe Copper ran up to him, flung himself down.\n\n\"Spare the one on the shelf. My sister! My sister!\"\n\nThe dwarf stepped on his neck. \"Hmpf. You don't want to see this.\"\n\nKa-thun! Ka-thun!\u2014the metal-and-wood contraptions of the dwarves launched their missiles, exploding into motion and dying a moment later, purpose served.\n\nThe dwarves yelled as they stormed toward the egg shelf in a rattle of metal\u2014chain shirts rustling, shields banging, helm flanges rattling on shoulder plates, metal-spiked boots striking the cavern floor, and above all the kuu-kuuu-kuuuu! of the dwavrish war cries.\n\nIt sounded like the end of the world.\n\nThe big man went forward in a series of leaps, springing from prominence to prominence and jumping over formations the Copper had to climb. A flood of dogs led him, and more warriors of his kind followed behind, aiming thick arrows notched in curved bows like half-folded dragon wings.\n\nThe Copper smelled the brassy, hot-oil smell of dragonfire, heard the roar of flame devouring air. The shadows of the cave began to dance.\n\n\"In there under it, my lads. That's the style!\" the dwarf-lord grunted. At least, that was what it seemed to the Copper he was saying, though how he caught the meaning without knowing the words he could not say.\n\nThe Copper heard his mother roar, and the sound made him tremble.\n\n\"Spare my sister!\" the Copper squeaked.\n\nThe dwarf looked down. \"Poor wretch. We'll not bleed her a drop. She's worth a lot to us. Now what passes? Dogluk, hold him.\"\n\nThe potbellied dwarf hurried toward the egg shelf, and the Copper scrambled up a stalagmite.\n\nMother lay on her side, chest heaving, neck and chest pierced by great shafts that showed feathers at one bleeding hole and gory barbed heads at the other. Her head still moved weakly, one golden eye rolling this way and that, bathed in fire leaking from her breastbone.\n\n\"You have won this battle, Gobold,\" she said to the dwarf. \"But I keep a last trick. The war is not over. My young live. And they are free. Free!\"\n\nThe potbellied dwarf walked over to her, laughing. \"Your young? One of them led us to you. Don't look to your young. Greedy and selfish, like all dragons.\" The one she'd called Gobold struck her across the mouth with first one fist, then the other.\n\nMother spit out a broken tooth.\n\n\"They will avenge this day!\"\n\nThe potbellied dwarf laughed and, still laughing, swung his ax and struck her in the neck. By the third blow his boots were awash in blood, his stout helm, beard, and arms splotched red.\n\nThe Copper's hearts ceased beating for a moment and he swooned.\n\nA mass of dwarves, men, and dogs crowded on the egg shelf, embracing one another and letting blood from Mother's wounds run into their helmets, which they then passed around and drank. Dogs, wild with excitement, chased from wound to wound, sniffing, biting her where she still twitched.\n\nMen stood, holding nets over Jizara with heavy boot heels. His sister lay frozen in terror, eye whites bright in the cave's gloom. The Copper wanted to fling himself down atop her, protect her, but the smell of dragonblood in the air had him clinging tight-bellied to the cave floor.\n\nThe big man came forward, his dragon-jaw blade out and ready. He stepped up to Jizara, glanced over his shoulder at the dwarves dancing and stamping about Mother's corpse.\n\n\"Mercy,\" Jizara gasped.\n\nThe big man laughed. \"Nits make lice,\" he said in his rough Drakine.\n\nHe pushed his blade slowly into her throat, twisting it this way and that, and, whimpering, Jizara died.\n\nFiends!\n\nA dwarf dragged him back by his battered tail, but the pain was nothing to the insensate anger flooding his hearts. A howl broke from his throat, every agony he'd suffered since the moment of his hatching gathered into a single scream.\n\nFiends!\n\nA dwarf stood on his neck. The dwarf called another over, and they bound him in the leather strapping they used to bear their war machines.\n\nThe dwarves took up a chant. The Copper heard thwacks and chunks as they employed their axes, and then he heard a strange, high-pitched sound as some blew air through tubes.\n\nThen the singing dwarves marched back out of the cavern, bearing their wounded and trophies wrapped in salty-smelling fabric on litters made of their spears. He smelled dragonblood everywhere.\n\nOne of the men pointed and there was some talk, but Gobold broke away from the others and grabbed the Copper by the crest and lifted his head. The Copper shut his eyes at what was coming\u2026.\n\nBut instead Gobold spoke, and again, strangely, he understood: \"No. This feud started over bargains not being kept. Let none say Gobold\u2014\"\n\nThe dwarves called out at that; others clapped and stamped their feet or rattled their knives in their sheaths. The Copper struggled against his bonds, wanting to sink his claws into the dwarf's fleshy gut.\n\n\"Well, Fangbreaker, then. Let none say Fangbreaker is not true to his word. Or his threats.\"\n\nGobold the Fangbreaker let go of his crest. \"Besides, he's worthless in trade. That foreleg's useless, and his tail's shattered. The cavern and its treasures are yours, O prince of dragons!\" He laughed and slapped his belly. \"The honor and glory of this day is yours.\" He bowed. \"Enjoy.\"\n\nThe dwarf hurried off to join the others in their march.\n\nNext the men left, leading their dogs\u2014dried dragonblood made the curs' hair pointy\u2014with the big man in his black armor carrying his spear across his shoulder, a bloody dragon ear dangling from each end.\n\nThe big man paused the march by the bound hatchling. He stared down at him, the gruesome flat face working obscenely as he thought.\n\nThe Copper felt his fire bladder pulse. He managed to spew a little yellow stream of sulfurous saliva across the dragonscale-covered boot.\n\nThe man chuckled. \"That's more like it,\" he said in his rough, uninflected Drakine. \"I'm your enemy. You may as well know my name. I'm called the Dragonblade. Know that I did all this\u2014with your help.\"\n\nWhy didn't the man end the misery? Strike off his head, obliterate each bloody memory, the horror of what he had done\u2026\n\n\"If you're my enemy, why don't you kill me as well?\"\n\nPerhaps the man sensed his torment, decided to leave him with the pain, alone in a cavern with the stripped bodies of his family. He just adjusted the burden across his broad back and called something out to his companions.\n\n\"Will you not kill me?\" Some little flicker within him still wanted to live, then, for he waited for an answer.\n\nThe man expelled a long breath. \"You should be wiped out. Bestial. Craven. Look at you. You sold your birthright for a mouthful of silver. The sooner the last remnants of the tyrant-wings are gone, the better for the world.\n\n\"Besides, I slay only dragons.\" He set down his spear and drew his long sword. The Copper shut his eyes again, and he felt a sharp tap along his back. Then a throbbing agony flared, worse with each beat of his synchronized hearts.\n\n\"Farewell, worm.\"\n\nThe Copper opened his eyes and saw a jagged rent next to his spine. Exposed meat and bone gleamed among torn scale. It hurt worse than the battering his tail had taken. He took a cautious breath\u2014his lungs were still intact, though it hurt to breathe. The man had crippled his dormant left wing!\n\nHe panted in his binding, pain plaguing both body and spirit. He lay there for a long time, thinking slow, dark, wounded thoughts as his blood thickened across his back.\n\nMother had told him once to overcome difficulties. How did one overcome oneself? Self-destruction?\n\nHunger saved him, hunger and the sound of squeaking rats. He heard them moving toward the egg shelf.\n\nHe wiggled his head around and began to chew at his bindings. He bent as he reached for the straps on his saa and incautiously brushed his back wound against the cave floor, white-hot agony leaving him quivering for a moment, and when he came out of the hurt his brain took a moment to remember where he was. He forced his head between his sii and tore through the back bindings.\n\nThat done, he lay for a moment, too weak to do anything but breathe.\n\nHe crawled toward the egg shelf and saw a ghastly heap atop it, the end of a severed neck dangling off the egg shelf, cave moss in a tiny splash of light where the blood had pooled. Rats, fat on dragonflesh, crept along the cave wall, stupid and weakened by gorging.\n\nHe tore into them, biting and flinging them hard against the cave wall, and they dove for their cracks. One was too fat to fit back into his shelter, and the Copper solved his problem for him by biting him in half.\n\nHe didn't dare climb the egg shelf. If he got up there and saw what remained of his mother and sister, he'd go mad.\n\nHe found a riven helm and nibbled off some chain links. The metal tasted better even than rat. With that he remembered Father's hoard cave.\n\nFather! What would happen when he returned to this?\n\nTime passed, sliding by unmarked as he staggered around the cave. He couldn't drink from the pool, evil memories of the dwarves keeping him far from the familiar waterfall. He couldn't drink from the trickle; he'd spotted more gore and slaughter atop the moss-thick heap of dragon waste; the shadows of the cave held lurking recriminations; the stalactites and stalagmites were spears\u2026.\n\nWhat sort of world was it where dragons were slaughtered in their own homes? He knew almost nothing of the history of his kind, but had a vague sense of the majesty and grandeur that once was theirs, passed down from egg to egg. He'd committed a crime against every drop of blood in his body, every glittering scale passed down from some ancestor.\n\nA hard world, that was certain. Cast out by his own family. Betrayed by dwarves. Of course, he forgot his own intent to betray in his wretchedness, explaining to himself that the dwarves didn't know his plan. Any betrayal on their part carried the full weight of its own sin, not tainted by his own intent.\n\nThen he went a little mad.\n\nHe may have even frothed at the mouth. He vaguely remembered thirst-thick saliva crusting on his snout when he came out of it, a good deal thinner and with claws worn down to dull nubs.\n\nWhen he woke as though from a sleep-terror he found himself bleeding from a cracked scale at the base of his crest and between his eyes\u2014he'd been bashing his head against a sharp projection shaped like a dragonhorn.\n\nWhat had brought him out of it?\n\nA familiar sound, a dragon roar.\n\n\"Irelia! Auron! Wistala! Jizara!\" Father called. \"Spirits, it cannot be! Not all! Curse the Wheel of Fire to flame and ash!\"\n\nWhy did Father not list him with the others? Was he not part of all?\n\nHe tried to answer, but his dry throat was capable of only emitting a small squeak: \"Fazer!\"\n\nFather didn't call for him because he had no name. He needed a name if he were to be called for.\n\nHe hurried toward the bellows but found himself stumbling on his crippled forelimb. He caught one quick glimpse of bronze tail-scale disappearing through the shaft that led up and out. Only Father's harsh, angry smell remained.\n\nHe found some deer that Father had dropped and nibbled a little, but had no appetite. He should save them for Father when he got back. Father would also need metals; he would return from his great battle with the dwarves needing them. He'd show Father that he hadn't eaten a single coin of the hoard, and in gratitude Father would share some with him again.\n\nThinking of the hoard\u2026\n\nHe went to the shaft covered by the great rock. It had been moved aside and smelled of dwarf. He shut his nostrils so as not to be overwhelmed by the smell and descended into the cavern\u2026.\n\nThe cavern lay almost empty. A few pieces of copper had been left, and a bit of silver glinted toward the back where it had rolled under a projection, but all that remained was the lingering smell of dwarf. There wasn't a full mouthful left for him, never mind Father's vast jaws.\n\nFather would give him some fine names. Thief.\n\nTraitor.\n\nOutcast.\n\nHe flung himself down and keened.\n\nLater, he climbed out of the hoard cave and went to the much-reduced pool. The dwarves had rerouted the water so it emptied into some deeper cavern to facilitate their works and crossing into the cavern. It bubbled and belched up from a whirlpool. As he drank he could feel the current.\n\nHe heard a wailing Drakine scream from the direction of the egg shelf.\n\nDid one of his family still live? Perhaps Zara had played dead so the dwarves would leave her alone. The smaller body he'd glimpsed was a cruel trick of the Dragonblade's. He hobbled as quickly as he could to the egg shelf.\n\nIt was Zara, green and alive and rubbing her fringe against a sharp spur of rock next to a great growth of thriving moss at the base of the trickle where the dragon-waste lay. He could just see the fringe on her back and the side of her head, but it was certainly her, gloriously alive and moving\u2026.\n\n\"Sizter!\" he said, happy beyond words. She must need comforting, with Wistala lying dead next to her; the pair had been closer than stalactite and stalagmite run together.\n\n\"They killed her, Jiz\u2026\" he tried to get out, but the words came only with difficulty.\n\nThe green hatchling rounded on him, burning anger in her golden eyes. \"I'm Wistala.\"\n\nConfusion\u2026certainty. He missed the rest of her words, or perhaps shut his ears to the accusations he knew to be true. It was Wistala; she'd returned, and she knew exactly what had happened and who was responsible.\n\nAuron wasn't with her. He hadn't made it. Perhaps the Copper could reason with her, confess and beg for a chance at redemption.\n\n\"They lied,\" he said. He needed her to know the whys and wherefores. \"A bloody cave, no hoard\u2014\"\n\nShe leaped at him, tripping in her fury. He fell on her, tried to keep her from biting him. If she'd only listen for a moment, he'd make it up to her somehow. \"We need to overcome this, put it behind. Unite. The past can't be changed, but we can make sure\u2014\"\n\nShe wasn't listening; she was struggling. She threw him off; healthy, well-fed muscle with a good deal of strength in her stout frame forced him backward, over\u2014\n\n\"It can be avenged,\" she said, biting and clawing for his underbelly, fighting as though in a duel to the death, not a hatchling wrestling match. Blinding pain struck as her claws found soft flesh at his eye. He fought madly, broke her grip, turned his good set of backscale toward her, and hit her with his broken and stiff tail. He scrambled away.\n\nAlone again.\n\nWistala knew what he'd done, the enormity of it, bigger than the cavern, bigger than the mountains he'd never seen save in vague dreams. Somehow that was worse than the pangs of his own conscience. Wistala would carry this knowledge with her for the rest of her life and hate him forever.\n\nHow could he overcome her hatred? Or was it not her hatred, but his own, shared in some lesser portion by her?\n\nYes, he would overcome her hatred, his guilt, the horror that had engulfed their home. He staggered toward the pool, flung himself in, and let the whirlpool carry him away from his lonely and broken life.\n\nLater he tried to remember how long he was in the water. The darkness made it a fearful journey. He slipped down through the whirlpool, went limp, and waited to become wedged in a crack or hole and asphyxiate.\n\nInstead he had the sensation of bouncing off a rock, and then feeling air all around his body before he struck moving water again with a slap. Something about the smell and temperature in the water told him he'd joined an entirely different watercourse.\n\nOddly, the interest in that fact sustained him for a moment, long enough for him to right himself and realize he was in a fast-moving current in a tunnel.\n\nThe rushing current and the cold were enemies to be fought, and his body responded automatically. He turned to keep his nostrils above water, angled his frame so he rode the current with little effort.\n\nAt intervals he passed glowing dots, little clusters of eyes and wagging tongues. They flashed up and by so rapidly he never could make sense of them. In his experience anything regular indicated dwarves, though he couldn't imagine why they should wish to mark a tunnel of freezing water in the dark of the Lower World.\n\nSo when he fetched up against a stout chain hanging into the water, fully as thick as his neck, it was the easiest thing in the world to hang on and look around.\n\nHe recognized more marks, similar to the ones in the tunnel behind, differing only in profusion in their verticals and horizontals. Three caves were scarred with signs of mining. Cave moss, a good deal brighter than the kind he knew from the home cave, extended from the water from the common landing.\n\nHe reached out with his neck and found a grip, then let the rest of his body follow in easy stages, finally releasing the helpful, wide-looped chain with his saa.\n\nHe lay a long time and slept next to the rushing water.\n\nVoices came to him in a dream full of dark rocks rushing by.\n\n\"Don't m'tell that m'knowing not the smell of blood. Fresh blood.\"\n\n\"Faaaa!\" another voice bawled back.\n\nHe opened an eye.\n\n\"Here e'is. Traveler. A bit of washup from the river.\"\n\nA horridly upturned face, all ears, black eyes, and nostrils, regarded him from the cavern wall. The thing had leathery wings, with a gripping digit not unlike a dragon's wing-spur. It was a bat, fully three times the size of the ones he'd seen in the home cave. And he'd never understood a word of their high-pitched chatter.\n\n\"E'breathing!\" a second, smaller but wider one behind said.\n\n\"Cave lizard, m'think,\" the larger said, hanging from his tiny rear legs for a better look. \"Strange sort. Hurt.\"\n\nThe larger extended his arms and flapped his leathery wings vigorously. They were thinner than dragonwings, almost translucent. The Copper could see blue veins in the skin.\n\nUnder the fanning and the light touches of the wing tips the Copper twitched. They tickled! He twitched.\n\nHe tried to give a greeting, but it came out as an unintelligible cough. He shook his head and righted himself.\n\n\"E'having a set of scale. A'wait!\u2026E'be a dragon!\"\n\n\"Faaaa!\" the other said again, staying away from the Copper and just peeking out into the cave.\n\nThe hanging one rubbed his face up and down with his wings, licking his grip-digit and rearranging the face-fur, though there was only so much that could be done with such ugliness. \"M'name's Thernadad, an e'be m'mated, Mamedi. A'begging your pardon, sir. Y'be hurt. W'can attend that for you.\"\n\nThe brightness in the creature's black eyes disturbed him a little.\n\n\"You're right, I am a dragon,\" the Copper said. \"I do seem to be bleeding.\" His back wound had opened up again, and it hurt abominably.\n\n\"M'told you!\" the hanging one said to his companion.\n\n\"Once!\" the other said to no one in particular. \"Once in a three-season turn e'be right, and now m'hearing it until m'let loose for the drop.\" But she licked her lips, and the Copper saw sharp white teeth.\n\n\"If y'will just shift closer to the wall, sir, we work best right-side down. Unless y'want us clinging to your scale, but m'knowing not the extent of your injuries\u2026.\"\n\nThe Copper rolled and the bat shifted. It started licking at the wound on his back, and he felt a slight tingle that transformed into a pleasant numbness. He looked back, and the bat had worked his odd, jutting jaw into the wound and was tearing away ragged bits of flesh and lapping up blood with a blurring tongue that flicked in and out faster than he'd ever seen anything move in his life.\n\nThe bat lifted a blood-smeared snout. \"See to sir's face, dear, with that soft touch of yours.\"\n\nThe other came forward a good deal more cautiously, eyeing the Copper warily. Finally she hung over him, but kept all her four limbs attached to the cavern ceiling, ready for a quick getaway. She dropped down and went to work in the region around his right eye. He noticed some blurring there, as though the eye regarded the world through a half-closed lid.\n\n\"Bit of a mess, here, sir. Just a'going to numb it down a bit.\" She began to lick about the eye, and he felt that same tingling followed by numbness.\n\n\"Y'carrying a set of tunnel nits, tight up against that scale. A'lurking in the moss a'waiting on a tasty bit of juicy skin, like always. May I?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nThe Copper felt a tug and heard a crunch. Followed by another and another.\n\n\"Finished here,\" the female said. She touched him with a wing. \"Excuses, sir. Y'permit some body work?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" the Copper said, enjoying the warmth beneath the numbness.\n\nHe felt the female climb onto his back, gripping at his scale, lifting and digging out insects with more tugs and crunches, moving slowly front to back. \"That's kindness! That's generosity. So rare these days. E'be a gentle sort, e'be.\"\n\n\"Y'hearing m'disagree? M'found him, you thick cow!\"\n\n\"Faaaa! Luck's the only thing y'got in this life, you great squirt.\"\n\nThe Copper fell into a pleasant half sleep, and heard little gassy emissions from the pair. \"That's what m'call a feed. Indeed,\" the male\u2014Thernadad, the Copper corrected himself\u2014said.\n\n\"Y'wanting to get away from the river, sir,\" Mamedi added. \"A trunk full of dwarves could pass at any time. Might a'spot your skin and throw out a hook.\"\n\nThe Copper dragged himself around the corner of the cave, ready for sleep.\n\n\"Watch out for snakes. Cave snakes in here,\" Thernadad said.\n\n\"E'be too big for all but King Gan himself,\" Mamedi said.\n\n\"Don't y'worry, sir. We'll be right above.\" Thernadad said more, but the Copper didn't hear it.\n\nHe had vague dreams of the bats clinging to him, swelling like great ticks, but woke to find his wounds crusted over with healthy-smelling scab, though they itched a little. His right eye bothered him more than anything; he could see through it as if through a mist, but everything went a little fuzzy and indistinct when he closed his left eye and looked only through the right.\n\nHe judged himself to be in a cave, vaster but lower than the home cave, branching off in every direction but up. Always there were the little channels of cave moss\u2014in some places stopped up, glowing bright where the water still flowed. There were a good many small holes driven into the ground, as though something had been fixed there with spikes, like the dwarves had used for their water-diversion apparatus, but the work had long since been abandoned and the metal taken up. While nosing around he found a broken bit of spike and swallowed it.\n\nHe heard a flutter off in a corner and saw the big blood-drinking bats yeeking in voices pitched so high he could hardly hear them, and flapping their wings in each other's faces as they hung from the cavern roof. It seemed more of a squabble than a fight, so he ignored the commotion.\n\nThe odd thing was that he felt relieved when he saw them. It was nice to have someone speak pleasantly to you, praise you, even if it was only for the number of nits clinging to your scale-roots. And their chatter distracted him from the griefs circling in his mind.\n\nHe walked over to the pair, trying to strut like a proud young dragon, but feeling a little off balance, thanks to his stiff tail.\n\n\"You, there. Excuse me.\"\n\nThe bats left off spitting at each other. Both licked their gripping digits and straightened up the fur on their ears and chins.\n\n\"Sir a'needing something?\" Thernadad said, rubbing his gripping digits together under his chin.\n\n\"What is this place?\"\n\n\"Dwarf mine, long and longer abandoned,\" Thernadad said. \"In my oldfather's time, there was a'feasting on draft horses and goats, but now there's nothing but mushroom-fed rats and moss-crawlies. And the snakes, of course, who a'eating our poor young.\"\n\n\"What were you fighting about?\"\n\n\"Nothing of import to sir.\"\n\n\"Faaaa! E'be a heartless brute, to a'be telling the truth,\" Mamedi said. \"E'leaving my sister to starve! Ooo, ooo, ooo!\"\n\n\"Sir doesn't want to be a'hearing our troubles.\"\n\n\"Why will she starve?\"\n\n\"The dwarves just closed off the old air shaft to a stock paddock and she's\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut it, you,\" Thernadad made a swipe at her ears, but she ducked over it.\n\n\"M'answering the nice young dragon's question! So now e'be starving and yeee-eyee-yeee\u2026\" Her story trailed off into high-pitched wailing.\n\n\"Oh, you should just bring her to this cavern. I'm going exploring. Maybe I'll pick up another set of cave nits.\"\n\nMamedi left off crying. \"Oh, sir\u2014\"\n\nThernadad snapped his teeth at his mate. \"Mind the snakes,\" he called.\n\nHe left them yeeking and boxing again, though Thernadad flapped his wings halfheartedly, as a veteran campaigner who knew a battle lost when he saw one.\n\nThis cavern was very different from the home cave. The dwarves had carved it almost wholly from rock, smoothed the floors, and laid the saa-width water channels where the mosses still thrived and offered some amount of light.\n\nDeep pocks like spear wounds\u2014no, like rat holes\u2014could be found in profusion around rougher areas where they'd extracted their minerals. He sniffed one and smelled rat. There were damps and trickles, and these supported more colonies of cave moss and mushrooms, which in turn supported rats and mice. When backtracking to the bat cave and river outlet, he found a few soil beds where the mushrooms grew more thickly\u2014the dwarves must have cultivated something in the soil other than mushrooms, for there were stakes and wire lines, but nothing but a few dead, tough vines remained of their crop.\n\nHe smelled more rat here and began to hunt by nose. He caught a flash of white skin and bit quickly and instinctively, cutting it in unequal halves. Legless\u2014a snake! The back end had a big bulge\u2014it had obviously just eaten a rat and couldn't creep away as he approached. It took a moment for the front end to twitch out.\n\nHe carried both halves back to the bats. Mamedi was away getting her sister, so he climbed up and hung the front end up where Thernadad could easily reach it, and swallowed the back half in one long inhale\u2014with a little gulp at the thickening where the half-digested rat lay.\n\nThernadad nibbled and sucked. \"Not to be a'criticizing, sir, but if y'leaves 'em whole, there's more to lap. Just give 'em a good shake and a crack against a rock, is how an experienced snake killer goes about it. They stay juicier that way.\"\n\n\"I wasn't hunting with you in mind.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, no, no. Of course not.\" He nipped out one of the snake's eyeballs and gulped it down. \"M'sees your wounds are healing up nicely. Glad we got to you in time, sir, so's y'didn't bleed to death crawling out of the river.\"\n\nThe Copper looked over his many scabs and felt a little ashamed. He should have brought Thernadad and his wife back a whole snake, at that.\n\n\"Hope y'didn't chomp one of King Gan's favorites. E'be a mean one. E'doesn't like anyone a'meddlin' w'his snakes. Except hisself, of course. E'eats his own kind.\"\n\n\"King Gan eats his own snakes? Why would they keep such a king?\"\n\n\"The others not be having much choice in the matter. E'says: 'They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear.' It's a necessity, like. There's precious little to fill an appetite such as his.\n\n\"A cave snake, sir, twice your length and more besides. The White Lightning. By the time y'knows he struck y'be dead. He's strong enough to swim upstream in the river if he likes. Lost my own poor father to him, and an uncle besides.\"\n\n\"Any area I should stay away from?\"\n\n\"There's a swampy bit over there.\" Thernadad pointed with a vein-stitched wing. \"Beyond that, a real honeycomb it is, where the dwarves struck gold. There's an air shaft to the surface e'using in summer. Y'be keeping away and not getting ideas, m'hoping.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the Copper said. He squeezed into a crevice welled in shadow. \"I'm for a nap. Wake me if King Gan goes for a swim.\"\n\nThernadad licked his grasping digits and cleaned all around his eyes. \"Nowt a'gets past me, sir. Why, m'be having eyes that can spot a rat-tail twitch on the far side of the cavern, and ears that echo off a pinched mouse turd before it hits. M'begging the sir's pardon for the coarse language; m'be forgetting myself. Right! Ears down and all, on duty, quick's the wing and sharp's the tooth\u2026\"\n\nThernadad's chatter went on, but the Copper slept through the rest.\n\nThe Copper woke briefly at a slight smelly sploit of bat guano dropping. He rolled an eye upward and saw Thernadad hanging there, wings well over his face, making rasping noises in his sleep.\n\n\"There, e'be waking,\" Mamedi said.\n\nAnother, even wider than her and with two little bats clinging trembling to its back, also looked down at him.\n\nMamedi rubbed her grasping digits together. \"Sir, not to be bothering sir, but it's been a long trip and me sister, e'be perishing hungry, and her brood a'be so hungry they barely a'clinging to her back. Just the tiniest of nips out of your tail; won't feel but a pinch, an' a little blood loss heals a big wound, good for the circulation an' all\u2026.\"\n\n\"Just this once,\" he said, shifting so he could extend his tail.\n\nMamedi crept down first, found a scale nit, and crunched it down. \"Oh, they a'be the very buggers. There's another. Sir, what y'been doing that y'picked up so many so quick?\"\n\nHe craned his neck a little so he could look behind and saw Mamedi's sister and her children lapping at a slight, pleasantly tingling wound. Another bat crept out of the shadows and joined in the flowing feast.\n\n\"Wait, who's that?\"\n\nMamedi lifted her snout from his scale-roots. \"Her mate, of course. E's supposed to leave the father of her children behind when she moves into a new cave?\"\n\n\"I imagine not.\"\n\n\"There's a lesson in generosity for you, nephews!\" Mamedi said. \"Remember it. Y'don't often see the like these days. E'be a very special gentle sort. It's a rare one that doesn't forge a favor and returns kindness with kindness, Thernie and me saving his life and all.\"\n\nHer sister and family cooed and yeeked agreeable noises as they lapped.\n\nThe Copper dozed. He'd hunted again, keeping well away from the set of pools Therenadad had called \"the swampy bit.\"\n\nHe wondered if the events in the home cave had been some terrible dream, brought on by exploring the pool, diving, and being injured when he fell into the river. He'd fallen in and out of consciousness often enough, or been half drowned when pulled by undertow. Could all the detail\u2014the dwarves with their faint-glowing beards and the big man with the glowing spear\u2014be the product of frightful, dying-hatchling dreams?\n\nHe told himself his family was alive and well. Not missing him a bit, of course, but such was his lot as an odd male\u2014what had Father called him? Outcast. They were probably gathered around Mother on the egg shelf now, feasting on some thick-muscled oxen brought back by Father, and Jizara was singing after the feast.\n\n\"M'excuse, sir. Sir?\" Thernadad said, climbing down the cave wall next to him.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"The mate an m'talked, and since her sister's come to stay, we thought one more or less wouldn't make a difference.\" He went into a paroxysm of fur smoothing.\n\n\"Why are you telling me?\"\n\n\"It's me old mum, sir. E'can't make it to the surface anymore, or survive the dangers out there besides. Pitiful shape she's in. If e'could just have a lick or two, e'doesn't have any appetite at all no more, hardly.\"\n\nThe Copper saw a half-white bat, small and frail, above.\n\n\"Oh, very well. I suppose her sister's somewhere behind, also starving.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, no. My brother. A great, well-traveled bat e'is; been down every hole in these mountains. Thousand and one stories. Now e'takes care of old Mum. E'pulled her up, again and again, to the cave roof on the trip so she could drop for another glide. E'perishing with exhaustion, e'is.\"\n\n\"So he needs some blood down his throat, too.\" The Copper felt his griff flutter.\n\n\"Sir, don't be a'taking me wrong,\" he said as the tiny old bat crawled down his back. \"What you've done for us poor hangers more than makes up for your life being saved by quick thinking an' skill and charity. Wonderful thing, charity. Never know how it a'gets paid back in this life or the next. Here, y'be excusing me, her old teeth, you know.\"\n\nThernadad licked him a couple times, and the Copper felt the nook in his saa go numb. With a quick bite Thernadad opened a cut and the old bat began to lap.\n\nThernadad wiped the corner of his eyes again and again as he licked a smear of blood from his limbs. \"Oh, sir. Me poor old mum. You've made me so happy. M'won't forget this kindness till the day I drop. No, sir.\"\n\n\"Rich good blood, this dragon,\" Thernadad's mother said.\n\n\"Oh, dragon,\" a great heavy bat said. He'd shifted to directly above the Copper with surprising stealth. \"Haven't tasted that since I flew the whole way 'round the Lavadome. What a place. Thick with dragons. Not as kind as this one, no, nearly got my wings bit off. Y'be falling into the Nor'flow by accident and get carried all this way, m'lord?\"\n\nThick with dragons? \"Tell me more,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Glad to, m'lord. It's only my throat, a'be drying up from the exertions.\"\n\n\"I suppose I can spare a little more.\"\n\nThe big bat dropped down to his flank.\n\n\"Ooooo, is there a party?\" Mamedi said, crawling across the cave roof with her sister and brood behind. A couple more bats seemed to have joined the family.\n\n\"E's flowing nicely,\" Thernadad's mother said. \"Great strong young dragon.\"\n\nThernadad's wide-bodied brother shoved his mother out of the way and pushed his nose in and drank. When he came up for air, he wiped his snout with his wing and dragged himself up the Copper's neck, where he threw a companionable wing around and gave him a bloody leer. \"Dragons a'loving treasure stories. Ever heard of CuTar? How about the great glowing stone of NooMoahk? In old Uldam, it is, like a bit of the sun itself dropped into the earth\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd rather hear about this Lavadome. Where is it, exactly?\"\n\n\"Oh, an awful journey y'had, to get so lost and confused. To get back y'be having to make it to the Antiope for the southward flow, and there's no good road, in the sun or in the dark, not hereabouts. M'taking another pull and think on it. Hey! Y'be getting out of it, you greedy beggars!\"\n\nMamedi and her relations fought for a place in a wing-jostling heap at the cut in his tail. One of the bigger ones, more enterprising than the rest, had opened another wound in his tail.\n\n\"This is a bit much,\" the Copper said. He dragged his tail away from the greedy mouths.\n\n\"Y'be molesting our good host,\" Thernadad yelled from above.\n\n\"Faaaa!\" Mamedi answered back.\n\n\"Off me mum, you!\" Thernadad dropped down on one of his mate's relations who'd shoved his frail mother aside\u2014less vigorously than her own son, it seemed to the Copper, but he was learning that the insult wasn't as important as who offered it. A full-out bat brawl started.\n\nHe curled his slit tail around himself\u2014it bent in a funny and uneven manner, with bends more like a dwarf tunnel, thanks to the rod injuries to it, and alternately licked and blew on the cuts until the bleeding stopped, as the bats lashed one another with leather wings and tried to bite off oversize hairy ears.\n\nHe woke feeling tired and hungry. He checked his cuts and discovered a new wound in the soft spot just behind his shoulder. Though bat bites did heal clean and fast, and he could hardly feel the injuries. His head hurt, and he walked down to the river for a drink.\n\nHe sucked cold water, and his head began to feel better almost immediately.\n\nThernadad swooped by. \"Sir, y'be wanting to get away from the river!\"\n\nBing-bing. Bing-bing\u2026Bing-bing! The metallic clatter was regular, and therefore alarming. He saw a light up the tunnel from upstream, reflected on the flowing water.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Thernadad urged.\n\nBING-BING!\n\nHe scrambled backward and set himself against the cave wall.\n\nA long wooden trunk, a clattering bell anchored at the front and swaying lanterns hung in reflective hollows in its sides, rushed down the river, pushed along by the fast-flowing water. Through long, narrow slits he saw dwarves within, sweating backs rising and falling as they worked at some mystery on their craft. He caught one glimpse of a dwarf at the tail, hanging off a flange and working some kind of apparatus that descended into the water from the safety of a metal cage, and it was gone, moving as fast as a quick-walking dragon.\n\nBING-bing\u2026Bing-bing\u2026Bing\u2026Bing.\n\nThernadad alighted and smoothed his face fur. \"Careful at the river now, sir.\"\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"The dwarves. They get about on those things here in the Lower World.\"\n\n\"It came from the same direction I did, with the current.\"\n\n\"Of course e'did, sir. Always a'coming from that direction.\"\n\n\"Then how do they get back?\"\n\n\"Mother! Mother!\" Thernadad called back, but not in answer to his question. The Copper heard air move above, and saw the old white-flecked bat turning tight circles low over the underground river.\n\n\"M'knew it,\" she screeched as she flapped back into the cave and rested. \"Flies be riding with the dwarves. Snapped up two while y'be working your jaw.\"\n\nThe Copper's appetite had woken with a vengeance, and he began to sniff around the bank of the river. Perhaps fish lived within the fast-flowing current.\n\n\"Y'flying days be over, m'thinking!\" Thernadad said. \"Enjor, e'be saying you could hardly glide nomores.\"\n\nShe alighted next to the channel bearing a trickle into the cave interior and took in water with her quick, darting tongue.\n\nShe smacked her thin lips. \"Oh, Thernie, just woke up hale this morning, m'did. Full of guano and ginger. M'wanting a bit of air under me wing.\" She brushed the fur forward on her face and dug in an ear and gobbled down whatever she found within. \"This young dragon\u2014yeeek!\"\n\nA translucent tongue shot up from where it rested next to the channel. It was segmented, with countless legs a blur, its body like living, mottled eyejelly. To the bat, thicker around than she and many times her length, it was a mortal danger, pincers at the front opening for her\u2026.\n\nTo the Copper it was breakfast.\n\nHe scrambled after it and extended his neck, bit down on the back half, and yanked it skyward. Legs tickling at his throat, he gulped it down.\n\nHe looked down to see Thernadad flapping his wings in the face of his mother, who blinked awake. She climbed onto his back and he scuttled back up, in that elbows-out fashion of bats, to the cavern roof.\n\n\"Twice grateful, sir,\" Thernadad said, panting a little.\n\n\"Any blood flowing this fine night?\" Mamedi said, creeping forward.\n\n\"Out of it!\" Thernadad bawled. She was out of reach, so he battled the air in her direction with his wings.\n\n\"Just thinking of refreshing meself. Like a new-mated bat you were last sunrise. M'be hardly able to keep a grip.\"\n\n\"Oh, son, m'be pershishing of that scare,\" Thernadad's mother croaked. \"Just a wee drop; perhaps y'be persuading our kindly young prince now?\"\n\nThe Copper saw other eyes shining in the darkness. How many bats had gathered in this cave?\n\n\"Sir\u2014\" Thernadad said.\n\n\"Leave me alone, would you?\" the Copper said. He stalked into the cave, leaving the cluster of bats.\n\n\"Greedy sots!\" Thernadad yelled, and soon the Copper heard the wing-flapping, tooth-snapping sound of a full-out bat brawl.\n\nThe Copper found a dark corner and rested. The seemingly still-twitching centipede wasn't agreeing with him.\n\nHe wondered about this Lavadome and the dragons there. It must be a wonderful place, with plenty to eat, for dragons to be gathered there. He didn't know much about dragon society, but he knew that Father had to fly far and wide so he wouldn't over-hunt an area\u2014or so that snatched livestock were only a nuisance, and not a regular threat. Would they look kindly on the arrival of a distant relative, hurt by weary dragonlengths of travel?\n\nAnd they wouldn't know his secrets.\n\nHe let off a burp, and the centipede finally ceased its attempts to escape his stomach.\n\nThe Lavadome sounded a long way off, and he couldn't fly like a bat.\n\nBut he could follow one\u2026.\n\nThe Copper lunged forward without really knowing why. A heavy force struck the ground behind and all he could think was, Curse that Gray Rat!\u2014having instinctively avoided another of his brother's pounces. But he felt the weight of the thing in the air behind, in the tremor that ran through the solid rock when it hit.\n\nHe turned.\n\nA huge, pale gray mass writhed over and around itself behind. A head that could probably suck him down as easily as he'd swallowed the centipede lifted itself from the mass, pointing its nose this way and that until it fixed on him.\n\n\"You picked the wrong cave, hatchling,\" it whispered at him.\n\nThe Copper didn't know of the old rivalry between snakes and dragons, the contempt in which the serpents held the winged and legged. Young dragons hunted the same game the great snakes did, so perhaps the old enmity was akin to that of lions and cheetahs in other parts of the world, competitors who struck each other's young. He certainly never heard the tale of the deaths of AuZath and Nubiel, dragons of Ydar. They were murdered by a serpent who injected his poison into apples, which were eaten by grazing horses, which died and were naturally devoured in turn by the dragons.\n\nThe Copper just knew he was afraid.\n\n\"You must be King Gan,\" he managed to say, though the words sounded a little croaky. Some instinct flared within; he hated the legless, writhing form. But fear froze him. They can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear\u2026.\n\nHe'd never seen such black eyes. The way they fixed on him, so exactly aligned, it was as if the entire earth were a little off-kilter, as measured by the level of those eyes.\n\n\"I am. And all within sight, sound, hearing, and heat is mine. You are mine.\"\n\nThe snake flowed toward him. The Copper couldn't break off; all he could do was watch the eyes approach, twin balls rushing toward him, perfectly level\u2026.\n\nSomething boxed him about the eyes and crest. \"Don't be looking him in the eyes!\" Thernadad screeched, darting up and out of the way of the snake.\n\nThe snake lunged at him, suddenly transformed into pure energy. Its body seemed to vaporize into a white blur rushing toward him.\n\nHe ducked, hugging his belly to safe rock.\n\nKing Gan, forced by the bat's intervention to strike a switchback before he was ready, struck the Copper at the head instead of the base of the neck. His fangs, out and forward, folded against the Copper's young crest above his eyes.\n\nThe Copper felt hot liquid run down either side of his head as the snake became a snake again, and coiled back.\n\nFear flowed up from his belly, tightened against his breastbone. He seized up, stuck out his own neck, and vomited, fire bladder emptying toward the snake.\n\nA spray of yellowish liquid, vaguely sulfurous, struck King Gan across the nose.\n\nThe great snake went mad. He whipped his head back and forth, writhed, coiled, uncoiled, knotted, until the Copper couldn't tell head from tail but could only run lest he be crushed as the snake rolled and whipped.\n\nA dragonlength away he paused to glance over his shoulder. King Gan flowed toward his swamp as fast as coils would carry him, where he plunged headfirst into the shallow water of the moss-thick mire.\n\n\"Right in the pits y'be hitting him. Never saw the like\u2014a'taking the venom out of ol' King Gan that way.\"\n\n\"The pits?\"\n\n\"Everything here in the dark has a way of a'hunting that don't rely on light,\" Thernadad said. \"Bats be having our ears, that lousy legpincher feels vibrations, and the snakes feel the heat of us poor warm-blood rodents. M'hearing dragons sniff for that what doesn't smell as bad as they do, but y'be free to correct me, cousin.\"\n\n\"Cousin?\"\n\n\"Your life. Saved three times now. That be making us family, the way bats see it. Speaking of which, m'be working up a powerful thirst saving your life. How about a nip out of the old tail, real quiet, before a whole skytrail of the hungry beggars show up?\"\n\nLater, feeling a bit drained, and not just because of the blood Thernadad lapped out of his tail, the Copper rested. He perched high\u2014hopefully out of King Gan's reach\u2014and watched the mire. He heard an occasional bubbling hiss and a splash, as King Gan soaked the heat pits on his nose.\n\nSome piece of him was the tiniest bit grateful to Auron for all the sudden pounces out of the darkness. Without the torments of his brother, he'd never have avoided the snake's first strike.\n\nHe began to cry.\n\nThe Copper slept but couldn't rest. He ate but didn't enjoy. He eliminated but felt no relief. More often than not he perched near the river tunnel, losing himself in its steady echo.\n\nAuron and Wistala would come hunting for him. Wistala had already probed the home cave, looking for him, and both knew he used the pool. They'd never felt the pain of iron rods, or soft, promising whispers and kind touches that left one's head in a muddle.\n\nKing Gan still lurked in the moss-ringed cavern pools, according to the bats, and his snakes were more aggressive than ever\u2014at least as far as the bats were concerned. One got some cousin of Thernadad's.\n\nWhich was just as well. The Copper had lost count of the number of bats gathered in the cave, each with a sad story, each begging for just a lap or two from a nipped-open vein. He'd be about to say no, and then Thernadad or Mamedi would dig at an earhole or push stray chin whiskers back into place and remind him of his escapes from death.\n\nHe dipped his stiff, dwarf-broken tail in the river, watched the cut it made in the current, the arrowhead pointing in the direction of the flow\u2026\n\n\"Water Spirit, you brought me here for a reason. Give me your wisdom.\"\n\nIf he still lived, it meant the spirits weren't willing to take him back just yet. Scarred, lamed, and probably never able to fly thanks to the wound from the big man, he would be denied a normal dragon's existence. What female would take a mating flight that could last no longer than a leap from a rock top?\n\nAccording to Thernadad's brother, Enjor, there were dragons somewhere upriver of him. That arrowhead in the current pointed toward them.\n\nDid he even want to find more dragons?\n\nHe remembered Auron's stalking and pouncing, Father's indifference, Mother's shunning. Anger bubbled in his fire bladder.\n\nSometimes their deaths didn't seem such a crime.\n\nHe saw a six-legged scuttling thing crawling along just under the surface of the water, making the smallest of waves in the current. He plunged his snout in, grabbed it, flipped it out, and cracked its shell with a quick stomp of his saa before it could right itself. He tongued out the whitish, rather tasteless meat within and crunched down the legs and limbs. A little grit helped the digestion and was a pleasant change from the dirty, hairy taste of rat. If only he had Jizara to join him in the hunt. One could swim and toss the crabs out of the river; then the other could smash them before they could retreat back to the water.\n\nJizara's death was a crime. A betrayal piled on a betrayal.\n\nHe could almost hear her singing beside the river.\n\nHe hurried away, back to the holes in the cavern ceiling where the bats liked to roost.\n\nHe listened for a particular pair of squeaky voices.\n\n\"Oh, shove off! Y'nose be dripping all over.\"\n\n\"Faaaa!\"\n\n\"Thernadad, you up there?\"\n\nThe bats quieted. Thernadad climbed out of his hole and worked the back of his head with his gripping claw. \"Sir be wanting something?\"\n\n\"I need to speak to your brother.\"\n\nThernadad clawed his way across the cavern roof, poking his head into holes, climbing over sleeping bats, throwing an occasional elbow and getting swatted in return.\n\n\"What be going on. Party?\"\n\n\"Oooh! Watch it, cousin.\"\n\n\"Enjor! Rouse yourself, y'fat tick. Sir wants to speak to you.\"\n\nThe brothers' mother popped out of her hole, moving with a younger bat's energy despite her aging frame. \"Is a feed on?\"\n\n\"What do you want, m'lord?\" Enjor said.\n\n\"How do I get back to my people? The dragons of this Lavadome?\"\n\n\"Eh? Y'be knowing that best, m'lord.\"\n\nIt took him several tries to get across that he couldn't get back to his own kind without help\u2014help from the bats. Their little mammalian brains took a while to get around the idea that they could travel together. While bats understood sharing living space, the idea of traveling together didn't come easily.\n\n\"All roads in the lower world lead to the Lavadome, if y'follow them long enough,\" Enjor offered, after much thought. \"Don't dragons have homing sense an' all that?\"\n\n\"Mine doesn't seem to be working,\" the Copper said.\n\nEnjor scratched his tailvent and sniffed at the residue before continuing: \"The best route would be the rivers. Only problem is the Sou'flow be a weary and uncertain trip from here. You might have to go the wrong direction a'ways, then cut across, though that would take you near more dwarves and their works a'following the river.\"\n\n\"And then what?\" The Copper felt a weight on his tail, found the white-flecked bat at her usual spot, lapping up blood.\n\n\"Old caves full of nothing but dark and bad air.\"\n\n\"So good y'be to us, sir,\" Thernadad said as the Copper's teeth ground against one another.\n\n\"Perhaps I could engage you as a guide,\" the Copper said to Enjor.\n\n\"Oh, m'be too old for such a fearful journey. Besides, there's old Mum.\"\n\nBats fluttered down from the roof.\n\n\"Oooo! A party!\"\n\n\"There, open him up just under the knee; e'flows so nicely there\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll feed you along the way,\" the Copper said. \"You and your mother both.\"\n\nEnjor's eyes brightened. \"That's a generous offer, m'lord.\"\n\n\"Faaaa! E's our host!\" Mamedi said, leaping on Enjor's back.\n\n\"Off me, y'daft sot!\"\n\nBut just as Thernadad shouldered his way into what was working up into a fifty-bat brawl, a bat let out a terrified death screech. A snake had reared up, biting a low-flying bat heading for the Copper's tail and dragging it to the ground.\n\n\"Sons o' Gan!\" Thernadad shouted.\n\nThe Copper hugged rock, protecting his belly, and heard a pained squeak.\n\nThe cavern came alive with white shapes, pink tongues flicking as they rushed forward, coiled, struck, and rushed forward again. The greedier bats, stuck on the floor by the Copper's open wounds, fell first.\n\nThe Copper found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a great white snake, almost a rival to King Gan himself. He felt his griff lower and rattle, and the snake pulled back, gathering itself for a strike.\n\nIt would flash like lightning when it hit, so the Copper preempted the fangs with an openmouthed rush of his own. The snake, for all its size, wasn't used to a dragon dash and seemed to slide in all directions in panic. The Copper bit for the neck\u2014anywhere else on the snake would mean a counterstrike of venomous fangs.\n\nThe snake whipped its head sideways and the Copper went with it, clinging with claws and teeth. He struck the cavern wall, saw stars at the impact.\n\nBlindly, he bit down hard, pulling with teeth and pushing with sii. The snake rolled and rolled again. The Copper found himself ensnared in coils. But they didn't crush; they just twitched.\n\nHe dropped the dead snake's neck and pushed away from the still-writhing body.\n\n\"Kill that one! The burning lizard!\" the Copper heard. He turned his good eye to the sound and saw the great snake with a black-flecked face. King Gan's smooth nose was peeled and cracked.\n\nSnakes dropped dead bats and crawled for him.\n\nThe Copper doubted he had the strength left to fight another such snake, let alone several, or King Gan himself. He ran for the river. A snake slipped sideways to intercept. He jumped over it before it could do more than snap at his legs.\n\nHe looked up. The surviving bats were fighting to get into holes too small for snake heads.\n\n\"I'm leaving! Enjor?\"\n\n\"Good idea, m'lord.\"\n\n\"Leave the cave?\" a bat squeaked.\n\n\"Who be a'needing it?\" Thernadad barked. \"Snakes and misery and too many bats lately.\" He glared at his mate.\n\n\"E'be our host! W'be coming along,\" Mamedi said, fluttering toward the river.\n\n\"Mum! Mum!\" Thernadad shouted. He alighted on the chain hanging by the river mouth, then turned to search the tunnel and cavern beyond. \"W'mustn't leave without m'mum!\"\n\n\"Past her time, anyway,\" Enjor said, turning circles over the river.\n\n\"Mum!\"\n\n\"'Ere me be!\" a tiny voice squeaked. \"M'been clinging for life to this fool dragon.\"\n\nA trio of snakes followed as quickly as coils could carry them.\n\n\"Unless you want to swim, madam\u2026\" the Copper said.\n\nThernadad flapped down and alighted on the Copper's back. \"Here, Mum, climb on.\"\n\nShe launched herself into the air. \"M'be all right for a bit.\"\n\nThe Copper slid into the river, hugged his limbs to his side, and let his tail rather stiffly propel him through the water. He found that if he took a full breath of air, he could sink and let just his head ride above the waterline.\n\nHe gave a glance back and saw a snake plunge into the water, but its fellows clustered at the bank.\n\nWith a bend, a dropped shoulder, and a wave of his tail, the Copper rounded on his pursuer, and the snake fled upstream.\n\nThe bats fluttered overhead. For all the elbow throwing and head butting they did when clinging to the rock ceiling, they maneuvered in the air expertly, avoiding outcroppings of rock, the river surface\u2014and a hatchling's tiny crest.\n\nThey left the brighter mosses of the tunnel for a dim line of growth that existed at the edge of the river, clinging to the rough-hewn tunnel. Every now and then the tunnel widened and the lines fell away before coming together again where tool-work scarred the rock.\n\nAt one \"lake,\" Enjor swooped down and guided him toward an outflow. Colored lights glimmered across the lake, reds and blues and oranges, but he had no desire to investigate and risk another encounter with dwarves or whatever else lived down there.\n\nSwimming was tiring\u2014his bad leg dragged on the current, and he had to turn and push to compensate\u2014so he preferred to float, keeping his lungs inflated and just waving his tail enough to stay afloat.\n\nHe became used to the cold of the water so quickly he feared he might be going numb and freezing to death. He struck out for the side of the cavern and tried a short climb and found all his limbs still able to function, though his hearts were pounding from the slight effort.\n\n\"M'be needing a rest, anyway,\" Thernadad said, landing. His mother clung to his back, a tiny white-flecked thing atop his bulk. Her spurt of energy must have given out.\n\nThe others soon landed.\n\n\"M'be perishing,\" Mamedi said. \"Just a tiny drop of blood, sir.\"\n\n\"I need my strength,\" the Copper countered.\n\n\"Faaaaa!\" she said. \"You're just floating there. Us on wing be doing all the work.\"\n\n\"M'mind be muddled with exertion and shock of seeing cousins slain right and left, m'lord.\" Enjor coughed. \"A fork be coming up in the river. Unless I have my wits w'be going wrong.\"\n\nThe Copper was tempted to tell him to return to the cave and deal with King Gan.\n\n\"Oops, you'd better be climbing higher, sir,\" some young relation of Mamedi said. \"Another dwarf boat a'coming!\"\n\nThe Copper saw its light before he heard the faint ring of the approaching bell.\n\nFrom what he could remember of the craft, the only dwarf who could see out the front was in a cage at the back of the boat.\n\n\"I'm tired of swimming,\" the Copper said\u2014though he'd been floating, there was no reason for the bats not to think him as tired as they were; otherwise they'd each clamor for blood. \"Let's ride with the dwarves.\"\n\n\"Muh?\" the bats chorused.\n\n\"You cling to rock well enough. Hang on to the front of the boat.\"\n\n\"With all that racket?\" Thernadad said. \"A'deafened by that bell? Can't echo with all that noise.\"\n\n\"Leave the steering to the dwarves. Anyway, I'm going to ride for a while. Try to keep up.\"\n\n\"The lordship's right!\" Enjor said. \"M'be for it. The dwarves know their business.\"\n\nThe Copper slipped back into the water.\n\nBing-bing. Bing-bing\u2026Bing-bing.\n\nIt filled the tunnel like an angry dragon, light and clanging and churning as it cut through the water.\n\nThe Copper reached for it, but the front had been smoothed where it met the water. He slipped beneath its prow and felt the pull of current toward the bubbling stern, clawed frantically, and finally got a grip on a sort of rail running the underside of the vessel. He locked sii and saa on the projection and used it to climb back to the nose end.\n\nHe rode for a moment between front point and bow wave, catching his breath. Using the power in his saa and his good sii to grip, he managed to round the nose and found the bats huddled unhappily, their gripping digits white with terror. Worked metal in regular spiral shapes had been driven into the bow. Whether it was decor or functional he couldn't say, but it did offer a grip.\n\nHe wrapped himself around the bow as comfortably as he could.\n\n\"M'feel like a bit o' flushed dwarf-waste,\" Thernadad said. His face was wet from being splashed.\n\n\"Ooo, ooo, ooo, such a tragedy,\" Mamedi blubbered; some cousin of hers had slipped and fallen into the water.\n\nSome of the bats climbed on the Copper, as his scales offered better grips than the smoothed wood.\n\n\"Sir, m'be losing strength,\" Thernadad's mother said. \"Just a quiet nip and none be wiser.\"\n\n\"Oh, very well.\"\n\nThe bat dug around in the soft tissue behind his ear and he felt the usual tingling numbness as she licked the area before biting. He couldn't move his head without squashing her, but he rolled an eye down and saw the other bats feeding.\n\nIrked that they didn't ask permission, he was tempted to eat one in the hope that it would teach the others some manners. But Mamedi had finally left off her blubbing.\n\nThe river wasn't always flowing and channeled. Three times the boat plunged into rushing, frothing water, thoroughly drenching them as it nosed into walls of water. Bats and one exsanguinated dragon hung on until the bat claws hurt him more than the teeth. At these moments the dwarves shouted to one another and beat a drum, and the Copper heard a clanging within as they worked their machinery.\n\nOther times the boat stopped at steel doors in the water and waited until the dwarves finished turning wheels and clanging, then passed through to another chamber shut by another set of steel doors, sometimes raising the boat and sometimes lowering it. During this process the Copper and the bats hid under the nose of the ship. The dwarves emerged from the boat's interior and stretched on the flat top of the craft, or fouled the water with their waste.\n\nThese water chambers were thick with rats, but the Copper didn't dare leave to hunt. The bats were under no such compunction, and whipped through the chamber, clearing it of insects.\n\nThernadad returned, cleaning his teeth and gum line with a darting tongue-tip.\n\n\"Wherever dwarves go, rats go. Wherever rats go, bugs go. Wherever bugs go, bats hunt.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should live here, then.\"\n\n\"Oh, sir, w'be sticking to you. Be a heartbreak to leave you after all w've been through.\"\n\nWater bubbled all around the craft as the chamber filled, and the dwarves shouted to one another. The Copper, splashed and cramped from clinging to the underside of the boat, felt a nip at a sore spot behind his saa joint.\n\nHe lashed out and down, heard a brief squeak as he crushed a bat in his jaws. He swallowed it.\n\nThe other bats yeeked in terror.\n\n\"Stupid sot,\" Thernadad said. \"That'll teach 'em some manners.\"\n\nMamedi set to yeeking with a group of bats. \"Cruelty, cruelty, a poor starving bat\u2026\"\n\nThe Copper felt rather better for the snack. \"Did you see who it was?\"\n\n\"Me cousin twice removed by mating. Too dumb to dodge a cave wall. W'be better off without him. If sir's in the mood for afters, Mamedi's sister wouldn't much be a'missed. By me, anyway.\" He threw a companionable wing around the Copper's shoulder. \"Let that be a lesson to the rest of you,\" he yeeked.\n\n\"They're getting set to open the doors again,\" the Copper said. He heard the dwarves tramping back into the center of the vessel and going to their positions.\n\nHe looked back at the huddled bats, eyes wide and glinting at him in terror, and felt better than he had since he spit in King Gan's eye.\n\nThe Copper longed to sleep, but Enjor insisted that the tunnel they needed to get to was \"just a bit ahead.\"\n\nThey'd had to leave their first boat at another lake and swim to a different river mouth before coming upon a new vessel, smaller and more beat-up than the first, worked by a trio of dwarves.\n\nTwice their own boat idled, hugging the side while larger vessels going the other way passed. One was wide and had heaps of black rock piled within, and crawled along only a slug's pace faster than the current.\n\nThe other almost flew down the tunnel, a long, narrow craft with dwarves sitting in the front and rear at some kind of apparatus that reminded the Copper of the foul machines they'd used to attack Mother in the cave. Instead of a bell, this one sounded a horn at intervals. Its lights, throwing tight beams from curved copper lanterns, almost blinded him as they searched the water's surface.\n\nAt last they came to another landing, where the dwarves reached up and snagged hanging chains and yelled back and forth as a pair of dwarves laden with bags hanging from wooden poles joined the boat.\n\n\"M'lord,\" Enjor whispered in his ear. \"This passage be getting us to the other river.\"\n\nThe Copper nodded, and Enjor roused Thernadad. The Copper waited until the vessel got under way again and slipped off the nose with hardly a splash. He floated for a moment until the dinging bell receded, then dragged himself up into the chamber.\n\nThey passed into another cavern. The floor was littered with broken bits of masonry, and cave moss in several colors\u2014red, blue, and green\u2014still thrived where water was dripping. The Copper looked at characters scrawled on a wall in a reflective color, like liquid dragonscale, though someone had clawed through it.\n\n\"What is this place?\" he asked Enjor on one of his swoops.\n\n\"Old dwarf settlement, m'lord. Abandoned in the wars with the demen.\"\n\n\"Demen?\"\n\n\"Deep Men. Filthy bunch. Not above throwing a net over a bat and a'sticking a skewer through him for roasting.\"\n\n\"Demen?\" Thernadad's mother cried. \"They snip off bat wings and roll up their awful moss paste in it.\"\n\n\"Faaaa!\" Mamedi said. \"They bite our heads off before singing a battle song. M'be going no farther.\"\n\nThe Copper hopped up a set of stairs and peered through a broken portal. He smelled rats and damp wood rot.\n\nEnjor hung upside down and picked at his tailvent. \"Only other road to the south river is right through the heart of the Wheel of Fire city. A black bat in full cave-dark couldn't make it. I'm resting where I can hear them coming.\"\n\n\"Wake me if you do,\" the Copper said, too tired and cold to fear dwarves or demen. He found a pile of smashed wood and rotten fabric and went to sleep.\n\nHe heard rats scrabbling around in the dark and shifted position. The noises faded as the rats fled, but they returned. They always did, drawn by the smell of dragon-waste.\n\nHe followed the sounds and smells, then spit out the thin contents of his fire bladder. While it wasn't ready yet to burst into flame, it could blind or wound. He jumped after the pained squeaks and trapped two rats under his good sii, then swallowed them before his prey knew what had happened.\n\nFeeling a little better with rat in him, he went back to sleep.\n\nEnjor led them up a winding, rough tunnel, claiming that it went all the way to the surface, with a fair prospect off a mountainside if you followed it long enough.\n\nThernadad's mother rode his back the whole way. The tunnel smelled decidedly dwarvish. It made the Copper nervous.\n\n\"Sir, I can fly a bit if y'be just generous enough to give me a small lap.\"\n\n\"The last time your family left me light-headed. I need my wits.\"\n\nThey took a crack and descended some rough rock to a cavern filled with a confusing array of smaller chambers. Enjor flew off to be sure of the path. The Copper sniffed out a discarded iron-soled boot and carried it in his mouth until they took a rest break, where he thoughtfully chewed it down. Tearing and devouring the mixture of leather and metal was most satisfying, even if the dwarf-foot smell could poison a cave slug.\n\n\"Oh, m'be perishing, sir. Perishing!\" Thernadad's mother lamented.\n\n\"Just a little, then,\" the Copper said, feeling generous with a belly full of heel and hobnail. \"But be quiet about it.\"\n\nShe opened him up just under his bad sii. He couldn't feel much of anything in that limb anyway.\n\nEnjor flapped back, gasping. He shoved his mother out of the way and took a hearty drink of dragonblood.\n\n\"What's all this?\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Better and better still,\" Thernadad's mother said. \"I feel a maiden bat again,\" she called, flapping off into the cavern. \"Up and at 'em, y'slugs. Darkness a'wasting!\"\n\n\"Careful, Mum!\" Enjor called. \"Not that way!\"\n\nHe flapped heavily into the air, shouting, and in a few moments his mother returned, flying in irregular loops. She didn't so much land as nose into the cave floor.\n\n\"What's the matter? Drunk on dragonblood?\"\n\n\"Bad air,\" Enjor said.\n\n\"Eeeeee, that's a funny color moonlight,\" the old white-flecked bat said. She rolled her eyes this way and that, coughed, and was still.\n\n\"Mum! Mum!\" Thernadad said, flying down from the ceiling.\n\n\"She went down the wrong tunnel,\" Enjor said. \"Bad air.\"\n\nThenadad landed next to her and head-butted her hard in the stomach. The body didn't so much as twitch. \"Mum!\" He rounded on his brother. \"Why didn't you watch her?\"\n\n\"Me only just made it out myself!\"\n\nThernadad snapped at his brother's ear.\n\n\"Stop it,\" the Copper said. \"She's dead.\"\n\nThe other bats crept across the ceiling, yeeking at one another in the shadows.\n\n\"That's three lost. How many more?\" Mamedi's sister said. \"This dragon's not such a lucky strike after all.\"\n\n\"No one asked you all to come,\" Thernadad said. He made to fly up, but the Copper put a sii claw on his wing.\n\n\"Let's keep moving.\"\n\n\"Once a bat drops\u2026\" Enjor said, flapping back up to the ceiling. \"M'lordship's right.\"\n\n\"And just be leaving her here?\" Thernadad asked. \"Bats should be living above the bones of their elders.\"\n\n\"I'll carry her, if you like,\" the Copper said. He picked up the cooling little body and swallowed it whole.\n\n\"Awwwww, sir,\" Thernadad said. \"That was unkind.\"\n\n\"She had enough meals from me. One in return seems just. You'd rather the rats and slugs got her?\"\n\n\"Y'see another gone,\" Mamedi's sister whispered. \"Who's next?\"\n\n\"The Lavadome's worth a few odds 'n sods droppin'. Like outside, underground.\"\n\n\"Long way yet,\" Enjor said, whipping back. \"Little to eat until w'be reaching the river.\"\n\nEnjor hurried the party past another shaft plunging down\u2014the source of the bad air\u2014and they entered some naturally formed caves. The moss here was the natural variety, faint blue and green threads that vanished whenever the eye moved. White things with waving antennae slipped into cracks as they approached, and insects with bodies like glass froze against the striped cave walls.\n\nThe older bats grew tired and clung to the Copper as he walked, and only Enjor, tireless for all his bulk, and some of the first-year bats had energy to flit around.\n\nA bat squeaked.\n\n\"What's that?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Boktemi found something,\" Mamedi said.\n\nA brighter patch lay ahead. The Copper smelled rot and metal on the air.\n\nThe source of the odor was two figures sitting back-to-back, dead for a day or two at most.\n\n\"Ahhh, that be more like it. There's some juice there still, down in the lower quarters,\" Mamedi said. She crawled off the Copper and began to scratch around at an outthrust leg. Tendrils of blue cave moss had found the bodies as well, and climbed toward wounds on the bodies.\n\nThe Copper examined the faces. These were no dwarves or men; they were thicker-skinned than either, pebbled like a dragon's stomach and with thick ridges of horn making fearsome flanges at the skull and jawline. A row of spines, thin as straw, grew from their backbones.\n\nThey wore helms, though not in the dwarvish fashion. These helms were open, a series of reinforcing rods that capped the natural ridges on their skulls, and had a fearsome spike on the top. One's spike still bore a bit of dried gristle.\n\n\"Are these\u2014\"\n\n\"Demen,\" Enjor said. \"Ech. The blood's gone bad.\"\n\n\"M'be calling the eyeballs,\" Thernadad said.\n\n\"A'taking more than your fair share!\" Mamedi protested.\n\n\"Says who?\"\n\n\"Faaaaaa!\"\n\nShe jumped up on one of the creature's shoulders, bristling for a fight.\n\n\"Easy, now,\" the Copper said. \"I'm trying to read this.\"\n\n\"Who be a'caring how they got here?\" Enjor said, shoving a younger bat away from some slow-seeping fluid.\n\n\"Blast these thick skins,\" another bat commented from the darkness. \"Wish these were dwarves.\"\n\nThe Copper tried to ignore the bats. The two demen bore grievous injuries, yet no dead lay around them. So they must have fought elsewhere before sitting down to succumb to their wounds. But why back-to-back? And why hadn't their fellows carried them to safety?\n\nHe suspected that the answer to both questions was a lost battle. They were either on guard against the victorious dwarves\u2014or whomever\u2014or something deadlier lurked in the darkness.\n\nThreats in these caverns or no, he needed his strength. He chewed down a mouthful or two of the rotting flesh and the metal tip of a scabbard, then crept off to sleep scales-out in a protective nook.\n\nHe woke and found two new brown-stained wounds on his tail.\n\nThe greedy bats had taken advantage of his sleep.\n\n\"Thernadad!\" he roared.\n\nThe bat flapped over, and the Copper waved his tail in front of his upturned nose.\n\nThernadad combed his ears. \"Sir, m'be telling them to take only a lap or two each. There be so much energy in dragonblood, and w'be all bone-weary from the journey. Only a few drops out of your great body, nothing to you, but a lifesaver\u2014\"\n\n\"I was tired enough as it is. Now I'm drained. Who am I going to ride on when I get tired?\"\n\n\"They be a rotten bunch of sots, yes; m'won't let it happen again.\"\n\n\"You've got only three songs, Thernadad, but you sing them well.\"\n\nHe stalked back toward the bodies of the demen. \"Tell them to keep clear. I'm having my breakfast and I'm tempted to juice a bat to wash it down.\"\n\n\"Told you his lordship\u2014\" Enjor said.\n\n\"Faaaaa!\" Mamedi screamed, backhanding her mate's brother with a wing tip. \"Y'be the one saying he wouldn't miss\u2014\"\n\nHe ignored the fighting and nosed around in the corpses. Their vital organs were a putrefying mass\u2014he settled for a bit of thick shoulder. The blood had drained down from the upper half of the bodies, and the shank had tenderized a little as it aged.\n\nA clattering\u2014a pile of dry bones falling was how it struck the Copper's ear\u2014made him look up, still attached by an un-severed hunk of tendon to the corpse of the deman.\n\nHe couldn't say what appeared out of the dim light, for the cave moss lit only the lower underside of its body, only that it was frightfully spindly, standing on many legs, with two long, pincer-tipped claws on its front limbs, a cluster of eyes, and a long rise up from the tail, curling around.\n\nHe'd seen a scorpion or two in the home cave. They liked the dark and the cool, and if you flipped them and gave them a good smash at the leg joints with your tail they had tastier meat than a slug, though a good deal less. But those were compact little creatures.\n\nThe bat brawl stopped.\n\nOdd how the bats looked up to him. It was only a lucky splatter that allowed him to escape King Gan. And this armored monstrosity\u2026it would stick him with that barb and lift his slight body up in those great claws and drag him off to some dark hole.\n\nHe backed up, wanting the bodies of the demen between him and the scorpion. The tendon running from his mouth to the corpse tightened, and the body lurched.\n\nA blur, and then a thwak sound\u2014the spindly scorpion struck the deman's corpse. The force of the blow knocked it over and its wiry helmet fell off. The Copper hugged the cave floor and the helmet rolled, its arc limited by the spikes, up against his nose.\n\nThe scorpion rushed forward and took up the corpse in its claws, and the deman's companion, now with nothing to lean against, slowly sagged a claw's breadth at a time. The scorpion rounded on the motion, wary, and struck again with its tail. It pulled its prize in a little closer and guarded it with the other pincer, as though the second body meant to challenge it for the meal.\n\nThe Copper ever so slowly tongued the snared tendon out from his teeth and took the deman's helmet in his jaws, trying to think his way through a fog of terror that kept his sii and saa from obeying. Maybe he could ward off a blow, the way dwarves did with a shield\u2026.\n\nThe vast creature, for all its size, was a slave to its senses. No doubt it would take the corpse it had acquired back to whatever hole would accommodate those long, thin, segmented limbs, and eat in peace. But how long would it be until it grew hungry again? Would the short, regular steps of a dragon hatchling draw it after them?\n\nSummoning his courage, he pressed his tail against the leaning corpse and gave it a shove so it spilled over toward the scorpion.\n\nThe insect let out a shocked, whistling breath and struck with its tail again.\n\nThe Copper dragon-dashed forward through two of the impossibly thin legs, got under the thing, and struck upward with the spiked helmet, right at the joining of its eight limbs.\n\nHe pulled back down just in time to feel himself stepped on as the beast sprang sideways, crashing heedlessly into the cavern wall. It tipped, fought to right itself, claw arms and tail waving this way and that.\n\nThe Copper didn't wait to see whether it would die or not.\n\n\"Enjor\u2014which way?\"\n\n\"Oook.\"\n\nHe threw the helmet at the bats. \"Lead the way, curse you!\"\n\nThe bat flapped off and the others followed. The Copper kept up, and as the fright seeped out of their bodies they collected themselves in a cramped corner, where he could press up against the ceiling with the bats, catching his breath.\n\nHe listened for that bone-rattle sound of the thing's feet, but heard only his own hearts pounding.\n\n\"You killed a cave scorpion,\" some young nephew of Mamedi's\u2014Uthaned, he thought the creature's name was\u2014said.\n\n\"The dead men did the fighting for me,\" the Copper replied.\n\n\"What be that to us? Bug juice is poor in vitality,\" Mamedi said. \"Besides, w'be leaving the body behind.\"\n\n\"Ooo, m'be famished, how about\u2014\" one of Mamedi's relations began.\n\n\"None of that, now,\" Thernadad said. \"Our host has done enough. Suck air and saliva for a bit.\"\n\nThe Copper hardly heard them. He wished he hadn't thrown away that helmet in a fit of temper. If nothing else, he could poke the more annoying bats with it.\n\n\"Good news, m'lord,\" Enjor said.\n\n\"Almost any change could be good news.\" Food, freshwater, an end to all these twists and turns. Even a change in light level. He was tired of groping through the dark, led on by bat yeeks from patch of dim moss to patch of dim moss.\n\n\"W'be at the river.\"\n\nThe Copper had been walking for the last thousand paces or so with just one eye open, trying to sleep as he slid his three good legs forward and hopped over his bad.\n\n\"How far?\"\n\n\"Y'be smelling it just over this next incline.\"\n\nThe bats flew wearily ahead. He climbed up a rocky tunnel. Someone had cleared a path of loose boulders.\n\n\"All I smell is dwarf.\"\n\n\"Must be a'fighting with the demen again,\" Thernadad said.\n\nThey passed over a makeshift wall in the tunnel, the source of all the loose boulders, and descended. The Copper smelled wood: Splintered shields lay all about, some with arrows growing out of them. He extracted a few arrowheads and swallowed them. What had made this dark pocket of emptiness worth fighting over?\n\n\"M'perishing,\" Thernadad gasped.\n\n\"We'll rest.\"\n\nThe Copper hoped he could find fish in the river. His appetite had progressed from tickle to gnaw to worry two marches ago. He curled up. Past the \"wall\" the tunnel turned into another series of chambers leading off in various directions, mostly down.\n\n\"Lights. Lights!\"\n\nIt took the Copper a moment to realize that he'd been asleep. He shook his head, clearing cobwebs some industrious spider had woven on his ear. He scanned the downslope with his good eye, marked the beams of light waving around, probing corners.\n\nBehind the beams of light he saw the outlines of glowing beards and thick curves of light-frosted helmets. Dwarves.\n\n\"A'searching the cavern,\" Thernadad said. \"Better run, sir.\"\n\n\"I don't think I'm up to it,\" the Copper said. \"Here, all of you gather 'round; let's go down this incline. Oh, never mind the damp\u2026I've got an idea.\"\n\nThe Copper clung to the cavern roof in the downslope, hidden by a series of serrations not very different from the ones on the roof of his mouth. The dwarves had broken up into smaller groups to better search all the chambers and shafts of the system behind the wall.\n\nA dragonlength below and up the slope from him, the bats lay on the floor, as relaxed as he could make them, save for Mamedi's sister, who cowered in a crack for fear of being stepped on by a dwarf.\n\nThe dwarves probed the darkness with their lights and began to descend into the chamber. This had better work, or he had nowhere to run\u2026.\n\nA dwarvish lantern flicked across a length of stiff bat wing, and the Copper got a momentary glimpse of the delicate finger bones and veining in their remarkable construction.\n\n\"They're going to step on us,\" Enjor yeeked.\n\n\"Faaaa!\" Mamedi said. \"Keep your ears down.\"\n\nThe dwarves froze in their tracks and grumbled to one another. One made a loud sniffing sound.\n\nThe young bat, Uthaned, gave a twitch.\n\nThe dwarves hurried back up toward their fellows, shouting warnings.\n\n\"Good work, you all,\" the Copper said. \"Everyone gets a lick of blood for that. Except you,\" he said to Mamedi's sister. \"No risk, no reward.\"\n\nThe dwarves passed over to the other side of the wall, leaving only a group of sentries standing at the gap. As soon as the others moved on, the sentries stacked their arms and started a low fire. Soon the smell of sizzling meat cooking had the Copper's mouth gushing.\n\nIf there had been just two dwarves he might have become reckless and attacked them for their food. Luckily they left four behind, so the hatchling wasn't even tempted to rashness. The only alternative to listening to his empty stomach groan as the dwarves ate was a quick escape, so he roused the bats\u2014most of them reenergized by a quick nip from his tail\u2014and crept away. The only sentry the dwarves left watched the long incline on the other side of the way, not the warren of caves the dwarves had already searched.\n\nAnd so they came to the southbound river\u2014the Sou'flow, as Enjor styled it.\n\nAnd were checked again. One of the dwarvish hollow-log riverboats rested in the current, in what seemed the dazzling brightness of cave moss and numerous lanterns at front and back. The craft waited, hooked to chains hanging down from the ceiling and occupied by a dwarvish crew.\n\nThe Copper evaluated his chances from the shadows. With the amount of light in the cave, he felt as though one of the dwarves focused lanterns right on him, but told himself it was only the long trip in the dark that had oversensitized him.\n\nHe heard a strong breeze moving with the current. Between the wind and the sound of water in the tunnel breaking against the swinging chains and the back of the dwarf boat, they wouldn't hear him slip into the water or swim past.\n\nThe dwarves seemed glad of a chance to escape their vessel, and lounged ashore, sleeping or tending to their beards or gathering around a flat bit of cavern floor where they spun coins at one another, stamping and barking their satisfaction or disgust with the course of the game.\n\nEnjor flapped off to hunt for insects on the water, and the Copper saw a dwarf comment and point at the bat's darting black form.\n\n\"I need a diversion,\" he told the bats. \"Thernadad, Mamedi\u2026could you fly up to those chains hanging from the ceiling? Start a fight, as noisy as you can.\"\n\n\"Us? Fight?\" Thernadad said. \"A more unnatural act m'can't imagine! W'be as close as ever two bats\u2014\"\n\n\"M'willing,\" Mamedi's sister said. \"M'making enough noise, if sir will let me have a nip first.\"\n\n\"After.\"\n\n\"I'll go too, Mum,\" Uthaned said. His speech inflections had grown almost dragonish, but then, he was a young bat with more brains than the common run of them.\n\nThe bats flitted off and alighted on the chains. There they commenced yeeking and swatting. The dwarves noticed the commotion and turned to watch.\n\nThe Copper had considered creeping across the cave wall or ceiling\u2014the dwarves would be less likely to look there\u2014but he opted for speed instead of concealment. He shot from his hiding spot at the dragon dash\u2014though his was a little strange in that he used his front limbs only to land; his saa did all the work because of his withered sii.\n\nOne of the dwarves bent to pick up a loose rock. The Copper couldn't say what made him shift course\u2014later he decided it was both dislike of dwarves and a worry about the bats losing heart to go on if they lost still another\u2014but it wasn't a conscious decision at the time.\n\nHe caught the dwarf in the back of his stubby knees as he threw, and felt a weight come crashing down across his back.\n\nDwarvish yells of alarm\u2014none louder than from the dwarf unexpectedly finding himself atop the hatchling's back, riding it like a child attempting to make a pony out of too small a dog\u2014followed him right into the water, where he kept running along the river bottom, weighed down by the dwarf.\n\nHe lost the dwarf to buoyancy and surfaced in the current and hazarded a look back, expecting to see the dwarves running to their weapons or the ship to give chase.\n\nInstead he saw one bedraggled dwarf scooting out of the water as quickly as limbs and backside could carry him, and the other sailors bent over, laughing so hard their glowing beards dripped light.\n\nThe journey south took a good deal more time, both because of the greater distance they traveled and the infrequency of tunnel boats. Most of the craft on this part of the river were warships thick with well-armed dwarves and throw-lamps. He didn't dare ride any of those, for dwarves rode in the front, with a good view of the prow of the ship, sometimes tossing lines to probe the water depth.\n\nHe even encountered one being laboriously drawn back up against the current by dwarves using poles and hooks, sweating and grunting and chanting as they worked.\n\nThey clung and splashed to another vast lake, and Enjor advised them to make for the other side. It was easy enough for the bats to fly, but the Copper had to fight his way through a waterfield of spongy pads anchored to the bottom by long roots. A black slime thick with biting water mites infested the underside of each pad. The slime caught in his scales, and he began to itch immediately.\n\nAll the Copper could do was curse the bats for their ability to fly, and his curses were all the more venomous thanks to the foreknowledge that he would never fly, even if he lived to see his wings uncase.\n\nThey lingered at the edge of the lake for a day or two in a warren of half-submerged rocks and sand and muck. He had no way of telling time other than his body's natural rhythm, as he tried to scrub out the nits with sand and freshwater, scratching himself until he was raw and bleeding. In this case the bats were a positive blessing; their saliva took away the itch as they worked over every sore spot.\n\nBut the nits always rallied and returned. Each time he woke, fresh masses had gathered.\n\nHe'd never forget the fish of that deep, vast lake. They were bony, and had thick hides with horny dimples running the back and side, with long shovel noses. But the softest, tastiest flesh he'd ever sampled ran from just behind the jawline and along the underside down the long tail. If he dipped his tail in the lake and poked at the bottom, overturning rocks, the fish would often come, drawn to whatever creatures were stirred up by his probe. And more often than not he could get his jaws on one before it could flee, though he once was taken on a wild underwater ride by a specimen three times his own length.\n\nHe came back bloody-mouthed, having lost a pair of hatchling teeth.\n\nHe feasted on fish and the bats feasted on him and the nits feasted on both\u2014though the bats were better at digging the creatures out of their fur. Scale had its disadvantages.\n\nBut after a period of rest and feasting on fish he felt the urge to move on. The bats took some convincing, for there was good insect hunting, especially over those awful pads in the middle of the lake, but after one of their number was eaten by some swooping thing that was all mouth and wing, they saw the wisdom in moving on.\n\nJust when he thought it was time to strike off downriver again, they were delayed by one of the younger bats giving birth to a trio of young. The bats had a strange system of feeding their young in which the newborns lapped fluid from their mother. It struck the Copper as being wasteful; to his mind the sooner young learned to feed themselves the more likely they were to survive. But considering the utter helplessness of a pink newborn bat, their system had been literally born of necessity.\n\nThernadad cadged twice-daily feedings of dragonblood for the nursing mother. The Copper agreed, mostly because Thernadad said a well-fed mother would mean well-fed young, and well-fed young would soon be able to cling to their mother as she clung to the dragon, and thus they'd be able to get going downriver all the sooner.\n\nIt meant more fishing, and as fish were growing scarce at that end of the lake, the Copper explored its edges. He found a few old dwarvish camps and exploratory tunnels filled with little but mold and slime.\n\nDuring one of these trips, swimming back with half of one of the bony fish floating along in his mouth, he came across the wreck.\n\nHe'd missed it during his climb across the rocky edge of the lake because it was more than half-submerged. It was a strange sort of vessel, hardly large enough for more than three dwarves, only a quarter the width of the other vessels, and entirely lacking in machinery. Parts of it were charred, and the wood that was in contact with the water had rotted.\n\nThe Copper found a few tasty metal pegs made out of a greenish heavy metal. They smelled hearty, and he extracted one with his teeth. Finding it palatable, he pulled out a second one, and the vessel parted from its lower half and rolled over, breaking into two pieces, one of which was dry and still floated.\n\nWhat dwarves could do, he could. He hopped into it and, after a moment of precarious rocking, found that it supported him. It was curved, and about half of it went under the water. He found that if he lay between the two raised arms he could be mostly out of the water.\n\nHe pushed off and paddled with his saa, alternating with tail swipes when his legs grew tired. With this, he didn't need a dwarf boat. It wasn't quite swimming, nor could it be called riding, but it would do.\n\nHe paddled it back to the rocks where the bats waited, clinging to the cavern ceiling, and showed off his prize. The bats were more interested in the fish than the find.\n\nThe Copper had gotten better at pounding ideas into minuscule bat skulls. Or perhaps the bats had grown used to following his orders. \"This way you don't need to fly all the time. You can rest on the wood edges, there.\"\n\n\"Ooo, m'be not liking that,\" Mamedi said. \"Bit of dwarf craft. It'll go wrong and end up on top of me in the water!\"\n\n\"Then cling to my back. I won't roll over. Here, try.\"\n\nShe stayed where she was on the rock until Thernadad gave her a shove. Then she fluttered down and settled on his head.\n\n\"You're blocking my good eye with your wing.\"\n\n\"M'regrets, sir,\" Mamedi said.\n\nHe pushed out and swam in a slow circle. He wondered how the piece of wreckage would handle in the stronger current of the river tunnel. But even if he bumped his whole way to the Lavadome, it would be easier, and warmer, than swimming. The dwarves, for all their faults, knew how to get from one bit of cavern to another with as little discomfort as possible.\n\nAnother advantage of the Copper's discovery was that it allowed the young mother bat to travel with her young.\n\nLooking back on matters later, he counted the final leg of the journey as one of the key turning points in his life. A thousand tiny circumstances might have caused him to miss the camping demen and their egg. Had he ridden lazily in the piece of wreckage instead of paddling, had he not passed up likely landing places because of dwarf-smell and pushed the bats, had it been another season when the river flowed more slowly, or more quickly\u2026\n\nThe strange chain of events started when he saw a distant shape in the dim light of the tunnel. A brighter patch of light that marked a tunnel mouth revealed it as three hominid shapes rowing in a little shell of a boat not much larger than his own bit of wood.\n\nHe reached out a saa and arrested his drift.\n\nThree demen struck the tunnel mouth. Two dragged their boat out of the current while a third scouted, spiny projections on his back bristling. The two began to take baggage out of their craft.\n\n\"Kuu! Kuu! Kuuuuu!\" a chorus of voices shouted.\n\nThe demen shoved their boat back into the river.\n\nThe Copper heard a scream, and he saw one of the demen fall toward the boat, sprouting new quills in the chest and leg where none had been before. He dropped some light-colored orb into the water as he fell. His companion shoved their craft into the water and fell on board.\n\nThe Copper saw sparks fly as missiles struck the tunnel wall.\n\nA group of dwarves charged into view, striking at the deman who'd gone ahead to scout. He fought like a mad thing, lashing out with blades in each hand, head-butting dwarves with his spiked helmet, but fell when an ax caught him across the horned spine. The dwarves didn't stop to celebrate, but threw wide, flat-bottomed craft of their own into the water and pursued the wounded deman and his companion.\n\nThe Copper waited with the bats, who filled the time by complaining of exhaustion and hatred of the river and travel. He ignored the chatter. The only bat he couldn't afford to lose was Enjor.\n\n\"Keep out of sight,\" he told the bats. \"If I jump off the craft, just drift with it for a while.\"\n\nHe approached the tunnel mouth. He caught the smell of burning flesh\u2014heard the dwarves chattering as they burned the body of the slain deman.\n\nA pale white object just beneath the river's surface caught his eye. He arrested his silent drift and retrieved it by pinching it between his good sii and the crippled limb. The dwarf watching the river stiffened and took a step toward the bank.\n\nIt was an egg. Smaller than a dragon egg and wider at one end than the other, it had a faint, clean smell that reminded him of wet sand.\n\nHe released his grip and let his raft continue downstream. The dwarf looked out onto the river, unsure of his own eyes, but by the time he called his fellows over the Copper was rounding a riverbend.\n\nHe heard a distant hammering sound. Not long later they came upon the dwarf boat, anchored just beneath a series of cracks in the cavern wall that led to another hole in the cavern roof. He smelled demen here, and a little dwarf.\n\nThe dwarves had anchored their craft with an arrowlike piece of metal driven into one of the cracks. The Copper bumped up against the dwarf boat.\n\nHe dug his teeth into the line holding the boat. A quick grind of his teeth and the boat commenced drifting. He tossed the egg into some canvas at the bottom of the boat, hopped in after it, and sniffed around the bottom. He found some bread and dried meat wrapped up in waxy cloth, ignored the bread, and swallowed the meat.\n\nAs he ate he sniffed the boat. It was a clever thing, with canvas sides held up by wooden slats. It leaked a little through the hinge at the bottom. He guessed the dwarves folded the boat up to carry it through the tunnels.\n\nHe smelled a slightly sweet fluid and looked at the egg. It was cracked, either when the deman dropped it or in his clumsy retrieval\u2014perhaps even when he'd tossed it into the boat.\n\nHe tasted the fluid. Delicious! He widened the crack and began to lap at the fluid within, and found it so tasty he greedily shoved his nose in and sucked the yolk down. He felt like a new dragon afterward.\n\nThe bats, always sensitive to a meal being served, joined him. They licked up bits of egg that had dripped or pooled in the cracked shell.\n\nHe smacked his jaws open and shut and ran his tongue around the edges of his mouth. It was the best meal he'd ever had. If he were ever king of his own land like the dragon-lords of old, he'd eat one just like it every day.\n\nHe crunched down the shell. Then he left the dwarf boat. No one would ever mistake it for a bit of flotsam. And if the dwarves needed it back\u2026well, war was a series of misfortunes, wasn't it?\n\n\"Who lays eggs like that underground?\" he asked Enjor.\n\n\"No idea, m'lord. No birds be a'living down here. At least, no birds y'be wanting to meet.\"\n\nThe river drained off into a mire filled with giant mushrooms. The less said about this portion of the trip, the better\u2014the Copper remembered only having muck and filth between every scale, every tooth, even working its way into his eyes.\n\nThe only ones happy about it were the bats, for insects flew so thickly here they made mistlike clouds. The bats ate their fill and then some\u2014except for the young of Mamedi's relative: They had hair now and an unslakable thirst for dragonblood.\n\nLuckily they were so small they took only a few drops each.\n\nHe came out of the mire a bedraggled dragon, sick of filtering mouthfuls of filthy water through his teeth to eat the worms that wiggled through the mire bottom. He assuaged his appetite by tearing off mouthfuls of fungus.\n\nAt the other side of the mire they passed through another series of tunnels, these sided with a hard, shiny surface that offered cave moss no purchase. He had to be led through the blackest patches by the bats, who probably drained him each time he slept.\n\n\"Almost there now,\" Enjor said, so often that Thernadad took up the refrain. \"Almost there now.\"\n\n\"What's almost?\"\n\n\"One more river to cross, the river of slaves. It flows in a circle around the Lavadome. Then the passage up.\"\n\nAfter one of his \"scouts,\" Enjor returned in excitement. \"W'be there. You'll get a good view if the sun is right.\"\n\nThey reached the river, its current so slow that it was hard to distinguish from a lake. This river cavern made the dwarf-boat tunnels seem little more than chutes.\n\nIt had a high ceiling, sheer walls climbing to a dark roof cracked in places where true sunshine fell through. Shafts of light, one or two angled just right so the sunlight fell in neatly edged beams of gold, illuminated the gray-green river surface, tendrils of mist hovering above it in zephyrs of air. Titanic granite boulders rose from the waterline like teeth guarding the far edge.\n\n\"One more swim, m'lord,\" Enjor said.\n\nHe saw a winged shape cross through one of the shafts of light.\n\n\"What are those?\"\n\n\"Nothing y'be wanting to meet,\" Enjor said. \"That's the griffaran\u2014the dragon-guard.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\n\"Bat eaters,\" Enjor and Thernadad said together.\n\n\"Hunt by?\"\n\n\"Sight, m'lord.\"\n\n\"Let's cross once the sunlight goes, then.\"\n\nHe rested on the riverbank and saw a long, thin boat with a line of hominids on board, crossing the water, beetle-sized in the distance. One of the flyers, a black shadow with vast wings, hovered overhead.\n\nHe waited until the beams lifted and vanished, disappearing into a faint glow from the sky. The shadowy wings still flew over the river, though. He nosed around the riverbank as the light faded, but found only a tasteless snail or two. He wedged himself into a crack\u2014more to prevent the bats from feeding on him in his sleep than because he feared discovery\u2014good eye on his vulnerable side.\n\nBut he couldn't sleep, so excited was he to be this near to the Lavadome. He three-quarters shut his good eye. But why weren't there dragons whirling above the river? Surely such a vast body of water had those long, bony, shovel-nosed fishes living within?\n\nHe felt a cautious nip at his leg. He reached out with a saa and heard a bat squeak.\n\n\"Thernadad! You!\"\n\n\"Sir! Didn't think you'd miss\u2014\"\n\nHe squeezed.\n\n\"You're wrong there. Listen, Thernadad, or I'll squeeze every bit of my blood back. I'm putting you in charge of my body. I wake up with any more slits, nips, or cuts, no matter how well concealed, I'll assume you did it and squeeze you.\"\n\n\"Yeek!\"\n\n\"I can't hear your voice at that pitch.\"\n\n\"Y'be very generous, sir,\" Thernadad grunted.\n\n\"Spread the word.\"\n\n\"M'don't suppose, as a gesture to our new understanding\u2026\"\n\n\"No. Once we're across the river and I'm in the Lavadome. Not before.\"\n\nThe cavern was eerie in the way the lighting changed into full dark. He understood light changing from cavern to cavern, but the idea of the amount of light over the lake altering over a single digestive cycle was new to him.\n\nHe set off into the water, the three thriving young bats riding upon his crest. The water was a good deal warmer than that of the underground tunnels, warmer than the rock or air, thus the low mist that hung over the water.\n\n\"Stay low,\" he suggested to the bats on wing. \"The, umm\u2014\"\n\n\"Griffaran,\" Uthaned said, turning a tight circle over the Copper's nostrils.\n\n\"\u2014griffaran shouldn't be able to pick you out through these mists.\"\n\nSomething else was using the mists to hide. A boat, a version of the deman craft he'd encountered on the river, rowed across the water as fast as paddles and demen hands could move it. It held three demen, two rowing and a third in the center.\n\nThe deman in the middle of the boat lifted up a round, white object\u2014an egg! and wrapped it in a cloth before placing it in a basket. He wore colorful feathers tucked through each ear piercing, set so they covered his shoulders.\n\nThe Copper's stomach rumbled. An egg or two would be just what he'd need to get him the rest of the way to the Lavadome.\n\nHe swam alongside the boat, matching its direction and speed. The boat neared the far bank. The rowing demen jumped out, and the other climbed out, then extracted his basket. The rowers lifted the boat.\n\nAppetite helped him make up his mind.\n\n\"You'd better be old enough to fly,\" he told the young bats.\n\nHe dove and swam for the basket-carrying deman. It became more of a wet scuttle as he neared the shore.\n\n\"Jt tht aleet,\" a deman shouted as the Copper pushed past a leg.\n\nHe spun, using his tail to take the deman's legs out from under him. The hominid fell into the shallow water with a splash.\n\nThe Copper didn't want to fight the demen so much as cause confusion and make off with an egg. He nosed into the basket and extracted an egg and\u2014\n\nUrk!\n\nHis head was jerked out of the water. The jerk originated from his neck, and his neck was attached to a line, and the line was in the hands in one of the demen rowers.\n\nIt took two of them to drag him, fighting madly and still clutching an egg to his breast in his good sii, and haul him out of the water.\n\nAnother deman got a line about his saa.\n\nThe Copper fought on pure instinct, determined to either die or be freed of the lines. He'd never be bound and tortured again, and if that meant his hearts' blood pouring into this underground lake and his last breath rising up through those far-off cracks, he'd overcome even the fear of death.\n\nHe fought to bite through the line on his saa, but the line on his neck pulling in the other direction restrained his reach. Every time he tried to reach up to dig his claws into the line on his neck, they pulled again to straighten out his body so he couldn't reach.\n\nAll he could do was hiss, gurgle, and fling his tail this way and that.\n\nThe demen, pulling him first one way and then another, dragged him out of the water and toward the cavern, shouting to each other in their rattling language. The third got his basket of eggs and ran into the rough-cut, low-hanging tunnels.\n\nHe returned with a short tube. He made a gasping sound, and his obscenely short throat expanded. He put the tube to his mouth.\n\nA bat struck him between the eyes. The dart that flashed by the Copper's ear missed. The other two young bats who'd been nursing on his blood were flitting back and forth between the demen with their lines.\n\nIf the Copper hadn't been otherwise occupied by being choked and dragged, he would have gaped in astonishment. Bats, shy and fearful as any whisker-quivering rodent, attacking creatures a thousand times their own size! What had gotten into them?\n\nThe deman with the tube hissed and extracted a strange sort of a weapon, a long, wide-ended blade. He didn't raise it like a dwarf, but reversed it so the blade was shielded under its elbow. It whistled through pointed teeth and came forward.\n\nThe Copper tried to right himself, but his bad sii slipped on slimy stone. He went down on his side. The deman at his saa ran forward and looped the line around his free limb and tied them at the joints, avoiding the Copper's claws.\n\nThe blade flashed down and then up, and the Copper saw his own blood fly into the air, splattering the deman.\n\nAnger, hurt, fear\u2014his breastbone convulsed, and a wide gout of flame shot out of his chest.\n\nThe deman had only a moment to regret his inexperience in dragon fighting before the liquid fire consumed his face, chest, and shoulders. He lit up like a dwarf's oiled torch. The deman with the line at his neck caught a little of the spray on his arm.\n\nPain struck\u2014hard. Harder than the blade, or the tail-breaking iron bars of the dwarves.\n\nThe strain at his legs vanished as the deman groped for the fallen blade of his companion. The Copper wiggled toward the water. And here was the dropped egg!\n\nHe tucked it under his arm and saw a pair of stout, thick-skinned, horn-jointed legs next to him. He looked up to see the remaining deman ready to chop his head off.\n\nA pair of black-taloned claws opened above the deman, took him up by the shoulders, and the Copper felt a wave of wind flow across him at the beat of feathered wings.\n\nThe Copper turned his head so he could watch the flier with his good eye. It was a strange sort of creature, a half dragon with twin tails, hardly any neck at all capped by a tall, arching head with a hooked snout, and feathered wings. It rose and turned, screeching, and another almost identical flier passed, flying in the opposite direction. The other reached out a claw and grabbed the kicking legs of the deman, and with only the briefest of jerks the deman parted messily.\n\nAnother flier came down and plucked him out of the water, its talons closing around his chest. Yet another approached, and the Copper wondered what it would feel like to be torn in twain and for how long he could watch his back half being carried off, but the second bird-creature flew under, eyeing him before alighting at the riverbank and poking around in the deman's boat.\n\nThe feathered avian carried him up, across some of the tall towers of rock, and to a splinter of stone that made a convenient ledge. It dropped him and turned its leathery-skinned head almost completely around to watch him, a fierce cast in its eyes thanks to streaks of yellow and blue eyelid decorating the round black orbs.\n\nIt didn't have a tooth-filled mouth, but a beak with a pink-white tongue inside. He saw it as it opened his mouth to cluck at him. What he took to be twin tails were in fact only feathers, like the heavy-ended blades he'd seen in the demen's hands, only longer.\n\n\"Tlock\u2014the fire was you?\" it asked in good Drakine. The Copper noticed that it had a silver ring set into the fore-edge of a wing bone near the shoulder.\n\nThe Copper could only pant, the wound in his chest burning.\n\nHe shut his eyes, and opened them again only when he heard high bat yeeks. The great bird-creature had left as silently as it had dropped on the demen. Thernadad, Mamedi, Enjor, and one or two of the other bats clung to a crack in the rock.\n\nReal greenstuff grew on these pillars of stone. Enough light must come down through the cracks to support true plants rather than the mosses and lichens and slimes of the Lower World.\n\nThe bats nibbled and lapped at his wound, but as they seemed to be doing more good than harm, he left them to it. The pain faded to an ache. Awful, but tolerable. Scales, stuck together with blood, closed over the wound.\n\nSuddenly they scattered. The fliers returned, bearing the woven basket.\n\nOne of the bird-creatures\u2014griffaran, he reminded himself\u2014climbed down the rock face from above, using its two limbs and beak.\n\nAnother placed the basket on the shelf beside him as it alighted.\n\n\"Egg thief!\" one croaked.\n\n\"Egg thief! Death to all egg thieves!\" others called, drifting on air currents.\n\nAnother landed and turned its head so it looked at him, first with one eye, then the other.\n\nThe Copper gulped. With so many gathered around would they each take some piece of him in those hooked beaks and yank him apart?\n\nA vast griffaran, its beak battle-scarred, one eye socket dry and empty, and two digits missing from its right foot, landed. It wore a pair of golden rings, one in each arm, with fabric like bits of woven sunlight looped through and knotted.\n\n\"Gak! Any other prisoners?\" it asked in Drakine.\n\n\"No, none. They've run again.\"\n\n\"Curse the thieves,\" one of the watching creatures called. Others squawked in agreement.\n\nThe one with the gold bands looked into the empty basket. \"We will see justice done, drake. Prepare yourself.\"\n\nIt reached out with a spread-taloned claw\u2026."
            },
            {
                "title": "Drake",
                "text": "\u2002\"FOOLS AND THRALLS TALK OF GOOD AND EVIL. THEIR MASTERS THINK IN TERMS OF TIME AND PLACE.\" \u2014Tighlia\n\nThe gold-shouldered griffaran, with two silver-winged companions soaring beside, flew to the far side of the water. The Copper rode, clenched in maimed talons, protecting his chest wound with his bad sii.\n\nThe Copper was more than a little surprised they didn't tear him to shreds, or eat him, or drop him to break and die against the rocks below.\n\nThe griffaran sailed into line and entered a tunnel. He heard wing tips brush the chiseled sides. He looked ahead and saw the tunnel's end, but the griffaran didn't slow. They dropped, picking up speed, as though to dash themselves against the wall.\n\nThey beat their wings powerfully, and turned up, and rose through a hole in the cave ceiling, and suddenly there was open air and light all around.\n\nThe Copper looked around in wonder, wishing both his eyes worked so he could take it all in properly.\n\nHe couldn't see much overhead, thanks to the commanding griffaran, just a vague sense of an oddly regular dome shape rising above, like a vast hollow mountain, and a glowing light source at the apex of the dome. Was that the sun? It was high in the sky and bright enough, but it hardly dazzled, and it seemed held in place with no blue about anywhere, so unlike the vague mind-pictures passed down from his parents that he decided it must be some imitation.\n\nBelow he saw a vast blue-green plain, with little rises of red rock, some needle-shaped, others leaning, a few formed like toadstools, and many more low hummocks scattered about. Mosses thrived in the wet crevices; ferns dripped from the edges of pools and streams.\n\nAt the center of the Lavadome stood a black carbuncle, like the pupil in the middle of an eye.\n\nThe fliers were making for the black rock.\n\nAs they flew closer and turned above it, he saw that the rock, unevenly shaped on all sides and resembling a kidney, had been sculpted, added to, cut and galleried and tunneled, enlarging what had been irregular holes scattered around the minimountain like the eyes of a potato he'd once seen a dwarf eating.\n\nThe fliers dropped toward a long garden filled with flower-covered vines set atop one of the rises in the rock. A sculpted river flowed through it, complete with waterfall. Statues of dragons\u2014rampant, reclining, rearing, crossing necks, even dipping their noses into pools of water\u2014surrounded the greenery. It smelled like earth and green growing things.\n\nHis captors swooped down and landed gently.\n\nHairy, broad-backed hominids dropped jugs and tools and scattered as the avians alighted. A rise of black rock overlooked the garden.\n\nThe griffaran fluffed their wings and let out loud calls.\n\nA dragon\u2014a real dragon, huge and silver with black tips at his griff and crest and tail-line\u2014stirred from where he'd been resting atop a small rock.\n\n\"High Captain, what brings you to the Imperial Resort without invitation?\"\n\n\"I have a wounded young drake. He was involved in an egg raid. I'll speak to the Tyr.\"\n\nDragon snouts emerged from the rock. A head or two rose from holes. The Copper saw golden, and red, and pink, and even purple eyes looking at him. He heard whispered dragon voices.\n\n\"The Tyr rests.\"\n\n\"Yark! He has always trusted my judgment in waking him.\"\n\nThe silver dragon inclined his head sideways\u2014rather like Auron when puzzled\u2014but there seemed to be lassitude to the gesture, and disappeared into the rise. The Copper noted that it was the tallest prominence on the black rock; even the garden was above much of the rest of the top.\n\nThe others looked and sniffed at him with interest, not contempt. The smell of dragons, the odd sense of the vast space around while still being underground, the faint throb of so many heartbeats and breathing bodies and shifting claws and scales\u2014it overwhelmed him, and he felt his throat go thick and his good eye blur.\n\nThe Copper's eyes roved in wonder around the dome. What he'd taken to be the sun was just a glowing patch of light at the top of the dome. He suspected it was in fact sunlight being filtered through translucent material. But that wasn't the only glow. Jagged streaks of orange light, brightening and fading and pulsing, flowed down the sides, adding a red-orange cast to the brighter light above.\n\nA smallish, wide-bodied dragon, with scales that seemed deep red or purple depending on how the light struck, carrying seventeen, eighteen, nineteen\u2026twenty-one horn-tips atop his crest, emerged from the rock. The horns grew up, sideways, down, as though interested in what was happening all around the dragon's head. But for all the creature's evident pride in the number of horns, patches of bare skin showed around his eyes, mouth, and the edges of his crest where scale had fallen away.\n\nA pair of wide-shouldered, stooped-over hominids wearing white loincloths trailed behind, with brushes, scoops, and a basket.\n\n\"It's you, Yarrick. They just said a griff captain or I would have hurried. It is the hour of white?\"\n\nYarrick stepped in front of the Copper, cutting off his view of the Tyr.\n\n\"But one. We thought it best to let you sleep, Tyr,\" the silver dragon said.\n\n\"Oh, bash it. I like getting to work early. You should have roused me. But I'm forgetting our visitors. What news from the water ring, brave Yarrick?\"\n\n\"Another egg raid, Tyr. Well organized. They distracted us, poisoned the nest guardians. Sixteen eggs this time\u2014it would have been the worst loss we've ever suffered. And then there's this.\"\n\nHe sidestepped from the Copper. The Copper felt the gaze of two slightly cloudy eyes the color of aging gold coin. He stared back defiantly. If this dragon was going to watch his own kind torn to bits for nest raiding without singeing so much as a feather\u2014\n\n\"Really? That's terrible,\" the Tyr said.\n\nYarrick fluffed his wings. \"This drake\u2014still with egg-wet behind the griff, if I'm still fit to judge dragons\u2014almost lost his gizzard to the demen while rescuing our eggs. But there were guts to spare in that one.\"\n\nRescue?\n\nIt took the Copper a moment to get over the shock. He felt doubly fortunate that the fight with the demen turned out the way it did, even at the price of a stab in the firebladder. What if the griffaran had found him eating from a broken egg?\n\n\"What is he, some young relative of yours eager to prove himself, my Tyr? He shows the old FeHazathant spirit.\"\n\n\"NoSohoth,\" Tyr said, \"is this some relative of mine? Why hasn't he been presented to me? Such old scars on a young drake, too. He's taken honors from three bitter fights, and I'm just looking at the front end of him.\"\n\nThe silver dragon with the black griff tips lowered his head and looked at the Copper closely. \"He's no hatchling from the Imperial Resort, Tyr.\"\n\nTyr glowered. \"Hmmmm. Yes. Why does that not surprise me?\"\n\n\"Let us sing of glories proudly won,\" a golden drake said from one of the flower beds. The Copper saw a couple of bats flit under an overhanging rock behind him.\n\n\"Let's keep our fool's mouth shut for a change,\" NoSohoth muttered.\n\n\"Let the drake sing, old fellow,\" Tyr said. \"At least he's got an appreciation for the old virtues and deeds.\"\n\n\"Sir, I've no time for songs,\" Yarrick said. \"I'm here to see that justice gets done to this brave little fellow. He saved six eggs.\"\n\n\"Did he? Did I doze off and miss part of the story? Well, if you say so. What's your name, lad?\"\n\nThe Copper opened his mouth, but couldn't find words.\n\n\"Perhaps he's in awe to be in the Imperial presence,\" NoSohoth said. \"You've nothing to fear, drake. Glorious Tyr is grandsire to all of us, a part of our lifesong whatever our parentage. Just answer honestly and no harm will befall you.\"\n\n\"Nice to see daring young drakes plunging in among enemies instead of crying for help. Not enough about. Not enough,\" the Tyr said. He settled down over his sii and saa, perhaps to be less threatening.\n\n\"I\u2026I've no name, sir. I'm\u2026my sire and dam\u2026dead.\"\n\n\"What? Who?\" Tyr said. \"NoSohoth, what's this? Are you keeping ill news from me again?\"\n\n\"No, Tyr,\" NoSohoth said. He turned to the Copper. \"There've been no attacks in the Lavadome in two generations. Are you from one of the Upper Provinces?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. Perhaps. I came down the river. I've been traveling for ages\u2026ages, it seems.\" The Copper wished his voice hadn't sounded so squeaky. He wondered if he could even be heard over the surr-whooosh of the Tyr's breathing.\n\n\"Yarrick, where did you find him?\"\n\nThe avian straightened up. \"The lake circle.\"\n\n\"The lake circle, Tyr,\" NoSohoth corrected.\n\n\"Oh, never mind that,\" Tyr said. \"We're old friends, and this is a friendly visit.\"\n\n\"Of course, Tyr,\" Yarrick said. \"On the far bank, to the north. Downstream from the thrall crossing.\"\n\n\"Who were your parents?\"\n\nThe Copper wondered if the truth would be a mistake. Something about the friendly stare of Tyr made him tell the truth. \"AuRel and Irelia, sir.\"\n\nThe dragons looked at each other. \"Irelia? That's no staion-name. AuRel\u2026hmmm, what line?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I don't know.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Tyr,\" NoSohoth corrected again.\n\n\"I don't know, Tyr,\" the Copper repeated.\n\n\"He's lying. He's an outcast; I'll put my fringe on it,\" a hard-edged voice said. A beautiful green dragon joined the others in the garden. She was rather fleshless about the hips, more so than Mother at her hungriest, and had startling violet eyes.\n\nThe dragons and avians dipped their heads at her approach, save for the Tyr, who tickled her under the chin with his tail. The golden drake in the garden bowed especially low.\n\n\"Now, Tighlia, how could you know that?\" the Tyr said. \"Do you know his parentage?\"\n\n\"No. If I had, I'd order them to have such a cripple drowned.\"\n\n\"Then do be quiet. I let you have your way with the drakka, don't I? Let me see to this drake.\"\n\nHe looked back at the Copper. \"You found your way here through the Lower World? Down a river thick with dwarf trunks and demen boats?\"\n\n\"Yes, Tyr.\"\n\n\"You're a drake of singular purpose,\" Tyr said. \"What did you expect to find here? Safety?\"\n\nThe Copper wanted to tell the Tyr all about his dreams of protecting his kind from lying, torturing assassins, but when surrounded by all these great dragons, it seemed a silly hatchling fantasy.\n\n\"Have you had anything to eat this morning, my love?\" Tighlia asked.\n\n\"Hot watered fat and a fresh sow's head.\"\n\n\"And your kern?\"\n\n\"Haruuummm\u2026\"\n\nHer claws rattled the river-smoothed rocks in the walkway between the door and a garden pool. \"I'll roast your cook. What you need is an elf, not that blighter.\"\n\n\"But he can braise an ox so that it melts\u2014\"\n\n\"You'd sleep better if you'd just listen. And there'd be less groaning at your eliminations.\"\n\n\"Tyr, I must get back to my command,\" Yarrick said. \"I won't rest until I see the drake here settled here in the Imperial Resort.\"\n\n\"What? A half-starved, bedraggled stray here?\" Tighlia said. \"The bones of my grandsire will crumble.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered at her hostility. Did she know more of his deeds than she would admit? Why would she not tell the truth, if she knew it, as she was so clearly against him?\n\n\"Why, I think that's a fine idea. We could use some new blood on the Rock.\"\n\n\"Quite right, Grandsire,\" the golden drake said. He crinkled up the corners of his mouth at the Copper, who started, fearing a bite.\n\n\"Perhaps we could discuss it later, at feast,\" NoSohoth said.\n\n\"Delay, delay. You always counsel delay,\" the Tyr said. \"No, I like the idea. I'll have him.\"\n\n\"CuRassathath over by Wind Tunnel and his mate are barren,\" Tighlia said. \"He could go and live with them. They've a lovely hole.\"\n\n\"There was a time when brave deeds merited a place in the Imperial Resort,\" the Tyr said. \"I'd like to restore the tradition.\"\n\n\"You're always cross and impulsive when you haven't eaten properly,\" Tighlia said.\n\n\"I've not been cross in years. Cry settled, for I've made a decision. NoSohoth, get it inscribed at once. This lad\u2026Oh, dear, what was that name\u2026?\"\n\n\"I've no name, Tyr.\" His wound throbbed, but he did his best to stand straight, neck up and head alert.\n\n\"I told you. An outcast,\" Tighlia said. \"And you wanted to settle him in the Black Rock.\"\n\n\"Now, lad, take heart. You're not as forlorn as you'd think; it's happened several times in my lifetime. Why, I could tell you stories\u2014outcasts tend to be lucky, for a start, and I'll take a lucky dragon over the quickest tongue or the stoutest scale. You rate a name for your deeds this day, and a good one.\" He looked around. \"What shall we call him?\"\n\n\"Cripple,\" Tighlia said. \"Half-wit. Both highly appropriate names. Look at that eye and tell me he wasn't cursed in the egg.\"\n\n\"How about MiKalmedes,\" the golden drake said. \"He was a copper, wasn't he?\"\n\n\"Insolence!\" Tighlia spit. \"You flakescale. My own grandsire and one of the founding\u2014\"\n\nThe golden drake scratched himself behind his griff. Loose skin and bits of scale-edge wafted toward Tighlia.\n\n\"Stop quarreling,\" the Tyr said, and the others fell silent in an instant. \"He'll be Rugaard.\"\n\n\"Tyr, your own grandsire by the female?\" NoSohoth objected.\n\n\"He was wounded at hatching, and he turned out all right. His jaw never grew quite right, of course. Not much in the way of wits, but a fierce fighter, and he gave the demen what-for. I think it suits him. How do you like that name, hatch\u2014er, drake?\"\n\nThe Copper's hearts swelled. Not just a name, but a name from an illustrious line! \"Thank you, Tyr.\" He wanted nothing more that instant than to devote himself to this great dragon's will and prove himself worthy of the compliment.\n\n\"Grandsire, lad. Grandsire from now on. You're the Tyr's ward now. Be worthy of your new heritage.\"\n\n\"Grandsire,\" the Copper said. The golden drake was turning up the corners of his mouth at him again.\n\n\"See that he's given a lair,\" the Tyr said. \"Not in the nursery, now\u2014a battle-scarred dragon deserves a real chamber of his own. I know\u2014have him join the Drakwatch. Give him a chance to prove himself to you doubters. Attend to it, won't you, NoSohoth?\"\n\nThe female checked a loosened scale on the Tyr's haunch and shot a look at NoSohoth as he bowed to the Tyr.\n\n\"A fine addition to the family,\" the golden drake said, rolling so he came up with flower petals caught in his scales. \"We won't want for entertainment as long as he's around. I can't wait to see him limp his way through a court dance.\"\n\nNoSohoth led the Copper through what seemed a maze of tunnels, beautifully sculpted, with dragonscale patterns on the rises and drops to help the claws find purchase. The rock inside was shiny and black, with veins of white where it had been left natural, but in many places, like projections and corners, it had been coated with metals or ceramics in intricate designs. The floor wasn't quite smooth, the better to give dragonclaws places to grip, but it was polished. Splashes of water from drinking trickles looked like blood.\n\nTurns, drops, and climbs were marked by burning fat-lamps.\n\n\"Don't you use moss?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"What is this, a mining camp? You're in the Imperial Resort. Besides, there are other advantages to lamps. Smell.\"\n\nSome kind of substance had been thrown into the mix to give a pleasing, relaxing aroma.\n\n\"What's that burning, sir?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"You're a polite hatch\u2014young drake. I haven't heard 'sir' from the Imperial lines in three sets of scale. You've never been in the Upper World?\"\n\n\"No. I've seen shafts of sunlight; that's all.\"\n\n\"The smell's hardy pine. It has an oil that's useful in a variety of ways, a solvent for a start. We put it in the fat-lamps. Some mint and rosemary are added to the oil. Eucalyptus is even better, but hard to come by these days. Otherwise the dragon-smell can get thick in here. Drakes get aggressive, and the drakka play up too much, and dragons who should know better get to dueling. We dragons are thralls to none but our noses.\"\n\nThe Copper had no idea what \"eucalyptus\" was, but had more important questions on his mind. \"I like the smell of dragons all around. I keep fearing I'll wake up and be alone again.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind a year or two alone, myself. Now, let's see, plenty of empty space on this level, as it doesn't have much in the way of egress. Everyone in the Black Rock thinks they're born deserving a gallery with its own trickle.\"\n\nThe Copper gave up counting passages and turns by the time they descended a third time.\n\n\"You'll learn your way around soon enough,\" NoSohoth said. \"If you get lost, just remember always to go from smaller to larger. That'll get you to the Central Spiral.\"\n\n\"That big downshaft with the columns?\"\n\n\"Yes, where we first descended. Just ask a thrall; they all speak Drakine. More or less. They'll put you right. If they don't, you're free to eat them.\"\n\nThe passage rose and then fell away to a wider, lower tunnel. There wasn't so much frill and decor along the passages now. Hominid skulls lined the wall here, grouped in threes and sixes and nines, grinning at him from beneath a coating of bronze or pewter.\n\n\"This is the old Drakwatch level. When I was your age, we had an elvish sorcerer who could make these skulls talk. The stories they told! Plenty of room here; there's just old NeStirrath and some orphans from the provinces adopted into the Rock. Here, this one's got its own passage, which is nice. Can't stand sleeping with air on more than two sides, myself. And room for growth.\"\n\n\"How might I learn more about this RuGaard, sir?\"\n\nNoSohoth stopped for a moment, raised his head up, and spit into a wrought cup connected to a larger pot. The flame lit the passage. The skull of a creature with four horns projecting from the temples and two shorter ones out of the jaw decorated the entrance.\n\n\"A young drake should look to his duties.\"\n\n\"Isn't my first duty to learn about the heritage I'm charged with defending?\" He was rather proud of that little speech.\n\n\"Hmmm. That eye is deceiving. You have some wit about you.\"\n\nThe Copper thought it better not to reply beyond a \"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\"Listen to the storytellers, then. If you've a taste for the exotic, you could read some of those old scrolls and things the archivists keep. The Anklenes keep their traditions, as undragonish as they are. They live in the Marble Slope, just on the other side of the Gardens.\"\n\nHe led the Copper to a climbing wall. \"There's a shelf on top. How do you like it? I hope that's not too difficult a climb.\"\n\nThe rock reflected just enough light for him to see the interior. Though the entrance was cramped, the cave opened up nicely. No air moved, and the dragons' thickening odor made him nervous. He felt very small among the echoes of their shifting scale.\n\n\"It's quiet. Is there a trickle?\"\n\n\"There're downspouts with water in the common pool. Let me show you.\"\n\nNoSohoth backed out into the passage, turned, and led him down another length or two to a graveled chamber. Four burning lamps illuminated a pool fed by a spiral of sculpture that reminded him of\u2026of trees, yes, that was what they were.\n\nHis guide loosed a strange, whistling cry. \"He must have the drakes out on a circuit.\" What the Copper guessed to be a a blighter and a human with one hand were cleaning the gravel with strange implements and a tub of water. They scrubbed harder.\n\n\"Ka! You there. Man!\" NoSohoth said.\n\nThe man, a rather hairy and stooped-over specimen, looked at the blighter and came forward. Trembling, he held out his tool, a stick with what looked like straw bundled on it. The straw smelled rotten.\n\n\"Please? Need fix,\" the man said, in rather wretched Drakine. He shut his eyes as he spoke.\n\n\"Never mind that,\" NoSohoth said. \"Thrall, you've just been promoted. You're this dragon's servant now.\"\n\nThe man opened his eyes and bobbed.\n\n\"Do you know the duties of a servant?\" NoSohoth asked.\n\n\"Get food. Get water. Get ingot. Clean scale. Clean teeth. Very good, I clean the all,\" the man said. At least the gibberish seemed that way to the Copper.\n\n\"What's your name?\" NoSohoth asked.\n\n\"Harf,\" the man said.\n\n\"He belongs to you now,\" NoSohoth told the Copper. He took a chain out of his ear and hung it around Harf's neck. A piece of dragonscale edged in bronze hung from it. The man examined it, openmouthed. \"And, Harf, do something about those bats, will you? They keep getting in here.\"\n\nHarf let the piece of scale go. \"Clean bats. Yes.\"\n\n\"Vermin.\" NoSohoth snorted. \"Good man. Young Rugaard, just obey NeStirrath and no harm will come to you. Understand? My apologies, of course you do. If you need anything, just ask your thrall.\"\n\n\"Thank you for Harf, sir.\"\n\n\"You'll get on together, I hope. Try to be forgiving with humans; they're intelligent enough, but terribly lazy.\"\n\n\"Why did you choose him instead of the\u2026the blighter, sir?\"\n\n\"You've both got a bad limb. Honor and glory, young Rugaard.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\"\n\nNoSohoth turned and stalked out, sniffing the air around a crevice concealing the bats. The blighter looked at Harf and made a chopping motion at his neck. Harf showed a mouthful of brown teeth and patted his belly.\n\n\"My prince want food?\" Harf asked, holding up his neck marker so the Copper could see it.\n\n\"Yes. And be quick.\"\n\nHarf disappeared in the lurching, two-legged run of his kind. The Copper wondered how he didn't fall over. Humans struck him as half-finished\u2014and the completed half wasn't much to look at. Badly balanced, thin-skinned, just the odd patch of hair on their heads that seemed to do nothing but get in the way of their eyes, nostrils, ears, and mouths, and they smelled like wet bats. The Air Spirit must have had his mind on other things as he created them.\n\nAfter a refreshing sleep he explored his new home caves. The wound over his firebladder wept a little clear fluid, and felt tender but not painful. A projection of rock, like a long limb, reached out from the wall and almost to the pool. It smelled strongly of male dragon.\n\nA bat flitted past his eye. \"The others be frightened, m'lord,\" said Uthaned, the active young bat. \"They want to know where to go.\"\n\nHarf made a move to swing at the bat with his scrubbing stick, but the Copper gave him a sharp, \"No!\" He sniffed at Uthaned; the bat smelled exhausted. \"That cave with the big horned skull will do for now.\"\n\n\"Mamedi is ready to drop, and the three young aren't used to so much flying. Might we have a taste of generosity?\"\n\nThe bats had gotten him here, and food was on the way. \"Oh, why not. But let's go somewhere private. Back to my cave.\"\n\nThe bats opened him up front and rear. He did a quick count: only eight left. He couldn't even remember how many had been with him when he jumped in the Nor'flow, but it was a lot more than eight. Of course, rodents were made for dying.\n\n\"Did y'be seeing those herds of cattle below?\" Thernadad said as he sat on Mamedi, keeping her from a trickle of blood leaking from the Copper's armpit.\n\n\"M'smelling fresh air wafting up from below. We've got an entrance near,\" Enjor agreed. \"Water, too.\"\n\n\"Faaaa!\" Mamedi said, pushing her bulky mate off and getting a few quick tonguefuls of blood. \"Dragon reek so bad in here, m'eyes be watering.\"\n\n\"W'be in the happy flapping land,\" another bat said.\n\n\"Sharply now,\" a deep voice from the outer passage echoed. \"Krthonius, what can you say for yourself?\"\n\nWhoever Krthonius was, he didn't have anything to say right away, so the deep voice bellowed, \"Aubalagrave?\"\n\n\"Strange smell in the cave, your honor.\"\n\n\"That's more like it,\" the deep voice said. \"Just because you're home doesn't mean you're safe. Remember that. Many's the wing-sore dragon who's lost because he returns to his cave already half-asleep.\"\n\n\"There haven't been assassins in the Lavadome in\u2014\" a rather lisping voice said.\n\n\"Thrall revolts. Leadership battles. Cave claim jumping. I've seen dragons die in all of them. Any of you lot able to identify the strange smell?\"\n\n\"Ummm. Bat?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Here's a hamcart,\" the lisping voice said.\n\n\"Get up to the ceiling and hide yourselves,\" the Copper told the bats. With a mixture of burps and flaps, they took off for the deep shadows above.\n\nThe Copper climbed off his shelf and walked out into the light of the passage. He saw a vast, ruby-red twelve-horned dragon. The Red had been maimed, with nothing but a stumplike projection from each side of his spine where his wings should be. Three young drakes, one a dazzling white, the other two blacks, narrowed golden eyes at him.\n\n\"Excuse me, are you NeStirr\u2014\"\n\n\"Rough-and-tumble, lads. Here's our intruder. Give him what-for, but don't bleed him.\"\n\nThe drakes dragon-dashed forward. The attack came so suddenly the Copper's brain froze, and he could do nothing but hug the floor of the passage before they were on him, each bigger than he.\n\nThe white reached him first. The white had an ugly wound on one side of his face, exposing teeth and gum line. He head-butted the Copper in the snout, then threw himself across the Copper's neck, pinning his head. The others wedged their noses under his side and flipped him, exposing his belly. They scrabbled at his skin with sheathed sii claws.\n\nThe Copper smelled blood in his nostrils. The larger, heavier drakes squatted atop him; he was as helpless as a lamb in a dragon's jaws.\n\n\"That's the style,\" NeStirrath roared. \"We'll teach this scat to poke his nose into our home cave. And the Imperial shelf. Bite a toe off, Krthonius. That'll be a memento.\"\n\n\"I was given that cave,\" the Copper squealed. He felt a hard squeeze on his left saa.\n\n\"Vent-drippings!\" The old dragon snorted.\n\n\"NoSohoth told me!\"\n\n\"Your honor, look at the hamcart,\" the white drake said. He lisped thanks to his words leaking out of the lipless side of his mouth.\n\n\"I don't have to look; I can smell it. Oh! Let him up, you fools. Let him up!\"\n\n\"He's in the Imperial Family,\" one of the blacks said. The other spit out the Copper's severed toe.\n\n\"Cry settled! Cry settled!\" the deep voice of NeStirrath shouted.\n\nThe pressure vanished, and the Copper rose and saw the black drakes backing away wearily. One had a bit of bloody flesh hanging out of his mouth. The Copper looked down and saw that a toe was missing. Oddly enough, it didn't really hurt; he just felt a warm, tingling sensation.\n\nThe Copper looked at the widening of the passage. Harf stood there beside a two-wheeled cart. Fragrant sides of meat swung from hooks on a wooden frame.\n\n\"Finally, something other than guts, hides, and hooves,\" one of the black drakes said.\n\nHarf was doing his bobbing thing again, holding up the dragonscale on the chain around his neck.\n\n\"An Imperial Family thrall,\" NeStirrath said, as Harf waved his icon at the drakes, bobbing and bringing the cart forward a wheel spoke at a time. NeStirrath made a wretching noise: Grf grf.\n\n\"Well, we've landed in it, lads. What are you doing down in the Drakwatch caves, sir?\"\n\n\"I was told I should learn from you. I've just arrived.\"\n\n\"That's a good way to get your guts spilled, showing up un-announced. We might have had a tragedy here.\"\n\n\"NoSohoth couldn't wait,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Accept our apologies, sir,\" the white drake said.\n\nThe Copper bristled. His toe was starting to really hurt, and the drakes were lowering their heads and exchanging wary glances. But he was going to live here, and if he got too highhanded, what was stopping them from gutting him and going to NoSohoth with a tragic tale?\n\nBesides, he didn't really know what being in the Imperial Family meant.\n\n\"No one's fault but NoSohoth's, I'd say. I came down the river from the north, and the griffaran found me. The Tyr gave me the name Rugaard and put me under your eye. Your honor, if I'm to join the Drakwatch, maybe we could all have a fast feast and begin afresh.\"\n\nNeStirrath licked drool from his lips, and his wing stumps relaxed against his sides. \"That's a kindness, sir, that is. Better put a mesh of cobwebbing on that toe, sir. I'll show you where you can find\u2014\"\n\n\"Rugaard will do, your honor. I can take care of it myself.\"\n\nHe rather enjoyed the generosity of the gesture. The dragons each tenderly lifted a joint off of the cart's hooks and tore into the meat. NeStirrath took the smallest of the joints and sucked at it for a long time, as though relishing the taste, before swallowing it. \"Smoke and flame, lads, we'll be eating well with an Imperial scion among us. Tails up and heads down for Rugaard, newest member of the Drakwatch!\"\n\nThe Copper learned his duties, and learned them well.\n\nFrom the first, he learned that every drake of the Drakwatch wanted honor in his lifetime, and a glorious memory after death\u2014a name proudly sung to a line of future hatchlings and would-be mates.\n\nWord came down from the Tyr himself that the Copper was to be treated the same as any other member of the Drakwatch. With permission to unsheath his sii, so to speak, their leader saw to it that the Copper was treated as roughly as any of the others, in fact more roughly, for he was the junior, and so the others considered it their duty to pummel him for the slightest error. NeStirrath liked aggressive young drakes, and almost any question, from order of line at mealtimes to order of march out in the Lavadome, was settled by pairing off into duels or all-out brawls. Claws sheathed and teeth only for gripping, of course.\n\nThe Copper took his first blows learning that there were separate pools for drinking and bathing, and that his fellow drakes would knock him about the ears and griff if he forgot to use the right one.\n\nThen he learned about the honorable, glorious history of the Drakwatch and how it was organized. There were perhaps six or seven claw-score of drakes in dragon watch\u2014provided you were counting with a full set of twelve true-claws, that is. The Drakwatch was charged with patrolling the area of the Lavadome itself in search of hominid thieves and assassins. They could also be called on by the leaders of the various hills to present a show of force to troublesome thralls.\n\nWhat the drakes of the Drakwatch liked best of all was the chance to compete against the Firemaidens. The young females performed similar duties to the males, if not quite so wide-ranging, placed at important posts to guard and inspect and supervise.\n\nSome of the more aggressive of the Drakwatch, and a few wild-griffed and claw-loose Firemaidens, would explore far beyond the underground river that circled the Lavadome, looking for signs of dwarf, blighter, or demen activity. There was great honor to be found in that sort of territorial assertiveness. Only a victorious battle with the hominids themselves could bring more glory, and with it the chance of a fine cave, thralls, and flocks to supervise upon reaching dragonhood.\n\nWhen they needed physical rest they got lectures. NeStirrath made them recite proverbs and learn about battles won and lost\u2014but mostly won.\n\nNoSohoth gave them a lecture that seemed to stretch on through the day and into the night about the importance of honor. One dragon being able to rely on another to keep his word was the solid ground into which the lasting cave of civilization was dug. He went on and on about this point, until the Copper wondered if he was simply rearranging the same words into every variation possible.\n\nThe Copper's favorite days and darks in the Drakwatch were spent wandering from horizon to horizon in the enormous Lavadome, looking in on the thrall hovels, or counting cattle and swineherds, or running sorties to check the alertness of the Firemaidens on watch at the various tunnel entrances. The Firemaidens had their own set of teachers and taskmasters in the form of the Firemaids, the unmated and oathed-never-to-mate dragonelle guardians of the Lavadome.\n\nNeStirrath drove his drakes hard, delivered bites and bashes as they climbed or jumped or dashed or swam, lobbed bruising stones into mock battles at any dragon who lagged or paused too long in evolutions. They learned to ignore pain and blood until the objective was achieved, be it a bit of tattered banner on a sharp pile of lava rock or a pumpkin-headed scarecrow with a tin crown. If they could keep the drakes off the scarecrow-king for a set time, heavily padded blighters armed with hatchling tooth\u2013studded clubs could win a cask of the malty beverage they adored, with a leg of beef thrown in for any who managed to draw drakeblood.\n\nThey learned to take turns volleying flame in groups as they advanced or retreated, though the Copper's stream came out thinner and more liquid than the others' and seemed to take forever to light properly. They hunted boars goaded to savagery by cruel wires twisted into them by blighter herders. To keep things fair NeStirrath applied similar painful wires to the hunting drake's sii or saa.\n\nIt was a toughter, tested bunch that passed out of the first-year caves.\n\nThere were losses. Sometimes adventuring drakes would simply disappear. Others were crippled permanently in duels or skirmishes. Fallen drakes would be replaced by younger drakes from NeStirrath's little enclave of \"yearling\" trainees in the Black Rock.\n\nThe Copper didn't quite feel the equal of the three other trainees. Though they bashed him and joked about it afterward, they seemed to think his joining their ranks was sort of a stunt, a bit of preening from a member of the Imperial line destined for a high cave in the resort. Though NeStirrath ordered him around and cajoled him much like the others, he never got water spit at him the way the others did around the pool, or received a playful nip as they hurried toward the hamcart at mealtimes, and while halfhearted duels were fought every other day between the other three over who should have the honor of leading the next patrol or running a message from one sissa of the Drakwatch to another, no one ever challenged him when he asked for a chance at the honor of leading an ore raid on the caves of the Firmaidens.\n\nSo once again, it seemed he wasn't to fit in, a stranger in his own cave.\n\nIt took a full season before the Copper could walk the inside of the Lavadome without standing and gaping upward.\n\nWhen the sun was down and the shining oval at the peak was dark, it was at its most spectacular. Glowing rivers of fire rose or fell along its sides, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker.\n\n\"What holds the world up?\" he asked NeStirrath as they rested on one of their \"saa-hardeners\": a pile of volcanic rock, the slag heap of an old tunnel leading down to the water ring.\n\n\"The Air Spirit must have made it,\" Krthonius said. \"Some battle with the Earth Spirit.\"\n\n\"The Anklenes say it was a mighty scale that fell from the sun,\" NeStirrath said. \"It plunged deep into the Lower World and expelled a ball of gas.\"\n\n\"The way you do when in the washing pool, Aubalagrave,\" Nivom, the white drake with the slashed-off lip, said.\n\n\"Give me a whole pig for dinner and I'll produce one as big as what made the Lavadome,\" Aubalagrave said.\n\n\"May you choke on your next mouthful of pig, boaster,\" Krthonius said, and he and Aubalagrave wrestled for a moment, scattering sharp lava rocks and ending it bleeding from a wound or two.\n\n\"Who are these Anklenes?\"\n\nThey all looked at him.\n\n\"Half-a-drake strikes again,\" Nivom muttered to the others.\n\n\"Remember, he didn't hatch here,\" NeStirrath said. \"The story goes that the Lavadome was found long ago by a wizard named Anklamere. He was a grasping, conniving sort of fellow, like most hominids, and had it in mind to control everyone and everything: dragon, hominid, beast, even the worms in the earth, I expect. NooMoahk, Black Glory of Legend and Eternal Guardian of the Sun-Shard, finally got rid of him, but not before he enthralled some dragons and set them up here. They're a spiritless sort of cringers, and they fiddle around with scrolls and books and whatnot. Always blending melting metals or heating stones or poking around in the bodies of dragons who should be decomposing honorably under a lava-stone cairn. The dragons of the lines of Wyrr and Skotl put them in their holes when we moved in.\"\n\nThe Copper knew little more about the lines of Wyrr or Skotl, but after asking about the Anklenes he decided not to press his ignorance. Besides, Krthonius was getting twitchy. He had the honor of leading this patrol and wanted to set a taxing pace.\n\nThey returned to the towering black overhang of the Imperial Rock sore of claw and thirsty. The others hung back, arguing and snapping, until the Copper drank, then jostled one another and splashed and slurped up their thirst. The Copper's good front limb felt as though it were going to fall off, and he dragged his tail on the way back to his shelf.\n\nNeStirrath entered and took a nostrilful of air.\n\n\"Whew. Smells of bats in here. What, are you keeping them as pets, Rugaard?\"\n\n\"Habit from my travels,\" the Copper said. \"I\u2026I used them to mask my odor. I got to kind of like having them around.\"\n\nNeStirrath wrinkled his nostrils. \"They call you 'Batty' when your crest is turned, you know.\"\n\n\"I've heard them,\" the Copper said. He knew NeStirrath thought him soft. \"They're a good ward against starvation too. Food's hard to find when you're traveling underground.\"\n\n\"I'd have to be starving to eat a bat. But I wanted to have a talk with you, lad. You might be in charge of a whole sissa of young drakes someday. You need to scrap it up a bit. More of the rough-and-tumble, or they'll never accept you or respect you.\"\n\nThe Copper felt his stomach sink. \"I don't like fighting. They're all older and bigger than me. I always seem to come out of one worse off. Like my toe.\"\n\nThe missing digit itched as though solid with scale mites, a sensation made all the more disagreeable by the fact that it wasn't there anymore and he couldn't scratch it.\n\n\"You've got to be willing to be the first to jump into a fight if you're to win respect from this lot. Even if you lose a tooth or two, stick up for yourself, lad. It's not the size of the drake that wins the fight; it's the size of the fight in the drake. Let your father know he hatched a dragon.\"\n\nMention of Father just made him miserable.\n\n\"Don't look glum,\" NeStirrath growled. \"Doesn't matter where you came from, or what you know or don't know. You're in the Imperial line now. Cor, someday you could be the Tyr himself. Keep your thoughts behind your eyes; don't wear them on your face\u2014and above all, let them know a set of dragon hearts beat behind your scale.\"\n\n\"Yes, your honor,\" the Copper said.\n\nNeStirrath loved to pit his drakes against one another in contests and challenges and games, when they weren't having the weak points of ax-dwarves or fighting-shield demen pounded into their heads, that is.\n\nHe ran dragon dashes (the Copper came in last), jumping contests (the Copper fell short of the mark Krthonius set, even the time Krthonius stumbled before the vault mark), and tried to whack a barrel full of sand off a dragon's nose with his tail (the barrel easily avoided the Copper's stiff tail).\n\nThey looked at one another in triumph. He knew what was going through his fellow drakes' minds: Another rodentlike performance from Batty, lowest of the Imperial line. They probably sent him to the Drakwatch so they wouldn't have to look at his odd eye and listen to him limp about the upper chambers.\n\nAt each failure he shook off the dirt and dust and tried to keep his face from showing his disappointment. Krthonius found all the athletic events so easy, but he held his tongue and didn't bark out his triumph. Unlike Aubalagrave, who sometimes could outjump his black-scaled comrade and let the whole Lavadome know it when he did. Nivom also rarely won anything, and it put him in a foul mood.\n\nIt was after a particularly gruesome humiliation in which the drakes had to climb up a sheer wall with the drake behind gripping at the tail, a deadweight to be hauled (the Copper's twotoed saa gave way at the last and he and Nivom fell three full lengths to a mud pit) that Nivom pushed past the Copper on the way to the bathing pool.\n\nHarf and a couple other thralls hurried to get hot water and pumice to scrub the dragonscales.\n\n\"Filthiest last, or you'll dirty the water for the rest of us,\" Nivom said.\n\nThe Copper, still smarting in his tail from Nivom's hatchling-sharp teeth, let out a squawk that everyone later said sounded more like a startled chicken than a drake's battle cry. He threw himself on Nivom and thumped him in the snout with the joint of his crippled arm.\n\nSnarling and growling, the Copper thumped him again every time Nivom tried to shrug him off.\n\n\"Batty's tearing Nivom a new tailvent,\" Krthonius cried out to Aubalagrave.\n\n\"Rugaard!\" the Copper snarled, griff rattling all on their own as though they wanted in on the contest. He left Nivom and dashed at Krthonius, head low and down so Krthonius couldn't get under his guard and flip him.\n\nSome of the hominids shouted in excitement.\n\nKrthonius turned sideways, as he always did in a brawl, so he could strike with head or tail, off-side up against a cave wall with a line of bronzed skulls just where a mature dragon's wings usually brushed the walls. The Copper split the distance and jumped up between tooth and tail-tip, pushed off the wall, and fell, rather awkwardly, on Krthonius's back. He wrapped his neck around Krthonius's and began to pull scales with his teeth.\n\n\"Yeow! Yeoow!\" Krthonius shouted, bashing the Copper with his tail.\n\nAubalagrave joined the brawl, defending his friend's honor\u2014and scales. The Copper found himself sandwiched between two larger drakes, and much beaten about the head and hindquarters. All he could do was try to make Krthonius or Aubalagrave miss, thus striking each other when they were trying to hit the Copper.\n\n\"Keep the claws in, you,\" he heard NeStirrath shout.\n\nHe didn't have much success. Aubalagrave gave him a saa swipe across the snout, and he saw brilliant fields of flowers.\n\n\"I'll finish it,\" Nivom shouted, forcing his way through the others.\n\nThe Copper wanted to flee, but instead he flung himself on Nivom again. They went up on their hind legs, boxing each other with sii and exchanging bites about the snout and griff. Nivom stood tall on his hindquarters and rattled his griff.\n\n\"Tail swipe,\" one of the thralls shouted. Despite the urging, the Copper's tail refused to reach. Krthonius yanked on it and he fell, belly-up, under Nivom.\n\n\"Cry settled!\" Nivom urged.\n\nThe Copper got both saa under Nivom and launched him into the bathing pool. He could hardly see out of his good eye, thanks to the blood, but he could make out Krthonius well enough, and charged at him again.\n\nHe felt tail strikes and a weight above his saa\u2014Aubalagrave was atop him, hammering him with kicks while he clung with his sii\u2014but he still pushed forward for Krthonius and grappled. Krthonius easily pushed his nose into the bed of rocks lining the floor.\n\n\"Cry settled,\" Krthonius grunted.\n\nThe Copper managed to poke him under the chin with his crippled forelimb. Krthonius backed off, making retching sounds and coughing. Aubalagrave sank his teeth into both sides of his head behind the crest.\n\n\"Kah ettehld!\" Aubalagrave said.\n\nThe Copper rolled, rolled again, at great pain to the tender skin at the back of his head, and managed to plunge both of them into the bathing pool. He got Aubalagrave's head underwater and pushed for all he was worth. Aubalagrave refused to yield and go limp.\n\nSomething hauled both of them out of the water\u2014NeStirrath, trying to keep Aubalagrave from breathing too much water. The Copper gave him a tail strike for his interference and was dropped atop Nivom and Krthonius. Cheering from the thralls\u2014or maybe the pained roaring of a tender-gummed old dragon\u2014sounded in his ears.\n\nThey rolled, a three-colored mass of fury letting out battle cries in high-pitched drake voices. The Copper got his teeth into Nivom's shoulder and forced him down, pushing for all he was worth, keeping Krthonius's head pinned with his in the crook of his crippled limb.\n\nAubalagrave and Krthonius boxed him about the head, trying to get him to let go. He grabbed Aubalagrave at what felt like a sii digit, twisted.\n\n\"Cry settled! Cry settled! Cry\u2014\" the three chorused. But their voices seemed far away and receding. The smooth rocks of the flooring gave way to the soft, mossy pads of the river-lake, only there was no itchy slime or biting water mites this time\u2026.\n\nHe woke, his face wet. His eye rolled this way and that, but his vision was misty.\n\n\"Give him another,\" NeStirrath said.\n\nKrthonius spit another cheekful of water on him. Thralls were huddled all around, and Harf was counting knocked-out hatchling teeth from hand to hand.\n\n\"Did I cry settled?\" the Copper croaked.\n\n\"No, we did,\" Nivom said. \"You'd gone dark and wouldn't let go of Aubalagrave's dragonhood.\"\n\n\"Hope his mate can fall sideways on the wedding flight,\" Krthonius said.\n\nAubalagrave sat with his hindquarters in the coolest part of the pool, his face contorted.\n\n\"Good fight, Rugaard,\" Aubalagrave said between quick breaths. \"Good fight.\"\n\nThe bats had their fill of blood for once, that night. Even Thernadad finally gave up, crawled a length or two away from the Copper, too swollen to fly, and went to sleep. Harf made to swat him with a waste scoop, but the Copper threw a protective sii over the bat.\n\nThe next day he could hardly see. He looked at himself in the polished black rock just beneath the lamp and a frightful, swollen face looked back out of the reflection-world, every scale out of place. He was excused all duties, given an extra ration of meat and ore, and as the other three had bites and bruises enough for a whole sissa of Drakwatch, NeStirrath called for a lesson day.\n\nTo NeStirrath's considerable vexation, the Tyr decided to pay a visit.\n\nA pair of broad-shouldered blighter thralls led the way, with dragon-headed incense burners letting out of trails of rich-smelling smoke, equal parts spice and oil. The Copper smelled it a long way off and felt better disposed to the world and his aching body. He managed to climb off his shelf and join the others in the common room by the drinking and bathing pools.\n\nNoSohoth led the way, and immediately went to NeStirrath's side and led him in a bow to the Tyr. The Imperial retinue flowed into the common room, and attendant thralls shrank into the corners.\n\nNeStirrath pointed his charges into a line behind him.\n\n\"Always good to smell drakes again,\" the Tyr said. \"There's too much drakka scent about the upper levels. I grow tired of the eternal bloom of females. Drakes and blood\u2026well, what's this?\"\n\nBehind the Tyr the Copper saw a forest of legs. The sleek young golden drake was there, and another, sort of a reddish-purplish color that reminded the Copper of the radishes the thralls chewed to wash the dragon-smell out of their mouths at the end of a long day.\n\n\"And I thought it was just thralls making stories up, as usual,\" the Tyr said. \"There was a fine old fight down here, wasn't there?\"\n\nThe golden drake walked the perimeter of the Drakwatch caves, peering into the eyes of the skulls and fighting yawns all the way.\n\nThe Tyr shifted so he could make room for the dragon behind. \"You should know what's going on in your own caves, SiDrakkon. I know you've got other titles, but as my mate's brother you're also in charge of the Drakwatch.\"\n\nThe radish-colored dragon just glowered.\n\n\"Simevolant, stop idling and come have a look at these drakes.\"\n\n\"Yes, Grandsire.\" Simevolant, the golden drake, approached the line of bruised and bashed drakes. \"Impressive specimens. A credit to the Drakwatch. But glory does bring out the ugly, doesn't it?\"\n\nThe Tyr looked sharply at NoSohoth. \"I'd like a little more ferocity on the Rock; a dragon should fight with tooth and claw, not tongue. Too much of that. What's this, old friend? Is that a lump on your jaw? Don't tell me you were involved in the fracas.\" The old dragon chuckled.\n\n\"I was pulling them apart and your young ward there loosened my teeth for my trouble.\"\n\n\"Is that\u2026er\u2026\" the Tyr said, looking at the Copper.\n\n\"You decided to call him Rugaard, Grandsire,\" the bright young Simevolant reminded the Tyr.\n\n\"Rugaard, yes. I'd hardly recognize you. You're beginning to fill out a little.\"\n\n\"It's the swelling, I think,\" Simevolant said. \"Most hatchlings are ugly, but they get better proportioned as they age. I do believe you're getting worse, Rugaard. Someone should take some studies of you for posterity.\"\n\nThe Tyr ignored the byplay and tapped radish-colored SiDrakkon with his tail.\n\nSiDrakkon sniffed all the drakes. \"There's an opening for a messenger in Deep Tunnel. Which drake of these is your fastest?\"\n\n\"Krthonius, with the big haunches, there,\" NeStirrath said.\n\n\"Good of the Empire, now, think for the good of the Empire,\" the Tyr muttered.\n\n\"Why won't you let me make a decision? It's my responsibility!\" SiDrakkon sputtered.\n\n\"Imperial messengers do a lot more than just memorize reports and run,\" Tyr said.\n\n\"I should know. I was one,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\nThe Tyr's jaw tightened; then he relaxed. \"And a fine one, too. So you know that sometimes they are asked for an independent opinion of the situation in some distant, tight corner, or even to assume command if there's been an unexpected death. That requires sound judgment.\"\n\n\"Nivom's very bright, Tyr,\" NeStirrath said. \"Best memory of the bunch. Aubalagrave is strong and clever in a fight.\"\n\n\"Who's in charge of the Drakwatch?\" SiDrakkon roared.\n\n\"Bearers, more oliban there; fire bladders are starting to throb,\" Simevolant said.\n\nThe thralls with the smoking dragon heads extracted some milky chips from pouches at their waist and dumped a small handful each into the dangling brazier. The rich, aromatic smell filled the cavern, and one of the blighter thralls sniffled.\n\n\"Honored friend,\" the Tyr said to NeStirrath. \"Let's say we were at Three Tunnels again, with the blighters hip-deep all around and battle horns blowing. Which of the three would you want with us? Good of the Empire, mind.\"\n\n\"Little Rugaard, there. Kept his teeth dug in, even when he went unconscious. He's no duelist; he fights as though his neck were on the line.\"\n\n\"Does that help, SiDrakkon?\" the Tyr asked.\n\n\"Why do you even drag me along if you're just going to have your way anyway?\" SiDrakkon said.\n\n\"The decision is yours.\"\n\n\"I'll have Nivom. A mixed message can lose a battle.\"\n\nNivom straightened, and his pink eyes shone. The Copper felt his joy and gave a little prrum for him.\n\n\"As I said, the choice is yours,\" Tyr said. \"I'm sure you've made a good one.\"\n\nHe turned to the bruised drakes. \"Don't worry, you others; there'll be for you glory enough in your turn. It's always the ones that you'd never expect who become legends.\"\n\nThe Copper remained longer in NeStirrath's part of the Drakwatch caves than most. Krthonius joined an Upper World sissa who patrolled the plateau on the rocky slopes covering the Lavadome. Aubalagrave served on the river beneath the wings of the griffaran, as part of a new aquatic sissa protecting their nests from raiders.\n\nDrakes came and went. They usually had only one or two others, and never more than six. Each time a review was held, SiDrakkon or one of the wingless Drakwatch leaders walked up and down in front of the drakes, and each time a drake left. Once, after a bloody battle with a company of elvish mercenaries that resulted in the destruction of a sissa before help from the griffaran could arrive, they took every drake out of the training caves\u2014except for the Copper.\n\nHe practiced leadership of his drakes under NeStirrath's tutelage. He learned to praise in public and reprimand any first offense in private. He rewarded group efforts with group plea-sures: After particularly successful brawling raids on the ore bins of the Firemaidens, he'd let his drakes have a \"sun day\" on the water ring. Of course, the same went for punishments. When his drakes woke to find their own ore supply emptied in a stealthy Firemaiden raid in return, a taunting note reminding them that a drakka named Nilrasha had left a noisome present in the washing pool, he gave the Drakwatch thralls a rest day and set his drakes to work cleaning out the thrall pens, washing and airing bedding. His bats got their fill of bedbugs.\n\nAfter the drake who'd fallen asleep on watch fished out the turd with his lips, of course.\n\nThe bats thrived, and grew to know Imperial Rock better than the Copper did, for they flew around the upper levels, hunting insects, or flitted out into the Lavadome in search of tied livestock.\n\nThe adult bats aged quickly, in the manner of rodents. Mamedi dropped eventually. Thernadad grew old, almost blind and deaf, but his appetite, and that of his brother's, never flagged.\n\nThe trio of young bats\u2014the Copper called them Big Ear, Spike Hair, and Wide Nose for their most prominent features\u2014grew into truly colossal bats, bigger than Thernadad and his brother put together. The Copper suspected they sneaked dragonblood when they could.\n\nNeStirrath had him apply his energy to the drakes as a sort of assistant, saving the old dragon's saa wear on the longer hikes and expeditions.\n\nThe Copper made the best of his time, plaguing NeStirrath with questions about the Lavadome, draconic history, even how he came to lose his wings.\n\n\"It was in the civil wars, of course. Dragon family against dragon family, a terrible business. It was an aerial duel. A Skotl-clan dragon named AgMemdius tore into my back. Most dragons would be satisfied with just crippling a wing, but he wanted me to fall to my death. The Tyr himself pulled me out of my fall, and we splashed into a lake together. In the end we reconciled only when the blighters rose.\"\n\n\"How did the Tyr come to lead the dragons here?\"\n\n\"Strange you should ask that. Rethothanna is creating something she calls a history\u2014it's like a lifesong, only you sing it about someone else\u2014and she's on me like a leech. Seems a waste. If you're so wretched you don't have any deeds to sing of, better to die trying for a few lines of your own than reciting someone else's laudi. Anklenes,\" he finished with a growl.\n\n\"What does she want from you?\"\n\n\"The lines of my lifesong about the war between the Skotl and the Wyrr and the Anklenes. I hardly know her, and here I'm supposed to spew out my lifesong as though she were my poor Esthea? Just seems wrong.\"\n\nNeStirrath always darkened at the mention of his mate. The Copper didn't know the circumstances, only that she was dead.\n\n\"Tell them to me, your honor. I'll go over there and deliver it for you, and bring back any questions. I've been curious about their hill; I'd be glad of the errand.\"\n\n\"Dragons set too much on appearances. Why not? You're practically a son to me. We'd have been proud to hatch you. You're a quality drake. I feel much better now, having one I can trust. Among dragons trust is more seldom shared than even gold.\"\n\nThe Copper gulped. Usually NeStirrath was finding fault with the sharpness of his saa, or telling him to always poke his head over a ridge's crestline and examine the other side closely before crossing, lest game be scared away or enemies forewarned, or barking at him to take brief naps when in the field and save real sleep for safe, well-guarded caves.\n\n\"I'm not much for wordplay\u2014that's an Anklene pastime\u2014but here are the parts:\n\n\u2003When CuTar's sons in battle met\n\n\u2003One perch but we nine who sought\n\n\u2003Two-score dragons fell to earth.\n\n\u2003In Rednight's reckoning fought\n\n\u2003Three lines at war for power's pride\n\n\u2003Black murder just a tool\n\n\u2003AgMemdius struck, my hatchlings died\n\n\u2003A bloody cave I found\n\n\u2003An anguished roar, a wish for death\n\n\u2003I sought my bloodstained foe\n\n\u2003And over Kog's hill, trading breath\n\n\u2003We perished, each aflame\u2026\n\nIt went on for quite some time, about how the dragons fought to rule the great cave. Meanwhile an alliance of dwarves, demen, and blighter thralls took advantage and struck, attempting to recapture the Lavadome. But a dragon named FeHazathant rallied them, made peace between the lines, and organized the dragons according to their abilities.\n\nOld RaHurath, unable to fly without first dropping from a height, called on his old friends the griffaran, who helped turn the tide when the dwarves attacked Imperial Rock. FeHazathant himself, hiding a grievous spear wound, flew from point to point, rallying dragons and convincing them to abandon their caves and treasures for a last stand atop Black Rock. A beautiful dragonelle named Tighlia went bravely into the blighter camp, ostensibly to negotiate, but instead sowed discord between the blighter army and their allies, so they quit the battle with cries of \"betrayal\" when they suffered a reverse. EmLar, a slender, scaled gray born an Anklene thrall and a grandsire of Nivom, was put in charge of the drakes. He had them bury themselves in the gravel of the lower passages. The drakes trapped the demen's storming column, collapsing a wall that trapped half the demen forces inside the rock, and took turns volleying flame at any others who tried to get in to reinforce them.\n\n\"They died in these chambers. That's where we got many of these skulls.\"\n\nThe Copper repeated back the song. NeStirrath corrected him, and he repeated it back again almost perfectly. The first few lines still intrigued him.\n\n\"You wanted to be Tyr?\" he asked.\n\n\"I was young. I wouldn't take it now if it came with a river of gold. Dragons are always quarreling, and no matter how wisely the Tyr settles matters, both parties grumble and blame his judgment.\"\n\nThe Copper had never been in the strange, smooth hill of the Anklenes before. He and the Drakwatch had seen it from every angle on the ground, and once he'd looked down on it from the Imperial Resort on a botanical tour of the gardens, but he'd never walked past the twin statues of robed hominids, one holding a lamp and the other a quill and scroll, and up to its entrance.\n\nHe paused there and let Harf catch up.\n\nFlat spaces yawned at the base of the statues. According to NeStirrath, there'd once been statues of dragons crouched beneath the figures on their pillars, but the dragons found the arrangement vaguely offensive\u2014hominids towering above dragons? The statues were moved to more illustrious accommodations on the Imperial Resort. Now they looked down on the Anklene hill.\n\nThe base of the Anklene hill\u2014if hill was the right word, for it was too regular to be a natural formation of the cavern and seemed too big for anyone to have constructed it\u2014was exactly square. It sloped away from its base, at first very slowly, but then the angle increased until the four sides met at the peak. Viewed from the entrance, the peak seemed very high and far-off.\n\nThe hill was coated with pink-white stone, lined and divided like good plump meat. The Copper passed under the statues on their columns and approached the entrance, a portal that mimicked the peak shape of the entrance. He saw\u2014and smelled\u2014lights burning within.\n\nA human hurried toward the entrance, adjusting his thrall-wrap. He had the potbelly of a thrall who wasn't worked hard enough, or who perhaps filched food. The Copper gave NeStirrath and Rethothanna's names, and the thrall led him inside.\n\nThe passages were low and wide within, carved out of a more natural-looking brown stone, reinforced in spots with steel or scale-chipped wood. They'd been smoothed and coated with a paste the color of a hatchling's belly to make the most of the lights. A similar sort of surface covered the floor, only tiny rounded pebbles had been thrown into the mix. Two dragons could just slip past each other, if they adjusted their stance and didn't lock wings. The place also had that disgusting wet-bat smell of humans.\n\nThe thrall led him on a zigzagging course like a snake's trail. It seemed there was only one main tunnel in here, winding upward in a series of turns, opening out on galleries and larger rooms that extended to the hillside. Greenish light filled the rooms that didn't have lamps in use, and the copper recognized baskets dripping with cave moss hanging from the ceilings. There were thralls, naked from the waist up, who did nothing but carry yokes and buckets of filthy-smelling water. They'd hook a ladder to some eyebolts in the ceiling and climb up, endlessly watering the thriving moss.\n\nThe thrall fell to his knees at a wide gallery. A female stood within, her heavy haunches to him. She examined a series of pieces of matched paper hanging on a line, with writing scrawled on them.\n\n\"Very well. Put the new page nine in,\" the dragon told another thrall. This one was elvish, a female with hair like dead cave moss.\n\nThe prostrate thrall glubbed something out into the set pebbles of the hallway pavement, raising dust.\n\n\"Who? I don't know a Rugaard-nester.\" She turned, showing eyes that struck him as bulging and a little oversize, though her nostrils had an elegant upward curve that reminded him a little of Mother.\n\n\"Rugaard. Sent by NeStirrath,\" the Copper said. \"I have some lines from his lifesong\u2014\"\n\n\"You're too late,\" she said, settling down with forelimbs crossed. \"That old fool. This is just like him, making difficulty just when I'd given up. My history's complete. It's to be presented tonight; the Tyr himself wants to hear it at the Imperial banquet.\"\n\n\"We could present the Tyr with a revised edition later,\" the elvish thrall said, in remarkably good Drakine. \"You'll recite tonight personally, won't you? He'd like a few lines about NeStirrath; they are old friends.\"\n\nThe dragonelle ignored her. She swung her neck sideways, another unsettling gesture, for it reminded him of a snake, and looked at Harf and shut her nostrils. She returned her wide-eyed stare to the Copper. \"What did you say your name was again?\"\n\n\"Rugaard.\"\n\n\"I'm Rethothanna. Wait, you're the one who was adopted into the line three years ago?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The Copper wasn't sure if she deserved some sort of honorific or not. He started to recite the poem while it was still fresh in his head.\n\nShe interrupted him after six lines. \"Look at your scale. What's that servant of yours been doing with his time, the one-handed hominid pastime? The banquet's in three hours!\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026I don't know about a banquet.\"\n\nRethothanna's overlarge eyes widened, and the Copper wondered if they'd pop out. \"You're of the line. It's an Imperial banquet. You must be at your place.\"\n\n\"Er\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't pollute your locution! Say something worthwhile or be silent.\"\n\nThe Copper settled on silence, so fixed was he on the vast whites of her eyes as she looked him over.\n\n\"But not looking like that. Yam, go get every scale polisher and claw shaper in the hill. Open your mouth, drake. Well! Those teeth aren't bad. There's many a drake who'd be proud of a set like that. A little oil and they'll gleam admirably; maybe they'll divert attention from that eye. Eyegrit, are those bat bites? Where do you live?\" He heard Harf take a few steps back. The shifting head turned on him. \"Yes, you, thrall, you'd better cower. I've half a mind to eat you. Who taught you to use scouring salt on a dragon's scale?\"\n\n\"All scale clean! All them clean!\" Harf said, covering his head with his forelimbs.\n\n\"Yam, have you died and rooted?\"\n\nThe elf hurried off into the passage.\n\n\"Now, let's have what passes for poetry from NeStirrath again. While they're getting you cleaned up I'll see if I can't make something of his word butchery. His stanzas might be ranked enemies, the way he scatters them\u2026.\"\n\nRethothanna kept Yam busy filling gaps in her scale with similarly colored green scales, which required much working with wire, attaching them to their neighbors so they'd stay in place.\n\nThe Copper had a thrall at each quarter, and one rather young, small, deft-handed female human working his face and teeth. First she trimmed the edged of his face scale with shears, then a file; then she went to work with a brush and something that smelled a little like paint. She poured dust though a straw into the crevices in his scale, then dusted his face with a glittery mixture that smelled of metals.\n\n\"Don't skimp on the oliban and bay leaf,\" Rethothanna said as a thrall painted the trailing corners of her nostrils, making them look even longer and more elegant. Red powder around her eyes set the deep green of her face off admirably, and gave her eyes life and fire.\n\nThe girl nodded and bent for a long, heavy wooden box topped by a broad handle. She came up with a pair of silver bottles with golden tops, and applied fragrant oils to his crest.\n\n\"Dragon-ward behind his griff. If he rattles them, I want the dragons to know it.\"\n\nThe girl nodded and dabbed something into the folds of the skin behind his griff. It smelled like hot iron and blood to the Copper.\n\n\"His teeth now,\" Rethothanna said.\n\nThe girl smeared a clear oil on his teeth. The Copper didn't like the taste and pulled back his lips a little to keep it from getting in his mouth.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Rethothanna said. He'd never heard her use such a satisfied tone before. \"Your mother taught you well, girl.\"\n\nThe girl tipped her head down a little.\n\n\"Bring a mirror-plate. Our young drake finally looks worthy of the Imperial line.\"\n\nTwo thralls held up a polished sheet of bronze. He looked into it. The odd sense of depth to the reflection gave him a moment of dizziness, soon overcome as he adjusted to the idea of his reflection. It was like seeing your image in the water, but tinted with the colors of a coal fire.\n\nHis scale had a depth and polish and glitter. She'd shaped the displaced scale at the gouged side of his face so as to minimize the scarring, and added a pewter-colored powder to the crevices in his crest that emphasized the strong, smooth ridges.\n\nSo it was a proud young drake who followed Rethothanna over to the Black Rock and up to the Tyr's Gardens.\n\nThe Copper had never seen such a gathering, or imagined there could be anything so splendid. It must have been dark outside, for the peak of the dome was a plate of midnight. This, however, made the fiery streams of lava running along the exterior of the dome all the brighter and more colorful.\n\nFemale dragons with fringes painted and smooth ribbons wound about their necks in fascinating knotwork, males with vivid red or blue lines painted on their wings\u2014Rethothanna said it was a form of display of laudi, recognized by the Tyr himself and worn for all to see\u2014drakes and drakka playing and singing and mirroring.\n\nAt the middle of the Gardens an open oval free of plants served as the center of the party. A little lower than much of the terraced garden, it was paved with shields and helmets and breastplates, trophies taken in battle and presented to the Tyr. At the center of the open area was a long masonry trench shaped like a drawn bow. At the notch of the bow lay the Tyr and his mate, on a low rise of wood and cushioning that gave them a commanding view. Where bow would give way to string, stairways led down to the kitchens. The most splendid of the dragons reclined at the bow. The string was reserved for the younger drakes and drakka.\n\nFor a moment the Copper's eyes were tricked, and he thought platters of food slid by magic from dragon to dragon. He spotted thralls bearing vast platters on their heads. They rose heavy-laden from the stairs and circulated, always in the same direction to avoid collisions in the narrow trench. The roast chunks of meat went around the circuit, and emptied as the dragons reached down with jaws and plucked the tidbits. Sometimes instead of platters they bore a long pole in a sort of harness-and-cup, and from cross-braces at the top of the pole dangled whole roasted joints from hooks. These seldom even made it to the drakes and drakka.\n\nAt the very center of the dining plaza was a sandy pit. According to Rethothanna, new hatchlings of the Imperial line would be exhibited there so all could see them, but there were none at the moment.\n\n\"Any guests the Tyr wishes to particularly honor get seated to his left, so they have first choice of the dishes,\" Rethothanna explained.\n\nRethothanna didn't mix\u2014she wasn't of the Imperial line\u2014but instead waited to be called by NoSohoth, in his usual role of organizer. His gleaming silver shone especially bright tonight.\n\nA scream and a clatter. The Copper's attention went to the far end of the bow, near where the thralls entered and exited the kitchen.\n\n\"Drop him, Simevolant,\" the Tyr said across the sandpit.\n\nThe golden drake ceased dragging a thrall up out of the trench. \"But his platter was empty and I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"An empty platter's not his fault. A thrall's a thrall, but you can't eat them for no reason at all. Let him go, now.\"\n\nSimevolant released the man. The thrall was so frightened he scuttled for the exit without picking up his platter. The other food bearers continued circling. He noticed they quickened their step at Simevolant's end, sometimes bumping into one another.\n\n\"That's done it, worm,\" Tighlia said, looking pointedly at Simevolant. \"Their tiny brains can't hold more than one thought, and now they're more concerned with being eaten than keeping step.\"\n\n\"Let's have some drumming,\" the Tyr said. \"Where are those clever blighters with the kettledrums?\"\n\nNoSohoth extended a black-tipped wing toward a grove, and a trio of blighters came forward, two bearing pairs of vast, leather-topped drums and a third with a hollow polished log. They went to work on their instruments, filling the gardens with rhythmic pounding. The Copper liked the sound so much he couldn't help swaying and stamping his feet.\n\n\"Mind the step, now, fellows; no one's been eaten,\" the Tyr said to the thralls passing under his nose. \"That's more like it. Steady on and I'll order a barrel of sweet ferments up for you after the meal.\"\n\nSiDrakkon, sitting to his sister's right, hardly ate at all, and worked at the edge of an embedded shield with his claws, prying up the rim.\n\n\"SiDrakkon looks unhappy,\" the Copper said to Rethothanna.\n\n\"He's always in a temper. Pay him no mind. Stuck between the ambitions of his sister and the directions of her mate. He's the Tyr's eyes and voice in the Lavadome, and he's not an energetic dragon. Doesn't like parties, either. Speaking of which, how is your first Imperial banquet?\"\n\nThe Copper looked around. \"It's the most splendid thing I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"It occurs to me that I'll have to hear your lifesong at some point. You're the first outsider to seek the Lavadome in\u2026oh, a generation's time. Of course, we don't advertise our presence. Even with such allies as we have on the surface, we have to keep our home secret.\"\n\nThe Copper would have liked to hear more from her, for he was curious about the Upper World and its dangers, but the drummers had exhausted themselves, and NoSohoth waved her over.\n\n\"My turn. May the Air Spirit carry my voice well,\" she said. She stepped forward, and all eyes turned in their direction as NoSohoth announced: \"Cry hear and hear, for we'll have poetry now. A new work on the late feuds of the founders of the Lavadome by Imperial memoriam. Hear Rethothanna.\"\n\nSimevolant scanned the crowd, found the Copper. \"I say, cousin, what are you doing there, lurking in the blade-bushes? Come and find your place at the banquet.\"\n\nThe Copper stepped forward, and Simevolant made room for him, nudging a drakka aside.\n\n\"Hear me, Spirits; hear me, Ages; hear me, dragons great and small, for I tell a tale of the founding of a new Silverhigh\u2026.\"\n\nSimevolant ignored her preamble and snatched a plump sausage linked into the shape of a curly-tailed dog off a platter. \"Now, how are things in the lower levels? I so seldom get down your way. Is the strength of the Drakwatch still keeping the Imperial Resort from falling?\"\n\nThe drakka around Simevolant fluttered their eyelids and griff at his joke.\n\n\"Little has changed since your last visit,\" the Copper said. He'd rather listen to Rethothanna than chatter and joke.\n\n\"I've traveled with the Drakwatch. Muddy, tiring business. Wars and body pieces. Have you made it out of the training caverns yet?\"\n\n\"No,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You won't lack for learning. But nothing teaches like experience. Even up here, you'd be amazed at what a young drake can experience.\" He tapped the drakka next to him on the nose.\n\nThe Copper tried to close an ear to his yammering, but Simevolant kept asking questions. How many thralls were being brought across the river, the size of the herds driven underground from the surface provinces, improvements to dwelling space in the Skotl Hill\u2026\n\nThe Copper caught only bits of Rethothanna's performance. It dealt with the Tyr's vision for a new Silverhigh here in this deep fastness, and told how he rose to preeminence after a series of duels and feuds between Skotl, Anklene, and Wyrr lines that divided the dragons of the Lavadome, uniting them through a rigid hierarchy where even the lowest dragons at least commanded numerous thralls. Thus, \"Each dragon a lord, each dragonelle a queen.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered what it was like to be one of even the lesser lords around the banquet, so important that your deeds were sung by others. They must be proud dragons indeed. And what dragonelle would not be pleased to be a queen?\n\nBut there were queens and there were Queens. Rethothanna dropped in a few lines of praise for Tighlia's beauty, \"a flower of the Skotl line, plucked and placed as high as any Wyrr for all to admire.\"\n\nSimevolant brought up a fragrant quantity of gas at that, loudly enough that Rethothanna had to pause until he was finished.\n\n\"I do beg your pardon,\" Simevolant said. \"Go on. I'm a dragon turned to stone by the power of your words.\"\n\nDuring kern, a thick, yellowish paste full of smashed vegetables that aided the digestion, Rethothanna finished with FeHazathant's victory at the duel of Black Rock, after which the \"iron-willed, steel-limbed\" dragon assumed the old Anklene title of Tyr, borne by the dragon who ruled and commanded his fellows in the old, half-forgotten Age of the Sorcerer, when Anklemere ruled.\n\n\"They wallow too much in the past, that generation,\" Simevolant said. \"Refighting old wars. What's going to come after the Tyr dies? That's what concerns me. I've no ambition whatsoever, but there are plenty who do. Dragons can be ruthless in getting what they want.\"\n\nThe dragons spat torf-sized gobs of flame into the water troughs placed here and there among them, and Rethothanna bowed to the crackle and hiss of water turned instantly to steam.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Tyr said, casting flame into the sandpit at the center of the banquet. \"So polished, and all the grim business of bodies and broken eggs left out. I don't like brave deeds tarnished, you know. Come, Rethothanna, take first position there and eat your fill.\"\n\nA dragon, wings thick with red laudi, moved over, and with some shoving and squashing the dragons rearranged themselves around the banquet.\n\nThe Tyr thumped his tail. \"Now I have an announcement. Our Uphold in Bant has suffered some serious reverses of late. The humans and blighter tribes there are set upon and need our assistance. I'm sending a dragon up to set things right.\"\n\n\"Bant. Oh, how tiresome,\" Simevolant said. \"Humans. They can't stand to see the moon change without starting some new feud.\"\n\nThe Copper would have liked to ask what the moon was, but he kept his tongue.\n\n\"I don't need to tell anyone at this table how important Bant is to our food supply. I've decided that SiDrakkon shall go and help our Upholder in Bant, ummm\u2014\"\n\n\"NiThonius,\" Tighlia supplied.\n\nSiDrakkon glowered, going even more purple about the cheeks. He reared his head back, but the Copper saw his sister quickly put her head across his neck and whisper something in his ear.\n\n\"He's not even of the Imperial line, Tyr,\" Tighlia said. \"My brother is only to 'help' him?\"\n\n\"NiThonius is a wise dragon. The Bant are a raucous crowd, argumentative as crows and headstrong as boars. He knows how to handle them.\"\n\n\"I wonder who is handling whom. Two more like him in the Upholds and we'll be skeletons down here. Food is short enough.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered at that, with thralls sweating and groaning under the weight of the platters that flowed around the banquet. But perhaps exceptions were made for banquets.\n\n\"I want full powers,\" SiDrakkon said. \"As the Tyr's representative. Three good, battle-tested dragons. And three sissa of the Drakwatch to support.\"\n\n\"I don't want another surface war,\" Tyr said. \"The hominids lose ten thousand and we lose ten, and they have a fresh ten thousand before ten eggs are even laid.\"\n\n\"Let me manage things or find another dragon,\" SiDrakkon roared. The whole table went quiet.\n\nTyr stood.\n\nThralls hurried to throw more sticks of incense in the braziers, and a thick, sweet odor fell over the banquet.\n\nThe Tyr glared at his mate's brother. \"Fair enough,\" he said in a steady voice. \"Best to speak softly, with a fearsome host behind the words. You pick the dragons. As to the Drakwatch, I want Nivom leading the three siisa. He's impressed me. I understand he's quite driven the demen away from the caves bordering the far shores.\"\n\nTighlia looked sharply at her mate as soon as he mentioned Nivom.\n\nThe Tyr got a faraway look in his eyes. \"I'll give him a stripe for that when he gets his wings. Blue will look well against that white of his.\"\n\nHe blinked, and looked around the banquet table. \"We'll need an Imperial messenger to report progress. Simevolant, you haven't been off Black Rock these three years.\"\n\nSimevolant tucked his head against his shoulder for a moment. \"Tyr, I'm touched, really, with this expression of the Imperial confidence. But I've got a notion\u2014send Rugaard, here. He's never even been to the Upholds. The experience will do him good.\"\n\n\"Rugaard?\" Tyr said, looking at the Copper as though he'd never seen him before. \"Wasn't he killed at\u2026Oh, yes, of course. The egg saver.\"\n\nSimevolant offered one of those smiles that made the Copper's scale bristle. \"Yes, the eternally budding flower of the Drakwatch training caves. Is he not a marvelous young drake? Stand, Rugaard, for you are looking fine tonight, and let the assembly see the future of the Imperial line, adopted by the Tyr himself. I don't believe he's attended a banquet before, and he needs an introduction anyway.\"\n\nThe Copper rose, shifted uncomfortably, and did his best to open his bad eye. He didn't want to be exhibited thus, but Simevolant had such a musical way of putting things, you followed his words this way and that the way you did a good blood trail.\n\n\"The Drakwatch calls him 'Batty,' I understand,\" SiDrakkon said. \"He keeps bats as pets.\"\n\nThe drakka twitched their noses and fluttered their eyelids. They were laughing at him. No matter how polished his scale, or even his edging\u2014\n\n\"Burn it, Sime; you're always wriggling out of things,\" the Tyr said. \"You chatter your way through life like a drakka. I won't have it.\"\n\n\"Stand up for yourself, cousin,\" Simevolant said out of the side of his mouth. \"You want to stay in those drippy holes forever?\"\n\nThe Copper found his voice. \"I'd be grateful for the opportunity, Tyr.\"\n\n\"That's a norther's vocalization if I've ever heard one,\" a dragon opposite the Copper at the banquet said. \"How did he ever come to the dome?\"\n\nTyr's tail tapped in thought. \"Never been to the Upper World?\"\n\n\"No, Tyr.\"\n\n\"Well, Bant's as good a place as any to get sunstruck. NoSohoth, get his shoulder line painted, won't you?\"\n\n\"Congratulations, Rugaard,\" Simevolant said. \"Keep out of the way of most of the arrows. Remember to put a little dwarf's-beard on your wounds.\"\n\nThe rest of the banquet passed in a blur. He met the dragons and dragonelles, drakes and drakka of the Imperial line. A trio of drakka, who he later found out were directly grand-daughtered to Tyr, twitched their noses as they greeted him and perfunctorily laid their necks across his, pressed on by their mother, a rather pinched-looking, tight-scaled creature named Ibidio. Two were sleek, beautiful specimens, the third rather thin and sickly, but they were polite enough under the urging of their mother. Her mate, AgGriffopse, the champion of the Tyr's first\u2014and only\u2014clutch before he lost his first mate, had been badly wounded fighting dwarves and died of his injuries within a year. Many sad tales were sung of AgGriffopse, and the Copper was glad of a chance to meet some of his titular relations at last. AgGriffopse and Ibidio's daughters were gracious enough to greet him as a brother, and his hearts beat hard at their touch as they crossed necks.\n\nThe only one of the three who really spoke to him was the sickly one, Halaflora, conversing between tiny mouthfuls of food. Perhaps that was why she was sickly. She was interested in details of life in the Drakwatch. Ayafeeia and her sister Imfamnia spent most of their time discussing how they would have organized the banquet.\n\n\"No, no. Make the dishes stationary. That way the society has to circulate,\" Ayafeeia said.\n\n\"Look at Tighlia up there, queen of all she surveys. How I envy her,\" Imfamnia said.\n\n\"Envy's nothing to brag of, daughter,\" Ibidio said, raised scale in her voice.\n\nTighlia's relations of the Skotl line, on the other hand, didn't mix much with those from the Tyr's Wyrr side. They didn't have quite the decor of scale and elegance of manner the Tyr's side possessed. He spoke with only one, a grim, battle-scarred dragon with still-healing wounds on his uncased wings\u2014SiDrakkon's son, SiBayereth. He glistened, a deep red oily color, like blood spilled in shadow, but was polite enough to tip his head as he congratulated the Copper.\n\n\"Heartstrong of you to jump forward, cousin. Don't let them frighten you about the Upper World,\" he said in the growling accent of his Skotl clan. \"Our family's just so used to being guarded down here, they swoon at the thought of risk.\"\n\nThe Copper swelled with pride, willing to hurl himself against a wave of spears at such praise. A guard! And of these splendid, noble, glamorous, glittering dragons\u2014his\u2026his family.\n\nThe Copper walked around the caverns of the Drakwatch trainees one last time. The rather brackish pool, the loose skull that one of the thralls had jammed back into place upside down, the boiled kern and fatty joints, the smoky smell of the fat-lamps and drakes\u2014each bore a memory.\n\nHe limped around saying good-bye to his trainee companions. He knew they told jokes behind his back, because of his age. But they didn't dare snicker when his eye was on them. He towered over them, thanks to years of Imperial hams and chucks.\n\n\"You'll need a good travel thrall,\" NeStirrath said. He looked into the Copper's cave, where Harf scrubbed the decorated archway in his usual halfhearted manner. \"Strong and road-wise. That fool can feed your bats until you come back.\" Harf scratched his paunch and edged out of the way. \"I'll give you one of mine, Fourfang. He's mostly blighter, strong as a dragon, for his size.\"\n\n\"I've come to wish the drake honor and glory as well,\" a dragonelle's voice called. Rethothanna didn't bother to announce herself as a stranger to the Drakwatch caves or wait for an invitation, but the drakes would hesitate to attack a full-grown female.\n\nShe closed her nostrils. \"Fee-fie-foe-foul, when was the last time these holes were washed out?\"\n\n\"There's a sluice from the upper levels that backs up,\" NeStirrath said. \"But do not tell the Imperial Family that their waste stinks; they'd never believe it. What are you doing bringing your refined nostrils to these caves, female?\"\n\n\"As I said, to wish young Rugaard safe horizons. I give him a gift, as well.\"\n\nThe girl thrall who'd worked his face stood just behind, a heavy quilted coat around her and a woven basket tied to her back.\n\nNeStirrath dug around behind his griff and extracted some loose scale. \"For an egg-dripping drake you make the journey, but you couldn't be bothered to come wait on me for your blasted song?\"\n\n\"Even the oldest of trees needs to bend now and then. I wanted the advantage of home ground to hear your song, lest my hearts melt and I lose all my concentration in your glory.\"\n\n\"Don't jest with me.\"\n\n\"You old, stump-winged fool. I've wanted you beside me for years. You're the best dragon in the dome, and yes, I include the Tyr himself in that assessment. But we can talk later. It's youth that needs the benefit of our years now.\" She swung her oxeyed head around to the Copper. \"To glory bid, eh, drake? I've brought you a gift. Come forward, Rhea.\"\n\nThe girl stepped up to the base of the dragonelle's neck, her flat face hidden behind her straw-colored hair. Harf put down his brush and made an ooking noise.\n\n\"You remember Rhea; she arranged you for the banquet. You need a proper body thrall, and she needs some time in the sun, or she'll grow up all bent and spindly, no matter how many fish she eats. Bant's sunny enough.\"\n\nRhea shivered despite her quilted coat.\n\n\"She's worried about Black Rock. Thralls get eaten in here,\" Rethothanna said.\n\n\"Not in my caves,\" NeStirrath said. He pointed his tail toward Harf. \"That idle-fingers is still intact, as you can see.\"\n\n\"Can she make a journey?\" the Copper asked. The slight girl didn't seem up to a climb to the gardens.\n\n\"She's young. She'll harden to the road,\" Rethothanna said.\n\nNeStirrath brought Fourfang over. The blighter had shoulders fully as broad as the girl was high, and legs like a dragon. He offered a long list of instructions, both to Fourfang and the Copper, as Rethothanna inspected the skulls decorating the passages. \"Above all, remember your lessons and keep a dragon's virtues. You can't go far wrong.\"\n\nThe Copper thought it funny that the same advice went to a blighter as well as a dragon. What would a blighter do with learning? It would pass through him like water, clear going in and smelly and tainted coming out.\n\n\"And keep off that poor girl,\" he finished.\n\nThat must have been directed at the blighter. Fourfang grinned, showing his sharpened teeth.\n\n\"What can you tell me about Bant?\" the Copper asked Rethothanna.\n\nShe fluttered a griff at NeStirrath. \"You mean what kind of food is to be had?\"\n\n\"No. Our allies in the Uphold. What are they like? How do we keep the peace with them? What's the nature of this problem SiDrakkon needs to solve? But if there's some delicacy to be had\u2026well, I'd hate to miss a new feast.\"\n\n\"He is a promising young thing,\" she said to NeStirrath. \"Interested in the essentials. Very well. I'll give you the essential for Bant: water. Bant's either dry or rainy, depending on the time of year; the rainy season starts right around the summer solstice, usually a little before. It's made up of rocky, rather dry plains that go lush during the rains and tinder-dry the rest of the year. There are three rivers, all flowing west to the Ocean of the Summer Sun, and it's control of the rivers that's everything, for there are rich forests full of trade goods and spices along the rivers. Very good land for herding on the plains, as long as the herds can get to water holes or the rivers in the dry season.\n\n\"The elves lived there first, along the rivers, but tribes of blighters came and dispersed them, though they didn't quite get rid of them. A few still live on in the deeper woods or around the better-watered rock piles. A dwarf or two pass through, usually engaged in trade or craft with the ivory and hardwoods. Some tribes of men as well, distant relations to the Ironriders of the north, I believe, as fierce as the blighters when fighting on horseback.\"\n\n\"So it's hard to keep the peace between the groups?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Well, yes, they'll go to the dragon to settle disputes, when neither side thinks it can gain an advantage. But this case is difficult. The Ghi-men, the stone shapers, are pushing south and taking over the rivers, from what I understand of the messages the Tyr has shared with me. They're well organized\u2014their armies will put up a fight against even dragons in the field\u2014but their real skill is in digging and roofing and wall building. When they're behind their battlements they're as tough as a scale digger.\"\n\nNeStirrath's wing stubs dipped. \"If SiDrakkon thinks he'll throw his main strength against one of their fortress towns, we'll be singing laments from Imperial Resort again.\"\n\n\"You do travel light,\" SiDrakkon said three days later, as they assembled at the northeast riverbank. \"Only two thralls?\"\n\n\"You said it was a six-day journey.\"\n\n\"Barring delays.\"\n\n\"I've gone hungry before.\"\n\n\"That's why I bring extra thralls. Once you've consumed the baggage, there's no need for baggage carriers.\"\n\nNivom had two sissa of Drakwatch and a sissa of Firemaidens. He wore a golden ring in his ear, a mark of a Drakwatch full commander, a rare honor for a wingless drake. Beside the Tyr's brother-by-mate and and Nivom, the Copper also noted three battle-scarred dragons, two blacks and a red, with purplish tones shading their coloring.\n\n\"The worst of the Skotl clan,\" Nivom said quietly. \"Duelists.\"\n\nThe Copper hadn't seen a duel yet, though his bats had witnessed one while hunting. The Tyr discouraged the custom for the dragons in the Imperial Resort, and absolutely forbade it among the Imperial line. But on some of the other hills, dragons settled their differences in combat. For the wealthier dragons who didn't want to risk losing an eye or something even more vital, challenges could be settled by means of a duel-by-proxy.\n\n\"What do you have against duelists?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"A rich dragon can hire professionals, and then start a squabble with a poor one to take what little he has.\" His griff rattled, though he kept them sheathed.\n\nThe three-score drakes and drakka under Nivom snorted and whispered: \"They've finally let Batty out; Spirits help us.\"\n\nSiDrakkon walked back up the line of dragons, flocks, baggage, and thralls at the northeast tunnel mouth. They'd go down for a short distance, to the water ring, then start the underground journey to Bant. He paused again by the Copper and took a long sniff at Rhea.\n\n\"She's just maturing. Ahh, but that's a smell,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\nThe Copper found her aroma pleasing, rather soft and mammalian, but not nearly as interesting as forge-fresh steel or a fat joint sputtering in an iron pan. But there was no point in being disagreeable.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"The blighter could use a daily wash, as she does.\"\n\nSiDrakkon glanced back at the distant wart of Black Rock. \"I'd have a garden of such women, rather than the Tyr's wretched ferns and darkblooms, if I had my way. But duty calls. Which reminds me\u2014Nivom, where's that old courier ring of yours?\"\n\nNivom nosed around in his baggage, and approached with a bronzed token on a chain.\n\nSiDrakkon took it in his sii and held it up. \"Your first laudi.\" It was a pair of equal-sized bronzed bones, joined and wired at the center so crossed as a dragon might cross his sii before settling down to sleep.\n\n\"The crossed man-bones of the Tyr. This shows you to be a courier of the Imperial Resort.\" He opened the length of chain, and the Copper bowed so he might slip it down his neck.\n\nThe links rattled down his scale and finally stopped.\n\n\"Of course. It doesn't fit. You're wide across the neck base, drake. We'll have to find some smithy and get it adjusted.\" SiDrakkon smelled hot and angry, like Father.\n\n\"My\u2026my line was thwick-bodied,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Watch that lisp. What's wrong with you? You sound like a hatchling. Nivom there speaks better, and half his lip is torn off.\"\n\nThe Copper averted his eyes and swallowed.\n\n\"Well?\" SiDrakkon growled.\n\nSome of the Firemaidens were whispering among themselves.\n\n\"Sow\u2014sorry.\"\n\n\"Be careful with that necklace in battle,\" Nivom said. \"It gives foemen a good aiming point.\"\n\nThe lounging drakes chuckled, and even SiDrakkon deflated a little. \"Confound it, we were supposed to have more baskets of chickens. Where are they now?\" He swung around and stalked back up the line.\n\nNivom edged closer. \"What do you mean, your line was thick-bodied? You still live, so your line does.\"\n\n\"Bad wing. I'll never be able to mate.\" At least the words came out with a dragonly inflection. He felt comfortable around Nivom.\n\n\"Nobody cares about those back-mountain rituals anymore. Well, almost nobody.\"\n\nSiDrakkon, satisfied at last with the preparations, set the column in motion. They left the Lavadome, with the tunnel guardians of the Drakwatch and the Firemaids raising their necks and trumpeting.\n\nThe families of the thralls in the baggage train who'd made the trip to the assembly camp added their own wails. Bits of wood and bone on string were passed from fathers to sons, or between mates. The Copper had been told a dragon could spend a lifetime describing the different good-luck charms and fetishes of the hominid races.\n\nSiDrakkon placed him behind the thralls of the column, with the rear duelist dragon and the sissa of the Drakwatch. They came to the encircling river and he again took in the wonder of the high-walled cavern, with sunlight falling through the cracks and landing in golden slivers upon the fetid water. A group of hatchlings sunbathed under the watchful eyes of their mother, and two young dragons swam. Probably newly mated, the Copper thought with a pang.\n\nThere were boats drawn up for the thralls and provisions. The dragons all swam.\n\n\"You'll need to ride in a boat, I expect,\" SiDrakkon said as he watched the thralls load the last boat.\n\n\"No, sir. I'm a strong swimmer,\" the Copper said, plunging into the water.\n\n\"Don't come crying halfway across. Maybe one of the bodyguards will let you ride on their back, but I won't carry you.\"\n\n\"Of cowse not sir.\"\n\n\"And stop that flapping lisping!\"\n\n\"Y-yes.\"\n\nThe Copper clasped limbs to body and swam off after the sissa.\n\nAt the other side of river\u2014two bonfires marked the wade-out\u2014the Copper was able to lose his shame again in the fascinating activity of loading and manning the rut-carts.\n\nHere by the river ample cave moss lit the scene. A wide tunnel, with two shining bands of metal running off into its darkening length, left sun-shafted beachfront and disappeared back into the depths of the Lower World. The Copper was so used to the pool of yellow light coming down from the top of the Lavadome or the orange flicker of fat-lamps that the faint green glow of the moss seemed strange again.\n\nWheeled contraptions rested on the bands of metal. Some had sides; some were just flat platforms, but all ran on four or, rarely, six wheels. The wheels were small things, with lips along the inside that kept them in place on the iron bars. Specialized thralls, barefoot with thick leather belts and wrist braces, minded the oily-smelling joints and laid out and checked pulling lines.\n\nThey were dwarvish contraptions, of course.\n\n\"I've seen these lines in tunnels before,\" the Copper said to Nivom.\n\n\"They're rut-carts. Have you ever seen a road?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nNivom never minded showing off his knowledge. \"In the Upper World hominids use these chariots and wheeled carts and such, and they eventually dig furrows in the ground. This is the same principle, only instead of furrows the wheels sit in the iron furrows. They're a little noisy, but you can pull a heavy load quite easily. The dwarves use them for mining, or for transport when there's no underground canal about.\"\n\nThe Copper blinked for a moment as he tried to absorb what Nivom had said. Nivom was a clever drake, but didn't make allowance for those not as bright as he.\n\n\"So the cart\u2026floats on the rails. Like the dwarf boats on a river.\"\n\n\"Yes, you'll see.\"\n\nThe thralls went to ropes attached to one end of the carts. SiDrakkon barked out an order, and Nivom distributed his drakes to the heads of the lines, putting their necks through harnesses made for draft animals.\n\nSome of the drakes grumbled at doing beast work.\n\nThe Copper put Rhea on one of the flat carts with some of the other female thralls, who cooked or toasted a grainy paste on metal bracking rods for the males.\n\n\"Exercise won't do any of you harm,\" SiDrakkon said. \"Toughen you up before you get to the Upper World.\"\n\nThe Copper, though frightened enough of SiDrakkon to keep well out of his way lest he be barked at again, had to grant him this: He kept the column working and moving. The thralls didn't have time to worry about being eaten, and the drakes were so busy they couldn't get into squabbles.\n\n\"I'll take a line,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You're a courier. You needn't\u2014\"\n\nThe Copper stiffened, extending his neck as though getting ready to issue a challenge.\n\n\"If you want the fatigue, have it. I'm riding in a cart, as befits a commander.\"\n\nThe men went to knotted lines and threw loops across their shoulders, padding them with bunched clothing. The Copper let the sweat-stained leather ring\u2014it smelled deliciously of equine\u2014fall about his shoulders. It fit better than the Tyr's emblem.\n\n\"Set\u2026step\u2026off!\" SiDrakkon shouted.\n\n\"Take the strain. The start's the worst,\" Nivom shouted.\n\nThe carts set up a chorus of metallic screeching, and the chickens clucked in alarm and the sheep hurried out of the way, but the procession lurched into motion.\n\n\"Sorry, lads, it's mostly uphill to Bant,\" SiDrakkon said as he lowered his head to watch the wheels on their iron ruts.\n\nThe Copper liked the challenge of the pull; you could lose yourself in the effort. He did most of the work with his saa, just hopping forward on his bad leg during a strain.\n\nWhen a thrall slipped and fell so that he lay dangerously facedown across the rail, the Copper quickly hooked him under the arm with his tail and helped lift him to his feet again before the grinding wheels could take off a leg. The thrall looked at him wide-eyed from behind his shaggy hair.\n\nFourfang clapped the thrall upon the back and grunted out a few hominid words, pointing at the Copper. The Copper had earned little enough honor among Drakwatch and Firemaidens, but even the respect of his thralls counted for something.\n\nThey took their first rest at a cave spring. The thralls instantly fouled the tunnel with their waste; the grains and roots they ate resulted in enormous quantities of excrement that rivaled bat guano in its unwholesomeness.\n\nNivom came to check on him.\n\n\"Ride for the next quarter.\"\n\n\"I'm well enough.\"\n\n\"I don't want the Tyr's courier dropping of heart seizure. Water or blood?\"\n\n\"Blood.\" He thirsted for the salty taste. Fourfang made a nuisance of himself, pulling up his saa and applying some kind of ointment that smelled like sheep fat.\n\n\"There's a pan. SiDrakkon's already shared a pair of sheep with his duelists. Better hurry, or your fellow line drakes will have had it all.\"\n\nHe walked while the pullers were changed, but as soon as they took another break, went back to the traces.\n\n\"No. Drake ride. Fourfang pull,\" Fourfang protested.\n\n\"I like it,\" the Copper said, settling into the collar.\n\n\"Only unimportant drake pull,\" Fourfang said. \"Unimportant drake have unimportant thrall.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" the Copper said. It hadn't occurred to him that the thralls had some kind of clan system of their own.\n\n\"Pride of place.\"\n\n\"Oh, all right. I'll walk beside. If you get tired, let me know.\"\n\nThe blighter planted his short, bandy legs. The column squealed into motion again.\n\n\"These carts need tinkering,\" Nivom said, looking at the wheels of a particularly noisy contraption in front of the Copper. \"If only dwarves didn't starve themselves so quickly when enthralled. Get some fat drippings over here. That helps.\"\n\nAt a widening of the tunnel SiDrakkon had found a rock pile to rest upon and watch the column as it passed. \"That's it, Rugaard. Work 'em hard and they're too tired to make trouble. True for scales as well as hair.\"\n\nThey had to leave the carts on the fourth \"day\"\u2014as measured by sleep periods\u2014and go on foot.\n\nThey lost only two thralls on the trip to Bant, one to sickness and one to a badly broken leg when he fell under a cart and seemed unlikely to recover. In both cases they had their heads quickly bitten off by the big duelist dragons as they slept. The others accepted the deaths fatalistically, though they turned their backs when the bodies were shared out and eaten, except for some of the younger thralls, who watched the process with a sort of dread fascination.\n\nAt last they saw golden light at the tunnel mouth again. A female dragon, with dust caked thickly in her scales turning her almost white, guarded the entrance from a pallet of wood and straw.\n\nSiDrakkon had them rest in the cave until the sun had lowered so they wouldn't emerge into full daylight.\n\nThe Copper took his first step into the Upper World at sunset, blinded and blinking for a full hundred heartbeats. When he finally looked about, squinting, he saw a dizzyingly vast landscape, bronze-colored and dotted here and there by taller green lacework that Nivom identified as trees. An orange sun, so perfectly round it seemed an eerie visitor as strange to the landscape as dragons, rested on the horizon, illuminating a distant rise.\n\n\"That's the Sunshard Plateau,\" Nivom said, pointing with his nose to the distant break in the horizon. \"The Lavadome lies beneath. We've come all this way. It fills the sky when you're nearer.\"\n\nThe mouth of the cave had bones scattered all around the looser gravel below the cave gap. \"My warning to trespassers.\" The Firemaid chuckled.\n\nSiDrakkon flew into a rage when he saw the tiny, tired collection of animals gathered at the watering hole at the base of the mouth-mount, watched by a few sandled herders in thin white robes who threw themselves on their bellies when they saw the dragons.\n\n\"Courier! Come here!\"\n\nThe Copper approached, trembling.\n\nSiDrakkon had turned quite purple. Or maybe it was the color-shifting light of the setting sun. \"Your first duty is to hurry back with a message for the glorious Tyr. Tell him I'm relieving that fool NiThonius, friend of his or no. We'll come to the Mud City half-starved, thanks to him. Eat one of these pathetic, scrawny sheep and go!\"\n\nIt appeared his visit to the Upper World would be as brief as it was dazzling.\n\nAs it turned out, the Copper didn't return to the Lavadome that day. Nivom hurried up to SiDrakkon and convinced him that ill news would be better received by the Tyr if it were mixed with good.\n\nSiDrakkon sputtered some more, but when Nivom pointed out that the Tyr might just appoint SiDrakkon as replacement governor of the Uphold, and SiDrakkon would spend a goodly stretch of years in Bant, the dragon finally retracted his griff and f claws and cried settled.\n\nThe next morning the Copper looked more closely at the Bant hominids as they washed. Their skin was a similar tone to his own scale, though a good deal less shiny, and he decided it made them look healthier and more intelligent than the paler thralls from the Lavadome.\n\nTwo tiresome marches later, guided by another dusty dragonelle who could easily converse with the locals, they came to the Mud City.\n\nThe Copper got a chance to study a depiction of the lands on an animal skin, with inked squiggles representing rivers, ranges of hills, stone outcroppings, and water holes. Once one got used to maps they made sense. The Mud City was a collection of dwellings and workshops and markets on the southernmost of Bant's three great rivers. Downstream the riverbanks teemed with life, according to SiDrakkon, with the assorted kinds of trees growing so tall above they blocked the sun, rendering the Upper World much like the Lower, though better lit, at least in daytime.\n\nThe Copper discovered that while dirty, the Upper World had its compensations. For one thing, all the light sharpened his eyesight. He picked up detail at a distance. In the muted light of the Lower World colors faded and shadows muddied edges. Up here the Spirits' wonders and labors in shaping all between blue sky and black earth stood under brilliant light as though it were a statue on display in the Anklene hill.\n\nThe Mud City stood on both banks of the river, surrounded by green, well-watered hills and walls of various age. The buildings were all a white or sandy color, sprouting wood supports or a plot of gardening here and there. The dwellings looked cracked and dry, like Fourfang's sunburned skin.\n\nHe expected to see flocks and herds on the surrounding hills, but there were few animals on the heights grazing, and what there were kept close to town.\n\nThe dragons camped in a vale between two hills overlooking the town, with good cliffs to one side and a steep slope on the other.\n\n\"The Ghi men's horsemen have not yet raided south of the river,\" their Firemaid guide said.\n\n\"I don't put anything past men. They always show up where you don't expect 'em,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\n\"And don't let your thralls cut wood from these trees; these belong to the local chieftain. Wood pilfering will create a grudge.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nThe Firemaid departed, and SiDrakkon immediately ordered the thralls to gather wood for cooking fires\u2014but only dead branches and deadfalls.\n\nRhea spent weary hours cleaning dust out of the Copper's scale, while Fourfang made some kind of gruel in a pot as he was toasting a spitted lamb. Fourfang and Rhea licked the spit clean of grease when the Copper was through eating.\n\nThe Copper hoped the provisioning would improve soon; already the thralls were pushing and shoving over food allotments.\n\nThe next morning NiThonius arrived, and the whole camp stirred at the news.\n\nHe was an odd-looking dragon, rather bony and the color of a rusty shield, and had strips of cloth running from his crest and twelve horns, all tied to an ivory tusk piercing his nostrils, creating a sort of fabric shield for his eyes and nose.\n\nAlongside him rode a fine figure of a man with a long, forked beard wrapped in gold cording. More gold cording held a sun cloth to his head, and his robes had glittering strands woven into the lapels.\n\nSiDrakkon lined up the drakes and Firemaidens to meet him, with his bodyguard just behind him. \"Let's wait downwind; we'll be able to hear better,\" Nivom said.\n\n\"Eminent of the Bant Uphold, I bring you the Tyr's greetings,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\n\"Mate-brother to the Tyr, I long regret the Tyr's absence from my hearth and hoard. Will you cry ally?\"\n\n\"I do cry ally.\"\n\nThey both made a perfunctory clucking noise at the sky.\n\n\"I welcome your coming,\" NiThonius said. \"Let me introduce King Onato of the Rains and Winds and the Three River Savanna. You met his father, I believe.\"\n\n\"A great warrior and friend to the Lavadome,\" SiDrakkon said. He gurgled out a few words in a tongue the Copper did not understand.\n\n\"Did you catch that?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"I can't make snout nor tail of their yammering. But I expect I'll learn if we're here long.\"\n\nSome of the king's retainers unrolled white material and tied it between the branches of two spreading trees. The king sat beneath atop a folding wooden sort of post-seat, and NiThonius settled down beside. SiDrakkon dismissed the welcoming party and joined the repose, calling Nivom forward. The Copper followed behind.\n\n\"A Drakwatch commander and an Imperial Courier. I'm impressed you've come so well arrayed,\" NiThonius said.\n\n\"I was not impressed with your welcoming banquet when we emerged from the Lower World.\"\n\nNiThonius pulled back his head a little. \"I did not expect so many. I'd asked my old friend the Tyr for a cunning dragon or two to help me cope with the Ghi.\"\n\n\"And what could be accomplished against fortresses by a dragon or two?\"\n\n\"I would rather attack them where they are vulnerable, rather than behind scale or stone.\"\n\n\"Where are they vulnerable?\"\n\n\"Where their archers can't stand behind battlements and their war machines throw javelin, rock, and fire. I'm a little old to be flitting about, laying waste to flocks and herds. The men of Ghi, the Stonemen, would probably be induced to quit most of the lands they've grabbed if we make the lands unprofitable. They are keen calculators, not prideful. Also, they have some salt mines and clayworks and lumber camps. Burn them and kill the workers, swim up under their trade boats, scatter their herds, and burn their crops in the night. A war of stealth and surprise will weary them before too many years pass. That's why I asked for an active young dragon or two. And that is what our allies gathered provision for.\"\n\nSiDrakkon tore up the ground with his claws, and the king and his retainers scooted back on their hindquarters, perhaps fearing their new ally would lash out. \"I've no patience for that kind of warfare. The Lavadome needs Bant's herds, not tales of a burned crop or shepherd's lodge.\"\n\n\"A salt mine is no shepherd's cot. Without salt, men do not last here.\"\n\n\"A war of many small cuts doesn't answer our need.\"\n\n\"It is the only kind of warfare left to us, at least in Bant.\"\n\n\"How is that?\"\n\nNiThonius said a few words to his human ally. \"The king has lost many of his finest warriors in fruitless assaults. Those who remain are discouraged and scattered.\"\n\n\"You say that as though the fault lay at another's sii.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I delayed too long. The northern half of the country was under the protection of my clutchwinner. After he and his mate were killed, the collapse came so quickly\u2014now the Stonemen build a new strongpoint at a watering spring just north of the Green Dancer that flows below.\"\n\n\"Build?\" SiDrakkon said. \"It's unfinished?\"\n\n\"They have a stout wooden palisade. The stoneworks rise day by day.\"\n\n\"There is where we'll strike, then. They won't expect a hard blow after having won so much, and I wish to move before word of our arrival may spread. Nivom, tell your sissa, rouse the Firemaidens\u2014we fly at once! We'll give them a taste of dragon fury that'll put hearts back into these spiritless whelps.\"\n\nAfter the longest, hardest march of his life, the Copper stayed far to the rear of the attack, watching events from the top of a rock pile.\n\nHe didn't feel the least bit tired, not with the night full of the fire of battle. If it weren't for SiDrakkon's forcibly expressed orders\u2026\n\nThe plains beyond the rivers had these rocky, windswept piles of stones like river-smoothed rocks grown to dragon proportion and heaped. The Copper had become almost as acquainted with the wildlife of the rocks as he had with the grasslands. The rock piles were thick with hopping, naked tailed rodents that the Firemaidens flushed with a quick blast of flame. As he watched the battle, he probed his gum line with his tongue for the remains of the rat he'd just eaten.\n\nHe watched carefully as SiDrakkon's orders were executed, remembering details for a report to the Tyr.\n\nHis orders had the virtue of simplicity. First the Firemaidens, the most skilled huntresses of their number at the fore, would attack whatever sentries stood on the outskirts of the water hole. One had been killed on the rock pile where the Copper now stood, and his blood still scented the air.\n\nWhen Nivom gave the signal that the sentries and outwatchers had been cleared, the Drakwatch went forward.\n\nThen SiDrakkon swooped overhead, low enough to smell the bubbling fire bladders (the dragons chewed an irritating pepper called green fury to fill their bladders), his three duelists in line behind to lessen the chance of their being spotted.\n\nThe aerial dragons struck and struck hard, setting alight the nests of wooden spikes that warded off horsemen, then picking the flaming bundles up in their saa or knocking them around with their tails.\n\nThe men rallied to the circle of stone, firing their bows and setting their spears against a descent when the Drakwatch struck, all loosing their flame at a roar from Nivom. The Drakwatch swarmed over the unfinished ramparts, scale glittering in the firelight, and the Copper wished more than anything to be with them.\n\nThe Stonemen broke and fled for their lives, and the Firemaidens had much sport hunting down stragglers in the grass.\n\nAt last a Firemaiden called to the Copper and told him that SiDrakkon bade that he join in the feast and survey the night's work.\n\nOne of the Drakwatch had been killed in the fighting. Apart from bloodless arrow wounds to the wing tissue, SiDrakkon and the duelists had not been scratched.\n\nThey devoured some of the beasts of burden killed in the action and made presents of the rest to King Onato of the Rains and Wind and other titles. Such heads as didn't disappear down dragon or drake gullets were lined up on the unfinished ramparts as a warning to the Ghi.\n\n\"That's how you do it, Rugaard. A fast, heavy blow. Smash 'em up, and they'll break and scatter,\" SiDrakkon said. \"When these human and blighter tribesmen see this work, they'll rally to the king's banner again. Especially if the banner's carried by a victorious dragon.\"\n\n\"Four victorious dragons,\" one of the bodyguards said with a belch, as he nosed up a silver-hilted knife from the dirt, broke off the blade, and swallowed it.\n\n\"Forget not the drakes!\" a pair from Nivom's first sissa chorused, where they rooted among the burned bodies for coin to eat.\n\n\"The Firemaidens took their share of honors,\" a dazzling, golden-eyed drakka said as another licked the wounds about her sii and griff.\n\nSiDrakkon stood and roared a victorious bellow that no doubt sent the rock-racks digging even deeper into the sand. \"Now, Rugaard, now you may return to the Lavadome. Tell the mighty Tyr what has been accomplished in his name this night. But hurry back, for the feasting will be even greater when we strike their fortress from the depths of the very river they so arrogantly claim!\"\n\nNo one but the departing Copper noticed NiThonius, who'd stayed back from the attack as well. He remained at the edge of the celebration, using his nose to help the Bant tribesmen gather spent arrows and dropped swords. He simply sighed quietly.\n\nSiDrakkon roared after him: \"Give your report to the Tyr, and tell my sister to keep her advice. Her snout's in too many caves as it is.\"\n\nThe road back to the Lavadome was wearisome in several respects.\n\nFor a start, the king awarded them, through SiDrakkon, a rather broken-down and dismal donkey, who complained, in the simple words of the beast tongue, that he would be eaten as soon as the Copper grew hungry. For a while Rhea rode him, but he staggered and bellowed, so they left him with just carrying grain and dragon-smoked meat.\n\nRhea performed her scale-cleaning duties until her fingers bled from beneath her nails. She slept rather close to him. Fourfang, however, continually disappeared while they passed back south through Bant, especially when the Copper smelled tribal blighters around. He'd slip off quietly in the night, and come back smelling of scented oil.\n\n\"Where do you go nights, Fourfang?\" the Copper asked one morning.\n\nIn response, the blighter made a motion of such obvious obscenity that the Copper almost scorched him from the waist down. The Copper wondered how many prominently toothed blighter litters would be born next season.\n\nOn their last day of travel the rains began. Blue-bottomed clouds boiled up out of the east and gathered, and water fell from the sky, first in a drizzle and then in such torrents it was pointless to seek shelter, so they simply squelched on through the mud to the next soggy camp.\n\nThe donkey complained that not only was he to be eaten, but he was going to be eaten wet and uncomfortable.\n\n\"The rains, at last,\" the Firemaid guarding the underground entrance said. \"You leave us so soon?\" The rain had washed and brightened her scale.\n\n\"I'll return with messages, I expect. I'll offer you a gift of this donkey to remember me. I suggest you eat him; it's the only way you'll ever have any peace and quiet.\"\n\nThe Firemaids kept a goodly supply of meat, gained hunting on the plains, and there was even a little fish pulled out of a stream that morning, for with the rain the fish were hurrying to mate and lay their eggs. The Copper ate the fish as soon as it was offered. If his time in the Lavadome lacked anything, it was a good piece of fish now and again.\n\nThe trek down the tunnel was long\u2014fortunately there were few places one could get lost, and when in doubt the Copper simply smelled for the leavings of the flocks driven downtunnel. Once they met up with the dwarvish iron ruts it was simply a matter of following the lines down. Their trek had little to remember, save that Fourfang slept soundly each night with his head pillowed upon the Copper's rump, and Rhea, lacking the warm sty provided by her fellow thralls, huddled against his leathery stomach. So they came again to the Lavadome with little doubt or danger. The deman boatman who carried them across was a gruesome specimen, and fondled Rhea's sun-colored hair as they climbed in.\n\n\"Enough, you,\" the Copper growled. The demen were useful enough in keeping order among the thralls, but he still found them loathsome. \"Keep to your end of the boat.\"\n\nThe deman and Fourfang exchanged looks. Fourfang licked his lips and showed his teeth.\n\nThe deman's spines rose. \"No brawling,\" the Copper said, placing his tail between them.\n\nThe pens and dragon-holes of the Lavadome's hills felt shrunken in scale now, after the horizon-stretching space and light of the Upper World. They had to rest only once, crossing easily on common paths, and instead of blue infinity overhead, they enjoyed the intricate beauty of the fire-streaked dome. He left Fourfang and Rhea on the lower entrance to the Imperial Resort. He would have liked to see how things were getting on in the training caves\u2014though he'd been gone only two-score and five days it felt like years\u2014but Tyr would need to hear about events in Bant.\n\nHe hurried up one of the steep, narrow back step-passages used by the thralls. He was still small enough to fit, and he could avoid some of the transverses leading to the garden level.\n\nThralls worked the Tyr's Gardens, diverting trickles from the central pool and splashing water on the ferns and vines. One had a dirty joint shoved in his waistband, probably cast aside during a banquet and found in the underbrush, and guiltily dropped it.\n\nWell, let him enjoy his find. \"I'd boil it well if I were you. A joint can go a long way, made into soups,\" he said. The thrall just blinked. \"Go on; pick it up. You found it; you enjoy it.\"\n\nHe met NoSohoth in the plaza before the Tyr's outer entrance, eating a dish made of meat shredded into thin, stringlike strips and swimming in gravy, as a thrall poked around behind his crest, cleaning dirt and dead skin with a rag-wrapped stick. Saliva flooded the Copper's mouth at the smell of the dragon's breakfast.\n\n\"I'll say this for you, Rugaard: You're easy to identify at a distance. Your hop-walk is distinctive.\"\n\n\"I bring news for the Tyr.\"\n\nNoSohoth took another tongueful of gravy. \"I'd be surprised if you didn't. SiDrakkon calls for three more dragons, I suppose.\"\n\n\"My mate is sleeping,\" Tighlia said, emerging from the Tyr's cave. She moved rather stiffly.\n\nThralls exploded out of the corners of the plaza like a flight of startled birds, converging on the Tyr's mate.\n\n\"Yes, some breakfast, just a little kern,\" she said, looking from thrall to thrall. \"No, no bath. Just some ointment for my joints. My shoulders again. Leafdrip's formula and none other, now. Oh, leave off; the scale's still lined from sleeping. It'll smooth on its own.\"\n\nShe shrugged off her attendants and took a long drink from Tyr's trickle basin.\n\n\"Restless night again, glorious Queen?\"\n\n\"Not a good turn to be had, NoSohoth.\" She looked at the Copper. \"What on earth are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Our newest courier has returned with news from Bant,\" NoSohoth said.\n\n\"My mate's lame little indulgence. Well, out with it.\"\n\n\"I bring news for the Tyr himself,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Be off with all of you,\" she said to the thralls. \"You too, NoSohoth. See what's keeping my kern.\" She sidestepped toward the trickle spilling into the basin.\n\nThe Copper regretted to see the shredded meat in gravy go, but the hard eye of Tighlia made him forget his appetite.\n\n\"We can talk here, you. No one will overhear. Come closer; I've never bitten a drake in my life and I won't start this morning. What news?\"\n\n\"I'm the Tyr's courier,\" the Copper protested. He wondered if he should relay her brother's exact words.\n\n\"Don't question me; it's not your place. FeHazathant needs twice the sleep that he gets. I'm eager to hear every detail of my brother, and you have my promise that the Tyr will hear your report.\"\n\n\"I'm under instructions\u2014\"\n\nShe interrupted in a quiet voice. \"You would be wise to obey me. I've given my word: Tyr will hear your message. Will you offer insult to me by disbelief? There is no shortage of champions who will duel to defend my honor.\"\n\n\"Yes, great Queen. Our journey\u2014\"\n\n\"Stomp the journey. How go things in Bant?\"\n\n\"They are hard-pressed by the Ghi men. Two of their river valleys are lost. Their forces have been defeated, scattered, and discouraged.\"\n\n\"What has my brother done to retrieve the situation, or is the Uphold lost?\"\n\n\"SiDrakkon won a victory against the Ghi men. He destroyed a fortification before it could be completed, with small loss.\"\n\n\"Ninny! You should have been shouting that from the moment you passed into the dome. A victory! FeHazathant must hear of this.\" She rounded on a kitchen thrall hurrying up with a steaming bowl of milky, yellow kern. \"You there! Let's have a skewer of steaks for the Tyr's breakfast, and if they're not still sputtering from the fire you'll be turning on the next spit.\"\n\nWithin a dwarf-hour the court was roused and the Tyr came into the plaza to hear the story. When the Copper repeated his news and told of the battle, all the Imperial line began to twitter.\n\n\"Well, that is good news,\" NoSohoth said when Tighlia nudged him. \"A roar for SiDrakkon.\"\n\nThe dragons roared, but to the Copper it sounded half-lunged.\n\nThe Tyr nodded. \"Well, if it's begun, at least it's begun well. But open war\u2026the Ghi men are strong and numerous and craft-wise. What's the spirit of the warriors in Bant?\"\n\nThe Copper chose his words carefully. \"NiThonius says they're in poor spirits. They've been broken by defeats. SiDrakkon believes this victory will bring them round.\"\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I, Tyr?\"\n\n\"Yes, you've been up there recently and I haven't. What do you think? Can Bant win a war?\"\n\nThe Copper remained silent for a moment. \"I\u2026I can't form an opinion. I haven't even seen them fight.\"\n\nThe dragons chuckled at that. \"Don't overtax my poor cousin's abilities, Grandfather,\" Simevolant called.\n\n\"SiDrakkon seems confident they can win,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"And why not?\" Tighlia said. \"Hominids are always braver behind a dragon than in front.\"\n\nThe Tyr stared off to the northeast, as though trying to pierce crystal, lava, and rock with his eyes. \"Rest for three days, Rugaard: You look worn. Then return to SiDrakkon and give him my congratulations. Tell him that if there is to be a war, let it be a short one, and seek concessions from the Ghi men rather than battles. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, Tyr.\"\n\nAs it turned out, he didn't return to his familiar shelf in the training caves. NoSohoth arranged a cave midrock in the better-lit south quarter, among some of the wealthier dragons who stored their hoards in the Imperial Resort and wanted caves near their coin. He even had a nice crack in the wall where he could look out and take the air\u2014though he suspected his head would be too large to fit out the hole anymore as his horns began to come in\u2014and was near a cascade of only occasionally tainted water.\n\nTyr sent him a gift of a small bag of coins. He ate just a few and stuck the rest on a little shelf by a corner the bats were exploring for grips. He was a growing dragon and should think about establishing a hoard.\n\nHarf, Rhea, and Fourfang even had their own room just off his, with a thick curtain so it was warm and cozy. Naturally they set to squabbling when Harf started pawing at Rhea and trying to mate with her. The Copper sent Rhea to see about some fresh clothing for herself and Fourfang, for the journey had tattered their simple tunics, and put Harf to work scrubbing a noisome corner the previous tenant had left. Why couldn't dragons be bothered to use the waste pits?\n\n\"Fourfang, you know about these things. If she's not ready to mate, she shouldn't, right?\"\n\nFourfang probed his ears, perhaps prodding his brains into activity. \"Not know humans of many. Not want babies for sell?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure she's even mature enough for that. Don't they get those suckle points when they're ready for children? Bigger is better, no?\"\n\nFourfang thought that funny.\n\n\"Well, if he starts pawing at her again, stop him. Or tell her she can sleep in here, but there's a draft from that crack, I'm afraid.\"\n\nThe bats were happy to probe his scales for juicy ticks and fleas that had come along for the journey, and they told him of what they saw and heard while he was gone. Uninteresting bat gossip, mostly involving the movement of herds or sickly, deep-sleeping dragons. Old Thernadad, blinder than ever but still with some hearing, relayed some details of a good fight in the Drakwatch caves. The Copper decided that when he returned to the surface he'd take a few bats along, just to keep the vermin out of his hide.\n\nThe bats stirred at some motion in the outer passage. The Copper smelled rich perfumed oils.\n\n\"So you do keep bats,\" Tighlia said, thrusting her head in.\n\nThe bats flapped back up into their holes.\n\nShe sniffed at the bat crack and clamped her nostrils. \"I thought it was just gossip. Scale and tail, as my granddam used to say, it's cramped in here, and the bats are making my eyes water. I want to talk to you, Rugaard. I don't believe I can fit without squashing you. Perhaps you'd better come out into the passage.\"\n\nThe coins rolling around in his innards had left him in a contented mood, and he followed her fleshless hips out into the tunnel. She looked around, and though there was nothing but a sleeping thrall on a mat in front of a passage, waiting for her dragon to return, Tighlia still followed the sound of falling water to the cascade. She made a pretense of wetting her face.\n\n\"Now, my ill-favored little adoptive granddrake, I thought we should have a talk before you returned to Bant.\"\n\n\"Yes, Granddam. I'm honored by\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course. That's the only thing I can stand about you. You're polite rather than wheedling or sycophantic or challenging. For all your faults, it seems you have a good memory. I want you to send my compliments to my brother. Can you manage that?\"\n\n\"Yes, Granddam.\"\n\n\"With one piece of advice. This is imperative. If he's going to win a war in Bant, he needs to inspire the hominids. They're not thralls; he can't just threaten and bluster and drive to get what he wants. He has to handle them. Make them want the war.\"\n\nShe paused, so the Copper guessed she expected a reply. \"Handle them so they want the war.\"\n\n\"Yes. Aren't you wondering how?\"\n\n\"Doesn't he know?\"\n\n\"You've no intellectual curiosity at all, have you? Don't answer; you're tiresome enough when silent. My brother's much the same. The trick to getting hominids worked up for a war is to fixate them.\"\n\n\"Fixate them, Granddam?\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Yes. Find some old wrong the Ghi men have done to them and get them talking of nothing else. Make sure it's something long enough ago so the memory's clouded about exactly what happened. Then tell them all their difficulties spring from that source, like a salted well slowly poisoning the land around. Fixate! If their sheep are dying, it's because of the Ghi men. If the rain causes a mudslide, it's because the Ghi men cut down their trees. That kind of thing. Their brains can't hold more than three ideas at once, and my brother must make sure at least one of the ideas is useful to him.\"\n\nIf the hominids are so dull, why must we hide from them in the Lower World?\n\n\"Fixate them so they blame the Ghi men for everything. Yes.\"\n\n\"He should call an assembly of their king and shamans or witch doctors or whatever they have and put the idea into their heads.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Granddam.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For bending your thoughts to the crisis. The Lavadome is lucky to have such wisdom.\"\n\nShe let out what in another dragon might have been a prrum, but it was strangled deep in her throat and emerged as just a sort of gargle. \"You're almost a credit to my mate's wisdom, Rugaard. Now get back to my brother, before he flings his dragons against towers and war machines. The Bant think it's their country; they should be the ones dying for it.\"\n\nAs it turned out, he didn't return to SiDrakkon in time. After reluctantly pressing Harf into service as a food carrier, he, the bats riding in a two-layer basket, and his thralls made the surface two days sooner than it had taken on the trip with the main force, thanks to a quick passage on the rails. The Copper drove the cart day and night, sleeping uncomfortably on the noisy rails when he wasn't pulling.\n\nThe rains had turned the countryside green in the interval, and there were herds everywhere, following the water and growth. Dry washes now ran with water, and armies of frogs had appeared as though by magic.\n\nThe bats had good hunting at night, for the waters had awakened all manner of insect life as well.\n\nHarf disappeared one rain-filled night, and Fourfang guessed he'd run away. The Copper toyed with the idea of sending the bats to find him, but was in fact relieved to be rid of him, and wished him well. Fourfang prophesied: \"Day and day at most before lions eat him.\"\n\nThey reached the Mud City, and the Copper simply waited in an open square, watching some half-grown humans practice throwing spears, until NiThonius showed up. He'd taken the laundry off his horns with the rains, but he still looked haggard.\n\n\"I'm relieved to find you here,\" the Copper said. \"I really must learn a few words of this tongue. I can't even ask those children playing there where to find you.\"\n\n\"Children playing? That's part of the king's guard, now. Every family in Bant has had to send a fresh warrior, and rather than give up strong men they're sending the old and the young.\"\n\nSiDrakkon had taken his war, and what of the king's forces he could scrape together, all the way to the Black River. Nithonius gave him three blighter guides, who took him across the savanna, hunting as they traveled. They also taught him several words for the local flora and fauna, though he made little progress with the language beyond that.\n\nSo within two-score days' time of leaving the Lavadome he found himself on a bluff overlooking a green river valley, and a battle being lost.\n\nIt was a strange transition. One moment the Copper was walking up a long, grassy slope still wet with morning dew. A spotty-hided feline watched them from a dead tree limb, the silence so perfect he heard each grass-parting footstep from the guides in front and Fourfang and Rhea behind.\n\nThen they crossed the hillcrest into chaos.\n\nThe river broke into pieces here, lined with sandbars, some with trees up past their roots in floodwaters. On the far bank stood a fortress of the Ghi men: a rounded hill, crowded with stone housing and surrounded by a wide, stout wall and marshy ground. The fortress stood next to taller hills cut open and butchered for the stone they contained.\n\nA dead dragon lay on the riverbank, below a raised path that led up to the fortress gate. The path itself was littered with what looked like colorful bundles, and it was only after a moment's reflection that he realized they were bodies.\n\nAnother of the duelists lay, apparently unconscious, panting, bleeding, while a couple of blighters pulled gingerly at spear shafts sticking out of his underside. The Copper left Fourfang and Rhea with some gibbets of drying game and dead Ghi men and approached the wounded dragon. It was HeBellereth, the red.\n\nThe Copper looked downriver and saw confused motion at the bank of some eddies in the river. Bant men and blighters were riding or wading across the thigh-deep water, retreating from the far bank.\n\n\"One more flight, NoTannadon. Just one more flight,\" SiDrakkon was saying. \"You must keep them off the Drakwatch and what's left of the blighters. Otherwise they'll never get back across the river. They're out of range of the war machines now.\"\n\nThe duelist dug in his throat with his saa and extracted a piece of an arrow. \"And end up like HeBellereth, or the corpse across the river? Go yourself.\"\n\nSeveral deep thwack noises rose even to the hilltop, and the Copper saw the arms of war machines whipping up from thick hedges of concealing brush. They threw masses of stones high in the air, dark clouds that dispersed as they fell on the river crossing. Warriors threw cowhide shields up over their heads for protection, but they had no more effect than a mist. Blighters fell by the score.\n\n\"Curse them!\" SiDrakkon roared, and flapped into the air. He swooped down over the river crossing and loosed his flame upon the bushes and war machines.\n\nHe turned a tight circle over the river valley and plunged among the burning machines, throwing men and their constructs this way and that in his fury.\n\nThe Copper saw a group of Drakwatch clustered around Nivom\u2014he was easy to see at a distance, a white vesper with head rising again and again to call to the drakes. Nivom loosed his flame into a mass of rock and washed-up timber on the riverbank, and was rewarded by the sight of tin-helmeted Ghi men running, throwing aside their weapons. Nivom dashed through the inferno and came back with something in his mouth. He dropped it long enough to call to the last few Drakwatch on the north bank of the river, and as they plunged into the current he retrieved his prize and followed.\n\nThe blighters staggered back up the hill, some throwing themselves into the first piece of cover to pant or tend one another's wounds. The proud Drakwatch had an easier climb, being four-legged, save for the wounded. Nivom stalked right past his injured drakes and started up the hill.\n\nThe Copper looked from blighter to drake and back again. Dragons were a superior species in every physical respect. Their scale kept out arrows that felled the blighters, their crests could deflect a fall of stones such as rained down on the blighters at the ford, and their fire terrified even if it did not kill.\n\nBut the blighters would not abandon an injured fellow warrior to his fate.\n\nNivom threw down his captured weapon, a contraption of wood and metal, in some respects similar to a bow. \"Curse them. They're using dwarvish crossbows.\"\n\nA bleeding drake just made it to the top of the hill and collapsed. The Copper approached to see to his wounds, but the drake just snarled a warning: \"Keep off!\"\n\nThe wounded drake curled into a ball.\n\nSiDrakkon flapped across the river and landed on the hilltop, somewhat bloodied about the griff and gums. A blighter ran up and tugged at an arrow projecting from his saa, and the dragon growled and struck him down.\n\nOn the other side of the river, the Ghi men sallied out of their fortress, teams of spearmen hunting about the riverbank. They flushed a wounded drake and put an end to him. Wounded blighters they beheaded, digging into the ground the warriors' short stabbing spears and setting the taken heads atop, grisly flowers lining the road leading to the Ghi men's fortress.\n\n\"Come, NoTannadon,\" SiDrakkon said. If he noticed that the Copper had returned he gave no sign of it. \"We'll return to the Lavadome and there ask for more dragons to redeem this. Nivom, go back to the Mud City as best as you can. I'll return with two-score dragons ready for war!\"\n\nWith that he flapped into the air, the remaining duelist trailing behind.\n\n\"Rest a moment,\" Nivom said to some of the Drakwatch who rose to begin the long journey south. \"The Ghi men aren't crossing the river just yet. Might as well eat the hanging meat; Spirits know when we'll have full bellies again.\"\n\nHe looked at the receding dots of the dragons flying south. The wounded duelist gave a groan.\n\n\"Two-score dragons,\" Nivom said. \"Three will come over footsore and give up before they're out of the Lower World. Two will get into a duel, killing one and leaving the other too wounded to go on. Six will see all the game on the savanna here and decide to spend the season hunting instead of in warfare. One will see a village in the distance, immediately attack, and it will turn out that he just burned out some headman of the king's and will have to be sent back in disgrace. Four will argue with SiDrakkon about the orders he gives, and return to the Lavadome rather than serve under one they consider inferior to themselves. Two more will quit the first time an arrow goes home; for having shed blood honorably, they will consider their bit in the war over. Of the half-score remaining one will always be too ill to fight, another too cowardly, and a third will fly into a rage and die atop the first tower he sees. Leaving SiDrakkon with three reliable dragons again.\"\n\n\"You should have a mouthful yourself,\" the Copper said. He'd never heard Nivom so discouraged. \"Just as many lengths for you as the rest.\"\n\n\"What I'd like is some wine. Have you ever had wine, Rugaard?\"\n\n\"What about HeBellereth? And the wounded on the hillside?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"You think this is a training march? I won't bleed victorious dragons looking after losers.\"\n\n\"The blighters don't feel that way.\"\n\n\"Blighters!\"\n\nThe Copper stared off across the river. Trails of smoke rose from the town.\n\n\"It's that cursed wall that did it,\" Nivom said. \"See how the causeway runs along it? They could fire down on us, throw rocks. Rothor and NiHerrstrath tried climbing it, but they were picked off from the towers.\"\n\nSome of the Ghi men had ventured out beyond the broken gate and were crowded around the corpse of the dragon, cutting trophies of their victory.\n\nThe Copper suddenly noticed something about the wounded and the survivors. \"What happened to the Firemaidens?\"\n\n\"SiDrakkon grew desperate. After the first rush against the gate was thrown back, he sent the Firemaidens to lead the blighters. Some fell under the towers. I think that's Agania there, being lifted by those rats.\"\n\nThe Copper approached HeBellereth. The blighters had managed to get the horrible, hooked spear out, and the dragon lay on his side, panting. He rolled an anguished eye at the Copper.\n\nNivom shut his nostrils and walked over to the hanging meat.\n\n\"Can you walk, sir?\" the Copper asked.\n\nThe dragon managed to right himself. He got his hindquarters up, but managed only a short, shaky rise on his sii before collapsing again. \"No. I'm vanquished.\"\n\n\"I've been vanquished too,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Yet\u2026\" the dragon said, \"you wear laudi.\"\n\nThe Copper inflated his lungs, looked down at the wounded drakes struggling up the slope. He couldn't say who was talking or where the words were coming from, only that he was angry about the sacrifice of the Firemaidens, and the wretched humans across the river, pulling teeth and claws from the corpse of the dead dragon. \"Not yet! Drakwatch of the Lavadome, you're hurt but you're not dead. Not yet!\"\n\nA drake pulled himself out from the rocks at the bank of the river.\n\n\"Up. Up, drakes,\" the Copper said, rearing onto his hind legs, a strange clarity in his mind. \"Climb. On three legs if you have to.\" He waved his shriveled limb to emphasize his point.\n\nOne drake made it only a few paces before collapsing.\n\nThe Copper scrambled down the hill. The drake, a coppery color not much different from his own, was bled out, his gums and eye sockets almost white.\n\n\"Vanquished,\" the drake said. \"Cry vanquished for me. To what little glory I've earned I depart this\u2014\"\n\n\"Not yet! Climb on my back. I'll get you up the hill. You'll heal and get another chance at them.\"\n\nSix or seven blighter warriors were gathered nearby, resting and chewing on some kind of leaf. Some no longer had their spears or shields.\n\n\"Up the hill,\" the Copper said.\n\nThey looked at him blankly as the drake climbed on his back. Luckily he was slender-framed. The Copper gestured with his snout. \"To the top. Top.\"\n\nThe Copper appreciated the hill's difficulty more on the way up than on the trip down. Especially with the weight of a drake supported by only three limbs. The Ghi men would have a hard time coming up it, at least from the riverside.\n\nThe wounded drake's claws relaxed and he slipped off. The drake's tongue hung out as he breathed.\n\n\"Can you grip my tail?\"\n\nThe drake didn't answer; he just closed his teeth around the Copper's tail, then shut his eyes. The climb was harder, not to mention painful, with the deadweight of the drake pulling at his tail, but he made it to the others.\n\nThe wounded drake breathed no more. The Copper pried the jaws loose.\n\nHe thought furiously. The drakes would lose heart, staring at that cooling body.\n\n\"I don't know this drake. What was his name?\"\n\n\"Nirolf,\" another said.\n\n\"This is Nirolf's hill, then. Let's put him in those rocks, there, where he'll have a good view of the fight.\"\n\n\"Why name a hill after one who was vanquished?\" a drake asked.\n\nThe Copper didn't have an answer, so he just snarled and rattled his griff until the drake backed away.\n\nNivom returned to him, chewing, negotiating a course through the wounded drakes as though wishing to avoid droppings.\n\n\"What's this about you remaining behind?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm not so sure this battle is over.\"\n\n\"I am. I felt the rocks fall. I felt a dragon crash to the ground. Those stone houses of the Ghi men do not burn like some blighter village.\"\n\n\"There's still a fight in these drakes. The Ghi men will learn that if they try to come up this hill.\"\n\n\"Your honor,\" a drake said. \"If there're still fighting claws dug into this ground, I don't want to leave it.\" He sniffed at one of his wounded fellows with a scabby snout missing a few scales.\n\nNivom looked around. Enough of the unbled drakes had crept up to listen to the conversation, while still keeping their distance from the wounded, so he had an audience in two rings. The duelist dragon licking at the wound in his chest formed a little hill all his own.\n\n\"How do you propose this battle be fought? No wings, no mobility, and no hominid levees.\"\n\nThe Copper lowered his head. \"I'll follow any order you wish to give, Commander. As long as it doesn't involve my leaving this hill and the wounded.\"\n\n\"You mean the vanquished.\"\n\nHeBellereth lifted his massive scarred head. \"Not yet, drake.\"\n\nThe Copper felt a thought break loose in his mind. \"Yes! That's the spirit. Not yet. That will be our battle cry. Not yet.\"\n\nNivom took a deep breath. \"It'll be dark soon. We'll post wind sentries on the adjoining hills. If we get everyone out of sight they might think we've left. Then I'll slip back with a siisa to the ford\u2026.\"\n\nThe Copper could almost feel the heat from the gathered and the filling fire bladders. He looked across the river. \"Not yet, you milksops. Not yet.\"\n\nA scent Nivom called \"jasmine\" hung in the night air. The flowing moonlit waters beckoned below, seeming to tickle the base of the hill with silver fingers. Night birds warbled amid the flooded trees, their soft calls denying the existence of blood-caked spears and war machines that sent rocks hurtling from the skies.\n\nEven the fortress town on the opposite bank slumbered in peace, a few slivers of light showing from shuttered windows.\n\nThe night passed quietly. The remaining blighters, no more than a few score, clustered nervously behind the wounded HeBellereth. The Copper suspected they were too frightened to venture anywhere else.\n\nA rather long-haired blighter with unusually large eyes closed the wound in HeBellereth, using bits of sharp wooden peg and leather to close the gash.\n\nAs the sun went down the Copper asked Fourfang to go among the blighters and see if they'd be willing to send messengers to seek help from the nearby tribes. He'd seen enough burned villages while following the guides to the river to suspect that the local blighters would be more willing to fight the Ghi men than would those from farther south. He dispatched his own guides back to the king to report that there'd been fighting but it was \"inconclusive,\" and that they were camped within sight of the Ghi men's walls.\n\nThen he loosed his trio of bats on HeBellereth to do what they could to soothe his wounds. HeBellereth protested. Being tended to by savage, unenthralled blighters was bad enough, but he didn't want \"vermin\" nosing about his wound\u2014until the first licks and the numbing tingle the bat saliva brought made his eyes widen in amazement.\n\n\"Those are the biggest bats I've ever seen. They're like hunting dogs,\" Nivom said.\n\n\"They were raised on dragonblood,\" the Copper said. \"Almost from birth. It appears to agree with them.\"\n\n\"They'll get their fill this night.\"\n\nNivom told him what had transpired between his trip back to the Lavadome and his return. SiDrakkon sent NiThonius to the Mud City to press on the king the need for more forces\u2014men or blighter\u2014then he and his dragons caught a large force of Ghi cavalry in the open and scattered them. SiDrakkon concluded that with their main strength gone, it was time to strike at their largest settlement in Bant, the quarry city on the Black River.\n\nBut the Ghi men had prepared against the coming of the dragons. Poor iron spears, tin axes, and cowhide shields were met by steel broadswords, chain armor, and far-flying dwarvish crossbow bolts. As for the dragons, the war machines of the men struck as the dragons turned and dived, and every issue of flame was fought by bucketfuls of sand.\n\nLeading to the debacle the Copper had partly witnessed.\n\n\"They'll come in the morning to finish the wounded off,\" Nivom predicted.\n\n\"They'll have to cross the river to do that,\" the Copper said. \"Humans can't swim like drakes. Not with their false-scale.\"\n\n\"My father told me once that the best place to strike an upright is in the crotch, when they take a long step forward.\"\n\n\"Wise dragon. Does he still live?\"\n\n\"No. A Wyrr was he, like the Tyr himself, and distantly related. He lost his hill and his life to a Skotl-clan duelist. My mother, an Anklene, took her own in her despair.\"\n\nThe Copper thought it best to switch subjects, as Nivom could become gloomy, and he wanted his old cavemate alert and active. Every time talk turned to clan friction it left him nonplussed. Had not dragons enemies enough? \"So that's where you get your cleverness. The Anklenes.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't be surprised if you had some Anklene blood in you too. Your eye ridge is like theirs, though that odd eye spoils the effect. You spout strange ideas. Why all the concern over a vanquished drake?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can put it into words. How are you with mind-pictures?\"\n\n\"Baby stories? I'm a drake, and you're not my mother. Or some dragonelle angling to be flattered.\"\n\n\"In my travels I came across the bodies of two demen sitting back-to-back in a cave, as though they were guarding each other as they died of their wounds. When I smelled the bodies, it was just two more bodies; I'd seen plenty before. But that\u2026that\u2026comradeship\u2026\"\n\n\"Did you just say comradeship? That's a queer word. I think it's taken from a hominid tongue.\"\n\n\"Dragons could use a little of that, instead of always working out who's above whom and adding to their own store of glory and gold.\"\n\n\"You're not one of these foamers who wants everyone to have the same rank and offer up metals to those who can't be bothered to get it on their own, are you?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"We've had a sun-struck dragon or two before. Do your dreaming while you're asleep.\"\n\nThe Copper thought it best to change the course of the conversation. \"So what do you propose to do about catching them in the crotch?\"\n\n\"I'll take a sissa of the healthy drakes to the river. Can you handle matters here on the hillside, with the better of the wounded?\"\n\n\"Yes. I was thinking that trick they played, with their war machines hiding in the brush, could be played on them too. You grab them at the crotch and I'll bite their arms off.\"\n\n\"By the Earth Spirit, yes! Rugaard, I'd be proud to cry havoc with you at my side.\"\n\n\"I was thinking. Some cooperation from the blighters might help. How are you with their tongue?\"\n\n\"I know a little.\"\n\nThe Copper thought. \"I have a thrall who has a way of making himself agreeable. Maybe he can fill in the gaps.\"\n\nA very unlikely reinforcement arrived after a short rain squall\u2014the weather at this time of year seemed to mandate a rain in the early afternoon and a second in the long hours of the night before dawn\u2014a bashed and mud-splattered Firemaiden named Nilrasha.\n\nAccording to Fourfang, the blighters now named her Ora, a word that in their tongue referred to some hunting season festival or other, during which one of every kind of game animal was sacrificed to their capricious deities. But the blighter shaman always chose one sacrifice at random\u2014the Ora\u2014to be released back into the wild to let the rest of the game know that though the herds might be thinned and a few jaguars brought down, enough would be left to ensure future hunting. According to Fourfang, Ora either meant lucky or redeemed, as the rather fatalistic dragon-tongue didn't have many words for those blessed and guarded by the gods.\n\nThe Copper found her sucking rainwater off of leaves and eating some of the hung meat, and told her Fourfang's tale. While he did this a pair of blighters toasted meat on sticks and gave the bits to her.\n\n\"So that's why every muddy blighter on this hill's been patting me,\" Nilrasha said.\n\nShe had a lot of mud on her, and blades of grass caught in her scale. Drakka who joined the Firemaidens didn't shirk from dirt and muck, but they were usually cleaner than the drakes. This one either didn't give a flame for her appearance or was too tired to care for herself. \"What happened at the gate?\"\n\n\"It was so quick. I just remember a hail of projectiles: Some were stones; some were those infernal crossbow bolts. Mivonia in front of me, four struck her, two in the neck, or I wouldn't be speaking to you now. There was flame, and some of the blighters rushed into this sort of open space at the center of town. Then one of the dragons overhead was hit; I didn't see it, but I heard his cry as he fell. Everything went wrong after that.\"\n\n\"The blighters didn't run, then?\"\n\n\"No. Not the ones with us, by my maidenoath, though I can't speak for those behind. But the dragons overhead vanished and the men lost their fear. They poured down their walls and out of their towers.\n\n\"Some of the Firemaidens loosed their flame to drive the humans away with heat and smoke, and I chased some through a burning building. Then a wall or a roof fell on me, and I was senseless for a time, though\u2014this is very odd\u2014I heard my mother singing. I distinctly remember it. When the singing stopped it was night, and I moved and some rubble shifted, and then I found myself in their town. I sneaked out through a drain hole that goes under the wall. I think there was meant to be water in it all the time, for the walls and ceiling were covered with dead shell creatures, but something must have gone wrong with the flow, for it was dry everywhere but the floor. It let out by the river, so I just swam across and smelled my way back to the hill. And so you see me.\"\n\n\"We're going to see if we can't avenge your dead sisters tomorrow,\" the Copper said.\n\nNilrasha looked across the river. \"I should like that. By my maidenoath, I should like that very much.\"\n\n\"You've had enough honors. Stay back with HeBellereth, please. That route into the Ghi men's town may prove useful. I'd like your head to stay on your neck.\"\n\nShe rose, and some bits of hardened mud rained off.\n\n\"Who are you to give orders, Batt\u2014Rugaard? You're just a courier.\"\n\n\"I'm also the Tyr's eyes and ears wherever I go. I can be his voice as well, if griff meet teeth. But I'd much rather ask than order. So I ask again, please stay back behind HeBellereth. If matters go as badly as they did yesterday, I expect you'll have another chance to fight.\"\n\nThe blighters lit a few cooking fires, but just a few, on the hillside, allowing them to go out as the warm night passed. HeBellereth agreed to act as bait, and morning found him stretched out on the hill, head lolling, looking like one of those savanna rock piles of red scale.\n\nThe Ghi men were no fools, however. They marched their archers to the ford in the river and sent scouts across. The blighters threw spears, hiding from the archers behind the trees with their roots in the floodwaters. The blighters ran as soon as the men in glimmering armor went forward, arms linked at the elbows as they fought the current, crossing like some fantastic serpent.\n\nThe blighters got into the spirit of the game, gathering here and there on the hillside to scream insults at the men, sometimes tossing a rock that would go bouncing down the hill and land well short of their foes. Each rock was answered by a hail of arrows once the archers came across and the blighters retreated uphill.\n\nThe Ghi-men scouts, clad only in light tunics and sandals with a brace of javelins across their backs, hurried to high vantage points and blew signal horns. The archers crossed from behind. Men with long spears and tall shields had come across, and a group of heavily armored men with great helms and wide blades tied across their backs began to venture into the current.\n\nThe Copper watched all this from thick grass halfway up the hill, with strips of thick green sod dripping with ants and beetles laid across this back, his scale rubbed with dirt\u2014Rhea had misunderstood his orders at first, and braided some flowering bramble around his crest and tucked flowers into his spinal ridge. Once she understood that he wanted to be grubbed up, she put a thick paste of mud on every scale.\n\nThe Ghi-men scouts found the body of Nirolf lain atop a pile of rocks sticking up above the grasses of the hill, and went to work with their knives.\n\nThe drake near him, who'd wormed his way into the center of a thick succulent-leafed bush, growled.\n\n\"Still,\" the Copper ordered. But he liked the sound of their anger; it meant they'd got their spirit back.\n\nMore scouts hurried up toward HeBellereth. One pointed to the spot on his belly where partially digested coins could be found, and two set down their javelins and drew blades while a third kept watch, signal horn in one hand, javelin in the other.\n\nThe spearmen came up the hill in a rather ragged line, some falling behind thanks to rougher terrain, others forgetting themselves and hurrying toward the fallen dragon, eager for a chance at a trophy.\n\n\"Still,\" the Copper said again as the spearmen approached, but kept his good roving eye on HeBellereth. The duelist had unusually steady nerves to let a pair of men approach his leathery belly. Or had he slipped into unconsciousness?\n\nHeBellereth suddenly rolled, putting the two men under his massive weight.\n\nThe third scout's mouth dropped open, and he reached for his horn, brought it up toward his lips\u2014\n\nA flash of green scale exploded out of the hillside as Nilrasha leaped on the scout. The Copper's brain made sense of it only once it was over, so improbable was her sudden appearance, as though she were conjured up out of the blades of grass that could never conceal a creature of her size. The precision of her leap matched her stealth. She struck high, wrapping herself around her foe like a constricting snake, digging in with her claws, and the struggling pair toppled into the grass. The horn spun in the air and fell.\n\nWhy didn't Nivom start the contest? What was he waiting for? The lines of spearmen were almost to the dead tree that marked the widely spaced hiding holes of the wounded drakes\u2026.\n\nA warning horn on the hillside sounded. A scout, somewhere he couldn't see, must have seen HeBellereth move. The spearmen looked to their companions and stepped sideways to close\u2026.\n\n\"Cry havoc!\" the Copper roared\u2014well, trumpeted\u2014and if some sentry far down the river valley thought he heard a goose being strangled, it was because the Copper didn't have much of a roar yet.\n\nShowers of dirt flew in the air as the drakes rose. Bright gouts of flame erupted on the hillside, spreading and falling as it rained on the warriors. Screams of pain competed with the signal horns and bellows of the Ghi-men chieftains.\n\nThe Copper dragon-dashed forward, threw himself on a hastily upflung shield, and brought both shield and man down. He gouged, kicked out a saaful of belly organs as he'd done on practice bullocks, and moved on to the next target, a warrior running forward, spear set to skewer him.\n\nHis head whipped up and back and his chest muscles tightened. He spit\u2014what was this? A thin stream of liquid hit the man across the shield and shoulders, but no flame. The warrior danced for a second as though he were on fire, and then the Copper and the man locked eyes as they each realized what had happened. The Ghi man raised his spear for a throw, but a green flash flew over the Copper's head.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Nilrasha said, spitting out a mouthful of tendon and blood vessel from the warrior's gaping neck. \"They're running!\"\n\nSo they were. What was left of the spearmen hurried down the hill, using their spears as a third leg, holding their shields across their backs against further flame.\n\nThe Copper marked oily smoke rising from the riverside foliage. A body of swordsmen in a rough triangular formation let the archers pass through and take shelter behind their blades and shields. Little puffs flew from the formation into the trees on either side of the ford. The Copper realized he was seeing the bright feathering on the archers' arrows rather than the arrows themselves.\n\nA drake dashed forward, hurled himself onto the swords and shields, and disappeared into the mass of men. A cheer rose from the Ghi men.\n\n\"HeBellereth,\" the Copper called. \"We need a shield wall broken. Can you move?\"\n\n\"Out of my way, drakes!\" HeBellereth roared. \"I've hot blood to cool in that river. Try to take my gold-gizzard now, you dogs!\"\n\nThe dragon pushed off with his back legs and began to slide down the hillside on his belly. He tore through brush, snapped and flattened small trees, and a wounded drake only just limped out of the way before he pushed past, tail swinging as he tried to keep balance.\n\nAnd failed. He hit a steeper slope as he neared the river and one of his back legs slipped under his hindquarters. The great red dragon upended and fell sideways, rolling down the hill like a felled tree.\n\nBut he was too close for it to make a difference. What the men thought in those last heartbeats could only be imagined. Some of the archers fired, but the arrows had all the effect of pebbles hurled into floodwaters. The triangle dissolved, spreading to each side.\n\nHeBellereth righted himself in the center of the warriors, biting and thrashing. The battle turned into a rout. Pieces of armor and pieces of swordsmen flew in all directions.\n\nWhat was left of the swordsmen nearest the river ran for the ford. Spearmen, finding their line of retreat blocked by the raging red-scale, waded into the trees, only to be pulled under by drakes\u2014or a crocodile or two that smelled blood in the river and decided to take an easy meal courtesy of warfare.\n\nThe Copper spotted men and beasts pulling war machines that looked like oversize crossbows toward the bank of the river and hurried toward HeBellereth. But Nivom anticipated him and called for his drakes, and the mighty dragon, to take cover behind the trees at the riverbank. HeBellereth, his blood flaming in the heat of battle, even found the strength to fly a few dragonlengths to reach a thicker section of trees.\n\nThe catapults on the other side of the river sent a rain of stones, but they fell somewhat short of the bank. A drake or two waded into the river to roar defiance at the retreating men.\n\n\"We gutted them,\" a drake said, looking at the bodies scattered on the hillside.\n\n\"This is news our Tyr will wish to hear,\" Nivom said. Blood ran from both nostrils, but his eyes were bright with triumph.\n\n\"We've just given them a shock,\" the Copper said. \"Now it's time to complete the victory and burn that city. Our good Firemaiden Nilrasha knows a way in\u2014\"\n\n\"Ghioz is strong. They'll send armies to avenge their dead.\"\n\nNilrasha appeared at his side with her usual stealth. \"The bigger the army the better,\" she said. \"More mouths to feed. Let them sit behind their burned-out walls and starve; we'll cut off their flocks and take their wagons.\"\n\nThe Copper half expected Nivom to roar and snap, for some captains didn't like arguments. Nivom just said, \"We've traded blood for blood; it's time to send in the king's headmen and arrange a peace. They may be inclined to agree to stay on the north side of the river from now on.\"\n\n\"Our Tyr won't like the sound of that. A fight, a win, and a peace will please him,\" Nilrasha said. \"Honors all around.\"\n\nNivom, for all his brains, had little experience with hominids. The Copper knew what bargaining with hominids brought. They designed deals only to get what they wanted for a moment, and the instant their need was met, the deal was forgotten. They had to be made to shake in fear of ever giving offense to dragonhood, and tuck their squalling broods in at night with tales of fiery vengeance falling from the skies if the scaled gods were offended.\n\n\"You won't get a lasting peace unless you're negotiating from a position of strength,\" the Copper said. Nilrasha chirped agreement, sniffing him now that his blood was up.\n\n\"'Settle terms only once your claws are pressing their neck to the ground,'\" Nilrasha quoted, using one of NoSohoth's briefer maxims.\n\n\"The Upholder would just as soon end this war quickly,\" Nivom said. \"In his Uphold, NiThonius speaks with the Tyr's voice.\"\n\nThe Copper tried to count the warriors left in the towers, his blood cooling and the wisdom of Nivom's words settling his scale. \"A few days behind those stone walls and they'll mourn their dead and get over their fear. They'd give in fast enough if there were nothing between them and the blighter tribes but a pile of rubble. If only we could bring them down somehow.\"\n\n\"Yes, the walls are an enemy as strong as the Ghi men. But I saw fire slide off the stones like rain,\" Nilrasha said.\n\n\"War machines would help,\" the Copper said. \"Couldn't the blighters build some?\"\n\nNivom sighed. \"Not to match the Ghi men's. They're cleverer when it comes to such contraptions, and they have better steel and wood than the bleached-out timber under this sun around here. Their projectiles can always fly higher and farther\u2026.\n\nNivom gave a little choke, and the Copper wondered if he was having an attack of some kind. Had a poisoned arrow pierced him somewhere unsuspected?\n\n\"Air Spirit, Rugaard! I think we can do it. Yes, I'm sure we can!\"\n\nOver the next day the two sides gathered, each on their own bank of the river. According to the blighters some of the smaller farming settlements and posts had been abandoned as Ghi men sought safety for their families behind the thick stone walls of the town. Boats soon crowded the riverside below the town, and herds sheltered at night beneath the city walls.\n\nThe blighters gathered too, but some of them, seeing no fight at the moment, little food, and no plunder, grew bored and wandered away. Even the king himself came, with NiThonius and such forces as could be spared from guarding the river crossings, which set the blighters all to groveling and celebrating as they heaped the few remaining captured weapons at his feet.\n\nMeanwhile, Nivom worked with HeBellereth. The dragon recovered from his wounds quickly, eating rainy-season-fat Bant cattle and gazelles, though he sometimes winced when he had to walk far. The king watched HeBellereth's endless flights and practice drops with the stones, and then ordered his people to assist the dragons with their strong backs.\n\nEach day the Copper took Rhea to the riverbank for water and bathing. He liked to check on the men's boats in any case, to see if it looked as though any had been loaded. There were two-score or more small, narrow vessels and they could get a substantial force over the river if they so desired. Once satisfied that another day had passed with the two armies glowering at each other from their opposite points, they went to an island-sheltered bank and he'd let Rhea bathe him, and herself. He ventured out into the pool first to check for crocodiles; then she went in and scrubbed him over with rushes. Sometimes he would roll over and she'd tickle his belly.\n\nFourfang didn't think much of bathing, but he took a captured Ghi-man spear into knee-deep water and came back with a fish or two, sucker-mouthed bottom-feeders that he would fry on an old shield, bathed in herbs.\n\nWhile they dried, Rhea would sometimes skip stones at Fourfang and spoil his fishing. She took perverse pleasure in making the blighter splash around and curse her. At times she laughed, and the Copper found the sound so pleasing that he prevented Fourfang from thrashing her with cattail stalks.\n\nNivom joined them one evening.\n\n\"I wonder if this will work after all,\" Nivom said. \"Should we even attempt it if it might fail? Another failure before their walls will just encourage the Ghi men. The king sent a messenger across, letting the Ghi men know he was present, but they sent forth no emissary to plead for peace.\"\n\n\"Is he having trouble dropping the stones?\"\n\n\"If he releases them too high, he misses the target marker. If he releases them low enough so they're sure to hit, he'll pass over the town belly-down. Their war machines will get a chance at him then, and it will probably take many stones to collapse the wall. He still wants to try. It's a terrible thing to have a vision and not be able to see it through.\"\n\nThe Copper didn't know what to say. If Nivom wasn't smart enough to figure out how the walls might be brought down, the Copper certainly couldn't improve on his plans and practices.\n\nOut in the pool Fourfang speared a fish and bent over to retrieve it. The Copper nosed a river-smoothed rock toward Rhea.\n\nShe cackled and picked up the stone, then flung it with her arm out sideways so it skipped across the water and hit Fourfang square in that odd assortment of reproductive apparatus male mammals displayed.\n\nFourfang howled as he clutched his fish and his loincloth.\n\nNivom took a startled breath. \"Of course! Of course! Why didn't it occur to me? Speed\u2014speed's the thing, and he can get all he wants far from the walls. That's it, Rugaard; your little human did it!\"\n\nHe hurried off up the hill without any more explanation.\n\nSiDrakkon returned before Nivom's attempt against the walls could be put into effect. He seemed rather surprised to find the drakes and HeBellereth still camped on that hilltop, with some of the signs of an intact army at war: herds of cattle and goats, blighters making charcoal, members of the Drakwatch on the adjoining hills and keeping watch from stone piles on the savanna.\n\nWith him were two young dragons with wings freshly uncased, and another veteran duelist, a one-eyed, rather fat dragon who collapsed to the ground as soon as they alighted and roared for food to be brought to him.\n\n\"Cursed ill luck,\" SiDrakkon said, looking south at the rolling cloud banks portending the afternoon's rain. \"I set out from the Lavadome with a full score, but everyone had to get a turn of hunting in when they weren't arguing. I've brought what I can; the rest will catch up or deal with my wrath on their return.\"\n\nNivom and the Copper exchanged a soft snort.\n\nSiDrakkon looked from the working blighters, using drag ropes to bring a boulder up the hill, to Nilrasha teaching some of the Drakwatch how to stalk in tall grass, to the temporary huts and corrals that had been built for the Bant king and his retinue.\n\n\"What transpires here?\" SiDrakkon asked.\n\n\"We're preparing for an attack on the walls,\" Nivom said.\n\n\"With what forces?\"\n\n\"HeBellereth.\"\n\n\"He lives? Good. But one dragon would be wasted. Now, with all five of us, we've got a good chance of clearing those towers of war machines.\"\n\n\"They've built more, many more, on every rooftop in the town,\" Nivom said. \"You can see them from our hilltop.\"\n\n\"Delay always allows the enemy time to prepare,\" SiDrakkon said. \"Still, enough fire should make them abandon their machines. It may take several days, but I've seen it done.\"\n\n\"Your honor, Nivom has a plan to bring down the walls,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Sacrifice every blighter here to the Earth Spirit; it still won't bring an earthquake.\"\n\n\"No, sir. With rocks. Dropped by HeBellereth.\"\n\n\"Ahh, youth,\" SiDrakkon said, softening his tone a little. \"Always thinking they can reinvent warfare. It's been tried in other places. Never works\u2014not one stone out of scores of scores goes true. No, I've got the experience.\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Nivom said. \"It's a matter of force and momentum. He's been knocking down trees for days now\u2014\"\n\nSiDrakkon's griff dropped and rattled. \"Trees don't shoot back. No, we'll start this very night. No, not another word out of either of you! It seems I got here just in time before you all got yourselves killed. Fire and terror are the way to go with humans; believe me. They're not dwarves, after all. Fire and terror, drakes. Fire and terror. Now, we've got to hurry. According to the griffaran there's an army of Ghi men on the march, big enough to sweep this collection and two more besides off these hills.\"\n\nSiDrakkon's second assault on the city walls was an improvement on the first only in its brevity. His duelist, enraged by javelins fired into his wings and belly, plunged into the city, and managed to make a good deal of noise roaring and smashing before he was silenced. The two young dragons, fast friends since their days in the Drakwatch, according to Nivom, died together when one was brought down in front of the gate tower and the other flew to fight beside him.\n\nHeBellereth had the sense to empty his fire bladder in one long pass over the city and returned, setting the blighters to work fastening shut the holes in his wings with bits of leather and wooden pegs.\n\n\"They're ready for dragons, all right,\" HeBellereth said, wincing as a bone needle passed through his wing skin.\n\nSiDrakkon alighted and the blighters ran from his growlings. He knocked over a tree with his tail and tore apart a meat-smoking hut.\n\n\"With four more dragons I could have done it,\" he raged. \"Three to go in and draw fire, and the rest to attack the war machines before they could be reloaded. Only four more!\"\n\nNivom had a few words with HeBellereth and approached SiDrakkon. \"Your honor, we can still try the rocks. HeBellereth is willing, and he wasn't injured.\"\n\n\"I should think not, the way he dropped his flame and flapped away. Yes. Send him back over there. I'd like to see that.\"\n\nNivom set the blighters to work at the rock pile. There was a good deal of cheering and horn blowing from the other side of the river, and the men ventured from their gates to swarm over the corpses of the young dragons like hungry ants on a bit of dropped fruit.\n\nHeBellereth waddled over to the steepest part of the hill, and the blighters, who'd rolled a more or less round boulder into position at the edge of the cliff, jostled for positions to watch.\n\n\"No. He'll never get off the ground with that. It's too big,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\nHeBellereth clutched the boulder against his chest, wrapping his front limbs about it, spread his wings, and launched himself off the cliff.\n\nSiDrakkon, who hadn't seen the stunt, stood with mouth agape as HeBellereth picked up speed down the steep hill. Then he leveled off, shooting down the river.\n\n\"He's going downstream,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\n\"Just watch, your honor,\" Nivom said. \"He just needs a long, straight run. We're going to try for that ramp leading up to the main gate.\"\n\nHeBellereth shrank to a hard-to-see shadow against the night sky, banked, then rose a little using his momentum, and for a moment the Copper could see him framed against the low-hanging moon.\n\nThe dragon adjusted his course, rose with a few strong flaps, and then extended his wings as wide as he could and began a long glide toward the city.\n\n\"His idea, the glide,\" Nivom said. \"Oh, I can't wait until I get my wings, can you, Rugaard?\"\n\nThe Copper didn't say anything. There was a chance, he supposed, that his wings would come in properly. The injury from that foul human seemed so long ago now.\n\nThen HeBellereth was over the ground. Several arrow-flights away from the city walls, he released his boulder and soared off across the river, skimming the surface low enough that his wing tips broke the surface as they beat.\n\nHis stone bounced twice up the causeway. The first time its trajectory was almost flat; the second it must have caught on some projection, because it flew almost straight up. It struck hard just over the gate.\n\n\"Well, that didn't seem to do much.\"\n\n\"The angle was wrong,\" Nivom said, sounding a little doubtful. \"It took a bad bounce.\"\n\nHeBellereth came up and rested for a few minutes. Nivom helped the blighters select another stone and roll it into position.\n\n\"You're wasting your time, I think. But if it amuses you\u2026\"\n\n\"Not an arrow struck home,\" HeBellereth said. \"Attacking a town is hatchling play if you can keep your scale to the wretches.\"\n\n\"I found a rounder one,\" Nivom said, returning with the blighters rolling the stone to the edge of the bluff. \"If only we had some dwarvish stonecutters. Rounded stones would fly truer.\"\n\nHeBellereth repeated his performance, falling, then turning downstream and banking once again for the drop. Nivom held his breath as the stone was loosed. The Copper noticed Fourfang and Rhea crouching in the underbrush, clear of SiDrakkon's eye, watching as well.\n\nThis time the boulder stayed low as it bounced. It hit the tower next to the gate, and they heard a series of shouts and crashes from the buildings in town.\n\n\"Did it! Did it!\" Nivom said. \"It punched straight through; did you hear?\"\n\nSiDrakkon resettled his wings. \"So you made a peephole in the wall. Much good it does us.\"\n\n\"Let me take that big, diamond-shaped one,\" HeBellereth said, panting a little. \"Just let me rest for a moment. They're shooting at me as I pass the wall, not as I approach. I think I can release it closer.\"\n\n\"If you think you can do it,\" Nivom said.\n\nThis boulder was a little larger than the others, and the watchers heard tree limbs snap as HeBellereth passed over them. On this flight, rather than releasing it low over the causeway, he altered his wings so he rose, and released the boulder on the upswing. HeBellereth executed an elegant turn, keeping his belly away from the city walls.\n\nThe boulder transcribed a short arc and struck the wall with a crack the Copper felt all the way across the river. The gate tower shuddered, then toppled backward with a long, groaning crash, sending up a cloud of dust.\n\n\"I'll be gutted,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\nThe gate crumbled next; then a piece of wall where the tower had been attached fell away. A huge, crescent-shaped gap opened up.\n\nThe Copper roused Fourfang with a poke of his tail and sent the blighter to give a message to the king.\n\nHeBellereth returned, a big chunk of his wing flapping as he landed. \"Stitchers!\" he roared. \"They punched a hole in me with a rock of their own,\" he said as the blighters went to work.\n\n\"You've done enough for now. Rest,\" Nivom said.\n\n\"I'm getting the wind under me now,\" HeBellereth said. \"I'll bring down another section of wall before you can recite Ryu-Var's Tally of Drakine Virtues\u2014if I can get this wing fixed.\"\n\n\"Can you teach me how to do this, Nivom?\" SiDrakkon asked.\n\n\"It takes practice. Some days of work,\" HeBellereth said.\n\n\"The cheering and horn blowing have stopped over there, I notice,\" the Copper said.\n\nHeBellereth put in a long night, making two-score or more runs. Some simply missed, or the boulder bounced wrong, or it did no apparent damage. But by the time dawn came up the town looked very different. The smooth stone wall had been opened in three wide sections, the entire gate area lay in ruins, and the southernmost tower had collapsed, leaving a whole quarter of the city undefended.\n\nThe humans were frantically arranging the rubble to form an improvised wall.\n\nBut the real blow to the Ghi men came at dawn. The sun came up to reveal the king's army camped south of the city, the hillsides thick with squatting blighters that made them look like vast melon fields. The tribes howled and clashed their spears against their leather shields, setting up a steady, doom-laden thrumming that echoed from bluff to bluff in the river valley. The Copper wondered if any human in those closely packed streets counted on still drawing breath by the next sunset.\n\nRhea stood and watched through the night, trembling and crying, and refused any food or comfort.\n\nIn the end, the king sent forth a messenger once again, announcing his presence and leaving it to the Ghi men to decide. They met on a hilltop thick with fuzzy fruit the blighters called \"sweetdrops,\" and the Peace of the Sweetdrop was announced.\n\nThe Copper, though cynical about such arrangements, had to admit that the terms were very advantageous to Bant. NiThonius himself advised the king on the whys and wherefores.\n\nNo Ghi man would come south of the Black River without seeking the king's permission.\n\nThe Ghi men would keep their mines and saltworks, but pay over the worth of one burden out of ten extracted from Bant in the form of coin, goods, or thralls. Value of goods or thralls would be determined by the king's representatives at the mines. New mines and works would be opened only with Bant's permission.\n\nAs a sop to the Ghi men, the Black River would be considered open to commercial traffic to the sea, and trading posts would be kept, along with sufficient garrisons to defend them from bandits.\n\nThe Copper wasn't sure that there could be a permanent peace with hominids\u2014either abject submission into thralldom or the peace of a corpse was the only practical alternative\u2014but even the historian Rethothanna chuckled when he said so on his return to the Lavadome. Though she knew the evidence flanking his arguments better than any, she said, \"We must make do with fortune when it favors us.\"\n\nThe mighty\u2014and now newly victorious, thanks to the events in Bant\u2014Tyr heard the report in the shadowy gardens of the Imperial Resort atop Black Rock, with accompanying songs and stories of the returned Drakwatch, the lone Firemaiden Nilrasha (whom the blighters, even in the Lower World, forever after called Ora), and his mate-brother.\n\nThe march back had been one of the most pleasant experiences of the Copper's life. The blighters sacrificed bullocks to the dragons all along the way, and held bonfires in their honor, where the tribal youths and maidens danced until they dropped in exhaustion. The king's praise-singers wore out even their iron throats describing the victory, and the Firemaids at the entrance to the lower world bowed at head and tail as their contingent passed.\n\nEven SiDrakkon was in a good mood for once. He let Rhea, easily the most comely of all the thralls in their party, ride on a strapped-down cushion at the high ridge of his back and wave at the garland-throwing crowds.\n\nThough the Copper asked several dragons, none could tell him anything about his strange failure of flame. He could bring up tiny wads from his fire bladder, which when spit would flare after a moment. As an experiment he brought up every drop he could squeeze out. It just splattered and gave off a sulfurous, oily smell.\n\nHe finally realized he had one more crippling injury to add to the others. At least this one wasn't visible. No dragonelle would flutter her eyes in amusement.\n\nEven wise old NeStirrath could only guess that it had something to do with the injury to his fire bladder, from the fight with the demen over the griffaran eggs. NeStirrath had a thrall touch a torch to his spew, and it burned brightly enough, but wouldn't ignite on its own if he brought it up in any quantity.\n\nTo celebrate the victory in Bant, the Tyr commanded a garden-filling banquet, inviting not only the dragons of the Imperial line but the chief dragons of the other hills of the Lavadome.\n\nThe Copper made no effort to color his scale; he just had Rhea make it as clean and even as possible. She tried covering his bad eye with a bit of red silk she'd taken off one of the Ghi-men bodies, but the result made him look like he was flaunting an injury, so he told her to keep it.\n\nThis banquet was more splendid than the last. The great dragons brought their own thralls to help attend them, and offered up whole bullocks and hogs and bone-crusted river fish as long as a drake and wine aged in artisan glass to the Tyr to add to the gorging and merriment.\n\nThe Copper kept to the edges of the banquet this time, in no mood for gorging himself as Simevolant made jokes about the walls of a Ghi-men city being brought down by HeBellereth's tailventings rather than stones.\n\nFools! Just because they happen to be safe and well fed now, that does not mean things will always be so comfortable. The bones of four dragons are being nibbled at by those tasty fish of the Black River, and all they can do is laugh over jokes about bodily functions.\n\nHe passed the time with Rethothanna. She questioned him closely about conditions in Bant, and especially about the weight and composition of the stones.\n\n\"They were reddish, some sparkle to them. I can't say more,\" he answered. \"The Ghi men made use of them in building their walls, homes, and the ford, by the look of it. There were cuts in the hillsides to extract it.\"\n\n\"Iron balls would be better. I've heard of the dwarves using them in warfare against dragons. They attach them to harpoons and then bring the dragons down with their weight.\"\n\nNoSohoth approached and gave the briefest of bows to Rethothanna. \"Famed historian, beloved of the Tyr for her wisdom. May I tear Rugaard from you for a moment? A small question has come up regarding events in Bant.\"\n\nRethothanna bowed deeply, not so much to NoSohoth but to the command of the Tyr. \"Off you go then, Rugaard. Though personally I'd rather be dropped into a dueling pit.\"\n\nThe Copper approached the great dragons, perched on benches above the banquet pit, braziers all around burning oliban. The Tyr and his mate, with SiDrakkon on one side and Nivom on his other, clustered about with the three granddaughters of the Tyr. The Copper limped up and made a greeting bow.\n\nThe Tyr looked from one wingside to the other. \"Ahh, er, Rugaard, we've run into something of a question that I was hoping you'd help us with.\"\n\n\"Of course, Tyr.\"\n\n\"I won't have lies spread about my brother, whatever the source,\" Tighlia said. \"This half-wit can't tell vermin from griffaran.\"\n\nThe Copper felt a quick flush. How good it would be to attend a banquet like this with Zara. Her eyes would burn like the sun, as Tighlia's did, when others made jokes. He didn't care what Tighlia thought of him; he rather admired her for her defense of her brother.\n\nThe silence, threatening from SiDrakkon, cautious from Nivom, put Rugaard on edge.\n\n\"Please be quiet, my love,\" Tyr said. \"Rugaard. It seems negotiations were made possible only by a good deal of damage to the walls of that stone city on the Black River. Can you enlighten us as to how that came about?\"\n\nThe Copper wondered if he could be challenged to a duel over his answer. \"I believe so. HeBellereth knocked them down by dropping stones.\"\n\n\"Bravely done, yes,\" the Tyr said. \"But how did all that come about?\"\n\n\"The idea was Nivom's. He and HeBellereth worked on it for days, practicing, and he put the blighters to work finding the right kinds of boulders and gathering them. The night of the battle SiDrakkon ordered the actual attack, and of course he was in command at the time.\"\n\n\"Ha! See, the victory is mine,\" SiDrakkon thundered.\n\nThe Tyr flapped a wing. \"Quiet now; don't intimidate this drake. Now, Rugaard, correct me if I'm wrong, but the stones were used only after an attack had failed. An attack that cost the lives of three dragons. Am I wrong in any detail?\"\n\n\"The last thing I'd wish to do is correct my grandsire,\" the Copper said.\n\nThe Tyr snorted. \"Yes or no, do I have it right?\"\n\n\"Yes, great Tyr.\"\n\nNivom seemed to swell. SiDrakkon's tail knocked over two braziers, and thralls rushed forward to right them and pour water on the smoldering coals and incense.\n\n\"Is that all, Grandsire?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Tyr, this fool had a thrall run away on him, I believe,\" SiDrakkon said. \"Escaped into Bant. A man named, er, Harb.\"\n\n\"Harf,\" the Copper corrected, wondering how SiDrakkon knew that.\n\n\"Don't bother me with trivia,\" the Tyr said. \"I know your games, SiDrakkon. I want to know the truth about events in Bant, not the comings and goings of dropping scrapers.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for his escape, Tyr,\" the Copper said. \"Should I have chased him down?\"\n\n\"Never mind that. There's one other question. It seems after my mate's brother lost two dragons on the first assault on the fortress, he gave orders for a retreat south. Why weren't those orders followed?\"\n\n\"We were in a strong position, Tyr, and the Ghi men had lost much of their cavalry.\"\n\nTyr cocked his head. \"According to some, everyone was ready to quit the hill until you said you'd stay by the wounded. HeBellereth insists that it was you who wanted to stick and fight.\"\n\n\"HeBellereth was badly hurt at that point. I helped look after his wounds, so that could be why he remembers me. Nivom was in command, Tyr. The glory and honor of the victory the next day belong to him\u2014and HeBellereth, of course\u2014for breaking the shield wall with his own body.\"\n\n\"Someone really must make a song about all this,\" Tyr said. \"NoSohoth, call for silence. I want the banquet to hear something.\"\n\nNoSohoth raised his wings, which had little chimes looped into the trailing edge. He flapped them, and at the ringing the company turned their attention to him. \"Our glorious Tyr asks for silence.\"\n\nThe Copper slunk out of the way so he wouldn't obstruct anyone's view.\n\n\"Answer my thoughts, for a change!\" Tighlia hissed into her mate's ear. \"Let us retire and discuss before you make any announcements.\"\n\nThe Tyr ignored her. \"Free dragons of the Lavadome and hope of our united lines. Twice now this honored drake at my right side, Nivom, has done great service to all of us.\n\n\"First, let it be known that I'm adopting him into the Imperial line. As a son, mind you, to replace AgGriffopse in position if not in our hearts.\"\n\nThat set the banquet to talking. NoSohoth had to sound his wing chimes again to give them time to settle down.\n\n\"Second, I'm getting older and don't have the attention to detail I once possessed. Nivom will take a few of the lesser responsibilities from my wings, that I might be able to pay more attention to the greater.\n\n\"Finally and most pleasantly, he'll soon be sprouting his wings, and it will be time for him to be mated. I offer any of the daughters of AgGriffopse, the champion of my only clutch, to him, so that we might be joined by more than duty and respect. He can look forward to some pleasant years choosing among my beauties, for their wings are just beginning to bulge.\"\n\nThe assembly at the banquet liked the sound of that and thumped their tails. Thralls danced out of the way to avoid being struck.\n\nThe Tyr's young granddaughters fluttered their eyes and griffs, save for the sickly one, who shrank behind her longer, stronger, better-fleshed sisters.\n\n\"I hope he's not expecting a blushing maiden,\" Simevolant said, staring at them.\n\nThe Copper glanced back at his own spine. Two ridges ran down it, parallel to his vertebrae. His were some years off too, but it made him feel better to know that horns and wings were growing.\n\nSiDrakkon left the banquet almost immediately. The Copper grabbed a dropped mouthful or two but kept away from the throngs. They dragons either asked idiotic questions about whether arrow wounds stung much or joked about his bats.\n\n\"You, there,\" a cold voice said. \"Rugaard. Come and have a word with me.\"\n\nIt was Tighlia, and her scales were up and out as though she were expecting battle. She led him to a prominence looking out over the south end of the Lavadome, where fewer orange streams lit the crystalline surface.\n\n\"Hurry along now and sit beside me. Yes, close to the edge, so you have a good view. Oh, don't blanch; I've never pushed anyone to his death, and I'm not about to start tonight.\n\n\"I like this view. There was never the fighting at the south end of the Lavadome that there was at the north. Just a few thrall hills and livestock pens and mushroom fields. No memories of where friends died.\"\n\n\"Was this what you wanted to speak to me about?\"\n\n\"No, outcast. My time is too valuable. I expect my mate will have you in for a little chat shortly. You might want to tell him that this Nivom fellow isn't all he appears.\"\n\n\"What makes you think so?\"\n\nShe scowled. \"I know a calculator when I smell one. He weighs everything by his own ambitions. I fear for what will happen if the Tyrancy passes to a Wyrr-Anklene mix. There's already resentment in many Skotl caves. They will have their turn at the Tyrancy one way or another. Civil war could break out again.\"\n\n\"Why do you tell me this?\"\n\n\"Because, oddly enough, I think you've got the simpleton's faith. The same as my mate has. You're duller\u2014and uglier, certainly\u2014but I believe you think of dragonkind first and yourself second. My mate has that quality too.\"\n\n\"He has all a dragon's virtues\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, rot all that tripe. Virtues? What's the first of them?\"\n\nThe Copper thought for a moment, remembering his lessons. \"Destiny. The gifts of the four Spirits in shaping\u2014\"\n\n\"Mythological balderdash that lets dragons with nothing to offer the world get puffed up about themselves. Next!\"\n\n\"But everyone knows\u2014\"\n\n\"No, they don't. That's the problem. Let's have another; your tongue's slow as your wit.\"\n\nThe Copper stiffened. \"Courage to\u2014\"\n\n\"Courage? Exhibitions of courage have killed more dragons than spears. Give me a dragon who sneaks in when the warriors are otherwise engaged and visits the cribs of the hominids; they put up as much of a fight as squalling babes. Next.\"\n\nThe Copper found her aroma warm, comforting, pleasant. Almost motherly. She was obviously enjoying this. \"You can't have anything against fidelity to mate, kith and kin. Every dragon in the Lavadome admires your devotion to our Tyr. You and your brother\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not old enough to know better. We'll talk again when your mating flight was four scale-ages ago, and your precious clutch champion has breathed fire into your face as he drives you away from your hoard. When some bright young thing spreads her wings for you and promises better times, we'll speak again. Come, come, I'm eager for more.\"\n\n\"Serenity.\"\n\n\"Now, there you may have something. It's the dragon who can control his emotions, wait instead of rage, take an insult or a setback with a song\u2014that's a dragon to be feared. Never let your thoughts past your tongue; never let a competitor know what you really think of him.\"\n\n\"Then why do you tell me what you think of me?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Because you're the sorry, sawed-off tail-tip of the Imperial line, not a competitor. Go on now; you've scored a hit. Press home.\"\n\nThe Copper thought it over. Tighlia was mistress of a thousand details in the Imperial Resort, from arranging matings to seeing after the quality of her mate's kern. \"Diligence. It's attention to detail in the routines of\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, and now you've gagged on it. Strained at a bat and swallowed a warthog. I'm devoted to idleness. Adore it. Gives one time to think. You'd be amazed how few dragons sit down and just think these days. Don't look cross; I'm giving you medicine that tastes bad, but it'll do you good if you have the sense to repeat the dosage.\" She tapped her claws on the shining black stone of the rock. \"I'm waiting.\"\n\n\"I was going to say charity to those in your thrall, but I expect you'd answer that the more you task them, and the greater they fear you, the better the results.\"\n\n\"Now you're learning. Maybe you're not hopeless after all. There's only one left, so I'll save you the breath. Strength. Strength I believe in. But I'm not talking about roaring and stomping and being able to knock down trees with your tail. That just brings the foemen. Intellectual strength to form a plan, physical strength to carry it out, and moral strength to see it through\u2014those are virtues indeed. That alone will take you farther than the rest of your Drakwatch ideals put together.\"\n\n\"Why do you tell me all this, Granddam?\"\n\nShe winced as though struck. \"Tomorrow a messenger will come for you, asking for a private interview with my mate. He's going to give you a new position as a reward. An important one. I don't want you buggering it up and making slippery bat droppings out of it. Husband your strength and display serenity, and you'll do well enough.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Granddam.\"\n\n\"That's not all. My mate may ask you about SiDrakkon and matters in Bant. Praise him and you'll find me grateful. Those who are good to me make no complaints about my kindnesses in return. But guard your tongue against any slanders, if you know what's good for you.\"\n\n\"I have no slanders to offer, Granddam.\"\n\n\"That's a clever answer, drake. Be equally clever when you talk to my mate tomorrow.\"\n\nHe spent a restless night in his cave, listening to the bats go in and out. Two new litters of hungry young bats suckled at a vein on his inner saa, leaving him rather dreamy.\n\nHe rose early and had a hearty chicken-and-kern breakfast brought by Fourfang, who burped and vented all while arranging the platters, proof that he had filched a hearty portion for himself.\n\n\"Let me smell your fingers, Fourfang.\"\n\nThe blighter shrank away. The Copper clacked his teeth together. \"Your fingers or your head. Which will it be?\"\n\nTrembling, the blighter held out his hairy hands. The Copper sniffed them.\n\n\"I thought so. Don't go digging around in my dishes before I've eaten, or I'll bite few fingers off next time. Wait until after I've finished, like Rhea. Don't I always leave generous portions?\"\n\n\"Yes, your honor.\"\n\n\"You're not the cleanest with your hands, Fourfang. Your always either digging in some orifice or scratching scabs. In either case I don't like the residue in my food. Just the other night I was offered an elf to take your place.\" Which wasn't true, but Fourfang couldn't know that.\n\n\"I hope to see some improvement in the future, or I'll have to make changes. But I hate unpleasant talk at the beginning of the day. Draw some water and take care of these bat droppings, won't you?\"\n\nFourfang showed admirable energy in getting a bucket and a bristle. The Copper watched the blighter work while Rhea cleaned and filed his claws. Fourfang scrubbed his hands in the bucket after finishing the floor.\n\n\"Much better. Now go down and get yourself a dried apple. One for Rhea, too; I think she's exhausted from all the travel.\"\n\nThe quick elf messenger came from the Tyr before Fourfang returned from the stores. The Copper followed the messenger up the winding air shaft and through the Gardens, where Simevolant was lounging, eating honeyed beetles.\n\n\"Come over here, Rugaard. The shadebells are blooming. You must see them. You don't posses any beauty, but you have an eye for it. Oh! What did I say. An eye? I beg your pardon.\"\n\nThe Copper wasn't in the mood for Simevolant's jokes. \"I'm on my way to the Tyr. He summoned me.\"\n\n\"Oh, he's arguing with SiDrakkon; you've time to spare. Speaking of which, look at the purples; doesn't it rather remind you of SiDrakkon when he's angry?\"\n\n\"A striking color,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"I've been staring at these flowers all morning. You know, no two are alike? Why do flowers differentiate? The petals are just going to drop in a little while anyway, and unless you get right up under them, it's hard to tell. I wonder why they bother.\"\n\nThe elf cleared his throat.\n\n\"Don't make noise, you,\" Simevolant said. \"You're wilting my flowers. Look, that one's gone all sad. I'll have your hair plucked out by its roots for that.\" The golden drake stood up.\n\n\"I can't keep our Tyr waiting,\" the Copper said, putting himself between the drake and the elf. \"I must be off, cousin.\"\n\nThe elf led him past the Tyr's outer chamber, where messengers, many either bearing gifts themselves or with thralls to carry the load, waited. Curtains blocked the far end, and the elf slipped through them.\n\nA few moments later the Copper heard a heavy tread, and before the curtains could even be opened SiDrakkon stormed out, glaring. The Copper shrank against some baskets of metal rings to clear his way, but SiDrakkon was staring at something only he could see.\n\nThe elf gestured for the Copper to come in.\n\nHe passed through a door of stone and steel that turned on a central pivot, and two blighters rushed in with braziers burning incense to clean away the angry smell within.\n\nThe Tyr's audience chamber was roughly oval, with the door at one end and a shelf at the other. A cascade of gold coins and two waterfalls of silver made it look as though the Tyr reclined upon a mountain of gold. The walls were stacked with glittering, polished samples from the Imperial horde, the metallic art of a thousand or more years, coin, cup, statue, and frieze. Curtains hung thickly about the back of his shelf, and pleasing aromatic fragrances emanated from behind them.\n\nPolished wooden shafts like ribs ran up either side of the chamber, joining at a peak in the top. Captured banners, some tattered and stained, hung here. Above the banners were four members of the griffaran, with polished metal talon extenders on their formidable feet. They sat on perches in the shadows above, vigilant as hawks. They looked strong enough to tear him into quarters of twitching dragon meat.\n\nOne of the griffaran let out a friendly click from the side of its mouth, and its fellows looked down at him.\n\n\"Ah, Rugaard, don't let the bodyguards worry you. Come forward, and we'll talk.\"\n\nThe Copper smelled NoSohoth somewhere, perhaps behind the heavy curtains surrounding the Tyr's shelf.\n\n\"What service can I do you, your honor?\"\n\n\"I should be asking you that, drake. Take a mouthful of gold. No, don't pretend; just enjoy. I've more than I could ever eat if I live to be another thousand.\"\n\nThe Copper swallowed a mouthful of coin. The heavy yet soft metallic taste made him feel pleasantly fierce, ready to take on anything the Tyr asked of him.\n\nWhich, he supposed, was the point.\n\n\"I wanted a quick chat with you without a dozen ears listening to every word.\"\n\n\"Yes, Tyr?\"\n\n\"According to Nivom, you're one of the better drakes in the Drakwatch, yet you always get overlooked because of your\u2026well, let's be frank about it, your injuries.\"\n\nThe Tyr stood on his shelf and turned, as though finding a more comfortable spot from which to speak. The Copper marked heavy scarring, as from a burn, on the inside of one saa. He'd never seen the injury before, but then, the Tyr always rested so it was hidden against his underside.\n\n\"It is a wickedness that dragons count so much on appearances. That's the way of the world, and there are some things that just can't be changed. But you've got nice teeth and some impressive horns coming in. Hopefully they'll draw attention from the rest as you grow into your wings.\n\n\"I'll tell you this, Rugaard: It's something that impressed me about you from the very first. You get around very well, considering that sii. There are dragons who'd play it up to inspire pity, and tell their tale of woe at every pause in the conversation. But now my hunt's lost the game trail. Oh, yes. Obviously, you've done well as a courier, my eyes and ears and all that, and you've shown good judgment, which is worth a whole set of limbs.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Tyr.\"\n\n\"Do you know anything about our Uphold in Anaea?\"\n\n\"We\u2026the kern comes from there, does it not?\"\n\n\"Do you like kern?\"\n\n\"Not much. It fills one up, I suppose.\"\n\n\"That's how I feel as well. There are two varieties, yellow and orange, as you've probably seen when it's mashed. The orange variety is rarer. But there's something in kern\u2014it keeps dragons who live long underground healthy. Without kern, scale doesn't grow right, the teeth loosen, eyesight fades. Why, I've even seen an old darkwhittled dragon or two missing claws and teeth. These days it's often overlooked, because we either eat it directly as mash or get it through livestock, but in my own grandsire's generation darkwhittle was a very plague.\"\n\n\"I'll be sure to pay more attention to my ration,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"And it's quite cleansing. I think half SiDrakkon's problem is that he doesn't eat his unless it's in a chicken's stomach, and he's always blocked up. So the pressure builds and he explodes out the other end.\"\n\n\"I know it's a long road to Anaea. Will I have a guide?\"\n\n\"Yes, the Drakwatch is in charge of patrolling the road, and there are Firemaidens at a couple of key points as well. We'll get you a guide.\"\n\n\"What am I to do there? I hope the supply isn't threatened.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, no, nothing like that. It's just that old FeLissarath and his mate deserve more help than they get, and I'd like to relieve some of their burdens. They've done their bit. Responsibility wears after a while. And they are cut off from society at the end of that long, dark road. They deserve to start taking an honored place in society here if they wish.\"\n\nThe Copper bowed. \"I'll do my best, Tyr. Nothing shall threaten the supply of kern.\"\n\n\"Then my mind shall be at ease. Let me tell you one more thing, Rugaard. I just said this to Nivom, by the way, so I apologize if it sounds practiced. The great dragons\u2026well, they're fine warriors and all that, but it's the dragon that can handle the problems of peace that keeps an empire going. The greatest warrior fights least and all that. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that I do.\"\n\n\"You will. In time. Now, no hurry about your departure. You have a good rest. Another mouthful of silver and gold before you leave this room, as well. Can't be too careful where your scale is concerned. If you have any needs for thralls or anything, just see NoSohoth; he'll attend to it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Tyr.\"\n\n\"Oh, one other question. About the fighting in Bant. How much did you see of it?\"\n\n\"I was there for the attack on the tower under construction. I missed much of the first attack on the city on the Black River, but I was there for the rest of it.\"\n\n\"You know, it's odd. SiDrakkon was in the thick of battle, from his reports\u2014battle that cost the lives of four dragons. Yet there's not a scar on him. Three engagements with heavy fighting would leave most dragons' wings in tatters, yet he's hardly holed. Did he lead his dragons against the Ghi men the whole time?\"\n\nThe Copper wondered just how he could shade the truth. \"He struck fast and hard. His attack on the first tower was brilliant. I saw him personally burn war machines on the first attempt to take the fortress. Even though we were thrown back, the campaign ended successfully. He deserves his share of the glory.\"\n\n\"I don't like dragons taking credit for the courage of others, you know. Don't like it at all. Anything to add? Just between the two of us. If you're worried about my mate, I don't tell her everything, you know.\" He winked.\n\n\"No, Tyr, nothing to add.\"\n\n\"I won't press you. Visit anytime, officially or unofficially. I enjoy the presence of virtuous young drakes. We need more of your sort.\"\n\nThe Copper left and saw NoSohoth in the outer room, organizing the visitors to the Tyr.\n\nAs he descended into the rock, he became lost in his thoughts. He should pay a visit to the Anklenes and learn about the conditions on the road to Anaea. Find out what he could about the kern trade. He had a vague idea that it came in on pack animals. It wouldn't hurt to ask a little of the history of Anaea as well\u2014he wondered how somewhere so far away even became an Uphold.\n\nFourfang was waiting at the outer entrance to his cave. The blighter almost danced with anxiety.\n\n\"Bad! Bad news! Drakwatch came, took Rhea! Took Rhea to SiDrakkon, your honor. I think he eat her!\"\n\nThe Copper had been to the outer chambers of SiDrakkon's cave only a few times to deliver routine messages concerning the younger Drakwatch trainees. He occupied one of the highest levels, practically a whole sublevel of his own, on the well-watered eastern spur of the Imperial Resort.\n\nSiDrakkon's doorwarden thrall, a rather fleshy human with a shaved skull, begged him to wait and disappeared inside.\n\nSiDrakkon's mate, an almost gruesomely thin dame with tired golden eyes, greeted him. \"I cry welcome. You'll find my mate in his wet grotto. He's in one of his moods.\" The Copper had no idea what her name was, so he simply bowed.\n\n\"I'd be grateful to be shown where that is, honored dame.\"\n\n\"Just follow the sound of water.\"\n\nHe could hear splashing, and the babble of human voices, and a plucking sound of some musical contraption or other that grew more distinct as he passed a burning brazier or two throwing off expensive smelling scents. SiDrakkon's mate dropped some fragrant leaves on the flames and took a deep lungful.\n\nA curtain blocked further progress.\n\n\"Your honor,\" he called. \"It's Rugaard. Your mate admitted me. I wish to speak to you.\"\n\n\"Go away, drake.\"\n\nThe Copper sniffed at the moist air around the curtain. He smelled humans, along with wine and the vaguely sickly smell of fruit.\n\n\"I want my thrall back. The girl, Rhea.\"\n\n\"I sent you a replacement. Didn't she arrive?\"\n\n\"I don't care if you sent a calf of solid gold. I want my thrall back.\"\n\n\"Well, come in, then. Let's talk. You should appreciate the air in here.\"\n\nThe Copper pushed through the double layer of tanned hides on the door. The air was moist, warm and a little steamy. A pool of water filled almost half the chamber, and in an alcove on a woven matt SiDrakkon reclined, reading something written on metal plates laid out under his nose.\n\nThe place was crawling with human females sweating in the heat. Some polished his scale, one stood with a barrow containing more metal plates, one played an instrument with strings that made those annoying twanging sounds, and several more just lounged around, drinking or eating or bathing. Only a few bothered to wear even the lightest kind of wrap.\n\n\"Take a breath of nepenthe, Rugaard, and relax. Here you can let the cares and responsibilities fall away.\"\n\nThe thick human musk made the Copper hungry, if anything. He looked around for Rhea and didn't\u2014Wait, was that her, huddled with an elder of her sex in a corner? So hard to tell without the coloration. She looked shocking with all her hair shorn off.\n\nHe noticed that none of the females had very long hair.\n\n\"Why did you shear her?\"\n\n\"All my cushions are stuffed with human hair. Adds a pleasant air to the room, and they still bring a good price once they lose the smell. What do you need that one for? She's just a thrall, or does she do something special for you? She's only just ripening now. The next few years are going to be exquisite. I won't eat her for years, I promise.\"\n\nHe sniffed at one of the wine-sipping females. She giggled something to a companion. The Copper guessed none of them spoke much Drakine.\n\nRhea looked at him, a silent plea in her eyes. A muscular blighter came in bearing a stone the size of a dragon egg in iron tongs, and dropped it into a smaller pool connected to the main one. It hissed and steamed as it struck.\n\n\"I'm fond of her, and she's quiet. I'd like her back. I don't care about the hair. In fact, every time she gets a new coat, I'll have it shorn and sent to you.\"\n\n\"You've made enough trouble for me, showing me up on the Black River. You're lucky I've calmed down or I'd be challenging you.\"\n\n\"My memory of events on the Black River isn't clear at all. You'd better hope it doesn't come back, or I'll remember how you hung back while you sent dragons to their deaths.\"\n\nHe rolled and straightened. \"You whelp. Nivom's bitten out one heart, and you're after another. Do that and I'll challenge you to a duel of honor.\"\n\n\"Challenge away. It won't keep me from telling the Tyr all I know. Kill me and I'll swear to its truth as I'm dying.\"\n\nGriff flickered on each of them.\n\n\"I can't stay angry in my grotto. Take your silly little girl and snuffle away.\"\n\nThe Copper switched to the rather slower form of Drakine used for the thralls: \"Rhea, come away from there, if you like. Back to my cave.\" The girl threw a wrap around herself and hurried to his side.\n\n\"I can get a dozen just like her in here tomorrow, you know,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\nThe last sounded like more of a promise to himself than a parting blast at the Copper.\n\n\"Thank you, your honor,\" the Copper said. He held the curtain open for Rhea and together they escaped the steaming grotto.\n\nSure enough, a \"replacement\" for Rhea arrived the next day, a craggy-faced female with a basket of her own scale-shaping tools. The Copper had no use for her, so he gave her as a parting gift to NeStirrath, who was kindly to his thralls. NeStirrath didn't bother much about his appearance, and sometimes looked quite deranged about the ears and griff.\n\nHe also received a small flower from Tighlia's own garden, with a message wishing him fortune in his assignment.\n\nAs this was no simple journey to the surface and back, the Copper had to decide what to do with the bats. He released them to go where they would, though any who wanted to come with him were welcome, but he warned them that they'd have to make themselves useful.\n\nThernadad was too old to fend for himself, too blind to find himself food, and too bloated to be of much use to anyone, so the Copper allowed him to drink himself into insensibility on drakeblood, then had Fourfang break his neck with a quick twist as he slept.\n\n\"What do with body?\" Fourfang asked.\n\n\"I don't care. Burn him and use his ashes for cleansing paste. Or make a stew out of him; he's fatty enough.\"\n\nAnd so passed the strange, greedy bat who almost accidentally saved the Copper's life.\n\nOver the next few sleeps Rhea made frightened, whimpering noises. Not knowing what else to do, the Copper woke her each time, and she'd sleep soundly afterward.\n\nAs the day for departure grew closer, Nivom visited him twice. Nivom now spent much of his day accompanying the Tyr in his duties, both in the audience chamber and in brief visits to the other hills. At the end of the day they would sometimes eat, or be groomed together by thralls, and his adoptive father, as Nivom called him, would talk the day's decisions over with him and explain why he overruled a dragon's punishment of a thrall, or granted a petition, or refused a gift.\n\n\"The Lavadome obeys him because he's loved. I wonder what would happen if a dragon who wasn't so universally admired took his place atop the Rock.\"\n\n\"Fighting, I expect,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"It's\u2026it's like a giant game of mirroring to them, with the object being 'please the Tyr' so they get what they want. These court dragons in the line, and the leaders of the six hills, they're just carrion birds and jackals waiting for his death. All playing different games where no one's quite sure of the rules, so everyone cheats as best as he can.\"\n\n\"I'm glad of my place at the tail end of the Imperial line. You've got the end with the teeth.\"\n\n\"If the head gets chopped off, the tail dies too.\"\n\n\"Oh, now you're being as gloomy as SiDrakkon. Why so downcast? I heard you were cheered as you crossed Wyrram Ridge the other day.\"\n\n\"And had waste kicked up as I passed between the greater and lesser Skotl hills, let's not forget.\"\n\n\"Oh, probably just drakes. Forget it. It would take a mighty turd to slay a dragon.\"\n\n\"I'd almost rather be back in a war in Bant,\" Nivom said. \"Well, I must be off. A good journey and success in Anaea. Honor and glory, Rugaard.\"\n\n\"Honor and glory, Nivom.\"\n\nOn the day he told NoSohoth he would depart, he met his guide: the Firemaiden Nilrasha. She awaited him at the western exit ramp from Black Rock. He had two long, narrow cave carts, each pulled by a plodding ox waiting for him, one filled with food and supplies for him and his thralls, and the other with grain for the oxen. The Copper bore nothing but his small hoard loaded into a hollowed log, all traded into gold so it would carry more easily, and an introductory message from Tyr to FeLissarath.\n\n\"This is a happy chance,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"No chance to it at all. I bribed NoSohoth with every silver piece in the Tyr's victory bequest.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered at that. Why would she throw away the beginnings of a hoard? From what he had learned, Anaea was a quiet Uphold with little fighting chance at combat honors. \"You know the Anaean Trail?\"\n\n\"I served my time at its mouth.\"\n\n\"Good enough for me. Let's be off. I want to be at the river by dark.\"\n\nSeveral good trails led westward. The western quarters of the Lavadome were rougher, with growth only in patches of soil trapped between the rocks. Rather scraggly-looking goats roamed here under blighter herdsmen. Fourfang went forward with a switch to clear the way of both the animals and the lesser blighters.\n\nThey rested at the riverbank and waited their turn at a flatboat, and the Copper worked up the nerve to ask a question of Nilrasha:\n\n\"Why so eager to get to Anaea?\"\n\n\"I get bored with duty in the dome. All anyone talks about are the banquets atop the Imperial Resort, and it's like having a feast described when you're starving. That or who's on top of which hill, six little Tyrs under one big one. They say the trail to Anaea is the most magnificent of all the lower roads.\"\n\n\"They say? I thought you knew the route.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course. There's the Long Fall, then the Lake of Echoes, and then Tooth Cavern\u2014\"\n\n\"All of which are listed on several maps. I've looked at them too.\"\n\n\"Don't send me away! I have been on the trail. I was second in the endurance march in the tests to pass into the Firemaidens.\" She swallowed. \"I just haven't been the whole length. But it's easier after the Tooth Cavern; there are no major underroads off the trail. I've been that far.\"\n\nThe Copper chuckled. \"Oh, I wouldn't send you away, not for half of the Tyr's gold.\" In fairness, though, no one was making the offer.\n\n\"Why's that?\" she asked, glancing at him from lowered eyes.\n\n\"You're lucky. NeStirrath always said he'd choose the lucky drake over the toughest or the most skilled. I imagine the rule applies to drakka as well.\"\n\n\"I've never thought myself lucky.\"\n\n\"It's in that name the blighters gave you, Ora.\"\n\n\"Some would use the word cowardly. I lived because I hid.\"\n\n\"Besides, you saved my life. I'm not forgetful when it comes to things like that.\"\n\nTheir journey to Anaea was lengthy but fascinating. They passed through several different strata on the Long Fall, and the Copper saw geologic formations he'd never viewed before: rocks like eggs with crystals inside, gardens of colored stone that some indigent blighters kept polished and shaped and exhibited to travelers for gifts of food or coin, even veins of iron and copper they could lick to get the pleasant taste of heavy metals and cleanse their mouths.\n\nIn the tunnels after the Long Fall they caught up to a mule train bearing bags of shed dragonscale to Anaea for trade. Shaggy humans handled the mules under the supervision of a thick-hided deman and a drake apprenticed to one of the Lavadome's trading houses, very simplified versions of the roving markets the dwarves had perfected. The drake's conversation was boring, and he continually pointed out that the Copper was giving his draft animals and thralls too much to eat to ever make a profitable run.\n\nBy the end of the trip the Copper was loosing his bats to feed on the unpleasant drake every other night. Fatigue shut him up about the weight of grain given to his oxen when they were unhitched.\n\nThe Lake of Echoes required that they take a flatboat. They poled on its broad back across the water. The vast cavern was low and dripping, divided in places into chambers by walls of old rock that hinted at masonry, some underground settlement drowned long ago by a shift in water drainage. The ceiling of the cavern was covered with slimy creatures that lived in shells, like snails with many tiny legs. Translucent insects gathered around the flatboat's sole lamp, which they took turns spitting fire into to keep it lit, at the request of the dwarven ferrymen. They were an odd bunch, outcasts from better dwarf societies, the Copper suspected, and sharp dealers who would take only gold. The dwarves tried to sell them grain and dried fish, and Nilrasha advised him to purchase the first but avoid the second. But they took them across and on the other side picked up a two-score mule train bearing bags of kern.\n\nThe bats feasted on the insects, and the dwarves muttered among themselves. One held out his hands as though estimating the wingspan of the bats, and another pulled at a scraggly, unlit beard.\n\nThey came to the Tooth Cavern, and even Rhea stopped and stared with mouth open. Far in the distance to the north it was open to the sun, but here it was just a wide chasm with hanging or rising formations carved by wind whipping through the cavern. The road here leaped from massive stalactite to massive stalagmite, most slightly bent and sharpened like dragon teeth.\n\nA garrison of Firemaidens greeted them here, including two sii-sore young almost-hatchlings at the end of an endurance march, and the Copper saw a nest of griffaran on a high ledge.\n\nThe bridges were strange patchwork contraptions of metal, wood, stone, wire, even thick rope, an odd quilt that showed evidence of all manner of different builders' hands. There were even carved poles of wood that he suspected had been decorated by elves, for they bore faces. Skulls dangled from the bottom of the spans and overhangs, trophies of fights on, below, or around the bridge.\n\n\"During the last siege on the Lavadome, the demen threw a whole army into this cavern,\" Nilrasha said.\n\n\"But that was ages ago, Nilrasha,\" the Firemaidens of the garrison said. \"All we have to worry about these days are bandits.\"\n\n\"Which does not mean it can't happen again,\" Nilrasha said.\n\n\"You've been visiting those sour-bellied historians. Spirits! When I get back to the Lavadome, I'm joining swimming parties on Sunshaft Beach, not listening to Anklenes recite their epics.\"\n\nThey picked up an escort of Drakwatch at the other side of the canyon. The tunnel here was wider, with small cracks and passages that hostile hominids sometimes used, but according to the drakes they fought one another rather than risking the ire of the Lavadome. But desperate demen might be tempted by an unguarded party.\n\nNilrasha made interesting conversation, but she never chattered for the satisfaction or the noise of it, a failing of some drakka the Copper had observed.\n\nShe often steered the conversation to him, which he found a little unsettling. He wasn't used to drakka asking him anything beyond, \"Rugaard, please don't drool on the platters,\" at banquet. She was even interested in his bats, how he became affiliated with them, and he told her an abridged version of his time in Thernadad's cave.\n\n\"I'm not used to talking about my life,\" he confessed.\n\n\"Why not? You're in the Imperial line. You're well thought-of. I've heard the story of you and the griffaran eggs, and that alliance is important to us, for they guard the plateau above and the river below and the Tooth Cavern. Being of the line, you'll never want for food or pleasant accommodations.\"\n\n\"I'm a\u2026fortunate dragon, in that respect. Why is my situation of interest to you?\"\n\nShe looked at him a moment before speaking. \"I've no intention of ending my years as a Firemaid. You may want a mate someday. A dragon in the Imperial line needs someone clever at his side.\"\n\nHer honesty was as startling as one of her sudden leaps from the grass.\n\n\"I haven't thought of mating.\"\n\n\"Few drakes do, and then they lose their heads to the first flash of green that crosses their path after they crack their wings.\"\n\n\"About that. I\u2026I was injured as a hatchling. I may never be able to fly.\"\n\nHe showed her the scar, a little more visible now that his growing wings were rising beneath his skin.\n\n\"So you're a little bitten and bled. I get sick of drakes so full of themselves they do nothing but swell and preen.\"\n\n\"Then never having a mating flight doesn't bother you?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014oh, Spirits take it. I figured out life isn't a song years ago, Rugaard. No, it wouldn't matter. We wouldn't be the first dragons forced to mate under stone rather than above the clouds. But what do you think of me?\"\n\n\"You're just the sort of drakka I think any drake would want.\"\n\n\"Any drake?\"\n\n\"Yes. Especially a rather beat-up one.\"\n\nShe touched her neck to his. He felt an electric thrill run up his spine, and something stirred under his skin along his back. \"Then I really am a lucky drakka, Rugaard.\"\n\nThe trading drake interrupted the conversation with an opinion, detailed and long-winded, about the advantage of selling him the oxen at the end of the trip, and the Copper tapped the side of the wicker chest housing the bats with a sii-claw where the drake couldn't see.\n\nNilrasha fluttered an eyelid at him flirtatiously.\n\nThe Copper spent his last years of drakehood in diligent service to FeLissarath and his mate. They were both courtly, well-mannered dragons when humans were about, and quite in-formal when they weren't. The pair had been unable to have a clutch of their own, so they looked on the kern kings of the high Anaean plateau almost as their own progeny.\n\nHe learned much of what he needed to know about the humans there his first summer. Their lives were organized around agriculture, growing kern in their high, sunny plateau. Something about the soil and the dry summers, bright sun punctuated by heavy rain at either end of the season, lent itself to their strange-sheathed crop. There were planting festivals and rain ceremonies and harvest celebrations and winter pod picking for their other staple, a rather reddish, bulbous berry that made decent enough wine but tasted eye-crossingly sweet, at least to a dragon.\n\nThe kern kings traded dragonscale for kern. The dragonscale they used at human or dwarvish trading houses to buy finery for themselves, or gold. These humans had a lust for gold that matched that of dragons. They wore it, wove it into their hair, girdled themselves in it, decorated their bedchambers with it, ate off it, and even, the Copper suspected, voided their bowels into it if they could afford the pots.\n\nThe mated dragons, when they weren't talking commerce, talked only of hunting. They were friends with the great condors of the mountains, who kept them abreast of conditions of the herds, and they hunted deer, mountain goats, sheep with vast, twisted horns, elk, even woodland sloths and the taut-bodied big cats that preyed on all the above.\n\nWhenever their presence wasn't required at some kern-king ceremony, they were off after game.\n\nThe kern kings had no enemies that could get at them on their mountain-girded plateau, though sometimes their young warriors descended the slopes to raid the fringes of what the Copper learned were the old southern borderlands of the Hypatian Empire, dragging off females and stealing horses, more for sport than bloodlust.\n\nA single, lonely Firemaid guarded the dragon lair and the entrance to the lower world. Her name was Angalia, and she took Nilrasha to be her own long-awaited replacement. She sniffed Nilrasha's back every morning for signs of wing growth.\n\n\"The air's too thin up here. I'm not a high-altitude dragon; never was,\" Angalia complained whenever the Copper visited. Constantly. \"My hearts beat so. I'll burst my hearts and be dead within a year. Mark my words!\"\n\nBut Nilrasha had it worse. She had to live at the entrance to the Lower World with Angalia, risking burst ears at the endless complaints.\n\nHe had a nice chamber in the Upholder palace temple, filled with square carvings of grimacing faces of the kern kings. The men had built a sort of temple to their dragon gods on a spur of one of the mountains surrounding their plateau, over the mouth of the gate to the Lower World. Like all the other constructs on the mountain-girded land, it was done in what the FeLissaraths styled the \"Anaean Royal.\" Meaning great, heavy square blocks of limestone, elaborately carved, piled on other great, heavy square blocks. They also liked stone globes, smooth and undecorated as turtle eggs. Sometimes the builders placed them on the great, heavy square blocks. But for some reason, perhaps religious prohibition, they never put great, heavy square blocks atop the globes, unless the globes were holding up a roof. Then it was allowed.\n\n\"Hominid frippery,\" the Copper said to himself, extracting a crunchy beetle from a crevice with his tongue.\n\nSo much for the dwelling place of the Anaean royal families' god allies. Almost every morning the Copper arose to cool, fresh air and bright yellow light. When there was no water in the raincatchers he had a short walk to a melting glacier and tasted runoff from ice older than any dragon and most legends he knew.\n\nIn his opinion, his rooms here were as fine as the Tyr's in the Lavadome, and a good deal sunnier.\n\nA long, straight flight of many scores of scores of scores of stairs led down the mountainside to the dragon-keepers, special priests of the kern kings who offered up pigs and cattle whenever FeLissarath and his mate didn't have fresh game\u2014a rarity. It was hard to stand at the top of that stone ramp and not feel part of a higher world. He wondered how FeLissarath and his mate seemed such normal, earthy dragons. It would be easy to get delusions of godhood with such a vista.\n\nThe Copper made such improvements as he could to the long road back to the Lavadome. After studying how the kern kings sent messages by relay runners carrying hollow, gold-dipped bones with scrolls carried inside, he copied the practice.\n\nHe colonized a few caves with bats, and taught the Drakwatch and Firemaids to use them as messengers in return for either draft-animal blood or a taste of dragon vintage. Some of them found the practice creepy, but others enjoyed the tickle of a bat tongue and the euphoric light-headedness and the strangely pleasant dreams that followed. In any case, they reserved dragonblood for the most intelligent of the messenger bats who could be relied upon to carry either a verbal message or a written one to the right post.\n\nAt this remote Uphold, they got their news rarely and in large, sometimes confused batches. SiDrakkon's thin little mate died of a stomach disorder. The incense trade so vital to peace between male dragons continued to leap in price with barbarian attacks on the trade routes in the east, and Nivom had opened his wings and begun instituting contests between the Drakwatch and the Firemaidens, in which they fought mock battles for hills and caves.\n\nSo the years passed and the Copper's horns came in and the bulges on his back rose. He looked forward to his wings emerging, just because there was so little going on in the plateau, with its unvarying seasonal routines and cool, sunny weather. Nilrasha, perhaps a year behind in her own wing growth, would rub fats into the stretched skin to soothe it. They became translucent, and FeLissarath judged them ready to pop.\n\n\"You should return to the Lavadome, Rugaard, so that there can be a proper celebration. You're in the Imperial line, you know,\" FeLissarath said one sunset as the plateau turned to gold and orange.\n\n\"Yes, take this winter off and return. Take poor Nilrasha with you,\" FeLissarath's mate added, looking at Nilrasha, who sometimes went stalking on the mountain slopes with the older dragon-dame, and therefore was frequently invited to dinner. \"She's a lively young thing. A great huntress, too. It's a deprivation to be up here, away from society.\"\n\n\"I do have friends I'd like to see. But will you be all right on your own?\"\n\n\"You've learned little these four years to ask a question like that. Nothing ever happens in Anaea.\"\n\n\"All the same, I'd like to stay here. I'm not much of a drake for parties.\"\n\nOddly enough, something did happen in Anaea that very night.\n\nIt began with being woken by Nilrasha. \"Rugaard, there's a wounded dragon come up from the Lower Road. He asks to speak to you in private. He's just ouside.\"\n\nRather than being frightened, the Copper was almost delighted to hear it, after the first startle of being prodded from a deep sleep, of course. \"Send him in.\"\n\nA silver-white dragon, his sii and saa wrapped in rags to enable him to move more quietly on the stones of the palace, mud smeared all over his wings, and his face wrapped in bloody bandaging, stepped in.\n\nHe glared at Nilrasha.\n\n\"A moment, please, Ora,\" the Copper said. The visitor's wild eye looked panicked.\n\nNiVom tore off the false bandage covering his torn lip as soon as she left. \"The blood is from a donkey,\" NiVom said.\n\n\"NiVom! What in the two worlds\u2014\" The Copper at least had wits to pronounce his adult name correctly.\n\n\"I'm a fugitive, Rugaard. Hunted. Branded a coward.\"\n\nThe Copper would have sputtered questions until the bats returned, but instead he listened.\n\n\"It's all Tighlia's doing, you know. She's room for only one dragon in her heart, her brother. She aims to make him Tyr, and she's destroying any dragon that stands in her way. First AgGriffopse. Then DharSii. Now me.\"\n\n\"Have some wine. Some food.\" The Copper looked in on Rhea, who had a comfortable anteroom. \"Rhea, get the leftovers from last night's dinner. Hurry, but do it quietly.\" He worked a small cask and poured some wine into a bowl, and NiVom took a deep draft.\n\n\"Spirits, that's good,\" NiVom said. \"Oh, Rugaard, I've been such a fool. I was set to be mated to Imfamnia, and now I suspect she's lost to me. I've been blinder than any of your bats in the sun. Imfamnia, gone. As though she'd care; she'll fly with SiDrakkon if its his destiny to be Tyr.\"\n\n\"How did this come about?\"\n\n\"Let me see. Five, no, seven days ago\u2014can it be only a week?\u2014seven days ago Imfamnia threw herself down before the Tyr and Tighlia, covered with bites and scratches, claiming I'd done it to her during an argument. She's never had so much as a cross word from me! I was brought before the Tyr, and I challenged her word, and Tighlia worked herself up into a fury and named SiDrakkon's son SiBayereth Imfamnia's champion.\"\n\n\"I remember SiBayereth. He seemed a decent sort.\"\n\n\"He's obsessed with dueling ever since his wings came in. He lives for the pit. He's my size and half again my weight, and has a very long neck and tail. I'd never live close.\"\n\n\"So you fled?\"\n\n\"No, like a fool I took the challenge. My blood was up, you see? The accusations\u2014I couldn't think. Then Tighlia\u2014\"\n\nRhea arrived bearing a platter of meats and kern. NiVom stuffed food into his mouth like a dragon starved.\n\n\"Please say there's more, Rugaard,\" he said.\n\n\"Rhea, get Fourfang up and have him help you in the larder. A whole side of beef\u2014raw is fine; it's hung.\" The girl fled.\n\n\"Thank you, Rugaard.\"\n\n\"You were saying something about Tighlia\u2026.\"\n\n\"She accused me of always being a blighted egg. Said I lied about her brother. So\u2026oh, what did I do? I challenged her, and anyone else who said I didn't give a correct account of matters at the Black River. So she appointed that old duelist ventlick of SiDrakkon's to defend her word, NoTannadon.\n\n\"Oh, I said some very fine words to that. Quite a speech, all about my innocence seeing me to victory. The Spirits themselves would fight on my side\u2014ha!\" He spit out a chuck-bone. \"But that night all I could think about was my poor, lame father\u2014he had a limp a little like yours; did I ever tell you that?\u2014in the dueling pit. How I jumped down atop his body.\"\n\nNiVom looked away. \"I was terrified. I flew, flew across the Lavadome like baying dragonhounds were after me. Rugaard, I'm a coward.\"\n\nThe Copper looked at the blazing, mud-smeared victory insignia painted on his former cavemate's wing-leather. \"You're nothing of the kind. Nivo\u2014NiVom, I'm honored that you came to me this night.\"\n\nThe onetime future Tyr gulped. \"Honored?\"\n\n\"That you trusted me. And you can trust me. What can I do to assist you?\"\n\n\"You've done enough. Keep quiet; there will be hunters after me, I expect.\"\n\n\"News of this is bound to reach the ears of the Upholder and his mate. You must leave before they rise.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"I'll put off the pursuit and confuse the word, if I can. You can't hide in the plateau; the kern kings will wonder at it and report to the Upholder. The condors see much of what happens on the outer slopes. The mountains trail off farther south; you could try there. When Nilrasha gets her wings I'll send her looking.\"\n\n\"What about your own\u2014Oh, of course. Well, so be it. Don't worry, Rugaard; I'll speak to none but you or Nilrasha.\"\n\n\"I think the Tyr means for me to take over this Uphold when I mature. When I do, and they've left, I'll have the roof marbled white. Look for it. That means it's safe to visit.\"\n\n\"Roof marbled white. Very well.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't be long. My wings are almost in. Failing that, visit late at night. The balcony is big enough for you to slip through.\"\n\nRhea and Fourfang arrived with the side of beef, bearing it on a pole between them. NiVom tore great gaps in it, belched, and then crept out onto the balcony and spread his wings. He fell into open air and soared off.\n\nThanks to the clear moonlight the Copper could watch him for a long time as he flew south. He called Nilrasha to him and told her a somewhat expurgated version of events.\n\n\"So what now?\" she asked.\n\nHe almost swore at her in his frustration and grief at NiVom's news. \"We're taking that trip back to the Lavadome. I'm going to do what I can to confuse the pursuit. Then I need to see the Tyr.\"\n\n\"Darling, your wings are weeping. I think they'll be in any day now. Must be all the excitement.\"\n\nHe went over to one of the square stone blocks bordering the balcony and tore his back across it. Nilrasha gasped. The pain, and with it hot, sweet-stinking relief, helped his ugly fighting mood. He raised his left wing. Beautiful blue-veined membranes blotted out the moon and the receding dot of NiVom.\n\nHe turned. Now for the real test. He opened the right, and pushed out the wing.\n\nHe was thankful the pain blotted out some of the disappointment when it wouldn't extend. The main joint at his forespur kept slipping each time he tried to unfold it.\n\nNilrasha stifled a sob. \"I'm sorry, Ru. But it doesn't matter. Your wings are uncased.\" She began to lick his wounds.\n\nBy hooking the wing tip in a crack on the balcony and pulling his bad wing open he was able to let the membrane dry.\n\n\"You're a dragon now, my love,\" she said.\n\n\"Good. Because I've got a dragon's work to do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon",
                "text": "\u2002\"YOUR TRUE STRENGTH IS NOT DISCOVERED EASILY, OR WITHOUT GRIEF. LIKE A DESERT SEED IT LIES DORMANT, WAITING FOR THE HARD RAIN.\" \u2014Lessons of NeStirrath\n\nThe Copper paid his respects to the FeLissaraths at the morning meal the next day, showing his wings.\n\n\"I've thought about it, and I would like to go back to the Lavadome. Just for a season or so. Nilrasha said she'd welcome the change of scene.\"\n\n\"You deserve to have a party where your dragon-name is cheered, RuGaard,\" FeLissarath said. His mate nodded. \"Too bad about the wing. But there's many a grounded dragon living a long and happy life. That fellow who trains the Drakwatch, for example\u2026er\u2026\"\n\n\"NeStirrath,\" the Copper supplied.\n\n\"I had the oddest dream last night,\" his mate said. \"I could have sworn I smelled a strange dragon in the palace. It was almost alarming.\"\n\n\"You talk to the condors too much,\" her mate said. \"They think every far-glimpsed griffaran is a dragon.\"\n\n\"I hear there was a herd of elk spotted on a frozen lake on the northern slopes,\" the Copper said, turning the talk to hunting.\n\n\"Yes, we should go,\" FeLissarath said. \"Shouldn't we, dear? The larder's looking rather empty.\"\n\n\"Fattening up for my trip,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You're a wise young dragon, RuGaard,\" FeLissarath said.\n\nThough he was almost dancing with anxiety to leave, the Copper delayed another day or two, for a train of kern was assembling, the last of the fall harvest. It would be irresponsible of a future Upholder not to see it through.\n\nFourfang groaned about having to take care of mules, and Rhea looked glum. She liked the sun and air of FeLissarath's palace, though she still never said a word about any matter, great or small; she just nodded and followed orders and sometimes cried in her sleep.\n\nPutting up a second set of bed curtains cut down on the noise.\n\nOn their first day into the cave they came across the pursuit, the noisome NoTannadon and another Skotl dragon searching westward, sniffing at every strange tunnel. Their reek set the mules to bawling, and the blighter mule tenders cursed and shoved them aside, clearing a way in the tunnel.\n\nAnd the Copper moved up to block it.\n\n\"Cry meetings,\" NoTannadon said.\n\n\"Cry meetings, NoTannadon. Haven't seen you since the Black River fight.\"\n\n\"You're\u2026you're RuGaard, now, as it looks,\" NoTannadon said. \"Have you seen anything of NiVom? He's visiting the western Upholds and the Tyr has need of him.\"\n\n\"I'd be glad of the visit. But no dragons have passed through the cave mouth, have they, Nilrasha?\"\n\n\"A dragon? No. We'd have welcomed a new face. Ha! No dragons, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I told you the trail went cold at the Tooth Cavern,\" the other Skotl dragon said. \"He flew out there. We should turn around, catch up with the others.\"\n\n\"This drake\u2014er, dragon\u2026\" NoTannadon said, then fell silent.\n\n\"Yes. Both my ears work, duelist. What were you going to say?\"\n\n\"\u2026Is in the Imperial line. I expect he'd notice if a dragon emerged in the middle of his palace. We should turn around.\"\n\n\"I'll send word back that the Upholder should tell him the Tyr needs him, should he show up for a surprise visit, shall I?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Yes. Yes. That's a fair wind of an idea,\" NoTannadon said.\n\nThe dragons turned around in the rather cramped tunnel and hurried in the other direction.\n\nTheir arrival at the Lavadome merited no special reception, as it was simply another load of kern coming in. The trading house saw to its distribution to various wareholes and livestock corrals.\n\n\"Where will you go?\" the Copper asked Nilrasha.\n\n\"Wherever you like, my lord.\"\n\n\"We're not mated yet, dear. Things may go ill for me on the Rock. Perhaps you should go to the Firemaiden quarters on your home hill. Your association with me could be hazardous.\"\n\n\"It's my blood. It flows for you. If you die, it might as well be spilled too.\"\n\n\"Where can I find you?\"\n\n\"I grew up on Dufu hill. Yes, the milkdrinker's hill, among the thralls. Not much of a home, but the tunnels are clean enough. At least there's little chance of society from the Black Rock visiting.\"\n\n\"I'll come to you in a day or two. Take care of my thralls until then. If anything happens, treat them well; they've earned it. And as for you\u2014if they come for you, just do what they say and feign ignorance.\"\n\n\"The way you feign your lack of ambition. Certainly.\"\n\n\"You may have to do more. Tell them you grew sick to death of the sight of me in Anaea. They'll believe that.\"\n\n\"I shall. But I won't enjoy it.\"\n\nHe wound his neck around hers, squeezed her, then broke it off and looked across and down the river.\n\n\"I did enjoy that, however,\" she said. \"I'm told the Anklenes have some scrolls about how dragons can mate in a river, and it's like flying. It seems delightfully perverse.\"\n\n\"We'll have to find out.\"\n\nThey said no more. The Copper told the kern train that he was exhausted and would spend the night on the riverbank, washing and resting and preparing for his return to the Imperial Resort with a bellyful of fish.\n\nAnd with that he hurried off toward the high rocks of the griffaran.\n\nYarrick's perch looked much the same, though the griffaran who flew him up to the high perch grew so exhausted he had to set the Copper down on a ledge and bring the aging grand commander to him.\n\n\"You right! Yark! It is that lame copper fellow.\"\n\nThe bird-reptile cocked its head so Yarrick's good eye was pointed straight at him. \"It good to see you again. We heard about a battle in Bant, let loose victory cries on your behalf.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered what would happen if Yarrick knew the truth of his \"rescue\" of the eggs. He felt a twinge as he cleared his throat and spoke the words he'd rehearsed in his mind.\n\n\"Long ago, Yarrick, you befriended me and flew me to the Imperial Resort. I ask you to fly again, and beg the Tyr to come to me. All this must be done in secrecy.\"\n\n\"Too old for courier flying these days. Molting. Fishing is all I do anymore, and even then I need a long rest before returning to the perch. I'll send a younger set of feathers. The Tyr will come, though he, too, does not care as much for flying as he once did.\"\n\nThe Copper waited until the shafts of sunlight falling to the river disappeared. Though he sought it, sleep evaded him. He wondered how he looked after a long tunnel journey. Better than he would have without Rhea's endless cleanings and polishings, he supposed. The girl\u2014no, woman, now\u2014could do wonders with wet ash and a brush.\n\nHe saw the Tyr flying, a griffaran to either side, turning slow circles in his climb to the perch on the griffaran's rocks. He alighted rather heavily, and the griffaran retired.\n\n\"It is you, Rugaard. Or, I'm sorry, RuGaard now. Why this strange form of meeting? I know you don't like court ceremony, but this is a little extreme.\"\n\n\"I've seen NiVom, Tyr.\"\n\nThe Tyr's teeth disappeared and his neck straightened. \"You have. Come to beg for his pardon, have you?\"\n\n\"Your honor, it's all lies. He never attacked your granddaughter.\"\n\nThe Tyr sighed. \"He's always been a bit of a brawler. You should know. He's welcome to come back and defend or explain himself anytime; he doesn't need to send emissaries.\"\n\n\"NoTannadon and another Skotl were hunting him on the western road. I met them.\"\n\n\"Hunting him? I said there was to be no pursuit! He's disgraced, and a coward to run away from a challenge issued and accepted, but no harm's been done apart from the bites and scratches on Imfamnia. I'd say the only permanent damage to her was to her dignity, but she's a flit young thing and has little enough to hurt.\" The Tyr rested in thought. \"NoTannadon and another, you say?\"\n\n\"I met them myself, Tyr. I doubt they were seeking him to share some meat and a song.\"\n\n\"He should have stayed and defended himself. The spirits would have seen him safely to his home cave if he's innocent. These things have a way of working out.\"\n\n\"Do they? How did they work out for your son, your clutchwinner? And what of this DharSii? I don't know his story, but NiVom seemed to think he was the victim of treachery. NiVom wouldn't hurt a female\u2014of your line or any other\u2014unless he had been attacked first. He said he had no idea how the marks got on her.\"\n\n\"Imfamnia would never make up such a thing. What has she to gain? She was getting a good mate, in all likelihood the future Tyr, there even if his lip was a bit torn up.\"\n\n\"She would if it meant reigning as queen over the Lavadome.\"\n\n\"She would have had that anyway. They were to be mated!\"\n\n\"My guess is she doesn't want to wait and leave anything to chance. It's a plot, your honor. It's a game, with the throne as the stakes. Your life may be in danger.\"\n\n\"Yes, danger and I are old friends.\" The Tyr paused, and his expression went blank. \"No! SiDrakkon hardly knows the dragonelle. I'll swear he's not spoken to her more than three times, all at banquets.\"\n\n\"If you become incapacitated, who rules?\" the Copper asked, though he knew the answer.\n\n\"With NiVom gone, the title of Tyr passes to my mate's brother, for at the moment I have no heir.\"\n\n\"Would Tighlia be happy to see her brother in your place?\"\n\n\"Of course. It's only natural. I just have never much liked SiDrakkon. He's too quick to quarrel. You can't hold dragons together if you're going to be the first to start a feud. That and his taste for human females. It's just not done. One can enjoy a discreet sniff now and then, but this habit of his, wallowing in it, it's revolting. I need a new regent. As it is, if I dismiss SiDrakkon the throne would fall to SiMevolant, now that he's matured. Physically, at least. He's still a tailgazer.\"\n\n\"You must hurry and appoint a new heir, then.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. No. No! They couldn't be so deceptive.\"\n\n\"I think they've wronged you worse than you can imagine, Tyr. Certainly one heir can be lost to accident. Twice might be a coincidence. But three times? That's the work of an enemy.\"\n\n\"I'll question Imfamnia again in the presence of her mother. Ibidio thought highly of NiVom, and a mother can sometimes get the truth out of the toughest dragon.\"\n\n\"Don't tell your mate or SiDrakkon any of this, Tyr, until you've learned the truth.\"\n\n\"You're a sly one, RuGaard.\"\n\n\"You must know I have no ambitions, Tyr. I speak only on behalf of my friend.\"\n\n\"If all this comes to pass you'll move several places up in the line. Perhaps I should be suspicious of you.\"\n\n\"I'm content to go back to Anaea for the rest of my years, Tyr. Get to the truth of this matter with NiVom. You might ask some questions about the others, as well. I don't know enough about those dragons.\"\n\n\"I will ask some questions. Starting with Tighlia.\"\n\n\"Tyr, no. Avoid her. Don't let her influence you.\"\n\n\"You've not been mated yet, have you? When you're older you'll understand these things. I can handle my own mate, dragon. Don't worry; your name will not pass my lips or waft across in thought.\"\n\n\"Go to Ibidio first, Tyr. I beg you.\"\n\n\"I'm not without resources, RuGaard. Where can I contact you?\"\n\n\"I'll let the griffaran know where I am. I won't be far from these rocks.\"\n\n\"RuGaard, thank you for coming to me with this. Bravely done, if it's the truth. If this is all some scheme of your own\u2026well, bravely done for that, too. I'll forgive you personally. But as Tyr, matters will go hard with you.\"\n\n\"I ask only that you try to find the truth, your honor.\"\n\nThe Tyr raised his wings, nodded to the griffaran escort, and dropped off the towering rock. He caught an air current and disappeared into shadow, entering the tunnel through which the Copper had been carried years ago.\n\nEven the fresh fish the griffaran brought him soured in his mouth. He picked at rocks with his claws and wondered about Nilrasha. Finally the Copper could sleep, though it was a fitful one. His mouth had gone dry from the tension.\n\nYarrick himself woke him the next day with news that the glorious Tyr was dead.\n\nThe Copper stood before the massive Black Rock in the center of the Lavadome; it was dozens of dragonlengths high, heavy and black and forbidding.\n\nHe'd always thought it looked everlasting, a guarantee of dragonkind's survival. Now it seemed a marker in a vast, empty, crystal-topped tomb.\n\nHe could return to the Uphold and act as though nothing had happened. Perhaps he'd just been escorting the final bounty of the year's harvest to the Lavadome, ensuring its prompt arrival intact.\n\nIn the end, he decided he had to play his part in the tragedy, for good or ill. He walked up the path leading to the lower caves, the smaller one the Drakwatch used. There were dragons idling about the more elaborate main entrance, waiting for news, and more clustered at the servants' door, pestering thralls running errands.\n\nThe Rock seemed deadly quiet, as though expecting another outburst of battle. The Copper took the most familiar path, to his old residence in the trainee wing, and saw a good deal of water on the floor. They were fixing the water feed on the upper levels again.\n\nThe young drakes were sitting around the pooled water, chatting in low voices. \"A visitor,\" one said.\n\nNeStirrath stuck his aging, tangle-horned head out of his cavern. \"That's no visitor; that's one of the Drakwatch, but so long away he's become a stranger. How are you, Rug\u2014RuGaard. Wings up and out at last, I see!\"\n\n\"Out, anyway. I've not managed up yet.\"\n\n\"You have heard the news, I expect.\"\n\n\"Yes. The Tyr is dead. What do you know of it?\"\n\n\"It happened in his mate's chambers. I had only a quick word with NoSohoth; he could tell me no more. He advised me to get back down here and ready the Drakwatch, saying those were SiDrakkon's orders. So here I sit, awaiting further orders.\"\n\n\"I'm going up.\"\n\n\"Squeeze up the thrall passages, if you can. The great winding one is blocked by those waiting for news and spreading rumor.\"\n\nThe Copper took his advice and made his way up to the Imperial kitchens, at some cost of scrapes to the poor, thin-skinned humans he had to squeeze by. He fought his way out into the gardens, past dragons, drakes, dragonelles, and drakka thronging the garden.\n\nSome of SiDrakkon's Skotl clan kept them back from the doors, exchanging rather profane insults with the catcalling Wyrr.\n\n\"We want NiVom back; he was an honest Wyrr!\"\n\n\"Anklene, more like,\" a Skotl roared back.\n\n\"Make a breach, you; I'm in the Imperial line,\" the Copper boomed, a little surprised at how loud his voice sounded. \"Let me in to see my family.\"\n\n\"Air Spirit, even Batty's turned up,\" someone said.\n\n\"NoSohoth,\" the Copper roared at the Tyr's door. \"I know you're on the other side of that. Let me in.\"\n\n\"He fought with NiVom at the Black River. Let him pass,\" someone in the throng shouted.\n\n\"He's a no-line half-wit.\"\n\n\"Not even hatched in the Lavadome. What business is it of his?\"\n\nThe portal opened, but the Copper didn't catch what was said. In any case, the fat Skotl toughs made room for him.\n\n\"RuGaard, what a pleasant surprise on this tragic day,\" NoSohoth said. Naturally he was the one dragon who pronounced his new appellation effortlessly, as though it had always passed his lips that way. \"Follow me.\"\n\nNervous thralls gathered in the shadows. Even the tiniest brazier was aflame, sending out soothing fragrances. At the larger versions blighters worked the fire with bellows.\n\n\"Where's Tighlia? I wish to speak to her,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"She's obviously in a delicate condition, shattered by the loss of her mate. It happened in her sleeping chamber, you know. Tyr SiDrakkon is holding court in the Tyr's chamber.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just call him Tyr? Did the Tyr name a new heir?\"\n\n\"Careful, now. There's the traditional one-year period of mourning.\"\n\n\"Of course. I'm no courtier; I apologize.\"\n\nThe Copper heard SiDrakkon's voice as he passed through into the Tyr's audience chamber. It was smaller than he remembered it, perhaps because of the crowd. Griffaran crowded the upper areas, two to a perch, looking agitated.\n\n\"We'll speak with one voice. United. I'm Tyr and that's all there is to it,\" SiDrakkon said. \"They'll have to accept it. The succession is legal and according to tradition. The worst thing we can do is divide and argue like this. Blood could be spilled at any moment.\"\n\nImfamnia lounged at his side, looking as though she were enjoying the view down on the Imperial line.\n\n\"I still say NiVom should have a proper trial,\" Ibidio said. She stood just below the shelf. \"One Anklene, one Skotl, and one Wyrr judging him.\"\n\n\"Mother, not that again,\" Imfamnia said. \"He's violent. War-worn, I expect.\"\n\n\"He ran from a challenge. He's not going to appear for a trial,\" SiDrakkon said.\n\n\"You seem very sure of that,\" SiMevolant put in airily. He'd dusted his golden scales with ash for the occasion; otherwise he would have outshone the whole room.\n\n\"Are you implying anything?\"\n\n\"Imply? Me? I come right out and say things. I've no ambition to conceal. I was just wondering if you'd had him killed, is all.\"\n\nSiDrakkon turned a deeper shade of purple. \"Of course not! Shut your snout if you've nothing to offer but blather. Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk! That's all the whole lot of you is good for. We have to act. Let's go out there and tell them something before flame begins to fly.\"\n\n\"Yes, I think that would be for the best,\" a raspy voice said.\n\nThe company hushed, and Tighlia emerged from behind the curtains. Both griff were down, and her wings dragged in mourning. She cleared her throat, but could produce only a rather loud whisper: \"I won't have all that my mate worked for destroyed. If we go out and present a united line, they'll accept SiDrakkon. Well?\"\n\nSiDrakkon glowered down at everyone, and Imfamnia looked warily at her future sister.\n\n\"If no one's dragon enough to venture out first, I shall,\" Tighlia said, moving toward the door down one of the silver waterfalls.\n\n\"No, Granddam,\" the Copper said. \"I'll go out first. No faction can do much worse to me than life's already done.\"\n\n\"What a way to begin your reign, Tyr SiDrakkon,\" SiMevolant said. \"A lame half-wit announcing your ascendance.\"\n\n\"And a garrulous bit of rabbit fluff bringing up the rear, no doubt,\" Tighlia croaked. \"Go on, RuGaard; show us what you're made of.\"\n\n\"I'll lead, blast it,\" SiDrakkon said. \"Are you coming, Imfamnia?\"\n\n\"You must be joking,\" she said, staying on her shelf. \"I had dung thrown at me on the way in. They're like humans.\"\n\nThey began to file out, and the Copper felt a pressure on his saa. It came from Ibidio, who maneuvered him into an alcove between half-melted war trophies as the others walked past.\n\n\"Ummmm, RuGaard, is it now?\" She glanced around to make sure none were listening, not even thralls. Outside, the crowed roared as the doors opened.\n\n\"Yes,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You had the Uphold at the end of the western road. Did NiVom come your way?\"\n\n\"If he had, I certainly wouldn't give him away. He was a good friend.\"\n\n\"I believe he's being hunted.\"\n\nThe Copper heard SiDrakkon roaring out a few emphatic words. A good deal of noise came back from the crowd.\n\n\"The Tyr came to me last night. He said he'd selected a new heir. He told me if anything happened to him, to ask you.\"\n\n\"Ask me what?\"\n\n\"Did you see him or didn't you?\"\n\n\"I did. I told him NiVom was innocent, and to ask you for the truth about your daughter. And your mate, and DharSii, whoever that was.\"\n\n\"He was our best air commander. Once.\"\n\n\"Dead?\"\n\n\"No one knows. It's not important; we have only a moment here. Who is the heir the Tyr mentioned?\"\n\n\"NiVom, I expect.\"\n\n\"What happened to the Tyr?\"\n\n\"I was one of the first at my mate-father's side,\" Ibidio said. \"We heard a roar from Tighlia's chamber. I tore down the curtains and rushed in. The Tyr was flat on his side, and there was a terrible smell in there. It made my head swim and brought my meal up. I found Tighlia on the balcony.\"\n\n\"What could have happened?\"\n\nThe crowd outside was quieting.\n\n\"I don't know. She's half deman, that one. But I'll tell you this: Look behind her griff. There are claw marks. Deep ones. Someone tried to tear her head off.\"\n\n\"I have to go.\"\n\nHe hurried toward the door, but SiDrakkon was already storming back in, his face spattered. \"They'll just have to get used to the idea,\" he said. \"I'll be spending the rest of the day at the bath.\"\n\n\"In all fairness,\" SiMevolant said, \"I don't believe they were throwing their own dung at you. It was some animal's. I think that makes a difference.\"\n\nSiDrakkon ignored him. \"The rest of you, go through the Resort, and then to all the hills. Talk to your friends and let them know I'll be Tyr, and there's to be no fighting, no changes in control of the hills. No decisions of the Tyr will be voided, no policies changed, and all are welcome to petition me after a six-day mourning period.\"\n\nThe line dispersed, with SiMevolant sighing. \"I was hoping for a banquet\u2026.\"\n\nSave for Tighlia. She walked, a little stiffly, up to the Copper.\n\n\"I see your wings have come in,\" she rasped. \"What's wrong with the odd one?\"\n\n\"An old injury, Granddam,\" he replied.\n\n\"You call me that just to annoy me, I expect. Well, I'm sorry for you. Come to my outer chambers tomorrow. I have an interesting piece of news for you. Oh, come now. I don't bite, and after all these years I'm not about to start with you.\"\n\nThe Copper spent the night in anxiety in the strangely empty Imperial Gardens, trying to make out figures on the milkdrinker's hill. He wanted to go to Nilrasha, but she couldn't be linked to him so publicly until he learned what Tighlia had in mind.\n\nHis imagination offered plenty of possibilities, none of them less than terrifying. She was the most dangerous dragon he'd ever met, and she never even so much as extended her claws. He suspected she intended to entrap him with some giveaway.\n\nHe slept but little.\n\nBone-weary from his journey and the upsets of the previous day, he splashed cool water on himself and ordered a thrall to bring him some toasted meat and a little wine. Fortified, he made his way to her caverns adjoining the Tyr's. Or, now, Tyr SiDrakkon's.\n\nHe scraped outside the curtains.\n\n\"Come,\" she rasped.\n\nIt was gloomy in her reception chamber. On a happier day there would be light bouncing off the glasswork mosaics worked into her walls and floors. He was rather surprised at how cheery the room could be, if it were better lit.\n\n\"RuGaard. I'm glad you made it early.\" Her voice sounded a little stronger today. \"I hate it when I invite someone over and they either don't show up at all or spend the whole day getting ready for the visit. Wastes my time.\"\n\n\"How are you feeling, Tighlia?\"\n\n\"That's better. Dragons never realize how much dragonelles\u2014and yes, dragon-dames\u2014love hearing their names said. It's always 'dear' or 'my love' or 'cloud-dream' or 'tenderness' or something they've heard their fathers use. Just say her name, RuGaard. You have your faults, but you do speak well. It seems to me when you first came here, you lisped like a hatchling.\"\n\n\"I remember. I hadn't been around dragons much.\"\n\n\"Just bats. Yes. Well, at least you don't smell like them these days.\"\n\n\"How can I be of service, Tighlia?\"\n\n\"Good news. I've selected a mate for you.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You heard me. Don't act fixated. Whatever else is the matter with you, you can make up your mind and not just stand around gaping. I saw that yesterday.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine my mating or not is of consequence to you.\"\n\n\"I want you a little more firmly in the Imperial line. The griffaran think well of you, and as you've no line to call your own, nobody hates you outright, which is more than can be said for most of your relatives.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you have time to think of such things with your dead mate still cooling. One might wonder\u2014\"\n\n\"You know, you almost look like a dragon who is working himself up to asking me if I've murdered my mate. And that would lead to a horrible scream from me, and a challenge, and then probably a duel, unless you have brains enough to flee for your scale, like NiVom.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your thoughtfulness, Tighlia.\"\n\n\"Everyone has the wrong idea of me. I want peace and quiet and beauty. Nothing more. No screaming dragons, no burning hills, no eggs tailswiped off their shelves to smash against uncaring, unknowing rock. Order, RuGaard. Simple order. You can help preserve that order.\"\n\n\"I had other plans\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, forget them. Here's my dilemma. Halaflora, my beloved mate's oldest granddaughter through AgGriffopse and Ibidio\u2014you remember her?\"\n\n\"The sickly one.\"\n\n\"You're one to talk, but I like your honesty. Halaflora is from AgGriffopse's first clutch. SiMevolant was the champion. Those eggs were laid under an evil star; that much is certain. Imfamnia and Ayafeeia came later. None of the males survived the hatching contest. Whatever's the matter? She's not that ugly.\"\n\n\"Nothing. Go on,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Of course, Imfamnia\u2014silly's not the word for that brainless bit of fluff\u2014has been dreaming about being mated with every breath her whole life, and now she's got her wish. An Imperial mating, no less. It will be the celebration of a tri-score year.\"\n\n\"What has Halaflora's mating to do with this?\"\n\n\"I was getting to that, if you'd tuck in your griff. Ayafeeia is taking formal vows to go into the Firemaids. Sensible girl\u2014if I had to do it over again\u2026Well, it doesn't matter. But Halaflora. Poor little dear. She's not as dumb as Imfamnia, but just as dreamy, and not as idealistic as Ayafeeia, but just as devoted. She wants nothing more than a mating flight, and those wings of hers aren't even strong enough to get her off the ground. Poor dear. I'm not going to draw breath and have a titular granddaughter of mine sobbing her eyes out as her sister is mated. And I want some good news in this family for once! It's like the last act of some bitter elvish tragedy. And fresh, hungry blood never hurts, if we're to raise a new generation of dragons and not lounging, scaled felines. You need some new males now and then or you get more glittering piles of dung like SiMevolant. A mating between you and Halaflora is just the thing.\"\n\n\"I've met a dragonelle already. Well, a drakka. She'll have her wings in a year.\"\n\nTighlia's eyes narrowed. \"Who?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I want to jeopardize her health by giving you the name.\"\n\n\"I suspect it's Nilrasha.\"\n\nThis time the Copper was dumbstruck.\n\n\"Of course, you could do worse,\" Tighlia said. \"Do you forget that I've got the management of the Firemaidens? A word of advice, RuGaard. She's from a bad family on a worse hill. She's out for a position in the Imperial line and a lookout from this rock, nothing more.\"\n\n\"What would an old viper like you\u2014\"\n\n\"So young. So young.\" She pushed open a curtain, and light came into the room through tinted panels of some thin-shaved crystal, or perhaps glass. As the Copper suspected, the colors were bright and cheery. She tore a bit of fabric off a polished piece of brass.\n\n\"I'm not as vain as I once was, but I'm vain enough that I can't stand what I see in this anymore. Look into this, RuGaard. Look into the mirror. A beautiful, vital young dragonelle is going to want that?\"\n\nHe looked at himself. The half-closed eye, the sloping stance, thanks to his bad sii, the broken-jointed wing that wouldn't close\u2026\n\n\"Lame and twisted, that's you, RuGaard. Another hatching under an evil star. She's after your line, not your scale.\"\n\n\"We neither of us much like what we see in that mirror,\" he said. \"Perhaps you should give it to Imfamnia as a mating gift.\"\n\n\"You can live in the world and accept it, or you can pretend the hatchling songs and stories are true. Which will it be, dragon?\"\n\n\"At the moment, a quiet life in Anaea seems enough of a dream.\"\n\n\"Easiest thing in the world. Simply mate with Halaflora and you can be back on the western road the next day. You'll forget your little Firemaiden soon enough, roasting ceremonial kern.\"\n\n\"What if her love is some pleasant dream of mine? What's wrong with dreams? I've seen enough of the world to prefer them.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"Oh, you are a prize fool, boy. I try and I try to help you. And this is what I get. Ingratitude. Ah, well, you'll get no more help from me. Or my brother. I'll see to that.\n\n\"Go to your precious Firemaiden, RuGaard. Someday you'll learn what dreams are made of.\"\n\nHe sought out Nilrasha on the milkdrinker's hill. The place was a warren of aboveground dwellings housing mostly human thralls, with blighters in huts on the other side of a filthy stream running in twin channels with a wall between that held washing.\n\nHe remembered NeStirrath on one of the hikes telling him that the humans wouldn't drink or wash in the blighter water, and the blighters wouldn't drink or wash in the human water, yet both were indistinguishable in their foulness.\n\nThere were dragon-holes on the hill too; in fact, the whole area was sort of one vast catacomb, with little ledges and chambers off the main passage, so that few had what could really be called a place of their own, and mother dragons had to shelter their eggs with the weight of their bodies to keep them from being disturbed, if not accidentally crushed.\n\n\"Our day for visitors,\" a mud-speckled Anklene said, looking at the painted stripes curling back from his shoulders.\n\n\"I'm looking for the Firemaiden quarter. I was told it was down here somewhere.\"\n\n\"Down it is, and then some; they're well below. Bottom of the air shaft to the left, your Imperial grace.\"\n\nHe had to climb slowly, thanks to his sii, but he made it to the bottom of the shaft. A few of the Firemaidens made jokes or hooted about an invasion of Drakwatch.\n\nHe searched for Nilrasha but could learn nothing more than that an Imperial messenger had come for her. He managed to find Fourfang, and told him to make ready for a journey back to Anaea.\n\nHe hurried on the path back to Black Rock, scrambling up every prominence and kern mill to look over the grounds for Nilrasha. He hoped it was just some matter of business with the Firemaidens, or that she'd gone to visit friends.\n\nHe marked a lone female sitting on a wall next to a mushroom field, and hurried toward her. With each step he became more certain it was Nilrasha.\n\nHe limp-trotted up to her. \"Nilrasha! I've been looking for you for hours.\"\n\nHer tail flicked up, but she kept watching the mushrooms. \"So you've found me. I understand you're to be mated to the late Tyr's own granddaughter. Well-done.\"\n\n\"No, you misunderstood. I refused her.\"\n\nShe turned and looked at him. \"Refused her, or refused Tighlia? That was a foolish thing to do. Such a strong connection to AgGriffopse's line would be to your advantage.\"\n\n\"I'm not looking for an advantage, just a chance at what\u2026what my parents had.\"\n\nAnd who took that away? Not Tighlia.\n\nShe looked away again, flicked out her tongue, and consumed a black beetle climbing the stones. \"I've changed my mind about mating. I'm taking vows as a Firemaid.\"\n\n\"Have they threatened you?\"\n\n\"No, they've not threatened me. I'm a poor drakka from a lowly line. What could they possibly take away that I cherish?\" She blinked, and the Copper saw a wetness in her eyes; then she took a cleansing breath. \"Our eldest was thrilled to hear me decide to take the vows. Offered me any guard post I wished.\"\n\n\"No. Come back to Anaea with me. There's nothing to stop us from mating.\"\n\n\"Nothing but the fact that I don't love you. I was just using words, words used by mated dragons for ages, and they worked their magic. But the Skotl clan is on the rise now, and they'll never let go of Black Rock. I had hopes for you.\"\n\n\"I thought\u2014\"\n\n\"I made you think, you mean. Yes, just as Tighlia said. I was after your lineage, your position, not some comedy of a mating.\"\n\n\"How do you know what Tighlia said?\"\n\nShe looked uncertain for the first time since he'd come upon her, resting on the wall. \"I can guess. She's a venomer, thanks to that tongue of hers. Go. Mate with that sickly little thing.\"\n\nShe jumped off the wall and ran, making a retching sound, leaving the Copper feeling as though his body were dissolving, flowing into the rocky soil of the Lavadome.\n\nNothing to overcome now. The course of his life was set. Perhaps he'd take up hunting.\n\nTheir mating was done, and done quickly.\n\nA goodly crowd turned up to watch them leave the Imperial Resort. According to NeStirrath, Halaflora had fond memories attached to her, for she used to ride atop her father as he went from hill to hill. AgGriffopse thought air and travel might improve her weak constitution, and his mate had no interest in leaving the Gardens atop the rock. So she was associated in the dragons' minds to AgGriffopse more than to Ibidio.\n\nAlmost everyone of the Imperial line trooped out behind them, even SiMevolant, who disliked the dirt and rough stones. Thralls walked to either side with pieces of soft cloth at the ends of sticks, wiping dust kicked up by the mating party from his scales.\n\nSiDrakkon led the party, with griff extended and a challenging eye, as though daring any of the spectators to throw dung. Imfamnia skipped next to him. Her wings were bulging against translucent skin and soon it would be her turn.\n\nThe party halted twice to let Halaflora catch her breath.\n\nThey finally came to the shaft everyone called the Wind Tunnel. Some trick of direction and air density ensured that this short tunnel to the slopes of the plateau always had a howling wind passing through it, equal to an uncomfortable mountain-top in a storm.\n\nIt was also called the \"death tunnel,\" for sometimes escaped thralls tried to climb out of it, or thieves tried to creep in from above. The winds usually snatched them up at some point and hurled them down the shaft. But no one called it the death tunnel today.\n\nThe Copper climbed to the top of a wind-cut rock with Halaflora and sang his song, with all around listening as best as they could in the wind. Rethothanna had helped him with the wording. The Copper felt that as long as the mating was to be done, it might as well be done well, so he sang of rivers, egg-snatching demen\u2014who said a lifesong must be all true?\u2014and wall-smashing boulders skipped across battlefields.\n\nAnd with that, they spread their wings\u2014SiDrakkon reached up and kindly helped him extend his injured left with a discreet pull\u2014and jumped.\n\nHis mating flight lasted what a dwarf would call a full ten seconds. They hung in the wind for a moment, the Air Spirit's untiring voice shrieking in their ears, Halaflora touching his good wing, and slowly glided to earth.\n\n\"I think they're laughing at us, my love,\" Halaflora said.\n\nThe Copper looked around at the assembly. Only SiMevolant was outright laughing\u2014\"That was worth a walk in the dust!\" he seemed to be saying, though with the wind carrying his words away it was impossible to be sure\u2014but most were at least fluttering their eyelids in amusement. Even the usually dour SiDrakkon looked to be enjoying himself for a change.\n\n\"I care not. This is the happiest day of my life. If I can share out some proportion of my own joy, all the better.\"\n\nThe expression on his mate's face washed the sting out of whatever wounds this exhibition cost him, and made the lies, if not pleasant, at least palatable enough so they didn't stick in his throat.\n\nSo the Copper and his mate returned\u2014by a journey made in very easy stages, out of regard for his mate's health\u2014to the Uphold in Anaea.\n\nThe Copper was relieved to see that Fourfang and Rhea seemed to get along with Halaflora's thralls. His mate took a special liking to Rhea, and soon she was supervising the other body-servant.\n\nHe took pleasure in pointing out the sights of Anaea and introducing her to some of \"his\" bats. Their lines had so intermingled, it was impossible to remember who was descended from Thernadad, or Enjor, or his oversize trio raised on dragonblood. She petted their strange furry skin and marveled at their ears and delicate wings.\n\nAt the western mouth everything was just as he remembered it, unexpectedly so. Nilrasha was back in the cave guarding the tunnel mouth, now with the Firemaid's red-painted stripe around her neck, though she still had not uncased her wings.\n\nShe kept her eyes downcast as she greeted him. \"Welcome, future Upholder.\"\n\n\"We thank you,\" the Copper said, his mind whirling like a leaf flung down the Wind Tunnel. What madness was this; did she wish to torture him with her presence? \"On behalf of my mate and myself.\"\n\n\"You're very lovely,\" Halaflora said. \"You could be a statue in the Imperial Gardens. I hope we'll be good friends.\"\n\n\"Thank you, your honor,\" Nilrasha said.\n\nThe first few feasts with the rather robust Upholder and his mate were a little on the awkward side. Halaflora had difficulty swallowing unless she ate tiny bites, and the tough-fibered game they brought back to the banquet floor was difficult for her to get down without choking.\n\nBut within the limitations of ill health, she was a superb mate. She made and arranged cushions for him on all his favorite lookouts, and she explored Anaea with FeLissarath's mate and returned with rich, scented oils that she rubbed on the worn spot on his bad sii and the stuck folds of his wings, or fixed lines on his growing horns to make them come in so they matched each other in a slight, attractive curve. She experimented endlessly with their meals, discovering what they both liked\u2014fish, sadly, which was rare save for the small specimens found in some of the mountain lakes\u2014and sang to him at night.\n\nHe decided there were many dragons worse mated, and if she didn't make his hearts hammer and his scale stir the way Nilrasha did when she stretched, there were other compensations.\n\nThen there was his work. He tried to learn more about the ins and outs of the scale trade.\n\n\"Why is dragonscale so valuable to humans?\" he asked FeLissarath.\n\n\"Jewelry, I've heard. Tips of sword scabbards, or holding wooden shields together. In some principality or other on the banks of the Inland Ocean, they use it as currency because it's impossible to forge, and dangerous to get hold of. Very wealthy hominids will lay it on their roofs to keep off fire. Some of the larger hominid cities suffer terribly from fires, nothing to do with dragons.\"\n\n\"It might behoove us to have a shortage of it now and then, especially when there's a particularly large crop of kern. I think we could get more bags in trade for scale.\"\n\n\"We have good relations with the kern kings, and the values were set long ago.\"\n\n\"To their advantage. I've heard one of the kings now has a stairway decorated with golden dragonscale.\"\n\n\"He'll slip and break his neck when it rains.\" FeLissarath laughed. \"Ah, the follies of humans. They don't live long enough to really learn what's important in life. Did I tell you about the bear I got yesterday? Yes, you heard me right, a bear\u2026.\"\n\nThe Copper spent a good deal of time on the western road. Thanks to a bridge collapse at the Tooth Cavern, almost an entire pack-train of kern was lost when inattentive handlers allowed the mules to bunch up on one of the more rickety spans.\n\nThey were already making repairs when he arrived to survey the damage\u2014thanks to the bats, he heard about it the same day it happened and left immediately\u2014and a Firemaid was flying back and forth carrying thralls\u2014mostly men, who, if their workmanship wasn't quite as skilled as that of dwarves, at least labored more willingly\u2014and tools from one end of the break to the other.\n\n\"Oh, your honor,\" she said. \"There's a thrall been asking every day to speak to the dragon in charge. That would be you.\"\n\n\"A human?\"\n\n\"Yes. He's got some plan or idea or bargain or something.\"\n\nThe Copper half expected to see Harf again, recaptured, but the young man who came before him wearing the tatters of some very tight weaving just looked at him with clear blue eyes. He was extraordinarily handsome, as far as he could tell hominid standards went.\n\n\"What is it you want, man?\"\n\n\"Great one. This bridge of yours. It's a death trap.\" He spoke the simplified pidgin Drakine with a thick accent; he hadn't been in the keeping of the Lavadome long, it seemed. As for his observation, that required no great mind to discern, with the bones and bodies of dead animals and handlers scattered all over the floor of the canyon below.\n\n\"Do you offer a remedy, or is this just idle conversation?\"\n\n\"I know how to improve it.\"\n\n\"Do you, now. Have you built many bridges?\"\n\n\"I've been involved in several construction projects. I was trained by dwarves.\"\n\n\"I didn't know they shared their secrets so readily with outsiders.\"\n\n\"I was a kind of special apprentice, your honor.\"\n\n\"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Rayg.\"\n\nThe Copper did like the look of him, except for the fact that he didn't appear particularly afraid of dragons. New thralls usually bent and tucked their heads down between their shoulders like frightened turtles.\n\n\"I should like to hear your plans.\"\n\n\"I have a condition.\"\n\n\"You forget your place. I could lift you and toss you down to rest with the other bones, and no one would say a word.\"\n\nThe man called Rayg just blinked at him.\n\nThe Copper relented, though he wondered if it was a mistake to do so. \"What's your condition?\"\n\n\"My freedom.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear. I can't say that I blame you, but there's a problem. You're not my slave.\"\n\n\"I'm sure I can be traded.\"\n\n\"Let me see your plans. Then we'll talk again.\"\n\nHe widened his stance. \"No. Buy me, and then I'll show you the plan. If you like the plan, I'll expect my freedom.\"\n\n\"You'll supervise the construction?\"\n\n\"Yes. As long as I can get more, much more, of the materials you're using now. And some good stonecutters.\"\n\n\"If I'm satisfied with the bridge you build, I'll grant you your freedom. You seem intelligent enough, so I'll see about buying you.\"\n\nNegotiating with thralls. The duties of an Upholder, even an Upholder-to-be, had a variety of flavors. Which made him think of the herbs Halaflora added to those big-footed rabbits Fourfang had caught\u2026.\n\nHe learned from the grunting deman overseer that this Rayg belonged to a general pool of Imperial thralls, to be used for mundane duties like building dams, clearing tunnels, mining for ores necessary to a healthy dragon's diet. As a member of the Imperial line he could make claims on such thralls, so he simply affirmed that the Uphold in Anaea needed him and paid out a small sum to the overseer as a kind of gratuity.\n\nThe Copper was very grateful his life couldn't be bought and sold so easily.\n\nHe had Rayg transferred to his household and introduced to Fourfang and Rhea with a minimum of squabbling. He set Rayg to work with a chalk tablet used to keep track of rations\u2014it would take time to get paper\u2014and tried to do what he could to retrieve the bags of kern from the fallen animals. Blood or rats had spoiled much of it.\n\nThe Firemaid told him of rumors from the Lavadome of some political housekeeping carried out by SiDrakkon. Nothing severe, just a replacement of some staff with his Skotl supporters. There'd been a few duels and deaths. SiDrakkon had also converted the Imperial Gardens to a private topiary and bathing area for himself and his mate-to-be, which was causing some grousing, as a walk in the mushroom fields or past livestock pens couldn't compare with the view from Black Rock.\n\nSiMevolant would have to find new flowers to contemplate. The thought brought him some pleasure.\n\nRayg presented him with a rough version of the plan, a mixture of tunneling through the stalactite formations and a new platform added to one of the rising rocks, complete with a drawbridge.\n\n\"I made it draw up toward the Lavadome,\" Rayg said. \"I believe you are more worried about enemies getting down into the Lower World than threats coming up.\"\n\nThe Copper wondered if Rayg knew more about the jealousies and rivalries and head-hunting going on in the Lavadome than he let on.\n\n\"It's wide. Will it hold?\"\n\n\"I thought you might like to take carts across. Yes, it will hold. The calculations are there, based on the materials I've seen. It's dwarven notation; can you read that?\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Do it well, and you'll get your reward,\" the Copper said, dodging the question rather than admitting that a thrall could do something he couldn't, which seemed wrong in an indefinable way. \"How long will it take?\"\n\n\"Two years. Unless you give me more tunnelers and tools. A furnace on site would speed things up as well.\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can do.\"\n\nIt was rather nice to leave all the details and worries in the hands of Rayg. He left instructions to the Drakwatch and the Firemaiden garrison that everything he asked for should be given.\n\n\"It will take some time to assemble the materials. Maybe you'd like a little sun?\"\n\nRayg's eyes lit up. \"The surface?\"\n\n\"Yes. Plenty of food, too. It's been a good summer; kern is coming out of our ears.\"\n\nThey had to return for SiDrakkon's mating, of course. They traveled light, bringing Rayg back to the works to supervise the first stages. A rickety catwalk replaced the gap in the bridge, and the Copper for once was slower than his mate, hobbled by his bad sii.\n\nThe Copper quietly warned the Firemaidens to watch Rayg, so that he didn't use his authority to fashion an escape. The project seemed well begun, and Rayg liked his work and got along well with the other thralls, but there was no telling with hominids.\n\nThe Copper went so far as to have Rhea decorate him for the mating banquet, as she had for the first time he'd attended a gathering atop Black Rock. NeStirrath helped him prepare by having a pair of blighters paint his war decorations on his good wing.\n\nSiDrakkon reopened the Imperial Gardens to show all the improvements. There were more statues and galleries and plant beds everywhere, and it had been redesigned so a lone dragon could walk the perimeter in something like isolation, at the cost of making the space less functional for multiple dragons to enjoy.\n\nBut then, as Imfamnia liked to remind everyone, \"It is our garden.\"\n\nHalaflora set herself on some cushions near the banquet trench and spoke to her other sister, now grave in her Firemaid ring.\n\nTheir mating flight commenced with a long, expanding flight around Black Rock, then the inner hills, and finally the outer edge of the Lavadome. Thralls had been coached to cheer them from the rooftops and hills, and dragons who knew what was good for them trumpeted their well-wishes.\n\nImfamnia was in her element at the mating banquet, alternately roaring orders and simpering. The Copper was rather glad for a sickly mate rather than this whirlwind in painted scale. \"This? This is nothing,\" she said. \"Wait until we get a new trade route open. I want everyone to shake off every scale they can. There are some new metal-based paints that will drive everyone mad with excitement when they see them. Such vivid colors!\"\n\n\"Is it wise to send dragonscale directly to the merchant houses?\" Rethothanna asked. \"Especially for luxuries? I always thought it was wiser to bring scale to market indirectly, so its source would be harder to trace.\"\n\n\"And what of it, if the source is found? We control every road and every river in the Lower World for many marches in every direction,\" Imfamnia responded. \"I've even heard the Wheel of Fire has been smashed in the last year by barbarians. Those dwarves had the only army capable of forcing itself anywhere near here, or so my mate says. Isn't that right, Tyr?\"\n\n\"Yes, the main threat against us in the Lower World is gone. And as for the Upper, the Ghi men got a lesson,\" Tyr SiDrakkon said, for in the Copper's heart there would only be one Tyr, and the title choked on its way out his lips. \"We'll teach the same to any who dare come against us.\"\n\n\"War, war, war,\" Ibidio said. \"You make it more likely with your foolishness and bragging. There's always risk in war. Always loss.\"\n\nThe Copper suddenly noticed that Tighlia wasn't at the celebration. \"Where is my granddam?\" he asked. \"I would like to pay my respects.\"\n\n\"The old has-been keeps to her room,\" SiMevolant said. He'd had his claws painted up with gold striping and added black to his tail. The Copper thought he looked like a bumblebee among the coneflowers bordering one of Anaea's kernfields.\n\n\"She doesn't like being outdone by our beautiful new queen,\" SiMevolant continued, bowing to Imfamnia. \"Ladies, look to your mates, for no hearts remain true when Imfamnia passes. Beautiful Imfamnia.\"\n\n\"I'm going to go see Tighlia. Will you be all right, darling?\" the Copper asked his mate. She smiled up at him from her cushions and nodded.\n\n\"When has Halaflora ever been all right?\" SiMevolant asked, and everyone waggled their eyebrows.\n\n\"You go too far, SiMevolant,\" the Copper roared in his face. \"Cry challenge, and meet me in the pits!\"\n\n\"RuGaard, you really must have your body-slave look to your teeth and tongue,\" SiMevolant said, his griff not even twitching. Behind him, NoSohoth pushed his way forward, guiding blighters with incense to calm the situation. \"Unless you intend to slay with your breath. But soft! I cry submission. I meant no offense; it was only a little jest at my sister. She's known me for years. I mean no harm.\"\n\n\"Thank you, my lord,\" Halaflora said, ignoring her brother and staring at the Copper. \"Thank you for that.\"\n\nHer sister Ayafeeia looked at him with new eyes. She flicked a griff at him, one warrior to another. He turned away.\n\n\"Now I know why he walks so oddly,\" SiMevolant said. But softly. \"It's that lance stuck up his tailvent.\"\n\nHe left the party and sought out Tighlia. One of her thralls admitted him.\n\n\"No, no more visitors,\" he heard her cry, followed by a low humming hominid voice. \"Oh. Well, I can stand him,\" she said a little more quietly.\n\nThe elderly female thrall brought him into the cheery little room. Now a bronzed tooth and a scale and a claw from, he guessed, her mate stood on a special pedestal in the center of the room. Other than that it was largely unchanged, though perhaps the air was a little heavier, as though she rarely left the room.\n\n\"I've come to pay my respects, Tighlia,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Wine?\" she asked, indicating a deep cistern next to her low shelf. She took a tongueful. \"It's good. Go ahead! I've never poisoned a guest's wine, and I'm not going to start today.\"\n\n\"A little, thank you.\" The Copper took a tongueful. \"Why aren't you at the mating banquet?\"\n\n\"Because my brother's going to be there,\" she said a little thickly. \"I suppose you find that odd.\"\n\n\"I grew tired of the banquet myself.\"\n\n\"You know what he's done with the Gardens, I expect.\"\n\nShe's even drunk! All I have to do is make one good leap. I've got enough strength in my good sii to\u2014 \"Made them into a private park for himself and\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, that's bad enough,\" she said, taking such a great slurp of wine a little ran out of the corners of her mouth. The spill somehow disarmed him, and he relaxed. \"Oh, how sloppy of me. Yes, bad enough to deny decent dragons the view, but do you know he's stocked it with his precious, plump human females? Brought at great expense, oh, yes, the demen slave traders and ferrymen are happy with him. He's in there all day sniffing around like some wretched dog. Getting himself puffed up for a night with Imfamnia.\"\n\n\"She's an energetic young dragonelle\u2014er, dragon-dame,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"There's something sad about that mating. Of course, there always is with a dragon his age and some bright thing with her wings fresh out. Happened before, just not in the Imperial line. If you must dilly-dally you can at least be discreet about it and not bring the jade-scale into company.\"\n\n\"Manners have never been my specialty.\"\n\n\"He hardly visits me anymore,\" she said, and paused for a little more wine. \"Doesn't care for my advice. You know what he told me, once we had things sorted in the Rock? I brought him a whole bellyful of matters needing attention. He said, 'I'm Tyr now; I can do what I want.'\"\n\nShe paused.\n\n\"'I can do what I want.' What a child. What an old, foolish child. It's quite the opposite, you know. Perhaps he never really understood what it meant to lead.\"\n\n\"I came to tell you about some improvements I have in mind for the western road,\" the Copper said. \"I was wondering if you had any advice about stonecutters.\"\n\n\"Oh, I've had too much wine for any of that. How is your mate?\"\n\nThe Copper tried to find the proper words. \"I'm\u2026I'm content.\"\n\n\"Good for you, RuGaard. I hope you will be able to stay content. As for me\u2026oh, I must do some serious thinking. But first, a little more wine. It is the day of my brother's mating, after all. Oh. Stonecutters. Yes, come tomorrow and I'll give you a name. Fat human, smelly as a pig's arse and dripping fleas, but he does good work with his crew.\"\n\nThe stonecutter's name was Hiriyal, and he did excellent work and regulated an efficient crew. With their quick\u2014albeit expensive\u2014help, each day saw the tunneling progress and the slag pile grow. Hiriyal was a \"free slave,\" which sounded like a contradiction, but he made his strange social position work for the benefit of himself and his men.\n\nThe Firemaidens had carried out their orders a little too enthusiastically, and he found Rayg chained by the ankle to a heavy boulder. He got around by having a blighter help him lift it into a barrow, and together they could move it to the next site, though negotiating the catwalk was obviously impossible.\n\nThe Copper had the chain struck off and set up a temporary household while the most difficult element of the work, the stonecutting, was carried out under Rayg's supervision. After a few arguments about methods with Hiriyal, they made good progress.\n\nThe Copper was surveying the first span with Rayg when the young man suggested that he fly below and look at the supports.\n\n\"I can't fly.\"\n\n\"Is it that wing? The one that hangs?\"\n\n\"Yes, useless. Not even good to glide; it's more of a swooping fall, I'm afraid.\"\n\nRayg walked around him. \"I believe the problem's in that joint. It looks different from the one on the other side, like the two ends are slipped.\"\n\n\"I know the cause,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"I might be able to fix that. It looks like all it needs is a brace to keep the outer edge from sliding and then folding over the inner.\"\n\nThe Copper hardly dared hope. \"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"It's simple\u2026\" He said a word the Copper didn't understand. \"Just a matter of give and take.\"\n\n\"If you do that, I will set you up like a kern king. Once you finish the bridge.\"\n\n\"I'd always heard dragons are terrible. You're better than barbarians.\"\n\n\"I should hope so,\" the Copper said.\n\nOver the next weeks Rayg worked with two pieces of wood carved into shapes that resembled a crescent moon, thick leather, metal bands, and some studs. Rhea helped him, holding the wing still as he tested model after model. It infuriated the Copper, as each session ended with an \"I've got to build another model\" that became an inevitability ending the experiments.\n\nHe wondered if all this work was just an excuse to divert his attention from an escape attempt, or some bit of spycraft, but all Rayg seemed to do was spend more and more of his off time with Rhea.\n\nThen one day, after an unusually long session extending and retracting his wing over and over and over again until the Copper's muscles grew weary, with Rayg making chalk marks on the wood, the man said, \"This model will work.\"\n\n\"You mean\u2014\" the Copper began.\n\n\"Oh, I've got to improve it. A little more shaping. But this one folds just enough. It's a little stiff, but better too rigid than something that'll give way when you're in the air.\"\n\nThe bridge, and the wing contraption, both progressed daily. After having his skin rubbed raw extending and retracting his wing, he tried a short glide from one construction platform to another.\n\nHis wing stayed open! Hearts beating, he threw his head to the sky and roared, so loudly that the Firemaidens came running, thinking there was a fight.\n\nWith that he launched himself off the platform. Rayg shouted something but he didn't catch it; it was lost in the sound of air as he flew. He tried one beat, two, three, gaining altitude with each stroke of his wings. He had never realized how good it would feel to use the muscles on his back properly, how perfect the sensation\u2014\n\nSnap!\n\nThe device flew off and he felt the old, faint grinding sensation of his bones folding against each other. His wing collapsed and the world spun around him. No, yes, he managed a turn, leveled out, and then the ground was suddenly beneath him and it struck hard.\n\nHe woke smelling his own blood. But he managed to stand, and looked at the skid mark he'd made in the canyon's side. He'd lost a few scales as well.\n\nHe picked up the broken contraption and made the long, slow, sore climb back up to the construction site.\n\n\"I'm glad you live,\" Rayg said.\n\n\"How thoughtful of you,\" the Copper responded.\n\n\"No, I'm truly glad. The Firemaidens said that if you were dead, they'd throw me off the bridge.\"\n\n\"Ten lengths ago I would have told them to do it. I'm too tired now.\"\n\n\"Didn't you hear me shout? I wanted to take it off and make sure the leather strap was holding. It's meant to be permanently fixed with steel pins.\"\n\nRayg worked on his model for a few more days, and was extra diligent at the bridge as well. They went through a few more practice glides, and the Copper flew back and forth and did turns under the bridge\u2014with the harness tied around his limbs and a long, long line leading back to the bridge, just in case.\n\nBut in the end, he flew. He knew he didn't fly well; nor could he do any of the fancy maneuvers he'd seen some of the dragons flying over the Imperial Resort perform for the sheer joy of it, but the ability made him feel complete, perhaps for the first time in his life.\n\nAnd it hurt to know that Halaflora wasn't up to it.\n\nAfter showing his mate, he demonstrated his wings to Nilrasha. Her wings had come in some months ago, but he'd purposely kept away so he wouldn't have to watch her fly. It didn't help that Halaflora described the occasion in excruciating detail, full of praise for how natural and well formed she looked in the air.\n\n\"Oh, it's a miracle, your honor. The Spirits are rewarding you at last.\"\n\n\"You don't have to call me your honor, Rasha. Not when we're alone.\"\n\n\"I like formalities. It's so easy to hide behind them. If you offered to take me up, I'd say yes. You know that.\"\n\n\"Take you up?\"\n\n\"You know. Mate.\"\n\n\"Nilrasha, my mate is above in the palace.\"\n\n\"Oh, we wouldn't have to fly out together, silly. Go out separately, and meet where she couldn't see.\"\n\nThe Copper felt bar-struck. \"I meant a dragon should just have his mate.\"\n\n\"So we are never to\u2026I thought you just mated with Halafora to make the line happy.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it doesn't make the mating anything less for that. She's been kind to me.\"\n\n\"And you to her. Too kind. Do you ever\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about that. You've got the wrong idea about me if you think I could\u2014\"\n\n\"Could? Do you have another injury I'm unaware of?\"\n\nHe rattled his griff. \"Would, then. No. Not while Halafora lives. I've pledged myself to her, and that's an end to it.\"\n\n\"But do you still love me, RuGaard?\"\n\nHe couldn't answer that. If he did, he'd never be able to look at Halafora across a feast again. He turned tail and left the Firemaid's cold, chaste quarters.\n\nHe told FeLissarath and his mate that as soon as the bridge was completed and he could turn his attentions to Anaea, they would be free to leave.\n\n\"The odd thing is, I don't think we want to go,\" FeLissarath said. \"The hunting is good, and we have friends here among the humans and condors. Perhaps we'll leave the palace to you and set up somewhere in the mountains. A little cave. Really rough it, like young, wild dragons of the north first mated.\"\n\nHis mate looked at him and she loosed a prrum.\n\nTalk turned to politics, as it often did. Rumor had come up through the Drakwatch that SiBayereth, SiDrakkon's first clutchwinner, had been killed, not in a duel, but in his bath. Some were saying he was assassinated in retribution for some of the killings and forced duels that had been taking place with greater frequency since SiDrakkon turned Tyr.\n\nOthers said that he'd bodily insulted some maiden dragonelle and she'd taken the traditional revenge of a female wronged and discarded.\n\nThe Copper returned to his cushions and his mate, exceptionally happy to be in Anaea and out of the Imperial Resort and its feuds. He slept with his neck across hers in silent appreciation.\n\nSo eager were the FeLissaraths to be in their new digs that they started hunting for caves almost immediately, and turned over all the day-to-day temple duties to him.\n\nNow that he had his wings he hunted for NiVom, searching the mountains to the south, but there was no sign of him. He spent a rather cold night in the mountains\u2014the Upper World made him feel exposed and watched; he didn't like it, even when the unpredictable weather was nice\u2014and flew back in the morning.\n\nIt was a brilliant, clear day. The sort of day that wouldn't think about being evil, and instead put off ill tidings until the next overcast.\n\nHe saw a distant dot. It was a dragon, male\u2014and therefore not Nilrasha, nor FeLissarath. It was light-colored, reflecting the sun, perhaps white.\n\nHe beat his wings hard toward it. He hoped if it was NiVom he'd recognize him rather than think him an assassin, despite the improbability of his being in the air. The dragon turned a little, not running away then, but coming toward him.\n\nThey rushed toward each other with frightening speed. The Copper saw that it was a light shade of bronze, though a good deal smaller than Father, at least Father as he remembered him. The dragon gained altitude at the last moment, as though seeking an advantage, and the Copper veered away, fearing a tailstrike on his weak wing and upset by something odd about its lines.\n\nThe dragon had a rider!\n\nThe implications so upset the Copper that he dropped toward the palace as fast as he dared\u2014Rayg said that he couldn't be certain that the joint wouldn't give way under what he called \"extraordinary stress\" but refused to further define it.\n\nHis wing held as he leveled off, making for the staircase cut into the side of the mountain, topped by the familiar outlines of the dragon palace.\n\nThe other dragon\u2014for some reason the term hag-ridden popped into his head, but he couldn't remember the origins; perhaps it was some story mother dragons told their hatchlings to compel them to behave\u2014followed his course, though it made no attempt to catch up.\n\nHe came in for a landing at the wide lower entrance hall, and Fourfang trotted up.\n\n\"Get my mate and Nilrasha. Danger!\"\n\nFourfang glanced up and turned around, doing a fair attempt at running on all fours to get back inside the palace.\n\nThe Copper backed into the entrance to get solid Anaean stone between himself and the stranger\u2014there was that term again, hag-ridden.\n\nThe man shouted words down at him, but he couldn't comprehend their meaning.\n\n\"May I land?\" the dragon roared.\n\n\"What is it, my lord?\" Halaflora said from the entrance.\n\n\"Stay back. If a fight begins, use your flame to help me and then run for the Lower World.\" He stuck his head out. Oh, this was cowardly! He stepped out.\n\n\"Cry parley and land away. Beneath me, now.\"\n\nThe dragon turned one more circle and landed well, though it rocked the man in his leather seat a little. The hag-rider wrapped the reins around a curved tooth at the front of his seat and hopped off, though he kept hold of a rope linking him to his leather seat.\n\nThe Copper tried not to stare at the elaborate reins linking dragon, head and wing, to the rider. There were copper rings punched through the skin of the dragon to better fix the lines. He wondered if that hurt.\n\nThe man glubbed out a few words.\n\n\"That's Parl,\" Halaflora said. \"It's a trade tongue here on the surface.\"\n\n\"Can you speak it?\"\n\n\"Only a few words. I know a greeting.\"\n\n\"Then say it.\"\n\nShe coughed something out that sounded like the mindless yapping of a dog.\n\nThe man took off his helmet and said something in return.\n\n\"He's being polite,\" she said.\n\nAnd there the conversation sputtered and died out. The man spoke to his mount, and the dragon said, in a rather thick accent: \"We have come to bring peace.\"\n\n\"That's good. I hope you may also go in peace.\"\n\nThe dragon translated for the hag-rider. The man responded, through his dragon: \"We seek allies in a great war. A war that unites dragon and man against their common enemy.\"\n\nHawks and mice uniting against the dogs and cats! The Copper didn't know what to make of it, but he was in the Imperial line and needed to answer well.\n\n\"If you are so united,\" the Copper said, \"why do you need to speak the man's words? Why do you fly tied head and wing tip to the man? Answer me that, and don't bother saying anything to him.\"\n\nThe bronze looked nonplussed.\n\n\"I tell the man that, and he will be angry,\" the bronze said.\n\n\"All the more reason not to translate it.\"\n\nThe hag-rider yapped something.\n\n\"That was a 'What?'\" Halaflora said.\n\nThe Copper smelled Nilrasha lurking somewhere. He suspected she was slipping around the side of the palace, next to the stairs.\n\n\"It is a great war,\" the bronze said. \"We win battles.\"\n\n\"I'm happy for you, then. I'll welcome any dragon who wishes to come in friendship, parley, and leave in peace. Leave your men at home, though. It's bad manners to bring armed men into a free dragon's home.\"\n\nThe dragon said something to the man, but it didn't take long. The Copper suspected much of the wordplay had been lost. He hoped the meaning remained.\n\nThe man showed his teeth and raised his hand to his chin. He gave a twist of his hand, as though fixing his faceplate.\n\n\"We may return,\" the dragon said.\n\n\"Yes, I think that was it,\" Halaflora added.\n\nThe man climbed back up onto the bronze and took up the reins. He prodded the bronze with his pointy boots, and the hag-ridden dragon flapped up into the clean blue sky.\n\n\"I think I'm going to be sick,\" Nilrasha said, looking up. \"The creature's riding him like a horse.\"\n\n\"If that's the great alliance, I think we should have no part of it,\" Halaflora said. \"I'd sooner trust a dwarf.\"\n\nThat night the three of them talked the matter over across the feasting floor.\n\nNilrasha tore into her meal of kern-fattened pig, tearing off lusty bits and swallowing them, while Halaflora ate in her usual dainty style due to her trouble swallowing.\n\nThey presented a pretty contrast, the Copper thought. But he couldn't consider aesthetics.\n\n\"I think we'll have to tell Tyr SiDrakkon. This is a matter for him.\"\n\nNo one objected to the compound name, a serious insult had they been back at the Rock. At least in that respect, all three were alike.\n\n\"I'm going to send word through the bats. I'm afraid it will get confused, so I'll follow to answer questions,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"What if the rider comes back? Shouldn't you be here?\" Nilrasha asked.\n\n\"I'm not even sure I'm the Upholder. The FeLissaraths have moved to their lodge cave, but they still attend all the Anaean ceremonies, preside over them, in fact.\"\n\n\"I would go for you, your honor. But I cannot leave my post,\" Nilrasha said.\n\n\"You could leave it in my hands,\" Halaflora said. \"I took the Firemaiden oath. I never did anything with the other maidens, but does that make the oath less valid?\"\n\nThe Copper felt trapped between duty and need.\n\n\"No. I may need to argue, or even challenge. I'll beg the FeLissaraths to return to the palace long enough for me to return to the Lavadome. I can break tradition and fly to one of the griffaran cuts in the mountainside. This is important enough. I can make the journey at night and rest in the day and be there in two days.\"\n\n\"Will your wing hold up? You'll be far from help if that man's contraption fails,\" Halaflora said.\n\n\"If the joint fails after all this testing and trial, Rayg will wish I'd been on the other side of the world.\"\n\n\"Your blood certainly was up tonight,\" Halaflora said, as they settled into their sleeping chamber. His mate had turned several of the stone globes into rather comfortable backrests, thanks to cushions stuffed with bird feathers. \"I've never seen you like this. Is this what war is like?\"\n\n\"No. Nothing like this, and Spirits keep it that way.\"\n\n\"What way?\"\n\n\"Far from here.\"\n\n\"You smell hot. I thought certainly you'd take your jade up tonight.\"\n\nThe world froze for a moment. \"You thought what?\"\n\nRhea finished cleaning out her mistress's ears and scurried out of the room. Had the girl put on weight? Ten other equally trivial thoughts washed through his head, so eager was he to avoid the consequences of thinking about what his mate had just said.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Am I being too direct? All those years with SiMevolant as a brother. Some time at night to relax and refresh, then.\"\n\n\"She's a Firemaid. She swore an oath. I swore an oath to you, for that matter. She's not\u2026not my lover.\"\n\n\"Oh, RuGaard. My lord, I won't be hurt by the truth. I married a dragon, not some perfumed flower. There's nothing wrong with a jade for a dragon in your\u2026in your situation. Because of my health.\"\n\n\"Have you gone mad?\" He didn't mean it, but the words came out. Anything to stop her from going on.\n\n\"Our mating wasn't a real mating, after all. As much as it meant to me.\" She looked down.\n\n\"I had no idea you felt that way,\" he said at last. They each studied opposite corners of the room for a moment. What came out next was inspired by kindness, rather than love, but he meant every word of it. \"Darling. Let's be mated again, then. Or mated for the first time. Whatever you call it. In tight spots, during wars and so forth, dragons have been known to mate underground. It's tactics, you know. Just a matter of position.\"\n\nShe looked up at him, blushing.\n\n\"Can we? Really? Would it be\u2026proper?\"\n\n\"Proper? Probably not. But it'll be exciting.\"\n\nThe sun rose in front of the mountains to the west and lit the night-curtains with its orange glow.\n\nWest? In front of the mountains?\n\nThe Copper's sluggish brain took its time apprehending the wrongness of the lighting. He opened another eye and righted himself, rose, and put his head out of the curtains.\n\nFlames dotted the plateau, but they were nothing compared to the conflagration below the temple. The city of the kern kings was a solid mass of fire.\n\nHe saw dragonwings silhouetted against the flames, and then another set, and another, flying in a line.\n\n\"What is it, my lord?\" his mate said.\n\nHe pushed the curtains open with his tail. \"War.\"\n\n\"RuGaard.\" He heard a dragon voice from above, soft yet insistent.\n\nWith a single soft wing-beat, FeLissarath alighted on the top of the temple, keeping to the shadows. His mate followed.\n\n\"We have terrible news,\" FeLissarath said.\n\n\"A moment.\" He turned to Halaflora. \"Get the thralls and such meats as can be easily carried. Go to the Firemaid chamber. If they come into the palace, bring the roof down on top of the entrance and head down into the Lower World. Have Nilrasha fight and delay them; you just run. Leave the thralls behind if you must, but find the Drakwatch and tell them Anaea's been attacked by man-ridden dragons.\"\n\n\"I understand. Thank you for not treating me like\u2026like\u2026\"\n\n\"I know. They may not come here. They may just be after gold.\" He wished he could summon a prrum, and instead rubbed his snout on hers. \"Go.\"\n\nAs she left by the inner exit he climbed out on his balcony and up. Together the three dragons watched the flames spread.\n\n\"Less than a score, do you think, my love?\" FeLissarath's mate said.\n\n\"They're causing confusion,\" the Copper said, watching a trio of dragons land. \"Burning the city but landing at the palaces. I think they're after gold.\"\n\nFeLissarath spoke: \"They're man-ridden, RuGaard. We had a brush with one, but we lost him by going to ground by the river.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"RuGaard, the Tyr must be told of this, the faster the better. Thank the Air Spirit for that clever thrall. Take the skyway to the plateau\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, Upholder, I know.\"\n\n\"After this night you'll be Upholder, I fear.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHis mate spoke: \"We need a prisoner or two. Find out who they are and where they came from.\" She stared into his eyes.\n\n\"The most dangerous game of all, my love? We must be careful. They'll be tougher than wild griffaran.\" He turned back to the Copper. \"You must make the best speed you can to the Imperial Resort and come back with everything the Tyr can send. He should come himself, at that.\"\n\n\"Oh, for DharSii's old aerial host at this hour,\" she said.\n\n\"We'll try from above, dear. Don't frame against the moon\u2014\"\n\n\"Am I a wet-wing?\"\n\nThe Copper only half listened to them talk. He watched another trio of dragons come in, landing on a triangular temple top. It was hard to see at this distance, but it seemed figures dropped off the dragons as soon as they landed. The dragons took off again almost immediately.\n\n\"This is for my benefit as well,\" FeLissarath said. \"We may get lucky and snatch one out of the saddle. In case of trouble, make for the big smoke column and climb. Whatever happens, we shouldn't lead them back here. If we're separated, we'll go to the high pass lookout and meet there. RuGaard, are you still here?\"\n\nThe Copper extended his wings. \"Back in three days if I can. Four days at most. More means I'm dead.\"\n\n\"If you don't see us again, lad, remember us every time you take a wild bighorn,\" FeLissarath's mate said.\n\nThe Copper launched himself into the night.\n\nIt took time to gain altitude, and he did so on the dark side of the mountain backing up the temple. Curse the bright moon tonight!\n\nHe saw the FeLissaraths take off from their palace and wheel around north to keep the attacking dragons on the moon side. He saw them gain altitude.\n\nThree shapes dropped out of the sky upon them, falling like hawks.\n\nThe FeLissaraths closed up on each other, with the male slipping a little below the female, guarding his mate's vulnerable belly.\n\nSuddenly the old Upholders flipped over on their backs, practically bending their spines in half. Tails a blur, they struck their lead pursuer, one high and one low.\n\nThe Copper saw an object fall, turning cartwheels as it plummeted to the plateau. He suspected\u2014no, rejoiced\u2014that it was one of the hag-riders. The dragon they struck convulsed in the air and fell, limp-winged.\n\nBut the two following avoided their quarry-turned-hunters and broke, one high and to the right, one low and to the left, a terrible perfection in their evolutions.\n\nThe male swung under his mate again, guarding her, and the low-flying dragon passed under him. FeLissarath twitched in midair, turned sideways, and began a stiff-winged fall to the surface.\n\nThe female flew to the aid of her mate, diving, but that just gave the one who turned high an opportunity. It dove on her, claws extended like a hawk after a duck, and raked her across the back.\n\nThe Copper saw one wing rise, fluttering.\n\nBut she wasn't done yet. She lashed up with her neck, got her teeth in her opponent's tail, and folded her wings. With her weight clinging to him, the other dragon couldn't stay aloft, and the pair began to fall, whirling around and around to destruction on the plateau. The female pulled herself up her opponent's tail and dug into his belly, trading bites as they went down.\n\nSo passed the Upholders of Anaea.\n\nThe Copper swung around toward the remaining hag-ridden dragon. He was descending to the aid of the other rider. But he saw another formation of three coming in, late to the fight but arriving before he could.\n\nHe couldn't match the flying of the FeLissaraths, let alone the guided enemy dragons working in concert. No flame, almost blind in one eye, and a bad wing. He wouldn't even get one. He turned east for the Lavadome.\n\nBut in his ascent, watching the aerial duel, he'd passed out of the shadow of the mountain and into moonlight. He realized it too late.\n\nThe three hag-ridden dragons flapped their wings in unison as they turned toward him.\n\nThey made no great effort to catch up to him as he fled east. After closing to two-score dragonlengths, they seemed content to trail him.\n\nThe long flight exhausted him. He passed over unfamiliar country, dry and rocky and dotted with widely spaced patches of vegetation clinging precariously to what he suspected were seasonal water supplies. There was little sign of habitation in this waste.\n\nThanks to his injury, he couldn't manipulate his wing to take the wind at a favorable angle, and he suspected he was ex-pending as much effort just to glide between beats as he would climbing. His strength would fail before dawn.\n\nAnd on and on glided the pursuit. Didn't they have buildings to burn and gold to steal? Why didn't they close and put an end to him?\n\nPainful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. Painful beat-glide. On and on through the night.\n\nA black scar broke the moonlit ground ahead.\n\nCould it be the Tooth Cavern? He knew it opened to the sky not far north of the bridge at the Lower World. He altered his course a little south.\n\nFool! More the fool! The change proved to be a telltale to the pursuing dragons. They beat their wings harder, closing.\n\nHe expended what strength he had left trying to stay ahead; still they closed.\n\nAnd still they fired no weapon, just kept him under observation.\n\nAt last the cavern was in his glide-path. No elegant flying, just a simple turn and descent. He closed his wings a little to hurry it, making for the canyon floor.\n\nThe leading two followed. The third stayed above, watching the action.\n\nHe looked frantically for some sign of the tunnel, the enclosure of the Lower World, but there was none. Columns of rock could be seen ahead; perhaps they were the beginnings of the teeth.\n\nReaching the stone columns, he swerved around one, the next painfully bashing his wing tip when he miscalculated his turn. Now the lead flier was closer behind, his companion a little farther back, and the Copper didn't dare roll his good eye toward the sky lest he hit the cavern's side.\n\nThere. Darkness ahead. As a dragon he could see well enough. He wondered how good the night vision of the riders was. Would they let their fliers choose their own path?\n\nHe whipped into darkness, and the first pursuer drew even closer.\n\nThese rocks he knew. He'd flown around them often enough in his practice flights as Rayg tested the joint brace.\n\nThe fat one ahead, in fact, had a deceptively wide but shallow route around the east side, and a narrow but deep channel to the left.\n\nHe approached the fat rock as though going around the east, then at the last moment rolled and shot through the west gap. But instead of continuing down the cavern he stayed in the turn, hoping to meet his pursuer coming around the other side\u2014anything but nose-tip to nose-tip.\n\nA flash, a thump in his wing, and they were past each other.\n\nHe found himself flying headlong toward the second hag-ridden dragon. The rider put a shimmering piece of metal to his shoulder and something whirled past his ear, turning tight circles as it cut the air\u2014a crossbow bolt.\n\nThe Copper dove for the surface, and so did his opponent. He rose to turn and the opposing dragon lashed out with a saa as they passed, opening a wound in his belly.\n\nHe turned back south for the bridge.\n\nNow the third dragon descended, its rider leaning over and struggling with his weapon. The Copper made for the tunnel, but the second pursuer banked in front of him. The rider hurled some kind of apparatus of chain and steel balls but missed, thanks to the tight turn his mount was making in the narrow walls of the canyon.\n\nAhead the Copper saw the first dragon shooting out of the mouth of the cave, the strapped-on leather chair hanging askew and reins loose and flying free in the breeze. He'd dismounted the rider!\n\nNow in the cave he saw the hag-rider sprawled on the floor, unconscious or dead. He flapped into the canyon, the darkness promising safety, but still one dragon followed.\n\nHe didn't have time to wonder what had happened to the third.\n\nThe chasm descended sharply and he banked around a bend, and there ahead was the bridge.\n\nHe loosed a bellowing war call: \"Firemaidens, cry havoc!\"\n\nHe turned for the south side of the bridge and a crossbow bolt punched through his wing.\n\nUnder the bridge and up, he saw two shapes hiding at the openings of the short tunnel through one of the rocky \"teeth\" on the new bridge. As the dragon trailing him closed they loosed their flame and spread it.\n\nThe dragon closed its wings, and the rider crossed shield-elbowed in front of the Copper's face. They passed through flame together, the oily, burning mess sliding off dragonscale but clinging to the rider's exposed surfaces. The dragon flipped over, whether by orders, instinct, or accident, allowing the fire to fall off.\n\nUntil a stalagmite clipped off its rider from the waist up as neatly as a blade.\n\nNow unguided, the dragon turned and fled, passing over the bridge this time.\n\nA Firemaid spread her wings to pursue.\n\n\"No!\" the Copper called, landing. \"There's another waiting out there.\"\n\nAlert Firemaidens guarded each end of the under-construction bridge and the tunnel in the center. The Copper felt confident they could deal with the remaining rider, even if the dragons assisted. They didn't seem like well-trained tunnel fighters, judging from their performance as soon as the walls closed in.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he asked his rescuer.\n\n\"Asleea, your honor.\"\n\n\"Asleea, there's a rider down out there. If he's still alive, bring him back that way. If he's not, bring his body and whatever dropped weaponry you find. I'll fly above, close to the cavern ceiling, and keep watch. If they come down on you, turn tail and fly like the wind. Perhaps I can surprise them.\"\n\nAs it turned out, they retrieved the corpse without incident. Perhaps, having lost two riders, the remaining one flew back to wherever they came from to report.\n\nHe was a squatty sort of man, tanned and dark-haired, very different from the thin, darker, well-formed men of Anaea. His beard was almost as full as a dwarf's, and he had several layers of clothing on to protect him from the cold.\n\nRayg was most interested in the crossbow quarrels he found in a leather case strapped on the man's thigh. They were wooden, with nickel-silver tips, and two thin glass tubes to either side just behind the arrowhead containing a clear liquid.\n\n\"I'm guessing that's poison,\" Rayg said.\n\nHe carefully emptied the glass tubes on the ground, rinsed out the glass, then put them back in the sides of the quarrel. He wrapped his hand in a bit of leather and drove the quarrel into the dirt.\n\n\"Fascinating,\" he said, extracting the point.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"When the head strikes it slides down the shaft, just the width of my thumb. But it's enough to shatter the glass, putting both vials into the wound.\"\n\nThe Copper thought back to the fight over Anaea. \"I saw FeLissarath pass over one. He died within a few seconds. I thought an arrow found one of his hearts, but it could have been one of these.\"\n\n\"A few seconds, you say? That's a deadly toxin, to bring down a dragon so fast.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it found a heart after all.\"\n\n\"You should take that into consideration when fighting these dragon-riders. The quarrels are light; I suppose every bit of weight counts when you're loading a dragon. Unless they were fired from a very close range, they probably wouldn't go through scale without a lucky shot.\"\n\n\"'Close' and 'probably' are not exact enough that I wish to bet my life on it. I'm exhausted. I need a meal. Oh, and find one of my bats. I'll give him a nip of blood if it would hurry him down the tunnel in search of the Drakwatch.\"\n\nThe Copper sent messenger bats in both directions on the western road looking for Drakwatch patrols, bearing a request to hurry to Anaea and assist the Upholder's mate and the Firemaid at the cave mouth.\n\nUpholder's mate. His mate. Sickly little Halaflora. So much depended on a cripple and a weakling. Whatever Spirit had put into dragons' nature the desire to contest every mouthful, with the weakest dying off, must be having a good, ethereal laugh at that.\n\nRayg found one other item on the dragon-rider and brought it to him before one of the Firemaids ate it. It was an odd little pendant on a thin chain, a tiny figure of a man standing with his arms and legs outstretched within a circle.\n\n\"I wonder what that could mean?\"\n\n\"Man's first destiny,\" Rayg said.\n\n\"You know that symbol? Where does it come from?\"\n\n\"The barbarians in the far north. I'm\u2026familiar with them. They've got a few prophets and shamans who say life is like a great game between gods of each of the races, and we're all just pieces dropped into the world and taken up again when we fall to an opponent's piece.\"\n\n\"That's a grim way to think about life.\"\n\n\"The ones who wear this believe man is destined to rule the earth\u2014worlds, Upper and Lower, as dragons think of it. Man will eventually remove all the blighters, the elves, the dwarves\u2014\"\n\n\"Dragons too?\"\n\n\"They don't speak of it much, but I believe it's implicit in their philosophy.\"\n\n\"You get better with the dragon tongue every day, Rayg. You're an intelligent fellow. I'm glad you aren't wearing one of those.\"\n\n\"I was once,\" he said. \"Now I'm just here to finish a bridge.\"\n\nAfter getting landmarks from the Firemaid, the Copper scouted the mouth of the cavern as the sun set the next day. He took a short, circular flight. There was no sign of his pursuers\u2014or pursuer, rather. It was hard to think of dragons as little more than brute service animals; he still couldn't quite get his mind around the idea.\n\nSatisfied, he hurried west at the best speed he could manage. Luckily the wind here blew hard out of the northeast, a direction he vaguely knew to hold the Inland Ocean.\n\nHe managed to take down the smelliest, hairiest herbivore on four legs he'd ever encountered and, using the tiny gob of flame that was, as ever, all he could ignite, set fire to some brush to cook its skin off. Even the smoky scent didn't help the taste.\n\nHe saw the plateau a long way off, arriving in the late afternoon. It was an unusual sort of mountain range; all the peaks were so close to one another in height that from a distance they appeared identical. Only once you came closer did you see the variety in formations.\n\nThe plateau over the Lavadome was smaller, lower, and rounder than that of Anaea. Instead of being lush and green, it steamed and smoked.\n\nHe found one of the shafts the griffaran used and circled down toward it.\n\nTwo griffaran flapped up to challenge him, but recognized him, he supposed, by his bad limb.\n\n\"Good wind, egg saver!\" one said, floating beside him effortlessly. The mixture of lizard and bird looked a little less strange aloft, thanks to its colorful wings.\n\n\"I'm on urgent business. I must use one of your shafts, and I can't be delayed. One of you, fly ahead and tell the Tyr I must see him as soon as I land.\"\n\n\"Follow, then.\"\n\nThe griffaran had to wait several times for him to catch up. He made the rather terrifying drop through the shaft\u2014plummeting with wings folded into a shadowy gap was a bit of exhilaration he could do without\u2014but it wasn't a far fall, and his eyes adjusted instantly to the tall cavern of the water ring.\n\nHe paused for water and to catch his breath, then went aloft again for the last, mercifully short leg to the Imperial Resort.\n\nHe made for the top of Black Rock and the griffaran swooped in front of him.\n\n\"Yark! No. No landings on Gardens. Through kitchens now fastest.\"\n\nNext, he supposed, SiDrakkon would forbid flying in the Lavadome, or bathing in the river. The orange streams of lava, once so bright and beautiful against the otherworldly crystalline surface of the dome, seemed to have picked up on SiDrakkon's dour moods and now looked gloomy to him. Or maybe his eyes hadn't fully converted over to tunnel-sight yet.\n\nHe made for the red glow and smoke of the kitchens, and landed next to a pile of dead swine.\n\nThralls scattered.\n\nHe hurried past boiling vats and frying platters, smelling the sweat of the nearly naked kitchen workers. He knew the rest of the way to the Tyr's door.\n\nNoSohoth, meeting him on the stairs, started babbling about Skotl and Wyrr, of course. \"There's been a duel on almost every hill. The mating between SuUpshauant and Deresa\u2014broke, now, and the Skotl blame the Wyrr, and the Wyrr blame the Skotl side. Hardly a moon goes by where we don't lose a dragon. Now there's a Wyrr Drakwatch and a Skotl, and they spend their whole time brawling with each other. CuTarin hill and the north side have threatened to burn each other's herds\u2014\"\n\n\"This is war news, man.\"\n\n\"War? The empire is cracking. After cracks, pieces crumble off. Then collapse. If the Kayai Uphold declares independence\u2014\"\n\n\"Flames burn in Anaea as we speak.\"\n\n\"Then you must speak to the Tyr. Except he's in his Gardens. He won't emerge until this evening, when the light fails.\"\n\n\"I know my way to the Gardens.\"\n\nThough he knew the way, a wide-bodied Skotl, fully twice his weight, blocked the tunnel up to the courtyard and the gardens.\n\n\"Tyr level,\" the small mountain of scale grunted.\n\n\"Please, Skotl, let him pass,\" NoSohoth said. \"It's war news.\"\n\n\"I have my order,\" the Skotl said.\n\nNot smart enough to remember more than one, NoSohoth mind-spoke to him. The Copper thought it a rare intimacy.\n\n\"I'm mated to the sister of his mate. He can see me.\"\n\nThe Skotl's eyes narrowed as he tried to work out the family dynamics.\n\n\"You see Imfamnia, then,\" the Skotl said.\n\n\"Oh, very well.\"\n\nNoSohoth led him, the Copper nudging him along whenever he tried to stop and talk politics. They found Imfamnia in Tighlia's old quarters. She'd mounted colored quartz and sheer fabrics in her balconies and galleries, bathing the room in a hideous watery color trying to be green.\n\n\"Tighlia lives with the Anklenes now,\" NoSohoth said. \"She fell into a rage and started burning the silks and smashing Imfamnia's glasswork with her tail.\"\n\nThey found Imfamnia with SiMevolant. A thrall was painting her griff, and another slave was mixing colors for the one with the brush.\n\n\"No, dull as passwater,\" SiMevolant said as she lowered her griff and turned her head this way and that. \"Would you consider having gemstones embedded?\"\n\n\"But then my griff wouldn't close up properly.\"\n\n\"That may become the new fashion, then. Remember, as queen of the Lavadome you set the style.\"\n\nTyr's mate was always title enough for Tighlia, NoSohoth thought.\n\n\"Mate-sister,\" the Copper said, breaking in on the decorating. \"I must see the Tyr at once.\"\n\n\"NoSohoth, I thought there were orders about guests without invitations,\" SiMevolant said.\n\nThe Copper came forward, the quartz-filtered light making the whole interview dreamlike. \"Anaea has been attacked. By men flying on dragons.\"\n\n\"Ewwww. That must look a fright,\" SiMevolant said. \"Skin tones.\"\n\nMother had warned him that he would have to overcome. But there were few foes as implacable as stupidity.\n\n\"Quiet, love,\" Imfamnia said. \"You'll find my mate in his Gardens.\" She walked over to curtains dividing this chamber from another, opened them, and then stuck her head outside and said a few words.\n\n\"Not you, NoSohoth,\" she said as the Copper moved toward the gardens. \"Family only.\"\n\nThe Copper passed out under two silver-clawed griffaran perched high to keep watch over the Tyr's privacy. He saw SiDrakkon in one of the warm pools.\n\nOne of his human females washed him behind the crest by sitting astride him, a blanket-sized piece of soft leather polishing Tyr SiDrakkon's scale, grinding her body back and forth. The rest of his human females bathed, or lounged, or ate, or anointed one another with oils taken from silver vials.\n\nA muscular blighter brought forward a huge, polished turtleshell of wine. He grunted as he set it down.\n\n\"Idiot!\" SiDrakkon roared. He knocked the vessel over. \"Silver! I won't drink out of anything that isn't silver.\"\n\nThe blighter scurried away in the direction of the banquet entrance.\n\n\"The purity of silver! I require purity!\"\n\nThe Copper approached and bowed. A few of the women covered themselves and cleared the way between the dragons.\n\nSiDrakkon glared at him. \"Everything around me is tainted and corrupt!\"\n\nThe Copper didn't know whether it would be more dangerous to agree or disagree. One of the griffaran fluffed up his feathers and shifted his stance, leaning forward a little.\n\n\"Why am I being disturbed, RuGaard?\"\n\n\"Bad news from Anaea. We've been attacked. Dragons, hag-ridden by men. I've seen it with my own eyes. They control them somehow.\"\n\nBlighters extracted big river stones from his bath and disappeared as three more emerged and dropped the oven-hot stones in. \"You can stop that now,\" SiDrakkon said to the blighters. \"I'm climbing out.\"\n\nHe lowered his head so the females could dry his ears and griff. \"I've heard these odd fables before, RuGaard. Men riding dragons come and take away young male dragons and insert logs into their\u2014\"\n\n\"No, they came with flame. They dueled and killed the FeLissaraths.\"\n\n\"My Upholder? Murdered?\"\n\n\"They fell in battle. The riders use poisoned quarrels fired from crossbows.\"\n\n\"War, eh?\" He climbed out of the steaming pool, and water cascaded off his scales into the tiles. It ran in channels down toward the lower Gardens. \"War may shake the Lavadome out of the madness that seems to have crept in. I'll call for dragons and appoint a grand commander for the Drakwatch. Revive the title of aerial host commander. Perhaps I'll assume the responsibilities myself.\"\n\nWhatever his faults, SiDrakkon could at least act decisively when it came to war.\n\n\"Will you come yourself, Tyr?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"No. Anaea may be a feint. The griffaran have reported strange dragons above the Lavadome, but they always flee north at sunrise. If I wanted to attack the Lavadome, I'd strike the most distant Uphold too, and draw our forces as far from the main blow as possible.\"\n\nHe shifted a little to let the women dry his underside, but he did it mechanically, grinding his teeth as he thought.\n\n\"You'll be host commander, RuGaard. You've seen me at war and know what to do. Strike fast and strike hard, and keep striking until the war is over.\"\n\n\"I've left my mate back in Anaea. I must return at once.\"\n\n\"Of course. You can take my personal flying guard with you; the Skotl bodyguard can remain. AuBalagrave is in charge of the flying guard. You remember him from the Drakwatch. I believe you served together. That'll give you an immediate force.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Tyr.\"\n\n\"Oh. I heard about this bat messenger service of yours. Let's talk again when this is over. I've an idea that we could expand it.\"\n\n\"They don't do it for love of us, sir, but the taste of our blood.\"\n\n\"Well, there are a few fat dragons here that could do with a little bleeding. Get back to your mate, Upholder, and keep me informed. Try to find out more about this enemy.\"\n\nHe rested for a few hours in a spare nook Imfamnia offered him. With the numbers of the Imperial line dropping, and the increased space closing off much of the top level of the Imperial Resort, there were rooms and cushions to spare.\n\nShe even offered him a bowlful of gold. \"For family only,\" she said, as though the gold could tell the difference. \"Have as much as you like; my mate eats only silver these days.\"\n\nHe ate but a few coins, not wanting to have to fly with a chest's worth of heavy metals in his belly.\n\nAfter checking with SiDrakkon one last time, to see if any additional orders or circumstances arose\u2014\"I'll try to send as many as thirty dragons,\" Tyr SiDrakkon promised\u2014he departed with AuBalagrave and the other two dragons.\n\nThey were good fliers, lean and wide-winged, and he held them back the whole way. He wondered how many dragons would really be sent. Using NiVom's old formula, perhaps six or seven might make it all the way to the Uphold.\n\nThey approached the plateau at night. The Copper, his hearts pounding, crossed the mountain line and looked first to the Upholder's palace temple.\n\nIt looked intact.\n\n\"Have two dragons fly high. Just in case,\" he called to AuBalagrave using mind-speech. \"You follow.\"\n\nThe words must not have come through clearly, because AuBalagrave took another dragon and gained altitude. Well, mind-speech wasn't a perfect form of communication among dragons who hadn't been long together.\n\nIf anything, the plateau was darker than usual at night. The hearth fires sometimes glowing out of windows didn't give the city its usual ghostly glow. But there would be time to survey the damage in daylight.\n\nThe palace temple had been scorched about the roof, and one of the stone globes had been knocked off the roofing. Another was missing entirely, and judging from the cracks in the long set of stairs it had been sent bouncing down to the fields and woods beneath.\n\n\"Halaflora! Nilrasha!\" he called as he landed, ready to tear into any dragon but his mate or guardian Firemaid.\n\nFourfang waved from behind a stone.\n\n\"All sleep be\u2014\"\n\n\"We're in the lower chambers, as you asked, my love,\" Halaflora called, surprisingly loudly for her small frame.\n\nHe looked at his escort. \"Tell AuBalagrave that I'd like one dragon to stay aloft, keeping watch. The others may rest, and I'll send food if there's any to be had. Don't go down into the valley to scavenge; the humans there are frightened enough.\"\n\nThe Copper descended to the mouth of the Lower World. Two members of the Drakwatch stood guard at the tunnel, now partly blocked with piled stone and timbers. Nilrasha slept atop the blockage, but she winked at him with an eye and fluttered a griff.\n\n\"Asu-ra, that kern king, was up here,\" Halaflora said. \"He cried. He wanted to know why the dragons had loosed such fury on them.\"\n\n\"You told him it wasn't our doing, I hope.\"\n\n\"I said there are good and evil dragons, just like there are good and evil weather gods. I think he understood.\"\n\n\"That's a better reply than I could have produced, with half the valley floor aflame.\"\n\n\"They were after gold. They didn't even steal any women or children, which I thought warriors always did.\"\n\n\"What happened here?\"\n\n\"They knocked down some statues and set fire to a few curtains. I believe they wanted to show their contempt for us more than to try to kill us. They never so much as ventured inside, though the upper level is entirely open, as you know.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the mess on the steps,\" Nilrasha croaked.\n\n\"What happened on the steps?\"\n\n\"They used it as a toilet pit,\" Halaflora said. \"Just a little water and scrubbing. Hardly worth mentioning.\"\n\n\"Are you well, dear?\" he asked his mate.\n\n\"Better than ever, my lord. You know, I think all this stimulation agrees with me. I almost feel as though I could fly, if I found a high enough ledge and caught a good updraft.\"\n\n\"Let's put the Uphold back in order before dropping you off any cliffs, shall we?\" he said.\n\n\"How were things with Tyr SiDrakkon?\"\n\n\"War always seems to put him in better spirits. He sent three dragons with me and promised more, and a grand commander of the Drakwatch.\"\n\n\"Grand commander? I didn't know there were as many in the Drakwatch as that anymore. So few of the drakes from the better families volunteer. You must tell me all the news of my sisters and brother.\"\n\n\"Let's save politics and family news until I've eaten.\"\n\n\"I've been saving a fat calf the kern king offered just for you. Would you care for the liver, Nilrasha?\"\n\nThe Firemaid yawned. \"Very kind of you, lady. Yes, I could do with some dinner.\"\n\n\"Fourfang,\" the Copper said, \"see about feeding the dragons who came with me. Where's Rhea? I'm caked with grit.\"\n\n\"Wonderful news, my lord. She and that clever man of yours are mated! She's going to issue, or whatever they call it!\"\n\n\"Whelp?\" Nilrasha asked.\n\n\"I think it's give birth,\" the Copper said. \"All the more reason for a dinner. We should send her some stewed brains and the tongue. I've heard that's good for brooding.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm saving those for me, my love.\"\n\n\"You don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"We may have hatchlings. Isn't it wonderful?\"\n\n\"That could be dangerous for you. Your mother told me\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, forget my mother. She's always looking at the dark side of things. I'll wager she's back in the Lavadome now, foretelling a loss in the war against these riders and lamenting the weaknesses of dragons these days. Our cause is just, so we are sure to triumph, are we not, my lord?\"\n\nPerhaps that is why Tighlia mated us, the Copper thought. We both have what she called the simpleton's faith.\n\nDinner passed in a more jovial mood than the Copper would have expected with destruction all around. Thanks to the guard overhead and outside, they ventured to the upper level and ate upon the feasting floor. Nilrasha made jokes, and Halaflora ate with unusual enthusiasm.\n\nOr perhaps her expectations were forcing her appetite.\n\n\"A griffaran comes!\" the watchdragon aloft outside bellowed. \"He makes the signal-wing of bearing important news for the Upholder, from the Tyr himself.\"\n\n\"A message? But you just got here,\" Halaflora said. \"Whatever could it mean?\"\n\n\"I'd better see to that,\" the Copper said, rising and taking the exit that would bring him to the stairs.\n\nThe griffaran alighted on one of the globes-atop-squares flanking the long staircase down the mountainside.\n\n\"Yark! Upholder RuGaard?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the Copper said. Fourfang trotted up with a torch.\n\n\"Written message. Sent yesterday.\" The bird detached a tube from some sort of hook in its tail feathers and passed it to him.\n\n\"You must have flown straight here without a break. Have you eaten? Fourfang, go down to the pool and see if there are any fish there.\"\n\n\"Read message first,\" the griffaran said. \"Then duty done.\"\n\nThe tube was one of NoSohoth's message tubes, certainly. He flicked off the sealing wax with a claw-tip and extracted the paper inside.\n\nTYR DEAD. PEACE DECREED. TYR SIMEVOLANT RULES. RETURN AT ONCE.\n\nThe Copper blinked, unable to believe his eyes. Each pair of words was harder to believe than the last.\n\nBwaaaaaaak!\n\nHe started. That was a blighter alarm horn!\n\nIt blew again, sounding from the dining chamber. His hearts froze for a second; then he spread open his wings and flew up to the balcony on the upper level. He crashed through the tattered, burned remains of the evening curtains and saw Halaflora, stretched out and twitching on the floor.\n\nBlood ran from a corner of her mouth. A white-faced Rhea stood in the corner, gasping for air, the horn hanging loose in her hand. Over his mate Nilrasha stood, the claws of one sii bloody, scratched about her eyes.\n\n\"Away from her!\" he roared, feeling his fire bladder well. He tripped on his bad sii and sprawled next to his mate, but he didn't care. He rolled her undersize head toward him, but Halaflora's eyes were white and sightless.\n\n\"She's dead, my lord,\" Nilrasha said, breathing hard. \"There's nothing you can do for her.\"\n\nThe Copper shook his mate, struck her face, turned her upside down, and shook her until scales fell off and skittered across the spotless feasting floor. Finally he dropped her limp corpse.\n\n\"What did you do?\" he asked Nilrasha.\n\n\"Do?\" she choked.\n\n\"Shwok'd?\"\n\n\"Am I not speaking clearly enough, you lisping lizard? Yes, she tore off a big piece of thigh\u2014I think it had a bone in it\u2014and lifted her head and gobbled it right down, smiling and happy as can be. It stuck. I tried to get at it with my sii, but I couldn't reach it without tearing her head off.\"\n\n\"How did you get wounded?\"\n\n\"She panicked. She was flailing this way and that instead of letting me help her, and she scratched me.\"\n\n\"It's not like her to take such a big\u2014\"\n\n\"She's been delirious these last few days. She thought she was brooding, stupid thing.\"\n\n\"Get out of here!\"\n\n\"But, Ru\u2014I'm sorry about the lisping thing. You do it when you get excited. I shouldn't have said anything.\"\n\n\"Just go.\"\n\nAuBalagrave and the other dragons arrived, looking for enemies, a fight, anything\u2014but they just found the Upholder, lying against his mate. Nilrasha slipped out.\n\n\"Leave me alone!\" the Copper said. \"I'm staying with her until she cools! All of you, get out. No, not you, Rhea. Clear away this mess.\"\n\nThe dragons departed, and Rhea bent to pick up the spilled platter of spitted calf.\n\n\"Rhea. Please speak to me. For once in your life, don't be afraid and speak. Did you see this? What happened here?\"\n\nThe pale girl\u2014no, woman; she had a swelling at her midsection and the feeding sacs had enlarged\u2014looked at him with terrified eyes. Then she fainted.\n\nHe buried Halaflora on the mountainside with a good view of the palace, the vale, and their sleeping chamber. Then he went to see Nilrasha and found her idling in her bathing pool.\n\n\"If I find that you had a sii in this, I'll kill you,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You're upset, your honor. I know what you think. Put it out of your mind. She choked. It was a terrible accident.\"\n\n\"You're such a careful huntress.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't I have killed her long ago? I had opportunities every other day. I could have done it easily when we where hiding together, listening to those cursed dragons smashing the upper level. A quick pounce and\u2014snap! She was so slight, you could practically poke a claw through her. What did the griffaran messenger want?\"\n\nThe Copper couldn't decide whether she was being callous or just her usual practical self. She was a born warrior who left the dead behind and kept her regrets, if any, private. But maybe her instincts were such that when she had an enemy, she'd pounce. Grabbing a loin and shoving it down a rival's throat would be too roundabout a way of doing it. And if she wanted an accidental death, she would have just tossed Halaflora down that endless flight of steep steps as they took in the view, and then claimed she slipped.\n\n\"We have a new Tyr. SiMevolant. I'm to return to the Lavadome. I suspect his first edict will be that everyone paint themselves blue or add stripes.\"\n\n\"Si-SiMevolant? What happened to SiDrakkon?\"\n\n\"He's dead. When I saw him last, he looked healthy enough.\"\n\n\"Is SiMevolant smart enough to execute an assassination?\"\n\nWould a killer be so ready to use that word? the Copper thought. His mind was turning quick enough circles, and he tried to put Halaflora out of his mind. \"He may have just been pretending to be a fool so no one would suspect him. How did the title of Tyr fall on those golden haunches, I wonder?\"\n\n\"Who will you leave in command here?\"\n\n\"According to the message, there's to be no war. Which sounds like SiMevolant. He's just stupid enough to believe that it takes two to make a war.\"\n\n\"Challenge him if you get the chance,\" Nilrasha said. \"You can defeat him. He's big and thick-scaled, but he doesn't know the first thing about fighting.\"\n\n\"I've never had much luck with duels. I always seem to come off the worse,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"Still angry with me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Only if you killed my mate.\"\n\n\"Do you forget what you said? We can't be mated while she lives. She no longer lives. After a decent mourning period we can have our happiness. She would have died over your eggs. I can give you many.\"\n\nThe Copper snorted. \"This is not the time for that kind of talk.\"\n\n\"I just\u2026I just want to know that you don't hate me. What must I do to make you believe I tried to save her? Stuff a horse down my throat and choke myself?\"\n\n\"You're too tough to choke on a horse. I must sleep. I've got a long flight tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I wonder what SiMevolant has planned for you?\"\n\n\"Tyr SiMevolant,\" the Copper corrected.\n\n\"Not for long, I think. He won't last his name-year.\" She displayed her teeth and rattled her griff.\n\nHe left AuBalagrave at the Uphold, with instructions to defend the temple and inform the kern kings that he was in mourning over the death of his mate and would perform no functions, ceremonial or otherwise, until further notice.\n\nThen he took to the sky. Thoughts of Halaflora took all the joy out of flying; now it was just a dull, exhausting routine. He broke his journey at the Tooth Cavern bridge to speak to Rayg and the Firemaidens and Firemaid.\n\n\"Supposedly there'll be no war,\" the Copper said. \"But I want you watchful here nonetheless. I'm sure these hag-ridden dragons know of the existence of this bridge and this portal into the Lower World. They may use it to reach the Lavadome.\"\n\nThe dragons nodded their agreement. Then the Copper pulled Rayg aside, to the little bench where he kept his plans and designs.\n\n\"I understand you're to be congratulated,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"For what? Construction on the bridge has stopped ever since that fight in the cavern.\"\n\n\"Rhea. You're mated, I hear.\"\n\nRayg looked across at him, sucking on his fleshy cheeks. \"I didn't know you paid attention to that kind of thing.\"\n\n\"I do. How would you like Rhea freed with you?\"\n\n\"Nothing more, your honor. You would do that?\"\n\n\"I just need you to turn your brain to one final project.\"\n\nHis shoulders dropped. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"You worked for the dwarves, I understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, well, it was sort of an apprenticeship.\"\n\n\"They understand armor, I'm told. I want you to design some kind of armoring for the underside of a dragon. Enough to keep out one of those poisoned crossbow quarrels. It's got to be light, though. No layers of chain mail.\"\n\n\"It would help if I had one of their crossbows for a test firing.\"\n\n\"A few may have been lost thanks to those riders the FeLissaraths downed. I'll have Nilrasha hunt for them.\" He reminded himself to send a messenger bat as soon as he finished with Rayg.\n\n\"Leather would be best, then,\" Rayg said, eyes rolling in thought. \"Perhaps if it were stiffened and reinforced with wire. Or wood flanges.\"\n\n\"One more request. It's got to look like a regular dragon's underskin, at least from a distance.\"\n\nAs there was no emergency, the Copper returned to the Lavadome by the more tiresome\u2014and cramped\u2014south passage. The entrance was well hidden by a thick, multicanopied forest, and he'd never seen it from the air, only from the ground in his orientation hikes in the Drakwatch. So he had to cast around a little before he found the right waterfall that led to it.\n\nHe found Angalia and another maid guarding the door.\n\n\"I come at Tyr SiMevolant's request, Angalia, but I cry joy at seeing you again,\" he said, figures of speech being just that. \"How do you like your change of scenery?\"\n\n\"Warmer, your honor, but still terrible. The air is so heavy and moist. I feel it creeping into my lungs. I'll be dead of a fever in a year; mark my words.\"\n\n\"It would take a tall tablet to mark all your words, Angalia,\" her companion observed.\n\nHe had no difficulty learning about the death of SiDrakkon on the way to Black Rock. It was all anyone talked of, from the youngest drake to the oldest dragon-dame playing with some widower's hatchlings. He'd been found alone in his garden bath, dead of some sort of seizure.\n\n\"Alone?\" the Copper asked.\n\nHe'd named SiMevolant as his heir some time ago, it seemed, though the news had escaped the Copper in his far-off Uphold. Everyone took it to be a kind of joke.\n\nIt was NoSohoth who explained it to him, as he ran himself ragged arranging for an audience SiMevolant had commanded for his line and the principal dragons of the six hills.\n\n\"I believe he thought of it as a sort of safeguard against assassination,\" NoSohoth said. \"With the Lavadome the way it is, a fo\u2014a personality like SiMevolant atop Black Rock would guarantee chaos and destruction. He figured we'd all be invoking the spirits every dawn and dusk, praying for his health.\"\n\n\"I'm told he was found in his bath, alone.\"\n\n\"Yes, by his mate and SiMevolant.\"\n\n\"Alone. In the garden bath. How likely is that?\"\n\n\"If SiMevolant said it happened, that's how it happened.\"\n\n\"I'll challenge him on that.\"\n\nNoSohoth placed a sii on his. \"Don't. He's been unusually wise about things since he rose to the rank of Tyr. Let's wait and see. Things may work out. I expect he's going to announce a mating to Imfamnia at this audience.\"\n\n\"So soon?\"\n\n\"These last years have been rather a whirlwind, haven't they? No one's had a chance to right their wings and glide for a bit.\"\n\n\"I'm worried about those hag-ridden dragons returning.\"\n\n\"They'll be handled. With diplomacy.\"\n\n\"I had a mouthful of their diplomacy over Anaea. It tastes like death and ash.\"\n\n\"I've no more time. There're details for a grand banquet to be arranged; the gardens are to be opened up again to the dragons of the Imperial Resort\u2026.\"\n\nHe hurried off down the tunnel, rounding up thralls to do his bidding.\n\nThe commanded audience was held just before a scheduled banquet of rumored magnificence, which showed some craftiness on SiMevolant's part. He'd speak to them in brief, and then dismiss them to go gorge themselves at length. No one could accuse the golden dragon of not knowing the most pleasant way to go about business.\n\nImfamnia, painted all in black\u2014except for the sparkling jewels embedded into her griff\u2014watched the dragons assemble from her bare widow's perch.\n\nThe Copper noticed that there were no griffaran above, and wondered. Either SiMevolant was extraordinarily brave or exceedingly foolish; both Tyrs he had known had found the implicit threat of a griffaran bodyguard useful.\n\nThe wooden arches above seemed cold and empty without their colorful feathers.\n\nThe audience chamber didn't look particularily full; perhaps some in the higher-ranking families feared reprisals. To fill the room NoSohoth began to shove in dragons of lesser lines. When a solid mass of dragonflesh stood before the Tyr's shelf, Tighlia foremost and eyes locked hatefully on her mate-sister, Imfamnia nodded.\n\n\"They're all assembled now, Tyr SiMevolant,\" Imfamnia called toward the curtains.\n\nThe curtains parted, drawn by thralls as though through sorcery, and SiMevolant emerged, moving forward on a sort of traveling perch that rolled both smoothly and almost silently, its wheels obscured by heavy fabrics, draped and corded. He had polished his scale to a bright sheen and purpled his eyelids and whited his claws, but other than that he looked like a fine, healthy, gold dragon. The Copper couldn't say what he was expecting\u2014peacock feathers and snakeskins perhaps\u2014but if anything, this mate-brother looked\u2026kingly.\n\nSiMevolant bowed, let his head rove across the audience, and let out with the loudest prrum the Copper had ever heard.\n\n\"I want to begin anew,\" SiMevolant said. \"I've been distressed beyond words these last few years. Skotl set against Wyrr set against Anklene. Everyone may keep their current positions, but in the future I'm going to do my best to fill ranks based on merit, with the assistance of wise counsel.\n\n\"And I hate all this dueling. Is that really a way for dragons to settle differences? Can't we learn a new way that doesn't involve shedding blood? I don't have a solution, but I welcome ideas. I beg the assistance of wise counsel.\"\n\n\"Furthermore, I hate all this skulking around undergound. Dragons are the most glorious of all the Spirits' creations. It's time we started acting it instead of taking such pains to hide our existence.\"\n\n\"Bloody fool!\" Ibidio hissed. The Copper hardly noticed that she'd slipped up next to him, shoving her way through a deputy of Firemaids.\n\n\"Also, I've thought it best to dismiss the griffaran guard, as you can see.\"\n\n\"Dismissed the griffaran?\" NeStirrath asked, his tangled horns rising from the crowd. \"Our stoutest allies?\"\n\n\"And biggest appetites,\" SiMevolant said. \"I've spoken to wise counsel, and, measure for measure, they consume twice what a dragon does. It's never been the greatest of friendships; there's almost no social interaction. We guard their nests and they guard our skies. The whole thing's based on some mossy old hatchling story of a griffaran egg and a dragon egg washed away in a storm, saved and hatched together by a wise old eagle. We're paying for it all these years later, in less for all of us to eat.\"\n\nA few dragons raised their heads as though to object, but SiMevolant stared them down, his eyes full of power and certitude. The last time the Copper had seen eyes like that, they were attached to King Gan. It was as though SiMevolant could slay a dragon by thought alone.\n\n\"Let's hear how SiDrakkon died,\" the Copper said, not sure where the voice was coming from.\n\n\"Be silent,\" Ibidio whispered. \"This isn't the time.\"\n\nThe surrounding dragons shrank away from the Copper as though he carried a new kind of parasite.\n\n\"I don't mind the question,\" SiMevolant said. \"Not one little bit. He had some sort of seizure in his bath. His mate found him first; I arrived soon after. No one could say what caused it, or how long it took, but he did have a ghastly expression on his face. Accidents do happen, RuGaard. By the way, how is my dear sister? But back to our late, beloved Tyr. Perhaps it was an assassination; he had enemies enough, and there were no witnesses. Which reminds me\u2014you'll enjoy the plumpest, most succulent, tastiest manflesh you've had in years at tonight's banquet.\"\n\n\"Look at you all! Lions led by a frothing hyena!\" Tighlia said, stepping forward and rounding on the audience.\n\n\"Now, Granddam,\" SiMevolant said. \"I thought I sent you some wine to keep you quiet. Why don't you go home and drink it?\"\n\nShe ignored him, spitting a gob of flame at the audience. \"The civil war killed off the good dragons. What's left? Brazen cowards, vain philosophers, mating deviants, and back-scratching scalemates adding to one another's hoards. It's the litter and detritus collecting in the shadows and corners that bred this, this\u2026farce. This fool will get you all killed. Maybe it's for the best. We've earned our extinction.\"\n\n\"She's like one of those windup things the dwarves make. Same speech every time her tail is twisted,\" SiMevolant said quietly to Imfamnia, who giggled.\n\n\"Are you done, Tighlia?\" Imfamnia asked.\n\n\"Yes. We all are,\" she said. She began to stalk out of the room, stumping out her own fire. She stopped and sent a sharp glance at Ibidio, who let out a startled gasp; then she moved on. The crowd parted for her, bending back like tall grass before a strong breeze.\n\n\"Good,\" SiMevolant said. \"I want to introduce some wise counsel who will guarantee our dignity and security for generations to come. Mmmmmm? I present our new ally, recently sent here from the Alliance of the Golden Circle.\"\n\nA tall hominid in black scale armor stepped from behind the curtains and strode forward so he stood next to SiMevolant. He had gray hair flecked here and there with black, and a slightly darker beard hanging from a scarred face.\n\nThe Copper recognized the armor, the weapons, the face.\n\nThe Dragonblade stood before the audience.\n\nTighlia turned again, knocking over two members of the Drakwatch.\n\n\"How dare you! How dare you!\" Every scale stood straight up on her skin, her wings half-opened as they shook with fury; her griff rattled, and slime poured out each side of her mouth.\n\n\"On the shelf where my mate stood,\" she continued, hardly able to get the words out. \"You bring a human arrayed for war? A spear and a drawn sword, atop the Black Rock? No man may dare stand on such hallowed stone!\" \"Not any human, Tighlia,\" the Copper said. \"He kills dragons for a living.\"\n\nThe Dragonblade tipped his spear forward just a little. Some of the audience squeezed out of the audience room; others shoved their way forward.\n\n\"I expected to be challenged,\" the Dragonblade said. \"That it comes from an aged female surprises me.\"\n\n\"She's under the impression she's still a personage of consequence,\" SiMevolant said.\n\n\"Are you going to come down, man, or will I have to soil my mate's memory by spilling your blood where he used to stand?\"\n\n\"I've no wish to kill. I made my peace with dragons years ago. But a wise man convinced me your kind can be saved, if properly led and channeled. I don't want to begin my governorship here with blood.\"\n\n\"Governorship!\" Tighlia roared, shaking the timbers all the way to the roof, and jumped.\n\nShe jumped well for a dragon her size, and against an ordinary man, even a warrior, she would have turned him into pulp and black blood against the obsidian stone of the Rock.\n\nThe Dragonblade set his spear and she impaled herself upon it. He rolled out from under her, on his feet with sword out as easily as a falling cat righted itself. The sword flashed up once, and liquid fire spilled across the Tyr's shelf, a second time down and the Copper saw the gruesome white of the bones of her spine.\n\nTighlia collapsed, all of her going limp at once\u2014save for her tail and twitching saa, which jerked and shuddered as though trying to fight on.\n\nSiMevolant looked down at her. \"What's that, Granddam?\u2026Well, first, I don't believe in curses; second\u2026Oh, dear, you're gone. I must learn to make my points more quickly.\"\n\n\"I wish she had stayed at home and enjoyed her wine,\" Imfamnia said.\n\nLiquid fire ran off the Tyr's shelf. To the Copper, the events on the Tyr's shelf seemed a horizon distant, yet etched in vivid detail. His head whirled.\n\n\"Sand. At once\u2014now,\" Imfamnia called, lifting a curtain out of the way with her tail to keep it from catching fire.\n\n\"Are there any more challenges?\" the Dragonblade asked. A drake tried to step forward, but NeStirrath pressed his heavy sii on the youth's tail.\n\nThe Dragonblade retrieved a decorative, jewel-encrusted goblet from the Tyr's display of trophies and knelt beside Tighlia. He filled his cup with the blood leaking out of her neck and drank, smacking his lips afterward.\n\n\"Our future is in alliances, not war,\" SiMevolant said to the shocked assembly. \"United with these men, no power in the two worlds may threaten us. Let all who doubt this truth remember the fate of Tighlia. Now begins a golden era, begun by a golden dragon. Light the beacons, NoSohoth.\"\n\n\"Hurrah!\" shouted the Dragonblade. \"The union forever!\"\n\nIbidio slipped up next to the Copper. \"I must speak to you,\" she whispered, then switched to mind-speech. If you still live tomorrow, go to the hill of the Anklenes. Once inside, ask for the senior doorwarden. Tell him this: \"Immortal Memory.\"\n\nThe Copper was still too shocked to do anything but nod. The swirl of memories, of fears, of regrets, of pain brought by the Dragonblade's slaying of Tighlia, had left him clouded.\n\n\"Immortal Memory,\" he thought back to her. If I still live?\n\nIn the lore of the Lavadome, the hours were afterward known as the Night of the Desperate Deaths.\n\nTo those who knew only vaguely of events within the Imperial Resort, the first sign of them was when two beacons were lit atop the Rock, burning a bright blue as though by magic\u2014the Copper knew very well it was dwarvish chemicals, but what sort of mix the humans who lit the beacons used, he never could remember, despite all the pleadings and urgings of the Anklenes.\n\nAnd with that, hag-ridden dragons flew into the Lavadome in two long lines.\n\nPerhaps a score of dragons, knowing the war gossip that had been spreading ever since the Copper's arrival with the news of Anaea, realized what the invasion portended and took to the air to meet it.\n\nNo dragon who fought that night lived.\n\nBlack Rock was emptied of all dragons save for the Imperial line, who remained in the Imperial Resort in a nebulous role between leaders and hostages. The allies occupied the best caves and the best galleries, save for the top level and the Gardens, where SiMevolant, his widowed-and-mated Imfamnia, and the governor-general remained.\n\nAnd the ubiquitous NoSohoth.\n\nAtop the rock, as the hag-ridden dragons performed military evolutions, showing their skill, the most dispirited banquet in Lavadome history was held. The food\u2014exquisite and tender. The wine\u2014unparalleled by anything that had come before, thanks to exotic captured vintages brought in by the Andam, the Men of the Golden Circle.\n\nIt was a brave young drake who took the first bite. The rest of the company watched anxiously for signs of poisoning as they nibbled on bits of greenstuff, onions, and ores.\n\nThe Copper, never a fan of banquets and unable to enjoy the flesh of so many limbs and sides that looked like Rhea, sat in the garden and tried to think.\n\nOne thing the display of force and flying skill did offer him: a chance to count their numbers. Three-score dragons and riders, and another half-score of dragons on lines attached to the others, bearing baggage or supplies.\n\nA few wings over forty, using the ten-count numbering system of the dwarves Rayg had been teaching him.\n\nHe did his best to overhear some of the conversation between SiMevolant and the Dragonblade. Evidently some kind of long-planned war had begun. They flew from a fastness in the north, and had just seized a sort of floating city on the Inland Ocean. Holding the Lavadome would give them a third hold for rest and organization in the south.\n\nThe Dragonblade filled SiMevolant's ears with praise about his foresight as a dragon and the heights his leadership would allow the Drakines to reach.\n\nThe Copper almost wanted to warn SiMevolant of the fine words that marched in front of betrayals, but when one gathered such snakes to one's bosom, one had to learn about being bitten.\n\nHe slunk off into the greenery and became violently sick.\n\nThe next day he did as Ibidio requested and went to the Anklene hill. He asked for the head doorwarden and gave him the signal phrase. The warden took him down a short ramp and stuck an odd metal spike into a crevice under a cast of a blighter's face, and the wall clicked.\n\nHe showed the Copper where to push, and soon he found himself in an underground chamber designed for dragon-sized creatures, with low ledges around the walls, fine sand on the floors, and a water cistern fed by a drip in the roof. There was also a tiled sanitary room with a gutter.\n\nRethothanna was already there, waiting with Ibidio.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" the Copper said. \"Is this a conspiracy? If we packed this room with dragons atop one another, there wouldn't be enough to fight the hag-riddens.\"\n\n\"Well said, RuGaard,\" Ibidio said. \"That's just what they are.\"\n\nRethothanna drew a claw across the sand, making a furrow. \"This group was started\u2026Perhaps you should tell him, Ibidio.\"\n\n\"After the death of my mate,\" Ibidio said sternly, \"I suspected an assassination. He came back from the wars injured, yes, but he was a strong dragon who always recovered quickly, from even greater injuries than those I saw that last time. Then his wounds suddenly quit healing, became infected, and he died. Even the Anklenes said they'd seen nothing like it.\"\n\n\"No more than seven dragons ever belonged to this group,\" Rethothanna said. \"One from each hill, and Ibidio from the Imperial Resort. We had Skotl, Wyrr, and Anklene members. All with one thing in common: love of my mate.\"\n\n\"And now you have an outcast of no particular line,\" the Copper said. \"Even my name was once another's.\"\n\nOthers trickled in, at what seemed like long intervals. Finally NeStirrath arrived.\n\n\"Why, RuGaard too! You never seemed the conspirator type,\" NeStirrath said.\n\n\"We have two new members tonight,\" Ibidio said, with seven other dragons sitting around the edges of the room. \"And we mourn the loss of UlBannesh in the fighting yesterday. A brave dragon. He will be missed.\"\n\n\"It's dangerous meeting so soon after yesterday,\" a Skotl dame said. \"I'm sure I'm being watched.\"\n\n\"I will be quick. I have important news. Before she died yesterday, Tighlia and I exchanged our first mind-speech in\u2026well, since my mate died. Yes, we used to argue or joke with our minds frequently, for our mates were kin and closer than usual for a dragon and his clutchwinner grown, but after AgGriffopse died\u2014\"\n\n\"Immortal be his memory,\" the others said in unison, save for the Copper, who just mumbled to join in, not knowing the group's habits.\n\nNow I'm in league with the memory of a dragon I've never even met.\n\n\"But to go on,\" Ibidio continued. \"RuGaard, this will be a shock to you. Tighlia mind-spoke and told me that just before he died, the Tyr\u2014Tyr FeHazathant, my mate's father\u2014said that he was appointing you heir and future Tyr. If you wanted the rank. That's what his words meant, the day he died. 'Ask RuGaard to be Tyr.' I'm so used to looking for plots and hidden signs in everyday talk I couldn't puzzle out its simple meaning. What do you say to that?\"\n\nAll the dragons were looking at him.\n\n\"What does it matter?\" he asked.\n\n\"What does it matter?\" Ibidio laughed. \"If we ever gain back the Lavadome, I think you'll find it matters very much.\"\n\n\"If we are to do it, we must strike quickly,\" NeStirrath said. \"Strike before they get organized, and before all here become used to submission to men the way these accursed foreign dragons are.\"\n\n\"I have a small force on the Western Road,\" the Copper said.\n\nOthers listed a few dragons who could be relied on. NeStirrath could bring together his best Drakwatch. But as they counted in their heads they knew it would not be enough. Not against the training and weapons that had been displayed last night.\n\n\"The men alone, we might be able to handle,\" Rethothanna said. \"They're not much without their dragons.\"\n\n\"The dragons aren't much better without men,\" the Copper said. \"I've seen them. They're not like us. They can't think for themselves very quickly; they either do what they're trained to do\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps we could convince them to revolt,\" Ibidio said.\n\n\"Fat dragons stuffing themselves with Anaean gold?\" a dragon from the Wyrr hill asked. \"You might as well ask a horse to fight its rider. I'm not sure they could even grasp the concept.\"\n\n\"Let us meet again tomorrow,\" Ibidio said. \"Early, around the morning meal. I'll try to get in and get a feel for the hag-riddens. What's the matter, RuGaard, not feeling kingly?\"\n\n\"I'm being hunted by an old nightmare.\"\n\nThe others nodded understanding, but the last thing he wanted was for them to understand.\n\nThe Copper walked back to the Imperial Resort\u2014it didn't seem like a resort anymore, just a rather dark and forbidding rock\u2014with NeStirrath. They talked of unimportant matters, old memories of training with the Drakwatch.\n\nHe even returned to his old cave. There hadn't been a member of the Imperial line since him serving in the Drakwatch, and he even caught the faint smell of bats\u2014wait.\n\nA bat still lived, up in a shadowy corner. Something about the ears reminded him of an old acquaintance.\n\n\"You wouldn't be related to old Uthaned, would you?\"\n\n\"I am Uthaned,\" the bat said. It stretched. \"You've grown considerably, m'lord.\"\n\n\"It can't be. Mamedi and Thernadad's nephew? Bats don't live\u2014\"\n\n\"They do when they've been fed dragonblood. I even talk to Big Ear, Spike Hair, and Wide Nose, as you called them, now and again when they visit.\"\n\nThe Copper was relieved to be so pleasantly distracted. \"But why are you still here, Uthaned?\"\n\n\"The eating is good. These young drakes, they sleep hard after their days' hiking, and they dream better, down a little blood. They make it up quick enough. And that old one with all the horns and the stumps where his wings should be\u2026well, he sometimes has a draft of wine to help him sleep, and with a bit of a nip he sleeps sounder still. I like to think I'm doing a service\u2014Ah, soft. None have returned yet tonight. I don't suppose m'lord might spare\u2026?\"\n\nThe Copper was thinking back to his own days with the bats. Sometimes they'd left him so listless, and in the mornings if he lifted his head high, he went dizzy\u2026.\n\nHe froze. It was like the idea had a glowing aura around it, like the moon's halo in a mist. He didn't know exactly what the idea would look like once it took shape, but he knew its rough outlines.\n\n\"Are there any other bats still about?\"\n\n\"Another of my cousins still lives near the kitchens, where it's warm. Then there's a son of mine, and his family. Oh, and of course\u2014\"\n\n\"I need more, many more. Can you go to your relatives and then send them out on the western road? Someone must know where that is.\"\n\n\"Yes, bats go to and fro all the time. That message system.\"\n\n\"Forget it. At least for now. I need every bat you can scrape up, big and small. But they've got to be smart, stealthy, sneaky.\"\n\n\"That's a good deal of flying on my part, m'lord.\" Uthaned smoothed down his hair and straightened his ears. \"A bat setting off on such a flight needs a full belly, and at my age the wing joints pain me.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the Copper said. \"You can practice on me. I'll show you what to do.\"\n\nThe Copper walked in the Gardens, thinking. Some of the dragon riders, new to the rock, explored it as well, curious about the underground garden with its strange, spiked, low-light plants, or admiring the view of the lava streams against the dome.\n\nHe saw a glimmer of gold, and turned.\n\n\"Oh, RuGaard. No, don't sulk away. Your Tyr calls.\"\n\nThe Copper turned and approached SiMevolant. He bowed.\n\n\"What does my Tyr require of his Upholder?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Just a chat. You looked so queer when the governer-general walked out, I thought you were going to keel over like SiDrakkon. Your face looked just like his. Shocked.\"\n\n\"I thought you arrived only after he died.\"\n\n\"I meant to say after he was dead, of course. Anyway, speaking of deaths, superb job on my sister. The more I think about it, the more brilliant it is.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The choking. I've heard all about it. I have my own sources and messengers, don't forget.\"\n\n\"It was an accident.\"\n\n\"Of course it was. And if it wasn't, you've got your jade set up to take the blame. You've got witnesses from two different species and three lines of dragons that can attest that you were nowhere near.\"\n\n\"She was my mate. She was your sister. How can you speak like that about her?\"\n\n\"Because she was my sister. Sickly from the moment she came out of the egg and I sat on her while I dined on my late brother.\"\n\n\"I'm tired. I must beg your\u2014\"\n\nSiMevolant flicked around the Copper and blocked his path. \"Hold. Since you've shown such an aptitude for this, I've got a list. A tiny list, the briefest of lists; it'll take you no time at all to work your way down. The first is your old teacher, NeStirrath.\"\n\n\"I've got a list for you. Traitor. Cretin. Disgrace to\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, please. Look, I've got a very clever weapon that will help you.\" He reached behind his griff and passed the Copper a silver tube, very much like the ones SiDrakkon had kept his oils in. \"It's a dwarvish thing with a blade and a spring and a small vial of toxin drawn from\u2014\"\n\nThe Copper snatched it out of his hand before the tiny point projecting out of the end could be pointed in his direction.\n\nHe looked at the device. A little lever, a\u2014what was the word?\u2014trigger, was set into the side.\n\nHe pointed it at SiMevolant.\n\n\"Ah-ah-ah-ah,\" the new Tyr warned. \"Am I stupid enough to hand you an envenomed weapon, or am I so clever I've given you a harmless point to test your loyalty, hmmmmm? Or, as a sort of a joke, have I given you one that in fact fires backward out of the thin metal on the bottom? And why am I even putting such doubts in your head? It's rather like looking at your image in a wavy pool, so many different possibilities in motion. Which do you think I am? Brilliant or an imbecile?\"\n\n\"I think you're mad.\" He sent the tube spinning off the top of the Rock.\n\n\"You had your chance,\" SiMevolant said.\n\n\"We both did,\" the Copper said. \"Let's see how we compare in surviving the consequences.\"\n\nThe next day the Immortal Memory group met, though it took twice as long for them to gather, and the Copper outlined his plan. NeStirrath improved on it, and a dragon from the Skotl hill promised to go up the western road and try to hurry things along.\n\n\"I've been to the stable caves,\" Ibidio said. \"Off of the old spirit-caller's holes. Yes, I said stables. I can't think of what else to call them, dragons packed so close. They're well guarded, yes, and the men stay near. But there are vast galleries so several can take off at once, if need be.\"\n\n\"I might be able to get the men away for a few hours,\" the Copper said. \"When the time comes.\"\n\n\"The sooner the time comes, the better,\" Rethothanna said. \"A man and a drake crier came through the milkdrinker's hill today, looking for dragons to volunteer to be ridden, promising gold, food, a cave in the Imperial Resort, everything. With food stocks falling the way they are and dragons going without meat, soon half the dragons here will have nothing to look forward to but the saddle and a trough at the end of the day.\"\n\nRethothanna got her wish. Less than a score of days later, the Imperial line and the leaders of the hill selected the hour for the battle. Of course, not everything could be readied on time. The bats were still gathering, and every day the Copper was making a trip to the river to explain to them what to do. But each day's delay increased their risk, for more and more dragons found themselves watched, and the Immortal Memory group could no longer meet except in twos or threes for a few brief words.\n\nThe Copper had spies of his own. The bats, out of hunger or curiosity, went so far as to do practice runs, trickling into Black Rock in search of nourishment.\n\nThere was a last-moment change in the Immortal Memory's calculations. A half-score more dragons had arrived, carrying several people each on them and more possessions. Some of the mates and babes of the Andam had arrived.\n\nSo the Copper stood, flanked by Rethothanna and NeStirrath, listening to SiMevolant speak. He was explaining to the high-ranking dragons that soon each of them would have a human \"assistant\" to help allocate food and cave space, ore rations, and exercise flights. Even grooming standards would be discussed, if there were health-threatening habits that needed to be broken.\n\nThe Dragonblade lounged on a golden chair, brought up and fixed on the Tyr's shelf. A rich fur lay before it, and another hung off the back. He also wore a fur cloak closed with dragonscale.\n\nImfamnia was not in the audience. She was inspecting a case of luxuries brought in on dragonback.\n\n\"I do not say you must follow the advice of the human assistant,\" SiMevolant said. \"But they are wise, and I feel matters will go easier if we heed them.\"\n\n\"I say enough,\" a Skotl called.\n\n\"I say too much!\" a Wyrr added.\n\nThe Copper braced himself and took a breath. This was worse than spreading his wings to jump, trusting to a bit of wood and leather and steel pin. \"I say we have no Tyr. Just a dog too well trained to need a collar.\"\n\n\"That's a poor sort of insult, RuGaard.\" SiMevolant yawned. \"I hope you didn't labor hard over it. You wasted your time.\"\n\n\"I challenge you to a duel, with the charge of treason against the Imperial line,\" the Copper said.\n\n\"You can't challenge a Tyr,\" SiMevolant said. \"The rank is too exalted.\"\n\n\"I may. There are some who believe I am the rightful Tyr. Tyr FeHazathant named me as his successor after NiVom fled and before he died.\"\n\n\"I witnessed it!\" Ibidio called.\n\n\"I was told in secret as well,\" said NeStirrath. Which was a lie, but a lie he gladly offered to tell.\n\n\"He told me the same,\" Rethothanna said. \"There is even a secret testament in the archives.\" Another lie, but one she had made true with a bit of parchment and a forged scale-seal.\n\n\"That's three,\" NoSohoth said quietly.\n\n\"So, yes, I do challenge you,\" RuGaard said. \"If you refuse, all will know you to be a coward.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes, heroes taste death but once and all that. But the coward gets a long time to enjoy all those deaths, bitter as the cup may be, and heroes die young. Still, you annoy me, RuGaard. I think I should like to kill you. I accept your challenge and name the Dragonblade as my duelist.\"\n\nThat startled the man out of bored daydreaming. He reached for his sword hilt.\n\n\"You get to kill a three-legged dragon,\" SiMevolant said.\n\n\"When I came down here, I was told I'd be acting as an adviser,\" the Dragonblade said. \"I've had enough fights in my life. I'm old, my bones are easily chilled, and a hairy-rumped well digger would find this blasted rock uncomfortably cool.\"\n\n\"The alternative is fighting between the Andam and the dragons again,\" SiMevolant hissed.\n\n\"So be it. I'll kill the beast for you. What's one more to my tally? Ach, you're making me regret my chickens and coops.\"\n\n\"The deepest hour of the night, then,\" the Copper said. \"When the new day rings.\"\n\nBlack Rock's dueling pit lay on its lowest level. An amphitheater had been dug out beneath a point of rock, and there was room for six-score or more dragons, though the air got closed-in and stuffy when it was that full.\n\nFewer than a score of dragons attended this duel. RuGaard was well liked (or at least not hated outright, as Tighlia liked to put it), so most of the audience was of the Andam. They would have preferred, perhaps, to see two dragons fight, but entertainments were few enough.\n\nSiMevolant was there, of course, in his ridiculous bumblebee-painted scheme.\n\nAfter a light dinner, the Copper took a last walk around the Rock. He wondered how many dragons\u2014or men\u2014noticed the bats flitting about. Every now and then one landed on his head to whisper in his ear.\n\nFinally, it was time. He descended to the dueling pit with limbs that dragged reluctantly.\n\nI've never had any luck with duels. From my first one out of the egg.\n\nThe Copper made a long, reluctant show of having himself groomed before the match, trying to make the contest last as long as possible. If he went onto the sand before the attack, in all likelihood he would be killed. The Dragonblade occupied his time sharpening his sword and testing his footing in the sand of the dueling pit. He picked up a bronze dragonscale shield\u2014how odd, the coloring was much like Father's\u2014and banged his sword hilt against it.\n\n\"Come on! It's late, beast, and I'll have this over with.\"\n\nI've never had any luck with duels.\n\nThe Copper dropped into the pit and lowered his griff.\n\nThe Dragonblade put on a helmet featuring two wings rising up and meeting above his head, dropped his spiked face mask, and jumped into the pit. He took six paces forward so he couldn't be trapped against the wall. Then he waited, shield held ready and sword held loosely in one hand.\n\nNoSohoth invoked the spirits, asking them to determine whose cause was just, and to offer strength to the combatant in the right\u2014but took his time doing so, and had to go back and repeat several lines.\n\nThe dragon-riders began to shout and make venting noises with their lips and tongues.\n\nAt last NoSohoth finished the invocation. But then he improvised: \"I give you one last chance to reconcile. You have both proved your bravery by stepping into the pit, knowing that only one will climb out again\u2026.\"\n\nWhere are they?\n\nNeither offered to forget the quarrel. NoSohoth had difficulty making out the Dragonblade's reply, and finally asked him to step over and repeat his words, without the face mask in the way.\n\nWith that done NoSohoth droned on and on about the glorious traditions of single combat and how these two opponents set an example of courage to be learned from by eyes young and old\u2026.\n\nNever before had the Copper been so grateful for NoSohoth's ponderous speechifying.\n\n\"Enough, NoSohoth,\" SiMevolant cried. \"Or I'll have a saddle made for the Dragonblade out of your hide. Begin!\" he shouted, lest NoSohoth suffer another attack of deafness.\n\nThe Dragonblade dropped into a crouch. He whirled his sword, and it whistled an evil tune as it cut the air.\n\nThe Copper shifted stance and his wings opened a little and flapped, instinctively readying themselves.\n\n\"Now I know you. You're the little crippled traitor! Stupid of me!\"\n\n\"Not finishing me when you had the chance?\" the Copper asked.\n\n\"Thinking such as you might put up a fight.\"\n\nNothing to do but go forward. The Copper, for the first time in his life, made a show of limping.\n\nThe Dragonblade danced forward, deflected a bite with his shield, and cut the Copper in the shoulder. He moved as if he were made of air itself, a zephyr of slashing steel and stinking man-breath.\n\nThe Copper turned, swinging his stiff and broken tail, and beat his wings, kicking up a whirlwind of dust.\n\nThe men in the stands roared in displeasure, though whether they thought this was cheating, or just objected to not being able to see the action, the Copper couldn't say.\n\nThe Dragonblade was ready for the sand. Blocking it with his shield, he came forward and opened a cut in the Copper's vulnerable belly.\n\nHe's toying with me. He's going to let me die by scores of small cuts rather than a fatal blow.\n\nDribbles of blood made strange spiral traces in the sand beneath the Copper as he sidestepped, protecting his wounded underside. The man sliced a piece of skin from the Copper's haunch the size of his shield. Naked muscle gleamed red.\n\n\"I need a new shield-leather anyway,\" he said.\n\nThe Copper's fire bladder pulsed with his pain, and he vomited up its contents.\n\nThis, too, the Dragonblade was ready for. He crouched behind his shield and the thin liquid just splattered his shield, him, and the sand around. The liquid dripped off his shield like rain off a wide jungle leaf.\n\n\"Not even any fire? Let's end it; this is no contest at all,\" the Dragonblade said. He slashed the Copper's good leg, and the Copper collapsed face-first into the sand.\n\nA man's voice shouted from the entrance. The Copper didn't understand the words, but the dragon-riders jumped to their feet and fought one another to the exit.\n\nThe dragons were coming at last!\n\nHe raised his head to see the audience in flight, and the Dragonblade kicked him behind the jaw. He saw stars and his whole neck went numb. He fought to regain control of his head and neck as painful, prickling electricity danced up and down his spine.\n\nThe Dragonblade planted himself in front of his snout, just out of reach. He pointed the tip of his sword at the Copper's eye.\n\nIf you died fighting, were you still vanquished?\n\nA trickle of oily-smelling liquid dribbled out of the Dragonblade's scale greaves, spotting the sand. The Copper traced its source with his eye. It came from beneath the armor.\n\n\"Mercy,\" the Copper whispered, as Jizara had. Perhaps the Dragonblade had changed. Perhaps this time he'd grant mercy to a vanquished foe.\n\nThe man just snorted and adjusted the aim of his sword tip. \"Not to such as you. Last words?\"\n\nThe Copper refused to waste his final breath in a curse. With what wind he had left he forced a gob out of his mouth.\n\nA flaming torf. Pitiful. Hardly bigger than a lump of coal.\n\nA flaming torf that struck the Dragonblade on the boot.\n\nA flaming torf that struck the Dragonblade on the boot and set his whole leg aflame.\n\nWhich set his hips on fire.\n\nWhich crawled up his torso and yes, even flickered out the slits in his face mask.\n\nHe died rather more noisily than Mother.\n\nA blur of gold and SiMevolant landed heavily in the sand. He stormed toward the Copper, shining like the sun itself come to earth. \"What have you done? Don't you understand? Our age is over! We must ally with men, or our flame will be extinguished forever.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" the Copper gasped.\n\nSiMevolant raised his tail. Along with the strange black stripes, a silver barb had been added to the end.\n\nIt dripped.\n\nOpen jaws and claws bounded out of the darkness. Nilrasha seized SiMevolant's tail in her jaws and yanked, tearing a third of it off. She threw the dismembered tail away, and it rolled and twitched in the sand.\n\nSiMevolant forgot about the injured Copper\u2014someone had done that before, to his regret, the Copper vaguely remembered with a tickle of pride\u2014and turned on Nilrasha, rising and spreading his wings a little, showing this backbiting female how big he truly was!\n\nThe fool. He should have kept to his cowardly ways. Don't fight if you know nothing about fighting. He didn't even lower himself to protect his belly.\n\nThe Copper lashed out with a saa and opened SiMevolant wide and deep.\n\nThe would-be Tyr looked down at the coils spilling from his belly, writhing like a horde of unleashed snakes.\n\nAnd then Nilrasha fell on him, pushing his neck to the sand, opening windpipe and blood vessels, and SiMevolant let out a gurgling protest as he died.\n\n\"Nilrasha, you've come again.\"\n\n\"I never thought I could fly so fast,\" she said, dropping beside him. \"You're not badly hurt. Just cut up.\"\n\n\"You must go up. Help the others.\"\n\n\"I've no armor. Rayg had time and materials to make only three of the underside leathers. AuBalagrave and his dragons are wearing them.\"\n\n\"The plan could fail. We're deep beneath the Rock. You should leave, so you have room to run.\"\n\n\"In victory or defeat, I'm determined to die at your side, my love.\" She looked up. \"Here! You! Bat. Get over here. I've work for you.\"\n\nUthaned himself, a gray mouse who could fit in the Copper's nostril, fluttered above his ear.\n\n\"The blood is in pools on the dragon-barrack floor, m'lord,\" Uthaned said. \"The dragons rise just high enough to kill their men in their fall.\"\n\nThe Copper always regretted not being able to see it.\n\nAs Rethothanna related it to him later, like all well-fought battles, it was over before it was begun. The bats had opened veins on most of the dragon-rider mounts, numbing and cutting, numbing and cutting, and letting the blood run into the washing gutters.\n\nIn another cave it might not have worked\u2014some attendant might have noticed the blood pooling on the floor\u2014but not in the shining confines of the Rock. The black surface concealed the damage done until it was too late.\n\nSo when the alarm was sounded and the men ran to their mounts, the woozy beasts slipped and bumped. Those who even beat their wings hard enough to rise soon passed out, crumpled, and fell to earth. There was a terrible toll in broken necks and backs on the dragons, but the dragon-riders had it even worse.\n\nOf course, a healthy patrol was up over the Rock, as always, and it took many lives before the hag-riders were plucked out of their saddles and their maddened, confused mounts crippled. Even AuBalagrave, one of the few dragons with his belly armored against crossbow bolts, fell with a poisoned arrowhead in his jaw. But other dragons battered and swatted the flying hag-riddens, or plucked the men off while they were reloading their weapons.\n\nThere was bitter tunnel fighting against the Andam, but the Drakwatch distinguished itself. Old NeStirrath fell at their head when a wounded human plunged a poisoned blade into him. Of all the names of the fallen from that day, his glory lasted the longest.\n\nThe Imperial line had been reduced once again. Now only a handful remained.\n\nImfamnia fled. Some said she had chains of gold clutched in each claw. Others said she was heavy with SiMevolant's eggs. Or SiDrakkon's. Or a dozen other rumored lovers, earning her the title \"Jade Queen\" in the Anklene Histories. None could say where she went.\n\nA small group of men and dragons barricaded themselves deep in the rock with a reserve of food and water. They refused all attempts at parley until the Copper tottered to their tunnel, supported by Nilrasha. He dragged with him a woman clutching a squalling babe.\n\nHe showed the pair to the men at the other end of the tunnel and issued the only offer he could to give to the poison-men, for it was the only one their savage, half-formed brains could appreciate:\n\nHe summoned his best voice. \"Surrender and give your lives over to us, or we'll kill each of you, your wives, and spit your babes for roasting. The choice is yours, men: fair treatment as thralls, or death.\"\n\nTwo committed suicide in despair. The rest sensibly chose thralldom.\n\nAnd it was only while limping out of the Imperial Resort, with dragons and thralls alike calling him \"Tyr RuGaard\" and Nilrasha \"Queen Ora,\" that he realized what he had become.\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nAn Anklene, with the assistance of two elvish thralls, stitched him up. His good sii soon functioned again, though the scarred hide on his haunch never grew a proper set of scale again, just a sort of scabby covering like a turtle's shell.\n\nHe had to make a great many decisions from the Tyr's shelf, but he grew used to much of the labor required of a Tyr, to the point where he looked forward to the challenges, such as rebuilding the alliance with the griffaran. He even made a sort of art of delegating authority. The real trick was matching the right sort of brains and brawn to each task.\n\n\"Rayg is a clever man. In the world I intend to build, clever men will do very well. As long as they understand their place in the Spirits' grand design,\" he said to Rhea as she scrubbed him one morning. He had to confess that he liked the smell of bath-water with a slippery woman in it. But all things in moderation.\n\n\"You might want to communicate that to him,\" Nilrasha said as she performed her own ablutions.\n\nRayg had been kept busy studying the dragon-riders' weapons and equipment in the hope of making improvements. Now and then he complained that he should be freed by now, but the Copper always reminded him that the bridge was not yet built.\n\n\"Release me from this trivia and I'll finish it in thirty days,\" he grumbled. But he'd grumble more in the ore mines, seeing to improvements in the hydraulics, the Copper reminded him.\n\nBath done and breakfast down, the Copper hooked his mate at the wing and walked her to the balcony overlooking the now-public Imperial Gardens. And yes, he had a review to do, then a short speech to give to the newest generation of Drakwatch and Firemaidens.\n\nWith his beautiful mate pacing behind, the Copper walked through the quarters of his tiny aerial host, still new and untested as a wet hatchling, but they were learning.\n\nInstead of reins, the warriors fought chained to their saddles. For their own safety, of course. But it also established who guided whom.\n\nHe limped down a long line of dragons, with a few dragonelles sprinkled in, the red bands of the Firemaid oath around their necks. Each set of wings faced a rider, free thralls all\u2014a fine-sounding status, as long as one didn't think about it too much. Dragon and rider stared into each other's eyes over a lance's distance. Their armor was variegated, their weapons according to taste, but at least they all matched in their red cloaks. Not all the men were former dragon-riders; some were thralls who showed great loyalty and promise and skill at arms. And not all the dragons had once been hag-ridden. Those dragons who'd been victorious in combat had the Tyr's laudi painted on their wings in inexpensive but long-lasting tones. The dragon-riders had the equivalent, called \"tattooing\" or some other odd-sounding Parl expression, on their arms and at the outer edges of their eyes and temples.\n\nMaturing hatchlings\u2014clutchwinners, for the most part, including AuBalagrave's own champion\u2014stood between and behind the dragons and men they attended. Hatchlings bore food and carried wash water for the men, fetched boots and flying cloaks when called for. The human boys and girls polished scale, cleaned teeth with bristle brushes, and adjusted saddle pads with their nimble little fingers. The Copper hoped that in time a firmer alliance could be bred.\n\nIn time, as he often told Rayg, whenever he presented them with a tender calf, advising that the liver go to the swelling Rhea.\n\nImfamnia would have thought them poor work and too dreary-toned for words. So would SiMevolant, though he would have been arch about it. SiDrakkon would have approved, for the markings were grim-looking enough.\n\n\"Let's make it loud enough so the Tyr RuGaard hears it this time!\" HeBellereth, the aerial host commander, roared.\n\n\"This is my rider,\" the ranks boomed in unison. \"He is unique, an individual, and deserving of my respect.\"\n\nThe men recited the same speech as the dragons, switching rider for dragon.\n\n\"Without my rider, I am nothing. Without me, my rider is nothing. If I fall, he dies. If he falls, I will see to it he rests on the empire's ground. My blood is his nourishment. His sweat is mine. So be it until death or our Tyr releases us.\"\n\nOf course, the men had to change the wording of the last, too.\n\nThe Copper passed through the Black Rock, limping past bronzed skulls and captured banners hung from cut dragon reins. Thralls, drakes and drakka, dragons and dragonelles, and even a watchbat here and there bowed\u2014or crossed their wings, in the case of the bats\u2014to him.\n\nThere was no more laughter at his awkwardness. A Skotl or two, and the odd Wyrr holdout or Anklene radical, glared at him hotly.\n\nThey can hate as hard as they like, as long as they fear.\n\nHe looked in on the workshop, and the thrall's meal room. Rayg and Rhea and their growing brood stood with the rest, though their textiles and footwear were of much higher quality.\n\nHe paused, and put his head close to his mate's.\n\n\"There's so much still to be done. I believe before long we will long for those quiet evenings around the feast floor in Anaea.\"\n\n\"We're in charge of the Lavadome now. We can do what we want,\" Nilrasha said, smiling. A little piece of him deep inside turned cold. He could still admire her lines, her cool courage, and her tenacity at getting what she wanted. And above all, be grateful for what she had done for him. But she was no Tighlia.\n\nBut at that moment, he would rather have had frail little Halaflora. Halaflora understood the burdens of rank and station. When his mood turned dark like this, part of him believed Nilrasha hungered for bows and scrapes as Imfamnia had once wanted expensive baubles.\n\nThen they went back up to the top level, or \"their level,\" as Nilrasha styled it. She nuzzled her head under his as he stepped out onto the platform overlooking the Gardens. What little was left of the Imperial line looked up at him. Lesser dragons lined the garden walls, drakes and drakka perched atop broken columns and darkvine arches.\n\nA pair of hatchlings batted a dragon-rider's rotting severed head back and forth with their tails and had sport snapping at the flies seeking the putrescent flesh.\n\nThe Drakwatch and Firemaidens looked up.\n\nTime for the words a Tyr had to say now and then, to remind everyone that life was more than banquets and hunts and mating ceremonies and discreet little intimacies.\n\n\"Our species is at the beginning of a great awakening. The blighters had their Age of Wheels. Then the other hominids began the Age of Iron with a slaughter of our kind. Never forget the betrayal and fall of Silverhigh, or the fate that we in the Lavadome so narrowly escaped. The malice of hominids knows no charity or reason.\n\n\"They must be subdued and tamed. Or they will do the same to us, as the Dragonblade once tried. How many other Dragon-blades are there beyond our borders?\n\n\"Join me and look to our future. We need only master ourselves, and we can master the world! Today, here, atop this ancient stone, surrounded by the caves and egg shelves and trophies of our birthright, we dragons have inaugurated a new age. Let our enemies tremble, for now begins the Age of Fire!\"\n\nDrakine Glossary:\n\nFOUA: A product of the fire bladder. When mixed with the liquid fats stored within and then exposed to oxygen, it ignites into oily flame.\n\nGRIFF: The armored fans descending from the forehead and jaw that cover a dragon's sensitive ear holes and throat pulse points in battle.\n\nGRIFF-TCHK: An instant, an immeasurably short amount of time.\n\nLAUDI: Brave and glorious deeds in a dragon's life that make it into the lifesong.\n\nPRRUM: The low thrumming sound a dragon makes when it is pleased or particularly content.\n\nSAA: The rear legs of a dragon. The three rear true-toes are able to grip, but the fighting spur is little more than decoration.\n\nSII: The front legs of a dragon. The claws are shorter, and the fighting spur on the rear leg is closer to the other digits, and opposable. The digits are more elegantly formed for manipulation.\n\nTORF: A small gob from the fire bladder, used to provide a few moments of illumination.\n\nDraconic Personae:\n\n(ALL MALES ARE NAMED USING MATURE DRAGON FORM)\n\nAGGRIFFOPSE\u2014Tyr FeHazathant's only male clutchwinner, mated to Ibidio, died years before the Copper's arrival at the Lavadome.\n\nANGALIA\u2014Firemaid in Anaea.\n\nAUBALAGRAVE\u2014member of the Drakwatch.\n\nAURON\u2014the clutchwinner at the Copper's hatching.\n\nESTHEA\u2014NeStirrath's dead mate.\n\nFEHAZATHANT\u2014Tyr at the time of the Copper's arrival in the Lavadome.\n\nFELISSARATH\u2014Upholder of Anaea.\n\nHALAFLORA\u2014sickly daughter of AgGriffopse and Ibidio.\n\nHEBELLERETH\u2014Skotl clan duelist dragon.\n\nIBIDIO\u2014AgGriffopse's mate.\n\nIMFAMNIA\u2014daughter of AgGriffopse and Ibidio.\n\nJIZARA\u2014the Copper's weaker sister.\n\nKRTHONIUS\u2014member of the Drakwatch.\n\nNESTIRRATH\u2014chief trainer of the Drakwatch.\n\nNILRASHA\u2014Firemaiden.\n\nNITHONIUS\u2014Upholder of Bant.\n\nNIVOM\u2014member of the Drakwatch.\n\nNOSOHOTH\u2014majordomo of the Imperial line.\n\nNOTANNADON\u2014duelist.\n\nRETHOTHANNA\u2014Anklene historian.\n\nSIDRAKKON\u2014Tighlia's brother by mating to Tyr FeHazathant.\n\nSIMEVOLANT (golden drake)\u2014AgGriffopse and Ibidio's surviving clutchwinner.\n\nTIGHLIA\u2014Tyr FeHazathant's mate.\n\nTYR\u2014title for the ruler of the Lavadome, usually used in lieu of a name.\n\nWISTALA\u2014the Copper's stronger sister."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Shaman 2) The Smoky Mirror",
        "author": "Teresa Garcia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "native American",
            "time travel"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Finding the Path",
                "text": "\u2003Passing through the forest\n\n\u2003The trees tower over me\n\n\u2003Sweeping arms reaching\n\n\u2003For what I do not see.\n\n\u2003My vision had grown dim\n\n\u2003What was once bright\n\n\u2003Shadows behind a screen\n\n\u2003Hidden from my sight.\n\n\u2003Distant is the thunder\n\n\u2003Sweeping down to me\n\n\u2003Sweet is the water\n\n\u2003Flowing at my feet.\n\n\u2003Closing my eyes tight\n\n\u2003I sway with the wind\n\n\u2003Dancing with the might\n\n\u2003That has my soul pinned.\n\n\u2003I hear the call within\n\n\u2003And lift my voice high\n\n\u2003Remove from me the tsumi\n\n\u2003That obscures my light.\n\n\u2003I have forgotten my way\n\n\u2003Lost in this mortal frame\n\n\u2003Fill me once again today\n\n\u2003Rekindle my lost flame.\n\n\u2003This little body trembles\n\n\u2003Soft beneath the touch\n\n\u2003Wind and water mumbles\n\n\u2003But will it be too much?\n\n\u2003Waiting at the bank\n\n\u2003The birds sing their songs\n\n\u2003What are my words\n\n\u2003Where did I go wrong?\n\n\u2003The lesson that I seek\n\n\u2003Lies within my grasp\n\n\u2003All that I need\n\n\u2003Is to lift this hasp.\n\n\u2003Within this box waits\n\n\u2003My mirror ever still\n\n\u2003I look within to find Fate\n\n\u2003And for the Earth to spill.\n\n\u2003To send my roots deep\n\n\u2003Grasping the dark ground\n\n\u2003Another connection to keep\n\n\u2003Spirit and Body sound.\n\n\u2003Show me the Way\n\n\u2003That I must softly tread\n\n\u2003To balance the two\n\n\u2003Fairly in my head.\n\n\u2003I have forgotten my way\n\n\u2003Lost in this mortal frame\n\n\u2003Fill me once again today\n\n\u2003Rekindle my lost flame.\n\n\u2003This little body trembles\n\n\u2003Soft beneath the touch\n\n\u2003Fire and Earth mumbles\n\n\u2003But will it be too much?\n\n\u2003I can only walk ahead\n\n\u2003Pacing step by step\n\n\u2003Toeing the finest line\n\n\u2003Where once I merely wept.\n\n\u2003Standing strong and deep\n\n\u2003Reaching for the sky\n\n\u2003I'll climb the mountain steep\n\n\u2003And watch the stars go by."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon Shaman",
                "text": "[ Book Two: The Smoky Mirror ]\n\n[ Losing the Way ]\n\n[ Prologue \u2014 Gathering of Spirits ]\n\n\"This running away has to stop!\"\n\nFierce eyes the color of a summer sky, ringed with a desperate yellow, bored into eyes that were the color of an Irish field, as her fiery hair formed a corona around her head. The green of her gown swirled as she swept one slender and pale hand toward the floor, while the butt of the spear in her other hand struck the marble flooring of the meeting hall. The sharp sound echoed in the recesses of the chamber. The owner of the shamrock eyes stirred in her own gown of emerald on the carved granite of the small throne at the oak table.\n\n\"I quite agree with you my Priestess, but tell me Maeve, how do we break this particular family cycle that dear Drake's curse has exploited for so long?\"\n\n\"I don't know, M'Lady. I just can't stand to see what has befallen little Marie from BlowingWind's mad flight. The child has to face what she has done to her mother, though our plans never worked to heal what Marie did to her own mother Rowena.\"\n\nThe impassioned ghost sank in her seat once more, a wilting tiger lily where once had been a proud Priestess in a life long ago, before history was written down. She had been one of the favorites of Brigit, a woman of strength and courage selected to tend the Sacred Forge and Well. The weapons that she had forged had been as powerful as her own temper, and just as difficult to wield properly, but worthwhile to master. It was in part because of her skill at the forge that the calamity had befallen her line.\n\nBrown eyes gazed with concern on Maeve, black braids swinging forward as the man in blue denim reached over to touch her shoulder. SoaringHawk's skin still bore the dark mark of long hours in the sun, but he had been murdered before the lines of age had begun to set in his face. The haunted look in his eyes had broken through its disguise.\n\nThe Shaman's hand tightened slightly, betraying what he felt for both his wife and his only child that still navigated the perils of the living world. Maeve put her slender yet work-roughened hand on that of the man who had married into her family, grateful for the small miracle of touch. Ghosts did not get much contact these days, unless it was with one of their own. The scientific studies that man had done in this modern age all recognized how important it was, although any of the Old Ones could have easily said just as much.\n\nThe small dragon that was curled up like a crown upon Brigit's brow stirred, then slid down from his perch into her lap. Although he was nearly as old as the much-missed Drake, making him well over a thousand years old, this dragon had remained small, and not much larger than a hatchling of his particular breed. The ancient goddess looked down and stroked his emerald scales, watching them glint in the fairy light that illuminated the hall. Finnigan pushed his head into her hand, purring like a cat as she fondled his ears. The other hand rested on his side, and he covered it with one leathery wing. He always knew the small gestures that made the immortal feel better, and had been a much-needed confidant during the time he had become a guardian. He had stepped into Drake's place after the imposing and sometimes thoughtless red dragon had finally perished of heartbreak.\n\nA soft masculine voice trickled like water, \"Gomen nasai, but what is this curse that you speak of? I'm afraid that I don't know much about the particulars of the woman I am helping to test.\"\n\nThe deity's mind went over the first two words of the statement as she turned her gaze to the red fox sitting in the chair across the Council Table from her own. He looked so much like the foxes of her own land, and yet she was forced to remind herself that he was from a country far from her homeland. After a moment, she realized that those words must have meant something akin to \"sorry\" in his native tongue. The gold eyes rimmed with black were filled with curiosity, and his young voice matched the black tipped ears that pointed straight at her in his interest.\n\nBrigit gestured at the water silently waiting in the silver bowl located precisely in the center of the table, summoning an image of the fateful day that she witnessed the event that had set in motion the separating of the spirit and human worlds of the lands within her influence. The image filled the chamber, putting all of the occupants into the scene, although none could change history. She had already tried calling in favors from those that could control time. Something much greater than she had decreed the happening, although what purpose it would ultimately serve she was still unsure.\n\nThe once green grass was now blackened where the flame of the livid dragon had blasted through the air. The village was in ruins, the charcoal skeletons reaching for the sky, while men and women farther away lay where they had been struck down, some lifeless and others merely unconscious. The children had been allowed to flee, as Drake loved children dearly.\n\nMaeve, weak from the drug herbs that her captor had been slipping into the food and drink that she had been provided during her captivity, lay protected between Drake's great forepaws. Each of his coal colored talons individually was larger than she was. Drake glowered down at the one lone man left before him, his great fangs glinting in the light, every one of his back spikes at attention and slicing the air.\n\n\"Those of your line too shall have the one they love stolen from them, just as you have done to me. My sorrow and shame shall be thine, and that of your descendants, until two that carry thy blood shall unite with dragons that care for them as much as I care for Maeve. Only then shall her dishonor be fully avenged, and generations shall pass before it shall happen!\"\n\n\"If you care for her, then you should let her be with her own kind, Serpent!\"\n\nThe single man that still held his feet, soot marring his broad features and discoloring once blonde hair, charged at the dragon wielding one of the shining blades that Maeve and the two other Keepers of Brigit's Forge and Well had smithed. Somewhere on the field Brigit's past self stood watching, unable and at the time unwilling to intervene in the magic of a dragon, with Finnigan girded about her waist. Drake's massive wings folded against his sides, and an inferno erupted from his mouth to defend him.\n\nBrigit turned her head; still angry with herself about how she should have known back then that there was a possibility that Maeve was with child, especially with how long she had been captive. Her thoughts echoed in her head, \"I should have warned Drake, so in a way, everything was and is my fault.\"\n\nShe gestured again, and the illusions faded. The fox had remained in his seat, putting on a brave face, though the slight tremble of his single ebony-tipped tail gave away his fear. Brigit studied the young male.\n\nOnce more, thoughts sprung from the depths of her mind. \"Has he never seen a dragon in full rage, even though it was said his mother had become one? Such a heritage was why I had chosen him, unaware that he was already employed as one of the Japanese spirits testing BlowingWind in her new home.\"\n\nThinking about BlowingWind's new country brought to mind a picture of the male she was currently with, although the human woman had fought against it. Perhaps if the Kami had not looked so much like her lost love, or if she was not still slightly addled from his tragic death, then the particular descendant in question could have resisted Ryu's charms more effectively. While mad with grief BlowingWind had fled the pain and her home, a strange by-product of the curse that had shown itself in some of the adopted O'Drake line, and thankfully not in the children of Drake himself with Maeve. Or at least they did not have that tendency unless the Children of Drake had wedded those carrying the taint of Maeve's shame, as how BlowingWind and Marie carried it. Those thoughts brought to Brigit's mind the young Obsidian, a dragon who had lost his physical life at the tender age of five hundred, and the one that had made the obsidian mirror that BlowingWind used as a focus, and at times as a portal to the spirit world.\n\nThe mirror, that was the solution, and the best route to take in order to make BlowingWind see what had befallen her mother, and perhaps the way to ultimately fulfill one part of the breaking of the geas, that ancient and ill-conceived curse. Maeve frowned as she watched the deity that she served become lost in thought, then started when the woman opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\"Akaisu, your mission will be to obtain the mirror that BlowingWind keeps in her pouch. You must then attempt to get her to think about her mother at a time that you can get her alone and out of the influence of others that would hamper her, and cause her to look into its depths. Do not tell your compatriots what you are attempting to do.\"\n\nThe foxed bowed to her, his thoughts forming as gently as a brook would whisper. \"This will not be an easy task. Things never seem to be simple with that girl, if my intuition is correct.\" He spoke carefully to the Irish goddess; \"I will do so, Lady.\" Akaisu bowed once more.\n\n\"Leave me, all of you. You know your duties.\" Brigit's voice had become threadbare as she dismissed the others with a wave of her hand.\n\nThe room emptied with the previously unaddressed Hawk and Raven winging noisily out of the room in their avian forms as the two human ghosts morosely filtered out. It emptied even of the uncharacteristically silent Coyote from North America, where Marie had fled to after her encounter with the curse, and where BlowingWind had been born. When all of them had gone, leaving her alone in her layer of the world's fabric, she turned her attention back to the gazing bowl, and to studying the mentioned Marie for long hours before watching Marie's troublesome daughter again. The goddess felt pulls, but she was not omniscient and so was unaware of being watched herself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Morning Plans",
                "text": "Starlight streamed through the open window to spill across the tossed sheets and pale face that he watched, lending the narrow visage its silver luminescence. Her short auburn hair was dark in the night, a far cry from the daytime highlights of red, like a swirl of fertile earth beneath the rich loam outside of the cabin. A stray moonbeam refracted off of his dark eyes, shining like foxfire as he ran a hand through his midnight hair and guarded her restless dreams.\n\n\"You're supposed to let me into them BlowingWind.\"\n\nShe frowned in her sleep, rolling over to her side and away from him, counting on his honor to restrain him on the other side of the sword lurking between them. The luminescent oval of his own pale face smiled beneath the night dark spikes of contained energy where it rested on his hand, his body perilously close to the keen blade.\n\n\"I suppose that I could leave you in Tokyo safely while I set up our new home in Hokkaido. The time alone will be good for you, and you can learn for yourself how entwined you are with me. I will still be easily available if you need me though.\"\n\nThe growls of her dreams died away slowly as she conquered whatever minor demon she had been facing. The mask of her anger fell away again, revealing the child hiding within the woman whose loneliness had called him to her side only a few short weeks ago, or perhaps it was months now with the way time flowed so strangely between his world and hers.\n\n\"Besides, even though we have reunited the four major parts of your spirit, you still feel incomplete. If I let you be for a month, perhaps you will be able to feel some sense of where the dust and shards of your soul-jewel have scattered to, my precious tama.\"\n\nBlowingWind retreated beneath the covers, pulling them over her head as if even in her dreams his constant watch was annoying. Incoherent mumbles came from underneath the blankets, then faded to nothing.\n\n\"What is it you don't want me to know Little One?\"\n\nSilence was his only answer from the sleeping woman, and the night danced silently on as he brooded over his prized gem. When night had finally left and the sun intruded into the rustic bedroom with her spears of light, BlowingWind rolled over again. Restless legs stretched out from the ball she had curled into, bringing the blankets down and exposing her once more to his penetrating stare. The itch on her skin that his gaze produced caused blinking and bleary eyes to search for the irritant.\n\n\"Ah! You didn't stare at me all night, did you Ryu?\"\n\n\"I prefer to think of it as 'brooding.' It's a dragon thing.\"\n\n\"You should have slept, dragon.\"\n\n\"I got more than enough yesterday. Even in this shape I don't require as much rest as you do.\"\n\nRyu watched her lips purse, biting back whatever comment had been about to spew out. Judging by the glints in her sapphire eyes, it had packed an edge that would have equaled his sword.\n\n\"Not a morning person I see. I thought your previous ill temper with me was just a result of your hormones.\"\n\nBlowingWind burrowed back under the covers before replying.\n\n\"Annoying Japanese dragon, scaly coyote, stalker, sicko.\"\n\n\"I love you too my unwilling wife. I'll be making breakfast while you work out your 'grouchiness' my dear.\"\n\nRyu smirked as he got up and made his way to the kitchen, remembering how shattered her soul had been when their paths first crossed and pleased at her progress. After she had reintegrated her wisdom aspect, she had slept for a week and then ran away the very next day after she had awoken. It had been interesting to hunt her through the forest and ultimately capture her, storming the castle of her heart, even though she did not like admitting she had a soft spot for him.\n\nSafely in the kitchen from her wrath now, he gazed sadly into the refrigerator and mused aloud as he drew out a carton of eggs and some chopped venison. \"Such a complicated woman. But there is still so much of her spirit left to find and return, and we have her new life to set up.\"\n\nHe set them on the counter before reaching up to where a frying pan was waiting to be pulled down.\n\n\"You mean I have my new life to set up. Not you.\"\n\nBlowingWind had stressed the singular, and her entrance into the kitchen pulled Ryu out of his thoughts. He said nothing in reply to her as he placed the venison and eggs into the pan. She sniffed as she sat at the table, trying to hide how hungry she was, the eggs and meat beginning to sizzle as she made herself comfortable at the table.\n\n\"God, I need some coffee, Ryu. My classes start in March, and I need to get an apartment near the University. I need a job too, so I can support myself.\"\n\n\"You fell asleep right after dinner last night, so we didn't get to talk much after your extremely long bath. What University?\"\n\n\"Hokkaido University. I've got a spot at the new Fukuhaku campus.\"\n\n\"I'm not familiar with that campus. Is it new?\"\n\nA silence stretched between the pair as BlowingWind fell into a trance while gazing at the table. Ryu let it be as he scrambled their eggs and mixed in now cooked bits of venison. Shortly, breakfast was ready, and served with the ever-present rice and tea.\n\nFrowning in concern, he leaned over her and whispered into her ear. \"Wind-chan, are you all right?\"\n\nBlowingWind snapped from her trance, sighing when reality caught back up to her and her plate was placed on the table so that Ryu could touch her forehead. She waved a hand in irritation at his touch.\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine Ryu. Just a little distracted.\"\n\nRyu sat down across from her, his scarlet and yellow silk kimono blazing around him, contrasted starkly by the unruly and slightly spiky hair that was cut short on his head. Melted chocolate eyes locked with BlowingWind's glaciers. After a moment, he picked up a pair of chopsticks and began to eat. BlowingWind ate her own fare, her eyes focused far away and not seeing the nutritious food she had been prepared.\n\n\"We will go collect your things from the lower shrine today.\" He assured softly, believing that was what had been on her mind.\n\nShe looked up from her breakfast at Ryu's words. Although he had used one tone, what she had heard was another.\n\n\"You say that like you have the right to decide my life Ryu.\"\n\n\"Would you rather leave them there? I thought that you would want to start on your preparations as soon as possible.\"\n\nBlowingWind slammed her hand down, releasing the chopsticks she held before leaping up and leaning over the table to shout at him.\n\n\"Yes, I want my things and to start as soon as I can, but I am a big girl and can take care of myself! I don't need you, or anyone, to plan my life for me!\"\n\nRyu's eyes widened as she smacked the table once again to punctuate her point, then watched as she stormed out of the room and out of his ostensibly cozy little cabin that was filled with historic curios and books, work desk showing signs that he had been there at least once during the night. The outer door slammed behind her.\n\n\"Ku, did I say something wrong?\"\n\nThe voice came from one of the doorposts, deep and creaky, as it had been when the wind had groaned through the boughs when the owner had still been a tree. \"Very wrong master. You did something very wrong.\"\n\nRyu stood, and started for the door to follow the angry woman. He held out his hands, palms up and grasping for an answer, listening with the entirety of his being. \"What did I do?\"\n\nRyu's hand touched the knob on the outer door, and Ku's voice answered while the door opened.\n\n\"You presumed to try dictating to the tiger what was going to happen. Or so thinks the tiger.\"\n\nThe door shut behind Ryu and he scanned the forest for BlowingWind. \"The tiger jokes are getting a little old, even if she does act like one.\"\n\nBlowingWind was sitting in a cedar tree, looking down at Ryu's modest cabin from in between the boughs. Ragged breath tore its way from her chest as she leaned back against the trunk, hoping her scent was hidden well enough.\n\nRyu's eyes slitted, like shards of obsidian, as she continued to elude his gaze. Her presence was infuriatingly close, but hidden, her scent cloaked within the rest of the forest. Mount Fuji towered above the lush forest, her white cap reduced to its smallest size under the heat of Amaterasu's summer dances. The Aokigahara Jukai, or Sea of Trees, lay spread out as a lush green carpet, deceptively peaceful seeming to all except those who had heard tales of strange happenings and disappearances within its mysterious borders.\n\nRyu's heart jumped to his throat as the acrid stench of Tengu drifted into his nose, mingled with the taint of a Kitsune trespassing as well.\n\n\"Oh no, now is not a good time for a visit of tricksters.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Beneath the aromatic boughs of an ancient cedar, deep within the Sea of Trees and bordering the territory claimed by Take Ryu for his personal retreat, three figures huddled and conferred in velvet shadow.\n\nGolden eyes peered out of a pointed red face, two large ears perching on top of the owner's head like black-tipped sails catching the breeze. A bushy comma, also tipped with black, curled around four dainty feet as if to hide such small appendages from view. Akaisu in his form of a fox listened intently to his companions.\n\nWhat appeared at first glance to be a withered old Yamabushi or mountain priest, in tattered brown kimono, lifted his head to reveal a red face and long nose. He adjusted his hat and repositioned the great black wings on his back.\n\n\"So, since she's been paired before we could finish testing her, does anyone have any ideas how we are going to finish now that we have to take her guardian into account?\"\n\nThe fox flicked his tail before he replied to the Tengu. He had too many objectives to accomplish with the woman, and only one way that he could think of to accomplish both without alerting the Tengu to the fact that he had been retained by someone with an interest in the woman's safety.\n\n\"Somehow we need to steal the memory of that bothersome dragon, she started her tests single, so she needs to finish them at least thinking she is that way. If we can steal his memory of the binding, then it puts them further back in the courting process.\"\n\nThe old Tengu nodded his head, and a younger Tengu rubbed the side of his sharp beak while the feathers of his face stirred in the breeze.\n\n\"True, but how are we going to manage that? She doesn't seem to be very good at holding still, and young Take-san will no doubt keep a very tight grip on her for a while yet. Stealing his memories will be even harder.\"\n\nThe old Tengu nodded again. \"Karasu is right. She is still sick though, so maybe we can drive her fever back up enough to temporarily wipe those memories. It could be another test of her hardiness as well. There are too many physically weak mystics these days.\"\n\nKarasu looked down into the needles he was sitting on. \"That's rather dangerous, isn't it, Kori? What happens if it goes too high? She almost died during her last fever, and she hasn't had enough time yet to really build her strength back up. Akaisu saw with his own eyes how close she is to the border when he tricked her off the summit.\"\n\nKori sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. \"I feel for the child too, but our assignment was to test her so that her powers would develop. Let us not forget that although he has a good heart, Take Ryu is not the most well-balanced individual, and probably a poor partner for an already unseated young woman.\"\n\nAkaisu's golden eyes were rimmed with moisture as he delicately cleared his throat. When both of the Tengu were looking at him, the fox spoke. \"I could transform into the boy in her heart again and lead her off. It wouldn't be hard, and it is an illusion that she still seems to have trouble seeing through because she wants to see him again so much.\"\n\nKori nodded. \"Very well. Karasu will distract the dragon, you lead the child away, and I will administer her medicine. We will want to keep her with us though, to be sure she doesn't regain her memories before it is time. During that time we can figure out a way to take his memories, probably through her.\"\n\nAkaisu stood up, then darted away to where he could smell the human, weaving through the underbrush to avoid the gaze of the dragon that no doubt was scanning his territory well, judging by the shouting of one name over and over again. The Tengu blipped in and out of existence as they teleported toward their mark. Soon the three were carefully looking into the clearing, observing the human hiding in the tree, instinctively trying to cover her scent, and the dragon rather comically and completely missing the woman he was trying to tend."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "BlowingWind watched as Ryu wandered into the forest, calling her name. Her breath was still as she sat motionless, willing herself to be invisible with every ounce of strength that she had. Silent tears welled up in her eyes as she watched him go about his search. Finally, he left at a quick pace; apparently chasing something that he thought was she.\n\nShe picked her way back down the tree, placing her feet gently so as not to make any rustles for the sharp-eared spirit to hear, still trying to cloak her presence. Once her feet were on the ground again, she crumpled into a quivering ball while restraining a sob, tired from the short climb.\n\n\"I must have overdone it yesterday. You'd think sleeping for a week would give a person more energy, not less.\"\n\n\"Sleep is a tricky thing.\"\n\nShe looked up in surprise at the familiar and long-sought voice, her eyes meeting the concerned brown of Obsidian's, or whom she thought was Obsidian. His long black hair was pulled back in his customary plaits, the buckskin of his clothes gleaming in the sun. BlowingWind sobbed and threw her arms around him, cringing as she did so expecting to grab nothing but air. Instead of the expected air, she found him warm and solid, and his arms wrapped her in a gentle embrace.\n\n\"I am here now. You are safe.\" He rocked her gently back and forth, smoothing her short hair with one hand as he hummed into her neck, nuzzling softly to soothe her.\n\n\"I thought I'd never see you again. But you're here Obsidian. I've missed you so much!\"\n\nAkaisu cringed as he continued pretending to be the one she was looking for, reading her heart for his proper cue. He stood up, drawing her with him to cover the response. It had been a long time since he had held an unrelated female, but now was not the time to remember.\n\n\"I missed you too, but I'm here now. Come with me. Everything will be just fine Little One.\"\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nShe clung meekly to his arm, smiling broadly even as the tears continued to stream down her face. As they walked, he couldn't help but reach up to brush them away, disconcerted to see any creature capable of joy and sorrow at once. They walked for a short distance before Kori came into view within a sun-streamered clearing, where \"Obsidian\" stopped for introductions.\n\n\"This is Kori. He helped me regain a body and is excellent with herbal remedies. He's prepared something for you.\"\n\nHe and BlowingWind sat down on a small log beside a trickling stream, while Kori bowed a greeting and came near with a small cake.\n\n\"The trees have told me you are ill. Please accept this, as it will give you back your strength.\"\n\nThe human accepted the gray cake with a bow of gratitude, then regarded it carefully. When \"Obsidian\" nodded to her after a short glance, she took a bite. Choking it down, her face contorted, and she lunged for the water of the nearby stream.\n\n\"Genkaku taisan!\" A commanding voice boomed, the earth rumbling gently in response to it.\n\nRyu broke into the clearing at a run when his command broke the illusion that had caused the Kitsune to look like BlowingWind's former guardian. At the same time, the medicine cake had its desired intent, and the human fell to the ground asleep, the spell and herbs running their course. With a curse, Ryu scooped her up and began running for the bridge into the world of man, and the one place he was certain that he could keep her safe.\n\nAkaisu hissed in frustration as he loped after the racing Ryu and the young woman that the magma Kami was carrying. The woman's bag had been slung over one shoulder, as if he had figured out that it was possibly no longer safe to keep her in the forest.\n\n\"I thought that Karasu was distracting him.\"\n\n\"Apparently not anymore!\" Kori flashed in and out beside him, using the limited ability to teleport that all Tengu possessed.\n\n\"He figured it out! That's all! I don't know how though!\" The more crow-like of the two Tengu flashed beside Akaisu, and then ahead of the Kitsune as he came from nowhere.\n\n\"Birds\u2026 And I had done my job so well,\" the fox sighed and continued the chase, at a slower pace than the Tengu. Although the dragon was leaving very little trail even in the headlong flight, his father Kitsui and grandfather Vadise had taught him well how to track, no matter the form. Now was a good time to come up with another plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Return to Sengen Jinja and the Boy in the Mirror",
                "text": "The forest trees rushed by as Ryu used every bit of his draconic speed in an attempt to leave the Tengu behind. His cargo groaned, her fever mounting once again swifter than he could have ever thought possible, her hands like ice where they touched his chest.\n\n\"My heart, my kokoro. Precious treasure, sleep. Forgive me Kokoro!\"\n\nDark chocolate eyes gazed gently down at the woman sleeping within his arms, examining her pale skin and committing her pert nose to memory once again as he noted the spreading flush. Her short auburn hair waved gently in the breeze as he carried her through the forest, her glacial eyes lost in dreams as the memories of her sojourn in his world were buried. He used his hand to shut her eyes as he ran, disconcerted by the blank stare every time that they opened.\n\n\"Obsi\u2026\" She sighed as Ryu closed those eyes.\n\nThe breeze tousled his unruly black hair, setting the ever-present spikes to wave as if even they felt guilt at ever hiding her memories. It seemed that his spell was having a reaction with whatever spell was in the cake he had been just in time to see her take a bite of. Still it was the law. The young woman moaned a little, turning her face toward him, her fever having returned when he had thought that surely she had conquered her sickness. The white of her buckskin dress only accentuated the unhealthiness of what should have been very lightly tanned skin that had been toasted to perfection a week ago. A backpack bumped on his back along with a staff, the only belongings that she had brought with her into the Forest of No Return.\n\nRyu continued to croon, now wordlessly, as he ran through the forest toward where the humans had a shrine. Gone were the silken reds and yellows of his kimono that mimicked his magma. They were replaced now with black slacks and a white buttoned down shirt as he used his magic to shift his apparel. The smell of Tengu and Kitsune nearby drove him to run ever faster, although he had to be careful of his precious cargo. A harsh voice over-rode his worried tune.\n\n\"Give her to me, Dragon!\"\n\nRyu growled as he leaped to the side, still doing his best to continue on a forward path, dodging the being that had materialized where he would have been. He did not stop to regard his assailant, having already had his fill of the red face, fire-poker nose and coarse brown robes. \"She is mine to protect Tengu!\"\n\n\"You know nothing!\"\n\nAnother Tengu materialized, this time right beside Ryu, snatching at the human in his arms. Ryu manipulated the ground beneath them, causing holes to open up and swallow the crow spirits that were trying to steal his Treasure. It didn't matter to him which Tengu was which.\n\nAkaisu had by now secreted himself and was occupied in murmuring a spirit summoning spell that he had modified from the awakening call that his mother had used for centuries in her work. If he had modified it correctly, then what would prove most useful for his purposes would be called. All he had to do was to be watchful and take it when it came.\n\nRyu kept running, darting around the rocks and beneath the reaching boughs of the twisted cryptomeria trees. Unnoticed, an object wrapped in leather made its way to the top of the contents of BlowingWind's backpack, then dropped unheard upon the moss underfoot. The red fox darted out from the underbrush to secure the package, then hid again with his prize as he waited for his compatriots to find their way out of the embraces of an irritated earth.\n\nThe song of a river filled the air as mist closed around Ryu and the woman he was defending. Continuing his run through the border a red bridge came into sight.\n\n\"Finally! I've been running for hours! Blasted time flux.\"\n\nHe pounded across the spanning arch, the phantom water receding as he crossed the boundary between his world and hers. The mist cleared, and now the trees were shorter, twisted, as if ancient magic had stunted them even though it was only the work of nature and ancient eruptions. The gateway between the realms closed and the sounds of the river stopped, taking with it the smells that had been hounding him.\n\nHigh in the sky, a hawk circled, and then filled the air with his cry. The wind rose, and seemed to spur the dragon on faster as he ran, lending its wings to his feet. With another cry, the hawk above them faded back out of sight. Ryu looked up briefly, taking stock of what possibly was another threat. The hawk made no show again though.\n\nDespite having crossed safely, Ryu did not dare stop his run. The forest kept flying behind him, the pines growing larger and straighter as he left the aftermath of the latest eruption of Mount Fuji, and at last the Torii of the shrine came in view. Beyond the looming gateway rose the magnificent lacquered structures that he knew so well, edifices of grandeur meant to honor the Buddha and the Kami. He ran past the few humans who were still milling about, the latest festival having finished last week if he had not lost track of human time too badly. His now highly scuffed oxfords resounded on the stone flagging as he passed under the high vermilion Torii, skidding to a stop to rinse his hands and mouth at the Temizuya as tradition dictated.\n\n\"My, my, such a hurry young man. I have never seen anyone literally running onto the shrine grounds in my entire life.\"\n\nRyu looked up from the water, his eyes following the laughing old voice to see a familiar old priest in plain white haori and black hakama, a broom well in hand. Ryu gasped lightly, the stitch in his side from his miles-long sprint through the forest tearing paths of fire in his sides.\n\n\"You always did joke that I was the most devout local that you'd ever be likely to meet, Kannushi-san.\"\n\nThe old man's deep-set granite eyes settled on the young woman that Ryu was cradling. A moment passed while he took in the sleeping and flushed form where they stood in the stone-paved courtyard.\n\n\"MountainChild-san is ill. How did you find her? A search party was sent out for her last week when she didn't return in the planned time, but no traces could be found.\"\n\nRyu's heart froze as he realized that he needed a story.\n\n\"I was on my way back in from my sabbatical out at my cabin, when I found her lying beside one of the streams. She looked sick so I took her in for a bit, but she just kept getting worse instead of better. I was hoping that I could get her some help here. On my way bringing her in, I thought something was chasing me. You know me, nervous city boy at heart and too much time in a classroom.\"\n\nHe laughed nervously, fighting the urge to turn around to look behind him, hoping that the seemingly unreasonable spirits hadn't followed him and that the old priest wouldn't try to delve deeper into the truth. The old man sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"That explains why we couldn't find her, although you probably should have brought her in sooner. Follow me, and we'll get her comfortable. I'd send her to the hospital, but she left clear instructions for us, before she went out, that she was not to be sent to the hospital if she was found injured.\"\n\nRyu sighed, the spikes of his hair calming down and looking only slightly disheveled instead of the terrifying mass it had been, following after the priest to the living quarters of the shrine. Their steps echoed, rebounding off of the building and driving the half-truth back into Ryu with all the comfort of bone spurs. At last, they had stepped up onto the wooden porch and left their shoes, and he followed the old priest inside.\n\nThe shrine building itself seemed to be keeping a wary eye on the man carrying the woman it had known only briefly, though he had been here many times before in his life. The wooden walls developed eyes for Ryu as he observed the grain of the wood, the same with the hand-polished floor. The Priest led him past several Miko who were turning to look after the woman, recognizing the foreigner who had brought the gift of the Hawk Dance from so far away for this year's fire festival.\n\nAt the end of the hall, the Kannushi turned, and slid open the shoji leading into a simple room. In the open closet, a futon and comforter were neatly folded, and sitting on top of these was a blanket seemingly covered in hawk feathers. A jolt of recognition singed Ryu's body as he tried to keep from staring at it, and the identity of the mysterious hawk maiden from the festival was now revealed to him. The priest moved to the closet, carefully putting the blanket on another shelf before bringing out the futon and comforter. It was only a moment while the old man was unfolding the mattress and then preparing the comforter, but it seemed like an eternity as the man watched Ryu and BlowingWind from the corner of his eye. The young professor cradled the woman tenderly, but with experience the Kannushi could tell he was anxious to make her comfortable.\n\nFinally, Ryu was able to lay the woman on the futon, automatically covering her with the blanket before the Priest could do anything to help. His deft hands tucked the comforter around the sleeping woman and carefully arranged the slowly lengthening hair around her head as he smiled at her. The priest quietly stood up, his assistance unneeded.\n\n\"I see she means something to you, young man.\"\n\n\"The world and more Kannushi-san.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't get your hopes up too high Ryu. I know that you've been searching for a possible wife for a while now, but I don't know if being the wife of a teacher is something that would appeal to her. And she didn't seem quite ready to even be looking for a husband.\"\n\nRyu stood up, only to move to situate himself near the door.\n\n\"Thank you for your years of friendship, but that is for her to decide, and not my concern right now. Right now I only want her to get well. I will sit and watch her.\"\n\nThe old priest nodded his head, withdrawing quietly with the intention of fetching some medicines for the woman's fever. Ryu waited until the last muffled sounds of the human's shuffling feet retreated down the hall before moving again to sit near her side, taking her hand.\n\n\"I am so sorry. I thought that we had the solution. Please forgive me my hitogami. You've come so far.\"\n\nBlowingWind lay still in the bed, her hand still as frigid as the ice beginning to grip his heart yet again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Squawks rent the silence of the forest as the two Tengu fought to claw their way out of the damp loam, and Karasu finally managed to get out of the hole, having found it a little difficult to teleport out from underneath several feet of uncooperative earth. He brushed off what he could and then began to pick it out of his feathers using his claws, until Kori's own loud squawk made him flinch. Gaining control of himself, the Karasu-Tengu glared at the newly freed Dai-Tengu \"Do you enjoy almost making me fall back into deep dark holes Kori?\"\n\n\"That's not why I squawked! Look, the gate is shut!\" Kori pointed toward where the bridge spanned the river, the bed now dry as evidenced by the lack of sound. The pair ran for the border, and the sight of the stones verified the reports of their hearing.\n\n\"How did he manage that? He doesn't have the training to close a gate, he's still technically a kid as far as dragon age goes.\"\n\n\"I don't know Karasu. But I don't like it.\"\n\n\"He didn't. It was closed for him. That hawk that was following her did it.\"\n\nAkaisu came out from behind a bush, properly gold eyes watching the sky. His long black hair was now pulled back in its customary top-knot, his green kimono and hakama neatly in place as his wakizashi lurked quietly at his side. A russet tail tipped with the same midnight that tipped his grandmother's white tails hung softly behind him, limp as if his deeds shamed him or he had been scolded. The woman's father was keeping a sharp eye on her, SoaringHawk had disapproved of what had been done.\n\nKarasu clacked his beak.\n\n\"Why didn't you get her? You were the only one that he didn't bury fox.\"\n\nAkaisu held out the leather-wrapped package.\n\n\"In a way, I did. Part of her soul is hiding in here. This is also attached to that boy she has been dreaming about. When she wakes up, she'll come looking for this, whether it is part of the memories that are being hidden now or not.\"\n\nKori took the package and unwrapped it, revealing what seemed to have once been a perfect orb of blackest obsidian, struck in such a way as to render two halves and two natural mirrors. Only one of these was in the package, but surely the mate was somewhere out in the world. The face smoked, and then cleared to reveal the scowling face of the soul whose features Akaisu had borrowed from the memory of the young shaman they had pursued. The young man's lips pursed, then parted as his eyes flashed, the voice slightly more melodic than Ryu's more fiery tone.\n\n\"Leave her alone. I swear that if you hurt her there will be no end to your torment.\"\n\nKarasu leaned in, looking into the mirror over Kori's shoulder as Akaisu studied the grass at his feet. \"You're just a mirror, what are you going to do? Show us illusions of ugly faces?\"\n\nThe image of the young man disappeared, a black mist pouring out of the mirror and taking the shape of a great dragon. The spirit rose up and then arched down toward his prey; jaws open and ready to devour the two Tengu.\n\n\"Amehana no kami no hyoushi!\" Akaisu darted forward, drawing from his kimono an ofuda and slapping it onto the stone and then his hands flashed through several signs. The shadowy mist broke up and returned into the mirror, a crimson mane and flaming eyes the only thing that could be seen in it.\n\nWith a face the pale color of moonlight, Kori carefully re-wrapped the mirror. \"That's what the dragon can do to us, Karasu. He was apparently quite powerful as a living being and not a soul fragment trapped between the worlds of life and death. We are lucky that Akaisu is the grandson of that human priestess who had become a Ryugami like her ancestor and then chose to gain a kitsune form like her husband.\"\n\nAkaisu accepted the mirror after Kori handed it back to him, placing it in a pouch hanging from his obi. Frowning, he went to the bridge, recalling the water from where it had hidden in the earth below the rocks and opening the gateway again to the human realm. After all was correct, he crossed the bridge and went through the mist, followed by the Tengu. Thoughtfully they made their way to the shrine, disguising themselves as ordinary salarimen before even drawing near the Torri and passing beneath, their black suits as nondescript as any other middle class men."
            },
            {
                "title": "Memory Retained",
                "text": "Darkness bound her tightly, and she kicked and struggled against the fog that filled the forest of her mind. Two forces railed against each other as each simultaneously fought to wrap around her, voices shouting back and forth about ancient and recent laws and treaties echoing even over the roar of the falls at the source of her inner river. BlowingWind stabbed at the spectral invaders with her obsidian tipped spear, willing them to depart from her mind.\n\nThe redder of the two mists departed with a scream of pain, but not before pulling something with it from her inner landscape and her memories. She knelt on the fragrant loam of the pines and cedars, gasping after the exertion, relieved at having finally won the long fight trapping her within herself. As she shut her eyes, the second mist wrapped around her tenderly, running smoky caresses over her flushed and broken spiritual skin. It called to her, no words this time, only insistent tugs on the region of her heart. Following the tugs, she clawed her way back to the waking world.\n\nBirdsong woke her from sleep, and two blue eyes opened to take in the world around her. Sitting up, a thick blanket puddled in her lap and on the equally thick futon in addition to the thinner one that had originally been placed with her. The plain sliding screens forming the walls of the room were barely recognized, although she knew this had been the room she had stayed in at the lower Sengen Shrine. A low buzz filled her head as what was within her jostled into new positions with the absence of what had been stolen.\n\nBlowingWind stood, brushing her hair back behind her ears as it curled forward to cup her jaw and reach for her pointed chin. Her brow furrowed, and her mouth drew downward. A hand went to her temple and her eyes squeezed shut for a moment as she regained her balance, the world swaying gently as if a breeze blew across the surface of a small pond.\n\n\"How did I get here? I thought I was in the forest?\"\n\nOnce she regained what she could of her equilibrium, she left her room to wander the hall on her way outside. She whispered to her other selves in her mind, \"Something is missing. Who is missing?\"\n\nHer head pounded like a drum as a battle of magic continued to ensue, and she touched her temple again as kind brown eyes flashed in her mind. The gleam of polished coal in the bright sun and a dancing wave of ruby flames followed the puzzling vision. As quickly as the vision came, it was gone. The screens of the hallway fell behind, and she stepped out into the courtyard beneath the kiss of the sun.\n\nA small sea of stone lapped between vermilion lacquered wooden buildings centuries old, or so the scene seemed to her. The stone lamps known as Toro were seen as well, solemnly keeping watch over the shrine and its occupants, which along with the Temizuya could be found in various places on the compound. Fujisan towered majestically over the forest around the shrine, smiling down upon all of the country that sat about her feet.\n\nThe young woman pooled her body on an out-of-the-way section of the porch, staring out over the courtyard as she tried to piece together what had happened.\n\nShe remembered running through the forest in the dark, and then the cave she had camped at, the images leaping to her mind after a little prying. After that was a blur, a man helping her to ascend the ancient volcano, a marriage ceremony of sorts, then time at the base of Fujisan again, all with a distinct air of unreality. A few words, not even loud enough to be a whisper, slipped out.\n\n\"Was it just a dream?\"\n\nThe disappointment in her voice surprised her as she looked for the man in her dream. Obsidian was gone, and he had looked so much like her dead fianc\u00e9 that it could easily have been a dream. In some ways, it was a relief to think it was a dream, but if it was then her search for Obsidian's soul was still a long way from finished.\n\nBlowingWind sighed loudly, shattering the stillness for a moment, surprising herself.\n\nA young man had been meditating beside one of the Toro, and he stirred from his thoughts at the sound of her voice. When she locked eyes with him gold eyes blinked back at her, and she could see and feel the young man looking at her very soul. After a moment, he smiled and got up, moving toward her with an inhuman grace. Curious and still exhausted from her short walk, she stayed seated.\n\n\"I see that you are awake. You've put the shrine in an interesting state of affairs, and many here were worried about you while you were gone.\" The young man sat next to her, and continued. \"Forgive me, I have been rude. I am Sagukari Akaisu.\"\n\n\"MountainChild BlowingWind.\"\n\nThe young man smiled and took her hand, a very forward move by both his society's standards and BlowingWind's usual preferences. However, she was tired, and felt that surely in a shrine she should be safe.\n\nA stern half-remembered voice broke into the conversation. \"Here you are! I had left to get some fresh water and a clean cloth, and you weren't in bed. I'm glad to see that you are awake Kaze-chan.\"\n\nThe deeper voice had a possessive tone to it, and the previously unnoticed figure kneeled down where she could see his face. It was familiar, and flashes of starlight and rain-coated spider webs danced before her eyes as they struggled to retain focus on the man she had seen in her dreams. The world spun and she felt herself falling forward, but was caught gently against a white-shirted shoulder. Arms gathered her up and held her close as her vision returned to normal. She could feel that his features were marred, and felt his worry, without knowing how.\n\nThe voice rumbled its displeasure through her body. \"You've overtaxed yourself again. Back to bed with you, you need to rest if you want to go home under your own power Little One.\"\n\nShe could feel herself nodding even though she struggled against it. Part of her trusted him without question, and part of her had the overwhelming urge to bash his head with the nearest handy blunt object for holding and addressing her in such a familiar way.\n\nThe other man cleared his throat delicately, and she weakly turned her head to face him.\n\n\"I take it that you know this man.\"\n\nShe nodded, smiling a little as she answered. \"Ryu.\"\n\nHer eyes slid shut, but not before she saw a spectral tail behind Akaisu. Ryu's voice was tense as he spoke to Akaisu, bowing an awkward farewell over the limp woman in his arms.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but she is in no fit state to visit. She actually shouldn't have even gotten out of bed, but she really doesn't like to take things lying down.\"\n\nAkaisu nodded his head and bowed, having lost yet another chance to accomplish his mission. His father and grandfather had instilled in him a firm concept of honor though, and in a way this was like the games of Go he once played with his father. The pieces needed to be set correctly, and now was not the time.\n\nRyu stood up, and carried her back to her room. When he had her propped up on her futon, and she had gotten the first whiff of the miso soup that he had also brought for her along with the cooling water and clean cloth, she opened her eyes and spoke softly.\n\n\"Was that a Kitsune?\"\n\nRyu nodded, then brought a spoonful of the broth to her lips. BlowingWind took it as he expounded.\n\n\"I don't know how much of what you remember. Your breath smelled of a memory-hiding spell. That particular one was with the Tengu that had given you whatever you had been eating. I tried counteracting it with a spell of my own hoping the energies would clash and neutralize\u2026\" He internally cringed at yet another half-truth.\n\nBlowingWind closed her eyes, then opened them again, taking a deep breath. \"It seems my heart got me in trouble again then. I think I remember most everything, but it's all disordered and hazy, like a dream.\"\n\n\"You didn't eat much of it then. The spell won't be very strong.\"\n\nRyu brought another spoonful to her lips, and again she ate it. Several spoonfuls met the same end and she quirked an eyebrow at the dragon, which chuckled and obliged her with his answer and a wink.\n\n\"Old counter-spell for memory loss, the benefits of soy, and a little healing and strengthening magic that I picked up from my Sensei as a child. Maybe a little love spell thrown in to improve my chances with you.\"\n\nThe latest mouthful squirted onto his face, which merely dripped into his lap as he restrained the urge to wipe it away.\n\n\"The last was a joke BlowingWind.\"\n\nEven though she was tired, she reached up and grabbed near his nose even though she couldn't see any hairs. Being a dragon meant that there were probably some whiskers hiding somewhere in that vicinity hidden by illusion. A quick tug confirmed her half-formed suspicion, and his hand, spoon and all, flew to shield his nose from her terrible wrath.\n\n\"Ow. Ok, I get it, not funny.\"\n\n\"Not in the slightest you... scaly coyote.\"\n\n\"I see you are getting stronger already. How comforting. What a great healer I am, although my patient could give me a nicer thank you after watching over her for yet another week.\"\n\nRyu handed her the bowl as he tried to pout about his chastisement. BlowingWind finished it very quickly by drinking directly out of the bowl while he winced about her lack of finesse.\n\n\"At least you have a good appetite.\"\n\n\"Your healing didn't really include anything I'm going to have to find something to bludgeon you with to restore my sense of honor, did it? Have I really been out that long?\"\n\nRyu took the bowl carefully, his muscles coiled to leap for safety if she made another aggressive move.\n\n\"No, there are females here whereas there were none at my little retreat. Yes, you were really sleeping for another week. I came close to losing you to the dream world a couple times, but it seems a certain young lady had left instructions to NOT be taken to the hospital if she got hurt or sick.\"\n\nHe glared as one eyebrow twitched, crossing his arms with the bowl still in hand. His display would have been more terrifying if his eyes weren't heavy with concern. BlowingWind looked down to her lap.\n\n\"I see. I've been a burden to you. I'm sorry, and thank you.\"\n\nRyu huffed, then felt her forehead. \"You'd worry me more if you weren't being at least a little trying. Besides, it's rather nice to have someone call me on the things I do. I know very well I can be overbearing and a little too hot to handle.\"\n\nBlowingWind smiled, her eyes taking on a strange glint. Ryu leaned a little closer to get a better view.\n\n\"BlowingWind? Are you laughing at me?\"\n\nDespite having pressed her lips into a firm line, the laughs escaped out of her nose. Giving up, she let them escape in a more comfortable manner. \"You're so full of yourself Ryu!\"\n\nHe blinked and felt her forehead again, his lips turning down even further as his brow began to show slight furrows. \"I should hope so. If I wasn't full of me I'd be someone else\u2026\"\n\nBlowingWind's laughter returned at the confused Kami, but it was brought up short by his sighed comment. \"And to think I thought you'd soon be ready for me to take you shopping for your coffee and chocolate that I had promised you. I guess since you are obviously still a bit delirious you'll just have to stay in bed for another week. I had even used the phone that they have to get my old apartment set up for the brief time you'll be in Tokyo.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed, looking down into her lap. With the quiet escape of her breath the band around Ryu's heart tightened another notch. When she looked back up, her eyes carried the same tsunami of sadness that he had first seen in them only a few weeks ago.\n\n\"What makes you think I have no place to stay? There is a family that I have been staying with, and I must have them very worried. I have to let them know that I am intact. Ji-san must feel terrible if the news that I went missing has reached him, which I'm sure he has already received.\"\n\n\"You have a family here? I thought you had said you had left your mother back in America? And speaking of your mother, when are you going to call her? I'm sure she has been waiting for you to check in with her.\"\n\nBlowingWind winced as his words fell out of his mouth, eating away at the heart she tried to keep hidden as if those simple hurt words of his had been drops of acid rain. Ryu hadn't meant it to sound as desperate and broken as it had come out. He pulled back abruptly, crossing his arms and looking casually away, a veil covering his eyes as he tried to hide his feelings.\n\nBlowingWind sighed. \"I can't call my mother. I ran away without telling her where I was going. I am ashamed of what I did, but I can't do anything to change it. She wouldn't understand.\" BlowingWind sobbed before she could stop herself, but bit back the rest that wanted to come. After a moment, she continued in a calmer voice. \"I met a man on the flight here, and he insisted I meet his wife and stay with them until I got my feet under me. He is no threat to you, if that's your worry.\"\n\nRyu's eyes widened, and he swallowed his feelings. They audibly clicked as they slid down his throat. \"I am sure she would forgive you. You were grief-stricken, and people do strange things in that state. She may understand more than you would think. As for this man you met, neither he nor any other human threatens me. I am merely trying to fulfill my duty to you as guardian. I already know that you have no intentions of being available to any male.\"\n\n\"And thank you for respecting that Ryu.\" BlowingWind murmured as she leaned forward and quickly pecked his cheek.\n\nHis eyes now were about as wide as dinner plates in her opinion as he blushed and his hand flew to where her lips had brushed him. Realizing perhaps a little too late what she had done and the possible thoughts she may have given him, she blushed and hunched her shoulders, then her eyes bored into him when she snapped.\n\n\"Now, when can I go home to collect my things and say my good-byes? More importantly, when do we go shopping? Don't let that get to your head either!\"\n\nRyu recovered quickly and smirked. \"I wouldn't dream of it my dear. I wouldn't dream of it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "A Promise Kept",
                "text": "A black beast filled the house with its roars while it lurked in its place, disturbing the baby that was so quietly sleeping in an upstairs room. Said infant soon joined the beast's roars with her own squalling. While a young and tired hand rubbed the child's back, an older hand lifted the mouth of the beast downstairs. A threadbare voice sounded into the ensuing silence.\n\n\"Moshi-moshi. Rejidensu no Takamura.\"\n\n\"Konnichiwa Takamura-jisan. It's BlowingWind.\"\n\n\"Kaze-chan, you're alright. What a relief my child, I'd heard that you had gone out on your quest and had not been seen by anyone and presumed lost in the forest. Then last week I got a call saying that you had been found and brought in by a young man.\"\n\nAt the lower Sengen Shrine at the base of Mount Fuji, BlowingWind smiled as she sat on a chair in one of the Shrine offices. The Miko that normally attended to Shrine finances in this Spartan room had stepped out momentarily to allow for the young woman to use the phone privately. Outside in the hall, Ryu waited rather impatiently, glancing from time to time at the closed door.\n\n\"I'm fine Ji-san. I was well taken care of. I obtained a guide and guardian, and despite being a little tired am truly no worse off than I was before.\"\n\n\"You were successful then, I am glad.\"\n\n\"No, not completely successful, but not unsuccessful either. I did not quite achieve my original intent.\"\n\n\"It sometimes happens like that. Will you be coming back soon? You'll need to find an apartment and pack your things if you want time to get used to the area.\"\n\n\"Hai, Ji-san. Very soon.\"\n\n\"I'll let Haruko know. It will put her at ease.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Domo arigato gosaimasu.\"\n\nBlowingWind gently placed the phone back in its cradle, and miles upon miles away so too did Takamura-san. Smiling gently to herself, she reflected upon how quickly he had taken her in, showing her great compassion in a foreign country. The reverie did not last long though as she remembered what had driven her from her old home to new shores. Chewing on her lip, she reached for the phone again, and dialed a number that came easily to her fingers.\n\nAcross the Pacific Ocean, at the base of Mount Shasta in the small town of McCloud, a bell rang out rapidly, nearly resembling the purr of a cat. Beside a tousled bed on a night-stand curled a white creature, summoning to wakefulness the red head bearing the white streaks and frosting of snow. Glacier blue eyes opened and glared at the nearly cat-like phone, and the red numbers of the digital clock beside it declaring it to be 1:00 AM. A slender, pale, callused hand picked up the receiver and brought it to her ear.\n\n\"Bob, I don' care 'ow drunk ya are, call a cab if the barkeep took your keys again. There really is one if ya look in the book or ask about. It's one in the morn' and I've got to get up at five to be at the site on time.\"\n\nBlowingWind's hand began shaking as she heard her mother's voice, her years spent in America apparent as the once thick Irish accent she had known as a small child had smoothed into a more American and much easier to understand form. She had forgotten about the time difference as well, that Japan was seven whole hours ahead of California. A small sob escaped her throat.\n\n\"Mom.\"\n\n\"Leanbh? BlowingWind, is that you baby girl?\"\n\n\"I-\"\n\nMore sobs threatened to erupt, and BlowingWind slammed the phone back down as the incredible shame of having run away boiled over. Covering her mouth with her hands in an attempt to stifle the sounds and keep from alerting her guardian, she closed her eyes as the tears started washing her face.\n\nIn the historic Victorian styled house at the foot of a distant sacred mountain in the midst of a forest of mystery, an aging mother was left to stare at the phone in her hand. With a sigh, Marie MountainChild hung it back up and laid down to cry tears of her own, remembering her late husband and worrying about the daughter that had taken after him in more ways than she had wished for. The mother flopped back down in her bed and stared at the ceiling.\n\n\"I'll call the psychologist tomorrow after work. I think I was having another of those hallucinations. They've been coming so frequently these past several months.\"\n\nOutside of the finance office, Ryu heard BlowingWind's sobs, and slid the door open quietly. Padding across the floor in his tabi socks, he carefully observed her hunched and shuddering form as the woman tried to regain her control. After what seemed like an eternity for him, he crouched down beside her chair and enveloped her.\n\n\"It will be alright. What happened?\"\n\nBlowingWind wiped away the tears with the back of her hand, glaring into his eyes before looking away.\n\n\"It's nothing. Everything is fine.\"\n\nShe forced herself up while scrubbing at her eyes, then stalked toward the door with the force of a springing tiger. Ryu could only calmly stand and follow after her, gently rolling along the floor in measured strides.\n\n\"If it will make you feel better my dear, we can catch a bus back today.\"\n\nThe woman gave no sign that she had heard, only continued down the aromatic halls and to her room, looking neither right nor left. The only evidence that she was aware of the world of man was given when she would bow a greeting to someone that she would pass by, her distance from everything an icy chill that froze the air about her. Finally, after thousands of the echoes of their feet falling upon the hard floor, BlowingWind slid open the shoji that led into her chamber.\n\nSmall hands shoved any stray articles into her bag, and soon it was nearly bursting with the things that she had brought with her. Deftly, she tied her small drum to the outside of the worn red backpack, as the sheer amount of things within it posed a threat to the tanned and stretched leather. The flute that she was clumsily learning to play found a safe haven within.\n\n\"As soon as I tie this shut Ryu, let's get to the bus stop.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Wind-chan. May I help you?\"\n\n\"NO.\"\n\nRyu heaved a sigh and instead folded up her futon, putting the mattress away in the closet where it had been when he had brought her here. After stowing it on one of the shelves and turning around, BlowingWind was still struggling with the ties.\n\n\"Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nBlowingWind continued struggling with the final tie on her pack, her tongue tucked into the corner of her mouth, the tip protruding slightly, like a crocus peeping through the snow. Ryu kneeled in seiza by the door, his legs folded carefully beneath him as he watched the woman. After a moment, a sharp cry of victory sliced the air and his eardrums.\n\n\"HA! Take that, you stubborn bag! I win.\"\n\nShe thrust her fists onto her hips and gloated down upon the bag. Ryu coughed, choking on his laughter as her eyes snapped to pin him with their fierce gaze. Without even thinking of it, she scooped it up and let it dangle from one shoulder.\n\n\"What? It's a stubborn bag.\"\n\n\"Nothing\u2026\" Ryu managed to control himself for two seconds, then burst into a fit of laughter.\n\nBlowingWind crossed her arms, coming to stand in front of him and glaring down even harder. \"Are you laughing at me?\"\n\n\"You were just so\u2026 cute.\"\n\n\"Bad dragon. I am not cute, nor have I ever been cute, and I will never be cute Ryu.\"\n\nShe smacked the top of his head with one knuckle, which produced a satisfying hollow thunk. Ryu squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the crown of his head.\n\n\"Owwwww. It's tender there\u2026 Will you kiss it better?\"\n\nShe growled, then stalked out the door as she looked over her shoulder.\n\n\"Ryu, the only thing saving you from a good clout with this bag is the fact that you had promised me chocolate and coffee, and I'm going to add onto that now. You're going to order me about 12 cases of something citrusy and packed with caffeine, since my favorite drink has to be imported.\"\n\nRyu rose from his seat, grinning and still rubbing the sore spot on his head, and padded after her cheerfully.\n\n\"It seems that I've found another button of yours then. Fascinating.\"\n\nAfter navigating the quiet halls once more, they found their way to the porch, and put on their shoes once off of the platform and upon the flagstones. Ryu gestured gently in the direction of the priest who was his friend. A gentle breeze ruffled their hair as they made their way over to where the man was speaking quietly with the disguised Kitsune from before. Standing a distance away, the pair waited for the speaking men to take notice of them.\n\nAfter a moment, the old Priest looked about, feeling the presence of others.\n\n\"Ah, ohayo gozaimasu Take-san, MountainChild-san. You are leaving?\"\n\nBlowingWind resolutely nodded, smiling at the Kannushi.\n\n\"Yes sir. I think it is time for me to go back. Thank you so much for your hospitality.\"\n\n\"Don't you think you should rest a little longer child, you are still rather pale.\"\n\n\"No, thank you. We have some things to do. Sayonara!\"\n\nBlowingWind bowed, and then began walking out of the shrine yard, toward the towering Torii. Ryu bowed as well, eyeing the Kitsune whose gaze was following his ward, and then followed her. The American woman kept up a sprightly step as she passed beneath the vermilion gateway, feeling stronger with each breath of air and each movement. Soon, she was at the bus stop with her escort, and humming to herself as she thought of the wonderful time that she was going to have shopping.\n\n\"Ne, Wind-chan. Should I be afraid for my wallet?\"\n\n\"Very. I haven't been shopping for some time.\"\n\nRyu sighed and patted his pocket where his wallet was, glad that his bank account was still full of unspent earnings, and that Ku had kept his affairs up to date.\n\n\"I guess we'll want to be renting a room where we can leave your pack then. Might as well make a day of your shopping after the horrid time you must have had. That way you can enjoy your treasures after what I know is going to be a long day.\"\n\nThe bus rolled up to the stop, and BlowingWind grinned up to the cerulean bowl of the sky, dreaming of chocolate, coffee, and her favorite soda.\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nThe door opened, letting off a short stream of people that had ridden to visit the shrine. After the last one had gotten off, BlowingWind drifted on and deposited her yen into the box, followed by a smirking Ryu. After he deposited his own fare into the box, he sat down next to the American, who had found herself a seat in the middle and was leaning against the window with her eyes closed.\n\nHe waited for some reaction, some sign that she had heard only one room and not two, but she stayed lost in her dreams. The streets rolled by, the wheels rotating round and round, humming on the concrete as the engine purred its tune. The angelic face that he studied was his only comfort as the fumes from the vinyl seats and the exhaust of the vehicles that went by caused his stomach to churn into knots.\n\nHis surroundings blurred and swam, leaving only her face, sleeping once more. His mind drifted back over the years, to the time that he had first seen a motorized vehicle of any kind. Those tracks had gone through the landscape so long ago, and as he stood surveying the gleaming steel cutting by, the thunder approached. At first, he had thought that perhaps some other dragon was tearing through the landscape along the strange new road to put a final bit of fear into the hearts of the humans who were abandoning the old ways so quickly. Then he had seen the beast responsible, and as the wind from the metal creature blew back his kimono while standing unseen by the eyes of man, the stench of the billowing black smoke drove him to his knees. Perhaps if he had been prepared then he would have held his feet, but the sheer smell was enough to sicken him.\n\nMuch later, he had witnessed his first automobile when he had gone into the capital to investigate for himself the changes that the Emperor was implementing, including the abolition of the Samurai. He had preferred the coal-burning train to the putrid fumes of petroleum, though neither had made him feel particularly well.\n\nWhile replaying old events in his mind as he waited for the bus to arrive where he wanted to be, he glimpsed a familiar face walking through the streets of Edo. The hair was a blazing scarlet swirled into a bun that struggled to break free, but the face was the same, the icy eyes looking over the streets as the woman walked by in her strange foreign garb. She walked beside someone that he took to be a scholar, probably one of the \"scientists\" he had heard bits and pieces about.\n\nThe reverie faded, and he was once more aware of what was around him, and gazing into now open eyes that were studying him carefully.\n\n\"You look like you've seen a ghost Ryu.\"\n\n\"I-No. I just had an interesting recollection. Did you have an ancestor that traveled?\"\n\nHe reached up and pulled the signal cord, letting the driver know that he wanted off.\n\n\"Ryu, I have lots of ancestors\u2026 You expect me to know how many of them traveled?\"\n\nThe bus stopped, and he led the way off of the bus, BlowingWind following and keeping pace as well as she could through the bodies that had crammed themselves in during the different stops.\n\n\"I see. Well, I suppose it is hard to keep track of one's family, especially if it is large.\" His eyes still darted about, as if he were looking for something to answer his question or to distract his mind, perhaps both at the same time. \"Stay close, I don't want to lose you in this crowd.\"\n\nWithout any more ado, he struck off with the woman tagging at his heels."
            },
            {
                "title": "Tokyo Delivery",
                "text": "Akaisu shadowed his target through the streets and stores, never far away, and always blending in with the others filing past. The jostling had become normal to him, though it had taken many years after leaving his quiet childhood home to get used to the presence of so many humans all around him. Few noticed what he was, taken in by surface appearance.\n\nThe woman smiled distantly as they explored the shops, picking out candies at one place, coffee beans and other supplies at an aromatic shop that catered to other coffee lovers, and even a few clothes at one place under the urging of her dragon. It had been amusing watching him trying to talk her into a crimson dress with a flared skirt. Ultimately, he had only been able to talk her into a few demure blouses and sensible slacks, much to the dragon's dismay, as well as that of the lurking Kitsune.\n\nAs he followed them through the street after they had disembarked the last train of their route, he chuckled to himself about BlowingWind's reaction in the coffee shop. The sudden drop in irritation had been visible as soon as she had walked in the doors as her shoulders dropped and her face smoothed. The slow smile that had curled her lips on the first inhale had started Ryu twitching, to Akaisu's great annoyance.\n\n\"Stupid dragon.\"\n\nAkaisu's reaction had been to draw the woman's attention to some of the beans in the farthest corner of the shop, which also were the most expensive, to his great satisfaction. The shop keeper had been very happy to help her in obtaining her desire. He grinned as he followed the pair around a corner, nearly missing the fact that they had turned while caught in his reverie.\n\nThinking about the chocolate shop hadn't helped much either. BlowingWind's eyes had gone large and round, sparkling like the glass eyes of an antique doll. That had only made Ryu look like he was trying not to melt at the woman's feet.\n\n\"How she can put up with that without killing him I have no idea\u2026\"\n\nAkaisu watched as the pair went through the doors and into the building, waiting a few moments before entering himself and slipping in quietly, willing himself to be unseen by any in the area. In a way, he was glad to use his skills again. The lobby was soothingly neutral, carefully balanced to achieve a pleasing sense of balance between fire and water, while green carpeting called to mind a forest. He continued to follow, taking the sunlit stairs instead of the elevator, and relying on his intuition and sense of smell to alert him to the floor and direction that he needed to travel.\n\n\"Trust a dragon to find a posh place to live, even when he is lying low\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The apartment that Ryu kept was a modern affair, an impeccably orderly section in a complex multi-storied building like the many others that stretched for the sky in white terraces. Other angular modern buildings squatted nearby in carefully arranged rows, each with their own gardens hanging from eaves and bubbling up balcony walls to brighten the day while trees lurked in planters. The district was always a colorful place to visit, whether staying or merely passing through.\n\nA sense of pride filled him as he escorted his young woman to one of his other lairs, his need to show off exactly how well he could provide for his Chosen One temporarily appeased. Ryu closed his eyes for a moment as he carried her burden, inhaling the rich scents of their purchases as they mingled with the cinnamon curls and earthy woodland that still seeped from BlowingWind's pores where she walked at his side. His hair moved more vigorously with every step that he took as he noticed her eye drift over to him and dart away.\n\nBlowingWind looked around the halls as they walked, taking in the soft pastels against the cheery white walls, broken here and there by pictures and plants. By how well kept the apartment building was, it was obvious that the rent was expensive. Her eye casually swept the area, falling on him for a moment before she darted her eyes forward. He had seen though, and his already noticeable swagger grew yet more easily seen as a smirk played across his face. She narrowed her eyes and pretended to not notice, but another peek revealed that it had only grown bigger, and his eyes sparkled as they taunted her with her own secret.\n\nHer nostrils flared slightly as they caught the scent of rich earth that always seemed to come from him. As soothing as it was, it irritated her as well, and the hallway suddenly grew warmer to her as her cheeks tingled.\n\nThe day had been long, and they had done much walking together, BlowingWind having had to break down and hold onto Ryu's hand to keep from losing him in the crowded streets. It hadn't been a bad sensation overall, but if they had not been so busy it surely would have brought back many memories that she didn't want to have today.\n\nRyu, for his part, had enjoyed it and made that fact completely obvious. The softness of her warm hand had soothed him, proof that she was alive and well. He had always enjoyed the hustle and bustle of city life, even if he needed to retreat to the quiet of the forests or to lurk in shrines from time to time. When they had stopped in at a store that specialized in nothing but chocolates, the way her face lit up had made it worth the large amount of money that had been charged to his credit card. Secretly, he thanked Ku and his contacts for having kept all of his affairs in order and up to date the five years that he had been gone, even something as easy to overlook as credit cards and bank accounts. It was good to have friends that could be so trusted.\n\nNow if only they hadn't been followed, perhaps he would have been able to enjoy things a little bit more. Two scents had plagued him as they had gone about their day, one smelling infuriatingly close to his own. The other had been the scent of that same infuriating Kitsune that had both tricked BlowingWind off of Mount Fuji and fooled her into thinking that he had been the lake spirit that she sometimes mumbled about in her dreams.\n\nA slender hand worked the card key and door handle, and the owner pushed the door open for the package-laden dragon that had been with her. Unnoticed by them, a small silver streak slipped into the room and hid itself under the television wardrobe.\n\nThe walls of the room were a creamy tan, and green curtains were drawn back to reveal the city below them. The furniture was wood, stained to look dark and rich, and despite the air having been laden with air freshener it had the stale taste of a room that had seen the comings and goings of hired cleaning staff. Ryu huffed in disgust, making a mental note to open the window to let out the stench of chemicals and to let in the comparatively better air. The grey carpet was clean though, steely and firmly supportive. A painting of a country river, with a young girl and a white dragon swimming together, hung over the desk where it could be glimpsed in the office from the living room.\n\nThe pair kicked off their shoes just inside the door, which BlowingWind lined up beside it before following the dragon to wherever he was walking to. As he nudged the door open with a toe, the sliding door revealed a quiet room, reminiscent of a forest in a way, with the wooden furniture and earthy walls. While he put the many shopping bags down in the closet of the bedroom, BlowingWind flopped onto the bed, glad of a western styled mattress and fluffy pillows. When he had deposited her hoarded treasures safely and turned around, he laughed at the image that she made as she sprawled over the cerulean blanket.\n\n\"Did I wear you out my dear?\"\n\nCheeks still flushed, she looked up at him and glared quietly before finding the remote on the bedstand and flipping on the small TV that was in a distant corner. In truth, it was surprising that the batteries were still good. He sighed and sat down next to her.\n\n\"I guess I did something wrong today\u2026 I tried to be good, sort of. Bath?\"\n\n\"Unh.\"\n\n\"Wind? What's wrong?\"\n\nHe began to massage her shoulders, hoping that it would help, and discovered that her shoulders had become twin stone carvings. She sighed as he quietly worked at her back, though at first the interesting red shade of her cheeks darkened. Several minutes passed in silence as he worked the muscles loose, feeding on her silent thanks. He kept going, waiting for her to be ready to come out from behind her barrier.\n\n\"Ryu?\"\n\n\"Hm?\"\n\n\"I don't feel\u2026 right\u2026\"\n\nHis hands moved to her arms, working at those as he waited.\n\n\"Something is missing, like I forgot something, and I feel\u2026 dirty\u2026\"\n\nThe silence stretched again, and she began to melt. After a little, he began humming a soft tune to fill the silence. When he had worked his way down her entire body, surprised that she had allowed him to finish, he spoke.\n\n\"A bath would prove useful to you. It will help remove the poisons from your body.\"\n\n\"Not that kind of dirty.\"\n\n\"What kind then? I'm afraid that I don't understand.\"\n\nShe rolled over and looked up at him as he looked down.\n\n\"Like I've done something wrong, or betrayed someone. Something was close to me today, I could feel it reaching, but I don't know what.\"\n\nRyu frowned.\n\n\"I wasn't going to tell you this, but we were followed today.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nShe growled in frustration.\n\n\"We haven't done anything wrong. All I want to do is to get finished here, and then move for my schooling. That's all. Why follow when that's all I'm doing? Ob-he- is already gone. I won't find him.\"\n\n\"We'll just have to wait and see. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Go have a nice soak, and I'll order us something to eat.\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded, then got up off the bed with a groan, nearly dragging herself to the bathroom. The door closed behind her, and a few minutes later he could hear the rustle of clothes being removed and the soft roar of water spilling into the tub. One sniff confirmed that it was good hot water, as the air around him took on a wetter smell. Quietly, he rose to open the window, letting in a playful breeze. For a moment he admired the sun as she sank closer to the horizon. By the time his charge was done with her bath, the sunset would be painting the sky. Turning away, he shut off the small TV and went back out to the living room.\n\nSearching through the drawer near the phone back out in the living room, he found the phone book and paged through the directory in the restaurant section. Take out sushi tempted him, but with how BlowingWind had been acting he didn't think it would be wise to order his favorites. At last, he settled on the thought of pizza and dialed the number. A few moments later, he had placed an order for a large pizza with seaweed, olives, pineapple, tomato, green onion, and his favorite, bacon.\n\n\"Surely that should be acceptable\u2026\"\n\nHe sighed, and hung up the phone, pulling out of his wallet enough cash to cover the tab and a tip for the delivery person. Carefully he set it down, looking around the room out of the corners of his eyes, watching for whatever was watching him, and knowing that something was lurking in the hallway as well. He pretended to be unaware of his circumstance, and sat down on the couch, turning on the TV that he had in there and changing the channel from some inane commercial onto a documentary of some happening in the feudal period.\n\n\"Close\u2026 but that's not how I remember it. Then again, whatever person is recording history has their own biases.\"\n\nA scuffle under the TV cabinet alerted Ryu where the watcher in the room was lurking.\n\n\"Hmmm\u2026. I didn't think that this place had mice. I suppose it's gone downhill then.\"\n\nIn a flash, he had bared his teeth as his feral hunting instincts took over, and sunk down on the floor to reach under the cabinet. He grabbed the fuzzy creature that he could feel and hauled it out, his eyes widening at the hissing and clawing cat-sized fur-ball he had caught. Sharp fangs sank into his arm, the little creature wrenching her head around as she tried to make the injury worse. A small, high-pitched voice issued from around the mouthful.\n\n\"Put me down!\"\n\nRyu narrowed his eyes and inspected his \"guest\" more fully as she wore herself out. When she hung limp in his hand, he could see that she was longer than she was wide, a curious mix of snake and wolf from what he could see.\n\n\"Just what do you think you are doing here Snapdragon?\"\n\n\"I came to help, Aniki. Snapdragon knows what was taken, I do!\"\n\nRyu growled and set the tiny dragon on the bed, then bent down to look into her cerulean eyes.\n\n\"You should be at home, a little mountain dragon like you. Mother will have a fit when she discovers that you are gone.\"\n\n\"Unh-unh, I have permission, because my big brother would get lonely. Omoto-sama said that I could go with you! So when you left your house I followed you, it wasn't easy either. The big metal things are smelly.\"\n\n\"Snap, you're not even five springs yet. You shouldn't be here. You could get hurt\u2026\"\n\n\"But the Kitsune took the obsidian piece from her bag. I saw it get unwrapped.\"\n\nRyu chewed his lip nervously, and looked at the door to the bathroom. Remembering the strange power it had seemed to hold over her when he had begun spying on her those long weeks ago, part of him was happy that the bothersome relic was now removed from her influence. However, another part of him felt a deep foreboding that reached icy fingers into his very bones. He was contemplating what to do, when a loud knock broke his train of thought and sent his heart into his throat.\n\nThe smell of Kitsune was strong, but so too was the smell of the pizza he had ordered. Gesturing, he silently indicated to his little sister to conceal herself. Grabbing the money from beside the phone, he shouted. \"I'll be right there.\"\n\nOpening the door carefully, Ryu braced himself to meet their other stalker face to face. All that greeted his grim face was a rather nervous appearing college student, whose wide brown eyes clearly spoke of both inexperience and a touch of fear. His clothing was nondescript, the most striking thing about it being the red jacket that that bore the words \"Speedy Delivery Pizza.\" Like most of the clothing, the boy's brown hair hung limply.\n\n\"Your pizza sir\u2026\"\n\nRyu silently gave the boy the money and took the delivery, surreptitiously looking up and down the hall. Although he could still smell the fox, he saw nothing out of the ordinary, and the boy smelled completely human.\n\n\"Arigato.\"\n\nThe boy bowed nervously, feeling Ryu's protectiveness about something. Although the man looked so human to him, there was something about the eyes that weren't quite right. As if they were far older, and the pupils looked vaguely cat-like, not perfectly round, but only enough where it could be thought a trick of the light.\n\nRyu watched the delivery boy walk away, then closed the door thoughtfully. As he came in and shut the door, Snapdragon piped from behind the bags on the top shelf of the closet.\n\n\"What's that? It smells tasty!\"\n\n\"Her dinner.\"\n\n\"You like her. Why? Dad says that humans smell bad and make messes everywhere they go\u2026 Like puppies, but worse.\"\n\n\"So do we, father just doesn't like to admit it because he is who he is.\"\n\nRyu set the box on the table and set out the paper plates and napkins that had come with it. Quietly, he relaxed, and then got out some of the drinks that they had purchased earlier, setting one of the carbonated sodas out for BlowingWind, and himself a bottled tea.\n\n\"Snapdragon, I suggest that you don't let her see you. She's still under a lot of stress, and she probably wouldn't appreciate it if she knew you had been watching her like a bug this whole time too. I'll set aside some food for you, if you go invisible you should be able to eat it off of my plate without any problems.\"\n\nThe little dragon complied with her big brother and scrambled up to his shoulder where she draped herself. Her little tummy growled as she nuzzled him.\n\n\"You're the best big brother, even if you pretend to be something you're not.\"\n\nRyu chuckled nervously and smiled in embarrassment, flushing a bit over his cheeks. He was about to try making an answer to it, when a yelp from the bathroom drew his attention. Forgetting that she still had issues about her privacy, Ryu burst through the door into the steam-misted bathroom. Blinded for a moment, he followed his nose to where the smell of fresh blood was coming from.\n\n\"Ryu! GET OUT!\"\n\nSomething hit him in the chest as the embarrassed and surprised woman ranted about decency, privacy, and something about knocking. He wasn't quite sure that he'd caught all of it, because after the first blow several other things came flying at him with the force of a raging storm. It was after the steam cleared out the still open bathroom door that he registered that he had been bludgeoned with the soap, shampoo, and conditioner bottles. BlowingWind still held her razor in her hand and was hidden behind the shower curtain and hadn't even made it into the now filled and capped tub. Spinning around to escape the divine retribution that she would otherwise no doubt wreak upon him later, he looked down.\n\n\"Why are you bleeding? You scared me. I thought that someone had gotten past me and hurt you.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 cut myself shaving my legs\u2026 I saw something, and heard him. He's calling for me. It distracted me.\"\n\nRyu fisted his hands, jealous again.\n\n\"I see. I'll leave you in peace to finish. Dinner is here.\"\n\n\"Ok. I'll be right there.\"\n\nOutside in the hall where he was listening, Akaisu imperceptibly waved his leaves, disguised as a potted plant. If all went well, then soon he would administer the first test. The mirror that he carried in the pouch at his waist throbbed hotly, indignant at the long separation from its owner, and the spirit inside had unwittingly played the woman right into his hands.\n\n\"Delivery indeed\u2026\" Akaisu smirked."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dream Questing",
                "text": "The last few days had passed uneventfully, and the wind was blowing softly through the cedar and pine trees towering outside the house. The sound of a reed flute carried on the autumn wind, and her mother's apple pies baking in the oven perfumed the air as the smell wafted up to her bedroom from the kitchen. As BlowingWind got out of bed and looked around her room, she wondered why she felt like she should have been someplace else.\n\nThe sound of the flute faded, and her mother's cheerful voice goaded the player into another tune. Going to her closet, she picked out a green skirt and matching blouse, and twirled before the mirror on the back of the door once dressed. The skirt flared outward, and so did her unrestrained auburn hair. She laughed at herself, and brushed it out. By the time she was done, she heard masculine laughter drifting up with the scent of apple pie.\n\nBlowingWind drifted out into the hall, and then down the stairs of the old building, relishing the smells and feels of home. As her hand slid down the dark banister, a twinge in her heart spoke as if she had been gone for months. It was cool and smooth under her hand, and she found herself caressing it lovingly before padding quietly to the kitchen, where she could hear her mother putting together the Thanksgiving Feast.\n\n\"Really Mrs. MountainChild, I need to rest a little.\"\n\n\"Obsidian, a strong boy like you needs little rest. I suppose a little pie after dinner'll do much to help ya.\"\n\nMarie was enjoying heckling Obsidian, who truly did sound a bit winded. BlowingWind was now watching with quiet amusement from the doorway. His rich black hair was plaited in one long braid down his back today, the blue silk dress shirt and cotton slacks somehow evoking the feeling of water. His face was darker than hers was, tinted evenly by the sun, and his dark chocolate eyes laughed. He grinned and got up from his seat at the kitchen table to shift things around to make room for the fresh pies to cool alongside of the cornbread that he had brought as a contribution. BlowingWind couldn't help but superimpose a nearly identical face over her boyfriend's. As she viewed the shorter and wilder hair in her mind's eye, she wondered whom it was that had slipped into her thoughts.\n\nObsidian glanced up after moving the various foods around, catching sight of her and smiling.\n\n\"We thought you were going to sleep all day. Were you up late studying again, during your Thanksgiving vacation?\"\n\nEven though the tone was light, something was different, something was very wrong. She sat down at the table, only to have her mother put a hot mug of coffee in front of her, with the usual sugar and dollop of cream. At the same time, everything was perfect, just as it was before.\n\n\"Before what?\" She pondered to herself as she gratefully sipped the steaming concoction. \"That's right, Obsidian is still dead. So this is a dream. Just another dream\u2026\"\n\nMarie continued on with the preparations, just as she had at the last Thanksgiving they had spent together.\n\n\"Yes and no Little Warrior.\"\n\nThe voice of the departed spirit took on a hard and determined edge, something she had only ever heard a few times during a very strange summer. BlowingWind looked up from the comfort of the dream coffee.\n\n\"What do you mean Obsidian?\"\n\n\"Someone is in here with us. It's not Coyote, but one of Fox's descendants can be just as bad sometimes.\"\n\n\"A fox? You mean a Kitsune? Here in my dreams? How?\"\n\n\"Whatever they're called here... or there, whatever\u2026 I don't have much influence anymore, and won't for a long time, so be careful.\"\n\nBlowingWind's eyes fell on a small fox figurine on the kitchen windowsill, with its ears trained attentively forward.\n\n\"Let me guess, yet another of the tests that have been plaguing me since I got to this country.\"\n\n\"You would be going through a similar testing process if I hadn't been such a klutz and left you and my lake alone\u2026 But I would be able to help you, and they would be different.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed and finished her coffee, then got up from the table, glancing again at the fox figurine.\n\n\"Stop beating yourself up about it Ob. You once told me a little about your theories of the afterlife for nature spirits. The problem is how do I get you a body again so that we can continue what was left off?\"\n\nObsidian got up from the table, grabbing the flute that he had put down, and followed her outside into the crisp air.\n\n\"That will come in time, but to do it, you need to move on. You have consciously accepted that man, Ryu I believe his name is, but you are still clinging to me. What is left of me that is still bonded to you is in the mirror. Before it was easy for you to use it, but the real function you still haven't learned yet. You have to find it for yourself, and can't rely on me. You're a Woman now.\"\n\nAs the pair walked through the woods, leaving the memory of family behind for the time being, BlowingWind was aware of flashes of red and black in the underbrush. The forest steadily took on a more menacing demeanor as they went deeper. At last, they came to a waterfall that occupied itself in recklessly plunging over a cliff to churn the frigid and deep pool far below in a granite bowl before carving a path out and down to the sea. Moss and ferns clung tenaciously to the gray and weathered rocks, lending an air of mystery and foreboding as forbidding pines glowered down upon the pair.\n\n\"Well now my Little One. This is as far as I can go with you, and perhaps the last of me you will see in years. I don't even know if you will remember this when you wake up.\"\n\n\"That's enough Lake Dragon. I took a risk in letting you talk to her this long. Step away from the girl and retreat back to where you sealed yourself, or I will drive you back for unnecessary interference in a test.\"\n\nObsidian rolled his eyes and shook his head, the image dissolving with a wistful smile on his face as he sang. The young man that BlowingWind had met at the shrine stepped out from behind a bush, holding a familiar bundle in one hand. The forest itself seemed to swath him in green pines to give him the kimono and hakama that his single scarlet fox's tail fell out of, a set of wakizashi and katana at his side while red and black ears twitched at the sides of his head.\n\nObsidian became a mist that wafted gently into the bundle, but not before giving a last caress and whispering a song to her soul.\n\n\"Look deep below, follow the flow. Find the still within in order to begin. Take the dread leap; allow my memory to sleep. Into the water, oh wind's daughter, take me now. Relearn how.\"\n\nWith that, she was falling, backwards now, watching the man affix a slip of paper to her mirror and mumbling some sort of chant in his own language. As the wind roared and the water reached upward to catch her, she strained to hear the words, in case it was some sort of spell. Experience with her friend Willow had opened her eyes to the possibility of spells used anywhere. The only word that she could catch was \"Amehana.\"\n\nThe water hit; or rather she hit the water, embraced by the frigid flow and sucked down into the inky darkness that stretched for her eagerly. Voices whispered to her as she sank, although she struggled ever upward. The light retreated farther and farther thanks to the swift current, and finally even the twilight above was gone, abandoning her to the void.\n\n\"Now what?\" She thought. \"Do I wake up? What was with the Amehana chant? How do I take him below if the Kitsune has him?\"\n\nShe gave up fighting the current, and let it sweep her still further downward. The voices stilled, save for what sounded like a man and women conferring. With no light to give her eyes sight, she closed her eyes and let her ears pick up what they could through the river's muffling liquid.\n\nSoon enough, the current stilled, leaving her with no indication as to which way was what. Although she strained to hear, the words were just out of reach.\n\nHer lungs burned, she needed air. Still, time drug on, and she was held immobile by the river's icy grip. At last, she could hold her breath no longer, and BlowingWind opened her mouth on instinct, drawing the liquid death deep into her lungs, deep into her body. Obsidian's song rang in her head, the words sad and distant, as weak as he had been and tried to hide from her. Instead of the burning fire that she had expected, instead she was filled with something else, and found herself falling deeply into a trance. It no longer mattered whether she lived or died, and with the last of her thoughts stilling, she realized that she had forgotten something important.\n\nBlowingWind exhaled, and felt the water leave her body. Dimly, she was aware of it removing something from her, or perhaps something leaving her. Another breath and the darkness filled her again. The sounds of the river died out, and all she was aware of was the steady drumbeat of her heart, slow and soft as the heart of the earth itself. She was heavy, falling deeper again into the water, bubbles of air still leaking out of her somehow, from somewhere, carrying something away. The water lulled a part of herself to sleep, leaving her with nothing, no defenses, no hopes, no dreams. Only the moment existed.\n\nAfter an age, the sandy floor of the river kissed her feet. Lazily, she kicked toward a light that she saw further along the bed. A shining form beckoned her, his presence comforting and forbidding all at once. When she stood before it, he bowed, and after she bowed in return he took her hand and drew her along. BlowingWind was aware of feeling as if she had traveled a vast distance in the fall. She was unsure though, as anything that could be measured in a dream never really was what or where it seemed to be.\n\nThe spirit led her to a building, the eaves turned up in a manner that reminded her of a temple in a way. Although it was there before her, and seemingly built out of wood, there was an ephemeral quality about it that made her wonder if perhaps it was only water commanded and arranged in such a way that the illusion of a home was present.\n\n\"Tatsuya, set out a zabaton for our unexpected guest, onegai. Did you send word to Amehana that her grandson was sighted?\"\n\n\"Yes Yasuigawa, I shall and I did.\"\n\nTurning her head to look again at her guide, she saw a Japanese youth in a golden robe. His long dark hair floated free in the currents of the river, and his body had the transparent quality that she had detected in the river building. A woman, that looked as if she were perhaps part seahorse, solidified somewhat from the water as she stepped from behind a large clump of riverweed. BlowingWind was about to smile and murmur confused thanks, when she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her stomach. Out of reflex, she grunted the word that was still picking at her brain.\n\n\"Amehana.\"\n\nAs she was yanked back through into the dark and beyond, she saw a pair of startled brown eyes in her vision, which drew back to reveal an older woman gazing into something. Before she was completely in the dark, she heard one of the voices from before. Calm and cool as a river, it still held the hidden heat of a raging inferno, was as sweet as the scent of sakura, and as soft as a falling petal.\n\n\"I don't know who you are, but if you know my name then find me and I will help you, since you have called on me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Ryu had happily been laying down next to the sleeping woman that fascinated him with her fragile strength, covered only with a light blanket while she rested under what had already been on the bed. When she slept deeply enough, he held her in his arms, as if to provide himself with some small feeling of being able to guard her dreams for her. It had seemed to work well enough, but after a while she had begun to murmur. Still later, she fell silent, and grew colder. As her breathing and heart rate slowed, she began to take on a slightly bluish cast, as if she were perhaps dying.\n\nIn fear, he had begun calling her name and shaking her, reaching out for her soul and trying to pull it back, though still trying to keep quiet for those in the apartments around their own, who all possessed keen hearing as well. An hour had passed in total, and still she lay unresponsive, only a very few respirations and beats per minute that let him know that she was indeed still among the land of the living, in a sense.\n\n\"BlowingWind! Either let me in your dream or wake up! Don't go now!\"\n\nThe woman continued to lie in his lap. Ryu reached out with his mind for hers, as well as he could, following the bond that had been forged between them when Lady Fuji had performed their bonding ceremony. His wife, or wife to be depending on from what view the relationship was viewed from, was locked behind a wall of water, screened away from his help.\n\nSnapdragon scampered down from the shelf that she had claimed for herself, and then crawled onto the top of Ryu's head.\n\n\"What's wrong with her? Why is she blue? I didn't know humans could turn that color.\"\n\nRyu frowned. \"Normally they don't. I'm not sure what is going on, but I don't like it.\"\n\n\"She won't wake up?\"\n\n\"I don't know Snap.\"\n\nThe little dragon chewed on her lip for a moment and smelled the air, wrinkling her nose at the scent of water as it came from the human's breath. Making a decision, and doing what her clutch-mates used to do to her, she leaped off of her older brother's head. With a thud, Snapdragon landed squarely on BlowingWind's stomach.\n\nBlowingWind sprayed a lungful of water, and rolled over gasping for air. Snapdragon took off for the safety of her shelf, fleeing from what her brother was no doubt about to do just as much as she fled from the possibility of being seen. Ryu helped her to roll over, his eyes widening as yet more water spewed out. The only thing that he could do was to rub BlowingWind's back, and to wait for the coughing to subside.\n\n\"A-ame-hana.\"\n\nRyu coughed himself, not expecting to hear the familiar name. When BlowingWind's coughs faded, he leaned forward to nervously whisper in her ear.\n\n\"Where did you hear that name?\"\n\n\"While I was out. A woman\u2026 Do you know her?\"\n\nRyu nodded slowly as BlowingWind sat up, noting the determined glint in her eye. Already the color was returning to her face. Despite how unceremonious and rough the wake up had been, Ryu was glad for his little sister's quick thinking.\n\n\"She was human once, centuries ago. Technically, it can be argued that she still is. She has the blood of a dragon that was awakened, but I've only heard tales about it, and a few other things that's she's done. I never asked her to tell me about it when we crossed paths at the yearly gathers. It wasn't the happiest of times for her. Amehana functions as both a healing Kami, and a tutelary Kami for those that ask her to help them. Her specialty is mirror work. She has a bit of a changeable nature from what I remember\u2026\"\n\n\"We need to find her. She said she will help me.\"\n\nRyu felt ice grip his heart at the thought of another Kami, even though a female, entering into her energy. It was just one more being to share her with. \"I really hope that is just a temporary arrangement\u2026\" Speaking aloud, he continued. \"Very well, rest then. I know pretty much where she can be found. It's getting permission to get there without arousing her or other's suspicions that will be hard to do\u2026\"\n\n\"Really? Ok. I thought that she would be hard to find or something.\"\n\n\"It will all be fine, just go back to sleep. No more dreaming though.\"\n\nRyu watched as her eyes closed again, and BlowingWind's breathing evened out. Going to the bathroom, he came back with the dry towel, and used that to soak up what he could of the strange water. He shook his head as he worked; pondering how best to approach an area that he had never visited, as dragons tended to be rather territorial creatures. The water cooperated as well as water ever does, and after a while he had that area of the bed reasonably dry. Going over to the table, he draped the red and gold towel over the back of a chair and sat down, placing his head in his hands.\n\nOne of the plastic bags in the closet rustled as his sister emerged from her hiding place. Slowly, she coiled her way up his leg and into his lap, and then threaded herself around his neck once she had reached that point.\n\n\"You shouldn't brood so much. Mama says it isn't healthy.\"\n\n\"You're right. It isn't healthy. Are you sure that you only hatched five years ago? You get to sleep too kid.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Snapdragon, go to sleep or I'll tell Mother what you've been getting into while you were visiting me\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "First Glimpse of Home",
                "text": "Bamboo sang in the wind, clapping gentle welcomes in the rivers of the air as they coiled around the house. Soft green washed upward, as if live bamboo had given its coloring to the walls of the two story western inspired dwelling. Once more, the red door would guard her luck for a short time as Ryu went to the north, to secure a temporary home for the time that she would need to find a more permanent dwelling. The familiar disconnected feeling filled her once more, a strange sensation as if she floated in the sky above herself and yet saw her life through her own eyes.\n\nThe lucky golden frog greeted BlowingWind from its post as the taxi had brought her to her home with the Takamura family. The gleam of the morning sun caused it to seem almost as if it were winking at her. Her heart leaped as she thought of little Yuki and the quiet Haruko. Still, she was an outsider to the family, a rootless wanderer that had cut herself loose from her own. Distantly, she wondered how her mother was doing. It was as close as she could allow the thought at the moment, or she would break down again. Her fingers twisted the hem of the green kimono-wrapped top that she wore, the black ties firmly holding it shut. The conversation she had that morning played over again in her head.\n\n\"Moshi-moshi? Takamura residence.\"\n\n\"I'm coming back today Ji-san.\"\n\n\"Wind-chan! That's good to hear. Haruko has been missing you.\"\n\nThe taxi stopped in the driveway, and both she and Ryu got out, he to introduce himself, and she to take her things in. Ryu smiled a little at the home, and then busied his hands with bringing her bags out of the trunk.\n\n\"Are you sure that you'll be fine? I don't feel right leaving you here.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine. I stayed here before I met you, they expected me back to help out a little bit more before I move to the north. I'm not going to get kidnapped, lost, or have anything else stolen from me here.\"\n\nHe grimaced, then pulled out the last bag.\n\n\"But if something were to happen to you, I will be far away. You will still be open and new for some time.\"\n\n\"Being particular, I was always open and new\u2026 I think.\"\n\nThe driver had stayed in the cab, and the meter still running. Two sets of brown eyes watched from the porch, one old and wizened and the other young and tired. Takamura Koji and Haruko had come to the porch to greet their guest, and to get a better view of the young stranger that was fussing over the young woman that they played host and friend to.\n\n\"Just be careful. That Kitsune has a piece of you. I don't like that. But he never shows himself long enough for me to be able to catch him and steal it back for you.\"\n\n\"It's probably a task I have to do myself.\"\n\nRyu sighed, and shouldered the last of the bags that BlowingWind didn't grab. He followed her to the porch and bowed a greeting as well as possible to the two humans waiting for them there. Centuries ago he would have wondered if they could tell that he wasn't human. However, these days it seemed that hardly anyone was able to tell the humans apart from other spirits that occasionally dwelled in physicality. He kept his head down until the bow was returned and he had been addressed by Takamura-san. For some reason, he felt a little like he suspected a boy felt when meeting a date's family for the first time.\n\n\"Thank you for bringing her back. I could have gotten her myself, but you are a generous man.\"\n\n\"I am only happy that I could provide some help.\"\n\nRyu straightened, taking stock of the man who took stock of him at the same time. Although he was dressed in the western style at the moment, there was a placid current in Takamura-san's aura that gave Ryu the thought that the man was a priest. However, there was also the glint that revealed a hidden and mischievous nature that rarely had reason to come out.\n\n\"Maybe this is the reason she has a Kitsune following her\u2026 if he is a kannushi, then I'm willing to believe he serves at an Inari shrine.\" Ryu thought to himself.\n\nThe silver-haired grandfather stayed on the porch, while the dark-haired woman excitedly but silently ushered BlowingWind inside. Although the shadows under her eyes were only just setting in, they would no doubt deepen as the young one that he could smell grew. Ryu couldn't help watching his now and future bride as she withdrew inside and the door shut behind her.\n\nWith the click of the latch, a pain shot through his being as if he had just had an important part of himself partially severed. If not for the knowledge that the taxi driver was waiting to take him to the airport, and the fact that Koji was still regarding him carefully, he would have gasped at the unexpected agony.\n\n\"I will return for her soon. Please keep her safe.\"\n\n\"Of course. The Takamura house has a long history of keeping its residents safe\u2026 Why do you make such a strange request boy?\"\n\n\"My reasons are my own Takamura-san. Arigato.\"\n\nThe sharp eyes pierced into his own orbs, hawk-like in their intensity. Ryu left the rest of BlowingWind's things on the porch, unable to enter with no invitation, and the fact that he was considered a stranger. Once inside the taxi, he leaned back and covered his eyes, unable to watch his retreat from his chosen as they backed out into the street once again.\n\n\"To the airport.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Luck had conspired against her today, and once more she found herself sitting near a very annoying golden-haired and blue eyed Spaniard. BlowingWind ground her teeth as she tried to ignore how he was prattling with his seat-mate about the girl he planned to try seducing.\n\n\"Queso, shut up.\"\n\n\"I know that voice from somewhere.\" His rich baritone rolled off of his tongue as he turned his head. \"Ah, you were the chica on the plane when I came to this beautiful country, and still as feisty as ever I see. A bit of a delay in your trip?\"\n\nBile rose up the back of her throat, sharp and bitter as he fixed those eyes on her, settling first on her chest before sweeping up to finally meet her eyes. Ryu cleared his throat most indelicately, allowing one eyebrow to rise and his eyes to flash in distaste as he schooled the rest of his face into frigid neutrality.\n\n\"I take it that the two of you know each other, dear\u2026\"\n\n\"One could say that Ryu.\" BlowingWind nodded. \"It seems that someone else had a bit of a delay.\"\n\n\"Only a slight one my dear. Mizuchi will be certain to fall for me though; it will just be a matter of time.\" Queso replied pleasantly.\n\nBlowingWind gagged again, trying to think of some way to keep herself from clobbering the young man. Clenching her fists was a viable alternative, and one that she made use of repeatedly as she ground out her reply to Queso.\n\n\"Several years if at all. Someone seems to have forgotten a very important age difference.\"\n\n\"True love is willing to wait, Breeze.\"\n\n\"It's BlowingWind.\"\n\nRyu harrumphed in his seat, crossing his arms and glaring at the 17-year-old in the seat in front of them before horning back into the conversation. \"I would prefer that you refer to my girlfriend as MountainChild-san.\"\n\nThe conversation had ended there while some imp painted her cheeks a soft rose in her embarrassment at having been publicly claimed. Ryu noticed her reaction out of the corner of his eye, secretly pleased about it, but continued to stare down the already irritating man. He couldn't quite say what it was, but something about Queso did not sit well with the young Kami. A voice whispered inside his head, the same as his own but perhaps just a little darker, \"This one will be much trouble later.\"\n\nSilence ruled their small section for a while, broken by BlowingWind after a short time as she spoke of her hopes and dreams, presumably to Ryu, but more to herself. \"With any luck, my class arrangement will leave time to help out with the River Reconstruction Project for the Fukuhakugawa. That will look very good on my resume after I've finished University, and am starting my career.\"\n\nThe trip passed by fairly quickly for her as she allowed her mind to roam. After a while, she fell silent, playing over the events of the past several days.\n\nHer memory fast-forwarded to where Ji-san set eyes on the young man helping her unload her things from the trunk of the cab. Ryu had been fretting over leaving her alone, and offering to carry her things in for her. When she had turned around after batting his hand away from her backpack for the sixth time, the cool regard with which he had been staring at her companion made her heart leap to her throat for one short moment. The half-formed fear barely had time to root though. Ji-san had merely bowed politely when he finally managed to catch her dragon companion's eye.\n\nFor a moment, she thought that he had known the truth or had been able to somehow see that Ryu was truthfully a dragon masquerading humanity. Or perhaps the fear had been that the old man had sensed that a Kami stood before him. It was a silly fear though. After all, even though officially the realms were separate, she was quickly learning that nothing was ever the way it seemed.\n\nThe stay at the home had been short for her. As she went inside with her things, she had heard Ryu discussing his plans to pick her up in a few days to whisk her away to Hokkaido and her new life. Although she did have plans, she wasn't sure that she really liked the idea of being whisked anywhere. The river of life had been flowing quickly the past few months. The water still ran high and fast as she adjusted to being what and where she was. It was better than letting him deal with it all though. This way she had a choice of what apartment she applied for, what jobs she tried to get, or it felt that way.\n\nWhile she had been with the Takamura household again, she had not been idle. She gave the last of her guitar lessons to the kid next door, and took care of minor chores while Haruko nursed or worked. Once more, she regretted leaving her guitar behind with her mother. \"Perhaps I could work up the courage to try calling mother again, to reassure her and to send for things that I'd want once settled. I'm sure she'd like to know where I am\u2026\"\n\nThe problem was that last time she had called she had broken down. That call didn't count. She had wondered if she could reach out with her mind and let her mother know that she was safe.\n\nAt night, she had tried to harness her latent powers. It was easiest to try when the household was quiet, and the soft light of candles kissed the mirror that rested on the Kamidana. The curling smoke from the joss sticks softened edges of objects further and lent a mystical air to everything. When she thought about it, it was the same misty look that her surroundings had possessed when she had chased through the rocks after what she had thought had been Obsidian, and then crossed over the red bridge in the middle of nowhere. The silver reflective surface had helped her to focus somewhat, but she missed holding the half orb, and the grounding that its weight had provided.\n\nAll she kept seeing at first had been unwelcome images of Ryu, and then two small children that she thought could possibly be her own in the future that she was not looking for. Other things leapt unbidden to her knowledge as well, though she tried desperately to remember how to control what she saw. There were flashes of a young woman that looked similar to herself, only with longer hair and in a jungle with men she did not know. Once, she saw green eyes, and the image of a river being lost from the earth, and heard the unvoiced cry as it turned down into the depths, unable to burst through the cap placed over the springs. Interesting, but not the information she sought after.\n\nReaching out with her mind had been strange, and she still wasn't sure that she wasn't just producing images with her mind. It was entirely possible that she was. However, every time that she tried to find her own mirror, the sensations were the same. She was in the dark, alone, trapped in heat with a terrible urge to just\u2026 evaporate\u2026 to feel it no more. Then, it was as if something was aware of what she was trying to reach, and the connection would be severed as swiftly as if someone had sliced a thread with a katana.\n\nShe had tried reaching out for the woman called Amehana, and been met with light brown doe's eyes that had shots of red, green and blue, and the sensation of warm silky fur wrapping around her. A stray thought had believed it to be tails of an unknown number, but nothing that she knew of had such a large tail, or as many. It was almost as if the woman had been trying to make it easy for her to hold the connection, by holding her as well. The voice, as gentle still as a softly flowing stream, had called out to her as if calling her own child, and whispering encouragement.\n\n\"Look with your heart, not your mind. Search from your soul and you will find. Look within, do not be blind. Immerse yourself, but not too deep, if it be the life outside you want to keep. To accomplish, let the dream temporarily sleep. All things return in time, heed the words of my rhyme, that is how to make victory thine.\"\n\nRyu had returned for her in a week, and had nervously waited for her at the bottom of the stairs when Ji-san had let him in. He revealed that he had a place for them to stay for the time being, until she found a place that she truly wanted to live there. Studying him, he reminded her more of a nervous Senior in High School than a former history professor. By the slight blush on his face, perhaps her host had hinted politely that she was available.\n\nThe dark-haired boy, whose lesson she had just finished, had taken his guitar down the stairs at the end of the hall, and smirked back up at her.\n\n\"Ah, so this is the guy you've been muttering about.\"\n\n\"Tomo!\"\n\nShe was still ashamed of how deeply she had blushed at his gentle ribbing.\n\nAfter securing a roof and job, she could return to getting her mirror back, unless she could figure out a way to call it back to herself.\n\nBlowingWind pushed her hair back behind her ear and shook her head at her thoughts. Once again, she was brooding over her problems, a bad habit that she had never been able to be rid of. Still, she had run out of things to talk about. Ryu's eyes had narrowed sufficiently to make her believe that his look of distaste was in fact still directed at her one-sided conversation earlier instead of the boy bragging about his feminine exploits back home.\n\n\"And how many pretty ladies have you taken out to dinner, Ryu?\" Queso asked.\n\n\"It's about quality, not quantity. I've taken enough out to know what I really want.\" Ryu answered frostily.\n\nThe plane descended gently, only to bounce as the tires kissed the tarmac. Ryu watched the world slow down as the plane slowed, and watched as BlowingWind watched it out of the window. He had never been a fan of riding in jets. However, it was a convenient way for humans to transport things, including themselves. Some other spirits did not have as quite as many problems with riding in jets. Still, the fumes from the plastics and the fuels always made him feel slightly ill.\n\nThe two Watchers had to admit that they were made a little ill as well, and the Lady was not a very becoming shade in the body that had temporarily materialized in the physical realm. Brigit's own illness was a small price to pay for keeping an eye on the pair though. Finnigan was under the same extreme nausea as his Lady. Akaisu had already reported to Brigit once, and she had wished to observe them directly instead of through her own mirror, the waters of a pool, or the eyes of people near to her.\n\n\"It strikes me as odd that she would go to another island instead of directly heading off for the training that she would need. Then again, it has been a long time since I myself was human, if I ever was.\" Brigit whispered to her two companions where they sat unobserved several seats behind.\n\nWhen the permission to disembark was given, they watched from their seat two aisles behind them as the dragon male helped her to stand and got their carry-on luggage. It was intriguing how eager he seemed to help her descendant, and to see her reaction. It was a small wonder that Akaisu was interfering less in their relationship than he had been hired to do. Although it still moved too quickly for Brigit's taste in some areas, they had plenty of misunderstandings to slow it down at the same time. When the time came for her purposes in a few years, they would hopefully be ready.\n\nFirst, she needed to find the keys. There was still much that was unknown.\n\n\"You're sure that you sent off that letter of introduction Ryu?\" BlowingWind fretted.\n\n\"Yes, both of them koi. The first I dropped was to Sagukari Amehana-san, the second to Ogino Mizuchi-san and Koji-san.\"\n\nBrigit trailed a distance behind as they disembarked and then went to claim their luggage in the unimpressive building so much like other airports, listening to the conversation. It was amusing to see the woman insisting on carrying her own luggage, and Ryu finally caving in and letting her.\n\n\"You're concerned about the speed? It looks about as fast as that molasses stuff to me Lady Brigit.\" Finnigan harumphed.\n\n\"Quiet, the mortals here will here you.\" The Lady hissed quietly at her distant cousin, where he had wrapped around her waist and was passing as a creative belt.\n\nFollowing them further, they watched as the dragon hailed a cab for he and his charge, clearly already having a basic plan for the day. However, he turned at the wrong moment and saw the figures watching them. Brigit walked onward and pretended to consult a planner, wondering if he was going to realize she was following them. Ryu seemed to not notice her, and she seemed just another Gaijin, another foreigner, wandering and lost.\n\nBrigit was relieved; knowing her time would no doubt come. Meanwhile, the Lady could see that she was not the only one watching them. BlowingWind's father watched too. Letting go of the material form, comfortable that no one would notice, she left the material behind in favor of the spiritual, melding with the land and following the pair to their destination. The mother and mother's sister were well enough without her direct supervision. The Kitsune and his Tengu compatriots followed, watching for another chance to test her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The wind freshened as BlowingWind rolled the window down a crack, noticing how Ryu's normally healthy complexion had taken on a slightly green and pallid cast as he looked out of the window from time to time, and the droop in his normally unruly hair. Although the plane flight itself hadn't been very long, there had been the train, and the bus, and now the taxi in addition.\n\n\"Obsidian had never been too fond of riding in vehicles either\u2026 I wonder if it's a spirit thing\u2026\" she thought to herself.\n\nOnce again she looked out the window, at the land passing by. They had left the true cities, and now she thought that they were in a suburb, although to her a large town was still a suburb. She could see forest and mountains beyond the houses, green and vibrant trees reaching up toward a snowy peak. Deciduous mingled with evergreen, and even though the scene was soothing, at the same time it lacked a sense of vitality.\n\n\"Something is missing.\"\n\nShe had leaned over to whisper into Ryu's ear. Ryu nodded as he sadly looked out the window.\n\n\"You're right. It feels almost like the heart of the area here was sucked dry. The land is dry feeling too. Then again, this community did fill up that river you were talking about helping rebuild.\"\n\n\"You mean to tell me that you were actually listening on the plane while I was telling you about the campus and community?\"\n\n\"I'm a dragon. Of course I'm listening, even if it seems I'm not.\"\n\nThe taxi pulled up at a white apartment complex, with a green expanse carefully crafted to mimic nature sprawling out front. The three tiers rose up into the blue sky, a terrestrial cloud yearning to return home. In the garden, a small stream had been made to run into a pond, the water endlessly cycling in the fountain to host a number of koi in the pool. Water lilies sheltered the shy creatures. As they unloaded, it was hard to keep from going over to the pool. Ryu eyed the water feature carefully.\n\n\"You're sure that this is the one that you want? There is still time after we move our essentials in to shop for another apartment.\"\n\n\"Yes Ryu. This is the one that I can afford within walking distance to the University campus.\"\n\nHe sighed; feeling his energy tail curl a little as the spirit in the pond morosely reached out to his mind. The sweetened despair emanating from the pond made his heart hurt, and it made him think of what it might have felt like to be pulled in two.\n\n\"I think we can find another. I'm not poor, I can pay whatever difference there is if you would just let me.\"\n\nBlowingWind cast a withering glare at her mate. It was gratifying to see that she was not bending herself beneath a male, but at the same it worried the watchers that she was not working with him.\n\n\"I want to do it myself. Besides, you're the one that secured us a place here for a month while we searched for a more permanent place. Looking around though, I think I really like this place.\"\n\n\"Even though they say it's haunted? I don't want you getting into something you can't handle, even though I'd like to live here and figure the mystery of the ghost out.\"\n\nRyu shook his head as she shouldered her bags and started in, then cast a glance at the young girl that was feeding the fish. She was dressed in kimono and hakama, the top the same white as the foam of a river, the blue the same shade as the curl of a whirlpool in a rapid. The hair that spilled down her back in a long horse tail was a rich earthy brown, secured with a purple tie that drew his eye. The woman had the scent of sakura and river gently wafting from her pores, as if the spring earth had melded with the river that no longer flowed and expressed itself through her. The movements she made were dreamy and remote, although only a maid of perhaps eleven or twelve, with a grace that the gangly form should not have had. Closing his eyes, he confirmed for himself what he had merely suspected.\n\n\"A miko? And whatever spirit is hiding in that pool possesses her partially\u2026\"\n\nWith misgiving, and the sinking feeling that these steps were going to embroil he and his bride in a future problem, he followed the human into the complex.\n\n\"Since when do you ever listen to my ideas in the first place? I hope we get everything squared away quickly. I'd feel better if I had all of you in one place\u2026\"\n\nA red streak followed them a little later, and Brigit nodded from where she watched in her home, knowing it was Akaisu performing his duty. She considered changing his orders. Perhaps it would be for the better, and her being hurt just from her short presence there, listening to the cries of the ground which was still healing from the loss of the river that had once ran through there. It was unbearable to listen to the soft sighs of what remained of the noble and caring spirit where he hid in the garden's water feature, to see the fall of what had once been a powerful being judging by the fact that a portion still remained.\n\nBlowingWind climbed the stairs, admiring the wooden floors of the complex. Although the building was new, there were elements of the ancient incorporated in at unexpected places, as if the designer had perhaps lived centuries ago. Ryu followed closely, the always-unintentional spikes of his hair standing on end still from the closeness of the river's spirit, fully aware that they were being watched, and that he was being judged. However, the building itself was soothing, a balm to his soul in its neutral tones, and the plants that stood in the hallways breathed freshness. Despite himself, he found that he was smiling.\n\nWhen Ryu opened the door to their apartment, the sunlight filled the empty rooms with a golden glow, magically sparkling as it hit stray dust motes. Three bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and bath greeted them with open arms.\n\n\"Wind, are you sure that you can afford this without my help? I think the brochure misquoted you the price.\"\n\n\"Ryu, I'm thinking I can handle a little ghost. I just want to get my mirror back. We get the apartment set up, I submit some job apps, then we move on to the next task.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Rain's Flower, Wind's Child, Living Silver",
                "text": "The water of the pond rippled beneath the stars, an ageless woman stepping forth then turning around to bow to the river spirit that dwelled part time in the pond.\n\nStarlight and forest snows lent their glamour to the white kimono that the older woman wore, the vast sleeves draping gracefully to the ground where they puddled around her. Crimson rubies and Life's blood could not compare with the red that flowed down from the woman's waist to form a Miko's hakama. In turn, this also formed a pool where the woman kneeled. A thin and pale face gazed gently at the water, her midnight locks spilling freely over her shoulders, then in soft waves to her thighs, a single thick streak of silvery white snaking over it all. Although the white betrayed age, her face was eternally youthful, with only a few slight lines about the eyes to betray the fact that it too could feel time.\n\n\"I thank you for allowing me passage through your waters. I hope that all goes well and that you may come to the surface again soon.\"\n\nThe water rippled in acknowledgment, the face of an aristocratic young man forming for a moment when the water stilled, then fading away before it could be truly glimpsed. She shook her dark head and giggled.\n\n\"And I thought my husband was shy at times. Well then, to find my errant grandson and attempt to get an answer as to just what is going on to pull me away from the Shrine when it is not the tenth month yet.\"\n\nAmehana closed her eyes for a moment, listening and feeling with her entire being, suppressing a shudder at how far from home she had ventured. As each being was set aside, the snowy fox ears set on either side of her head twitched, the black tips fading into the night. When a bit of light reflected off of the pond, the patch of skin it illuminated seemed to gain peacock blue scales. After a moment, she felt what she was looking for and saw the colors that she searched for. Her many tails twitched as she reached out and wrapped her target in her essence, drawing him to her.\n\nAfter a moment, the patter of feet could be heard, and soon Akaisu in his fox form bowed at her feet. The ethereal woman bowed back slightly, a tired smile on her face, then made herself more comfortable on the damp grass. The fox crawled into her lap and nuzzled under her chin.\n\n\"Obaa-sama, you shouldn't have come. Won't you become ill being so far from the springs and river? Ojii-sama will worry when he wakes to find you gone.\"\n\n\"I won't become ill if I return soon, and your grandfather worries about you as well Akaisu. When will you return to the village and put his mind at ease?\"\n\nThe fox sighed and let his head droop, his tail limp where it spilled over his grandmother's leg. Amehana tutted quietly and held him against her with one of her own snowy appendages, stroking his head lightly with a hand.\n\n\"Not until this newest job is through. I am needed.\"\n\n\"There is no shortage of work at home either Grandson. Or I could ask Inari-sama if he has work for you if you must do something more active.\"\n\n\"Obaa-san, there has been no attacks on the Shrine or Village since before my birth, so another guard isn't needed, and there are plenty of hands to tend the rice crop. And why do you still refer to Inari-sama that way? Isn't he an equal to you now? I never understood.\"\n\nAmehana smiled at her grandson's diversion of the topic. \"I see that your mind is made up, something that you've inherited from us. I may seem different to many, but inside my heart I am the same simple shrine maiden I was in my youth, No more and no less. Now, Yasuigawa-sama told me earlier that you were seen by him with a young woman\u2026 Are you finally seeing someone?\"\n\nAkaisu winced, wondering if the river Kami of his homeland had seen him push BlowingWind into the river, and kicked himself for not realizing that the river in the woman's mind could have easily been a portal to any river in the world with a proper connection.\n\n\"No, not I. Sadly, I am still single Obaa-san.\"\n\n\"What did you take?\" Amehana sighed. \"Most of your jobs seem to require the theft or retrieval of something. I hope you didn't get yourself involved in anything illegal, or get another spy job.\"\n\nAkaisu whuffed at the reference to a job that had nearly cost him his life during World War Two.\n\n\"Not quite that dangerous Obaa-chan.\" He licked under her chin quickly then nuzzled in reassurance. \"You could say that I'm holding something in trust for her as part of it all.\"\n\n\"You won't tell an old woman what you were doing either, I suppose\u2026\"\n\n\"You're not old\u2026 And I'm only helping her, even though she might not think so.\"\n\n\"I see. I also see that my searching for you has awoken the other one that I came to see about. Take her relic back to the forest, kit. She'll follow. But I don't like the fact that you have taken it.\"\n\nThe former Priestess shooed Akaisu into a bush and turned her face toward the window where she felt the stirring."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The water whispered in the pipes that ran through the apartment, singing to itself and anyone listening about a lost channel where it had once danced beneath the summer sky. Mentions of a favorite child came every now and then, sighed as though the water longed to wrap its arms around her and protect her from what it felt coming.\n\nBlowingWind listened to the slow drip coming from the kitchen, each of the drops a softly sighed syllable of a name as it called.\n\n\"Mi zu chi. Mi zu chi.\" The water continued chanting to itself forlornly.\n\nBlowing sat up and looked out the window of the bedroom. The pearl of the moon spilled light in, bathing the floor with a silver luminescence that made her remember her home and her mother. Ryu lay on the floor beside her, for once truly sleeping beneath his downy red comforter. Black hair glinted with blue highlights as it slowly moved in his sleep.\n\n\"I wonder why no one else seems to notice that his hair moves on its own.\" She sighed quietly at her thought, and quietly threw back the brown comforter that she had pulled over herself. Padding quietly out of the room, she worked the knots out of her back. Though young, she wasn't used to sleeping on floors.\n\n\"I'm getting a real bed soon. No more futon\u2026\"\n\nHer socked feet continued padding across the bare pine floor, the white walls reflecting the light of the moon where it shone into the living room from the kitchen. The water continued dripping until she reached the faucet, stopping once she tightened the handles. Her eyes scanned the kitchen area, silently approving of the space. A modest kitchen, it still had plenty of room, well organized to make use of what was there.\n\nBlowingWind frowned when she turned around, noting that despite having a total of three bedrooms, Ryu still chose to sleep with her.\n\n\"It's like he is staking a claim against something. Crazy dragon.\"\n\nThe toilet flushed in the bathroom, the normally soft sound obscenely loud in the night.\n\n\"Nice. I'll have to check that too. I wonder why this apartment is so cheap though, since I haven't seen anything wrong yet other than the self-flushing toilet. Still, might not be a bad idea to get a roommate. Might deter lover boy a little. It would also give us a little more in the monthly budget.\" She shook her head. \"And I'm talking to myself again\u2026\"\n\nBlowingWind walked into the simple bathroom, the stark white walls amplifying the soft moonlight that fell through the window, and the simple mirror on the medicine cabinet focused an indistinct gleam onto the opposing wall. Here too the floor was also the polished pine, warm and golden in color but cool to touch. The fixtures, that white porcelain that she had been so used to at home, were ghosts lurking around the edges of the room. Lifting the lid of the toilet, she frowned as nothing seemed amiss and the chamber was refilling itself.\n\nAfter putting the lid back down on the tank, the young woman went to the window, resting her hand on the frame of the frosted glass. Overlooking the garden and the pond reflecting the pearl of the moon, she began to slide it shut when an apparition caught her eye by the pond.\n\n\"A ghost? I'm pretty sure that all the Miko I have seen so far had to wear their hair bound. Something about the spirits having theirs unbound. Or was it the dead?\" BlowingWind whispered to herself.\n\nThe woman inclined her head, as if she knew she was being watched. Inside of her chest, she felt a pull to the woman, an insistent tug that was gentle enough to be ignored and yet insistent enough to cause a paradoxical ache.\n\nA great clatter in the kitchen broke the summons cast by the seeming spirit on her, startling the breath from BlowingWind's lungs. A tiny voice whimpered, and her feet flew in the direction of the sound. As she skidded to a stop in the kitchen, a silver streak darted past her, nearly sweeping her feet out from underneath.\n\nTurning as quickly as she could, BlowingWind was in time to see the streak ram into a table leg in the next room, halting the mad dash for cover. The little creature chirped in protest to the obstruction.\n\n\"Ow.\"\n\nBlowingWind lunged for the tiny creature, grabbing with both hands and lifting the writhing and now spitting form. A brief struggle ensued, the creature's whip-like body eventually contorting in such a way that it managed to bury its teeth deep into her arm. With a cry, the woman threw the creature away from herself as well as she could.\n\nRyu, exhausted from the day's strain on his system, remained trapped in his slumbers. His energy stirred lazily around her, soothing her, reassuring her that all would be well. Another energy curled around her again, beckoning with motherly warmth that caused her to ache. Forgetting momentarily about the little creature, she followed the insistent summons out of the apartment and through the halls of the complex. From the halls BlowingWind wandered dreamily out into the garden. Walking the path, the cool night air caressed her softly, the damp grass aromatic and crickets singing softly. Before too long, she was standing before the strange woman.\n\n\"Hello child. Sit with me a moment.\"\n\nBlowingWind eyed her carefully, but did as instructed as she tried to keep from counting the tails that waved lazily about the woman. Eventually, curiosity won.\n\n\"You aren't the same Kitsune that I met at the lower Sengen Shrine. You are a Kitsune, and not some kind of Neko are you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm no cat, although I can be several things when I wish. Sometimes when I don't wish.\" She chuckled. \"I'm Sagukari Amehana of the Yasuigawa and Arashi Shrines. You called me as I remember. Why did you call my name child?\"\n\n\"I heard the name from an incantation, and then from what I guess was a river spirit. When Ryu heard me say your name, he told me that you might be able to help me.\"\n\n\"Take Ryu? Is this the one you speak of?\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded. \"Do you know him?\"\n\n\"Well enough to know that he is often overly boisterous, but a good fellow with a good heart. I owe him no favors, but I can see that you are a sweet child\u2026 although it also looks like you like to hide yourself as well.\"\n\nAmehana peered at BlowingWind with a youthful twinkle in her eye. As the twinkle grew she appeared to get younger, although the white streak of hair did not disappear. BlowingWind looked into the pond uncomfortably.\n\n\"I see I haven't lost my touch then. What do you need help with?\"\n\nBlowingWind continued looking into the pond, her hand drifting to the snail shell necklace once again.\n\n\"In the Sea of Trees, my obsidian mirror was taken from me. It was very special... I need it back, but I'm scared by the time that I manage to get it, if at all, I will have forgotten how to use it.\"\n\n\"I see. You are a Priestess in your own right then, from before Take-dono came into your life. Let's see if we can find you some clues to guide your journey then\u2026\" Amehana pulled a small mirror out of her obi, laying it flat on a square of deep blue silk to catch the light of the moon. \"Look in, and tell me what you see.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked deeply for several minutes. The smooth silver revealed only reflected light, yielding no answers. \"I see nothing.\"\n\n\"You push too hard then. Let yourself flow.\"\n\nTrying again, red and green flashed before her eyes as she gazed into the mirror. It was a fleeting shape, too swift to see, but that left an impression all the same. Moments seemed to stretch into eternity as she watched the flashes, until finally she was able to pick out trees. Amehana watched carefully, smiling gently.\n\n\"Do you see now?\"\n\n\"I see a forest, and something red.\"\n\n\"Meet the red's challenge, with who I believe has it, you will need to be true to yourself. Once you have the mirror, call me again. Until then, I must return to my husband. He is already looking for me.\"\n\nThe Kami folded her mirror inside the cloth and tucked it away into her obi again, before bowing a farewell and standing. Gently stepping into the water, she sunk below the surface and traversed the gateway of water to return to her home far away.\n\n\"The red's challenge\u2026 I wonder what that is\u2026\" BlowingWind mused."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Smoky Mirror",
                "text": "[ Path of the Green Robe ]\n\n[ Guardian Training ]\n\nSnapdragon scampered back to the bathroom after BlowingWind had left the apartment. She nosed the window open again, her nostrils flaring when the fresh air filled them. The soft leather covering of her nose was not tough enough yet, and the tip stung as it split open. Finally, the window was fully open, and she perched precariously on the sill. Her back arched high to allow front and rear talons to find purchase at once. Once her balance was found, she peered into the night.\n\nSnapdragon watched from the window while the dragon/fox woman talked with her brother's Priestess. Her ears perked forward as far as possible, to hear everything that she could. The Kami's face was calm and caring, reminding the young dragon of her own mother so far away. Whereas only part of Amehana's hair was now completely silver, Lady Take's was entirely like silver in the moonlight. The little dragon shook the stray thought of her emotional mother from her head, and focused her concentration and keen hearing again.\n\nA familiar scent could barely be detected, pulling at the edge of her memory. The sensation of a warm chest, and amused deep voice, accompanied the soft brush of a red tail in her vision. As quickly as it tickled her memory, it was gone.\n\nWhile the two women were conversing, a red fox slipped away from the garden, transforming to a human form as he passed from the human plane to a spiritual plane. Slipping outside, she did her best to embed her claws into the wall to scurry down, but they were not sharp or strong enough. The soft scratching sounds ceased as she lost contact, and began falling through the air. Fur was blown by the resulting wind, tickling and nearly making her laugh. Snapdragon managed to keep her silence though. Stretching and snaking in the air, she caught the back of a breeze, then rode that to where it intersected with a local dragon lane.\n\nSnapdragon snapped her head to the left, allowing her body to flow after it, in order to mount the magnetic current that flowed through and above the earth. Thankful that the Kitsune had followed the same path, she sighed. As she faded into an alternate dimension after him, the scenery changed from the suburbia that was taking root, into the forest that had been so lush before. The trees reached for the sky around her, and the trail continued blazing through. Still the fox ran on, shifting back into his four-footed form. She did the best that she could to track him, even though she had not been assigned to a master yet for apprenticeship.\n\nAkaisu's breath came heavier, panting now as he ran, his sides heaving as he carried his burden back to where he was strong. Hokkaido was beautiful, but Honshu was the island he was most comfortable on, his home. As he ran closer to his destination, his fur grew silkier and movements more fluid even though the strain exerted its toll.\n\nTwo trees loomed ahead of where Akaisu loped, and he huffed a low spell as he drew near, little puffs of air sounding like the soft barks of a sleeping puppy. The air between the trees shimmered into life, looking like glowing water for a moment, then showing the main island between the sides of the portal. In a moment, the fox passed through, and the gate shut behind him.\n\nSnapdragon put on a final burst of speed, but being so young and so small she could only go as fast as the flow itself went. Instead of passing through the gate to the other side, she only passed between the trees.\n\n\"Oh eggshells\u2026\"\n\nProwling around the base of the trees, she sniffed the ground, hoping against hope that she had not missed a gate, and that it had only been an illusion. Despite her wishes the scent trail ended between the trees abruptly.\n\n\"Moldy eggshells\u2026\"\n\nSnapdragon sighed and completed the circuit around the trees, then began to retrace her steps back to her brother's current home. The trip back was slower as she moved against the prevailing currents, the greens of the forest still black under the night sky.\n\n\"Akaisu was nice to me when we met at the Kami gathering, and I'm sure that was him and his scent. What would Daddy do?\"\n\nThe forest gave way to the growth of civilization again, and Snapdragon prowled through the garden to the building entrance. Dipping her head politely at the door, she spoke in the sweetest voice that she could.\n\n\"Toguchigami-sama, would you please let me back inside? I am just a baby dragon and I flew a long way.\"\n\nFrom the potted pine beside the door stepped a small boy, clothes carefully woven from green pine needles, his hair as dark as the bark would one day become. Almond eyes gazed down at the little dragon, and then stooped closer as his small hand reached out to stroke the top of her head.\n\n\"I'm little too. I saw you go out the window. I saw the human come out to talk to the strange Kami too. Is something bad happening?\"\n\nSnapdragon pressed her head into his hand, her little eyes closing in pleasure and the young door guardian smiling slightly at the softness of her fur.\n\n\"I don't know Toguchigami-sama. I need to talk to my big brother, because he knows a lot. Not everything though.\"\n\n\"Ok, I'll open the door for you. Will you play with me sometime? I'm lonely and don't get much attention yet to help me grow strong to protect the building. My name is Hogosha\u2026\"\n\nSnapdragon nodded and then watched as the little boy turned around to open the door. As the handle slowly turned she could hear the bolt sliding back. It wasn't long before the boy was stepping into the foyer and holding it open for the young dragon, his lips lifted at the corners as he watched her sashay inside. Once she was in she turned around and dipped her head again.\n\n\"Arigato Hogosha-kun\u2026\"\n\nThe boy bowed back.\n\n\"I still don't know your name\u2026\"\n\n\"Snapdragon\u2026\"\n\n\"Good night then Snapdragon-chan.\"\n\nThe boy stepped back outside and shut the door behind him, then faded into the bonsai he had come from. Snapdragon giggled a little, then scurried through the halls, and up the stairs until she found the apartment that Ryu had secured. Looking up at the shiny handle, she tried to figure out how she would open it. Standing on her hind legs, the little dragon stretched as far as she could and reached out with both forepaws, scrabbling at the metal until she finally figured out how to grip it.\n\nThe door swung open, pulling her with it. Letting go, she slipped behind the door and pushed it closed again. Once it had latched, Snapdragon eyed the locks, then flipped the one that she could reach. The chi currents were not set well enough in the building to use them for lift, and so the chain lock would have to stay undone.\n\nSnapdragon shook her head with frustration, her mane swirling gently as she prowled into the room that her brother was currently sleeping in. She eyed him, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest and the play of the soft light on his face.\n\n\"Brother\u2026 wake up.\"\n\n\"Ugh. Cookies and milk in fridge.\"\n\n\"Just what do you do that wears you out? I don't get it\u2026 You smell funny when she's around, and when she's not, you're a talking log.\"\n\n\"Being a Guardian isn't fun and games. Especially when guarding from oneself.\"\n\nRyu pulled his pillow over his face and rolled towards where BlowingWind had been sleeping, putting his arm over where she had been.\n\nSnapdragon crawled up and sat on his side, purposefully digging her claws into him.\n\n\"Your darkside is trying to take control again? Teach me to be a guardian. Something strange just happened, and you were sleeping... or fighting with yourself... Whatever it is that makes you so strange when she's near.\"\n\nSlowly, it sank in that instead of the expected warm body to rest his arm on, Ryu merely had his arm where her comforter had been discarded. A brown eye opened into a small slit, blearily surveying where his human had once been, then opened fully.\n\n\"Wha? She left me! She should be sleeping\u2026\"\n\nRyu rolled over and sat up, quickly looking around the rest of the room, sending little Snapdragon flying into the wall.\n\n\"Whee!\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Ryu looked to where his little sister picked herself up. \"So, something strange happened while I was resting. It has to do with my Ma-er\u2026 Miko being gone? How could I have slept through something coming in?\"\n\n\"Uh, nothing came in. She went out. There was this funny looking lady in the garden with ears and lots of tails, I think it was nine. The lady was waiting for Wind I think, because she talked to her for a bit about the mirror and then went into the pond. That fox was out there though listening\u2026 I followed him.\"\n\nRyu got up, his red pajamas seeming to be glowing where the moonlight washed across them.\n\n\"I see. What did you find? BlowingWind is still in the garden?\"\n\n\"The fox made a portal and left, but I wasn't fast enough to get through it to follow him. I'm just too young to fly that fast.\"\n\nRyu glared at the little squiggle on the floor that was his sister.\n\n\"And a good thing too\u2026 who knows where you would have ended up! What were you thinking? Why didn't you get me up earlier, then I would have gone after him. I'd tan that pelt of his and use him for a pillow.\"\n\n\"Brother, I don't think he's bad\u2026 He's actually really ni-\"\n\n\"You don't think anyone is bad unless they take your fish or father tells you so.\"\n\n\"But the woman that Wind was talking to seemed really concerned for her\u2026 and he smelled a bit like her, like they were from the same family. Wind was still down in the garden when the Toguchigami let me inside.\"\n\n\"Alright then\u2026\"\n\nThe elder dragon sighed and ran his fingers through his hair as he left the room and the apartment.\n\nSnapdragon chewed her lip thoughtfully. It had been a long time, and when the fox had held her for her mother she had been perhaps only a year old, and the encounter had been brief, as he had caught her exploring while accompanying the woman that she had just seen."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Blowing Wind watched Amehana melt into the water. The brief flash of purplish blue scales as one form gave way to another below the surface held her eyes. The gentle voice whispered in her mind as the presence withdrew.\n\n\"Something is coming child, I don't know when, or if I am even right, but you too will know when it comes. There will be signs\u2026\"\n\n\"The Challenge of the Red. Is that Fire? The South? Blood?\" BlowingWind frowned into the pool, the fishes coming to the surface now hoping for some crumbs, drawn by her voice.\n\nThrough the water, the absent spirit of the water watched from his place, within the now capped springs that had fed his river when it had flown above ground. She reached out and dangled her fingers into the cold liquid, allowing the carp to nibble them, and hummed softly to herself. Minutes upon end passed by as she sat there, and eventually the cold drove her to bring out her fingers.\n\nBlowingWind lay down on the dewy grass and looked up at the star filled sky, reaching out from within to find some trace of her path. Eventually, her eyes slipped shut and she dozed where she was, too tired to walk back to her apartment, as if the one simple thing she had done had worn her out.\n\n\"I've got to pull myself together, but the more I push the weaker I get.\"\n\nShe sighed and opened her eyes.\n\n\"How am I going to pull this off? I've still got school coming up, and my money won't last forever\u2026 but I have to get my mirror back too...\"\n\nShe gazed up at the sky for many uncounted minutes before trying to sit back up. Her body was heavy and unresponsive, just as it had been in the dream where she had entered the river, a lump of clay waiting to be animated. It was becoming merely an empty husk that she was loosing connection to.\n\n\"Do I think too much? Or maybe I fight too much? Dear God but I've become obsessive\u2026 I almost wish\u2026 to be like everyone else\u2026\"\n\nThis simple wish, packed with emotion, reverberated through the emptiness of her body and out into the diamond spider's web of creation, the vibrations shaking the fabric that it made. Where Ryu was, at the doors of the complex, he heard the whispered binding clearly and loudly. The coldness cut through him again, oily illness spreading through his core as he felt her slip further away from his protection.\n\nHe went to her and kneeled at her side, heart pounding in his throat. \"Is that what you really want BlowingWind?\"\n\nBlowingWind inhaled another deep breath, still looking up at the stars and struggling to rise. A rushing sound filled her ears, a vast wind of creation passing by and through her as her words continued to take effect. The dance of the stars dimmed to her eyes, growing higher and more distant. The sweet smell of the night's flowers and grass grew muted. The night, though still warm, was colder. When the phantom wind ceased, the heady pulse of life that she had been used to was weak and hardly noticeable.\n\n\"Yes\u2026 and no\u2026 I don't know.\"\n\n\"Why don't you come back to bed? You shouldn't be out this late, and you really need to stop running off without me. You could get hurt\u2026 perhaps even here\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes were tired, and for the first time she could see the age in them, even though he was young as spirits went.\n\n\"You had been sleeping, you were fast asleep. You should rest yourself and stop worrying about me.\"\n\n\"I can't. You are part of me. I can't explain it any better than that. But you do make me\u2026 tired. You still aren't fully well.\"\n\nHe leaned closer as he spoke, the words coming softer and quieter, although they resonated more in her ear as they faded to a throaty whisper. Ryu easily picked her up, a war raging in his eyes as he held her gaze and then snapped his eyes away. Guilt painted his face as he carried her inside, even as his lip curled in amusement.\n\nIt wasn't long before he had her back inside, certain to throw the locks on the apartment door and placing her where they were sleeping. With effort, he took his own bedding and moved it in front of the door, blocking her way out of the bedroom.\n\n\"Now. Sleep Little One.\" The dragon quickly laid himself down to do the same and lay still for a moment, his eyes shut and face turned toward her. A moment later though, his eyes opened again and pinned her fiercely, a feral gleam that was soon tamed. \"Do not leave my safety again without permission. Whether you know it or not you are doing things to me, and I have been repelling things interested in you that clung from that Queso boy. Most things I have no problem with, but these particular things have been taking advantage of a certain 'weakness' of mine. I wouldn't want to accidentally harm you from instincts brought too close to the surface. Even in this human form, there is still much that I could do if I am not very careful.\"\n\nBlowingWind lay down and nodded, closing her eyes. Something had been bothering Ryu for a while, though she wasn't sure what. The odd way that he sniffed the air put chills up her spine, as if he smelled meat. Then he calmed, and she was also able to calm and drift to sleep, even though something tickled at the back of her mind and whispered half-formed thoughts.\n\nRyu waited until he heard her heart rate and breathing change, and then opened his eyes and watched her for several moments longer, to be certain that she stayed asleep. When he was certain she was truthfully asleep, he sat up and opened the door.\n\n\"You didn't go very far. I half expected you to follow me.\"\n\n\"I thought you would rather that I stayed here, Aniki.\"\n\nSnapdragon slipped in, curled up on his lap and looked up at him, waiting for an explanation as to what was bothering her brother so much.\n\n\"You're learning then. Only five years old, but we rarely act as young or as old as we really are\u2026\" He carefully stroked her head and sighed. \"And you want to know why I am so on edge. Part of it, you just aren't old enough to understand. Part of it, I somehow managed to get infested by lust demons when near that despicable Queso man. Normally it wouldn't have been a problem for me, but I've got an impurity that I need to take care of.\"\n\nSnapdragon stared at him wide eyed, not understanding what a lust demon was, but understanding the idea of infestation and the necessity of cleaning oneself.\n\n\"Can't you just wash away whatever it is that is letting them stay on you?\"\n\n\"I could, but to do that I need to do Misogi, and she won't stay out of trouble long enough to let me. The other option, is not an option at this time.\" Ryu sighed.\n\n\"Why not get her to do Misogi with you? It would help, and she would be purified too. Then you can't get reinfested.\"\n\n\"Hm\u2026 It's a sound idea. I like it. I don't think I'll be able to get her to do it the traditional way though. She would expect me to wear a bit more. It can be done though.\"\n\n\"This would be easier if you had been trained as a personal guardian, huh? Instead of a magma guardian?\"\n\n\"Infinitely.\"\n\n\"What makes her different from your magma big brother? She reminds me of it in a way.\"\n\n\"Well, she has a mind of her own for one. My magma, like those of our siblings in the rest of the magma, does as I say. However, part of it is also part of me in a way. In my case it is also my true physical body, just like this is also my physical body.\" Ryu gestured to his form as he spoke. \"BlowingWind being separate from me, I can't control her. But I can hopefully point her in a good direction.\"\n\n\"So basically you can't order her around, even though you're her guardian and married to her, as far as the rest of us are concerned.\"\n\n\"Exactly, and she won't even let me exercise my rights as our culture acknowledges them, and because of this\u2026\" He caught himself before he continued. \"Oh, nice try\u2026 You're too young for that. It's just a big problem to me right now\u2026\"\n\n\"You just have one problem after another.\"\n\n\"Must be an important transition year.\" Ryu smiled wanly and waited for the next question that was bound to come.\n\n\"Why don't you just take what is yours?\"\n\n\"What I want isn't mine to take, and I want her happy and healthy. I can wait, though it will be hard.\"\n\nHe fingered an object strung around his neck, pulling out the scale and looking at it sadly. \"I've had this ready for a long time. Now, do you have any other questions?\" Ryu tucked it back under his clothes.\n\n\"Does a guardian have to be with their charge the whole time?\"\n\n\"Ideally, but in practice that doesn't work. She has to have time for herself, otherwise I am no better than those Kami and Youkai that possess a chosen host and take over a life. I think I know what to do about the problem though. Wind-chan likes the apartment, so I'll convince her to take a bit of a sidestep, and get a few things in order before she gets hired somewhere. The way time flows I don't want her getting fired, and if we do it right, then time might pass faster where we are going than it does here.\"\n\n\"We are going back?\"\n\n\"We'll try to find him, yes. Now sleep.\"\n\nRyu stroked his sister more, humming a soft song that evoked an image of sleepy moonlit woods and softly babbling brooks passing through green grasses. Only once she was asleep did he allow his song to trail off, then laid his head back down and stared at the ceiling in thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Cleansing the Dragon",
                "text": "The cold waters caressed his skin as he swam the liquid shadows spanning between the two halves of the obsidian orb which he now dwelled within. This he had once obtained from the guardian of the feature that humans now called Glass Mountain. The soul piece of the former water spirit sighed as he listened to what he could hear from the two mirrors. On one side of the world within the mirror, he heard the heartbeat of the fox, and the young Akaisu's quiet thoughts. No doubt that it was unknown to the shrine child that the Native American dragon spirit was able to hear so well, elsewise the thoughts would have been even more guarded. On the other side, he heard the gentle lap of the waters that he had known for so long as his home.\n\nThe soft voice of Akaisu's thoughts fretted about how he was going to lure BlowingWind back to the forests where she would not be distracted. It was imperative to get the tests done as quickly as possible so that the woman could get back to her life, and out of his life. The longer he spent watching her, the more he wanted to have a family of his own. To dwell on such thoughts would only serve to pull a very meddlesome ancestral Kami into his life, and with his luck the river spirit would take a shine to the already paired maiden.\n\n\"There is no way in Yomi I want a territory dispute with a lovelorn magma Ryugami.\"\n\nObsidian snorted at Akaisu's thoughts, already seeing where the boy's thoughts were leading. To be \"owned\" was still a strange thing for him, demoted to the fragmented spirit of a pair of mirrors, as he was now. With any luck, an attractive fox or perhaps a human would be a good distraction. His problem now was how on earth he was going to move, much less sneak past the two Tengu once met up with.\n\n\"What a fix I'm in, all because I had to slip. I probably did something stupid in a past life to get to this.\"\n\nTurning from the side of his world that was Japan, Obsidian slipped toward Medicine Lake and where his half of the mirror still lay where his Medicines were hidden away. Only one other dragon knew where to find them, as she had become the Keeper of the Lake and moved away from the man made lake known as the Shasta Lake. Waiting for incarnating as a new soul took so long, but as long as he could maintain his energy, he would be able to function as a separate entity from what had already moved on. It was a common thing for some of the older souls to do, splitting into two or more flames to live as two or more separate beings.\n\nAs long as he could continue to draw strength from nature as he waited to heal, then all would be well. It had happened to the original soul that had spawned BlowingWind, now living as four separate beings in addition to the shattered pieces of what had become BlowingWind. The four that he knew of had no conscious knowledge of this as far as he knew, although two of them had met and interacted briefly. Perhaps some day, if not found, those little soul pieces would grow and mature to inhabit bodies, thus expanding her soul group further.\n\nA smile played across the dark face, the black scales bending ever so slightly to accommodate the moving muscles. Obsidian's tail flicked as a hind leg stroked, and he jumped further through the spiritual snowmelt.\n\n\"She will do well, and may have more children then she will even realize, even if she does not have any physical children. I do hope that she does eventually have one though, I would hate to have to wait for the right person to come into possession of what has to pass as my body.\"\n\nThe seemingly infinite night began to lighten ahead of him, a pearl grey circle of light beckoning to him where the other mirror lay. Perhaps his cousin sat nearby singing the songs of the tiny tides that caused and came from the dance of the lake weeds, and the flitting of the fish and water bugs, that was the life of the lake.\n\nAs he swam, unfamiliar currents began to pass through, as if someone were slipping through the weave of the fabric that made reality. Darkness passed through darkness, and shadow slipped through shadow. Intelligence moved within it, or perhaps the intelligence was the passing shadow. Less than a moment passed, and the feeling was gone. Propelling himself the rest of the way to the Mirror of the Lake, the spirit was gratified to see the weeds stretching for the sky and the shafts of light that penetrated the waters. Upon his death, the shelter he had made had gone with him into his new abode, leaving his cousin much leeway to live as she saw fit.\n\n\"Cousin! My Cousin are you here?\"\n\n\"Yes Cousin, I am here.\"\n\n\"Tell me Water, did you feel the strange thing?\"\n\n\"Yes Obsidian, a strange thing I have felt. I would not have felt it as strongly as you though, who are between the realms.\"\n\n\"What do you think it was?\"\n\nA large presence settled in the water beside the small stone, then picked it up and held it in one claw. A blue orb flared into existence between the elongated face and the dark surface, floating off to the side slightly to cast soft light upon the features of the spirit. The purple scales had a darker and richer color than they would have had in the light of the sun above the lake surface, but the indigo eyes gazed back with the same intensity they always held.\n\n\"I don't know, but it wasn't of our world.\"\n\n\"Water, it worries me. I can't do anything to protect BlowingWind in this state, and kidnapped on top of it.\"\n\n\"You have to let her stand on her own sometime. I know you've always been waiting behind the nearest tree, figuratively speaking, just to be able to fly to her side. I heard about the child that stood on the surface of the water all those years ago before the gate to that other world.\"\n\n\"Angelina was known to me\u2026\"\n\n\"But she was still upon the surface of the water, a first experience for her. You will be pleased to know that she is adjusting to her new life, world, and form.\"\n\n\"It is good, although you are still on about that night of world crossing.\"\n\n\"I have to tease you somehow, and you worry too much. BlowingWind is a strong woman, you will see that she will manage. Maybe whatever it was did not come for her at all, but is totally unrelated, as much is in the worlds.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\n\"I know so.\"\n\nObsidian opened his mouth to fret some more, as he still felt guilty from his involvement in her curse as the originator in a previous existence. Memories of being Drake flitted to his consciousness now and then, a distraction. Before he was able to utter a word, the purple dragon had shoved a bit of fish into the black dragon's mouth through the mirror face. The spiritual version passed through just as easily as the mist the Obsidian had spent so much of his energy on recently. The living dragon smirked as her cousin glared at her, well armed with another mouthful.\n\n\"Now, hush and eat. It will be a few years before you will have a body.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "BlowingWind drifted softly in gossamer webs, listening to eight women singing softly. The constant action of their weaving rocked the threads that made a hammock for her, lulling the woman into a deep state of relaxation. It was as if all was being designed for a higher purpose, and the words of the song reflected this. Dreamily, she allowed the music to wash over her.\n\n\"Dragon's Fire and Heart's Desire, a Sacred Flame burning bright, Fanned by winds of mountain spire... Rest you now in dark of night.\"\n\nAnother of the eight voices took up the tune, the weft passing between deft fingers in time to the rhyme.\n\n\"A hole in time most sublime, open now to pass Warp through. A Shadow of intervention divine As the Winds of Change blew.\"\n\nThe sisters, for sisters they surely were with the similarity in their voices, traded places as another carried on the song.\n\n\"In the Trees the wise one Sees, The Red waits patiently alone. Yet the Shadow holds the key, To the Path you must Roam.\"\n\nBlowingWind touched the multicolored threads carefully, noting the strange feelings that passed through her heart at some that she touched. It was a vast tapestry, this intricate webbing, and somehow she had been drawn outside it, and yet she still remained a part of it.\n\n\"The mighty dragon alone fights to retain his balanced control. Losing ground through the nights, so as to keep pure a precious soul. Ease his pain and shed your fear. There is a gift that he bears, something kept forever near, to heal up these starting tears.\"\n\nAs she touched the thread, her attention was drawn to weak places in the weave. Several images filled her head, such as the river that was no more which she now lived over. Following, she saw a woman that looked like a close relative who was busily studying ruins in a jungle, and flashes of an old battle. As she reached for these to find out more about them, a tearing sound filled her ears. BlowingWind followed the sound, and the young woman with the fiery hair was kneeling in a room. From the bruises and dirt, it seemed she had fallen into something.\n\nThe fabric wobbled as something passed through. BlowingWind reached to try and see the Weavers that she could feel and hear.\n\n\"Destiny is not cast in stone. To claim a birthright there is work, better to find others than walk alone. Your burden then is less to shirk.\"\n\nA breeze brushed over her face in the dream world she was in, and only now did she realize that her form was not the one that she was accustomed to. When she tried to look at her hands though, she could not see them. Reaching up to touch her face, nothing was the same. Between her eyes was a large bump that felt like some sort of jewel, and her face had stretched, gaining a long leathery muzzle. At this point, the dream faded, and she floated in space.\n\nThe velvet darkness carried her for some time as she slept, then gradually it lightened, graying at the edges in the same way that the sky grayed before a coming dawn. The flap of wings sounded to her right, and she turned to follow it in the strange world. The air was thick as she walked through it, caressing her serpentine shape. Still, there was no way to look at herself to see what she looked like here. Finally, she saw something else move, a noble hawk swooping low in her vision and through clouds, then plunging further down, to the earth below them. BlowingWind looked down, seeing the Earth and the clouds in the sky below her.\n\n\"Dad?\"\n\nBefore she could follow, a great roaring came from behind her, and light burst all around, blinding BlowingWind for a moment. The sounds of a chariot could barely be made out beneath the roaring, and intense heat embraced her as she turned around. When her astral eyes adjusted, five golden dragons pulling a glowing disk of light raced toward her. Upon this disk, a woman with long black hair and ornate kimono sat with a few other beings that were surrounded by luminescence. Most of these were busy watching what went on below, talking among themselves and at what appeared to be some sort of communication console.\n\nAmaterasu's eyes caught BlowingWind, smiling warmly as they swept over the soul. The turquoise bead within the center had become more rounded, showing more of the gold veins that swept through the blue soul stone. Amaterasu noticed the quality, then pulled her gaze out farther to take in the graceful form of the next layer of BlowingWind. Yellow scales covered the lithe form, not yet having gained the burnished gold color the Kami had seen once in a dream. The human was unaware of her spirit's form though, and so the Kami merely opened her mouth and sang the song of Purification in the old language. After the song ended, Amaterasu closed her eyes, and BlowingWind found herself hurtling back to her body."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The remainder of the night had passed quietly for him, the steady sound of BlowingWind's heart and breathing the soft lullaby sung in duet with little Snapdragon's. Ryu had given up even trying to rest in the same room, retreating to the common room and situating himself in one corner to meditate. Though his eyes were closed, his other senses told him all he needed to know about the room, the sleeping state of his charges via sound, his skin and nose telling of the approach of dawn.\n\nSatisfied that all was in order, he let his mind drift back to the rest of himself. Immersing his consciousness in the heat of the magma, Ryu was content to rest in the bowels of the mountain that had served as retreat and as prison at different times in his life. After all, it was his home deep within the twisting caverns, the pressure of the depths soothing to him in the way that made most babies calm when swaddled.\n\nFinally, the coming warmth of Mother Amaterasu was undeniable, and he leaned forward where he sat on his knees in the seiza position in order to bow to the Sun Goddess as her golden rays adorned the room with her blessings.\n\n\"Child of the Mountain\u2026 Your pained heart calls to an Ancient Mother.\"\n\nThe Sun Goddess herself stood in the middle of the room, her golden robes brilliantly shining with her light as she looked down at the young dragon. With a sigh, she knelt down beside him and pulled him back up into the sitting position. Ryu shrank away the best that he could.\n\n\"You shouldn't touch me my Lady, I am currently impure and could contaminate you.\"\n\n\"Too bad, I can always perform Misogi before I return. I have glanced your way often these last Days, and noticed that your own light is not as bright as it once was, despite the fact that it should be brighter from the joy of your recent union.\"\n\n\"I have allowed myself to be contaminated by demons, and not even nice ones at that. My particular infestation seems to be bent on taking my sanity\u2026 and a few other things.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should visit the local priest and his granddaughter. They could help you, as well as your mate.\"\n\n\"I was unaware that there was a shrine nearby.\"\n\n\"The buildings are long gone officially, but the family still runs small operations and devotions. The priest has learned some creative ways to make up for the loss of the river\u2026 and the young priestess is gathering help for the reconstruction of the river. Some involved in supporting this are also seeking for workers.\"\n\nThe Sun Kami smiled and shook her head. \"And those little 'demons' wouldn't be giving you nearly as much trouble if you would just let yourself act and think naturally with her. Do you expect her to try hurting you for giving her a hug when in private?\"\n\nRyu nodded his head slowly. \"Yes, actually.\"\n\n\"I don't think so Young Mountain Spirit. I think that she may appreciate a tender touch and is still afraid to find her grounding. I wouldn't worry about that ancient taboo, it does not apply.\"\n\nThe Sun Kami faded back into the solar beams, ascending to her rightful place in the High Plain of the Heavens again to continue her trek across the sky to bring her people light. Ryu stood up and went to the kitchen, starting water for tea and for rice. He sighed as he opened his senses further, searching for the surge in energy and devotion that would indicate where the Keepers of the shrine were.\n\n\"Or,\" the voice of Amaterasu sounded in his head, \"you could ask your own Priestess to perform her own Purification ritual for you. Let her see that you need her.\"\n\n\"Let her see that I need her\u2026\" Ryu's thought trailed off as he watched the water boil and added the rice. Turning the temperature down to simmer he covered the pot and smiled. \"I wonder if she would do that for me.\"\n\nThe light of the sun had fallen into the bedroom where BlowingWind lay sleeping, and a warm gentle presence filled her mind. It was like a mother's touch in a way, softly calling her to awake, and awake she did. Ryu's sleeping things had been folded and put away in the closet, and the door to her room was shut. At first, that she was alone confused her, but she soon felt his presence and calmed.\n\nSince the door was shut, she changed out of her sleeping clothes and into a set of jeans and green T-shirt before stowing her bedclothes. Her dream had been a strange one, and she silently processed it as her body began to flow with the strange feeling of peace that had overcome her. Something had changed suddenly, entered the world and broken the tension, sending ripples out across the fabric of reality that allowed and caused things to happen. There was a sense of relief in the air.\n\nWith the futons folded and stowed, the room was empty. Furniture for the room had yet to be bought, and so there was ample room to move. Her whole body itched to dance, filled with something new. Heeding her body's calls, she followed the dance of her soul, opening herself to Creation and offering back the beauty that she felt. A quiet song escaped her lips, wordless crooning of strange syllables that she did not know the meaning of, only that they needed to be sung.\n\nSoon came familiar energies to fill her, the sensation that she always received when in prayer, as if some great light were streaming through and filling her. Laughter bubbled up in her song, and her steps quickened. She became caught up in great sweeping motions, as if she were a great bird soaring far up in the sky on powerful wings. The light overflowed, and filled the room. Today, she was sure, would be a good day.\n\nIn the kitchen, Ryu had set the timer, still enmeshed by the comfort given by Amaterasu-omikami and proceeded to set out the hashii and chawan, or chopsticks and rice bowls. The first traces of BlowingWind's song hit his ears and swept through his body. His breath stilled in his chest as he recognized the song, or at least a similar version to what he had once learned. The lust demons that were plaguing him paused in their torturing of his mind, hissing at the sound.\n\nSomehow, she had been gifted with precisely the song that he needed to hear. His beautiful Priestess was learning, and he had a guess as to who had implanted the knowledge of the song into her.\n\nCarefully, he made his way to the door of the room, and quietly opened it. The sight of the woman dancing in the sunlight so naturally was an awe-inspiring sight, even though he was not very impressed by what she had chosen to wear. The red of his family kimono better suited her in his opinion. The unpolished turquoise that was her soul tumbling before him, slowly becoming polished, more than made up for external appearances.\n\nAnother laugh spilled from her lips, pulling a soft chuckle out of him against his will. A blush washed his face as BlowingWind came to a shocked stop and stared at him, a blush of her own covering her cheeks.\n\n\"Good morning\u2026 Ryu. I didn't see you\u2026\" She trailed off as she took a step back.\n\nTurmoil filled Ryu, and disgust at himself for interrupting such a lovely display. Sensing his weakness returning, the demons once more attacked him, whispering suggestions on what to do with such a lovely maiden alone in her room. With a barely audible whimper, he cast himself down on his knees and bowed to her.\n\n\"Lovely and honorable maiden, Otome-sama, I have become impure and can not fulfill my duty to protect and guide you in my state. Please, sweep away my impurity and restore me, that I may take up again my proper place at your side, and be content with what you allow! I can no longer trust myself and need you to help me.\"\n\nBlowingWind took another step backward at the strange display, the blush draining from her face in shock that he was throwing himself literally at her feet.\n\n\"Ryu, what are you talking about? Impurity? I'm just a human, so how can I purify a Kami?\"\n\n\"Because, you are more pure than I am. I have allowed myself to become\u2026 polluted\u2026 by creatures that had been attached to someone, and they have fed on my own weakness regarding\u2026 you\u2026\" Ryu pressed his forehead into the floor, shamed at having admitted what he had.\n\n\"Regarding me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He pressed harder into the floor, hoping that she wasn't going to keep asking, or that she didn't figure out what he was saying he had been thinking about her. As he continued, he expected her to fetch a frying pan to bludgeon him with. \"Male dragons, and some females, have a particular\u2026 weakness\u2026 that is sometimes taken to advantage\u2026\"\n\nUnderstanding of Ryu's problem slowly began to dawn on her. Blinking, the blush returned and she backed up yet another step.\n\n\"You mean\u2026 Oh! Sick! Bad dragon! Bad Ryu! You mean you've been\u2026 Just\u2026 Bad!\"\n\nRyu cringed each time she told him he had been bad, although part of his mind did fixate on the phrase \"Bad dragon,\" stirring darkly in the back and coiling around it. Perhaps some day that phrase could be a good thing, or perhaps some day he could change it was the aramitama's hope. The dominant part of him, the nigimitama currently, whimpered like a pup seeking assurance.\n\n\"I'm sorry honorable maiden. You know that I treasure you. Above my territory, above myself, and above my possessions, your soul and to be united with it someday completely is what I wish\u2026 While you are in a body, and I continue to be physical, I will have these thoughts. But please, remove from me my impurities and chase off these demons torturing my thoughts and magnifying them, so that I may do my duties to you. I do not desire to find myself abusing what little trust you have placed in me!\"\n\nBlowingWind looked down at the sight, the anger slowly leeching out of her as she processed the desperate pleas. Her intuition told her that things had to have gotten truly bad if he were reducing himself to begging, and using one of the titles that she had learned at Sengen Shrine was sometimes applied to Miko, in relation to herself. The small whimper he had given before speaking, and the flinches as she had seethed at him, pulled on her heartstrings. A warm presence sat on the back of her shoulders, which were currently pointing toward the window.\n\n\"I suppose this explains why you have been acting so increasingly odd. How do I help you?\"\n\n\"Follow your instincts, and whatever training you had in your own traditions.\" Sensing that a battle of will was about to ensue between them and the woman, the demons increased their attack on Ryu's mind while he spoke. \"But please, hurry. You smell very good and they are using that against me too.\"\n\nSmelling good was not something she had expected to hear at that point, and she made another mental note to find out as much about dragons as she could. His combination of instincts and spiritual actions was more than confusing.\n\n\"Alright, but get up off the floor. That's creepy. So is talking to me so formally.\"\n\n\"Arigato Otome-sama.\"\n\nRyu stood up, still avoiding looking at BlowingWind as his mind continued to be tortured. BlowingWind sighed, and went back to the closet, taking out her backpack and bringing out of that a bundle of herbs and box of matches.\n\n\"Sage for clearing and cedar for blessing.\"\n\nShe held it out so that he could see it well, and he studied the herbs that were not native to his land, noting their silver hue and narrow leaves. The scaly leaves of the cedar he did recognize, the pungent sweet scent a welcome reminder of safe forests.\n\n\"I gathered this myself last summer Ryu, mountain sage has a narrower leaf than plains sage.\"\n\nShe lit the end of the bundle, and the smoke began to fill the room as the medicine smoldered. With a feather, she fanned the smoke over him, starting at his feet and working her way up. The heady smell tamed the restless rustlings of his aramitama that her proximity caused, and at her silent urging he held his arms out. As she worked she sang a soft chant. He fought against watching her and closed his eyes, grateful that the smoke masked her scent, although it seemed to intensify for him the feeling of her presence. In a way, it was almost as if the smoke made her more real, more of the world. After a moment, she moved to repeat the process at his back, while the weak demons leapt away from him and ran for the open window.\n\nThe chant ended, and as he opened his eyes he felt a little lightheaded.\n\n\"Thank you MountainChild-dono.\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow at the honorific. It was less strange to her than him elevating her above himself, but referring to her as a highly respected equal was strangely exhilarating.\n\n\"You are welcome.\"\n\nHe smiled brightly at her and took a step toward her, when at that moment the whistle on the tea kettle blew.\n\n\"Ah! The tea water! It'll be too hot and ruin it if I add the powder now!\" His rushed steps and frantic cry left her behind to gaze after him a moment before following at a more sedate pace.\n\n\"What's gotten into him now?\"\n\nBlowingWind watched from her new place at the door as he lifted the kettle away from the heat and set it to cool a bit, muttering to himself about always ruining a proper tea and then adding rice grains into the boiling pot of water for their breakfast. He sighed as he turned down the heat and put the lid on the pot, aware that he was being watched.\n\n\"Er\u2026 I wanted to make something that would sit well with morning stomachs? Normally I'm a much better cook\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off as BlowingWind quietly went to sit at the table, and he occupied himself with checking the temperature of the water. Finding it to his satisfaction after all, he poured some into a teapot to warm it, before discarding that to fill the same pot and mix in the tea powder. BlowingWind watched in silence before closing her eyes and thinking over what she had just done.\n\nHer methods had been no different than the ones that she had seen her father use, and yet somehow something about them had been different. The energy of the smoke had been the same, but at the same time her hands had filled with an unfamiliar heat while working, and something clear and warm had pushed in through the top of her head and out like a river. The effects had soothed her, slowing her thinking into a peaceful drift. The more she thought about it, the more the feeling stayed with her, and the palms of her hands tingled.\n\nRyu stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye as he pretended to still be busy at the oven. BlowingWind gazed out the window unaware, looking for once as if she were at peace. It was good to see her that way, and he sat as quietly as he could after a moment so that he would not pull her from her reverie. After a while, she began humming a soft tune, further lost in her thoughts.\n\nHe carried the pot of rice to the table quietly after it was done, and placed it softly before sitting down next to her. The air around her made him feel sleepy, his own eyes slipping closed as his ears perked to listen to the slow pace of her heart and gentle music that she made as she waited.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" He thought to himself. Reaching tentatively with his mind, the gentle touch of water slipped over his mind. The feel of the water was like one of the pure streams or lakes deep in the forests, and an intelligence pushed back against him, as if wondering who he was. As gently, it parted and allowed him to fall. The touch was impartial, as if it were a natural reaction reawakened somehow, though as he paid more attention to it the feeling of not being alone grew stronger.\n\nJust as suddenly, the presence was completely gone, as if it had been cut off."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Red and white swirled in the courtyard, one tail arched sedately behind herself as she reached for the ripe scarlet fruits hanging from the branches of the sakura trees. The sunrise ceremony had been completed, the denizens of the shrine grounds had arisen early or stayed up all night to perform it. Most of those that lived in and participated in the care of the facility were unseen, preferring to be nocturnal or too shy to be visible. This was a place were layer upon layer of reality overlapped, and it was easy to slip between them. The shrine maiden, Mizuko, smiled over the vista below her, then turned her head to survey the old but well cared for simple frame of the Honden. The doors were open to the sun and to any visitors, as the community was so tightly knit and the different types of beings lived in such harmony.\n\nThrough the doors, the former Head Priestess could be seen, the nine tails of her more vulpine form traded for the single long blue and lilac scaled tail tipped with the cerulean fur of her more dragonic humanoid form. Her teal wings were folded carefully about herself and fox-like ears perked forward as she concentrated on the task she had set. Amehana's form was well known for easily sliding through a range of transformations, as fluidly as the river and the storms that she was connected to and associated with. The scales that covered her body, merely hinted at last night, now gleamed in the sun.\n\nAmehana kneeled in the Honden of the river shrine she lived at, gazing into her mirror while trying to discern more of the strange child's past. The old wooden boards of the simple shelter creaked under the weight of the history seen by the complex, and various planes and levels that it existed in. Despite that, they were silent under the step of the current Head Priestess when she stood at the door and whispered.\n\n\"Mother? You hardly ate anything at breakfast\u2026\"\n\n\"I just have a full mind Mizuko. That is all.\"\n\nShe looked up at the younger and less tailed version of her kitsune self standing at the door. Last night Amehana had been late in returning home, and walked through the door of the dwelling that she shared with her husband to find Vadise sitting up waiting with a hot pot of tea ready. It was just as well, with all of the questions flowing through her head, Amehana would not have been able to fall to sleep without help. Still, she thought that she had returned soon enough to prevent her mate from waking.\n\n\"I think you should come back inside and eat something. A small bowl of rice we both know is not going to serve you until the next meal Ame.\"\n\nVadise stood slightly behind their eldest daughter, his blue eyes clearly showing his concern, set in the thin silver fox face that Ame had known and loved for centuries now. His ears still made her want to rub them after all this time, a carryover from when she had been purely and simply human all of those long years ago. The fact that those ears were lowered slightly made her eyebrow rise. The older kitsune currently wore one of the blue hakama and kimono that she had made for him several years ago, well cared for, as were the wakizashi at his side.\n\nSighing, the young Kami wrapped her mirror and put it away. When his ears drooped a little more at the sigh, mistaking her sleep deprivation for irritation, she giggled. \"Alright, I'll put work away as completely as I can. You don't have to look like you got blamed for thieving the mochi silly...\"\n\nHis ears perked up slightly, and his nine tails waved hopefully, causing Ame to chuckle.\n\nMizuko shook her head and went back to the courtyard, where she had been tending the trees before stopping to check on her mother. She knew that generally there were two things that the pair would possibly do after an exchange like that. Her parents would either be busy spending time with each other, catching up on the long years that they were too busy with the duties they once held to have spent much time with each other, or cooking in the kitchen. The latter always meant more food than she and her younger sister Taiga could eat. The help of their brother Kitsui and his large and growing brood would need to be enlisted to ensure that none was wasted.\n\nAround the base of the hill, the river Yasuigawa flowed serenely by, happily occupied in carrying the water from its source to the lake that it filled. Ame hugged and kissed her husband once their eldest was busy, and then walked back to the living quarters quietly, her tail waving thoughtfully behind her as she fretted her bottom lip.\n\n\"I just don't understand it Vad-kun\u2026 I'm not a well-known Kami. The girl I told you about last night needs training, almost as if she's all the way back at the beginning in some ways, but she shouldn't even have my name to call on. Something just isn't right.\"\n\nVadise sighed, and used his tails to still hers as they walked. His wife did not leave their home often, and when she did it usually entailed an adventure that gave him much more excitement than he preferred, whether or not he was with her. He still remembered the time that she managed to get kidnapped by a tree of all things, and she had been much younger and slightly less prone to finding trouble.\n\n\"You won't be any help to her if you don't take care of yourself Ame.\"\n\n\"I do have that bad habit\u2026\" Ame chuckled, remembering the last time that she had something strange cross her path, which had sent her into a flurry of research and meal-skipping. \"I'm glad that you keep such a good eye on me.\"\n\nVadise smiled and squeezed gently with his tails as he opened the door to their home and allowed her to enter before him, releasing as she stepped away. \"It isn't always easy.\"\n\nBoth had quite naturally and unobtrusively slipped off their geta and left them by the door from long custom. The kitsune closed the door again and followed her as she walked to the kitchen, their tabi barely whispering on the floor.\n\n\"You're going to eat more than a bit of miso I hope.\"\n\nAme paused and looked at him guiltily, the dipper and her bowl in her hand. Her ears and tail drooped a bit, then perked back up as she giggled.\n\n\"You were reading my mind\u2026 I've been caught.\"\n\nShe finished filling her bowl with some of the soy bean soup, then got a plate and put a serving of the already prepared fish on the red and lacquered clay. With her plate and bowl on a traditional tray, she went to the common room to eat the rest of her breakfast, her husband once more following to keep her company.\n\n\"I've picked up a few tricks from my favorite dragon, my love.\"\n\n\"Oh my, whatever shall I do? If I'm not careful, you'll catch me again and I'll be at your mercy.\"\n\nThe pair giggled, their tails twining around each other companionably as Amehana began to eat under the watchful eyes of her mate, her wings folded around them both as she leaned against him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rediscover Possibility",
                "text": "\"So, you have a general idea of where my mirror is through your phenomenal Kami Sense.\" BlowingWind crossed her arms and pinned Ryu with cold eyes, that promised great pain if he was trying to play a joke. \"You realize exactly how lame that sounds I hope, like a bad anime.\"\n\nRyu winced again, praying to the kitchen Kami that his human did not turn any eating or food preparation implements into weapons, adding the table Kami in for good measure. Thinking about it, the explanation was incredibly lame. This was better than revealing their little tag along though, at least to his mind. Instead of the anticipated blow to the head or shin, she tucked into her food thoughtfully.\n\n\"Ok Ryu. You get me there, and I'll find my mirror.\"\n\nBlowingWind meekly ate a mouthful of rice, finishing her meal. Ryu had hardly touched his, although his bowl had emptied while the pair had held each other's gaze locked over their discussion. Snapdragon had never been so glad of her knack for invisibility, as it was much simpler to eat her brother's food without being seen.\n\n\"Fine. I was thinking that it would be simpler and cheaper if I carried you myself\u2026\"\n\nRyu tried to disguise the hope in his eyes and voice, but it shone through despite his best efforts. BlowingWind looked at him for a long moment, remembering the last two times that she had ridden his back, the feel of the wind rushing past, and the knowledge that there was nothing beneath her. His eyes were calmer now, than they had been since the day she had woken up ill in his cabin, although just as eager to please.\n\nHer dreams from the past night still had her in an unanchored state. She found herself agreeing, her head nodding gently, as she murmured a reply. \"Alright, just remember that I am new to dragon-flight still. No acrobatics.\"\n\n\"No acrobatics my love.\"\n\n\"When should we go? Should we wait for nightfall? We are closer to people here. There's more chance of you being seen.\"\n\n\"No, we can go as soon as you feel your food has settled enough.\"\n\nRyu's eyes narrowed in pleasure, and his voice dropped to a throaty purr while he spoke. His rather soundly abused ego was soothed by her questions. A lazy smile spread across his face as his spirit form slowly wrapped his tail around the woman, not touching her and yet still able to be felt. BlowingWind's eyebrow raised at the feeling of being surrounded, although she could not see what was encircling her. All she perceived of the tail this time was the presence.\n\n\"Explain?\"\n\n\"The separation between worlds is thin in this area, and I can feel an entrance to the travel gate system nearby, my guess is that its near the spring that had fed the river. You and I can take a walk up there, and then I will change form when we are in a safe location far enough away from where most people will be. We slip through to the other world, and there we go, the journey is started.\"\n\n\"Ok, aside from my normal travel gear, am I going to need to take anything?\"\n\nRyu snorted a bit at the question, feeling as if yet again his maleness and ability to provide was being questioned. By the look in her eyes he was soon mollified, BlowingWind was only being herself. She was a woman with strong drive, and so it was natural for her to ask such a question.\n\n\"You won't need a thing.\"\n\nBlowingWind's eyebrow rose higher as she surveyed her guardian.\n\n\"Ok, but you're still acting extremely weird\u2026\" She got up and washed her bowl and chopsticks, but only after tripping on the astral tail that Ryu had curled and left on the floor. Her squeak of surprise and then growl of minor irritation did not help Ryu's mood. Instead of giving in to frustration though, he rose smoothly and carried his very empty bowl over to the sink to wash as well.\n\nOnce the bowls were washed, dried, and put away Ryu found himself in a better mood. BlowingWind sighed deeply and leaned against him, a small smile on her face. His breath stopped for a moment and his heart sped.\n\n\"So, oh Weird One, let's go now\u2026\" BlowingWind looked up at him as she spoke quietly.\n\n\"Um, alright then.\"\n\nShe left his side to grab her still unpacked bag and walked out the door once she had gotten it. The carpeting absorbed her steady and sad pace, and Ryu followed quietly. Although sad, her shoulders were squared firmly, as if she had been given some special instructions or secret vision.\n\nMorning well underway, the high blue skies spanned the heavens, the solar disk occupied with it's daily transit across the heavens, or so it seemed. The green manicured grasses and paved drives were left behind as the fresh air and sunshine quickened BlowingWind's pace. It was not long before the grasses took on the longer and unkempt character of the edge of civilization. Only then did she stop to look up and frown at the sun.\n\n\"You know, I had a strange dream last night.\"\n\nRyu looked out the corner of his eye, tilting his head down as he listened.\n\n\"Indeed?\"\n\nShe nodded as they continued walking, the forest that lay at the end of the road slowly approaching. The younger growth of the forest whispered in the breeze. Farther back, and closer to the feet of the mountain, the older growth silently stretched out to the land around it, in the trees' search for the missing river.\n\n\"At first, it was all fuzzy, like if someone wraps you up in a blanket and holds you, but after a while\u2026 I was out of the fabric\u2026 and there were women singing. I think\u2026 I think\u2026 I think it was the Weavers of the Web.\"\n\nRyu turned his face to fully look at her, and found that his sly glance had been completely missed. She was gazing at the forest they walked toward, lost in her memory. Beside the road, or now more accurately path, passed the old river bed, parched and leveled, ready for the developers to do more buildings. He frowned, hearing the pain from below the ground. The river was not the only spirit missing, as the earth itself pulled at him.\n\nA misplaced foot would have sent BlowingWind tumbling to the ground, but Ryu was quick enough, catching her before she could even exhale in surprise. She blinked up at him after he was certain that she was on her feet, and he arched his eyebrow at her.\n\n\"So, you were saying\u2026 Weavers of the Web.\"\n\n\"You've not heard of them?\"\n\nRyu shook his head as they started walking again, pulling his attention from the earth below their feet and the plants that would be such a simple thing for him to bring more life to. Now was not the best of times to meld with the ground.\n\n\"No, is it something from your heritage?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure\u2026 I don't think so. I don't know what else to call them though. At first I thought maybe the Fates, but the Greek legends I know from playing video games and watching movies say that there are only three. I then thought of Grandmother Spider for some reason, but the voices that I heard were way more than one, and there were two other presences that didn't sing.\"\n\n\"Odd\u2026\"\n\nShe nodded again, and the new silence continued for a while longer as they walked in silent contemplation. A mile and more passed by, before either one thought to say another word. It was not until the springs that had fed the river, came into sight, that either realized how long they had been walking.\n\n\"Hm, looks like there was a fight here. The river really didn't want to be stopped. This is a strange place.\"\n\nRyu frowned, as he surveyed the deceptively quiet pool. It was fed by few small springs up a small incline trickled in, and more springs welled up from directly beneath the pool.\n\n\"It looks like it's waiting, doesn't it Ryu?\"\n\nRyu nodded to her, and eyed a steel cap. The remains appeared twisted by a bolt of lightning, before looking more closely at the pool. At the edges the water was shallow, a perfectly normal occurrence, deepening toward the center. At one end, a large granite rock sat in the water. It seemed to preside over the resulting pond like a guardian, a brooding, but currently sleeping presence. The water itself lay quiet, save for one place where it seemed to bubble with life.\n\n\"If I were the river spirit, I would have taken refuge here. I'm not positive, but I think the river is still here, just traveling through an underground conduit. It wouldn't really need to be above ground, but wants to be. The spring itself has a spirit of its own too.\"\n\nThe water stirred, something moving deeper into the depths at the center. A tree near the pool chuckled, her limbs moving quietly. \"Very good young dragon. You are advised to watch your female here very carefully.\"\n\n\"What do you mean I'd better watch my female here?\"\n\nRyu's sharp eyes pinned the tree, which instantly stilled. He would have no information from the tree. Meanwhile, BlowingWind had moved down to where a sort of dam had been built. Earth and rock held the water in the basin. Near the top, a little water leaked out, feeding the grasses that held the earth firm.\n\n\"You know, this shouldn't really work\u2026 something very strange must have happened. Something like this should have gotten on the news\u2026\" BlowingWind ran her hand over the embankment thoughtfully.\n\n\"My Kaze-chan, so many 'strange' things happen, that don't get onto the news, because either those involved in them talk themselves out of the happenings, or it is actively covered up.\"\n\nShe put her hand against the mound, holding the water back from the ancient course and closed her eyes. Wondering why such a little barrier could stay a river, even though it had been small judging by what was left of the watercourse she could see, she let her mind open. A glimmer pulled at the back of her mind before an image unfolded. A young woman in red and white was smiling at a young man in blue and white as the water began to flow again, the dam breaking as the pair removed a last stone.\n\nThe same light voices from her dream wafted through, singing another song as they busily wove and mended. However, the sound was so light BlowingWind was unable to hear the words. Fate had something very special waiting for someone, but when she tried to keep watching the scene, the image faded. Seeing only the back of her eyelids, she sighed and opened her eyes, her upper lip curled in frustration.\n\n\"Lost it\u2026\"\n\n\"Hm?\"\n\nRyu jumped down and landed beside her. This area, and the mile below, seemed to be the only area where the bed had not been filled in.\n\n\"Thought I had something.\"\n\nBlowingWind scrambled back out of the bed, shaking her head at how easily Ryu was able to bound back up, the earth not crumbling below his feet as it did with her own steps.\n\n\"But you do!\"\n\nRyu beamed a cheesy grin at her as he turned to help her up, the slightly elongated eyeteeth that looked more like small fangs shining. BlowingWind rolled her eyes at him, but gave him a smile of thanks all the same.\n\n\"That was a lame line Ryu.\"\n\n\"You shoot down the good ones.\" He chuckled slightly as he spoke, then pointed deeper into the forest behind the springs. \"The gate is a little further that way.\"\n\n\"What good ones?\" BlowingWind giggled and arched her eyebrow at him.\n\nRyu's steps faltered, and his jaw dropped imperceptibly, before he schooled himself back to normal. In an effort to save face, he transformed to his dragon shape and lay down to make it easier for her to climb onto him. The polished coal of his scales whispered of the dark recesses that he guarded. The scarlet of his mane indicated the liquid earth that he came from. His chocolate colored eyes closed while he waited. The scents were far more intense to him in this form. Finally, BlowingWind's weight settled where it belonged, and he stood.\n\n\"Am I not attractive?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that Ryu. You just have read too many romance novels.\"\n\n\"Oh? And how many have you read my dear?\"\n\n\"None of your business.\"\n\nRyu chuckled and stood back up, walking now towards the gate. The springs fell behind, and the air thickened, weighing him down with the familiar weight of the borderlands. BlowingWind's legs gripped him tighter in response to the unexpected spiritual pressure.\n\n\"Ryu\u2026 The air is so heavy\u2026\"\n\nHe nodded, and spoke into her mind.\n\n\"In the borderlands the weight is doubled in perception to those sensitive to it. That's presumably to help deter beings from knowingly slipping back and forth too often. Most people don't even notice it. So they either cross over without knowledge when a gate is open, or are repelled by the off feeling of the area. Only a few people realize what the feeling is, aren't repelled by it, and use it. Still, there are a few people that stumble in.\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded, and although he could not see it, he could tell by the subtle movement of her body, and the quiet affirmation of understanding that emanated from her mind that she understood. She sighed and closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling as Ryu walked through the woods. Eventually, the heavy atmosphere lifted, leaving a vacuum in its wake.\n\nRyu leaped, catching the back of one of the many currents. The wind bore him up, and BlowingWind opened her eyes again. There was no trace below of human habitation, the forests of old Japan appeared untouched by time. Her dragon consort snaked through the sky as she looked in awe at the ground.\n\n\"Where did everything go?\"\n\n\"That's a result of the time flux. What you see is, what would have been, an alternate possibility. I'd say something happened in the area long, long before the whole river problem. Hold on tight, fast spot coming up.\"\n\nBlowingWind tightened her grip and leaned forward, just as the stream they were riding suddenly shot forward, as if a wide river had been condensed into a small channel. The chi was a joyous thing, and it took a moment for her to realize that she could feel it pouring through her. Higher above them, she could hear a hawk's piercing cry. The island gave way to the sea, the frigid waters dancing into eternity.\n\nWhen the dragon lane slowed, the island of Honshu came into view, and Ryu angled his body down to exit the current. His objective was to return to the forests around Fujisan. Although he would have rather had the flight last longer, he was a Kami of his word. Slipping between the borders slowly, what could have been, was superimposed over what was, drawing a gasp from his passenger.\n\n\"This is amazing.\"\n\n\"This is how the higher Kami see. The further back they are from the day to day happenings, the more they see.\"\n\n\"So why are we seeing like this?\"\n\n\"Passing between layers is all.\"\n\nRyu stayed away from the cities, choosing for his landing a place deep in the untouched forest. The great dragon laid down once again, allowing his passenger a chance to get off if she chose. To his great surprise, she stayed, and stroked his mane.\n\n\"Are you feeling alright? I may be ruining this, but you are acting uncharacteristically nice.\" He looked back at her, sniffing as unobtrusively as possible, on the off chance that her hormones had put her in a receptive state. Her scent, though smoother, still had a barb to it. \"No, that's not it,\" he thought.\n\nShe nodded quietly, her eyes scanning the forest around them before sliding shut. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, she found that she was better able to focus. Pointing in the direction where she felt a pull, she spoke.\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine. I just have felt strange all day. Um, I think we go that way\u2026\"\n\nRyu nodded.\n\n\"That way we go then. That's the direction of Amehana's home anyway. I really hope that her husband doesn't take it as a threat when I step into Sagukari-san's influence range.\"\n\n\"Don't be your usual annoying self then.\"\n\n\"Hey! That hurt my feelings! Maybe I should make you walk\u2026\" Ryu pouted, standing back up and walking anyway. \"Not everyone here is as nice as me you know.\"\n\nWatching from the trees, two sets of eyes followed.\n\n\"Akaisu's plan had better work Karasu.\"\n\nThe two Tengu shadowed the pair, as they made their way through the forest. The pair occupied themselves with casting spells and using charms to befuddle BlowingWind's senses. Their powers of illusion made phantom creatures at the edge of her sight, causing her to cling more tightly to her protector. Most of the day was spent that way, until she learned to see through the illusions they cast. Reaching deep inside herself, the wolves she saw loping turned back into strangely formed young trees and boulders.\n\nRyu smirked, as the crows that he could smell around them had lost this particular attempt. Night was falling though, and as they were firmly in the realm of the spirits, it was prudent to camp.\n\n\"This looks like a good place to spend the night. The nearest spirit village is still a day's travel away.\"\n\n\"But we've gone so far already. Why is the 'nearest' village so far away?\"\n\n\"Space and time don't work here the way they work in your world, remember? We went from between layers again, to fully in the realm that I grew up in. It won't even be Amehana's village, but maybe we can get some information on where that meddlesome Kitsune took your mirror.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Faith in Self",
                "text": "Setting up camp had not taken long. It was merely the nominating of where they were going to sleep, relative to the suitable location of certain necessary facilities. BlowingWind's threatening of Ryu's maleness should he peek, and the location of water had followed a very natural and amiable pattern. The threat to Ryu had been unnecessary, as even though he was intensely curious, he wasn't quite so curious about the human body as to spy during certain functions. It was understandable though, as the threat was apparently more for BlowingWind's mental benefit than a real threat.\n\n\"I mean it, Ryu, you stay over there.\" The waver was barely there, but apparent enough. Where she had gone he couldn't see her knife, and didn't really know if she was currently holding it, but the warning tone reminded him a bit of his mother.\n\nAs odd as it was, and as scary as she could look when threatening his anatomy and brandishing a sharp object, in a strange way he rather liked her defiant streak. He especially liked when it combined with her shyness. It was something he'd rather see directed against someone else though.\n\n\"I can heal, but it would still hurt\u2026\" He thought to himself.\n\nTo pass the time, he foraged for something that could be food, in the event that she needed grounding in the world. Eating was often a good idea anyway, even if he didn't need as much as a human. The bushes yielded berries, and the stream yielded a few fish, nothing fancy by any stretch of the imagination. A little wood, a little fire, and it wasn't much longer before he was roasting the fish.\n\nRyu lifted his head and smiled languidly when she came into the camp area, an armload of wood revealing what had been taking her so long.\n\n\"Dunno\u2026 had a weird urge to get this\u2026\" She shrugged before making a tidy pile, then going back out to gather a bit more. BlowingWind returned quickly, her edges beginning to fade a little like smoke.\n\n\"Here, eat this, let's take care of that\u2026\" Ryu popped a berry into her mouth before she could protest. Her hand slapped across his snout in reflex.\n\nThe tartness spread over her tongue quickly, causing it to curl after she swallowed. \"Yuck. That one could have used more sun\u2026\"\n\nRyu purred quietly where he had coiled up after his self-imposed chores and watched as BlowingWind tossed more wood into the fire that he had started. His snout still stung a bit where she had slapped it for not warning her. For her part, she had tried to avoid his gaze, blushing lightly every time he managed to catch it.\n\n\"Hm, I wonder if she enjoys beating on me? Odd, how she seems to unconsciously slip into courtship procedures\u2026 I wonder\u2026\" his thoughts trailed off. BlowingWind was moving again, nibbling the fish that he had caught for her from the nearby stream, delicately taking the cooked flesh from the bones. He smiled indulgently as he thought, \"You're not as scary as you want to be, dear\u2026\"\n\nHe purred slightly and stretched slowly, uncoiling his length and nonchalantly depositing part of his tail around her. She twitched slightly at the unexpected movement and contact, and looked at him in surprise.\n\n\"Something wrong?\"\n\n\"No, something right.\" Ryu chuckled as he pinned her with his gaze. \"Stay here and be good. I'm going to patrol again.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him. \"Oh honestly, you've got the place reeking of your pheromones already. I don't think any hungry creatures are going to try snacking on me when I sleep. Stop rubbing up against the trees, I half expect one to smack you with a branch.\"\n\n\"That's right, I'm going to coil around you, so that they can't, because I don't feel like sharing you. You won't be able to get away from me either. First though, I'm going to have another look around and chase off any foxes or crows I see.\"\n\nRyu ignored the comment about the trees pointedly. Instead, he got up and walked slowly away, letting the scales of his tail drag against BlowingWind's skin where her shirt had ridden up at the back. Sensory warfare was proving to be fun, and by the expression on her face as he watched over his shoulder, this attack on her sensibilities had been totally unexpected. It was working to lull her into a calm and fairly submissive state though.\n\n\"You're just afraid that Akaisu is going to tempt me away. While at Ji-san's I read a little on Kitsune. Some of what they are known for is\u2026 interesting. I think I may be in just as much danger with a dragon though.\"\n\nApparently, his ploy hadn't worked well enough, to his great annoyance. Ryu could have easily done without the reminder of a possible rival in his mind, especially if the particular Kitsune was revealed to be unmated. BlowingWind returned to eating her meal quietly. She was seemingly content at being left where she was, judging by the slow pace of her heart and breathing as he listened to the sounds around him. Before leaving the camp itself, he checked the talismans that he had set up to keep out anyone but them.\n\nRyu smiled again, his fangs a menacing and yet comforting sight. BlowingWind directed her attention to the fire, hovering gently in between several mental states, lulled into a light trance by the lingering sensation of the earlier scale upon skin.\n\nThe night began to fall softly, and Ryu patrolled through the trees around the camp, spiraling out in ever widening circles as he checked yet again for any dangers. Falling into his instincts was a comfortable thing, and he rumbled deeply as with each round the section of the forest was found to be clear. They were being watched, it was true, but their watchers stayed out of his temporary territory for now. Lifting his nose to the breeze, he reveled in how his maiden's scent combined with the forest. Ryu lingered, doing his best to give BlowingWind a bit of time to herself. Curiosity and a dragon's need to brood over his treasure eventually overcame him, and he stole back to camp. Shifting to his human form, he hid behind a large rock where he could watch over her, and yet not be seen.\n\nThe foreign child gazed into the deepening blue sky from the forest around Fujisan, contemplating the mysteries hidden within the clear depths. Untold beings lived their lives there, seen only to those who had the eyes to see. The night-time winds ruffled her closely shorn auburn hair, fondly as a parent would to a cherished offspring. For this short span of time, she was genuine and unguarded, letting her heart flow freely and her troubles abate.\n\nRyu's breath was taken away at her unshrouded beauty. Watching BlowingWind's own open skies closely, to savor and preserve the moment in his memory. The traveler's tears ceased their relentless course down her face, as he watched from his hiding place behind the rock high-seat. The winds swirled around her slight form ever tighter, as if some spirit from long ago were trying to communicate a desperately needed secret.\n\nThe air within her form began to dance, with the essence that was drying her tears so tenderly. Producing an unearthly song of innumerable feeling, compressed into a ball for so long, she caused it to unravel and spin out into the rest of creation. BlowingWind began a dance from the heart, unaware that the mischievous, and often troublesome, spirit that insisted upon shadowing her was even there. She mimicked movements of hawks and cougars, and mingled them with those of the snake and fish. Meanwhile her song flowed from her like some Hawaiian lava flow of love and loss, loneliness and near despair.\n\nAt the last, Ryu glimpsed the shape of the spirit. He was eager to see who had been shrouding from his full influence the tender human, that he was going to claim both as his abode within the world of the humans and bride. Long dark hair plaited into twin braids held golden hawk feathers, while the skin of a male deer clothed the Spirit's body. As BlowingWind's song and dance came to an end to carry her prayer to what she had termed \"Great Spirit,\" the two Guides locked eyes over her collapsing form. BlowingWind fell into an exhausted sleep, curling up where she fell.\n\nRyu and SoaringHawk stood staring into each other's inner Fire for an untold span of time, each gauging the other's intentions toward the young one that they cared so much for. The ancient pine trees bowed closer to the ground in the wind that carried this foreign visitor, anxious to know what would happen next. Finally, the human spirit found the things he was looking for, and smiled at the dragon.\n\n\"Take care of my daughter. Through you, the blood of my Clan will be spiritually replenished. Touch her if she's not ready for you, and I will scatter your scales to the winds.\"\n\nSurprised to hear such arrogant seeming words from the mouth of a mere human spirit, Ryu was about to utter a retort. However, he fell silent as the child's father came forward and placed in the dragon-man's hands a stringed instrument brought from across the seas.\n\n\"Stay with her, though she will try to push you away for a long time. Be sure that she receives this again when she returns.\"\n\nSoaringHawk looked forlornly at his little girl, the guilt of not having been there to teach her the traditions, or to see her achievements physically, fully evident on his face. The wind rose abruptly to shroud the deceased's departure, driving dry needles from the forest floor into the nature spirit's eyes. When it died down again, he was gone.\n\nRyu inspected the object within his hands, noticing the contrast of the dark and light wood, and the supple curves that the traditional instruments of his own people did not possess. Shaking his head at the trouble he found himself bearing for one lone human when he could easily take any that he desired by force, he allowed a more natural form to house his being again, resuming his dragonic form.\n\nBlack and red could dimly be seen in the moonless night that had fallen as he wrapped about the little human to preserve her warmth. The price to be extracted for such a liberty was most likely going to be a bit painful when she returned to her body, but he would rather it be so than to see her fall ill yet again. In one large claw he still carefully cradled the guitar, fascinated by the warmth that seemed to exude from it the closer it came to the human's presence. Darkly burning eyes turned at last from the instrument to once again regard his BlowingWind.\n\nBlowingWind's body slept deeply, but it was a simple matter to see that she was occupied in some internal world. The glow of her soul was quite plainly seen inside of her, the stone that he saw her as, busily spinning and flashing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "BlowingWind opened her eyes onto a dimly lit room, smelling heavily of incense and jasmine. In the background, she could hear what sounded like a happy family having supper when not engaged in a seemingly insane amount of purring. Before she could figure out where she was, BlowingWind thought of her mother, and found the scene shifting. In a flash, she was standing in a familiar doorway.\n\nMarie knelt at a windowsill, where she had set up several angels, animal figurines that BlowingWind had liked, a few candles, and a cross that she had brought with her from Ireland. To BlowingWind's eyes, it appeared that her mother was praying. This time however, she was unable to hear anything, merely watch her mother's lips as they moved.\n\n\"Lesson for today\u2026 Faith\u2026\" Akaisu's voice whispered in her ear.\n\n\"Ah!\" BlowingWind spun on her heel, instinctively bringing her elbow to bear and aiming for the Kitsune's side.\n\nAkaisu calmly stepped back, BlowingWind's elbow breezing harmlessly past him, and he reached out to catch her as she fell over, having overbalanced herself and slipped on the rug she was standing on. His kimono and hakama barely moved in the breeze that she generated.\n\n\"Careful!\" He chuckled. \"Like it or not, I'm not a bad guy.\"\n\nBlowingWind glared as she stepped back from him.\n\n\"Sure you're not! Lots of people randomly push me into rivers inside my own head, and hold my stuff captive, and impersonate dead people.\"\n\n\"If you had been living properly in the moment, and in faith, you wouldn't have fallen for my disguises.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\nAkaisu was no longer looking at BlowingWind, his gaze resting instead on her mother. The lines on her face and the white in her hair had not escaped him.\n\n\"Your mother has gone through hard times, yes? Yet, instead of curling up and giving in, here she is on her knees, praying to her deity.\"\n\n\"Mom always told me to never depend on God to take care of me. She always said that the Bible said that he would help those who help themselves.\"\n\n\"Any Kami would find it easier to help those that were willing to work. I quite agree with the Creator-God of the Hebrew people on that choice. But the fact remains that your mother quite obviously does have faith, even if she does not admit it to you. She quite obviously fears for your safety, listening to her prayer, but in her red heart she knows that you are and will be fine.\"\n\nAkaisu continued studying Marie for a moment longer, then smiled.\n\n\"A woman I would love to meet. Well then, let's see if you can find your own faith. You don't even really need this mirror you are trying so hard to get back.\"\n\nThe Kitsune gestured and BlowingWind's surroundings disappeared, leaving the pair standing in cold dark. BlowingWind could no longer see Akaisu, but she could feel his presence, a strange pressure.\n\n\"What is this? What's going on now?\"\n\n\"This is your mind as it really is, without all of the mental trappings that give your thoughts form to your consciousness. I never understood why anyone would want a whole other world in their mind, but I understand it is common.\" Akaisu sighed. \"You need to find it in this. Find your faith, and you pass this test, but you still won't get the mirror yet.\"\n\nAkaisu had no problems seeing in the darkness of BlowingWind's mind, being well used to the darkness in his own mind. It wasn't even sight that he was truly using, more like his own inner awareness.\n\n\"How can I find anything if I can't see?\"\n\n\"You're training to be a link between the worlds, so you'll have to find a way. Ask your mate if you must.\"\n\n\"He's not my mate.\"\n\n\"By standards I grew up in, he is. But that's beside the point, you aren't focusing on your task. Find some faith.\"\n\nBlowingWind growled, something roiling inside of her, a hot energy. She tried to recall the physical feelings that came with anger, but they did not come. The body she used in her own mind had dissolved into nothingness, and she was only presence. Everything was only presence.\n\n\"Get out of my head!\"\n\nBlowingWind tried to shove him out, a heavy icy feeling filling the center of her being now. Without hands, it seemed impossible though. The presence of the fox remained, quietly waiting and observing. The harder she fought against his cool and collected presence, against the very patience that seemed to exude from him, the more oddly alone that she felt.\n\n\"Ryu! You're supposed to protect me! I'm afraid!\"\n\nIn the Spirit World, Ryu observed as BlowingWind's sleep seemed to be disturbed, and felt her insistent tug on his mind. Nothing could assail his treasure on this outer level, so simple logic said that whatever was bothering her was inside of herself.\n\n\"Again? Is her mental shielding Swiss cheese?\"\n\nLetting his eyes slide shut where he had been coiled around and brooding over his prize, he let his consciousness slip into hers. Actually, it was more like pounding rice into mochi, a laborious process as her fear had begun to push at everything around her. Ryu could see both beneficial and harmful chi forcibly expelled and repelled on his way in, could feel as it whizzed by his steady pushing, although he could still feel insistent pulls on him as well. Finally, he was immersed in the void and swam through it, as he often swam through his own consciousness.\n\nRyu's keen senses picked up something, a male presence \"speaking\" to BlowingWind.\n\n\"Find some faith\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, not him again\u2026\" Ryu growled to himself, remembering the way that the Kitsune had last looked at the young woman.\n\n\"I do have faith, I have faith that you're a thieving jerk!\"\n\nRyu felt a wince travel through his environment, though with the blending he couldn't be sure that it was BlowingWind or Akaisu. Logic told him it was Akaisu, as he fully agreed with the statement, and had a few other choice thoughts of his own. Sorrow washed over him, also not his own, a cold undercurrent of regret and long-suffering patience. There was a sense of an indrawn breath.\n\n\"Perhaps, perhaps not. I am thought of as many things. What is the doubt that obscures everything though?\"\n\nBlowingWind had felt the arrival of Ryu, bolstered by his warm and protective presence that threaded through her cold airiness. She was aware of Akaisu's reaction, but only distantly, her anger, fear, and shame seething in a collective stew that dampened her ability to be connected. The others could feel her, but for her to perceive them was becoming increasingly more difficult.\n\n\"I don't know!\"\n\nBlowingWind lashed out, though she was unaware of any limbs, desperately trying to push away what was causing her this pain. If tears would have been possible, they would have come, but here in her deep core there was nothing, only gnawing emptiness that devoured even fear.\n\n\"Leave her alone fox!\"\n\nRyu threw his presence around the guttering spark that he could see now. The woman's despair now blazing of its own accord, a dark flame that lit the dark itself, a strange paradox that could be so true when dealing with matters of heart and spirit. With that flame, things began to take half-shapes, the unfinished forms that usually are found in nightmares.\n\n\"Not until my job is through dragon. And only she can end it.\"\n\n\"It's all my fault. I don't know what I'm doing, I just keep pushing, and I don't know why. I can't stop, I have to keep going forward\u2026 and I don't know what I'm trying to do\u2026\" BlowingWind ground out.\n\nThe dark light grew brighter, indigo shadows danced around them in the mental realm, threatening inner demons feeding on her uncertainty and ready to pounce. Akaisu coolly regarded the forms, briefly noting that not all of them actually belonged to the young woman. Countless fears and sorrows seemed to follow her family line. It was no wonder that Lady Amaterasu was so nervous about the young woman."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Outside, in the realm of the spirits, Kori and Karasu sat in meditation beneath one of the pines, listening with their spirits to what was happening and watching over the still body of their Kitsune compatriot. Akaisu's fox form lay curled up, as if sleeping, barely breathing, as his consciousness was elsewhere.\n\n\"He coddles the girl.\"\n\n\"Kori, do you think that maybe he has designs on her?\"\n\n\"Akaisu? Designs? If he takes after his grandparents or his father as much as we think, then no. Frankly, I don't think he even likes girls. I've not seen him display any interest.\"\n\nThe two Tengu silently watched the tiny chest rise and fall, one small breath every so often. They could feel the battle raging in BlowingWind's mind, the affair striking a sympathetic chord with the Kitsune whose body they were watching over.\n\nAkaisu frowned, knowing that his compatriots had been talking about him. She was so close to the key though, it was within her grasp. All she had to do was to realize it, to own the strength she had been using.\n\n\"All I can do is what my family has always done, to go on. I don't know my purpose, I don't know what I'm being called to. I just know that I have to go on. And I will go on. I will take back what is mine\u2026 I will fix\u2026 whatever I am supposed to fix, find what I am supposed to...\"\"\n\nThe indigo flame burned brighter, blindingly so, and a turquoise flame soon joined it around her, finally met by white. It was no longer possible to look at her, and everything around them was obliterated once more, this time hidden by the light.\n\nThe fox opened his eyes, inside his own body once more. His chuckles startled his friends.\n\n\"She passed. Almost done. Then we can start figuring out what's so important about her.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Mirror to the Past",
                "text": "Ryu had not slept that night, not as if he had really needed to anyway. Their experience with the Kitsune in BlowingWind's dreamscape had been sobering, all thoughts of romance abandoned as she had finished out the night. The edges of her shell had hardened, and once she had cast both him and Akaisu out he had not been able to get in again. In a way, he felt it was good, and yet she had called him in.\n\n\"What a confusing woman.\"\n\nThe more time passed, the more he realized that what he had thought to be a simple thing was not simple at all, only a subset of some greater design that escaped him. Strange names fell from her lips as she lay in his coils, and half formed conversations whispered like wind through leaves. If he strained just a little more, he felt as if he could hear who or what she was talking to.\n\nAt last, the night ended, and the dawn came. As the light came to the sky, BlowingWind sighed and snuggled in his coils, relaxing finally. He really couldn't remember a time that he felt more useless. Frowning, he inspected again the stringed instrument that he had laid down nearby.\n\n\"This is just too blasted weird.\"\n\nA tiny snuffling came from under one of the rocks, and a sleepy Snapdragon scuttled out to drape herself on a rock near the fire, absorbing the last of the heat from the nearly dead coals. With as close as she was to the ashes, she may as well have been in them. Ryu chuckled as his little sister glared at him with a sleepy eye.\n\n\"I'm cold brother. I think I may go home if the winter is going to be colder than this. It's nice and warm where your magma is, and there's a nice silver vein that's very comfortable to inhabit.\"\n\n\"Alright. Winters up here get to be very cold. White snow drapes the ground, and sometimes it's cold enough for rock to crack.\"\n\nRyu kept his voice quiet and noncommittal as the human continued to sleep. It was difficult to keep the relief out of his voice, but he managed. Even though she still wasn't well known to him, Snapdragon was his sister, and it was instinctive that he would want her far below the ground, where it was safe for her to be as she wished, and materialize or not as she wished.\n\n\"The village is nearby, Wind. You're almost here!\"\n\nObsidian's voice floated through BlowingWind's mind as she swam closer to consciousness, becoming dimly aware of coils wound around her, warm and comforting. The chest she was cradled against was both soft and yet hard, the hide supple and leathery. Without thinking, she rubbed her face into it, breathing deeply as she wrapped her arms around what held her so tenderly. Leathery underbelly gave way to scale, but the presence felt so much like Obsidian's had that she didn't notice the difference in form.\n\nRyu looked away from his sister and back at BlowingWind in surprise at the intimate nuzzling, and his blush would have been highly visible if his scales were not black. Instead, what had appeared to be merely fur in the part of his mane around his head brightened and stood up slightly, separating itself from the true fur, and spreading a bit as it displayed. The human saw none of it, and might not have understood what it meant anyway, still nuzzling and snuggling, sighing again.\n\n\"I miss you so much\u2026\"\n\nSomething inside of him stirred and reached to comfort her, answering her, his soul speaking to hers at a deep level that he just couldn't access. The response that she gave surprised him even more, as she purred softly. It wasn't a true purr, which would be produced deep within the throat. It was more with the tongue than anything, but it was recognizable.\n\nSnapdragon watched from her rock, used to such things. Her parents were often found coiled around each other, nuzzling and purring, sometimes growling, whenever Fujiyama wasn't involved with the paperwork that resulted from the views that some people had of how the spiritual world worked.\n\nBlowingWind sighed again, as Obsidian's voice called to her again. \"Wind, you have to wake up. I know that you're comfortable in our coils, but you have a job to do mother.\"\n\n\"I don't understand\u2026 These are your coils\u2026\"\n\n\"You'll understand someday\u2026 For now, you need to wake up. Father is getting a little uncomfortable, and you have to get me yet. The mirror\u2026\"\n\n\"The mirror\u2026 There's something in the mirror\u2026\"\n\nRyu listened to BlowingWind's whispered conversation, stroking the back of her head with his tail's tip now, able to feel the conversation, but unable to hear it. It confused him, how it felt like he was having the conversation, although he was aware that it was not himself.\n\n\"I have to fix this\u2026 It's too weird.\"\n\nBlowingWind opened her eyes slowly, inhaling deeply and moaning slightly as she stretched then froze.\n\n\"You perverted scaly Coyote! Remove your coils from me this instant, or I will stuff my medicine pouch with the whiskers from your beard and nose!\"\n\nHer tension was obvious, and in response to it, Snapdragon decided to go invisible. Ryu jerked his head back, unaware previously that his snout had been inching slowly toward her face as he studied her, his display plumage wilting and returning to its normal color and position as he defended his whiskers.\n\n\"Why? What did I do? I was just keeping you warm, then you started sleep talking!\"\n\nThe poor dragon quickly uncoiled and covered his nose with a paw in further defense as BlowingWind shakily tried to compose herself. Her cheeks crimson, she hastily turned around.\n\n\"There's a village nearby, that's where Akaisu and my mirror are\u2026 We have to go now.\"\n\nWithout another word, she started off, following her intuition as to what direction to take, thoughts still muddled by the remembered comforting sensation of Ryu's form and scent.\n\n\"What in the worlds was THAT?\" Ryu muttered as he buried the fire in sand, also feeling the direction that needed to be followed. \"And why am I feeling it now too?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Akaisu waited patiently, quite certain that the grouchy young woman was going to find him just fine. Truthfully, he'd be glad to be rid of the mirror, his dreams had been strange since he'd come into possession of the blasted thing. The sounds of a woman's scream and the roar of a dragon, the heat of flame and feelings that he associated with battle had filled them. He was able to step back from them, but it still annoyed the Kitsune that his dreams had not been normal.\n\nThe village he was currently in was not his home village, but it was still quite nice. Here, the people were mostly human, living in the spiritual world, lost to history long ago and none the wiser for it. Sometimes, things just happened that way, places slowly slipping from one world to the next. In some ways, it reminded him of how the human village that his grandmother had grown up in sounded.\n\nHe sipped his tea after finishing his breakfast and felt the cool breeze. A few days ago, he had met a very strange occurrence of his food disappearing off of his plate before his eyes. As if that wasn't enough, an unseen something had consumed it before his eyes, the food disappearing bite by bite into oblivion. Teacups had been disappearing too, and reappearing later\u2026 minus the tea of course. Other completely random things, like pink bows appearing on the woodcutter if he had been rude to a lady, whether accidentally or on purpose, had also been happening. Such strange happenings were what had called him to this particular hidden village, as a friend that lived here wanted to use his observational abilities to figure out what was going on.\n\nAfter their several days at the village, Akaisu still had no idea what was going on. Whatever was doing everything, it was just something that he couldn't see. Not for the first time he wished that he'd gotten formal priest training, but as the shrine in his home village had been well filled with personnel there had been no need for him to enter the priesthood. Consequently, he only knew the simple things that Amehana taught all her children and grandchildren. The ability to see this particular oddity apparently wasn't one of them. Whatever it was, it was certainly turning the world upside down though.\n\nA sigh off to his left meant that Karasu had grown tired of the town. Neither of the Tengu had really understood just how being completely away from BlowingWind served as a test. However, the last ones that they had helped test had been prideful men and women. BlowingWind wasn't exactly consumed by pride, and that, of course, changed the rules of the game.\n\nKori grumbled as another rice pocket disappeared from his plate, along with his serving of pickled ginger. More accurately, the food just seemed to float away, dangling tantalizing just out of reach. If the Tengu teleported in an attempt to reclaim it from the other side, the three of them knew it would simply vanish, as quickly as if someone stuffed it into a large mouth. They'd seen it happen before, yesterday in fact.\n\nKori had been a big target for whatever the mysterious thing was, much to Akaisu's concealed amusement. Whatever it was, it had good taste in its targets for pranks. Of course, Akaisu also couldn't boast that it had left him alone either. Yesterday, his chopsticks had mysteriously turned bright pink after he had accidentally insulted a woman outside.\n\nAkaisu was still lost on exactly how the color change or the insult happened, but he wasn't perfect either, and had terrible luck with females. Not for the first time, he wondered exactly how his grandfather had attracted his grandmother's eyes, much less managed to talk to her without making himself seem like an idiot. He also wondered how his grandmother had not driven his grandfather insane.\n\nAkaisu closed his eyes, drifting into a light trance as he absorbed the feel of the wind on his skin and the scent of autumn. His ears, though currently appearing human, were still as sharp as always, and he listened to the sounds around him. The presence of the villagers as they went about their business flowed gently, working well together as they went about their usual tasks. Beyond the bounds of this village, so very like his home village and yet so unlike it, other familiar presences drew steadily closer. The mirror, carefully kept with him at all times, surged and hummed where it lay, growing stronger again as the dragon and his mate approached.\n\n\"This will be an interesting day, my friends\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Hours had now passed, and the sun was overhead once again. BlowingWind emerged from the trees, viewing simple rice fields and a modest village, the people whole-heartedly busy with their pursuits. A simple wooden Torii rose as a symbolic gate into the village, weathered wood met by no fence, either physical or magical. She was about to walk closer, when she was grabbed from behind and pulled back into the forest.\n\n\"Not yet!\" Ryu hissed into her ear. \"Not dressed like that. I know this village, this is Anjuumura. This village of humans cultivated right mind until they faded from the human world into the spirit world. They still give birth and die, and like every village a few undesirables are here, but for them, they are unaware of what has changed in the world you and I know.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked over Ryu's clothes when she was released, noting that he was in kimono once again, though of a less costly material than she had seen him wear before.\n\n\"How do you do that?\"\n\n\"What? My clothes? This is just part of me, simpler that way. A little conscious manipulation and it changes. You're another matter though\u2026 I should have made you wear some clothes from my things from the start\u2026\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"You need to change your clothes\u2026\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Do you want to give those people collective heart attacks with the way that you're dressed? There's some bushes back there, I swear I won't look\u2026 just please\u2026\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\nRyu shoved a bundle of cloth into her hands and nudged her toward the mentioned bushes, turning his face away as promised. Confused, BlowingWind continued to the bushes that had been indicated, and changed into what he had provided. The simple garb of a travelling Miko to the eye, it felt odd against her skin, as if it were alive.\n\nOddly enough, that alone was soothing.\n\nStill behind the bushes, she indulged herself a small sigh, closed her eyes for a moment, and mused silently to herself. \"It's almost as if I've been covered in a cloak of protection or something. I don't feel quite so raw\u2026\"\n\nSteeling herself again, summoning the usual mask that she hid behind when in the world, she stepped back out from the bushes and clutched her old clothes in a bundle. As promised, he still wasn't looking, but was very silently studying the leaves on a nearby tree.\n\n\"Ok Ryu\u2026 I'm done\u2026\"\n\nHe turned around quietly and smiled, taking in the details. When she was close enough, he took her bundle of clothes from her and stashed them in his obi, resisting the look of utter disbelief on BlowingWind's face at the disappearance. Well, more accurately, he almost resisted it. He winked at her when the spluttering didn't stop.\n\n\"Not today my dear.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed. \"Ok, you're explaining how that works later though. We can go get my mirror back now, right?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nBlowingWind started for the village again, Ryu walking quietly at her side. She noticed that his eyes darted around every once in a while, as if he were trying to keep tabs on something that was with them. The rice fields were dry, villagers out busily harvesting the grasses and tying them into sheaves, standing them to dry. When they were seen, the busy villagers waved and bowed in welcome and returned to their work as the visitors passed them by.\n\nBlowingWind watched curiously as they passed by, nodding back. Women visiting and dressed as Miko seemed to be something that happened often, with how they returned to work. Then again, winter was approaching steadily, perhaps it was simply important to bring in the crop. Whatever the case, Ryu led her directly to a house that was clearly meant as an inn for travelers.\n\nHunger drove them swiftly inside after removing their footwear. The smells of food and comfort were a good lure, and it wasn't long before the innkeeper had given them both a bowl of hot noodles and they were comfortably seated.\n\nThe noodles disappeared in silence; both Ryu and BlowingWind trying to find the source of the strange pulls that harried their souls. Ryu's eyes darted around the room from time to time, following the progress of his sister as she invisibly explored.\n\n\"It's so close Ryu\u2026\"\n\nHe nodded to BlowingWind.\n\n\"I know, I feel it too, though I don't know why\u2026\"\n\nSnapdragon slipped back out of the inn, following her nose along the path that Akaisu had taken. Following through the village, her transit was cut short when she literally ran into a darksome young man busily poking at what looked like a hole.\n\n\"What are you doing, Sir?\" Snapdragon tilted her head and looked up at him, watching as he looked down at her in surprise.\n\n\"You can see me?\"\n\n\"Of course I can. You're out in the open. If you're trying to hide, you aren't doing a very good job.\"\n\n\"Usually only people that I want to have see me, are able to see me\u2026\" The strange young man, clad in a long dark coat and a hat that would be quite at home on an Irishman, returned to poking his arm in the hole and muttering. \"I'm trying to get home, it's not working very well though.\"\n\nSnapdragon's eyes widened when he poked his arm in further, and it just came right back out toward his face. \"Neat trick. I'm Snapdragon, what's your name, Sir?\"\n\nThe man winced, apparently not being very fond of being called a Sir. \"Shadow. And this would be a neater trick if the hole would open and let me through. I've been trying different places for a week or so now, and no luck.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Ryu's eye paused at the door while Snapdragon slipped out, and he let his consciousness expand further into the area around him. It wasn't his favorite method of exploring, as it was so easy to let himself become one with the land and give up the elements that comprised his body. However, there were times that it was effective.\n\nHis sister, still invisible since she wasn't giving up her dragon form, was chattering quietly to apparently nothing next to a hole in the ground. Expanding further, he found the Kitsune that they had been looking for, currently sitting quietly outside. With him were the two Tengu that had once chased him through the forest.\n\n\"Interesting\u2026\"\n\n\"Hm?\" BlowingWind's gaze had gone into her empty bowl, as she was trying to feel with her inner senses. Directing her gaze back toward him, the dreamy look had not left her eyes.\n\nRyu regarded her carefully before answering. \"Let's go for a walk. I have a general idea where to go.\"\n\nShe nodded her consent and stood, trailing after him and still firmly in the grip of the mirror's calls. Heavy and light at once, her body felt as if it were not her own, as if something inside her very blood was trying to wake up as another part of herself tried to keep it in check. Ryu, unseeing of Shadow, walked right past his sister, towards Akaisu.\n\nBlowingWind paused seeing, the young man standing up and sighing in frustration. \"Odd\u2026 I didn't see him a moment ago\u2026\"\n\nA strange whispering could be felt in the back of her mind, not-quite remembered lyrics whisping past her consciousness, like mist through mountain valleys. Ryu continued on toward the trio, that she knew had her mirror. She could see them all clearly, the three in human guise and watching seemingly without interest as her companion approached them, and watching her as well. And yet, as strange as it was, it seemed that it was imperative to stop and talk to the young man now regarding her with surprise and a small amount of possible irritation.\n\n\"You mean you can see me too?\"\n\n\"Of course I can. Why wouldn't I?\"\n\nSitting in the shadows against a building, the lone town drunk blearily looked at BlowingWind. \"Hey woman, I wouldn't be talking to yourself, they'll think you as crazy as they think I am, just because I've seen reality and know that we don't live in the real world. Now, what say a pretty thing like you comes and sits with me. I'll even let you pour\u2026\"\n\nThe jug of sake beside him exploded, thoroughly saturating the whole area where the inebriated villager had been sitting.\n\n\"Such manners.\" Shadow muttered.\n\nBlowingWind raised her eyebrow again at the young man she had been talking to, then looked at the drunk before looking further around. Life continued about them, although none of the others of the village seemed to pay the slightest attention to Shadow. They avoided BlowingWind when passing by, but Shadow was able to take a bit of food that one lady was carrying past them.\n\n\"That's strange\u2026\" BlowingWind thought, rubbing her eyes and having been certain that she had seen Shadow reach through the woman and then sweep his hand around her.\n\nAs she had been puzzling over the oddity, Ryu had begun speaking with Akaisu. The discourse was quiet enough, but it came with a zing in the air that made her hackles rise. BlowingWind looked over with concern and moved to join them, worrying her lower lip the rest of the way. Snapdragon watched the human, then looked up at Shadow.\n\n\"She's my brother's. The man that my brother is arguing politely with took BlowingWind's mirror, and she needs it. It's magic of some sort.\"\n\n\"Oh? How'd he get it?\" Shadow watched the proceedings with slight interest. BlowingWind's concern seemed to be turning to indignation of some sort, and blossoming rather quickly as she stalked the last few steps to her target. Sighing, the young man prepared himself, thinking, \"it would seem yet another thing to balance.\"\n\n\"Ok Akaisu\u2026 I'm here. I want my mirror back. You're cute, but you aren't cute enough to want you in my dreams. STAY OUT.\" BlowingWind folded her arms and scowled, further underscoring how she felt.\n\nKarasu had been sitting quietly and merely watching the negotiations with Kori, sipping a bit of water. That water almost sprayed out his nose at BlowingWind's quite candid verbal admission that her dreams had been invaded lately. Hearing what he already knew only served to irritate Ryu though. The possible other meanings were completely lost on Snapdragon though.\n\nShadow shook his head and materialized a bowl of popcorn and pitcher of freshly melted butter, and poured the liquid over the treat. Kori rubbed his eyes as he saw the bowl and pitcher not only pop into existence, but the butter pouring itself and absolutely nothing supporting them.\n\n\"Popcorn? This program looks interesting.\" Shadow held the bowl down where Snapdragon could reach.\n\nSnapdragon sniffed dubiously, not having encountered the dish before, then started eating happily and watching the show after she decided it was indeed food.\n\nKori muttered to himself and rubbed his eyes again, hearing a little girl's voice explaining to another voice, but unable to see either of the speakers. \"I knew this fox was going to drive me insane.\"\n\n\"It fell out of her pack while Aniki was taking her to the city for 'med-i-cal' help\u2026 He used some magic to call it out though\u2026 He's been harassing them since.\" Snapdragon looked up at the tall man, unfazed by the trench coat Shadow wore and prattling on contentedly.\n\n\"I see\u2026\" Shadow trailed off and stroked the small goatee on his chin as he looked over the round lenses of his dark sunglasses.\n\nAkaisu held his position bravely, despite the now irate young woman seething and towering over him. With Ryu there, however, his pride was not going to allow him to simply hand the woman the mirror. Against his better judgment, he found himself pulling a vial of water from his robe and offering it to the rather draconic and absolutely terrifying woman.\n\n\"I think you should take a drink of water, it will help you calm down. I can't give it to you if you are about to hit me\u2026\" The Kitsune smiled at her, as non-threateningly as he could and hoped that no one thought that he was trying to poison BlowingWind.\n\nShadow raised his eyebrow and pointed, and suddenly the water in the vial turned pink and fizzed, popping the cork and covering his entire front. In less than a second the now sticky substance had grown hair, and Akaisu was wearing cotton candy fur. Snapdragon continued to eat popcorn while the two Tengu watched the fight and tried to decide whether to get involved or not, since now pink sticky stuff seemed to be popping up and neither was particularly fond of wearing the color.\n\n\"Forget the 'water,' my temper will calm when I have him back fox-boy. Give Obsidian back!\"\n\n\"Hey! You just tried to poison my mate!\" Ryu was now ready to jump on Akaisu and pummel him into the ground, despite the fact that the poison smelled more like colored sugar water, and how it had obviously been a complete surprise to Akaisu. At this point, any excuse to bring the fox pain was enough.\n\nShadow had seen enough, the whole problem was irritating to him, and there was now more than enough chaos. He was stuck, without the ability to go home, and somewhere that he had very little idea of exactly where he was. He had the terrible feeling that there was a reason that he was stuck, there was a bunch of people bickering about a blasted mirror, and they refused to find any humor in the situation. Shadow simply stepped from the shadow of the nearby building, which happened to be covering him, and into Akaisu's shadow and thusly behind him.\n\n\"Heads up!\"\n\nGrinning, Shadow reached through Akaisu as easily as a ghost, plucked up the bag that obviously had the mirror in it, and tossed it to BlowingWind. Seeing the bag, and not having time to react to the sudden \"appearance\" of the young man that had at one time been behind her, BlowingWind stepped forward to catch it.\n\nRyu had also seen the bag suddenly take flight, although he, unlike nearly everyone else in the village, could now see the force that had launched it. Or more accurately, part of it. As he had begun to throw himself at Akaisu he had seen a pale hand poke through the annoying fox spirit and fling the bag that had been at his waist. \"What the-\"\n\nRyu brought himself up short, his new target the \"magically\" flying bag. The dragon and BlowingWind caught the mirror at the same time, but their collision sent them toppling into Akaisu. The fox was knocked to the ground under the two, and as BlowingWind gasped both in surprise, and because of Ryu's weight landing on top of her, the trio vanished.\n\nUnnoticed, the force of the fall had tossed the pouch encasing the mirror in another direction, landing unseen in one of the many pockets of Shadow's trenchcoat.\n\nSnapdragon padded over to where the Kitsune, the human, and her brother had been and sniffed around. \"Where'd they go? How did you do all that? I can't go from one place to another like that!\"\n\nShadow looked down at her. \"I'm a shadow walker, so I can move from one shadow to another. It was easy to reach through because I'm outside of reality, so it only applies when I want it to. If I want to change reality, it changes. Quite useful sometimes. Now, as to where they went, I have absolutely no idea. I'm not one of those crazy eight that weave the web or the eight that pull it apart.\"\n\nKarasu, unheeding of the conversation between Snapdragon and Shadow, turned to Kori. \"I told you he had designs on her.\"\n\n\"Are you sure that was his doing? I'm quite sure that if he wanted a chance to court her, he'd ask and not do whatever that was that just happened.\"\n\n\"Well, he did steal her mirror, and he has been very soft on her during this whole testing process. If we were in charge, she'd be laying curled up screaming in the forest now. I would say that he has just been trying to get her to leave the dragon and think it was her decision, planting little things in such a way that she's not aware of it.\"\n\n\"You think he's trying to out fox a dragon\u2026 If Akaisu really wanted her, I still think he would have her by now. You're getting old and your brain is getting feeble.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Shadow shook his head at the oddness that he had just caused, and the oddness of the conversation now behind him, and tried to open a different portal. Before even attempting this though, he exchanged the hats that the two Tengu were wearing in repayment for having helped harass a woman that had obviously gotten to the end of her rope. This time, the portal worked, or so he thought, and he left behind two very annoyed Tengu, one wearing a plain white head kerchief, and the other wearing a sober black hat that better suited an Amish farmer on Sunday.\n\n\"This had better work\u2026\" Shadow muttered as he reached experimentally through the hole. \"And those women must be bored again.\"\n\nFinding the portal working, he stepped through the shadows, mirror still in his pocket."
            },
            {
                "title": "Trace the Pattern",
                "text": "Smoke enveloped the trio as they fell together, a tunnel forming in the darkness around them. Wails of loss, mingled with cries of elation, and snippets of song to form the din of an eternal now. The occasional glimpse of the everyday lives of countless men and women flashed by. Red hair and blue eyes were near constants against pale freckled flesh. BlowingWind's startled cry had cut off when she recognized her mother, and who was possibly her mother's sister. The two were having a fight, before the flashes progressed further back in time. A common thread, connected to BlowingWind, pulled the three along, as if she were a needle pulling thread through the fabric of time, space, and reality.\n\n\"What's going on? I saw my mom as a teen!\"\n\nThe fall was not forever though, and all too soon for anyone, or perhaps not soon enough, the ride ended and they were deposited in a tangled pile on the sweetly scented green grass.\n\n\"Gomen nasai Wind-chan\u2026 Get off of me fox!\" Ryu ground out as he levered himself off of the woman below him, who had arrived first despite how they had started falling.\n\n\"Gladly, I hardly want to be on your back, and I don't think the lady appreciates having broken our fall\u2026\" Akaisu nimbly scrambled off of the sandwiched dragon and extended a hand to help the breathless BlowingWind. Smiling gently, he addressed her, \"Here, please let me help you up.\"\n\nWhen she nodded and took his hand, Akaisu suppressed a smirk and helped her up, consequently helping to knock Ryu off balance. Ryu raised his eyebrow once regaining his balance and looked around, suppressing his jealousy in order to focus on the more important issues.\n\n\"Well, we obviously aren't in Japan any more, and by what we glimpsed during that strange transit we probably aren't even in our own time anymore.\"\n\n\"You mean that we have traveled both space and time Ryu? That's just not possible. I think you hit your head.\" BlowingWind looked around, rubbing her own, \"or maybe I hit mine too hard and this is a hallucination.\"\n\nAkaisu shook his head. \"No, I think he's right. I don't know how it happened, but whatever tossed the bag at you may have somehow either opened a portal or triggered a purpose the mirror can be used for of which you were unaware\u2026\"\n\n\"It was someone in a black coat, that's what distracted me enough to not catch the bag.\" Ryu frowned at Akaisu. \"He reached right through you.\"\n\n\"It's weird, I feel like I know this place\u2026 somehow deep in my bones\u2026\" BlowingWind frowned, chewing her lip and peering down from their landing site. \"It's creepy.\"\n\nThe three continued to look around, noting the greenness of the grass as it rolled over the hills, groves of oak and yew sprinkled in the folds, or standing out in the fields. Farther out, past the valley, the terrain could be seen to be more mountainous. Great crags stretched for the sky and fanned open partially hidden caves. In the valley, nestled by a slowly winding river, a curious medley of buildings in all sizes sprang up to greet the eye, at first glimpse nothing but an ordinary village.\n\n\"Guys\u2026 are you seeing what I'm seeing?\"\n\nBlowingWind pointed at the village from their vantage on the hillside. Focusing in more on the village itself, the sinuous forms of dragons could be seen going about their business, interspersed with more humanoid shapes and the odd human that had \"something\" about them.\n\n\"It's a dragon village from the look\u2026 Let's go and find out exactly where we are, maybe then we can figure out how to get back\u2026\" Ryu murmured.\n\nBlowingWind and Akaisu nodded, neither having any better ideas.\n\n\"You being a full dragon, it would probably be best if you led the group into town. Obaa-san used to tell me stories that she had been told about dragon-only settlements, not just the Sea King's palace. Some were not open to those of non-dragon blood\u2026\" Akaisu flicked his tail as he spoke.\n\nRyu nodded. \"I know the stories well, the city that I am from is one of those, and I intended to lead the way, since protocol would demand it if I were taking anyone into my domain or my father's domain, or visiting that of another. I hope that their rules are at least similar to the ones that I know.\"\n\nRyu changed into his dragon form as he spoke, although his form was slightly different than that of many of the dragons that they could see. The other dragons were of a thicker, sturdier looking build, some having large wings, either feathered or leathered. Tasting the air and adding everything together that he knew of the world in his mind, Ryu was fairly certain that they were somewhere in the Western world.\n\n\"I half expect to be in Ireland\u2026\" BlowingWind murmured. \"That would be my luck.\"\n\nRyu led the way down into the valley and toward the village, his senses picking up on even the slightest of movements. He was followed by BlowingWind and Akaisu wading through tall grass after him, or more accurately partially to the side of him but ahead of his tail. Several unseen beings watched their progress, but none more avidly than the mysterious forces that had ensured that the dragon and woman had been pulled through the fabric of time. Shadowy and indistinct, they held their breath until the little human with her escorts was far enough away from her entry stitch, then returned to the shadowy realm that they truly occupied.\n\nThe group paused at a sign that was found at what they assumed were considered the town limits, partially down the hill. It was weathered, and a bit charred in places, as if it had seen many battles in the area. There were a few gouges in the wood that made it seem like several young dragons had tried to make off with it from time to time.\n\n\"Beware, here be dragons\u2026\" Ryu shook his head as he read the sign aloud. \"Someone had a sense of humor\u2026\"\n\nA small yellow dragon was sunning herself on top of the sign, a hatchling that looked more like a lizard.\n\n\"Not really, the human that put this sign here is a rather mean sort. He thinks that our kind is out to get his kind. Why, I don't know. I suppose maybe because some dragons raid, but then again so do they. This is a peaceful village, for the most part.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026 Thank you little one\u2026\"\n\nThe little dragon returned to sunning itself, stretching along the top of the sign in a feline fashion, and draping her tiny leathery wings to gather the most light that she could. The hatchling was obviously very tired, though the smirk on its face bespoke of some secret mischief.\n\nRyu started walking again, and the little dragon winked at BlowingWind as she passed by. Both of the males accompanying her looked relaxed, at the first glance, and yet by the way they held themselves it could just barely be seen that they were also on the alert. The difference in the way they walked was quite noticeable, when she mentally compared it to the way the people that she grew up with walked when cautious. The dragon and fox were calm, if it had been any of her friends, or perhaps even her lake spirit, nervousness would be seeping out of their very pores."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "From the top of another hill, a pair of blue eyes followed the trio from beneath bright blonde hair, carefully dulled with dust, a smile beginning to curve his lips for the first time in months.\n\n\"There she is, men. I knew that woman would be back this way. Drake certainly is foolish to have left Maeve with only two men. We can take her easily and have the weapons smith all to ourselves.\"\n\n\"Corbin, if they're going to the dragon village, how do we know her minders aren't dragonkin, at the least? They dress strangely, and I've only seen the Priestesses of the Forge in green. She's in red and white\u2026\"\n\nThe blue eyes turned to look at the green eyes of his companion, the auburn hair and tanned skin a familiar sight from their roving. With a smirk Corbin replied.\n\n\"A plan to throw me off, no doubt, Garryth. I'm sure that news of my forays into Rhian has reached the ears of the Priestesses. After all, Drake himself comes here often to speak with his friend Obsidian.\"\n\nGarryth studied his clansman, noting how the wild glint in his eyes had flared once again. How Corbin had met such a creature as Maeve, he was not certain, though it seemed to have something to do with the weapons the Priestess smithed.\n\n\"I still don't understand why you'd want someone as fey-touched as that woman. Her clan is only rumored of, in this land. For all you know, she could be a child of the goddess herself, and therefore indeed one of the fey.\"\n\n\"Oh, but that's why I want her, and I will indeed have her\u2026 such beauty and strength is wasted on the demonic dragons. She bested me by herself, in the last raid that any humans had been in that village below us, with the unfinished sword that Herman had been helping her with. Her blades meld the blessings of Brigid and the magic of dragons, nearly unstoppable.\"\n\nThe more the man thought about his objective, the wilder the light in his eyes grew, and a cruel scowl spread over his face. Garryth shuddered as Corbin eyed the retreating form of \"Maeve.\"\n\n\"She doesn't look like much to me, I prefer MY women with a bit more meat on their bones. Far sturdier for the housework and childbearing, and much more comfortable to hold\u2026 But if you say so\u2026\"\n\nTheir companion had no chance to say more, cutting off the tail of his statement with a loud scream, as myriad sharp objects lanced into his flesh and he was drawn backwards. Garryth and Corbin rolled over to find out what had happened, and were just in time to see the embodiment of night, Lord Obsidian of Rhian, toss the hapless victim in the air and devour him in one gulp. The fearsome black fixed his glowing purple eyes on the remaining two human shaped snacks while a smile curled his lips.\n\n\"Plotting another raid on an innocent village, are you? It's not happening while I'm around to help protect the young ones.\"\n\nUnderstandably, Garryth and Corbin fled. Sadly, it is the sane that seem to fall first in battle, and so it was that Garryth was the retreating figure who was snatched up to join the lesser clansman. Satiated, Obsidian watched the remaining human run in the direction of some of the less used mines. The smell exuding from the creature passing as human was a most unappetizing scent, the result of a blackened heart. Licking his chops, the dragon shook his head and began to waddle to the town.\n\n\"Invading scouting parties, my favorite snack. Tired of them trying to pick on little ones. I'm ready for my nap now\u2026 Five to one Maeve is back from wherever she went off to this time. Drake has his hands full with that one\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "The woman glided to the base of the mountains, her green skirts swirling around her legs as they paced to one of the mine entrances. Her normally voluminous sleeves were now closely bound to her arms with copper armlets and bracelets, matching the copper and gold breastplate that shone warmly, as if with its own inner light. As she normally did when mining the ores that she worked into armor and blade, in the name of the goddess she served, her auburn hair was tightly bound and wound around her head to form a sort of natural circlet. Trailing by her side, a small white creature pulled a cart behind him, rather like a miniature horse, but by the pace and movement revealed a fully sentient spirit even when the eyes were not met.\n\nMaeve's slender form slipped quietly from the joyously lighted world of grass and tree into the cool dripping silence of earth. Her way lighted by the breastplate that she wore, the purity of the priestess interacted with the blessing of Brigid to produce the golden light. Further down into the mine she slipped, passing by various veins of iron and bloodstone. She searched for one of the deeper deposits of adamantine, a mineral that was not available at her home, and of which she currently had need. Sapphire eyes scanned the walls of the mine, supported by stout timbers, searching for both the ore and the gem forms that she needed. Her lips curved upward into a gentle smile, as she thought of the reason that she needed the substance she usually didn't work with. Her mind played over the special items that she was learning to forge, and the new process that she was learning thanks to her friend, Herman.\n\nAfter a while, she found the vein she had sought, newly discovered and brimming with the deep magic and strength that she desired for her mate, to become the dowry that she was fashioning for him. Setting to work, she steadily freed the spars, and less lovely forms of it, with rhythmical motions of the enchanted pick she wielded. The ring of metal filled the depths, the music of hard labor rebounding and redoubling as she lived the secrets of her discipline, seeking with open heart. In return for her diligence and effort, the earth gave of itself willingly, and Maeve's voice rose and fell as she hummed, focusing on her task.\n\nIt was with a sharp eye that she surveyed the fruits of her labors during her pauses for rest. Her personal rule was to take only what she would need. It was the easiest way to make sure that the strange fellow that had been harassing her for the past few years didn't annoy her as much. It also just made sense, so that there would be plenty for the future as well. After a while, she moved upward with her findings, placing them in the cart that her assistant had brought after her.\n\n\"Thank you Cody. Do you think Drake will be able to use them? He's not going to be able to shift back for a while after the ceremony\u2026 And I don't think that I'm going to be able to defend myself soon if all takes as planned\u2026\"\n\nThe nervousness in her voice was amplified by the echoing of the mine, their footfalls muffling the footfalls that were now heading for them. Maeve looked at the horse spirit at her side.\n\n\"Why Maeve, I don't think I've ever heard you worry so much.\" The spirit smiled and whinnied quietly. \"He'll be gentle, to be sure.\"\n\n\"To be sure\u2026 but\u2026 I'm worried about the young that will come\u2026 When I'm big and fat-\"\n\n\"Och. When you're big and fat with baby he'll be hoisting ye around as if ye weighed nothing and probably not let anything near ye. Drake is probably driving Obsidian out of his mind fretting over the details of your protection on the journey home.\"\n\nThe unnoticed footfalls went down a side passage of the mine and stopped, the maker waiting for the woman and companion to pass by.\n\n\"Aye. I've never had a harder time getting out of Rhian unnoticed. I think Ashkore may have seen me. I've probably been shadowed again\u2026 I'm not full yet, so I can still defend myself!\"\n\nCody rolled his eyes and shook his head as they continued through the tunnels, the footfalls now sounding behind them in time with their own.\n\n\"Your young are going to be as stubborn as you, and probably get into trouble just as easily Maeve.\"\n\nThe light reflected off a surface of a ruby in one of the side passages as they passed, drawing Maeve's attention and causing her to stop. \"More than likely\u2026 Cody, please take those the rest of the way up for me, leave the cart at Herman's? I think I found what might be suitable for the hilt, so it shouldn't take long for me to follow.\" Maeve chuckled as she removed the pick from the cart and wandered toward the gem in order to see if it was indeed suitable.\n\nCody rolled his eyes and shook his head. \"Sure, I'll drop it at Herman's, while you fuss about Drake's gear. I'm not sure who's the bigger dragon\u2026 him, or you the human\u2026\" The spirit plodded onward, chuckling to himself, and his footfalls eventually faded as Maeve lost herself in her chosen task.\n\nHer watcher took advantage of the din when she began to work the stone loose, taking along with it some of the ore that was insisting it wanted to come with her as well. His footfalls came behind her, softly placed as he studied the woman at her work. A crazed smile pulled at his lips, as he had found the object of his hunt at last, despite the distraction that her apparent kinswoman had provided.\n\n\"Drake is more wily than I thought\u2026 Don't worry love, I'll free you from him\u2026\"\n\nHis voice, though low, made its way to Maeve, just as she put down her pick to pick up the rough crystal. Clutching it to her chestplate, Maeve instinctively stepped away from the voice, but also away from her weapon.\n\n\"Who's there? Unless Obs, Drake, or Ash sent you, you'd better leave. Where'd you come from?\"\n\n\"Sh, Maeve, everything will be ok. You don't want to be around those dragons, they've just enchanted you\u2026 I've got something that will free you though, and then we can be together like we should have before that dragon wormed his way into your life\u2026\"\n\nAs he stepped into the soft glow, Maeve's face hardened in recognition. \"Go away you lovestruck fool\u2026 I've had to say no far too often\u2026\" She took another step backwards as she sent out a mental plea for help, finally releasing the cloaking spell that she had used on herself to hide her presence from the dragons that lived in the area. At the same time though, her heel came down on a stray stone, and she fell backward as her undesired suitor came steadily toward her.\n\nWith a dull thud, the back of her head struck the ground and the light dimmed as she fell into unconsciousness. Corbin gazed in shock for a moment at her prostrate figure, then quickly scooped her up and began to run for the entrance to the mine. With a grim smile, a dark energy pulled on the threads that had just been pulled through the fabric of reality, inspecting the buttonhole that she and her sisters and just made."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "\"Maeve!\"\n\nRyu had just reached the gates of the bustling town when a surprised, happy, and panicked cry bubbled out of what sounded like the town center, deep as the earth, and wild as forest fire. The general uproar that erupted from the town surrounded BlowingWind and her companions with its confusion, as a pair of red dragons burst through the gates, leaving behind their human forms too fast for her to see any details. Ryu kept her behind him, swiftly wrapping his tail around her and hoisting her to his back to keep her from being accidentally trampled as he held his ground. Akaisu stood close, watching quietly as the pair thundered past, then turned to see a large black river of scales pounding off in the same direction, before the bearer even finished making his way to the village, his membranous wings and powerful hindquarters hoisting him into the sky.\n\n\"I've got a bad feeling\u2026\" BlowingWind pressed down into Ryu's back, looking in the direction that the three dragons had flown off in. \"The tugs go that way. Lemme down, I have to go that way.\"\n\nRyu shook his head silently and began running in the direction that BlowingWind wanted to go, Akaisu keeping pace, ready to draw his sword if needed. BlowingWind hissed in pain, invisible cords wrapping tightly around her and burning her skin, filling her with the darkness and despair that she had been trying to leave behind.\n\n\"I've got him!\" The voice that had cried out before sounded again, feral now and filled with bloodlust. The large red could be seen reaching toward a man carrying an unconscious figure, the man fiddling with something as he ran.\n\nIn a flash of light, man and cargo were gone.\n\n\"NO!\"\n\nThe smaller red pulled up short and kept well out of the larger red's reach as it clawed angrily at the ground. Obsidian landed near him and patted his tail with his own while watching his friend destroy the ground.\n\n\"Ashkore, you'd better stay back\u2026 I'll talk to him. Go talk to the shrine keepers and Herman\u2026 See if we can trace her.\"\n\n\"Ok\" The smaller red nodded and took to the sky again, leaving the impromptu grouping.\n\nSlowly, Obsidian walked forward, deliberately making noises so that he could be heard. The large red still dug at the spot in rage, fire scorching the earth and his own claws, filling the air with a terrible stench.\n\n\"Drake\u2026 We'll get her back\u2026\"\n\n\"I TOLD her to stay in town. I TOLD her that I would prefer her to be safe, or to stay with Ash until I was done at the Red Shrine. No. She couldn't wait. When I was done, and I rushed\u2026 She'd already snuck out of town and used that blasted cloaking spell of hers! How can I protect her if she won't let me?\"\n\nRyu watched, feeling the loss in his own heart, as BlowingWind slumped into his mane wearily. Akaisu looked up at the woman, noting the paleness of her skin, then again at the scene before him.\n\n\"This is not what I'm getting paid for\u2026\" The fox observed mentally to himself.\n\nObsidian and Drake snapped their heads around, hearing the thought, and looked closely at the trio. Enraged that his sorrow had been witnessed, Drake looked for an excuse to roar, and found it quickly.\n\n\"Woman! Why do you smell of my mate to be? I know her kin well, and have never seen you.\"\n\n\"Drake, why don't we question them in the tavern? Looking at them, I don't think they were involved at all, and the woman looks as if she could use a little restoration\u2026\" Obsidian walked firmly toward the group, gesturing with his nose that all were to head toward the town. \"No use in sniffing around here when a teleport crystal was used\u2026 The priests and Herman will probably be there soon anyway.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Welcome to Rhian",
                "text": "Inside, the tavern seemed dark, the light being provided by warmly glowing candles and strange elf-lights, even though the sun streamed though the window to light the dust that gently swirled. Despite the amount of light, the atmosphere remained dark and secretive, enspelled by the shopkeeper long ago.\n\nAt one of the tables sat a gentleman in blue robes, fussing with the large pearl in his hands, his long salt and pepper hair forming three separate and well bound rivers around his shoulders, drawing attention to his well-kept beard and mustache. At his side, a massive man with bronze skin and fiery hair leaned back on his chair, a large flagon of ale supported in his callused hands. The pair looked up as a group came in the door, nodding silent greeting as the Color Keepers sat nearby, summoned by the bellows that had carried earlier, as well as the silent urgings of their own orbs.\n\n\"Another mess. We gather way out here to live in peace, and messes still wind up right outside our caves\u2026\"\n\n\"Aye Balthazaar, but what are we going to do, eh? They may be a wee race, but just watch\u2026 one day they'll take over the world. And they're so cuddly\u2026\"\n\nThe alchemist attempted to take the ale from his friend's hand. \"Herman, I think you've had enough. You really should drink some water and eat something, just because you're going to be lonely doesn't mean you can finish drinking yourself silly.\"\n\nHerman glared at the Alchemist and put the flagon down himself. \"I'm not drunk, you just look about ready to start playing with your chemicals again worrying, and turn your hair green, again.\"\n\nThe dragons let the exchange die, and after a bit, the door opened again and let in the young Ashkore.\n\n\"Obs wants us to try tracing Maeve. That crazy human that keeps coming back teleported off with her.\"\n\nA woman in purple and black robes tapped her cheek as she leaned back against a male in red, the Color Keepers conferring telepathically amongst themselves and the Alchemist as to how best to cast the appropriate spell. Ashkore paced near Herman, growling impatiently, eager to go wherever the woman had been taken and lay waste to Maeve's kidnapper."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Outside, near the mines, Ryu had wrapped his forearm around BlowingWind, holding the loudly protesting woman to him both in defense, and restraint, of her as she started yelling back at Drake. Obsidian knocked Drake over the head with one of his knuckles, looking exasperated and understanding at the same time.\n\n\"Growling at her isn't getting Maeve back quicker\u2026\" Obsidian muttered. \"You have more sense than that.\"\n\n\"No, but it makes me feel better\u2026\" Drake scowled, looking between his large black friend, the black Asian that was unknown to him, the bristling woman, and the equally bristling fox thing which looked and smelled like he was waiting for the first lunge to let himself loose.\n\nDrake rubbed his head where his friend had knocked it, then huffed and turned back for the village.\n\nObsidian shook his head and sighed. \"You'll have to forgive him, he's very touchy about his mate to be\u2026 and you do smell a lot of her. Welcome to Rhian\u2026 Come on, I'll get the three of you something to eat, it's looking like one of those days.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked between Ryu and Akaisu. Ryu sighed while Akaisu raised an eyebrow and nodded. Ryu raised his eyebrow back and nodded, then followed silently, Akaisu once again taking up his position. Watching the exchange, she frowned.\n\nThe walk was short, the buildings of the town a mixture of huts, cabins, piles of rocks, and entrances to underground caves, though there were a few larger wood and stone buildings. BlowingWind looked at the town from her vantage on Ryu's back as their group followed the others. Denizens continued about their tasks, some obviously unaffected by the recent occurrence, already back in their routines after the brief uproar.\n\nBefore long, they stood before what was clearly marked as an inn. Drake had already assumed his human form in order to fit into the building, copper skin and wild black hair shockingly different than what her mind's eye had always painted when she thought about her family curse. His red tunic glowered over deerskin trousers and bare feet. Lord Obsidian followed, his human form slightly bear-like in its size, his own dark hair pulled back in a low yet barely tamed ponytail. His own tunic and trousers were black, his feet booted.\n\nRyu let her down and took his own human form. Taking a deep breath, BlowingWind pushed past him brusquely and went in first, tossing a brief, cool, glance at him on her way past. Akaisu shook his head and followed.\n\nThe Purple Priestess rose from where she and the other Shrine Keepers were conferring. \"This may work even better, Lugh\u2026\"\n\nDrake sighed. \"Raven, what are you up to?\"\n\nRaven turned her amethyst eyes to Drake, her plum skin paling a little in exasperation. \"If you had been listening in, you'd have heard Lugh's suggestion, and my counter.\" A little of her navy blue hair worked it's way out from under her ornate headpiece.\n\n\"I still say as a fire and water priestess, our best bets to find her are Red and Blue Priests using one of the mirrors we've got around here\u2026\" The vibrant golden Light Priest muttered, running his hand over the side of his face.\n\n\"But the mental invasion wouldn't be good for her in the state of mind that she was in last I saw her. She was looking rather nervous when we had tea the other day and she was telling me a bit about her home and sisters.\"\n\nBalthazaar interrupted the now audible fight that had been brewing. \"Right now, let's just worry about finding Maeve. I'm sure she can take care of herself. Just because she's human doesn't mean that we have to baby her, and she'd happily debate circles around us and then hang us by our ankles if we tried.\"\n\nObsidian listened thoughtfully and kept an eye on Drake. Drake drew a deep breath, obviously struggling to hold his temper. \"What is your idea, Raven? And spare me the pity, you don't hide it well and it sours your scent.\"\n\nRaven shook her head, well used to his ways, from what BlowingWind could see. \"The little one from her sisterhood follows her. Her elemental strengths are different, as it feels like she is air and fire, not fire and water, but as she smells and feels like a relation she will have the best homing abilities, as Maeve hasn't yet performed the soulbonding with Drake.\"\n\n\"I don't like it.\" Drake snapped. \"I've met every Priestess in Maeve's sisterhood, and this woman is not one of them the Lady Brigit has introduced me to.\"\n\nRaven went over to Drake, raising to her full height, which was still considerably shorter than his, and poked him in the chest. \"She has a better chance and you know it, you're just spooked that she smells so much like Maeve and you don't know her.\"\n\nThe Red Priest sighed, waiting for his pupil to lose his temper yet again.\n\n\"And Flame agrees with me!\"\n\nFlame flinched and took a large bite of the bread roll the tavern keeper had brought him. \"I said nothing of the sort, I only sighed because you're pushing his buttons. I say that we ask her if she wants to try to use your Dark Mirror.\"\n\n\"This whole conversation seems too well put together.\" BlowingWind thought to herself. \"Something is lining itself up\u2026 and I don't like feeling like a pawn\u2026\"\n\nRyu placed his hand on her shoulder, getting ready to speak for her, when she opened her mouth to speak for herself.\n\n\"I think I need to know more about this mirror. We came here as the result of a fight over my mirror, and need to find both our way home and hopefully my mirror again.\"\n\n\"Kori and Karasu will probably take care of it till we find a way back, BlowingWind.\" Akaisu sighed. \"Though I know I'm going to get an earful from them. I assure you they won't take off with it.\"\n\n\"We did wonder what brought you here.\" Obsidian said as he sat down at one of the tables, while the inn keeper came back out with some breaded cod to distract Drake with. \"Our visitors usually have reasons for coming. Been more lately than usual though.\"\n\nAshkore mumbled from where he was lurking. \"Too many for my taste. I like people, but sometimes trouble just comes with them\u2026\"\n\nRaven grabbed BlowingWind's hand and led her over to the table the Priests and Priestesses were all occupying, chuckling a little at Ryu's unconscious growl. \"Would you prefer me to tell you about the Dark Mirror in my Shrine, or would you prefer to see it yourself and learn about it there? I'm afraid that if I tell you much about it outside the Purple Shrine you'll only be confused.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose if that's the case, then you had better tell me where things will make sense. Do you think that maybe we could find a way back to where we came from?\"\n\nRaven smiled. \"It's quite possible, few people know what lies hidden in the shadows.\"\n\n\"Fine, while you lot lollygag about playing at Magic and Mysteries, I'm going to go find my mate to be.\" Drake muttered. \"Ash, you coming with? I know Obs will stay behind since if he leaves for too long there's a couple dragons that would love the opportunity to grab power. And we don't really need their sort of 'rulership.'\"\n\nAshkore nodded. \"Yeah, I'll go with you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Purple Shrine, Dark Mirror",
                "text": "The Purple Shrine was dark marble in the midst of a deep jungle, the way overgrown, though well used once, resulting in a narrow cave-like path through the foliage. Raven led the small party down it quickly, her now black and silver gown swirling around her.\n\n\"I could teleport us to the Shrine, but that would be cheating. First time visitors must walk in from somewhere if they want to do it right\u2026\" Raven apologized, once again ignoring Akaisu and Ryu.\n\n\"That's alright. If it's the proper way to do things, then that's all there is to it.\" BlowingWind replied.\n\nRyu hid his distrust of the woman, but watched their guide carefully. She cycled through her emotions far too quickly for his taste, and there was something about the way that she looked over her shoulder often to check on them. Her eyes had a strange hollow emptiness, and the dreamy, faded look that comes with gazing into flames for too long. And yet the next glance would be vibrant, and full of life, sharp as an eagle's eyes and the gaze as quick.\n\nThis time, the amethyst eyes were cool and calculating, meeting his own gaze.\n\n\"Almost as if there is more than one being in there, but even more fully separate than my own, or the fragmented parts of my BlowingWind's beautiful soul\u2026\" he mused to himself.\n\nAkaisu whispered quietly to Ryu. \"She's possessed\u2026\" He had come to the same conclusion, basing things off of his own prior experiences with possessed individuals.\n\nRaven smiled as the path cleared and opened, revealing the ancient shrine in all its glory. Black marble and polished obsidian gleamed in the filtered light in the strange jungle-like forest.\n\n\"Welcome to my home. We come and go as the land has need to access us and the gifts we bring. Some individuals look all their lives and don't find us here.\" Raven led the way inside, between two pillars, and into the cavernous eternal twilight. In the main chamber, three pools of varying sizes lurked, guarding unknown treasures for those brave enough to dive into their depths, instead of just gazing into them.\n\nBlowingWind frowned as she took a few steps toward one of the pools, feeling a tug and a stirring within her heart. \"It's almost as if, if I were to jump in, I could get to him\u2026\"\n\nRyu's eyes narrowed. \"An unhealthy obsession\u2026 When we are back I may have to push her to focus on her studies, even though she's so keen to get this done so she can do them, it might not last\u2026\" he thought to himself, a tiny bit of jealousy worming its way into his thoughts.\n\nRaven observed BlowingWind quietly as she looked into the pool, while Ryu and Akaisu both lightly touched BlowingWind's arms. \"It's not wise to gaze too deep for too long. It's easy to get lost in the dark when still suffering under a loss, and you have the marks all over you. This way\u2026 The Twilight Mirror isn't in the main chamber.\"\n\nTowards the back of the cavernous space, there was a dark curtain spanning the entrance to an offshoot passage, a slight draft stirring it so that one could never tell if it were black or purple, though a slight sheen of silver could be glimpsed every now and then. As Raven pulled the curtain to the side, the three travelers could feel things stirring inside of their hearts.\n\n\"Are the questers brave enough to enter? You'll have to face your greatest fear before being able to find the mirror. I'm sorry, but it's part of the way that it works.\"\n\n\"I knew there was a catch\u2026 Magical items always seem to have them\u2026\" Ryu mumbled. Akaisu flicked an ear slightly in agreement.\n\nBlowingWind nodded and walked through, wincing slightly as her Shadow stepped forward more, gaining power from the darkness around them.\n\n\"Sounds like my sort of challenge\u2026 Don't you dare screw this up!\" RagingTornado whispered inside BlowingWind's head.\n\n\"Well, now's not the time for you to screw with my thoughts, self.\" BlowingWind muttered to her fragment.\n\nThe air around them was heavy, warm and cold at the same time, and unseen things trailed icy fingers over them as they walked through the eternal night. Whispers of fears and accusations filled their ears, though not material voices. Raven slipped silently through, untroubled by her own fears and misdeeds, having lived with them so closely for so many long centuries and come to terms with them.\n\nThrough her eyes, eight women watched from their own plane of reality as their needle and thread found her way through the fabric of the tapestry that they were weaving.\n\nThe penetrating darkness wrapped velvet ribbons around BlowingWind's heart, squeezing tightly and causing her to gasp. Her senses closed off to the world around her, though her body continued forward down the passage, where the mirror lurked in shrouds of veil and shadow.\n\nThe spirits of Abandonment and Despair whispered to her heart, painting bleak pictures of how her relationship ended with her last partner, and the pains of her mother's heart from her having run away. In the limbo that her mind and heart had been pulled into, she could hear her mother's sobs. Before long, BlowingWind was before the mirror, staring into the depths of the surface so much like that of her own mirror, her face morphing into the face of her mother."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Summerrose reached up and knocked on the door, glad to be on the porch that she knew so well. It was still strange to her to not see BlowingWind and Obsidian leaning against each other in the corner while she studied. Her black hair, pulled back at the nape of her neck, and tired green eyes betrayed that she had finished a long day at work. Stacy still wore her red work shirt from one of Mt. Shasta's burger joints, her short blond hair still a little greasy from working the fry cook position and smelling of burgers and fries.\n\n\"Stacy, Summerrose\u2026 'Ow nice of the two of ye to visit me\u2026\" Marie tucked some of her auburn and white hair behind her ear as she stood in the open door, looking at BlowingWind's friends in surprise.\n\nThe dark-haired Summerrose examined Mrs. MountainChild, then came in, followed by Stacy. \"Mom, you've not been sleeping\u2026\" She observed.\n\nMarie closed the door behind the girls and went to sit on the couch, heaving a sigh. \"I'm fine, I keep telling all of you that.\" Her accent slipping between thick and thin uncontrollably.\n\nStacy walked into the kitchen, carrying hitherto unnoticed styrofoam boxes, revealing the origin of the aroma of food as she placed them on the counter. \"Mom, we're not going to believe you. We miss her too.\"\n\nSummerrose sat down beside Marie softly. \"Had any more dreams?\"\n\n\"A few, Rose\u2026 I sometimes dream that she's with a handsome young man that stays with 'er, even though she doesn't seem to know what she wants. She looks happy, and then she wakes up and gives him attitude about keeping her warm.\" Marie sighed and settled back. \"Strange dreams, so very unlike my little girl\u2026 You kids aren't going home to your parents any time soon, are you?\"\n\n\"Nope.\" Stacy returned, carrying a cup of tea and frowning at how much of Marie's accent was falling into the local accent instead of the sometimes rather thick accent she had been so used to. \"Our parents thought it was nice we still wanted to visit you\u2026 You're like another mom\u2026\"\n\nMarie sighed and accepted the Earl Grey, straight like she always drank it. \"I just don' understand it, she's always been so strong. Runnin' away just isn't like her. I\u2026 I thought that she would be back by now. I thought that maybe she just needed a little time away\u2026\"\n\nStacy hugged Marie carefully. \"You know she'll be fine. She's 'Wind. She'll scalp anyone that tries to hurt her. Then she'll probably roll her eyes, mutter about perverts, stomp a bit more, and go find some chocolate.\"\n\n\"That's partially what I'm afraid of\u2026\" Marie trailed off, then started again. \"Mostly, she's God knows where, and I can't be there for 'er if she needs me.\" She took a big sip of her tea, forcing her tears down again. Marie's accent slowly began to creep toward thick again, forcing the girls to pay close attention to the lilt.\n\nSummerrose shook her head. \"It's been quite some time now, I fully expected at least a letter by now. I know she loved Ob-boy a lot, but I didn't think it would affect her this badly.\"\n\n\"Well, I cannae exactly say that me mother was very sane after Da' passed on, or that I was for some time after\u2026\" Marie broke off for a ragged breath, then continued. \"After I lost me husband. He was a fine man, though a little odd sometimes.\"\n\nBlowingWind's school friends watch Marie sadly as she finished her tea. \"Ready for dinner now? We don't want to let it get too cold, I made them as my last order of the day.\" Stacy murmured.\n\n\"I'm nae really hungry, kids. You two eat and I'll sit with you.\"\n\n\"No way Mom, you've pulled that on us at too many of 'Wind's snowboarding meets. And you probably have work in the morning too, you've stopped talking about the different construction sites.\" Summerrose got up and tugged on Marie's hand.\n\nMarie followed grudgingly. \"I could always cook myself a pot pie later tonight, girls. It's not like I starve myself.\"\n\n\"We know, but food is always better with company, and we wanted to give you a nice surprise.\" Summerrose chimed innocently.\n\n\"Besides, if we didn't, 'Wind would kick us up and down the stairs when she comes home.\" Stacy giggled. \"And if your dream is right, she might have a new boyfriend to introduce us to then.\"\n\n\"You know I don't believe in dreams\u2026\" Marie grumbled as the girls dragged her into the kitchen and over to the small table in there. \"If I did, then 'Hawk would kiss me goodnight every night.\"\n\nTime skipped forward for BlowingWind as she watched the scene and her fear in the mirror, and now her mother was sitting on her bed brushing her hair out, in her nightly routine. Marie rocked gently back and forth as she hummed a lullaby, her eyes staring into the past and full of tears that refused to fall.\n\n\"Mom\u2026\" She whispered, her hand drifting up to touch the polished obsidian, the mirror standing as tall as herself.\n\n\"What a terrible daughter you are.\" A voice cut through her consciousness, sharp as an obsidian blade and as dark. \"Pathetic way for someone like you to act, look what you have done.\"\n\n\"I know\u2026\"\n\n\"And that call you did make to her, can't be counted. You weren't even able to swallow your pride enough to speak for more than a moment.\" The voice continued, sounding so much like Raven's, and yet darker and airier, like a void in itself.\n\n\"So what am I supposed to do about it?\" BlowingWind asked the mirror.\n\nThe darkness swirled on itself, answering with a voice that was not a voice, silky and amused. \"What do you want to do about it? Can you make the sacrifice to fix not just this, but a myriad other problems? Do you have the courage that would take?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't know.\"\n\n\"Then you will stay paralyzed as you are, and I'm afraid the situation will only worsen. Such a pity.\" The mirror's voice lost all warmth and seemed to split into eight separate voices speaking at once.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"We think you know what we are talking about. We've only been speaking to your soul since before you were birthed. You haven't been listening very close it seems. That fox Brigid hired has been doing his job too well just by annoying your dragon. You have a very clear path, that does not quite match with hers.\"\n\nThe floor seemed to drop from below BlowingWind, pitching her into the weightless feeling that she despised.\n\n\"Those two are completely innocent you know, Ryu and Akaisu... Terrible that they'll be affected by your family curse. If she were young, I'm sure that Marie would be quite willing to help us, and if not her, then Marcella. Brigid guards your aunt rather jealously though, and your cousin\u2026\"\n\n\"Leave them alone. I've not met the other two, but whatever you're planning can't be good.\" BlowingWind shouted into the space that was forming around her, reaching out with her mind to her companions to draw herself back to reality.\n\n\"We make reality little one, with a little 'help' that at times we'd rather not have. Cling to them if you like, it makes the thread stronger to pull more through at once.\" The voices joined as one once more, sighing slightly. \"It must be your generation though. A chance like what is coming up won't happen very often. Do you realize how many people you will save if you use that fire inside?\"\n\n\"Fine, what do you want me to do?\" BlowingWind's irritation snapped through her voice as she answered the strange presence.\n\n\"You will find yourself caught up helping reunite a pair of very good friends, and you will help bring worlds back together. You are also going to regain your spirit forms.\" A ripple of humor danced through the voice and through BlowingWind as she listened.\n\n\"Haha. You're a dramatic spirit or spirits, aren't you? You want me to do all that and you're threatening my family if I don't roll over and beg. I suppose next you'll want me to bare my belly.\"\n\n\"Your Obsidian would have asked you if he had known. In a way, he has already asked you. He needs you to pull yourself together and stop looking for him. You have to live your life. Tools and forms come and go, and you will be together again\u2026\"\n\nThe air rushed from her lungs as quickly as if she had received a blow to her solar plexus at the name.\n\n\"Thought so. You'll be surprised at the connections you'll find as life passes on. Now\u2026 Priestess of the Web, go apologize to your mother! And live in the present, that's where you are needed.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "A hand grabbed onto her own, larger and firmer, though the softer hand of a man that had wielded a pencil and laptop more often than a sword of late. \"I don't think it's such a wise idea to touch it my dear\u2026 the mirror makes me feel ill\u2026\" Ryu's voice barely penetrated her consciousness, barely made her aware of the body that she occupied, as washed out as if he were shouting to her across a vast sea.\n\nRyu frowned at the coldness of BlowingWind's hand, and the nearly empty feel of her shell. Only the space of a breath had passed, and yet it seemed so much more had happened for her than merely laying her hand upon the object. Searching for her mind, he tried to see what she was seeing.\n\n\"The Sea\u2026\" The words fell out of her mouth softly as the image of it filled her mind and the darkness inside herself fled.\n\n\"BlowingWind, what are you talking about\u2026?\"\n\nRyu frowned as her focus continued to be in a realm where he could not go. \"Raven, what did you do to her\u2026\" His eyes narrowed dangerously as he looked at the woman that had lead them there.\n\n\"I have done nothing\u2026 I've not seen this sort of thing before\u2026 Usually the querant sees the answers in the surface of the mirror\u2026 Is your charge a Thread Weaver then\u2026?\" The true Raven, on the plane that served as the physical realm for now, murmured quietly.\n\n\"Complications and more complications!\" Akaisu mused. \"What in the name of the Sun is her quest really?\"\n\n\"It's supposed to be 'get the mirror, get to school\u2026' I'm beginning to believe that much of her learning process involves the scenic route.\"\n\nAkaisu stifled a sigh. \"I know I was hired to slow things down, but I really can't watch this\u2026\" He thought to himself. \"I think you should take her to counseling\u2026 This is way beyond you\u2026\" He continued out loud.\n\nRyu looked into the mirror, searching for whatever was holding BlowingWind's attention so intently. After a moment, though he could see only the dark surface, he began to feel the flow of energy more clearly. Stepping back, he knelt nearby. \"Seems we need to leave her to her work and push her if she tries to run from it\u2026 care to join me? Maybe you aren't as bad as I thought at first.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Reaching for Mother",
                "text": "Marie pulled up into the driveway of her home of many years, wondering for the nine millionth time if she should just sell it. With the deft turning of the key, she killed the engine of her truck and got out. Pulling out the pins holding her long graying hair up in the bun she used for work, she let out a weary sigh.\n\nPlodding toward the large home, she didn't spare a glance for any of it, instead quietly pushing through the door and straight up the stairs to the bathroom. Marie ignored the middle-aged woman she saw in the mirror, her eyes caught somewhere between blue and green. Her business there was taken care of quickly, and hot water gushed over her hands, scalding them a delicate pink and pulling her thoughts out of the ethers for a short time.\n\n\"Did it again\u2026\"\n\nShe had no reason to check her face, there was no one to worry about impressing. Her work callused hand turned the knobs of the faucet, adjusting the water to her preferred temperature, searing hot. The water sang through the old pipes, and steam began to fill the room. Meanwhile, she prepared her items, the lavender oil that her husband had loved so much, the henna shampoo and conditioner that she had discovered when her daughter was small, and the small beeswax soap that one of her friends made a living selling.\n\nBefore long, the tub was filled, and after discarding her work-filthy garb into the laundry basket, she slipped into the cleansing burn of the water. Marie hissed as she gave herself up to it, submerging herself as quickly as she could, her skin beginning to redden. Her eyes closed, tears squeezing out as her walls crumbled, and she gave in to her nightly cry.\n\nNo one was going to hear anyway.\n\n\"Gone. Gone. Gone gone gone\u2026\" Her voice took on a halting sing-song as she wept. \"Taken away, gone away\u2026 Where I can't follow\u2026\"\n\nMarie slipped the rest of the way under the water, letting it cover her face. As her pores opened, she let more of the sorrow flood out of her, into the water. With each beat of her heart, the rawness exposed itself more, seeking solace from wherever it would come from. After a minute, she sat back up, and began to shampoo her hair, humming the song she once sang when shampooing her daughter as a young child.\n\nHer eyes still closed, she finished up her bathing regime, her humming fading away to nothing. After rinsing a final time and draining the tub, Marie toweled off and wrapped the terrycloth around herself, padding to her bedroom. The house creaked and moaned around her, sighing with the temperature changes as the day ended.\n\nAs she walked down the carpeted hall, she could almost hear BlowingWind's voice humming along to the songs she'd pull from the strings of her guitar.\n\nMarie stopped, staring straight ahead, a familiar prickle zipping up her spine. It had come much more often as of late, as if someone were looking in on her. Once, long ago, she would have scoffed at such a thought.\n\n\"Whoever you are, stop. You've been peepin' in on me all day.\" Marie's point was underscored by slamming her fist into the wall beside her, forceful enough to shake the framed photography and paintings that were gifts from various friends that her small family had made over the years.\n\nSilence was the only reply.\n\n\"Look you, I'm damn positive I'm not a-goin' insane. Bring my baby back. So help me, if I ever get my hands on you\u2026\"\n\nThe atmosphere changed suddenly, and the tingling lessened as the presence withdrew. Marie continued on to her room and collapsed on the bed, her hand going over her heart as she lay there. Moments of silence passed, broken only by the ticking of the clock.\n\n\"Ah\u2026 I have this feeling I'd better get dressed\u2026\"\n\nIt wasn't long before Marie had changed into fresh clothes and gone down to the living room, when a knock came on the door. With the knock, the feeling of being watched returned, and vague whispers were something that she felt more than heard while some of her daughter's friends visited and made her eat dinner.\n\nAt last, the girls went home and left her to her thoughts.\n\n\"Children\u2026\" she sighed to herself after a time. Quietly, she retreated up the stairs and to her room, changing into her nightclothes after the door was shut.\n\nThe watcher smiled to itself, if it could be called such in its proper form, shifting perspective easily between the dimensions back to the other soul it currently wished to observe, waiting for the realities to merge again.\n\n\"Sleep,\" the voice purred to Marie, deep and quiet as would be comfortable for her. \"I'm working on fixing it all...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "BlowingWind took a deep breath and looked deep into the surface of the stone. The darkness waited there silently, shining slightly in the depths.\n\n\"What do I need to do?\"\n\nAs the woman stared into the stone, her head tipped slightly downward and short hair falling forward to hide her face, her vision and senses split. In moments her mother's face filled the mirror, but only for her eyes.\n\nMarie lay in her bed asleep, red and white hair fanned out around her head, her lips parted slightly as her breath flitted in and out. The longer the vision lasted, the deeper and purer that it seemed Marie slept.\n\nBehind her, Ryu and Akaisu continued to watch her carefully, Ryu expecting at any moment to need to catch her falling form.\n\n\"You know what to do...\"\n\nThe voice rippled through her body, though she wasn't sure who had said it. Around her, she still saw a vast sea of glass, though she was able to see through that to the reality where her companions were waiting for her.\n\n\"I'm not so sure that I do, but ok...\" BlowingWind murmured. Looking through the mirror, she imagined reaching out to her mother. With the mental reaching, came the sensation of a thick wall.\n\nThe image of Marie frowned a bit, the figure shifting in her sleep, as if sensing that someone was trying to win their way into her mind. The impression of a wall between their minds took on the visualization of a thick wooden wall, of an old fortress battered many times. BlowingWind found herself walking around the outside, looking for the gate.\n\n\"It's battered here like in my own mind...\" She mused. \"but it's not my mind, so mom must be in here somewhere... Here I thought I was the only one thinking in images.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Ryu's consciousness pricked as he sat waiting and watching the maiden and the mirror, images beginning to stir in his own mind as BlowingWind stopped shutting him out from her deeper levels of thought. Carefully he examined the impressions of the mental landscape he was receiving.\n\n\"The walls have had their gates shut with lumber and iron most skillfully... I see where you get your own ability at shutting things out from...\" Ryu mused into her mind. \"Look above then, you'll have to go over.\"\n\n\"Go over with what, you eavesdropper? I don't see anything I can use.\" BlowingWind mumbled.\n\nRyu couldn't help chuckling out loud, while he mentally made his reply to the traveling shaman in training. \"Your body doesn't restrain you where you are, change shape or fly, like a dream.\"\n\n\"I don't know how to shapeshift Ryu...\"\n\n\"I think you do...\" His reply into her mind was soft, giving the impression of a gentle nudge and soft smile. \"Feel the change.\"\n\nBlowingWind closed her eyes, trying to remember dreams from long ago, and thinking of Ryu's changes in form in front of her, and how spirits, including the strange woman by the pool, seemed to slip from form to form and from place to place.\n\n\"I need to be able to fly... but maybe I should call first... Maybe she doesn't know I'm here.\" She thought to herself, then raised her voice. \"Mom! Can we talk?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Within her dreams, Marie slowly opened her eyes, turning her head slightly where she had leaned against the thick wall of the fantasy fortress she had often imagined as a small child.\n\n\"Leanbh?\" Marie whispered quietly, her face furrowing to a small frown, not daring to hope and knowing this was all just another dream, perhaps even a dream within a dream. \"BlowingWind?\"\n\nThe call came again, a bit louder, timid as a bird and very unlike the hawk-like cry that Marie expected to hear. Giving herself over to Hope, which welled up again within her breast and propelled her forward, she rushed through the wall, passing through it like the dream barrier it was.\n\nThe young voice outside had indeed been BlowingWind, and she stood a bit away, uncertainly as if she were one of the little grey birds that startled so easily at the park. Marie's eyes took in the red skirt that swirled in the breeze and covered her daughter's legs, and the strange wrap-around blouse with the billowing sleeves, and the short hair of her daughter's continued mourning. Her sharp eyes also noted a strange ephemeralness about her, vague impressions of red, yellow, black, and gold. It was a dim outline, as if, perhaps in the strange way of dreams, her child had been about to become a hawk and be lifted up by some rising air current.\n\n\"BlowingWind?\" she asked, louder this time.\n\nBlowingWind looked carefully at the young woman standing before her, a green tunic and leggings below beaten copper and leather armour. Fiery hair had been pulled back in a no-nonsense braid, not a hint of the white that she could remember beginning to streak through.\n\n\"Momma?\"\n\nMarie began to shake, silently, and dropped a previously unnoticed bronze shortsword to the ground before dashing the final few steps and sweeping her child into a bone-crushing hug.\n\n\"What possessed you to run off 'Wind? Why couldn't you stay and talk to me about what was goin' on?\"\n\nThe pain that had been caused was a nearly palpable force from the younger version of her mother, and BlowingWind bit her lip to hold back a sob as her mother fell apart into a trembling, clinging child. She smoothed her hand over Marie's back slowly.\n\n\"You don't need to worry about it mother, it's my problem. I have to find where he went. But, I'm starting a good life... I've a... a something or other, no idea what to call Ryu other than my twerp. I have no idea what I'm doing though.\"\n\nMarie heaved a deep sigh and clung tighter. \"You could have at least told me instead of running away first. I could have helped. I could have helped with getting things set up, since you know I came from a different country...\"\n\n\"I didn't think momma... I just... reacted.\"\n\nMarie heaved another sigh, and though she still looked young, the toll of her long worry could now be seen in her face.\n\n\"Just as I did. Leanbh, you can't go through life doing that. You just hurt yourself and everyone that cares about you when you do. I don't want you repeating my mistakes.\"\n\nBlowingWind heaved a sigh, shaking a bit herself, remembering the last time she had seen her mother in such a state so very long ago.\n\n\"I know Momma. I'll try harder. Meanwhile, can you try harder to be well...? You don't look like you feel very well...\"\n\n\"I'm afraid to sleep, because I always dream about you. Such strange dreams. I had one were you fell off a volcano a few months ago...\"\n\n\"A few months?\" BlowingWind thought in confusion. \"It's only been a few weeks, hasn't it? How much time am I loosing to these strange crossings between worlds?\"\n\nMarie continued on, looking over her daughter's shoulder thoughtfully, as if she could see Ryu and Akaisu waiting behind her. \"I've never been one to believe in premonitions, but you have a long road ahead of you, I think, and you will have strange companions... and this is all a dream that I won't remember on waking. It feels so real though...\"\n\n\"Remember it if you can Mom. This isn't a dream, and it explains a lot to me...\" BlowingWind looked around carefully, spying a hill some distance away where a small well could be seen. \"Explains quite a bit about you that I didn't know. Thank you for letting me in...\"\n\n\"Letting you in?\" Marie looked back at her daughter, but already both could feel invisible threads pulling taut again, as if perhaps they there threads currently strung on different needles.\n\n\"I have to go Mom... but maybe someday I'll have the courage to explain while you are awake...\" BlowingWind hugged her mother fiercely.\n\n\"No someday, you're explaining to that poor woman while she's awake as soon as I can prod you into doing it, preferably face to face.\" Ryu mumbled to himself, still listening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Relearning to See",
                "text": "Ryu caught BlowingWind as she fell, perceiving that she was going to be tired and disoriented after returning her consciousness fully to her body. Akaisu pulled a small vial out of one layer of his kimono, holding it up for Ryu to see and quirking an eyebrow, waiting for Ryu's permission to give BlowingWind a drink of the water.\n\n\"Ok fox, I trust you enough to let you give her some water... but I'm watching you.\" Ryu mumbled.\n\nAkaisu carefully removed the cap, exaggerating each tiny movement just enough to show he wasn't going to make any foolish movements, then handed the vial to Ryu. Ryu carefully put it to her lips and tipped it in time with her thirsty swallows, watching carefully. A moment passed, and BlowingWind opened her eyes.\n\n\"I am so tired... Still have no idea where the mirror is though.\"\n\nRyu sighed. \"We'll figure it out. It's ok.\"\n\nAkaisu flicked his eyes toward the silent Raven, and Ryu nodded imperceptibly in agreement. Stealthily, Akaisu retreated, unseen by the dark priestess.\n\n\"Priestess,\" Ryu spoke carefully. \"What do you know of the ability to walk through shadows?\"\n\n\"Shadow Walking?\" Raven replied as carefully. \"It's an ability that not many have. Shadows can be seen as borders between worlds and places, as the spaces between everything are pretty much shadow...\"\n\n\"I see...\" Ryu murmured, thinking of the mysterious hand that was responsible for his party being in this strange place. \"So, is there maybe a way for someone to call someone with this ability?\"\n\nBlowingWind sat up and looked into the mirror again, remembering that she only accomplished one objective, and it wasn't either of the two she had originally meant to do.\n\n\"And just what do you think you're doing Little One?\" Ryu asked.\n\n\"Working. Like a good girl.\"\n\n\"Are you ready for another look already?\" Ryu sighed. \"Alright, but be careful not to overtax yourself.\"\n\n\"I know, I know... Stay grounded when gazing to minimize disphoria at the end. Amehana said something like that in... a dream recently... I think... Dreams keep flooding together...\" BlowingWind chewed her lower lip as that bit of information wafted up from her subconscious memories. \"And I didn't do that last time. I didn't have to do that with Ob's mirror.\"\n\n\"Well, you aren't very good at staying grounded, at least during the time I've known you... Here...\" Ryu came close behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. \"Let me help.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed as a warmth seemed to push her down into the ground, though his touch was feather light, strengthening her own tenuous hold. Ryu smiled a bit when she reflexively wrapped a bit of her energy around his own, knowing it was something she wasn't even aware of doing. Raven smiled a bit and nodded, watching the two and retreating further into the shadows where the Kitsune had disappeared to.\n\n\"Ok...\" BlowingWind sighed as she looked into the mirror and became distracted by it, somewhat aware that he was there. The mist that was beginning to form over the surface slowly took shapes for her, responding easier now with her being more used to the particular mirror. Instead of letting the mirror take her where it wanted to go, she focused the first of her two objectives in her mind.\n\n\"Show me where this 'Maeve' person is...\" She breathed lightly, unconsciously leaning back against Ryu a bit as she settled further into her trance.\n\nThe unconscious face of her ancestor swam, almost grudgingly, into the images that her mind's eye saw. A pillow supported her head, the skin of her face a bit pale, her body covered up to the chest by coarse wool blankets. BlowingWind sighed. \"This is more than a bit scary Ryu...\"\n\n\"I know. I'm here.\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded, opening her mind more and trying to take more control of the vision. Her vision broadened, the room coming clear around her. \"Maeve is in a room that seems well cared for, but empty. The furniture here is a bit rough-hewn. Definitely looks like a guy house...\"\n\n\"Can you see outside? Anything that can give a better indication of where?\" Ryu whispered into her ear.\n\n\"Checking already... I see a window and a door...\" With another breath, she pushed her consciousness to the window, cautiously looking out. \"I hope no one can see me... I see a village, hills not too far away, woods... the people moving around are in sort of rough clothing, but clean. Don't hear anything though... not a bit of anything they are saying.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Akaisu slipped through the darkness carefully, as BlowingWind and Ryu worked with the mirror, senses alert to whatever else was there. It was a vague scent pulling him onward, but one that was still fresh in his memory. Slipping into his fox form, Akaisu continued to follow it, very glad that he had learned from his grandmother how to take his possessions into his energy. Padding through the darkness, his very fur tingled, and though he knew he was moving, could feel the pads of his paws on the marble floor, he was not entirely sure that he was making any progress.\n\nThe smell of distant places, the confusion of shadows passed through, forced the Kitsune to stop, searching again for the smell. He swiveled his ears, straining to hear anything that he could, anything that might hint which way his quarry had gone.\n\nA footstep sounded off to his right, followed by another. Stealing along the hallway that branched off the chamber, he picked up the scent again, stronger. Akaisu could easily taste it now, the spirit of the mirror that he had once had.\n\n\"Closer... I need closer...\" was the only formed thought in his mind, allowing his body to do what it must."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "\"There's got to be something, dear...\" Ryu grumbled in frustration. \"We've got to find them something. Look harder...\" His grip on her tightened.\n\nBlowingWind gasped in surprised and stiffened as he tightened his grip, struggling momentarily before relaxing again beneath his energy. \"Fine, fine. I'm looking!\"\n\nPutting a bit more of herself into what she was seeing, BlowingWind tried the door. As her hand touched it to push it open, the world she was attempting to view spun around her, becoming only swirls of color. \"I'm loosing it!\"\n\n\"No you aren't, I've got you. Calm down and draw from me. I know you can feel me, just tug a bit.\" Ryu spoke firmly, but gently, his face set in determination as he pulled her body into his lap. \"Stop relying on your own energy and take in what's around you.\"\n\n\"Okay...\" She breathed, willing herself to open further to his energy, tentatively. \"Not going to try anything funny with me?\"\n\n\"Woman! We are working, I think I can ignore your soul long enough... I'm not going to take advantage of you...\" His eyebrow quirked upward. \"Maybe push you out of your shell, but not take advantage of you. Now focus.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed and pulled a bit more on him, not quite sure how she knew what she was doing, and the view became clear again. Reaching out with a little trepidation, she waited for her hand to make contact with the wood of the door, or the iron of the latch. Instead, what her hand was greeted by was a gentle brush as her hand pressed through, as if she were reaching through leaves. With another breath, she stepped completely though.\n\nThe village wove its daily life around her, just as she had seen it from the window. Darting behind a parked cart loaded with straw, she glanced around to see if anyone had seen her. None paid any heed.\n\n\"I don' like it Marcus. That woman'll bring a curse on the village fo' sure once she wakes up. The Priestesses are all fey touched, ever' one.\" A haggard woman holding a baby against herself muttered where she stood in her doorway.\n\n\"Aye, Kara, but tha's if she remembers. He was pretty adamant that the herb woman 'ave a look at 'er fo' 'er head, 'e was. She might think she's still a wee lass, the way 'e described 'er fallin' from tha cliff.\" Marcus replied from where he was repairing Kara's door, tossing a thoughtful look up at her before returning to his work.\n\n\"She won' be thinkin' tha fo' long, the way 'e is with women, an' I still say she's not to be trusted, even sleeping like she is and will be till she heals up. They say the Priestesses of the Flame, the Forge, and the Well all have dragons for protectors. We'll be eaten up we will.\"\n\n\"Kara, ye superstitious ol' wench. Ye be sounding as crazy as Corbin 'imself.\"\n\n\"Fie! Tha' wasn't what ye were a saying when those short ones were a stealin' your sheep! Who was the one talking about the Fair Folk then, may I remind ye? My grandda used to pay the dragons with sheep to leave the village alone, he did!\"\n\n\"I still say the women of the Green Gowns are just women all the same. Nary a dragon has been seen anywhere near Glomsten for many a year!\" Marcus finished what he was doing, standing up and stretching in satisfaction. \"Tell that fool 'usband o' yours to quit kickin' the door off it's 'inges.\"\n\n\"May I remind ye tha' Corbin's not told me where my 'fool' 'usband' is?\" Kara spat.\n\nBlowingWind sighed, lettting go of the vision, and her sight returned to the smooth dark surface of the mirror, barely registering now the ghostly twists of smoke that seemed to lurk just beneath the surface.\n\n\"What kind of name is Glomsten? I've never heard of the place Ryu...\" She leaned her head back against his shoulder, looking up toward the ceiling. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could make out far above little points of light from phosphorescent stones, which also reflected off of myriad crystals that grew there.\n\n\"I don't know. How are you feeling?\" Ryu frowned as he looked her over, smoothing a hand over her brow. Then down her cheek, then more when instead of the elbow in the gut he expected, she settled deeper against him.\n\n\"Gross. Absolutely gross. My stomach wants to leap up my throat.\"\n\n\"I think we need to work with getting you used to moving energy and using your talents... and don't throw up on me, I don't want to have to wash.\"\n\n\"I may, just because...\" She turned her head toward him a bit.\n\n\"You would, just to be difficult...\" He chuckled a bit as she shifted. \"And whether you feel like it or not, you're going to rest a bit. I don't like how that mirror seems to like sucking up your energy.\"\n\nBlearily opening an eye and glaring up at him, she attempted to look stronger than she felt. With her head resting on his shoulder and her torso firmly wrapped in his arms, to her irritation she wasn't able to look very strong, much less feel strong. At the back of her mind, she could feel something shift and prowl about restlessly, a stronger urge to slap him for assuming that she was weak.\n\n\"Uh huh... Nice try Little One. Not afraid of you right now. Beat me all you want after we get home, but for now let me be in charge.\" Ryu muttered and sighed, his chest heaving a bit with the depth of his breath.\n\nBlowingWind grumbled a moment, and then nodded, closing both her eyes again and letting herself drift as she did when younger. He watched a moment, waiting to make sure that she actually was resting and not pretending, before reaching his senses out to find the guardian priestess of the artifact that they had been using.\n\n\"Raven. Where did you slip off to?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Raven perked her ears a bit, hearing the quiet summons normal for her kind. \"In the twilight where I belong, giving you and your mate the privacy she seems to need. You have information for me, sir?\"\n\n\"Glomsten was the name my mate found.\"\n\n\"Many thanks to your mate, that will help Drake considerably to find his mate again. Her mirror that she seeks?\"\n\n\"Not yet. She rests.\"\n\n\"Very well, she is young... Stay there as long as needed, I will make sure that you are undisturbed...\"\n\nRyu narrowed his eyes as he felt the she dragon priestess sever the telepathic connection, then looked at his treasure. \"I think someone wants to keep you and have you trained here. Why do you draw such trouble?\"\n\nRyu looked into the mirror carefully, exhaling and settling his energy firmly. \"Alright, it's my turn. Where is my mate's mirror?\" An unseen breeze stood his mane on end and waved it softly.\n\nThe mirror remained blank for him, sitting defiantly quiet.\n\n\"Oh, I don't think so. My mate is resting because you want to be difficult. You are going to help me do my job and provide what she needs, and what she needs is her own mirror, not you.\" Ryu rumbled, stern and official.\n\nSlowly, the mirror responded to his unyielding gaze. \"Master volcano, the part you seek lies in the pocket of the one known as Shadow. He is, in fact, traveling between shadows as we speak, and could easily be brought here as time has no meaning in the shadow.\"\n\n\"Is there a way to obtain the mirror without pulling this Shadow here?\"\n\n\"No, although he is a reality bender as well, there is no way to obtain anything from his pockets that he is not consciously ridding himself of. Putting things in his pockets, yes, taking, no.\" The mirror responded quietly with the dark pulses of energy usual between rocks and dragons.\n\n\"I see...\" Ryu stroked his chin with his tail. \"I'd prefer to try talking with this Shadow anyway... Very well then...\"\n\n\"I have already taken the liberty of calling him, already being aware of our conversation. My Priestess is on the way to greet him, though your fox servant has also been drawn.\"\n\nRyu kept himself from raising his eyebrows archly at the mirror's supposition, keeping his thoughts to himself. \"And how to get back to where we belong?\"\n\n\"Her mirror will serve to bring you home, she was only needed here to ensure that the things that needed to come to pass, did in fact begin. Her destiny will entail much rending and mending.\"\n\nHis heart froze, feeling the truth behind the mirror's words."
            },
            {
                "title": "Time, Energy, Will",
                "text": "Shadow frowned a bit, as his trip through the shadow he had stepped into was taking longer than usual. For a brief moment, he thought that he heard the click of a claw on a floor, or the rustle of fabric. The smell of incense filled his nose.\n\n\"Interesting...\" He thought to himself. The dark reaches had given way, and the path beneath his feet was firm marble, as it had seemed to be fading into for quite some time. \"Somebody seems to have an agenda for me today. Why doesn't he ever tell me stuff? Noooo, instead he just decides to mess with where my paths lead... Make me put them all back the way I want them...\"\n\nAnother soft footfall sounded behind him, slippered feet and the whisper of long robes. Dark velvet and darker hair barely distinguished itself from the temple's eternal twilight. Purple eyes shone softly, lending a soft light to add to the gentle twinkle of the dim crystal phosphorescence.\n\n\"Welcome Shadow Walker. You have been expected. There is a young woman here that has done me a service, and so to help her, I ask for the sacred item that you carry which she is keeper of.\"\n\nShadow removed his hat and his glasses respectfully, taking a good look at the figure the darkness revealed when he had turned around.\n\n\"If it's who I think it is, she should already have it, Miss.\"\n\n\"But she doesn't, and that is the problem. Neither she nor the young men with her.\" Raven shook her head quietly and sighed. \"I am told by the Twilight Mirror to speak to the Shadow Walker that arrives, because it fell to his keeping again. My feeling is that she can not return to where she belongs without it.\" The Priestess remained unmoved, looking at him openly and curiously. \"Perhaps there was confusion when you handed it over?\"\n\nShadow stroked his chin thoughtfully. \"Well, I tossed it more than handed it, and everyone sort of fell together so I can see that maybe it could have gotten lost... I could go back and look, if it means I can get back to my own things.\"\n\n\"I'd check your pockets first, just to be certain...\" Akaisu spoke quietly and thoughtfully from the shadows, to the young seeming man that he had been led to, having heard the whole exchange. \"Things around BlowingWind seem to have a strange habit of seeking dark hiding places. Though I'm not saying I am wrong or that you are wrong in where it is, I feel the presence of a holy object on your person...\"\n\nShadow looked at the little fox and began checking his pockets. \"Rubber chicken... laptop... dice... package of donuts...\"\n\nAkaisu sat slowly and wrapped his tail around his feet, making sure to look non-threatening. His own eyes reflected the light as he waited.\n\n\"Pencil, wallet... Why do I have a wallet when I don't need an ID? Brown leather pouch that's really heavy... How did this get in here?\" Shadow opened it carefully, looking at the obsidian mirror now in his hands.\n\n\"Mind of it's own probably...\" Akaisu muttered, eying it carefully.\n\n\"Actually, it was an accident and I got hit in such a manner that I ended up flying into the pocket. I'd appreciate someone getting me back where I belong... It's very tiring being too far from her, and I am waiting for something to happen...\" A very weary voice spoke from within, the surface smoking weakly as the remnant fragment of Obsidian spoke. \"And I'm a little afraid that if I'm not returned soon, she will eventually snap before what I need to do for her can be done. She doesn't like moving very quickly in relationships, and Ryu... is a very lonely dragon and might push.\"\n\nShadow quirked his eyebrow, then raised it further when Akaisu nodded his assent. \"Ok. I think I'd better hand you over myself though. I don't much fancy the idea of you winding up in my pocket again.\"\n\nRaven nodded and turned around, leading the way quietly back toward the Chamber. \"The Chamber of Night Pathways is this way, and so is the little one."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Darkness surrounded her, the same darkness that always threatened to claim her. Outside the darkness, she was aware of being held, distantly. Keeping herself together was a chore, emotional fatigue numbed her thoughts seemingly at random. All she had were brief moments of lucidity, despite how long it had been since her beloved lake spirit's death.\n\n\"How long HAS it been now? It's so easy for me to lose track of time... Obsidian... you called me to follow you and find you, but... Where are you?\"\n\nDesperation flared up in her heart, and she reached out into the enveloping blackness as if she were going to grab him by the shoulders. Her fingers brushed against a strange substance, silky yet slightly tacky in texture, and she tried to grasp it. The familiar sensation, the fact that she recognized the energy she was touching, emboldened her. Swiftly she pulled together every bit of it that she could muster, scooping and pulling.\n\nAt last, it congealed into a familiar half orb, the flat polished surface of the mirror glowing softly with an inner light.\n\n\"Obsidian...\"\n\nBlowingWind looked sadly at the darkness that she held in her hands, her fingers caressing the curved backside of the halved orb. Biting the inside of her lip, she drew a shaky breath deep into her soul, then released it again. \"Another dream. It has to be. I was looking into the big mirror just a bit ago.\"\n\nThe mirror refused to be let go, though she knew it would require a force of will to draw another breath.\n\n\"I'm being broken down and reconstructed, that's what this whole process is... Or I've finally gone insane.\"\n\n\"Hold tight, keep breathing.\" A quiet voice whispered, and in the mirror, Amehana's pale face smiled softly. \"Your mate has you safe, no more planeswalking or mirror gazing for a little bit. But you've got some rather big choices in front of you I'm afraid Little One.\"\n\n\"Choices suck...\"\n\n\"Sometimes.\"\n\n\"Are you sure of what you want to do with your life?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You need to really commit yourself, not keep giving up and withdrawing from life.\"\n\n\"I am committed to my path...\"\n\nThe pale, softly furred, narrow face tilted softly and slowly, an ear flicking dubiously. \"Are you? Being truthful, do you have a purpose that burns in your heart and fills you? Who do you serve? Who do you protect? What drives you to continue? Once you've got the tool you are calling back, what will you do with it?\"\n\nBlowingWind flinched in her dream. The quiet, gentle voice prodded at the tender areas of her heart carefully. \"I want to prevent what happened to my Obsidian from happening to anyone else. That's my purpose... but who I serve and who I protect... I don't know. And I don't know what else to do with the mirror other than to look... I can't call myself a Shaman, I'm mostly self-taught, and I certainly don't know what to call myself now either.\"\n\n\"For now, a label will only get in the way I should think... A mirror is a gateway.\" Amehana held her hands up so that she could show her pupil thin threads running over her fingers that glowed and pulsed lightly. \"The energy cords, the web of energy through everything, can be thought of as passing through these to other mirrors or into the gazer's inner landscape. Following these paths, the mind can go anywhere, the soul anywhere, or any time. The problem is in not getting lost, and remembering to move along with Life and the Present...\" Amehana trailed off, and then sighed. \"There can often be a very large temptation to stay in the past. I speak from personal experience as I'm guilty of being stuck at times.\"\n\nAmehana's form faded into mist, which passed through the mirror and more firmly into BlowingWind's dream. The Kami took her human form next to her, though still keeping the strange feeling of Draconic and Kitsune energies about her. A heavy red kimono lay open over her Miko's garb, gold autumn leaves chased along the hems.\n\n\"These portals, under the right circumstances, can take you back to the physical world, where your body will usually be waiting, if you have left it. Under other, rarer circumstances, one can go directly through them, but that takes quite a bit of power, and sometimes a big mirror. To come back, you'd be better off following some sort of thread.\"\n\n\"So what am I supposed to do with this knowledge? This mirror I hold is only a dream, I don't have the actual mirror back yet. I don't have my Obsidian, and don't know what he wants me to do.\" BlowingWind sighed in exasperation, \"And am I going to remember this lesson when I wake up, or is it going to be another thing that I forget?\"\n\n\"That's up to you... I can't lay out your destiny for you, and Ryu can only help you when you let him and when you give him some idea of what you want and his boundaries. He knows very well what he wants, but he has too much honor to force it on you before you're ready... at least from my own very brief encounters with him and the things I have 'overheard' when going about my duties.\"\n\n\"Ryu... why on earth does he want me so bad? There's nothing special about me...\"\n\nAmehana's gaze grew watery, and her voice even softer, now more like a light breeze over a pond. \"He's not talked to you much about his past then I take it. He's got a reason he's so lonely, but I'm not aware of the details. You'll have to ask him to tell you why his heart is broken some day when you and he are ready to share such personal information. I think he needs you as much as you need to trust him. It takes a lot to harm us here, where belief in us is still very strong even if so many of us are not known by name to the people that we watch over.\"\n\nBlowingWind sighed and nodded. \"I'll remember to do that.\" She chewed her lip lightly as she pondered the purpose of her life, dwelling again on the fact that she'd lost what she had been entrusted with.\n\n\"And... don't you think that since you've been able to hold your mirror in a dream again, that it might mean it is near once more...? Stop beating yourself up over being a bad guardian, take a breath, and just keep walking. You'll get there.\"\n\nAmehana hugged her pupil, BlowingWind stiffening in surprise at the unexpected contact and looking at the spirit with wide eyes. At their contact, a quiet burst rushed down into them through the tops of their heads and through their hearts. The force filled them each to overflowing and then danced between them, going through each again through their hands and chest. Another breath, and it cycled down to the ground and danced around them, stirring cloth and hair before subsiding again, leaving behind a steady pulse. Both could feel as somewhere, something punched through the fabric of reality again, and a thread was drawn taut.\n\n\"What was that?\" BlowingWind gasped.\n\nAmehana frowned in confusion as she let go and stepped back. \"I don't know, I'd only intended to give you comfort and strength... but... I almost wonder if... No, no, what I think is far too rare a thing. I won't speak it.\" She wavered a little, putting a lightly purple tinted hand to her forehead. \"I feel so strange. Move firmly when you make any decision and remember you've got a long road ahead. I... I have to go rest now.\"\n\nHer form faded back into mist and passed away from BlowingWind's sight, the absence of the spirit leaving an emptiness behind. And yet, if she paid attention, she could feel a lingering something, as if she had found an important part of herself, or of what she might become.\n\nFar distant, in the shrine where her body resided, Amehana fell from her seated position to the floor loudly. At the resounding boom of the sensitive pine flooring, slippered feet came through the door after the owner slid the shoji open. One of the other priestesses in attendance kneeled beside the woman to tend the young Kami."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Ryu sighed as he felt the storm Kami that had taken an interest in his chosen Miko, whether BlowingWind thought of herself by the title or not, withdraw again. Amehana's presence was always brief he had noticed, as if despite her soul's age and strength, there were few places where she could remain long. He stroked BlowingWind's forehead lightly, noting the symbols of wind and fire that glowed briefly thereon, bright enough to show a silvery blue before they faded out again.\n\n\"I'm beginning to associate that with something going to happen...\" Ryu thought to himself, turning his head in the direction he could hear distant movement from.\n\n\"Hmmm...?\" BlowingWind opened her eyes sleepily, looking up at him curiously as she resettled. \"I missed something?\"\n\nRyu swallowed his heart at how confused and trusting she looked. \"Nothing... I didn't say a word,\" he whispered. \"Though I did think something, I didn't project it.\" He thought to himself, careful to be sure that the veil between his mind and hers was still intact.\n\nThe child-like quality to her gaze faded, her eyes sharpening again as she fully returned to herself, focusing on his eyes. He swallowed again, this time wondering if she were about to attack for something she thought he might have done during her short rest.\n\n\"Well, if you say so then...\" She cradled her forehead with the palm of her hand and grimaced before attempting to sit up again.\n\n\"We are working on getting you used to channeling chi... You could have learned a lot more I think.\" Ryu grumbled gruffly, directing his attention back toward the direction where he could hear people walking.\n\n\"And you're going to tell me why you're overprotective eventually.\" She directed her gaze guiltily in the same direction as he was, feeling an insistent tugging on her mind and heart. Shakily, she got to her feet, Ryu helping her when it became clear that she intended to get up. \"I feel I've forgotten something. Weird.\"\n\nRyu spared a suspicious glance at the lurking shrine mirror from the corner of his eye, but the dark surface remained empty and silent. BlowingWind had already started to move uncertainly into the dark, her steps sounding crisp against the stone.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" He hissed, following her. \"It's better if we stay where we are... Who knows what sort of things are in this place? Besides, the-\"\n\n\"I'm tired of playing by the rules Ryu...\"\n\n\"You're going by rules? What rules are you using?\" He sighed. \"Heaven forbid I ever make you mad enough to attack me in my sleep then.\"\n\nBlowingWind smiled a bit at his grousing, reaching tentatively to him with her mind. \"You're almost attractive when you're exasperated. Now quit distracting me. I feel my mirror... It's smokier and mistier feeling than this big one here. And... he's close... There's part of him left.\"\n\nRyu smirked, making a mental note of admitted almost attractiveness. His eyes darted about the darkness as he felt things moving other than the priestess, Akaisu, and the shadow walker they had gone to meet. BlowingWind's footfalls were soft but determined as he moved up next to her right, unwilling to risk not being able to shield her from an attack either behind or before.\n\nTo the right a scene formed in the darkness, a young woman with flame colored hair frizzing its way out of a long braid. Her khaki clothing showed the effects of weeks in a jungle. At her back was a young dark haired man, also in khaki, machete as ready as the woman's.\n\nRyu raised his eyebrow and continued on, BlowingWind not having noticed the scene rise and fall, intent on moving forward in the darkness with her limited human sight. Reality seemed to flicker again, the energy having a nearly physical feel as it rippled against his skin. Reacting, Ryu grabbed her and pulled her close.\n\nUnseen worlds fluxed around them as he held her still, unknown threads drawn tightly and puckering the darkness of space around them. An insistent hand seemed to pull on BlowingWind, and he stubbornly clung to her, keeping her where she was. BlowingWind narrowed her eyes and wriggled, trying to break free until she realized what was going on and became still.\n\nDragon and maiden waited in the darkness, tense, straining to hear and feel what they could. The shifting, slithering, scurrying sounds of unseen creatures and the darkness itself pulsed around them.\n\n\"Fight it, shape your environment instead of letting it pull you...\" Ryu murmured, his eyes fixing on a point ahead of them.\n\nA feral growl ripped through the darkness as a jaguar leapt through the gap that opened, in the direction he had seen the woman in less than a second before. Out of instinct, he shifted back to his draconic form, now shielding BlowingWind with his body.\n\nHis own roar echoed through the halls as he struck at the cat, the luminesence from its crossing through time and space not having time to fade as flaming claws sliced through the body. The jaguar landed on the floor in a pile of smoking meat, and the dragon scanned the area for more hazards to his charge.\n\n\"Finally something in my range of expertise... Thank you for allowing me the liberty to defend you properly now.\" His aramitama hissed as Ryu coiled his long, lithe body around the shocked maiden in his grip.\n\nBlowingWind paused, looking into the darkness ahead. Reaching her hand out, it pressed against an invisible barrier. It gave slightly beneath her fingers, warmer to the touch than the rest of the space around them.\n\n\"Ryu, this feels like a gate to me... what do you think?\"\n\nThe thick jungle slipped and clicked into place around them, and the darkness faded to merely that of a MesoAmerican jungle.\n\n\"As your guardian, I say you were safer with the mirror, though I didn't like that large thing one bit. You know that I know as little as you do what's actually in all this nothingness in this temple. On the other hand, you're moving forward again...\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded slightly. \"Not the forward I was really hoping for... Was hoping for going closer to the mirror, not out into some jungle.\"\n\nThe khaki clad woman and her partner paid the large dragon and tiny woman no attention, occupied with fending off large cats of their own and yelling.\n\n\"William! If we get out of this, you are so explaining to my mother 'ow you got us lost in the jungle!\" The woman's Irish accent added an extra edge, boosting the scream that came as her side got grazed.\n\n\"Jewel, I'm more worried about living, and then explaining to our benefactors. Archaeology is all we know HOW to do.\"\n\nRyu huffed and swiped at one of the large cats, sending it crashing into a tree. \"I'd say we must be on the etheric level, though these cats must be hungry, or something is controlling them, since they haven't felt me and run to safety yet.\"\n\nWilliam's machete managed to slice the throat of a jaguar leaping at him. Before long, the remaining cats were either dead or running away, and the woman called Jewel inspected the bodies. BlowingWind watched from within the coil her guardian had kept around her, her eye caught by the sheen of a thread.\n\n\"Ryu, some of those threads are being pulled... but I can't see by who... And I swear that there's something familiar about how she feels. Who is she?\"\n\n\"Threads, dear?\" Ryu inspected William closely as the human moved around. \"I see nothing...\"\n\n\"Bill... We have to be close to the dragon pyramid we've been looking for, these are claw marks, not machete... and we aren't strong enough to fling big cats this far... If something has protected us, then maybe some of the others are also alright, and we can still accomplish what we went on this expedition for...\"\n\n\"Maybe it ate those poachers that were responsible for us all getting split up and lost...\" Bill distastefully cleaned his blade, his nose wrinkling a little as his lips thinned. \"I don't believe in this mumbo jumbo you say your family believes, I'm just here to study artifacts of MesoAmerican cultures, but things are always really weird around you, Red. Doesn't matter where we are.\"\n\nJewel tossed a rock at him and chuckled, still a bit breathless. \"How many times do I have to tell you, William, I hate that nickname.\"\n\n\"As many as it takes to get you to call me Bill 75 percent of the time.\"\n\n\"Ryu...\" BlowingWind pressed against his side. \"I don't feel well... I'm starting to shake, and... I feel something weird... like a ripple inside. And it's creepy that they can look right at us and not see us...\"\n\nRyu pulled her closer. \"I think the woman knows something is around, but we're out of phase enough and she's still disoriented enough that she isn't sure exactly were or what. That ripple, did you feel it before it came out into what's around us and we wound up here?\"\n\n\"Yeah...\"\n\n\"Try to make it stronger, maybe we'll wind up back in the hall we were in again. Here, draw on me. You have to learn to save your own strength.\" Ryu rested his muzzle against the top of her head and exhaled slowly, gently pressing his energy into her.\n\nBlowingWind tentatively pulled the offered energy, allowing that to strengthen and steady her. Timidly, she allowed the rippling feeling inside her heart to spread outward, and gasped at the feeling of a vast fabric being shaken and folded around her. \"It feels a bit like someone's weaving, and another person is sewing, while someone else is trying to move a really big quilt out of the way for more...\"\n\nThe jungle slid out of place and faded, leaving them in the dark halls lined with the glowing crystals mimicking starlight once again. Ryu smiled grimly. \"See, you don't need that mirror. Might be useful for some things, but largely I think it's just a crutch for you...\"\n\n\"Part of my past though...\" BlowingWind leaned back into his arms as he slipped between dragon and human again. She nodded a bit, closing her mind to the strange pulls on her spirit. Her view narrowed to the point that Ryu had been looking at earlier, as the temple came back into view. Deliberately, she began walking again. \"Right. Forward we go. I feel like an idiot, but hold tight to me and don't let me slip.\"\n\nRyu nodded lightly behind her, following carefully as she resumed her movement. Deliberate steps led them along what felt like a thread. BlowingWind paused whenever it seemed to move beneath their feet, reaching out for Obsidian's energy.\n\n\"Think I can get you to call your mother or write her a letter when we get back home? She has got to be very worried. I half expect to get pulled into a pocket dimension for you to confront your mother or something.\"\n\n\"Ryu, do you think we're living in a Sci-Fi or something? That's just crazy.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not giving up on maybe you accidentally slipping us into a romance...\" He chuckled, then sputtered when she elbowed him. \"Ow, that's my spot...\"\n\nThe world grew lighter around them. With every step and every breath, BlowingWind felt life returning to her, a slow stirring in her breast and loins, a tingle in her limbs. Pillars could be seen now in the soft glow.\n\n\"My pace, you scaly coyote.\"\n\n\"...is as slow as a snail when you don't want to do something that requires maybe being shown wrong, like apologizing to your mother for running away...\" he thought.\n\nLooking around, BlowingWind began to realize that the glow came from herself. Ahead, she could see two humanoid creatures walking, and one little red fox padding with them, face betraying nothing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Shadow stopped, feeling the fabric of reality ripple, and then ripple again as whoever or whatever returned from wherever and whenever they went, a dragon's roar echoing and resounding through the halls, devouring the echoes of their footsteps. \"Smells like barbecue...\" he commented, sniffing. \"Smells like they forgot the sauce though...\"\n\nAhead of them, Akaisu could see BlowingWind leaning back against Ryu, who held her protectively as he shifted his shape. The pair glowed from their slip as they murmured to each other, the tiny woman stabilizing, and then elbowing the volcano Kami with great gusto.\n\n\"I see you've had a bit of an awakening Child...\" Raven said carefully.\n\n\"No, I only see that I have to keep going. I don't know why.\" BlowingWind replied.\n\n\"It would have been easier on you if you had waited with the Twilight Mirror.\" Raven commented. \"The halls past the point of the chamber tend to slip between worlds and times. Without being firmly tied to a reference point, it would be very easy to become lost. The Purple Shrine has reasons that it is known as the Dark Shrine and the Temple of Twilight to those who come to it.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I felt Obsidian's fragment inside the mirror he gave me, and was eager to get it back.\" BlowingWind frowned. \"Though I don't quite know what I mean by that since part of the reason I left mother was to find where he had gone... and I've been finding little bits of myself now and then while on my quest.\" She looked even more confused for a moment, pressing her lips together with a far away look.\n\nRyu eyed her carefully, prepared to dip into her mind as far as she would let him, or to repell an invading presence if required. Akaisu sat quietly, his gaze going between the gathered group calmly as he observed. BlowingWind focused her eyes again quickly.\n\nShadow looked at BlowingWind's face and into her eyes as she fearlessly looked back into his. \"Leaving that room was a stupid thing to do. You could have gotten lost, you could have fallen off the path. I've never been here before and I'd rather not walk around without someone that knows their way around.\"\n\nRagingTornado, her darker aspect, stirred for just a moment before settling down deep again. BlowingWind carefully chose her words. \"I had to move somehow. The path felt like it went this way, and we could hear you walking.\"\n\nRyu watched Shadow considering her answer, his own eyebrow raising a bit in exasperation.\n\n\"I'd say that your boyfriend agrees with me that it was a dangerous thing for you to do, and I'll bet that since you were obviously so set on meeting us, that he did what he could to keep you safe. You really should be nicer to him.\" Shadow handed the pouch to Akaisu, who very promptly moved to BlowingWind's side and handed it to her.\n\nRyu held his tongue, though he did agree, and would have rather had BlowingWind back home. His developing understanding of the workings of her mind, and the tightness of her aura around herself, told him that silence would be better.\n\n\"He did have to help keep me here, I started to slip through something... Thank you for bringing Obsidian's gift back to me... I can promise that this won't happen again.\" She looked at Shadow thoughtfully as she spoke. \"He looks a little like I'd expect one of my uncles or cousins to look.\" She thought.\n\n\"Good, now if you'll excuse me, there is a party I've been trying to get to.\" With that, Shadow put his shades back on and stepped into the shadow cast by Raven's body and the light that emanated so softly still from BlowingWind. In the next moment, he was gone.\n\nBlowingWind carefully pulled the dark mirror from its case, just enough to brush her fingers over the surface, and heaved a deep sigh. \"Now to figure out how to get home... and I'm worried about Maeve... I feel like there is something more that we should to do help her...\"\n\nRyu's chest tightened when BlowingWind turned her eyes on him, age and worry temporarily darkening them. \"I'll figure something out, if that's what you want...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Finding the Heart Path",
                "text": "Kori and Karasu sat on the ground beside a stream, the water rushing quietly past rocks. They had no idea how long they had been in meditation there, searching for Akaisu's mental presence. They had left the forgotten village days ago, having no need to continue to be in the area.\n\n\"I found it.\" Karasu projected to Kori, directing his awareness to the path that Akaisu had fallen upon with the dragon and the human.\n\n\"It's a step. Now for the next.\"\n\n\"Hai... Seems to go right through a barrier. \"If she makes it back, do you think that we won't have to observe and test anymore?\"\n\n\"If she brings Akaisu back... Yes, I think that it would prove she has enough grasp of herself she won't need binding or death.\"\n\n\"And if not?\"\n\n\"Then it's out of our hands and up to whatever is where she is. These threads feel very tangled... Possibly more at work here than just you, I, and the Kitsune.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Marie opened her eyes, looking at the white ceiling for a moment before reality caught up with her once again. Her sister was far away across the sea, her husband long dead, and her daughter still gone. There were still bills to pay, houses to build while the richer folks moved out to the woods, houses to fix when people couldn't or didn't have time to do it themselves, food to cook and eat. Life continued rolling on around her...\n\n\"And I feel like the rock stuck at the edge of the river. Sometimes I wish I were a little boat and I could float on too...\" Marie observed aloud to no one in particular.\n\nWith a groan she sat up and got out of bed, changing from her green night clothes into her blue denims and a white shirt. After pulling on her socks and tying her work boots, Marie shook her head quizzically, walking over to the small carved cherrywood box she kept her jewelery in, one of the few items that she had brought with her from Ireland and kept.\n\nCarefully, she flipped up the hinged lid, exposing small school photos of her only child, the baby teeth that she had kept, some of the silver and turquoise she still owned, and little feathers and trinkets BlowingWind had found and brought her. Digging carefully through the box she pulled out an old envelope before shutting the lid carefully.\n\nMarie played with the corners of the envelope thoughtfully as she made her way down to the kitchen for coffee, a small frown etching into her face, her long hair still unbrushed. After putting a small pot of Folger's on to brew, and frying up some ham and hashbrowns, she brought her breakfast to the table. It was there that she opened the envelope and pulled out the old letter, and a small bronze medallion.\n\n\u2002Dear Marie,\n\n\u2002I'm sorry that it has come to this, and that you have deemed it necessary to leave us. I will miss you Marie. I made this medallion for you with the old equipment. I know you don't believe in it all, that you've made yourself forget, but Our Lady is always there when we need Her.\n\n\u2002With Love,\n\n\u2002Marcella O'Drake\n\nRunning her fingers over the medallion, she looked at and studied the equal armed cross surrounded by the circle, and on the other side the figure of Brigit. Marie sighed deeply, then fingered it the whole time she ate her breakfast and drank her coffee. After putting her dishes in the sink and rinsing them, she drifted over to one of the drawers and pulled out one of several packs of bootstrings, choosing a sturdy black leather lace.\n\nQuietly she strung the medallion, placed a little salt in a small cup of water, and took both to the little window shrine she had maintained since BlowingWind's disappearance. The novena still burned, the assorted trinkets and pictures rested where they had. On an impulse, she sprinkled a little of the water on herself and over the shrine before placing the cup with the rest.\n\n\"We'll keep our eyes open Mrs. MountainChild.\" Marie could hear the slight eyebrow raise as she remembered what Officer O'Burke had said. \"But we've not found any trace, and we have nothing to go on.\"\n\n\"I know she's alive out there. I can feel it.\"\n\n\"Mrs. MountainChild, we all hope that, for every disappearance.\"\n\nShe pushed away the memory, refusing to give in again to the bone crushing and mind numbing worry.\n\n\"I'll try anything, it feels like my baby is in trouble still. Brigit, if you are there, if the stories of your involvement with my family are true and you are real... bring my baby home. And... show yourself to me somehow...\"\n\nMarie sighed deeply and placed the medallion around her neck before heading to work. Standing within the flame of the candle, a woman with fiery hair and a green gown crossed her arms in displeasure.\n\n\"I show myself, and she doesn't even look! Finnegan! We have work to do with Marie herself, she's forgotten for far too long.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Akaisu sat in the corner of the tavern, where he had lurked since they had left the Purple Shrine. Several days had gone by, without Blowing Wind having figured out how to use the mirror to get them home. His ear flicked away a fly and he shifted his hands inside the sleeves of his kimono. Nearby, BlowingWind gazed into the depths of her mirror, probing her memories for clues, the Obsidian of this time/place and Ryu watching her.\n\nIt almost bothered him a bit that the spirit dwelling in the mirror and the black dragon of Rhian were different beings, and that Ryu was connected to the spirit she sought. \"More worrisome that she hasn't figured it out yet, I do believe...\" Akaisu finished his thought within his own mind, watching the ripple on the surface as the bubble rose.\n\nHe sighed and slipped back into meditation, trying to make contact with the Tengu that had been his companions. \"Surely there is some way to find our way back.\" had become his internal mantra for the time being.\n\nRyu sighed and retreated from BlowingWind as she raised her shields around herself, examining some memory she did not want him peeking into her mind to see. Gwydion had allowed him to borrow maps of the area and surrounding lands, and it was to these that he returned the main of his attention. Obsidian watched the three travelers carefully for a moment before leaving to attend to his own duties... waiting to hear from Drake about Maeve.\n\nA small green dragon slipped into the tavern, her blue eyes and red mane seeming to glow with their own inner light.\n\n\"Belara!\" The tavern keeper cried and thudded across the floor toward her, a tray of his finest bread and mead in his hands while she stood and let her eyes adjust to the lighting. \"What brings you into town?\"\n\n\"My forge sent me, said a sister of the Flame was here and stuck... and a few other things... you know how such things are...\" Belara well knew that the tavern keeper didn't, but liked to think he did from all the stories that travelers shared. Her eyes swept over the room, pausing for the briefest moment before continuing on. \"But I see no green gowns here, other than the fuzzy young man in a strangely cut robe. Perhaps she is with Herman or Gwydion then.\" Her eyes settled on Akaisu for a moment, studying his green kimono. \"I have been seeing a few more of similar robes...\"\n\nRyu raised his eyebrow and looked up from the maps for a moment, looking at the newcomer and then smirking a little when he saw the direction of her gaze. Returning his eyes to the map he was studying, he tapped at one location. \"My dear, they use teleport crystals to cross large distances, this location where they are known to come from looks like it might have some of the same properties as the crystals themselves... and we materialized in the general vicinity.\"\n\nBlowingWind finally looked up from her mirror, looking at him carefully. \"Maybe I can find the thread then from that... hole... we fell through... That's the best I can describe it. A hole and a thread. The Apache tell that humans came to this earth by crawling up through a hole in the ground, many other tribes tell the tale, if what I have learned was correct. I remember the rope described as a spider thread in some versions... or a sunbeam in others... How can I use this information to cross us back....?\" Her eyes glazed over again as her thoughts turned inward and she began to debate with herself.\n\nRyu frowned a bit, having hoped that the information would have pulled her attention outward for more than a moment. \"Perhaps I should be thankful that I have given her an idea, no matter how much I despise being out of my element and my known world.\" He silently consoled himself.\n\n\"And that still leaves us not helping Maeve...\" BlowingWind leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and chin in her hands, gazing forward now as she thought. \"Do you really think Drake can handle finding her? I feel like I'm forgetting something important that my mother told me once... long ago... but every time I try to remember, there's this blank spot in my memory...\"\n\nRyu paled and his hair stood on end. Moving to her side and slipping his arm around her, he drew her close. \"Can you describe that more?\" Akaisu's ear turned toward the pair and his eyes opened, fur on end slightly.\n\nBlowingWind leaned into Ryu's chest without thinking. \"It's fuzzy, fuzzy and dark, like something overlaid the memory, and I get sleepy when I try to push at it, or come to the memory by a round about way. It was something she said just before I found the mirror. I'd seen eyes watching us in the water, at Medicine Lake, and told mother, and then she went on and ranted, and told a story about... something... bad... that happened in the family past...\" She swallowed and pressed against him. \"Ugh... makes me feel ill trying to think.\"\n\n\"I'd say either it hasn't happened yet, or... it was the 'medicine' from Kori affecting the wrong thing.\" Akaisu murmured.\n\n\"Or it could be that whatever she's trying to remember has no business being remembered right now...\" Belara interrupted and stepped closer, sniffing carefully at the three outsiders. \"I'd say that anything you do will bring about what's going to happen, so it's better to go home, wherever your home is. The problem is not yours.\"\n\nRyu stroked BlowingWind's shoulder when she stiffened. \"It is my problem, it affects who I am, but I don't know how. I have to fix what's broken.\" She fixed her gaze on the green dragon.\n\n\"Why try to change who you are, you weren't brought here to change things? You were brought here to face yourself and kindle your fire. You've faced yourself, your fire at least smolders now, why stay here? Go home, the task belongs to another, this is the message I was given to bring you, though you are not what I expected to meet.\"\n\nBelara's eyes were cold as ice and her face set, refraining from the sneer that she wanted to wear, reminding herself that she was young and lost once too.\n\nBlowingWind groaned and put her gazing mirror away. \"I have this bad feeling I'm going to get that often. Alright, we go home. That's what I was trying to figure out how to do anyway... Maybe I can talk to the land where we materialized and get an idea... not like I know HOW to talk to land...\"\n\n\"I find it's often better to stop worrying about the how of a matter, and to just perform the task. We often already know inside how to do something, it is getting past ourselves enough to do it, believing that we can.\" Belara spoke quietly and purposefully, each syllable falling like the sound of a hammer on metal, vibrating the bones of all in the room.\n\nAkaisu's mind managed to finally reach forward in time enough to brush against Kori, the sensation a slipping of fur past feather, very lightly, as if barely at the tips of both.\n\nBelara watched BlowingWind get up and drift outside, still deep in thought. Ryu shrugged at Akaisu, who had opened his eyes fully at the sound of the bench scooting, before both of them got up to follow the woman. Belara shook her head sadly. \"If that's what the future is coming to... I am worried... I will have to talk long to the Lady of the Forge, and to Maeve when Drake returns with her... There will be much work to do in the coming times.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Kori sighed, exasperation just barely beginning to tickle the edges of his mind while he stretched for the mind of his fox associate, or the mind of the dragon, or the young woman they were with, disgruntled that the testing had been interrupted. One snowy eyebrow finally twitched as he felt the light brush of the fox's mind and then as the Kitsune's attention redirected."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "BlowingWind narrowed her eyes after a hike had brought them back to the general area of their appearance. \"Guys... How long do you think we've been gone, from where we were and from the material world...?\"\n\n\"No way to tell until we get back.\" Ryu eyed ominous grey clouds on the horizon before looking at her. \"Feeling anything yet?\"\n\nBlowingWind shook her head, fingering the shell pendant still around her neck. \"I keep wondering if we're just following red herrings.\"\n\nAkaisu had ranged ahead a bit, the green of his kimono almost blending with the grasses. \"Found something interesting...\" He called to them, not taking his eyes off his discovery, waiting for the others to come see.\n\nBlowingWind kneeled down, pushing the grasses to the sides to see more of the rock. The dark grey of it looked extremely out of place, the spiral carvings filled in with a green lichen. \"This feels weirdly familiar...\" Her finger traced the spiral thoughtfully, leaving a light glow as it passed.\n\n\"It reacted to you.\" Ryu murmured, Akaisu nodding his assent. \"There's more.\" Ryu pointed to another nearby.\n\nBlowingWind moved to the next, her finger tracing over a similar symbol, \"I... think I might have had a dream about something like this...\" The hem of a green skirt, and the flash of auburn hair and copper flitted through her mind, and the sound of a voice intoning vowel sounds almost registered before slipping away again.\n\n\"Can you tell us about it?\" Ryu asked.\n\n\"I don't know...\" Getting up, she moved to another rock that caught her eye with the same pattern. \"Voices, eight of them, maybe female... and dark. Then a symbol like this, and the image of a loom. Sometimes I see women in green dresses, sometimes there is Amehana teaching me about mirror magic from her culture... Feelings like weaving and then sewing... maybe embroidering. So many dreams that are just blank spots, but I was seeing or learning something... but in one, a circle of stones... maybe a gateway...\"\n\n\"Is this a gateway then? I suppose it could be if fully opened.\" Akaisu frowned, examining an untouched stone and then going back to the first stone. \"There were plenty of gateways in that Temple Complex... Where would this one lead?\"\n\n\"Those were all unstable though, I didn't like the feel of the place, and that's saying something for a dragon used to living underground inside himself.\" Ryu answered. \"Of course, Wind-chan still nearly managed to slip through something, and it didn't look like a good place to slip to.\"\n\n\"I'm used to the gates back at... home...\" BlowingWind looked up. \"I just ran through them and they would fold the forest, and I'd come out the other side. No activation, just jumping. Though I know the land there, and... it knows me. I almost know the land here, like it's in my blood, but very distant somehow.\" She returned to tracing the signs, one by one.\n\n\"In your blood...\" Ryu murmured quietly. \"You seem calmer, smell that way too...\"\n\n\"Things just shifted a bit...\" Akaisu looked at the ground doubtfully. \"I think I'd feel better if you stopped tracing the symbols, I'd rather not fall through the ground or something.\"\n\nBlowingWind looked up at Akaisu, his red fur standing on end and ears laid back. \"You look better like that, than when you pretend to be a human... Shouldn't pretend to be something you aren't... and you should stop feeling so bad about whatever it is that you have been doing...\"\n\nRyu took a close look at her eyes, \"Which of you in there is in control...?\"\n\n\"The one that has a little bit more of an idea as to what I'm doing. I might not have gotten formal training, but I can somewhat feel what's going on here...\" BlowingWind's lips curled into a cool smile. \"And no, it's not RagingTorndado. Akaisu, please reach out for your 'friends' since you know what they feel like more than I do.\"\n\n\"What? You want the fox to help?\" Ryu sputtered and glared. \"What do you intend to do?\"\n\n\"Spin for the one part. I need a reference point, or we could end up anywhere or nowhere.\"\n\n\"Spin...?\" Akaisu murmured, sitting down and getting comfortable before doing as asked.\n\nBlowingWind pulled Ryu to a spot on the other side of the circle. \"You'll see... I think...\" She smiled at Ryu and pressed him down to his seat.\n\nRyu looked up at her in confusion, a blush beginning to tint his cheeks at the unexpected contact.\n\n\"Hey... focus... Ryu, don't go like you were back...\" BlowingWind looked at him pointedly for a moment and let the statement trail off before beginning again. \"Just think of home right now.\"\n\nAkaisu would have snickered if he was a century younger. Instead, while BlowingWind sat down in the center of the circle and pulled her gazing stone out again, he focused on searching for Kori and Karasu. After several moments of sinking into his breath and feeling as if the earth and sky had claimed him, he felt the feather brush of Kori's search.\n\n\"I have something...\" Akaisu announced quietly. The feather touch soon was a claw grasping his mind as firmly as if his mother had grabbed his tail to prevent him from avoiding a long ago chore.\n\n\"Good. Try to hold onto that for me.\"\n\n\"I don't think he'll have a problem with that...\" Ryu hissed, Karasu's mind having found his own, simultaneously gripping back even though every fiber of his being wanted to shove the troublesome presence away.\n\nBlowingWind nodded nervously and traced the spiral pattern onto the surface of the mirror, chanting quietly Spider's Song as her father had sung it when she was small. Letting her eyes focus just behind the surface, she watched as smoke seemed to spiral on the surface where she had traced. Breathing slowly, she listened to the beating of her heart, a slow drumbeat that pulsed through her body.\n\nBefore long, her breathing dropped to an even slower rate, and her heart felt strangely full. Reaching out for the minds of her companions, she followed the threads of consciousness, to her mind's eye showing as thin beams of sunlight through a darkness, tiny dust motes dancing through. The last of the circle, the grassblades behind the half orb, fell away, leaving her in the darkness of the cavern. Around her, green swirls marked where the rocks actually were.\n\n\"Draw your bow Daughter...\" A voice echoed within the cave their minds were in.\n\n\"...Daddy...?\" While one fragment of her mind chanted, BlowingWind called and turned around, a bow now in her hand.\n\nSoaringHawk, his tanned skin darker in the shadows, pointed to the small hole high above.\n\n\"You shouldn't have ever been able to go to where you fell. I'm glad that you were able to make your way to the ancestral cave with whatever portal you used. Good girl. Now you need to shoot for up there, be ready to have your heart pulled on as the arrow flies.\"\n\nBlowingWind nodded, glancing over at Ryu and at Akaisu before nocking an arrow from the quiver she felt on her back. Aiming for the light, she pushed away the thought that she had no idea of what she was doing, and pulled the string back as far as she could.\n\nWith the release sounding through the cave, she screamed in surprise at the sudden feeling of her heart being ripped out of her chest and yet still within her. As her fingers closed physically around her obsidian mirror in reflex, she nearly lost the vision. As one, Ryu and Akaisu leaped for her, seeing both the circle in the grass as well as the cave BlowingWind's soul had slipped into.\n\nThe arrow shot through the hole and landed outside, burying itself in the ground outside. The three of them saw what looked like a tick spiderweb glistening in the light, and then a flash of light surrounded them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Return to the Present, Forgetting",
                "text": "She opened her eyes and groaned, eyes burning from the change between velvet dark and bright sun streaming through the leaves. Looking upward as her eyes focused, she noticed the leaves were maple, rustling and dancing softly in the soft breeze that she felt on her skin. BlowingWind groaned loudly and covered her eyes, mirror clutched tightly in the other hand.\n\n\"Owwwwwww. It hurts...\"\n\n\"You got us back though.\" Akaisu stated, sitting up and rubbing his temples. \"I think I have holes in my brain...\"\n\n\"Yes you do!\" Kori boomed, making Ryu, BlowingWind, and Akaisu all wince and hold their heads. \"You should have contacted me sooner.\"\n\n\"Kori means he was worried.\" Karasu broke in.\n\n\"He yells like that again and I'll roast him...\" Ryu growled. \"None of us would have been in that fix if it weren't for the likes of you meddling in our lives.\"\n\n\"The girl's training wasn't complete, it was our job to test her.\" Kori glared coldly at Ryu. \"She can hardly be trusted with the rambunctious, chaotic, disobedient likes of you.\"\n\n\"Actually, all things considered, I think that no one has to worry about how well he can take care of her...\" Akaisu interjected, attempting to derail the fight. \"He's shown himself to be very protective.\"\n\n\"Hey... I'm a big girl, I can make my own decisions. You guys had better not be fighting over me, I'd be very happy to get a big stick and beat you with it for being a bunch of pigs. Now about the training, no I didn't finish, technically I've barely started. I'm quite willing to keep learning all my life... not that I understand why this is such a big thing...\"\n\nEveryone looked at BlowingWind, who for that moment had all parts of her shattered soul working in harmony. The waves of irritation rolling off of her were perfectly visible to the spirits. Ryu sighed carefully, not letting it become apparent.\n\n\"Though I'd really rather her rest after that, as I know it took a lot out of her just by the look in her eyes, a closed mouth gathers no foot... Or anything else she might shove in it depending on how badly I mess up...\" He thought slowly.\n\nRyu nearly flinched when her eyes swept over him, sensing somehow that he had thought something about her, and he prayed she didn't interpret it as him thinking something bad. BlowingWind raised her eyebrow and took a deep breath, then calmed down.\n\n\"I'm very angry that this relic that my former boyfriend had given me was stolen, but with what I've gotten to know of Akaisu, I think somehow he got in over his head. I plan to go back to my apartment with Ryu, and hopefully I've not missed my first semester with all of this, that would really screw up my student visa.\" BlowingWind wrapped up the half orb, refusing to look at anyone, before securing it to her waist.\n\nKori pressed his lips into a thin line at the imperious tone BlowingWind had taken. \"Very well, you've satisfied us at any rate for the purposes of what our assignment had been.\"\n\nAkaisu's ears laid back against his head, recognizing the cutting edge in Kori's own voice.\n\nBlowingWind sighed and shrugged off Ryu's hand as he reached for her. \"Thank you for being an anchor to get us back to the right point. I wouldn't have been able to know where to go without a direction to aim... and Akaisu being able to connect with you opened the hole...\" She looked up at Kori, noting the ancient leathery face and large red nose before raking her eyes over the primeval Japanese forest.\n\nRyu smiled a bit, feeling well how it had been difficult for her to thank the Tengu. Kori softened slightly, ruffled feathers laying back down. Karasu and Akaisu exchanged a quick glance.\n\n\"Alright. You're welcome. But be careful with yourself...\" Kori left the clearing, Karasu nodding in relief to Akaisu before following the older Tengu.\n\nAkaisu waited until the two Tengu were out of the clearing. \"Ryu, you be careful with her and take good care of her. If you mess up and I find out about it, I'll be back...\" After bowing to BlowingWind, he shifted back to his fox form and streaked off after his companions.\n\n\"Brigit won't be happy with me no doubt, but I see no reason for her to be concerned now. I'll get a work contract with someone else...\" Akaisu thought to himself, hackles rising slightly as he remembered his few conversations with the green robed foreign goddess, her very foreignness triggering his unease.\n\nGreen eyes had watched the whole exchange, the flash of light as the young woman punctured the fabric of reality and pulled herself and her companions through on a thread of determination from her own heart. In another day, she would have called the child one of her priestesses-in-training, and yet, there was much that she would not have learned if BlowingWind were only her own. The breeze stirred her green robe and red hair invisibly as she continued to watch BlowingWind throw herself at Ryu and hug him fiercely, sobbing quietly now that there was no one else to see.\n\nBrigit sighed silently as Ryu stroked the hair of the girl and murmured soothingly to her in his own language. \"So... that is how Maeve had been found and taken from Drake... and why I had been unable to find out the exact happenings... now that one of the descendants went to that time period, a veil in my mind is torn... I can see more of what had been stored in her breastplate.\"\n\nBlowingWind's tired and frustrated tears hadn't stopped, Finnegan shifted around Brigit's waist in distress at the sounds and the energy. \"Do you think that they'll find Maeve, Ryu?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but something tells me that things will work out.\" Ryu murmured in her ear, rubbing her back now. \"Ready to go home? Shall I carry you.?\"\n\n\"Please... I'm so very tired here...\" She tapped over her heart. \"It feels that we definitely should not have been there whatsoever. And my head hurts, dizzy...\"\n\nRyu nodded. \"I'm not feeling in my best form either, but everything is fine...\" Ryu's head felt like it was pulling apart and reordering itself, as if his own soul was fighting memories contained within it from before his current birth. A slight prickle crept up his spine and he looked around carefully.\n\n\"Someone's here...\" Ryu thought to himself.\n\nBrigit noticed that his eyes were coming dangerously close to her location, even if she was certain that he would not be able to see her. \"No, Drake's life memories can't wake up right now... It is not a good time.\n\nFinnegan nodded at her telepathic communication. \"Ryu deserves to be Ryu, not any of the lives he's been part of before.\"\n\nBrigit reached into the tawny leather pouch hanging from the belt of gold and emeralds that Finnegan coiled just above, withdrawing a rounded pebble. Gathering up the water and fire within herself, she focused on her need, adding in the earth from which ores came. When she could feel the stone laden with mist to the full of it's capacity, she hurled the stone, striking Ryu's forehead. The rock rebounded and hit BlowingWind, and the magic released into both of them.\n\n\"Drake's memories sleep within the soul, and if knowledge of true relation of BlowingWind to anyone encountered on her journey, let it be forgotten, a dream, that life will be within the present. Let there remain a drive to reunite BlowingWind with Marie.\"\n\nBlowingWind and Ryu slumped into each other and fell against the ground. Brigit and Finnegan watched quietly as even unconscious, Ryu continued to fend off the magic. Red and yellow tendrils wrapped around the greens and reds now visible, but with a breath the older goddess was able to subdue the much younger Kami, and her spell did it's work. Brigit took a step toward the pair, and then stopped.\n\n\"I could take her back to her mother right now Finnegan...\" She sighed deeply, and then knelt by the pair after all, running a finger over swirling marks over BlowingWind's shoulder. \"But what good will it do with these if they don't meet again willingly? I swear the young ones of this family just can't keep their wits about them when it comes to some things...\"\n\nFinnegan nodded. \"Every last one of them. And the volcano dragon will fit right in...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "The breeze almost seemed to flick Ryu's ear, as if to wake him. Opening his eyes, he was greeted by the sight of BlowingWind's forehead. \"Ngh. Too close...\" Closing his eyes for a moment, he placed his own forehead against hers. \"Whoever I felt is gone. And I don't feel like several people at once. That was worse than when my aramitama decides we're bored.\"\n\nCarefully he extracted himself from BlowingWind's unconscious embrace and erected a barrier. \"Ridiculous, I've not had to use kekkai just to be certain I won't be interrupted checking anyone over for quite some time. You just attract trouble my dear.\"\n\nHe frowned, running his hands a few inches above her still sleeping form. \"More magic. More foreign magic. Hers I don't mind, but this... I was beginning to understand what was going on without another layer of crud muddling it all.\" Working carefully where he could feel knots and bindings, he did what he could to work them loose or to break them. At last, he reached a point where he knew he would be able to do no more, that he would have to work on it again at a later time.\n\nStepping out of the barrier, Ryu set about gathering some food for the two of them. Following his ears to a stream, he scanned the water for fish. Reaching in deftly after tying his sleeves back, he caught two decently sized ones. He then returned, building a small fire near BlowingWind, yet far enough away that there would be no danger that she would suddenly roll into it. Spearing the fish, he set them over the fire and propped the sticks so that he could tend the fire better.\n\nTime passed by, his attention drifting between his task of preparing food and monitoring the unconscious woman. Part of himself mentally ran over the commute between their apartment and the college campus, and the possible dangers that she might face just in trying to lead her mundane life. Her problem with slipping between dimensions bothered him greatly. \"If it's this bad, I have to wonder what it would be like farther from gates and closer to gates,\" he thought.\n\nWhen the fish was nearly done to his satisfaction, BlowingWind began to stir. Ryu watched as she opened her eyes, and they focused on the leaves overhead.\n\n\"Welcome back, my Kaze-chan.\"\n\nBlowingWind's eyes flicked away from the leaves, to the young man preparing fish a small distance away. The spectral overlay of his true self had wound it's tail around her, draping the end over her chest. It was just barely visible though, perhaps only because she knew what he really was.\n\n\"What happened Ryu?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. I feel like you hit me over the head with a frying pan again.\" His dark eyes danced a little teasingly as he eyed her, although his question was very serious. \"Did you hit me?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so\u2026\" She slowly sat up and brushed her hair behind her ears. \"I feel like I've gone a million miles, but what we did I can't remember\u2026\"\n\nRyu nodded as he used stones to prop the roasting sticks properly over the fire, his sleeves carefully tied back to prevent them from being damaged. \"Someone's got a bind on us, but it's too advanced for me to undo. While you were unconscious I did manage to figure out that it's either time delayed or situation triggered. So whoever bound our memories intends for us to get them back at some point.\" He made no mention of what he remembered of their trip, the thought of reminding her how frozen she had been over things did not appeal to him, and if she were past that point he did not wish to bring it back. The memory of her releasing an arrow and the rope that it carried from within herself held him back.\n\nBlowingWind frowned. \"Seems rather odd, and like a lot of work. Why would someone do something like that?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But I don't like it.\" Ryu handed her the larger of the fish. \"Eat this, then I'll carry you home, dear. Sooner we get home, the sooner we know when it is and how much time you have left before classes start. Maybe I'll take a class or two myself, learn something new or hone some skills.\"\n\n\"Why does it sound like an excuse to tag along and keep an eye out on me, Ryu?\" She grumbled before taking a bite of her fish.\n\n\"Because in part it is.\" He replied mildly. \"And I will need to get to know the area we now live in better anyway. I think if I can find someone teaching, I ought to brush up on my magic, and it certainly won't kill me to brush up my fighting tactics. I don't like being rusty.\" Muttering to himself, he added, \"and learn more about foreign magic techniques so I don't blow us up with counters... I really don't expect the campus to offer courses on that, I'll have to find other sources.\"\n\nThey ate in silence, and Ryu buried the fire once it had burned out, the last ember dying shortly after they had finished. Without a word, he resumed his dragon shape once more and laid down for BlowingWind to arrange herself upon his back, her hands firmly gripping the base of his horns and thighs gripping his neck. A few steps along the ground, and he caught an updraft, circling over the forest a moment. He sought his bearings, and then settled into a chi stream that would carry them toward their destination."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "[ Life Flows On ]\n\nA red haired woman smiled across the desk, her piercing green eyes twinkling out of her thin face. BlowingWind eyed the woman, doing the best that she could not to stare at how the shade looked on a very obviously Japanese woman that was going to be her superior.\n\n\"Yes, MountainChild-san... I think you will do nicely in our company. Your major and your grades in school, I'm happy to say, make it very possible for us to pay for your schooling. Of course, in return you are expected to work for me after you graduate.\" She winked and flashed a saucy smile, \"And I can fully understand your refusing to let your boyfriend support you.\"\n\nBlowingWind blinked a bit, positive that she had seen teeth that were slightly more pointed than she expected to see. \"Ah... thank you Ni-san. I hope that I don't offend anyone by my unease with using the proper title...\"\n\n\"Please, call me Tsukaimono then. As my father also works here, it can sometimes get a little confusing in the office and at Board meetings. And by the time you come to work here, I'm quite certain you'll be fluent enough.\"\n\nBlowingWind pulled her memory away from the green carpeted room, and the odd woman in red. It was strange how a chance meeting at the local bathhouse while canvassing for work led to an afternoon appointment at a local construction company. This same company, as she understood, was also donating much help to the river restoration project. Firmly schooling her thoughts back in order, she directed her attention once again to her studies.\n\nUnbidden, she could almost hear Ryu reprimanding her to remember not to stare at her book for too long.\n\nBlowingWind sighed and glared at the work in front of her, feeling more like throwing her textbook across the room than reading it, even though geology was fascinating. Something else had her attention, and that infuriated her more than simply not being able to concentrate.\n\nShe winced again as she remembered what his arms felt like around her, and fought the urge to lean back or to get up and go to him. With every fiber of her being she hated herself for not being able to control her thoughts better. Yet she also remembered how gentle his voice was, and how warm it was tucked against him, and how even the tiniest most obscure thing he said acted like a balm on raw nerves. When she didn't want it to...\n\n\"Damn it, I'm lonely, that's all. It's the stress and what I know is coming up.\"\n\nA slender finger twirled a lock of her hair around itself in frustration, and the pencil she had been taking notes with found its way to her mouth where her teeth absently chewed into it.\n\n\"It's not his goofy hair and its disturbing tendency to spike up when he gets excited, oh good grief no! And it's not those eyes of his... No, and I don't like or want to hear his voice right now either, not one bit. I can take being away from him for a little bit...\"\n\nInvoluntarily, her body shuddered, and a tiny whimper snuck out.\n\n\"You're lying to yourself...\" RagingTornado whispered, a slightly sadistic smirk curling BlowingWind's lip now as the mental conversation launched itself. \"Not only is he good to look at, but he's a good study partner... and you like his company. When he's around and you can see him and talk to him every day, you can concentrate. What would Ryu say if he knew you'd taken to sleeping with his blanket?\"\n\n\"He'd want to know if I was in my Pjs or not. Then he'd ask why he can't be under the covers with me yet.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's easy... Yes, and it's because you're too chicken.\"\n\n\"Shut up you... shadow-me. Don't make me get Ai and Wisdom to help me with you.\"\n\n\"Make me. I dare you. You know you miss him. Two days is longer than you thought, how are you going to survive now for a couple weeks?\"\n\nThe heavy textbook winged into the mirror across the room, miraculously leaving it unscathed. BlowingWind's face continued to smirk back at her from it as her Shadow continued to taunt her. The expression shifted into disbelief as she regained control of her facial muscles.\n\n\"I need him and his 'comfort' like a bear needs a tutu.\" BlowingWind lied to herself.\n\nShe got up to retrieve her book, and as she was bent over, a knock came on the door before it opened. Turning her head, she saw the little old man from next door, in his blue hakama and white kimono as always.\n\n\"Are you alright young one?\"\n\nA smile spread over her features, softening them. \"Yes Koji-san, I'm alright. Killing spiders...\"\n\n\"Big spider by the sound of it...\"\n\n\"Ornery too. It seemed to delight in tormenting me.\"\n\nKoji raised his eyebrow and nodded. \"So it seems. I would have thought you had attacked the ghost...\"\n\n\"Ghosts are afraid of me...\" She laughed nervously and motioned her neighbor in. \"Come, sit, visit. Can I get you some tea or maybe some cookies?\"\n\nDepositing her text on the coffee table, she made for the kitchen as Koji closed the door behind him and made his way to the couch. His eyes fell on a painting leaning against the wall for the progress to dry. Sapphire eyes glowed and dominated the canvas, peering out from among the beginnings of lush leaves and a dark hollow, the tip of a snout and long white whiskers already bursting forth as if to snatch up and devour whoever gazed upon it.\n\nA chill ran down his neck at the malice, despair, and loneliness already captured in those eyes. For a brief moment, Koji could almost share the vision that his neighbor had been making vague references to.\n\n\"Do you know who they are yet?\"\n\n\"Not a clue...\" BlowingWind set the tea and a tray of cookies on the coffee table. \"Ryu tries to pretend that he's not worried about it, but it bothers him.\"\n\n\"Which is why he is gone, and you are up late during the nights talking to yourself. You do realize, that if you wanted to, you could learn to talk to him even when he is not here...\" Koji looked at her shrewdly from the corner of his eye. \"I do know what the two of you are, from the first I met you. I hope you realize that...\"\n\n\"Why, Koji-san... Whatever do you mean?\" Her heart thudded as she wondered what the old man had surmised about her relationship.\n\n\"I mean that I know he is one of the Kami, though certainly not a Greater Kami. You've hidden it well, and most of the people in the area have no reason to think of you yourself as anything more than an exchange student and that you follow a strange religion. But you have a very bright soul, and a certain look...\"\n\n\"So much for a normal life. I have this bad feeling that sometimes it's going to be more difficult than it should to get to my classes...\" She sighed in audible relief. \"Oh, that's all you meant... Perhaps I should ask how you know this...\"\n\n\u2003Tame the Wind\n\n\u2003The fierce winds blow,\n\n\u2003Ripping up the earth\n\n\u2003Of who I am in your flow.\n\n\u2003I know what hides behind\n\n\u2003Your terrible claws\n\n\u2003That tear at me.\n\n\u2003You call, and your fear\n\n\u2003When I reach for you\n\n\u2003Through the bamboo.\n\n\u2003The sky is low in your eye\n\n\u2003As the rains fall to the ground.\n\n\u2003That ground beneath you is I,\n\n\u2003Blow away my love.\n\n\u2003I'll ride with you\n\n\u2003Upon rivers of sky.\n\n\u2003I will fly with you\n\n\u2003Trapped within you\n\n\u2003Until you finally find me.\n\n\u2003At the time you fall\n\n\u2003The dragon will heal you,\n\n\u2003That time when you are yourself.\n\n\u2003When I have you at last\n\n\u2003I will tame you\n\n\u2003The wild, blowing wind."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "The Forgotten Element",
        "author": "Chester Young",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "Dragons of Etra"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Guide to the Dragons and Creatures of Etra",
                "text": "There are five elemental types of dragons on the continent of Etra, and each has its own respective god. Centaurs and griffons also call Etra their home.\n\nLight: White in color always. Their respective goddess is Aelais, the queen of the lesser dragon gods. In the past, light elementals were always in charge of the other elementals. Light elementals are often healers or bureaucrats in society.\n\nFire: Usually red or orange in color. Occasionally can be other colors like pink or yellow. Their respective goddess is Niassynth. Most dragons of this element go on to become soldiers or metalworkers.\n\nEarth: Brown or green in color. Their respective goddess is Mupiol. Dragons of this element are often farmers due to their ability to control nature.\n\nWater: Various shades of blue. Their respective god is Xamulayn. They are often fisher-dragons.\n\nAir: Grey-colored dragons. Their respective goddess is Siozudoith. Many air elementals become messengers or soldiers because of their ability to manipulate air currents.\n\nNon-elemental: Rarely, a dragon will be born with black scales to any elemental pairing regardless of the parents' elements. This dragon has no element associated with it, and cannot wield any magic. Considered a curse, dragons born this way are often culled before their scales can harden.\n\nCentaur: Sapient creatures with their lower body being that of a horse, and their upper body being that of a human. They control the northwestern side of Etra and try to stay out of the politics of dragons. About half the size of a fully-grown dragon.\n\nGriffon: Sapient creatures with the body of a lion that is completely feathered with wings. Like a cross between a lion and an eagle. About the same size as a centaur when fully grown. Their feathers are usually brown, grey, or black. They control the northern portion of Etra and also ignore the politics of dragons. Used to have magic long ago, but lost it.\n\nWyvern: Sapient dragon-like creatures with only two legs. Usually various shades of yellow. They are slightly bigger than centaurs and are a few heads shorter than a fully-grown dragon. Native to the continent of Drarke in the south. Some can breathe fire. Females have curved horns and males have straight horns.\n\nDwarf: Short, human-like creatures that used to inhabit the mountains in the north. Were wiped out long ago.\n\nElf: Human-like, lanky creatures with pointed ears and white hair. Left the continent of Etra long ago, and used to inhabit lands in the north, similar to the dwarves."
            },
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "I crouched in the tall grass and tucked my wings close to my body. You won't get away that easily.\n\nWithout warning, I pounced, narrowly missing the blue butterfly as it darted just out of the reach of my paws. My snout went straight into the dirt. Huffing, I pushed myself back up to continue my pursuit.\n\n\"Kai! Come inside!\" a voice called from behind me.\n\nI gave the butterfly one last baleful look as I replied, \"Coming!\"\n\nMy mother waited for me on the porch of our farm. I eagerly pushed through the tall grass that concealed my approach. The dark-green scales of my mother blended almost seamlessly with the wooden home that was made from a lone tree. My mother always told stories of how she and my father molded the tree using their combined earth magic.\n\nMy mother's eyes were a deep blue as she stared at me. \"Come. Your father needs you.\"\n\nNeeds me? Father rarely talked to me besides the occasional grunt. I assumed he was just busy with tending to the farm to care much about me. But he always seems to spend time with..\n\nA dragon pounced on my back, pushing me down as I let out a loud, \"Umph!\"\n\n\"Jerso! Get off your brother.\"\n\nJerso pushed himself off of me as his eyes bore a mischievous yellow mixed with brown. Jerso was my younger brother, but looked totally different from me. Where my scales were pure black, his were a vivid green, similar to my mother's.\n\nA smile spread across his muzzle. \"I was only playing, mother.\"\n\nMy mother's eyes were still a distinguishable blue, as they always were when she was around me. \"Go finish your chores in the barn,\" she commanded.\n\n\"But I ALREADY did them!\" Jerso whined.\n\n\"Your father wants the hay changed for the red rams. Now go.\" Her tone didn't allow for conversation as her eyes flashed red. Jerso hung his head low and walked out the door.\n\nI ruffled my wings nervously. Mother never snaps like that.\n\n\"Let's go to the dining room, Kai,\" she said softly as she moved to the next room.\n\nIn the dining room, I noticed my father sitting in one of the chairs across the table. As soon as his eyes laid upon me, they turned from a green to a purple. I knew that green meant a dragon was happy, as Jerso's eyes were always green when we played together. Purple wasn't new to me, but I didn't understand it.\n\nTwo other dragons stood to the right of my father. One of the dragon's scales were red, and the other a dull grey. Each wore armor that matched the color of their scales so well I almost didn't notice it. One of them brought out a bag with a metallic clang, and threw it to my father. His eyes flashed yellow before going back to purple again.\n\nMy father nodded. \"It's all yours.\"\n\nI pressed myself back against my mother's legs as the two dragons walked up to me. I looked up at my mother, who was turned around. Her shoulders heaved as she wept.\n\n\"Mother?\" I questioned as I tugged on her leg. Suddenly, two claws closed around me and lifted me away from her. \"MOTHER?\" I wailed, trying to free myself from the red dragon's grip. Neither of my parents looked back as I was carried out the door."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Job",
                "text": "[ Omens ]\n\n[ Seven Years Later ]\n\n\"I thought dragons like you were supposed to be killed at birth.\"\n\nI averted my gaze from the dragon in front of me. Ale tended to make even the nicest dragons rude and arrogant. I poured more into his mug.\n\n\"Tell me, dragon. What's it like having no element?\"\n\nI shrugged and didn't respond.\n\nThe dragon grunted and turned back to his friends.\n\nThe tightness in my chest loosened as I was released from the conversation. I hated talking to other dragons. Not only because they were usually rude to me, but because I always couldn't think of what to say next.\n\nIn front of me, several dragons sat around at different tables in my bar. The elements of each dragon varied widely - the only dragon that was missing was a white dragon, which could wield light magic.\n\nThe only reason I bought the bar in the first place was because it was cheap. The previous owner couldn't afford to keep the place running anymore, so I swooped in and purchased it with the last of my saved drakarn. He actually ignored the color of my scales - probably all too happy to rid the place from himself. He didn't even question my age either.\n\nDespite my awkwardness, I felt I needed some sort of income. I planned to give the bar to my brother once he graduated from school so I could focus on something else in life. Hopefully, something that didn't involve much conversation.\n\nI couldn't help but keep thinking about what that dragon said for the rest of the night. I knew I should have been dead long ago. Non-elemental-born dragons had black scales and were incredibly rare.. and considered bad luck.\n\nLucky me.\n\nInstead, my parents kept me until they could sell me to the highest bidder. If they had the money, they would have killed me before my scales could harden.\n\nI had just managed to save enough money to escape that life I was thrust into. Never again.\n\nJust as the last dragon left my now-closed bar, another dragon entered. His deep-blue scales signified his element being that of water and ice.\n\n\"Namr!\" I smiled. Namr was my only friend in Stramwood since I arrived one year ago. Not only that, but he was the only dragon that treated me like a normal dragon.\n\nHe was a bit older than me. He had seen eighteen winters, while I'd only seen eight or nine. Namr still hadn't taken a mate, despite being considered an adult for the past ten winters.\n\nNamr grinned. \"Kai! I've just come to see how you were doing.\"\n\nMy smile dropped, and Namr's eyes changed to a sad blue. \"I know it's tough..\" he began.\n\n\"No, it's all right. I'm used to it. I'll never be treated like a normal dragon.\" I sighed. Even after spending a year in Stramwood, dragons still looked at me with unbidden disgust. I often just kept my head down.\n\n\"I wish I could change their attitudes. If they try anything, you know I'm here to help, right?\"\n\nI couldn't help but chuckle. \"You know I could handle them on my own.\"\n\nNamr rolled his eyes. \"You've told me a lot, but I've never actually seen you fight before.\"\n\n\"Hope.. hopefully..\" I stammered, before correcting myself. \"Hopefully you never do. I'm done with that.\"\n\nNamr moved up to the counter and helped me clean some of the mugs. \"Times are changing. Crops are beginning to fail up north. Herd animals are dropping dead.\" He paused, breathing heavily. He obviously believed every traveler that came from the north. \"What if they blame you?\"\n\nI paused, thinking. \"I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.\"\n\n\"Fair,\" he said. \"Still, I pray to Aelais and Xamulayn every day.\"\n\n\"You believe in that fantasy?\" I asked, raising an eye ridge. Namr wasn't a religious dragon that I knew of, but here he was talking about praying to Aelais, the god of light, and Xamulayn, the god of water. Aelais was the queen of the lesser dragon gods. \"Next you'll tell me you've spotted a dwarf.\"\n\nNamr put the clean mug down. \"It can't be a coincidence. A normal plague wouldn't kill herd animals and plants.\"\n\n\"So you think something supernatural is causing this, and not just a rogue earth dragon?\" I asked skeptically.\n\n\"It's possible. I don't know of any evil dragon gods though,\" he laughed shakily.\n\n\"You better be careful Namr. First you've found religion. I'm afraid next time I talk to you you'll tell me you found a mate!\" I teased.\n\nNamr grinned. \"Don't count on it. I've still got a few good years left in me before I settle down.\" He went to the door. \"Be safe, Kai. I'll see you around.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "I locked the door to the bar and began the trek back to my home. Stramwood wasn't by any means a city, but it was a decently sized town. My bar was one of two in the entire place.\n\nI kept my head low as several dragons stared at me. It was close to midnight, yet many dragons lingered. Late, but I always felt better at night anyway.\n\nOne dragon launched a rock from the ground at me, which I narrowly avoided. The brown dragon's eyes flashed red as he glared at me. \"You shouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"I'm leaving,\" I muttered. Sometimes I wondered if it would just be easier to live alone up north. If what travelers were saying were true, though, it may not be safe anymore.\n\nWhy do you let them? Teach him a lesson, a voice cut through my mind. I ignored it as I ignored every other dragon. I wouldn't let my conscience defeat me even more than it already has.\n\nMy thoughts drifted to Jerso. He would be graduating in a few years from school. I never attended a normal school as I had no magic. I had training, which I guess technically counted. If the training was anything like the elemental schools, though, I doubt many would survive.\n\nI shivered. The cold never bothered me, though heat was desirable. That part of my life is gone. I will never be that dragon again.\n\nI finally came across my modest home on the outskirts of the town. It was made of a singular block of stone that was carved by earth magic. All dragons could enchant a lock that would only open for those they wanted. I, on the other paw, had to fumble with a key that was tied to my wrist.\n\nAfter I finally made it inside, I skipped making myself anything to eat. I walked up to my bed of moss that I had recently gathered from the forest and collapsed in a heap. I closed my eyes as I wept silently."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "A sharp crack sounded through the air as the stick hit my back scales. I screamed.\n\n\"Again,\" a voice called with no mercy. Again and again, my back was struck, denting my still hardening scales. Several scales fell onto the ground in front of me.\n\nAfter the twentieth or so strike, I finally turned around and grabbed the staff from my tormentor. I spun it in my paws as I struck back against their red armor.\n\nThe dragon simply stared, his eyes an indecipherable brown. He pulled out another staff. \"Begin,\" he spoke.\n\nI used all my rage in attacking him. My hits did nothing but scratch his armor as each of his strikes were worse than the last. I won't give up that easily.\n\nI jumped to the side and brought my staff down on his foreleg, only to have my right foreleg sliced open by the blades on his wings. I cried out as I grabbed the injury, only to get struck repeatedly again by the staff.\n\n\"Enough,\" another voice rang out. Immediately, the attack stopped.\n\nThe grey dragon walked forward and glared down at me. \"What did you learn, Kai?\"\n\nI spat out blood as tears dripped down my face. \"He cheated.\"\n\nThe dragon closed his eyes in disappointment and sighed. \"The enemy will never play fair. You need to get the notion of honor out of your mind. Fighting isn't honorable. Killing isn't honorable. We do it because it's what has to be done.\" He crouched down and lifted up my muzzle to force me to look him in the eyes. \"Now, Kai, what did you learn?\"\n\nSuddenly, the grey dragon's face contorted into that of a black dragon with blood-red eyes staring at me. \"Yes, Kai, what did you learn?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "I shot up in my bed panting. When am I ever going to get a good night's rest? It seemed every night my dreams were plagued with visions from my past. No matter what herbs I tried, every night ended the same way.\n\nA crash from the room next to me forced me to shake off my stupor. I got up, but was too slow as four dragons flooded my room and surrounded me."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Proposition",
                "text": "My head swiveled as I fought to keep each adversary in my vision. Each were about a head taller than me - clearly fully grown. Red runes covered the black armor they wore. Moonlight glinted off the blades on their wings. I shifted my weight on my hindlegs and readied for the first strike. Instead, a fifth dragon entered the room.\n\n\"You're not an easy dragon to track down, Kai.\"\n\nI glared at the new dragon. His armor was identical to his comrades, except for the missing helmet. His dark-blue scales nearly blended with the darkness of my room. Several of the scales around his face were cracked.\n\nI rolled my eyes. \"And who might you be?\"\n\nHe waved a paw dismissively. \"Doesn't matter. I have a job for you.\"\n\n\"I'm not in that business anymore,\" I scoffed, assuming what he wanted from me.\n\nThe blue dragon raised an eye ridge. \"Really? That's quite surprising. Imagine how much money someone of your caliber could make on your own.\"\n\n\"I'm done hurting dragons,\" I growled.\n\n\"It's a good thing I'm not,\" he grinned manically. \"But I have an offer you cannot refuse.\"\n\nI glanced warily at the other dragons around me. \"I doubt it.\"\n\n\"We have your brother.\"\n\nA low growl was all that escaped my throat as I stood in shock. What?\n\nIgnoring my silence, he continued. \"I think you know what will happen to him if you don't agree to the job.\"\n\nMy claws dug grooves into the stone below me and I ground my teeth to prevent myself from lashing out. Why are you holding yourself back? my conscience purred in my mind. Instead of acting on my urges, I called his bluff. \"Prove it.\"\n\nFor the first time that night, the dragon's eyes changed to an annoyed purple. \"Fine.\" He gestured to one of the other dragons, who pulled a green scale out and threw it to me.\n\nI smelled the scent on the scale, and instantly my memories went back to the time Jerso and I were chasing each other through the fields. I hid behind the barn and crouched, waiting for him to..\n\nShaking my head violently, my shoulders dropped. \"What is it?\"\n\nHis eyes went back to a passive brown. \"I'm glad you understand. It's a simple job, actually. All you have to do is take a bracelet from the princess of Trone.\"\n\nI eyed him skeptically, noticing for the first time the faint scars on his snout. \"You come in here knowing all of my skills, yet want me to just steal?\"\n\n\"That's the main job, yes. But you will likely have to kill her and fight others.\"\n\nKill the princess. That will go over well, I snorted in my head. \"Why don't you just do it yourself?\"\n\n\"We'd rather remain anonymous. There's always a chance someone escapes and warns others. If you do it, they won't be able to assume anything.\" He took a step closer. \"Besides, you're the best at what you do. No other dragon comes close to your skills.\"\n\nHe was right. As much as I wanted to forget my past, I had a certain prowess for being discrete in my jobs. Besides, it was just a bracelet. How hard could that be? Though, I suppose it's pretty important to them to warrant enlisting my services. Not that I was going to ask.\n\n\"You will bring the bracelet to us in Porando.\" He pulled a paper scroll out of his satchel and handed it to me. I opened it, seeing a map of Porando along with an X where I presumed I was to meet them. At the top, there was a small sketch of the bracelet as well.\n\nI glared at him. \"And Jerso will be there when I return?\"\n\nThe lead dragon pulled back as if offended. \"Of course he will be. Unharmed and in one piece, I assure you.\"\n\nI wasn't quelled, but I let the matter drop. \"And where will I find the princess?\"\n\n\"Our sources tell us she recently traveled to Tolk.\"\n\nTolk. That's north, where the supposed plague was. Hopefully, Namr was exaggerating.\n\n\"Also, one last thing,\" he said, pulling out a collar. It was black, marked with red runes similar to the ones on their armor.\n\nI took a hesitant step back, confused. \"What is that?\" Suddenly, two dragons grabbed both of my forelegs. How did I not see that coming? I'm too out of practice.\n\nThe dragon put the collar around my neck before I could say anything else. \"It's to make sure you complete the job.\"\n\nSuddenly it clicked. A binding rune collar. I growled inwardly. Binding rune collars were banned in Trone's prisons years back when guards began abusing what binds they could make the prisoners do. Since then, it was illegal to possess one. As if these dragons care about legality, I thought.\n\nThe dragons on either side of me released me.\n\n\"I'm sure you already know what that is. If it detects that you aren't doing the job, it will force you to.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. Of course I knew that. Rune collars could essentially listen to your mind. If you even so much as thought about not completing the task, it would hurt you until you did. I even heard rumors that it wouldn't let you sleep or eat. Hopefully, those weren't true. I could go a few days without eating like most dragons, but sleep? That would be difficult, even for me.\n\n\"Sleep well, Kai. You'll need the focus.\" He looked me up and down, analyzing every inch of me. \"I expected something more, especially after the stories I heard.\"\n\nI shrugged, letting my eyes flash red. \"I can prove it if you'd like. Just tell your guards to leave.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes on me. \"Until we meet again.\" Nodding, he stepped out and the guards followed. I waited a moment before following their scent back to the smashed window. Great, that won't be cheap to fix.\n\nTurning, I went back to my bed. It was likely close to morning, and I'd have to spend my waking hours preparing for the journey. I sighed inwardly, willing sleep that never came."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "I laid in bed well past my normal wake-up time.\n\nNormally, I was up at least an hour earlier to open my bar. Someone will have to run my bar while I'm away, I thought, thinking instantly of Namr. Namr didn't actually have a consistent job - he just went place to place, doing odd jobs to earn his drakarns. I offered him work at my bar in the past, but he didn't want to take what little profit I made from it away from me.\n\nI pushed myself out of bed, ignoring a slight burning sensation from the collar. Relax, I'm leaving soon. The burning subsided slightly. Rune collars could sense intentions, and I intended to finish this stupid quest as soon as possible. Right after I found Namr.\n\nI looked in the mirror to make sure my satchel was on my back correctly. I stretched out my wings, noticing how long the span was since last year. It was nearly double the length of my body now.\n\nNamr's home was on the same road as mine, but much closer to the town's center. He had inherited the home from his father, who had passed a few years prior at only age thirty-three. Most dragons lived for about two centuries, but his father served in the Trone army on the continent of Drarke - wyvern territory. They weren't dangerous on their own, being half the size of a fully-grown dragon, but they were nearly unstoppable in groups. They had nearly reached Trone's soil in the last war a few hundred years ago, and the current queen wasn't keen on letting it happen again.\n\nAfter a few minutes, I knocked on Namr's door. A garbled, \"One second,\" echoed from inside followed by Namr poking his head out. His eyes were bloodshot as if he hadn't slept at all the night prior. I could relate to that.\n\n\"What - Oh, Kai! Come in!\" He opened the door wide open. I obliged.\n\nI sat on one of the stones protruding from the ground that were covered in fresh moss. Namr sat across from me, looking a little more awake now.\n\n\"Don't you usually open your bar earlier than this?\" he asked, confused.\n\nPart of me wanted to tell him everything. If I did, he would likely insist on coming along, and I couldn't have that. I worked alone in every other job I've done, and I wouldn't start working with other dragons now. \"Something in my past came up.\"\n\nNamr's eyes widened with recognition, glowing a purple for anxiety. He knew a lot about my past - in fact, he was the only dragon I knew of that I told my past to. If other dragons knew what I've done, they wouldn't look at me the same way.\n\n\"I understand.\" Namr didn't press on, which I appreciated. Namr was quite perceptive in most situations - he talked when he knew I wanted to, and could read my expressions well enough to know when to leave me alone. \"Do you need anything from me?\" he asked, the purple still not leaving his eyes.\n\n\"Actually, I do. Could you run my bar for me while I'm away? I shouldn't be gone for more than a week.\" In my head, I already calculated how long it would likely take. Tolk was maybe a two-day flight from Stramwood. Porando would be easier to get to because the winds favored dragons flying south. Maybe three days from Tolk to Porando, and another two days from Porando back to Stramwood. Easy. \"You can keep all the money you make,\" I added tentatively when he didn't respond right away.\n\n\"Of course. You know you can count on me.\"\n\nI smiled genuinely for the first time in a while. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"What's that collar on you for? Are you making a fashion statement?\"\n\nI almost forgot about the collar, which angered me. I didn't want to stress Namr out, so I lied. \"Yes.. I got it made at the jeweler. I wanted to at least start wearing something.\" My smile weakened, but Namr didn't press on. It was common for dragons to wear jewelry.\n\nI got up and reached into my satchel. \"I need to leave soon. Here's the key to the bar.\" I threw Namr the set of keys. \"Those are all of my keys. Including my home.\"\n\nNamr nodded. \"Be careful Kai. I may not act like it, but you're one of my best friends. I can't imagine losing you.\"\n\nI almost choked up at the sentiment. I didn't recall being cared about so much by anyone in my life, besides maybe Jerso, but he never said it. \"Thanks, Namr. You're my best friend too. I'll be careful.\" With that, I stepped out the door. Keeping my head low to not draw attention to myself, I made my way back to the shops to get food."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Look at yourself. So much power in one dragon.\n\nFrowning at my conscience, I looked in the mirror one last time. The black armor that I now wore was dull. The only part of it that gleamed were the blades on each of my wings. I spent the last of the morning sharpening those blades. I may need them, after all. The armor was a lot easier to put on when you had someone else helping, so it took me a good amount of time alone. It was especially difficult since I had grown a bit since I last wore it.\n\nI held the helmet in my left claw and took a deep breath. I hadn't worn this armor since I arrived in Stramwood, and I had hoped to never have to again. I rolled my shoulders and shifted my weight, allowing my body to ease back into the presence of the metal. Draconic armor was made of a very light, but durable, metal mined in the hills southeast of Stramwood. Light metal was essential to allow dragons to maneuver and fly for extended periods of time without fatigue.\n\nEven as I prepared to leave, the collar burned at my neck. I had stuffed my satchel full with dried meat to last me two weeks, as well as enough coinage to purchase more if needed. The map was also stuffed inside. Another flare forced me to step outside and lock my door with my spare key. I turned northeast, running and jumping to take off. Let's get this over with."
            },
            {
                "title": "Festival of Summer",
                "text": "I stretched my wings underneath a large tree as I observed the sprawling city of Tolk.\n\nI had been to the city many times on other jobs, and it never ceased to amaze me. Built on either side of a great ravine, the city was only rivaled by the capital of Trone, Treka. Thousands of homes that dwarfed my own surrounded the ravine, while thousands more lived in the ravine itself in carved-out caves. Sandstone walls surrounded the city. I dealt mainly with the shops underground in my business, as those tended to attract the certain kinds of dragons I had relations with. Not that I chose to.\n\nIn the distance, waves lapped up against a large cliff, signifying the Delta Sea. I had heard rumors that elves could build large vessels to sail across the sea. It was apparently how they left Trone thousands of years ago. It was a ridiculous idea, though. Even if it was possible, I doubt any dragons other than water elementals would enjoy it. The air was where we belonged. Even the ground was a better alternative to water.\n\nIt felt nice to have my armor off. I hid the set of armor under the tree, digging a small hole after my two-day flight. I didn't expect to come into trouble in the city. My goal was to spy around until I figured out where the princess was staying. It shouldn't be too difficult - wherever the princess was, there was surely going to be plenty of royal guards. Then it was a matter of figuring out when she was least guarded. I was quite the patient dragon. It was partly why I was so revered in my past career.\n\nMy first problem would be entering the city. I was observing for the past hour and noticed dragons were only allowed to enter by walking through the gate. I was surprised the city even had a gate - the last time we dealt with creatures that couldn't fly was hundreds of years ago. There was a tenuous peace now between us and the closest non-flying creature: centaurs.\n\nThis prospect presented a new problem. When I had arrived several years before, dragons were permitted to fly in and out with no problem. What has changed? I hoped it was because of something insignificant, like the princess visiting, but my mind couldn't help but drift back to Namr's words about the plague.\n\nWho am I kidding? Some dragon probably broke the law, and they're looking for them.\n\nI steeled myself, attempting to regain what little confidence I had. I was confident in everything: fighting, sneaking, and I guess now stealing. What I wasn't confident in was interacting with other dragons. I rarely had to in my line of duty, as long as everything went as planned.\n\nMy paws soon found themselves in front of the gate. I was behind several other dragons. The one directly in front of me was a red, obviously a fire elemental. She kept turning around to glare at me, as if she expected me to jump her right then and there.\n\nWhat good company!\n\nI kept my head down to look as least threatening as possible. Every dragon around me was a head taller than me, but most regarded me as a threat. I turned to see a dark-grey dragon behind me. His eyes were blue, as though he pitied me.\n\nYou don't need pity. You're more powerful than all of these dragons combined!\n\nAgain, my conscience spoke, trying to boost my confidence. It failed. Maybe these dragons were right. I would never be considered anything other than an abomination.\n\nFinally, my turn came in the line. I looked up at the iron portcullis. The spikes that drove into the ground made me think it would come down and impale me at any point.\n\n\"Name?\" a female voice inquired, looking down at a book.\n\nI looked up and saw an orange dragoness that was only a little older than me. I would even consider her pretty, if I was allowed to think of things like that. As if anyone would choose me as their mate. Her red-orange armor complimented her shimmering scales.\n\n\"K - Kai.\" I cursed inwardly.\n\nWhen she finally looked up, she gasped. \"What's your business in Tolk?\"\n\nShe hadn't asked that question to the red dragoness that was in front of me. Whatever. \"I'm visiting.. family,\" I lied. It wasn't very convincing even to me.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"What family would want you?\"\n\nThere it was. I forced my head not to drop and stare her in her eyes, but I was sure bits of blue were beginning to pool their way into my eyes. \"My brother still loves me.\" That was true - I hoped. I hadn't exactly talked to Jerso since I bought myself out of the guild and moved to Stramwood.\n\nAfter an uncomfortable pause, she growled softly. She scribbled something in her book, and shouted, \"Next!\" Taking my cue to leave, I moved quickly into the city.\n\nInside the walls, music filled the air as dragons walked around in elaborately colored silks. Many were openly drinking ale and laughing. The streets were packed. My black scales stood out like a sore claw.\n\nI'll need silks to blend in and hide my scales. Perhaps no one would notice the color of my scales then. Maybe I'd even be treated as a normal dragon for once. Directly down the road, perhaps a mile away, was the castle of Tolk. It wasn't nearly as big as the royal castle in Treka, but it was still impressive. Inside, the ruling family of the city resided.\n\nI stepped into the first shop I saw on the side of the cobblestone path. Colorful silks adorned the walls everywhere. Perhaps this purple one will suit me\u2014\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" an old voice asked behind me.\n\nI jumped in fright and turned around. A dark-brown scaled dragon stood extremely close to me. His scales were faded and dull. If I had to guess his age, I'd assume he had at least seen a century go by. Perhaps more.\n\n\"Umm..\" I panicked, trying to sort my thoughts. \"I'm looking for silks for..\" I stopped, not actually knowing what was going on outside.\n\n\"Ah! You're looking for silks for the festival!\"\n\n\"Festival?\" I asked stupidly.\n\n\"Yes! The Festival of Summer! All dragons know Tolk has the best celebrations for it.\" His eyes flashed green.\n\nHow could I have forgotten? I didn't even realize summer was almost beginning. The Festival of Summer was a three-day event that began right before summer started and ended once it officially began. It had a religious background, but I didn't know of many dragons that followed them anymore. Well, I don't really know many dragons to begin with, so..\n\n\"Of course,\" I said quickly. \"I'd like this purple one, if I may.\"\n\nThe dragon looked me up and down and I prepared for the worst. He hadn't mentioned my scales yet, but at any moment he would kick me out of his store.\n\nTo my surprise, it never came. \"No, that purple won't suit you. I have a much darker purple that will complement those scales of yours much better. Yes, don't worry, ol' Griff will sort you out.\" He turned around and disappeared into the back.\n\nBefore I could even process what was happening, Griff returned with his claws full of a beautiful purple silk. \"Here you go. This will suit you much better.\"\n\nI shook off my stupor. \"How much do I owe you?\"\n\nThe dragon raised a paw. \"Nothing. You've clearly never celebrated the festival before, and I'd rather have a young dragonet like you spending your drakarns on other things. Maybe even on a gift for a pretty dragoness,\" Griff said mischievously.\n\nHeat filled my cheeks as I looked down. \"Thanks,\" I mumbled. I began to tie the fabric around my body like I had seen on the dragons outside.\n\n\"Let me help,\" Griff said, crouching down to pull a bit under my belly. Once that was situated, he pulled me to a mirror. \"Look at you. All the dragons will be jealous.\"\n\nI couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Griff was too kind for this world. I had felt nothing but pain almost all of my life, and only in the past year was I beginning to see the world in a different light. Maybe there was hope for me after all.\n\nI stepped back out into the bright sun. The purple silk blended with my black scales that did poke through, but for once I wasn't ashamed of them. Maybe dragons would think I painted my scales for the celebration.\n\nMoving through the crowd of dragons proved a challenge. I was constantly pushed and bumped into as dragons danced. The sun was at its zenith, yet these dragons partied like it was the middle of the night. A blue dragoness grabbed my foreleg and pulled me into a small group of dragons that were dancing while a white dragon played a folk tune on a traditional draconic larp. The seven-stringed instrument was crafted so our claws wouldn't destroy it as we strummed.\n\nThe blue dragoness's eyes were bright green as she regarded me. I estimated her to be just a few years older than me, though our heights were the same. She began to dance once a new tune started, but I had no idea what to do. She smirked at me. \"You've never danced before?\"\n\nMy collar burned as it realized I was straying from the mission. I ignored it. \"No,\" I said bashfully, looking down. I wouldn't screw up my first chance at making friends in a while.\n\n\"Just follow my lead. When I step like this, you step here.\"\n\nI followed her advice and spent the next few minutes without a care in the world. Is this what it's like to be normal?\n\nFinally, the music ended, and we both laughed. \"I'll see you around. I'm Ruvia, by the way.\"\n\n\"Kai,\" I sputtered, to which she just giggled and turned back to her friends. The collar burned again, obviously agitated. All right, I'm going. I looked back one last time, but Ruvia was dancing with another dragon as the music began again. I sighed.\n\nThe palace was even grander up close as I emerged from the crowd. White stone columns supported much of the pristine expanse, with towers on all four corners. The towers were each entrances for the dragons that lived there, so guards were stationed on all of them. I didn't see any distinct royal guard armor, though.\n\nI gazed through the gate into the courtyard. The guards in front of me were unfazed as I sat watching. They likely assumed I was some drunk that strayed a little too far from the festivities, but I didn't do anything to provoke their ire yet.\n\nFinally, I saw the distinct crest of the royal guards as they emerged from one of the barracks. That confirmed that the princess was here, but I still had no idea where. The collar flared against my scales, and I felt an urge to move north. That's odd. The palace is east of me. I turned around, and sure enough, the pull was still towards the north. I suppose it's possible the princess isn't here, but why would the royal guards still be at the palace?\n\nI decided to obey the rune collar, not that I had a choice. I turned back and walked down the street towards the entrance of the city. Part of me wanted to visit the ravine for old time's sake, but I was afraid of what the rune collar would do if I delayed further.\n\nRight before I could insert myself back into the crowd and be rid of the guards' prying eyes, a wing was thrust out in front of me. \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\"You thought you could hide those scales of yours,\" another deep voice spoke.\n\nI began to back towards the alleyway behind me. Three dragons surrounded me - two were grey, while another was green. The green had a large scar down his muzzle. \"I don't want any trouble,\" I said, lowering myself to the ground to not appear threatening as I usually did.\n\n\"You shouldn't exist. And don't deserve to,\" one of the greys growled. Suddenly, he launched himself at me. I rolled away, dodging the pounce narrowly. His other companions snarled and moved in on me as I stood up on all fours.\n\nWe still weren't in the alleyway, and surely the guards saw the attack. I steadied my breathing and analyzed the situation. Three dragons: two wind elementals and one earth elemental. All three were bigger than me, but I could move a lot faster.\n\nThe green swiped at my face, while a grey went for my exposed belly as I dodged. I swiped the muzzle of the grey, drawing blood and forcing him down. I kicked at the other grey that attempted to flank me in the chaos.\n\nI spread my wings in an attempt to take off, but the green was on me before I could. The membrane tore and I groaned. I shook him off and jumped on him, tearing at his chest before his companions could help. Finally, one of the greys pushed me off. A puddle of blood poured from the green as his chest barely rose and fell. I saw in the corner of my eye guards from the palace approaching.\n\n\"Guards! We've been attacked,\" the grey yelled, running towards them. The other grey blew a wind straight down onto me, forcing me down. He went to kick my face, but I managed to roll and swipe his legs, breaking his concentration. I slashed at his neck, hoping to land a fatal blow. Wait, why did I hope so? I thought I was done with that.\n\n\"You there! Stop!\" a new, commanding voice yelled. I hissed at the fallen dragons and got up. Luckily, the injured grey seemed fine. My claws didn't go deep enough. An unusual mistake. I darted down the alley, but the shouting followed.\n\nI emerged on a different road that was even more packed than the one I entered on. My purple silks were in tatters, but it might just be enough to blend into the crowd. I pushed myself into a group of dancers.\n\n\"Hey! Watch it!\"\n\nI turned and saw a large group of guards pushing partying dragons aside in an attempt to reach me. I kept my head low and shouldered dragons out of the way when they got too close. A gust of wind blew several dragons behind me, clearing a path for the guards to move quickly.\n\n\"Over here!\" one of them shouted, separate from the group.\n\nI suppressed a groan and grabbed the silk from another dragon. I threw it back towards the guard that was right on my flank, blinding him as I launched myself into him, barreling him over. I darted through a group of drunks as the rest of the guards caught up to their incapacitated kin.\n\nI flared my wings out to push one of the drunks away. I grabbed some blue silk I found discarded and threw it over my body, hoping it would disguise me a little better. A keg stood on a table nearby, so I grabbed a mug and helped myself in a bid to become one with the crowd.\n\n\"What brings you here?\" a red dragon asked, clearly inebriated.\n\nI cast a nervous glance at the group of guards, who were grabbing dragons and pushing them aside when they inevitably weren't who they were looking for. It seems that I lost them for now.\n\n\"Ale,\" I answered, and the red grinned. The ale wasn't as good as what I brewed, but I'd take what I could get.\n\nSlowly, the guards got closer. Quickly thinking, I asked the drunk red, \"Is there a place where dragons can go for a little.. privacy?\"\n\nHis eyes turned a yellow-green as he said, \"Who's the lucky dragoness? Or dragon. I don't judge.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. \"Just show me where.\"\n\nHe raised a forepaw. \"All right, keep your secrets. Follow me,\" he said, as he gestured with his head towards a large stone inn nearby.\n\nIf I thought the outside was crazy, I was unprepared for the inside of the inn. Dragons splashed ale around as they sat around large tables telling tales. Trash piled up on the floor. I couldn't even count the amount of dragons in the room that was clearly over its intended capacity.\n\nI thanked the red and walked straight to the bartender. Surprisingly, he was a white dragon, which was rare in this part of Trone. \"What'll it be?\" he grumbled, clearly annoyed at the antics of his customers.\n\n\"Do you have an exit in the back?\" I questioned.\n\n\"For employees, not for the public,\" he growled. Just then, several armored dragons barged into the inn. Guards.\n\nAs soon as I spotted them, I knew they saw me. I threw myself over the counter and tore through the kitchen. The staff screamed as I pushed past them and out the back entrance.\n\nOnce I was out, I flew over a few homes and landed back in another street still filled with dragons partying. I exhaled, knowing there was no way the dragons could track me. Even if they had my scent, there was no way to track it in this crowd.\n\nI walked to the main entrance of the city, hoping they wouldn't be looking for me. Surprisingly, there was only one guard stationed. He was too preoccupied with those entering to bother with me leaving.\n\nFinally, I found myself at the tree where I buried my armor. I carefully put on each piece, making sure the leather knots were tight enough to not falter in a fight. My goal was close, and Jerso would soon be safe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Morality",
                "text": "Trees surrounded me as I crouched low in the grass in front of a tree that was also a building. It reminded me of my home when I was little..\n\nI felt a pang in my heart as I remembered that part of my past. I wasn't sure why I even thought about it anymore - it wasn't like I could go back and try again. If I hadn't been born this way, my life would have been fine.\n\nBut you're destined for greatness, my conscience soothed.\n\nThanks. I'll remember that when I'm getting killed trying to steal a stupid bracelet.\n\nA voice shocked me out of my reverie.\n\n\"Relax Firsiss. If any creature tries to fight us, they'll have you to contend with as well as me,\" a distinctly feminine voice spoke.\n\n\"We shouldn't have come here,\" another deeper, yet still feminine, voice responded.\n\n\"You didn't have to come.\"\n\nI peered over the grass from behind another tree as the other dragon scoffed. \"As if I had a choice. If anything happened to you, the queen would have my head.\"\n\nThe dragon that answered was a light-grey scaled dragon in likewise grey armor. Runes that represented the element of air decorated the pristine metal. What blew me away most was the one standing next to her.\n\nThe princess was the most beautiful dragon I'd ever seen. Her pure white scales had not a speck of dirt from the surrounding forest on them. Her ears were smaller than mine, but stuck out more prominently. She also wore a white sheen of armor, but it seemed more ceremonial than functional. The ridges around her head seemed invisible from this distance.\n\nWhere are the rest of her guards? I wondered. I knew some were at the palace, but surely they didn't leave her alone with this other dragon.\n\nAs if she heard my musings, she said, \"We'll be back before sunset. The other guards will be none the wiser. Now let's hunt.\"\n\nThe dragons took off, leaving me alone by the small tree-cabin. Once I was sure the sky was clear, I quietly crept to the door. I pushed on it, expecting it to not budge, but the door loosely swung open.\n\nThis is almost too easy, I thought, looking around for any signs of an ambush. When I didn't find any, I relaxed slightly. The cabin's interior was rather mundane for a member of the royal family. It was only one room, but it boasted a small kitchen and dining area. There was also a corner of moss for sleeping, though I doubted many spent the night here when Tolk was only a few hour's flight south.\n\nI heard wingbeats outside and the sound of a dragon landing. Quickly, I jumped behind the counter. The door! I forgot! I whispered a curse.\n\nThe patter of claws on wood stopped right at the entrance. \"Hello?\" the princess called. She stepped inside, looking back and forth. Her eyes were tinted orange as I peered from behind the counter.\n\nI heard her sniff and took it as my cue. She would surely catch my scent. Leaping out, I tackled the princess before she could react.\n\n\"Wha-\" she said before growling and pushing me off her with a force I didn't expect from the young dragoness. We slowly circled each other. She snarled while I let a low growl escape my throat.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she asked, her eyes now a mix of red and purple. I thought I also still saw a tint of orange. \"What do you want?\"\n\nI said nothing and launched myself at her again. This time she was ready and leaped to the side. She scored a slash at my chest, but my armor deflected it. I swung a wing at her exposed muzzle, scoring a slash with the blade on my wing.\n\nBlood dripped onto the floor and she gasped. I looked her over and noticed the gold bracelet that I needed on her left foreleg. If I could incapacitate her, I could take the bracelet without killing her.\n\nTo my surprise, she lunged and slashed at the part of my neck that was exposed, drawing blood. I rammed her chest in turn with my head, putting a dent in the already weak ceremonial armor. Before I could land another blow, she swung her legs out and flipped me over. I rolled out of the way as her claws came down right where my exposed neck was.\n\nI got up and heard a voice outside. \"Iteda? Did you find your satchel?\"\n\nThis was it. I had to finish this now. I snarled and faked a swing with my left wing. Iteda took the bait, and I simultaneously slashed her muzzle again, making the cut deeper. I pushed her down, trying to grab the bracelet as she lay stunned. Just as I got my claws around it, another body slammed into me.\n\n\"No!\" I yelled, trying to swipe at the new dragon. Just when my wingblade got close to her, a gust of wind slammed me into the wall. The armor plate on my neck flew off in the process, as well as my helmet. I tried to get up, but a talon was placed on my now completely exposed neck, daring me to make a move.\n\nI lost.\n\nThe collar on my neck flashed and burned at my neck. I cried out in pain, trying to pull it from my neck. The talons on my neck receded as my neck dropped to the floor. I wriggled in pain.\n\n\"What's wrong with him, Firsiss?\" Iteda asked. Her voice actually sounded concerned.\n\nFirsiss let loose a low growl. \"He's being controlled by a rune collar. I thought I would never see one of those ever again.\"\n\n\"Well get it off of him!\" Iteda said.\n\n\"It's not so simple. It can only be removed by the one who put it on him, or by powerful magic.\" Her eyes glazed over in thought. Suddenly, her eyes shot open, green ringing the edges. \"Give me your bracelet.\"\n\n\"My bracelet? What would that do for him?\"\n\nI groaned as I felt my scales literally melting around my throat. I had to do something fast. I kicked out at Firsiss, causing the dragon to fly backward in surprise. Iteda gasped, and part of me hated seeing the fearful look on her face. I shook my head, and lunged for the gold bracelet. Anticipating Firsiss, I dug my claws into the wood just as the gust of wood came. With my free forepaw, I went to pull the bracelet off of Iteda.\n\nIteda slashed my muzzle, pushing me down and causing my talons to bend the wrong way. I screamed, and Firsiss was on top of me. My right wing bent under her weight, and I heard a loud crack. The much bigger dragoness forced her weight all over me, and I couldn't move. The collar burned again, but it was nothing compared to the pain in my wing.\n\n\"The bracelet! Give it to me!\" Firsiss yelled.\n\nI couldn't see anything that happened above me as my snout was forced into the ground, but I felt claws around my neck. This is it. I deserve this fate.\n\nSuddenly, the burning around my neck went away. The weight remained on my back, and talons found their way to my melted scales. \"I'm going to release you. If you try anything, I swear I will kill you.\"\n\nFirsiss released me, and I slowly pushed myself up. My right wing lay limply at my side. I stared at both of the dragonesses. Iteda's chestplate was ruined, and she had a long slash down her muzzle from me. Her eyes seemed more curious than angry, though. Judging by her being almost a head taller than me, I guessed she was only a few years older. I made eye contact with her, and she dropped her gaze.\n\nFirsiss, on the other paw, was seething. Her eyes were the darkest shade of red I could think of. I couldn't bring myself to look her in the eyes. She was over a head taller than Iteda, and was the epitome of imposing. Though she was slender for a dragon, I had seen how good she could fight firstpaw.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Firsiss growled, moving to stand in front of the princess.\n\nI sighed. I may have been free from the control of the collar, but I would likely still be punished. As if not being able to fly wasn't punishment enough. \"Kai. I'm-\"\n\n\"-an assassin.\" Firsiss finished. \"Who sent you to kill Princess Iteda?\"\n\nI looked down in shame. \"I don't know. But I wasn't here to kill her.\"\n\nThis time, it was Iteda who spoke. \"Then why were you here?\"\n\nI wiped some blood from my muzzle. \"To steal that.\" I pointed to the bracelet that Firsiss was now holding in her paw.\n\n\"Why would you want a piece of jewelry?\" Iteda asked, confused. Firsiss instead looked fearful. Iteda noticed it, and said, \"You're hiding something from me.\"\n\nFirsiss bowed her head. \"Your mother didn't want you to know until you were older. In fact, only a pawful of dragons know about the bracelet and its powers. I'm concerned that someone outside the castle knows about it.\"\n\n\"Well? What is it?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"It's a relic from ages past. Back when dragons were separated by their elements. One elemental group crafted it, though the knowledge of whom has long been lost. It amplifies the elemental powers of the dragon who wears it.\" Firsiss handed it back to Iteda, who stared transfixed at the relic. She turned back to me. \"Either way, it doesn't matter. Since you can't answer any of my questions, I have no choice but to put you under arrest for the attempted murder of Princess Iteda.\"\n\nFear coursed through me. I couldn't be arrested! How could I save Jerso from a jail cell? \"Wait, please! They have my brother.\"\n\nFirsiss paused her approach. \"They?\"\n\n\"The dragons that forced me to do this. I.. I didn't have a choice.\" How could Firsiss know I was being controlled then still try to arrest me? \"I was to bring the bracelet to them in Porando. They gave me a map.\"\n\nIteda gazed at me, concerned. I followed her gaze to my broken wing at my side. The pain was dull now, but I dared not move it. \"Firsiss, hasn't he suffered enough?\"\n\nFirsiss reeled back in surprise. \"What? He tried to kill you!\"\n\n\"I wasn't trying to kill her,\" I mumbled.\n\nIteda moved to my side. I fought the urge to run away and lowered my head bashfully. Why was I suddenly fearful of this dragoness?\n\nIteda gingerly prodded my wing, and I ground my teeth to keep from screaming. \"It's broken. I can set it, and use my magic to accelerate its healing.\"\n\n\"We need to warn the guards,\" Firsiss growled.\n\n\"No. We will not tell any dragon until I say so.\"\n\nFirsiss hissed, but obeyed. She kept an intense gaze on me, which I didn't blame her for. \"You're making a mistake.\"\n\nIteda moved away from me, much to my dismay, and walked to Firsiss. Though they tried to remain silent, I could still hear every word. \"You heard what he said. He has a map, and they don't know that he's been compromised. For all they know, he's on his way back with the bracelet.\"\n\nFirsiss's eyes widened. \"I get what you're saying, but why not tell the guards and the queen? We could lay an ambush.\"\n\nIteda shook her head. \"You heard what he said. Those dragons knew of the bracelet's powers. What if there is a traitor in our midst?\"\n\nFirsiss scratched her muzzle, thoughtful. \"You're so much like your mother.\"\n\n\"When we get there, we can gather a small group of guards to launch an ambush, while also helping Kai find his brother.\"\n\nFirsiss nodded. \"The guards will freak if they find you gone.\"\n\nIteda smiled. \"Then we'll leave right away.\" She turned back to me, and crouched down at my limp wing. \"We'll help you get your brother back.\"\n\nJoy filled me, but I couldn't help but let out a whimper as she set my bones into place. \"Sorry. I had to set it first so it heals properly. That was the worst part.\" Iteda took the blade and armor off the tip of my wing. She then placed her paw where the wing met my back, and closed her eyes. My heart raced at her touch.\n\nWhat was that about?\n\nShe released my wing, and it already felt better. \"Thanks,\" I said, my head down. I lifted my head to inspect the wing. She tied some fabric that she pulled from her satchel around it to prevent me from moving it.\n\nIteda grinned. \"You won't be able to fly for about a week, but we can walk around Gallow's Bay towards Porando until it heals. I can keep checking on it and healing it a bit more.\" She stared into my eyes. I wanted to turn away, but I was captivated by her. No dragoness had ever given me this much attention before besides Ruvia, and it excited me.\n\nFirsiss cleared her throat, and Iteda broke off her gaze with me. \"If I'm not interrupting anything, we should head out. Night is coming, and you've heard the stories from the farmers up north.\"\n\n\"Is it true?\" I asked, assuming she was talking about the plague Namr mentioned to me.\n\nFor the first time that night, Firsiss looked vulnerable as her wings drooped. \"I'm not sure. Our sources are credible, but it just doesn't seem probable.\"\n\nI nodded and walked over to where I was slammed into the wall earlier. The wood was splintered where I landed. I grabbed my helmet and neckpiece and put them back on with ease. I then picked up the rest of the armor taken from my broken wing. \"I appreciate your help. Both of you.\"\n\nIteda smiled and walked out the door. Before I could follow, Firsiss put a wing in front of me. \"I know Princess Iteda believes you, but you have yet to earn my trust. Know your place, non-elemental.\" Her eyes flashed red as she walked out, leaving me alone.\n\nDespite Firsiss's cynicism and my injuries, I still felt invigorated. Jerso, I'm coming, I thought as I followed the two dragonesses."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Journey",
                "text": "[ Voices ]\n\nLater that night, I laid sprawled out on the ground under a grove of trees. My right wing was still pressed to my body, but my belly was up close to the fire. Luckily, Firsiss carried flint with her.\n\nEveryone was silent on the trip thus far, save for the occasional command to switch direction. My legs were already tired from walking for half the day. I longed for the skies, but I knew I would be up there in a week if I just bided my time.\n\nIteda kept glancing at me from where she lay, but I never met her eyes. I still felt shame for what I did to her. Finally, I decided to speak. \"Iteda.. I,\"\n\n\"Princess Iteda, mind you,\" Firsiss growled from behind me, dragging a pheasant in her talons. She threw it by the fire and sat down close to the princess. \"Know who you are speaking to.\"\n\n\"It's fine, Firsiss,\" Iteda said. \"We're equals here.\"\n\nFirsiss was clearly annoyed, but said nothing as she began to defeather the bird.\n\n\"What were you saying, Kai?\" Iteda looked at me.\n\nI couldn't bring myself to look at her beautiful face that was marred by my own claws. \"I'm sorry for injuring you. I..\" I couldn't think of anything else to say. She had put a healing salve on her wounds, but I declined for my own. I deserved the injuries, and I didn't want to waste her supply.\n\nIteda smiled. \"It's not your fault. You were being controlled.\"\n\n\"I still blame myself. Maybe I could have tried something else.\"\n\nIteda raised a claw, and I found myself looking at not another dragoness, but a princess. \"I don't blame you.\" There was a sense of finality to her words.\n\nWhen did I ever deserve this kind of forgiveness? \"If you knew my past, you would,\" I muttered, dipping my head down. If Iteda heard me, she didn't give any sign of it, though Firsiss just narrowed her eyes.\n\nWe sat in silence as Firsiss gave us parts of the now defeathered pheasant. I noticed that I got significantly less meat than them, but I didn't complain. I tore ravenously into the food, suddenly hungry. All of my meat had fallen out of my satchel when I checked earlier. Luckily, the map was still there as it was in a different pouch.\n\nFirsiss was the first one to break the silence. \"So, Kai, who are you really? How did a dragonet like you end up trying to steal from the princess?\"\n\nI tensed, but Firsiss's gaze didn't betray any hostility. \"First of all, I'm basically an adult,\" I said, glancing furtively at Iteda as I said so. \"My parents sold me to a guild when I was young. They were extremely poor, and, well, you know what happens to those like me..\" I trailed off.\n\n\"Indeed,\" was all Firsiss said, but Iteda's eyes flashed blue.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Iteda sympathized.\n\nPart of me was angry at her sympathy. I would rather be hated than have others feel sorry for me, but I suppressed that part of myself.\n\nYou don't need anyone's sympathy. If only they knew what power you possessed..\n\nI glanced behind the two dragonesses and saw red eyes flash in the darkness. Instantly I was on my paws, causing Iteda and Firsiss to follow my lead.\n\n\"What is it?\" Firsiss growled, turning around to face the dragon's eyes I saw. When I looked again, however, they were gone.\n\n\"I thought I saw something,\" I said, ashamed. I was going crazy.\n\nFirsiss snorted, but Iteda looked at me with her concerned eyes once more. I wanted to melt under her gaze and tell her all my worries, but I suppressed the feeling instantly. I didn't want to appear weak, especially with Firsiss watching. I turned to Firsiss. \"What about you? Are you the princess's bodyguard?\"\n\nFirsiss drew herself up and puffed out her chest. \"Indeed. I am also the second in command of the air elementals.\"\n\n\"Why were you assigned to be the bodyguard of It-Princess Iteda?\" Iteda looked annoyed that I used her title, but I ignored it.\n\n\"I was good friends with her mother. We grew up together. I've been more of a.. mentor to her since she was five.\"\n\nYes, she is strong. She lost her daughter and mate at the same time and looks to the white dragoness as a daughter. That most certainly wasn't my conscience. I looked behind Firsiss and saw the red eyes even closer than before.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I hissed at the darkness behind them.\n\nFirsiss got up and turned around, but saw nothing. \"Are you mad?\" Firsiss asked incredulously.\n\n\"I swear I saw a dragon's eyes behind you. They were red..\"\n\nIteda got up and laid her wing across my back. My muscles relaxed at her touch. \"Nothing's back there. I don't sense anything.\"\n\n\"You can sense dragons?\" I asked, perplexed.\n\n\"Some white dragons can. My magic only works nearby, but my mother can sense miles in every direction.\" Iteda lifted her wing from me when she noticed Firsiss's cool glare.\n\nI longed for her touch again, but I felt my eyelids drooping. \"I'm just seeing things. Maybe sleep will fix it,\" I offered.\n\nFirsiss huffed. \"I'll take first watch.\"\n\nIteda jumped up. \"Second.\"\n\n\"Third,\" I said.\n\nFirsiss shook her head. \"Nope. No way I'm trusting you with a watch.\"\n\n\"Firsiss!\" Iteda growled in surprise. \"We're all on the same side here!\"\n\n\"In case you forgot, princess, I tried to kill you,\" I said before Firsiss could defend herself. I didn't want to sow any division between the pair. If it hurts my budding relationship with Iteda, then so be it.\n\nIteda narrowed her eyes, a red flowing in. I saw it for only a few seconds and I hated it.\n\n\"I still need to earn both of your trusts. It's understandable.\"\n\nIteda gave me a look that said, We'll talk about this later.\n\nI closed my eyes, and a laugh echoed in my mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "\"Kill her,\" a voice said behind me.\n\nI looked down at the brown dragoness, barely a year older than me. She whimpered in fear. Scratches covered her scales, covered in mostly her blood. She barely got more than two swipes on me before I had her at my mercy.\n\n\"She submits. I win,\" I growled, not looking up.\n\n\"Finish her, or you both die.\"\n\nI lifted a claw and placed it on her neck. I saw her eyes squeeze even tighter. Just when I was about to end her, I put my claws back on the ground. \"No.\" I turned around to see the dragon giving me the orders, and a black paw came swiping at me. Just before it hit me, the scene collapsed and I was left suspended in darkness. Booming laughter followed.\n\nSuddenly, I was back at the camp. The fire was long gone, and Firsiss lay sleeping. Iteda was a few feet away, looking around and at the sky for intruders. I almost missed my own black body, laying where I had fallen asleep.\n\nBut if that's me, how am I here?\n\nAnother black dragon with red eyes stepped into the clearing. He was the biggest dragon I'd ever seen - his head reached halfway up the treeline, with my head only reaching where his stomach began. I expected Iteda to sound the alarm, but her gaze passed through the dragon and went back to looking away from the camp.\n\nHow is that possible?\n\n\"There's a lot you don't know yet, Kai.\"\n\nI looked up at the dragon. \"That was you I saw earlier, wasn't it?\"\n\nThe dragon looked at his paw as if he had better things to do. \"I think you already know the answer.\" He snaked his head down so that it was level with mine. \"Why didn't you kill her?\"\n\nWas he talking about the princess or the dragoness in my dream?\n\n\"I'd imagine both have similar reasons,\" the dragon said.\n\n\"How can you hear my thoughts?\" I asked.\n\nThe black dragon laughed, but his eyes remained red. \"I'm a part of you.\"\n\n\"This is a dream,\" I questioned, but it came out as a statement.\n\n\"You're much smarter than you think you are, Kai.\"\n\nI didn't know what to make of that. Tearing my gaze from him, I glanced at Iteda. The dragon saw and turned his attention to the dragoness.\n\n\"Something plagues her mind. She's not as confident as she pretends,\" the black dragon whispered.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I asked, stupidly.\n\n\"Like I said, I'm you.\"\n\n\"That doesn't answer my question,\" I growled, and the dragon pulled back slightly, smirking.\n\nAfter a long pause, the dragon once again put his head at my level. \"Know this. There are many who will be jealous of your power. Dragons will lie and manipulate you so they can use you for their own devices. Trust no one.\"\n\nBefore I could ask another question, the dragon raised himself to his full height and grinned. \"Now, where were we?\" A massive black paw came crashing down and struck me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "I yelled as I woke up, panting as blood dripped down my muzzle. How? I thought it was just a dream.\n\nIteda was over to me in a flash. \"What happened?\" She gasped as she saw my blood. \"Your cut opened up again! I told you to let me heal you!\" she chastised.\n\nI didn't have the heart to tell her about my dream. \"It was just a nightmare,\" I stated.\n\n\"Tsk.\" She reached into her satchel and pulled out the salve. When she cleared the blood, her eye ridges lowered in confusion. \"There's another set of claw marks here. You were only scratched once by me..\"\n\nI avoided her eyes as she searched my gaze. \"There's something you're not telling me,\" she continued.\n\n\"I told you he couldn't be trusted.\" Firsiss was behind her.\n\nIteda's eyes betrayed the hurt she felt. I couldn't bear to see her like that. \"If I understood it, I'd tell you. I don't know what happened.\"\n\nIteda's eye ridges never widened as she applied the salve mechanically. She was much rougher than she was with me yesterday. When she finished, she didn't even look back at me as she began to gather her supplies.\n\nFirsiss stretched. \"It's almost morning anyway. Let's move before the patrols begin sweeping this area.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "I hissed at a stray branch as it smacked me across the face after Firsiss passed it.\n\nShe turned and narrowed her eyes at me. \"Hmph. Best be careful, non-elemental.\"\n\nI wanted to talk to Iteda, but she made it her mission to ignore me. I sighed.\n\n\"I'm going to scout the area,\" Firsiss said. \"Iteda, you should come with me.\"\n\nIteda didn't even look back at me as she took off with Firsiss, eager to be free from the confines of the ground.\n\nFine. If those two want to leave me alone, I'll do something in the meantime. Opening my mouth, I tried to catch a scent. The overwhelming stench of elk landed on my tongue and nostrils immediately, drawing me away.\n\nAs I walked, my thoughts drifted to the black dragon in my dreams. Was he seriously the one talking to me and acting as my conscience? What if a stray thought that I have is actually his thought? Could I even trust myself? Was he thinking this?\n\nThere was no way, surely. Whatever he was, he was a figment of my imagination. The blood on my muzzle was probably from another cut I didn't notice. But Iteda would have noticed, I thought, shivering.\n\nA dull sound permeated my senses as the scent of the elk grew stronger. The small din turned into a loud roar as I walked around the corner of a small cliff, seeing a decently sized waterfall. I was in the middle of it, with the lake the water pooled into maybe ten feet down.\n\nAcross from me were the elk. They stared at me, flicking their ears. Their heads went right back into the grass, as if they knew I couldn't make it over the river and thus bore no threat.\n\nI'll show them, I growled to myself. The distance over the waterfall and lake at this point wasn't too far. I've jumped farther distances before, surely.\n\nI stepped back to allow for a running start. I readied myself, shaking my flank and waving my tail to check for balance. It would be just like taking off, but without spreading my wings. Easy.\n\nMy legs moved quicker than my thoughts, and before I knew it I hurled myself over the chasm.\n\nIt was enough, but barely.\n\nI caught the rock on the other edge, scrambling with my claws to find purchase on the unexpectedly slick surface. The elk ran away as soon as I landed, which would have made me angry had I the time to consider it.\n\nInstinctively, I fanned out my left wing, flapping to keep myself from falling. My hindleg slipped, and I began to lose ground. Had I two working wings, I would have been fine. I wouldn't have even had to jump this to begin with. My other hindleg slipped, and I went tumbling down.\n\nThe water shocked me. Dragons were usually pretty indifferent to temperature changes: we preferred heat and could feel different temperatures, but it wouldn't necessarily kill us. I now started to doubt that fact as I fought to move my legs. The water kept pushing me down, and I kicked away to swim towards what I assumed was the middle of the lake. My armor wasn't doing me any favors either.\n\nI never swam in my life, and I started to panic as I held my breath. How did the water dragons do it? I tried to remember how they swam, but couldn't think clearly. They used their wings, didn't they?\n\nI fanned my left wing to try to boost myself up, but it failed to do anything. This is it, I thought, resigned to the simple fact. I wouldn't save Jerso. He would die because of me. I desperately tried to kick as I thought that, but I didn't make any progress.\n\nYou're just going to give up? the voice in my head scoffed. Embarrassing. First losing to the princess, now this.\n\nTo be fair, she had some help.\n\nSuddenly, talons locked around me, and I was dragged out of the lake. I gasped the air into my lungs like it was a fresh kill after a long hunt. The ground met me hard as I was dumped unceremoniously onto the gravel shore.\n\n\"What were you thinking?\" Firsiss growled as she pushed me hard.\n\nI coughed, willing myself to stand. The sling that wrapped around my right wing was gone, and I was forced to hold the wing close to myself. \"I saw prey..\" I began.\n\n\"You mean fish, the prey of the water elementals? Did you forget you had no element?\"\n\nI cringed, lowering myself down in submission. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nIteda landed, but her face betrayed no hint of emotion. \"Let's put a new sling on,\" she sighed. I didn't have to move as she got out her supplies and went to work on wrapping it.\n\n\"Please be more careful,\" she whispered as she finished.\n\nI shot up as I remembered the map. I dug in my saddle until I found it, grateful it wasn't completely destroyed by the water. It was damp, but still legible.\n\n\"Come on, we've wasted enough time as it is,\" Firsiss said resentfully."
            },
            {
                "title": "Trust",
                "text": "It had been two days since our first night, and I hadn't said much since. When we first began traveling, Iteda had been curious about me and was constantly sneaking glances at me. Now, she ignored me. Perhaps it was for the best.\n\nThe voice in my head hadn't returned, nor had I dreamed of the large black dragon again. Slowly, the trees condensed as we traveled. There weren't any paths in this part of Trone, as there wasn't any civilization in this area. I had heard that there used to be, but any remnants that would prove that were long gone.\n\nI flicked my tail in irritation as I stepped on a particularly sharp rock. It was only early evening, but Firsiss called a halt.\n\n\"There's a large overhang up ahead we can use for the night.\"\n\nI nodded, not trusting my voice. I knew now neither of the dragonesses trusted me, especially after the waterfall fiasco, so I didn't try to communicate. My head was low as I followed them to the cave.\n\nFirsiss began to gather sticks. I helped, not wanting to be even more useless than I already was. She glared at me but said nothing.\n\nFinally, Firsiss lit the pile of sticks in the cave. \"I'll be back,\" she informed us, presumably off to hunt.\n\nAfter slipping my armor off, I plopped myself on the ground and let my head rest on the hard surface. I felt utterly dejected. I could sense Iteda's gaze.\n\n\"What happened to your back?\" Iteda asked.\n\nI knew what she questioned. It was the first time I took my armor off since we left Tolk, and I forgot my back still bore the scar from my training. \"I was given it when I was two while being trained.\"\n\nIteda's eyes turned blue. Great, more pity.\n\n\"That sounds more like torture than training,\" she stated.\n\n\"It was torture in more ways than one.\" Suddenly, I remembered what the black dragon said in my dreams. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nIteda pulled her head back in surprise. \"Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be?\"\n\n\"You just seem.. distant.\" As if I'm not distant myself, I thought.\n\nLike she read my mind, she said, \"You're not much better yourself.\" She sighed. \"You're in pain, but won't tell me what's bothering you. Is it from the waterfall..?\" she began.\n\n\"No, only my pride is hurt from that.\"\n\n\"Then what's wrong? I want to help. Let me,\" she pleaded.\n\n\"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me. You'd think I'm crazy. Every dragon already treats me like I'm worthless.\" Did I seriously just let out my deepest secret to this dragoness?\n\nIteda walked over to me. I dared not move as she lay a comforting wing over my back. \"You're not worthless, Kai.\"\n\nWhat did I do to deserve this kind of kindness? Before I could respond, Iteda went further. \"It's even more impressive that you've accomplished so much without-\" she stopped herself.\n\n\"Magic?\" I finished for her, anger coursing through my mind. I rose up, Iteda's wing falling from my back. \"You think I'm useless. You're just like the rest of them,\" I snarled, but tears began to brim in my eyes. I held them back.\n\n\"No, it's nothing like that,\" she responded, almost as a whisper.\n\n\"Then what is it like? I don't need any more pity. I'll go hunt for myself. Even without a wing, I can.\" I stomped out of the cave, ignoring Iteda's pleas.\n\nWhat was I thinking? Of course I couldn't trust this dragon. The dragon in my mind warned me about this. I pushed myself through the branches and smashed several plants in the process. I'm sick of being treated like carrion.\n\nAfter almost fifteen minutes, I stopped. I sniffed, trying to catch a scent. The scent of a squirrel met my nostrils. It wouldn't be more than a snack, but it would prove I could do things on my own.\n\nI slowly tracked the scent, until I spotted my quarry. The squirrel sat in a small clearing, foraging for nuts. I crept forward, ensuring I was downwind. Just before I could pounce, the wind changed direction and the squirrel ran away. I hissed in frustration and scratched a nearby trunk. I collapsed in a heap, and tears flowed freely down my face.\n\nAfter several minutes, a wing gently touched my back. I tensed, seeing Iteda's concerned gaze. I couldn't let her see me like this!\n\nI buried my head even deeper into my uninjured wing. \"Go away,\" I said, my voice muffled. To my relief, she stayed.\n\n\"Kai, please tell me what's wrong. I promise I won't tell Firsiss.\"\n\nI finally looked up and our eyes met. For a moment, her eyes reminded me of my mother's when I was younger - caring, with a hint of something else that I couldn't quite place. Part of me wanted to tear myself away from her gaze and hang my head bashfully, but I didn't. Instead, I poured out my life story.\n\nI told her everything. I don't know why I did, but I couldn't help myself. I told her about my parents selling me to the assassin's guild. I told her of my training sessions that often involved me going to bed bloody and with missing scales. I didn't speak of any of my jobs, but I knew she would assume what I did. Finally, I told her about the voice in my head and my dream. I didn't mention what was said, however.\n\n\"Whatever hit me in my dream hurt me in real life. I don't know how that's possible, but it happened.\"\n\nIteda was silent for several minutes. I was afraid I scared her, but she nudged me softly with her wing. \"I understand. Know that you'll always have a friend in me.\"\n\nFriend? My throat tightened. I hadn't even been this open with Namr for fear that he'd hate me, and here I was telling my deepest secrets to a dragoness I barely even knew.\n\n\"I'm not a good dragon, Iteda. I don't how you could be friends with me,\" I griped, but Iteda's glare scared me.\n\n\"You had no choice but to do what you had to do. What matters now is what you do now that you're free.\"\n\nShe was right, however much I wanted to disagree. I couldn't change my past, but I had the rest of my life to be a better dragon.\n\nSuddenly, I remembered what the black dragon had told me a few nights ago. \"What about you?\" I asked as she pulled her wing back to her body. \"Something is bothering you, and it isn't just me.\"\n\nIteda turned her head. \"It's nothing.\"\n\nIt was my turn to drape a wing over the princess. I hesitated at first, but decided to go for it. She didn't move away. In fact, she leaned into me, which surprised me. My heart raced.\n\n\"Come on. I just told you my story, the least you can do is tell me what's bothering you.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"I left for Tolk because I wanted to avoid my duties.\"\n\nI scrunched my eye ridges. \"Surely your journey to Tolk is part of your duties as princess?\" I asked, but she shook her head.\n\n\"My mother wanted to send just Firsiss, but I insisted on going along. I told her it was important to send me if I was to be queen soon.\"\n\nWhen she didn't continue, I pressed. \"Did something happen in Tolk?\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"No, everything went well. We were to leave the next morning when you.. found me.\" She turned her head to mine and laughed. I looked away quickly, my face feeling hot.\n\n\"Yeah.. sorry about that.\"\n\nHer eyes flashed green with mirth but then darkened to a red. \"My mother wanted to marry me off to another family. I left to avoid meeting the dragon.\"\n\n\"What? Why would she force you to do that if you don't want to?\" I felt stupid at her answer.\n\n\"Because that's how royal families work. Your whole life is prearranged for the benefit of the realm.\" She pulled herself from my embrace, leaving me cold in the rapidly descending sun.\n\nI felt rage in my chest, but why would I care who the princess married? \"That's unfair,\" was all I could think to say.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I can't avoid it forever. It's expected of me.\" A pause followed, then she said, \"We should probably head back to camp. Firsiss is likely back by now.\"\n\nI hadn't realized how long we had been out here. The sun was gone. As I followed her, Iteda said, \"I know Firsiss won't let you take a watch, but I'll split mine with you secretly. She'll find out in the morning, but maybe then she'll realize you're trustworthy.\"\n\n\"You'd do that for me?\"\n\nIteda looked back at me. \"Of course. What else are friends for?\"\n\nI felt a warmth in my chest at her gaze. \"Thanks.\"\n\nWhen we reached the overhang, Firsiss glared at us. \"Welcome back. It's been over an hour.\"\n\n\"Sorry, we got carried away,\" Iteda apologized, lowering her body.\n\nI muttered another apology, which only garnered even harsher scrutiny.\n\n\"I saved two squirrels for you, Iteda. It was all I could hunt out here.\" She looked at me, her eyes red. \"I couldn't catch enough for all of us.\"\n\nMy empty stomach growled, but I said nothing as I laid down by my discarded armor. Iteda carried over one of her squirrels and handed it to me. \"You don't have to-\" I began.\n\n\"Take it. Don't even try to argue.\" The vulnerable dragoness that I talked to in the clearing just an hour ago was suddenly a stoic princess once more, and I obeyed her command.\n\nAfter I ate, I couldn't help but stare at Iteda. She was beautiful and kind, but did I deserve her friendship?\n\nShe would make a great partner to help usher in the new age of dragons.\n\nI growled softly at the voice in my head. Partner? She was a princess, and I was just a lowly non-elemental dragon. If no common dragon would want me as a friend, how could I possibly become that with her?\n\nShe became your friend. This voice I was sure was my conscience.\n\n\"I'll take the first watch,\" Firsiss said. Iteda took second, and, as usual, I wasn't asked.\n\nIteda walked towards me and laid by the fire just a few feet from me. Her tail curled around her muzzle and soon her breathing became rhythmic.\n\nA tap on my back shocked me, and I turned to see Firsiss glaring down at me. \"Come with me.\" Not wanting to offend her, I followed her a few feet out of the cave.\n\n\"I saw what you and Iteda did,\" she growled. When I tried to defend myself, she raised a paw. \"Stay away from her. She's the princess of Trone, and you're nobody. In fact, you're worse than nobody. You're a non-elemental.\"\n\n\"We're just friends,\" I said, but she hissed.\n\n\"That's what I'm talking about. Dragons like you don't get to have friends, especially with royals.\" Her eyes flashed an even darker red as she realized what I meant. \"What? Did you think she actually likes you? You think the princess of the kingdom of dragons would take an interest in you?\"\n\nI growled, but it died in my throat as my head dipped down. \"She's my friend. She said it herself.\"\n\n\"And when this journey is over, she'll forget about you. Know your place.\" She reached up a paw as if to hit me, but instead rumbled a growl. I followed her back to the campsite, my tail dragging behind me.\n\nWhen I laid down, careful to be much further away from Iteda, my thoughts were scattered. Iteda wouldn't forget about me, would she? Maybe I should just stay away from her. Doubts plagued my mind as I descended into a restless sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "A soft nudging woke me from my slumber. \"Psst, it's your turn.\"\n\nGreen eyes glowed in the darkness as I woke. Embers were all that was left of the fire in the cave.\n\n\"Iteda?\" I asked groggily.\n\nI heard her snicker. \"You're not much of a morning dragon, are you?\"\n\nI pushed myself up. \"You remembered.\"\n\n\"Of course I did.\"\n\nThinking of Firsiss, I stepped back and bowed. \"Thank you, princess.\"\n\nIteda looked confused. \"I thought I told you not to call me that.\"\n\nMy head drooped. \"Sorry.\" When Iteda tried to nudge me with her wing, I backed up to avoid her.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"Nothing, I'll take the watch. Rest; you need it.\"\n\nIteda's eyes were a mixture of blue and purple as she ignored my coldness. I was afraid that Firsiss was awake and watching every move I made, and I didn't want to make her angrier Firsiss was unpredictable, and there was no telling what she would do to me if she discovered I went against her wishes.\n\nShe was right anyway. Why would a royal dragon like me when no common dragon wanted anything to do with me?\n\nI watched at the cave entrance for the precious few hours of darkness before the sun finally rose. Pawsteps echoed behind me, and Firsiss was at my back. She growled.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I took third watch.\"\n\n\"And who agreed to this?\"\n\n\"I did,\" Iteda said, forcing herself between us.\n\nFirsiss glared at me, and I retreated away from the princess, ducking my head.\n\n\"Grab your armor, let's go,\" Firsiss said coldly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Temple of Aelais",
                "text": "We didn't make much progress that day.\n\nThe trees were so packed together that we had to move in a single file line at times. I stayed in the back, careful to only talk curtly with the princess. Iteda's eyes flashed with confusion and sometimes a hint of red, but I ignored it. It was for the best, though my mind screamed that it was wrong.\n\nFirsiss kept glancing towards the sky that was mostly hidden by the canopy of the forest. I knew what she was thinking - she wanted to fly. Of course, another thing that was my fault. We could have been in Porando by now had my wing functioned properly. For at least the next few days, we would be grounded.\n\nDarkness began to fall as I was sure we covered very little distance. Firsiss decided to camp in a small clearing barely three dragon lengths across.\n\n\"No fire tonight,\" Firsiss said to my dismay. \"I have no doubt patrols will be searching this area for the princess.\"\n\nFirsiss fell down. I noticed for the first time that she never actually took her armor off once this journey. The metal may have been light, but it still was a considerable weight after a while. I couldn't imagine sleeping in it for this long.\n\n\"I can hunt,\" I said. Firsiss put her menacing gaze on me, but I didn't submit. \"You've hunted every night. Let me hunt for you.\"\n\nFirsiss snorted. \"I'd like to see you try without flying.\"\n\nI growled, raising my unharmed wing.\n\n\"Firsiss, cut it out. I'll help him,\" Iteda countered.\n\n\"Remember my words, dragonet,\" Firsiss hissed as I walked out of the clearing.\n\nIteda was practically on my tail. When we were a good distance from the makeshift camp, she asked, \"What did she mean? What did she say to you?\" When I didn't turn, she stomped on my tail, stopping me in my tracks.\n\nIteda didn't stop there. She wound her way around me, using her superior height to look down on me as I ducked my head. \"Answer me. You've been cold to me all day.\"\n\nSighing, I answered, \"She told me to stay away from you and that she saw us yesterday.\"\n\nIteda growled. \"Leave it to Firsiss to think she can control my life when my mother isn't around. I bet my mother put her up to it to ensure I didn't step out of line before I could marry my suitor.\"\n\n\"She said you're not my friend, and that you're just going to forget about me when this is over.\"\n\nIteda once again draped a wing over me. \"She can't and won't control my actions. If she tries something, tell me. I'll defend you. You're a true friend, Kai. I don't have many of those.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I said, allowing myself to relax in her presence once more. Did she really mean it? Suddenly, a scent came across the wind. Deer.\n\nIteda's eyes turned brown. \"Do you smell that?\"\n\nI pulled away from her and nodded.\n\n\"This way,\" she said, walking north. I followed.\n\nAfter a few minutes, we both spotted the deer. It was lazily drinking at a stream, not a care in the world.\n\nI looked at Iteda, and her eyes were green. \"First to catch it wins.\" She then darted left into the foliage, and I lost track of her white form.\n\n\"Wait, that's not fair!\" I laughed, then decided to take a more direct approach. I slowly crept up to the unsuspecting deer. When I was close enough, I lunged, but landed into the creek. Shaking the water off my scales, I watched in horror as Iteda stood over the deer, pride in her eyes.\n\n\"Too slow, I win.\" She smiled at me, and I couldn't help but grin in return.\n\nA few trees away, a squirrel darted away. \"How about first to catch that squirrel, and we come back for the deer?\" Without waiting for an answer, I ran after the squirrel. Pawsteps echoed behind me, but I focused on the fleeing brown squirrel. My strides were much bigger, and I was just about to pounce when Iteda landed on my back.\n\n\"Oomph!\" I yelled as I landed on the hard dirt. I could only watch as the squirrel kept running.\n\n\"Caught you!\"\n\n\"That wasn't the point of the game,\" I complained, laughing. She got off of me and nudged me with her wing. I noticed a white column ahead.\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked, moving closer. Iteda was close behind.\n\n\"Looks like ruins. Legends speak of a time when dragons lived in these woods, but that was a long time ago if it was even true.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"I'm the princess. I had private tutors teach me the history and legends of Trone.\"\n\nThe column seemed to be a marker. Runes were carved on it, but I couldn't decipher them.\n\n\"The ancient language. Only a few words are still remembered from it,\" Iteda whispered.\n\nI noticed a rectangle in the dirt by the column, but Iteda didn't see it. \"We should head back with the deer before Firsiss comes looking for us.\" Her eyes flashed a slight red when she mentioned Firsiss, but quickly cleared. I hoped I wasn't ruining their relationship.\n\nIteda walked away, but I remained. She turned around. \"Are you coming?\"\n\n\"I'll catch up.\"\n\nHer concerned gaze met mine, and my heart raced once more. \"Everything is fine, I promise,\" I clarified. \"Trust me, I'll be back soon.\"\n\nIteda nodded. \"All right. Be careful.\" She left.\n\nI turned back to the marble column. When we first spotted it, I felt compelled to stay. I walked over the slight rectangular depression in the ground, but nothing happened. Moving to the column, I analyzed it. I ran my paw over the marble, pressing gently. Suddenly, part of the column gave way under my paw. The sound of gears filled the air. The rectangular depression parted, and stairs led down to the depths below. Braziers lit by white flames gave the only light.\n\nI looked behind me, expecting Iteda to be there, but no dragon greeted me. Steeling myself for anything, I walked down the stairs.\n\nWhen I exited the stairwell, my eyes laid upon a massive chamber lined with white marble. Runes were carved into the walls. A lone white flame was lit in the center of the otherwise empty room. Behind it was a statue of a white dragon. Tapestries contained images of groups of dragons interacting. Some had them fighting. What shocked me the most was that there were dragons of every color..\n\nIncluding black dragons.\n\nPerhaps the colors on the tapestry faded, and the artist had originally intended a different color. However, the rest of the tapestries were in seemingly perfect conditions.\n\nMaybe non-elemental dragons were treated normally back then, I thought. This room had to be centuries old at the least. The scenes depicted were of a different age. I even saw depictions of centaurs and griffons trading with dragons, and another scene of a wyvern fighting a griffon and a dragon.\n\nI pulled myself away from the tapestries and walked to the center pyre. When I reached it, I heard claws clicking on the marble. I turned suddenly, expecting to see Iteda, but was shocked when my gaze fell upon an utterly ancient dragon. Her scales were a dull grey, but somehow I knew they used to be white. This was a temple dedicated to Aelais, the light dragon god. It had to be, considering the statue.\n\n\"It's been a long time since another dragon walked these halls,\" the dragoness said. I expected her voice to be gravely, but was surprised at the musical quality of her voice.\n\n\"Especially one of Tervain's sons.\"\n\n\"Tervain?\" I asked. What was she talking about? My father's name wasn't even close to Tervain. When I thought of the name, however, I sensed power around it.\n\nThe dragon was now in front of me. She reached a paw and took hold of my muzzle gently. I wanted to pull away, but I remained still.\n\n\"Such a tragedy. You don't even know your heritage.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" I wanted to let out an exasperated growl, but I didn't want to offend the dragoness.\n\nReleasing my face, she was silent for a long time. Finally, she spoke. \"Sha had to fall. If we didn't defeat the night elemental dragons, Etra would have fallen.\"\n\nNight elemental dragons? What? \"Etra?\"\n\n\"You would know it as Trone.\"\n\nI pressed a claw to my forehead. \"There are only five elemental magics. Earth, air, fire, water, and light.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"That wasn't always the case.\"\n\nWhen I didn't say anything, she sighed. \"Long ago, Etra was divided by each elemental order. Fire controlled the south, where Treka now is. Water controlled the southwest, towards Porando. Air controlled the west, sharing the land with the centaurs. Earth controlled the north, carving lairs into the mountains the dwarves gave them. The light controlled the heart of Etra, where we are now. It's long gone; this temple is all that remains.\" She gazed intently into my eyes. \"And night controlled the island of Sha.\"\n\n\"There aren't any night elemental dragons, though. It's not mentioned in any book that I've read.\"\n\n\"That's because it was scratched out of history. The night dragons were defeated and chased out of Etra by the other elemental orders because they became power-hungry. They wanted to control all of Etra. All dragons banded together for the first time in draconic history to defeat them.\"\n\nMy mind was reeling as I took all the information in. \"So that's who the black dragons are in the tapestries?\"\n\nThe dragoness nodded. \"Indeed. And that's also who you are, Kai.\n\n\"You are a night elemental dragon. The first in thousands of years to live longer than their birth.\"\n\nIt dawned on me that I never gave her my name, but I didn't question it as the words hit me like a wyvern's horns. \"How is that possible? I'm a non-elemental. All dragons born with black scales don't possess magic.\"\n\n\"And who told you that?\"\n\n\"Every dragon alive. Everyone knows that.\"\n\nShe shook her head in disappointment. \"Night dragons are unique, as they can be born to any elemental dragon pair. However, they were wiped from history, so slowly the lie was crafted that black dragons have no element, and are to be killed at birth. The memory faded. Dragons only live for a few centuries.\"\n\n\"I don't have magic,\" I said, still trying to find a reason to not believe the dragoness.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" she asked, her eyes wide as she smirked.\n\nI did feel stronger at night, but that was just a coincidence because fewer dragons bothered me then. \"Yes!\" I snarled. Suddenly, I remembered what the dragon in my mind told me: trust no one. \"You're lying.\"\n\n\"It's the truth. You can't deny your heritage any longer, Kai.\"\n\n\"How do you know my name? What else do you know about me?\"\n\nShe smiled despite my increasing rage. \"I know the names of every dragon, Kai. You travel with the dragonesses Firsiss and Iteda.\"\n\nI stepped back. I wanted to fight, but what other powers did she have besides reading my mind? \"You're wrong. Night dragons aren't real, and never were.\"\n\nI ran back up the stairs, not daring to look back. When I stepped outside, the gears shifted and the entrance closed once more. I sprinted as fast as I could back to the camp.\n\nIteda and Firsiss had seemingly already eaten. A pile of meat lay in a clump in the middle of the camp, likely saved for me. \"What's wrong?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"Don't like being alone in the darkness,\" I lied. I hated lying to her, but I wasn't sure if what just happened was real or not. I ravenously tore into the meat lying in the camp. It was lukewarm, but I appreciated it nonetheless.\n\nFirsiss said she would take first watch, as usual. Iteda took second, and I took third. I was surprised that Firsiss didn't comment.\n\nI took my armor off and stretched all my limbs except for my right wing out. I closed my eyes, but sleep was a long way away.\n\nI listened as two sets of paws walked a bit from camp. I strained my ears to listen.\n\n\"Iteda, I don't like how close you've been getting to the dragonet-\" Firsiss began.\n\nIteda growled, cutting Firsiss off. \"He has a name, you know. Stay out of my business, Firsiss. I don't know what my mother told you, but neither of you will control my life.\"\n\n\"I only want what's best for you! Think about your duty! You've only known him for a few days!\" Firsiss hissed.\n\n\"You've tried to deny me a simple friendship with him, not just what I know you're talking about.\" I heard Iteda stomping away towards me. I felt her lay right next to me, pressing herself against my body and draping a wing over me. Her tail moved to find mine, and I let it entwine with my own. My heart raced at the implication.\n\nI cracked an eye open and saw Iteda raise her head to glare at Firsiss. \"Is this what my mother is afraid of?\" she growled.\n\nFirsiss let a low growl rumble from her throat, but said nothing more. She turned and walked away for her watch."
            },
            {
                "title": "Blight",
                "text": "When I woke, Iteda was still by my side. Sunlight gently poked through the treetops. Didn't I have to take third watch?\n\nFirsiss appeared from behind a tree, her eyes bloodshot. She saw me awake and hissed at me. I glared in return, causing her to reel back slightly in shock.\n\nI looked back down at Iteda as she blinked slowly, opening her eyes. She looked down at our embrace, then quickly pulled away, ducking her head. \"Sorry,\" she mumbled, her eyes flashing with embarrassment.\n\n\"Why didn't you wake me for my watch?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"Who am I to get in the way of love?\" she said mockingly.\n\nLove? Does she seriously think that? We're just friends, and she was obviously just trying to prove a point, I thought. Right?\n\nIteda pushed her snout into Firsiss's. \"Know your place. You may be my mentor and closest friend, but I'm still the leader here.\"\n\nIt took a moment, but Firsiss finally backed down. \"I saw a patrol a few miles east. We should leave.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" was all Iteda said. She turned to me, her eyes softening. \"I'm sorry about-\"\n\n\"It's okay. No harm done. Still friends?\" I could tell she felt she overstepped her bounds, but I knew I didn't want to rush into anything.\n\nShe smiled, shoulders drooping in relief. \"Friends.\" She nudged my wingtip with her own.\n\nWithout thinking, I added, \"Besides, I needed the warmth without the fire.\" Cringing, I waited for Iteda's reply.\n\nTo my surprise and relief, she chuckled. \"Hopefully it will get warmer at night as we move south.\"\n\nI hoped it didn't.\n\nA few hours passed as we moved in silence. Iteda slowed her pace in front of me and slid back to my side.\n\n\"Have you heard that voice at all since we talked about it?\"\n\nI almost forgot I told her. \"Once, but it didn't tell me anything important.\"\n\nShe nodded. I knew she wouldn't press me since I never told her what I was told in the first place. She didn't explicitly say I was crazy, but I could kind of guess by her countenance. I didn't blame her - it sounded crazy when I thought about it. \"Why did you stay back last night?\"\n\nI tensed, and Iteda instantly read my expression. \"What happened? Did you see something?\"\n\nI wanted to lie, but I couldn't bring myself to. \"Yes. There was an underground temple to Aelais there.\"\n\nIteda's sharp intake of breath was all I heard. \"Really? All the way out here?\"\n\n\"Apparently.\"\n\n\"Was that it?\"\n\n\"There were some neat tapestries, but that was it.\" I neglected to mention the archaic dragoness.\n\nIteda seemed to want to press on, but instead, she said, \"I'm glad I met you, Kai. You're one of the only dragons to treat me like another dragon, and not a princess.\"\n\nI grinned. \"I.. I was never one for formalities.\"\n\n\"I'd imagine. How often did you have to be formal as a commoner?\"\n\nThe title of commoner didn't come out like an insult. It was rather a statement of fact. \"I usually just kept my head down. Dragons would insult and yell at me.\" I flicked my wingtip at her, careful to not hit her with the blade. \"Don't go on and pity me,\" I joked. \"All that matters is you're not like that.\"\n\nIteda's eyes were cloudy, then she turned to me. \"I'm not trying to be insensitive, but do you have any other friends?\"\n\n\"I have one friend back in Stramwood, but he's it. I met a nice dragoness in Tolk, though. But I don't think she saw my scale color.\"\n\nI saw Iteda's eyes flash with annoyance. \"Really? How is she?\" There was an edge to her tone.\n\n\"She was nice, but she was only the second dragon to treat me like normal. I only met her for a few moments, and I'll probably never see her again.\"\n\nIteda drooped with relief, but quickly picked herself up. \"Good.\" She walked back up to Firsiss and began talking quietly. Clearly, they had resolved their differences.\n\nSuddenly, Firsiss held a paw up to tell us to stop. She pointed ahead and gestured at me to move up. I moved slowly, careful to not make a sound.\n\nUp ahead, there was a brown and black speckled bear. Its back was turned to us, but we were downwind of it. It would soon know we were here.\n\nBears weren't usually a problem, as dragons could easily avoid one by flying. Even on the ground, a dragon was maybe double the size of one, and could easily overpower it. Still, it would be a good idea to stay away from one. None of us could risk another injury slowing us down even more. When the bear turned, Firsiss hissed. Iteda and I just gaped silently.\n\nIts eyes were black. A yellow puss dripped from one of its eyelids, and it stood over the mangled corpse of a crow. It didn't even look to be eating the crow - rather, it was just smearing it all across the ground.\n\n\"It's true,\" Firsiss whispered. I tensed, ready for a fight.\n\nThe bear roared a challenge that I was sure could be heard for miles around and charged. Firsiss and Iteda took to the sky, breaking several branches in the process. I jumped for a tree and began climbing, digging my talons into the bark.\n\nThe bear blew right past where I had been standing, slowing to a stop. It turned back to me and walked to the bottom of the trunk. The bear began climbing.\n\nIteda then dropped down from the sky, scoring long tears down the back of the bear. It ignored her, continuing its climb to me. It would soon be upon me. I tried to get higher, but one of its paws wrapped around my hindleg. I was pulled down. Spinning in mid-air, I managed to wrest myself from its grip and dart away, back to where it was attacking the dead crow.\n\nThe bear roared in anger and dropped from the tree with a sickening crunch. To my surprise, it got up as if nothing happened.\n\nWhat is that bear made of? I wondered as it began its charge anew.\n\nA gust of wind ruffled the bear's fur, barely avoiding Firsiss's attack. I held my ground, ready to fight the smaller creature, when Firsiss slammed into its side. The bear flew into a nearby tree, taking it down with its body. Firsiss backed up to me.\n\n\"That seems to be your signature move,\" I said before I could help myself.\n\nFirsiss glared at me, but gasped as the bear got up once again. \"How is this possible? It should be dead!\"\n\nThe bear looked around for its target, then began running towards us again. A beam of light came from one of the trees. The attack took a chunk out of its side, but it continued its charge. Firsiss and I met the bear's force together, stopping it in its tracks. I held both paws away while Firsiss kept slashing at its neck. Iteda was down with us, launching beams of light at the bear's back.\n\nAs if the bear obtained a burst of energy, I was overpowered. Falling onto my back, the bear wrestled in my grasp. When Iteda and Firsiss tried to help, a black shield of energy stopped them from moving closer. Iteda launched another light beam, but it was deflected. I saw Firsiss throw a stick, which actually made it through despite its uselessness.\n\nThe bear's claws kept getting closer to my throat. Its ebon eyes bore no pupil nor any sign of life. I cried out, losing the last of my strength. How is a bear this strong? It's stronger than two fully-grown dragons! At the last second, however, an arrow pierced its eye.\n\nThe bear collapsed on me, and I fell back. The black-tinted shield around me dissolved.\n\nIteda ran to me. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I groaned. \"It was so strong..\"\n\nI heard hooves behind me. We all turned, watching as several centaurs surrounded us. Each held a bow in their clawless paws that were aimed at us. Why save us just to threaten us?\n\n\"You are trespassing on our lands. Take off your wingblades immediately or die.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Accusations",
                "text": "Iteda backed up, pressing her flank against mine. Firsiss and I took off our wingblades as instructed, which made us have to take off our armor in turn. Iteda also dropped her armor, but I doubted the ceremonial pieces would have helped much. The centaurs collected our gear.\n\nI had never seen a centaur before, and I doubted many living dragons had. They have been extremely reclusive since our last war. The upper halves of their bodies resembled the fabled humans of old, but the rest of their body was that of the wild horses of Drarke. Each wore fabric over the chests of the human part of their bodies that matched the colors of the surrounding forest.\n\nAnother centaur came galloping from the east. He spoke quietly to the leader, who nodded. The leader gestured to two centaurs without bows, who pulled out metal chains.\n\nFirsiss pulled back when they approached, but the leader pulled his bow out again instantly. \"Move again and I won't hesitate, dragon,\" he spat out.\n\nIron cuffs were shackled just below our forepaws on each of us. The chain was actually continuous, connecting the three of us together so one of us couldn't make a daring escape.\n\nAddressing the new centaur, he said, \"Inform Chief River of our capture and to call off the search parties.\"\n\nSearch parties? They wouldn't be looking for us, would they?\n\nThe white centaur bowed. \"At once, General Sequoia.\"\n\nGeneral Sequoia turned his attention to us. His stern gaze actually intimidated me, despite me being slightly taller than him. The brown fur on his head matched the color of the horse half of his body. \"You will come with us, on your paws. No flying. Any funny business, and you die.\"\n\n\"What is the meaning of this? Since when did your territory extend this far out?\" Iteda asked, puffing herself up. I couldn't help but agree. Unless something changed in the past hundred years, their territory should begin miles west.\n\nUnless of course we accidentally wandered into their territory. Which I guess isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.\n\n\"In case you haven't noticed, this is our territory,\" General Sequoia sneered. \"Besides, it's not like you have any room to talk after what you did.\"\n\n\"What did we do?\" I blurted.\n\nGeneral Sequoia's ire fell on me. \"We won't discuss such matters here.\" In a louder voice, he shouted, \"Let's move. I want to reach the outpost by nightfall!\"\n\nA centaur yanked on our chains, which forced us to follow their uncomfortably fast pace.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I whispered to Iteda.\n\nShe glanced back at me, confused. \"What are you sorry about?\"\n\n\"If I could have defeated that bear quicker, we wouldn't be in this situation.\"\n\nIteda sighed. \"You need to stop blaming yourself, Kai. Not everything is your fault. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be-\"\n\n\"No talking!\" the centaur leading us yelled. Iteda smartly quieted.\n\nI was struggling only an hour into the journey. The fight with the bear had sapped me of most of my energy. I found myself panting.\n\nIteda looked at me with that concerned gaze of hers that made my heart rush, but Firsiss just glared at me, as usual.\n\nI collapsed.\n\nI was dragged a few feet before the group stopped. Black spots danced across my vision as I fought for consciousness.\n\nLook at you. Captured by these lesser beings. I'm insulted to be a part of you, the voice of undoubtedly the black dragon spoke in my mind.\n\nI could feel Iteda at my side assessing me for injuries.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" the centaur leading as asked. General Sequoia appeared at his side.\n\n\"We can't afford delay,\" the general said, annoyed.\n\n\"Release me, and I can heal him.\"\n\nFirsiss didn't even sleep last night, and here I am being the one to slow everyone down, I thought.\n\n\"Yeah right, dragon. Like we'd believe that.\"\n\nIteda hissed at him and put her paws on my side as best as she could without tangling the chains. Instantly, I felt strength returning to my strained muscles and even felt the pain in my right wing dull.\n\nIteda was huffing when she finished, but she turned to the General. \"We can move, no thanks to you.\"\n\nGeneral Sequoia rolled his eyes. \"Whatever.\" He shouted a command and the group continued once more.\n\nI noticed Iteda seemed a lot more tired, but she kept her head high as she kept up with the pace of the centaurs. \"Are you all right? You didn't have to-\"\n\n\"I'm fine!\" she cut me off, a little too harshly. I flinched, and her face softened. \"Sorry. It just took a little strength from me. What matters is that you're okay.\"\n\nThere she was again caring about me more than herself. I felt a tightness in my chest that I couldn't explain, and just fell back as far as I could, which wasn't far. The chains weren't very long.\n\nThe sun set fast, and the group of roughly fifteen centaurs and three dragons arrived at a wooden tower. I looked up and saw that it towered over the trees. How do the centaurs even make it up there?\n\nI wasn't afforded an explanation, as three centaurs emerged from the tower. Words were exchanged, and the three of us were paraded to a large tree nearby. The chain was wrapped around its trunk. We had no choice but to lay down in the dirt.\n\nA fire was lit, but we were too far away to feel its heat. The centaurs all talked and shared stories, all while eating dried meats. We were essentially ignored, except for the set of four guards that were changed every hour.\n\n\"What do you think that bear was, Firsiss?\" I was nervous to speak to the dragoness, but I figured she'd get over our differences because of our situation.\n\nFirsiss's usual anger at me dissipated. Her pupils swam in orange. \"I don't know. The farmers up north told us of that happening to their animals, but never like that.\"\n\n\"I'm scared that our elemental powers were useless when that shield was thrown up,\" Iteda whispered. \"How did the bear do that if it's mindless?\"\n\n\"A defense mechanism, perhaps? Maybe it sensed your elements?\" I offered.\n\n\"If that was the case, it would have thrown a shield up when I was sending light beams at it,\" Iteda said.\n\n\"It was chasing me at the time, so maybe it was distracted?\" Doubts were biting at me.\n\nFirsiss shook her head. \"I don't understand it, but at least it was able to be killed. I would be more afraid if it was still out there.\"\n\nI closed my eyes. I was on the side near Iteda, who was also falling asleep. Cracking an eye open, I watched as Firsiss looked around, then fell asleep. I felt Iteda's tail tip touch my own, and I left it at that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "\"Centaurs, really Kai? Not a good step for the new leader of dragonkind, that's for sure.\"\n\nI glared at the black dragon. Once again, the dragon invaded my dreams. This time, however, we were on a cliff overlooking a black sea.\n\n\"Where are we?\" I asked, looking around. There was not a tree in sight. A green valley snaked around the hills. A large city occupied the lowest point, its size rivaling that of Tolk.\n\n\"Sha. At least, Sha at its peak.\"\n\nThe city was beautiful. Lights sparkled everywhere. Dragons zipped through the sky, not a care in the world. The streets were filled with laughter that I could hear even from my position a few miles away.\n\nWait, Sha? Didn't that dragoness back at the temple mention that? And those are black dragons..\n\nThe black dragon to my left rumbled an acknowledgment to my thoughts. \"Indeed, that traitorous dragoness did mention it.\"\n\nWhen he didn't elaborate further, I asked, \"So why am I here?\"\n\n\"To see the truth.\" Instantly, the scene changed from a tranquil night to a world on fire. The once beautiful city on Sha was now a heaping pile of rubble. Fire burned everywhere, scorching the green grass black. Dragons of all colors flew, picking black dragons out of the sky as they attempted to flee.\n\nI was now in one of the city's streets. Dragonets were running away from green dragons in armor as they cut their throats. An old black dragon struggled to breathe on my left, before being sliced open by a white dragon. A beam of light hit a young group of black dragons that moved to intercept, vaporizing them where they stood.\n\n\"The dragoness said they were chased out.\"\n\nThe black dragon let out a growl so fierce that I crouched in submission. We were once again on the cliffside. The fighting was over, and all that remained of the once beautiful city was a blackened valley devoid of life.\n\n\"She lied. I told you not to trust any dragon. The five elemental orders of dragons banded together under Aelais to slaughter the night elemental dragons.\"\n\nAll I could hear was my steady breathing. There was no wind on the island. I didn't know if that was part of the dream, or if no element dared touch the forsaken island of Sha.\n\n\"The dragoness spoke many untruths, but one thing was true. You are a night dragon, Kai. The first of many to come.\"\n\n\"And you will be their leader and have revenge. Under my stewardship.\"\n\nMy breath caught in my throat. \"That's not possible. How could I be a night dragon?\"\n\n\"The dragoness already told you how. There's no such thing as a non-elemental dragon.\" The black dragon seemed annoyed.\n\nI still couldn't accept it, but that could wait. \"And what do you mean I'll be their leader?\"\n\nThe dragon puffed out his chest. \"You will lead a new age of dragonkind that will strike fear into the hearts of the other elementals. For too long, my dragons were cast aside and treated as worthless beings, killed at birth. Now, they will suffer.\"\n\nI couldn't help but resent that notion. Dragons were doing well for themselves now. Why would we punish them for the sins of their ancestors? \"I won't lead dragons to fight other dragons,\" I growled.\n\nTo my surprise, the dragon laughed. \"Oh Kai, you will. I'm more a part of you than you could possibly understand. Everything is already in motion.\"\n\nBefore I could ask what he meant, the world plunged away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "I woke up gasping in the waning darkness. The centaurs around me flinched and drew their bows, but relaxed when they saw it was just me. I looked behind me and saw that Iteda had moved closer to me, but not as close as the previous night. Our tails had entwined at some point in the night, and I smiled.\n\nIteda woke right after me, and to my relief, she didn't pull her tail away from me. She did draw herself a little taller as she scrutinized me. \"You had a nightmare,\" she stated.\n\nShe knew me too well. \"Yes. That dragon spoke to me again, though I don't know if I understand.\"\n\n\"At least you're not injured again.\"\n\nThat was true.\n\nWe moved early that morning. The moon was still lowering as we kept up the same grueling pace as yesterday. My body felt more than awake, and I could tell my companions felt the same. There seemed to be an air of fear around them, as we had no idea what was going to happen next.\n\nI took the time to think. Was I seriously a night dragon? Was it possible? If the dragoness in that temple was lying to me, why should I believe the black dragon in my dreams? I expected him to rebuke my thoughts, but he remained silent. I didn't know what to believe.\n\nAfter a few hours, the trees began to thin. Another hour passed, and the roofs of a town appeared in the distance. Smoke left through the chimneys of the houses, and centaurs galloped around the dirt roads. I scoffed at the place. Was this seriously where the Chief resided?\n\nTo my surprise, our group galloped right through the ramshackle town. Centaurs stared at us. Young centaurs hid behind fences, sneaking peeks at what was presumably their first time seeing a real dragon. I could tell Firsiss was humiliated, but if Iteda was, she hid it well. Her head remained high the whole way through.\n\nOnce we passed through the town, a much larger city appeared on the horizon. The buildings in this one were made of not just wood, but bricks as well. It was also much cleaner. After passing through the low gate, my paws felt the comforting presence of cobblestone. My mind was brought back to Tolk, and for a moment, I felt calm.\n\nVoices assaulted my ears, and I heard loud gasps as centaurs drew back to the sides of the road. Unlike Tolk, the buildings here were spaced out and not connected. Centaurs of all ages stared at us. Several sneered and jeered, while others just looked on with confusion and even expressions of hurt. Why would they feel hurt by looking at us?\n\nA large castle of polished marble presented itself as the main building of the city. It was surrounded by a large body of water that we crossed. I managed to sneak a peek over the edge and saw several exotic-looking fish in the water. I licked my chops at the sight, wondering how they would taste.\n\nSeveral rugs adorned the inside chambers of the palace, and we were ushered through yet another set of doors. The centaurs that were with us broke off, replaced by armored centaurs that held spears. I looked nervously at Iteda, whose eyes were a fearful orange.\n\nThe new chamber we were in was huge. There were several pillars on either side of us along with a throng of guards. A pedestal I assumed was the throne sat directly in front of us, and atop it was a centaur, sitting down as much as his horse body could allow. I doubted centaurs could sit properly like dragons.\n\nThe centaur in front of us bore a crown of twigs and leaves, as well as a dark-green and white robe. The grey fur on his head was tied to hang at that back of his head, and a small tussle of fur grew below his mouth. I had no idea why centaurs had so much fur on their heads, but none to warm the rest of their torsos. It seemed rather useless.\n\n\"Dragons!\" he yelled, his voice carrying a note of power that clearly proved his rank. \"I am Chief River of the centaurs. I understand your kind has kings and queens, so I am akin to your king.\"\n\n\"Queen,\" Iteda mumbled, her head down. Our king had died a few years after my birth. I couldn't imagine how Iteda felt at the mention of her father's untimely death from sickness.\n\nIf Chief River heard Iteda, he made no show of it. \"And who do I owe the honor of meeting? I understand this is the first time our species have met since.. well, since the war.\" The guards around us shifted at the mention of the war. Only the oldest dragons had been alive during it, so I doubted there was any centaur alive that remembered the war personally.\n\nIteda stepped forward. \"I am Princess Iteda of Trone, and these are my companions Firsiss, second in command of the air elemental order, and Kai. I demand to be released. Kidnapping the royal family and one of our most prized generals will not be tolerated by Queen Karis.\"\n\nI drew myself up in pride and beamed at her. I couldn't help but marvel at how well she could handle herself as the princess of this kingdom. There was no doubt in my mind that she would be a powerful queen one day.\n\nChief River leaned forward and bowed slightly. \"Apologies, Princess Iteda, but I'm afraid we can't do that. You three have been accused of some high crimes that will be punished. Besides, you're princess of the dragons, not all of Trone.\"\n\n\"What crimes?\" I asked. Firsiss glared at me for speaking out of turn, and I cringed back under her stern gaze. I wasn't used to how royal courts functioned, and it showed.\n\nChief River turned his attention to me. \"Well, Kai, is it? The fields to the north have been burned, leaving nothing but a blackened char. Our people will be hard-pressed to have enough food come winter. I'm sure you're well aware of that, since you three were obviously the ones who did it.\"\n\n\"What?\" Iteda hissed in surprise. \"We did no such thing!\"\n\n\"Lies!\" Chief River spat, standing up. The guards tensed and lowered their spears, but Chief River threw his paw up. \"Locals said they saw dragons running away from the scene. We looked everywhere, then found you three hobbling through our territory. Seems like a rather interesting coincidence no?\"\n\n\"We didn't do it,\" Iteda repeated. \"What would we have to gain by doing so?\"\n\n\"Enough. We'll have your official trial soon enough. Guards!\" The guards on either side of us moved to flank us, spears at the ready. \"Take them to the dungeons. Throw them some bones to eat. I don't care if they starve, as long as they're alive for the trial.\"\n\nOur chain was grabbed by the closest guard, and we were dragged away."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Sixth Element",
                "text": "I relaxed in the dark, damp cell as Iteda ran a paw over my right wing joint.\n\n\"It feels pretty much healed. How does it feel to you?\"\n\n\"Feels like normal, but I'll keep it bound for at least another day just in case,\" I answered.\n\nIteda nodded, satisfied. \"Now you're thinking like a healer.\"\n\nI looked over at Firsiss, who stood at the bars staring out into the hall. Darkness enveloped the dungeon, save for a strip of grey light that emerged from a barred window at the top of the cell behind us. Water poured in from the outside as rain battered the city. Braziers were lit all down the hallway. As far as I could tell, we were the only creatures in the prison.\n\nWhen we were first thrown in a few hours ago, Firsiss had tried to break the bars down. Guards immediately rushed over to thrust spears between the bars, forcing us back to the edge of the stone walls.\n\nWe were trapped.\n\nWorse, Iteda was fretting nonstop about our upcoming trial and wrongful accusation. The only time she stopped was when I mentioned my wing, which is why she was checking up on it.\n\n\"It must have healed when I fell down yesterday and you healed me,\" I said.\n\n\"That would make sense,\" Iteda replied, beaming. \"At least now if we get out of here we could probably fly away.\"\n\n\"First we have to get out of this cell,\" Firsiss growled and turned back from us. Her grey scales glistened with moisture. If only we had a water elemental down here to stay dry, I thought.\n\n\"Did you figure anything out yet?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"Nothing useful.\" Firsiss turned and began studying the rocks around us, leaving Iteda and me to talk once more.\n\nWanting to keep Iteda distracted, I changed the subject. \"How do you use your magic?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she asked, raising an eye ridge.\n\n\"When you heal or shoot beams of light, what goes through your mind before you do it?\" I couldn't believe I was considering that the black dragon's words were true, but I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to try.\n\nIteda pawed the ground gently, thinking. \"It's hard to explain. It feels natural, like flying. When I was first learning as a dragonet, I was told to envision my magic as a river flowing inside of me. To use it, I cup my paws in the water and pull it out.\"\n\nI nodded, still not understanding. \"Interesting.\" I did as she said and reached down in my mind, but felt nothing.\n\n\"It feels different depending on what dragon you talk to,\" Firsiss interrupted, hearing our conversation. \"For me, I hear music. I harmonize with the natural music around me, and there I can manipulate the air.\"\n\n\"Could you manipulate the rain?\" I asked. I knew some air dragons could, but it was a rarer trait among them.\n\nFirsiss looked thoughtful. \"I can, but I haven't tried in years. It saps me of pretty much all of my strength. We usually combine our powers for something of that caliber.\"\n\nI realized for the first time that evening that Firsiss was treating me with respect. Well, maybe not exactly the respect she reserved for the princess, but it was better than the cold hate I've been receiving for the past few days.\n\n\"Not that it would be helpful to you, non-elemental.\"\n\nThere was the Firsiss I knew and loved.\n\n\"I wonder who actually burned those fields. Perhaps it was simply lightning?\" Iteda offered.\n\nI hadn't actually thought of who did it. I just knew we didn't.\n\n\"It would have to be extremely dry for a lightning bolt to ignite a whole field.\" Firsiss ruffled her wings.\n\n\"Well, something did it. And what if that something is still out there? What if it attacks dragonkind next?\" Iteda shivered, looking outside at the torrential downpour. She had assumed her concerned princess persona once again.\n\nNone of us answered.\n\nIt was nearing night, and I could tell we were all exhausted. \"Maybe we should sleep on it?\" I suggested. I clung desperately to the hope that our trial would take a few days to begin, but knowing how angry these centaurs were, I'd be hedging my bets incorrectly.\n\nFirsiss grunted. \"You two can. I'll stay up and think a little longer.\"\n\nI moved to the middle of the cell to avoid most of the water, and Iteda followed. She shivered as she laid down, so I cautiously draped a wing over her. \"It's cold,\" I mumbled, feeling the need to explain myself. She just chuckled and moved closer.\n\n\"Firsiss, you may need to sleep by me as well,\" Iteda said. Firsiss looked back, her eyes clouding with a tint of pink as she tried to hide her anger at us.\n\n\"I'll manage,\" she curtly replied.\n\nWhen I closed my eyes, a new world emerged from the darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "I stood at the peak of a large mountain range. Below me, a dense fog blocked the rest of the mountains as they descended into foothills. It was so high that snow still clung to the surface despite it being summer.\n\nAt least, I assumed it was still summer in this vision.\n\n\"Magnificent, isn't it?\"\n\nI turned to the deep voice and saw none other than the black dragon once more. His red eyes glowed even brighter than normal, and his gaze seemed like it could read my soul.\n\nThe fog cleared enough for me to see several forms down below emerging from caves. \"What are those?\" I couldn't help but ask.\n\n\"Some creatures that will assist you,\" was all he said, looking at his claws without a care in the world.\n\nFor some reason, my talk with the ancient dragoness back in the temple of Aelais came back to me. She had mentioned a name, and I still wanted to know who she meant. \"Who was Tervain?\"\n\nThe black dragon froze, then turned back to me. He studied me for several moments before saying, \"That's a name I haven't heard in many years.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\" I pressed. Finally, I thought he might give me useful information.\n\n\"I suppose I haven't been talked to by a sentient being in a long time. I am Tervain.\" He gave me a wide grin, showing all of his teeth.\n\nWhat? \"She called me the son of Tervain.\"\n\n\"What? Oh, the old dragoness in that temple? She would assume I created you, that wrench.\"\n\n\"Why would she assume that?\" I couldn't help but shiver as the thought of this dragon creating me came across my mind.\n\n\"You were the first night dragon born not to be killed at birth in thousands of years. I became a part of you when you were born - the legacy of my kind hangs with you. I had to ensure you weren't killed when your parents.. sold you.\" He looked away, looking back at the creatures far below.\n\n\"Aren't they incredible?\" he asked, changing the subject.\n\nI looked down at the forms, my eyes focusing to see what he was talking about. My mind froze at the realization.\n\nDwarves.\n\n\"Yes!\" Tervain trumpeted triumphantly. \"Remarkable! Everyone thinks they are dead. They were, mind you, but I brought them back.\"\n\n\"You what? How?!\" How could a dragon such as Tervain bring them back from the dead?\n\nTervain smirked. \"I'm a god, Kai. What can't I do, especially now that you're here helping me? Our plan is working perfectly.\"\n\nI recoiled back. \"Our plan? I was never part of your plan!\" I shouted.\n\nTervain grabbed his chest as he let out a loud laugh. \"Kai, you're funny. You've been a part of it ever since you were born. Everything is falling into place, and we will conquer every kingdom and draconic city.\"\n\nI looked at the black dragon in horror as he grew even bigger. \"Soon I'll be released from this pathetic form, and we can control the world. But first, we need to get rid of some pesky creatures.\"\n\nHe grabbed me and pulled me to his muzzle. His eyes were as big as my head. \"Starting with the centaurs.\"\n\nThe void swallowed the scene, and all I could hear as I faded back into blackness was a blaring laugh."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "I shot up in my sleep. Firsiss looked at me in confusion. \"What's wrong?\" she asked.\n\nShaking Iteda, I said, \"We have to get out of here! Something is coming!\" I ran to the edge of the cell, shaking on the bars. Several guards trotted over to me.\n\n\"Get back, dragon!\" They began stabbing at me through the bars.\n\n\"You need to warn the chief!\" I yelled from the back of the cell.\n\nIteda grabbed my muzzle and forced me to look up at her as she searched my eyes. \"Kai, what's wrong?\"\n\nA loud boom rang from outside, and the whole dungeon shook. Everyone, dragons and centaurs included, were thrown to the ground.\n\n\"What was that?!?\" Iteda screamed as she pulled herself back up.\n\nDust filled the dungeon from outside as several screams filled the air. \"Tervain,\" was all I said.\n\nFirsiss's eyes filled with fear. \"Tervain? That's a myth!\"\n\nI glared at her. \"It's him. He's back.\"\n\nThe centaurs were back on their hooves, but had lost all their prior confidence. \"Let us out, we can help.\"\n\nThey looked amongst themselves, then nodded. \"This better not be a trick, dragon.\"\n\nThe cell door swung open, and the three of us walked out. \"Where is our armor?\" Firsiss questioned.\n\nThe centaur wearing brown armor stepped forward. \"Down the hall. Follow me.\"\n\nWe were led into a room filled with various weapons that the centaurs wielded. Among the assortment of tools was our armor, thrown in a heap in the corner.\n\nFirsiss and Iteda put their armor on with a speed I envied, while I struggled to get the leather straps tied. I noticed their armor had different straps that seemed to make it easier to tie it on. \"Here, let me help,\" Iteda said, stepping forward.\n\nI obliged, allowing her to grab one of the straps and snake it around my stomach. Heat rushed to my face as she crouched down and wrapped it ahead of my hindlegs, but washed away when I remembered Tervain's warning. Finally, I slid my helmet and wingblades on.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Firsiss said. \"I want you to tell me everything, Kai.\"\n\nAs we headed up with the centaur guards, I obliged. \"Tervain spoke to me in a dream. He said he needs to get rid of some pesky creatures, starting with the centaurs.\" I shivered as I remembered what he would likely use to fight them. \"He's using dwarves.\"\n\n\"Dwarves?\" one of the centaurs ahead of us asked, clearly listening to our conversation. \"Dwarves are long gone.\"\n\n\"Apparently not. He said he raised them from the dead.\"\n\nIteda shook her head. \"I understand gods are powerful, but how could he possibly do that?\"\n\nSilence followed.\n\nWhen we emerged to the surface, the rain had stopped. It was midnight, and centaurs were swarming the walls with bows. I looked to my right and noticed a hole blown into the top of the wall. Luckily, whoever was out there would still have to climb to make use of the destruction.\n\nScreams and battle cries echoed all around me. Dirt clung to my armor where centaurs running past kicked it up. I spotted General Sequoia moving rapidly towards us away from where he was commanding the defense.\n\nThe centaurs with us saluted. \"General Sequoia, sir.\"\n\nThe general glared at them as they dropped their salute. \"What are these three doing out?\"\n\n\"They offered to help fight, sir.\"\n\n\"And how do you know they aren't allied with those we are fighting?\"\n\nI hissed, surprising everyone. Even the general drew back. \"Enough of this! Those dwarves have been risen from the dead by the dragon god Tervain, and he wants to destroy you. Let us help!\"\n\nThe general's mouth was a hard line. Another explosion racked the wall, throwing several centaurs into the air. \"Fine. One wrong move and you're dead. You,\" he said, pointing at me. \"You can't fly, so you'll stay with me. We're going to pull an offensive maneuver. You two will fly and create enough chaos that they can't group up,\" he commanded Iteda and Firsiss.\n\nTo my surprise, Firsiss and Iteda nodded. \"Sounds like a plan.\"\n\nBefore they could fly away, I looked to Iteda. \"Be careful,\" I pleaded.\n\nShe smiled. \"Don't worry about me. You're going to be the one on the ground, so I'll worry about you.\"\n\nThey both flew into the sky, no doubt happy to finally fly again. I looked on with longing.\n\n\"Follow me,\" the general said, leading me to the top of the wall. What I saw took my breath away.\n\nDwarves filled the fields for miles. Several catapults were lined up behind them, launching flaming balls towards the walls. Centaurs on both sides of me fired volleys of arrows in turn. Contraptions that fired several arrows at once were handled by centaurs towards the corners and were the main reason the dwarves were held at bay.\n\nWhat seriously scared me were their eyes. Black as night, matching the tunics they wore. Individually they would be no match for a centaur, let alone a dragon, coming perhaps halfway up my leg. In a group, I did not doubt their deadliness. If they were anything like the turned bear from a few days ago, I feared they would be more difficult to kill than anticipated.\n\nAs if the general read my thoughts, he said, \"The dwarves can only be killed by cutting off their head, shooting them through the head, or burning them. We have no magic, so we don't know how well dragon magic will work.\"\n\nIn the air, I saw Firsiss and Iteda both taking turns diving and swiping at the top of the mass. The dwarves carried bows but were unprepared for the aerial assault. Panic arrows flew into the air, missing the dragonesses by a wide margin. I saw Firsiss fire a bolt of lightning, which was deflected by a black shield that was cast right before it could impact the army.\n\n\"That's new,\" the general said, watching the events unfold.\n\n\"It seems magic is useless against them,\" I explained, \"if they throw a shield up in time.\"\n\nThe dwarves had yet to charge, staying a decent distance back to avoid the worst of the arrows.\n\n\"I'm going to organize an offensive attack. I'm sending one squad out the back to wrap around the gate in the cover of darkness. You, me, and the rest of my group will charge out the front gate and distract them. When you hear the horn, retreat to the gate immediately. Is that clear?\"\n\nI nodded. \"Seems easy enough.\"\n\nGeneral Sequoia's eyes darkened. \"Phirus hasn't had to hold up an attack like this in hundreds of years. All of our defenses are designed for dragons.\"\n\nWhen I didn't respond, he just grunted. \"Meet me at the gate in five minutes.\" He disappeared.\n\nI watched the sky as Firsiss and Iteda kept diving, albeit much more carefully now that the dwarves knew about their presence. Firsiss dove down, then Iteda sent a beam of light where Firsiss just was. The dwarves couldn't get a shield up in time, and several were vaporized instantly.\n\nAt least they're not immune to it, I thought with relief. Part of me worried for Iteda, but I knew she was a capable fighter. Despite that knowledge, I still forced myself to stay on the ground and not fly away to fight alongside her. If my wing still wasn't healed, I would likely make it worse and not remain airborne for long.\n\nI walked down the stairwell to the gate. The stairs shook as I stepped, clearly not made for my weight. Maybe fifty centaurs carrying swords and spears were gathered with the general in front. When he spotted me, he nodded and beckoned me over. The centaurs separated to allow me room to get to the front. \"I gathered some of our city's best fighters. When that gate opens, we will charge out and kill any we see.\"\n\nI flexed my claws in anticipation. I've killed several times in my life, but never in a battle such as this one. At least these were creatures with no minds or souls. I hope, at least. If they were raised from the dead, surely they weren't sentient?\n\nChains moved as the portcullis was raised. General Sequoia let out a battle cry and charged forward. I added to his battle cry with a roar that shook the foundation of the wall and followed.\n\nThe ground beneath my paws turned from hard cobblestone to wet grass. I hated the feeling, but knew it was only temporary. We would be upon the dwarves in less than a minute, but we weren't unnoticed. The dwarves turned their lifeless gazes towards us and remained standing, axes at the ready. Arrows were fired, but the centaurs with me easily dodged them. One managed to hit my breastplate, causing no damage except for a scratch on the black metal.\n\nI swiped at the closest dwarf to me with my talons, tossing it to the side like nothing, before I remembered the only way to kill them was to decapitate them. I sliced a wingblade at the next dwarf, taking his head off. Axes attempted to slash at my legs and exposed part of my belly, but I stayed as high off the ground as I could to dodge. One axe managed to pierce my hide slightly, and I grimaced. My tail swung behind me, knocking an unsuspecting group aside.\n\nThe centaurs around me were faring quite well. We had taken a small chunk out of the dwarven army, but we were now being surrounded. Most of my hits weren't useful, as they couldn't feel pain. It was difficult to get my wingblades down low enough to kill, and my tail wasn't suited to the task. I found myself throwing and hitting dwarves out of the way to make room for the centaurs.\n\nA black streak appeared above me, and I rolled out of the way. Several dwarves were crushed underneath my bulk as an explosion hit right where I was fighting. The centaurs that were closest to me weren't so lucky.\n\nMagic? An axe hit on my back woke me up, and I swiped the dwarf aside with ease. I tried to look to the back, but the dwarves around me kept me distracted. As I took the head off the closest dwarf, I thought, Not all of these dwarves are using magic! Are there a few mages?\n\nI saw Firsiss and Iteda flying around, white and grey flashes in the otherwise dark sky. I backed up into the center of the group of centaurs, which lost about half their number. Squinting my eyes towards the back of their army, I noticed a dragon with grey and black scales staring right at me.\n\nHe had black eyes.\n\nMy breathing got even faster as I realized. How did Tervain turn a dragon?\n\nGeneral Sequoia moved to my flank, decapitating a dwarf that made it through our now circular formation. \"What is it?\" he asked, noticing my expression.\n\n\"They have a dragon on their side. It's turned, like the dwarves. That's the one casting the magical attacks.\"\n\nThe general's expression dropped. Pulling up a horn, he sounded. \"Retreat!\"\n\n\"What about the ambush?\" I asked.\n\n\"They should have been here already by now. Something went wrong. Retreat!\" He shouted again.\n\nThe remaining centaurs followed the command, pushing a line out of the chaos. I swiped a group of dwarves out of the way, crushing another under my other paw. A sharp pain came from my hindleg, and I kicked the dwarf off of me.\n\nFinally out of the dwarven army, we ran. We were chased. Several balls of black fire were launched at us by what I assumed was the turned dragon. Most missed, but one hit the centaur closest to me square on the back.\n\nA screech hit my ears that turned my blood cold. I knew that voice.\n\nIteda! I halted my retreat, ignoring the general's protest as he continued running. I charged straight into the dwarves on my left who were unable to stop me. Several axes found their mark at the weak points of my armor, but I kept moving.\n\nDwarves found their way on top of me somehow, and I shook myself. They flew off, but one stuck on and pulled out a knife. Just as he was about to drive it into the exposed part of my neck, a gust of wind blew him off. Firsiss flew above me, shouting at me to keep moving. Arrows followed her, and one managed to pierce her hindpaw.\n\nAs I continued moving, I heard the unmistakable sounds of hooves Instead of turning around, I looked ahead. My stomach turned as I saw a dark shield around the now grounded Iteda. Her wings looked fine, but she was holding onto a wound on her stomach. Firsiss now hovered above, held back from landing by constant arrow fire.\n\nThe centaurs caught up to me, holding the dwarves at bay. The general was there as well, and he was looking in the same direction as me. \"That's why you ran off!\" He sounded exasperated as he panted. \"Help her!\"\n\nI started to run, stopped. The dwarves were converging on her, and if I didn't do something now, she would be killed. I was too late.\n\nHissing in anger, I clawed the mushy ground. I tried to cast a spell as Iteda had described, but felt nothing inside of me. Suddenly, I remembered Firsiss's words: It feels different depending on the dragon.\n\nThat's it! I just had to figure out how it felt for me.\n\nYou are a night dragon, Kai. I wasn't sure why, but the old dragoness's words appeared in my mind.\n\nI've always felt stronger at night, I thought. My eyes widened in realization. Moonlight!\n\nI reached slowly inside of myself, allowing the full white of the moon to bathe all of my senses. Around me, the centaurs fought to keep the dwarves at bay. The general didn't question me, though I could tell he wanted to yell at me for standing and doing nothing. But I was doing something.\n\nI grasped the moonlight inside of me, pulling it like a ball of yarn. Slowly it unraveled, and I took aim with my paws..\n\n..and I let loose a black stream of darkness. It went straight through the shield, shattering it in the process, and melting every single dwarf around Iteda. Iteda saw it coming and had managed a weak light shield before it could impact her as well.\n\nI stood gaping, before running to her. It felt as if I just flew for hours, and I fought to stay conscious. As I ran, feeling crept back into my paws. The centaurs moved around me, holding the storm of dwarves at bay.\n\nIteda lay in the now charred grass, her eyelids drooping. I shook her, and she woke up quickly. \"What.. how.. did you..\"\n\nFirsiss landed behind me. \"Up, now!\" She turned to me, her eyes displaying a new sense of reverence. \"Your magic isn't affected by their shields! Use it sparingly so you can regain your energy. It will take a lot out of you, especially since it's your first time. Fledglings spend years on basic spells, and you just cast one of the strongest spells I've ever seen!\"\n\nA volley of arrows came at us as Firsiss spoke, but she was ready. One gust of wind and the arrows flopped to the ground uselessly. \"We'll talk more later.\"\n\nGeneral Sequoia caught up. \"We need to retreat to the city! You two included,\" he said, gesturing to Iteda and Firsiss. \"Help make a gap for us!\"\n\nThey nodded and flew to the sky. The dwarves between us and the gate had thinned out, and when I looked behind us it seemed that the army was even bigger. I saw the turned dragon in the back, who just kept.. staring.\n\nSuddenly, the dwarves converged on us with a heightened sense of strength. We attempted to make a gap but were battered away by more dwarves. It seemed every time I killed one, two more took their place.\n\nFirsiss and Iteda attempted to help, but the dragon in the back kept them at bay with balls of black fire. Arrows continued to rain down from the walls well away from us, but the dwarves all but ignored them for the closer prey.\n\nWe were trapped.\n\nGeneral Sequoia looked at me and pulled out his horn. He blew three times, and he yelled, \"We need to hold out for a few minutes!\" I swiped a dwarf away, and he stabbed another. \"I called the full force into the fight!\"\n\nThe centaurs had once again formed a circle, and this time I was a part of it. I swiped my wingblades as much as I could, but it was difficult to get meaningful hits with only one wing in play. The general reared up and kicked a dwarf that came too close back. I covered his exposed belly with a swipe of my claws. Dwarven heads rolled across the blood-stained grass.\n\n\"You think you have any more magic left in ya?\" the general asked. His sword was stained with blood.\n\nI closed my eyes to focus, but the dwarves began to get much closer. Behind me, a centaur was swallowed beneath a pile of the creatures. I cursed as my concentration broke.\n\nUtilizing the newfound gap in our circle, dwarves flooded into the middle, forcing us to fight two fronts. Dwarves climbed up my tail as I swung it side to side, careful to not hit another centaur. I swung my claws everywhere, hitting nothing but flesh. Still, the dwarves kept on coming.\n\nAxes began to cut into every part of me. The centaurs moved to surround me to defend their backsides, but it was hopeless. Firsiss and Iteda were still held off by arrows and fireballs. We had maybe another minute before we were completely overrun.\n\nFinally, the full might of the centaur army came flooding out of the gate. The dwarves immediately moved away from us to meet the new threat as if they were given a silent command. The dwarves with me that lived were quickly finished off.\n\nI ran to meet the army, which dismantled the front lines of the dwarves right away. Despite the success, the brunt of the dwarven army began to push forward. Luckily, we managed to get behind our army.\n\nFrom the fifty centaurs that started the gambit, only seven remained. Each one was in bad condition except for the general. Large volleys of arrows streamed from Phirus. The dwarves returned with catapult fire that hit indiscriminately both the centaurs and dwarves.\n\nGeneral Sequoia sounded the horn. \"We need to get back behind the walls. There's no way we'll be able to take them in the open!\"\n\nI focused on the moonlight inside of me and sent a black mass of black and purple fire over the centaurs. It hit in the middle of the dwarven army, smashing a shield that was put up.\n\nCentaurs fell like trees caught in a wind elemental's storm. Firsiss and Iteda flew back behind the walls. I watched as a group of centaurs caught fire from a flaming projectile. I managed to cast another magical attack, but it was weak. I cursed my magical prowess and vowed to train if I got out of this alive.\n\nI backed up the walls as centaurs poured in. Despite no dwarves being up here yet, the grass was slick with the blood of centaurs and water from the storm hours prior. At several points, the wall was destroyed, but not enough to allow easy entry. Several centaurs were positioned at the weakened points to stop any surprise attacks. Smart, I thought.\n\nArrows rained from the sky once again, but once again fell limp. I was glad that Firsiss was on our side, as she had become invaluable to the centaur's defense.\n\nOnce inside, I quickly ran to Iteda. She was on the ground, clutching her stomach. \"Are you all right?\" I asked, panicked.\n\nShe grimaced but cracked a smile. \"I've had worse.\" She lifted her paws, and I saw a small hole in her stomach. Her ceremonial armor was completely off. A poultice dripped down her scales.\n\n\"You healed yourself?\" I asked incredulously.\n\n\"Of course I did,\" she said, smirking. \"I've used too much magic, and I'm resting. The injury isn't bad. Get back to the fight, I'll join you in a moment.\" She shooed me away.\n\nThe portcullis lowered as the last of the centaurs drifted in. When I climbed to the top of the wall, bodies of slain centaurs dotted the once beautiful valley. Catapults rained fire and arrows onto Phirus. Firsiss was nearby, using her air magic to stop most of the projectiles, but she was quickly tiring. Blood seeped over my armor and exposed scales, but it was hard to tell if it was my blood or the dwarves'.\n\nPanic rose inside of me as the dwarves charged. My magic wouldn't come to me. I hoped it wouldn't take long to emerge again.\n\nThe dwarves ate several of the arrows, but it did nothing to slow their charge. They hit the walls quickly, disappearing from view. When I leaned my neck over, I watched in horror as they began piling up to scale the walls quicker.\n\n\"They're climbing the walls!\" a centaur to my left screamed. An arrow hit the back of his head and he dropped.\n\nBlackened fireballs began being shot by the turned dragon once more. Firsiss's magic was useless against that, and I simply watched as one hit the top of the palace. Flames spread like wildfire as centaurs rushed to put out the inferno.\n\nThe first dwarves reached the top of the walls. I swiped them back with ease. Centaurs joined me on either side. Together, we kept the dwarves back. Farther down the wall, the dwarves had managed to overrun the defenders. Half jumped down into the city and began running down several alleyways and the other remained.\n\nThey turned to us just as another blackened fireball hit the wall just behind me. I jumped ahead to dodge the black fire. The centaurs that were with me were gone, no doubt burned alive in the blaze's intensity.\n\nIt was me versus roughly forty dwarves on the wall.\n\nDwarves scaled the walls and ran past me as I fought. I kicked two over the edge, but three more ran past me and jumped on my side. I landed on my side to crush them, but that only allowed the others more access. I swiped my left wingblade, decapitating three while an axe tore part of my membrane.\n\nHissing, I swiped my tail around to hit more into the city below. Firsiss landed on the other side of me and cast a gust of wind before a shield could be thrown up, forcing the rest back. Iteda also appeared, clearly unhindered by her injury.\n\nWe watched as dwarves swarmed inside the city. They had managed to raise the portcullis. Centaurs were dropping like flies and screams pierced the night.\n\nA loud explosion rang out across the battlefield. We turned at the sound and saw the catapults on fire. Did that centaur ambush finally work out? I wondered.\n\n\"There!\" Iteda hissed. Iteda and Firsiss dropped down to fight a group of dwarves that surrounded ten centaurs. Before I could join them, I looked back at the sky, noticing the sun's approach. At the corner of my eye, I saw several shadowy forms flying in.\n\nDragons? I wondered. No, their wingspan is too small.\n\nI tensed, ready for a fight, as several feathery beasts landed in the courtyard."
            },
            {
                "title": "Battle for Phirus",
                "text": "Ten of the beasts landed in the courtyard while several times that flew past them to the rest of the city. They immediately began ripping into the dwarves.\n\nI jumped down to help. A dwarf managed to get behind one. I swiped the blade on my wing down, cutting his head into two. I kicked another to the side and crouched at the ready.\n\nThe courtyard had been cleared for now, but I knew the rest of the city faltered. Dwarves still poured in further down the wall, but the portcullis was finally pulled down. I took the moment to observe the new creatures as they regarded me in turn. Gasping, I realized what they were. Griffons.\n\nThis far north? Why? I was a head taller than the griffon closest to me, but he had the same bulkiness. His body was that of an overgrown eagle, brown feathers all across his body. Talons that rivaled my own flexed over the cobblestone while muscles rippled underneath his coat of feathers. Firsiss and Iteda also looked shellshocked at our new allies. Even some surviving centaurs began to creep from behind barricades.\n\nAt least, I hoped they were allies.\n\n\"There's more in the city,\" I finally said, breaking the silence. The griffons regarded me closely.\n\nThe brown feathered one dipped his beak. \"There's more outside the gates. We can take the fight to them. Our soldiers will help those inside the city.\" He spoke with an odd accent, where some vowels were held too long.\n\nI nodded, and turned to the centaurs, gesturing them closer with my left wing. General Sequoia was not present. I pointed to a tan and brown speckled centaur. \"You, what's your name?\"\n\n\"Juniper, sir.\" I expected a sneer, but was surprised at the respect.\n\n\"Lower the portcullis at once. This ends now.\" There was one target I had eyes for out there. Juniper obeyed.\n\n\"Let's finish this,\" I growled, speaking to all who could hear me. The centaurs cheered, and the griffons clicked their beaks, looking to the brown one. They clearly deferred to the battle-scarred griffon. He simply nodded. The portcullis raised, but the griffons took to the sky. Iteda and Firsiss followed close behind, while I followed the centaurs who galloped out the gate.\n\nThe griffons and dragons dodged several arrows. The griffons were surprisingly agile in the air. I watched as they dove towards the back of the army, fighting the dwarves that had turned around at the new threat.\n\nThe griffons needed no introduction to the enemy. They used their talons to decapitate as easily as a dragonet chasing a turtle. One even used her beak to stab one right between their eyes.\n\nWe quickly made leeway through the dwarfs, reaching the griffons and dragons. The centaurs had fared quite easily, flanking the dwarves in a surprise assault. Now that most of the army had entered Phirus and the catapults were destroyed, the dwarves were nearly defenseless.\n\nAs I took the head off a dwarf, a centaur by my side shot an arrow into one that was sneaking behind me. A griffon yelled at me to duck, and I dropped, allowing him to jump over me and sink his talons into two more dwarves.\n\nA sense of pride filled me at the thought of our three races fighting together. Never before in our history has this happened. Centaurs, griffons, and dragons all fighting side by side. Imagine the songs!\n\nThen thoughts of Tervain darkened my happy thoughts. These are troubling times that we find ourselves in. I wish this was under different circumstances.\n\nOne griffon became ensnared by several crafty dwarves, who wrapped a chain sneakily underneath her legs. She gave out, and several axes found purchase.\n\nThe brown griffon leader roared and pounced, fighting off several dwarves at once. Another group of dwarves wove a chain into a noose and went to throw it around his neck. Thinking quickly, I cast a wave of black fire at the pair, incinerating them on the spot.\n\nThe leader clearly felt the heat, as he turned to me. He saw the steaming pile of ashes with the half-melted chain and nodded at me. My muzzle was a hard line as I nodded in turn, striking a dwarf at my side. The general began to help the young griffoness up, defended closely by four other griffons.\n\nAs I surveyed our companions, I saw that only one centaur had fallen. Iteda fought with a fury I never saw before, her eyes a molten red as she killed ten dwarves in a matter of seconds. Firsiss used her air magic to stop any arrows, but there was almost none being fired now as the devastation to the dwarven army was realized.\n\nA blackened fireball was launched at us. I managed to roar a warning, which caused the ball to land on a mass of dwarves that were regrouping. Turning to the attacker, I walked slowly towards him. He stood maybe one hundred feet away, unmoving.\n\nUp close, the dragon was imposing. He was two heads taller than me. His once grey scales were seemingly poisoned with black scales poking through. Obsidian eyes bore into my own. I wasn't sure how long I stood staring, but a brown griffon at my side shook me from my stupor.\n\n\"What is that?\" he growled. Iteda appeared at my side, with Firsiss not far behind.\n\nI turned back and saw there weren't any dwarves around. The city was still on fire, and I saw several griffons flying out and diving back in at regular intervals. The other griffons were watching us, curiosity clear on their strange faces.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I called out once I was twenty feet away. Any closer was a risk I wasn't willing to take.\n\nThe dragon stared at me still, then began to convulse. The shaking stopped, and a grin spread across his muzzle. A laugh rang out. The unmistakable voice that terrorized my dreams spoke.\n\n\"Goodbye, Kai. We'll talk again soon.\" The dragon disappeared in a cloud of smoke.\n\nI turned back to Iteda, my gaze full of horror. She stared back, fear clear in her now orange eyes.\n\nThe brown griffon looked at me. I couldn't read his expression as his eyes were pearly white with black pupils, though I could guess. How do griffons understand each other's emotions without eye colors? I thought.\n\nHe picked up his foreclaw and whispered something. Instantly, a translucent griffon's face appeared. The dragons and centaurs around me jumped back in fright, but the griffons remained impassive.\n\n\"Report, Acornbrow?\" he asked the ghost.\n\n\"The dwarves have all disappeared. It's like someone cast a spell to make them invisible!\" the figure spoke as if he was here with us.\n\nThe brown griffon grunted. \"Gather the troops and meet me at the gate.\" He turned to me and dipped his head. \"I think it's time we properly introduce ourselves. I am General Softadler. I've been tracking this army since they left our territory.\"\n\nI bowed slightly. \"I am Kai.\" Gesturing with my paw to Iteda and Firsiss, I allowed them to introduce themselves.\n\n\"I am Princess Iteda of Trone, and this is my mentor and second in command of the air elemental order, Firsiss.\"\n\nHe bowed deeply, acknowledging the rank. He looked at me questioningly. \"And you're just Kai?\"\n\nI forced a smile. \"Kai.. first of the night dragons, I suppose.\"\n\nIteda and Firsiss's shocked expressions told me all I needed to know. General Softadler looked between us, realizing. \"I know it's been a while since our species have interacted, but I had assumed there were no more night dragons.\"\n\n\"So have we,\" Firsiss said, but there was no hint of malice in her voice like when she spoke of non-elementals. Which didn't exist.\n\n\"Well, Kai of the night dragons, I thank you for saving my life.\"\n\n\"I can explain everything later, once we're inside the city,\" I said, nodding my head towards the still burning city. \"Let's put out the fires first, then talk.\"\n\nSoftadler nodded. \"Already have the makings of a good leader too. Let's go.\" He hesitated, eyeing my right wing. \"Are you all right to fly?\"\n\nI looked at Iteda, and she nodded. \"Should be all right, but I'll fly close to make sure.\"\n\nWe took off. I cringed when the general referred to me as a leader, as it made me think of Tervain. Distracting myself, I flew close to the general and asked, \"How did you communicate with another griffon like that?\"\n\n\"Hm? Oh, you mean the hellion. It's a magical device that we use to talk over distances.\" He pulled up his foreleg to show me. \"I tap it with my talon and think of who I want to communicate with.\"\n\nI nodded, still confused. Instead, I peaked and valleyed in the air, enjoying the freedom of flying once again. When I returned to the group, Iteda glared at me for taking such a risk so soon. I smiled sheepishly at her.\n\nOnce we arrived in Phirus, griffons were already carrying buckets of water to dump on the fires. We helped, and soon the fires were quelled to mere embers.\n\nThe courtyard outside the gate was a mess of wood and stone. Bodies were still scattered here and there, mostly dwarven. A griffon's body was strewn to the side, an axe between his lifeless eyes. I bowed in respect to the body. Softadler trilled approval behind me.\n\n\"Oakentalon. A fine warrior, but a little too young. We've been forced to use griffons as young as three to fight,\" he said sadly.\n\nDon't I know it, I mused internally.\n\n\"There's no more prey in our territory. What we find is barely enough for a snack. I think this army is a part of it.\"\n\nWhen I looked at the general again, I noticed his ribs poking slightly out. The other griffons that began landing looked similar, but their eyes still held a fierce pride. Despite the circumstances, I knew they would fight until the end.\n\nI padded over to where Firsiss and Iteda lay. Iteda had patched up Firsiss's wounds. A green film had been placed over Firsiss's hindpaw and on several other places. My scales were still covered in cuts, but I hadn't had the chance to get Iteda's help.\n\nIt took several minutes until General Sequoia appeared as well as Chief River. The chief was limping, but he maintained an air of regality.\n\nOnce proper introductions were out of the way, the gathering turned to business.\n\n\"Why don't we talk about this inside?\" Chief River asked, but General Softadler shot the idea down instantly.\n\n\"Time is of the essence,\" he snapped politely, but curtly. He turned to me and said, \"Kai, I think you have some explaining to do.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to me and I cringed. I hated this. I couldn't talk to others this way! During battle was one thing, but this was a different beast.\n\nIteda laid her wing over my back and nudged me with her muzzle when she noticed my hesitance. Whispering in my ear, she said, \"Go on. You can do this.\"\n\nForcing my legs not to shake, I moved to the center of the group. This is a significant moment in the history of Trone, and I will not screw this up.\n\n\"I'm not sure how many of you know this, but the dragon god Tervain that was long thought a myth is back.\"\n\nMumbling broke out among the centaurs, but the griffons hissed. General Softadler nodded sagely. \"The griffons know of Tervain. Our history speaks of the time we came to this land, back when dragons were divided by elements. We stopped in Sha, and were graciously given land to live on until we found a proper home in Etra.\"\n\n\"Etra?\" Iteda asked. \"You mean Trone?\"\n\nSoftadler nodded. \"With all due respect, the land is called Etra. You dragons renamed it to Trone when you banded together and ousted the night dragons.\"\n\nClearly griffons were better keepers of the past than dragons.\n\n\"Tervain may be gone from Phirus now,\" I began, \"but he will surely strike somewhere else next.\"\n\nCommotion broke out. One centaur gasped, \"What if he strikes here again?!\"\n\nThe one who broke the chaos was Iteda. \"Enough! We will react appropriately wherever he decides to strike.\" Breathing deeply, she spoke again. \"I believe that this bracelet is a part of it.\"\n\nEveryone, including the centaurs and the griffons, looked at her with confusion. \"It was crafted back in the age Softadler spoke about,\" she explained. \"That's what Firsiss told me. She knows more about it than me.\"\n\nFirsiss stood, cringing when she put weight on her injured paw. \"It's true. I don't think it's a coincidence that someone is trying to steal the armband at the same time Tervain is coming back.\" Thankfully, she didn't mention that it was me who was forced to attempt to steal it.\n\n\"What does it do?\" Softadler asked, intrigued.\n\n\"It amplifies the magical power of the wearer and allows them to cast without getting incredibly tired,\" Firsiss stated.\n\n\"I knew it had some sort of power, but I didn't know until Firsiss told me a few days ago. Since then, I tried to hide the full extent of the power from Kai, as Firsiss didn't trust him.\" She looked at me apologetically. \"Sorry, Kai. I meant to tell you earlier, but..\"\n\nSurprisingly, I wasn't hurt. She had acted on Firsiss's command, and it was an understandable precaution. \"It's okay.\"\n\n\"So you think this bracelet has something to do with Tervain?\" General Sequoia asked.\n\n\"I was sent to steal it by a secretive group of dragons,\" I said, knowing that the memory I didn't want to reveal would likely help in this discussion. I explained the situation to them about how they had kidnapped my brother and forced me to steal it for them. I even mentioned how Firsiss had broken my wing.\n\n\"That's why we were moving this way on paw. If we can get to the group, maybe we can figure this all out.\"\n\nThe centaur chief nodded. Softadler looked thoughtful. \"Makes sense,\" Chief River said. \"I can spare a few centaurs to help aid you in your quest.\"\n\nI shook my head before Firsiss or Iteda could respond. \"No, we wish to fly now that my wing is healed. As General Softadler said, time is crucial.\"\n\nSoftadler moved forward. \"In that case, I can spare two griffons to help you.\" Before I could politely decline, he raised a talon. \"Don't try to deny my help, dragon. This concerns all the races of Etra.\"\n\nI relented. \"All right, I accept.\"\n\nSoftadler clicked his beak, and a young white-feathered griffoness appeared at his side. He dug into the satchel she carried and pulled out two large bracelets with his talons. \"These are hellions. They allow you to communicate over long distances with someone else that is wearing it. All you do is tap it with a talon.. or whatever you have, centaurs.. and think of who you want to speak to. As long as the device is on them, you will be able to talk.\"\n\nSoftadler handed one to General Sequoia, who accepted graciously. The other one he gave to me.\n\nI raised an eye ridge. \"You're sure you don't want the princess to have this?\" I asked.\n\n\"Positive.\" Softadler returned to his spot in the circle. \"Mellowleaf! Pinegrove!\" The two griffons were by his side immediately. \"These two griffons are capable fighters and will accompany you on your quest. They both have hellions as well.\"\n\nThe griffons bowed to me. Mellowleaf had milky-brown feathers and was a head shorter than the male to her right. Pinegrove had black and grey feathers, but the most shocking aspect of his appearance was that he was missing his right eye. A scar was all that remained. Like the general, he was well-muscled despite the ribs poking through his chest feathers.\n\nAfter they moved to where Firsiss and Iteda stood, Softadler spoke. \"Our territory is in ruin and barren of prey due to the blight. We tracked the dwarves because we thought they caused it.\"\n\n\"They likely did,\" I growled, understanding his plight.\n\nSoftadler continued. \"I will bring the griffon army to the defense of the dragons and centaurs in exchange for amiable land for my pride.\"\n\n\"I'll see that it's done,\" Iteda replied.\n\n\"Excellent.\" He bowed deeply to Iteda. \"Simply call me on the hellion, and the army will be there as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Call General Sequoia as well if the dragons are attacked. You have found an ally in us, dragon.\" The chief bowed, and I bowed as well.\n\nAll this bowing is going to give me whiplash, I thought humorously. My scales eagerly soaked in the morning sun as it began to reach its zenith.\n\n\"These are troubling times,\" Softadler spoke softly. \"We must work together to defeat this darkness.\" Every creature nodded. They understood the gravity of the situation as they experienced it first hand.\n\nI couldn't help but think about how the other dragons would react to what transpired here today. Griffons, centaurs, and dragons all fighting side by side, and then pledging allegiances to each other over a universal threat. I feared that it would take the full might of Tervain for the dragons to see the reason for this plan, and by then it would likely be too late.\n\nAfter a lengthy silence, Chief River clapped. \"We need to work on rebuilding our forces for the coming war. Dismissed!\"\n\nSoftadler stretched his wings. \"I must return to my kind to gather the full might of our army together.\" He walked over to Mellowleaf and Pinegrove, speaking something meant only for their ears.\n\n\"This is really happening,\" Iteda bubbled, nudging my wing.\n\nFirsiss nodded at me. \"I'll help you to learn how to handle your magic better.\" She smiled. \"Sorry about all the things I said about you.\"\n\nI drew back in surprise. \"It was nothing, I'm used to it..\" I murmured.\n\nThe griffons that were a part of our group joined us as Softadler flew out. \"When do we leave?\" Pinegrove asked.\n\nLooking at my companions, I turned back to the griffons. \"Let's leave now and find a place to rest quickly.\" My body ached and begged for rest, but I knew we needed to begin to cover at least some distance.\n\n\"Let's go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Truth",
                "text": "The sun had finally reached its zenith when we stopped for a much needed rest. Iteda pulled out her healing poultice and began to spread it on my wounds. My armor was off, drying from the wash in the nearby creek. Firsiss dozed nearby.\n\n\"They really got you good. You need to be more careful,\" she chastised.\n\nMellowleaf and Pinegrove sat off to the side underneath a tree, their bodies pressed against each other as they murmured softly. When they noticed my stare, they bowed to me.\n\n\"Do you two know each other?\" I asked stupidly.\n\nThey both laughed. \"Do we? We're mates.\" Mellowleaf grinned, and I blushed. Of course they were mates, it should have been obvious.\n\nIteda cuffed me lightly. \"Did you seriously ask that?\"\n\n\"How was I supposed to know?\" I hunched my shoulders in anticipation of another blow that never came.\n\n\"They told us on the flight over! Were you not paying attention?\"\n\nTruthfully, I wasn't. My mind was constantly fretting over Tervain and how the dragoness in the temple had lied to me. I tried to come up with several reasons as to why the dragoness lied, but none of them made sense. Is Tervain really evil, or is that dragoness the real enemy? I scoffed at the thought. Tervain was the one attempting to destroy civilizations in the name of revenge. What did the dragoness do besides speak untruths?\n\nThe sight of the turned dragon also terrified me. I hoped his power only extended over the dead, because we couldn't stop him if he could just change any dragon he chose to his side. Luckily, dragons burned their dead, so we should be all right for now. Though, who knows how many dragons up north had been killed so far..\n\n\"Sorry, I was just thinking,\" I said when Iteda coughed expectantly.\n\nShe shook her head. \"You need to relax, Kai.\"\n\nI stood up, knocking her away from me. \"Relax? How can I relax when a god is hellbent on revenge against Trone?\"\n\nIteda hesitantly ran her paw down my spine. Her touch alone soothed me. \"Sit back down, Kai. I understand, but fretting now won't do the world any good.\"\n\nOf course, she was right. She always was.\n\nI relaxed as she finished applying the salve. Firsiss was blinking sleepily, awakened by my outburst.\n\n\"I was thinking..\" Iteda began. \"Perhaps we should warn my mother first before going to Porando.\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" I yelled, startling everyone in the clearing. Several birds flew away. \"How could you say that??\"\n\nIteda cringed slightly but otherwise held firm. \"The army could be moving on the capital as we speak! What if they are attacked while we're helping your brother in..\"\n\nThe last words didn't come out of her mouth as I cuffed her hard across her muzzle. Iteda fell back slightly, looking back at me. Her eyes were orange with fear and disbelief. Blood dripped into the dirt.\n\nI stepped back, horrified. I stared at my paw as it shook; whether with fear or anger; I wasn't sure. Firsiss hissed, while the griffons stood in shock.\n\n\"I.. I gotta go.\" I took to the sky before anyone could speak, heading northeast to the only place I could get answers.\n\nFor the entire flight over the forest, I was numb. My thoughts were a mess. The only thing that kept repeating in my mind was when I hit Iteda. Tervain's words echoed in my mind: You've been a part of it ever since you were born..\n\nThat was it. If I was a part of Tervain's plans, then I was inherently evil. I couldn't control that part of me. For my companions' safety, I had to stay away before Tervain could use me against them.\n\nI sensed more than saw my destination. Diving, I landed at the familiar marble column. Pushing in, the ground opened up once more. I descended the white marble steps, searching for my answers. The tapestries no longer interested me, nor did the unwavering white braziers.\n\n\"Show yourself!\" I hissed. Reaching deep inside myself, I let loose a black flame at the center brazier. The white flame was enveloped by the darkness for a second before the black flame completely dissipated. What? How is that possible?\n\n\"I see that you've finally accepted your heritage.\"\n\nI wheeled around to stare at the ancient dragoness. If Tervain knew who this dragon was, then there was only one dragon this could possibly be.\n\n\"Aelais.\" I growled. I heard pawsteps behind me at the stairs but didn't bother to react to them. My focus was entirely on the light dragon god.\n\nAelais sighed, bowing her head in defeat. \"Indeed.\"\n\nI waited for a moment, expecting her to say more. Instead, she looked at me patiently. \"Why did you lie to me?\" I finally asked.\n\nFor a long moment, she stared at me. \"Neither side was right in that conflict, Kai. It's true that the night dragons wanted to control the other clans and were hungry for power, but we shouldn't have gone about it the way we did.\"\n\n\"You killed them all,\" I growled. \"Tervain showed me.\"\n\n\"Tervain showed you?\" she gasped, stepping back slightly. It was the first time she showed any emotion other than her tired appearance. \"If that's true, then the world is in greater danger than we realized. I thought the dwarves would be the end of it.\"\n\n\"So you know about the centaurs?\" I questioned.\n\n\"Of course. I see everything the children of the light see.\"\n\n\"Then you'd know he turned a dragon.\"\n\nAelais nodded. \"Correct. Tervain's dominion extends over all the dead, so long as their body remains in one piece in this world. That dragon perished in the north, allowing Tervain to poison him to his cause.\"\n\nSuddenly, I remembered what she said about Tervain in my head. \"Why did you act surprised to hear that Tervain is in my head?\" My growl returned to my throat, anger threatening to cloud my judgment as the edges of my vision turned red.\n\n\"If he's in your head, that means his powers are much stronger than I thought. He could turn more than just one dragon and an army of weak-minded dwarves to his side. Despite what you may think, our powers aren't limitless.\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't I just let him destroy Trone? After all, he deserves revenge.\" I clawed grooves in the marble ground. Deep down I knew it was ridiculous to think that way, but I couldn't think clearly.\n\n\"As I said, Kai, we weren't right in what we did. It was a terrible deed. We were blinded by fear. I'm not saying to forgive and forget, but punishing the dragons for the sins of their ancestors isn't the path to atonement.\"\n\nAelais's words made sense, and I hated it. I wanted to hate someone, something. I smashed the ground with my tail and turned around, startled to find the griffons and my two dragon companions there.\n\nI couldn't help as tears fell down my muzzle. How much did they hear?\n\n\"Is it true, Tervain is in your head?\" Firsiss asked, staring at me.\n\nMy head fell almost to the ground. \"Yes. He told me you lost your mate and daughter long ago.\"\n\nFirsiss's mouth dropped open. \"How..?\"\n\nThat was it. I wanted to keep it a secret for as long as possible, but it was out there now. Iteda would hate me not just for what I did to her, but for what I was now with Tervain inside of me. No one would look up to me as a leader, even after my deeds in Phirus. I was finished.\n\nIteda stepped forward. \"So he was the voice inside your head you told me about?\" Her voice was barely a whisper.\n\nI sniffed, willing myself to stop crying, but I couldn't. \"Yes.\"\n\nA muzzle touched my own, lifting my head to stare into Iteda's eyes only a foot away from my own. Tears streamed down her face as well.\n\nI couldn't help myself as I leaned my face onto her shoulder and cried. \"I'm sorry,\" I cried into her shoulder.\n\nShe wrapped her wings around me tightly. \"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said those things about our quest. I was wrong.\"\n\nWhy was she blaming herself? I was the one who acted out of line. \"Please don't blame yourself..\" I managed.\n\n\"You're not in this alone,\" she growled, her voice full of conviction. \"I will stay by your side, always.\"\n\nWhy didn't she hate me?\n\n\"Promise?\" I asked, my voice small.\n\n\"Promise.\"\n\nI slowly pulled away from her, wiping my tears away with my claw. I turned back to apologize to Aelais, but she was gone. \"Where did she..\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Firsiss said stiffly. I saw tears leaking from her eyes that she struggled to hide. Even the griffons' eyes (or eye, in Pinegrove's case) were wet. They all looked at me.\n\nFor once, I didn't balk at the sudden audience. \"We'll camp here tonight, then make for Porando. With any luck, we'll get there in two days.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "A large fire right outside the pillar rivaled the waning sun. All of us stretched lazily, our bellies full on the two deer we managed to catch. The griffons had ripped into their share ravenously. Only when I noticed that their ribs were poking out of their stomachs did I remember that their territory had little prey left.\n\nIteda sat next to me, her head resting on my shoulder. Mellowleaf and Pinegrove also sat together on the opposite side, preening each other's feathers. Mellowleaf looked at us, her eyes playful as she said, \"You two are awfully close. Are you two...\"\n\nI shook my head viciously before she could finish, which just made the griffons and Iteda laugh. Even Firsiss chuckled, breaking her usual stoic demeanor. Iteda's eyes flickered green as they bore into my own.\n\n\"Rest up, we'll need it.\" Firsiss was the first to take watch, with the griffons offering to take the second and third.\n\nI closed my eyes, nestling close to Iteda. Sleep evaded me for so long that I opened them again. Firsiss was a good distance away and looking in the opposite direction, so I slipped away. I walked until I found another clearing, this one leading to a ten-foot drop. It allowed a good view of the forest ahead of me and the stars.\n\nA twig snapping behind me betrayed Iteda's presence. \"It's a beautiful night, isn't it?\"\n\nI smiled and nodded. The cloudless night allowed the stars to shine bright. The moonlight gave me an energized feeling that I couldn't put into words. Iteda sat right next to me, leaning on me. I couldn't help but gawk at the dragoness beside me. Before I could help it, I said what I was thinking out loud. \"You're beautiful..\"\n\nDid I seriously just say that?\n\nShe giggled, and I felt embarrassment bubbling beneath my scales. Before I could make it any worse, she spoke. \"My father would take me stargazing all the time when I was a dragonet before he passed. I always asked him if a dragon could fly amongst the stars.\" She chuckled. \"It was a ridiculous notion, but he never told me no. He said anything was possible, and that perhaps I would be the first to accomplish such a feat.\"\n\n\"Your father sounds like he was a kind dragon,\" I said, draping a wing protectively over her.\n\nHer eyes were a happy-sad as she said, \"I miss him. Not a day goes by that I don't think about him.\"\n\nWe sat in companionable silence for a while, just watching the stars. For once, I felt at peace. Tervain wasn't invading my thoughts, and I didn't feel like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. I felt incredible when I was around Iteda. I couldn't put it into words, yet I wanted to tell her how I truly felt. Is now the best time? I heard a little voice in my head answer, Yes!\n\n\"You know, if we end up surviving this..\" I began, then swallowed nervously.\n\nThe biggest smile lit up on her face. \"Go on..\"\n\nI blushed and looked away. \"Gods, why is it so easy to talk to you then so difficult..\" Turning quickly back to her, I said what I wanted to say before I could doubt myself. \"Every time I think about you or look at you my heart races, and I just wanted to say that.. Um..\" Doubt flickered at the edge of my mind, but before I could run away in shame, her muzzle met mine.\n\nEverything felt right. I felt her tail entwine with my own as we pulled our snouts away from one another. The question came to my mind, but I cringed away before I could ask it.\n\nI forced myself to look away from her beautiful face as I tried to fight my feelings. \"I can't.. you're the princess of Trone, I shouldn't.. your duty..\"\n\n\"Pft, duty. Becoming the mate of a dragon I haven't even met isn't duty,\" she growled before her eyes turned a happy green once more. In a more pleasant tone, she said, \"As the princess, I command you to tell me.\" Chancing a glance back at her, she bore a smirk and didn't budge.\n\nI sighed, defeated. \"When this is over.. would you be my mate?\" Perhaps I was rushing things. I was of age to begin searching for one, but many dragons waited before settling down. Maybe she didn't\u2014\n\nIteda tackled me, pinning me to the grass. At first, I thought she was angry, but she stood over me with the most beautiful smile of happiness I had ever seen on a dragon. Her eyes were a bright green mixed with yellow as she said, \"Yes! Of course I would!\"\n\n\"Great!\" I said as she kissed me once more. \"Maybe we should head back to the camp,\" I said sheepishly.\n\n\"Probably,\" she said, winking at me. Blushing like crazy, I followed her tail back to the camp. Firsiss raised an eye ridge at us, her eyes yellow, but didn't say anything.\n\nIteda laid down at our spot, and I emulated her motion. I draped a wing over her and pulled her close, tails entwined. It was the best sleep I had ever had."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "The next morning, we flew back to where we had stopped the morning before to collect my armor. When we had woken up earlier, Firsiss was the first to speak to Iteda.\n\n\"I hope you didn't do anything stupid,\" she had said, cuffing her lightly on her shoulder.\n\nIteda looked mortified. \"No! Nothing like that!\"\n\nFirsiss chuckled. \"Good. I hoped you had enough sense in you to wait.\"\n\nIt took me a few seconds to realize what Firsiss had meant, and my eyes widened. Firsiss noticed, and laughed again. \"The dragonet isn't completely dull in the head, I suppose.\"\n\nOnce my armor was back on, we prepared for flight. Before we took off, however, the hellion on my foreleg buzzed. I pulled it up, and an opaque form of General Softadler appeared.\n\n\"Kai? I'm glad to see you in one piece.\"\n\n\"What is it, General Softadler?\" I asked, confused as to why he was calling me already.\n\n\"I have bad news. Can Mellowleaf and Pinegrove hear?\"\n\nI looked over to them, and they nodded. \"Continue.\"\n\nSoftadler was steeling himself. \"The pride was destroyed.\" He paused to allow the griffon pair to gasp. \"A good amount survived. I have five hundred able-bodied fighters ready, and many times that are wounded and too young or too old. That's not the scariest information, though.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"There were no bodies. It's like they were just.. stolen. The griffons that survived swear they saw griffons' bodies slain on the ground as they fled, but that's not what I'm seeing.\"\n\nTervain's dominion extends over the dead, I remembered, as well as, He's more powerful than we thought.\n\n\"Tervain has turned them to his army already.\"\n\n\"That fast?\" the general hissed in surprise.\n\n\"He's much more powerful than we realize.\" The fact terrified me, despite me already knowing it.\n\n\"Be careful, Kai. I fear the dragons are his next target if he thinks he destroyed us.\" The image flickered out, and I stared at the group.\n\nIteda moved close to me, pressing herself against me. I appreciated the gesture. \"I guess we'll have to move faster.\"\n\nI wanted to give up and scream that we had no chance, especially if we would now likely be faced with an army of almost indestructible griffons. But I couldn't give in. There had to be a way to defeat Tervain, and I would figure it out."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Eclipse",
                "text": "[ Lesson ]\n\nWe decided to camp out just a short few-hour flight from Porando. Night was rapidly approaching, and we didn't want to stake out the point of interest in the dark.\n\nA stream burbled nearby, the cold water quenching our thirsts. The open plains bore little prey save for herds of wild guffaws, the long-necked creatures that called this land their home. Their meat was stringy and tasteless at best, but it would be enough for the night.\n\nFirsiss and I managed to bring one down out of their herd, but it was an old one forced to the back. Firsiss was my only other companion in the group to know how to hunt the furry animal, as Iteda rarely ventured out this direction and, well, the griffons were self-explanatory. Guffaws were notoriously difficult to catch, due in part to their speed, but mostly because of the eyes on the top of their head. Dragons typically hunted from the air, and guffaws immediately countered our strongest advantage.\n\nOur camp was in the open, but I doubted we'd see any dragons. The land was hospitable for farming, but not so much for cities. Porando was the exception, but its proximity to the ocean gave it another food source to rely on other than the farmland. Some dragons preferred the vegetables we grew, but I never liked the taste. Even on the farm I grew up on (well, grew up on for a year) all I ate were extra bits from the red rams we raised. Our farm really only produced the wheat needed to keep the animals alive and healthy. They could survive on grass, but wheat tended to produce better, meatier results. And more meat meant more drakarns.\n\nThe griffons decided to skip the meager rations, allowing Iteda and Firsiss to eat more. I also skipped on the meal, but for other reasons. My stomach was flipping inside of me as I thought more about the coming battle. I knew I would have to face Tervain again, with other dragons hopefully, but how would we hold up against the draconic god? Why didn't Aelais or the other dragon gods just deal with it? Perhaps they were content as long as dragons weren't being slaughtered, but the farmers in the north were being killed. I cursed inwardly at not questioning Aelais more when I had the chance.\n\nEven now, I was likely useless in battle beyond my fighting prowess. Every time I used magic, I would get too tired to use it again and be effective. If I was to be the one to turn the tide versus the dark creatures, I had to at least understand the magic stirring inside of me.\n\nI stood up, pushing Iteda away from me in my haste. After muttering a sheepish apology at her glare, I said, \"Firsiss, can you help me with my magic?\"\n\nShe flexed her claws. \"Of course. I train air elemental dragons at Treka. I can't promise that I can completely understand and explain your elemental powers, but I can at least teach the basics.\"\n\nFirsiss and I moved away from the fire slightly. The griffons watched, curiosity clear on their faces while Iteda's eyes glowed happily. My chest warmed at her gaze, and I instantly felt shy. What if I made a fool of myself in front of the beautiful dragoness?\n\n\"Did you hear that?\" Firsiss growled, and Iteda laughed. Great, better check that off the list.\n\n\"No, sorry, please repeat,\" I muttered.\n\nFirsiss rolled her eyes as she noticed where I had been looking. \"I asked, how do you see your magic inside of you?\"\n\nI remembered how Firsiss and Iteda had described how they saw their magic in Phirus when I asked, but they didn't go beyond their explanation, especially because at the time they had no idea I possessed an element. \"I see moonlight, and I unravel it like rope to use magic.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" Firsiss nodded, satisfied. \"Does that work consistently for you?\"\n\nI thought back to the battle at Phirus and shook my head. \"Yes, but sometimes I don't have enough energy to cast another spell. I felt exhausted and almost passed out.\"\n\n\"That's not good. You should never feel that way. Tired occasionally, but never to that degree.\" She rubbed her head to alleviate her stress. \"You could have died if you kept trying to pull on the mana you didn't have.\"\n\n\"Mana?\" I had never heard the word before. Of course, I wasn't a magic wielder until two nights prior, so I guess it made sense.\n\n\"Mana surrounds us; it is part of the world.\"\n\n\"It is the world, dragon,\" Pinegrove interjected. When the dragons looked at him, he explained, \"We griffons don't have elements like you dragons do, but some of us are imbued with the ability to manipulate the mana of the earth. That's how we created these.\" He lifted his foreleg, showing the hellion. \"Very few of us have the trait, and even fewer can create devices like this. The creator of the hellion died centuries ago, so we have very few to give out. I was surprised the general could afford to give both me and Mellowleaf one.\"\n\nFirsiss turned back to me. \"He's right. The difference between dragons and griffons is that we have an element that imbues mana into us quickly.\" When I nodded, she continued. \"We get our mana back after using spells slowly if we don't have the aid of our own element. However, if we are in proximity to our element, our mana returns very quickly. For me, the higher in the sky I am, the faster my mana returns.\"\n\n\"The sunlight gives me my mana faster,\" Iteda added.\n\n\"The night always felt better to me,\" I said, realizing now the reason. \"I felt stronger.\"\n\nFirsiss nodded sagely. \"Indeed. Now, the reason you were on the brink of passing out was because you were trying to draw on mana you didn't have. The more you use magic, the more mana you have in your reserves. It's like flying - if you fly every day for a moon, your wing muscles will be stronger than the moon prior.\"\n\n\"I don't have a moon to practice magic,\" I growled, exasperated. It was hopeless.\n\n\"No, but that doesn't mean you can't cast spells at almost the same rate as Iteda and myself,\" she said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"It's all about efficiency. How do I explain this.. Ok, think of it this way. When hunting a guffaw, you could just barrel down on it and chase it until it tires itself out. But that would be idiotic, not to mention exhaust yourself as well.\"\n\nI scratched below my muzzle as I had seen the centaurs do below their flat faces when they were thinking. Firsiss raised an eye ridge but didn't comment. Instead, she continued. \"So what did we do to catch that guffaw?\"\n\n\"You distracted, and I snuck up on it,\" I said, and she nodded.\n\n\"Yes! So you accomplished your goal, and still had an enormous amount of energy.\"\n\nMy eyes widened as I realized what she was saying.\n\n\"You understand. Mana works the same. When you cast a spell, the amount of magic used, the strength of the spell, and the distance to send the spell all play a role in how much is spent. The spell you sent to save Iteda was way too strong for your task of just killing the dwarves. You incinerated them.\"\n\nI looked over at Iteda, smiling slightly. She grinned back. \"Thanks, by the way.\"\n\n\"You did what you thought you had to do, but if you would have used significantly less power, you could have accomplished the same feat and still had energy for more spells. Just like tricking the guffaw.\"\n\nIt made sense in theory, but how would I do it in practice? I voiced as much to Firsiss, and she was quick to explain. \"When you.. unravel the moonlight, or whatever, don't unravel as much. Exert your will over the mana to create the spell in your mind, and let it go. If you hold it back, it spends much more mana. Also, think about how you are sending it. An arc will be easier on your reserves than a straight shot.\"\n\n\"I think I understand.\"\n\n\"Try it,\" Firsiss said. \"Aim that way, and send out your balls of dark fire.\"\n\nI turned inwards and unraveled the moonlight. It unrolled eagerly, but I stopped, remembering Firsiss's advice. I instead rolled it back up gingerly, which was annoyingly more difficult, but I managed. Finally, I let loose the fireball into the sky in an arc, as if I was tossing a squirrel to a friend, allowing it to explode fifty feet away. It devastated the field, leaving a ring of blackness.\n\nFirsiss didn't attempt to hide her surprise. \"I've never had a student able to do it that fast..\"\n\nIteda was practically glowing with pride. \"Kai, you're a natural!\"\n\nI beamed at the compliments. Looking inside myself once again, I was happy to feel completely fine, besides the normal tiredness that came with traveling. \"Thanks,\" I said, ducking my head.\n\n\"You still have a lot to learn, but you're progressing extremely well. Have you tried any other spell?\"\n\n\"No, I couldn't think of how.\" With the dark fire, it was easy, as I kind of just copied the beams of light Iteda could spew.\n\n\"Let's do a simple shield spell.\"\n\nThe night went on similarly, with Firsiss teaching me a few spells. The shield spell took me the longest to be able to accomplish, as I spent more time than I'm willing to admit accidentally exerting too much mana, and having to bask in the gentle moonlight to gain the energy again. By the time the moon was at its highest, I had managed to cast a shield spell with a modicum of success. I was also becoming more consistent with my fireballs, my arcs much more accurate.\n\nFirsiss yawned, and I copied her. \"That's enough for now. You're coming along well, Kai. You're a much better student than I expected you to be.\" Without letting me respond, she flicked her tail as she went to lay by the dying fire. The griffons were already sleeping, but Iteda was still wide awake.\n\nI went to sit next to her, and she nudged me. \"You were amazing!\"\n\nMy eyelids drooped. \"It's difficult. How did you manage to get so good?\" I wondered aloud, and she chuckled.\n\n\"I had a good mentor.\" She looked over at Firsiss, affection clear as day on her face.\n\n\"Kai, you have first watch?\" I was surprised she trusted me with the first watch, as she never let anyone else take her customary position. She looked exhausted though, and I didn't want her to be tired for the long day ahead.\n\n\"Sure. I'll wake Pinegrove in a few hours.\" We would only need one more watch since the moon was already drifting lower. I didn't move from my position next to Iteda as she snuggled closer to me. I raised a protective wing over her and kept my head high and alert for dwarves, though I doubted they would be this far south yet. Tervain was crafty, and I wouldn't be caught off guard again by the dragon god."
            },
            {
                "title": "Porando",
                "text": "Porando was nothing like the other two major draconic cities.\n\nIt was worse.\n\nLike Treka and Tolk, it was a coastal city. Fish provided adequate sustenance to its population, as the surrounding valleys were devoid of anything worth hunting. Anyone who wanted a different kind of prey had to pay a small fortune for the import, and it wouldn't even be worth it as it would be cold. Besides, red rams were good enough if they didn't want the abundant fish.\n\nThe city also harbored a dangerous criminal underground. Tolk also had one in the ravine ironically enough, but Porando's crime practically ran the city, and it showed. Many buildings were simply sitting around empty. Some were half-destroyed with homeless dragons sleeping out of them, while most others were just in a state of constant disrepair. Rain was a hell send for the populace, as it would just leak into their homes and cause unwanted problems.\n\nThere was a central building for the council that ran the city, but they were more of a figurehead than anything. Dragons with any sense knew who really ran the city, and those with even more sense knew to avoid it. Of course, the assassin's guild also dwelled in the insult of draconic cities. I knew Porando well.\n\nOur motley crew stood in the valley surrounding the city. There wasn't any specific start to the city, as buildings kind of just dotted the valley until conglomerating into Porando. The city bore no walls despite its proximity to the centaurs, which would have been at war with us not too long ago. Perhaps the damages to the buildings came from an attack hundreds of years ago?\n\n\"I thought draconic cities were supposed to be beautiful,\" Pinegrove grunted behind me, his words sloppily drawn together in his accent. The griffons had spoken a lot about their culture in the time it took to fly here. Iteda was curious about their pride, as they called them.\n\n\"Our pride lives together in caves in the mountains,\" Mellowleaf had explained. \"It functions similar to your cities and towns on the ground, but up in the skies, safe from predators. We call it an eyrie.\"\n\nI had no idea what creature would mistake a griffon for prey, but I didn't ask. Perhaps there was a creature like that up north. I shivered, not wanting to think about it.\n\n\"Don't you think Firsiss would have been back by now?\" Iteda whispered in my ear.\n\nFirsiss decided to go on ahead and get hoods for all of us to protect our identities. I had originally volunteered, but Firsiss feared that the mission would get jeopardized if I was spotted without the rune collar. Iteda obviously couldn't go, and neither could the griffons, leaving the air elemental. She was still a recognizable face, but she doubted anyone would recognize her if they weren't an air elemental soldier. As long as she avoided the grey scaled dragons, she would be fine.\n\n\"I thought you trusted Firsiss,\" I joked, which earned a light cuff on my shoulder. \"Hey!\"\n\nTruthfully, I did worry for Firsiss. She had helped me practice my magic the night before and gave me some expedited training as we flew. She was surprised at how fast I could learn, but I knew I still needed to hone my abilities. I couldn't tire out in the middle of a battle, especially looking at the likely future that was coming closer. I definitely felt more confident in utilizing my magic, though.\n\nPinegrove hissed a warning, and we dove behind the cart of hay we were standing by just in time to see another cart ambling by, loaded to the top with barley. Porando's outskirts were mostly farm and grazing land, with the occasional creek snaking in. We managed to get as close as we could to the city, which was maybe half a mile to where the buildings started to get close together and less sporadic.\n\n\"I knew you all wouldn't see me coming,\" Firsiss said, coming around the small shed nearby. She still bore a small, yet noticeable, limp. Two satchels were spread across her back. She dumped them, revealing the contents. One carried the hoods, while the other carried a used set of white armor. I looked questioningly at her before Iteda sprinted behind me saying, \"You managed to get it!\"\n\n\"The garrison's armory was barely guarded.\" Firsiss rolled her eyes. \"It wouldn't be that easy in Treka.\"\n\n\"It's much better than my old ceremonial armor,\" Iteda gushed.\n\n\"Were you spotted?' I whispered, eyes darting around. Her mission was only to get us hoods, not armor for Iteda. Secretly I was glad, as I wasn't prepared to fight alongside Iteda if she wasn't at least protected in some regard. Her old armor barely counted.\n\nShe gazed at me with an expression of mirth. \"Does an air elemental swim?\"\n\nI opened my jaw to respond, but Firsiss moved her tail to my muzzle. \"Don't answer that.\"\n\nIteda was already putting the armor on. Her straps seemed similar to mine; nothing like her old ceremonial armor or Firsiss's armor, which was designed much more practically. \"Do you need help?\" I asked, moving closer.\n\n\"You think I can't do it myself?\" she replied a little too harshly. I drew back a little, which just made her sigh. \"Sorry, I'm used to dragons asking to help me just because I'm the princess.\"\n\n\"I meant nothing by it..\"\n\n\"Actually, yes, you can help me.\"\n\nAfter I helped her tie off the underbelly straps, which were always the hardest alone, I moved to inspect the brown hoods. The griffons already wore theirs.\n\n\"Dragons will probably think they're young,\" Firsiss laughed. The griffons were a head shorter than me, and I was only half a head shorter than Iteda and Firsiss. I had to admit that they did look rather comical in the hoods.\n\nIteda brushed a stray feather off Pinegrove. \"As long as you don't shed while we're there, we should be all right.\"\n\n\"We've been preening all morning,\" Mellowleaf explained, which made us roll our eyes as we just noticed the pile of feathers beneath our paws.\n\nThe hood fit surprisingly well on me, covering every inch of my scales. Even my legs and tail were covered if I walked carefully, which Iteda and Firsiss mimicked.\n\nThe path to the city was more of a line of dead grass than a walkway. We passed another cart on the way, but they paid no mind to our appearance. Perhaps the hoods would work well in the city. After all, dragons in Porando knew not to get involved in anyone's business.\n\nWhen we got into the real meat of the city, buildings clustered together. Dragons walked the roads, but it wasn't nearly as congested as Tolk was during the festival earlier that week. I pulled the map out of my satchel and looked it over.\n\n\"We're here,\" I said, pointing a talon onto the map. Firsiss and Iteda hovered over me while the griffons kept watch in our small corner of the road. \"If we keep going forward and make a left, the place should be right ahead.\" The building we were looking for wasn't exactly deep into the city, which made our lives a bit easier in escaping. The only issue would be the lack of city guards in the area, but I hoped that our plan wouldn't involve raising any alarms.\n\nAs we continued, I couldn't help but observe all the dragons around us going about their business. Small shops selling prey from the ocean as well as farm goods dotted the streets of the poorer section of Porando. Hard to believe the world may be ending soon, I thought. I looked over at Iteda for reassurance, just spotting her soft-green eyes through the hood reassuringly blinking. I'm glad she's here with me.\n\n\"There it is,\" I said. Ahead of us was a massive square building surrounded by an iron fence. Between the fence and the black and brown building was a stone courtyard. Several guards dotted it, dressed in the same black armor with red runes as the ones that assaulted me in my home. There were multiple entrances to the building, but all seemed to be guarded quite well.\n\n\"Hmph,\" Firsiss grunted. \"Shouldn't be too bad. Distract the guards, get in, get out. Quick and painless.\"\n\n\"I know a bar we can sit at to plan,\" I inserted before Firsiss could continue. \"We'll look suspicious if we just stand here and stare.\" Already some of the guards were moving to look down our street. Food and ale would do wonders for me. The others didn't argue as I led them through the streets I practically grew up in. Not by choice, however.\n\nThe bar we went to I knew well. The Wyvern's Horn was a small, but lively establishment. The ale wasn't as good as what I brewed, but it was serviceable. A folk tune from the war was being sung as we found a booth to sit at. We gave our orders to a blue dragoness that was quick to serve us. In the corner was a grey dragon bard playing a larp, singing while some of the patrons joined in.\n\n\u2003Oh, Drink more dragons, drink more\n\n\u2003Drink 'til you forget how to soar\n\n\u2003Drink more while the king's away\n\n\u2003Surely the general is down to play!\n\n\u2003Oh, Drink more dragons, drink more\n\n\u2003Drink 'til you collapse on the shore\n\n\u2003The wyverns may be on the way\n\n\u2003But that don't mean the ale's decayed\n\n\u2003Oh, Drink more dragons, drink more\n\n\u2003Drink 'til your belly's sore\n\nI tuned the bard out as Pinegrove spoke. \"We need a serious strategy if we're getting in there. We have no idea what the inside looks like.\"\n\n\"A distraction would work, but the moment we're inside we're going to have to improvise,\" Iteda said.\n\n\"Leave that to me,\" I growled. \"I won't let them keep Jerso any longer, over my dead body.\"\n\n\"Don't-\" Iteda was cut off as the waitress brought us a glass of ale and food. The griffons decided on fish, passing on the alcohol our kind enjoyed. Firsiss and Iteda also passed on anything, so my ale was the only drink.\n\nIteda's eyes narrowed under the cloak. \"Do you seriously need to drink now?\"\n\n\"What?\" I defended playfully. \"I run a bar where I come from and know the owner here, his ale is weak.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes, but I saw a smile poking through the hood where the light touched. \"As I was saying, don't be too rash, Kai. If you act on your emotions, you might get yourself killed.\" Her eyes turned to a concerned blue, and for once I didn't get upset at the color.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll be fine.\" I reached my tail under the table to reassure her, but ended up poking Firsiss in the chest instead. She glared at me under the hood, and I hunched my shoulders in a sheepish apology.\n\nThe bard changed to a more somber tune, and I felt the mood of our group darken..\n\n\u2003Oh Ren, oh Ren\n\n\u2003Ten wyverns have fell\n\n\u2003Oh Ren, oh Ren\n\n\u2003Water will be found\n\n\u2003Oh Ren, oh Ren\n\n\u2003What's another mile?\n\n\u2003Oh Ren, oh Ren\n\n\u2003I forgot how to smile\n\n\"We'll need to distract the guards outside before we can enter,\" I said, which made Mellowleaf perk up.\n\n\"We can do that! It's probably a good idea to not reveal who we are until we can help it,\" she explained more calmly.\n\n\"Good idea. You can help if things get rough.\" I feared the griffons' fates if they fought the dragons head-on. They didn't wear the same armor we did. Although they were extremely capable fighters versus the dwarves. In fact, the only injury I saw besides small scratches here and there was the fallen griffon in the courtyard, who was much younger than the pair in front of me.\n\n\"So the griffons distract, and we just waltz in? Ask for Jerso politely, and head out?\" Firsiss asked sarcastically.\n\n\"While they're distracting, we'll hover high above.\" The plan came to me almost immediately. \"Once they're properly distracted, we'll dive down and into the compound before they get their wits about them.\"\n\n\"And then..\" Firsiss said expectantly.\n\n\"And then we'll sneak around from there. By all accounts, we shouldn't have been spotted.\" I turned to Iteda, and said, \"Maybe you should stay with the griffons..\" I began, but she pounded the table, eliciting a look from the dragons around us. Luckily, they didn't do anything else and went back to their business and drinks.\n\n\"I promised you Kai that I would never leave your side, and I'm not about to break that promise.\"\n\nI knew she would react that way, and I was happy to have her support. Still, I didn't want anything to happen to her. \"I don't want you to get hurt..\"\n\n\"And I won't. You've seen me fight, remember?\" The griffons and Firsiss stayed out of the conversation, as they realized it was between me and Iteda only.\n\n\"How could I forget?\" I mumbled, blushing. Raising my claws, I said, \"All right, you win. Once we're inside, we'll figure out a way to get Jerso and escape without issue.\"\n\nEveryone nodded, satisfied.\n\n\"Did the group that sent you know about you being a night dragon?\" Firsiss asked.\n\n\"I haven't actually thought about that,\" I responded, suddenly apprehensive. They clearly knew about the bracelet, but perhaps my involvement was purely coincidental. \"We'll find out tonight, right?\" I downed my ale and stood up. \"Speaking of which, let's get ready for it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chains Broken",
                "text": "Night had fallen rather quickly, and I couldn't have been more excited for the darkness. I would finally get my chance to save Jerso, and hopefully figure out more about Tervain and his plans. All I could think about was how many coincidences were occurring in this past week that may actually be connected. Why was I sent out to find a bracelet, and why does Tervain choose the same time to begin speaking with me in earnest?\n\nTervain hadn't talked to me since he possessed the dead dragon in Phirus, and I was glad. Whatever connection he thought we had was broken in my opinion when he decided to try to kill my friends. A small part of me feared that he had some sort of control over me, but if he did, he would have probably exercised that power. Right?\n\nI shook my head of the ill thoughts. Right now, I should focus on the task at hand. On the walk back out of Porando, we had determined that we would rendezvous due south of the city, close to the shore. There were a few settlements out that way, and it would be easy to hide in one of them.\n\nFor some reason, I was afraid. The emotion was alien to me in a time like this. I knew fear, of course. In all the other jobs I've done, however, fear was one of the last things on my mind. I would always steel myself before every mission, as I would either perish or live to take another job. This time, however, the stakes were much higher. If I didn't win, Jerso would die. Not only that, but Iteda might get hurt. I sighed deeply. I wouldn't let that happen.\n\nIteda nudged me affectionately, making me relax. I was glad she was here. I had my concerns for her safety, but they were the typical fears for someone you loved about to go into a fight where you didn't know the odds.\n\nWe stood in one of the alleys, waiting for the signal. Once the griffons began walking down the main street, we would fly into the sky and circle, diving once the moment arose. It was a plan contingent on many factors outside of our control, but it was the best we could come up with within the short time we had allotted. I could only hope that it would be enough.\n\nAs if sensing my distress, Iteda spoke softly. \"We'll get Jerso back.\"\n\nMy heart melted at her confident voice. I didn't respond but instead leaned into her for support. She craned her neck to give me room, draping part of her wing over me.\n\n\"Pst,\" a voice came from the main road. Firsiss moved out, then nodded at the two griffons. They still bore their robes, as we didn't want to reveal that griffons were once again in draconic lands. That would definitely draw attention from all the wrong places.\n\nI knew that our original plan when we set out was to contact the royal guards to assist, but time was no longer on our side. Even now, I feared that the dark-blue scaled dragon that set me up for this mission already knew of my betrayal, and would be ready. Perhaps this compound was even a ruse. We didn't know who we could trust, and Porando was the city of distrust. We'd have more luck trying to convince a drunk earth elemental to lay off the ale.\n\nI followed Iteda and Firsiss into the air, ditching our hoods in the process. If I began to doubt myself now, there was no way I would be able to save Jerso. There was nothing else to do but stick to the plan.\n\nThe griffons were just another speck on the ground far below as I darted in and out of the clouds. Iteda used some of her powers to move the clouds away to give us a good view. I doubted any of the dragons would be looking this high, and if they were, they'd assume we were birds.\n\nSuddenly, two of the specks jumped over the fence and wreaked havoc. Other specks flew towards them, and they flew away. One speck turned to fight, but followed their companion before others could help. I saw our opening.\n\nFirsiss and Iteda saw it too. We dove.\n\nThe air was whipping by my sides in a frenzy. I dove many times in my life, but here we wouldn't be able to pull up until just the last second if we were to act on the advantage we were given. I spotted the door we were aiming for, and just as we were to hit the courtyard, we fanned our wings. I felt a small jolt of pain in my newly healed wing joint, but it held true.\n\nIteda and Firsiss landed right outside the entrance, and we quickly pushed it open. I was the last in. I closed the door behind me. We were met with darkness. Braziers were lit with fire, but they barely emitted enough light for the corridor. I thought back to the griffons and hoped they were all right.\n\nIt was strangely silent. Firsiss took the lead, and I was happy to follow. The corridor slowly expanded into a large room. Four other hallways were leading out of it. One hallway descended, while the other three seemed to stay on the same level.\n\nNot wanting to speak, I pointed with my tail to the descending corridor. If castles were anything to go by, most prisons were held below ground. I had no idea why that was such a staple in building design. Maybe that was the reason I'd never be an architect. Let the smarter dragons with higher aspirations handle that.\n\nThe hall that went down was even less lit than the previous. Luckily, dragons had a keen sense to see in the darkness at least to some degree. Well, at least I could. Maybe it was because I was a night elemental. I had no idea how Firsiss and Iteda were faring, but they hadn't walked into a wall yet. That was promising.\n\nThe lack of dragons inside was worrying. There wouldn't be so many guards outside if nothing was happening inside. Even if it was meant to be a trap, surely by now they would have caught us?\n\nA loud boom echoed somewhere far above us. We froze, looking around wildly. After a few moments, we continued, though much more warily. So there definitely is someone here. We just have yet to meet them.\n\nOnce we found Jerso, we would then try to figure out the meaning of this compound. What was happening here, and how did they know about the armband? I glanced down at Iteda's foreleg that still bore the bracelet. I hadn't even thought about it, but was it really the best idea to bring it here? I doubted they would be able to get it from her, but this was exactly what they wanted, right? Even when I think I'm going against them, I still end up playing into their paws.\n\nI shook my head of the thought. They didn't know we were here, so there was no way I was flying into their claws.\n\nThe floor beneath us turned to stone, and the walls turned into bars. Several cells lined the walls. One held a strange, twisted version of a guffaw. Its neck was no longer long, and it had lost all of its fur. The creature was sleeping, but it barely breathed. Iteda gasped as she saw it.\n\n\"What kind of creature would do that to a guffaw?\" she whispered. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the dragons here were likely the culprits. She tried to see the good in everyone, and I wasn't about to destroy that worldview. I wish I could think that way. She hadn't grown up the same way I did, surviving by killing while also dealing with the harshest of insults from dragons that wished you were dead.\n\nIn the farthest cell down, a green form lay in the corner. A quiet sob broke the unrhythmic breathing of the guffaw. I ran to the bars, ignoring any possible guards that we didn't scope out yet. \"Jerso?\" I said hopefully.\n\nThe sobbing stopped, and the lithe dragon raised his head. \"Kai? Is that really you? I thought..\"\n\n\"It's me. You're safe. These dragons,\" I said, gesturing to Iteda and Firsiss, \"are with me to rescue you.\" I understood his hesitance. He hadn't seen me since I was sold away by our parents.\n\n\"Kai..\" His voice was dry as if he hadn't had a proper drink in days. \"They killed mom and dad.\"\n\nI froze, my breath hitching in my throat. While I didn't hold out any hope that my parents still loved me (I got over that a long time ago), they were still my parents. And they clearly loved Jerso, and Jerso loved them. These dragons would pay for what they took from my brother and me.\n\n\"Let's get you..\" Paw steps came rushing from the corridor we came in from. It would only be a few moments before the dragons came around the bend. Thinking quickly, I thrust Iteda and Firsiss behind a stack of crates nearby. Before they could come to my defense, I stepped into the light.\n\n\"Freeze!\" one of the guards growled. Both wore the characteristic black armor with red runes, but neither had helmets. One was orange, and the other was a dark-red. Fire elementals. Great.\n\n\"Relax, it's me. Kai. Remember? Your.. master sent me to retrieve the bracelet.\" I hoped they at least knew of my enslavement to their cause.\n\nThe orange one looked confused, but the dark-red one raised an eye ridge. \"Right. How did you come in without us knowing?\"\n\nI willed Firsiss and Iteda to stay hidden. I told them to leave the improvising to me, and I would follow through with that. Shrugging, I said, \"Guards must not care enough.\"\n\nThe orange dragon growled, but his companion hit him in the chest with his paw. \"Enough, Cret. Where's your rune collar?\"\n\n\"It fell off when I got the bracelet,\" I answered, not missing a beat. The lies came to me effortlessly. \"Must not have been enchanted properly.\"\n\n\"And the bracelet?\" Cret blurted before the dark-red dragon could ask another question.\n\nI patted the satchel next to me. \"Safe and sound. Of course, I won't take it out until I give it to.. what's his face..\"\n\n\"Lord Hasgr. Come, we'll take you to him.\"\n\nI trailed the two dragons, quickly looking back at Iteda. She had the look on her face that she always had when she was about to fight. I shook my head violently. Hopefully, she trusted me enough to handle this myself.\n\nCret turned around. \"In front of me, dragon.\" Iteda ducked her head before he could spot her.\n\nThey led me back to the chamber with all the hallways. They took me to the largest stone entryway, which led upwards at a slight angle.\n\nDragons appeared on either side acting as sentinels as the hall widened. I knew Jerso would be safe with Firsiss and Iteda. Iteda could easily blast the lock off and get him out of here. Perhaps my presence being known would distract the guards long enough for them to escape. Maybe even Has Grown or whatever his name was would give me information before he realized I didn't have the object he desired.\n\nWe had passed maybe ten dragons, and slowly my hopes of escape drained. I perked up, though, as we entered a set of two doors into a room. Towards the back, a balcony presented itself, allowing dragons to enter by flight. It must have been on the other side of the compound for us to not have spotted it in our earlier reconnaissance.\n\nThe rest of the room was filled with seemingly random objects. Piles of scrap metal sat thrown aside, while other bits of armor and silks were scattered about. Obsidian pillars dotted the room. To my left, a set of marble stairs led up into a wall. Weird design, but whatever. Five more dragon guards stood in the room, flanking the form of Lord.. was it Happy Grr?\n\nLord whatever his name was rose as I entered. His dark-blue scales seemed even darker today. \"Kai!\" He greeted me as if I was an old friend. \"It's good to see you in one piece. Are those new scars I see? I had hoped the rune collar wouldn't cause you too much trouble, but clearly it has.\"\n\nI gingerly touched the scar on my neck that peaked through my armor. I had forgotten about it. \"Yes. It thought I was going against its command when I went hunting.\"\n\n\"Must have been one long hunt then, no?\"\n\n\"Only a few minutes. You of all dragons should know that rune collars barely let the wearer have the necessary sleep and sustenance.\"\n\nThe guards shifted at my brazen disdain of the lord. He simply laughed. \"Funny as ever, Kai. Now, where is it?\"\n\nI tapped my satchel. \"First, I want information.\"\n\nA small smile spread across his muzzle. \"That wasn't the deal, Kai. The deal was that we free Jerso in return for the bracelet. Besides, I thought the guild trained you to not ask questions about clients. I honor every deal I make.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes, careful to not let any red show, lest he realize my annoyance. \"There's nothing honorable about holding a dragon as collateral.\" When he didn't respond to my intended jest, I said, \"Fine. Then show me Jerso unharmed first.\"\n\n\"Did you not see him below?\" Cret growled. The lord rebuked him with a glare.\n\n\"Bring the green prisoner.\" Lord Bats Been examined his claws. \"I'm surprised the rune collar isn't on you anymore, Kai.\"\n\n\"It fell off after I stole the bracelet.\"\n\nThe lord didn't hide his surprise. \"Really? The enchanter I paid was the best in the industry.\"\n\n\"It was enchanted well enough to not let me eat, I suppose.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I see the evidence of that.\"\n\nI looked over at the strange marble stairs that led to nothing. \"Strange design choice, no?\"\n\n\"Everything in here has a purpose,\" the lord stated cryptically.\n\n\"Can you not give straight answers?\"\n\n\"Everything will make sense soon, Kai. It's only a matter of time.\"\n\n\"You know who I really am, then.\" The dark-blue scaled lord dropped his jaw as he realized what I just said.\n\nHis rebuttal was interrupted when a grey-scaled dragon burst through the door. It was the guard he had sent for Jerso. \"Lord Hasgr, sir..\"\n\nAh, Lord Hasgr. I remember now.\n\n\"The prisoner..\"\n\n\"Spit it out, dragon!\"\n\n\"He's gone!\"\n\n\"What? How is that possible?\" Lord Hasgr turned to me, his face now a glare as he heard my talons click on the wooden ground.\n\n\"Is Jerso not here? Did you lie to me, Lord Hasgr?\" I played the part of a fool. That was the wrong decision.\n\n\"Sire, he was down there with the green dragonet! We took him up here as soon as we found him. The prisoner was still there, I swear!\" Cret scrambled to explain the situation.\n\nHasgr lost his glare; instead, amusement played on his face. \"I knew you were good Kai, but not this good. How did you get the rune collar off?\"\n\nThe guards hadn't advanced. Yet. I had hoped I would get away with information, since Jerso was gone, but had neglected the fact that Cret and his crimson scaled friend were still in the room. Stupid, stupid. Hasgr now had the upper claw, and I had to play his game. Whatever game that was.\n\nInstantly, I decided I wasn't playing his made-up game. I showed my paw. \"What do you know about Tervain?\"\n\nDragons tensed. My wings prepared to launch me forward over Hasgr's head and hopefully make it to the exit before he noticed.\n\n\"Tervain? Why, he informed me you would be here with the bracelet.\" As if sensing my intention, the guards behind him closed the doors to the balcony, leaving only the doors behind me as my avenue of escape.\n\n\"Speaking of which, I'd like to see it.\"\n\n\"You don't have Jerso.\"\n\n\"As if you didn't help him escape,\" Hasgr spat. \"You're in no position to bargain. Guards!\" One of the guards feinted an attack on my left, allowing another to rip my satchel off. It was thrown to Hasgr.\n\nHe dug through its contents, which was minimal. When it was emptied, he lifted it up to look inside. \"What? Where is it?!? Did Tervain lie to me?\"\n\nI laughed, and Hasgr once again turned his gaze on me. His eyes were pools of magma. \"What did you do with it?\"\n\n\"I didn't do anything.\" A hiss came across the room, and guards were all over me. Claws ripped at my scales that were exposed, and I couldn't help but cry out. I was pinned down beneath the mass.\n\n\"Enough!\" Hasgr growled. All but four guards moved off of me, allowing me to breathe once more. Hasgr stepped down from his throne, moving until he could look down easily at me. \"Your death will be a slow and painful one, Kai.\"\n\nA loud struggle came from outside the room. Hasgr looked up just as I heard the door spring open. I couldn't turn behind me, but from the stream of curses, I knew who they had.\n\nI should have known Iteda wouldn't leave me to my own devices. Why couldn't she just let me fight my own battles? At least then she would live. Now we would both die.\n\n\"Let her go,\" I growled.\n\nHasgr was surprised. \"Well, that's unexpected.\"\n\nIteda was laid right next to me, limbs splayed out. Hasgr moved to her foreleg, pulling the bracelet off.\n\nYou've been a part of it ever since you were born. Tervain's voice echoed through my mind as a memory. Thanks Kai. You've been more than helpful in our plan. That thought was definitely Tervain, who now stood in the room, towering over every dragon.\n\nHasgr and the other dragons didn't notice the intrusion of their beloved overlord. \"Kai, you've kept your part of the deal! Impressive. Even without the rune collar, you still obeyed my command!\"\n\nIteda mumbled an apology, but it was difficult to hear as she couldn't open her jaw all the way.\n\nI wished you would be a part of my new world, and you still may. Perhaps once you die, I'll resurrect you and make you lead the first army of dragons. Tervain's maw didn't move as he spoke in my mind. I growled.\n\nHasgr put a claw on Iteda's throat. \"Neither of you are useful now. What to do..?\" He pressed the claw harder, drawing a slight bit of blood.\n\n\"Stop! Don't hurt her!\" I yelled before I could stop myself.\n\n\"Oh? How fun!\" Hasgr threw back his head to laugh. Tervain had faded. \"You care for the princess! The first night dragon to live past his first year, and he cares about the ancestors of the murderers of his own kind!\"\n\n\"You have no idea of my history.\"\n\nHasgr shrugged. \"Does it matter? Tervain will be back to full power once he isn't imprisoned, and the draconic cities will be conquered. You should be thanking me, Kai! Without me, Tervain wouldn't have his revenge, which is also your revenge. The world will be a better place without those murderers.\"\n\n\"You're just replacing killers with more killers! Where will it end?\" Iteda looked at me with surprise. She hadn't expected me to actually take his side, had she?\n\n\"It will end with Tervain.\" Hasgr walked to the marble stairs that led nowhere. A few more dragons followed, joining forepaws together as they materialized a glowing mirror in front of them. He nodded, and the dragons that helped summon it walked through the mysterious mass and disappeared. A portal! How is that possible?\n\nBefore Hasgr stepped through, he turned back. \"Kill them. I have no use for them anymore. Come through quickly afterward, it will only last a few minutes.\"\n\nYeah, that wasn't going to happen. I ignored the laughter in my mind coming from Tervain.\n\nThe dragons holding me down had lost their focus on actively applying the pressure at the appearance of the portal, so I used it against them. I pushed up, fanning my wings and swinging one of the blades at the captors holding Iteda down. It cut through his exposed neck, nearly severing it.\n\nIteda used the distraction to also get up, putting us back to back as the dragons advanced. With one dragon down, that left eleven more in the room. There was likely more outside, so I hoped the dragons thought they didn't need backup.\n\nA loud banging came from behind me, but I faced the door. Where..\n\nThe entrance to the balcony outside flew inwards as if a gust of wind blew it. Using the distraction, I dove at Cret. He tried to throw a fireball spell at me, but it was barely a spark as we collapsed in a heap. His claws fought for my exposed scales. I pushed a wingblade towards his helmetless muzzle, but another body slammed into me before I could execute my prey. I forced myself up from the fight as the other dragons got their wits about them and faced my new attacker.\n\nIt was a brown dragoness. She was the same size as me, surprisingly. Formalities clearly were not her strong suit, as she immediately warped the wood below me to strike upwards. Sensing her strategy, I threw a black fireball not at her, but just in front of her. The smoke from the blackness blinded her just enough for me to dive straight through it. She was unprepared as I bowled her down and slashed my talons just below her jaw, sealing her fate.\n\nIteda ran up next to me as I noticed the other fights going on. Pinegrove and Mellowleaf fought side by side, their speed unrivaled by the dragons. Firsiss did her best attempt, though. She grappled with two fire elementals, only barely managing to manipulate the air to stave off the flames. My black fire was spreading slowly behind me, eating the wood.\n\nCret was back on his paws. He jumped on me before I could react, scoring a long slash down the membrane of my wing. It wasn't enough to prevent me from flying, but any more would. Rolling, I kicked upwards, keeping my jaw low to stop him from slashing my neck. Cret was an experienced fighter. I relaxed my muscles, making him dip lower just so I could slash at his exposed eye. Blood dripped onto my nose.\n\n\"I will end you,\" he growled before he was bowled off of me by a white blur.\n\n\"Stay away from my mate you brute!\" Iteda hissed as she slashed possessed at his throat. He was long dead, but she pressed her attack.\n\n\"Iteda!\" I pushed her away, and her eyes faded from red to blue.\n\n\"Sorry, I got carried away.\" It was her turn being sheepish, and I found it funny despite the blood staining her armor and scales.\n\n\"The portal!\" I remembered. Fights still waged around us, but somehow the tide had turned in our favor.\n\n\"Don't!\" Iteda yelled as I ran towards it. I hesitated at her plea. \"You don't know what's past that!\"\n\n\"I have to. If he succeeds, the world is doomed.\"\n\nIteda faced me with a look of steel. \"I'm coming with you.\"\n\nI tried to find the words to argue, but one glance at her made me agree. \"Quickly!\"\n\nI looked back just before I jumped in. Firsiss's face was full of rage from the battle. She looked at us, and panic set in on her face as she realized what we meant to do.\n\nWe jumped through the portal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "It was probably a stupid decision. I was good at those, though.\n\nThe world around me was a purple and silver blur. I couldn't see Iteda. Fear coursed its way through me. What if she didn't make it? What if she was trapped in this world forever?\n\nAlmost as soon as I entered, I exited on a grassy hill. My landing was far from perfect, as I came out rolling across the dead grass. Iteda exited behind me a moment later, also rolling.\n\nIteda shook herself. I copied her. Dead grass stuck to us where blood had pooled. Luckily, most of the blood was from the dragons in the compound. The portal behind us fizzled out.\n\n\"I guess no one else is coming,\" I said.\n\n\"What is that?\" Iteda sounded bewildered. I followed her gaze.\n\nA purple beam of light similar to the portal we were in went seemingly to the stars above. The beam came from a lone, overgrown temple. Around the temple were remains of buildings long since taken by nature. The place looked familiar..\n\n\"Sha,\" I answered, breathless. So this was the place my ancestors had lived.\n\n\"What? Sha is hundreds of miles east!\"\n\n\"I don't know, but I don't like the look of that beam of light.\" It was unnatural. The color was associated with no known element, and it made me nervous.\n\n\"Well, if that dragon went anywhere, it's definitely there,\" Iteda said.\n\n\"There's still time. We can stop him. You don't have to..\"\n\n\"Are you serious, Kai? I saved you back there, and you still want me to hide like some scared dragonet.\"\n\nI chuckled despite myself. If I kept this current streak up, it would all go to her head. \"I just don't want you to get hurt. I can't lose you.. I just met you..\"\n\nShe hugged me tightly and my muscles relaxed. \"I don't want to see you fight either. But if we don't, Tervain wins.\"\n\n\"You're right. Let's go.\"\n\nWe flew down to the temple in the valley below together. The island was eerily quiet, save for a small ringing sound that got louder as we approached the temple.\n\nThe ground outside the temple was hard compared to the grassy hill we had landed on upon our arrival. Stepping onto the marble (why are dragon gods so obsessed with it anyway?) we moved past the columns and into the temple itself. We were careful to be quiet.\n\nA dragon stood frozen in front of us as we went around a bend, and we instinctively ducked back. I was the first to come around. I crouched and pounced as if he was a meager deer. To my surprise and horror, he collapsed into a pile of dust. His armor was all that remained in the pile.\n\nIteda didn't hide her disgust. \"What?\"\n\nI looked past the pile of ash and saw the source of the purple beam.\n\nHasgr stood looking into the light. Inside was the largest black dragon I had ever seen and the same uninvited guest of my dreams.\n\n\"Tervain.\"\n\n\"That's him? How is he so big?\"\n\n\"Something to do with being a god, I suppose.\" I kicked the chestplate towards the beam, but none of the dragons reacted.\n\n\"Whatever they did killed them,\" I explained. Just below the beam of light emitting from the pedestal was the golden bracelet. Perhaps if I took it, that would be the end of it. I said as much to Iteda, who nodded.\n\n\"Be careful. I don't want you to.. you know.. turn into dust.\"\n\nI chuckled despite the situation. \"That's not high on my list of priorities.\"\n\n\"But it's on your list?\" she replied to my dry humor.\n\nI walked slowly towards the light. Power radiated from it, and something in the back of my mind told me to touch it. The power soothed me, and I wanted more.\n\n\"Kai. Stop!\" Iteda ran to me and grabbed my forepaw just before I could touch the beam. I reeled back in shock as I realized how close I was to the beam of purple light. Just below me was the bracelet.\n\n\"Your eyes.. they glazed over,\" Iteda explained.\n\nWilling myself to stop shaking, I forced a brave smile. \"Let's end this.\"\n\nHer muzzle was a determined line as I reached and grabbed the bracelet in my talons. Instantly, a loud snap like thunder struck through the temple. The ground shook, but the purple beam did not relent. Instead, it grew even more powerful. Tervain's eyes were open, staring hungrily at me.\n\nIteda noticed. \"Run!\" she screamed.\n\nI needed no more encouragement.\n\nThe entire island of Sha was shaking like a dragonet at the graduation of their elemental school. With no other place to put it, I slid the bracelet on my foreleg as I dove after Iteda. \"It didn't work!\" I growled my frustration to no one in particular.\n\n\"We need to warn my mother!\" Iteda yelled over the wind. It had picked up. Dark clouds were moving in on the rapidly disappearing island behind us.\n\nI followed Iteda southeast over the ocean. Hours flew by like the birds of the sea. My eye ridges drooped as my wings fought to keep flapping.\n\nThe sun was beginning to rise just as the beginnings of a beach appeared in our view. Needing no command, Iteda and I drifted down until we landed unceremoniously in the sand. As soon as my body touched the gritty ground, I fell asleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Consequences",
                "text": "I sat poised on my haunches behind a tower of oak barrels. Night was creeping in, but my quarry would be here soon. The past three days I had spent observing this particular part of the city. I was already given the information that he would be here at this time, but I wasn't one to trust easily. So I observed it for myself.\n\nRushing into things like this was how dragons died. Once he appeared, I would pull him behind the barrels and slit his throat, dumping his body into one of the canals that ran into the ravine of Tolk. His body wouldn't be found for at least several days if all went well.\n\nSome might say that this particular job wasn't fair. To them, I would scoff. In a battle, if you get into a fair fight, you've done something wrong. I was simply using my brain.\n\nClaws pattered on the cobblestone ahead, and I flexed my claws in anticipation. Easy kill.\n\nThe dragon I was sent to kill was rather small for a male dragon, only two heads taller than me. He was a water elemental with uniquely colored cyan scales. I was never told why I was sent to kill a dragon - only where, and a timeframe on when to finish. The guild would pay me for my time, and I would walk away none the wiser. Why should I care about the big picture when I was given enough food, water, and drakarns to survive? I didn't want more, nor did I need more.\n\nBut didn't I want more? I wanted out of the guild. I wanted to stop killing. I wanted my brother to be safe. I wanted to live a normal life, maybe find a dragoness that saw past the color of my scales..\n\nThat last part definitely wouldn't happen. An image of a white dragoness flew across my vision. Who was that? I wondered as the vision disappeared as quickly as it appeared. Doesn't matter. I felt a strange sense of familiarity with the dragoness, but I quelled the feeling. The cyan dragon approached.\n\nOnce he was within a foot of me, I reached out and grabbed the dragon. He panicked, but I was stronger. While he spent his days writing bills and paperwork, I trained in killing. I held him next to my body, his bulk pressing against my black armor. When he realized he couldn't escape, he whimpered. \"What do you want with me?\" he cried.\n\nI put my claw to his throat, pausing. Why did I hesitate? I never hesitated before I killed someone before. It was one of my specialties. But for some reason, I didn't swipe my claw across his throat.\n\nI pulled my claw away. \"Listen closely,\" I growled in his ear, still holding him hard. I probably could have relaxed my grip, but I didn't want to risk him escaping. \"I need you to leave Tolk. Go settle down in a village nearby, or fly south to Treka. I don't care. But change your name, and find a different career. Cyan dragons are rare, but you should be able to blend in, especially in Treka.\" I knew Terka had a significant water elemental population in addition to the light dragons, so hopefully, it would be safe there.\n\n\"Why?\" was all he pitifully mumbled.\n\n\"Because someone wants you dead.\"\n\n\"No..\" he choked, and I loosened my grip around his throat. \"Why didn't you just kill me?\"\n\nOh, that. What was I supposed to say? I don't want to be an assassin anymore? \"Does it matter? It's your lucky day.\" I let him go, and he gave one last look at me before flying south out of the city. At least he had the sense not to go back to his home.\n\n\"Why indeed, Kai?\" a feminine voice sounded behind me. I jumped up and saw a young white dragoness. She wore shimmering gold armor and seemed to glow in the night.\n\n\"There's more to you than meets the eye.\"\n\n\"What.. who are you?\"\n\n\"You know who I am. We've met.\"\n\nSuddenly, memories flooded into my mind. The whole scene dissipated, and I was left in a white void. I remembered the fighting, Sha, and Iteda. Iteda..\n\n\"She's fine. Sleeping nearby. Both of you were exhausted. It's amazing how you didn't fall into the ocean.\"\n\nI also knew this dragon. \"Aelais,\" I growled.\n\n\"Nice to see you too, Kai.\"\n\n\"You're.. young?\"\n\nShe made a show of looking herself over. \"Ah. This is my true form. The form in the temple was bound only to that place and in that exact form.\"\n\n\"How could you allow Tervain to grow so powerful?\" I hadn't quite understood what happened back on Sha, but it seemed as though Hasgr wanted to bring Tervain back.\n\n\"Almost correct,\" Aelais responded to my thoughts. \"The bracelet was created by all the dragon gods minus Tervain to keep him from attacking the draconic cities. It also locked him away from his true form in the physical realm.\"\n\n\"So, Tervain has returned?\"\n\n\"He's been back for a while. Only now he has a physical form, and can freely attack the three draconic cities. Before, magic held him back.\"\n\nI rubbed my head. This was too much talk of magic for me in the past week for my tired mind. \"Why didn't you tell me earlier?\"\n\nAelais looked worried. \"I didn't realize Iteda wore it. I assumed it was back in Treka with the queen. I was wrong.\" She made eye contact with me. \"You were my focus.\"\n\n\"So what? You could have contacted me or Iteda and explained the bracelet.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I can't contact just any dragon. There's.. laws, to put it in simpler terms. Gods can only visit the dreams of their own element, and only in temples.\"\n\n\"So how are you in my dreams right now? I'm not in a temple.\"\n\n\"The bracelet,\" she explained. \"It allowed me to be able to contact you as I am now.\"\n\nI breathed deeply. The dimension we were in was strange. There was no wind and no sound other than my breathing. Aelais didn't breathe, but she could sigh just like any other dragon.\n\n\"So, Tervain is free to attack the draconic cities and has an army of griffons at his command. Likely more dragons, too, especially if he manages to conquer a city. Why don't you stop him?\" It made sense. She was a god, Tervain was a god. Should at least cancel one another out.\n\n\"As I said, laws forbid us from interacting with mortals. Tervain bent the laws in.. ways that shouldn't be possible. Which is why we imprisoned his physical form with the bracelet.\"\n\nI hissed in frustration. I tried to claw the ground, but there wasn't any ground. \"So what do you expect us mortals to do while you sit all high and mighty in your dimension?\"\n\nAelais sighed. \"You've grown so much since your days in the guild, yet there is still so much you don't understand. The bracelet must be used to defeat him.\"\n\n\"How?\" was all I could manage to sputter.\n\n\"You'll find a way.\"\n\nGreat. So she didn't know. How fun. I wasn't a gambling dragon, but I'd say I'd have better odds playing dice with a dragon from Porando.\n\nShe began to fade. \"Wait! Tell me more!\"\n\nShe just smiled, the white void fading away to a dark one. A voice spoke on the edge of my conscience. \"Kai.. Kai.. Kai!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "\"Kai!\" My head flew up, slamming my muzzle into Iteda's neck. I groaned in pain, rubbing the injured nostrils.\n\n\"Oh, thank the gods you're fine. You were mumbling in your sleep like crazy.\"\n\nI looked around the beach. The sun was at its peak, meaning we spent the entire morning sleeping. A stray crab wandered the sand as waves lapped on the distant shore.\n\n\"I did this,\" I moaned, falling back onto the sand. \"If I would have remembered that they wanted the stupid bracelet, I would've hidden it.\"\n\n\"No, it's my fault,\" Iteda responded, not hiding the pain in her voice. \"If I would have just let Firsiss and the griffons handle it instead of running off on my own, none of this would have happened. Gods, I'm useless.\" Tears began to freely fall down her muzzle as she turned to look at the sea.\n\nWhy did she blame herself? It was my fault. Obviously. I draped a wing over her, but she pulled away. \"Iteda..\"\n\nShe launched into the sky and flew west away from the ocean. I followed her close behind. She eventually landed in a small grove of trees.\n\nI landed outside of the grove. I slowly walked into the trees, not wanting to scare her off again. Sobbing hit my ears, and I found her hiding below a tree.\n\n\"Leave me alone, Kai,\" she cried when she spotted me. I ignored her command.\n\nI crouched under some of the low-hanging branches until I was next to her. I pressed myself against her slowly, not wanting her to snap out at me. To my relief, she didn't.\n\n\"Please don't blame yourself..\" I began, thinking of what else would comfort her. I was awful at this sort of thing, never knowing what to say.\n\n\"Don't you get it?\" Iteda sniffled, \"Tervain is going to destroy all of dragonkind, and I was the reason for it. I don't deserve your forgiveness! You probably hate me..\"\n\nI put my wing over her, careful with the blade still on it, pulling her close. She turned her head into my chest as her body racked with sobs. I rubbed my paw down the back of her armor soothingly. \"Shh. They would have gotten the bracelet eventually. It was just a matter of when. Nothing could have prevented this.\" Didn't I just argue against that minutes ago? Deep down, though, I knew it was true. Tervain was going to come back, we just didn't know when. And we just got the answer.\n\nWe sat like that for a long time. Finally, her sobs lessened. She pulled her head from my chest and looked down at me. I smiled, and her eyes turned a light green.\n\n\"We'll figure this out. Aelais told me I can use the bracelet to stop him. I just don't know how yet.\"\n\nShe raised a questioning eye ridge. \"Was that what you were dreaming about?\"\n\n\"Partially.\" After a pause, I said, \"We need to warn the queen.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said, snapping out of her stupor. \"Don't have to tell me twice.\" She followed me into the sky.\n\n\"Is Jerso all right?\" I shouted over the wind. How did I forget to inquire about my younger brother's safety?\n\n\"Yes! We left him outside the city and told him to stay put. I left them to help you, and I guess Firsiss and the griffons followed.\n\nI laughed. \"Should have known it wasn't their idea.\"\n\nShe brushed her wing gently on mine as we glided on an updraft. After a snort, she said, \"As if I'd let you fight another battle alone. I'm probably going to have to save you again..\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. Yeah, definitely going to her head."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Treka made Tolk look horrible in comparison. Treka was nearly double the size of Tolk, with a grey stone wall that rose almost fifty feet in the air. By all accounts, the city was a small mountain of dragon ingenuity.\n\nGlorious buildings made up of several different kinds of stone and wood rose above the walls. The walls ran all the way into Legus Sea, ending roughly fifty dragon lengths into the waters. I had to strain to see the ends of the city. Rocks dotted the coast.\n\nNone of the buildings in the city could match the grandeur that was the palace. It seemed to take up as much room as the entire town of Stramwood. It rose to easily double the height of the walls. Four sizable domes sat on each corner of the courtyard, held aloft by towers. In the middle, the largest dome rose into the sky. Walls surrounded the courtyard, connecting each of the dome shapes together. Several spots opened up in the main castle to allow for aerial entries. Each landing spot was patrolled by no less than ten guards.\n\nSmall trees and large farms dotted the land for miles around the city's walls. Grazing herds feasted on the luscious grass that was kept in perfect shape by the city's earth elementals.\n\nI could tell that Iteda was glad to be back when she began to increase her speed. I struggled to keep up. The past week's journey has finally caught up with me and I was beginning to feel its toll.\n\n\"Hurry up, Kai! We're finally home!\"\n\nHome? Treka was a sight to behold, but it wasn't my home. I missed the peacefulness of Stramwood. Even though I was relentlessly hazed by the population, it still was my home. But when I looked at Iteda and how happy she was, I couldn't help but feel happy in turn.\n\nTreka, unlike Tolk, didn't have any restrictions on who entered. At least, restrictions on those that could fly. Tolk was a crime hub, similar to Porando, but much more regulated by the crown than Porando was. It seemed as though the queen had forgotten about the city to the west.\n\nWe touched down outside the palace a few buildings down. I was already feeling nervous at the thought of being around so many dragons, so when we landed, I instinctively ducked my head. Dragons turned at our arrival, and several words floated around.\n\n\"Iteda.. the princess.. returned..\"\n\nWe moved towards the palace's gates. Dragons were staring at us, but none had any of the usual glares reserved for me. I supposed Iteda's presence was a good enough deterrent. More likely, they were just surprised to see the princess returning.\n\nThe buildings close to the palace were made of painted limestone. The shops sold various expensive objects and food. One such shop on my right was advertising a rare fish that could only be caught northeast of Tolk. I had tried the fish, and it wasn't very good. It was ridiculously cheap in Tolk, while here it was marked up to be twenty times that. Rich dragons will buy anything, I thought.\n\nSeveral posters advertising various events and other things dotted the walls in between shop doors. One wall of posters contained several portraits of dragons that were wanted in the kingdom. One poster caught my eye: it was a painting of a black dragon that looked just like me.. Not that there were any other black dragons alive that I knew of. It had to be me.\n\nI ran to it, pulling every dragon's eyes to me. Ripping it off the wall, I scrutinized the small lettering.\n\n\u2002Wanted for assault and other crimes\n\n\u2002Warning: dangerous fighter, approach with caution\n\nSeriously? They put up a wanted poster for me? What did I-oh, right. Tolk. The memory of the fight I had in Tolk with the hooligan dragons and the guards caught up to me. I should have known they wouldn't have let a dragon get away with assaulting a royal guard.\n\nIteda walked up behind me. \"What is it, Kai?\"\n\nI showed her the poster. \"What? What did you do?\" She studied me like a mother would a dragonet who lied about hitting their sibling.\n\n\"I got into a small scuffle in Tolk before I met you. I was defending myself!\" I said before she could get a word in otherwise. \"But I may have.. attacked a royal guard.\"\n\n\"WHAT? Did you..\"\n\n\"No, I didn't kill him. I don't do that unless I have to, you know that.\"\n\nIteda nodded. \"I'd keep your head down for now until I can clear your name.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I grumbled. \"I'm used to it.\"\n\nHer eyes flashed blue. \"I'll make this right. I promise.\"\n\nThe dragons kept following us as we made it to the gate. The portcullis raised immediately. Two squads of royal guards filtered out. Another dragon in green armor appeared, his markings indicating him to be a captain. \"Princess Iteda, you've returned.\" When he bowed, the other guards did likewise.\n\n\"Rise,\" Iteda commanded. Her head was held high, and she looked every bit a dragon of royalty. Very rarely did I glimpse this side of her. I had a feeling I'd be seeing a lot more of it while we were here. \"Captain Altone, I presume.\"\n\nCaptain Altone looked surprised. \"You honor me with my name, your highness.\"\n\n\"I'd like to see my mother immediately. It's urgent.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He gestured to a guard on his right, and he ran off. \"Might I ask who your companion is?\" I detected a note of suspicion in his voice. While my head was down, he could definitely see I was a black dragon.\n\nFlames. I might as well get this over with. I raised my head to make eye contact with the captain as Iteda introduced me. \"This is Kai. He's.. my protector.\"\n\nI knew she couldn't say what we really were, but it still hurt. I did my best not to let it show on my face.\n\nA dragon on my left hissed, causing the guards to tense. \"Back away slowly, princess,\" a voice came from where the hiss originated. Turning, I didn't recognize the face. It was an orange dragon in armor that matched. His markings proved he was a colonel.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked innocently.\n\n\"What is it, Colonel Ezzit?\" the captain asked.\n\n\"That dragon is a wanted criminal. He assaulted one of the dragons in my unit back in Tolk!\"\n\nGasps rang out from behind us. I hadn't noticed that the crowd had yet to disperse from outside the gate.\n\nCaptain Altone's face hardened. \"Seize him!\"\n\n\"No! As a member of the royal family, I forbid you from taking this dragon.\"\n\nThe guards hesitated mid-stride.\n\nMy heart warmed at her defense but cooled when Altone spoke again. \"Sorry, Princess Iteda, but it's protocol. This dragon probably also kidnapped you, since I seem to remember Master Firsiss being your protector, not him.\"\n\nIteda watched helplessly as I was grabbed roughly by several guards. Chains were wrapped around all four of my legs, leaving only barely enough space to walk, though my dignity would be gone. Another was wrapped around my muzzle. Colonel Ezzit's paw grabbed my left forepaw, turning it to see the underside. Though it was mostly faded by now, the marking of the assassins guild by a large \"A\" was still visible.\n\n\"I knew it, assassin,\" he spat. \"He probably lured Princess Iteda here for his own devices!\" More gasps followed, even from the guards. He tried to pull the bracelet from my foreleg, but it didn't budge. Odd, I thought.\n\nI was practically dragged away almost immediately after. I tried to turn to look at Iteda, but whoever held the chain around my muzzle yanked hard, forcing me to look ahead.\n\nSo much for first impressions."
            },
            {
                "title": "Threat",
                "text": "I rubbed my left forepaw absently while I waited in the dark cell. It was much nicer than the centaurs', but it was still a prison.\n\nThe marking on my left forepaw was given to me when I first joined the guild. The paint came from an old fruit that was poisonous to dragons, but when put on the weak scales of our paws, it would leave a slight scar. The scar faded after a few years, so it was applied every time it faded. I had hoped it would have faded by now so I could forget about it, but apparently it hadn't.\n\nOnly other guild members knew about the marking; at least, that was the case a few years ago. It was a way for members to know who was our own safely. I wonder who gave away that secret?\n\nMy armor had been confiscated as soon as I was thrown in. My chains were removed for only the time it took to remove the armor and quickly wound around me once more. They seemed tighter than before.\n\nOther dragons were in the cells around me, but I couldn't see them. All I could see was the bars in front of me while the rest of my cell was limestone. The hall between the cells was well lit, but my cell was not.\n\nI was interested to know how the bracelet didn't come off when the guard tugged at it. An experimental tug proved I could easily slide it down my foreleg, but it didn't budge when that guard had pulled earlier. Aelais said that she and the other lesser gods had created it, so it was clearly magical, but that didn't explain why it wouldn't come off of me. Yet another question Aelais would dodge if I asked.\n\nThe prison entrance was separate from the palace. That was the full extent of what I managed to notice as I was dragged here. So many dragons had surrounded me that I wondered if they knew about my magical prowess. As of now, they still thought I had no power, so why the extra guards? Even now, guards patrolled the hall in front of me. I could sense magic on the locks and bars of my cell, so I knew I wouldn't be able to escape.\n\nEvery time the guards passed my cell, they lingered in front of it for quite a bit. I didn't have that big of a reputation as an assassin. At least, my infamy was known only to the low-lives that sought my assistance. Maybe their interest was because the princess that was missing for a week showed up randomly with me. I wasn't about to ask.\n\nMore guards walked past and stopped once again at my cell door. They jostled with a key, and the door swung open. Three grabbed me and ushered me down the hall and up the stairs. My legs were still chained along with my muzzle.\n\nWhen we emerged into the courtyard, night was swiftly beginning. The moonlight felt amazing on my armorless scales. I also finally got a chance to fully appreciate the courtyard despite our rapid approach to the main entrance of the palace.\n\nThe courtyard has several exotic plants and trees growing in regularly spaced square gardens. Flattened stones were put in the grassy areas to allow dragons to bask in the sunlight while enjoying a small piece of nature in an otherwise bustling city. Despite the night just starting, dragons walked around the courtyard dressed in lavish silks. My processional drew their attention.\n\nThe inside of the palace was no less spectacular. Tapestries denoting the royal family and other famous dragons I probably read about covered the limestone walls that were painted white. I even saw a tapestry denoting all of the dragon gods (except for Tervain, unsurprisingly).\n\n\"That looks nothing like Aelais,\" I muttered, earning a swift kick in my side.\n\n\"Stop talking.\"\n\nOne of the guards looked at me weirdly, before turning stoic once more.\n\nSo that was how it was going to be.\n\nWe entered a double set of doors made out of a white wood I had never seen before. Inside was a room larger than the Temple of Aelais back in the forest. Tapestries that bore simple colors hung from the domed roof. Around me was a set of stands that rose towards the roof, all made of wood. Dragon chatter echoed in the air. In the stands were hundreds of dragons, all staring at me. Silence followed as they realized who walked in.\n\nI instinctively cringed, but fought to push the fear down. I had spoken to the leaders of the griffons and the centaurs along with countless others and earned their respect. Why should I fear my own kind?\n\nI fought to hold my head up as we moved to the center, though it was the hardest thing I had ever done. Whispers rose around me. Ahead of me were three large, raised pedestals that allowed dragons to sit down on, covered in animal skins. Perched on one of the sides was Iteda. My heart skipped as she made eye contact with me, though it was hard to tell what she felt. Her eyes were a murky brown.\n\nTwo other dragons sat on either side of her. On her left was a small male dragon with light-blue scales who seemed to try to get her attention, but she resolutely ignored him to stare at me. On her right was a larger version of herself, who I knew instantly despite never meeting.\n\nQueen Karis.\n\nIteda mouthed a \"sorry\" as the queen spoke.\n\n\"Dragons of Treka and Trone!\" Queen Karis shouted, silencing the room. \"Attention!\"\n\nI was pulled to a smaller pedestal directly in the middle of the room, where the chains on my muzzle were unceremoniously ripped off of me.\n\nAnother dragon stepped forward from behind the queen. I knew the dragon well, fixing my glare on him.\n\nCaptain Altone drew himself tall and puffed out his chest in a show before looking at his papers. \"Dragons of the assembly, I present the black dragon Kai. He stands accused of assault of a royal officer, resisting arrest, and kidnapping Princess Iteda.\" He paused to allow for shocked murmurs before continuing. \"In addition, the dragon also belongs to the assassins guild.\"\n\n\"Belonged,\" I growled, just loud enough for every dragon to turn to me. I was given a hard cuff on my back. I hissed at the guard.\n\n\"You will speak when the queen grants it, dragon,\" Captain Altone said. To the assembly, he said, \"The dragon before you has arrived this afternoon, which is why there was such short notice.\" I looked around and saw that several seats in the stands were empty.\n\nQueen Karis stood up. Even that motion seemed regal in comparison to what I could do. She was easily a head taller than Iteda and bore several scars. Her scales were cracked in several places, but she moved with the grace of a dragon half her age. \"Dragon, what do you have to say in your defense of these heinous accusations?\"\n\n\"I was being controlled when I attacked the royal guard.\"\n\n\"Controlled?\" the queen asked, glaring at the crowd so they would stop their chatter.\n\n\"With a rune collar,\" I explained.\n\nThe queen narrowed her eyes. \"And who put this rune collar on you?\"\n\n\"A servant of Tervain.\"\n\nDragons began speaking in earnest around me, not trying to hide their whispers. The queen roared. It shook the very foundation of the palace. I was impressed.\n\n\"Explain.\"\n\nI looked hopefully at Iteda, whose eyes were red with anger. She nodded, and I dove right into my telling of the past week and a half's events. I told them of how I left the guild a year ago, but dragons hunted me down to send me to take a bracelet from Iteda. When I pulled up my foreleg to show it, the queen growled.\n\n\"Guards! Remove that from him at once!\"\n\nThey tried. They really did. I had to give them credit. No matter how hard they pulled, it didn't move an inch. The queen seemed to notice this, and she showed the first emotion on her face of the night. Confusion.\n\n\"I think I can explain that as well, my queen, if you'll allow me to continue.\"\n\n\"Granted,\" she said, though it lacked the conviction of earlier.\n\nI explained how I met Iteda, and how I wanted to steal it without hurting anyone. When I told the queen how Firsiss broke my wing and Iteda fought valiantly, her eyes glowed with pride. When I got to the part about the centaurs capturing us, the captain of the royal guard stopped me.\n\n\"You got captured by centaurs? Those weak..\" The queen silenced him with a glare.\n\nThe story of the bear attack made a few dragons nod. When the queen stopped and questioned those who nodded, they spoke of similar experiences up north. I explained the battle of Phirus in full. I even talked of my magic and the turned dragon at the end.\n\nThe queen rubbed her face with a claw. \"I'm sorry, I just have trouble believing that part. You say you're a night dragon?\" When I nodded, she said, \"I thought that was a myth. Tervain and the night dragons was just a tale long forgotten.\"\n\nI was careful not to talk of Tervain's apparent residence in my mind or any of my meetings with the dragon gods. Queen Karis should be the first to know, alone, should I get the chance. I shook my head at the queen's statement. \"He's as real as ever, and now he's back. This bracelet brought him back. Even as we speak, his army marches forward to destroy the draconic cities.\"\n\nQueen Karis tried to maintain order in the hall, but chaos reigned. Dragons were shouting across the room. Wings were flapping as dragons fought to speak over one another.\n\nI had enough of this. Focusing, I launched a black flame into the air above me. I could have heard a drakarn drop once the flames dissipated. The steady breathing of the guards around me was the only thing that reminded me where I was. I turned my head, surveying the incredulous gazes of the multicolored palette of dragons.\n\n\"We're wasting time,\" I growled. I heard sharp intakes of breath from the sea of dragons around me. One brave guard moved to restrain me, but the queen held up a claw.\n\n\"Continue.\"\n\n\"We must prepare! If we-\" I was cut off as several guards slammed the doors open behind me. Behind them were four creatures I had been thinking about the entire day in the cell.\n\nIteda stood up in surprise. \"Firsiss!\" Ignoring the queen's disapproval, she flew down and crossed necks with her mentor. There was one dragon I wanted to see.\n\nThe guards didn't move to stop me as I nuzzled my little brother. Jerso's once vibrant green scales were now dull, likely from malnourishment in Porando. \"I'm glad you're okay,\" I said.\n\n\"You too. All covered in chains,\" he joked. \"I hope you didn't do anything dumb.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"You know me. Just because it's dumb doesn't mean it won't work.\" I looked back at the dragons around us, but none of their gazes were on us. Instead, they stared at the two griffons behind them.\n\n\"Do you believe me now?\" I yelled out, before turning back to the griffons. \"I trust everything is all right?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Pinegrove said with his odd inflections. \"We were worried about you and Iteda. The portal went away before we could follow.\"\n\n\"I'll explain later.\"\n\nFirsiss walked up to the queen. She bowed, then whispered something in her ear. Queen Karis nodded and turned to address the crowd. \"Tervain leads a dark army of turned dwarves, griffons, and some dragons against us. We must prepare if we are to survive the coming war!\"\n\nBefore the inevitable talking could commence, the queen added, \"I trust Master Firsiss's counsel in this matter. The night dragon,\" she said, gesturing to me, \"speaks the truth. For now, we will look past his wrong-doings in light of this discovery. Guards, remove his binds.\"\n\nThe guards grumbled as they unlocked the chains wrapped around my forelegs. Iteda launched herself into me, fiercely hugging me until I struggled to breathe. \"I can't..\" I managed before she relaxed the pressure. I returned the gesture.\n\n\"I'm so glad they didn't hurt you. I tried to explain everything to my mother, but she wouldn't listen.\" We rested our heads on each other's shoulders. I looked back at the raised pedestals and noticed Queen Karis now glaring at me, her eyes blood-red. I eased myself away from the beautiful dragoness.\n\nAt some point when we embraced, the small light-blue dragon had maneuvered his way down to us. \"Princess Iteda, may I take a walk with you?\"\n\nI noticed the dragon's green eyes when he spoke to Iteda, but when he glanced at me, his eyes were full of red fury. What was his relationship with the princess?\n\nIteda sighed. \"Sure, Ura.\" She turned back to me, and whispered, \"I'll tell you later.\"\n\nSomething stirred inside of me as the light-blue dragon walked side-by-side with Iteda, attempting to brush his wing with hers. She pulled away to not let it happen. I had never felt this emotion in me before. I felt betrayed, angry, and hurt.\n\nFirsiss was in front of me before I knew it, smirking. Clearly, she observed the entire affair. \"Come on. Queen Karis wants you with the special council at once.\"\n\n\"Special council? Is this not the council?\" I asked, bewildered.\n\n\"This is the assembly of Treka and Trone. The special council is for military talk. We're about to be attacked by the largest force Trone has ever had to deal with before.\"\n\n\"I'm no strategist,\" I said, but she shook her head.\n\n\"Maybe not, but you still are the only one able to contact both the centaurs and the griffons.\"\n\nOh yeah, I forgot about that.\n\n\"Also, the special council requires at least one member of each elemental order.\" She winked at me. \"Seeing that you're the only night elemental..\"\n\nYeah, I could take a hint.\n\nI followed Firsiss closely as we exited through a small door behind the pedestals opposite the way I entered. Some guards glared at me as I passed, but others gazed curiously. For their entire lives, they thought black dragons had no element, and I had just proved that otherwise. In a few days, we would be fighting side by side. I didn't want to have enemies on both sides, so I bowed my head to them in respect. To my surprise, some paid me the same curiosity.\n\nThe special council room was very small. Several pedestals surrounded a table that bore a miniature map of Trone as a whole, as well as a detailed map of Treka. Around the table were several battle-scarred dragons. There were two of each element present. Firsiss made her way past me to another air elemental, leaving me alone next to a brown dragon. The dragon grunted at me, then turned to the queen.\n\n\"We must send patrols out at once! If we don't know the full strength of Tervain's forces, we can't prepare properly!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"Make it happen, Master Yren.\"\n\nYren bowed and left the room hastily.\n\nA fiery red dragon spoke next. \"Allow me to organize messengers to be sent to the major cities and villages. Word must spread fast if we are to allow dragons the best chance of survival.\"\n\nQueen Karis agreed and sent the dragon off.\n\nFirsiss spoke next. \"Kai and I know the army the best out of any dragon here. Allow us to help with the city's defenses.\"\n\nI felt warmth in my chest as Firsiss vouched for me. It was only a little over a week ago that the air elemental despised me, and now here she was asking to work with me.\n\n\"Of course.\" The queen turned to me, her eyes still slightly red. I almost forgot what I did to garner her hate, but then remembered my open show of affection with Iteda. \"Can you explain what you know of the army?\"\n\nI told them of their siege weapons and dwarven spell casters that could form shields that stopped every element. I also spoke of the dragon spell caster, and even talked of possible griffons in their army. \"The griffon general told me of the decimation of their eyrie. No bodies were recovered, though they swear that they saw bodies when they escaped.\"\n\nQueen Karis thought long. One of the water elementals spoke next. \"Do the griffons support us in our fight?\"\n\nI nodded. \"The centaurs and griffons both pledged allegiance. The griffons only requested land nearby as a condition.\"\n\nQueen Karis nodded. \"If it's true that their land has become tainted, and they fight alongside us, they will be treated as our equals.\" A few of the dragon masters around me reeled in shock, but the others nodded. \"We'll take any allies we can get at this point.\"\n\nI pulled up the hellion on the opposite foreleg as the bracelet. Luckily, the dragons that tried to pull the bracelet off were interested in only that and not the magical communication device. I tapped the device and thought of General Softadler. It took only a few moments before a translucent image of the general appeared. I heard several gasps.\n\n\"Kai! Is all well?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not, general. How fast can you make it to Treka?\"\n\nThe general thought for a moment before responding, \"My army can make it in two days. Is Tervain's army nearby?\"\n\n\"We don't know where exactly he is, but we can only assume he means to attack one of the major draconic cities. Treka makes the most sense to destroy, considering it's the home of the royal family.\"\n\nGeneral Softadler trilled at a griffon nearby that was outside of what I could see. \"All right, we'll be there in two days. I trust our arrangement still stands?\"\n\n\"The queen has agreed should you fight alongside the dragons.\" I glanced over at the queen, who nodded once.\n\n\"Excellent! See you then.\" The image faded away.\n\n\"How many griffons does he have?\" the other air elemental asked.\n\n\"Five hundred,\" I answered, remembering his words from a few days ago.\n\nI also contacted the centaur general. He was a little apprehensive about sending his army down here, but after I explained that Tervain was free to attack the draconic cities he relented. Only after General Sequoia's form faded did the queen speak again.\n\n\"Free to attack the draconic cities?\"\n\n\"This bracelet was created by the draconic gods to lock him away from his physical form. Twisted servants of Tervain took the bracelet from us and used it to free him, allowing him to attack our cities freely.\"\n\nFirsiss raised her eye ridges. This was new information to her as well.\n\nQueen Karis nodded. \"Begin work on our defenses, masters. Tervain's army likely won't sleep. Get rest when you need it, though. I won't have the masters of their elements dropping from exhaustion in battle.\"\n\nBefore the dragons could leave, a knock sounded on the door. When Queen Karis allowed the dragon entry, a young dragoness poked her head in. \"My queen, survivors from a destroyed village come bearing news of a dark army of dwarves and other creatures..\" She looked at me, and her eyes widened. \"So it's true? The night dragons are real?\"\n\nThe queen ignored her last comments. \"What village?\" The masters looked down at the map in anticipation.\n\n\"Stramwood, I believe, your highness.\"\n\nMy heart dropped."
            },
            {
                "title": "Preparations",
                "text": "I was outside at the gate of Treka as dragons trekked in. All were muddy, some caked in dry blood. Several limped, while others carried dragons with broken wings or legs on their shoulders.\n\nMany of these dragons likely jeered at me or threw rocks at me when I lived in Stramwood. By all means, I had every right not to feel pity. But I still did. They were all thrust out of their home without any chance of fighting back. I knew the feeling well.\n\nMy eyes scanned the group of about one hundred dragons, looking for one dark-blue dragon in particular. I began to panic until I spotted Namr. A few arrows were buried in his back, but he moved unhindered. I ran to him.\n\n\"Namr!\" I yelled.\n\nHe looked over at me, and his crestfallen expression changed to that of happiness. \"Kai! You're alive! Thank the gods!\"\n\nWe butted heads in greeting. \"There was this huge army-\" he began, but I cut him off.\n\n\"I've seen the army before. It's why I'm here. It comes for Treka next.\" Probably.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like it,\" Namr said fearfully. \"Their eyes, Kai..\"\n\nWhile we walked side-by-side through Treka towards the palace, I filled him in on everything that had happened since I left. The other dragons from Stramwood had stopped just past the gate at a hastily constructed tent that was set up to treat the injured. When we walked into the courtyard of the palace, several guards ran up. One called for a medic.\n\nMoments later, a silver dragon ran out from one of the buildings. She scrutinized Namr, before saying, \"Come with me.\"\n\nNamr looked back at me and I nodded. \"Go, you'll need to get that treated. I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nWhen Namr departed, I was left alone out on the courtyard. The moon was at its peak, and I suddenly felt exhausted. I walked to the palace entrance. One of the guards saw me and went inside. A small icy-blue dragonet emerged that couldn't have been older than four. \"Kai?\"\n\nI nodded. \"Come with me, your quarters are this way.\"\n\nI followed the dragonet up a flight of stairs. She was remarkably fast despite being half the size of me. I mapped our course in my head until we finally stumbled upon a door.\n\n\"This will be your quarters for the remainder of your stay. Will you be needing anything else?\" she asked expectantly.\n\nI was hungry, but that could wait until morning. \"No, thank you.\" Not knowing what else to do, I bowed. She bowed in turn and scampered off. I opened the wooden door and was met with an impressive sight.\n\nThe room was bigger than my entire house. A desk lay off in one corner, with a small bathtub full of steaming water nearby. A balcony led off to a wonderful view of the courtyard below. The bed was merely a stack of animal pelts in a corner, but that was an incredible luxury to have. Not many dragons could skin animals. It was a well-paid profession for those that had the skill, and a costworthy luxury to own.\n\nI collapsed in the pile of furs, feeling like I was sleeping on a cloud. My mind drifted away from the coming battle and to Iteda. Where is she now? I wondered. An image of Ura came to my mind, and I inadvertently growled. Why does she spend time with that groveling dragon and not with me? I thought bitterly. The same kind of thoughts consumed me as I fell into the waiting arms of sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "I was up early.\n\nThe balcony was a welcome reprieve from the stuffiness of the palace. I already hated it. While the cushiness was nice, I missed the nights spent under the stars in the embrace of the dragon I loved..\n\nShaking my head, I flew down to the courtyard. Preparations had already begun, it seemed. Squads of dragons were flying through the air in regimented training exercises, while patrols flew towards the outskirts of Treka.\n\n\"Master Kai, right?\" a red dragoness ran up to me.\n\nMaster? Startled, I answered, \"Y-Yes. You are..?\"\n\n\"Captain Fole, sir. I was requested to have you observe our training and give information about the army approaching.\"\n\nI wonder who requested that? \"Lead the way,\" I said, gesturing with a paw.\n\nAs we walked, the dragoness spoke. \"Dragons from surrounding villages are arriving to be trained to fight. The old, infirm, and the young are being transported to the inner city as we speak.\"\n\nFirsiss seemingly materialized on my other side. I jumped, making her laugh. \"I thought assassins weren't ever startled.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. \"I'm sure you have some news.\"\n\n\"Messengers were sent to each of the draconic cities last night and have yet to return. I fear it may not be in time.\"\n\n\"Any good news?\" I asked sarcastically.\n\n\"Training is going well. Defenses are being strengthened as we speak. Ballista are being reinforced for quicker reloading to take down turned griffons and dragons.\"\n\n\"That is good news,\" I said. I saw Namr up ahead just as he emerged from a tent, and flagged him over.\n\n\"Kai!\" he said, before looking at Firsiss. \"Who's this pretty dragoness?\"\n\nI was mortified, but Firsiss took it in jest. \"Who's this wyvern?\"\n\nNamr laughed. He looked at me, and I introduced Firsiss. \"This is Master Firsiss, second in command of the air elementals.\"\n\nNamr's eyes widened. He made a big show of a bow. \"My mistake, Master Firsiss. My name is Namr, and I am a great friend of Kai, let me tell you.\"\n\nCaptain Fole cleared her throat. \"If you'll follow me this way, Master Kai..\"\n\nWe moved again. Namr tagged along right behind Firsiss's tail. \"Master Kai?\" He whistled loudly. \"You've made major moves since I've last seen you!\"\n\nI blew air through my nostrils. \"And you haven't changed a bit, Namr.\"\n\n\"Why would I change something that's already perfect?\"\n\nFirsiss actually laughed at that, and I shook my head in exasperation. \"Don't encourage him,\" I murmured to her.\n\n\"I can hear you, you know!\"\n\nOn my left was a squad of dragons sparring. To my surprise, I saw Pinegrove and Mellowleaf teaching them. Mellowleaf waved at me as I passed. Firsiss noticed where I was looking.\n\n\"The griffons fight differently than us, so I thought it would be a good idea to learn at least some of their moves\"\n\nI turned my head back to see Namr frozen, staring at the griffons. \"Namr, you coming?\" I yelled as we stopped, much to Captain Fole's displeasure.\n\n\"Yeah.. sorry. It's just.. strange to see griffons not wanting to kill me.\" He caught up to us and we continued.\n\n\"How many griffons are in their army?\" I asked.\n\n\"I didn't count. Kai, they came in the evening.. they were so fast.. so many..\"\n\nFirsiss was the one to drop back and drape a wing over him. \"Shh. Hush now. Focus on the present, not the past.\"\n\nNamr nodded, sniffing.\n\nI raised an eye ridge at Firsiss's actions. She didn't seem like the comforting type, so seeing her act this way was like dipping your paws in the Delta Sea first thing in the morning. Jarring.\n\n\"I hope we can hold out long enough for the griffons to arrive. If the army is at Stramwood, it won't take them much longer to come here if Treka is their goal,\" Firsiss fretted. I shared her hope.\n\nMany dragons had stared at me as we walked. I wanted to believe they were looking at Firsiss, but I knew I would be lying to myself. Most stares were indifferent, but some made no attempt to hide their ire. I didn't know if they hated me because of my heritage, or because I used to be an assassin. Some soldiers considered the act of assassination to be dishonorable. I didn't necessarily disagree, but I never spent much time thinking philosophically about my predicament years ago. Any loss of focus could mean your demise.\n\nWe finally reached the group Captain Fole was leading us to. Several officers were in front of the dragons, demonstrating a move.\n\n\"The dragons training here are all colonels or below in the army. We figured it best you tell them as much as you can about the enemy, so they can go back to their squads and teach their comrades.\"\n\nI nodded at the idea. \"Smart.\"\n\nCaptain Fole blushed beneath her armor at the compliment. \"It wasn't my idea, sir.\"\n\nI stepped in front of the group of dragons. The officers in front bowed when they saw me, relinquishing their stage. Part of me wanted to bolt away, but fear of Tervain's forces kept me rooted.\n\n\"The creatures we are fighting have been risen from the dead to fight for the dark god Tervain,\" I yelled. \"The only way, and I repeat, the only way to kill these creatures is by cutting off their heads or burning them. Piercing their head will also work.\"\n\nThe dragons nodded gravely. I continued. \"The fire dragons will be essential to defeating them, but the army is not so easily conquered. They have several spell casters among them that throw up dark shields. These shields are impervious to any elemental magic, so distraction is key for our fire to be able to touch them.\n\n\"Of course, claws and wingblades work too.\" Steeling myself, I said, \"We will defeat them, for we have no other option. I'm willing to fight.\" I stamped one of my forelegs down for emphasis. \"Are you?\"\n\nA cheer rose from the group, along with stamping. I nodded, satisfied. \"Continue,\" I said, gesturing to the officers to my right. They bowed, and the troops continued with their exercise.\n\nWhen I walked back, another dragon had joined my small group. Iteda.\n\nShe walked up to me, crossing her neck with mine. \"Kai, that speech was amazing! You're a natural leader!\"\n\nI blushed. Namr took the opportunity to talk. Typical.\n\n\"Oooh, Kai, is this your mate?\" he asked. He was almost double my age, yet he behaved like a dragonet.\n\n\"Umm, well..\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Iteda didn't hesitate, wrapping her tail with mine. \"He is my mate, as a matter of fact.\"\n\nFirsiss didn't look surprised. Namr's eyes widened, while Captain Fole's jaw dropped. \"Well, aren't you going to introduce me?\" Namr asked, grinning.\n\n\"Iteda, this is Namr. Namr, this is Iteda.\"\n\nNamr looked shocked. \"P-P-P-Princess Iteda??\" he sputtered.\n\n\"Now you're sounding like me,\" I laughed as Iteda leaned into me.\n\n\"I knew you traveled with her, but I didn't know about that part..\"\n\nI chuckled. \"I didn't know how you'd react.\"\n\nCaptain Fole coughed. We looked over to her, and she bowed. \"I will be taking my leave now, sir. Princess Iteda.\" She bowed even lower, then left.\n\n\"Great. Soon every dragon will know now,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"They will find out eventually. Why, are you ashamed?\" Her eyes glowed playfully.\n\n\"Wha-no-I-\" It was my turn to sputter.\n\nShe leaned over and kissed me. \"It's cute when you're flustered.\"\n\nI smiled, but it disappeared from my muzzle when I saw a light-blue dragon land near Firsiss.\n\n\"Princess Iteda? Queen Karis wanted me to..\" he trailed off as he saw me as well. I stepped away from her and nodded respectfully in his direction. Ura's eyes were dark-red.\n\nUra got his wits about him quickly. \"Queen Karis asked me to take you to one of the gardens for lunch.\"\n\nI could tell Iteda was not fond of the idea. \"Did she now?\" Her shoulders drooped. She turned to me. \"I have to stay on my mother's good side. I know I said I'll explain later last night, but I promise I'll tell you everything later tonight. All right?\" Her voice was low.\n\nI was hurt but didn't let it show. \"Okay.\" I wanted to say more, but I felt what I would have said would make Ura even angrier than he already was. She followed Ura, who kept his icy glare on me for a few more steps before they took off.\n\nFirsiss's eyes were sympathetic. \"She only does things with him to appease her mother. She was introduced to him yesterday.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" I couldn't help the growl that escaped my throat.\n\n\"He is to be her suitor. He comes from one of the most wealthy families in Treka, so his guaranteed allegiance to the crown would be beneficial. Not to mention the drakarns he would bring.\"\n\nNamr smirked. \"Don't worry Kai, I'm sure he means nothing to her.\" To Firsiss, he said, \"So how about showing me a few moves? I'm not much of a fighter.\"\n\nFirsiss was unmoved. \"Can't you just join a training session?\"\n\n\"I could.. but it would be better to learn from one of the best.\"\n\nSighing, she relented. Namr clearly knew how to play into a dragon's ego. \"A few quick moves. But I have to return to my duties.\"\n\nNamr looked the happiest I had ever seen him. \"See ya, Kai.\"\n\nFirsiss nodded at me and took off with Namr. Once again, I was left alone in the bustling courtyard. Even outside in the streets, dragons trained. I walked up to a battalion of fire elementals practicing balls of flame.\n\nI observed for a few minutes before the orange-scaled captain noticed me. He padded over. \"Master Kai.\" He bowed. \"I am Captain Aleer.\"\n\nI was a little uncomfortable with every dragon calling me master. \"Just Kai is fine.\"\n\n\"As you wish, Kai. What brings you over here?\" he questioned.\n\n\"I'm looking to learn new spells.\"\n\nHe scratched his head. \"I'm not sure I can be of much help with that. I understand you're a night elemental, but we're fire elementals here.\"\n\n\"Some of my spells incorporate a black fire. I thought while maybe the spells aren't the same, I could at least be inspired by the spells your elementals use.\" I hoped that maybe by attempting to replicate their spells, I would accidentally stumble upon a spell that would be useful.\n\n\"I suppose it's worth a shot. Come join us.\"\n\nThe other dragons ranged in color from orange to red. I even saw a pink dragon, which surprised me. One dragon was even red with orange splotches, something I didn't know was possible. All of them relaxed when they learned I was there to learn with them. Each was about a head taller than me - fully grown, no doubt. I still had another growth spurt or two left in me that I would likely hit within the year.\n\nThe fire elementals continued firing small balls of flame towards the sky. The weak spells fizzled out before they could cause real harm. They were testing their control over the element. I was impressed with how easily they could do it. I decided to try as well. Despite my practice with Firsiss, when I first tried, the ball of black fire was double the size of theirs. Dragons ran like mad when it came back down, but it luckily died out before it could hit us.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I said sheepishly. \"Still learning. Only began casting a few days ago.\"\n\nThe dragons resumed their practice, though there was now a wide berth between me and the nearest dragon. Several dragons had stopped on the sidelines to watch us practice. Most were staring at me as I finally got control of the dark fire. One of the dragons watching was a water elemental.\n\nI walked over to the dragoness. \"Could you help me test something quickly?\"\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked politely.\n\n\"I'm not familiar with water elementals. Are you able to summon water on command?\"\n\nShe looked insulted. \"Of course I can.\"\n\n\"Ok. Can you put this out?\" I reached down inside of me and threw a small bit of fire on the ground. She doused the flames with water to no effect.\n\n\"Interesting,\" I said. Scratching my chin, I turned to a light elemental that had turned his attention to me and the water elemental. The ridges on his back were oddly spaced, the only defining thing about him. \"Can you summon a beam of light on this fire?\"\n\nHe nodded and quickly shot it. It zipped right past me, too close for comfort. His aim was true, and the dark flames dissipated right away.\n\n\"Makes sense,\" I said. \"Thanks you two.\" I bowed, and they bowed in turn.\n\nI spent the next few hours practicing my focus with the fire elementals. It was nice to spend time with a group of dragons that didn't despise me. After the first hour, they began to treat me like one of their own. We had a small contest of aiming our fireballs at targets. I was happy I didn't come in last, though it was a close-fought victory for second-to-last.\n\nThe fire elementals turned to practicing lighting objects on fire. That would definitely be a useful skill in the battle to come. When I asked the captain about it, he described the concept to me. \"When I cast this spell,\" he had explained, \"I focus on the object or creature I am trying to set on fire. I envision every part of it in my head, then will fire to surround it.\"\n\nIt made sense, so I tried it on a piece of wood. I tried ten times, but each attempt yielded nothing. On my eleventh try, however, the wood began to darken. It was like termites had gotten to it in a matter of seconds. It decayed, turning to dust, blowing away in the wind.\n\nWhat? How.. I turned to a weed growing out of the ground. I did the same spell, and the weed wilted away and died. The captain noticed and walked over to me.\n\n\"That's.. interesting,\" was all he said. \"I'd keep that a secret if I were you. Dragons are just beginning to accept you, and I don't know how they'd feel if they find out you can do that.\"\n\nI excused myself from the training session. Fear coursed through me. Could I do that to living creatures as well? The thought scared me. The fireballs I cast should have made me feel weak right about now, but I felt even stronger instead. Firsiss did say the bracelet makes the wearer not tire as easily and have stronger powers, so perhaps that was the reason. I hoped it was the reason I could kill living things essentially on command.\n\nI wanted to seek out Iteda and listen to her counsel. She would know just the thing to say to me right now. Or would she be afraid of what I could do? No, she would drape a wing over me and say it would all be okay.\n\nThe rest of the day went by quickly. I received no word from the griffons or the centaurs. I spent my time walking around the courtyard and introducing myself to too many dragons to count. I even had the chance to observe the construction on the walls and outside of the city. Several trenches were being dug around the walls to hinder dwarven invaders, as well as wooden spikes at regular intervals. The walls were being reinforced with metal poles dug into the ground behind it to prop it up should the wall lose its structural integrity.\n\nI felt a sense of pride. While dragons have been united as a species for a while, it never failed to impress me at what we were able to accomplish.\n\nThe sun was just setting when I returned to the palace. Several dragons greeted me when I landed, and I called back to them. I supposed I was the most recognizable dragon in the city at this point considering my black scales.\n\nPinegrove and Mellowleaf flew over to me. \"How are the defenses going?\" Mellowleaf asked.\n\n\"Great for the time we have. The city should hold.\" There was no doubt in my mind the city would be able to withstand a beating. The addition of the turned griffons would prove a challenge, but our aerial defenses seemed top-notch. \"The ballista will manage to hold back the griffons. They tipped the arrows to be able to burn.\" That had actually been my idea. When I saw them working on the ballista, I talked to one of the engineers and explained the way to kill the turned creatures. He assured me they would get to it right away.\n\n\"That's great!\" Mellowleaf happily ruffled her feathers.\n\n\"Any updates on Tervain's army?\" Pinegrove asked gruffly.\n\n\"None of our scouts have returned.\" That part scared me. I begged Master Yren to stop sending scouts, but he assured me they had it under control. What if those dragons were turned? We would just be adding numbers to Tervain's already formidable army. I had no idea how fast Tervain could turn creatures, but I had no doubt it was less than a day.\n\n\"You should rest, Kai,\" Mellowleaf said, concerned. \"I've only been around your kind for the past week, but I can tell you're exhausted.\"\n\nMentally, I was. Physically, I probably could have flown for another hour, but I didn't argue. \"You're right. Have you seen Iteda?\" I wanted to at least share a meal with her.\n\nMellowleaf grinned. \"I saw her fly into the palace just a few minutes before you got here.\"\n\nI thanked the griffoness and ran to the palace. For all its winding corridors, I found Iteda walking the hall that led to the dining area. It had been recently opened to the soldiers as well. Only a few other dragons were in the dining hall when I arrived. Most were probably off to get at least a few hours of sleep in before training began early the next morning.\n\nBeside Iteda walked Ura. Their wings touched. Something snapped in me, and I growled as I approached. Iteda and Ura both turned. Iteda's eyes were a red-purple until she saw me, eyes now green. \"Kai!\" She ripped past Ura and hugged me.\n\nI wanted to question her about the dragon behind her, but I decided to wait. She pulled away from me, much to my displeasure.\n\n\"I was looking for you, but couldn't find you. Ura found me, and I.. well..\" she trailed off.\n\nI raised my paw. \"I know, appease your mother.\"\n\nUra's eyes were red when he stepped into our conversation. \"Iteda, I thought we were going to get something to eat?\"\n\n\"We had lunch together. Go find another dragoness to impress,\" she said. Ura flexed his claws when he looked at me but decided better of whatever he was thinking and walked away.\n\nIteda and I shared a fat pig before heading upstairs. She ate some of the vegetables that were offered, which I politely declined. I turned for my quarters, but she grabbed me. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"My quarters.. I thought..\" I ducked my head.\n\n\"You don't want to spend the night with me?\" she asked with mock sadness.\n\n\"Of course I do,\" I said, smiling. \"It's just.. that dragon..\"\n\n\"Ura? That gross dragon? You think I like him, don't you?\" She smirked. \"I see what's going on here. You're jealous.\"\n\nWas that the emotion I felt yesterday? \"Am not,\" I said unconvincingly.\n\nHer eyes widened. \"You totally are!\"\n\n\"Let's just go to your chambers,\" I grumbled, looking around. Luckily, no dragons traversed these halls at this time.\n\nIteda sauntered her way to her door, taking her time. I followed closely behind. The door was painted gold, but made of wood. When she opened it, I felt insulted at the room I had been given.\n\nHer room was triple the size of the one given to me. Luxurious animal pelts were thrown around to make some sort of carpet. A large pool of water that was able to fit four fully-grown dragons sat to the side, steam rising from it. Her balcony was large as well, with a stone platform that allowed her to bask in the sunlight when it reached this side of the palace. Tapestries adorned the walls. A large table sat to the side, along with a desk with writing implements strewn about.\n\n\"This is amazing,\" I breathed.\n\n\"It's nice, but nicer with someone to share it with.\"\n\nI blushed. She made a show of walking to one corner of the room where the animal pelts were piled high. It looked incredibly cozy. She beckoned me over and I followed, lying next to her. I draped a wing over her, our tails entwining.\n\n\"Sorry I was jealous,\" I said, and she just giggled.\n\n\"If anything, it makes me love you even more.\"\n\nShe leaned her head on my shoulder. \"Whatever happens in the coming battle.. just know.. I love you,\" I finally managed.\n\nIn response, she kissed me. It lasted far longer than our previous kiss, and I enjoyed every second of it. When she pulled away, her eyes were a color I had never seen before on any dragon. She pulled me closer. I felt warmth everywhere on my body. Everywhere.\n\nI slept well that night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Challenge",
                "text": "Light streamed in through the cracks in the door of the balcony. Iteda was still asleep, nestled under my wing. I reluctantly untangled myself away from her, kissing her head softly. I knew that I would follow this dragoness everywhere and anywhere, no matter what.\n\nIteda slowly blinked her eyes open as I sank into the pool of heated water. \"Good morning, love,\" she greeted. My spine shivered at the term of endearment. She looked even prettier in the morning.\n\nShe sunk into the water with me, enjoying the heat as it cleansed our scales. We sat next to each other, basking in the small amount of peace. I wanted to confide in her about my newfound power, but I felt it would ruin the moment. Maybe later.\n\n\"They'll be expecting us shortly,\" I said reluctantly.\n\nBlue sadness filled her eyes. \"Yeah.. I just wish we could spend all day together like this.\"\n\n\"Well, when all of this is over..\"\n\nIteda grinned, displaying all of her teeth. \"Promise?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said, before deciding to add, \"My mate.\"\n\nShe nuzzled her head into my neck before we stepped out of the water. Allowing the air to dry us, we took off from the balcony and glided to the ground. It was much the same as yesterday. Dragons trained all around us. In the sky, squads flew practicing aerial commands.\n\nOnce again, I was at a loss for what to do. At least Iteda was with me. I supposed I should be checking the defenses with Firsiss. I asked the nearest air elemental as she walked past me if she saw her, and she pointed me to the other side of the castle.\n\nIteda stuck close to my side the entire walk over. We could have flown, but I didn't want to disrupt the training in the sky. Besides, I wanted to savor every moment I had with Iteda. Dragons didn't try to hide their gawking as we walked together. No doubt the rumor had already spread far.\n\nI saw a shadow below me, and I instinctively rolled out of the way as the form landed right where I had been.\n\n\"Damn! You've still got it!\" Namr remarked.\n\n\"If I didn't, I'd have died a long time ago.\"\n\nIteda cuffed me. \"Don't say that.\"\n\nI rubbed my shoulder, grinning.\n\nFirsiss landed a moment later. \"There you are. There's something you need to see right away.\"\n\nFirsiss flew to the gate of the city. Iteda and Namr were close behind. Below was a crowd of dragons so large it barely fit in the street. Even more dragons streamed in from outside the gate.\n\n\"Where did these dragons come from?\" I asked. There was so many, it had to be a\u2014\n\n\"Porando. They were attacked yesterday morning.\"\n\nI dropped when I missed a wingbeat as I hovered. It made sense, I supposed. Porando had no walls, so it was likely an easy target. \"Is it gone?\"\n\nFirsiss nodded gravely. \"The survivors speak of the city set ablaze. It's gone.\"\n\nOne draconic city falls. Two more to go.\n\n\"You said yesterday morning?\" I asked suddenly, realizing something.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That would mean they split their forces. There's no way they moved from Stramwood to Porando that fast.\"\n\nFirsiss considered the notion. \"Seems likely. Stramwood could be taken by a much smaller force. Even Porando wouldn't need a large army to be conquered. It has virtually no protection.\" She huffed. \"I don't blame the dragons for abandoning the city that fast.\"\n\n\"It's still their home,\" I said, shocked at her blatant disregard for the dragons below.\n\n\"I suppose,\" was all she said.\n\nWe quickly surveyed the battlements before landing back in the palace's courtyard. The sun had only risen a little, and it would be a few hours still before it reached its apex. The cobblestone below my paws was already feeling normal.\n\n\"Feeling hungry?\" I asked Iteda, and she grinned.\n\n\"You know, I haven't eaten in a while either,\" Namr butted in.\n\n\"You ate last night.\" Firsiss sounded exasperated.\n\n\"Spending time with you saps me of my energy.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"Whatever.\"\n\nWe were about to head inside when another dragon landed next to us. I growled. Ura.\n\n\"Princess Iteda,\" he greeted. \"I, like most dragons, have been wondering what your relationship is with this,\" he looked at me, \"wyvern. I heard a terrible rumor about your choice of mate.\" He ruffled his light-blue wings impatiently and kept his glare fixed on me.\n\nDragons were stopping to stare at the exchange. Part of me wanted to scream we were nothing more than friends just to avoid potential conflict, but I knew it wasn't true, especially after.. well..\n\nIteda growled. \"What does it matter to you, Ura?\"\n\nHe shrugged, dusting a bit of dirt from his pristine scales. \"Perhaps it matters to me, perhaps it doesn't. Will you put the rumor to rest?\"\n\n\"I will,\" she said smugly. Speaking up, she said, \"Kai is my mate, making him the prince in every way minus the decree.\"\n\nUra's countenance turned from superior to hard anger once she finished. Even I was shocked at the last part of her sentence. The queen obviously disapproved of us, and I knew she would be even angrier if I went around calling myself Prince Kai. Gods, I hated Master Kai as it already was.\n\n\"Then I have no choice but to enact the ritual.\"\n\nRitual? What is he talking about? Apparently Iteda knew what he meant, because she said, \"That hasn't been enacted in hundreds of years. We're civilized now.\"\n\n\"According to Tronian law,\" Ura yelled, \"should two males make a claim on a female, a battle to submission shall be fought. No armor or elements, only tooth and claw.\"\n\nDragons talked around us, the words rising over the sounds of training and wingbeats in the air. Did he seriously mean to challenge me like that?\n\n\"That law is ancient,\" Firsiss growled.\n\n\"But it still stands,\" Ura hissed back.\n\n\"Can't it wait until after the battle?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"No. The challenger has a right to choose the time and place. It will be fought right here in this very courtyard when the sun reaches its zenith.\"\n\nI looked at Iteda in confusion. Was this seriously happening? I couldn't afford to get injured with a battle looming on the horizon.\n\nFirsiss's shoulders dropped. \"He's right, however stupid it is.\"\n\n\"I'll see you then, Kai.\" He flicked his tail as he flew away.\n\nI knew there was something up with that dragon, I thought. \"Is there anything I can do to get out of it?\" I asked Iteda. She shook her head.\n\n\"Unfortunately, nothing that I know of. I only read about it. It has been enacted just a few times in our history.\"\n\n\"There's a battle coming up, so I can't get injured. I'll have to surrender.\"\n\nIteda looked horrified. \"Kai, you can't!\"\n\n\"It would look bad for you,\" Firsiss agreed. \"Dishonorable.\"\n\n\"To blazes with honor,\" I growled. \"There's no honor to be had if we all end up dead because I'm too injured to fight.\"\n\n\"There's no other way, Kai. You've been trained your whole life to fight, haven't you? He's an uptight noble. You can take him,\" Firsiss said.\n\nI was glad for her vote of confidence, but Iteda's opinion mattered more to me. \"It's not just about your honor. It's mine as well. I'm to be queen of these dragons one day, and I can't have my chosen mate losing a fight like this. You have to fight, and you have to win.\"\n\nI sighed. If Iteda wanted it, I would do it. \"Fine.\" I looked to Namr, who was staring longingly at the palace, probably thinking about food. \"But I need to eat first.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "\"You're really going to fight?\"\n\nThe fear in Jerso's voice hurt me more than any claw could. \"I have no choice,\" I said, crouching a bit so my eyes were level with his. \"I love Iteda, and I won't do anything to lose her. If it means fighting one thousand battles, so be it.\"\n\n\"That means a lot,\" Iteda said, walking into my quarters. She greeted me with a small hug.\n\n\"I only just found you again..\" Jerso lamented. \"I don't want to lose you. You're the only family I have left.\"\n\nI pulled the green dragon into a hug. \"I'll be fine. I've fought much more difficult opponents and won. What's one more?\"\n\nI had no idea what to expect from Ura. I had never seen him fight, nor did I know about his past. He was about the same age as Namr, putting him around eighteen. Luckily, he was small for a male dragon of his age, so he was the same size as Iteda. Though Iteda had fought me off rather well when we first met, I had to hope Ura didn't have the same training as the princess. The only reason Iteda beat me was because of Firsiss, I tried to convince myself.\n\nThe walk down to the courtyard was a slow one. Dragons surrounded me once I reached the lower level. Questions were thrown around, and one rang out above the others.\n\n\"Are you really mates with Princess Iteda?\"\n\nWhy did it matter? Yeah, I knew why it mattered (she was a princess, and I was a common dragon that only a week ago was cast aside as one of society's deplorables), but why did every dragon bring it up as if it was some foreign concept so hard to grasp? When two dragons liked each other very much, they eventually became mates. Just because Iteda was a princess didn't exclude her from that.\n\nIt took all of my willpower not to give the dragons a piece of my mind. Most bore the silks of nobles, which made their behavior even stranger. I would have expected this kind of commotion from the dragons in the city. Once I got outside the palace, even more dragons flooded me with questions. Most bore armor, but others seemed to have snuck in from the streets. Even a few dragonets ran around, barely visible in the chaos.\n\nA large section of the courtyard had been cleared out. Nothing denoted the space as anything special other than a wall of dragons surrounding it. Inside, Ura stood. He scratched his claws on the ground impatiently. Above rose the palace. The queen's balcony was directly above. On it sat Queen Karis along with a couple of other noble dragons. I had to wonder if they had any relation to Ura. Of course, the queen would want the rich dragon to win.\n\nI had no way of knowing who she favored, but I'd be hard-pressed to find a reality where she wanted me and Iteda to remain together. It didn't take a scholar to realize that. And I was horrible at reading expressions from dragons I didn't know well. Luckily, our eye colors helped with that.\n\n\"I need to go sit with my mother,\" Iteda said, her eyes blue. \"Be careful. Ura isn't much of a fighter, so I have no idea why he chose to fight you.\" She gave me a quick kiss, then flew off.\n\nI pushed my way through the crowd, ending up in the clearing of the courtyard. Behind me stood Jerso, now next to Firsiss and Namr. Firsiss looked stoic as ever, while Namr seemed quite confident. Jerso's eyes were a sullen blue.\n\n\"So he finally decided to show up?\" a grating voice called from across the clearing. I turned to face my opponent.\n\nIteda's words tugged at me. Ura isn't much of a fighter. Surely Ura knew I could fight. Why would he try to fight me in one-on-one combat? It wasn't like he had a secret spell; elements weren't allowed. I regarded him warily. \"Wouldn't miss it for the world.\"\n\nUra raised his foreclaw to the queen, drawing a cheer from the crowd. Most of the crowd were soldiers, but some were noble dragons. I noticed the noble dragons were cheering far louder for Ura.\n\nI decided to treat this fight like I would any other job of mine. Observe, then react. If he had a trick up his foreleg, let him play it. I wouldn't so easily walk into any of his traps.\n\n\"Dragons of Trone!\" the authoritative voice of Queen Karis called out. \"The right of ritual combat has been enacted for the paw of Princess Iteda. The fight shall commence once I say, 'Begin!'\"\n\nI rolled my shoulders. It was a weird feeling to fight without my armor on, but it hardly mattered here. I trained my whole dragonet life to fight without it.\n\nUra looked as confident as ever. I noticed when he clawed the ground, small sparks appeared. Odd.\n\n\"Begin!\" Queen Karis shouted.\n\nUra launched himself into the air. Normally I would have risen to challenge such a gambit, but I stayed down. Ura was a dragon I wouldn't trust playing dice with, let alone fighting a fair fight.\n\nHe dove down to meet me. Just as he was about to land, I rolled out of the way. He anticipated the motion, but I was still fast enough that he didn't do any damage. To my dismay, he was on all four paws easily.\n\n\"Iteda seems rather infatuated with you, wyvern.\" He walked to me as I edged backward. My paws made little sound on the stone, while his claws made a distinct clink with each step. \"I wonder how she'd react if she sees your head on a stick? I'd comfort her, of course.\"\n\nI growled. I knew deep down he was goading me, but I ignored it. I dove at him, and our claws met one another as we both stood on our hindlegs. His claws began to dig into my own almost right away. The coldness of them gave away his trick, and likely the reason he chose to fight.\n\n\"Metal claws,\" I growled, pulling away. Ura didn't give up so easily. He attacked with fury in a series of swipes. I backed up, dodging each swipe. One of his attacks put him off balance, and I swiped my tail under him. He fell on his back, and I was on top of him.\n\nHis metal-tipped claw swiped my side just before I could get him in a grip. I cried out, jumping into the air. He was close behind. His claw latched around my tail, pulling me down with him. Instead of fighting, I allowed my body to fall. He didn't expect it. I swiped his muzzle and scored a long, deep slash down his chest before falling away.\n\nBlood dripped onto the cobblestone. The gash in my side throbbed. Luckily, the wing hadn't been hit. My tail also ached where the scales had been ripped off. We circled each other. Ura's earlier bravado had been crushed, but his eyes were still red with one goal in mind: to defeat me.\n\n\"Did you use your corrupted magic on Iteda to make her love you?\" Ura yelled just loud enough for the crowd to hear. \"A night dragon shouldn't exist. You're an affront to dragon kind!\"\n\nHow did he know just where to poke me? Don't react, that's what he wants you to do, I thought. I smirked at the realization as an idea hit me.\n\nI dove at him, mustering all my anger into the attack. He raised his claws to defend himself. I stopped just short, flying into the sky. I dropped down right away before he could turn around, scratching down his back.\n\nUra hissed, swiping me hard across my eye ridge. Blood pooled into my right eye. I blinked to clear it, but couldn't. He pressed the advantage. Another claw slashed my exposed chest as he fought to keep himself on the right side of my vision. The blow wouldn't have caused much damage had his claws not been metallic, but instead, it dug a few inches into me. I fell over, the breath knocked out of me as he shoved me down.\n\nGasps filtered through the crowd as Ura stood over me. Pain shot through every part of my body. He put his claws over my throat and paused, savoring his victory. But then he began to dig the claws into my neck..\n\nAn image of Iteda sped across my mind, and I kicked up with all my might. He flew off, surprised. Blood dripped from the scar of my neck where his claws had dug in. I shook my head, partly to clear the blood, but mostly to get my head back in the fight. Had I seriously almost submitted? If he hadn't broken the scales at my throat, I would have easily called it quits.\n\nMy vision became sharp in my left eye. Ura attempted a cheeky swipe, but I twisted the other direction. I hit his head hard, forcing him down. His head hit the ground with a resounding crack, and I managed to score a slash down his back before he got back up. He attempted to fake a left swipe, but the move was sloppy.\n\nHe's just a rich, snobbish dragon. The only reason he's hurting me is because of those claws. I outmatch him. The thought gave me hope as I dove under his outstretched claw to claw hard down his chest to his stomach. He fell to his knees in shock. Ura tried to swipe his tail at me in a last-ditch effort, but I jumped over it and pushed him onto his stomach. Before he could move another paw, my claws were around his throat, my bulk over him.\n\nHe tried to wiggle free, but I held him tighter. \"Do.. you.. submit?\" I growled loudly. My blood began to drip onto his light-blue scales that looked more like an ocean stained crimson.\n\n\"I submit!\" he yelled, panicked. Satisfied, I jumped off of him. The crowd cheered. The soldiers were the loudest of them all. I even saw some friends that I had made in the past day waving from where they could see the fight on one of the palace walls. I walked towards the palace and looked at the queen.\n\nQueen Karis's expression was unreadable. Iteda flew down from the balcony as soon as the fight ended. She stood in front of me, her eyes glowing happily. They turned orange in a split second. She said something, but I didn't hear it as I turned to meet the charging Ura.\n\nUra hadn't expected me to turn. I ducked under his claws that were stretched out. I stabbed my claws upwards through his jaw. He fell on top of me, his bulk nearly crushing me. I pulled my claws out from him as several dragons helped push his body off of me.\n\nBlood still dripped from my claws as his body spasmed a few times before lying still. Several things happened at once.\n\nRoars split the air. Several dragons flew at me. Before I could tell if they were friendly or hostile, several fire elemental soldiers surrounded me in a circle.\n\n\"Back away! The challenge is over! Master Kai fought in self-defense after the challenge ceased!\" one of the dragons yelled. I recognized the voice as Captain Aleer.\n\nThe crowd of dragons quieted and parted as Queen Karis herself forced her way in. The two blue dragons that were with her gasped when they saw Ura's body. The dragoness turned and began to cry into her mate's shoulder.\n\nFirsiss had appeared at my side as well. I assumed the soldiers around me had let her in.\n\n\"Captain Aleer!\" Queen Karis hissed. \"Explain everything that has happened.\"\n\nAs if she didn't see it for herself, I growled in my head.\n\n\"Well, my queen, Lord Ura submitted to Master Kai after a well-fought fight. When Master Kai turned to you, Lord Ura tried to sneak up and attack Master Kai. It looked to be an attempt at murder, your grace.\"\n\nQueen Karis's eyes narrowed. \"And who are you to assume such a thing?\"\n\nFirsiss cleared her throat. \"Karis.\"\n\nQueen Karis lost her anger as Firsiss addressed her without her title. She was surprised. \"Firsiss, what is it?\" I had expected her to react differently to such a breach in respect, but apparently Firsiss was above that.\n\n\"You were up too high to have noticed, but at one point in the fight, Ura had Kai pinned. His talons were at his throat, but instead of leaving it there, he began to dig them in.\" She pointed to me.\n\nI nodded, showing my throat to all. Before the queen could muster a response, I roared. Silence followed. \"Captain Aleer, what are the rules of such an engagement?\"\n\nCaptain Aleer looked startled. \"From what I read, Master Kai, the rules simply are no armor, no elemental magic, and no killing.\"\n\n\"Examine his claws, Captain Aleer. What do you see?\"\n\nCaptain Aleer crouched down to look at them. He picked at them and pulled. It took a little effort, but he managed to pull metal off of one of the claws. \"It's.. tipped in metal,\" he breathed. \"His claws are covered in metal!\" he yelled out. \"The fight was never fair to begin with!\"\n\nDragons talked to one another in panic. The nobles that I assumed were Ura's parents looked surprised. I had thought they were in on the trick. Either they were putting on a good show, or they actually hadn't known their son was an evil trickster.\n\nQueen Karis's eyes were an indiscernible brown. \"This discovery clearly violates the code of the ritual. Since the ritual was never fair to begin with, I have no choice but to declare no winner.\" The soldiers around me bristled at the statement.\n\n\"But, your majesty-\" Captain Aleer began.\n\nQueen Karis hissed. \"No dragon wins. I won't have my daughter become the mate of such filth,\" she spat. \"An assassin and an abomination.\"\n\n\"Is that how it is, mother?\" Iteda's voice shot through the crowd like an arrow. No dragon dared speak as the mother and daughter argued.\n\n\"Iteda, we will speak of this at a different time,\" she said curtly.\n\n\"NO!\" Iteda roared, startling even me. \"You may be my mother and the queen, but you won't control my life anymore.\"\n\n\"Stand down, Iteda.\"\n\n\"I will not.\" Iteda moved close to me. To all the dragons around us, she said, \"Kai is my mate. And you, mother, will not stand in the way of that.\"\n\nQueen Karis looked hurt and outraged at the same time. She looked like she was about to argue, but huffed instead. \"Very well, Iteda. From this moment on, you are not the princess of Trone.\"\n\nIteda flinched but stood firm.\n\n\"And you are no longer my daughter.\"\n\nIteda broke down, collapsing into my side. Her heavy breathing as she fought off tears was all I focused on as the queen marched away. Firsiss looked at me.\n\n\"I'll talk to her.\" She looked at Iteda, her eyes blue, before following the queen and her guards.\n\n\"Iteda..\" I began, searching for words.\n\n\"Just.. don't,\" she responded, sniffling. \"Leave me alone.\" She ran off into the palace, leaving me alone with the rest of the nobles and soldiers. Ura's parents stood over his dead body, sobbing.\n\n\"That was brilliant stuff, Kai!\" one of the fire elemental soldiers said, clapping me on the back. I grimaced in pain. Dragons crowded me, complimenting my fighting. I caught glimpses of Jerso and Namr in the crowd, but couldn't reach them.\n\n\"You fight incredibly well. We should spar sometime,\" Captain Aleer looked me up and down. \"We should get you to the medical tent, though.\"\n\nAll the adorations fell on my deaf ears as I thought about what just happened. Did Iteda seriously just give up her title and mother just to be with me? How could I ask that of her? How could I ask that of anyone? Would I have done the same thing? The answer came swiftly.\n\nFor Iteda, I would do anything.\n\nI laid down in the medical tent as two light elementals worked on my wounds. I felt them infuse magic in their healing, which I was grateful for. I didn't want to be injured for the real battle that was surely coming. I hoped I would heal quickly.\n\nBy the time I exited the healer's tent, the sun was just setting. Jerso and Namr were sitting outside. They bounded up to greet me.\n\n\"You fought amazingly, Kai! I never doubted you.\" Namr shook his head, then said, \"Well, mostly never doubted you.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Namr,\" I responded, but it felt robotic.\n\n\"I'm glad you're all right,\" Jerso said in a small voice. I crossed necks with him.\n\n\"Just a few scratches,\" I said with aplomb. \"Did I miss anything?\"\n\n\"Nothing of note. Just training.\" Namr rolled his eyes. \"No dragon has any fun around here.\"\n\nI knew Namr was just joking, so I didn't argue. He had seen the army firstpaw as well, so he knew the gravity of the situation. My thoughts instead turned to Iteda. Would she even want to see me again?\n\n\"I.. gotta go. Make sure he doesn't do anything stupid.\" I winked at Jerso.\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\nI made my way to the palace. The beautiful sights of the gardens no longer had an effect on me. Dragons complimented me as I passed them, but I paid them no heed. I had one mission.\n\nI was going to tell Iteda I would no longer be her mate. It was a tough decision, but a necessary one. I loved her more than anything, and it was for that reason I would have to let her go. I couldn't bear to see her hurt anymore because of me.\n\nMy paws eventually put me right outside her door. I blushed at the memory of the previous night. I almost decided against doing what I was about to do, but didn't. Instead, I rapped my claws on the door.\n\n\"Go away,\" a distant voice called.\n\n\"Iteda? It's me.\"\n\nMy heart was tight when nothing happened. Eventually, the door cracked open slightly. From what I could see, she had been crying. \"Kai?\"\n\nShe didn't open the door anymore, and it hurt me more than my bandaged wounds. \"Iteda.. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. I've been a horrible mate to you. I don't deserve you, and..\" I choked on my words. \"And for that reason.. I..\"\n\nI felt tears drip down my muzzle. I'm crying, gods, why!? \"I..love you so much, but I can't bear to see you hurt..\"\n\nIteda opened the door. She rubbed her muzzle with mine, gasping as she noticed my injuries. \"Kai..\"\n\nI sniffed, steeling myself. \"For that reason, I can't be your mate.\"\n\nIt was finally out. I shook as the words tumbled from me. I tried to back up, but Iteda stepped forward. Tears were streaming freely from her as well.\n\n\"Come inside, Kai. Please.\"\n\nI wanted to run away and scream my frustration, but I instead followed her inside. Once the door closed, she hugged me fiercely. What? I just told her..\n\n\"I was so scared I would lose you,\" she cried into my ear. \"Kai.. I was never so afraid before in my life. I love you so much.. I can't imagine life without you. I know I've only known you for a little, but it's like..\" She paused to catch her breath, still crying her eyes out.\n\n\"You still love me?\" I asked in a small, pensive voice.\n\nShe pulled her head back from me, a small smile spreading across her muzzle. \"Of course I do, scale-brain. Why wouldn't I?\"\n\n\"I.. I made you lose your title.. Your mother disowned you..\" The list went on in my head, but she cut me off.\n\n\"And I did those things for you. Because I love you, Kai.\" She smirked. \"Besides, my mother will come around. She's angry because she isn't getting her way. Firsiss will convince her.\"\n\nLet's get some rest, Kai,\" she said, my brain still trying to process how she didn't hate me. I followed her to the nest of furs, laying beside her. She wrapped a wing around me, pulling me close.\n\n\"Please don't scare me like that again,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere.\" I pushed my head into her neck, falling asleep in that position."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "I pulled myself away from Iteda as I woke up. To my surprise, the room was still dark. Only one of the braziers remained lit. A booming laugh echoed from the entrance of the room. I knew it well.\n\nI hissed as Tervain walked in. I stood protectively over Iteda's sleeping form. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nTervain casually shrugged. \"I felt I may have said some rather.. harsh things to you.\"\n\nWell, that wasn't what I expected. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nTervain's eyes glowed. \"As we speak, my army comes. I'm giving you one last chance to join me. If you do, I'll spare your mate as well.\" He gestured to Iteda.\n\n\"But you'll kill all of dragonkind,\" I growled.\n\nHe huffed. \"A fate no less deserved for the sons and daughters of the draconic gods. Other than my children, of course.\"\n\n\"These dragons didn't murder our kind,\" I snarled.\n\n\"Yet they reap the rewards!\" His muzzle snaked down to be in front of mine. His head alone was almost the size of my chest. \"If they truly repented, they wouldn't kill black dragons at birth.\"\n\n\"They were lied to. They thought they were doing the right thing..\"\n\n\"Killing dragonets not even old enough to think isn't doing the right thing.\"\n\n\"You preach that, but you're about to go do that yourself!\" Did he not see the irony?\n\nTervain shook his head. \"They've corrupted you. I should have known.\" He pulled himself up, shaking his wings. \"If all of dragonkind must fall to see the error in their ways, so be it. Goodbye, Kai. Sleep well.\" He flashed a manic smile and faded away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Screams and shouts rose from outside the palace. I blinked away sleep as I realized the implication.\n\nThe battle had come to Treka."
            },
            {
                "title": "Siege",
                "text": "Iteda shook herself awake right after me.\n\n\"It's time,\" was all I said. She simply nodded.\n\nWe walked out onto the balcony. Luckily, our scouts had noticed the army before they could sneak up on us. Soldiers flew out to meet the army before they could get close. I couldn't see Tervain's forces yet, but I knew already it had to be stronger than the force in Phirus. Especially if he had griffons and likely dragons.\n\nI looked down at my body and hissed, almost falling backward.\n\n\"What is it?\" Iteda asked, before she gasped as well.\n\nThe injury on my chest was gone. Judging by Iteda's reaction, my other injuries were likely gone as well. \"How is that possible? I thought healers could only accelerate the healing..\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I was going to say maybe your kind heals faster, but your wing was healing for a week. What changed?\"\n\nI looked at the bracelet. This cursed thing was going to be the death of me. I raised it to Iteda.\n\n\"Maybe. It didn't heal me when I used it, though,\" Iteda mused.\n\n\"Something must have happened once Tervain was released. Aelais said it was the key to keeping him contained.\" If the main purpose of the bracelet was indeed that, then perhaps the magic had come back to it. That had to be it.\n\nI almost flew down to join the dragons at the wall but stopped when I remembered I had no armor. \"Where's my armor?\" I asked. How did I forget about it all this time?\n\nIteda flicked her tail as she walked back into her room. I followed closely. \"What?\"\n\nShe opened a small closet door. Inside were several silks hanging. Below the hanging silks, however, was both sets of our armor. \"How did you..\"\n\n\"I had it brought to me when you were released. I expected you to stay with me that night,\" she pouted. Perking up, she added, \"Though the other night more than made up for it.\"\n\nBlushing, I went about putting my armor on. Iteda helped me with the chestplate, and I helped her as well. I didn't feel nearly as self-conscious about it as before.\n\n\"What will the queen think about you fighting?\" I asked. I already crushed any hope I had of stopping her. She wouldn't let me go out there alone.\n\n\"Does it matter? I'm not the princess anymore anyway. Like I'd leave you out there by yourself. Someone's gotta keep you in line,\" she smirked.\n\nWe touched down on the wall of Treka, just above the gate. There, dragons prepared contraptions that allowed arrows to be fired, as well as catapults and ballista. The catapults would help against the dwarves, while the ballista with bolts tipped in flammable oil would take out any flying creatures. Dragon or griffon.\n\nIn the distance, Tervain's army amassed. From what I could see, there were only dwarves. Among the dwarves were several towers that I assumed would help them traverse the walls. Catapults were also dragged behind them, pulled by all manner of turned woodland creatures: bears, horses, and even deer. I doubted the deer had the strength, but it wouldn't be the first misconception I had about Tervain.\n\nDragons flew above them, harrying them. Luckily, they were our own. It seemed they took my advice to heart: some distracted, while others spewed their elemental magic on the unsuspecting army. It did nothing to lower their numbers, but it did impact their speed. At this rate, they would be in range of our weapons very soon.\n\nA ranking officer walked past me. \"Sir, a word?\"\n\nThe green dragon's eyes were bloodshot, annoyance creeping in at being distracted from his duty. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Any update on the army?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing but dwarves and siege weapons. Our scouts that we sent to harass them haven't reported anything else yet.\"\n\n\"Any more reinforcements?\"\n\n\"Nothing more than the few from small villages.\" I dismissed him with a \"Thanks.\"\n\nIteda and I exchanged glances. \"Why is he holding back, I wonder? It would make sense to send the griffons in to stop the harassment.\"\n\nI had to agree with Iteda. \"It would, but Tervain is smart. There has to be a reason he wouldn't send them in.\" I removed my helmet to relieve an itch. \"There are two reasons, logically. One is he wants to preserve the number of griffons that he has, as he doesn't have many. The other is they're somewhere else.\"\n\n\"Where else would they be?\"\n\nI didn't answer. That was the question of the hour, wasn't it?\n\nThe dwarves were obviously going to be used to distract. There was no way Tervain had any disillusion that the dwarves alone would be enough to destroy Treka. It hadn't been enough in Phirus, even with a dragon on their side. There had to be something else.\n\n\"Only one thing to do.\" I put my helmet back on. \"Let's distract.\"\n\nIf we could buy more time, our reinforcements would have a chance to arrive. The griffons would get here soon, and the centaurs were likely not far behind. I hoped Tolk would send some dragons as well. We had yet to hear back from the scouts sent there, which made sense considering the distance. The flight was a quick one if dragons used the right thermals over the Legus and Delta seas.\n\nIteda flew beside me. \"My magic isn't blocked by their shields, so try to get a strike in when they're distracted with me.\" She nodded.\n\nNow that we were closer, I saw the full might of the dwarven force. At least fifty siege towers rolled along, pulled by various creatures. The wheels dug into the grass despite it being dry. Catapults were also dragged along. While the dwarves were being slowed down by having to defend themselves, the siege weapons were undeterred.\n\nAn orange dragon swooped in to spew flames over one, but the flames washed over it like stone. The tower was undamaged.\n\n\"They're using magic to stop the siege towers from getting destroyed!\" I yelled. A few dragons heeded my call.\n\nLet's see how it stands versus my fire, I thought, summoning the black flame. It spread over the closest siege tower like hot oil, burning and killing the wood like nothing.\n\nMy threat was not lost on the dwarves, who directed their arrows on me. I had to hover high to avoid the onslaught. I tried to summon black magic downwards from me, but it didn't stay long enough in the air to hit the siege towers far below. Iteda and a few other dragons flew up to discuss strategy.\n\n\"Your fire goes through their shields!\" a red dragon said in a high-pitched voice.\n\n\"Yes, but that won't mean anything if I can't get close enough to use it. They're going to focus their fire on me!\"\n\n\"Master.. I mean, Kai needs a distraction,\" a firm voice vocalized behind me. Turning, I saw Captain Aleer flapping his wings to stay on my level. \"Aleer! What are you doing out here?\" I had thought he would be more valuable.\n\n\"I could ask the same of you,\" he said, smirking. \"My squad was asked to help the scouts keep the army at bay.\n\nThat made sense considering all the fire elementals down below. An idea came to me. \"Can you survive in fire?\"\n\n\"Fire elementals are immune to fire as long as we close our eyes. Why?\" Aleer's eyes were misty as he began to think. His eyes flashed green when he realized what I planned.\n\n\"You intend for us to fly through our own fire?\"\n\n\"Can you create a tunnel to the ground level?\"\n\n\"With help, yes.\"\n\n\"Do that, then fly through it. Once you're at the ground, attack quickly, but don't stay long. It will be enough for me.\"\n\n\"An ambush. Smart.\" Aleer nodded. \"It will be done.\" He flew lower to gather some dragons.\n\nIteda looked worried. \"You better not do anything rash.\"\n\n\"Do I look like I would do something like that?\" When I met Iteda's unconvinced glare, I just grinned. \"Fair point.\"\n\nFor a second, it looked as if the dragons had ceased attacking. The dwarves fired arrows into the night sky, hoping to hit a lucky target. Suddenly, a tornado of fire appeared, going straight to the surface in the middle of the dwarves. No dwarves were below it, so none had a shield there. Smart thinking, Aleer. A shield would have ruined it.\n\nThe dwarves kept a distance from the inferno. They fired more arrows into the sky as non-fire elementals harassed them once more. However, they were in for a rude awakening when I saw orange and red forms dart out of the blaze, striking the dwarves hard and fast.\n\nNow! I thought, dropping like an arrow onto another siege tower. I burned that one, and one more close by before the fire elementals zipped past me into the air once more. Arrows followed their retreat, as did I. One arrow grazed my tail, and I hissed.\n\nThe first siege tower I had burned was now a smoldering pile of rubble. The animals pulling it weren't untied and suffered the same fate. Dwarves didn't even attempt to put out the black fire.\n\nMore arrows came at us, forcing us back once more. The gambit had put an obvious strain on several of the fire elementals. Aleer commanded them to retreat and rest. He missed a wingbeat, dipping several feet before catching himself.\n\n\"You should go too,\" I said.\n\n\"Not without you,\" he argued. \"Your magic is the only magic capable of passing through their shields. I won't let you fight alone. You're too valuable.\"\n\nNow he was sounding like Iteda. \"Go, Aleer. I'll come in a moment. Besides,\" I said, gesturing to Iteda flying in just after launching a beam of light, \"I got her to watch my back.\"\n\nHe bowed. \"I'll hold you to that.\"\n\nI watched his retreating form for several moments before turning back to the battlefield. Despite our efforts, the army was moving steadily. We needed a new strategy. The harrowing force holding them back had diminished significantly with the loss of the fire elemental squad.\n\n\"Fall back,\" I yelled. I wasn't a general technically, or even a high-ranking officer. Firsiss had bestowed the title \"Master\" to me, which I still wasn't sure I even earned. However, the dragons heeded my call.\n\nIteda flew right behind me. \"I'm glad you listened to Aleer's advice.\"\n\n\"Only because it works with my new plan.\" It was quickly formulated in my mind after I thought of Firsiss.\n\n\"I'm not sure I like the sound of that.\"\n\n\"It doesn't involve risking any dragons.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you came up with it?\" she asked skeptically.\n\nI chuckled as we touched down on the wall. The army was much closer than before, though just out of range of our weapons. \"Where is Master Firsiss?\" I shouted to no one in particular.\n\nMoments passed before the grey form of Firsiss landed. \"I was helping with the ballista on this side. Lucky you. What is it?\"\n\n\"Do you remember when I asked you about magic in Phirus?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\"\n\n\"Well, you told me air elementals could control the weather.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"Reminisce later. What do you need me to do?\"\n\n\"Can you make it rain outside on the fields around the city? I believe it would slow down their siege weapons. They already struggle in the grass as it is.\"\n\n\"That's,\" she began, ready to argue, \"actually smart,\" she finished, impressed. \"I will find enough air elementals to make it happen.\"\n\nIteda looked stunned. \"Did Firsiss, of all dragons, just pay you a compliment?\"\n\n\"I guess so.\"\n\n\"She barely compliments me!\"\n\n\"Talk about jealousy.\" She hit me on my shoulder. \"Not sure I deserved that.\"\n\nClouds began to drift in from far away, obscuring the stars and moon after a few minutes. As time dragged by, rain began to fall all around the city. The gentle patter turned to a thundering drumroll. It was strange being so close to the storm and not being affected by it.\n\nThe ground quickly became a brown mush. The dwarves had managed a shield to block out most of the rain, but it wasn't enough to cover the ground ahead of them. I saw one of the siege towers in the front sink and stop moving. As soon as that happened, it was as if a silent command told them to stop moving.\n\nIteda nudged me. \"Your plan actually worked.\"\n\n\"Don't sound so surprised.\" I grinned. \"It won't keep them away forever. I doubt the air elementals will be able to hold it for long.\"\n\n\"It buys time, though.\"\n\nTurning around, I noticed for the first time roughly twenty air elementals on top of an inner tower. They all had their paws pointed to the sky. Their eyes were closed as they focused. Firsiss was easy to spot as her armor clearly denoted her ranking as master.\n\n\"They stopped moving!\" a dragon shouted.\n\n\"Hold out for as long as possible,\" another roared from the air. \"No dragon is to leave this wall to engage until the rain ceases.\" The dragon flew to give the orders to dragons further along the wall. Dragons could fly in the rain, but to attack now would be pointless. They had already stopped.\n\nI looked at the white dragoness standing by my side. \"I guess we'll wait.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "An hour ticked by. Still, the air elementals managed to hold the rain. It had turned into a measly drizzle, but it still held the army at bay.\n\nIn the meantime, I had found Namr, Jerso, and the griffons. Well, rather, they found me. It wasn't hard to find the only dragon with black scales in black armor.\n\nPinegrove watched the storm, impressed. \"Smart thinking.\" His black and grey feathers were rumpled - he had obviously just woken up. Mellowleaf, Pinegrove's mate, preened her milky-brown chest feathers.\n\nNamr was staring at Firsiss on the rooftop. \"Isn't she remarkable?\"\n\n\"Are you seriously still flirting with my mentor?\" Iteda asked.\n\n\"Flirting? That implies I'm courting her. I'm simply complimenting a beautiful dragoness.\"\n\n\"Isn't she, like, double your age?\" I remarked.\n\n\"You act like that's a bad thing.\"\n\nIteda rolled her eyes. \"Males.\"\n\nMellowleaf laughed into her chest feathers. \"At least there's something similar between dragons and griffons.\"\n\nI enjoyed the light-hearted mood. It would be crushed soon, but at least I could enjoy this time with my friends. Looking down at Jerso, I said, \"I need you to hide in the palace when the battle comes.\"\n\n\"But I can help!\" he said. \"I'm only a year younger than you.\"\n\n\"Yet you're much smaller still. You haven't hit your growth spurt yet, and you still haven't finished your schooling for your element. No offense, but you'd be a liability. I can't worry about you and fight effectively at the same time.\"\n\nJerso's head drooped. \"If you say so..\"\n\nNamr's new blue armor reflected the fire nearby. \"Are they supposed to shake? I don't when I use magic.\"\n\nI looked up at the air elementals. My eyes widened when I saw two of them begin to tremble. \"Stop them!\" I screamed, flying towards them. Several dragons heeded my call, realizing the problem.\n\nI had no idea how these combined spells worked, but I sure as flames knew dragons shouldn't shake when casting. My scream didn't move them, so I assumed they were too enveloped in the spell being weaved.\n\nI hit the first shaking dragon with my shoulder. That threw the entire spell for a loop. The clouds dissipated instantly and several of the air elementals dropped onto the roof of the tower. The dragoness I had hit barely breathed. I searched for the other one, noticing several dragons crowding him as well.\n\n\"We need a medic!\" Two earth elementals nodded and took off in search of one. It took a minute, but finally a medic arrived.\n\nThe light elemental analyzed her form, running her paws down her chest. \"She'll live, but only if we can get her to my tent right away.\" Another medic worked with the other dragon. \"Had she cast for another minute or so, she wouldn't be so lucky.\"\n\nMy claws trembled as I helped carry her to the tent. It put a lot of strain on my wings, but I couldn't just leave her there. Namr grabbed another side and helped heave her. When we got back to the tower, the other air elementals were shaking themselves to focus.\n\nThe griffons and Jerso met me there. Namr rushed over to Firsiss, who promptly growled at him to leave her alone. He walked back to me, head still high.\n\n\"She'll get over it.\"\n\nIteda landed next to Firsiss, chatting away with her. The pair eventually made their way to us.\n\n\"The ground should stay muddy for a while now. Hopefully, they stay back for the time being.\"\n\nBefore I could say anything else, a dragon flew in from the north, narrowly missing the dwarven army. His flight was erratic.\n\n\"Do you see that?\" Even with my strong sight, it was still a chore to discern anything that far away.\n\n\"I do.\" To my surprise, Mellowleaf was the one that spoke. \"Perhaps a straggler from a neighboring village?\"\n\nThe dragon finally reached the walls of Treka, collapsing in a heap. Four dragons ran to his blue form, but an officer pushed his way through them to speak. I watched as his face turned grave.\n\nI couldn't handle the suspense any longer. I glided down to the wall, landing right next to the earth elemental master as he gave orders to the surrounding dragons.\n\n\"..every officer at each segment of the wall to know!\" he finished, before turning to me. \"Master Kai.\" He didn't bow to me like the other officers, which I appreciated. I knew his rank dictated that he would bow to no one but the queen. I tried to remember his name from the council, but couldn't.\n\n\"What news did the dragon bring?\" The blue dragon was being hoisted away by three dragons.\n\nHis face was a grim line. \"Bad news. We won't be getting any reinforcements from Tolk.\"\n\n\"Was Tolk.. destroyed?\" I couldn't believe it.\n\n\"No, no. The messengers got there and managed to pull one thousand dragons to Treka. The thing is..\" he swallowed, \"they got ambushed by griffons on the way here. Gao was the only one to survive.\"\n\nI hissed. I knew there was something awry.\n\n\"Sir, they move once more!\"\n\n\"What?!\" The master ran to the edge of the wall to see it for his own eyes.\n\nWhen I reached the wall, I couldn't believe it. The army was moving forward through the slush as if it was nothing. The wheels moved over the ground easily, not sinking one bit anymore.\n\n\"How are they moving like that?\" I panicked. Iteda landed next to me.\n\n\"Firsiss is going to rest,\" she said before her ears perked up. \"They move once more!\"\n\nThe master wasted no time. \"Ready the ballista!\"\n\n\"At once, Master Wier!\"\n\nMaster Wier regarded me coolly. \"I heard the rain was your idea. Any other ideas to slow them down more?\"\n\n\"I thought that would hold them back much longer. How did they manage to get the siege weapons to roll over the mud like nothing?\" I shook my head, while Iteda rubbed my back. I could still feel the touch despite my armor. Calming, I said, \"I suppose we must defend for as long as possible.\"\n\nWier grunted. \"I will dispatch scouts once more to slow them down.\"\n\nThe wall shook before he could fly away. Running to the edge, I saw a small crack form from where a flaming rock had been launched. It hit far below, but it meant they were now within range.\n\n\"Ballista! Return fire! Scouts..\" his commands faded from my hearing as Wier flew off.\n\n\"I'm joining them,\" I rumbled angrily.\n\n\"But Captain Aleer..\"\n\n\"Like blaze I'm going to stand around here while other dragons risk their lives fighting.\"\n\nShe stared at me for several moments before nodding. \"Fine. But don't overextend yourself.\"\n\nWe flew with the first line of scouts. I supposed the advantage of being a master meant I couldn't be commanded by any dragon to stay. I breathed in the humid air of the summer night, relishing as it condensed on my scales.\n\n\"Going somewhere?\"\n\nI groaned. \"Namr, what are you doing here?\"\n\nHe flew to the other side of me. \"Same as you. Oh, Pinegrove and Mellowleaf came as well.\"\n\nPinegrove did a barrel roll over my head. Show off. \"How do you dragons fly in this humidity? My feathers feel like mud!\"\n\nNamr closed his eyes for a moment, and the humidity surrounding me went away, leaving dry air. \"Did you just..?\"\n\n\"Gotta be useful somehow.\" He smirked. \"Is that better?\"\n\n\"Much better,\" Pinegrove said.\n\nWe were once again over the army. The arrows wouldn't reach us, nor would the catapults. \"Pinegrove, Mellowleaf, and Namr. Distract for Iteda. I'll do what I can to attack the shielded dwarves.\"\n\n\"Stay close.\" Iteda's firm gaze restrained any argument on my part.\n\nThe night was growing old when we first dove. It seemed like there were more arrows than ever before. I went straight for a siege tower, but couldn't manage any magic because of the arrows. I instead dodged and weaved to get to the ground. I wanted to see how they still moved.\n\nMy paws sunk into the mud. The dwarves hadn't expected me to land and were woefully unprepared as I launched black fireballs at the closest ones. While they recovered, I looked at the wheels.\n\nThe rest of the siege tower had a black glow around it, and the wheels were no different. The glow caused the wheels to levitate over the ground. Their defense of every element was also helping them to get across at a much quicker rate. I had to warn the other dragons if they didn't notice yet.\n\n\"Duck!\" I threw my body to the ground just as a beam of light shot over me. Turning, a pile of dust remained. When I launched into the air, arrows stuck into the side of the siege tower where I had just been standing.\n\n\"What was that?!\" Iteda hissed. Even the griffons looked at me as if I was stupid.\n\n\"Their wheels!\" I managed. \"They're using their magic to cover the distance over the water faster. It gave them an advantage, not a disadvantage! They'll get to the walls much quicker!\"\n\nOf course, my plan was falling to ruin. Instead of aiding the dragons, I was just accelerating our demise. Was this what Tervain meant when he said I was still a part of his plan? Was I subconsciously sabotaging us?\n\nIteda read my mind. \"It's not your fault, Kai. You didn't know.\"\n\nI had no argument for that. A scout flew to our hovering group. \"They won't stop. They're practically ignoring us!\" she complained. Launched flaming rocks flew close by, deflected by one of the dwarf's shields.\n\n\"We'd have to take our full army out here to stop them!\" Namr said.\n\n\"The masters will only do that as a last resort. Let's do what we can.\"\n\nDespite my confident words, our efforts were in vain. No matter how many dwarves we took out, the siege weapons moved ever closer. I didn't know what the siege towers would do when they reached our wall, and I didn't want to find out.\n\n\"It's hopeless!\"\n\nA birdlike call pierced the air above me. Pinegrove? I flew up towards the noise, expecting to assist. To my surprise, multiple feathered forms dropped from the sky. There were more griffons than I had ever seen before in my life. They're here!\n\nThe griffons must have flown just until they were above the dwarves because they were all diving now. General Softadler fanned his wings just beside me to hover.\n\n\"It's good to see you again, Kai,\" the general spoke in his gruff, accented voice.\n\n\"We seriously need to stop meeting like this,\" I said curtly, but I couldn't help the grin that appeared. \"Formalities later. Let's push them back.\"\n\nThe dwarves weren't ready for us on the ground. Almost none of them had weapons meant for paw-to-paw combat other than their bows, which were cumbersome to reload at a quick rate. The griffons, along with the fifty or so dragon scouts, managed to decimate the frontline.\n\nI tucked my wings close to dodge an arrow before swiping my tail at the closest dwarf. My wingblades took the head clean off. Several more followed. Two arrows found their mark in between my chestplate and backplate, but I pressed my assault. Iteda appeared and disappeared into the chaos despite being much taller than the dwarves. I crushed one beneath my forepaw and ripped the chin from another.\n\nMy wings were aching by the time we had finished. A black and brown feathered griffon leaped over me to kill a dwarf that had managed to survive our onslaught. \"Thanks,\" I panted, turning to the remaining forces. The towers!\n\nThe dwarves protected the towers fiercely, but they were distracted. I saw several towers and catapults retreating. One tower near me was attempting to fall back. I sunk my claws into the bear that pulled it, ripping the head clean off. Turning to the tower, I lit the black mass on fire with my magic. Arrows hailed at me, but none aimed true.\n\nI wanted to chase and destroy one more siege tower, but I needed some rest. My muscles ached. I wasn't tired enough to warrant a nap, but lying down for a few minutes would do me wonders. \"Fall back!\" I shouted. \"We've done enough here!\"\n\nOnly when we were back in the air did I truly appreciate the might of the griffons. There had to be at least a few hundred. Softadler had told me five hundred the last time we spoke, but it could have changed.\n\nSoldiers cheered as we landed on the walls. \"Send the griffons to the palace courtyard!\" I called to Softadler, remaining in the air. \"We'll talk there.\"\n\nNothing felt more relieving than when my paws touched on the hard cobblestone of the courtyard of the palace. I wanted to drop right there, but I instead forced myself to move. My dragon friends as well as the griffons and Softadler touched down behind me, the rest of the force not far behind. Firsiss stood at the palace entrance.\n\n\"Was this the reason for the commotion?\" She blinked sleep from her eyes. \"Well, what happened?\"\n\nI gave her my recapitulation of the events outside the walls. \"Well, at least they've retreated for now,\" she mused.\n\nA few more draconic masters had appeared while we spoke. \"Let's take this conversation to the council chambers. The griffons will no doubt prove useful when we have to fight the full mass of Tervain's army.\"\n\nI had to agree. Rolling my wing joints, I said, \"I'm going to rest for the time being. You can speak without me.\"\n\nFirsiss nodded gravely. \"Good idea.\"\n\nThe draconic masters and Softadler walked inside. I found a grassy spot in the garden to rest. Iteda and Namr followed along with our two griffon companions.\n\n\"Just a few minutes..\" I said, yawning.\n\nThey sat down around me. I closed my eyes for just one moment."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "\"Kai, wake up!\" Iteda's panicked voice sobered me fast.\n\n\"What? How long did I sleep?\"\n\n\"Only an hour,\" she said. When I glared at her accusingly, she only added, \"You needed the rest. There's something else.\"\n\n\"Are they back already?\" The dwarves must have aerial defenses ready if they were coming back so soon.\n\n\"No. The southern part of Treka is under attack.\" Smoke billowed in the air behind Iteda.\n\n\"The dwarves can swim?\" Now that would be a development.\n\n\"Worse. Wyverns.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Two Legs",
                "text": "Wyverns?\n\n\"They attacked just now. A dragon flew in and roared the news.\"\n\nI jumped up. \"We have to help!\"\n\n\"Couldn't agree more.\" Pinegrove perked up at the thought of a new battle.\n\nOur strange squad flew south. Fires burned at random spots just ahead. Forms darted in and out of the city. It was difficult to spot which shadow was a wyvern and which was a dragon. The sun had risen, but it was blocked by the moon. Weird.\n\nWyverns had been the bane of dragons since Trone was founded. Usually, they remained on their continent of Drarke, but a few centuries ago they attacked Trone. Since then, Trone has had a steady military presence on Drarke to keep the wyverns from attacking. I wondered how they got past that?\n\nA wyvern appeared in front of me out of nowhere. Iteda reacted faster, slashing his exposed stomach. Pinegrove landed on his head, clawing at his face until it was a bloody pulp. It fell into the city below.\n\nOur smaller cousins only had two legs and two wings, strangely enough. They had two main advantages. What were they again? I struggled to remember. Oh, right. They could all breathe fire, and they had horns that could pierce dragonhide. Our armor was even susceptible if they struck at the right angle.\n\n\"Does Tervain control them?\" I roared over the wind.\n\n\"I don't know!\" Iteda answered.\n\nA group of six wyverns dove at us. Their yellow forms reflected the few rays from the sun that managed to circumvent the moon. We met them with equal fury. I swiped a wingblade at the nose of the first, but another managed to hit me hard in the head. It wasn't damaging, but it made me lose focus long enough for another slash to get me on the exposed part of my neck. Fire came at me. Thinking quickly, I threw up a shield just in time before it could hit me.\n\nPinegrove wasn't so lucky. One flame hit his coat, smoldering some feathers off. Still, he kept fighting with the wyvern. A stray shard of ice flew over his head, presumably an errant strike from Namr.\n\nIteda slammed her tail into the wyvern she fought, breaking its neck immediately. I turned to the other wyvern. We grappled with each other in mid-air, my foreclaws wrapped around his wing joints, causing us to fall. He opened his mouth to spew fire. I released my right claw grip and shoved a talon into his open maw, coming right out the other end. He dropped. I fanned my wings to stop my descent.\n\nThe others had dealt with their adversaries. Namr had lost part of his neck plate and had scratches there, but was otherwise fine.\n\nDown below, several dragons ran from the wyverns as fire spread in several places. Water elementals fought to keep the blaze down, but they were getting harassed by the wyverns. I didn't need to tell the others what to do as we dove together. Other units of dragons were fighting the wyverns as well.\n\nMost wyverns were yellow, which made them easy to tell apart from my fellow dragons. There was the occasional orange or red, but most were a sandy color. They hailed from a desert, so I supposed it made sense.\n\nA water elemental below me was surrounded by three wyverns. He valiantly tried to summon water to help, but it was in vain as another jumped on him from behind. His throat was ripped out quickly, being armorless. At least it was a quick death, I thought, grimacing.\n\nNamr was furious. He dove onto the wyvern as it began to rip apart the dragon. Namr shredded his back scales as other wyverns came to his defense. It was for naught, as the rest of us stopped them before they could manage.\n\nI dodged a stream of fire and swiped my blade at my foe. He evaded. I threw myself at him, stopping just before impact. It was well-timed, as his long horns were lowered so that I would impale myself on them. Instead, I dropped to my stomach. Fire flew over my form. I jumped up, stabbing a claw into his chest. His breathing hitched as he fell on me.\n\nGetting up, I saw Iteda and the griffons form a semi-circle around the remaining wyvern. It was female judging by her horn shape, being curved instead of pointed. Namr hovered nearby, ready to pounce if she flew away.\n\n\"Leave me alone!\" she growled. Her voice was much higher pitched than other dragons. Each word was sharp and pointed as she struggled to pronounce them. I was impressed that we managed to capture one that spoke the common tongue. In fact, I thought they weren't smart enough to speak.\n\nPushing myself in between Iteda and Pinegrove, I let a growl tumble from my throat. \"Who sent you?\"\n\n\"I don't know! He never told us his name! It was a huge dragon!\" Her eyes were wide, which made me realize she wasn't controlled by Tervain. That's a relief.\n\nI moved closer so that I stood over her. It was nice to be taller than someone for a change. \"Tell me exactly what he looked like.\"\n\n\"He had red eyes, a deep voice, black scales.. what else? I don't know.. Please don't kill me!\" Her eyes took on a panicked look. She threw her head around madly, searching for an escape that wouldn't present itself. Her wings drooped under her weight.\n\n\"Tervain,\" I groaned. To Iteda, I said, \"This is part of his plan.\" I turned back to the wyvern. \"What did he promise you?\"\n\nShe cringed back under my gaze. \"He.. he said we would have this land.\" Her yellow form shivered. \"Our land is barren, and we're getting attacked-.\"\n\n\"Not my problem.\" I raised a claw, prepared to spill her innards right here. Something held me back, though. I turned to Iteda, who saw my inner conflict. She nodded her head.\n\n\"Go,\" I murmured. \"Go! Fly back to whatever hole you came out of and stay there. I won't be so kind next time we meet.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you dragon, thank you,\" she stammered, flying immediately. \"I'll remember this.\"\n\n\"Why did you let her go?\" Namr hissed, landing.\n\n\"I.. I couldn't bring myself to kill her. She wasn't turned and she wasn't fighting back.\" Memories of my past threatened to resurface. I pushed them down. Now wasn't the time.\n\n\"Who cares, let's go deal with the rest of them,\" Pinegrove said, stretching his limbs. He bore several new injuries as well as singed feathers.\n\n\"Wait,\" I said, raising a forepaw. \"Tervain wouldn't send the wyverns here for no reason.\" It came to me instantly. \"It's a distraction.\" Above many squads of dragons fought the wyverns head-on. If I had to guess, most of our army had been pulled here to fight them. \"We have to get back to the palace!\"\n\nJust then, ten wyverns landed in front of us. They took one look at the bodies around us and hissed.\n\n\"I don't have time for this!\" I screamed. I summoned two dark fireballs, hurling them at the closest wyvern. He melted.\n\nThe others dove to the sky or attacked on our sides. We were fighting a battle on almost every side now. I swiped up to push a claw away, but another flame managed to hit my chestplate. The metal heated uncomfortably, but held. Mellowleaf was fighting next to me, but a swipe of a claw hit just under her throat when she used her beak to snap at a wyvern above her. She choked, dropping to the ground. Mellowleaf sputtered, coughing blood.\n\nNo, I panicked inwardly.\n\nPinegrove noticed Mellowleaf's form, and he screeched unlike anything I had ever heard. It was chock-full of anger, grief, sorrow, and rage. He jumped on the wyvern that had murdered Mellowleaf and utterly ravaged him. Other wyverns leaped on him, but they paid a dear price when he met them with similar fury as he showed the dead wyvern beneath him.\n\n\"No one else dies today,\" I whispered. I searched deep down in myself as I sensed every part of the tan wyvern that snuck on Pinegrove. He now fought four wyverns head-on. Iteda and Namr struggled with four of their own, leaving me alone. I imagined every part of the tan wyvern and surrounded him with my dark magic.\n\nHis scales began to crack. He let out a blood-curdling scream as he aged faster than possible. His wings fell to the ground, now dust. With nothing to hold his front part up, he fell. Once he hit the ground, he disintegrated.\n\nThe other wyverns saw this and peeled away. Pinegrove roared and followed, intent on killing them. I shook Mellowleaf's still form, confirming my darkest fear.\n\nMellowleaf was dead.\n\nI hadn't known her long, but the loss hurt. Part of me wanted to call Pinegrove back, but I knew he needed his vengeance. A single tear fell from my eye.\n\n\"We have to warn them,\" Iteda said, pressing her flank against mine. Calmed, I flew with her and Namr back to the palace.\n\n\"What happened back there?\" she asked as we flew. Namr was uncharacteristically silent.\n\nTaking a deep breath, I said, \"I k-killed him with my magic. I.. I'm scared, Iteda. It doesn't seem natural, this power.\" Words tumbled out before I could stop them as I realized what I had just done. \"What if I kill a dragon by mistake? What if I hurt you..\" I blinked hard to stop any tears from falling.\n\n\"Shut up!\" Iteda yelled. I was so stunned that I forgot to speak.\n\n\"You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself all the time and worrying. You didn't kill a dragon, and you won't hurt me. Focus on the now, not the later.\"\n\nI swallowed hard. She was right. I was being selfish. If I kept worrying about the future, I would forget to live in the present.\n\n\"You're right.\"\n\nShe smirked. \"I know I am.\"\n\nWe landed in the palace courtyard. Dragons were flying everywhere frantically. Wounded were carried to tents, while dragons lay sprawled out all over the place trying to get some rest. Rumbling came from the front of the city.\n\nFirsiss came running out along with General Softadler. \"Iteda! I'm glad you're okay.\" She ran up to the white dragoness to greet her.\n\nThe brown griffon nodded at me. \"Well met, though the timing could be better. We're being attacked on two fronts.\"\n\n\"We came here to warn you about that.\"\n\n\"According to our soldiers, the siege towers will be at the walls soon. Already the catapults batter our defenses.\"\n\n\"Any sign of the turned griffons or dragons?\" Or Tervain?\n\n\"Let's find out for ourselves.\" Softadler ruffled his recently preened feathers and took off.\n\nThe five of us flew towards the wall. I decided it was a good time to inform the general of Mellowleaf's departure from this world. He took the news as well as he could given the circumstances.\n\n\"My kind has lost many in the past month. Blight, murder, and war. It will be a miracle if there are any more of us left when this is over.\"\n\nThe thought of this war being the end of a species struck a chord in me. I wouldn't let Mellowleaf's death be in vain. Tervain was going to pay. I just didn't know how yet.\n\nSure enough, the dwarven army was closer than ever. Catapults on both sides launched projectiles at one another. The wall had several cracks in it, but it held. Pride surged through me at how well my kind could design and build. Dragons harassed the army, careful to dodge any projectiles.\n\n\"If those siege towers make it to the wall, we're doomed,\" Firsiss commented. I saw Namr attempt to edge himself closer to the dragoness.\n\nGeneral Softadler nodded. \"Indeed. They'll destroy the ballista with their bare hands.\"\n\n\"Is that why they're waiting to send the griffons and dragons in?\" There was still no sign of the turned creatures.\n\n\"Maybe. Didn't the scout say they were attacked north of here by the griffons? They might still be on their way.\" Firsiss shifted on her paws.\n\n\"I don't like it. It seems too easy,\" the general reflected. \"The siege towers would get here much faster if they weren't being distracted so much.\"\n\nMorning should have been here by now, but the sun was still covered by the moon. \"Tervain is the god of night, right? Maybe he'll wait until tonight.\" It was wishful thinking, I know. He would obviously press his advantage, however slim it was. Especially with whatever was going on with the sun.\n\n\"Look out!\" I shouted, tackling Iteda out of the way as a projectile landed right where she had been standing. Except it wasn't a projectile. Two ebon eyes bore into my soul.\n\nThe griffons had arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Adversity",
                "text": "It was a bloodbath.\n\nHundreds of turned griffons had dove in on our defenses. No one was prepared. The ballista closest to me crumbled. Shrieks pierced the night. Dragons tumbled out of the sky.\n\nI met the turned griffon head-on. Whatever color his feathers once were was almost gone, leaving black feathers in turn. He swiped his scaled foreleg at my own. I dodged, but before I could react his other foreclaw hit my head hard. Reeling, I took a new appreciation for my foe. He was fast, so I just had to anticipate.\n\nThe griffon threw a wing out. Instead of attacking, I backed up to see what he had planned. He jumped into the air and rolled. When he was just above me he dropped. Instead of moving out of the way, I stayed where I was. My claws satisfyingly dug into his back. Unfortunately, I remembered that turned creatures don't feel pain, because he battered me to the ground. A claw came down to crush my head, but I drew myself up. His claw came down, and I stabbed my claws through his head. The griffon dropped to the ground, no spasm or anything similar to predict his demise.\n\nThe others were dealing with griffons of their own. In the sky, more griffons battled with dragons. It wasn't a pretty sight. It was clear we were losing. I even saw griffons fighting other griffons, which I knew were our own. Hopefully, they could match the speed of the husks.\n\nI summoned a black fireball to hit the griffon fighting Iteda while his back was turned. Smoldering feathers flew in all directions as the spell I used was a little too strong. Namr was on the ground to my right, pinned beneath another. I jumped over the griffon, bringing my wingblade down straight through its neck. Namr pushed the corpse off of him.\n\n\"Gods, griffons smell awful!\"\n\nGeneral Softadler sank his claws through the skull of the turned griffon he battled. \"Speak for yourself, dragon!\"\n\nI looked out over the field. The dwarven army was now almost at the walls. The wall shook. Going as far as I dared to the edge, I saw a siege tower already here. Ladders came out of it, as well as a battering ram that continually hit the base of the wall.\n\n\"Kai!\" Iteda screamed. I dropped just as a griffon skirted over me. Its claws scraped my exposed scales hard. When it came back for a second attempt, General Softadler met it in a tangle of feathers and claws. The general fought with a ferocity that would make a dragon blush. Before I even thought about helping, Softadler stabbed his claws through its jaw and into its head. He untangled himself as it dropped to the ground.\n\nBehind us, the city was alive with the sounds and sights of battles. I wouldn't be surprised if the griffons had managed to get to the palace. Bodies littered the wall and the ground below, indiscriminately both griffon and dragon. In the distance, I saw a group of dragons surrounding a much larger form.\n\n\"He's here,\" I whispered.\n\n\"What?\" Iteda shouted. She padded over and gaped.\n\nA griffon landed right next to me, its eyes glossed over. Another landed next to the body. I tensed, but relaxed when I saw the griffoness's determined amber eyes. \"I'm organizing an assault on the siege towers. We're evenly matched in the sky. Not sure for how long, though.\"\n\nWe all ducked as three griffons chased two fire elementals in the air. I looked back and saw one of the griffons falling from the sky on fire.\n\n\"If the dwarves get into the city, who knows what havoc they'll cause while we're distracted with the griffons?\" Firsiss appeared. She had disappeared from my view when the griffon ambushed us.\n\n\"Kai's magic is the only magic able to destroy the siege towers.\" Iteda's eyes flashed blue.\n\n\"Only magic,\" Softadler emphasized. \"What if we were to carry rocks and other objects to drop on them?\"\n\n\"Should work in theory,\" Firsiss said.\n\n\"We have to do something! Do it!\" I hissed, panicked. We didn't have time for deliberation. Diving into the air, I introduced a squad of griffons to a black fireball. They crumbled out of the sky, though one managed to escape. I chased it. Iteda was just on my tail.\n\nI caught up with the griffon when it attempted to turn around. It tried to drop, but I wrapped my talons around its tail, using my foreclaw to slice open its head. Shaking the dark blood from my talons, I turned to yell at Iteda. \"Why aren't you helping them with the towers?\"\n\n\"You know why!\" She shot a beam of light just past me, incinerating the griffon before it could throw a shield up. It obviously hadn't expected a magical assault while it was sneaking up on me. \"Any other questions?\"\n\n\"Let's just get rid of these griffons!\" We flew through the minimal light of the eclipse, my form a stark contrast to the white form next to me.\n\nMy thoughts were focused only on the battle. I couldn't worry about the others at a time like this. At least Iteda was with me, so I knew she would be okay. I hoped Namr wouldn't do anything rash to impress Firsiss.\n\nAhead of us, three dragons were fighting to survive against five griffons. I flew to intercept, but a black flame was shot just over my head. Pivoting, I saw a dragon I hoped I would never have to meet again.\n\nIts grey scales were basically gone by now. In their place were black scales. It was the same dragon as back in Phirus, but now similarly scaled dragons flew past to bolster the turned griffon's attack. They ignored me, leaving us to deal with our unfinished business. Tervain wasn't with them anymore. I dropped lower to dodge flaming rocks launched by the dwarves. A building behind me collapsed.\n\nLuckily, there were only roughly ten of the corrupted dragons. The issue would be their magic. I didn't know if we could manage to kill them all without losing everyone in the process.\n\nThe dragon didn't speak. Instead, he fired a huge swath of black fire at me. I instinctively threw up a shield. When the fire faded, the dragon was already on top of me. I slashed with my wingblade as we tumbled in the air, but his scales were harder than a normal dragon's. My blade bounced harmlessly off them. The dragon slashed at my armor, hunting for any opening.\n\nIteda fired a beam of light, which forced the dragon to let go of me in order to dodge. I threw my wings out to catch myself, wincing as I felt the membrane tear open more where the dragon had cut me.\n\nTervain's minion flew straight at Iteda. Iteda's shield blocked the worst of the black fire, but something blew her straight down. Did the dragon just control the wind?\n\nHe did have grey scales in his previous life. Do they retain that magic once turned? The revelation shocked me as I summoned a shield to block more of the black fire that followed Iteda. The dragon glared at me, then disappeared.\n\nWhat? Where- The dragon reappeared as he slammed into my stomach, ripping at the armor. To my surprise, the armor began to give way to the powerful blows. I felt a claw pierce one of my belly scales. I screeched, summoning black fire all over the dragon's head. He didn't get a shield up in time. He broke off of me, flying aimlessly as his eyes had likely burnt away. Iteda fired a beam of light, vaporizing the dragon instantly.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Iteda yelled, flying to me.\n\nI felt weak. The claw the dragon had managed to stab me with had gone a lot deeper than I thought. \"I'll live,\" I answered, forcing a weak smile.\n\nA griffon and several dragons dropped nearby. Another griffon fell, impaled by a ballista bolt that hit his head. I turned to the ballista, which was now overrun by the griffons and even a couple dwarves. I hoped Firsiss and the others were at least somewhat successful.\n\nIt was hard to tell who was winning. I saw wyverns still close to the palace, along with hundreds of griffons and the few turned dragons. It was hard to tell which griffons were which, but the black dragons stood out easily. I watched one tear through three fire elementals with ease.\n\n\"I can't take out all the turned dragons myself,\" I panted. \"I don't have the energy, and I doubt they'll allow a fair fight again.\" It was weird how all but one of the dragons had avoided me. They could have easily overpowered me - surely they knew I was a greater threat?\n\nUnless they think the bracelet is useless.\n\nOr Tervain wants me alive to see dragonkind fall.\n\n\"What will we do?\" Iteda cried. She threw up a shield to block a stray bit of black fire.\n\nThe creatures moved as if they were all connected with one mind. When that ballista killed that griffon, several creatures had destroyed it immediately. When the rain began earlier, the army stopped all at once. There had to be something controlling them, and only one dragon came to mind.\n\n\"I have to kill Tervain.\" It sounded ridiculous, I had to admit. Killing a god? But if I didn't, Treka would fall. Iteda didn't say it, but I could tell she felt the same utter hopelessness as me. Our forces were stretched too thin, which made it easy for the turned dragons and griffons to pick us off.\n\nWe landed on the ground just as I told her my intentions. \"WHAT?!\" she shrieked. \"You can't!\"\n\n\"I have to! Look around us! Tervain controls them. If I kill him, maybe the creatures will go away too.\" It was all a massive if, but I didn't see any other ideas that didn't involve a massive amount of death.\n\n\"What if he kills you? Or-or.. makes you one of them?\" she cried. Tears streamed down her face. \"Kai.. he's a god! You can't kill him..\"\n\nI brushed away her tears with my claws. We fought to maintain our balance as another flurry of rocks struck a building close by. \"Aelais visited my dreams. She said the bracelet can be used.\" My eye ridges dipped in worry. \"It's our only chance, Iteda.\"\n\nI didn't tell her the ever-so-important detail that I didn't know how to use it to kill him.\n\nThe selfish part of me wanted to fly away, forget about dragonkind, and live the rest of my life with Iteda far away from Tervain. Raise a few dragonets and spend every night in each other's paws.\n\nIt was a foolish thought. I'd be condemning not only my friends, but the rest of dragonkind to a fate worse than death. They'd become slaves to the dragon god Tervain.\n\nI wouldn't let that happen.\n\nShe hugged me fiercely, wings wrapped around me, careful with the blades. \"Please..\"\n\nWe stayed in that pose for several moments. Finally, Iteda relented. \"I'm coming with you, then.\" I opened my mouth, but she was quicker. \"You said it yourself. If you fail, we die. I'd rather be by your side then.\"\n\nI pulled away from her. Her eyes were a multitude of colors, but her face was determined. \"I.. I love you, Iteda. If anything happens..\"\n\nShe kissed me. \"I know, you small oaf.\"\n\n\"Hopefully when I hit my next growth spurt I'll be taller than you,\" I huffed.\n\n\"In your dreams.\"\n\nI closed my eyes to focus. Filtering out the screams, the fire, and the stench of death. \"Let's end this. For real, this time.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The flight past the city walls was a painful one. With every flap of my wings, I felt the opening in my stomach getting bigger, but still, I pushed. I saw Firsiss, Namr, and several griffons dropping rocks and stopping the dwarves. Several other dragons fought any griffons that tried to stop them. Their strategy was working surprisingly well. They were so focused that they didn't even notice us flying away.\n\nAt least, I thought they didn't. I heard flapping behind me. When I turned to fight the dragon, I was surprised to see Firsiss there instead. \"What are you two doing!?!\"\n\nNamr was right on her tail. \"Kai? What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm taking the battle to the source,\" I said resolutely, not stopping. Dragons still harried the assault on the wall below despite the lack of my friends.\n\n\"Are you mad?\" Namr gasped.\n\n\"He seems convinced it's the only way,\" Iteda said. \"I trust him.\"\n\nIteda's words warmed my heart. \"Thanks.\" To the others, I explained, \"The bracelet is the key to defeating Tervain. Aelais told me.\" I wasn't sure I entirely trusted Aelais, but what other choice did I have?\n\n\"We'll defend you until you get there, then,\" Firsiss said.\n\nIt wasn't necessary. We flew over the dwarven army, and no arrows were fired. Even the catapults had stopped their assault.\n\n\"Eerie,\" Namr whispered. \"It's almost like they're expecting us.\"\n\nTervain was easy to spot in the back. He easily towered over the dwarves ahead of him as he sat on his haunches. Surprisingly, no other turned creatures were nearby. The grass he stood on had wilted away, leaving brown, dry grass behind. His scales absorbed the meager light the blocked sun provided.\n\nHis eyes never left mine as we landed several yards away from him. He was double the size of Firsiss, and she was a big dragon. I looked around, expecting an ambush, but none presented itself.\n\n\"Kai,\" Tervain spoke, shaking his head. His voice reminded me of stones grinding together. \"Finally, we meet in the mortal realm. What do you think of my creations?\" He gestured out towards Treka, now looking like a mountain in the distance. If I strained my ears, I could still hear the sounds of battle.\n\nI snarled at him. He looked offended. \"Relax, Kai. Soon, Treka will fall. Next, Tolk. Etra will be mine, ruled by my creations.\"\n\n\"Your creations are unnatural.\" I stepped towards him, though my friends stayed back.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Oh, Kai. I wish you would have seen things my way. We could have made the perfect team. Instead, you choose to fight alongside our ancestor's murderers.\" He closed his eyes, and I felt the power emanating from him. \"Such a shame.\"\n\n\"You won't win,\" I hissed, moving even closer to him. I heard Iteda gasp behind me, but I didn't turn.\n\n\"A shame indeed. I already am winning, Kai.\"\n\nI launched a ball of black fire at him, but it dissipated instantly once it hit him.\n\n\"Seriously?\" He shook his head as if I was a disobedient dragonet. \"I'll break you here right now, child.\" His muzzle curled to show his teeth. Stabbing pain hit my mind, and I dropped to the ground in a heap. I screamed, clawing at my head. As my vision faded, dwarves swarmed my companions. Darkness found me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Precipice of Madness",
                "text": "I found myself standing in my dormitory. Raising my ears, I listened around. I wasn't about to be fooled again.\n\nThe guild masters would often try to keep us on our paws by attacking us when we least expected it. Darkness filled the room, though my eyes adjusted easily to it. I tried to filter out the snores of the other trainees. The door creaked open.\n\nI heard the talons as they clicked towards my bed. Five feet, two feet..\n\nI jumped on the dragon. I clawed down his back. He roared in pain, flinging me off of him. The dragon was more than double my size. His red eyes bore into my own, filling my mind with memories once more.\n\n\"Tervain,\" I growled. I attempted to summon my magic but felt nothing when I reached inside of me. Tervain laughed.\n\n\"Magic doesn't work here, dragonet. We're in your mind, and I'm in control!\" He jumped on me, clawing at my neck. My armor was gone, leaving my scales exposed. I threw myself down and rolled, kicking him off of me and scoring a large slash down his side in the process. I felt blood running down my scales.\n\nTervain was up once more, now holding a staff that the guild masters would use to discipline the dragons they trained. He swung it madly at me, forcing me to stay back. Once I was close to the door, I shot through it. I attempted to fly, but the stick slammed into my back harder than it should have. I felt scales crack.\n\nTervain repeatedly hit me with the stick as I lay on the ground. I flared my wings and moved to block his view, backing up to circle him.\n\n\"As we fight now, your friends die. What was the name of that dragoness you're so infatuated with.. Iteda, right? I can't wait to see her expression as she sees you slowly die from your injuries.\"\n\nI jumped on him, dodging the stick and his claws to latch onto his muzzle. He threw me off, but I swung my tail into his cheek.\n\n\"Gah! Enough!\" The scene changed. We were now in a large desert. Dunes of sand rose up everywhere. The sand around me was stained crimson with blood. Beside me lay a slain fire elemental. Wha- I looked up.\n\nA battle raged above me. Dragons fought wyverns with.. humans? Humans rode on the backs of the wyverns. Leather was laid across the wyverns' backs to allow the humans to stay aloft.\n\nHow is that possible? I thought humans were long gone!\n\nI recognized none of the dragons. I flew up, dodging several wyverns chasing another dragon. It seemed that they ignored me.\n\nA black form streaked across the sand, kicking up dust in his wake. I flew down to meet him.\n\nOur talons locked together as he tried to bite my neck. It took all my energy to keep my neck back. Despite his size, our strengths were almost matched. He let go of my left foreclaw to stab a claw into my shoulder.\n\nI cursed. Biting hard, I used my left foreclaw to slice his jaw at the same time. We both released each other, but he recovered faster. He jumped on my back, forcing my wings close to my sides to prevent damage. His claws dug into my shoulders deep as we plummeted.\n\nI shook myself to try to get released, but it did nothing. I closed my eyes. We hit the sand hard. Despite its softness, it still took the wind out of me. The cloud of sand that was kicked up was enough to distract Tervain, who hadn't shut his eyes. I pressed my advantage, rolling from under him and slicing through the soft membrane of his wing. I stabbed a claw into his back, ripping several scales from him as he stumbled. He roared.\n\nThe scene changed. I was now standing on a cliffside overlooking a large expanse of water. Bustling sounds of a city turned my attention behind me. A large stone path led to the most beautiful sight I had ever laid my eyes on. Even Treka would be hard-pressed to challenge the regality of what I saw.\n\nThe city was made of gold, silver, and marble along with other materials I had never before seen. It sparkled like a jewel on the hillside, overlooking the light-blue water. Wyverns flew around the city, landing on buildings. They screeched to one another. A yellow wyvern chased a blue one.\n\nWait, a blue wyvern? I looked closer, and sure enough, the wyvern was blue. I watched as the wyvern dove into the water and disappeared. It suddenly shot out over fifty feet away.\n\nWyverns can build cities like this? I thought they lived in caves. Smaller forms walked along the walls of the great city. Squinting, my jaw dropped when I realized what they were.\n\nHumans. Humans appeared regularly in the landscape outside the walls. Carts were pulled by horses on the path in front of me. Small buildings dotted the landscape, clearly farms.\n\nMy attention was pulled back to one of the yellow wyverns. It landed nearby, maybe one hundred feet away. A human stepped off its back.\n\nWhy do they let those creatures ride them? It felt like the ultimate form of disrespect.\n\nThe human scratched the wyvern's chin with its strange talonless paws, the wyvern letting out a happy trill. They stared at each other for several moments, before the human nodded. It was like they had a conversation I wasn't privy to. The wyvern then flew away, leaving the human to walk over to the house nearby.\n\nA heavy body landed on my back, crushing me into the grass. I tried to roll away, but I couldn't move.\n\n\"This ends here, Kai.\" Tervain's mad voice filled my senses before pain like nothing I had ever felt before struck me. Claws shredded the membrane of my wings. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.\n\n\"You have no idea how long I've waited for this.\" Tervain's words grated my ears. \"I could have had my dragons kill you, but I wanted you for myself.\"\n\nBlood began to drip down my neck as he removed his claws from my wings to put on my neck. \"Say hello to Iteda for me in the afterlife before I turn you into my slave.\"\n\nJust hearing my mate's name stroked the fire inside of me. With a burst of strength I didn't think I had, I pushed Tervain off of me. His claws didn't release my neck until I rolled away, so I lost even more scales. My wings were on fire. I tried to move them, but the motion was torture.\n\n\"So you still have fight left in you?\" He grinned, his own blood dripping into the dirt. If he bleeds, that means he can be killed. Right?\n\nThe scene around me began to ripple. Just before it changed, I saw the human that had dismounted the wyvern staring at me. Before I could think about it, I was in a clearing in a forest. Trees rose above me, taller than any I had ever seen in Etra. In front of me was Iteda, surrounded by eight wyverns. One snapped at her, forcing her to back too close to another that also snapped.\n\n\"Iteda!\" I pulled my wings out to fly, gasping as utter agony filled my body. I pressed them gingerly back to my body. The membrane was a bloody pulp, barely recognizable as wings anymore. I wouldn't fly again.\n\nThe second I tried to run to Iteda, the wyverns jumped on her. \"NO!\" I screamed, watching helplessly as their claws shredded the dragoness. Her form quickly became a mess of guts and blood. Scales were scattered over the ground.\n\nI couldn't believe my eyes. Iteda was gone. My legs shook to keep my body up. Closing my eyes to stem the tears, I remembered Tervain. He wasn't around anywhere I could see. Wait! This is a dream! Iteda wasn't really dead. She couldn't be.\n\nWith that in mind, I also remembered Tervain's words weeks ago, when he first revealed himself to me. I hadn't known his name at the time, but the words were embedded in my mind. I'm a part of you.\n\nAll dragon gods were a part of their designated elementals in some fashion, so it made sense. But if he was truly a part of me and could access my mind's deepest fears, then could I do the same to him?\n\nI saw a dark form zipping right below the clouds before it dove to me. If I didn't try now, Tervain would surely kill me. I searched deep in my mind, looking for the black dragon. Wait, this is my mind! I stared at the rapidly approaching Tervain, using nothing but my thoughts to look inside of him. I felt his mind at the edge of my consciousness. I forced my way in as if I was battering a weak wooden door down. I felt his surprise like it was my own, but before he could throw up any more defenses, I was in. I bent my will on his mind, combing his memories until I found what I wanted.\n\nI watched Tervain stand in front of an assembled group of black dragons. Their eyes were an ominous black as they stared back at him.\n\n\"You will slay the dragons and take over their kingdoms as our own. For too long we've been confined to Sha. No longer!\" He raised his claws to the sky, moonlight shifting to put a spotlight on him.\n\n\"No.\" A voice spoke in the back. All dragons present turned to stare at the offending dragon. It was an older dragon, judging by the way several of his scales were cracked. He waddled forward to stand in front of Tervain.\n\n\"No?\" Tervain stared at the dragon for a long time, before seeming flustered. \"Why won't-\"\n\n\"You may have tricked and consumed their minds, but you won't take mine.\"\n\nTervain glared at the old dragon. \"You think you're a hero? A great martyr for dragons to rally with?\"\n\n\"A dragon of principle.\"\n\n\"Principle won't help you where you're going.\" With a nod of his head, the army of night dragons descended on the dragon. It wasn't pretty. I looked through more of Tervain's memories. I felt him throw walls up, but I battered them down with summoned battering rams. This may have been his mind, but it was also mine. I saw that now.\n\nI saw Tervain's plans. I saw him meeting with the wyverns and forcing them to swear their allegiance in exchange for the draconic lands. He envisioned a world of mindless slaves living with the wyverns, who would swear fealty to him or die. I saw his visions of a world led by Iteda and myself, with him pulling the strings like a puppet.\n\nTervain finally took control. He manifested in the dark chamber. \"You think you're so smart?\" He padded up to me, his pawsteps making no noise in the void chamber.\n\n\"We could crush each other's minds if we wanted to. But if you do that to me, you'll be trapped here forever. Do you want that?\"\n\nThe thought didn't scare me. Would I sacrifice myself to defeat Tervain and save countless lives? If I was asked that two weeks ago, I probably would have laughed in the dragon's face. But now? Now I had dragons I loved. I wouldn't let Tervain hurt them any longer.\n\nFor the first time, the evil dragon's countenance turned to one of fear. \"So be it.\" He ran at me. I dodged the first swipe, but a second struck me in the jaw. I tried to retaliate, but my movements were sluggish. My injuries were too much for me to handle. Tervain was a flash, scratching and biting all over my body. I couldn't match his speed.\n\nAs I fought to survive, I tried to remember anything that would help me. Aelais said the bracelet was the key to defeating him, but how would I use it? It certainly wasn't helping me now. I was minutes away from death. I needed something to help me now.\n\nOur powers aren't limitless. The words drifted to the front of my brain. Wait, if Tervain could change where we are, then I can! I rolled away to give myself a reprieve long enough to switch to a memory.\n\nWe now stood in a white marble temple. Light shone through from outside, blocked partially by a line of trees. Marble columns that were carved surrounded the open-air temple. In front of me were the statues of the five dragon gods. One more pedestal was there, but the statue meant for it was missing. Tervain.\n\n\"A bold move, Kai. But this is the end of your story.\"\n\nI focused hard, trying to call Aelais. Help me! You said the bracelet would help! I roared at the ceiling, striking the pedestal of Aelais in anger. Suddenly, the temple shook violently. Even Tervain lost his footing.\n\n\"No, Tervain. This is the end of yours,\" a musical feminine voice said.\n\nFive dragons walked out to stand in front of me. I must have looked awful compared to their pristine forms. Each wore gold armor that glowed. There was one dragon of each element.\n\nXamulayn, the water elemental god, growled to emphasize Aelais's words.\n\nTervain's eyes widened, fear turning to anger. \"You! YOU KILLED MY CHILDREN!\"\n\n\"No, Tervain. You killed them yourself when you twisted their minds to your cause.\" It was Niassynth, the goddess of fire, who spoke.\n\n\"You killed them all,\" he growled, but it sounded much weaker. Almost pitiful. I fought to stay awake as my blood stained the white marble crimson. \"Even the dragonets.\"\n\n\"That is our burden we must carry. But you will not leave this temple.\" Siozudoith ruffled her grey wings. \"We won't make the same mistake again.\"\n\n\"If you think I'm going down without a fight,\" he panted, \"think again. I may perish here, but I will take down your beloved champion,\" he spat. He threw himself towards me, but before he managed to get close to me, he was struck by every element at once.\n\nSiozudoith's wind held him down. Mupiol's vines kept his limbs tied together. Niassynth and Xamulayn's fire and water impossibly combined to drill into his pinned chest. His shrill scream was cut off when Aelais's beam of light incarcerated the draconic god of night.\n\nTervain was dead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Reunion",
                "text": "The ground below me shook. I still didn't get up. I had no energy left for that.\n\nThe dragon gods turned to look down at me. Before they said anything, the temple crumbled and faded away, along with the gods. I was alone in the darkness.\n\nThere was no sound. I felt the sensation of falling, but there was nothing above or below me to give me an impression of which direction. There was nothingness all around. My mind felt hazy, all the previous events seeming like a dream you couldn't quite remember after waking up. You knew it happened, but couldn't piece it together.\n\nI heard words. At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, but I definitely heard them. Come back..\n\nPlease..\n\nI need you..\n\nLove..\n\nThe words came out a jumbled mess, though some together made sense. I thought I remembered the voice, but the name couldn't come to my mind. Was it a white dragoness? Why would I know a light elemental? There weren't many in Stramwood, let alone one that would take an interest in me.\n\nWasn't Stramwood gone? Something in my mind told me it had been destroyed by an army, but that wasn't possible. No army could destroy anything in draconic territory. I saw obsidian eyes in my vision, but that didn't make sense either. Dragon's eyes were never black.\n\nPlease..\n\nKai..\n\nKai? Was that my name? It sounded familiar. Perhaps it was. A horrendous hissing sound filled my ears as light entered the void. I squinted my eyes at the unwanted intrusion.\n\nA white dragoness in gold armor appeared at the fissure. She reached in, wrapped her talons around my foreleg, and pulled me out with a strength she didn't seem to possess. Light filled my vision."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "I groaned, blinking my eyes open slowly. My body felt like it had been thrown into the rocky waves of the Legus Sea, then burned. A white form hovered protectively over me, crying into my chest.\n\n\"I-Iteda?\" The name suddenly had meaning as I remembered everything once more.\n\n\"KAI!\" She screamed, wrapping her forelegs around me. I winced, forcing her to pull away. She wiped tears from her cheeks. \"I thought you were dead! Your body was getting attacked by an invisible force, and I couldn't do anything.. I..\"\n\nI coughed. \"I'm here,\" I soothed. \"Is he..?\"\n\nIteda nodded. \"He collapsed and turned into dust when he hit the ground.\"\n\n\"And the city?\"\n\nShe laughed in joy. \"You were right. When he died, the rest of the husks fell from the sky or just fell over. It's over.\"\n\n\"Good,\" I said, allowing my head to fall back into the dead grass. I began to close my eyes, but Iteda shook me.\n\n\"Don't you dare close your eyes on me!\" She called for a medic. Several white dragons flew over. I was surprised at how many appeared. I wasn't in that bad shape, was I?\n\nI heard the padder of hooves around me as well as their voices as the white dragons examined me. Centaurs had come?\n\n\"He may not fly again if we don't help him now,\" one commented.\n\n\"Then help him! I'll lend my mana if I must!\" Iteda hissed quickly.\n\n\"We need to staunch the bleeding now before we move him.\" My armor was removed.\n\nI felt magic knead its way into my injuries, and the shock overwhelmed me. I passed out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "I was in a cot inside of a tent. Several other dragons and even a few griffons were sprawled out in cots nearby as well. A light elemental was patching up my left wing. My right wing was covered in bandages so much that I couldn't even see the wing anymore. I felt the medic weave magic into me. It helped dull the pain.\n\nI raised myself to look at my belly, earning a growl from the medic. \"If you want to fly again, I suggest you don't move.\"\n\nI did as she requested. There was substance all over my back scales as well as over my other injuries. I felt utterly useless in the cot like there was something I should be doing but couldn't. \"Where's Iteda?\" I murmured, still a little disoriented.\n\nThe dragoness's eyes softened. \"She's fine, before you ask. Princess Iteda is outside the tent with a few others that want to speak with you. I told them they had to wait until you were all patched up.\"\n\nI relaxed. \"Princess? I thought-\"\n\n\"The queen reinstated her title a few hours ago. I guess she proved herself in the battle.\"\n\nI smiled, feeling prideful of my mate. \"She is a great dragoness.\"\n\nThe medic chuckled. \"Don't go all sappy on me. I heard you defeated Tervain.\"\n\n\"I did what I had to do. Any other dragon would have done the same.\" I grimaced as the needle dug into the part of my membrane that was still there.\n\n\"Would they?\" The question hung in the air while she finished.\n\n\"All done. I'll bring them in.\" She walked over to the flap, walking out. Moments later, the flap reopened. Iteda, Firsiss, and Namr pushed their way through along with Softadler. Namr limped strangely.\n\nIteda cried as she ran over to me. She rested her head on my shoulder. \"I love you so much,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I love you too.\"\n\n\"So, you actually did it,\" Firsiss stated. \"I won't ask exactly what happened back in that field, but at least give us a rundown.\"\n\nI told them of my mental battle with Tervain. I didn't tell them what I saw, though. Tervain had used my memories and darkest fear against me, but the other two visions weren't anything I saw before. I didn't even know humans existed anymore.\n\n\"In the end, the dragon gods finished him off. It wasn't even me.\"\n\nIteda grinned widely. \"Don't discredit yourself.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" I turned the question on them. \"What happened when I blacked out?\"\n\nNamr answered. \"The dwarves attacked us. We were almost overwhelmed, but the centaurs came and bailed us out. Without them, we'd have been goners.\"\n\n\"I saw the dwarves turn their attention to where Tervain was, and then I saw you dragons all out there. After I cursed how crazy you were, we fought our way over to help,\" General Softadler said.\n\nI took a new appreciation for my friends. All of them bore fresh injuries that had been healed, but still they were up to visit me. \"Namr, why are you limping?\"\n\nHe smiled sheepishly. \"I may have lost a few talons on my hind claw in the fight.\"\n\nFirsiss cuffed him softly. \"Only because you didn't listen to my plan, feather-brain.\"\n\n\"I'm right here, you know,\" Softadler said with mock offense.\n\n\"How long was I out?\" I asked once I stopped laughing. It hurt to laugh, but I couldn't help myself.\n\n\"A few days,\" Firsiss answered. \"Iteda didn't leave your side unless she was forced to by the medics.\"\n\n\"Firsiss!\" she chided.\n\n\"What? It's true.\"\n\nI tried to push myself up, but Iteda laid a claw on my back. \"No, Kai.\"\n\n\"I want to see Treka,\" I said, brushing her off of me. \"You'll all help me, right?\"\n\nFirsiss looked guilty. \"We'll help, but I'm not about to get yelled at by the medics for moving you. Are you sure you're okay?\"\n\nI snorted. \"Besides the pain, I'm good.\" Once I raised my stiff legs, I laid one out in front of the other to dismount the cot. It was a chore, but finally I managed to put four legs on the cobblestone floor. I shook, but Iteda and Firsiss on either side steadied me.\n\nTaking a deep breath, they led me slowly out of the tent. Right at the entrance, I saw the unmistakable black and grey plumage of Pinegrove lying down. \"Pinegrove?\"\n\nSoftadler padded up. \"Indeed. He survived, thankfully. Have you seen his mate?\"\n\nMy head drooped. Softadler took the hint. \"Right, I remember now.\" Sighing deeply, he added, \"We've all lost many. It's tragic, but the pride lives on.\"\n\nThe pride lives on. For dragons, I guess that means the city lives on.\n\nOutside, sunlight shone brightly above me, no moon to hinder it. It felt amazing on my scales after being in the darkness for so long. While the moon was my element, a little sun once in a while felt nice.\n\nWe slowly made our way up the road to the palace. All around me the destruction of the battle was evident. Buildings lay in crumbled heaps often. Dragons walked and flew around disposing of the bodies. I assumed there would be a mass burning soon once all the bodies were collected.\n\n\"What of the wyverns?\" I asked, remembering how they weren't turned.\n\n\"They were chased off quite quickly once the turned griffons fell. They lost quite a bit,\" General Softadler answered. I couldn't help but think about my visions of the humans and wyverns. Were these the same ones?\n\nDragons stared at us as we passed. Some even bowed. I felt uncomfortable once more.\n\n\"They bow to you, not just me, you know,\" Iteda whispered in my ear. \"By now, every dragon has heard about what you did.\"\n\n\"Every dragon?\" I said in a small voice.\n\nIteda smirked. \"Yes, and you deserve to have pride in yourself for once. You saved us for Aelais's sake!\" Her tail snaked around to cover my muzzle. \"No buts.\"\n\nOnly when I nodded did she remove her tail. \"You're the worst,\" I said playfully, butting her head with mine gently.\n\nWhen we stepped into the courtyard of the palace, I was surprised. The palace had managed to stave off most of the destruction, though there were several holes. Piles of rubble were scattered about. Tents were set up nearly everywhere for the wounded. One soldier cheered when he spotted us, causing more to join in.\n\n\"Master Kai! Master Kai!\"\n\nI ducked my head, but Iteda forced it back up. \"Stop that,\" she reprimanded. What I saw in front of me made me wish my wings were healed so I could fly away.\n\nStraight ahead at the palace entrance was the imposing form of Queen Karis along with several of the elemental masters. Our pace was agonizingly slow as we made our way to them. I cringed as I waited for the harsh string of words to inevitably flow from Iteda's mother's mouth.\n\nInstead, Queen Karis bowed. The masters around her also bent down. I stood, surprised. \"You don't have to..\"\n\nQueen Karis raised a claw as she rose back to her full height. \"Kai, I was wrong about you. I thank you for saving Treka and dragonkind.\"\n\nI was too stunned to speak. Luckily, Iteda spoke for me. \"Sorry, mother, he's still recovering.\"\n\n\"Clearly,\" she said, bemused. \"I also give my blessing to your partnership.\"\n\nIteda's eyes widened. \"You do?\"\n\n\"Indeed. Kai is a worthy mate.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you!\" Iteda ran and hugged her mother, causing me to almost fall. Softadler caught me before I could meet the ground.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Iteda said, coming back. She nuzzled my head before returning to my side.\n\n\"What of the griffons, Softadler?\" I remembered Queen Karis's deal with them.\n\nQueen Karis spoke. \"The griffons have been given the land northeast of here, where the land resembles claws. The cliffside caves will suit them well, but I will be sending earth elementals to help carve their new eyrie.\"\n\n\"It is a most generous gift, your grace.\" General Softadler bowed. \"Though my kind is in rough shape, we shall begin trade once we can.\"\n\nQueen Karis nodded. \"It is my hope that our races will work together from now on.\" Turning to me, she said, \"The centaurs already have agreed to begin trading with us. Their wood will be very beneficial in rebuilding our city.\"\n\nI felt happy. \"We will build a new world for our offspring to be proud of.\"\n\n\"Well said, Kai.\" Firsiss was impressed.\n\n\"Hey!\" a dragon shouted. I couldn't turn my neck properly to look, but I saw three white dragons land in front of me between us and the palace. \"You stole our patient!\"\n\n\"It was my idea more than theirs,\" I said, trying to shift the blame to myself.\n\n\"He was not to be moved until we can be sure his wings will be properly healed!\"\n\nQueen Karis cleared her throat. The medics bowed. \"Sorry, your grace.\"\n\n\"It's quite all right. I've seen how much you care about your patients' well being. But would it be okay if you tend to Kai from Iteda's quarters? You can check up on him when you need to, and Iteda will inform you if anything happens.\"\n\nWas Queen Karis seriously suggesting what I thought she was? Flames, she is serious about her blessing.\n\nThe medic looked torn, but she finally relented. \"I suppose that will be okay. I'll inform the guild master of this arrangement. We're spread thin as it is.\"\n\n\"We are proud of your work,\" Queen Karis complimented. \"Continue your diligence, but don't work yourselves to death.\"\n\n\"Will he fly again?\" Iteda butted in.\n\nThe medic scratched her head. \"He should, as long as he doesn't move them or get rid of the bandages. Wing membranes heal just like any other part of us as long as there is still some membrane left, and luckily there was some.\"\n\nThat was a relief. I couldn't imagine being grounded for the rest of my life. Sure, I'd have Iteda, but true freedom could only be felt in the sky.\n\nThe Queen dismissed us all. \"I'm glad you're okay, Kai, but I have others to speak to. Welcome to the family, Prince Kai.\" She laughed as I stood gaping. \"Well, that will be your title, after the ceremony that is.\"\n\nThe masters and the queen flew off. Iteda closed my jaw for me. \"Let's get you to our bed.\"\n\nAs we began the arduous trek to her quarters, I couldn't help but notice the bracelet was still on me. It had seemingly fused with my scales. The hellion was also on my other foreleg still.\n\nPerhaps I will heal well, after all. Hopefully, there was at least some magic imbued in the piece of jewelry. I still didn't know how I healed so fast nights ago, but something told me it had to do with the bracelet and Aelais. Though I was still injured quite badly, so maybe it didn't work anymore.\n\nWe finally reached Iteda's room. The entourage led me to the animal furs in the corner, letting me sink into the welcome softness. I sighed in relief.\n\nGeneral Softadler bowed first. \"It was great fighting with you, Kai. I have to head back to where I left the rest of my pride to lead them to our new home. I hope to see you again soon.\"\n\nI smiled. \"And you as well.\"\n\nI saw Namr scoot himself close to Firsiss. He tried to lay a wing on her back, but she moved towards me. \"Get well soon,\" she said gruffly. She whirled on Namr, but instead of hitting him, she draped a wing over him. I chuckled at his surprised look.\n\n\"Yeah, Kai. Heal quickly. But not too quickly. I want you to fly again.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" I laughed. \"Though, could you fetch Jerso for me? I'd like to see him.\"\n\nFirsiss nodded. \"He's with the rest of the dragonets on the first floor. I'll fetch him.\" Namr and Firsiss padded out, leaving Iteda alone with me.\n\nShe sat down next to me, draping a wing over me. Her tail found mine. \"I'm so glad you're okay. I don't know what I'd do without you..\"\n\nI rested my head on her shoulder. \"I love you so much.\" We stared into each other's eyes before she leaned in to kiss me.\n\n\"Am I interrupting something?\" Firsiss said from outside. Iteda pulled away from me, blushing madly.\n\n\"No, it's okay.\"\n\nJerso walked in. He ran as soon as he saw me. \"You're okay!\"\n\nWe crossed necks. \"Yes, I'm fine. You didn't get into any trouble, did you?\"\n\n\"There was no trouble to be had in the palace,\" he huffed. \"You speak as if I'm much younger than you.\"\n\n\"Sorry. It's hard to see you as any older.\" I only had one vision of Jerso besides the dragonet I saw now, and it was a much younger version.\n\n\"I'm going to finish my schooling and become a guard!\" he said, suddenly bubbly again.\n\n\"Really? That's amazing!\" I grinned. \"Where did you come up with that?\"\n\n\"I spoke to one of the older dragons in the castle. He said I would be a perfect fit to join and that I have the drive to be one of the best!\"\n\nMy life in Stramwood seemed like such a long time ago. It was hard to believe that I may become king one day when just a month ago I was running a bar to give Jerso a better life. Just the thought made me lightheaded.\n\n\"All right, Jerso. You should probably let Kai rest.\"\n\n\"You're right, Master Firsiss.\" He nudged my cheek affectionately before heading back out the open door. Iteda made sure to close it behind him this time.\n\nShe resumed her place next to me. We simply enjoyed each other's company. After a few minutes, I said, \"I.. I saw some things when I fought Tervain. I can't explain them.\" I told her of what I saw of the wyverns. I spoke of the battle and the golden city. When I finished, she leaned into me to calm me.\n\n\"I'm sure it was nothing more than Tervain playing tricks on you. You know how he was.\"\n\nI relaxed. That made the most sense. \"Yeah, you're probably right.\"\n\nShe stood up, stretching her wings. \"You must be starving.\"\n\nMy belly rumbled in response. \"I haven't even thought about it, but yeah, I am.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Red ram.\" I licked my chops.\n\n\"Red ram?\" she asked, raising an eye ridge. \"That cheap meat?\"\n\n\"It reminds me of home.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"All right. I'll be back.\" Before she left the room, she turned around. \"Kai?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I love you..\" Just those three words made me feel so much better. \"..but you'll definitely be needing a bath once you are able to.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"I love you too, Iteda.\"\n\nThe world felt a little brighter."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "I threw my arms back and yelled my joy for the world to hear. The wind whipped my brown hair back, though I knew I would just fix it at home. My mother would throw a fit, but I would worry about that later.\n\nI'm going to dive, Martin, Cynthia thought to me. I grabbed the lip of the saddle in anticipation, feeling my stomach flip as she dove. Leveling out, she glided in a lazy circle before landing near my home. I hopped off, grinning.\n\nDo you really have to go? she complained. We could fly to the desert and back and your mother wouldn't even know.\n\nI scratched her chin, causing the yellow wyvern to purr. I felt her disappointment as my own through our bond. I wish, but I promised my mother I would be home for dinner. You also have to train today.\n\nShe huffed. I know, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.\n\nI smiled. Cynthia was fiercely intelligent but young. I was only sixteen, though I knew she was a lot smarter than me. She made me understand that any chance she got. Look, how about tonight? We'll fly to the desert and back. It'll be cooler then as well.\n\nShe grinned. Promise?\n\nOf course, dear.\n\nShe butted my chest with her nose before flying off. I watched her go, still blown away by how regal she looked. We had only been linked for a few months, but she never failed to impress me.\n\nI walked back to my home. The grass was up to my ankles, making the trek uncomfortable. I longed for the stone streets of Aura.\n\nBehind me, I heard grunting and words being thrown around. It was far enough that I couldn't understand what was being said. Turning, I stood shellshocked at what was unfolding in front of me.\n\nA much larger wyvern-like creature stood on top of a smaller one, both with black scales. The larger one was ripping the wings of the one below it like butter. They resembled wyverns, but instead of having two legs, they had four. Were these.. dragons? I had read about such creatures, but they were dismissed as myths and legends.\n\nThe smaller dragon threw the larger one off of him. It was covered in blood and its wings looked useless in their current state. They began to fade from my sight, but the smaller one looked at me. His eyes bore into me as if they could see my soul. A flash of light, and they were gone.\n\nI looked around. Wyverns were flying nearby, but they didn't give any indication that they saw what had transpired. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me?\n\nI ran to the top of the cliff where the dragons had been fighting. Several black scales were lying on the ground. I picked one up, stroking it. It felt exactly the same as Cynthia's scales, only a different color. Tucking the scale in my coat pocket, I leaned down to touch the blood. I couldn't believe it. What kind of magic could make such powerful creatures disappear? Why were they fighting?\n\nI sprinted back to my house to get a glass jar to prove my sanity. Something important had just happened, and I would find out."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Erth Dragons 1) The Wearle",
        "author": "Chris D'lacey",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "In the beginning was the sleeping dragon, Godith. And all around Her was a void that moved with Her gentle breathing.\n\nFor no reason known, at no time that could be measured, Godith opened her eyes and poured light into the void. And liking this, She chose to make an i:mage. A limitless universe in which She might live as many lives as She desired, within the bodies of countless dragons. She opened Her mouth and brought forth a great flame. Into this flame She spoke a word, KI:MERA, meaning 'place of fire and light'.\n\nAnd when this was done, Godith looked upon Her i:mage and blinked Her eye. And from every sparkle that fell from that jewel came a creature or a mountain or an ocean or a forest. And many of those creatures were also dragons, made in the i:mage of Godith Herself. To each She gave a blessed gift, which was the right to speak the beginning of Her name whenever they spoke the beginning of theirs.\n\nAnd so came Gawain, G'reth and more. And such was the power of Her jewelled light that other worlds formed beyond Ki:mera, some with creatures, some without. But nowhere else did dragons roam, until, as their wisdom and numbers grew, they came to understand that She was in the stars that blinked in the darkness around Ki:mera and that the stars were therefore as close to them as She was.\n\nKnowing this, they i:maged openings in the void and reached into the darkness to explore every fragment of Her creation. Through their 'fire stars' they travelled, to colonise worlds beyond Ki:mera and awaken the glory of Godith across the universe. A journey that in due course brought them to a planet of plentiful water and diverse life forms.\n\nWhen Greffan, Prime dragon of the visiting Wearle, commingled with the wisest forms on the planet, using his mind to look into theirs, he discovered that the creatures used the sound 'Erth' to describe their home. In the language of dragons this meant little more than 'dirt'. Yet even the dirt here was tingling with life. Greffan communicated back to Ki:mera, describing 'Erth' as an unspoiled breeding ground for dragons.\n\nIt was the last Ki:mera ever heard of him or of the twenty-three others in his Wearle.\n\nThis is the story of what happened to those dragons \u2013 and the dragons that came in search of them\u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Gabrial",
                "text": "'Fold down your wings,' per Grogan said. He was huddled up almost in the shape of an egg, his words gruff and hard to hear against the wind. His gnarled old feet, missing the third claw on the left side, were barely visible beneath the curve of his chest. His scales lay taut against his aged sides, flattened down for warmth, less open to the wind. Yawning, he said, 'It might be nightfall before Grystina calls. You need to conserve your energy for battle. You're supposed to be presenting a measure of pride not hopping about like a giddy wearling. It will not look well if you fall off this mountain before you have the chance to raise your claws against G'vard.'\n\n'I can't settle,' said Gabrial, letting the wind lift his wings to their maximum. His underwings, which were the colour of blue ice water, glinted in the frost-cooled sun. Across the valley, where the snow-capped mountains were arranged in a wave as blunt and uneven as per Grogan's teeth, G'vard would be waiting with his second, per Gorst. All that stood between them was a strip of fine cloud and this deep pool of air. Far below, safe in her birthing cave, the matrial dragon, Grystina, was curled around her hatching eggs. As soon as they broke she would call for a guardian to protect her young, a dragon to be her companion for life, a dragon that would have the right to call himself 'father'.\n\nGabrial was nine Ki:meran turns old, half the age of his powerful opponent. He was also a blue, technically a minor in dragon years, a turn or so away from the first blush of green that would earn him the status of roamer, a dragon free to fly where he chose. But the Wearle had known guardian blues before \u2013 most notably Gabrial's father, Garon, who had never quite lost the blue tints on his underwings and had always been classified by that colour.\n\nWhen he thought about his father, Gabrial's wings did lower. Garon had been among the first Wearle of dragons to visit this planet, an expedition whose fate was still shrouded in mystery. For some reason, as yet undetermined, contact with them had ended abruptly. On the dragons' homeworld of Ki:mera, the Elders had consulted and decided to send a second, larger party to investigate.\n\nAmong the sixty that arrived on Erth were mappers, healers, roamers, three Elders, two representatives of the intelligent class of dragons known as De:allus, and an entire wyng of fighting dragons called the Veng. The new Wearle immediately colonised a mountain range close to the open sea, just as their predecessors had. Three phases of the moon had passed, but they had found no trace of the missing dragons. And while the search for them was the highest priority that Gabrial and his companions faced, all other rituals were being observed \u2013 including the raising of young.\n\n'Your impatience will be your undoing,' sighed Grogan. He belched and a curl of smoke rose from one nostril. 'The whole Wearle expects you to lose this contest. If you're happy to prove them right from the outset, then flap away and be done with it.'\n\n'I'm not intending to lose,' said Gabrial, clawing slivers of grey shale loose from the ground on which he was perched. Such was the heat pouring off his body that most of the snow around him had melted, paring back the crisp white surface to its wet grey underbelly. 'Why are you here if you believe that I will?'\n\nPer Grogan belched again. 'Tradition demands you have a second for a fight like this. Someone has to see to it you don't make a fool of yourself. Rightly or wrongly, I promised your father before he left Ki:mera with the first Wearle that I would watch over you until your scales turned green \u2013 a reckless statement I might yet have cause to regret. What will be the most damaging, I wonder: following you here or the prospect of ridicule if this one-sided \"contest\" does not go well?'\n\n'At least I put myself forward,' growled Gabrial, spitting orange-tipped embers around his feet. He watched a pair of roamers set down on a peak due east of him. Once Grystina gave her call, this entire ring of mountains would be filled with dragons, keen to observe the battle for her.\n\n'And for that you have my respect,' said Grogan, tipping his grey head forward a little, 'but don't let this brief flirtation with glory puddle your brain. You're only here because the more eligible young dragons know what the outcome would be if they fought G'vard. They applaud you while blowing a snort of relief.'\n\nGabrial barrelled his chest. 'I courted Grystina and she did not reject me, therefore I have to fight for her. My father would be proud of me.'\n\n'Your father was impetuous,' Grogan sighed, his scales clattering quietly as the wind got under them. 'A quality you seem to have inherited in plenty. But even he would accept it takes more than raw courage to defeat an opponent as powerful as this. G'vard will put your tail in a knot if you try to blaze your way past him. Stick to the tactics we devised and you'll hopefully survive with your wings unclipped. An honourable defeat is no shame, believe me. Put up a good display and the Elders might give you a wyng to command. Think of it as a training exercise, practice for the battle you really want to win.'\n\nGabrial tightened his eye ridges slightly. 'What do you mean?'\n\n'Some matches are more appropriate than others,' muttered Grogan, looking across the valley for signs of movement. 'We both know your second heart beats for another.'\n\nGabrial gulped and ingested a wisp of smoke, passing it out through the spiracles that lined the sides of his neck. He stared into the open sky as if mesmerised by a drifting cloud. His soft blue eyes, yet to develop their jewelled state, barely moved as he thought about what Grogan had said.\n\nThree females had come to Erth with this Wearle. One was Grystina. Another was the ageing queen, Gossana, a dragon so fearsome even the Veng avoided her. And then there was Grendel, the youngest of the three, whose primary role was to assist Grystina throughout her laying cycle and beyond. Whenever Gabrial thought about Grendel, the scales around his snout turned a deep shade of green. He couldn't hide the change in his colouring now.\n\nWithout looking at his charge, per Grogan said, 'I have seen the admiration you have for Grendel \u2013 and the regard she reserves for you.'\n\n'Really?' Gabrial said, slipping forward as his feet danced on the wet rocks. 'You've spoken to her? She\u2014?'\n\nBefore he could go on, a screech wound up from the pit of the valley, clawing at every fissure of rock along its way.\n\n'That's Grystina. She's ready. Prepare yourself,' said Grogan.\n\n'Yes,' said Gabrial, snapping to attention. It was true that his second heart ached for Grendel, but his primary heart was in control now, pumping great waves of energy through his body, heating his blood till the veins began to swell. He punched out his wings to steady himself, sending a snow cloud sideways over Grogan. By the time the flakes had settled, per Grogan had raised himself and the mountain tops were rumbling to the roars of dragons eager to see a fight. One roar carried above all others. It came from a distant peak directly opposite Gabrial's perch.\n\n'That's G'vard,' Grogan said. 'He lays claim to Grystina and demands you stand down. You must answer him.'\n\nGabrial knew this and was ready. For two days, since the Elders had accepted his challenge, he'd been training his throat to deliver the most powerful response it was capable of. Unlatching the bones at the base of his jaw, he clicked his mouth wide and called up a bellow which drove aside a wide cone of air and coloured the world every shade of orange. His fire reached into the valley in a jet half as long again as his body. There was a little more squeal to it than he would have liked and per Grogan was visibly displeased by the energy wasted in making a sound of such magnitude, but the effect was just what Gabrial had wanted. All around the mountain tops the air was popping with similar bursts of colour. The watching dragons were becoming excited. Perhaps the battle for Grystina would not be as one-sided as the odds suggested?\n\nG'vard called again, strength and purpose pouring out of his lungs.\n\n'Now you've angered him,' sighed Grogan. 'That's not a good start. And it won't impress the Elders either.' He swivelled his eyes toward the peak of the mountain the dragons called Skytouch where the silhouettes of the Prime dragon, Galarhade, and the other two Elders had appeared. 'This is not a fight to the death, remember? Produce a flame like that in battle and Galarhade will kill you if G'vard doesn't. All you're aiming to do is take a scale, not turn him to ash. Are you clear about the rules?'\n\nGabrial nodded. 'I can flame and claw, but not stab or bite. Eyes and hearts must always be avoided.'\n\n'Good. What else?'\n\n'No phasing.'\n\n'None whatsoever,' said Grogan. 'Any movements through time, no matter how minor, will be seen as cheating. You'll be back in Ki:mera before you can scrape your last meal off your teeth if Galarhade detects a change in the continuum. What else?'\n\nA second call went up from Grystina, the final call to battle. The assembled dragons burned the air in acknowledgement. All along the skyline now, more were arriving like a flock of giant birds. G'vard threw out another fierce roar.\n\n'What else?' per Grogan repeated harshly, lashing his tail across Gabrial's chest to prevent the young dragon from launching too soon.\n\nGabrial roiled his wings in frustration. 'Only one i:mage.'\n\nPer Grogan nodded. 'One. Don't waste it.' He pulled his tail away and Gabrial launched. 'Stay low!' the old dragon bellowed, adding to himself, 'The less far you have to fall, the easier it will be to stand up tomorrow\u2026' And then he took to the rock that Gabrial had vacated and bellowed to per Gorst that his charge was in the air.\n\nLikewise, per Gorst let it be known that G'vard had launched.\n\nTwo dragons, one theatre of air.\n\nThe battle for Grystina had begun."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Gabrial arrowed downward into the cloud, rolling once before levelling out and streaming with it toward the far mountains. He was following per Grogan's advice to fly fast below the layers and tease the white dragon with glimpses of him, before disappearing at the point of a strike. On a day as bright as this, blues enjoyed the natural advantage of being able to lose themselves in the sky. It mattered that the angle of the sun was right, but for a brief and sometimes telling moment Gabrial knew he could effectively vanish. And a moment was all it took, at speed, to lash out and rip away a dragon's scale. The first to deliver an opponent's scale to Prime Galarhade would be Grystina's champion.\n\nBut G'vard was a dragon of no mean stealth, and his second, per Gorst, was a clever tactician. Between them, they'd concocted an unusual strategy, which also made use of the cloud. Gabrial's first inkling of it came when it started to rain. He was confused, and rightly so. There had been no rain in the sky all morning and the cloud was too fine to produce the sort of wash spitting over his wings. Yet the droplets were definitely coming. Suddenly G'vard loomed up behind a semi-transparent wall of water and Gabrial realised what was happening. The white dragon was using bursts of cold flame to condense the cloud and drive the water across Gabrial's flightpath. As Gabrial splashed into it, four huge claws punched through the torrent. Their sharp tips closed like a deadly flower, grazing the small scales under his jaw. A moment later, his lungs were almost turned to stone as the thwack of G'vard's enormous tail fell across his breast. No scales worked loose, but the hit sent Gabrial spinning sideways. Every spiracle hissed in complaint. His fire sacs stuttered and temporarily went out. Dazed, he fell in a plummeting spiral. The gasp from the onlooking dragons suggested they feared for the young blue's life. It would have been a simple matter at this point for G'vard to swoop down and flick a scale off Gabrial's back or shear away the isoscele at the tip of his tail. (What humiliation that would have been: a sore stump instead of a sharp triangle.) Instead, the white swung round and waited for Gabrial to right himself, prepared to intervene if necessary and save his opponent from a fatal crash. For as per Grogan had rightly said, this was a test of worthiness, not a battle to the death. The Wearle could ill afford to lose any dragons.\n\nAfter a drop that measured some thirty wingspans, Gabrial recovered. His fire reignited and his ear stigs rattled out a fierce alarm: if he didn't lift his head and do something with his wings he was destined to become a permanent feature of the valley floor. He heard roars of relief as he rolled three times and found the strength to enter a glide. It wasn't enough to prevent him hitting an escarpment and tumbling even further down the valley, gathering snow like a falling seed. Any sensible dragon might have accepted defeat. But Gabrial wasn't ready for surrender. He was stunned and pained all over his body, but the hurt had merely sharpened his senses. He flipped himself upright, roared for good measure, shook off the snow and looked around for G'vard.\n\nThe white dragon had landed behind him. G'vard had risen to his full height, just over a flame's length away. His jaws were open, his multiple, hooked incisors glistening and sharp against the smoke-stained pink of his mouth. It was a posture that would have made most dragons cower, and a ripple of fear ran through the blue now. When dragons grappled on the ground, rarely did the smaller beast triumph. Gabrial was strong, of good weight for his age, but G'vard was huge in comparison; the hardened veins in his formidable wings were almost as thick as Gabrial's front legs. But it was the eyes that Gabrial knew he must avoid. G'vard was fully jewelled and an expert in glamouring, the ability to mesmerise opponents with a stare. Yet it was a subtle glance at the eyes that saved the blue dragon and prolonged the fight. Something wasn't right with them. The eyes were shaped like jewels, with many angled sides, but they weren't glittering. That could only mean they weren't real. Gabrial was looking at an i:mage.\n\nOf the many gifts dragons possessed, the ability to i:mage was the most prized \u2013 simply because the technique was so difficult to master. As early as the wearling stage, young dragons were encouraged to make structures outside their heads of the shapes they created inside them. These 'floating pictures', as they were sometimes called, had no substance and dissolved as the dragon's concentration wavered. Gabrial could still recall many of the 'blobs' he'd produced as a wearling. He had struggled in his youth to make anything worthwhile (his mother had called his first creations 'disturbingly different'), but had steadily improved with his father's guidance until he could make convincing i:mages that looked so perfect they had to be prodded to determine whether they were real or not. That was exactly what G'vard had done here, used his ability to create a duplicate i:mage of himself, even drawing some snow into the structure to give it depth. Gabrial took a chance and flew straight at it. The fake G'vard exploded in a burst of snow, hiding the blue just long enough to avoid the swing of real claws concealed behind the i:mage. Once again, G'vard was left frustrated and the young contender escaped.\n\nAnd now Gabrial had a minor advantage. G'vard had used up his chance to i:mage. If he tried again he would be disqualified and the contest would default to Gabrial. What's more, Gabrial was in the air again, where he was more at ease. On a straight flight, G'vard would have left him behind in five wingbeats. But in aerial combat, Gabrial was easily more agile, and he proved it several times in the next few clashes. Twice the white dragon closed on him at speed, and twice Gabrial deftly swooped away. At one point, he cleverly folded his wings and darted between the white's stout legs, almost nicking a scale from his belly. The watching dragons hurred in appreciation. The blue was proving an entertaining adversary. Was it possible he could actually win?\n\nGabrial believed he could. But he was also aware that if the aerial exchanges continued for too long he was going to tire. One sloppy wingbeat, one miscalculated roll, and G'vard would have him. And so he moved into his final stage, which was to use his right to i:mage. First, it involved a little deceit. He swung toward G'vard again, apparently attempting to loop around him. This was a dangerous strategy. Halfway through the manoeuvre, G'vard twisted and caught hold of Gabrial's leg (the unscaled part between the knee and the foot), almost dragging the youngster to him. It was a terrifying moment, echoed in the gasps from the mountain tops. Yet somehow Gabrial wriggled free, banking away toward the only volcanic peak in the range \u2013 the open crater of the mount they called Vargos.\n\nG'vard roared and gave chase. The watchers rumbled, thinking the blue was fleeing. But this was all part of Gabrial's deceit. He had saved enough energy to put a decent space between himself and the white. And as he flew over Vargos, in his wake he created his i:mage, a huge eruption of volcanic splinters \u2013 fire, hot embers, fizzling rock, spits of lava, dense black smoke. It took a huge amount of mental energy. Indeed, as he landed on the far side of the crater and turned to look for his pursuer, he almost toppled into the fearsome caldera his mind had created. The eruption looked incredibly real. It was almost as if the thrill of battle had strengthened his i:mage and shaken the entire mountain awake. Deep in its belly, it was grumbling worse than per Grogan at sleep. Gabrial thought he heard the sound of splitting rock, but ignored it as he set himself, ready for G'vard. He was hoping the white would come through the i:mage with his eyes closed \u2013 as he would if shielding himself from real sparks. Then Gabrial could pounce, steal a scale and win. But G'vard was nowhere to be seen. And the mountain was growling like a thing possessed. Out of it came a dreadful cry \u2013 a cry that sent a shiver running right through Gabrial. It was Grystina, calling to say she was in danger. She was birthing in this mountain, Gabrial realised. She was here, in the caves of Vargos.\n\nIn two wingbeats he had crossed the crater to the other side, though it might have been better for him to sink into that hole and never come out. What he saw as his i:mage dispersed struck a chord of terror in all three of his hearts. Dragons were descending from the mountain tops, swooping on an area halfway down Vargos, coming away with great lumps of stone. G'vard was among them. So too, per Gorst. A whole section of the slope had collapsed, in a slurry of rocks and churned-up snow.\n\nWith a flap of wings, per Grogan landed beside Gabrial.\n\n'W-what happened?' Gabrial stuttered, blinking in shock.\n\n'What were you thinking?' per Grogan hissed, steam emerging through the gaps in his teeth. His eyes held a deeply troubled look.\n\nGabrial was shaking. What had he been thinking? Embers. Smoke. A distraction, nothing more. Not this. Not a landslide. That just wasn't possible.\n\n'The mountain cracked,' per Grogan said, as if he'd like to pick it up and drop it on Gabrial's foolish head. 'Did you i:mage a solid rock fall?'\n\n'No,' said the startled blue. 'I\u2026I can't do that, you know I can't.' He looked at the frantic activity below. The whole Wearle, directed by an Elder called Grynt, was trying to free a passage through to Grystina and her precious wearlings. Gabrial shook his head in horror. 'We have to go and help.' He put out his wings.\n\n'No,' said Grogan.\n\nGabrial looked into the old dragon's face. Lines were creasing around Grogan's eyes. 'But\u2014?'\n\n'They may turn on you, Gabrial. Godith have mercy, it would be better if you fled.'\n\n'But I didn't do anything,' Gabrial repeated. 'I can't i:mage physical effects.'\n\nPer Grogan fanged his lip. 'That's not the way the Veng will see it.'\n\nGabrial tightened his claws, sending a small stone tumbling down the mountainside. Grogan was right; if the Veng set upon him they would rip him to pieces and ask questions later. But his fate truly rested on the judgment of the Elders. 'I'm innocent,' he said. 'I have nothing to fear. We must aid Grystina. If we fly into the crater we might be able to reach her from the in\u2014'\n\n'No!' Again, Grogan held him back. 'Look at me, Gabrial.' He dug his claws into the young dragon's chest. 'She's already dead. She couldn't survive a rock fall like that. You wouldn't get through the melt pools anyway.'\n\nDead? The word felt like a stone on Gabrial's tongue. Dead? He had killed a potential queen? And almost certainly her wearlings too. Wearlings that could have been his to care for. His knees gave way and he sank to his haunches, a sickness as ferocious as any eruption beginning to bubble up deep in his gut. As if his nerves weren't strained enough, faint cries began to ripple the air. The excavating dragons had found something.\n\nGabrial and Grogan looked down together, in time to see G'vard, blackened by dirt, presenting a moving bundle to the prime dragon, Galarhade. It looked like a wearling. It was a wearling. A female. A wearmyss. The whole world fell silent for it. For a moment, the entire planet was still. All that moved were the feet and tail of that baby dragon, reaching out for her absent mother. Galarhade tilted his head very slightly. He grunted something which sounded like a question. G'vard shook his head from side to side. The onlooking dragons all lowered their gaze. A wave of sorrow flowed up the mountain and all but stopped poor Gabrial's hearts. He knew what that head shake meant.\n\nGrystina, as per Grogan had suspected, was dead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The Elders called the Wearle to gather at Skytouch, where the mountain flattened out at the bottom of the waterfall and the water spread forth like a seeping wound to form a restless lake, always on the verge of freezing \u2013 or thawing. The result was a conflict of shuffling ice that flowed over the basin at its farthest edge into any number of smaller cascades, before joining the permanent glacial lane that surged between the mountains in snow-thickened layers to the open sea. On their homeworld of Ki:mera, centuries of flamework had led to the carving of ornate settles at meeting places just like this. Here, the dragons perched wherever they could, mainly clawing to ledges on the lower mountainside. Gabrial sat some ten strides from the water, an uncomfortable figure on an even more uncomfortable seam of boulders, guarded at his rear by two of the Veng who had forcefully escorted him there. On the shoreline in front of him lay the tragic figure of Grystina, stone chips in the traps of her scales, rock dust blighting the pleasing gradations of her mid-green body. Just beyond her, at the near-centre of the lake, on a natural stone pillar that poked through the ice field like a discarded tooth, sat the Elders, Grynt and Givnay, between them the imposing figure of the Prime dragon, Galarhade.\n\nGalarhade was old. It showed in the furrows around his eyes and in the hairs which grew unflatteringly long from the base of his jaw. These days, his tail rarely stood straight, but lay curled around his creaking legs (to warm the failing joints, some said). His breast, once as bright as the fresh ice around him, was slowly losing colour, the first indication that death's scale had set forth to shadow his eyes. But these were minor imperfections. Through most of his body, including his wings, he was still a magnificent red \u2013 a colour not given to a dragon at birth but a prize earned from a dance with longevity. Green or purple was the base colour of most dragons, who grew into it (from blue) around their ninth turn. They would keep that shade for the rest of their lives \u2013 unless they lived to be Galarhade's age. Then the scales would cease to renew but at the same time gradually convert to red, like a tree observing the onset of winter. Unusually, for one so aged, Galarhade had lost none of the glistening highlights on his eyes or wings, most notably along the run of fine scales which protected the bony edges of the wing. Too many 'lytes' (scales which sparkled) were generally considered unappealing, though dragons had argued for and against this feature for centuries. Decorative braids on the face or zig-zagging accents along the neck were the trimmings that determined beauty in females or handsomeness in males. The debate went on. Many believed that Galarhade possessed the perfect mix: enough lytes to make his contours shine, plus the finest example of gradation ever seen, those sweeping tints across the underwings and chest that truly determined a dragon's 'look' and set one dragon apart from another. The tail was also a source of great vanity. Those creatures blessed with an elongated hue that flowed from their neck right through to the isoscele were much admired among their peers. G'vard, for instance, despite being white, and therefore one of the genetic minority that had hatched outside of the standard pattern, possessed an enviable range of near-white tints that almost touched yellow at his isoscele (a colour much desired, but rarely seen). G'vard was tipped to be an Elder someday. But for now, the wisdom and majesty of Prime Galarhade was the voice that prevailed upon the Wearle.\n\nHe summoned G'vard to stand beside the blue. It was the closest they had come since the battle terminated.\n\n'Is there no hope?' the Prime dragon said. He had spoken softly, but his words rolled across the lake with such stark gravity that even the clattering ice fell silent.\n\n'None,' said G'vard. 'Grystina was dead when we found her.'\n\n'That is not what Prime Galarhade meant,' said Grynt, the fearsome-looking Elder at Galarhade's right.\n\nGalarhade raised a single claw, enough to keep Grynt in his place. 'What of the drake?' He meant the male wearling. A mother would only ever lay two eggs: one male, one female.\n\nG'vard hesitated. His white chest rose. 'Missing.'\n\n'Missing?' gasped Gabrial, blowing up a whisk of snow. He looked at G'vard. There was a faint speck of light in the white dragon's eyes, as distant as a pale Ki:meran moon. He was mourning the loss of Grystina more than anyone.\n\n'Be silent,' said the Prime, barely raising his voice.\n\nGabrial bowed his head. He should not have spoken out of turn, he knew, but he'd done no more than echo the rumblings on the slopes behind him. 'Missing,' G'vard had said. That meant there was a chance the drake was alive.\n\n'When we entered the chamber,' G'vard announced, his words floating off his tongue like a fog, 'we found the wearmyss shielded by the queen's tail.'\n\nA fresh wave of murmurs descended. Strictly by law, Grystina should not have been declared a queen until she emerged from the cave with her young, but no dragon was going to challenge the sentiment.\n\n'Continue,' said Galarhade, waving for quiet. His ears, like his legs, were no longer at their best.\n\nG'vard drew breath. 'The floor of the chamber had partially collapsed. Grystina had been taken into the void. All but the thickest part of her tail was buried by rocks that had fallen onto her. When we pulled her out, we raked away what we could of the rubble. We dug where it was safe to, but the debris was deep and so hard-packed it was difficult to clear. We believe it consumed the drake, because we could not scent him or find evidence of his body. One so young could not have survived such a weight of rock. His fire belongs to Godith now.'\n\n'Have you looked for tunnels?' a sharp voice said.\n\nGallen, leader of the Veng, arched his body forward. He was on a ledge not far above Gabrial's right ear, a worrisome speck on the edge of the blue's vision. It was a general truth that dragons feared nothing except themselves, but if there was one class they cared not to cross, it was the Veng. Like G'vard, the Veng also differed from the standard colour pattern. They were bright green, almost emerald, not easy on the eye. They were often considered to be physically small, an illusion caused by their lack of gradation and the slender design of their bodies (they were sometimes called sier pents, a derogatory term that meant 'green fish'). There were no illusions about their power, however. One only had to look at their ferocious horns or count the battle stigs rising from the backs of their heads to know how intimidating they could be, even to a dragon like G'vard.\n\n'Of course we looked for tunnels,' G'vard said. 'We found many fissures in the walls of the chamber, but nothing that resonated deeply when we called. And we have heard no cries from the drake. The roamers have been searching the outer slopes, melting back the snow, looking for openings. They found one unmapped cleft that may have a passage into the mountain \u2013 too small for any dragon to crawl through, though a wearling might crawl out. We dare not widen it lest the rocks collapse again.'\n\n'May I ask a question?' another voice said.\n\nPrime Galarhade's gaze swept up the mountainside, where a purple dragon with large yellow eyes sat beside a similar-looking one. 'De:allus Graymere will speak,' said Galarhade.\n\nGraymere shuffled forward slightly. 'This may be of little significance, but it took a few moments for the rocks to fall, and Grystina had time to call out before the tragedy occurred.'\n\nGallen sighed and flicked out his talons. 'Get on with it, De:allus. My scales will have dropped by the time you've made your point.' The Veng had little tolerance for dragons that spent most of their time prodding things to see how they worked.\n\n'My point is,' Graymere said with a growl. 'Why would she place only one of her wearlings in her tail for safety?'\n\nThat started a rumble, most of it scathing. The weight of many scowls bore down on Graymere, but when Gabrial looked across the lake he saw a thoughtful glint in the Prime dragon's eyes. Elder Givnay, he noticed, was paying particularly close attention to the words of the De:allus.\n\nG'vard was less impressed. He raked the ground in frustration, making Gabrial jump. 'What does this matter? The deed is done. There could be any number of reasons Grystina failed to protect the drake.'\n\n'But when I was a drake, I hardly ever left my mother's tail,' said Gabrial.\n\nG'vard curled his claws into the loose grey rocks, almost grinding the smaller stones to dust. 'That's probably because you were as pathetic then as you are n\u2014'\n\n'Enough,' said Galarhade, ending the argument. He glared at G'vard, who lowered his head. For a moment, the only sound was the honking of birds as they flew across the lake. The wind snapped and changed direction. Snowflakes drummed Grystina's corpse. Galarhade shifted his position slightly.\n\n'The words of the De:allus are noted,' he said, throwing his voice high up into the mountains. 'We may never know what happened in the cave. Let it simply be recorded that Grystina gave her life saving one of her young, perhaps choosing the wearmyss over the drake to foster the future growth of the Wearle.' He levelled his gaze at Gabrial again. 'Now we must examine why this tragedy happened and what is to be done with those involved.'\n\nA stony beat rang out around the mountains as dragons pounded their tails against the rocks.\n\n'Prime, I'm innocent,' Gabrial protested, his wing bones rattling in fear. 'Why would I want to harm Grystina? I fought for the right to protect her young. My i:mage was clear. I pictured embers in my mind, nothing more.'\n\nThis was too much for G'vard. With a roar that almost burst Gabrial's ear pipes, he turned on the blue and wrestled him, neck first, to the ground. He was quickly surrounded by Gallen and the Veng, summoned by Grynt to stop the violence. It took a vicious swipe from Gallen's left claw to claim the white's full attention. When G'vard looked up, one of his scales was hanging loose off Gallen's talons. A cruel jibe, perhaps intended to say, 'If you'd done this earlier, we'd have had another drake to protect the Wearle.' The stand-off that followed was brutally loud (though thankfully not physical). It took a huge burst of fire from Galarhade to calm Gallen and the white dragon down. The exertions left the Prime visibly weary. He had to breathe deeply to recover. He flapped Gallen and his Veng away.\n\nG'vard knelt before his Prime and sought his forgiveness. Galarhade granted it without redress. He told Gabrial to stand. The blue staggered to his feet, the mountain tops dancing around his head. It felt as if his spiracles had been plugged with sand. All three of his hearts were beating fast, and at different rates.\n\nGalarhade called per Grogan forward. To the anxious mentor he said, 'What is your opinion of this?'\n\nPer Grogan gulped. He was one hundred and seventy-four Ki:meran turns old, looking forward to a future of deep simplicity and even deeper sleep. He glanced at the pitiful body of Grystina, mercifully arranged to hide the injuries to her head. He had known this female since she was a myss. How many more lives did this planet have to claim before the Elders looked to colonise elsewhere? A pricking sensation at the corner of one eye warned him of the danger of shedding his fire tear, that drop of burning water that contained a dragon's auma, the fire of life granted to them by Godith. 'Gabrial can be\u2026impulsive,' he said. 'A trait inherited from his much-admired father.'\n\n'This is not about his father,' Elder Grynt reminded him.\n\n'I merely wished to point out,' per Grogan said painfully, 'that his father's ability to i:mage was highly developed, if a little\u2026'\n\n'Wild?' said Grynt.\n\n[ Per Grogan stared at him. He had never liked Grynt. He was one of those lightly-coloured purple dragons that boasted dark tints and a streak of armoured silver on his throat and breast. He was young for an Elder ]\n\n(a title not awarded purely by age) and had been sent on this mission to oversee security. Although Gallen commanded the Veng in the air, operational procedures were decided by Grynt.\n\n'There is no wickedness in Gabrial,' Grogan said plainly, making sure his voice carried far. 'His loyalty to the Wearle is as true as any dragon. It should not be forgotten that he volunteered for this mission when others suggested he was too young to be of use.'\n\n'And now we see the fruits of it,' Gallen sneered.\n\nPer Grogan turned on the Veng. 'I know this blue. I have trained him well. He would not use his powers of i:maging recklessly.'\n\nFor the first time, Elder Givnay entered the debate. Givnay was a mute who had lost the ability to speak due to an accident shortly after birth. He had been trodden on at play by an adult dragon and one side of his throat had collapsed. The injury had left him unable to utter anything other than stifled cries. His fire sacs, still in their early stages of development, had withered to nothing and his chances of making fire were ruined. His devastated father had wanted to end the drake's life, fearing Givnay's future would be a miserable arc of unrequited desires or envies. But the mother's better wishes had prevailed, and despite his difficulties Givnay had grown into a handsome adult \u2013 a distinctive grey, with gold and purple trappings around his neck, which helped to shadow the injury he'd sustained. Unlike his peers, he had never roamed or sought the attention of females, but had turned himself inward, developing the skills of the dragon mind. He had spent much time in isolation, meditating upon the glory of Godith and perfecting the gift of transference. He could not only speak (and listen) in thoughts, but move his mind into another dragon's head. It was hardly surprising that most dragons feared him. In a world ruled largely by claws and smoke, silence was a weapon not even the Veng knew how to battle.\n\nHe leant towards Galarhade and pressed a thought into his mind, which Galarhade aired. 'Did you know what the blue was planning to i:mage?'\n\nPer Grogan looked flustered. His eyes lost focus. Momentarily, his balance faltered. 'I\u2026advised him tactically, of course, but\u2014'\n\n'Advised?' Grynt said, picking out the word and holding it up like a piece of skewered prey.\n\n'Wait,' said Gabrial, stepping up to Grogan's shoulder. He could see where this line of questioning was going. 'It was my idea to draw G'vard across the crater.'\n\n'You've been warned more than once to be silent,' said Grynt. 'Do I need to remind you, you stand before your Prime? This impertinence will not serve you well.'\n\n'I won't let you hold Grogan to blame,' said Gabrial, the words squirming carelessly out of his mouth.\n\nEvery watching dragon caught their breath. To disrespect the Elders in this manner was as good as inviting death's fire to rain down.\n\n'Still \u2013 your \u2013 voice,' Grynt said, barely needing to open his jaws. Black smoke played around his purple face. 'The per was asked for his opinion and he alone shall give it.'\n\nGrogan cleared his throat. Looking squarely at Galarhade, he said, 'I have thought on this and I do not believe my charge was capable of causing a physical eruption. A few live sparks, perhaps, but nothing of the magnitude so witnessed. He's simply not advanced enough.'\n\nPrime Galarhade tilted his head. 'Then what are you saying?'\n\n'That it was a natural event \u2013 or that some other force took advantage of the moment.'\n\nNow there were cries of 'Shame!' from the mountainside.\n\nElder Grynt leant forward, making his pillar creak beneath his weight. 'Are you accusing a dragon more accomplished of callously causing the death of a queen?' 'Murder' was an ugly word among dragons. Even the Veng did not kill for pleasure or reward.\n\n'Of course not,' Grogan snapped. Raising his voice above the clamour, he roared, 'We were sent to this planet to find the first Wearle! How can we be sure that whatever force has conspired to hide them from us did not bring about the death of Grystina?'\n\nA good argument, but not strong enough to stay the tide of insults.\n\nOnly the De:allus dragon, Graymere, was truly taking note of Grogan's words.\n\nIn spite of the hysteria, the Elders consulted. The Prime exchanged brief words with Grynt, but spent longer in silent communion with Givnay. In tragic situations such as this, it was Givnay the Wearle would turn to for solace. His long contemplations on the wonders of Godith marked him as a source of spiritual comfort. If any dragon would show mercy, it would be the mute.\n\nCalm fell as Galarhade raised his head. He said, 'We find the blue guilty of causing the rock fall which killed Grystina and her myss. We accept there was no malice intended, and for this reason he is spared the worst of punishments. We also find that the dangers of the i:mage should have been recognised by the per. We therefore hold both to account. Before I pass sentence, would anyone speak in favour of these dragons?'\n\n'I would,' said a voice. To Gabrial's surprise, per Gorst came forward. He was a cousin of Grogan and shared similar gradations in the grey-green blushes that dignified his sides. 'Per Grogan is older than most of my teeth\u2014'\n\n'And nearly as useless,' a Veng voice muttered.\n\n'\u2014but his loyalty to the Wearle is without question. I ask that his sentence be light. As for the blue\u2026yes, he has caused a great misfortune. But let us not forget that he fought to be this queen's companion \u2013 and bravely so.'\n\nThis was met by another hail of roars.\n\nPer Gorst lengthened his neck and shouted, 'When other, more legitimate candidates, closed their wings and would not even court her!'\n\nHrrrrrr. The storm of criticism blew itself out.\n\nPer Gorst looked at the dismayed figure of G'vard. 'My charge is wounded, his challenge unfulfilled. But he will recover to fight for another queen. This is a terrible day, I agree. But the Wearle needs young dragons. Fearless dragons. Dragons prepared to face difficult and possibly dangerous encounters. Despite our mapping and our searches we are still no nearer to knowing what happened to the first Wearle. I am therefore in some agreement with Grogan.'\n\n'Your point?' said Grynt.\n\n'I ask that the blue be kept on Erth to continue his work, not exiled back to Ki:mera in shame.'\n\n'I agree,' said Galarhade, before Grynt could interrupt. 'They will both stay \u2013 but they must always be reminded of what they have done.' He ordered both dragons to look at him.\n\nGabrial sat up proudly.\n\n'From this day,' said the Prime, 'until or unless you prove your worth again, you are no longer recognised in the glory of Godith.'\n\n'What does that mean?' said Gabrial.\n\n'It means your name is now Abrial,' said Grynt. He nodded at Grogan. 'And his is Rogan.'\n\n'No,' per Grogan said. His old legs gave way and he collapsed to the stones. This time, not even per Gorst came to help him. 'I am of the old ways. The shame\u2026 Please. Anything but this.'\n\nGabrial glanced at per Gorst. G'vard's second was deeply troubled by the sentence. And very few dragons were making any noise. 'Abrial?' the blue repeated. And then the rumble did begin. One of those peculiar waves of sound that dragons could produce, but rarely did.\n\nThe sharp and raucous wind of derision."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "His judgments delivered, Galarhade gave the order that all activities would be postponed until sunrise the next day. During this time the Wearle would pay homage to the memory of Grystina. All of them, Veng included, would return to their settles when the meeting was done to contemplate her life and that of her drake. Elder Givnay would prepare a song of comfort, which he would share with the Wearle through the gift of transference. No dragon would forget this tragic day.\n\nBefore that, there was yet more misery for Abrial and Rogan. Looking at the older dragon first, Galarhade decreed that Rogan be removed from his duties as a mapper \u2013 one engaged in memorising the layout of the land around the dragons' domayne \u2013 and that he be sent instead to the far side of the mountains to mine the seams of fhosforent there. Fhosforent was a pink, crystalline substance found in Erth's volcanic rock. Its discovery had been reported by the first Wearle, who had also determined its principal benefit. Ingesting even minute quantities of the crystals appeared to improve the strength and duration of a dragon's flame. Over the centuries, dragons had tested many naturally-occurring minerals in this manner, but none had produced such rapid or promising effects as fhosforent. Rogan knew the work would be hard, but he was not overly dismayed by his punishment. Confinement in a mine would keep him out of the main body of the Wearle, where there would be fewer taunts about his name. And there was always the chance he might find a rich seam, which would instantly grant him favour with the Elders. In these respects, he counted himself lucky.\n\nAbrial was less enchanted with his new role.\n\n'A sweeper?' he said, when Galarhade passed sentence. Until the morning of the tragedy the young blue had been part of a five-dragon wyng, learning to improve his flying skills. This included lessons in aerial combat from none other than per Gorst. Abrial was easily the best of the wyng and had just advanced to the most exciting part of his training: learning the art of phasing \u2013 the ability to move through time during flight. Now, it seemed, his progress was about to be abruptly halted.\n\n'Are you questioning the decision of your Elders?' said Grynt, his breast scales glinting weakly in the sunlight.\n\n'But I was\u2014?'\n\n'It doesn't matter what you were. Your duty now is to fly the edges of the domayne, keeping watch for incursions, especially from the Hom. You will rest no more than once on each circuit, and at dawn each day you will report to Veng commander Gallen. Don't disappoint him, blue. The Veng do not respond well to laziness.'\n\nAbrial puffed a heavy wisp of smoke. Talk of the Hom had made his scales lift. He had never seen one of the two-legged creatures that could allegedly stand like bears and make fire outside their bodies. (Hrrr?) According to per Gorst, who spoke of them occasionally between teaching sessions, their auma levels were superior to any other creature that inhabited Erth (except dragons, of course). The Hom were clever and inventive, he said, but usually fled when challenged. There had only ever been one serious confrontation. Recently, a large Hom male had foolishly hurled a rock at Gallen. The Veng commander had responded with limited force and charred the arm raised against him. But even the Veng adhered to the Elders' law of no killing, except in self-defence or for food. (No dragon had thought to taste the Hom yet, preferring instead to graze on the lush forest greenery or the juicier animal forms that covered the domayne.)\n\nDue to their aggression and relative intelligence, the Hom were chiefly suspected of being involved in the disappearance of the first Wearle, yet nothing could connect them to it. Prime Greffan, in his earliest reports, had identified the Hom as a potential threat. This had first become apparent when he'd ordered his dragons to lay claim to the mountain range. He told how the Hom had resisted being driven out of their caves and how some had fought back with sharpened sticks. No dragons had been injured in the skirmishes and no Hom killed, though several had suffered serious burns when sparks had fallen on their fragile skin or warning flames had blown too close. For a while after the conflict had ended, small parties of Hom had tried to reinvade the domayne. In exasperation, Greffan had ordered his roamers to sear a line in the ground, all the way from the borders of Vargos to the shores of the unmapped sea, a line that the Hom were forbidden to cross. This had led to further clashes, until the Hom had finally withdrawn to resettle in the flat lands beyond the domayne. And there they remained, always a source of simmering tension, without ever posing a serious threat. Barring the incident with Gallen, not a single dragon had since been targeted. The Veng had come to Erth prepared for a fight, but so far their formidable claws had generally been employed picking food off their teeth.\n\n'I thought the Hom were driven out of the domayne?' bickered Abrial, still tetchy about his new role.\n\n'They were,' said Grynt, equally irritable. 'Your job is to stop them coming back in.'\n\n'Grynt, be done with this,' said Prime Galarhade. 'We are not gathered here to talk about the Hom.' He gave a call and two more dragons glided down from their settles \u2013 the females, Grendel and Gossana. Abrial stepped aside so that Grendel would have room to land. She was a gloriously beautiful dragon with touches of gold around her purple face and enough lytes underwing to star the night sky. Her eyes, like Abrial's, were just beginning to crystallise, but there was still enough softness in them to melt even the hardest of Veng hearts. She nodded shyly at Abrial, a look that suggested she felt sorry for him. He gulped and tightened his wings. Being this close to Grendel made his scales rattle, and that was not wise in front of the Elders.\n\nThe other female, Gossana, was well known throughout the Wearle. She was dark green, running to black along her neck. She had heavily-slanted eyes, one the colour of amber stones, the other near blood red. Many dragons feared to look at her, for the eyes could alter colour with her mood. Like most mature females, she possessed a ruffle of sawfin scales, which stood up in a frill behind her ears and were the same dark colour as the rest of her body. This bestowed her with a bold, majestic look, which she further inflated with the high carriage of her head. On Ki:mera she had twice raised wearlings and had been sent to Erth to oversee Grystina's first birthing \u2013 a slightly modest assignation for one so grand, but an important commission nonetheless. Galarhade bowed when he spoke to her.\n\n'Matrial,' he said, acknowledging her previous successes with young.\n\n'A sorry day,' she said, funnelling dark smoke. Dark smoke was heavier than air and would fall from the nostrils rather than drift away. It was one of the few ways a dragon could express sorrow. She glanced at Grynt and the ever-silent Givnay. Both gave a courteous nod.\n\n'We have a problem,' said Galarhade. 'Grystina's wearmyss is without a mother. I cannot commit her body to Godith until we have settled upon a solution.'\n\n'Is it so difficult?' Gossana said, her words almost hissing across the water. If any other dragon had addressed the Prime so, they would have been met with an ear-singeing flame. (Abrial actually flinched, expecting it.) 'We have an able female in Grendel. Fostering an orphan is not beyond her, as long as the myss is given to her quickly. I'm surprised the Elders have been slow to see this.'\n\n'I see it,' said Galarhade, some authority restored in his terse response. He straightened his long red neck. 'The myss is sickly, her air sacs full of dust. She is nesting in healer Grymric's cave. She will be given over to one of you when Grymric is satisfied she will survive.'\n\n'One of us?' Gossana said. She inhaled the last of her smoke.\n\n'It is important,' Galarhade said, letting some weight fall onto his words, 'that we continue our breeding programme.'\n\n'One of us?' Gossana repeated, her upper jaw pulled so tight that her teeth were now aggressively unveiled. A broken fang on the upper left side was causing an abrasion where it met the lower jaw, weeping saliva and a touch of green blood. 'Are you saying you expect me to foster the myss?' Her fin scales billowed.\n\nAbrial shuddered and looked around him. G'vard and per Gorst were keeping their silence. Even Grynt was curling his claws.\n\nElder Givnay leant towards his Prime, who nodded as he received a thought from the mute. Galarhade said, 'The Elders acknowledge Gossana's past accomplishments and are grateful she brings her wisdom and experience to bear at this time. However, as Elder Givnay has reminded me, we must always introduce new lines into the Wearle. We are therefore decided that Grendel will enter the next laying cycle and Gossana will raise the myss.'\n\n'This is an insult!' Gossana roared.\n\n'It is my ruling,' Galarhade said firmly.\n\n'Yours \u2013 or his?' She cocked her snout in the direction of Givnay. She had never liked the mute, whom she saw as little more than an ineffective peddler of spiritual fantasies. What use, she had been known to argue, was a dragon steered by its third (and smallest) heart? The matrial had even been recorded as saying that she would not have let Givnay survive the injury that had left him unable to flame or speak. Not surprisingly, there was little regard between them. What was surprising was that both had been included in the second Erth party, a decision that had caused a great deal of muttering among some orders of the Wearle.\n\nDespite Gossana's fearless conceit, Elder Grynt felt it necessary to lash out a warning. 'Have a care, Matrial. Remember where you are.'\n\nGossana spread her gigantic wings, almost blowing Abrial off his feet. 'Have you forgotten that I am frenhines fawr?' (Words from the old tongue, meaning 'great queen'.) 'How dare you dishonour me like this? The fostering of orphans is for common dragons, not one of my standing. And what male would willingly protect an orphan's\u2026carer?!'\n\nGalarhade let out a thread of steam. 'The white, G'vard, will be your guardian, and will be called father to the myss.'\n\nThis raised an immediate objection from per Gorst. 'Prime, with respect, that cannot be. The battle was void.'\n\n'Well, it appears he's been declared the winner,' snapped Grynt, who seemed to be growing tired of the arguments.\n\n'But without her true mother to imprint upon, the character of the wearmyss will always be challenged. This would be of little importance if the father was of less noble bearing, but\u2014'\n\n'It's all right, Gorst, I will do it,' said G'vard. He raised his weary head. 'In the name of Godith, I will honour Grystina and be a father to her myss.' He looked at Gossana and bowed. 'I pledge to protect you in all\u2014'\n\n'Faah!' said Gossana. 'Save your voice for singing your orphan to sleep. I demand to be returned to Ki:mera,' she roared. 'You'll send the wearling too, if you know what's good for it.'\n\n'You would be wise to bite your tongue,' said Grynt \u2013 a slightly inappropriate remark, given the condition of Gossana's upper fangs.\n\nShe bared the whole row at him. 'You haven't heard the last of this.' And with a screech that made the mountains shudder, she took off back to her eyrie.\n\nAbrial sank into a pit of despair. His wings felt as heavy as the rain clouds looming overhead. Had it not been for a kind glance from Grendel, he might have thrown himself under the waterfall and joined the ice on its long trail down to the sea.\n\nPrime Galarhade called for Grendel's attention. The young female looked up, her blue eyes lively with fear. Galarhade said, 'Be calm, Grendel. Do not think yourself unworthy of the duty your Elders have placed upon you. Although you were not brought here to further the early growth of the Wearle, fate has selected you to be the first true queen of this colony. You were born of noble, Fissian ancestors. The males that come to you must be a suitable match. Do you understand?'\n\n'Yes.' The word clicked in her throat.\n\n'Are you ready to be courted?'\n\n'I am.' She bowed before Galarhade, but again she flashed a look at Abrial as if to say, Will you fly with me?\n\nIt made his hearts race to have her regard, but it also hurt so much. How he would have loved to chase Grendel round the mountains. But what chance would he have, stuck out on the edge of the domayne, keeping watch? He was going to be a sweeper, the lowest of the low. A forest might have grown on the peak of Skytouch before he ever saw Grendel again.\n\nWith a whumph! Grystina's body caught fire. Galarhade was above her, coating her in flame. One by one every dragon flew past, adding their own breath to the blaze.\n\n'Forgive me,' Abrial whispered. And he lifted up and flamed Grystina as well, not caring who was watching or what was being said. And when his flame was spent he lifted up again and flew away from the lake. He glided over the bulging crags of Vargos, setting a course for the northernmost edge of the domayne. He hung his head low as he flew. His life was over, he told himself. His name was blunted, his family shamed, his chances of fathering wearlings minimal. It really didn't get much worse than this.\n\nBut had he been a little less doleful and a little more alert, his life would have been so very, very different. Had he chanced to begin his sweep from that moment, his sensitive optical triggers would surely not have missed a slight movement on the hillside, the actions of a creature desperate to conceal itself against the dark rock. Unbeknown to the dragons, the loss of Grystina was being felt by something other than themselves.\n\nA young Hom was on the mountainside. A boy, no more than twelve winters old. Within the folds of his robe he was hiding something.\n\nA frightened dragon wearling.\n\nA drake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ren",
                "text": "It was forbidden, by order of Targen the Old. No man or woman of the tribe must contest the beasts or defy their will. Just to look upon the skalers, especially in flight, was enough to call down their fire on the tribe. From now on, men would settle on the flatlands.\n\nThis was the law of the Kaal.\n\nRen Whitehair, son of Ned, heard the words true. No man or woman must contest the beasts. But Targen the Old had not mentioned boys. And what kind of boy concerned himself with laws when his heart was beating to the spirit of adventure?\n\nEver since the first group had burst through the sky and driven the Kaal tribe out of the mountains, the beasts had been despised by the men. A few brave souls had crossed the scorch line in defiance, but all had returned to the settlement in terror, many with hot blood running from their ears, clouds across their vision or blisters on their skin. Thus far, the skalers had killed no men, but their forceful defence of the mountain territories suggested they would burn to the bones anyone foolish enough to provoke them to excess. Nothing got past their patrols anyway. The eyes of the beasts were so advanced it was said they could see the smallest scratcher scurrying through grass from the highest clouds above. And even if a man did manage to hide, he could not conceal the scent of his body.\n\nBut as much as men mourned the loss of their caves, it was all Ren could do to contain his excitement about the skalers. Awed by their power, he was eager to be near them and learn their ways. He was often chastised by his father for climbing to high places from which he might watch them, and banned from making drawings of the beasts. 'What Kaal,' Ned had thundered in exasperation, 'would wish to look upon a rock and see the eyes of a skaler looking back?'\n\nNone of this hampered Ren's ambitions. If a curfew was placed upon him, he simply waited out his father's temper and amused himself with the cache of skaler artefacts he kept hidden among the hides on which he slept: two talons, a chipped scale that sparkled under moonlight, and the charred bones of several unfortunate animals. What would it feel like, he wondered, to run his hand along a whole row of scales? Or ride upon a beast as it soared above the mountains? Such fancies played with his dreams, but dreams were all they were destined to be, until the morning of the fateful hunt, the day he saw Utal Longarm burn.\n\nRen had been out catching snorters with the men when two huge skalers had ranged across the sky. Utal had dared to challenge them. Utal, who stood higher than any man in the tribe, had ripped his robe wide open at the neck, bared his chest and roared at the beasts to give the mountains back to the Kaal.\n\nNed, who was leading the hunt that morning, turned his whinney round and said, 'Utal, step back from the line. If you bring the beasts down, we all burn.'\n\nBut Utal had been drinking the juice of many berries and his head was not where it needed to be. He began to dance and sing a lewd song. Stomping left and right, he flapped his arms in a mocking imitation of beating wings. 'Harken to me, skaler! I'm flying!' he boomed.\n\nIt amused the men, but not Ren's father, who was watching the beasts with a wary eye. 'Oak,' he said, to the man astride the whinney nearest him, 'I propose you tie your brother to his mount if you wish to hear him snoring tonight.'\n\nOak laughed and pulled on his reins. 'Utal, stand back,' he called. 'Ned fears you might be worrying the beasts. Don't poison them with your breath, brother!'\n\nIt was a decent attempt to calm the situation, but Utal continued his clownish antics. And now Ren was growing concerned for him as well. A skaler the colour of fresh spring grass was raising the horns that grew in sharp lines from the back of its head. Ren had seen many skalers do this just before they swept to take prey.\n\nThe beast was preparing to attack.\n\n'Utal, it's coming!' he called.\n\nStill Utal refused to listen. He lifted a foot and dangled it over the scorch line. Then he pulled up the lower half of his robe and made water on the skalers' territory.\n\nThe bright green beast gave a quiet snarl and bared more fangs than Ren could count. Almost leisurely, it glided down and produced a burst of fire that made the hair crackle on Utal's head. Utal yelped. And then he really danced, flapping his arms as if a swarm of buzzers had filled his ears. Foolishly, he picked up a stone.\n\nHis brother whispered, 'Utal, no\u2026'\n\nBut the fool could not resist. He took aim and hurled the stone. It bounced harmlessly off the skaler's rump. The beast flicked its tail in anger. Utal gave a triumphant shout and picked up another, larger stone.\n\nThis one would never leave his hand.\n\nThe green beast circled back. It put itself directly in line with Utal and began what appeared to be another slow descent. It was still some distance away and there was time enough for Utal to halt his madness. But Ren had witnessed this manoeuvre as well. He had once seen a beast bear down on a bleater, closing so fast that the hapless animal had died of fright, even before the claws sank into it. He knew exactly what was going to happen.\n\n'GET DOWN!' he screamed.\n\nAt the same time Oak kicked his whinney in the belly and raced toward his brother. He planned to knock some sense into the oaf or at best take hold of his newly-singed hair and drag him clear of the line. But in an instant the beast was there in front of them, fearfully huge, much closer to the line than anyone (other than Ren) had expected. It had somehow jumped the length of fifty men in the time it would have taken Ren to crush a leaf in the palm of his hand. The whinneys reared. The men yelped in terror. Ren flung himself down as the beast unlatched its blistering jaws and released another surge of flame. The fire travelled in a ball from the back of its throat and burst against Utal's upright arm, charring it black from the midbone to the hand. Utal rocked like a blade of grass. His eyes glazed, their centres stopped. Then he fell in a slow and steady motion. He sagged to his knees and toppled sideways, falling just the right side of the scorch line.\n\nThe skaler banked away, splattering sizzling dung across the field. One pat landed squarely on Utal, steaming where it glued to the skin of his chest. The men recovered their nerve and dragged him away. Using leaves, they cleaned off what they could of the dung, cursing when it stung their hands. Then they laid Utal over a whinney and quickly took him back to the settlement. One burst of lunacy had bought their best hunter a withered arm and a new name. From then on he was known as Utal Stonehand, because the stone he'd intended to throw was now permanently fused to his clawed black fist.\n\nAnd there was worse. By the time the men had laid him out, the stains of the dung had burned into his chest, eating back the flesh in great red welts. A splash had travelled to his eye as well, fusing the lid to the ball in a horrible stew. And no amount of bathing could wash the stench of dung off his body. Poor Utal. He now had a chest that stank, a useless arm and only one eye to see it with. The stench made certain no one visited his shelter without good cause, and not without their face wrapped heavily in cloth. It was a terrible lesson to bear, and Targen the Old was rightfully enraged. Had he not ordered the Kaal to stay clear of the beasts? Was it not better to live in peace beyond the mountains rather than be walking ash among them? The men glumly acknowledged this wisdom, but the incident had rankled their pride and there was much shared talk that night about what might be done to restore their honour. The beasts were mocking them. First they had driven the tribe from the mountains, and now left their best man ruined by dung!\n\nBut while most of the Kaal tribe cussed and wailed, Ren began to look at what else might be learned from this dreadful incident \u2013 and a frightening idea came to him. It happened as he watched Oak Longarm burning his brother's soiled robe. Even in the fire the bad odour still carried, blocking out the cooking smells around the camp. Men and women alike were complaining, covering their noses as they went about their work. It made Ren wonder how the skalers put up with it, never mind the Kaal \u2013 and suddenly, there it was: a way of reaching the mountains again, a way of getting close to the beasts.\n\nUse dung.\n\nIt would be dangerous. Ridiculously so. One mistake and Ren would be black specks floating on the wind. But the challenge burned so brightly in his mind that he could not resist exploring it. Early the next morning, he crept back toward the mountains and waited until the skies were clear. Then he ran across the scorch line in search of what he needed \u2013 a fresh heap of skaler dung.\n\nThe heap he found was fresher than fresh, steaming black, still red with cinders. It almost boiled away the mitt he'd made for his hands. Turning his face aside, he smeared the dung over a robe he'd brought with him. Oh, it smelled bad. Worse than the innards of a dying mutt. But he stuck to the task and when it was done he undressed and put the dung robe on, over an undercloth he'd stolen from his mother's things. She would roast him like a snorter if she ever found out, but Ren had taken note of Utal's suffering and knew he must keep the dung off his skin. Thankfully, the extra layer worked, but the stench was just as bad as ever. Every time Ren drew breath, the reek almost tore the nose off his face. But the deed was done and there was no going back. Two beasts had appeared above the shoulder of the mountains. He was over the scorch line, inside their territory. Now he must hide \u2013 or die.\n\nThrowing the clean robe aside, he sank into a small depression in the rocks, drawing up the bare parts of his legs and covering his face with a shallow-rooted thicket he'd ripped from the ground. The beasts soon saw the robe he'd discarded. One of them, a bright green monster identical to the one that had maimed Utal, dropped with a heavy thump beside the cloth while the other glided in circles overhead. The beast picked up the robe and sniffed it. It turned its incredible head both ways, staring left and right along the hillside. The eye that Ren could just about see rolled suspiciously in its socket, the inner layers moving like ripples on a pond. Ren steadied his breathing, praying he hadn't left a toe exposed. He thought about his hair, which was lighter than the colour of corn, and hoped the thicket had covered it well. Lay still, he told himself. Still as the dead. If he rattled the thicket or made water down his leg he would know in an instant what it felt like to be a log on a fire.\n\nBut the beast didn't come for him, and its friend in the sky was growing impatient. It gave a grating call. The one on the hill gave a sharp call back. It took off with a whumph!, trying to shake the robe from its claws. It was several wingbeats clear of the hill before the robe came sailing back. It landed beside Ren's hiding place, ripped but still wearable.\n\nWhen he was certain the skalers had gone, Ren carefully changed back and hid the soiled robe beneath the thicket, keeping it separate from the undercloth. A flush of boyish pride ran through him. He had accomplished something no one else in the tribe had ever done. He had walked across the scorch line and back again, unburned.\n\nHe had fooled the beasts."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Ren hurried back to the settlement and washed for some time in the river which ran behind the shelters, treading water in the shadow of an overhanging tree to avoid inquisitive eyes. Very little of the dung had got onto his hands (one slight burn on a fingertip) and mercifully the smell stayed in the water. He walked home fresh of body and mind, bristling with the need to tell someone what he'd done. Wisely, however, he kept it to himself, mainly because he returned to find the settlement veiled in sadness.\n\nUtal had developed a fever. No one would speak any details of it, but Ren heard his father saying to his mother that Utal's arm was being chewed by a wound the colour of grass. None of Targen's herbs could cleanse it. Two days later, Utal died. His wounded eye was sealed and matted, the other popping out like a hard grey pebble.\n\nThe tribe gathered around a fire to mourn him. They drank the juice of many berries. The talk among the men grew loud and dangerous. They shook spears at the mountains and called for vengeance. But what hope did they have of killing a skaler when they could not even get near to the beasts?\n\nThis was the moment an unexpected voice spoke up.\n\n'Ren Whitehair knows a way.'\n\nThe voice belonged to a girl, Pine Onetooth, so called because she had one strong tooth in the middle of her mouth, gaps to either side of it.\n\n'What's this?' said Ned, while Ren was busy stilling his heart.\n\nPine came into the light. A frail girl, thin as the flower stalk hanging loose between her fingers. 'Two days afore, I see'd him washin' long in the river.'\n\n'Washing?' scoffed Ned. 'Away with you, girl. The boy's mother likens him most to a snorter. If he could bathe his bones in mud, he would do it.'\n\nThe men laughed, but Oak Longarm took up Pine's words. 'What mean you, Pine? Why would seeing Ren in the river be aught to do with the skalers?'\n\nPine did not answer. She simply looked at Ren and skipped away into the night.\n\n'Well?' said Oak. He turned his attention now upon the boy.\n\nBut Ned Whitehair was in no mood to amuse himself with the ways of children. 'Ren, be gone. Your bed beckons,' he said. He flicked a twig into the fire and ran a hand through his hair. The loss of Utal had hit him hard.\n\n'Nay, I would hear his piece,' said Oak. 'The boy is quick of mind and purpose.'\n\nThis was met with a grunt from Oak's right. Varl Rednose, a man with an oval belly and a beard so dense it was a wonder nothing nested there said, 'Perhaps your boy would tell us our business, Ned? Shall I loan him a spear and point him at the mountains? He might bring us back a juicy skaler leg to roast.' He broke wind, making the fire flutter. The men laughed loudly, but their mood remained sour.\n\nNed said, 'Varl, he's a boy. Let him be.'\n\n'Aye, but he likes the beasts fondly, doesn't he?' Varl stared at Ren as if he meant the lad mischief. 'Why do you stand among the grieving, boy, when your heart flies the other side of the scorch line?'\n\n'Ned!' Oak gripped Ned's arm before he could retaliate. 'What good would it do to fight among ourselves? How will that bring my brother justice?'\n\nVarl burped and wiped an arm across his mouth. 'I tell you all there will be no justice until we put a sword through a skaler's throat. But let us hear what Whitehair's boy has to say. My gut is sore in need of humour.'\n\n'Well?' said Ned. He switched his gaze to his son.\n\nThe eyes of the Kaal tribe turned upon Ren, pressing the story out of him.\n\n'I\u2026I know a way to cross the line safe,' he said.\n\n'What?' said Ned. 'What blether is this?'\n\n'Ned, give him air,' Oak Longarm said. He met Ren's gaze again. 'You have made your boast, Ren, now you must share it.'\n\nRen could feel himself shaking inside. There was a terrible, terrible conflict here. If he did not say his piece he would be sorely ridiculed before his father. But if he revealed his method to the men, he was opening up the way for a possible attack on the creatures he loved. But what if the Kaal did cross into skaler territory? One man? Two men? A whole tribe? What harm could they do to the winged giants?\n\nAnd so he spoke his truth. 'Dung,' he said.\n\nA portion of the fire collapsed, scattering cinders across the erth.\n\n'Dung?' Varl said. 'Have my ears turned soft?' He stood up, swaying. 'DUNG?' he thundered. 'Are you mocking us, boy? It was dung that took out Utal's eye!' He hurled a stale, chewed bone at Ren, and not even Ned could object to it.\n\n'But\u2026it works,' Ren shouted over their derision. He looked at Oak, who had turned his head away in disappointment. 'I covered a robe in their scent and went beyond the line. I hid from two of the beasts \u2013 and returned.'\n\nNed stood up quickly, forcing Ren back. 'Go to your bed and dream there,' he snarled. 'What devil makes you shame me so? This, on a day so clouded by misery?'\n\n'But\u2014?'\n\n'Go!' Ned pointed the way.\n\nRen sighed and stumbled back. But he did not go to his bed, for a storm was brewing in the minds of the men and the first roll of thunder was about to break. It came from the mouth of Varl Rednose again. 'Why do we sit with our hearts in our boots when we all know a way to defeat the skalers?' He cast his ugly gaze around the circle. 'I will not sleep this night while these words sit heavy on my tongue: I say we raise the darkeyes.'\n\n'NO!' cried Ren, coming forward again.\n\nOnce more, his father was forced to intervene. He grabbed a hunk of Ren's robe and drew the boy to him. 'This is men's talk. Why are you still here?'\n\nRen shook his head, making his white hair fly. 'Please, Pa. You cannot let them do this.'\n\nBut the plot was already in progress. 'How?' said Oak, the only voice except Varl's not muttering in fear.\n\nVarl clapped a hand to Oak's sturdy shoulder. 'Utal's spirit may be with the Fathers, but his body can still be of use to us.'\n\nOak looked puzzled. 'Again, I ask how?'\n\nVarl bent close. 'We give your brother to the darkeyes in sacrifice.'\n\n'What?' said Oak. His face had turned the colour of the moon.\n\nVarl straightened up. 'We go to their cave,' he boomed at the men. 'We wake them, aye. Make them know the skalers are back. Invite them to suck every speck of green from that murderous fire-thrower in the mountains. Let the darkeyes and skalers war again. Let the beasts be hunted by the black terror and the skies be clear of their kind for good \u2013 just like the first time the skalers came\u2026'\n\n'No!' cried Ren. 'I won't let you hurt them! It was Utal's folly that earned him the right to his walk with death. The skalers mean us no harm!'\n\n'Ned, put your boy away,' growled Varl.\n\nAnd Ned had no choice but to drag Ren clear.\n\nAt the shelter, he drew the boy to him again. 'Listen to me, Ren, and listen well. Is your mind so addled by these fearful creatures that you have no pity for Oak's sad loss and would taunt a brute like Rednose with it? I have no love for the darkeyes, you know this. I would rather swallow a fistful of grit than have the tribe befriend such a hideous thing. But the skalers have taken Utal's life. We must fight for his honour. What else would you have me do?'\n\n'Make peace,' gulped Ren.\n\nNed sighed and put a hand to the boy's pale face, wiping away a tear with his thumb. 'The skalers took our land, Ren. The stars were always going to settle like this.'\n\n'Then you will all die!' Ren said harshly.\n\nAnd he dived into the shelter and threw himself, face down, onto his bed.\n\nThat night, without sleep, Ren thought long about the 'black terror', for the darkeyes were a mystery all to themselves.\n\nSometime after the first wave of skalers, the Kaal began to witness battles taking place in the skies above the mountains. A terrifying creature, the colour of a caarker but the size of twenty, appeared just as suddenly as the beasts had done. They had twisted, scale-free bodies, stunted wings and a shortened tail. Their eyes were like mud shaken up in water; no light shone from their fixed black cores. They blew no fire, these things, but instead released a poisonous spit that burned as fiercely as any flame. Several of the tribe carried scars from the time a squealing darkeye had crashed on the settlement, the rear half of its body ablaze. Ren's father had put an arrow through its throat as it thrashed in agony on the ground. He'd been trying to show the creature mercy, but the darkeye had let out a hideous squeal, thrown its head and sprayed the camp with its ugly bile. A skaler had followed the darkeye down and destroyed it with a flame so hot it had marked a deep scar in the ground. Whatever these darkeyed creatures were, the skalers regarded them as mortal enemies.\n\nThe battles raged for nearly three days. No man or woman of the Kaal (and certainly not Ren) ever believed the skalers would be beaten. Yet they were. The darkeyes prevailed, with two survivors. It was feared the two would lay claim to the land and call others of their kind to colonise the mountains. But no. More mystery followed. The survivors withdrew, secreting themselves in a cave half a day's ride from the settlement. They were still there now as far as anyone knew, yet they had not challenged the new crop of skalers. Likewise, the second wave of skalers seemed unaware of the enemy in the cave. A bizarre situation, but one that the Kaal, led by Varl Rednose, intended to use to their advantage.\n\nThe next morning, Ren heard more of their scheme. Varl announced it openly to the tribe. Let the darkeyes have Utal! Let his body be taken to their cave and shown to the creatures! They will know from the stink, if not the arm, that skalers are in the air again! Surely this will draw them out and encourage them to drive their enemy away!\n\nThe Kaal roared their support, but nothing could be done without Targen's approval.\n\nTargen retired to consider the plan. He would speak in dreams with the Fathers, he said, and announce his decision shortly. The men chewed on their frustration. They were ready to tie poor Utal to a sled and drag him to the darkeyes there and then. But Targen had spoken, and they must wait.\n\nRen was relieved. Here was his chance to act. If Targen's journey with the Fathers was long (and they usually were), Ren would have time to carry out a plan of his own, one he'd been hatching overnight.\n\nUnder the hides where his father slept was a rare prize. When the burning darkeye had crashed on the settlement, some kind of horn had broken from its head and lodged in the wall of Ned Whitehair's shelter. A small, hardened spiral of flesh, sharper at its tip than the best Kaal arrows. Ren had wanted it for his collection, but to his frustration, his father had claimed it. A trophy, Ned said, for arrowing the beast. It was the best relic in the Kaal's possession, the only evidence they had of the darkeyes' existence.\n\nBefore he departed, Ren left a flower on his mother's bed, hoping she would send his soul to the Fathers if he was brought back to her in a worse state than Utal. In truth, he could not explain this feeling in his breast, but his heart told him he must do right. His plan was simple. When night fell he would cross the scorch line, make his way to the great ice lake, bow down before the skalers and show them the horn.\n\nThe darkeyes were coming. The beasts needed to be warned.\n\nAnd he, Ren Whitehair, would be the one to do it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "He used the dung robe as he had before. The smell had turned even worse for the keeping, but this was the price Ren knew he must pay if he wanted to get among the beasts.\n\nThe night was dry and idly dark. Even the sluggish, half-chewed moon failed to notice him crossing the scorch line. Only twice did he need to conceal himself, once from a startled hooter that glided away from the smell of his disguise, and once from a distant skaler. This time, the beast made no attempt to land.\n\nBy dawn, he was deep into skaler territory, already climbing the sleeping mountain, so called because it rumbled with fire and smoke like an old man blowing wind from either end of his body. The beasts were often seen circling here. Skalers, because of their size and weight, needed good ledges on which to settle. And nowhere were the mountainsides more ragged than on the peaks that surrounded the great ice lake. Ren was certain he would find a whole clutch of skalers here. And why warn one when he might warn many?\n\nTravelling in the light was slow and dangerous. For a while, he was safe in the Whispering Forest, among the swathe of tall green spikers that thrived on the lowest sections of the climb. But when the trees thinned out and he was faced with a bumpy expanse of grass, his choices became severely limited. If a skaler flew over and he was forced to lie low, he would have to hope it mistook him for a solitary stone. A perilous risk to take. So he changed his mind and took the longer way round, keeping to those areas of bare grey rock where only the skinniest plants took hold and the shadows offered plenty of cover.\n\nDespite the unevenness of the slope, he was able to travel freely for a while. But it wasn't long before the mountain grew serious and the rise began to bow his back. The rocks made ever more awkward angles and their edges began to cut into his hands. And soon he was faced with another problem: snow. The higher he climbed, the more pockets he encountered. At first he ignored it and went scrambling up the incline like a young bleater; the Kaal were mountain people, used to living with cold conditions. But there came a point where every fingerhold burned. Worse, water had leaked into his boots. His toes no longer moved when he stretched them and his back was a growing arc of pain. If he didn't complete his journey soon he would either have to go back to the settlement or make himself known to the next beast that flew over.\n\nLuck was on his side, however. Not far ahead was a fresh crop of trees. They were set out in clusters of twos and threes. Their branches were sparse and offered poor cover, but no skaler, unless it came down to feed, was going to see him amongst them.\n\nHe checked the skies then ran for the nearest tree. It wasn't easy. The slope was truly against him now and his knees had forgotten how to bend. Twice he stumbled, the second time kicking enough scree down the mountain to wake every beast from the ice lake to the sea. The rubble slid away and would not stop clattering. Ren plunged toward the treeline, getting there in time to see a purple skaler with a long white neck come soaring up the spur of the hill. It jerked its head at the trickle of stones, but didn't stop to investigate. Ren sighed with relief and pressed back against a tree. A chance to rest and warm his hands.\n\nBurying his fingers in the pits of his arms, he turned to see where the skaler had gone. It was well above the ridge, near the peak of the mountain, resting on an overhang beside another skaler. They snapped at each other as they shuffled for room. Then both of them turned toward the valley, their long tails flapping in the wind.\n\nAt the same time, a lengthy cry split the air. Ren jumped and covered his ears. The wail was so strong it shook the trees, sending down a shower of the dark green spikes that grew from their branches. A skaler had clearly made the sound, but it seemed to have come from within the mountain. The pair high above roared back in response. Ren's heart began to thump in unison. He didn't need to speak the skalers' language to realise they were seized with excitement.\n\nBlowing on his hands he moved into the open, scrabbling from one clump of trees to the next. A half-blind caarker might see him now, but the skalers seemed more concerned with what was happening on the far side of the ridge than in guarding this tiny part of their territory. At the last of the trees, Ren paused for breath, and looking up, he saw an amazing sight.\n\nTwo skalers, one white, one blue, appeared to be clashing in mid-air. They rolled as they approached one another at speed, disappearing from sight as a cloud exploded and the sky around them filled with rain.\n\nRen had never seen a spectacle like it.\n\nHe hurried on again, hugging the final bend in the hill that would take him swiftly to the top of the ridge. But at its steepest the hill puckered gently inward, and he was irritated to find that he needed to climb a short, almost vertical wall of rock. Desperate not to miss too much of the fight, he reached up and found the holds he needed. At no point did it occur to him that this might be a reckless venture. Indeed, it wasn't until he was halfway to the top that his folly was realised and the first note of panic set in. Whup! Whup! Whup! A skaler was approaching. Ren's heart immediately beat a new rhythm. Breathless with fright, he looked over his shoulder. The thing was out of sight, somewhere behind a bulge in the hill. But the onrushing clatter of wings suggested it would fill the sky at any moment. Ren was in a hopeless position, his arms and legs both fully exposed. If he was seen \u2013 and the skaler would have to be blind to miss him \u2013 the beast could melt him with an arc of flame. Frantically, he looked for somewhere to hide. Again, his luck was in. Down to his right the rock face darkened and he could see a crescent-shaped split in the stone. Using all his strength he swung himself sideways and dropped onto a sill just in front of the split, gouging his left knee as he fell. It was all he could do not to cry out in pain. Somehow, he managed to grip his knee before the blood could bubble freely to the surface and send its warm scent into the air. He rolled into the opening, out of sight. The skaler flew past, blowing up a cloud of dust and grit. Ren stalled for as long as he could before opening his lungs and coughing out the dirt. The skaler was gone by then, but something had heard Ren's burst of noise. A growl, not unlike a row of deep clicks, came creeping out of the belly of the mountain. Ren turned his head and stared into the darkness. There was something in here.\n\nSomething huge."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "That was the moment Ren should have escaped, while the skalers were diverted by the fight above the valley. He should have dressed his wound, counted his blessings and fled. Blood was leaking fast through his fingers. His lungs were lined with grime and dust. Climbing was going to be painful at best. And he didn't need Targen the Old to tell him that whatever had made that clicking sound would not stop to think about taking off his head if he poked it close within biting range.\n\nHe stared into the darkness again. By now his eyes were making use of the light and he could see he was in a narrow cleft, no wider than his outstretched arms could span. The crack ran some way into the mountain, tightening at its end where the light grew dim. With the skalers occupied, Ren slid down and attended to his wound. The gash was the length of his smallest finger and dark with grit at its puffiest end. He picked out as many chips as he could, then spat on his hand and rubbed the spittle into the cut. It stung like the tips of a hundred spikers, so sharp he couldn't stop himself yelping. Again the darkness answered, with a growl even more threatening than the last. But on top of the warning was a grating squeal that could only have come from the throat of something small. Ren's heart pounded again. For now he had guessed what was in the mountain: a female skaler, maybe with young.\n\nIt was madness, he knew, to even think of going closer. He had once seen his mother give birth to a child (a brother that had not survived) and she had screamed foul murder at any man who tried to approach, especially Ren's father. But Ren had also known the joy of seeing and holding a new-born mutt, and the lure of the skalers proved too much. Quickly, he tore off a piece of his under-robe (the cleanest patch he could find) and tied it tightly around his knee. Then he hopped to his feet and started to feel his way along the cleft. The light from outside was quick to grow faint, but he was soon drawn forward by a deeper, yellower glow. It occurred to him that it must be fire, because the air all around was thick and warm and seemed to be competing for his every breath. On he went, aware that the passage was leading him down, until sixty paces forward, his progress was stopped. A wedge of stone was blocking the upper half of the cave, creating what amounted to a tunnel beneath it. The only way through was on his belly or his back.\n\nHe got down and squeezed himself into the hole. The first push was the hardest, but once his shoulders were beyond the wedge the tunnel became a comfortable crawl. It took two painful scrapes off his arms, but the threat of small flesh wounds was soon to be the least of his worries. At its end, the tunnel opened out again. And there, almost filling the entire floor space of a huge cavern, was a beautiful skaler.\n\nShe was mid-green with white flecks around her head. Her incredible slanted eyes were the colour of the setting sun, but shone in all directions like broken ice. Ren could see her as clearly as day, thanks to a cluster of small fires burning low along the scorch-blackened stone behind her. It took him a moment to realise she was burning her own waste matter. It occurred to him then that she must have scented the dung on his robe. But if she knew he was there, she seemed unconcerned. She was curled up like a sleeping mutt, tenderly nosing a large blue egg that had just cracked open at its narrowest point. A tiny skaler, purple in colour, was struggling to break out. The mother whispered her encouragement and bathed the egg in a pale half-flame. The shell crackled and split in several places. A tail poked out, followed by a wing. The youngster shuddered and the shell exploded off its body. Ren held his breath in wonder. This was better than he ever could have hoped. To see a mother and\u2014\n\nSuddenly a second youngster clambered onto a rock in front of him. It was blue, this one, with wings the colour of black thornberries. Although Ren was still in shadow, the young skaler clearly had his scent. It flipped its head to one side and sniffed. Out of its throat came a weak roar. Grrrockle.\n\nRen took a breath. It was almost his last. Faster than an arrow, the mother's tail lifted and shot towards the tunnel. Ren saw it coming and scrabbled back in time to avoid being speared. He realised then that she'd been waiting for him, working out precisely where he was before she struck.\n\nThe skaler's tail lashed around the walls, its sharp points drilling into the darkness, stirring up another stifling dust cloud. Ren coughed and pressed back as far as he could, the tail twisting like a fire sprite in front of him. But for a bend in the tunnel, he would have been skewered like a roasting snorter. Maybe the skaler thought so too, for as she pulled her tail clear Ren heard her move and guessed she was turning, ready to fill the tunnel with flame. From that, there would be no escape. The flame would travel like a gush of water and make ash of anything it found in the space.\n\nRen slid down and covered his eyes. He begged the Fathers to forgive his folly and prayed that his mother would not weep long. A moment passed. But the fire did not come. The skaler moved again. And now she was not the only thing shifting. Ren could feel his entire body shaking, but fear was only part of the cause. He touched the wall behind him. The rock was trembling. Grit fell from a crack in the stone above his head.\n\nThe sleeping mountain was waking up.\n\nThe skaler knew it too. She let out another screaming call, so loud Ren thought his chest would burst. Silence thickened around him for a moment, as if he'd put his head in a bucket of mud. Again, the wall behind him shook. Dizzy with fear, he struggled to his feet.\n\nHe needed to escape, that much was clear. But as he turned he heard a pitiful cry. He knew right away that one of the new-born skalers was in trouble. The voice of survival urged him to go, but that bleat had torn a hole in his heart. In truth, he owed the beasts nothing. They would kill him as soon as look at him. But the code of honour that governed all life had been drilled into Ren from a very young age. All life is precious, his father had taught him. For Ren, that included the lives of skalers. He couldn't desert the youngster now.\n\nHe staggered back to the lip of the tunnel. Rocks were falling like hard black rain, pounding the mother as she sought in vain to protect her young. She was curling her tail around the skaler that Ren had seen breaking from the egg and was all the while calling the blue one to her. Ren could see it, trapped in rubble, kicking its tiny skaler feet. One wing and half its body was buried. The mountain yawned. More rocks fell. A huge lump struck the mother on the head. She lurched forward and her skin split open. Dark green fluid poured out of the wound, coating her neck and the stones around her. Ren thought he saw a tear begin to form in her eye. A single tear, glowing with fire.\n\nThat was it. He leapt into the cavern. It took a heartbeat, no more, to free the skaler. It squealed like an angry storm of caarkers, but folded its wings as he drew it to his breast.\n\nThrough the hail and dust, he looked for the other. It was sheltered by a curl of the mother's tail. Thinking he could place the rescued one with it, Ren started to pick his way back toward them. But the sleeping mountain was wide awake now. The floor of the cavern whined and split open. Ren was thrown back as a crack the size of a narrow stream divided him from the mother skaler. Pained and spluttering, he got to his feet. The youngster had fixed its claws into his robe as if begging him never to leave it, but the mother was slipping away. One last time she lifted her head \u2013 and fixed her gaze on Ren.\n\nHer thoughts poured into his mind with such force that his neck almost snapped as his head jerked back. And these three words she spoke without speaking: GALAN AUG SCIETH.\n\nThen her head slackened and thumped against the stone.\n\nWith a smokeless breath, her jewelled eye closed.\n\nAnd her fire tear fell."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Other than when he'd been hunting with the men, Ren had only ever seen one animal die. A mutt so old it had buzzers laying eggs in its matted fur and legs so bent they wobbled when it walked. He was a boy of just six winters then, and life and death were still a mystery to him. Where did the 'life' go when something died, he wondered? He'd asked the mutt's keeper that very question: Was that what the dead eyes were staring at, the life drifting to its next dwelling place? The keeper, none other than the gruff Varl Rednose, had bellowed with laughter and flashed his knife in a gouging motion. He had asked Ren if he'd like an eye to stew? Ren had said no. He didn't understand why Varl had found the question funny. The tribe prayed for help from the Fathers all the time and some of them had been dead for ever. Surely their 'lives' must be floating over the settlement somewhere?\n\nThat day in the cave, Ren learned something about the death of skalers. For one thing, their eyes didn't stare like a mutt's. As the mother's tear struck the floor of the cavern, every rock around it shone like gold, including those where Ren was standing. Her life filled his like rising water. His body grew light and his mind touched the stars. He felt the presence of something extraordinary. It moved around him and through him and somehow between him, blowing like a wind from another world. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was what happened to the darkeye horn he still carried. It was lying in a pocket close to Ren's heart. Later, when he would think to look at his robe, he would find a scorch mark on the cloth around the pocket and remember a burning sensation there. But that was later and this was now.\n\nThe mother's eye closed and Ren heard the erth breathe as if to welcome her home again. He shook himself alert. He was still in great danger. Rocks were falling. The erth was dancing. The sleeping mountain was no less angry. The skaler in his arms gave a pining cry. Ren stroked it and said a short prayer for the one still minded by the mother's tail, then started for the tunnel.\n\nIn his bid to rescue the skaler he had jumped a fair way down into the cavern. Going back up would be a far stiffer challenge. The mountain had been kind to him, though. A number of boulders were heaped in a stack just under the tunnel entrance. Ren bounded over three, then had to stop. A wall of rock now stood in his way. He could rest his hands on the ledge without stretching, and would normally have scrabbled straight up it and away \u2013 but not with a skaler clinging to his chest. At best it might fall. More likely be squashed.\n\n'We climb!' he said, aware that his words were stiffer than usual. But how did one talk to a baby skaler? He pulled it off his robe. It took several attempts; as one foot cleared, the other reattached.\n\nGrracck, it skriked, looking frightened and lost.\n\nNo time to worry about that. Ren lifted it onto the ledge, forgetting that from there it could see its mother. He watched it turning circles with its wings outstretched, all the while calling mournfully to her. For a moment, Ren thought it would be kinder to leave it. But even as the idea entered his mind the mother's voice was in his head again. Galan aug scieth. He pressed his hands to his eyes. What had she done to him?\n\nAnother shuddering movement underfoot reminded him survival was of primary concern. In one push, he scrabbled onto the ledge. The youngster called again, with a little less hope in its gravelly voice. Ren scooped it up and ran, relieved to see the tunnel wasn't blocked by rubble. He pushed the beast in as far as he could, then dropped to his belly and started to crawl. The skaler, not surprisingly, was frightened by the dark and unsure of what to do.\n\n'Go!' Ren snapped.\n\nThe youngster wailed and flapped. But after a couple of head butts and a squirt of dung that landed in Ren's hair, it got the idea and skittered on ahead. Ren spoke to it all the way, but was in the cave before he saw it again. He had a moment of panic when he thought he'd lost it and another when he trod on something soft in the gloom. Horrified, he knelt down and patted the rock. Feathers. Old feathers that crumpled to dust. A beak. A wrinkled leg and claws. He'd stood on a caarker, dried and long dead. Sighing with relief, he pushed the carcase aside but stuffed the foot into his robe. A Kaal hunter wasted nothing. And to string a caarker's claws around the neck was lucky.\n\nBy now his eyes were seeing shapes in the rock, but the youngster was absent still. 'Pupp?' he called, using a name he liked, one his father had given to a mutt they'd once owned. With a rustle of wings the skaler found him. Ren bent down and picked it off his ankle. As he tilted his head, a trail of the wet dung fell from his hair and Ren instinctively wiped a hand through it. Strangely, it didn't burn too badly, though the smell was just as raw. He supposed that was because the skaler was young, and probably still to eat meat. 'Galan aug scieth,' he whispered to it. 'What does this mean?'\n\nGrracck, it said again, and nibbled his finger.\n\nRen pulled his hand clear of the mouth. The teeth, though small, were sharper than grit. To have come this far and be a skaler's first meal would be a cruel outcome indeed.\n\nA draught of cold air rolled through the cave, carrying the cry of an adult skaler. The youngster turned its head and gave a mystified skrike. Ren immediately clamped its jaws shut. It took the full wrap of his hand to do it; the little beast was strong for its size. It responded by pinching his chest with its claws. 'No!' Ren hissed, pulling it away. He raised it up until their eyes were in line. The pupp's were glowing with a pale blue tint, making better use of the light than his. He loosened his fingers to allow it some air. A row of holes along its neck made a wheezing sound. Ren pointed to the far end of the cave. 'They will hurt Ren if they hear you,' he whispered. What gesture said 'hurt' without pain? He opened his mouth and made a quiet 'agh'. The youngster mimicked him (as best it could). Ren sighed and looked toward the light. That call had raised a fresh round of dread. The skalers must be out like a hunting pack. If they saw him with the pupp they would ask no questions, they would simply kill. All he could do \u2013 or hope to do \u2013 was leave it outside, then hide until nightfall, assuming the mountain didn't take him first, though its rage, for now, had largely blown out.\n\nFolding down the pupp's wings, he crept quietly forward. Never had a light been less inviting or shadows more difficult to find. But the task itself was simple enough: get as near to the outside as possible, wait until the skies were clear, then put the skaler out on the mountainside. They would see it soon enough (or more likely hear it), and the job was done.\n\nThe first part was easy. In the wall at the very brink of the opening was a natural recess, deep enough to take Ren and the pupp. He got there just as a skaler flew past. He pressed himself into the shadows, holding tight to the youngster so it wouldn't flap. Breathing slowly, he closed his eyes. Ten breaths later there was still no hint of wings outside and the youngster had settled quietly in his hands. All he had to do was step into the open, stand near to the edge and release the pupp. But as he rehearsed the action in his mind, his thoughts lit up with more pictures of the mother and her dazzling eyes. What did she want of him? Why did this feel like a terrible betrayal when all he was doing was giving the skaler back to those who could care for it?\n\nHe broke cover and ran for the light. It was almost the end of them both. The rocks at the brink of the cleft were smooth and weathered, but unevenly layered, eager to trip a careless foot. Ren stumbled to his knees, opening his hands as much to save himself from falling as to let the skaler go. Its wings paddled the air but made no flight. It hit the slope with an awkward splat, slid down on a gaggle of stones and pitched forward onto its back. The noise it made was unbearable, such an indignant squeal that Ren was tempted to bound down the mountainside and immediately retrieve it, as though it had all been a terrible mistake. But the air was trembling to the pulse of wings and a shadow had just swept over the hill. Ren scrambled back into the cleft and made himself as thin as possible. The pupp \u2013 still out in the open \u2013 squealed fearfully and not without reason. A huge skaler had just come down to land.\n\nIt was so close it ate up most of Ren's light. Moving nothing but his eyes, Ren tried to see it. It stretched its sinewy neck and a ripple of colour ran down its scales. Green, Ren thought, but then most of them were, darkening a little towards the head. He stilled his breathing, expecting that he wouldn't need to hold the air for long. All the adult had to do was pick up the youngster and fly it to safety. Ren's heart wrenched at the thought. He'd cradled the thing for less time than it took to scratch his rear and yet\u2026\n\nHe let his chest down and filled it again. Outside, the big skaler was doing the same, moving the air like approaching thunder. A clatter of rocks suggested it was struggling to hold its position. Ren risked another look, pulling back quickly as the skaler turned its head. It seemed to be scanning the sky for some reason. Why? What was it waiting for? What help did it need to lift up anything as small as Pupp? And why hadn't it made a call to the others to say the youngster was alive and found?\n\nThe reason soon became chillingly clear. One of the beast's short limbs came into view. Set among its claws was a large stone.\n\n'No,' Ren mouthed.\n\nToo late. The skaler thumped down with so much force that the rocks zinged and sparks flew. Ren could not believe what he was seeing. The adult snorted, apparently in annoyance, opened its jaws and raised the stone again.\n\nThis time, Ren screamed openly, 'NO!'\n\nBy rights, it should have been the last word he spoke. But at the very moment he'd opened his mouth another skaler had skriked in the distance, drowning him out. The skaler on the ground gave a worried start. It dropped the stone and replied with a kind of irritated grate. It shook its head as if to say there was nothing to be found.\n\nThen it glanced down quickly, bared its teeth and disappeared into the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Stunned. That was how Ren felt. Stunned and hollow inside. After some moments of indecision, he started to make up positive reasons for what he'd just seen. He told himself that the skaler might have been striking at a slitherer that had wound by looking for an easy meal. Maybe the beast had used a rock because the pupp was too close to survive a burst of flame? For all Ren knew, it was, in fact, rescued; when the adult had flown, its feet had been hidden from view. But his mind refused to accept those reasons, and when he at last peered over the ledge there was no sign of any splattered slitherer, just a flash of blue between the stones. The pupp was buried on the slope, not moving. Struck down by one of its own.\n\nSorrow the like of which he'd never known began to squeeze Ren's youthful heart. Yet even with the evidence bare before him, he was struggling to believe what had just happened. He ran the scene through his mind once more. Skaler, landing. Pause. Stone. Whichever way he sifted it, the facts came back to him swathed in darkness. A green skaler had cruelly attacked the pupp. It had struck with a stone and\u2026\n\n\u2026not completed the kill!\n\nRen dropped to a crouch and squinted. Yes, there was a definite twitch of a foot, a little knock of pebble against pebble. Dismissing any thought for his own safety, he quickly jumped down and separated the stones. Amazingly, the pupp was alive, nestled in a cavity between two boulders. Ren remembered the adult's snort of annoyance and wondered if the young one had seen the blow coming and dived into the hole to protect itself. The impact had probably knocked it senseless, giving the attacker cause to believe it had done enough \u2013 but also leaving room for doubt.\n\nCarefully, Ren dragged the youngster clear. It was bleeding from a gash where the legs joined the belly. The goo trickled warmly over Ren's wrist, the same green fluid he'd seen oozing out of the mother's head. In that moment, the pupp snapped back to life, kicking in terror and biting Ren's hand. Stifling a cry, he clamped its mouth shut. Grimacing, he looked at the back of his hand. Blood was springing from an arc of fine holes.\n\nA fresh call from the far side of the mountain reminded him of how much danger he was in. The skaler could return at any moment to finish off what it had started.\n\nWhat to do?\n\nThe cave was the obvious answer, but\u2026 He wiped his wrist \u2013 and that gave him an idea. A slim chance, but it might just work, though it would mean inflicting more hurt on the pupp. 'Forgive me,' he whispered. Kneeling down, he clamped its mouth again and squeezed its belly till more green spurted out of the cut, enough to make a pool on the face of a boulder. The youngster wriggled and jerked like fury, but in a moment it was done and Ren was upright again. He launched the pupp in the direction of the cave, praying it wouldn't crash and hurt itself further. But it was learning fast what its body could do. Instinctively, it beat its fragile wings, this time creating enough momentum to fly a short way and land safely on the ledge.\n\nRen knelt again. His left hand was burning with pain from the bite, but he ignored it and used the palm of the other to smear the green blood in a trail across the rocks. To this he added some dung from his hair, still wet enough to spread. In a moment of inspiration, he reached into his robe and pulled out the caarker leg he'd found. It was the size of the pupp's, but with one toe less. He planted it carefully at the head of the trail, leaving just one toe showing. Then, with a wary eye on the sky, he pushed as many stones as he could toward the site to try to create the illusion of a rock fall, even managing to tip up a huge boulder before he scrambled back into the mountain.\n\nHe found the pupp there, huddled and miserable. This time when he picked it up it didn't struggle, but just settled in his arms as if it no longer cared what happened to it. Ren cradled it in a fold of his robe, then slipped back into the shadows and waited.\n\nBefore long, the large skaler came back. It went through all the same motions as before: pausing, breathing, checking the sky. It bent its head and Ren heard it sniffing. He prayed it wouldn't rake the rocks, and it didn't, an outcome aided by a closing shudder from the sleeping mountain that added a last trickle of stones to the pile.\n\nBut the skaler wasn't done. It raised itself up and thumped down on the erth with colossal power, doing this twice before it flew off. When all was quiet, Ren emerged from the cave and looked at the site. His 'burial' mound was flattened. Whichever skaler had committed the strike didn't just want the youngster dead \u2013 it wanted it deader than dead. For the first time, Ren felt truly afraid. His mission had taken on a whole new twist. He could not abandon the youngster now, nor could he risk another try at returning it. He looked across the silent landscape. The Kaal settlement seemed very far away. Perhaps he should have listened to Targen the Old and never let himself become entangled with the skalers. For whichever way his life turned now, he was going to encounter more enemies than friends, the worst of them being a dark green skaler with a speck of red in its hateful eye.\n\nAnd a broken fang on its upper left side."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Ren decided not to wait for nightfall. The death of the female skaler had brought others to the mountain from all directions. But as time went by and flurries of snow began to drift into the cleft, the sky emptied and he guessed that the beasts had gathered around the great ice lake. If they were anything like the men of his tribe they would have come together to decide what must be done. Now and then he could hear them roaring. He almost felt he ought to be among them, sharing their loss, giving word of what he'd seen. But that was a fever talking. His bitten hand was beginning to swell and purple blotches were spreading out around the tooth marks. He could feel the pupp's fire flowing up his arm, breaking in beads of hot sweat across his brow. Another reason to get home soon. He needed herbs. He needed Targen the Old.\n\nBut first he had to attend to their wounds. The youngster's cut was healing quickly. The blood loss, in fact, had almost stopped. Ren spat on his hand and rubbed some wet into the wound, then tied another strip of his mother's under-robe around the belly, knotting it off at the back, between the wings. It was a struggle. Although the little one was yet to grow scales, there were bristles all over its bony body that wanted to stand up at different angles. And like any young animal, it pecked at the binding as soon as it was on. Ren sighed, knowing he had done all he could.\n\nFor himself, he made another binding, which he wrapped three times around his injured hand and attempted to tie off using his teeth. While he was labouring, he noticed the skaler sniffing at the dressing he'd applied to his knee. He batted it aside before it could rasp the red stain on the cloth. 'Nuh,' he grunted, the tie between his teeth. He didn't want a skaler tasting his blood. Who knew where that might lead?\n\nGrracck, said the pupp, which seemed to be its response to everything.\n\nRen went back to his hand.\n\nThe pupp, looking on, tilted its snout and tottered forward again, this time stretching its wiry neck and nipping at the knot that held the knee tie in place.\n\nThe dressing slipped down Ren's shin.\n\n'No!' he said, and tried to swipe the pupp again, but was overcome by a sudden bout of dizziness, a sway so strong it turned him onto his side. He lay there panting, the mouth of the cave growing large and small. Once again the pupp came forward, lifting its dark wings, sniffing for blood. Ren tried to kick out, but the fever wouldn't have it. This was it, he thought. His life was over. The skaler had numbed him with a poisoned bite. Now he was just a lump of meat, as useless as the caarker he had trampled in the tunnel, as dead as the mutt with its staring eye. Killed by a skaler barely out of its egg.\n\nIt was going to eat him alive.\n\nWhen he woke, the pupp was the first thing he saw.\n\nThere was blood, red blood, around its mouth.\n\nHorrified, Ren sat up and felt for his knee. He feared he would find the leg severed in half or at best put his fingers in a gory hole. But the limb was good and the wound clean, all its shredded edges sealed. At first he thought it had healed itself and the skaler had grazed on a crust of dried blood. But a gouge like that took days to mend. And though he couldn't know how long he'd been sleeping, he felt sure that very little time had passed. That must mean the skaler had healed him. And all he had done for it in return was to slap it around the cave.\n\nHe put out a hand, palm upraised. The skaler was hesitant, but eventually climbed on and seemed glad to be cradled back at Ren's chest. It had pulled off its dressing, but its bleeding had stopped.\n\nRen tickled two tiny stumps on its head.\n\nGrracck! said the pupp.\n\nRen laughed quietly. 'Grracck,' he whispered, in a tone he hoped would sound grateful. He glanced outside. The snow was falling steadily now. Not the best conditions for running, but at least he felt better, stronger for the sleep. And though his bandaged hand was still a worry (unlike his knee, it hadn't stopped hurting) now was the time to leave.\n\nWith the pupp in his arms, he approached the cave mouth. Another low rumble drifted over the hills. The skalers were still by the lake. What was going to happen, he wondered, when he walked into the settlement and laid the pupp at the feet of Targen? The Kaal might kill the youngster just as gladly as the adult skaler would. But men had voices he knew and understood. Men, he could reason with \u2013 he hoped.\n\nFirst, he had to survive the journey. 'We go,' he said to the pupp. He pointed to the hills, the forest, the scorch line. 'You stay close to Ren.' He made claws with his fingers to demonstrate.\n\nThe skaler gurgled and gripped the robe. Ren accepted the pinching this time, but the noises, he knew, would have to stop. He put a finger to his lips and made a shushing sound. The pupp made a happy hurring noise. 'No,' Ren whispered, shushing again. He wagged his finger. The pupp tried to nip it, thinking they were playing. Ren sighed and patted its head. Hopefully, it would get the idea as they went, otherwise one of them, at least, was dead.\n\nAll the while keeping a watch on the skies, he took the drop one boulder at a time, careful not to stand on any rocks heavily wetted by snow. If a bone broke now or a muscle tore, the journey home was over before it had begun.\n\nHe started to run as he hit the slope proper, the skaler bobbing freely at his chest. The ground chattered as he knocked the shale aside. Noisy, but a risk worth taking, just to get across the scorch line as fast as he could.\n\nHe ran at an even downhill pace, covering the ground twice as quickly as he had in the night. The Whispering Forest was his first objective. Before long, it rose in the distance, a huge ribbon of green flowing over the hills, just starting to be capped by snow. Ren ran and ran, finding rushes of energy he never knew he had. He was almost on the point of self-congratulation, close enough to the trees to think that the skalers were not as smart as Targen claimed, when the pupp made a warning noise. Ren hit the ground fast, pulling up his legs and sheltering the youngster in the curve of his body. The land outside the forest was more green than grey, with few rocky outcrops of any size. Even huddled in a ball, he was going to stand out. And maybe his nose had gotten used to the smell, but his robe no longer reeked of filth. Ren pressed his eyes shut, trembling from his hair to his aching feet. He could hear wingbeats. Close. Very close. Any moment now the erth would boom and a skaler would surely set itself down. All Ren could do was offer up the pupp and the darkeye horn still tucked into his robe and hope that the monster was merciful.\n\nBut there was no boom. No shake of the erth. Ren felt the rush as the thing swept over. It was flying low, and yet it had missed him. He took a chance and opened one eye. A skaler was disappearing into the distance. It was one of the two he'd seen fighting earlier. Not the glorious white one tipped with yellow. The other. The strikingly-coloured blue.\n\nHe let it fade from his sight before he stood up. A poor (or stupid) hunter it might be, but if nothing else Ren was grateful for the rest. He waved it goodbye, arrogantly thinking he could now afford to stroll into the forest. But as he turned toward the trees, he found his way blocked by the point of a spear.\n\nIt jabbed at his belly like the end of the mother skaler's tail, carried by a man no wider than the bones his skin stretched over. A man with so much hair around his face that his eyes looked like two eggs in a nest. Despite the cold, his chest was bare, the skin grown over with dark green moss, notably on his shoulders and back. Twigs and old leaves were clinging to the moss and even some wild flowers sprouted there. A treeman. The first Ren had ever seen. Two more of them rose from the ground as if they had floated up from the grave. The Kaal had always believed that the skalers had driven these men from the forest. Yet here were three, all wielding spears.\n\n'What got?' said the first, dribbling into his beard. His milky eyes squinted at the shape in Ren's hands.\n\nRen wrapped his arms round the pupp. He wouldn't be able to shield it for long. 'Mutt,' he said.\n\nThe treeman squinted. Outside the forest, their sight was poor. 'Show,' he grunted. He jabbed again.\n\nRen shook his head. 'I am Kaal,' he said proudly. He nodded at the lowland beyond the forest. 'I have no quarrel with treemen. Let me go.'\n\nA second man stepped forward, the point of his spear less lenient than his friend's. Without warning, he stabbed Ren's bandaged hand.\n\nRen cried out and the skaler echoed. Its head wriggled free and it hissed like a slitherer. Tiny though it was, its teeth, when it set its jaws wide, were chilling.\n\nAll three treemen backed off in fear.\n\nRen clasped his injured hand. 'Stand away,' he growled, the words burning angrily on his tongue. And at first he thought they were going to allow it, but they looked at each other and seemed to reach a mutual conclusion.\n\nKill the boy.\n\nKill the beast.\n\nThey came for him, spears raised, murder in their eyes.\n\nA strange sensation flooded through Ren. In the face of this danger he suddenly felt the mother skaler's presence, as if she had emerged from within him like a spirit. But what could she do? He had nowhere to run and no weapon with which to defend himself.\n\nOr did he?\n\nFaster than the treemen could have thought possible, he went into his robe and pulled out the darkeye horn. He held it high in his fist, the way they held their spears against him. Now the mother skaler came alive in Ren. His chest seemed to double in size. The fingers on his bitten hand curled like claws. More remarkable than that, his lips rolled back and he heard himself roar. But it was not the roar the treemen ran from, it was the fire that burst from the darkeye horn. Ren felt it coming like a rush of hot blood, from the centre of his chest all the way down his arm. It leapt across the space between them, catching the nearest man and setting his brittle grey hair alight. He screamed. His spear hit the ground. He fled with the others, beating his face, leaving cinders trailing on the wind. He ran from the boy who made fire in his hand. The boy who could roar like a skaler.\n\nRen sank to his knees and let go of Pupp. The youngster, who seemed unaffected by the conflict, was happy to potter and graze for a moment. Ren looked at the horn, still glowing at its tip. He clamped his fist even tighter around it, curling his fingers into its spirals. 'What am I?' he whispered. He raised up his hand and stared at the bite marks. The mother skaler had left him now, but during the time she had spent in his mind, she had opened a pathway to understanding, beginning with the words she had spoken in the cavern: galan aug scieth. 'I am you and you are me.' That was what it meant. Somehow, she had made herself part of him.\n\nAnd Ren was coming to know her too, and all that glittered in her haunting eye. She was called Grystina, of the Astrian line. To her son she had also given a name: Gariffred, meaning 'flame of truth'.\n\nGariffred. On Ren's tongue, it was hard to say. Begging respect, he chose to stick with Pupp. But there were other words that caught his imagination. He had always wondered how they named themselves, these astonishing creatures of fire. Now, with the mother's help, he knew. They hailed from a world they called Ki:mera. And they were not beasts, nor monsters, nor skalers, but went by a word that spilled off the tongue like a storm of fire.\n\nDragons.\n\nThey called themselves dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Grendel and Graymere",
                "text": "'Herbs?' said Gossana, twisting her snout in a way that Grymric found uncomfortable to watch. He had served many matrials in his time spent studying the healing arts, but never one quite as off-putting as Gossana. Those eyes, as changeable as the planet's skies. And those sharpened sawfin scales that somehow felt like an extra set of claws she might use to slash through an old dragon's neck. She had Veng in her bloodline somewhere, he was sure of it. He shook himself and put the thought from his mind.\n\n'The myss has suffered a great trauma,' he said, squinting sideways at the female wearling huddled up at the mouth of the cave. She looked miserable. Worse than that, cold.\n\n'Herbs?' Gossana repeated, as if she expected a great deal more from the healing dragon than vegetation.\n\n'Yes, indeed,' said Grymric, sweeping his claws over the rich array of samples he'd collected, all of them sitting in separate piles, well out of the wind. 'The planet has an endless supply of green forms. I have still to discover what benefits many of them could have for us, but I'm certain that with a little time I can\u2014'\n\n'I don't have time,' Gossana cut in, flexing her glistening claws. 'I need something to raise her out of her melancholy. I was thinking of fhosforent.' She snorted across the cave floor, making the nearest leaf pile dance. They resettled in a less than perfect heap. Grymric shuffled forward and tidied them again, being careful not to show any hint of displeasure.\n\n'I would not advise it,' he said. 'The properties of fhosforent are still unclear and it has never been tested in one so young. In her present state, even the smallest quantity might kill her.'\n\nHe thought he saw Gossana raise an eye ridge, but did not care to interpret its meaning. 'Of course,' he said, before she could carp, 'no amount of plant life could replace the warmth of a mother's love \u2013 which only a matrial as experienced as yourself could offer.'\n\nGossana snorted again. Her jaws were tightly clenched, but there was just enough movement in the skin around her mouth to show off her impressive fangs. Grymric noticed she was dribbling slightly and wondered if it would be impolite to ask if she was having a problem with her teeth.\n\n'She's not mine,' Gossana growled. 'And she does not want to be. I cannot raise a wearling that will not bond, not even with the noble G'vard at my side.'\n\nThese last few words were spoken with a high degree of irritation, leading Grymric to fear even more for the wearling. What hope did the orphan have if its appointed mother did not wish to raise it? And if there was no fondness between that mother and the dragon destined to be her companion, what then?\n\nThankfully, he didn't have to offer up a comment. At that moment, another dragon appeared in the cave mouth. Grymric was pleased to see it was Grendel, a female he had a great liking for. She took a keen interest in the healing arts and often came to spend time with him.\n\n'Oh, forgive me,' Grendel said, bowing to the superior female. She threw a worried glance at the wearling.\n\n'I did not know you had a consultation with Grymric. I will leave.'\n\n'No\u2026wait,' Gossana said. That glance from Grendel to the youngster had not escaped the old queen's attention. In a silky voice most uncommon to her she said, 'Grymric and I were just discussing the welfare of the orphan. As I think you noticed, she is not what one would want to see in a dragon so young.'\n\n'No,' said Grendel. She lifted her tail and ran her isoscele down the wearling's back. The youngster shuddered and gave out a pitiful, but not ungrateful graark.\n\nGrendel looked up to see both adults watching her. Despite the wet trail running from her jaw, Gossana's expression was as close to smiling as any dragon ever came. Grymric, however, had tightened his eye ridges. Displaying signs of affection to a wearling bound to another female might confuse it. He'd expected better of Grendel.\n\nShe read his eyes and tented her wings in apology. 'Something my mother used to do for me.' To satisfy Grymric, she pulled her tail well away from the youngster.\n\nBut Gossana, who ought to have been the one doing the scolding, stretched her head toward Grendel and said, 'You may be able to help.'\n\n'Me?' Grendel looked puzzled.\n\nAnd Grymric seemed alarmed. 'In what way might Grendel help?'\n\nGossana took a breath that bowed her chest and made her dark green scales clatter. 'How goes your courting, plentyn?'\n\nGrymric almost choked on a ball of his smoke. He looked again at his pile of herbs, wondering if Gossana had accidentally ingested an overdose of the green stalks he knew to cause dreaminess. Plentyn? Why was she using the ancient tongue? To call a younger female 'child' was a sign of immense fondness \u2013 a quality no dragon would ever have assigned to the most fearsome matrial the Wearle had known.\n\nGrendel bowed in acceptance of the compliment. 'I\u2026it is only five days since\u2026'\n\n'Since the Prime instructed you to enter a laying cycle,' Gossana reminded her. 'And no male has come to you yet? I find that hard to imagine.'\n\nGrendel floundered again, her neck scales flushing a light shade of green. 'I\u2026no,' she said.\n\n'But you're so\u2026radiant,' Gossana remarked.\n\nAnother extraordinary compliment, but Grymric had heard a hiss beneath the words and realised Gossana had slavered her way through them. There was definitely something wrong with her teeth. He broke in nervously.\n\n'The matrial knows that Grendel is entitled to take her time before allowing males to court her.'\n\nGossana turned and stared him down. The amber eye (the 'kind one', as some dragons called it) was suddenly glowing as red as the other, sending its sharp light around the cave. 'Don't ever tell me what I know,' she growled. 'Grendel's eyes are as bright as new snow. And I see fresh lytes along her tail. Her heartbeats can be heard all around the mountains. Any day now she'll start to sing. She is ready. And yet no males pursue her. And she comes here seeking advice from a healer? This can only mean one thing.' She turned and looked at Grendel again. 'She has already made her choice of companion and is actively avoiding all other approaches.'\n\n'No, no,' said Grymric, flashing his tail. Now he did feel able to disagree. 'Grendel cannot choose one male above all others. That would be absurd. I would expect at least four males to be presenting the Elders with their right to do battle to be her guardian.'\n\nGossana raised her head so high it almost touched the ceiling of the cave. 'Have I suddenly become a vapor? Did I or did I not just say don't teach me what I know.'\n\n'Matrial, I\u2026' Grymric shrank into a huddle, his protests now as parched as his herbs.\n\n'Tell him,' Gossana snapped at Grendel, her menacing eyes changing colour again. 'Tell him before I roast his ears. Tell him how your second heart beats for one dragon. Tell him what colour that dragon is.'\n\n'Blue,' Grendel admitted weakly. She looked at the sky as if to remind herself.\n\n'Hear that, healer? She desires a blue.'\n\n'A BLUE?' said Grymric, coughing up a long-dead cinder. There were only two blues he could bring to mind: Goodle, who had an excellent bloodline but was a little immature to court a dragon like Grendel, and\u2026 'Not G\u2014 Not Abrial?'\n\nGrendel rolled her upper lip.\n\n'I saw the signs during Galarhade's address,' Gossana said, raking one foot with the claws of the other. A web of saliva fell from her jaw. 'Our future queen was making glances at a dragon who is now little more than a renegade.'\n\n'That's unfair and you know it,' Grendel said, her voice approaching the pitch of a roar. The sound boomed around the walls, alarming the wearling and causing her to flap. Grendel immediately corrected herself and leant nearer to the youngster, blowing warm air along her back to soothe her. 'I don't believe Gabrial killed Grystina. I know him. We grew up together. He's gentle.'\n\nGossana snorted again. 'Not a quality most queens would want in their companion.'\n\nGrymric interceded with a heavy sigh. 'This is not good. Not good at all.' He was pacing back and forth now, swishing his tail. 'The Elders will not allow this match.'\n\n'Indeed they will not,' Gossana agreed, and yet there was a strangely triumphant tone floating just under her words. 'That leaves us very few options.'\n\n'Us?' said Grendel, growling again.\n\n'Would you put aside my help?' Gossana said. 'Oh yes, the healer has his potions, but he does not understand the hearts of a queen. With Grystina gone, who else can advise you?'\n\n'I do not want your help,' said Grendel, causing Grymric to jump in again.\n\nHe stood between them. 'What does Gossana propose?'\n\nThe old queen flexed her neck, easing the tired muscles in her shoulders. 'How do you live in this cramped little hole?' Grymric started to answer, but Gossana waved an arm to say the question did not require a response. 'Grendel has two choices, both of which will anger Prime Galarhade. Either she persists in this folly and calls the blue to her, which will bring shame on her bloodline and cause others to question Galarhade's decision to let her be courted, or she allows me to speak to the Elders on her behalf so that the issue might be\u2026resolved.'\n\n'Resolved?' said Grendel, her nostrils widening. She pushed forward a little as if she'd like to bite off Gossana's head. She looked at Grymric. The fine scales above his eyes were almost cracking.\n\n'Love is a complex emotion,' said Gossana, before the healer could speak again. 'If a female admits her affinity for a male, rather than wait for the strongest to fight for her, the process is hard to reverse. For the good of the Wearle, Grendel's liking for\u2026Abrial' \u2013 she lashed her tongue around the name as though to flick away a sour taste \u2013 'should not be denied\u2014'\n\n'But he's virtually an exile,' Grymric said. 'How\u2014?'\n\n'I haven't finished,' Gossana snorted.\n\nGrymric shuffled back again, glad, for once, of the comforting shadows his 'cramped hole' offered.\n\nGossana picked up her thread. 'But neither should the match be encouraged at this stage. If the blue should demonstrate his worthiness again, Grendel could yet accept him \u2013 though he would be forced to fight for her, of course, once other dragons declare their interest.'\n\n'But who knows how long that might take?' said Grymric. 'Grendel has entered her laying cycle. It could be damaging to her if the feelings she embraces are not played out.'\n\n'Yes,' said Gossana, still irked that Grymric was telling her her business, 'but it is an outcome easily prevented. It is not too late for Grendel's feelings to be\u2026diverted.'\n\n'Diverted?' said the healer. 'What do you mean?'\n\n'She means to give up the myss,' said Grendel, beginning to understand where this was leading. 'She wants me to foster the wearling for her, so that Gossana might be free to be a queen again.'\n\n'She\u2026? You\u2026? Exchange places?' Grymric shook his head so hard that his stigs looked in danger of falling off. 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That cannot happen. The Prime has made his decision. He\u2014'\n\n'I will speak to Galarhade,' Gossana cut in. 'I will tell him that Grendel had already developed feelings for the blue before the quake that shook Mount Vargos, but was too overcome with grief and confusion to inform the Elders at that time. I will add that she has struggled to alter her affections and has wisely sought my advice. We, that is Grymric and I, having discussed the matter further and noted the fondness Grendel has for the orphan, are agreed that she, in her present state, should foster the myss \u2013 with my ongoing support, of course.'\n\nGrendel sighed and looked down at the youngster. It had started to rain and the wearmyss was making no attempt to avoid the drops. 'This is most irregular,' Grymric was saying, but Grendel was already speaking over him. 'She's right, Grymric. The wearling will die if she doesn't bond soon with an appointed guardian. Grystina was my cousin and friend. I could raise the myss.'\n\n'Excellent. Then it's settled,' Gossana said.\n\n'Hold your claws,' said Grendel, staring her down. The old matrial rustled her wings. The look in Grendel's eyes was not far short of a call to combat. 'There is still the question of my honour. Before I can formally accept your terms, I must be sure of the Elders' approval.'\n\n'And you will have it,' said Gossana, not quailing in the slightest. 'I will fly to Prime Galarhade's settle directly. You will have your decision before the moon rises.'\n\n'Wait!' cried Grymric.\n\n'What NOW?' snapped the matrial, in no mood to be impeded again. She already had her wings half lifted.\n\nGrymric glanced at his precious herbs, but could not find the courage to ask Gossana to walk to the cave edge before taking flight. Instead he said timidly, 'Your mouth. You're ailing, I think.'\n\n'Pff! It's nothing,' the matrial said. 'I broke a fang on the back of a catch I was hunting. Trust me, its bones fared worse than mine.'\n\nShe bared her teeth. For a dragon of her age, her teeth were good, blackened but almost entirely intact \u2013 apart from one fang on the upper left side, sheared to a slant and as jagged as ice, stained with the red blood of her prey, and the faintest hint of dragon green."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "There was no hope for the herb array. One flap of Gossana's wings sent the piles into a spiralling cloud. They seemed to take as long to drop as every leaf in the nearby forest.\n\nThe healer sank to his haunches and sighed.\n\n'Don't worry. I'll help you,' Grendel said, already beginning to pick off the leaves that had settled on her scales. 'Now Gossana has what she wants, she won't disturb you again.'\n\nGrymric gave a grateful nod and began the long process of sorting the herbs into appropriate piles. After a while, he said, 'I hope she remembers to speak with G'vard. This arrangement is going to anger him, Grendel. The white has pledged to be a guardian to the myss. If the Elders accept Gossana's proposal, G'vard will be forced to protect a female who sides with a dragon who has caused him pain. Wars have been fought over less. You must go softly around him.'\n\nShe nodded, but raised her head proudly and said, 'G'vard must think of the Wearle before he thinks of his pain. If he accepts this arrangement nobly, he will still have a little of Grystina to fight for.'\n\n'I hope so,' said Grymric, his eyes heavy with concern. 'It is vital that a wearling imprints on the father as much as the mother. If G'vard has lingering doubts about his role, it will affect the wearling's character development. The same applies to you, of course. You cannot allow your feelings for Abrial to confuse the myss. This is a brave commitment, Grendel. Some might even say rash.'\n\n'Your words are kindly noted,' she said. 'There is one thing we can be certain of, Grymric. If the myss is not cared for, what hope does she have? Did Gossana say if she had learned her name?'\n\nGrymric shook his head. 'I doubt Gossana spoke to it more than she needed to. Grystina may have died before she chose a name anyway. A queen-elect will usually wait until she knows who the father will be, then names her young accordingly. You knew Grystina well. Given the unusual nature of this family, I doubt G'vard would object if you gave the myss a name sympathetic to her mother's lineage.'\n\nGrendel glanced at the youngster again. The wearling had at last moved out of the rain. Not only that, it was staring at something on the wall of the cave. 'Grymric, what's she looking at?'\n\n'Um?' The healer turned his head. 'Oh, the marks. They're nothing. They were left by the Hom. They make poor i:mages of themselves on rock. You'll find similar likenesses in most of the caves around Vargos.'\n\nGrendel put down her herbs and went to see. On the wall, just as Grymric had said, were some scratchy outlines of Hom figures. They were grasping weapons and chasing an animal. She glanced down at the myss, who was tilting her head and mewing quietly. Grendel circled her tail. With her isoscele, she pointed at the tallest figure. 'This?' she asked. She had picked out the fiercest-looking of the Hom, thinking the wearling might be frightened by it.\n\nThe wearling made a graarking sound and brought her tail around as well. She had no triangular scale at the end, just a stub where the isoscele would soon begin to grow. But she could point, and point she did \u2013 at a figure without a spear. A figure half the size of the hunting men.\n\n'This one?' said Grendel, moving her tail alongside the youngster's.\n\n'Gffrd,' the wearmyss said, though what actually came out was little more than a grunt. Although dragons learned to speak at an early age, it took them a while to form the most guttural words correctly.\n\nGrendel was certain all the same that the wearling was trying to tell her something. She called Grymric over and repeated the sound to him.\n\n'Guffred?' he said, fleshing it out with a vowel or two.\n\n'Gffrd,' the wearling repeated.\n\n'It sounds like a name,' the healer muttered, 'but\u2014'\n\n'Gariffred,' Grendel murmured suddenly, her gaze drifting slowly into space. 'Grystina was from the Astrian line. She spoke fondly about her great-great-father, an Elder called\u2026' She dipped her head towards the young one again. 'GARIFFRED,' she repeated firmly.\n\n'Graark,' said the wearling, almost falling over as she tried to touch the wall.\n\n'I don't understand what you're getting at,' said Grymric.\n\nBut a light was shining in Grendel's eyes. 'Don't you see? It is a name. Grystina must have named the drake after her ancestor.'\n\n'No, not that name,' Grymric said, smoke balls puffing out of his ears.\n\n'Why not?'\n\n'Because\u2026 Oh, you know your history,' he spluttered. 'Why would Grystina burden her drake by calling it \"flame of truth\"? No one can prove that the Astrian line was closer to Godith than any other dynasty. That argument was settled before I was born, with a great deal of bloodshed, so I was taught. To bring a drake called Gariffred into the Wearle would be a direct snub to Prime Galarhade's authority. And Elder Givnay would not approve on spiritual grounds, not to mention the fact that his family is long connected to that conflict. Why would Grystina, that most sensible of dragons, wish to cause any hint of controversy? These are tense times, Grendel. Do not speak of this, I beg you. It will only make matters worse. Besides, the drake is dead. Its name is of little consequence now.'\n\nBut Grendel wasn't done, and her next words fell like icy rain around Grymric's ears. 'I disagree. I think she's trying to tell us what happened to her brother.'\n\n'What?' the healer exclaimed. Had Grendel lost all grasp of her senses? He had herbs for that kind of malady, he thought \u2013 if only he could find them.\n\n'We must summon the Elders without delay,' she said.\n\n'Why don't you speak to me instead?'\n\nThe imposing figure of G'vard had suddenly filled the cave mouth. Despite her surprise, Grendel found herself impressed by his stealth. He had glided silently into the cave and closed his wings without disturbing a single herb. She wondered how much he had heard.\n\nGrymric, who looked grateful for the break in proceedings, said, 'Ah. Perhaps I should leave you two\u2026three to get better acquaint\u2014'\n\n'Stay where you are,' G'vard growled. He looked harshly at Grendel and nodded at the little one. 'Is it true?'\n\n'If you mean about the wearmyss, yes.' She manoeuvred herself to stand over the wearling.\n\nG'vard pushed his thick neck forward, the muscles hardening all along its length. 'How dare you make an arrangement like this without consulting me or\u2014'\n\n'I didn't,' Grendel cut in fearlessly. 'It was Gossana's idea. Show her your impressive teeth, if you must. The future of this wearling is all that matters. You will do as you pledged and protect us.'\n\n'Her,' G'vard thundered, stabbing his tail at the terrified youngster. 'I pledged to protect her. Not you. Not the consort of a traitor.'\n\n'Gabrial did not harm Grystina,' she growled.\n\nG'vard whipped his tail back and held it aloft, a sign of his deep displeasure. 'Listen to her,' he snorted at Grymric. 'Hear how she openly defies the Elders.'\n\n'She is\u2026confused,' Grymric offered weakly.\n\nBut Grendel stood proud. And boldly she said, 'Gabrial and Grogan are falsely accused. I know. I have proof.' From the corner of her eye she saw Grymric wince.\n\n'PROOF? I was there,' G'vard hit back. 'The blue caused an eruption; the whole Wearle knows it.'\n\n'One of the Wearle knows differently,' said Grendel, 'and she was closer to Grystina than you.' She stood aside to reveal the marks on the wall.\n\nFor the last time Grymric tried to interrupt. 'Grendel, in the name of Godith, please let this go.'\n\n'No,' said G'vard, flicking out his claws. 'Let's hear the female's \"proof\".'\n\nThe healer winced again, sipping air through his teeth. This was going from bad to dangerous. To use the term 'female' \u2013 that is, not to refer to Grendel by name \u2013 was a dreadful slur. Even afflicted by anger and grief, it was unlike G'vard to shame another dragon so.\n\n'Look at the wall,' Grendel said plainly.\n\nG'vard sharpened his gaze on the figures. 'Hom. What of it?'\n\n'She points to them and says her brother's name.'\n\nGrymric strangled a breath. But Grendel had thankfully not revealed the name.\n\nAnd G'vard was showing no interest in learning it. He pulled his nostrils tight together, the worst expression of scorn a dragon could make.\n\n'Don't you see? It means they were there,' said Grendel.\n\n'Who? Where?' Grymric asked.\n\n'The Hom were at Vargos,' Grendel explained. 'The wearmyss saw them in Grystina's birth cave. That's why she points at the figures.'\n\nG'vard snorted and shook his head wildly. 'If the Hom were at Vargos, Grystina would have burned them, and we would have seen their ash.'\n\n'Well, perhaps just one of them,' Grendel snapped back, floundering around her theory a little. 'A young one. A smaller one, that might hide in a crevice.'\n\n'And not be scented? They are Hom. They stink!'\n\n'We must tell the Elders,' Grendel insisted.\n\n'Grendel, listen to me,' Grymric cut in. His tone was firm; he had heard enough. 'The Elders will not believe a wearling's babble, and nothing will bring Grystina back.'\n\n'But\u2014?'\n\n'No, plentyn. Hear me out. Even if the Hom had escaped our patrols, how could they have caused the eruption we saw? They do not have the power to i:mage such a thing.'\n\n'At last, some words of sense,' said G'vard. He moved closer to Grendel, until they were almost snout to snout. 'I am flying to Galarhade right away to withdraw my offer of guardianship. I would rather return to Ki:mera in shame than be an unwilling ally to that idiot blue.'\n\nAnd with that he gave a formal bow and backed out of the cave.\n\nGrymric, glad now to see him go, let out a weighty sigh. 'In the name of all that is noble and good, how can we suffer such dreadful wretchedness? It's this planet, there's something odd about it, something that blights a dragon's soul. Did you see G'vard's eyes? Did they seem in any way dull to you? There was something ailing him, I'm sure. And I don't just mean Grystina's death. His condition was akin to a worker I saw at the fhosforent mine this morning. Dullness of eye; quick to anger. When his fire has simmered I must go to him and offer assistance. In the meantime, I pray to Godith to bring down the night before any other vile misfortunes befall us.'\n\nThese words were spoken with heartfelt concern, but Grendel was about to land one more blow. Stroking the wearmyss again, she said, 'If I leave her with you, can you feed her, Grymric?'\n\n'I \u2013 sorry? Leave her? Here? With me?'\n\n'Just until morning,' Grendel begged. 'Make some i:mages for her. She'll like that.' She produced one, quickly. A star that popped when the little one touched her snout to it.\n\n'But\u2026where are you going?' Grymric asked.\n\n'For help.'\n\n'Help?'\n\n'If my guardian deserts me, I must seek out another.' Grendel bent her head low and spoke softly to the wearling, then raised her head to the healer once more. 'I name her Gayl, after her mother's mother.'\n\n'Yes, yes. Very apt. But where are you going?'\n\n'To the edge of the domayne,' Grendel gulped. 'Where the sweepers fly.'\n\nAnd before Grymric could protest, she had backed up to the cave edge, spread her wings and flown."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Halfway across the valley, Grendel could still hear Grymric's cries for her return. But her mind was set. She would follow her second heart and seek out Gabrial. He would believe her if no other dragon would.\n\nThe problem was where to look for him. Although she was old enough to roam freely, the mountain domayne was vast and her knowledge of it limited. She had spent most of her Erth time aiding Grystina, seeking out suitable birth locations. It was Grendel, in fact, who'd discovered the opening that led to the cavern in Mount Vargos (a thought that still made her sleep uneasy) and though between them they'd explored large sweeps of the mountains, they had never flown far beyond sight of the sea. She had therefore never seen the fabled scorch line that was supposed to keep the Hom at bay.\n\nBut she knew a mapping dragon that had.\n\nIt was dark when she landed at the fhosforent mine, but the lytes on her underwings never dimmed and she barely had time to fold down her wings before she was spotted by one of the Veng. It came to her like a long, thin dart, landing so close that she almost lost her footing on one of the sharp gradients that marked the outlying hills around Vargos. She had never thought herself afraid of the Veng, but she had never been challenged by one before. Stilling her primary heart, she raised her head and announced herself.\n\n'I am Grendel, from the line of\u2014'\n\n'I know who you are,' the Veng said bluntly. 'What are you doing here?'\n\nGrendel readjusted her optical triggers. Despite her enhanced night vision, the Veng was little more than a pointed head with dull red eyes, the remainder of its body a wedge of obscurity against the sullen backdrop of the mountain range. 'I am free to go where I please,' she said, doing her best to mask a tremor. She caught herself glancing at the Veng's harsh claws. 'If you stand in my way, Prime Galarhade will know about it.'\n\nThe Veng was unimpressed. 'You're not a queen yet,' it snarled, tilting its head as though it wanted to sink its teeth into her throat. 'So I'll ask you again, what are you doing here?'\n\nNow its stigs were bending back as its lip curled clear of its upper fangs. Attack mode. Why? What had she done to incense it so? Yes, the Wearle needed security, but weren't the Veng here to make her feel safe? A dragon of this class should be bowing to her, not drawing her into a petty conflict. Grendel blew a wisp of smoke, being careful not to trail it across the Veng's face. All the while, she could feel her third heart shrinking. That tiny compass of spiritual devotion that kept all dragons on the path to Godith was reacting badly to this encounter. Something was wrong here. Something that filled her with a strange sense of dread.\n\nBefore she could determine the root of her fear or even start to answer the Veng's question, a second dragon landed beside her. She recognised him as Graymere, one of the De:allus breed, sent to oversee the extraction of the fhosforent. The De:allus were quick of mind and good at solving problems. Some rose to be Elders later in life, though many shied away from that position, preferring instead to devote their lives to the science of interpreting the physical wonders of Godith's universe. Graymere was larger than the Veng and had a striking purple hue throughout. Like all De:allus he had bright yellow eyes, a feature associated with high intelligence. De:allus normally kept their eyes half lidded, because at close range the yellow glare was off-putting. Graymere's lids were fully raised tonight, which meant Grendel could see the Veng clearly in the darkness. Was it her imagination or was it less green than it ought to be?\n\n'Fanon Grendel,' Graymere said, exuding a little air from his spiracles. He spread his wings and bent the tips up. This was a sign of deep respect, probably a little more than Grendel deserved. But she was still, technically, in a laying cycle and any male, even one as committed to his work as Graymere, was entitled to consider himself eligible for courtship. She blushed, the green pallor just visible, thanks to his eyes. It pleased her to hear him use the term fanon, a word from the old tongue meaning 'a female yet to have young'.\n\n'De:allus Graymere,' she said, tipping her snout.\n\nHe folded his wings. 'May I ask what brings you here?'\n\nOnly the slightest portion of his tone carried any hope that she was inviting courtship, though Grendel was certain if she took off now he might decide to chase her round the mountains. The De:allus needed to further their lines as much as any other class of dragon \u2013 and there was no denying that Graymere was handsome.\n\n'I already asked her,' the Veng said tetchily, its eye ridges narrowing by half.\n\nGrendel raised her head and made another wisp of smoke. 'Does a dragon in my position need to give a reason for exploring the domayne?' She thought this sounded a little lofty, but Graymere's reply was perfectly polite.\n\n'Of course not,' he said.\n\n'Then I would like to see the work you do here.'\n\nHe seemed surprised, but bowed nonetheless. 'It would be my pleasure,' he said. The stigs on the back of his head were bristling. 'In fact, this is the perfect moment. We are currently in a resting phase. The workers have retired to their settles \u2013 it's a splendid time to see the fhosforent seams. Veng Gazz has no objection, I assume?'\n\nThe Veng snapped his wings open, almost slashing Grendel with the fine-toothed spikes that ran along their edge. 'I have better things to do than watch a fawning De:allus embarrass himself in front of a female.' With a whump that pulled in a raft of cold rain, he banked sideways and slipped away into the darkness.\n\n'My apologies,' Graymere said, when Gazz was gone. 'I am forced by Elder Grynt to employ the Veng's services. No dragon is comfortable around them, I assure you.'\n\n'Is he well?' asked Grendel. 'Only, his scales seemed dull. And he was hostile, even for one of their class.'\n\nGraymere peered after Gazz, into the darkness. Choosing his words with care, he said, 'You must keep this to yourself, but I would not be surprised if Gazz was taking a supply of fhosforent, and possibly encouraging other Veng to do the same.'\n\n'Taking? You mean stealing?' Grendel said.\n\nThe De:allus rustled his wings, a gesture that suggested she should keep her voice low.\n\nShe apologised and leant a little nearer to him. 'Have you reported this to Elder Grynt?'\n\nGraymere fanged his lip \u2013 something he seemed to make a habit of, judging by the scrapes and scars around his mouth. He too did not look in the best of health. But any dragon tasked with managing the mine and dealing with the angry attentions of the Veng could be forgiven a few skin lesions, Grendel thought.\n\nHe said, 'Fhosforent begins to degrade almost as soon as it's removed from the rocks. It's hard to keep a record of how much we've mined. I would need to be certain a crime had been committed before I dared inform Elder Grynt of my suspicions. The consequence of falsely accusing a Veng is too alarming a prospect to consider.'\n\n'Then how will you ever prove his guilt?'\n\n'You saw him,' Graymere whispered. 'If he's stealing the ore, he's eating it.'\n\n'But wouldn't that strengthen him? I thought fhosforent improved our fire?'\n\n'In small amounts, yes,' Graymere agreed. 'But it's hard to know how much Gazz has eaten. The darkening of his scales is deeply puzzling \u2013 even Veng Commander Gallen has commented on it. But it's not his loss of colour that concerns me, more the change in his temperament.'\n\n'Fhosforent affects his mood?' said Grendel.\n\nThe De:allus nodded. 'Most of the combustible minerals we ingest improve our fire through chemical reactions, a mechanism that has evolved over countless generations \u2013 forgive me if I sound like I'm tutoring you.'\n\n'No, please, go on,' Grendel said.\n\n'Fhosforent works by expanding the fire sacs, giving us the power to eject more flame, more quickly. To be safe from harm, the strength of flame we're able to discharge must never overwhelm the tissues that protect the lining of the throat. The heat of a fhosforent flame can quickly wear those tissues down, thus exposing the organs of the brain to a pressure they would not normally accommodate.'\n\nGrendel blinked her soft blue eyes. 'You mean, it's driving him mad?'\n\nGraymere fanged his lip again. 'Too early to say. But if Gazz's behaviour becomes any more erratic, he will be his own ruin.'\n\nGrendel nodded. Now she understood where that sense of dread in her third heart was coming from. She looked at Graymere and felt sorry for him. No one could blame him for not wanting to speak to the Elders about Gazz. But why was this even happening? Dragons stealing? On Ki:mera, such a thing would be unthinkable.\n\n'So, the mine,' the De:allus said, raising his neck to show off his fine array of purple shades. 'It's not only fhosforent we dig for, of course. One of the benefits of being on this world is that it offers many interesting rock forms to graze.'\n\n'Really?' Grendel said doubtfully. 'What I take from the gravel heaps all tastes the same.' She was referring to the piles of loose stone that were stored in places close to the eyries. These days, it was considered distasteful to see Elders gnawing at a rock face for the essential minerals all dragons needed. On Erth, the mine supplied stone chips for all.\n\n'Most of it is,' Graymere said, nodding. 'A basic grit is all that's required to aid the digestion of raw food and give us what supplements we need. If you're interested, I could show you a range of the different substrates we've mined and talk you through their properties?'\n\n'I think I'd prefer to see the fhosforent,' said Grendel, trying to sound as graceful as she could. She admired Graymere's passion for his work, but one rock was much like any other to her.\n\nHe angled himself toward the mountains. 'The best are on the external slopes. Why don't I chase\u2014 I mean, fly you over our latest find? It will be lit by the moon. It's quite impressive.'\n\n'I'd like that,' Grendel said. 'The workers \u2013 you said they were resting now?'\n\n'Yes, until morning \u2013 well, except one.'\n\nGrendel lifted an eye ridge.\n\n'Rogan,' he said.\n\nGrendel steadied her breathing. Rogan was the real reason she was here. 'He works in the night?'\n\n'His own choice,' sighed Graymere. 'The Veng push him hard, but he is allowed rest time \u2013 he simply will not take it.'\n\n'But\u2026he's old. He must be exhausted?'\n\nGraymere nodded, clearly not at ease with the situation. 'Dying of exhaustion, I'd say. He speaks in strange sentences, a never-ending babble of incoherence. He's an excellent worker. He has already uncovered two promising seams, but is always keen to dig harder and deeper; his talons, I'm told, are worn to nothing. He is a poor sight, Grendel. Have no fear, I will make sure we fly well clear of him.'\n\n'No,' she said, before Graymere could launch. 'I want to see him.'\n\nThe De:allus blinked his yellow eyes. 'Why?'\n\n'He knew my father.' (It was a distant connection, but it wasn't a lie.) 'If Rogan is ailing as badly as you say, I want to see him \u2013 alone \u2013 and offer him forgiveness. This is my right as a queen-elect.'\n\n'But if Gallen finds out I've taken you to\u2014'\n\n'This will rest between you and me,' said Grendel. She stretched her beautiful wings, casting a soft light all around her. 'Now, show me fhosforent glowing in the moonlight. I cannot think of anything more appealing, can you?'\n\nAnd then it was Graymere's turn to blush. 'Follow me,' he said. And with a rush of pleasure lifting his wings, he took off into the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "It was indeed an impressive sight. On an ordinary night it would have been impossible to see any natural features in the mountainside. But where the moon shed its subdued light against the slopes, the rocks sparkled in frills and patches, just as if the sky had spilled its stars upon them.\n\nUsing his eyes to light the way, Graymere strafed the scarps and ridges, ending his tour with a jet of flame that made a small portion of the ground explode, showering pink sparks high into the sky.\n\nGrendel was breathless with wonder by the time Graymere invited her to land on a bluff above a quarry filled with misshapen rocks. They were some way from Vargos now, cresting a narrow range of hills that wrinkled in a long tail back to Skytouch.\n\n'Did that please you?' he asked.\n\n'It did,' she confessed, her lytes glowing brightly. 'The sights \u2013 and the guide.' She kept her words pleasant and true, but without suggesting anything deeper \u2013 though the heat from her neck could not be denied. Had her second heart not beat for Gabrial, she would have been more than happy, she thought, to bring up wearlings in Graymere's company. But Gabrial was the one, she was certain of it. To be sure of deflecting their dialogue away from anything that might be misleading, she said, 'Was that fhosforent you burned? I thought you didn't allow that?'\n\n'An impure seam,' he said. 'The finest crystals are deep in the rock. By burning off the layers of a weak or scattered seam, we can sometimes reveal a stronger vein underneath. We have lost a few good sources that way, but it spares the talons of the dragons who work here. Grymric spends a lot of time healing claws.'\n\nGrendel nodded. She'd been scratching at the rock face as she listened to this. Although a dragon could crack a large stone between its claws, endlessly gouging the surface of a mountain had to be painful and damaging over time. 'Is there no other way to retrieve the ore?'\n\n'Not as yet,' Graymere answered truthfully. 'Patient grazing still serves us best. We alternate the workers and rest them well. They're young, so their claws regenerate quickly. Some prefer biting to gouging. Regrowth keeps the incisors healthy.' He showed her his two most prominent teeth. They looked sharp enough to slit a clean edge through cloud. 'Dragons that work the mine will boast of a fighting advantage over others. A myth, in my opinion, but we're never short of volunteers. Recently, we've been testing ways of opening a seam by i:maging fissures in the weakest strata.'\n\n'You mean, Prime Galarhade works the mine?'\n\nA faint splutter of smoke left Graymere's snout, hiding him for a moment in a yellow haze. 'Forgive me,' he coughed, 'I don't wish to belittle you. I understand why you would think that. Prime Galarhade does have extraordinary powers of physical i:maging, but, no, he does not attend the mine. Elder Givnay is helping us.'\n\nGrendel's eye ridges tightened slightly, a not unpleasant look on her. 'I thought Elder Givnay hardly ever left his settle?'\n\n'He doesn't need to. We map out the mountainsides and i:mage him any promising sites. He does the rest remotely.'\n\nGrendel dropped her jaw in disbelief. Elder Givnay could i:mage remotely? She knew his mental powers were legendary, but to mine rocks from a distance was astonishing.\n\nGraymere went on, 'I pray the technique is perfected soon, if only to spare dragons like Rogan more trauma.' He nodded at the void. 'You'll find him down there. Listen for the scraping and the sounds of his voice. I can light the first part of your descent from here. Call if you need assistance.'\n\n'Thank you,' Grendel said. She tented her wings and pushed away from the ridge, needing nothing more than the night air to glide on. Under Graymere's light she was able to gyre down without clipping the sides of the quarry. But as the drop increased and the light grew less, she looked around for a suitable perch and landed safely on a smooth cold boulder, close to the centre of the pit.\n\nShe opened her ear ducts fully. Right away she heard Rogan's voice. He was singing quietly, like a wearling might. A song about a fire star that opened in the heart; a gentle cry of unrequited love from an elderly dragon who had never been a father as far as she knew. It touched her deeply to hear it. Tonight, she decided, someone would share his lament.\n\nShe began to join in, harmonising softly as she clambered nearer to the sound of his voice. He faltered when he heard her and she thought at first he might stop and hide. But as her notes drifted sweetly through the darkness, he picked up again. He was still singing as she reached his shoulder.\n\n'Per Grogan?' she said, ignoring Galarhade's ruling on the name. What did it matter down here? 'I am Grendel, of the Fissian line. You knew my father. Will you speak with me?'\n\nHe could see her, she knew, for the moon had moved well clear of the clouds, giving their eyes sufficient light to work with. He continued singing as if she wasn't there.\n\nShe tried again. 'I have flown here from Skytouch. I need your help.'\n\n'Be gone, vapor,' he croaked.\n\nWas that what he thought she was, a spirit? 'I am no vapor,' she said, looking at the rock he was working. It was streaked with dark green blood. To her horror, his claws had completely worn away, his arms little more than infected stumps. He was using bone to dig for the ore.\n\n'Per Grogan, please stop this,' she said.\n\nShe reached out to him. A bad mistake. He turned on her and roared, but didn't use flame. She backed away, her primary heart pounding. Graymere would have heard that. Another burst would bring him to investigate. Or worse, bring Gazz.\n\n'I wish you no harm,' Grendel said urgently. 'Please, you must help me.'\n\nThis sounded callous in the circumstances, but she had seen his eyes when he'd challenged her. They were void of colour, their once-jewelled surfaces cracked and dull. He was going to die in this pit and he probably didn't care. There was little Grendel could do for him, but still much he could do for her.\n\n'I am charged with caring for Grystina's wearmyss. I believe I can prove that you and Gabrial were not responsible for the quake at Vargos.'\n\n'Varrrrgos,' he slurred. He punched the rock, cracking a splinter of bone.\n\nIt was all Grendel could do not to empty her gut. She fought back a dangerous tear. 'Brave dragon, I want you to sleep with the knowledge that you and Gabrial were true to the Elders. But first, I must find him. You were a mapper once. One of the best in the Wearle. You know the domayne like no other dragon. To which region of the line would they send him, Grogan? Where will I find the blue?'\n\nHe moaned and swept his head back and forth, babbling in the manner Graymere had described, some unrelated murmurings about his mother, then a complicated chatter about rock locations. Even now, punished by madness, he was using his mapping skills to chart the position of every stone in the quarry.\n\n'Gabrial\u2026?' she pushed him.\n\nHe twitched and seemed to have a moment of lucidity. 'I know no dragon of that name,' he growled. Then he was muttering again and moving away to a new location.\n\n'Please,' she said, scrambling after him. 'Gabrial \u2013 Abrial, whatever you want to call him \u2013 is the only dragon who can help me. There were Hom in the mountain when Grystina died. Hom, Grogan. You have been misjudged. I want to see your honour restored. In the name of Godith, please help me find Gabrial.'\n\n'Godith,' he murmured. And he swayed for a moment, gathering himself, before emitting a roar that shook the whole pit.\n\nGrendel instinctively spread her wings. In the darkness, the rumble of rocks was terrifying. Their hewn cries wailed like the spirits of the dead as they cleaved and slid and bounced over one another in their quest to find their lowest resting place. She immediately took off, hovering at a level just above the jumble. A fearful madness had taken hold of Rogan. He was snarling and biting and thrashing his tail, calling Gabrial's name in challenge. At the place where he'd been scraping, a pink seam winked like an open wound. Rogan set his jaws against it, and using what remained of his shattered teeth, he grated raw fhosforent into his mouth.\n\nHe was seeing Gabrial in every dragon now. And as the pink ore melted and his fire sacs enlarged, he unlatched his jaw and tried to burn Grendel. The result was horrifying. A bright red flame poured out of his throat but quickly billowed back around his head, setting him alight down the length of his neck and all along the edges of his wings. At the same time, his body was going through a terrifying change. He seemed to be withering, turning black.\n\nGrendel screamed and flapped away, helped by the warm air rising from his body. Graymere was flying to her aid by then, but he was rapidly overtaken by two of the Veng. Gallen, the Veng leader, was in the air as well. As he swooped overhead he gave a command that would haunt Grendel for the rest of her days.\n\n'Kill it,' he hissed.\n\nAnd the Veng burned, without mercy, what was left of the dragon that had once been Grogan. They aimed their fire at his open mouth, forcing it deep into his broken body until the flames had vaporised the tissues within and he exploded in a fizzing ball of scales. They had taken him down as if he were nothing but hunted prey. Just a thing, consumed by hatred and darkness.\n\nNo longer a dragon at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "'Give me one good reason,' Elder Grynt said angrily, as rain began to fall in steady lines around him, 'why I should not send you back to Ki:mera to spend the rest of your days teaching wearlings how to scrape dung off their tails?'\n\n'I was roaming, as I'm free to do,' said Grendel. She proudly lifted her head, taking the opportunity to swivel one eye and glance at Gallen. The Veng commander was behind her, pacing back and forth through puddles forming in hollows in the rocks.\n\n'Look at me!' Grynt thundered. The dark tints in his purple face were more prominent than Grendel had ever seen them. She looked at him squarely, fearful of the power in his brilliant green eyes. 'You went to see Rogan the traitor,' he said.\n\n'Elder, may I speak?'\n\n'No,' Grynt snarled at the healing dragon. Grymric, along with De:allus Graymere, had been summoned to Grynt's superior eyrie \u2013 a high ledge on an isolated slope. Green hills and a strip of forest one way, Vargos and the open sea the other. Grendel had been brought here during the night and guarded till sunrise by two of the Veng. As if that wasn't serious enough, Elder Givnay was also present. Givnay had silently impressed upon her the need to open her third heart fully. Godith was everywhere and nowhere, he'd said. No harm would befall her if she spoke the truth.\n\nGrymric bowed submissively and shuffled back.\n\n'You went to Rogan,' Elder Grynt repeated, water dripping off the wavy stigs that grew beneath his chin. 'Why?'\n\n'To offer comfort. He was cruelly mistreated by your Veng.'\n\n'He mistreated himself,' Gallen cut in. 'And when I got there, he was shouting the name of the blue. Now why would he do that?'\n\n'Well?' said Grynt, smoke winding from his nostrils.\n\nGrendel looked away. 'Gabrial was his charge\u2014'\n\n'Abrial,' the Elder reminded her. 'Dishonour the name of Godith once more and you will be removed from the Wearle.'\n\nGrendel sighed and bent her knee. She glanced at Elder Givnay for support. The spiritual leader of the Wearle was sitting with his foreclaws pressed together, his eyes focused on the shape they were making rather than on Grendel's anxious face. She said, 'Rogan was\u2026confused.'\n\n'And so are you,' Grynt said, 'if you think you can lie to me any longer. Do not forget you are in the presence of Elder Givnay. One word from me and he will enter your mind and scrape the truth out. I know about your arrangement with Gossana. I know about your feelings for the blue. The only reason you would go to a mapper is to check on layouts or ask for directions. The healing dragon has testified to me that you intended to seek the blue's help. Why?'\n\n'I tried to stop her,' Grymric said weakly.\n\n'Silence,' snapped Gallen.\n\nGrynt continued, 'Answer my question. What were you planning to do if you found the sweeper?'\n\nGrendel was shaking. The rain was drumming hard on her back, as if it would have the truth from her too. She might as well tell it, even though they would mock her. 'I believe the Hom were in Vargos when Grystina died.'\n\n'What?' said Graymere, as if he'd suddenly woken from sleep. He stepped forward, shaking water off his wings. The whole eyrie grew a little brighter, thanks to the widening light from his eyes. 'What's this about the Hom?'\n\nAnd so Grendel told about the wearmyss, Gayl, and the drawings they'd seen in Grymric's cave, including her suggestion that the Hom were somehow to blame for the quake. The healer, she noticed, was shaking his head. But Elder Givnay was looking at her carefully now, as if he'd like to float into her mind and view the evidence for himself.\n\nDe:allus Graymere spoke up again. 'This is extraordinary,' he gasped. 'Has any of it been reported to the Prime?'\n\nGallen snorted in amusement. 'You expect the Prime dragon to believe the ramblings of a wearmyss?'\n\n'She spoke her brother's name,' Grendel said fiercely.\n\n'So?' said the Veng.\n\n'So he might be alive,' Graymere said breathlessly, all the while keeping his gaze on Grynt. 'You heard G'vard's words at the funeral: he couldn't say for certain what happened to the drake. What if Grendel is right and the Hom got in and took the wearling? What if he's out there, beyond the scorch line?'\n\n'Impossible,' sneered Gallen.\n\nTurning on him, Graymere said, 'What would it take to send out patrols over all the Hom settlements? Or are you so unsure of your questionable security that you're too embarrassed to go looking for one so young?'\n\n'Freeze your fire,' spat Gallen, flicking out his claws. In the rain, he looked even more hostile than usual. 'You may be quick of mind, but I could have those yellow eyes on my tongue before you'd have a chance to blink them again.'\n\n'Enough,' Grynt rumbled. His gaze fell on Graymere. 'You are forgetting, De:allus, that our \"questionable security\" rests ultimately with me. There will be no patrols.'\n\nGraymere hung his head, as though to let his frustration drain away. 'With respect, Prime Galarhade should know of this.'\n\n'And he will,' said Grynt, 'when I have a mind to amuse him with it. The death of Rogan has angered and distressed him. The Prime is resting.'\n\n'Is he ill?' said Grymric, his concern feeding into his jittery eye ridges.\n\n'No worse than this De:allus,' Gallen muttered.\n\nGraymere ignored the slur and said, 'When the news of Rogan's death begins to spread there will be great unrest among the Wearle. Thanks to Gallen's brave defenders, Rogan died without shedding his fire tear. You don't need the brains of a De:allus to know what mutterings that will cause. The Veng that summoned me here were already talking about the Tywyll.'\n\n'The Tywyll?' said Grendel, looking shocked. As a wearling, she had heard many frightening tales about the fabled black dragon without a third heart, but she had never expected to encounter it. She turned to Grynt, whose jaw was set rigid.\n\nGraymere said quietly, 'If the roamers believe that a black dragon has risen among them, there will be panic. News that Grystina's drake could be alive will do much to ease any superstitious whispers. I'm sure Elder Givnay sees the wisdom of that?'\n\nGivnay lifted the tip of his tail and slowly turned his isoscele, a gesture that could be taken one of two ways: he was either intrigued or irritated. But as no thoughts were flowing from his mind, it was impossible, just then, to say which.\n\nGraymere went on. 'Prime Galarhade should be informed of this \u2013 now. The longer we wait\u2014'\n\n'I have spoken,' Grynt said, in a tone so deep it wafted the rain aside momentarily. 'Grendel has beguiled you with her stories, De:allus. Next you will want me to believe that the Hom have captured the first Wearle and are hiding them somewhere among the trees.'\n\n'But\u2014?'\n\n'I have spoken,' Grynt snapped again. A rivulet of water ran between his eyes. 'I will not tolerate another interruption. The Wearle will be told that Elder Givnay is praying for the auma of Rogan and asking Godith to accept his fire. Any talk of black dragons will immediately be quashed.'\n\n'And the Hom? The drake?'\n\n'Forget about the Hom. They are no threat to us. I do not believe they were in the birth cave or that they caused the quake. You have already told me that Rogan disturbed many rocks in the mine. Is this not further proof of his guilt?'\n\nGraymere fanged his lip. He wanted to say that any dragon with a loud-enough roar could disturb a small amount of quarry rock, but not on the scale they'd seen that day at Vargos. He sighed for Grendel. Her case was hopeless. Without real proof of the Hom's involvement, the blame was always going to fall on Abrial and Rogan.\n\nThe Elder turned to Grendel again. 'Would I be right in thinking you planned to ask the blue to search for the drake?'\n\nA run of air rippled the length of her neck. She nodded.\n\n'You know that is treason?'\n\nGrendel gulped in alarm. 'But\u2026I was acting in the interests of the Wearle.'\n\n'That is my job. Yours is to breed and tend to wearlings. I asked you at the start of this dialogue for one good reason why you should not be sent back to Ki:mera in shame, and I ask you the same thing now. Be careful how you answer.'\n\n'Gayl,' she said meekly, lowering her head.\n\n'Correct,' he said. 'You will return to the myss and raise her well. On behalf of the Elders I am prepared to accept that your second heart misled you and that this folly with the blue is nothing but a youthful aberration. But I warn you, any more of these disturbances and the Fissian line will fall into disgrace and the myss will be left to run wild. Is that what you want?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'Then you are dismissed \u2013 no, wait, I have one more thing to say.'\n\nGrendel looked away from him, trying not to frown. What more humiliation could he burden her with?\n\nThe Elder raised his chin, showing off his fine array of silver breast scales. 'G'vard has come to us asking to withdraw his offer of guardianship.'\n\nGrendel sighed. 'He will\u2026admit his duty and come around,' she muttered.\n\n'He will not,' said Grynt, racking up his tongue. 'G'vard is a noble dragon who through no fault of his own has been placed in an adverse situation. I am therefore willing to grant his request and put another candidate in his place.'\n\n'Who?' said Grendel. She looked up in time to see the Elder's hard gaze drift toward Graymere.\n\n'Me?' the De:allus said.\n\nVeng Gallen snorted in amusement. 'Did you hear that, Elder? I never knew it was possible to hear a dragon squawk.'\n\n'You deny there is affinity between you?' said Grynt.\n\nGraymere flashed a look at Grendel. She was staring into space, her jaws wide open.\n\nA blush of green ran the length of Graymere's neck. The rising heat in his scales turned the drying rain to steam. 'There is some affinity, yes, but\u2014'\n\n'Then it is done. This is my ruling.'\n\n'But\u2026the mine? Who will oversee the fhosforent? The workers?'\n\n'The Veng will take full control,' said Grynt.\n\n'The Veng?' Graymere rose up as if he'd been stabbed by Gallen's claws.\n\n'The order comes from the Prime,' said Grynt. 'More lapses of security will not be tolerated.'\n\n'There was no lapse of security,' said Graymere. 'And if there was, Gallen should look first at his own wyng.'\n\nThe Veng commander bared his fangs. 'Meaning?'\n\nGraymere ignored him and spoke closely to Grynt. 'This is wrong. The mine should be closed. We must investigate the pit where Rogan was working. Something unnatural happened to him. He was going through some kind of change when he died. Grymric and I should examine his remains and\u2014'\n\n'You are relieved of your duties,' Grynt said impatiently. 'Unless you want to take Rogan's place?'\n\nGraymere inhaled sharply. He looked at Grymric, hoping he'd find some support from the healer.\n\nGrymric shook his head. This was not the time to argue, he was saying.\n\n'You are dismissed,' Grynt said to Graymere. 'I hope you and Fanon Grendel have pleasant days together. Elder Givnay will bless the union.'\n\nGivnay, dutifully, bowed his head.\n\nGraymere locked his teeth together, bringing some purple back into his neck.\n\nThe rain continued to fall in lines.\n\nAnd Grendel finally closed her mouth."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Words. They had never seemed so strange or so difficult before. Every time Grendel tried to converse, her sentences trailed away into the rain. Graymere's, likewise, when he spoke to her. All that made sense in their first few moments were the hurrs and grunts of the wearmyss, Gayl, destined now to be the focus of their lives.\n\nShortly after being dismissed by the Elders, Grendel had retrieved Gayl from Grymric's cave and flown her directly to Graymere's settle, an open crag just behind the mines. Despite the range and scope of the mountains, there were few available caves around Vargos, certainly none that could shelter three dragons. The rain was of no concern to an adult; they enjoyed the pulse of it on their wings, and a concentrated fall of water would wash out the parasites that lodged between their scales. But a youngster could become severely wet. And though Gayl was unlikely to die of exposure, it was nevertheless preferable to keep her dry until her first layer of scales came through.\n\nSo Graymere found himself saying, 'I should roam. Find shelter. For her, for\u2026us. She cannot sit under you all the time. I have heard there are caves further out. Shall I\u2026?'\n\n'Yes,' Grendel said, knowing they would be better apart for a while. 'Go to the mine as well. There must be arrangements you need to make?'\n\nHe nodded and bumbled through a reply. 'The mine. Yes. Arrangements. Yes.' He tented his wings and prepared to fly. 'Grendel?'\n\n'Later,' she said, her voice full of kindness, 'when you've found shelter for us.'\n\nHe fanged his lip. 'I will\u2026care for you,' he said. He looked down at Gayl, curled up in a ball between Grendel's legs. 'Both of you.'\n\n'Hurr,' went the youngster, tucking her snout under her skinny tail.\n\n'And we for you,' said Grendel, meeting his gaze. Even half lidded, his eyes were so sad. 'Go. We will wait until you summon us.'\n\nHe nodded again, and bowed. 'Keep her safe,' he said, and flew.\n\nThere was no activity at the mine, though Graymere had been expecting that. Heavy rain could dilute the freshly-exposed ore or simply wash it out of the seams. The workers would be on their settles, resting. It hurt to think that his work here was done. They'd been his, this desolate group of hills. His project. His reason for leaving Ki:mera. He was proud to be a guardian, albeit by command, but fostering was not his true vocation. He was De:allus, born to unravel the mysteries of the universe, born to understand the wonders of Godith. He was going to miss these harsh grey scarps, and the hollows and shafts his dragons had dug to find and retrieve the precious pink ore.\n\nAh yes, the ore. Perhaps a life of fatherhood was better for him now. How could he ever look at fhosforent again without reliving Rogan's horrifying end? What was Rogan thinking of when he'd swallowed so much of the pink, so fast? Did he know what effect it would have on his fire? Or had something turned his mind before that? Like a gathering storm, these thoughts began to pull his gaze toward the quarry, and before he knew it he was flying there. What he was looking for, he couldn't say, but a chance to investigate might never come again.\n\nTo his surprise, the pit was not deserted. One of the workers, a good-natured green called Gruder, was almost on the spot where Rogan had burned. He was sniffing at the stones and racking them aside, his head bent low to the ground.\n\nGraymere landed with a quiet clap of wings.\n\n'De:allus Graymere,' the green said, jumping around. He looked nervous. Or distressed. Possibly both. Rain was bouncing off the top of his head, making spikes as tall as his primary stigs.\n\n'Gruder, what are you doing?'\n\nThe young dragon made clamping movements with his mouth. 'I\u2026' He put his shoulders back like a guard. 'I was told you were removed from your duties,' he said, as if he had read it off a nearby rock.\n\nGallen's words in Gruder's mouth. Graymere gave a quick snort of contempt. 'I have been chosen to raise the wearmyss,' he said, making it sound like a great honour, 'but I could hardly leave my position here without\u2026' How could he put it without worrying Gruder into calling the Veng? '\u2026saying a prayer for Rogan.\n\nNo matter the reason he was sent to us, none could deny he was an excellent worker. One of our best. Wouldn't you agree?'\n\nGruder swallowed hard. 'I'm sorry, I must continue with my work.'\n\n'Of course \u2013 what has Gallen ordered you to do?'\n\nThe young dragon swung his head from side to side, his wings hanging limp like the last leaves on a tree. The rain pounded on the rocks around him as if drawn down by the weight of his fear.\n\n'Gruder, you know me,' Graymere said. 'You are in no danger. None of this will reach the ears of the Veng. Why are you working when the others are at rest?'\n\n'I don't like this,' said Gruder, taut with dismay. 'Godith will punish us. We should not\u2026'\n\n'Not what?' Graymere pushed him gently.\n\nGruder shuddered, rattling every scale from his neck to his isoscele. 'They want me to find his heart.'\n\nGraymere felt the tips of his wings turn to ice. A dragon had three hearts, closely linked, but it was clear to him which one Gruder meant. The primary heart was the organ that supplied a dragon's strength. Its walls were as thick as three layers of scales and almost impossible to pierce. Yet when a dragon died those walls would open and out of them would come a single spark. By a means unknown, even to the finest De:allus minds, the spark would travel to the dragon's eye where it would enter a single tear. With the shedding of the tear, the auma of the dragon was released into the universe and its spirit could be one with Godith once more. But if the death was unnatural and the tear didn't form, the heart would close around the spark and its walls would gradually turn to stone. Then, legend had it, the auma of the dragon would forever haunt those who'd denied it the chance to die in peace. That could arguably include the whole Wearle.\n\nNo wonder Gruder was frightened.\n\nThe rain eased to a softer beat. Graymere blinked his eyes, clearing the runnels of water that sometimes collected in the folds of his lids. 'You must do your duty,' he told Gruder kindly. 'If your auma is pure, nothing can harm you.'\n\nBut the dread in Gruder's eyes did not marry with that statement. 'Is it true?' he whispered. He was shaking like a wearling.\n\n'Is what true?' said Graymere.\n\n'That the Tywyll came for Rogan at the end?'\n\nWas that the rumour the Veng were spreading? That the change observed in Rogan was the spirit of evil, risen? Graymere set himself strong. 'No, Gruder, that is not true. I was there. The darkness played no tricks on me. Rogan was distressed, driven mad by\u2026his confinement. He was not in control of his flame. I assure you no dark spirits rose. What is to be done with the heart \u2013 if you find it?'\n\n'I am to carry it to Veng commander Gallen.'\n\n'And then?'\n\n'I don't know. The Elder was here. I suppose he will decide.'\n\n'Elder Grynt?'\n\n'No, Elder Givnay visited this morning.'\n\nGraymere narrowed his ridges. Givnay was here? The mute had left his settle \u2013 for the mine? 'Have you found anything?'\n\nGruder blew two lines of smoke, first from one nostril, then the other. He pointed to a piece of ground where a few charred pieces were stacked.\n\nGraymere adjusted his position to bring himself close to the pile.\n\n'De:allus, please,' Gruder said urgently. 'By order of Veng commander Gallen, no dragon is allowed to examine the remains.'\n\n'Did he say why?'\n\n'No. Not to me.'\n\nGraymere gave a thoughtful nod. He raised one foot and let it rest on the remains. 'Pray with me,' he said.\n\nThe green twitched nervously, looking all around him.\n\nGraymere said, 'Relax, Gruder. Not even Gallen would deny a blessing on Rogan's spirit.' And he bowed his head and appealed to Godith, asking Her to accept Rogan's auma and take him back into the Fire Eternal. And as Gruder bent his head as well, the De:allus closed his short rear talon around a piece of bone and gripped it neatly under his foot.\n\nLeaving Gruder to continue his work, he flew out of the pit, heading for the settles on the ocean side of the mine. He had almost reached them when he was rudely intercepted by none other than Gallen, who happened to be accompanied by the dragon Graymere had come to find: a talented mapper called Garret.\n\nThe Veng commander ordered Graymere to land. Graymere chose a strip of waterlogged erth. Not the ideal place to stand up to a Veng, but the ground underfoot was very soft; he could bury Rogan's bone with one push if he needed to.\n\n'You're out of your territory,' Gallen said bluntly.\n\nGraymere glanced at Garret and back. 'I was seeking Garret, not you.'\n\n'And what would you want with a mapper?' said Gallen.\n\n'I could ask you the same thing,' Graymere said, though the answer was obvious. The Veng prided themselves on knowing every piece of the territories they defended, and Garret was the best mapper in the Wearle.\n\nGallen spread his claws under Graymere's snout, sending mud in all directions. 'I warned you not to mock me, De:allus. The mines are my business now and I will do all I need to protect them.'\n\n'How might I be of assistance?' said Garret. Like Grymric, he was a gentle soul who did his best to avoid any conflicts. His quiet intervention was enough to make Gallen retract his claws.\n\n'I need to find a cave \u2013 for three,' said Graymere.\n\n'Um, yes,' said Garret. 'I heard about your new\u2026appointment. You must be proud to be\u2014'\n\n'Get on with it,' snapped Gallen. 'We've got work to do.'\n\nGarret gave a chastened nod. 'As you know, the atmospheric conditions of this planet have weathered out many fine hollows in the mountains. The best have been claimed by the Elders, of course. There are some spectacular sea caves I could point you to, but they may be too damp for a new-born wearling and the overlying strata can be quite unstable.'\n\n'You're testing my patience, mapper.' Gallen's claws were out again. 'You'll be unstable if you don't answer his query soon.'\n\n'Garret, just show me something safe,' said Graymere. 'All I need is shelter for now.'\n\nSo Garret closed his eyes and concentrated. Within moments, he had built a floating i:mage of a wide green hill, topped by a cluster of mature trees. 'We've mapped several formations in this region,' he said, 'where an ancient fault line has divided the land. There was an extensive body of water here once that has worn down the rock and carried loose sediment into the hill. Drainage cracks have expanded all over it and several attractive caverns have formed. The best one is here.' He turned the i:mage to show an undulating slope. In one fold was a dark gash. 'It has ample mineral deposits and three subterranean branches, plus pillars of varying heights. Ideal for a playful wearling. Follow the mountains to their natural end and you can't miss it.'\n\n'It looks exposed,' said Graymere. 'Low to the ground.'\n\n'It's also near the scorch line,' Gallen said, pouring smoke across Graymere's chest. 'Be careful you don't get stolen by the Hom.'\n\n'I can show you others,' Garret offered, feeling a little squashed between the stares.\n\n'Thank you,' the De:allus said quietly. 'I'd like to explore this one \u2013 if commander Gallen has no objection?'\n\n'The further away the better,' said Gallen.\n\nAnd with one more brooding exchange of glances, Graymere recorded the i:mage in his mind and left without another word."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Garret was right. The cave was easy to find. The dwindling grey backbone of mountains pointed like a drawn-out isoscele to an unrestricted tract of hills, only one of which had trees at its peak. Graymere swept over it, studying the cave from several angles. It was, as he'd feared, a little low to the ground. Grynt could think what he liked about the Hom, but until the wearling grew, it was vulnerable to attack.\n\nUsing his optical triggers he scanned every gap between the trees, registering the scent of any sizeable creature, moving or still. Birds were active in the trees, and on the hill was a plentiful supply of rabbits (a good meal for a growing wearling). Swinging further out, he was pleased to see a pale stream wiggling through the fields, with good vegetation all around it. A few wingbeats beyond the stream, running almost parallel to it, was a long dark streak in the grass: the scorch line. It was the first time Graymere had seen it, and he didn't get long to study it now. His nostrils began to twitch as they picked up the scent of another dragon. It was approaching low with the sun at its back, flying fast and breathing fire. At first he thought it might be Gallen, chasing him down because he'd discovered the theft of Rogan's remains. But it soon became clear that this was not the case. A young blue swept underneath him, renewing the scorch line with bursts of flame that left the ground scored and crackling, blackened.\n\nThe blue was good at his job. As soon as his fire sacs emptied, he lifted and banked, then reversed his course and burned the line in the opposite direction. It was on his next run that he noticed Graymere and switched course to join the De:allus in the sky.\n\n'Do I know you?' said Abrial, gliding alongside.\n\n'No,' said Graymere, 'but I know you.'\n\nAbrial tipped his wings and circled. What dragon didn't know him by now?\n\n'You were Rogan's charge,' Graymere said, as Abrial passed by on the other side.\n\n'Yes,' the blue said eagerly. 'You have news of him?'\n\nSo word hadn't reached the domayne edge yet. This was going to be difficult. 'We should land,' said Graymere, and pitched towards the hill.\n\nMoments later, they were facing one another on the ground. Out of habit, Abrial stood a little lower than the visitor (when reporting to Gallen, he was expected to look up). 'Tell me of Rogan. Is he still at the mine?'\n\nGraymere bent his claws around the remnant, a bony piece of wing, shrivelled and blackened by the heat of the Veng. He kept it out of sight as he spoke. 'I am Graymere. I ran the mine,' he said. But that was as far as their dialogue went. Suddenly both dragons snapped to attention as they heard the sound of a fast-beating heart and smelt the scent of a Hom approaching. Abrial was swift to react. He turned, stood tall and spread his wings \u2013 a passive gesture taught by Gallen to scare off anything from small animals to Hom.\n\nBut the boy kept coming, using both hands to pull himself up the slope. He was deep inside the scorch line and not stopping. Abrial snarled and filled his fire sacs. He directed a flame above the boy's head. The pressure knocked the Hom a short way down the hill. The boy cried out, more in anger than in fright, but picked himself up and came at them again, shouting something in his feeble Hom voice.\n\n'He's wounded,' muttered Graymere. Wounded and limping. The boy was stained on his arms and chest with the strange red blood that leaked from his kind.\n\n'Why doesn't he stop?' Abrial said anxiously. By now, his battle stigs were fully extended. 'He must go back. He must know I could kill him?'\n\n'This will send him back,' said Graymere. And he pushed his head forward and bellowed a warning, setting off cries of alarm in every animal to the far horizon.\n\nThe boy screamed and clutched his ears. He fell to his knees, writhing and clawing at the sides of his head. Blood ran in trickles through his fingers.\n\n'Nudge him over the line,' said Graymere. 'And make sure he sees your fangs.'\n\nBut as Abrial prepared to step forward, the boy spoke a sound that both dragons thought they'd misheard at first. Then he spoke it again, in a slur, before collapsing face down onto the ground.\n\nAbrial felt his claws contracting. He looked at Graymere and Graymere at him. The boy had just mimicked the speech of a dragon. It was thin of tone, but unmistakeably a word.\n\n'Tada?' Abrial said.\n\nThe De:allus nodded and whispered the translation.\n\nTada: father."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ned",
                "text": "The Kaal settlement, two days earlier.\n\nKnowing it might be several days before Targen the Old would awaken from his dreams, the body of Utal Stonehand was stripped and washed by the women of the Kaal. He was dressed in a white robe ready for burning, or for taking to the darkeyes' cave. His fate now rested with the wisdom of the Fathers.\n\nBy the end of day one, with nothing better to occupy his thoughts, Ned Whitehair began to wonder why he had not heard sound of his son for a while. He asked the boy's mother \u2013 Mell \u2013 this question as she was walking to the river to wash. 'Seen Ren?'\n\nMell laughed and shook her tangles of hair. 'Perhaps the growlers have got him at last.' For Ren liked to climb trees and he liked to taunt growlers.\n\nBut that was before the skalers had come.\n\nThen Mell stroked Ned's cheek and said, 'I'll be thanking you later for that flower, Ned Whitehair.'\n\n'Flower?' said Ned.\n\nAnd Mell just smiled and walked on toward the river, wiggling her fingers high in the air as if she knew of something Ned had forgotten.\n\nNed shook his bemusement aside and continued his search. He spoke with the men. 'My lad, Ren. Seen him lately, makin' bother?'\n\n'No,' said the men, each one.\n\nMystified, Ned returned to his shelter. He untied the reins on Wind, his white whinney, planning to take his search into the woods. It was while he was swinging his leg across her back that a quiet voice said, 'I knows where Ren Whitehair might'n be.'\n\nNed looked down. The voice belonged to the girl, Pine Onetooth. A strange child by anyone's measure. She seemed to waft around the settlement like a leaf on the breeze. He stroked Wind's mane. 'Say your piece, girl.'\n\nShe pushed her tongue into her lip and pointed at the mountains.\n\nA deep sigh escaped Ned's chest. Skalers. The boy was obsessed with them. 'When?'\n\nThe girl broke a reed of grass in two. 'A night back. See'd him runnin' in the shadows o' the moon.'\n\nA night back? Now the mountains drew a long gaze out of Ned, their snow-tipped peaks mostly hidden in cloud. He thought on Pine's words and began to connect them with something Ren had said at the meeting, something about dung and using it to hide from skalers. 'Sweet mercy of our Fathers,' he said below his breath. He glanced down at Pine again. The girl smiled back as best she could. Ned said, 'Do you watch my boy always?'\n\n'Some,' said Pine, sniffing a flower.\n\nNed nodded to himself. 'If he should return, you may marry him one day.'\n\n'Mebbe,' said Pine, swaying to the thought.\n\nNed shook Wind's reins. He made to kick her belly, but stopped. Those words Mell had spoken about the flower itched as badly as the nibblers in his robe. Back when they had courted, he'd given flowers then, often riding high into the steepest mountains to find the pretty blue petals she liked. But he hadn't picked a flower for many a moon, so\u2026?\n\nHe climbed down off Wind and strode into the shelter. Sure enough, there was a flower on the skins where Mell laid her head. A chilling fear crept over Ned then. He began to throw the heavy skins aside, looking for something he hoped would be there \u2013 but wasn't.\n\nThe boy had taken the darkeye horn.\n\nLeaving skins everywhere, Ned ran to Wind and leapt onto her back. The whinney took off as much out of shock as from the smack Ned gave her. He heard voices as he rode \u2013 'Ned, what's the bother?' But Ned put his head low and galloped. He rode Wind all the way to the scorch line, to the place where the hunting party, Ren included, had watched Utal burn.\n\n'REN WHITEHAIR!' he thundered into the mountains. Wind reared above the blackened grass. 'REN WHITEHAIR! I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE, BOY! YOU COME BACK TO ME NOW, YOU HEAR!' The words faded into gentle echoes. Ned turned the whinney and trotted her along the right side of the line. 'REN WHITEHAIR, SON OF NED! CALL LOUD TO YOUR FATHER AND YOU WON'T GET A BEATING!'\n\nNothing. Ned cursed and gritted his teeth. In truth, he had never once beaten Ren, but crushing him with relief might not be out of the question this day. He turned the whinney and trotted her the other way. 'REN! WHITE! HAIR!' No response. Ned looked at the skies. Empty. The same could not be said of his gut, which felt as though it were lined with stone. 'Mell, forgive me,' he whispered, and galloped Wind across the line.\n\nAs he rode, many thoughts screamed through his mind. There was no point trying to track the boy. If Ren had done as he'd boasted and used the dung to cover his scent, Ned could be searching until he grew old; the plains were covered in skaler waste. Most likely the lad had made for the sleeping mountain, where the skalers liked to settle, and anyone familiar with these hills could find hiding places. But why had he taken the darkeye horn? What was the stupid boy planning to do?\n\nWhatever the answers to these questions might be, Ned was not about to learn them then. Suddenly the way ahead filled with shadow and a roar like the crack of stone split the sky. Wind pulled herself up and reared. Ned fought to hold her but was thrown before he could steady her head. She fled, leaving him to face the skaler alone. His first instinct was to roll into a ball. But if he was going to die, he would die standing up, though the skaler had its own ideas about that. The first time Ned tried to get to his feet, the beast swooped over so fast and so low that the pressure of air knocked him onto his back. Shielding his face, he looked for the thing. It was gliding in a circle, wings as blue as the cloudless sky, tail flicking to give it momentum. Breathing hard, Ned managed to rise. He spread his arms wide, palms fully open.\n\n'LOOK AT ME, SKALER! I HAVE NO SPEAR! I HAVE NO FIRE! ALL I WANT IS MY PRECIOUS BOY!' He turned with it as it circled again. 'MY BOY!' Ned screamed. He levelled one hand to the height of Ren's head.\n\nBut the skaler showed no sign of understanding. It swooped again, quicker than Ned could judge, and out of its mouth came a ball of flame that seemed to consume every morsel of air. Ned reeled back clutching his throat, gagging as the suffocating heat swept over him. It pulled at his robe and sucked at his innards. The centres of his eyeballs felt like they could boil. 'My boy,' he managed to say once more, but the fight had gone out of him now and his brain was thumping with two clear choices: raise a fist and lose an arm like Utal, or retreat, rethink, and live to fight again.\n\nHe chose the second option.\n\nThe skaler watched him all the way to the scorch line, firing out another harsh ball of flame when Ned stumbled wearily across it.\n\nNed turned and pointed a shaky finger, making sure the blue beast saw him. 'I will remember you,' he panted, 'and in the name of my Fathers and the tribe of the Kaal, I will kill you first if my son has been harmed.'\n\nThe beast snorted and swept overhead.\n\nAnd Ned, his pale skin reddened and blistered, turned and began the walk back to the settlement, two thoughts ringing clear in his mind:\n\nFind the darkeyes.\n\nKill the skalers."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Halfway home Ned was met by two friends: Oak Longarm, younger brother of Utal, and Waylen Treader, a farming man. Both were on their whinneys. Waylen was holding tight to Wind.\n\nOak dismounted and ran to Ned, catching him in his powerful arms. 'Ned, rest steady. It's me, Oak. We found Wind runnin' free. What's happened?' He clamped Ned's face and raised it up. The skin was peeling in several places. That told Oak what he needed to know, but he asked the question anyway. 'Skalers?'\n\nNed closed his eyes and nodded.\n\nOak Longarm shuddered, thinking of his brother laid out in white on a raft thick with spiker branches. 'Water,' he said to Waylen.\n\nWaylen slid off his whinney and took a pouch from a rope at his hip. He spilled cool water over Ned's face. Ned gripped the pouch and drank in great gulps.\n\n'You crossed the line?' asked Oak.\n\n'Aye,' Ned said, his white hair dripping.\n\n'We see'd you take off on Wind,' said Waylen. He took back the water pouch and drank from it too. 'Why, Ned? What's the bother?'\n\nSo Ned told all \u2013 about Ren, the flower, the horn, the blue skaler.\n\nOak Longarm stared at the mountains.\n\n'We must gather the men and search,' said Ned.\n\nWaylen spluttered with laughter, spilling water down his robe. He wiped a hand across his mouth to dry it. 'I fear the beast has nipped you, Ned. How shall we take men across the line? That way brings death on us all.'\n\n'He's my son,' said Ned.\n\n'Aye, an' I have two right similar. Both good lads. Would you send their father to dance in flames 'cos Ren were dull enough to cross the line?'\n\nNed raged at him for that, but Oak Longarm stood between them, strong.\n\n'Ned, this ain't the way,' he said.\n\n'I'll have his tongue on a stick and his spit to sauce it!'\n\n'If you want yer arms broke, you might try,' said Waylen. He was a big man with a jaw like rock. The lines of his face were nearly as rough as the fields he ploughed. He shook a flutterfly off his shaggy black hair.\n\nOak pushed Ned back. He was leaner of face than both his companions and as handsome again as his brother was plain. 'Ned, you know that Waylen speaks fair. Crossin' the black line ain't the way.'\n\n'Then Varl has it right \u2013 we must wake the darkeyes.'\n\n'What?' said Oak, pulling back a little.\n\n'If the beasts have killed my boy, let us punish them for Ren and your brother as one.'\n\n'Ned\u2026' Oak sighed and looked away.\n\nWaylen stabbed the toe of his boot into the erth.\n\nNed threw up his hands. 'Speak loud, friends. I would hear you on this.'\n\n'Targen has given his ruling,' said Oak. 'Utal burns on the water, tomorrow. We are not to seek vengeance against the skalers.'\n\n'No,' Ned wailed, staggering back. He ran his hands through his scorched white hair.\n\n'I like it as little as you,' said Oak. 'But the Fathers have spoken. We cannot go against them.'\n\n'Am I not a father?' Ned beat his chest. 'And you a brother?' He strode forward again and struck Oak's arm with the back of his hand. 'Are we to do nothing to free ourselves from the curse of these beasts?'\n\n'Ned, you must think straight,' Oak said. 'Wait another day. Ren may yet walk clear of these hills, unmarked. We all know he has the luck of the stars upon him. As for my brother, I will weep for him as he flies to the Fathers and that will be enough.'\n\n'For you, aye,' Ned said, coming close. 'But what would Utal have wanted?'\n\nOak gulped and turned his face away. For all his wise and mindful talk, his eyes were suddenly soft with tears. On gritted teeth he said, 'We cannot slight Targen. My brother has been prepared for burning. We cannot steal him away to the caves.'\n\nNed nodded. 'I hear you true. But what is to stop us going there without him?'\n\nWaylen pinched his eyes into a frown.\n\n'We three,' Ned said, looking at the farmer. 'Let the darkeyes see my face and know their enemy flies again. Let it be us who claims these mountains back for the Kaal.'\n\nA cool breeze swept between them. Waylen's whinney ruffled its mane. Oak snapped a twig beneath his boot and said, 'The old ones are saying it would be a poor ride. In their chatter they ask why the darkeyes have not yet stirred or how the skalers have failed to find them. What if the darkeyes are gone, Ned? Or fallen dead in their cave? What are two against a host of skalers, anyway?'\n\nNed stroked Wind's ear and swung onto her back. 'Old men chatter like farts in the wind. If the darkeyes take only one beast down, we will have smiled on your brother's spirit. Now, will you ride with me, or will you sit here and chew on your memories?'\n\nOak and Waylen exchanged a glance.\n\n'My fields are sown,' said Waylen. ''Tis a dreary day waiting for corn to poke through.'\n\n'For my brother, then,' said Oak, getting onto his whinney. 'My brother and the Kaal.'\n\nAnd they gripped hands, these three brave men, and turned away from the sleeping mountain toward the valley where the darkeyes lay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "They rode long and into the night, stopping where the river narrowed to a pinch to rest a while and water the whinneys. Oak put an arrow through a careless hopper and cooked it over an open fire. The three spoke little and slept until morning, woken by the patter of rain on their camp.\n\nThey crossed the river with Waylen leading. On the far bank, the ground rose steeply away from the water and continued to rise before levelling out to a run of green hills, spotted with trees and bald patches of rock. Waylen pointed to the far horizon, where the only hill of substance, a thick-set tor thinning to brown over most of its surface, stood at the end of a shallow dale.\n\n'When the battles were done, that's where the darkeyes were tracked to,' he said. He stroked the ears of his whinney as if he sensed it warming to the coming danger.\n\nNed patted Wind's neck. 'Then that's where we go.'\n\n'Ned, wait,' said Oak, taking hold of his reins. 'My fury for vengeance has brought me this far, but my wits are begging me to stop now and speak.'\n\n'Then say what you will,' Ned replied fairly.\n\nOak sat high and stared at the hill, pressed from above by grey clouds dark with the threat of rain. 'How are we to raise these creatures? And more so, how will we chase them into battle? We will be their foe the moment they see us. I would rather die in the flames of a skaler than see myself rot from a darkeye's spittle.'\n\nWaylen slanted his gaze Ned's way.\n\nCalmer for his sleep, Ned looked to the skies as if hoping for a sign. And right away, there it was. He pointed to a skaler, some way off. 'We bring a skaler down \u2013 as near to the cave as we can.'\n\n'How?' asked Waylen.\n\nNed laughed. 'By being Kaal. Even this side of the line, the beasts won't bear our taunts for long. The first fire will bring the darkeyes out. Then we have a battle, do we not?'\n\n'Aye,' breathed Oak, as he walked his whinney on. 'And we three best pray to the Fathers we are not caught in the midst of it.'\n\nBy midsun they were at the foot of the hill, on the crumbling bank of a near-parched stream still alive with a shimmy or two. Ned fancied he would see the ground strewn with bones or hear the scrubland hissing in pain where the darkeyes had left their poisonous bile. But all was quiet and disturbingly plain. The only animals Ned could see were going about their lives, untroubled.\n\n'Where is it?' said Oak, meaning the cave.\n\nWaylen pointed to a chin of rock. 'On the far side of that.'\n\nNed scanned the slope they would need to climb. It was stonier than it had looked from a distance, and where grass grew it was heavily tufted. An easy task for a mountain man, but difficult for their rides. He slid off Wind's back. 'We'll leave the whinneys here. They won't find foot on ground so ill. And if we run them on it, we'll likely be thrown. Is there cover, Waylen?'\n\nThe farmer leant sideways and spat. 'No.'\n\nOak dismounted and passed him the reins. 'Wait here, by the water.'\n\nThe sun was on Waylen Treader's face, but no words of warmth flowed out of his mouth. 'Don't slight me, friend. I dint make this ride for the pleasure.' He showed Oak the hilt of a knife, tucked firmly into his waist. Like most Kaal, Waylen was a skilful hunter. He could skin a hopper quicker than any man.\n\n'No sense in us all gettin' killed is what I'm sayin'.'\n\nNed took Oak's side in this. 'You done well, Waylen, leading us in. But Oak's right. We need the whinneys calm and ready. This is our fight: Oak's brother, my boy. If we burn on this hill, someone needs go back and tell it.'\n\nWaylen spat on the ground again. 'I say we're better as three.'\n\n'And I say not,' Ned Whitehair challenged.\n\nAnd that was an end to it.\n\nOak pulled a sheaf of arrows from his saddle. 'How high do you think I can aim?'\n\nNed smiled and slapped his shoulder. 'If any man can prick one, your long arm will.'\n\nWith that, the two men crossed the stream and quickly began to breast the hill, picking up a winding, sideways path. For the first time in many a day, Ned was pleased to be climbing again without fear of what was flying overhead. But in his heart he knew he must always be alert. If they strayed too close to the darkeyes' lair, they would face an unpleasant greeting. He remembered the horror on the faces of the Kaal when the darkeye had landed in the midst of the settlement. Skalers, despite their fearful size, were as handsome in their way as any flower in the field; but darkeyes, they were loathsome creatures, drawn from a deep well of evil, to be sure.\n\n'Ned!' Oak suddenly pointed to the sky. A skaler, the one they'd seen earlier, was circling.\n\nNed instinctively dropped to a crouch. 'It's seen us and it's wonderin',' he whispered. He watched those incredible eyes changing size. He could almost read the curiosity in them.\n\nThe beast glided by without making a sound.\n\nOak snared a breath. 'Did you see it? Did you see its colour? Green, like the one that burned my brother.' He pulled the bow off his back.\n\nNed stayed his arm. 'Not here. We must be closer to the cave. Come on.'\n\nHe took the lead, running uphill at a sensible pace, avoiding as much loose stone as he could. Before long they were flat against the lip of the mound that Waylen had pointed out by the stream. Green hills flowed to the distant horizon. But not far over the rise the ground cut away like a yawning mouth. And barely a stone's throw down was the cave where the darkeyes supposedly slept.\n\nNed rolled onto his back, panting. In the sky, the skaler had cut its distance by half. 'Get ready,' he whispered. He patted Oak's arm, then scrambled upright and stood on the ridge.\n\n'Skaler!' he shouted, and cursed his stupidity right away. With Oak's arrows at hand, they could have provoked the beast in silence. But all Ned had done was alerted anything with half an ear to the presence of men. He glanced at the cave. No sign of movement. What if Oak was right and the darkeyes were gone? What if the skalers had killed them already? What if this was nothing but dangerous folly?\n\nThe skaler sailed over, its green tail glinting in the lazy sun.\n\nWithout warning, Oak released an arrow. It whistled off the bowstring, quivering to its target. To Ned's surprise it struck and held, waggling freely in the nick between two of the beast's huge toes. The skaler squealed. Its claws flashed out. The arrow fell to the hillside in silence.\n\n'Sweet mercy, what now?' Oak Longarm said. Neither man had expected to hurt the skaler, merely to annoy it.\n\n'The cave,' said Ned. He extended a hand to help Oak up, all the while keeping his eye on the beast. The skaler's forward momentum had kept them out of range till now. But it was turning smoothly, setting itself low. It was going to attack.\n\n'The cave?' hissed Oak.\n\n'We have no choice,' barked Ned.\n\nHe hauled Oak onto the ridge. The beast was still some distance away, but Ned had not forgotten how fast they moved. Sure enough it was on them in a blink, so close he could feel the rumble of its roar and breathe the choking stench of its power.\n\n'Down!' he yelled.\n\nThey ducked and went sprawling in one movement, helped in their fall by the pressure of heat. A ceiling of flame raged over Ned's body as he tumbled haphazardly toward the cave. He heard Oak cry out and saw him sliding, beating down a small fire at his shoulder. His robe was burned, the flesh underneath it eaten through to the jointed bones. The bow lay broken behind him. Arrows were scattered all over the ground.\n\n'Oak, to me!' Ned screamed.\n\nBut the skaler had already turned and there was no ridge this time to hinder its aim. It opened its jaws with a deadly click and Oak Longarm went to the Fathers in a curling flare of orange light. Ned saw his outline briefly, a dancing ghost in the heart of the flame. And then there was nothing but the smell of seared earth and the terror of Ned knowing he was going to be next. His only hope was the cave and a different form of evil. He ran for it, his head full of rage and torment.\n\nWhere were they? his mind was screaming.\n\nWhere in the name of the Fathers were the darkeyes?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "In his time, Ned had thought more than once about dying, but he had never imagined it might be like this: trapped far from home in a hole in a hill, waiting for a fire-breathing terror to trace his scent and melt his bones. Survival was a stubborn friend to all men, but as Ned crept along the wall of the cave, feeling his way deeper into the darkness, there seemed little chance it would side with him today.\n\nUnless this place had hidden depths, he was certain now the darkeyes were gone. He tried not to dwell on that wretched thought. Oak Longarm had met with a horrifying end \u2013 and all that Ned had gained from it was the hollow discovery that there was no way of fighting the skalers. He cursed his stupidity and his pride. Targen the Old had been wise in his rulings. A life of peace was better than a death spent yearning for vengeance. Now Ned was primed to learn that lesson, in the most brutal way imaginable.\n\nThe skaler entered with a bad-tempered snort, extinguishing most of the light. Ned tensed as the beast shuffled forward, loading the air with its lumbering sweat. There was very little room for its giant frame, but how much room did the creature need when its fire was more flexible than any limb? A short, hot flame punctured the darkness. It licked around the cave walls and billowed into nothing. It easily missed Ned, who had pressed himself into a protective nook, but it did briefly light the way ahead. In that instant, Ned made a startling discovery. He'd been wrong about the darkeyes.\n\nThey were here.\n\nTwo of them, hanging from the roof of the cave. They reminded Ned of the strange black flappers that batted around the settlement at night, but these were larger, three times the height of a man. The skaler had seen them too. Its eyes were now radiating light into the gloom \u2013 enough to illuminate the darkeyes' shape. Ned braced himself, expecting a bigger gush of flame. But the beast seemed more confused than threatened. It pushed right forward, its long snout passing Ned's hiding place. From the back of its throat came a number of colourful rumbles and clicks, as though it might be trying to communicate. The darkeyes did not stir, but something was moving within the cave, a presence not even Ned was aware of till Waylen leapt onto the skaler's neck, and crying vengeance loud enough to wake the dead, plunged an arrow deep into its eye.\n\nIt was a lucky strike. Waylen might have tried ten times to maim the skaler and on nine of those times he might have failed. But his arrowhead had found one of the spongy gaps between the surfaces that formed the jewel of the eye. Squealing, the creature threw back its head, slamming its foe against the ceiling of the cave. Waylen fell with a dead thud, right at Ned's feet. Ned shook in silent revulsion. Oak's end had at least been final and quick. Now here lay Waylen, panting for life, his body broken, his insides mashed.\n\nThe skaler was also in trouble. It had pulled right back, banging its head both ways against the wall. The up and down thrash of its colossal tail rocked the whole cave with every brutal thump. It was trying to get out but was stuck near the opening, impeded by a rock its rage had brought down.\n\nAnd still the darkeyes hadn't moved.\n\nNed's mind boiled with choices. If he ran while the beast was ailing, he might squeeze past it and escape to the whinneys. But where was the honour in running? Two men were dead (or near enough; Waylen's breathing was reduced to a thread). Their spirits would haunt him for ever if he did not try to win this fight. But whatever he did must be quick and decisive. The skaler had his scent. How long before it came for him again, or more of its kind rallied to its calls?\n\nHe risked a look. The beast had ceased to thrash and was in some kind of giddy fall. It was sure to be even more dangerous wounded, but there was no better time to strike. Ned prayed to the Fathers to show him how. They answered with a glint of light. Waylen's knife. It had found a small squint of daylight and bounced it back to Ned's grateful eye. He dropped down and snatched the blade up. It was heavy in his hand and wet with blood. A farming tool with a long curved edge. Waylen had come for a fight, all right. For friends, now dead, Ned told himself. He clasped the hilt firmly and stepped out of hiding.\n\nThe skaler detected the move right away. It gurgled once, then opened its jaws and filled the cave with a roar that strained every seam of rock.\n\nNed clamped his ears and was forced to fall back, physically sickened by the weight of air pushing through his body. An ocean of noise raged in his head. It was all he could do to stay level and awake. Panting hard, he spat out some vomit and cut two pieces from the arm of his robe to fold up small and plug into his ears. He fastened one in, surprised he was still alive to do this. Why had the skaler used voice, not fire? Could it be it wanted the darkeyes intact? Why, when the two were mortal enemies? Ned looked at them again. Even now, they were static. Were they dead, he wondered, or locked in a frozen sleep like the animals that wintered when the deep snows came? A spike of frustration rose in him then. And for no other reason than his lack of understanding, he found a loose rock and threw it at the place where the darkeyes were hanging.\n\nThere. Let the monsters wake.\n\nEven with his ears half stoppered he expected to hear a faint clatter or thump. But the rock just seemed to disappear, as if the creatures had sucked it in. A moment passed, then something extraordinary happened. A wing cracked off the nearest body, turning to dust as it hit the cave floor. A spark of pale pink light appeared and lengthened into a vertical line. Ned's heart thumped against his ribs. His rock had made a hole in what was nothing but a husk. But he'd woken something, of that he was certain. Something very different from the darkeye he'd arrowed in the settlement that time.\n\nRun. There was nothing else for it. He plugged his other ear and jumped out of hiding. 'Kaal!' he screamed, the knife in both hands. He readied himself for a ruthless swing. One good blow before he died. One blow to avenge courageous friends and swell his terrified heart with pride.\n\nBut it did not come to that. The skaler was down already, a fire-filled tear rolling out of an eye that bled green around the shaft of Waylen's arrow. It was the most sickening and yet the most wondrous sight Ned had ever seen. He glanced behind him. The light from the darkeye had billowed out into a ghostly spirit. What use was a blade against that? Quickly, Ned sliced a horn off the skaler's head, then threw the knife behind him and ran. Using the dead beast's head as a step, he tumbled along its curving back and out into the daylight.\n\nThe whinneys were calm and ready, tethered to a rain-soaked bush. Ned freed the mounts of Oak and Waylen, slapped them and sent them galloping wild. Then he mounted Wind and rode her as her name suggested, away from that eerie cave of death.\n\nOn the slope to the river where the three friends had camped, one of Wind's feet found a hole in the ground and brought her down. Ned was thrown headlong into the water. When he turned he saw Wind lying helpless on the bank. Her leg was broken, useless.\n\n'NO!' he screamed, and beat his fists into the water.\n\nAnd the skies, already heavy with cloud, poured their rain on Ned's fair head, as though his torment was not yet great enough, or his eyes not sufficiently wet with sorrow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Killing a whinney so maimed by injury was a terrible burden, but it had to be done. One strike to Wind's skull and she slept. The rest Ned did with the skaler horn. As the flow of warm air calmed in her nostrils, he blessed her spirit and asked the Fathers to tend her well, until it was his time to cross over into death and he could meet his faithful ride again.\n\nHe knelt and stroked her beautiful mane, singing her a song of the open field. And when it became too much for him to bear, he lifted the skaler horn again and thought to plunge it into his heart. How his despondent spirit yearned to feel the point of that worthless prize, but he could not force his hand to do it. If he died here, the tribe would die too. When the skalers discovered the body in the cave, a broken arrow lodged in its eye, their wrath was sure to come down on the Kaal.\n\nSickened, Ned threw the horn away. He wept for his friends and his beautiful whinney. His life was now worthless, but it must go on. He deserved whatever judgment awaited him, but it would be nothing compared to the murder and ruin the beasts would inflict if they flew against the men. Saving the tribe was all that mattered. It was the only shred of honour he had left.\n\nSo he picked himself up and began to run, moving at a pace he thought he could sustain. He ran and ran, through twilight and darkness, finally reaching the outskirts of the settlement just before dawn. Exhausted, he dropped to a shallow in the river and cupped his hands in the cold, clear water, drawing it up to his mouth and face. No skalers. No burning shelters. Still time for the Kaal to escape. He drank again, re-wetting his face, stretching the lids of his weary eyes as if he might wash away the horrors they had witnessed. Mell, he whispered to his weary reflection, I love you, forgive me if they judge me harshly. On that prayer he made ready to stand, but heard a twig break and held his position. In the half-light he saw the figure of a boy, dipping a vessel into the river.\n\n'Ren?' Ned croaked.\n\nThe boy jumped. The vessel clanged against a rock.\n\n'Ren Whitehair?' Ned said, wiping his mouth.\n\n'F-father?' came the reply.\n\nNed was at him in a matter of strides. He gripped the boy powerfully by the shoulders, squeezing to be sure it was flesh he held and not some lurking spirit. 'Where you bin?' he panted, a rough, bewildered snarl in his voice. He moved his hands to clamp Ren's face.\n\nRen said, 'Pa, you're hurtin'.'\n\nBut Ned held fast, walking Ren backwards as he spoke. 'I bin looking for you, boy, these two days past. Looking. Over the line. For you. Oak and Waylen, they rode out with me. And now they are dead men. Wind gone too. All a'cause of you, boy. All a'cause of you.' He pushed Ren over, onto his back. And from a place within the foliage that grew beside the river came a sound that would haunt Ned the rest of his days and steal any sleep still due to him.\n\nGraaarrrk!\n\nHe turned swiftly, reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. 'Sweet mercy, what was that?'\n\nRen rolled to the place where he'd set Pupp down. He clasped the dragon to him, folding its wings. 'Hold yer anger, Pa. Don't fall mad on me. Swear.'\n\n'Heart's fire, boy, what have you found?'\n\nRen stood up with Pupp in his arms. 'It's young. Ain't no worry to no one.' Slowly, he raised Pupp into the light.\n\nNed backed away, the juice of his insides rising.\n\n'It were gonna die,' said Ren. 'I was there, watchin', when the mountain waked. I see'd its mother killed by rocks. I ran with it a'cause\u2014'\n\n'Fool,' Ned said, hearing Ren's words but not heeding them. 'Foolish, foolish, foolish boy.' He was laughing and weeping all in one. 'Now we have both brought fire upon the tribe. Now we are dead in more ways than you could dream. Why, boy? What devil made you walk among the beasts?'\n\n'I would save them from the darkeyes,' Ren said boldly.\n\nNed beat his hands flat to his head. 'There are no darkeyes, boy. If you had seen\u2026' But what had he seen? What exactly had he freed in the cave? The threat of fire from the skalers was one thing. What now if the tribe was haunted by spirits released from the shell of a demon? 'We must kill it,' he muttered, meaning the pupp. 'Hold it in water. Drown its fire.'\n\n'No,' said Ren, guarding Pupp's head.\n\n'And afterward bury it,' Ned chattered to himself. 'Aye, bury it. Seal it deep in the ground so the beasts will have no scent of it.'\n\n'Father, come no closer,' Ren warned. He stepped back, raising the darkeye horn, struggling to keep the little one quiet.\n\n'What's this?' said Ned, the lines around his eyes making plain his bewilderment. He matched steps with Ren as the boy stepped back. 'Would you seek to wound me now?'\n\nRen jabbed the horn. 'When I hold this, I have the skalers' temper. I can make fire in my hand, like them.'\n\nNed allowed himself a moment of mirth. 'Boy, I have seen a man vanish in flames. There is nought that you or this fiend you coddle could do to harm me worse.'\n\n'I can,' said Ren, his hand shaking. He could feel Grystina rising again. It was only the thought that this was his father standing before him that was keeping the dragon inside him tethered. 'I am bound to the mother by an oath, deep hidden.'\n\n'Oath?' said Ned. 'You look harsh at your father yet swear a bond to skalers?'\n\nOn this tender balance of words, Pine Onetooth interrupted them.\n\n'There!' she called from among the trees.\n\nAnd as Ren chanced to look, his father burst forward and gripped the arm that held the horn. It went spinning out of Ren's grasp. They wrestled a moment, with Pupp between them. Squealing fearfully, the dragon wiggled and thrust out a wing, slicing Ned's throat just below the ear.\n\nNed called out in dire pain. He staggered back, stemming the blood with his hand. Ren turned to run, with Pupp in his arms, but walked into the swipe of a wooden club. A second club jarred the back of Ned's head and broke the world up into tiny stars. The last thing he remembered before he hit the ground was the rustle of feet and the voice of Varl Rednose saying in a swagger, 'You done well, girl. This night be yours. Take them. Bag the beast.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Even in these troubled times of darkeyes and skalers, rarely could a man expect to set his gaze on the face of Targen the Old. The leader of the Kaal never left his shelter and would only communicate through his dreyas, the two aged women who attended to his needs and sat beside him during his journeys with the Fathers. It was said that Targen had more years on him than most of the trees in the Whispering Forest. It showed in the many lines of his face, more wrinkled than spiker bark and said to be home to the same kind of nibblers. As Ned was led in and made to kneel, he thought he saw a nibbler scuttle over Targen's rumpled cheek and crawl into the shell of one gnarled brown ear, though it could have been a faint adjustment of expression as the old man framed a look of displeasure.\n\nNed's head was throbbing, in more than one place. A poultice pasted to the wound at his neck had dried overnight and tugged the edges of the cut together. The pain clawed at the bones of his jaw whenever he tried to open his mouth. One eye was drawing down a veil upon the world. And as if to make his tally of misfortune complete, Varl Rednose had gifted him a swollen ear, the last of the blows to send him into darkness.\n\nNow it was light and the reckoning had begun. Ned hung his head, tormented by the memories clawing at his mind: Ren. The river. The graarking skaler. Oak had judged it right. If only Ned had followed his advice and waited another day for the boy. Now there was tragedy at every turn, and more to come when the skalers arrived. He looked around the shelter. Ren was not there, only Targen and his grisly women, sitting on a pile of animal skins. Between them, in one of the wooden cages used for carrying catches from hunting, was the skaler.\n\nIt was lying on its side, twitching now and then. Ned flinched as its claws gripped a bar of the cage and squeezed the wood until it cracked. What strength, he wondered, must an adult have if one so small could splinter a length of wood in its sleep? One of the dreyas bent forward, her grey hair crackling as she stirred the contents of a black pot bedded in the ashes of a fire. Yellow wisps were rising out of it, stinging the air with a grievous scent. The dreya picked up a stick. It was bulbous with rags at the thickest end and heavy with the stains of the potion she was cooking. She stirred the stick into the shallows of the pot and wafted it close to the skaler's snout. The creature's body jerked, then slackened. The dreya sat back with her hands in her lap. She stared at Ned as though his breaths could be numbered by the gaps in her teeth. Ned disliked these women intensely. They were nothing like his Mell, who dressed in simple working robes and warmed his heart with her floating smile. The dreyas never smiled. They wore robes the colour of river mud, sewn with single caarker feathers. In their hair they hung bones that clattered when they spoke. It was said their magicks could turn men to stone. What magicks, Ned wondered, were they planning for him?\n\n'Where is my son?' he asked, needing to support his jaw against the pain.\n\nThe second dreya leant close to Targen. She repeated the question as if Ned had spoken a foreign tongue.\n\nTargen opened his toothless mouth. He whispered a faint reply back to the dreya. The words whistled off his breath like arrows.\n\n'He says the tribe is light,' said the dreya. 'He hears death singing among the men. You will speak on this.'\n\nNed lowered his head. He grimaced and felt the poultice crack. A tear made a pale line down his cheek. 'I rode with Oak Longarm and Waylen Treader. We journeyed by our own consent. We followed the moon in search of the darkeyes, so we might raise them against the skalers. Both these men now lie at peace, slain by a skaler which itself rests dead in the darkeyes' cave, an arrow deep in its blood-drained eye. My soul weeps for brave friends missed, but it will weep a world more if we do not flee the settlement. Do not doubt this: the skalers will come. I say to Targen, the Old, the Wise, do what you will with me, but leave here now and save yourselves.'\n\nThe dreya shared these words with Targen and listened, patiently, for his reply.\n\n'He says you must settle the spirits of these men.'\n\nNed nodded, the tips of his white hair dancing. 'What would he bid me do?'\n\nTargen whispered to the dreya again. She said, 'You will lead the men of the Kaal to the flat rock. You, Whitehair, will carry the skaler.'\n\nA look of surprise set over Ned's face. The flat rock was an old sacrificial stone. It lay some fifty strides wrong of the scorch line and had not been used since Ned was a boy. He shook his head in disbelief. 'You would blood the creature \u2013 on skaler ground?'\n\nThe dreya consulted Targen again. 'When the skalers come, you will kneel by the stone and return the creature to its kind, unharmed, but a sacrifice will be made.'\n\n'Of what?' said Ned, growing anxious.\n\nThe yellow smoke drifted across the shelter. Two bones rattled in the dreya's hair.\n\n'Your son, Whitehair.'\n\n'Ren?' Ned gasped, despite the pain. He looked at Targen. The lines of the old man's face did not lie. 'No,' Ned said. He rose up, struggling to keep his balance. 'If you seek a life, take mine. The boy fell prey to a madness, yes, but I will not give him up in place of this beast.'\n\n'Stay where you stand,' a harsh voice said. Varl Rednose. Again. 'Move and I'll finish what the creature started.'\n\nNed felt the edge of a sword on his neck.\n\nTwo more men swept into the shelter.\n\n'Get him out,' said Varl.\n\nAnd they dragged Ned away, still in pain, still protesting.\n\nVarl knelt before Targen and bent his head. 'At first light, it will be done,' he said. Then he nodded at the dreyas and picked up the cage, spitting on the wearling as he carried it into the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "They gagged Ned and tied him to a post overnight, so he might not call Ren or move to flee. Mell was not permitted to see him.\n\nAt the break of dawn, Varl woke him with a bucket of watered filth. He gripped Ned's chin with the gag still in place, enjoying the fear he could see in Ned's eyes. 'Were it me,' he said, 'it would be you, not Ren, on that rock this morrow. You are no friend to any Kaal now.' And he spat on Ned's face with even more venom than he'd used for the skaler. Ned heard the creature skrike somewhere and rolled his eyes toward the sound.\n\n'Aye,' said Varl. 'All night the creature called to your boy, and he likeways to it. It's taken him, Ned, chewed on him bad.' He ran a hand down a forearm crowded with scars. 'All this, not flesh no more. Skaler, he is. Gone wild to the beasts.' He tapped the side of his head. 'Fevered.'\n\nNed's eyes shrank in disbelief.\n\nVarl nodded. 'Aye, I tell it true. When I blood the boy, I'll be killing the juice o' the skalers in him.' He stepped up close, making Ned recoil from his stinking breath. 'And the spirits of Oak Longarm and Waylen Treader will look upon the green that flows from the cut and smile on my blade and know they are even.'\n\nAnd he punched Ned hard, taking his wind. Ned groaned and wrestled with the ties that bound him. He would have given all the wealth he owned to break free and punch Varl's fat, red nose. But the ties were strong and Ned knew he had lost. A tear ran silver from his grieving eye.\n\nVarl took him again by the chin. 'I am bound by Targen to kill you alike if you choose to make bother. Will you make bother, Ned? Shall I spear you now with this strange black treasure an' save you the long walk to the rock?' He held up the darkeye horn.\n\nIn the background, the wearling skriked again.\n\nNed cursed it silently and said nay with his eyes; nay, he would not make bother. He grunted, wanting to speak.\n\nVarl thought for a moment, then loosened the gag.\n\nNed coughed away the dry, rank taste in his mouth and seized his chance to breathe cold, sweet air. 'Tell me true. Has Mell seen the arm? Has she seen this change in Ren?'\n\n'Listen hard,' Varl snorted. 'You may hear her weeping \u2013 as Oak and Waylen's women weep for them.'\n\n'They rode with me freely,' Ned protested. 'I did no more than\u2014'\n\nVarl stopped him with a brutal slap across the mouth. 'Slight them again and I will cut your tongue till it's twice as skinny as a spiker leaf.'\n\nA bloodied tooth worked free of Ned's gum. He spat it onto the ground and said, 'Will you take me to Ren?'\n\n'You'll see him soon enough.'\n\n'What have you done to him, Varl?'\n\nBut Rednose would not say. He pushed the horn into his belt and turned to go.\n\n'Wait!' Ned cried, making several mutts bark.\n\nVarl did him the grace of pausing.\n\n'You swear Ren is bit?'\n\n'Aye,' Varl said. 'Green of arm and babbling like he were born of fire.'\n\nGreen of arm? Ned grappled with despair. If this were true and the boy was poisoned, he was as hopeless as Wind with her shattered leg. And so Ned gathered up his grief and said, 'Let it be me.'\n\nVarl half looked back. 'What blether is this?'\n\n'I should be the one to end it,' said Ned. 'Let me be true to the Fathers and the tribe. Let me bear the blade against Ren.'\n\nVarl turned, kicking at a mutt that had drifted too close. 'You ain't got the gristle.'\n\nNed spat another bead of blood from his mouth. 'You think I want him changed so wrong? It's my right to take back what I seeded. I say to you plain, I stand by the ruling. I will give the skaler back to the beasts and show them the blood of my son, and be done.'\n\nVarl filled his swollen nose with air. He was a pitiless man who cared little for the lives of those around him \u2013 but he did understand the need for honour. 'I will think on it,' he said, and walked away.\n\n'Think on it soon!' Ned shouted through his pain. And he glanced up to the sky and whispered, 'Or I tell you true, we are all dead.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "They came for Ned shortly. Two to cut him free, two more to drag him to the midst of the settlement where Varl and the rest of the men were waiting. Mell broke free of her guards and threw herself at Ned, pleading with him not to allow them to take Ren to sacrifice. But Ned, by now convinced of his destiny, spoke openly and loud for all to hear. He said that Targen had ruled with wisdom and that he, Ned Whitehair, father of Ren, would settle the spirits of Oak and Waylen by his own strong hand.\n\n'No-ooo!' Mell screamed and was dragged away, promising murder on Ned, and worse.\n\nThey brought Ren out on an open cart. He was lying on his side, alive but fuddled. His hands were bound in front of him. Ned shuddered when he saw the state of the arm. Varl had spoken true. The boy's flesh was covered in fine green scales that glittered freely in the morning sun. There were bloodstains down his robe, which looked to have come from the blow he'd taken, though Ned suspected they had beaten him too. They had gagged him also, but the cloth was slipping. To his horror, Ned could hear the boy whining, making the sounds the skalers made. A guard punched him hard and tightened the gag. Ned's gaze drifted to the skaler in its cage. That too had been silenced again. It lay squeezed into a corner, a green froth spilling from the angle of its jaw, tail half twined round one of the bars.\n\nVarl strode up, his sword at his side. He nodded at the cage. Ned reluctantly picked it up, holding it well away from his face. The skaler was surprisingly light.\n\n'Aye, be wary it don't bite,' said Varl. He snapped his teeth. The men laughed, but their nerves made the mockery hollow.\n\nNed liked being taunted as little as anyone, but he saw the wisdom in carrying the cage by its flat wooden base, rather than showing his fingers to the creature. 'I would speak with my son a moment,' he said, a request that Varl straightway denied.\n\n'Your son speaks only with skalers,' he jeered. He mounted his whinney, which tried not to sag beneath his weight. 'Walk,' he ordered, and kicked Ned hard between the shoulders to move him.\n\nBy the time they had reached the Whispering Forest, the skaler had woken. It immediately wailed and looked for Ren. Ned had a swift reminder of its strength when its tail whipped the cage, forcing him to drop it. The cage tumbled down a grassy knoll and came to rest in a hopper's hollow. The men roared with laughter to see the beast upside down and kicking. Varl was less impressed. He ordered Ned to retrieve the cage and told another man to find a skin to cover it. For a short while after, the creature was quiet. Then from its dark pen began to come a sound.\n\nTada, it cried. Over and over. A wail so heavy with woe that it could have drawn the sap from the heart of the trees.\n\nIn the cart, Ren stirred. He gestured for water.\n\nNed looked to Varl for pity.\n\nVarl stroked his beard. 'All right, ungag him. Give the boy water. I need to dampen a tree, anyway. I've enough piss in me to drown a mutt.' The men's laughter shook the forest again. One by one they slid off their whinneys and found places to stand and lift their robes.\n\nNed used the break to move nearer to Ren. A guard put out a weak hand to stop him, but Ned pushed right on by, saying, 'What harm can there be in speaking to the boy? His time is short. Tend mercifully to him.'\n\nSo they hauled Ren into a sitting position, took away his gag and wet his tongue.\n\nNed said quietly, 'Boy, harken to your father now. You are fevered by skalers, and I must be your remedy.'\n\nRen's head lolled into his bloodstained chest. 'Garrffred,' he said in a slur.\n\nNed looked at the man who was holding Ren. The man shrugged. Like Ned, he could find no meaning for the boy's strange babble. He pulled Ren up by the hair.\n\n'Galan aug scieth,' Ren hissed.\n\nThe guard backed off, muttering that the boy had been taken by a devil.\n\n'Ren, what are these words?' asked Ned.\n\n'His,' Ren breathed, making soothing sounds that Pupp would understand.\n\nThe cage shook in Ned's hands as the skaler grew restless. Tada, it wailed. Tada. Tada.\n\n'His?' said Ned. He thought back on Varl's jibe at the start of the journey. Your son speaks only with skalers. Could it be true that Ren had their words? Ned asked directly, 'You speak with the beast?'\n\n'Some,' Ren said, and quickly produced more sounds of dragontongue. The skaler responded with a similar noise and began to jab at the covering skin.\n\n'What does the creature say?' asked Ned.\n\nRen rolled his eyes. 'It calls me Father, for I am all it has.'\n\n'Let's be on,' barked Varl, reapproaching his whinney.\n\n'And what say you in return?' gulped Ned.\n\nRen swayed and looked his father in the eye. 'I say I love it \u2013 as a father should.'\n\n'Whitehair!' snapped Varl. 'Be done dreaming! I said we are onward. My hand grows eager to slay something.'\n\nOne of the men clapped a hand on Ned's shoulder.\n\n'No,' said Ned. He brushed the man off.\n\nRednose paused and dropped his reins.\n\nBy now, Ned's mind was wild with a notion, a notion so strange he could barely believe he would hear himself say it, but say it he did: 'Harken to me. All of you. This errand is false. Targen is wrong. We need Ren alive. He alone can save us.'\n\nVarl's hand moved slowly to the grip of his sword. 'Have a care, Ned. Your words move perilous close to the edge.'\n\n'Take me instead if you must,' Ned shouted, making sure he had the ears of every man. 'But the boy must live. He speaks their tongue.'\n\nVarl drew the blade and held it level at the pulse of Ned's throat. 'He makes an interesting noise, it's true. As will you when I take off your head.'\n\n'I beg you, think on this!' Ned cried. He turned his back on Varl to face more of the men. 'If we can talk to the skalers, we can know their will. We can\u2014'\n\nAnd that was where his plea was ended, on the pitiless tip of Varl Rednose's sword. It entered Ned's back and pushed out through his front like a milky tongue, bearing nought but the slightest streak of blood.\n\n'No-oo!' Ren screamed, setting Pupp off too.\n\nNed gasped and dropped the cage. The covering skin fell clear. The skaler flapped and kicked as though all hell was about to rain down.\n\nVarl withdrew his blade, the force of it pulling Ned back against him. 'I told you Ned, no bother,' he whispered.\n\nNed's mouth bubbled with blood. Despite the pain, he reached back quickly and found Varl's belt. In a moment, the darkeye horn was in his grasp and he had stabbed Varl hard in the groin with it. Varl howled and dropped his sword. Ned fell against the cart and slashed Ren's ties, placing the horn in his son's small hands. 'Whatever you would do, do it now,' he said. And he touched the boy's soft white hair and fell, dead.\n\nBy now, the men had recovered their wits and the nearest were beginning to close on Ren. He took the first one down with a burst of fire. The man screamed and fell back, his robe jumping with flames. The others, seeing this, stayed their distance. Some cried out in fear of magicks. Despite his weakened state, Ren tumbled off the cart and staggered to the cage, springing the clasp which held it locked.\n\n'Fly!' he shouted, shaking Pupp out, an act that almost cost him his life. For Varl was injured but certainly not dead. As the drake flapped awkwardly towards the trees, Varl picked up his sword and came there, swinging.\n\nRen rolled aside as the blade crashed down, its scarred edge splintering the spoke of a wheel. He raised the horn and aimed it true, but Grystina was there in his head and she was saying, Too many. Flee. Flee! She was right. Men were coming from all sides now. Some had loaded their bows, awaiting Varl's order to fire.\n\nHow? Ren said. How shall I flee? But the answer was with him as soon as he asked. Closing his eyes, he i:maged himself on an open hillside, as light as a wind blowing through tall grass. And instantly he was gone, moving through the barriers of time and space as if he had done no more than push a hand below the surface of a lake.\n\nWhen he found his wits again he was clear of the forest and out of danger \u2013 on his knees in a nearby meadow, within touching distance of the scorch line.\n\n'Pupp,' he whispered, anxious lest the wearling be lost or recaptured. 'Pupp!' he screamed, and immediately started back toward the forest. But Grystina changed his mind again.\n\nSeek them, she said. Gariffred will hide.\n\nThem? said Ren.\n\nThe Wearle, said she.\n\nRen looked giddily toward the mountains. In the sky he could see a blue dragon soaring. It looked like the one he'd hidden from three days earlier. Back then, he had needed to avoid its gaze; now he must call the beast to help. So he ran for the scorch line in open sight. Shortly, across it, he found himself stopped by not one, but two huge dragons. The blue one rose and blew fire above his head; the other released a roar so loud that Ren's head went numb and blood ran from his ears. Yet somehow he managed to open his mouth and speak the word Pupp had used repeatedly to him, a word he knew they would understand.\n\nTada, he said. Before he fell, exhausted, to the ground at their feet."
            },
            {
                "title": "Goyles",
                "text": "Although Abrial was the first to see the scales on Ren, Graymere was the one to work out what had happened.\n\n'He's been bitten,' the De:allus murmured.\n\nHe nudged Ren onto his back. The boy's arms flopped out in the shape of a cross. There on one hand were the tell-tale teeth marks. Spreading out from a star-like crust at their centre was a perfect set of soft green scales. They had already crossed the wrist and were forking toward the midbone of the arm. Graymere blinked his yellow eyes, but it made no difference to what he was seeing: a Hom infected by the sap of a dragon. In the entire history of dragonkind, nothing like this had ever happened before.\n\n'Look at this,' said Abrial. He was sniffing at something that had rolled from the boy's hand. 'It's dragon, I think. I'm not sure.'\n\nGraymere looked over. He saw the darkeye horn and thought immediately of the remnant of Rogan, now lodged inside the long scales on his leg. He scanned the piece that Abrial was sniffing at. It looked like a cranial stig. They grew in curving lines behind the ears and were of little use other than to serve a dragon's vanity; the further they extended, the more imposing the dragon was considered to be. Oddly, the stig looked fully formed. That made no sense to Graymere. Stigs of such quality took years to grow. This one was far too small to have come from any adult dragon. 'Is it burned?' he asked.\n\nAbrial ran his nostrils over it. 'I can scent no fire, just fresh Hom blood. How would the Hom get something like this?'\n\n'I don't know,' Graymere said quietly.\n\nBut Abrial had a theory. 'Do you think it could have come from the first Wearle?'\n\nBy now, Graymere was thinking many things, most of all about that bite. 'Abrial, I have something to tell you. Fanon Grendel believes that Grystina's drake might still be alive.'\n\nAbrial sat up smartly, pricking the fins around his ears. 'How? What does Grendel know?'\n\nGraymere let his gaze run deep beyond the scorch line, his optical triggers panning the hills. 'There's no time to explain. I have to start searching and you need to take this Hom to Prime Galarhade.'\n\nRen stirred at this point. He gave a terrified start when he saw how close the dragons were and realised the drops of warm fluid on his chest were saliva, dripping from Abrial's jaws. He scrambled away, still low to the ground. In an instant, Abrial brought his tail round and levelled his isoscele at the boy's throat. The dragon growled, but all Ren heard was the rumble in his bones. His head was filled with mush, his hearing shattered by Graymere's roar. He gestured in surrender and tried to speak, but in his fright the words were muddled and mostly Kaal. He saw the horn on the ground and went for it.\n\nWith a whump that fractured the surrounding soil, Graymere's foot came down on the stig.\n\nRen jumped again. Out of the balloon that used to be his head, he made sounds that were supposed to say, 'No. Let me have that. I'll show you what I can do with it.' Foolishly, he slapped at Graymere's foot.\n\nThe dragon slapped back, catapulting Ren through the air like a fly. The boy landed on his back, groaned and passed out.\n\n'Take him to Galarhade,' Graymere said again.\n\n'But I'm supposed to report to Veng commander Gallen. He\u2014'\n\n'No, not Gallen. Take a route that will keep you clear of the Veng, especially Gazz.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Just do it, Abrial.'\n\n'But they'll\u2014'\n\n'Listen to me. The Veng killed Grogan.'\n\nThat stopped the blue dead. 'What?'\n\n'They were following Gallen's orders. It happened at the mine. Grogan was sick, poisoned by fhosforent.'\n\n'Poisoned? How? Did you send him to Grymric?'\n\n'I wasn't allowed to.'\n\n'By Gallen?'\n\n'By the Elders.'\n\nAbrial took a moment to let this sink in. His teacher. His per. His father's best friend. His crusty old guardian. Dead? 'You\u2026you called him Grogan.'\n\nA ripple ran down Graymere's neck. 'Look into my eyes and tell me the truth: did you cause the quake at Vargos?'\n\n'No,' said Abrial. How many times did he have to protest his innocence?\n\n'You weren't attempting to create a physical eruption, just the illusion of one?'\n\nThe blue turned his head away. 'Do I look like an Elder?'\n\nNo, you don't, thought Graymere, and briefly wanted to run that line of inquiry deeper, but now was not the moment. 'For what it's worth, I believe you were falsely accused. And so does Grendel. Abrial, there's something I need to tell you about myself and Fan\u2014'\n\n'How did he die? How did the Veng kill my per?'\n\nGraymere sighed and shook his head. 'Forget the Veng and any thoughts of vengeance. What matters now is that we find the drake.' Likewise, Graymere chided himself, the situation with Grendel could wait; the blue would know about it soon enough.\n\nAbrial tightened his claws. 'You truly believe it got out of the mountain?'\n\nGraymere flicked his snout at Ren. 'Only a wearling would speak the word tada. Only a wearling could have wounded the boy this gently; you or I would have taken his hand off. The drake is out there somewhere. Dead or alive, he must be found.'\n\n'Where do we begin?'\n\n'I will search; you will return to Skytouch for help.'\n\n'But\u2026if I find the drake, my honour will be restored and\u2014'\n\n'Abrial, you've captured a mutant Hom. That alone will prove your worth to the Elders. Tell the Prime everything I've told you. If you're lucky, he might let you fly the wyng that leads them back here.'\n\nA proud moment that would be. Abrial stood up a little straighter. 'Should I take the stig he was holding?'\n\nGraymere lifted his foot. Though he'd come down on the stig with some force, he'd been careful not to break it. He picked it up and examined it closely, letting its auma feed into his. As he turned it in his claws, a coldness began to crawl through his bones that had nothing to do with the chill in the wind and everything to do with Abrial's earlier question, Could it have come from the first Wearle?\n\n'Say nothing of the stig,' he said. And offering no further explanation, he tucked the piece away and spread his wings. He did not have an answer to Abrial's query, except to say that whatever this thing was now, it had definitely been part of a dragon once. It was also tainted with a high concentration of fhosforent.\n\nJust like the remnant he'd taken of Grogan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Abrial took the long way round, coming in on the ocean side of the mountains where the roamers were less likely to be circling and the threat of interference was much reduced. He held Ren clamped between his feet; the boy was alive but barely conscious. At a glance, it looked as if Abrial had been out hunting. It was only when he rounded the peak of Skytouch and glided across the great ice lake that he started to hear the calls.\n\nThe blue! Abrial, the blue, is coming! Then the sky began to fill with overlapping roamers and jewelled eyes were glinting on every ledge.\n\nFearful the Veng would cut across him, Abrial quickened his wingbeats and misjudged the approach to Galarhade's settle \u2013 a magnificent depression in the upper half of Skytouch that resembled a dragon's mouth, fully open. (It was the only cave on Erth 'manufactured' by flamework \u2013 a construction commissioned by Prime Greffan, leader of the first Wearle.) Abrial pitched forward on landing, swiping his tail to regain stability and smashing several 'fangs' of glistening ice that hung in spines around the lip of the opening. Luckily, he let go of Ren before he put down. The boy hit the cave floor and rolled forward, only to be pinned by the claws of Elder Grynt.\n\n'What in the name of Godith is this?!' It wasn't clear if Grynt was referring to the boy or the intrusion. Abrial decided it was probably both.\n\n'Elder,' he panted, his head low, his wings at half-stretch. 'I bring news from the scorch line.'\n\n'Get out!' roared Grynt. 'Since when did a traitor have the right to invade the Prime dragon's settle and drop\u2026filth like this?!' He scraped Ren to the side of the cave. The boy hit the wall with bone-cracking force. He wailed in pain, but was silenced into a cowering huddle by the threat of Grynt's formidable claws.\n\n'Elder, look at him!' Abrial pleaded. 'He has scales. De:allus Graymere believes he was bitten by a wearling \u2013 Grystina's wearling.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Grynt, let him speak,' said a voice from the shadows at the back of the cave. This time it was Prime Galarhade. He sounded weary, unwell.\n\nGrynt powered two columns of smoke from his nostrils. Twisting his face close to Abrial's, he said, 'You have the time it would take me to cut out your primary heart and skewer it onto the peak of this mountain. Trust me, blue, that would not take long.'\n\nAbrial nodded. He didn't doubt Grynt's words; the supreme commander of the Veng had not developed armoured breast scales for nothing. The blue allowed himself a gulp, then told the whole story, leaving out the parts about the stig.\n\nAnd then the claws did come for Ren. Grynt scooped him up and held him like the carcase of a slain animal.\n\n'Well?' Prime Galarhade croaked.\n\nGrynt's response was to give out a call that instantly brought two roamers to the settle. 'Bring the healer,' he said to one. To the other, 'Summon G'vard and the Veng to Skytouch. Alert me when they are gathered.'\n\nWith a whoosh, the roamers were gone.\n\nGrynt turned Ren left and right. 'You say it spoke dragon?'\n\n'From the old tongue,' said Abrial. 'It said \"tada\". A word that only a wear\u2014'\n\n'I know how a young dragon speaks,' snapped Grynt.\n\nAbrial bowed in submission. 'Elder, may I return to the line to aid De:allus Graymere with the search for the drake?'\n\n'You may not,' Grynt said with a quiet growl.\n\n'Speak to it, Grynt,' Prime Galarhade said. Abrial could see him now, hunched in rest, eyes fully closed. He looked on the point of death, which explained why Grynt was here, giving orders.\n\nElder Grynt shook the boy to bring his head forward. Ren was helpless, a rag in his grasp. 'Pupp\u2026' the boy muttered.\n\nThat made no sense to the dragon. 'What are you?' he growled, training his gaze deep into Ren's eye. 'Where is the drake you stole? If you speak our tongue, speak it now, before I crush you like a berry and drink your juice.' He squeezed Ren a little, maybe hoping he would pop out a meaningful word, but all Ren gave was another cry of pain.\n\n'Grynt, we need it alive,' said Galarhade.\n\nAbrial looked again at the Prime. Grynt seemed to be taking no notice of him.\n\nTo Abrial's relief, Grymric, the healer, landed in the cave mouth. He threw Abrial a questioning glance \u2013 a look soon bettered by the one he gave to Elder Grynt. 'I was gathering herbs nearby when the roamers\u2014 What's that doing here?'\n\nGrynt dropped the boy at the healer's feet. 'It's been bitten \u2013 by a young dragon. The blue fancies it might be the drake, though we have no proof.'\n\n'The drake? The drake?' Grymric spluttered.\n\n'Look at it,' the Elder growled.\n\n'Here,' said Abrial, pointing his isoscele at Ren's infected arm.\n\nGrymric mashed the air with his jaws. 'I\u2026this is astonishing. Has De:allus Graymere seen this?'\n\n'He's at the scorch line, looking for the drake,' said Abrial. 'We found\u2014'\n\n'Be quiet,' snapped Grynt. 'Can you make it talk?'\n\n'Talk?' said Grymric.\n\n'It knows some dragontongue,' Abrial said, buffering another dark gaze from the Elder.\n\nGrymric ran his gaze over Ren. 'It would talk better if you didn't break it,' he muttered. 'I have herbs to restore it, but it will take time.'\n\n'We don't have time,' Grynt said, as a high-pitched call reached across the cave mouth. The Veng were coming together. This was confirmed a moment later when Gallen swooped into the cave.\n\nHis first look also fell on the blue.\n\n'There's been an incident,' barked Grynt, to draw Gallen's attention. 'Call your full wyng. Give half to G'vard and lead the rest yourself.'\n\n'Incident?'\n\n'At the scorch line.'\n\nGallen glared at Abrial again. 'What position?'\n\n'Show him where you found the boy,' Grynt said.\n\n'Elder, I can lead the wyng my\u2014'\n\n'Show him!' the Elder roared.\n\nAnd so Abrial i:maged it as best he could.\n\n'Take mappers if you need to,' Grynt told Gallen.\n\n'What are we looking for?' the Veng commander said, his mean eyes thinning as they scrutinised Ren.\n\n'A dragon. A small one. Grystina's drake. Fly as far beyond the line as you need to. Kill anything that resists.'\n\n'No, use restraint,' Prime Galarhade said.\n\nGrymric leant toward the shadows. 'The Prime\u2026?' he queried.\n\n'Unwell,' said Grynt, 'falling in and out of confusion. Your herbs had better be strong, healer. Under the edicts of Ki:meran law, I am leading the Wearle now \u2013 and my judgment is sound. Gallen, go.'\n\nThe commander was strangely hesitant. 'We are missing five Veng, including Gazz.'\n\nHearing that name made Abrial start. Hadn't Graymere warned him to avoid Veng Gazz? And now he was missing? How? Where?\n\n'Then find them,' said Grynt. 'And be quick about it.'\n\nGallen gave a sharp nod. With another fierce look at Abrial, he left.\n\nGrynt turned his attention to Abrial and the healer. 'You will speak of this to no other dragon. When the drake is found, this thief will be dealt with.'\n\n'How?' said Abrial.\n\nGrymric cast his gaze to the floor.\n\nGrynt said, 'It will burn before the whole Wearle.'\n\n'But\u2026?'\n\n'But what, blue?'\n\n'It ran to us, Elder.'\n\n'And what is that supposed to mean?'\n\n'It means,' Prime Galarhade said in the background, 'that the Hom may have formed a bond with the drake and crossed the line because it needed our help. Would you reward such bravery with burning? We need the Hom alive. It must be given to the De:allus for examination. It may even have links to the first Wearle. Grymric, attend to me now.'\n\nGrymric looked at Elder Grynt, who nodded.\n\n'And the Hom?' Grymric said. 'Shall I try to heal it?'\n\n'No,' said Grynt, narrowing his ridges. 'I know better how to get information from him.' He raised his head and looked squarely at Abrial. 'It pains me to say it, but you have done well.'\n\nAbrial swallowed a ball of smoke. 'May I now aid De:allus Graymere with the search?'\n\n'No. You will return to the line and continue to sweep until this is done.'\n\nAbrial dropped his wings. Elation and disappointment in the space of two sentences.\n\n'This is not a punishment,' Grynt was swift to add. 'With the Veng engaged beyond the line it is more important than ever that you watch for Hom movement. Prove your worth now and your honour will be restored.'\n\n'Really?! I\u2014'\n\nA quick cough from Grymric warned the young dragon not to push it.\n\n'Go swiftly,' Grynt said. 'But before you do, you will carry out one more task.'\n\nAbrial bowed and awaited the command.\n\n'Get this thing out of here and never bring it back.'\n\n'Where shall I take it?'\n\nGrynt looked down at Ren's battered body. 'We need to see into its mind,' he said. 'Take it to Elder Givnay.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Despite the blood spilling out of his groin, Varl Rednose was stout enough of body to continue giving orders to the Kaal. 'Find it,' he growled, meaning Gariffred the drake.\n\n'But the boy?' they jabbered. 'What took 'im, Varl?' Ren had disappeared from their sight with all the speed of a bubble bursting. The men were pale of face, scared. 'And the fire from his hand\u2026'\n\nHis hand, they repeated.\n\nDevilry, they murmured.\n\n'I care nowt for the boy,' Rednose thundered. 'Scour the woods. Find the beast. It ain't no flyer yet. Net it tight and bring it back.'\n\n'Fer what?' said Oleg Widefoot, so called because his feet, when together, did not point straight. 'I say it were wrong to kill Ned. Now we are four men dead. Who knows what magicks the boy can call with his father's spirit set loose? I say we go back and seek Targen's wisdom.'\n\n'And what of Oak and Waylen?' Varl snapped, crushing the whispers before they could grow. He pressed a hand to his wound and grimaced. 'Are we not here to rest their spirits? The boy has fled. And he will want to stay fled or eat on this.' He placed a foot on Ned's back and waved his sword under Oleg's chin. Oleg stretched away from its point as if he had smelled a vile brew on the wind. 'The boy has gone to his skaler masters. The only magicks he will bring will come on wings and fire. The young skaler will be our passage, our shield. Now find it, before the treemen do.'\n\nAnd he swept them, every one, toward the woods as if they were seeds blown loose off a flower.\n\nIt took no time to find the drake. Within moments of entering the trees, those leading the search heard a high-pitched squeal and hurried to its source. In a small clearing, untidy with fallen trees and bracken, two treemen were rejoicing a hunting strike. Only one was armed, and he was soon persuaded to drop his spear when he saw he was surrounded by a circle of arrows.\n\nOleg followed the man's wild gaze. High on the stem of a nearby tree, pinned by a spear through the centre of one wing, was the skaler. It flapped and cried out with a ragged yowl that almost clawed the branches bare.\n\n'Our kill,' the treemen argued.\n\n'Ours now,' said Oleg, showing them a knife. 'Bring it down \u2013 and don't lose it.' He jabbed the knife to show he meant business.\n\nThe first man spat tamely at him, then sloped toward the tree and climbed it with ease. 'Keep your aim,' Oleg advised the bowmen. The treeman's mossy skin was a perfect blend for the natural browns and greens around him. But he knew better than to risk a flock of arrows in his back. Keeping his face well clear of Gariffred's claws, he pulled out the spear and let the drake fall.\n\nThree Kaal swooped on the creature, netting it tightly as Varl had ordered.\n\nThe treeman found a branch and hid from sight, but he was no bother to Oleg now. Kaal and treemen had clashed before, and the outcome for the mossy ones had never been favourable.\n\nOleg took a bracelet of stones off his wrist and threw it so it landed at the other man's feet. He was scrabbling for it quicker than a snorter could grunt. 'For your trouble,' Oleg said. And to keep the peace. He gestured his men back out of the woods.\n\nThey emerged into the light far cheerier of spirit, but their laughter was about to be swiftly arrested. As they filed in straggling lines toward the whinneys, a shadow swept over the ground, accompanied by a scream so unforgiving that no man needed to look into the sky to know what fury was coming.\n\nThe drake squealed back, bucking and wriggling despite its injury. The men carrying it panicked and let the net drop. One of them backed up into the trees. He was among the first to die.\n\nThose who chanced to look at the terror would have seen a purple skaler with bright yellow eyes dropping at a steep, sharp angle, fire blazing out of its terrible jaws. It tore a wide line through the edge of the woodland, shooting its flame across the canopy of trees, instantly turning their tops to ash. The men caught under it never stood a chance. Those in the open scattered like peas rolling out of a pot, though any man sluggish of foot was caught by the heat of the creature's next pass as it sprayed the ground in front of the drake. Men and whinneys died where they stood, but Varl Rednose somehow survived both strikes. In the rush to escape he'd been knocked to the ground, his sword fortuitously thrown from his hand. Had he raised it he would have been dead or on fire, and would certainly not have lived to see what happened next.\n\nThe skaler was turning, ready to swoop for a third time, when a challenger came out of the sun at its back. It was swift, the new creature. Much smaller than the skaler. Ugly. Vicious. Eyes the colour of dull plums.\n\nDark.\n\nMaking a sound like the jarring of steel against stone, it spat a stream of bile at the skaler's head. The skaler saw it coming and lidded its eyes \u2013 but not fast enough. It roared in agony and banked away, flapping its head with so much force that its flight immediately began to falter. It quickly lost height. As it fell, the darkeye came in again, striking for the ears \u2013 or more precisely the navigational stigs that gave a dragon its manoeuvrability. Once again, its aim was perfect. The dragon flipped onto its back and dropped like a fading purple star.\n\nIt hit the ground with a thump that shook the erth. The darkeye screeched in triumph. It wheeled a full circle, and cast its gaze on the dragon in the net. But as it prepared to drop down and strike, it appeared to be distracted by something in the sky. It turned away rapidly, heading off in the direction from which it had come.\n\nVarl Rednose staggered to his feet.\n\nHe picked up his sword and began to chuckle, a small dry sound which turned into a bellow of raucous laughter. 'Men of the Kaal!' he cried. 'We have our VENGEANCE!' And he walked up to the stricken skaler and dared to poke it twice with his sword. It didn't move, but it was alive \u2013 the flicker in the good eye told him so.\n\nWiping Ned's blood off his sword, Varl said, 'So, Ned, it seems your spirit has sent us a prize.' And placing his boot on the skaler, he whispered, 'Now you are mine, beast. Now you are mine.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Abrial was not kept long at Elder Givnay's settle. He delivered the boy as instructed and was about to relate the story of his capture when Givnay gave a gentle whine and raised a claw to indicate he should stop. The Elder's gaze fell on Ren's arm. Those lines of scales on pale Hom flesh seemed to be all he needed to see. Is the drake alive? he said, pressing the words into Abrial's mind.\n\n'We\u2026believe so,' said Abrial, stuttering slightly. A conversation with the mute was a strange affair. Although it was unnecessary to speak aloud to Givnay, most dragons found it awkward to rely on thoughts alone.\n\nGivnay gave a silent nod. Leave us, he said, waving Abrial away. Abrial bowed, glad to be free. Now he could join the search for the drake.\n\nSurprisingly, it hadn't started yet. Despite the urgent orders from Grynt, Gallen was still on the peak of Skytouch, calling his fighting dragons together. The white, G'vard, was with him. As Abrial flew over, he heard them arguing.\n\nThe white was growling, 'I don't care how many of your wyng are missing. I'm leaving now, whether your sier pents fly with me or not.' He exchanged a snarl with one of the two Veng Gallen had assigned to him, a belligerent-looking creature with darker eyes than normal who looked keen to murder anything that might cross its path.\n\nG'vard took off, the Veng at either side, on a course that would take them toward the Hom settlements. Not entirely the wrong direction, but wide of the coordinates Abrial had i:maged.\n\nAbrial sighed at the white's foolhardiness and kept faith with his own instincts, flying for a point between his place of contact with the boy and the large area of woodland close to it. And it was there, at exactly that halfway position, that he encountered the darkeye that had brought down Graymere.\n\nIt came at him head on. He could see it was dark and smaller than himself, but he simply assumed it was another dragon. The Wearle dominated the sky. What else could be up here with him?\n\nThe rule of grace in situations like this was that the smaller dragon should give way and bank, allowing the larger one to continue unhindered. For once, that right belonged to Abrial. He clearly had the greater wingspan. In fact, he was bigger all round than the other. But it was only as they veered towards a possible collision that he began to question what he was seeing. His optical triggers switched to a narrower focus, recording the creature's ugliness, its high prominence of battle stigs, the strangely dull eye. Even then, he couldn't bring himself to believe it was anything other than a dragon approaching. So he opened his jaws and roared a warning: 'Get out of my way!'\n\nExactly what the darkeye wanted.\n\nIt sucked in and spat its venomous bile, aiming for Abrial's open mouth. Luckily, a favourable gust of wind carried the stream sideways and only droplets hit their target. Abrial retracted his tongue, flooding his mouth with saliva as the bile bit into the soft parts of his palate. He was more stung than hurt, but the pain had done him a precious service: now he was fully alert to the danger.\n\nHis battle stigs came up and his scales locked down. Instinct had made him lift and swerve when the bile had hit, a move that granted him enough air space to avoid a slash from the darkeye's claws. They were red at their tips, possibly even poisonous, but nowhere near as thick and sturdy as a dragon's.\n\nHe turned fast, but the darkeye turned faster. It flashed underneath him, hacking at his wing with the hard ball of spikes on the end of its tail. Two of the veiny network of bones that held the sheet of the wing together broke, leaving one dangling in the wind. Spurts of bright green blood shot forth. The wing contracted a little, but held. A painful, but not calamitous blow. And Abrial had been lucky. The swipe had caught the rearmost edge. Losing tissue there was a jolt to his vanity, but not a serious injury that would impair flight.\n\nHis adversary, however, might not think so.\n\nDuring his training sessions with per Gorst, Abrial had been warned never to assume an opponent was down until it crashed, unmoving, onto the ground. He put that philosophy to good use now. Rather than turn and re-engage the creature, he deflated his air sacs and allowed himself to drop, as if the strike had been a success. The darkeye gave a victorious aark! and followed him down \u2013 a little too leisurely. In an instant, Abrial rolled onto his back and filled the space between them with flame, using rapid blasts of air from his spiracles to flatten the fire into a broad wall of heat.\n\nThe creature screamed and dropped through the inferno, most of its lower surfaces on fire. It spat wildly, spraying the air with a red-hot mist of toxic venom. This time, Abrial dodged it with ease. He rolled again, stiffening his isoscele. With one swing, he brought his tail around and slashed through the creature's wing, cutting it off cleanly, close to the body. Black blood burst from the wound. The creature spiralled down, dragging a trail of smoke behind it. Abrial followed it all the way to impact. It hit the erth and sagged, dead, dissolving in a pool of its own foul spit.\n\nVictory. But the blue was shaken. The fight had left him exhausted and hollow. What, exactly, had he killed? More importantly, where had it come from? Clearly, this had to be reported to the Elders, but there was still the drake to think of. And where, he wondered, was De:allus Graymere?\n\nOn that thought the wind changed direction and the odour of burned wood pricked his nostrils. Turning his face into the breeze, Abrial scanned the terrain ahead. Right on the edge of his optical range he saw a plume of smoke and the damaged woodland. On the ground near to it, some dots of life were moving round a static purple mound.\n\nIt looked like a dragon surrounded by Hom.\n\nHe didn't want to believe it was Graymere, but every wingbeat made it more likely. As he came close, the sight of a yellow eye confirmed it. His first impulse as he landed was to kill every Hom in sight. All except one had scattered from the body. A male, plump of build, holding a sword, double-handed, at Graymere's throat.\n\n'One more step and I kill it by my own strong arm!' roared Varl. 'The Kaal will have their vengeance, skaler!'\n\nAll of this was mere noise to Abrial.\n\nHe started to growl and fill his fire sacs. If the Hom had not been standing by Graymere's head, he would have destroyed it in an instant. But he had seen a faint flicker of life in the dragon and dared not risk extinguishing it.\n\n'If I give word,' Varl barked again, 'my men will fill your young one with arrows. I say stand back, beast!'\n\nSuddenly, Graymere spoke. 'Abrial, is it you?' His voice was thin, as weak as water. To Varl Rednose it would have sounded like a terrified whimper.\n\n'What have they done to you?' Abrial growled. 'Why don't you rise against them?'\n\n'Listen carefully,' Graymere rasped quietly. 'There isn't much time. My limbs are frozen. I can barely speak. Do not come near.'\n\n'But I could crush it or\u2014'\n\nA gargle of pain left Graymere's mouth. In response to Abrial's muted aggression, Varl had roared another warning and leant on Graymere's throat with his sword.\n\nGraymere said in a quiet whine, 'Do as I say. Don't anger the Hom. I must speak while I can. They have the drake.'\n\nOn cue, Gariffred let out a pitiful skrike. Abrial swivelled his head and locked his optical triggers onto him. In his keenness to aid Graymere, he had forgotten one of the key rules of battle: keep all your senses alert. He should have scented the drake the moment he'd landed.\n\nVarl Rednose rocked his sword. Laughing cruelly, he said, 'Aye, we have it. If you want to hear it squawk again you'll be backin' off and givin' me the life o' this beast!'\n\nAbrial couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. Everything he'd felt that day above Vargos came thudding back.\n\nGrystina.\n\nHer drake.\n\nAlive.\n\nWith the Hom.\n\n'How did they bring you down?' he muttered, assessing Gariffred's situation. The young dragon was still netted, a short distance away, snared in an awkward splay of limbs. He'd been abandoned by his captors, but their weapons were firmly trained on him.\n\n'They didn't,' said Graymere. 'It was Gazz.'\n\n'Gazz?'\n\n'You must take an urgent message to Galarhade. The mine must close. The fhosforent is poisonous. Too great an exposure causes a dark mutation in the Veng, possibly other classes too. Once it has taken, it develops rapidly. I saw the changes in Gazz and should have worked it out sooner. It was he who attacked me, I'm sure.'\n\n'Then\u2026I killed him. I flamed a dark creature in the sky just now.'\n\n'Good, but there are going to be others. The Wearle must be put on full alert. Per Grogan was mutating at the point that he died. He took in a large amount of the ore. It occurs to me now that he might have suspected its ill effects and sacrificed himself to warn us of the danger. I have a remnant of his body lodged in my leg scales. It will match the stig the boy was carrying. It's proof of what happened to the first Wearle. Some of those dragons must have mutated and\u2014 Raaargh!'\n\nGraymere winced again. Varl Rednose was growing impatient.\n\nSo was Abrial. 'If you can move a little, I can burn the Hom with ease.'\n\n'No,' said Graymere. 'Save the drake.'\n\n'I can't. They have their sticks on it.'\n\n'How many?'\n\n'Four.'\n\n'Then pray to Godith their aim is poor. When I tell you to, raise your wings.'\n\nAbrial locked his gaze onto Varl. 'The Hom will kill you if I move. I can read his actions.'\n\n'I know. Let him.'\n\n'But?'\n\n'I'm dying, Abrial. Grymric and his potions can't help me now. You must do as I command and fly the drake to safety. Back away slowly, let the Hom think it's won. Keep your wings down but keep on talking. Did you take the boy to Galarhade?'\n\n'The Prime is ailing,' said Abrial, backing off. 'The boy is with Elder Givnay.'\n\nVarl Rednose roared to his men, 'See this! The beast retreats, beaten!'\n\nGraymere hissed uneasily. 'I don't trust Givnay.'\n\nAbrial blinked in shock. 'But\u2026Elder Givnay is closer to Godith than any of us. How can you question his loyalty to the Wearle?'\n\n'He's been taking too much interest in the mine. More than that, I cannot say. Make a plea to Grynt to keep the boy safe.'\n\n'You think he did come to warn us?'\n\n'I'm sure of it. The drake has been crying out for him. Make ready. Now is the moment. One last thing. Tell Grendel\u2026I'm sorry.'\n\n'Sorry? For what?'\n\nThe De:allus sighed. At the corner of his eye, a tear was forming. That immense yellow light was beginning to fade. 'She will know. Be brave. Be strong \u2013 for her. I wish I could have known you longer \u2013 Gabrial. Raise your wings.'\n\nA few moments of fury, and it was done. The instant Abrial's wings snapped out, the men of the Kaal panicked. Two dropped their weapons and fled. One changed his aim and bounced an arrow off the blue's shoulder. The fourth did loose an arrow at the drake, but his fingers trembled against the string and the dart buried itself in the ground.\n\nVarl Rednose, screaming of death and glory, plunged his sword into Graymere's throat. Graymere's tear had fallen by then, but he had stored enough fire to remind the Hom of what it meant to threaten a dragon. A streak of flame poured out of the gash, igniting Varl from his boots to his beard in a swirling pillar of orange and red.\n\nAbrial roared and ran to Gariffred's side. It was pointless to attempt to free the drake. He merely clamped the net in his jaws, then went back for the remnant in Graymere's leg. By then, the only Hom left on the scene was the burning fat man, Varl Rednose. Abrial moved closer. The Hom was still alive, screaming as he tried to beat down the flames. So Abrial made it easy for him. One stamp put the whole fire out. And with that he took off for Galarhade's settle, wiping the Hom off his foot as he flew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Ren Whitehair ached, in places he never knew a boy could ache. One side of his chest was so weak and tender that the lightest touch made him want to cry out. He dragged his left foot into the light and saw that the ankle was swollen, blue. There was blood on his robe and in his mouth as well where he'd bitten his tongue after hitting the wall of the cave. Blood was also plugging his nose, making breathing difficult and thick. Through his left eye, the world was a dull grey blur; his right was puffy and closed. And his ears, still singing after Graymere's roar, just seemed to be filled with mud. He coughed and felt it keenly in his side, but heard only a muffled expulsion of air. All the same, he had senses enough to know that he was in another cave with another dragon. Every hair on his skin felt the fear as the skaler slanted its head so close that Ren could have put his fingers in its nostrils. He cramped his limbs and tried to make himself small. But it hurt to move and what was the point? Big or small, the beast could rip him apart any time it chose.\n\n'I am Ren, of the Kaal,' he croaked, his tongue pressing painfully against his teeth. The sounds, of course, meant nothing to Givnay. And without the aid of the darkeye horn (and Grystina therefore lying dormant) Ren could form nothing but the simplest words of dragontongue. He tried again, in Kaal. 'I came in fair heart to warn o' the darkeyes. Never wanted to take the pupp \u2013 aagh!'\n\nHis head jerked back as though a hand had brutally gripped his chin and pushed him hard against the wall \u2013 such was the force of Givnay's mind as it entered Ren's consciousness. Ren had never known a feeling like it. It was as if he'd plunged his head into a river and his ears had failed to keep the water out.\n\nYou understand me, don't you, Hom?\n\nThe voice blew through him like a sudden gust of wind. Ren tried physically to speak, but could muster no more than a stuttering rasp.\n\nI advise you not to resist me, said Givnay. You may think you are blessed with the strength of a dragon, but I could claw your puny mind to shreds and remove your disgusting arm with one bite. He snapped his teeth to emphasise the point.\n\n'I swear, I done no wrong,' Ren said. He turned his face away from the fangs.\n\nYou're going to show me what you know, said Givnay, right from the moment you came to Vargos. If you don't, I'll suck it out of you. Believe me, Hom, that would not be pleasant.\n\nA vision of the scorch line filled Ren's mind.\n\nCross it, said Givnay. Show me how you fooled that idiot sweeper.\n\nHe widened the i:mage to bring in the mountains. Ren wept a little to see them. At a basic level, the mountains were what this fight was about. Slowly, he relaxed into his memories. The skies across the i:mage darkened to evening and he saw himself fit and well again, a young boy driven by the thrill of adventure, changing robes, smelling of dung, hiding flat to the ground from skalers.\n\nGivnay snorted in contempt. Continue.\n\nRen showed him everything he could remember, his entry into Vargos, his rescue of the drake, his strange encounter with Grystina. All of it had Givnay bristling. Then Ren showed him the scene on the hill, and how he'd tried to release the drake, only to see it attacked by a dragon with a broken fang. Givnay looked at that memory twice. Only then did he break the connection.\n\nAll the pain of Ren's injuries immediately rushed back, squeezing another groan from his lips. His head felt like a scrubbed-out pot. Snatching for breath, he said, 'The pupp were barely born. What's it ever done? Why would your kind want to kill it?'\n\nHe swung his head up. The veil across his left eye cleared momentarily and he saw Givnay sitting there, deep in thought, grating one set of claws against the other. It was hard to determine the dragon's size, for the soft grey twists of his long, lean body were blending partially into the rocks. Only the light from his pale green eyes gave any form to his head and neck. Ren panned his gaze further around the cave. Apart from the bones of some unlucky animals, the place was bare \u2013 except for an item balanced on an isolated pillar of rock not far from Ren's right shoulder.\n\nAt first, he thought it was just a large stone. But after straining a little he saw it was shaped like a cluster of berries. It was dark, the same shade as the horn he'd taken from his father's bed. Perhaps if he could touch it, Grystina would rise and the fire would come? Then he might speak more freely to this other.\n\nHe sat up and shuffled sideways.\n\nIn a glint the dragon turned, claws extended.\n\nRen pointed at the 'rock', which was now just above the height of his head. 'I would hold it,' he said, and reached out for it.\n\nGivnay immediately bared his fangs. Ren, fearing a strike was coming, somehow found the strength to duck. Crack! The dragon's claws struck a point on the wall where a moment ago Ren's head had rested. They hit with such force Ren heard the tips break. Givnay gave a strangely smothered squeal. He pulled back, holding an arm to his breast. Instinctively, he whipped his tail around and lashed at Ren with a swipe that would have removed the boy's head had the stone pillar not stood in the way. The pillar shuddered. The strange object rolled off. It landed with a thump on the floor of the cave. Givnay hissed, inviting Ren to go for it. Ren knew he would have no chance. One lunge and he'd be joining those animal bones. He lifted his hands in surrender, shaking his head and saying, 'You take it.' For that was why he believed he'd been attacked, because the thing (it looked like a heart close up) was some sort of sacred relic.\n\nWhether he was right or wrong, he was spared by the arrival of two other dragons \u2013 the green kind, almost identical in size. There was an urgent look in their amber eyes. They spoke rapidly to Givnay (who had swiftly extinguished his temper) and one of them gestured at Ren. Ren's ears were still clotted with blood, but he didn't need to hear a word of dragontongue to read the message the green dragons were conveying.\n\nThe colony was under attack.\n\nGivnay sucked in through every pore. Still nursing his shattered claws, he glanced at the sky and then at Ren. The interruption had clearly irritated him. All the same, he gave another stifled grunt and before Ren knew it he was in the grip of claws again. The green dragon nearest to him picked him up and flew him at great speed out of the cave. As the cold air hit his battered body, Ren looked at the ice sheets below and half hoped the beast might drop him. He was so giddy with pain that death would be a welcome relief.\n\nBut the journey was short and the dragon put him down, gently for once, back at the first cave they'd brought him to. Givnay and the other green followed them in. There were a host of others there now, including the most beautiful skaler Ren had ever seen. She (he guessed it was a female) had intensely blue eyes and golden patterns on her purple face. She was shielding a young one under her wing. Ren was sure it was the infant he'd last seen wrapped in Grystina's tail. He tried to signal to it, but was dragged to one side and put under guard.\n\nA row of dragons was posted at the front of the cave. What they were watching for, Ren didn't know, but before long he heard a rumble of voices and the dragons parted to let another one in. Trapped behind his guard, Ren failed to see it. But the sudden clustering of bodies suggested something important was happening. The large dragon with the silver breast that had done so much to cause Ren's pain gave a sharp roar and the crowd fell back. Then, at last, Ren had a clear view. At the front of the cave was the blue dragon that had carried him into the mountains. Between his feet was Gariffred, the drake, shaking off the strands of a broken net.\n\nRen filled up with joy. 'Pupp!' he cried. 'Pupp! Pupp!'\n\nEvery jewelled eye fell on him. And that allowed the drake a moment of freedom.\n\nSkriking weakly, he hobbled toward Ren, dragging his injured wing along the floor.\n\nUsing every scrap of strength he had left, Ren forced his way past his guard. And there, in Galarhade's settle, in sight of the senior dragons of the Wearle, he gathered the wearling into his arms and stroked its spiky head, saying, 'Galan aug scieth. Galan aug scieth.'\n\nI am you and you are me.\n\n'Tada,' the drake said wearily.\n\nAnd rested his head on Ren's blood-stained shoulder."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "They were parted quickly, Ren and the drake. Then the arguments began.\n\n'This is an outrage!' Gossana roared. Despite the presence of so many males, the matrial dragon still dominated her surroundings. One blast of her voice had created a tidy space around her. 'Not only do we have this Hom in our midst but you stand by and let it hold the drake?'\n\nShe rounded on Grynt, whose response was swiftly interrupted by Abrial.\n\n'The Hom helped us save it. They have a bond.'\n\n'Bond?' Gossana snarled at him. 'You really are more stupid than I ever thought possible. And still a traitor, despite your lucky\u2026find.'\n\n'No. I believe him.' Grendel came forward. 'I'm convinced the boy rescued the drake from Vargos. We all heard the words he spoke.'\n\n'Mimicry,' the matrial scoffed. 'Can't you see they're cunning, these creatures?' She turned her head and spat at Ren.\n\nGariffred immediately skriked his disapproval, which earned him a harsh rebuke from the queen.\n\n'Have a pity. He's injured,' Grendel growled, gathering Gariffred close to her. 'Isn't it clear he feels for the boy?'\n\nGossana came snout to snout with her. 'You need to dip that pretty purple head into the lake. Hopefully, the ice will clear your mind of any more of these false romantic fantasies.'\n\nBut Grendel persisted with her argument, saying, 'When was the last time you taught a wearling a phrase as demanding as galan aug scieth? The boy would only hear that from an adult dragon, which gives weight to the theory that\u2014'\n\n'ENOUGH!' barked Grynt, finally taking control. He forced Grendel and Gossana apart. 'There are more important issues at stake than your petty bickering. The drake is returned and we rejoice in that. In time I will hear all sides of the story and will decide what is to be done, especially about the boy. How bad is the drake's injury?'\n\n'A small wing tear,' said Abrial. 'No bones were broken.' He examined his own wing. Already, the severed edge was starting to seal itself for repair.\n\n'Good,' said Grynt. 'Then it will heal quickly and won't be too painful if we have to move them.'\n\n'Move them?' Grendel looked around for an explanation. 'What's happening? Why are we gathered here? And where is Prime Galarhade?'\n\nGrynt replied, 'The Prime is unwell. He is under close supervision in the healer's cave. Myself and Elder Givnay are ruling in his absence.' He glanced briefly at the mute, who had gone back to his poised observational state. Grynt went on, 'You have been brought here for your protection. We have received reports of an unknown enemy, flying near to the\u2014'\n\n'Not unknown,' said Abrial, panting a little, still cooling down after his exertions. 'The enemy are Veng, mutated.'\n\nVeng? Mutated? The words flew around the cave like a chill wind.\n\nGrynt silenced the murmurs with a sharp growl. 'What evidence do you have of this?'\n\n'The D\u2014' Abrial paused and looked hesitantly at Grendel.\n\n'What?' she said. She drew the wearlings to her.\n\nThe blue lidded his eyes a little. 'De:allus Graymere was slain by them.'\n\n'What?' gasped Grendel, echoing the shocked response of others. (Gossana merely sniffed and made circles of smoke.) 'Graymere? No. Say it's not so?'\n\n'It is so,' Abrial said gently. And now he understood (or thought he understood) why Graymere had wanted Grendel's forgiveness. She was in her laying cycle. They must have\u2026courted. The thought that Grendel might have been in love with another dragon tugged at Abrial's second heart. But how much worse must it have been for Graymere, knowing he would never see her again?\n\nEven Elder Grynt looked disturbed by the news. 'I asked you for evidence,' he said very quietly. 'Did Graymere find something?'\n\nAbrial nodded. 'Veng Gazz was changed by fhosforent.'\n\n'Changed? To what?' Gossana shortened her snout.\n\n'Into a kind of\u2026goyle,' said Abrial, finding a word from the old tongue. 'They are smaller than us, dark of colour. They have no fire, but their spit can burn through a layer of scales.'\n\n'I believe it,' Grendel muttered, her eyes still wide with shock. 'Gazz was stealing fhosforent from the mine. Graymere knew but didn't\u2014 He was concerned about the effects the fhosforent was having. He\u2014 Oh, Graymere.' She sank into a huddle. Gayl, the female wearling, whimpered and licked her guardian's snout.\n\n'It was Gazz who attacked him,' Abrial said.\n\n'You saw this?' Grynt asked solemnly.\n\n'De:allus Graymere told me so. I only found him after I'd taken Gazz down.'\n\n'You killed a Veng?' Gossana hadn't lost the sneer in her voice. She flipped her tail in further disbelief and caught Gariffred a glancing blow across his snout. The wearling squealed in complaint and nipped her. Gossana, her red eyes blazing, turned on him with every fang showing.\n\n'Stop that!' screamed Grendel, on the point of blowing fire. 'Anyone would think you wanted him dead!'\n\n'It's a nuisance. Keep it under control!'\n\n'BE QUIET!' Grynt thundered again. 'I would remind you both of the seriousness of this situation. We are threatened by a dangerous, unfamiliar opponent that has killed a highly-respected dragon. Your trivial squabbling is an insult to his memory. Any more of it and I'll throw you both onto the mountainside without so much as a smoke ring to protect you. Now, you were saying?'\n\nAbrial jumped to attention.\n\n'Speak, blue! You said you killed Gazz?'\n\nAbrial nodded. 'He engaged me in combat, without provocation. I had no choice. Elder, I must show you something.' He brought forth the piece of darkeye that Ren had been carrying.\n\n'A burned stig?' Gossana's words were still laced with scorn. 'Is that all you left of Gazz after your heroic conquest?'\n\n'This didn't come from Gazz, and it's not burned,' said Abrial. 'It was in the boy's hand when he came to us. De:allus Graymere believed it might have come from a previous goyle \u2013 one mutated in the first Wearle.' He gave it to Grynt. 'Feel it, Elder.'\n\nGrynt closed his claws around it for a moment, then passed it on to Elder Givnay.\n\n'Now compare it to this,' said Abrial, handing Grynt the wing bone from Grogan.\n\n'This is newer,' said Grynt, 'but its auma is similar.'\n\n'It came from per\u2026Rogan,' Abrial said.\n\nBy now this dialogue was causing a considerable stir among the roamers. In addition to Abrial's use of 'goyle', a more chilling word was again being whispered: Tywyll. A reference to the fabled aumaless dragon, supposedly a fallen wearling of Godith. A black dragon that carried no fire and whose eyes reflected no light.\n\nThe atmosphere in the cave had suddenly become highly charged with fear.\n\n'Look at the boy,' Grendel said suddenly.\n\nRen was stretching his scaled arm, appealing to Givnay to give him the stig. Givnay was rolling it in his claws and showing no sign of granting the request.\n\n'Elder, let him hold it,' Grendel said.\n\n'What? And kill us all?' Gossana said sharply, saliva dripping like slime off her jaw. She flapped a wingtip at Grynt. 'How do we know that the boy is not in league with these \"mutants\"? How do we know he won't call them to the cave?'\n\n'If the boy was our enemy,' Abrial argued, 'why would he befriend the drake? The drake respects him. It called him \"father\". You heard him as well as any of us.'\n\nGossana blew a line of smoke his way. 'A young dragon will imprint on anything that shows it kindness, you idiot. A falling leaf could lead this wearling astray. Befriending him would make him easier to capture. Have you considered that?' She looked at Grynt again. 'How can we be sure that the stig is not a keepsake; a trophy?'\n\nThe Elder agreed. 'You,' he said, to one of the roamers. 'Take the boy to a high ledge on Skytouch. Make sure it's one he can't escape from.'\n\nAbrial almost reared in shock. 'But if the goyles come, they'll kill him.'\n\n'Or not,' said Grynt. 'If he's in their command. Until we're certain, he'll be treated as a prisoner.'\n\n'No. You can't\u2014'\n\n'I AM YOUR ELDER!' Grynt roared, a flare of purple around his jaws. 'It is not for you to challenge my ruling. Your rescue of the drake has won you great favour. It will be reported to the Prime when he is well enough to listen. But if he should die, your future is with me. You would do well to remember that.'\n\nAbrial bowed and fell back. He glanced up at Grendel. She looked as frustrated by this ruling as he did.\n\n'Take him,' said Grynt.\n\nThe roamer came forward. And while Grendel calmed Gariffred as best she could, with one scoop Ren was lifted and gone.\n\nA not-too-distant cry from outside turned every dragon's gaze to the sky.\n\n'What's happening?' Grynt asked.\n\n'Flames over Vargos,' came the reply.\n\nThe battle was coming closer.\n\n'I demand to be released from this cave,' said Gossana, her strutting arrogance oozing forth again. 'I cannot be around frightened wearlings \u2013 their scent will draw the mutants to us.'\n\n'How can you say such a thing?' said Grendel.\n\n'This is war,' Gossana snarled. 'Something an innocent like you would know nothing about. If the creatures come, we're trapped in here. I am a queen-elect. I must be protected above all others. What good is a Wearle without eggs?'\n\n'What good is it without Grystina's wearlings?'\n\n'Faah!' Gossana brushed her aside. 'Grynt, if you've got any sense you'll abandon the drake or use it as bait to lure one of the creatures into a trap.'\n\n'Bait?!' roared Grendel.\n\n'It's a liability,' Gossana hissed back.\n\nSo much bitterness. Even though he wasn't involved in the spat, Abrial's claws were scratching grooves in the rock beneath his feet. He agreed with Grendel: how could a queen dragon say such things? How could she sacrifice a drake to the goyles?! He was amazed that Grynt had let the argument progress, or that he should choose such a stressful moment to turn away and commingle with Elder Givnay. And what was Givnay doing to soothe the tension? The spiritual leader of the Wearle had been quieter than usual during these proceedings. For some strange reason, he seemed to be taking a keen interest in the dribbles of saliva on Gossana's jaw, pointing them out to Grynt.\n\nGrynt said quietly, 'You're certain?'\n\nGivnay gave a solemn nod.\n\n'Clear a path,' Grynt barked at the roamer guard. 'Elder Givnay is leaving.'\n\n'About time,' said Gossana, preparing to follow Givnay out.\n\n'Not you,' said Grynt, blocking her flight. 'You're staying with me.' He nodded at the wet streak on her jaw. 'You're ailing, Matrial.'\n\nGossana fuddled her head. 'It's nothing. A broken fang. What of it? Now let me out of this cave. I'll take my chances alone with these goyles.'\n\n'You may wish to by the time we're done,' said Grynt.\n\n'What?'\n\n'You were seen attacking the drake, when the boy tried to free him outside of Vargos. A dark green dragon with a broken fang in the upper left jaw.'\n\nEvery stig on Gossana's head shook with indignation. Both eyes glowed fully red. 'Are you insane? I searched faithfully for the drake as we all did that day. What dragon dares slight my name?'\n\n'No dragon,' Grynt said. 'It was in the boy's mind. Elder Givnay saw it clearly while interrogating him.'\n\n'The BOY?! You believe a HOM over me?'\n\n'I do,' said Grynt. Without warning, he brought his tail around and struck Gossana on a joint of her neck where the nerves of the brain were sited.\n\nThe queen staggered and fell with a thump.\n\n'Hhh! Is she dead?' gulped Grendel.\n\n'No,' said Grynt. 'But she'll wish she was when she wakes.' He turned to the roamers. 'Leave, all of you. Post a chain of guards on Skytouch, but don't draw attention to the cave. If the goyles come, fight them in the open.'\n\nHe flicked his head and the roamers departed on a clatter of wings.\n\nTurning finally to Abrial, Grynt said, 'Not many moons ago, you wished to be a guardian. Will you be one now?'\n\n'I\u2014?' Abrial gaped wide-eyed at Grendel. 'Yes,' he said, raising his jaw. 'In honour of De:allus Graymere, I pledge myself to Grendel and these young.'\n\nHe saw Grendel gulp. She gave a proud nod to say she would accept him.\n\n'Hide them apart, low down,' said Grynt. 'Smear them with any dung that isn't dragon.' Noting Abrial's look of confusion he added, 'It's how the boy got past you at the scorch line. If it worked for him, it might also fool a goyle. When this is done, retrieve the boy and bring him here to me, unharmed.'\n\nAbrial nodded, eager to move. He ushered Grendel and the wearlings to him.\n\n'One last thing.' Grynt waited till he had the blue's gaze once more. 'I said earlier today that you had done well. I say it again now. You have been of great service to the Wearle and your worth is proven beyond all measure. In the eyes of Godith and by the power of the Elders, I call you Gabrial. Your honour is restored.'\n\n'Th-thank you,' said Gabrial, feeling Grendel's isoscele wrapping gently round his.\n\n'Thank me by caring for them,' said Grynt. 'Now go.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "When he was a lad of seven winters, Ren had sat astride a whinney with his father and they had ridden to the highest point of the grasslands, where Ned had reined the whinney to a halt, turned them around and pointed to the tallest mountain in the land, the one the Kaal called Longfinger. Thin clouds were hiding Longfinger's peak, but they were running fast across the wide blue sky and before long the tip of the mountain was revealed. Ren, in his joy, had asked his father, 'Have yer climbed it, Pa?' Laughing, Ned had tousled his son's white hair and clamped the boy in his strong, lean arms. 'No man nor beast will tame Longfinger,' he'd said.\n\nBut that was before the skalers had come.\n\nThe roamer had put Ren down on a ledge, twice as long again as it was deep. No green thing grew there; no flake of snow clung. His only companions were the biting cold and the cushion of a sheer wall of rock at his back. He lay, depleted, in a broken heap, listening to the frequent calls of the dragons, his nose pricking as their pungent bursts of fire were borne across the sky on the shuffling wind. They were fighting, fighting the evil darkeyes, though how the sides were numbered Ren could not tell. Now and then a dragon swept overhead, whupping the air with its sturdy wings. But the battles were mostly distant, nearer to the sleeping mountain than this.\n\nA silhouette against the sun was all Ren saw when he finally encouraged his eyes to blink open. After a time, he supported his chest and dragged himself into a sitting position. The ledge looked over the great ice lake, down the arm of the slow-moving glacier, onward to the boundless, misty sea. Barely days ago, Ren would have thought this a prayer answered: Longfinger tamed and the world spread out in its glory below. But oh, what a price he had paid to be here. Now he was nothing, a hopeless wreck at the mercy of skalers, and no brave father to lean upon.\n\nShielding his face, he looked across the sky. The sun was still high enough to warm the mountains, but the wind was concealing a spiteful edge. A torn robe was poor defence against it. No matter how Ren tried to wrap the cloth around him, one patch of skin always seemed to burn cold. Worse, each time he sucked for air it felt as if his chest had been cut in half. Out of nothing, he remembered a story from that ride with his father when he was seven. A tale about an invisible giant who lived in a crack on the peak of Longfinger. The giant did not like the Kaal on his mountain and would squeeze a man's chest the higher he climbed until the man could breathe no more and he fell.\n\nRen thought he could feel the squeeze right now, but the giant that came to land on his ledge was anything but invisible. He turned his face away as a rush of cold air announced the arrival of a dragon. Not the green one that had dropped him here, but the grey patterned scales of Elder Givnay.\n\nGivnay folded his wings down slowly. He peered over the valley as if to check that no other dragon could see him. There was one in the sky some wingbeats away, but it was following a screaming fireball to ground and showing no interest in Ren or his visitor.\n\nWake, said the mute, invading Ren's mind for the second time that day.\n\nRen jerked and gripped the rock at his back. 'What do you want, skaler?' He had little love left for the beasts by now. All the glory he'd associated with the word 'dragon' was smeared in his blood on a cave wall somewhere.\n\nGivnay looked around him again. Show me what you can do with this.\n\nSomething clattered across the ledge. It was the horn Ren had taken from his father's shelter. He studied it hard, wanting to have it, but the memory of the stand-off in Givnay's cave, when that strange stone heart had fallen between them, stayed his hand. Unless he'd been much mistaken, Givnay had wanted to kill him then. He shook his head.\n\nPick it up, growled the dragon.\n\n'No,' said Ren.\n\nGivnay's eye ridges narrowed. He switched his gaze to a portion of the ledge on the far side of Ren. Moments later, a crack appeared. It ran along the join between the ledge and the rock face and splintered into several thin black roots. The ledge creaked like an old man's knee. Ren scrabbled sideways in terror. 'You're too heavy! Stone's breakin'! Fly!' he shouted.\n\nThe ledge groaned. A small piece crumbled away.\n\nWhat powers did the Astrian give you? snarled Givnay.\n\nRen shook his head in confusion. He looked frantically left and right to see where the next crack might appear.\n\nThe queen, Grystina. She had the gift of transference. I waited years to take my revenge on her line. And now I find she lives on \u2013 in you: galan aug scieth. Reveal her to me! Pick up the stig!\n\nThe rock sang again. Another crack weakened the ledge some more, rolling the stig near to Ren's right hand. 'Let me be. I done no harm to you.'\n\nYou have, and you know too much, said Givnay, a dark light entering his pale green eyes. Grystina's father crushed my neck. So I crushed hers while she lay in the mountain. And I would have rid the Wearle of her drake as well, had it not been for your interference.\n\n'Drake?' said Ren.\n\nGivnay gave a snort of contempt. This planet has some interesting treasures. The much-maligned mineral, fhosforent, for one. If the Veng had used it wisely they would have discovered that their dark mutation can be controlled. Allow me to demonstrate.\n\nAnd there on the ledge, in the plain light of day, one of Givnay's eyes turned red and his grey scales darkened to a deep shade of green. He growled in his curiously stunted way and opened his mouth. In the upper left quarter was a broken fang.\n\n'You!' gasped Ren. 'It were you that went for Pupp!'\n\nCall Grystina. Now! snapped Givnay. I want to see her die in your eyes. Call her! Or I will rip out your\u2014\n\nWhatever Givnay was about to say was cut short by a shadow spreading over the rocks.\n\n'Darkeye!' Ren cried, a fraction too late.\n\nFrom nowhere, one had risen at Givnay's back. In a blink it had clamped itself onto his shoulders and plunged its fangs into the curve of his neck.\n\nGivnay squealed and threw his head sideways, pounding it so hard against the mountain he almost shook Ren off the ledge. He twisted and managed to spread one wing, but that was the full extent of his resistance. The creature had targeted the vulnerable point where nerves and directional tendons clustered, rendering the Elder dazed and unstable. He rocked dangerously towards the drop. The darkeye raised its head, spitting out scales and blood-green flesh. It had suffered some serious injuries itself. One leg was nothing but an oozing stump and a burn mark had seared the length of its belly. Even so, there was fight left in it. It opened its jaws to take a second bite and must have believed that victory was assured.\n\nBut it had not reckoned on Ren.\n\nThe boy whistled.\n\nThe darkeye paused. It swivelled its gruesome head and saw a damaged Hom, struggling to stand, holding a stig in its shaking fist.\n\nRen opened his mouth as wide as he could, hoping the creature would mimic him.\n\nIt did.\n\n'Bite on this,' Ren whispered. And he tightened his fingers around the stig and felt Grystina's auma rising. Fire poured into the darkeye's throat. A burst so strong it passed along its gut before exploding out of the tail in a spray of sizzling, acidic pulp. The dull eyes rolled. The claws loosened their grip. The creature slumped sideways, dragging Givnay with it. Both rolled over the edge.\n\nBut as Givnay fell, he scored a final triumph. One point of his isoscele hooked onto the ledge, cracking it down a heartline, front to back. The ground beneath Ren's feet gave way. Instantly, he dropped through the gap, skinning his arm against the newly-sheared rock. The pain opened his hand and the stig worked free. Without it he was helpless \u2013 no dragon to call upon.\n\nHis one hope of escape had gone.\n\nThe drop was prolonged, and Longfinger was kind. Its ragged grey slopes made no attempt to break Ren's fall. And so he had time to make his peace with the Fathers. He thought of Mell and Ned and Wind (and Pine Onetooth, strangely, flashed through his mind). But most of all he thought about Pupp. And lastly, he spoke to Grystina. 'Forgive me,' he whispered as the air whistled by.\n\nHe closed his eyes, and then it came \u2013 the thump that should have brought eternal darkness but instead brought a sweeping whoosh of air. The ice flew past in a blur of white, followed by the upward slant of the mountains. Ren blinked as cold air rippled his face. He was alive and the world was slowing down. Alive and flying again \u2013 caught by the claws of a dragon.\n\nOnly when Gabrial set him down did Ren Whitehair know the dragon that had saved him. By then, Gariffred was on Ren's chest, licking his wounds in a noisy confusion of joy and distress. Before long, Gayl had joined in too, under the watchful eye of Grendel.\n\nRen groaned and laid himself out. He looked up at Gabrial and managed a smile.\n\nThe blue adjusted his optical triggers and seemed to understand that this movement of the mouth was a gesture of friendship. He bowed his head. 'My name is Gabrial,' he said. 'For all you have done, I pledge you my life.'\n\nThe words were too fast for Ren to understand, but he reached out a hand and let it rest on the claws that had saved him. 'Galan aug scieth,' he whispered.\n\nGabrial looked at Grendel, who said, 'In memory of the Astrian queen, Grystina, I call you into the Wearle.' And she lowered her head and ran smoke across Ren, saying in return, 'Galan aug scieth.'\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nIn total, not counting Givnay and Graymere, sixteen dragons were lost in the fighting over Mount Vargos. Only five were goyles, all of them Veng. Gallen, the Veng commander, returned with a break in his isoscele and several melts at the joint of one wing.\n\nG'vard, the white dragon, did not survive. Shortly after setting off to search for Gariffred, the Veng that had snarled at G'vard on Skytouch mutated in mid-flight. They were approaching the Hom settlement when it happened. A savage battle had ensued. G'vard had fought bravely, wounding the goyle but succumbing to its bile in much the same manner that Graymere had. The white had fallen on one of the Kaal shelters, killing two women and one old man. As he dropped, he sprayed his fire in such a frenzy that nearby roofs of straw caught fire and passed their sparks on the wind to others. Before long, the whole Kaal settlement was burning. The second, unaffected Veng, after some confusion, had turned on the goyle and managed to kill it. It had then swooped on the settlement to flame G'vard and put him out of his misery.\n\nIt was a sorry tale made worse by the fact that G'vard had ignored the i:maged coordinates in favour of following his personal conviction that the Hom were hiding the drake. There was no suggestion that fhosforent poisoning was to blame for his behaviour. His loss of shading prior to these events had been noticed by dragons other than Grendel, but despite their argument in Grymric's cave, Grendel identified grief as the cause of the white's distress. The healer supported this, and G'vard was duly honoured in the glory of Godith.\n\nGivnay was left to rot where he lay. At the inquiry held by Grynt, the first roamer to attend the body explained that he could not identify it to begin with. Its colouring resembled the matrial, Gossana, but its features were somehow different, he said. Givnay was still clinging to life at that point, but as his fire tear ebbed away the roamer was shocked to see the green scales turning to grey. He was even more disturbed to realise the stricken dragon was Elder Givnay.\n\nWhen Gabrial was called to give his evidence, he was asked, first of all, why he had deserted Grendel and the wearlings. The blue confessed he had seen what appeared to be a wounded goyle drifting toward the peak of Skytouch. Fearing it would attack Ren, he had flown to intercept. On his approach he had witnessed the final moments of the drama and seen a dark green dragon fall from the ledge. He could not say if it was Givnay or not \u2013 but the next witness could.\n\nIn what would become an extraordinary twist to the chronicles of dragon lore, a Hom was called before Elder Grynt. Using Gariffred, the drake, to help him channel Grystina's auma, Ren was able to make himself understood. He positively identified Givnay and gave a patchy account of the Elder's motives. All of it confirmed the appalling truth. The mute, with his extraordinary powers of physical i:maging, had started the rock fall that had killed Grystina.\n\nA disturbing revelation, and a terrible blow to the Wearle. Grynt acted quickly to remedy it. Gossana, who had stood accused of Givnay's crimes, was freed and allowed to redeem her honour in any way she saw fit. She seared Givnay's scales to the soft flesh beneath, then turned bitterly to Grynt and said, 'Let anything that finds him chew on him now.' Grynt, in his unopposed role of leader of the Wearle, had agreed.\n\nThat same day, Prime Galarhade died of natural causes. He was two hundred and thirty-nine Ki:meran turns old. He had been a companion to four great queens and lived through two ancestral wars. He had witnessed the birth of stars. He saw no part of the fighting with the goyles and shed his fire tear in peace, asleep in Grymric's healing cave.\n\nAt his burning, Grynt addressed the Wearle, saying:\n\n'We gather today to commit the auma of this great Elder to shelter under the wings of Godith. Despite the tragedies this Wearle has suffered, he would be proud of what we have achieved. He led us here so we might determine what became of the first Wearle. This battle has given us an answer. We know the first colony mined the fhosforent, doubtless unaware of its harmful effects. Overuse of the ore or prolonged exposure to a concentrated seam causes a dangerous, regressive mutation. It is unclear what triggers the decisive transformation, but when it happens, the change is rapid. For this reason, and because the Veng were primarily affected, commander Gallen has surrendered himself into quarantine until his blood can be cleansed or otherwise investigated. All surviving Veng will also be tested. The mine is now closed, the caches of fhosforent destroyed. The time of these goyles is over.\n\n'Some of you, I know, have been deeply unnerved by what you have seen. I have heard foul whispers that the Tywyll has risen. Such talk will not be tolerated. We go forward with facts, not superstitions. Based on what we have learned, I have reached the conclusion that the first Wearle was drawn into a conflict like ours \u2013 and the result was mutual destruction. We have been more fortunate. We have lost many dragons, among them a brave De:allus and the old per, Grogan, whose name we restore and whose memory we honour for his valiant attempt to warn us of these dangers. But our quest to seek Godith in all creation survives. We will continue to explore this planet and its mysteries. The Wearle is everything; the Wearle goes on.'\n\nThere were roars of approval all round, the loudest from a family on a nearby hill. Ren was among them, flanked by Gariffred and Gayl. It still hurt Ren to move any limb, but he rested a hand on each of the wearlings and gladly accepted their nuzzles and licks. He was happy for them, truly happy, but he ached to go home and find his mother. The report of fires in the settlement had troubled him. But for now, a return would not be possible. Grynt had given the order that Ren should be kept within the Wearle until he healed. A show of kindness, perhaps, but Ren felt there was some shading in the Elder's words and was already counting the days when he might have to fool the sweepers again and cross the line in the opposite direction.\n\nNurtured by Grymric's powerful herbs, he was growing stronger with every day. Strangely, now, his scales came and went, but he could feel Grystina's auma always and no longer needed the aid of a stig or Gariffred by his side to call upon her power. Soon he would be ready to run if he needed to \u2013 and Gabrial seemed to be aware of it.\n\nAs they listened to the last prayers for Galarhade, the blue said, 'Do you hate us, Ren, for the death we have brought on your kind?'\n\nNot hate, thought Ren. Hate was too strong a word. He flicked away a blade of grass. 'I miss my pa.'\n\n'Pa?' said Gabrial. This was a Hom word new to him.\n\n'Tada \u2013 father,' Ren translated.\n\nGabrial nodded. His claws pressed a little tighter to the ground, churning gentle furrows in the erth. 'I lost my father in battle.'\n\nRen looked up into the great blue eyes.\n\n'He was here with the first Wearle,' Gabrial said.\n\nFar below them, Galarhade's body caught fire. The sudden whumph made Gayl cry out in fright. Gariffred sat up as if he'd seen a star fall out of the sky.\n\n'Come,' said Grendel, ushering him to her. She gathered both wearlings under her wings.\n\nRen picked a small flower, leaving enough of the stalk to twirl in his fingers. 'Dint know about yer pa. I'm sorry.'\n\nThe blue let a quiet moment pass. 'He was a mapper,' he said.\n\n'Muh\u2026?' Ren said.\n\nGabrial pronounced it again, more slowly. 'Map-per.' Ren's grasp of dragontongue was fast improving, though some expressions still bounced around his ears like muddled growls.\n\n'Map-per,' the boy repeated.\n\n'Hrrr,' said the dragon, meaning 'good'.\n\nRen smiled and looked at the flower in his hands. It had six pink petals and a black centre. It made him think of the pink-coloured crystals that had turned some dragons into goyles. What if Gabrial's father\u2026?\n\nHe shuddered, not wanting to go where that thought was taking him.\n\n'Are you cold?' asked Gabrial.\n\nRen shook his head. 'No.'\n\nGabrial lifted a foot, flexing his claws to be rid of the dirt. 'We must go, both of us.'\n\n'Where?'\n\n'To Galarhade.'\n\nA small sigh betrayed Ren's thoughts. It was a long walk down the hill from here.\n\n'You would honour the Wearle if you did,' said Gabrial.\n\nHonour. Of course. Ren stood up and threw away the flower. He sighed again as he measured the distance.\n\nGabrial tilted his head in query.\n\n'Long way,' said Ren. He made walking movements with his fingers.\n\nThe dragon's eye ridges narrowed. He tried to move his claws in the same way as Ren's fingers; the Hom had some strange abilities, he thought. He bent his knees, dropping his wings to a comfortable height.\n\n'REALLY?' gasped Ren. They were going to fly?!\n\n'Swiftly, before Grendel burns my ears,' said the blue.\n\nRen did not need a second invitation. He scrambled up the stairway made by the wing bones and sat astride Gabrial's giant neck. The warmth from the dragon's body was amazing, even if the scales were uncomfortable to sit on. 'Does this hurt?' Ren asked, taking hold of two stigs for balance.\n\nGabrial snorted and put out his wings.\n\n'Waah!' cried Ren, gasping and laughing as the dragon rose up.\n\n'Ready?' said Gabrial.\n\nRen tightened his grip. In his best broken dragontongue, he gabbled, 'One day, we will fly to my home and make peace between skalers and the Kaal.'\n\nGabrial's eye ridges creaked again. Ren's words were like raindrops tossed in a storm. But the beat of the boy's heart told its own story. Gabrial matched it with a positive hrrr!\n\nAnd they took off into the crisp blue sky.\n\nA boy and a dragon, at peace.\n\nBut peace was not on everyone's mind. On the far side of the scorch line, Mell, wife of the tragic Ned Whitehair, was sitting alone by the river, idly making a chain of flowers. Behind her, dying columns of smoke still marked the invasion of the skalers and their war.\n\nSo lost in her thoughts was Mell that she did not hear a whinney approaching, until it was blowing its warm breath over her.\n\nShe looked up, cupping her eyes against the sun. 'Do I know you?' she said, even though the rider was a stranger to her.\n\nHe smiled, but did not reply at first. His hair was thin and its colour blacker than the nose of a mutt. It fell in curling strands to his shoulders. He was wearing a robe the kind of which Mell had never seen before. Sleek, it was, like the fur of a hopper, but shining here and there like a skaler wing.\n\nOdder still was his ride.\n\n'What kind of whinney would that be?' she asked.\n\nIt was white, the whinney, with a flowing mane and a spiralling horn protruding from its forehead. There was a strange and distant light in its eye, a light the colour of an evening sky that would herald sunshine on the dawn.\n\n'I found it so,' said the man. 'I seek shelter, woman. Will you give it?'\n\n'I would, if I had it to give,' said Mell. 'The skalers have burned what was mine, what was Kaal.'\n\nThe man reined round and stared at the mountains. 'I have no love for skalers,' he said.\n\nMell bowed and felt a tingle of joy. She liked this stranger's sureness of heart. 'You have the eyes of someone I knew,' she said. 'A brave man, a farmer, now resting with the Fathers. He went by the name of Waylen Treader. Are you kin to him?'\n\n'I have no kin,' said the man. And now, Mell noticed, his eyes for a moment glowed the colour of those that defined his whinney.\n\n'Nor I,' she said, throwing her flower chain into the river. She fought back a tear as it floated away. 'Our leader, Targen the Old, is dead, along with half our men. My man and my boy are both gone.' She gestured at the mountains so the stranger knew her meaning.\n\n'Then join me,' he said.\n\n'I might,' said Mell, stroking her hair where it fell across her shoulder. 'First, I will need a name to call you.'\n\nThe stranger extended his hand to her. 'I have only one name,' he said. 'Tywyll.'"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Mating Flight, A Non-Romance of",
        "author": "Bard Bloom",
        "genres": [
            "comedy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "humor",
            "first person",
            "Mating Flight",
            "1st person",
            "Humor"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Summary: It's finally time for Jyothky and eight other misfit adolescent dragons to go off to an unexplored, dragon-free universe and decide who will marry whom. They're astral dragons, mighty and arrogant, with devastating breath weapons and vast magical powers, and they're not even there to conquer the place. What kind of trouble could the natives possibly be \u2014 even civilized and technologically sophisticated natives? Or the mind-controlling parasite worms, or the undead god, or any of Hove's other surprises? \u2026Maybe quite a lot of trouble, but not as much as they will bring upon themselves."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Conjuring in the Indigo Desert (Day 1)\n\nToday I grew up. Finally. Everyone's been waiting for me the last fifteen years. Naturally it happened in the most embarrassing way possible, right in front of one of my fianc\u00e9s and a non-dragon.\n\nI woke up and ate nine rabbits and flew to the Tumult Sands to clean up. The Tumult Sands are a little scrap of desert where indigo sand boils around. It's never still. It's like it's being stirred by a huge wooden spoon from the sky, and like someone with about seven heads is underneath it puffing it up. It used to be sacred to the mhelvul's gods, before my parents chased them off and gave the mhelvul something more worthwhile to serve. The mhelvul used to tie a spare child of the noble classes upside-down on a heavy iron scaffold there every spring and fall, and let the sands scourge them to death. The desert gods would gather around and lap up the child's blood and spirit as he died. What good that did the mhelvul, I don't know. Kept the desert gods from eating them more, I guess. Only, the mhelvul don't go into the desert, and the desert gods didn't leave it. There's nothing else there but stirred-up indigo sand and that horrid iron scaffold.\n\nBut it's a good place for a bath. I perched on that scaffold and let the sand blast my scales clean. It doesn't like me very much, that sand. It hates dragons for what we did to its gods. It leaps up and splashes around me and tries to flay my skin off, as if I were a mhelvul sacrifice and a half.\n\nEveryone else thinks I'm being silly, taking sandbaths there. Everyone else says it hurts. The ichor of the ancient paingods is in those sands. The touch of them is like being raked with salted claws.\n\nI wouldn't know, though. I can't feel.\n\nAnyway, nobody else ever comes to the Tumult Sands. Except that morning, Osoth did.\n\nI should explain about Osoth. He's one of my fianc\u00e9s. He's not the oldest \u2014 Tultamaan has a dozen years on him \u2014 but he acts the oldest. I mean, like he was several centuries old, or sometime more, not just seventy years. He's eighteen feet long plus head and tail. That's a touch short \u2014 not that I can talk, I'm four feet shorter than that. His scales are patterned quite intricately, curling lines of deep grey and deeper grey on a background of light grey. You can see the spellwork making it grey, though. He's just a gloomless pastel violet underneath it, quite pretty really, but not the necromantic style. (I'm just a flat black \u2014 girls always get dull colors and no patterns.) He affects eight small horns, four of which curl around his eyes. He thinks it makes his head look a bit skullish. I think it makes him look like he's wearing goggles. And he's got the same wing-shaped ears and the usual bulbous eyes that dragons always do and skulls never do.\n\nOh, and he's a necromancer, of course. I said that before, right? His breath is a gust of some terrible poison dust that he excavated from a cursed grave. He's got an ordinary fiery breath weapon too, from back before he discovered necromancy, but he never uses it.\n\nAstrally, he's perfect. I can see this of course, but small people can't, because this part of him \u2014 of us \u2014 is in a slightly different world. A pert little whef\u00f4, pulsing with the essence of flame and poison dust for his two breaths. Around that a nice symmetrical four-lobed v\u00f4, nice and strong, good for breaking spells so well. Most of us have four lobes in our v\u00f4, from when the doctor performs the Great Separation, but often they're not so symmetrical. (Well, the ones of us who survive usually do. Five-sixths or more of dragonets die from it, but we don't count them.) His thez\u00f4 is a perfect sphere, which makes sense 'cause he's very good with magic.\n\nThen his hukuch\u00f4 is perfect too, a big forward-pointing almond shape twice the size of his body at least. Hukuch\u00f4s are pretty useless really, though lesser beings cannot endure their touch, so they're good if you ever need to make a bunch of small people run away or faint or something. I keep telling myself that a hukuch\u00f4 doesn't matter very much, because mine has a huge jagged ugly rip in it that matches the rip in my mind that keeps me from feeling. I survived my Great Separation but not really very well.\n\nIt's hard to see or aerocept or hear much in the Tumult Sands, so I noticed him as a growl of medium-bitter magic and danger first. Since the Sands are my family's territory, good manners demanded that I fly up and get ready to drive him off. Which is all very silly. Nobody just flies in and attacks anyone anymore, not on Mhel. And if you're poaching on someone else's territory, you wouldn't pick the Tumult Sands anyway, would you? There's nothing there to poach.\n\n\"Jyothky! Behold, it is I, Osoth, foremost among your fianc\u00e9s! I bring you tribute! Do not strike at me with your fierce claws, do not exhale upon me the depths of winter which dwell within your inner heart, do not rip at my breast with your deadly fangs!\"\n\n\"Well, let me see your tribute. If it's good, I won't kill you,\" I said. It's good to be polite to your fianc\u00e9s, especially if they're polite to you first. Not that I could kill him in a fair fight, anyway. Especially starting out with him flying in high and me flapping like a frantic sow to get off of that nasty iron scaffold and out of the messy low winds of the Tumult Sands.\n\n\"I have brought you a rabbit stuffed with caramelized onions, and with efforasze \u2014 that strong cheese \u2014 upon which you may break your fast this glorious place, with the dust of gods and small people all about us,\" he said.\n\nWell, it wasn't quite breaking my fast. I had just scooped my breakfast out of the hutches, though, and rabbits are much nicer stuffed with onions and cheese. So I flew up to him, and politely snatched it out of his claw and devoured it. If you ever wondered why I'm so tubby, this sort of thing is why. It was pretty tasty. He must have brought it from his home, or something. My parents' cooks aren't very good.\n\n\"I have inspected your tribute, and find it adequate,\" I told him. (That means \"delicious\" when you're talking about tribute. Or \"excellent\" if the tribute isn't food.) \"So I shall not drive you off with claws and teeth and breath. This time.\"\n\nHe dipped his head and flew under me for a minute and a third. That's etiquette, too. If I had been lying about not attacking him, he had just ceded me the advantages of height and facing. In theory I could have attacked him and had the advantage. Of course, if he'd actually been worried about it, he'd have had all sorts of extra defenses prepared. I'd probably have dived into a doominess of surprise skeletons and flying ghosts, knowing Osoth. And he's my fianc\u00e9 and my friend and bigger than me. And nobody attacks like that anymore, it's all sneaky feuds or honest blood-duels between friends. This stuff about manners is all very silly.\n\n\"What meditations do you perform here, Jyothky, in this dustyard of dead gods and dead mhelvul?\" He actually talks that way.\n\n\"Not meditations, but ablutions, that the scourging sands may flense dry blood from my scales.\" I answered. I don't actually talk that way, but around Osoth I sometimes wind up talking that way. That's got to count for something. I don't know if it counts for him or against him, though. Is it imposing? Or pretentious?\n\n\"Oh, have you already hunted on this day?\"\n\n\"Just in the barnyards of my parents' small people,\" I said. He looked a bit disappointed, so I added, \"They do not stuff their stock with onions and the greatest of cheeses!\"\n\nHe craned his head towards me, peering out of his fake eyesockets, his tongue darting. \"You have tarried here overlong already, have you not, Jyothky? The blood of the farmers' beasts may have been cleansed from your claws, but the blood at the corners of your eyes is dragon's blood, or my tongue deceives me.\"\n\n\"Sneaky sand!\" I keep a close eye on my body usually, but I can't keep a close eye on my eyes. A tenasensitive peek (that's a sense observing structural integrity, in case you're from a tenablind species) showed only the least bit of injury. I didn't bother healing it. It's not very good form to look like I can't handle a bit of pain in front of one of my fianc\u00e9s. Especially since handling pain is the only good part about not being able to feel.\n\n(Which is a point in Osoth's favor. Whoever I marry is going to have to pay attention to my little injuries. He showed me that he can do that. I suppose anyone can, but he knows he should.)\n\n(Also, I'm sure you're wondering why I wasn't wearing any protectives. I had taken them off for sandbathing. The sand is fierce enough that any good spell will think it's attacking me, probably because it's attacking me, and keep it away.)\n\n\"Sneaky indeed, for these sands are laced with the vengeful dead,\" Osoth said.\n\n\"Sounds like you'd like them, then.\" I really do talk like that. I should try to be more dignified now that I'm grown up.\n\n\"Indeed. I shall in time rip the secrets of ancient treasures long-lost from the unwilling spectres of the dead,\" he said.\n\nI didn't know whether to be pleased or insulted. Pleased, because one of my fianc\u00e9s should be thinking about his hoard, on the chance that he actually manages to get married. Insulted, because this is my family's land. He'd bought safe passage with a stuffed rabbit, but there's a big gap between safe passage and actual treasure-hunting.\n\nSo I hissed at him.\n\n\"Cterion, your mighty sire, has given me leave to undertake this endeavour,\" he said. \"Indeed, he has given me encouragement.\"\n\nWell, if Dad said it's OK, I can't complain much. (When I asked him about it that night, he said he was just being calculating. Treasure lost for centuries underground isn't doing us any good, even if it's on our land. And there's, a priori, one chance in six that I marry Osoth, so treasure that he finds might do us \u2014 which is to say, me \u2014 some good. So why not let Osoth look? That's the economics of Cterion for you.)\n\n(I wonder if Dad told him about watching out for me getting injured?)\n\n\"Well, can I watch? I mean, I know there are all sorts of undead things in my bath-desert, but I've never actually met them.\"\n\n\"Certes!\" Necromancy has some major professional hazards. I guess the worst of them, for dragons, is having bits of archaic languages sneak into your everyday speech. \"We shall descend under the shelter of my mightiest spells to the very heart of the desert, wherein I shall bind terrible spirits!\"\n\n(Maybe my father's wrong. Do I really want my children to grow up talking like that?)\n\nWe flew down through the messy twisty winds to the iron scaffold. We ended up using my best protective spells, which are better than Osoth's. Dad taught me the Ulthana's Targe early on, when it was clear I would never be able to feel. It's a family specialty. And Rankotherium taught me the Hoplonton. I've never been very good at it. But the Hoplonton cast badly is much tighter than the Small Wall, cast expertly, which is the best that Osoth knows. Osoth is very clever with fancy magic, like his necromancy. But I'm better with child's magic, ordinary things like protection and shapeshifting and language and healing. Practical things. Basic things. The only things that an underage dragon is allowed to study. And since I'd been underage so long, I'd gotten good at them.\n\n(So that means we'd complement each other magically, doesn't it? Maybe I should marry him.)\n\nWell, Osoth's impractical magic is very impressive. He churned the indigo sands with his spells, and sieved them with sorceries, and caused them to swirl and spiral more than they ever do in the normal course of events. (Not that the normal course of events there is normal.) He scooped up a heap of broken bits of blue bone that didn't look like anything more than the ordinary sand, and corked them into a sapphire bottle, and giggled and slap-slap-slapped his tailtip against the ground. I don't think necromancers should giggle. I think they're supposed to laugh hideous insidious laughs, but Osoth giggles.\n\n\"What did you get, Osoth?\"\n\n\"Let us torment it and discover, O my fianc\u00e9e!\" he said.\n\nI wasn't sure how to torment some dust in a sapphire bottle, since claws don't really work very well on dust. Osoth knows how to torment dust with words, though. Heavy little words that landed on the bottle like a rain of mercury. They looked rather pretty. I can't work spells with words in them yet, so I was jealous.\n\nThe bottle howled as they fell on it. \"Depart, and let the dead sleep in peace!\" it mewled, in a voice like winter wind blowing through ashes.\n\n\"Not likely!\" said Osoth. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"In the grave there are no names,\" said the bottle.\n\n\"You're not in the grave. You're in a little gemstone bottle in my claw,\" said Osoth. He added three more quicksilver words which I refuse to try to write down.\n\nThe bottle moaned at Osoth's incantation, and surrendered. \"When I lived, Xolgrohim was my name. Mighty was I among the gods of war and pain.\"\n\n\"Now you're mighty among the gods in bottles. Did you have any treasure?\"\n\n\"Wealthy was I when I lived, wealthy beyond measure. Seven palaces of jade and chalcedony had I, and a thousand priests did me homage, and ten thousand warriors brought me tribute. All fell to the dragons, all was taken or destroyed. Now let me sleep.\"\n\n\"Reeeaaally? If I open that jar up and dump you out, you'll be gone for good. No more sleep for you!\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Is that how it works?\" I asked Osoth.\n\n\"Indeed it is, O my fianc\u00e9e, in the simplest of instances. But there are subtleties to the practice of necromancy, subtleties within subtleties. His actual status would be worse than that: not asleep, yet not wholly destroyed. Necromancers could still call him up and torment him. Yet I have means of granting him a less tenuous existence: not life, but considerably more than death,\" said Osoth, back to his usual style of speech now that he was talking to a live person. \"But more proximately, are you ill?\"\n\n\"How would I know?\" I grumbled. I cast a very direct spell to tell me my general health. Nobody else I know needs to cast that on themselves. \"No, I'm perfectly healthy, except for minor abrasions.\"\n\nHe looked nervously at my hind legs or so. \"Are you sure?\"\n\nI would have breathed ice on him, being suddenly in a surprisingly and uncharacteristically terrible mood, except that he actually looked worried. \"No, I'm not sure. You know that. Don't ask me such things.\" He looked even more worried. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"You're laying an egg.\"\n\n\"I am?\" Which is about the stupidest thing to say \u2014 how could he mistake it? I stuck my neck between my forelegs and looked. Yes, indeed, there it was, forcing its way out of my cloaca: the tip of a gleaming amber blob big enough to fit a dragonet. Or a medium-sized lioness, say. One was about as likely as the other, since I was a virgin. I have protection spells on to keep me from relieving myself at socially awkward times \u2014 and I will kill anyone who tries to dispel them! \u2014 but of course they don't cover eggs.\n\nWell, that was embarrassing. Having one of my fianc\u00e9s see me at a very intimate time is bad enough. Having him notice it before me was hideous. And having the ghost of a conquered god staring also... Well, I suppose every dragon has to do something so remarkable that no other dragon has ever done it before. I'd rather have had something a bit more glorious for myself, though. Like, oh, being killed by a rabbit.\n\nOsoth naturally didn't realize that. \"You are, indeed. Allow me to be the first to express my congratulations on your attaining maturity.\" Of course he would say that. The whole mating flight had been waiting for years for me to grow up.\n\n\"Better you than that horror in the bottle,\" I said. I wished I could have come up with something caustic.\n\n\"May I help you back home?\" asked Osoth.\n\nRight. I couldn't just lay the egg in the Tumult Sands and breathe it to ashes. I needed to take the cursed thing to show my parents and and my fianc\u00e9s and everyone else who might care that I was now sexually mature and the long-delayed mating flight could finally get going.\n\nWithout anyone bothering to teach me any adult magic, for one disadvantage.\n\n\"I can get there myself!\" I said. That was worth a breath, at least a small one. An ice breath, which is more annoying but easier to heal than fire. (Yes, I've got both, and lightning too. I had a long time to study child's magic.)\n\nOf course, he was wearing the Hoplonton I had given him, so it didn't touch him. He blinked innocently at me. \"Jyothky, I beg your indulgence. Forgive me for whatever insult I have offered to you. But be aware that it was inadvertent, and, indeed, I do not know what it is.\"\n\nSo I tried to dart at him to bite him. As I write this, half a day later, I don't think that biting him would have been at all polite. It seemed to make sense at the time. Laying an egg makes a dragoness crazy, everyone says. Even if she can't actually feel it.\n\nWhen Arilash darts, it's beautiful and elegant. When I dart, usually it's just sort of massive on a small scale. This time, it was all waddly and awkward. Why having something going on behind my hind legs gets in the way of something that's mostly forelegs and neck, I don't know.\n\nSo I didn't successfully bite him that time. Just as well, I guess.\n\nHe didn't complain. \"O Jyothky! Shall I command the liches of long-dead mhelvul to bring you to your parents' home, wherein you shall be given a festival commensurate with your new status?\"\n\n\"What a horrid thought.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, O Jyothky, you do not appreciate the value and utility of necromancy. The dead are not mighty, but they are many, and with proper spells they are obedient.\"\n\n(Which is a point against marrying him. Animata are fine when servants are scarce, but would I want to have animated skeletons all over the house doing the housework?)\n\n\"No, I don't. I'm going home now. Stay and play with your sapphire bottle if you like.\"\n\nWell, it was a horrible trip. I tried to fly, but I was too awkward. Whenever I flapped my wings, my protection spells screamed that I was being attacked by a dragon. The dragon being me: flying while you're laying an egg is likely to rip something important inside of you. So I wound up levitating rather than flying. Dead slow.\n\nAlso, it gave all the peasants a chance to look up at me and see me with an egg hanging halfway out of me. Until I realized what they were pointing at and why they were screaming. I wrapped myself in the Esrret-Sky-Painted so that nobody would see me. I did a really bad job of it. Osoth could see me. Not just magioception or dangersense, but out and out see me. I guess I actually was in serious pain or something.\n\nXolgrohim, in the sapphire bottle in Osoth's claw, couldn't see me. And the mhelvul stopped looking so terrified. So that part worked at least.\n\nWhat to Do When You Finally Grow Up\n\nI floated through my bedroom window, and got Osoth to go away, before the egg finally came out. This is a good thing. I might have had to carry the vile thing miles through the air.\n\nAnd yes, it was a vile thing. Dragonesses are supposed to be very fond of newly-laid eggs. I don't see how they do it. A newly-laid egg is sticky and glowy and translucent. It smells rather like everything else that comes out of my cloaca. I don't know any reason why I should like it better than anything else that comes out of my cloaca.\n\nOlder fertilized eggs with dragonets growing in them are a different matter. Once they've been cleaned up and the shell has hardened, they smell very cute. This is important for the survival of the species. Otherwise nobody would put up with them for the duodecades it takes them to hatch.\n\nBut when mine finally went plop on the floor in the middle of my bedroom, it was a real effort not to burn it to ashes immediately.\n\nOf course I mustn't do that. Mom had flown into the room while I was squeezing the egg the last of the way out. When she saw me rear my head back, she said, \"Stop, Jyothky!\"\n\nWell, I almost breathed it at her instead. \"Why? It's disgusting! You burn your eggs up every year!\"\n\n\"We're going to have to clean this one up and show it around. You can destroy it afterwards.\"\n\n\"You never show yours around,\" I said.\n\n\"When one has a sixty-three-year-old daughter, as I do, it is not so hard to convince anyone that one is a sexually mature dragoness,\" she said. \"You, dear one, are another matter. Everyone expected you to lay your first egg a dozen years ago, and that would have been somewhat late. Since it has taken so long, after that back injury, best that the evidence be undeniable.\"\n\nI did breathe fire, just a little, at her then. It could have been very bad, because my mhelvul maid Thujia was next to her, scrubbing away at some disgusting sticky bits on the floor that had come out of me along with the egg. Mom spread her wings to catch the fire. I presume that hurt Mom a bit (Mom, like every dragon I've ever met so far, can feel). Mom believes in Uplifting the Small People, which includes not killing them except for some good reason.\n\n(I would have been sad to kill Thujia too of course. I've only killed a few small people, more by mistake than not. Sad and embarrassed \u2014 now that I'm an adult I'm not supposed to make that kind of mistake anymore. Also Thujia has been my maid the last seven or eight years and I like her.)\n\nUsually when I breathe on Mom, she scolds me. This time she didn't. She just looked sad. \"Let's go to the river and get you washed up. Thujia can scrub the egg clean.\"\n\n\"I'd rather go back to the Indigo Desert,\" I said. I don't like being in water very much. (Flying is a bit awkward for me, since I can't feel where the air is on my body, but aeroception makes up for that mostly. (If you don't have that sense, it's awareness of where the air is near you and what it's doing.) Swimming has all the problems of flying, but of course there's no such thing as \"aquaception\" , so I've got to rely on less direct senses to know what's going on. Usually the only one that's saying anything useful is dangersense, which is constantly shouting you're about to drown!. So I hate swimming.)\n\n\"You don't want egg-mucus caked up with dust on your belly,\" she said. \"I know that very well. Once \u2014 after you were laid, but before you hatched \u2014 I laid an egg out in the Rasputranus Desert. As soon as it was out I wanted your father, and we coupled in the sands for a long time. Afterwards I had to get three mhelvul with hammers and chisels to clean the gunk off. It was as hard as sandstone, and as tough as shell-leather.\"\n\nEmbarrassment #1: Mom knows more about laying eggs than I do. It's not fair! Just because she's done it three hundred times or so, and I've done it once. And she can feel what's going on and I can't.\n\nEmbarrassment #2: Mom was talking to me about coupling with Dad. Adults talk to each other about sex all the time \u2014 and in a lot more detail \u2014 but not very much when children are around. Except the last fifteen years or so. They've been talking to each other about it when I wasn't quite nearby, but close enough so that I could hear.\n\nBut this is the first time I've been included in the conversation. With Mom, at least. Arilash says all sorts of things that a dragonet shouldn't hear. I know how I'm supposed to respond, too, because I was eavesdropping for those fifteen years. I'm supposed to tell a more impressive story on the same topic. Leading to Embarrassment #3: I don't have any stories. I can't even make one up, to Mom! She'd know it was fake, veriception blocks or not. Mom can be an adult at me, but I can't be one at her.\n\nSo we went and splashed around in the river. I looked a lot cleaner. And I didn't smell quite so much like sticky stinky dragoness, so I probably felt a lot better too. Whatever \"feeling better\" is like.\n\nBut... I have my coming-of-age party tomorrow! I can't wait! And everyone's eager to get the mating flight flying, too.\n\nI've never been to a coming-of-age party before. Children aren't allowed. Arilash used to tease me about what was going to happen to me. \"You have to go copulate with all the grownup drakes on the whole planet!\" she told me when I asked her about it.\n\n\"Did you, Arilash?\" I used to ask.\n\n\"I did 'em all twice, and the dragonesses too! They had to import some extras from Chiriact to satisfy me!\" she said.\n\nI stopped believing her when she said she was coupling with other females. I can't think how that would work, even if anyone could imagine trying to do it.\n\nYthac never lied to me, I don't think. He's one of my fianc\u00e9s, not one of my rivals, so he ought to be trying to make me like him. I don't think lying to me would make me like him. Anyway, he said that you're just supposed to show off a bit, flying and breathing and such. There's an embarrassing bit where you need to show off your physical maturity. For Ythac that meant producing all three varieties of semen \u2014 with just one witness, he didn't need to diddle himself in front of half the adult dragons on Mhel. And have a doctor proclaim that yes, he ought to be capable of siring dragonets.\n\nFor me, I guess I just need to show off my egg. Maybe I get Osoth and Mom to say that, yes, it's my egg and not a latex model or something. Or not one of Mom's. I can't blame people for being suspicious, since I took so many extra years.\n\nActually, the vile thing smells like me and not like Mom, so I don't suppose I'll need to get even that badly inspected. Sniffed intimately, I suppose, carefully enough to tell that the egg is mine.\n\nCoda: Fianc\u00e9s\n\nDrumet Academy recommends that every essay end with a coda \u2014 an epilog sort of thing which either summarizes the essay (if you're boring) or provides an additional ornament on the theme (if you're clever, which I usually wasn't in class). The word \"coda\" means \"tail\" . It is a sort of symbolic homage to their long-tailed draconic overlords. I'm not exactly sure why I'm doing a symbolic homage to myself in my own diary. I'm mostly going to use the codas for keeping track of how my fianc\u00e9s are doing. It will be dull, I'm afraid, but if I don't do it I will lose track.\n\nHere's who I'm engaged to:\n\nYthac My best friend. His scales are delicate blues and greens, he breathes fire and darkness, he's pretty big, and he's good at information magic. He's a bit quiet and morose.\n\nOsoth The necromancer. Grey scales (but they're really lavender with blue highlights). Graveyard dust and fire. He is verbose and a bit pompous when he speaks to live people, but he's perfectly comfortable with the dead. He's quite sweet. He doesn't have a chance in the mating flight though.\n\nGreshthanu A huge big strong dragon, who will probably come in first. His scales are orange and blue, and he's all over spikes. Cold breath, combat magic. He doesn't have a working hukuch\u00f4 at all, not that it really matters.\n\nNrararn I haven't met Nrararn yet. He's a sky mage or something.\n\nLlredh I haven't met Llredh either. He's a replacement fianc\u00e9,\n\nfrom offworld \u2014 Squeretz I think \u2014 after Gorzaldwa got\n\ntired of waiting for me and went somewhere else. He's reported to be big, orange and brown, and aggressive. Fire breath I think.\n\nTultamaan Rather old for a suitor; he's been on two mating flights before.\n\nBrick red with green chevrons, ice breath. His forelegs don't work, they dangle floppily and look so sad. He's a coward, too. I don't like him very much."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Coming of Age Party (Day 4)\n\nWell, that was horrible.\n\nThe actual proof of maturity wasn't the horrible bit. Dr. Dnazhvhens \u2014 she's my usual doctor \u2014 sniffed at the egg once and declared that it was mine, and sniffed at again and said that it would have been fertile had it been fertilized. She didn't have to sniff me. She knows perfectly well what I smell like. (I asked her later. Boys usually don't get any more inspection than that, usually less. Only when there's some doubt about them is a doctor called in to look. Ythac didn't say what the doubt was about him. I should find out, preferably before I decide to marry him. I guess I can't count that as a point against him now since I don't know what it is. Probably I shouldn't count it at all since it was actually not a problem.)\n\nThe party wasn't supposed to be horrible. It wasn't half the dragons on Mhel, but it was a hundred forty-four or a hundred sixty-eight or so. So more than a sixth of them. No mhelvul, no small people. This was something that's about dragons, and nobody that we've conquered gets to see it or know anything about it.\n\n(Probably because they'd just tell a dragonet and that would spoil the fun of the newly mature dragons trying to scare them. It's not much different from, oh, Rankotherium's multiple-of-144-year birthday that we celebrated a while back. Except he got more dragons, plus lots of small people.)\n\nSo it was a party. It started off pretty nice. Mhelvul really weren't invited. They covered a great deal of the castle's courtyard with food, though, before we drove them off. Mom and Dad made them work all night. Except for Annamhyv. Annamhyv was going to go get married that night, she'd been telling us about it and planning it for a year and a half. Dad didn't want her to go. Mom got all Uplifting the Small People. She bit Dad's wing, and told Annamhyv that she, Mom, would take her, Annamhyv, to the wedding hall a third of an hour before the wedding, or he, Dad, would pay for the next slaves out of his own personal hoard because if we didn't let her, Annamhyv, go to her own wedding, we wouldn't be able to levy any worthwhile servants anymore ever again.\n\nWhich doesn't make much sense to me either way. I suppose they're just tense about having so many dragons visiting tomorrow. It's not like there's not going to be enough food at the party, or enough small people to do the cooking. Annamhyv isn't even a very good cook. We mostly have her making leather things or doing masonry. What if she stuffs a sheep with bricks instead of efforasze by mistake. Or by \"mistake\" ... she might be upset at missing her wedding and do something wrong on purpose. Slaves do that a lot, I hear, and even servants do it sometimes. Then we'd probably have to kill her, and an awful sort of wedding present that would be for her. Well, Mom and Dad would \u2014 I'll be off on my mating flight. (!)\n\nAnyway. There was plenty of food. There were roast cattle stuffed with squids and onions. There were roast cattle stuffed with mushrooms and eggs. (Bird eggs! If anyone tries to eat my egg I'll kill them. Not out of maternal instincts. I don't think I have any maternal instincts. I'll kill them preemptively so they can't complain how vile stuff that comes out of me tastes.) There were ratites stuffed with scallops, and ratites stuffed with game birds and grass, and ratites stuffed with spicy peppers and dried yogurt. I'm pretty sure the local ranchers had lots of ratites hatch this year. There were rabbits stuffed with caramelized onions and strong cheese. (Osoth's rabbit was better. We need new cooks, especially ones who are good at cooking.) There were rabbits stuffed with crushed small fishes. There were salmons stuffed with garlic and fermented snakes, because I like them, even though it's not a good season for salmon. That's how you could tell it was my party.\n\nEverything was stuffed. That's the style for a dragoness's coming of age. If it were a drake, everything would be skewered instead. I won't explain why because I don't think I need to. That's one of the big secrets which dragonets must never be told. If you're underage and reading this, act surprised and amused when they tell you about it.\n\nOh, and you're supposed to start the dancing too. All the other dragons land. You jump out of a window on the castle's tower (or whatever you've got), and fly around. Oh, and you breathe a lot. Not at anyone. It's a supposed to be happy sort of party. Just into the air, or at cliff walls, or whatever.\n\nOh, and in the \"supposed to be happy\" bit, I showed off all three breath weapons. Most dragons only learn one. A few have two but usually only one is good and the other is a hobby or a half-learned false start, like Osoth and his graveyard and fire breaths. So I got a lot of adults thumping their tails on the ground when I showed the lightning after the fire and the ice. (Not that there's much point to having three, or even two. I had to do something while younger dragons than me were learning real sorcery, though. And dragonets are supposed to work on their breath weapons.)\n\nThen everyone who wants to also dances. And by \"dances\" I mean \"flies around in a very small space above the castle and breathes their brightest breaths and tries to intimidate their friends without actually attacking them.\"\n\nAnd by \"friends\" I mean \"dragons you try to intimidate.\" Enemies are dragons you try to hurt.\n\nLots of dragons were my friend at that party. I was pretty thoroughly intimidated. Even a big, strong dragon could feel intimidated with so many other big, strong dragons around. And I'm not very big and not very strong.\n\nStill, I got to meet the rest of my fianc\u00e9s.\n\nNrararn\n\nI was trying to decide between another slice of salmon (spicy!) or a slice of ratite stuffed with peppers (spicier!) when a youngish drake spiralled down and stopped just over the table. Spiralling is pretty hard, if you're doing a tight twirly spiral in a crowded place like he was. He wasn't very big for a boy, eighteen feet of body. That meant he was a sorcerer of some sort, because too much sorcery stunts your growth. His scales were a beautiful light blue. He had bright blue eyes and a single bright blue twirly horn in the middle of his forehead. And a sort of a blue-white mane, starting right after the horn and going to the base of his tail. It was a pretty mane, too. It was full of little lightning bolts that kept the hair upright.\n\n\"Congratulations!\" he said to me, like everyone else had been.\n\n\"Thank you!\" I said back to him, like I had to everyone else.\n\n\"I'm Nrararn\" he said. I looked blank a second too long. \"We're engaged, you and I.\" he added.\n\nOh, right, that Nrararn. \"Oh!\" I said. I am fortunate to be such a witty and eloquent dragoness.\n\n\"I'm glad to finally meet you,\" he said.\n\n\"Me, too.\" What do you say to someone you're engaged to and are meeting for the first time? \"What do you breathe?\"\n\n\"Lightning, like you.\" He said it as if he expected to please me with it. That's not very smart. Better to point out that his breath complements my fire and ice breaths.\n\n\"That makes sense. You've braided lightning in your mane, too,\" I said.\n\nHe beamed. His fangs are short and a bit curled, and the left top one is rather scraped. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"I do, truly. It's quite pretty.\" Which was just true, since it was quite pretty. In retrospect, I do not know why my fianc\u00e9 was trying to get me to praise him. If anything, he should have been praising me, since (1) I'm the dragoness, and (2) it was my party. Maybe he was nervous at meeting his fianc\u00e9e. Maybe he wanted a bit of reassurance that he had a bit of a chance in the mating flight (which he didn't), that he wouldn't waste several years trying to marry some dragonesses who don't have the least bit of regard for him (which he would).\n\nI'm not going to choose my husband based on the color of his mane, though.\n\nLlredh\n\nAs that straightforward admission was extracted from me, I must have twitched my tailtip or some such. A rather large orange and brown dragon with lots and lots of spikes (who turned out to be Llredh) swooped down and reached for Nrararn with sets of glittering claws.\n\nNrararn was already dodging as Llredh started his strike. At first it looked like Nrararn was a very elegant fighter, not all that big but very accurate. (I'd like to fight like that. It takes lots of practice, though, and I've never had the patience.) But there were sneaky little air spells whispering to Nrararn. I don't think that Llredh noticed them, but they were there. Nrararn isn't actually a good fighter at all, it looks like, but he uses sky magic to help him fight. That's clever. As long as he's in the air, or his foe is, it's clever.\n\nNrararn then proved that he wasn't a very elegant fighter by snapping at Llredh's tail as he flew past, and missing. Whispery windy warnings aren't much good for biting tails, I guess. I probably would have breathed at Llredh in that situation. I probably would have missed him and scorched the banquet table (woeful!) or one of the guests (dangerous!).\n\nAnyway, Llredh turned and landed next to me. \"This scrawny boy, he is being a pest or a pestilence? His neck, I will bite it!\"\n\n\"This sparkly boy is amusing me! I am investigating how pretty he is,\" I said.\n\n\"Very pretty. His prettiness will serve you well when he tries to defend you and your unborn dragonet,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"You sound like you're engaged to me too. You're Llredh, right?\" I asked him. This was an easy guess, since Llredh was the only fianc\u00e9 I hadn't met, and his colors were right. His family is from some other world \u2014 he grew up there \u2014 and he lives on the other side of Mhel.\n\n\"The mighty Llredh, that is me,\" he said.\n\n\"The mighty but not terribly clever Llredh, that is you,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"The cleverness, you think too highly of it. Will it protect your neck when I land with great heaviness upon your back and bite, bite, bite?\" asked Llredh.\n\nThe traditional answer to that sort of threat is some sort of blustery brag. Ythac would have said something like, \"A clumsy lizard like you? You would miss, and land with great heaviness on the ground, and it is I who would bite, bite, bite.\"\n\nNrararn just grinned. \"Try it and see!\" Which made sense. His mane was full of lightning, and went the whole length of his back. Landing on that would probably hurt.\n\n\"On the mating flight, I surely will. Hunting we will go, you and I, but only I shall return,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"I'm definitely not marrying anyone who kills off my other fianc\u00e9s,\" I said.\n\nLlredh lashed his tail. \"Bah! There are too many drakes already. A few inferior ones will not be missed.\"\n\n\"And our fianc\u00e9e has quite clearly implied that she would miss me. Which leaves one of the three of us to be inferior, and it's not me, and it's not her,\" said Nrararn.\n\nLlredh lashed his tail again. This time he demonstrated his inferiority by accidentally swatting the redoubtable Rankotherium with it, as that redoubtable lizard was standing by the table lecturing my mother about the salmon. Rankotherium being Rankotherium, and thus exceedingly redoubtable, Llredh's tail did not actually touch Rankotherium. It got caught in one of Rankotherium's sticky sparky protective spells. Probably the Quarnish Reek, since it didn't smell very nice and it ate several scales off Llredh's tail.\n\nRankotherium reared his redoubtable head covered with heavy red scale plates and four redoubtable and very sharp and forky antlers, and glared at Llredh. He said, \"Ah, the young Llredh. This would be an excellent time to practice the noble art of apology, would it not?\"\n\nLlredh allowed as how it was, quite likely, such an excellent time.\n\nRankotherium looked at him redoubtably. I hope that, when I'm a grand of years old, I shall be able to look redoubtably like that. (But I doubt it. I'm sure the only redoubtably I shall be doing is doubting things like that twice.)\n\nNrararn and I floated and slithered away, behind my aunt and uncle. They were ripping apart a ratite and feeding bits of it to each other, and giving each other very sizzly looks.\n\nNrararn tried to give me a sizzly look too. I didn't sizzle back. Which is bad of me, since we are engaged, and when the mating flight actually starts flying we ought to be copulating frantically at every opportunity or we're doing it wrong. I'm not a very sizzly sort of dragoness though. So we chatted about very ordinary things, our favorite foods and our first kills and our best kind of music and suchlike whatnots. He talks well.\n\nGreshthanu\n\nAnd of course Greshthanu had to come poke at Nrararn too. Greshthanu is a neighbor, so he knows how to behave. He didn't step on anyone or thump anyone with a stray coil of tail.\n\nI waved my forewing in his face. \"Greshthanu! Come meet Nrararn. We'll be spending a lot of time with him over the next while.\"\n\nGreshthanu spread his barbels. \"Ho, my pleasure! We shall have many memorable contests, I am sure!\" He peered a bit more closely. \"You would seem to be a sorcerer of some sort, would you not?\"\n\nNrararn smiled back. \"My pleasure as well. Yes, I am a sorcerer of sorts.\"\n\n\"What sorts?\" barked Greshthanu.\n\n\"Well, the obvious ones,\" said my lightning-wrapped fianc\u00e9, his attendant sylphs dancing around his head.\n\n\"Don't like guessing games so much, Nrararn,\" said Greshthanu. He grinned. \"Yeah, I know you'll use that against me. Every time you do, I'll accept if you'll accept a Caramelle against me.\" (That's a kind of duel.)\n\n\"And from everything I hear, you'll do pretty well in fights,\" said Nrararn. \"That sounds fair. I'm a sky mage: winds, storms, airy spirits, and, of course, a plentiful supply of lightning.\"\n\nGreshthanu sat on a big stone, and arched his head up. \"Fair's good. I like fair. Hey, speaking of fair, how'd you get the extra mating flights?\"\n\nNrararn blinked at Greshthanu. \"I have extra mating flights?\"\n\n\"Don't you? Isn't this your third?\"\n\nNrararn spread his wings a bit. \"No...\"\n\nI stuck my head up. \"You're thinking of Tultamaan; it's his third.\"\n\n\"Tultamaan's been on mating flights?\" asked Greshthanu.\n\n\"Oh, yes. He came in last in both of them. He was gone about the same time you were off in the jungle doing whatever it was you were doing in the jungle, so I supposed you missed it,\" I said.\n\n\"Must be that,\" Greshthanu said.\n\n\"You know each other socially?\" asked Nrararn.\n\n\"Oh, sure. Jyothky and Arilash and Osoth and Ythac and I, we all live around here, we see each other a few times a year. You and Llredh, you two are new. I haven't met Llredh,\" Greshthanu answered.\n\nNrararn looked worried, and said \"oh\" in a rather small voice.\n\n\"Don't worry, sparky little wizard!\" boomed Greshthanu. \"Mating flight's pretty long. After a year or two, old friendships hardly matter. That's fair about a mating flight!\"\n\n\"Maybe that's why they're so long,\" I mused. \"Twelve years seems like an awfully long time to me.\"\n\n\"Twelve years if we play it to the end,\" said Nrararn. \"Mostly they end rather earlier than that.\"\n\n\"I must amend myself. Six or seven years sounds like an awfully half-long time to me.\"\n\n\"I hear it goes pretty fast! All the twining you like!\" laughed Greshthanu. \"And you get six of us to play with, too. Plenty of variety.\"\n\nI flattened my ears at him. I shouldn't have done. Yet.\n\n\"Aww, poor Jyothky. You'll like it when you get used to it!\"\n\nI sort of pried my ears off my scalp with my wingclaws. \"I hope so. Everyone else does.\" I am actually rather worried about this topic, since the part of sex that everyone else talks about liking the most is how it feels.\n\n\"How did Tultamaan get three mating flights?\" asked Nrararn. I think he was rescuing me from being embarrassed, so I was grateful. Of course he'll be one of the six drakes twining me in a few days.\n\n\"He's the king's oldest and slightly favoritest nephew, and the king really sat on my parents and the other girls' about who would go on this mating flight,\" I said, and pointed a wing. \"They're flying together now. Trust Tultamaan to spend more time with his important uncle than with his fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\nGreshthanu leaned his head down to me. \"You're offended? I didn't think you liked him all that much.\"\n\n\"I don't, he's not a bit nice to be around. I will try to be polite to him, and give him a fair chance,\" I said.\n\nGreshthanu nodded. \"I like fair.\"\n\nNrararn curled his tail. \"Well, most of us only get one try at a mating flight. He's had two extras. Do you like that?\"\n\nGreshthanu nodded again. \"Yeah, I like that.\"\n\n\"Oh? Why is that fair?\" asked Nrararn, tossing his mane.\n\nGreshthanu laughed. \"Oh, Nrararn, it's not fair. But I'd rather be competing against a drake who's such an expert at losing. Better than another fresh young drake like you, all full of skills and enthusiasm, with who knows what sort of surprises for me!\"\n\nNrararn laughed with him. \"I'm glad to be competing with you, Greshthanu. It should be more fun than with Llredh.\" He spread his barbels and smiled at me. \"And it should be fun competing for you. I'm glad I came here today. Not that I was about to miss it of course!\"\n\nI smiled back at him, a girlish sort of smile (viz. without barbels). I'm sure I didn't seem the least bit terrified of the prospect. I had been sure to put scent-distorting spells on before the party, though.\n\nYthac\n\nMy best friend Ythac and his father Rankotherium flew to the party together. This is natural, since they were both coming from Pdernuz. This is also foolish, since they were fighting by the time they got here, as anyone who had ever met them both knew they would be.\n\n\"Congratulations and all of that,\" wrote Ythac. A while ago I let him cast the Horizonal Quill on me, so that we can scribble messages to each other from far apart. I imagine his notes scratched on a waxboard with a claw-tip. He said he imagines my notes burned on planks. He's good at language and information magic, probably because Rankotherium doesn't think that's very useful.\n\n[Note: It's the Horizonal Quill, not the Horizontal quill. It reaches as far as the horizon. It is not lying flat.-Jy+BB]\n\n\"I accept that in the spirit it was offered. And a better one, since you smell like you're ready to rip someone's wings off.\" You can't smell or anything through the Horizonal Quill, of course; it only shows what a pen can write. But I know Ythac pretty well.\n\n\"My father's, or mine, I'm not sure which.\"\n\n\"Well, wait 'til after my party. I'd like to keep the actual bloodshed down to a minimum,\" I wrote back selfishly.\n\n\"I want something in exchange if I do that!\" he wrote. He perched on the curtain wall across the courtyard from me, and started a conversation with Tultamaan about winemaking.\n\n\"You can't have that 'til we leave for the mating flight!\" Not that Ythac has ever made an improper advance on me, the way Greshthanu and Tultamaan did.\n\n\"Well, if I can't have that, how about something else? My father has been insisting that I congratulate you effusively. He still wants us to get married right away.\" Rankotherium has been sneakily maneuvering for that for duodecades. But when I marry Ythac \u2014 or anybody \u2014 I'm going to do it properly. Eloping is tantamount to coming in last in your mating flight.\n\n\"Why, of course I'll marry everyone who congratulates me effusively! Wouldn't anyone?\"\n\nAcross the courtyard, Ythac smirked at me. \"I think you're mistaking Arilash for yourself. Anyway, would you mind terribly if, as the price of peace, I appear to ignore you completely and not say a word to you?\" He listened attentively as Tultamaan discussed soil quality or something.\n\n\"Rankotherium will be annoyed!\" I actually like Rankotherium, who has been friendly and kind. But I don't mind helping Ythac tease him. \"Actually, want me to pretend to get offended and come over and swat you for snubbing me, sometime when he's watching?\"\n\n\"Wait, are you annoyed at me, enough to swat me?\" His handwriting had gone scribbly with haste.\n\n\"I laugh! No, I'm just conspirey with you.\"\n\n\"Oh, good. I am happy for you, really!\"\n\n\"But you can't miss one of your last chances to stick lice under your father's scales. I understand that!\" I wrote back.\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\nAt which point the king waddled over and started congratulating me. \"Sorry Ythac, I need to spew forth polite etiquette over here a bit.\"\n\nTultamaan\n\n\"I have been Tugging on your Tail for the last six minutes, but you have not become Aware of that fact,\" Tultamaan said in my ear.\n\nI looked over my shoulder, confirmed that he was indeed tugging on my tail, and glared. \"I can't feel, Tultamaan.\"\n\n\"You have Mentioned this to me before. It is sure to arise as a Crucial Topic in any conversation that we Indulge in. Inevitably it is followed by a Catalog of your spells for becoming Aware of Circumstances which are occurring to you. My magioception being superior to your feeling, it is Clear To Me that your the Sentrydog has been trying to catch your attention for quite some time,\" smirked Tultamaan.\n\nI glared at the Sentrydog. It's not a very good spell. Actually it's a perfectly fine spell for dragons like Arilash who don't have dangersense. It's just not designed to report light, friendly touches. Which Tultamaan knows perfectly well. So I hissed at him, \"Next time you want to get my attention, try one of the nineteen senses I do have. You could probably manage kineception\" \u2014 that's awareness of moving things \u2014 \"or maybe hearing\" \u2014 that's awareness of sounds. \"I'm not so sure you could manage to make yourself visible to dangersense.\"\n\n(Honestly, Tultamaan roars with potential menace to dangersense just as much as any other slightly crippled dragon. He's roughly as dangerous as I am. In a party of a gross or more dragons, and him not attacking me, he certainly doesn't stand out.)\n\nHe hissed at the insult. \"There is more to being Dangerous than the use of Foreclaws. I hunt krakens in the Seas of Graulfnir!\" To remind me that he's got important relatives in more than one world, I suppose, as well of his cold breath and utterly ordinary fangs. \"Some of those of us with Handicaps choose to experience a full and expansive Life despite a few Little Problems. Others are Not So Adventurous and prefer to avoid Interesting and probably even Enjoyable Situations.\"\n\n\"You get to twine me on our mating flight. Not before,\" I snapped. A few eavesdropping adults chuckled at my vulgarity.\n\n\"I do not strictly refer to that degree of Intimacy, Jyothky, but to any sort of Broadening Experience,\" said Tultamaan. \"You could have travelled in the Entourage of the King to other worlds.\"\n\n\"And I could have stayed away from my doctor for a year and maybe never grown up,\" I snapped. \"We've had this argument before.\" We hadn't really, but I was fairly sure that I had told him that when I turned down his invitation.\n\n\"It is of Very Little Consequence anymore. The trip was a success despite your Conspicuous Absence,\" said Tultamaan. I suppose it was, since the king put Tultamaan into our mating flight when they got back. \"Though there will be further opportunities for Merriment of All Sorts when we travel together.\"\n\nI looked around for Llredh, but unfortunately my orange and spiky fianc\u00e9 was deep in a conversation with my mother, and not available to rescue me from the one of his rivals I actually did want to be rescued from. The useless beast.\n\nRoroku\n\nSo that part was all fine. That part that wasn't fine was Roroku.\n\nRoroku has every right not to be fine. She and Arilash are my rivals. Actually, Roroku usually has been pretty nice to me, and Arilash acts more like an older cousin than a rival. It's not like I'm much of a threat to either of them. (We don't really need to have a mating flight. Roroku will be first, Arilash will be second, and I will be third or last depending on how much effort Roroku and Arilash spend on defeating me. That's how it will go.)\n\n(On second thought, there is a point. The drakes have to try to impress us, so that we can choose who marries who. I'll have my choice of four, at least. That's not so bad. I can't really see either Roroku or Arilash wanting Osoth, either. There should be someone left who's at least a friend, if I decide I want that, even if Ythac gets picked, which he might. And Nrararn was pretty, at least. I didn't want to set my sights as high as Llredh; Roroku or Arilash would probably pick him.)\n\nI should cross that out, though. It's wrong.\n\nLate in the party, Arilash's father flew up higher than anyone else, and shouted in a very loud voice, \"And come to our home tomorrow! Arilash and Roroku and Jyothky and six young boys will be going off for their mating flight!\"\n\nWhich got a chorus of \"Finally!\" s and things like that. But dragons were more glad for us than anything else.\n\nBut then Roroku flew up next to him, and shouted, \"You'll have to wait a few more days. I don't think any dragon in the mating flight is really suitable for me. So I've arranged to change places with Csirnis of Chiriact.\"\n\nWhich got a chorus of rather angry hisses and growls and gracks from several of us, mixed in a sea of snickers from most of the guests.\n\nMy fianc\u00e9s all were furious. She had said, in front of a sixth of the dragons on Mhel, that they weren't suitable mates for her. Chiriact is an old rich dragon-world. Mhel is more of a minor frontier. She declared that she was worthy of the scion of an old rich powerful famous family, and they certainly didn't qualify.\n\nAnd, of course, the mating flight would be delayed even more. A few days on top of fifteen years doesn't seem like that much. But having finally gotten the chance to go, and have it delayed yet again, is a grave insult.\n\nI was nearly as angry myself, though. She didn't say \"no drake is suitable.\" That would have been bad enough, since I'm going to be marrying one of those drakes who isn't suitable for Princess Queen Grandiose Roroku.\n\nShe said \"nobody is suitable\" . Like, Arilash and I aren't suitable rivals for her. Nor suitable companions either. It's not enough that she'd be first dragoness, with only a little challenge from Arilash and less from me. She doesn't even consider us worthy to challenge her.\n\nAnd she announces this to a sixth of the dragons on Mhel. At my coming-of-age party.\n\nIt's usually not very good manners to attack anydragon else at your party. I didn't think that I could look any more foolish than I already did, though. Unfortunately she was wearing the Ulthana's Targe, and my lightning just sizzled around her and didn't do very much. I should have expected anydragon to wear her best defensive spell before making an announcement like that. I should have looked, claw it!\n\nSo I wound up looking rude and ineffectual. Just the thing for a happy coming-of-age party.\n\nA while afterwards she flew down to me. \"I'm sorry, Jyothky. I just got the word back from Chiriact yesterday, and didn't have time to tell anyone else. And I really was trying to get a mating flight that would leave sooner, more than about the quality.\"\n\nBut she had illusion spells all around her that blocked veriception. Like everydragon usually does. She could have been telling the truth, for all I could tell. I'd guess half-truth: she wanted a flight that left sooner, but she didn't think much of anyone else in the flight. Maybe half-truth about finding out about it yesterday, too. I'll bet she pushed the issue with them right after she heard about my egg.\n\nI exercised all my wit and diplomacy, and said, \"Quite all right.\" Yes, this exercised all my wit and diplomacy. Not to come up with a clever phrase. To avoid attacking her and getting even more embarrassed. Or to avoid crying.\n\nNrararn, at my flank, said \"Quite all right, truly. We who remain faithful are getting the better part of the bargain. Even if they send us a two-winged one-eyed brutal idiot, we will be far and away the exchange up.\"\n\nRoroku hissed at him. \"It is I who will be the exchange up. Chiriact does not breed twee sorcerers, unfeeling children, wild perverts, or lumpish brutes!\"\n\nThere were an awful lot of dragons around for us to attack Roroku in any serious way. (In case it's not obvious, her family is pretty important. Mine is not.)\n\nSo we bickered at her a bit and let her go. No choice there.\n\nArilash\n\nArilash stomped up behind Roroku, hissing like a thousand kettles, and prodded her in the flank with a clawtip. \"You decide to take a wisdom path, Roroku! Competing with me is a fool's deed.\"\n\nRoroku smiled a wicked smile, and said, \"As you like, Arilash.\" Which everyone who heard it understood as, \"You're wholly wrong, but you're not worth arguing with.\"\n\n\"I like the situation. I do not so much like the means by which you announce it. But I do not expect any very good manners from you, Roroku.\"\n\n\"My manners are not to be questioned. Yours are another story, Arilash. Is it polite, the things you do? Is it ritually appropriate? For, know this: you have defiled yourself with so many drakes that there can be neither honor nor good fortune in a mating flight with you.\"\n\n\"Hah \u2014 you attempt libel! If you had not abandoned all your honor just now, I would take offense!\"\n\n\"Libel, you call it? The truth is not libel, Arilash.\"\n\n\"Truth, you call it? You leave out so many of the people I have defiled myself with, and you dare to call it truth? And about the mating flight. That is superstition. You cannot theocept any truth to it, can you?\" Arilash doesn't have a good reputation really, as Roroku is hinting, but Arilash is quite well educated at least.\n\n\"It doesn't need a god to bring bad fortune to a mating flight,\" snapped Roroku.\n\n\"So, what is the governor of this cosmic principle which brings bad fortune to mating flights where someone starts a bit early and does a bit of investigative research? A god could do it, but there is no god involved. A spell could do it, a very intelligent spell with extensive divination and many forms of effectuator. A most mighty and puissant spell. A spell that is cosmic in scope and terrible to behold. A spell that we could probably magiocept from three universes over,\" said Arilash. \"A spell which is notably \u2014 even remarkably \u2014 nowhere to be noticed.\"\n\n\"It doesn't need magic, Arilash. It's a matter of honor.\"\n\n\"It is ever so fortunate that we have you with us to educate us on the topic of honor, Roroku. You break your engagement-oaths so honorably,\" said Arilash in a voice as sweet as honeyed blood.\n\nAnd that earned Arilash a gust of firebreath, right in the face. Arilash was only wearing the Small Wall. Roroku is good with fire; it must have stung. Arilash laughed while she was healing her eyes. \"And your manners at a party are impeccable too. Offend the guest of honor, then scorch the guests. For an encore, perhaps you will try to steal Rankotherium's enchanted bracelet.\"\n\n\"I shall do no such thing,\" said Roroku, stiffly. \"But I shall be glad to have seen the last of you, and the boys as well.\" She left me out. Probably she barely remembered me.\n\n\"I shall be glad to hasten that wondersome day!\" said Arilash. \"Shall I cast the Triangular Cyclonette for you, as a sign of my esteem? Or at least my pleasure at our final parting?\"\n\n\"I have a correspondent on Chiriact who shall do the honors. Not that I think there is the slightest chance that you would miscast it and spill me and your soon-to-be-rival Csirnis into the void,\" said Roroku.\n\n\"And when, precisely, will this delightful day occur? I would not miss the chance to confirm that you have, indeed, fled to Chiriact. Not that I doubt your words one bit, O most honor-teaching and custom-upholding oathbreaker,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Tomorrow. The third hour, at Ztesofaum's Pyramid,\" said Roroku.\n\n\"My wingtips quiver with pleasure at the very thought!\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Better than what usually makes them quiver with pleasure,\" said Roroku. She leapt into the air before Arilash could reply.\n\nArilash grinned at me and Nrararn, and Osoth who had joined us. \"She does like to get the last word in, doesn't she? I wonder what flaw this Csirnis might have, that Chiriact wanted to be rid of her, or she of them?\"\n\nThe drakes didn't want to speculate. If one of them was lucky, he would be marrying her. It really doesn't matter what flaws a dragoness has (e.g., mine): she will find a mate. And a mate who considers himself luckier than half the drakes anywhere, at that.\n\nI didn't want to speculate either. I'd have been happier alone in the Indigo Desert, getting flayed by the sand, not feeling anything and not feeling anything.\n\nCoda: Which Sex Is Better To Be\n\nThis seems like a good time to be officially Very Glad To Be A Dragoness. I don't get much of a choice about it though. I suppose I could shapeshift to male and pretend for a while. As long as I never met another dragon, since they could tell instantly. Or\n\nanyone else with the least bit of magioception.\n\nAdvantages Disadvantages\n\nI am guaranteed getting married, since there are two drakes for every dragoness. I'm not really very eager to get married. Arilash, well, Roroku was right about Arilash, so I guess she does want to have a drake she can mate with whenever she wants and nobody will complain. I haven't really been looking longingly on drakes very much. And I've tried, too.\n\nThis is rather more than a matter of gratifying intimate personal urges, or even producing progeny. Mated pairs of dragons control territory.\n\nBachelors do not. They live on the territory of mated pairs, one way or another.\n\nI get a nicer coming-of-age inspection. Every year or so a big slimy vile thing shoves its way out of my cloaca.\n\nOr, after I'm married, it'll probably be fertilized sometimes too, and I'll have to destroy the ones I don't want to hatch.\n\nDragonesses enjoy copulating more, according to Arilash. I can't imagine how she found this out. If it's true at all.\n\nI can't feel, so I'm not going to enjoy it much.\n\nDrakes need to compete all the times, before they're married or definitely not getting married. Lots of fighting, lots of verbal sparring, lots of treasure hunting, all that sort of thing. Which some of them enjoy (Greshthanu) and some of them don't (Osoth).\n\nDragonesses compete too. The customs are a bit different. We fight and spar verbally as much. We don't collect much treasure, that would be offensive to the drakes \u2014 the drake gets status from presenting his mate a good\n\nhoard. Amatory prowess is another realm of competition... for drakes too, but more for dragonesses. Arilash is going to beat me in that. She's been practicing, if the rumors are true. Which is very undignified and\n\ninappropriate of course!\n\nI am not much obliged to study anything in particular beyond the basics of breath, sorcery, combat, rulership of households and domains. A dragoness can get away with more laziness than a drake. I know a handful who have taken advantage of this option. (I've actually had more of the opposite problem: I've wanted to study sorcery, but nobody will teach me anything but the simplest, because it will stunt my growth more than it already is.)\n\nDrakes who think it likely that they will lose generally need to study some craft or profession which will give them some status among dragons, afterwards. Osoth studies necromancy and Nrararn studies sky-magic, both quite respectable and useful specialities. Tultamaan studies the king, and is one of his advisors and retainers. Ythac should probably be paying more attention, though he is pretty good with information magic. Of those four, only Ythac has much of a real chance at getting married.\n\nI am automatically considered attractive and appealing no matter what I look like or what parts of me got broken. This ought to be important. I am probably going to be the technically worst lover in all of the\n\ndragon-worlds. I'm going to keep asking \"is it in yet?\" , because I\n\ncan't tell. If not using an outright scrying spell \u2014 can you think of anything more offensive than that? But ultimately that doesn't matter.\n\nI'm a dragoness, which means I am more desirable than the lack-of-mates that half the drakes have.\n\nI am not actually very attractive. I'm a dull black color without much texture. Arilash is a dull tan color without much texture. Roroku is a dull green color without much texture. And so on. Compare that to the drakes: Nrararn with his twirly horn and incandescent mane and pretty cerulean color, Greshthanu with his garden of blue and orange spikes, etc. etc. etc.\n\nThis is really just the same as songbirds. Females are dull colors to avoid attracting attention. Males are bright colors to attract attention: attention of females, attention of predators, whatever.\n\nBut I'm not a stupid little songbird. I'd like to look exciting and dramatic. Again, I could shapeshift or use cosmetic spells the way drakes do, but everydragon can tell that they're there and pretty much can tell what I really look like too so it doesn't help.\n\nI have a better-than-drake chance of surviving my Great Separation.\n\n(Mating flights must be nasty on Dragonhome for the original, un-Separated dragons. Two drakes for every dragoness is bad enough, but they've got three or four.)\n\nI did survive my Great Separation, so this one doesn't seem very important any more. Sure, I should be thankful and happy for it. But the only difference it makes to my day-to-day life is that I have a day-to-day life. That's surprisingly hard to remember.\n\nI'm going to get married.... I'm going to get married.\n\nI'm not even being flippant or clever here. Suppose that I have my choice of four drakes (really two or three) and I don't want to marry any of them, or anyone at all?\n\nSuppose I want to go be an explorer, a discoverer of new worlds? A researcher into the depths of sorcery (bad for size, bad for fertility)?\n\nAnythingother than the co-ruler of a tiny-to-small domain? That's not a choice for me. I'm going to get married, because there are so many more drakes than dragonesses that every dragoness has to get married.\n\nI hope there's actually some fun in it. I'm not going to enjoy sex, that's clear enough. My parents seem basically happy with each other, but they say that's some work to achieve and due in a large part to a regular schedule of sex plus lots of unscheduled sex. Rankotherium and Dessvaria seem to basically hate each other.\n\nI hereby resolve to meet my fate with all the honor and bravery of a dragon.\n\nAnd if I don't have all the sensuality of a dragon, I'll fake it as best I can.\n\n(I hope you believe that resolution for me, 'cause I don't.) ((I also hate writing codas. They make me think too much.))"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Csirnis (Day 5)\n\nZtesofaum's Pyramid is a great big tetrahedron of reinforced concrete and archaic plastics, nearly half a mile high. The mhelvul made it for their god Ztesofaum and his army of priests, subordinate gods, functionaries, crusaders, and assassins. I don't really understand why. Ztesofaum had conquered most of the continent when the thing was started. (Osoth's new pet god-in-a-bottle was one of his subordinates, I think. He might know why it was built.) And when my parents and their cohort showed up, neither pyramid nor priests nor subordinate gods nor functionaries nor crusaders nor assassins nor Ztesofaum's own powers helped him very much. He died under Rankotherium's breath. And Rankotherium wasn't nearly so redoubtable back then, I don't think.\n\nAnyway, the pyramid is a pretty impressive structure. It's small if you think of it as a mountain, but it's awfully big if you think of it as a building. And all the ancient, broken guns and beam-projectors sticking out of the sides look kind of imposing too: like you want to wear the Hoplonton if you're flying close to it. It's made of some very stern black concrete. We had the mhelvul paint it pastel yellow and green after we conquered them. There's nothing like a big pyramid that used to be the invincible fortress of one of your mightiest gods being painted pastel yellow and green to remind you just how weak you are compared to your new overlords. And the big hole that Rankotherium burned through it can't hurt that impression either.\n\nWe like to describe it to off-world visitors, so that they can show up there and be impressed too. Not that it's their ancestors' fortress. Most off-world visitors are dragons anyway. But it looks like the site of a huge impressive battle. Actually it was a small impressive battle. The real sites of the huge impressive battles are places like the plains of Owixie where Ztesofaum died, flat and covered with farms now, or the Indigo Desert where the survivors of Owixie fled. Rankotherium's hole in the pyramid mostly let him get at some subordinate crusaders and assistant functionaries and adjutant priests and auxiliary assassins. All the top-grade ones had died at Owixie.\n\nSo, at the third hour, Roroku made her final farewells to her friends and family (warm and heartfelt), and to her former mating flight (perfunctory).\n\nSomeone in Chiriact cast the Triangular Cyclonette. I have never seen the spell before. It's worth remembering. It looks like a fierce wind made of fire, niobium, and poetry, blowing both ways through a gate made of ice, centuries, and death. Roroku dived into the wind and flew through the triangle, and I suppose she ended up on Chiriact. Her parents took that opportunity to fly off for home, with some good travel spells. Which didn't look particularly suspicious at the time.\n\nThen another dragon, Csirnis, flew out. I was pretty impressed with Csirnis, from the first glance. We all were.\n\nCsirnis's scales look like crisp leaf-shapes of gold. Mine do too, sometimes, but that's because I'm pretty good at shapeshifting. Csirnis wasn't wearing any shapeshifting spells. Eyes like huge emeralds, antlers with four perfect and symmetrical forks each, six perfect barbels, a long crest from head to mid-back with just the right touch of iridescence. Tail with an elegant diamond-shaped stinger. Six curved claws, and matching elbow-spikes, as white as ivory. Forewings shining like gold, hindwings shining like emeralds, matching scales and eyes just right. Big, too \u2014 twenty-five feet from shoulder to tailbase. As big as Greshthanu, who was distinctly the biggest dragon in the mating flight before. And not a bit of shapeshifting involved.\n\nNo spells to block veriception either. A lot of defensive spells, to be sure, as for a dragon who expected to be flying into a sudden battle. But we could all see that everything Csirnis said today was true, with neither lies nor evasions.\n\nAlso, despite the promise and the name, Csirnis was very obviously, beautifully male.\n\n(If you're a dragon and reading this, you know how I know. If you're not, you should learn to tell because sometime you might annoy one of us by saying the wrong thing. Both sexes of dragon can be touchy about it.)\n\n\"Dragons of Mhelvul! The dragons of Chiriact have cheated you!\" he boomed, by way of introduction. \"They promised a dragoness, but sent a drake instead!\"\n\nAnd that's a big cheat! It means that one more of their drakes gets to marry, and one fewer of ours does. Or, two fewer if Arilash or I marry him, and by the end of the day he sounded like he'd be pretty tempting and sure to come in first. And the one or two drakes who don't get to marry are one or two from our mating flight.\n\nOsoth laughed a low, bitter laugh. \"Our proud fianc\u00e9e was in such a hurry to leave that she paid little attention to the bargain she was making.\"\n\n\"A dead drake, but still flying! I do not approve of this unfairness!\" shouted Greshthanu. He had been upset all morning. We all thought that he was Roroku's favorite. Maybe he was, but she still didn't actually want him. Now he was going to be stuck with Arilash, or me, or nobody.\n\n\"The concept is not wholly unappealing, nor wholly unobtainable,\" said Osoth. \"Though this one is particularly alive. I speak as an expert on the topic.\"\n\n\"After I kill him, will you animate him?\" asked Greshthanu.\n\n\"Back to Chiriact we will send him! Our opinions on drakes and dragonesses, this will show!\" added Llredh.\n\n\"The one who kills him is not going to marry me!\" shouted Arilash.\n\n\"Nor me!\" I added. \"Which pretty much means a wasted mating flight!\"\n\n\"Kill me if you will,\" shouted Csirnis, very high up and circling a deliquescing but still probably usable the Triangular Cyclonette. \"But know this: Though you were sent a drake, you were not sent the least among drakes of Chiriact!\"\n\n\"Oh? Who are you, then, Csirnis of Chiriact?\" I yelled at him.\n\n\"I am Csirnis Tok\u00e0-Dnes\u015b Varagirion.\"\n\nRight. Not the least among drakes of Chiriact. He probably is in line to inherit a continent, if not the whole world. He must have a hoard bigger than our whole castle. I really, really wished I had much of a chance to come in first in the mating flight.\n\n\"Right,\" said Arilash, a half-step ahead of me. \"Where's your hoard? Got anything more than you can carry under your scales?\"\n\n\"I have not so much as a single shard of topaz, real or false. I abdicated hoard and title both.\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"And why would you do a thing like that?\" asked Llredh, hoping to diminish Csirnis in the eyes of his fianc\u00e9es.\n\n\"In protest at my parents' cheating. And various prior crimes to which I will be no party.\" he said. Which certainly diminishes him in my eyes now. Not because he's poor, but because he's so proud. A drake who abandons that much, that easily, might well abandon wife and territory and children for no better reason.\n\n\"Not so that we won't kill you the first night out?\" asked Greshthanu. \"If you're coming on the mating flight at all \u2014 Arilash and Jyothky haven't accepted you.\" Arilash and I showed no signs of wanting to. The king, perched on the pyramid next to Tultamaan, looked a bit irritated, but didn't choose to exercise his legal authority to dissolve the mating flight (kings never do that, not twice in a gross-year) or to ban Csirnis from it (which would have been humiliating for the king since he had already approved the exchange of Csirnis for Roroku). Probably he wasn't interested in picking a fight with the royal family of Chiriact, probably because he'd lose any paws he slashed them with and then some.\n\n\"You may try to kill me now, or later, as you wish. But I am as deadly in battle as any dragon of our age, and more than most,\" he said. It didn't even sound very arrogant when he said it: just the pure elemental confidence of which arrogance is a cloying and obnoxious imitation.\n\nThere was, by this time, a bit of a stir among the older dragons. Most of them started off furious at Chiriact for cheating us. The more they heard from Csirnis, the less furious they could be. His decision not to wear veriception blocks was a very clever bit of tactics. When he explained that he was, in part, offering himself as a hostage to prevent a war between Mhelvul and Chiriact, everyone knew that he meant it.\n\nI don't remember the arguments very well. My parents and Arilash's were more amused than anything; one of us would have a chance at a really splendid and pedigreed, if poor and irrational, husband. My fianc\u00e9s' parents were the most unhappy, for the same reason. They were the only ones who actually suggested attacking Chiriact. Nobody else really wanted to do that, since there are a lot more dragons on Chiriact than on Mhelvul, and we'd pay dearly for any revenge. Roroku's parents had already left. Roroku's friends were between those poles.\n\nArilash and I invited Csirnis down to chat more sociably. Ythac joined us. The other fianc\u00e9s sat and glared at us, or joined the elders' argument.\n\n\"So. Would you marry me, if I picked you?\" Arilash asked Csirnis.\n\nCsirnis' eyes were like clear emeralds. \"Yes, or Jyothky, if she does. I am landless, hoardless, subjectless. A drake like me can hardly be choosy.\"\n\n\"Well, you are a pauper today,\" said Ythac. \"What will happen when you return to Chiriact and demand your old perquisites back?\"\n\n\"I would get soundly trounced by some of the best warriors on Chiriact, I should think. And executed in some public and painful way, if I didn't arrange to die fighting,\" said Csirnis calmly.\n\n\"So you have no territory for a new bride, nor the hope of any!\" roared Greshthanu. \"Unlike myself!\"\n\n\"True indeed. I would have made a better husband an hour ago than I am currently,\" he said. \"I did not come here for personal advantage.\"\n\n\"You left on bad terms with your parents... are they the king and queen of Chiriact?\" I asked.\n\nHe smiled at me, which was awfully impressive and presumably made my cloaca go fluttery, not that I could tell. \"Yes, they are king and queen. I was expecting to leave on bad terms; they are not given to forgiving public insults so easily. But they goaded me, and in some fury I revealed two crimes which they had hoped would never be traced to them. I doubt that they will forgive me this grand-year.\" (Twelve times twelve times twelve years, which is a long time, even for us.)\n\nYthac smiled his sticky-sweet smile, and said, \"I'm sure it's hard to stay angry at you, Csirnis.\"\n\n\"I am pleased to hear that, Ythac, though I am not wholly sure my parents concur. They have had more than a little practice. Still, I feared that any other drake who came here would be torn apart. I was not sure that I would not be!\"\n\n\"But you came anyway,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"My parents were going to send Merigon, who is half-crippled and half-daft; he would have no chance. I demanded to be allowed to come in his place. They refused. With a certain amount of violence, distraction, and blackmail, I arranged that they allow me. Indeed, they were glad for some reason to keep me far from Chiriact.\"\n\n\"That's a brave and romantic story, and all true too!\" Arilash's eyes were glowing, and Ythac's. I'm sure mine were too.\n\nCoda: Chiriact\n\nI don't know all that much about Chiriact. Somehow it seemed rude to interrogate Csirnis about his home. Actually about the home he just exiled himself from. So here's what I know.\n\nAfter my great-four-or-five-times grandparents discovered how to give their children the Great Separation, my great-three-or-four-times grandparents left S\u015br\u00f2u. I think a few of their parents came with them. There was a bit of discord with the dragons who didn't get astral magic. One of us (the dragons who had the operation, viz. my ancestors, viz. us) had inherited a lifetime post, and when the unimproved dragons realized that he'd have it for many, many of their generations, they got rather upset and drove us all off.\n\n(How could they, you might ask? Sorcery stunts your growth. They were bigger than us, maybe a lot bigger, and certainly far more numerous as well. Modern magic might be enough to compensate in a one-on-one fight against a far bigger dragon, or it might not. And I don't think my ancestors had very many good spells. And even modern magic isn't that much of an advantage against a dragon. I usually lose fights to Arilash or Chevethna or Roroku, even though I have much better defensive spells.)\n\nAnyway, my ancestors went to Graulfnir, which had the honor of becoming the first proper dragonworld. (S\u015br\u00f2u isn't proper.) Their children mostly stayed on Graulfnir, though I think they colonized a few other worlds too. Their children, my great-or-great-great-grandparents, didn't have a lot of space on Graulfnir to live, so they colonized a lot of worlds, and Chiriact is one of those. So it's been a dragonworld for a long time.\n\nChiriact is a Typical Toroid. That means it's an inside-out world compared to, say, Mhel. And donut-shaped instead of round. It's got three kind of people I think. We named it after the chir \u2014 I think they're small and kind of buggish, but maybe they're the long-haired six-legged ones. I can't remember. The third kind is the gomgomfalloy, who are centipedes larger than a dragonet.\n\nAnd it's got politics. The original king and queen were in my great-or-great-great-grandparents' generation, of course, since they colonized the place. But there was some sort of big dragon-war, the kind where we fight each other thoroughly. I think the original queen got killed by treachery, and the original king got crippled beyond healing magic and exiled, and then got mysteriously assassinated. And Csirnis's parents took over after that.\n\nTwo wicked deeds in that story. Two blackmails that Csirnis revealed. I'll bet they go together.\n\nAnyway, back to Chiriact. The king and queen live in the Topaz Palace; that's pretty famous. It started off as an immense mountain of impure mottled quartz and amethyst. Lots of small people mined for a long time to tidy it up and carve it into a palace. Then three dragons very carefully breath-roasted it until it was, by all reports, a quite uniform and beautiful citrine. It's not topaz of course, just yellow quartz, but it's supposed to be impressive and beautiful and imposing. (Hence the \"fake topaz\" that he doesn't have any of now.)\n\nAnd probably matches Csirnis's scales perfectly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Greshthanu's Feast (Day 6)\n\nInevitably, we took a tour of Plaga Point. \"Inevitably\" because it's Arilash's favorite mountain range on all of Mhel, and she's sort of in charge. I didn't have any better ideas; nobody else wanted to go to the Indigo Desert. \"We\" means Arilash, Csirnis, Greshthanu, Osoth, and me. Ythac and Rankotherium were going to come, but they got into a huge fight over he-wouldn't-tell-me-what and they went to visit Dessvaria instead.\n\nOf course the drakes got into a bicker or two, as soon as we were in the air on the way. That's good manners even if they're not technically on the mating flight yet.\n\nGreshthanu shouted at Csirnis, \"And what good is a prince and heir, when he is a dragon? Are your parents so weak that they fear death?\"\n\nCsirnis flicked his left barbels. \"Oh, not much use at all, truth to tell. I imagine I live a more worthwhile life now that I have abdicated.\"\n\n\"Hah! You know nothing, prancing prince!\" roared Greshthanu. \"I may not be royalty, but I have done mighty deeds already, while you were playing with your dancing-masters and poetry-masters in the court of Chiriact!\"\n\n\"My poetry-masters were never fully satisfied with my performance. An odd thing, for a royal dragon to be chided by distinctly non-royal chirs. But my parents were never fully satisfied with my performance either. Especially yesterday,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"Just what I would expect, from a prancy poncy prince! Why, only recently, I settled a war among my parents' small people!\" laughed Greshthanu.\n\n\"That is surely a valuable thing!\" said Csirnis. \"I have done a few minor things here and there, but never that.\"\n\n\"I hadn't heard all about it either,\" I said. That's just barely true enough not to make me vericept unpleasantly to myself: I had heard a lot about it, just not all about it. Everyone knows something about it. I am not precisely one of Greshthanu's intimates, not since I refused to be intimate with him a few years ago, so I hadn't got details. (I officially cannot complain about being intimate with him starting in a few days, and before Csirnis showed up Greshthanu was pretty much my most attractive fianc\u00e9, but I didn't want to start early. Like, not before my first egg.) \"Will you tell us now?\" That's the traditional invitation for a drake to boast \u2014 not that they mostly need to be invited very much \u2014 and it's a polite thing to do and a good way to keep conversation going.\n\n\"Surely I will tell!\" roared Greshthanu. Yes, surely he would. \"In my parents' territory is Cartharn, a small kingdom rich in rice and mustard, whence comes the strongest fish sauce in all of Mhel. Next to Cartharn is Kbrench, slightly larger, wherein is grown rice and cotton and a fish sauce flavored with mushrooms. The two are old enemies from before we came to rule them. My parents fixed the border between them as the shallow Rumzu River, all set about with bullrushes, and ruled them fairly and well. From afar.\"\n\n\"Ruling from afar is certainly the best-loved form of rulership. If you have the misfortunate circumscription of the intellectual facilities to restrict yourself to living subjects, that is,\" enunciated Osoth. (Most dragons talk. Osoth enunciates.)\n\nGreshthanu hissed at Osoth, and swatted at him with a hindclaw. \"Lout of a necromancer! You know less than the prince about governance!\"\n\n\"I make no pretense of rulership! Unlike one or two dragons, who pretend to it with great determination,\" said Osoth, dodging badly. He healed the long shallow score on his flank.\n\n\"Well! When the floods came very heavily, the Rumzu River leapt away from its traditional banks, and Cartharn and Kbrench were all aswim and adrown for a while. And when the water receded, the river found a new course for over eight miles: a course that snipped half a mile's territory off of Cartharn and gave it to Kbrench. Or, if one were to listen to Cartharn's description of the situation, the river simply moved half a mile over, so that it now flowed entirely through Cartharn territory for eight miles,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"A shame to rely so heavily on autonomously mobile landmarks,\" said Csirnis. \"Though rivers do make wonderful boundary markers for the most part.\"\n\nGreshthanu glared at him angrily. I don't think Greshthanu could find any actual insult in Csirnis' words \u2014 I certainly couldn't \u2014 but we're both sure they were mocking somehow. Greshthanu snorted a thick frore fog. \"A shame my parents didn't have your advice when they set up the boundary. They could have chosen both to have it there and not to have it there.\"\n\n\"Your parents are mighty indeed, if the laws of logic fall before their breath and fangs!\" said Csirnis, and flipped his tail-sting. \"I am tolerably skilled at fighting, but I know not how to challenge such a foe as that.\"\n\nGreshthanu glared at him a bit more. \"Well. Mighty they were, mighty they are! But distracted they were, too.\"\n\n\"Right, distracted. I remember. Your father was having an affair with Dessvaria, wasn't he?\" said Arilash.\n\nI hadn't heard about that. I certainly didn't see Dessvaria around very much when I stayed with Rankotherium and Ythac, and less afterwards. Certainly Rankotherium and Dessvaria aren't on the best of terms. I've never heard that she behaved improperly. Dragons don't do that sort of thing.\n\n\"So naturally they sent me, their son and trusty vicar, to settle the border!\" roared Greshthanu. Which rhymes and scans pretty well in Grand Draconic. Classy of him. \"So I descended into the disputed region, where angry farmers faced angry farmers with bill-hooks and spears, and I commanded them to peace!\"\n\n\"I imagine that a few gross of poorly-armed mhelvul warriors could feel themselves overmatched by a dragon,\" said Osoth. \"Even an unimpressive one. I trust they belayed their bulbinating battle and bowed before you?\"\n\nGreshthanu glared at Osoth. \"They stopped! They did me obeisance, in the bloody mud of the battlefield! But I know these mhelvul. They are wicked and evasive; they are sneaky and subtle. They might not fight that day, while I was present, but later? After I left, they would surely fight again, unless I took measures to bring about some unity! Some commonality of purpose, some agreement, some cooperation!\"\n\n\"And I found a clever plan for that. I commanded them to lay down their arms and build me a palace, working side by side, in the center of the disputed territory!\"\n\nCsirnis curled his tailtip again. \"Well, that's a novel approach, to be sure, especially in a region recently troubled by floods and wars. How did it work?\"\n\nGreshthanu crashed his forewings together. \"Brilliantly! Oh, there were a few troubles here and there. It started out badly, in fact, with bickering and fistfights! I had to hire a chief architect from Pdernuz, so that the project would not be run by someone from one side or the other. But after a few months the foundations were begun, and the two countries cooperated.\"\n\nCsirnis looked a bit alarmed. \"Months? How long are months on Mhel?\"\n\n\"Two days longer than standard months. Why, how long are months on pretty little Chiriact?\"\n\n\"We have no moon, being in a Typical Toroid. We use standard months,\" said Csirnis. \"Months it is, then. I must admire your patience, to put up with discord for so long a time.\"\n\n\"Ah, a bit of hunting, a few trips to Fohhona,\" said Greshthanu. He and Arilash smirked at each other. Maybe no rumors about Dessvaria, but I had heard that Arilash wasn't quite as chaste as she should have been. (Oh, I wrote that earlier: Roroko said as much, and Arilash too. I don't know that they were telling the truth, but maybe.) I refused Greshthanu when he asked me, but maybe Arilash didn't. (I wonder if my fianc\u00e9s care more about chaste behavior, or prowess at lovemaking... actually I'm pretty sure that Greshthanu and Llredh don't care much about chastity at all. I have some hope that Csirnis does.) \"After a year or so, the palace was done.\"\n\n\"What was it like?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, very tidy, very cozy. A big cave of a room to sleep in, a bigger cave of a room for waking, some small people rooms for small people. We didn't bother with a lavatory; the Rumzu is fine for such things. It was painted glorious marigold and aquamarine, with expensive paints imported from Gzathato.\"\n\n\"Paid for from your own hoard? Or your parents'? Or what?\" asked Arilash. I was wondering the same thing. He should be fattening his hoard for the mating flight.\n\n\"Well, no, of course not any dragon's hoard. This was a service to my mhelvul. It's only right and fair that they should pay for it,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"And surely the mhelvul paid gladly, eager to provide for their own correction?\" asked Osoth, smirking.\n\n\"They never complained!\" roared Greshthanu.\n\n\"Well, I don't know nearly enough about the conquest of Mhel,\" said Csirnis daintily. \"But shortly after the conquest of Chiriact, my mother demanded a grand of pounds of gold from each city-state in a certain region. One city-state protested, saying that it was poor and half the size of the others, which was true. Mother, who was a bit of a Downcrusher, proclaimed that they should pay double.\"\n\n\"\u00dbj,\" said Osoth in Grand Draconic. Which means of course, \"Any doom is proper for small people.\" A simple, common word for a simple, common concept.\n\n\"I am not a Downcrusher!\" snarled Greshthanu. \"I did nothing of the sort! \u00dbj is a wicked philosophical principle! There is no fairness to \u00fbj!\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure Osoth was referring to my parents, who are, indeed, quite well-known Downcrushers,\" said Csirnis. \"No unnecessary inferences or comparisons need to be made to your own, far more generous, activities.\" Osoth and Arilash and I struggled mightily, and mostly avoided smirking. Mostly.\n\n\"Well! That's fine! After the palace was complete and the Cartharnese and Kbrenchese had proved that they could dwell side by side in peace, I promised that the worthiest of the two countries would get control of the disputed lands. For each of them had a reasonable claim to them, and no fair division could be made from first principles,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"And how did you measure worthiness?\" asked Osoth. \"We are provided with twenty splendid senses, of which I esteem dangersense not the least. But I, at least, have no innate way to measure such a hazy thing as worthiness.\" I considered biting him, but he was on the other side of the flight, and that didn't deserve a breath.\n\n\"In the most natural way possible!\" exclaimed Greshthanu. \"With a triumph of applied philosophy. I had each kingdom in turn produce a great feast and symposium, at which they displayed for me the greatest triumphs of their culture, sophistication, and cuisine. The one that measured the highest, of course, would get the land. Perfectly decisive! Perfectly fair!\"\n\n\"And you get two top-notch feasts,\" I noted.\n\n\"Well, of course. And no, that's not \u00fbj, it's simply an exercise in the displaying of superior culture. And Cartharn certainly took it that way! Oh, what a feast that was. Flounder stuffed with snails and peppers, glorious curries of plaintains and squashes, and a whole roast ox crusted in cinnamon and cumin and asafoedita half an inch thick.\" (A dragon after my own heart, in that respect. One fianc\u00e9 point for Greshthanu! A pity he lost so many other ones.)\n\n\"That sounds like a respectably tasty bribe for a nice slice of territory,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"It wasn't a bribe,\" snarled Greshthanu. \"It was a display of culture.\"\n\n\"A display of cuisine, at least,\" said Csirnis calmly.\n\n\"That it was, that it certainly was! I made sure that Kbrench's feast was a week later,\" said Greshthanu. \"But... what do you suppose they came up with?\"\n\n\"A little bowl of pickles and mushrooms and rice, to show how poor they would be without that slice of land?\" I guessed.\n\n\"Hah, no, worse! They served a similar feast \u2014 the two countries mostly have the same cuisine, after all \u2014 but even the oh-so-clever prince will never guess what the ox was encrusted with,\" said Greshthanu. He arched his head up and half-struck at Csirnis, as a challenge.\n\n\"I would not offer offense to your storytelling or to the local spices, which are largely mysteries to me, by guessing,\" said Csirnis. (Backing out of a challenge like that? Very weak of him! But guessing wrong wouldn't have counted for much either, I suppose. Tiny point to Greshthanu.)\n\n\"Cinnamon and cumin and asafoedita and such... yes... but also with the dung of the hybarcas!\"\n\n\"Extraordinary,\" murmured Csirnis. \"What's a hybarcas?\" Arilash and I explained that it's a big wolverine sort of thing, whose droppings are probably quite foul and certainly never eaten intentionally. \"Whyever did they do that?\"\n\n\"Bah, you get ahead of the story!\" said Greshthanu. \"It matters not why they did it, not yet. I put my paw upon the neck of the king of Kbrench, and commanded him to eat of it! Which he did with reluctance and trembling. So straightaway I had my answer: Cartharn had a noble nature, but Kbrench had the vilest nature among all mhelvul! Right, right? Do you not agree?\"\n\n\"Well, I would like to know a bit more first,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"Bah, you demur, you disagree, you cavil and quibble and argue with vast bubbles of windy words, Csirnis! What sort of a foulness-lover are you? On Chiriact I imagine that you dine daily on pheasants festooned with ferret feces, but on Mhel we do no such thing!\"\n\nCsirnis fluttered his wings in a rather girlish giggle. \"Well, I suppose I can do without them for a dozen years on this mating flight. Perhaps even longer than that... Yes \u2014 for the company of Arilash and Jyothky, I shall give ferret feces up forever!\"\n\n\"He said 'no',\" said Osoth, in Grand Draconic. (That will take some explaining. The phrase \"He said 'yes'\" sounds pretty much like another phrase that can be translated as \"Overly complicated\" or \"too effete\" \u2014 the hisses are toned differently, but it rhymes and scans and has most of the same letters in most of the same order. So \"He said 'yes'\" is a sort of put-down for someone whose courtly speech has gotten the better of them. Lately \"He said 'no'\" has gotten to be that too.)\n\n\"So, Kbrench insulted you, so you awarded the land to Cartharn?\" I asked.\n\n\"Exactly! That is exactly how it went,\" said Greshthanu. \"But the story does not end there. I was clever, very clever.\"\n\n\"What else did you extort out of them?\" asked Osoth. \"A grand-weight of gold, as a payment that you do not destroy them from the insult?\"\n\n\"Nothing so unfair, nothing so unfair! I am an Uplifter, you must surely know it! I did, indeed, discover why Kbrench had given me such an insult,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"We were wondering that, yes. Even I was, and I'd heard somewhat about the judgment,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Cartharn has a most devious chef \u2014 Pdunk is his name. Pdunk made a great show of preparing his roast ox by a secret recipe known only to Rankotherium's personal chef, whom he, Pdunk, seduced and cozened out of it some years before. That recipe, assembled and cooked in the main kitchen with great pomp and many people watching, was the blend of spices and feces. He explained it in detail, how we enjoy slightly putrid food by mhelvul standards, and how the musky pungency of the manure is a spice to our tongues,\" said Greshthanu, flicking his ears in disgust. \"Yet in the bread-kitchen next door, they prepared a similar ox without any foulness in the crust. By means of a secret door they had built between the ovens, Pdunk and two assistants exchanged the oxen as they were roasting. The untainted ox was served to me; the tainted one was cast into the Rumzu. Then the Cartharn feast was a success.\"\n\n\"And, secretly, Cartharn's spies told Kbrench the whole recipe of the foul-crusted ox. And Kbrench's chefs resolved to match Cartharn's deed, and prepare the same recipe, and they served it to me. And thus they lost the contest!\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know which is the most cultured,\" said Csirnis. \"But Pdunk of Cartharn is certainly clever.\"\n\n\"Hah! I, too, am clever! In the Rumzu, the fouled ox floated, and fetched up against a fallen tree, and there it stuck. And then the farmers of Kbrench came upon it, and saw it, and knew that they had been tricked. They sent their children as spies to the private celebrations of Cartharn, and learned more of the story. And then they came to me, and told me of their humiliation.\"\n\n\"Oh? What did you do?\"\n\n\"Well! I interrogated them with veriception, I can tell you, and Pdunk as well! I had already proclaimed Cartharn the more cultured one, and it would be a shameful thing to change my mind. So I called for a ceremony of formally proclaiming the debatable lands to be Cartharn's. And at that ceremony, I gave Pdunk the devious chef his choice: either to lose a leg, or to lose the debatable lands,\" said Greshthanu. He smirked. \"Pdunk squirmed himself heartily, before he agreed to lose his leg! I almost made him roast it and serve it to me, but that seemed a bit much.\"\n\n\"A suitable reward and suitable mercy, perhaps, for the crime of not serving you a shit-ox,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Obtuse Osoth! He arranged to serve it to me!\"\n\nOsoth scratched his head with his tailtip. \"In that case, why did you not give the land to Kbrench?\"\n\n\"You are being deliberately dumb now! I had already pledged it to Cartharn!\" roared Greshthanu.\n\n\"I suppose I see.\"\n\nGreshthanu sneered at Csirnis. \"So these are the sorts of political subtleties and entanglements that a real drake must face, on a real and still untamed frontier world!\"\n\n\"Well, I have never faced a banquet dish quite like that,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"Bah! Not the cooking, but the treachery! Bravery and cleverness, power and sorcery \u2014 these are our great tools! Not your dainty little court concerns!\"\n\n\"Where did the 'bravery' part come in, Jyothky? Or the 'cleverness' part?\" asked Osoth to me, in a whisper just loud enough for everyone to hear. \"I think the 'power' was from intimidating a bunch of poorly-armed mhelvul. The 'sorcery' part is also obscure.\"\n\n\"I figured out the plans!\" roared Greshthanu.\n\n\"Well, yes. Too late to do anything about it, and after the mhelvul had told you about most of them,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"You, too, do not understand! For this insult I challenge you to the Caramelle!\" roared Greshthanu. Which he won, of course, five touches to two. Osoth isn't really a very good fighter.\n\nCsirnis should have challenged Greshthanu then, but he didn't. Which confuses me. Maybe Csirnis is actually the coward that Greshthanu is trying to paint him as? But no, coming here alone isn't a coward's deed.\n\nThen we got to the waterfalls at Plaga Point. They're impressive enough, I'll give Arilash that. One of them is a tall sort of vertical waterfall, as a small but intense mountain stream pours down a gap. The other one is a ring-river which flows around the mountain. When it gets to the same gap, it waterfalls too, but left to right.\n\nNo, that's not how rivers go normally on Mhel. The paingods did a few worthwhile things, when they ruled this world. Naturally they stuck them in the wilderness two hours' flight away from anywhere that mhelvul normally lived.\n\nThe dragons who like water spent a while circling around and through the crossing waterfalls. Osoth and Arilash even persuaded me to make a few passes. I continue not to like water.\n\nCoda\n\nFlying through a waterfall is just like flying through the air. Except that first your aeroception doesn't work very well, since your flight path isn't all air. Then when you get closer, your kineception doesn't work very well, since there are grands upon grands of small quickly-moving drops of water all over. Then your\n\nvision doesn't work very well, because water splashes into your face.\n\nThen your veriception doesn't work very well, because Csirnis and Arilash asked me whether I enjoyed it. And I'd lose fianc\u00e9e points if I told the truth. So I made quite sure that my lying spells were working before I\n\nanswered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Where Are We Going? (Day 7)\n\n\"Where are we going?\" asked Csirnis, as we flew across the Vorey Sea.\n\n\"Do you often undertake Long Voyages to Remarkably Distant Locations without the slightest clue where you will End Up?... But that is how you came to Mhel,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Pdernuz. Ythac's home. You've met Rankotherium and Dessvaria, big dragons who don't seem to like each other very much? Their capitol, too,\" I said.\n\n\"Please forgive me, Jyothky, but my mind was elsewhere. I was wondering where we were going for the mating flight. Roroku's messages might have said, but I did not get to read them myself,\" said the golden prince.\n\n\"It has been planned for many years to be at Chregony Point,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"It's not going to be there now!\" said Greshthanu. \"Don't be a fool, Tultamaan! Do not keep your mind in your forepaws!\"\n\n\"Pray forgive me for keeping my mind in my forepaws, or at least not having it in my head,\" said Csirnis. \"I did get the impression that there might be some change of plans necessary, but of what sort?\"\n\n\"Roroku's parents own Chregony Point,\" I said.\n\n\"And a diplomatic solution to the current crisis of letting us have the mating flight there, and construing that as her parents' apology...\" Csirnis mused.\n\n\"... Is rather more apologetic than they seem to be at the moment, and rather more forgiving than anyone else wants to be,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"If you were the girl your name implies, this would be much simpler,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"The politics might be simpler,\" said Arilash. \"But we don't have much to do with the politics, not exactly. We'd need to find another place to go, no matter how girly Csirnis is or is not.\"\n\n\"It is pleasant to find a practical topic which does not depend on my gender!\" said Csirnis. \"And to which I may be able to provide some assistance as more than a sacrificial victim, at that.\" But he wouldn't explain until we were all together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Rankotherium had given us his private garden for our private discussions. By \"private\" he means \"every dozen years or two he doesn't let the mhelvul use it for a day or two and doesn't apologize.\" I've never seen the garden empty before, and I must have been here a gross of times. But today, Rankotherium's mhelvul had worked for a day or more to arrange things for us, and then left, and put up barricades to keep all the other mhelvul of Pdernuz out.\n\nRankotherium is not a subtle dragon, not that he needs to be. He had arranged nine couches in a circle, with barrels of our favorite beverages by them: fish broth for Arilash, ginger and garlic and seagull soup for me, plain water for Ythac, and so on. In case that was too subtle, each couch had a circle of paper with the dragon's name on it. Ythac was to my left. Tultamaan was to my right, in case I needed a readily-available drake to compare Rankotherium's son against. Arilash was on Ythac's left, and Osoth on her left. (Fortunately, there aren't two Tultamaans in our group. One is quite enough. Osoth isn't impressive husband material, but he's perfectly good company. Arilash flirts with him sometimes, I've seen it.)\n\nCsirnis was as far as possible from either dragoness. Behold the subtlety of Rankotherium!\n\nYthac, our host, crashed his forewings on my back and Arilash's to call for quiet. \"As Csirnis is reported to have asked, we must choose a new place for our mating flight. I recommend Fohhona.\"\n\n\"Fohhona may, arguably, perhaps serve us poorly,\" said Osoth. \"It is a great metropolis of the mhelvul, to be sure. There are fine restaurants abounding upon the edges of splendid avenues. There are operas in elegantly-carved opera houses, and opera-boxes strewn with iron coins for the comfort of size-shifted dragonic spectators. One may lounge in parks which are both spacious and gracious. There will be a great deal to divert us from the business at hand.\"\n\n\"And we're supposed to go somewhere without any other dragons,\" said Nrararn. \"Bad enough that we traded a dragoness for a drake. We don't need competition from all the drakes who live in Fohhona, too.\"\n\n\"It is the drakes who visit that concern me the most!\" said Osoth. \"They are a dissolute and luxury-seeking lot, of poor moral character, given to the most vile of habits. Some, it is said, visit the brothels of Fohhona in mhelvul form. The others, I should worry about.\" Which got a few tails twitching: Llredh and Ythac and Arilash.\n\n\"Ythac, the Boundary Conditions of our situation are more Dire than you account for,\" said Tultamaan. \"Our Continued Presence on Mhel would serve as a Sort of Irritant to the senior dragons. My uncle has explained in the Very Strongest of Terms that we must Depart from our dear home world and learn about each other in an Idyllic Setting far from the Potential Political Instability that might trouble this poor innocent sphere should we Stay.\"\n\n(Tultamaan speaks with capital letters a lot, in Grand Draconic. Actually he just uses the emphatic particle \"xh\u00e9\u00e8\" a lot \u2014 it's a word that means \"the next word is the most important one in the sentence, even if you might not expect it to be based on the grammar.\" Most dragons don't use \"xh\u00e9\u00e8\" very often. I've never met another dragon who ever used it xh\u00e9\u00e8 twice in the same sentence \u2014 there, I just used it properly, but for the first time in my diary. When Tultamaan says it it comes out sounding just about like \"xh\u00ea\" , which you sometimes say if you're talking formally \u2014 \"xh\u00ea\" means \"Here comes a sentence which is just a plain statement and not a question or command or anything special\" , and we usually don't even say it. (But if you're not a dragon you shouldn't be learning Grand Draconic, so I won't say anything more about it. Not that we'll kill you for knowing a few words, especially those, but best not to learn too much. You can learn Petty Draconic instead. (And, if you do and if you care, Tultamaan pronounces and uses Petty Draconic's \"sh\u00e9\u00e8\" and \"sh\u00ea\" just the same way he does Grand Draconic's \"xh\u00e9\u00e8\" and \"xh\u00ea\" . [In translation, \"xh\u00e9\u00e8\" is rendered by putting the emphasized word in italics, as above, and \"xh\u00ea\" is simply not translated; Jyothky only uses it three times in the document.-bb])))\n\n\"Your absence, that is what the king craves! The politics, of this he is master. The idyllic setting, this is his court without you!\" growled Llredh. (Llredh, in case you're reading this in translation, never uses \"xh\u00e9\u00e8\" at all, and puts the word he wants to emphasize first in the sentence a lot. That also sounds funny but somehow not as pretentious as the way Tultamaan talks. (Though nobody can top Osoth for pretentious speech forms.))\n\n\"That's not true!\" hissed Tultamaan. \"I am a Trusted and Favored Advisor to the King, despite my Relative Youth!\" (Six xh\u00e9\u00e8s in one sentence!)\n\n\"Whose advice is so valuable that he is happy to send you away for years at a time, for more mating flights than anyone else gets,\" said Arilash.\n\nAs the two of them hissed at each other, Csirnis flared his shoulder-scales and shook out a length of chain holding a dozen engraved steel ovals. \"In service of the mating flight, and in deference to the wishes of the King of Mhel, I suggest we go to some other world. I happened to bring with me the copy of the summary of Quel Quen's latest surveying trip. They'll be published in a book in a few decades. Until then I doubt that many other dragons will know about any of these worlds.\"\n\nArilash leaned across the ring and politely snatched the ovals from his talons, and read the first one. \"What do we have here? Mavirta. A Basic Ball of a world, inhabited by seven-eyed basic bipeds with strong wizardry. Very active gods. Constant wars with the living dead. Lots of magic treasure lying around for the taking... I guess 'lying around' means 'being used by a hero less mighty than an average dragon'. Anyone interested? Osoth?\"\n\nOsoth laughed a dry bitter laugh, and said, \"I greatly prefer to have amiable relationships with the undead. And by 'amiable' I mean relationships in which I am clearly dominant. Mavirta, from that brief description, holds little appeal.\"\n\nTultamaan said, \"And strong wizardry and constant wars mean lots of Hard Fights for us, too.\"\n\nLlredh breathed a little tongue of flame towards Tultamaan. \"For Tultamaan's fear of wizards and wars, we dare not go to Mavirta.\"\n\nTultamaan rolled off his couch and against my flank. \"Do not do that, Llredh! This is a Council-Meeting, albeit an Informal and Undignified one, verging upon the Vulgar and Supremely Petty, compared to my Usual.\" Llredh just smirked at him.\n\n\"Does anyone actually want to consider Mavirta any more?\" asked Ythac.\n\n\"I am compelled to admit the logical possibility that, while Mavirta holds little direct appeal to me from the brief description, that the other eleven worlds in Arilash's hand are still worse. Perhaps, arguendo, the great explorer Quel Quen has gone off his form. Indeed, it is not unimaginable that none of the dozen worlds currently dangling from yon steely chain will please us, and that we might need to resort to different primary sources,\" said Osoth prissily.\n\n\"Mavirta was not my guess about which of the dozen worlds would make the best place to go,\" said Csirnis in a silky voice. \"We could come back to it if none of the other eleven are better in the end. But I have read them, and think there are four or five that may serve us well.\"\n\n\"Well, then, let us shuffle the ovals and read the most useful ones at the end, so that we may feel relieved and hopeful when we come upon them,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Or read them first, so that we can dispose of the useless ones in short order,\" Nrararn said.\n\n\"Useless, no world is her! Conquered and ruled, they can all be!\" said Llredh with a little roar.\n\n\"Arilash, perhaps you could read Plurdat, the fourth of the ovals, as a counterexample to Llredh's claim?\" said Csirnis. A delicate little claw-thrust into Llredh's metaphorical eye, that, and particularly elegant for co-opting Arilash into delivering the actual blow.\n\nSo Arilash skipped two ovals, and read. \"Plurdat. A swamp world, infinite in one direction, finite and unbounded and eight miles in the other direction. What, that would make it an infinite tube? That's odd! Inhabited by sentient frogs, barbarian ones. No gods. No treasure. Anyone want to go eat frogs in a swamp for a dozen years, with option to rule them forever?\" She looked left, she looked right. \"I believe we have proven Llredh wrong.\" Eight dragons fluffed their wings; one snorted sparks.\n\nArilash began, \"More usefully...\"\n\nOsoth chirped, \"But what could be more useful than confounding Llredh?\"\n\n\"More usefully, we may consider Poxis, which is what Quel Quen called it. The natives called it Dust, but we've already got a world called Dust, so they'll have to change. Another Basic Ball inhabited by basic bipeds, this time with trunks and forked fingers. They're really good crafters, good at enchanting magic devices, without much other magic. One fairly active creator god and three fairly active rebel angels opposing him and each other \u2014 he must be awful, usually there's only one rebel angel. Desert world. Constant plagues. That one sounds good to me, the drakes will have plenty of good treasure to hunt there,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"We must consider precisely what sorts of Trouble, Annoyance, and other forms of Difficulty we might achieve in the presence of four mutually hating Divine Beings,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Bah! Against me, against Greshthanu, against girl-named Csirnis, what god shall prevail? There is no god, there can be no god!\" proclaimed Llredh. Which isn't true. Gods, and less than gods, have killed young dragons before. And old ones too.\n\nSo we argued for a while about Poxis. Mostly we liked it, since any treasure-hunting we do there is sure to come up with lots of magic devices, and those are excellent treasure.\n\n\"Next one is Hove. More basic bipeds, this time with hooves, udders, and short fur. High technology, no magic, no gods. Typical Toroid shape, nice terrain. Anyone want to go fight giant robots and not collect enchanted rings for treasure?\"\n\n\"I do!\" called Llredh.\n\n\"What, really?\" asked Arilash. \"It sounds insipid to me, with no magic.\"\n\n\"The technology, she is amusing to fight. The treasure of technology, she is a special delight! The palladium, the vrexium, the niobium, these metals are greater of value than the gold, the silver, the copper!\"\n\n\"And also there are other treasures, for the more refined and culturally superior dragon to enjoy. Imagine a magic box that can peform a thousand songs on a thousand different instruments!\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"We all know about your father's collection from Oisec,\" said Arilash. (Which I barely did \u2014 I had heard that he had a particularly nice and unusual hoard, but didn't know the details.)\n\n\"My point exactly,\" said Greshthanu. \"A good hoard from a magic world is respectable, but a good hoard from a technology world is memorable. It's the kind of hoard that everyone knows about.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I suppose so,\" said Arilash. \"But anyone who wants to sire children on me had better give me at least one good magic ring too. Stereo sound systems and flashy televisions only count for so much, and that only until they're broken.\"\n\n\"I know plenty of repair spells,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"And we are Largely Better Off in a world that lacks both Magic and Gods,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Except for the giant robots and nuclear weapons,\" said Greshthanu. \"I'll bet those would pull your wings off and kill you nice and slow.\" (I'm pretty sure that nuclear weapons don't work that way.)\n\n\"So, you're against it, Greshthanu?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"No, I'd be glad to see a giant robot mash Tultamaan's hind legs 'til they match his forelegs. I'm hardly worried about a giant robot myself!\" said Greshthanu.\n\nAnd so on around. We rejected Arthiothis and Mnenzu and Traa out of hand, got a bit of interest in Orro and Oixe and Fanhanhan, and seriously considered Warvesh and Prane and Desperzio. I really liked Desperzio. The people there were llama-taurs, not basic bipeds, and they used science and magic both, and they were already under the control of seven Grand Archangels who didn't seem to be much stronger than dragons and were friendly to visitors. But there was to be no looting on Desperzio, so none of the drakes liked it, and there were no mountains, so Arilash didn't like it much either.\n\nAnd in the end, everyone thought that Desperzio and Hove were acceptable, except Tultamaan, who didn't find any of these worlds acceptable and wanted to go somewhere very civilized, so we ignored him. Greshthanu and Llredh favored Hove. Osoth, Ythac, and I favored Desperzio. The other three didn't care much.\n\nSo we battled it out. Deciding on the terms of the battle took longer than the battle itself. We offered them fair terms, that's three hits on one of them would remove that one from the battle and two on one of us would \u2014 so each side could have six total \u2014 but they laughed and said \"No thanks\" . So two hits to take anyone out of the battle, giving us an advantage in scoring. Then we had a very long argument about who was allowed to heal who, ending up with anyone can get healed by anyone but after the fight is over and it doesn't count. Then a shorter one about defensive spells, ending with everyone wearing just their own. And then a very fast one about where we'd fight. Ythac made us fight high up in the air, where we wouldn't rip up much of the garden.\n\nSo Ythac and Osoth and I flew as high as we could. We picked out Greshthanu as our first victim, and circled around, and dived at him from three angles. He looked stupid and stunned as we came close, and I scored his face with lightning breath. But as we closed upon him, he dived in a tight curl and got away from us, and his tailspikes left long bloody slashes on Osoth's side, and his fangs took a large bite out of my forewing. And we chased him down, and forgot about Llredh for a half-second too long, until his flame breath removed me from the fight (second hit). Llredh leapt on Osoth then, and bit his cheek and clawed his belly (second and unnecessary third hits). Ythac scorched Llredh, but the two big dragons struck at him from both sides, and he didn't have much of a chance. So we lost.\n\n\"Hove! She is our destination,\" roared Llredh. \"The zeppelins, the robots, the marvels of her technology!\"\n\nOsoth glared at him. \"It may be some while before you fully appreciate the marvels of technology, Llredh! You have not mastered the mysterious and subtle engineering art of counting to two properly!\" He healed his three wounds ostentatiously.\n\n\"The full measure with its lagniappe, in war, this is what I provide!\" He grinned at me. \"In battle, in love, both these places!\"\n\nI glared at him as I healed myself. \"I suppose we're going to Hove.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Farewell to Old Friends (Day 8)\n\nA while ago Verimet had sent me an invitation to Pdaalu's fourth birthday party. That's a very important birthday for mhelvul. For the very stupid reason that, at that age, the mhelvul could be controlled by their gods. They don't have their gods anymore. Of course we control them collectively as much as their gods used to. Except that we're benevolent about it. Their gods were usually more interested in sending armies against each other than in doing anything useful or decent for the other mhelvul.\n\nWe don't let them fight each other much, pace Greshthanu's clumsy matter of Kbrench and Cartharn. We definitely don't let them starve or die of plagues either. Uplifters do this because it's uplifty. Even a fairly downcrushy Downcrusher doesn't find it economical to let all the slave peoples die.\n\nAlso, we're nice. We control them by force. Not by insinuating psychic tentacles into their minds and depriving them of free will, or wracking them with agony if they disobey, depending on which kind of god it was. The Mhel gods were pretty horrid and clumsy. For one example I remember: the mhelvul have always hated their albinos. One year in the time of the gods, the mhelvul of Pdernuz rioted and burned several albinos alive. So the gods compelled every mhelvul (even the children, even the mhelvul who had tried to stop the burnings (not intentionally, they just commanded the whole region having forgotten that some people there might be innocent)) to submit coitally in a despised way to an albino. They pretty much raped the whole city, and the albinos the most of all. Naturally the mhelvul hated the albinos even worse after that. After Rankotherium and Dessvaria came to rule in Pdernuz, the mhelvul killed six albinos with knives in two days. Rankotherium found out who did it pretty fast, and executed them and their spouses. Nobody got raped, especially no mhelvul children. We punished the perpetrators, not the innocent, and certainly not the heroes. And the mhelvul don't hate the albinos much more for it. They hate us instead, which is fine. (Or they did for a while. Now, generations later, we're an ordinary part of life.)\n\nAnyway. Even if there aren't any more gods on Mhel, the mhelvul celebrate fourth birthdays specially. Even if what they were celebrating was actually repugnant.\n\n(Actually, there's one god on Mhel. Undead, not live, but whatever. Osoth has him caught in a sapphire bottle. I wonder if he's revealed any treasures yet, or if Osoth will let him out before he goes to Hove.)\n\nVerimet had invited me to Pdaalu's fourth birthday party. I don't think I was taking the place of a paingod, really. Most mhelvul fourth birthday parties go on perfectly well without a dragon being invited, much less attending. Not that the mhelvul could complain if a dragon landed and ate half the pastries or something. (I won't say that I've never landed in a big outdoor mhelvul party and eaten half the pastries. I was eight the last time I did it.) But they're mostly just mhelvul affairs. Verimet invited me because we went to school together. And I am sort of her patron \u2014 I've chatted with Rankotherium or Dessvaria on Verimet's behalf a few times.\n\nI don't think Verimet expected me to come, when she invited me. I'd missed her daughter's fourth birthday, and a dozen other major life events.\n\nIt was probably rather rude to have my secretary write a polite \"No thank you\" letter a month ago, and then have me write a more-eager-than-polite \"Yes please and I'd like to bring a friend!\" letter two days before the event. Oh, well, Verimet is rich. I'm sure she just told her cooks, \"Oh, and by the way, we'll need a bit more food. Enough for two dragons.\" Then the cooks must have given that infuriating mhelvul-style nod that means \"That's impossible, we're doomed, but we'll do something.\"\n\nThen I got Ythac to come with me. This was not so easy.\n\n\"Why should I come to a mhelvul fourth birthday party?\" he asked.\n\n\"Because it's your last chance to come to a mhelvul party for a dozen years or more,\" I told him.\n\n\"Good,\" he said.\n\n\"Or because they're fairly important subjects of your parents,\" I said.\n\n\"Definitely not going,\" he said.\n\n\"You get a wing up on my other fianc\u00e9s,\" I added.\n\nHe looked sort of sad at me and didn't say anything. Usually he comes up with something arch when I say that, but not today.\n\n\"Good food?\" I tried.\n\n\"That's a good reason for you to go.\" Oh, good, Ythac was back to the routine.\n\n\"An unshakeable excuse to get away from Rankotherium?\" I asked.\n\n\"When is this party?\" Predictable, is my friend Ythac.\n\nBirthday Party\n\nThe first practical issue was how to get there.\n\n\"Verimet rented the lawny half of Saint of Hermundro Park. I guess, best if we meet at Yaie Plaza, change there, and walk to the park.\" I wrote. That made perfect sense to me. The park is full of flowerbeds and grassy lawns and such, and there's no good place to land without leaving huge clawmarks. Which wouldn't stop us for a second if we were doing anything important. But probably Verimet would have to pay for the damages. So I wanted to land in a nice stone-paved plaza.\n\n\"That makes no sense,\" wrote Ythac. \"If we're going incognito, why change in the plaza with a grand of mhelvul watching?\"\n\n\"We're not going incognito. We're just trying not to scare the four-year-old mhelvul by being gigantic scaly fangy clawy bulgey-eyed death-breathy lizard monsters at them.\"\n\n\"What about four-year-old mhelvul in the plaza?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't care about four-year-old mhelvul in the plaza. I just don't want to spoil Verimet's party.\"\n\n\"Very well. I still don't want to walk all the way from the plaza in mhelvul shape. It's slow and tippy.\" he wrote back. I've never seen him in mhelvul shape before, actually. That's pretty usual \u2014 nobody but me really likes to take mhelvul shape.\n\n(Except mhelvul, I suppose.)\n\n(In case you haven't seen one, a mhelvul is a basic biped. They've got very flat faces \u2014 at least, I think they're flatter than most other basic biped faces, I've only seen a few kinds of basic bipeds so I don't know for sure. Flatter than dragon faces, by a lot. They've got little tusks sticking out of the corners of their mouths, which the more elegant mhelvul dye in pastel colors, and lots of dark hair on top, and lighter hair elsewhere, and no tail to speak of. Five-fingered hands, clawrasp it; that's caused more arithmetical problems on Mhel in the last few centuries than I can imagine.)\n\n\"How about Plujer Street?\" That's a big avenue on one side of the park. About five steps closer to the party, or five dozen mhelvul steps. He flies over his city often enough, but doesn't walk in it.\n\n\"When do we go?\" he wrote back.\n\n\"Now!\"\n\n\"Now? Where are you, Jyothky? I thought you were at home.\" (I had flown back home, with the Melismatic Tempest, courtesy of Arilash, to speed my trip. Useful grownup travel spell, that.)\n\n\"I'm just in sight of the shore. I'll be at Pdernuz in a ninth of an hour. I suppose I shouldn't stop and have a dolphin. They're leaping and splashing down in the water.\"\n\n\"Not unless you want to show up at the party all over dolphin blood,\" he wrote.\n\n\"I guess that might be a bit rude.\" Though it would wash off in the sea just fine.\n\n\"And you'll be too full for party food,\" he added.\n\n\"Me? Never!\" But I didn't stop to eat one."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "The second practical issue was, what to wear.\n\nYthac got there first. He was taking up half of Pluger Street. Mhelvul had to walk around him. Mules wouldn't go anywhere close to him. Mules are stupid. He could kill them from a distance just as easily.\n\n\"Ythac! I, Jyothky, am intruding on your territory again! I bring you tribute!\" I waved a little book with copper pages at him. That's polite, isn't it?\n\nHe glared at me. \"Jyothky, will you stop it with the formal manners? You've been here so much it practically counts as your territory too.\"\n\nWhich left me waving the book around stupidly. \"I'm just being polite. Take your stupid book, OK? And make some space for me to land.\"\n\nSo he held out his paw for me to drop the book into. I had to levitate to do it \u2014 I can't hover with my wings like some dragons. He didn't even grab it away from me. That's a point against marrying him actually \u2014 our children would have the worst manners.\n\n\"Oh, that's a nice book!\" he said, looking at it. \"I do want a nice library as part of my hoard.\" Hardly Osoth-style punctilio, but good enough between friends.\n\n\"Now, are you going to drive me off? Or make some space so I can land?\"\n\n\"Right. I'm going to drive you off so I can go to your friend's birthday party without you. The one that you want to go to and that I wasn't even invited to and you had to bite my tail to make me come. Will you please stop the formal etiquette?\"\n\n\"We're in public, Ythac.\"\n\n\"We're engaged, Jyothky,\" he said. He turned into a naked mhelvul man, which made a lot of space for me in the street.\n\nI landed next to him, and turned into my Spotty shape, a sixteen-year-old mhelvul girl wearing a school uniform and ink-spots on my cheek. \"Good thing we're not married yet, or I'd annoyed at you waggling your genitalia at a streetful of mhelvul.\"\n\n\"They're not my genitalia,\" he said. \"They're some stupid mhelvul genitalia. They're not even homologous to my genitalia, I shifted them from two belly scutes. And I hate wearing clothes.\"\n\n\"I guess they're not.\" I haven't actually seen any of his hemipenises yet. They stay behind his scutes unless he's doing something with them. For that matter, I haven't seen very many at all. Which is (1) just fine with me, and (2) going to change in a few days.\n\n\"Well, they're attached to you now,\" I said. \"You should wear something.\"\n\n\"Well, O Mistress of Etiquette, what is the proper dress to wear to your fianc\u00e9e's highschool chum's granddaughter's fourth birthday party?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. Anything decent and pretty, I suppose.\"\n\nSo he turned back into a dragon briefly. He had to; he's not that adept at shapeshifting. Then he then turned into a male mhelvul wearing elegant orange robes cut in absolutely the wrong style and not even fitting well, and a ridiculous pointy leather hat.\n\n\"Ythac? You do know what those clothes mean, don't you?\" I wrote to him, even though we were in the same place. I didn't want to be rude to a dragon in front of the mhelvul.\n\n\"The robes are for a matron of high caste attending a court function. The hat is for a cheap male hooker.\"\n\n\"That's really what you want to wear?\"\n\n\"I suspect my father will hear about it, in detail,\" he wrote, striding towards the park.\n\n\"He'll be embarrassed,\" I wrote.\n\n\"All for the best,\" he answered.\n\n\"Don't embarrass my friend. I'll bite you if you do.\"\n\n\"As long as she doesn't try to hire me, she'll be fine.\"\n\nAt the Party\n\n\"Oh, wild jumping gods! Spotty! You came!\" Verimet squealed, as if she were the schoolgirl she was when we met. She didn't look much like a schoolgirl elsewise. Her hair was tied in the complicated knots of a clan-matron. Her robes looked a lot like Ythac's, only she had the right to wear them. Her hat was rather less humiliating. Her tusks were chipped, and dyed a distinctly artificial lavender. She looked to be getting towards feeble. Mhelvul only live about eighty years, and Verimet was close to that.\n\n\"Of course I did!\" I said. \"This is the last time I'll see you. I wanted to do it properly.\"\n\nHer voice got old and quavery. \"Are you going to kill me?\"\n\n\"OK,\" I said. I didn't much want to. But I'd killed Nenuet a few years ago, before the cancer could, and with a bigger farewell party and greater honors and less pain than death in a hospital would bring. She was another schoolmate, and not nearly as good a friend as Verimet. I could hardly refuse Verimet the same incendiary favor if she wanted it.\n\n\"Not in front of my grandson? Please, give me one more day!\" she wailed, and her scent was full of fear.\n\n\"However you like, but soon,\" I told her. \"I'm leaving on my mating flight in a few days, and I won't be back for a dozen years.\" Verimet looked all horrified at me, so I asked her, \"What's so wrong, anyway? You don't seem too unwell, and I haven't heard that you're in disgrace.\"\n\nWell, it took a whole twelfth of an hour for me to understand that she wasn't asking me to kill her and didn't want me to. She thought I was being cruel and tormenty when I said \"last time I'll see you\" and \"do it properly.\" Ythac was smirking terribly, and writing me imaginary notes with sketches of me rampaging at a pile of mhelvul stick-figures.\n\nI put Verimet in a comfortable armchair in the gazebo, and intimidated some of her servants into bringing her warm brandy, and let her recover from the shock of discovering that her old schoolday chum and occasional political supporter didn't want to destroy her for any reason or none at all. Her daughter Abrythy and many of the relatives ran over to take care of her. I wasn't going to help her recover, and it really wasn't time to introduce her to Ythac. Ythac helpfully cornered the Arbiter of Civic Morality and started questioning him, loudly, about the morality of various sexual practices.\n\n\"What is frottage?\" I asked him in an imaginary note.\n\n\"Something male mhelvul can do with their silly wiggly genitalia,\" he answered. Hmph.\n\nSo I obscured myself with the Pyerthu's Spare Hallucination, and went over the person the party was actually for. He was romping around on a tangle of ropes with a few other children. I knew it was him: he smelled the most like Abrythy. The ceremonial birthday wimple he was wearing should have been my first clue. But I'm a lazy dragon, never think when I can sniff.\n\n\"You're four years old today, Pdaalu?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm four years! That is more than three years!\" he said proudly. \"Today is my birthday! In the park!\"\n\n\"I know! I flew in 'specially to celebrate it with you,\" I said.\n\n\"You did not flyed! You not a bird!\" he said. \"You a person! You wearing shoes!\"\n\nI sat on a wooden bench, and Pdaalu climbed up next to me. \"What does wearing shoes have to do with flying?\"\n\n\"Birds do not wear shoes!\" he said. \"I wearing a wimple!\"\n\n\"Birds don't wear wimples,\" I said. \"So you must not be a bird.\"\n\n\"I a bird! I a big sea-vulture! With a birthday!\" he said, and flapped his wimple with his hands. His untruth was like the scent of rotten cheese to veriception, but he was obviously having fun making up stories, so I didn't try to correct his behavior. I don't think four-year-old mhelvul are trainable to tell the truth; our servants try to keep their children away from us mostly.\n\n\"Do you like sea-vultures?\" I asked.\n\nHe jumped off the bench and started running and swooping around. \"I catching fish! I eating fish! I catching fish for you too!\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you! I am eating the fish you are catching for me!\" I said, which was false enough to make me a bit rotten-cheesy too, but that's OK.\n\n\"Here a fish for you!\" He pulled a tulip out of a flowerbed and threw it at my face. I dodged the flower, but the mud from its roots got everywhere. I was living up to my nickname fairly well.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" shrieked Abrythy, running over. \"Don't throw things at Spotty! Never, ever throw things at Spotty! Spotty, please, please, accept our apology... please spare him... he is a child, he knows nothing...\"\n\nWhich was infuriating! \"I am not here to kill anyone! Really! You must think that dragons have nothing better to do with their social calendar than go around murdering old friends and their families! What sort of a bloodthirsty monster do you take me for, anyway, Abrythy?\" (Which in retrospect is probably the wrong way to phrase that.)\n\n\"We've taught him and taught him, never attack a dragon. But he didn't know it was you, Spotty...\" She threw herself to the ground and started grovelling properly.\n\n\"It's just a flower, Abrythy. Get up, you're scaring the children.\" She didn't get up, so I picked her up and held her over my head. \"Besides, you did worse that that when you were a baby. You spit up all over me. Twice. I smelled of mhelvul puke for a week.\" My own words weren't much better than mhelvul puke to veriception \u2014 I don't have a spell that protects me from perceiving my own lies. (Which is the real reason dragons tend not to lie very much. Most of the time we explain it with words like \"honor\" , and that's all true of course, because dragons tend not to lie very much, but the core of the reason is, it's noxious and disgusting to lie, even if nobody else can tell.) I didn't spend nearly that much time with Abrythy; the actual baby mhelvul who left me reeky was her older brother.\n\nShe squeaked at me a bit confusedly. Pdaalu jumped up and down and tugged on my muddy skirt with his muddy fingers. \"Flying! Mommy flying now!\" So I put her down, on her feet, and picked Pdaalu up and waved him around in the air. He squealed.\n\n\"Have you ruined the party yet, Jyothky?\" scribbled Ythac.\n\n\"Pretty much,\" I wrote back. \"How about you?\"\n\n\"I have terrified the Arbiter of Civic Morality into admitting that there are circumstances under which he ought to volunteer to be my catamite.\"\n\n\"What a horrid thought,\" I wrote.\n\n\"Yes, quite. My father will be so upset. Thanks ever so much for inviting me!\"\n\nI waved the guest of honor around a bit more. He flapped his arms and legs, and naturally wound up kicking me in the face. Abrythy covered her eyes and moaned, and smelled all terrified and doomed. I really can tell the difference between a child's foot and a determined attack, even if I can't feel the difference. But if the mhelvul were so determined to have me ruin their party, I decided to do it properly.\n\nSo I turned into a giant black sea-vulture. \"For your birthday, you are going flying!\"\n\n\"You a bird! You really a bird now!\"\n\nI snatched him carefully in my talons, and flapped my wrong number (viz. 2) of wings, and cheated a bit with a levitation spell, and carried him above the treetops. He started off squealing with delight, \"I flying! I flying with a sea vulture now!\"\n\nHalf a minute of flight was enough for him, and he started squeaking, \"Down, down now! Put me down! Don't do that!\" Since this was as much for revenge as anything, I didn't exactly hurry down.\n\nBut within the minute, I had deposited him in front of his mother, safe and unharmed. He ran over and wrapped himself in her arms, and caught his left tusk on her tunic and nearly ripped it. I glared at her, and said \"I hope you understand what I meant with my little lesson!\"\n\nShe nodded, though she was lying. She could hardly help it. I'm not sure what I meant with my little lesson exactly either. Something about power and friendly and such, I guess. Anyway, I glared at her a bit, but she started smelling too scared, so I smiled and excused myself and stomped over to the buffet table and ate most of the spicy crab appetizers and listened to mhelvul whisper to each other wondering how upset I really was (a tiny bit with them, a bigger bit with myself) and whether I was going to kill them all (no).\n\nSince that wasn't working very well either, I went to rescue the Arbiter of Civic Morality from Ythac. We made our farewells to Verimet. I guess they'll be final farewells. Which is sort of a shame, I won't have any old childhood friends left except Ythac.\n\nCoda: Whining\n\nI wonder if there's really any point to knowing anyone but dragons. Verimet went from being \"roughly my age\" to \"a grandmother getting ready to dive into death\" in less time than I took to go from \"young girl\" to \"slightly adolescent girl\" . Also I somehow went from \"family friend\" to \"volatile nemesis\" , too. That's almost insulting. Just because I didn't visit much in the last dozen years, probably.\n\nNon-dragons are all obnoxious little squirmy things and I don't like them much just now.\n\nWell, I'm leaving Mhel soon enough. I'll find out how well I like not knowing anyone but dragons for a duodecade.\n\nDragons are all obnoxious big scaly things and I don't like them much just now either.\n\nEspecially myself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Our Farewell Battle (Day 11)\n\nWe're on Hove now.\n\nThe farewell battle was rather sweet. I guess. I've never been to one before. We all went to Tavrennou Peninsula. Me; Arilash; the fianc\u00e9s; our parents except for Csirnis's who aren't terribly friendly or available; three or four assorted bachelor drakes who seemed disappointed that Arilash was leaving only fifteen years late. More than one of whom muttered some scurrilous variation on \"I hope she can stand being cut down to only seven drakes for her mating flight... to say nothing of only one after she's married.\"\n\nA lot of mhelvul in wagons had come there the day before to set up. Two feasts in one week. I hope I can stand being cut down to only what we can hunt during our mating flight. Fortunately, after I'm married, I can eat as much as I want. I'm ahead of Arilash that way, at least.\n\nThe symbolic food for the farewell was all things that were nearly cut in half, to be shared. So my father brought me a roasted tapir, and we ripped it in half and each ate some. Then my mother brought me a roasted sheep, and we ripped that in half and each ate some.\n\nAs feast foods go, I like the dragoness-coming-of-age food better. When your mhelvul stuff an animal, they use garlic or cheese or mushrooms or chilis or something, and give it lots of flavor. When they mostly cut it in half and roast it, maybe they'll slosh some wine or honey or spices over it, or not. Then they roast it until the meat is all tender. Then we eat it bones and all. I don't quite understand what good it does anyone if the meat is tender, since the bones aren't.\n\nThen Rankotherium slunk voluminously around the field, making sure that everyone had the mighty and fortificational the Hoplonton. And no reprisal spells \u2014 he made Ythac take off the Quarnish Reek.\n\nThen the adults attacked us.\n\nWe fought them back as well as we could. But we were outnumbered two to one, with each of the two being bigger and more skilled than the one. And of course our parents know our fighting styles better than anyone else. Except that Llredh had practiced a few tricks, and got a few really vicious bites on his parents that even the Hoplonton couldn't entirely blunt. They were bleeding and proud afterwards, I'll bet.\n\nMy parents and I didn't fight that seriously. Not with claws and teeth and breath, at least. Nagging, though...\n\n\"Jyothky, be sure to copulate with all your fianc\u00e9s,\" said Mother, as Father breathed a delicate little jet of fire around me which wouldn't have hurt even if I could feel. And hadn't been wearing the Hoplonton, of course.\n\n\"I will, Mother,\" I said. Rather grumblesomely. She had been telling me that for the last dozen years or more. And telling me not to copulate with anyone before then, too. Which I hadn't particularly wanted to, but she never believed that.\n\n\"That doesn't go for you,\" Rankotherium shouted at Ythac, at my flank. \"If you dishonor me I'll bite your wings off.\"\n\n\"And don't try to conquer Hove,\" said Father. I stared at him. That gave Mother an opening to bite my left foreleg. She didn't bite very hard \u2014 there's no point unless she actually wanted to cripple me \u2014 but enough to prove that she could injure me.\n\n\"Why would we conquer Hove? We haven't talked about it,\" I said, and blasted Mother with lightning to prove that I could.\n\n\"Well, don't get distracted trying to conquer Hove. It's hard work, conquering a world and keeping it conquered. You're going there to get married. Not to go conquering.\"\n\nLlredth shouted over at him, \"Maybe not. We're sure going to go plundering though.\"\n\n\"Nothing wrong with that,\" said Father. Mother scowled at him. Mother is a determined Uplifter. That means she wants to improve the lot of the small people that she rules. Sometimes making them happier, sometimes improving their character, sometimes granting them more privileges or knowledge or whatever. So plundering small people is only justified when you're doing something good for some other small people. Like, if you kill off an oppressive warlord, you can plunder his properties too. But it would be unkind to plunder them without killing him.\n\nFather is a not-very-determined Downcrusher. That means he wants to keep a firm control of the small people that he rules. Say, to keep them from having enough science or armies to kill themselves off. For Downcrushers, there's nothing wrong with plundering small people most of the time. Of course, if they're terribly poor, plundering them is unkind. But it's usually not worth your time to plunder someone who's terribly poor anyway. And, oh, plundering half a warlord's wealth makes for a weaker warlord, which has got to be better than a strong one, right?\n\n(There aren't any mhelvul warlords left on Mhel. And we're not plundering the mhelvul anymore anyway. We're farming them. So most of the discussions about Uplifting and Downcrushing are academic. The dragons on Mhel mostly are on the Downcrushing side though. The mhelvul and their gods were well on their way to killing each other off. They definitely needed all the Downcrushing we gave them then. And, if their practices of constructing gymnasiums are any indication, they're still better off being ruled with a firm claw. More of that later.)\n\nAnyway, I didn't want them to start bickering, so I breathed fire on Father and lightning on Mother. \"You're supposed to be driving me off, remember?\"\n\n\"Right, Jyothky. I'm sorry!\" Mother and Father flanked me, then dived at me at the same time. Very elegant of them. They've been fighting side by side for a long, long time.\n\nAlso very inconvenient. If I wanted to get out of their way \u2014 which I did! \u2014 I had to land by Arilash. There wasn't much space left in the lower air. Arilash was setting up the Triangular Cyclonette. A rather bloody Csirnis and a rather less bloody Greshthanu were keeping five big dragons away from her. They looked rather outnumbered, so I waddled over to help them a bit.\n\n\"Have a wonderful time, Jyothky!\" shouted Mother.\n\n\"Go pick out a good one! See you in a dozen years!\" shouted Father.\n\nArilash finished up the Triangular Cyclonette. She spread her wings, and let the wind of fire and niobium and poetry carry her through, to Hove.\n\n\"We love you!\" my parents shouted in unison, and struck at me with their breath weapons, fiercely.\n\n\"I love you too!\" I roared, and flew after Arilash.\n\nOver Hove\n\nArilash's gate of ice and centuries and death was very high up in the sky, and below us was a ruddy desert wrinkled with mountains.\n\n\"This is awfully high up. Were you afraid that some basic bipeds would see us come in?\" I asked her. We were on the official mating flight. That made it my job to be as mean as possible to the other females, and as nice as possible (including plentiful copulation) with the males. I felt obliged to start on one half of that, at least.\n\n\"Well, better high up than inside a mountain. Digging out isn't such fun! Worst is if you have to turn into stone to keep from dying. Then you have to claw yourself separate from the living rock,\" she said.\n\nThat sounded a bit defensive, so I tried to press my advantage. \"So, you're not very accurate with your fancy travel magic?\"\n\n\"Not very!\" she said.\n\nWell, that's infuriating. She didn't spar words with me. Either she's not used to being in an extended multi-faceted dominance contest (impossible, she contested with Roroku all the time) or she doesn't think I'm worth contesting with. I probably should have bitten her. But I'm not used to being in an extended multi-faceted dominance contest, at all.\n\nBut Csirnis and Greshthanu were falling out of the gate, looking all battered and bitten. I'm pretty sure that Greshthanu was breathing on Csirnis in the cyclonette. At least Greshthanu is being polite. Or angry, if he hasn't forgiven Csirnis for not living up to his feminine name.\n\nI tried to fly up to help out, but I was still a bit dizzy, so I kind of half-flew and half-levitated. I have never felt more like a zeppelin in my life. (I wonder if we'll get to see any zeppelins on this trip. There aren't any on Mhel, of course; we don't let the mhelvul fly or have any technology to speak of.)\n\n\"Do either of you want some healing spells?\" I asked.\n\n\"Tend to Greshthanu first. His wounds are more bitter than mine, and his mastery of the secrets of life is inferior,\" said Csirnis. Of course Csirnis has impeccable manners. I wished I wanted to couple with him right there. That would have been just as impeccable. Of course I didn't want to do that; I've never managed to actually want to copulate.\n\n\"Sure! C'mon over here, Jyothky!\" Greshthanu obviously expected me to be polite. I wasn't feeling terribly polite. So I flew over him, by means of levitating more than he was doing so he fell past me, and landed on his back, and healed him with the Rose Rescaler.\n\nWhich got a snort of disapproval from Greshthanu. Not that he can manage the Rose Rescaler himself. I doubt he knows healing spells better than the Great Titan Sanitarium. But of course he's got grownup magic, and can cast it from afar.\n\nSo I bit him. Not that it hurt him much, with Rankotherium's Hoplonton still snugly wrapped around him.\n\nWhich got most of my other fianc\u00e9s staring at me. They had been whooshing through the triangle and plummeting casually towards us. \"Jyothky? Poor little Greshthanu, what is it you are doing to him?\" shouted Llredh.\n\nGreshthanu turned his head to peer at me. \"Yeah, what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Teaching you some manners, or trying to. It's pretty hopeless,\" I said.\n\nAnd that got some scowls from the others. Ythac wrote to me, \"Are you competing as a boy? Or is Greshthanu competing as a girl?\"\n\nRight. Horrible manners on my part, trying to establish dominance over one of my fianc\u00e9s. That would have to wait until after marriage, if we're being traditional. I wrote back, \"I need some lessons in manners too. Thanks, Ythac.\"\n\nLooking At Hove\n\nI didn't much want to talk to anyone I was engaged to right after that, and there wasn't anyone else in the whole world I had so much as met. I thought about flying back through the cyclonette, but (a) that would make me look even less polite, and (b) my parents might kill me. Probably they'd just decide I hadn't really left yet and send me back to Hove. Polite fictions are very important for dragons.\n\n\"I am grown up now. There's no going back,\" I told myself. By thinking it so it wouldn't make me nasty to veriception.\n\nSo I looked around the world that we had so carelessly chosen to be our home for a dozen years. I've never been in a Typical Toroid before. Mhel is a Basic Ball. And my parents weren't much for travelling, so I'd never been anyworld else.\n\nHove is shaped like a donut with quite a big hole, except reversed: there's empty space where the donut has dough, and there's stone and outside-the-world where the donut doesn't have dough. We'd come in on the outer equator, more or less. Looking down, you know your eyes are lying to you. Geography tells you the world is curved, but it looks flat. That part is just like on Mhel. But on a Basic Ball, the world really curves away from you, like you're on the top of a hill, and you can't see the bits that are far away from you.\n\nInside a Typical Toroid, the world curves in on itself, so the neighboring continents and oceans and the tops of clouds are painted across the walls of the lower sky. Or sometimes you have the illusion of being in a huge valley, until you have your eyes far-focus on the sides of the valley and you see boats and whales in an ocean that looks vertical to you, but is not. The tops of clouds are the most disorienting. I'm used to looking down on the tops of clouds, not across or even nearly up.\n\nLooking up, the sky is just crazy. There's a huge bar of world across the middle of the sky, with continents and oceans all upside-down to you. That's the central pillar of the world: the hole of the donut, if you will, as seen from inside the donut. The Word-Fox says that it's called \"Godaxle\" , not that there are any gods here except the one we brought, and not that Hove actually turns. The stuff on Godaxle is too far away for my eyes to see anything on really, except for scatters of light along cities and roads at not-really-night.\n\nNight's not really night here, and that's craziness too. Most Typical Toroids have only one sun. Hove has four suns, all moving along the... it's not an equator exactly, equators ought to be on the ground. Center-circle, is that the right word for it? If you slice the donut vertically, you'll get two C-shaped halves with circles at each end. The sun would be in the middle of one of those circles. The bright one is Virtuet, according to the Word-Fox: a tiny sun of actinic eye-aching blue-white, zooming quickly around the Godaxle. I suppose we'll call its period a day, even though it's somewhat shorter than a real day or even an official standard day. (That's wrong, isn't it? When I think \"real day\" I'm thinking of a Mhel day, and we've left Mhel behind.)\n\nNext is Verdinet (yes, the Word-Fox told me that name, and all the others; I won't mention the spellwork again), a big smoggy green tetrahedron. It's not very bright. It's huge \u2014 bigger than a dozen moons in the sky. It doesn't move very fast. I wondered what would happen when Virtuet smashed into it. Not much did. Verdinet glowed green, and Hove got a lot dimmer because the main sun was in a cloud. After a while Virtuet zoomed out of Verdinet, leaving the cloud all full of turmoil. After a while it settled down back and looked like a very peaceful and serene smoggy green tetrahedron.\n\nNext is Curset. It's a black ball. It's even faster than Virtuet. It hasn't caught up with Virtuet yet \u2014 early tomorrow, if I'm any judge of speeds and chases. I'll leave some space to fill in what happens when it does, here: This is me editing a previous day's diary entry the way I said I'd never do. When Curset catches Virtuet, it totally clouds it out for, oh, maybe three hours, leaving the world all illuminated with just dim pink and green from the other two suns. Which I think is a lot longer than it should take for Virtuet to get out. It looked to me like Curset slowed down with Virtuet inside of it, but not quite to Virtuet's speed. Oh, and Curset doesn't slow down for Verdinet or Floret, just Virtuet.\n\nRight, Floret. Floret looks like a sea anemone cloud to me \u2014 but those things are oversized tornadoes, not cute little stinging tentacles. It's on the opposite side of Hove from Verdinet, and moving just as fast. It's too far away for any sort of accurate kineception really, but that's my best guess. It gives off a nice pink glow. It gets really bright when Virtuet goes through it, and goes out entirely when Curset engulfs it.\n\nI'm sure that most of this doesn't matter much even to hovens. The part that does matter is day and night. Noon is when Virtuet is directly overhead, except when it isn't. Night is when Virtuet is behind Godaxle, which is about six hours a day. Eclipse is when Curset engulfs Virtuet; it's about three hours long, it can happen any time of day or night, and when noon isn't, it's because it's eclipse instead.\n\nThis has Serious Practical Consequences. Mostly that we're going to want sleeping caves deep enough to keep out the sunlight. Night's not really long enough, eclipse isn't reasonable enough, and everyone's temper is going to be feather-thin enough even if we all get enough sleep.\n\nI suppose it has more serious consequences for hovens. Though what's more serious than nine highly cranky dragons around, I really can't say.\n\nThe further sky is all muddly and marbley. I can't see too many details: a sea here, a mountain range there, I guess they are. The red streak might be a desert.\n\nThe wind seems to mostly go the same way the suns do. So I'm pretty sure there's air all the way through the inside of the toroid, and all of the same pressure except where it's hot or cold or something. Ghastrantos had one of his characters (Mielar, was it?) fly all the way across Toku Spoka in Wings Over Doux-Saloux, and Toku Spoka is a Typical Toroid too, so I suppose air like that is Typical and the way that Mhel does it, with air thinning out the higher you go, is unusual.\n\nMating Flight, per se.\n\nWe came in over a desert. A nice healthy nonviolent nonindigo desert of inanimate orange-red sand with scrubby plants growing in it and obnoxious animals eating them and vicious animals eating them and gangly rude birds flying overhead to eat everything else after it dies.\n\nSo it's nothing like home. I miss my raspy stormy purple sands. And I'm going to have to bathe in the river like everyone else.\n\nCan I go home yet?\n\n(Answer: No. I've got to be a good little dragoness and take up to twelve years and get married first.)\n\nSo we set off to find some good caves. Which means that the larger drakes flew around staring at things and not doing much good. Arilash and I tried to do that too, but Csirnis pointed out that this was the first real competition between the drakes and it wouldn't help if one of us won it. Osoth landed and started dripping heavy quicksilver words on the ghosts of dead hovens, though it turned out to mostly be dead hoven bovines which weren't much help. Nrararn conjured the airy spirits of Hove, and got into some sort of perplexing spat with them about the precise amount of service he can get from them for one hyargique-qua, whatever that is.\n\nAnd Ythac cast some grownup spell, the Draft of Direction I think, and took us right to a nice pair of big dry sandy warm caves at the base of the Khamrou Voresc mountains.\n\n\"We've got two good caves. One for Arilash, one for Jyothky, and the rest of us stay with whichever one we're coupling with?\" said Nrararn, practically.\n\n\"Thats' no good. I'll be coupling with both of them most of the time,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Will you, now? Seems to me you'll be waiting in line 'til I'm satisfied,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"Until we're satisfied,\" I hooted. I'm trying to get in the right spirit, really I am.\n\n\"Which for you is, well, probably never,\" said Arilash. \"I'm going to have to come rescue our poor helpless drakes from your clutches.\" She is definitely in the right spirit.\n\n\"I do believe that Arilash has an Extremely Perspicuous Point,\" said Tultamaan. \"If the dragonesses and their current consorts get the Homelike and Cozy Caves, what homes do the other ones have? Will they Sleep Upon the Sands and Enjoy the Starry Skies, which upon this sort of world actually are Lacking In Stars? And where will they keep the Loot with which they will Inspire the Dragonesses to Further Amatory Activities?\"\n\n\"That's your problem. Won't be mine,\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"What loot, anyway? We're in an empty desert.\" said Nrararn. \"Lucky to find enough food.\"\n\n\"There's a big hoven city under an hour's flight that way,\" said Ythac, beaming a huge smile at Llredh. He cast the Word-Fox. \"Called Ghemel. And there are smaller ones closer. Plenty to loot I think!\"\n\nLlredh chuffed. \"The giant robots, I shall rend them apart! The swoon and the awe, they shall fall upon the girls!\"\n\n\"Who can destroy them perfectly well themselves,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"I will do it with such elegance and grace that you will instantly wish to couple with me!\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Unpersuasive! I need no extra stimulation to instantly wish to couple with you!\" said Arilash, and flew in front of Llredh and spread her claspers lewdly. (Is it really lewd if you're showing yourself to a fianc\u00e9? Maybe it's just polite. Can it be both?) He responded in the drakish version of the same.\n\nThey circled each other twice, then came together with a loud crash, belly-scutes grinding against each other, eight wings pumping awkwardly to keep them more or less stationary in the air.\n\n\"Levitate, levitate! You're falling!\" hooted Greshthanu.\n\n\"We both know what we're doing!\" shouted Llredh back. \"Unlike you!\"\n\n\"Hey, I am not such a novice! I know how to mate with a dragoness,\" yelled Greshthanu. \"You have been mounting them for duodecades, yet, somehow, you still have no clue how to do it well!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't exactly say 'no clue',\" warbled Arilash. \"Speaking as an experienced dragoness who is well on her way to satisfaction from his efforts.\"\n\n\"I don't want to watch this,\" Ythac wrote to me. \"Perhaps you and I can go inspect the caves?\"\n\n\"I don't want to watch either,\" I wrote back. \"Let's go.\" I thought a bit and added, \"Are you going to mate with me down there?\" Most of the drakes seemed to be finding Llredh and Arilash's performance a bit inspiring. Csirnis and Greshthanu were preparing to fight who would be next. I guessed that Ythac was trying to be kind to me. I'd rather not have my apparantly highly nonvirginal rival critiquing my first attempt at mating.\n\n\"Forgive me, but I'm feeling a bit unsettled. I've never seen my father so angry,\" he wrote back. Which must be saying something. Rankotherium was always kind to me. But one day he ripped Ythac's right forewing to ribbons for some minor bit of cowardice \u2014 choosing a \"Caramelle\" instead of a \"Dominance\" to fight Chevethna, and then healing her twice. Which was unfair I thought \u2014 there's nothing cowardly about a \"Caramelle\" except the name, and that's the fashionable way to fight duels these days anyway.\n\n\"I'm not in quite the hurry that Arilash is either,\" I wrote back. \"Let's just look at the caves.\"\n\nCaves and Monsters\n\nThey're big and deep, twisty enough so that Virtuet's light doesn't sneak far into them at any hour of the day. The stone is some soft orange stuff that isn't exactly sandstone. It's not as hard as claws. That afternoon, everyone else claw-planed their sleeping places flat of all the little bumps. I just picked a vaguely flat spot that wouldn't do any actual damage when I slept there. Everyone else is just over-sensitive. Or, well, just plain sensitive.\n\nBut the fun part of my afternoon wasn't the sex (which didn't happen). We caught a hoven.\n\nOne of the caves was all nice and empty, as far as we felt like looking.\n\nThe other cave wasn't. It smelled of all sorts of things: sweaty mammals, oiled metal, cloth, spiced meat, uncleaned privy, this, that, and the other. We'd landed in a flutter of wings that didn't leave any tracks in the sand by the cave entrance, but there were winding trails on the path to the river, as though a thick-tailed creature had walked back and forth several times without leaving footprints.\n\n\"What's that?\" I wondered. \"Are there local dragon-cousins?\" But it didn't smell a bit ophidian.\n\n\"Let's go and see.\" Ythac folded his wings and stalked into the cave, mouth half-open, the fires ready at the base of his throat.\n\nSomeone inside growled at him in a deep voice, a complicated guttural language that vaguely reminded me of strangling an unusually eloquent cow. I stuck my head over Ythac's shoulder to see. It was a hoven, of course: a basic biped, with hooves on his feet, a single smallish teat or udder on his chest, big rectangular eyes flat on his round face. He had short grey fur all over. (I looked at his picture books afterwards \u2014 hovens come in grey, dim blue, dim red, dim purple, and most combinations. Lucky ones have stripes.) Unfortunately he had ten fingers, like mhelvul \u2014 I hate that, it means they use decimal not duodecimal.\n\nAnyway, he was holding a big gun in both hands. He shouted a war-cry. (Let's give him that. It might have been the name of his favorite dessert or anything, we couldn't understand it.) He shot at us with the gun. Little metal bullets spattered off our scales and protective spells, and bounced off the rocks.\n\n\"That's a shame. We've got to kill him now,\" I said.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" , Ythac asked.\n\n\"Well, he attacked us,\" I said. \"He still is attacking.\" The hoven had picked up a big axe and was trying to split Ythac's chin.\n\n\"Pretty brave of him,\" Ythac said.\n\n\"Right. It's the brave ones we need to kill. Otherwise they'll all be encouraged to fight at us.\" Which is only common sense. Also one of the few things that my parents agree on about punishing mhelvul.\n\n\"That's how it goes on dragon-worlds. This one's still unconquered,\" Ythac pointed out. \"They aren't under the law really. They don't even know the law.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're right. I had forgotten that.\"\n\n\"Besides, he's so cute. Look, he's standing on a ladder trying to hit my eye.\"\n\n\"Absolutely fearless when cornered,\" I agreed. \"What are our choices, since it sounds like we've got some?\"\n\n\"Defeat him in some thunderingly obvious and overwhelming way. After that we can take him for a slave if we don't want to kill him.\"\n\n\"It would be convenient to have a few slaves.\"\n\nThe hoven whacked Ythac in the gum with the edge of the axe. Ythac yelped, \"Hey! I felt that!\"\n\n\"Lucky lizard. I'd trade a grand of slaves to be able to feel that.\"\n\n\"Sorry, sorry.\" He didn't sound very sorry.\n\n\"Do you want to thunderingly defeat him, or should I? We shouldn't both do it. We'd squish him.\"\n\n\"I'll do it.\" Ythac brushed the hoven with the edge of his hukuch\u00f4. The hoven howled in involuntary fear and leapt backwards away from him. Hoven, ladder, and axe landed in three separate places. The hoven picked himself up and tried to run, limping considerably from a leg badly twisted in the fall.\n\nYthac pounced on the hoven \u2014 Ythac pounces very gracefully, I wish I could do that \u2014 and snatched the hoven up and scrubbed him with the Great Titan Sanitarium for half a heartbeat, until his leg wasn't twisted anymore.\n\n\"You're so nice to your slaves, Ythac.\"\n\n\"He's not going to be a very good slave with a bunged leg, now, is he?\"\n\n\"Well, pass him over to me. I want to learn the language. You can loot the cave,\" I said.\n\n\"I caught him, I get to use him first,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm the dragoness. You need to impress me,\" I helpfully reminded him. But by that time he had cast the The Spilling of the Speech. (If I ever invent a spell, I am not going to start the name with \"the\" .)\n\n\"OK, here's your hoven.\" He handed the squirming man over, and I cast the same spell, and learned the whole Ghemelian language. It's big and complicated and mostly stupid... any language without an aorist tense is stupid. Also it's not called Ghemelian, it's stupidly called Ursk Eskarak, but I'm going to call it Ghemelian to be tidy.\n\n\"Who are you, hoven?\" I asked him in Ghemelian.\n\n\"You speak?\" he said, sounding all surprised.\n\n\"Dragons all do. Now, who are you?\"\n\n\"I am Murghal dvo Sdrezi tho neng Nhestravvath.\" He was somewhat calmer. \"Put me down, and depart from my home immediately.\"\n\n\"It's my home now, mine and my rival's. The drake is going to live next door. You can have it back after we leave.\"\n\n\"I shall not leave it! This is my final refuge \u2014 the armies of Trest have left me nothing else \u2014 and I shall not be further pushed to the margins and the deserts!\"\n\n\"You're not leaving it. You're our slave.\"\n\n\"I am slave to no man!\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" I beamed at him. \"You're slave to a girl dragon!\"\n\nHe wasn't instantly convinced. I held him in my forepaw and brushed him lightly with my hukuch\u00f4, and he screamed and soiled himself and tried his best to flee. When he was able to speak coherently, I sent him to the river to wash up, tracked him down a bit when he tried to run away, brushed him with my hukuch\u00f4 again to punish him, let him wash up again, and finally sat on the orange sands of the Khamrou Voresc to learn a bit about Hove.\n\nThe cyclonette had dumped us on the outer fringes of a war. Murghal was a great general of Ghemel, the ruler of one of its three armies. He was triumphant and mighty and brave in many battles... as long as they were battles against his own people. He made quite a military career crushing rebellions and insurrections, of which there were many. \"Uncle Holder\" , the hoven (of course a hoven, there's nobody here but hovens) who ruled Ghemelia for some long time, had many enemies.\n\nThen, Trest came conquering Ghemelia. \"They said it was a war of liberation, to free us from Uncle Holder. Free us! We, who elected Uncle Holder every year of our own free will \u2014 not a single Ghemelian voted against him these last ten years! So well was he loved!\" exclaimed Murghal.\n\n\"If he was loved that well, why so many rebellions and insurrections?\"\n\n\"Hah, those were fools and degenerates.\"\n\n\"Didn't they vote against him?\"\n\nHe looked insulted. \"Fools and degenerates may not vote. Who would honor a leader elected by fools and degenerates?\"\n\nI giggled. \"I suppose that voting against Uncle Holder guaranteed that you were declared a fool and degenerate?\"\n\nHe sputtered and fumed. \"No such thing! It would start the proceedings, yes, but there were plenty of legal protections so that the sensible and honorable would never be branded.\" And yes, he meant branded literally, with a hot iron burning the initial of \"Fool\" and/or \"Degenerate\" , as appropriate, on the hoven's forehead.\n\n\"I don't know much about elections. Or laws made by hovens, for that matter. So, what's Trest, and what did they do?\" I asked.\n\n\"Trest is a vast blood sausage, full of fat and arrogance! Trest is the Realm of Lies and Wickedness! Trest is the Handmaiden of the Anti-God, the orifice from which the spiritual shits enter the world!\" And on and on for quite some time.\n\n\"Let's start with some basics. Is Trest a king? A country? A religion?\" It's a country, a vast and corpulent and corrupt country, Archconsul Shuvanne says they're spreading their pestilent political system everywhere, but they invaded Ghemelia as a reprisal for Ghemelia joining the Alliance of Freedom, and out of their greed and arrogance, and on and on with the insults until my next question.\n\n\"What is the Alliance of Freedom?\" A number of countries whose hearts are in the right place but whose legs are slow and whose hands are tied. The Alliance of Freedom is the anti-Trest. (So: The anti-handmaiden-of-the-anti-god? The orifice from which the spiritual shits depart the world? I am unclear on this point, and Murghal simply adds imprecations.) It is an alliance which intends to keep Trest under control, but does not.\n\n\"What was the war like?\" Murghal had a great deal to say about that. Cutting out the obscenity, the war was, first of all, fast. Trest used a smallish army of cowards, and Ghemelia a huge one, every one a brave and mighty veteran. (Presumably, mostly against their own people.) Trest's army had technology though. Airplanes and zeppelins, some of them automated. Yay, zeppelins! Also for the drakes' sake, yay, we will get to fight great technological airships, if not actually giant robots, if we want! Huge boats armed with huge guns, and smaller trucks armed with smaller but still quite large guns. And, if their soldiers ever got into the least bit of trouble, they could call in the grand artillery. Far away, in the region of Muld, over there (about a third of the way up the curve of the world) there is a vast and mighty projector of a terrible purple twistor ray. All of Ghemelia is in its effective range \u2014 indeed, half of Hove is. And nearly all of Hove is in range of at least one of Trest's projectors.\n\n\"So, how did the war go?\" The quick answer was, terribly. The Peace Everywhere Array smashed all the important strongholds and airports of Ghemelia in the first two days. The rest of the Alliance of Freedom didn't send much support \u2014 they simply didn't have time. Ghemelia's vast army of brave and mighty veterans resisted Trest's smallish army of cowards less effectively than Murghal himself had resisted Ythac. Viz., they mostly didn't even bother putting up an ineffective fight, they just ran away before the Tresteans came. Every bit of Ghemelia that Trest wanted to devastate was devastated, and their soldiers died by the grands. Trest lost nineteen soldiers. Twelve of those died when a truck drove over a bridge that fell down. I suppose those are actually Ghemelian kills, since the Ghemelian government built that bridge using the cheapest materials and worst construction they could find.\n\n\"Not very well, then?\"\n\nMurghal allowed as how the war had not gone very well. He was one of the main targets of the Tresteans. \"Though I did not use extnuvia against the Palisees \u2014 lies, all Trestean lies! If I had such a thing available, which I did not, I would not have needed it against such a pitiful foe as the Palisees.\" It seemed to be the moment to inform Murghal about veriception, just to save time when he considered lying about something we cared about. Yes, he had used extnuvia, some sort of rare mineral which compels hovens to eat themselves, against the Palisees. He regretted it greatly; he should have saved it for the Tresteans.\n\n\"So, what are you doing out here?\" He is hiding from the Tresteans. He has supporters in Ghemelia \u2014 many supporters \u2014 who will rise up and destroy the Tresteans. Now a few of them bring him food and news every week or so. Fortunately the Tresteans are fools and degenerates, so they cannot find him.\n\n\"They don't sound like they'd vote for Uncle Holder,\" I agreed, but I made him tell me the full truth anyway. \"He's got a few active supporters, though there are plenty of people who would probably follow a native \u2014 any native who had a chance, really \u2014 against the conquerers. Ghemelia is rather a hellhole though. Everyone has some reason to hate everyone else, and the Trestean conquerors most of all.\"\n\n\"If we were feeling nice and helpful, we'd set the place in order ourselves,\" I said.\n\n\"We're here to get married. We are not going to go conquering. I can't think of anything I'd like less than trying to set a place like this in order,\" said Ythac in Ghemelian. He had joined us about as the war was going terribly, but mostly been quiet. \"I've studied governments and all, I know how to do it right, but you have to start with some bit of unity.\"\n\nMurghal looked crafty, and started trying to talk us into attacking the Tresteans.\n\n\"No. We're going to live in our cave \u2014 the one that was yours \u2014 and enjoy each other a lot. We're not going to fight anyone,\" I said.\n\n\"Except each other,\" added Ythac. \"And you, if you keep trying to run away.\"\n\n\"Anyway, it's time for you to do your nightly duties,\" I told my new slave.\n\n\"What are his nightly duties?\" asked Ythac.\n\n\"I don't know. Go to the cave and see what you've got that's good for polishing scales. I want my fianc\u00e9s to look their best.\" I used the plural because Osoth had landed beside me, and Csirnis was circling overhead.\n\n\"I am beautiful and elegant!\" said Osoth, rearing up and spreading his intricately-patterned grey grey grey wings.\n\n\"And dusty and bloody,\" I said. \"Murghal, go polish my fianc\u00e9 until he's all shiny.\" That's a job for three or four well-equipped and well-trained small people per dragon, so it was pretty hopeless. I couldn't think of anything else for him to do though. He looked like he'd mostly be good as a secretary, not a laborer, but my social calendar just said \"copulate with fianc\u00e9s\" every day for the next twelve years. Anyhow you can't let slaves go idle. I think that Murghal actually polished Osoth's left knee a little before Osoth decided it was useless and sent him off."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Oh, and there wasn't much loot. Murghal had a variety of weapons, for shooting bullets and smallish purple twistor rays. He had some nice spices, but not enough for even one meal for all of us, and he said he didn't really know how to cook in any case. He had some books, but neither Ythac nor I was much interested in hoven pornography. (I should have brought some dragon pornography... not that I had any on Mhel... maybe Arilash has some. Not that she really needs it, and not that she'd be willing to help a rival particularly.)\n\nThe others had been drifting in, so we stopped chatting with the useless new slave, and set up our haphazard home for the next duodecade. Arilash and I took over Murghal's cave, and made him sleep outdoors. He complained a bit at the lack of secrecy, since he's in hiding from an entire army. He's being silly though. What could an army of small people do against nine dragons?\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nWell, this is what the mating flight is about, and what the codas are about too.\n\nLet's see. Greshthanu gets one for first flirtation. Llredh two for first copulation. Ythac one for finding the caves, and one for exploring them. That's about all.\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 12 12\n\nLlredh 0 2 2\n\nYthac 12 2 14\n\nGreshthanu 0 1 1\n\nOsoth 0 0\n\nNrararn 0 0\n\nTultamaan-12-12\n\nI was going to start everyone at 0. But I was really impressed with how Csirnis came to Mhel, and I've liked Ythac for years, and Tultamaan's forelegs are just so awful to look at.\n\nOh, and if anyone else's counting fianc\u00e9e points... I think I lost one 'cause Arilash had the Triangular Cyclonette, and three from fighting Greshthanu, and two more for letting Arilash get the first legitimate intercourse. Maybe I get one back for my part of getting Murghal, I'm not sure. I don't even know if the boys are counting fianc\u00e9e points. Maybe that's a girl thing.\n\nCoda: Fighting\n\nI know I talk about fighting a lot. It's very important for dragons \u2014 we are predators, after all! Lots of us try to get into at least one fight a day, a practice bout of sparring if nothing else. I don't, I'm not that aggressive. But two days out of three, even for me.\n\nFirst of all, simply clawing or breathing at somedragon once isn't real fighting. Small people usually use words for what we mean by that. They might say, oh, \"Your mother copulated extramaritally with a black poodle, and from this union you were born.\" Dragons just attack, once, instead. It's just as expressive. A light firebreath on someone who has firebreath (and is thus not going to be hurt so much by it) could be the equivalent of saying, \"Oh, pish! Scurry off quickly for a romantic encounter with a dry starfish!\" Biting someone's neck hard might be more like saying, \"How is it you do not stink more than you do? For surely your proper place in the universe is in the drain of the Grand Sewer, so that the filth of twelve grand mhelvul may flow across you. Perhaps you avoid this situation because, comparing itself to you, even the filth itself would become proud.\"\n\nActually, the small people way might be more creative.\n\nAnyway, those aren't real fights. Though they sometimes turn into real fights.\n\nRhedosaur's Forms of Fighting lists 541 different kinds of standard rules for blood duels \u2014 those are the ordinary kinds of fights, one dragon against another, out for blood rather than any serious injury. That's very silly, since lots of them are the same except for changing a number or a rule. Like, the difference between \"Questro Intangible\" and \"Dominance\" is that the \"Questro\" goes to four hits and the \"Dominance\" to five. Not really worth having two unrelated and unmemorable names for \u2014 or the ten others, since a fight in that form to one hit is a \"Babble of Raises\" , and a fight to twelve hits is a \"Duello Prolongato\" , and so on for the other numbers. The only name that makes any sense there is the \"Dominance\" , since usually actual dominance contests were done by \"Dominance\" in Rhedosaur's day. Or occasionally a seven-hit \"Krage's Glory\" , if they were feeling more fighty.\n\nThen there are the variations that let you heal your opponent and have it count as a hit \u2014 that's \"Caramelle\" for five hits, or \"Quest for the Narnu\" for seven, if you're trying to follow Rhedosaur. Those are fashionable among my friends now. They're a good combination of hard ('cause if you're paying attention, you can block the healing spell with your v\u00f4) and nice ('cause you get to show your opponent that you don't actually want to hurt them.) Rankotherium, Ythac's father, despises this fashion and says it's making us all soft and his son worst of all. I think he's being ridiculous.\n\nThe most important distinction is between friendly and unfriendly fights. Mostly we have friendly fights. There are a few choices of rules to them, but mostly they end up being \"don't hurt your friends in ways they can't heal.\" So we usually strike at legs, wings, or tail \u2014 wings are the top choice, because they make a nice satisfying crunch when you bite them, and they're easy to heal. Or shallow slashes at the body \u2014 deep enough to get through scales and hide, but not so deep that they get to entrails. If you're very agile you can claw someone's eye out. I've never managed that, but it's very elegant if you can. Breath is fine, except darkness breath and other ones that leave long-term damage, but burning a hole through someone is no friendlier than biting one through. Pretty much, if the Great Titan Sanitarium \u2014 the first real healing spell that everyone learns, but not a very good one \u2014 can't heal it, you shouldn't be doing it in a friendly contest.\n\nI have to be careful in friendly fights. I have, when I was young, kept fighting after I had lost because I didn't notice I had been hit. That's worse than losing, it's rude. My friends usually remember to shout when they hit me. I've got the Sentrydog and such analysis spells to tell me about it too, but they're sometimes stupid and I need to be careful.\n\nUnfriendly fights are nastier. You're still trying not to permanently maim your enemy. But it's fine if you break their back, say, or do something else that will take them a few years to heal. Of course you're obligated to save their life if you do something like that \u2014 if you break someone's back while they're in the air, you have to get them to the ground safely at least. All the minor wounds that matter so much in friendly fights either count just the same in unfriendly ones ( \"Watashi's Coyote\" , etc.), or don't ( \"Tea for Disharmony\" , etc.). That sort of distinction is how Rhedosaur got his 541 forms.\n\nI've never been in an unfriendly fight. Dr. Dnazhvhens told me that I should avoid them. I'd be at a terrible disadvantage \u2014 I couldn't tell if I had been hurt badly, so I wouldn't know when to heal myself. Anyone in an unfriendly fight risks a years-long injury. I'd pretty much be begging for one. Not that unfriendly fights are all that common. Ythac has only been in one, I know for a fact, and that one with his father; he lost of course, but didn't get injured very badly, because his father doesn't want to hurt him. Arilash and Osoth have never been in one either.\n\nIf you do kill someone in a fight that's not supposed to be to the death, you'd better start making reparations immediately. You won't get away with much of your hoard or your status, that way, but you might get away with your life. This doesn't happen very often though. We mostly know when to stop, and we mostly get very clear-headed and accurate when we're angry.\n\nIf it's a bigger fight than just one dragon against one dragon, the 541 choices aren't enough. Then it's time to make a war treaty. You agree in advance what the stakes in the fight are \u2014 when and where the fight will be, what can be destroyed, who can be injured and how much, what the penalties are if you go beyond those limits, and anything else. Like, the fight to drive adult children away onto their mating flight has some very strict and customary rules: the parents outnumber the children about two to one, and are trying to injure them some but nothing that will actually leave us injured for very long. They're not supposed to kill us unless we won't leave.\n\nSo don't worry if we seem violent towards each other by small people standards. It's all friendly. Or, if an unfriendly one shows up somehow, I'll point that out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Mating Flight, Proper (Day 12)\n\nEditorial Note: We spent some time on the mating flight proper, hanging around in the desert and fighting and challenging each other, before things started to go a bit wrong, then very very wrong. I am going to show you my first diary entry from that time. The later ones are generally like it, except sketchier. By the end I was just writing down the drakes' scores most days \u2014 or rather, intending to write them down and putting it off, then writing them down later and probably wrong, or not at all. I used a variety of stratagems to avoid actually mating with anyone, which was quite irresponsible of me. Finally on day 25 I decided that I was going to write something so I would have something to do. \u2014 JyTNM, bb\n\nDragoness Fights\n\nI woke up with Arilash grinding my chin on the floor hard enough to smooth my sleeping-place out some, and shouting into my ears, \"Wake up! Wake up!\"\n\n\"Hey! That presumably hurts!\" I said, and tried to bite her forepaw, but she was holding me too tightly. I breathed winter frost on her where I could reach, which was her underbelly and one hind leg and part of her tail.\n\nWhich might have been a bad move tactically, since it turned a rather brutal but polite wakeup into an actual dominance fight. Starting out a dominance fight with the other dragon actually holding your head is the sign of either supreme skill and confidence, or supreme confusion. I did not demonstrate any notable skill or confidence.\n\nAfterwards, she healed her frostbite, and I healed a big bite on my left forewing, another big bite on my neck, a huge claw-wound on my flank, a small claw-wound on my neck, and some large claw-holes in my left hindwing. Oh, and some slight abrasions on my chin.\n\n\"First round to Arilash,\" said Osoth.\n\nI didn't have the pride to even glare at him for that.\n\nDrake Fights\n\nArilash strutted and I slunk out to the desert floor, the big brick-sandy spot in front of the two caves. Most of the drakes were there, in a loose semicircle. \"OK, they're both up!\" said Greshthanu. \"Now, we can fight.\"\n\nNrararn leapt into the air, and started a bit of a sorcery to call clouds into the sky. Greshthanu looked up at him, and chuckled. \"I think we can fight down here well enough!\"\n\nNrararn snorted, and blue-white sparks danced around his nostrils. He waited until just before an astral heartbeat, and breathed a tight harsh lightning blast at Greshthanu. Greshthanu, of course, had tilted his Small Wall against lightning, and braced his v\u00f4 behind it, and it spattered off and just fused bits of sand into tiny globs of ugly red glass. Greshthanu leapt at Nrararn, using some sort of grownup combat spell to give extra speed to his pounce.\n\nNrararn's astral heart beat then, and refilled his whef\u00f4, so he did get to breathe at Greshthanu almost immediately. That's good tactics, by the way, giving you the advantage of two full breaths in quick succession. Greshthanu was expecting it, I presume, but the second breath did scorch his face nicely, with his spell and his v\u00f4 weakened by the fight.\n\nBut then Greshthanu was on him, clawing and biting fiercely. Nrararn's sylphs whispered advice in his ears, but Greshthanu was the faster. He ripped up Nrararn's ribs, and bit his face and got a fang into his left eye, and swatted him in the back with his tail and left big cuts from his tailspikes. Nrararn bit Greshthanu's chin nicely, but Greshthanu clawed his right foreleg while he was doing that. Then Greshthanu flung his tail around Nrararn's back and squeezed, hard. Nrararn's woven mane-lightning scored and seared Greshthanu's tail, but... that was five good hits on Nrararn, and only three on Greshthanu.\n\nThe two drakes split apart. Greshthanu circled over our heads \u2014 Arilash and mine. Nrararn landed, and put the Rose Rescaler into his eye in a hurry before the wound had time to set. \"First round to Greshthanu,\" said Arilash, and smiled at him and spread her wings.\n\n\"And I will treat this golden prince of Chiriact just the same, when it comes time for that!\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"Perhaps you will,\" said Csirnis sweetly, sitting on his haunches on a big rock. \"Or perhaps you will be more devastating. I have no mane, nor lightnings to braid in it, after all. Would you like to show off your prowess now?\"\n\nA big boast from Greshthanu, a shy little demurral from Csirnis. Greshthanu could hardly refuse. Which I think is a nice bit of strategy from Csirnis, since Greshthanu must have been a little bit shaken from the wounds Nrararn gave him. Of course Greshthanu had the advantage of position, being well above Csirnis' head. So all of us thought that the situation was rather in Greshthanu's favor.\n\n\"Now we will fight in the Caramelle, dainty princess lizard!\" roared Greshthanu, and dived at Csirnis. With his battle spell and his advantage of height, I was expecting him to land quite hard on Csirnis and more or less win the fight right there.\n\nBut Csirnis slipped off the rock gracefully, and swatted at Greshthanu with his tail. Which fouled Greshthanu's wings at just the wrong time. Which meant that Greshthanu slammed face-first into the rock at a full dive, and got both left wings badly wrenched. Csirnis casually raked Greshthanu's flank with his wingclaws and his foreclaws while Greshthanu was picking himself up.\n\nThe rest of us were staring, so much! Csirnis had gotten all five hits on Greshthanu before Greshthanu had so much as touched him. And using wingclaws, yet. Nobody takes those seriously. They're useless!\n\nCsirnis just smiled sweetly at Greshthanu, and said, \"Thank you. I should be glad to meet you in combat again, under more even circumstances, Greshthanu.\"\n\nAfter that, all the drakes had to challenge Csirnis immediately. Llredh went first, and that was a much more ordinary sort of fight. The two of them circled around in the air, and struck and breathed at each other. Csirnis did win, but only five to four. Ythac fought a very conservative fight, and lost five to three. Osoth, who really isn't that much of a fighter, only got one hit, and that because Csirnis wasn't expecting graveyard dust breath. Nrararn got into an intricate aerial duel with Csirnis, and his sylphs and the stormcloud he had prepared but not used for fighting Greshthanu worked very well for him; he beat Csirnis, five touches (four of them lightning) to four. Tultamaan went last, and the fight was over in less time than it will take me to write the next sentence. Poor Tultamaan. (Yes, that's the sentence.)\n\nThen it was time for lunch, or rather time for some drakes to get us some desert mammals to eat for lunch.\n\nAfter lunch, there was more fighting, of course. Arilash copulated with some more drakes with such artistry that everyone applauded. I wanted to go home, or anywhere else.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nHere are today's scores. I wrote down the scores from last time (which didn't make it into my diary, did they?), and how much I thought each fianc\u00e9 should get, and what that made of their scores this time. My Household Economics and Finance teacher would be so proud of me, she might almost think I paid any attention to her.\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 12 8 20\n\nLlredh 2 2 4\n\nYthac 14-1 13\n\nGreshthanu 1 0 1\n\nOsoth 0-1-1\n\nNrararn 0 3 3\n\nTultamaan-12-3-15"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Interlude with Dead God (Day 25)\n\nMurghal was spending a great deal of time in one of the side rooms of the drakes' cave, and there were little prickles of magic coming out of his ears when left. So I had to check. \"Murghal! What are you doing back there?\"\n\n\"I'm tending to your treasures,\" he said.\n\n\"What treasures? The drakes haven't done much looting yet,\" I said.\n\n\"There's a blue bottle, looks like sapphire,\" he said. \"It needed polishing.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's Osoth's pet god,\" I said. \"What's he doing?\"\n\n\"Doing? It is a bottle,\" said Murghal. Just because he can't perceive magic is only a mediocre excuse for him not perceiving magic.\n\nSo I waddled past him and stuck my head in the side cave. Xolgrohim's little sapphire jar was tucked in a corner of the rock. \"Hi there,\" I said.\n\n\"And the greetings of the day and the century to you as well, child of conquerers,\" said Xolgrohim. His voice was like ashes painted on the air. It wasn't sound. I don't know if Murghal could have heard it even if Xolgrohim had been talking to him.\n\nI curled up on the floor of his cave. \"I hope you're enjoying the mating flight,\" I said, mostly to be polite.\n\n\"It is an infinite improvement over being dead,\" he said. \"Beyond that, though... Please forgive me, for I intend not the slightest offense, but watching the children of my killers disport themselves is only a limited pleasure.\"\n\n\"Would you like to tell me about how you died?\" I asked. Osoth says that's a polite question for the undead, nearly always.\n\n\"Yes, I would. Ztesofaum, my master, had a dozen assassins expert in the seven kinds of dagger and the seven kinds of venom. We had a hundred monks expert in the eleven subtle assaults and the eleven subtle defenses. We had ten thousand crusaders garbed in blessed steel. We had walls of concrete reinforced by iron bars and ancient prayers. We had harnessed the lightnings and the meteors as our weapons. Seven great armies of mhelvul and their gods had come upon the pyramid, and been broken, and receded forth from it. When Rankotherium came, all these things melted,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, Rankotherium is rather imposing even for a dragon,\" I said.\n\n\"But before Rankotherium came, Ztesofaum told me and seven of my fellows to preserve Dolau his daughter, and Molau his son, and his tray of secrets. We fled by hidden ways to the Tumult Sands, the indigo desert, the furthest and most terrible of lands, and there we hid. In time, we hoped, the dragons would become weak and careless. In time, we hoped \u2014 and this, too, you must forgive me \u2014 we could free Mhel from your bitter talons and cruel breath.\"\n\n\"We're not that bad. The mhelvul are mostly happier with us than with you.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately there is no pleasant way to express the situation. You are alien. You are no true part of Mhel. There is nothing natural with your dominion.\"\n\n\"Well, of course not.\"\n\n\"We burrowed deep beneath the Tumult Sands, in caves that were too small for dragons. We drank charnel water, and ate luminous cavern fungi, and suffered as we hid. But by mysterious means, Cterion and Uruunma discovered us. Uruunma burned green trees by the entrance, and filled our cave with a choking smoke. Molau died of it. The rest of us fled out the long passage. Cterion was waiting by the adit. I died under his flames, we all died under his flames.\"\n\nSo, what do you to say to someone that your parents killed? \"Well, my condolences on your death,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, think nothing of it,\" he said politely. \"It was sure to happen sooner or later. Our mhelvul enemies all had plentiful assassins too, and even without them, the risk of infection from my apotheosis was very great. Paingods rarely lasted more than twenty or thirty years.\"\n\n\"Well, I do wish my parents had managed to arrange a more peaceful conquest,\" I said. I hope that was polite.\n\n\"Which are your parents?\"\n\n\"Cterion and Uruunma.\"\n\n\"Then we are opposite-siblings,\" he said. \"They gave you life; they gave me death. Hence it is a singular sort of a pleasure \u2014 but undeniably a pleasure nonetheless! \u2014 to make your acquaintance, after so many centuries.\"\n\n\"That's relatives, of a sort, I suppose!\" I said, quite politely.\n\n\"And tell me of yourself, O dragon,\" he said, just as politely.\n\nSo I did, for a third of an hour. That was easy enough.\n\n\"I am pleased that Mhel endures. Your stewardship \u2014 and, I beg of you, please forgive me for the use of that word. Were I able to rewind time a few seconds, I would surely use the word, 'empire'. Your empire seems a calm sort of empire, compared to ours,\" said Xolgrohim.\n\n\"Oh, there's still some fighting. Dragon against dragon, constantly. Even occasionally mhelvul against mhelvul until we stop them.\"\n\nThe dead god considered that briefly. \"I am pleased to hear that you have not squashed every last drop of virility from my erstwhile proud and glorious species. But I am given to understand that you, personally, were not involved in much of those events. So, if you will forgive me a unilateral declaration, I would proclaim that you and I are at peace and have no quarrel with each other,\" he said.\n\nI spread my ears. \"I accept your declaration of non-war. And, in a wholly unrelated aside, I note that will make no attempt to destroy any small and quite fragile sapphire bottles.\"\n\n\"Excellent! Then let there be a specific friendship between us now!\" he said, truthfully.\n\n\"A specific one? What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Well, I am a man of substantial experience. I gather your mating flight is not entirely to your satisfaction? And you have neither true allies nor pure friends anywhere to hand. My master's destroyer's son being a friend of sorts, but hardly disinterested. I should be glad to listen, to advise if you wish, to sympathize if you do not. Indeed, I have little else to do. In exchange... perhaps you could leave me in some civilized place on Hove when you depart? Without destroying me, I mean.\"\n\n\"That should be fine!\" I said. I'm sure I can get Osoth to give me the god somehow. Trade him for my virginity when I get the bravery to evict it, maybe.\n\nSo we chatted a bit longer, mostly about the other dragons, and then it was time for lunch.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\n[Since several days were omitted, the scores here don't match the scores on the previous entry.-bb]\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 41-1 40\n\nLlredh 38-2 36\n\nYthac 23 0 23\n\nGreshthanu 30-1 29\n\nOsoth 18 +1 19\n\nNrararn 14 0 14\n\nTultamaan-3 0-3"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "My First Kill (Day 26)\n\nNothing much happened today. Actually it is still early afternoon, and nothing much of interest is going to happen for the rest of the day, or the duodecade, either. So I'm going to sit down and write something that didn't happen today: the first time I killed anyone on purpose. A mhelvul, specifically. No big surprise; most people I grew up around are mhelvul. (Actually the only people I've killed were mhelvul, so far, though I can't imagine that it'll stay that way.)\n\nWhen I was twenty-four, my parents sent me away to Drumet Academy. Incognito \u2014 so, wearing a mhelvul shape, and with nobody much supposed to know that I'm me. Drumet isn't a dragon school. There aren't any dragon schools on Mhel \u2014 there aren't enough young dragons for there to be any point to a dragon school. We mostly get tutors: mhelvul tutors for things that mhelvul know, and our parents or their friends for dragon things. I can only think of two others who went to schools. Osoth attended Quenhendoom University for, oh, nearly a duodecade I think, studying history and archaeology, and then some off-world necromantic association on and off for another duodecade. Osoth would not wear any shape but his own for any price, though. Chevethna went to Drumet incognito for a few months, but left after Rankotherium punished Ythac for fighting her in a way that he, Rankotherium, didn't like.\n\nNo, three. Arilash attended some academy or other, not incognito, but got into so many scandals so quickly that her parents took her out in a hurry. Nobody would tell me the details.\n\nDrumet is a school for adolescent girl mhelvul of middle and upper castes. So they were either a lot younger than me, or considerably older, depending on how you want to count things. Cterion made sure I mostly thought of them as older.\n\nI was going to pretend to be an adolescent mhelvul of the middle or upper castes myself. Everyone thought this was a good idea. Uruunma thought it would give me an appreciation for small people. Cterion thought it would be excellent practice for my child's magic (which was potent but slapdash) and my cunning in general (which was just plain slapdash). I thought it would be a lot of fun, and my first chance to do anything much on my own.\n\nDrumet is across the Vorey Sea from home. It's a nice two-hour flight. I had to be sneaky though. Uruunma taught me the Esrret-Sky-Painted, so I could fly across the sea without any mhelvul noticing. I would usually land in a cove on the beach next to Drumet's grounds, in the water so I didn't leave any footprints. Then I'd turn into a seagull and fly around on Drumet's campus until I found somewhere nobody was watching. (And if you're wondering why I didn't fly across the Vorey Sea as a seagull in the first place \u2014 once I tried it. I gave up and turned back to myself after five hours, and I wasn't even halfway to Drumet.)\n\nThen I'd turn into an adolescent mhelvul girl. That was good practice, right there. Turning into a seagull is easy. Seagulls don't wear any clothes. Drumet Academy girls wear a very modest and dignified orange uniform with green epaulettes, and a small round green hat with an orange pompom, and a Drumet Academy insignia on the chest, and it all has to be right or someone will notice.\n\nAlso, seagulls can look different from time to time and nobody much cares. But if a Drumet Academy schoolgirl has greenish tusks one week and bluish the next, everyone will notice. Ordinarily, of course, Drumet girls aren't allowed to use tusk-dye. The headmaster and a few teachers had been told what I was, and they weren't about to try to punish me. But the students would guess that something was suspicious.\n\nOf course all the girls knew that something was suspicious. They were all from Pdernuz or nearby, and they all knew each others' families and clans and history. I didn't really feel like trying to make up a story about where I came from and whose daughter I was. I was sure to get caught in a lie, and that's embarrassing. So I just refused to say anything about myself.\n\nI did use my own first name though. Arilash or Ythac would have had to use pseudonyms, because no small people on Mhel have names like that. But my name is just a common mhelvul name which my parents liked. And they were tired of working to find impressive names for their dragonets who kept dying from the Great Separation, so they just gave me a mhelvul name. I have a fancy family name that you can't mistake for a mhelvul name (Jyothky T\u0161\u015dura-Nw\u00e1\u00f2 Meragathium) for special occasions. This wasn't a special occasion though. It was only small people."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The first day I was there, Headmistress Inth brought me into class, and said \"Students, this is your new classmate Jyothky. Please show her absolutely the best that Drumet Academy has to offer. Miss Jyothky, I hope you will enjoy your time at Drumet, and if there is anything that needs improvement, please do not hesitate to call upon me.\" She smelled utterly terrified. Of course, mhelvul tongues are barely worth being called tongues... actually, I think they smell through their noses. In either case, they'd be hard-pressed to smell a live cat from across the classroom, much less someone's fear.\n\nI smiled at everyone \u2014 thirty students in the class, and a teacher, and a room-servant. They stared at me the way I'd stare at a bracelet I was considering buying. I shrugged, and sat down at the end of the bench in the second row, where there was some space. I didn't wobble a bit, even though I had only half as many feet as usual. I had been practicing walking as a biped. For years, on and off.\n\nThe subject of the day was pairs of linear equations: 8x+3y = 14; 3x+8y = 19 sorts of things. The teacher called the students up one at a time, going across the first row, across the second \u2014 and skipping me. Which I thought was quite unfair, at the time. In algebra, of all things, small people may contend evenly with dragons. In retrospect, I think she was afraid of what might happen if I got the problem wrong and wanted to learn my temper. Which is sweet!\n\nAfter the morning's classes \u2014 Algebra, then History, then Comparative Dancing \u2014 was a break for lunch. The teacher sat down behind her curtain. The room-servant brought out small tables, white napkins with the school's insignia on them, and bowls of water with a dash of cheap rose perfume. The hall-servants came in bearing baskets of grilled root vegetables and egg pies, and served them out with quiet politeness.\n\nThe girl next to me said, \"Hallo. I'm Bdresia, daughter of Thunes and Hascrinet of Clan Prelret, from the Herringray district of Pdernuz. And that is Gunthet, daughter of Sdecca and Carnaret of Clan Prelret, also from Herringray.\"\n\nI smiled. \"Good to meet you both! I'm Jyothky.\"\n\nShe looked at me expectantly, and the dozen closest girls as well.\n\n\"Well,\" Bdresia said after a bit. \"Will you tell me the rest of it?\"\n\n\"Nope!\" I said.\n\n\"Well, how are we supposed to know your caste and status, then?\" asked another girl.\n\n\"If Headmistress Inth didn't have anything to say about it, I don't suppose I should either,\" I said.\n\nThe teacher rushed out from behind the curtain, quite stinking of her panic. \"Oh, girls, girls, girls! You mustn't pester your new classmate like that!\"\n\nThe girls looked more than a little perplexed, and they left off trying to chat with me altogether. Which was fine with me; I didn't know what to say to them. I nibbled egg pies and listened them discuss matters of great importance: possible marriage contracts, clan politics, geometry, raising ornamental trout, and high-quality fabric.\n\nAfter lunch, the teacher left for the washroom for a moment. Someone \u2014 Idrut, her name was \u2014 halfway across the third row threw an inkwell at me.\n\nWell, I had these odd floppy soft mhelvul-style hands on the ends of my arms, and all the kineception and aeroception and speed of a clumsy dragonet slightly hampered by being in the wrong body. So I caught the inkwell with one of them, with, according to all witnesses, consummate grace and skill. It was an open inkwell, and I got a lot of blue-black spots all over my uniform and face. All the other girls laughed.\n\nI had no idea what the etiquette of the situation was. It wasn't an attack really, so I wasn't obliged to kill Idrut. But it seemed to call for some kind of response. I had no idea what.\n\nWhile I was standing there with a dripping inkwell in my hand looking fearsomely stupid, the teacher returned in a rush. \"Oh, no! Girls, what has happened here?\"\n\n\"Oh, not so much,\" I answered her. \"I had asked Idrut for an inkwell, is all. It splashed a bit.\" All the girls laughed some more.\n\nThe teacher rushed me to the washroom. (I don't like mhelvul washrooms a bit; they stink horribly. Even mhelvul sometimes can smell them.) She scrubbed at the ink on my face and clothes, which didn't help all that much. She apologied and babbled and promised that Idrut would be punished for ruining my uniform. So I turned into a parrot, then back into a mhelvul schoolgirl with a clean uniform.\n\nI kept the spots on my face. Well, sort of. I rearranged them into triangles, in a regular sort of pattern, with the biggest spots in the middle. I kept those spots for my whole time at school.\n\nThe teacher begged and pleaded that she accept Idrut's coming whipping as sufficient. I told her not to whip the girl. The teacher asked me to add to Idrut's punishment until I was satisfied. After I told her three or four more times that I was satisfied already, she rather nervously decided to believe me. She was very cruel to Idrut whenever she thought I was paying attention, after that.\n\nThe girls called me \"Spotty\" from then on. They never had any good idea how to treat me. I mostly avoided situations where caste made a big difference, and never pressed for status, and the real mhelvul mostly figured out not to press me for status either. I wasn't going to get favors in any case, which top-caste girls sometimes demanded from bottom-caste ones. (That's an euphemism. It starts with the one girl helping the other take her clothes off, and gets disgusting from there.) Twice or thrice a top-caste girl made as if to demand it of me, but a flick of my hukuch\u00f4 scared her off. (The astral bits of our body don't shapechange, so, yes, I had my regular hukuch\u00f4 even if I looked like a mhelvul to material eyes.) Lacking a clan, I didn't have any clan chants to perform in the pagents, so I just sat that part out and shrugged if anyone asked me. At dinnertime, I stayed indistinctly around Bdresia and Gunthet and their artisan-class cohort, the lowest at Drumet Academy. Nobody challenged my right to eat with them instead of after them, and I didn't need to press my caste rights to eat earlier.\n\n(I was hungry a lot though. (I can tell that, by the way. It's not exactly feeling. Also I get more cross and find things more annoying when I'm hungry. That's not really very reliable, so I sometimes use analysis spells to know for sure. (Oh, and food tastes better when I'm hungry, but it tastes pretty good all the time so that's not very reliable either.)) Each session was five days long, and then we went home for three days. The refectory set a generous table at dinnertime, and again at midnight. I filled my plate as full as I could, and it was a running joke with my schoolmates about how much I ate. But a plateful is only a small mouthful to me really, barely a snack. Even if it's dozens of mouthfuls with the mouth I had then. By the time I got home, I usually would eat a whole cow and never mind cooking it if it's not already cooked.)\n\nAnd that's how two years and more went. Six or seven girls did figure out what I was. Three of them at once, when I forgot which side of my face had the spots on it and shapeshifted it from one side to the other right in front of them. The others were clever. Everyone knew that I was very strong, but Verimet realized that I was impossibly strong for a mhelvul, for one discovery. They all kept quiet about it, until later, being sensible girls. Well, maybe some weren't so sensible \u2014 I don't think I was \u2014 but they weren't so reckless as to annoy a dragon.\n\nGym Class\n\nEvery day, in the middle of the afternoon, our class was herded into Dordford Gymnasium for some exercise. Dordford Gymnasium was a very big and very new building. Its big central room had four tall wooden columns carved with the faces of the now-dead mhelvul gods governing health and physical activity. (Well, I think really they were some of the earliest gods, and they demanded lots of hard labor from their subjects, but they got mythologized.) The gym teachers of Drumet spent their nights coming up with odder and odder games for us to play, which they swore were traditional mhelvul recreations. (I checked on some of them later. They really were traditional mhelvul recreations.)\n\nGhu-Mung-Ghu is a sport in which two teams of girls shove a small and very heavy wagon around, trying to get it into each others' goal while the other team tries to deflect it by tossing small things under the wheels. The wagon is laden with sacks of grain if one is being traditional, or piles of protective gear and stone weights from other gym classes if it is loaded by a practical sort of gym teacher. Teams were picked in caste order, of course. I was the first of the artisan caste to be picked, of course.\n\nWell, having one strong person on your team is all very well when it's your turn to push the cart, but there's some strategy too, and our highest-caste team captain was not nearly as good at strategy as theirs. Our team was losing, four to two. I pushed the cart very, very hard. The other team threw a rag under the wheel to turn it and slam it into one of the columns, the one for the god Mangu-Pdenru, whose domain is the strength of the back, and whom I swear I did not theocept as being a single bit real. Which they had done a dozen times before in that game.\n\nThe base of the column slipped out of its moorings and slid across the floor, conveniently towards the other team's goal. The whole ceiling suddenly roared to dangersense, as intense as anything I had ever perceived. A quick tenasensitive glance pointed out that the whole building was now one large structural flaw.\n\nIt no longer seemed like a good place to be in a soft, small mhelvul body. So I got my own body back.\n\nThe girls and gym teacher promptly started screaming. I never did ask whether they were more scared of me or the the collapsing building. In any case, it didn't seem like a very good place for them to be in soft, small mhelvul bodies either. I couldn't do much about that, exactly. So I wingscooped and tailscooped as many of them under my belly as I could reach. If I favored my teammates, it is simply because they were closer, I promise.\n\nAnd then the roof fell in. It seemed almost elegant, first the part where the column had stood, then the four huge beams connected to that, and then the outer quarters of the roof, one after the other. One of the beams caught me across the back, but of course I couldn't feel it and didn't notice until later.\n\nAfter the whole roof had fallen, and some of the walls too, the mhelvul kept screaming. I'm not sure why. Dragons usually get very calm and quick in emergencies, which seems much more practical than yelping and panicking. I tilted a bit and dumped the bits of roof off my back. That part worked fine.\n\nThen, I intended to go try to dig out the girls I hadn't got under me. It was a bit of a challenge. There were small people all around, some of them under me and some of them hidden under piles of ex-roof. It wouldn't do to step on someone I was trying to rescue. It certainly wouldn't do to step on someone I already had rescued, and they were running all about and making that part harder. I mostly stood still and burrowed in the ruins with my muzzle, and picked out Verimet and two other girls, and the gym teacher. That's all that was in reach.\n\nI found a clear spot to step, and discovered that my hind legs would rather collapse than do what I wanted them to. I looked at them with sight and tenasense, but they didn't seem to be much hurt. I decided to ignore them. I dragged myself forward with my forelegs to dig out the last five girls, three of them still living. Gunthet was dead, which annoyed me.\n\nI still couldn't move my hind legs or tail, though. It must have been two dozen heartbeats before I realized that, though my legs were fine, my back was broken. I knew a fine, simple spell for taking care of that. Unfortunately, it needs to be cast rather soon after the injury happens: one heartbeat or two, not dozens. I cast it anyway, but it didn't do very much good.\n\nThe next hour or so was very, very confusing. Some small people thought I was attacking Drumet Academy. Lots of them tried to run away, which at least meant I didn't need to deal with them. Headmistress Inth and some of the teachers thought that I had gotten upset, and ran out to try to calm me down and salvage what they could of the situation. Since I was very upset now that the actual emergency was over, the conversation didn't go terribly well.\n\n\"Mighty Jyothky, we beg to know who has wronged you, so that we may torture them in your sight to appease your wrath!\" declaimed the headmistress, in a shaky version of her lecturing voice.\n\n\"My back, I think,\" I said. I wasn't paying attention to her. I was thinking that my parents could probably heal me with better spells, if they could get there in time. I could fly home in two hours, except not without the back half of my body. The Academy could send a message, but it would take a few days to get there by boat, and that would never do at all. I didn't (and don't) have any long-range magic or anything. I was feeling a bit at a loss.\n\nInth didn't quite see how my answer applied to her question, so she tried again. She declaimed, \"Oh, tell us whom we must punish! Let us absolve our community of its crimes against you, even if half of us must die!\"\n\n\"Rankotherium!\" I shouted. That redoubtable beast was the ruler of Pdernuz, and a mighty wizard, and a casual friend of my parents. Surely the Academy could get a message to him quickly.\n\n\"Rankotherium...?\" whispered Inth, too scared to declaim anymore. \"We offer you any and all mhelvul for your vengeance, but we cannot offer you Rankotherium...\"\n\n\"I don't want vengeance. I want Rankotherium,\" I said. I thought it made perfect sense.\n\nInth simply started crying, though. Much later, she explained to me that she thought I was dying, and that I wanted Rankotherium to avenge me. My parents could only take a limited vengeance on Rankotherium's territory; too much and they would offend Rankotherium. But Rankotherium could do whatever he wanted on his own territory, and Inth thought I wanted that sort of revenge.\n\nVerimet waved her hands from where I had put her when I dug her out. \"Jyothky isn't angry, I don't think.\" She somehow managed to translate from clear, coherent Pdeshlantine as spoken by a somewhat distracted dragon to clear, coherent Pdeshlantine as spoken by a somewhat distraught headmistress. And within a dozen minutes we had the riding instructor on the Academy's fastest horse, galloping off to Rankotherium's castle.\n\nRankotherium came flying in a hurry when he heard. He couldn't completely heal me \u2014 it was too late for that \u2014 but he healed enough so that I could be moved without getting worse. He sent his son Ythac to tell my parents, who came flying over in their own hurry. They healed me a bit more, using the slow spells rather than the battle ones, but I still had to spend the next two years or so convalescing, because the slow spells are slow.\n\nRankotherium invited me to convalesce for some time in his castle. His official reason was that he could teach me better apotropaic spells so that the next time the roof fell on me it wouldn't hurt much. And he did that \u2014 he taught me the Hoplonton, and some good child-magic style healing spells, either of which would have saved me in that situation, and quite a bit else, over the next year or so.\n\nHis real reason, though, was that I could get to know Ythac before the actual mating flight. Parents of young drakes are always trying to find an edge to getting their sons married. And what better edge than having your son have a year or more to befriend one of his fianc\u00e9es?\n\nThat worked, too. Ythac is probably my closest friend. Which doesn't mean I'm going to marry him. But it doesn't mean I won't, either.\n\nThe Investigation\n\nBut there was the question of why the building had fallen on us. The natural assumption was that I had turned into a dragon and knocked it down. Which is silly. If I were going to kill some mhelvul, I wouldn't knock a building on them, I'd just breathe on them, or bite them, or claw them. Or sit on them. Plus everyone who was there saw the pillar start to fall before I turned into a dragon.\n\nI asked to be the truthforcer at the trial of whoever had done it to me. Vengeance for my back, and Gunthet, and my favorite mhelvul academy.\n\nRankotherium and Cterion appointed me the sentence-maker and executioner as well. Dragonets usually don't do that \u2014 whether it's \"don't have to\" or \"don't get to\" I am unclear on. But if I was going to get my vengeance, they would give it to me in in full measure. They thought it would be educational.\n\nThe mhelvul were particularly interested. There was a rumor that it was some rebel against our rule, taking an opportunity to try to kill a young and relatively unprotected dragonet. If this had been true, they would have needed to give us the culprits quickly, or face an extravagant reprisal. That happens every dozen years or two, and sensible mhelvul make sure that it is taken care of quickly and efficiently.\n\nIt turned out not to be nearly so personal.\n\nThe gymnasium was a new building, less than a dozen years old. The Prelret Construction Company had built it.\n\nThey hadn't done a very good job.\n\nThey'd used cheap materials when the Academy had paid for expensive ones, and hired unskilled workers instead of experts, and taken shortcuts. The columns, for example, weren't dug into the ground. They were set on top of the floorboards. Which probably would have been fine if we hadn't kept slamming carts into them. I certainly sped up the collapse, pushing carts harder than a team of mhelvul girls could have done. (I refuse to accept any guilt for that.) But even without me it probably would have happened in a few dozen years. If nothing else wrecked the building earlier.\n\nBut they'd done the same thing everywhere. The column was grey pine rather than oak. The mortar they used on the stonework didn't have very much pozzolana in it, and it was still soft in spots. The plumbing leaked \u2014 all the girls knew about that. Three walls were double walls but without any insulation between them, and the fourth was just a single wall. And so on.\n\nIt wasn't dragons vs. mhelvul, when that news came out. It was everyone vs. the Prelret Construction Company. Owned by Bdresia's parents Thunes and Hascrinet.\n\nThe Trial\n\nSix dragons: me, Cterion, Uruunma, Rankotherium, Ythac, and Rankotherium's somewhat estranged wife Dessvaria. Some six hundred mhelvul, starting with the families of the high-caste mhelvul whose daughters had been in the gymnasium when it collapsed, and on from there. Plus the impresario, the crime-speaker, the bailiffs, the attorneys, and the other judicial staff, except that the judgment-maker was Rankotherium and I've already listed him. To say nothing of the thirteen executives and owners of the Prelret Construction Company. No courtroom in Pdernuz could hold all of us. Unless we shapeshifted smaller, but that would have made the occasion less impressive. So we took over an amphitheatre in Saint of Hermundro Park.\n\nThe crime-speaker was Headmistress Inth. She declaimed furiously at the builders, ending in a thunderous crescendo. \"You have worked frauds upon us. You have built a deadly school for us. You have assaulted us by means of poor construction. You have injured us by means of poor construction. You have killed us by means of poor construction. And you have tried to kill a dragon by means of poor construction. And for these heinous crimes you must pay in full, so that the ghosts of our dead students can sleep, and so that no builder ever again thinks he can make such frauds as you have made.\"\n\nShe's rather brave when she's got six dragons backing her up, is Headmistress Inth.\n\nThe truthforcing was actually rather tedious. The impresario would point his bell-covered crook at one of the attorneys. The attorney would ask a question, like \"Did you have the central columns of the gymnasium seated properly in the deep soil and properly restrained by proper moorings?\" . The builder being interrogated would say \"No\" . I would keep my veriception open, in case the builder was lying, which he wasn't. Then the attorney would ask another question, like \"And is there some proper and safe construction technique that you used in place of that?\" and the builder would say \"No,\" and I would see if he was lying, which he wasn't. The builders mostly didn't lie. They knew that they were pretty much doomed in any case, and they didn't want to annoy the sentence-maker by lying.\n\nInstead, they annoyed her by being boring. I was ready to make the sentence after a third of an hour. The judgment-maker \u2014 Rankotherium \u2014 wasn't ready to make the judgment that fast though. He was quite proud that Pdernuz was ruled by laws as much as by dragons. His subjects thought that he was quite fair, and that made them better subjects. So we had to hear all thirteen builders answer the same questions the same way.\n\nRankotherium even let the builders try to defend themselves. \"There is no doubt or disagreement that you have committed the wickednesses of which you are accused. But is there any reason why we might incline to mercy?\"\n\nThe proper answer is \"No\" and most of them said that. A humble submission to the forces of Justice is considered more sympathetic than any possible appeal for mercy. But that's when Justice is mhelvul. And the assault on me made it worse for the builders. The punishment for trying to kill a dragon is death: death of the perpetrator, and his family, and his closest friends.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" said Hascrinet. \"I knew we was working cheap. We're guilty as anything of all the fraud charges. But we thought it was good enough. I sent my own daughters there to school. Bdresia was in that gym when it fell over. We didn't mean no harm by it, and that's a fact too, Miss Truthforcer.\" Which it was.\n\nAnd the proper punishment for his crime would mean killing Bdresia too. Which I didn't want because (1) she had been kind of a friend when she thought I was mhelvul, and (2) I had saved her life, and it's embarrassing to kill someone you've saved.\n\nRankotherium used some grownup spell or other to talk quietly to me. \"And we have to take some of the blame for that, Jyothky.\"\n\n\"Me knocking the column over? I am not taking blame for it! Besides, it would have fallen over sooner or later anyway!\"\n\n\"Not you. Dragons as a whole. We have denied the mhelvul all knowledge of any but the simplest science. They barely know concepts of structural strength and equilibrium of forces. And we'd certainly never let them go so far as to measure them.\"\n\n\"I don't know them either,\" I pointed out. (This was before I spent a long time studying them, with Rankotherium.)\n\n\"Well, you should, and a good deal more besides. They're very useful when you build a building that won't fall down. We don't let the mhelvul have any science. We've seen what other creatures can do with it. But that means they can't use it for worthwhile things. Like architecture,\" he said, and broke the quiet chat spell.\n\nThen there was another third of an hour of annoying questions and discussions. Finally I was allowed to make the sentence. \"There's no question about the crime, no question about your guilt, and no question about what the punishment is. For your lesser crimes, everything you own shall be given to Drumet Academy. For your greater crime, you, your families, and your closest friends shall die.\" All very standard.\n\nThere wasn't a lot of surprise about that. I looked at Bdresia, who had been crying quietly in her hobbles for most of the trial. She stared back at me with thick darkness in her eyes. I can't blame her, since I'd just condemned her to death.\n\nI added, \"However, if making a lethal gymnasium counts as a murderous attack on me, then surely it counts as a murderous attack on everyone in it. So you've tried to kill your daughters, Hascrinet. It's not punishment for me to kill someone you've tried to kill. So they'll live, to spite you.\"\n\nBdresia wasn't expecting that. She didn't stop crying, though.\n\nHascrinet tried to thank me for my mercy, the fool. I yelled at him, \"It's not mercy. It's extra revenge.\" It sounded petulant and fatuous to me. I'm sure everyone in the stadium knew I was making up a reason to save a friend. Even the small people. The dragons knew my lie like a vericeptive fart in the face, but they didn't call me on it.\n\nExecution\n\nThe actual execution was pretty straightforward. The mhelvul had already collected all the people to be executed. There was a bit of shuffling, as Bdresia and her sister, and two other builder's daughters who had gone to Drumet Academy, were set free. Ythac very nicely took them over to Headmistress Inth, since I still couldn't walk. Not that I wanted to say anything to them just then.\n\nFresh mhelvul blood is very thick, and tastes somewhat like sulphurated chocolate, more than most of Mhel's animals. Mhelvul bones are somewhat fibrous, and sometimes get stuck around your fangs, just like most other of Mhel's animals. And if a mhelvul tries to flee, one quick little child-sized firebreath will remind them that they can, in the end, choose whether to die with dignity, or to be craven and make their surviving daughters' lives just that much worse.\n\nTwo Years and More\n\nI stayed with Rankotherium and Ythac for over a year. My parents flew in every week or so. They and Rankotherium became good friends, which was a nice bit of extra prestige for them. Ythac and I became good friends too, which was what Rankotherium wanted. I read every one of Rankotherium's books from other worlds, and learned all about science that way.\n\nSome girls from Drumet came to visit once, as an official sort of embassy. They thanked me for saving their lives, and for punishing the builders. Some of them were sincere about that last to the point of bloodthirstiness. Verimet had huge scars and a crushed fang and every reason to be angry. Some of them were barely able to talk to me. I can't blame Bdresia for that. I could barely talk to her. It was a hideously awkward visit, and I sent Headmistress Inth a letter asking that her charges not be subjected to that again. By which I meant that I wouldn't be.\n\nAfter the year, or so, I flew home. With an escort of four dragons to levitate me if I couldn't fly all the way. Which I couldn't, then.\n\nIt was almost two years before I was pretty much healed.\n\nAnd I really haven't recovered yet completely. I'm much smaller than I would be if I hadn't gotten hurt. And it probably is why my first egg was delayed so long.\n\nIt's also why I'm so fussy about wearing apotropaic spells all the time. That's good, right?\n\nToday\n\nAnd nothing interesting has happened today, and I am tired of writing.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 38 0 38\n\nLlredh 36 0 36\n\nYthac 27 0 27\n\nGreshthanu 28 0 28\n\nOsoth 17 0 17\n\nNrararn 15 0 15\n\nTultamaan-8 0-8\n\nActually, I don't like any of them today. Two dozen points off for everyone!\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 38-24 14\n\nLlredh 36-24 12\n\nYthac 27-24 3\n\nGreshthanu 28-24 4\n\nOsoth 17-24-7\n\nNrararn 15-24-9\n\nTultamaan-8-24-32"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Artillery Dance (Day 31)\n\nWe had spent the last several days in the desert. I was bored.\n\nI had talked Nrararn into teaching me some basic grownup-style sky magic. (Talking a drake into doing something on a mating flight isn't at all hard. He's here to try to get my attention.) It started with soaring exercises to become one with the sky. Nrararn immediately got four assorted challenges from four assorted other drakes, and didn't wind up having time to teach me anything else that day or the next. I was bored.\n\nThe drakes had done all the hunting. I was bored.\n\nThe drakes aren't very good cooks, either. For one thing, Osoth had learned fire breath before he became a necromancer and got his exotic new breath weapon of graveyard dust. We learned this when he tried to roast a dead pointy desert herbivore and picked the wrong (dusty) breath at first. That wasn't boring. The other drakes ganged up on him and made him eat the whole poisoned thing. Then they had to fly off in a hurry and be the first one to collect something to eat and offer it to Arilash. (I suppose to me too, but they only said Arilash, which I suppose is her advantage for twining with them all the time and me not.) This meant that we ended up with three pointy desert herbivores, one lumpy desert herbivore, and a bunch of obviously domesticated and very incompetent birds. I gorged on raw meat and slept half the night. Which was important. Arilash had been twining noisily with everyone but Tultamaan and me. It had been hard to sleep through that.\n\nSo about noontime, Osoth and Greshthanu were doing one of the tedious little contests that the drakes think will make us choose them. Osoth was raising masses of assorted quadruped skeletons and sending them at Greshthanu. Greshthanu was seeing if he could kill them faster than Osoth could raise them. The answer, of course, was that Greshthanu was ahead in terms of the challenge. But Osoth was secretly making a huge army of skeletal birds concealed behind himself, and was surely going to throw them all at Greshthanu as soon as the challenge was over. Osoth is a very devious necromancer.\n\nI would think it was all very clever and interesting and important if I hadn't had several days of variations on that theme. Am I supposed to put up with twelve years of this?\n\nSo when the skeletal birds attacked a very startled Greshthanu, I flew off the other way, towards the big Hove city.\n\nThe Road to Ghemel\n\nI didn't get to Ghemel immediately. We were some two-thirds of an hour's flight from it. So I flew over the jaggy craggy mountains. I flew over the big scrubby desert mostly full of big browsing mammals, and hovens herding them who were probably just starting to get unhappy with the drakes. They looked rather unhappy about me flying overhead.\n\nThe countryside was rather in ruins. Roads and fields had small craters in them, and the occasional wrecked car or truck or tractor. The first car delayed me for a third of an hour: I landed and stared at it a long time. I couldn't figure out how it worked. I'd studied a reasonable amount of science, but actually getting confronted with some dirty oily ruined science wasn't the same as reading about it. I was pretty sure that the bullet holes shouldn't actually have been there, though. All I really learned was that my fianc\u00e9s hadn't done it. They don't use bullets.\n\nAnd there were some small villages. Many buildings had walls scarred by bullets or rays. Some were broken or burnt or flung asunder, and abandoned. There were plenty of hovens around, working in the fields, tending herds of assorted mammals, managing smaller herds of children, sitting in the shade drinking tea from small glass cups, and standing guard with guns. As I flew overhead, they pointed the guns at me. Some of them shot at me. Their guns threw lots of bullets rather fast, but they fell quite short of me. Sometimes they scared herd animals. In a rather Z\u1e65r\u00e0s\u1e2bi\u1ecd \u017a\u00f3 Hra\u0161\u015bi\u01d2 spirit, I decided that they were saluting me rather than attacking me, so I didn't have to stop and kill them.\n\n( Z\u1e65r\u00e0s\u1e2bi\u1ecd \u017a\u00f3 Hra\u0161\u015bi\u01d2 might be translated as \"politeness is lightness.\" It's about using polite fictions to relieve the heaviness of draconic honor, custom, and law. It's not completely dignified, and definitely not completely honorable, but I don't think anyone will complain.)\n\nSome dragons were trying to find me by grownup magic. I didn't let them.\n\nThe devastation seemed worse as I got closer to Ghemel. It wasn't really. The countryside was getting more crowded. The small villages gave way to towns, and then to cities. Hove is far more crowded than Mhelvul. The small subsidiary cities were bigger than Pdernuz. They were in far worse shape too, or at least their injuries were more dramatic. Here a fire had eaten two or three blocks. There, an explosion had scored a street \u2014 recently, for it smelled of blood and oily flame and torn iron no more than two days old. Small trucks of soldiers roamed the streets, menacing terrified un-uniformed hovens with guns. Some soldiers shot at me as I flew overhead. Their weapons were better than the villagers', and a few bullets reached me. I healed myself a bit, and put on the Ulthana's Targe and the Hoplonton. I was feeling somewhere between lazy and irresponsible, so I decided that was another salute.\n\nI'm sure I'm going to regret that later. But we're not going to conquer Hove, after all. So teaching the hovens proper manners and terrors will be someone else's job. Though I imagine that the drakes will get a good start on terrifying them, at least.\n\nGhemel\n\nGhemel is a huge city. It used to be huger, and beautiful. It still is beautiful in spots. It's also blown up in spots. And covered with garbage. I didn't want to land. The artillery wasn't enough to drive me off, but the stench was. I kept breathing little gouts of fire to try to burn my tongue clean, but it didn't help for long.\n\nGhemel is a river town. There's a huge stinking river more or less cutting it in half, and a smaller but still rather big and rather smelly river cutting one half in half. One quarter looks pretty rich. The other parts are gigantic slums. We didn't let mhelvul make slums like that on Mhel. But nobody has civilized Hove yet \u2014 that's why we picked Hove in the first place.\n\nThe nice quarter had a big palace in it, surrounded by all sorts of very small fortifications. I'm used to massive stoneworks. My parents' castle isn't very big by Mhelvul standards, and it's got walls eight feet thick and forty feet high. That's no good against dragons. My parents just flew over it and killed some mhelvul and a god or two, and that was that.\n\nThe hovens' fortifications were even punier. They had big rolls of wire. They had tall wire fences that I could have walked through without any effort. They had walls, maybe twelve feet tall, but they were just thin slabs of some powdery grey stone. They were pretty tough as thin slabs of powdery stone go, but one rock from a catapult would have knocked them over.\n\nAbout that point, Ythac wrote words on my mind from afar. \"Jyothky, what happened to you?\"\n\n\"I got bored of watching Osoth outwit Greshthanu. So I flew off to be a tourist,\" I wrote back.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I will shred your liver if you ask me that again,\" I wrote, quite reasonably.\n\n\"I didn't mean it like that. I mean, could you make sure you're not injured?\" , he wrote.\n\nThat was probably a good idea, since hovens had been shooting at me for an hour. \"Not a scratch. I'm wearing your father's favorite defensive spells,\" I wrote back.\n\n\"Good, good. One minute...\" he wrote, and then a minute later, \"Very well. Three officially lovestruck drakes are placated.\"\n\n\"I am officially glad to hear that,\" I wrote. \"I'll be back by nightfall.\"\n\n\"By dinnertime!\" he wrote.\n\n\"Well, yes.\" He knows me pretty well.\n\n\"What's it like? I haven't gone very far that way yet,\" he asked.\n\n\"Big and stinky, damaged all over, and very poorly defended.\" I described the puny stone walls around the rich areas, since I had just been staring at them.\n\n\"You should throw a rock at them and show them how weak their fortifications are!\"\n\n\"I don't want to land, Ythac. It's that smelly.\"\n\n\"Actually, I think that they're not worried about massive assaults by heavily armed warriors from another country. It sounds like they're mostly trying to keep their own countryhovens out. I'll bet that that wire is sharp and poisoned, or run through with lightning, or something,\" Ythac wrote.\n\n\"I'll check...\" I answered, and peered around with dangersense. \"No poison or lightning, but it's very sharp.\"\n\n\"Speaking of poison and lightning, Osoth and Nrararn are flying out there to protect you.\" he warned me.\n\n\"From what?\" I asked.\n\n\"Each other, I suppose.\"\n\n\"How about from the artillery barrage?\" The hovens had given up with the little guns. A dozen boxy trucks were coming, with gun muzzles the length of my neck, and the soldiers were getting out any number of other smaller guns. Well, \"smaller\" mostly meaning \"bigger than one hoven could carry.\"\n\n\"Artillery barrage? Are you serious? I'm going to fly out there to protect you!\"\n\n\"Sure, if you want. I'm going to have to protect Osoth and Nrararn, though. They don't have good armor spells. You can be a very very drake drake and take that as scoring some points with me.\" Some soldiers started shooting tiny little ray guns at me. I don't think they would have injured a hoven, even, but they were quite bright. I flew in circles, and they tried to keep the rays on me.\n\n\"I think I'll score more points by staying away,\" he answered.\n\n\"I think Osoth and Nrararn would too. If you really want some points from me, tell them.\"\n\n\"I can't. Only you and Llredh have given me permission for the Horizonal Quill.\"\n\nThe soldiers started shooting their artillery at me. I circled around a bit, flying near the paths that their shells would take. \"Oh, this is fun!\" I told Ythac.\n\n\"You and your fun! Do you have a spell to tell you if you do get hurt?\"\n\n\"No.\" I cast one. \"Now yes.\"\n\n\"OK, I claim some fianc\u00e9 points. Before you and Arilash shit on the points and do whatever you want.\"\n\nThe tiny bright ray guns were back on my chest, and the cannons fired their second barrage. I dived a bit, spread my wings, swooped this way, swooped that way, trying to fly a circle around each shell's path before they all hit the ground. I only missed one. \"Ooh, this is fun!\" It would probably be more fun if I could feel the rush of wind on my wings, but vision and kineception and dangersense made it pretty exciting anyway.\n\n\"It sounds it! Can I come out?\"\n\n\"Sure. There's Osoth and Nrararn now, riding a wizard-wind.\" I thought that Nrararn must be actually worried if he was willing to bring another drake along.\n\n\"Well. Maybe next time.\"\n\nThe next barrage included a peppering of little mortars and other whatnots. Some of the shells exploded in the air next to me, in tight little yips of mild danger. There were too many of them to circle. So I made up a new dance move, flying right under the shells and letting them explode on my back if they felt so inclined, and spatter on the Ulthana's Targe.\n\nOsoth and Nrararn flew up frantically, suitably fretful. \"Jyothky! What, what is this? Why do you court danger and destruction under the guns of the hovens? You should stay home and court the drakes who desire you!\" Guess which one that was.\n\n\"Come dance with me!\" I hooted back at them.\n\nOsoth's look of offended dignity was worth all the earlier boredom. He circled up very high. Nrararn laughed, and flew over to me. He told his sylphs to whisper to me of the flight of the projectiles. That's much more accurate and helpful than relying on vision and kineception, especially when there are so many of them.\n\nAnd then Nrararn and I danced and play-fought through the next four barrages. We chased each other up and down the parabolas of heavy shells, pulling up into the sky as the shells crashed into this or that hoven neighborhood. (Which explains how the city is so demolished, if they always fight like this.) We circled each other in the paths of the silly little ray guns.\n\nThen I play-snapped at his wing just as he was dodging several shells, and he missed, and one of them got through his the Small Wall (which isn't much good against physical attacks anyway) and sort of wrecked his left rear wing. A great cheer went up from the watching hovens.\n\nWell, some air spirits and I grabbed him and towed him up high high high! He healed himself frantically with the Put-Together-Now \u2014 he's pretty good with it. Osoth took care to kill the soldiers who had shot that gun with his graveyard dust breath.\n\nFive miles up, I tried to apologize. \"I'm very sorry! I don't want to hurt your wing when it's not on purpose!\"\n\n\"Oh, no problem, no problem.\" He looked a bit shaky though, but he tried to be cheerful. \"It's all part of the testing, isn't it? If the artillery could touch me without help from a dragon, then I should be ashamed.\"\n\nIt's so nice to hear him bragging properly. To say nothing of dancing nicely with me. And rushing off to rescue me. I wasn't exactly eager to mate. (I've never been eager to mate in my life. As far as I know, which isn't very far.) But I did have a duty to my fianc\u00e9s \u2014 and to myself, really. And everyone's supposed to enjoy coitus, aren't they? So it seemed like a good situation to demand my prenuptial rights.\n\nThen I thought of one more way to procrastinate, maybe for a long time.\n\n\"Ythac? Would you be horribly offended if I coupled for my first time with someone who isn't you?\" I wrote.\n\n\"Go ahead. I'm not expecting much physical affection from you. You know that,\" he wrote back. I didn't know that.\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Jyothky, I am sure. I will bite your left foreleg very hard if you come back a virgin,\" he wrote.\n\nSo much for procrastinating.\n\nDuty\n\n\"Nrararn, have you ever coupled with me yet?\" I don't actually remember what I said to him, and I really don't want to remind him. It came out as something wrong like that, though.\n\n\"Not yet,\" said Nrararn, who suddenly looked very hopeful.\n\n\"You've taken so many lovers that the memory of one blurs into that of another?\" asked Osoth. \"Could it be that you are Arilash, come disguised as Jyothky?\"\n\nI collected a few wits and a few manners. \"I mean, will you couple with me now, Nrararn?... Then you, Osoth.\"\n\n\"I'd be delighted to,\" said Nrararn. It's not like he's in any position to refuse. But he sounded fairly pleased about it.\n\n\"I shall, of course, attend to our defenses whilst the two of you take delights in one another. Then I shall demonstrate to Jyothky of the great value of superior wisdom and deeper perspective,\" said Osoth.\n\nAt which point I remembered that we were high in the sky, over an alien city, with lots of well-armed soldiers. They probably had flying machines. And telescopes. And light recorders. And mass media.\n\nI am so glad we're going to leave Hove pretty soon. Preferably without ever meeting any hovens socially. Their main impression of me will be as \"The dragon who fornicates in the sky. Badly.\"\n\nBecause, well, it was pretty awkward. I had been planning a sweet romantic first time. Ythac should have been first, then maybe Greshthanu, then Osoth. After Csirnis showed up, he'd've been first, and Llredh in there somewhere too. In a big fat cave. Lying on lots of precious coins. With lots of licking each other first. I can't feel, but I can smell just fine, so licking should be nice, shouldn't it?\n\nIt's hard to lick someone very much in the air. I took a few desultory flickers at Nrararn. He tasted very nice about the genital slit. And that is really all the intimate detail I want to write down.\n\nExcept that coupling in the air isn't nearly as easy as it looks from underneath. So I when grabbed him with my tail and we squirmed around a lot in the air, we started by plummeting. But Nrararn caught us with a cute updraft spell. And we squirmed around some more.\n\nOsoth was laughing. \"It appears that my esteemed co-fianc\u00e9 is just as good a lover when he has not actually achieved intromission.\"\n\n\"This is foreplay, jealous death lizard,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"It is? I thought you'd mounted me!\" I said.\n\nNrararn hissed at that, to be sure. I am the most ungracious fianc\u00e9e ever.\n\nI swatted him in the side, not that it would do much to a dragon wearing the Hoplonton. \"Don't hiss! You know I can't feel.\"\n\nNrararn obviously could feel the swat, though. He said, \"Right that. Well, I'm ready whenever you are.\"\n\nI had no idea where either of our bodies exactly were, or not exactly enough for coupling anyway. So I cast a scrying spell. I know that Arilash doesn't need to do that. Maybe she did the first time. It was rather dizzying, scrying on my own tailbase.\n\nThen he was in me, according to both the scrying spell and the rather self-satisfied grin on his face.\n\nSo we writhed around in the air. Nrararn looked fairly well pleased. Osoth looked amused and tolerant. I tried not to look too bored. But it really wasn't very interesting or fun.\n\nI scried on what was going on with our genitalia. It was mostly squooshy and very biological. Dragons look more elegant from the outside than the inside.\n\nSome minutes later, Nrararn looked distinctly happy. I scried some more, and, yes, he was squirting properly into me.\n\nOsoth gave Nrararn long enough to enjoy that part, and three more seconds besides. Then he thwacked him with his tail. \"Sky mage, I do believe that your helpfully elemental skills are the most-appropriate ones for our current situation.\"\n\n\"What, what?\" asked Nrararn, blinking at his rival.\n\n\"Seven very large and very fast aircraft are coming towards us. They are armed with missiles of moderate power, and with guidance systems of amazing finesse. One of them has killed two hundred and eighty-four hovens, and their ghosts follow it in a dismal train. Shall I destroy the aircraft with arcane secrets and the hungry spirits of the dead? Or will you turn them aside in some gentler way, and thereby give them less provocation to intrude upon our idyll?\"\n\nSo Nrararn got out of me and called for a horrible windstorm. Osoth and I mated in the air, which was even more awkward than with Nrararn, and took a fair while longer for technical reasons. Next time I'll bring a book along.\n\nOh, that's ridiculous. This mating flight is twelve years long. I can spare a boring third of an hour, or a whole hour, to be marginally polite to my fianc\u00e9.\n\nAnyway, Nrararn provided a sandy tempest, and blew the planes around and away from us. That was fun to watch. I wish I had had time to learn some grownup magic, so I could do that sort of thing myself. Osoth satisfied himself inside me. I did my best to be politely enthusiastic, even if I spent more time watching the sky magic than I did to my necromantic lover. It wasn't the most interesting part of the day. Better than waiting for the drakes to come back with some food, but not that much better.\n\nBut I had a trick against boredom. \"OK, I'm not a virgin anymore,\" I wrote to Ythac.\n\n\"Good for you!\" he wrote back. \"How do you like it?\"\n\n\"It feels just as good as having my back broken,\" I wrote.\n\n\"Oh, sorry to hear that,\" he answered. \"I was hoping it wouldn't just be about feeling.\"\n\n\"No, it's mostly about feeling. I'd just as soon not bother anymore 'til I'm trying to have children. But that wouldn't be polite to you and the other drakes.\"\n\n\"And Arilash. She's copulating enough for two dragonesses. I don't think there's enough time in the day for three though.\"\n\nSo I scribbled some apologies about how terrible a fianc\u00e9e I was being. He scribbled some lack of fretting about it. Which passed the time before Osoth's climax, at least.\n\nWhen we untwined, Osoth said, \"I thank you, O my fianc\u00e9e. Your embraces are sweeter to me than hervetical vinegar. And a single drop of that rare and exquisite vinegar holds more than three drops of honey.\"\n\nYes, he talks like that. I think he's making it up about the vinegar though. At least I've never heard of it, and I pay attention to food.\n\nAnd then we flew back.\n\nGetting Noticed\n\nEveryone knew what the boys and I had been up to. We could have gone for a swim so we didn't smell quite so much like each other, the way that my parents usually do. But (a) Osoth and I have the right opinion of swimming, and (b) unlike any other time that any of us might have been sneaking around indulging ourselves, we are now allowed, encouraged, and even required to do such things.\n\nSo Llredh immediately challenged Osoth to a Caramelle. He distinctly amused himself by fighting Osoth very defensively, and only scoring hits on him with his spiky tail. He took a good three minutes to win the fight, and did not let Osoth touch him even once. After which victory, Llredh grinned a big fangy grin at me, and said, \"The mating flight, finally you join her. The unhurried dragoness, she you are, but in time you get where you are going.\" But he didn't demand a turn right then, which is good."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Greshthanu, on the other hand, growled, \"You finally start? You take the smallest member from one, the middle from the other.\" (Yes, the three varieties of male organ do produce different sorts of seed, and they do smell different. And they smell a bit different from drake to drake, too, if what Arilash has come home wearing is any indication.) \"Come now and try the full set!\"\n\n\"Not now, please,\" I told him.\n\n\"Jyothky, this is not fair! You make everyone wait years and years, then days and days more! Do not be so great a delay beast!\"\n\nSo I bit him. Just the tip of his wing, so it's borderline not hideously rude. He flew away in a huff."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Csirnis simply smiled a big barbelly smile at me. Csirnis is a drake with patience. Also, I think, he is Arilash's favorite. I would happily take him away from her \u2014 but not today. I've used every scales-weight of courage and daring and manners that I ever had, already."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Osoth and Nrararn were very sweet and deferential. Osoth even got a couple packets of spice from a hoven village or something and sprinkled it on some dead birds for me at dinner. It wasn't the best food I've ever had, but it was the best on Hove so far.\n\nAnd I wasn't at all sure how to behave back. Arilash is often seen with her tailtip twined with her consort-of-the-hour's. I wasn't feeling that demonstrative. For one thing, I was confusingly sad about not starting with Ythac. I kept thinking in circles: I had offered, he'd said no, and I didn't expect to have the courage for too much longer.\n\nFor another, I didn't really want to favor one of the two over the other. I should have just put a Y-shaped fork in my tail and held both, but I didn't think of that until just now."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Tultamaan just looked morose and slithered off into the drakes' cave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "That evening, when we were alone, Arilash grinned a big grin at me. \"Well, how was it?\"\n\n\"Not as good as for you, I guess,\" I said. \"Judging...\"\n\n\"I'm not trying to have a dominance contest just now, Jyothky,\" she said. \"I'm just trying to congratulate you. If you want that.\"\n\nSo I stole a trick from Tultamaan and mumbled \"Right. Thanks.\" and looked morose and slithered off into the corner of the cave. I didn't want to talk to her about it.\n\nFortunately I am not without resources. I wanted to talk to Xolgrohim, who is the wrong species and too dead to be after my claspers himself. Sneaking into the drakes' cave sounded like utter doom. I'd probably end up either coupling with someone again, or, more likely, insulting someone I like by turning them down.\n\nSo I scribbled. \"Ythac? Are you awake?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'm just cheating on you,\" he wrote back.\n\n\"What?\" Arilash was asleep in the dragoness cave, her head under her left wings, her tailtip twisted into a spiral.\n\n\"Not like that. I just played a round of tsheriaf with Llredh. We did not keep score. It is outside the mating flight.\" Ythac wrote.\n\n\"So you're not upset at me for, well...\"\n\n\"[I laugh!]\" wrote Ythac. \"Hardly upset! I am glad for you.\"\n\nI was evidently obliged to chew his spikes from afar. \"What was your first time with Arilash like? When was it, for that matter?\"\n\n\"Third day on Hove, out behind Khamrou Ghanirma. It was pretty different than today for you. She knows how to squeeze pleasure out of a drake's body,\" wrote Ythac, risking his status as my best friend.\n\n\"I can't do that!\" I whined. \"I can't even begin to do that!\"\n\n\"Nobody expects you to. It's not even a good thing. Llredh maybe prefers a dragoness like her, and Csirnis is utterly unflappable, but I'm sure that Osoth and Nrararn find her awfully intimidating. Can you imagine either of them marrying Arilash and trying to keep up with her?\"\n\n\"No, now that you mention it. How about you?\" I asked. Today is my day for being very direct.\n\n\"There is absolutely no chance Arilash would choose me,\" Ythac wrote definitively.\n\n\"Oh? What did you do to her? You've always seemed pretty friendly with her.\"\n\n\"Oh, she's not upset with me at all, nor I with her. We'd be a terrible couple though. I'd rather marry you than her.\"\n\n\"Even if she's a better lover than I am?\" I had to ask.\n\n\"Even if that. Even if something more than that: even if it's what my father wants,\" he said.\n\nWhich is certainly worth something.\n\nI don't feel any more grown up than I did this morning. Or than last month, before we left. Or than twelve years ago, really.\n\nCoda: Tsheriaf\n\nTsheriaf is a traditional and exciting dragon game. You take a few turns diving along a cliff face and breathing against it as you dive. You get points for making shapes: wobbly line = 1, straight line = 3, half-circle = 4, full circle = 6, equilateral triangle = 8, five-pointed star = 12, etc. You get to multiply the points some for having them related to your peer's previous moves. Connecting two figures is \u00d72. Centering your figure on a point of someone else's is \u00d73. Neatly circumscribing or inscribing is \u00d74. Oh, and you get some extra points for setting things up for your opponent, like leaving a point of one figure in the center of another one, so your opponent could potentially get the centering and circumscribing bonuses at once.\n\nActually it's not just a dragon game. We played it in Drumet, in mhelvul shape, with pencil and paper. It's a lot more exciting when you're plummeting down a cliff though. I suppose that's true of most things.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nI think I lost track of some scores. I'm not doing this very well. My Household Economics and Finance teacher would no longer be happy with me. She would just be afraid of me.\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 40 0 40\n\nLlredh 36 0 36\n\nYthac 28 +1 29\n\nGreshthanu 25-2 23\n\nOsoth 18 +6 24\n\nNrararn 15 +5 20\n\nTultamaan-8-1-9"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "We Need To Talk (Day 32)\n\n\"We need to talk,\" said Arilash.\n\nWhich was a bit odd of her to say, since we had been talking all morning. We had spent hours in the cave dissecting a spare slightly killed pointy desert herbivore together. They've got about three stomachs, each connected to the other two. We were trying to figure out what went where when, when the animal was alive and eating. Arilash had even gone so far as to turn into a not-killed pointy desert herbivore and eat a few pointy desert plants. But she didn't want to stay in that shape for long enough to try out even two stomachs, much less all three. I wouldn't want to either. It's not a very dignified shape to wear in the presence of your rival.\n\nActually, the whole dissection exercise isn't really something you should be doing with your rival. Arilash and I are both finding the mating flight a bit tedious.\n\n\"No. We need to fight,\" I said.\n\n\"I suppose we ought to a little bit, for form's sake,\" she admitted. \"But let's talk about what we're fighting about.\"\n\nSo I breathed lightning on her left foreleg. It barely got through her the Small Wall, but enough to make her scowl. She must have thought I was being careless, though, because I did it just after an astral heartbeat. Which ought to mean that I wouldn't have any more lightning 'til the next one, in twenty seconds, and dominance fights don't usually last that long.\n\nThis one looked like it might last longer, unfortunately, because Arilash just blinked at me and looked hurt. Twice hurt actually. Distinctly offended, and slightly singed. She didn't even riposte, she just said \"Can we do this after we talk?\"\n\nSo I breathed fire on her left foreleg. It poured through her Small Wall like a claw through a sheep. Oops. If she weren't offended she'd have realized I was up to something.\n\nThat at least got her attention. She adjusted her Small Wall to block cold better, since that's all I had left to breathe for eighteen seconds, and she darted beautifully and elegantly at me and bit my right wing.\n\nSo I breathed lightning on her left foreleg, just like I shouldn't have been be able to do for seventeen more seconds. It wasn't a lot of lightning. But with Arilash's Small Wall tilted against cold, it prickled her left foreleg more than the first bolt. She looked very surprised.\n\n\"Right. That was tricky,\" said Arilash, sounding all annoyed.\n\nWe scrabbled around for a while after that, clawing and biting and tailswatting. Before my next heartbeat I was on my back underneath her \u2014 on the dissected pointy desert herbivore, yet \u2014 and she'd clawed me once with her foreclaws and once with her hindclaws, and bitten my neck.\n\nBut I had clawed her belly and bitten her wing. That plus three breaths made five hits.\n\n\"Well, you win this one,\" she said. \"Another few seconds and you'd have been all clawed up, like usual.\"\n\nShe didn't get off me, so I turned into a meerkat and leapt out from under her and turned back. \"Maybe, and maybe not. I'm more dangerous than you think!\" , I boasted politely.\n\n\"Well, that was a good breath trick... how did you do it?\" she asked. \"I can't squeeze that much fire out of my whef\u00f4.\"\n\n\"Your Small Wall was loose on the lightning side. A half-sized bolt could get inside of it. Half of mine anyway, I'm better at breathing than you.\" And if that sounds friendly, it was. I don't win fights with Arilash very often, and I was in a good mood.\n\nShe started healing her left foreleg. \"I can feel that \u2014 it stings! I wouldn't trade adult magic for that, but it's got its place.\"\n\n\"I got you good!\" I helpfully pointed out.\n\n\"You did. Now heal your belly before those wounds set,\" she said.\n\nI flapped my wings. \"Much better!\"\n\nShe gave me an odd look. \"No, you didn't heal yourself yet.\"\n\nI set to work on that. \"I mean, that was a nice riposte. Poking me for being the worse fighter really, and broken too. I'm glad you're taking me seriously as a rival.\"\n\nShe flicked her tailtip. \"I'm taking you seriously. I'm not taking rival seriously.\"\n\n\"If Roroko were here, would you take it seriously?\"\n\n\"Probably. But she's not here. The drakes are stuck struggling for us, and mount-fighting each other like crazy from the sound of it. You and I at least can arrange the mating flight how we like,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"I'm not going to let you choose your husband now. That's silly and undignified. And what's mount-fighting?\"\n\n\"You're such an innocent. Mount-fighting is a drake challenge, loser has to turn female and please the winner,\" Arilash said. \"There's a whole mount-fighting club in Fohhona. You fly in, pay some, get sorted by size, and then it's off to the valley to fight and twine. Lots of fun.\"\n\n\"You did it?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Arilash. \"Annoyed a lot of drakes, too. They were all shouting, 'If you want hemipenises, I will give you plenty!'. I picked one of those, and we flew off. He was so distracted, he only bit me once before I won the fight. Worse than you, even. He was the dragoness, I was the drake, and half the club was watching and cheering. You look shocked and offended, Jyothky.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to figure out what I should be shocked and offended about first. Mount-fighting at all? The club? You doing that?\"\n\nShe lay on her belly, her head on her forepaws. \"Roroko was right about me, you know. And the club is in Fohhona \u2014 what do you expect all the bachelor drakes to do? Of course they're going to want to fornicate, and most of them would rather do it in their real bodies. I mean, they could turn into mhelvul and rent whores, but that is so embarrassing 'til you get used to it, and doesn't feel half as good anyway.\" I declined to ask how she knew; she'd probably tell me. \"So if you're going to be shocked and offended about anything, how about our fianc\u00e9s mount-fighting each other?\"\n\nThat seemed like a good thing to be shocked and offended about. \"Are they?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. They're not finding the dragonesses quite as satisfying as they might have hoped,\" said Arilash. Which stung, even though she chose gentle words. Arilash was all they could have hoped for and more. I'm the laggard on that, even if I'm not completely useless like I was two days ago. \"Ythac especially. He keeps challenging Csirnis, Llredh, and Greshthanu. Csirnis not for mounting.\"\n\n\"Ythac does? He never mentioned that to me!\"\n\n\"He does. I wouldn't mention it to you either if I were him,\" said Arilash.\n\nI had to think about that a bit. It doesn't make much sense. Ythac never asked for my favors \"since we're engaged anyway\" when we were younger, the way that Greshthanu and Tultamaan did. He always seemed to have so much self-control, to me. \"Does he win much? They're all bigger and stronger than him.\"\n\n\"Not very often. Well, Csirnis won't mount-fight at all, but Ythac's claspers are as familiar with Greshthanu and Llredh as mine are.\"\n\n\"Boys shouldn't have claspers. Those are girl parts,\" I said. \"It's wrong.\" I'm right. It is wrong.\n\n\"And dragons shouldn't have hands, but that doesn't stop you from spending years as a half-time mhelvul. We've got lots of power, Jyothky. Why shouldn't we enjoy it in all the ways we can?\"\n\nI was far to upset to talk any more. \"I'm going to go outside and enjoy it now. Alone.\" Which I did by blasting the north half of Kuhankun Mountain with fire and lightning until it slumped and melted and flowed down into the river of the next valley over. That made a nice crackling and steaming. There's no better way to calm down. And it truly alarmed my fianc\u00e9s, to see me so angry.\n\nServe them right. They're all a bunch of perverts. I'm going to have to figure out how to beat Arilash enough to get first choice, and marry Csirnis. He may be crazy, but he's at least decent.\n\nConversations With The Pervert\n\n\"Do you mount-fight my other fianc\u00e9s?\" , I wrote to Ythac. I didn't actually want to talk to Ythac. I was sure I'd end up biting him, probably more than I really wanted to. So I had flown off to a hoven village with a name like Drupe-ek-Kavash, a miserable grubby place except for one nice new blue-roofed building. I was sitting in the yard of a miserable grubby farm, with a small herd of animals that were enough like sheep and chickens so that I'm going to call them sheep and chickens trying to stay as far away from me as they could on the other side. Oh, and some farmers running around with battered semi-automatic guns trying to decide what to do.\n\n\"Now and then,\" he wrote back shortly.\n\n\"It sounded more like a 'constantly', from what I hear.\"\n\n\"No. Not constantly.\" There's no veriception through a language spell, but he sure sounded evasive to me.\n\nI was not about to let him out of my glare. \"How many times in the last twelve days?\"\n\n\"Nineteen.\" Once a day, often more.\n\n\"Why?\" I underlined it about five times.\n\n\"I need to train somehow. I won't win fights against any of them without lots of skill, lots of practice. And I need practice when you're not watching, I don't want to look bad in front of you. And they won't fight me that much without some sort of wager. Mount-fighting is maybe a bit embarrassing, but won't diminish my hoard.\"\n\nI needed to think about that, so I burned a chicken to eat. That's always a bit delicate. Fire breath wants to be exceedingly hot and spread a lot. Which is wonderful for a weapon, or for melting a mountainside to show how annoyed you are. It's not so good for cookery. If you're not careful, you will end up with a chicken burnt on the outside and raw in the middle. And, in this case, several chickens in various states of partial burntness on either side of it, and some very worried farmers with semi-automatic guns trying to decide what to do, more frantically than before.\n\nAt least the chicken was fresh and crunchy. The farmers weren't so happy letting me have it. They argued a bit: \"It's pretty big. If we just wing it, it might get mad and charge. It might hurt somebody.\" \u2014 \"So shoot in the air. The noise will scare it off.\" Either their tactics are truly miserable, or they don't know that I'm intelligent, or they don't know I already gathered their language. Probably the first one; the other choices are kind of insulting.\n\n\"I suppose that makes sense, Ythac.\"\n\n\"I'm doing it so I have a chance for you. I actually love you, Jyothky.\"\n\nWhich isn't something you really expect to hear from a fianc\u00e9, especially one who spends so much time coupling with other people and so little with you. Love is for married couples who've been together a long time and somehow managed to get it right. We've been friends for duodecades, though. Maybe that could do it \u2014 couldn't it?\n\nWhat is the polite way to answer that, though?\n\n\"I suppose that's fine.\" The words looked all unkind in my head after I wrote them. Polite maybe, but not really right. I froze a partially-burnt chicken and took a bite. (Also crunchy, but not as cindery as a burnt one. Too many feathers, though.) I was really trying to put off writing what I knew I really should. The farmers started arguing whether their bullets were big enough to stop me, or whether they'd just make me angry. I hooted \"Neither one!\" at them, but they didn't seem to realize that I had spoken.\n\nAfter the chicken was gone, I persuaded myself to write it anyway. \"Shall I fly back and couple with you?\"\n\n\"No, you don't have to,\" he answered.\n\nWhich I was just as happy about at the time. And seemed like a good omen really. My husband shouldn't be pestering me all the time, the way Arilash's should be pestering her. Also, if I'm angry enough to melt half a mountain at noontime, I probably won't want to be fornicating at two-thirty.\n\nThen the farmers decided that they had to shoot me. I didn't really want to have to kill them. So I flapped at them with my hukuch\u00f4 and made them run away. And then I lumbered into the sky and left Drupe-ek-Kavash, never to return. At least, a bunch of farmers and I hope I don't return.\n\nI took one of their sheep back to the cave, though. If the drakes are going to have claspers, the dragonesses can do some of the hunting. That's fair, isn't it?\n\nArilash again\n\nI was here in the dragoness cave, writing what you have just read. Arilash was out late, presumably reducing the need for mount-fighting among our fianc\u00e9s. She flew back in, with some sort of travel spell I guess, so fast that she left little shards of music in her wake. \"Did that help any, Jyothky?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. He told me he loves me.\"\n\n\"The sheep told you that? Or the mountain?\"\n\nI puffed fire at her. \"No. Ythac.\"\n\n\"Well, I meant the mountain. I've never melted nearly so much of one, but I'm sure I'm going to want to before this is over. I didn't know you had even talked to Ythac \u2014 he was with us most of the afternoon.\" Arilash rolled on her back and blasted her belly with fire, and the cave filled with the stench of burnt dragon semen. Ythac's and Nrararn's.\n\nI couldn't really accuse her of poaching on my drakes, since (a) we're officially sharing them for the mating flight, and (b) if we hadn't been, she'd have had the prior claim on both. So I was a good dragoness and ignored it. \"Just writing messages from afar. He's good with language magic.\" I waved my wings around. \"Can't you go wash off in the river? Or doesn't that stuff dissolve in water?\"\n\n\"I ran out of soap.\"\n\n\"Have a drake raid some from Ghemel.\"\n\n\"Right, we're on a civilized world. I haven't seen any of it yet. Did Ythac of the Good With Language Magic explain at all what he meant by loving you?\" she said.\n\n\"I'd like to see more of Hove myself. Ythac didn't really give me a seven-page Manifesto of Affection. He didn't want me to fly over there and fornicate. That's how I always imagined how a real romantic declaration of love should go.\"\n\n\"I usually do it while I'm twining somebody,\" she said. \"It's more convenient that way.\"\n\n\"You've been in love?\" I asked.\n\nShe took a huge wad of sand and started buffing the last of the mess off her scutes. \"Oh, dozens of times. For about an hour and a quarter after the last orgasm is over.\"\n\n\"That's not real love,\" I said.\n\nShe breathed fire on me, not doing much. \"Says the expert in both love and orgasm. Ever had either one?\"\n\n\"No,\" I snapped, and breathed lightning on her, hard enough to scorch through her Small Wall. Which was rude of me: if I was going to fight her, we should decide which form and all of that.\n\nArilash hissed as she healed herself. \"You're the prickle queen today! If we're going to keep talking about your personal life, could you at least give me the Hoplonton? Talking with you hurts!\"\n\nI couldn't really take offense at what I wanted to take offense at, so I took offense at something she didn't actually say. \"You know I can't feel. I know I can't feel. Murghal probably knows I can't feel by now. You can always score points off me with it, but by now it's not very many points,\" I hissed.\n\n\"I'm not trying to score points off you!\" She sounded rather irritated.\n\n\"Well, you should be,\" I said. \"I'm trying to put up a good struggle at least, and you're not even paying attention most of the time. I actually won a fight this morning, and I'd probably win again if I pounced you now.\"\n\n\"So maybe you'll surprise everyone and win the mating flight,\" she said. \"Fine with me. Just don't you dare declare it over any sooner than you need to.\"\n\nWhich makes no sense at all. How could she not care whether or not she won the mating flight? She's got to have a top choice among the drakes \u2014 by then, if not by now. Probably Csirnis, there aren't many drakes as appealing as Csirnis. If she's not first, I'll probably take her top choice.\n\nAnd of course everyone will know for the rest of forever that she was second in her mating flight. Maybe even last, if I beat her resoundingly enough. There's a big difference between second and last \u2014 I wake up and fret about it for at least a third of an hour every night. Second (which is \"third\" in any reasonable mating flight, or \"sixth\" for a drake, or \"seventh\" for our drakes) means \"Put up a good fight\" . Last just means \"Lost\" . Last is just plain humiliating. For your whole life.\n\nAnd if Arilash loses to me, that means she sure didn't put up a good fight.\n\nSo I sort of blinked confusedly at her, for a bit. She snarled, \"I'm going to sleep,\" and stuck her head under her wing like a bird.\n\nI was furious. \"Turn your back on me in the middle of a dominance contest, will you?\"\n\nShe raised her wing a bit. \"It's not a declared one. And if it were I'd concede, you slow-witted lizard. I want to sleep.\"\n\nSo she was serious. Insane, but serious. I prodded her a bit more with some questions and some claws, but she just muttered about wanting to sleep and talking more when at least one of us was willing to be the least bit sensible.\n\nDead God's Advice\n\nI couldn't sleep. So I went to the other cave, evaded a couple of drakes, and found Xolgrohim. Where I had left him \u2014 I don't think he'd had any visitors.\n\n\"Good evening! And how are the concerns of the conquering lizards?\" he asked.\n\nSo I complained about Arilash and Ythac and more Arilash to him. He listened with suitable sympathy. I suppose I was the best entertainment around.\n\n\"Speaking as the ghost of a man who had many loves in his life... may I speak frankly, without offense?\"\n\n\"Of course! You're the only one around who can.\"\n\n\"It seems to me that Ythac's love for you is not, shall we say, one of the great epic loves of all time. Actually, do dragons have great epic loves?\"\n\nI snorted sparks. \"Oh, of course we do! Elelizet and Harco, Dathe and Esrret... lots of them!\"\n\n\"I am not sure that Ythac and Jyothky will soon join their place in the draconic literary canon,\" he said in a silky little voice. \"It could be shyness, this soft little evasion of his. But he is not shy with anyone but you. His excuse rings false. Perhaps you could pry deeper, and find a real reason. He would not be the first man to tell a woman that he loved her as a sort of distraction, a way to keep her quiet while he pursued another. He will mate with Arilash, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, he will. While he's declaring his love for me, even.\"\n\n\"And Arilash \u2014 she sounded evasive, to me. It could be that they have secretly chosen each other. They cannot say so yet. But perhaps they are trying to keep you unaware of their intentions towards each other, to prevent you from taking any strategically potent actions now, while it is easy.\"\n\n\"Insidious beasts!\" I hissed. \"What should I do about that?\"\n\n\"Well, what steps can you take, towards capturing Ythac's affection? Especially if he refuses to mate with you?\"\n\n\"I can think of something!\" I snarled. So I stomped out of Xolgrohim's alcove, to where Ythac was sprawled next to Llredh. I thumped him with my tail to wake him up, and kissed him severely, and stomped off to my own cave to try to sleep.\n\n\"The kissing, is there some especial reason for her?\" asked Llredh, when I was out of the chamber but not out of earshot.\n\n\"I think I had a fight with her earlier today. I think she just forgave me,\" Ythac answered.\n\nHardly!\n\nCoda/Scores\n\nYthac, Llredh, and Greshthanu lose lots of points for mount-fighting. Just this once. Unless it bothers me a lot more sometime later.\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 40 +4 44\n\nLlredh 36-4 32\n\nYthac 29-8 21\n\nGreshthanu 23-4 19\n\nOsoth 24 0 24\n\nNrararn 20 0 20\n\nTultamaan-9 0-9"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Bickery Boring Day (Day 36)\n\nI was sprawled on the top of Kuhankun Mountain, in a blobby crevice that I had melted the other day, catching the noontime sun. I couldn't see the caves. This was a good thing. I didn't much want to see any dragons. I'd seen about eight too many of them lately \u2014 or maybe nine \u2014 and had a surfeit of dominance contests.\n\nThe drakes were looking a bit surfeited themselves. Half of them were sprawled on the sand by the river. They couldn't see me casually. If they had been the least bit paying attention, they would have magiocepted or heard me. But why would a pile of drakes pay attention? I couldn't see them either, but they were talking loudly.\n\nLlredh: \"The casual friendly fight \u2014 who will join me in her?\"\n\nOsoth: \"I am afraid that you must be partnerless in this dance. Ythac is off hunting. For the rest of us, the taedium of the endless contests has become rather redolent of ennui.\"\n\nLlredh: \"What?\"\n\nNrararn: \"He said 'no'.\"\n\nLlredh: \"The Grand Draconic \u2014 he should learn to speak it!\" I don't know why he said that. They were all speaking in the language of Mhel, not Grand Draconic.\n\nCsirnis: \"He is not wholly wrong. There is no urgent need for having constant dominance fights, beyond the minimum that sociability and honor require. Arilash will couple with whoever suits her fancy, and pays the contests no mind. Jyothky will not couple with anyone, and, also, pays the contests no mind.\"\n\nLlredh: \"Forget Ythac not! You must recognize that he is every bit as eager a vulva-wielder as Arilash.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Saying that of our rival, sir, is beneath contempt. Withdraw it or I shall ask to fight you immediately, in a Tea for Disharmony.\" Which is one of the most painful of Rhedosaur's 541, since minor hits don't count.\n\nLlredh: \"I withdraw it! The berserk rage, she leaves me today, tomorrow she returns.\"\n\nNrararn: \"Just like Arilash.\"\n\nOsoth: \"An energetic bunch of suitors we are today. No fighting for our fianc\u00e9es. The only challenge over Ythac's honor.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Well: all our honor. But I shall gladly contend with you in any way you wish, for any decent stakes, or for no stakes at all if you prefer.\"\n\nOsoth: \"I would sooner seethe the vile Nevethian stench-pig in the ichor of mummified crospolids to quaff as a sleeping-posset.\"\n\nNrararn: \"He said 'no'.\"\n\nLlredh: \"The baroque coiling speech, I understand her generally!\"\n\nOsoth: \"I shall endeavour to exhume archaic verbiage and the cloying remains of ancient elegies from the catacombs of Hove, to the singular end that my quotidian expression shall become a polysphinxian miasma of enigmas.\"\n\nNrararn: \"He said 'no'.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"He should have done, at least.\"\n\nThey were silent for a moment or two.\n\nNrararn: \"Csirnis, were you serious about Jyothky?\"\n\nCsirnis: \"While she is not wholly opposed to the core reproductive purpose of the mating flight, she does not follow the lead of Arilash. She has her own style, which is rather less earthy.\"\n\nLlredh: \"He said 'no'.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"I said 'yes', actually.\"\n\nLlredh: \"He said 'no, I didn't get to coil tails with her.' That recreation, that fianc\u00e9e, she evades me also.\"\n\nNrararn: \"So, which would be the unluckier one: the drake who marries Jyothky, or the drake who marries Arilash?\"\n\nLlredh: \"The fool, or the simpleton: which one is you? The husband of Arilash enjoys her thrice or four times a day. Lucky beyond lucky the husband of Jyothky counts himself to enjoy her thrice or four times at all!\"\n\nWhich stung a lot!\n\nNrararn: \"Does Arilash's husband think he can keep up with her? Does Arilash's husband think he can keep her? She has never been faithful a day in her life, except the last few, and that only because no suitable adultery partners are convenient. Do you think she'll be a faithful mate for more than, oh, three weeks at the outside?\"\n\nLlredh: \"The constant copulation, I provide for her! The need to wander will be far, far from her.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"And saying that of our fianc\u00e9e, sir, is even further beneath contempt than Llredh's insinuations about Ythac! Nrararn, I expected better of you! Withdraw that libel \u2014 withdraw it at once, I say, or you shall face the fiercest fight that law and custom allow!\"\n\nSo Csirnis will defend Arilash's honor, but not mine?\n\nNrararn: \"I withdraw, I withdraw!\"\n\nOsoth: \"Still, let hyperbole be rendered into parabole, or even elliptibole, our fianc\u00e9es are a study in amatory opposites. Perhaps, in all mental equilibrium, one drake may prefer the one, another the other. Even if neither one is precisely perfect in all regards.\"\n\nNrararn: \"Not that we get to choose. Still, which would you prefer?\"\n\nOsoth: \"There is no real choice. Arilash may toy with me now and then on our mating flight, when the bumptious appeal of Llredh is temporarily flaccid. I expect no more after she marries.\"\n\nNrararn: \"And no less, too?\"\n\nOsoth: \"I make no such pronouncements in the presence of the prince.\"\n\nLlredh: \"He said 'no'.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Llredh, you will not trick me into fighting Osoth for reasons that are not my own. If you wish him to be injured, you must do it yourself.\"\n\nOsoth: \"Nrararn, you humiliate yourself. You attempt to inveigle us into speaking ill of our fianc\u00e9es, at least one of whom can surely hear our declamations. This is a poor and petty amusement for any day, and thrice poor and petty during a declared truce.\"\n\nLlredh: \"Oh, what is he doing, is it that?\"\n\nNrararn: \"Simply chatting. There's little enough to do here else, save fight and fuck and feed.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Which are, as you well know, the proper and important duties and rights of dragons on their mating flight.\"\n\nLlredh: \"Dead dull, the rest of each day.\"\n\nOsoth: \"And what does a bellicose beast such as yourself do the rest of the day, when in your familial domicile you did reside?\"\n\nLlredh: \"Research into poison, mostly, on Mhel. Antidotes for curchao stings.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence. I wasn't expecting that of Llredh, and evidently nobody else was either.\n\nCsirnis: \"I am not from Mhel. What are those?\"\n\nLlredh: \"The large poisonous insects of equatorial Mhel, is what they are.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Large enough to endanger a dragon? I heard nothing of such dangers of Mhel!\"\n\nLlredh: \"The smallest dragonet, she fears no sting of a curchao. Harsh their stings to small people! Many the mhelvul who lose a limb to one, or a life or a child. Yet a few drops of tincture of scharniu, a common thing on Squeretz, will save nearly every one. This thing I discovered myself, after much seeking.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Remarkable! I knew nothing of this. You take better care of your small people than I had expected.\"\n\nLlredh: \"Small people, they are the labor. A bit of care, they work all the harder, and last the longer too.\"\n\nNrararn: \"Well, this dismal desert holds no attractions like toxicology, or much of anything else.\"\n\nOsoth: \"Alas, there are but few ghosts in here, and those of the dimmest and most tedious sort.\"\n\nLlredh: \"Plentiful copulation, she is of some attraction.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"But with only two females \u2014 for which again I apologize on behalf of my former world \u2014 and only one of those being as eager as one might have thought a dragoness on her mating flight would be \u2014 even that attraction is somewhat limited. Physically engaging, to be sure, but there are aspects of life beyond the body's basic wishes.\"\n\nNrararn: \"We are agreed, then?\"\n\nCsirnis: \"On what?\"\n\nNrararn: \"Finding something less boring to do.\"\n\nI stuck my head over some melted bits of Kuhankun Mountain. \"Yes, let's!\"\n\nLlredh and Csirnis looked pleasantly embarrassed to realize that I had listened to them not speak so well of me.\n\nCoda/Scores\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 47-3 43\n\nLlredh 37-3 34\n\nYthac 25 0 25\n\nGreshthanu 24 0 24\n\nOsoth 21-1 20\n\nNrararn 20-1 19\n\nTultamaan-7 0-7"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Seduction of Nrararn and Osoth (Day 37)\n\nThis morning I was flomped on the mountain I had melted, writing about yesterday. Nrararn and Osoth circled overhead twice side by side, and flew down to land on either side of me.\n\nI was instantly suspicious of them.\n\nAlways when drakes are together on a mating flight, they're contesting with each other at least a little bit. (Me and Arilash too, in principle, but see Day 32 about how that is going.) So, usually they'll be racing a bit, each one trying to get there first. Or maybe each one trying to fly higher than the other, in case there's an excuse to have a fight. Or whatever.\n\nNrararn and Osoth were just, well, flying side by side, without any of that.\n\nI lifted my chin off the frozen lava and peered at them. \"You're looking inordinately peaceful today.\"\n\n\"In matters of love and marriage, our contest is as bitter and dire as any that this dragonless world has ever seen! Yet, somehow, there is an entire world beneath our wings, to observe, to explore, to sift for secrets,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"What oblique, obscure, occult Osoth isn't saying is, we've found the stars here, or some of them anyway. Want to see them with us?\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"The stars? Were they missing?... This is a Typical Toroid. There aren't supposed to be any stars,\" I said. \"There's no sky that isn't Hove for them to be in.\"\n\n\"Right, but we found some anyway. Come see!\" said Nrararn, as if that explained everything.\n\nI puffed sparks of lightning at Nrararn. \"You're just trying to get me to spread my claspers for you again.\"\n\n\"The effects of the celestial realm may be mirrored in the terrestrial in divers ways. The fecundity and humidity that lie at the heart of the natural world may, perhaps, be among them.\"\n\n\"He said 'yes'. In a truly beautiful place, if our stolen hoven tourist guidebooks are any indication,\" said Nrararn \"Got any better plans for the day?\"\n\nI didn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "They were acting quite odd on the way.\n\n\"How much further are these stars?\" I asked. \"We've been flying a while.\" The while was well over an hour by that point, and we were still over wild and apparently star-free lands.\n\n\"We could fly all the way across the sky to the land on the other side!\" said Nrararn. \"There's air all the way.\"\n\n\"Wise, wise sky-mage, to answer the question only with praises of his chosen domain!\" said Osoth. Then he blinked. \"Which is to say, rather, that though we could fly across the sky, in this instance there is no need to. Another third of an hour will bring us there.\"\n\n\"Are your wings tired?\" asked Nrararn, with a pointed look at Osoth.\n\n\"For if they are, Nrararn could surely conjure a comfortable wind, fast as a tempest, gentle as a breeze, letting us fly there with only a moderate delay and much less effort,\" said Osoth. \"Such are the powers of sky magic.\"\n\nSo strange, hearing one of my fianc\u00e9s praise another one. Very suspicious!\n\nIn the Cave of Stars\n\n\"Behold! The Cavern of Dancing Lights! Made by the wicked king Vludeath in ages long past, as the site of his secret nympharium! His principal queen Gelecheledesea discovered it, and disguised herself as the next concubine to gain entrance. She struck him with an oar, knocking him into the lake, and there he died,\" said Osoth. \"Or at least, so run the legends. If it amuses you \u2014 either of you, of course I mean \u2014 we can learn the truth.\"\n\nThe Cavern of Dancing Lights wasn't that much to look at from the outside. A snaky dirt road with heavy wagon-tracks slithered up the side of Mt. Ghrasco. A barren stony field dripped off the side of the road, with a battered sign covered with cryptic glyphs and a few dusty cars parked haphazardly around. A small house nestled by the mountainside. A few hovens looked around and spoke to each other in an unfamiliar tongue. They could not see us, the Esrret-Sky-Painted took care of that badly and in a bit the Pyerthu's Spare Hallucination took care of it better, but they surely could hear the sound of our wings and our speech.\n\n\"Jyothky, Osoth! I suggest that we take the shapes of aquatic birds for this expedition.\"\n\n\"Undignified!\" squawked Osoth. \"I do not object for the sake of making you look the worse, Nrararn. But could you really imagine that a elegant and proper dragoness such as Jyothky could take for even one moment the shape of a goose or...\"\n\nI was, by that time, already a pitch-black duck. \"I'm only elegant and proper in the sense of 'not as promiscuous as Arilash.' I'm not even sure that's a good kind of elegant and proper as an adult.\"\n\nNrararn turned into a brilliant white duck with a gaudy rainbow crest down his back.\n\n\"Am I the only one with...\" Osoth struggled to find words that didn't insult me. \"...... a sufficiently refined sense of self-esteem, or, nay, even vanity, which forbids so casually taking the shape of such a lesser creature?\"\n\n\"Csirnis wouldn't like it either, I don't think,\" I said.\n\n\"Perhaps you could turn into a bat? That's a bit dignified, especially in the grand necromantic tradition. You'll be fine in the cave that way. Though if there's any playing in the water, you'll have to shift again to join,\" said Nrararn.\n\nSo two ducks and a bat dived onto the nervous hovens sitting in the house. They yelped and swatted at us with hats and folding chairs, but it was too late for that; we had already cast the The Spilling of the Speech and learned the Queltzin language. The signs just read \"Cavern of Dancing Lights\" plus hours and prices of admission, and the hovens were discussing how strange it was that peculiarly-colored ducks and bats should be assaulting them. Nrararn scattered the hovens away with a flick of his hukuch\u00f4, anyway.\n\n\"Now, will you show me these underground stars?\" I asked my fianc\u00e9s.\n\n\"Over there are postcards of them... I think the actual stars themselves are through that door,\" said Nrararn. Beyond that door was a cave in clay and stone, a lazy dark stream, a small dock for three small boats. Spikes were set in the walls, and ropes on them. A big sign in Queltzin read \"No Candles Here!\".\n\nWe followed the ropes upstream, candlelessly. Hoven laughter and squeals guided our way, as the stream got slower and deeper, and curved left and right and left again, and broadened.\n\nThen it opened into a modest underground lake. Not a huge one \u2014 Csirnis would have been a bit cramped in there, unless he hid his dignity and turned into a duck. Two little boats of delighted hovens were in the center of the lake, staring at the ceiling.\n\nAnd the ceiling was impressive and beautiful. Hovens had set it with grands upon grands of bits of mirror. Each boat had one guide holding two candles, waving them in slow circles. A myriad reflections sparkled in the ceiling, and a myriad myriad answered from the boat-shattered surface of the lake.\n\n\"Behold the stars of Hove!\" said Osoth in sepulchral tones.\n\n\"You're right, Osoth. This isn't a duck sort of place.\" I turned into a black watersnake, so I could swim with just my head above the surface. Tiny sparks swirled on the surface. Nrararn followed suit after one of the hoven children said, \"A duck! A duck! Look, a duck!\" His parents teased him a bit and told him to look at the lights in the ceiling since they'd driven all that way and paid for it.\n\nNrararn breathed a delicate thread of lightning at a stalactite. The sudden transient brilliance shattered into a myriad fragments of light, splashing all around the wet cave for an instant. Osoth and I hissed appreciatively.\n\nThe hovens yelped, some in amazement and some in fear. \"Oh, cousin Nifferat didn't say anything about that when she was here!\" said a visitor.\n\n\"We didn't...\" said a guide.\n\nI laughed, and tried blowing a firebubble. That's harder than it sounds. Firebreath \u2014 any breath really \u2014 wants to rush out and spread and destroy things. If you're persuasive and slow and careful, you can usually get it to hold together in a ball and hover near your mouth, for a little while at least. (On rereading \u2014 you can only do that if you're a dragon, in which case you already know about it. I meant 'I' not 'you'.) It's harder when you're not using your own mouth, too.\n\nWhich is just an excuse for why it came out wobbly and pointy, not a tight-wrapped flaming globe that I had intended. It drooped and bobbled in the middle air, waving its tongues in all directions, and filling the room with bright reflected sparks and a more intense glory than the candles had provided.\n\nThe tourists \u2014 hoven and dragon \u2014 ooh! ed with much appreciation. \"A fireworks! A fireworks like the Floret sun!\" chirped the child.\n\n\"Drukah and Bmern save us,\" mumbled the guide.\n\nNrararn blew a bubble of lighning, just as wobbly as my firebubble but he wrapped it in a whirlwind, and tugged it into a cone shape. Fire and lightning swayed and circled each other. Children clapped, and I would have too if I had had forepaws then.\n\nOsoth said, \"Best, I suppose, if I did not add my own venefice to the celebration. Dark and dusty death does not delight to dance in deep mirrors!\"\n\n\"Though better than lightning or fire when hunting a hoard!\" said Nrararn. \"My own breath melts metals, chars gems, ruins electronics! Yours will slay without such a vastness of destruction.\"\n\n\"Mommy, that bat is talking about death! Why is a bat talking about death?\" said the child.\n\n\"More to the point, why are you talking in Queltzin, Osoth?\" I asked him. In Queltzin, of course.\n\n\"Queltzin is a scratchy, sparky tongue! Its sandpaper cadences and flashing fluids are uniquely appropriate for these caves!\" said Osoth, giggling. \"Or else I just learned it.\"\n\n\"Mommy, bat and snake are talking! Talking in the cave!\" chirped the child.\n\nMommy wasn't so enthusiastic. She turned to the guide. \"Sir, is this part of your usual performance?\" His terrified eyes and scent (if hovens can smell \u2014 I think they can't really) answered her without speech. \"No? Perhaps we can leave now?\"\n\n\"They're between us and the way out,\" said the guide.\n\nNrararn reared out of the lake and turned back into a duck. \"We're here to look at the mirrors, just like you! Stay if you will, go if you must!\"\n\n\"Besides, we're not very big and we're not very dangerous!\" I added, and turned into a duck too. This caused Osoth to erupt in giggles.\n\n\"Mommy, mommy! The snakes becomed a ducks!\" chirped the child, clapping her hands.\n\n\"Yes... it did...\" said the mother, rather perplexed.\n\nI hopped into their boat and sat on the child's foot. \"Now I becomed a shoe!\" Nrararn went me one better, flapping to sit on her head. \"And I becomed a hat!\" Child and necromancer apparently contended to see which of them could laugh the most. The child had the dual advantages of (1) being tickled by water running down her cheeks and (2) not having studied so much death. So she won.\n\nThe mother was untrickled, untickled, untricked, and unamused. She picked Nrararn off the child's head and put him gently but firmly on the gunwale or narwhal or whatever it's called. The side of the boat. \"I'm afraid that I do not allow ducks, no matter how pretty, to sit on my daughter.\"\n\nNrararn squawked indignantly, and flapped his wings for balanace. \"There is only one possible response for this! O mystic bat, you must conjure up the ghost of King Vludeath!\"\n\n\"That's impossible,\" said one of the other hoven tourists. \"Ghosts do not exist.\"\n\n\"Fortunately, neither do necromantic bats!\" chirped Osoth.\n\nHe spoke five words that fell into the lake like drops of molten lead, and the dark waters boiled around them with frore vapors, and the wide-eyed apparition of a crowned skeleton rose up from an impossible distance. \"Let the dead and drowned drink of oblivion!\" it moaned.\n\n\"Nope!\" said Osoth. \"I'll let the dead and drowned describe their death!\" I blinked at him. He added, to me, \"No topic is superior, no topic is more polite, no topic is closer to the heart of the undead spectre than the matter of his own death. Indeed, the greatest peril of necromancy is the terrible, terrible boredom of conversing with an endless parade of monomaniacs upon that single topic.\"\n\nThe hovens drew back as far as they could. Even the fearless child shivered and hid behind her mother.\n\n\"I drank brandied wine and honeyed wine, I sucked the narcotic nectars of the purple lotus and the grey, I luxuriated in the smoke of storax and brahavni candles in the twinkling darkness. I sent my wife out to fetch more wine. I drifted into sleep. My boat tipped over, and asleep I slipped into the deep lake, and the deeper death.\"\n\n\"Oopsie!\" said Osoth. \"You got some bloodier rumors about it after you died.\"\n\nThe spectre regarded him dully. \"In death there are no rumors. In death there are no lies. In death there is but a single truth.\"\n\nThe hoven child buried her head in her mother's side, crying, and the adults didn't seem much happier. I flapped my wings, and honked at Osoth, \"Stop playing with your ghostie. It's scaring our fellow tourists!\"\n\n\"They must not fear! It is conjured simply in terzo oblotto \u2014 there is no possibility of any sort of doom or danger!\"\n\n\"I'm not entirely sure that they appreciate the subtleties of your art,\" said Nrararn. \"I'm not sure that I do, for that matter, for they are extremely subtle, and, of course, extremely artistic.\"\n\nOsoth banished his ghost. The ghost had, more or less, banished the hovens too. Once it left, the guides started rowing the boats back out as quickly as they could. \"Goodbye, little hoven girl! Thanks for your foot!\" I quacked at her, and waddled back into the water.\n\nHovens gone, we play-fought as ducks in the water. Well, Nrararn and I did. Osoth stayed a dignified bat, hanging dignifiedly upside-down on a mirrory stalactite. We dignifiedly breathed threads of fire and lightning at him, but that cracked a couple bits of mirror, so we stopped.\n\nDespite the introduction, they didn't try to mate with me. I didn't realize that 'til just now.\n\nAlliance\n\n\"The two of you are awfully friendly,\" I said to them as we flew back. \"It's making me suspicious.\"\n\n\"Should we tell her?\" Nrararn asked of Osoth.\n\nI preemptively translated, \"He said 'yes'.\"\n\n\"For some interpretation of the past tense!\" Osoth protested. \"But I see no grave doom that may come from Jyothky's full knowledge of our compact. Indeed, should it please her, we could have no greater ally.\"\n\n\"Now I'm even more suspicious,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm going to steal a trick from Csirnis' book,\" said Nrararn, and destroyed the spell that protected him from veriception. \"So, just the truth about this. Though, let it be a private truth! Please don't tell the other drakes. Let them figure it out for themselves.\"\n\n\"That's dramatic,\" I said. \"I'll be discreet about it.\"\n\n\"The drakes have a pretty clear ranking, except for the two of us. Csirnis has got to be at the top, then Llredh second. Greshthanu is third,\" said Nrararn\n\n\"Fourth, by reason of his vast and impressive blockheadedness! Ythac is third,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Well, they're third and fourth anyway,\" said Nrararn. \"Osoth and I are fifth and sixth, except that I'm prettier...\" Osoth glared at him, and he continued, \"... well, we're fifth and sixth, and Tultamaan is clearly seventh. We were bickering at each other about which was fifth, like that, and then we realized that it didn't matter who was fifth. Only first and second really matter much. You might dip down to third and pick Ythac if he is third by the end, since you're friends. Not to fifth though.\"\n\n\"My esteemed colleague must mention one further esoteric aspect of our situation. In most mating flights, there is an especial reason to struggle for fifth place, or, in any event, to struggle not to be sixth. It is a particular humiliation to be the least among the drakes. But Tultamaan, and, paradoxically, first-ranked Csirnis, are saving us from that particular bit of strife,\" added Osoth.\n\n\"So Osoth and I have made an alliance. Naturally we will each strive to persuade you of our own supremacy as your mate. But we shall not interfere with each other. We shall not contest so hard for fifth place! We shall have one friend on the mating flight, which is an unusual luxury for a drake. Indeed, we may take steps which aid the other.\" Nrararn hesitated a bit. \"Such as sharing the recommendation of the ghost of a well-travelled native merchant of the previous century for what to see in the area.\"\n\n\"So I'm flying around with two drakes allied against me?\"\n\n\"Allied for you!\"\n\n\"Allied to acquire me!\"\n\n\"Arilash is the only one not trying to acquire you,\" said Nrararn, \"And, given Arilash's general nature, even that's not a sure thing.\"\n\nA vile concept, being acquired by Arilash! But I didn't know what to make of the alliance. That's no part of a usual mating flight that I know about. So I asked someone.\n\nDead God's Advice\n\n\"To summarize, two of your fianc\u00e9s have made a compact to win your hand?\" asked Xolgrohim.\n\n\"I don't have hands. Win my claspers,\" I said with a bit more of a snarl than one ordinarily uses talking to (a) a dead god, or (b) one's romantic confidant.\n\n\"Forgive me; I died before learning the proper nomenclature for the parts of a dragon,\" he said. \"How great an ally is a dragon?\"\n\n\"Rather great! How many dragons did it take to squash Ztesofaum and all his empire?\" I snapped.\n\n\"Five had been involved in one way or another. Perhaps more. My attention was diverted by trying to escape from your parents,\" said Xolgrohim. \"I do not fully appreciate how relevant that statistic is. Does winning your, well, private parts, entail a military campaign like the conquest of Mhel?\"\n\n\"No. Not usually, anyway,\" I had to admit.\n\n\"Osoth has subtle and useful powers. I should be the last one to deny that. They have been exceedingly useful to me. Nrararn I have observed less closely, but he braids lightning into his mane, does he not?\" said the bottled god.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Can either of them do anything that makes the least bit of difference towards pressing their own suits, much less each others'?\" he asked.\n\nI chewed on my tailtip. When I tasted blood I healed it. Then I answered. \"Osoth says that necromancy is useful for tracking down the long-buried treasures of the dead. That's supposedly why he reanimated you.\"\n\n\"I should be happy to tell him what I know. I daresay he would be disappointed, for all that I once owned is now in the land of Rankotherium and Dessvaria, back on Mhel. They may not be quite as eager to grant permission for Osoth's treasure-seeking as your parents were,\" said Xolgrohim. \"Actually, I daresay that Rankotherium and Dessvaria own the greater part of it. A few things were hidden before the dragons came, but there were more urgent things to do than to cache gems and scrolls for the far-future convenience of the conquerors' spawn.\"\n\n\"That's true. Around here we've only got the ghosts of hoven bovines. I don't know that Osoth is ever going to be a very successful treasure hunter,\" I said.\n\n\"So, if I understand draconic terms properly, I should have to judge the both of them to be essentially useless as husbands, and as allies to each other and anyone else,\" pronounced Xolgrohim. \"Their alliance is an admission of weakness and incompetence. You should scorn them for it. Take a dragon more worthy of your attentions: Greshthanu or Llredh.\"\n\nWhich I suppose makes plenty of sense.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nNrararn and Osoth get points for being fun. Fun isn't actually very important. Llredh gets points for some very mighty fighting in challenge contests, but I didn't feel like writing about that. It is important.\n\nIt is also dull.\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 43 +1 44\n\nLlredh 34 +2 36\n\nYthac 25-1 24\n\nGreshthanu 24-1 23\n\nOsoth 20 +2 22\n\nNrararn 19 +2 21\n\nTultamaan-7 0-7"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Seduction of Tultamaan (Day 41)\n\nI woke up this morning in a tangle of dragon. Last night I had gone to sleep alone and early, when Virtuet first rolled behind the Godaxle. Arilash was out frolicking with grace, enthusiasm, and... Greshthanu, I think it was. Llredh maybe. She evidently slithered in at some time in the night and decided to sleep on me rather than her own spot. I am evidently warmer or more comfortable than bare floor, whatever \"warmer\" or \"more comfortable\" are like.\n\nI escaped from her clutches, getting some grumbly mostly-asleep protests, and waddled out of the girls' cave to try to find Murghal and make him do something cooklike with whatever bits of dead desert mammals were left over. He's not a very good slave, not very attentive \u2014 he spends most of the day chatting with Osoth or someone, or even bottled Xolgrohim.\n\nTultamaan was lying in wait for me on a sand dune. The sunlight gleamed on his brick red scales, setting them off against the dull red of the dune. Some scrubbly spiky desert plants vaguely echoed his bright green chevrons and the clusters of spikes on his head and shoulders. His useless forelegs were tucked under his chest, claws sticking out, just as if he had put them there the way anyone else would. He looked rather like an elemental spirit of the Ghemelian desert. I'll bet he had taken a third of an hour arranging his body to best effect.\n\n\"A pleasure to see you come by my corner of our encampment, Jyothky,\" he said.\n\n\"Good morning to you, too, Tultamaan,\" I said.\n\n\"I trust and expect that you are here for Appropriate Purposes, as I am?\" he said.\n\n\"Breakfast is appropriate at any hour of the day or night,\" I said.\n\n\"Ah, the famous Jyothky appetite has come to visit. A pity that Another appetite didn't come with it. That other appetite hasn't exactly Overstayed Its Welcome, if you know what I mean. Its presence has not become Oppressive,\" he said.\n\n\"It's too early in the morning for that,\" I said. Meaning being bitten about my inadequacies, though I suppose it could have gone for fornication too.\n\n\"Ah! Now it is too early for that. Later on it will be too close to Lunchtime. After that, it will be too much in the Middle of Eclipse. Further on, it will be Far Too Midafternoony. It will be time for Lying About On Melted Rocks and Looking Appealing Without Actually Doing Anything About It. Then, of course, it must not interrupt Dinnertime. After that comes an hour of all-important Complaining That There Are No Books To Read. Then, of course, an early bedtime, so that you can rise from your cave early the next morning for yet another exciting day of Avoiding The Issue,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"That's not what I meant,\" I said. I wrapped the Hoplonton around myself.\n\n\"A very apotropaic, that. A very good defensive spell. Just the thing to cast when your fianc\u00e9 is having a pleasant casual conversation about a topic so near and dear to both of us. What better time for Seeing To One's Protections? One can't go Unguarded in the Presence Of One's Lovers and Suitors, after all,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"I cast it every morning when I get up. It saves my scales from little injuries that I can't feel,\" I protested. Which is perfectly true.\n\n\"Ah! That would be a Similarity between us, and a Difference. We are both a bit crippled here and there. But you do not feel Anything, and I feel things quite acutely. All Sorts Of Things,\" he said.\n\n\"I am going to find the dragon who decided to use the same word for 'experience emotions' and 'experience bodily sensations', and assault him with unpleasant emotions and unpleasant bodily sensations until he really can't tell the difference,\" I said. (I say that regularly. It's a sore spot with me. (And I'm going to bite whoever made up that set phrase, too. There's no escaping touch words.))\n\nTultamaan would not be distracted by one of my favorite gripes. \"Emotions can come with bodily sensations. Especially Bodily Sensations Which One Should Produce Upon One's Mating Flight. And I use the word 'produce' with a Determined Intent. I do not insist that one 'Experience' them when one cannot. This behavior may distinguish one from one's... dare I use so bold a word?... Friends.\"\n\n\"What are the other drakes doing to you?\"\n\nThat did distract him for a moment. \"They are careful to propose contests which, while not strictly impossible with two legs, are certainly more challenging. Greshthanu suggests a footrace. Osoth suggests a calligraphy competition. Still, I suppose one Ought Not Complain. The others are generally too confident in their own superiority to bother offering challenges at all.\"\n\n\"I have to feel... I have to sympathize with you on that. Arilash won't challenge me much.\"\n\n\"Another Point of Similarity between us,\" he said. \"Another thing we Have In Common.\"\n\n\"Trying not to be ranked last in our sex?\"\n\n\"Precisely. Though, like the other Similarity, this one comes with a Difference. When you are ranked last, you will find yourself married to a Drake. Indeed, he will be a Drake of Some Distinction. You may choose the second among seven.\"\n\n\"I'm going to be ranked second. Not last.\"\n\n\"That is a Truly Subtle Distinction when there are only two dragonesses. But we digress. For my part, I might perhaps \u2014 perhaps! \u2014 excel over Osoth or Nrararn. It is barely imaginable that I could excel over both of them. Ythac? Greshthanu? Llredh? Csirnis? Preposterous! One could challenge them to a contest of Complaining, one supposes. This one might win, but would earn one very little glory.\"\n\n\"Yes...?\"\n\n\"And this is, of course, your first mating flight. You will not need any further one to secure yourself a Wholly Satisfactory Mate.\"\n\n\"Well, that's an awfully optimistic way to think of any of you,\" I said. \"Csirnis is insane about honor and justice. Llredh is coarse and brutal. And so on down the list.\"\n\n\"And down to me. Despite being Eloquent and Far More Intelligent and Sensible than Any Other Drake, I am somehow seen as Whiny and Cowardly. Even without considering the unfortunate matter of the forelegs. Yes. Your mate may not be Wholly Satisfactory. He may have a few Endearing Flaws. My mate will not have any Endearing Flaws. She will, simply, not exist at all.\"\n\n\"Well, what do you want me to do about that?\" Which was the stupidest thing I can imagine saying. I can do something about it, I just won't.\n\nHe didn't take that opening, though. \"And, furthermore, this is my third mating flight. There will not even be time for a fourth, such as happens to one drake in a grand of grands. Because for Some Unsaid Reason this mating flight was unaccountably delayed for a dozen years or more.\"\n\n\"I won't take any responsibility for that. I wanted to get started as much as anyone else did. My body wasn't cooperating.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" he beamed. \"You see the Unpleasant Situation which 'your body not cooperating' has put us into. And me, in particular.\"\n\n\"I see that I'm not getting breakfast any time soon, at least.\"\n\n\"Oh! I will happily cooperate with you getting breakfast. I ask only that you Cooperate With Me in exchange,\" Tultamaan said.\n\nI sort of glared at him.\n\n\"Let us consider what will become of me after we return. Naturally I am far too decent a drake to indulge in the Activities which remain open to Unfortunate Elderly Bachelors, such as are available in Fohhona and other such Places of Much Repute. I do not consider mount-fighting to be an activity in which Decent Drakes take part. Neither is the occasional affair with Small People at all to my taste.\"\n\nI generally try not to think about what bachelor drakes do; that's their business, and Arilash's I suppose. Except for ones like Quel Quen, who make quite a name for themselves by exploring new worlds and, I'm sure, make the dragonesses who chose other drakes over them rather embarrassed.\n\n\"So this flight is my final remaining chance for Sexual Congress. There is, in fact, no other real reason for me to stay here even a few more weeks. I might just as well return home and start to enjoy the humiliations of being Ranked Last In Three Separate Mating Flights. Except that that would deprive the rest of you of my Brilliant Insights, and of course, leave me no further chances to enjoy the Company of Dragonesses. Ever.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen a lot of Brilliant Insights,\" I said.\n\n\"You're seeing one now. And I haven't seen a lot of Company of Dragonesses,\" he answered.\n\n\"Arilash has been pretty busy, hasn't she?\" I said. Unwisely, as if I needed to ensure that I'd come in last instead of second. I was rather rattled and upset at Tultamaan.\n\n\"Arilash has not found me Wholly To Her Taste. Not to put too fine a point on it, after two Experiences she has told me not to ask her again. Which is an Unfair and indeed Repugnant way to treat a fianc\u00e9. I think she does not like my forelegs. This is a popular opinion. I, myself, hate them with a passion that dwarfs even Arilash's distaste for them.\"\n\n\"Can't you wear a shape that doesn't have them? Like, oh, a bird or something?\"\n\nHe spread his spikes. \"Is that your Opinion of me? That I am more of a Scarlet Grebe, or a Hargreve's Lesser Puddle Duck \u2014 or, if you are being generous, perhaps a Pileated Kingfisher \u2014 than I am a Dragon of Honorable Lineage and Substantial Rank At Court?\"\n\nI have no spikes, but I can sure hiss. \"I'm just trying to be helpful! I like being a bird!\"\n\n\"Perhaps it is just as well that you have no Matrimonial Intentions towards me. Your suitability for the Royal Presence is not Entirely Peerless,\" he said acidly.\n\n\"I haven't decided who to marry yet! And I'll be a better wife than that!\" I wailed.\n\n\"You are Practicing for this 'Being a Better Wife' sort of thing by being a Worse Fianc\u00e9e? This strategy has both short and long term flaws. For one long-term instance, it will limit your fertility in the future. Unless you wish all your dragonets to have two, or, even worse, One sire?\"\n\n\"I've got a dozen years for that! I don't need to do it all today!\" But he was perfectly right about that, clawrasp it. If I don't get my ova partially fertilized during my mating flight, well, either my husband will have to supply all three parts himself (which is a bad thing for several practical and theoretical reasons), or, um, the alternative is simply not done by any sort of respectable dragoness \u2014 pace Dessvaria.\n\n\"But today will soon become Yesterday, and, in due course, Three Months and Eleven Days Ago, and then Quite a Long Time Ago. If you do not get take care of matters today \u2014 for some choice of 'today' \u2014 they will remain uncared-for indefinitely. A Truism, but True nonetheless.\n\n\"... well, yes...\" is all I could think of to say.\n\n\"Now that you see the Inescapable Logic of my position, I do expect that you will Fulfill Your Premarital Duties.\" He stared at me with eyes like frozen coals.\n\nI breathed a tight hot fireball into his face, and leapt (viz. waddled) into the air, and flew off downriver. I expected he would follow me, but he didn't. I suppose he has a lot of experience at rejection.\n\nI curled up on a hilltop, and moped meditated. Which is totally unfair of me, since he's completely right. Most of my fianc\u00e9s won't have much of a chance with dragonesses for most of their lives. Arilash and I should be as nice as we can to them, shouldn't we? And Arilash is doing her part, and Roroku's, and some of mine.\n\nSo: today's resolution. I will couple with all of my fianc\u00e9s this week.\n\nExcept for Tultamaan. He may be right, but he's horrid. Fairness only goes so far.\n\nSeduction of Csirnis\n\nAfter a few hours of assorted moping, mixed with occasional periods of introspection and deprecation, I decided that I'd start off by coupling with Csirnis. This was very practical. If anyone can make me feel like a worthwhile dragoness doing the noble and honorable thing even if it's not exactly what I'd be doing for my own purposes, it's got to be Csirnis. He does the noble and honorable thing as easily as breathing. Well, breathing fire.\n\nWhen I got back to the camp, Csirnis and Llredh were circling around in the middle air, with most of the dragons watching. Llredh swatted at Csirnis with a brutal forepaw full of glittering white claws. Csirnis dodged with lazy elegance and grace, and snapped at Llredh's wrist with his tail. Llredh growled in pain. The spectators warbled, \"First blood to Csirnis!\"\n\nI called out, \"Winner copulates with me!\"\n\nAll the dragons peered up at me. Greshthanu shouted back, \"How come you never do that when I'm fighting!\"\n\n\"I will, I will,\" I answered. I meant it, too.\n\n\"I see that my Impassioned Lecture has produced a Crude Approximation of the Right Result,\" said Tultamaan, flicking his tailtip in annoyance.\n\n\"I see that I'm going to have a real challenge after all!\" said Arilash, spreading her forewings happily.\n\n\"The prize, she is the small extra reason why I will win this contest!\" said Llredh, and snarled, and flapped fiercely to get to Csirnis.\n\nCsirnis slipped beautifully away from him, gliding over Llredh, trailing his hindpaw lazily and leaving a long red score down Llredh's back. \"Second blood to Csirnis too!\" I called out. \"Looks like he'll be a happy drake soon!\"\n\nLlredh spun around in the air in a ferocious whirl. He caught Csirnis mid-tail in his jaws, and jerked his head, sending Csirnis into a ragged tumble. The two drakes fell together, thrashing and slashing faster than I could follow without actually being in the fight myself. Fifty feet from the ground they split apart, Csirnis flying to the river and Llredh landing in the circle of drakes, each bleeding from a dozen wounds.\n\n\"Csirnis? When you're ready?\" I called to him.\n\nHe looked back at me with a very noble expression. \"Llredh won that fight, actually.\"\n\nLlredh hooted. \"The quick victory, I have her! Csirnis hurt me more than I hurt him, yes, but I am the quick drake! All my claws taste his blood while he is figuring out which one with which to show more of mine!\"\n\nI stared at my intended drake, rather disappointed. He looked back at me. \"Llredh is quite a skillful and mighty warrior when suitably inspired. I hope I shall have a rematch. With the same stakes, or any other, or none at all.\" He smiled, and dipped his head, and sat by the river and healed his wounds.\n\nLlredh looked up at me. \"Hah, you do not expect to couple with mighty Llredh! Do not fear. There are worse fates... Ho, most fates are worse!\" He smirked at Ythac. \"My favorite sparring partner, you must trade stories with her! Or him, as the case of the moment may be!\"\n\nYthac swatted at Llredh. \"You'll be my girl next time!\" Most of the dragons chuckled. Apparently Ythac's behavior is more amusing than anything else. Disgusting monsters.\n\n\"My girl this time, she is Jyothky!\"\n\nRight. Well, I did intend to be responsible with six of the seven. And besides, there's nothing less responsible than not keeping your wagers and promises, even if they turn out wrong. So I circled overhead, waiting for Llredh to fix himself up. I was suave, I was collected, I was gleaming with lust and anticipation. Or trying to be.\n\n\"Don't be so nervous, Jyothky,\" wrote Ythac. \"You look more like a very large flying rabbit than a dragon. Llredh is fine, he won't hurt you, he knows what to do.\"\n\n\"He can't hurt me, anyway. I wish he could!\" I scribbled back to Ythac.\n\n\"I didn't mean it that way!\" he wrote back.\n\n\"Well, how did you mean it then?\" I snapped.\n\n\"Oh, never mind. Just don't you hurt him.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means I've distracted you with bickers 'til your date-of-the-day is ready!\" wrote Ythac. \"That's what friends are for.\"\n\nAnd Llredh was ready, indeed, very ready. He rose up, beautiful and strong, his own blood and the blood of his rival still red on his orange scales, and he took me in the sky, and we thrashed around in the middle air which had been his battleground. Most of my fianc\u00e9s shouted encouragements, 'til I breathed winter ice on them to shut them up.\n\nHe smelled good, very male, though not as eager as Osoth and Nrararn had been. I didn't smell that eager myself of course... maybe I would have more for Csirnis. I didn't enjoy it other than the smell really. From now on, why don't you assume that that's how all the sex goes, and I'll tell you if anything is different?\n\nWhen my claspers released him, he grunted to me, \"To the desert of succulents, come with me, Jyothky.\" I was about to complain that I had only offered one copulation, not all three, and if I was going to do more after all I sure wanted everyone to know that I could handle it. But he didn't sound particularly lustful... more worried or something.\n\nSo I flew by his side out to the desert. That part is pretty nice, actually, flying off with someone you've just mated with, racing to see if you can get there before the bright sun is swallowed by tentacled pinkness (we couldn't). Scattering the unhappy scavenger birds with our presence and the sound of our wings, and hearing them hoot imprecations that we absolutely are not allowed to steal their carrion, even if we are immeasurably more powerful than any number of them. (We didn't.)\n\n\"Our mating flight, are they listening to us now?\" asked Llredh.\n\n\"I don't think anyone's listening, unless they're following us in a very well-disguised form indeed. No scrying spells.\"\n\n\"My magioception, she is not so keen. My dangersense, my lluyception, my theoception, they are even worse. Of this concept, you must understand as I do, or even more.\"\n\n\"I do. I'd offer to trade, if I could. Theoception's pretty much useless... the only god I've ever spotted is Osoth's god-in-a-bottle,\" I said. \"I miss touch every day, and never more than when I'm with a pretty drake.\"\n\nYou might think a drake would be happy when a dragoness (1) mates with him, (2) flies off to the wilds with him, and (3) tells him that she had a good time, in however backhanded a way. He wasn't, though. \"Yes, yes. The important thing I will tell you now, may I? You will not like it. But who better than I to tell you? There is none, there can be none.\" Yes, he really did echo the words of the victor of the mating flight.\n\n\"I suppose so...\"\n\n\"The rage at missing senses, I know her well. When Osoth and Nrararn praise the sublime lluyew of their gemstones, that is the hour I challenge them both at once and in my fury to defeat them at once. Sense-deprived am I, but strong. Sense-deprived are you too, but still a dragoness.\"\n\n\"So this is a feeling-dragon sort of thing I need hear about, then?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Say it. I won't bite you too much for it.\"\n\nHe stretched his wings and climbed a few dozen tail-lengths or so, as an extra precaution. \"The copulation with you, she is dry, and dry is painful. Painful to the drake, maybe painful to you too.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" I said. \"How painful are we talking here? Compared with what Csirnis did to you in your fight?\"\n\n\"Not so painful as that. But the worse time she is at, this pain. In a fight, the pain, even the rest of us can ignore her. In love, she is not so expected, she comes to me more insistently.\"\n\n\"So you're telling me I'm a bad lover.\"\n\n\"You do not move so nicely as Ythac or Arilash, how could you, they have much more practice. Expertise, I do not expect her here. She will come in time. The dryness, the chafing, I do not expect her here either,\" said Llredh. He looked so apologetic and helpful that I roasted a scavenger bird with lightning instead of him.\n\n\"It's not my fault!\" I shouted.\n\n\"The revenge you are making not, when you bring yourself to copulate! Your fault, he is not. Your hemipenis losing skin, also, he is not,\" said Llredh.\n\nI did what any reasonable person would have done under the circumstances, viz., I flew lower and started melting a sand dune into a glass pond with a terrible rage, all at myself. \"I am the worst fianc\u00e9e ever! I barely even manage to want a drake, and when I do that, I hurt him!\" And on like that for several minutes while Llredh was trying to get a word in sideways.\n\nWhich he finally managed by landing on my back and sticking his head in front of mine. Which meant that he got a full firebreath right in the face, and even with the Small Wall and a very strong v\u00f4 set to take it, it must have stung a good deal.\n\nAfter I breathed on him, while I was recovering, he said, \"The answer, she is not so troublesome.\"\n\nI'm fairly sure I said something about the answer being that I go off by myself and never bother to so much as look at a drake 'cause it's hopeless. I don't remember exactly what I said \u2014 I mean, I usually make up half of everyone's lines anyway, but this time I really would rather forget everything I said.\n\n\"Not that. The holes that are not slick, now and then and often I twine them. Oil! The oil of olives or seeds, she is your ally.\"\n\n\"... what?...\"\n\nSo he explained about how the slipperiness doesn't need to come from me to satisfy the drake, it just needs to be there somehow. A slosh of oil in the right place will do just fine.\n\n\"So how do I manage that in the air?\"\n\nLlredh allowed as how his relevant experience hadn't been in the air.\n\n\"Where did you learn it, anyway?\"\n\n\"Arilash, she is the true expert among us in knowledge of the joys of the body. Second place, he is me perhaps.\" Which I understand to mean, roughly, \"none of your business\" . Or that I, as ninth place in that contest \u2014 no, last place \u2014 probably wouldn't understand or approve of whatever it is that he does.\n\n\"So where do I get oil? We're in the middle of a desert. We've only got one slave, and he'll be shot in sight if he goes to a market,\" I whined.\n\n\"The drakes, they are the raiders among us. The loot, the prizes, those things the drakes should bring to the dragonesses.\"\n\n\"I'd be so embarrassed, telling you all to bring me oil to do what I can't do for myself. I'm sure some of them would figure out why I want it.\"\n\nHe gave me a very innocent look. Well, of course they'll find out when I go to mate with them and slosh them with it, anyway."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "\"Llredh, thank you for telling me. Telling someone bad news is not so easy.\"\n\n\"It is the important thing to say. Next time, I have a better time! Also next time, you are the confident dragoness, the happy dragoness. The better for both of us.\"\n\n\"Still, thank you much.... get some oil and we'll try it out.\" I wasn't actually eager to mate with him again \u2014 or anyone. I'd rather forget about that part of my body and my life entirely. I was trying to act brave and responsible, like someone could imagine that I'd be a 1/12-of-the-way decent wife.\n\n\"The cowards, you will remember them!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The drakes who do not tell you the thing you need to know, who take their little pain and hide it. The drake who tells you, and lets you breathe your terrain-melting fires in his face to tell you more. Which drake is the mighty one, which is the brave one?\"\n\n\"Well, if you phrase it that way,...\"\n\n\"To me, you must not answer. To your little book where you write every day, there, you must think about what is the truth, and write it down, who is the better husband for you.\"\n\nSo I will."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Coda: Judgment of the Day\n\nI don't like Tultamaan a bit, and I don't really like Llredh that much either. But they had a lot of truth for me today. I should be a responsible dragoness and do what I'm here for, it's not fair to any of the drakes if I don't. And Osoth and Nrararn really should have told me. They were probably thinking of some sneaky way to let me know.\n\nMaybe Osoth was going to animate a mummy of a legendary ancient courtesan to slip into my cave and offer me aromatic unguents of love, or something. Probably she'd have gotten the firebreath, not Llredh. But probably I'd have gotten the point... I hope.\n\nBut they didn't get to do that. And Llredh did, and was pretty nice about it, and brave.\n\nIs it OK if I give him some points, but still don't really like him that much? He's rather a vicious bully.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 47-2 45\n\nLlredh 39 +5 44\n\nYthac 22 +1 23\n\nGreshthanu 26 0 26\n\nOsoth 20-1 19\n\nNrararn 21 0 21\n\nTultamaan-7-4-11\n\nSeduction of Ythac (Day 42)\n\nOil Quest\n\nI didn't take Llredh's suggestion to have the drakes get me oil. Too embarrassing. I put on the Esrret-Sky-Painted, flew back to Drupe-ek-Kavash under cover of eclipse, and looted them myself. Drupe-ek-Kavash has three grocery stores. These are pretty unusual places, by my rather parochial Mhel-reared standards. I am used to a farmer's market sort of place, a big public square where farmers (that means small people, of course. Dragons never go farming) bring their crops and sell them out of their carts, or piled in big pyramids on the stone benches.\n\nDrupe-ek-Kavash doesn't have that, probably because half of everyone is a farmer there. Instead it has a Magnificent Central Shopping District consisting of two blocks in the main street lined with shabby little stalls selling... well, in Mhelvul, they would be the most amazing wonders, but here they look somewhat battered and a little bit sad. One shop sells music. That's music that's been wrapped up and squished flat somehow and pressed into black circles. Which would be a most delectable wonder by itself, really. The music store keeps its music in battered dingy cardboard boxes with faded pictures of hovens with wearing Traditional Hoven Costumes using Traditional Hoven Instruments. Or maybe they're radically unusual both, I don't know. The cardboard boxes look so out of keeping with the miracles inside of them though.\n\nI didn't poke much at the music shop, just a little bit because it was so strange. I am a very practical dragoness. I went next door to Awolfo's Fine Foods and Confectionary shop. The store was about as big as I am with my wings folded, so I turned into a hoven-sized verson of me. The store had a lame old hoven at the counter, who might never in a whole life have wished that he could run nearly as much as he could just then. A thousand scents prickled my tongue: spices, fermented vegetables, spices, preserved meats, spices, flour, alien candies, and spices. And, here and there, the sticky dull scent of old cooking oil \u2014 the treasure I sought!\n\nWell, Awolfo wasn't my hoven or anything, but he wasn't anybody else's either. No reason not to be polite. I asked him, \"Hallo! Do you have any oil?\"\n\nHe left off muttering his death-prayer, and blinked at me. \"... Oil?\" ...\"\n\n\"Yes. Slippery oil from seeds, that you can use for, um, making things slippery.\" I was embarrassed. I am not used to buying marital supplies.\n\n\"Cooking oil? I have cooking oil. Groanseed oil, mustard-seed oil, ghee...\"\n\n\"Whichever is the mildest,\" I said. Mustard-seed oil doesn't sound nice for unarmored bits of dragon. It would probably hurt the drakes more than dry dragoness, and maybe injure me too.\n\n\"That would be ghee. How much ghee would you like?\" Awolfo waved his hand at a two-gallon metal box marked \"Marthu-ek-Krasnou Brand Supremmly Pure GHEE\" with a picture of a a rather ridiculous Hove-style cow painted next to it. It was spelled wrong, but it smelled right: rich and buttery and only the barest touch rancid.\n\n\"That should do nicely!\" I flickered my tongue about, and thought that I might as well do some shopping for myself too. \"Oh, and some spices. Can I have some spices?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, of course, I have spices, many spices...\" He indicated three battered wooden shelves covered with bags and boxes and jars and jugs, with many assorted labels.\n\n\"Wonderful!\" I had no idea what they tasted like, and with all the scents in the room it was hard to tell which one came from which box, so I picked a dozen at random. Then I smiled at him, and said, \"I don't have any money today.\" Which wasn't true, but I don't have much of a hoard and don't want to use it for things like this. And it's not any kind of Hoven money. \"But you can ask me a favor and if it's quick I might do it.\"\n\nAwolfo looked at me, smelling that complicated mix of scared and brave and devious that small people sometimes smell when they're trying to trick or exploit a dragon. \"You're the monster who ate chickens from Blemia the other day?\"\n\n\"Across town from here? Yes, that's me.\"\n\n\"You spit fire?\"\n\n\"Sure! Want something burned?\"\n\n\"There's a big new building on the edge of town. It's got a blue roof. It's marked 'Trestean Occupation Forces.' I wouldn't miss it if it were gone.\" His words were tinged with the rotten lavender of understatement. I didn't think that was much of a trick or an exploitation.\n\n\"It's a deal!\" I politely snatched the can of ghee, collected my spices, and waddled outside. I turned into my real size, so that I could waddle more impressively hide my loot under my neck-scales and destroy the military base conveniently. One big fireball left the building burning nicely, with angry Trestean soldiers running around shooting inadequate weapons in my general direction. I decided that they were celebrating the liberation of Drupe-ek-Kavash, since Awolfo and his friends were. So I let them live, and flew home mostly wondering how I could use the ghee without my drake of choice \u2014 Csirnis? Ythac? \u2014 being any the wiser.\n\nApproach to Ythac\n\n\"Ythac? Let's go flying. Together, I mean,\" I told him when I got back.\n\n\"Sure, why not?\" he said. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Can you find us a nice canyon? Some privacy and some strong updrafts would be just the thing,\" I said. You can't get much more direct of an invitation than that.\n\nHe sighed, and cast a fancy finding spell. \"Sure. River, or no river? The one with a river is a bit further.\"\n\n\"The river might be a good idea, actually.\" OK, that's more direct.\n\nWe flew wingtips to wingtips, but without fouling each other, the way old friends do. More accurately, the way that dragons who have been flying alongside each other for duodecades do, but that's pretty much the same thing.\n\n\"What did you think of Llredh?\" he asked me.\n\n\"I was pleasantly surprised!\" I said. \"He's a brute and a bully, but he was kind... helpful maybe I'd call it.\"\n\n\"He didn't say what you two did out in the desert,\" said Ythac. \"I was wondering if you'd really caught his interest.\"\n\n\"Well, he worked a bit to catch my interest. By doing me a rather brutal, bullying sort of favor, I mean. And pointing out that Nrararn and Osoth were inferior to him in a surprising way.\"\n\n\"So, does he want you instead of Arilash, do you think?\"\n\nI thought about that a bit. \"I'd guess that he's worried that Arilash will choose Csirnis, so he's making sure he's one of my especially suitors as well as one of hers.\"\n\n\"Sensible of him,\" said Ythac dully.\n\n\"Are you going to be one of my especially suitors too?\" I asked him. \"You've got special advantages over everyone else, if you want to use them.\"\n\n\"I'm sure I'll get into the style of it soon enough,\" he said. \"I'm not the very romantic dragon, nor the very aggressive one, nor the very lustful one really. I have to work hard for all of those.\" He didn't quite mention the mount-fighting, which sounded awfully aggressive and lustful to me, so I decided not to either.\n\n\"You'd be a really strong suitor if you wanted to try. You're big and strong, even if you're not the musclebound monster that Greshthanu is. You've got the cleverest magic of any of us, I think, with those supreme finding spells, and you're even better with apotropaics than I am. You've got darkness breath as well as fire \u2014 that's not like any of mine. And you're familiar and comfortable to me. I might choose you over Csirnis even.\"\n\n\"That's really sweet of you, Jyothky,\" he said, sounding a bit sad. \"That is what my father wanted.\" He grinned at me suddenly. \"Have you ever tasted a bird killed by darkness breath?\"\n\nI know that he knows my secret weakness. (OK, everyone does. It's not very secret. It's not very weakness either.) I'm so glad he's exploiting it. I'd hate for him not to get married because he didn't like competing. I'm not quite sure what if he tries and loses, though.\n\nAnyway, he breathed a needle of darkness on one of the scavenger birds. Not very many dragons study darkness breath. It's not actually very effective. Fire's best of course, very flexible and very destructive. Ythac has fire breath too for everyday use. Cold and lightning are popular alternatives. Cold's not as destructive, which is good when you're trying to kill the people and leave the priceless metal statues and rare books and plastic CDs intact. Lightning is very sharp and very good at a distance, and, if you're Nrararn, you can braid it into your mane. Darkness isn't most of those. It only comes in a few shapes, like the line that Ythac used. It doesn't go very far. It's pretty easy for a small person sorcerer to block with a light spell. It'll damage anything: it'll leave flaws in metal statues and insert grammatical errors into the books and warp the CDs. Even dragons: it'll leave any of dozens of minor medical problems which have to be dealt with individually over the next few weeks. It's really not polite to use darkness breath on anydragon, unless you've got some quarrel with them already. Ythac used it on dragons who teased him sometimes, and on his father a lot. He usually just uses fire breath like most people.\n\nThe bird died of course. Ythac dived, beating his blue-green wings hard, and picked it out of the air before either it or he hit the ground. I flew down more demurely. I don't exactly understand the point of flying demurely after a drake whom one is engaged to and determined to seduce, but I did it anyway. He held the bird up. I snatched it out of his claws, landed on a patch of crazed crackled dry mud, and started nibbling.\n\n\"This is very odd, Ythac. It tastes a bit rotten already.\"\n\n\"Darkness breath does that! Like it?\"\n\n\"It's savory!\" I nibbled a bit more. \"Not like your usual slightly rotten meat, either. The rotty bits aren't just at the surface, they're all scattered throughout. But they're small, so it's not like the whole thing is rotten. That would be a bit much.\"\n\n\"Ever had anything like it?\"\n\n\"Not with meat,\" I said. Ythac looked proud. \"Cheese, though. It's like one of the very moldy cheese, with mold spread all the way through.\" Ythac looked a bit disappointed. \"Some of the best cheeses on Mhelvul were like that! Didn't you ever have efforasze or neucca?\"\n\n\"I don't like mhelvul food very much,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, I do. I don't want to waste the senses I do have, y'know? They're quite excellent cheese, and your darkened bird reminds me of them more than anything else. So I like it, and in a rather educated way.\"\n\n\"Glad to hear it! I like it too. Llredh doesn't much, he likes his food fresh. He challenges me every time I bring some dark-dead meat home.\"\n\n\"You have done? It never got to the dragonesses.\"\n\n\"The other drakes persuaded me you two wouldn't like it. I should have known better.\"\n\nYthac's Proposition\n\nWe had just finished up a game of tsheriaf, burning lines and arcs in the side of some Khamrou or other. (We'd tied, 282 to 282, which is a rather good score in a two-player game, and ties are pretty rare too.)\n\nI made sure I had my box of ghee. \"Ythac? Would you like to mate with me now?\"\n\nOne rarely sees a drake in the fullness of his power quite as terrified as Ythac was. \"Actually, I was going to make maybe a better offer,\" he said.\n\n\"Arilash wouldn't admit that there was any better offer,\" I said.\n\n\"Nor would Llredh. You and I know better, I think,\" he answered.\n\n\"What's your better offer? And why are you refusing copulation to a willing \u2014 indeed, an offering \u2014 dragoness?\"\n\n\"Willing, yes. Offering, yes. Interested, no. My tongue is as keen as any dragon's. I know the scent of an eager dragoness well enough \u2014 most of the drakes have been wearing it regularly, from Arilash. You are not eager. You are nervous. You are on the edge of scared. You are touchy. You are not eager,\" he said.\n\n\"More than just a bit willing though. I'm really trying to behave properly. Well, maybe not for Tultamaan. Certainly for you, Ythac.\" I made a mental note to wear a full suit of illusion spells, hiding scent and everything else.\n\n\"What makes you think I'm pleased to couple with a dragoness who doesn't want me? My hemipenises are not in charge of me,\" he said. \"How about this: Marry me. We'll promise to each other to have sex whenever we want... I mean, whenever either of us wants. Waiting 'til we both want at the same time would be a long wait indeed.\"\n\n\"I'll think about that in a dozen years,\" I said. \"For now, I'm going to try not to be insulted. It's hard work.\"\n\n\"I apologize for not pressing you to do something you obviously don't want to do, and are only offering because your parents and Arilash and Tultamaan think you should,\" he said. \"And yes, I'm offering to stand by you against any or all of them.\"\n\n\"That is very sweet of you. So sweet that I'm going to go melt another mountain,\" I said. I started flying towards a likely-looking peak. Ythac tried to follow me, but I spattered lightning off his apotropaic spells. \"Don't you dare follow me.\"\n\nHe tried to apologize some more.\n\n\"Don't you dare apologize to me either. I accept your apology completely. Effective as of, oh, eclipse tomorrow.\" I flew off, alone, though Ythac's scrying spells whispered lavenderly around me. I snarled to them, \"I am not going to get in trouble.\" He didn't stop watching though. I suppose that's a good thing.\n\nLet's see. The Khamrou range has some eight hundred and twenty peaks. If I am really going to go through two a month, that's two hundred eighty-eight by the end of the mating flight. There'll be a lot left. No problem. No problem at all.\n\nUnless someone else gets annoyed too, that is.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 45 +1 46\n\nLlredh 44 0 44\n\nYthac 23 +1 24\n\nGreshthanu 26 +1 27\n\nOsoth 19 0 19\n\nNrararn 21 +1 22\n\nTultamaan-11 0-11"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Re-Seduction of Csirnis (Day 43)\n\nThis morning I sort of snuck out of my cave in case Tultamaan was lurking in wait for me, which he wasn't, and then crept outside the drake's cave and lurked in wait for Csirnis. Which meant conversations with Ythac, Osoth, and Greshthanu, of the form \"Good morning, Jyothky, what are you doing now?\" \u2014 \"I'm lurking.\" \u2014 \"Right. Happy lurking!\" Or, \"Whatever for?\" , followed by me looking trying to look simultaneously mysterious, responsible, and elegant. I had better grow two more heads if I'm going to pull that off.\n\n(That's not a bad idea actually \u2014 maybe I'll do it. It takes a couple weeks to get used to multiple heads though. Maybe I'll be hideously annoyed with everyone and want to spend that long away from them, and can stomp off to a different corner of the desert and practice seeing everything from three sides for long enough so I don't run into things and trip over my own feet constantly. Also the thought of watching myself eat is oddly disturbing, I don't know why. I don't like having a mirror at table, either, for what that's worth.)\n\nI prepared a very elegant and eloquent proposition for that most elegant of drakes. It was full of courtly language, and it had three internal rhymes, and enough fancy vocabulary that it looked as if Osoth had helped me write it. I rolled it over and over in my head, and it was delightful.\n\nFinally Csirnis glided out. Yes, he glides when he walks. I don't know how he does it \u2014 he's only got four legs most of the time.\n\n\"Good morning, Csirnis!\"\n\nHe looked amused in a generally dignified way. \"Good morning, Jyothky. What brings you to the drake's cave so early?\"\n\nMy whole elegant and eloquent proposition fell apart. It came out something like, \"Let's... us... I mean, you and me... and a desert... there...\"\n\nHe smiled anyway. \"I take it today is my turn?\" I nodded with all available elegance and eloquence. He continued, \"At the top of Khamrou Elephantodontou is a pleasant spring set about with aromatic afhtherias trees. There, let me give you my love.\" He can do elegance and eloquence on a moment's notice and only half a night's sleep.\n\nAs Csirnis and I flew out, Osoth muttered to Nrararn, \"We had been lucky up to now. No more.\" Nrararn lashed the ground with his tail.\n\nAt the top of Khamrou Elephantodontou, the tallest and whitest and shiniest of the Khamrou Voresc range, there was indeed a pleasant spring, a round bathtub of a spring, warm water bubbling through smooth white pebbles. Lazy orange fish swam there, and a pair of ducks that flew off when we landed. The afhtherias trees filled the air with the scent of sweet resin, and amid their roots star-shaped white flowers bloomed, and rendered the place exceedingly romantic. Of course, a few big clawprints in the grass showed that the romance had already been tested and confirmed.\n\nI flickered my shape around and took out the cubical box of ghee.\n\n\"Oh, no, I do not imagine that we will need that,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"You know what it's for?\" I mumbled.\n\n\"Certain technical details have gotten around among the drakes, I'm afraid,\" he said. \"But today we may set them aside.\"\n\n\"Well... it's your hemipenises in danger,\" I said. \"Ready?\" I crouched to take off, and spread my claspers.\n\nHis eyes twinkled. \"Let us not be quite so swift. We are not fleeing from warplanes and an artillery barrage here!\"\n\nSo he wasn't quite so swift. He danced for me, coiling and twirling in the lower air, and if he didn't have Nrararn's perfect sky-mage's mobility, he had far more grace. Then he called to me and we danced together. I don't have either the mobility or the grace, but he had enough for two: he taught me a Chiriact court dance for one slow and one fast dragon.\n\nThen we lay by the bank of the pond. \"Let me please the senses you have,\" he said. We kissed and breathed careful fire and lightning into each other's mouths, pouring the strength of his whef\u00f4 into mine and mine into his, which is really delightful. You do have to do it right, or it turns into a very painful attack. I wouldn't do it with Llredh, say, but this was Csirnis.\n\n(Aside: I am actually more powerful of whef\u00f4 than Csirnis, though not by much. It's not that he's absolutely the best of us at absolutely everything \u2014 Llredh beats him in fights often enough, Greshthanu sometimes, and even Nrararn did once or twice, Osoth and Nrararn and Ythac are better sorcerers, and I'm better at breath, and I guess Arilash is the better lover. He's just a very close second-best at everything that he's not the best at, and he's utterly beautiful about it.)\n\nAnd Csirnis broke some pods of spice-seeds on his belly, enhancing his natural scent just the right way, and we spent some long time smelling and tasting each other. Yum, beautiful musky boy!\n\nFinally he leapt into the air and beckoned for me to follow, and we mated in the sky, and everything on my body worked the way it's supposed to. Without extraneous additions of ghee, or even needing to consciously spread my claspers. I actually felt like a grownup dragoness for once.\n\nWell. Everything worked except the parts of me that never work. Csirnis was well-satisfied, by the sight and scent of his body at least. I don't get any such satisfaction. He had managed to tell my body that there was a beautiful, agreeable drake around, but my body couldn't tell that she'd actually had him.\n\nSo we splashed in the pool to clean off \u2014 even washing in water is somehow an elegant joy with Csirnis. Then we sprawled in the hot sunlight and I made him tell me about Chiriact's court politics until my body gave up on the beautiful agreeable drake that she knew was somewhere around and folded my claspers and grumbled quietly.\n\nWell, it was a very romantic morning, anyway.\n\nThe Aftermath\n\nFor the rest of the afternoon, whenever anyone held a wing to me, I bit it off. Well, mostly just metaphorically. I didn't mean to. It went a lot like the day I laid my egg. My body knew that something had happened, or should have happened and didn't, and that meant I needed to be a vicious berserk monster even if I'd rather not have been.\n\nDealing with Osoth\n\nIn the early afternoon, Osoth flew from roughly Ghemel-wards with a fat and woolly quadruped in his mouth. He dropped it in the red Khamrou sand at my feet, and proclaimed in a rotund voice, \"O my fianc\u00e9e, whose wingtips are the pinnate delights which tickle at the battlements of my soul, behold! An ovine tenderment for your delectation!\"\n\nSo I bit his cheek.\n\n\"Jyothky? Why did you bite my cheek?\" He sounded rather perplexed as he healed his face. \"Why does bringing brawny bellwether embitter you?\"\n\n\"You dropped it in the sand!\"\n\n\"Yes, truly, some of the fragmentary grindments of the mighty Khamrou range do now cling to its sorry mortling. And although I am mightier in the arts necromantic than the arts gastronomic, in this instance, the domains of the two intersect! Observe!\" He dripped three words of mercury upon the sheep's head, each one so heavy that the carcase shuddered beneath it, and then it rose up and did obeisance to Osoth. He commanded it, \"Clean yourself, render yourself a suitable treat for yon dragoness!\" It stumbled off miserably to the river.\n\n\"Now I'm going to have a wet sheep to eat. A sad wet sheep. It'll probably be treading little circles in my gut,\" I said.\n\n\"Should you choose to partake of it with the volcanic embellishment that your nigh-achromatic and octo-antlered dearling can provide, it will prove less than wholly humectant. Should you choose precede your meal with a slightly-nontraditional but nonetheless benedictive benediction, it will prove less than wholly animate. Or you can whack it with your v\u00f4.\"\n\nSo I bit him again. He tried to get away this time, and I just got his left forewing.\n\nHe took several steps backwards. \"Perhaps a different repast would be more to your taste today. Perhaps a different drake would be the one to fetch it.\"\n\nI struck at him again, but only to heal his forewing. \"I'm sorry, Osoth. I'm being hideously ungracious.\"\n\n\"Self-knowledge is the root of all virtue, according to St. Ovolo,\" said Osoth.\n\nHe had just said 'yes'. Biting him again would have been tantamount to declaring him my enemy for life, and I was pretty sure I'd regret doing that. Especially since he'd just agreed with me. \"Who's St. Ovolo?\" I asked.\n\n\"A local religious figure of considerable significance to hovens. A dispenser of wisdom, often in the form of aphorisms which the dull-minded might easily swallow.\"\n\n\"Oh... well, thank you for lunch, and I'm sorry I bit you.\"\n\nHe stepped back a dozen paces, and arched his head high. \"Do you refer to the initial or the terminal bite? Hoping, indeed, that it is terminal, and not medial.\"\n\n\"Both, really. You didn't deserve them.\"\n\n\"As a matter of policy, I would generally refrain from disputing against you in matters of simple opinion. In this instance, I do not merely refrain passively. My refrainder is active, dynamic, tumultuous!\" Which is about as close as low-ranked Osoth can come to scolding a dragoness on a mating flight.\n\nSo I apologied some more at him, and took a bite of sheep. Raw wet zombie sheep, since we'd both forgotten about cooking and disenchanting it. So I accepted his gift and was not in the slightest trying to kick him out of the mating flight. When he saw that, he flew off. He didn't much want to be around for my occasional terrible mood.\n\nI didn't much blame him. If I could have avoided being around me for the rest of the day, I would have done.\n\nDealing with Arilash\n\nI slunk back into the cave. Arilash curled her tail around her forepaws tightly to emphasize that she was trying to be harmless. \"There's a trail of wounded drakes from here to Chiriact tonight. Did it go badly with Csirnis?\"\n\n\"It. Went. Excellently. With. Csirnis.\" I said. \"And you are not going to score any fianc\u00e9e points off of me today.\"\n\nSo help me, she turned into a camel. \"I'm not trying to. Maybe we can have a truce for the evening?\"\n\nWell, I outfoxed her. \"I'll challenge you. You win, you get to declare a truce,\" I said.\n\n\"If you like, OK. Just a Babble of Raises, though,\" she said, and turned back into a dull tan monster half again as big as I am. I guessed wrong about how she was tilting the Small Wall, and my lightning slipped off of it and ruined Murghal's poster of a famous Ghemelian movie star or something. Claw that the Small Wall, it's not even good at not being very good sometimes.\n\nArilash and I swatted at each other a few times. Then she said, \"You're bleeding.\"\n\nI flicked my tongue out, and smelled dragon blood. \"You mean to say 'I hit you, and I win.' Don't go saying 'You're bleeding' and avoiding the point.\"\n\nSo she put the Put-Together-Now into me, presumably on where she had clawed me. I hissed at her, \"This isn't a Caramelle. Or whatever a Caramelle to one touch is called. It's a Babble of Raises, and it's over, and you won, and can I be done with today yet?\"\n\n\"Some days you're just impossible to make peace with, Jyothky,\" she said. \"But I do declare that truce for the rest of the night.\"\n\n\"We both know who's coming in first. I don't want to come in last, is all,\" I said. \"I've got to keep fighting you to show my indomitable spirit. Even if I keep losing.\"\n\n\"Can't I say that I'm so impressed by your indomitable spirit that I don't want to fight you any more?\" she asked.\n\n\"That only leaves the sex contests, and you win all of those,\" I pointed out.\n\nShe rolled on her side, and folded her wings demurely around herself. \"You certainly seem to have gotten thumped on that score thoroughly today, by how you're acting. What happened? Csirnis hinted that it was a quite respectable entry in the sex contests, suitably handicapped.\"\n\nSo I let her read today's entry.\n\nShe unaccountably said, \"Oh, you're just like me that way.\"\n\n\"Not likely.\"\n\n\"I get pretty irritable if I get too much flirted at, and don't bring matters to a suitable conclusion,\" she said. \"I have to be pretty careful sometimes. There was one drake in Fohhona \u2014 did you ever meet Ressal?\"\n\n\"I've only been to Fohhona about three days, and with one parent hanging on each hindwing all the time to keep me innocent,\" I said.\n\n\"Pity, it's a fun place. Anyway, Ressal is as pretty and as hot as an explosion of brightly-colored chili peppers, and he's the sweetest, kindest drake you'll ever meet. But he is utterly unable to satisfy a dragoness. His largest hemipenis lasts for three heartbeats, not three hours like it should.\"\n\n\"He wasn't ever going to be our fianc\u00e9,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"Which loses me a great many fianc\u00e9e points with anyone who cares about purity. It sure did with Roroko! Osoth and, I think, Csirnis care about it pretty much too, so you're inevitably the victor in that part of the contest.\"\n\n\"For whatever that's worth,\" I mumbled. It's embarrassing about three ways to hear her talk about that.\n\n\"For whatever that's worth. Anyway, Ressal and I would flirt and play tsheriaf and make love badly and then go to one of the roasting pits for dinner, and next thing you know I'm screaming at him about how awful he is, or biting the drake at the next bench for eating too loudly, or writing another angry letter to my mother about how she treated me.\"\n\n\"All at once?\"\n\nShe giggled. \"No, a different way on each date. On the fourth date, I got smarter. I pleasured myself thoroughly and made him watch, and then coupled with him. And then didn't bite anyone.\"\n\n\"Lucky dragoness. I've never managed to do that either, I don't think.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I could help, if you wanted... Hey, we've got a truce 'til dawn!\" We did, too, so I didn't breathe at her.\n\n\"No. Never. Is there any other way to be less cross afterwards? It's almost as bad as when I'm laying an egg,\" I said.\n\n\"Take a bath, perhaps. Or just go to sleep.\"\n\nI glared in the direction of the river. \"Sleep.\"\n\nShe smiled at me. \"Yes, sleep. You'll feel better in the morning. And, for what it's worth, Csirnis said he had a very pleasant time with you.\"\n\n\"Oh. What do the other drakes say?\"\n\n\"The twins don't say anything,\" she said. I blinked at her a bit. \"Osoth and Nrararn, I mean. Llredh gave details in a triumphant sort of way.\"\n\n\"I wish he wouldn't have.\"\n\n\"And Tultamaan was very oblique,\" Arilash said.\n\n\"I didn't even couple with Tultamaan yet,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"You didn't?\" Arilash crossed her eyes. \"I suppose he didn't exactly say that you did. He just Insinuated Things and Led Me To The Wrong Conclusion.\" She hissed. \"Well, you're not missing much. He's better than Ressal, by a lot, and very enthusiastic in a completely self-centered way. Afterwards he whines about anything you said or did that wasn't utterly flattering or directed purely at him. I enjoyed Ressal a lot more, all in all. Once I figured out how to use Ressal properly.\"\n\n\"You've had so many adventures. How are you going to manage to settle down to be a reasonable wife for someone?\" I asked. I wanted to score some fianc\u00e9e points.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said, with a bit of darkness in her voice. \"I'll figure that out when the time comes. For now, maybe, time to sleep?\"\n\n\"Right.\" I stuck my head under my wing and was asleep before you could count to twelve grand, if you counted slowly.\n\nMaybe I should marry the drake I like the least, 'cause the married part of marriage is going to be pretty miserable.\n\nXolgrohim thought that might be a good idea too. I can't imagine that any of the drakes would be really happy with me as a wife. (Better than nothing? Possibly, if I work really hard. Better than being an eternal bachelor in Fohhona's fleshpots? I doubt that.) If I can't come up with an actually happy marriage, maybe getting someone I can fight with a lot would be a good choice. Fighting's worthwhile, isn't it?\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 46 +5 51\n\nLlredh 44 0 44\n\nYthac 24 +1 25\n\nGreshthanu 27 0 27\n\nOsoth 19 0 19\n\nNrararn 22-1 21\n\nTultamaan-11-1-12"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Seduction of Greshthanu (Day 44)\n\nI was feeling fairly confident and reasonably happy the next morning as I circled around over the drakes and picked my quarry. \"Hey, Greshthanu! Come mate with me!\"\n\nHe looked up at me, and shouted, \"What? No!\"\n\nI was so surprised, I nearly forgot to beat my wings. \"What?\"\n\n\"I said 'no',\" said Greshthanu in Mhelvian. \"In Grand Draconic that's 'eill', and in Ghemelian it's 'vask'. If you'd asked me me in the polite register it would be 'wo diau vasku skan', which is to say, 'No thank you'.\"\n\n\"But... last year you were trying to get me to.\" I circled lower, and Ythac and Osoth made space for me to land.\n\n\"And you said 'no',\" said Greshthanu.\n\n\"Because it was before the mating flight started!\" I protested.\n\n\"That didn't bother anyone else,\" hissed Greshthanu.\n\n\"Even Roroku?\" chirped Arilash.\n\n\"The basics, she learned them from Greshthanu or before,\" said Llredh. \"The advanced lessons, she learned one or two from me.\"\n\n\"That hypocritical little lobster!\" said Arilash. \"How dare she insult me for doing it if she was too?\"\n\n\"Well, she mostly mated with us,\" said Greshthanu. \"Not often a drake she wasn't engaged to, and no dragonesses or small people.\"\n\nI spat lightning and scored Greshthanu's face a bit. \"Stop changing the subject. So now when it's legitimate, you're turning me down? Do you actually expect to have a chance to get married if you behave that way?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to marry a dragon who behaves the way you do!\" he said. The other drakes mostly smirked at each other, except for Csirnis who simply looked concerned.\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" I whined.\n\n\"Do you remember Drupe-ek-Kavash?\" he hissed.\n\n\"A hoven village, over there.\"\n\n\"Exactly. The other day you went raiding. Wrongth the first: you went raiding. Not a drake, but a dragoness. Actually that isn't the first wrongth you've wronged on this flight \u2014 you started out fighting me, as you surely remember!\"\n\n\"I needed something. Something personal,\" I said. \"I wanted to be private about it.\" Some of the dragons sniggered, and the rest pretended that they didn't want to. My 'private' wasn't very private.\n\n\"Wrongth the second: you paid for it. You did not actually go raiding, you went shopping. Wrongth the third: you overpaid for it. You make us all look like fools,\" he said. Several of the drakes were nodding in agreement.\n\n\"Wrongth the most! You paid for it by burning a Trestean army station. And how very, very wrong that is! You killed two Trestean soldiers \u2014 or, rather, one medical assistant and one clerk. Also one Ghemelian sweeper they had employed,\" Greshthanu declaimed. Yes, he half-spread his wings and raised his head high as if he were reciting something formally.\n\n\"So what? They don't belong to anydragon,\" I said. Several of the drakes nodded to that too, so I wasn't totally without allies.\n\n\"Exactly. That is exactly the sort of thing that I despise the most about you.\" Which got Greshthanu a few hisses. \"You killed three small people for no good reason and you don't even care a bit.\"\n\n\"I wasn't trying to kill them,\" I said. \"I don't go rampaging and destroying for fun.\" Llredh and Tultamaan glared at me. They sometimes rampage for fun, I think.\n\n\"You certainly weren't overly concerned for their safety! You breathed a great big fireball on their building!\" shouted Greshthanu.\n\n\"What, are you the Defender of All Hovens now?\" There was much laughter from all the others, at both of us pretty equally.\n\n\"I care about basic ethical standards! Murder for no good reason is a wickedness! Buying a bit of ghee for three hoven lives is a wicked waste and a wicked imbalance!\"\n\n\"I don't have to answer to you about it!\" I said. Which was a pretty feeble answer, but my moral position was pretty feeble.\n\n\"I dread what would happen if you wanted a whole meal of roast camel! You would lay waste to all Ghemelia!\" crowed Greshthanu. Everyone else laughed.\n\n\"And with Jyothky's gourmet tastes... you'd better loot the place before she gets hungry!\" said Arilash.\n\nGood: Arilash was taking me seriously and having a contest with me.\n\nBad: She'd won it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Nrararn followed me on wings of wild wind as I fled. \"Jyothky, Jyothky, come back, stop!\"\n\nAfter a while, I did. \"I should just go home, shouldn't I? Or find a spare corner of Hove on the other side of the Godaxle.\"\n\n\"No, no, nothing like that. Greshthanu is just being a blockhead. He's always going off on crazy tangents and stupid enthusiasms like that. Nobody takes him very seriously,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"Well, he's right about this one. I killed three hovens for two gallons of ghee and a pawful of spices,\" I said.\n\n\"That's maybe a bit much \u2014 but that's a blockhead way to look at it. You helped the native peoples strike back against the occupying invaders,\" Nrararn said calmly. \"It's not as if you raided the grocer and slaughtered all the hovens who stood in your way. That would be excessive. Helping free the country we landed in \u2014 not so excessive. I could imagine we'd decide to do that for some reason, and for less profit than some ghee.\"\n\n\"That's comforting. Not exactly true though, since I wasn't that conscientious about it,\" I said.\n\n\"Good enough for everyone but Greshthanu, I think. Even Csirnis wasn't too disturbed by it,\" said Nrararn. \"And I don't think Greshthanu is exactly your best choice.\" Comforting, and still managing to be competitive, is my clever little Nrararn.\n\n\"Not my best choice for today,\" I said.\n\nNrararn smiled at me, and half-spread his wings, and radiated sparks of lightning.\n\n\"OK. You are. But you'd better use the ghee. It's ripped from the bleeding heart of Ghemelia. I spilled oceans of blood to get it, and duelled the great beast, and won,\" I said. \"So I hope you like it.\"\n\nHe giggled, and took the can from me, and poured a bit carefully on himself.\n\nIt works fine.\n\nAnd if I'm miserable when I start instead of excited, my senseless feelless numb body doesn't realize there's even a pretty boy drake to pay attention to, and so I'm morose at everyone instead of horrible afterwards. Even Xolgrohim couldn't cheer me up very much. Probably this is an improvement.\n\nI really wish this mating flight were over.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nEvery drake who didn't come to comfort me gets-4! (If I were keeping score on me, I'd get about a-12.)\n\nFianc\u00e9 Last Time Change This Time\n\nCsirnis 51-4 47\n\nLlredh 44-4 40\n\nYthac 25-4 21\n\nGreshthanu 27-8 19\n\nOsoth 19-4 15\n\nNrararn 21 +1 22\n\nTultamaan-12-4-16"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Hide and Seek (Day 45)\n\nLlredh and Arilash started it, I suppose. They're usually pretty noisy together. These noises weren't their usual happy ones though. They were the crash of claws on scales, the roaring rush of firebreath, the hideous crunch as fangs ravaging bones. I peeked out of the cave. Llredh was on top of Arilash, ripping up her left forewing. She was blasting him uselessly with flames, squarely in the center of his Small Wall, and rather more effectively raking him with her hindclaws. They were far past a Caramelle, or even a Tea for Disharmony, and they stunk of rage.\n\nI breathed my sharpest lightning at Llredh's flank, under his wing, at the edge of his Small Wall. That charred his scales nicely.\n\nLlredh thoroughly glared at me for that. \"Jyothky! The great mistake, again she comes on you! By mistake it is a boy you fight as! So little do you copulate, you forget which genitalia you have!\"\n\nSo I froze his face with cold breath for that. He winced and shook his head. Arilash sank her fangs into his throat and shook him viciously. He turned into an owl to escape her hold. Her heart beat, and she breathed fire on him as he fled to the other side of the river. Both dragons sat and started healing themselves, glaring at each other.\n\n\"You looked like you needed a rescue there, Arilash,\" I said, trying to get some manners back into the situation.\n\nShe glared at me. \"I need a rescue from all these dungs of dominance contests. Llredh I can deal with on my own.\"\n\n\"Deal with by letting me break your wings!\" Llredh hooted.\n\n\"That's one approach,\" I said.\n\n\"Stop teasing me or I'll crunch your no-sanitary-accidents spell while you're sleeping and you'll poop on Csirnis' foot and he'll never look at you again without laughing,\" she said with a snarl.\n\n\"I am not so rude as that, \"said Csirnis in a huff. Most of the drakes had come out of their cave by now.\n\n\"What's going on here now? The dragonesses are all snarly, but Llredh, not Jyothky, is the injuredmost one,\" asked Tultamaan.\n\n\"Llredh was being pretty insulting. Not that he's ever exactly pleasant, but telling a girl that she's the worst lover in the mating flight while your hemipenis is actually in her \u2014-- that's an amazing display of manners.\"\n\n\"And dead wrong!\" chirped Greshthanu.\n\n\"How would you know?\" I roared at him. \"You didn't compare!\"\n\n\"Llredh, Arilash, you should not be fighting. Arilash, you are a girl. You may fight with Jyothky all you wish, and that is all. Llredh, you are technically a boy. You have five or six choices of combatants, but Arilash is not one of them,\" said Csirnis in his prissiest voice.\n\nSo they both puffed flame at him.\n\nThen there was rather a m\u00eal\u00e9e. I'm not quite sure who attacked who, exactly. Osoth was mostly defending me, which was very sweet of him, but not enough to keep Greshthanu from opening my flank a foot deep from ribs to tail. Most of us got at least one wound like that.\n\nThen we sat around healing ourselves and snarling at each other.\n\n\"This is the worst mating flight ever,\" moaned Ythac.\n\n\"This is utterly standard,\" said Nrararn. \"Most mating flights get quarrelsome after a few weeks in.\"\n\nArilash snorted sparks. \"Which you know because of your extensive experience of... what?\"\n\n\"I brought both books on mating flights,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"He's right, you know, or at least a Very Crude Approximation of Right. Though we are being Less Congenial than is Typical. Which I know from My Extensive Experience on Two Other Mating Flights,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Fine. He knows everything, I'm just an ignorant swamp-dragon, I'm sure not marrying him or you either,\" said Arilash. \"What do your stupid books say we should do about it?\"\n\n\"Take a vacation from it. And have the mating flight in a place where there's something else interesting to do. If even the lumpish and stultified Llredh is getting aggressive, we know we need more diversions than each other,\" said Nrararn.\n\nOnce Llredh had been prevented from ripping Nrararn's leg off from the insult, we made some actual plans. We're going to play Hide And Seek, with a quest. Ythac \u2014 he's Seek \u2014 will stay here for a day in the caves. The rest of us will scatter as we wish. Then Ythac will go find us. We picked Ythac because he actually can find us with sorcery, if he wants and if we let him. He's supposed to use lesser means for the first three weeks.\n\nAnd the quest is to find somewhere good to spend the rest of the mating flight. A nice big island, maybe, with a pleasant and luxury-loving hoven nation that we can lightly conquer and use as our holiday resort for a dozen years. Somewhere with an intricate and exciting cuisine (me), a rich and extensive dramaturgical tradition (Nrararn), an infestation of poisonous insects (Llredh), an ancient history and lots of dead people (Osoth), and so on. Or the best we can find.\n\nI'm going to disguise myself as a hoven and do some exploring.\n\nCoda: My Score\n\nSince the hide-and-seek begins tomorrow, and nobody feels like talking to anybody tonight, and some of the drakes aren't very cooperative, I'm not going to get to my plan to couple once with each of the drakes except Tultamaan this week. Still, I think I did pretty well on it. I got half of them. And less than half of the encounters were completely miserable or humiliating or spirit-wrecking. If you don't count the ones that ended up miserable after the deed was actually done, I mean.\n\nI guess that's not really a good score after all. I'm definitely better off alone.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nI don't want to do scores. Everyone comes in dead last, and especially me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Hiding (Day 46)\n\nI'm a hoven!\n\nWell, I was for a lot of the day, I'm a mouse at the moment.\n\nSpecifically, I've been a girl hoven with dim red fur and a couple changes of outfit. And not a lot of luggage, considering how far I've been travelling. Also not a whole lot of awareness of geography, or customs of how one buys a zeppelin ticket, or any number of other things that a supposed world-traveller might be expected to know. If the hovens suspected that terrible monsters from another world walked in disguse amongst them, I'd have been the first one they'd finger. They haven't figured that out yet.\n\nStaying in Ghemelia didn't sound good. Not to me, not to anyone. The place is a pile of turmoils, and the sophisticated pleasures it offers are probably gobbling down food in a restaurant and hoping to finish the meal before some militia or other explodes the place. We'd probably end up battling the entire Trestean army before we were done. Which would be fine if we were here for exercise, and necessary if we were here for conquering, but would be much more of a distraction from our actual purpose. Of course the whole Hide and Seek game is a distraction from our actual purpose too, but it's just a temporary and much-needed break.\n\nI decided to go to Trest. That's the worst choice for finding a small isolated island for us to enjoy \u2014 see \"battling the entire Trestean army\" \u2014 but it's likely the most civilized place in Hove. And it's a reasonably sophisticated world, with zeppelins and theatres and such. We could probably import some civilization to our presumed island paradise, if we didn't mind breathing money at hovens. If we had any money, I mean. I'm sure we could get some somehow or other if we wanted it.\n\nTrest isn't that far away by dragon wings. But I could see Arilash poking around an archipelago from quite a ways off. (She's good at grownup travel magic. She got there before I even made it as far as Ghemel.) Ythac has better eyes than me, and he's probably watching, so I didn't want to fly with dragon wings. The Esrret-Sky-Painted would keep him from seeing me very well, but leave an astral track that he could follow later. And he's devious.\n\nI'm a very lazy dragoness. I didn't want to fly that far with seagull wings either.\n\nSo I went to Ghemel Airport to take a zeppelin. Yay, zeppelin!\n\nGhemel Airport\n\nSpecifically, I flew to Ghemel with Llredh. The fighter planes came for us. We (mostly Llredh) burned one up, and dived into some trees, and turned into starlings, and flew off separately. I think he went to the harbor.\n\nThe airport was full of soldiers. Trestean soldiers in sand-colored uniforms armed with ray guns and hatchets, and Ghemelian soldiers in bright red uniforms with the same sort of bullet guns that the farmers had shot me with, only a bit less battered. I took the opportunity to land on a Trestean's head and learn Trestean. They smelled very nervous when I got there, and very nervous and very angry a few minutes later as the news of Llredh burning a fighter plane spread. They didn't pay any attention to a starling skittering overhead, over their ridiculous fences, and onto the wide paved field.\n\nThree zeppelins swayed in the hot winds, tethered at the tops of three narrow ziggurats. I darted into the shadows of a staircase on one ziggurat, turned into a hoven woman in heavy purple indistinct Ghemelian-style robes with mismatched sandals, and climbed to the top. A Trestean soldier glared at me from the gently bobbling open hatch.\n\n\"I'd like to buy a ticket to Trest,\" I told him.\n\n\"You'd what?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'd like to buy a ticket to fly to Trest. On that zeppelin.\"\n\n\"That is so wrong I don't know where to begin. This zeppelin isn't going to Trest. It's a semi-local military transport, you don't just buy tickets on it. You don't buy tickets on it at all; you're Ghemelian, not Trestean.\"\n\n\"Well, which one is going to Trest?\" I asked.\n\nIt sounded like a reasonable question to me. The soldier didn't like it very much. He pointed his ray gun at me, and said \"You stay there, girlie. I'm going to call Ground Security, they'll come and check you out.\" He stepped over to a big brass cylinder with intricate controls, and started doing intricate things to it.\n\nWell, that was annoying. I brushed the soldier with my hukuch\u00f4. His fur went flat, and his hands trembled on the controls, but he didn't flee. Trestean military discipline is impressive. I spat careful lightning at him, ruining his ray gun, breaking his discipline, and sending him screaming into the depths of the zeppelin. Oh, and saving his life. If he'd attacked me, I'd have had to kill him.\n\nSo, that was the wrong zeppelin and the wrong approach. I shifted around a bit, until I looked a lot more Trestean \u2014 matching my coloration and fur to the soldier's, and copying his uniform. I strode down the ziggurat's sandstone staircase and marched crisply across to the next one.\n\nThe soldier there wasn't quite as brusque to one of his own kind. He peered at my badge, copied from the soldier at the first zeppelin. \"What can I do for you, Guardswoman Tweenpo?\"\n\nI peered at his badge too. \"Does this go to Trest, Guardsman Gordome?\"\n\n\"Churry City. May I see your paperwork?\"\n\nWell, of course he couldn't see my paperwork, I hadn't any paperwork. I came out with something like \"My... I... I don't... never...\"\n\nGuardsman Gordome appeared unpersuaded by my draconic eloquence. \"Guardswoman? Perhaps you could go back to your commanding officer and correct what is obviously a simple misunderstanding in a situation that could not possibly cause any trouble and under no circumstances could possibly be confused with attempted desertion?\" He was clearly lying.\n\nBursting out laughing wasn't the right thing to do, really. Neither was saying, \"You think I'm deserting?\"\n\nHe looked a bit annoyed. \"May I please see your identification papers, Guardswoman? Just a formality. You know the drill. I'd really rather not cause you any more trouble than the rules require.\" He was telling the truth that time.\n\n\"Don't be silly,\" I said, forgetting, for a moment, that dragons had not been ruling Hove for grosses of years, and that I didn't look like a dragon in any case.\n\nGordome looked a bit upset. \"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm going to have to take you into custody if you don't show me your identification papers.\" Also truthful.\n\nI wanted to be taken to Churry City, wherever that was, not custody. But he had been polite and helpful. So I took his ray gun away from him and smashed it, and picked him up and wrapped him in some ropes and tossed him on a couch. Small people are all very slow and weak really. I'm rather slow and weak when I'm being a small person, but not as slow and weak as real small people.\n\nAnd then I scampered through the canvas room to the door to the zeppelin's gondola. I dived under the nearest sofa, hoped that nobody could see me very well, and turned into a mouse.\n\nIf considered as a way to get aboard a zeppelin and hide, this plan worked brilliantly. If considered as a way to get to Trest quickly, it didn't. The Tresteans delayed the zeppelin for several hours as they looked everywhere on it (and the first one, I suppose), repeatedly, for their intruder. They saw me repeatedly, but they were looking for a hoven, not a mouse.\n\nEventually they gave up, and sent the zeppelin off. All the officers on board were nervous, wondering if the dangerous intruder had somehow managed to stay on board (yes, she had) and whether she would do something dastardly (yes, she took a dastardly nap). They were expecting something rather worse, like having her ignite herself and the zeppelin as well. (Which makes no sense \u2014 such a roundabout way of a suicide. There aren't any dragons around to help her do it elegantly, but there must be, oh, poison. Or maybe she could shoot herself with a ray gun. Well, in this case she wasn't suicidal or murderous, just a dastardly, dastardly stowaway.)\n\nI peeked out from under the sofa, because the gondola was really quite pretty. It was a long narrow room of polished wood, polished brass, polished leather. Seats lined the walls, comfortable-looking leather chairs, bolted to the floor. Windows lined both sides of the gondola, and gleaming brass tubes were mounted on both sides. When we were finally flying, the officers \u2014 the passengers were mostly officers of Trest \u2014 would peer through them now and again and say things like \"There's Mount Malacha!\" or \"I believe we're passing over Esbaril,\" so I suppose they were some sort of technological vision enhancer, telescopes or something.\n\nThe trip took, roughly, forever. Nearly two days. We were, at least, the farthest off the ground that I have ever been: the zeppelin steered straight from Ghemel to Churry City. The officers slept in their leather chairs at night, and gambled and traded stories during the daytime, and complained that the buffet in the zeppelin galley was worse than usual. I stayed under my chair, and exchanged catty notes about the other fianc\u00e9s with Ythac when I got bored (and probably gave him enough clues to find me, by the end of it, but I tried not to), and wondered if I could get away with eating the entire buffet or if the officers would notice that. It seemed best to wait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "The Best Food On Hove (so far) (Day 48)\n\nChurry City turned out not to be Churry City. The zeppelin floated down to a stout metal and wood tower some miles away from the actual city, in a zeppelin-field in the middle of a town of brutal barracks and hangers. Trestean soldiers walked this way and that, practicing looking menacing, preparing for going to Ghemelia. The officers rushed off the zeppelin, glad to be less cramped, glad to have survived, glad to meet their waiting wives and husbands or whoever.\n\nNobody was waiting for me. Which was good \u2014 I was half expecting Ythac to tag me as I came off the zeppelin. He didn't, though.\n\n\"How's the game going? Caught anyone yet?\" I asked him.\n\n\"I found Osoth in the Prevalian Catacombs, some hoven religious archaeological site, but that's so easy a victory it barely counts,\" he wrote back. \"I haven't been rushing. Solitude is so nice now and then.\"\n\n\"Solitude with the necromancer of your dreams, even better?\"\n\n\"Jyothky, please don't start on that. Everybody else nips me all the time, and I wish you wouldn't.\"\n\n\"Sorry, sorry! I like Osoth fairly well, even if he does talk very oddly.\"\n\n\"I forgive you. But I am going to go stuff Osoth back in his catacombs and enjoy more solitude. Then I'll hunt a deer down and not share it with any dragonesses.\"\n\nHaving unaccountably offended my best friend, I decided that I, too, should hunt something down and not share it. Ythac was being sneaky suggesting deer though. I'd have to be very careful not to be seen from above \u2014 well, from the side. Ythac was over there in the middle sky, or on the ground past the middle sky. A few minutes later I could see him, or some dragon anyway, flying across a forest and breathing fire. I suspect that a hoven with a telescope could see him too.\n\nSo, I turned into a crow and tried to find a large animal that couldn't be seen from above. By looking for one, from above. As I am an extraordinarily mighty huntress and supremely skilled in the ways of the taking of prey, it took me rather a long time.\n\nThe beast I found wasn't quite a cow, but I'll call it that anyway because the real name is \"vask\" in Trestean, which means \"no\" in Ghemelian and I'm more used to Ghemelian today. It had a single big teat for an udder, and it was a bit on the small side and a bit on the male side as cows go. It was in a barn at least, a big hot wooden barn with a sheet-metal roof and space for thirty cows its size. Or one dead cow and one dragon. I grilled it a bit with fire breath, and seasoned it poorly with a handful of dry clover from a haystack, and it was the best thing I had eaten in two days.\n\nHalfway through my meal, a farmer peeked into the barn. He inspected me. I waved a forepaw at him. He tiptoed out.\n\nA few minutes later, he was back with five other farmers. Most of them were armed with tiny little rifles. Some guns roar their danger, and some growl it, but these rather whimpered it, as if they were begging me to be a rabbit or squirrel or something they could actually conquer. The other farmer had a heavy wood box with several glass lenses, set on a tripod. It didn't say that it was dangerous at all.\n\n\"Thanks for the cow! The vask, I guess you call it,\" I told them.\n\n\"It talks! It talks!\" yabbled the farmers.\n\n\"It talks, it cooks, it writes, and it breathes fire!\" I said.\n\nThe farmers discussed this in some confusion. The one with the box pointed some of the lenses at me. I peered at it. It seemed safe, and then safe, and suddenly it whispered that it could inconvenience me slightly if I was extraordinarily careless with my eyes. (Dangersense doesn't really make things make sound, or even talk. That's just an easy way to describe it.) So I stared at it. The farmer pushed a knob; the device flashed brilliantly, and clicked a bit. I had brightness dots floating in front of my eyes! The Great Titan Sanitarium fixed them though.\n\n\"What was that?\" I asked.\n\n\"Just a picture in case anyone doesn't believe us. What are you, and what are you doing with my cow?\" said the farmer.\n\n\"I'm Jyothky. I'm a dragon, obviously, and I'm eating it mostly raw, obviously.\" Maybe the dragon part would have been more obvious to them if, oh, there had ever been more than one dragon in their world before, and a rather secretive explorer of a Quel Quen at that.\n\n\"Joffee, as in short for Joffinet? My daughter is Joffinet too,\" said the farmer. The brave, brave farmer.\n\n\"I'm JYOTH-kee.\"\n\n\"Well, then, hello there, JOTH-kee. I don't know what to make of you, showing up in my barn and speaking all polite-like and stealing my cow.\"\n\nThat sounded like a fair complaint. On Mhel, we own everything, so it's not stealing \u2014 except from each other maybe, but who cares about just one cow now and then? That's not true here. Not that I care much what a hoven thinks about me. \"I'll give you something in exchange, if it's fast.\" But the last time I'd offered that, I'd burned a building and gotten into trouble with Greshthanu over it. Maybe I could do something less violent here. \"Are any of you sick? I'll heal someone. Or one of your animals.\" I looked at my half-a-cow. \"Not this one though. It's a bit on the dead side.\"\n\nThe farmer looked very suspicious. \"Marfy's got a bad back, Churdle's got Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome.\"\n\nMy magic can't fix backs quickly, as I know very well. \"Which one is Churdle?\"\n\nThey didn't want to tell me; they didn't say anything. But they glanced at him, and he took a half-step back. I smiled at him. \"What's Moray-Lagrozo Syndrome?\"\n\nHe said something about blood and polysthegides and his Fralian nodes not doing what Fralian nodes are supposed to. I didn't understand it. Neither did he, I think.\n\n\"Come here, then, and I'll see if I can fix it.\"\n\nChurdle didn't much want to get any closer to the beautiful and powerful magical healer girl from another universe. Perhaps he was thinking of her as a huge fanged clawed blood-spattered carnivorous monster. (Unfair! I didn't expect company, so I wasn't trying to eat neatly.)\n\nSo I grabbed him with my tail and pulled him into the barn, with him struggling and fighting me the while. The other farmers gabbled about whether they could shoot me without hurting Churdle and suchlike. I sniffed at him \u2014 he did not much like being so close to my mouth and flickery tongue! \u2014 and, yes, something smelled wrong compared to the other hovens. Too many polysthegides in his blood, I suppose, whatever those are. So I put the Great Titan Sanitarium into him, and the Rose Rescaler. Which was silly, the Rose Rescaler is much better on lizards.\n\nAnd then I remembered the Arcane Anodyne, which is meant for basic bipeds, and I had to wait for the next heartbeat to put that in him too. It sort of filled him up and flooded out of him. That seemed like a good sign (no more healing to be done), or maybe a bad one (my spells couldn't do anything).\n\nSo I put him down and patted his head. \"Did that help?\"\n\nHe blinked at me, and then ran away.\n\nSo I finished the cow, and spent a while grooming myself, scrubbing blood off of me with hay. The next part of the plan was to fly to the city in raven form, get some Trestean money, then travel halfway across Trest to somewhere as yet undecided and be a tourist in hoven shape for a while. That plan had a terrible flaw: flying that far in raven form is exercise, and I was feeling tremendously lazy.\n\nWhile I was dawdling, some of the hovens came back out. No guns this time, but they had a big pot and a basket of bread.\n\n\"I took a blood test, and my polysthegide levels are 210 and 83! 210 and 83!\" Churdle was practically dancing.\n\n\"Is that good?\" I asked.\n\n\"Is that good? That's normal! I haven't been better than 840\u2013850 and 10 in years!\"\n\n\"That's good, right?\"\n\n\"That's perfect!... But I gotta know. Will it last, whatever you did?\"\n\n\"I don't know the etiology of whatever-it-was you had.\" He looked blank at the word. \"I don't know what causes it. If it's a sickness that you can get twice, you can get it again.\" That's usually true.\n\n\"I was born with it. It's genetic.\"\n\n\"Then, if it's better now, it'll probably stay better.\"\n\n\"Well, anyhow, I'm quite thankful. That's worth my bosses' cow and then some... then lots. Anyhow, if you're still hungry, we've brought you genuine Churry chili and troublecakes.\"\n\nWell, after a whole cow, I wasn't hungry exactly. But the hovens had found my secret weakness! The chili was delicious, and spicy, and full of wonderful unfamiliar vegetables, and spicy, and had a superb blended flavor such as comes from long loving cooking, and spicy, and after about the third \"and spicy\" the troublecakes were very pleasant and buttery and blandly sweet and not the least bit troublesome.\n\nThen I turned into a raven, flew approximately three and one-twelfth taillengths to the nearest tree, stuck my head under my wing, slept until night and/or not feeling quite so stuffed, flew to the military base, sniffed around for valuables, found them in a building marked \"Paymaster's Offices\" , pried open a safe that was unaccountably not built to keep dragons out, collected a large pile of thurnies, stuffed them under my neckscales (or feathers as the case may have been) for safekeeping, and lashed my crow's tail furiously.\n\n\"I hereby do not like technology worlds,\" I wrote to Ythac.\n\n\"Giant robot bit your tail?\" he answered.\n\n\"If I were there I'd bite yours. No \u2014 the money here is all paper.\"\n\n\"That's not very inspiring! I was hoping for piles of niobium and brazinion, and gemstones that do not occur naturally on any dragonworld!\"\n\n\"Well, you're going to have to buy them with bits of paper. Or loot them directly.\" I answered.\n\n\"You know that you just told me a lot about where you are?\" he said.\n\n\"Oh. Right. Are you going to come drag me home?\"\n\n\"Not in a hurry. I'm going to go drag Llredh back next, I think, and then Arilash. Enjoy your vacation!\"\n\nHe's so sweet."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Tourist (Day 49)\n\nThe zeppelin to Dorday was all commercial. That means that I could look like a hoven woman dressed like one of the farmers, and give a hoven at a desk two hundred-thurney notes (I hate decimal!), get eighteen thurnies back, and a bit of paper which entitles one to sit in a hot little brick room for an hour, then climb a steel tower and sit in a lightly swaying and very long gondola full of chairs for two hours and peer at scenery and wonder, nay, marvel, at how boring flying is when it's not with your own wings. While lightly uniformed hovens bring you little paper plates of bad olives and paper cups of lightly fermented watermelon juice, in case any spare delight is needed.\n\nWhich left me climbing down a steel tower down to the Top Tourist City of Trest, with lots of money that wasn't looted locally, and no dragons around.\n\nSo, Dorday. Nine islands in a bright blue-water lagoon, with thirty-one bridges of gleaming stone between them. Many tall spires in gaudy colors, which would be so much fun to fly through if it weren't for the strands of lightbulbs strung between them. (Maybe I'll be a bird for a while later on.) Five vast parks, full of: metal and wood sculptures for hoven children to climb on, a zoological and botanical garden, games, slides, wheels to ride, carts selling any number of snacks. A huge oval stadium made of glittering stone topped with metal arches. Wide avenues of shops and caf\u00e9s lined with aromatic trees.\n\nPlenty of hotels, too, but the first three that I went to were full. I got a reservation for the following night at the Pozarde Hotel Dorday, and got annoyed with looking, and planned to spend the night in a tree in crow-form or some such. It's not as if a bed feels any better to me than lying on a rock.\n\nDragons do not take terribly well to being thwarted, especially by the snivelling machinations of small people. The natural thing to do would be to kill with terrible lightning and frost those who stand in my way. (Not fire. Fire would burn down the hotel.) That didn't seem right, because (a) the hotel would probably be full of police and detectives and reporters and such and I still wouldn't get a room, and (b) those who stand in my way are not would-be dragonslayers, but innocent tourists. Like me but better organized and with better local connections.\n\nSo, I decided that I needed better local connections.\n\nI bought a copy of the day's Magic Trumpet of Dorday, and looked around for advertisements of local guides. There weren't any. (Many advertisements were cryptic, but after the Word-Fox told me that the first of the odd words, 'TUSS' was an acronym for 'Temporary Until Someone Special', viz. a companion to tide one through a breakup, I stopped trying to translate them.) But there was an establishment called the Red Spire of Rented Friends, on the seventh block of St. Alacord street. I was on the tenth block of St. Alacord street. Renting a friend would probably do.\n\nThree blocks and two flights of stairs in a slightly shabby tall building with a predictably red spire brought me to the slightly shabby front door of the Red Spire of Rented Friends. The lobby wasn't shabby exactly. It was baroque. It was full of gilded statues of hovens embracing each other, dancing under arched boughs laden with with berries, playing harps and violins, or... well, I suppose you can do that to your lover if you don't have lots of sharp pointy teeth. I should have figured it out then, but on Mhel they all wear special hats to show what they are, and on Hove they don't, so I didn't realize.\n\n\"I'd like to rent a friend, please,\" I said to the receptionist.\n\nShe smiled a mouth full of very white and very symmetrical blunt flat teeth at me, and twirled a lock of long black hair around a finger. \"This would be your emporium! What sort of a friend would you like? And what name shall I give for you?\"\n\n\"I'm Jyothky Meragathium,\" I said. I was not concerned with secrecy, except from Ythac. If Ythac tracked me down to Dorday, he'd find me in a few minutes no matter what name I gave. \"I'd like someone who knows the local entertainments. And hotels. Hotels especially.\"\n\n\"All of our associates know the local entertainments and hotels in great detail,\" she said, which should have been a clue. \"I take it you're thinking of an overnight rental?\"\n\n\"No \u2014 two weeks, I think. Maybe more, maybe less. I was planning to pay today for two weeks. If I need to go home before then, I won't be asking for a refund.\"\n\n\"That does limit things a bit \u2014 not all of our associates are available for quite so long at once.\" She shuffled through some papers, and spread five on the counter. I looked. Each one had a picture of one of the rental friends, all beaming and beautiful hovens dressed for the beach, and a few none-too-specific sentences about how Trabundo was cheerful and compliant, Elesma was enthusiastic and energetic, Tarcuna was sweet and spunky, and so on. That should have been a clue too.\n\nSpunky sounded like an advantage in making reservations. \"Tarcuna, maybe.\"\n\n\"An excellent choice. Let me consult with her and make sure that she's actually available. Our associates don't always tell me their commitments two weeks in advance.\" (Which was an overripe-mango sort of white lie.) She smiled that fearsomely symmetric smile, and walked elegantly down a corridor to one of many small doors. She tapped on the door. \"Tarcuna, are you alone in there?\"\n\nTarcuna was alone, and let the receptionist in. The receptionist asked, \"We've got a customer, for a two-week hire. Are you available?\" I think she thought I couldn't hear her. Hovens are basically deaf.\n\n\"I never have any plans. That's fine,\" said Tarcuna. \"Boy or girl?\"\n\n\"Girl, named Joffee something-or-other. Young. Not so bad to look at. From out of town, but I'm not sure where. I'm not sure if she's your exactly your type or not.\"\n\n\"I don't really care if she's my type or not. A job's a job,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Has Bopo been fed lately?\" asked the receptionist.\n\n\"Yesterday. Make sure I can get a night off in a week so I can feed him again, can you? It would be awkward if my customer got sick halfway through.\"\n\n\"I'll check. She's got to sleep sometime anyway. Anything else I should ask about?\"\n\n\"Nothing really. I know what to do. Buzz me and I'll come out,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nSo the receptionist came back, and discussed the rates with me (fifteen hundred thurneys a day, with a 100% tip traditional for satisfactory service, plus I'm supposed to buy her meals and museum tickets and such if she's going to any such things with me, the receptionist was careful to inform me), and make sure that Tarcuna would have one half-day off out of every ten. I counted out thirty thousand thurneys in bills, the receptionist pushed a button that rang a bell, and that was that.\n\nTarcuna sauntered out of her chamber. She's a compact hoven with short neat red fur with grey stripes, long red hair in spirals, and a very full udder. She was wearing short swimwear, rather like in her flier. Little paste gems were glued on her hooves, and a big paste smile was glued on her mouth. \"Joffee? I understand that you're my special friend for a very long time? I'm Tarcuna,\" she said and embraced me in considerable detail. At that point I did start to suspect what she was, really I did. But only a little.\n\n\"Glad to meet you, Tarcuna. I'm Jyothky, though.\" She tried to say it right, but it kept coming out Joffee. So I told her to use my highschool nickname Spotty, which I had to translate into Trestean so she could say it right.\n\n\"Would you like to come back to my room, have a little brandy, relax a bit and get to know each other better?\" she asked.\n\n\"OK! But I will be making you work some in a half-hour or a whole one!\" I said. I wanted a hotel room.\n\n\"I'll work in whatever way you like, Spotty,\" she purred in a voice as sweet and artificial as corn syrup.\n\nSo we went back to her room, which was a small place with a big and very important-looking bed, and a few smaller and lesser bits of furniture here and there. It looked all very contrived, except for a battered textbook on designing ray guns stuck in a corner. Tarcuna poured us each a little cup of some sort of sweet aromatic brandy from a cheap-looking glass decanter, and held her cup to my lips to drink a little toast to friendship and pleasure. Which all should have been a pretty unambiguous clue, but I was mostly thinking of the hotel.\n\nAnd after we finished our brandy, and said a few very unmemorable pleasantries, she asked me what I liked.\n\n\"For this vacation? Seeing Dorday... museums and parks and such. The zoo, definitely, I don't know anything about the native animals except for some ugly pointy desert herbivores. I'm going to eat a lot \u2014 I've got an appetite that you wouldn't believe, and I haven't had much but raw meat for a while. Mostly, though, I don't want any company... hovens don't count... but obviously you won't be helping with that.\" No point in being secret from my rent-a-friend.\n\nTarcuna laughed, and said. \"Oh, I'll be glad to show you around Dorday all you want! You're funny, Spotty. People don't count as company? What does?\"\n\nOK, I guess that wasn't quite as clear as it could have been. I tried the direct approach. \"I'm really a dragon \u2014 that's a gigantic scaly carnivorous monster from another dimension. I'm here on my engagement flight. But I'm pretty annoyed at all the rest of us, so I'm taking a vacation for a few weeks from them.\"\n\n\"Wow, that's original, that's a cool story! What am I? Your captive specimen? Are you going to probe me?\" she said, and winked.\n\n\"Um... no, you're my hired friend, and you're going to find me a hotel room and take me around Dorday... right?\" I said.\n\nShe smiled a very syrupy smile. \"Whatever you like! We can do both, there's plenty of time.... I'm very accomodating. Just tell me what you'd like me to do, and I'll do it.\"\n\n\"Start with the hotel room. I don't want to sleep in a tree tonight,\" I said.\n\n\"In a tree?... Sure! Want a bridal suite? A special bathtub? A massage table? How much do you want to spend a night? Two hundred for a nice basic room, up to six hundred for the best Dorday has to offer,\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't see any reason to get less than the best. If it's available \u2014 I tried a few hotels and they didn't have rooms,\" I said.\n\n\"Don't worry! I will find you somewhere excellent!\" She took a curly little appliance and a big book from a cabinet, and started calling hotels \u2014 the first four she tried didn't have any rooms \u2014 and negotiating. As she called, she untied the straps of her bathing suit, and caressed herself here and there and sucked the tip of her finger and grinned at me. That's when I got the point for real. Oops!\n\n\"The Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium has Suite 406, a very nice suite for four hundred sixty a night. No massage table, but a big bathtub. It's a wonderful hotel! I've been to that room before. Is that good? Shall I have them reserve it? We can go look when we're done here?\"\n\n\"That's fine, let's just take it.\"\n\n\"Sure! You won't be unhappy. I can do all sorts of things in Suite 406.\" She chatted on the phone to make the arrangements \u2014 we'd need to come by in four hours to pay for it. As she talked, she showed off various primary and secondary sexual characteristics, and indicated intimacies to me by quiet but eager gestures.\n\nSo I had to ask. \"Um... Tarcuna? Are you a prostitute?\"\n\nHer face was carefully guarded. \"Sure, if that's what you'd like, Spotty.\"\n\n\"I mean, professionally,\" I said.\n\n\"I do prefer a word like 'public friend' when I'm being coy. I don't necessarily pleasure all my clients. I'll use whatever word you like... I can be your high-class courtesan, or your dirty whore, or your nice sweet girlfriend, or your captive native specimen, or whatever you like.\"\n\n\"I'm really not here to fornicate with hovens,\" I said. \"If I'm going to fornicate with anyone, it ought to be my fianc\u00e9s, but I've really not been doing such a good job on that.\"\n\n\"I really don't follow you,\" said Tarcuna, her face-fur going irregular.\n\n\"I really did want to rent a friend, or a native guide who knows what's what here and will keep me company when I want and tell me interesting stories and show me where to get the best chili in the restaurant only the natives know about,\" I said.\n\n\"I'll do all that! I'll be glad to make your body feel so happy, too, if you ever like that,\" she said. She smelled worried.\n\nBut by then I had figured out the problem. \"Oh, you're worried about your tip \u2014 that's for fornicating, right? Here's 8, 640, um, nine thousand I mean, right now.\" The money was all stolen anyway, and worthless as treasure, and just had to last for a few weeks. \"I'll give you a bigger tip at the end. But really, I don't want you to try to pleasure me. It wouldn't work, 'cause I have no sense of touch, and even talking about it just gets me upset.\"\n\nShe counted the money quickly and made it vanish, and smiled a nice honeyed professionalized weaponized smile to me. \"Whatever you like, Spotty! All I have to say there, is, thank you! And just about anything you want to do with me, to me, is fine. I won't push anything at you... I'm very sorry I did, just, most of my customers like that.\"\n\n\"Think nothing of it. My fianc\u00e9s keep wanting me to copulate with them, and I'm not interested, and I'm on vacation from that for a while, is all. Let's go get that hotel room, and then some food.\"\n\nShe started dressing, taking some rather more practical underwear and tunic and skirt out of an armoire. \"I won't push anymore!... Wait, fianc\u00e9s? plural? How many people are you going to marry, anyway?\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to pick one.\"\n\n\"That's so unusual! Having several fianc\u00e9s at once, I mean. Picking one is normal.\" She finished dressing, looked in one of the mirrored walls, and adjusted her hat and tunic a bit. \"Bthera told you, you're paying for my food if we eat out together, didn't she? That way I can come with you to any restaurant you want to eat at. Don't worry, I'll pick cheap things.\"\n\n\"Bthera's the woman at the front counter? Yes, she did. Eat whatever you like. I've got three-quarters of a million thurneys to last me two or three weeks.\"\n\nTarcuna whistled. \"Three-quarters of a million? No wonder you'll rent a call girl instead of a chor-chor, and get Suite 406.\"\n\n\"Chor-chor?\" I cast the Word-Fox: it meant 'guide around Dorday'. \"Oh, there were all sorts of ads for them in the paper.\"\n\n\"Don't worry! I know everything that any chor-chor knows, plus lots more. They don't get to Suite 406, I'll tell you that! Plus... you said you don't want to be touched, but I can put on a show for you. Me alone, or with someone... would you like that?\" We left the Red Spire, waving at Bthera on the way out.\n\n\"I really don't find hovens sexually appealing at all. You look like food, if you must know, and I'm hungry. The dinner kind of hungry, not the sex kind. I've got enough trouble noticing my own kind as appealing,\" I said. Which was a third of a lie: hovens look like small people, who are not, generally speaking, appropriate food. Not that they can't be eaten, but eating them is only for special occasions of one sort or another.\n\n\"Oh, right, you're an alien monster beast. I'll have to remember that. You don't look it.\" Tarcuna didn't believe me, but I didn't care as long as she did what I hired her for. \"Sorry to keep offering. Whores don't have a lot of professional ethics, but I try to be an honest one.\" She grinned at me. \"OK, alien monster beast! Let's get you set up in a hotel, then... do you like Ventelian food?\"\n\n\"I've never tasted it.\"\n\n\"Amazing. There's the best Ventelian restaurant about four blocks away from the Elysium, in the building with three yellow spires. They make a zotanco al besti that you would not believe. It's so rich!\"\n\n\"Now that's the sort of thing I hired you for! Lead on, my brave native guide, and show me this thing which you call 'zotanco al besti'.\"\n\nAnd she did nicely. Com' al Virtu was easily the best Ventelian restaurant I have ever eaten at. I might say that again after I've eaten at another one. Zotanco al besti is a very fine liver puree mixed with butter and aromatic spices, and served on little circles of crispy rice cracker that make a wonderful contrast and crunch delightfully on silly flat hoven teeth. Tarcuna was a bit surprised when I ordered twelve more servings after I liked the first one.\n\nThen of course I had the main courses \u2014 I'd ordered several. Tarcuna said, \"I thought you were just going taste them all, but it looks as if you're going to finish them all.\"\n\n\"I am, and order some more of that grilled young vask with fruit sauce. And that poached fish, too, the pink one.\"\n\n\"How can you eat that much?\"\n\n\"I'm very large lizard! I need to keep fed.\"\n\n\"Right. You'll make yourself sick, eating like that.\"\n\n\"Only if I don't eat enough and start to starve.\"\n\nI didn't eat enough, but we'd been in the restaurant for two hours. I'm going to have to go off now and then and find a full-sized meal \u2014 I can't really spend half my days nibbling tiny hoven-sized snacks with a tiny hoven-sized mouth. Tarcuna can earn her salary and arrange for a whole barbequed cow in a private pavilion in the countryside sometime.\n\nAfter that we saw the Dorday Museum of Art and Culture, which was very pretty. I bought a guidebook showing most of the art though, so I'm not going to write about it in here.\n\nIndignities of Life as a Hoven\n\nWhen we got back to the hotel room, it was instantly clear that Someone Had Been There.\n\n\"Two female hovens have been in here!\" I hissed at Tarcuna. \"They searched the room and they did something with ammonia!\"\n\n\"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"I smell them. I smell two female hovens, one older than you, the other younger and pregnant and having digestive troubles. I smell soap and ammonia, as if they had sought to conceal their odor from me by pungent substances, the fools. And they disturbed the room! Remember the bed, which was rumpled from when you bounced on it? Its sheets and blankets are smooth again! Remember the closet door, which was open? It is now closed!\"\n\nTarcuna laughed. \"You're silly!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't call it\" silly \". I would call it\" furious \"! What if I had left something valuable in here?\"\n\n\"Well, there is that. Nobody should leave anything too valuable in a hotel,\" she said. \"You didn't though. You don't have any luggage.\"\n\n\"That's beside the point. Nobody, nobody, should come into a dragon's lair without permission! I should find them and kill them!\"\n\n\"Well, that's maybe a bit extreme, Spotty,\" she said.\n\n\"Well. I don't feel like doing a lot of work about it. But I will if they do it again!\" I hissed.\n\nShe looked rather scared, which is silly because I wasn't angry at her. \"Shall I call the front desk and have them stop maid service?\"\n\n\"Maid service?\"\n\n\"Yes, the hotel sends a maid to clean your room twice a day. Part of the price of the room. If you don't like it they don't have to though. I like having clean towels and sheets, especially if there's any, um, business,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nWell, that was embarrassing. \"Oh. And the ammonia?\"\n\n\"For cleaning the mirrors and windows. I'm surprised you can smell it \u2014 I can't \u2014 it usually clears out pretty fast,\" she said. I examined her closely with veriception. She was telling the truth, claw it.\n\n\"So I did ask for it, just without realizing that I had done?\"\n\n\"Sure!\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Right. Don't cancel the maid service.\" I was still furious though. Anger doesn't just go away after it comes, and being shown to be a stupid ignorant lizard by a hired whore didn't really improve my mood any. Even if I wasn't angry at the maids anymore, or even at Tarcuna exactly. \"OK. You go to bed now. I'll be along in a bit.\"\n\n\"Just checking? Do you want me ready, or awake, or anything? Or we can just cuddle or anything you like?\" Tarcuna was sounding professional. She didn't smell the least bit lustful, by the way, not this time or any of the others that she offered.\n\n\"No. I'll wake you if I want to talk. Nothing else is the least bit appealing,\" I snapped.\n\n\"Whatever you like, Spotty. At Red Spire we try to give our clients exactly what they want! Nothing less, and nothing more.\" she said, and started to ready herself for sleep.\n\nI went into the bathroom. The tub was huge and made of marble, and had many interesting knobs and levers of shining ivory. I called Tarcuna. \"I'd like about three inches of water in the bathtub.\"\n\n\"Hot or cold?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter, I'm going to freeze it and boil it anyway,\" I said, which got an odd look.\n\n\"Well, this knob is for hot water, this for cold, this lever to keep water in the tub. This one points the water to the shower above, this one to the side, this one to the fountain-chair in that corner,\" and so on for the rest of the controls.\n\n\"And to turn the water off, I twist those knobs back the way they came?\" I asked.\n\n\"Right, yes. Just like an ordinary bathtub.\"\n\n\"I've never used an ordinary bathtub. I usually take a sandbath in a desert of angry sand. Or a river, if my mother makes me. Well, used to. I'm a grownup now.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say, Spotty,\" she said. \"Shall I go to bed now?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She left. I closed the door, and waited for the tub to fill enough. Then I threw a towel into it, and took the smallest shape I could \u2014 that's a tiny little dragon shape, about a third of an inch from head to tailtip. Everything looks huge in that shape.\n\nIt's not as satisfying to attack a wet towel with tiny needles of fire and ice as it is to attack a mountainside with the full force of my whef\u00f4. But it's a lot more convenient.\n\nTwo-twelfths of an hour later, the towel was a ruined mess of scorch-patches, and I had managed to beat my temper back to the point where I could sleep. I turned back to my hoven shape, discouraged Tarcuna from her lusty yet lustless professional obligations once more, and went went to bed.\n\nNow Tarcuna is asleep on one side of the bed, and I'm going to do the same on the other side. And if any of my fianc\u00e9s complains about me sharing a bed with a hoven, I'm going to toss off all my illusion spells and tell them a long and boring story about what happened that they can see is true.\n\nNot that any of them can talk, with all that mount-fighting they've been doing.\n\nCoda: Scores\n\nTopic Score\n\nFianc\u00e9s-144\n\nCivilized Food +144\n\nMy Cleverness-72\n\nBeing On My Own +72 (Tarcuna doesn't count)\n\nTechnology +36 (It's pretty spiffy)\n\nMagic-36 (My language spell didn't tell me \"chor-chor!\" Because I learned the\n\nlanguage mostway across Trest, and didn't ask it about local words here!)"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Dorday Day (Day 50)\n\n\"What do your usual clients like to do in Dorday?\" I asked Tarcuna over breakfast. The Grand Hotel Elysium Dorday provided a generous variety of pastries and fruits for breakfast, if one were willing to pay a generous price. Which I was.\n\nThis was the wrong question to ask Tarcuna, because she told me. I am alarmed and surprised that hovens \u2014 whose necks are so short as to barely be there at all, and so inflexible as to not even allow their heads to face backwards \u2014 can do some of those things.\n\n\"Maybe a different question would be in order. What do your usual clients who are taking a temporary vacation from their reproductive organs like to do in Dorday?\"\n\n\"That sort of vacation isn't the usual reason to hire a public friend, Spotty. Would you like me to suggest a few things we might do today?\"\n\n\"Yes. That,\" I said. \"Actually, you think about it while I go get a few more of those sausage-and-egg pastries.\"\n\nShe looked at her plate, where she hadn't managed to finish a whole one, and looked a bit alarmed. \"Don't make yourself sick, Spotty!\"\n\n\"I'm not going to get sick!\"\n\n\"Still, maybe I'd better leave the amusement park for later,\" she said.\n\n\"Why? What's that?\"\n\n\"It's an amusement park,\" she said with a smile. \"An old wheel of iron, some new roller coasters, a mini-zeppelin, a starcatcher room, all the usual things. Not so good on a full belly, somehow.\"\n\nI sat back down and started devouring the pastries with a mouth that's much too small for practical eating. \"I fly barrel rolls when I've got my wings,\" I said. I do, too, at least once a year. \"A few hoven rides aren't going to bother my belly!\"\n\nTarcuna giggled. \"That's right. Flying lizard from another world. Still, how about a cruise around the islands and out the bay in the morning? Or if you're feeling intellectual again, the Museum of Visible Experiments is quite smart, and the Museum of the Previous Millennium is quite pretty. Then lunch, if you really want it...\"\n\n\"I will!\" I think that if I eat at a steady but unhurried pace constantly while I am hoven, without stopping to sleep or sightsee, I will manage to keep myself from starving. I'll probably lose weight though. (Sorry to dwell on this, but I am quite hungry as I write.)\n\n\"... After a mere seven gigantic sausage and egg pastries, one of which would fill a large man's belly, of course you'll want lunch. Then the amusement park in the afternoon, if it please you? And after a vast dinner, because you'll surely be starving by then, perhaps you would like to go to the theatre \u2014 a play, an opera, a lecture, a concert? By evening I'm on more familiar ground, you know. Many of my customers like to combine several of the finer things of evening life.\"\n\n\"All of those sound good. You're the guide, I'm appointing you to be the one to pick for today. The rest will wait until later days,\" I said. Tarcuna looked at my plate, so I added, \"You do know I'm going to have a bigger lunch than I had breakfast.\"\n\nShe giggled. \"You certainly have the most unusual personal style of any of my customers!\" Which had the burnt-milk scent of a rather debatable truth, but not enough of an actual lie to complain about.\n\n\"Well, do a good job and I'll tell my friends. I'm sure you'll have dragons hiring you regularly.\" I determinedly didn't think about what I'm pretty sure Llredh or, worse, Arilash would be hiring her for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Tarcuna obviously loved the Museum of Visible Experiments. \"I haven't been here since I was in school. Prof. Wulpmegarn was running an exhibit on intrascopy. Kangbok was my special friend at the time, we were taking Wulp's class. She talked me into helping out setting it up.\" Tarcuna peered at me as though she had said something secret and significant. I didn't know what and didn't feel like asking; she'd probably tell me. \"That exhibit is long gone, but the permanant exhibits are still there, and they've surely got something fun in the rotating exhibit hall.\"\n\nAnd the word 'rotating' was quite correct. The rotating exhibit hall was on torque batteries. Those are tiny squat cylinders which store torque. You can wind them and wind them and wind them and wind them with a big red plastic crank using some big red plastic gears. Then you flip a big green plastic lever and scoot the battery into one of four positions. And then you push a big blue plastic button, and release the torque more or less quickly in a violet beam. They don't do the full mighty twistor beam in a science museum with children around! But they do make a heavy wheel spin, just as if you had been cranking it by paw. Or hand, if you're a hoven or something.\n\nThey even showed us the insides of a battery. Something about a self-polarizing niobium slush. I didn't understand it very well. Tarcuna had studied it in school a lot, so she explained it all to me. My brain was a non-self-polarizing non-niobium slush and I didn't understand it any better. Fortunately I don't have to think, I'm on vacation."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "After an unmemorable lunch, we went to the St. Cheerior Amusement Park. It's what I was hoping to see on Hove in the first place: small people playing games with technology. So there were engines projecting spirals of rainbow energy, or floating and bounding balls in the air, or whirling hovens around at alarming speeds, all for no better reason than being pretty or having fun.\n\nSo Tarcuna and I sat in a big plastic cart shaped somewhat like a huge-toothed lion and somewhat like a cow and adorned with some holy symbols, and got spun around in the air. It's not much like flying, not even like barrel rolls. If you try hard, you can persuade your kineception that the plastic cart is standing still with you in it, and the whole rest of Hove is whirling madly around you. I don't think you can do that kineceptive trick if you're flying by yourself. It goes reasonably fast, measured in body lengths. And of course you don't have to flap anything. Except for your clothes and your hair, and they flap themselves.\n\nI think that it feels fun somehow, too. I'd rather snarl than talk about that.\n\nSt. Cheerior has some more sedate rides too. We rode the iron wheel, which is huge and tall and not very dramatic, but gives one of the best views of the city that one can have without flying.\n\nOh, and there are games too. They are not built for dragons. I played the Brick Lift, where you lift one huge brick on a rope pulley sort of thing, then two bricks, and so on to ten bricks. Not very many real hovens can lift ten bricks; Tarcuna could lift four, and she's reasonably strong. I won a six-legged blue-green stuffed animal with big plastic bubble-and-bead eyes and a hideous crimson tuft on its tail. I wore it on my head for a while. Then it fell off and knocked over a child's ice cream, so I bought the child more ice cream and give her the stuffed animal too. Everyone was happier that way, including the stuffed animal I'm sure."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "We went back to the hotel to clean up before dinner. Tarcuna changed clothes to a sinuous sparkly-black sheath sort of thing that clung tightly to her hips and udder. I stared at it long enough for her to notice.\n\n\"Like it?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's quite nice. I was thinking of copying the sparkles.\"\n\nShe stuck glittery metal and paste gemstone things into holes in her ears. \"I don't quite understand, Spotty.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm flat black,\" I started. Tarcuna looked me over, but of course I'm not flat black as a hoven, I'm brick red. \"Which is nice and feminine of course. But sometimes I like to look a bit more interesting than that. I was just thinking I could go shiny sparkly black, like that, um, garment thing that you're wearing. Still feminine, but more glamorous. Not like wearing glowing blue spikes or something.\"\n\nTarcuna stared at me, either trying to keep a straight face, or trying to figure out what answer would give her the best tip. Then she twirled around right under the light, to make it sparkle more. \"That would look beautiful on you.\" I had to wrinkle my nose at the sewage impression of her lie. She continued, \"You're welcome to borrow this tonight if you like. I can pin it to fit you, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"No, this is fine. I don't like wearing clothes much.\"\n\nShe looked at my face, and at my dress (which isn't clothes, it's shapeshifted scales), and at my face again. \"Well, if you're naked enough to suit you, let's go to dinner. The restaurant won't mind you being completely nude under that dress, I don't imagine. We're a bit late as it is, even for someone with a regular appetite.\"\n\nWe were a lot late for dinner, actually, and went to the opera first."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Molishan Boiled is a musical reconstruction of a particularly dramatic episode of one of the Trestean holy books. Everyone is completely familiar with the plot from childhood. So they made no particular effort to make it easy for extradimensional travellers to understand. (As far as I know I am the first extradimensional traveller who has seen it, and I am incognito, but that is no excuse.) The whole performance was tinted with overripe-fruit of fiction. If I were a proper adult, I would have put a veriception block on the performers, but I don't know the spells, so I just put up with it.\n\nMolishan was the one wearing the golden antler headdress... I think. Of course sometimes that was one actor and sometimes it was another. The first time it changed heads made sense to me. The first act was during Molishan's childhood, if I am interpreting the live birth scene properly. I don't think hovens are usually born as teenage boys though, for I have just today bought ice cream for a younger one than that, but we'll count that as artistic license. Definite artistic license and/or religious orthodoxy comes in the big scene in the first act, when the suns Verdinet and Floret swoop out of the sky and become the gods Drukah and Bmern, here presented as a three-headed eagle and a dancing flower, and proclaim Molishan to be the Prophet of the Age.\n\nThen there's an intermission, where small mammals with quick biologies can take care to be comfortable for the second act (Tarcuna). Or where they can get expensive cups of very good fermented watermelon juice if they want to be uncomfortable for the second act (the gentleman sitting on the other side of Tarcuna). Or, if they want to venture into the dubious streets outside of the theatre, they can find dubious gentlemen willing to sell them bosum or lurds. (The one makes one sleepy and peaceful, and the other makes music appear to have colors; they are both illegal, and Tarcuna had little good to say about either one.) I had watermelon juice, but I am forever denied discomfort.\n\nThe second act gets confusing beyond words. Molishan goes to work in the king's kitchen. But that's somehow Garchune, which is to say, Hell. The chief cook, who is secretly the Lady of Peppers, prepares soup for all the nobility, but it's too spicy and they all die in very overdone convulsions (?) and become ingredients for the next feast (?) of the damned (?). Molishan rescues them in a grand theatrical style. One of them gets rescued from a gigantic tin can. Another gets cracked out of a giant egg, which I thought was a birth scene until Tarcuna reminded me that hovens are live-birth creatures like we saw in the first act. Another gets defrosted from the Freezer in the Kitchen of Hell. The king himself was in the back of the refrigerator, wrapped in plastic, covered with mold made of cloth and paint. Molishan made a big show of unwrapping him, nearly getting overwhelmed by the stench, plugging his nose with wax, and then unwrapping him the rest of the way and scrubbing the mold off. It was beautiful and funny at the same time, and the music was very cheerful.\n\nThen, of course, the chief cook/Lady of Peppers comes back, and all the saved nobles run out the back door. Molishan has a terrible fight with her. By \"terrible\" I mean \"utterly unimpressive\" . I don't think that even hovens fight that slowly and clumsily. Molishan loses, dies, and is tossed into the cauldron. The chief cook builds up the fire high, but then has to run off to nurse her baby. (I think the baby grows up to be a major adversary at other points in the myth cycle.) Molishan pops out of the cauldron, except he has become a girl. This evidently confounds the Lady of Peppers so much that she doesn't realize it's Molishan \u2014 perhaps she cannot see the golden antler headdress? \u2014 and he/she escapes.\n\nThen there's about five-twelfths of an hour of dancing and singing. Much of it is on horseback. They had twenty-two actors riding fifteen horses on stage at one point. I don't think this had anything to do with the plot, though Molishan was extensively and acrobatically involved. All three versions of Molishan, I mean. They tossed the golden antler headdress from one to another.\n\nThat is a medium-important myth of most of the orthodox religions of Trest. I was not greatly enlightened. I trust you understand more than I."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "After that, Tarcuna and I went for a very late dinner at a bar. The small spicy sandwiches were very small and very spicy, though I don't think they were quite up to the Kitchen of Garchune level of heat. Nobody died anyway. Tarcuna tried to explain the opera to me, but my head was still a non-self-polarizing non-niobium slush. Also I don't think she understood it very well either.\n\nIt was pretty and exciting anyway. This is a wonderful vacation!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Getting Mugged (Day 53)\n\nTarcuna informed me that, as anyone knows, the best crompies in Dorday are found in a little waterside restaurant named \"Billy's\" . Tarcuna has been very good for important bits of information like this, and a good deal else. She has lived in Dorday her whole life: as a child, then as a student at Dorday Academy for two years studying weapons engineering, then she dropped out and became a public friend about a year and a half ago. (She seemed a bit sad about that. I didn't want to make my vacation sad, or torment the girl, so I didn't ask any details.)\n\n\"I didn't know that. What are crompies?\"\n\n\"You don't know crompies? A great gourmet like you, and you've never had a crompy?\" She was quite glad to find an euphemism for \"glutton\" that she could use on me.\n\n\"I haven't. Not by that name.\"\n\nCrompies are sandwiches, fried fish and chilis and shredded apples and sour cream on puffy bread. They are a Dorday specialty, and nobody in the universe makes them better than Billy's.\n\n\"So let's go for that boat ride with music in the morning. We'll get back a little before eclipse, we'll be right by the lagoon, and we'll have lunch at Billy's then.\"\n\n\"Just to warn you, Spotty, it's in a rather bad neighborhood. Sailors, dock workers, and criminals. Billy's itself is fine, but the walk there isn't really nice to do in the dark.\"\n\nI shrugged. \"Dark and criminals really shouldn't be much trouble.\"\n\nTarcuna looked a bit worried. \"Well, I want your vacation to be as trouble-free as possible.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "The boat ride was quiet and peaceful, except for all the hoven children running around and squeaking, trying to see fish in the lagoon, trying to attract gulls with bits of cookies. The promised musical entertainment was five hovens in odd costumes singing traditional Trestean childrens' songs. The ones with the wordplay were pretty fun for me, since I hadn't heard them before. The ones urging good behavior were tedious even to me. Tarcuna and I were the only adults without children listening, though. Then somehow two of the children tricked me into playing Pickle-or-Pie with me \u2014 it's a board game where you move your pawn around based on which cards you draw. You never have any choice about what to do. I will take that as a sufficient excuse for losing a board game to a six-year-old hoven boy.\n\nBilly's wasn't a little waterside restaurant any more. They'd moved a block away to somewhere much larger. And we still had to wait half an hour for a table; the eclipse started while we were standing outdoors in a line full of sailors, dock workers, criminals, and tourists.\n\n\"After lunch, we could go to the Garment District and get you a couple new outfits,\" said Tarcuna. \"You've been wearing that same tunic all week.\"\n\n\"It's not dirty,\" I said. It wasn't. It's not a real tunic, it's some of my scales shapeshifted, and that makes it easy to clean even if some dust manages to blast its brutal way through the Hoplonton.\n\n\"It looks like something a farmer from Churry would wear. Let me at least take you to look for something new. We're next to the Garment District, clothes there are cheap.\"\n\n\"I don't care about cheap. I've got three-quarters of a million thurnies in my pocket, I can buy expensive clothes if I want.\"\n\nTarcuna looked a bit nervous. \"I wouldn't say that so loudly right here. Would you rather go to Bisarello Street? It's expensive there, I can't afford to shop there myself, but the boutiques are really something.\"\n\n\"That sounds maybe better,\" I said. I don't like wearing real clothes generally, since they're so easy to wreck with a careless movement or a stray fire breath. But Tarcuna could help put them on me. Then I could shapeshift into wearing them.\n\nAnd finally it was our turn to get a table. Tarcuna didn't blink an eye at me eating twelve crompies to her one (and they are really quite good, even if Tarcuna says they're not as good as when Billy's was just a little shack when she worked there). And headed out towards the canal, where we planned to catch a bus-boat to Bisarello Street.\n\nAnd of course that's where we got jumped. Three hovens were lurking in the doors of an ugly brick warehouse, trusting to eclipse's shadows to hide them. But they smelled of sweat and excitement and their hearts were racing as we approached and their bodies whispered of feeble danger, so I'm not sure why they bothered hiding, except that they thought I was a hoven and unable to smell or hear very much. Two others had been following us from Billy's. The last two were pretending to be engrossed in a game of cards.\n\nAnd then they all got up or turned around or stepped faster, as the case may be, so that we were roughly surrounded. Two of them showed guns, little stubby things that whimpered \"if you were really what you seemed, I'd be menacing\" to dangersense. Three had knives, and two had leaden clubs or some such. \"OK, you two. Hand over all your cash and you don't get hurt.\"\n\nTarcuna started squeaking \"He\u2014-\"\n\nI took the gun from the hoven who had talked, and one of his fingers with it, and the club from the hoven next to him. It turned out not to be a club, but a battered length of pipe. I don't much like using weapons at all, and certainly not ugly ones, so I threw it through the other gunman. It left a big messy hole. For the sake of symmetry, I threw the gun at the other pipe-wielder, but it didn't go all the way through. Unreliable, like all weapons. I'd rather use my claws and breath.\n\nTarcuna finished squeaking \"\u2014-lp!\"\n\nI smiled very politely at the surviving muggers. \"Same deal backwards. Hand over all your cash and you won't get hurt. More.\" They weren't really listening to me, though. They were staring at their two dead companions, except for the first gunman, who was staring at the place his finger had been.\n\n\"Oh, never mind,\" I said, since I didn't think they were worth looting. I flopped at them haphazardly with my ripped hukuch\u00f4. They ran away screaming.\n\nTarcuna stared at the corpses. \"You killed them... I've never seen anyone move so fast. You... you... are you a special government assassin, an enhanced agent?\"\n\n\"No, just a dragon, like I said.\"\n\n\"Is that like a cyoziworm... you're a... something mysterious and powerful... who's taken over a girl's body?\"\n\n\"No, I'm just a dragon. Oh, I know how to change my shape to look hoven, or animal, or whatever,\" I said. \"I'm not very good at fighting \u2014 most of my fianc\u00e9s are much better.\"\n\nShe looked at the corpses, then at me. \"That's not very good? It was as deadly as the Lady of Peppers in a fury.... Should we call the police? What do you do when you kill someone?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, with people who don't belong to anyone. We could eat them if you want.\"\n\nTarcuna was staring at me as if I'd said something ridiculous. \"I don't want to eat them...\"\n\n\"I don't either. They're not my friends, and I'd rather find a good restaurant if I actually want a meal,\" I said. So obvious.\n\n\"This isn't the time for jokes. Do you want to spend the night in prison?\"\n\n\"Why would I do that? I've got a perfectly good hotel room,\" I said.\n\nShe was tugging me away from the bodies. \"We've got to get out of here!\"\n\n\"Tarcuna, I'm really not worried about fighting hovens. If seven come at me, seven will die. If twelve thousand and ninety-six come at me, twelve thousand and ninety-six will die.\" Which would have sounded better in Trestean if I had said \"seven thousand\" , but I don't like decimal numbers any more than I like weapons. Also it wasn't true, since seven had come at me and only two died.\n\n\"If the police come, we'll get arrested. We'll go to jail. It would ruin my life!\" , wailed Tarcuna. I evidently didn't seem that impressed, so she added, \"Oh, and cut into your vacation.\"\n\nI had to chuckle at her last point; she was obviously starting to understand me. Though I rather liked her, and didn't want to ruin her life either. \"Oh, right. I'd have to get you out, wouldn't I? That would be awkward.\" I put the Esrret-Sky-Painted on both of us, not that it's at all the right spell for the ground, and trotted through the dismal streets under the eclipse with her.\n\nWe passed the maimed gunman, with one of the other thugs working hard to bandage his hand. I gave them a cheery wave. They didn't seem to recognize me, so the Esrret-Sky-Painted must have been doing something. Tarcuna broke into a run, and I followed her, and after a few more turns we came to the bridge.\n\nShe wasn't in the mood for shopping after that, though. I bought two bottles of spirits that she said were good, and four more that she didn't say were good but looked interesting (but weren't actually good \u2014 I should listen to Tarcuna). We ordered two hoven-long sandwiches, one mostly of roast cow and peppers, and the other an assortment of smoked sausages, brought to the room. And we locked ourselves in the hotel room, and I spent most of the afternoon comforting Tarcuna from being scared of muggers and being scared of me and being just plain scared.\n\nWhich was at just as pleasing as shopping for clothes would have been. I just realized that I've always liked being a shelter for small people. It's a good hobby, and better than most. Even if it occasionally breaks my back, I suppose.\n\nCoda: Laws and Punishments in Trest\n\nTarcuna told me a lot about the laws and gendarmes in Trest. I wouldn't say that it makes very much sense, but here it is.\n\nFirst of all, some things are illegal if they happen at all. Murder, embezzling, simony, kidnapping, apostasy from any of the orthodox religions, drunkenness, theft of art, and sedition, for example. These are mostly the more severe crimes, but not all of them. Drunkenness is punished by a fine of a single thurny, which used to be a lot of money but isn't anymore. Actually people aren't convicted of drunkenness very often. A drunkenness conviction is a convenient way for the gendarmes to harass someone they don't like, or for one politician to humiliate another.\n\nOther things are only illegal if they're noticed soon enough \u2014 prostitution (ten days), kidnapping (ten years), use of evil chords in music (ten days from time of the first public performance), adultery (ten years), theft of foodstuffs (ten hours), and bribery (ten hours). And mugging (ten days). I didn't see how mugging could go unnoticed at all, even by weak hoven senses, but the law is that the gendarmes have to notice it. So the victim has to go find a gendarme and complain quickly enough, or there's no crime.\n\nIn the center of Dorday, at least, the gendarmes do wander around the city, showing their wire circle insignia, and try to make everything peaceful and lawful. That's in the parts of the city that tourists go to. The dock areas are for sailors and lowlives. And of course, places like the Red Spire of Rented Friends have their own ways of avoiding the gendarmes. Tarcuna didn't want to explain how that worked. I suspect bribery, noticed after eleven hours.\n\nOh, and I'm now a criminal, since I killed two hovens. \"They attacked first\" is a pretty good defense against murder charges in court, and if I went to trial I'd probably be sentenced to two months of penance supervised by my official sect. Trestean citizens are more or less required to maintain a state of ritual purity, though that's not really observed for anyone, and Tarcuna hasn't been anywhere close to it for years.\n\n(Actually it's more than two, isn't it? Three more when I burned that army station in Drupe-ek-Kavash. I'm pretty sure that's all so far.)\n\nThen, of course, I'd get tried for atheism, since I don't have an official sect to impose penances. \"My fianc\u00e9 has an undead god in a bottle. I don't exactly worship him, but he's good for romantic advice.\" isn't a good defense against atheism charges in court. Tarcuna gave me a rather odd look when I told her about that.\n\n\"You really can't expect me to worship any hoven gods. Your suns are just natural phenomena, not supernatural powers. I do have a sense for telling where gods are,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm not a judge! I'd be convicted for prostitution and homosexuality and ritual impurity and drunkenness and lots of other things, if I ever got to court. Besides, you're my customer. I'm not going to argue with you, even if you want to pretend to be a giant lizard,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I am a giant lizard,\" I said, and turned into... well, I don't fit in my hotel room really, but a one-sixth-sized version of me does.\n\nUnfortunately, that's not a very good way to calm a skittish hoven down.\n\nFortunately, the hotel management is used to prostitutes screaming loudly in the middle of the afternoon in their rooms. Usually, Tarcuna said afterwards, they're pretending excitement than actually experiencing terror.\n\nAlso fortunately, as soon as I turned back, Tarcuna calmed down to the point of not screaming. She even mostly stopped whimpering a few minutes later. Brave hoven, that.\n\nThe Interrogation\n\nWhich of course lead to my hired whore questioning me severely.\n\n\"All the stories say that there's something you're supposed to do when you discover the aliens are secretly invading,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"We're not invading,\" I said. \"If we were, we'd be sure to let everyone know so you could surrender conveniently.\"\n\nShe looked a bit put out. \"What makes you think we'd surrender?\"\n\n\"History, mostly. I can only think of a couple dozen worlds which fought off one dragon invasion successfully, and I think only two of them fought off the next one. Not sure exactly,\" I said, and shrugged.\n\n\"So you \u2014 dragons \u2014 usually conquer worlds?\"\n\nI nodded my hoven head. \"Usually. We're very good warriors. And very good rulers, so don't worry.\" Tarcuna looked dubious, so I added, \"Besides, now that you know we're coming, you can make plans to fight us off.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that anyone is going to listen to me if I tell them,\" she said. \"It's not quite obvious that you're the same sort of creature that was melting mountains and blasting airplanes in Ghemelia.\"\n\n\"I melted a couple of Khamrous. My fianc\u00e9s were being upsetting.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear, I'm sorry to hear that.\" Which sounded like a rote answer from a professional sympathist. \"Anyway, somehow whores occasionally get turned away when they try to talk to the generals about upcoming invasions.\"\n\nI shrugged, and stretched out on the bed. \"Well, I'm not really setting out to make life difficult for whoever comes conquering Hove, so I'm not going to fly you to the nearest military science station or whatever and let them study me. I'm not really setting out to make life easy for them, either, so I'm not going to make my vacation troublesome by trying to be all hidey and secrety. Besides, the invasion probably won't come for dozens of years. Quel Quen's book isn't even written yet.\" After that I had to explain who Quel Quen is and what he's doing.\n\nTarcuna still looked worried. \"Well, what should I be doing? Not to the authorities, I'll figure that out after you're gone. I saw the films of you melting the mountain, and you just said it was when your fianc\u00e9s upset you. So will you melt Dorday if you get upset here?\"\n\nI drooped, as well as a hoven can droop, which isn't very well. \"You saw what I did when I got annoyed today, too. I didn't even kill all of the muggers, and I probably should have done. I'm a very lazy lizard.\"\n\n\"But what should I be doing?\"\n\n\"You should be doing what I hired you to do! Show me around town and make my vacation fun. Oh, and I promise not to kill you or destroy Dorday on this visit or for a decent time afterwards.\" Which she found a lot less comforting than she should have, but it will have to do."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Dragons in the News (Day 55)\n\nTarcuna read the Magic Flute of Dorday to me this morning. She usually does, since she finishes her breakfast in a few minutes but I need to eat for another hour. I'm cheating the hotel horribly on their all-you-can-eat breakfast.\n\nGiant Monster In Kyongsy Temple\n\nIt sounds like something out of a science-fiction thriller movie! But it's 100% real! Yesterday morning, an absolutely gigantic four-winged lizard monster took over the Kyongsy Temple in Zheribac. We're not talking about a little thing like an alligator or a giant caiman here. This monster was much larger \u2014 reporters at the scene estimate an astounding fifty feet from head to tailbase, plus an extra twenty feet of tail. It was covered in heavy scales, a dark tan in color. Machine-gun fire seemed to bounce right off of its huge flanks and thick scales! This agrees with reports of similar beast-monsters from Ghemelia.\n\n\"Dark tan? That must be Arilash. She's not really that big though. She usually dresses up some, but I don't suppose there are any drakes around for her to impress. I hope she didn't hurt too many people.\"\n\n\"She killed them,\" said Tarcuna, and read:\n\nIn a terrifying display of what would surely be special effects in a puppet show, but was much more awful in reality, the monster belched out a horrible glob of flame and reduced seven Zheribac Military Police officers to ashes.\n\n\"Oh, that's all right, then,\" I said. \"We kill small people who try to kill us, more or less always. That's just basic etiquette. She didn't get upset and burn the whole city down; that's nice of her.\"\n\n\"I suppose you might call it nice,\" said Tarcuna, in a voice of veiled disapproval. \"It... she?... she wasn't there very long though.\"\n\n\"But, just like in a puppet show! A glorious, elegant four-winged flying blue-green lizard, elegant with ruffles and long flowing spines, quickly flew in from the coast! The newcomer was smaller and more beautiful! The tan monstrosity growled and snarled! Obviously it hated the newcomer! The two gargantuas fought in the air over the temple, biting and clawing and scorching each other with flames!\"\n\n\"That's Ythac. I wonder what they were fighting about?\"\n\n\"The paper doesn't say.\"\n\nSo I asked him. \"Hi, sweet drake who hasn't found me yet! I hear you got Arilash back.\"\n\n\"I did,\" he wrote back.\n\n\"The paper says you had a fight with her over some temple.\"\n\n\"Paper's right.\"\n\n\"Why? And why do you sound so dismal?.\"\n\n\"She was teasing me about Llredh.\"\n\n\"What happened with Llredh?\" I asked. I was worried.\n\n\"Nothing really. He's in hoven shape, he's staying in hoven shape, he's in Port-of-Zom, and he's not leaving. Won't talk to me really.\"\n\nTarcuna looked at me. \"Spotty, are you all right? You went quiet all of a sudden... should I keep reading the paper to you?\"\n\n\"No,\" I told her. \"I'm chatting with Ythac \u2014 he's the rescuer in that story. Hold on a moment or six.\"\n\n\"That's odd.\" I wrote back to Ythac.\n\n\"So I went to get Arilash, so he'd have someone to twine. Without mount-fighting me, I mean. Oh, I don't mean to be rude at you, I'm just worried by Llredh.\"\n\n\"I haven't been very good at my fianc\u00e9e's duties, and Arilash is, I know that. Wait, did you know where Arilash was?\"\n\n\"I know where all of you are. You're in hoven form in Dorday, in Trest.\"\n\n\"How did you know? I thought I'd notice if you used a finding spell on me, even if I couldn't stop it.\"\n\n\"I've known since you got there. I wasn't casting finding spells for you, I was casting them for your name. The words 'Jyothky Meragathium' are written exactly one place in this universe, and that's in Dorday.\"\n\n\"You can look for a word? like that? That's clever! Do you want to marry me?\"\n\n\"Sure, I'll marry you. Usually it's no good, most words show up in a grand grand of places or more, so I have to be extra-devious to find any of them, much less the one I want. I know some other tricks. I found you five ways, so if you slip off, I'll use one of the others on you and find you again.\"\n\n\"So, do I have to come home?\"\n\n\"Not unless you can be more tempting to get Llredh back than Arilash can.\"\n\n\"I don't think so, for which apologies. Llredh doesn't seem the least bit interested in me, no matter how much oil I use.\"\n\n\"Well, enjoy your vacation some more. I plan to find you last,\" he wrote.\n\n\"Poor Ythac. A friend is snubbing him,\" I said to Tarcuna. \"Is there more in the paper?\"\n\n\"This is probably one of the cluster of mountain-melting monsters that appeared a few weeks ago in outer Ghemelia. Scientists are uncertain about what could have induced it to move out of its home territory. Military officers in Trest and Zheribac are uncertain about how it could have flown so far without being detected.\"\n\n\"Nothing to it. Arilash is good at all sorts of travel spells,\" I said.\n\n\"I don't know about that. The paper said that the Zheribac army didn't see it. Zheribac hasn't hired Ythac, has it?\"\n\n\"He didn't mention that they had,\" I said.\n\n\"I hope not! Zheribac is one of the Alliance of Freedom!\"\n\n\"I thought you liked freedom...?\"\n\n\"The Alliance of Freedom isn't about freedom! It's about making sure that we can't defend ourselves!\" she said.\n\nWhich didn't make any sense, so I went back for another bowl of pancakes in sour cream. \"Eating for six or eight hours a day and still being hungry all the time is getting tiresome. I should go have a real meal and then not eat for a couple days.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine you not eating for a couple days.\"\n\n\"You'll see. Why does the Alliance of Freedom not want you to defend yourselves?\"\n\n\"When we started building the Peace Everywhere Array, the rest of the world was very jealous. Maybe also afraid. Stupid of them, we weren't going to conquer anyone. But we wanted to be able to defend ourselves, and to stop wars. With the Peace Everywhere Array, we can shoot anywhere in Hove, enough to break a city or ruin an army. Nobody can attack us. Nobody can attack anybody, or we'll interfere and stop them. That's all they're for.\"\n\n\"How do they shoot through the Godaxle? Or the suns?\"\n\n\"Oh, they don't. There are, I don't know, eighty-odd emplacements, and together they cover pretty much the whole world. Ghemelia tried building one itself, but the Peace Everywhere gun in Muld destroyed theirs before it was much built. They tried to build another one, though, so we had to put a stop to that, and get rid of Uncle Holder altogether.\"\n\n\"As you like,\" I said. She thought it was true, but it didn't sound much like what Murghal had said that he thought was true. I didn't feel like arguing though. \"Is there any more of that article?\"\n\n\"In the end, the noble blue-green monster defeated the vicious tan one, and chased it far, far out to sea. They fought a huge battle over the ocean. Each one slew the other, and their corpses fell into the depths of the sea, never to rise again.\"\n\n\"You and Arilash are dead, right?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"The Dorday paper says you are. Drowned in the sea.\"\n\n\"I'm fine. Arilash is fine. We just went swimming. Please stop teasing me, or I'll come over there and bite your wings to shreds.\"\n\nThat's not like Ythac at all. \"I apologize! Just telling you funny things from here!\"\n\n\"Oh. OK.\"\n\n\"He says he's not dead. I believe him. If he were dead he'd be in a much better mood. I've never heard him so annoyed.\"\n\n\"What, do you have a telephone inside your head?\"\n\n\"A language spell. We can write words in each others' minds.\"\n\n\"That must be wonderful, being able to talk to your true love whenever you want.\"\n\n\"True love? My best friend, maybe.\"\n\n\"But you're going to marry him, you said?\"\n\n\"I don't know yet!\" So then I had to explain how mating flights work, which took another three plates of breakfast.\n\n\"So you're supposed to go off somewhere and have a lot of sex?\" she asked. \"With the boy you're going to marry, and five other boys too?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" I said. \"Six other ones for me, but that's nontraditional and mostly a mistake.\"\n\n\"What if you get pregnant?\"\n\n\"I won't get pregnant, that's a mammal trick and I'm not a mammal despite that I've got an udder like yours today. If I lay any fertile eggs, I'll burn them, of course. My husband should be one of my dragonet's fathers. But that's usually what we do anyway, burn fertile eggs I mean. We live a very long time, we don't want to have many dragonets.\"\n\nTarcuna waved her hands. \"Back up, back up. You lost me at 'one of my child's fathers'. How many fathers does a dragonet have?\"\n\n\"Three. Well, one to three, but usually we figure on three,\" I said around a mouthful of steak and pea pie.\n\n\"I'm going to ignore the biology weirdness there. Any biology that has giant flying lizards that breathe fire is crazy. But I know sex. How does the sex part of that work?\"\n\nSo I explained about how drakes have three hemipenises each, small, medium, and large, and I don't but I have claspers. And when a drake and a dragoness love each other very much, or at least are willing to tolerate each other's close company for long enough to assuage some lust, they can...\n\n\"I sort of get the idea,\" said Tarcuna. \"All three male members go into the same female member?\"\n\n\"That's why it's claspers. I'd squeeze them closed on the smaller ones,\" I said. \"Or spread them wider for the large one.\"\n\n\"Convenient, that, though I do pretty well for a wide range of sizes myself without any strange appendages. But I guess what I really don't understand is... if a dragonet has three different men \u2014 drakes \u2014 as fathers, and you're married to one of the three, do you go have adulterous sex with the other two?\"\n\n\"Oh, heavens, no. Dragons don't do adultery,\" I said, reflexively checking my veriception blocks even though Tarcuna doesn't have that sense. \"My ova should be two-thirds fertilized at the end of the mating flight. That's the real point of having sex with all my fianc\u00e9s so much now. Well, that and trying all the drakes out.\"\n\n\"You want three fathers for your dragonet? More to the point, your husband doesn't mind sharing with two others?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\nI sighed. \"It doesn't matter that much for dragoness babies. But drakes with three fathers have a better chance of being all pretty and fancy than drakes with fewer. That's very important. Pretty drakes have a better chance of getting married. So yes. My parents mostly hatch eggs fertilized by Cterion \u2014 he's my father \u2014 and the top two drakes in their mating flight. Whom they haven't seen for several grosses of years, in some cases. I mean, several-and-a-half centuries.\"\n\n\"That's pretty strange. Male people don't like the thought that their wife's children aren't theirs. Besides, how do you even tell who the fathers are?\"\n\n\"Analysis spells. Not very hard ones,\" I said.\n\n\"Spotty, I don't know that I exactly believe all your stories,\" she said. \"Maybe you're a person. You're a shape-changing lizard, I think I got that part the other night. But I do know love and jealousy, it's part of my job, and what you're saying makes no sense.\"\n\n\"Why on Mhel \u2014 or Hove even \u2014 would love matter?\" I had to ask.\n\n\"Well, on Hove, it is customary in most civilized parts of the world to get engaged to someone you love,\" said Tarcuna. Then, a bit archly, \"Should you be lucky enough to fall in love with someone to whom you can become engaged, of course. Not everyone does.\"\n\n\"That's utterly backwards. I need each of my children to have three fathers, and falling in love with one drake would only make that so much more awkward. Besides, I don't have that much leeway about who I get to marry. It would be unspeakably awkward if I fell deeply and truly in love with Csirnis, say, and then came in second and had Arilash snatch him up first,\" I said. \"No, our way is best: marry first, and fall in love with the one you marry.\"\n\nTarcuna rubbed her cheeks. \"I suppose it sounds convenient if you can manage it. It doesn't make much sense to me, emotionally, but I suppose it doesn't have to.\"\n\nI couldn't force the thought of loving someone to make sense to me either, so I pretended to have the secret wisdom: \"Just act like they're true and all will be well.\"\n\nCoda: Swimming\n\nDragons shouldn't swim.\n\nSwimming is just like flying, except that it's a lot more chilling. Also a lot more effort. Flapping your wings underwater is hard. And dangerous \u2014 you can actually break wingbones if you do it wrongly and strongly enough. Also you can't breathe water.\n\nUnfortunately, most dragons love to swim. I don't know why. Osoth is the only other dragon in the mating flight who has the proper opinion of water. In his case I wonder if it might be a necromancer's affectation. As if he's saying \"The dessicated liches of the animated dead can't swim, so in solidarity I shall not swim either.\"\n\nI don't care what his reasons might be. I'm going to award him a fianc\u00e9 point, right now, in absentia."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Worm (Day 60)\n\nToday wasn't the best day of the vacation, really.\n\nTarcuna had been a bit odd all morning, glancing at me and looking a bit twitchy and smelling a lot anxious. I don't know that much about hoven moods or needs. I asked once or twice, and got vague little answers that didn't mean anything to me.\n\nIn midmorning, we were strolling down the Boulevard of the Orange Pine Trees, nearly deserted at that hour, and Tarcuna turned to me. \"Spotty... hold me. Please, please, just hold me...\" and tried to grab me in her arms without waiting for me to answer. She smelled terrified and ashamed. I don't much like to be grabbed that much, especially not for a small person's convenience, so I stepped back.\n\nShe had worn a low-cut green tunic with buttons down the front, and had left the lower buttons open. A forked grey-pink spiky grey appendage squirmed out of the open slit, writhing around blindly. At first I wondered if it was some odd part of her, but I didn't have any such appendage in my hoven body and at the time we were the same shape. Hoven blood joined the smells, and something else complicated and musky that I didn't recognize.\n\nAnd it proclaimed, \"I can conquer you in your hoven form\" to dangersense. Making it far and away the most dangerous thing I have seen on Hove that I'm not engaged to.\n\nI didn't particularly feel like being conquered, especially not by something small and ugly. So I spat a bit of tightly-woven lightning at it, and it died. That made it stop being dangerous, though it was even uglier half-scorched.\n\nTarcuna didn't die. She just staggered and started laughing and crying at the same time.\n\n\"Tarcuna? Could you explain yourself to me?\" I asked her. \"Maybe in a way that doesn't make it look like you tried to attack me, so that I don't have to kill you?\"\n\n\"Cyoziworm. They're real.\" She hiccuped a bit, and scrubbed tears from her eyes. \"I'm wormridden... I was wormridden. You killed Bopo. Now I'm free. For like ten minutes.\"\n\nWhich made just about no sense to me. \"So this cyoziworm thing was attacking me, and you weren't?\" Polite fictions are very important to dragons.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\n\"That's fine, it sounds like I don't have to kill you. But why was it inside you?\"\n\n\"You did kill me though. It poisons me when it dies. I can feel it burning in my blood.... Thank you. Really. I wanted to die for a long time, but I couldn't, the worm wouldn't let me.\"\n\nThat sounded like something Osoth would do if he were in a very bad mood. \"Hey! I didn't give you permission to die either! I hired you for another week!\"\n\nShe started falling over and hugging herself. \"Ow, that hurts so much... sorry for dying on you... sorry for living at all...\"\n\nWell, that was frustrating. I was so careful not to kill her twice in two minutes, once with the lightning and again by giving her an excuse, and here she was dying anyway. So I put the Arcane Anodyne in her. It filled her and flooded out, like it had for Churdle, and she straightened up and blinked at me.\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"A healing spell. I really didn't give you permission to die, and I really am going to enforce that if I have to.\" I hate having my friends die on me, especially when they don't have me do it and don't have a proper suicide party or something.\n\nShe looked at me with huge watery eyes. \"OK, you can rescue me.\" She looked at the dead cyoziworm hanging out of her udder. \"What can you do about that?\"\n\nI took off her tunic and undershirt, and looked. The cyoziworm had protruded some two feet of its body out of an often-opened cut on the underside of her udder. More of the worm was inside. The worm was covered with little retractile hooks and spikes, all extended in death. Pulling it out would rip Tarcuna's chest to shreds, but the Arcane Anodyne should fix that.\n\nSo I tugged it gently. Tarcuna screamed in agony and fell unconscious. The worm broke in half right where it left her body. The broken bit whimpered its danger to me, that it was covered with an oozing poison.\n\nThis was very awkward.\n\nI put the Arcane Anodyne into Tarcuna again, and she woke up again. The spell wasn't overflowing her much this time, though. \"Please, Spotty, just let me die.\"\n\n\"Shan't,\" I snapped.\n\n\"It hurts, it hurts!\" she wailed. Here and there along the boulevard, hovens were coming out of their shops and caf\u00e9s to see what the commotion was.\n\n\"It's going to hurt more, I'm afraid.\" I don't know how to render a hoven unfeeling. I know three useless spells that are supposed to do the opposite and never work on me, and with a week's work I could probably turn one of them backwards. \"I'm going to try to knock you out so you don't feel much.\" I wrapped my hukuch\u00f4 around her unendurably tight, and held her arms and legs, and she screamed a few times and her mind fled. I hoped I hadn't broken it too much.\n\nWell, she was dying from the poison again, so I put the Arcane Anodyne into her again. Hoven fingers aren't much good for surgery, and I don't like surgical weapons any more than martial ones. So I turned into a horse-sized, gracile verson of myself, with short sharp-edged claws. This caused some incoherent screaming and yelping from the watching hovens.\n\nI started slicing her udder, from the bottom, trying to open her up enough so that I could lift the rest of the worm out. Her flesh parted quite nicely under my scalpelsome claws \u2014 I'll have to remember that if I'm ever fighting something scaleless.\n\nShe started dying again at my first incision. So I put the Arcane Anodyne into her. Then she wasn't dying very much, but her udder had healed. Catching my fingers partway inside, even. This was very awkward.\n\nWell, if her body was going to do that, I would just have to work fast. I sliced a deep valley in her flesh with one hand. Tarcuna started to die again; I'm not sure whether the wound or the poison was worse. I cut off a chunk of cyoziworm with the other hand, and scooped it out as quick as I could, ripping a big hole in her left lung by mistake. I poured the Arcane Anodyne on her as fast as I could, and her wounds closed.\n\nAll around me, hovens were screaming.\n\nBeneath me, Tarcuna started dying of poison again.\n\nTime for another incision, another slice, another Arcane Anodyne. That time I didn't get the whole bit of cyoziworm out of her, and as her flesh closed over it I knew it was pouring out more poison into her. I wanted to cast Arcane Anodyne again, but I had cast it three times already this heartbeat, and didn't have enough force for a fourth. I could cast the Great Titan Sanitarium with what was left, and I did. It didn't do very much good.\n\nThen my astral heart beat again. I have never, ever been so glad.\n\nI started in on a horrible rhythm. A deep incision, wiggling my scalpelly-clawed right hand which had been trapped in her often-healed flesh. A quick grab for a bit of worm with my left hand, trying above all to get it out of her. The Arcane Anodyne so she wouldn't die. Another incision, another grab, another the Anodyne. A third set. Hold still a moment, my right hand still buried in her breast, and cast the Sanitarium and hope that it would stop her from dying for a bit longer. A regret that I didn't have the strength in my thez\u00f4 to cast the Anodyne again. A heartbeat, filling my not-quite-adequate thez\u00f4, and time to start again.\n\nIt wasn't quite enough though. Tarcuna's vitality rose eleven lengths from each round of spells, but fell twelve from surgery and poison. I hoped I would get to the end of the worm soon, or she'd die despite all my work.\n\nThen, a mumble of danger from down the street: five gendarmes waving pistols, shouting \"Monster! Away from that woman!\"\n\nWell, that didn't make any sense. Can't they tell the difference between combat and surgery?\n\nI didn't want to argue with them though. I battered at the street with my hukuch\u00f4, scattering hovens all about. Still, the Boulevard of the Orange Pine Trees was a bad place for surgery \u2014 pine needles kept getting into my patient, for one extra problem. I could hear the howling of emergency vehicles coming towards me, too. Trying to repair Tarcuna with pine needles and bullets flying all over seemed to make a hard job impossible.\n\nSo (the Sanitarium) the next heartbeat, (the Anodyne) I didn't do any more surgery. I just scooped (the Anodyne!) her up in my left claw, ripping deep surgically-useless furrows in her back (the Anodyne), and leapt clumsily into the sky. The shock of the takeoff worked its own mischief on her, and my best available answer for that (the Sanitarium) wasn't much good. But we were in the sky (heartbeat) and another healing spell (the Anodyne) healed her back and kept her from dying all the way. Again.\n\nWe landed on the flat top of a nearby bank building. I set to work rather desperately. I didn't know how much worm was left in her, or how many more healing spells she could endure.\n\nFour more heartbeats, and I got to the end of the worm's main body, a long tapered tip slithered up next to her esophagus. I thought for a moment that that was enough.\n\nIt wasn't enough. A dozen long hooked probes extended from the tip into Tarcuna's brain. That's presumably how it had conquered her, and how it had intended to conquer me. It made the surgery that much harder, too. I'm willing to rip breasts and lungs and livers fairly casually and heal them back, but brains are much more delicate. Now I had to cut twice: a bit careless slice opening the side of her face, then a more careful slice exposing just a bit of brain, hopefully where a probe was. Then grab the worm-bit, careful not to rip her brain any more than I had to, quick before the wound killed her, and get my hand out of the way quick before the Anodyne trapped it inside her brain. I didn't dare use the Sanitarium spell to heal such a wound, it's just not that good. After a while, I skipped surgery on the second the Anodyne casting, hoping that the extra healing magic would keep her more alive, even at the cost of slowing the surgery down.\n\nNineteen heartbeats and ten probes later, the first fighter plane came roaring noise and roaring danger across the sky.\n\nI couldn't imagine how I was going to do brain surgery and protect myself from missiles and rays at the same time. So I skipped the spare Anodyne and breathed long lightning at the plane's left wing. I was hoping to just cripple it, since it technically hadn't attacked me. But that's where it stored some of its bombs or fuel or something. It caught fire rather impressively, and bits of blazing metal splashed over the city two miles away.\n\nSuch a botchery of a day.\n\nThe other eleven fighter planes curved around a bit. (I didn't understand at the time, but the television report said that they were waiting for orders from their sky-admiral. They knew something of our breath weapons from the Kyongsy Temple, but didn't know about lightning.)\n\nI rushed the rest of the surgery. The last probe was buried deep in her brain, and the eleven planes had encircled me and were coming from eleven different directions. I healed Tarcuna with my hand stuck at the base of her brain holding the end of the probe, waited for a heartbeat, and tug and the Anodyne \u2014 tug and the Anodyne \u2014 tug and the Anodyne, ripping the core of her brain and healing it as quickly and fully as I could manage. On the third tug, the probe was free, out of her brain, and I could slice the side of her face and lift it out in the usual way.\n\nI took a heartbeat to watch and listen. Tarcuna was still dying between the Anodynes, but with most of the worm out of her and no surgery, the spells were actually making progress. I took Tarcuna in my forepaws and put the Esrret-Sky-Painted on us, and flew off the bank.\n\nThen the fighter planes came, and circled overhead in much confusion.\n\nI flew us to our hotel, took a hoven form, disguised us with illusions, levitated a bit so we wouldn't leave bloody footprints, and carried Tarcuna to our room. Our bathtub was quite large. I filled it with hot water and soap, and started the laborious business of scrubbing a vast amount of hoven blood out of both our fur. I still needed to put the Arcane Anodyne into Tarcuna: every minute at first, every six minutes by the time we were clean. Lots of poison had been spilled into her, and I had left little bits of deliquescing cyoziworm all over too.\n\nHalfway through the bath, Tarcuna opened her eyes. \"I'm free? I'm alive?\"\n\n\"You're free, you're alive, you're still needing lots of attention to keep you that way. Rest now. Later you must explain many things to me.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes again, and let me clean her and heal her.\n\nSometimes my hobby of sheltering small people is rather too much work.\n\nOr maybe, rather a lot of work. I was glad to have done it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "After Surgery (Day 61)\n\nTarcuna stirred in my arms. I had held her most of the night, putting the Arcane Anodyne into her every few minutes. Boring spell, that. I'd rather not cast it so many dozens of times in one day. By the morning, she only needed it every hour or so. With careful use of the alarm clock \u2014 now that's an interesting device! \u2014 I had managed to get a bit of sleep.\n\nAt 11:32, according to that fascinating alarm clock, Tarcuna stirred and awoke. \"Spotty? Is that you?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so,\" I said. I admit to being a bit snippish, probably because of missing sleep.\n\n\"I'm free, aren't I?\" Her voice was low and slow, and her consonants were muddy.\n\n\"No more worm in you. I spent far too much of yesterday arranging for that.\"\n\nShe tried to sit up. \"My right arm, it's not working...\" She wiggled her fingers, but her arm was limp.\n\n\"My mistake. I had to pull bits of worm out of your brain. I was mostly able to heal you afterwards, but I couldn't do everything.\" I put the slow healing spells into her. \"There. You'll probably be better in a year or two.\"\n\n\"Oh... Bopo's gone, you said?\"\n\n\"That's the worm? Very gone. I killed it with lightning, and broke it into a hundred forty-four pieces. It was sort of disintegrating or melting while I was taking it out of you. Nasty thing, that,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm glad it's gone. Nobody ever survives their cyoziworm dying.\"\n\n\"I believe that. You almost didn't, with a whole dragon working full-time to save you. Now you owe me, though.\"\n\nShe rolled over and used her left arm to help her sit up. \"What do I owe you? I don't have much.\"\n\n\"An explanation, to start with. What was that thing? Why was it inside you?\"\n\n\"It's a cyoziworm, like in the stories,\" she said. \"Not the strangest stories, but the rest are pretty true.\"\n\n\"I've never heard the stories. I'm really not from around here.\"\n\n\"Oh... It's a parasite, a mind parasite. Nobody believes in them, but they're real. We, I mean the wormridden, we didn't let anyone investigate them much. When it's in you, keeping it safe and happy is the most important thing for you,\" she said.\n\n\"They control you? Are they intelligent?\"\n\n\"I don't think they're exactly intelligent. They understand some things... Bopo knew that you were a very appealing potential host because you're so strong and fast, but he didn't understand that you weren't really a hoven. But he did sort of control me.\" She shuddered. \"It's like there was a little cup in my mind. Not really but that's how it felt to lots of us. When Bopo wanted something, he'd drip in that little cup, I could feel each drop. When the cup was full I would obey, I couldn't stop it then, and there was no way to empty the cup but to obey him. He'd do that when he was hungry. He did that when he wanted to put an egg in you, too. I knew you'd probably kill me but there was no way to explain that to him, he just dripped and dripped and I had to do it.\"\n\nI said, \"That sounds awful.\"\n\n\"At the Red Spire we'd just cry and cry after our worms made us do something. Mostly it was just feeding, or letting them mate with each other,\" she said. \"Sometimes it was spawning, giving a uninfested hoven a worm to control them. That was awful. When the Spire wasn't busy the other wormridden would come and hold us or ride us. That helped a little.\"\n\n\"Wait, you weren't the only one with a worm there?\"\n\n\"Nearly everyone there had one. It's the nicest whorehouse in the city to work in... it's not run for anyone's profit, it's run to keep our worms comfortable. Safe, too. We had four bouncers, they weren't wormridden, they'd come and rescue you if any of the johns gave you trouble.\"\n\n\"So it's not all the public friends, just you and your colleagues? Just the ones I found?\"\n\n\"Maybe some whores are. I don't know. The deputy mayor is wormridden, and he makes things smooth for the Red Spire. We could advertise, if we were discreet about it. The other public friends can't, they don't have important dignitaries as allies, mostly,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Yuck... are a lot of hovens wormridden?\"\n\n\"Not very many. One in ten thousand? A hundred thousand? We don't encourage them to breed. If there were too many, the clean hovens would probably figure out how to find us and... kill us, I guess. The stories about the wormridden are really horrible. The parts about drinking blood and turning people into slaves are true.\"\n\n\"Drinking blood?\"\n\n\"The worms do that. They'll stick their forky end out a bit and slurp, oh, maybe a half-pint or a pint. They numb you, you don't feel anything...\"\n\n\"I don't feel anything anyway.\"\n\n\"Oh, sorry, sorry, I mean, the victim doesn't feel anything even if they can feel normally. And they don't remember very clearly either. They're sick and woozy the next day. Lots of us are whores, it's easiest to let your worm feed on someone while you're fucking them up close and tight. And lots of us didn't really care about ourselves after the worm got us, so whoring is easy.\" She curled up and cried. \"Bopo wanted to feed every seven or eight days, he was always quick and quiet about it, he liked fat boys best, I knew he was hungry when he'd make me try to get one, and now he's dead and you killed him...\" She started trying to hit me with her working hand, clumsily.\n\nThat didn't make any sense. \"Why are you punching me? Didn't you want to be free?\"\n\nShe stopped, and wiped her eyes. \"Oh, I'm sorry, I did want to, I'm glad you killed him. He was the only thing I cared about for a long time though. I have to remember that I'm me again now, I'm not used to it.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll count that attack as Bopo trying to get revenge from beyond the grave. Or at least, from beyond the rooftop of the bank,\" I said. That saved her life again. She didn't notice, which is just as well.\n\n\"Oh... do you want to know anything else?\" , she asked, snuffling on the sheet a bit.\n\n\"Probably, but I can't think of it now. Want breakfast? I'm as hungry as you've ever seen me.\"\n\n\"Good gods, that's terrifying. Did you really skip dinner for me?\"\n\n\"I did, 'cause you were too busy trying to die every few minutes for me to have a proper meal. Hold on...\" I put the Arcane Anodyne into her again, sooner than absolutely necessary. \"Need help getting dressed?\"\n\nShe did need help. In retrospect, it seems very odd that I had to take care of my hired whore after saving her life and personality. But her arm really wasn't working very well, even after I put the Rose Rescaler into it, and I wanted breakfast and company.\n\nWe went to the hotel's restaurant, but breakfast was over, and lunch isn't a buffet. So we walked across the street to Porphirio's, which has a lunch buffet. It's not very good, but Tarcuna wasn't really up for walking very far. I refused to carry her plate, though; I offered a waiter an extra dozen thurnies to do it. Which is Not How It Is Done At Porphirio's, as they explained when they tried to return my money. You're supposed to ask for a favor, and leave an extra couple of thurnies at the end of the meal. I was not in much of a mood to tolerate backwards hoven customs, though, and flicked the waiter with my hukuch\u00f4, just a tiny bit, and he stopped arguing.\n\nTarcuna was very clumsy, trying to eat with her unaccustomed hand. After she spilled the third bite of steak and pea pie in her lap, I said, \"Do you know where one hires a friend in this city?\"\n\nHer fur went flat. \"You're firing me?\"\n\n\"No, I'm going to hire you a friend, to help take care of you. It's not dignified for me to do it,\" I said. Not that I've managed to keep much dignity on this trip, but there are limits.\n\n\"Oh! You don't mean a friend like in a prostitute. Maybe a nurse?\"\n\nI stared at what I had learned of Trestean. \"Right, that's the word for it. A nurse.\"\n\n\"You can take the nurse's wages out of my tip,\" she said. \"Assuming I'm still getting a tip. I haven't been much fun.\"\n\n\"You haven't been?\"\n\n\"Well, you've spent two days so far taking care of me, and I haven't even given you a single orgasm,\" she said.\n\n\"I've had a great time. More excitement and less luxury than I was thinking, but that's not a bad thing for a dragon. And I couldn't notice an orgasm if I got one; I don't want to try; that would just be miserable.\" I thought a bit. \"I'm going to give you the rest of my money with you when I leave. I won't need it anyway.\"\n\nThen I spent the next two plates of Porphirio's world-famous pie trying to get her to stop thanking me. It's just as convenient for me as throwing the money away. And my fianc\u00e9s would tease me horribly if I brought any treasure back \u2014 they're supposed to do that \u2014 and especially ugly treasure. It'd be different if I were stealing a world-famous gold and niobium statue or something."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Back in the hotel, she called around and found a slightly shady nurse agency who didn't ask too many questions. While we waited for the nurse, we read the paper.\n\nVoresc Monster Kills Woman, Warplane In Dorday\n\nOne of the winged lizards from the Khamrou Voresc, or another of its kind, raped, tortured, and killed an unidentified woman in the Boulevard of the Orange Pine Trees yesterday!\n\n\"Oh, clawrasps! How can I get them to correct that? It's not rape! I paid for sex with you!\" I hissed.\n\nShe giggled, and said \"Haven't gotten it. That makes it larceny too, on my part.\" She put the paper down to move her useless right arm into a more comfortable position, then resumed reading.\n\nThe horrible monster, like the one in the Kyongsy Temple, made its wicked way to our fair city undetected by military surveillance! In an editorial we urge the consuls to increase patrols of our nation's borders, even if this requires withdrawal of some troops from Ghemelia!\n\n\"So far I can't argue. Not only didn't they detect me, I looted them a bit,\" I said.\n\n\"You're a horrible monster?\"\n\n\"Sure!\"\n\n\"It was first sighted at approximately 10:15 in the morning, by Poure Drallinet, the proprietor of a caf\u00e9 on the Boulevard. He \u2014 the monster, not Poure! \u2014 had grabbed a woman and ripped off her upper garments! It may seem the stuff of puppet shows, but it is reality! Reality, in our own fair city, just as it was in the Kyongsy Temple!\"\n\n\"They're remarkably accurate. I did rip off your upper garments.\"\n\n\"Then the wicked beast ripped her fair udder with its massive claws!\"\n\n\"Hmph! They were very delicate claws.\"\n\n\"Poure called the constabulary. Five gendarmes were nearby, wire circles polished and shining, ready and waiting for just such an emergency as this! They ran up and fired their pistols into the air to scare the beast off! And \u2014 it ran! It fled! It dared not confront the might of Dorday's Finest!\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't want to do major surgery while they were shooting at me,\" I mumbled. It did look like I had run off.\n\n\"I'm not calling you coward! You're as brave as anything as far as I'm concerned.\"\n\n\"Focussed, maybe. Devoted.\"\n\n\"But when it fled, it snatched up its poor victim's hopefully-senseless and probably-moribund body! It flew to the top of the First Dorday Bank, where it landed and perched and resumed its grisly and protracted torture! By this time the alarm had been sounded in Querbico Air Force Base. Two wings of fighter planes scrambled \u2014 they were in the air almost before the word went out! They zoomed towards Dorday, where the monster's tormentations continued out of reach of the gendarmes. But the terrible beast showed unexpected forms of viciousness! Just as if in a puppet-show, just like the Kyongsy Temple monster, it blasted one of our brave fighter planes out of the sky, exploding it in a terrible burst of flame! Three skymen were slain instantly! A huge ball of burning jet fuel spilled upon the Narwalla Noodle Works, igniting the building!\"\n\n\"Is that true?\" Tarcuna asked me shakily.\n\n\"Probably, they've been pretty good so far,\" I said.\n\n\"You blasted a fighter plane?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"You killed three soldiers?\"\n\n\"That's what the paper says. I was more trying to keep you from dying than paying much attention.\"\n\n\"You killed three people to save my life?\" She didn't sound very happy.\n\n\"Yes. They were going to be shooting at me. I didn't think I could finish the surgery while they were shooting. It was hard enough as it was.\"\n\n\"You killed three brave soldiers who were trying to rescue me, a wormridden whore.\"\n\nI hissed at her. \"Exactly. You understand. Could you be a proper hireable biddable whore and do your job and read me the rest of the article?\" That at least reminded her of her position, and she went back to reading. Her voice was terrible, between the leftover brain damage and the considerable distress.\n\n\"The surviving eleven jets performed an encircling maneuver. As they closed on the leviathan, it turned tail and ran! It gobbled down the woman! It leapt off the roof the bank, and vanished into the trees!\"\n\n\"Did you kill anyone else?\"\n\n\"I don't know! Finish reading the thing!\"\n\n\"There's not much more.\"\n\n\"Beware! The monster is still at large! Seven wings of the Air Force have been patrolling over Dorday, but at press time there has been no sign of it! Patrols of gendarmes have been searching sewers and basements, but it has not been located!\"\n\n\"Why would I hide in a sewer? I can't feel, but I can sure smell!\"\n\n\"We call upon all loyal citizens of Dorday to report menacing incidents and possible sightings of the monster to the proper authorities! We call upon them to drive the monster forth! We of Trest need no assistance from any noble blue-green monster \u2014 we are brave and mighty, and wholly capable of defending ourselves!\"\n\n\"They'll get their noble blue-green monster when he's good and ready to fetch me,\" I said.\n\nTarcuna wasn't listening. She climbed into the bed and was crying into a pillow, mumbling about how her life wasn't worth that price. I told her that I didn't kill them because of her, just because they were going to attack me, and besides I didn't mean to kill them, just cripple the plane, it's their stupid for keeping explosives in the wings of their jet. That turned out not to be a very comforting thing to say to a hoven. I was quite tired of comforting her by then, so I read more of the paper, all the editorials urging better defense against me.\n\nAfter a while the nurse came, a tall shaggy red-furred sort of hoven man, and I rather snappishly explained a bit and handed him a couple thousand thurnies. I left him to take care of Tarcuna, and went stomping around in the city. Well, walking around trying to enjoy some of the sights. And watching the fighter planes zoom around overhead looking for the real me. And being cross. It wasn't nearly as much fun to do it alone.\n\nWhen I got back to the hotel, the tall shaggy nurse had arranged a sling for Tarcuna, and was working on voice exercises. She didn't sound much better to me, but the nurse said that she'd made some progress in just a few hours and would probably recover most of her speech. Tarcuna was back to being cheerful and optimistic for her own reasons. Or, maybe, she was being cheerful and optimistic for the first time since she had been taken by the worm."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Summoned to Port-of-Zom (Day 62)\n\nAs Tarcuna and I were eating breakfast the next day, Ythac wrote to me. \"Are you awake yet?\"\n\n\"Awake and eating delicious steak and pea pie at the world-famous Porphirio's Buffet. Well, eating steak and pea pie at Porphirio's Buffet.\" I wrote to him, and told Tarcuna that I'd be chatting a bit and she should stop reading the paper to me.\n\n\"I have to ask \u2014 were you raping that girl, or eating her? And if you were raping her, why aren't you copulating with your fianc\u00e9s instead of poor hoven maidens?\"\n\n\"I what your pardon?\"\n\n\"The newspaper said you were either raping or eating some unidentified woman on a rooftop in Dorday two days ago. That was you, wasn't it? Or are there some other dragons in Dorday?\"\n\n\"I wasn't doing that. I was doing surgery.\"\n\n\"On a rooftop? While blasting warplanes out of the sky?\"\n\n\"Just one warplane,\" I said.\n\n\"How many hovens have you killed so far?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just five in Dorday. I think eight total.\"\n\n\"Are you and Arilash having a contest to see who can kill more? Or even, who can kill fewer?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, nothing like that. I'm just being a tourist.\"\n\n\"Dorday is quite a spectacular vacation spot indeed, where tourists do surgery and fight warplanes at the same time!\"\n\n\"Well, I think they mostly don't. My native guide got into trouble, is all.\" I wrote.\n\n\"What kind of native guide needs to be attacked by warplanes?\"\n\n\"If I let you read my diary, will you promise not to come get me immediately? It's got my hotel and room number in it.\"\n\n\"Grand Hotel Dorday Elysium, Suite 406,\" he told me.\n\n\"I'm going to chew some of your ruffles off next time I see you,\" I told him, and fumbled around with my diary and the Devourer of Books and my end of Ythac's the Horizonal Quill until he could read the whole thing.\n\n\"So you hired a whore, didn't fornicate at all, and did impromptu major surgery on her?\" he asked.\n\n\"Exactly! Aren't I horny and honorable and brave and resourceful?\"\n\n\"You're buried up to your bulging eyes in Uplifting, that's what you are. Uruunma would be proud of you. Actually even Uruunma would think you were kind of extreme.\"\n\n\"It's not like I'm ordinarily much of an Uplifter. Besides, the five I killed weren't exactly Uplifted.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute. This cyoziworm, it was dangerous to you in hoven form?\"\n\nI remembered as hard as I could. \"It seemed like it could conquer me... like if its egg got its hooks into my brain-in-hoven-form, it would control me just as much as it controlled Tarcuna. It wasn't so hard to avoid it. It was pretty obvious to dangersense, it didn't move fast, and it wasn't a bit tough or smart. I don't think it could control me in my real shape. It's not big enough.\"\n\n\"Llredh doesn't have dangersense,\" he wrote back. \"He's staying in hoven form, refusing to leave Port-of-Zom, being all protective and Uplifty about some hovens there. Says he doesn't care about the mating flight, or getting married, or collecting any loot.\" He scribbled a bit, hesitating, before writing \"Won't even mount-fight me. He's never refused before. Says he doesn't want to risk injury. Think he's wormridden?\"\n\n\"Can you scry on him and find out? Look inside for a worm shaped like the figure Y, about three feet long, with spikes and ruffles.\"\n\n\"I can't do that from here. I told you I wouldn't drag you home from your vacation, and I won't. I am going to drag you to Port-of-Zom. Bring your whore too, I need her more than you even.\"\n\n\"I'm going to chew all your wings off,\" I told him, in the Grand Draconic verbal mode indicating a fictional future.\n\n\"After we rescue Llredh. Really, Jyothky, this is important. You can have as much vacation as you want after he's safe.\"\n\n\"Fine. You owe me,\" I said. \"So does he, if he's really wormridden.\"\n\n\"OK, Tarcuna. My plans just changed. We're going to Port-of-Zom,\" I said.\n\n\"Port-of-Zom, in Vlechinse? Isn't that a rather grotty shipping and manufacturing city?\" she asked. \"What's there for us?\"\n\n\"My fianc\u00e9, wormridden I think. Feel like rescuing someone else from the cyoziworms?\"\n\n\"Everyone, if I could.\"\n\n\"We'll start with Llredh.\"\n\nI fussed privately about honor and etiquette, and decided to be sensible. We stripped the bed from Suite 406, and bought some rope and carabiners and a mountain-climber's harness from a sporting goods store. We went to the top of the bank \u2014 the bloodstain was still there \u2014 and I turned back into me. We tied a couple loops of rope around my neck, snapped Tarcuna on with carabiners, and wrapped her in blankets. I cast the Scratch-the-Sky \u2014 I don't know any better spells to speed up flight. It's not really nice to leave big aching cuts in the middle air, so nobody uses that spell in a civilized world unless they really need to. But this isn't a civilized world, there's nobody flying around but hovens, and I was in a hurry.\n\nI also put the Esrret-Sky-Painted on, but that doesn't work very well if there's a big aerial wound pointing right at an invisible me. The fighter planes from Dorday figured it out pretty fast. Also they figured out the practical way that flying through the Scratch-the-Sky's scratch would wreck their planes and they should fly to the side of it. I had to give up on the Scratch-the-Sky, and just fly along at a leisurely just-my-wings sort of pace, and watch the fighter planes zoom past me trying to find me.\n\nAfter a while they gave up or got very far away, so I put the Scratch-the-Sky back on. Which upset a great many hovens, since I was flying near a big city \u2014 Tublier, according to Tarcuna. Many, many warplanes were already in the sky, and most of them started flying towards me as soon as they could see the wound. I tossed the Scratch-the-Sky away again, and landed, and caught and ate a horse and a half, in a barn, while the Trestean military worked exceedingly hard to keep me away from a city that I didn't actually want to visit that day.\n\n\"Where are you?\" screamed Ythac, underlining his letters three times in my imagination.\n\n\"In Tublier, in Trest. Not quite halfway there.\"\n\n\"Well, Arilash and I have been here for two hours!\"\n\n\"Well, Arilash has adult travel spells. I've only got a stupid little baby the Scratch-the-Sky, and I can't even use it half the time.\"\n\nWe snarled at each other, and promised to gnaw each others' tails off after we'd rescued Llredh. Ythac is such an anxious mommy-drake sometimes. It's not as if a wormridden Llredh is going to get any worse. He couldn't hurt himself if he wanted to, not in any way that would be bad for the worm anyway. Ythac was unconvinced.\n\nI took care of cloacal matters that I hadn't wanted to deal with in hoven form \u2014 if it's slow going in, it'll be slow going out, and that's not the fun direction. And raided the farmhouse for food for Tarcuna, who didn't want burnt horse. I didn't want her going hungry, she was still recovering. If Ythac wants my expert services \u2014 or my public friend's expert services \u2014 he'll have to have them on my terms.\n\nCoda: Carrying Small People\n\nDragons are not zeppelins! We do not generally take passengers. Ordinary honor and politeness says, if you must carry a few small people in the air, hold them in your foreclaws. The theory is, that way you can carry them around and intimidate them at the same time. If they get annoying, you can start to close your paw on them, which will often scare them. If they get very annoying you can either crush them or drop them.\n\nI'm not generally one to dispute the theory of honor and etiquette. This time, though, I really don't understand. How often do you carry someone around who you're willing to kill? Or someone who you need to intimidate?\n\nI have only carried one small person in my paw flying, ever. (Verimet, which shouldn't be surprising at all.) It was hideously inconvenient. I couldn't tell if I was holding her nicely, or I had accidentally dropped her without realizing it, or I was crushing her. After a bit I stopped and made her tie herself to my fingers, so at least I couldn't drop her so easily, and told her to scream if I started crushing her, which happened a couple of times. I had to heal her with the Great Titan Sanitarium, which didn't work very well. We still got there in time, more or less. I got Rankotherium to teach me the Arcane Anodyne the next day. Anyway, I don't like carrying people in my paws. Especially not for as long a flight as this was going to be.\n\nCarrying someone on your back is considered to be (a) inconvenient and (b) a great honor for the someone. I will utterly vouch for (a) inconvenient! Especially when you have just accidentally rendered the someone's right arm unusable, and you don't have anyone to help you put her on.\n\n(b) A great honor for the someone... I don't think so, in this case. If anyone is wondering whether I am doing Tarcuna a great honor, well, I did a lot of work to heal her. Much more work than your average slave is worth. A public friend ought to be worth less than that even, by any reasonable measure: if someone's just hired for a short-term job, you don't have much of an investment in them.\n\nSo I think Tarcuna has some kind of hold on me. For one thing, it's never a good idea to kill someone you've worked that hard to save. You look so foolish when you do that. So, if I were carrying her in my paw, I couldn't drop her or squish her, not sensibly.\n\nUnder no circumstances is it the least bit acceptable to let the small person on your back rein you.\n\nAnyhow, that's why I decided to let her ride on my back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Saved by Love (Day 63)\n\nBackground Research\n\nPort-of-Zom is, indeed, a grotty port city in Vlechinse. It's smaller than Dorday, and far uglier. The bay side of the town is a skeleton forest of iron scaffolds (used for getting cargo onto and off of ships, not hoven sacrifices), ugly brown brick buildings made from the river Zom's ugly brown mud baked into ugly brown bricks, barren parking lots, snaking train tracks carrying battered old cars spattered with ugly brown mud, and other assorted practical things spattered with ugly brown mud. Beyond that is a slovenly slum, homes for dock workers and railroad workers and whatnots, hotels and bars and whorehouses for sailors from afar. And, of course, one singing spot of magic from Llredh's protective spells and such.\n\nWe landed in an abandoned lot rather far in the outskirts of town, Arilash and Ythac and I, and Tarcuna in her harness on my back. The Zomites were nervous to see us fly in. I suppose some of our fianc\u00e9s had been a bit violent here and there around Hove \u2014 actually, I had been, though entirely for good reasons. So we weren't quite as welcome to just fly in somewhere for some nonviolent purpose and land as we might be. The Vlechinse army started to gather to defend the most vital bits of town from us \u2014 the port, the governor's house. Misplaced! Nothing in Port-of-Zom was more valuable than our fianc\u00e9.\n\n\"Is he really wormridden?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"He sounds like it to me,\" said Tarcuna as she struggled to get off my back one-handed. \"I'll go check if you like though.\"\n\n\"How can you check?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"Go and ask him, what else? There are some code phrases, they're obvious to the wormridden really, I'm sure he'll have learned them.\"\n\nYthac was in rather a state. He'd bite the tip of his tail, wince when he noticed what he was doing, and then heal it. A few seconds later his tailtip would be in his mouth again. \"Once we know he is... What do we do? We can't stun him out and and do surgery on him, the way you did to Tarcuna. He's far too dangerous for that, even in hoven form,\" Ythac fretted.\n\n\"No, we can't.\"\n\nHe thought a moment. \"Jyothky, are you sure that cyoziworms can't infest dragons in dragon shape?\"\n\n\"I didn't check it exactly. It can't conquer a dragon in dragon shape, I know that much. It shouldn't be able to control Llredh if he turns back. They control hovens with little barbed probes in the brain. Our brains are a different shape, probably the probes won't work. A lot bigger, so the probes probably won't reach very much. Healing is probably a good idea though. Tarcuna's a bit broken, we don't want Llredh broken too.\"\n\nHe bit his tail, winced, healed. \"Tarcuna. Do you think he'll know that? Or that his worm will?\"\n\nTarcuna thought a bit, looking up quite calmly at Ythac's huge teal eyes. \"I certainly didn't know that. I didn't know about the brain probes. Bopo didn't seem to understand dragons very well. I was really afraid that Spotty would kill him for trying to colonize her \u2014 I couldn't care about her killing me \u2014 but I couldn't explain that to Bopo. He just wanted it, so I had to do it.\"\n\n\"Good, then. How long before a cyoziworm can... colonize, you say?... colonize another hoven?\"\n\n\"Two days. They could spread very fast, but they keep their numbers down mostly,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"So I'll try to tempt Llredh back to dragon shape, which should free him, and then we heal him a whole lot very fast, and... if that doesn't work, I guess we'll do something else,\" said Ythac. \"Jyothky, Tarcuna, you know as much about what's going on as anyone, is that a good plan?\"\n\nI thought a bit. \"Well, we'll want to get the worm out as quick as we can. It shouldn't poison a large dragon so fast as a little hoven, but it could make him sick.\"\n\n\"Right. OK, get down off of Jyothky, and go and find out about him, Tarcuna.\" He plucked her delicately off my back, and set her on the ground. \"Oh, and we need to clean you. You stink of dragoness.\" He blasted her with illusions and scent-destroyers, while Arilash tried to tease him about his choice of words. \"Now you sing of recent magic, but Llredh probably won't catch that. Ready?\"\n\nTarcuna waved her good arm. \"Sure!\"\n\n\"If you take this opportunity to run away, I will find you in about three minutes and come and kill you,\" said Ythac.\n\nTarcuna gave him an odd look, and shrugged. I glared at Ythac. \"She's my, um...\"\n\n\"'Whore' will do for now,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"OK, she's my whore. And I worked pretty hard to save her life. No killing her without my permission,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, Murghal's the only hoven I've met, and he's always wanting to run away, and I'm very upset and nervous about this, so please accept my apology even though it's pretty feeble? Or bite me if you want more revenge,\" said Ythac to me.\n\n\"I accept your apology, Ythac. Just stop scaring my, um, pet hoven,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm not scared,\" said Tarcuna. \"I'm ready whenever you want me to go.\"\n\nSo she hiked citywards, and we flew to the hills to wait. \"Fearless little girl, that,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"She is now. I think I broke her,\" I said. So I had to explain how I did surgery on her, and how I wrapped her in my hukuch\u00f4 to knock her out, and that probably burned out the part of her soul which was capable of knowing fear. Or maybe it was ripping holes in her brain that did it, if the fear center is next to the right-arm center. Then Arilash made Ythac teach me the Lure of Dreams, which is a grownup sort of spell that traps people in a dreamworld. It's mostly a torture spell, if you make the dreamworld unpleasant, but you can use it as a sleep spell. Ythac was the worst spell-teacher in Hove that day, missing parts and being all bitey and impatient when I didn't get a piece right the first time. But Arilash and I made him keep at it. It mostly served to distract him from the wait.\n\nTwo hours later, a bicycle rickshaw drove out to the edge of town, and Tarcuna got out in the abandoned lot and looked around. Ythac was off in a flash, flying towards her in a vast thunder of wings.\n\n\"Is he wormridden?\" Ythac demanded. \"Llredh, I mean.\"\n\n\"Yes, he is,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"How did you tell?\" I asked, coming in rather more slowly than Ythac.\n\n\"Oh, walked up to him and asked if he knew about the little cup and the dripping \u2014 that's one of our passwords. He said he did, complained a bit about how very little his little cup was. I asked where there was a place to rest from it. He's guarding a wormhouse. He said he'd let me in. I told him I needed to do something first, but I'd be back afterwards. That means that Bopo is going to make me do something \u2014 he probably thought I needed to feed Bopo. He was polite to me. He looked kind of unhappy though.\"\n\n\"I should think so, being all conquered like that!\" shouted Ythac.\n\nTarcuna clapped her hands to her ears. \"Ow, that hurt, so loud!\"\n\nYthac turned to me. \"Right. I'm going to go save him, if I can. If I don't come back, do not come after us. Not you alone, and not you with everyone else. Oh, I should tell you where everyone else is,\" and he told us who was hiding where. And then, \"Jyothky, tell my father I died bravely and... make something up that's totally not like what really happened.\"\n\nI sort of goggled at him. \"Well, good luck...\" We embraced in farewell.\n\nLove\n\nYthac leapt into the air. He circled the lot a few times, shapeshifting a touch \u2014 putting on his prettiest barbels and spikes, his most gleaming scales. Then he flew for Port-of-Zom. Arilash and I took to the air, Tarcuna on my back, but to watch from quite a distance. The Vlechinse soldiers were getting a bit frisky with their artillery.\n\nYthac circled over the wormhouse where Llredh was trapped, calling out, \"Llredh, Llredh.\"\n\nLlredh was sitting on the step, in hoven form. He cupped his floppy hoven hands in front of his floppy hoven mouth so he could shout back. \"Hi, Ythac. The tempting-back you come here to make again, no? The denial you will have again! A more important thing to do is now the thing I have to do!\"\n\n\"Llredh, Llredh. I know what has become of you. I know about the little cup and the dripping,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"And you dare come back? The taunting you will make of me now? The teasing, the mocking? I care nothing! Nothing!\" howled Llredh, full of despair and helpless anger.\n\nYthac stripped off his illusion spells, so that anydragon could see the truth of his words. \"No, no, not that, never that. I love you. I've loved you from the time we met,\" he said. Which is a rather disgusting thing for one drake to say to another, and even more to mean it. He sounded a lot more intense about it than when he had said he loved me, too.\n\n\"The sentimental romantic farewell you make on me?\" said Llredh. \"Fine, fine. My favorite drake, you were he, and my favorite dragoness, you were she, too, more often than not. Those were good fights and good fucks. Now, away with you. This place, I will never leave it, the worms here are more important than any fighting and any fucking.\"\n\nYthac hovered as best he could, all his wings beating. \"I don't want to leave you. Not here, not like this... Come up and mate with me. I'll be the dragoness for you. Come up. I'll leave my scutes off. No heavy scales, no apotropaics. Just bare soft skin on my chest. I'll join you, if that's how it goes. We'll protect the wormhouse forever, you and I. Just to be together with you, always.\" Every word true. I was absolutely horrified.\n\n\"You cannot wish it,\" said Llredh. \"The worm, she is not so nice.\"\n\n\"Better sharing the worm with you than leaving you,\" said Ythac, truthfully.\n\nYthac turned female, and shifted away his... her... scales and stripped off her other spells, leaving herself unprotected. Llredh looked up at her, lust and horror and unwanted need burning in his eyes. Ythac called down to him, \"Come up, come up here and take me, Llredh.\"\n\n\"No, no, it is a horror you ask!\" howled Llredh from his hoven mouth. But his worm no longer left him the freedom to protest (he told us later). It knew a superb host when it saw one, albeit distored through Llredh's mind, and it wanted the best for its child. It splashed into Llredh's psychic cup, as Ythac circled over him and spread her claspers, and in minutes forced him to try to colonize Ythac.\n\nAnd so Llredh was compelled to put back on his orange and brown scales and take up his wings and claws. And as soon as he did, he howled in fury and pain. The worm's control must have broken then, and torn Llredh inside then.\n\nAnd Llredh was deep, deep in his fury. Nothing angers a dragon a twelfth as much as being dominated by a far lesser creature. He cast a simple scrying spell inside himself, to find out where the worm was. And then he went after it. He ripped open his own chest with his claws. He snapped three of his ribs. Ythac flew down and tried to put the Rose Rescaler on him, but he blocked the healing spell with his v\u00f4. \"The time, the more time you must give me, this enemy I will destroy even if I die from it!\" Ythac beat his wings, staying close to Llredh, and let Llredh alone to rip open his left lung and expose the tiny forked-tailed cyoziworm flopping around feebly in there.\n\nAnd Llredh breathed flame into his own chest, his fiercest flame, so strong and deep that it must have strained his whef\u00f4. His flesh seared here and there; his fire was so hot that it overwhelmed his usual immunity to his own breath.\n\nHis cyoziworm had no such immunity. It fell away as ashes.\n\n\"Not enough revenge, not nearly enough is that. But what can one do to an animal that barely even thinks? Ythac, Ythac, now you may heal me,\" said Llredh. And Ythac was more than happy to, with the Rose Rescaler and the Great Titan Sanitarium. And Llredh gave himself the Put-Together-Now, and that seemed to mostly take care of the wound.\n\n\"Come back, come back to the mating flight with me,\" said Ythac, when Llredh was out of danger.\n\n\"The cheating-on-me, already you make her?\" warbled Llredh. \"You give me my saving, but with the false promise?\" He air-danced around Ythac, laughing.\n\nYthac half-folded her wings in shame, nearly falling out of the sky into the vile streets of Port-of-Zom. \"No, Llredh, everything was true... how am I cheating?\"\n\n\"The fine fuck in the sky, you promise her to me! Now first the flying-away you want to make?\" said Llredh, laughing.\n\n\"... Oh!...\"\n\n\"One minute, I give her to you. One minute to put your spells back and your scales back, and all things back,\" said Llredh.\n\nYthac sort of gaped at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"The fine brave boy, he risks his soul to rescue me, this is the boy I will twine in the sky and anyone can see it! This is the boy who offers his life for mine! This is the boy I will give my life to!\" shouted Llredh, in Grand Draconic except for the vulgarity. The few trees of Port-of-Zom shook at his voice, and the soldiers got to work with their artillery.\n\n\"Oh!\" said Ythac, and started putting spells on herself \u2014 then himself \u2014 in rather a daze. Llredh circled him while he worked, looking rather more excited and eager than any drake had looked for me.\n\nAnd the two of them coupled in the sky over Port-of-Zom. I don't know exactly what they did with each other; I couldn't watch. Arilash was watching, and soon smelling of dragoness lust herself.\n\nI couldn't bear to see the nastiness that my best friend had chosen for himself. I snatched Tarcuna up and flew away, to fetch Osoth from the Prevalian Catacombs.\n\nMeditation\n\nSaved by the power of love. In the most horrible way possible.\n\nBetter than a cyoziworm for each of them? I don't know.\n\nEn Route\n\n\"Why are we flying away?\" asked Tarcuna calmly. \"I only caught a word here and there.\"\n\n\"And that word was probably vulgar,\" I said, \"That's all that Llredh said in Hoven languages.\"\n\n\"Your friend got freed, right? That's why he ripped his chest up?\"\n\n\"Llredh got freed. I don't know that he's my friend, or Ythac,\" I said.\n\n\"He did the surgery on himself? That's a bit tough.\"\n\n\"Yes. I don't think anything could have stood between Llredh and his revenge. Certainly not Llredh's own scales and bones.\"\n\n\"But he's all right now?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think so. Our healing spells work better on us than on you, and he wasn't nearly as badly hurt as you were,\" I answered. \"I don't know for sure. My horrible ex-fianc\u00e9 and my rival are taking care of him. I can't imagine that he could be in much trouble with that much help.\"\n\n\"Ex-fianc\u00e9?\"\n\n\"Ythac,\" I said.\n\n\"Last I heard, he was your best friend and likely husband...?\"\n\nI turned my head back to glare at her briefly. It's a good thing I broke her ability to experience fear. \"He loves another male dragon. I can't marry someone like that. I can't imagine how to even tolerate someone like that.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"You and my mother.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I've mostly loved other girl hovens. Or doesn't it count when non-dragons do that?\" said Tarcuna. \"It sure counted for my mother; she disinherited me. Better dump my perverted ass off your back right now.\"\n\n\"I am not going to kill you, Tarcuna. It is such bad form to save someone's life and have them help out and then to kill them,\" I said.\n\n\"And it's good form to abandon a friend on one of the most important days of his life?\"\n\n\"I can't think what might be good form under the circumstances,\" I said.\n\n\"What are they doing back there?\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I don't want to think about that. They didn't even have the clawtip of a decency for one of them to turn into a girl,\" I snapped.\n\n\"I mean with the explosions... is that part of dragons making love?\"\n\n\"Not generally,\" I said, and looked back. Hovens were assaulting the other dragons from the ground with artillery and purple rays, and from the air from many planes. A moderate amount of Port-of-Zom was ablaze.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" I wrote frantically to Ythac.\n\n\"We're fine! We got interrupted by some soldiers though. Want to help us? I'd really appreciate some lightning now,\" he answered.\n\n\"Yes. Don't think you're forgiven though,\" I scribbled to him. \"I'm going back to help. I'll put you down, it's safer.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't! I want to stay with you! This should be exciting to see from your back!\" chirped Tarcuna.\n\n\"You are very mind-broken,\" I said.\n\n\"So true! But I might as well enjoy it,\" she said.\n\nThe Battle of Port-of-Zom\n\nSo I turned and flew back with my hoven on my back. The others were having trouble with the warplanes. Fire breath can go reasonably far, but it cannot go reasonably far very fast, and the planes were dodging around too much to be convenient targets for fire breath. They had some sort of technologically magical torpedoes, too, which curved and twisted in the air, and if they missed the first time, would try twice or thrice more. And of course my friends had to pay attention to any number of assaults from the ground too, artillery and twistor rays and such.\n\nSo I touched this plane and that with lightning. Sometimes they exploded. Sometimes they stopped dodging and zipping around, and their momentum carried them off away from the fight. Sometimes they simply sprouted big burny holes in the side, and fled under their own power. Lightning is happy to be both far and fast, though you can't melt mountains with it when you're upset.\n\nThe airplanes were mostly gone by the time I got back to Port-of-Zom. Llredh wriggled happily at me \u2014 I've never seen him so happy. \"Thanks so much, Jyothky!\" he cried out in Trestean.\n\n\"Well, sure... what are you doing?\"\n\n\"The city of my humiliation, I am destroying her! The armies of defenders, my husband and my lovers are holding them back.\"\n\n\"The whole city?\" shouted Tarcuna. \"They'd hate the wormridden as much as you do!\"\n\n\"Come not between the dragon and his vengeance!\" cried Llredh.\n\n\"I'm not, but if you get vengeance on the wrong thing, it's pretty stupid vengeance!\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\n\"The girl who rides you, she is very chatty!\" remarked Llredh. \"If she were off your back, I would slay her.\" A heavy shell exploded under his belly, and he grunted and put the Rose Rescaler into himself.\n\n\"The girl who rides me, she saved you nearly as much as Ythac, and without half the reward.\" (And without half the indecency, either, but I didn't say that.) \"And she knows more about hovens and cyoziworms than you do.\"\n\nLlredh flew down a bit, to where his breath was hot enough to melt the gun which had shot him. \"My revenge, my vast and terrible revenge, what does your expert recommend I do for her?\" he called up to us, as he dodged and blasted an assortment of other missiles.\n\n\"Let's go somewhere quiet and discuss it. It looks to me like all of your actual enemies here are dead, and lots of the hovens who should be your allies against them too,\" said Tarcuna. \"And you're killing your allies by the tens and hundreds.\"\n\n\"Besides, we've got about five hemipenises more to go,\" said Ythac. \"I am not letting you get out of that!\"\n\n\"This battle, it looks like we have won her?\" We looked around. Fourteen of the twenty planes were destroyed, the rest were fled, and two dozen tanks and cannons. Which was a third or five-twelfths of the big weapons that had come against us. We hadn't particularly been bothering with the less well-armed soldiers, who hadn't done much more than scramble around and try to look fierce and/or effective. A half-mile square and more was ablaze, in a big wobbly circle around the former wormhouse. \"My revenge, my fury, Port-of-Zom will not soon forget him!\" cried Llredh.\n\nThe rest of us agreed that honor and violence were satisfied for the moment. Arilash darted around and touched put the Melismatic Tempest into us. We flew away tremendously fast, leaving trails of spiky music behind us. Within the hour, the Vlechinse army congratulated themselves on the radio on their victory over four dragons.\n\nMe vs. Ythac\n\nArilash, Tarcuna, the perverts, and I flew for a third of an hour, and the Melismatic Tempest made it as if we flew for a third of a day. Not that there was much of a reason to go so far. None of us were all that fond of Port-of-Zom, even at its best, and it certainly wasn't at its best anymore, though.\n\nWe passed over water, we passed over jungle, we passed over water, and we came to a shining white cone of an island in a shallow silvery sea. I called up to Tarcuna on my back, \"What is this place? Are we out of Vlechinse?\"\n\n\"Long gone from Vlechinse. This is Esbaril. It's a wonderful vacation spot for people who can afford it. My parents had their honeymoon here. Um, please don't destroy it, if it's all the same to you?\" she shouted back.\n\nSo we landed on the top of Esbaril. The hovens have built a small pavilion up there, and a wide playground and picnic area around it. There are telescopes mounted on the rim of the mountain, and for a small coin a hoven can peer around at the rich jungle of Esbaril, or tilt the telescope up and perhaps catch a glimpse of home in distant Trest or Vlechinse or wherever. Or spy on far-off Nrararn as he disported himself in the clouds when he thought nobody was watching. Each morning in Esbaril very early, dozens of poor Esbarites load their backs with big packs of nut cookies and pre-made sandwiches, bottles of foaming cider and small beer, spare shoes and straw hats, and whatever else they think that tourists might want, and hike to the top to scrabble for their day's living. Every morning in Esbaril not so early, hundreds of families of tourists hike up the wide well-paved mountain trails, and mostly have a wonderful time. And if they break a shoe or didn't bring enough lunch, the poor Esbarites are delighted to help out for a quite fair fee.\n\nUnfortunately, the poor Esbarites didn't have a very good day today. Neither did the tourists.\n\nThe four of us with wings landed at one end of the paved area. Arilash helped Tarcuna off my back. Llredh and Ythac smiled at the tourists and the vendors. \"Hi! We're going to borrow a corner of your mountain for a chat!\" said Ythac in Trestean. \"We're completely harmless unless pestered, taunted, or assaulted with high-caliber weapons!\"\n\nThe tourists and vendors didn't seem to entirely believe him. Many of them ran for the paths down, and made their escape good and their holiday not so good. A few dozen stayed. Perhaps some had the tactical sense that climbing (slowly) down a mountain to escape from speedy fire-breathing flying monsters wasn't likely to work very well. Perhaps they were poor and determined to extract whatever money they could from the day. Certainly some of them didn't look as if they could get down the mountain very fast.\n\n\"Tarcuna, please go buy all the vendor's food. Have some for yourself, if you're still hungry,\" I commanded.\n\n\"Sure, no problem,\" she said. It was a problem though. She couldn't carry much, being exhausted and having a paralyzed arm. Even the bravest vendors wouldn't come close to us.\n\nArilash listened to Tarcuna bicker with them for a few minutes, and then hopped to the other side of the mountaintop and grinned down at them with a mouth full of very large and very gleamy fangs. \"O respected hovens! If we wished to kill you, you would even now be dead. If we wished to melt your mountain, it would even now be a river of stone flowing down to the cities on the coast. We wish neither one. Alarmingly, we wish to buy snacks from you. I will even buy a straw hat! But you must be polite.\"\n\n\"Arilash, it's my thurneys you're spending! My whore's thurnies, anyway, but it amounts to the same thing,\" I squawked as the vendors, their escape routes cut off, brought us their wares. Arilash speared a straw hat jauntily on one of her headspikes. Her rather suspicious headspikes \u2014 drakes should have spikes, dragonesses shouldn't. Arilash has always been rather flashy and masculine in her choices of form. That seemed a lot more suspicious to me today.\n\nLlredh blinked at me. \"Jyothky! Of dragons you are the virginest, of dragons you are the properest! The female hoven whore, why do you have her?\"\n\nI chilled his flank with winter breath. \"You are the grand pervert! You tempt Ythac away from decency! You are not one to talk!\"\n\nArilash adjusted her Small Wall. \"I'm a fairly grand pervert too, though I can't say I've managed to tempt Ythac very well, and I was wondering the same thing.\" She put on her most conciliatory voice. \"Is it that you don't lust for dragons much, but you lust for hovens?\"\n\n\"Nothing like that. I'd no more copulate with her than I would with you, Arilash,\" I said.\n\nShe looked a bit dismayed. \"Really? I was hoping for a turn with you now and then. I like dragonesses, as a break from all the drakes.\"\n\n\"... really?...\" I mumbled. That wasn't something I much wanted to hear.\n\n\"Yes. I planned to ask after you'd gotten through all the drakes at least once. That's polite,\" she said.\n\nWell, that was a despair and a half. \"I am surrounded by perverts,\" I said.\n\n\"True, true, you're from the 'cripples' side of the mating flight, and the rest of us here are from the 'perverts' side,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"The grand denial I must make here!\" rumbled Llredh. \"Neither one side nor the other am I on, but both at once!\"\n\n\"It's not like that! What about Csirnis? What about Osoth and Nrararn, for that matter?\" I shouted.\n\n\"Nrararn has no aeroception and is small and unimpressive, Osoth is exceedingly clumsy, neither of them is very strong in battle, and Csirnis wasn't part of the flight 'til the last minute,\" said Arilash. \"But Nrararn and Osoth could go in a 'weaklings' side, if you'd like.\"\n\n\"You make us sound like the dregs of Mhel's dragons,\" I whined.\n\n\"Oh, we are, absolutely. There were, what? four mating flights sent off at about the same time, in the same duodecade, except ours got delayed. We mostly got the dragons that the others didn't want: perverts, cripples, weaklings. Roroku thought it better to make a grand of enemies for her parents and flee to Chiriact than to come with us,\" said Arilash.\n\nI thought about that a bit. I've thought about it more since then. I wish I could think of any flaws with it.\n\n\"Which doesn't change the fact that Ythac and Llredh are being completely horrible and wicked and disgusting,\" I noted. They were, too. They'd twined their tailtips together. Drakes should not do that. Especially drakes on a mating flight.\n\nYthac glared at me. \"Easy for you to say. You've never wanted drake or dragoness a moment in your life. You've never had your fiercely powerful and powerfully fierce father chew up your wing to try to pain the perversion out of you! You've never had to make up excuse after excuse to get the touch that you actually do need. You've never listened to everyone you ever respected the least little bit mock you for what you needed so much. You've never tried and tried to lust after the right sort of dragon and it never, ever works.\"\n\n\"... except the last one,\" I muttered.\n\n\"Well. Right. You've never lost your oldest friend because of it,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Not 'til today,\" I snapped.\n\nLlredh reared his head and puffed sparks. \"My...\" He tried to think of a good word. \"My true love, if you make him your enemy, I too will be your enemy.\" Most of the remaining vendors and tourists ran away.\n\nYthac put a forewing in front of Llredh's face. \"Llredh, Llredh, this is between us. Jyothky, I have wronged you. I will give you as vast an apology as I am capable of.\"\n\n\"How'd you wrong her?\" hissed Arilash. \"You owe her nothing.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't call giving me the keys to Llredh's soul nothing, Arilash,\" said Ythac. \"And I told her I loved her and promised to marry her with a particularly favorable arrangement.\"\n\n\"Y'what?\" roared Arilash. \"I should have gotten first choice, not Jyothky!\"\n\n\"She didn't accept either one,\" said Ythac, his hindwings flat on the ground.\n\nMine were flat too. \"I should have done. Then you wouldn't be a pervert.\"\n\n\"No, Jyothky. I was expecting to have some drake friends on the side. Llredh, for one. That I'd go hunting with, or... other things away from home for a while or two. I didn't think you'd care very much even if you found out. I didn't think you'd mind much... well, much compared to most other dragonesses.\"\n\n\"You are the most vile dragon on Hove,\" I said.\n\n\"Well. Yes,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Worse than Tultamaan?\" asked Arilash.\n\n\"Tultamaan is honest at least,\" I said. \"Ythac's been lying to me for duodecades.\"\n\n\"The loyal friend and ally, he also has been for duodecades! Deny him that if you can, finicky dragoness!\" thundered Llredh. \"You knew nothing of his true soul, but it was no mystery to him when he attended stupid birthday parties and cared for your safety from artillery!\"\n\nI thought about that a while. \"Right. Ythac, I will accept your apology sometime. But you're a disgusting pervert. Your tastes are as nasty as anything that ever came out of your cloaca, and your lust for Llredh is a disgrace to our entire species.\"\n\nYthac dipped his head. \"Thank you. I agree with you on all of that.\"\n\nArilash and Llredh hissed angrily, and tried to argue, both at once. Ythac flapped his forewings at them. \"You're perverts too. You can't think like a pure one anymore. Jyothky can't think like anything else. She's right.\"\n\nArilash snarled at me. \"If you aren't at least pleasant to Ythac from now on, I am going to chew your left wing off in your sleep and you won't notice and you'll be grounded for a year 'til you can grow it back.\"\n\nI snarled back at her. \"If you try, I am going to quite handily deprive you of your top choice of husband. If Ythac doesn't do it instead.\"\n\nSo at least basic civility was restored to the mating flight.\n\nLlredh vs. Tarcuna\n\n\"Now that that's settled,\" said Arilash, \"Perhaps we should discuss what we're doing next.\"\n\nI had the answer. \"Back to the Khamrou Voresc, of course. Back to the mating flight.\" I grinned a thin grim grin. \"Only, now we're back to three girls like we should be. I don't think Ythac is going to come in first or second though.\"\n\nYthac and Llredh looked at each other. \"Not for Ythac will I speak \u2014 not yet! \u2014 but I say this. The full withdrawing from the mating flight I shall make, if Ythac will have me. No more shall I compete,\" said Llredh.\n\nYthac looked supremely happy, but said nothing.\n\nArilash grinned at Llredh. \"I'll miss you \u2014 you're one of the best lovers in the flight!\"\n\n\"Hah! The best!\"\n\n\"In enthusiasm, yes. In energy and force, yes. In technique, Csirnis. In pleasure, Csirnis. Mating with you is like a big meal of raw meat. Mating with him, like meat simmered in butter 'til it melts,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"If any shame is on you, Ythac, it must be the shame of depriving Arilash from a lover like me! She will grow fat and torpid on a diet of buttered meat!\" said Llredh with a laugh.\n\n\"We need to talk, privately,\" said Ythac. \"There's a lot for us to decide.\"\n\n\"We need to fuck, publicly!\" said Llredh. \"There's a lot for us to display!\"\n\n\"That too,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"That's for you two. But what all of us need to talk about is, what are we doing about the fact that we've rather stirred their armies against us?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Bah, we destroy bits of one city, or two, a few planes and tanks,\" said Llredh. \"Plenty upon plenty have they!\"\n\n\"Plenty upon plenty is the issue, yes,\" said Arilash. \"I imagine we could spend the whole mating flight doing nothing but battling hoven armies. And hopefully not get any injury we can't heal ourselves. Their weapons are not very good, but they are good enough to hurt.\"\n\n\"I'd rather just fight you,\" I said to Arilash.\n\n\"Then you shouldn't have destroyed all those warplanes and burned up half of Port-of-Zom. You'll probably have more battles coming. Soldiers don't give up so easily.\" said Tarcuna. She was sitting crosslegged, her back against my foreclaws, polishing her hooves, and mostly being ignored. I realized then that she was eating a sandwich from the pile we had bought, a pile of food which I was ignoring too. I was obviously very upset if I wasn't eating.\n\nThe other dragons had forgotten about her too. \"Which brings us back to the minor question of just what pure, virginal Jyothky is doing with a female hoven whore whom she lets ride on her back?\" asked Arilash. \"Especially given her opinion about same-sex coupling, and, I should think, inter-species as well.\"\n\nI stripped off my deceit spells. \"I never coupled with her, I never had the least bit of lust for her, I didn't know she was a whore when I hired her. I thought she was a... professional friend. Like a tour host.\"\n\n\"The very na\u00efve girl, Jyothky is she!\" crowed Llredh. \"Fortunate and happy am I that my mate is bright with clues and sense!\" Ythac beamed, and squirmed over so that his flank rested against Llredh's. Disgusting.\n\nTarcuna glared at Llredh. \"And don't you go teasing Jyothky! She's clever and powerful and kind and brave!\" Well, I guess I had one ally there, even if she was a hoven.\n\n\"And rich, she is also!\" crowed Llredh. \"Your loyalty she buys by the hour!\"\n\n\"Rich enough to let me die and hire another public friend! Or even chor-chor, a real tour host!\" shouted Tarcuna. \"Instead she worked all night to save me. And if she had not done, guess what? You'd still have a little cup in your mind, and a worm dripping his will into it.\"\n\nLlredh was taken aback. I don't think small people shout arguments at him very much. \"This is what happened?\" he asked Ythac, rather uncertainly.\n\n\"Yes, that's all true,\" said Ythac. The next sixth of an hour was all full of my adventures in Dorday.\n\n\"Brave, I don't know about,\" said Arilash. \"Powerful, well, she could do better on that too. Clever, maybe adequate. But Jyothky certainly does her Uplifting rather thoroughly.\"\n\n\"Except when she's blasting warplanes out of the sky,\" said Ythac. \"Jyothky, have you picked Uplifter or Downcrusher yet?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" I said.\n\n\"No Uplifter, no Downcrusher, is what we talk about now! The worms, the worms, the hateful worms!\" roared Llredh. \"Upon the cyoziworms I will have my revenge, a greater revenge than just the little one of the day in Port-of-Zom!\"\n\n\"And how are you going to manage that, Llredh?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\nLlredh answered her with fire. He breathed a great column of flame into the sky, so bright that Virtuet seemed dim beside it. It rose and rose, and hung in the sky for a full minute.\n\nTarcuna yawned. \"Right. You can kill one of us \u2014 a wormridden I mean, I need to remember I'm not wormridden anymore. No problem, you can kill any hoven, or any thousand hovens, without half trying. What are you going to do? Go visit some poor hoven city... how are you even going to find the wormridden? They look just like normal hovens. You need an intrascope to tell, I suppose. You'll what? Parade the whole city in front of an intrascope to pick out ten or twenty wormridden?\"\n\nYthac said, \"No need, not while I am his...\" He fussed for words a moment. \"His ally.\" He lashed his tail. \"His true love! I'm going to live it, I want to say it! Anyway, one wormridden person in Dorday lives at at 18 St. Spello Street, apartment 37.\"\n\nTarcuna stared. \"How do you know?\"\n\nI told her, \"He's good at finding things. Remember how I was complaining that he knew my hotel room in Dorday?\"\n\n\"Oh. So... do you want revenge on the worms?\"\n\n\"Yes, the worms, I hate the worms more than you can possibly imagine!\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Not more than I can imagine. I was wormridden for much longer than you were, fruity little lizard,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nLlredh stared at her hard. \"Small people rarely insult me and live,\" he said.\n\nTarcuna yawned again. \"Whatever.\"\n\nI stretched a forewing between them. \"Tarcuna, please be polite to Llredh. Llredh, don't you dare kill my rental friend.\"\n\nTarcuna shrugged, and said, \"Sure thing, Spotty.\"\n\nLlredh said, \"Your whore, she is practicing to be a great hoven hero who challenges dragons?\"\n\n\"Just foolhardy. There's a crack in my mind, right where any sort of fear should go,\" added Tarcuna.\n\n\"Which is to say, she's braver than you are,\" I added.\n\n\"Yeah, well, maybe I'll get better someday,\" said Tarcuna. \"If Llredh doesn't kill me first. Anyway, we're talking cyoziworms. You hate them almost as much as I do, right?\"\n\n\"... right...\" Llredh was a bit intimated.\n\n\"But not the wormridden. You were one for a bit. Killing wormridden wouldn't be a very good revenge on the worms, now, would it?\"\n\n\"Not so bad,\" he said.\n\n\"Killing people like you were, like I was?\"\n\nLlredh allowed as how that might be a bit less than perfect.\n\n\"Let's torture the worms,\" said Tarcuna. \"They're not very smart, but they know fear and they understand a little of what the wormridden do. Let's go and find them, starve them maybe, take them out of their hosts, and kill them. And keep the hosts alive. They'd hate that more than anything. You killed yours fast, but Spotty killed mine more slowly. The last thing it dripped in me was how glad it was I was going to die with it.\"\n\n\"Please don't try to lie to a dragon, Tarcuna,\" I said. \"We can tell when you are.\"\n\n\"That was a lie?\"\n\n\"That bit about how glad it was that you would die... not a lie, quite, but shading the truth a lot.\"\n\n\"OK. Here's the exact truth. Bopo sort of clutched at me and tried to take me with it in death. Definitely it was bodily, when it poured out its poison. Maybe it was spiritually too, I don't really know exactly. I'm sure it wanted me dead though. I'm sure it would hate more than anything if it knew I would live.\"\n\n\"There's a truth, fine. I like that revenge,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"I don't. It's a huge amount of work, if we're going to be rescuing hoven after hoven,\" said Arilash. \"We're not here to conquer Hove. We're sure not here to save it.\"\n\nThe Escape\n\nLlredh and Ythac started climbing on each other and otherwise acting like drakes shouldn't. Arilash watched with considerable interest.\n\nTarcuna seemed rather interested too. She's a professional after all, or a soon-to-be-ex-professional. \"Your men have three?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I rather hissed at her. \"I told you all that before.\"\n\n\"So big.\"\n\n\"Not compared to the whole drake,\" I said.\n\n\"That's the small one. The medium and large are even more delightful,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"My hemipenises, they are for Ythac! The watching, the self-pleasure, these things you may do. The touching of me, she is for one drake alone!\" hooted Llredh.\n\n\"I'm leaving,\" I snapped. \"I'll tell the other drakes, and make sure they don't get caught by cyoziworms or something. Tarcuna, are you staying or coming with me?\"\n\n\"I guess I'd better come with you,\" she said. \"You'll take me back to Dorday sometime?\"\n\n\"By the end of our contract, unless we extend it or something,\" I said. \"Arilash, could you put her on my back?\" Arilash did so, not taking her eyes off the drakes.\n\n\"You're awfully serious about the contract,\" she said when we were over the Sea of Diamonds.\n\n\"We keep our agreements,\" I said. \"And promises and wagers and such. We don't make either one very often, not if we're sensible, but only the vilest dragon would break either one.... Of course, half the dragons you've met have been pretty vile, and Arilash isn't much better, but they're not wicked that way. I don't think.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty vile myself. I loved the wrong way a lot, then got a cyoziworm and pretty much lived in a whorehouse and did... everything. Everything that didn't endanger me or Bopo. I didn't care much.\"\n\n\"You had an excuse. Llredh has a hint of an excuse... he can certainly honor the drake who saved him, but romance is disgusting and I'm pretty sure it was going on before this. Ythac has no excuse at all.\" I said.\n\n\"I don't think you quite understand about how we feel when someone frees us from the worm, Spotty. But even before that, I had plenty of choice about Kangbok,\" said Tarcuna. \"She's not just a girl, she's a tappu.\"\n\nI poked at 'tappu' with the Word-Fox, which gave me several definitions. \"What's a tappu? Religion? Fur pattern? Ethnic group?\"\n\n\"All of those. They've got brown spots usually, Kangbok sure did. They worship Drukah, but they consider Bmern to be the Evil Angel, and regularly try exorcisms against him \u2014 can you imagine?\"\n\n\"I can't imagine, I can't understand, and I can't theocept.\"\n\n\"It probably doesn't matter to you anyway. What's theocept?\"\n\n\"A pretty-useless little sense for noticing gods in the area. There aren't any except a dead one Osoth brought with him,\" I said.\n\n\"Anyway, some hovens are vile, by your standards. Some dragons too. We're not doing it to you, just maybe near you,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Well, Osoth had better not be having a secret love with Nrararn, or I'll bite all his wings off,\" I said.\n\n\"What's all this about biting wings?\" she asked.\n\nI was as glad to change the subject as she was. \"Oh, nothing very much. They're easy to heal though. And everybody else says that they hurt a lot when you crunch their bones.\"\n\n\"Oh... how angry do you have to be to bite another dragon?\"\n\n\"It's a polite way to say 'I'm somewhat annoyed with you' to a peer. I wouldn't bite a much bigger dragon \u2014 like Ythac's father Rankotherium \u2014 not without a really good reason.\"\n\n\"Polite, in a practical sort of way. How about biting a hoven?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't do that unless I wanted to kill one.\"\n\n\"As long as you remember the difference between people and dragons, I guess we'll be fine,\" she said.\n\nTelling Osoth\n\nOsoth was sitting on a big pile of rubble, in the midst of a big jungle of overgrown ruined stone buildings. All around him were hovens working in the hot sunlight, some armed with dainty shovels, and some with tiny brooms and dustpans, and some with even less impressive implements of cleaning, or cryptic technological equipment, or even notepads. He knew I was coming from quite some distance of course.\n\n\"Osoth? Is this your territory?\" I yelled to him from a polite distance.\n\n\"Hm? No, no. This is the Prevalian Catacombs. Fascinating place! Come see!\"\n\nI circled around. Hovens looked up at me without much fear \u2014 I guess they had been working for Osoth for a few days and he hadn't been too dangerous. I started to land on a ruined cathedral sort of place. Osoth and some of the hovens jumped up and shouted, \"No, no, not on the Tholos of the Abnegation!\"\n\nI glared at them, and after a bit got permission to land in the street. Several hoven workers helped exhausted Tarcuna off my back, and took her to a tent down the road. I hope they fed her and let her sleep like I told them to, rather than hiring her and making her work anymore.\n\n\"So, O my glorious and dark-scaled fianc\u00e9e, what brings you to this dismal domain of ancient death, wherein lie buried tyrants and theopomps of bygone ages, and where I consult with the Prevalian Archaeological Society to recover them?\" Osoth seemed quite proud of his archeological and necromantic powers, and any other time I would have let him trumpet about them for hours.\n\n\"Horrible news,\" I said, in Grand Draconic.\n\n\"I await it with dread and trepidation!\" said Osoth.\n\nSo I told him everything. He giggled considerably at all the wrong places.\n\n\"So, briefly, Llredh got himself taken over by a mind-worm, Ythac freed him, and now they're a couple?\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"I continue to await the horrible news with dread and trepidation,\" said Osoth.\n\n\"What could be more horrible?\" I asked.\n\nThat is a very unwise question to ask a necromancer. \"Well. He could continue to be trapped by the worm for one thing. Or dead. Or dead and his spirit entrapped in an ivory column in crenzi tasvri. Or he could be alive and infested with a magic-resistant strain of flesh-eating insects. Or, say, it could be one of our scant supply of dragonesses suffering one of those fates. For a few examples.\"\n\n\"No. None of those.\"\n\n\"Instead, Llredh and Ythac seem to have found happiness together. I can but wish them the greatest joy and success in this most unorthodox yet sublime of projects!\"\n\nI tried to bite his wing, but he dodged. \"You're being awfully nice to your rivals. You don't have an alliance with them too, do you?\"\n\n\"Ah! But from this news, they are rivals no longer!\"\n\nI should have understood that before. Of course the drakes won't mind losing a rival. Especially not two higher-ranked rivals.\n\n\"You're disgusting too! Wouldn't you rather win with dignity than have your chances improved like this?\"\n\n\"Win with dignity? I should be delighted, but I cannot expect such a thing. Any sort of victory that is not out-and-out dishonorable on my part would please me... not that I think you would accept me if I were the least bit dishonorable in person! Yet I do not constrain my failing rivals to behave so well.\" said Osoth.\n\n\"I understand. But that didn't win any fianc\u00e9 points,\" I told him.\n\n\"Nrararn will do better when you tell him, I should think.\" said Osoth.\n\nI had a horrible thought. \"You and Nrararn aren't lovers like that... are you?\"\n\n\"No, no, not we!\" He displayed for me the truth of his words. \"Allies, yes. Friends, more or less, yes. Lovers, intimates? We have never been.\"\n\n\"You sound evasive, necromancer,\" I thundered, because he did. \"Do you have any indecent plans?\"\n\nHe breathed a puff of graveyard dust into my face. I choked on it, and had to use the Rose Rescaler. While I did, he answered, \"We have options, not plans as such, which you might not regard as wholly decent. If one of us marries and the other does not, the married one will carefully overlook any adultery of his wife and the other, should such a thing arise.\"\n\n\"I would not do a thing like that!\" I roared.\n\n\"Arilash might, if it came to that,\" said Osoth softly. \"She might prefer it. And Nrararn and I cannot refuse the slightest advantage in our suit for her, no more than for you.\"\n\nWhich was unendurable. \"I'm going to go tell Csirnis. You can tell your proto-cuckold yourself.\"\n\nTelling Csirnis\n\nAccording to Ythac, Csirnis had found a home in the island kingdom of Ze Cheya. I didn't expect his home to actually be a home, just a hotel or something like mine.\n\nI didn't even notice that at first. I was just flying around over the capitol city, looking down at an odd mix of pointy temples with intricate and probably sacred gargoyles and very bland rectangular buildings where hovens actually seemed to live and work. The Zeanese looked up at me of course \u2014 I really ought to remember the Esrret-Sky-Painted \u2014 but they didn't seem terribly worried.\n\nAfter a few minutes, Csirnis boiled out of the base of one of the largest of the pointy temples, a beautiful gilded tower in the middle of a grand park pink with flowers. \"Hallo, my sweet fianc\u00e9e!\" he called out in Grand Draconic. \"Be welcome here in my temporary home!\" So there was no worry about territory, either.\n\nWe circled each other twice, and embraced in the air. That's always worth doing with Csirnis, even if you can't feel it. The lluyew of his scales is delightful. In the streets of the city, dozens of photographers recorded the moment of our meeting.\n\n\"You seem to be doing well, my beautiful prince! And these hovens seem rather more glad of you than the hovens of the cities the rest of us have visited. Have you conquered them?\" I asked.\n\nHe grinned at me, his teeth gleaming in the pink light of Virtuet-inside-Floret. \"Well, not exactly. If I wanted to rule, I would never have left home! I flew here, and made my home in the Golden Pagoda of the Invisible Cloud, down there, in the middle of the night. Then I offered to heal anyone who came there in the first hour after dawn, of anything I can heal. The first day was a bit light, the second not so light, and by the third there were more hovens than I could manage in one hour. I'm up to two hours; I think that's enough. Oh, and the occasional quick trip to someone who's too sick to travel.\"\n\n\"That's very uplifty of you!\" I said. \"The rest of us aren't being so nice.\"\n\n\"I saw a bit of a pitched battle over Port-of-Zom earlier today. It was on all the news stations. Oh, I should add, I'm not looting the city, but the people I heal often bring me gifts. I've got a statue of a dog made of gold with bright ruby eyes that dates back two thousand years. I've got the best television set that Arucu Corporation made last year. And I've got a piece of slightly used butcher paper with a crayon drawing of something that might be me or might be a spider, I'm not sure which, with the words\" THAK YOU DRRON GRAGON \"written on it. And various other treasures.\"\n\n\"Oh, you've got the start of a hoard now! That's wonderful!\"\n\n\"The start of one! I don't know that the drawing will charm anyone but me. In any case \u2014 tell me what happened in Port-of-Zom!\"\n\nSo I did. He listened with intent politeness.\n\n\"Well, I shan't fault Ythac or Llredh for determination,\" he said. \"I am glad that, in the end, nobody was injured or conquered in any lasting way.\"\n\n\"I am too, now that you mention it. I'm not quite sure about the last bit though. It seems to me that Ythac and Llredh were both injured and conquered in a very lasting way. Injured in social status, and conquered by love.\" I said, rather pleased with myself. It is rare to score points chatting with Csirnis.\n\n\"Well, I was thinking of bodily injury and conquest by invader worms. But you are right as well! It will be a challenge for either of them to live down when they wish to put this incident behind them. We must be careful not to mention it after the mating flight. They may well end up married, but if not, it would hurt their chances later on.\"\n\n\"Oh! They were sounding like they meant to marry each other.\"\n\nCsirnis laughed. \"Now that would be rather a challenge. One might imagine them as a pair of old bachelor dragons living not so far from each other and often found in each others' company, about whom might speculate if one were so inclined but, in all politeness, one should not be so inclined. Though Llredh in particular is quite a potent dragon: a better fighter than I am in many ways. He should not abandon his chances at marriage quite so early in the mating flight! Now, are you hungry?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am quite hungry. I've flown quite a ways today, and didn't even get any hoven-sized sandwiches in Esbaril.\"\n\n\"I have no servants or funds per se, but the King of Ze Cheya has proclaimed me an honored guest of the kingdom. A privilege which includes a roaster of oxen! Shall we see how the day's barbeque is doing?... Oh, and I must warn you. Now and then a hoven will come to the barbeque site wishing for healing. There is no obligation to help \u2014 it's after my promissed hours \u2014 but now and then I have been healing them as I ate. It is my appreciation of their Way of Gentleness.\"\n\n\"I've healed hovens a bit too. Mostly with the Arcane Anodyne,\" I said.\n\n\"Ah, the Arcane Anodyne! It is hideous form for a drake to ask presents of his dragoness \u2014\" (And I was so purring to be called his dragoness!) \"\u2014 but I have been using the Great Titan Sanitarium, and the results have not been all that one might hope for,\" he said. \"If you have an hour to spare this afternoon, could you teach me the Arcane Anodyne?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes!\"\n\nSo we flew to the Royal Racecourse, where three oxen were turning on self-turning spits (hovens have machines for everything) and six hovens tended them with sauces and spices. \"Zakuna \u2014 the king \u2014 didn't have a feasting-yard for dragons already prepared,\" said Csirnis. \"But twice a year he holds public races and feasts, and the kitchens here are large.\"\n\n\"Larger than my appetite? Let's find out!\" I said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "One of the oxen was being roasted with salt and garlic and persimmon wine; the second with pungent dried scallops and fermented bean paste; the third with lemons and onions and basil. All three were delicious. The cooks carved small slices for the hoven visitors (of which there were two dozen or so \u2014 I don't know what they were doing), and split the rest between Csirnis and me, and quickly got another three oxen started.\n\n\"You get the best servants, Csirnis. Especially since they're not even yours.\" I told him. He and I were sprawled on the racetrack itself, facing each other. The cooks had given each of us a big square of oiled cloth in lieu of a table, and a fresh white tablecloth on top of it for each new course in lieu of a platter.\n\n\"May I boast a bit?\" asked Csirnis.\n\n\"Please do!\" I took the left foreleg of the scallop-and-bean-paste ox to gnaw on while he talked. One of the cooks trotted under my chin, hooves a-clop on the paved track, and poured a big ladleful of sauce on the bone. All the other cooks applauded their colleague's bravery and punctilio. \"You do have them well-trained.\"\n\n\"Well, Zakuna is rather pleased that I came to visit,\" said Csirnis. \"His grandson and fourth-in-line for the throne was dying of cancer of the heart. The death-watch hadn't quite started, but any week now. All the local papers were full of preemptive mourning. So I flew in, sat in front of the Golden Pagoda, and offered to heal anyone who came in the next hour. A few burns and cuts, and the stinkiest upset stomach you could ever imagine on a hoven, and they believed me. So Prince Ayave got driven up in the royal ambulance, and walked up to me \u2014 right between my forelegs \u2014 and politely welcomed me to his grandfather's country. So I healed him too \u2014 three casts of the Great Titan Sanitarium. That made a bit of an impression on Zakuna. On the whole country, really.\"\n\n\"Very convenient,\" I said, crunching my delicious saucy bone.\n\n\"I asked Ythac to find me a place with a sick ruler. That was a quarter of the way across the world, so I asked for a sick member of the family. This sounded like a good choice.\"\n\n\"You asked Ythac? The one who was going to Seek?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not a strategically superb move, truly! I did not expect to be hidden for very long, but Ythac was in no hurry. Or, I suppose, he was distracted by the troubles of Llredh.\"\n\nA pair of hovens wheeled a child wrapped in blankets across the field. \"O gentle dragon Cisirinis, O gentle dragon Cisirinis, please be so generous as to heal my daughter! She is dying from the same cancer that Prince Ayave was dying of!\"\n\nCsirnis hesitated a second. I raised my head. \"May I do it, Csirnis? I've not taught you the Arcane Anodyne yet.\" He spread his wings a bit and beamed at me. Which was more delicious than any of the oxen, really.\n\nThe child struggled in her wheelchair, trying to run away. She was only a few years old, and not so brave as her prince. I touched her with my tongue, and cast. The Arcane Anodyne filled her up and flooded out. Her fur brightened a bit, and she instantly felt well enough to tumble out of the chair and dash across the racetrack crying and screaming from fear. Her mother (one presumes) ran after her, calling for her to stop, and shouting that I would not eat her.\n\nHer father (one presumes) threw himself on the racetrack in front of me, babbling incoherent thanks. I patted him with a forepaw, spattering him with delicious sauce.\n\n\"Are you going to eat him now?\" asked Csirnis in Grand Draconic. \"Or just marinating him for later?\"\n\nSo I belched a tiny scallop-and-bean-paste flavored lightning bolt at Csirnis. The lightning didn't much reach him, but the belch certainly did. He squeaked nicely, \"Hey! I only marginally deserved that!\" The hoven ran off, wailing.\n\nCsirnis and I swatted at each other a bit. He laughs like golden temple bells ringing, when he relaxes enough to laugh.\n\nThen Prince Ayave came trotting up, all worried and fretful. Csirnis introduced me as his fianc\u00e9e, and explained that we were just playing. Ayave solemnly welcomed me to Ze Cheya, and offered me the Pagoda of Elephants to stay in.\n\n\"It's not decent for the Zeanese to couple before marriage,\" said Csirnis in Grand Draconic. \"The Way of Gentleness doesn't include that kind of gentleness. Or maybe they're rough when they couple, I haven't asked. So, separate pagodas for us.\"\n\n\"What an odd custom. How do you know you'll like your spouse, if you haven't mated beforehand? What if he turns out to be, well, like Ythac?\"\n\n\"I don't fully understand hovens myself! Their ways are strange and exotic. And the Zeanese Way of Gentleness is one of the stranger religions, lacking real gods and all.\" said Csirnis. \"Fortunately I don't need to understand very much.\"\n\n\"May I stay with you for a day or two? This seems like a very nice place, and I've done enough rampaging to last me for at least, oh, through tomorrow lunchtime.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Of course you may \u2014 did not the prince give you a pagoda? This is his territory, not mine. But in case that was no joke, please try not to destroy much here. It is a very pleasant place.\"\n\n\"I'll be good! And, if you don't mind, I'll obey the local customs about mating,\" I said.\n\n\"That will make it easier not to destroy the place, certainly!\" Which was only a little bit of a tease, the way he said it.\n\nCoda: Ze Cheya\n\nZe Cheya is a smallish and mostly irrelevant country. It's an archipelago, naturally fortified by rings of ancient coral reefs. They don't keep it safe anymore, not from zeppelins and jet planes, much less dragons. But they used to. Its big neighbor Damma couldn't send a huge overwhelming armada to conquer it, they way that Damma did to three dozen other little countries. So the three dozen other little countries are now happy (or maybe unhappy) little states in one of Hove's great regional powers. Ze Cheya is a quiet, poor, unimportant, and generally backwards country. Or mostly poor. Now that it's actually reasonably easy to get to, lots of tourists from Damma and Trest and other rich places come there to enjoy the quaint exotic beauty of Ze Cheya.\n\nThen they're disappointed, because the capital (also called Ze Cheya) isn't all that quaint or exotic or beautiful. Not everywhere, at least \u2014 the temples and palaces are wonderful. But the city itself is very urban, full of tall boring rectangular apartment buildings and tall boring rectangular office buildings. Like Port-of-Zom or Tublier, or the outskirts of Dorday where the tourists don't go because it's too boring. Except Ze Cheya (the city) has to fit on a small island, so they built taller and even more boring buildings.\n\nThe rest of Ze Cheya (the archipelago) is pretty nice. Csirnis and I flew over to, um, I don't want to wake Csirnis up to ask him what that island was called. Which is a nice place to the old castles of the bandit princes (Ze Cheya used to be a pretty rough place), and the not-so-old pagodas of the Way of Gentleness monks (Ze Cheya has an indigenous pacifistic religion). And lots of terraced hill farms that look the way they did two gross years ago. Superficially! They've mostly got radios or televisions hidden inside of big stocky black wood armoires. So they mostly know that the four-winged beautiful prince flying overhead is friendly, and easy to distract with \"Please heal my baby! Please heal my arthritis! Please heal my baby's arthritis!\"\n\nSo a dozen times I told the story about healing Churdle and getting genuine Churry City Chili and troublecakes. Which is a fun way to ask for tastes of the local cuisine! The farm's cook would usually bristle herself up and say, \"Well! Churry City Chili is all very well, but have you tasted lampkyos with egg sambar?\" Or whatever their speciality is.\n\nLampkyos are small squids stuffed with spiced grain, and steamed, and served with a sauce that's about 11/12 ground chilis and 11/12 ground boiled eggs. I know the arithmetic doesn't work out right, but if you taste it, you'll understand. They're too spicy for arithmetic.\n\nAnyway, we tasted lampkyos with egg sambar, and stuffed drum (a squash, not a musical instrument), and candlenut curry, and candied sirenva fruits, and all sorts of rural Ze Cheyan specialties. And left a trail of healed farmers in our wake!\n\nAnd that sounds like less fun than it was. I'm going to give Csirnis five more fianc\u00e9 points.\n\nOh, time for a fret. Csirnis is delicious, but he's not really being a good dragon. I can't imagine how we could raise a dragonet the least bit properly, if this is how he'd want to live."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Council of War (Day 66)\n\nWe gathered in Ze Cheya over the next three days, all nine of us. Arilash zoomed with travel magic, gathering Osoth and Greshthanu and not Tultamaan the first day, Nrararn the second day, and Llredh and Ythac (who had evidently needed some privacy) the third day. Tultamaan must have offended her somehow \u2014 I cannot possibly imagine how \u2014 and she didn't give him a travel spell, and he had to fly there with only the Scratch-the-Sky for extra speed, so he got here late today.\n\nFinally it was nightfall in Ze Cheya. We gathered in a rough circle on the Royal Racecourse, where we had made the cooks work very hard in the day and leave the feast for us. No hovens around. (Not even Tarcuna, who had gotten left in the Prevalian Catacombs excavation site. I was definitely not getting my money's worth of her tour guide skills.)\n\nYthac stepped into the center of the circle and spread his wings. \"Usually it's the dragoness who does this, and usually at the end of the mating flight, but I seem to be making a life of doing everything the wrong way 'round. You know it already though. Llredh and I have chosen each other. As mates, I mean.\"\n\n\"I cannot see that this announcement will have any Appreciable Effect,\" said Tultamaan. \"This mating flight is already in an Extraordinarily Miserable State. Why not a few more Perversions and Improprieties? There are only so many hours in a day in which we can be Mocked by More Proper Dragons when we return to our home world. They will have to eat and sleep, after all.\"\n\n\"Your forewings! After more such comments, I will break them, they will be no more useful than your forelegs!\" said Llredh with a snarl.\n\n\"They will be Healable. Unlike the social damage which will accrue to me for having been Associated with such a mating flight as This,\" said Tultamaan, and took a bite of lemon ox.\n\n\"Oh, quite true. Half the drakes competing as dragonesses, and still nobody will copulate with you.\" said Greshthanu. \"Quite impossible to ever live down.\"\n\n\"Half? Who are the other two?\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"You and Osoth should know!\" hissed Greshthanu, pointing at Osoth with a neatly-gnawed legbone.\n\n\"We're competing for dragonesses, not as them,\" said Nrararn, revealing the truth of his words. \"In case there's the least bit of doubt about that.\"\n\n\"Though we have nothing but the highest esteem for our more spiritually epicene and monoclinous erstwhile rivals,\" said Osoth, smoothly if incomprehensibly. \"We applaud their bravery in pursuit of their true and essential character, and we offer our most cogent benedictions for the upcoming nuptials, or the invert simulacrum thereof.\"\n\n\"He said 'yes',\" I said. \"Or maybe 'no'.\"\n\n\"He said 'Glad they're out of the way,' is what he said,\" hissed Arilash.\n\nOsoth arched his head up. \"Nothing so simple and crude as that! I also wished that they would be so happy being out of our way that they would stay out of our way!\"\n\n\"From the first few days, it looks promising,\" said Ythac. He and Llredh grinned at each other and coiled their tailtips together. Still disgusting.\n\n\"I trust that you will take an Extended Honeymoon? I understand that the Desert of Vhanff is a Perfectly Splendid Resort for the most Disreputable Sort of hovens. And dragons of your Unnatural Tastes should find no trouble being a pair of hovens for some great length of time to fully enjoy all Sorts of Unmentionable Things,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Your trust, she is misplaced. Seek her in the place you have lost your manners, your courage, your honor, your forelimbs.\" said Llredh. \"Of those, surely your forelimbs will be the first you find again!\"\n\nTultamaan reared his head back to breathe at Llredh. Csirnis stuck a wing in front of Tultamaan's face. \"No fighting, Tultamaan, Llredh! You may duel later when important matters have been settled, far over the city where it is safe for the hovens who are our hosts. But remember, Tultamaan, that Llredh is no longer your rival. He is, for all practical purposes, a married drake, and your senior.\" Tultamaan crouched before the prince's glory, and did not strike.\n\n\"Also he is, for all practical purposes, seven times the warrior you'll ever be. Actually, no, we weren't going to leave the rest of you yet. Unless you drive us out, of course,\" said Ythac, glancing at me.\n\n\"I'm not going to,\" I said, while not eating any ox because I was too upset.\n\n\"I'm glad to hear that,\" said Ythac, sounding rather sincere.\n\n\"I'm going to ruin your wings. Once. Then call us even,\" I said. It seemed fair to me.\n\n\"Thank you for letting me off so lightly,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\n\"Touching little scene, that,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"But there is something I would like to ask of you \u2014 all of you,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I don't know that you're exactly in a position to extract favors from us,\" I said.\n\nYthac spread his wings and said quietly, \"I'm not demanding anything more than a minute or two to ask a favor, and you can refuse the favor. Llredh and I have a particular enemy on Hove, and we would like your assistance dealing with it.\"\n\n\"You wish us to assault your Ignoble and Disgusting Tendencies? We should be Delighted. What weapon works best on such things? Breath? Teeth?\" said Tultamaan, snorting frost.\n\n\"Foreclaws,\" snapped Llredh. The two of them hissed at each other until Csirnis glared at them.\n\n\"Cyoziworms, actually. You all know about them?\" Everyone did, by this point. Nobody had worn anything but a dragon shape since they had heard, in fact. Getting conquered by a worm after what we know would be embarrassing beyond words, and probably inconvenient beyond deeds as well.\n\n\"Horrible things,\" I said, and meant it.\n\n\"Llredh and I would like to destroy the entire species,\" said Ythac quietly.\n\n\"A worthy cause,\" said Csirnis. \"I shall be glad to help.\"\n\n\"A total distraction,\" said Arilash. I think they'd told her about it in advance; she had her speech prepared. \"Yes, they're horrible. Yes, they're a wicked minor parasite on the hovens. Yes, Llredh has every reason to take whatever revenge on them he wants, and Ythac to help him. But \u2014 they're not intelligent, they're not organized. They're scattered all over Hove. Nine of us could learn the best finding spells, and spend all our time flying around killing them, and they'd reproduce faster than we could kill them. They're not exactly dangerous to us if we're paying any attention, and there's absolutely no glory to be gained for killing one, and no loot either. Llredh, Ythac, you have my utter best wishes in your marriage or whatever you're going to call it, never doubt that. But I won't go hunting cyoziworms for you. And if any of my pretty drakes \u2014 my remaining pretty drakes \u2014 do it, I won't count it as anything more than it is. I'm not going to give extra credit for killing them, I mean. If you do something brave or wealthsome while you're doing it, it's still brave or wealthsome. But spending time away from me, hunting cyoziworms, isn't going to count in your favor.\"\n\n\"They're my pretty drakes too,\" I said. \"It will count for them in my favor.\"\n\nArilash glared at me. \"Jyothky, you're being stupid. Suppose your husband spends three years of the mating flight hunting worms. That's a quarter less of a hoard, and not even any good stories about what he did in that time. Your parents will not be impressed. Nobody will. And it's not like much else you do impresses anyone that much anyway.\"\n\n\"Taking a deeply moral position which works to one's practical disadvantage doesn't impress you, Arilash? A pity. It impresses me. I could do worse than marry Jyothky,\" said Csirnis. His words tasted like hot spiced fat to me; I could have married him right then.\n\n\"That's ridiculous, Csirnis!\" hooted Arilash. \"You can do better than Jyothky!\"\n\n\"We would be honorable paupers together. We and our outcast friends,\" said Csirnis. And that sort of returned me to Hove, or Mhel maybe. To my senses, I mean. He's beautiful and glorious, but he's crazy, and he has every sort of contempt for basic draconic society. How could I live with that?\n\n\"Csirnis, listen to me. We should have a single standard for the mating flight. It is not fair to the drakes otherwise. You must be able to compete against each other, knowing roughly how you will be judged. Beauty, prowess in battle, prowess in love, hoard \u2014 all these are clear enough. Squashing annoying little worms \u2014 not so clear. Let us have one standard for the whole flight,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Will you agree to abide by our one standard, even if it is killing worms?\" asked Csirnis.\n\nArilash said, \"How about this. We shall have a contest, all who agree with you against all who agree with me. If my side prevails, helping Llredh squish worms counts for nothing. I'll be generous here: brave deeds done while doing so count extra. If your side prevails, drakes can spend a third of their time hunting worms and that counts a lot for Jyothky and me both. But you'll be generous here: extend the mating flight by half so that everyone can get a good hoard anyway.\"\n\nI peered at her. \"It sounds like either way, both sides get something of what they wanted.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Arilash. \"That's my kind of dominance contest.\"\n\n\"Six more years of being Ignored by Nubile Dragonesses,\" said Tultamaan. \"I know which side I shall be upon.\"\n\n\"Six more years of a tough mating flight,\" said Nrararn. \"I, too, know which side I shall be upon. Jyothky, you have my apologies, but fighting worms doesn't sound very appealing to me.\"\n\n\"You don't have to, either way,\" I hissed. \"You can, is all.\"\n\n\"Well, I probably won't,\" said Nrararn."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "The sides were obvious. Csirnis, Llredh, Ythac, and me wanting to fight the worms. Arilash, Greshthanu, Osoth, Nrararn, and Tultamaan not wanting to. This fight would be a sort of nine-dragon Krage's Glory: after seven hits, a dragon will drop out of the fight, and the side with any dragons left at the end wins. We thought that was pretty fair.\n\n\"The victory, already she is ours,\" said Llredh. \"The best fighter, the second-best fighter, those are on our side. My husband, he is neither best nor second-best, his top skills are elsewhere, but Osoth cannot stand against him, Nrararn cannot stand against him, Tultamaan will soil himself against him. Jyothky, her breath is mighty, she is probably a match for Osoth or Nrararn.\"\n\nGreshthanu mused, \"But we're still a whole dragon up. Arilash plus Tultamaan plus me can probably beat Csirnis plus Llredh. Osoth and Nrararn are kind of evenly matched against Ythac and Jyothky... maybe a bit overmatched, but whoever's left after three of us take care of Csirnis and Llredh will make up the difference.\"\n\n\"Your theory, she is a lying puppet of illusion!\" said Llredh with a snort. \"Ythac, he has depths you know nothing of!\"\n\n\"I certainly haven't put bits of myself as deeply into him as you have!\" said Greshthanu with a giggle.\n\n\"Depths of powerful! Your defeat by us, she will be total and ignominious,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"We shall all contend with the bravery and passion of the noblest dragons,\" said Csirnis. \"Let our battle be the stuff of legends and heroic epics, to be remembered a grand of years!\"\n\nUnfortunately, Csirnis was right in that.\n\nHove's Finest Hour\n\nOur side flew off to the east (the direction that the suns come from), and Arilash's side off to the west. \"We're outnumbered,\" said Ythac. \"Let's even that up, to start with. Let's start by all attacking Greshthanu. It'll be a lot easier with him out of the way.\"\n\n\"Not Arilash?\" I said.\n\n\"Greshthanu is the more dangerous,\" said Csirnis. \"And drakes will have fewer compunctions about being fierce to other drakes.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I will, actually,\" said Ythac. \"I'm not used to being... like I am. I mean about drakes and dragonesses. I mean, I am used to it, I've always been, but not used to saying it or even really letting myself think it.\"\n\n\"Love? You are babbling,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Oh, yes, I am, aren't I? What I mean is, I'm happy with either target first.\"\n\nLlredh said, \"Greshthanu, he shall fail first.\"\n\nSo much for feminine wiles. We flew to, oh, a mile and a half in the sky, so we'd have room to fall and catch ourselves or each other if we needed. Right over Ze Cheya.\n\nThe other side came towards us in a very classic pyramid shape, with Greshthanu conveniently at the point. We flew towards them in a square, with Llredh over Ythac and Csirnis over me. I breathed lightning at them from afar, and Nrararn at us, but everyone was expecting it and avoided it well enough.\n\nWe came together fiercely. All four of us did our best to strike at Greshthanu at the same time. So Csirnis and Greshthanu sank their fangs into each others' necks. Llredh raked at Greshthanu's left wings, and Ythac at his belly, while Arilash and Osoth harried them as best they could. I kind of landed on Greshthanu's back, mostly to get out of the air so that Nrararn's sylphs couldn't foul my wings. Tultamaan belched ice at Llredh, and probably got in Greshthanu's way as much as anything, or even Arilash's.\n\nMy drakes did various battleish things that I mostly didn't see and haven't asked about. My head was sort of trapped under Greshthanu's right wings, but pointed at him. I breathed a tight drillsome jet of fire into Greshthanu's ribs, and then a tight needle of ice. Greshthanu growled, and set his the Small Wall very specifically against lightning coming at his side. So I thumped on his defensive spells with my v\u00f4, which is usually not worth doing but seemed to make sense here, and left them full of holes.\n\nThen the whole sky howled with danger, terrible danger, dragon-breaking danger.\n\nWe were all too tangled up in combat to do much about it, and we didn't have much time to think and didn't know what the danger was. I know I breathed my harshest lightning at Greshthanu then, which was utterly the wrong thing to do.\n\nAnd the terrible purple rays from the region of Muld in Trest fell upon us, the great Trestean weapons that had threatened all their world. My Hoplonton could not hold them all off, and my v\u00f4 crisped and scorched under their force, but my body was untouched. I could see a bit of Arilash, with just a Small Wall. She didn't have the strength in her v\u00f4 to block them from her, and the tan scales were ripped from her back, and fell, bloody, towards Ze Cheya beneath us. She roared in pain and anger. Six drakes were similarly wounded, and roared their answers to her in kind. I roared too, in anger.\n\nGreshthanu... Greshthanu didn't have much of his Small Wall left, after I had been breaking it so much, and what he had was tilted against lightning, giving him little enough protection against anything else. And Csirnis and Llredh and Ythac had been attacking him with all their force too.\n\nGreshthanu's body was ripped apart by the twistor beams. It fell apart in seven pieces, spraying blood and bile and ice and bone. There is no healing spell good enough for that, none enough for even a twelfth part of his injuries.\n\nThe eight of us stared aghast. Our fianc\u00e9, our companion and friend and gadfly \u2014 a whole dragon \u2014 slain by the powers of hovens? We keened in our fury and, yes, our fear.\n\nAnd the sky started to scream danger again.\n\n\"Scatter, out of the way!\" I called out. \"They will strike again soon! Arilash, you must travel now!\" My rival had the weakest sort of protections left, and no dangersense. Another great twistor assault might have injured or killed her.\n\nWe flew this way and that, and defended ourselves as best we could. Healing spells, travel spells to get out of the way, apotropaics for those whose protections had been weakened in the fight...\n\nThe second and third barrage of the Peace Everywhere Array came from Trest in the sky, hitting at where we had been.\n\nWe weren't there, though.\n\nThe capitol of Ze Cheya was next in line. There was nothing that could have protected it from the power of Trest. The twistors carved vast arcs of destruction in the crowded streets, and ripped the ancient temples out of the ground and flung them in a blind cyclopean bombardment across the city that had been wholly innocent, and wholly generous, and wholly beautiful. In retrospect at least.\n\nThe Magic Trumpet of Dorday's headline that day called it \"Hove's Finest Hour.\" And said that all of us had been killed.\n\nRuins\n\nThe main tower of Ze Cheya's national radio station had been smashed, but some of the lesser stations had survived. They somehow caught the words of Archconsul Shuvanne of Trest, and broadcast them.\n\nFor some weeks, there have been reports of terrible monsters, destroying and fornicating and ravaging, probably released from the deadliest depths of Garchune by the apostates and anti-consulars who still remain in Ghemelia. We have been monitoring the situation as the beasts increased the range and ferocity of their devastations. Starting with Trestean army outposts in Ghemelia, and testing their weaponry by melting parts of the Khamrou mountains. Increasing to holy sites like the Kyongsy Temple outside of Trest. Then to actual attacks within Trest itself, in Dorday and Churry City. Finally they revealed the fullness of their destructive intentions, and were only prevented from utterly obliterating Port-of-Zom by the most extreme efforts and severe sacrifices of the Vlechinse army and air force.\n\nIn solidarity with decent and orthodox people everywhere, with our cousins the Vlechinse, and in protection of our own interests, I ordered the Peace Everywhere Array to strike at the monsters the next time they were gathered in a single place. Earlier today, they gathered in the air over Ze Cheya. The King of Ze Cheya struck a diabolical alliance with the infernal beasts. They were allowed to range freely in his country, choosing their own victims to devour or worse among his citizens. In exchange they supported his own non-consular regime and started preparing to assault the peace-loving people of the world.\n\nIntelligence reports confirm that they were planning to attack Trest. General Marzoni, in charge of the Peace Everywhere Array, notified me and asked for my recommendation. I ordered him to eliminate the monsters.\n\nThree full barrages of fifteen projectors each were used in the attack, separated by thirty seconds. I firmly believe that the monsters were entirely destroyed by Trest's attack. Trest's military, by the grace of Drukah and Bmern, is superior to any monsters from Garchune.\n\nIn any operation of this nature, some civilian casualties are inevitable. The Trestean government officially regrets any such. However, the final responsibility for these casualties belongs to the King of Ze Cheya for making common cause with demons.\n\nWe trust that the decent people of Hove will join us in our applause and enthusiastic support for the Peace Everywhere Array and the Trestean military.\n\nGood night, and may Drukah and Bmern bless and protect all people.\n\nWe listened to this as we worked under the terrible cloud. By 'we' I mean eight dragons and many thousands of hovens. By 'terrible cloud' I mean a huge black stormcloud that Nrararn and Osoth had put together, obscuring Ze Cheya from above. The Zeanese Minister of Defense was pretty sure that the Peace Everywhere Array could fire through clouds, but it couldn't see to choose its targets. We (just dragons) wore the Esrret-Sky-Painted and the Hoplonton, in case.\n\nAnd by 'worked' I mean... well, whatever needed to be done that could be done. Lots couldn't be. My first task was the Mana Masala apartment complex, I picked just the nearest ruined building that I saw really. The twistor ray had hit one of its four towers, Tower Two. That one was simply gone, ripped and spun apart (just like Greshthanu my fianc\u00e9, (I was cool and clear-headed and focussed, because that's how dragons are when there's danger. I would think about him and mourn him when the emergency is over)). Its beams and girders and hovens and furniture had become missiles, slammed through the other buildings with fearsome force. There was nothing to do for anyone who had been in that building: only by scent could we tell which puddle had been a hoven and which had been a particularly large dog.\n\nBut in the other buildings, there was plenty to do. Seven huge boulders of masonry had been flung entirely through Tower Three, and a thousand smaller missiles as well. I levitated and peeked into the topmost hole, where tenasense said that the roof would soon fall in, and plucked out a handful of screaming crying hovens and carried them to the ground. They begged me to go look for their two younger children, so I did. One of them was cut in half by an oven door from Tower Two. The other had only had an arm and a leg crushed. I scooped them both up and flew them to the rest of their family, and put the Arcane Anodyne and the slow healing spells into the one that still lived.\n\nAnd that was the first of a hundred and sixty apartments in the first of three buildings near the first of dozens and dozens that the twistor rays had struck. There really was plenty to do.\n\nThe first hour: Uncovering seventy-three dead hovens of an assortment of ages, mostly crushed, but three of them burnt by fires from the very dangerous and incendiary liquid they use to fuel their stoves. Healing another thirty-one hovens. Refusing to heal another eighteen: fifteen who weren't that badly hurt and I needed to track down others, three with back injuries that I couldn't do anything quick about no matter how much I sympathized, who didn't believe me when I told them the first time about the slow healing spells in them. Picking another ninety-something out of the building before it fell down. Assaulting with ice breath (me) and a localized thunderstorm (Nrararn) on a huge blue-white fire where a tree had been flung through a big tank of that very dangerous and incendiary liquid.\n\nA quick visit by King Zakuna. His guards wouldn't let him dig people out of the ruins and the rubble with his own hands, like he wanted. But they let him drive around the city, surveying the damage, offering water and encouragement to the hovens who were working. I gave him a quick sad look when he drove to Maya Masala Tower Four, which had fallen down while I was dealing with that fire. I was digging in the rubble with my forepaws like a huge dog, to where someone was calling for help.\n\n\"Jyothoky! We of Ze Cheya grieve that our hospitality and protection for our honored guests has become inadequate,\" said the king.\n\n\"You're sending us off? We're going to leave soon anyway. We've got a bit of revenge to attend to. But you're right, your city is in jeopardy as long as we remain here.\"\n\n\"No, no, nothing of the sort!\" called the king. \"You are not our enemy. You have brought grace and healing.\" (I took a moment to be so impressed with Csirnis for charming Ze Cheya) \"To us, I mean. I do not know the truth of what you have brought elsewhere.\" (I took a moment to be so ashamed with Llredh and myself for blasting Port-of-Zom.) \"We regret that the peace and cooperation that has been the hallmark of your visit in Ze Cheya has not prevailed on your entire visit to Hove, and that other nations have chosen to reply with great violence.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry too,\" I said. \"They should have waited 'til we went back to Ghemelia. One moment...\" I prised a huge sheet of building-stone up, revealing four and a half hovens who had been trapped under it. The friable, artificial, overstressed stone crumbled in my forepaws, and chunks of it fell upon the hovens and crushed them. \"Oh, no!\" I got busy with the Arcane Anodyne and digging, and got three of them out alive.\n\nThe king and his guards scrambled out of the limousine. The guards knew medicine. Zakuna threw them his formal jacket, and they ripped it up for bandages. Zakuna scrabbled in the wreckage for a pair of straight sticks, and his guards made them into a splint. Zakuna held the hands of the two daughters while I dug the corpse of their father up, and he started the Zeanese prayer for the dead. I couldn't help with that.\n\nI smelled at the corpse, though. He was the brave cook who had given me an extra ladleful of sauce.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I'm going to keep...\" I looked at the father, the cook, who had been alive before the stone had crumbled and fallen on him, whom I might have fought to defend, and never would have killed. I couldn't think of any good way to end the sentence, I couldn't say 'saving people' when I had just fumbled and killed.\n\n(Afterwards \u2014 I'm not even sure if I should count him as a kill or not. Accidental if at all, of course. Would the building-rock have broken on its own? Maybe \u2014 it was awfully fragile. Would they have been rescued before some of them died? Maybe \u2014 they were badly hurt before I got there, and hoven ears wouldn't have heard them to rescue them. Actually I think I won't be counting kills at all today, and not for a while. Even if Dad knows exactly how many of what species he's killed in his whole life, doesn't mean I have to know or care.)\n\nAnd the rest of the day went like that, only mostly with fewer kings and nobody else I knew. Curset swallowed Virtuet, and we labored. Curset relinquished Virtuet, and we labored. The Zeanese brought machines and engines from elsewhere on the island, big scoops to dig and grapples to lift. Many, many hovens came, bringing food and medicine, clothes and blankets, offers of hospitality and refuge. Damma sent supplies and equipment, despite their frequent hostility to Ze Cheya.\n\nVirtuet went behind the Godaxle, leaving the world dim and pink and green. Hovens brought out lamps, bright without fuel, and kept hunting for survivors, though the hunting was getting scanty. We needed no such lamps, and we searched and dug and healed and repaired and, for Csirnis and I and a few others, apologized.\n\nVirtuet came out from behind the Godaxle, and we labored more. Three airplanes with the dagger-and-coin sigil of Trest roared out from Nrararn's cloud, and we felt their eyes upon us. I touched one of them with lightning, and its engines died and it glided. The other two arced upwards, into the cloud, and escaped. We were too tired to give them chase.\n\nBut Zeanese soldiers ran to the fallen plane, and took the pilot and the co-pilot prisoner, and asked them a few quick questions. When they heard the answers, they sent messengers to the king and to all the dragons, saying, \"Trest and the armies of Trest now know that many dragons survived.\"\n\nWe could stay no longer. Trest would surely attack, sooner or later. Ze Cheya did not deserve what had happened to them already. We would not subject them to any more: certainly we would not risk another massacre of hovens to help save a few more. We took Greshthanu's body. Osoth called up the ghosts of great birds of forgotten ages, and Arilash gave them a dragon's semblance, and we sent them flying slowly across the Sayanamma Sea. Then we hid ourselves with other illusions, and Arilash gave us spells for speed, and we raced across in a different direction to hide in the mountains of Damma. To sleep \u2014 and oh, we needed sleep! \u2014 and, when we woke, to plan our vengeance."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Peace Everywhere (Day 68)\n\nPeaceful Sleep\n\n\"No, I'm not going to wake her up. You wake her up if you want her awake,\" hissed Nrararn.\n\n\"\u0147\u1eabs\u015bu\u00f2, M\u1ea9\u015d\u015bu\u00f2\" I mumbled. \"I'm not asleep, I'm awake.\" I was, too, obviously. Nobody speaks Grand Draconic in their sleep. Every dragonet explains this to their parents on many mornings.\n\n\"Arilash isn't,\" said Nrararn. \"Osoth wants the Melismatic Tempest. He left some things in some catacombs.\"\n\n\"Oh! I left some things in some catacombs too!\"\n\nOsoth peered at me over Nrararn's wings. \"Subtle dragoness, to conceal your riches in my own domain of research! Beware, beware \u2014 it is not mine alone, a veritable horde of petty archaeologists and overzealous, underskilled seminarians seek the origins of their religion in the corpses of its martyrs. They will take your treasures for their own, if they find them!\"\n\n\"Just Tarcuna,\" I said. \"We'll probably want her soon.\"\n\n\"Subcontractest thou thy mating duties to thine whore?\" hissed Osoth, and giggled.\n\nI snapped at his wing, and missed. \"No, no. She studied weapons engineering. In Trest.\"\n\n\"A course of studies which inevitably leads to whoredom, in one form or another!\" chirped Osoth, drawing back.\n\n\"Well, if you're stolen by a cyoziworm, it might,\" I said. \"Anyway, I get to wake Arilash up. Where is she, anyway?\"\n\nShe was curled up with, and rather stuck to, Csirnis. Obviously they had been up a bit after I had gone to sleep. This made me jealous, so I woke them both up with a sharp gust of ice breath.\n\nTried to, rather. Csirnis awoke instantly \u2014 his dangersense is as good as mine \u2014 and managed to interpose himself between my breath and my rival. \"Oh, good morning, Jyothky. I'm not sure that today is quite the best time for dominance contests. And I'm not quite sure that they really count quite as much if your opponent is fast asleep.\"\n\n\"Good morning, Csirnis! I was trying to wake her up, not have a contest. Osoth and I need some travel spells.\"\n\n\"Ice breath might be a bit much for your first alarm,\" said Csirnis, as he healed himself.\n\n\"A screaming argument didn't wake her! Or you, either,\" I said.\n\n\"Two of them, actually,\" noted Nrararn.\n\nCsirnis lowered his wings. \"You could have just nipped her a bit.\"\n\nI made sure my illusion spells were strong, and lied, \"That never works on me. I forgot it'd work for other people.\"\n\nCsirnis regarded me closely. \"Naturally you are unused to the basic properties of the people who surround you.\"\n\n\"Stop teasing me, Csirnis. Just wake Arilash up, will you?\"\n\n\"I'm not asleep, I'm awake,\" mumbled Arilash in Grand Draconic.\n\nSo we got our the Melismatic Tempests, Osoth and I, and wrapped ourselves in many illusions, and headed off to another continent, trailing a wide wake of thorny music.\n\nLove and Peace\n\nWe landed at the Prevalian Catacombs. The archaeologists swarmed around Osoth, glad that he had not been slaughtered in Ze Cheya, hoping that he was back to invoke the spirit of this or that mummy who might (if yesterday's discoveries are to be interpreted cleverly) have been St. Ovolo in life.\n\nOsoth scattered them. \"Not for long shall I linger; soon my wings shall carry me hence. Nor should you wish for me to stay. The hand that turned the Peace Everywhere Array against us at Ze Cheya might well turn it towards us at the Prevalian Tombs. And that would destroy all, beyond any hope of archaeology to recover. For the moment, bring me the mask and the sceptre which were my prizes \u2014 you have photographed them fully, have you not? \u2014 and bring my sweet fianc\u00e9e her sweet concubine.\"\n\nMask, sceptre, and concubine were duly acquired. The mask and sceptre were old and grotty and dusty, not very beautiful and not magical at all. I hope they've got some sort of historic interest, or they're pretty mediocre treasure.\n\nThe concubine was yawning, rubbing her eyes, and dressed in loose blue pants and an oversized baggy shirt that didn't flatter her all that much. \"Hi, Spotty,\" she said. \"You survived somehow, I guess.\"\n\n\"Most of us did. Greshthanu died, though... we'll talk more about that in the air.\"\n\n\"Oh? Where are we going? And are we going to be blasted by the Peace Everywhere Array while we're flying?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure where, I'll ask Ythac after we've started flying. And we didn't get shot at on the way here. I think our aerial invisibility spells are good enough,\" I said. \"How have you been enjoying yourself?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you that after we've started flying,\" she said with a bit of a smile.\n\nHalf or seven-twelfths of an hour later, Tarcuna was roped securely to my back, and we were flying off to, as it happened, our original camp in Ghemelia. The drakes wanted to pick up whatever they had managed to hoard there. Drakes have a great deal of trouble giving up anything they've collected, even if it's not very much and getting it back is some risk.\n\n\"Well, that was a nice little vacation. Kind of odd for a sex worker to not have sex on her job, but have some on the vacation!\"\n\n\"Oh? What happened?\" I asked.\n\n\"... I... suppose I should have asked your permission, shouldn't I have done? Since you've got my privates rented. But you weren't using 'em, nor the rest of me,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"I don't mind. Just tell me what happened,\" I said. I didn't mind, after a bit of thought. Tarcuna had seemed a touch obsessed with me since I fixed her. Bad enough that she's having a passion with another female \u2014 actually I do mind some \u2014 but at least that female is not me.\n\n\"Oh, I had a lightning-fast affair with Macra,\" she said. \"Smiles across the room to tongues between the legs in ten minutes flat.\"\n\n\"Macra the Ozgrani seminary student, or Macra the wife of Director Viliwr?\" asked Osoth.\n\n\"Macra the wife of Director Viliwr,\" said Tarcuna. \"Viliwr asked her to find some clothes for me, we went to her tent, and next thing you know I was giving away free samples and then some. Probably good that I got out of there when I did, though. Secrets don't stay kept in that sort of camp. And Director Viliwr is a strict Regulator.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"A Regulator. A very orthodox sect which has very orthodox and very strong opinions on who can do what to whom. They don't approve of adultery, or prostitution, or girls who prefer girls. Or lots of other things, but those are the ones that would probably get him to divorce Macra.\"\n\n\"You haven't told me much about Macra,\" I said. \"But why would she want to stay married to someone like that?\"\n\n\"Maybe two parts love, five parts love for their son, and three parts not wanting to get despised. You can do worse for yourself than get divorced for invert adultery \u2014 I managed to do worse for myself \u2014 but she'd really not have a very good status after that. Not even in Trest, and we're relatively progressive about it. Definitely not in Vlechinse, where she's from.\"\n\n\"Well. Did you enjoy it at least?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Having free will and a non-commercial fling is such a treat, I can't tell you the tenth of it. How's your own erotic voyage? You're engaged to that big grey dragon over there, aren't you?\"\n\n\"We could stop, at need, and demonstrate our amatory prowess to Tarcuna. It is not beyond draconic comprehension!\" said Osoth.\n\n\"Beyond mine. I don't have any oil,\" I said. \"I'd probably strip all the skin off your hemipenis.\"\n\n\"Marital prowess, martial prowess \u2014 these are never far apart for dragons, but rarely closer than for Jyothky,\" said Osoth philosophically.\n\n\"Let's worry about surviving first. We can figure out the twining after that,\" I said.\n\n\"An optimistic attitude!\" said Osoth. \"For if we should fail to survive, we would also fail to, as you put it, twine.\"\n\n\"Like Greshthanu,\" I said. \"I never got to couple with him, did you know? My mother told me to make sure to. Now I never will.\"\n\nWhich was a good argument for doing it, I suppose, but neither of us felt much like it after I had invoked his name.\n\nPeaceful Discussions\n\nWe got back to the camp at the base of the Khamrou Voresc. It smelled rather of recent dragons, and the desert was dug up here and there by claws. But it was completely deserted. Even Murghal had decamped.\n\n\"Right. Where is everybody?\" I scribbled to Ythac.\n\n\"Oh, I forgot to tell you. We're in a big cave under Khamrou Psulcho. Out of the desert sunlight, the thunderstorms, the tornadoes, and the purple ray guns,\" he wrote back, and drew a map. So we lumbered back into the air and flew another six dozen miles, complaining about the rudeness of our fianc\u00e9s and allies all the while.\n\nFinally we were reunited. Nine dragons (one of them shredded and encased in stone), plus one hoven. It was a big cave before Tultamaan had gotten there, and he had made it much larger, and with stone magic sculpted a ring of eight stone couches around Greshthanu's catafalque.\n\n\"The first Question we must consider is, are we presently in a position of safety? I would be willing to forgo the pleasure of another round of those purple rays. I daresay that one or two of you would even be willing to forgo the pleasure of Seeing Me In It if it meant that you would get hit by it too,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Seeing you \u2014 her I can live without. Shutting You Up, her I cannot live without,\" said Llredh.\n\nTarcuna laughed. \"None of you know the first thing about twistor beams, do you?\"\n\n\"I know what it feels like to get hit by one,\" said Arilash. \"Can you say the same?\"\n\n\"This must be your fearless whore, Jyothky,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"My fearless native who knows a lot about the local weapons!\" I said. \"I don't think she's a whore any more. She's upgraded to 'slut'.\"\n\n\"Some upgrade,\" said Tarcuna. \"That just means I don't get paid anymore.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm going to pay you for your weapons engineering,\" I said. \"That should make up for it.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm certainly not going to upgrade to traitor!\" she said.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\nTarcuna stood up by my forefeet. \"I do believe you're about to attack Trest, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Trest attacked us,\" I said.\n\n\"And do you remember what country I'm from?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well, Trest.\"\n\n\"Right then. Do you really think I'm going to tell a bunch of alien monsters all the military secrets of my native country?\" she asked.\n\n\"Alien monsters who saved you,\" I said. \"You owe me your life and more.\"\n\n\"My life, sure,\" said Tarcuna. \"You have my life, my heart, and my pussy. They're not worth very much anyway. My country, I don't owe you.\"\n\n\"Yes you do,\" hissed Llredh. \"Your military secrets, you tell them to us, or your death, she is very artistic but not very fast.\"\n\n\"'scuse me, I need to pee,\" said Tarcuna. She walked over towards Llredh, unbuttoning her pants.\n\n\"Not on Llredh!\" I said.\n\n\"Aww. You are such a boring one, Jyothky,\" she said with a laugh.\n\n\"Your brave hoven, she is too brave,\" grumbled Llredh. \"She does not say what she should say, and she always wants to challenge me.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're thinking of killing her, talk to me first. She's under my protection 'til I tell you otherwise,\" I said.\n\n\"Fine, fine. I do not kill her. If she pisses on me, I piss on her, and we see whose bladder is the mightier!\"\n\n\"Jyothky, Llredh, please stop. Jyothky, either get your native consultant to consult with us, or put her outside. Llredh, if you wish to void excretions, use a side cave,\" said Csirnis in a prissy voice.\n\nI glared at Tarcuna. \"Do you remember what Llredh did to the warehouse and its block at Port-of-Zom? The first huge fire?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yeah. I know he can kill me as quick as look at me. I really don't care.\"\n\n\"That was one fire breath. Just one. And it wasn't a particularly large one, either,\" I said.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So how long do you think it would take, oh, three of us to destroy Dorday with fire?\"\n\nThat got her attention, and made her do some mental calculations too. \"Oh. Half an hour?\"\n\n\"Close enough. Twelve minutes maybe, depending on how ruined we wanted it and who was breathing. How long would it take us to destroy every city in Trest?\"\n\n\"Not very many days. Are you going to do that?\"\n\n\"We're deciding that now. The less we know, the more conservative we'll be. That means, the more of it we'll destroy,\" I said. \"So the more you tell us, the more we'll know and the less we'll burn. Your call.\"\n\n\"You are a bunch of monsters!\" she said.\n\n\"Except Csirnis, maybe, and I wouldn't push him too far,\" I said.\n\n\"Well... I don't know any Trestean military secrets,\" said Tarcuna. \"For some reason, they don't teach them to second-year engineering students very often, or whores even.\"\n\n\"Just tell us a few basic things. Like, how do those twistor beams work?\"\n\n\"I guess it's not treason if it's in all the textbooks, is it? And that museum you saw.\"\n\n\"It just saves us from going and getting the textbooks, is all. And it'll make us a bit more kindly disposed towards Tresteans, which will probably mean fewer deaths too,\" I said.\n\nPeace Everywhere Array\n\nThis is going to be boring, but I want to at least write it down. The Peace Everywhere Array is, ultimately, nothing more than some very big twistor ray guns, but a great deal of engineering and cleverness has made them very dangerous.\n\nTwistor rays are the classic purple-beamed Hoven ray guns. They shoot torque.\n\nThey make things spin. The work best on things with lots of little parts, which will spin independently and usually go flying off in all directions.\n\nThey work worst on things like mountains which are one piece and anchored to something really big and immobile.\n\nHere's what's special about the Peace Everywhere Array.\n\nEvery point of Hove is visible from at least eight guns, out of the 82\n\n(according to Ythac's finding spells)\n\ncurrently active. They are expensive fancy tricky guns that can cross all of Hove \u2014 hand rayguns only go a few hundred feet.\n\nThey are mostly concealed or protected. Some are under heavy stone domes; some are on train tracks and move around, and some are on very big boats moving around in a lake.\n\nSome of them have other tricks. Like mostly each gun has a huge torque battery \u2014 \"huge\" being \"a whole lot bigger than me\" . The battery is big enough for one shot. Then some very big machines roll the spent battery out and put a new one in, and that's not very fast. One set of guns can hold seven batteries, though, and thus can shoot seven times in quick succession, so that's a useful trick for something.\n\nReally the fancy thing about the Peace Everywhere Array isn't the guns.\n\nIt's the thousands and thousands of cameras and other technology senses which give a pretty good view of all of Hove \u2014 when cloud cover and daylight permit \u2014 and let the Tresteans point their guns at pretty much anything they want.\n\nAccurately enough to destroy one building of their choice, though it won't be good for the buildings next to it either, or the brave cooks who live in them.\n\nBuilding new twistor guns which twist as hard as the Peace Everywhere guns isn't that hard \u2014 fifty countries can do it, maybe more. If we destroy the Peace Everywhere Array, Trest could probably have it back as good as new in a year or two.\n\n\"Thank you, Tarcuna. That's very helpful,\" said Csirnis. \"It saved us at least two hours of flight and library work. And I, for one, have a much better opinion of Tresteans, by reason of the dignity of your words.\"\n\nTarcuna blushed. Csirnis could probably have seduced her then if he had wanted. (Me, too.) Well, or paid, if he'd wanted Tarcuna.\n\nPeace Process\n\n\"First things first. We must destroy the Peace Everywhere Array,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"The obvious, you are her master,\" said Llredh. Ythac gave him a hurt look, so Llredh added, \"My heart, you are his master, too.\"\n\n\"I wish you'd stop doing that in public,\" I muttered. The only one who didn't ignore me was Tarcuna, who picked up a big stone and hammered on my muzzle. I gave her a hurt look, imitating Ythac, and she calmed down.\n\n\"I think you're both right,\" said almost everyone else, in one way or another.\n\n\"I think that Jyothky and I should do it. Finding them will be finding, and I'm best at that. Destroying them will be breathwork, and she's the best of us at that,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I will come along! Lightning and storms will be very helpful,\" said Nrararn.\n\n\"The lightning, the storms, they are not so helpful as all that,\" said Llredh.\n\nQuarrel quarrel argue argue quarrel bicker, went Nrararn.\n\n\"The fianc\u00e9 points, Ythac no longer needs them, he has a better. The seduction of Jyothky, if he had ever wanted, long ago he would have made,\" said Llredh.\n\nQuarrel quarrel argue argue quarrel bicker, went Nrararn some more.\n\n\"The long trip with Jyothky, the common purpose with her, this is what he wants. The peace with the old friend, this is what he would make,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Right. I'll go,\" I said.\n\n\"I think that the Entire Situation has ceased to be Utterly Perfect. It now contains a Flaw. Possibly even Two. It is no longer what you might call Impeccable, or even Superb. It admits to the occasional trace of Imperfection. But I don't suppose anyone could endure the shame of agreeing with me. Even when I am simply Stating the Obvious,\" said Tultamaan, grooming his forewing.\n\nArilash sighed. \"It's pretty awful, you're absolutely right, Tultamaan. We are going to have a bit of work avenging Greshthanu, and making Hove safe enough for us to finish the mating flight in peace. Real pax draconica, I mean, not Peace Everywhere Array kind of peace.\"\n\n\"You are still Missing The Obvious, Arilash. You have not Noticed the Most Salient Features of the Situation. Perhaps if you were to think with your Brain rather than your Claspers you might have noticed, but, well, y'don't,\" said Tultamaan. \"Hovens Can Kill Us. This Is Troublesome, Or, Perhaps More Than Troublesome. We Should Not Allow Ourselves To Be Killed.\"\n\n\"Csirnis, you have encouragement to thrash me if I start to kill one of my fianc\u00e9s before we've dealt with Trest,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"You are an exceedingly Fortunate dragoness, to have so many fianc\u00e9s that you can kill one or two of the more Clear-Minded Ones and not miss them,\" said Tultamaan. \"Especially after losing three of the less Clear-Minded Ones in quick succession.\"\n\n\"Csirnis, if I don't kill Tultamaan as soon as I have the chance, could you remind me that I meant to?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"I think that is quite uncalled-for. Of both of you,\" said Csirnis.\n\n\"Nrararn, Osoth, could you keep an eye on Tarcuna and make sure that she doesn't try to kill Llredh while his husband's not here to protect him?\" I said.\n\n\"If you have the courage,\" said Tarcuna. Crazy hoven!\n\nPeace Nowhere\n\nYthac and I flew for Trest. More accurately, Ythac and I and eleven sylphs (courtesy of Nrararn) and thirty vengeful ghosts of recently-dead Zeanese (courtesy of Osoth) and an assortment of spells (courtesy of almost everyone) flew for Trest. Not Greshthanu's ghost \u2014 that would be disrespectful. The Melismatic Tempest was certainly going to be useful, and the Horizonal Quill if Ythac and I got separated. The rest we thought of as mainly well-wishes by our friends.\n\n\"I'm still waiting for you to break my wings,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"Not today. We're busy, today,\" I told him.\n\n\"I suppose... we can take a few minutes out and take care of it,\" he said. \"Revenge will keep.\"\n\n\"I don't want to do a rush job of it,\" I said. \"I want it to count.\"\n\n\"Well, of course. I don't think you're going to forgive me 'til you do it.\"\n\n\"I don't think I'm going to do it 'til I forgive you!\" I said. \"And that won't be today.\"\n\n\"If you and the Tresteans kill me today, I'll be upset, forgiven or not,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"That's not even a good joke. I'm not going to kill you. I'm trying to figure out whether we can be friends or not, is all. I can't even trust you. You said that you loved me. Not something reasonable like you thought you could learn to love me after being married together for a few duodecades. That you actually loved me right then.\"\n\nHe looked miserable a bit. \"Well, you're my best friend. That's a kind of love, isn't it?\"\n\n\"A better kind than the one you actually use the word 'love' for these days! And pretty much a lie.\"\n\nYthac said darkly, \"I was hoping to bind myself by my words. I don't much like being what I am. I ought to love you, I do love you by some meaning of the word. I was hoping that, if I told you, if I promised, I would do it.\"\n\nI snorted sparks of lightning. \"Didn't work, did it? The first chance you had to love another drake, you took.\"\n\nYthac hissed at me. \"I had to save Llredh! I could hardly leave him as the slave of a worm!\"\n\n\"I think that two or three of us could have knocked him down and given him surgery. Or maybe he'd have shifted back to protect himself and the worm, and that would have freed him too. You didn't have to do what you did!\" I was roaring by that point.\n\n\"Maybe be a bit quieter, Jyothky? There are planes over there; they can maybe hear you. Shall we kill them?\" I looked over to the left, where Ythac was looking. Half a dozen jets were flying more or less towards us. Zooming much faster than I can fly naturally, but rather dawdling compared to flying with the Melismatic Tempest.\n\n\"They did kill my fianc\u00e9, so killing them would be a good idea. Except not them, just their comrades-in-arms. Let's not get distracted today. Especially let's not get distracted and have an aerial duel with some stupid fighter jets and get twisted to bits by the Peace Everywhere Array,\" I said. \"Besides, they don't seem to see us.\" Someday they'll figure out how to see through the Esrret-Sky-Painted, I'm sure.\n\n\"OK! I just don't want you to think that I'm not brave enough. 'Cause of who I love, I mean.\"\n\nI had to think about that, as we crossed the official border into Trest. \"You haven't been such a Tultamaan the last few days. The way you rescued Llredh was brave. Disgusting, but brave. And if you're going to act married with him and bring him to Mhel, that's awfully brave.\"\n\n\"Good... My father was always after me to be a better drake. Braver, prettier, stronger, tougher. Fightier toward other drakes.\"\n\n\"He knew about you and other drakes?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. For years before you and I met. And here we are, at the Magistrate Beanfeld Array Site.\" We circled twice to look at it. It wasn't a very impressive place: an octagon of big tents, and some paved roads connecting them, spread out over a quarter of a mile, surrounded by coils of sharp wire and a few sheds with a few soldiers as guards. Ythac poked with a finding spell. \"The actual twistor projectors are in the first and fourth tents.\"\n\n\"Destroy all the tents anyway?\" I asked. \"Impress them with the thoroughness of our power?\"\n\n\"Maybe just the ones with twistors,\" he said. \"Impress them with the precision of our power. Thoroughness means we should go back and blast those jets.\"\n\nSo we burnt just the two tents. Each one had a heavy apparatus the size of a small house. The chimney \u2014 a heavy tube of metal, painted purple, with a few pipes or cables around it \u2014 was mounted on gimbals, with motors, so that it could point at any part of the sky. A heavier cable, thicker than my tail, connected the base of the tube to the rest of the house: one moderate-sized engine which produced the twistor beam proper, and some huge lifter machines for changing the batteries quickly. The batteries were huge tubs of orange metal. If one were knocked flat, I could have sprawled on it, head and body. I don't think I'm strong enough to knock one flat just by force though. I'd need a lever, or some burrowing, or some such.\n\n\"Precision is all very well, but let's ruin it completely at least,\" I said. I melted the engines and the gimbals with fire breath, and they ran and stank and puffed out noxious smoke. Ythac breathed fire on a battery, which just melted a bit. Then he grinned at me, and we conspired, and he breathed darkness on while I breathed deep metal-shrinking cold. Its casing failed, and it started to unwind. A battery that big can store a great deal of torque, and when it unwinds, it can throw many things around rather quickly. Ythac and I flew half a mile up, and we still had to dodge lumps of stone and metal.\n\n\"I don't think that counts as 'precision' exactly, Ythac,\" I said, when the whirling violence had stopped.\n\n\"No, nor 'our power' either, exactly, since we mostly let their power out. Nice and destructive though. Shall we do another one, or should we go on to the other eighty-one installations?\"\n\n\"Another one. We might as well have fun with this chore,\" I said. We flew as high as we could and still reach the battery with cold and darkness. The second battery's casing shattered beneath our combined breaths, and we flew away giggling as the hovens' hoarded power wrecked their own weapon camp.\n\nOur attendant ghosts cheered. I suppose that was useful of them.\n\nYthac and I grinned at each other, too. There's no remedy for a spat between friends like visiting flaming, whirling death upon your enemies.\n\nPeace and War\n\nThe second twistor installation was six projectors in the open, with no particular attempt to hide anything. They melted nicely. The third installation was tented like the first, and no more trouble. The fourth was in a glass dome underwater, and we whipped the lake into a shardful niobium-rich froth when we broke the dome and released its batteries. The fifth was three projectors on short and very heavy rails, so that they could be hidden in a mountain in case of rain, snow, or enemy attack, and if they had been inside we might have had to work a bit more. The sixth was back in the open again. By then we had found our rhythm, and demolished it in three pairs of breaths.\n\nWe'd been flying around plenty, and were pretty sure that the Tresteans couldn't see us through the Esrret-Sky-Painted (since they hadn't shot us yet), and we had gotten used to being invisible. The seventh, Cone of Heaven Park, was another tented one, like the first. The hoven soldiers had already started to flee before we got there; we assumed that the word of the first six emplacements being destroyed had started to get around. We swooped down, melted two engines, and circled a bit waiting for our whef\u00f4 to refill (Ythac) or blasting engines with lightning (me).\n\nAnd the whole sky roared danger to us, huge terrible dragon-breaking danger.\n\nWell, we knew what to do about that. We cracked the air and sped away as fast as eight wings and two Melismatic Tempests could carry us! Which was the right thing to do. We were no more than three miles away when two dozen Peace Everywhere beams played over Cone of Heaven Park.\n\nWe turned and watched. This wasn't the simple secondhand destruction that had come to Ze Cheya, nor the clawtip pricks that we had used to ruin the first few projectors. The huge batteries were scattered around, the mighty engines ripped into shards and shavings, and no stone was left atop another stone nor plastic atop another plastic. Ythac and I together could work no such devastation, nor a twelfth part of it, or not as fast at least. Probably our parents couldn't either.\n\n\"I suppose we ought to thank them, for finishing the job for us,\" said Ythac, very quietly.\n\nI didn't feel flippant though. I started reciting in Grand Draconic: \"Xh\u00ea t\u015bi\u012ba\u0151 \u0161sy\u1eb5i\u0105\u1ef3\u015b\u015b \u1ebesr\u0155y\u016f...\" . Which is to say, \"Thou art Esrret, with thine own wings dragging a molten star from heaven to fall among us. Thou art the Morliu; when we bit off thy forepaw, thou cast thine blood into our eyes to blind us. Thou art Elelizet, locking thine jaws in death in our throat. Thou art Shirivve, carrying the Narnu to the depths of the sky to keep it from us...\" After a few words, Ythac joined me, and we recited the whole thing in unison.\n\nIt's a praise-song for an enemy willing to accept the most terrible wounds in order for revenge (Esrret, Elelizet) or giving a child a chance to escape (the Morliu) or hiding a sacred vessel (Shirivve), or various other purposes in various other lines. One has to be very impressed indeed to say it to small people. But the Tresteans had just shown that they commanded more-than-draconic energies. And that they were resourceful enough to use the few moments in which we could be located to attack us. And that they were willing to pour out their strength and even their lives to strike at us \u2014 somehoven must have been in the control booth, on the telephone, telling the other Peace Everywhere emplacements that we were there, and that one could not possibly have survived.\n\n\"Not that anyone that 'thou art' in that song actually wins,\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I don't plan to let the Tresteans win! Besides, didn't Elelizet survive? She was the mother of Ghanimaan, wasn't she?\" I said.\n\n\"Wasn't that the other Elelizet? Smerdaleon's wife? Or am I getting them confused?\" said Ythac.\n\n\"I don't remember my ancient draconic history very well,\" I said. \"It's all from before we got astral magic. Not very important anymore.\"\n\n\"It's an important part of our cultural heritage!\" he said. \"You know that! You're the one who started reciting it first!\"\n\n\"True. I'll learn more... oh... when I have a hatchling to teach it to,\" I said.\n\n\"Fair enough.... I had better find some other reason. Llredh and I won't have hatchlings.\"\n\n\"No, you won't.\"\n\nHe hissed at me. \"I'm just glad he wasn't here, Jyothky. He doesn't have dangersense. He'd likely not have gotten away in time.\"\n\n\"Now we're back to you being disgusting, Ythac,\" I wisely and kindly pointed out.\n\n\"Right. Never mind that then,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, I guess we don't need to worry about Cone of Heaven Park, in any case. Where's next?\"\n\nHe cast a finding spell. \"Dark Snake River is closest.\"\n\n\"How about a different question. Which one is the closest one that doesn't have other giant twistor cannons aimed at it? Can your spell find that?\" I said.\n\n\"Good thought!\" He poked around with a spell. \"Osmogoth Point, off the other direction.\"\n\nSo we flew to Osmogoth Point, which was only half-built, with just one projector working. I hissed at Ythac when we were half a dozen miles away, \"You stop here. I'll go melt it alone.\"\n\nHe hissed back at me, \"What, what? That's silly! I've got plenty of fire breath!\"\n\n\"You've also got a husband to mourn you if you get twisted apart. I've just got some suitors who'll probably be nearly as happy without me,\" I said.\n\nHe blinked at me. \"Did you just forgive me or something?\"\n\n\"Do your wings hurt terribly? No? Then I have not!... But my best friend's husband is my best friend's husband. Even if it's disgusting. Now, stay here and be useful and play with information magic and tell me if they start aiming anything dangerous at Osmogoth Point, will you?\"\n\nHe levitated there, half a mile above nowhere in particular, while I flew down and breathed three very narrow needles of flame into the bowels of the Osmogoth Point projector. None of the playful devastation of the previous times, not there. The Peace Everywhere Array was a mighty and wily foe, not a simple small person city to destroy at leisure.\n\nBut we did destroy it. Very slowly and carefully. We'd fly to one side of Trest, and I'd break a few projectors as quickly as I could. (Lightning will usually ruin the generator, though not destroy it beyond repair as fire will. Cold is useless without darkness breath also.) Ythac would watch for the rest of the Array hearing about it and starting to point their weapons at me. When they did, we'd fly off to another emplacement, a sixth of the continent off maybe. It was all rather like killing a huge sluggish giant armed with a huge hammer. One hit from the hammer and I'd have been dead. But a bit of caution and I'd be out of range whenever he started to raise the hammer, much less swing it. Not that I've ever fought a giant at all, much less one like that, but it sounds a lot more plausible than a small person military system.\n\nAfter a day and a half of hard work, none of the Peace Everywhere Array worked any more, and neither did the main stocks of replacement parts. We flew back to Khamrou Psulcho, clutching the our ragged Melismatic Tempests (which aren't really supposed to last that long or work that hard). I curled up in a deep cave and slept in a deep sleep. Ythac, I believe, coupled with Llredh enthusiastically, and got Arilash so excited that she coupled with every drake but Tultamaan. Or that's the story I heard the next morning. The cave didn't smell of very much sex at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Lazy Morning (Day 71)\n\nI woke up after a very long time, curled up in a far corner of the cave. I crept out to the stone couch room. There was nobody there but Greshthanu's catafalque. So I waddled over and had a one-sided conversation about how I had destroyed the weapon that had killed him and would see about the people presently, and I was sorry I hadn't managed to couple with him while he was alive but I had offered, and how I was taking good care of the hovens when I could, and... That sounds awfully ungracious. I'm pretty sure he couldn't hear me. I'll have to ask Osoth for sure.\n\nAnd Osoth came to mind soon enough. Eight mummies in matching heiroglyph-encrusted vestments marched into the chamber, bearing a vast copper tray upon which rested the corpse of a yearling cow, dusted with tongue-searing mya-mya powder and tomb-natron, though neither one was sufficient to keep off the scent of putrescence that hovered about it. Behind them three skeletal harpers danced a languid pavane and clattered their instruments against their bare rib-bones as they played. The mummies placed their burden in front of me and made many humble obeisances, bowing more deeply than a hoven still encumbered with the hindrances of living flesh and sinew could have done.\n\n\"Oh, Osoth left breakfast for me! How sweet of him!\" I said, and started to eat it. It wasn't as good as the rabbit with onion and efforasze he had given me in the Tumult Sands. Osoth is a better dramaturge than chef.\n\n\"The very attentive suitor, that is he!\" shouted Llredh from outside.\n\n\"Oh! Good morning!\" I called back. \"Who's around?\"\n\n\"You, me, and the sleeping of my husband,\" he said. \"Looting and scattered, the other drakes are these things, in Trest.\"\n\n\"Well, they should be. Where's Arilash?\"\n\n\"Seeking a suitable mountain, this is Arilash. A sentimental lizard is she! The final sepulchre of Greshthanu she will make from it when she finds it. Who better?\"\n\nI ripped a bite of rotting muscle off the foreleg. \"I suppose she was the closest thing he had to a friend here, or to a wife. I never did too well on either one.\"\n\n\"Better taste in friends, she is yours! The best among us, he was your friend first.\" Llredh reared his head up proudly. \"Elsewhere, that is the place you must seek for your own husband!\"\n\nI reared my own up, to breathe something or other at him. He laughed. \"Too late, for the dragonessly dominance contests with me! This contest, I win her. A mighty victory is my victory! For I did not know I was competing in that contest.\"\n\nI didn't breathe at him, though. He's a lot bigger than me, and quite a good fighter. Better to tease him back, or try to. \"So, you're the dragoness of the two of you?\"\n\n\"Drakes, both of us! The detailed investigation, I perform her! Very often!\"\n\n\"Shameless drakes.\"\n\n\"Shame, she visits Ythac when he thinks of Rankotherium, or of you. Anger, she visits me when I think of cyoziworms. Vengeance, I do not forget her!\"\n\nI wiped the platter clean of pungent spice and drippings with the last scrap of hide. \"Have you figured out how to get any worthwhile revenge?\"\n\n\"Not yet! It has been a busy half-week.\"\n\nYthac called out from deep in the caves, \"Llredh? Who are you talking to?\"\n\n\"Your anti-pervert, your prickle queen, with her I conspire!\"\n\n\"Oh, hi, Jyothky. One minute.\" I heard the rushing of fire breath, the rasping of sand on scales, and soon enough Ythac waddled out. \"My wing-muscles hurt like anything. I don't think I've ever flown so much at once. It's only a day and a half, but I think my body aches by the league flown not the time.\"\n\n\"Oh, claw it, I'd better check too.\" A bit of scrying determined that, yes, my wing-muscles were just as unhappy.\n\n\"The warm lake, in her you must both lounge and soak!\" said Llredh.\n\n\"Where is this warm lake?\" I asked.\n\n\"On equatorial Mhel, many are there.\"\n\n\"That's back on Mhel. Hove doesn't have a molten heart to make warm lakes, though,\" said Ythac. \"Are there any here?\"\n\n\"Such questions, such finding questions, I ask them of my husband!\"\n\nYthac swatted Llredh with his tail. \"Someone insisted on giving me a proper hero's welcome last night and wouldn't let me go right to sleep! Or newlywed's welcome, at least.\"\n\n\"The resistance, the struggle, the objections, the defianc\u00e9 \u2014 all these were far, far away! The acquiescence, the concupiscence, the eagerness, the compliance \u2014 all these came in their place!\"\n\n\"I don't think Jyothky wants to hear that,\" said Ythac. He was right. \"Can you make us a hot lake to soak in?\"\n\nSo Llredh strutted over to a pond and dammed it closed. Ythac and I levitated, trying not to move any more than we had to. All of us breathed fire on it, and when it steamed we sloshed in. The drakes looked happy. Some scrying said that my muscles were happy, too, so I suppose it was worthwhile.\n\nThen I went back to the cave and put some slow healing spells on myself, and wrote this, and went back to sleep.\n\nTarcuna's Next Job\n\nAnd not too long after that, I woke up to the sound of Tarcuna grumbling by my head.\n\n\"I'm not asleep, I'm awake,\" I mumbled in Grand Draconic. I haven't taught Tarcuna any of that (which is illegal by draconic law), or even much Petty Draconic (which isn't).\n\n\"Spotty? Are you up?\"\n\n\"More or less,\" I said. \"I didn't know you were here. Llredh said nearly everyone had left.\"\n\n\"No, no, how would I leave?\"\n\n\"I should hope that Osoth or Nrararn would have taken you with them. I told them to protect you from Llredh.\"\n\nShe shrugged her good shoulder. \"I'm not leaving you, you should know that. Llredh's not so bad. He was pretty interested in my life story: getting disinherited for the wrong kind of love, getting wormridden, and lots of sexual adventures. I'm ahead of him on all three counts, and never mind that he's a lot older than me. He had to talk about his toxicology research. I couldn't one-up him on that.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad he didn't burn you to ashes or something,\" I said.\n\nTarcuna shrugged. \"I suppose I am too. How much longer is our contract for?\"\n\n\"It's about over; I'd have to count to be sure.\"\n\n\"After it's over, I'd like to go back to Dorday for a little while... Unless you've destroyed Dorday.\"\n\n\"Destroyed? Why would I destroy Dorday? I've enjoyed Dorday more than the rest of Hove all together,\" I said.\n\n\"You and Ythac went on a big rampage all over Trest,\" she said. \"I don't know what you might have ruined.\"\n\n\"Just the Peace Everywhere Array. This wasn't our revenge for Greshthanu, it was just pulling Trest's fangs so they couldn't kill any more of us.\"\n\n\"I've been with you long enough so I understand that. Have you been with me long enough so you understand why it upsets me?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, I don't think so,\" I said. She stared at me hard. So I had to ask, \"Why does it upset you?\"\n\nShe sat on my forepaw, and looked up at me. \"First of all, I hope you know that I am very grateful to you personally, more grateful than I can ever say or do. You saved me from the worm. You worked all night, and that's much more than a dragon usually does for a... small person, I guess you call us. So to the extent that I have any personal honor, I'm on your side. But that's the you-as-Spotty side.\"\n\nI moved her off my foot and turned into my Spotty-the-hoven shape. She smiled and hugged me. \"I didn't really think I had two sides.\"\n\n\"Well, there's the you-as-Joffee-and-I-know-I'm-saying-it-wrong side. When you casually blast fighter jets who are trying to protect Dorday from a mysterious flesh-rending monster. When you rip your friends' wings up as casually as I'd comb my fur. When you fly across the sky and destroy... do you know what the Peace Everywhere Array meant to Trest?\"\n\n\"I don't think Trest made it to kill giant lizard alien invaders which you didn't know about before a few days ago, so, no, I don't.\" I sat on a rock, and she sat next to me.\n\n\"Hove had been full of wars for the last century or so. Well, always, but extra-bad since we've had the technology to fight big. Massive wars, nasty wars, bloody terrible wars. This country would find a bit of extnuvia and bring horror to its neighbor. That country had no deposits of horrid minerals, but raised a big army and invented some deadly new weapons and broke its neighbors with big guns and planes. The conquered country had no such power, but they trained a few expert assassins who killed the leaders, or destroyed just ordinary people with bombs or fires. The other country didn't like tappu \u2014 no country likes tappu \u2014 and arrested them all and made them work in prison 'til half of them died.\"\n\n\"Lots of small people worlds are like that. Especially when they get some technology, but most manage some of it even without. We don't allow such things on worlds we rule.\" I said. It did sound a bit odd when I was in small person shape.\n\n\"We don't either. Well, 'we' is Tresteans here, not all hovens. Trest is a federation, a lot of old countries who learned to live together and settle our differences politically instead of with guns and doom. When we federated, we became the biggest and most powerful country in the world. We worked pretty hard to impose peace on our neighbors. When Prof. Troubralane invented the twistor beam \u2014 he was Trestean, of course \u2014 we had a national referendum on what to do. We decided by a very famous 68% majority that we should impose peace on the whole world. So we built the Peace Everywhere Array.\n\n\"Nobody else was very happy about it, by the way. Half the rest of the world joined up as the Alliance of Freedom, to oppose us. Freedom meaning 'freedom to fight each other in the most horrible ways'.\"\n\n\"Anyway, we stopped a couple of nasty little wars in a hurry, and prevented... dozens I guess. It's been a lot of work, we've had to remove a few really horrible tyrants. Like in Ghemelia. It's cost us lots of our own blood, and huge amounts of money, and brought us the hatred of a lot of Hove. But we've kept the pax Tresteana for nearly two decades. The world's far and away a better place for it.\"\n\n\"Lots of your own blood? That sounds like you were fighting wars,\" I said. \"And Ghemelia must have been one of them \u2014 that looked like a war. A nasty one. I was there during the occupation, and it even smelled nasty.\"\n\n\"No, those are peace actions, not wars. There's a difference,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm not sure I see, but go on,\" I said.\n\n\"The heart of our ability to keep peace across Hove was the Peace Everywhere Array,\" she said. She was quiet a moment, twisting her hair in her good hand. Then she added, \"And you destroyed it completely yesterday, I hear.\"\n\n\"I had to! Greshthanu...\"\n\nShe interrupted me, \"I know why you think you had to. I want you to know why it was a terrible thing. 'Cause I'm loyal to you, in love with you, remember? I'm loyal enough to tell you when you've done something awful.\"\n\nI had the best idea I've ever had. \"Right. OK, your contract with me is over, we're not renewing it. But I'm giving you another job.\"\n\n\"I don't really see that you've got the right to tell me what to do,\" she said, smelling irritated. Which is silly of her \u2014 of course she's one of my small people. But it was a good enough idea that I didn't think I needed to tell her that.\n\n\"I want you to go to Trest and explain what dragons are like. They need someone who understands us so they don't do stupid things like shoot at us and make us go destroy them. Also you should tell us important things too, preferably before we burn the city to ashes or whatever. But we're just here to get married to each other, we'll mostly leave hovens alone if you leave us alone. If you can explain that to the consuls, we'll be a lot less annoyed and a lot fewer hovens will die.\n\nShe nodded and didn't say anything.\n\n\"And you know us somewhat, I don't think any other hovens know anything about us really,\" I said.\n\nShe nodded and didn't say anything some more.\n\n\"Besides, it's a better job than being a wormridden whore,\" I said.\n\n\"A lot less popular,\" she said.\n\n\"What? You'll be helping people. A lot.\"\n\n\"I'll look like a collaborator of the destroying alien monsters. That's not going to make many friends,\" she said. \"I'd rather stay with you.\"\n\n\"If anyone gives you trouble for it, I will kill them,\" I said.\n\nShe looked annoyed. \"That is a perfect example of the problem.\"\n\nWell, I thought it was a good idea, anyway.\n\nCoda: On Owning Small People\n\nThere are about two opinions about owning small people, with variations.\n\nDowncrushing Opinion\n\nFor Downcrushers, your small people are pretty much part of your territory or other possessions. You get them the same ways: conquest, purchase, trade, gift, whatever. You can do whatever you like to them: work them to death, kill them when they annoy you, trade them to other dragons, whatever's convenient.\n\nSo you might expect them to be terribly evil greedy monsters who delight in destruction. But Rankotherium \u2014 for the most traditional Downcrusher I know, by how he talks at least \u2014 isn't like that at all. He conquered Pdernuz and a goodly chunk of Mhel by breath and claw. Then he gave a lot of his new territory away to some other dragons, like my parents (who hadn't done all that much) and Osoth's (who did even less). He sat on Pdernuz very hard for a while, until his mhelvul learned not to fight him. And then he proclaimed a bunch of laws \u2014 and got the mhelvul to design some of them, in fact \u2014 and, pretty much, follows them himself.\n\nNot because it's right for him to do that \u2014 he considers it morally neutral \u2014 but because it's convenient. He's got a nice comfortable peaceful domain full of productive, compliant mhelvul. Also generally happy mhelvul, but he officially doesn't care about that.\n\nChurdle the farmer probably feels about the same about his cattle.\n\nUplifting Opinion\n\nFor Uplifters, your small people are the ones you're responsible for. Usually that means the ones in your territory, or that you conquer, or buy, or trade, or whatever \u2014 the same things that Downcrushers say. I took responsibility for Tarcuna when I healed her, in Uplifter terms.\n\nThat's a serious point of disagreement between the two sides. If my mother had been there when the gymnasium collapsed, and she'd healed Verimet, she'd have taken responsibility for her. (I was a dragonet at the time, so it wouldn't have counted much.) Which would have annoyed Rankotherium considerably, since Verimet is certainly one of his small people too. So they probably would have had a fight, over what price Uruunma would pay Rankotherium \u2014 for a broken schoolgirl? Or a future high-caste matron?\n\nBut the real disagreement is over what you're supposed to do to your small people. Theoretically Downcrushers will give any sort of orders or impose any sort of punishments, whatever serves the dragon's purpose. Theoretically Uplifters will mostly do things for the good of the small people.\n\nSometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Like, Rankotherium's small people have better doctors than my parents \u2014 he pays well for doctors; we can't afford them. And better traditional schools, because Pdernuz has always been a very educated city.\n\nBut, well, my parents' small people have better libraries. Rankotherium doesn't let his learn much about their history, or much about science. It would not be convenient or peaceful if they made a few paingods and challenged him, say. We're not so worried about that, or mother at least thinks that the mhelvul deserve to know what they used to do to each other, so, libraries.\n\nAnd sometimes it's easy to tell the difference. Rankotherium probably wouldn't have healed Tarcuna, in my place. Unless it were actually convenient or fun or something (which it wasn't).\n\nI'm an Uplifter, I guess. Ythac certainly is \u2014 anything to oppose Rankotherium. Llredh is a Downcrusher through and through, so that \"marriage\" will be like my parents. I'm not exactly sure about the rest of us.\n\nThe Judgment\n\nOf course, most Downcrushers (well, Rankotherium at least) pay attention to the welfare of their small people. And most Uplifters (Uruunma at least) don't fuss too much about having slaves or servants as convenient, and don't fret that the slaves don't get much benefit beyond basic sustenance and livelihood.\n\nI just thought of a very strange experiment. When I get back home, I'll ask some of my parents' small people which kind of dragon they prefer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Ambassador Tarcuna (Day 72)\n\n\"I've thought your idea over, Spotty,\" said Tarcuna the next morning over breakfast. She took a bite of breath-grilled chicken, grimaced, and said, \"It's a terrible idea, I don't want to do it at all, I don't want to be away from you. But I can't think of anything better to do. There's stuff I could do, like being a public friend more, but now that I've got my own motivations back I'd really rather be picky about who I share my body with. There's stuff I'd like to do, like go back to school to get my degree and then go to work in the Peace Everywhere Array's research department. I don't know which half of that is the more impossible. If I try to do anything at all decent, it'll surely get out that I spent a while with you. If I try to hide it, it's sure to go terribly when I get found out. I might as well take advantage of it. Help you some, and help Trest and Hove, too.\"\n\n\"The Jyothky apology, Tarcuna is demanding her!\" said Llredh.\n\n\"For ruining my life? No, not really. Bopo did that. Jyothky's put me into a terrible position, yes, but it's hopeless love terrible, a loving-the-wrong-way terrible. Which is so much better than worm-terrible there are simply no words.\"\n\nLlredh roared his agreement to that, and for the next half-hour I could not slip a word or wing between them, with all their agreements on how bad cyoziworms are, and how inconvenient but inescapable loving-the-wrong-way is.\n\nSo Tarcuna and I flew to Perstra \u2014 that's the capitol of Trest \u2014 after breakfast. A long time after breakfast. Arilash is off doing I-don't-want-to-know-who-what. So I asked Ythac for his best travel spell, which turns out to be the Dozenwing Dozentail. My parents wouldn't let me learn the Dozenwing Dozentail. They were worried that I wouldn't notice how much it was bashing me, and I'd fall out of the sky and die. So I made Ythac teach it to me.\n\nIt isthe most annoying spell I know. If you do something that irritates it, it slams your ribs, very hard. Things that annoy it include: slowing down; turning left; going into a cloud; flying over a well; complaining about it. I set up some subsidiary spells to warn me whenever my ribs got broken. Which happened three dozen times on the one flight. Sometime I am going to cast the Dozenwing Dozentail and make it read this diary entry, just to annoy it more.\n\nPerstra, then. City of Roses. It's a designed city, less than a gross of years old, except that it's really very old and got rebuilt recently after it was mostly burned down in a war a gross of years ago. All the main streets used to have rose gardens down the middle, and lots of them still do. There are dozens of monuments, and dozens of fountains. Every eighth block used to be a park, and lots of them still are.\n\nIt's rather pretty from overhead, so much so that one is tempted to slow down and get one's ribs broken. Since it is one's destination anyway, one can break the clawraped Dozenwing Dozentail with a furious swat of one's v\u00f4. Even if one's v\u00f4 is still crunchy from getting blasted by the Peace Everywhere Array. One may also unwittingly break one's quite innocent and helpful the Esrret-Sky-Painted, and attract considerable attention while one interrogates one's ex-whore about where to go and who to bully upon.\n\nThe right place to land was, of course, the office of the Trestean Diplomatic Brigade. Neither Tarcuna nor I had any idea where it was, beyond \"somewhere in the main administrative district.\" I didn't much feel like pestering Ythac about it, since he had been so helpful with that travel spell, that travel spell, that insufficiently-chewed-upon travel spell... after I thought about that a bit, I wrote to him and asked him.\n\nThe headquarters of the Diplomatic Brigade is a big square building with a big square courtyard with lots of rose bushes and diplomats in it and a statue of two hovens shaking hands in the center. I scattered the diplomats with a roar, and squashed many rose bushes (but no diplomats) when I landed.\n\nA handful of guards with whimpery little ray guns tried to hold me off. I roared at them, \"Bring me the Secretary of Diplomacy, and nobody will die!\" They seemed glad of an option that involved (a) leaving the garden, and (b) not dying. Naturally the Secretary of Diplomacy was unavailable, being off at an extremely urgent meeting with the consuls or something. So they brought me the Expendable Undersecretary of Diplomacy. That's not her actual title, but it's pretty obvious.\n\n\"Welcome to Perstra. I am Shebra Narthium, assistant to Secretary Hemmo. I trust that you come in peace and will observe the traditional diplomatic customs?\" she said.\n\n\"No. I'm not even going to observe the traditions of my people. I'm here to give you the best hoven expert on dragons, so that you don't do anything more stupid than you've already done and make us kill even more of you than we already have to,\" I said. I probably could have been more diplomatic myself. I was quite annoyed though. Shebra Narthium might not be one of Greshthanu's murderers, but she was a senior ally of theirs. And having my ribs broken so often to help her didn't improve my mood any, even if I couldn't feel them.\n\n\"I'm not sure I understand,\" she said. \"Could you explain further?\"\n\n\"Tarcuna, the woman tied to my back, has been travelling with me for a while. She knows what we're on Hove for, has a basic understanding of our etiquette and the ways for small people \u2014 that's you! \u2014 to deal with us. And she knows a lot about how we think and even what we can do. You need an expert on dragons. So I'm bringing you one. Now, get her off my back and give her a high salary. I want to go back to my fianc\u00e9s and have lots of sex.\" Half true.\n\nIt took four sturdy diplomats to help poor one-handed Tarcuna get untied and off my back. (Note to self: get proper harness, with carabiners. Having Llredh tie knots, and tugging them tight with a dragon's strength, is not a good substitute for technology.) While they were working, we conducted a combination job interview and intimidation session.\n\n\"Do we have any particular reason to trust Tarcuna not to be acting in your interests?\" Shebra asked.\n\nI glared at her. \"Of course she's acting in my interests. I want to stop having to waste time killing Tresteans, and get back to the vacation that I came to Hove for in the first place. Now, I will burn all your cities to ashes if I need to, but I can think of lots of better ways to spend a week, so I'd rather not.\"\n\n\"Spotty!\" Tarcuna shouted. \"That's not what I told you to say!\"\n\n\"Oh, right. She's a loyal Trestean citizen. She didn't want to cooperate with us, or even stay with us, after we started fighting Trest,\" I said.\n\n\"We will certainly listen to her story with considerable interest,\" said Shebra.\n\n\"Also you'd better pay her. A lot,\" I proclaimed.\n\nShe said something that had words like \"Brigade policies\" and \"proper remuneration\" and \"official channels\" and \"standard procedures\" in it. I cast the Word-Fox, but the spell didn't understand it either.\n\nSo I used more diplomacy. \"I'll come back in a few days to make sure that you're treating her properly. If you're not, I'll destroy some of the Diplomacy Brigade buildings. It'll end up being more expensive for you than if you paid her up front.\"\n\n\"Spotty! You're not helping!\"\n\nShebra glared at me. \"We will take this under advisement. Normally we do not allow foreign nationals to dictate Brigade employment or salaries. Especially not hostile foreign nationals.\"\n\n\"Normally you don't allow hostile foreign nationals to destroy the Peace Everywhere Array either,\" I snapped. Bickering with a small person in public is undignified, but I was rather irritated.\n\n\"Spotty! How am I supposed to make any kind of peace when everything you say is past or future war?\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\n\"You're not supposed to make peace! You're supposed to explain dragons to them!\" I told her.\n\n\"So that we stop getting into unwanted fights with you!\"\n\n\"Well, you don't not get into unwanted fights with me by yelling at me in public!\" I hissed.\n\n\"I am grateful for when you saved me. But it sometimes seems as if everything you've done since then is purposefully trying to ruin the life you gave back to me,\" Tarcuna snapped. She turned to Shebra. \"I will be glad of any opportunity you give me to serve my country. If you prefer not to use my services, I'll find something else to do. If you decide I should be tried for prostitution or whatever, I'll be safer in prison than with the dragons.\"\n\n\"I do not give you permission to imprison her!\" I roared. All the hovens covered their ears with their hands.\n\n\"It's not your decision!\" Tarcuna shouted back. \"It's an internal Trestean thing. Now go away and stop trying to make me utterly unwelcome in my own home!\"\n\nI reared up, over the statue of two hovens shaking hands, and breathed a very long tight needle of fire onto it. The stone melted, and a tail-length of soil and rock under it. The hovens screamed and ran. Then I leapt into the air, levitated because the courtyard was too tight for actually flying, and... cast that clawraped the Dozenwing Dozentail on myself too early. Naturally getting out of the city and back to Ythac and Llredh involved a great many things that offended it, and I had to heal my ribs a dozen more times on the way back than on the way there.\n\nToday was thoroughly horrible, and it was pretty much all my fault. I don't have so many friends that I should be doing that to one of them. Even if she'd rather, say, be at home with her own people than be stranded in a cave with a murderous short-tempered alien monster who abandons her half the time anyway.\n\nCoda: Travel Spells\n\nTravel spells are mostly grownup spells. I don't think that's an inherent part of the magic. The Dozenwing Dozentail might stunt your growth because it injures you constantly, so that one has a good reason for being for grownups. The Scratch-the-Sky isn't any harder on your body than any other simple magic (and I had learned it as a child but was forbidden to use it except in emergencies.) It's harder on anyone else who's flying around though, so parents don't like when their children cast it. Or, in fact, when anyone else casts it. I don't think that the Melismatic Tempest has any problems like that \u2014 unless you count the occasional minor cut on a fragment of music \u2014 but it's a hard spell. I might be able to cast it, if I felt like begging my rival to teach it to me and losing still more fianc\u00e9e points, but I couldn't do it very well.\n\nI don't feel like writing a coda about travel magic.\n\nCoda: Perstra\n\nPerstra is a big city. Before the unification of Trest it was the capital of one of the little countries, and if I had Tarcuna around I could ask her which one, and I don't feel like writing a coda about Persta either.\n\nOr about anything else."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Diplomacy (Day 80)\n\nThe Wind to Diplomacy\n\nThere really was only choice of who to make negotiate with Trest. Csirnis didn't object.\n\nThere was a lot more choice over whether to negotiate with Trest. Several of us, including me, simply wanted to fly around and incinerate or squash the people we're supposed to kill, and not fuss. Ythac and Csirnis, who are surely the most decent of us, argued that if we're going to be insisting that the hovens follow the usual laws, they have to, first of all, know what the laws are, and, second of all, follow them in the traditional way. The first is only fair and practical (though in draconic law it is nowise required), and nobody argued with it too much. The second part was the sticky part. It's going to take a lot longer and a lot more work to do it right.\n\n\"But this is Greshthanu's death-price. Remember that he refused to mate with Jyothky because she hadn't been treating some hovens properly,\" said Ythac. (I'd rather not remember that part too much, but everyone does.) \"So let's do this properly.\"\n\nThere was no arguing with that. Though there was a bit of Ythac-wing-biting for how he had phrased it.\n\nThen we had to persuade the hovens that we were creatures who should be negotiated with. Or even that we were creatures who could be negotiated with. Ze Cheya was some help with that, since Csirnis and I had been quite civil there. Of course, Ze Cheya was the other injured party in the negotiations. Several of the leading countries of the Alliance of Freedom, viz. the alliance against Trest, offered their services as mediators and assured everyone that of course they would be completely impartial in negotiations concerning Trest. Trest instantly took exception to the very concept, and several days of bickering ensued. Finally they settled on having the first talks in Strobland, a small island country that never dared either join or oppose the Alliance of Freedom.\n\nI was doing my best to disport myself with my surviving fianc\u00e9s, and generally enjoy life. If you care, I only disported myself that way once, with Osoth and a goodly amount of Dammanese vegetable oil, and he chattered constantly during it so I wasn't so bored, so it was almost as pleasant as just chattering with him. (Except for the envious part that he got to enjoy it and I didn't, as usual.) And he said it felt pretty good and didn't hurt much, which is all I'm hoping for.\n\nMore significantly, Arilash trounced me several times. I wouldn't flatter myself to thinking that I'm any better an opponent than before. But we are down three males out of seven, and neither of us wants Tultamaan. So first place female gets Csirnis, and second place gets Osoth, Nrararn, or, if she's somehow Arilash, probably both. And the only reason why we have to spend the next twelve years working on this is that it's undignified not to.\n\nAnyway, finally all of us moved to Strobland yesterday. Today Csirnis is going to tell Trest's ambassador about the right way to propitiate us.\n\nStrobland is a tall craggy island country. It's very wet. The valleys that aren't underwater are quite fertile, so it's a very prosperous tall craggy island country in an agricultural sort of way. Technologically it's rather backwards: there are only seventy-two miles of paved roads and a grand of cars in the whole place. Lots of big slow tractors with very well-maintained brakes though. Politically it's consular, sort of \u2014 that's the political system of Trest too. It's not exactly consular, because there are only three consuls and twelve states rather than seven and sixty-three. Even the most devoutly consular Tresteans admit that there aren't sixty-three proper cities in the whole of Strobland, so there's no point to a full-sized consular government. There are barely twelve. There's also a King and Queen of Strobland, a pair of generally beloved nearly-figureheads who override the consuls about once every three duodecades when the consuls are about to do something that offends the dignity and spirit of Strobland, and are otherwise used for potentially sacrificial purposes like negotiating with dragons.\n\nThere aren't any buildings built for dragons either. There's a havocs stadium though, so we're using that for the meetings. The havocs fans are upset that they can't watch their favorite sport in the height of the season. We're sleeping in the royal barns. And eating lots of fish, mostly caught by Stroblanders; that's most of what they do all day, except for the farmers. The fish are upset too, but not for very long.\n\nOpening Remarks\n\nThis all sounded very scripted. There wasn't really a script, except a little bit on our side, but everyone followed it anyway.\n\nScene: A big tent taking up half of the Daistrob Havocs Stadium. The tent is gaily striped in red and orange, except for occasional spots of mold. It was last used for the wedding of King Darmund and Queen Jingis a while ago, and stuffed in an attic in case they had a big anniversary party or something.\n\nDramatis Personae:\n\nDramatic Person Nationality / Side Notes\n\nCsirnis Dragons; Justice Beautiful and useful! Well, more beautiful than useful today.\n\nHemmo Trest Short, fat, grey-furred hoven wearing very precise and modern clothing. Secretary of the Diplomatic Brigade.\n\nZakuna Ze Cheya Short, fat, dim blue hoven wearing elaborate traditional Zeanese robes and a phoenix headdress larger than his whole head. The headdress had a small oil lamp in it, so that the phoenix's head was burning.\n\nQueen Jingis Strobland Tall, slender, elderly, dim-blue-turning-grey hoven wearing modern clothing that looked like last duodecade's fashion. (Her tunic had several structural flaws, I looked with tenasense, and a few patches.)\n\nPlus dozens of functionaries I was never introduced to, and eight other representatives of important countries who didn't say anything worth mentioning, so I won't mention them anymore.\n\nJingis: (A brief speech welcoming everyone to Strobland, urging everyone to keep the best interests of Hove as a whole in mind and quickly come to a generally-satisfactory resolution of the unpleasantries.)\n\nHoven ensemble: (Polite insincere applause.)\n\nDraconic ensemble: (No applause. The tent wasn't high enough. (No, really. If we sat on our haunches so we could clap with forepaws, we'd rip through the roof and probably sully the memory of the king and queen's wedding or something. (And clapping your forepaws when your belly is on the ground looks awkward.)))\n\nZakuna: (A devastatingly polite and indirect speech about the recent unpleasantries. If you didn't know the background, you'd think that the Tresteans had stepped on his foot or something, rather than killing grands of people and wrecking half his capital city.)\n\nEnsemble: (Quiet attention)\n\nHemmo: (A forceful and accurate presentation of the injuries to Trest and its allies and interests, from Drupe-ek-Kavash through the Peace Everywhere Array.)\n\nEnsemble: (Quiet attention)\n\nYthac: [privately] \"Jyothky, Scourge of Trest!\"\n\nMe: \"Ah, the things I do for love!\"\n\nCsirnis: (A calm and precise explanation of our side of the story, based on the twin principles of (1) we only destroy hovens when they're in our way, and (2) in nearly all cases the response has been traditional and appropriate to the situation.)\n\nEnsemble: (Quiet attention)\n\nHemmo: [In a whisper to a nameless functionary] \"They're sticking to that cyoziworm nonsense. Unfortunate.\"\n\nJingis: (Concluding words thanking everyone for peaceful, considerate, and careful participation.)\n\nAnd that was all of the peaceful, considerate, or careful participation.\n\nDemands\n\nHemmo: \"As the country which has suffered far and away the greatest injury, we present our demands. (1) that the extradimensional monsters return home and neither them nor any member of their species ever come to Hove again. (2) that before they depart they grant our scientists a full study of their capabilities and limitations, with an eye towards (2. a) our developing weapons against any potential future incursions in violation of (1), and (2. b) the adoption of their capabilities into Trestean technology. (3) Reparations from the Alliance of Freedom totalling ten times the cost of the damage to Trest, since this damage was taken in defending all Hove including the Alliance of Freedom from the alien monsters. (4) A complete waiver of all present and future claims of injury from Ze Cheya.\"\n\nHoven Ensemble: (general nodding)\n\nDraconic Ensemble: (general hissing) Because (1) would be personally awkward for us, and I can't imagine any way of telling all the other dragons, much less getting them to do it. (2. a) We don't want them to have those weapons, and (2. b) even if the hovens could use our magic we wouldn't want them to do so. (3) at least is not our business, but (4) is offensive.\n\nZakuna: \"As the country which has suffered terrible injuries for no more provocation than admitting to our country visitors whom we could scarcely exclude \u2014 whom the full military power of Trest was unable to keep out of Trest \u2014 we humbly request the consideration of the Empire of Trest for the rebuilding of our destroyed city, plus twelvefold more as punative damages, plus an official apology and agreement that the Peace Everywhere Array not be rebuilt and that Trest repudiate further violence against Ze Cheya.\"\n\nHoven Ensemble: \"That's meek peaceful little Ze Cheya making that sort of demand?\"\n\nOf course it wasn't just Ze Cheya making that sort of demand. Csirnis had discussed the amount and the repudiation with Ze Cheya and various Alliance of Freedom countries in advance. Some parts of Csirnis' demands came from them, too.\n\nCsirnis: \"We will ask only the traditional quantity punishment for an attack on nine dragons and the slaying of one. First, that all hovens involved in the attack, and their families and their closest friends, be delivered to us to take their deaths. Second, that their entire personal fortunes \u2014 in this case, including the year's military budget of the Trestean Army \u2014 be given, half to us, half to Ze Cheya. Third, that Trest never again build a weapon capable of injuring a dragon. Fourth, that Trest withdraw its military into its own borders and never again protrude it forth. Fifth, that Trest cease to fly airplanes, though by Jyothky's particular dispensation they are permitted zeppelins. Sixth, that Trest not object when we hunt hovens ridden by cyoziworms in its territory and do what we will to them.\"\n\nHoven Ensemble: \"What???\" Mostly at the first item, which I thought would be the least troublesome one. The last one got some snickering, since cyoziworms are generally considered to be legendary. The first one was the real problem.\n\nHemmo: \"Madam Queen, this request is inhoven, is barbaric! Archconsul Shuvanne's life, and the lives of so much of our military, cannot be made part of the settlement! I demand that the beast exclude itself from the discussions!\" There was general agreement. Apparently hovens think that leaders shouldn't be personally responsible for the atrocities they order committed. This makes no sense to me whatever.\n\nJingis: \"I have no authority to order any such thing. Csirnis, I beg that you withdraw the first part of your demands, in order for the negotiations to continue.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"I cannot withdraw it. It is simple justice. Additionally it has been at the heart of relations between small people and dragons for all time.\"\n\nHemmo: \"We have not been a part of any such relations! You are newly come to Hove! And on Hove, the life of a national leader is sacrosanct!\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Uncle Holder of Ghemelia is no longer alive to dispute that. I daresay that Osoth could track down his spectre and have him dispute it posthumously.\"\n\nHemmo: \"Irrelevant! Uncle Holder had been deposed before he was put on trial for his many crimes!\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Then depose Shuvanne too. You may use whatever legal fictions you like to fulfil your obligations.\"\n\nHemmo: \"Impossible! Further, killing family and friends is an atrocity, a barbarism!\"\n\nCsirnis: \"A preventive measure only. It discourages a great many vengeful small people from foolish assaults.\"\n\nZakuna: \"Csirnis, Csirnis, come, do not insist on this. It is not the way of gentleness.\"\n\nCsirnis: \"It is the draconic law, Zakuna. I can but uphold it, and apply it mercifully. Or, if Trest refuses to obey it, apply it fiercely.\"\n\nAnd that pretty much ruined the day's negotiations, right there. The hovens all tried to persuade Csirnis to give up on that. Of course Csirnis couldn't, and wouldn't. He even got a bit testy about it, which is unusual for Csirnis. By the end of the day, the dialog was more like:\n\nCsirnis: \"I can't alter that demand. I shan't alter that demand. If you like we can take it off the table. If you do, we shall need to pursue it privately. You may expect considerable collateral damage. I would rather a dozen, a gross, of uninvolved hovens die than a single involved one survive.\"\n\nHoven ensemble: \"No, no, that's awful, that's uncivilized, that's heinous, it's unhoven!\"\n\nCsirnis: \"It is no such thing. Trest killed more uninvolved hovens per unit dragon not long ago, in Ze Cheya.\"\n\nHoven ensemble: \"But that was different!\"\n\nCsirnis: \"Yes, different. Both Zeanese and dragon who were killed were wholly innocent, and, indeed, devoted to paths of gentleness and peace.\" Which is a bit of an exaggeration about Greshthanu, but not completely false; he was very Uplifty at least.\n\nBy the end of the day's negotiations, we had pretty much alienated all the hovens, even Ze Cheya."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Worse Diplomacy (Day 81)\n\nThe next day in the big red and orange tent didn't do any better. Except for one thing, and that was seeing Tarcuna again.\n\nI was sleeping in a barn. Specifically one of the barns of the Royal Stables, so it was quite a nice barn as long as I was careful not to knock against the sides. Though it smelled so much of recent horses that I was quite hungry. It required a good deal of determination to go to sleep rather than sneaking off for some night hunting, which would have surely made poor Csirnis' diplomacy just that much harder.\n\nEarly in the morning, at least an hour before the day's negotiations were supposed to start, Tarcuna and some Trestean soldiers drove up to the barn in a very nice wooden carriage. I had my head under my wing (see \"determination\" above). Tarcuna pounded on the door and shouted, \"Spotty, Spotty? Are you awake?\"\n\n\"I'm not asleep, I'm awake,\" I said, although it wasn't true, and didn't rhyme in Trestean either.\n\n\"Do you have time to talk?\"\n\nI woke up some more. \"Oh! Tarcuna! I didn't know you were here!\" I peered down at her. \"Are we still friends?\"\n\nShe looked up fearlessly, which I had to feel guilty about. \"I hope so. I'm still in love with you anyhow. Could we talk a bit, though?\"\n\n\"Of course! Come in! I think there's something to sit on. No food though. Who are your companions?\"\n\nShe introduced them, but I mostly don't care about their names. \"They're my guards, and Markosh here is my... they call him my mentor.\"\n\n\"That sounds evasive to me. What do you call him?\" I asked.\n\n\"My tender, maybe. My handler. They're not at all sure what to make of me,\" said Tarcuna. She looked into the barn, which was mostly full of me, and sat on a bale of hay in the barnyard instead. The soldiers sat, two on the hay, the other two on the ground. Markosh bowed and said something diplomatical and therefore meaningless.\n\n\"I hope they have given you a very high salary and made you comfortable and honored in all ways?\" I asked, glaring at Markosh.\n\n\"It takes a while. They've been OK so far. I'm sort of consulting for them on spec. If I do a good job here and if they think they can trust me afterwards, they'll do that,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Tarcuna, you know you can't lie to a dragon,\" I said.\n\nTarcuna glared at Markosh. \"Told you.\"\n\nMarkosh nodded gravely. \"We had to know.\"\n\n\"I have to know too! Tarcuna, you must tell me what you are being evasive about!\" I roared.\n\n\"Oh, some forceful interrogation techniques. Not a big deal. Some of my johns were harsher to me, when I was a whore,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"But you were getting paid then!\" I said. My tail boomed against the side of the barn. I didn't want to break the barn down \u2014 I'd probably have to sleep in a cave if I did that, and Strobland's caves are awfully wet and moldy. So I shrank by three-quarters (linear), and waddled out to the barnyard. The diplomat and soldiers boggled a bit at the display of very ordinary magic. Which was silly of them, I'd been that size last night so I could go to the theatre for a chanting-out. (I didn't want to take hoven shape \u2014 none of the other dragons did, and I wanted to show my solidarity with them. And we want to be full-sized and impressive for the actual negotiations.)\n\n\"Well, I expect I'll get paid again soon. It wasn't so bad really. Truth drugs \u2014 they're not really truth drugs, they just lower my inhibitions and make me dizzy. I barely have any inhibitions anyway, and they usually let me sit down, so that wasn't any trouble to speak of. They also kept me awake a couple days in a row, and shouted at me a lot. You've done worse to me and I was, am, grateful,\" said Tarcuna.\n\nI tasted her scent, and thought about her words. \"You're angry at them but don't want me to kill them, is that what you mean?\"\n\n\"Exactly. I'd rather they make it up to me with money and honor and such. And I'd rather earn it myself than have you blast it out of them. It'd be nice to have some pride again,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Well, next time you're telling me something, don't be so evasive. I hate having to think. I'm the laziest dragon on Hove, especially before breakfast.\"\n\nSo we chatted about her circumstances a bit more. She's constantly guarded and monitored. She grinned a big grin at that. \"I asked for privacy, and they didn't want to give it to me. They thought you'd sneak in and give me secret orders, or something.\"\n\n\"Because it's so easy for a barn-sized lizard to sneak into a small room without anyone noticing,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, you got around Dorday pretty quietly for a few days,\" said Tarcuna. \"Anyway, if they don't don't want me to have any privacy... a whore doesn't really expect a lot of privacy in her professional life anyway.\" The soldiers' fur went all turbulent and their scent a bit sour, which means they were embarrassed. \"I know how to put on quite a flashy show of auto-eroticism. Good for flustering the guards, and for feeling sweeter after being kept awake for two days.\"\n\nI had to laugh at that. \"From that, did they give you any privacy?\"\n\n\"No, just female guards.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine that stopping you,\" I said.\n\n\"It inspired my artistry!\"\n\n\"I guess they didn't know you like girls better than boys?\"\n\n\"The Diplomacy Brigade knew. I don't think the guards figured it out 'til you just said it,\" said Tarcuna. Her guards did seem to be melting a bit into puddles of embarrassment.\n\n\"Well, I'm glad you've been taking good care of yourself,\" I said. \"Was that what you wanted to talk about?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not,\" she said. \"I wanted to know how to get Csirnis to stop insisting on killing so many of us. We can't agree to any deal including Shuvanne's life, much less all the people you want.\"\n\nI blinked at her. \"I suppose you could do something worse than death to them, if you'd rather. A cyoziworm maybe. You and Llredh could probably persuade us that that's a sufficient punishment.\"\n\nTarcuna shuddered. \"We simply can't have a treaty with any such thing in it. For one thing, it's not how we do things anymore, on Hove. It's barbarous.\"\n\n\"It's barbarous not to punish the hoven who killed many grands of hovens in Ze Cheya?\"\n\n\"He's got Immunity of Office. It's not a crime if it's while he's a consul and he's just setting national policy. His job is to set national policy. Sometimes innocent people get hurt by national policy, and that's too bad, and we're willing to pay money by way of apology for that. But not for the national policy as a whole.\"\n\n\"That sounds barbarous to me,\" I said, because it did.\n\n\"And even if he was responsible, his family and friends aren't. He's got a two-year-old son, Spotty! The baby probably can't even talk, much less have any influence over his father.\"\n\n\"All the more reason why Shuvanne shouldn't be challenging dragons,\" I said. \"He's endangering his innocent family.\"\n\n\"No, you're endangering his innocent family.\"\n\n\"Well, after he killed so many hoven children, I don't really see the problem with killing his,\" I said. \"Though technically that's not why we're insisting on killing his family. Anyway, we're not punishing the baby, we're punishing Shuvanne by killing his baby.\"\n\n\"That's simply horrible,\" Tarcuna said. \"What if we insisted that your parents should be killed for you destroying the Peace Everywhere Array?\"\n\n\"I imagine you would quickly learn how mighty a pair of fully-grown adults at the height of their powers are, compared to a gawky half-trained one-third-grown girl like me,\" I said, rather proudly.\n\n\"That's a good practical argument, but totally shit as a moral argument,\" Tarcuna said.\n\nI thought about that a while. \"I suppose so.\"\n\nShe looked triumphant. \"So you agree that your demand is immoral. Could you at least put it on the table for negotiation?\"\n\n\"Well, Csirnis is the negotiator. You could probably make the same point with him \u2014 he's a far more decent and ethical person than I am. But practically I don't think it'll work. It's a very old and very practical law, and I wouldn't feel at all good about violating it. Especially so publicly,\" I said.\n\n\"I didn't really think so. Oh, and as long as we're being practical, the other reason we can't do it is, Shuvanne can veto the treaty. That's part of his job as a consul too,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"This whole diplomacy seems pretty futile, then. I think we probably should negotiate a war treaty instead of a peace treaty,\" I said.\n\n\"What's a war treaty?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"An agreement about what we're going to destroy if we can, but of course in this case we can.\"\n\n\"What good is that?\" asked Tarcuna.\n\n\"It's mostly to be nice to you. We might, oh, say that we're going to destroy Perstra in a week, as part of it. Then you have twelve days to...\"\n\n\"Ten. Weeks are ten days.\"\n\n\"If it's our war, it's our week. Don't complain, you get more time that way. You have twelve days to get all the hovens out of Perstra who want to leave, or to put up whatever defenses you want, or if you're sensible to take your military far away and keep it quiet 'til we're done.\"\n\n\"I still don't see what good that does for you.\"\n\n\"Depends on the agreement! If you agree that you'll take your military out of the way, then we can burn the city conveniently, and if that's what we want to do, we'll be happy. And your soldiers at least won't be dead, so it's a good treaty for you too.\"\n\n\"Do small people ever break those treaties? Like saying they'll keep their armies away, but reinforcing them instead?\"\n\nI had to think about that. \"Oh, I'm sure it happens. Usually they're treaties between dragons... we fight a lot more than you do, and for more reasons, so it's important to keep the fights under control. But we can make war treaties with small people too. If you break the treaty, we will too, and that usually works worse for the small people. At the very least, you'd lose the soldiers who went up against us.\"\n\n\"Or you might lose a dragon or two,\" said one of the soldiers. I think Masha was her name.\n\n\"Possibly! You'd have to kill us all though, if that happens, or we'll ruin the entire country. Oh! You can put something into the war treaty about that \u2014 that's important! If you're planning to fight us, demand permission to fight us. That way we don't have to kill you and your family if you shoot us, Masha. That's good for us, less work to do, and good for you too since we won't kill your family and we might not even kill you.\"\n\n\"Don't be so cocky! We killed one of you already!\" said Tarcuna.\n\nI licked her head, messily. \"I'm still sorry I broke your ability to feel fear, but you are so delightful without it.\"\n\nTarcuna tried to clean her head with some hay. \"That is horrible! Can we negotiate a Licking Treaty? Only appealing hoven girls can lick me, and only between the legs?\"\n\nEveryone blushed, or hid their eyes behind their wings, as appropriate. Except Markosh, whose profession demands unflappability.\n\nThen it was time for the morning's negotiations, but you already know that they went so badly it's not worth talking about them.\n\nSpy Games\n\nSince Strobland is so craggy, and since the talks were so tedious and futile, some of us went for hunting and tail-chasing and tsheriaf around Mt. Monjior. (Scores if you care: Arilash caught one mountain goat, one Ythac, and 166 points. Ythac caught nothing, one Arilash, one Jyothky, and 223 points. I caught a giant climbing spider, nobody, and 208 points.) Then we brought our food and our non-captives, but not our tsheriaf points, back to the royal stable grounds. The hovens couldn't cook them very fast, and didn't think that the climbing spider was edible at all. So we made them give us a lot of spicy mustard and cheese sauce. Ythac delicately rotted the meat with darkness breath, and I delicately scorched it with fire, and we shared it and complained about this and that, mostly in Ghemelian. Ghemelian is good for complaining in.\n\nThen Ythac cast a language spell, and wrote to Arilash and me: \"Trestean spies are listening to us now. Do you care?\"\n\n\"I imagine the Tresteans know by now that I liked to copulate with the dragon they killed, and that I miss him,\" wrote Arilash.\n\n\"And they can count the open-air theatres in Strobland as easily as I can. I was at the only one last night, listening to big hairy brawny hovens chanting epic poetry at each other. It's not entertainment, it's a sporting contest.\" I re-complained.\n\n\"Well, I care. Follow my lead, OK?\" wrote Ythac.\n\nOut loud, in Ghemelian, he said, \"I just noticed something that would be funny if it weren't dangerous. You know the Trestean word for 'ferret' and the Ghemelian word for 'sleuth'? If you say them back to back, it comes out as my True Name.\"\n\n\"Well, you'd better watch out for, um, Trestean military police in Ghemel who are looking for illegal mustelids, then, hadn't you?\" I said.\n\n\"Don't laugh! It's a real problem! If someone says that to me, I lose all my powers!\" Which is silly. There's no such thing as a True Name. All our powers come from our astral bits, and sound doesn't even carry to the astral plane. Ythac had been reading Trestean mysticism and magical fiction, which has True Names.\n\n\"Really, how likely are you to run into someone who mixes Trestean and Ghemelian like that?\" snorted Arilash.\n\nI said the words to myself in my head as I crunched a spider leg in cheese sauce. \"Ythac? Why'd you pick Petty Draconic for 'I'm so doomed.' as your supposed True Name? You're not that doomed, are you?\"\n\n\"That depends on whether my father calms down before he finds someone to cast the Triangular Cyclonette so he can come here and kill me, when he finds out about me and Llredh. But that's not the joke \u2014 I'm not going to be yelling my True Name at me and expecting me to roll over and die.\"\n\n\"You are so vicious! I know I can't marry you, but can I twine you a few more times?\" wrote Arilash.\n\n\"No, but you're welcome in my territory anytime, once I have a territory,\" he wrote back.\n\n\"Well, you're still safer than poor Csirnis. His True Name is pronounced just like 'Crompies King'. There might even be a fish sandwich store called that in Dorday,\" I said. \"He could be destroyed at any time by a careless hoven tourist!\"\n\n\"That doesn't even fit Grand Draconic phonetics,\" wrote Ythac.\n\n\"No, but it sounds almost like 'Give me fermented ham' in Mhel. Best I could come up with,\" I said, and took the last of the goat.\n\nArilash had been musing and looking clever. \"Tultamaan's True Name is 'Square Running Bowl' in Zeanese.\" \"Or 'Whiny Aphid' in Mhel!\"\n\nSo we carefully doomed ourselves and all of our friends, or worked out some feeble bilingual puns, your choice, for the benefit of the spies.\n\n\"So we could all be wiped out by a few people who know the right words, is what you're saying?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\n\"I wonder if Csirnis realizes how vulnerable we actually are?\" I mused for the benefit of the spies.\n\n\"Well, he'd better not act like it! The appearance of strength in negotiating is everything. Besides, it's not as though anyone is going to stumble on those words.\"\n\n\"As long as Csirnis avoids hungry tourists. Anyone fancy another fly around Mt. Monjior before the afternoon session starts?\"\n\nThe flight was nice. The afternoon session was very bickery. Except that Arilash and Ythac and I kept writing bilingual puns at each other, and giggling out loud in the middle of Zakuna's elegy for the fallen of Ze Cheya or something equally inappropriate.\n\nCoda\n\nDragon Stated True Name Other Meaning Note\n\nJyothky Catastrophe Agenda Late Breakfast Huge Ythac was in good form with this one!\n\nArilash Bright Wint-Winter Too Much Sex Ythac was not in such good form with this one. He had to stutter one\n\nword.\n\nLlredh Slipper of an Old Agent Destroy Me Now! I'm proud of this.\n\nOsoth Dung of the Harpy Eagle Narcotic Miasma Probably would have been better the other way around.\n\nNrararn Later, Later, Later Neither Surprised Using the same word in three different languages was cute. The\n\ntranslation, not so much."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Too Much Diplomacy (Days 82 through 87)\n\nDay Diplomacy Dragons\n\n82 A general agreement to table the discussion of killing Shuvanne.\n\nOsoth and Llredh got into a terrible fight about... something. I think it might have been cheese sauce. Or someone's honor. Maybe one of them splashed the other with cheese sauce? In any case, Osoth got his forewings terribly crunched, and Ythac and I had to bodily pull Llredh off Osoth before he did the hindwings too.\n\n83 Blinding success! An agreement that the Trestean army's military budget not be entirely paid as reparations, but that they would bring their army within their own borders. This makes some sense because they need to pay for moving lots of stuff all around.\n\nArilash and Csirnis put on a rather spectacular amatory display. Nobody said a word to me. I was ashamed anyway, and whined at Tarcuna for a long time afterwards. She was sympathetic enough, because she had to be I suppose. I miss Xolgrohim; he's easier to whine at.\n\n84 Csirnis conceded that Trest can fly civilian airships, just not military ones. Trest agreed that they will pay reparations to Ze Cheya.\n\nEveryone snarled at Csirnis for conceding points. He snarled back that that's what negotiation is about. Everyone snarled at Csirnis more for starting with what is lawful, if he's going to give a bunch of it away.\n\n85 Trest agreed to repudiate further violence against Ze Cheya. Unless Ze Cheya continues to ally themselves with Trest's enemies. Csirnis and Zakuna allowed Trest to get away with fourfold punative damages, instead of the original twelvefold.\n\nEveryone snarled more at Csirnis. Arilash declaimed at length about how ashamed she is for copulating with such a one as Csirnis two days ago.\n\nCsirnis flew off to Mt. Monjior to \"meditate\".\n\n86 Csirnis informed the hovens that our further demands are no longer negotiable. The hoven ambassadors were rather ticked! They argued; Csirnis held firm. They\n\nexpostulated; Csirnis held firm. They bickered; Csirnis held firm. They remonstrated; Csirnis held firm. They even quibbled; Csirnis prodded them with his hukuch\u00f4 and they stopped quibbling and started dribbling. Day's negotiations ended early.\n\nArilash and I both rewarded Csirnis. Stroblanders don't cook with vegetable oil\n\nthough. Mountain goat butter \u2014 not clarified \u2014 works just fine, though I smelled rather nasty and goaty about the genitalia despite washing in the ocean for some while. I must find some soap next time.\n\nAfterwards, Arilash utterly demolished me in a dominance fight, five touches to one. And her second touch wrecked my left eye. She healed it before I managed to, but that was her third touch. I should stop fighting Caramelles with her, and switch to just classical Dominances.\n\nWhich brings us to this morning. Csirnis walked glidingly into the tent \u2014 how does he do that? \u2014 and said to Hemmo, \"Today, you must accede to the rest of our conditions. If you do not, we will no longer negotiate a peace treaty. Instead, we will start to negotiate a war treaty.\"\n\nSo we spent the next half-hour explaining what a war treaty is to the Stroblanders and the Zeanese and such. The Tresteans already knew. They are listening to Tarcuna.\n\nHemmo tried to avoid Csirnis' fork. \"I believe that progress is possible on your sixth point. Our medical establishment can, we believe, develop a test for the presence of cyoziworms \u2014 if provided with a few samples \u2014 and, armed with that test, we could establish a legal procedure so that our doctors and police could provide you with the so-called 'wormridden'... yark!\"\n\nThe \"yark!\" was probably due to Csirnis breathing a circle of fire around him, without touching him. So elegantly he made every dragoness's heart sing. Probably Ythac's too, though Ythac better not touch Csirnis.\n\n\"Centered circle! Eighteen points!\" warbled Arilash, as if this were a tsheriaf game.\n\n\"I imagine that such a medical test and legal procedure will be helpful when we resume negotiations for the peace treaty. This will happen after the upcoming war. It is now time for violence, or, more properly, planning for violence.\"\n\nVarious hovens argued. Csirnis was having none of it. The diplomacy adjourned for the day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "War Treaty (Day 88)\n\nBack in that tent:\n\n\"This will be an advisory sort of war,\" said Csirnis. \"We will destroy Perstra by fire. After that, you should come back to Strobland and accept our revised demands.\"\n\nThe hovens' fur generally went muddy and turbulent, and they stammered and stank of fear, save for one. \"Hey, Csirnis. Aren't you supposed to give us some time to, oh, evacuate the city?\" shouted Tarcuna.\n\n\"Oh, absolutely, Tarcuna! That's one important detail for the war treaty. Also which direction we shall approach the city from, who shall do it, what important sites you wish to preserve, and what your army will be doing in that time,\" said Csirnis. \"Shall we begin?\"\n\nA somewhat shaken Hemmo reluctantly acquiesced.\n\nDay Diplomacy Dragons\n\n88 The attack will commence one week (12 days) from the agreement on the war treaty. Fine, fine. Get on with it.\n\nAll the drakes were ferocious with dominance contests. Including Llredh who beat up Nrararn (five to three) and Osoth (five to four). Even though there's really no point to him having dominance contests anymore, is there? Actually, Arilash beat me again, but by a rather less humiliating than last time five to three.\n\n89 Maybe Churry City instead of Perstra? Whatever.\n\nEveryone was utterly pissy. Even Nrararn and Osoth had a dominance contest (Osoth won, five to four). And I got into a fight with Tultamaan over The Usual Problem which has been going on for this Whole Mating Flight that I will Occasionally Mate With Other Males but never quite Get Around To Him. He really isn't a very good fighter. Which is his own fault really. A nice satisfying close-up fight where I clawed and clawed and bit, and he cursed his paralyzed forelegs and bit, and I won five to four.\n\n90 They want infantry not to be killed, even if they're firing at us. Much argument. No decision. Everyone gangs up on Csirnis and chews his wings to rags.\n\nCsirnis, wings gleaming from being newly regrown, glided into that clawraped tent. \"At the end of the day, the war treaty will take effect. If you wish to persuade us of anything, do so now.\"\n\nHenno looked very disappointed. I guess he had been trying to delay us as long as he could, perhaps the rest of his life or something. Well, a day or two more and it would have been... Llredh and Arilash aren't the most patient dragons that you've ever met. I'm sure one of them would have squashed him. Three or four days, and I would have done.\n\nThe War Treaty proper\n\n\"We\" is six of us, excluding Arilash and Llredh who aren't fighting in the war because no dangersense.\n\n\"They\" are the inhabitants of Trest.\n\nFourteen days from today, we'll destroy the military base at Darpuldo. We are confronting the Trestean army in this regard: that means that (1) they can fight back, and, if they do, we're obligated to duodecimate and rout the army (which destroying the military base counts as, so no problem), and (2) they can kill us and we're not obligated to take any particular degree of revenge.\n\n(We're allowed, of course, and we probably would if one of us gets killed.)\n\nFifteen days from today, we'll destroy the military base at Fort Tasse Man, under the same terms.\n\nSixteen days from today, we'll destroy the military base at Bastruzo, under the same terms.\n\nSeventeen days from today, we will have a big battle with the Trestean army at the Quenjo Wastes. We are challenging the Trestean army in this regard: that means that (1) they can attack us and we're not obligated to take any particular form of reprisal, and (2) they can kill us and we're not obligated to any particular revenge.\n\nEighteen days from today, we'll destroy Churry City. Just the city and the military base. Farmhouses will be specifically spared if the residents do not attack dragons. (Churdle and his boss should be fine.) We'll be confronting anyhoven who chooses to resist.\n\nArilash and Llredh will not be participating in any of these battles.\n\nThe devastations pursuant to this treaty will take the place of the destruction of the families and friends of Shuvanne and his associates in other treaty discussions. (We figure that, for a major world leader, accidentally losing an old, important city will be a humiliation comparable to the death of his family. Also, when it comes down to it, none of us wants to kill the two-year-old, and Nrararn and Arilash outright refused to do it.)\n\nThere was lots of bickering on our side. Why are we having the big battle as a challenge rather than a confrontation? (Answer: it doesn't make any difference really \u2014 it's just a little less restrictive on us, and we're going to more than duodecimate them anyway. (Objection: it's more cowardly! (Answer: Shut up!))) And, of course, why does does Jyothky get to do this? She already got to destroy the Peace Everywhere Array! (Answer: That wasn't a proper rampage, that was a chore. (Elaboration: A chore and a half!) (Objection: But I want to destroy a city toooo! (Answer: It's a big city, there's plenty for everyone. And Jyothky didn't destroy a city, just a bunch of little camps. (Objection: a lot of camps! (Answer: Shut up!)))))\n\nOh, and Arilash and Llredh are out because they don't have any dangersense.\n\nThe Tresteans have lots more big twistor projectors which could potentially kill a dragon. These are smaller ones, shooting a few miles instead of all the way across the world. But they'd hurt, and a badly-timed shot or two would kill. We persuaded Arilash and Llredh to stay out of the way. Arilash looked a bit disappointed, but told the drakes to loot a lot for her. Llredh \u2014 that most aggressive of dragons \u2014 looked unconcerned and said he'd find something else to do. Marriage, or fake marriage, seems to rather change a drake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "In The News (Day 92)\n\nFor old times' sake, I abducted Tarcuna to Stajrn\u00ebblott\u00eb, on the other side of Strobland. It was an easy sort of abduction:\n\n\"Hey, Tarcuna! Want to come with me to Butterboard's?\" Butterboard's being a famous sandwich restaurant in Stajrn\u00ebblott\u00eb \u2014 so famous that its fame has spread far and wide, and that it is mentioned in nearly all three tourist guidebooks about Strobland.\n\n\"Sure! What's Butterboard's?\" said Tarcuna, who had, evidently, only read the other guidebook. If that.\n\n\"Sandwich restaurant!\"\n\n\"I should have expected some such. Can I bring my guards and mentor?\"\n\n\"Sure, but I'm not carrying them. Or paying for them,\" I said. I'll carry my friends, but not their oppressors.\n\n\"I'd better not, then,\" she said. \"Or maybe we can meet you there?\"\n\nSo I grabbed her in my forepaws, and jumped into the air, and flew off to Butterboard's.\n\n\"Spotty, you're going to get me in trouble. More trouble, I mean,\" she said, but she was laughing.\n\nSo I shouted down to her oppressors, \"Meet us at Butterboard's!\" and let them work out the logistics.\n\nStajrn\u00ebblott\u00eb is a small, unimpressive city, devoted mainly to fishing, logging, and herding. The buildings are heavy wooden things, mostly not painted except for one red circle on the front of each one that represents having paid the house-tax. Butterboard's is in one of the buildings, somewhere, but I had to land, shrink to hoven-sized, and have Tarcuna ask a native to find it. They were a bit surprised and a bit scared to be serving a dragon, but if the Queen of Strobland could have dragons around without flinching, they could too.\n\nInside, it's all very ornate and kitschy, with lots of small wooden or ivory carved hovens peeking at you from lots of shelves. There's a big table in the middle of the room, where five Great Chefs of Making Sandwiches stand at attention, surrounded by a vast array of breads, meats, sausages, cheeses, p\u00e2t\u00e9s, mayonnaises, butters, mustards, and spreads. There are a few terrified-looking vegetables off at one end of the table, too. I don't know what the vegetables are so terrified of. Nobody ordered any vegetables while I was there.\n\nThe menu is about half a tail long, listing more than fifteen dozen choices, all with fanciful names. \"The Happy Little Gnome\" is roast cow and spiced butter and goose-liver p\u00e2t\u00e9 on dark pumpernickle. \"Top of the Mountain\" is four kinds of sausage and plain butter on seeded white bread. Why? I have no idea.\n\nYou're supposed to order three assorted sandwiches (they're small) for a small meal, up to ten sandwiches for a Gigantic Hunger. \"Hm... it's not dinnertime yet, but I'm rather hungry,\" said Tarcuna. \"I'll order the Normal Dinner, of five. You're paying, right? I don't have any money.\"\n\n\"Sure, if they take thurnies.\" I looked at the long, long menu and drooled.\n\n\"Spotty? You may not order one of everything here. You just may not.\"\n\n\"Pity.\" So I ordered two Gigantic Hungers, one their top ten sandwiches of pickled fish and the other their top ten of sausage, and watched with interest as the chefs sawed thin slices of bread with huge knives, and spread and sliced and assembled.\n\n\"Actually, I promised you some money and forgot to give it to you.\" I took out the greater part of the money I had taken from the paymaster at Churry City.\n\n\"No thanks, Spotty. It'll look like a bribe. That would be real trouble for me.\"\n\n\"Well, I owe you your tip at least, don't I?\"\n\n\"Well, that's up to you. Usually it's for good service...\"\n\n\"And flying into battle on my back has to count as good service,\" I said. \"So, the full thirty thousand.\"\n\n\"Well, fine. Could you hold on to it for me?\" She obviously didn't want to be seen taking money from me, so I dropped the point.\n\nThen the sandwiches came. The sandwiches were beautiful (but open-faced! I wasn't expecting that), long rows of fanciful spirally towers of meats and cheeses and whatnots on thin slices of bread, served on planks. They tasted good, too. Butterboard's reputation is entirely deserved, and the next time I am in Stajrn\u00ebblott\u00eb I shall be sure to go back to Butterboard's, it's that good. (The next time I am in Strobland and don't have some other reason to go to Stajrn\u00ebblott\u00eb, I won't make a special trip. It's not that good.)\n\nAfter Tarcuna had finished three and two-halves of her sandwiches, she said, \"I see a copy of the Magic Horn of Perstra by the door. Want to see what they're saying about us?\"\n\n\"I've always enjoyed having you read the paper while I'm eating, Tarcuna.\"\n\nSo she fumbled with it, one-handed. \"Here we are. It's yesterday's, but that's fine.\"\n\n\"Our greatest enemies remain at large in Strobland, the Black Curse and his conspecifics!\"\n\n\"The Black Curse is you, I'm sorry to say,\" noted Tarcuna.\n\n\"It doesn't sound that bad,\" I said.\n\n\"It's a variation on 'Curset'. The anti-sun, the material manifestation of the evil principle. His anus, to be specific. It is not an overly flattering name. I'm sorry, Spotty. To keep reading,\"\n\n\"They threaten to attack our fair home! Churry City, the heart of Muld, is at peril! Henno has failed to stop or deter them \u2014 incompetent? Or traitorous? Shuvanne must find a better approach towards dealing with these savage beasts whom he has stirred up! When they leave Strobland and fly toward Trest, it is only our brave and noble military that will stop them! That will not be accomplished without great shedding of blood! Our soldiers have already had to endure far too much in Ghemelia and in the Peace Everywhere Array!\"\n\n\"Does Trest want Shuvanne to surrender himself and his family? We might accept that. Though the drakes are eager to show off in a real battle.\"\n\n\"I imagine that Churry City would prefer that. Unless they think the army can protect them. Anyway, there's more.\"\n\n\"Meanwhile, the barely intelligent brutes fly and fight and feed and fornicate in the mountains of Strobland! The perfect opportunity to strike them with the Peace Everywhere Array without unnecessary casualties!... But, somehow, Shuvanne has already lost the Peace Everywhere Array!\"\n\n\"They don't sound pleased anywhere. Who do they hate more, us or Shuvanne?\" I asked.\n\n\"They've had more practice hating Shuvanne. Not the majority, but lots of people. He's very aggressive. Some people think that's a bad idea... I used to, when I cared about politics.\"\n\nI nibbled at a slightly monumental pyramid of cheeses and pickled fish and sweet butter on a whisper of brown bread. \"D'you think Tresteans would take it as a kindness if we killed him, instead of Churry City?\"\n\n\"No. You're alien monsters. Even people who want him dead wouldn't be happy if you killed him. Really, you killing hovens is just going to make the surviving hovens more upset. No matter how you do it,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Including making you more upset?\"\n\nShe slurped hot tea and stared at me over the cup. \"Definitely including making me more upset. I wish you'd stop killing people.\"\n\n\"I don't particularly enjoy it,\" I said, and it sounded petulant to my own ears. \"You've seen me kill, oh, muggers and that first warplane and then the other warplanes in Port-of-Zom, and then the Peace Everywhere Array. And not kill Shebra, despite how annoying she was. Do I seem to like killing hovens?\"\n\n\"No, but you keep doing it.\"\n\n\"Well. All the drakes are telling me that I've had my turn demolishing Tresteans already. I can hardly promise never to kill any more Tresteans, or other hovens, but I can sit out of the next war and nobody's going to complain.\"\n\nTarcuna's eyes widened. \"Would you?\"\n\n\"I suppose so. Everyone would be happier if I did.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose you could get the drakes to sit out too?\"\n\n\"There wouldn't be much of a war if they did!\"\n\n\"I'd like that,\" said Tarcuna. \"Think you can?\"\n\n\"No. They're furious and haven't tasted blood yet. I'm furious too, but I've done somewhat about it,\" I said.\n\n\"Didn't you hate Greshthanu?\"\n\n\"We didn't get along very well. I might have married him though. He was the second-best drake, after Llredh and Ythac were out. Now I'll probably be stuck with Osoth or Nrararn.\"\n\n\"You'd marry him even though you don't get along?\"\n\n\"Why would I want an inferior mate?\"\n\nShe started trying to talk me out of it \u2014 to explain to me why it's important to love your mate. Which is all very silly. Everyone figures out how to love their mate eventually. Except maybe for very inflexible dragons like Rankotherium. And nobody is in love when they get married. Except maybe for perverts like Ythac and Llredh.\n\nAnyway, I pointed out that I wasn't going to marry Greshthanu anymore anyway, and that was her country's fault, and the next thing we needed to do was to make sure that they stopped trying to kill any more of my fianc\u00e9s.\n\n\"So why not reject that war treaty, and not fight?\" she asked.\n\n\"They're drakes. They're not going to not fight. Even wimpy ones like Osoth and Nrararn and Tultamaan are going to fight, they just don't enjoy it as much as Llredh.\"\n\n\"Well... I hope the army can drive them off, then. I don't see any way out of this that makes both of us happy, though,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"No, probably not. Sorry about ruining your country. I hope we don't have to wreck it more past this.\"\n\nAftermath\n\nNobody minded moving me to the \"not participating\" section of the treaty. So that was easy.\n\nTarcuna got credit for... well, it was a pretty minor diplomatic victory, but it was the first thing that the Trestean diplomats could call a victory. Getting one dragon fewer in the enemy forces is pretty big. Bonus points for most veteran dragon with the most experience destroying technology military things (which is me! Until day 104, when it will be the drakes). Except when there are still five left.\n\nReally, it shouldn't take more than one dragon to crush the army, should it?\n\nCoda\n\nWell, it shouldn't take more than one, that's axiomatic.\n\nWhy, then, did Ythac and Arilash and Llredh call me back to Port-of-Zom to help them fight? I can see a few ways to make that agree with the axiom.\n\nThey were being friendly to me. This is pretty likely \u2014 Ythac knew how offended I was by his behavior, and didn't want me storming off alone.\n\nArilash and Llredh aren't really whole dragons. They don't have dangersense, and when you're fighting an army and there are alarums and explosions going on all over, dangersense is very useful. (I'm not a whole dragon either \u2014 I might not notice that I need to heal myself, and die by mistake. At least I'll notice before I get hurt.)\n\nThey weren't fighting the army per se. Llredh certainly wasn't. He was raging, he was trying to burn up the city or something. Ythac and Arilash didn't really want that either. Nobody was actually fighting the\n\narmy for real.\n\nThey, we, weren't fighting the army the right way. If you want to destroy an army, you fight vicious and sneaky. I speak from experience here! I destroyed the Peace Everywhere Array like that. We've got several distinct advantages over technology armies: healing magic to endure, apotropaic magic to defend, illusion magic to hide, travel magic to speed, big versatile breath weapons. These work better when you fly across the continent and burn up bits of the army that aren't expecting it. A big pitched battle like we're going to have is a showpiece. It looks impressive (I hope!) but it's not the efficient way to demolish an army.\n\nWe're all pretty young dragons, just adolescents. Maybe the axiom is about grownups.\n\nMaybe the axiom could be wrong?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Etiquette of Xolgrohim (Day 100)\n\n\"What are you and your fianc\u00e9s doing in Ghemelia now?\" Tarcuna asked me at breakfast. This was some effort on her part, since the Stroblanders were roasting oxen for us in a little mountainside park a half-hour's drive from that useless tent.\n\n\"Nothing, I don't think. We haven't been back to Ghemelia since, oh, it must be nearly two weeks. Unless someone's gone back to dig up a bit of a hoard from the desert or something, I suppose,\" I said. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"This,\" she said, and handed me a little scroll of paper.\n\nWhich got annoyed squeaks from her guards. \"That's a Trestean state secret, level 2!\"\n\n\"And how am I supposed to get anything else out of her if she doesn't know what I'm talking about? You know she's involved somehow.\" snapped Tarcuna. I glared at the guards a bit, and they glared back. Markosh gestured to them, and they shut up.\n\nReport on Death Falcon Mission 148J-S-GHEMEL.\n\nObjective: Rescue senior ambassadorial and/or military staff from Mystery Zone around Ghemel; return with intelligence about nature of Mystery Zone.\n\n\"What's a Mystery Zone?\" I asked.\n\n\"We don't know. That's why we call it a Mystery Zone,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Well, what do you know about it?\"\n\n\"It's an approximate circle eighteen miles in radius, centered loosely on the former Presidential Palace in Ghemel. That covers Ghemel city proper, most of its suburbs, and chunks of farmland and such. Also dozens of Trestean military bases, the airport, and stuff. Two days ago we lost all contact with everyone in it. We \u2014 Trestean goverment and military I mean \u2014 should have been getting thousands of reports from it constantly, and, all of a sudden, nothing,\" said Tarcuna.\n\n\"Nearly nothing,\" said Markosh. \"Some very strange final reports that Tarcuna hasn't seen.\"\n\n\"And we should have lots of messages from Ghemelians too \u2014 phone calls to other cities, businessmen and travellers and such, all kinds of things. All of that stopped at the same time. Now, we can see the city, with the Peace Everywhere Array cameras, and it doesn't look any different. There's plenty of traffic inside the city, plenty of people walking around, no mass casualties. No violence, which is pretty surprising \u2014 they usually get tens of explosions and fires a day, and that's all stopped too.\"\n\n\"Well, we certainly wouldn't permit explosions and fires if we ruled the city, but eight of us are in Strobland, I've seen us all today, and the ninth is dead,\" I said. \"What are the final reports you got?\"\n\n\"Two categories. Some said things like 'Station 14-A under presumed chemical attack, details unknown. Symptoms increasingly intense pain and auditory hallucinations. All personnel affected.' The others were more like 'Can't stand it any more. Must surrender. Tell my wife and children I love them.'\" said Markosh.\n\nTarcuna's fur went utterly flat, and she started shaking and smelling of rage. I folded a wing around her, and tried to be comforting. \"It's not cyoziworms.\"\n\n\"You know what it is?\" asked Markosh.\n\n\"I think so. Let me finish reading this, I'll see if that sounds like him,\" I said.\n\nPersonnel: Five Darkness Axe helicopters, each with pilot, co-pilot, and 4\u20138 specialists. Group included two enhanced agents.\n\nPlan: Enter Mystery Zone along attached flight path. Stop at Station 1 and Trestean Embassy. Return along attached flight path.\n\nThe attached flight path wasn't attached, but it didn't seem important. I read the next quarter of the report.\n\nPrecautions: Helicopters equipped with anti-electronics gear; personnel wearing gas masks. Monitoring by telemetry with one or two correspondents giving running commentary in each copter. Results: Immediately on entering Mystery Zone, all correspondnts mentioned burning sensations on the neck and shoulders. Several mentioned hearing voices saying, \"The pain will increase until you surrender to Murghal Nhestravvath.\" No such voices heard by telemetry. All reported rapid increase of pain. Nonverbal expressions of agony in audio telemetry. Copters attempted to turn around and flee. All ceased radio contact before they could reach edge of Mystery Zone.\n\nGuardsman Monos on copter 4 started to report, saying \"We have surrendered and\" Follows only protracted screaming for over an hour. A voice tentatively believed to be Murghal's says, \"You were told to disobey all Trestean orders. You dared to defy us and continue to report. You will now die in pain.\" Screaming intensifies for two minutes, then ends in gurgling. Presumed-Murghal speaks directly into microphone: \"The Trestean army in Ghemel has surrendered and is now part of our loyal guard. They will stay and serve us forever. If you send anyone else in, we will conquer them just as easily. Do not think to meddle with us and our supreme new ally.\" Then a pistol shot ends telemetry.\n\nThat was plenty to confirm the obvious. \"OK, what you've got there sounds like Xolgrohim. He's a paingod from Mhel. My parents killed him a while back. Osoth put his spirit in a bottle and was going to compel him to find treasure, but we got a bit distracted and didn't get around to it before we came to Hove. Xolgrohim was pretty friendly with Murghal \u2014 oh, I don't know if you know, we picked the best cave in the the Khamrou Vorescs, and so did Murghal, so he was there before us and we enslaved him. Anyway, it sounds like, after we left, the two of them made an alliance and snatched Ghemel back from you.\"\n\nMarkosh frowned. \"So, Murghal and this paingod...\"\n\n\"Xolgrohim.\"\n\n\"Zolgroan\" (Three tries later) \"Xolgrohim, they're your servants? Is this another front in your war against Trest?\"\n\n\"No, nothing like that. Murghal is an escaped slave, we should kill him but probably won't bother because we didn't want him in the first place. Xolgrohim was pretty friendly to me, good with romantic advice for an undead paingod, so I'm not quite sure what I should do about him. I think he's just working for Murghal though. It was either that or sit in a cave for duodecades, since the rest of us abandoned him.\"\n\n\"So you deny all responsibility for the Mystery Zone in Ghemel?\" said Markosh.\n\n\"Oh, we're sort of responsible. We should have cleaned up our dead god. We would have done, but we got distracted by you killing my fianc\u00e9. It's a case of littering that got out of hand.\"\n\n\"What can we do about the situation?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have no idea. Hovens don't seem to have the least bit of resistance to magic, so you can't get close to him. Of course you can't have any long-range ray guns anymore. We could get rid of him, but you certainly shouldn't expect any favors from us. So you can either come up with a tremendously clever bit of technology, or stay out of Xolgrohim's way.\"\n\n\"Do you plan to take any action?\" he snapped.\n\n\"Definitely. I am going to comfort Tarcuna a lot. She seems a bit shaken.\" Which was an understatement. Tarcuna was curled up under my wing, bristling and hissing. I suppose that having been wormridden once leaves one a bit distressed by the idea of other, even more malevolent forms of overriding the will. I hissed useful promises to her \u2014 I wouldn't let any paingods take over her (real promise) or even Trest (vague intention). I know how to kill them because my parents did it a lot (not so confident here \u2014 Xolgrohim knows a lot more about dragons than he did then, and we're a lot weaker than our parents, and he's already dead. Plus side though, we've got a necromancer.) He can't get me because I can't feel. (No clue \u2014 nobody's tried pain magic on me. It would be nice if it could work.) Even the greatest paingods couldn't subdue dragons with their power. (Probably true. Cterion and Rankotherium talked about brushing pain-spells off with a flick of the v\u00f4. Of course, Xolgrohim probably has other powers than pain.)\n\nNone of that helped. Tarcuna wasn't scared, she was disgusted. Xolgrohim seemed like a magical super-cyoziworm to her, and she couldn't endure the thought of so many people wormridden, or dead-god-ridden, or whatever it is.\n\nTarcuna uncoiled after a while, but smelled utterly devastated the rest of the day and didn't want to leave my side. (She's asleep in my barn, while I'm writing this. I hope she's better tomorrow morning.) Markosh wanted lots more details. I didn't want to distress her any more, so I sent Markosh to Osoth.\n\nIt's Osoth's problem anyway. He brought the silly god-lich with us, he can clean up after himself. I heard him giving Markosh ancient Dorfindalian riddles though, so I don't think he was very helpful.\n\nAnyway, this is an extra mess which we simply did not need. We're here to get married. Not to fight undead gods (or import them), punish empires, hunt down mind-controlling worms, or any such distractions."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Etiquette of Tultamaan (Day 101)\n\nTultamaan was doing his best to immerse both Arilash and me in burbling corrosive guilt at lunchtime today. \"You must remember the only reason I continue to remain in this Distinctly Unpleasant and Dangerous Situation!\"\n\n\"The chance to stick your droopy little hemipenises in Jyothky's abrasive little vulva?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Hey! Mine's as big as yours!\" I protested. (Haven't measured. Can't argue with \"abrasive\" .)\n\n\"I should not have expected any clearer reasoning from a Dragoness whose Main Intellectual Asset is behind her claspers. The situation is Wholly Untenable. Not to put too fine a point on it, the hovens have Snuffed the Life from A Very Large and Powerful Dragon. I see no reason to allow them to Repeat the Procedure, probably with Variations. I should not like to see small people destroy even Ythac or Nrararn, much less Myself.\"\n\n\"So you're going to scorch and claw them 'til they realize that they shouldn't,\" I said.\n\n\"I note with a Bored Displeasure your Feeble Personal Attack, Jyothky,\" said Tultamaan. \"I can, as you well know, neither scorch nor claw. I can freeze and bite, which will serve just as well in nearly any circumstances and better in many.\"\n\n\"And are you really brave enough to get within breath-range of a hoven, much less biting-range? You seem unduly terrified of them. I suspect your best attack will be to pee on them from far, far above. Out of fear, without meaning to.\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Your Attempt at Humor confounds me. Which is it more: more Feeble, or more Juvenile?\" mused Tultamaan philosophically.\n\n\"Juvenile. You're as skittish as a young dragonet. I needed to put in terms you'd understand,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"There is indeed somewhat of a Gap in Degree of Understanding between us. You have figured that Important Fact out at least. In other respects you continue your traditions of being Quite Largely Inaccurate, with occasional excursions to the realms of Wholly Wrong and Massively Mistaken,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"You're trying to seduce her, aren't you, Tultamaan?\" I said.\n\n\"I am trying to remind her, and you, that I am a Valued and Important Participant in this punitive expedition, and, indeed, on this mating flight. Your appreciation of this important fact has been Slightly Muted. It has been Somewhat Less Than Monumental. One would be hard-pressed to accuse it of Extravagance. Unlike your appreciation for, shall we say, the dragons whose Hideously Careless Tourism and Floundering Flopping at Diplomacy have resulted in stirring up an actual war.\"\n\n\"Oh! You're trying to seduce me, too, with your marrow-sweet words and your extravagantly romantic poetry,\" I said.\n\n\"I do not see any Need or even Hope for affection under the circumstances. I simply point out that I am being Quite Responsible on this mating flight. Additionally I provide eleven-twelfths of the Sensible Advice, among other underappreciated Valuable Services. However, neither of you is taking any Particular Degree of Responsibility back towards me.\"\n\nArilash hissed. \"Right. Do something impressively brave punishing Trest, and I'll grit my teeth and couple with you. Once more. Then I'll wash the yuck out of my genitalia with cattle semen or something else that's a whole lot braver and more companionable than you.\"\n\n\"An imposingly Generous and Wide-Hearted, to say nothing of Wide-Claspered, Offer. Considering that the offerer has several times mentioned how much she misses the variety of drakes available in Fohhona. And that she is so bored of the paucity of drakes here that she should start on the dragonesses, and that the very hovens around us are beginning to look appealing.\"\n\nI glared at Arilash for (a) capitulating, and (b) talking about lusting after me. She shrugged. I glared at Tultamaan. \"Your sensible advice hasn't been very helpful. You missed the Peace Everywhere Array, the cyoziworms, and even taking good care of Xolgrohim so he didn't get loose and start fouling the world up.\"\n\n\"Your Unclarity of Mind is brilliantly illustrated by your current Lack of Focus upon the Matter at Hand, Jyothky. There is a Purpose in this discussion. This Purpose should not be confused with producing Further Uninspiring and Unfunny Insults. You can do that upon your own time, and I Daresay that you will have a Great Deal of your own time in which to do it.\"\n\nI breathed a cloud of winter fog at him. Contemptuously, since he's got ice breath himself. \"What are you getting at, Tultamaan? It sounds like you're trying to imprison us in a dimension of pure despair.\"\n\n\"He's already imprisoned us in a conversation of pure whininess,\" snapped Arilash.\n\n\"Right then. Arilash, Jyothky, I hereby Resign from this exercise in botchery, degeneracy, and broad-spectrum incompetence that you are somehow pleased to call a Mating Flight. I have been on three, I have heard stories of many, and this is far and away the Worst that could ever be Imagined. I do not require an Intellectual or Spiritual Peer as my wife, but my recent experience with the two of you has shown me how far my Standards could be Endurably Diminished. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a life as a Miserable and Humiliated Batchelor is far, far preferable to spending another Day in the presence of such Arrogant and Stupid dragonesses as yourselves. Or even Dying Gloriously in the Sky of Battle because of Your Utter Worthlessness at Diplomacy, though that Would Be Much Better than marrying either of you.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's a bit redundant. We had pretty much written you out of the mating flight weeks ago,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Yet again, you fail to capture the Point. It eludes you. It evades you. It escapes you, despite that it makes every effort for you to catch it. It sails across your left flank, waving a Gigantic Purple Flag for your Attention, while you muse brainlessly on the details of your last Fornication with a Supposedly Braver but Certainly Cerebrally Inferior drake and manage to miss it despite staring right at it,\" said Tultamaan.\n\n\"Not really. There's really no way I can insult you a twelfth as much as you deserve before you go, but I do feel obligated to try. Back to Mhel, then?\" said Arilash.\n\n\"Mhel will Do Quite Adequately,\" said Tultamaan. \"On Mhel the small people do not Shoot At One with gigantic purple ray guns.\"\n\nArilash opened the gate of ice and centuries and death for him, and called up the cyclone of fire and niobium and poetry. He inspected the gate for several moments. \"Alarmingly, it does, indeed, lead to Mhel. I had expected some Petty bit of Childish Reprisal for Imagined Insults from you. Such as sending me to Plurdat, where doubtless no dragon will bother to follow for a grand of years,\" he said.\n\nArilash shrugged. \"Sure, I'll send you to Plurdat, if you can endure another eleven seconds of us to my next heartbeat, and if it'll make you feel more persecuted and thus better.\" (Which I thought was the best insult of the day.)\n\n\"I suppose I'll need to tell the other drakes,\" I said. \"I don't know that they'd notice the lack of whining, or missing a nominal fifth of their military power, for some weeks, otherwise.\"\n\n\"Those are your Heartfelt Farewells?\" he said. \"I can Improve Upon Them Considerably. Indeed, I thank you without irony for your Best Efforts in my regards, and with irony for the rest of them. It has been an Experience involving Considerable Self-Discovery.\"\n\n\"Please be gone yet,\" I muttered.\n\nAnd he flew off into the Triangular Cyclonette, and was gone yet, finally. Back to Mhel, where he has a dozen years to tell everyone how horrible we are and how hopeless the mating flight is.\n\nArilash and I looked at each other, and shrugged. \"Well, he lasted longer than I expected, anyway. You shouldn't have encouraged him so, Jyothky.\"\n\n\"I didn't!\"\n\n\"I think you did. By starting to mate with the drakes after he yelled at you.\"\n\nSo we had a quick little impromptu angry Caramelle, which she won but only by one touch.\n\nNone of the remaining drakes looked particularly surprised when I told them. Nor even very encouraged.\n\nI'm not particularly encouraged either. We're down to three drakes for two dragonesses, which is awfully skimpy choices. Not that I would have chosen Tultamaan over, say, destroying my claspers with many many lightning bolts, but it'll sound much more impressive to have a bigger choice.\n\nSo... Osoth? Nrararn? Both, by their odd arrangement? I'm sure Arilash will come in first and pick Csirnis.\n\nOr maybe we'll lose all the drakes and need to get some more, or something. I don't really think I'll get off with less humiliation than Tultamaan will, at this point. Though more married. Eventually.\n\nTo someone I admire and/or like, even. That's good enough for a bottom-of-the-barrel dragoness like me, right?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "Quenjo Wastes (Day 103)\n\nThe seven of us slept last night in the ruins of Bastruzo Military Base. We got up very early. Virtuet was well behind the Godaxle. The drakes were mostly getting ready for the battle \u2014 their first real battle. Arilash and I prepared them suitably: she gave everyone the Melismatic Tempest, I gave them the Hoplonton. Osoth and Nrararn conjured a lot, cooperating to make a truly ominous cloud that radiated so much magic that I'm sure that even the hovens could tell how dangerous it was. Ythac amused himself by picking out the real weapons scattered among the fakes and marking them with invisible illusionary fireworks for later destruction \u2014 the hoven military had filled the Wastes with logs casually disguised as artillery.\n\nCsirnis simply looked graceful and friendly. \"Do the rest of you have plans for the day?\"\n\n\"I'm going to find a likely looking mountain and carve it into a memorial for Greshthanu,\" said Arilash. \"And I better not have to do that again for any of you.\"\n\n\"Except Jyothky, of course,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"No, not except Jyothky. If any of you die, I'm going to get Osoth to call you back so I can scold you,\" said Arilash.\n\n\"What if it's Osoth?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm sure Osoth can raise himself from the grave somehow,\" she said. \"Enough of that. What are you doing, Llredh?\"\n\n\"Some little errand or other, she will be today's business,\" said Llredh.\n\n\"I'm just going to watch the battle and grumble about getting talked out of it,\" I said. \"Hey, Ythac, where's the best place to watch from?\"\n\nYthac cast the Draft of Direction. \"From the Perspeckle Movie Theatre, in Perspeckle, six miles from the edge of the Quenjo Wastes. That's odd.\"\n\n\"I'll go look.\"\n\nMovie Theatre of Operations\n\nAn hour before dawn, I flew to Perspeckle. The movie theatre was surrounded by military vehicles and military hovens and military nervousness. The top of the building was all spiky with antennae. I shrank to pretty small \u2014 the size of three hovens or so \u2014 and landed in front of the theatre, and then let the three hovens guarding the theatre's door see me. \"Hello! Ythac said this was the best place to watch the battle.\"\n\nThey pointed their guns and hatchets at me. \"What the fuck? Didn't you promise not to be here? Don't you have some kind of treaty?\"\n\n\"Not me! I'm just a tourist or something. I'm not trying to fight today.\" I looked at the guns and hatchets. \"But you can attack me if you like.\"\n\nThey didn't like. \"Tourists aren't allowed here, this building is off limits,\" said the guard. Another guard was talking into some fancy technology phone about how there was a situation at the front door of the command center.\n\n\"I'm going to go in in three minutes, one way or another. You can figure out the etiquette, if it'll make you happier,\" I explained.\n\nI spent a few more minutes than that talking them out of bringing up artillery ( \"You'll need it in the Wastes. And if you use it here, either you'll wreck your command post, or I will, and everyhoven will be upset or dead about that.\" ) After maybe six minutes, a gentleman whose badge said \"Darrir Smedris, Social Warfare Specialist\" zoomed in in a jeep, and introduced himself.\n\n\"Glad to meet you. Are you going to try to engage me in a social battle to determine if I'm going in? I'd switch to claws and teeth pretty fast, I warn you.\"\n\n\"Well, we don't normally allow enemy combatants into our command center...\"\n\n\"I'm not an enemy combatant today. Unless you say I can't come in,\" I pointed out quite reasonably.\n\n\"Well, you're still a hostile alien, and we don't allow those either,\" he said. I started to say something, but he continued, \"But under the circumstances, I am authorized to allow you in, if you promise to be well-behaved and non-destructive and peaceful.\"\n\n\"I so promise!\" I approve of his attempt at sneakiness or social warfare. I was going to go in either way, and best for him if he can extract a promise of good behavior out of me. I can be just as sneaky though. He didn't specify how long the promise was good for. Obviously it couldn't be unending, and he hadn't said, so I took it for the traditional twelve minutes.\n\nSo I went in. It was the best place to observe the battle, really. They had dozens and dozens of television screens showing various scenes of the waste. The big movie screen had been taken over somehow, so that it showed this and that piece of the waste, changing every few seconds under the command of a rather nervous Second Lieutenant of Communications. Half the seats in the theatre had been ripped out, replaced by folding tables holding all manner of computers and screens and radios and other very fancy and technology sorts of things.\n\nThree dozen hoven officers stared at me. I stared back. \"Just here to watch!\" I said. That started a few arguments, Darrir Smedris arguing with the other officers about what General Crane had said. The arguments were resolved when General Crane strode into the theatre, apologized to her staff for my presence, and told me how displeased she was that I was there.\n\n\"I want to watch my friends kill your soldiers!\" I said. I think my twelve minutes were up, but I was still mostly polite.\n\n\"Understood. Your presence is disturbing my officers, though,\" she said.\n\n\"Understood. I'm not trying to help Trest fight my friends.\" I said.\n\n\"Understood. If I understand our 'war treaty' thing, you're not involved in this fight, right?\"\n\n\"Understood! I mean, I'm not involved, I'm just watching. I'm not trying to hurt Trest's attempt to fight my friends, I'm just not going to help either.\"\n\n\"You're not welcome here,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course not!\" I said. So obvious! I sprawled out in the center aisle of the theatre, and looked at the main screen. \"Are your secret new weapons all ready?\"\n\n\"We don't discuss military secrets with the enemy,\" said the general.\n\n\"How about the experimental new kva-rays? Ythac said that your scientists were afraid that the polyduction coils would break. Or that bomb based on the Zigrelder Effect? Will you be using that today?\" Ythac had been enjoying himself.\n\nThe general didn't answer me. \"Darrir, do your best to keep the monster under control. See if you can get him out of the middle of the room.\"\n\nDarrir sat by my head. \"You realize that you're making everything more awkward here?\"\n\n\"That's fine!\"\n\nWe debated the etiquette of slithering into the enemy's command center and sitting in the middle of the room for a while. I had to concede that it was impolite to take up the whole aisle, forcing the officers to either step on me or take the long way. I didn't move, though. I didn't see any reason to be polite. The officers were all very nervous during this discussion, and getting more nervous as it went on.\n\nThen the general shouted \"Catastrophe Agenda!\" at me, half in Ghemelian, half in Damman.\n\n\"What? Oh, right!\" I said, and did my best to go limp.\n\nThe officers looked greatly relieved. \"Such big monsters, and all it takes is a magic word to destroy them.\" Several military guards came into the theatre carrying a few big rocket guns of the sort they use to explode tanks. The guns muttered a moderate degree of danger.\n\n\"I wasn't expecting that to work,\" Crane said. \"Implement plan seven. This one's a hostage 'til the situation's resolved in the field.\"\n\n\"Sure, but I'm not leaving the theatre,\" I said.\n\nGeneral Crane smiled. \"I don't believe you have a choice in the matter, do you?\"\n\nI flapped my wings. \"I'm not leaving! The fight's started!\" We all looked at the big screen. Csirnis and Nrararn were levitating in the middle air, side by side, as dozens of war planes flew towards them. Csirnis breathed lightning, a thin delicate bolt that could barely have used half his whef\u00f4, and exploded one plane. Nrararn curled his thez\u00f4 (not visible on the material-only movie screen, but I knew how it had to look), and caused a wild horizontal tornado sort of thing, lashing around among the planes. Half a dozen more died.\n\nThe warplanes fled. The dragons followed, flying lazily in their thorny music, striking with lightning breath when they could, each breath taking a single plane.\n\nThen the warplanes stopped and circled. The dragons stopped too \u2014 Ythac and Osoth had joined them. \"Implement Plan Seven!\" called out General Crane.\n\nLarge loudspeakers on the ground boomed forth, \"Crompies King! Ferret Sleuth! Dung of the Harpy Eagle! Later, later, later!\" Or, if you prefer, \"Give me fermented ham! I'm so doomed! Narcotic Miasma! Neither surprised!\"\n\nThe screen didn't transmit sound, but the body language was clear enough. Ythac wriggled in the sky, laughing. Csirnis and Nrararn, not in on the joke, stared at him and roared and surely interrogated him. Osoth shrugged, and flew closer to the ground to breathe a huge cloud of flame downwards. So much for the speakers.\n\n\"Sorry, we don't have True Names, those words don't do anything. That was just a joke between me and Ythac,\" I told the general. \"We didn't tell Osoth about it though.\"\n\nThe general shrugged. \"Not really surprised. It sounded too good to be true.\"\n\nDarrir asked me, \"Is war a joke to you?\"\n\n\"No. But if you're going to make us have a war, we might as well have some fun with it.\"\n\n\"Killing people is fun to you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sometimes it is, but it isn't usually even as much fun as mediocre wordplay with Ythac.\" I peered at him. \"Have you been talking to Tarcuna?\"\n\n\"I got to read one of her reports, is all. If you don't like killing people, why don't you...\"\n\nI waved a wing to shush him. \"I haven't killed anyone today, and if those gentlemen in the back leave the bazookas in their cases, I might actually get through the whole day without killing anyone. I would be content with that. I daresay some next of kin would be content with that too.\"\n\nOsoth had gotten rather close to the ground to destroy the speakers, though. A dozen quick little howitzers blasted him with a barrage of annoyances: shells that exploded in clouds of caustic smoke, shells that exploded with huge harsh bangs, out-and-out fireworks. Nothing particularly harmful, but a plentiful supply of inconvenience. Osoth writhed and struggled in the messy air.\n\nTwo wings of fighter planes closed on him while he was clouded, firing bullets and small missiles. Osoth surely growled; I know he blasted one with flame (boom!) and another with graveyard dust (no boom). The other drakes circled overhead, presumably making bons mots at Osoth's expense. The planes danced around.\n\nExcept for one plane, the one that Osoth had breathed death dust on. Surely that pilot felt his own death close upon him \u2014 I've gotten a faceful of Osoth's dust, and it's quite vicious. So, that pilot aimed his jet squarely at Osoth, as quickly as he could fly. Osoth, who was still in a cloud of smoke and fireworks.\n\nOsoth tried to dodge, of course.\n\nOsoth is the clumsiest of all dragons.\n\nThe jet hit Osoth's left haunch, and exploded. Bits of burning metal splattered down on the battlefield. Not many bits of dragon, though. The Hoplonton is quite a good spell. Osoth, in approximately one piece despite a huge wound in his flank and his left hindleg in ruins, was presumably casting the Rose Rescaler rather than worrying too much about flying.\n\nThe other drakes stopped mocking, and flew down to rescue him. Csirnis and Nrararn grabbed him in their talons and bore him back to the sky. Ythac fluttered around him, presumably casting a new course of protective spells. Osoth's apotropaics must have been rather ragged at that.\n\n\"Xh\u00ea t\u015bi\u012ba\u0151 \u0161sy\u1eb5i\u0105\u1ef3\u015b\u015b \u1ebesr\u0155y\u016f...\" , I had to say.\n\nDarrir looked at me. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"A praise-song for a brave enemy,\" I said.\n\n\"Would that translate into any sort of armistice, by any chance?\"\n\n\"Oh, not at all. You're the best sort of enemy. You're very brave, there'll be lots of good stories, but there's not much doubt about the outcome of the battle,\" I said. \"Well, unless Osoth gets caught off guard and klutzy a whole lot more.\"\n\nThe hovens pressed their advantage, firing huge guns, spraying huge cauldrons of flammable liquid in the air and exploding them, sending forth odd magenta and green rays, sweeping in with waves of fighter planes. A tidy little hurricane arose upon the battlefield around the dragons, courtesy of Nrararn. Trains of angry ghosts, the dead that each pilot had slain, flew after the airplanes, and their touch left huge streaks of rust and rot in the planes' flanks, courtesy of Osoth. Csirnis breathed a vast cone of light, and a dozen planes were blinded, instruments and pilots both, and landed or crashed as best they could. Ythac used a finding-spell, and then breathed a narrow cone of darkness upon one of the experimental weapon embankments; the odd rays ceased. My drakes are so pretty when they're fighting, I'd have married them all just then, and even perverted Ythac too.\n\nThe hovens reeled or reloaded. The drakes had a moment of peace, and finished their healing-spells. They circled over the field, and breathed flame and lightning in unison.\n\nGeneral Crane glared at Osoth's now-unhurt flank and leg. \"Damn it! I spent planes and guns and brave, brave men for that one hit, and for what? A sore leg on one dragon for five minutes?\"\n\n\"Well, you gave them a moment of actual worry. That's some measure of success, really,\" I said.\n\n\"I've got a city to save,\" said the general. \"A moment of worry won't do it.\"\n\n\"Oh, right, that's tomorrow's chore. Did the hovens leave Churry City?\"\n\n\"Mostly,\" said Darrir. \"Some refused to go. Are you ready for another thousand deaths on your conscience?\"\n\n\"Well, if they chose not to go, they're suicides. And I don't get to burn the city either. Or loot it.\"\n\n\"You sound resentful,\" said Darrir sympathetically. \"The other dragons are keeping you away from the glory and treasure?\"\n\n\"More or less,\" I said.\n\n\"Well... what if they didn't manage to win today, would that help?\" Darrir said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"What if they got driven off without looting Churry City. So you'd have a chance to get your own share later, or at least keep them from being ahead of you,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh! This must be Social Warfare!\" I chirped.\n\n\"Well, technically, yes. A rush job of it. Still... if we're being straightforward now... is there some sort of private deal we could arrange so that you'd stay neutral in any further conflicts?\" he asked. \"Not to betray your... friends? They are friends?,... just to stay out of fights.\"\n\n\"Can you restore Greshthanu to life? Heal me in ways that draconic healing spells cannot? Give me the strength and size to defeat Arilash regularly? Get rid of all the cyoziworms on Hove?\"\n\n\"No on restoring life. Maybe on the healing; our doctors are peerless. I will gladly arrange examinations and they will see what they can do. No on the strength and size. I had always thought that cyoziworms were something out of old wives' tales, but if they're real and anything like the fiction, we'd want to get rid of them too,\" he said. \"So we clearly have interests in common, as well as things we can do for you.\"\n\n\"Right now, though, you should be quiet and let me watch my friends demolish your army,\" I said. Which they were doing quite nicely. Ythac and Nrararn had assembled a very complicated and intelligent storm which rained lightning and tornadoes on the actual artillery, leaving the fake ones dry. The battlefield was crawling with skeletons, though Osoth was staying very high up and being quite cautious personally. Csirnis was darting and diving among the warplanes, elegantly ripping their wings off or tricking them into shooting each other. \"Aren't they beautiful? And kind, too, they're mostly destroying machines and mostly letting the soldiers live when that's convenient.\"\n\n\"They certainly fight very well. And have a certain ophidian grace to them. I would rather admire them under more peaceful circumstances.\"\n\n\"It should only be a few weeks more. Unless Shuvanne is awfully obstinate. People sometimes are, in the face of execution, but if he delays too much we'll just kill him without all the formalities,\" I said. He started to say something, but I added, \"Which is probably better for you than losing too many more cities.\"\n\nIt wasn't a few weeks, though.\n\nConquest of Trest\n\nLunchtime in the command center was sandwiches from a deli across the street, gobbled by the officers while they watched their soldiers try and fail to hurt the drakes in any serious or lasting way. They refused to buy me any food, though I don't particularly blame them. I wanted to watch the whole fight. I could eat with the drakes later \u2014 I planned that I'd go hunt something for them, for once.\n\nMidway through lunch, the officers got very, very nervous. Not at the battle, which was dawdling along as it had been all morning. A message came in on a special teletype, saying, STAND BY FOR IMPORTANT CONSULAR ANNOUNCEMENT ON PUBLIC TELEVISION. There was speculation, mostly disappointed speculation that the army's performance was so bad that the consuls would sue for peace. Which it had been.\n\nA few minutes later, the communications specialist put the state television channel on the big screen. The picture showed the Hall of the Law, a big room where one of the secondary but very powerful branches of the Trestean government meets. Llredh, at half-size, was standing in the middle of the room, grinning hugely at the camera. Hovens sat or knelt or lay all about, well-dressed hovens who looked as if they had been extremely important until a few minutes ago and now just looked rather injured or occasionally killed. Hoven blood was splashed all about, and entrails, and fingers.\n\nLlredh picked up one hoven, by the horrible expedient of ramming a claw into his ribcage, lifting him screaming into the air, pulling him off for long enough to show the wound to the camera, and then healing him. The hoven's clothes and fur had been burnt off, and he had the echoy scars of many recent and recently-healed wounds. He wasn't the only one in the room like that. Llredh had been having a torture party.\n\n\"Your time to speak, she is now!\" said Llredh.\n\nThe officers around me gasped. \"Shuvanne...\"\n\nShuvanne struggled. Llredh tapped Shuvanne's head with a claw. Shuvanne turned to the camera. \"My countrymen, I bring you the news of the ultimate catastrophe. The alien monsters...\"\n\nLlredh roared, \"Not all of us! Just me!\"\n\n\"... this alien monster has attacked Perstra while our army was busy elsewhere.\"\n\nLlredh laughed. \"The army is there, the army is here, what difference is it? Only who kills the army!\"\n\n\"We have been forced to offer a complete and unconditional surrender to the dragons...\"\n\n\"To Llredh only! The other dragons, if they want to share, it is me they must ask!\"\n\nShuvanne scowled. Llredh scowled back. The two glared at each other a moment, and then Llredh said, \"Your capitulation, your command to grovel, it is time for them!\"\n\nShuvanne started to say, \"I shall do no such...\" . Llredh must have brushed him with his hukuch\u00f4 very gently then (television doesn't show the astral), for Shuvanne screamed and babbled and soiled Llredh's forepaw. Llredh transferred Shuvanne to his other forepaw, and wiped the dirty one on a few limp but clothed senior Trestean officials.\n\nA moment later, Shuvanne was able to talk coherently, though hardly able to object. He was sobbing as he spoke, \"Please remain calm and go about your business. Over the next several weeks we will be arranging the transfer of control to our new masters.\"\n\nLlredh put Shuvanne down, and smiled a huge fangy smile at the camera. \"The huge present, she is what Ythac gives to me, and that on the night before we become mates. The just-as-huge present that I can give back, she does not exist! The medium-sized present for my new mate, she is Trest. Lucky Trest! No better queen could any country have!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "The hovens in the command center were an assortment of studies in stunnedness and fury. Darrir waved his hands in front of my face. \"Dragon! Do you have any sense of honor or decency?\"\n\nI peered at him. \"I think so. Why?\"\n\n\"What your friend has done violates both! What he has done is wicked, wicked! If you have any of either, you must fly to Perstra and force him to back down!\"\n\nI thought about that a bit, somewhat distracted by a tumult of all the other officers trying to figure out what to do next. \"I don't think it was at all the right way to do things. But there's nothing wrong with conquering you. Except that we'd said that we weren't doing any conquering when we came here.\" But that wasn't right. We'd decided not to conquer because it would be a distraction from the mating flight, but (1) Llredh has gotten mated, sort of, and (2) the mating flight is in a shambles anyhow.\n\n\"You made a war treaty! How can you not honor it?\"\n\n\"Llredh wasn't in the war treaty. Neither am I, for that matter,\" I pointed out.\n\nBicker, bicker, bicker. Darrir and a couple other officers tried to harangue me. None of it made any sense. So I wound up saying lots of sensible things several times in various ways. Like...\n\n\"No, I won't go depose him. It would be rude, he's my best friend's mate, and your country is a gift to my best friend. Also he's about twice my size, and an excellent fighter, and Ythac's not much weaker, so I don't think I could do it if I tried.\" (This one is true.)\n\n\"Yes, you should get your soldiers to stop fighting. That's just basic manners. You're the property of one dragon now, you shouldn't go attacking other dragons. Even if the others don't kill you, your master will probably be upset with you.... Um, actually, your soldiers now belong to Ythac I think, so you really shouldn't be fighting him.\" (This one is confusing, and they got very offended when I reminded them who owned them. Just like Tarcuna would have. Or Murghal, for that matter. I guess the mhelvul were used to being slaves to their gods, but hovens aren't.)\n\n\"Why on Hove do you think it's a bad thing to be conquered by dragons? Llredh's actually a pretty nice master, and Ythac's wonderful. You'll be much better off than you were before.\" (This one sounded wrong and fatuous as I said it, to the point of a touch of veriception nastiness, but I had to defend my species' honor, and try to comfort the unhappy hovens. I don't think either half worked very well.)\n\nIn the other side of the room, General Crane was starting a discussion of how the army would resist Llredh. It was pretty technical really \u2014 starting with the distraction plus fighter crash that had hurt Osoth, and trying to add destructiveness to the point where it might, with supreme luck, be able to kill a dragon. But by \"a dragon\" they meant Osoth or me \u2014 once in a while one of them would point at me and say that, oh, my wings looked fragile. (They aren't.) Llredh is much tougher, as anyone who saw us side by side could clearly see.\n\nWhich is all perfectly reasonable of them, having just been nominally conquered without having a chance to get killed when they fought back. But it was rude. After, oh, a third or five-twelfths of an hour of this, I was thoroughly annoyed with all the officers. Under other circumstances, I might have injured one or two of them. Now, of course, they belonged to Llredh, and I didn't want to challenge him on his own new territory. (Was I even allowed to be there? I was here before it was his territory!)\n\nSo I shouted, \"This isn't proper! I will leave you to your sedition alone!\"\n\nThey didn't seem very happy about the word 'sedition'. But they did seem happy about me leaving.\n\nI was happy to leave too. I hate being ashamed of my species in front of small people.\n\nThe Recipient\n\n\"Ythac? Where are you and the others?\"\n\n\"Flying to Perstra. Llredh did something a bit radical,\" he answered.\n\n\"I saw it on television. What do you think of it?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm tremendously flattered that he thought of me, of course. A bit ashamed \u2014 he's pretty much giving me a hoard. Like I'm a girl.\"\n\n\"You're a better girl than I am!\" (Intended as teasing.) \"Doesn't take much, Jyothky.\" (Good, he teased back, he's not upset.) \"Anyway, I'm pretty nervous. It's a huge country. It's not properly conquered. Llredh just tortured the leaders 'til they capitulated, and of course we thumped on the army a little bit. But if we're going to start out ruling by fear, the country doesn't fear us very much. And if we're going to start out ruling by love, well, I don't think even your whore is going to love us any time soon. It's a really sweet present, but... kind of daunting.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could pick out a reasonable-sized territory and conquer it properly? Dorday, say. Dorday is very nice.\"\n\n\"Only if I need to. Llredh gave me this as a mating-present. I don't want to offend him by throwing it away... or spoiling it in any way.\"\n\n\"It would make rather a big mess if you two had to pacify it city by city. Oh, and also your army is planning to kill you. Llredh at least.\"\n\n\"I can hardly blame them. I'm going to have a lot of work trying to get the country governable, much less do any improvements on it.\" His letters looked a bit wobbly.\n\n\"Uplifter, you are?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Nothing but the best for my hovens.\"\n\n\"I hope they learn to appreciate that,\" I wrote back.\n\nBut they're not going to, not this generation. Tarcuna owes me her life and soul, and isn't really very political most of the time, and even she will be all upset at Llredh. Poor Ythac is going to have to rule with an iron claw, or not at all.\n\nCoda: Botchery\n\nWe didn't intend anything more vicious than maybe a bit of looting. But we've rather trashed several bits of Hove. In any sort of fairness, we should fix them back up before we leave.\n\nProblem Solution\n\nTrest: Trest is now ruled by dragons. Rather in the sense that, if you've just burned the head off a mile-long serpent, you've technically won the fight, but the thing is going to do a great deal of damage to everything around while it's thrashing and dying.\n\nI need to, somehow, get Trest in a state which dragons and hovens are both happy with, in fairly short order. Since the hovens hate us, and Ythac can't decently turn down Llredh's mating-present, I don't see that this is possible at all.\n\nGhemel: Ghemel is now ruled, nastily, by a pain-god from Mhel. I don't imagine anyone but Xolgrohim and maybe Murghal are pleased with that.\n\nWell, if two full-sized dragons didn't have trouble killing an unprepared Xolgrohim who knew nothing about draconic powers, surely one half-grown dragon shouldn't have trouble dealing with\n\na well-prepared Xolgrohim who's been studying us since his undeadification, right? Maybe I can get Osoth to help. This one is his fault anyway.\n\nCyoziworms: We didn't cause this problem, mirabile scriptu. But I want to solve it... by way of apology to Hove, if nothing else.\n\nWell, I can work overnight and free one hoven from a worm. At that rate, if I work all the time, I accomplish... nothing. Cyoziworms can spread very fast if they want to. I can probably get Llredh to help me, which might be good for the Trest problem.\n\nGetting Married: Not a Hoven problem, but mine. We've lost more than half the drakes in only a few weeks. I don't know if any of the remaining ones would actually want to marry me, now that they know me better. Especially if I spend the next dozen years working on Hove instead of mating flight.\n\nNo idea. I suppose I can have a second mating flight if I need to. It never happens for a girl not to get married on her first, but I suppose they'd let me try again. Then a third, because I can't see the second going any better. I doubt that I'm allowed to just hide in a cave for the rest of my life instead of getting married though; dragonesses aren't.\n\nEventually some drake will surely be desperate enough.\n\nOh, and I do mean those \"I need to\" parts. I'm not the only one who can do them \u2014 well, I don't know about whether I can or not. I'm not the only one who should do them, but I'm the only one who really seems to realize that she should."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "Glossary:\n\naeroception: Draconic sense of air: where there is air nearby, and what it is doing\n\nAstra:l: A nonphysical but very real aspect of a dragon, comprising the v\u00f4, whef\u00f4, and hukuch\u00f4.\n\ndangersense: Dragonic sense of danger\n\ndozen (1): 12; (2) about 12\n\ndragon (1): Adult dragon of either sex, or (2) any dragon (q. n. v.)\n\ndragoness (1): Female dragon of any age; (2) female adult dragon.\n\ndragonet: Child dragon of either sex\n\ndrake (1): Male dragon of any age; (2) male adult dragon\n\nduodecade: Twelve years, or about twelve years.\n\nefforasze: A strong bleu cheese of Mhelvul\n\ngrand (1): 1,728, which is 123; (2) about 1,728, like about a thousand or two\n\nGreat Separation: Astral surgery, performed by dragons on young dragonets. Most of the patients die. The few who survive get considerable magical powers. Many are injured, losing a few senses or the use of some limbs or what have you. (Historical note that does not matter in the book: All dragons in Mating Flight come from the branch of dragons who perform the Great Separation. This is a minority branch, whom the majority consider quite wicked for what they do to their children.)\n\ngross (1): 144; (2) about 144, between a hundred and two hundred or so\n\ngross-year (1): precisely 144 years; (2) approximately 144 years, like about a century and a half\n\nhukuch\u00f4: An astral part of a dragon; most small people cannot endure contact with the hukuch\u00f4\n\nkineception: A dragon's sense of things moving in the vicinity.\n\nlluyception: A dragon's sense of \"lluyew\" , q. v.\n\nlluyew: A sensory property known to dragons and few if any other people. It is largely an aesthetic property. Certain treasures and dragon scales exhibit a pleasurable lluyew. It is most relevant to the value of a hoard, or a drake's beauty.\n\nmagioception: Draconic sense of magic\n\ntheoception: The draconic sense that detects gods and their activities.\n\ntsheriaf: dragon game, played using breath weapons on a cliff wall or something, requiring both precise control of the breath weapon and a sense of tactics.\n\nveriception: Draconic sense of truthfulness. Dragons can tell if people are lying (in the sense of saying things that they believe to be false \u2014 dragons do not have the ability to sense absolute truth.) Lies are personal and unpleasant sensations, comparable to smelling severely bad breath, so dragons dislike being lied to. Veriception blocks Spells which prevent one dragon from vericepting another. Most dragons wear veriception blocks most of the time. Veriception blocks prevent others from vericepting the wearer's lies, but the usual spells for this don't prevent a dragon from vericepting their own lies. So, dragons rarely lie, even when they can get away from it.\n\nv\u00f4: The four-lobed astral aspect of a dragon which can be used to break magic.\n\nwhef\u00f4: An astral part of a dragon; the heart of breath weapons"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Dragonfriend",
        "author": "Roger Eschbacher",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Watch Out for the Dragon",
                "text": "Sir Ronald rubbed the faint scars on the back of his neck and winced at the memory of how he'd gotten them. \"Be careful, Leonard! Those claws are sharp and will draw blood!\" he shouted. \"I speak from experience!\"\n\nThe tall, thin knight with a kind face and graying beard nervously glanced at the skies. Fortunately, the only winged beasts in the vicinity of Widow Toe's garden were the original five attackers he and his young page battled moments earlier. That's good, he thought. Sometimes the cries of these beasts drew in more of their kind, and one could find himself engulfed by a cloud of black fury before he knew what hit him. But the skies were clear, and the surrounding countryside was calm and peaceful.\n\nThis was Sir Ronald's land, and he loved it. Known as the Green Valley, it had been given to a distant ancestor by one of the old pagan kings and handed down to him when his father died some fifteen winters ago. Not large, especially when compared with the holdings of some of the more prosperous nobility, the Green Valley was lush and, not surprisingly, green. It was dotted with the tiny homesteads of poor tenant farmers and surviving patches of the old forest. No, not particularly large; not especially prosperous; but it was his, and he took the care and protection of the valley and its people seriously. Right now, it was under attack by a cunning menace. One that had plagued simple farm folk since the dawn of time.\n\nSir Ronald watched as his page, a wiry boy of fifteen with dark brown hair and pale blue eyes, crawled out of a weedy irrigation ditch. The boy had lost his balance and fallen backward into the murky water while dodging a frenzied attack just moments before.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Leonard, wiping the mud from his face. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\nLeonard was ready. He stood up, pitchfork in hand, and waited as the winged attackers banked for another strike.\n\nSir Ronald permitted himself a quick smile. It was not in Leonard's nature to back down. He was a bright and honest lad with a brave heart and could always be counted on to do the right thing. Little did he know when he found the boy, barely a toddler and crying in the middle of a smoldering hut, that he'd grow up to be such a fine young man.\n\nSir Ronald was proud of the boy.\n\n\"Here they come. Mind those beaks, too.\"\n\nLeonard took a deep breath and widened his stance. He'd faced foes like this a few times already in his young life and felt confident he could handle anything these ill-tempered creatures could throw at him.\n\nAs they dove toward his head, he waited until the last moment to thrust the wooden pitchfork into the air. Predictably, the leader crashed into it and fell to the ground, tumbling head over tail through the rows of radishes and into a tangle of gourd vines. Dazed but not injured, it sat still for a moment before it jumped into the air and flew off, summoning its companions with a loud \"caw!\"\n\nLeonard nodded to himself. Crows always turned tail and fled at the first sign of any serious opposition.\n\n\"Well done, Leonard!\" said Sir Ronald, looking for a mud-free space to pat him on the back. \"You'll make a fine knight someday.\"\n\nSir Ronald was always quick to praise Leonard with a kind word, and Leonard thought of him more like a favorite relative than his Master. In the almost sixteen years he had spent with the knight, he'd never been beaten or even had a cross word spoken to him. Leonard felt lucky He was not in the service of a cruel man. He'd heard of other servant boys who weren't so lucky. So, while Leonard wasn't quite sure how chasing crows out of Widow Toe's garden would help him gain the skills necessary to become a knight, he took Sir Ronald's compliment in the spirit it was given.\n\n\"Thank you, milord,\" said Leonard. \"But I'd need my own land before that ever happened. The King doesn't usually grant property to a page, does he?\"\n\nSir Ronald chuckled and tousled Leonard's hair, temporarily revealing the boy's malformed left ear. His right ear was normal, but his left ear came to a slight point and had been that way since birth. \"Yes, well, we'll have to see about that, won't we?\"\n\n\"Here's some bread, Sir Ronald,\" said Widow Toe, leaning out of her cottage window. She was bent and plump and grinned at them with a largely toothless mouth. \"It's not much, just my way of saying thanks.\"\n\nBoth Leonard and Sir Ronald stared at the loaf for a moment. Then Leonard's stomach rumbled.\n\n\"Thank you for your kindness,\" said Sir Ronald, shooting Leonard a pointed glance before accepting the loaf of bread.\n\nThe bread was fresh, and Leonard's stomach rumbled again as he inhaled. Thanks to an involuntary lack of calories, both he and Sir Ronald were too thin. As landlord, his Master could have demanded those living on his land pay him a large percentage of their crops and livestock; it was his right to do so, but Sir Ronald was too kind to take food out of the mouths of his barely surviving peasants. Instead, he grew his own scrawny vegetables, raised his own scrawny geese, and every now and then, humbly accepted a warm loaf of bread.\n\nSir Ronald bowed to Widow Toe then he and Leonard started on their way toward the knight's partially built castle.\n\n\"Leonard, as soon as we get home, I want you to take a dinner invitation to Sir Francis,\" said Sir Ronald, kicking at a stone and missing it. \"Tomorrow night we feast!\"\n\nSir Francis was another poor knight who lived on the other side of Medwishire, the Green Valley's only village. Medwishire was located on the banks of the Stenc River, a foul-smelling stream that would make a person's eyes water if they breathed in too deeply near its banks. Medwishire boasted a stone bridge, a small church with actual stained-glass windows, and a population of just fewer than two hundred souls.\n\nSir Francis was Sir Ronald's best friend, and the two liked to invite each other over for feasts. Since Sir Ronald was poor, his feasts were simple dinners involving stale bread, cheap wine, and a scrawny goose\u2014definitely not the kind of feasts shared by the well-fed Knights of the Round Table. Sir Francis kept a nice vegetable garden so his dinners, although a little bit on the green side, were more \"filling.\"\n\nLeonard and Sir Ronald walked through the Green Valley for the rest of the morning and, slightly after midday, crested a small hill and paused. Just ahead stood Sir Ronald's half-castle. It was not much to look at, basically a half-built gate in the middle of a half-built wall surrounding a half-built hall and half-built tower. Large piles of stone and aging cut timbers lay scattered about, giving the place the overall appearance it had been half-destroyed by some half-crazy barbarian horde. It hadn't, but that's what it looked like due to Sir Ronald's lack of anything resembling a steady income.\n\nSir Ronald often vowed he would one day finish the structure, but since he'd been saying that for a while Leonard didn't get the feeling it would happen anytime soon.\n\nDespite all its half-built imperfections, Leonard couldn't help but smile when he first caught sight of the half-castle. None of the mess mattered. This was the place where he felt safe, where he took care of Sir Ronald, and where his heart was. Leonard loved the half-castle.\n\n\"We're home, Sir,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Indeed we are, Leonard. Indeed we are.\"\n\nA few moments later, they reached the castle gate where Sir Ronald said something that almost made Leonard's heart stop. \"Oh, watch out for the dragon.\"\n\n\"Dragon?\" said Leonard, wheeling around. \"Are you joking, Sir?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. A morose dragon has taken up residence under the bridge in Medwishire. Didn't I tell you this already?\"\n\n\"No, Sir, you did not.\"\n\n\"Oh. There's a dragon, and the Round Table knights haven't had a chance to clear it out yet,\" said Sir Ronald. \"So, be careful on your way to Sir Francis's estate.\"\n\nRecently, the Knights of the Round Table had issued an order declaring only they could do the bravest of deeds. This meant all the rest of the knights could only do unchallenging brave things that wouldn't get them into trouble. Things like chasing crows out of gardens.\n\nTruth be told, this new rule had probably saved Sir Ronald's life by keeping him out of dangerous situations. As kind and good as he was, Sir Ronald was also a clumsy knight and not a good fighter. Sir Ronald would thrust when he should parry (terms having something to do with sword fighting), back up when he should charge (terms having something to do with horsemanship), and poke when he should pinch (terms having something to do with fighting hand to hand). His jousting was awful and his helmet so big it would sometimes get completely twisted around on his head. Most of the other knights in the kingdom laughed at him behind his back and called him \"Sir Ronald the Mediocre.\" But an order from the Knights of the Round Table was as good as law, so, these days, Sir Ronald rescued cats from trees and fought with crows.\n\n\"The Miller's wife said the great beast just lies there and sighs all day, but she and the rest of the villagers run across the bridge as fast as they can anyway, just to be on the safe side,\" said Sir Ronald. \"You'll be fine as long as you remember to be careful and don't go doing something thick-headed like talking to it. Now be brave and run along.\"\n\nLeonard shuffled away from the castle gate toward Medwishire and got more worried with every step. He worried past the blacksmith's shop where the blacksmith was talking about the dragon under the bridge. He worried past the butcher who was talking about the dragon under the bridge. He worried past the baker, and the candlestick maker. They were talking about the dragon under the bridge, but at this point Leonard didn't care. A dragon waited up ahead, and he was walking toward it\u2014on purpose! Leonard worried all the way up to the Medwishire Bridge. Amazingly, once he got there, he found he wasn't worried anymore.\n\nHe was terrified."
            },
            {
                "title": "That Big Thing Under the Bridge",
                "text": "As Leonard walked through Medwishire, he was surprised to discover it was still standing. You'd think with a dragon in the neighborhood, this town would be in ruins, he thought.\n\nBut everything was as it should be. Clusters of little white houses with thatched roofs still lined the main street, neither crushed nor burned. The central marketplace, with noisy peasants selling their wares, was untouched. A dappled mare grazed on the village green while her colt bucked and kicked just for the fun of it. The presence of uneaten livestock alone made Leonard start to doubt there was a dragon around. Maybe Sir Ronald had gotten the story wrong. Maybe the dragon was in a different town. Maybe he should go ahead and do something stupid just to see if there really was a dragon down there.\n\n\"Hullo?\" said Leonard, approaching Medwishire's large stone bridge. All Leonard heard in reply was the smelly water of the Stenc River gurgling below him. \"Hullo?\"\n\n\"Hullo yourself,\" said a big, deep voice from under the bridge.\n\nLeonard jumped back, his eyes wide with fear. Sir Ronald was right, there was a dragon down there. He stood frozen for a moment, unsure of what to do. \"Well, I guess I'll start running across the bridge now.\"\n\n\"Go ahead. See if I care,\" said the big deep voice.\n\nAgain, Leonard didn't quite know how to react, so he stood in place and fidgeted. Something was wrong.\n\n\"Well? I don't hear the clop-clop-clop of a terrified human running across,\" said the big deep voice. \"What are you waiting for?\"\n\nLeonard edged a little closer to the bridge and tried to peek underneath. \"Are you the dragon everyone's talking about?\" said Leonard, immediately feeling stupid for asking such a silly question because, after all, who else would it be?\n\n\"Yes, who else would it be?\"\n\n\"Well, then, is this some sort of trick? Will you try to catch and eat me when I start running across the bridge?\" asked Leonard.\n\n\"Ordinarily, yes, I would swoop up and gobble you down before you had a chance to figure out what was going on. But I will not do that today. Go ahead and cross,\" said the dragon.\n\nLeonard wasn't buying this. After all, it was just the sort of thing a crafty dragon would come up with to trick people. \"Why not today?\"\n\n\"Because today, I am tired of being a dragon and, as a matter of fact, I plan on being tired of being a dragon tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and all the days after tomorrow until the Knights of the Round Table come to kill me. So, run back and forth in a panic as often as you wish. I just don't care.\"\n\nOnce again, Leonard didn't quite know what to do. Any other person would've just shrugged his shoulders and run across the bridge, but there was something about this that just wasn't adding up. Leonard hated it when things didn't add up.\n\n\"You're waiting for them to come and kill you?\" asked Leonard. \"But that doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\"I don't care if it doesn't make any sense to you. It makes sense to me, and that's what matters. Now go on and leave me alone.\"\n\nThe \"too curious for his own good\" part of Leonard's brain couldn't let that one go by. \"Excuse me, Master Dragon,\" said Leonard. \"Well, sir, and I don't mean to pry, but would you mind telling me why you want them to kill you?\"\n\nAfter a long pause, the dragon spoke again. \"Come closer, young man, so I might look at you.\"\n\nDespite being so nervous his legs felt weak, Leonard edged a few feet closer to the bridge.\n\n\"Closer, now. I won't bite. You have my promise, and a dragon never breaks his promise.\"\n\nLeonard looked over the bridge wall. What he saw amazed him, even though he already knew he was going to see it. Looking back up at him was a pair of large, red, and incredibly sad dragon eyes. They were attached to an exceptionally large dragon head with large smoky nostrils attached to a large dragon body covered with large and thick scales. Finally, the dragon had a large tail wiggling in the river like a large snake.\n\n\"What is your name, boy?\n\n\"My name is Leonard. I am the page of Sir Ronald of the Green Valley.\"\n\nThe dragon's eyes flashed with excitement, and he moved closer, which made Leonard move farther away. \"A knight? That's marvelous! Do you think he would slay me?\"\n\nLeonard had never been asked a question like this before. \"Well, I suppose he could.\"\n\n\"Splendid! Go fetch him so I might end my miserable existence.\"\n\n\"Hold on there. I said, 'I suppose he could,' which is not the same as saying, 'Oh yes, he'll definitely slay you.'\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't he? I'm a dragon and he's a knight, isn't he? We're meant to fight. It's what we do.\"\n\n\"Two reasons. First, he's not a member of the Round Table. And second\"\u2014Leonard leaned closer so no one else would hear\u2014 \"Sir Ronald is a terrible knight.\" Leonard felt guilty referring to his Master as \"terrible,\" but on the other hand, he was speaking the truth.\n\nThe dragon frowned. \"You mean terrible as in nasty and evil? Evil knights are usually quite good at killing things.\"\n\n\"No, I mean terrible as in not good or \u2026 mediocre,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, then that's different. He must really be terrible.\"\n\n\"He is. Nice, though\u2014heart of gold and all that.\"\n\n\"That's too bad,\" said the dragon. \"The mediocre part, I mean.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" said Leonard with a sigh. The dragon slumped down into the waters of the Stenc River with a loud splash.\n\n\"I've grown so tired of my dragon's life. Sure, it was fun when I was younger; laying waste to entire villages, eating almost everything that moved. Who wouldn't enjoy that?\"\n\nLeonard didn't think he would enjoy that but didn't say anything as the dragon was speaking rhetorically, which means that you ask a question but don't really want it answered. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Many of my friends and family died,\" said the dragon. \"They were killed over the last year or so by those cursed Knights of the Round Table. My mate Helgad and I did our best to stay ahead of them, but there was never any rest once their stupid little club started going after us. We'd torch a village, and the next thing you knew they'd be charging up on their stallions, poking at us with lances and shooting those little pointed things with the feathers.\"\n\n\"Arrows.\"\n\n\"Yes, arrows. I've got one stuck in my neck that hurts like the dickens!\" The dragon took a deep breath and looked down at the swirling stinky water.\n\n\"So, the Knights of the Round Table killed your mate?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"No, it was a grove of angry trees that killed Helgad, a little over a fortnight ago.\"\n\n\"Trees?\"\n\n\"Yes, magical ones guarding a herd of dairy cows we were about to attack. She was heavy with egg\u2014made her easier to grab, I suppose.\" The dragon sighed and looked off into the distance. \"Our young would have been close to spitting fire by now. We dragons mature quickly, you know, it's part of our magic.\"\n\n\"I didn't know that,\" said Leonard, quietly.\n\n\"Yes, they got her, and Leonard, it just hasn't been much fun being a dragon since then,\" said the dragon.\n\nLeonard and the dragon stayed quiet for several dozen heartbeats. Leonard again found himself more than a little unsure about what to say. After all, Leonard felt bad that the dragon had lost his mate and children, but it wasn't like the Knights of the Round Table or magical angry trees were attacking dragons for no good reason. What dragons considered to be \"fun\" is what people and herds of cows considered to be horrible. So, while he had sympathy, he also had a little voice in the back of his head that said, \"Serves you right, you big, horrible beast!\" But it would've been unkind to say that, so he tried to think of something else and was astonished when the words, \"Would you like me to pull the arrow out of your neck?\" came out of his mouth without Leonard giving them permission to do so.\n\nThe dragon's eyebrows shot up in surprise, and he looked at Leonard as if he were seeing some strange new animal appearing out of nowhere. \"That is a very kind offer for a human,\" said the dragon. \"Yes, Leonard, I would like that very much.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Sir Gareth the Pain",
                "text": "Things were not going well at Camelot, the home of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Apparently, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere had left many months ago on a grand tour of the kingdom and had not been heard from in quite some time. Since King Arthur had been gone for as long as he had, things were starting to get a little \"relaxed\" around the castle. Whenever this kind of thing occurs, people called \"killjoys\" like to move in. Also known as a \"wet blanket\" or \"party pooper,\" a killjoy's main job is to make sure that no one has any fun. They start a lot of their sentences with phrases like, \"I'm sorry to have to say this, but\u2026\" and, \"Shouldn't we really\u2026?\"\n\nSir Gareth of the Round Table was a killjoy and was only there because his mother was King Arthur's sister. He had always felt insecure about that fact, and as he looked around the Grand Hall at all the brave knights having fun, that insecurity translated into irritation.\n\nThe hall itself was truly grand, a huge room with walls of heavy cut stone covered with heraldic banners and elaborate tapestries. The ceiling was made of heavy oak beams, and a gigantic hearth at the far end filled the hall with smoke and firelight. Right now, the hall barely contained Camelot's larger-than-life knightly heroes such as Lancelot and Percival, Galahad and Gawain, Tristan, and Caradoc. All in all, there were some thirty-five Knights of the Round Table, and each one of them was present for the weekly feast. Seated on benches at long tables groaning under the weight of platters of grilled boar and venison, they sang, shouted, drank warm ale, arm wrestled, and generally created an agreeable ruckus\u2014all activities bound to irritate an insecure killjoy.\n\nSir Gareth sighed and stood. \"Gentlemen!\"\n\nThe rowdy Knights of the Round Table paused from their feasting and looked toward Sir Gareth. \"I hold in my hand a message from His Royal Majesty, King Arthur!\" The banquet hall was instantly filled with excited murmurs. Sir Gareth held up a hand for silence and began reading. \"'My Dear Knights of the Round Table, since I plan on continuing my grand tour for a good deal longer, and since I know how things tend to \"relax\" when I'm away for very long, I am hereby placing Sir Gareth temporarily in charge and bid you to obey him in all matters as you would me. Sincerely, Arthur of Camelot.'\" Sir Gareth rolled up the scroll and placed it back in his sleeve.\n\nThe other knights looked at him with amazement but said nothing. These were honorable knights. In the days of Camelot, if a knight from your circle said he had received a letter from the King, then you believed him. The letter from King Arthur said that Sir Gareth was in charge until he got back, so Sir Gareth was in charge. Simple as that. The thought would never have occurred to any one of them that Sir Gareth had written the letter himself and was tricking them into obeying his orders as part of an evil plan to destroy everything good about Camelot. So, they only groaned a little when Sir Gareth said, \"I'm sorry to have to say this, but shouldn't we really be getting back to work?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Arrow",
                "text": "Leonard felt that he had truly lost his mind when he found himself jumping over the bridge wall and sliding down the muddy banks of the Stenc River toward a very large dragon that he really didn't know at all.\n\nAs Leonard got closer, he quickly noticed that the river wasn't the only thing that smelled. In fact, when his eyes started to water and he gagged a little, Leonard thought there might be a chance that the dragon smelled worse! Ugh! The dragon smelled like a big wet dog sprayed by twelve diseased skunks and rolled in a giant bowl of rotting pig cheese.\n\n\"Forgive me, sir,\" said Leonard, using his most polite voice even though he was about to vomit. \"I don't know how else to say this, but you stink even more than I do! I'm finding it hard to see straight and think I might even throw up or pass out!\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry about that. I'm used to it, I suppose,\" said the dragon. \"The horrible smell is a little anti-knight defense I invented. If the knights can't see straight and need to heave, it's easier to knock them off their horses.\"\n\n\"Congratulations, it's working very well,\" said Leonard, gagging.\n\n\"Hold on,\" said the dragon. He got up and waded out into the middle of the river. Then, like a bird taking a bath in a puddle, the dragon dipped his head in the water and fluttered his wings. The water rolled off his scales and ran down his back, looking like small, flooded streams in the springtime.\n\nAs he watched the dragon repeat the bathing motion, Leonard thought it was quite remarkable that little songbirds and big dragons took baths in the same way. The dragon waded back toward the bank of the river and then shook like a big old wolfhound. Leonard, and just about everything around him, was coated with Stenc River water. \"There. How's that?\"\n\nLeonard wiped the water out of his eyes and took a cautious sniff. \"Much better, I can only smell the river now.\"\n\nLeonard looked up at the dragon, and the dragon looked down at him. A shudder ran down Leonard's spine and he questioned his own sanity for the fiftieth time since jumping over the bridge wall. The arrow was stuck in the back of the dragon's neck, right where two of his boney scales met\u2014far enough back so the dragon couldn't pull it out with his teeth and high enough up where he couldn't grab it with his stubby dragon arms.\n\n\"Could you please lean down so I can reach the arrow?\" said Leonard. The dragon dipped his head low, and Leonard stepped forward to take a closer look. \"The arrow didn't go in too deep, so it shouldn't be hard to pull out.\"\n\nVery carefully, he reached forward and spread apart the dragon's scales with one hand thinking, Amazing! I'm touching a dragon! as he did so. With the other hand, Leonard grabbed the shaft of the arrow. The dragon grimaced and grunted.\n\n\"Sorry, but I'm fairly sure this is going to hurt a lot. Are you ready?\"\n\n\"As I'll ever be,\" said the dragon, closing his eyes. \"Go ahead and pull it out.\"\n\n\"I'll go on the count of three. One, two\u2026\"\n\nWithout warning, Leonard pulled on the arrow as hard as he could. He didn't wait until the count of three but yanked one number early. This was an old trick he had learned from Ned, the town's barber-doctor, when Leonard had gone to him to have a splinter removed. Ned had said that if you waited until three, people got tense, and whatever painful thing you had to do ended up hurting even more.\n\nRip! The arrow came out with a kind of squishy, tearing sound. The huge beast reared up on his hind legs and let out a shriek so loud that the expensive stained-glass windows in the village church shattered like thin ice on a pond. Leonard dropped to the ground and covered his ears.\n\nIt was a good thing he did, too, as a second later the air around him erupted with intense heat thanks to a little thing called dragonfire. Dragonfire is different from regular fire in that it's magical and keeps searching for things to burn long after regular fire would have given up. The trees all around Leonard exploded into flame, as did a nearby hay cart. The dragon's tail whipped and slammed into the bridge before coiling around Leonard like a giant snake and hoisting him off the ground. Leonard found himself in the uncomfortable position of hanging in midair just a few inches in front of the furious dragon's face.\n\nWell, I suppose there are worse ways to go, thought Leonard, clamping his eyes shut. At least I didn't die getting eaten by an ogre or by falling off a giant beanstalk.\n\nLeonard waited for the blast of dragonfire, but nothing happened. After a few seconds, Leonard dared to open one of his eyes just a little bit. He could see that the dragon was still glaring at him. Its breathing was ragged and hot, and its eyes were blood red and filled with anger. But then a funny thing happened. The dragon's breathing slowed, and his eyes cleared, then Leonard heard him sigh with relief.\n\n\"Well done,\" said the dragon as he set Leonard down and bowed. \"Thank you, Leonard, you are a good soul.\" The dragon paused for a moment as if trying to make up his mind about something, then leaned down and held his face directly in front of Leonard's. \"Look at me, boy.\"\n\nLeonard looked into the dragon's eyes and, for a moment, could've sworn the huge beast's pupils flashed silver. \"There, that should do it.\" Leonard was about to ask, \"Do what?\" but the dragon stood up on his hind legs and began to stretch his neck from side to side. \"Aah, much better. That stupid feathery flying thing\u2014\"\n\n\"Arrow,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That arrow was really bothering me,\" said the dragon as he scooped out some river water to put out a burning willow tree.\n\n\"You're welcome, uh...\" Leonard paused when he realized that he didn't know the dragon's name. \"Sir, what is your name?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I am called Mantooth,\" said the dragon.\n\n\"Mantooth?\"\n\n\"It's like the man-phrase 'sweet tooth' but instead of candy, when some of us dragons develop a craving for man flesh, we call it having a mantooth,\" said the dragon with a small chuckle.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Leonard, now regretting that he'd ever asked.\n\nMantooth shook off some more of the river water then cocked his head and listened before snorting with disgust. \"They're coming.\"\n\n\"Who?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"The usual angry mob,\" said Mantooth with a sigh. \"I'd hoped they would've stayed at home today, but I guess I'm not that lucky.\"\n\n\"Why don't you let them kill you?\" said Leonard.\n\nMantooth frowned. \"Allow myself to be killed by mere peasants? Never! Wouldn't be dignified. Besides, their weapons aren't strong enough to do the job. A knight, fully armed and trained in the art of battle, is needed to kill a bull dragon in his prime.\"\n\nLeonard saw a flash of pride in Mantooth's eyes and had no doubt that what he was saying was true.\n\n\"You had best stay hidden. Not a good idea to be seen talking with a dragon,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"They'll accuse you of being a demon or an evil wizard and burn you at the stake.\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" said Leonard, ducking down behind some still smoldering bushes. He was surprised he'd forgotten one of the basic rules of peasant living: those caught in the company of magical creatures are considered to be under their power and thus ripe for being reduced to cinders.\n\nLeonard peeked over the bushes and saw the entire village storming toward them with pitchforks and torches. This was what villagers did whenever they were unhappy about something and wanted to make it go away\u2014permanently. Superstitious villagers would grab torches and pitchforks and assemble a mob when they thought something \"unnatural\" was happening. Like the time they thought some poor old woman was a witch, or when the local gravedigger lost his mind and decorated his cottage with real corpses for All Hallows Eve. Then there was the time they rioted when Moe the Baker had raised the price of bread; but this was just because peasants were, as a rule, quite cheap.\n\nBut now they were storming toward Mantooth, and Leonard guessed it was because they were fed up with having a fire-breathing, church window-wrecking dragon living under their bridge.\n\n\"That's Master Prinkle leading the mob,\" said Leonard. \"He's the village head man and likes to hear himself talk. He'll blather on for a bit and then the mob will attack you.\"\n\n\"Oh, will they?\" said Mantooth. \"We'll see about that.\"\n\nLeonard could see the flames building in Mantooth's mouth and jumped to his feet. \"Don't burn them, sir. Please!\" said Leonard. \"This is the Green Valley's only village, and these people are my neighbors, stupid as they may be.\"\n\nMantooth stared at Leonard for a moment. \"Very well, Leonard. Since you are a dragonfriend and asked very politely, I will honor your request and not torch the peasants.\"\n\n\"Or the village?\"\n\n\"Or the village.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Leonard, finding himself surprisingly proud that Mantooth had called him a dragonfriend. He wasn't exactly sure what that term meant, but he figured it had to be special.\n\nThe village mob stopped about thirty feet from the Medwishire Bridge, just out of range of the dragon's fiery breath. Master Prinkle, a balding, pudgy man with hair growing on the tip of his nose, stepped forward and cleared his throat.\n\n\"Ho there, dragon! It's time you leave this place. We are finding it unnatural that you are living under our bridge and breaking our church windows. Begone or we shall be forced to kill you,\" said Master Prinkle in a nervous, squeaky voice.\n\nLeonard watched with awe as Mantooth rose to his full height and spread his leathery wings. The mob took a step back, and one of the older ladies fainted. Leonard could see why this might happen as a dragon in full display was an awesome and fear-inspiring spectacle. Add in a loud roar and some dragonfire, and it would be hard to imagine a sight more terrifying.\n\n\"Now see here, dragon. We don't want any trouble,\" said Master Prinkle, looking less brave by the second.\n\n\"I'm not sure I believe you,\" said Mantooth. \"Now, you say that you don't want any trouble, and yet you come charging at me with burning torches and all manner of farming implements. To me, that sort of behavior always invites trouble. I see you are holding the usual pitchforks, hoes, shovels, and\u2026 You there, what is that tool?\" said Mantooth, looking down at a wiry young man who was now frozen with fear.\n\n\"Who, me?\" said Randall, the village carpenter.\n\n\"Yes, you. What is the name of that tool, and what is it used for?\" said Mantooth.\n\nRandall gulped. \"This is an adze, and it is used for shaping wood,\" said Randall, making a sweeping motion as though hitting a log on the ground.\n\n\"An adze? What a peculiar name,\" said Mantooth. \"Egyptian, I suppose. Well, brave villager, come here and take a swipe at me with your adze.\"\n\nRandall's eyes widened even more. \"Oh, no, thank you. I don't think I could do that.\"\n\nMantooth shifted back and exposed his belly. \"Go ahead and swing away. I promise I will not fight back or harm you in any way,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Adze! Adze! Adze!\" chanted the angry mob.\n\nUrged on by glares from Master Prinkle and the rest of the villagers, Randall shuffled forward and raised the shaping tool. Closing his eyes, the villager took a half-hearted swing that bounced off Mantooth's belly scales without even leaving a mark.\n\nMantooth snorted. \"Oh, come now. You appear to be a strapping young man. Give it your best shot. Hit me with all your might. Try to impress the village women by slaying a dragon,\" said Mantooth.\n\nLeonard watched as Randall glanced over at a pretty young woman named Daisy. The thought of impressing her obviously had its appeal, especially since she hadn't so much as looked in his direction until this point in his life. He spat on his hands then swung again, this time as hard as he could. The blade of the adze shattered while its shaft snapped in two, and Randall fell face first into the mud, thus ensuring that Daisy would never look at him again.\n\nLeonard saw to his astonishment that there wasn't even the tiniest of scratches on Mantooth. These dragons are built tough! he thought. To say this knocked the wind out of the angry mob's sails would be an understatement. Mantooth picked up the young man with his tail and set him back on his feet.\n\n\"Thank you for helping me to prove a point, young man,\" said Mantooth. \"You may return to the mob. Now, citizens of Medwishire, you come here to attack me with farming tools and fire.\" Mantooth stopped and shook his head. \"I am sorry. I can't let that one go by. Fire? Please, what were you pea brains thinking?\"\n\nMantooth spat a small ball of dragonfire into his hand and rubbed it all over his face and belly. Nothing happened. Even his fur refused to catch on fire. Then Mantooth tossed the ball of flame onto a nearby pile of stacked firewood. The magical flames licked and circled the wood like a pack of wolves, chewing at it with such ferocity that after only a few seconds there was nothing left but ash. \"Hello! I'm a dragon!\" said Mantooth.\n\nThe villagers who held torches looked embarrassed and lowered them to the ground.\n\n\"Good. Now, here's the situation as I see it, and by that, I mean, here's the situation as you are going to see it. Yes?\" said Mantooth.\n\nMaster Prinkle and the villagers nodded.\n\n\"All of you are going to go back to your dirty little huts and I am going to go back under the bridge.\"\n\n\"But what about the church windows?\" said Master Prinkle, not quite ready to let go of the angry mob. \"Those cost a fortune!\"\n\n\"Yes, and everyone's afraid to walk over the bridge with you under it,\" said Daisy.\n\n\"I understand. Listen to me. I only plan to stay under the bridge as long as it takes the Knights of the Round Table to come and kill me,\" said Mantooth. \"I have no plans of trying to catch and eat anyone that goes over the bridge and no plans to do anything else that you might consider unnatural. You have my word as a dragon.\"\n\n\"You're just waiting for the knights to kill you?\" said Master Prinkle.\n\n\"Yes, I am,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It's a complicated story involving the death of my mate, deep inconsolable sadness, and whatnot, but suffice it to say that I no longer wish to live. Is that clear enough for your little peasant heads to grasp?\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Certainly,\" said Master Prinkle.\n\n\"Good. Now, as far as the church windows go\u2026\" Mantooth shut his eyes and squeezed hard. Instead of tears, several small jewels fell from the corners of his eyes and dropped onto the ground in front of Master Prinkle who scooped them up. \"I believe these should cover the cost of replacing them,\" said Mantooth.\n\nMaster Prinkle looked at the sparkling gems in his hand and scratched his head. \"Well, yes. I guess they would. We could probably even afford to put in a couple of extra windows with these!\" Master Prinkle called over the village elders and consulted with them for the briefest of moments. \"Right, then. So, you'll stay under the bridge, and do nothing threatening or scary until you're killed by the Knights of the Round Table\"\u2014Mantooth nodded his head\u2014\"and we'll go away and leave you alone. I think that's a deal we can all live with. Peasants? What say you?\"\n\nThe rest of the villagers murmured in agreement. Master Prinkle clapped his hands together. \"Sorry about this angry mob business. It's one of the only ways we villagers have to express ourselves. I mean, besides harvest festivals and maypoles,\" said Master Prinkle.\n\n\"Think nothing of it,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Thank you for understanding,\" said Master Prinkle, turning toward the villagers. \"Go on now, nothing for you to see here. Go home!\"\n\nLeonard stood and brushed himself off after they'd all gone. \"Thanks again for not torching them,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Not a problem. Although I suspect a few of them deserved it,\" said Mantooth.\n\nLeonard hopped over the stone wall. \"Well, I had best be going,\" said Leonard. \"It was nice meeting you, Mantooth. I hope you don't have to wait here for too long before they come to slay, er, before the Knights of the Round Table come.\"\n\n\"Thank you, young Leonard, dragonfriend. Were the rest of the human souls in this world more like you then I should probably want to stay alive at least a little bit longer,\" said Mantooth.\n\nLeonard wasn't sure what to do next, so he bowed and ran across the bridge. Maybe the dragon would still be there on the way back; then again, maybe he wouldn't. As Leonard thought about Mantooth's impending death, he was surprised to discover he felt more than just a little bit sad. People weren't supposed to have any sympathy for dragons in their hearts. It just wasn't natural."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Brilliant Plan",
                "text": "As he walked along, Leonard found it hard to think about anything else besides Mantooth sitting under the village bridge, waiting to be killed by those show-offs from the Round Table. It was a strange sensation to find yourself feeling sorry for a dragon. Especially since, until only very recently, Leonard would have been quite pleased to hear that all the dragons in the world had been wiped out by those very same knights. It just goes to show you that sometimes you must meet someone before you find out they're not half bad, thought Leonard."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Leonard spent the rest of the morning trudging through the small farms and rolling hills of the Green Valley. He paused for the briefest of moments under a large oak to eat his meager lunch, meager being a word that for Leonard meant \"barely enough to keep you alive.\" As he chewed on the end of a goose's leg bone, it occurred to him that it would be nice to figure out a way for Sir Ronald to be a little more successful at the business of being a knight. At least successful enough for there to be a little meat on the goose bones in Leonard's meager lunches. If only Sir Ronald was a better knight or at least could act like one. That way he could join the Round Table and earn a respectable living, thought Leonard.\n\nLeonard froze for a moment, his brain racing.\n\n\"That's it!\" he shouted. \"I could\u2026then the dragon could\u2026then Sir Ronald could\u2026 Yes! That's it!\"\n\nHe threw the goose bone to the ground, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and ran back to the village.\n\nAn hour or so later, an exhausted Leonard arrived at the Medwishire Bridge. He jumped over the stone wall and slid down the riverbank, almost landing feet first in the snoozing dragon's open mouth. Mantooth awoke with a start and spat out a quick fireball which just missed Leonard.\n\n\"Foolish boy! Don't you know better than to sneak up on a sleeping dragon? I could have killed you!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mantooth,\" said Leonard. \"I just got so excited that I rushed down here without thinking. I have a plan, a brilliant plan that will help both of us out!\"\n\nMantooth's eyes narrowed. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I was on my way to invite my master's friend, Sir Francis, over for dinner. Right? But what if I never went to Sir Francis's home but instead went back to my Master and told him that Sir Francis insisted that my Master come to his house for dinner\u2014?\"\n\n\"Your Master would beat you and call you a stupid servant?\"\n\n\"No, no. I'm not finished,\" said Leonard. \"So, my Master sets out toward Sir Francis's home. He comes through this very village, toward this very bridge where there just happens to be a dragon who wants to be slain by a knight. Boom! You jump out, he kills you. Then he joins the Round Table, and I get to eat more than goose bones! Brilliant, isn't it?\"\n\nMantooth frowned. \"Except for the part where he's too incompetent of a knight to do anything right, then yes, that's a brilliant plan,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Since you jumped out and attacked Sir Ronald, he can rightly say that he had no choice but to defend himself. Killing a dragon is such a very brave deed that they'll just have to ask him to join their Table. They can't blame him for fighting to save his own life.\"\n\nMantooth sat back on his haunches and scratched his belly. \"Well, that's just it, isn't it? He won't really be fighting. I mean, I'm a dragon, and a dragon has his pride. Any self-respecting member of my horde just wouldn't allow himself to be killed without a true fight. Those Round Table Knights with their steel-tipped arrows and battleaxes, now that's a real fight,\" said Mantooth. \"I'll easily take half of them with me.\"\n\n\"I understand. I am just asking you to think about it a different way. That's all,\" said Leonard. \"Think of it more as your grand and very generous final performance.\"\n\n\"A grand performance?\" said Mantooth. \"Now, that is interesting. A dramatic exit, so to speak. Hmm. Since you put it that way\u2026and you are a dragonfriend\u2026\"\n\nMantooth sat still, and Leonard could tell that he was giving his proposal some serious thought. After a moment, the huge dragon straightened himself and struck a dramatic pose. \"I'll do it!\" said Mantooth.\n\nLeonard clapped his hands. \"Wonderful! Thank you so very much, Mantooth!\" Leonard began to pace. \"Let's see. We'll need a signal to let you know we're close. Something like, 'Make way for brave Sir Ronald!'\"\n\n\"That's laying it on a little thick, don't you think?\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"No doubt about that. I'm just trying to think of a way to get my Master in the right frame of mind. Trust me,\" said Leonard. \"Sir Ronald needs all the help he can get.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Glennys the Beauty",
                "text": "Hurrying back to Sir Ronald's half-castle, Leonard could barely contain his excitement. Sir Ronald was a good knight who had rescued Leonard from a smoldering hut and certain orphanhood, and Mantooth was about as close to being a good dragon as a dragon could get. They were both deserving and in need. Leonard, you've really outdone yourself, thought Leonard with a chuckle. A truly brilliant plan!\n\nLeonard heard a commotion behind him and saw a fancy horse-drawn carriage coming his way. It was escorted by four mounted guards and pulled by two of the finest chestnut-colored horses Leonard had ever seen. The large sunflowers painted on each door caused Leonard's heart to skip a beat. They meant the carriage belonged to Maid Glennys of Camelot, fifteen-year-old orphaned niece to Sir Gareth of the Round Table, and the most beautiful young girl that Leonard had ever set eyes on. He had caught a glimpse of her from afar on a few occasions and was always surprised at how his heart beat faster and his breath grew shorter\u2014as if he had been infected by Glennys-itis, a pleasant sort of sickness only caused by looking at Maid Glennys. She, of course, being a lady of the castle, had no idea who Leonard was\u2014and never would. Lowly pages of kind-hearted but third-rate knights and nieces of joy-killing, first-rate knights just didn't mix. In the words of the villagers of Medwishire, it would be unnatural.\n\nLeonard stepped off the road but kept looking back at the coach as he walked, not wanting to waste a second of Glennys-itis. This would prove to be unfortunate as Leonard's decision to look backward but walk forward meant he didn't see that he was walking straight toward a trapper's snare. Leonard was imagining what he would say to Glennys, if they ever met, when he heard a twig snap. \"Uh oh,\" said Leonard in the half second it took the snare to tighten around his leg and yank him skyward.\n\nDangling upside down in midair and feeling thoroughly disgusted with himself, he watched helplessly as Maid Glennys's carriage and guards came to a stop in front of him.\n\n\"Hello, sir,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Is this your idea of a joke, boy?\" said the lead guard, a rugged man with dark, piercing eyes and a full beard.\n\n\"No, sir,\" said Leonard. \"I accidentally stepped in a snare trap.\"\n\n\"That wasn't very smart,\" said another of the guards who had a nose shaped like a stubby carrot.\n\n\"No, sir, it wasn't,\" said Leonard.\n\nCarrot-nose dismounted and pulled out his sword, but the lead guard signaled for him to stop. \"I see that you are dressed as a page, boy. What is your name and who is your knight?\" said the lead guard.\n\nLeonard prepared himself for the teasing and mockery that always came when this question was asked. \"My name is Leonard, sir. I am page to Sir Ronald of the Green Valley.\"\n\nThree of the guards snickered.\n\n\"Sir Ronald? I know of no Sir Ronald,\" said the lead guard.\n\n\"Of course you do. He's that fool of a knight who lives in the half-castle near the village of Medwishire,\" said Carrot-nose.\n\n\"Sir Ronald the Mediocre,\" croaked a guard with a raspy voice.\n\nLeonard fumed while the four guards all had a good laugh at Sir Ronald's expense. The window panel on the coach door slid down and Leonard heard the voice of an angel calling from inside.\n\n\"Morley, what is the delay?\" said Maid Glennys.\n\n\"A boy, hanging from a tree, milady,\" said the lead guard. \"He stepped in a trapper's snare.\"\n\nMaid Glennys leaned out to get a better look, and Leonard's heart nearly stopped. There she was, only a few feet away; a vision of pure beauty and grace. Shading her sparkling green eyes from the sun with one hand, Maid Glennys brushed aside a lock of dark red hair with the other and looked right at Leonard. Even though he was upside down, he decided that Glennys of Camelot was beautiful from every angle.\n\n\"Hello,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Hello,\" croaked Leonard.\n\n\"Manners, boy!\" said the lead guard.\n\nIt took Leonard a second to figure out why the lead guard had spoken so sharply. Then he realized that he had addressed a fair maid of the Court of King Arthur without using her title. If someone was important enough to have a title like Maid or Baron attached to their name, then those beneath them had better use it. \"Hello, milady! Sorry, milady!\" said Leonard, discovering how difficult it was to bow when you're upside down.\n\nGlennys frowned. \"What's wrong with your ear?\"\n\nLeonard's hand shot up to his deformed left ear which, thanks to him being upside down, was no longer covered. \"Dunno, milady, it's always been that way.\"\n\nMaid Glennys shook her head. \"Cut him down and let us be on our way. I have berries to pick and herbs to gather.\"\n\n\"Yes, milady,\" said the lead guard. He nodded to Carrot-nose who cut the rope with his sword. Leonard fell to the ground, landing right on top of a pile of fresh horse plop.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Give our best to your Sir Ronald,\" said Carrot-nose as he mounted his horse.\n\nThe rest of the guards laughed and rode off with the sunflower coach of Maid Glennys of Camelot close behind.\n\n\"Give our best to your Sir Ronald,\" repeated Leonard in a mocking whisper, picking bits of plop and partially digested grass out of his hair. \"They'll be singing a different tune when my Sir Ronald joins the Round Table.\"\n\nAs grumpy as he was about Maid Glennys's rude guards, Leonard had to smile when he remembered how she had actually spoken to him. I suppose that could've gone better for a first meeting, he thought. On the other hand, it could've gone worse. At least she didn't see me fall into the plop.\n\nLeonard continued walking but made sure he kept a sharp eye out for snares, covered pits, or any other trap that would capture an unsuspecting animal or love-struck page.\n\nHe reached the top of the hill and paused for a moment. There it was again: Sir Ronald's half-castle in all its mediocre glory, almost demanding to be made fun of. He'll soon have more than enough gold to finish his castle, thought Leonard with a fierce pride. He deserves that.\n\nA figure coming toward him on the road had a familiar rounded shape and when he squinted, Leonard could see that it was Hubert, Sir Francis's page. Hubert had a quick grin and was a little shorter and much stockier than Leonard. He sported a tangle of curly blond hair and was Leonard's best friend in the whole world.\n\n\"Hello, Fool!\" shouted Hubert.\n\n\"Hello, Friend of Fool!\" shouted Leonard.\n\nThe two boys ran up to each other and shook hands. Hubert sniffed.\n\n\"Yes, I know, I stink. What brings you around here?\" said Leonard. \"And how come we didn't pass on the road?\"\n\n\"I've been in the South, delivering cabbages to Sir Francis's sister. As to why I'm here, my Master, Sir Francis, did bid me to travel here and invite your Master, Sir Ronald, to a feast tomorrow eve at his humble abode,\" said Hubert in an overly dramatic voice.\n\n\"Go on!\" said Leonard in surprise. \"Sir Ronald sent me your way to invite Sir Francis over for a feast, too!\"\n\n\"I know, he told me. But when I mentioned that Sir Francis had been given a suckling pig in return for helping the dairyman stack his giant wheels of cheese, your Master changed his mind and quickly accepted the invitation.\"\n\n\"A suckling pig beats a scrawny goose split two ways any day,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What happened to you?\" said Hubert, looking more closely at Leonard's singed shirt and plop-caked hair.\n\n\"You would not believe the day I've had,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Try me.\"\n\nLeonard counted off the events of the day on his dirty fingers. \"One; pulled an arrow out of the neck of and made friends with the fearsome dragon living under the Medwishire Bridge, hence the singed shirt. Two; saved an angry mob from being torched by the very same dragon. Three; stepped in a trapper's snare and was cut down, hence the horse plop. And four; spoke, actually spoke, with the very lovely Glennys of Camelot,\" said Leonard.\n\nHubert stared at Leonard for a good three heartbeats before speaking. \"You are, without a doubt, the worst liar in all the land. If you are going to engage in tall taletelling, you need to seriously improve the quality of your fibbing. A dragon and Maid Glennys in the same day? Please! You insult my intelligence.\"\n\nLeonard placed his hand over his heart. \"It's all true. I swear on the ashes of my long-departed parents that I, Leonard, page of Sir Ronald, am not lying,\" said Leonard.\n\nHubert rubbed his chin. If there was one thing that he knew about Leonard, it was that he only swore on his parents' ashes when he was serious about something. \"The dragon? Really?\"\n\n\"Really. His name is Mantooth. He's incredibly sad, and he wants to die,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"And Maid Glennys? You actually spoke real words to her?\"\n\n\"I did. She said, 'Hello' and then I said, 'Hello,' 'Hello, milady,' 'Sorry, milady,' and 'Dunno, milady, it's always been that way.'\"\n\n\"What was that last one about?\"\n\nLeonard pointed at his pointed ear.\n\n\"Oh, of course,\" said Hubert. \"Well, that's amazing\u2014an actual conversation. Ooh! Did you smell her? I've always imagined that she smells like a flower. A beautiful fragrant flower.\"\n\n\"She smelled me, but no, I did not smell her,\" said Leonard. \"I just saw her face in the window of her carriage.\"\n\n\"That would be enough, I suppose,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"It was.\"\n\nThe two friends thought about Glennys of Camelot in silence for a good minute before Hubert cried out in pain. \"Ow!\" said Hubert, reaching inside his shirt as if trying to grab something. \"Curse you, Piffle!\"\n\nLeonard watched with amusement as Hubert thrashed about, grabbing under his tunic for the unseen tormentor. After a moment or two, Hubert's hand found its mark, and he pulled out a tiny creature roughly the size of a rat. It was human in appearance, female, and wore smart gray clothes with shoes that curled at the tips. A pointy hat did its best to contain an uncombed shock of bright red hair. It was Piffle, the brownie.\n\n\"Why did you bite me?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"You was standing so still and quiet for so long, I gets bored,\" said Piffle. \"Besides, that Glennys girl not so good for heart dreaming. She be snooty at you and Master Leonard.\" Piffle crossed her arms and frowned.\n\n\"Hello, Piffle,\" said Leonard.\n\nPiffle's face brightened. \"Hello, the Leonard!\"\n\nPiffle jumped on Leonard's leg and climbed up to his shoulder where she planted a big kiss on his cheek.\n\n\"Sure, she kisses you,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"That's because I'm nice to her.\"\n\n\"You can have her, then.\"\n\n\"I wish! This brownie picked you, Hubert, so like it or not, you two are bound,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I likes it,\" said Piffle. \"And I likes that Master Hubert and the Leonard is friends! I likes it, I do.\"\n\nPiffle stopped smiling and looked with deep curiosity at Leonard's face.\n\n\"I know. I stink,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, but there's is something else. Fa! You is become a dragonfriend, Master Leonard! Piffle not seen a true dragonfriend for the last ten one hundred years or so,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"In his eyes, look there.\"\n\nHubert moved closer and looked in Leonard's eyes. \"You've got a small bit of flame in the black part of each of your eyes.\"\n\n\"I do?\"\n\n\"Yuh huh, the mark of a dragonfriend,\" said Piffle. \"You was magicked by that dragon under the bridge. Big honor, that is.\"\n\nLeonard rubbed his eyes. \"I don't feel any fire,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Is not a feeling thing. Is a magic thing,\" said Piffle as she picked chunks of dried plop out of Leonard's hair.\n\n\"But what does it mean?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What you think? It means that dragons is your friends. They thinks you is a good egg. No burning of your butt or eating of your meat. You is safe when a dragon's around,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"That sounds good,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Maybe. There aren't that many dragons around anymore, and the one that put this mark on me wants to die,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Why?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Yes, why's why?\" said Piffle, hopping back onto Hubert's shoulder.\n\nLeonard explained Mantooth's sad story about how his mate had been killed by magical angry trees, and how he was waiting for the Round Table knights to come and put an end to his misery. Then he laid out his plan for getting Sir Ronald a seat at the Round Table by having him kill a willing Mantooth.\n\n\"That is brilliant!\" said Hubert, after a moment.\n\n\"Isn't it? I was proud of myself for coming up with that one. Sir Ronald kills a dragon because he's forced to defend himself and gets invited to the Round Table because of his extreme bravery. Just imagine it! It'll be suckling pigs and big fat geese for us anytime we want them,\" said Leonard. \"I might even be made a squire with pages of my own.\"\n\n\"A squire? Now you're getting a little full of yourself, aren't you? Next thing you know, you'll be ordering your own suit of armor for when they make you a knight!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Stranger things have happened, Hubert,\" said Leonard. \"Sir Ronald says I'll make a good knight someday.\"\n\n\"You're serious, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes. I am.\"\n\nHubert let out a low whistle and rubbed his chin again.\n\n\"I suppose there is a chance that could happen, but you realize you have a serious flaw in your plan, don't you?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Which would be?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Sir Ronald is no good at knighty fighting,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Piffle!' scolded Hubert. \"She's right, though. Your Master has a hard time killing a goose, let alone a dragon\u2014willing or not!\"\n\n\"Mantooth is going to make it happen. He's going to act his way onto Sir Ronald's sword,\" said Leonard, his voice full of confidence. \"This plan is going to work. I just know it is!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Wherein the Brilliant Plan Becomes a Spectacular Mistake",
                "text": "The next day, Leonard got up early so he could oil Sir Ronald's armor, touch up the coat of arms on his shield, and sharpen his sword. Leonard wanted to make sure that Sir Ronald's gear was in top condition and his Master looked his best when Mantooth pretended to attack. He even put a fancy red ostrich feather on Sir Ronald's helmet, the one he only wore on special occasions. This is the kind of thing I'll be doing a lot more of after today, thought Leonard. This is the kind of thing a page does for a real knight. Leonard stopped fussing with the feather. He was being unfair. Sir Ronald was a real knight\u2014he just needed a little more help than most.\n\n\"I see you've put the fancy red feather on my helm, Leonard,\" said Sir Ronald as he came in from the courtyard, his hair dripping wet from dunking his head in a bucket.\n\n\"Yes, sir. I thought it was the right thing to do since you will be feasting on suckling pig for dinner,\" said Leonard. \"A special occasion if ever I've seen one.\"\n\n\"Yes. Indeed it is. Well done, Leonard,\" said Sir Ronald. \"But do you really think I need my sword today? It always seems to get in the way.\"\n\n\"Sir, you are a brave knight of the realm and so must be ready for battle at all times,\" said Leonard. \"Also, the sword is a symbol of your authority and position in the world. You must carry it, especially when traveling.\"\n\n\"Quite right. So, I must. Well then, let us be off. I believe I hear a slice of savory roast pork calling your name,\" said Sir Ronald with a wink.\n\nSir Ronald climbed on the back of a big old plow horse named Poppy. He had been given the horse by a nearby farmer for helping to re-thatch a barn roof. Sir Ronald rode Poppy whenever he needed to travel anywhere more than an hour's walk from the half-castle. Poppy wasn't a very pretty horse, but she had a sweet temperament and was huge, big enough to carry a knight wearing armor without much trouble. \"Onward, Poppy,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\nLeonard walked alongside Sir Ronald, carrying his solid green banner, and beaming with pride. This was it. This was how things should be. This was his Master sitting up bold and straight in the saddle, smiling with confidence. Sir Ronald the Mediocre on the back of a broken-down old plow horse was nowhere to be seen \u2013 this was Sir Ronald of the Green Valley riding his mighty steed toward unknown danger."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Sir Ronald and Leonard traveled for most of the morning, pausing every once in a while for Poppy to rest.\n\nWhen they reached the outskirts of Medwishire, Leonard started to get nervous. He was imagining all sorts of ways that his brilliant plan could go horribly wrong. Maybe Sir Ronald would stumble and stab himself in the foot like he had at the last jousting tournament. Or maybe he would slip and fall into the river and drown because of his armor. What if Poppy reared back when Mantooth charged out from under the bridge, and Sir Ronald fell off and broke his neck?\n\n\"Master, I think you should dismount from Poppy, and walk her through the village,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"You do? Why?\"\n\n\"Uh, well, I'm sure you wouldn't want to scare any of the small children,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Scare them?\" said Sir Ronald, a look of concern on his face.\n\n\"Yes, Sir. An armed knight on a large horse can be quite scary to the little ones,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"My goodness. I hadn't thought about how imposing I might look on horseback. I don't know what I'd do without you, Leonard,\" said Sir Ronald as he climbed off Poppy.\n\n\"Thank you, Sir,\" said Leonard.\n\nAs they walked past the various shops and houses that lined the road, Sir Ronald smiled and waved at each villager they came across. He didn't notice that some of them made faces at him after he turned away, but Leonard did. They were friendly enough when they needed Sir Ronald's help getting their cat out of a tree, but some of these peasants could be downright nasty behind his back. Stupid peasants, thought Leonard. You'll soon be singing a different tune.\n\nMaster Prinkle was up ahead, tending to the sugar peas in his front garden. Sir Ronald and Master Prinkle had never gotten along because Master Prinkle had married the girl that Sir Ronald had loved since he was a little boy. She apparently saw more potential in a high-ranking commoner than a low-ranking nobleman. Sir Ronald had never really gotten over that and had remained a bachelor to this very day. But as the manners of the time commanded, the two men were outwardly polite to each other.\n\n\"Good day, Master Prinkle,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"Good day to you, Sir Ronald,\" said Master Prinkle.\n\n\"I can see that congratulations are in order. At last you have more vegetables than weeds in your garden,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"You are too kind, Sir. And allow me to compliment you on the broken-down nag that so perfectly matches your own station in life,\" said Master Prinkle.\n\n\"A pox on your household, Master Prinkle.\"\n\n\"And on yours as well, Sir Ronald.\"\n\nThe conversations between Sir Ronald and Master Prinkle always went along these lines, and Leonard was amazed at how both men could get away with such insults simply by smiling and saying them in a polite manner.\n\nAs they got closer to the bridge, Leonard was more nervous than ever. His stomach began to churn, and small beads of sweat showed up on his forehead. He swallowed hard, said a quick prayer, and then cleared his throat. \"Make way for brave Sir Ronald,\" he shouted.\n\n\"Now, Leonard, I hardly think that was necessary,\" said Sir Ronald. \"You can leave off 'brave' next\u2014\"\n\nBut before Sir Ronald could finish, Mantooth rose from the river and roared. The trees, and buildings, and the very ground shook around them.\n\n\"Oh my, I had forgotten about the dragon,\" said Sir Ronald in a weak voice. \"Leonard, my sword.\"\n\n\"You're carrying it, sir.\"\n\n\"Oh, so I am,\" said Sir Ronald, unable to take his eyes off the fearsome beast. \"And my shield?\"\n\n\"On your left arm, sir.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Exactly where it should be. Thank you,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\nLeonard couldn't help but admire the trembling knight as he unsheathed his sword. He may not be the best fighter in the world, but Leonard had to admit he was brave, meaning he had the courage to do something that needed to be done even though he was scared to death.\n\n\"Leonard, please get yourself and Poppy to safety,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"Yes, Sir,\" said Leonard, leading the skittish horse off the road.\n\nAfter quickly tying Poppy to a hitching post, Leonard ran behind a large oak tree, hoping that Mantooth would be a good actor and not get carried away and forget to lose.\n\nMantooth roared again, and the villagers of Medwishire came out of their cottages to see what was going on.\n\n\"Stand back, everyone,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\nMantooth stretched out his wings to their full width, and stamped his feet, and growled in what Leonard believed was an overly theatrical manner.\n\nWhat a show-off, thought Leonard.\n\nMaster Prinkle rushed forward. \"Stop, you fool! There's no need to fight, we've worked out an arrangement with the beast\u2026\"\n\nSir Ronald silenced Master Prinkle with a wave of his sword. \"I do not presume to tell you how to keep order in Medwishire, Prinkle. Do not presume to tell me how to be a knight.\" Master Prinkle stared at Sir Ronald for a moment then shrugged and retreated down the road. As he passed the oak, Leonard could hear him muttering words like \"idiot\" and phrases like \"deserves to die.\"\n\nWe'll see about that very soon, you horrible old gasbag, thought Leonard. He was feeling more proud of Sir Ronald then he ever had before.\n\nMantooth jumped into the air and landed a few feet in front of Sir Ronald. Leonard could see the dragonfire building in his mouth and hoped that Sir Ronald would be able to get out of the way of what was about to come. \"Don't fall. Please, don't fall,\" whispered Leonard.\n\nMantooth let loose a fireball that Leonard was quite sure was a mere fraction the size of what the dragon usually blew out. He breathed a sigh of relief when Sir Ronald avoided it by stepping to the side and raising his shield. \"Good one, Sir!\" shouted Leonard from behind the tree.\n\nSurprised and emboldened by having done a fighting move correctly, Sir Ronald took a respectable swipe at Mantooth with his sword. The blade glanced off Mantooth's neck scales and slipped out of the knight's hand, imbedding itself in the stump of a dead tree.\n\nLeonard thought he might have seen Mantooth roll his eyes before launching into another round of over-the-top growling and bad acting. Using his shield for cover, Sir Ronald worked his way over to the stump and was desperately trying to pull out his sword. Mantooth waited, stomping in place for several moments before losing his patience and charging at Sir Ronald. The knight backed away from the stump, and Mantooth pulled the sword out with his teeth, pretending he was enraged that such an object would be anywhere near him. The dragon \"accidentally\" dropped the sword near Sir Ronald's feet, catching Leonard's eye as he did and shaking his head in mild disgust. Leonard flashed a smile and gave a thumbs up in return. This was already going a lot better than he had expected.\n\nSir Ronald picked up his sword and was stabbing at Mantooth's belly. Mantooth, for his part, was stomping in place, and Leonard knew that the dragon was giving him time to find a gap between his scales. Sir Ronald continued to miss his mark, and Leonard was starting to worry that Mantooth would lose his patience again and just stab himself.\n\nBut, as it turned out, Leonard needn't have worried about that as something else happened.\n\nTrumpets blared and a huge metal chain net with heavy weights flew through the air and wrapped itself around Mantooth. The dragon was pinned to the ground, and Sir Ronald was knocked flat on his back. The staged battle part of the brilliant plan had been cut short. The Knights of the Round Table had arrived.\n\nAs he watched from behind the oak tree, Sir Lancelot and several of the other Round Table knights pulled hard on the heavy chains connected to the dragon net. Mantooth struggled but even with his immense size and strength could not break the thick chain links.\n\nA team of draft horses pulled the massive catapult used to launch the metal net past where Leonard stood. Its wheels creaked and groaned under the immense weight of so much iron and timber. It must've taken them a lot of time and effort to get that thing into place, thought Leonard, cursing at himself that he hadn't spotted it when they came into Medwishire.\n\nHe watched Sir Percival, another Knight of the Round Table, walk over to where Sir Ronald lay. He reached out his hand to help the dazed knight to his feet.\n\n\"Thank you, good Sir. I do believe you arrived just in the nick of time,\" said Sir Ronald, wiping the dust from his doublet.\n\n\"What is your name, knight?\" said Sir Percival.\n\n\"I am Sir Ronald of the Green Valley,\" said Sir Ronald with a bow.\n\n\"Sir Ronald of the Green Valley, I hereby arrest you in the name of His Majesty, King Arthur of Camelot,\" said Sir Percival.\n\nSir Ronald was stunned, as was Leonard.\n\n\"On what charge?\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"That you, being a lesser knight, did willfully attempt an act of bravery without a license and as such shall suffer the penalty of imprisonment for an undetermined amount of time in the castle dungeons,\" said Sir Percival.\n\nLeonard couldn't believe his ears and stepped out from behind the oak. \"But Sir, the dragon attacked Sir Ronald. He was only defending himself.\"\n\n\"I don't make the rules, I only enforce them,\" said Sir Percival as he tightened a pair of manacles around Sir Ronald's wrists. \"Section twelve of the Universal Rules of the Round Table specifically states that under no circumstances shall a non-member of the Table attempt any significant brave acts without the express written consent of His Majesty the King.\"\n\n\"But that's not fair!\" shouted Leonard.\n\nSir Percival frowned, and Sir Ronald put his hand on Leonard's shoulder. \"Forgive the boy, milord, he meant no offense.\"\n\nSir Ronald looked Leonard in the eye. \"You needn't worry, Leonard. I am sure this will all be cleared up when we reach Camelot. King Arthur will understand,\" said Sir Ronald, giving Leonard a firm squeeze on the shoulder as a way of telling him to keep quiet.\n\n\"Kill me! Kill me now, you cowards!\" bellowed Mantooth from the other side of the village green. Their eyes met briefly, but Leonard had to turn away. The sight of such a mighty beast made so completely helpless was too much for him to bear.\n\nLeonard watched in stunned disbelief as Sir Ronald was led off in chains, and Mantooth was dragged up onto two large freight wagons, tethered side by side. His Master was going to be thrown in a dungeon, his dragon friend was still alive and headed toward an uncertain fate, and it was all his fault! Leonard felt the presence of someone standing behind him and turned around to find Master Prinkle with a smug smile on his face.\n\n\"Well, how about that? The dragon removed from our fine village and your Master being taken off in chains. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect day,\" said Master Prinkle.\n\nLeonard didn't feel as bound to the rules of etiquette as Sir Ronald so, without a moment's hesitation, he kicked Master Prinkle in the shin as hard as he could. The unpleasant man cursed and dropped to the ground, holding his shin in pain.\n\n\"Begone, you horrible boy!\" said Master Prinkle.\n\nStruggling mightily to control his rage, Leonard took a deep breath and tried to think of how Sir Ronald would've have wanted him to answer Master Prinkle. He exhaled slowly and forced a smile. \"With pleasure, goat licker,\" said Leonard.\n\nFeeling as though he'd been punched in the head, Leonard stumbled around the green, picking up Sir Ronald's sword and shield. He pulled Poppy, who'd slipped off the post during the battle, away from Master Prinkle's sugar peas, and stepped out on the road to Camelot. Using a fencepost to help himself up, Leonard hopped on Poppy's back, nudging her in the side with his heel. Poppy did her best to catch up with the Knights of the Round Table, but her attempt at a gallop slowed to a trot after just a few yards, her heavy breathing betraying her age.\n\n\"Slow down, Poppy,\" said Leonard. \"No sense in dropping dead. We know where they're going.\" The huge horse snorted and then slowed to a more comfortable pace."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Several hours later, Leonard rode Poppy into the courtyard of the strange-looking building, an unfinished stone structure about twenty feet high and twenty feet across. Lacking a proper roof, it was instead covered by a mixture of old thatch and animal skins. He had arrived at the home of Sir Ronald's friend, Sir Francis. It was unfinished because, like Sir Ronald, Sir Francis was a poor knight who could only afford to hire stonemasons every once in a great while. They would add a few feet of stone, get paid, then go away and drink ale for a few years. The tower's most striking feature was that it was surrounded by a large and productive vegetable garden and an apple orchard that was the envy of all his neighbors. Leonard tied Poppy to a hitching post and pushed open the garden gate, the smell of roast pig filling his nostrils. Normally, the prospect of a good meal would have lifted his spirits, but even the aroma of roast pig didn't make Leonard feel any better.\n\nAs Leonard walked toward the door, Piffle popped up from behind a large cabbage with a half-eaten caterpillar in her mouth. \"The Leonard is here! How is you?\"\n\n\"Not so good, Piffle.\"\n\n\"Where is your knighty knight?\"\n\n\"That is why I am not so good,\" said Leonard. \"My Master has been arrested and taken to Camelot.\"\n\n\"Oh, no no!\"\n\n\"Oh, yes yes,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What was that?\" said Sir Francis, who was wiping his hands on his apron as he stepped out the tower's front door.\n\nSir Francis was a short man with bright red hair and a full bushy beard.\n\n\"Sir Ronald was arrested for being brave and fighting a dragon without a license, and it's all my fault,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said Sir Francis. \"A dragon and the Knights of the Round Table. That doesn't sound good at all. Come inside and drink some water, Leonard. You look as though you need to sit down.\"\n\nLeonard followed Sir Francis inside where Hubert was turning the pig on a spit over a fire. Hubert saw the look on Leonard's face and jumped up. \"What's wrong? Did the dragon eat him?\" Hubert clasped his hands over his mouth.\n\n\"Hubert, am I to take it that you were aware that Sir Ronald would be fighting a dragon and chose not to inform your Master?\" said Sir Francis with a frown.\n\n\"Yes, Sir,\" said Hubert, his eyes cast downward.\n\n\"Get our guest a cup of water, Hubert. Leonard, tell me what is going on.\"\n\nLeonard took a seat by the fire, drank down the water, and then proceeded to tell Sir Francis about his brilliant plan and how it had gone so horribly wrong. He left out the part about kicking Master Prinkle in the shin, though, because he wasn't so sure that Sir Francis would approve. After Leonard finished, they sat without saying a word for a moment.\n\n\"Leonard, I understand that you thought you would be helping Sir Ronald with your brilliant plan, but I'm afraid that you've gotten him into quite a pickle,\" Sir Francis sighed. \"There's not much we can do to help Sir Ronald. Once the Knights of the Round Table have ruled, that is pretty much that. Only King Arthur has the power to overrule their decrees and he very rarely does so.\"\n\nLeonard buried his head in his hands and moaned. \"What have I done?\"\n\n\"The Leonard maked a big boo boo,\" said Piffle from the open window. She inhaled. \"Does we eat now?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. We shall eat soon,\" said Sir Francis. \"But first, Leonard, you must take a bath!\"\n\nLeonard was shocked. Sir Francis may as well have said that he'd have to cut off all his toes before he could eat. \"Why?\"\n\n\"You stink,\" said Sir Francis. \"Badly.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nSir Francis pointed in the direction of the courtyard. Moments later, Leonard was sitting in a tub just outside the front door, shivering, while Hubert poured bucket after bucket of cold well water over his head.\n\n\"Here,\" said Hubert, tossing Leonard a bar of lye soap.\n\n\"Soap?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Sir Francis's orders,\" said Hubert.\n\nLeonard growled then used the harsh soap and cleaned up as best he could. When he was finished, the water in the tub looked like it had come out of a stagnant pond. Leonard dried off and then put on some of Hubert's old clothes which were a little big, but not too bad.\n\nThe two boys went inside. Leonard plopped down at the table and buried his head in his hands while Hubert set out the food. During the whole meal, no one said much more than, \"pass the meat,\" or, \"pass the cabbage.\" Leonard picked at his food and gave a polite, \"no, thank you,\" to Sir Francis when he offered to let him stay with them for as long as Sir Ronald was imprisoned. Since it was his fault that Sir Ronald had gotten arrested, it was his responsibility to figure out some way to get him out. That meant that he would have to continue on to Camelot, even though he had no idea of what he was going to do when he got there."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The next morning, Leonard fed and watered Poppy before unhitching her for the long journey. He placed Sir Ronald's sword and shield in a large sack along with some food and a jug of water and slung it over his shoulder before climbing onto the huge horse's back.\n\n\"Tell Sir Ronald that I will look after his lands and half-castle until he's won his freedom and will try to visit him as often as I can,\" said Sir Francis, rubbing Poppy's nose.\n\n\"I will, Sir. Thank you,\" said Leonard.\n\nNeither Leonard nor Hubert could look each other in the eye as they both had the feeling they wouldn't be seeing each other for quite some time.\n\n\"Goodbye, Fool,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Goodbye, Friend of Fool,\" said Leonard.\n\nPiffle popped out of Hubert's shirt. \"Goodbye, the Leonard. I thinks everything's gonna be all right. You'll see.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right, Piffle.\" And with that he was on his way.\n\n\"Godspeed, lad!\" said Sir Francis."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The journey to Camelot was long but largely uneventful. Leonard rode along in a self-pitying daze, snapping out of it every once in a while to thoroughly curse his own stupidity, shouting things like \"You're an idiot, Leonard!\" and not caring if there was anyone around to hear him do so.\n\nAt one point, a small band of goblins tried to steal Poppy after Leonard had stopped for the night, but all Leonard had to do was pull Sir Ronald's sword from the sack, and they ran off like a gaggle of scared geese. He slept close to Poppy with the sword on his chest for the rest of the journey after that bit of excitement, and the only other troubles he had were in his guilt-filled dreams."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Old Peddler",
                "text": "Leonard arrived at Camelot just as dawn was breaking in the eastern sky. Even though he wasn't there for the best of reasons, Leonard couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer size and beauty of the place. Camelot was huge, filling the top of a large hill. Or was it a small mountain? Leonard guessed the rocky outcropping fell somewhere between the two. The snow-white stone of the castle's battlements reflected the rosy hue of the morning sky, and a light breeze out of the west caused pennants hanging from the highest towers to ripple lazily.\n\nLeonard let Poppy loose to graze a little and sat down on a stump, glancing up at several ravens flying in slow circles above Camelot.\n\n\"How am I going to get in there, Poppy? And what am I going to do when I'm inside?\" said Leonard, taking a bite from an apple.\n\n\"It is my understanding they're looking to hire a stable boy,\" said a voice.\n\nFor a brief moment, Leonard actually thought that it was Poppy who had answered his question. But when an old peddler plopped down on the stump next to him, Leonard jumped up in alarm. He hadn't heard the peddler approach, so it was almost as if the old man had appeared out of thin air.\n\n\"Settle, boy, I mean you no harm,\" said the peddler.\n\n\"I know that. You startled me, that's all,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"My apologies, young Master.\" Setting aside his knapsack and traveler's staff, he bowed.\n\nLeonard took a breath. The old man didn't look like much of a threat. Stoop-shouldered, he smelled of apples and spice and had a long gray beard and wispy hair tucked under what probably used to be a pointed hat. Weather and time had worked their cruel charms on the man and the hat, leaving them both faded and bent. The peddler sat in silence, his eyes closed and his face pointed toward the sun. This went on for several long moments and when the old man began to snore, Leonard decided it was apparently up to him to keep the conversational ball rolling.\n\n\"So\u2026they need a stable boy at the castle?\" said Leonard.\n\nThe peddler's eyes popped open. \"What's that? Oh yes, they do. Give me a fresh apple and I will tell you what door to knock on and who to talk to in the castle,\" said the peddler.\n\n\"I only have one apple left besides the one I'm eating,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Good. Then you can give it to me,\" said the peddler.\n\n\"I could, but how do I know you'll be telling me the truth? You might be making the whole thing up just to get my apple,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I might be. You won't really know until you get to the castle, will you? There's a small bit of gambling going on here; an act of faith, so to speak,\" said the peddler. \"You'll have to decide whether or not you trust me based on what your gut tells you, Leonard.\"\n\nLeonard was stunned. \"How do you know my name? Have we met before?\"\n\n\"Long ago,\" said the peddler, pulling back his shoulders as if trying to straighten out his bent back. \"I've had my eyes on you ever since your master found you in that burnt out peasant's hut.\"\n\n\"Why?\" said Leonard, now even more stunned than before.\n\n\"You're interesting,\" said the peddler, with a shrug. \"I like interesting people.\"\n\nLeonard frowned. He'd never thought of himself as interesting nor had, for that matter, anyone else who'd ever met him. His \"ordinary-ness\" was something everyone in the world seemed to agree on, including Leonard. He didn't want to be interesting. Interesting people had interesting things happen to them and in this day and age, interesting things often meant dangerous things.\n\n\"So, what does your gut tell you, Leonard?\"\n\nLeonard looked at the old man and decided that there was a certain easy feeling of trustworthiness about him and a kindness in his eyes. He wanted to trust the peddler, even though his clothes were torn and tattered and his hair was full of burrs.\n\nWith a shrug, Leonard reached into the sack and tossed the peddler his last apple.\n\n\"Well played, Leonard.\"\n\nThe peddler used one of his remaining teeth to take a bite out of the apple, sighing as he did so. \"Ah, easily one of Sir Francis's best crops yet.\"\n\n\"You know Sir Francis, too?\"\n\n\"My peddling takes me to the far corners of the kingdom, and my tongue is well educated on the matter of who has the best of everything,\" said the peddler. \"Sir Francis is doubly blessed with the best vegetable garden and the best apple orchard.\"\n\nLeonard watched the peddler as he munched on the apple. The old man ate the whole thing, all the way down to the seeds and stem, and then slipped the core into his sleeve. \"That was an exceptionally good apple. Thank you kindly, Master Leonard, a fine treat indeed.\"\n\nThe old man got to his feet, picked up his bag of goods, and started down the road.\n\n\"Hey! Hold on there! What about my job?\"\n\nThe peddler stopped and looked over his shoulder. \"Go to the outdoor kitchen and ask for Ham. Not a piece of ham, but a large man named Ham. He is my friend but will act like I am not.\" The old man lowered his voice. \"He could get in trouble if anyone knew we are on the same side.\"\n\n\"Same side? What\u2026\"\n\n\"You need know no more at the present. Tell Ham that the old peddler sent you and that you are here for the stable boy job.\"\n\n\"That's it?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" said the peddler, glancing up at the circling ravens. \"Be careful, young Leonard. Camelot is not the shining beacon it once was. A smart young man would be best served by keeping his eyes and ears open for danger.\"\n\nThe old man headed down the road away from Camelot and threw something round over his shoulder. Leonard caught it and, much to his amazement, found that it was an uneaten apple."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Following the peddler's instructions, Leonard made his way around to the back of the castle. This was not as easy as it sounds as Castle Camelot was a large collection of buildings that was more like a small city surrounded by a big wall. So, \"going around back\" didn't mean a quick stroll, it meant a good half-hour walk.\n\nThe outdoor kitchen was a smoky cluster of huts and preparation tables just outside of the castle walls. Leonard hitched Poppy to a sapling, then hid Sir Ronald's sword and shield in a clump of bushes before walking over to the kitchen. It was abuzz with activity as a group of ten or so cooks and their assistants tended large bubbling pots, butchered game and livestock, and cut up cabbages and root vegetables. Warnings about not overcooking pies and watching the fire under certain pots filled the air, as did the incredible aroma of properly cooked food. A cook carrying an armload of carrots hurried by.\n\n\"Excuse me, ma'am. Could you tell me where I can find Ham?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"We don't serve beggars here,\" said the cook who kept walking.\n\nLeonard followed her. \"I'm not a beggar, I'm looking for a man named Ham.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, why didn't you say? He's over there,\" said the cook, jerking her head toward the castle wall. The cook dumped the carrots on a cutting board and began chopping them up.\n\nLeonard looked toward the wall and saw one of the largest human beings he'd ever seen in his life. Although he wouldn't qualify as a giant, he certainly was at the upper limit of human height. Hairless except for a chin beard that grew down to the middle of his chest, the big fellow was leaning up against the wall near a small doorway and eating a cabbage like it was a piece of fruit.\n\n\"Here,\" said the cook, tossing Leonard a carrot. \"You look hungry.\"\n\n\"I thought\u2026\"\n\n\"That was just me being grumpy,\" said the cook. \"It's been a long day already and it's not even noon yet.\"\n\n\"Thanks, my name's Leonard.\"\n\n\"I'm Gert.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you Gert.\"\n\n\"Likewise.\"\n\nTaking a bite out of the carrot, Leonard continued to stare at Ham.\n\n\"Big, isn't he?\" said Gert.\n\n\"You might say that. Certainly the biggest man I've ever seen,\" said Leonard, between crunches.\n\n\"Some say he's a half-giant. Arthur's wizard brought him here as a babe.\n\n\"Arthur's wizard?\"\n\n\"Merlin, ya dunce.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course.\"\n\n\"Ham was as big as you or I by the time he was but a year old.\"\n\n\"You don't say.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nLeonard sighed. \"Well, I'm supposed to ask him for a job.\"\n\n\"Good luck with that,\" said Gert, with a snort.\n\nLeonard approached the big man cautiously, which is always a good thing to do when the person that you're approaching looks like he could squash your head with one hand. \"Excuse me, sir. Are you Ham?\" said Leonard, stopping just out of reach.\n\n\"Who wants to know?\" said Ham.\n\n\"My name is Leonard. I was sent here by an old peddler who said that I should ask you for the stable boy job,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, did he now?\" said Ham, looking around to see if anyone was watching them. \"That old fake ain't to be trusted.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Leonard. \"Um, was he lying about the job?\"\n\nHam looked Leonard over like one would a goat at market. He checked Leonard's teeth and limbs, pausing when he saw Leonard's left ear.\n\n\"You part elf?\"\n\nLeonard couldn't help himself and snorted. \"No!\"\n\n\"You're small and scrawny. How are you with a pitchfork and shovel?\" said Ham.\n\n\"Quite skilled, sir. My Master says\u2014\"\n\n\"Master? If you have a Master, why do you need a job?\" said Ham.\n\n\"Sorry. I meant my old Master. He was taken away\u2026\"\n\nHam didn't wait for Leonard to finish the sentence but crouched down to go through the small doorway. \"This way.\"\n\nLeonard followed Ham down a long and low hallway. Ham grunted and cursed the whole way as he kept hitting his head on the hallway's ceiling. \"You'd think they built this place for dwarves,\" he muttered.\n\nThey emerged into a large courtyard with a well in the center and a large number of horse stalls lining the walls.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What? Yeah, I suppose it is, isn't it? That there's where you get the water,\" said Ham, pointing to the well. Ham looked up and Leonard followed his gaze to a large loft filled with loose straw and hay. \"Up there's the straw for bedding; that's where you'll be sleepin,' too. Each stall's to be shoveled out once in the morning and once in the evening, with new straw forked back in. Fresh hay and two handfuls of oats\u2014make that eight handfuls for you\u2014go into the feeders. The feed oats is in them bins near the gate. You gets Sundays off for church and a copper a month for pay. Any questions?\" said Ham.\n\n\"Uh, does that mean I get the job?\"\n\n\"Course. Why do you think I've been telling you all of this? For me own health? What do you want, a written invitation?\" said Ham.\n\n\"No, sir. Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\"Good, cuz I can't write.\"\n\nLeonard couldn't believe how easy it had been. He'd been expecting to be begging at the castle's back gate for several days before anyone even gave him the time of day. Apparently, the old peddler knew what he was talking about when it came to whom to talk to about getting a job at Camelot. Now, not only would he get to see Sir Ronald, but he'd also get to see how things worked in a fully finished castle\u2014the best and finest in all the land.\n\n\"Do I help with getting the horses ready for battle?\" said Leonard.\n\nHam laughed a deep laugh that sounded more like it should be coming out of a bear. \"What? You think I'd be startin' you out takin' care of the Sirs' mounts? This stable here is for the coach horses and those what's used for pleasure ridin.' Show me your worth with them, and then we'll talk about lettin' you near a battle horse.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"And I ain't no sir. Call me Ham. Now get to cleanin' them stalls.\" Ham headed back to the tiny hallway.\n\n\"Ham. Where are the dungeons?\" said Leonard.\n\nHam stopped and turned back around, a frown on his face. \"Why would you want to know about that?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Simply curious, I guess.\"\n\n\"Don't you be worrying about such places, little runt. Your thoughts should be on hay, and oats, and shoveling dung. Nothing else.\"\n\nHam left, and Leonard got to work shoveling. He soon had a cart filled with horse plop to take out to the fields. He dumped the cart near the gardens then hooked Poppy up to it and brought her into the stables along with Sir Ronald's sword and shield which he quickly hid in the hay loft. He filled all the stalls with fresh straw and took the time to brush down the horses before he went up to bed.\n\nLying in the loft, Leonard found himself grateful that he'd gotten this far but also wondering about just what he'd have to do to free Sir Ronald. Whatever it is, I'll do it, thought Leonard. Although, I suppose that means we won't be going back to the Green Valley. They'd just arrest Sir Ronald again. We'll be on the run like common thieves. Leonard wiped a tear, then glanced out at the night sky before closing his eyes and drifting off to sleep.\n\nThe next morning, Leonard filled the water troughs and gave each horse the eight handfuls of oats that Ham had ordered. The stable held fifteen horses in all, including the two chestnut beauties that pulled Maid Glennys's coach, and Poppy. He'd asked Ham if it was all right if he kept the old plow horse in one of the unused stalls. Ham grunted and nodded, and Leonard got the feeling that as long as he did his job well, the big fellow didn't care about such matters."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "One afternoon, Leonard looked up from shoveling horse manure to find Maid Glennys tapping her foot in the center of the courtyard. He'd completely forgotten she lived here at the castle and a major case of Glennys-itis overwhelmed him: his heart beat faster, and his breath grew shorter. Dropping the shovel, Leonard ran out of the stall and slipped on the pile of horse plop. \"Great. Just great,\" muttered Leonard.\n\nFortunately, Glennys had been looking in the opposite direction, so he got up and shook himself off. \"Yes, Miss, how may I be of service?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I need my coach immediately,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Yes, Miss.\" Leonard hurried over to the chestnut mares and led one of them over to Glennys's sunflower coach where he hitched it up. Glennys paced around the courtyard, and Leonard's thoughts raced as he tried to come up with something to say to her. \"It's a beautiful day, isn't it, Miss?\" said Leonard, wincing.\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" said Glennys in a way that let Leonard know she thought that was a stale conversation starter, too.\n\n\"Are you going out to collect more herbs, Miss?\" This was a better angle, Leonard thought. It showed that he was interested in what she was interested in. Leonard smiled at his cleverness as he hitched up the second horse to Maid Glennys's coach.\n\n\"Yes, as a matter of fact, I am, but how would you know that?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"I'm sure you don't remember me, Miss, but we met once on the road when you were out looking for herbs.\"\n\n\"We did?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Yes, Miss,\" said Leonard. \"Maybe this will help you remember.\" Leonard turned his head sideways as if he were upside down.\n\nGlennys clapped her hands. \"Yes! The smelly upside-down boy. You were caught in a hunter's snare and my men cut you down.\" She sniffed. \"You smelled then, and you smell now.\"\n\n\"Yes, Miss, that's me. Leonard, at your service.\"\n\nHe finished hitching up the second horse just as the coach driver showed up and climbed up into the driver's seat. Glennys walked over to the coach door and waited. Leonard panicked. He knew she was expecting him to do something, but he wasn't sure what it was.\n\n\"Open the door for Maid Glennys, boy,\" said the coach driver.\n\nOf course! Leonard hurried over to the coach and opened the door. He offered his hand to help her in, and she took it. She took it! Even though it was only for the briefest of moments, Leonard was holding Glennys of Camelot's hand, and he vowed right then and there that he wouldn't wash his own hand until he got something nasty on it. Nastier than horse plop, anyway.\n\n\"And do consider taking a bath, boy,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Right away, Miss,\" said Leonard, bowing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stable Employment",
                "text": "Over the next several days, Leonard learned the not-very-complicated ins and outs of stable life and soon was able to keep the back stable in tip-top condition without much effort. As far as Leonard could tell, Ham was pleased with the job he was doing. Ham wasn't big on giving approving smiles or hearty pats on the back (Ham was so big that this was probably a good thing as a pat on the back from him could be deadly), but Leonard decided that if Ham wasn't saying anything to you, that meant that he didn't think he had to, meaning that you were doing your job right. Ham even got Leonard a new set of clothes to replace the ones he'd borrowed from Hubert. They were plain and dull by Camelot standards, but to Leonard they were the finest clothes he'd ever worn, and he thanked Ham with all his heart. \"Well, now. Can't have you roaming around Camelot looking and smelling like rotten cheese,\" said Ham."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "During the little bits of spare time he had here and there, Leonard took to exploring the rest of the castle and, of course, trying to catch a glimpse of Glennys whenever he could. As Leonard wandered around, he never stopped being surprised at how huge the place was. Blacksmiths, barrel makers, carpenters, and just about every other tradesman under the sun worked within the castle walls. Ham told him this was in case the castle was ever surrounded by a hostile army. \"Then we gots all we need in here to keep the Sirs well supplied with weapons, and shoes, and whatnot.\"\n\nLeonard wasn't quite sure why a knight would need a new pair of shoes during a castle siege, but he nodded as though he agreed it was important anyway."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "During his various excursions throughout the castle, Leonard began to pick up the feeling that things \"weren't quite right\" in Camelot. The feeling was vague at first but started building as he came across things like clusters of quarrelsome ravens, uncomfortably large spiders, and the occasional swarm of black rats. These things don't seem like they belong in a place built around truth and beauty, he thought. The other workers, the Lords and Ladies wore sad or sour looks on their faces and always seemed to be in a hurry. When Leonard told Ham about what he'd been noticing, the big man only sighed and nodded, muttering something about Arthur having been gone for too long before shuffling out of the courtyard. The worst of it was when Leonard started getting the feeling that someone or something was looking at him. The first time it happened, he was pulling a bucket of water up out of the well when the hair on the back of his neck began to rise. He calmly set the bucket down before whipping around and catching a glimpse of a black-clad figure looking straight at him from the courtyard archway. For the briefest of moments, they stared at each other and a chill went down Leonard's spine when he realized the man's eyes were yellow.\n\n\"Is there something...?\" started Leonard. But before he could finish, the strange stranger had hurried away and was nowhere to be seen when Leonard ran to the archway. How peculiar, thought Leonard. He would've written it off as a wild burst of imagination if the same thing hadn't happened to him again when he was taking the manure cart out to the fields and again when he was brushing down Poppy. Ham wasn't much help and told him to keep his nose down and to avoid \"them fellas\" if he knew what was good for him. So, Leonard did just that, going about taking care of the stables and resisting the urge to whip around when the hair on his neck stiffened.\n\nIt hadn't taken Leonard all that long to find out where the dungeons were, but it seemed that every time he got near the stairs leading down to them, he was shooed away by the two guards. \"Get back to the stables, boy. You've got no business here,\" the guards would say.\n\nLeonard got his chance one day when Gert, the cook he'd met on his first day at Camelot, was bringing him his soup and bread for midday meal. She scooped a bowl for Leonard out of a large pot then sat down with a groan.\n\n\"What's wrong, Gert?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I've got to feed those poor souls in the dungeon next, and my old back's giving me an argument about carrying that pot down all those steps.\"\n\nLeonard froze for a moment before dipping a chunk of bread into the soup. \"My chores are done for the day. I could carry the pot for you,\" said Leonard, trying as hard as he could to make it sound like it was no big deal.\n\n\"Would you? What a sweet lad!\" said Gert.\n\nLeonard gobbled down his food as fast as he could, let out a mighty burp then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and stood up. \"Ready?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Well, I can see that you are!\" said Gert. \"Yes, I'm ready.\"\n\nLeonard helped Gert to her feet, then picked up the pot of soup and the sack of bread.\n\nThe guards stopped them when they reached the top of the stairs leading down to the dungeon. \"Where do you think you're going, lad?\" said the taller guard.\n\n\"This nice boy has offered to help me carry this heavy pot down these stairs which, I might add, neither of you louts has ever offered to do,\" said Gert.\n\nLeonard could see a look of genuine hurt on the faces of the guards.\n\n\"But Mother, you know we're not supposed to leave our posts. We could get in big trouble for that!\" said the other guard.\n\n\"You'll get in bigger trouble with the good Lord for how the both of you are treating your dear old mother. Now, step aside and let us pass,\" said Gert. \"I've got a true gentleman assisting me.\"\n\nThe two guards stepped aside as though it was King Arthur himself who had commanded them to do so. Gert walked down the steps with Leonard following close behind.\n\n\"They're both good boys, but every once in a while, I have to remind them who's really in charge at Camelot,\" cackled Gert.\n\nThe stairs seemed to go down forever, and Leonard began to understand why dungeons had the reputation for being dark, damp places.\n\n\"Aye, a dungeon's a terrible place,\" said Gert, seeing the look on Leonard's face. \"This one's better than most, but still...\" Gert shrugged. \"Some that's here deserve to be, but most don't. That's none of my business. It's only my duty to care for seventeen men and one dragon.\"\n\n\"Dragon?\" said Leonard, his heart racing.\n\n\"Aye, but he's harmless. They got him bolted down so tight that he couldn't hurt a flea. He ain't eatin' anyway. Seems like he's had the fire knocked out of him,\" said Gert.\n\nThey reached the bottom of the steps and were met by the jailer, an old and bent man with messy white hair and an eye patch.\n\n\"I could smell your soup coming a mile away, woman,\" said the jailer.\n\n\"Sounds like someone's hungry enough,\" said Gert. \"Leonard, give my husband a bowl of that soup and a piece of bread before he chews his own arm off.\"\n\n\"Husband?\" said Leonard as he dished out a ladle of soup into the jailer's waiting bowl.\n\n\"Aye, working at the castle is a family affair for a lot of us. I've got sons and daughters and nieces and nephews working in every corner of it,\" said Gert.\n\n\"A pleasure to meet you, Leonard. My name is Vincent,\" said the jailer.\n\n\"Nice to meet you too, sir,\" said Leonard as he handed the bent old man a piece of bread.\n\n\"Come along, Leonard. I'm sorry to say that my lowly cooking is the highlight of the day for these poor men,\" said Gert.\n\n\"Don't let her fool you, boy, my Gert's the best cook in the castle,\" said Vincent as he kissed Gert on the cheek.\n\n\"Back off, you old goat!\" said Gert with a laugh.\n\nGert took the sack of bread, and Leonard followed her into the cell area. Leonard was surprised at how neat and tidy the open-faced cells were. Each was well kept and contained a bed, a stool, a table, and a man whose face brightened when he saw Gert. The first prisoner was an older nobleman with a long gray beard.\n\n\"Gert, old girl! How are you today?\" said the prisoner.\n\n\"I am well, milord,\" said Gert.\n\n\"I see they've finally given you an assistant.\"\n\n\"Indeed! And about time, too!\"\n\nThey went along from cell to cell dishing out soup and bread.\n\n\"We've got a few brigands in here, but most of them made the simple mistake of being a little too brave and taking business away from that Round Table bunch,\" said Gert in a low whisper.\n\nWhile Gert stopped to talk with a prisoner who had been imprisoned for illegally saving a village from some sort of monster that had laid its eggs in the church steeple, Leonard pushed on in his search for Sir Ronald. He passed several empty cells before at last finding him.\n\n\"Sir Ronald!\" said Leonard as he set down the pot of soup.\n\nSir Ronald hopped up from his stool. \"My goodness, Leonard! What are you doing here?\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"I got a job working in the back stables.\" He drew closer to the bars of the cell. \"I'm going to find a way to get you out of here,\" said Leonard in a low voice. \"I promise.\"\n\nSir Ronald chuckled. \"That's exceedingly kind of you, Leonard. But from what I've been able to see, this place is escape proof. I'm not sure I'll be going anywhere soon and I don't deserve to. In a way, the Knights of the Round Table are right. I did break the rules by fighting that dragon. By the way, did you know that they have him in a large cell on the far side of the dungeon? He snores something terrible at night and kicks his legs and growls like a dog when he dreams. The whole dungeon shakes.\"\n\n\"Sir Ronald, I'm afraid I have something to tell you about the dragon incident,\" said Leonard. \"Well, you see, Sir, the whole thing is my fault.\"\n\n\"Now, Leonard, how could that be true?\" said Sir Ronald.\n\nLeonard proceeded to tell Sir Ronald about his brilliant plan that had gone all wrong. When he finished, he sat and waited for Sir Ronald to begin scolding him, but his Master said nothing.\n\nAfter a few moments, Leonard couldn't bear the silence for any longer. \"I'm sorry, Sir Ronald. Really, I am. I think I must be the worst page that any knight has ever had. Really, I do.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's not true, Leonard. You're a good page, but unfortunately you got a little too carried away in your effort to help me,\" said Sir Ronald. \"I've had a lot of time to think here in this cell, and I've come to the conclusion that I must not be a very good knight. I especially believe this now that I've heard how much help you think I needed.\"\n\n\"Oh no, Sir. You're a very good knight\u2014\"\n\n\"Leonard, stop. I will not have you be a liar,\" interrupted Sir Ronald. \"As I was being brought into the castle, I heard one of the knights refer to me as Sir Ronald the Mediocre. Those around him laughed, so I can only conclude that they agreed. Apparently, I've been something of a joke around this kingdom for quite some time.\"\n\n\"But, Sir,\" said Leonard. \"They don't know how good and brave you are. It doesn't matter whether you knew if the fight was real or not, you went to fight that dragon anyway. You are the absolute best knight a page could ever hope to have.\"\n\n\"Leonard!\" called Gert from out in the hallway.\n\n\"Sir, I think it might be better if no one knew I was your page,\" said Leonard, quietly.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"There you are, boy!\" said Gert as she shuffled around the corner and handed Sir Ronald a chunk of bread. \"Hello, Sir Ronald.\"\n\n\"Hello, Gert. Is King Arthur back yet?\"\n\n\"No, milord, he's not. But I'll let you know as soon as he shows up,\" said Gert.\n\n\"Thank you, Gert.\"\n\n\"I've given out all the bread. Give that last bit of soup to Sir Ronald, and we'll be on our way,\" said Gert to Leonard. She hobbled back toward the steps.\n\nLeonard ladled the soup into Sir Ronald's bowl and pulled the last of Sir Francis's apples out of a bag he wore on his waist. \"Here. This is from one of Sir Francis's trees,\" said Leonard. \"I've been saving it for you.\"\n\n\"Now, that's what I call a treat!\" said Sir Ronald as he took the apple.\n\n\"Sir Francis told me to tell you he would watch over your lands until you are free and would try to visit you as often as possible,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"He's a good man.\"\n\n\"I will find a way to get you out of here, Sir Ronald,\" said Leonard. \"Really, I will.\"\n\n\"Of course you will, my boy,\" said Sir Ronald as he patted Leonard on the shoulder. \"It is so good to see you again. I have missed you.\"\n\n\"Me too, Sir,\" said Leonard in a quiet voice.\n\n\"Leonard, let's go! Now, please!\" shouted Gert from the stairs.\n\nLeonard grabbed the soup pot and sprinted after her.\n\nOver the next few days, a routine developed where Leonard would get his morning chores done early so that he could help Gert deliver her food to the dungeon's prisoners.\n\nThis way, Leonard was able to see Sir Ronald daily to give him pep talks, fresh fruit, and fresh apologies for his brilliant plan that had gone horribly wrong. He was having a hard time getting close enough to the dragon to apologize since the great beast was separated by some distance from the other prisoners. But one day, when Gert got into a lively discussion with a knight who had made the mistake of saving a damsel from a giant man-eating bat, Leonard was able to sneak over to Mantooth's cage.\n\nThe huge dragon was lying on the floor with his back to the door. Leonard could hear him breathing, but other than that there was no movement. Leonard suspected that this was due in large part to Mantooth being covered with chains. Each length of heavy chain was attached to the floor of the cell by either a heavy padlock or a massive steel spike. Whatever the case, Leonard could see there was no way that Mantooth, as large and powerful as he was, was going anywhere.\n\n\"Mantooth! It's me, Leonard.\"\n\nMantooth didn't move.\n\n\"Mantooth, please. I'm sorry. I want to apologize.\"\n\n\"Go away,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Look, I know that you are mad at me, and that you should be\u2014\"\n\n\"He's not going to kill me, you know,\" interrupted Mantooth.\n\n\"What? Who?\"\n\n\"That insufferable Sir Gareth. He plans on keeping me alive for as long as he can,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Figure it out, boy. Why would such a man want to keep a dragon alive?\" said Mantooth.\n\nLeonard thought hard but couldn't come up with a reason why Sir Gareth, or any of the Knights of the Round Table, would want to keep a live dragon in the dungeon. Mantooth was as dangerous as ever. Could it be that they wanted to train him as sort of an overgrown watchdog? No, Mantooth would never submit to being a pet of men. Then what was it? As Leonard thought some more, he found himself getting distracted by all the jewels on the floor of the cell.\n\n\"The gems!\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What a clever boy you are,\" said Mantooth with a sarcastic note in his voice. \"Yes, that is exactly why I was brought here, to get my tears. Once, when we were alone, Gareth picked up a handful and started blathering about how much mischief could be bought and paid for with the product of my sorrow. He is not right, Leonard. There's something very wrong with that man.\"\n\n\"I am so sorry,\" said Leonard.\n\nMantooth looked at Leonard. \"I know you are, boy. You're not to blame. If my brain hadn't been so clouded with grief, I would have figured out that it wasn't the best plan in the world to wait under a bridge to be killed. I should have gone out in a blaze of glory, so to speak, and attacked the castle directly. A fight to the death would have been preferable to this Hell I find myself in now.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Leonard again.\n\n\"Me, too,\" said Mantooth before turning away.\n\nLeonard heard small gemstones hitting the ground and knew that Mantooth was crying again. As Leonard walked away from the cell, he decided it was the saddest he'd felt in a long time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "That night, Leonard lay in the hayloft and, as usual, tried to think of a way to undo all the trouble his brilliant plan had caused. Every time he came up with something, he'd have to remind himself that he was inside a giant walled city full of knights and guards and all sorts of people that would do what they could to keep Sir Ronald and Mantooth in their cells.\n\nLeonard stopped thinking when he heard some rustling in the straw on the other end of the loft. Sometimes one of the black rats got up in the hayloft and Leonard would have to scare it off with loud noises. He always kept a couple of pieces of wood from the kindling pile for just such a reason. Leonard picked up a large stick and threw it in the direction of the rustling.\n\n\"Ow! Hurt me!\" said a familiar voice.\n\nLeonard sat up. \"Piffle?\"\n\nPiffle popped up out of the straw, rubbing her head. \"Yeah, it is me. Why the Leonard hit Piffle with the piece of stick wood?\"\n\n\"Because the Leonard thought Piffle was a rat,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, right. Piffle should have said she was Piffle, first.\"\n\n\"Get over here, Piffle.\"\n\nShe bounded across the hayloft and jumped into Leonard's arms. \"Oh, Piffle missed the Leonard. He is been gone for too long,\" she said.\n\n\"I missed you, too, Piffle. How is your Master and how is Sir Francis?\"\n\n\"They is well enough, I suppose, but they misses you, too,\" she said. \"Sir Francis is going be visiting sometime in the very soon. That's what I is supposed to be telling you.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful, Piffle. I'm looking forward to seeing Hubert and Sir Francis.\"\n\n\"How is things is going here? This castle is so big, it takes Piffle a long time to find the Leonard.\"\n\nLeonard lay back and took a deep breath. \"Well, it's been good and bad, Piffle. The good part is that I get to eat decent food and see Sir Ronald every day; the bad part is that I haven't been able to come up with a plan to get him or Mantooth out of here. Camelot is just too big and well-defended. I'd need an army of giants or a horde of dragons to get my Master out of here.\"\n\nPiffle sat still, scratching her ear as she thought. \"Piffle don't know where to get no giants, but Piffle knows where to get dragons,\" she said.\n\nLeonard sat up again. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Brownies is dragonfriends before they is humanfriends. We takes care of dragons first in the olden days when there is much, much more of them. We only switches to humans when there is not many dragons left. But there is some still alive. About a horde's worth I reckon, and Piffle knows where they is.\"\n\n\"You do?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I do,\" said Piffle. \"Maybe since the Leonard's a dragonfriend, they agree to help him out. Piffle don't know, but stranger things has happened in the worlds.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Along for the Ride",
                "text": "A few days later, Sir Francis and Hubert arrived at Camelot with smiles on their faces and a bag full of apples. Gert was impressed with the quality of the fruit and talked about adding Sir Francis to the list of approved sources of produce. It was Hubert's first visit to Camelot, so he soaked in everything like a bone-dry sea sponge. \"Leonard! This place is huge!\" said Hubert. \"And I've never seen so many fine knights and ladies in one place at the same time! How do you keep from grinning ear to ear all of the time?\"\n\n\"You get used to it, I suppose,\" said Leonard with a shrug.\n\nWhile Sir Francis visited Sir Ronald in the dungeon, Leonard took Hubert on a tour of the back stables. While they walked around, Leonard filled Hubert in on his latest brilliant plan.\n\n\"Hold on there. Are you saying you want to ask dragons\u2014fierce and nasty fire-breathing dragons\u2014to help you free Sir Ronald and Mantooth?\" said Hubert as they sat on a bench outside Poppy's stall. \"You're daft!\"\n\n\"I am not!\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What is daft meaning?\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Crazy,\" said Leonard and Hubert at the same time.\n\n\"I think this brilliant plan is even worse than your first brilliant plan, and we know how well that one turned out,\" said Hubert. \"Come on, Leonard. Where's your common sense? Attacking Camelot with a gaggle of dragons?\"\n\n\"Horde,\" corrected Piffle.\n\n\"Horde, gaggle. Whatever. Doing something like that would put you up there on a list with some of the worst arch villains and dark wizards of all time. This is Arthur's castle! King Arthur! And in case you've forgotten, he's not one of the bad guys. He's the one who wields Excalibur. The chosen of Merlin. The once and future king.\"\n\n\"I know that! But here's another thing,\" said Leonard. \"I haven't seen King Arthur once since I started working here. They say he's on a grand tour of his kingdom and a knight named Sir Gareth has taken charge. He claims King Arthur is sending notes to him from the road on what he wants him to do, but I think something's wrong. I mean, come on, ruling by notes? Doesn't that smell fishy to you?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Like a smelly ripe rotten fish,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Plus,\" whispered Leonard, motioning Hubert to come closer. \"This place is crawling with rats, spiders, ravens, and\u2026men with yellow eyes.\"\n\nPiffle and Hubert exchanged glances, with Piffle silently mouthing the word \"daft.\"\n\n\"I swear to you everything I just said is true!\"\n\n\"Fine, let's say it is. That doesn't mean that it's acceptable to attack the castle with dragons!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Not the castle, just the dungeon,\" said Leonard. \"There's something wrong here and I have to get Sir Ronald out of that dungeon, and if it takes a horde of dragons to do it then so be it.\"\n\nPiffle jumped up on Hubert's head and started grooming him. \"Piffle thinks the easy part will be attacking the castle. Hard part's getting the dragons to come, too.\"\n\nLeonard sighed and leaned back against the stable wall. \"I don't doubt that you're right, Piffle, but I'll worry about that when I get there, I suppose.\"\n\n\"When are you leaving?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Tomorrow, after my morning chores,\" said Leonard. \"Piffle said she'd point me in the right direction.\"\n\n\"Piffle is good at pointing in directions that people wants to be going,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I'm going to tell them that I have to go back to my village to get the rest of my possessions. They shouldn't give me any grief about that. I told my boss, Ham, that my parents are dead, so I'm in charge of myself,\" said Leonard.\n\nHubert's eyes suddenly brightened as he looked over Leonard's shoulder. \"Ooh! Is that\u2026?\"\n\nLeonard saw that his friend had noticed Maid Glennys's carriage. \"Yes,\" said Leonard. \"It is.\"\n\nHubert ran over to the coach and inspected it closely. \"Have you spoken more words with her?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\"Lucky dog.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "The next morning, Leonard completed his morning chores, giving each horse an extra handful of oats as a farewell treat. He said goodbye to Ham and Gert, trying the best he could to hide the guilt he was feeling. If everything went according to his second brilliant plan, the next time they saw him would be in front of a large horde of ill-tempered dragons.\n\nLeonard dug Sir Ronald's sword and shield out of the hay loft, concealed them inside a heavy woven sack, and then let Poppy out of her stall and led her out the castle gate. A couple of miles down the road, Leonard was surprised to see Hubert and Piffle sitting on a stacked stone wall.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Just enjoying this fine morning with my good friend and associate, Piffle the brownie,\" said Hubert.\n\nPiffle stood up and doffed her cap as she bowed. \"Charmed, I am sure I am.\"\n\n\"Is that a crime?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"No, it's not a crime to enjoy a fine morning. But that doesn't answer my question. What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Well, after a lengthy late-night conversation with my associate\u2014\" said Hubert.\n\nPiffle stood and doffed her cap again. \"We was talking long and hard,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"It was determined that the both of us were of the same mind when it came to the subject of assisting our very good friend,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"That be you, the Leonard,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Assisting? What do you mean?\"\n\n\"We're coming with you, you bonehead.\"\n\n\"We is both gonna help the Leonard find the dragons,\" said Piffle. \"Me and Hubert is coming together, too.\"\n\n\"Are you crazy?\"\n\n\"No, we is daft,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I'll say. What does Sir Francis have to say about this?\"\n\n\"Not a problem. He's fine with it,\" said Hubert.\n\nLeonard threw Hubert a skeptical look. \"Fine with it?\"\n\n\"Well, when I say 'fine with it,' I'm referring to the part of the story where I mentioned to Sir Francis that I would dearly love to accompany my best friend on a trip to explore some of the more unusual parts of the kingdom. And since I believe that this is one of those instances when it's best not to tell the full story, I left out the part about finding the dragons and asking them to attack Camelot to free Sir Ronald and Mantooth.\"\n\n\"Master Hubert left out the getting-in-trouble parts,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I see,\" said Leonard.\n\nLeonard had to admit he was grateful for their company, and so the only other thing he could think to say was, \"Climb on up.\"\n\nPoppy didn't seem to care in the least that she now had two boys and a brownie riding on her back. Leonard and Hubert each barely weighed a hundred pounds, and Piffle was about as heavy as a large songbird.\n\n\"Good girl, Poppy,\" said Leonard, patting the huge horse on the neck. \"How are we doing, Piffle? Still going in the right direction?\"\n\n\"Yup, we is going the right way,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I wish we at least had a map or something,\" said Hubert. \"This just feels like we're wandering.\"\n\n\"Piffle don't needs a map. Piffle feels in her heart where the dragons is. We is going the right way.\"\n\n\"I still like maps. When you're holding a map, you have a feeling of where you are in the world. Right now, I have no idea where I am,\" said Hubert.\n\nPiffle jumped off Hubert's shoulder and ran to the top of Poppy's head. \"Turn big Poppy that way, the Leonard,\" she said, pointing toward a stand of large trees.\n\n\"You want us to leave the road?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, leaves the road. The dragons is that way, far away from peoples. Not next to no big road. We gots to go through the Old Woods to get to them.\"\n\n\"You mean the dragons aren't hiding in a place where it's convenient to find them? How odd,\" smirked Leonard.\n\nLeonard guided Poppy off the well-worn road and into a large meadow, making their way toward the trees.\n\n\"Of course you realize that this is always how it starts, don't you?\" said Hubert. \"The dangerous part of any quest. When the old ones start telling their campfire tales about heroes and monsters and the like, the bad part always starts when they leave the well-traveled and safe road and go into some scary woods or a cave or something. I just wanted to point that out,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"And I want to thank you for that. It's good to know that you'll always be there to help us start worrying.\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" said Hubert. \"It's what I do best.\"\n\nThey made their way across the meadow and paused at the edge of the woods.\n\n\"Look at the size of those trees!\" said Hubert. \"They're huge!\"\n\n\"And very, very old,\" said Piffle. \"Some of the trees in this wood has been here from the starts of all things,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"What? That's impossible,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"You'll see,\" said Piffle.\n\nLeonard gave Poppy a gentle kick in the side and urged her into the trees.\n\nAs soon as they entered the forest, Leonard and Hubert felt as though they had stepped into another world. Trees, ferns, and shrubs were everywhere, but there was also the strange feeling that everything was where it should be, as if placed by the hand of an unseen and brilliant gardener. Leonard wasn't sure how he knew this, but the trees, ferns, and shrubs that he was seeing were not the usual plants of the forest, they were the originals\u2014the ones that all other trees, ferns, and shrubs were but lesser copies. The birds, too. Their songs were clearer and more beautiful, and the colors of their feathers were brighter and truer than the ordinary birds from outside the forest.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"And powerful. Can you feels it?\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Leonard. \"But how come\u2026Why haven't I been here before? I never even knew that such a place existed.\"\n\n\"The Old Woods is always keeping to itself,\" said Piffle. \"Nots letting nobody knows about it unless it wants it so, or you gots a brownie like Piffle to guide you into it.\"\n\n\"Oh good,\" said Hubert, looking around nervously. \"It's a magical place.\"\n\n\"Yups. This part's the light part,\" said Piffle. \"Good powers lives here. But deeper in is where the dark part is and bad powers lives there. To gets closer to the dragons, we gots to go through the dark part.\"\n\n\"And you said I was the one who made you worry,\" said Hubert.\n\nLeonard was worried, but the thought of Sir Ronald sitting in that dungeon cancelled out any doubt he had about going forward. They crossed a small stream, and Piffle turned to Leonard.\n\n\"How's about we rests here? Getting dark soon, and it's much more best to sleeps and rests in the good parts of the forest,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Good idea, Piffle,\" said Leonard. \"I'm afraid that if I sat on Poppy's back for very much longer, I'd end up permanently bow-legged.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert climbed off Poppy and slid to the ground with a long groan. The horse wandered over to the stream and drank.\n\n\"You're right about the bowlegs,\" said Hubert. \"My legs feel like they're gonna stay in the shape of a wishbone for at least a couple of months.\"\n\n\"Piffle gonna look for some eats,\" said Piffle as she ran off into the trees.\n\n\"I hope she means just for herself,\" said Leonard. \"The last time I saw her eating something it was a caterpillar.\"\n\nAlmost out of habit, Leonard and Hubert picked up twigs and small pieces of deadwood for a fire. Leonard had his arms full of kindling when he stopped and looked at Hubert, who had also stopped.\n\n\"Do you get the feeling that maybe we shouldn't build a fire here?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yeah. Like the forest would get mad at us or something,\" said Hubert.\n\nThey both threw their armfuls of wood to the ground.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Hubert, looking toward the trees.\n\nSome rustling in the ferns let them know that Piffle had returned. She sprang out into the clearing with an armful of odd-looking berries. Each was yellow, about as large as a hen's egg, and glowing.\n\n\"What in the world are those?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Brownie berries! Oh, it's been so long since Piffle ate one that she gots to keep herself from gulping them all down at once!\"\n\n\"I never heard of brownie berries,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"They is the most delicious berries in the whole wide world, the Leonard,\" said Piffle. \"They only grows in the magical places so you humans not be seeing them anywhere you are living. Here, tries one!\"\n\nShe tossed each of them a brownie berry then proceeded to devour her own pile like she hadn't eaten for years.\n\nLeonard and Hubert gazed at the odd-looking berries with some suspicion. Hubert sniffed his and grimaced.\n\n\"It smells like burnt fruit.\"\n\n\"Well, she seems to be enjoying it,\" said Leonard.\n\nPiffle was covered with juice and berry flesh but couldn't care less.\n\nLeonard shrugged. \"How often do you get to eat a piece of fruit that only grows in magical places? Cheers.\"\n\nLeonard raised the brownie berry to his lips and took a small bite. Hubert was watching him closely. Sure enough, the berry tasted like a burnt pear at first, then a warm tingly sensation spread out from Leonard's mouth and covered his whole body. The burnt taste disappeared and was replaced by the most divine sweetness that Leonard had ever experienced.\n\n\"Oh, Hubert, she's right. This is the best tasting fruit in all of creation!\"\n\nHubert took a tentative bite of the brownie berry. After a moment, Hubert's eyes opened wide, and he joined Piffle and Leonard in devouring the small pile of fruit.\n\n\"I wish Sir Francis could grow these,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Nope, Master, his tower's not a magical place, so brownie berries not gonna grow there,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Can you imagine? People wouldn't be able to get enough of them,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That's why they only grows in places where people is not,\" said Piffle. \"Peoples gets greedy and wants them all for themselves and starts fighting. Piffle's not getting you anymore brownie berries until it is time for breakfast time.\"\n\n\"Aw,\" said Leonard and Hubert.\n\n\"Just a couple more?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"No. It's best you finds a place to lays down your head before it gets too dark. You don't wants to be hitting your noggin on a root or a rock or a something.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert looked around the clearing. Piffle was right. Roots and rocks were all around them. Then Leonard and Hubert both spotted a large pile of leaves at the same time.\n\n\"That's mine!\" shouted Hubert.\n\n\"Not if I get there first.\"\n\nBoth boys sprinted toward the pile as fast as they could. Just as they were about to jump into the leaves, Piffle blocked their way.\n\n\"Stop! That's a pile that's not for sleeping on!\" said Piffle. \"Watch.\"\n\nPiffle picked up a stick and poked at the pile of leaves and grass. To Leonard and Hubert's surprise, the pile shook, then stood up on four legs. It was about as large as a cow and was making loud sniffing sounds. Leonard and Hubert took several steps back, as did Piffle.\n\n\"It's alive!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Quiet! And no be moving,\" said Piffle.\n\nLeonard watched in amazement as the pile shook itself like a dog. The leaves didn't fall off; they were attached to the beast's body like a coat of fur. The pile growled deeply as it turned in their direction.\n\n\"Piffle!\" said Hubert, a note of panic growing in his voice.\n\n\"Shoosh, Master! The Leonard, show him your eyes!\"\n\nFrozen by fear, it took Leonard a moment to understand what Piffle was saying. When he finally got it, Leonard leaned forward toward the pile and opened his already wide-opened eyes even wider.\n\nThe pile returned Leonard's gaze with two fire-red eyes as big as dinner plates. After a moment, it blinked and relaxed noticeably.\n\n\"Forgive me, I didn't know. Do you require any help?\" said the pile.\n\nLeonard glanced over his shoulder to see if the pile was talking to someone standing behind him but, since there wasn't anyone there, guessed it was addressing him. \"Me? No, thank you.\"\n\n\"What about that one?\" said the pile, glancing at Hubert. \"I could shred him for you.\"\n\n\"No, that won't be necessary. He's a friend of mine,\" said Leonard, glancing at Hubert who looked like he was about to make a run for it.\n\n\"Then I bid you adieu, friend,\" said the pile.\n\nThe strange pile of leaves snorted, bared a set of dagger-like teeth, and then lumbered off into the forest. It took a few moments before Leonard realized that he hadn't been breathing. He took a deep breath then sank to his knees.\n\n\"What was that thing?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Leaf dragon,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Leaf dragon? Never heard of it,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Not many peoples has, Master. Disguise so good, leaf dragon can't be seen by peoples no way. They is small and calm dragons, not the attacking kind if you leaves them alone but dangerous if you jumps on one thinking it's for sleepy time.\"\n\n\"I thought you said that this was a good part of the forest,\" said Hubert. \"If it's so good, what's that thing doing in here? It offered to shred me!\"\n\n\"Good don't mean safe,\" said Piffle. \"Dogs is good manfriends but they can bite, too.\"\n\n\"Did you hear it? It called me 'friend,'\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That's right. You is a dragonfriend,\" said Piffle. \"That means all dragons, not just big ones.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert continued looking around the clearing for a place to bed down and found a small depression near the base of a giant oak tree. After getting a nod of approval from Piffle, Leonard lay down and fell asleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Sometime in the middle of the night, Leonard's eyes popped open. Hubert snored quietly while Piffle lay curled up in a ball on his shoulder. The clearing was bathed in the silvery glow of a full moon, and the very stars seemed to dance in circles overhead. Leonard rubbed his eyes and saw that they weren't really stars but small glowing winged creatures. Wood faeries! One swooped close to Leonard's face and smiled at him before holding her finger to her lips. She beckoned Leonard to follow her as did the other faeries, and to his amazement, Leonard's legs made him stand up and do as the faerie requested. He was surprised at what was happening, but Leonard did not feel at all afraid. He just knew in his heart that these magical woodland creatures meant him no harm.\n\nLeonard walked for quite some time before noticing that the forest was changing around him in both feel and appearance. The perfect trees, ferns, and shrubs found everywhere when they first entered were becoming scarcer. Twisted or dead plants were taking their place. The faeries continued to fly in front, beckoning him forward, but Leonard couldn't help but have the feeling that even though it was the middle of the night, he was moving away from light into dark. Strange sounds and shapes lurked in the shadows just beyond the glow of the faeries. Leonard could feel the danger around him growing in the same way you feel the heat of a burning candle as you bring your finger closer to the flame.\n\nThe faeries stopped, and all but their leader disappeared into the branches of the trees above.\n\n\"Where are we?\" said Leonard.\n\nThe faerie rushed up to Leonard and made another motion for him to stay quiet. She then pointed ahead on the path. The faerie's attitude made it clear to Leonard that whatever it was up ahead, it was something that he should approach with caution.\n\nLeonard followed the faerie for about a hundred yards before hearing low rumbling sounds that reminded him of large stones being rubbed against other large stones. As he drew closer, Leonard could see the flickering light of a campfire up ahead in a small clearing. The trees in this part of the forest had been dead for a long time and had lost their bark. They glowed an eerie white in the light of the full moon. Leonard stopped just beyond the limit of the campfire's light.\n\nWhat he saw astonished him. Two huge men, easily twice the size of Ham, lay on the ground near the blazing fire. The grating rock noises that Leonard had heard from a distance came from one of the colossal men when he leaned back against a large boulder on the edge of the clearing. Lacking any hair at all, their skin was a dull stony grey, and their clothes hung on them like shredded rags.\n\nLeonard jumped when the faerie landed on his shoulder and whispered, \"Stone giants,\" into his ear. \"Best to cover these creatures,\" said the faerie.\n\n\"Cover?\"\n\nThe faerie motioned for Leonard to be quiet as one of the stone giants was idly looking in their direction. Leonard froze, then breathed a sigh of relief when the giant scratched his ear and looked away.\n\nA sickeningly sweet smell hung in the air, and Leonard's heart went cold when he saw where it was coming from. Several tree branches had been jammed into the ground close to the fire, and on each one Leonard saw what looked like a man's arm or leg.\n\n\"Why did you bring me here?\" whispered Leonard in a voice that grew in anger and fear.\n\nThe faerie pointed toward a pile of clothes and weapons taken from the giants' victims. Leonard thought his eyes were playing tricks on him when he saw the uniforms worn by Camelot's guards. He nearly cried out when he saw the giants' next victim weeping in the center of the pile.\n\nGagged and bound by a coarse rope and staked to the ground was the fair Maid Glennys!"
            },
            {
                "title": "A Giant Problem",
                "text": "Leonard had no idea what he was going to do, but he knew he was going to have to do something fast to keep Glennys from ending up in the bellies of the stone giants. He turned to talk with the wood faerie, but she had disappeared with the rest of her friends. Well, isn't that nice? Thanks for the help, he thought.\n\nOne of the giants stood up and grabbed a leg off a branch and bit into it. Leonard shuddered at the sound of crunching bones. \"Oy, Billiam, this lot was well fed. Their meat's got the flavor of feasts and good wine,\" said the giant.\n\n\"Toss me an arm, will ya, Jayclub?\" said Billiam. \"I'd like to test your claim.\"\n\n\"Certainly, my dear friend, here you go.\"\n\nThis isn't going to be easy, thought Leonard.\n\nIn the old stories, stone giants were always stupid and clumsy things easily outwitted by clever heroes, not as intelligent as their much larger cousins who lived in the clouds and occasionally fell off beanstalks. These two, however, were smart, powerful, and had good table manners. A dangerous combination any way you looked at it.\n\nJayclub went over to Glennys and knelt to get a good look at her. She screamed through her gag and closed her eyes.\n\n\"This one looks to be the sweetest of them all,\" said Jayclub. \"And she's been soaking in her own tears, too.\"\n\n\"Yummy!\" said Billiam. \"Might I suggest that we save her for dessert? You know, a little something sweet to finish things off?\"\n\n\"Splendid idea, old chum. We could eat her fresh and without firing her. I think she's tender enough for that,\" said Billiam.\n\nThe stone giants were going to eat Glennys for dessert! Leonard thought about going back to get Hubert and Piffle, but he wasn't sure if he would return before the conclusion of the stone giants' gruesome feast. No, it was up to him. He'd have to think of some way to save her and think of it fast.\n\nLeonard scanned the clearing, looking for anything he could use for a weapon, but all he could see were dead trees and loose rocks. The rocks weren't going to hurt stone giants, and Leonard doubted that the guards' weapons would be of any use either. Cutting steel obviously hadn't saved them from being torn limb from limb and grilled over a campfire. Leonard could see that some of the swords were broken, as if shattered by stone. What could he use to fight these monsters?\n\nHe scanned the pile of debris near Glennys. Beside the swords, shields, and uniforms were a few items that the giants had taken from Glennys's coach. In the light of the fire, he could barely make out cushions, fine fabrics, and one of the coach doors with its cheery sunflower painted on it. Slightly away from the main pile, Leonard saw the wide scroll of paper he'd loaded on Glennys's coach several times. She used the paper to press and dry the plants she collected on her herb gathering outings. What was it the faerie had said about covering the giants?\n\nMaybe if I got some of that paper on fire and covered their heads with it, I could get Glennys out of here while they were busy brushing the flames out of their eyes, thought Leonard. Then again, maybe if I could shoot dragons out of my butt, I'd be the King of France.\n\nThe flaming paper idea was chancy at best, but it was the only thing he could think of right now. As the giants snacked, Leonard made his way around the edge of the clearing toward Glennys and the scroll of paper. He was amazed at how quietly he was moving until he stepped on a dry branch that snapped in two.\n\n\"What's that?\" said Billiam.\n\nThe two stone giants listened for what seemed like an eternity, and Leonard was sure they would be able to hear his heart pounding away like a drum in his chest. Jayclub shuffled over toward Leonard. Then a pinecone came flying out of the tree and hit the giant square in the forehead. He looked up and was greeted by a chorus of high-pitched scolding.\n\n\"It's those stupid squirrels again,\" said Jayclub.\n\n\"Nasty ill-tempered rodents,\" said Billiam. \"You'd have to catch a hundred of them to get enough meat for a decent meal.\"\n\nJayclub threw a couple of logs on the fire, and Leonard seized the moment to cover the distance between himself and Glennys. He ducked down behind the root ball of an upturned tree then crawled on his belly toward a shield leaning up against a small boulder. From there he was both hidden from the stone giants and able to see Glennys, who was still sobbing.\n\n\"Glennys! Glennys!\" whispered Leonard. \"Over here.\"\n\nIt took a moment or two for Glennys to notice that someone was trying to get her attention. She lifted her head and looked around for the voice, not finding Leonard until he whispered her name once more. \"Glennys!\"\n\nThe look of sheer surprise that came over Glennys's face would have made Leonard laugh at any other time than this, but things were too serious for that to happen now. He motioned for her to stay still then continued his belly crawl toward the roll of paper. As he crawled, Leonard wondered when this particular brilliant plan of his would go wrong. It wasn't a question of how bad it would go (he and Glennys would suffer horrible deaths in the mouths of those two stone giants); it was just a question of when things would take a turn for the worse.\n\nLeonard reached the large scroll of paper and lowered it to the ground. He looked up and saw Glennys staring at him with a confused look on her face that seemed to say, \"A piece of paper? That's the best you can come up with?\"\n\nYes, as a matter of fact it is the best I can come up with because my name is Leonard and not Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad. With Leonard, you take what you can get and, in this case, that's not a whole lot, he thought.\n\nLeonard picked up a broken sword then unrolled the paper, using the pops and whistles of the burning logs and the giants' stony rumbling laughter to cover the sound of him cutting off several large pieces.\n\nNow, how am I going to get these to the fire without being caught and roasted? thought Leonard. But before he could answer his own question, Leonard was hoisted into the air by the seat of his pants and held dangling before the face of a bemused stone giant.\n\n\"Look at what I have here, Billiam!\" said Jayclub. \"I think it might've been the squirrel we heard mere moments ago.\"\n\nBilliam walked over for a look. \"Only this one ain't furry and has a bit more meat on him. Hello, little squirrel. Care to join us for dinner?\"\n\n\"Put me down!\" shouted Leonard.\n\n\"Good idea! I'll gladly put you down my throat,\" said Jayclub before turning to Billiam. \"First bites?\"\n\n\"Be my guest,\" said Billiam.\n\n\"Ta,\" said Jayclub.\n\nWhat happened next would amaze and puzzle Leonard and Glennys for years to come.\n\nAs Jayclub lowered Leonard toward his mouth, Leonard panicked and used the only thing he had at his disposal. He thrust his hands forward and covered Jayclub's face with a large sheet of paper. The effect was instantaneous, and Leonard, Glennys, and even Billiam watched in stunned silence as the paper wrapped itself around Jayclub's head like a second skin. Jayclub dropped Leonard and clawed at the paper, but it wouldn't come off. Then, as quickly as it started, Jayclub's struggling stopped, and he fell to the ground.\n\n\"Jayclub?\" said Billiam in a quiet voice. Billiam tapped Jayclub on the cheek but his old friend lay motionless and did not answer.\n\nBilliam wheeled around. \"What did you do to my Jayclub?\" he growled.\n\n\"I don't know! I didn't do anything!\" said Leonard as he tried to back away.\n\n\"I say you did!\" said Billiam as he pulled a large burning log out of the fire and swung it through the air.\n\nLeonard ducked just as the flaming log missed his head and smashed through a small thicket of dead trees. Driven by raw fury, Billiam chased Leonard around the clearing, swinging wildly and narrowly missing him with each blow. Leonard dove out of the way and found himself wedged between a large stone and a fallen tree. Coming in for the kill, Billiam raised the log above his head.\n\nThe trees around them again erupted with squirrel chatter, but instead of pinecones, Billiam found himself being attacked by a swarm of angry wood faeries. They hit at him with a ferocity that would put hornets to shame, bouncing off his head and leaving behind small sparks of light. Billiam shouted out in pain and swung the burning log at his tormentors, taking out a few unfortunate faeries with each swing.\n\nIt took a full second for Leonard to realize that he should be helping in this battle. He got up and circled Billiam, waiting for his opening. Billiam turned away, and in one quick motion, Leonard leapt on his back and covered Billiam's head with his remaining piece of paper.\n\nLeonard held on for dear life as Billiam, just like Jayclub, clawed at the paper as it dripped down and wrapped around his head like butter on hot cakes. And then, just like his dear old friend Jayclub, Billiam froze and fell face-first into the dirt.\n\nIt was all too much for Leonard to understand, and he just stood there staring at Jayclub and Billiam until shaken out of his trance by the chime-like cheers of the faeries. The faerie that had led him to the stone giants' camp dropped down out of the tree and landed on Leonard's shoulder.\n\n\"Good work, brave Leonard,\" said the faerie.\n\n\"Thanks. Wait, how do you know who I am?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"We were told you were coming our way,\" said the faerie. \"By the Old Traveler.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\nA high-pitched muffled scream filled the air, and Leonard spun around to find Glennys, still bound and gagged, glaring at him.\n\n\"I suppose your love would like to be freed,\" said the faerie.\n\n\"What? Her? She's not my love,\" Leonard shot back.\n\n\"That's not how our hearts see it,\" said the faerie.\n\nLeonard knelt and untied Glennys's feet and hands. She pulled the gag out of her mouth and hit Leonard in the arm as hard as she could.\n\n\"Ow! What did you do that for?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" said Glennys. \"I think it's because your plan seemed so stupid but turned out to be so brilliant.\"\n\nShe gave Leonard a hug, and now Leonard would be able to tell Hubert that Glennys did indeed smell good\u2014like a flower. \"I'd completely forgotten about such old magic. How did you know about the Rochambeau spell?\"\n\n\"Rochambeau?\"\n\n\"Rock crushes sword, sword cuts paper, paper covers rock.\"\n\n\"Uh, just lucky, I guess,\" said Leonard, glancing sheepishly at the faeries.\n\n\"I am grateful. Now be a good page and take me back to Camelot.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Red Herring",
                "text": "Glennys waited impatiently on the far side of the clearing while Leonard paid his respects to the Faerie Queen. \"Thank you. I'm sure I wouldn't have made it out of there alive without you helping me,\" said Leonard, bowing.\n\n\"You are most welcome, Leonard,\" said the faerie who Leonard now understood was the Faerie Queen. \"Those stone giants have been plaguing our woods for many seasons since we lack the strength to do little more than sting their stony flesh. Now the green shall return, and our woods shall sing the song of life once more.\"\n\nLeonard nodded toward Glennys. \"She's grateful, too. In her own way.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she is,\" said the Faerie Queen. \"Is she aware of your love for her?\"\n\n\"My what?\" said Leonard, his cheeks turning red.\n\n\"We were able to find you because of the link that stretches between you like a silvery thread,\" said the Faerie Queen.\n\n\"Well, I don't know about any silvery thread,\" said Leonard. \"She's a Maid of Camelot and I'm, well, I'm a stable boy.\"\n\n\"I sense you will not stay a stable boy for long,\" said the Faerie Queen.\n\n\"It would be ever so peachy if we could get back to the castle,\" shouted Glennys.\n\n\"She will learn,\" said the Faerie Queen.\n\nLeonard gave a quick bow then hurried off to Glennys. \"I'm sorry, Miss, but we won't be taking you back to the castle just yet.\"\n\n\"Don't be silly, of course you are,\" said Glennys. \"And what do you mean by 'we?'\"\n\n\"I'm traveling with Hubert, the page of Sir Francis, and Piffle, his brownie. We're on a quest to find the last of the dragons,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, that's very funny.\"\n\n\"I'm serious.\"\n\nGlennys grabbed Leonard by his shirt sleeve. \"How could you possibly be serious about a quest in which two pages, unskilled in battle, go looking for dragons?\"\n\n\"Two unskilled pages and a brownie.\"\n\n\"I don't care if you're traveling with an entire army of ogres. That's the most ridiculous quest I've ever heard of. Now, as a Maid of Camelot and niece of Sir Gareth, I command you to take me home.\"\n\n\"Command all you want. I'm sorry, milady, but I can't do that. You may not take our quest seriously, but we do. As any good page knows, rule number one of questing is to always resist everyone and everything that is telling you to quit.\"\n\nHe pulled away from Glennys and continued down the path.\n\n\"Well, I never! You will pay for this, stable boy!\"\n\n\"Yes, Miss, I always do.\"\n\nThe sky was beginning to lighten, and by the time they made it back to camp, the sun had risen high enough to become visible through the trees. Leonard stepped into the clearing only to be greeted by Hubert pointing Sir Ronald's sword in his face.\n\n\"Halt!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"It's me, you clod,\" said Leonard, who didn't feel much like having a sword pointed at his face after what he'd just been through.\n\nHubert breathed a sigh of relief. \"Where were you? I woke up and you were gone and Piffle and I thought that you might have been snatched in the night by something wicked and we were worried and\u2014 \" Hubert stopped talking as soon as Maid Glennys stepped out of the bushes. \"Wha\u2026 Why is she here? I mean, why are you here, Miss?\"\n\n\"You will take me back to Camelot. Now,\" said Glennys to Hubert.\n\n\"Yes, Miss,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"You will not take her back to Camelot. We're on a quest. Remember the number one rule of questing? Don't quit!\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, right. But why is she here?\"\n\nGlennys had taken off her slipper and was shaking out a small pebble. \"My carriage was ambushed by stone giants, and your stubborn friend was clever enough to rescue me.\"\n\n\"Stone giants?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"They is most dangerous! The Leonard must've goed into a dark part of the woods to see stone giants.\"\n\n\"I did, Piffle. About as dark as it gets, I would imagine.\"\n\nLeonard told them all about how the faeries had awakened him in the middle of the night and led him to Glennys and about his battle with the stone giants. When Leonard was done with his tale, Hubert let out a low whistle.\n\n\"Plain old paper will stop a stone giant? Who knew?\"\n\n\"The faeries did,\" whispered Leonard.\n\n\"That was very foolish to go alone in this forest, the Leonard. Next time the faeries wakes you up in the nighttime make sure that you brings me along, too. Piffle can do good helping.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I is talking about magical helping, not best friend helping,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I will be sure to bring you along next time, Piffle,\" said Leonard. \"It was a funny feeling, though; I didn't have the slightest desire to wake you both up to come with me. I felt safe around the faeries.\"\n\n\"That's is one of their magic tricks, some of thems anyways,\" said Piffle. \"They uses it to lead peoples they don't like into danger places.\"\n\n\"Well, they did lead me into danger, but I don't think it was because they didn't like me. They knew she needed help,\" said Leonard, nodding toward Glennys.\n\n\"With stone giants around, she sure does need the help,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"They also knew I was on my way here. Claimed they'd been told.\"\n\n\"By whom?\" asked Hubert.\n\n\"The Old Traveler, whoever that is.\"\n\n\"That's a perfect name for someone who hangs around in The Old Woods, I guess. A lot more questions than answers to this whole affair,\" said Hubert, shaking his head.\n\nThey sat quietly for a moment before Hubert ran his fingers through his hair and sat up straight. \"Maid Glennys? Er, how did you end up getting captured by stone giants?\"\n\nFor the first time since he had freed her, Leonard saw a hint of sadness in Glennys's eyes. Up until this point she had kept a look of brave defiance and impatience on her face. But now she sat down on a fallen log and sighed.\n\n\"It was all my fault,\" said Glennys. \"I was out looking for rare roots and herbs for my medicines when we came upon this strange wood that seemed to appear out of nowhere.\"\n\nHubert and Leonard exchanged a glance.\n\n\"It was dark, menacing, and incredibly old. I could feel the age in my bones. My guards took me to the edge of the trees but would not allow me to go in any farther. There weren't many useful plants near the edge, so I slipped away and moved deep into the trees. They began to search for me, and that's when the giants attacked. It was horrible. Those disgusting monsters killed all my brave guards, then dragged me to the campfire where I had to watch\u2026\"\n\nGlennys broke down and sobbed. Leonard and Hubert knew they should do something like give her a hug or pat her on the back and say, \"there, there,\" but since they were two awkward boys barely in their teens, they stood and stared at Glennys.\n\n\"You boys is useless,\" said Piffle. She hopped over and put a small pile of brownie berries in front of Glennys and patted her knee. \"These makes you feel better, little saddie. Go on, eat some.\"\n\nGlennys wiped her eyes and picked up a brownie berry. \"Thank you. We used to have brownies in the castle, you know. My uncle thought they were too mischievous and made them leave.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Piffle. \"They was sad to go.\"\n\nGlennys took a bite of the berry then looked at the fruit with wonder. \"Oh my, these are good!\" She scooped up the rest of the berries and began to devour them.\n\n\"Hey, that's our breakfast, too,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Hush, Master. Piffle gets you more.\"\n\nGlennys polished off the berries in short order then sat back and gave off a very loud and unladylike burp. \"Thank you, Piffle, I do feel better.\"\n\n\"You is very so welcome.\"\n\n\"If you're not going to take me home, then what am I supposed to do, just sit here?\"\n\nLeonard hadn't thought of that one. \"Good question. Come with us, I guess.\"\n\n\"That's right, come with us,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"On a quest to find dragons? You're crazy,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Daft,\" corrected Piffle.\n\n\"I am not going to hike through these foul woods hunting for dragons with you lot and that's that. Which way is Camelot?\" said Glennys.\n\nLeonard, Hubert, and Piffle all pointed toward the west. Glennys looked each of them in the eye, then got up.\n\n\"Wait a minute! You can't go there by yourself,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Just watch me,\" shouted Glennys over her shoulder. \"And remember this moment, Leonard, when you're trying to explain yourself to my Uncle Gareth!\"\n\nGlennys disappeared into the trees, but they could still hear her stomping away for quite some time.\n\n\"Her uncle is going to be mad. Really mad,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"We're on a quest,\" said Leonard. \"Besides, I think most of Sir Gareth's anger will be directed at me.\"\n\nPiffle went off and gathered some more brownie berries, refusing to tell Hubert where she was getting them no matter how hard he begged. \"No, peoples can't see the bushes unless they is looking back anyway.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Piffle's not telling what that is supposed to mean.\"\n\nThey ate every one of the berries and some of their own rations before climbing back on Poppy. Piffle sat on the big mare's head and pointed in the direction she wanted them to go. As they rode along, Leonard couldn't help but notice that while some parts of the forest were good and pure, a mere hundred yards later would find them in a dead zone. Everything was either dead or dying in these dark parts, and Leonard couldn't escape the feeling they were being watched by sinister things.\n\n\"Oh yes, there is eyes is watching us, and you sure don't wants to meet what they is attached to,\" said Piffle when Leonard asked about the uncomfortable sensation.\n\nPiffle always hurried them through the dark parts of the forest, all the while muttering what Leonard guessed were some sort of brownie prayers. The farther they went, the smaller the good parts got and the larger the bad parts got. Eventually, they came to a small grove of holly trees with a pool of water at its center. The dark green holly leaves were a welcome contrast to the surrounding landscape of gray and black.\n\n\"We stop here for this night,\" said Piffle. \"This is being the last piece of green for miles and miles and miles.\"\n\nHubert and Leonard climbed off Poppy and looked around.\n\n\"She's right, you know,\" said Hubert. \"Look.\"\n\nLeonard followed Hubert's gaze. As far as he could see, there was dead vegetation. Everything outside of the grove had a gloomy gray cast to it.\n\n\"Lovely,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Holly trees gots the old magic in them,\" said Piffle. \"They's strong enough to hold off the dark. We is safe here.\"\n\n\"What about the water in that pool? Can we drink it?\" said Hubert.\n\nPiffle walked to the water's edge and sniffed. \"Water is good.\"\n\nLeonard got down on his belly near the pool's edge and was about to take a sip of water when a bright red fish popped up. Leonard froze, and the fish smiled at him.\n\n\"Hello there,\" said the fish.\n\nThis was enough to unfreeze Leonard, and he scrambled backward as fast as he could.\n\n\"Criminy! It's a talking fish,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Yes, indeed, a talking fish,\" said the fish, a twinkle in his eyes. \"I am the Red Herring.\" The fish paused as though he were waiting for applause.\n\n\"What's a red herring?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Not a red herring, my dear boy, the Red Herring. The one and only Red Herring,\" said the fish with a bow.\n\nLeonard and Hubert just looked at each other and shrugged.\n\n\"Sorry, never heard of you,\" said Hubert.\n\nThe fish looked surprised. \"Really? You haven't heard of the Red Herring who aids good travelers on long and difficult journeys?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I've heard of you,\" said Piffle. \"You is the trickster fish! Leaves us alone and go bothers someone else.\"\n\n\"I am not the trickster fish. You're thinking of my cousin, the Red Snapper. He causes trouble for travelers and steals things from them. I'm the one that grants wishes and such, remember?\" said the Red Herring.\n\nFor the first time since he had known her, Leonard saw a wave of doubt pass over Piffle's face.\n\n\"Yes. No. Maybe Piffle remembers this. Maybe not. You should go away anyway, talking red fish.\"\n\n\"Wait. You can grant wishes?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I can. But I'm not so sure I want to after being told to get lost by a rude pixie.\"\n\nPiffle leapt to her feet. \"I is not a pixie! I is a brownie,\" she said with a note of fierce pride in her voice. \"Don't be calling Piffle no nasty bad pixie!\"\n\n\"Pixie, brownie, whatever you are, you're not very polite. Especially since I was the one who told the wood faeries to keep an eye on you.\"\n\n\"That was you?\" said Leonard, shocked by the very thought of a talking red fish keeping track of his whereabouts. \"They said it was someone called 'The Old Traveler.'\"\n\n\"Yes, it was me. That's another of my names.\"\n\n\"Piffle, apologize to the fish. I want to hear about the wishes,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"No!\" said Piffle, storming off to the other side of the holly grove.\n\nHubert knelt near the fish and cleared his throat. \"Please, sir, would you mind telling us more about the wish-granting powers of which you spoke?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad to see that good manners are not completely dead in this part of the forest,\" said the Red Herring. \"Very well, here's how it works. You, the traveler, are supposed to offer me some sort of gift. After examining the gift, I, the Red Herring, shall grant you a wish, or wishes, based on the quality of the gift.\"\n\n\"We have to give you something?\" said Leonard, suspiciously.\n\n\"Yes. That is how the deal works.\"\n\n\"But we don't have anything,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"How about the horse?\" said the Red Herring.\n\n\"Not mine to give,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What's in that sack?\" said the fish.\n\n\"My Master's sword and shield, which of course also aren't mine, and some food.\"\n\n\"Food! Let's see what you've got,\" said the Red Herring.\n\nLeonard carried the sack over to the water's edge and set it down. He handed the sword and shield to Hubert, then took out the food and set it on top of the sack. \"As you can see, we don't have very much to spare. Three loaves of hard bread, a piece of salt pork, some dried cod, and seven apples.\"\n\n\"The Leonard!\" cried Piffle.\n\nLeonard and Hubert turned to see Piffle running toward them, waving her arms and screeching. \"Don't lets the tricky fish nears our food!\"\n\nLeonard wheeled around, but it was too late. Their sack of food had vanished along with the one and only Red Herring."
            },
            {
                "title": "Here We Go Again",
                "text": "It's not your fault, Piffle,\" said Leonard as they rode Poppy through the bleak landscape. \"I was the idiot who laid out all our food in front of that stupid fish.\"\n\n\"Oh, but it is, the Leonard. Tricky fish tricked me with an oldest trick. Get me mad by calling Piffle a pixie so I stomp off like a big crybaby! Piffle should have stayed with you and the food. Oh, I is so mad with Piffle!\"\n\nLeonard stopped. \"Wait, do you hear that?\"\n\n\"Hear what?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I hears it,\" said Piffle who had climbed up on top of Hubert's head. \"Sound like a people is screaming.\"\n\n\"Give me the shield, Hubert,\" said Leonard.\n\nLeonard pulled Sir Ronald's sword out of his belt and hopped off Poppy, running in the direction of the screams.\n\n\"We is coming this time, too. Remembers?\"\n\n\"Then what are you waiting for?\" said Leonard.\n\nHubert jumped off the horse and grabbed a dead branch. \"Wait for us!\"\n\nHubert and Piffle caught up with Leonard and ran as fast as they could toward the source of the noise. Leonard had no doubt that, given the feeling and look of deadness in the area, anything that sounded like screaming had a one hundred percent chance of being bad news. Sure enough, as they reached the crest of a ridge and looked down into the gully on the other side, they saw the screams were coming from a familiar young lady who was hanging from a pole being carried by a band of goblins.\n\n\"Glennys,\" said Leonard. Without hesitating, he raised his master's sword and bravely charged down into the gully.\n\nNow, Leonard knew he and Hubert had two things going for them that made up for their decided lack of battle skills. The first was that goblins are not large, roughly one third the size of an average man. Second, although fearsome in appearance with gray skin, red eyes, and tusks protruding from their lower jaws, goblins were not famous for being bright or brave. They are a cowardly people that make their living preying on the weak and unaware, Leonard remembered Sir Ronald telling him once. As Leonard and Hubert charged into their midst, most of the goblins panicked and fell over each other trying to escape. Leonard was able to flatten several of them with Sir Ronald's shield and heard several satisfying thunks as Hubert swung around his large branch and connected it with goblin heads. Piffle was jumping from goblin to goblin inflicting some nasty scratches with her small but razor-sharp fingernails.\n\nWhile many of the goblins did indeed panic and run off, a small knot of them clustered around Glennys who had been thrown to the ground when the attack started. At the center of the cluster was a freakishly large goblin, a full head taller than the rest of his band. He brandished a menacing-looking battle-axe at Leonard, and his bright red eyes were defiant.\n\n\"This wench is mine!\" shouted the big goblin.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" said Leonard. \"Step away from her and leave here now, and I'll spare your lives.\"\n\n\"Gnarl, that sounds like a good deal,\" said Biter, one of the smaller goblins. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Shut up, Biter, you scum!\" said Gnarl. He looked at Leonard as if sizing him up as a battle foe. \"He's just a boy. Attack him!\"\n\nThe goblins charged Leonard who in turn charged back at them without any hesitation. Where's this sudden bravery coming from? thought Leonard as though what was going on was happening to someone else. The next few moments were a blur, a strange mix of events happening very quickly and slowing down to a crawl at the same time. To Glennys, the battle would appear to be over in a flash, but to Leonard, the goblins' and Hubert's motions slowed down dramatically. A feeling of calm and confidence spread through him and he felt he almost knew what was going to happen before it did. He watched with a casual interest as Hubert swung his branch and connected it to the helmeted head of a hapless goblin, turning just in time to catch Gnarl swinging his axe toward Leonard's midsection. Leonard easily blocked the blow with Sir Francis's shield but was knocked to the ground by the big goblin's raw power. As Gnarl raised his axe for the death blow, Leonard rolled to the side and, without thinking, thrust the sword up through Gnarl's throat. Eyes wide with surprise, Gnarl swayed in place for a moment, clutching at his neck. The other goblins immediately stopped fighting and watched their boss cough up a glob of blood before dropping to the ground. Time returned to normal for Leonard, who wore his own shocked expression as he released the sword and collapsed, his shoulders and the back of his head hitting the ground.\n\nA moment of awkward silence passed before Biter took a step forward. \"Well, then. Right. Seeing how's I was the second-in-command until the boss went and got himself killed just now, I'm thinking it would be better for everyone if we goblins left. What do you say, young sirs?\"\n\nThe goblins stared nervously at Leonard and Hubert as if awaiting orders.\n\n\"Fine. Go on! Get out of here!\" said Hubert, helping a still dazed Leonard to his feet.\n\nThe goblins scattered like hens running from a fox. Hubert pulled the sword out of the big goblin's neck. It was covered with thick purple blood that he wiped off on a tuft of dead grass.\n\n\"Never knew goblin blood was purple,\" said Hubert as he went over to Glennys and cut her free.\n\n\"Well, Miss, we have rescued you again. Not that I'm keeping score or anything,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"You were most brave,\" said Glennys in a quiet voice.\n\n\"She's not kidding, Leonard. You fought like a real knight,\" said Hubert, handing the sword to Leonard. \"How did you know how to duel like that?\"\n\n\"Don't know. Just kind of came over me, like it was someone else doing the fighting and I was just watching,\" said Leonard. \"It was a very strange feeling.\"\n\n\"If it was me, I think I'd be sporting a battle-axe in my forehead right about now,\" said Hubert.\n\nPiffle kicked at the big goblin's carcass. \"Big stupid goblin. The Leonard showed you who's who and what's what! Didn't he?\"\n\nLeonard sat down next to Glennys. \"I'm sorry to say this, but I think that you should stay with us from now on. Especially since we're so deep into the forest. It's too dangerous to go back alone.\"\n\n\"I think you're right,\" said Glennys. \"I hadn't gotten more than a mile away from the three of you when the goblins captured me. They're such a horrible and smelly people,\" said Glennys with a shudder.\n\n\"Repulsive creatures, those goblins,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"It's the dress, you know. You try running and fighting off goblins with thirty pounds of velvet and silk weighing you down. It can't be done. Now, if I'd been wearing a proper pair of breeches, then I would've been able to teach those goblins a thing or two,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Women wearing breeches? That will never happen,\" snorted Leonard.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because, well, it's indecent, isn't it? The very idea. Women parading around in breeches! It would cause nothing but trouble, and you know it,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"What kind of trouble?\"\n\n\"What kind of trouble do you think I'm talking about? Romance trouble! Men wouldn't be able to control themselves and all sorts of romantical things would be happening against our will,\" said Leonard. \"Sir Ronald says men are powerless when it comes to the female ankle.\"\n\n\"I think that has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"It isn't,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"It is. Watch.\"\n\nMuch to Leonard's shock, Glennys began pulling up her dress.\n\n\"What are you doing? Stop that!\"\n\nGlennys stopped when her dress was just below her knee and wiggled her feet in Leonard's direction. \"Honestly, how could these possibly make you feel powerless? They're a perfectly natural part of the human body.\"\n\nLeonard blinked and tugged at his collar. \"Well, I, um, you see, it's not that, what I'm trying to say is\u2026\"\n\nGlennys sighed and threw her dress back down.\n\n\"You boys are crazy. And I don't mean daft,\" said Glennys before Piffle could correct her. \"Let's get this silly quest over with, so I can go home. I'll bet my Uncle Gareth is worried sick.\"\n\nI wouldn't be too sure about that, thought Leonard.\n\nLeonard helped Glennys climb onto Poppy, fighting off an intense case of Glennys-itis caused by having her hand on his shoulder. What is it with this girl? he thought. One moment she's as annoying as a gnat and the next I feel like a giddy child!\n\n\"This horse is immense!\" said Glennys. \"Larger than a carriage horse, and I dare say even larger than a knight's battle steed.\"\n\n\"Yes Miss, she's a plow horse, bred large to pull a plow through the dirt,\" said Leonard, biting the inside of his cheeks to clear any thoughts of bare ankles and romance from his mind.\n\n\"What's her name?\"\n\n\"Poppy, Miss,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Now that's a pretty name.\" Glennys scratched Poppy on her neck, and the horse snorted.\n\n\"This way! This way to the dragons!\" said Piffle. \"Don't worries about having no food. When we gets there, we can find some.\"\n\n\"You don't have any food?\"\n\n\"A talking fish stole it,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Of course it did. With how things have been going, a talking fish makes total sense,\" said Glennys."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "They walked through the bleak landscape for almost an hour in silence. At one point, Leonard looked up and noticed a black raven in the air above them. \"That bird's the only living thing around here, besides us, I mean.\"\n\n\"If I had my bow, we could feast on yummy raven for dinner,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"No thanks, I'd rather have a mouthful of dust than eat one of those horrible birds. My Uncle Gareth, the one who will be punishing the both of you for not bringing me back right away, has an unkindness of ravens that hangs around his tower. They're disgusting,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"An unkindness?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"An unkindness is what they call a flock of ravens,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Why?\" said Leonard and Hubert at the same time.\n\n\"How should I know? They just do,\" said Glennys. \"Anyone educated knows that. If you read a book now and then, you might learn a few things.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert laughed.\n\n\"Oh, aren't we the grand and high lady of the manor?\" said Leonard. \"Not all of us are living a life of leisure where we get to frolic about collecting herbs and being taught how to read and write.\"\n\n\"Besides, our masters couldn't afford a book,\" muttered Hubert.\n\n\"Neither of you know how to read?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"No. Why should that surprise you? When your whole day revolves around caring for your Master and keeping his gear in good condition, there's not much need for learning how to read a manuscript, is there?\"\n\n\"I suppose not,\" said Glennys. \"But you should at least know how to read the Holy Scriptures. It's a sign of good character and refinement.\"\n\n\"Uh oh, now she says we've got to have good character and refinement. Next thing you know she'll be telling us we have to take a bath more than once a year,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Well, now that you mention it\u2014\"\n\nLeonard stopped.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Nothing. Look.\"\n\nThey followed Leonard's gaze to a small bush just in front of them. By any standard, it was an ordinary bush, but since it was alive it stood out from the gray ground like a dazzling gem.\n\n\"It's alive,\" said Glennys.\n\nPiffle came skipping toward them. \"Yes, yes! We is out of the big dark part. Now is all green and happy until we meets the dragons. Come and look!\"\n\nPiffle lead them up to the top of a large hill. When they looked down, they saw nothing but green forest and grassland in front of them.\n\n\"We should look for some food,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I think I see some,\" said Hubert, pointing down toward a small stream. Much to their amazement, their supply sack was sitting there on the bank.\n\n\"That can't be,\" said Leonard. They ran down to it and Leonard scooped it up and looked inside. \"It's all here. All of our food is here except for... an apple,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That is one strange fish,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Oh, who cares?\" said Glennys. \"Let's eat!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Pit",
                "text": "Leonard and Hubert ran alongside Poppy, struggling to keep up with the horse that Glennys had somehow managed to coax into a brisk trot.\n\n\"You know,\" said Hubert, huffing and puffing, \"we could go faster if all of us were riding Poppy.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" said Glennys, pulling back on the reins. \"Get on.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert exchanged surprised glances and then climbed up on Poppy's back.\n\n\"Don't act so surprised. The faster we get to your dragons, the faster I go home,\" said Glennys. \"It's in my own self-interest to allow you to ride with me.\"\n\n\"Thanks, anyway,\" said Hubert, wiping the sweat from his brow. \"I think your self-interest saved me from collapsing on the road.\"\n\nLeonard reached around Glennys for the reins but was shrugged off.\n\n\"I'll guide the horse.\"\n\n\"Fine. Does it always have to be so difficult with you?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"As far as you're concerned, yes,\" said Glennys."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "After about an hour of awkward silence, Hubert spoke up.\n\n\"I'm sorry to interrupt this lovely conversation we're having, but what are we going to do when we get to the dragons? I mean specifically? I can't imagine us walking into the middle of a whole lot of dragons without some danger being involved. Do you have a plan, Leonard?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" said Glennys. \"This quest has had an amateur feel to it from the moment I first heard it.\"\n\n\"I have a plan!\" shouted Leonard, a little too loudly. \"And it's not going to be as dangerous as you think, Hubert. Remember, I am a dragonfriend.\"\n\n\"A what?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"A dragonfriend,\" repeated Leonard before going on to tell her the story of his befriending of Mantooth who made him a dragonfriend after Leonard had pulled an arrow out of the beast's neck.\n\n\"I've never heard of such a thing. That's absurd!\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Looks into the Leonard's eyes,\" said Piffle, looking quite bored as she groomed the tuft of hair on top of Poppy's head. \"The sign is there.\"\n\nGlennys snorted and turned toward Leonard. A wave of Glennys-itis passed over him, but quickly disappeared thanks to Glennys's sour expression. Squinting, she looked into his eyes and, after a moment, gasped. \"It's true. There is a sign,\" she said in a small voice. \"That means you're a dragonfriend?\"\n\n\"Yes. And I may as well tell you this now. We were going to ask the dragons to help us free my Master and Mantooth, both of whom have been unjustly imprisoned.\"\n\nIt took a second for Glennys to grasp the full meaning of what Leonard had just said. \"You want to attack Camelot with dragons?\"\n\n\"Just the dungeon,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"That's horrible! Horrendous! Evil!\" shouted Glennys. \"I can't believe that I was going along with you fools! I thought you were going to try and fight them or steal an egg or something. This was your plan from the beginning?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Leonard. \"But we didn't mean for you to get mixed up in it.\"\n\nGlennys snorted.\n\n\"You must have noticed there's something wrong about Camelot these days. Knights imprisoned in that dungeon who did nothing more than try to help people? The king long absent?\" Glennys shifted uncomfortably but said nothing. \"There's no way my master was going to receive anything close to justice the way things are there now,\" said Leonard, bitterly. \"The dragons are his only hope of seeing freedom.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "High overhead and lagging just behind Poppy and her quarrelling passengers, three harpies quietly glided and listened. Half bird, with the faces of cruel-looking women, they were the size of a large eagle and were equipped with sharp hearing and sets of vicious-looking claws.\n\n\"They can't be serious,\" said Xanthe, a harpy with a yellowish tint to her feathers. \"The dragonfolk would just as soon burn them as talk to them.\"\n\n\"Yes, my sister, a most foolish and dangerous quest,\" said Kirke, the smallest of the three. \"Even if his claim of being a dragonfriend is true.\"\n\n\"And imagine attacking Arthur's stone pile!\" said Tanis, their leader. \"Just as foolish.\"\n\n\"Shall we warn the demon?\" said Xanthe.\n\nTanis thought this over for a moment. \"No, my sisters, they are but children, mere tender morsels. We shall handle them ourselves. I am hungry.\"\n\n\"As am I!\" said Kirke. \"And there is plenty of man and horse flesh for we three!\"\n\n\"Indeed. And they have a brownie,\" said Tanis with a wicked and hungry grin that quickly became a snarl. \"It is for my belly.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the other harpies."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Piffle was scanning the road ahead when she happened to glance upward. \"Harpies!\" she cried, pointing skyward.\n\nLeonard looked up to find three of the flying monsters circling overhead. \"They is looking for poor little Piffle,\" said Piffle in a trembling voice from the inside of Leonard's shirt. \"Brownies is a harpy's favorite snack! They likes to eat us like people likes munching down brownie berries.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" said Hubert, shading his eyes.\n\n\"Oh, yes yes!\"\n\nThe lead harpy let out an ear-piercing screech, and the three bird demons dove in unison. Piffle yelped, then ducked back down into Leonard's shirt.\n\n\"Here they come,\" said Leonard as he raised Sir Ronald's shield and kicked Poppy in the ribs. The old horse protested but picked up her pace nonetheless. Two of the harpies veered off at the last possible moment, but their leader kept going and slammed into the shield at full force. Leonard was knocked off Poppy and hit the ground with a thud.\n\n\"Leonard!\" cried out Glennys.\n\nThe lead harpy was relentless in her attack and kept clawing at Leonard who did his best to scramble backward and block the blows with his shield. \"Yield boy, and I shall end your life quickly.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's a very good offer,\" grunted Leonard. \"You need to work on your bargaining skills, harpy.\"\n\nGlennys turned old Poppy around and kicked the horse in the ribs again. Poppy charged forward toward Leonard and the harpy, just missing the bird demon with her hooves. The leader sprang up into the air and continued her attack from there. The other two harpies swooped down and clawed at Poppy to keep the horse from charging their nestmate again.\n\nLeonard unsheathed Sir Ronald's sword and took a couple of swipes at the harpy leader. He didn't connect with the blade but drove the big harpy back far enough to take a quick look at his surroundings. A large circle of stones stood out like an island on the plain.\n\n\"Head for those rocks,\" said Leonard. \"I'll follow you.\"\n\n\"You'll never make it on foot!\" said Hubert as he extended his hand. \"Climb on and we'll ride there.\"\n\nThe two harpies renewed their attack on the riders, and Glennys cried out in pain when one of them brushed her shoulder and cut into her gown.\n\n\"Go!\" shouted Leonard.\n\nPoor Poppy got kicked in the ribs yet again and galloped toward the rock island. Leonard deflected an attack from behind by the harpy that had knocked him off the horse.\n\n\"How are you doing, Piffle?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Not so good, the Leonard. Piffle thinks this is a too tight pickle she is in.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll get us out of this.\"\n\n\"Piffle 'bout as safe as she can be with the Leonard. I knows it.\"\n\nTime after time the harpy leader attacked as Leonard made his way toward the rocks. Time after time Leonard fought off the vicious attacks with Sir Ronald's sword and shield. Finally, the harpy flew off at an angle that allowed Leonard to get in a clear swing with the sword.\n\nThe sharp blade bit into the harpy's left wing and severed it. The bird demon plummeted to the earth with an ear-piercing scream. It fluttered and rolled on the ground, screaming and leaving a trail of blood behind it.\n\n\"Tanis!\" screeched the yellow-tinted harpy.\n\n\"One down, two to go, Piffle,\" said Leonard, turning to face the other harpies.\n\n\"The Leonard! Look out!\" screamed Piffle who was peeking out the back of Leonard's collar.\n\nThe warning came too late. Leonard turned just in time to see the bloodied harpy leaping toward him with her talons fully extended. The beast hit him full on, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground. Some of the talons pierced his flesh and dug deep into the hard-packed earth. The other harpies arrived and landed a few feet away. The harpy pinning Leonard hissed at them. \"Back off. This one's mine!\"\n\nLeonard tried to push the big harpy off but found that any movement caused such searing pain that he nearly passed out. The leader tore off bits of Leonard's clothing in her crazed search for Piffle.\n\nAs Leonard drifted toward unconsciousness, something big and brown rushed through his field of vision, taking the harpy and her painful talons with it. The sound of a fierce battle filled the air, and Leonard looked over to see the big and brown thing attacking the harpies with a lethal fury. Piffle climbed up to Leonard's neck and peeked out of his shirt just as the wounded harpy had its head bitten off.\n\n\"Good! Take that, you bad and nasty harpy!\"\n\n\"Piffle, what's going on?\" said Leonard, who was having a hard time seeing with the blood flowing into his eyes.\n\n\"Oh, my poor the Leonard, you is all torn up and bloody, and it is all Piffle's fault.\"\n\nThe other two harpies were circling around the big and brown thing, unable to take off for fear of being snatched out of the air as they rose. The harpies hissed and clawed the air while the big brown thing growled a low fearsome growl.\n\n\"Piffle! What is it? What's fighting with the harpies?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"It's being the leaf dragon, the Leonard's old friend from before.\"\n\nLeonard wiped his eyes with his sleeve and at last was able to watch a truly astounding battle. The two remaining harpies slashed at the dragon with their talons, but the blows didn't seem to have any effect. Apparently, under its brilliant leafy camouflage, this smaller dragon had scales as strong as Mantooth's.\n\nThe dragon kept its eye on one harpy at a time. Its moves were like that of a housecat toying with a songbird. It circled then with blinding speed attacked one of the harpies and slashed it in two with its own formidable paw. The remaining harpy panicked and leapt into the air, but it wasn't fast enough. The leaf dragon leapt up and wrapped its jaws around the harpy's foot, biting it off cleanly. The harpy shrieked in pain but was able to stay airborne, raising herself out of reach of the leaf dragon who continued to jump up and snap at her.\n\n\"Oh, my sisters!\" screamed the harpy. \"You shall pay for their deaths, you horrid creatures. All of you!\"\n\nThen the harpy banked and labored off and, as suddenly as the dragon's battle with the three harpies had begun, it was over. The leaf dragon raked its claws across one of the freshly killed harpies and ambled over to where Leonard lay. Even though the stocky beast had just intervened to save his life, Leonard froze as it sniffed his bloody face.\n\n\"I know you said that you did not require any help when we last met in the forest, dragonfriend, but something told me that your statement wasn't entirely accurate,\" said the leaf dragon. \"I thought I might follow you from a discreet distance and see if my hunch was correct.\"\n\n\"Thank you for not believing me,\" said Leonard with a weak grin.\n\n\"Yes, thanks to you so much from me too,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"You are most welcome,\" said the leaf dragon before sitting and licking the harpy blood from its claws. \"Dear brownie, I was wondering if I might impose on you to do a little grooming on my tired old carcass. The ticks have been thick this season.\"\n\n\"It will be an honor, dragon mister! Piffle give you such a cleaning that you feel like a pup again!\" said Piffle, jumping onto the dragon's back.\n\nHubert and Glennys had been keeping a cautious distance from the dragon on the chance that it might only be friendly to dragonfriends. But when the leafy beast rolled over on its back to give Piffle access to its belly, they saw this as a sign that it was safe and ran to Leonard's side.\n\n\"That was a bloody brilliant battle, Leonard!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Well, if you liked it from where you were watching, you should have felt what it was like to be in the middle of it,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Hush, you two,\" said Glennys, pulling a pouch out from the folds of her gown. \"I have some work to do.\"\n\nGlennys cleaned up Leonard as best she could with a small cloth soaked in soothing oil that smelled like flowers. I'm going to smell like Glennys now, thought Leonard closing his eyes and inhaling. Could be worse, I suppose. Could smell like Hubert. Next Glennys pulled assorted tins and small bottles out of the pouch and set them on the ground next to her.\n\n\"What's all that?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"My medicines. All this time learning the craft and collecting the herbs, and now at last I get to put my skills to the test.\"\n\n\"Happy to give you something to practice on,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Now I told you to hush, Leonard.\"\n\nLeonard closed his eyes and sighed while Glennys applied her cures. A little bit of oil rubbed here, and some powder sprinkled there, and Leonard soon found the pain to be lessening as it was replaced by a cool and pleasant sensation and a feeling of overall well-being. \"That's much better.\"\n\nHubert, meanwhile, had become transfixed by Piffle's treatment of the leaf dragon. The little brownie moved about the dragon's body with such speed that Hubert wondered if there was more than one of her. She'd pause for the briefest of moments, pull apart two scales, yank a big dragon tick out of the dragon's hide and then eat it. This activity repeated itself at least a hundred times before Piffle shifted to the dead skin and dandruff portion of the process\u2014removing flakey chunks of old hide with her sharp little fingernails. Hubert could tell the dragon was in heaven as it sighed. He laughed when Piffle was scratching out a thick area of dead hide, and the dragon kicked its leg and cocked its head like dogs do.\n\n\"You're amazing, Piffle,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Thank you, Master, but dragon care is what brownies is first made for. It's what we do best.\"\n\nGlennys had finished applying her ointments and medicines and was now wrapping some of Leonard's more serious wounds with strips of cloth taken from the bottom of her gown.\n\n\"There, that should do it for now,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"How is he?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"He's lost way too much blood and took some nasty stabs with those talons, but I think with a little rest he should be fine. I do think we should get him out of the sun, though. Help me carry him over to those stones.\"\n\nLeonard grunted in pain when Hubert and Glennys lifted and carried him over to the stone circle. They set Leonard down in a small pit of pristine sand near one of the larger stones and placed the supply sack under his head as a pillow.\n\n\"There, how's that?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Much better.\"\n\nLeonard looked at the stones that surrounded the pit. They were covered with unfamiliar carvings and symbols.\n\n\"This place is old,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"It's a faerie circle. You'd best be careful, or they'll snatch you and make you fight some more stone giants,\" said Glennys with a smile. Leonard smiled back and discovered he liked it much better when both were smiling rather than yelling at each other.\n\n\"Looks like there's a small stream over there; I'll get us some water,\" said Hubert, grabbing a water skin off the horn of Poppy's saddle. Hubert hadn't taken more than a few steps toward the stream when Leonard cried out in alarm. He was sinking into the sand.\n\nGlennys and Hubert grabbed onto Leonard's hands, but try as they might, couldn't pull him out. Leonard continued to sink, and they had to let go or risk being pulled in themselves.\n\n\"Leonard!\" cried Hubert.\n\nAnd with that, Leonard disappeared into the sand."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Xanthe, the wounded harpy, arrived at Camelot several hours later, slamming into the wall and collapsing on the balcony of Sir Gareth's tower. Sir Gareth stepped out of his study and frowned. \"Why are you here, bird?\"\n\n\"My lord, I have news that may be of interest to you,\" said Xanthe, hungrily eyeing the ravens on the tower roof. \"First, may I devour one or two of your familiars? I am quite weak\u2026\"\n\n\"You may not. What is your news?\"\n\nXanthe straightened herself as best she could, then told Sir Gareth of what she and her sisters had overheard prior to attacking Leonard and his friends. When she finished, Xanthe collapsed back against the wall and sighed heavily. Sir Gareth stood quietly for a moment.\n\n\"A dragon came to their aid, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes milord, it was a lesser one, but a dragon nonetheless,\" said Xanthe.\n\n\"Troublesome news. Bramath, get in here!\"\n\n\"Milord, might I ask for your help in seeking revenge for myself and my sisters? I would do it myself were it not for my affliction,\" said Xanthe, looking down at her crusted stump.\n\n\"Yes, this wish I will grant you,\" said Sir Gareth.\n\nBramath, a gaunt man dressed entirely in black, entered the room. His features were etched with deep sadness, and malice beamed from his pale-yellow eyes like the light from a carriage lamp. He was a Hellion, a damned soul brought back from Hell for one purpose: to obey Sir Gareth.\n\n\"Yes, my Master?\" croaked Bramath in a voice that would send shivers up the spine of any normal human.\n\n\"Take your Hellions and follow the harpy. She will lead you to two boys and a girl on horseback\u2014\"\n\n\"And a brownie,\" said Xanthe.\n\nSir Gareth glared at the harpy, causing her to cower. \"Apologies, milord.\"\n\n\"\u2014and a brownie. Follow them with stealth until they lead you to the dragons then kill them all, dragons and humans alike.\"\n\n\"Thank you, milord,\" murmured the harpy.\n\nBramath nodded. \"The dragons will prove troublesome, master. You will lose many of your servants in this attack.\"\n\nSir Gareth crossed to a cupboard and pulled out a small earthen jar. \"Dip your arrows in this,\" said Sir Gareth, handing Bramath the jar. \"It will give you an advantage.\" Sir Gareth stepped out on the tower balcony and scanned the castle grounds. \"I shan't be having a dragon horde attack Camelot before I'm ready to destroy it in my own special way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Eater of the Dead",
                "text": "Darkness. Moisture. Dripping. Warmth. Stench. Overwhelming stench. These sensations washed over Leonard as he became aware of his surroundings. He was lying on something that felt warm and moist, not at all unpleasant to the touch. His eyes could barely make out the edges of a dimly lit cavern with the usual stone walls and stalactites thrusting down from the ceiling like dragon teeth. Water dripped somewhere into a large pool, drops falling and echoing through the chamber for a full five seconds before dying out. And that smell! His nose just couldn't get used to it. It was almost as if the cavern had been filled with decaying bodies and then sealed tight for a thousand years.\n\nWhat happened to me? thought Leonard as he rubbed his forehead. His head was still propped up on the supply sack that Glennys had used as a pillow.\n\nThe last thing he remembered was being pulled down into the sand by something strong and unseen. Hubert and Glennys had tried to pull him out but couldn't. His face slipped beneath the surface of the sand and then he lost consciousness. And now, here he was in a very smelly place. Leonard pushed himself up onto his elbows, wincing at the painful throbbing coming from the harpy wounds. Glennys's medicinal herbs and soothing oils had done their bit to dull the pain somewhat, but wounds that severe would take some time to heal. Leonard imagined he'd be wincing for a while.\n\n\"Ah, I see you are awake,\" said a melodic voice. \"That is a good thing.\"\n\nLeonard looked over the dimly lit cavern but couldn't see who was talking or which direction the voice was coming from.\n\n\"Who's there?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Well, who are you?\" said Leonard.\n\nThe cavern was silent for a moment. \"You know, I believe I used to have a name\u2014a real and proper name\u2014but it's been so long since anyone's used it that I've forgotten what it was. Now, isn't that embarrassing? What is your name?\"\n\n\"Leonard.\"\n\n\"Oh, now that is a real and proper name. Leonard. I like it. It rolls off the tongues with ease,\" said the voice.\n\n\"Thank you. Um, where are you?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I am here.\"\n\n\"No, I mean specifically,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"There is very little 'specifically' when it comes to me. I am all around you. I am here. O ho! I just remembered what I am called by those above. It's not my proper name, but it will do.\"\n\n\"What are you called?\"\n\n\"The Eater of the Dead. You may call me Eater, for short.\"\n\nLeonard wasn't too sure if he was happy having a conversation with a being called \"The Eater of the Dead,\" although he was starting to suspect that this title might have more than a little something to do with the horrible smell in the cavern.\n\n\"Eater, may I ask you what I hope you don't think is a rude question?\"\n\n\"Please do. This is the first conversation that I've had in a long, long time so I'm quite willing to answer any questions you might have,\" said Eater.\n\n\"Well\u2014and again, please don't take this the wrong way\u2014but why does it smell so dreadfully bad down here?\"\n\n\"My cavern smells bad?\"\n\n\"You can't smell it?\"\n\n\"No. I'm afraid I can't. What does it smell like?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026like it's full of dead bodies.\"\n\nEater laughed, and the ground beneath Leonard shook. Eater's laugh was one of those infectious laughs that Leonard had to join in on, even though he didn't quite know what he was laughing about.\n\n\"What's so funny?\" laughed Leonard with a nervous note in his voice.\n\n\"Behold!\"\n\nAnd with that the walls of the cavern glowed a bright orange, and Leonard had his worst fears confirmed. Everywhere he looked were old dried-up carcasses, and stacks of bones and skulls piled so high that at some places they reached the ceiling of the cavern. Mixed in with the bones were various personal items. Bits of clothing, golden goblets, swords, shields, and spears\u2014the kinds of things that grieving loved ones and loyal subjects might have placed in the arms of the freshly departed. All items appeared to be of ancient design and making.\n\nLeonard picked up a small bracelet near his feet. It was a beautifully carved line of insects, connected head to tail, and he thought that, even though it came from a dead person, it might make a fine gift for Glennys\u2014if he ever got out.\n\n\"The reason it smells like it's full of dead bodies is because it is full of dead bodies. That is not a bad smell to the Eater of the Dead, Leonard. That is a delicious smell!\"\n\n\"I see. Of course it is,\" said Leonard as he slowly got to his feet. \"How foolish of me. I should have known that. Well, I guess I'd better be going.\"\n\nLeonard slipped the bracelet in his pouch, picked up the supply sack and took a couple of tentative steps.\n\n\"Ooh, that tickles.\"\n\nLeonard froze. \"Tickles?\"\n\n\"Yes, you're walking on my lip which has always been quite ticklish.\"\n\nLeonard looked down. What he had thought was a warm and moist floor was a purplish black version of what could only be described as lip flesh. Lots and lots of lip flesh.\n\n\"If I'm walking on your lip, does that mean that your mouth is somewhere nearby?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, indeed! You are correct. How clever you are, Leonard. If you take a few steps, you should be able to see my mouth.\"\n\nLeonard edged the slightest bit forward and peered down into the most gruesome excuse for a mouth that he ever could have imagined. Fully twenty feet across, it was more like a hellhole than a mouth. Its sides were studded with hundreds of terrifying fangs and at least that many tentacle-like tongues. Streams of saliva oozed from massive glands, and a hot, steaming breath rose from its depths.\n\n\"Are you going to eat me?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Again, what a smart boy you are! Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"Oh. I don't suppose there's any way I could talk you out of that idea, is there?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not. You see, once a body is sent down here, it's here for good.\"\n\n\"But I'm not dead. I thought you were the Eater of the Dead.\"\n\n\"You're a rare treat, Leonard. But let's not worry about being eaten just yet. Why don't you sit down, and we'll have a conversation. Like I said, I haven't had anyone to talk to for ages. Pretty much all I do these days is sleep and wait for bodies to be placed in the sandpit.\"\n\n\"I don't feel like talking right now.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's a shame. The only reason I didn't gobble you down right away was the hope that you and I could chat for a bit. But if you insist\u2026\"\n\nA large tentacle wormed its way out of the mouth pit toward Leonard who quickly sat down. \"What would you like to talk about, Eater?\"\n\n\"Are you sure? I don't want to impose on you.\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely. I'm quite willing to discuss whatever's on your mind.\"\n\n\"Not only are you smart, but you're quite generous, too, Leonard. Let's see. Where to start? Oh, how are the Druids doing?\"\n\n\"The Druids?\" said Leonard, scanning the cavern and looking for a way to get out as he spoke.\n\n\"You know, the nature worshipping Celts that inhabit this region?\"\n\n\"Well, as far as I know, they aren't around anymore.\"\n\n\"No Druids?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Well, that explains a lot. There haven't been any corpses or dying folk placed in the sandpit for at least two hundred winters. For a while I was thinking that they had all become immortal and weren't dying anymore, but now you tell me that they don't exist. Isn't that interesting? Any idea where they went?\"\n\n\"Maybe they got chased away or just became us, I mean, the people that are living up there now. Whatever happened, they didn't tell us about how the sandpit was supposed to work. Let me tell you, I was surprised when you pulled me under.\"\n\n\"You poor boy. I'm so sorry. I can hear the sand grate when a body is placed in the pit, and I reach up and snag it. You must have been terrified.\"\n\n\"I was. So, you'll let me go?\"\n\n\"No, I can't do that. Oh, that's such disappointing news about the Druids going away. I mean, I have enough dead down here to last me for quite some time, but still, I miss the fun and surprise of seeing what the old pit had to offer.\"\n\n\"So that sandpit was your only contact with the outside world?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, yes. I could tell what time of year it was by what the mummified corpses were wearing or whether there had been an advance in metalworking or weapon making. My job was not only satisfying from the viewpoint of my stomach, it was also interesting to my mind. Oh, and every once in a while they would sacrifice the living\u2014a priest or a sweet young girl\u2014and I would learn loads of things about what was going on outside, before I ate them. Now, about the only thing I can do to get an idea about what's going on up there is stretch one of my tentacles up to the pit. If I stretch it as hard as I can, the tip will just barely poke out of the sand and let me know whether it's warm or cold weather. Isn't that sad?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" said Leonard.\n\nLeonard couldn't imagine what it would be like to spend all of one's existence in a cavern with only dead bodies for company. But that was beside the point, and the point for Leonard was to keep Eater talking long enough so he could find his way out of this awful place. \"Have you ever been outside of this cavern?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, when I was very young. I remember the big blue sky so bright I had to hide from it and only come out at night. And then, the moon! Oh, so beautiful! And all the little twinkling stars around it. I did love the nighttime when I was living in the above world. They still have the sky and the moon and the stars, don't they?\"\n\n\"Yes, they do. Probably all about the same as when you last saw them.\"\n\n\"Good. I'm glad to hear that. I suppose that was a silly question.\"\n\n\"Not really. I mean the Druids had up and vanished on you, hadn't they? You just wanted to be sure.\"\n\n\"Thank you, you're too kind.\"\n\n\"How did the sandpit come to be?\" said Leonard, picking up the crown of an ancient Celtic king and putting it on his head.\n\n\"Now that's a rather interesting tale,\" said Eater. \"You see, when I was a little Eater and first came here, I would scrounge around the ground for small dead creatures such as rats and\u2026 Oh, what do they call them? Those rat-like creatures that have bushy tales and live in trees\u2026\"\n\n\"Squirrels.\"\n\n\"Yes, very good, squirrels. Thank you, Leonard. Anyway, those were the kinds of dead things I was eating back then. Well, one day, or should I say night, I was out on the prowl for decaying flesh when the most delightful aroma filled my nostrils. I made my way toward it and, lo and behold, discovered a battlefield where dozens of slain men lay in the grass. I'm telling you, Leonard, I thought I had died and gone to Saturn. I munched away in a state of near bliss. Have you ever eaten man flesh, Leonard?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Leonard, appalled he'd been asked such a question.\n\n\"Well, let me tell you, you're delicious! Human meat is oily and sweet,\" said Eater. \"Like pork.\"\n\nLeonard could feel that I'm-about-to-throw-up sensation building in his stomach. \"The pit?\"\n\n\"Ah yes, the pit. I ate my fill that night, nearly tripling in size. Exhausted, I crawled down into this hole for a snooze, and the next thing I know, there are more bodies being tossed in on top of me. I ate and ate and ate, getting bigger by the day. A body would be tossed in the hole, and my tentacles would grab it and pull it into my mouth. Eventually I got so big that I couldn't come out of the hole anymore. I had to go deeper to find more room. And then the bodies stopped, and I guessed that they had finished cleaning up the battlefield.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"At first, I did nothing, but then my stomach started rumbling, and I worried I was going to starve to death stuck down in this hole. I must admit to you, Leonard, that I was so hungry that I became desperate. I waited, and the next time I felt something walk near the opening of the hole I reached out with my tentacles and grabbed it!\"\n\n\"You did?\" said Leonard who by now was starting to get into the story.\n\n\"Yes! Now it could've been a deer or a wild boar, but the 'what' I grabbed turned out to be a 'who.'\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"A young Druid priest by the name of Merlin.\"\n\n\"Merlin? We know about him, although from what I've heard he hasn't been seen in a while. He's a wizard.\"\n\n\"Well, back then he was just a young man who was about to be eaten. I apologized for what I was about to do, explaining that live meat was more of an occasional treat for me, and that I preferred rotting flesh; and then, just as I was about to swallow him whole, Merlin proposed a deal. He said that if I wouldn't eat him, he would provide me with more dead flesh than I would know what to do with. He said since he was a Druid priest, he had something to say about where and how the dead were disposed of, and that he could use his influence to make sure they were placed near the entrance to my hole. I had to decide right there and then whether I trusted him enough to let him go. But you know, there was something about him that made me want to believe that he'd make good on his proposal. I let him go. He told me to seal the opening, which I did.\"\n\n\"You made it a sandpit?\"\n\n\"Precisely. He told me to seal it, and that he would return with the promised dead. I waited, thinking that perhaps I'd been fooled. But one day he returned. Oh, did he return! From that point on, and for over a thousand winters thereafter, corpses were laid to rest in my sandpit. Kings and commoners alike were brought here, and all were pulled below to their final resting place. Thanks to Merlin, I had become something of a religious figure, and it was considered a sacred act to place the dead in my sandpit. Sometimes there'd be one in a week; sometimes after a plague or a battle there would be hundreds! As you can see from looking around, they really piled up over the centuries.\"\n\nEater's tentacles snaked out and grabbed some skulls, causing a large avalanche of dusty bones down one of the cavern walls. He tossed the skulls into his mouth like a handful of brownie berries and munched away. \"I got fatter and fatter and sank lower and lower into my hole. So far down that all I can do is barely reach into the sandpit from below.\"\n\n\"That is some story.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'm glad you found it interesting. One never truly knows if his life is interesting enough to talk about.\"\n\nLeonard had to agree. Unfortunately, many uninteresting people are unaware of how uninteresting they are and talk about themselves way too much. \"You don't have to worry about that. Your life is very interesting and I'm not just saying that.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Leonard. I shall miss you after you're eaten.\"\n\nEater's tentacles stirred in the mouth pit, and Leonard knew that he had to keep the conversation going or else end up as a rare treat in Eater's belly.\n\n\"Eater?\"\n\nThe tentacles stopped. \"Yes, Leonard?\"\n\n\"Are there other, er, Eaters?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth. I remember there were lots of us at one time, but I seem to have lost touch. For all I know, I might be one of a kind.\"\n\n\"You certainly are that.\"\n\nLeonard's stomach rumbled, and he found himself horrified at the possibility that all this talk about eating corpses had made him hungry. He reached into the supply bag, took out one of Sir Francis's apples and bit into it.\n\nA sniffing sound came from Eater's mouth hole. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"An apple.\"\n\n\"What's an apple?\"\n\n\"A fruit.\"\n\n\"What's a fruit?\"\n\n\"Something that grows on trees.\"\n\n\"Trees. I remember them. Big tall things that drop acorns on you. Is an apple like an acorn?\"\n\n\"Well, sort of. I suppose you're right. An apple is kind of a big red juicy acorn. From an apple tree.\"\n\nEater took a deep breath. \"It smells divine. May I try it?\"\n\n\"Sure. Why not?\" said Leonard as he tossed his half-eaten apple into Eater's mouth hole.\n\nAfter the briefest of pauses the whole cavern shuddered, and its wall glowed a bright green. \"Oh, that's good! Do you have another you could give me?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" said Leonard as he reached into the sack and felt around. Leonard laughed at the thought that Sir Francis's apples were a hit everywhere they were eaten. Even in an underground cavern full of corpses. He pulled out another apple and was about to toss it into Eater's mouth pit when an idea occurred to him. This idea wasn't on the same level of complexity as one of his brilliant plan ideas, but it just might save his life.\n\n\"Eater? I have a proposal for you. You let me go\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll have to stop you right there, Leonard. As I mentioned before, I can't let you go.\"\n\n\"Please, let me finish.\"\n\n\"My apologies. Please, go on.\"\n\n\"You let me go, and I'll come back with a big sack of apples once a year for as long as I live. Then, when I'm dead, I'll have them place me in the pit, and you can eat me.\"\n\n\"Well, that is indeed quite a proposal. The question would be whether or not I could trust you enough to hold up your end of the bargain.\"\n\n\"I could swear an oath.\"\n\n\"Ooh, I love oaths. They're so serious and important sounding. Let's hear it.\"\n\n\"I, Leonard, do solemnly swear on the ashes of my dead parents, that I will return once a year with a large sack of apples for as long as I live. There, how's that?\"\n\n\"Splendid! That was a fine oath for a proposal that I would readily agree to if I could. A sack of those heavenly apple acorns? My stomach would be so happy that I wouldn't know what to do. Another apple, please!\"\n\n\"Hold on. If you like these apples so much, then why won't you agree to my proposal? You agreed to Merlin's.\"\n\n\"It's not that I won't agree to the proposal, I can't agree to it. There's no way out of here except for the sandpit. While I can still pull things down from above, it's too far up, and my tentacles aren't strong enough for me to push something back out again. I was closer to the surface when I made my deal with Merlin. I'm afraid it's as simple as that.\"\n\nLeonard looked up toward the cavern's ceiling and for a moment wondered if he could pile up enough corpses and skulls to reach the sandpit. Then he remembered the skull avalanche of just a few moments ago and decided it wouldn't work. \"Well, that's terrible,\" said Leonard, tossing in the apple.\n\n\"Indeed it is. I know that we would both benefit from an apples-for-freedom trade,\" said Eater between munches. \"And just so you know, Leonard, I would have trusted you to keep your end of the bargain, even without your fine oath. I can just feel that you are a good and trustworthy person. It will be an honor to eat you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Eater.\"\n\nLeonard sat on a pile of skulls and sighed. He felt the bracelet he'd picked up earlier and pulled it out of his pouch. It was beautiful and seemed to glow faintly when you didn't look directly at it. \"You have a lot of nice things down here. I must admit that I picked up one of them when I first woke up and put it in my pouch. Sorry about that.\"\n\n\"Oh, please, keep whatever it is. I don't have need for any of it; and, as far as I'm concerned, it's just so much trash and debris. Besides, and I don't mean to rain on your parade, but you weren't really going anywhere with it anyway.\"\n\n\"That's true.\"\n\nHe slipped the bracelet around his wrist and felt the strangest sensation. It was as if he was shrinking down and being raised high up into the air at the same time.\n\n\"Leonard!\" cried Eater.\n\nHovering in midair, Leonard looked down at his limbs and saw that he now had six of them. His vision had changed, too. It was as though he was looking through a thousand tiny pieces of glass, an image of the cavern on each one. Leonard discovered that he could turn his head completely around. On his back were two clear wings moving so fast he could barely see them. Leonard had become a fly!\n\n\"Where are you, Leonard?\" cried Eater.\n\nHe looked down at where his wrist should be and saw a tiny version of the bracelet that he had just put on moments before. Leonard pulled the bracelet off and fell to the floor with a thud. He was human again.\n\n\"There you are! Where did you go, Leonard?\"\n\n\"Hold on, Eater\u2026\"\n\nHe slipped the bracelet back on and was transformed into a fly again. This time, he made sure he landed on the ground before he took the bracelet off. \"Eater! This bracelet is enchanted!\"\n\n\"Well, I do know that many a witch and wizard have been laid to rest on my sands. I think it's a safe bet that it came from one of them.\"\n\n\"When I put it on it turns me into a fly,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"A fly? Why, Leonard, that's it! You can fly out of here.\"\n\n\"How? I don't think a fly is strong enough to push its way through sand.\"\n\n\"How do you think you are able to breathe down here? There are many smaller holes or entrances into my cavern. I know there are because occasionally, a small creature falls in from above. All you have to do is turn back into a fly and find one of those little holes.\"\n\nLeonard reached into the supply bag and tossed in one of the remaining two apples.\n\n\"Mmm, so delicious!\"\n\n\"Although there's no doubt that I'm much happier about not being eaten than I would've been had you eaten me, I must say that it has been a pleasure meeting you, Eater.\"\n\n\"Likewise for me, Leonard. The Eater of the Dead shall never forget you. Goodbye.\"\n\n\"Goodbye,\" said Leonard as he slung the sack over his shoulder and put on the bracelet. In a flash, the sack shrank, and Leonard was transformed back into a housefly and buzzed his way toward the ceiling of the cavern. He flew around the stalactites, searching for some sort of opening, but couldn't find one until he passed an outcrop of rock and was nearly knocked down by a small but steady stream of air.\n\nZeroing in on the source of the breeze, Leonard found a small opening through a crack in the stone and flew in. A few moments later, Leonard found himself once again on the surface, just a few feet away from Eater's sandpit. He removed the bracelet and turned back into his normal self. Tossing the last apple onto the sand, Leonard waited for a moment then watched with satisfaction as it disappeared beneath the surface."
            },
            {
                "title": "Lost and Found",
                "text": "Leonard was pleased to get out of Eater's cavern, but what now? Hubert, Piffle, and Glennys were gone, and he couldn't blame them for leaving. He was sure that as far as they were concerned he had disappeared under that sand for good. Maybe they'd gone on to find the dragons, or maybe they'd gone back to Camelot. It was his quest, after all. Glennys didn't want any part of it, and Hubert was only along to help Leonard. He was going to have to try and find the dragons and ask for their help on his own, without the support of his best friend and, more importantly, without the magical dragon-finding abilities of Piffle the brownie.\n\n\"Pick a direction. Any direction,\" said Leonard as he looked around the countryside. Identical vistas of grassy meadows dotted by isolated stands of trees were in every direction that he looked.\n\nLeonard picked up a dead leaf, wincing again from his wounds, and threw it into the air. A light gust of wind blew it toward the north. Was that the way he was supposed to go? Leonard shrugged and walked stiffly in that direction. He passed the spot where the leaf dragon had mauled the harpies and was glad to see bones that had been picked clean and scattered by scavengers. What horrible, nasty creatures they were! It was not a sad thing there were less of them drawing a breath in the world.\n\nOne thing that Leonard did know was that he was much closer to the dragons now that he and the others had crossed the huge expanse of the dead forest. Piffle had said that it was all goodness and green until they got to the dragons. To Leonard's way of thinking, that meant he should look for the dragons in another dead area in the middle of all this green countryside. That was as good a plan as any for right now.\n\nThe terrain wasn't at all uncomfortable. Leonard found a game path that seemed to be going in his general direction and stuck to it. The path wound its way through meadows of wildflowers and small patches of trees, occasionally crossing over a small brook.\n\nGlennys would love this place, he thought, looking at a meadow of brightly colored pot marigolds. There are lots of plants for her to collect.\n\nHe made good progress, which didn't mean a whole lot considering that he didn't have a clue about where he was going. In a way, it was helpful just to keep moving as the activity relaxed his muscles and eased the pain from his wounds. He had a feeling that if he kept exploring, he'd eventually find the dragons.\n\nAs Leonard walked along, he noticed the supply sack that hung over his shoulder was lighter than when they had first begun the journey. A quick inventory taken while eating lunch on top of a cluster of boulders drove this sad fact home. At this point, all that was left were a couple of moldy chunks of bread, some of the salt cod, and a nasty dried up sliver of pork. As he chewed on the pork, which tasted like what Leonard imagined a shoe would taste like, he regretted he'd been so generous with the apples back at Eater's pit.\n\nOf course, Hubert and Glennys were probably worse off. They wouldn't be eating much of anything at all since he had the sack. He hoped that there were brownie berries growing wherever they were and that Hubert, who was a fair hand at trapping, would be able to snare a rabbit or two.\n\nLeonard paused to take a sip from yet another small stream that happened to run across the path he was taking. Before he bent down, he scanned the crystal-clear water for a certain talkative red fish that tended to show up in places like this but didn't see him. Leonard scooped up some of the cool water and drank it. As the ripples cleared, Leonard saw something even more astonishing. On the bank of the stream behind him were several purple-leafed bushes heavy with brownie berries. When he turned around to look at them, they vanished. Looking back into the stream, he saw them clear as day. What was it that Piffle had said? Something about having to look back to find brownie berries.\n\nShe must've meant that you can only see them if they're reflected in something like water, thought Leonard.\n\nKeeping an eye on the berry-bush reflections in the stream, he felt his way backward to the berries and soon had filled his pouch with them. If he didn't look at them, the berries were there and ripe for the picking.\n\nI wonder if Piffle will be angry or pleased that I've stumbled across the trick to finding brownie berries, thought Leonard.\n\nHe ate a few of the delicious berries, then, cheered by their heart-warming effect, began walking again. Leonard limped along for a good portion of the afternoon without running across a single clue as to where he could find the dragons. Then, as he sat down for his supper, consisting of two brownie berries and a bite of stale bread, Leonard got the break he was looking for. A large shadow passed over him with terrifying swiftness, darkening the ground for an eye blink before racing on. Leonard flinched as the shadow passed then looked up to see the underside of a huge dragon flying northward. Leonard jumped to his feet and ran after the dragon.\n\n\"Wait! Stop!\" shouted Leonard. \"I need your help! I'm a dragonfriend!\"\n\nBut the dragon kept going, flying with such speed that it quickly disappeared. Well, at least I know where it's heading, thought Leonard.\n\nSure enough, as he followed the dragon's path, Leonard noticed a familiar pattern to the landscape returning. With each step he saw an increasing number of dead and dying plants. Normally, this would not be a good thing, but since Leonard was searching for a horde of dragons living in the center of a dead zone, his heart leapt. He was getting closer!\n\nLeonard pushed forward and could not only see but also feel the life force of the magical forest fading. More and more dead plants surrounded him, and the very air felt as though it wasn't interested in supporting life. After another mile or two there was nothing alive in any direction that Leonard looked.\n\nI must be getting close, thought Leonard, scanning the sky for any hint of dragons. If I were a dragon, this is the kind of dead place I'd choose. A chill ran through him as he realized he was walking toward a group of some of the most feared creatures in all of creation. It was bad enough the day he'd first met Mantooth, a lone dragon, but now the idea of standing in front of a whole horde of dragons and begging for help was positively terrifying. Still, he pushed on. For Mantooth. For Sir Ronald, he thought.\n\nA distant ruckus made Leonard stop walking and start listening. It sounded like some sort of argument; and, as Leonard crept toward a thicket of blackened trees, he could hear two voices, one high-pitched and one low-pitched, going at each other. Leonard looked around; this was about as dark an area of the forest as could be found, and his mind couldn't help but drift back to his experience with the stone giants. If only there was some way to sneak up unseen, thought Leonard. Hold on, there is a way! Leonard reached into his pouch and pulled out the bracelet. If ever there was a time to be unnoticeable, this was it. He put it on and a few seconds later was buzzing his way toward the argument.\n\nAs he drew closer, the voices became more and more familiar\u2014until it became obvious the two who were fighting were Glennys and Hubert. Piffle sat on the ground cleaning the dirt out from under her fingernails while Poppy, looking a little skittish, stood tied to a burnt-out stump. Leonard had a quick attack of multi-faceted Glennys-itis and almost crashed into a tree before swerving to settle on a burnt bush.\n\n\"You are a complete idiot, Hubert!\" yelled Glennys. \"How do you know they won't torch the lot of us the second we walk into their midst? We are not going into that lair when we have a perfectly good brownie to go in first!\"\n\n\"Piffle said that they won't necessarily listen to her,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Dragons is not listening to brownies that tells them to attack a castle. They is most probable to say, 'That nice little brownie, I gots ticks in my ear.' They not gonna listen to Piffle.\"\n\n\"See? I think we have a better chance of getting their attention with two humans making a request like that,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"A request that, for the thousandth time, I have no intention of making. I will not be responsible for bringing down a dragon attack on the House of Arthur,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Just the dungeon part.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. An attack on part of Camelot is an attack on all of Camelot. I won't be a party to such a thing!\" said Glennys. \"And I won't walk into the middle of a horde of dragons and get torched just so you can ask them.\"\n\n\"Then stay here,\" said Hubert.\n\nGlennys scanned the dead woods around them. The trees all had a tortured look to them as though they'd been in great pain before they died. \"You know what happens when I'm alone in these woods for any period. Send in the brownie.\"\n\nLeonard was enjoying the debate and could've let it go on for quite a bit longer but decided that they were being a little too loud\u2014a bad thing when a bunch of grouchy dragons was living nearby. Just as he grabbed the bracelet, something grabbed him, and he found himself looking down into Piffle's open mouth.\n\n\"Piffle! No!\" shouted Leonard in a tiny fly voice that would have made him laugh if he weren't about to be swallowed alive.\n\nLeonard wrenched off the bracelet and turned back into his human form just in time. Hubert and Glennys jumped back in alarm whereas poor Piffle was caught under Leonard's weight as he fell to the ground.\n\n\"Hello, everyone,\" said Leonard, rolling off Piffle who had been flattened into the soft earth.\n\n\"You're alive!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Very much so.\" He pried Piffle out of the brownie-shaped depression in the ground and bounced her in his hands like an infant. \"Sorry about that, Piffle. You were too fast for me to see you coming.\"\n\n\"That's all right, the Leonard. I is glad it was you who is crushing me in the mud. Piffle gonna be more careful grabbing flies when she can't see the Leonard around.\"\n\nHubert shook off his astonishment and rushed forward to give Leonard a rib-cracking hug. \"We thought you were gone for good! The pit\u2026! Where did you come from? Appearing out of thin air like that?\"\n\n\"And why do you stink of the dead?\" said Glennys, covering her nose.\n\n\"That's not a bad smell, Glennys,\" said Leonard with a smile. \"To the Eater of the Dead, that smell is delicious!\"\n\nLeonard filled them in on what had happened after Eater had pulled him down through the sandpit into his cavern, telling them about all of the corpses, the lifesaving deal for Sir Francis's apples, and how he had found the bracelet among all of the other burial offerings.\n\n\"Who knew that there are such creatures living beneath our very feet? Caverns full of corpses, magical jewelry...\" said Hubert when Leonard had finished.\n\nThe air seemed to split in two as the sound of a distant dragon's roar tore through it. Leonard and the others covered their ears while Poppy whinnied nervously.\n\n\"So it seems you've found the dragons' lair,\" said Leonard, stroking Poppy's muzzle to calm her.\n\n\"Yes, thanks to Piffle there. She led us straight to them, but now your blockhead friend won't send her in to see if the dragons even want to talk,\" said Glennys.\n\nThe dragon roared again, louder this time.\n\n\"That sounds like a big one,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"What do you think, Leonard? This was all your idea, after all,\" said Glennys.\n\nLeonard reached into his pouch and offered Piffle a brownie berry which she downed before the question of where Leonard had gotten them spread across her face. \"Let's just say that more than one of us knows how to 'look back to find them,'\" said Leonard.\n\nHe tossed Glennys and Hubert a berry, too.\n\n\"What's the trick? How do you find them?\" said Hubert as he gulped his berry down.\n\n\"That's between Piffle and me,\" said Leonard, noting the look of relief on the little brownie's face.\n\n\"Aw!\" said Hubert.\n\nLeonard sat on a small boulder and rubbed his chin. \"I think that Piffle and I should go in and speak with the dragons while you and Hubert wait here for us.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" said Glennys. \"That's exactly what I was saying. Well, except for the part where you're involved as I thought you were dead.\"\n\n\"But don't you think I should go, too?\" said Hubert. \"I mean, in case you need a show of force and whatnot?\"\n\nGlennys snorted. \"I don't think having a thousand Huberts on hand would count in any book as a show of force.\"\n\n\"Why don't you shut up!\"\n\n\"They is fighting like this a lot while you is gone, the Leonard. Very tiring for a little brownie to be hearing all of the time.\"\n\n\"I know Glennys won't have anything to do with my plan to ask the dragons for help,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"So I need someone brave, strong, and trustworthy to keep an eye out and make sure that she doesn't get herself captured and almost eaten by giants or tied up by a goblin again.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" said Hubert, pointing at Glennys. \"Now that you put it that way, I'll be happy to stay out here and babysit our little missy.\"\n\n\"Babysit? I'll show you what for!\" said Glennys, raising her fist.\n\n\"Enough! Please,\" said Leonard. \"Piffle, are you ready?\"\n\n\"Yessir, the Leonard, Piffle is ready to go!\"\n\n\"Hubert, sword and shield at the ready?\"\n\nHubert picked up Sir Ronald's sword and shield, trying his best to look at least a little impressive. \"Right you are, Leonard.\"\n\n\"Glennys, ready to soothe severe dragonfire burns with your bag of impressive balms and medicines?\"\n\nGlennys couldn't help herself and smiled just a little. \"Yes, of course. But do try your best not to get torched.\"\n\n\"You have my word that I shall do my very best to come out of there uncooked. Come on, Piffle,\" said Leonard, lifting the brownie onto his shoulder. \"I have to go convince some dragons to help us \u2026 or die trying.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Leonard and Piffle crept forward through the dead woods, doing their best not to step on dry leaves or snap any twigs. The closer they got, the louder the dragons' roars became and the more Leonard's stomach felt like it had a large stone in it. Even at a distance, some of the roars were so loud that Leonard and Piffle had to cover their ears.\n\n\"Why do they sound so angry?\"\n\n\"They's fighting about something, that's for sure. That's all Piffle can tell from this far away.\"\n\nIn the distance, a blast of dragonfire rose into the air like a pillar, setting on fire the limbs of dead trees and eating them down to the ground.\n\n\"Ooh, look at that, the Leonard! I is surprised there is any trees left arounds here.\"\n\nLeonard stopped and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. \"It's starting to get hot, Piffle. Really hot.\"\n\n\"Dragons likes it that way. When brownies was only taking care of dragons, we is having to make new clothes all the time because they gets so burned fast. It's gonna get much more hotter.\"\n\n\"Nice.\"\n\nPiffle and Leonard crept up to a large boulder that Leonard found was too hot to touch when he brushed his fingers against it. He crouched down and crawled around it and was hit by a sight which, despite all the heat in the air, nearly froze his heart.\n\nA huge ravine lay before them, filled with scorched rubble and devoid of any plant life. Colossal boulders dotted the gully floor, and on top of each one was an immense dragon. Quite a few were smaller than Mantooth in size, but an equal number were the same size or larger. They growled, pecked, and took swipes at each other, and, despite their large size and fearsome appearance, reminded Leonard of a cluster of angry hens.\n\nLeonard looked from one dragon to another and noticed that some, if not most, were injured. Many had arrows protruding from their hides and puncture wounds in their leathery wings. One even had a scorched battle-axe wedged into the bony plate on the back of its skull.\n\n\"Looks like this bunch has been taking a beating,\" whispered Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, knights is getting more and more bold about fighting dragons.\"\n\nAn extremely large dragon twice the size of Mantooth belched out a blast of dragonfire and followed it up with a ground-shaking roar. Filled with dread, Leonard flattened himself against the ground, his body automatically doing whatever it took to hide him from the source of such terror. To his amazement, a quick glance over at Piffle told him that the brownie was not in the least concerned and was maybe even a little excited.\n\n\"Piffle is guessing she is Wormal, the big queen of alls the dragons. Piffle heared of her but never gots to meet Her Greatness.\"\n\nWormal shifted on her boulder and ruffled her leathery wings. \"Silence! I will have you hear me speak.\"\n\nThe dragons all quieted down and turned in her direction, showing as much respect as was possible for creatures who respected nothing.\n\n\"First, Elmore has brought sad and grievous news,\" said Wormal. Leonard saw the queen nod in the direction of Elmore, a jet-black dragon who appeared to be missing a third of his tail. \"His mate Gorien was slain but a few short days ago.\"\n\nThe gully erupted with roars of outrage. Blasts of dragonfire filled the air, and Elmore himself howled with a deep wolfish sadness.\n\n\"Gorien's death must be avenged!\" growled a one-eyed dragon.\n\n\"We should attack the knights now, and destroy them once and for all,\" said another who was missing the claws on his left foot.\n\n\"There are not enough of us left to battle their armies and win. To attack would be foolish,\" said Graga, an elderly female with graying fur.\n\n\"I agree with Graga. We would risk wiping out all dragonkind,\" said a female with two young dragons sitting on her back.\n\n\"Look at how big those 'babies' are!\" whispered Leonard. \"As large as Poppy but only with stubs for wings.\"\n\n\"Yes. They is too young to fly so the mama dragon carries them still.\"\n\n\"Better to die fighting than to hide away like scared sheep,\" said Meckel, a young dragon.\n\n\"Spoken like a true bachelor, Meckel,\" said the female. \"You would think differently had you young of your own.\"\n\n\"He'd first have to convince a female to let him anywhere near her,\" barked an older male whose right arm was missing from the elbow down.\n\nThe rest of the horde laughed at Meckel's expense, causing him to tuck his head under his wing.\n\n\"Leave Meckel alone,\" said Wormal. \"He has had it rough since his parents were killed.\"\n\nThe other dragons made sympathetic noises and nodded their heads in Meckel's direction.\n\n\"We have debated our fate for much of this season,\" said Wormal. \"And I have heard counsel from all sides. Some would have us attack en masse and either snatch victory from our enemies' hands or die a glorious death trying.\"\n\nMany dragons snorted with approval for this plan.\n\n\"Others would have us stay in this place, away from mankind and their catapults and steel-tipped arrows,\" said the Dragon Queen.\n\nLeonard and Piffle saw other dragons nod and growl in agreement.\n\n\"Both arguments have points in their favor and against them. Speaking as your Queen, I will tell you that I have thought long and hard about both and have at last come to a decision.\"\n\nThe dragon horde grew quiet.\n\n\"What is your ruling, O Queen?\" said Elmore.\n\n\"We shall neither fight to extinction, nor hide away in this hole,\" said Wormal. \"We shall leave this realm and fly across the great sea to the New Land.\"\n\nThe horde exploded with protests.\n\n\"The dragons is leaving. I would not have believed such a things if I had not been here myself to hear it!\" said Piffle.\n\nLeonard, for his part, was trying to decide what it would be like without dragons around. On balance it would, of course, be a very good thing. No more burned villages or missing cattle. But just as it would be hard to imagine life without death, it was also hard to imagine not having dragons around to worry about.\n\n\"The New Land is but a legend, a dragon pup's tale,\" said Elmore.\n\n\"Melger, King of the Sea Serpents, assures me that the New Land does indeed exist.\"\n\n\"The serpents are nothing but foul and deceitful sea wyrms,\" shouted a red dragon. \"Why should we trust them and end up falling exhausted into the sea after our strength has given out?\"\n\n\"I believe he is telling the truth,\" said Wormal. \"When all is said and done, they are still our kin and would not see us end our race in the depths of the ocean.\" The Queen of the Dragons chose to ignore the grumbling that followed. \"That is why I have decided the six score and nine of our horde shall leave these cursed islands and fly to the New Land at the next full moon.\"\n\nThe protests started to build again, but in an instant Wormal raised herself up to her full height, spread her immense wings, and belched out a huge blast of dragonfire that lit up the sky for miles around. The effect was immediate as every single dragon went silent.\n\n\"I have spoken!\" said Wormal with unmistakable menace in her voice. She searched the horde, looking for any who would still question her decision. Finding none, she folded her wings and settled back down on her boulder. \"Now, as for my second announcement, we have a human and a brownie spying on us.\"\n\nThe entire horde rose in alarm.\n\nLeonard's heart seemed to stop as it dawned on him that the Dragon Queen was talking about him and Piffle.\n\n\"Oooh, Piffle forgetted that big, big dragons feels what's around them, the Leonard. I is very so sorry!\"\n\n\"Come out, human, and stand before me, or I shall burn you in the very spot where you cower.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Battle Royale",
                "text": "Considering the choice he'd been given, it didn't take Leonard much thought to figure out he should stand up and walk forward. Knowing this didn't make it any easier, though. Especially since cries of \"Kill him!\" and \"Torch the filth!\" filled the air. But he stood up, put Piffle on his shoulder and slid down the overheated ravine walls to the bottom. Upon getting there, Leonard knelt on one knee and averted his eyes. He hadn't quite figured out what he was going to say when he got to this point in the plan, but Leonard knew that whatever he said, it should be very formal and extremely respectful.\n\n\"O Great and Mighty Queen of the Dragons, please forgive me and my brownie friend Piffle for not immediately coming forward. It is my sincerest hope that you might understand how the presence of yourself, and so many other magnificent dragons, would prove more than a little terrifying to lesser creatures such as us,\" said Leonard.\n\nLeonard heard some in the dragon horde murmur approvingly.\n\n\"Well, at least he's polite,\" said Graga.\n\nWormal stared at Leonard for a moment then snorted. \"Brownie, groom me.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, Your Greatness, it will be an honor!\" The little brownie jumped off Leonard's shoulder and scrambled up onto the Dragon Queen. \"But where is your own brownies?\"\n\n\"Harpies. They attacked by the hundreds one night. By the time we fought them off\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" said Piffle, quietly. \"Harpies is always after us.\" The little brownie sighed, then got to work.\n\n\"Stand up, boy, and tell me your name,\" said the Dragon Queen.\n\nLeonard stood, still not daring to look up. \"I am Leonard, page to Sir Ronald of the Green Valley.\" The mention of a knight sent angry murmurs through the horde. \"Sir Ronald is like a father to me. He is a good and kind-hearted knight who has little interest in fighting dragons,\" Leonard added.\n\n\"Oh, so he thinks he's better than us, does he?\" said Meckel, anger rising in his voice.\n\n\"Oh, no! I meant that he would choose to do almost anything else before battling a fierce and magnificent dragon. As my brownie friend will attest, he, uh, lacks the proper skills to fight such a fearsome foe.\"\n\n\"That's right, the Leonard's knight is not very good at knighting,\" said Piffle, sticking her head out from between two of the Queen's massive scales.\n\nThe hairs on the back of Leonard's neck rose as Wormal brought her gargantuan head low. She glared at him, her hot breath so close and heavy that it caused Leonard's eyes to water and his clothes to flutter in the harsh wind it made.\n\n\"Why did you come here, Leonard, page to Sir Ronald of the Green Valley?\" said Wormal.\n\n\"To ask for help, Your Greatness.\"\n\nThe ravine filled with growls and hisses. \"Help?\" said the mother dragon. \"Since when have dragons had a reason to help the killers of our children and mates?\" The horde roared in agreement.\n\nA knot of fury pushed aside the fear in the pit of Leonard's stomach. It was Leonard's turn to get angry. \"Since a good and kind knight and a great and honorable dragon were imprisoned unjustly in Camelot's dungeons,\" he said, perhaps a little more loudly and forcefully than he should have.\n\nDisbelief spread like wildfire through the horde.\n\n\"A dragon in Arthur's dungeons? Who?\" said the Dragon Queen.\n\n\"His name is Mantooth.\"\n\nAgain, the gully erupted in anger and more disbelief. Shouts of \"You lie!\" and \"Mantooth is dead!\" filled the ravine.\n\n\"Silence!\" said Wormal. \"You claim that Mantooth is alive, manling?\"\n\n\"I do, Your Greatness. He is being kept alive for his tears which fall as jewels to the floor of his cell.\"\n\n\"Greed for our tears has always been a weakness of mankind,\" said Wormal. \"One of many, I might add.\"\n\n\"I came to ask Your Greatness and the dragon horde to free Mantooth and, by doing so, also free my Master.\"\n\n\"An attack on the mightiest castle in the land? He must be crazy!\" said a heavily scarred bull dragon.\n\nLeonard held his breath and was quite relieved when Piffle didn't try to correct the huge male by saying \"daft.\"\n\n\"How came you to know our Mantooth?\" said Wormal, Queen of the Dragons.\n\nLeonard took a slow, deep breath then proceeded to tell the angry horde of dragons all about his brilliant plan that had gone so horribly wrong. When he finished, Leonard was struck by how quiet the ravine had become. The only sound he could hear was that of crackling fire coming from a blackened tree stump.\n\n\"That is, without a doubt, the worst excuse for a brilliant plan I have ever heard,\" said Graga.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Leonard. \"I know that now.\"\n\n\"Look at me, Leonard,\" said the Dragon Queen.\n\nLeonard took another deep breath and looked up. The dragons in front of him gasped and moved their heads closer.\n\n\"It is true,\" said the Dragon Queen to the rest of the horde. \"Leonard is a dragonfriend.\" The entire ravine was filled with sounds of surprised amazement as the dragons pushed at each other to get a closer look at Leonard. \"Made so by Mantooth himself.\"\n\n\"Mantooth is alive!\" said the mother dragon.\n\nGraga stood up on her haunches. \"I propose we\u2014\"\n\nGraga's statement was cut short when a jet-black arrow embedded itself into the old dragon's neck. She made motions to talk and then fell flat on her face. The horde exploded into action as every dragon in the ravine leapt into the air to search for the source of the attack. As they did, the air became thick with dark arrows raining down from the top of the ravine. Most of the arrows bounced off the dense armor plating of their intended targets, but some found their mark and dragons began falling to the ground one by one. Piffle narrowly avoided being skewered by rolling out of the way just as an arrow bounced off the dragon scale she had been cleaning. Wormal took to the air, and Piffle jumped off and ran to Leonard, who was crouching down near one of the larger boulders.\n\n\"We is being attacked!\" said Piffle as she climbed up into his shirt.\n\nLeonard looked up and saw several black-clad archers ducking between the boulders. They would pop up, fire off an arrow, then duck down, only to reappear again a few feet away from where they last were seen. The archers were hard for Leonard to keep track of in the dark, and he wondered if the dragons were having the same trouble finding them.\n\nWith a terrifying suddenness, a dragon fell out of the air and landed with a heavy thud only a few feet from where Leonard and Piffle were hiding.\n\n\"Whoever they are, they mean business. I reckon they've killed at least ten dragons so far,\" said Leonard.\n\nPiffle picked up one of the dark arrows and sniffed it. Making a face, she threw it to the ground and spat on it. \"Arrows is poisoned! Dipped in ragwort and bracken juice. Very deadly.\"\n\n\"Especially to dragons!\" agreed Leonard.\n\nThe mother dragon, with her two young still clinging to her fur, flew to the top of the ravine and with a deft midair spin belched out a comet of flame. Three of the black-clad archers jumped up, engulfed in dragonfire, and tumbled down to the floor of the ravine. Leonard shuddered as each of their screams ended with a horrifying thud. Moving closer, he looked at the face of one of the archers and gasped when the man's eyes flashed open, revealing yellow pupils that glared at him before being consumed by dragonfire. These were the same eyes that glared at him out of the dark corners in Camelot!\n\n\"We've got to get out of here, Piffle.\"\n\nThe little brownie peeked out from inside Leonard's shirt and helped watch for danger as the young page picked his way through the dead and dying dragons that now littered the ravine floor.\n\n\"Look out, the Leonard!\"\n\nLeonard looked up and was able to leap out of the way just before a mortally injured dragon hit the spot where they'd been hiding. \"Thanks, Piffle.\"\n\nReaching the wall of the ravine, Leonard began climbing. Arrows continued to fall all around him, one even passing through the sleeve of his shirt. Leonard made it to the top and paused for a moment to catch his breath.\n\nHe looked back down into the ravine and was shocked by the carnage. Flames seemed to be everywhere. Fallen dragons covered the ground while those still alive circled the rim and blasted it with dragonfire, occasionally finding a cluster of archers who screamed briefly before turning into ash.\n\n\"This is horrible!\" said Leonard.\n\nIn a flash, Leonard realized that he had no idea of whether Hubert and Glennys were in danger, too.\n\n\"Come on, Piffle, let's go find your Master.\"\n\nAs soon as Leonard had taken one step forward, his path was blocked by four archers. They raised their bows and took aim.\n\nLeonard cringed, but as they pulled back on their bowstrings, a winged blur swooped down and coated the archers with a heavy dose of dragonfire. Leonard dove to the ground to avoid the blast, looking up for his savior after the screaming had died out. The massive mother dragon with her young landed in front of them. \"Come to me. I shall carry you to safety.\"\n\nLeonard ran forward, and the dragon mother grabbed him in her forearms and leapt into the air.\n\n\"Thank you for saving us,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"You are welcome,\" said the dragon mother. \"I thank you for bringing me the news that my mate is still alive.\"\n\nA poisoned arrow bounced off a chest scale close to Leonard's head. The dragon mother swerved to avoid another.\n\n\"You, you're\u2026?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, I am Helgad. Mantooth is my mate.\"\n\n\"But he thinks you're dead! That's why he wanted to\u2026\" Leonard's voice trailed off, and he could barely get out the words, \"kill himself.\"\n\n\"All the better that your plan turned out to be less than brilliant, isn't it? Hang on. These cursed creatures are everywhere.\"\n\n\"Who are they? What are they?\"\n\n\"I am not sure. They're not of this world, otherwise our Queen would have sensed them as she did you.\"\n\nHelgad continued to swerve to avoid the arrows coming up from the ground in decreasing numbers as they left the vicinity of the ravine. Leonard glanced down and saw Hubert and Glennys running away from the battle as fast as they could. Poppy was nowhere to be found. Directly behind them and in hot pursuit were a small band of five dark archers.\n\n\"There they are. Helgad! Those people are my friends.\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Helgad swooped down and torched two of the archers, but as she veered off to come around for another attack, an arrow found its way between two of the scales on her chest. Helgad roared in pain and convulsed, the poison from the arrow seeming to paralyze her in mid-flight. Helgad dropped out of the air like a stone and hit the barren ground with the force of an avalanche. On impact, Leonard and the two young dragons were thrown clear and tumbled away.\n\nThe second Leonard and Piffle came to a stop, the remaining archers were upon them with daggers drawn, their yellow eyes glowing with malice.\n\n\"Grab the boy then run down the other two,\" said their gaunt leader in a raspy voice. Two of the archers stepped forward.\n\nLeonard tried to get up, but a wave of dizziness passed over him, and he fell back. \"Who are you?\" muttered Leonard as the archers lifted him to his feet.\n\n\"I am Bramath, commander of the Fourth Legion of Hellions, in service to his Darkness, the Lord Murck.\"\n\n\"Hellions? From\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes, from Hell,\" said Bramath, a cruel grin spreading across his face.\n\nPiffle leapt from Leonard's shirt and jumped on one of the Hellions holding Leonard. At the same time, Helgad's young were upon them in a blur of teeth and claw. Although still not ready to fly, they were fearsome beasts nonetheless with their razor-sharp claws and needle-like teeth. They tore into Bramath and his archers like charging bulls and quickly reduced them into gruesome piles of shredded meat.\n\nHubert and Glennys ran up out of the darkness, and the young dragons turned on them.\n\n\"Friends!\" shouted Leonard before the small dragons could attack.\n\nThey snorted and sniffed at Hubert and Glennys then trotted over to where their mother lay.\n\n\"We saw your dragon torch two of these fiends before falling and dropping you,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"They came out of nowhere!\" said Glennys. \"So foul a folk I've never met before. Who are they?\"\n\n\"Hellions,\" said Leonard.\n\nHubert's eyes widened. \"From\u2026?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe two friends immediately crossed themselves.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" said Leonard. \"Glennys, I need you to help that dragon,\" said Leonard. \"She was hit by an arrow poisoned with ragwort and bracken juice. Can you do anything to save her?\"\n\nGlennys stared at the ground for a moment. \"Ragwort and bracken; let me think.\" Glennys glanced at the contents of her pouch then closed her eyes. \"Yes, I can help.\"\n\n\"Where's Piffle?\" said Hubert.\n\nLeonard looked around and then pointed to the spot where Piffle lay. Hubert ran over and dropped to his knees, scooping the brownie up in his arms. \"Piffle, don't die on me. Please!\"\n\n\"Piffle's not dying yet, no how. She just gets bonked on the head,\" said Piffle as her eyelids fluttered open. \"Got too much works to do taking cares of my Master and the Leonard.\"\n\nGlennys knelt at Helgad's side, and under the watchful eyes of the young dragons, examined the area where the black arrow had slipped between two armored plates and penetrated the dragon's thick hide. She touched the shaft of the arrow, and Helgad opened her eyes. Glennys jumped back.\n\n\"I'm sorry if that hurt. I'm here to help.\"\n\n\"I think I am well beyond that.\"\n\n\"Let's not be too hasty. I can stop the poison, but I need to pull the arrow out first,\" said Glennys as she grabbed the shaft of the arrow. \"I imagine this will hurt. One, two\u2014\"\n\nBefore Glennys could say three, Helgad reached up and pulled the arrow out herself. She growled in pain and breathed heavily for a moment. \"It hurts more if you wait until three.\"\n\nGlennys reached for her pouch and produced a small bowl. Ripping off a piece of fabric from her gown, she rolled it up and placed it in the bowl and emptied assorted vials of liquid, sprinkling the mix with powders from smaller pouches. Helgad's breathing became labored and ragged. When Glennys had finished mixing the remedy, she placed the bowl in front of one of the young dragons.\n\n\"Heat this, please.\"\n\nThe two dragons looked at each other and then the young female stepped forward and breathed on the bowl. \"Gently, now,\" said Glennys. A soothing steam rose from the bowl. \"Thank you.\"\n\nGlennys picked up the bowl and returned to Helgad's side. \"I have to take this piece of cloth and jam it into your wound. This will hurt, too.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" said Helgad, her voice weakening.\n\nGlennys picked up the piece of cloth and jammed it and most of her forearm into Helgad's arrow wound. Helgad's eyes opened wide and turned a violent shade of red, but to the relief of everyone watching, the great beast did little more than whine. Gradually, Helgad's eyes cleared, and she let out a sigh and passed out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Helgad lay motionless for a full day, hovering on the brink between life and death. Leonard hopped up several times, convinced that she had stopped breathing, only to be reassured by Glennys. She'd place her hand in front of Helgad's nostrils then draw it away quickly from the faint yet hot breath that still came from there. Several times a day, Glennys would clean the wound and check to make sure it was draining properly. The pus oozing out was dark and noxious.\n\nLeonard watched with amazement at how this Lady, born to the fancy life of King Arthur's court, was able to treat a battle-damaged dragon with the same ease she'd used to treat his own wounds.\n\n\"I've never seen one so skilled in the healing arts,\" agreed Hubert as they gathered kindling one afternoon. \"If I didn't know better, I'd say she was a witch.\"\n\n\"Watch your tongue!\" said Leonard, grabbing Hubert.\n\n\"I didn't say she was a witch, just as good as one. It's a compliment to her skills.\"\n\nLeonard let Hubert go and picked up the twigs he'd dropped. \"She's not a witch,\" he muttered as he walked away.\n\nHubert rolled his eyes. \"Fine! From now on I won't share a compliment about Glennys that's any more complicated than, 'She's very nice!'\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "With so much time on his hands, Leonard spent much of it searching the area for Poppy, who Hubert said had bolted off in a panic as soon as the dragons had taken to the air against the Hellions. Their loud roars and blasts of dragonfire had apparently proved too much for the old mare. The rest of the time was spent feeling utterly devastated that his latest plan had failed. Of course, it had been a longshot from the beginning, but with at least some small chance of success. Now, with much of the dragon horde rotting away in their ravine and the rest of them scattered across the land, there was no chance at all. Sir Ronald and Mantooth were likely to spend the rest of their days in Camelot's dungeon.\n\nHe had failed miserably. Again.\n\nThe young dragons, which Leonard learned were named Vaco and Drarb, stayed by their mother's side the entire time except for the occasional hunting trip. Drarb, the female, with a gray coat, was a superb huntress and the leader of the two, deciding what they should do and when they should do it. After a hunt, where the two young dragons had gone out and eaten their fill of venison or wild boar, Drarb would bring back some game for the humans to cook. Vaco, with a brindled coat of black and tan, seemed to have more of a guardian spirit to him and would patrol the area around the camp, resting only an hour or so in the early morning. Every time Vaco would hear a noise, he would charge like a bull into the brush, teeth bared and a small ball of flame on his tongue. Leonard wondered if this was how the work was divided in the dragon world.\n\n\"Yes, this is indeed the nature of our kind,\" said Drarb in a mature voice for one so young. As she spoke, Leonard's thoughts drifted back to what Mantooth had said about dragon younglings maturing quickly. \"Our males are made for fighting. They spend all their time either in battle or preparing themselves for battle. The real work of providing for dragonkind falls to the females\u2014the ones with the brains.\"\n\nGlennys and Piffle, who was feeling much better these days, laughed and caught a sly wink from Drarb.\n\n\"Where would you brainy females be without us strong males to fight off enemies and make you laugh?\" said Vaco.\n\n\"Yeah!\" said Hubert. \"You need us as much as we need you.\"\n\n\"Why, Hubert, I'm touched. Are you trying to say that you can't get along without us girls?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"What? No! I'm not,\" said Hubert, who went on for a bit more before sputtering out and going back to butchering a deer.\n\n\"Master's cheeks is glowing bright red,\" said Piffle with glee.\n\nToward the end of the third day, Helgad's eyes fluttered open to the delight of her children and the humans.\n\n\"I can only assume that I am not dead,\" said Helgad in a weak voice.\n\n\"I am pleased to report that you are indeed quite alive,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"All thanks to you, dear girl,\" said Helgad. \"Your magic must be strong, indeed, if you can use your healing arts to cure a dragon.\"\n\n\"But I'm not magic. I mean, I don't know how to use magic.\"\n\n\"Do not contradict a dragon, healer. Look at me.\"\n\nGlennys looked into Helgad's eyes and gasped when a flash of silver momentarily blinded her. All she could do was sputter until her vision cleared.\n\n\"W-what did you do to me?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Thank you for saving my life, dragonfriend,\" said Helgad.\n\n\"What? Oh. Oh my. I see. That is an incredible honor. I'm the one who should be thanking you,\" stammered Glennys, before abruptly curtsying. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You've earned it,\" said Helgad, closing her eyes with a sigh. \"It's been a long time since any human was deemed worthy of such an honor.\"\n\n\"What about Leonard?\" said Hubert. \"Don't forget he's a dragonfriend.\"\n\nHelgad opened her eyes and looked back and forth between Leonard and Glennys.\n\n\"Yes, but that's not surprising, considering\u2026\"\n\n\"Considering what?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Considering that you and that boy are marked for each other.\"\n\n\"Marked? What does that mean?\" said Leonard in a worried voice.\n\nHelgad was starting to sound like the Wood Faerie Queen. \"Our magic allows us to see things that others cannot. There is a string, like a thread, visible to my dragon sight that stretches between your hearts. Do you see it, Drarb?\"\n\n\"It's as bright as a comet's tail. I was going to complain it was keeping me up at night.\"\n\n\"But what does it mean?\" said Glennys, clutching at her chest.\n\n\"Well, if it was a black string, it would mean that you would eventually try to murder each other,\" said Helgad. \"But since this string is bright and silvery, it means that you are meant for each other and will soon fall in love.\"\n\nLeonard and Glennys sat in stunned silence while Hubert and Piffle did their best to keep their giggling to a minimum. Now it was Glennys's turn to blush while all Leonard could do was try to speak words that flat out refused to come out of his mouth.\n\n\"The healer will breed well with the boy, too. How many kidlings do you read in their thread, Mother?\"\n\n\"Kidlings?\" croaked Leonard.\n\nHelgad looked at Leonard and Glennys. \"I see at least four or five, possibly six.\"\n\n\"Six!\" said Glennys, her eyes wide with shock.\n\nHubert and Piffle couldn't contain their laughter. Both Glennys and Leonard jumped to their feet and backed away from each other, spitting out vigorous denials before spinning on their heels and walking in opposite directions.\n\n\"Humans are very strange,\" said Vaco.\n\n\"Tells me some things I don't know,\" said Piffle between spasms of laughter.\n\nThe rest of the day saw numerous awkward exchanges between Leonard and Glennys that always sent Hubert and Piffle into gales of laughter. Between the overly formal conversation and clumsy physical interactions, both Leonard and Glennys alternated stealing glances at each other as if trying to see if there was even the remotest shred of truth to Helgad's ridiculous prediction.\n\nHow could that even be possible? wondered Leonard as he watched Glennys inspect Helgad's wound. I mean she's\u2026and I'm\u2026\n\nLeonard stared some more, his thoughts sifting through a myriad of possible ways he might end up with Glennys. Despite the highly improbable likelihood of such an occurrence, he found himself both petrified and thrilled about the idea.\n\nHelgad rested for most of two more days before declaring that she was strong enough to depart at dawn to free her Mantooth and Leonard's Sir Ronald.\n\n\"Are you serious?\" said Leonard. \"My plan included returning to Camelot with a dragon horde. All we have now is a severely injured dragon and her young, two pages, a brownie, and a lady of the court.\" Leonard shot Glennys a quick glance. \"Formidable as she is.\"\n\n\"There was no guarantee the horde would have agreed to your request, Leonard,\" said Helgad. \"Dragonfolk are not, as a rule, easily united. At best we might have been able to convince one or two more to half-heartedly join in on this quest. As it is, we have three dragons, fully committed to this task. We shall prevail.\"\n\nLeonard opened his mouth to argue some more but shut it when a look from Helgad told him that the conversation was over. Glennys pleaded with the massive dragon to rest some more, but Helgad would hear none of it. Still too weak to fly, she arose the next morning, ate most of a stag, and began the march toward Camelot."
            },
            {
                "title": "Send in the Best, Send in the Beast",
                "text": "Shortly after the battle between the dragons and the Hellions was over, Xanthe landed heavily on Sir Gareth's tower balcony. Still weak from the leaf dragon's amputation of her foot, the harpy quickly collapsed on the wooden deck. Sir Gareth strolled out from his study. \"Well? What news have you?\" Xanthe bowed the best she could, then went on to relay what had happened. Flying high overhead, she had heard Leonard ask the Dragon Queen for help in freeing his master and the captive dragon being held in Camelot's dungeon.\n\n\"His Master's name?\"\n\nXanthe froze, the boy had said the name of his master, but what was it? One of those odd human names that were hard to remember. \"I am weak milord, and my memory is taxed but I do recall his started with an 'r' and ended with a 'd.'\"\n\n\"What was the Queen's response to the boy's plea?\" said Sir Gareth.\n\n\"She did not have time to answer, milord, as your archers began their attack at that very moment.\" Xanthe hesitated. \"And, milord, many of the dragons escaped the poisoned arrows as did the boy who sought their help.\"\n\nSir Gareth scowled. \"Escape. Perhaps to form up again and launch their attack on the castle.\"\n\n\"Yes, milord, I suppose so,\" said Xanthe. \"The boy does seem to have a way with dragons as I saw one of them obey his command to attack your Hellion chief, who, I am sorry to report, was slain.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Sir Gareth. \"I shall have to adjust my strategy.\"\n\n\"Milord, if you would only send out some more of your dark minions, I could lead them\u2014\"\n\n\"No, that's enough.\"\n\n\"But milord\u2014\"\n\nXanthe's plea was cut short when Sir Gareth placed his boot on the harpy's neck and snapped it. \"I said that's enough.\"\n\nSir Gareth went to his writing table and unlocked a heavy wooden box. Inside was a smaller wooden box. Inside the smaller wooden box was an even smaller box carved out of brimstone and encrusted with black gems. Sir Gareth opened the smaller box and pulled out a tiny gold whistle.\n\nHe licked his lips and blew the whistle three times with short, powerful breaths. An explosive blast of sound was followed by a blinding yellow light that faded as the room filled with a heavy acrid smoke that roiled up from the brimstone box. As the smoke cleared, a fearsome beast with gray-green skin stood in the center of the room. About the size of a large bull, it sported a collection of brutal horns that seemed to sprout from its body like porcupine quills. Small puffs of steam came out of its nostrils with every angry breath, and its eyes glowed with an eerie purple rage. This was Machus, the Hellhound.\n\n\"Sit!\" commanded Sir Gareth.\n\nMachus did not sit as he had been ordered but instead walked toward Sir Gareth with bared fangs and glowing purple eyes full of malice. Any ordinary person would have emptied his bladder at the sight of a bull-sized Hellhound ambling toward him with hate in its glowing eyes.\n\nBut Sir Gareth was not an ordinary person so all he did was blow the whistle again. \"Machus! It is your master commanding you to sit!\" This time Machus stopped dead in his tracks and sat down. Sir Gareth scratched the hound behind its right ear. \"You're a bad boy, yes you are. I have a task for you.\n\n\"Go into the Dead Woods and find a boy and his three companions, possibly in the company of dragons. Send back a raven when you secure them, and hold them, unharmed, until I arrive. Go!\"\n\nMachus leapt out the tower window, falling a good fifty feet to the ground but landing unhurt. Sir Gareth watched as Machus bolted off toward the distant forest, one of his ravens following overhead, and furrowed his brow. A dragon attack on Camelot was not part of his plan and had to be dealt with quickly. This boy, this meddlesome boy, appeared to be at the center of the problem and needed to be dealt with. Severely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hounded",
                "text": "According to Leonard's best guess, they were about a day and a half away from Camelot. Helgad was still in no shape to fly but had been improving thanks to Glennys's expert care. With a few more applications of her potent medicines, Leonard's wounds from the harpies had healed, too. They stopped to rest frequently, but the huge dragon mother's limp grew less noticeable as the miles passed, and she didn't seem to be favoring her wounded side as much.\n\nThe journey back through the magical forest was uneventful, largely because they had Helgad and her two children leading the way. Apparently, horrible creatures like harpies and stone giants tend to leave you alone when you had three dragons as bodyguards, thought Leonard. At one point, a brutish, fur clad cyclops jumped out from behind a large boulder but beat a hasty retreat the second he saw Helgad and her young. \"Oops, sorry! My mistake!\" shouted the cyclops over his shoulder.\n\n\"It must be nice to be able to scare away creatures like that,\" said Hubert to the young male dragon.\n\n\"Nice? I suppose so,\" said Vaco. \"For us dragons, it's more a matter of natural order.\"\n\n\"Dragons is always been at the top, and everything else is at the bottom,\" said Piffle, peeking out from under Hubert's cap.\n\n\"It's not that we think we're superior to all things, which, as it happens, we are. It's just that, considering our size and ferocity, we dragons are exceedingly difficult to defeat. Right, Mother?\"\n\n\"We dragons were exceedingly difficult to defeat,\" said Helgad. \"Our recent battle with the yellow eyes has proven that things have changed.\"\n\n\"The world has turned upside down when dragons must fear humans in whatever form they come,\" said Drarb.\n\n\"Our quarrel is with those who attacked our horde and have imprisoned my mate. For those acts, they shall pay dearly,\" said Helgad.\n\n\"Most assuredly,\" said Drarb.\n\n\"That reminds me,\" said Leonard. \"You thought Mantooth was dead, and Mantooth thought you were dead, and yet there you were with all the other dragons. What happened?\"\n\n\"I've been trying to work that out myself,\" said Helgad before pausing to collect her thoughts. \"It was a beautiful spring day, and we were on the hunt\u2014having learned of a large herd of Guernsey cattle near the sea. Dairy cows are a dragon favorite: full of sweet cream and blood.\"\n\nLeonard opened his mouth to say something then decided that this might not be the right time to scold a dragon for eating entire herds of dairy cows.\n\n\"My Mantooth and I flew over the crest of a hill and saw them. A huge herd, fat, contented, and grazing in a lush meadow that overlooked the ocean. We dove in for the kill and were caught by surprise when an army of trees sprang up to defend the cattle.\"\n\n\"Trees? You're joking,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I am not. The trees plucked us from the sky as though we were songbirds. Later, my Queen told me we had stumbled onto a herd owned by Amaethon and his brother Gwydion. Two powerful gods of old.\"\n\n\"Hold on. Gods of old? They're real?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"As one who was nearly killed by their servants, I can assure you they are real. Just because they are no longer worshipped by your kind, doesn't mean that they have ceased to exist. They live on in small corners of their former realms. Mantooth and I had the misfortune of hunting in one such corner.\"\n\n\"Mantooth mentioned the trees to me. What happened?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"We struggled against them\u2014breaking limbs, boughs, and branches, spitting dragonfire in all directions. But the trees kept coming, and we were overwhelmed. My last sight of Mantooth was in an immense tangle of angry wood as it carried him to the sea cliff's edge and fell with him into the pounding surf far below.\" Helgad paused and looked down at the ground. \"I thought he had perished, crushed or drowned by the trees. He must have thought the same of me.\"\n\n\"How did you escape?\" said Glennys.\n\n\"By doing something that dragons never do: I played dead. After a while, the trees' rage subsided, and they dropped me and returned to the wood. I flew back to the horde, battered and with a heart heavy with the loss of my Mantooth. Drarb and Vaco were born a short time later. Then you showed up with your incredible news, Leonard, and I found I could feel joy again,\" said Helgad, sniffing the air. \"We'll stop here and rest for the night. There is fresh water and game nearby. Vaco and Drarb, you may hunt.\"\n\n\"Can I go, too?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"No!\" shouted Vaco and Drarb in unison.\n\n\"Take the boy with you.\"\n\n\"Mother! He's clumsy and loud!\" said Drarb.\n\n\"And smelly,\" added Vaco.\n\n\"Hey!\" protested Hubert.\n\n\"He'll scare away all of the prey,\" said Drarb.\n\n\"He may prove useful as bait,\" suggested Helgad.\n\n\"True,\" said Vaco.\n\n\"Bait?\" said Hubert, a note of alarm in his voice.\n\n\"As you command, Mother,\" said Drarb.\n\n\"Wait a minute. Maybe\u2014\"\n\nDrarb grabbed Hubert with her mouth and tossed him onto her back. Piffle scrambled on top of Hubert's head and as the two young dragons ran off toward the woods, Leonard heard the brownie exclaim, \"Master is such a dope!\"\n\n\"Don't worry. My young know that I only said that in jest,\" said Helgad, noting a look of concern on Leonard's face.\n\nLeonard relaxed. \"Then good, he deserves a little scare.\"\n\nGlennys knelt and examined Helgad's wound. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"Still a little tender near the wound but on balance, much better.\"\n\nGlennys massaged some herbal ointment around the edges of the scab. \"This should help.\"\n\n\"Yes. That feels good, healer. I would keep you if you humans did not make such terrible pets.\"\n\n\"Do we now?\"\n\n\"Yes, always trying to escape or kill us while we sleep. Occasionally, one of our young will bring a human home, wanting to keep it. It works for a day or two, but the parents always seem to end up torching the poor human.\"\n\n\"Another joke, right?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"Your wound seems to get better by the hour,\" said Glennys, examining the dragon's eyes. \"Your eyes have cleared, and I think most of the poison has left your body. I would not be surprised if you were well enough to fly by morning.\"\n\n\"That is good. I'm afraid all this walking has worn down my claws. I shall have to bite my way through the dungeon stone.\"\n\nGlennys sat back and frowned as she searched through her medicine pouch. \"I'm running low on supplies. I need to gather more herbs to brew for my cures.\"\n\n\"What do you require?\" said Helgad.\n\nGlennys glanced again at the contents of the pouch. \"Everything. Bramble, tansy, bairnwort, incensier, milk thistle, enebro\u2026\"\n\nHelgad lifted her head and sniffed the air several times. \"There is tansy and bairnwort in bloom to the south. You can send out the brownie to get the rest when she returns. Those wee ones can find anything with root and leaf. Have you eaten those curious berries that only they can find?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Glennys. \"They're delicious.\"\n\n\"I'm not very fond of sweets, but for that fruit I make an exception. The perfect way to finish off a meal of mutton or pork, or a couple head of cattle.\"\n\n\"I'll be back shortly,\" said Glennys, heading south from the camp.\n\nHelgad glanced at Leonard before lying back with a sigh. \"What are you waiting for, boy? The girl goes for a walk, and yet you sit here like a bump on a log. Are you so thickheaded that you cannot see an opportunity when it presents itself?\"\n\n\"What? Oh, right,\" said Leonard.\n\nLeonard caught up to Glennys and pretended to know what he was looking for. \"It's fortunate that there's some brainwort and pansies nearby. Wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nGlennys smiled. \"It's bairnwort and tansy.\"\n\n\"That's what I said.\"\n\n\"No, it is not,\" said Glennys with a laugh. She stooped down and picked a clump of small yellow flowers. \"This is tansy. It is a magical herb used for health and longevity.\"\n\n\"I knew that.\"\n\n\"Uh huh. And those flowers over there are bairnwort.\"\n\n\"Daisies are the same thing as bairnwort? Why don't you just call them daisies?\"\n\n\"Bairnwort is the ancient name. The older a name, the more power there is in speaking it. Bairnwort is most useful for treating fresh wounds and fevers, but I suppose you knew that, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely. Fresh wounds and fevers, it's common knowledge.\" Leonard took a deep breath. \"They're pretty, too. Just like you.\" He clamped his eyes shut and grimaced. \"That was really bad, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Comparing me to a flower? Not so bad. I've heard worse. There's a young squire at the castle who once told me that my eyes glistened like a frog's rump.\"\n\n\"That's like something Hubert would say.\"\n\nJust then, Leonard caught a glimpse of something in the distance. It was large, had four legs, and was bounding in their direction at a high rate of speed.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\nLeonard pointed in the direction of the bounding creature. \"Look. There.\"\n\n\"Is it Drarb?\"\n\n\"It's not the right shape, and it's a little smaller.\"\n\nBy then, the creature had come close enough for Leonard to see that it looked like an exceptionally large and cruel dog, with spiked gray-green skin and eyes that shone with a deep purple glow.\n\n\"Run!\" yelled Leonard.\n\nLeonard and Glennys started to run, but it was too late. The last thing Leonard remembered as he was slammed to the ground was Glennys screaming and the feeling of sharp teeth clamping down on his neck."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Upper Hand",
                "text": "Leonard felt the world returning to him. It was like coming out of the kind of dense fog that surrounded Sir Ronald's half-castle during late autumn\u2014fog so thick that it muffled sound and made it so you couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of you.\n\nAs his mind drifted upward, and he became more aware of his surroundings, Leonard started to notice things. He felt a warm softness behind his head like he was resting on the world's best pillow. The pillow was warm and smelled good too\u2014like flowers. Like Glennys.\n\nGlennys!\n\nLeonard's eyes popped open, and he lurched himself up into a sitting position\u2014an act that he regretted as a searing pain seemed to split his head in two. This wholly unpleasant sensation was followed by two more: the nearby growl of a huge beast and its hot breath beating down on Leonard's face like blasts from a blacksmith's bellows. He turned toward the hot breath and looked into the eyes of one of the most terrifying creatures he had ever seen. A monster that Leonard somehow sensed was just waiting for an excuse to bite his head off.\n\nLeonard felt two hands on his shoulders, pulling him back.\n\n\"Lay down, Leonard,\" said Glennys. \"As long as we don't move, it doesn't seem to get upset.\"\n\nLeonard did as Glennys said, and in doing so realized that the world's best pillow was her lap. The huge dark beast, satisfied that Leonard wasn't trying to make a run for it, went a few paces away and circled in place several times before curling up on the dirt floor. Leonard glanced around and decided that they were in some sort of small cave, the walls and ceiling of which were solid stone, and the floor was a mixture of pebbles, sticks, and dirt. A musky aroma filled the air.\n\n\"Great, another smelly cave.\"\n\n\"This is a wolf's den. It drove them out and then dragged us in.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I've been trying to figure that out,\" said Glennys in a quiet voice. \"It has the appearance of a grotesque oversized dog, but those glowing eyes, the spikes, and the hot breath tell me that it's no earthly beast. If I lost all good manners and began making wagers, I would bet that we are looking at a hound of Hell. It's blocking the way out, in case you haven't noticed, and seems to be waiting for someone.\"\n\n\"First Hellions and then Hellhounds start showing up. It's almost like the gates of Hell were accidentally left open. Do you think it understands us?\" said Leonard.\n\nThe beast paused from licking its paw long enough to glare at them.\n\n\"I'll take that as a yes,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Who do you think it's waiting for?\"\n\n\"My uncle,\" said Glennys, a chill in her voice.\n\nLeonard saw Sir Gareth, crouched down in the den's entrance, flashing his cruel grin at them. \"My goodness, Glennys, what an unpleasant surprise to discover you're involved in this mess. Very disappointing, I must say.\"\n\nSir Gareth looked into Leonard's eyes. \"So it is true, you are a dragonlover.\"\n\n\"Dragonfriend,\" growled Leonard.\n\nSir Gareth shrugged. \"Whatever. Oh, by the way, young man, I had your knight executed this morning.\"\n\nLeonard blinked several times, trying to wrap his mind around the words that Sir Gareth had just spoken. \"Executed?\" was all he was able to squeeze out.\n\n\"Yes. So you see, all of this rallying the dragons to attack Camelot nonsense was for naught.\"\n\n\"Executed?\" repeated Leonard, more quietly.\n\n\"Uncle, why are you doing this?\" said Glennys, tears welling in her eyes.\n\nSir Gareth looked down at the floor of the cave and kicked a small stone toward Machus. \"Why? Well, that's an easy one. I'm doing it because I can, dear Glennys. Guards, get in here.\"\n\nTwo of his Hellions crawled into the den.\n\n\"Load these two delightful children into the wagon, and make ready to leave for Camelot,\" said Sir Gareth, grinning at Leonard and Glennys. \"I have more executions to plan!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "The rickety oxcart rolled and bounced along, with Leonard and Glennys in a cage on the back. Leonard's teeth rattled as the cart seemed to catch every bump and hole in the road. The Hellhound, who Leonard learned was named Machus from Sir Gareth's constant stream of angry commands, trotted alongside, his nose to the ground. A band of ten black-clad Hellions rode alongside the cart, five on each side. Sir Gareth rode in front of them on his white stallion, a smile on his face that looked as though he was on the way to his own birthday party. Leonard stared off into the distance, unable to focus his mind on anything but the word \"executed.\" The fiend on the white horse had killed his master, mentioning it in the same way that Gert might say, \"The soup's ready.\"\n\nExecuted, thought Leonard. My master's been executed!\n\nAs if sensing his thoughts, Glennys took his hand in hers and laid her head on his shoulder. This kind and simple act calmed Leonard enough to realize that he couldn't give up just yet. He had Glennys to think about. With grim determination, he turned his thoughts toward coming up with a way to get her out of this horrible situation. That's what Sir Ronald would have wanted me to do.\n\nThe cage they had been thrown into was the simple kind that peasants used to transport small farm animals to market. It was made of cut tree branches tied together with long strips of willow bark. Leonard thought it might be possible to snap the branches with a well-placed kick or two, but Sir Gareth and his men would hear the branches snapping and put an end to their escape attempt. Even if he and Glennys could get past the cage and the Hellions, there was still the small matter of Sir Gareth and his hound from Hell. Leonard didn't think Sir Gareth would hesitate in ordering Machus to rip him to pieces, even though it would spoil the fun of executing him back at Camelot.\n\nSir Gareth seemed to control the hellish beast by means of a small gold whistle he wore around his neck. Leonard had seen him use it to bring back the hound when it ran off after a deer. Sir Gareth had blown the whistle in three short bursts, and Machus had returned, tail tucked between his legs.\n\n\"If I could get hold of that whistle then we might have a chance,\" he muttered.\n\n\"What's that?\" sighed Glennys.\n\n\"Nothing, I was just thinking out loud.\"\n\nLeonard decided that getting hold of the whistle would be impossible after running a few ridiculous scenarios through his brain that involved getting Sir Gareth to climb off his horse and stand right next to the cage. If only he could fly out like he did when he was in Eater's cavern...\n\nLeonard froze for an instant when he realized he was an idiot and then used all his will not to shout the word \"idiot\" out loud and slap himself on the forehead. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have forgotten about it? Thanks to the bracelet he had found among the bones on the cavern floor, he could fly out of the cage\u2014as a fly!\n\nHe pulled the bracelet out of his pouch and quietly showed it to Glennys. Glennys's eyes widened. \"Put this on,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I can't leave you here,\" whispered Glennys, shaking her head.\n\n\"You have to, Glennys,\" said Leonard. \"I can't stand the thought of losing both my master and you. Please, put it on and leave.\"\n\n\"Quiet you two,\" warned one of the guards.\n\nLeonard placed the bracelet in Glennys's hand. She took a deep breath, then looked him in the eye and reluctantly slipped it on.\n\nTo both of their amazement, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing at all. Glennys pulled it off her wrist and Leonard took it. What's wrong with this stupid thing? Did it run out of magic? he thought. Slipping it on his own wrist, Leonard transformed, turning from boy to fly in an instant.\n\nOne of the Hellions noticed the movement out of the corner of his eye and guided his horse closer to the cage. \"Master! The boy is gone.\"\n\nSir Gareth spun his horse around and trotted back to the oxcart to see for himself. \"Glennys, where did your friend go?\"\n\n\"He just vanished. One moment he was there and the next, he was gone,\" said Glennys, laying it on thick. \"It was like magic.\"\n\nLeonard, now in his fly form, landed on top of the cage, pausing to collect his thoughts. The bracelet hadn't done a thing when Glennys put it on but did its job the second he tried it. Now he'd vanished and Sir Gareth was on full alert. He had to get that whistle somehow. Then, Leonard got the uncomfortable feeling that he was being looked at. He glanced down and saw Machus staring up at him from the ground. Surely the hound couldn't tell it was him, could it? He stared back at Machus for a few nervous moments before the beast looked away.\n\nSir Gareth rode a short distance away from the cart, scanning the surrounding countryside. Sensing this was his chance, Leonard took off from the cage and flew right toward him.\n\n\"Send three or four of your men in widening circles from this spot,\" said Sir Gareth, waving his hand to chase off the annoying fly buzzing around his head. \"Magic or not, he couldn't have gotten far. Look for any sign\u2014\"\n\nBefore Sir Gareth could finish, Leonard appeared out of thin air and grabbed the small gold whistle from around his neck. Leonard saw a look of shock cloud Sir Gareth's face as he dropped to the ground, but the knight shook that off and pulled his sword from its scabbard. \"Get him! Machus, attack!\"\n\nThe Hellions sprang into action, but Machus stayed put near the oxcart as if still waiting for a command. As the Hellions closed in on Leonard, he realized what Machus was waiting for and blew three times into the whistle.\n\n\"Machus, protect us! Please!\" yelled Leonard.\n\nMachus took only the briefest of moments to savor this command before leaping into action. He sprang forward and clawed one of the Hellions off his horse, leaving deep bloody gashes in the man's chest, before leaping toward another and biting him in two. Several of the Hellions decided they'd seen enough and tried to ride away, but Machus would have none of that. In a blur of breathtaking ferocity, he mauled the men and their horses in an instant, leaving behind their twitching corpses, before moving on to fresh victims.\n\nA black poisoned arrow tore through the air and embedded itself into the Hellhound's left rear leg. The poison had no effect and, with its slavering teeth, the hound ripped the arrow out of its leg before pouncing on the hapless archer\u2014removing his head with a single bite. Sir Gareth was barking orders while trying to keep his spinning horse from panicking and running off.\n\nWith the guards otherwise distracted, Leonard ran over to the cage and undid the straps. He climbed in and helped Glennys to her feet, then the two of them ran off to the relative shelter of a large tree.\n\nThey watched with growing revulsion as the hound did its work.\n\n\"I've never seen a creature kill with such ease,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Make it stop,\" said Glennys, burying her face into Leonard's shoulder.\n\nLeonard thought for a moment, rolling the small gold whistle between his thumb and forefinger. \"I can't. I must let him finish. If any of these devils are left alive, they'll kill us.\"\n\nThe rest of the one-sided \"battle\" was over in mere moments as Machus mauled the remaining Hellions as easily as a cruel child stepping on ants. The foul creature was quite simply unstoppable.\n\nOnly Sir Gareth remained. He buried his spurs deep into the flanks of the stallion. The horse charged forward. Machus charged, too. The beast that was Sir Gareth and the beast that was Machus the Hellhound collided with incredible force. The horse was knocked over backward, and Sir Gareth tumbled to the ground, his armor clattering as he hit the turf and rolled.\n\nMachus was upon Sir Gareth in an instant, clawing at the knight with its fearsome nails and chomping any part it could get a hold of. Sir Gareth was fighting back with all his might, blocking as many of the blows as he could while stabbing and slashing at the beast with his sword. Some of the stabs hit home and Machus cried out in pain and fury. The hound was injured, but not seriously, and redoubled his attack.\n\nA large shadow passed overhead, and Leonard looked up to see a huge unkindness of ravens zoom by, heading for Sir Gareth.\n\n\"His birds,\" said Glennys.\n\nThe ravens swarmed the battling duo, engulfing them. Machus leapt up and swiped at the ravens which were attacking him, knocking dozens out of the air with each blow. Leonard watched in amazement as the remainder of the flock lifted Sir Gareth and carried him off. The ball of ravens paused in midair for a moment and then changed direction and soared toward Leonard and Glennys, slamming into them with enough force to knock Leonard to the ground. Leonard felt like he was swimming in a painful sea of claw, beak, and feather as the birds sunk their talons into his tunic and lifted him off the ground. Glennys was also airborne and was doing her best to fight off the birds which covered her gown like a black feather blanket. For a terrifying moment, the ghastly, bloody visage of Sir Gareth emerged from the back cloud and made a grab for the whistle. Leonard twisted away in a panic and in doing so caused the ravens that held him to lose their grip. He fell roughly to the ground and was immediately swarmed again, but before the birds could grab him, Machus charged the ball and, as quickly as they had attacked, the ravens were gone, along with Sir Gareth... and Glennys!\n\nLeonard jumped up and watched as the flock of ravens disappeared into the distance with Machus chasing after them and barking like a hound on the hunt. So close. He had almost gotten them both away from Sir Gareth. Leonard looked around the field. Dead and dying Hellions lay about like someone had scattered a box of string puppets, crumpled in heaps here and there. The moans of the dying filled the air, as did a low and rumbling growl. Careful not to make any sudden moves, Leonard turned and had his fears confirmed. Machus was walking toward him, head low and ears back\u2014the posture of a monstrous dog ready to attack.\n\nLeonard's hand clasped the gold whistle. He could try to control the Hellhound with it but somehow sensed that he wasn't strong enough to truly dominate the beast. Out of the corner of his eye, Leonard caught some movement and looked over to see Hubert, Piffle... and Sir Francis! They were signaling to him from the trees, making motions to let him know that they were about to attack.\n\nOh, no, thought Leonard, knowing that this would only serve to add more corpses to the battlefield.\n\nLeonard shook his head no. His friends frowned but stood still and waited.\n\nMachus continued his slow and steady advance, and Leonard knew he'd have to think of something fast. It had the look of a creature that only wanted one thing.\n\nOr maybe two, thought Leonard in a rare flash of almost divine inspiration.\n\nHe held up his clenched fist and let the whistle fall from it, dangling from the thin leather strap. The Hellhound stopped in its tracks.\n\n\"Is this what you desire, beast?\"\n\nMachus grunted, unsure of Leonard's intentions.\n\n\"If so, allow me to give it to you with my compliments.\"\n\nThen, in a move that he'd question the sanity of for years to come, Leonard suspended the whistle's strap between his two hands and walked forward. Machus whined and stamped his paws with increasing ferocity for every step that Leonard took. He could feel the beast's hot breath as he drew to within three feet, before pausing and waiting. Leonard raised the necklace and looked away, not wanting to give this diabolical predator any excuse to attack. The Hellhound grew quiet and inched forward, lowering his head.\n\nLeonard drew a deep breath then tied the necklace around the hound's neck. He let go of the strap, and the small gold whistle dangled like a tiny ornament. Machus made a low growl that couldn't be mistaken for anything other than a sigh of relief.\n\n\"Thank you for protecting us.\"\n\nMachus drew closer and sniffed Leonard. The hound's breath was burning hot and horrid, a combination of rotten eggs and vomit. But to Leonard's way of thinking, it was better to be sniffed by a smelly Hellhound than bit in half by one, so he just stood still and tried his best not to breathe.\n\nAfter what seemed like an eternity, Machus stopped sniffing and gave Leonard the biggest, wettest, messiest lick ever given by a dog to a human. Rivers of dog spittle rolled off Leonard's cheek, and he saw the hound wag his stubby tail before bounding off into the forest. Leonard sighed and slowly sank to his knees.\n\nCheers erupted from the trees where Hubert and Sir Francis had been hiding.\n\n\"Brilliant!\" yelled Hubert as he ran toward Leonard.\n\n\"Well done, Leonard,\" added Sir Francis.\n\n\"We have to leave,\" said Leonard, trying to stand. \"That fiend, Sir Gareth, grabbed Glennys.\"\n\nSir Francis pushed him back down and examined him for injuries. \"We will, soon enough, boy. Now sit still. Nothing appears broken, and, aside from a few scrapes and bruises, you seem to be whole.\"\n\n\"How did you do it? That thing looked like it was ready to bite your head off,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"I'm sure it was,\" said Leonard. \"Hellhounds aren't known for their good behavior.\"\n\n\"Hellhound?\" said Hubert, his face turning white.\n\n\"Ooh, Hellhounds is nasty ones!\" said Piffle as she crawled up on Leonard's shoulder. \"They is made for hurting and eternal pain.\"\n\n\"There must be at least a small bit of good old dog left in them,\" said Sir Francis. \"Master Leonard would be covered in blood, and not dog spit, if that wasn't the case. Can you stand?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sir.\" Leonard got to his feet, and Hubert handed over Sir Ronald's sword and shield.\n\n\"Here, it's your turn to lug these about for a while. They're heavy!\"\n\nLeonard stared at the sword for a long moment before taking it and holding it tightly to his chest. \"Thank you, Hubert,\" he said quietly. \"What a good friend you are.\"\n\nLeonard took a deep breath then slung the shield onto his back along with the sword, which he hung from his shoulder by its belt.\n\n\"Where's Helgad and her young? And forgive me, Sir Francis, but what are you doing here?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Helgad's off looking for you and Glennys. She's strong enough to fly now,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"And I was summoned by a certain little creature that thought your merry band could use a little knightly assistance,\" said Sir Francis.\n\n\"You're fast, Piffle,\" said Leonard.\n\nPiffle shrugged. \"I catched a ride on an eaglefriend. You and the Glennys was in a pickle when you was taken, so Piffle decides it's a good idea to go quick to have some help.\"\n\n\"From what young Hubert tells me, this is quite an adventure you've undertaken, Leonard. 'Explore some of the more unusual parts of the kingdom,' indeed!\" said Sir Francis, raising an eyebrow at Hubert. \"I'm not sure how much help I can be to a dragonfriend and tamer of Hellhounds.\"\n\n\"It's good that you're here, Sir Francis,\" said Leonard. \"And I have no doubt you'll be helping more than you wish when we get to Camelot.\"\n\n\"Yes. Camelot\u2014\"\n\nJust then, the trees around them were hit by a strong blast of wind as Helgad swept into the clearing and landed almost on top of Leonard and the others. Vaco and Drarb hopped off her back and advanced toward Sir Francis.\n\n\"What's that knight doing here?\" said Drarb.\n\n\"He's a friend,\" said Leonard.\n\nDrarb and Vaco stopped but continued to glare at Sir Francis who was looking more than a bit nervous.\n\n\"Bow, master's master,\" hissed Piffle. \"Don't you know nothing about dragons?\"\n\n\"What? Oh, of course. Where are my manners?\" said Sir Francis, bowing low. \"I am Sir Francis of the Green Valley, a knight who means dragonkind no harm. And frankly, my fighting skills being what they are, I would not expect to survive for more than a moment in battle with you.\"\n\n\"Ha! I like this one,\" said Vaco.\n\n\"You may rise, Sir Francis,\" said Helgad. \"Welcome.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dragon Mother,\" said Sir Francis, turning toward Piffle. \"A title I use because I see you are with young and because I do indeed know something about dragons.\"\n\n\"Sorry, I is,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"I am glad to see that you are unharmed, Leonard,\" said Helgad. \"Where is the healer?\"\n\nLeonard filled in Helgad and the rest on everything that happened to them after being ambushed by Machus. Sir Francis gasped and Hubert put his hand on Leonard's shoulder when he told him that Sir Ronald had been executed.\n\n\"Leonard, I am so sorry for your loss, and my own,\" said Sir Francis, after a moment. \"Your master was a good man and a great friend.\"\n\n\"Yes Sir, he was both those things and more,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Shall we treat these corpses as meat, Mother?\" said Drarb.\n\n\"Burn them where they lie,\" said Helgad, without even noticing the looks of horror on the faces of the humans. \"Their origin taints the meat of these creatures.\"\n\nVaco and Drarb walked around the clearing and blasted the bodies of Sir Gareth's men with short bursts of dragonfire.\n\n\"A Hellhound. Quite impressive, Leonard,\" said Helgad, settling down with a groan and favoring her wounded side. \"Although we seldom see one, a Hellhound is one of the few creatures we dragons have trouble with, being resistant to flame and all. To defeat one, a dragon must hold it in place and pull off its flesh piece by piece, being careful to make sure the chunks do not touch else the beast becomes whole again.\"\n\nDrarb and Vaco returned from their grisly task and looked at their mother.\n\n\"We have a fair maiden and a handsome dragon to rescue,\" said Helgad. \"Shall we resume our march toward Camelot, glory, and certain death?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "My Name is Murck",
                "text": "The cloud of ravens dropped Glennys on the balcony of Sir Gareth's tower then flew their Master into the main room and set him down on a cushioned bench before swarming back out again. At that point, fully a third of the birds dropped to the ground, dead from exhaustion, while the remainder flew off. Glennys watched her uncle pull off what was left of his armor and let it fall to the ground. He loosened the ties on his heavy cloth shirt, revealing deep scratches left there by the Hellhound.\n\nSir Gareth leaned back and muttered strange words in a harsh tongue that Glennys had never heard before. A strange purple mist poured out of Sir Gareth's mouth and surrounded him, becoming so thick that he vanished. After an intense shriek of pain, the mist itself disappeared. Sir Gareth sat up looking refreshed, all signs of his wounds gone.\n\n\"You're not my uncle, are you?\"\n\n\"Glennys. You're such a smart girl. Why would you ask a stupid question like that?\"\n\n\"Then who are you?\"\n\n\"Much better question!\" said Sir Gareth, pouring himself a cup of wine. \"One worthy of your intelligence. My name is Murck. I am a demon.\"\n\nGlennys stared at Sir Gareth with disbelief.\n\n\"Oh, come now. Recently you must've seen things happen around me that made you start wondering just a little bit? The ravens, for example. Or my Hellions with their strange yellow eyes. The Hellhound. Surely those things gave you pause, did they not?\"\n\n\"But you look and talk like my uncle.\"\n\n\"A benefit of possessing you pitiful creatures is that we demons get to fool everyone. I consumed his soul a little over a year ago. Your uncle was such a weak little man.\" Sir Gareth discarded his torn shirt and put on a new one. \"He was my easiest way into Camelot.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I'm so glad you asked,\" said Sir Gareth, as he pulled up a stool. \"So, we have Camelot, a bright, clean spot in the otherwise muddy cesspool that is humanity. Arthur's kingdom stands as a symbol of all that is good and honorable. A shining city on the hill, so to speak. Well, the dark powers below, heaven curse their names, can't have that, can they? Something to inspire and uplift humanity? No! Something had to be done. This is where old Murck comes in. Mind you, at the time I'm just a low-level Hound Keeper living outside the seventh circle when I hear my masters want to destroy Camelot but haven't quite figured out how to do it. So I think on it, and then it hits me! The best way to destroy such a place, such an ideal, is from within. In this case, quite literally. If I could possess one of the Knights of the Round Table, I would be on the inside. I told the idea to my bosses, and they commanded me to begin immediately! Now the next part was trickier because these knights are excruciatingly pure and chaste and blah blah boring. I couldn't tempt them with the usual stuff in a demon's bag of tricks\u2014women, money, and sweets. But then I found your uncle.\"\n\nSir Gareth steepled his fingers with delight. \"You know the only reason he got a seat at the Round Table, don't you?\"\n\nGlennys sighed. \"He's brother to Queen Guinevere.\"\n\n\"Yes! Little Queenie leaned on her husband to give her brother a job. Perfect! There's Sir Gareth\u2014not really supposed to be here, feeling very insecure about it. I told him that I could make it so people would look upon his face and see the ruler of Camelot. I just didn't tell him that I was the one who would be looking out through his eyes. He bought the lie, we made the deal, and here I am.\"\n\n\"King Arthur never would have stood for this. I suppose that he's not taking a grand tour of his kingdom?\"\n\n\"Very good. He's in a secret dungeon along with the Queen and, by now, the majority of the Knights of the Round Table.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do to us?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking of bloody sacrifices on a dark altar I had imported just for the occasion. That's it over there,\" said Sir Gareth, gesturing toward a dark slab of stone resting in the middle of the room. \"I'll start with you and work my way up to the King. Leave a horrible mess of entrails, sacrileges, and defilements, then let word get out about it. Poof! Camelot goes from shining city on the hill to legendary pit of depravity, just like that. Afterward, I'll continue to spread my mischief throughout the land. I have to say, with complete lack of humility, that even my evil overlord is impressed with my plans.\"\n\nGlennys straightened her back and stood. \"There are still those who will stand against you.\"\n\n\"Who? That fool of a boy and his companions? They're no threat.\"\n\n\"They have dragons with them.\"\n\n\"True, but I have poisoned arrows and a big surprise for anyone that attacks Camelot before I'm ready to destroy it in my own special way. Come, I'll show you.\"\n\nGlennys cautiously followed him over to a table where he lifted the lid on the small brimstone box.\n\n\"Look.\"\n\nGlennys could barely make out the sounds of distant barks and howls. She looked down into the box and almost fainted. \"Hellhounds,\" she whispered. \"Thousands of them.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Return of the Red Herring",
                "text": "Helgad and her young flew ahead to scout the path. No one talked much as they marched toward Camelot, glory, and certain death. When you're doing that sort of thing, Leonard discovered, you don't feel all that chatty. Leonard's thoughts centered on how hopeless everything seemed. His master was dead and here they were, on their way to attack a mighty fortress with an \"army\" consisting of two pages, a knight who was better at growing apples than fighting, an injured dragon and her children, and a brownie who was less than a foot tall. But they had to do it. He had to do it. Impending doom or not, if Leonard didn't at least try to do something to save Glennys and free Mantooth, he wouldn't be able to live with himself. No doubt about it, he had to do it.\n\nDidn't make it any easier.\n\nHubert caught up with Leonard and handed him an apple. Piffle was perched atop his head, eating one, too.\n\n\"Sir Francis brought a sack of them with him,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Thanks. I was hoping to eat at least one more of his apples before I died.\"\n\nHubert furrowed his brow. \"That'll be enough of that talk. No one's going to be doing any dying, at least not on our side. We're going to walk right in there and walk right out without even a hair being knocked out of place. You'll see.\"\n\n\"Well, I have to say that I like your version of how things are going to go better than the one that I've come up with. This is madness, Hubert.\"\n\n\"True. But it's a good kind of madness. The kind of crazy that makes you feel proud of yourself later. Don't worry about sanity at this point. We've got a job to do.\"\n\n\"Look! Stupid red fish is back!\" shouted Piffle.\n\nLeonard and Hubert followed Piffle's gaze to a small pool of water just off the road. Sitting there as plain as day was the Red Herring.\n\n\"Hello there, travelers.\"\n\n\"Just ignore him,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Not a problem,\" sniffed Leonard. They both kept their eyes forward and continued walking.\n\n\"I said, hello there!\" said the Red Herring.\n\nSir Francis caught up with them. \"Boys, am I imagining things, or did that red fish just talk to us?\"\n\n\"No, Sir, you're not imagining things,\" said Leonard. \"He's a talking fish, all right. We're ignoring him as we've run into him before. He's a troublemaker.\"\n\n\"And a thief!\" shouted Hubert in the direction of the fish.\n\n\"I am not a thief!\" said the Red Herring. \"May I remind you that your bag of supplies was left for you safe and sound on the other side of a very dangerous void populated by brigands, goblins, and monsters?\"\n\nLeonard stopped. \"Wait. Are you trying to tell us that you only took all of our food because you were trying to keep it safe for us?\"\n\n\"Yes! You might have been robbed of it otherwise.\"\n\n\"Ha! That's rich. You're a thief and a liar!\"\n\n\"Was anything missing?\" said the Red Herring.\n\n\"An apple!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"All right. I admit that I took an apple. One apple. Sir Francis's crop has always been hard for me to resist.\"\n\n\"You've partaken of my harvest?\"\n\n\"Countless times, good knight.\"\n\nSir Francis's eyes narrowed. \"Who are you, Sir?\" he said, gripping the hilt of his sword. \"Come, reveal your true nature.\"\n\n\"If you insist.\"\n\nThe Red Herring walked out of the water, his body changing with each step it took. By the time he reached Leonard and the others, the fish had transformed into an old man clad in rags. The very peddler Leonard had given an apple to near Camelot.\n\n\"You!\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes. Me,\" said the peddler.\n\n\"What kind of man can transform himself into a fish?\" said Sir Francis.\n\n\"No man can,\" said Hubert, a note of awe creeping into his voice. \"But a wizard can.\"\n\n\"Very astute, Master Hubert,\" said the peddler with a bow. \"Merlin of Camelot, at your service.\"\n\nSir Francis dropped to his knees and cast his eyes downward. \"Oh, get up, Francis,\" said Merlin. \"I'm not of nobility, so there's no need to kneel.\"\n\nLeonard shook the baffled expression off his face and frowned. \"How come you didn't tell us you were Merlin? I mean, there you were annoying us as a talking red fish character and acting like an old fool of a peddler.\"\n\n\"I had matters that needed attending and didn't want it known yet that I was free.\"\n\n\"Free?\"\n\nMerlin sighed and gritted his teeth. Though it was only a brief flash of anger, there was immense power behind it, and many in the group took an involuntary step backward.\n\n\"Through my own stupidity, I was imprisoned by the hag Morgana for nearly ten years,\" said Merlin. \"She kept me in a pepper box on her kitchen shelf.\"\n\n\"Oh my!\" said Sir Francis. \"How did that happen?\"\n\n\"Word had come to me that my lifelong foe Morgana Le Fay had developed a weakness for figgy pudding, eating it on a daily, sometimes twice daily, basis. Sensing an opportunity to rid the land of this blight of a woman once and for all, I devised an irresistible batch of poisoned pudding and sought to sneak it into her home in the guise of a mouse. What I didn't realize, hence my calling myself stupid, was that the whole thing was a trap. I stole into her kitchen in the dead of night, and just as I was about to slip the pudding into her pantry, I was snared by a magical mousetrap of her own invention and tossed unceremoniously into the aforementioned pepper box prison. There I languished for ten years until, as chance would have it, a real mouse knocked the box off the shelf. The top popped off and I was free.\"\n\n\"Hooray for mouses!\" shouted Piffle, clapping her hands with glee.\n\n\"I soon discovered that the world had gone sour in my absence. Arthur and his Queen were missing, and a new dark power was in charge at Camelot.\" The old wizard stood and neatened his tattered robes. \"And so here we are,\" said Merlin, sniffing his sleeve. \"I still stink of pepper, and we march on Camelot to set things right.\"\n\n\"We?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Of course, my boy, we,\" said Merlin.\n\nLeonard and the others brightened at this news. Just then, Helgad returned from scouting with Drarb and Vaco.\n\n\"Greetings, Merlin,\" said Helgad in the casual tone of one saying hello to a neighbor who had just come back from a short vacation. \"Were you at rest or imprisoned?\"\n\n\"The latter. Morgana.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nMerlin and Helgad exchanged slight bows.\n\n\"I am grateful to have you with us on this little adventure,\" said Helgad. \"What plan has your cunning mind devised for us?\"\n\n\"I have no plan and nod to one among us who has a much better idea of what to do,\" said Merlin.\n\nMerlin looked at Leonard and smiled. Leonard smiled back and continued smiling until he realized that Merlin had an expectant look in his eyes. The others, including Helgad and Sir Francis, followed Merlin's gaze, and soon the entire party was staring at Leonard, waiting to hear his plan.\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You,\" said Merlin, still smiling. \"I understand you have a knack for plan making.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" barked Hubert before quickly covering his mouth.\n\nConsidering his history of failed planning, Leonard had no idea why Merlin thought that he had a much better idea of what to do and was about to tell him so when his mouth started moving on its own. \"Er, yes, well, I was thinking that\u2026 Helgad, Drarb, and Vaco could attack the castle directly and distract the defenders while Merlin, Hubert, Sir Francis, and I slip into the dungeon and free Mantooth. Then, um, Mantooth could join his family in their attack, and the rest of us could find Glennys\u2026and\u2026then we all leave.\"\n\nLeonard was surprised at how easily the words had come out of his mouth and even more surprised that no one was laughing at his improvised battle plan. Merlin startled everyone by clapping his hands.\n\n\"An excellent plan, Leonard, Page of Sir Ronald of the Green Valley! Let us be on our way to Camelot!\" said Merlin, pointing westward.\n\nRelieved to be moving again, Leonard and the others fell in behind Merlin. Leonard tried to push all thoughts of horrible things happening to Glennys out of his mind and just concentrate on getting to Camelot as quickly as possible. Helgad had taken to the air again, but Vaco and Drarb trotted alongside the humans.\n\n\"This wizard has a strange smell to him,\" said Vaco.\n\n\"Yes, he smells of pepper and fruit. Apples, I think,\" said Drarb.\n\nHubert caught up to Leonard. \"Who knew you had the makings of a warrior? Coming up with battle plans in the blink of an eye.\"\n\n\"Certainly not me,\" said Leonard who just then had been thinking about how well his other brilliant plans had gone. \"I must say it's a little disturbing how easily these plans come to me.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" said Hubert.\n\nThey walked along for several hours through clusters of small family farms mixed in with bits of dense forest, passing only a farmer, woodsman, or merchant here and there. Naturally, the poor peasants would shriek and run off at the sight of the dragons, and Leonard saw this pleased Drarb and Vaco.\n\nWhile taking a quick rest break near a small waterfall, Leonard took the magical bracelet out of his pouch and idly rolled it around in his hands.\n\n\"Let me see the that,\" said Merlin, sitting down next to him.\n\nLeonard reluctantly handed over the bracelet.\n\n\"I turn into a fly when I put it on,\" said Leonard, glancing at the wizard to see if he was impressed.\n\n\"I know,\" said Merlin. \"I made it.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you!\"\n\nMerlin shrugged. \"It's true. I crafted it for a Welsh witch by the name of\u2014oh bother, I can't remember her name, one of the hazards of getting old, I suppose. I do recall she used it to spy for her chieftain\u2014the proverbial fly on the wall. Never expected to see it again, though. I would imagine you have an interesting tale to tell about how you came to possess it, eh?\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Leonard, who told a quick version of his experience with the Eater of the Dead.\n\n\"Interesting,\" said Merlin.\n\n\"He also told me that you were the one who set the whole thing up, back in the days of the Droolids.\"\n\n\"Druids. Yes, that was me. Those days seem like a thousand years ago.\"\n\n\"Weren't they?\"\n\n\"Hmm? Oh yes, I suppose they were. You were lucky to get out of Eater's cavern alive, Leonard. The bracelet doesn't work for everyone, you know.\"\n\n\"I know. I gave it to Glennys so she could escape from Sir Gareth, but when she put it on, nothing happened. Why does it work for me and not others?\"\n\n\"I'm not certain. I will warn you, though, not to wear it unless absolutely necessary. For obvious reasons, the wearer of this bracelet is quite vulnerable when in fly form.\"\n\n\"Yes, I was almost swallowed by Piffle. Fortunately, I forget that I have it most of the time,\" said Leonard, slipping the bracelet back into the pouch. \"I think my mind has some difficulty accepting that such a transformation is even possible.\"\n\n\"That is a good thing,\" said Merlin, with a smile that turned into a frown when he looked skyward. Leonard looked up and saw a raven circling high overhead.\n\n\"Is that one of his?\" said Leonard.\n\nMerlin twitched his finger and the bird exploded in midair, its feathers twirling slowly toward the ground. \"Not anymore.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Several hours later, they paused on the crest of a hill. Camelot, with its gleaming spires and long pennants blowing lazily in the breeze, stood in the distance.\n\n\"There it is,\" sighed Leonard.\n\nHelgad landed next to them and hunched down. \"I will be spotted soon. We dragons have never been particularly good at hiding ourselves.\"\n\n\"Because we've never had to hide ourselves,\" said Drarb, rubbing against her mother like a kitten.\n\n\"Let us begin. I have an itch to kill that needs scratching,\" said Vaco.\n\n\"Leonard?\" said Merlin. \"Your plan, please.\"\n\n\"Well, I think Helgad should give us some time to get into the castle,\" said Leonard, glancing at the sun. \"Maybe begin your attack at midday? Oh, and please don't kill any innocent people. Just the evil and nasty ones. Please.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" sighed Helgad. \"Drarb, Vaco, come and let us be off.\"\n\nThe young dragons climbed onto their mother's back, and Helgad sprang into the air.\n\n\"Piffle, I think it would be a good idea if you went ahead and found out if Mantooth is still in the dungeon,\" said Leonard. \"And where Sir Gareth is keeping Glennys.\"\n\n\"Right! Piffle is good at secret spying work!\"\n\nPiffle scampered off like a rabbit and was quickly gone from view.\n\n\"How are we going to get into the castle?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"The boy's right,\" said Sir Francis. \"I would imagine all of the entrances are being watched closely.\"\n\n\"I believe I can help with that,\" said Merlin, unslinging his peddler's sack. The old wizard reached in and began pulling out black cloaks and breeches, handing them to Leonard and the others.\n\n\"Are these\u2014?\" began Hubert.\n\n\"Hellion garb,\" said Leonard, sniffing. \"I can smell the brimstone.\"\n\n\"Master Merlin,\" said Sir Francis, slipping a cloak over his head. \"If you have the power to, uh, liberate these garments from their former owners, why can you not use that power to free Arthur?\"\n\n\"The ones that wore these cloaks were once men and so are subject to the magic of this world. I have no power over one from the netherworld.\"\n\n\"No power?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"None at all. His foul aura saturates the very stones of the entire castle and protects him. He is virtually untouchable.\"\n\n\"I don't like the sound of that,\" said Hubert. \"How are we to defeat him then?\"\n\n\"I'm working on that, young master. So, is everyone ready?\" said Merlin.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Leonard, stretching out his hand. \"For Arthur, Glennys, and Mantooth.\"\n\nThe others joined in, forming a circle as they clasped their hands on top of his. \"For Arthur, Glennys, and Mantooth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "It took Leonard and his companions a little under a half hour to reach a low stone wall near Camelot's main gate. Chancing quick glances, Leonard could see the gate was under heavy guard by Sir Gareth's Hellions.\n\n\"This does not bode well,\" said Sir Francis. \"Camelot's finest should be on guard, not this unsavory lot.\"\n\n\"I think we'll find easier access through the kitchens\u2014less chance of being stopped and questioned,\" said Merlin. \"Put your hoods on\u2014it's time we assumed our gloomy identities.\"\n\nThey were stopped only once as they made their way toward the castle kitchens. A guard challenged them from his post on one of the smaller towers and, fortunately, Merlin's counter-call of \"All hail our dark master,\" appeared to be a proper response.\n\n\"Ah, there is Ham!\" said Merlin.\n\nLeonard's Stable Master boss stood at the small door to the stables, glowering at them. As they drew closer, Leonard saw the big man stiffen and heft a large wooden mallet leaning against the doorway. \"My stables are closed to your kind,\" growled Ham.\n\nMerlin threw back his hood and Leonard saw Ham's chin drop like a stone into water.\n\n\"Are you sure about that, Ham?\" said Merlin.\n\n\"Mr. Merlin!\" Ham dropped the mallet and scooped up Merlin into a massive bear hug. Leonard and the others winced as they heard the old man's back pop repeatedly, but Merlin didn't seem bothered in the least.\n\n\"Hello, Ham!\" said Merlin when Ham finally put him down.\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Merlin, you've been sorely missed.\" Ham leaned forward and lowered his voice. \"This place ain't nearly as good and friendly as the last time you was here. It's full of even more strange and wicked folk!\" Ham glanced around nervously, then pulled them all inside the cramped hallway and slammed the door shut.\n\n\"We know,\" said Leonard, pushing back his hood. \"That's why we're here.\"\n\n\"Leonard! You too? What in the world\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly, the hallway rocked as if a giant were kicking the castle with iron-tipped boots. Stone dust rained down on them from the ceiling.\n\n\"What in blazes was that?\" said Ham.\n\n\"The dragons are attacking,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Dragons! As if we don't have enough troubles!\"\n\n\"No, these are good dragons,\" said Leonard.\n\nAs they raced down the hallway, Leonard filled Ham in on what was going on with Helgad and why they were there.\n\n\"Dragons attacking Camelot! In all my days, I never thought I'd see something like that happening.\"\n\n\"It would be helpful if you would spread the word that our friends should not help too vigorously with the defense. Thankfully, the dragons aren't really trying to hurt anyone,\" said Merlin. \"Now, I must find the Knights of the Round Table and inform them as to what is going on.\"\n\nMerlin was stopped by Ham's large hand on his shoulder. \"The Sirs are all gone, Mr. Merlin. Every one of them, except that lout Sir Gareth, has disappeared. They was here one minute, and the next they're gone. More and more of them nasty, yellow-eyed fellows in black have been showing up, too.\"\n\nThe group emerged from the hallway and moved across the courtyard of the back stables. Leonard glanced up and was just able to catch a glimpse of Helgad as she soared around the battlements, sending out blasts of dragonfire and knocking heavy stones off the walls and sending them crashing to the ground below.\n\n\"We must hurry,\" said Merlin. \"The enemy will start fighting back soon.\"\n\nPiffle startled Hubert when she jumped on his head as they passed a small tree. \"They is down there in the dark hole, all right. Piffle seen the dragon and the knight with her own eyes! Now I is off to find the Glennys!\"\n\nBefore Leonard could say anything, Piffle scampered up a wall and vanished.\n\nThey made their way through the castle's back passages as quietly as they could until, at last, they came upon the steps that led down to the dungeon. Gert and Vincent's two sons were standing guard, watching the skies nervously.\n\n\"Are they going to let us pass?\" said Hubert. \"I mean, they're still on duty, aren't they?\"\n\n\"I'll handle this,\" said Ham, stepping out of the shadows. \"Hello, Jack. Hello, Dominic.\"\n\nThe guards swung around and leveled their spears but quickly relaxed when they saw it was Leonard. \"We're being attacked!\" said Jack.\n\n\"By a dragon!\" said Dominic.\n\n\"That's right. It's so we can sneak into the dungeon and release everyone and everything in it,\" said Ham.\n\n\"Why would you be wanting to do that, Ham?\" said Jack.\n\nHam gestured for Leonard to approach. \"The boy's got the answers to your question.\" Most of the others joined Leonard as he quickly filled the brothers in on what was really going on in Camelot and why he needed to empty out the dungeon. Jack and Dominic were astounded, to say the least, at Leonard's tale but no more so than when Merlin revealed himself at the end of it. The two brothers gasped at the sight of him before quickly dropping to one knee.\n\n\"Will you stop that?\" said Merlin, pulling both to their feet with a surprising show of strength. \"The real question is, are you with us?\"\n\nJack glanced at Dominic and the brothers shrugged. \"Of course we are,\" said Jack. \"We'll keep watch for you while you do what needs doing.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Merlin, patting them both on their shoulders.\n\n\"They've brought out the archers,\" said Sir Francis.\n\nAll eyes turned toward the battlements. Leonard could see a squad of black-clad archers taking up positions. Helgad swept overhead and blasted some dragonfire in their direction, and as the archers ducked, her two young jumped off her back into their midst, chewing and clawing their way through every last Hellion.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" said Merlin.\n\nThey hurried down the curving steps to the dungeon and came face to face with the jailer Vincent, a sword in his hand.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" said Vincent, looking at the faces before him. \"Ham? Leonard?\"\n\n\"Hello, Vincent,\" said Leonard, unslinging Sir Ronald's sword and shield from his back and setting it to the side.\n\nA look of amazement took hold of Vincent's features when he saw Merlin. \"Master Merlin?\" Vincent dropped the sword and embraced him.\n\n\"Good to see you again, too, old friend,\" said Merlin. \"But I'm afraid we have no time to catch up. I need the keys to your jail cells, please.\"\n\nMerlin extended his hand. Vincent's own hand drifted to his belt where his ring of jailer's keys hung on a rounded metal hook.\n\n\"My keys? You aim to free some prisoners, then?\"\n\n\"Most of them.\"\n\nVincent's eyes darted around the room, touching on the face of each of Merlin's party. \"I will not give you my keys.\"\n\n\"Now, Vincent,\" said Ham. \"Mr. Merlin asked politely. If you don't want to have me take them\u2014\"\n\n\"Hush, Ham, ya big sausage,\" said Vincent. \"If Master Merlin wants the prisoners freed from my cells, then I'm going to be the one to do it. I am the Dungeon Master, after all.\"\n\nMerlin bowed. \"Of course, Dungeon Master.\"\n\n\"Wait till Gert hears about this! I never thought I'd live to see the day when these poor men was given their freedom, and I know the same goes for her! Follow me!\"\n\nLeonard sighed and lagged behind the others. What was to be a glorious moment had lost a lot of its shine when he'd learned that Sir Ronald was dead. Although glad these other good knights were being set free, it didn't make up for his inability to free his own master.\n\nI'm sorry, Sir Ronald, thought Leonard. I've failed you.\n\nLeonard sat on a small barrel and watched as the old jailer went from cell to cell, releasing the prisoners. Almost to a man, they looked first to Vincent and then to the others with wide-eyed amazement, as if expecting to be told that it was all a joke. But once convinced that they were truly free, some laughed and leapt for joy while others sank to their knees and wept.\n\nFinally, Vincent arrived at Sir Ronald's cell, what had been Sir Ronald's cell, and began to unlock it. Leonard was about to shout, \"There's no one in there!\" when he heard Sir Francis call out, \"My goodness, you're alive!\" Leonard leapt to his feet and sprinted down the hallway, skidding to a stop in front of the cell. Sitting there, alive as can be, was Sir Ronald. Leonard and Sir Ronald stared at each other for a moment before Leonard rushed forward and hugged Sir Ronald with all his might.\n\n\"Sir Gareth said you'd been executed,\" sobbed Leonard. \"That he'd had you put to death because of me!\"\n\n\"What? Executed? No, lad, I assure you I'm quite alive,\" said Sir Ronald, patting Leonard on the back.\n\n\"The last person executed was a murderous brigand by the name of\u2014\" Vincent paused as a realization dawned on him. \"Roland.\"\n\n\"It appears that the fiend Sir Gareth was either tormenting you, Leonard, or your master's life was saved by a case of mistaken identity,\" said Sir Francis.\n\n\"I am grateful for this blessing for whatever reason it came,\" said Leonard, hugging Sir Ronald even tighter.\n\nSir Ronald looked around at the others. \"Francis, Hubert, and my other dungeon mates, too. If all of you are standing here, that must mean that something has gone wrong upstairs.\"\n\n\"Indeed it has, good knight,\" said Merlin.\n\nSir Ronald's eyes widened at the sight of Merlin who walked to the center of the dungeon hallway and held his hands in the air.\n\n\"Your attention, please,\" said Merlin.\n\nThe dungeon went quiet as the freed prisoners, numbering around twenty, gathered around.\n\n\"What I am about to tell you will not make much sense, but I assure you that it is true,\" said Merlin. \"The man you know as Sir Gareth is, in fact, a vile demon from the depths of Hell.\"\n\nIntense conversation broke out, and Merlin had to signal for silence again.\n\n\"He has imprisoned King Arthur and his Queen and all the Knights of the Round Table. His Hellions, the yellow-eyed men, were brought up from below to serve him.\"\n\n\"I knew it!\" said Sir Charles, a knight who was as wide as he was tall. \"There was always an unsavory look about that bunch.\"\n\nThe others murmured in agreement.\n\n\"Right now, a lone dragon and her young are attacking the castle, putting their lives at risk so that we might slip down here and free you. Is there any among you who would come to her aid so that things might be set right again at Camelot?\" said Merlin.\n\n\"Help a dragon that's attacking the castle?\" said Sir William, a knight with a crooked nose.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe former prisoners looked at each other before turning back toward Merlin.\n\n\"Of course we will,\" said Sir Harold, an older knight who, judging by the length of his beard, had been in the dungeon the longest. \"But we'll need weapons.\"\n\n\"Not a problem!\" said Vincent, who waddled down the hall and unlocked a door. \"There's a stash of weapons stored here. They're old, most of them, but I expect an old sword or spear will do the same amount of damage as a new one.\"\n\nVincent swung the door open, and Leonard could see a pile of weapons reflecting the light of Vincent's torch. Hubert reached down and picked up a short sword identical to the ones favored by the Roman legions. \"Yup, these are old, all right.\"\n\nThe freed knights made quick work of distributing the antique weaponry and armor. Leonard selected a chainmail hood and a helmet with a nose guard for himself before retrieving Sir Ronald's sword and shield.\n\n\"My sword! You were able to save it! And my shield, too! Leonard, I can't tell you how much this means to me.\"\n\n\"Show your thanks by wielding that sword for Arthur,\" said Merlin. \"Make haste and show no mercy.\"\n\n\"For Arthur!\" shouted Sir Ronald.\n\n\"For Arthur!\" shouted the other knights as they stormed out of the dungeon.\n\nAfter Sir Ronald, Ham, and Sir Francis had left with the rest of the freed prisoners, Leonard, his mood greatly improved by finding his master alive, pointed in the direction of Mantooth's cell. \"The dragon, too.\"\n\n\"The dragon?\" said Vincent, looking to Merlin.\n\n\"Yes, Dungeon Master,\" said Merlin. \"Release the dragon, too.\"\n\nThe old Dungeon Master shrugged and shuffled down the hallway to the far end of the dungeon. \"I'll unlock the cell door for you, but I'll not be staying for the part where you let the beast go.\"\n\nThey reached Mantooth's cell, and Leonard was struck by the wild rage that filled the dragon's eyes. Mantooth was snorting and pushing up against the heavy chains that bound him.\n\n\"He senses another dragon is near,\" whispered Merlin. \"Leonard, speak to him and calm him down.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You, dragonfriend.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\" Leonard cleared his throat. \"Mantooth, it's me, Leonard.\"\n\n\"A dragon is near. I feel it.\"\n\n\"It's Helgad.\"\n\nMantooth stopped seething and looked into Leonard's eyes, an act that sent chills down the boy's back.\n\n\"Helgad lives?\"\n\n\"Yes, she does.\"\n\nWith a single blink, all the blind rage vanished from Mantooth's eyes. \"What are you waiting for, boy? Get me out of these chains.\"\n\nVincent unlocked the cell door then ran back out, sprinting down the hallway as fast as his old legs could carry him.\n\nLeonard and Hubert went into the cell and undid the locks and chains that bound Mantooth.\n\n\"I smell apples. Is that you, Merlin?\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"It is. I have a request to make of you, Mantooth,\" said Merlin, stepping forward.\n\n\"Speak it,\" said Mantooth, shaking a chain off his neck.\n\n\"I ask that you continue the attack on Camelot long enough for Leonard to rescue a maiden and for me to find the King.\"\n\n\"That won't be a problem. I am filled with much rage and desire to inflict it upon my enemies.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Merlin,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Merlin, pausing at the door. \"I believe we shall all need plenty of that.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Reunion",
                "text": "There, that should do it,\" said Leonard as he undid the last lock that held the dragon in place. \"Watch out for the arrows, Mantooth. There's poison on them that's lethal to dragons.\"\n\nMantooth snorted then bolted down the hallway and up the dungeon stairs. Leonard heard his deafening roar answered by three other ones and smiled.\n\n\"I guess that's what dragons sound like when they're happy,\" said Hubert."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Topside, Mantooth charged out of the dungeon stairwell, knocking Jack and Dominic to the ground with the force of his passing. Once free, he immediately launched himself, taking wing and calling out with a deafening roar. Mantooth's call was answered from the far side of the castle grounds by three other roars. Mantooth banked in their direction and landed in a large courtyard where Helgad, Drarb, and Vaco were making short work of a squad of Hellions who had foolishly decided to make a stand against the dragons. Head down and ears folded back, Mantooth slowly made his way toward Helgad who stood tall and proud. Mantooth stopped a few feet away and, watched closely by Drarb and Vaco, lowered his head even further in an act of obvious submission.\n\n\"I was under the impression you were dead,\" said Helgad, an imperious note in her voice.\n\n\"As I was about you,\" said Mantooth, looking up at his mate.\n\nThey stared at each other for the briefest of moments before faint smiles began to spread across their faces.\n\n\"I am glad we were both wrong,\" said Helgad.\n\n\"As am I,\" said Mantooth, rising and rushing toward Helgad. The two fully grown dragons slammed into each other and coiled their necks together.\n\n\"Let us never be apart again,\" hissed Helgad.\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Mantooth, uncoiling himself, to look at Vaco and Drarb. The two young dragons bowed.\n\n\"Dragon Father, we are pleased that you are free. I am Drarb and my brother's name is Vaco.\"\n\nMantooth returned their bow. \"The pleasure is mine, Drarb.\" He dropped his head a playfully nuzzled with Drarb and Vaco. At the same time, a Hellion's arrow bounced off a scale on his neck and dropped at his feet. Mantooth looked to Helgad, smiling. \"Shall we?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" said Helgad. \"We shall.\"\n\nBack down in the dungeon, Leonard and Hubert were making their way toward the stairs when they ran into Piffle.\n\n\"The Leonard! The Leonard!\" cried Piffle with a note of panic in her voice.\n\n\"What is it, Piffle?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"I seen him!\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Calm down. Seen who?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"The dark evil bad knight! I seen him just now in the tower. He's gonna kill the fair maid. He's gonna kill the Glennys!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Too Late?\n\nL eonard could barely contain the panic that gripped him as he ran up the dungeon steps. He felt like he had an iron band tightening around his chest, and the only thing that kept him moving forward was the flicker of hope that he might be able to save Glennys. Dear, precious, sometimes really annoying Glennys. Hubert was just behind him, huffing and puffing a little more than Leonard.\n\n\"Hurry, hurry!\" urged Piffle from her perch on Hubert's shoulder.\n\nLeonard and Hubert ran across the courtyard and paused in an archway leading toward the center of the castle. They ducked back into the shadows just as a pair of Hellions ran past and were hit by a blast of dragonfire. The boys winced when the Hellions shrieked and collapsed into ashes. Leonard stepped out of the archway and was able to catch a glimpse of Mantooth before the dragon disappeared behind the stone walls of the central hall.\n\n\"Come on.\"\n\nThey started through the archway but stopped when Piffle pulled hard on Hubert's hair.\n\n\"Ow!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"No, the Leonard! Go that way,\" said Piffle, pointing down a small side alley. \"Straight through the middle is full of bad men. Piffle seen them when she's running over rooftops. Go the side way!\"\n\n\"But I don't know the side way.\"\n\n\"Piffle shows you. Go that way! Now!\"\n\nLeonard took a deep breath and then bolted down the small alley. It was long and narrow with barely enough space for two grown men to walk side by side. When they emerged at the other end, they found themselves in the courtyard of the back stable.\n\n\"See? Tower is just on the other side of the wall,\" said Piffle.\n\n\"Right, I know my way from here,\" said Leonard.\n\nThey stepped into the courtyard and were immediately surrounded by Hellions.\n\n\"Just where do you think you two are going?\" said their pinch-faced leader.\n\n\"We've got business in the tower\u2026with Sir Gareth,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Oh, do you now?\" said Pinchface.\n\n\"They're lying,\" said a boney Hellion. \"I can see it in their eyes. There's something extra in that skinny one's, too.\"\n\nPinchface leaned forward and squinted. \"You're right.\"\n\nGrinning, the evil men grasped their curved swords in unison.\n\nLeonard drew the Roman short sword from his belt while Hubert produced an even shorter hunting knife.\n\n\"That's all you have?\" hissed Leonard.\n\n\"I didn't think to grab a weapon,\" said Hubert. \"Besides, yours isn't much better.\"\n\n\"You're the one who gave it to me!\"\n\nThe two pages went back to back, watching the Hellions as they circled like a wolf pack. Since the reach of the swordsman can often determine the length of a fight, it didn't look like this battle would last long.\n\n\"We don't have time for this,\" whispered Leonard over his shoulder. \"Get ready to charge on my count.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Hubert, looking at his hunting knife with skepticism. \"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"One, two\u2014\"\n\nBefore \"three\" could come out of Leonard's mouth, a heavy wooden mallet swept through the air and took out two of the Hellions with bone-shattering finality. Leonard, Hubert, and the remaining attackers looked with surprise as a near giant of a man stepped into their midst. It was Ham, the Stable Master, and he was looking none too pleased.\n\n\"Gentlemen, there will be no killing in my stables,\" said Ham. \"Unless I'm the one who's doing it!\"\n\nHam dropped the mallet and surged forward, grabbing two more of the Hellions and slamming their heads together with such force that left no doubt that they wouldn't be getting up again. The remaining Hellions fell back while Leonard and Hubert stood frozen in place.\n\n\"Well? Go on, off with you!\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert ran across the back stable courtyard. A couple of Hellions went after them, but Ham blocked their path. \"Oh, no you don't, laddies, your business is with me.\"\n\nLeonard, Hubert, and Piffle made it to the other side of the courtyard and looked back to see that several of the Hellions had jumped onto Ham's back. One by one he pulled them off and delivered jaw-crushing punches to the face, laughing the whole time.\n\n\"I'm glad he's on our side,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Me too,\" said Hubert, turning to discover that Leonard was sprinting toward Sir Gareth's tower with Piffle on his shoulder.\n\n\"Come on, slow shoes!\" shouted Piffle as they reached the base of the tower.\n\nThey made their way to the tower door.\n\n\"You go save the Glennys, Piffle's gonna goes and gets some more help.\" She hopped off Leonard's shoulder and scrambled off toward the front of the castle.\n\nLeonard glanced at Hubert and bit his lip. \"Listen to me, there's no reason for you to go up there, too. He's dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And I'll not have you in harm's way when it isn't at all necessary. I think you should wait here.\"\n\nHubert stared at Leonard for a moment. \"Nice speech, fool. Are you finished?\"\n\n\"Yes, friend of fool.\"\n\n\"Good. Let's go.\"\n\nThe two friends allowed themselves a quick smile before running through the tower door. They ran up the narrow stairs that circled around the inside of the tower walls. Each time they passed one of the small archer's windows, Leonard was able to catch a glimpse of the chaos spreading throughout Camelot. Smoke and the sounds of battle filled the air. One window revealed Helgad and Mantooth dropping boulders on the parapets. A few steps farther, another window showed the freed knights in their assorted hand-me-down armor doing battle with a large band of Hellions. Leonard thought he caught a glimpse of Sir Ronald but couldn't be sure.\n\nWhen they reached the landing at the top of the stairs, Leonard held up his hand. He peeked around the corner and, sure enough, two Hellions stood on either side of a heavy wooden door.\n\n\"I don't think we'll have any luck talking our way past those two,\" whispered Hubert. \"I wish we had that Ham fellow with us.\"\n\nLeonard closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He had to think of something. He had to get past the guards before it was too late for Glennys. But how?\n\n\"Why don't you use your fly bracelet?\"\n\nLeonard looked at his friend in astonishment, then slapped himself hard on the forehead.\n\n\"What? Can't I have a good idea every now and then, too?\"\n\n\"That wasn't a good idea. It was brilliant. The better question would be, 'Why do I keep forgetting about the bracelet?'\"\n\nHubert shrugged. \"Like you said, maybe you're forgetting on purpose.\"\n\n\"Yeah, maybe. Does make me feel stupid, though.\"\n\nLeonard slipped on the magical bracelet and transformed. He circled above the guards' heads, looking for a way to get into the room on the other side of the door. Leonard was reminded again that it was hard getting used to looking at things with the eyes of a housefly. With everything fractured into a thousand tiny images, it was difficult to focus on anything. Only large and obvious objects were easy to identify, and Leonard decided that there weren't any large and obvious ways to get on the other side of the door. It was heavy and thick and probably locked.\n\nLocked? That's it! thought Leonard as he flew down to the door latch and climbed into the keyhole. What he saw when he peeked out on the other side sent a shiver through his housefly body. Lying strapped to a large black slab of stone was Glennys. For the shortest of moments, a bolt of fear shot through Leonard's tiny fly heart, for Glennys lay motionless on the slab. Was he too late? Then, much to his relief, Glennys groaned and pulled at the straps that held her down.\n\n\"Let me go, you beast!\"\n\nLeonard's fly eyes, not so good at examining small things but exceptionally good at detecting motion, picked up movement out on the tower's balcony as Sir Gareth, or whatever he had become, stepped into the room.\n\n\"You know, there's quite an amazing battle going on out there,\" said Sir Gareth. \"There are dragons, and my Hellions, and all manner of castle folk waging war on each other. It's enough to make an old demon's chest swell with pride. It's the perfect beginning to the lancing of this carbuncle known as Camelot.\"\n\nGlennys tried to pull away when Sir Gareth stroked her cheek but could only move her head a little because of the straps.\n\n\"And by the way, where I come from, it's a compliment to call someone a beast.\"\n\n\"I hate you.\"\n\n\"Isn't that nice? I hate you, too.\"\n\nSir Gareth picked up a dagger, the likes of which Leonard had never seen before. Its handle was golden and intricately carved with a few precious stones set in it. But as spectacular as the handle was, the blade was even more so. Roughly a foot long, it started out about an inch wide at the hilt then narrowed severely toward the tip of the blade. Its most unusual feature was the color or, more accurately, the complete lack of color. It wasn't black, for that would be a bright and cheery color compared to what Leonard was now looking at. The blade was so dark, it appeared to be more of a dagger-shaped hole in the air than a solid object: whatever light hit it vanished completely. Leonard had to force himself to look away from the dagger for fear that it would pull him body and soul into the void contained within its dark outline.\n\n\"Now, shall we begin the corruption of your lovely form? The defilement of a comely young lass such as yourself on a dark altar in the center of Camelot is bound to set tongues a-wagging.\"\n\nSir Gareth brought the blade close to Glennys's face, and Leonard could see that she, too, was having a hard time looking away from it.\n\n\"Lovely, isn't it? It's called the 'Blade of Despair.' Forged in the coldest depths of Hell, its purpose is to first cause a person to lose all hope before sucking out their soul. Oh, plus it's not very sharp and hurts like the dickens when you're stabbed by it. Prolonged physical suffering, eternal misery, and torment\u2014it's absolutely perfect!\"\n\nClose your eyes, Glennys! thought Leonard, and to his amazement, she did just that.\n\nLeonard's mind raced. He had to do something, but what?\n\nSuddenly, he was being pushed forward out of the keyhole. Turning his little fly head, Leonard could see it was something big and metal doing the pushing. The key! It rattled against the inside of the lock, and he was just able to get out of the way before the door was pushed open. Leonard landed on the wall and watched as one of the Hellion guards stepped inside, looking very much like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world than Sir Gareth's room.\n\n\"What is it?\" snapped Sir Gareth. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\"Begging Your Lordship's pardon,\" said the Hellion, pulling Hubert in by the scruff of his neck. \"But we found him lurking in the hallway.\"\n\nHubert gasped when he saw Glennys bound to the dark slab. \"Glennys!\"\n\n\"Hubert!\"\n\n\"Shut up, you.\" The guard slapped Hubert with much more force than was necessary, knocking him to the floor. The corners of Sir Gareth's mouth bent themselves into a slight smile as he glanced back and forth between Hubert and Glennys.\n\n\"Bring him in,\" he said, pointing at a low stool. \"Over there.\"\n\n\"Would His Lordship like me to tie him up?\"\n\n\"I'm in no danger from this pup. Was there another with him? Another boy?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Very well. Get out.\"\n\nThe guard left the room, locking the door behind him.\n\nSir Gareth extended his hand to a wide-eyed Hubert. \"Hello, I am Sir Gareth of the Round Table. And you are\u2026?\"\n\n\"Hubert,\" said Hubert, staring at Sir Gareth's hand like it was a snake.\n\n\"Go on, shake my hand. I'm not going to hurt you\u2026right away.\"\n\nHubert remained motionless.\n\n\"Shake it!\"\n\nHubert grasped Sir Gareth's hand.\n\n\"Good lad, Hubert. Hubert,\" repeated Sir Gareth with a grimace. \"What a repulsive name. The more I say it, the less I like it. Were you picked on by bullies because of it? I certainly hope so.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\"\n\n\"Don't listen to him, Hubert, he's just toying with you,\" said Glennys.\n\nSir Gareth spun around. \"Will you shut up? I'm trying to have a pleasant conversation with this boy before I rip him to pieces! Of course I'm toying with him!\" He crouched down next to Hubert and tousled his hair. \"Now, Hubert, you came here to, dare I say it, 'rescue' the fair Maid Glennys. But you didn't come here alone, did you?\"\n\n\"No, Sir,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Very good. Where is your companion?\"\n\n\"Companion?\"\n\n\"Oh, was that too big a word for you? How about 'friend'? You know, the lad with that charming ability to vanish? Is he in here now?\"\n\nSir Gareth scanned the room, and Leonard the fly was only just able to duck behind a tapestry. For all Leonard knew, the demon possessed the same ability to see through magical concealment as Machus the Hellhound.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"No, Sir, he's not in here. I'm not sure where he is, to tell the truth.\"\n\n\"You're such a terrible little liar, Hubert. Do you think you can get by with telling a fib like that to a demon? We are deceivers by our very nature. Lies are our currency, our bread and butter. It hurts my feelings to think that you believe I'd fall for that one.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"As you should be. Oh well, I suppose you're not going to give that information voluntarily, so I'll just have to kill you and find your pest of a friend myself.\"\n\nLeonard's heart rate quickened when Sir Gareth stood up and took a step toward Hubert with the dagger. Realizing he had no choice, he flew forward, removing the magical bracelet and changing from housefly to boy in midair. Drawing his Roman sword as he landed, Leonard leapt forward and plunged it deep into Sir Gareth's chest.\n\n\"Hellfire and damnation! I can't believe I fell for that again!\" gasped Sir Gareth, the Blade of Despair clattering across the floor when he dropped it.\n\nThe knight stumbled backward and collapsed onto a table, tipping it over and covering himself with a pile of old books and scrolls. Sir Gareth tried to get up, clutching at the overturned furniture around him, but fell back with a gasp and lay still.\n\n\"Is he dead?\" whispered Hubert.\n\n\"Not sure.\"\n\nThe two boys stared intently at Sir Gareth's still form, looking for any sign of movement.\n\n\"Ahem!\" said Glennys, still bound to the dark stone.\n\n\"Oh, sorry,\" said Leonard.\n\nHe hurried over and cut the straps. Glennys sat up and, to Leonard's delight, hugged him.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" said Leonard.\n\n\"That box\u2014\" said Glennys, pointing across the room.\n\nAmid the clutter that had been knocked off the table when Sir Gareth stumbled backward was a small brimstone box lying on its side. Its lid was open, and whiffs of jet-black smoke were streaming out.\n\n\"\u2014is full of Hellhounds.\"\n\nOne by one, the whiffs of smoke grew larger and more solid as they swept around the room, taking on a vague dog-like appearance with each passing second.\n\n\"Run!\" said Leonard.\n\nAll three ran across the room. Hubert grabbed the latch of the door and pulled hard, but it had been locked again from the outside by the Hellions.\n\n\"Let us out!\" shouted Glennys, pounding on the door.\n\nThey heard a key being inserted into the lock and a low rumbling growl behind them. Leonard peeked over his shoulder to see that one of the Hellhounds had completed the transformation and was moving toward them from across the room, its purple eyes ablaze with rage. Two more of the beasts were almost solid and handfuls more were in various stages of transformation as wisps of smoke continued to pour out of Sir Gareth's box. The lock clicked and the door swung open, pushing Leonard and the others back.\n\n\"What's\u2014?\"\n\nBut before the Hellion could finish the sentence, one of the Hellhounds leapt at him and clamped its teeth around his neck, biting off his head with a sickening crunch. The other Hellion charged in and managed to stick the hound with his spear, but this was only a temporary victory as two more Hellhounds knocked him to the ground and pulled him apart piece by piece.\n\n\"Now!\" shouted Leonard.\n\nHubert and Glennys ran out into the hallway, but before Leonard could follow, he found his way blocked by a hound with sickly red blood dripping from its jowls. It was joined by several more of the beasts. Hubert pulled out his hunting knife and moved forward.\n\n\"No!\" mouthed Leonard. \"Glennys!\"\n\nHubert stopped. With grim understanding, he nodded and backed away with Glennys\u2014his eyes were filled with a mixture of sadness and admiration as he turned and disappeared.\n\nLeonard continued to back away from the Hellhounds. His heel hit something, and Leonard glanced down to see that it was the box, which continued to pour out streams of smoke. He reached down for it, but the growls of five fully transformed beasts told him that they didn't think this was a good idea.\n\nIsn't this a fine way to end it all? thought Leonard. I suppose the least I could do is close the box before I die. The fewer of these things in the world, the better.\n\nLeonard started counting. \"One, two \u2026\"\n\nThe Hellhounds seemed to understand what was about to happen and tensed up as the countdown began. But, of course, Leonard didn't wait until three to scoop up the box. As soon as the word \"two\" left his lips, he grabbed the box and ran toward the tower balcony.\n\nEnraged, the Hellhounds charged forward but were stopped by a terrifying shout of, \"HEEL!\" The command made Leonard stop, too. To his dismay, he saw Sir Gareth standing in the middle of the room, Leonard's Roman sword still lodged in his chest. His skin now an ashy gray and eyes sunken far back into his head, Sir Gareth had joined the ranks of the walking dead.\n\n\"Give it to me, boy.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" said Leonard, stepping back onto the balcony and holding the box over the edge.\n\nSir Gareth took an unsteady step forward and then stopped. \"Aughh!\"\n\nTo Leonard's complete surprise, the corpse of Sir Gareth was feeling considerable pain. Sir Gareth reached up and grasped the short sword's handle. As he pulled, a terrifying moan poured out of Sir Gareth's motionless lips. Leonard shuddered and clamped his eyes shut, the cry chilling him to the bone. The colossal moan stopped abruptly, and Leonard opened his eyes in time to see Sir Gareth toss the sword to the ground where it skittered across the stone floor, stopping mere inches from where he stood.\n\n\"This form has been a useful one,\" said the dead Sir Gareth, shifting drunkenly from foot to foot. \"I shall be sorry to lose it.\"\n\nThe corpse stopped swaying, and Leonard was sickened by the sight of a large black-red fingernail emerging from Sir Gareth's mouth. The nail was followed by another then several more. Fingers with a purplish-gray cast to them were attached, and soon Sir Gareth's mouth was filled with them and stretched open to an unnaturally wide degree. The fingers pushed out enough to curl down and grasp the side of his head which snapped back to a horrible angle. The fingers pulled downward, and a horned head emerged from Sir Gareth's mouth. Leonard realized that he really should be running for his life, but he couldn't. The head emerged, and the rest of poor Sir Gareth's body was peeled off like a snakeskin.\n\nLeonard's knees buckled, and he sank to the ground at the sight of one of Hell's own demons standing before him. Fully ten feet tall, Murck stood on two powerful bull legs and sported leathery wings. His head was crowned by four wickedly sharp horns.\n\n\"There, much better,\" said Murck, cracking his neck from side to side. \"Give me the box.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Leonard, grabbing the Roman sword and climbing onto the balcony's railing.\n\n\"Very well, go ahead and kill yourself, but do remember this,\" said Murck as he turned his back. \"If you break the box, the hounds will be free. All of them.\"\n\nThe thought of even more Hellhounds on the loose distracted Leonard just enough for him to miss Murck's lightning fast lunge toward him. The demon almost had his fingers around his throat when Leonard was jerked into the air. Murck howled in disgust as Leonard twisted around and saw he was being held in the claws of Mantooth.\n\n\"You should be more careful, Leonard. A fall like that would kill you.\"\n\nMurck turned away from the balcony, his eyes burning with fury. He looked at the thirty or so Hellhounds that crowded his chamber and exhaled.\n\n\"Kill everyone,\" said Murck."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Down below, Hubert had managed to drag Glennys to the bottom of the tower and across the alley to a small room. She had fought him, uttering a stream of very coarse and unladylike curses at him as he pulled her along. He had to throw her to the floor of the room and sit on her until she calmed down enough to have her wits about her again.\n\n\"Get off me, Hubert,\" said Glennys, exhausted. \"I won't run.\"\n\n\"Promise?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHubert got up and crossed to the other side of the room where he collapsed against the wall and sank to the ground. They sat in silence for a long moment before Hubert spoke.\n\n\"I'm sorry. He never would have forgiven me if I'd let you go back into that room.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nThey sat for a few more moments, the only sounds being Glennys's quiet sobs and Hubert's not-so-quiet sniffles. After a while, Glennys pushed herself up into a seated position. \"We have to go and help the others.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"The demon told me Arthur and his knights are imprisoned somewhere in the castle.\"\n\n\"Merlin mentioned that, too.\"\n\n\"What do you say we go and find them?\"\n\nThey paused at the door and looked each other in the eye.\n\n\"For Leonard,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"For Leonard,\" said Hubert."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "While Hubert and Glennys made their way through Camelot's back alleys and passageways, Mantooth landed Leonard in the relative safety of the Queen's garden\u2014a small walled-in area full of carefully arranged flowers, herbs, and fruit trees. It was the place where Guinevere would come to read and meditate.\n\n\"Thank you, Mantooth,\" said Leonard, tucking Sir Gareth's box into his pouch.\n\n\"You are most welcome, my friend.\"\n\nLeonard reached up and pulled out a Hellion's arrow imbedded in one of the dragon's thick armor plates. He broke the arrow in half and dropped it to the ground, staring at it for a moment. \"Glennys is free now, so you should take your family and leave this place. It's not really your battle anymore.\"\n\n\"I suppose I should do that, Leonard. But then we'd miss all the fun. Helgad will agree, of this I am sure.\"\n\n\"There are Hellhounds on the loose.\"\n\n\"Yes, quite a few. I saw them as I snatched you from the balcony. You'll surely need a dragon's help to deal with them.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Leonard. Stepping forward, Leonard wrapped his arms around Mantooth's neck and gave him the hardest hug he could before stepping back.\n\n\"You restored my family to me,\" said Mantooth, with a smile. \"I am the one who should be thanking you.\"\n\n\"Leonard!\"\n\nLeonard and Mantooth turned to see Sir Ronald and Sir Francis and the rest of the knights from the dungeon in their odd assortment of antique armor and weaponry.\n\n\"Good luck, Mantooth.\"\n\n\"And to you, Leonard,\" said Mantooth before he leapt into the air and disappeared over the garden wall.\n\n\"Greetings, Sir Ronald, Sir Francis,\" said Leonard as he bowed to his Master and the rest of the knights.\n\n\"Leonard! How good to see you! You wouldn't believe what we've been through. There are Hellions everywhere, and we've been fighting them. I've been fighting them! Me! Can you believe it?\" said Sir Ronald. \"I haven't stabbed myself, either!\"\n\n\"Your Master has managed to dispatch several of the enemy with great skill and bravery while I had the good fortune of bending down at the same time an arrow was coming at my head,\" said Sir Francis.\n\n\"We must move on,\" said Sir Harold, the older knight. \"There is much work to be done.\"\n\n\"Sirs, there are Hellhounds on the castle grounds,\" said Leonard.\n\nAll heads turned toward Leonard.\n\n\"Hellhounds?\" said Sir Harold. \"Surely they are the stuff of legend.\"\n\n\"They exist, good Sir,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"The boy speaks the truth,\" said Sir Francis. \"I have seen one in broad daylight.\"\n\nA murmur of panicked excitement spread through the knights.\n\n\"They are exceedingly difficult to kill, and I have witnessed one mow down a squad of armed Hellions like a fox among geese,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"How can we hope to succeed against such creatures?\" said Sir Charles, the tall and wide knight.\n\nThe knights muttered among themselves and offered battle techniques that might work against a human foe but wouldn't work at all against invincible monsters from the depths of Hell. Each time a suggestion was made, Leonard would tell of how he had seen something similar tried by Hellions against Machus and how it had not worked. As they talked and argued about the proper way to attack a Hellhound, Leonard's thoughts drifted back to what Helgad had said about them, and a solution popped into his head.\n\n\"Good Sirs!\" shouted Leonard. \"I have an idea.\"\n\nThe knights all quieted down and turned to listen.\n\n\"My dragon friend\u2014\"\n\n\"Dragon friend? Hellhounds and dragons, this lad gets stranger by the moment,\" said Sir William, the knight with the crooked nose.\n\n\"That will be enough of that talk,\" said Sir Ronald. \"My page has a good head on his shoulders. Let's hear what the boy has to say.\"\n\nSir William harrumphed but kept quiet.\n\n\"My friend Helgad told me that the only way that dragons can kill a Hellhound is to rip it apart piece by piece, being careful not to let any of the pieces touch lest they join back together.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that all?\" said Sir William.\n\nIgnoring this taunt, Leonard pushed on. \"I propose those with spears pin down a beast while those with axes and swords hack it apart. The rest of us can pull the pieces away and make sure they stay apart from each other.\"\n\nLeonard fidgeted for a moment while the knights all stood silent, lost in thought. He had presumed to give professional warriors advice on how to defeat an enemy and would soon find out if this had been too forward of him.\n\n\"I do believe the boy is on to something,\" said Sir Harold at last. \"This just might work.\"\n\nLeonard breathed a sigh of relief and said, \"We'll need some of those with spears to guard those doing the butchery. There are at least thirty of the beasts.\"\n\n\"Thirty!\" said Sir Harold in a mixture of shock and bemusement. \"We'd best get busy, then. Let us go to the central courtyard.\"\n\nThe knights shouted, \"Hoorah!\" and marched out of the Queen's garden. Leonard fell in next to Sir Ronald who patted him on the shoulder.\n\n\"Well done, Leonard,\" said Sir Ronald. \"I am most proud of you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" said Leonard, trying his best not to look too pleased."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "We Thought You Were Dead!\n\nH ubert and Glennys hurried down the dungeon steps.\n\n\"Vincent?\" called Glennys. \"Vincent, are you here?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm here!\" said Vincent, emerging from the storeroom with a rusty sword and a few pieces of leftover armor. \"Saints above! Maid Glennys!\"\n\n\"Hello, Vincent. We need your help.\"\n\n\"Anything, young miss.\"\n\n\"My uncle told me that King Arthur and his knights were being held captive here, in a secret dungeon. Do you know of such a place?\"\n\n\"A hidden place in Camelot?\" said Vincent, scratching his ear. \"There's none I can think of that wouldn't draw attention to itself for reasons of maintenance alone. Every square inch of this castle is cared for and scrubbed like no other location in the land. It's a matter of pride amongst us who maintain it.\"\n\n\"We have to start looking somewhere,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Wait a minute now,\" said Vincent. \"There is one place, a corner that I haven't thought about in many a year. Under the chapel is a series of small rooms. Left there from Roman times. You see, Camelot was built on the ruins of an old Roman fort. Yes, that might be the place. Come on, then.\"\n\nAs they climbed up the dungeon stairs, Vincent slowed. \"You'll have to forgive me, Miss. My old legs aren't used to going up and down these stairs more than once a day.\"\n\n\"Not to worry, Vincent, we'll get there,\" said Glennys.\n\nHubert lent his shoulder for support, and they made their way up the stairs.\n\nThey reached the top and stopped dead in their tracks. Screams filled the air from every direction, and it seemed that no matter which way they turned, a Hellhound was either chasing someone or tearing them to bits. Castle folk, Hellions\u2014it didn't seem like the hounds cared who they mauled.\n\n\"I must find Gert,\" said Vincent in a quiet voice.\n\n\"You go ahead, I know where the chapel is,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Thank you, Miss. You'll find the entrance to the lower rooms just behind the altar. Good luck, then.\"\n\nVincent padded off toward the kitchens, and Glennys and Hubert ran toward the center of the castle. Twice, they almost ran into one of the hounds but had the good fortune to pull back out of sight before the beasts turned in their direction. The gruesome results of the hounds' vicious attacks lay everywhere, and in some places the ground was slick with blood. They rounded a corner and saw Drarb lying just ahead with several Hellion arrows sticking out of her side.\n\n\"Drarb!\" cried Glennys, rushing to her.\n\n\"She is dead,\" said Vaco's voice from the shadows. The young dragon stepped out of the darkness carrying a Hellhound's foreleg in his mouth. With a flick of his head, he tossed the limb to the other side of the walkway. \"She killed a good twenty of them after they stuck her though. Mother and Father will be proud.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they will be, she\u2014she was both fierce and brave,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Yes, she died an honorable death: a dragon's death.\"\n\nA pained growl coming from behind Vaco caused Glennys and Hubert to jump back.\n\n\"Pardon me, I have work to finish,\" said Vaco as he returned to the shadows. \"You two should keep moving and get to wherever you're going. It's dangerous out here.\"\n\n\"He's right. Come on,\" said Hubert.\n\nThey ran as fast as they could, skidding to a stop in an archway that spilled out into an open space. Right before them lay the castle chapel, a small, free-standing building with stained-glass windows adorning each side.\n\n\"There it is!\" said Glennys.\n\nThey ran toward the chapel but were again stopped short by a Hellhound running across their path. The beast slowed and looked at them, and Hubert drew his hunting knife. \"Glennys! Run!\"\n\nThe hound loped toward him, picking up speed with each step. Just as the beast tensed its muscles to pounce, a riot of motion blocked Hubert's vision and knocked him back on his rear. One of the freed knights had stopped the creature by plunging a spear into its chest.\n\nStunned, Hubert watched as Sir Francis and Sir Ronald rushed in and hacked at the hound with their swords, cleaving limbs off like chunks of wood from a felled tree. A large knight pushed his way past them and beheaded the creature with a mighty sweep of a heavy battle-axe. The hound continued to struggle for a moment then ceased moving.\n\n\"Don't let it fool you,\" said Sir Charles. \"Keep hacking until there's no piece larger than my hand.\"\n\n\"Hello, Hubert,\" said Sir Francis as he swung his sword. \"Are you all right, boy?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" was all that Hubert could manage.\n\nSeveral of the other knights moved in and tossed away chunks of hound flesh.\n\n\"It would take more than a Hound of Hell to slay Page Hubert Goodwin,\" said a familiar voice from behind him.\n\nHubert turned and jumped to his feet. \"You!\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Yes. Me,\" said Leonard.\n\nGlennys ran and threw her arms around Leonard. \"We thought you were dead!\" she shrieked.\n\n\"So did I,\" said Leonard who, despite the present circumstances, was clearly pleased at being embraced by the castle's prettiest girl.\n\n\"Am I to take it that Leonard and the young lady share affection for each other?\" said Sir Ronald to Hubert.\n\n\"Oh yes, Sir. He has a mad crush on her, and she has just recently decided to tolerate him,\" said Hubert.\n\n\"That's a start, I suppose.\"\n\nGlennys let go of Leonard and curtsied to Sir Ronald. \"My name is Glennys, good Sir, and it is my very great pleasure to meet you.\"\n\n\"And mine yours, young lady,\" said Sir Ronald, bowing in return. \"I am quite sure my Leonard is thrilled that you have decided to tolerate him.\"\n\n\"Yes, Sir,\" said Leonard, blushing.\n\n\"Step aside!\" shouted Sir Harold. \"Dragon!\"\n\nThey all pulled away from the carcass just in time to make way for the giant form of Helgad who charged out from behind one of the main towers. She had three of the hounds on her back, each clawing and biting her with maniacal fury. She skidded to a stop and pulled one of the hounds off with her dagger-like teeth. Throwing it to the ground, she shredded it with her massive rear claws as though she were wiping her feet on a doormat.\n\nMantooth swooped down and hovered overhead, his massive wings causing a windstorm that almost knocked Leonard over. \"Do you need any help?\"\n\n\"No, I'm good. Go find some of your own,\" said Helgad.\n\n\"Very well. Oh, hello, Leonard. I'd stop to chat but we're a bit busy right now,\" said Mantooth with a merry twinkle in his eye.\n\nMantooth flew away, and as Helgad charged off through the castle grounds, Leonard couldn't escape the feeling that she wanted the Hellhounds to jump on her back.\n\n\"That is easily one of the strangest sights I have ever seen,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" echoed the other knights.\n\n\"Good Sirs,\" said Glennys. \"I have news of great importance.\"\n\n\"What is it, child?\" said Sir Harold.\n\n\"We believe King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are imprisoned within secret chambers beneath the castle chapel.\"\n\n\"Ah, so that's where the fiend has hidden the King!\" said Sir Harold.\n\n\"There's one way to find out for sure. Follow me,\" said Glennys.\n\nSir Harold and the others stood still, and Leonard could see they were trying to decide if they should be following orders from a Maid of Camelot.\n\n\"Now!\" shouted Glennys over her shoulder.\n\nThe decision made for them, the knights fell in line behind Glennys and marched toward the chapel.\n\n\"If we survive this, I'm going to kiss her,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"You are brave,\" said Hubert.\n\nThe inside of the chapel was sparsely furnished\u2014no chairs or pews, just a plain stone floor, some candles, and a heavy stone altar on the wall opposite the door.\n\n\"It's about time you got here,\" said a voice from the back of the chapel. They all turned to see Merlin sitting at the base of the altar.\n\n\"Merlin!\" said Glennys.\n\n\"I've been waiting for you. Hurry now, we have a king to rescue,\" said Merlin. \"There is a hidden panel on the left side of the altar.\"\n\nJust then a Hellhound burst through the open chapel door and ran toward them. Leonard and the rest braced for a battle, but the hound stopped and yelped in pain, its paws sizzling and smoking as if being cooked in a frying pan. It turned and ran out faster than it had come in.\n\n\"Hallowed ground,\" said Merlin. \"The beasts can't bear to set foot on blessed soil.\"\n\nLeonard's eyes widened. \"We should try to get as many of the castle folk in here as we can!\"\n\n\"That's an excellent idea,\" said Sir Ronald.\n\n\"Indeed it is,\" said Merlin. \"Sir Ronald, you and Sir Francis should take your pages and round up as many as possible.\"\n\n\"I'll go, too,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Found it!\" said Sir William.\n\nLeonard saw the knight was holding open a carved panel on the side of the altar. Merlin stood and, with grim determination, stepped through the opening. The freed knights all looked at each other for a moment before silently following the old wizard.\n\nSir Ronald clasped Leonard's shoulder. \"Shall we be brave for at least a little longer?\"\n\n\"Yes Sir,\" said Leonard, smiling. \"Let's go save some lives.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Darkness Before Light",
                "text": "The small group ran as fast as they could, telling whomever they ran across to make their way to the safety of the chapel. At one point they bumped into Ham. He was covered with hound blood and had a few gashes but was grinning from ear to ear. Leonard couldn't help but feel admiration for the big man and his unabashed confidence in the face of so many enemies.\n\n\"Hubert and I decided we're glad you're on our side, Ham,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Me, too,\" said Ham.\n\nThe rescue party also came across Gert and Vincent and their two boys, Jack and Dominic, as they came out of a storeroom. They, too, were spattered with blood and refused to go to the chapel.\n\n\"Not until we clear our beautiful Camelot of this vermin,\" declared Gert, swinging her iron pan just to show that she meant business.\n\nAs they made their way through the castle grounds, Leonard noticed the scattered bits of hound flesh were becoming more and more numerous.\n\n\"I suppose Helgad and Mantooth are having their share of success in dealing with these beasts,\" said Hubert, kicking away a paw trying to join up with a forelimb. \"And the Hellions, too.\"\n\nLeonard caught some motion out of the corner of his eye and turned to see Mantooth, Helgad, and a third dragon so large that it made the other two look small. \"It's Wormal!\" shouted Leonard. \"She came after all!\" The three dragons swept through the air over the castle, delivering combined blasts of dragonfire to the dwindling clusters of Hellions.\n\n\"So much for the Hellions,\" said Glennys. \"But there are still so many hounds, I don't know if even our dragon friends will be able to get rid of them before all of us are destroyed.\"\n\nAt one point, Jack and Dominic used their spears to hold down a wounded Hellhound while Gert and Vincent hacked it to pieces.\n\n\"I won't be using this in the kitchen again,\" said Gert, holding up a heavy cleaver and bringing it down repeatedly on the beast's massive neck. \"Whether it'd be in my mind or not, I'd always be tasting dog on it.\"\n\nContinuing to move through the castle grounds, they found people hiding here and there\u2014behind low walls, under oxcarts\u2014and directed them to the safety of the chapel. At the edge of the castle green, they found two small children, no older than six, hiding under a large half-barrel used for washing. They would have passed them up if Leonard hadn't noticed a single brown eye staring at them from a drain hole in the bottom. Jack and Dominic turned the barrel over, and Sir Ronald knelt next to the trembling children. \"You're safe now, little ones. To the chapel now, run along!\"\n\nThe children joined a cluster of other castle folk and moved toward the chapel. Sir Ronald rose and placed his hand on Leonard's shoulder. \"I've always had a soft spot in my heart for abandoned children, eh, Leonard?\"\n\nBefore Leonard could reply, a Hellhound pounced on Sir Ronald from a nearby battlement, grabbing him in its mammoth jaws. It happened so quickly that all Leonard could do was watch in horror as the beast shook its head and Sir Ronald flopped around like a rag doll. The hound flicked its head sideways and sent Sir Ronald crashing into a stone pillar. He hit it hard, then fell to the ground where he stayed motionless. Leonard drew his sword and charged the beast, but Dominic and Jack beat him there, stabbing the hound and pinning it to the ground with their spears.\n\n\"Mother!\" shouted Jack.\n\nGert approached the crazed hound and began her grim chore. Leonard and Glennys ran to Sir Ronald and rolled him over. \"Master, are you all right? Wake up. Please!\"\n\nSir Ronald's eyes fluttered open, and when he coughed, a small stream of blood rolled down his chin. \"Ow, that really hurt. I don't suppose you got the name of the oxcart driver that ran me over, did you?\" Sir Ronald tried to laugh, but a coughing fit cut that short and caused more blood to flow from his mouth.\n\nLeonard brushed the hair out of Sir Ronald's eyes and he and Glennys exchanged a worried glance. He wasn't a healer but even Leonard knew that coughing up blood was a bad thing.\n\n\"Leonard, come closer. I need to tell you... You have been the best page a knight could ask for.\"\n\n\"Don't start talking that way, Sir,\" cried Leonard. That's the kind of thing people say when they're dying, thought Leonard. He can't be dying, he just can't be! He turned quickly to Glennys. \"Can't you do something?\"\n\nGlennys avoided Leonard's eyes and stared at the ground. \"He is badly hurt.\"\n\nSir Ronald coughed up some more blood then closed his eyes for a moment. \"When I found you in those ruins, I worried that I wouldn't do a proper job of raising you.\"\n\nThis can't be happening, thought Leonard. It's not supposed to go this way. My master is supposed to be recognized for his bravery and invited to join the Round Table when this mess is over and we're going to finish building his castle and have feasts, real feasts with Sir Francis and...\n\n\"You turned out to be a good lad. You are strong, brave, and kind. I am as proud of you as any father would be.\" Sir Ronald opened his eyes and grabbed Leonard by the arm. \"Leonard, you have been like a son to me, and I should like you to think of me as your undeserving father. Will you do that?\"\n\nLeonard's eyes began to tear up even though he was using all his strength to keep them from doing so. He took a deep breath and held it, not trusting himself to speak until he had his emotions under control. Then, slowly exhaling, he took Sir Ronald's hands into his own.\n\n\"Yes, I will\u2026Father.\"\n\nSir Ronald smiled and patted Leonard on the shoulder. \"Good lad. I should like you to have my lands and the half-castle, such as it is. Maid Glennys, you are a witness to my wishes. Please relay them to the King and request that he grant them.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"No! You're not going to die!\" cried Leonard.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Leonard. I\u2026\"\n\nAnd with that, Sir Ronald died."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Leonard sat for several moments, staring at Sir Ronald's face which looked kind, and loving, and fatherly even in death and dappled with his own blood. Glennys buried her face on Leonard's shoulder and wept.\n\n\"Uh, Leonard?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Not now, Hubert,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Leonard!\" said Hubert, this time with more urgency. \"We've got trouble.\"\n\nLeonard looked up and wiped his tears. They were surrounded by Hellhounds.\n\nGert and Vincent and their two sons lifted their weapons.\n\n\"Get back, ya great stinking monsters!\" said Vincent.\n\nThe Hellhounds stopped their advance, seemingly amused by the sudden show of bravado from the old man. Ham joined Vincent and the others, using his mallet to steady himself as he caught his breath.\n\n\"I'm not normally a pessimist by nature,\" said Hubert. \"But I'm thinking this might be it.\"\n\nLeonard stood up and wiped his eyes again. Picking up the short sword, he took a deep breath. \"I say we go out fighting.\"\n\nHe looked his friends in the eye, and each nodded in return. Glennys picked up Sir Ronald's sword and handed it to Leonard, taking the old Roman blade from him.\n\n\"This is yours, now. He would want you to use it.\"\n\nLeonard looked at her and smiled. \"I\u2014want to say that I have always thought of you as the sweetest and fairest maiden in all the land.\"\n\n\"And I have always thought of you as the upside-down fool who desperately needed a bath,\" said Glennys, returning his smile.\n\n\"Fair enough. Ready?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nLeonard raised Sir Ronald's sword, his sword now, and looked at all his companions with pride.\n\n\"Charge!\"\n\nA battle cry rose that was so loud, Leonard knew that it couldn't only be coming from his small band. To his absolute astonishment, he saw the freed knights and the Knights of the Round Table charging toward them at full speed. Leading the charge was King Arthur himself! He held the great sword Excalibur which shone with an unnatural brightness, catching the sun's rays and amplifying them tenfold.\n\nLeonard had to shield his eyes as Arthur and his knights ran past the stunned group and spread out to do battle with the Hellhounds. The hounds seemed equally surprised by Arthur's sudden appearance and scattered to avoid the full brunt of the charge.\n\nSir Harold paused near Leonard and Glennys. \"Sorry we're late, young miss. A few of those Hellions were down there hiding from the hounds and had to be dealt with,\" said the older knight.\n\n\"A most timely and welcome appearance, good Sir,\" said Glennys.\n\nThe knights had stopped their charge when the Hellhounds retreated and fell back to protect King Arthur who walked over to where Leonard and Glennys were standing.\n\n\"Maid Glennys! How good it is to see you again. It is my understanding that you are the reason I am free.\"\n\n\"That is not wholly true, Your Majesty, for there are a good number of brave folk who fought for King and Camelot,\" said Glennys. \"May I introduce Leonard, page of Sir Ronald of the Green Valley whose broken body you see yonder.\"\n\nArthur sighed. \"Many a good man and woman have died this day. I am sorry for your loss, Leonard.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" said Leonard, his voice choking.\n\nLeonard cleared his throat and looked past the King to see that the Hellhounds were gathering for a countercharge. They stomped and snorted and dragged their paws over the turf.\n\n\"Brace yourselves, one and all, for there is no doubt that this is a battle to the death!\" said Arthur.\n\nFor some reason, the Hellhounds weren't charging.\n\nLeonard glanced at Sir Gareth's tower. There stood Murck on the balcony, his hand held high. The hounds were waiting for him to give the signal.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" said Leonard, nodding toward Murck.\n\n\"So, the fiend finally reveals himself to me. I look forward to placing his head on a pike at the end of all this.\"\n\nMurck lowered his hand, bringing it down to his side. The hounds charged forward, their barking and growling so loud that it was impossible to hear anything else. The knights closed ranks to face the brunt of the charge, and Jack and Dominic lowered their spears to take the initial blow. The hounds swept over them like a gray tide, the air filled with cries of pain from both men and beasts. After the initial impact, the fighting broke into smaller clusters of men and hounds.\n\nLeonard heard a cry of anguish and looked over to see Gert cradling Dominic whose body had been broken during the hound's charge. He'll pay, thought Leonard with a cold resolve that surprised even him. If it's the last thing I do, I will make the fiend pay. Vincent and Jack were holding off one of the hounds with their spears, taunting and distracting it long enough for Ham to move in and crush its skull with a mighty blow from his mallet. The beast dropped and did not get up.\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Ham.\n\nLeonard pulled Glennys to him, and the two went back to back, a sword to face a beast coming from any direction.\n\nAnd come they did.\n\nOne after another, the hounds dove in and tried to bite one or both of them. But whether it was thanks to a guardian angel or sheer dumb luck, they were able to deflect each of the attacks that came their way.\n\nHubert came running toward Leonard with one of the hounds chasing him. Glennys saw him, too, and right as Hubert reached them, she and Leonard leapt apart, letting Hubert pass through. Spinning around, each plunged their swords into the beast's neck, causing it to stumble and fall.\n\nBut almost as soon as it was down, the hound leapt up, pulling the swords out of Leonard's and Glennys's hands and sending them clattering onto a gravel path. It spun around to face them, and the now defenseless pair stumbled backward.\n\nLeonard slipped on what he discovered was blood and fell back onto a large chunk of Hellhound still quivering with life. The wounded beast jumped on him, and Leonard felt the rest of the world\u2014sound, smell, and vision\u2014vanish as he looked past its yellowed fangs into its deep purple eyes filled with rage and hate. The beast roared at full voice and opened its jaws for the killing bite, and in that instant Leonard found himself wondering about what it was like to be dead. At least I shall be able to see Sir Ronald again, he thought before closing his eyes. He'll be surprised at how quickly I joined him.\n\nBut the end did not come and after a moment, Leonard opened his eyes and saw that something new had captured the beast's attention. Looking up, he saw that another Hellhound was standing over him. A bigger hound with larger fangs, a deeper growl, and a small golden whistle hanging around its neck.\n\nIt was Machus and he was protecting Leonard.\n\nMachus growled at the wounded beast and charged several steps forward. The lesser beast ran off, whimpering. Machus gave Leonard a foul-smelling lick on the face.\n\n\"Good boy,\" said Leonard as he reached up to scratch the hound's neck. \"Thank you\u2026again.\"\n\n\"You is welcome, again,\" said Piffle, crawling down Machus's neck and dangling from his jowl.\n\nOut of the chaos, King Arthur and Sir Galahad came charging in the direction of Machus and Leonard, swords held high above their heads and screaming at the top of their lungs. Leonard could feel Machus tense for a counterattack and leapt to his feet, grabbing the hound by the scruff of the neck with one hand and raising the other toward the charging king.\n\n\"Your Majesty! Stop!\" shouted Leonard. \"This one is good.\"\n\nArthur slowed his charge and frowned. \"I'll take your word on that, boy.\"\n\n\"Piffle!\" said Glennys as she and Hubert ran up to Leonard. \"You're back!\"\n\n\"Yes, where have you been?\" said Hubert.\n\n\"Piffle says she is going to get help, and she does. Big bad dog wants to help the Leonard!\" said Piffle, patting Machus on the neck.\n\nMachus nuzzled Leonard and whined.\n\n\"What is it? What do you want?\"\n\n\"The dog is wanting you to takes its whistle off its neck,\" said Piffle.\n\nMachus whined some more.\n\n\"The box. Big doggie says get the box,\" said Piffle.\n\nThen it struck Leonard what Machus was getting at. He pulled the whistle off the hound's neck then lifted the brimstone box out of his pouch.\n\n\"Are you sure I'm strong enough to do this?\"\n\nMachus barked.\n\nLeonard took a deep breath and blew the whistle as hard as he could. Immediately, the surviving Hellhounds stopped fighting and looked right at him! Then, much to Leonard's discomfort, each hound started running in his direction. Machus barked again.\n\n\"The box! Opens it!\" yelled Piffle.\n\nLeonard had barely enough time to do so as the hounds were almost on top of him. He opened the brimstone box and watched with amazement as the remaining hounds leapt into the air and transformed back into streams of dark smoke. Each stream hit the box hard, diving in with enough force to knock Leonard back an inch or two with every impact. When the last hound had vanished from the battlefield, Leonard snapped the box shut. For a moment, there was absolute silence as the stunned knights tried to figure out what had just happened. Then the air was filled with joyous shouts. \"Well done, Leonard!\" said Mantooth, who had just landed along with Helgad and Wormal.\n\n\"I was hoping to shred a few of the hounds myself,\" said Wormal. \"But I suppose I'll have to settle for wiping out the vermin who attacked my horde.\"\n\n\"You are indeed a wonder, lad,\" said King Arthur, throwing a distracted glance at the three humongous dragons. \"I should think Merlin would be interested in meeting you.\"\n\n\"I already have, Your Majesty,\" said a voice from behind them.\n\nThey turned and saw Merlin sitting atop a small boulder.\n\n\"Merlin!\" said Leonard, tucking the brimstone box back into his pouch. \"Where have you been?\"\n\n\"I have been here, all along. Waiting.\"\n\n\"Waiting?\" said King Arthur. \"For what?\"\n\n\"For this very moment,\" said Merlin, gesturing at the surroundings. The old man stood, then pointed up at Murck who was casually picking his teeth with a large splinter of wood.\n\n\"You there, foul demon! Come down, and face justice for all of your crimes against Arthur's kingdom!\" shouted Merlin.\n\nThe demon worked the splinter for another moment or two then flicked it away before stepping back into the tower.\n\nMerlin looked down at Leonard and smiled. \"Ready, Leonard?\"\n\nLeonard's eyes opened wide. \"Who me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You.\"\n\nKing Arthur stepped forward. \"Merlin, you can't be serious! He's just a boy.\" Glennys, Hubert, and everyone else in the immediate area, including Machus and the dragons, all joined in protesting the absurdity of Leonard facing a powerful demon.\n\nMerlin held up his hands, signaling for quiet. \"Leonard is a uniquely qualified boy. He possesses all the skills necessary to dispatch this fiend. As this could get complicated, I suggest we all retire to the fringes,\" said Merlin. When Arthur and the other knights showed no sign off moving, Merlin drew himself up to his full height and bellowed, \"Now!\" As Arthur and his knights reluctantly moved off, Leonard could only guess that they knew further discussion was pointless when Merlin used this tone of voice. Merlin turned to Glennys, Hubert, Piffle, and the dragons who were still standing their ground and shooting him very cross looks. \"Trust me, trust Leonard\u2014please.\"\n\nLeonard wondered what it was that Merlin saw in him. He certainly didn't see it himself.\n\nGlennys's features softened slightly, then she took a deep breath and stormed off, calling, \"You'd better be right, Merlin!\" over her shoulder.\n\n\"I am,\" said Merlin. \"The rest of you should leave, too.\"\n\n\"Our blessings are upon you, dragonfriend\" said Wormal, before turning and leaving with Helgad.\n\nMantooth paused for a long moment, then smiled at Leonard and joined the others.\n\nHubert bit his lower lip. \"Good luck, fool.\"\n\n\"Thanks, friend of fool,\" said Leonard, weakly.\n\nHubert picked up Piffle before turning and joining the others who were ringing the field.\n\n\"Good luck, the Leonard!\" shouted Piffle from on top of Hubert's head. \"Come on, big bad doggie, you, too!\"\n\nMachus rubbed his against Leonard, almost knocking him over, before running off after Piffle.\n\nMerlin put his arm around Leonard's shoulder. \"Now Leonard, there's a good chance that you'll survive this encounter with the demon\u2026\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, what happened to 'possesses all the necessary skills to dispatch the fiend'?\"\n\n\"You do have the necessary skills,\" said Merlin. \"It's just that, let's face it, he's a demon and you're just a boy. Things can happen.\"\n\n\"Things can happen?\"\n\n\"Listen to me, Leonard. You're about to face a creature of such immense power that he could easily destroy everyone here, including Arthur and his knights. Do you understand? Everyone.\"\n\n\"Glennys and Hubert, too,\" whispered Leonard.\n\n\"Glennys and Hubert, too,\" agreed Merlin. \"Now, I'd face the demon myself but\u2014\"\n\n\"Your magic won't work on him, I know. But why me? Look at all the brave knights. Surely one of them is more suited to this task.\"\n\n\"I've already answered that, you, my boy, are interesting,\" said Merlin.\n\n\"Which means?\"\n\n\"You have characteristics.\"\n\nJust then, the top of the tower exploded, sending chunks of wood and masonry flying in every direction and filling the air with smoke. When the smoke cleared, Leonard and the rest of the crowd gasped, for sitting atop the tower's rubble was Murck, now easily five times larger than he was before. He was bigger than even Wormal, making him the biggest living creature that Leonard had ever seen. Murck spread his wings and leapt off the tower, causing the ground to tremble when he landed and the crowd to scatter.\n\n\"I have 'characteristics,'\" muttered Leonard. \"Like?\"\n\n\"Luck\u2014massive quantities of the stuff. Here,\" said Merlin, pulling a pouch out of his sleeve and tossing it to Leonard. \"This should help.\" Leonard caught the pouch but before he could say anything more than a sarcastic \"Thanks,\" the old wizard literally disappeared.\n\nLeonard looked at the place where Merlin had been and sighed. Thanks again, Merlin, he thought. Too bad I can't do something like that. Leonard blinked, then sighed again before slipping the rope tie of Merlin's pouch over the wrist of one hand and reaching into his own pouch with the other.\n\n\"I must say that I'm more than a little annoyed at all of the interference with my brilliant plan,\" said Murck in a voice so loud it shook the walls. The demon searched the crowd and Leonard felt like all the life ran out of his body when the fiend's eyes set upon him. \"Ah yes, there you are, number one meddler in my affairs.\"\n\nMurck took a step in Leonard's direction but then stopped when Leonard disappeared.\n\n\"No!\" screamed Murck, his eyes filled with rage. \"You're not getting me with that one a third time, boy!\" The demon knelt and began clapping his hands violently in the area where Leonard had stood. SLAP! SLAP! SLAP! The impacts of his large fleshy hands sounded more like thunderclaps than ordinary clapping and the crowd on the edge of the field covered their ears almost in unison.\n\nLeonard the fly, buffeted by the blasts of air caused by each clap, did his best to avoid being knocked to the ground or smashed into fly pulp. It wasn't easy as Murck was slapping his hands together crazily all around. Leonard had to dive and roll like a falcon to evade each of the violent collisions. This heavy maneuvering was made even more difficult by Merlin's pouch on his wrist throwing off his balance. Whatever's in there was heavier than it should be, thought Leonard as he reached into the pouch. The second Leonard's hand touched the pouch's contents, he felt a deep cold start to run up his arm. Quickly, he pulled his foreleg out and even with his fractured fly vision could tell it had turned completely white. SLAP! Another clap detonated near him and a blast of air slammed him into the ground near Murck's foot.\n\n\"I know you're still there, boy! I can feel your feeble life. I can smell your fear!\"\n\nDazed, Leonard fought to make his tiny fly legs obey his fuzzy commands. He struggled to open the pouch and when he was finally able to force it open, what he saw caused his mind to clear instantly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Murck was getting angrier by the moment, impatient to get on with the business of destroying Camelot and spreading his foul mischief across the land. He was so angry that he almost didn't notice the small prick he felt in his clawed big toe. Looking down, he saw Leonard, in his normal form, staring back up at him with a cool grin. In Leonard's snow-white hand was a familiar-looking object, a dagger roughly a foot in length with a heavily jeweled handle and a blade darker than anything that existed in nature. The demon blinked and swayed slightly, a confused frown passing across his features. \"Oh, there you are,\" said Murck, in a slurred voice.\n\n\"This is for everyone you have ever harmed or caused to be harmed. This is for my Father, Sir Ronald of the Green Valley, who I loved dearly,\" shouted Leonard before plunging the Blade of Despair deep into Murck's flesh and leaving it there. \"Now, die!\"\n\nMurck tried lifting his foot to smash Leonard into the ground, but found it wasn't at all interested in moving. He tried the other foot, but discovered the same thing, it stood in place as though planted there. The rest of his body was stiffening rapidly as the demon learned when he tried to bend over to grab Leonard. He looked down and, for the first time in his miserable existence felt fear that quickly changed into absolute despair. \"No, this can't be. This was not part of the plan,\" whimpered Murck. He watched with increasing panic as the color was sucked from his body, drawn down toward the blade lodged deep under the skin of his toe. A low moan began to build in his throat, getting louder with each of Murck's increasingly ragged breaths. The demon inhaled deeply, and Leonard scampered backward, not knowing what to expect. A wail of complete hopelessness burst through the lips of the now completely white demon, causing everyone who heard it to despair. Then it ended when the demon abruptly turned the same color as the blade and slowly faded into nothingness.\n\nIt took the crowd a moment before they understood what had just happened, but once they did, they cheered and hugged each other. \"He's gone,\" muttered Leonard.\n\n\"Yes, he's gone,\" replied Merlin, once again appearing out of nowhere. \"This blade consumed him.\" Merlin carefully picked up the Blade of Despair and tucked it into his sleeve \"for safekeeping.\"\n\nGlennys and Hubert ran forward and knelt next to Leonard. \"THAT. WAS. WONDERFUL!\" shouted Hubert, throwing his arms around Leonard's neck.\n\n\"Good job, the Leonard!\" added Piffle.\n\n\"Hubert, let me look at him,\" said Glennys. Hubert gently laid Leonard on his back. Glennys gave him a thorough examination, pausing when she got to his right arm which was pure white from the tips of his fingers to the middle of his forearm. \"I don't like the look of this,\" she said.\n\n\"Touched the blade, did you?\" said Merlin.\n\n\"I think so,\" said Leonard. \"It was cold. Not like winter, like, I don't know. Like it was full of more aloneness than I ever could have imagined.\"\n\n\"He'll be all right,\" said Merlin to Glennys, with a reassuring smile. \"Although I'm not sure if the color will return anytime soon.\"\n\n\"I can live with that,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"That reminds me,\" said Leonard, slowly rising to his feet. \"Of something I promised I'd do if I ever came to this point.\" Leonard took a step forward and put his hands on Glennys's shoulders. Then, in front of everyone, including King Arthur himself, he kissed her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Leonard the Great",
                "text": "It took the rest of the summer and fall of that year, all of the winter, and the better part of the following spring to put things back to the way they were at Camelot. Even then, its inhabitants would still be finding dried blood stains, loose hound fangs, and broken black arrow shafts for many years to come. Machus left only a few hours after the battle was over, making it clear he was ready to depart by whining and looking off into the distance. Leonard tied the brimstone box tightly with twine before slipping it into a leather bag which he secured around Machus's neck. \"Better for you to have this than me,\" said Leonard, scratching Machus behind the ear. \"Not sure what I'd do if it tipped over again.\" Machus gave him one last sloppy lick, then bounded off toward points unknown.\n\n\"Think it's safe to have a Hellhound running about on its own?\" said Hubert.\"\n\n\"I think so,\" said Leonard. \"He's a good dog and I don't believe he'll bother people.\"\n\n\"People won't bother him, either,\" said Hubert.\n\nA day after the battle, they buried Sir Ronald in a place of honor near the chapel and Leonard was quite moved when Arthur said a few words over the grave. \"I should have liked to have met this man,\" said the King. \"For, I am told, he was brave when bravery was required and gentle when it was not\u2014a hero and a gentleman, an ideal combination as far as I am concerned. Fare thee well, Sir Ronald of the Green Valley, your King and Country salute you.\"\n\nLeonard stayed on to help as best he could\u2014mostly working with Ham to put the stables back in order and with Gert to rebuild the outdoor kitchens. To his utter delight, Poppy showed up at the front gate a couple of weeks after Murck had been destroyed and was brought to the back stables by Ham. Where the big plow horse had been all this time was a mystery, but it looked as though there was plenty of green grass and clear water wherever it had been. \"You are a remarkable horse, Poppy,\" said Leonard, handing her a tasty parsnip, then scratching her muzzle. \"Whether you know it or not.\"\n\n\"We lost a fair number of the horses to them cursed hounds,\" said Ham. \"But I heard from the King's own mouth that no expense would be spared in bringing these stables back to what they were. His Royalness might even be sending me across the Channel to check out the quality of the horses them Frenchies got.\"\n\nEven though he missed Sir Ronald something terrible, with King Arthur back in charge, Leonard couldn't help but notice that things just felt right. Everything was in its proper place, like they hadn't been for as long as anyone could remember. All the false Sir Gareth's killjoy rules had been chucked out the window the second King Arthur sat down on his throne. The non-Round Table knights who had been imprisoned were all given full pardons for their \"crimes,\" and the King issued an order that encouraged them to travel about and do brave deeds.\n\nSir Francis caused a minor sensation when he returned that fall with a sampling of apples and homegrown vegetables that King Arthur pronounced were the best he'd ever tasted. He was so happy with them that he pulled Excalibur out of its rock and dubbed Sir Francis the \"Gentleman Farmer of the Realm\"\u2014a silly title but one that, nonetheless, meant Sir Francis became the primary supplier of produce for Camelot and so was able to pay the stonemasons to stop drinking ale and finish his tower. And a fine tower it was\u2014tall and straight, impressive but not too heavy or threatening in appearance.\n\n\"Even though a structure of this nature is made for holding off armed foes, I don't want it to scare off any friendly visitors,\" said Sir Francis with a twinkle in his eye.\n\nAs far as the dragons were concerned, a somewhat uneasy truce was agreed upon between them and the Knights of the Round Table. Mantooth, Helgad, and Wormal left shortly after the big battle to track down the surviving dragons and managed to find a surprising number of them in hideaways across the land. Mantooth told Leonard that it had taken some forceful convincing on Wormal's part to persuade these survivors that the threat from the Hellion's arrows was gone but that most of them were now back at their home in the ravine. \"Our Queen does not handle disagreement well,\" said Mantooth, with a smirk. \"And I think many decided they'd rather face a black arrow than her wrath.\"\n\nOn one memorable morning, the castle inhabitants awoke to find the grounds thick with dragons.\n\n\"We have come to bid you farewell,\" said Wormal to a hastily dressed King Arthur. \"For we are leaving these isles that have come to hold much sadness for us.\"\n\nLeonard showed up with Ham, both wiping the sleep out of their eyes. Merlin was suddenly present without anyone seeing him arrive, as was Glennys who was starting to pick up more than a few of the old wizard's tricks. Leonard suspected that Merlin was training her in the secret ways of his kind, but when he asked her about it she would only tell him to \"mind his own beeswax.\"\n\n\"Leaving, are you? Oh, I see. Well, forgive me, but I would be lying if I said I thought that was a bad thing,\" said King Arthur. \"Unfortunately, humans and dragonkind just don't mix. It's\u2026\"\n\n\"Unnatural? I could not agree more. Despite this truce, I think we both know that our cordial relations would not last indefinitely. The killing would return soon, on both sides, and we have grown weary of holding back our true nature,\" said Wormal, Queen of the Dragons.\n\n\"Where will you go?\" asked Arthur.\n\n\"We shall fly across the great western sea to distant lands that are still wild and largely unspoiled by man,\" said the Dragon Queen. \"We have heard tales of vast grasslands where countless grazing beasts roam\u2014with no poisoned arrows to keep us from gorging ourselves.\"\n\nMantooth and Helgad stepped forward and bowed before Leonard who bowed back.\n\n\"We shall miss you, Leonard,\" said Mantooth.\n\n\"You have been a good friend not only to dragonkind but to our family,\" said Helgad. \"We are most grateful to have known you.\"\n\n\"And I am grateful, too. Not only that I am your friend but also because you didn't torch me when my brilliant plan went so horribly wrong,\" said Leonard.\n\n\"Well, I suppose we all suffered along the way thanks to events your plan set in motion,\" said Mantooth. \"But on the other hand, I am reunited with my family, and an evil mark has been erased from this land. All in all, things have worked out for the better. Would you not agree?\"\n\n\"I would,\" said Leonard.\n\nHelgad turned to Glennys and nodded. \"I am in your debt, healer, for without your skills I would not be standing here beside my mate.\"\n\n\"It was my honor to be of service,\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Come closer, child,\" said Helgad.\n\nGlennys stepped forward, and Helgad leaned down until her snout was in front of Glennys's face. Helgad exhaled, and from her nostrils came a fine and silvery mist which circled Glennys's head before rushing into her nostrils. Glennys gasped and clutched her nose but then a look of wonder spread across her face.\n\n\"A growth of bramble just outside the castle wall! Milk thistle on the pasture fences! A patch of bairnwort near the brook which runs past the ash trees! I can smell the plants\u2026and tell where they are! Oh, thank you, Helgad! This is a most amazing and undeserved gift!\" said Glennys.\n\n\"Undeserved? Hardly. I have no doubt you will put it to the best of uses and ease much suffering.\"\n\n\"But what of me? Am I not worthy of such a parting gift from the dragon clan?\" said Merlin, pretending to pout.\n\n\"Oh, please. What a greedy wizard you are. That old hide of yours already contains more tricks than are held by all our clan combined,\" said Wormal with a smile. \"I would ask a favor of you, though.\"\n\n\"Name it,\" said Merlin, bowing low.\n\nThe Dragon Queen nodded, and a small hatchling, no bigger than a sheepdog, was brought forward.\n\n\"This young one is an orphan and is too small to make such a dangerous journey across the western sea. We would ask that you care for him until such time that he is mature enough to travel on his own,\" said the Dragon Queen. \"His name is Taddy.\"\n\nThe Queen nudged Taddy forward, and Merlin knelt to greet him, stroking the fur on his head.\n\n\"Hello, Taddy. You and I shall become fast friends,\" said Merlin, looking to Wormal. \"I am deeply moved that you leave one of your own in my care. I shall raise him as if he were my own.\"\n\n\"Does that mean he'll come back to us stinking of apples and spice?\" said Vaco from atop his mother's back.\n\nThe horde laughed so loudly the humans had to cover their ears. Humans and dragons gazed at each other for a moment before Wormal snorted.\n\n\"Goodbye,\" said Wormal.\n\n\"Goodbye,\" said Leonard.\n\nWith that, she and the entire horde sprang into the air, circled the castle once and then headed westward toward the vast sea.\n\n\"I've been of two minds about dragons, for they are both glorious and deadly,\" said Leonard as the horde grew distant in the morning sky. \"But all in all, I think our world will be a lesser place without them.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" said Merlin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Once the repairs to Camelot had been completed, Leonard announced that he would soon be going back to Sir Ronald's half-castle, now Leonard's half-castle as Arthur had decreed the land had been properly passed on, to complete its construction (thanks to a heavy bag of precious gems that Vincent had given him after sweeping out Mantooth's cell). On the morning of his departure, Leonard awoke in the stable loft to find Piffle sitting on his chest.\n\n\"To what do I owe the honor of this visit, Piffle?\" said Leonard, stretching.\n\n\"I is waiting for you to wake up for many, many hours, the Leonard.\"\n\n\"I had to make her promise not to wake you up when we first got here,\" said Hubert from the other side of the loft. \"She was so excited she wanted to start jumping on you right away.\"\n\n\"Excited about what?\"\n\n\"She won't say. And neither will my Master. All Sir Francis would say is that we were going to Camelot to pick you up.\"\n\n\"Piffle not gonna be the one ruining no surprises!\"\n\nThey climbed down out of the loft and, after a quick head dunk in the horse trough and a light breakfast of Gert's fresh bread and homemade butter, went to the throne room to pay their respects before leaving. Entering the castle, they were struck with how many people were awake at this hour of the day.\n\nThe throne room was also crowded with friends. Gert and Vincent were there as well as Ham, Jack, Sir Francis, and all the Knights of the Round Table. All were smiling at Leonard and Hubert as they made their way through the crowd toward the thrones of Arthur and Guinevere.\n\n\"What's going on, fool?\" whispered Hubert to Leonard.\n\n\"Not sure, friend of fool, but I'm ready to run, just in case.\"\n\n\"Just in case of what?\"\n\n\"Well, if I knew that I'd already be running, now, wouldn't I?\"\n\nThe crowd parted, and Leonard saw Arthur and Guinevere sitting on their thrones. Merlin and Glennys were seated on smaller chairs off to either side. All four of them were smiling at Leonard and Hubert.\n\n\"Begging Your Majesties' pardon,\" said Leonard. \"But all of this smiling is starting to make me and Hubert more than just a tiny bit nervous.\"\n\n\"Yes, we should like to be told just what is going on\u2026if you please?\" said Hubert.\n\nThe hall filled with gentle laughter as King Arthur rose from his throne and was handed Excalibur by Merlin.\n\n\"Well, then, I shall tell you what is going on. For meritorious service to King and Country that included acts of extreme bravery and disregard for personal safety, I am quite pleased to elevate the both of you to the rank of Knight of the Realm,\" said the King.\n\n\"A knight?\" said Leonard, not believing his ears. \"Do you mean it, Sire?\"\n\n\"I do. I have granted Leonard the rights to his late master's estate,\" said King Arthur with a wry smile. \"And I believe Sir Gareth's land is available.\"\n\nHubert's eyes grew wide.\n\n\"That's right, Hubert; with land comes a title. Kneel, the both of you.\"\n\nLeonard and Hubert knelt and were touched by Excalibur on both shoulders.\n\n\"I dub thee Sir Hubert and Sir Leonard, Knights of Camelot,\" said King Arthur. \"Rise now and receive the greetings of your friends and admirers.\"\n\nThe hall erupted with cheers as everyone surged forward to offer their congratulations.\n\n\"Thank you, Sire,\" said Leonard. \"I am truly grateful.\"\n\n\"It is well-deserved and quite necessary,\" said the King. \"I couldn't have a mere page seeking the hand of a maid of the court, now, could I? It would be a scandal, and we've had quite enough of those around here for a long while. Don't you agree?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sire,\" said Leonard. He and Glennys exchanged shy smiles. \"I do most certainly agree.\"\n\nIf you liked Dragonfriend, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It doesn't have to be long, a couple of sentences will do, and it really helps. Thanks!"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Fires Rising 2) I am Dragon",
        "author": "Marc Secchia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "White Flame",
                "text": "Dragon and Princess skimmed over the Obsidian Desert, tracking the retreat of a defeated, broken Skartunese army. Weapons, armour and bodies littered the footprints and occasional paw print that wound southward between the dunes. Not all of the bodies had stopped moving, but the dense flocks of black crows and bald-headed vultures acted unfussy about the general twitchiness of their meals. The macabre feast had reached a deafening pitch of jollity, if one was a carrion bird.\n\nThe meat course was not so cheerful.\n\nThin shrieks drifted up to the mismatched pair as they arrowed across a dawn painted crimson by the giant red sun, Ignis. As the sun peeked over the horizon, mighty crimson flares burst from its corona, visible to the draconic eye.\n\nDragon adjusted his spectacles self-consciously. \"I do wish I could show you the sun's flaming, Princess.\"\n\n\"Trust you to be taking in the glories of the suns rather than the goriness of the scenery, Dragon,\" said she, touching his head fondly with her slim, dark hand.\n\nHe said, \"When an artist stands accused of not knowing the difference between black sand and even more black sand, the situation is dire indeed.\"\n\n\"I shudder in horror.\"\n\nWhat an incongruous moment. Dragon shook his muzzle, considering the peculiarity of a mighty Dragon, formerly of the Devastator Dragon Clan of the Tamarine Mountains, actually carrying a Human upon his neck. Worse, by his sire's egg, he called her his Dragon Rider. The histories might not look fondly upon this ebullient excess of chutzpah. Neither the Dragon nor the Human histories.\n\nHis Dragon Rider, by full title, Her Royal Highness the Princess Azania N'gala of T'nagru, the Black Rose of the Desert, was not the sort of character to lose sleep over such niceties. Leaning forward against his neck, the tiny royal pointed ahead.\n\n\"A Dragon.\"\n\n\"Aye. Doesn't look good.\"\n\nHe slowed so that they could examine the fallen Dragon from the air. All too clearly, it was too late for this creature. His flanks no longer rose and fell; the fires of life had fled his eyes.\n\nThe Dragon still wore the slave cage upon his head.\n\nDragon shuddered despite himself. \"Let's fly on. We have to save the others.\"\n\n\"Go, Dragon.\"\n\nA soul's heaviness shivered in her voice.\n\nThey were both exhausted following the conclusion of a long battle the previous day. With the siege on N'ginta Citadel broken and the Kingdom of T'nagru saved from being ravaged by the merciless Skartun, they had barely had a chance to rest before setting out to rescue the five Dragon thralls taken back into the desert by the retreating army.\n\nWhy was their course veering more and more to the East?\n\nPumping his wings, he accelerated into the chase, ignoring a plethora of aches and pains that accompanied his every attempt to move or breathe. It even hurt to think. Fire check? Aye. His breath rasped in a throat as dry as the tall, sweeping dunes below and his newly opened stomach blazed with pain, despite his having drunk well before they set out.\n\nEvery self-respecting Dragon ought to obey his Princess, especially when she was right.\n\nFour-foot-eight paragon of distilled vexation!\n\nDiminutive she might be in comparison to her peers, but his courageous pet \u2013 wicked chortle, bwa-haa-harr \u2013was an exceptional Dragon Rider. He would be forever grateful he had chosen to redeem her honour and pillage the Kingdom of Vanrace that day. Twenty years of his life a fireless Dragon, a laughingstock, a pariah. Now look at him!\n\nStill a pariah, mind.\n\n\"Dragon, not here. Save the fires for when we need them,\" she cautioned, alert to the eager rumblings of his innards.\n\nDid she not know how his very soul yearned to breathe fire once more?\n\n\"You'll get your chance in a minute. Look beyond that next dune.\"\n\n\"They camped for the night?\"\n\n\"Stopped for the day. The accepted method of making a desert crossing is to halt during the daytime and try to keep as cool as possible, digging a hole to try to reach cooler sands beneath. Then, one travels from evening until a little after dawn.\"\n\n\"Isn't this season impossible?\"\n\n\"Meant to be,\" the Princess agreed. \"I wonder if they aren't trying to surprise one of the more easterly Citadels? L'baru or V'naruk would be my best guesses.\"\n\nThere they were! Six more Dragons, rather than the four they had expected. Four reds, an orange and a brown. Each had a handler seated upon his or her back. The rest of the army had been trying to dig down as the Princess had suggested, laying their cloaks over shallow holes dug in the sand. How could this strategy possibly work according to the laws of physics \u2013 if not by magic?\n\nAzania patted his neck. \"Let's do this.\"\n\nUnhooking the additional claws that gripped his scales, Dragon passed his novel spectacles back to the Princess. \"Thanks.\"\n\nShe stowed them efficiently. \"Roar?\"\n\n\"Raw meat?\"\n\n\"A raw roar, if you please.\"\n\nCracking open his jaw, he thundered with roar-some power, <I \u2013 AAMM \u2013 DRRAAGOONN!!>\n\nCloth and sand ripped up before them, hurling a windstorm across the encampment. Perhaps seven hundred soldiers had camped here with the Dragons; the rest must have marched further on, he concluded. Dragon swooped sharply, searching for that familiar pain behind the massive keel bone of his chest that anchored his flight muscles. Skartunese warriors scrambled before them, crying out and trying to shield their eyes as the blast of his wings added to the mayhem.\n\nFor a second, all was fear. His fires had vanished. It had been a one-off; his familiar penchant for failure must of course take over \u2013 and then, with a detonation that jolted him to the core, white lightning skittered across his scales and forked off his tail, his wingtips, even his fangs.\n\nWeird enough?\n\n\"Princess!\"\n\n\"I'm \u2013\"\n\n*GRRRAAAOOORRRGGGH!!*\n\nA firestorm billowed out of his agape jaw. He had no control. No idea of what he was actually doing, only that the geyser of flame pouring out of this throat had to go somewhere other than back inside his body. Great waves of pearlescent white flame gushed over the soldiers arrayed around the Dragon thralls, a devastating sweep of destruction.\n\n\"Circle!\" cried the voice from his back.\n\nHer bowstring twanged at the same time. One of the Dragon handlers slumped in his saddle, a shaft jutting from his stomach. Orange fire billowed toward them. Immediately, he jinked in flight, whisking his Princess safely away from the blast. Most Dragon fire was limited in range to about twenty feet. His own \u2013 he had no idea. Nor the slightest yearning to help his pernickety brain develop an accurate estimate just now.\n\n<You're in a battle, Dragon!>\n\nFollowing the plan, he swirled around the captive Dragons, clearing as wide a sweep as he could. Isolate the handlers. Pick them off.\n\nAzania cursed unhappily as she missed her next shot. The handlers responded by urging their Dragons to scatter. The Princess shot another handler in the neck; he followed that up with a cunning tail strike, smashing one of the men off the orange Dragoness' back.\n\n\"Stall,\" she rapped.\n\nFlaring his wings, he braked hard. His Rider steadied herself and then placed an arrow square in another handler's back.\n\nThe problem was that the captive Dragons kept obeying their last command. Several tried to track his flight with their flame. All the years they had spent in captivity, however, made them slow to react. He shot over a red Dragon's head before he could swing his fire onto target, performing another stall-and-shoot manoeuver with the Princess. The red clearly had no clue where his aerial foe had vanished to, for his eyes were further hampered by metal blinkers affixed to his head cage.\n\nOne handler left. Arrows spat around them as the Skartunese troops responded to the attack. Several men ran for the Dragons they had already cleared, while others sidled forward in groups, hefting their javelins.\n\n\"We'll be picking them off all day like this,\" he growled. \"Let's collect ourselves a few Dragons. Ready to give the orders, Princess?\"\n\n\"Remember, my leg's still in a cast \u2013\"\n\n\"Noted.\"\n\nPicking a red Dragon who faced entirely the wrong direction, he shot over and helped his Princess land on its back. Grabbing the silver inductor handles which were attached to the head harnesses by cords, she squeezed them to burn the Dragon's ear canals. Brutal, but this was the only reliable method they had found so far. These lifelong slaves to the Skartun regime understood nothing but pain.\n\nShe said, \"Dragon, the men in armour are your enemy. Protect your brother Dragons from them, including this flying one and his Rider. You will respond only to our verbal commands from now on.\"\n\nThe Dragon lumbered off to attack the Skartunese troops with their black-feathered helmets, careless of any arrows they directed his way.\n\n\"Next,\" he called, snaffling her back into his paw.\n\nTwo more successful raids later, and the tide began to turn in their favour. The Dragons blindly followed orders, attacking any Skartunese warriors who came into their line of sight. The enemy warriors viewed this betrayal in the dimmest of light, but many of them carried injuries and a massed Dragon attack was no laughing matter.\n\nTogether, Dragon and Rider hunted down the next two Dragons. Azania collapsed on the back of the second, clutching her leg. \"Aah! That's \u2013\" with a low scream, she pulled a dagger out of that same thigh. \"What is this?\"\n\nWhat were the chances of another hit in the same place? Rounding upon the soldier who had struck with a chance throw, Dragon barbecued him in a stream of white flame.\n\n\"Die! Princess, are you \u2013\"\n\n\"I'm good.\"\n\n\"Right, and I'm a bushy-tailed \u2013\"\n\n\"Shut up, Dragon. One more and the job's done. Let's do this.\"\n\nSnatching her up in his right paw, they chased the final handler who was goading a red Dragon into running away. Azania growled something unintelligible as she had to duck behind his paw to avoid a flurry of arrows and javelins, and dropped her bow by accident. She drew her Dragon talon dagger instead.\n\n\"Upside-down!\" came the cry.\n\nChortling in realisation, Dragon allowed the tiny Princess to upend herself between his knuckles. She backstabbed the Dragon handler from her head-down position, caught one of the inductors in her hand, and issued new orders. Meantime, Dragon cleaned the last cockroach off his kin's back. Now it was seven Dragons against the scattered Skartunese soldiers.\n\nHe swung Princess Azania back up into his paw. \"Sure you're alright?\"\n\n\"Just a spot of blood.\"\n\nSurely he was the one who pretended bravado with the worst possible timing? Reaching over with his free paw, he carefully put pressure on the puncture wound with a pinch of his talons.\n\n\"Thanks, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Contrary to popular belief, I do prefer my captive Princesses alive.\"\n\n\"You're never going to let that one go, are you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm never letting you go,\" he blustered, making her chuckle at the blatant misinterpretation. <Dragon kin! Brothers and sisters! Help me clean up these Skartun scum! Target any men on the ground and wipe them out!>\n\nThe carrion birds would feast this day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Slipping down her trousers, the Princess cleaned her new wound with water from her gourd and then bound it firmly using strips of material provided by Dragon. Skartun cloaks. Given his Princess-sharpened talons, creating bandages these days posed no problem at all.\n\nHalfway through, he said, \"Well, at least that Skartunese warrior over there got his dying wish.\"\n\n\"What? Who?\" she muttered, yanking a knot tight.\n\n\"He saw the Black Rose of the Desert in her underclothes.\"\n\n\"Dragon, he's dead.\"\n\n\"Almost,\" groaned the man. He was only four feet away, and in bad shape.\n\n\"See? Although, how anyone can be attracted to these twigs you call legs, is quite beyond this Dragon. Is this attractive, man?\" He waved a paw illustratively.\n\nEither it was the heat or the pain of his burn wounds, but the warrior's eyes glazed over as he peered at the Princess.\n\nShe sniffed, \"Oh, if I must. O warrior of Skartun, how do you keep cool during the desert crossing?\"\n\n\"Not \u2026 telling.\"\n\nAzania primped her hair and did some sort of wriggle with her hips that he assumed must be suggestive. Now, if Ariamyrielle Seaspray had done that with her haunches \u2026\n\n\"I'd really like to know,\" she cooed.\n\nThe dusky Princess had turned a whole slew of knights, men-at-arms and rapscallions into her slaves with just such a glance. Not for nought was she said to be the most beautiful woman in the seventeen realms. True to form \u2013 and to the watching Dragon's disgust \u2013 the man's brains promptly evaporated, or some effect close enough to be indistinguishable.\n\n\"We carry coldstones,\" he groaned, \"green gems imbued with the power to \u2013 ahk!\"\n\nWith a ghastly splutter, he passed into the afterlife. Azania glared at the man as if he had personally disappointed her.\n\nDragon said, \"He's dead, you can stop teasing him.\"\n\nSquirming back into her tight leather trousers, the Princess patted her good thigh and said, \"Ever seen more powerful twigs than these?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Male Humans are idiots.\"\n\n\"And male Dragons are not?\"\n\n\"Obviously.\"\n\n\"Doth mine ears hearken to the intellect-stealing, musical strains of sea spray?\"\n\n\"Be quiet, woman.\"\n\nShe pressed, \"Sing you an aria?\"\n\n<Gnarrr-Princess-kebabs!>\n\n\"Just repeat after me, 'Women are always right.'\"\n\n\"Don't push your luck, titch. Are you sure that leg's alright?\"\n\nShe eyed the blood already seeping through the pad of bandages. \"No, not really. Want to cut up a few more cloaks for me?\"\n\nWhile his back was turned, his brave Rider face-planted in the desert sand of her native kingdom. Dragon rushed to her side with an aggrieved bellow. Aye, check one for the bravado. Gently, he tried to wipe her face clean of sand. He bathed her eyes and lips as best he could from her water gourd, alert to the fact that he should keep plenty aside for the trek back to N'ginta Citadel.\n\nHumans. So frail.\n\nWhat did that matter? He knew about being different. Why could he not simply apply that to a species most Dragons regarded as fleas, lice and cockroaches?\n\nBecause it was true of some? He could point to a few rather unsavoury Dragons, his own dam and two brothers being foremost among them. By his wings, such were the complications of family \u2013 as Azania knew all too well for herself.\n\nIf they walked fast enough, they would return in time for her eldest brother's coronation at noon. King N'gala had not survived the treachery of a woman of Skartun, the enchantress Nahritu-N'shula, who had brought him low through her unusual magical gifts. She was also the mother of Princess Azania's younger half-sister, Inzashu-N'shula.\n\nThe Psyromantic Mage had vanished into the desert, or within the citadel. No-one knew where she was, although the search was on.\n\nMarshalling the Dragon thralls with a bellowed command, Dragon had them quickly hunt for as many of the green stones as had survived his fires. If a creature were honest, he would admit to being a touch shocked by the power at his command. His throat hurt worse than ever, and he wore six javelins and more arrows than he could count in various places around his body, but \u2013 oh, why not a little swaggering? He was a victorious Dragon once more. His legend grew!\n\nAlong with the ego, Azania would be quick to point out.\n\nBig creature. Big ego, right?\n\nDragon and his six taciturn escorts backtracked for four hours before being met by an eager patrol from N'ginta Citadel. By then, Azania had recovered from dangling over his paw like an overused dishrag, to the relief of everyone.\n\nThe patrol leader saluted smartly. \"Sir, the royal family awaits you both for the coronation ceremony just as soon as you are able. What can you tell us about the Skartun remnant?\"\n\nHe briefed the man, meantime pleasantly picturing which body part he ought to surrender for calling a Dragon 'sir.' A foot? An ear? That would take a great deal of precision. Maybe a kneecap? Shortly, with Azania's help, they arranged to fly on ahead while several soldiers from the patrol detail returned at a far slower pace with the Dragon thralls.\n\n\"The royals were waiting for us?\" he pressed.\n\n\"Aye, sir. It's \u2013\"\n\n\"Call me Dragon. Not sir.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 Dragon?\"\n\n\"Dragon by name, Dragon by nature.\" He shrugged massively. \"It's complicated. Family affair, you see.\"\n\n\"I see, s \u2026 uh, Dragon.\"\n\nAnd with that, the soldier trotted on with his detail. There might have been a couple of sighs of relief, which he ignored.\n\n\"Onward and upward, Princess,\" he grinned, displaying a few fangs.\n\nShe said, \"Hmm, do you know what, Dragon? Your breath has a certain salty freshness about it now. Rather bracing. If nothing else, that goes to prove the changes inside of you.\"\n\nHe stretched as luxuriously as his bone-weary body would allow, and \u2026 crackled. From head to toe, he snapped and popped like fat spitting in a saucepan. They both started and stared at one another. Changes? Another stretch did not produce half as a worrying a sound. Still, his scales felt odd, almost furry underneath, for want of a better word.\n\nTruly terrifying for a reptilian creature!\n\n\"I'm not sure that was a good sound,\" Azania observed, sounding about as happy as the sagging, heavily damaged outer doors of her home citadel.\n\n\"The electrical charge didn't affect you earlier?\" he asked.\n\n\"When you started your electrolysis process by trying to frazzle everything in sight? No.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry if that scared you. Would you like to ride in my paws again so that you can keep your leg raised?\"\n\n\"Sounds good. I'm not sure I'm going to be walking anywhere during the ceremony. Or standing.\"\n\n\"I've got you covered, Princess. Let's go scare the new King.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Aye?\"\n\n\"I like you, do you know that?\"\n\nKicking up into the air, he eyed the bundle in his forepaws with great suspicion. Azania pretended complete innocence, but he was not fooled. Schemes and mischief practically oozed out of her pores. All that remained for him was to find out what she intended.\n\nWho was the Dragon? He would sniff it out.\n\n[ Princess Power ]\n\nThe kingdom of t'nagru had never seen a coronation to compare, one attended by a Dragon carrying in paw a Princess of the realm who stole the show with her truly fantastical golden attire. He was not even sure it counted for a dress. More like stiff, layered golden armour. Had he any doubt about the state of the kingdom's treasury, the weight of jewels and finery he clasped certainly made an eloquent statement, for starters.\n\nA starter for a Dragon's gold hunger would be another way of putting it.\n\nHumans might drool over such riches. A noble beast of the air panted so loudly that the Princess told him to breathe more quietly. Rasping throat. He needed something to soothe this infernal itching. Maybe a draught of cool peppermint tea?\n\nHe'd be smelling like a walking bouquet soon.\n\nWhen should he begin negotiations with the new King over his sister's ransom? *Gnarr-harr-haaa!*\n\nStill, with all the speechmaking and ceremonial nonsense occupying the Dragon's portion of the afternoon, he was thoroughly bored by the time King N'chala finally finished receiving the fealty of all of his subjects \u2013 with one notable exception, to wit, the exceptional exception in his paw. Intriguing, he thought, meeting the King's gaze across the chamber. Dragon arched his brow suggestively.\n\nExtending his scent senses, he sniffed out the new King's cold sweat.\n\nAh, his day had just improved a hundredfold.\n\nThe Princess said, \"Could you help me please, Dragon? I don't think I could limp over to the throne if I tried, but I really ought to congratulate my brother, and say my vows. He is my King, after all.\"\n\n\"Which of these nobles should I squash first?\"\n\n\"I'm sure N'chala will appreciate that service another day,\" she said testily, \"but for now, let's try to behave ourselves. Somewhat.\"\n\n\"I like you too, Princess, do you know that?\"\n\n\"Ah, but for how long, Dragon?\"\n\n\"You are not a bauble to be set aside on a whim.\"\n\nSuddenly, she trembled in his grasp. \"Don't make me cry, friend.\"\n\nWith a polite basso rumble, he cleared a path as if by magic. Then, the massive yet subtle tread of a Dragon conveyed the Princess up to her brother's throne. Dominating the space, he was able to stare down at the King even though the gorgeously carved throne stood upon a platform at the end of the hall, surrounded by all the magnificent finery of a proud and ancient desert kingdom. Given a less fraught time, Dragon decided, he would have loved to bring his easel in here and set up for a long, satisfying session of painting. The fluted arches, delicate frescoes and screens, and gold-leaf decorated treasure chests certainly created a most royal space.\n\nAs Azania spoke, he returned his attention to her.\n\n\"Brother, I wish to congratulate you upon your ascension to the throne of T'nagru, despite the grief and difficulty our kingdom faces at this time.\"\n\nHe inclined his head, weighted down with the great crown \u2013 it looked terribly uncomfortable, Dragon decided. A statement regarding the weighty nature of leadership. Everyone knew that this Skartun siege had only been a precursor to a much greater invasion later in the season. One Jabiz out of thirty had tested their mettle, and breached the outer gates of the citadel with a monstrous Bloodworm which still lay on the sand outside the gates.\n\nDid flesh rot in such a waterless desert climate? Or would it simply shrivel?\n\nUnexpected thirst tickled his gravelly throat. He coughed aside, the sound echoing loudly despite the large crowd gathered for the King's coronation event.\n\nThe Princess said, \"I am sorry that I cannot make the formal genuflections, but my injuries will not allow. I would still cherish the opportunity to give you my vow, if you will receive it. I believe you will make a mighty and just King, N'chala. However, I must report that I find my loyalties divided. As you are aware, Dragon and I flew down to T'nagru of our freewill both to help the kingdom, and to prepare the Dragonkind for the invasion of these slavers. With the help of the brave soldiers of the kingdom, we have been able to free twenty-six Dragons. This achievement cannot be underestimated.\"\n\nKing N'chala said, \"The Kingdom of T'nagru has never been more grateful. In noble service, you and the Dragon have far exceeded all expectations.\" Rising from his seat, he bowed formally, a beautiful desert obeisance. \"Without you, all would have been lost. We are forever indebted.\"\n\nEvery noble and soldier in the hall bowed with him, as demanded by tradition, Dragon realised belatedly.\n\n\"When I make my vows, I would want to reserve an unusual \u2026 freedom, for a Princess of the realm,\" she continued, treading delicately upon conversational eggshells. \"By law, I am still this Dragon's possession until such time as full ransom is paid. I would not like to place my Kingdom in any jeopardy as a result of my unusual position.\"\n\nHer brother's dark eyes flashed as he considered the implicit threat.\n\nAzania held up her hand. \"Furthermore, I would not want to strain the Kingdom's finances in a time of war by demanding such a ransom, and Dragon agrees with me in this.\"\n\nOh, he did, did he? This was news.\n\nGood thing she was right. Again. He restrained a juvenile eye-roll.\n\n\"Here is our proposal,\" the Princess continued, smiling. \"We would like T'nagru to take care of these freed Dragons until such a time as they are able to make independent decisions regarding their future. Meantime, Dragon and I will fly north, seeking the help of others of the Dragonkind against the forthcoming Skartunese invasion.\"\n\n\"I will not be manipulated.\"\n\nThe King's harsh reply cut into a simmering silence.\n\n\"You misunderstand our intentions, o King,\" Dragon put in. \"The time for manipulation has passed \u2013 we hope \u2013 and resulted in the unfortunate death of your father.\"\n\n\"How do I know your magic is not active right now?\"\n\n\"You have the oath of a Dragon.\"\n\nA tic pulsed in the man's cheek. Suddenly, he realised, a fresh and different danger threatened. His eyes flickered to Inzashu, standing to the King's right, garbed in similar golden finery. Her ten-foot train pooled around her. No warning of magic could he give her, but the glance was enough. The eleven year-old's tiara bobbed slightly in acknowledgement. Perhaps her senses also burned to the rawness of N'chala's grief?\n\nAzania said, \"Do our actions not speak loudly enough?\"\n\n\"Sister, at the crucial hour, will you choose to serve Humankind, or the Dragonkind?\"\n\n\"Both, I hope.\"\n\nHe was almost certain King N'chala feared a draconic plot against the future of his kingdom. How could he even begin to explain that this act would be anathema to any true Dragon's heart, when he well knew not all Dragons were so kind or honourable, in the Human sense?\n\nWas honour the word to sway this young ruler's heart?\n\nAs his emotions peaked, lightning crackled inside his jaw. N'chala and many of the nobles flinched. The other two Princes scowled as if he had just offered them a poisoned chalice each, compliments of the Dragon.\n\nShifting his paws, he sighed. \"I apologise for my lack of manners. My powers are new and I have yet to learn all the appropriate controls. Please hear our heart, o King. We plan to leave with you a force of twenty-six Dragons who, it is my hope, will both defend and help rebuild your city far faster than you could manage with Human hands or endeavour. You know they have been shamefully misused. As a Dragon, I ask only that you treat them with honour, and not as slaves. For my part, my intention is to treat your sister and your kingdom with equal honour.\"\n\n\"Our heart?\" he said.\n\n\"We are Dragon and Rider. This too, is a new thing.\"\n\nN'chala said, \"What of my sister's honour? What about the price my father placed upon her head? For I will be plain with you, Dragon. You are one Dragon, of no Clan. You cannot claim to speak for any of your kind. However, I do rejoice to see my sister well and hale, even if she is engaged in an enterprise which many, if not most in this kingdom, regard as deeply unsuitable for a woman. T'nagru's dealings with Vanrace were ill done and created a rift where solidarity was needed, especially at this time of war. Again, we have you to thank for restoring Azania's honour in that regard.\"\n\nSuddenly, he smiled and opened his right hand. In the desert, Dragon understood, this was a precursor to settling a bargain. \"Sister, what do you want?\"\n\nHis steely gaze stilled a rising muttering in the hall.\n\nIn a clear, steady voice, she said, \"To see you, King N'chala, and our beloved Kingdom of T'nagru prosper and be kept safe from the Skartun scourge. We would serve and protect these people, and thus, form a bulwark against a Skartunese invasion of the other Kingdoms and keep them from the Tamarine Mountains, where they seek more Dragon thralls.\"\n\n\"And for the Dragon?\"\n\n\"To see him grow into his powers as a mighty and noble creature of the air, and to be restored to honour, Clan and kinship amongst his kind.\"\n\nN'chala stepped forward boldly, until he was close enough that he could reach out to clasp her hand in his. \"And you, beloved sister? You have no wishes for yourself?\"\n\nPrince Aragu blurted out, \"Brother, I protest this shameful display!\"\n\nWithout turning, the King said, \"Do you?\"\n\nThe middle brother of the three, Prince Yadaxu, said, \"May we offer counsel, brother?\"\n\n\"To a King fighting for his kingdom's very survival? I will need all the counsel I can get, my brothers,\" N'chala said, heavy of voice. \"However, I will remind you both that this is our younger sister. Azania has always been one moved by her heart. As amply proven in these last few days, the heart of a woman is a force far more powerful than any of us imagined \u2013 both in spite and ambition, in the matter of Nahritu-N'shula, and in the power of a woman despised by her own father's plotting. Yet Azania, if I hear her rightly, wishes to rise above the sorrow and mistakes of the past, and so the question comes to this elder brother's mind, why? How far will she fly to pursue her dreams?\"\n\nHe knew. Word must have reached him from Chakkix Camp.\n\nEven as realisation set his hearts racing, Princess Azania said, \"You are perceptive, King N'chala. I will admit, there is something special, exhilarating and perhaps, world-changing in the notion of being a Dragon Rider, and friend and companion to a Dragon as noble as he who holds me in his paw. However, it is as you say. My heart yearns farther \u2013 across the ocean.\"\n\nN'chala said, \"Am I to understand \u2013\"\n\nAgain, Aragu burst out, \"This is nonsense! Forgive that I must speak plainly, my King, but are we to believe that this disobedient and disgraced woman would fly all over the realms, spreading her seditious doctrine \u2013\"\n\n\"Still your tongue! I am your King! Have not enough died?\"\n\nThe throne room rang with his fury.\n\nAfter a pause as awkward as a Sea Dragon in the room, Dragon said, \"May I give an answer?\"\n\n\"Speak,\" N'chala invited.\n\n\"First, we plan to consult with the Dragons of the Tamarine Mountains, finding one or a Clan who will speak for us. I believe that Dragon is Juggernaut the Grinder. We will ask the Clans to rise in power, wingtip to wingtip, and fly against the Skartun. In all honesty, o King, I cannot imagine such a brotherhood of Dragons coming to pass. We are famously clannish, hidebound and bearers of grudges in all five hearts, and that is my word as a Dragon. That some Clans will choose to fly is the best we can hope for.\"\n\n\"After that, the Princess Azania and I plan to fly to the North, to the Vaylarn Archipelago. There, we have the promise of a Dragon army of warriors such as few have ever imagined. The Isles Dragons are masters of combat. Furthermore, as you may be aware, Azania and I had the chance to serve the young King of Vaylarn, Azerim, when his parents were struck down by treachery and poisoning. We hope to visit with him and see how they are faring. There is much trouble with Sea Serpents in their oceans. However, we also have it on the word of a Dragoness that Azerim still harbours great regard for Azania, despite the years which have passed since last they met.\"\n\nN'chala posed a query with a grim quirk of his lips.\n\nHe added, \"We shall scent out the mettle of this young King's heart, and his intentions toward the Princess Azania. If they are not worthy \u2026\"\n\nHe twizzled his neck and bared a few fangs expressively.\n\nKing N'chala grinned in return, baring his own teeth in a surprisingly Dragon-like statement of intent. \"I believe we have an understanding, Dragon. Sister, is all this as you would have it?\"\n\nIn a small voice, she said, \"All that Dragon has said, is true.\"\n\nAn eerie, scale-prickling silence pervaded the hall.\n\nWhat would happen now? So many scents of discontent, outrage and distrust surrounded them. Dragon could not gain any clear sense of a future.\n\n\"Very good!\" The King clapped his hands sharply, making more than a few people \u2013 and one Dragon \u2013 jump. \"Citizens of T'nagru, I wish to make my first official appointment as your King. I, N'chala N'gala of T'nagru, hereby appoint the Princess Azania N'gala as Roving Ambassador to the Dragons.\"\n\nAh, how she leaped in his paw! Gasps arose from the crowd; he saw and scented naked fury in some. Dragon could not keep a grin from widening upon his lips.\n\n\"This is a new position in the realm, one carrying wide-ranging powers and authority. We shall speak about your duties and prepare letters of introduction to the Dragon Clans before your imminent departure,\" he added. \"Secondly, good citizens, hear my decree. I, N'chala N'gala of T'nagru, hereby decree that all citizens of our kingdom are to treat Dragons in a fitting and honourable manner, as creatures of intelligence and volition at least on par with Humans. If we are to survive this war, we must set aside old prejudices and forge a new path to freedom.\"\n\nWith a grin that lit up his dark, bearded face, the young King paused to take in his sister's utter bemusement and joy.\n\nHeartily, N'chala said, \"Ambassador, you and I need to discuss how we put a formerly rebellious Princess of the realm and her mighty Dragon to work. What say you?\"\n\nAzania voiced a wordless squeak.\n\nClearly bent upon ribbing her properly, he continued, \"Sister, may I be the first to congratulate you upon your appointment to a position in which I believe you will add most immodestly to our Kingdom's honour and renown? Furthermore, when you have recovered your tongue, may I humbly request the honour of receiving your vow?\"\n\nHow his scales prickled! Never had he \u2013 nor the Princess, he was certain \u2013 imagined such an outcome. Traditions overturned. Nay, tossed out of the nearest window! Centuries of a woman's so-called place in the Kingdom flouted, moreover, with full royal permission. Oh, N'chala was about to receive an earful from all his advisors and most especially his brothers, but this Dragon sensed something novel in the wind.\n\nWas this the scent of a one-Princess revolution?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "In the early evening, he and Azania visited the former slaves of the Skartun, overseeing the removal of their body armour and head cages, and the treatment of many wounds. Some of these wounds were the burns inflicted inside their ear canals by the dreadful electrical inductors, which had caused permanent deafness in half of their number. One Dragoness was severely ill. Inzashu worked with her for over an hour, stabilising her condition, before moving on to help with the others.\n\nThey quizzed the Dragons. Encouraging signs! Two of the older males, Soar Windchaser and Ruthless Obliterator \u2013 Azania had a private giggle at their names \u2013 were able to speak, albeit slowly and in muddled, incomplete sentences. Their strong Skartunese accents were hard to follow, but with Princess Inzashu playing occasional interpreter, they worked out that the deaf Dragons had developed a basic form of sign language during captivity. In time, they would be able to brief King N'chala on many aspects of Skartun life, culture and military organisation. They were more than willing to turn a paw to rebuilding the city.\n\nThe Dragons confirmed that the Jabiz of the Skartun sought fresh Dragons. Those in captivity had never bred well, almost not at all. The Skartun leaders had ambitions to conquer realms south again of their lands, but felt their armies needed to be bolstered by new recruits.\n\nSo grateful were his kin for their rescue, Dragon felt his eyes prickle in reaction. Not tears. Dragons had no tear ducts. Instead, they relied on their natural fires to burn away impurities or airborne particles and insects.\n\nWhat was this feeling, then? Similar to the leaking Azania had done in private, away from the throne room and the frayed emotions resulting from her encounter with her brother? Dragons lamented for a soul's overshadowing sorrow, but rarely grieved on behalf of another. Kin-grief, as it was called in the Draconian language, was a rare, precious gift.\n\nAzania gave him a subtle nudge. \"Fly us up to the Palace?\"\n\nWeary. Aye, this too, he understood \u2013 grief exacted such a toll upon the body. Taking both Princesses upon his neck, he flew them up to the flat-roofed Royal Palace, teasing Azania along the way that there was no tallest tower in all the land to rescue Princesses from. Clearly a severe failing in the development of T'nagrun architectural design.\n\n\"Maybe we should find you a tower, Inza?\" Azania tugged her sister's leg.\n\n\"Ooh, where I should be rescued by a Dragon? The only problem I have with that, is the stinky Prince angle,\" she chortled. \"I mean, if he's nice then no need for the Dragon, but what if he's as nasty as your Prince Floric?\"\n\n\"My Prince Floric? Wash your mouth out with soap, young lady!\"\n\nInzashu chuckled merrily.\n\nDragon said, \"There's something more serious I wanted to discuss with both of you. I sense we might need to spirit you away from here, Inzashu.\"\n\n\"That premonition of danger you had in the throne room?\" she asked immediately.\n\n\"Aye.\" Reaching up with his paw, he found her leg. \"Smart girl.\"\n\n\"That's my knee,\" Azania lied.\n\n\"Ditto for both Princesses,\" he snorted. \"When we get to your room, we should seriously consider our next moves. I'm thinking we spirit you away without tipping off the King \u2026 or your half-brothers.\" As Azania began to protest, he said, \"I'm not accusing Aragu of anything, mind. Nor have I any well-developed sense of where or how such a danger might arise. However, there is also the consideration that Nahritu-N'shula might have established other backup plans here in N'ginta Citadel.\"\n\nThe older Princess let out her breath in a long, approving sigh.\n\nThe younger said, \"All the more reason for me to stay. I can detect my mother's return and work against her, if needs be.\"\n\nAzania said, \"No, Inzashu \u2013\"\n\n\"That's courageous of you,\" Dragon said. \"Let's us three talk about this in private, later. No, don't you growl at me. I don't mean the older ones will decide for you. We'll talk together.\"\n\nThe girl patted his neck uncertainly. \"I \u2026 thank you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"I try. When I fail, I start eating cheeky Princesses.\"\n\n\"Why did the Dragon need to be saved from the wicked Princess?\" Azania teased unexpectedly.\n\n*GRRROARRRGGGH!!*\n\n\"My thoughts exactly. Now, how's about we run you a salt bath?\"\n\n\"Genius,\" he purred. \"Clearly, I kidnapped you for your brains rather than your woefully skinny rump.\"\n\n\"I guess that makes me the butt of the joke,\" came the talon-swift reply.\n\nInzashu made a scandalised gasp.\n\n\"The youngster's a bit behind, there,\" Dragon quipped.\n\nBoth Princesses groaned.\n\n\"Keeping up the rear \u2026 as usual.\"\n\n\"Dragon, you are incorrigible,\" Azania snorted. \"Drumroll, trumpet salute.\"\n\n\"That's what Prince Floric does with his \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"I rather hope not!\" he snorted, ever so drily, and had the distinction of not one but two Princesses nearly falling off his neck, breathless with laughter.\n\nIn the bathing chamber at the end of the royal corridor, the maidservants filled a bathing pool for Dragon, into which they threw two sacks of salt and stirred it vigorously. He teased one of the maids that he could dangle her in by her toes and use her for a large stirring spoon, making her burst into tears. Great. Time for a gentle paw and an explanation, that aye, Dragons did indeed have a heinous sense of humour.\n\nThen, he dunked his head and gargled salt water for a very pleasurable quarter of an hour or so, while they discussed plans. He bathed his eyes and tried rolling in the ten-foot bath, which really was not built for a fifty-three foot, multi-tonne Dragon.\n\n\"Feels great on the scales,\" he said.\n\n\"I can imagine,\" Azania said. \"Oh, who's knocking? It's late.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't let them in to see my nakedness,\" Dragon gurgled, trying by hook or by crook to immerse his whole tail at once. No way. \"By my wings, I've never been this itchy in my life.\"\n\n\"Is he serious?\" Inzashu asked.\n\n\"Rarely,\" her sister said.\n\nIt was King N'chala, relieved at last of his retinue of advisors, nobles, army generals and brothers. Without preamble, he launched into a prepared speech.\n\n\"I apologise for my brevity, but I'm late for my next meeting already. As you advised, the Skartunese remnant are indeed moving East, closing in upon the citadels there.\" He scratched his neck, and heaved a sigh. \"Please bear with me. One, I'm sorry I was harsh earlier, Azania and Dragon, but I am finding my way in terms of trusting people. This is a difficult time for the kingdom and also personally, as you can imagine. Two, when you leave, I would be most grateful if your flight path could veer toward the Kingdom of Amboraine.\"\n\nAzania said, \"Amboraine? Oh, Princess Yuali?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Deftly extracting two small message scrolls out of a belt pouch, he said, \"I'd be indebted if you could deliver this scroll to Princess Yuali, and this one to the King. Obviously, current events will be making a mess of our wedding plans. I wish her to know that I truly care for her, but making that commitment \u2013 could you phrase this nicely \u2013 is somewhat challenging, just now.\"\n\nAzania nodded. \"Consider it done. You're forgiven. I was brash.\"\n\n\"And I was rude. Three, I need you to take Inzashu-N'shula with you when you leave \u2013 tonight, that is. You must leave tonight.\"\n\nThey exchanged startled glances.\n\nDragon said, \"The Princess is hardly in fit shape \u2013\"\n\nN'chala shook his head. \"I've received word of a Skartunese plot against your life, sister. I am so sorry, since we've hardly had the chance to get to know one another. I know no better way of protecting you than to dispatch you abroad with this Dragon.\"\n\nInzashu said, \"I wanted to stay to protect you, brother.\"\n\nThough his face was graven of sorrow, the new King tried to smile. He gave up, saying between gritted teeth, \"Thank you, but I could not stand to lose more family. Not now.\"\n\n[ Aloft ]\n\nPrincess Azania tucked her younger but taller sister into bed with a kiss upon the forehead that Dragon thought looked like an experiment in affection.\n\n\"Now, I know it's next to impossible, but please do try to get a couple of hours' sleep, sister. We'll wake you when it's time to fly.\"\n\n\"I guess I get to be kidnapped after all,\" the girl said sleepily.\n\nHe rumbled, \"Not sure if that's by the wicked Princess or the devious Dragon.\"\n\nWorth a giggle.\n\nDragon sniffed around the rich bedchamber and glared balefully over the balcony at the royal gardens below. Nothing to like about this whiff of a plot. He could not for the life of him pin down the sense that somehow, somewhere, something was profoundly awry. Obviously. No clear vector of attack presented itself to his questing senses.\n\n*Gnarr.* He would lie right next to the bed while they waited. Nothing and nobody would get past him.\n\nEventually, Azania finished packing their few possessions to her satisfaction. She buckled his neck saddle in place and tried to work out how to place one in position behind it, so that she could be close to her sister during flight.\n\n\"Why don't you lie down?\" he said eventually. \"It'll be a long night. I'll keep watch.\"\n\n\"Hour after midnight?\"\n\n\"Done.\"\n\nDespite his better intentions, Dragon's multiple eyelids all felt weighted with sand. He growled at himself to keep alert. Tucked in beside her sister, his dark Princess fell asleep between breaths. Should have thought to pack extra bandages. Rising, he padded over to the linen cupboard and stole a set of the kingdom's finest silk sheets, suitable for royalty.\n\nSome royalty claimed silken sheets made them itch \u2026\n\nHis eyes narrowed. Itch? Just look at Inzashu-N'shula, who was not dreaming as he had imagined. She was scratching her arms, her legs, her neck, moaning in her sleep as she thrashed about and turned over, half-waking her sister with an accidental elbow to the nose.\n\nAh, the royal snout \u2013 he pulled up in surprise as Azania moaned in just the same fashion and began to scratch at her neck. Itching that madly?\n\nBy his sire's egg, what \u2026 fire imploded in his belly.\n\n\"Poison! Wake up \u2013 wake up!\"\n\nSomething in the sheets. A subtle white powder \u2013 ripping the covers off the Princesses, Dragon examined them as best he could. Rash! A fiery rash covered both girls upon their skin where it had been left exposed by their clothing. No! Don't panic. Think. Powder. Water \u2013 the bathing chamber! Scooping up the sisters as they woke in shock, he charged literally through the doors of the royal bedchamber in an explosion of splinters and promptly skidded on the marble and hit the wall so hard the entire Palace reverberated. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he belted down the corridor.\n\n\"What the \u2013 my skin!\" Azania gasped. Her sister started screaming.\n\n\"Poison!\"\n\n\"Into the bathtub,\" he cried, smashing through the next set of doors. Flimsy wooden screen. In a second, he dunked both girls in the half-full tub of salty water he had used before. \"Quick. Rub your arms. Get it off your necks.\"\n\n\"Blub,\" said Inzashu.\n\nHe fished the younger girl out with a clumsy paw. Drowning her was not the point. She vomited at once, clutching her stomach with a loud groan. Azania did the same. Dragon urged them to wash as much as they could. Soap, too.\n\nAzania called, \"Dragon, could you fetch the pot of aloe cream from my dresser?\"\n\nWretched girl. She looked as terrible as she sounded. When he returned with the stoneware pot, she thanked him for his quick thinking. Clearly, the real boon had been their travel clothes, he thought pensively. Had they been wearing those flimsy nightclothes that real Princesses were supposed to wear, so much more of their skin would have been exposed to this powdered poison. Even so, they were both shivering uncontrollably and set about another round of retching.\n\n\"Eat this,\" Azania told her sister.\n\n\"Eat \u2026 the cream?\"\n\n\"Aloe's highly effective against this type of poison. Trust me, I was made to study this as part of the education Princesses take in keeping themselves alive.\"\n\nInteresting curriculum.\n\nThe second part of the curriculum involved changing their clothes. All of them.\n\nAzania said, \"I'm going to miss these leather trousers.\"\n\n\"So are half the men in the kingdoms,\" Dragon agreed, drawing a gasp from Inzashu and a mock kick from the older sister. \"No mind. I'm sure we can find something even more scandalous for you both.\"\n\nInzashu said primly, \"I am not being caught dead in trousers.\"\n\n\"Skartun must be an incredibly backward realm,\" he teased. \"I can't see you flying well in desert robes.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Azania, pulling out her Dragon talon dagger. \"We'll wear the pantaloons and tunic tops. A swift spot of tailoring will resolve any issues with the full-length outer robes. When we get to Chakkix Camp, sister, we'll purchase you something that'll have the boys chasing your curves.\"\n\n\"Azania!\"\n\n\"Oops, slip of the old forked tongue there, as some Dragon I know would say.\"\n\n\"Don't drag me into this, Princess.\"\n\nDespite their banter, he realised that neither girl was doing well. They were in pain from the burning rash, their stomachs knotted up and their muscles leaping infrequently in spasms. When he inquired if they were able to fly, however, he earned a pair of glares that left him in no doubt as to the truth of their sisterhood, and of their mettle. By his sire's egg, Human Princesses were clearly far more dangerous than the legends made out. No insipid, simpering nitwits waiting for their perfect Prince to fall out of the sky at the end of a rainbow around here.\n\nMaybe they would fly a thousand miles to find their Princes.\n\nOr, not settle for Princes at all?\n\nInconceivable!\n\nBy now, several Palace guards were peering through the bedroom doorway, asking what had happened. Azania briefed them, making them promise to have the maids burn all the sheets and not touch them with their bare skin. Most had known her all her life; their emotions were muddy, furious, and not a hint of treachery could he sense. They made vows of vengeance in the desert way.\n\nHe gave that a satisfied snort. No Dragon could have done better.\n\nThen, Princesses safely seated astride his neck, he spread his wings and launched off the Princess' balcony with supple grace. Smooth as silk sliding into a deep desert night. One moon of the triplets stood high, a thin white crescent that still shed enough light for the draconic eye to enjoy, if one had his \u2013\n\n\"Spectacles?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Princess.\" He perched the spectacles atop his head.\n\nImpudent mind reader.\n\nDunes leaped into relief ahead of him. Sculpted for aeons by the powerful desert winds, they stood stark in the faint white moonlight. In the deeper desert, they had seen dunes over three hundred feet high. These were half that height, but still impressive for their chiselled, serpentine curves and pristine splendour. No footprints. No animal trails, plants nor signs of water. Just emptiness stretching as far as the eye could see.\n\nAzania leaned against Inzashu, who made herself comfortable against his neck. Both girls were strapped in tight on the leather saddles. Stretching out his body, he set about testing just how efficiently he could fly, adjusting his wingbeat for minimal bounce and maximal smoothness.\n\nSoon, a snuffle against his neck revealed his success. One down.\n\n\"Dragon, please look out for fresh aloe plant,\" Azania whispered. \"Might be hard to find this far south, but we could do with more juice.\"\n\n\"Of course. Where's best?\"\n\n\"Look for dips and flash flood watercourses, and around clumps of boulders. Might be well hidden in the cracks.\"\n\n\"Right.\" In a world of glittering obsidian sand? Hmm.\n\nSwooshing his wings in efficient half-beats, he bored northward into the stillest of nights. Worrying about his charges. So cunning, that attack. Someone had carefully considered how best to access a Princess under a Dragon's protection, and very, very nearly came out the winner. Shiver.\n\nFor four hours he coursed over the dunes, before the ripples smoothed out as if brushed away by a godlike paw. A new desert slowly unfurled before him, flat and featureless. Much more rock here, but it lay low and wind-worn. This region was called the central plains of T'nagru, he understood, the diametric opposite of what was called plains in the rest of the seventeen kingdoms. How odd it was that Vaylarn was never included amongst the seventeen. As an island chain lying three hundred and fifty miles offshore of the main continent of Solixambria, the most casual glance at a map identified it as a Dragon's paw print in shape.\n\nCapital city, Zunityne. Major lair, Wave Dragonhome. Primary danger, Sea Serpents. That was about as much as he knew about the faraway archipelago, apart from that it was also the birthplace of quite the most lethally attractive Dragoness he had ever met.\n\nAriamyrielle Seaspray, ocean tempest on wings. Twenty-nine feet of irresistible cobalt warrior Dragoness.\n\nPromised to another male.\n\nHis muzzle turned to the darkling skies. <Curse these fates.>\n\nOn and on he flew, skirting another citadel before continuing out over the black, grassless plains.\n\nAs the first fires of dawn turned the eastern horizon into the crimson heart of a forge, Dragon spied a clump of boulders several miles off his right wingtip. Aha. He nosed about briefly, but saw and scented nothing green. Another clump lay near the horizon. His leathery wings creaked, spreading across the lowering moons. They should find shelter soon.\n\nCheck both heartbeats. Weak, but present. Aye. Rest and recovery needed.\n\nSeven clumps investigated later, he spied the characteristic spiny, tooth-edged leaves of an aloe plant wedged deep in a crack. Circling, he put down in the lee of the boulders, which stood shoulder-high to him, at eleven feet tall \u2013 his crouching height, which Dragons traditionally used for a shoulder measure. Here was a nice bolt-hole for the Princesses, a shallow, wind-carved nook occupied by a fat, sleepy-looking desert adder.\n\nDragon brained it with a talon and slid breakfast down his throat. Oh! Catching the tail with his fangs, he pulled the snake out and snipped off a chunk for his Riders. Humans needed to eat so frequently.\n\n\"Mmm, regurgitated snake meat?\" Azania said drily. \"Can't wait.\"\n\n\"I can pre-chew it for you if you'd prefer?\"\n\n\"Don't be lazy, Dragon. I prefer pre-digested at the very least.\"\n\n\"Very good, Your Highness. Would you like your aloe juice masticated, too?\" Extending a paw, he helped her slide Inzashu off his neck, asking, \"Should we have waited at N'ginta to get her more treatment, do you think?\"\n\n\"With or without a poisoned arrow in the back?\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"Let me show you how to pulp and squeeze aloe juice. We need to get more into her and cover every inch of this rash as well, or it'll burn and blister. Do we have any spare cloth?\"\n\n\"I stole just the thing earlier.\"\n\nShe admired the white silk sheet he had pinched. \"Why, you wily reptilian reprobate!\"\n\n\"You are talking to a Princess-stealing Dragon, Highness. I'm very talon-ted.\"\n\nHis friend groaned on cue. \"Ooh, terrible pun. Reminds me of that old joke, what did the cat drag-in?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said, playing along, \"what did the cat drag in?\"\n\n\"I don't know either, but it gave me paws for thought.\"\n\n\"Gnarr-harr-harr, that's awful.\"\n\nDid she mean to cheer him up? Or to distract herself from the pain this poison was clearly putting her through? Dragon helped her treat her sister; when Inzashu half-woke from her stupor, they were able to urge her to deploy her magic with his help \u2013 strengthening her, he hoped. For the young girl to turn her sensory magic to healing was a perfectly natural process; for him, it was a struggle. After treating her skin and helping her to drink aloe juice diluted in water, they settled in the relative shadow of the boulder and rested through the heat of the day.\n\nDragon tested a couple of the green coldstones. Emeralds? Or perhaps, emeralds turned to a different use, he thought, sniffing pensively at the unfamiliar magic. The cooling effect was definitely noticeable within an area of approximately two feet. Under shade arranged to minimise heat transfer from the air, he estimated temperatures between eight and ten degrees cooler than outside. It must have been enough to allow the Skartun warriors to survive that first desert crossing; admittedly, nowhere near the hottest time of the year, when desert temperatures soared off the Fangheat scale.\n\nInzashu stirred in the early afternoon and declared that she felt somewhat better. They whiled away the hours swapping stories of a childhood spent on the run in Skartun, a cloistered royal upbringing in T'nagru and a Dragon's hatchling and fledgling days in the Tamarine Mountains.\n\nWhat vastly different experiences they had as youngsters.\n\nIn the evening, a blistering sunset of the white sun, Taramis, kept them under cover until later than Dragon had planned for. He also drank a little aloe juice to soothe his raw throat.\n\n\"Your fires?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Aye. I'm not sure if it's getting better or worse.\" Scratching his flank restlessly, he said, \"Do you remember how Hammaria the Devastator told me that an egg never forgets its origins?\"\n\nThe Princess nodded. \"Was that what you used to find your fires, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I was thinking about that, and how at Chakkix Camp, Yarimda said, <Ocean always rises.> That was what I experienced, but it wasn't an easy or a natural process. I had to literally tear it free \u2013 squeeze, and strain and tear it loose, using the electrical power from their machine.\"\n\n\"It did look agonising, but also glorious,\" she said.\n\n\"Glorious?\"\n\n\"Well, first of all your eyes started to bulge as if you'd sat on a cactus \u2013\"\n\n<Brraa-haa-haa!> he laughed.\n\n\"And then I feared you were having an epileptic fit, and you were jerking all over the place and smoking from beneath your scales \u2013 almost as if that power burned off a coating of some kind. I can only imagine what it did to your insides, Dragon, yet you are still flying. I feared you would be fried to a crisp, especially when you made Jabiz Urdoo shoot you yet again \u2013 stop looking at me like that.\" She shivered delicately. \"I worry about you, alright?\"\n\nAbruptly, she stood, but had to brace herself against his cheek. \"Ooh, that feels terrible.\" The Princess touched the scales beneath his eye. \"True strength, Dragon, comes from the heart.\"\n\nHis turn to shiver, all over, as if the stultifying desert heat had turned to ice.\n\nShe said, <Then you cried, I am Dragon! I am fire!>\n\nHis tongue flicked out to catch a salty droplet falling from her cheek.\n\n\"The ocean rose, and you became fire \u2013 beautiful, gleaming white fire\u2013 and you see, Dragon, it was never the crimson sunshine of Ignis that you should have been meditating upon! It was Taramis all along. You are kin of Taramis, the white of ocean spume, the purity and cleansing power of water.\"\n\nHis jaw creaked agape, and stayed that way.\n\nWhere had this come from?\n\nWith a self-conscious giggle, she said, \"Dabbling in deep Dragon lore not exactly being my forte \u2026\"\n\n\"No, it makes perfect sense!\" Enveloping her shoulders in his paw, he said, \"You are something else, do you know that? Clearly, the tiniest brains have the greatest ideas.\"\n\n\"Tiniest brains?\"\n\n\"Vanishingly miniscule,\" said he, illustrating with his talons. \"How did the Dragon thank the Princess?\"\n\n\"By wiping out her enemies in billows of gorgeous white flame?\"\n\n\"Aye, and then he said, 'Fangs you very much.'\"\n\n\"Aargh.\"\n\n\"Could not have expressed it better myself. So, who's keen on a long, long night flight?\"\n\nConsidering what the Princesses had been through, actual keenness was far from the mark, but after slathering themselves liberally in tart aloe juice and drinking a little more, they made ready to fly north once more.\n\nAs the largest male Dragon he knew of in the Tamarine Mountains, Dragon had always been able to fly with great stamina. This night, he pushed on steadily, filled with thoughts about how air and water were not all that different, after all, and if he could learn to keep a pace that combined efficiency and conservation of energy with speed, he might be able to sustain flight far enough to risk the crossing to the Vaylarn Archipelago. Aria's notes warned that the weather could be unpredictable and for part of the year, the winds were likely to be strongly opposed to a northerly crossing. Right now was the worst possible time.\n\nPerfect planning.\n\nTherefore, when he came down for a landing an hour before dawn, having sustained no less than ten hours in the air, it was with a sense of quiet satisfaction. Good flight. They had turned more easterly, headed directly for the 'foot' of the Tamarine Mountains. They might spy those from a height on the morrow.\n\nAzania patted his neck. \"Nice moves, Dragon. Fire check?\"\n\nWorried, Princess? Narked and grateful at the same time, he concentrated. Nothing \u2026 *sss!* He jumped in surprise. \"Alright, that snuck up on me.\"\n\nRubbing her eyes, Inzashu unbuckled. \"You're such a bright spark, Dragon.\"\n\n\"No, don't tell me you're starting with the terrible puns, too?\" he groaned, prodding her ribs with a talon.\n\n\"Oh \u2013 unintentional.\"\n\n\"A flare of inspiration, perhaps?\" he purred.\n\n\"Another day, another boulder,\" said Azania. \"More storytelling to pass the day, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Of course. Dragons love a good, long tail.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" the Princess chortled, \"I don't know which is worse, poison itch or your jokes.\"\n\nOn that note, they dozed another day away in the brilliant sunshine, and in the evening, repeated the night flight. It was early morning when Dragon realised he had dozed on the wing once more, and not only were the familiar white-capped peaks of the Tamarine Range spreading across the farthest horizon, but the landscape had changed once more. Cactus forests. This should have been Prince Floric's landing place, he chortled nastily to himself. All shapes and sizes of spiky cacti predominated in this region, from beds of tiny barrel cacti no bigger than the ball of a Human thumb, to multi-branched monsters standing sixty feet tall.\n\nWing-weary, he landed in an open area yet again, scenting the air. Changing to the badlands, if he was not mistaken, and soon, that clean zing of the mountains would greet his swelling lungs. They must not only purchase armour and clothing for his Riders, but warm clothing as well.\n\nChakkix Camp awaited.\n\n[ Ocean Always Rises ]\n\n\"Tarangis Lionbaiter!\" Azania called fondly.\n\n\"Princess Azania!\" said he, wheeling into Yardi the Armourer's cavern with a delighted smile. His eyebrows shot up immediately. \"And in another development, Princesses hunt in packs? Who is this?\"\n\n\"You've been warned,\" Dragon agreed.\n\nAzania shot him her patented glare.\n\nOne and a half days' further travel had brought them up to Chakkix Camp. Old friends, old haunts and the same old smells. Delightful place. It remained the unimproved version of a Human cesspit of vice, iniquity and thriving business, at the shadier end of every imaginable spectrum.\n\n\"This is my sister, Inzashu-N'shula. Inzashu, this is our friend Tarangis Lionbaiter, a long-time business partner of our father's.\"\n\nThe younger Princess smiled bashfully. \"Azania told me how much you helped them.\"\n\n\"Helped? Making me decent money, they are,\" he guffawed. \"Of course, it's all about the money \u2013 but Princess, please put me out of my curiosity here. King N'gala has but one daughter that I knew of, the famous Black Rose of the Desert, unless by some hitherto unknown process, beauty has duplicated itself?\"\n\nAs he spoke, he wheeled forward on the hard floor to first kiss Azania's hand, then Inzashu's. Dragon eyed him with a malevolent glare that suggested should any kisses be ventured in his vicinity, volcanoes would erupt. Sensitive soul that he was, Tarangis picked up on the vibe immediately. As the Princess filled him in on recent events, however, his jovial mood evaporated and he expressed his condolences to both girls and sober congratulations to Dragon on his feat of fire breathing.\n\nAt this point, Yarimda tottered through into the cavern, saying that her old ears thrilled to the voices of friends. Everything had to be repeated in greater detail than before. She insisted.\n\nDragon breathed fire into Yardi's forge by way of demonstration.\n\nHad they not all expressed their undying wonder, he would have been severely ticked off. Slice of the old ego there, Dragon?\n\nHow quickly one winged from despair at no fires to annoyance if one's fires did not provoke an awed reaction. Was he truly this shallow a beast? Or more straightforwardly, one beset by fears and weaknesses common to any intelligent creature?\n\nOnce the need for suitable clothing surfaced, Yarimda took Inzashu under her wing. \"Used to be an excellent seamstress back in the day, my dear child!\" she opined. \"Needle and thread defeat me due to advancing years, but I can design clothing suitable for the most delightful of Dragon-riding Princesses.\"\n\n*Gnrrr \u2013* Dragon began.\n\nYarimda sent a zinger of a scowl his way. \"Now, don't you misbehave in my cavern, young Dragon. Go warm yourself by the forge. Go on!\"\n\nYardi gave an exasperated gasp at her grandmother's tone. Her eyes pleaded for understanding.\n\nHe made a token shuffle toward the forge. Not a great deal of space in this cave for a Dragon of his dimensions, and due to the open-mouthed forge, it was as warm as the deep desert anyways \u2013 warm enough that the Princesses had immediately removed the outer layers of their desert robes. Meantime, chalk and spare scroll in hand, Yarimda set about her designs. He peeked over her shoulder. Not just a decent hand, lady \u2013 slightly unsteady due to her advanced age, yet from her fingers flowed elegant robes, flattering lines and even secret storage pockets, he observed with a tail-wriggle of pleasure.\n\nArtist!\n\n\"Dragon, why are you breathing over my shoulder?\" she probed.\n\n\"Appreciating your work, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\n\"With that talent, you could design scales for Dragons,\" he returned, satisfied when her neck visibly heated up. He scented her delight.\n\n\"You are too kind to an old woman, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\nShe laughed openly at his riposte. \"Dragon, would you and your Princesses be open to the suggestion of flying an old woman back to Hamirythe Kingdom, to the shores of the ocean?\"\n\n\"Grandmother!\" Yardi protested.\n\n\"Now, child, I've been talking about this for at least a decade. You know my heart.\"\n\nIt had been on the tips of his forked tongue to chuckle indulgently at her request, but now, Dragon stilled to a different realisation. She meant to die there. He had read that at the end of their days beneath the suns, old Dragons might sometimes be struck by an overwhelming desire to return to the lair of their birth. People shared this gift? How curious. Perhaps it was a commonality of a soul's knowing?\n\nThis lore was deeper than most Dragons would allow of the Humankind in their worldview, but her desire could hardly be mistaken.\n\nGlancing at Azania, who nodded slightly, he said, \"Honoured Yarimda, we would most certainly be amenable, but you should know our flight path is no easy one \u2013 from here, we intend to swing around the mountains and fly up through the Blood Desert to the Umber Steppes, from where it is a steep climb to the lair of Juggernaut the Grinder. We would then fly over the high passes to the Kingdom of Amboraine and straight north to Mornine.\"\n\n\"North until Mornine?\" she jested lightly. \"That could work.\"\n\n\"Grandmother, that is a gruelling flight over the very roof of the world!\" Yardi protested. \"You are no longer a spring chicken of eighty, may I remind you? Ninety-four this autumn!\"\n\n\"Child, neither of us have been happy in Chakkix Camp for many a year. Let's talk about this. You've wanted to travel and find yourself a man \u2013\"\n\n\"Grandmother!\"\n\nYardi flushed so violently, the colour moved down her tan throat and into her muscular arms. Intriguing response!\n\nDragon narrowed his eyes. \"Is there a man?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"May I threaten to eat him if he does not treat you honourably?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026 sounds good to me,\" the armourer grumbled.\n\nHer grandmother said blithely, \"None in this camp anyways. Yardi, fly with us. Come see the ocean with me \u2013 come fly Dragonback, as I used to fly on Wavewhisperer's back. I warn you, once you start \u2026\"\n\nTarangis Lionbaiter said, \"Well, educational as all this is, I must ask, Princess Azania, if the new King might be amenable to continuing our arrangement?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said.\n\nDragon put in testily, \"What do Roving Ambassadors of T'nagru do, then \u2013 wander about the kingdoms looking vacuously pretty? Use your authority, woman!\"\n\n\"Ambassador?\" Tarangis chortled. \"Old N'gala must be turning in his \u2013 ahem. Terribly sorry.\"\n\nWince. Tasteless joke.\n\nAzania clearly did not know where to look nor what to say.\n\nThe Lionbaiter rubbed his temples. \"I apologise. It's been a very long day. Princess, I will have my accountant turn in a statement of our business to you by morning. Suffice it to say, you and Dragon have enough credit to buy half of the clothing in this camp, not that you'd want it, mind. I can recommend an excellent tailor who will have you back in those lethal leather trousers in no time at all \u2026 grief, what is the matter with my tongue? I meant to say, he will have you suitably attired in a timescale of your choosing.\"\n\nInzashu dared a little wink at Dragon. \"Timescale?\"\n\n\"Don't encourage him,\" Azania advised.\n\n\"I'll send her right over so that you can ratify the Ambassador's derriere \u2013 I mean, your new, upscaled agreement, Tarangis,\" Dragon put in.\n\nHe smacked his thighs in delight. \"I could not possibly comment.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you know what's healthy for you,\" Azania warned, \"unlike my Dragon, who has just dug himself a hole through which one can see the other side of Solixambria!\"\n\nGlare, glare.\n\nAfter a moment, he chuckled smokily, for the first time in his life. So startled was he, he chuckled a second time.\n\nPlainly angered by what she took for a snarky response, the Princess snapped her fingers. \"Dragon! Heel.\"\n\nBy tone, he knew she meant to tug his wings, he was just not sure how. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"It doesn't help if you don't know Human culture,\" she complained. \"To call to heel means, well \u2013 perhaps I shouldn't \u2026 exactly \u2026\"\n\nYarimda pointed at the open forge. \"Dragon, aim that way.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's that bad, is it?\" said he, pointing his new fire-squirter anywhere but in the proposed direction.\n\nAzania marched out of the cavern in a fake huff, calling back, \"Dragon, we're going to the tailor. Will you come along to protect us, please?\"\n\nHe prowled along after, nursing the unfamiliar feeling of a stomach boiling with fiery fury. By his sire's egg, he would need to be careful with these volatile white fires. Either that, or learn to keep his fangs firmly clamped shut. That idea would not be shared with the Princess. It would be used against him most unfairly, with a coy female smile.\n\nTen minutes later, he asked a perfectly innocent tailor's assistant what 'call to heel' meant.\n\n*GRRAAA \u2013 BOOM!!*\n\nThe entire side of the tailor's tent, plus the next two over, went up in flames.\n\nSigh.\n\nTurning to Azania, he said, \"Do you want to pay for all this destroyed merchandise, or shall I?\"\n\n\"Perhaps that wasn't the wisest tease?\" she said, rubbing her chin ruefully as they stood shoulder to shoulder, surveying the smoking ruin.\n\n\"Perhaps not.\" Turning to the terrified tailor, he growled, \"There goes that tidy profit Tarangis was just congratulating us upon, I fear. Tell me again how you were proposing to make her trousers fireproof? I feel we ought to get this detail just right.\"\n\n\"A special leather treatment used by blacksmiths, Dragon,\" the Princess reminded him. \"Tailor, we'll make good on all the damages. What's next?\"\n\nHe stammered, \"M-m-measuring. Please, mighty Dragon, would you face the open air when I do so?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it involves me wrapping this tape about her \u2013\"\n\nHe pointed to the royal thighs.\n\n*Grrr-gnarrr \u2013* he struggled mightily, before jerking his jaw upward \u2013 <BLAST THESE FLAMES!!>\n\nWith a roar like a mighty ocean comber crashing upon a rocky shore, an incandescent white flower blossomed a hundred feet tall over Chakkix Camp.\n\nTailoring was a dangerous business.\n\nDragon lowered his muzzle with a toothy grin, blowing twin smoke rings from his nostrils. Nice! \"Much as I enjoy terrorising the local populace, Princess, forgive me if I keep my nose in the air from now on. It's not snootiness. This is called preservation.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she smiled. \"Tailor, what can we do to double the fireproofing?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The overloaded flying cart, alias the Dragon, glowered over the pile of gear he was supposed to be carrying in addition to no less than four riders, and added a curl of fire out of his nostrils for good measure. Unfortunately, the effect tickled his nose. Swiftly aiming skyward, he sneezed a plume of fire that licked the roof of the cavern.\n\n\"All essential?\" he growled.\n\n\"Are we not feeling strong enough?\" the Princess of Peskiness peeped pertly. Back to being an ornery, cranky chunk of male Dragon. Blame the early start.\n\n\"I hope for your sake this new clothing is as fireproof as they claimed,\" he threatened.\n\n\"Who's a scandalously handsome Dragon, then?\"\n\n\"Me. Who's a tiny Human about to be a Princess pancake, then?\"\n\n\"My sister,\" she said, without missing a beat.\n\nThey could not have been dressed less alike. Azania wore finely-tooled black boots, scandalously tight and certified fully fireproof black trousers, plus a shirt of the same sturdy material beneath her body armour. The Dragon talon blade hung at her right hip on a snazzy yet functional weapons belt. She had added three new daggers \u2013 one in each boot and one at the hip \u2013 and more weaponry in her slim, stylish vambraces. Silver trim on the armour, Princess? Crest of the desert eagle upon her belt? Aye, and she wore her curly sable hair loose, down to her middle-lower back.\n\nApparently, good taste need not be limited to ball gowns. Being the unconventional soul that she was, his Princess turned her outfit into a statement of lethal femininity. Slit of eye, he regarded the girl, who gave him the pointy-chinned, impudent appraisal right back. Based her fashion on a certain Dragoness they could both name, had she?\n\nIncluding the attitude.\n\nHis wings buzzed with anticipation at the thought of this Princess displaying herself before King Azerim. Well, not that Humans formally courtship-displayed their attributes, but he had noticed several rituals that approximated this draconic tradition \u2013 modes of dress, flirtation, demands for ransom and covert admiration of royal posteriors, to name but a few behaviours.\n\nAh, Humans thought themselves so noble, so unlike the beastly Dragonkind!\n\nNonsense.\n\nHer sister wore an all cream-coloured outfit of no style familiar to him \u2013 a one-off creation by Yarimda that comprised soft half-boots and full-length body-hugging undergarments, largely covered and flattered by a layered, charmingly tailored feminine over-dress of a darker cream shade that pinched in at the waist but flared into multiple splits to facilitate ease of movement. The layering made the silken material swish like a dress when she walked, but the functionality was also clear \u2013 multiple pockets for healing materials, a wide belt with generous pouches, and even places hidden in the collar and sleeves for equipment and aye, weapons. For the first time, she wore her black hair natural, a bouffant style that framed her face in at least six inches of curls. He blinked. Quite astonishing.\n\nInzashu smiled timidly at his zealous scrutiny.\n\nHe inclined his muzzle toward her. \"You look amazing, Princess the younger. Let's go.\"\n\nAzania cleared her throat.\n\n\"And you look lethal, Princess the older,\" he added promptly, leaving her in no doubt that her immediate aggravation had been noted and sniggered at. \"Come, o mighty Dragon Rider, your royal carriage awaits.\"\n\n\"Wow, I didn't get this treatment the first time you kidnapped me.\"\n\n\"No, that day I whisked you forth in your royal bed and straightaway nearly landed us both in the moat. Lucky save.\" He scratched at his flank and around his hindquarters. \"Load up, ladies. I need no less than four minions to look after the mighty draconic personage these days, being such a mighty crisper of fabrics and annihilator of fripperies, and all that.\"\n\nYarimda's wrinkles arranged themselves into a fantastical smile. In fluent Draconian, she said, <You remind me so much of my friend, Wavewhisperer! Dragon, this is such a gift to me. How can I thank you enough?>\n\nHe said, <To be blunt, you can tell us honestly how much travel you can cope with, honoured Yarimda. If you're struggling, I want to know it right away. No holding out for the sake of the youngsters, or pride, or anything else \u2026 am I clear?>\n\nThe old woman wiped away a tear. <Clear as the waters of the Lumis Ocean.>\n\nReaching out, he clasped her frail shoulders with his right forepaw. <I can never be Wavewhisperer, honoured elder, but this much I would gladly do for you.>\n\nShe snuffled against his scales.\n\nThen, the three younger ladies set about the loading while he acted the courteous tyrant, refusing to allow Yarimda to lift a finger. Well, she got to hold her cane. That much was permitted.\n\nLoading was in full swing when Tarangis turned up with a cheery greeting and an exasperated, \"Alright, who told all my staff to start calling me 'Dragonbaiter,' eh?\"\n\nBoth Princesses burst into merry peals of laughter.\n\nHis eyes flickered toward Azania's legs before patently jumping to the enormous fire breathing quadruped grinning toothily right behind her. Tarangis gulped. Ah, tested and approved. Azerim did not stand a mutton chop's chance in the back of a Dragon's throat.\n\n\"Inzashu's idea,\" Azania claimed.\n\n\"Ah, always the quiet ones, eh?\" Tarangis grinned, rubbing his neck. \"Very good. Your Highness, we were able to source all the items on your list of healing ingredients and potions. This is for you.\"\n\nShe accepted the leather satchel with murmured thanks.\n\n\"Secondly, regarding the matter of the coldstones you asked me to look into. A friend with expert knowledge claims that these are not Skartunese emeralds at all, but rather, a type of green tourmaline gem called verdelite \u2013 which leads to the rather more interesting and political issue. There is only one known source of this gemstone in all of Solixambria.\"\n\n\"Where's that?\" Azania inquired, checking the saddle buckles on his neck.\n\nDouble neck saddle, double up on the back. Why had he agreed to this again? Daft nobility? Flying cart had nothing on this effort.\n\n\"The interior of the volcano on Terror Isle, I believe,\" said he, passing the stone over to Dragon's paw.\n\nDragon swore beneath his breath.\n\n\"I \u2026 don't understand,\" Inzashu said. \"What does this mean, Tarangis?\"\n\nHe said, \"To clarify, this mage also examined the magical properties of the stone. The precise signature of the binding runes identify this, beyond doubt, as the handiwork of Terror Clan Dragons.\" Worth another blistering word, which Dragon readily supplied. \"Aye. We can reasonably conclude that there is a thriving trade between the Terror Clan across the Umber Steppes and the Blood Desert, to Skartun. Therefore, the Terror Clan may be plotting against all the Dragon Clans of the Tamarine Mountains, or against Humanity in general, or both.\"\n\n\"Skartun's buying in dark magic?\" Yardi growled.\n\n\"Sure looks like it,\" Azania replied. \"I should write to my brother at once.\"\n\n\"I've taken the liberty of preparing a scroll summarising the findings related to your inquiry, Ambassador,\" Tarangis said formally. \"If you would like to read and sign it, I'll have it dispatched to King N'chala by a trusted courier today.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Tarangis, why are you doing all this for us?\"\n\n\"Highness, the proceeds of good business are far more readily enjoyed in the current life than in the afterlife.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"During the last invasion, the Skartun butchered my family. I was the only one who survived. So aye, it is personal. Right now, I don't see anyone else working quite so hard to stop this fresh invasion. I'm here to wish you lightning speed and favour with the Clans of the mountains \u2013 but trust me when I say, if the talon of Terror Clan lies beneath this, we're going to need all the help we can get.\"\n\nBending over his wheelchair, Azania gave him a hug and a kiss on the scruffy beard.\n\nInstantly wound around her littlest talon.\n\nOne of his Dragon Rider's finest qualities, he reflected, was that she had no idea what impact she had on people. Artless, her affection; a heart which knew no limits. Witness how she had extracted a certain morose Dragon from his lair and turned him into one who believed he could breathe fire, traverse oceans and change the face of his world.\n\nThat was the thought that buoyed his wings as he arrowed into a sky brightening from the deep purples of early dawn to ruddy furnace fires. That, and Yarimda's laughter. Yardi had a death grip around her grandmother's waist, holding onto an improvised saddle strap anchored to his neck. They rode in tandem, as did the Princesses upon his back, just behind the Dragon bow mount. The muscular armourer muttered as if she might be praying. Yarimda giggled like a young girl and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. The wind, of course. Nothing to do with the emotions turning her colours blue and yellow and pink, and as turbulent as the ocean.\n\nHis five hearts quickened with a fierce, pounding rhythm of joy as he recognised the longing they shared. Ocean rose inside of her, too.\n\n<Ocean always rises.>\n\n[ Terror Clan ]\n\nThe flying cart itched worse than the two Princesses. Their skin, at least, although it had blistered and then peeled in numerous places, was recovering with gratifying speed thanks to an additional treatment Tarangis had sourced for them. Back in debt, of course. Seven paintings sold were not about to cover a spot of unintended obliteration, plus all their spending on clothing and supplies in addition to Tarangis' earlier advance of several gold bars. Resting over lunchtime in a wooded vale in the foothills of the Tamarine mountains, he scratched endlessly at his scales, all over. The rasp of his talons was matched only by his incessant grumbling.\n\nHe wished he had never imagined what it might be like to have shivery Human skin bobbles beneath his scales. This was as if he had been doused in itching powder, infested by fifty billion scale mites, or contracted a nasty bacterial hide infection.\n\nTo distract himself, he told Yarimda the tale of their doings since last they had met. Ten minutes into his story, she vented a delicate snore.\n\nAzania gave him one of her looks.\n\n\"I'll have none of your cheek, woman,\" he groused.\n\n\"Did I say anything?\"\n\n\"For a change, no, but you were definitely thinking it.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me to stop thinking?\"\n\nConversational porcupine! Gnashing his fangs, he gazed into the distance.\n\nThe three younger women worked at weapons training together and shooting arrows at targets until the early afternoon, when they set out for another stint in the air.\n\nTheir chosen flight path curved over the south-eastern foothills of the Tamarine Range, a dry but wooded range of hills that smelled strongly of pine scents and bitter herbs. They kept to the vegetation belt without intruding on the Blood Desert itself; in the early evening, Dragon spied a smaller Bloodworm through his spectacles.\n\nWhat did monstrous worms do for fun? Burrow beneath kingdoms?\n\nTurning north with the vaulting ranges of snow-capped peaks to their left paw, he searched for a campsite while Yardi and her grandmother engaged in a heated discussion about how much travel seniors could handle, even if they were having the best time of their life.\n\n\"There, beside that hot spring,\" Azania suggested. \"Is that a small buck?\"\n\n\"Aye. Shall we sneak in?\"\n\n\"He sneaks?\" Yarimda inquired in surprise.\n\n\"You've no idea how quiet and sneaky a beast of Dragon's size can be,\" Azania said truthfully. \"Show her, Dragon.\"\n\nDrawing his magic about him, he silenced the wuthering wind, his breathing, even the thudding of his hearts which Azania told him she could hear during flight.\n\n\"Awesome,\" Inzashu chirped.\n\n\"Shh!\" said everyone else.\n\nSilent as a drifting snowflake, they ghosted down toward the multihued springs, set in a shallow green valley, which possibly arose from mountain meltwater, Dragon surmised. Out there in the rust-red desert wasteland, there seemed to be no moisture at all. Would the suspected trade route follow the coastline, or would the flying route parallel the mountains here, as they were doing?\n\nAs he came down into Azania's range and the Princess landed a perfect shot to the heart, he found an answer of sorts. He spied paw prints in the crusty white salts beside the steaming spring, the most easterly of a set of at least five.\n\nWhy else would Dragons be out here?\n\nAfter setting down and unloading, he took a long, long soak in the hottest spring. Glorious. The heat unknotted his weary muscles. Every ten minutes or so, he could enjoy a hot shower from a regular geyser. This was a balm to his unbearably itchy hide. Maybe he would just sleep right here. The crusty salts looked and smelled tempting, despite being every colour of the rainbow. The girls set up camp, did their laundry \u2013 he lazily pictured hanging up Dragon scales to dry \u2013 and Inzashu changed her sister's crusty bandages. The double wound had puckered up and was oozing a few nasty yellow spots Dragon could have done without seeing.\n\nHuman bodies \u2013 *blergh!*\n\n\"A hot salt water soak would be best,\" the younger Princess announced. \"Clothes off, sister, and find a pool you can tolerate.\"\n\nHand to bosom, pretending \u2013 he was not quite sure what this was, but it might be related to the literary idea of maidenly palpitations, which he was convinced Azania had never experienced in her life \u2013 the older sister declaimed, \"Oh, not near yon fearsome beast!\"\n\n\"Sister, that snaggletoothed monster, that fiendish four-pawed \u2013\"\n\n\"Snaggletoothed?\"\n\nFire dribbled from his mouth, contributing to the general heat of his pool. Once, he had been a beast of enormous draculinity. Now look at him!\n\n\"Fie, hearken how he awakens in fearful, panting majesty, sister!\" Azania cried.\n\n\"Ah, I tremble that he did not even let me finish my one and only polished sentence, and now I am laughing too hard to think of any more creative insults \u2013\"\n\n\"I can always come up with a few extra.\"\n\nRising from his pool, Dragon stalked over toward them. \"I think I'll practise my Princess-throwing skills now. Which pool did you want to try?\"\n\n\"The one not overrun by a formidable monster,\" she crooned.\n\nTo his annoyance, his new fire stomach promptly began to rumble as if he had swallowed a small but decidedly angry Dragon. Even though the girls' laughter irked him, he decided to play with the sensation, experimenting, perhaps learning an element of control.\n\nNo chance. Once it was present, the fire had to be expelled. Was that to do with the electrolysis process, whereby his lightning magic worked upon highly flammable gases? He let the flame play from his lips, governing the flow with his throat and tongue. The sensation was marvellous, like playing with silken cloth that slowly, endlessly whispered up out of his body \u2013 but soon, the familiar tingling spread all over, and with it came the excruciating itching.\n\n<Scratch, scratch, SCRATCH!! GNARR!>\n\n<Tell me about these fires, Dragon,> Yarimda invited. <I understand that you've found the song of your ocean. Now, if you had never breathed fire in twenty years, we must expect things to change. You are fire. Fire is the Dragon \u2013 but moreover, your fire is unique amongst Dragons of the air, as I understand it. That will mean changes to your physiology, some of which are clearly uncomfortable.>\n\n<By my wings, that's an understatement!> he growled, watching his talons curling helplessly at the jangling sensations playing up and down his nerves. <I thought \u2013 wrongly, it seems \u2013 that after I found my fires, everything would be easy.>\n\nSerenely, she said, <But it is. Your fire arises at a thought.>\n\nHe scratched his rump glumly.\n\n<Come on. Tell an old lady all about it \u2013 and this time, I promise not to fall asleep, alright?>\n\nFire! He gulped twice, threw back his head, and lost it.\n\nYarimda cocked her head and watched his flame gush and gush and gush. Eventually, she said, <Now that's a breath weapon worthy of the name, Dragon! Come on, let's get to work on you.>\n\nAn evening's pleasant conversation, theorising, testing and experimentation came topped off with three-quarters of a delicious fire-grilled bushbuck prepared by Yardi. Skills beyond the furnace and metals, clearly, he approved, washing it down with long sips of water and several chunks of rock salt.\n\nDragon let out such a belch, it almost flattened Princess Azania's hair.\n\n\"Dragon!\" Inzashu squealed.\n\n\"It's cultural,\" said her sister. \"When among Dragons, you will need to learn to burp \u2013 like this. Brrraaa-ooouu-arrrpp!\"\n\n\"What a rip-snorter!\" Dragon approved.\n\nInzashu-N'shula had a helpless fit of the giggles. They had no idea how rude it was to belch in Skartun, clearly. People had been murdered for lesser offences. Often.\n\nWith four little Humans to guard during the nights, Dragon had to spread himself wider than before. He took the Princesses upon his forepaws and nestled the other pair in the crook of his tail, spreading his wing over them later on to ward off the night chill. Four cosy fleas \u2013 meant in the fondest sense of the word, of course. Oops. Fleas preferred fur to scales. *Pah!*\n\nHis kind always slept with one eye open a crack. Nothing bothered them out here, however. Come a dawn of towering sky fires over the ruddy desert, they broke camp and flew on, ever northward, seeking the next landmark of the broad, sluggish and highly dangerous Skaggar River that divided the Blood Desert from the Umber Steppes.\n\nHe flew fast but in shorter stretches for Yarimda's sake. The barren crimson rock of the Blood Desert passed beneath them all morning, about half a mile below. Before noon, they already caught sight of the turquoise, meandering river in the distance.\n\n\"Dragons on our tail,\" Azania gasped.\n\n\"What?\" He turned his neck sharply. \" *Gnarr,* I wasn't paying attention. Pass my spectacles, please?\"\n\n\"The clouds didn't help,\" the Princess pointed out. \"Must have been trailing us for a good few miles to have gotten this close. Shrewd.\"\n\nInzashu inquired, \"Are they friendly, Dragon?\"\n\nHe took a long look. \"I highly doubt it. Those are no Dragons I've ever seen around the Tamarine Mountains. Judging by the wing angles and speed, my guess is that they're chasing us.\"\n\n\"Terror Clan?\" Azania guessed.\n\n\"Spavined rock-chewing lizards!\" he gritted between his fangs. \"Aye, that's a good call. Three adult male greens. Three on one is not cheerful odds.\"\n\n\"Three on five.\"\n\n\"Princess, I \u2013 I should have kept a better watch. They're already too close to hide from or outfly. I'm heavily loaded.\"\n\n\"You are indeed,\" Azania agreed. \"Yardi, can you handle a bow and supply Dragon with quarrels? I'll set up the Dragon bow up top. Inzashu, there's a bow and arrows in the gear beside your left knee. Yarimda \u2013 er \u2026\"\n\n\"I can handle a bow,\" she said.\n\n\"Good,\" he agreed.\n\n\"Dragon, remember what Juggernaut said about protecting your Rider with your wings?\"\n\n\"Aye. We mustn't let them get too close. I can handle anything coming in from below, but it's the vertical attack that'll be problematic given the way we're burdened. If they're smart, they'll figure that out straight away. Girls \u2013 ladies, even \u2013 helmets and protective gear, please. It's very likely we're going to feel some flame. Our strategy will be to lure them in, then try to get shots away with the Dragon bows and my flame, which has a range no Dragon will expect. Yarimda says it's far hotter as well. If we can incapacitate one and wound another in that first tangle, we'll stand a chance.\"\n\nQuietly, for him alone, Yarimda whispered, <Three on one is deadly odds, Dragon. We've put you in mortal danger.>\n\n<I've never run from vengeful Terror Clan Dragons before, honoured Yarimda. This was completely unexpected. My question is, where did they come from and how much do they know about our capabilities?>\n\n<Aye, right you are. You've got this, Dragon. Courage!>\n\nStretching his wings to gain altitude, he led the greens on a merry chase toward the canyon from which the Skaggar River poured down out of the mountains. This gave his crew time to arm themselves. They donned gloves and helms in addition to their armour, and even neck protection meant to ensure that at least a quick blast of Dragon fire would not penetrate. Meantime, the trio of greens came on fast, flying aggressively to catch up.\n\nWould there be a nice river cavern down there in which to hide, change the odds \u2026\n\n\"Spectacles, Dragon,\" Azania reminded him.\n\n\"Thanks. Yarimda?\"\n\n\"I'll pack them away, young Dragon.\"\n\n\"What's in the river that's so dangerous?\" Yardi inquired meantime. \"Pretty colour but quite shallow, I think. How many quarrels, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Three, please.\"\n\nAzania said, \"Shoals of carnivorous fish. Nasty creatures. I once saw a trader who had managed to bring some down to N'ginta Citadel, wanting my father to breed them in the water cisterns. Father suggested the man jump into a barrel with his own fish. Never had time for fools.\"\n\n<Dragon! Stop and fight, you slack-winged coward! Donkey! I spit upon your ancestors' accursed eggs!>\n\n\"Donkey? Sure getting creative,\" he growled. \"I guess that confirms the friendliness angle. So, team, do we wait for them to take up their positions, or shall we spring an ambush of our own?\"\n\n\"Ambush,\" said three voices.\n\nYardi threw up her hands. \"Whatever keeps us alive!\"\n\nWhirling on his wingtip in a Juggernaut-approved aerial tactic, he kept his momentum moving away from the chasing Dragons, contrary to expectation. All three almost stalled as they anticipated the attack. Picking the nearest target, Dragon charged him, bellowing, <Terror Clan scum!>\n\nHe did not give the roar his all. Save that surprise for closer combat.\n\n<Ho, brothers, it's the flying turd from T'nagru!>\n\nSo, they knew. How? Where was their lair, their base?\n\nClosing to within a hundred feet, he and Azania unleashed quarrels simultaneously. The enemy green shimmered and split in two! The quarrels hurtled uselessly through nothingness.\n\nAzania spluttered, \"What the \u2013\"\n\nSuddenly, he was charging at something he knew to be an illusion \u2013 only, which was \u2013\n\n\"Left, Dragon!\" Inzashu screeched. \"Sorry \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't be sorry, keep calling!\" Loading his second quarrel, Dragon let loose from a distance of less than thirty feet. *Thwock!* Dead centre in the chest.\n\nThen he furled his outer wing, throwing them sharply aside and straight through the illusion. Two smaller bowstrings sang. The winch squealed as a wave of orange fire and heat billowed toward them. He threw up his other wing, shielding his Riders as he took them rapidly past the deeply wounded enemy Dragon, angling for a second Green, who repeated the dividing manoeuvre. The acrid stench of dark magic burned his nostrils as he closed in. The third enemy climbed higher. No time to worry about him as yet.\n\n\"Inzashu, which one?\"\n\n\"He's \u2026 oscillating! Switching \u2026 left, now right \u2026\"\n\nCursed dark magic! Lifting his bow, Dragon aimed deliberately and shouted at Azania, \"Shoot the right on my mark, Princess!\"\n\nHis quarrel spat forth with an ugly *whurr!* At the same time, he pursed his lips and summoned a deathly stream of fire, targeting the image on the left. A flicker of the magic warned him as the Dragon leaped somehow into that incandescent space, and screamed as the searing white fires immolated him. Two arrows plunged into the fires; he could not have told if they hit home, but his Riders were doing their best.\n\n\"Now, Princess!\"\n\nThe green oscillated into his other form again, only to be instantly spitted in the neck by Azania's quarrel.\n\n\"Left and below!\" Yardi cried.\n\nThe archers fired again as the first green closed in, orange fire gushing from his throat. The instant the arrows sped away, he rolled, presenting his belly and paws to the blast. A tail-lash kept the green away as they corkscrewed apart, but a quick talon tore a six-foot rent in his wing. Dragon cursed in pain.\n\nThe middle Dragon was done, falling limply toward the river. A lucky shot; it must have severed the spine or pierced a major artery.\n\nHe circled this wounded beast, trying to keep the right distance as well as looking out for the third green, somewhere above. Learning drummed through his mind, issues he knew of only from study. Taking the height was a dominant position in aerial combat, a statement of aggression and danger for the lower creature. Would they attack simultaneously? They must.\n\n\"Loaded,\" Azania said.\n\n\"My shot's the feint,\" he called.\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nSurging forward in the air, Dragon fired immediately. *Whurr!* The Terror Clan green blurred away once more. Handy trick, that, but the second he stabilised, Azania fired a second quarrel and he wore it in the thick muscle of the left shoulder. It did not even penetrate more than three feet. Closing the gap as the other Dragon whirled sideways under the impetus of the shot, he opened his jaw and thundered:\n\n<I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nThe sonic attack stunned him for a vital half-second. Smashing into the other Dragon's left wing, he yanked it sideways with his forepaws and sank his fangs up to the gums into the upper wing joint, delivering a deep, disabling bite to the sinews.\n\nAzania screamed, \"Dragon, above \u2013\"\n\n*KERBLAM!!*\n\nThey all rattled together like seeds in a pod as a massive weight smashed into his hindquarters. Pain ripped through his lower back as the third green stabbed his talons deep, hanging on as he dragged Dragon off his fellow marauder.\n\n<Brown traitor! You will die like the dog you are!> he snarled, sinking his claws in a second time, this time in the lower belly.\n\nHe bellowed as the weight dragged him through the sky; he tried to tumble to throw the other off, but the Talon Clan beast was cunning, hanging on with his hooked forepaws and great strength. Pain pulsed through his body as the Dragon ripped at his flanks and tail.\n\nTwo greens plummeted helplessly. His wing-bite had been near-perfect, severing the major sinews and nerve bundles serving the wing \u2013 still, the Dragon might recover and come to a safe landing, if he did not splash down in the river. Even for a Dragon, that would be fatal. This third one, however, had him in a talon-lock that could easily lead to mortal injuries. He must shake him off or face being disembowelled or having fangs chew down into his spine. Dragon lashed his tail and tried to claw upward with his hind paws, but the wrestler's lock-pawed grip on his lower belly region was inch-perfect.\n\n<Terror Clan traitor!> he bellowed.\n\nThe green roared, <There is no dishonour like bearing Humans upon your back!>\n\nStruggling and writhing, he fought to throw the other off. No good. Think, Dragon. Think! Twizzling his neck, he peered over his shoulder. <What do you even want with the Skartun, you fools? Don't you see that they will enslave you, too?>\n\nThe other Dragon just grinned malevolently, raising his paw. <Only a witless slave of Humans stands against the Terror Clan. We will rule all the Dragonkind after this! So tell me, brown slug, which shall I eat first \u2013 the little black Princess, or the other one?>\n\nHe roared the first thing that came to mind. \"Princess, cut loose and jump!\"\n\nInzashu screamed as the green's talons raked her back. She was the hindmost rider, the one in the most danger from this Talon Clan thug. Orange fire surged behind his fangs, but in that instant, Azania's talon dagger flashed, severing her sister's saddle belt. Grabbing her about the waist, she dived overboard, bouncing off his flank before falling free.\n\nWhite fire thundered across his own back, singeing the Dragon's face. Blinded! The grip released and he fell away, tearing at his eyes and screaming a Dragon's lament.\n\n\"Princess!\"\n\nFolding his wings, Dragon rocketed in steep vertical dive toward the river, which was far closer than he had imagined. Air, water, clouds, mountains blurred before his gaze. Not going to make it. The Princesses would be eaten alive!\n\n[ Water Fire ]\n\nSmacking him about the earholes with her bow to gain his attention, Yarimda yelled, \"It's too shallow for a dive! Pull up!\"\n\nShallow? Curse it! His weak eyes were no good in situations like this.\n\nFlaring his wings at the last second and adjusting toward where he saw a splodge of tan next to a darker splodge beneath the bright turquoise waters, Dragon landed clumsily, throwing up great white plumes of spray to either side. Poking his muzzle beneath the surface, he was shocked to find everything \u2026 clear. Crystal clear, from the rocky bottom to the school of silvery fish mobbing the Princesses, who were trying to swim to the surface while hampered by the weight of their clothing and armour.\n\nThe coverage must have saved them, because he saw crimson trailing like a ribbon from Inzashu's shoulder. The fish loved that, but so far they could only tear at her armour. Instinctively, he pursed his lips and breathed forth his fire. Close, but not directly at them.\n\nIn fact, twizzling his neck, he drew a neat circle around their bodies. The silvery fish flitted away.\n\nAzania hung limp in her sister's arms!\n\nPowering forward with wings and webbed paws pumping, he scooped them up and then breached again. Paddle for safety. He was not sure how to launch himself out of water; now was not the moment to experiment, despite the multiple pinpricks of pain from the fish nibbling at his wounds. They were only a hundred Dragon paces from the northern shore.\n\n\"Good work, Dragon!\" Yarimda yelled.\n\nYardi smacked a fish off her grandmother's arm. \"Get off!\"\n\nPowering through the water, he surged up over several boulders and then up the bank, beginning to shake himself before realising that ninety-four year-old elders probably would not appreciate such a violent jolting. Majestic Dragon-battling grand-dams!\n\n*Gnarr!* he approved. <Good work, my Riders!>\n\n\"What's that?\" Yardi asked as he placed the pair of Princesses upon a soft sandbank. Warm, creamy sand. Lovely. Especially since it came without carnivorous fish.\n\n\"I said, excellent work.\"\n\nLifting her sister, Inzashu smacked her several times between the shoulders. With a choking cough, half of the river came flooding out. She gasped, heaved a ragged breath and bent over, hacking away. Azania was waterlogged but alive, which was the important part. All alive \u2013 they had beaten the odds!\n\nYardi and Yarimda unbuckled meantime.\n\nThe older woman hobbled around to his side, drawing her dagger. \"Persistent, aren't they?\" she snorted, spearing at fish which were still stuck inside his wounds, trying to eat their way deeper.\n\nGreat. As holey as a moth-eaten carpet.\n\nYardi rushed around to his other flank to help out there. At the same time, Dragon glanced about for the Terror Clan Dragons. One lay slumped upon the far side of the river, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Two had fallen into the river; both were surrounded by a boiling mass of white, which he belatedly realised was the toothy fish fighting one another to get at the feast. One was dead, but the other, the wing-bitten Dragon, was being eaten alive.\n\n*Bwaa-haa-harrr!!* He thundered over the river.\n\n<Worm!> shrieked the stricken Dragon, thrashing around with his one working wing. The other had already been eaten away to the bone. <Help me \u2013 we'll defeat \u2013 aiee! Cowardly worm, don't just \u2026 stand there!>\n\nThe sight turned his stomach.\n\n<Call me Dragon!> he thundered, spinning upon the sand to vent his spleen upon the unfortunate traitor. <It's the last thing you'll ever do!>\n\n\"Dragon!\" Azania gasped.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You knocked Yarimda over \u2013 and, aren't you going to go help him?\"\n\n\"That cold-hearted coward? Help? What a vile, unthinkable idea. He's getting the death he so richly deserves, attacking us in a trio. That, Princess \u2013\" he stabbed a talon toward the wailing, writhing Dragon \"\u2013 that is called justice.\"\n\nInzashu wept.\n\nHe stooped over the younger girl, indignant. \"Come now, Princess. Does that beast not deserve the most horrible fate imaginable?\"\n\n\"Aye, but that \u2013 that \u2026 oh, Dragon! Listen to him.\"\n\nIt dawned upon him, from her reaction and the shadows in Azania's eyes, that Humans did not prize suffering the same way Dragons did. What thrilled him \u2013 the sounds of a cowardly, defeated creature meeting a most befitting end \u2013 distressed his companions far beyond what he could bear to inflict. How had he never seen it this way before?\n\nWas there only one path to honour? No.\n\nWith a slow nod, he said, \"For your sakes, I shall end him.\"\n\nRising, he coiled his legs and launched out over the waters, spreading his wings in a quick glide. In a moment, he hovered above the other Dragon, wondering if he could bring himself to act against everything he had been taught, what he had imbibed from his sire, dam and Clan \u2013 traditions and values which bound him so deeply, he realised. Was he that creature? That old Blitz the Devastator? Or could he be something new?\n\n<Please \u2013 PLEASE!> the green begged shamefully.\n\nIt was not about right or wrong, so much as learning to value differences.\n\nTo kill now was disgraceful, but who else would ever know? If he cared so much for what other Dragons believed, why had he ever chosen to bear a black Princess upon his back and to declare her his Dragon Rider? Could he ever become himself if he followed their hidebound thinking?\n\nA decision clarified in his mind. He breathed, <May your soul find rest, brother.>\n\nThe Dragon's agonised eyes registered disbelief and \u2026 relief.\n\nPursing his lips, he directed a stream of white-hot fire down upon him, raising enormous clouds of boiling water and smoke, until the thrashing stopped. The remains of the body drifted away on the current. Back came the fish to finish the feast, those not already fried in the scalding water.\n\nFlicking his wings, he returned to the sandbank, wondering what under the suns he was feeling. Disbelief, or relief of his own?\n\nHow odd.\n\nAzania said softly, \"Thank you, Dragon.\"\n\nHe inclined his muzzle, and snuffled gently at Inzashu's back. \"You are wounded and need treatment. I'm sorry about \u2026 about being such a Dragon. You see, in my culture, it is regarded as detestable to end suffering before full measure has been returned to the perpetrator of the wrong. We see it as a kind of righteous balance, I suppose. It must seem an awfully strange belief to you.\"\n\nShe sniffed, shivering at his touch, but then swivelled on her heel to face him. \"I \u2026 I understand, I think.\"\n\n\"You do? Ah, sorry.\"\n\n\"I suppose it's very silly of me to think that a Dragon will behave, believe and simply be just like a bigger Human.\" Inzashu made a very tiny, tremulous quirk of her lips. \"What would you say if I told you that many Skartun will kill an infant if its upper teeth come in before the lower ones? They believe the child is cursed.\"\n\n*Blergh!* he spat, taken aback. \"You're serious?\"\n\n\"Sad,\" she said.\n\nReaching out, he gave her an awkward paw hug. \"I know that these are meant to work marvels for the Human heart by a process no Dragon understands.\"\n\nShe shivered. \"I haven't had a great many hugs in my life. Nahritu-N'shula was not a believer in physical affection. I had most of mine from a nurse companion who travelled with us for some years, because an eminent Psyromantic Mage could not be bothered with caring for a whinging infant.\"\n\nSo bitter, at eleven years old.\n\nThis was her life's experience. Deliberately, he said, \"Well, I haven't had many hugs either. Very undraconic. In fact, many Dragons believe Humans carry unnameable infectious diseases. The way they talk, you'd imagine their scales were in danger of falling off.\"\n\n\"Like yours?\" Azania said, pulling at his tail.\n\nTo say he jumped was an understatement. He nearly leaped out of his scales. <WHAT?>\n\nThe Princess held up a scale. \"I think you might be shedding.\"\n\n\"Dragons do not \u2026 sorry, but \u2026\"\n\nShe prodded at her ears. \"Please, Dragon, I understand that you're upset, but those sonic effects are going to burst my eardrums one of these days. It hurts when you're that loud.\"\n\n\"Sorry!\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to scare you, but don't Dragons lose scales all the time?\"\n\nHe stared at the patch on his mid-tail. Not like that. Not as if he had mange. Lifting the next one over with his talon, he felt how loose it was. How flimsy. Upon investigation, he noticed many other brittle patches peppered up and down his flanks, along his back, and right down to the end of his tail.\n\nNot to mention the holes the green had clawed in his hide, oozing copious quantities of silver blood. No flying on today.\n\nHe said, \"My quest for new fires appears to have taken an unexpected turn.\"\n\n\"Plot twist,\" said the Princess.\n\n\"I don't like plot twists; they hurt,\" Dragon growled sulkily. \"Could I have a new author, please?\"\n\nAzania smiled, \"I'll hire a decent one, tomorrow. Instant new coat of scales. For now, let's get you patched up, my friend. I don't like the idea of you leaking quite so much.\"\n\n\"Dragons do not leak!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Unfortunately, that was not entirely true. He oozed. A lot. Nor had the Terror Clan beast bothered to clean his talons before tucking into his guts with zest. Desperately wanting a swim to clean off and relieve his inflamed scales, Dragon wallowed about in the shallows but still had to flame the waters regularly to keep the little pests from nipping around his ankles. When one absconded with a scale, he decided that enough was enough. In what may have been described as a temper tantrum, which he should have grown out of by the time he was five, he turned fifty feet of river into a steam bath.\n\nThe water did not care, but the barbecued fish did.\n\nWith utter predictability, his fish dinner tasted as disgusting as it looked. Spiny, oily and altogether disagreeable.\n\nTime for a nap on that sandbank.\n\n\"Tuck you in with a duck-down pillow and silken sheets, Dragon?\" Azania cooed.\n\n\"Watch out, I'm known for my biting humour.\"\n\n\"Aye, your jokes have a real snap.\"\n\n\"Sharp wit, Princess.\"\n\n\"I have you to sharpen my claws upon, gnarr,\" she chuckled, pretending her fingers were rending talons. Decent impression. Never in a million years would he admit how amusing she was.\n\n\"How's that hole in your hide, Highness?\"\n\n\"Shall we compare? Or are you just going to be all 'holier than thou?'\"\n\nThis time he guffawed so hard, he sprayed sand in her face.\n\nServed her right.\n\nHe added, \"I am holier than thou, but then, I have much more scope to be holy than you.\" Flexing his shoulder muscles to illustrate the point with suitable draconic gravitas, he reached out to chuck her beneath the chin. \"Quantity over quality, say I.\"\n\n\"The art of the self-defeating argument.\"\n\n\"I am perfection personified.\"\n\n\"How do you personify a Dragon? Dragonify?\"\n\n\"Good point. On a more serious note, is your sister alright?\"\n\n\"Long but shallow scratch, thankfully. The armour took care of the worst, but that piece is never going to be wearable again. Even Yardi can't rescue it.\"\n\nThe armourer nodded. \"That wasn't a friendly pat upon the shoulder.\"\n\n\"My first all-out Dragon battle. Yours?\"\n\nYardi nodded pensively.\n\nThe silly question being a different, related art. Chuckling to himself, Dragon went to chat to Azania. They needed to work out a plan to get Yarimda up to a height she would never have been before. He had to admit to a longing for it just to be the two of them again. Maybe that day would come again. For now, he must be a parent with responsibilities.\n\nHaving opted not to light a fire that evening for fear of being spied upon from afar, they slept a short ways from the river, under cover of a large copse of gum trees. In the morning, they rose lazily from their sandy beds. A couple of their number decided they might not be leaking too badly, and within an hour, were on their way on a north-westerly heading, up toward the snowy slopes of the higher mountains. The battle had taken far more out of him than he had imagined, Dragon discovered. It was he who had to call for an early lunch break.\n\nAfter lunch, they flew two more shorter stints, ending in a green valley of medium height, one endless meadow of mauve flowers that ran for twenty miles or more up into the Tamarine Range. At Yarimda's request, they strolled along slowly for an hour, enjoying the warm afternoon sunshine and the fragrant mountain airs.\n\n\"So clean. So pure!\" Inzashu exclaimed, filling her lungs with delight.\n\nOne forgot what it was like to see the world, Dragon told himself, doing the same. Adjusting his spectacles, he gazed about. Forget about the dusty heat and all that death down in the desert \u2013 yet he could not help but consider how the sands would run dark with blood once the Skartun armies returned in the full panoply of their might, their dark-tufted helms waving in the breeze. He paused to examine wildflowers close up, and told Inzashu how he would bury her in snow up to her neck.\n\n\"Oh, I've never seen snow before!\" she cried. \"Only from a distance, like this. Skartun doesn't have snow. Is it truly cold?\"\n\n\"Can you feel the chill in the air? That's a foretaste.\"\n\n\"Aye. It's \u2026 bracing.\"\n\nHe did not have the heart to clarify that they were barely up to one-third of the height they would need to fly to reach Juggernaut's lair. Instead, he told her that tomorrow, they would be flying over snowfields and between peaks that never lost their white robes. With an ounce of luck, she might see wolves or panthers, and most probably they would be met by a Dragon or two \u2013 hopefully friendly ones this time, on the alert for intruders in their territory. He picked pensively at his scales.\n\nWhen it was time to put his best paw forward, he was looking worse and worse. If he did not know better, he feared to lose the entire coat of scales. What happened then? He had never heard of a draconic moult. Perhaps this was a peculiarity of Sea Dragons?\n\n\"Oceans on your mind, young Dragon?\" Yarimda inquired.\n\n\"A bit,\" he admitted.\n\n\"Could we find a place to rest? I grow weary, even of joy.\"\n\n\"At once.\" She gave him a withering glance that suggested a keen youngster was being far too polite. \"Honoured Yarimda, it might sound trite, but I was worrying about my scales. Dragons of the Tamarine Mountains are not known to moult.\"\n\n\"A worm forms a chrysalis, and out comes a butterfly.\"\n\nThere, old narked Dragon made his appearance with a low growl. Worm! She dared the comparison?\n\nYarimda arched her left eyebrow.\n\nHe chose to say, \"I would make for a severely overweight butterfly.\"\n\n\"Oh, severely,\" she agreed. \"This old woman was trying to come up with a plausible link between the probable origin of your egg and the change to the Sea Dragon migration.\"\n\n\"Indeed?\"\n\n\"I remembered a tale I once heard in my youth, of a Dragon who was tragically killed in a storm \u2013 near the Kingdom of Amboraine, actually. Do you know of Bonewhite Valley?\" He shivered. \"Aye. How is it, Dragon, that after all these years \u2013 decades, even \u2013 the Dragonkind still have a communal aversion to that place? Almost as if there is a racial memory shared from dam to egg, and Dragon to Dragon.\"\n\nHe could only shake his muzzle. Deep, uncanny lore.\n\nShe said, \"Here's a nice spot. Let's camp here. Azania, would you be a dear and prepare me a sweet herbal brew?\"\n\n\"Of course, Yarimda. What were you and Dragon talking about?\"\n\n\"Creepy things,\" he intoned, blowing on her hair. \"Eerie, ghostly stories.\"\n\n\"Stop bothering your Princess like that, young Dragon,\" Yarimda said tartly, rapping her walking stick against his lower jaw.\n\nAzania thought she could hide that smile from him? Wretch!\n\nHe threatened her with a talon behind the old woman's back. Azania pasted on an innocent expression.\n\nAfter repeating the story for the Princess, Yarimda added, \"I wondered if there might not be a scent memory, to use the Draconian word, which changed the Sea Dragons' behaviour. Say there was a place from which your egg was stolen, be it by force or by guile, to your dam a tragedy no less than that of Bonewhite Valley. Say that place became to Sea Dragons just such an aversion \u2013 nothing you ever think about or could put a talon to \u2013 which made them take a different route.\"\n\nHe rasped, \"Where? Up north and all the way around the Vaylarn Archipelago?\"\n\nIt made sense. With the route changed, the Sea Serpents had found the seas between Vaylarn and the mainland much to their liking. That spelled the end of Azerim's fleet, and indeed, all coastal shipping from Lymarn in the south to Ermine in the far northeast.\n\n\"Possibly. The annual Sea Dragon migration is one of the greatest natural wonders of our realm, young Dragon. I imagine they might circumvent Solixambria itself, or even our entire world in the course of their journeying. It is a sight \u2013 ah, such a sight \u2013 as to infuse the music of the deepest seas with the magic of one's soul. I remember it well \u2026\"\n\nSitting upon a blanket the Princess had laid out for her, the old woman clasped her hands to her chest, suddenly lost in the mists of time and remembrance.\n\nAfter waiting a moment to see if she would speak more, Dragon departed soft-pawed to help Azania light a fire \u2013 Dragon the firelighter!\n\nJoy in the smallest things. Even if he exploded her pile of sticks on the first attempt.\n\n[ Fly High ]\n\nThe following morning, leaving a pile of brown scales behind him that he was not at all grumpy about, Dragon winged steadily up-valley between the jagged, white-tipped peaks. By mid-morning, however, the weather had changed for what he liked to call a miserable mountain special. Low, brooding clouds came rolling toward them, soon obscuring the towering cliffs and white-dusted slopes. The chill breeze freshened by the minute, blustering and buffeting like an angry bully blowing his threats.\n\nSuddenly, all was grey and damp. His Riders shivered.\n\n\"I've never flown through a cloud before!\" Inzashu cried, waving her hands as if she could catch the moisture.\n\nRidiculous girl. He cracked a huge grin.\n\n\"I can't feel my nose anymore,\" Azania put in, sounding surprised.\n\n\"Hmm, a blue-black Princess, how intriguing,\" he said. \"Anyone else feeling cold, you poor things?\"\n\nAt least two people kicked him, if not three.\n\nSince he did not know this terrain well, he reduced altitude until the lay of the ground became clear. Gone, the pretty mauve carpeting of flowers, replaced by dry brown boulders and tan, high-growing clumps of grasses, as tall as Azania. Not saying much, mind, since she was all of four feet and eight inches tall \u2013 but she acted taller, he had always thought. Something about the way she filled a lair, or a room, with her presence.\n\nDragon said, \"Bear with me for a moment. I don't know the area, but usually, caverns start about half a mile higher up, where you see the foot of those vertical cliffs \u2013\"\n\n\"See?\" Azania put in mildly.\n\n\"I was speaking metaphorically,\" he snorted.\n\n\"Ah, I would have completely missed the allusion, but thank you for the Dragonsplanation.\"\n\n\"The what and how much?\"\n\n\"A Dragon explanation \u2013 I just made that up,\" she chortled. \"It's to do with the way certain male creatures must point out the blindingly obvious to the ignorant little females \u2013\"\n\n\"I'd say, 'Be silent, little female,' but as I understand this to be a physiological impossibility for Humankind's so-called fairer sex \u2026\"\n\n\"Ooh, fighting talk.\"\n\n\"If you can't stand the heat \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't pull the Dragon's tail!\" Inzashu yelled, startling them all into laughter.\n\n\"Excellent twist,\" Yardi smiled back over her shoulder. \"I was going to say, don't stick your hand in the forge, or the Dragon's jaw for that matter \u2013 here, grandmother. Cover your mouth and nose like this against the cold.\"\n\n\"I am not that feeble yet!\"\n\n\"Clearly not. Would you like to light our next fire with your Dragon breath?\" her granddaughter put in sweetly.\n\n\"No need for rudeness, child. Dragon, if you're intending to find a cave \u2013\"\n\n\"Ooh! Look, there's snow on the ground!\" Inzashu exclaimed. She was having a squealing morning, Dragon thought sourly, then decided he felt sour about feeling sour. Why slap down another's joy? \"So white! So gorgeous! So fluffy!\"\n\nAlthough, what it was with Humans and fluff, he could not fathom.\n\nAnd the need to squeak at that ear-hurting pitch. Totally unnecessary, in his expert opinion on the subject. Dragonsplanation indeed!\n\nYarimda huffed, \"Well, if some people would let the old lady with the creaky bones finish, we are not about to find a cavern flying up the middle of a valley in a cloud! You need to go to the edge, Dragon.\"\n\nTell a Dragon how to fly?\n\n\"Except for that, grandmother?\" Yardi said, pointing.\n\nFour pairs of Human eyes and one pair of Dragon eyes stared at the great hole in the ground in surprise. Perfectly round. Unknowably deep. One thing was for certain. He was not going anywhere near that hole without knowing exactly what had made it. That something was either a natural process, or a creature roughly the size of a Bloodworm.\n\nHe growled, \"While that's intriguing, I am not going down there for all the gold in these mountains.\"\n\n\"Dragon instinct?\" his Princess asked.\n\n\"No, it's a vertical hole. The snow which is about to arrive would still be falling on our heads down there, Highness. Then my scales would get wet and I'd be even crabbier than usual. Trust me, none of us want that.\"\n\nOn that self-deprecating note, he sideslipped in the air and began to hunt in earnest for a cave in which to hide his hoard of Human females, odd collector that he was.\n\nJolly mountain weather. Predictable in its unpredictability, which had to be the very definition of feminine logic.\n\nThere. Dragonsplain that! Or not, if one wanted to live a long life."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "A brief but violent mountain squall shrouded the upper valley in white. Spring in one place, and a blizzard eighteen miles on. Having found a shallow but serviceable cavern, Dragon blocked most of the weather by dint of planting himself across the entrance. A bitter wind moaned over his back. When it became clear that his Black Roses of the Desert were shrivelling somewhat due to the plummeting temperature, Dragon trialled warming the cavern by breathing fire toward the back. Very soon, he had four eager pairs of hands warming themselves beside the stream of his fire.\n\nAll part of the service. Flying cart, royal conveyance, firelighter and now oversized cavern warmer. He was definitely moving up in the world.\n\nBetter not sneeze. That could end badly.\n\nAs the storm died down, however, the younger Princess decided now was the time to go romp in the snow. Dragon had barely uncurled himself when she returned with a shriek. \"Wolf!\"\n\n\"I'll pop out and talk to it,\" he offered, rising with a yawn and a stretch.\n\nFaced with a Dragon, the grey wolf and its nine hungry companions proved to be poor conversationalists. A swift clack of his fangs sent them sloping off minus the intended royal breakfast. Could they have been using this cavern? There had been no particular canine smell he could detect. Nonetheless, he was the apex predator around here. Wolves? Good riddance.\n\nWith a regal sweep of his forepaw, he said, \"Playtime, Princess?\"\n\nEven eleven year-olds found that tone discourteous.\n\nNo mind. Pretending to root about in the snow while he stealthily gathered a large pawful, he said, \"Snow is light, soft and very cold, Princess \u2013 want to try some?\"\n\n\"Dragon. Dragon!\"\n\nHe chased after her, chortling, \"Snow shower for you today?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Snow, did you say? Say, 'no snow snow no no snow snow no snow' very fast. It's that lisp of yours.\"\n\n\"I do not \u2013 Dragon!\"\n\nOne freshly frosted felon. Glare!\n\n\"Don't go wearing my name out now. I must say, you look very fetching with snow in your curls. Truly the winter Princess.\"\n\nVoicing what had to be a Skartunese war cry, she scrabbled for snow of her own. \"You had better start running now, Dragon! When I catch you, you're going to get one in the fangs, I swear \u2026\"\n\nShe had an excellent arm on her. Human snowballs were tiny, but that was hardly the point. They gambolled about until she declared her fingers were so numb they hurt. More logic that made complete sense. He had the same sensation in his paws. Since Yardi had put a kettle on for tea \u2013 most civilised, everyone agreed \u2013 they decided to have a warming herbal brew before flying on. Inzashu added herbs to stimulate blood flow. Eminently sensible.\n\nPity she could not simulate a desert sun, she muttered.\n\n\"Tired of the snow already?\" Dragon goaded.\n\n\"Never! The toes don't agree, however. In fact, I'm not sure how many I have left.\"\n\n\"We should check her circulation,\" he said at once. \"Humans are susceptible to frostbite. Take off your boots, Princess, and let someone tickle your feet.\"\n\nAzania snorted, \"That's not the treatment.\"\n\n\"How would you know, o Princess of baking sunshine?\"\n\n\"Wicked beast, I'll check my own toes, thank you,\" Inzashu said boldly.\n\nDragon promptly plucked her up and hung her upside-down by her feet, despite her protests. \"Wicked beast? I'll paddle your pampered behind, I will. That'll be good for the circulation, I promise!\"\n\nShe folded her arms and glared at him. \"What's this, pick on the Princess day?\"\n\n\"I am very picky about my Princesses, aye. Only the best will do. Say, have you ever been dumped headfirst in a snowdrift?\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Just can't stop calling my name, can you?\"\n\nAzania said, \"Save it for Ariamyrielle Seaspray, will you?\"\n\n\"Ooh, there's a Dragoness in the picture?\" The imp in his paw waggled her eyebrows. \"Is she pretty? Is there a romantic story involved? Azania \u2013\"\n\n\"By my wings, not enough snow to dump you into. Narrow escape, Princess.\"\n\n\"Tell me the story, please?\"\n\n\"Do I have to?\"\n\n\"Come on, Dragon, you can't leave it like that. You know I'll just get everything from my sister anyways. Want to get your version out first?\"\n\nAzania snorted, \"When we do find a snowdrift, Dragon, dump her in it for me, would you?\"\n\nDelightfully deadly warrior Dragonesses who lived on faraway islands were clearly the stuff of dreams, in Inzashu's opinion. Pest, she would not leave him alone until she had every salient detail, and then it was tragic, romantic, beautiful, a match made in the very heavens. There just had to be a good outcome, she announced. Fate could not possibly cut him off so cruelly.\n\nCould it not? Ah, the innocence of youth.\n\nFollowing the storm, the air was crisper than ever. The peaks stood exquisitely delineated against the crimsons and purples of the evening sky. Flying on, Dragon's directional sense told him that Juggernaut's lair was behind the next range of peaks, but the easterly pass he had expected was not yet apparent when he felt Yarimda surreptitiously rubbing her chest.\n\nHer response to his query seared his ear canals.\n\nNo mind. A lifetime's strict diet of respect for one's elders tempered his natural draconic ire at the rebuke. The only issue was that his previous idea of always being stoic was now undermined by the ebullient fires forever ready inside his throat, and the blasted itching of his hide. Agonising! He flew onward until at last he spied the high pass to the west, shadowed now by the setting suns. Time to find another suitable place to overnight.\n\nThey needed to prepare Yarimda for the hop over the top.\n\n\"Ready to roll?\" Azania asked the following morning, as Taramis set the snowfields ablaze.\n\n\"Do I look that fat?\" Dragon inquired, trying to push out his lean belly.\n\nAll this flying was packing on the muscle. He was quite sure that his shoulders bulged at least a foot wider than before, and no, that was not his natural, well-developed male ego speaking. Besides, any Dragon with a hide in his condition had nothing to boast about. Flying rug. Not a good sort of rug, either. This one had been liberally chewed on in places, and was starting to hang off him like badly fitting Human clothing.\n\nNot good. Nor pleasant.\n\nWhat he wanted was a hide that fit like Azania's trousers.\n\nOne that might earn more than a passing glance from a cobalt Dragoness, to pick no example in particular.\n\nBundled up in every scrap of clothing or blankets they owned, his four Riders took their positions. This time, Inzashu-N'shula took the neck seat behind Yarimda, where she could monitor her and touch her with magic if needed, while Yardi gingerly settled herself onto the seat behind Azania and buckled herself in with white-knuckled hands. The armourer still acted uncomfortable with the idea of flying Dragonback.\n\n\"All passengers aboard and strapped in?\" he rumbled. \"This flight is leaving in one minute. In the event of another vengeful flight of Terror Clan Dragons appearing, no-one is to jump overboard this time. We will outfly them into Grinder territory \u2013\"\n\nYardi grumbled, \"Can we not talk about going overboard, please?\"\n\nAzania said, \"On that note, there's our first draconic visitor \u2013 see, right up there? She's sunning herself at the top of the pass.\"\n\n\"Oh, well spotted,\" Dragon noted. \"Let's go give her greeting.\"\n\nTaking off with care for the oldest member of the team, he flew steadily up the pass under the scrutiny of the light yellow Dragoness. No rush. Unconcerned manner. Nothing to see here but the impossibility of a Dragon carrying four Humans upon his back \u2013 nothing new under the suns, right?\n\nThe pass had to be all of eighteen thousand feet, a vertical climb of over a mile from their previous altitude. Dragon attuned his scent ability to Yarimda's breathing and sense of herself, finding the rich desert-rose scent of Inzashu-N'shula already present. He chuckled. Well named for the rose, these Princesses. Despite that she was a youngster, he knew her for his better in matters of magic. He had the strength of Dragons to his credit, however, so between them, he was confident that they could keep the old woman safe despite the danger.\n\nThe yellow Dragoness waited until they had almost reached her altitude and started to sweep forward over the long snowbound saddle of the pass, before making a lackadaisical launch of her own. Nothing of her posture indicated aggression.\n\nShortly, she circled and drew alongside and a little above, assuming the position that declared she was Grinder Clan, in Draconian speak, the territorial-dominant Dragoness.\n\n<Ho, nameless Dragon, strength to your wings,> she called. <Are you he who carries the Princess Azania of T'nagru as \u2026 flight companion?>\n\nHer query betrayed disbelief.\n\n<Aye, that I do. I am Nameless and of no Clan. Call me Dragon. We fly to Juggernaut's lair this day, peaceably seeking what little peace he offers those who take up his training regimens.>\n\nShe chuckled smokily. <I am Chalice the Grinder, Dragoness of this territory.>\n\nHe genuflected with his wingtips. <Strength to the Grinder Clan. Forgive me if I fly swiftly on, o Chalice, but I carry upon my back one of no less than ninety-four years beneath the suns. We must bring her quickly back down to a safer elevation.>\n\n<I am well \u2026 enough,> Yarimda gasped. <Please make all speed, Dragon, I beg you.>\n\nHer heart rate was too quick, surely? He had no idea what it should be for Humans, but all of their pulse rates had quickened considerably as they climbed. Inzashu's magic enwrapped the old woman, strengthening, soothing, even oxygenating the blood.\n\nChalice echoed the genuflection. <Strength to your paw, Dragon. You will need it to face those who wait ahead. I shall fly with you, for I also am bound for Juggernaut's lair this day.>\n\nEscort? Subtle.\n\nStretching his wings to their utmost now, Dragon piled on the speed. To his surprise, he began to draw ahead of the Dragoness almost immediately. She could not keep up \u2013 in a few minutes, she waved and called for him to hurry on. His struts and wing bones creaked audibly at the lateral and wind-shear forces he exerted against the thin air, while he kept so low to the barren white saddle between the peaks shading the skies to either side that several times, his tucked-up paws kicked up puffs of snow.\n\nBeyond the saddle was a high plain just a few miles in length, dominated by extraordinary mauve clusters of boulders.\n\n\"Fairytale garden,\" Azania gasped.\n\nNot only that, but there was no snow. The rich mauve colour extended to the ground, but the smaller rocks were covered in many places with bright red, green and yellow mosses.\n\nIncredible! Mental picture for when, if ever, he got back to his beloved artwork.\n\nHow he missed painting.\n\nImagine splashing this mountain scene upon a canvas, or somehow capturing the endlessly changeable billows of the ocean.\n\n\"Dragon?\" Azania called, at the same instant he glanced sideways at one wing, then the other, in confusion. His wingbeat had \u2026 changed?\n\nA Dragon's wingbeat was like breathing. Usually, one did not need to think about it. As he lost headway slightly due to his surprise, he was forced to lightly run over the top of several boulders before he pulled his wings and thoughts toward himself and found his normal rhythm again. His old rhythm, which meant \u2026\n\n<Ocean always rises,> Yarimda said, in a strangely high-pitched voice.\n\nSmug, he felt, but she had a right to be. Years must give people wisdom like that. The ability to place a finger precisely upon the insight he had been struggling toward.\n\n<Rest in \u2026 the oc \u2026>\n\nOh no!\n\n\"Yarimda!\" he bellowed.\n\nDragon's neck vertebrae popped as he struggled to look back at the first neck position. From the corner of his eye, he saw a sight that had always intrigued him before he learned what it truly meant. Yarimda and her granddaughter were much paler of skin than the Princesses; the colour Humans called white, but was really a kind of light tan-pink. Just as black was not black, but many variations on deep, attractive browns \u2013 speaking as a member of the brown association, of course.\n\nFoolish beast! He snapped his mind back into order. Yarimda was blue. The kind of blue that did not go together with Human health in the slightest. Hypoxia. Somehow \u2013 oh, by his sire's egg, it was Inzashu who had lost control of her magic!\n\nAt once, he replaced what the Princess had been doing with his own, less sophisticated and sensitive framework. Colours brightened, galvanising his magic to greater heights of effectiveness. There. Breath restored. Even the sense of their blood flow hearkened to a susurrus upon the seashore just as he remembered from the Lumis Ocean. His own was more complex, but no less reflective of the life pulsating within.\n\nA Dragon swam in triumphal majesty through the air.\n\nHe revelled in the blast coursing over his sensitive wing membranes, in the protective flickering of his narrowed eyelids, in speeding low over the mosses and lichens. Blowing over the end of the plain as if a Bloodworm were chasing him, Dragon focussed his energy into shooting down a long slope, seeking a safer, lower altitude for his passengers.\n\nEven Azania and Yardi bent low over his back.\n\nBattle speed!\n\nNever had he flown like this. His thrusting wings were making a more convoluted action in the air, more a figure of eight than a standard rowing motion, which reduced drag as well as producing power both in the upstroke and downstroke. How was this? A resonant drumbeat of joy pulsed in his Dragon hearts.\n\nUp on his back, a Princess chuckled, <Fly, Dragon. Fly! Oh, how he thunders over the mountains!>\n\nThe wind's roaring did not drown out her voice?\n\nSomehow, through slipstreaming or angles or something to do with his body position and speed, he heard her as if she were talking right inside his ear canal. Drop! Hurtling over a cliff, he swooped into a rapid descent, realising that Juggernaut's lair lay not far ahead, and for sheer exultation, he might just crack open his jaw and \u2013 a cramp seized his hearts.\n\n<My sire!>\n\nBlaze the Devastator was present. Whatever was his father doing up at Juggernaut's lair?\n\nAll the old feelings came crashing back into his breast as his poor eyes followed the far sharper lead of his scent senses. The familiar flame-orange dipped over the edge of the crater. Were his brothers with his sire? Not unlikely. His hearts crashed around his paws at the thought. Gone, the joy. Vanished, the beautiful oceanic sounds that had hurtled him across the miles at a speed he could scarcely credit. That was a thirty-mile sprint. Thirty!\n\nHe panted hard, not only because of the physical exertion.\n\nA tiny hand patted his scales. \"Alright, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Not so much.\"\n\nYarimda croaked, \"That was your sire?\"\n\n\"Aye, but we must not admit it. I am an outcast, unknown to these Dragons \u2013 but known, if that makes sense. It's easier if we pretend we don't know each other. I'll be treated with stiff formality at best. What's imperative is that we get our message across.\"\n\nHis voice trailed off as his slack wings took them over the cliff's edge. Far from being the quiet retreat he had yearned for, Juggernaut's lair was a busy hub of Dragons hailing from at least seven Clans that he could identify at the tap of a talon. Perhaps more. That was nothing compared to the anxiety of gazing down and seeing his brothers Brand and Brawl strutting their stuff around his sire, greeting the Dragonesses, trying to get wing-touches with Juggernaut \u2013 *blergh!*\n\nWas it wrong to hate his kin so?\n\nBrand the umber, sly and suave. Brawl was the same burnt orange as his sire; as Dragons said, born in the same scales. Together with his sire, they must represent the Devastator Clan at this gathering.\n\nThe draconic congregation hushed dramatically at the sight of a shabby, moulting Dragon of considerable size arriving in their airspace with four Humans clinging to him like fleas to a deer's ears. Four! Jaws creaked, fire spat here and there, and wings quivered with indignation. Best guess? None of these Dragons had ever seen, or even imagined, indignity to compare. His brothers must be livid! Trying to rescue his shattered dignity with a whirl of his wings, Dragon hovered above the training ground, seeking wing space to land.\n\nThen, a bellow reached his ears that almost made him shed his wings in shock. <Dragon! How fared the war in T'nagru?> Juggernaut thundered. <Give us that battle roar I taught you!>\n\n[ Blergh ]\n\nGratitude fused with the cauldron of nausea churning in his stomach as the import of Juggernaut's greeting hit him on many levels at once. Brotherhood, acknowledgement and a path to such honour as he could scrape together, delivered in one breath.\n\nYarimda kicked his neck with her heels. \"I'm blocking my ears, young Dragon.\"\n\nHe wanted to laugh, or weep, he knew not which. The years had taught him to hide his face at moments like this \u2013 yet he was changing, becoming something new. Could he believe it?\n\nA ninety-four year old Human woman flew wing guard with him.\n\nSucking in a deep, ragged breath, he paused \u2013 and breathed in a bit more, until his ribs ached. Focus. He had one chance at this. Blitz the Fritz was dead and buried. He was a Dragon who had shot down a Bloodworm, frazzled Jabiz Urdoo in his own juices and carried a matchless Princess upon his back.\n\n<Iii \u2013 aamm \u2013 drraagoonn!!> His sonorous roar reverberated off the tall grey cliffs of the sinkhole.\n\nAuditory shock! Brand and Brawl smacked together and tangled wings, while many of the other Dragons reacted by assuming instinctual defensive postures and emitted involuntary spurts of fire. Using the space created by the reeling group, he landed gracefully \u2013 for once \u2013 and strolled over to greet the orange-black warrior Dragon.\n\n<Master. Apologies for the intrusion.>\n\n<No, Dragon. I am glad you came,> said he, touching wingtips as if they were old friends. <Will you light our understanding with your testimony?>\n\n<We shall. We flew directly from T'nagru, as you suspected. N'ginta is safe, but a far greater danger lurks in the desert.>\n\nTurning, Juggernaut offered a courteous paw first to Yarimda, but seeing she had already alighted and was trying to arrange her rickety knees beneath her with Inzashu's help, he lifted the paw high instead. \"Princess? Honoured guests? This way, please.\"\n\nMaster politician. Dragon could only shake his head and take notes.\n\nRemembering his manners, he introduced his group to the master warrior, from oldest to youngest following the draconic tradition.\n\nIn flawless Draconian, Yarimda said, <Juggernaut the Grinder, your reputation precedes you. You are a master teacher.>\n\nHis eyes widened at her fluency in the draconic tongue. <Honoured Yarimda, you and your granddaughter shall room with me in my own lair. We are a little busy, as you can tell. Much ado about happenings beyond the desert.> With a wink back at the walking sack of hide, he added, <Dragon, you'll sleep outside, of course. Princesses, this way, if you please.>\n\nIn the guise of taking care of the elderly, he slipped them away into his small lair.\n\nOnce inside the cosy space, the Master settled Yarimda in a comfortable nest of cushions and fetched water for her. Inzashu rooted out herbs for her to eat and a couple of peppery oils that she rubbed into her wrists and temples. Meantime, Dragon made stumbling explanations.\n\n\"You are moulting,\" Juggernaut confirmed bluntly. \"Heard it happens with some Dragons of the Archipelago. Don't worry, you'll probably still have draconic hide underneath \u2013 imagine the bits leaking out between your ribs otherwise?\"\n\nInzashu giggled as he prodded her ribs, exactly as one would tease a hatchling. He tried not to show surprise. The warrior Dragon liked younglings? Revelation!\n\nJuggernaut aimed a glance sourer than a hundred lemons in his direction.\n\nAhem. Moving swiftly on \u2026 he said, \"Did you hear \u2013\"\n\n\"Aye, Dragon. Reports reached the Tamarine Mountains of a Skartun army besieging N'ginta Citadel, including the detail that they field Dragon slaves in battle. This is what has riled up our kin \u2013 not many, by my wings \u2013 but some. These ones may decide to act, but as you know, agreeing on anything between the Dragon Clans may take a considerable length of time. Not to mention the politics. Blood will be spilled. Your reports will be invaluable.\"\n\nTurning to Yardi, Juggernaut said, \"So, you're an armourer? Ever worked with Dragon armour and forges heated by Dragon fire and magic?\"\n\n\"No, Master,\" she said.\n\nIntrigued by his manner, Dragon put in, \"Were you looking for an armourer, Master?\"\n\nHis muzzle bobbed curtly. \"There are three Grinder Clan smiths who specialise in Dragon armour, but even they will tell you that many of the smaller components, joints, buckles and so on, are far better produced by skilled Human hands. I am hiring. Interested?\"\n\nSmiling at his bold manner, Yardi said, \"I've never worked with Dragons before.\"\n\n\"Is this body armour your work?\"\n\n\"It is \u2013\"\n\n\"You're hired.\"\n\n\"Dragon,\" she said, pushing his paw away, \"you are very forceful. Two things. One, I cannot afford to work for free. Two, I would need to settle my grandmother in Hamirythe Kingdom before committing to a war effort.\"\n\n\"How long would you need? What is your price?\"\n\nFolding her muscular arms across her chest, she stared at the warrior Dragon. Bold! Clearly, something passed between them, because Juggernaut cleared his throat and twin spots of colour appeared in Yardi's cheeks. She said, \"I'm inspired by Princess Azania, honoured Juggernaut. I would gladly serve the Dragonkind with my talents and seize the chance to learn new skills. I would take \u2026 one standard gold bar a month.\"\n\nAzania's eyebrows shot up at her price.\n\nThe Dragon dipped his chin. \"I demand nothing but your best work, that you recruit at least ten more blacksmiths and armourers during your travels to the North and West, and I will push you to work harder than ever before in your life \u2013\"\n\n\"You want me to manage a team of Human smiths?\"\n\n\"Can't handle the job?\"\n\n\"I don't browbeat easily, Dragon!\"\n\nJuggernaut's gruff laughter broke the tension. \"Exactly what I like best about you. If I wanted to recruit a waif, I'd find some expensive little chit of a desert Princess \u2013\"\n\n\"Excuse me!\" Azania almost howled.\n\n\"Something I said, Highness?\" the gladiator snorted humorously.\n\n\"Yardi, do me a favour and shrink his hoard, would you?\" she complained.\n\nShe said, \"For that service, I'll offer two gold bars a month, and a percentage of each Smith's wages \u2013\"\n\n\"Done!\" Juggernaut growled, biting back on a curl of flame. \"Or would you like to press me on the percentage, too?\"\n\n\"Ten?\"\n\nHe stuck out his paw. \"When can you start?\"\n\nAzania put in slyly, \"I wonder how many single Armourers a woman can recruit in a hurry?\"\n\nYardi mimed flicking her away like a beetle. She shook Juggernaut's proffered talon gravely, saying, \"Not quite the future I expected, but life can be strange sometimes. Dragon, would you consider flying us as far as Dorline or even Fara'ane? I'd return far quicker.\"\n\nHe drawled, \"How may I best fleece you, rich girl? Two gold clinkers per mile?\"\n\n\"Even I can't afford that,\" his Princess pointed out.\n\nAfter a shared chuckle, they decided they had better talk about strategy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The rich, tropical vegetation of Juggernaut's lair depended upon underground volcanic activity. Compared to the snowy mountains all around, the humid heat was a balm, the perfect medicine for weary wings. Despite that there were plenty of springs about, all were in use. Evidently, cooking one's posterior was an aid to enthusiastic conversation. One such pool was occupied by his sniggering brothers, cosying up to a pair of grass-green Obliterator Dragonesses. Pah. Their commentary on the state of his scales made the Dragonesses giggle merrily. To his great annoyance, his brothers were both funny and accurate \u2013 but then, a pair of muzzles were summarily put out of joint when one of the Dragonesses cooed:\n\n<So, you fought in a real war, Dragon?>\n\n<With help,> he grinned in realisation. <Razed whole troops of Humans, devastated their encampment and rescued twenty-six Dragons from captivity.>\n\n<And contracted the world's worst case of scale rot,> Brawl put in snidely.\n\nThe Dragoness winked at him over his brother's back. <That must have taken a real Dragon.>\n\nOoh, his brother's face! His lips curled as if he had been forcefed curdled milk. Seemed not every Dragoness was overcome by his brothers' dubious charms.\n\nHe may have smirked. Just a little.\n\nToward noon, Dragon took a walk with Inzashu-N'shula in the opposite direction from the brotherly boudoir. As they pressed along through the lush, fragrant leaves, she said, \"You're looking fierce, Dragon. Is this the part where I get roundly told off for failing Yarimda?\"\n\n\"Actually, no. I was thinking about my brothers. We failed \u2013 don't laugh like that. You were protecting Yarimda, right?\"\n\n\"Supposedly.\"\n\n\"Don't sulk. Despite that I understand some males find it endearing, it is unbecoming in the Human female. The reason your magic failed was because of oxygen deprivation, not inattention. Put another way, we were so fixated on protecting Yarimda that we forgot about protecting you. People \u2013 and Dragons \u2013 react differently to altitude. There are records of Dragons flying no higher than we did and falling out of the sky. Lack of oxygen can scramble a brain like a Dragon's talon scrambles brain in the skull, do you see?\"\n\nWith a wan smile at his phrasing, the Princess said, \"I feel a bit better, but not a whole lot.\"\n\n\"Aye. We came within a scale's width of killing her.\"\n\n\"See why I fear magic so much? I know one can only do one's best, but what if it isn't enough?\"\n\n\"Why is the wind?\"\n\n\"Eh?\" Her pensive frown deepened. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Among Dragons, we say 'why is the wind' to refer to what cannot be explained, or predicted \u2013 a kind of shorthand for fate, I suppose. Wind blows where it pleases. You cannot see it except by its effects. Those effects might be fair or foul, without logic or reason. Why is the wind? It simply is.\"\n\n\"Interesting idea, given how the wind lifts every Dragon.\"\n\nJust when he thought he had figured Humans out, something like that popped out and he realised how different, and how deep, the thoughts of another species could be.\n\nPuzzling over this, he paused as a tiny voice cried, <Dragon, Dragon, where's my best Dragon?>\n\n<Sapphira!>\n\nThe blue hatchling came barrelling up the path, most likely outrunning her parents.\n\nShe had grown! The hatchling stood over chest-high to Inzashu. She had visibly put on muscle and sprouted in all directions. She'd be flying without any trouble now, he assumed, greeting her with a fond wingtip slap and a brotherly nudge \u2013 his knee against her shoulder.\n\n<See? My wing's fine now \u2013 and I'm flying again. You look funny. Is this your Human? She smells strange. By my wings, my sire and dam said to say to you that I'm so happy that you saved my life and I am because I'm pretty; don't you think I'm pretty? How did you live when they sent you away? Do I talk too much?>\n\nBlink, blink again, as he summarily failed to sort through that outburst in a hurry.\n\n<Sapphira, this is Inzashu-N'shula.>\n\n<What kind of a funny name is that? A Human funny?>\n\n<Call her Inzashu,> he said. \"Inzashu, this is my friend Sapphira, the hatchling I told you about.\"\n\n\"Humans talk silly,\" the hatchling chirruped, batting her eyelids at the Princess. \"Are you pretty? Are you a dam or a sire?\"\n\n\"I am a girl, like you. A youngling.\"\n\n\"Ooh, we can be \u2026 friendly? Can we? Why have wings you not?\"\n\n\"Because I'm a person and you're a Dragoness. We're different, see? But you are very pretty. Can I touch your scales?\"\n\n\"I'll bite you!\" <Dragon, she \u2026 hee hee hee. How I say \u2013> \"Sorry? I'm a wild, bad Dragoness.\"\n\nThe Princess smiled, \"And I'm a wild, bad Princess from Skartun.\"\n\n<Humans like to touch,> he put in meantime, just in case either of them had more wild ideas. <Their skins are very soft. Please don't bite her. It won't go well.>\n\nThe hatchling cooed and practised making eyes again. \"Dragon say no eat friends. Is okay? I some Human learn good, by my wings.\"\n\n\"Not eating friends is very wise,\" Inzashu agreed. \"You're cute.\"\n\n\"I am so not. I am some mighty stuff!\"\n\n<Talonfire! Gemira!> He greeted the mated pair fondly. Judging by the crimson Dragon's gait, Talonfire had fully recovered from the lightning strike he had taken. His attractive light blue mate's smile of greeting faded as she took in his condition. <Juggernaut says I might be moulting,> he said defensively. <Ugly, isn't it?>\n\n<Moulting? Well, that's \u2026 rare,> Gemira stammered. <Are you well, Bl \u2013 Dragon? Sorry.>\n\n<I've seen a few battles since last we met, but my fires \u2013 I found my fires, at last. This may be the reason I am changing, we think.>\n\nTalonfire said, <Chalice the Grinder was just singing your praises. Said she'd never seen a Dragon fly like he had a hurricane behind his tail. She's regarded as quick. What happened to you, brother?>\n\nHe shrugged. <I wish I knew. All theories accepted.>\n\n<You breathe fire now? May I \u2013>\n\nCarefully, he let a trickle of fire slip up his throat and lick around his fangs.\n\n<The colour!> the Dragoness gasped.\n\nTalonfire clasped his shoulder, choking out, <Brother this is the best news I ever \u2013 it's wonderful! You cannot let them see this. Under no circumstances \u2013>\n\n<What? Why ever not?>\n\n<White fires belong to Sea Dragons. This tells absolutely everyone that either Blaze is not your sire, or Indigofire is not your dam. The dishonour would be unthinkable.>\n\nThrowing back his muzzle, Dragon growled an imprecation at the sky.\n\nWhy? Why him?\n\nTalonfire was right. Curse it, why had he not made the connection himself? He had only to open his mouth to condemn his sire, to ensure that his station amongst Devastator Dragons would never be honoured again. Legends of Sea Dragons were told in every lair around the mountains. The white fire \u2013 perhaps a touch different to his multihued white, but he did not know this for a fact \u2013 was enshrined in lore. Dragons of the air took after Ignis, the flaming red giant sun. Dragons of the ocean favoured Taramis the white, in some legends the father of all Dragons of white fires.\n\nBoth of their heads lifted as a Dragon's roar sounded from near Juggernaut's lair.\n\nTime for his testimony.\n\nHow would his word be received?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "His sire Blaze addressed the congregation of adult Dragons assembled upon the famous sands of Juggernaut's training ground.\n\n<I am Blaze the Devastator. I do not claim to speak for any Clan or Dragon. My aim is for all Dragons assembled here to hear the truth regarding the reported Skartunese invasion across the southern deserts. As every Dragon knows, the wickedness of Skartun represents a deep and terrible scar in our scent memory. We are Dragonkind, free creatures of the air, never enslaved. Our histories record that many were captured and carried off, but we did not understand how \u2013 nor did we cross the deserts to avenge our brothers and sisters.>\n\n<Now, after thirty years, report has reached the Clans that the Skartun have returned, seeking fresh blood to swell their armies. We are fortunate to have a Dragon present who has just flown up from N'ginta Citadel in T'nagru. We will hear his word.>\n\n<Who is this tattered beast?> a voice called from the crowd.\n\nBlaze said, <This Dragon was once a Devastator and is known to us. He was cast out of our Clan for three years and three days by my judgement. He chooses to carry with him the Princess of his possession, Her Royal Highness Azania of T'nagru, the Black Rose of the Desert.>\n\n<With him?> another voice called. <We all know what we saw, brothers!>\n\n<Upon his back,> his sire acknowledged. An ugly muttering rose from the Dragons. More than one spat beside their paws, or declared him accursed by the sign writ upon his very scales.\n\nTurning, his sire said, <Will you swear, upon your fires, to tell \u2013>\n\n<He has no fires!>\n\nAh, the old laughter. Sizeable as he was \u2013 brawnier than any other Dragon here \u2013 he had never felt smaller, worth less, the talon point of every joke and the very definition of what it meant to be despised by all. All? Most, but not all. Juggernaut stood strong for him, and perhaps his sire too, although he had never worked out how to show it.\n\nBlaze sighed, <Let the one who has seen, speak.>\n\nMay his tongue not be a plank, this day. Lifting his muzzle, he said, <Dragons, I swear by the fires of Taramis and the quickening of my own draconic soul, to speak nothing but the truth before this congregation.>\n\nSilence.\n\nThe unusual oath seized their attention. In tones chosen to be measured, and not boastful or proud as most Dragons would be when telling such a tale, he began by confirming in stark outline how he had kidnapped the Princess Azania, and come to fly down to T'nagru in defence of her kingdom. Having attributed her becoming his Dragon Rider to his poor eyesight and lack of fires, it was only when he began to describe how the Dragon thralls had been enchained and forcefully subjugated by such pain that they could not even fly, that the muttering and disbelief gathered momentum. Such was the desolation of his hearts as he portrayed their fate, even his brothers suspended their sneering.\n\nNext, he passed over to Princess Azania to relate her own father's demise at the hand of Nahritu-N'shula. She revealed the secret of the magic which the Skartun armies had discovered which helped them to cross the desert, but not its origins, noting only that from her home citadel, they had flown up to Juggernaut's lair on a mission to bring word and detail of the invasion to the Dragon Clans. Concluding, she appealed with passion and force to the wisdom of the Dragonkind, that the Clans should unite and fly in defence of their kind.\n\nAs ever, she spoke with eloquence he could only marvel at.\n\nThanking her and Dragon, Blaze declared several hours' break for counsel among the Clans and reflection upon all they had heard. At suns-set, they would reconvene for the cross-examination, a classic draconic council technique by which, it was believed, all aspects of a story or issue would be examined and exposed by the heat of fire, as truth or lie.\n\n[ For Shame ]\n\nWispy cirrus clouds drifted high over the sinkhole, brush strokes painted upon the heavens by the lightest of paws. As Dragon, Azania and Yarimda joined the Dragons on the light grey sands of the combat training ground, he reflected upon Talonfire's words. In one breath he could prove everything he had ever wanted \u2013 and wreck everything, too. Had he ever been in a tighter quandary?\n\nHis Princess agreed. He had already disrespected his dam. How could he do the same to his sire?\n\nThere had to be a better way.\n\nAn old saying ran through his mind: Burned if you do, burned if you don't. What did honour mean to creatures to whom this value easily ranked highest of all, when there was no path to attain it?\n\nHe wanted to tell Azania how stunning she looked this evening. How her childhood friend, King Azerim, would gnash his fangs in helpless worship of her character, her integrity and aye, her physical beauty. Some people were born as royalty, born into a position. She was royalty. It fizzed in her blood and surfaced in the spark of her dark eyes and the tilt of her definite chin. The smallest being in the congregation was by no means the least.\n\nWould these Dragons see her as he did?\n\nAs they took their positions, it immediately became clear that several of the Clans could not wait to tear into them. There must have been discussion already. Heated discussion.\n\nThis was no Clan council. This was Clan against Clan.\n\nWith the thunder of his throat, his sire called the assembly to order. <We begin the cross-examination. Flare the Bonfire, would you share?>\n\nThe elderly crimson Dragon said, \"Princess Azania, Dragon, I carry upon my body remembrance of the Skartun. Here upon my secondary wing joint, you see the scars from where I was wounded and struck down, unable to fly as our brothers and sisters were carried off into this slavery you so eloquently described. Had I not flown, I should have walked. Had I not walked, I should have crawled upon my belly! My shame burns deep. We Dragons stood wounded, divided and stunned by this attack, for which vengeance has never been taken in all the years since.\"\n\nRising from his crouching posture, he limped toward her. After a moment, he reached out and clasped her shoulder. Touch! A powerful gesture of solidarity.\n\n\"My Dragon hearts burn for your loss, Princess, and the losses experienced by your nation. T'nagru is our bulwark against Jabiz Urdoo and this Mage. Many Dragons here believe that our kind cannot be controlled by magic, force or any other means. Yet hundreds, hundreds of Dragons were carried off that day. Some historians argue that they broke the might of the Dragon nation. Who here has not lost one of his or her Clan? Dragons?\"\n\nA collective roar shook the evening air.\n\n\"Have you the names of any of these you called Dragon thralls? Who were they?\"\n\nGlancing at Dragon, she said, \"They were recovering from a terrible ordeal. Only two were able to speak \u2013\" <Gnarr! What is this!> many growled \"\u2013 when we left N'ginta Citadel. We know Soar Windchaser and Ruthless Obliterator as those who \u2013\"\n\n\"Ruthless? My uncle Ruthless lives?\" A green Dragoness rose, so agitated that she stepped upon the paws of the Dragon beside her.\n\n\"Aye, we believe so,\" Azania said.\n\n\"You lie! No Obliterator Dragon would ever subject himself to such dishonour, such craven, belly-crawling behaviour. This is an outrageous insult to the Windchasers and the Obliterators.\"\n\nAt once, accusations and counter-accusations flew back and forth.\n\nShe must be publicly labelled a liar, yet his kind only thought about the insult to themselves and their precious honour? Azania stood her ground, serene.\n\n\"Tell us of these cages!\"\n\nDragon said, \"The control is achieved with a dark magic infused with physical equipment. A metal cage was fixed around the Dragon's head and muzzle, forcing two probes deep into the Dragon's ear canals. They called them inductor rods. A handler sat upon the Dragon's back to control the rods. By squeezing the handle with his hands, he shot electricity deep into the ears. The pain is like nothing else I have ever experienced.\"\n\nOpenly enraged, the green spat, \"Yet you stand here, and our kin were enslaved. What makes you so special, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Perhaps only my size.\"\n\n<Or his ego!>\n\n<His desire for prominence among the Clans!> another voice cried.\n\nAzania said, \"I placed my own hands into a Dragon's ears to check the damage. The insides of the ears were scarred and damaged, some so badly that half of the Dragons we were able to rescue were deaf. Possibly, the damage is permanent. In addition, they had an instrument we called a lightning cart. It collected lightning into metal coils as tall as I stand, and shot charged quarrels attached to the instrument by a long wire. This is how they bring Dragons down \u2013 striking them as if by lightning. As you can see from Dragon's hide, and Talonfire the Smiter will confirm, being struck by a violent electrical charge is no pleasant experience, even for a Dragon.\"\n\n\"Unbelievable! Simply unbelievable,\" the green Dragoness hissed.\n\nFrom this to the control of the Bloodworm, the dark magic they had encountered gave many of the Dragons a deep sense of unease. They expressed this by snapping at the story's details, questioning even the smallest particulars. At length, Inzashu-N'shula's part in the tale came to light in such an explosion of hatred that Dragon shifted to stand protectively over her.\n\nBite back the flame! Bite it!\n\nBlaze thundered the assembly back into some semblance of order. \"We do not attack hatchlings and younglings! She is eleven years old! Hold dignity close to your Dragon hearts, brothers and sisters. Were we not all born, shaped by the heritage of our sires and dams? Which of us could change that?\"\n\nHe dared not glance at his sire. Could this be the same regret which had touched his words before, as he cast his son out of lair, Clan and fellowship?\n\nApproaching the girl, he said, \"You stand with the Dragons?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" she quavered.\n\n\"Touch me. Convince me of this mental power you claim.\"\n\nPoor thing! Inzashu said, \"Dragon, Blaze of the \u2013 I \u2026 I made an oath I would do no harm with my power. Nor \u2026 meddle.\"\n\n\"That is well and fine, child, but you stand before Dragons now. My kin need to understand what we are facing \u2013 you must see, surely, that the power to control a Bloodworm or turn a King's mind challenges those who have always seen their thoughts as inviolable?\"\n\n\"Aye. I believe my mother must have found a way to imbue objects with power, but perhaps also, to draw upon the strength of many to enhance her powers. That is why the army marched with her to go fetch the beast.\"\n\n\"A sound conclusion, agreed. So, show me. Convince me.\"\n\nClosing her eyes, the girl gathered herself. He touched her mind lightly, conveying strength. In a second, he felt her reach out and in a way that escaped him, she placed a tickle inside Blaze's left ear. After a moment, he scratched absently at the spot. Inzashu shifted. He tickled his right ear, then his lip, then appeared to discover a fly on the tip of his nose.\n\nA second later, both of his wingtips jerked at the same time. *GNARR!!*\n\nThe Princess halted at once.\n\nBlaze delivered a glare that perfectly matched his name. \"That was \u2026 instructive.\"\n\n\"My mother \u2013 my dam's power is unusual,\" the girl added in a wavering voice. \"We had the coldstones checked by a Mage. He believed they might be traced to dark magic \u2013\"\n\n\"Human or Dragon?\"\n\n\"Dragon.\"\n\n\"Terror Clan magic,\" Dragon clarified. \"The traces \u2013\"\n\n<Even the Terrors would not stoop to this!>\n\n<Working with the Skartun?>\n\n<Unthinkable!>\n\nAgain, the Dragons bellowed and argued with one another. Inzashu was made to explain her assertion five different ways, and then to demonstrate her powers on two other Dragons. Both gnashed their fangs almost at once, before the accusation zinged forth from none other than his brother, Brawl \u2013 could this all be a Terror Clan plot against the Dragonkind, and were these Princesses and this Dragon not complicit in it?\n\nCunning, his brother. Having started the bonfire with a small spark, he allowed other Dragons to pick up the accusations. How could they trust these black-hearted Humans \u2013 racial slur most certainly intended? Could Dragon prove that his so-called Rider had no influence over his thoughts right now? Was it not convenient that the T'nagrun Princess had arranged to be kidnapped by a weak-minded, isolated Dragon who had been such an ill credit to his Clan, he had been cast out?\n\nWarpaw the Wrecker chipped in with, \"How can we even be sure that he has met Ruthless the Obliterator?\"\n\n\"Aye!\" half of the congregation roared.\n\n\"This Dragon fancies himself an artist,\" his brother Brand said slyly. \"Can you draw this Dragon you supposedly rescued for us, fireless one?\"\n\nBlaze clicked his talons toward Yardi. \"Scroll and charcoal!\"\n\n\"I'll help you fetch them from my stores,\" Juggernaut put in. \"Come with me.\"\n\nMeantime, Brutal the Smasher said, <For our part, we Smashers cannot believe a single Dragon, however much help he might have had from that little two-legged creature, could demolish an entire Skartun army. How is this credible, brothers? How do you explain yourselves?>\n\n<Strategy and good fortune,> he replied directly. <We have given all the details of the battle's flow, as accurately as we remember.>\n\n<Yet a discredited, Clanless Dragon comes out of this with the cleanest paws in history, does he not?>\n\n<Aye, by my wings!> many Dragons agreed.\n\n<Send some of your number south, if you cannot believe our sworn word,> he responded robustly.\n\nBrutal growled, <Fair enough. Here's your scroll. What do you have to show us, artist Dragon? I am Brutal the Smasher. Think your stature impresses me?>\n\nNo, but then, neither did the Smasher's jealousy.\n\nWith the help of Azania and Inzashu, he spread out the large piece of scrolleaf \u2013 two feet by six, the standard size for draconic messages. Selecting a stick of coal, he summoned up the picture he remembered, having to swiftly banish a vivid scent memory of a cobalt face he would far rather be painting, and set to work. Strong, stark lines. How exactly had the head cage been shaped and fitted? Hmm, around the jaw, and \u2013\n\nAzania pointed to the skull ruff. \"Underneath here.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" he murmured.\n\nMeantime, Yarimda told Blaze what she knew of this itinerant Dragon \u2013 not touching the issues of his past or birth, but rather what she knew of him in the present. She confirmed the exact times and dates of both of their visits to Chakkix Camp, and described the purpose of her journey onward. Dragon wished to honour her, as she put it, by helping her return to her birthplace beside the ocean.\n\nShortly, Brutal turned to the green Obliterator Dragoness. <Scythe, is this your kin?>\n\nStepping up, she cocked her head to gaze at the partial bust of Ruthless, and gasped. Her reaction was enough. <It is he.> Roughly, she plucked up the piece of scroll and showed it to the other Dragons. <This is my uncle \u2013 whom this Dragon could not possibly have met, otherwise. He was lost thirty years ago, long before the spark of this Dragon even entered the eggshell.>\n\nThey gaped at the image. Many openly spat or dribbled fires in shock.\n\nDragon could only imagine how they felt. He had sketched the head cage as frankly as he could, including the clamps holding the ear inductors in place. The device was every bit as ghastly as they imagined.\n\nShifting forward, Azania reached up as she said, \"These are the inductor rods. The cage is welded on \u2013 through the jaw, as you see. They remove two fangs either side to bridle the Dragon \u2013\"\n\nEvery creature present flinched.\n\n\"Aye, I am sorry, but this is a faithful representation of the Skartunese torture device.\"\n\nBrutal spat, \"By my sire's egg! If this is truth, Princess, then I will be the first Dragon to fly south. Who is with me?\"\n\nA thunder of approbation!\n\nStill, he caught a glint in his brothers' eyes as they looked on. Their work was far from done, was it not? What more could they be hiding behind their sober, attentive expressions?\n\nFor over an hour, into the fullness of a moonlit night, the talk majored upon political and practical issues. Who should lead a strike force of Dragons? Which Clan should take pre-eminence? What armour and equipment should be prepared in order to ensure that the dreadful lightning-bolt quarrels, as they called them, stood far less chance of bringing a Dragon down? The Princess' later plan of seeking additional aid from the renowned warrior Dragons of the Vaylarn Archipelago met with quick approval once Juggernaut threw his weight behind the idea.\n\nHe could not rest. Brand and Brawl were up to something. He knew them too well.\n\nAt last it came; yet when it did, the surprise was still complete.\n\nBrawl called the assembly to order one more time, asking if there was any aspect of the report which still required cross-examination.\n\n\"Aye, all of it!\"\n\nThe aggressive bellow caught everyone by surprise.\n\n\"Brand?\" his sire inquired.\n\nSetting his stance pugnaciously, the younger Dragon said, \"I call this account a fabrication, and this foul creature the worst kind of liar and deceiver. How do we know he is not working paw-in-paw with the Terror Clan himself?\"\n\nDragon growled, \"I swore to \u2013\"\n\n\"Every Devastator Dragon knows the kind of words that proceed from your mouth, Dragon. Aye, this dilapidated brown is known to us \u2013 he is notorious for being a miserable creature, so afflicted by his fireless state that even while part of a Clan and family, he lived as a pariah and cursed his own dam. This is a gentle, pacifist soul who never raided a village or burned so much as a candle in his entire life. He's an artist and one who, unlike any true Dragon, bears Humans upon his back. Imagine the desperation. The anguish. What vileness of hearts leads a Dragon to curse the egg sac that bore his very life?\"\n\nHe began to respond, but Blaze held his wings high. \"Make your point, youngling.\"\n\n\"Simply this,\" Brand said. \"Whenever I hear such a fabulous tale of bravery and sacrifice on the part of an all-conquering hero, I ask myself who stands to benefit? What am I being asked to believe?\"\n\nFlare the Bonfire snarled, \"You would school your elders, youngling?\"\n\n\"Never, honoured elder,\" he snapped at once. \"It was Brutal the Smasher who said it best \u2013 which quad of paws comes cleanest in this tale? We are being asked to believe that in a matter of several months, a shy, fireless Dragon jumps from solitary lair to being a decimator of entire armies, all on his own. Here upon his flanks, we are told, lie the marks of a battle with alleged Terror Clan Dragons. Truth or not, one Dragon defeating a trio of greens whilst encumbered with four Humans is a legendary tale, one which even Master Juggernaut would be proud to own \u2013 and you are a master, honoured elder, but even your training is limited to the beast and not to miracles, is it not?\"\n\nJuggernaut bared his fangs.\n\nBowing fluidly, his brother turned to Dragon. \"Truly an astonishing feat. So, tell us again, how many Skartunese warriors did you blow away with your non-existent fire in the heat of that final confrontation with Jabiz Urdoo?\"\n\n\"I told you, the lightning machine triggered my fires,\" he rasped.\n\nHis hearts pounded like massive log drums jammed inside his chest. Acidic bile gurgled in his throat. This could lead to only one conclusion.\n\n\"Whereupon you incinerated hundreds with the ravaging breath of your jaw? How wide and far did your fires rage, o Dragon? How many houses did you immolate? Was their regiment as large in extent, say, as this training field? Half the size? A quarter?\"\n\n\"I swore \u2013\"\n\n\"With the same mouth that cursed your dam, aye. How are we, and all of these Dragons gathered here, to believe a word you say?\"\n\n\"Why don't you breathe fire, youngling?\" Flare the Bonfire asked. \"Show us.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 cannot.\"\n\n\"Lost those fires all over again?\" Brawl sneered. \"It's all so convenient, isn't it? Just like the bodies of those three Terror Clan Dragons were lost in the Skaggar River.\"\n\nFacing his brothers, he said, \"I have given a truthful account. Could it be that you \u2013\"\n\n\"Your mental state is lamentable,\" Brand interrupted. \"You know what I see? A shabby coward who is so frantic to regain his honour, he would do and say anything at all. Nothing is beneath you, is it? No taboo cannot be broken. Let me guess \u2013 did you kidnap this tiny Princess, or did she kidnap you?\"\n\nThe Dragons almost fell over laughing as Brawl illustrated her size with his talons.\n\nHorror settled as ice in his bones.\n\nHowever, his brother was not finished yet. \"Or perhaps, a discerning Dragon might smell out another explanation. A plot born in T'nagru, or deep in the foetid bowels of Skartun, against the Dragonkind? Perhaps the Princess has been manipulating you, and all of us, all along?\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Chalice fluted. All eyes turned to her interruption; her eyelids flickered wildly as she put in, in a breathless rush, \"I saw him fly, and I can swear I've never seen such speed. That cannot be faked.\"\n\n\"Unless your mind was somehow twisted by the youngling,\" another Dragoness put in.\n\nAll of the faces surrounding him registered doubt, confusion and even outright fury. The old words wanted to worm their way into his mind, but he refused them. This time, he would stand tall. He would take the dishonour exactly as it was meant \u2013 but not for the perverse yet oh-so-believable reasons his brothers had advanced. Above all, Blaze must be protected.\n\n<Why not simply breathe fire?> Flare insisted.\n\nBrutal thundered, <Aye! What is this, youngling? Has your mind indeed been addled? If indeed you found your fires after all these years \u2013 Ignis himself be praised! Show us! What are you waiting for?>\n\nChalice put in, <Show us, Dragon. Show me.>\n\nFor by his words, she too stood impugned; bested by a Human child.\n\nNo. None of this mattered. For once, this Dragon would do his duty by his sire. He would be the son of his wing who reflected no shame upon the Clan, nor upon his birth.\n\nHe said, <Dragons, I have nothing more to share and no proofs to offer. I ask only that you consider the existential threat to our kind arising from the South, and act with the wisdom I have always known is far, far greater than any that which this Dragon may claim. Consider T'nagru. Consider the terror of Dragon slaves, and let none \u2013> his gaze rested deliberately upon his brothers \u2013 <let none divide you. May you always soar as the suns, brothers and sisters.>\n\nWhirling upon his heel, he began to walk away.\n\n<HALT, DRAGON!>\n\n[ Fires Burn Bright ]\n\nHis talons clenched involuntarily in the grey sand as his sire's bellow cut through the hubbub. He did not turn. Could not. Had his paws been welded to the ground, he would have been no less effectively immobilised.\n\nBlaze called, <Brother Dragons, I too know this Dragon. I have spoken with this Princess. I cannot believe that either would lie. If Dragon says he breathed fire, then he breathed fire.>\n\n<But, sire \u2013> Brand began.\n\n<But, indeed. Just as the young Princess gave us a demonstration, Dragon \u2013>\n\n<No! I will not.>\n\n<Do you refuse to offer proof?>\n\nTrembling, he bade his wings still and his fires withhold. Please. Anything but this! At last, he turned to face his sire. Did he not know? Could he not imagine what this might do to him?\n\nEyes so dark with emotion they appeared almost fireless, fixed upon him across the short space that separated them. Blaze seemed on the point of speech, but the words must have stuck in his throat. Strange, unknowable colours played upon his scent senses, a brew too complex to evaluate immediately. He understood. He wanted this, but feared it, too. That acrid scent was clear. After the longest, most fraught hiatus he had ever known, his sire's head bobbed up and down.\n\nA fire bomb imploded inside his chest. No! He could not mean \u2026\n\nTruth. Was there any force more brutal, any light that shone brighter beneath the suns? His sire could not mean it. Surely not!\n\nAs he dithered, Princess Azania jogged over to Blaze. He lowered his great muzzle to attend to her whisper; after a few seconds in which no Dragon dared shuffle so much as a wingtip, he nodded again and whispered something back to her. His talon tapped the top of her right shoulder, just once, a draconic signal of acknowledgement of a service rendered. Then, the orange Dragon raised his head to the stars as if seeking answers from the cosmos.\n\nThe congregation stilled.\n\nHe said, <What a Dragon chooses to do with their own honour, is a matter for them alone. However, when a Dragon chooses to sacrifice their honour that another might remain blameless, then that is a demonstration of integrity \u2013 which is, I believe, one of the highest forms of honour known to the Dragonkind. We might even call it a true expression of love.>\n\nPerhaps there were Dragons here who did not understand, but many did. The way Azania gazed at him, he knew her heart wept for joy as only a Human heart could.\n\nThe very night air took a collective inhalation.\n\n<This Dragon was the son of my loins,> Blaze added. <One day, I believe he still will be, and this imperfect sire can only wait and hope for the honour such a day will accord him. Now, Dragon. Have you fires?>\n\n<I \u2026 do,> he croaked.\n\n<Then, please. Show us all who you are.>\n\nHis sire genuflected respectfully. Beside him, Azania wiped her eyes. For his part, his head had just become disconnected from the rest of his body, feeling as if it were floating mysteriously above the ground according to a process hitherto undiscovered by science.\n\nWas this an apology? Fury shaped the fires suddenly come alive in his chest.\n\n<Best clear the way,> Yarimda called out suddenly. Her aged tones quavered in her throat, but the motion of her walking stick was more than firm. <You Dragons, step aside, please. Make a path.>\n\nThey gaped at her.\n\n<Right to the back! I mean it \u2013 shift a paw there, younglings.> Only respect for an elder kept them from grinding their fangs in her direction. <Now, young Dragon, see that tree?>\n\nHe nodded. Not terribly well, but an outline in the darkness was enough.\n\n<I'd like a nice big bonfire, please.>\n\nEvery Dragon around them measured the distance with palpable incredulity. Eighty feet? No Dragon could expel his fire that far.\n\nGlittering of eye, his brothers looked on as Dragon tried to remember how to breathe. So queasy. The incident with the stomach full of oil played in his memory. He had never been the best performer under pressure. Too dreadful to imagine if the fires chose this moment to disappear once more!\n\nA cane thwacked him in the knee. <Dragon, pay attention. Imagine Jabiz Urdoo over there \u2013 now, paint him for me!>\n\nHe did not.\n\nWhat he painted, was that moment the Jabiz had lifted Princess Azania by her hair. He evoked the way the man's lips twisted as he spat into her face. Then, he deliberately threw him against the electric machine. Man-toast. Ah, the sickly-sweet stench of flesh roasting upon a spit of his own making. The epitome of justice.\n\nA crackling akin to a bonfire spitting to its full height emanated from the depths of his chest. For want of a better description, everything tightened up \u2013 every muscle in his body scrunched up painfully, and his strange ignition stomach or organ spread white heat through his chest, causing his heart rate to double. Even his scraggly hide sucked against his body, perhaps drawn close by the electric potentials building inside? The sensation was uncomfortably close to the idea of wearing clothing. <Pah!>\n\nDragon picked Yarimda up and placed her out of his firing line. <Excuse me, honoured elder. It is safer for you over here.>\n\nCracking open his jaw, he willed the blaze forth. What joy! What incandescence! Like a wave rushing toward the shoreline, the power built inexorably to a peak that threatened to consume his being. Rumbling. Roaring. Frothing with turbulent abandon. Then, with the same force a wave carried to its apex before crashing to its end, it could no longer be denied.\n\nHis throat reverberated. Stretched. Opened!\n\n*GRRRAAAOOORRRGGGH!!*\n\nWhite flame jetted out of his maw. So sharp and ready were the magical and physical processes, the muscular squeezing produced a fine, high-speed stream of brilliant fire that illuminated faces and scales as it raced down the channel Yarimda had cleared for him. Sixty feet from his body, the plume abruptly widened in a bloom of destruction that rolled toward the tree in a fiery, unstoppable embrace.\n\nThe pristine light highlighted the gleam of fangs in many watching draconic faces as his flame streamed forth, endless, mesmeric and dazzling. Even the low, eager hissing sound it made was a statement of lethal beauty.\n\nNever had he imagined he would produce fire like this. How could it belong to him? A common, muddy brown Dragon had no business producing flame that seared the air like white-hot talons.\n\nWith a muted *whomp,* the tree gave up the unequal battle. Flames gushed toward the heavens.\n\nRage, o Dragon hearts! Rage!\n\n\"Alright, Dragon,\" the Princess breathed. \"That was awesome.\"\n\nReluctantly, he clenched the flame between his fangs, cutting it off. Darkness washed over the Dragons; deprived of the brilliance, the night became that much deeper and darker.\n\nNefarious deeds were at paw. A sire chose to save his son's honour, at his own expense.\n\nQuietly, he noted, <As I attested, I found my true flame.>\n\nOn another occasion, the stunned response might have been hilarious. Jaws sagged. Paws clenched. Wings flared in odd directions, eloquently describing the consternation of every Dragon, especially his precious brothers. Orange fires dribbled unheeded from many a jaw as they stared at him as if he had turned into a monster straight out of legend.\n\nHe could not better have dropped a mountain upon their heads.\n\nOr, kicked his brothers square in the Dragon jewels. A severe temptation at the best of times.\n\nPitching his voice to carry, Blaze said, <Here in the gaps left by your wounds, Dragon, especially when you poured forth your flame, the new hide shows white. It is said no Dragon can change his colour \u2013 but look, you will do the impossible.>\n\nA talon plucked at his flank. Sawed at the loose hide.\n\n<Uh \u2026>\n\nThat squawk was the limit of his speech at this juncture.\n\nWith a wicked chuckle, Yarimda cried, <Who would like to pluck a Dragon like a fresh fowl? Come help, Dragons!>\n\n<Me,> Juggernaut rumbled. <Tear him apart, Blaze?>\n\n<With pleasure!>\n\n\"I've just the tool for the job,\" Azania chortled, drawing her talon dagger with a bright *zing* of metal. He decided he loathed the fact that she understood enough Draconian to know what was going on \u2013 and that fervent expression? Deadly Princess!\n\n<Hold on!> Dragon heard himself bleat.\n\n\"Do tell us if something hurts,\" his Princess added, with a roguish grin. \"Oh, I've been wanting to do this for the longest time.\"\n\n\"It's soft under there, and \u2013 ooh!\"\n\n\"Rrrrrriiipp it up!\" she sang out. \"Come on, Juggernaut, flex those muscles!\"\n\nSomething was totally wrong about this picture. Dragon hide was not supposed to rip like tough cloth. Nor was it supposed to tear off in long strips that left him looking like one of those slatted fences he had seen in Aluxon, capital of the Kingdom of Alaxarmis. Dragons did not bother to skin their prey before consuming it. Waste of good nutrients. Now, his friends mobbed him to gleefully strip his hide like a troop of Human cooks preparing meat for the pot.\n\nDreadfully unhappy.\n\nHow humiliating was this?\n\nEspecially since the whisper about his white fires began to make the rounds of the Dragons, until it reached the ear canals of his brothers and managed to meld with something resembling sensible thought in there. Impossible as he felt it might be for their jaws to dangle further, they actually slapped down upon their forepaws, giving new meaning to the phrase, 'slack-jawed idiots.'\n\nEnjoyable, in a terrifying sort of way.\n\n\"By my wings!\" he roared as Juggernaut ripped right up to his row of spine spikes, where the old hide finally stuck.\n\n\"Princess, you could start chopping along here,\" the warrior suggested.\n\n\"Stuck?\" she asked. \"With pleasure.\"\n\n\"Gently with my new scales,\" he protested, trying to twizzle his neck around to see what was going on.\n\nOdd colours? The major part of most of his white scales was the same reflective sheen of his fires, but there was a strong underlying brown pattern too, highlighting the edges and undersides of some but not all scales. Not his old brown. This was a deep, lustrous gold-infused brown which nonetheless displayed the same pearlescent sheen of the white. Highlights? Background and edging colouration? As an artist, he imagined the effect might be quite striking, if for the life of him he could work out what the patterning meant.\n\nBrawl staggered toward them, gasping, <Sire, it cannot be \u2026 what is this? Who \u2026>\n\nBlaze snarled, <You share a sire, but not the same dam. Clear enough?>\n\nDistracted by the fact that Azania was working her way along his back, chortling charming, Princess-like things such as, 'Dragon kebabs,' 'slice and dice,' and 'I'm sure I have a glittering future as a butcher,' he bellowed in shock as Juggernaut ripped his way down his tail. A whole cone of dilapidated hide came off in his paws, along with a few scraps of new. Several patches began to bleed.\n\n\"Sensitive!\" he protested.\n\n\"Poor, sweet little Draggy need kissy better? Mweh! Mweh!\"\n\n\"Princess, I am not a forgiving creature!\"\n\n\"Just trimming off a few of the crustier bits. Hold still. You are still my favourite Dragon, after all. Consider this a demonstration of friendship.\"\n\n\"Don't you know how Dragons carry grudges? Inzashu, don't you dare \u2013 GRAARRRGGHH!\"\n\nThankfully, he aimed at the sky this time. The entire sinkhole lit up as if lightning had struck from clear skies."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Very late, a soft tread alerted Dragon where he dozed beside the entrance to Juggernaut's lair. He thought it might be Brand or Blitz come to exact a misguided revenge, but it was neither of them.\n\n<Sire,> he whispered.\n\n<Are you alright, son?>\n\n<I am not your son, remember?> More bitter than he had intended. Biting his lip to quell his emotions, he raised his muzzle to regard Blaze.\n\n<Can I explain? I was young, ambitious and enamoured of Indigofire \u2013>\n\n<Stop. Please, enough.> Dragon heaved a sigh worth the weight of ten hearts rather than five. <Just now, I cannot \u2026 hear what you have to say. Maybe one day, I will be ready to receive your word.>\n\n<Is there no forgiveness left \u2013>\n\n<Twenty years! Twenty years you let me suffer and now you beg forgiveness?> Sucking back his fires, he considered how close he had come to flaming his own father. Perhaps Blaze expected it; even wanted a sign of punishment. <I cannot go there, not yet. This betrayal is far too raw.>\n\nLiterally. His hide bled in a few places where the vigorous act of being stripped by large, energetic helpers had torn at the far softer new hide beneath. No battles for a few months, Juggernaut had advised balefully, until his hide hardened again.\n\nJust like a hatchling.\n\nInside of him was a youngling who had always yearned for his father's love. How did one ever, ever restore such a rift?\n\nExamining his hearts, he discovered a surprising truth. Slowly and thoughtfully, he said, <When the three years and three days have passed, I promise upon my oath that I will come to speak with you about this, Blaze the Devastator. Until then, I cast you out of> my <life. You are not my sire. I have no sire, for that Dragon is a despicable thief and one who stood by and let abuse endure for far too long \u2013 and for what? To satisfy his pride and selfish ambition?>\n\nThe other heaved a huge sigh.\n\nDragon said, <I would know one thing \u2013>\n\n<Anything.>\n\n<What was her name?>\n\n<Sirensong.>\n\nSo many questions. Had he loved her? Was it but a dalliance? Was she alluring? Had he treated her well, or decimated her very Dragoness hearts \u2013 he must have? What mother would have given up her egg? Or could there be more tragedy waiting for him somewhere out there in the Lumis Ocean?\n\nAt length, Blaze said, <For what it is worth, I have never been prouder of you, Dragon.>\n\nNow, after twenty years?\n\nHatred? Bitterness? Relief? He had no idea what he felt \u2013 most of all, an all-pervading sense of numbness. He wished nothing more than that his sire would leave him alone. Forever.\n\nVery soon, the heavy tread departed.\n\nPerhaps his sire fled.\n\nSirensong. One more reason for him to fly up to the Vaylarn Archipelago. If he was not mistaken, the annual migration should arrive in five to six weeks' time, if anything they had learned and surmised was correct. Would she be swimming with the Sea Dragons? Might he see her \u2026\n\n\"You alright?\"\n\nHe nearly shed his new scales in fright. \"Princess. No.\"\n\n\"Would you like company?\"\n\n\"Not really.\" How much had she overheard? Everything? \"Only if \u2026\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nStepping over his crossed forepaws, she slipped into her usual place in the crook of his neck. Said nothing. Asked no questions. Did not act like anything but a perfect friend cosying up for the night. Irrationally, that was exactly what broke him.\n\nCovering his Princess with his wing for warmth, his shoulders shook. He tried to clamp his muzzle shut with his paws. Vain hope. The first lament was not long in coming. Moans wrenched from the depths of his soul.\n\nWhat fool had first uttered the phrase, 'big Dragons don't cry?'\n\nWhat a heaviness of grief. He could only release it as best he knew how, or face being crushed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "His kin flew on just as Dragon stirred to the awareness of a Taramis-first sunrise. He hoped that Blaze flew to make things right with Indigofire. To warn her of what must surely come; the price that must be paid for what they had surely plotted together. What had broken his sire's resolve to keep the secret buried deep? Could it be that such secrets carried a dreadful weight of their own? Or had his hearts burned for the fate of his son? He wanted to believe it.\n\nSome Dragons had already flown on the previous evening. They agreed that Juggernaut's lair would be the base of operations. A small mixed group planned to travel south within a day or two to speak with King N'chala and to bring reports back to their respective Clans. The Obliterators, who had a blood feud with the Terror Clan, departed muttering about plans to 'see to those Terrors once and for all.'\n\nHe approved.\n\nThe previous evening felt like a dream \u2013 or nightmare \u2013 until he spied the still-smoking tree on the other side of the training ground.\n\n*Gnarr.* With extra gnarliness.\n\nHow to annoy oneself with one's own puns.\n\nNaturally, Azania slept the sleep of the innocent, one of the greatest lies under the suns. Inveterate rascal. He muttered, \" 'Dragon steaks. Oh, I've been wanting to carve a little of the male ego out of you for months, Dragon.' Right, Princess. The feeling happens to be mutual \u2026\"\n\nHis crackpot monologue ended at the sight of white paws peeking out from beneath a wing that was definitely turning white, with those rich brown tones tracing the veins and struts, like the veins of an autumnal leaf.\n\nNot too many half-air half-water Dragons about, were there?\n\nHow was he even supposed to think of this colour as him? Although, warming up his ego a tad, one must admit it was a far more fetching colouration than his old ability to blend in with swamps, mud flats and sundry roof tiles. He refused to miss that gift. Now, he could hide amongst melting snow. Perfect disguise for the Obsidian Desert, right? Would not stick out like a sore talon everywhere he flew, oh no.\n\n<Pah.> Enough of the jaundiced thoughts already. Chalice the Grinder, peering out of the mouth of the cavern where she must have rested, was giving him the kind of fiery eyeball he was most definitely not used to receiving from any Dragonesses.\n\nNot that he should be complaining.\n\n\"Dragon, where's Azania?\" Inzashu asked, stepping out of Juggernaut's lair.\n\n\"Curled up with me last night,\" said he, tilting his wing so that she could see. \"You know what your sister's like.\"\n\n\"I'm like what?\" Azania yawned, stretching. Her eyelashes fluttered. Human males were supposed to fall for tricks like that, similar to how Dragonesses flicked their eyelids, he supposed.\n\n\"Ah, I'll think of something. Best friend in all of Solixambria.\"\n\nA slow grin lit up her face. \"Scale check?\"\n\n\"Call me snow white.\"\n\n\"Huh, and here I thought you'd be a nice creature of colour, like me. You've gone over to the dark side \u2013 uh, alright, that failed rather miserably. The lighter and brighter side, right?\"\n\n\"I still have one paw in the brownish gold camp,\" he sniped, \"and what's all this silliness about colour anyways? Have you ever met a person who is of no colour? It's completely illogical. Everyone has colour! It's like saying, 'A Dragon of scales.'\"\n\n\"Really?\" she said.\n\nOne sarcastic warning shot. He refused to listen.\n\n\"Let me warm you up to the facts, Princess. White people are not white, they are a pale pink with nasty hairy bits. You can't hide them in a snowfield with the best will in the world. Black people are not black, or they'd blend in with the average lump of charcoal. They are various shades of brown, again with the socially unacceptable hairy bits. You Humans are completely unreasonable when it comes to colour. And hair.\"\n\n\"Connotations, Dragon. 'Black' means much more than \u2013\"\n\n\"Lunacy. Don't tell me to see what isn't there. You are not a black Princess, you are a shade of brown \u2013 a very pleasing shade, may I add? At least, seventeen kingdoms' worth of Human males agree with me on the subject.\"\n\n\"Dragon, it's far too early for you to be so feisty. Go work off some energy. Flirt with whatshername over there.\"\n\n\"Look, brownness of skin does not equate to fitness for slavery.\"\n\nPrincess Azania rose, stretched once more, and promptly kicked him beneath the jaw!\n\n\"What was that for?\"\n\n\"I like kicking white things.\"\n\n\"WHAT?\"\n\n\"Oh, whiteness doesn't equate to fitness to being kicked when I please?\"\n\nHe glowered at her. \"Very clever lesson, Princess.\"\n\n\"Aye. Anyone would think that with a lifetime's being the wondrous Black Rose of the Desert, I might have had a chance to reflect upon a few of the issues. While I value your perspective on the subject, Dragon, I \u2026\" she chuckled softly. \"I guess, what with you having literally just changed your hide, you will enjoy a number of insights all too soon. One such insight is skulking over there hoping you'll go give her polite greeting. Go on, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Azania, I \u2013\"\n\n\"Shoo!\"\n\n\"I don't wear shoes,\" he groused.\n\nReaching up, she touched his jaw where she had kicked him. \"Much as I wish you could sometimes live within my skin for but a day, I imagine the reverse is also true. Are you really alright this morning, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Far, far better for having a friend like you.\"\n\nTurning, he waggled a talon at Princess the younger, standing wide-eyed in Juggernaut's entryway. \"No, I am absolutely not sweet, nor sappy, nor anything else you were just thinking! In a male world, you now pretend I said nothing at all.\"\n\nThe girl giggled, \"Men are so weird. Males, even.\"\n\nLinking arms with her sister, Azania said, \"You don't know the half of it. Come on, Inzashu. Let's go do mysterious, inexplicable female things that completely bamboozle the macho mind.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's easy,\" Inzashu agreed at once. \"Dragon \u2013\"\n\n<GNARR-OFF WITH YOU!!>\n\n[ Rushing On ]\n\nJuggernaut thumped dragon upon the shoulder. <Fly with me.>\n\n<Busy times at the lair, Master Juggernaut?>\n\n<Shut your oversized, flapping gob and get airborne before I kick you so hard, you'll bounce off the moon!>\n\nClear enough.\n\nRaising his wings, he roused himself into a proper flap.\n\nAs they worked hard to gain altitude, he called over, <How's it working out with your new armourer?>\n\n<Very good. She knows her business \u2013 no experience with Dragon armour as yet, but the skills are solid, as is the attitude. I will be pleased with her work.>\n\nUnusual for the gruff Dragon to be so effusive.\n\nCould this strange business of regard for Humans be infectious? Watch out, mighty Dragon! Cough, sniffles and an appalling case of Humanitis?\n\n<Your sire took a great risk,> he commented. <I never would have thought it of Blaze the Devastator \u2013 but I don't know that your old Clan will be so forgiving. Will you search for your dam in the North?>\n\n<Aye, Master.>\n\n<Good. Consider this an essential part of your formation. A true warrior understands who they are. They might not like or accept everything they discover. That is a different issue. Tracing the pattern of who we have been informs our present, and allows us to hone our training for the future. You see, Dragon, some things we cannot choose about ourselves, but some things we can shape, actively and mindfully, to become who we want to be. Your scales will be the colour they will be. Nothing can change that. But you can choose to hate your sire, or shun him, or accept his flaws, or anything between. Understand?>\n\n<I do.> He looked to the day, to the soft azure-orange sky and a towering weather front building in the East. <It isn't easy, Master Juggernaut.>\n\n<Aye. It will take time, is all I can say. No other can fly this course for you.>\n\nWhat nuances of memory traced his words, Dragon could not say. In silence, they winged up into the great dome of the sky, where Dragons reigned supreme.\n\nJuggernaut said, <Chalice spoke highly of you, Dragon.>\n\n<She did,> he replied, keeping his tone neutral. Interesting how he brought her name up.\n\n<Show me. Race me to that peak.>\n\n<Only if you will promise to hear me out on a particular subject when I beat you wings and paws down, Master.>\n\nThe warrior glared at him. <What is this?>\n\n<A promise I made to someone.>\n\n<Huh. See if you can keep up, youngster!>\n\nWith a great clap of his wings he was off, surging into the lead with the power and grace that Dragon expected of him. Juggernaut was a subtle, effective flyer perhaps out of keeping with his name, but definitely in keeping with his combat philosophy. Never waste energy. Efficiency increased speed, keeping one alive.\n\nFor half of the three-mile flight, he struggled to find that novel rhythm again. He fell five Dragon lengths behind, then ten, as his ineffective exertions snarled him up. The orange Dragon powered ahead, indefatigable.\n\nTwizzling his neck, Juggernaut roared, <Don't make a fool of Chalice, youngling! Fly!>\n\nSecond time.\n\nPerhaps he was right, and Chalice's intuition was on target \u2026\n\nShutting his eyes \u2013 decent sight was overrated, anyways \u2013 he set upon painting swells upon an imaginary ocean. His body began to undulate. Suddenly, as if something clicked, his parts all began to work together and he accelerated past Juggernaut as if the older Dragon were hovering in place, not making his maximum effort. Gruff laughter! No chance even of matching him. He hurtled toward the peak and around it while the older Dragon was yet more than half a mile off, his own laughter thundering out of his chest for sheer elation.\n\nStalling and swerving to fall in line with his slower wing companion for the return journey, the Master said in a tone of clear approval, <Old Dragon, new tricks. Is that a swimming stroke? Could you teach it to me?>\n\n<So that you can impress her?> he said lightly, before he thought the better of his words.\n\nA fiery growl thundered across his bow. <If we are talking about whom I think we are talking about, Dragon, then it is more than clear that it is you who stokes her fires.>\n\n<I thought so, too. By my sire's egg, I was badly mistaken.>\n\n<What? Last night, her eloquence rose for your fires. I am not mistaken.>\n\nDragon met Juggernaut's gaze with all the honesty he could muster. <Do you want to know why?>\n\n<Surprise me.>\n\nWhy could he never approach these matters in a sensible way? He had just thrust his talons into all the arguments he had been so carefully mustering, and ripped everything apart. Blitz the Fritz in full cry. How he hated that old nickname!\n\nHe said, <She hoped to gain favour by supporting your position.>\n\nThe older Dragon gave this argument short shrift, barking out a rude response.\n\nDragon said, <Hear me. I went to Chalice the Grinder this morning expecting that she favoured me. As it turns out, that is a common mistake males make due to a muscular issue with her eyelids. What she wanted to know, was why you shun her? She asked me to speak with you, since we share \u2013>\n\n<This discussion is over!>\n\n<You promised you would hear me.>\n\n<Not on this subject \u2013 GNARR!! I must. Teach me the wing stroke before I clout you around the ear canals. This is how we do it.>\n\nWith a limber barrel roll, he suddenly left his position at Dragon's right wingtip and turned up directly above him. By his wings, had those Talon Clan greens been capable of such a manoeuvre, he would not be here today to remember their meeting. In a second, he felt the older Dragon's paws touch and grip his shoulders. His hind paws rested four feet above his haunches, also holding on without any use of the talons. Double Dragon. He had not known this could be done, either. Juggernaut still worked his wings, but the connection allowed him to sense exactly what the lower Dragon was doing.\n\nAfter a short struggle, he worked out how to demonstrate the stroke pattern without snarling up both sets of wings.\n\n<Faster,> Juggernaut ordered. <This uses the muscles very differently to what I am used to.>\n\n<It's strange, isn't it?>\n\n<A very different dynamic. I will have to study this. I'm not sure I could ever do the stroke as naturally as you, but it does appear to offer incredible speed over shorter distances \u2013 given high energy output.>\n\n<Surprise value for combat?> Dragon suggested.\n\n<Aye!>\n\nTogether, they passed over his training ground, whereupon the warrior Dragon broke off and led the way to a hot spring that fed a wide, mauve-tinged pool. Here, they settled into the steaming waters. Only then did he growl that he was ready to listen.\n\nChalice the Grinder was older than Dragon had supposed, thirty-six years of age. She had been mated before, but her mate had perished of a brittle bone disease. She had cared faithfully for him during a long, lair-bound illness of eleven years. She described herself as socially awkward \u2013 rather similar to someone else with a brand new white hide, one might argue. The tic in her eyes, which manifested when she was stressed, often led Dragons to believe she was flirtatious and coy. On the contrary, she was shy and often unsure of herself. Juggernaut's behaviour toward her had struck her as particularly harsh and unjustified.\n\n<Everyone knows I desire no mate,> Juggernaut said quietly. <However, I may have encouraged her \u2026 that was a mistake. I don't dislike Chalice. I was not fully aware of her story.>\n\nSinking deeper into the pool, Dragon muttered, <I've no idea why she asked me to speak to you. I've no talent at relationships.>\n\n<The Princess seems to have survived your dubious talents, unscathed.>\n\nThe dry joke brought forth an even dryer chuckle. <Master, why were you jealous when Chalice spoke highly of me?>\n\nNow, his gaze lidded. <Was I? Why are you suggesting this?>\n\n<Because I'm young and idealistic and a fool when it comes to females?> he offered glumly.\n\n<Youngling! Spit that rubbish out this instant!>\n\nDragon blinked as Juggernaut's roar swooshed hot water into his face. <Eh?>\n\n<I don't stand for lies. What I also do not stand for, is brash young Dragons trying to tell me how to feel and run my life! Have you finished mangling this subject? Or are you going to plead that I give this Dragoness a chance?>\n\n<No, Master.>\n\nA low growl across the pond turned into bubbles as the warrior Dragon immersed himself. He came up snorting and shaking out his wings in pleasure. Marvellous substance, water. Truly extraordinary how it could be so many things \u2013 cleansing, refreshing, warming, terrifying, life-giving.\n\nAn eye full of yellow fury glared across the waters.\n\nCourage, Dragon.\n\nQuietly, he said, <Perhaps due to my being half a Sea Dragon, o Juggernaut, I have a particular magical capability which allows me to scent sense something of the feelings of both Dragons and Humans. I am not skilled in the art by any means, but I will be open and tell you that you may not realise exactly how you feel about Chalice, and \u2013 I AM SPEAKING!>\n\nThe eye blinked. Aye, he dared. Dragon feared a world of pain was about to erupt. His hearts bounded around inside his chest like a quintet of startled deer. No. He would finish. Bury the disaster he had been. Juggernaut could do what he liked afterward; that was his responsibility.\n\nHolding up a paw, he managed to say steadily, <You're right. It is absolutely not my place to speak to you of such things, Master. I lack the faintest inklings regarding your past, your inner thoughts and state, or anything else \u2013 but if you asked this idealistic fool over here what he would want to say to you, then it is simply this: Give> yourself <a chance. You do have fiery regard for Chalice. Maybe you are denying it for reasons you cannot divulge? You took me in and mentored me when I saw nothing of my true self, only pain. I know little, but one thing is clear to me: you are worth loving, and deserve to be loved.>\n\nHow na\u00efve he sounded. *Blergh.* Wash the tongue with a caustic!\n\nWhen Juggernaut did not speak, appearing to have gone to sleep, he surreptitiously pulled himself out of the water and began to pad away.\n\n<Dragon.>\n\nHe glanced back over his shoulder. <Master?>\n\n<You do know that you not only have the biggest butt in these mountains, you're also the biggest pain in the butt?>\n\n<What the \u2013> he blinked, ten times. The grin that showed just above the water did not change in the slightest. Rude, yet true in the most infuriating way possible. Did that mean \u2026\n\n<I will speak with Chalice. Now, get out of here before I loosen a few of your fangs as I really ought to.>\n\nResult!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "That afternoon, they packed and prepared for the northerly run to Amboraine. While it was not far as the Dragon flew, the vertical height of the final pass posed the main challenge to even the draconic traveller \u2013 a whopping twenty-three thousand feet. The alternative was a four-day flight around the mountains to the East, which carried the distinct possibility that they might encounter a few Terror Clan friends once more.\n\nThe type of friends who only wanted to get close enough to slip a talon between one's ribs.\n\nHe was not a happy Dragon.\n\n\"Did you know your new patterning makes it look as if fires are playing along your flanks when you fly?\" Azania chirped.\n\n\"How nice.\"\n\n\"I can trim the excess hide a bit more around your head, where it's looking tatty.\"\n\n\"Tatty? You are too kind, Highness.\"\n\n\"How is my hair?\"\n\n\"You tamed the frizz? Astonishing.\"\n\n\"Frizz? Bad, bad Dragon!\" she growled, making to stomp off in a huff. \"You're in a foul mood \u2013 let me go!\"\n\nClasping her in his right forepaw, he wagged the fore-talon of the left beneath her definite little chin. \"Behave. Just because I'm outvoted on the route doesn't mean I have to like it. Apologies for the undeserved growling session. So, I observe that you have used a slightly heavier, silkier hair oil with a wonderful fragrance \u2013 Hulbine lilies and attar of crimson desert rose, am I correct?\"\n\n\"Er \u2026 aye?\"\n\nHer tone implied how weird it was that a male Dragon should know such feminine matters so well.\n\n\"Very good,\" he purred, almost tripping over his own ego in the process of adding, \"the quality of curl and the lustre of the individual filaments, to my disbelief, has improved from merely arresting to outright jaw-dropping. Congratulations, Highness.\"\n\n\"Dragon, stop mocking me.\"\n\nInstantly, he regretted his tone. She was sensitive about her hair, just as Dragons were sensitive about their scales. \"The admiration is sincere. Listen to what I say, not to how I say it.\"\n\n\"Do as I say, not as I do?\"\n\n\"Quite,\" he grinned, then ironed his lips straight. \"Are you also nervous about flying North? Not the immediate North, I mean \u2026\"\n\n\"Aye. How are you with people kissing your paws, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Blergh.\"\n\n\"I thought so. Therefore, settle for my grateful thanks. I had not realised what was making me so ratty.\"\n\n\"Ratty?\"\n\n\"The Human equivalent of a nasty scale rash.\"\n\n\"Ooh, how you conjure up my very worst nightmares.\"\n\nLaughing, they walked up together to Juggernaut's lair, where the Princess fetched her talon dagger and informed him that she was his beautician. Purr! In a manner of speaking. She tidied up the loose scales and hide with a steady hand, sitting right atop his head. This drew a number of very strange looks from the Dragons who were still about. When she fished a great glob of brown wax out of his previously infected ear with a wooden spoon, Dragon teased her that she would shortly have Dragons lining up for the full treatment.\n\nMuch better. He could hear all of her complaints at his awful jokes now.\n\nTrue enough, Flare the Bonfire shortly wandered over to inquire if a Princess could not be persuaded to check his ear canals, since he had not been hearing well on the left side for seven years.\n\n\"Oh, sister dearest?\" Azania called sweetly.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Could you help honoured Flare here, please? It's a medical issue \u2013 a hearing problem.\"\n\nTwenty minutes later, having gathered an audience of fifteen increasingly voluble and amused Dragons who were nothing if not keen to offer the best advice, she deftly employed a blacksmith's pair of pliers to extract the offending object from his ear.\n\n\"A blue diamond!\" she gasped.\n\n\"Too much rolling about in your hoard, honoured Flare?\" Warpaw the Wrecker chortled.\n\n\"Seems so, seems so.\"\n\nHe shook his head, completely forgetting he had a Princess aboard. Chalice snaffled her up before she fell too badly.\n\n\"Mmm, nice catch,\" Juggernaut approved. \"Starting with your own Princess, Chalice?\"\n\n\"I'd prefer a Prince \u2013 with respect, Inzashu,\" she said shyly, squeezing her eyes shut before the quivering became too pronounced.\n\nAzania said, \"You could start a whole new tradition of kidnapping pretty Princes for sport and holding them ransom, until their Dragon-riding Princesses come to the rescue.\"\n\n\"A modern twist on the old ways,\" Dragon agreed heartily.\n\nFlare passed the diamond to Inzashu. \"It's yours, with my thanks.\"\n\n\"Honoured Dragon, I could not possibly \u2026 I am grateful, of course,\" she spluttered. \"A king's jewels should be proud to showcase such a gemstone. It's huge!\"\n\n\"Better out than in, I've always said,\" he replied testily. He ambled off as if that comment settled the matter for good.\n\nInzashu asked, \"What do I do with this?\"\n\n\"Well, don't get it stuck in your earhole,\" Dragon advised."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "A bright and fair dawn greeted the travellers. Down in Juggernaut's warm sinkhole, energetic birdsong was the order of the day, along with the raucous honking of a group of blue-necked mallards somewhere down near the hot springs. Loud feather-brains! Was there time for roast duck times ten? Probably not, unless he tried to flash-barbecue them with his new skills?\n\nJuggernaut stumped over to greet the team loading Dragon. \"Chalice will fly with you.\"\n\n\"How come?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"When Yardi recruits my armourers and blacksmiths, I'll want them to travel here. There's a viable ground route into the mountains from near Dorline, especially in the summer, but it'll require an escort from someone who knows the territory,\" he explained. \"Chalice can bring them safely through.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" Dragon agreed.\n\n\"I'm full of good ideas,\" came the baleful reply, but he flicked wingtips with the pretty yellow Dragoness, making her jump. \"Hope to see you back here soon, Chalice? Don't tarry.\"\n\nThe Dragoness shook her head as if she had received a robust wallop.\n\nJuggernaut flexed his muscles, and then shoulder-thumped Dragon on the way past. Low of voice, but at a volume he suspected was perfectly calculated to carry, he said, <You look after her for me, alright?>\n\n<Of course, Master.>\n\nHis snigger turned into a stifled cough. Juggernaut needed a few lessons in tact, in his estimation, but the results appeared inarguable. By the time they were airborne, Chalice still did not act as if she knew what she was doing with her wings. No need to flap, indeed. She floated in a bubble of happiness.\n\nSly old reptile. Juggernaut had not waited long to make his move on the Dragoness, had he?\n\nLight white cumulous clouds drifted from the East, catching Ignis' crimson blaze around their edges. The Princesses played at spotting different cloud animals as the two Dragons winged up out of the lair and down a long, slight slope toward the wall of a distant mountain range. Mighty peaks! Several were over thirty-one thousand feet in height, well beyond the height even a Dragon might fly with impunity \u2013 so tall, indeed, that their purple heads stood disrobed of the snow that blanketed their lower reaches.\n\nThey flew for forty-five miles along a snowbound valley that wound back upon itself like a constrictor, climbing steadily. At Chalice's pace, this flight took the whole morning; selecting a spot where the dark ground and a couple of green bushes proclaimed the presence of a fumarole, Dragon brought them in for a landing. The Humans needed a break.\n\nSo did he, before they tackled that high pass.\n\nOnce the Humans had all dismounted and wandered off to hide behind bushes and stones, to Chalice's amusement, she said to him, <So, you spoke with Juggernaut?>\n\n<Me?>\n\n<Liar.>\n\nHe chuckled gruffly. <We had a Dragon-to-Dragon chat, aye. Why, did he say something to you?>\n\n<Only that he had mistaken my intentions and wronged me, and would appreciate the chance to work together more closely in the future.> The yellow Dragoness cracked her jaw open in a shy smile. <Was it very hard work, convincing him?>\n\n<No. I did no pleading or begging, and as you can see, I even avoided being beaten to a pulp for my temerity.>\n\n<How?>\n\n<He said, 'Work closely together' \u2013 in just that way?>\n\nShe sucked in a sharp breath. <Aye \u2026>\n\n<Well, it appears you must have made quite the impression, Chalice. I'll tell you, dozens of other Dragonesses have tried and failed, but you \u2013 ouch!>\n\nThe Dragoness snorted, <Don't even pretend that little tap hurt you. Dragon \u2013 the truth, please.>\n\n<I told him to give himself a chance.>\n\nThat brought Chalice up short! <What? What do you mean?>\n\n<I don't know either. Juggernaut has always been a famously private Dragon. He's told me nothing about his past. However \u2013> Dragon nudged her shoulder playfully, and teased in a lilting growl \u2013 <I think his fires burn ever so bright for the yellow, the yellow, the fiery little yellow \u2026>\n\nShe clouted him again.\n\nHe grinned to himself. Job well done.\n\n[ Rains in Amboraine ]\n\nAfter lunch, the riders switched positions once more. Inzashu with Yarimda. Azania considerably out-muscled by Yardi. Seeing them together, it became clear to him that adult Humans varied in stature and bulk as much as Dragons. At six feet and two inches of solid muscle, Yardi stood a foot and a half taller than the Princess and measured a foot wider, too. She must weigh at least two and a half times his tiny Rider. Interesting. He wondered if Humans treated bigger people as special. His unusual stature amongst Dragons made others leery of him, or painted a target upon his back.\n\nSuch a massive bruiser.\n\nSo intimidating.\n\n*GNARR!!*\n\n\"Something you'd like to share, Dragon?\" Azania asked politely.\n\n\"Just clearing my throat,\" he suggested, flexing his shoulders until the muscles rippled beneath her feet. Would Aria like the new, freshly peeled look?\n\nImaginary conversation: <Aye, Aria, I'm like an onion, a complex, virile creature of many layers.> And she would reply: <Shall I peel you a little further, you big beast, to reveal yet more complexity?>\n\nOuch. Not very appealing.\n\nTrue to form, his reaction had absolutely not passed the Princess by.\n\n\"Ready to assault the high passes, team?\" he roared.\n\nVarious 'aye's' and 'ouch, my ears' greeted his outburst. On that note, they winged up into the sky in a long, long thirty-five-degree incline. After an hour, Chalice complained about his holding back for her. Dragon snidely suggested he might take her upon his back as well, which had the desired effect of firing up her rage as the slope turned to sixty degrees, finally soaring into a spectacular vertical cliff face that had the advantage of hosting a breeze that could only be called a thermal by virtue of the fact that it was warmer than the biting cold that otherwise surrounded them. Nice rest. Both Dragons spread their wings and circled upwards. He helped Inzashu to check all their Riders, including herself.\n\n\"You're doing better this time,\" he told her.\n\nDesert Princesses were not half bad at growling, he had discovered. Now was such an occasion.\n\nChalice said, \"I scent bad weather on the other side of the pass.\"\n\n\"Storm?\"\n\n\"Aye. I've a reliable weather sense.\"\n\nIntriguing. Like his emotional sense? He had heard of weather senses and even a gold-sniffing sense, for that matter.\n\n\"Let's put down where the ridge flattens out, up there,\" he suggested, pointing with his foreclaw. \"Get our Riders ready for a rough ride \u2013 reason being, we need to straightaway go down the other side to get everyone back to a safe altitude.\"\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\n\"Is the Kingdom of Amboraine all white people?\" Inzashu asked unexpectedly.\n\n\"Very much so,\" Yarimda said. \"All of the Kingdoms north of the Tamarine Range are white-skinned apart from Vaylarn, as best I know.\"\n\n\"Kind of strange to imagine it,\" she said.\n\n\"You've been to Chakkix Camp,\" Dragon said.\n\n\"Mostly white, with a few tan and desert folk,\" Yarimda pointed out. \"Darker tones are definitely in a minority unless you're in the south \u2013 and Thobe, Trondis and Lymarn, I believe. Are there not many peoples beyond Skartun, Princess Inzashu?\"\n\n\"Very many,\" she agreed. \"Only one tribe is white. They are called albinos \u2013 not in a positive sense. Many people hunt them for their body parts, said to be useful in dark magic rituals.\"\n\n\"Isn't that in the realm of Unicorns?\" Dragon asked.\n\n\"Mythical,\" Azania said, at the same time as her sister said, \"Real.\"\n\nThey shared sisterly glares-into-smiles. The older sister made an inviting gesture with her hand.\n\n\"I once spent several months in Altyrine while living with my mother,\" she said. \"She was hunting Unicorns. I was young, but I remember that was the first time I learned that she was evil \u2013 this beautiful Unicorn foal, as black as the darkest night, had his hoof caught in her snare. I remember his terror all too well. We spoke \u2026 he helped me to understand, and I let him go. Nahritu-N'shula was so furious. I \u2026 I remember that, too. It was the first time she beat me until I bled.\"\n\nShe rubbed her arms.\n\nRaising his paw, Dragon touched her knee. \"I am sorry about your dam, Inzashu.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about yours.\"\n\n\"I guess we share that dam problem,\" he put in helpfully, and then when everyone shouted at him, had to splutter that it was an unfortunate slip of the forked tongue.\n\nGreat. He'd misbehave more in the future if this was the kind of hornet's nest he could stir up!\n\nCould command of Equitone, the horse language, run in the family? Mental note to check that one of these or those days.\n\nShortly, they put down on a steep slope at the foot of the final climb up the pass, a crack between peaks which over many years must have been filled with snow and ice. Chalice urged quiet and haste due to the instability under paw. Right she was. The very instant they took off once more, the slope shifted and an avalanche began that quickly spread over a width of several hundred Dragon-lengths.\n\nHe nodded to Chalice. \"Good call.\"\n\nThe Dragons winged upward once more, each wingbeat tougher than the last. The air became noticeably thinner, their heavy breathing steaming like smoking fumaroles as they worked their way up the endless slope. Inzashu worked initially with Yarimda, but soon had to support the others as well. Here they went. Over the top and out onto a plain of several miles that led to one more smaller ridge. Beyond that? Nothing but a gorgeous blue sky into which the white tops of cumulonimbus billowed upward, visibly gaining altitude every second.\n\n<Decent storm,> he gasped.\n\n<It's boiling up nicely,> Chalice agreed. <Still ten miles off, but closing in fast. We need to shift tail, Dragon.>\n\n<Aye. Slipstream me.>\n\nThunderstorms could reach heights of over ten miles, Dragon knew from measurements taken from these very slopes. Another moment with his nose buried too deep in a scroll. No overflying anything like this. As they panted along and finally hit the top, he realised just how skewed his perspective had been. Monster!\n\n\"Wow!\" Azania exclaimed.\n\n\"Spectacular even without my spectacles,\" Dragon agreed. \"Come on, let's fly!\"\n\nYardi said, \"Azania, are his jokes always this bad?\"\n\n\"No, they are wonderful,\" she said. \"Truly magnificent exemplars of intellectual prowess and mental agility.\"\n\n\"One speculation is that you'll be walking from here on out,\" he clarified.\n\nYardi burst out laughing. \"Figures.\"\n\n\"Does indeed. So?\"\n\n\"Wonderful sense of humour \u2013 cough, cough,\" she replied.\n\n\"Cheeky. Drop you off halfway, shall I?\"\n\nTilting onto the downslope now, he and Chalice picked up speed \u2013 which was just as well, because the wind began to gust directly into their muzzles. They charged together down a long V-shaped valley which must offer wonderful views of the lowlands beyond to those equipped to enjoy them. He saw a blur of green beneath a grey-black wall. The upper clouds turned crimson as Ignis eclipsed Taramis, but the red giant was in turn partially eclipsed by two moons. That lent the storm a malignant cast that made his new scales prickle urgently.\n\n<Careful as we go over the edge here,> Chalice cautioned as they approached the end of the valley. <It's a drop like few others, and known for the vicious wind shear. Gain some height.>\n\nHe followed her caution. Two hundred feet clearance as they hit the end. Sheer cliff! No wonder this was no viable route for foot traffic, for the drop off the far end was prodigious, perhaps exceeding seven thousand feet in several giant steps.\n\nThe yellow Dragoness cried out as the storm winds buffeted them sideways.\n\nDragon sideslipped with her, trying to control his speed and descent, to shadow her until she could regain control. Chalice wobbled as she righted herself. They swept outward in a fast descent, driving away from the immediate danger but further into the storm. Pockets of air caused them to wobble violently again, dropping tens of feet before suddenly pummelling them upwards. Dragon rode the roughness as best he could, but he felt every one of his riders' cries as they were hammered mercilessly side to side, up and down.\n\n*Krack!* His head twisted in shock. One of the leather belts on his back had snapped, slewing Yardi sideways. Azania grabbed her by the boot, but the larger woman's weight combined with the gale-force wind was too much. Her fingers tore away. With a cry, the armourer slid out onto his wing surface.\n\nChalice whipped beneath him, clearly aiming for the catch, but a violent downdraught sent her tumbling; it collapsed his wing, too, but he barrel rolled with the wind's punch to come in above Yardi \u2013 not where he intended, however. Hind paw snatch! He scragged her in the region of her extremely well-padded rear end, given how well they had covered up for the extreme altitude, and juggle-bundled her into his other rear paw before everything unravelled and he lost her again.\n\nTipping, struggling and jerking about, he righted himself. Now it was his turn to chase Chalice's tail for a change, after she had been chasing his for the last hour.\n\n\"Yardi?\" he called.\n\n\"Alive!\" Aye, and as pasty as a poorly cooked Human pie. Good enough.\n\nThe storm winds finally eased as they continued to lose altitude, but now the rain sluiced down until Dragon could barely see ten feet ahead. The Dragoness led them lower and then a short ways along the cliffs to the west, until suddenly they flew in beneath an overhang and the rain stopped as if a door had been slammed shut.\n\nAzania said, \"Phew. Tell this desert girl again what's to like about torrential rain?\"\n\n\"Or storms?\" the quivering bundle in his hind paw moaned.\n\n\"Or miles-high cliffs?\" Inzashu put in.\n\n\"You silly children, that was amazing!\" Yarimda crowed, throwing back her hood and shaking water out of her hair. \"Decent flying, Dragon. What an adventure. Is that a cavern over there? Let's land, please. This old lady needs to water a bush \u2013 too much excitement for the old bladder, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"Too much information,\" Azania murmured.\n\nSince Dragons usually landed on their hind paws first, he passed Yardi up to his forepaws before landing deftly on the rocky forecourt of the desired cave.\n\nChalice was already sniffing it out. \"Wolf cubs. Let's pick another further along.\"\n\nEveryone needed a rest after that short but entertaining episode. Dragon decided that when he wrote his memoirs, he would call this section 'up and down the mountain.' Was that not all there was to it?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "\"It is plain that the rain in Amboraine gives great cause to complain,\" Yarimda rehearsed with Azania and Inzashu, stressing the vowel glides of the Northern dialect.\n\n\"It is plain this rain does not fall down the drain, but onto my brain,\" Inzashu quipped.\n\n\"If I may explain,\" Chalice snorted, cracking one eye open.\n\nDragon sniffed loudly, \"Puns are such a pain. Please refrain.\"\n\n\"Don't strain,\" Azania said. \"Look, I don't think this weather is going to give up anytime soon. What say you we fly on to Amboraine and get dry there?\"\n\n\"Dragons don't melt in the rain.\"\n\nHis Princess said, \"It's only twenty-seven miles from here. I want to check Aria's tide schedule, but I'm worried about smudging the ink, what with everything being wet around here. No dry firewood either.\" She pouted, \"I want my silken sheets, a fragrant hot bath, fresh incense, girly clothes, a decent meal, a chance to primp my hair and paint my fingernails \u2013 is that too much to ask?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" he growled. \"Watch out, I might mistake you for a real Princess.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Sorry, I mean a real storybook Princess. Not a real-real one.\"\n\n\"Thin ice.\"\n\n\"Do you rather mean the revolutionary sword-waving, Dragon-riding, battle-winning, kingdom-saving, setting leather trousers smoking sort of \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\nHe showed a few fangs lazily. \"You haven't tormented any knights in weeks. Losing your touch?\"\n\nInzashu put in, \"Why do dragons always sleep during the day?\"\n\n\"Eh?\" he grunted.\n\n\"They fight knights.\"\n\n*Gnarr!!* \"That's a joke worthy of me.\"\n\nYarimda said, \"Call me old-fashioned, my dears, but I say that a true lady is entitled to wear whatever she likes within the bounds of decency without caring what others think \u2013 or indecency, in the case of a husband \u2013\"\n\n\"La la la!\" Inzashu chuckled, covering her ears.\n\n\"There's a good girl,\" the old lady said, with a wicked smile. \"You give that Azerim something to look at, Azania, and he'll never look elsewhere.\"\n\nBlushing, Yardi said, \"Grandmother, what kind of advice is that?\"\n\n\"Good, honest advice. Just so we're clear, it can be anything from the most magnificent ball gown to your silken scanties to just bare skin \u2013 you just wear it like a Dragoness wears her scales, and smoking will be the least of what you achieve.\"\n\nInzashu puffed out her cheeks. \"Ah \u2026 thanks, I'll keep that in mind. What say you, sister?\"\n\n\"Help?\"\n\nYardi put in, \"Grandmother, you're absolutely terrible.\"\n\n\"It's about confidence \u2013 something you could stand to learn, dear one.\"\n\n\"Me? I'm a muscly chunk of woman. Nothing girly about me.\"\n\nWith a decent eye roll for a ninety-four year-old, she retorted, \"You are curvy. Even your muscles are curvy. Yardi, you need to bear your body with confidence. You are big and beautiful; that is nothing to be ashamed of. By the time you reach my age, you'll realise how silly society's ideals are. I'll give you a guarantee. Somewhere out there is a special someone whose eyeballs are going to pop out on stalks at the very sight of you, let alone when they discover the beauty that lives inside of you.\"\n\nEven Dragon had to glance away as they shared a tender hug. Such raw emotion. Would he be like this one day, aching to pass on just a few more of life's lessons to his progeny before he passed beyond the fires of life?\n\nWith that, Yarimda declared her old bones were getting chilled.\n\nFlying on \u2026 which meant soggy cloaks, steaming wet scales and a pounding rainstorm. Perfect.\n\nDragon flicked his wings as his team mounted up. \"You don't want to take a few fleas aboard, Chalice?\"\n\n\"Oh no, you're such a big, strong Dragon and doing such a fabulous job carrying all those people and equipment, I'll just admire you from over here.\"\n\nHe pretended to preen. \"Don't admire me too much, or some other males might become jealous.\"\n\nThe yellow Dragoness smacked his hind leg with her tail. \"Insolent youngling.\"\n\n\"Rain's easing up \u2013 as in, diminishing from a raging torrent to a spirited river,\" Azania chuckled. \"Come along now, stop admiring yourself and shift your oversized behind, Dragon. I've a royal appointment to keep.\"\n\n\"At least you won't be half as smelly by the time we get there, Your Highness.\"\n\nWith that, he stepped out into the streaming rain.\n\nBy the time the two Dragons spied the fortress town tucked up against the mountainside, it was not possible to be any more drenched. Inzashu had given up trying to wring out her clothing, or even complaining that she had no idea there could be so much water in the entire world. New rivers danced down the cliffs behind the city in playful white plumes. On the flat farmlands below the outer battlements, puddles ran together to turn into ponds and lakes. Not good for the crops. Was this unseasonable rain?\n\nA break in the clouds presaged the rain finally deciding that enough was enough, at least for the moment \u2013 but as it cleared, they spied the next weather front looming close behind. Any more of this, and they would not be flying up to the Vaylarn Archipelago. Summer was supposed to be balmy weather.\n\nHe could not imagine flying through an oceanic storm.\n\nPopping his spectacles on his head, he eyed the fortress city with interest. Someone must have had a few feisty neighbours in the past. No less than four semi-circular granite battlements protected the city. Right at the rear was a castle, carved back into the cliff itself if he was not mistaken.\n\nIt would take quite the hammer to crack this nut.\n\n\"Those lower gates are a touch small,\" he commented. \"Chalice might fit, but I \u2013\"\n\n\"Need to go on a diet,\" his Princess giggled, kicking his back. Her boots squelched. \"Do Dragonesses like skinny butts, Chalice?\"\n\n<Chunky is hunky. How do you translate that, Dragon?>\n\n\"I'm the toast of the Tamarine Mountains?\"\n\nAzania said, \"Keep lying right through those fangs, Dragon. Chunky is hunky, eh? I think we can go with that \u2013 but you can't fit through that outer entryway, that's for certain. Over to your left wing, Dragon, there's a marketplace. Shall we land there and walk up?\"\n\n\"As long as those guards on the battlements don't get too excited.\"\n\nChalice hissed, \"Vertical drop? They can meet us in the marketplace \u2013 if they dare.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Dragons. I give up! What is it about your devious, fiery hearts that you love to scare Humans witless? Is it some predatory instinct?\"\n\n\"Hours of fun,\" he purred.\n\nChalice shrugged. \"I've never tried, but it sounds enticing. Do they scream and panic and run around like headless chickens?\"\n\n\"Fairly much. Try not to step on any. Nasty, squishy, warm fluids between the talons. Blergh.\"\n\n\"I need to brush up on my pillaging.\"\n\n\"Me too. Royal roar to announce your arrival, Princess Azania? Mwaa-haa-haa!\"\n\n\"As long as you promise not to harm so much as a mouse while we're down there, be my guest. This is an official royal visit with a kingdom that might very soon be allied with mine through marriage. For my brother's sake, best behaviour. You too, Chalice.\"\n\nThe Dragoness winked. \"As you command, Highness.\"\n\n\"Or, if they threaten you \u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, for pity's sake, Dragon, would you just get on with strutting your stuff?\" Azania cried. \"Aye, you are handsome! Aye, you're so huge my eyes water just thinking about it! Aye, you're a fire breathing, muscle-stuffed egomaniac \u2026 we understand all of this! Block your ears, everyone, because mister pompous over here just has to show off his masculinity!\"\n\n\"The word you're looking for is, 'draculinity.'\"\n\n\"Whatever!\"\n\nCupping his paws to his mouth, he voiced a cry that was more sonorous and haunting than he had expected. He almost cut it off in surprise. What was this? But then his usual thunder reasserted itself, and he boomed, <I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nAh, rattle those windowpanes and shake behind locked doors, puny Humans!\n\nTwo Dragons were flying to town.\n\n[ Royal Visit ]\n\nThe captain of the watch bowed with faultless formality. \"To what do we owe the honour, Dragons?\"\n\nHis men, however, continued to hide behind a wedge of shields. Dragon wanted to be genteel and point out that their armour would not exactly save them from becoming hot tinned food, should the fancy take him. Darn it. Why, by his itching wings, had he agreed to behave himself?\n\nOh, just a talon's width of fun. Why not?\n\nHe raised his forepaw for Azania. \"Your Highness?\"\n\nDespite the dripping cloak and waterlogged boots, his progressive royal was never one to miss the opportunity to seize an occasion by the scruff of its neck.\n\nShe stepped regally onto his palm. \"Honoured Dragon.\"\n\nHe conveyed her to ground level, whereupon she nonchalantly stepped off as if they had practised this manoeuvre a thousand times, glanced about as if she owned the very heavens, and bowed formally to the guards.\n\n\"Good sirs, I am Her Royal Highness the Princess Azania of T'nagru, here on an official royal visit to my sister-to-be, the Princess Yuali of Amboraine.\"\n\n\"Your Highness,\" said he, bowing once more. \"How may I best serve you?\"\n\nOoh. He wanted a few servants to call his own. Maybe a royal butler. And fifty staff! This man pleased his draconic hearts very much indeed.\n\n\"I should greatly appreciate it if you would appraise King Harilan of our presence. Please convey our apologies for the unannounced nature of our visit and our mode of arrival. The Dragons will harm nothing and no-one here during our stay. You have my word of honour.\"\n\n\"And mine,\" Chalice cooed, looking his men over.\n\nThey shrank back a step. Two actually fainted, slumping to the cobblestones with resounding clangs of their helmets.\n\n\"Is this normal?\" she inquired.\n\nThe Captain appeared utterly unfazed. \"They'll recover. Cohort! I want two men to run to the castle at the double, two to alert the battlement leaders, and four to inform the town criers that the populace should not be afraid of the Dragons. The rest of you, form an honour guard for our visitors. Follow me, Your Highness. I should be grateful to receive all of your names to ensure that you may be announced properly. The King was injured whilst out visiting the villages to the east, I regret to report, and thus has been delayed. He should arrive tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I am sorry. Will he recover?\"\n\nThe Captain said, \"Highness, the injury is said to be grave. His horse slipped and fell upon his leg.\"\n\n\"My sister is a magical healer. If we can be of any help at all \u2026\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Highness.\"\n\nAnother Human warren. The streets through which the escort led them were not large to begin with, and matters did not improve. Each house was two to three levels in elevation, the lower being made of solid stone blocks, while the upper floors were made of dark timber frames that contrasted prettily with the whitewashed filling between. For Dragon, the issue was that the upper one or two floors of the houses overhung the road at crazy angles, almost as if the buildings leaned together in conspiratorial conversation. His shoulders did not appreciate the conversation quite so much.\n\n\"Grr, sorry about your house,\" he growled, setting another building creaking upon its foundations. The person who had been peering out of the upper window fell back with a low cry. Another fainting episode?\n\nChalice said, \"You might need to fly up to the castle, Dragon.\"\n\n\"I will not leave my Princess.\"\n\n\"I'll watch over her.\"\n\nThe Dragoness fit. Looking ahead \u2026 he stood no chance. Not even if he slunk along on his belly, which was not happening. Seat for Princess' rump, aye. Crawling, no. Even he had his limits \u2013 not many, nowadays, but there it was. He did not want to break down anyone's dwelling.\n\nHe said, \"Try not to make too many of them faint. Yarimda \u2013\"\n\n\"I'll continue riding, if it's all the same to you, Dragon. It's been a long day's travel.\"\n\n\"I'll sit with you, grandmother,\" Yardi decided at once. \"Inzashu, you walk with your sister and try not to look quite so amazed at all these pale faces around you.\"\n\nShe giggled. \"Was I staring?\"\n\n\"They're all staring at you \u2013 probably never seen a black person in their lives. Act normal. They'll soon figure out you're a real flesh and blood person.\"\n\n\"Smile like me, and hope yours doesn't make them faint,\" Dragon said helpfully. \"See you up top, Princesses.\"\n\nAfter switching about, he walked back to the nearest open space, a communal fountain, and decided he could make the jump without risk of random demolition. \"Watch out, folks. Hold onto your hair.\"\n\nAs he coiled and sprang upward, he heard a child yell, \"Wow, mommy! Did you see him go?\"\n\nObviously not one of the fainting mob.\n\nGo he did. A series of rapid, circumscribed wingbeats saw him clear the rooftops without slamming his wings into any of the houses. Beating a town flat? Straight to the top of his to-do list. Dragon swung up over the town, dislodging a couple of roof tiles with the blast of his passage. Little white dots of faces swung about to follow his progress as he surged up over the large battlements, and baulked at the last. The courtyard below looked less than immense.\n\n\"Battlements?\" he suggested to Yardi.\n\n\"You're the Dragon.\"\n\n\"Undeniably.\"\n\nClearly, the couple of soldiers stationed upon this stolid, eight-foot-thick battlement knew what to do when their doom was upon them. They fainted. Shocked, Dragon performed a landing lunge that both bruised his sternum and put him in position to catch one of the hapless fools before he fell fifteen feet into the courtyard below.\n\n\"Nitwit!\" he snarled.\n\n\"Excellent reflexes, Dragon,\" Yarimda approved. \"Pop him out of the way, the poor boy. Oh, quite the reception.\"\n\nHe glanced up. A confused crowd milled in the large main doorway of the castle, at the top of a low set of stairs that repeated the semicircle pattern. Nobles, perhaps, or courtiers. All were richly dressed. The girl in the front wore a tiara \u2013 she was perhaps Azania's age, but as pale as his Princess was dark, and her hair beneath the simple tiara was straight and blonde in contrast to the fine sable curls of the desert-born. Her face was sweet and open, but this one clearly had some sort of backbone, for she stood apart amongst her court for her serenity as she faced most likely the largest Dragon anyone in this Kingdom had ever seen.\n\nDefinite potential.\n\nHearing Chalice's paw step approaching in the tunnel below and to his left that must lead into the courtyard, he poured down off the balcony with all the sinuous grace he could muster.\n\nBowing upon his foreleg, he smiled and said, \"Princess Yuali, may I present \u2013\"\n\nAt least twenty people atop the steps promptly fainted \u2013 actually, all of the females bar the Princess, who turned the colour of a freshly starched sheet, but held her nerve. Not only that, but every swain and companion from the youngest to a sprightly, white-bearded elder of some sort, caught their female in their arms and lowered them solicitously upon an arm or a lap. Rehearsed? All except for the two younger men who flanked Princess Yuali. They were left standing in foolish tableaux, hands extended as if pleading for their lives.\n\nThe males set about reviving the females with smelling salts and, in some cases, kisses or tender entreaties.\n\nHow truly bizarre.\n\nThe blonde Princess descended the steps gracefully, extending her hands in greeting. \"Azania! I bid you most warmly and royally welcome to the Kingdom of Amboraine.\"\n\n\"Uh, that's Azania. I'm Inzashu, her younger sister.\"\n\n\"Azania \u2013 Azania! I am so sorry, I had no idea \u2013 you're so tiny \u2013 ah \u2026 I mean, welcome, Princesses. Oh, another Dragon? You truly travel in style.\"\n\n\"I am a Dragon Rider, and this is my magnificent Dragon,\" she said proudly.\n\nHe growled in pleasure. Magnificent! Now, when could he have that inked on a scroll and sealed with the royal seal? Or, could she be tugging his wingtips?\n\n\"Oh!\" cried the foreign Princess. This time, surely, she would faint \u2026 but no. With a gracious gesture, she added, \"Welcome to Amboraine, Dragons. We have never received quite such a delegation before. I apologise, but my father the King is not available to receive you, nor the Queen.\"\n\n\"We heard the news,\" Azania said, clasping the other girl's hands as if intent upon keeping her on her feet. \"I trust your father will return safely. Inzashu has a healing gift. If we can be of any assistance, please allow us to offer help.\"\n\n\"We'd be most honoured.\"\n\nHer courtiers began to revive as Dragon helped Yarimda dismount, and the Princess indicated that servants should come and help with their belongings. That more than half fainted along the way attracted no comment whatsoever. Yuali meantime made introductions. The two younger men who had flanked her were her fourteen year-old twin brothers Garaine and Ramuine; both appeared very much taken with Inzashu, kissing her upon either hand simultaneously. She did not know what to make of that!\n\nDragon considered threatening to trim their fingers if they did not keep their hands to themselves. He had heard things about teenage boys one could not repeat in polite company.\n\nQueen Sahira had taken to her bed, indisposed, at the news of her husband's accident. Azania passed the Princess the pouch of scrolls from her brother, stating that she was looking forward to the day that they became family.\n\n\"Your cloak, Your Highness?\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Azania, slipping the sodden garment off her shoulders.\n\nThere was a collective gasp around the courtyard.\n\nMost of the men collapsed on the spot.\n\nDozens of women cried, \"Oh, the scandal!\" and did another round of fainting of their own \u2013 delicately folding up upon their male companions once more, Dragon noticed with an eye which was growing severely jaundiced due to all these vapid goings-on. Not one lovely coiffed head struck a stone. All landed with miraculous poise and perfection upon an arm, a chest, a lap. What strange malady afflicted Amboraine?\n\nPrincess Azania smiled uncertainly at her hostess. \"Woman in battle gear?\"\n\nYuali nodded. \"You wear \u2026 those? Wow.\"\n\n\"Riding a Dragon wearing skirts would be ridiculously impractical.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nA few more men fainted. All of the servants had dropped like flies. He quickly checked that no-one else was trying to throw themselves off a battlement. Oh, alright. Toss good behaviour in the Lumis Ocean, by his wings!\n\nHe growled, \"Princess Yuali, tell me truly, is fainting a national pastime?\"\n\n\"Quite ridiculous, aren't we?\" the other Princess snorted. She stood a full head taller than Azania, and had yet to let go of the other's fingers. \"I suspect I'm going to enjoy this visit a great deal. Princess in trousers indeed. You'd think that the world stopped turning a hundred years ago, the way we behave around here.\"\n\nShe directed a glare at her brothers. \"Stop blushing.\"\n\nThey spluttered their way through a couple of sentences that contained not an intelligible syllable between them.\n\n\"Would it help if I wore a dress?\" Azania inquired archly.\n\n\"A prerequisite for the slightest hope of intelligent conversation, it seems.\"\n\nDragon put in slyly, \"Ah, the trousers that slew a nation.\"\n\nChortling behind her hand, Princess Yuali said, \"The stories we're going to have to put up with after this. Desert barbarians, wicked Dragons and outrageous trousers. Our poor kingdom has never seen a scandal to compare \u2013 but Princess, such a sudden visit \u2026 this isn't just sisterly concern, is it? What happened, is something wrong?\"\n\n\"War. The Skartunese invaded.\"\n\n\"Oh no, that's terrible. We'll have to find a way to help T'nagru.\"\n\nHe purred happily. It was becoming clear that this generation of Princesses must have thrown the rulebook out of the window. Another victim \u2026 *mwaa-haa-hargh!* Corruption being an integral part of the service."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Princess Yuali not only had a pleasingly well-developed backbone, she was practical, too. She had messengers visiting all of the blacksmiths in the city before dark, choice portions of veal brought for the Dragons \u2013 one could hardly refuse such succulent offerings \u2013 and a chamber prepared for the Princesses which overlooked a small, private courtyard assigned to the Dragons. Her mind was clearly preoccupied with her father's reported condition, however.\n\nLate in the evening, Dragon leaned his forepaws upon the balcony just eight feet above the courtyard where he and Chalice had been resting, while he and Azania looked over the map and tidal almanac Aria had provided.\n\n\"You still game for this, Dragon?\" she asked.\n\nSober question. \"Aye. If this was only about me, I don't think I'd do it. I must face the fear that she will already be gone \u2013 and no, I'm not sure there would ever be another. I couldn't imagine as much, right now. I would make it clear to the Isles Dragons that we need an army, nothing more. You?\"\n\n\"No Aria \u2013\"\n\n\"Would be brutal, aye. There's a good chance we might also be able to wait for the migration. I'm not sure even the Skartun could cross the desert in the height of summer.\"\n\n\"No. As for me, I guess I'd have to admit to feeling mildly terrified. Everything could change. Or nothing. Nonetheless, this is my duty to my kingdom. If we could come away with a small army of warrior Dragonesses who don't have loyalties to other Clans but to you and me \u2026 I would feel a great deal better about the storm that's about to hit T'nagru. As you've said before, fifty of Aria might make all the difference.\"\n\nThey examined the map together.\n\n\"So, up to these islands on the northernmost tip of Mornine, which will give us the best angle to reach this pair of specks,\" he said, tracing the route with the tip of his talon. \"Then, we fly almost directly north for the worst and longest stretch of the trip.\"\n\n\"And land on this gnat's backside over here,\" Azania agreed.\n\n\"Aye. It's not even marked as a proper island, more a reef, which is barely visible even at the lowest tides.\"\n\n\"The previous stop isn't great either. Three feet above sea level if we're lucky and it's pretty calm, or we're definitely getting our paws wet. After that, it's fairly much west with the trade winds for the run in to the Dragon's talons. We can choose to jump onto Wave Dragonhome on the first major island, or Zunityne on the second. Whose love life do we start with first, do you think?\"\n\nThey stared at one another.\n\n\"Yours.\" Both spoke at the same time. Chuckle.\n\nAzania said, \"We should ask after Ariamyrielle at Wave Dragonhome first. That makes sense. Depending on what we learn, we fly on to Zunityne, where she might be anyways, and snaffle me up a nice King for breakfast.\"\n\n\"Ho ho, very draconic of you, Princess.\"\n\n\"Rubs off after a bit, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Roast royal thigh?\"\n\n\"Mmm, tasty.\"\n\n\"Man fillet?\"\n\n\"Stop making me drool.\"\n\n\"You are positively wicked, sister,\" Inzashu complained from over at a desk, where she had been reading a tome from the royal library on healing herbs. \"My ears are burning.\"\n\nHe growled, \"Younglings should learn to listen only when they are supposed to. It's a terrible habit you've picked up.\"\n\n\"Years of fearing how my mother's ambitions would affect me. Ah, sorry.\" She rubbed her temples tiredly. \"Not the most cheerful soul, am I?\"\n\n\"Inzashu, you've been through a great deal,\" Azania said stoutly.\n\n\"The instinct for self-preservation runs deep,\" Dragon agreed. \"So, when are you planning to tell us that you're thinking about staying here to treat the King?\"\n\nThe girl gave him a startled, even frightened glance. \"I \u2026\"\n\n*Gnarr,* he berated himself. \"I apologise. That was every bit as intrusive as I've always promised I would never be. Your feelings were so clear this time \u2026 still! Sorry. I wonder if working together has made us more sensitive to one another?\"\n\n\"I've noticed a few things emanating from you too, Dragon, but I've been trying very hard to bite my lip.\"\n\n\"Well, that definitely makes you the bigger creature.\"\n\n\"Bigger? Bigger?\" Inzashu spluttered.\n\nSuddenly, they all saw the funny side of a serious conversation. Dragon sniggered at his slip-up, Azania pretended to become all huffy about how Inzashu was clearly the bigger, older and wiser person and she would forever be doomed to live in her little sister's shadow, and with that, their rapid-fire interjections became very, very silly indeed. Dragon laughed so hard he began to hiccough, forcing him to have to dive outside to let rip with a mighty snort of fire. That set Azania off. She had the best laugh when she truly let go; an infectious, throaty gurgle that kept setting everyone else off. Even Chalice came over to join in the fun.\n\nHow beautiful a paws for laughter, Dragon told her.\n\nHilarity!\n\nNot so great for the flowerbeds outside, however. They suffered a rather dreadful fate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The following morning, Princess Yuali took the royal sisters for a guided tour of the fortress city. Time to show off the dark-skinned infidels from the desert to the marvelling populace, Dragon muttered sourly.\n\nAzania brought back a rather less testy report. Exhibit number one, two foreign Princesses \u2013 the older dressed in very decorous Princess attire for a change; a gorgeous deep red gown that suited her literally to the ground \u2013 had received a rapturous reception. Flowers, cheering and an honour parade around the city. These Humans. Always an excuse for some sort of party or occasion whereupon they would dress up and behave in lunatic ways. Truly astonishing.\n\n\"And here I thought the peasants were rioting,\" he sniped.\n\nYuali's eyes popped wide.\n\n\"They tend to do that around Dragons,\" he confided. \"We torch their barns and they come after us with pitchforks and axes.\"\n\n\"Nothing like that in this kingdom,\" Azania put in hastily.\n\nHe purred, \"Of course not. The citizenry is wonderfully well behaved. However, our Yardi has only managed to entice one blacksmith from an entire kingdom into a future of glorious riches. Blacksmith plus wife, to be fair. That is a poor performance from Amboraine, Highness.\"\n\nHis Princess gave him a fierce glare. \"Stop winding everyone up. Chances are very good they will send a strong army down south.\"\n\n\"Trying to defuse the tension around here.\"\n\n\"If you want to go defuse something, would you take a quick scout and tell us how soon the King will be here?\"\n\nAs if triggered by her words, a trumpet fanfare resounded from the highest tower of the castle. Dragon eyed it with interest. He liked high towers, especially those that claimed to be the highest tower in the land. In particular, he liked what he had found inside one just recently. Pleasant memories!\n\nEndless trouble, mind.\n\nOnly the best sort of trouble. The kind of trouble that got a Dragon all fired up \u2013 polish up his finest evil Dragon laugh, *hurgh-hurgh-urgh!* Maybe the King should be greeted with the sight of a huge white Dragon sunning himself atop his tower.\n\nNo, he was a sick man. Where had that nasty idea popped up from?\n\nSuddenly, the trumpets rang with a completely different sound. Urgent. Stirring!\n\n\"What's that?\" he snapped.\n\n\"It's an alarm \u2013 someone must be attacking the King's party!\" the blonde Princess cried. \"Oh, Dragon \u2013\"\n\n\"Azania. Chalice. With me!\"\n\nTen seconds later, he launched out of the castle courtyard as if he had been shot from a Dragon bow. Never mind sunning himself atop a tower. He had a much better greeting in mind for King Harilan.\n\nOne that involved decimating his enemies.\n\n[ Dragon Fires Rising ]\n\nWith yuali's final cry about bandits ringing in his ears, Dragon was more than startled by his initial view of the battle site. The King's party, carrying the royal white banners of Amboraine, must have just emerged from the treeline about two miles from the city when they had come under attack by what struck him as a compact but well-organised army. Actual knights. Not ragtag bandits. He concluded as much even from a distance, by the colours of their armour and the well-ordered deployment of troops.\n\nHe pointed his fore-talon. \"Renegade lord fielding a proper army?\"\n\n\"Looks like it,\" Azania said.\n\n\"Where's the King?\"\n\n\"He's on a pallet right in the centre. See where his cavalry have encircled him? They're trying to get him aboard a horse or he might be crushed by the hooves.\"\n\n\"We've \u2013 probably \u2013 a hundred knights riding in support from the city,\" Chalice called over.\n\nOn the negative side, there were plenty of light cavalry already at play upon the field of battle, with azure blazes on their shields and uniforms. They fanned out rapidly, engaging the rearguard of the King's column as they rushed to form ranks and resist.\n\n\"That's good, but our allies will be too slow,\" he said. \"Chalice, I'm going to do my sprint. Will you come in behind and mop up anything I leave with extreme prejudice?\"\n\n\"Done. Go, Dragon.\"\n\nDrawing a deep breath, he threw his power into the flight. He accelerated so hard, Azania, who had not had time even to throw a saddle onto his neck, had to cling on for dear life. She had her bow and arrows, however, having been armed with the intent of going target shooting. This would be high speed practice. Minus a saddle or belt to hold her on.\n\nShe hiked up her dress and clung on with her feet and knees. \"The reason I wear trousers is \u2013 this!\" she shouted angrily.\n\n\"I know. Careful, alright? You're not wearing armour either.\"\n\n\"You're as soft as a hatchling, Dragon.\"\n\n*Grrr!* \"Totally forgot. Thanks for the reminder.\"\n\n\"Use your fire as much as possible. They've a detachment of archers just at the treeline. What else? Foot soldiers engaging the King's Guard, and \u2013 I make that at least forty heavy knights and up to a hundred light cavalry. They're going to try a charge to break through to the King.\"\n\n\"I see that.\"\n\nHe did not know a great deal about cavalry tactics, but he had read about the use of heavy cavalry to break enemy lines. The King's detachment of foot soldiers rushed to form a shield line facing those heavy knights. Pity those men. They were about to become a metal sandwich. The King's cavalry, about fifty in number, drew themselves up with impressive discipline \u2013 but they were well outnumbered, four to one by his estimate.\n\nWhy the inadequate protection? Was this due to rushing back to the capital for medical treatment? A King's false sense of security?\n\n\"More soldiers moving among the trees,\" Azania noted. \"This is a serious attack.\"\n\n\"Cowardly sneak attacks tend to be,\" he grumbled. \"Ready to show these fools what it means to ambush allies of T'nagru?\"\n\n\"Ambush the ambushers. Nice.\"\n\n\"Or just beat them around the head with a few trees?\"\n\n\"Whatever works.\" The Princess wriggled about as she tried to use her ornate waistband to tie herself on somehow. \"Not enough material. This will be a test of my leg muscles. Ready.\"\n\nArrow to the bowstring. Fires bubbling just below boiling point.\n\nThose fools would burn!\n\nDragon swooped low across the grassy meadow, still visibly soggy after the heavy morning rains. The weather was overcast but not raining just now. A low rumbling of hooves carried to his ears as the attacking knights began to sweep forward, picking up speed as they trotted toward the King's position. He pumped his wings furiously. Close timing. Once they tangled up, he would have a much harder time separating out friend from foe. But if they could hit in one clean sweep \u2026\n\nAzania called, \"Save a roar for scaring the light cavalry. The heavy mounts are trained warhorses. They might not spook easily.\"\n\nSmart. Always thinking.\n\nHe felt her knees tighten and heard a *snick* as she plucked an arrow from the quiver. His chest tightened from within as the fire built down low. Did his chest even glow? Might need to test that out one night.\n\nHalf a mile. Top speed. Totally committed. His every sense reached out, measuring, evaluating, plotting, deciding. The attacking cavalry surged as they mounted a full charge. Thundering hooves! Clods of grass and mud sprayed behind them as if a massive beast rent the ground with its talons, smoking and snorting prior to falling upon its hapless prey. Fifty Dragon lengths. Fifteen. His wings flexed with supple grace as his neck curved sideways. They would pass almost directly over the King's troops.\n\nFire laced his throat with beautiful, molten heat. No reason to question how this was even possible. He was Dragon. Hearts afire!\n\n*GRRROOAARRGGHH!!*\n\nSix strides before the heavy cavalry struck the King's shield line, white Dragon fire slashed into the faces of those charging knights. So fast was he moving and so quick his head movement to try to spray along the length of the line, he missed several. They struck hard and heavy. Horses shrieked, their hooves lashing like crazed wheat mill, while the knights struck out with their longswords. The rest of the line collapsed as if by magic, smoking bodies and ruin sliding up to the King's foot soldiers.\n\nBriefly, he saw men peering from behind their shields in utter shock as a Dragon roared overhead.\n\n*Thwock!* Azania's precise shot took out one last knight, right at the end.\n\n\"Swerving.\"\n\nShe clamped onto his neck as he adjusted direction, continuing the rush toward the light cavalry force harassing the King's rearguard. They broke and scattered in all directions.\n\n<I \u2013 AM \u2013 FIIIIRRREEE!!>\n\nSuperheated white clouds of fire billowed over the field as they chased the light horse away. Stretching out his paws, he plucked riders off their mounts and threw them at the dense regiments of foot soldiers which had emerged from the treeline. *Kerump!*\n\n<Brraa-hurgh-HARGH!!>\n\nClapping his wings sharply, he shot upward to avoid the trees and then began his turn to line up a second pass. Here came Chalice, a furious yellow dart. Reaching the last few of the heavy knights as he circled, she kicked out with her hind paws. He heard the impact right across the field. *Crunch!* The azure shields fell.\n\nRaising a robust cheer, the King's knights extended their own charge, rolling up the flank of light cavalry as the enemy riders tried to flee.\n\n\"Those foot soldiers are trying to reach the King!\" Azania cried.\n\nFierce fighting raged down there. A sixty-strong detachment engaged the King's last line of defence. His shield wall had turned to run back toward the skirmish. Dragon eyed up another regiment to his left paw. Ugh. Leave them for the moment.\n\n\"Let's get in close.\"\n\nAs he shot back over the treeline and out toward the beleaguered royal force, Dragon felt a handful of arrows lodge in his soft hide. Great. Might as well invite them into his lair, too. Skimming in once more, he angled his body for the hit. Nothing subtle about this. A Juggernaut belly-and-paws landing crushed half a dozen of the enemy as they scrambled to get out of the way. Tail lashes, paw strikes and several violent snaps of his jaws dealt with several more. From the corner of his eye, he saw Chalice barrel into the other regiment, full-bore. Battle madness? Really, he needed to teach her that the old methods only got a Dragon hurt.\n\nThat said, here was a fool waving his sword in his face.\n\nDragon punched him atop the head. *Clang!*\n\n\"Take that!\" Azania yelled, stabbing a soldier in the throat with an arrow as he tried to drag her off Dragon's neck.\n\nHe whirled, stamping on and tail-slapping every scrap of blue he could see. Careful with the white. Several of them were lining him up with javelins!\n\n\"We're allies!\" he roared.\n\n\"Friends of Amboraine!\" Azania yelled, ducking a stray javelin. \"For the King!\"\n\nThey understood that bit.\n\nSomeone shouted, \"The Dragon's with us! Strike the blue, men! For the glory of Amboraine!\"\n\nAye, this bloody brawl was glorious. Nitwit.\n\nReaching over heads, Dragon poked and slapped enemy soldiers with his bared talons until they decided that retreat was an excellent idea. Should have figured that out the moment he rose out of that city in a vengeful rage!\n\nTurning, he sprayed their backs with white fire \u2013 *thwock! Thwock!* Neat arrows dispatched two soldiers hacking around his flanks with their swords.\n\n\"Chalice! She's in trouble!\"\n\nSurrounded by forty or fifty men and coming under a withering hail of fire from the archers now, the Dragoness was sore beset. His ire rose, unstoppable. Thundering a stream of unintelligible words, Dragon flap-skim-charged across the battleground, smashing a couple of unlucky enemy soldiers aside as they dared to linger in his path. Four or five soldiers had a hold of her right wing, trying to weigh her down and chop it off. Orange fire billowed around them.\n\nHow could he hit all those soldiers clustered around the Dragoness?\n\n\"Fire underneath!\" Azania cried, at exactly the same time as he roared, <Chalice! Jump!>\n\nShe leaped ten feet into the air as his white fire hosed beneath her paws, sweeping left and right to set a number of the pests dancing in agony. The Dragoness lashed her tail as she landed, crushing more; they briefly clashed shoulders before rounding on the remainder of the soldiers. They tried to break and flee, but it was already too late.\n\nOff to the archers, another charge!\n\nDragon groaned. Mad, destructive and \u2013 did he have to? Chalice began to fry archers as he dealt with a few last soldiers. Fine. Whirling, he aimed along the treeline and set about cutting them down with slow deliberation.\n\nRather peeved at all the holes in his nice new hide!\n\nFrankly, aerating a Dragon was not about to make them any lighter in the air.\n\nHe only stopped when he saw his line of fire might put Chalice in danger; meantime, Azania calmly kept his flanks and tail clear of any trouble.\n\n\"Ran out of arrows,\" she grumbled.\n\n\"Just in time.\"\n\nThe last stragglers fled back into the trees \u2013 those who could still run. The King's party slowly untangled themselves and rose from their defensive postures, while the knights chased down the survivors and accepted their surrender. *Pah,* he grunted, puffing air through his heated cheeks. Thirsty, after all that \u2013 could he assume his fire might run out if he burned himself dry? Water must come from somewhere to furnish this oceanic electrolysis process.\n\nSea Dragons clearly had no such problem.\n\n\"Well, my lovely Princess,\" he said. \"Shall we go bid the King a good day?\"\n\n\"How very Human of you,\" she grinned.\n\n\"Fighting talk.\"\n\n\"Oh, this Princess doesn't just talk. I walk the walk \u2013 or ride the ride, whichever you prefer, Dragon.\"\n\n*Gnarr-nrr-GRR!*"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "King Harilan greeted them cordially from his litter, upon which his broken leg now lay, heavily bandaged and splinted. Crimson stained the bandages. Despite his pale, sweaty sickliness, he brightened once he discovered who his visitors were.\n\n\"Allies, friends and soon to be family!\" he said in his Northern brogue. \"No thanks are enough, for we could not have stood this day without your aid.\"\n\n\"Grateful to serve, my King,\" Azania smiled, accepting a formal kiss upon her knuckles. Dragon tried not to wince. This Human idea of pasting one's saliva upon another creature's skin nauseated him. \"This is Dragon \u2013 we call him Dragon for reasons I can explain another time \u2013 and this yellow beauty is Chalice.\"\n\nHarilan nodded cordially. \"You both wear your wounds with pride. May your wings soar, Dragons!\"\n\n\"And yours, o King,\" Chalice fluted, openly surprised at his knowledge of draconic custom.\n\n\"As a white Dragon you are most unusual \u2013 not albino, by my mark?\"\n\nHe said, \"No, sire. I believe I am half Sea Dragon. That is the reason for the white fires you saw, and for my physical size.\"\n\n\"Blazing,\" he said.\n\n<And then some. You barbecued my belly,> Chalice teased.\n\n\"Forgive me \u2026\" The King's face twisted in pain. \"I must hurry to the healers.\"\n\nAzania said, \"We shall escort you.\"\n\nTo his Captain of the Guard, the King said, \"Track those men and bring report, will you? This will be Lord Varlan's crew, unless the fever has me hallucinating.\"\n\n\"Aye, my King!\"\n\nWith that, they rushed the royal up to his castle. Crowds gathered to greet him along the way, with muted cheers and many encouraging cries and wishes for him to get well. Popular. Harilan roused himself a few times to wave, but his suffering was clear.\n\nReminding himself that this town was not built for mighty beasts of his stature, Dragon joined Chalice in winging up to the castle.\n\nLanding, the Dragoness teased, <We'll have to pluck you, wing brother.>\n\nAzania laughed, <This must be a new record.>\n\n<Evidently, I make an incredibly attractive target,> he agreed immodestly. <You're wearing a few arrows yourself, Chalice, and at least three lances I can count. How's that wing?>\n\n<Well enough to fly, but those scum did a decent job trying to chop me up.>\n\n<Newly dead scum.>\n\n<Aye \u2013 gnarr!> she growled. <That was some impressive fighting for one your brothers seemed to think had never lifted a paw in combat.>\n\n<I blame Juggernaut. You fought with fire.>\n\nChuckling like a pair of old friends, they set about plucking one another of arrows, javelins and lance points while Azania ran to brief Princess Yuali and to prepare her sister. The surgeon had already dismissed her help as unwanted, even insulting, but Yuali promised they would smuggle her in just as soon as the old fool departed. Inzashu acted phlegmatic as she helped Chalice dig out a couple of javelin points, and told them she had seen the leg. Bone poked out beneath the knee, and there was a break mid-thigh in addition. He stood a good chance of losing the leg entirely if the surgeon did not know his business. Yuali was understandably upset. The Princes thought their father was a hero; the bravest man in Solixambria.\n\nThree hours later, Dragon snooped outside the King's chambers as the three Princesses slipped inside to attend to the heavily sedated King.\n\nThe man's colours were all wrong, he sniffed out immediately. Fascinating. Could pain or infection do this to a person? The wound was already two days old. Or \u2026 he tapped quietly on the balcony doors, left closed apparently because fresh air was a terrible idea for any convalescent. Primitives. Barbarians! And they had the cheek to reject magic as a solution when all they relied upon was superstition and not sound science. Inzashu came over to speak with him.\n\nShe said pensively, \"Good job on the lower break, but he left a bone splinter loose that I had to reposition. Terrible job on the thigh. Completely misaligned. Can you reach him from here? I need to readjust the bones and I'm not strong enough.\"\n\n\"I can try. You'll coach us, right?\"\n\n\"Do my best.\"\n\nAt her direction, the two Princesses and two servants held the King down while Dragon gingerly \u2013 biting his tongue \u2013 exerted pressure by pinching his knee and pulling downward. Sweat. Grumble. Check, no. Again. Inzashu cautioned him several times to use less strength. As directed, he made a slight twist while the poor man moaned even in his drugged-up state, and then, *click.*\n\n\"Did you hear that, Princess?\"\n\n\"No, but \u2013 thanks, Dragon.\" Her hands palpated the King's leg with great care. \"That's done it.\"\n\n\"Where did you learn to set bones, Inzashu?\"\n\n\"Learned the trade in a field hospital,\" she said. \"The Skartun have a great many disagreements with a great many nations. I only discovered what my mother was doing there when I was nine. She wanted bodies to experiment on. Dead or alive.\"\n\nAzania's eyebrows shot toward the ceiling. \"Truly?\"\n\n\"Aye. Dragon, how does he feel to you now?\"\n\nHe reached out with his senses. \"Far better. Still, I don't like the scent of that wound.\"\n\n\"Me neither, but the surgeon did clean it thoroughly. Can't fault him there. I might see if there are a few apothecaries in town who could supply herbs and essences for burning here in the room. The vapours might help, in this case. Yuali?\"\n\n\"I'll assign someone to help.\"\n\n\"I meant, would this be acceptable in your tradition?\"\n\n\"Aye, more than acceptable. I cannot thank you enough for all your help, Inzashu. It truly is fate's providence that you arrived in perfect time.\"\n\nShe smiled tiredly. \"He's not out of the woods yet, as you northerners say, but I'd like to think that leg's safe now. Much depends on how the next couple of days go.\"\n\nThe girl startled as Princess Yuali drew her into an embrace."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The King's condition deteriorated over the following day and a half, but with a nudge from Inzashu-N'shula abetted by a fretful white Dragon, his fever broke that evening and the man sweated it all out, which was supposed to be good news for Humans. Not so good for one with nostrils as sensitive as a Dragon's.\n\nThe range of Human whiff and pong was truly astounding.\n\nLike a Dragon with bad digestion, he teased Azania. That could be impressive, too.\n\nBefore they departed, a few jobs. One was for his Princess to weep copiously over her little sister's understandable desertion, as she put it. Yuali and Inzashu planned to join the army which Amboraine had already begun to muster with the help of the surrounding kingdoms, and eventually to make her way down to T'nagru, if Dragon and Azania did not catch up with her first. The second job was a special request from a grateful king.\n\n\"You wouldn't mind awfully if I asked you to pay a visit to Lord Varlan on the way north?\" he asked, propped up on his cushions. Dragon peered in through the window. \"A strong force is on its way there as we speak, but besides his annoyance value, Varlan has a highly secure castle with not less than three outer gates. It has withstood every siege in two hundred years.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Dragon purred. \"Do my nostrils detect a whiff of honourable pillaging in the air?\"\n\nHarilan chuckled weakly, his bearded face breaking into a grin. His daughter often had the same expression, and they shared the same hardy, not-fainting heritage so absent in the rest of their kingdom.\n\nHe said, \"Honourable pillaging? Music to this ruler's ear. To wit: my knights should be most grateful if Varlan's gates could be reduced to a state of not working or rubble, whichever works best, before their arrival day after tomorrow. They will do the rest.\"\n\n<Mmm,> Dragon agreed, rubbing his keel bone as the heat blossomed immediately.\n\n\"Listen to him,\" Azania smiled.\n\n\"That low roaring \u2013\"\n\n\"That's the sound of Dragon fires rising, my King. I think you just made my Dragon's day.\"\n\n[ Honourable Pillaging ]\n\nOne less in number, they took their leave of Amboraine the very next morning. Many hugs. Even one for Chalice, who graciously received the Human touch, despite that Dragon was convinced he smelled deep consternation. Ah well, one did not change a Dragon's scales overnight.\n\nFor every rule, an exception.\n\nHe peered at himself. How peculiar to have shucked one set of scales for another, almost like a Princess changing her clothes. Silver scabs from all the arrow wounds spotted his new scaly robes. Even his wings were now turning properly white on the surfaces, but the rich brown-and-gold patterning remained \u2026 engrained, he supposed, in many places. Azania said he looked most fetching and unique. Dragon agonised over what Aria would think. As if it mattered. She would be mated with another. What could he do to change this fate? Nothing.\n\nHe hugged Inzashu. \"Now behave yourself, young lady, and don't stir up any more trouble than your sister would.\"\n\n\"Thanks for everything, Dragon,\" she said. \"We'll fly together again, won't we?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Just as soon as I find you the right boy Dragon so that you can boss him around and tell him what to do.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't dare.\"\n\n\"Nasty little liar,\" he growled, pretending to swat her behind.\n\n\"Dragon, Aria will be yours, you'll see.\"\n\nShe had the strangest way about her, sometimes. The air of a Mage, some called it. Was this a childish faith that life always served up good outcomes and happy endings to tales, or something more? Could her unique gifts encompass foresight?\n\nThis fearful hope lurked uppermost in his mind as they winged out over the endless forests of Amboraine. The drizzle began within ten minutes of their departure. Naturally.\n\nSeizing her opportunity, Yarimda set about teaching them a fifteen-verse song that claimed to describe every important detail of the culture of her native Kingdom of Hamirythe. He learned about a boy whose nose was pinched off by a crab, how to make a seaweed trumpet, the belief in a type of mermaid called a sea siren that lured sailors off to a terrible fate, and the custom of 'skulling,' which involved displaying the preserved skulls of one's deceased relatives upon the mantelpiece. This last one was even true. One commonly dug up one's relatives seven years after the burial, she informed them.\n\nYardi shuddered. \"A nation of grave robbers?\"\n\n\"Isn't it marvellous to understand one's heritage?\" the old lady tittered.\n\n\"Rattle those family skeletons,\" Azania said.\n\nWith an unimpressed hiss, Chalice said, \"That one would even touch the bones of one's ancestors is unthinkable.\"\n\n\"I have to agree,\" Yarimda said. \"People believe it's a way of honouring the ancestors, but I always found it macabre to be eating dinner with the toothy grin and hollow eye sockets of Great-Aunt so-and-so staring down at me. Let the dead lie in peace, say I.\"\n\nToo true. It was rumoured that the Talon Clan lined their lairs with the bones of their ancestors.\n\nFlying two three-hour stints, they reached the location carefully shared with them by the King's cartographer; a short, deep ravine that abutted a huge mountainous outcropping locally called 'The Anvil' for its flat top. Beyond, they would find the Rillimis River, effectively the northern border of the realm of Amboraine. Lord Varlan's impregnable castle lay nestled within this ravine.\n\nLanding carefully out of sight, Dragon and Chalice searched for and located a well-concealed campsite where they might wait for nightfall. Training with her, he passed on a few lessons which Juggernaut had taught him, and learned a new vertical tail whip technique in return. He recalled seeing Aria doing this one, a particular undulation of the hindquarters that generated considerable centrifugal force. Naturally, the slightest inclination of his thoughts toward the lethal whipping action of certain hindquarters, notably those of cobalt colouration, instantly wrecked his concentration.\n\nOccupational hazard.\n\nNightfall came early and drizzly. Exactly what the wicked Dragon had ordered off the menu.\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" Yardi stated, when asked.\n\n\"Why?\" Dragon said.\n\n\"Someone has to get inside the gatehouses and spike the mechanisms of the portcullises. That's my job. I'm a blacksmith and armourer. Me and gears \u2026\" She flexed her shoulders meaningfully, and when that did not change his expression, patted the large hammer he noticed had made its way into her equipment. \"My job isn't all about shaping and crafting, Dragon. Sometimes, a good old-fashioned round of demolition is called for.\"\n\nHe displayed twenty fangs. \"Have I told you how much I like your attitude? So refreshing. Plus, I see our wardrobe has also undergone a little modification \u2013 do I spy actual trousers?\"\n\n\"If a Princess can flaunt it, so can I. These are utilitarian, hard-wearing and surprisingly comfortable.\"\n\nA blush belied her words, however.\n\n\"Kingdoms have toppled over less,\" Yarimda put in dryly.\n\n\"You approved, grandmother.\"\n\n\"It's all the rage in man-snatching equipment, my dear. Lockable metal cages, wild panthers and snug trousers are all a girl needs \u2013\"\n\n\"Grandmother! You are positively wicked.\"\n\n\"Oh, live a little. Now, you children run along and play with the nice castle.\"\n\n\"The previously unconquerable \u2013\"\n\nYarimda quelled Dragon with a look. \"I am speaking, young fire breather! I plan to relax right here. I've a fire and this lovely wineskin of red someone appears to have snuck into my belongings. Fresh from the King's personal cellar, I believe. Can't imagine how it might have got there.\" Chuckling at her granddaughter's scandalised expression, she added, \"I asked, of course. King Harilan wanted to give me a gift, but I don't need anything, not where I'm going. I suggested a suitable vintage might ease the chill of these damp Amboraine nights. Young Harilan has commendable taste, I must confess.\"\n\nYardi folded her arms. \"You haven't changed a bit, have you?\"\n\n\"Not in ninety-four years.\"\n\n\"You're an inspiration.\"\n\n\"Are you lot still here? I was planning to enjoy the peace and quiet, at least until the screams, crashing and burning begin.\"\n\n\"How's about we go plan our pillaging?\" Dragon said heartily.\n\n\"What an excellent idea,\" Yarimda grumbled. \"Have fun.\"\n\nArmed and dangerous, they took a slightly roundabout route, flying a mile to the south before scaling the heights and doubling back. Shortly, they knelt or perched upon the lip of the ravine, gazing down at the lamps and fires flickering in the darkness.\n\n\"Anyone can see why he chose this spot,\" Chalice growled. \"So, those will be the outer fortifications, the middle wall is here beneath us, and there's one last set beside the castle itself, I make it. Those look \u2026 challenging.\"\n\n\"Aye, but the middle gates could be dealt with from the inside \u2013 nothing too scary there,\" Yardi commented. \"Big crossbar, big Dragon.\"\n\n\"You speak my language,\" he purred.\n\n\"What if we attack the outer and inner walls simultaneously?\" Azania suggested. \"Dragon on the outer gates and us three girls see if we can sneak in and deal with the inner ones? Can't imagine they would shut the portcullis as a matter of course. Not unless directly threatened.\"\n\nChalice narrowed her eyes. \"I see guards on both sides of the battlements plus movement at ground level.\"\n\n\"Aye. They're on the alert, as expected,\" the Princess agreed. \"Shall we do this?\"\n\nYardi said, \"If they get the drop on you, Dragon, don't go bend that portcullis, alright? It'll be easier for us to raise it again and then smash the mechanism. Otherwise, you'd have to dismantle that entire wall to get the King's men through.\"\n\n\"Understood.\"\n\nThat would require more than a dint of muscular flexing.\n\nChalice said, \"The mechanism is probably worked from that little room on this near side of the ravine \u2013 see the light? Flame that, and nobody should be dropping anything anywhere.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Dragon,\" Azania said as they clasped paws and hands.\n\n\"May you soar, Princess. Chalice. Yardi,\" he growled. \"Be safe, be strong and be smart.\"\n\nAs they snuck away, he heard Yardi whisper, \"Is he always that protective of you, Princess? I never imagined such sweetness from a Dragon.\"\n\n\"Aye, he's all the rage,\" she joked back. \"But never call a Dragon \u2013\"\n\nTheir voices faded.\n\n*Grrr!* Just the commentary to warm up his fires.\n\nA bright white fright sneaking through the night, he padded up and over a small ridge, angling for the outer gate. His senses reached out \u2013 oh! He noticed a guard station right up here. Cunning, now that he thought about it. He had approached within ten yards before he realised what he was seeing.\n\nTaking a glance back over his shoulder, he spied Chalice's signal; a brief flare of orange jetted out between her fangs. He made a slow count of two hundred to allow the girls \u2013 *har-har-haaarrgghhh*, the Dragoness' sour expression at being called 'one of the girls' \u2013 to get into position. No chance of seeing them from here. Was he truly protective? Overprotective? Maybe, but his theoretically captive Princess had been there for him when all he wanted to do with his life was to throw himself off a cliff and never open his wings. He owed her everything. She might say the same, considering the circumstances from which he had rescued her.\n\nHow could he ever give this girl to another?\n\nThat King Azerim had better be the best, noblest, brightest, worthiest, most honourable \u2013 he laughed at himself, and reeled off a list as long as his tail. He had better be all of those things, and stupidly handsome and completely besotted with his Azania besides, or he would gut him like a fish!\n\nOn the count of one hundred and sixty-three, a soldier emerged from the door, untying the laces of his trousers. \"Nature calls,\" he called back inside. \"No looking at my cards.\"\n\nDragon froze. Icicle. <I am the night.>\n\nSinging an inane little ditty, the fellow proceeded to relieve himself at surprising length, making sounds of grotesque satisfaction all the while. Then he turned, and looked directly at the fifty-three-foot monstrosity lurking behind him.\n\nHe smiled courteously. \"Greetings.\"\n\nUnfortunately, this man was a screamer rather than a fainter.\n\nClearly a detriment to his kingdom, Dragon decided, removing his talon from the man's chest. Not screaming any longer, was he? Darting over to the guard post, he smashed down the door and scrabbled about inside, crunching several men up together with a table and a bed, perhaps. He flapped his paw back and forth until nothing moved or squawked in there anymore.\n\nTime for this Dragon to shift his tail.\n\nOver the edge he dived, angling for the glint of light Chalice had pointed out. His lips pursed. Despite the blurriness, he took aim and filled that spot with his fire. There. Nobody left to operate the portcullis. On to the outer entryway, which needed a gentle, loving sort of tap. As he landed, Dragon darted into the wide tunnel that led to the outer gate, a thick timber arrangement that lifted like a drawbridge from above a deep moat. He struck it with his shoulder, rattling the mechanisms so powerfully that he heard stone falling off the battlements. A little aged, perhaps? Kick! Kick! Nothing but a good rattle. Might have to burn through the chains and ratchet system, if he could.\n\nDragon backed up, preparing himself for another charge, when he heard a loud squeal right above his back. By his wings, the portcullis!\n\nMust have flamed the wrong room.\n\nFright lent his paws wings. From a coiled position, he launched into an all-out charge. The metal tips of the portcullis smashed down upon his tail, but he wrenched through and hit the massive timbers of the outer door so hard, splinters exploded from the ratchets at its base and the chains at the top.\n\nIt fell outward slowly. *Graboom!*\n\nPerfect path into the castle. If the defenders had not been awake before, they certainly were now.\n\nFaint cries sounded from further away.\n\nSwarming up to the top of the battlement, he punched, flamed and tail-slapped the gate guard out of his way, clearing the area. Where was the gatehouse that controlled the portcullis mechanism? There. Opposite side from what Chalice had \u2013 no, he had hit the wrong room, as suspected. Foolish mistake!\n\nGnashing his fangs, he did the necessary.\n\nNo reaching inside there. The window was too narrow and the stairway too long for his paw. He'd leave this job for Yardi. Whirling, Dragon raked the deep darkness at the bottom of the gulley with his gaze. Night sight was no problem for the Dragonkind, but his ability to focus was doing its absolute worst. He nearly missed a soldier almost beneath his paws. A sword pierced his gut.\n\n*GNARRR!!*\n\n*Thump.* Dragon dropped the body in the stream which ran alongside the paved road leading to the second gate. No more men here.\n\nBeyond the second battlement, he heard Chalice's roar and the clash of steel upon steel. Were the girls in trouble? One way to find out \u2013 charge!\n\nArrows and then javelins spat at him out of the darkness. Defenders up on the battlement. Gathering his legs, Dragon sprang sideways and then ran up the steep side of the gulley, throwing them off their aim, before leaping free with a violent, exuberant twist that brought him down atop the gully-spanning wall. Four-pawed catch.\n\nHe bared his fangs in fury. *BBRRROOOARRRGGHH!!*\n\nWhite fire blasted out of his jaw, bathing the length of the battlement in blistering flames. Several men leaped away before the fire reached them, but a fall from this height for a Human was no trivial matter, he had learned. Dull thuds proclaimed their demise. That left this gate unguarded. Next, he must deal with whatever trouble had beset Azania and Yardi. Ripping the huge crossbeam out of its slots with a violent flexion, Dragon hefted the wood onto his shoulder and rushed toward the innermost gate, where Chalice's flame flared bright through the cracks.\n\n\"Get that net secured!\"\n\n\"Ballistae \u2013 load up, you fools!\" another voice cursed.\n\n*Clong!* \"Take that!\" Yardi's voice, no doubt punctuated by the fine ring of her hammer.\n\nHe loved grammar, especially when an exclaiming enemy came to a full stop.\n\nOne must always be sure to hammer a point home.\n\nThundering in rage, Dragon leaped for the top of the final battlement, and came up short. The crossbeam slewed off his shoulder, knocking three soldiers off the wall.\n\nWhy had he even been carrying the beam?\n\nBruised ribs, scraped belly and a wrenched knee later, he was over. Fire! White hosed from his mouth, bathing the battlements, the courtyard and the castle itself as he used the brightness of his fires to target the enemy wherever they moved. Chalice squirmed beneath a heavy reinforced net, while a squad of soldiers tried to fight their way into a narrow stone doorway that must lead to the portcullis mechanism.\n\nDragon slapped them aside with the flat of his paw. \"Leave my women alone!\"\n\nWhirling, he tail-lashed them on the fly, crumpling the squad against their own battlement. \"Stuff that up your semicolon!\"\n\nErm \u2026 whatever.\n\n\"Princess, alright in there?\"\n\n\"Now we are, thank you. Yardi's hurt but alright. Safe to come \u2013\"\n\n*Whurr-whap!*\n\nDragon roared as a ballista quarrel slashed through his upraised wing, missing the arch of his spine by a talon's breadth. Trying for the disabling shot, were they? Consumed by a blind fury, he sprang twenty feet into the air and clawed his way up the side of the castle, beating his wings to help him reach the ballistae set on a pair of turrets. The quickness of the second crew saw a quarrel embedded shallowly in his right flank, a long wound but not deep, as he dealt with the first ballista. He sprang over and smashed the second off its mount.\n\nBy then, Chalice had thrashed free of the net and was making merry down below, clearing the courtyard area.\n\nYardi called, \"Smashed the mechanism. Just the gate now, Dragon.\"\n\nRushing down the side of the castle, he paused briefly to aim fire at several faces he glimpsed in the narrow windows.\n\nLittle dots in stone parentheses.\n\nHe landed hard but safely and stalked over to the castle's main doors. They had been barred at multiple levels, as best he could tell.\n\n\"Fire them!\" Azania ordered, rushing up to his neck.\n\nPure white billowed before him. Thirty seconds. A minute. The Princess picked off an archer, while Chalice amused herself by setting the keep's door and then the wooden storage sheds inside the battlements on fire.\n\nHis white stream guttered.\n\n\"Oh! That hasn't happened before.\"\n\nThe main gates were burning merrily now, however. He hoped he could produce an artistically charred ruin for the King's forces to admire on their way in.\n\nDragon cracked open his jaw. No fire at all. He had a raging \u2013\n\n\"Drink from the fountain?\" Azania suggested.\n\n\"Good idea.\"\n\nHe drank thirstily, while the Princess helped Yardi to secure a temporary bandage around her left forearm. Sword cut. He gulped hard as with a dull *whomp* inside his chest somewhere, the ignition process restarted and he had to gush fire once more at the gate, or something inside of him might tear all over again. Imagining himself to be a blacksmith, he played the stream against the crossbeams and locks, experimenting with where the fire was hottest. Metal dripped and ran like water.\n\n*Grr!* Chalice snarled. *GNARR!* \"Stupid door!\"\n\nA loud crash advertised more destruction. Having a merry old time, Dragoness? He saw darkness through the massive timbers now. Turning about, Dragon cocked his hind paw and smashed the wood apart with a powerful kick. *GRABOOM!*\n\n\"Maybe rip that one off its hinges?\" Azania suggested politely.\n\nHe wanted to warn the little Human not to sneak up on a Dragon while he was engaged in honourable pillaging, but realised that would only sound foolish and ungrateful. Instead, he said, \"I think you could do it at this stage, Princess.\"\n\nHe pressed through the stone archway and finished the job, heaping up the burning timbers in order to maximise the damage.\n\n\"Yardi? Princess? Let's mount up.\"\n\nChalice purred, \"Just when I was getting started.\"\n\n\"I left an entire gate for you to tear apart,\" he grinned back. \"Yardi, I dropped that outer portcullis by mistake. Shall we take a stroll out of Lord Varlan's castle, tidying up a few items along the way?\"\n\nAfter all, one would not like to leave any participles \u2013 or particles \u2013 dangling.\n\nDragons preferred complete sentences. So erudite.\n\n[ Beginning of the End ]\n\nSmoke still billowed out of the castle by the next morning. Something must have caught in there. Unlucky. A nice, thick and symmetrical plume, however. Rather tasteful, all things considered. To his left, the Princess changed Yardi's bandages.\n\nHe sidled over to admire her stitches. \"See? You can do fine needlework, Princess.\"\n\n\"Hardly a skill I prized until now. Still, all that instruction does seem to have come in useful, especially as pertains to sewing up your mouth \u2013 I mean your flank, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Very funny.\"\n\n\"I know, I'm in stitches.\"\n\n\"Sew what?\" he guffawed. \"Keep needling me until you find the right thread.\"\n\nContrived, one had to admit. Worth at least half a snort.\n\nUp and away they flew. The route was northerly at first, skirting the foot of The Anvil, before the Dragons were able to swing their muzzles to the northwest for the straight run to the Kingdom of Dorline. With Yarimda taken moderately ill, they flew four short stints during the course of the day, crossing the Rillimis River on the second leg. Dense forest cover stretched to the horizon, a beautiful sea of summery greens and a few patches of deep burgundy leaves to break up the monotony.\n\nDragon worried over his passenger. Ninety-four was a ripe old age to be gallivanting around the kingdoms as a Dragon Rider. Far from being daunted, Yarimda alternated between dozing in Yardi's arms and telling him she was having the time of her life.\n\nShe said he was a gift.\n\nHe actually blushed in all of his fires. *Grr.* Giving the elderly license was one thing. Having to put up with compliments, however well meant, was quite another.\n\nThe next day was Yardi's turn to be taken ill \u2013 in her case, in bouts of alarming violence that started during the night. All the worst of Human illness, too, with nasty, offensive things coming out of both ends, sometimes at the same time. Yarimda distracted her Dragon companions by telling them story after story. She had lived a full and exciting life, she claimed. By sundown Dragon was more than convinced, but the old woman talked beyond midnight. He did not grow bored, not even once. Fascinating! Especially her descriptions of Sea Dragon song language. Experimenting with his new bugle, she agreed that it sounded similar to what she remembered from her beloved Wavewhisperer.\n\nHe might have a built-in capability, with not the foggiest notion how to speak a single word in their tongue. Perfect.\n\nBlank slate. Clay to be moulded.\n\nHe grimaced. All he needed was his long-lost mommy, to put it in the Human way. Azania had lost both her parents. What right had he to feel unfortunate in any way?\n\nWith Yardi doing her best impression of a limp but recovering dishrag, they journeyed on into the Kingdom of Dorline. Human homesteads appeared to be few and far between, but they stopped at a likely-looking place in the late afternoon to inquire after herbs to help Yardi's upset stomach. With the Dragons standing a short ways off and out of sight, so as not to upset anyone, they greeted Azania by setting their pack of hounds upon her.\n\nIt could have gone badly. So badly.\n\nHe did not understand the pack's baying until the last second. Chalice was already streaking ahead, but the thought had been in his mind that the canines intended to greet his Princess.\n\nHis roar hit a shattering peak that threw the dogs into confusion for long enough that the charging Dragoness was able to blow fire in their direction and keep them at bay. She skidded to a halt above Azania, somehow managing to keep her great paws from stomping her flat.\n\nHe remembered charging, too; and an incongruous moment when the jet stream of his fire picked the hounds up and flung them away in the blink of an eye, so fast that only a couple were actually engulfed in flame. After landing in a smoking heap, the rest were able to run away, yowling in fear. Then he was at Chalice's side, panting, snarling, wondering what to do with all the fire churning inside of him.\n\nA sense of knowing shook him to the core: The flash of a fang, and her life could have been much shorter.\n\nEmerging from behind Chalice's paws, Azania gasped, \"I think they thought I was a ghost. Or a corpse.\"\n\nHe turned slowly toward the wooden house.\n\n\"Dragon. Dragon! Don't \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't what? Give them a piece of my mind?\"\n\n\"They're just \u2026 frightened.\" She said it as if the realisation had only just struck her. \"They're frightened of me. My blackness.\"\n\nStaggering up to them, Yardi said, \"People are often afraid of \u2013 blugh!\" She threw up. \"Sorry. Differences. Let me go and knock at the door. Maybe I'm white enough not to earn the dog treatment.\"\n\nHe stared at Azania.\n\n\"Look, as you can tell, not all black peoples' experiences are the same, nor are they the same in different places,\" she muttered. \"I'm alright, Dragon. Shocked and \u2026 sad, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Angry?\"\n\n\"Spitting mad. They're so ignorant, yet I understand why.\"\n\n\"Aye. The woman inside just said she's never seen a black person before.\" Nudging her shoulder gently, he said, \"And here I thought you had earned your very first mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. Doubtless you can look forward to that pleasure in the future, Princess.\"\n\n\"Hopefully not. I'm not a big, stinky, fire-stuffed reptile, after all.\"\n\n\"Almost, but I have noticed a few differences.\"\n\n\"A difference in scale?\"\n\n\"Me being upscale and you, downscale?\"\n\nThey shared a gloomy chuckle together. Amazing to him \u2013 he should not be amazed, but even so, he was \u2013 that at this most shocking juncture, her spirit shone. Bravery was not always what he expected it to be.\n\nShe said, \"Inzashu said I should share this joke with you: 'Why do Dragons make such great musicians?'\"\n\nHe frowned. \"No idea.\"\n\n\"They know their scales inside out.\"\n\n\"Groan.\"\n\n\"I told her that's what you'd say.\"\n\nHalf an hour later, they shared the Dorline tradition of an afternoon cup of bark tea and ginger biscuits with a family of seventeen, sitting beneath a huge, spreading tree in their front yard. Following Dorline culture, the husband, wife and five children lived together with his brother and wife and their three, plus various other relatives that Dragon never did get straight.\n\nThey all stared at the Princess as if she had dropped from the stars above. However, it was the children that surprised him most. They accepted her within moments. Had it not been for the mother's reaction, most of them would never have had a second thought about a black-skinned person \u2013 just now, two girls sat behind her playing with her hair, and another little boy had plopped himself down in her lap with the air of one who never intended to leave.\n\nWas this business of noticing difference inborn, he mused, or learned?\n\nWhen did Dragons learn to value blue scales above brown, for example, and who taught them to fear the white fire of Sea Dragons?\n\nOn another note, who taught his kind that Humans were fleas, cockroaches and vermin? Or that they did not deserve to be treated with dignity and respect? Shame at who he had been before burned from his paws right up into his wingtips. He had thought these things. Lived these lies. Should have known better, Dragon \u2013 but it was easier just to wing along with others and not think too deeply about it, wasn't it?\n\nFour children played happily between his paws. The adults smelled deeply unhappy about this, he had noticed, but everyone politely ignored the perfectly obvious. Perhaps they feared to point it out, lest he become angered and sup upon their tiny progeny?\n\nOne tripped and fell. He plucked her up and righted her. \"There you go.\"\n\n\"Thanksh, mishter Dwaggin,\" she lisped.\n\nOh, alright then. Human children could be tolerable, at times. Although, this lot had clearly never learned a healthy fear of the Dragonkind.\n\nHe hoped none of his kin ever happened along to teach them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Reinforced with herbs that ought to settle Yardi's misbehaving stomach, two Dragons and three Humans flew on up to the Kingdom of Dorline, to the City of White. White people wearing white, who lived in whitewashed houses with white roof tiles. It was a matter of some relief to the eye that local competitiveness appeared to major upon growing flowers lusher and more beautiful than one's neighbour.\n\nAlso, all of the citizens acted weirdly detached. They wandered about the broad, white-cobbled streets with an air of deep contemplation. Far too deep to notice two Dragons strolling into town. They merely avoided the approaching Dragons as if they were oddly mobile houses.\n\nYardi said, \"There's meant to be a Blacksmiths' Quarter here somewhere. I'll go ask for directions.\"\n\n\"How odd. They don't even notice you, Azania,\" Dragon commented.\n\n\"I was thinking about what you said about seeing difference,\" she replied, her mind evidently not dwelling upon a place a white Dragon could blend into perfectly. \"It should matter, yet it should not.\"\n\n\"Aha. At the same time, right? As in \u2013\"\n\n\"They should be held in tension. Aye! Differences absolutely matter. Differences are what make for uniqueness and diversity, art and beauty; it's what makes us stronger. Yet differences are not to be feared \u2013 even, not to be noticed at all. Why should it matter that Yarimda is light and I am dark? We are both Human beings; we bleed the same, yet we're also very different.\"\n\n\"We fear the other, that which is not us, the not familiar,\" he said. \"We Dragons joke that like likes like \u2013 it's just Dragon nature. And Human, if your frown is anything to judge by.\"\n\nShe thought out loud, \"I guess it's what's inside that matters, isn't it? It's about how in the case of that family we met, perhaps one is taught from a young age to fear the black robber from the desert. I've never been mistaken for a robber before. It's as stupid as believing black people hide better in the dark, so we must of course be wonderful robbers and own the night. Built for it.\"\n\n\"Blergh.\"\n\n\"Precisely my point. I was wrong to be so furious with you before.\"\n\n\"Ah \u2026 about what?\"\n\n\"Last time we spoke, when you lectured me about there not being any actual white or black people. I kicked you. I mean, if you don't see me as black, then you don't see all that I am! You don't see me! Blackness is my core identity \u2013 or at least, what I've always been taught is my identity. I guess I'm starting to learn that identity isn't necessarily rational or even coherent, and it's far more complicated than I ever imagined. The Black Rose of the Desert is as much an idea and an ideal of beauty, as I am a real person. Those knights were all chasing an idea about my identity, but they had no clue who the real Azania is. This person who befriended a Dragon and somehow stumbled into becoming a Dragon Rider \u2013 that hardly feels real, oftentimes, yet it is me.\"\n\nRaising a paw, he touched her cheek. \"Why are you crying?\"\n\n\"Because I'm so happy.\"\n\nJust when he thought he understood the first thing about a Human woman.\n\n\"Oh Dragon, you're so silly. My heart is so full it could burst, but right now, happiness has bubbled to the top, because I believe I've learned something.\"\n\n\"So have I.\"\n\n\"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?\"\n\n\"I do think I'm thinking what you're thinking, but you had best tell me in case I've somehow got it wrong. There's a fairly high chance.\"\n\n\"Is there?\" the Princess smiled, clasping his paw with both hands. \"You're the best friend ever. What I wanted to say is \u2026 I've realised that it doesn't matter. What a release! I feel so light, I'm almost floating \u2013 because skin colour has been such a burden for me, bigger than any mountain. This nonsense that I'm supposed to be the most beautiful woman in Solixambria because by some cosmic accident I was born black, born a Princess, and \u2013\"\n\n\"Stop,\" he growled. \"First talon, you are beautiful for many reasons, and aye, some of those do have to do with differences. Smallness, darkness, crazy curly hair, physical magnetism, and let us never forget the ability to make trousers smoke \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! Serious conversation. Mmm?\"\n\nHe pressed his talon to her lips. \"Be silent until I have finished being exasperating. Now, where was I? Aye, more importantly, I could expound many points relating to your character and deeds, and the fact that some people are born into royalty and some are royal, and there's a royally enormous difference right there. Second talon, you were and are no accident! What a frightful pile of droppings that statement was, I can hardly begin to spit off the end of my forked tongue. Do we understand one another?\"\n\nShe nodded meekly.\n\nDragon narrowed his eyes. In his experience, meekness and Azania did not belong in the same sentence. Not even in the same book!\n\nHe removed his talon.\n\n\"It's all black and white to me,\" she smiled. \"Black Princess, white Dragon. No wonder we make such an awesome team.\"\n\nThey shook paw and hand solemnly.\n\nHe said, \"You know, we might be as different creatures as can be imagined, but sometimes I could almost swear that we were cut of the same hide and scale.\"\n\nAzania, nodding, started as her gaze fell upon his neck. \"Yarimda, are you alright?\"\n\n\"Never better, my dear,\" she said. \"I love hearing you and Dragon speak. Hands down, that was one of the best conversations I have ever eavesdropped upon in my nine and a half decades. Believe me, keyholes and my right ear used to be extremely well acquainted. It gives me hope for both races, Dragon and Human, and peace for when I pass on, knowing that two creatures of integrity will be stirring up trouble from one end of the continent to the other.\"\n\nThe Princess dropped her gaze, quite possibly as embarrassed as he was.\n\n\"Yardi's beckoning for us. Shake a paw, Dragons. I shan't be growing younger any time soon.\"\n\nThey walked farther up into the walled city before taking a branching road toward the east. Yarimda rode upon his neck as if she were a queen.\n\nThe city's unrelenting white continued out into the mercantile and artisans quarter, but here at least people noticed them and paused to stare or comment to their neighbours. He understood that Dorline had been the subject of a decades-long feud with the Slasher Clan Dragons, but the populace did not seem to be alarmed. Maybe that was because they were not wheeling overhead thundering threats and swooping to fire-blast houses, just as a consideration?\n\n\"We're looking for Gamoz Blacksmith's place,\" Yardi said. \"Apparently, we can't miss it. They're the biggest and best in the kingdom, and well-staffed. Even better, Dorline is famed for the quality of its weapons and armour. They said the same in Amboraine.\"\n\nAzania said, \"Will that couple you recruited travel here first?\"\n\n\"Aye. They're game for an adventure.\"\n\n\"Here comes the guard,\" her grandmother pointed out.\n\nNot everyone had their heads stuffed full of clouds. The city guard, clad in natty green robes and wearing full chainmail armour, trotted down the street in neat, businesslike formation. Ready for action, but aye, since no great effort at pillaging, snorting fire and stomping over the merchandise was being made, the fifty-strong detachment visibly relaxed as they approached.\n\nRoutine. Couple of Dragons in town.\n\nChalice nudged his shoulder. \"Amazing how creatures can get on when we're not ripping heads off or having knights poke at us with lances, right?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" he purred. \"Almost civilised.\"\n\n\"Product of high intelligence,\" the Dragoness agreed. \"Truly innovative, actual diplomacy.\"\n\n\"Help me down please, Dragon.\" With the help of his forepaw, Yarimda descended. She arranged her knees with a soft groan, and leaned heavily upon her walking stick. \"Some things about growing old are not to be enjoyed.\"\n\nThe leader of the detachment, distinguished by a green star he wore upon his chest, took pause as he stopped ten feet away. \"Do I know you, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Conquiran Garamdi! Well met!\" Yarimda said.\n\n\"Yarimda-mah Ociane?\" he spluttered, bowing a second time, deeper than before. \"An unexpected honour. You are looking very well.\"\n\nDragon looked on in bemusement as the old woman straightened, as if a memory of being pervaded her person. Regal. \"It is good to see you again, lad. I'd say something embarrassing, like, 'my, how you've grown,' but your men are listening. May I present my granddaughter, Yardi-mae Ociane?\"\n\nAnother bow. \"Ma'am. I see the resemblance.\"\n\nYardi made an uncomfortable obeisance. \"Conquiran Garamdi \u2013 you are the leader of all of Dorline's military?\"\n\n\"Goes with the title, ma'am.\" Clearing his throat, he said, \"It is most awkward, I confess, but I must inquire what two women of your station are doing in our kingdom in the company of a disreputable desert scoundrel and two dangerous Dragons.\"\n\nStation? Whatever did he mean?\n\nHe could have fallen over laughing at Azania's belligerent expression.\n\n\"Behave yourself, scoundrel,\" he whispered for her ears alone.\n\nShe clenched her little fists. \"Dragon \u2026\"\n\nYarimda said, \"While we are in town, we should like to brief you about the Skartun invasion of the south, Conquiran. Our companions are travelling through with us and mean this city and its people no harm. We seek to hire armourers and blacksmiths for the war effort. For my part, I plan to travel back to my native Hamirythe one last time. I would like to heal a rift in our family which has been allowed to fester for far too long. I know you are aware of the history, and of my part in it.\"\n\n\"I am, ma'am,\" he said, his eyes resting upon Azania's sword.\n\nShe smiled at the Conquiran as if his suspicion were the stuff of delightful sunbeams.\n\nSuddenly, his knee collapsed as if he had been struck by a ten-pound hammer. \"I fear I have made an unforgivable error! Forgive me \u2013 you are the daughter of King N'gala, unless I miss my mark?\"\n\n\"I am the Princess Azania,\" she said. \"Travelling in disguise.\"\n\nAlways gracious, but Dragon scented the tones of her emotions and knew her outward politeness for the show it was. He also touched upon emotions beyond \u2013\n\nHis paw snapped out, catching Yarimda as she slumped with a low cry.\n\nThis was the start of a kerfuffle that consumed some time. Yarimda insisted she was fine; everyone else knew she was not. The Conquiran hustled her over to the nearest doctor's office, a walk of just a single block. The tall, severe-looking man examined her, and said that the best option \u2013 and the only one \u2013 was rest.\n\nShe was not well, he added gravely.\n\n\"Dying?\" Yardi asked. \"We know. How \u2026 how long, doctor?\"\n\n\"Your grandmother is a strong woman, Yardi-mae,\" he replied, \"but she is also very elderly and not well. Her organ function is becoming poor and she is suffering considerable pain. I fear it will be a matter of weeks \u2013 I am sorry, ma'am.\"\n\nYardi rubbed her temples. \"I knew; still, it's so hard. All she wanted was to go home to the Kingdom of Hamirythe.\"\n\n\"How has she been travelling?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\"Dragonback.\"\n\n\"Pardon? I mean \u2026 I can ease her pain, but that is all I can do. Today, she must rest. Leave your grandmother with me, my staff will look after her overnight. I will consider how best you might fulfil her wish.\" He made a superstitious sign with his hand. \"May those who seek to bless the elderly, be blessed. Truly, you honour her long life.\"\n\nWhen Yardi went in to see her, Yarimda was asleep.\n\n[ Orphan Smiths ]\n\nGamoz blacksmith's place was rather odd, as far as forges went. Even a Dragon could tell as much. First of all, it occupied an old schoolhouse over half a block long. The interior of one end had been knocked out to create a cavernous space in which no less than four forges operated. Space enough for a sneaky-pawed white creature to wander inside and take a good look around. Farther back was a busy leather-making trade \u2013 animal yokes, buckets and armour straps, as best he could tell. No trousers for females. Definitely missing a trick there.\n\nThe whole place was run by children.\n\nHe rubbed his eyes and checked again. The children did not evaporate, replaced by responsible adults. As best he could tell, the oldest ones could not be any older than Azania, and the youngest should not, in his opinion, be working anywhere near such a busy, dangerous environment.\n\nYardi gazed about the premises, openly taken aback.\n\nAfter a few moments, one of the young men noticed them \u2013 a tall, spare, dark-haired youth. Putting down the weapon he had been working on, he took off his heavy gloves, rubbed his hands upon his apron as if to clean them, and approached.\n\n\"Ma'am, ma'am, honoured Dragons. How may I help?\"\n\n\"This is Gamoz's place?\" Yardi asked.\n\n\"Aye, ma'am,\" said he, taking her for the leader. His tan cheeks flushed as he glanced at Azania, however. Dragon practically heard the 'woof' of his emotions. \"May I fetch your order?\"\n\n\"No. I would like to examine a few samples of your work, please.\"\n\n\"At once.\"\n\nYardi inspected the farming implements, weapons and household items with an expert eye. The boy knew her for a smith with a single glance at her hands, never mind her muscled arms. His answers were as concise as her questions, covering processes, quality and finishing. Moving over to the leather tables, they did the same, sparring with words. A reply for every quick question. Salient details. Acknowledging a flaw which must have crept in.\n\nAt length, Yardi said, \"I'm impressed. Who runs this establishment? Is it only children employed here, and do you earn a good living wage? Is there a Master?\"\n\n\"Of course, ma'am. He's in the back, taking stock. Shall I \u2013\"\n\n\"Aye, fetch him, please.\"\n\nWith a polite nod, the earnest lad rushed off.\n\n\"Not bad,\" Azania commented.\n\n\"The work or the worker?\" Dragon teased. She waggled her tongue at him. \"Did I catch you sneaking a look there?\"\n\n\"Like he didn't.\"\n\n\"Oh alright, that excuses everything.\"\n\nHer glare promised that a whole world of pain would shortly be delivered to his lair.\n\n\"This is certainly an interesting operation,\" Yardi commented meantime, glancing about the huge room again. \"I'm not sure we'll get any recruits here. Might need to look farther.\"\n\n\"How may I serve, ladies? Dragons?\"\n\nAs Dragon turned, Yardi stepped around his muzzle, and stopped dead in her tracks. \"Garan!\"\n\n\"Yardi-mae!\"\n\n\"It's been a while.\"\n\n\"Aye. A month shy of thirteen years.\"\n\nThe silence became so awkward, Dragon felt he could have bottled it and sold it as poison to the Skartun. At once, she said, \"You broke my heart,\" and the blacksmith whispered, \"You left without a word.\"\n\nGaran was a big, broad-shouldered man \u2013 big enough to be a hand taller than Yardi, who was no small woman. Dragon supposed Humans might call him a giant. Curly red hair! That was unusual, he understood. He had never seen a Human of such colouration \u2013 red hair and beard, tan skin perhaps from his work at the forge, and a freckled nose which gave him a mischievous air. Maybe if he had not been staring at his massive boots as if wishing he could be anywhere in Solixambria but here.\n\nYardi raised her chin. \"That was a long time ago. You seem to be doing well for yourself. Are these your children?\"\n\n\"Aye. All mine.\"\n\n\"All? My my, you have been busy.\"\n\nThe man flushed at her tone, his knuckles whitening on the belt of his smock. \"I am not that man anymore, Yardi-mae. This is not what it seems.\"\n\n\"Exploitation of child labour? No, obviously not.\"\n\n\"These are orphans.\" Dragon sensed the implosion of Yardi's shame. Garan said steadily, \"I would thank you for not shaming me in front of my charges. I run a registered orphanage here in Dorline, and what you see is my apprenticeship programme. I am training these children to be smiths, farriers, armourers, leather artisans and the like, so that one day, they can take their place in the world with a trade that will feed their families. I have thirty-two children here and another fourteen placed in other apprenticeships around the city.\"\n\n\"That sounds wonderful,\" Azania put in softly. Chalice agreed in the background.\n\nHe glanced at her as if seeing her for the first time. \"Aye \u2013 uh, is this your \u2026 daughter, Yardi? And Dragons? What are you doing here with Dragons?\"\n\nThe insult! He had only just noticed? Dragon pictured serving his head up on a large toothpick. Brains, fried, scrambled and spiced to perfection. Mmm \u2026\n\nIt was Yardi's turn, pink of cheek, to gaze at her feet. He understood that this was courtship behaviour, usually between younger Humans \u2013 more Azania's age, say. This pretence of reticence from both sides, which concealed all the other emotions. He sense scented attraction beneath all the hurts. It flung him away into the scent memory of a younger Dragon's blundering attempts to impress various Dragonesses, which had inevitably ended in shame.\n\nExcept with Ariamyrielle Seaspray.\n\nSomehow, having done nothing at all, it seemed he had managed to make an impression on her \u2013 following which, fate had turned around and paw-slapped him with a blow fit to shatter mountains.\n\nSigh.\n\nCollecting his thoughts as Azania introduced him and herself as his Dragon Rider, no relation to Yardi, he wondered how a Dragon could possibly insert a talon and stir this fate in the right direction. Him being such a flaming genius at relationships and all that.\n\nHe said, \"You seem busy, Blacksmith Garan.\"\n\n\"Aye, but profits are poor. It's been a brutal stretch.\" Scratching his head, he said almost defiantly, \"After your family made sure I was kicked out of Hamirythe and my reputation ruined, Yardi, I ended up here. I inherited a mountain of debt from my mother and the use of this place, which was covered by a punitive loan that crushed my parents. The stress killed them. I took over here on my twenty-second birthday.\"\n\n\"What changed you, Garan?\" Yardi asked, ever so softly.\n\nHis fingers trembled. \"Y-You \u2026 actually. What I did \u2013 I've never regretted anything so much in my life \u2013 I searched for you for three years, woman! All over the Northern Kingdoms.\"\n\n\"I ended up in Chakkix Camp.\"\n\n\"Chakkix? That's \u2013\"\n\n\"Northern T'nagru. You \u2026 searched?\"\n\nHe heaved a massive, defeated sigh. \"What does it matter? What are you doing here, Yardi-mae? Look, I don't \u2026 have time for a \u2026 for this. I've mouths to feed. Times are hard. This may look like a busy operation, but we are stretched to breaking point, what with the new taxation regulations and a drop in business since the war with the Slasher Clan ended \u2013 which is good, but not good, if you follow my meaning.\"\n\nShe nodded, biting her lip.\n\n\"Have you business for me? I will take anything you have and give you the best prices in town. You've seen the quality of our work.\"\n\nPoor Yardi. Dragon smelled her out once more, and purred at once, \"Actually, Blacksmith Garan, you sound like just the man we need.\" He ignored his companion's startled headshake. \"There is war in the south, A Skartunese invasion \u2013 this is the Princess of T'nagru, by the way.\"\n\nHis jaw dropped. \"Ma \u2026 uh \u2026\"\n\n\"I know. Far too beautiful for her own good, isn't she? Anyways, we're recruiting blacksmiths to support the war effort, and that's where you come in.\"\n\nThe man's eyes jumped all over the place \u2013 Dragon to Dragoness, then to the Princess who quietly apologised for her Dragon's behaviour, and then to Yardi, where they lingered \u2013 absolutely unmistakably, his gaze lingered. With intent. Since the dawn of time, Dragons and Dragonesses had looked each other over just like that. Clear enough that his feelings might as well have been inked upon a scroll.\n\n\"No. With respect, Dragon, no,\" he grated. \"I am not your man. I can't leave this, don't you see?\"\n\nDragon stroked his chin as if taking a pause for thought. In reality, he was begging Yardi to intervene, but she had lost her tongue. \"Why don't we just take all of you?\"\n\n\"All?\" Azania, Yardi, Chalice and Garan gasped at once.\n\n\"Everything. All. Was I unclear? Every last child, even those in your nursery over there.\"\n\n\"These children depend on me. I have responsibilities. Look, Dragon, you can't just come stomping in here and upend everything I've worked so hard for.\"\n\n\"Ah, but I can. I'm a Dragon. Excuse me \u2013 *achoo!* \" He sneezed aside, very careful to aim at no-one. Flame licked out of his nostrils. \"Look, Garan, you can't just refuse us until you know what we're offering.\"\n\nHe twined his arms across his chest, still shaking his head. Brawny fellow; Yardi's surreptitious glance betrayed her appreciation of his powerful biceps and forearms. There. Humans and Dragons were more alike than anyone supposed. Size mattered.\n\nHe had this under control.\n\nHis Princess said, \"What are you suggesting, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Do you have an office, Garan? Somewhere we can talk in private?\"\n\n\"That door.\"\n\n\"Good. Let's go over there.\"\n\nAt the doorway, everyone paused. No Dragon could fit inside his cluttered office, but that was hardly the point. With a grin as wicked as the points of his fangs, Dragon raised a paw and gently but unstoppably pushed Yardi and Garan inside together. \"Talk.\"\n\nYardi's glare behind the blacksmith's back was a study in fury \u2026 and yearning.\n\nThe blacksmith spluttered, \"And what are you going to do, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Me? I am going to ask your nice apprentices to file my talons and burnish my scales. Then, I plan to have a little snooze, somewhere out of the way \u2013 but beware, I shall have one eye open. If the two of you dare to emerge without some kind of deal, I will be a deeply frustrated, irritable, nasty piece of Dragon you won't want within a hundred miles of your forge. Do we understand one another?\"\n\n\"Dragon, you are evil,\" Azania said primly. \"I apologise \u2013\"\n\n\"Oh, be quiet. You are my captive Princess and you will do what I say.\"\n\nShe folded her arms and tapped her right foot.\n\nReaching out, Dragon pulled the door shut, making Yardi jump to get out of his way. He called, \"I mean it! Talk. Deal! Positive or negative, I don't care, as long as you explore the idea properly. As for you, Princess \u2013\" he winked massively at her \"\u2013 I think we need to have words over here.\"\n\nShe shook her head in consternation, but her smile had never been more brilliant.\n\n\"What?\" he growled.\n\n\"You've turned into quite the despot.\"\n\nHow he purred!\n\nChalice said, \"Truly masterful, Dragon. That's how to treat Humans.\"\n\n\"Aye, I agree. Every now and again, these silly little Humans just need a subtle paw to shove them in the right direction.\"\n\nThe Princess giggled, \"Oh, you were inconceivably subtle, Dragon. I mean, I had no idea what you were doing. Oh, I get it now! You don't think they still like each other, do you? I must have completely missed that.\"\n\nHe snapped toward her hair. \"Shut it, pipsqueak.\"\n\n\"Bully.\"\n\n\"I know. Isn't it marvellous how one can learn new skills?\"\n\n\"Indeed. After all, I aggravate Dragons for a living.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Garan's capable apprentices could sharpen Dragon talons with the best of them. They were also a dab hand at buffing and burnishing scales. He and Chalice positively gleamed by the time they were done.\n\nHowever, their friend was nowhere to be seen.\n\nStill talking?\n\nHmm. Rising, he padded over toward the office despite Azania's quiet protest. The door was shut, but the office had a window covered by curtains inside, only, they had been left open a crack. Putting his eye to the right spot, he peered inside \u2026 and almost shed his scales laughing.\n\nHe padded back to Azania. \"It's going well.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"They aren't talking.\"\n\n\"No? Is something wrong? What could we have \u2013\"\n\n\"Princess, I understand it is a positive sign when two people start sucking one another's faces, correct?\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"Grotesque, I know. What about when she grips his rump like this and squeezes so?\" He made the appropriate motions with his paws.\n\n\"Dragon! They are not \u2026 are they?\"\n\n\"No, it's not what you are thinking. They are still fully clothed. Unless Humans \u2013\"\n\n\"I was not thinking \u2013 you wicked reptile!\" she squealed. \"Will you stop pulling my leg? You're terrible. Oh \u2026 Jossun, was it?\"\n\nThe dark-haired youth smiled uncertainly at her. \"We're meant to be closing up. Is Master Garan still in there with the lady? They must have a lot to discuss.\"\n\n\"They're friends from long ago,\" the Princess said. \"Tell me, is he a good Master?\"\n\n\"Oh, ma'am \u2013 the best! I do hope you have some work for us, though. The Master has been very worried lately. He keeps it to himself, but I hear him walking up and down sometimes at night. He'll say he's looking after the little ones, ma'am, but \u2026\"\n\nShe said, \"We hope they can agree. Please, call me Azania. We're of an age, aren't we? I'm seventeen.\"\n\n\"Seventeen? But you look like a doll, barely twe \u2013 uh, sorry, ma'am. I just thought \u2013\"\n\n\"That's alright. A lot of people say that. My people are petite to begin with, and I am one of the smaller ones of a small nation. I'm tough, though.\" She flexed her right bicep. \"See?\"\n\n\"Impressive,\" he lied.\n\n\"What's impressive is this place,\" she smiled back. \"Quite the team.\"\n\n\"We all look after each other. We have to. Most of the kids here don't know their parents, or they lost them in the wars. Sometimes kids are just dumped on our doorstep. Not everyone is as good as the Master \u2013 ah, here he comes.\"\n\nThe pair were taking pains not to look as if anything had happened, but Dragon saw his fingertips brush hers as they approached.\n\nGaran flicked his head. \"Jossun. Gather the troops, lad. We've something important to discuss. Yardi-mae, please come by tomorrow evening. We should have an answer for you by then \u2013 but I'd like to invite you for dinner, to \u2026 ah, meet the children and learn about what we do. Princess, I expect you'll be wanted at the palace?\"\n\n\"Indeed. This evening.\" She wrinkled her nose. \"I might have to dress up, I guess. Or, what are your feelings about women wearing trousers, Garan?\"\n\nHe almost jumped out of his skin. \"Uh \u2026 you'll find I'm quite progressive, ma'am.\" He tried and failed not to glance at Yardi's legs. \"It was most certainly an interesting proposition, as your Dragon suggested.\"\n\nDragon put in dryly, \"Did you clinch a deal?\"\n\nAzania gave him a warning glare which Yardi picked up on. The blacksmith's pulse flickered wildly in her neck.\n\nHe added, \"Well, I hope you explored her options, Garan \u2013 I mean, by my wings, what a slip of the forked tongue! I hope you'll have a positive reply for us tomorrow evening. The Dragons will need all the help they can get, or I'm afraid the Skartun may choose to rearrange the seventeen kingdoms to their liking.\"\n\nThe minute they were out of sight of the forge, Azania slapped his neck \u2013 hard, for her. \"Dragon, I can't believe you said that!\"\n\nYardi growled, \"What did I miss?\"\n\n\"Oh, you didn't miss anything, I believe,\" he purred archly.\n\nAzania spluttered, \"Dragon! What's gotten into you today, that you must \u2013\"\n\n\"Me?\" Turning to Yardi, he said, \"Confession time. Since your negotiations were taking a while, I peeked through the window. You were talking \u2013\" the woman's eyebrows shot up \"\u2013 aye, talking fluently with your hands, and your body, and then with your lips \u2026\"\n\nYardi turned the colour of the sunset. \"You \u2013 you!\"\n\n\"Just call me Dragon.\"\n\n\"Azania, where did you get him?\"\n\n\"Corner shop, priced to fly off the shelf.\"\n\n*Gnarr-hrr-hrr,* he chortled. \"For my part, I got short-changed at the second-hand royal sale.\"\n\nEven Chalice smacked him for that one."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Three days later, with travel sums having been done, goodbyes said and promises made, Dragon and Chalice set wing for the westering suns. They planned to fly all together to Hamirythe, where Dragon and the Princess would promptly turnabout and fly almost the same return journey. Two long sides of a very flat triangle, as Azania put it. The other option would have been to cool their heels at Mornine for over a week, which did not make a jot of sense.\n\nChalice bore Yardi upon her back.\n\nThe Dragoness did not appear overly comfortable with the arrangement, but she had requested it, claiming the need to practice for the return journey. No way was she walking from Hamirythe to Juggernaut's lair!\n\nExcuses. He grinned to himself. Corrupted another Dragon into doing the unthinkable. He would just change Solixambria one creature at a time.\n\nDragon bore Yarimda in a lightweight travel litter. She was not well enough even to sit for long periods of time, but her complaining about her mode of transportation certainly sounded lively enough. Doctor's orders. He kept his forepaws curled about her bed. The comments could just wash off. This first stretch of a couple of hours until nightfall was just to test her out and assess if she would be able to cope with the far longer journey.\n\nHamirythe was within reach. He could smell it.\n\nHow had she kept her condition hidden for so long? One tough woman.\n\n\"So, you still have a deal?\" Azania prompted, calling over to their friend from Dragon's neck to where Chalice flew slipstream just behind and slightly below his left wing.\n\n\"We do. Garan plans to make everything ready by the time I return. He'll finish up all his orders and hand the forge over to a group of his graduates, who are keen to take over the business. The children were more than excited to embark on an adventure. Over forty! I do hope Juggernaut knows what he's getting into \u2026\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Rest assured, when he sees how they work, he'll be more than grateful.\"\n\nChalice put in, \"You'll need to be open with him about your relationship with Garan, but the point regarding giving orphans a hope and a future \u2013 that will not be lost upon him. Nor upon any Grinder. We may not be the most forward-thinking Clan, but we do like to fly against a trade wind.\"\n\n\"Why is the wind?\" Azania asked.\n\nThe Dragoness chuckled appreciatively. \"Why is the ocean breeze, o Princess?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\nYarimda called weakly, \"The question is, granddaughter, do you know what you're getting into?\"\n\nStiff-backed, she stared at her relative.\n\n\"Dear one, I do believe people can change,\" she smiled. \"Please don't misunderstand; you both explained everything and I accept that. What I meant is, should all proceed as I hope, are you ready to be a mother of over forty all at once?\"\n\nThe blacksmith shook her head. \"I'll be the first to admit that I've no idea what I'm doing. But I am getting along to be thinking about my own children, grandmother. This is a cause I could \u2026 I could thrive in. I truly believe that. I'm not saying it won't be probably the hardest thing I have ever tried \u2013 but the most worthwhile? Aye. Best of all, I won't be running away from my past anymore. Nor will he.\"\n\nPerceptive.\n\n\"He isn't the only one who has changed, child.\"\n\nOh, by his wings! This was so intimate, he could barely stand to overhear.\n\nAfter a moment, he said, \"She's fallen asleep again.\"\n\nYardi wept silently.\n\n[ Ocean Bright ]\n\nIn four long days of flying, the pair of Dragon Rider teams crossed half the breadth of Solixambria, covering hundreds of miles with the aid of a variable breeze from the northeast.\n\n\"We'll be flying against that all the way back,\" he told Azania.\n\nShe made a face that would have shocked any decent Princesses right out of their dainty slippers.\n\nLeaving the dense, tall forests of Dorline in their wake, they swept over a wild hill country where wooded hilltops punctuated dark green streams and patches of saltgrass. Nothing much of use grew in the briny soils. Midway through the journey, they flew across the Taribonli River, well to the north of the ruined, deserted kingdom, and then joined the busy coastal road for the run across the Hamirythe peninsula, past the rugged, windswept coastal mountains famous for their bamboo stands and man-eating tigers, and on to the edge of the Lumis Ocean once more.\n\nThe capital city, Hamir, was a gorgeous cluster of blue-tipped turrets and spires located upon the edge of a sheer white cliff that cut away into the turbulent ocean. The Ociane family was one of the wealthiest and most prominent in the kingdom, owning a massive mansion right on the cliff tops. Yardi's father was a Lord. He would never have thought it of her. Curious what people, and Dragons, might hide beneath their scales \u2013 just as Azania had been mistaken for a robber for the first time in her life.\n\nHe had not stopped tugging her wings about that.\n\nAs Yardi directed them into the grounds of her family mansion \u2013 a pretty castle with whitewashed walls and blue turrets, for all intents and purposes, comprised of two interlocking pentagons with no less than eight towers and a permanent staff of a mere two hundred and sixty servants \u2013 the Princess reflected out loud about her upbringing in comparison to what she had seen of life so far out in the rest of the kingdoms. So privileged. All the wealth, means and station she had always taken for granted; the effortless assumption that her every care and whim would be taken care of by servants.\n\n\"I do love wandering the world in disguise,\" she murmured. \"Plus, there's this teensy-weensy matter of the chance to fly wherever we wish. That is a gift, Dragon. Truly, a gift.\"\n\n\"Aye, one we Dragons don't half take for granted,\" he agreed.\n\n\"Looks like the servants are awake.\"\n\nThe mansion resembled a freshly disturbed anthill.\n\n\"I can't wait to go fishing,\" he said. \"I've a yen to toss something fresh and salty down my gullet. Have to be on the lookout for Sea Serpents, I suppose. Did Yarimda tell us that the beaches are right at the foot of the cliffs?\"\n\n\"Aye, in these tiny inlets. Some are only accessible at low tide.\"\n\nDeep he breathed of the saltiness in the air. Wonderful! Was it pleasure at the fresh nip of that scent, or something deeper, perhaps a connection with the oceanic demesne? He could not imagine what it was like out there \u2013 underwater, or a thousand miles from land. The ocean was said to be a realm far, far vaster than all of Solixambria.\n\nHe also realised that this would be one of the hardest leave-takings of his life.\n\nHow fond he had grown of Yarimda.\n\nDeliberately circling in a short ways over the stark white cliffs merely so that he could appreciate the glare of Taramis upon the spume-tossed waves, Dragon crooked his neck in surprise at Azania's exclamation:\n\n\"Look, there's a rider coming out of town. Fast.\"\n\n\"My father,\" Yardi called. \"I'd know that blue cloak anywhere.\"\n\nWould he be as terrified the day he returned to the family lair, or the moment they faced the open ocean, knowing there could not be the slightest mistake? Would Aria be his and Azerim hers?\n\nHe said quietly, \"Azania? When we face our fears, remind me to be gracious.\"\n\n\"You always are, Dragon.\" A tiny hand stroked his neck scales. \"Far more so than me.\"\n\nShe knew exactly where his thoughts dwelled.\n\nYarimda stirred in his paws. \"Dragon? Do me a favour?\"\n\n\"Aye?\"\n\n\"Call her. Call my \u2026 Wavewhisperer.\"\n\n\"I don't know how.\" She sighed. \"I will try. Can you tell me \u2013\"\n\n\"Ocean always rises. It knows. Why is the wind?\"\n\nIn the simplest words, she broke down his unbelief. Five hearts stirred within him; a strange tingling spread from the centre of his breast across his scales and out along his wings and tail. The tips sparked, as if he were charged with electricity once more. He could not have put a talon upon what he understood inside of him, only that her words must be true in some way that defied logic.\n\n<Why is the wind? Why are the waves?>\n\nGazing out over the Lumis Ocean, he sent forth the searching of his soul.\n\nA sound like a soft, fluting groan built within his chest. It was not the thrilling bugle of before, but something far more personal. A lament? Almost. Nay, an expression of yearning that seemed to form deep within his bones, and resonated out of him far, far beyond the limit of what he could have imagined a simple sound could convey.\n\n<\u2248Wavewhisperer,\u2248> he sang, and almost choked up in shock before he managed to continue, <\u2248Friend needs \u2026 come.\u2248>\n\n\"What was that?\" his Princess asked. \"So powerful. Did you just \u2026 communicate?\"\n\n\"That's \u2026 my Dragon,\" Yarimda whispered.\n\nAh! His grief song keened within him as Chalice led the way to their landing on an open area of green lawn that abutted the cliff's edge. Only a perfect white fence separated a walker from disaster.\n\nHe touched down with the greatest care possible, soft-pawed so as not to jolt Yarimda, but still she groaned slightly.\n\nIn a broken whisper, she said, <Dragon, I thank you for your selfless service. You have brought this soul home. Perhaps on the morrow, I will ask you to take me down to the shore, and we can call for her again. She will come, you will see. She will take me home to where my heart has always been.>\n\nTo the ocean. Some part of her was already out there.\n\nHe bowed deeply. <Yarimda, this Dragon soul has been honoured to travel with you.>\n\nCradling her pallet most tenderly in his paw, he carried her up to the house, to where perfect ranks of servants clad in white awaited them. Hoofbeats thundered up the stone path that led to the house. That was the only sound in all the world, save the faraway, restless voice of the ocean at the bottom of the cliffs, and the haunting cry of a seabird.\n\nWhen the servants recognised Yardi-mae, a ripple ran through them. A murmuring. Some bowed, others looked openly incensed.\n\nWhen they saw whom he carried in his paw, numbers began to weep.\n\n\"Raise me up that I may see, Dragon.\"\n\nHe tilted her bed so that she could gaze upon the faces of these she so clearly loved.\n\nYarimda whispered, \"Oh, my dear ones, I should never have left you. I have been the cause of so much hurt. Will you ever forgive me?\"\n\n\"Mother! Mother \u2013 and Yardi-mae!\"\n\nThe rider leaped off his horse. An elegant, silver-haired man he was, perhaps in his seventies, but he was stained with sweat and breathless from his gallop up from the town.\n\n\"You came. Oh, you came!\" he wept. \"You swore you never would.\"\n\n\"People make stupid oaths and foolish promises, Ivarn,\" Yarimda said, holding out her arms. \"Do I have a story for you \u2013\"\n\n\"I see that. You always loved to make an entrance, mother.\"\n\n\"Oh, this Dragon? I picked the best, of course.\"\n\nLord Ivarn ran to her. He enfolded her in his powerful arms, wailing like a child. After a moment, an arm reached out and beckoned to Yardi. She fell into her father's embrace."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Dragon, Chalice and the Princess slipped away while no-one was looking. Easy. The family had carried Yarimda off inside the house as if she were a great trophy, and why not? They promptly forgot all about their visitors.\n\nHe led them back to the cliff side, where a giant black walnut tree spread over both land and ocean a mile below. A hundred and five feet tall, the bookish Dragon within him estimated as they approached.\n\n\"I think we'll just settle down here,\" he suggested.\n\nAzania said, \"They might notice a couple of Dragons in the garden at some point, but there's really no rush. Shall I remove our saddles? Chalice?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Princess.\" The yellow Dragoness blinked slowly. \"I'm exhausted, but I finally understand two new things: one, why the Human tradition of hugging is important, and two, exactly why you two invented Dragon Riding.\"\n\n\"That wasn't us. Yarimda gave me the idea,\" Dragon admitted.\n\n\"That was Dragon Swimming,\" Azania corrected, then chuckled brightly. \"Listen to me \u2013 I'm starting to sound as pedantic as you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"I am far too wing-weary to give you the drubbing you deserve, little girl, but remember, a Dragon never forgets. I am storing all these things up, I warn you.\" He breathed down her neck, making her sable curls rustle slightly against her shoulders. \"You're just a morsel.\"\n\nWhirling upon her heel, she planted a kiss upon the point of his nose before he could pull away.\n\n\"What was that for?\" he gasped, rubbing the spot.\n\n\"Don't do that.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Rub it away. That's just rude \u2013 and don't you go scowling at me now. I'll unload our gear just as soon as I can. It is getting less and less the farther we travel. That kiss was to remind you that I'm a big, dangerous, Dragon-Riding Princess, and you're just a sweet little Dragon I completely conned into carrying me halfway across the continent.\"\n\n*Gnarr,* he disagreed, his most obnoxious effort.\n\n\"Indigestion?\"\n\nThis time, he did swat her, and instantly regretted it when she fell over. \"Sorry.\"\n\nSpringing up, she kicked him in the ankle bone. \"Pick on someone your own size, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Ah, but I am, in worth.\"\n\nShe shot back, \"Oh? Do you know what I say to that?\" *Gnarr!*\n\nThey both burst out laughing.\n\nChalice looked at them as if they were completely barmy.\n\nNight had fallen by the time someone managed to remember that there were Dragons skulking in the gardens. Possibly Yardi, they thought. A stream of visitors had been arriving from late afternoon until just after the suns set in the farthest reaches of the ocean. Dragon and Princess sat beneath the spreading walnut tree, watching the suns set the darkening, ever-restless ocean alight with magic and mystery.\n\nWere these Yardi's relatives? Exactly how much explaining was going on in there?\n\nHe snuck a paw behind Azania's back; she leaned against him with a long, long sigh and closed her eyes for a few minutes.\n\nHis family was right here.\n\nHard, amidst the poignant beauty of such an evening and a homecoming, to remember that very far away, across the desert, the Skartun war machine was warming up to wage total war upon these kingdoms. People here had no idea. They had their idyllic lives beside the ocean, their city of perfect blue turrets and their effortless comfort in riches. Was that necessarily wrong? People and Dragons alike often yearned most for peace, love and security.\n\nEven an idyll such as this could conceal a broken family.\n\nAzania spoke politely to the senior servant who had come to apologise to them. A butler, she said. What Dragon understood of butlers was that they were the kind of servant who thought they were more important than any other servant. This stiff-kneed elder was humble and sincere, by the scent of him, and affrighted of Dragons.\n\nClearly, one should take the stories he had read with a healthy dose of fiery scepticism. None of them had Princesses escaping from high towers and flying away Dragonback. Foolish writers. What did they know?\n\nThe butler led them along a garden path to the north side of the house, where a gorgeous reception room opened out onto a patio area that overlooked the moonlit ocean. Artworks of ocean scenery adorned the room's walls; he decided promptly that he should have a look \u2026 if he could fit through the doorway, that was. Job for the spectacles and an outdoor viewing, more likely. Even the twelve-foot interior roof height would pose a challenge.\n\nNo Dragon wanted to be dragging the candle chandeliers off one's host's ceiling.\n\nWhat did the Dragon drag in?\n\n*Murr-hurr-hrr!*\n\nRelatives and friends chatted amiably around chest-high tables set upon the grey granite flagstones, or lounged in comfortable couches off to one side. A most genteel gathering, although one or two guests seemed bent upon emptying the Lord's wine cellar as fast as possible. Oddly, despite the enormous gulf of difference, it reminded him of a Devastator Clan family gathering. Earnest conversation, laughter, in-jokes and the ease of long, long friendship, mingled with darker undertones. Always something concealed beneath the scales at such gatherings. A troublemaker. A pariah. A creature on the fringes desperately hoping for acceptance \u2013 that had always been him.\n\nHard not to feel those echoes here.\n\nThe gentry of Hamirythe wore flowing trousers and loose-sleeved shirts for the tall men, generally in shades of blue with white, cream and coral tones, while their women wore elegant full-length dresses gathered high at the waist. He almost did not recognise Yardi, who had changed from her travel clothing into a powder blue evening gown.\n\n\"She looks splendid,\" Dragon said, nudging Azania.\n\n\"I feel rather underdressed, but I doubt any of their clothing would fit. Quite tall as a people, aren't they?\"\n\nHe curved a talon about the small of her back, feeling unaccountably possessive. \"You're a desert barbarian. Maybe you should behave like one \u2013 you are the only woman wearing a weapon.\"\n\n\"I am too weary to care about that.\"\n\n\"For the record, you are as resplendent as always.\"\n\nFrom her other side, Chalice purred, \"Let the Dragoness wear her scales, say I. Look, the servants have prepared flame-grilled veal for us.\"\n\n\"Thoughtful,\" Dragon agreed, licking his chops. His belly growled eagerly. \"Where did they get peppers \u2013 ah no, those must be something similar. Delicious aroma, wouldn't you agree, Chalice? Just imagine that meaty umami flavour upon the tongue \u2026\"\n\nShe flicked her wingtips in amusement. \"Males. Stomachs on paws.\"\n\n\"May I?\" he asked.\n\nThe Dragoness' eyelids flickered in that way he remembered. \"Please.\"\n\nTo his surprise, a servant appeared at his elbow as if summoned from the aether by magic, bearing a golden platter of steaming, perfectly chargrilled veal. \"May I interest sir in a snack?\"\n\nForgive the poor serving girl. She looked as pasty as if Dragon had asked her to investigate the inside of his gullet.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said, flicking his fore-talons out of their sheaths.\n\nGasp!\n\nDragon paused, and waggled his talons in the light. \"I apologise for the state of my cutlery. I wish you to know that even the most ravenous quadruped is perfectly capable of distinguishing between a pretty girl and the offerings upon her platter.\" He plucked up a joint with judicious care. \"Chalice, this is for you. Now, one for me.\"\n\nShe quavered, \"Will that be all, sir?\"\n\nHe forgave her the racial slur. Who called a Dragon 'sir,' as if he were some knight?\n\nHe said, \"Do call me honoured Dragon, and Chalice 'honoured Dragoness.' Keep this delicious veal coming, and we shall be the very best of friends.\"\n\nThe serving girl departed with a lurch, as if her knees had come slightly unhinged.\n\nWith a wink, Azania said, \"My, Dragon, we do have a way with the ladies.\"\n\nHe purred contentedly.\n\nExcusing himself from the group he had been chatting with, Lord Ivarn strolled over with a woman who must be his mate, he assumed. She was as tall as Yardi but twice as plump in all dimensions. By his wings, it appeared that Human women could have ample haunches after all! How refreshing. Although, despite their woefully diminutive dimensions, Azania's buttocks \u2013 one must use the correct terminology for Human females, and never mention the aforementioned body feature in polite conversation, he reminded himself with a fussy flick of his wings \u2013 possessed a power out of all proportion to expectation. He had seen men turn into mindless idiots at first glance.\n\nLord Ivarn said, \"Welcome to our home, Princess Azania. This is my wife, Lady Ishana.\" They greeted one another cordially. Azania introduced Dragon and Chalice. Ivarn continued, \"Please forgive our preoccupation with my mother's return, and our daughter's, too. We did not even give you a chance to refresh yourselves.\"\n\n\"I've been made most welcome, my Lord,\" she said, smiling up at him.\n\n\"I understand that you flew our daughter and my mother all the way up from Chakkix Camp in T'nagru?\"\n\n\"We did. It was Yarimda's wish, which my Dragon was gracious enough to honour.\"\n\nBoth of their eyes danced with wonder. \"You \u2026 ride? Uh \u2026\"\n\n\"Many times in his paw, or more recently upon his neck here, or at the top of his shoulders,\" Azania said, pointing out the spots. \"That's our battle position. We worked out a way to mount a Dragon bow, and to have me strapped in so that both hands are free to fire either arrows or quarrels. A Dragon is a mighty and deadly foe, as the Skartun learned to their detriment at N'ginta Citadel, but a Dragon who is additionally armed with ranged weaponry, oil bombs or other assorted nastiness, is truly terrifying.\"\n\nLady Ishana said, \"We heard report that you two took on an army of thousands, together?\"\n\nHer tone posed the lightest of questions.\n\n\"Aye, my Lady,\" Azania said. \"I know I don't look like a great, muscular knight, but this Dragon has inspired me to become the best warrior I can be. You'll be surprised what a girl can do.\"\n\nDragon put in, \"Azania's skills pulled me out of trouble upon many an occasion. However, her greatest gift was to help me find my fires. I was a fireless Dragon before, outcast and belittled. Now, I have discovered fires like unto the Sea Dragons of yore.\"\n\nHe showed the tiniest, controlled output of fire upon his tongue.\n\nLord Ivarn puffed out his cheeks, and then said excitedly, \"I can't believe it! White \u2013 look, Ishana! Do you remember \u2026\"\n\n\"Of course I do, darling. We used to watch the migration together.\" She squeezed his arm fondly. \"I was just thinking that when I first saw you, Dragon. You have the ocean in you, do you not? Your unique colouration and this tell-tale white fire say it all.\"\n\nHe said, \"One of our wishes, Lady Ishana, is to reopen the shipping lanes up to the Vaylarn Archipelago. It's a great mystery why the migration stopped. We hope to change that.\"\n\nIvarn began to crow, \"That would completely revitalise the coastal \u2013\"\n\nHeads turned as a loud, belligerent voice broke out amongst the drunken guests. \"A toad, I tell you! A slimy black toad!\" \"Great-Uncle, hush.\" \"He's had too much.\" \"What's new about that? He was off his feet by lunchtime, as usual.\"\n\nThe drunkard raised his glass. \"I'm empty! Fill me up, you fools. Do you train your servants as badly as you govern our little land, Ivarn?\"\n\nYardi marched through the guests toward them. \"Azania, I'm sorry \u2026\"\n\nWhat was this? Had that man insulted the Princess?\n\n\"My precious brother,\" Ishana moaned meantime. \"Why is it that every family has one of these?\"\n\nStaggering to his feet as he threw off the hands that tried to restrain him, the man pointed dramatically at Azania. He slurred, \"Her. That's the one! What's a black toad doing here? Hop back home, toad!\"\n\nThe Princess froze.\n\n[ Ocean's Calling ]\n\nDragon's paws clenched so painfully, he ripped up several flagstones. Never had he so badly wanted to smash a man out of existence, but somehow in the pounding, migraine-like fury that raged inside of his skull, he realised that there were others present. Innocents, in a manner of speaking.\n\nThat drunkard; that racist fool!\n\nLord Ivarn began to roar in fury, but Ishana snapped, \"No, Ivarn. Allow me!\"\n\nClenching her fists, the large woman marched through the guests like a Dragoness pressing through ocean waves. As she approached her brother, she snarled, \"I've had enough. Quite enough! You've been an embarrassment to the family for years, you blowsy old sot!\"\n\n\"Ishana \u2026\" The man's eyes tried to focus. \"Why, if it isn't my flabby, overblown little \u2013\"\n\n*Crack!*\n\nThe Lady was a big woman, solidly built through the beam and in the shoulders. She hit him open-handed, with the full force of her body behind the buffet \u2013 much as Azania had learned to punch from Juggernaut, Dragon realised with belated, fire-cooling delight. She hit him so hard, his neck snapped about and he twirled twice in the air before falling insensible to the ground.\n\nHis head even bounced, as if the very ground had shuddered to feel the touch of such a man.\n\nDragon wanted to wash out his ears. Black toad? *Blergh!* The full import of the insult had only just begun to burn through his mind.\n\nIshana dusted her hands balefully. \"That's quite enough of that.\" Her gaze openly threatened the others of that group \u2013 her relatives, most probably. \"While we're having a day of dusting off skeletons, any other racists in my family want to raise their voices? Because I'm in a mood, I warn you!\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"I will have you behave with the uttermost decorum in my house, toward my honoured guests \u2013 do we understand one another?\"\n\nHer relatives nodded like a flock of parakeets caught featherless and embarrassed.\n\nOr, legless?\n\nShe said, \"Servants, could you kindly lock my brother in an empty storage cellar? I believe we will keep him there for as long as it takes him to dry out. Princess Azania \u2026 words fail me.\"\n\nHis Princess bobbed her head, still speechless.\n\nWith a polite nod, Dragon said, \"My Lady Ishana, you were magnificent. Thank you for giving an apology of surpassing eloquence.\"\n\n\"The least I could do,\" she replied.\n\nThe girl turned into his paw, shaking as she pressed her forehead against his leg. What a heart's cramp! Dragon drew his wing about her, more to shelter her from the stares than by way of comfort. A tiny body shook against him. He could only imagine the nausea and humiliation, consuming every iota of self-worth that ever had built up inside of her. That fool had torn her apart with a few repulsive words.\n\nHowever, a minute or two after the servants had carried off the unfortunate man, the Princess in his right paw wriggled. She wiped her eyes, shook out her curls and dried her palms upon her trousers.\n\nUp came that chin. \"Shall we, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\nHe shook his muzzle, buzzing with disbelief. Broken and back in the course of a couple of minutes.\n\nWhat kind of power was that?\n\nStill, the Princess confounded him when she crept out of the chambers she had been given in the middle of the night and came to join him and Chalice beneath the giant walnut tree, saying only that she felt unsafe in the house. She curled up in the crook of his neck.\n\nWaking at first light, Dragon found his Princess already wakeful, and pensive.\n\nHe touched her shoulder. \"Fly with me?\"\n\n\"Flyaway Princess? You know me so well. I should appreciate that very much.\"\n\n\"Up on my neck. Hold on.\"\n\nShe whooped as they swooped from the cliffs, picking up speed at a ridiculous rate. The Princess chortled as he straightened over the glittering waves and beat his wings to take them shooting away from the white cliffs, until they were but a thin line above the blue. Taramis peeked over the rim, unbearably white with a vast halo of crimson spreading in a semicircle above, like a vast eye gazing warmly upon his world.\n\n\"Dragon, am I wrong to let something like that \u2026 get to me?\"\n\n\"We can't predict what will spear deepest,\" he replied, gaining height. \"My brothers used to call me the brown slug. Plus all the jokes about being fireless. I remember every last one.\"\n\n\"Black toad. Where do people come up with these things?\"\n\nHeadshake.\n\nLeaning close to his neck, out where blue described the entire world, she whispered, \"Am I wrong or ugly inside to have enjoyed that slap so much? I can still feel the echoes this morning.\"\n\n\"No. That was the sound of justice.\"\n\n\"I feel guilty.\"\n\n\"No need, but I understand what it is to have all these ugly, mixed-up feelings toward my brothers and sire and dam because of how they treated me. I thought I was the one in the wrong \u2013 I still do, in some ways. It hurts to swallow all that, all the time. Maybe if I was stronger I could keep swallowing it all my life, but the truth is, I'm not that Dragon. It had to stop. Enough was enough. Same with that drunken fool, you can't just let someone go on hurting a family all their lives.\"\n\nAzania nodded. \"What's that strange patch out there? The lighter patch \u2013 wing that way a minute please, Dragon?\"\n\nTen minutes later, they hovered over a patch of Sea Serpents. Not big ones, but these azure serpents were twenty to thirty feet long, powerful and muscular, with a long, flexible dorsal fin and other pairs of fins along the body. They tore into the corpse of a Sanbris Whale. Their grotesquely elongated front fangs flashed in the water as they wrestled each other to rip choice portions of the meal. Feeding frenzy! No love lost here. Even from a height, Dragon could sense the bestial hungers that drove these creatures to feed so voraciously.\n\n\"I hate to remind you, Dragon, but we've a breakfast invite with the leaders of Hamirythe.\"\n\n\"Aye. We should return. Sea Serpents look charming. The tales have them up to five times bigger. Can't wait to meet their grand-sires.\"\n\nAs the cliffs rose again above the waves in the distance, she said, \"How do you shake it off, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Shake it off?\"\n\n\"The guilt.\"\n\n\"Oh, like a wingtip shake? I see \u2026 I don't know. Maybe \u2026 maybe you brush up on your evil Princess laugh?\"\n\nShe must think him awfully strange.\n\nAfter a moment, she teased, \"Don't you mean your evil Dragon laugh?\"\n\n\"No, let me hear your best evil Princess impression. Mwaa-haa-harr!\"\n\n\"Dragon, I do not do evil Princess! I am always polite.\"\n\n\"I've seen how polite you are with a Dragon bow in hand, or hurling flaming oil bombs into enemy ranks. Every self-respecting Dragon Rider Princess needs a wicked laugh. Come on. I can't hear you. No more protests, Highness. Action.\"\n\nShe said, \"Alright, then. Mwaa-haa \u2026 I feel stupid.\"\n\n\"You do sound like a mosquito. From the belly, with full expression.\"\n\n\"Mwaa-haa-harr?\"\n\n\"More gusto \u2013 BRAAA-HAA-HARRR! See? Let it ring!\"\n\n\"Braa-haa \u2026 ha ha ha \u2026 this isn't working.\"\n\nDragon snorted, \"Pathetic. Try again \u2013 no, pretend you're gargling splinters of glass in your throat. Let it rasp. Imagine you've snuck into Prince Floric's bedchamber late at night, and you want to put the fear of Dragons into him. You're going to scare him so badly, he will hide in his castle for the rest of his life and never look at another Princess again.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\" she giggled. \"Oh, alright. Mwaa-harr-hargh!\"\n\n\"Not bad.\"\n\n\"Gnarr-harr-hargh-arrrgh!\"\n\n\"Made me shiver, that one. Come on, you pint-sized pirate. Louder!\"\n\nRaising her fists to the sky, she roared, *Mwaa-harr-harr!*\n\n*MWAA-HAA-HA-HARGH!!*\n\n\"Listen to this one \u2013 gnrrr-hrrr-HARGH!\"\n\n\"I do believe you are now able to impersonate an evil Princess. Congratulations.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the lesson, Dragon. It's all I've ever wanted.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Ruling a kingdom was wildly overrated. Boring! After a frightfully dull day marked by frightfully dull chatter with people who were, in the main, frightfully dull, Dragon whisked his Princess into the blue yonder for a much-needed breath of fresh air. She practised her wicked laugh.\n\nDeveloping nicely.\n\nDragon gave his best window-rattling thunder upon departing, and had the distinction of many people running into the streets to wave their fists impotently at the sky as he winged off.\n\nAh, she might struggle with wickedness, but he had it built right into his five Dragon hearts.\n\nFlying up to the mansion, they kidnapped Yarimda and coasted down to the nearest beach. She was desperately weak and sick, but being herself, she had a few definitive requirements. One was to walk barefoot in the sand. A little sleight of paw allowed her to at least pretend, even if she was taking almost none of her own weight. The next request was to swim. Much, much easier. He simply floated her upon his paw, and the natural buoyancy of water did the rest.\n\nAzania stripped down and had a swim too. The luminous waters were as warm as ever, but Dragon spied the non-wavelike curves of a couple of large azure Sea Serpents lurking not far offshore. Busy waters. Greedy maws.\n\nDipping his muzzle into the water, Dragon experimented with spurting his fire. Despite that he knew it worked from exactly one prior experience, fighting off carnivorous fish in the Skaggar River, he was surprised how well it performed. White fire bloomed beneath the water in a long bubbling jet, all of fifty feet \u2013 less distance than in the air, but still a respectable effort in his ever so humble opinion.\n\nOh, fine. Strut that pride, Dragon!\n\nHis Princess agreed. \"Excellent effort. Did I see you drinking some seawater as well? Was that for the salt?\"\n\n\"Aye. I feel I needed it,\" he said. \"Don't know why.\"\n\n\"Freshly salted Dragon?\" she smiled.\n\n\"I'm so insalted.\"\n\n\"Don't get your tang in a knot, now.\" He waggled his tongue. She chortled, \"Exactly. My puns keep getting worse, don't they?\"\n\n\"Aye, conversation should not be too liberally salted \u2013\"\n\n\"With de-salt-ory comment?\"\n\nSharp.\n\nAfter returning Yarimda to the beach, Dragon collected driftwood and built her a roaring fire so that she did not get cold. While she and Azania sat watching the suns dip beyond the ocean, chatting non-stop, he tried to learn how to take off from the water without kicking off the bottom with his paws.\n\nFailure.\n\n<\u2248Wavewhisperer? Wavewhisperer, come.\u2248>\n\nThis was the limit of his vocabulary this day, even though he tried numerous times. Was he trying too hard? Why if some words came naturally, did others not follow?\n\nHe had no answers.\n\nOne could only hope that Yarimda was right. Perhaps the ocean alone knew. He begged the very waves to rise to his calling, and fetch an old friend to bear her to her final rest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "After tarrying in Hamirythe as long as they could, Dragon and Princess took their leave of their friends. The aching in his hearts was every ounce as weighty and poignant as he had imagined.\n\nFor Chalice and Yardi, the promise was to see them again. For Yarimda \u2026 the outpouring of his grief became so strong, he misplaced the ability to speak.\n\nIt was she who spoke to him in a whisper, as he leaned close, \"I have played my part, Dragon, and lived a good life. Wavewhisperer will come, you'll see. Thank you for this gift you chose to give an old woman. May it be returned to you tenfold. Take care of that girl for me, alright? She needs you more than she will admit.\"\n\nHe stroked her cheek with the tip of his sheathed talon.\n\nHis Princess muffled a sob.\n\n\"Don't weep for me, my precious Azania. I will depart the shores of Solixambria a happy woman.\"\n\nYarimda spoke with him a little longer as she had strength, her mind wandering to her love of the ocean, and riding upon Wavewhisperer's back. See? She was the first Dragon Rider. What he listened to most of all, was her heart. No Dragon hoard in the world could compare to this treasure.\n\nAt last, he managed to choke out, <Yarimda-mah Ociane, may you soar evermore.>\n\n<I have already with you, my wonderful Dragon.>\n\nWhen they turned their faces to the rising sun and flew out of Hamirythe, he began to grieve so helplessly, Azania rightly asked him to put down on a quiet hillside before he crash-landed somewhere. They held one another.\n\n\"I only hope Wavewhisperer will hear her call. I could not bear it if she did not,\" he managed at last. \"Fate should never be so cruel.\"\n\n\"She has faith.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" He shook his muzzle slowly, and shivered with feelings he could no longer understand. \"A lesson for this Dragon, for certain.\"\n\n\"And for this girl. Come on, Dragon. We've a ways to fly.\"\n\n\"North until Mornine,\" he said lightly.\n\nHe flew hard and steady for the green coastal mountains of Hamirythe, reaching them mid-afternoon against a wind rising toward gale force. It thrashed the towering heads of the tall bamboo forests mercilessly. After resting a couple of hours, they beat across a short but windswept stretch of ocean and put down on a tiny, sandy islet on the edge of the Tariboli River Estuary, where the ocean ran brown from silt and grey riverine sharks jagged hungrily through the brackish waters. Azania eyed up the busy feeding grounds and suggested she would rather play with the nice Dragon than those evil beasts.\n\n\"They aren't evil, they're just animals obeying their instincts,\" he protested. Phew. This coastal wind was something special. Spray blasted off the ocean, stinging his still-soft scales.\n\n\"I prefer your instincts.\"\n\n*Grrr.*\n\n\"You're such a sweet, kind Dragon,\" she said, patting his neck. \"Besides, you're my Dragon.\"\n\n*GNARR!!*\n\n\"What, I get to be your possession but you don't get to be mine? That is not how this relationship works.\"\n\nOoh, cross, was she? Stamp of the little foot there?\n\nHe purred, \"How does it work, Highness? Would you prefer to tell the story?\"\n\n\"Why, so I would. Once upon a time, a sweet Dragon was innocently painting flowers in his lair, when who should happen along but the wickedest Princess in the land. She took one look at him and cried, 'Ah, this talented Dragon shall be mine!' Mwaa-haa-ha harrr!\"\n\nHe fell over laughing.\n\n\"Nice. Stay there,\" she grinned. \"You make a wonderful windbreak.\"\n\n\"I abase myself before your dainty slippers, o mighty Dragon-kidnapping Princess.\"\n\n\"Ah, my day just improved.\"\n\nThe wind dropped during the night, but the following day dawned blustery and dull. They scooted across the estuary, labouring against freshening winds, and decided to make directly for Fara'ane on the far side of a wide bay. Bad idea. Five hours of non-stop gale-thumping later, he put down on the beach at the far side. His wings threatened to fall off. Lungs burning. Body on fire.\n\n\"I vote for walking. It's easier.\"\n\nAzania agreed, \"Well done, Dragon. I'd flap my arms if I thought it would help.\"\n\n\"You are very streamlined.\"\n\nShe gave him a beady-eyed glare. \"Is that a sizeist joke?\"\n\n\"Would I tease a shrimp?\"\n\n\"Oh my, the colossal granite boulder has gained the power of rudimentary speech. The science of evolution is real.\"\n\n\"I just evolved into a ruthless Princess-snapper,\" he chortled, clacking his fangs near her knees.\n\nShe dodged smartly. \"Hey, go ooze back into your primordial swamp, will you?\"\n\nOne Princess in fine fettle! They strolled up off the beach, searching for fresh water. Azania wanted to refill her gourd and to relieve herself. Scenting wood smoke drifting on the breeze, he circled her position a short ways away \u2013 protection balanced against privacy. Humans even had private rooms in their dwellings where they produced their waste, whereas for Dragons, the matter was always purely functional. Pit, river or airdrop, who cared where it landed? What little survived the digestive process emerged as pellets with almost no smell whatsoever.\n\nA soft harrumph of breath made his paws freeze. Soldiers? Knights? What he had heard was one of their mounts blowing air from its nostrils.\n\nAzania's voice carried to his ear canals, \"Were you spying on me in the bushes, sir?\"\n\n\"Never, milady. Merely waiting for you to finish so that we can have a little \u2026 chat. You and me.\" A voice with enormous slug factor. High, arrogant and far from as charming as the man imagined he was. \"You're a long way from home, girl.\"\n\n\"Am I?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't try to run, if I were you. My men have you surrounded. Wouldn't want to hurt you now.\"\n\nDragon drifted through the bushes, low and silent. Every sense on the alert. Drawing his magic around him to blend in with the sounds of the forest, the whisper of leaves, the soft birdcalls. Not a twig must be disturbed. Softly, he hooted the call of a Tamarine night owl, twice \u2013 their agreed signal so that she would know he was near and alert to her need.\n\n\"Do you know who I am?\"\n\n\"Obviously, you are the surpassingly beautiful Black Rose of the Desert,\" said he, sounding puzzled. \"Where are your companions? How came you to be trespassing on Fara'ane land?\"\n\n\"Oh, I flew here.\"\n\n\"You will fetch us a very fine ransom. We were hunting tigers, but you are a much greater prize by far, Princess.\"\n\nPolitely, she said, \"I should warn you that ransoms are only useful to men who remain alive to spend them.\"\n\nSeveral men sniggered; the nearest must be standing just beyond a screen of broadleaf trees ahead of him. There. He spied a glint of armour. Dragon bared his fangs. <Hello, little victim. Shall we measure your entrails, together?>\n\n\"So, in the code of chivalry, good knight,\" the Princess continued to string him along, \"where does the kidnapping of foreign Princesses fit in? Again I must warn you, I am no damsel in distress, and I do know exactly where I am and what I am doing here. You clearly do not. I'd desist and go after the tigers, if I were you. They are much easier prey than me.\"\n\n\"You're threatening me?\"\n\nNot the sharpest talon in the paw, this one. Dragon spied him between the trees now. A big man clad in plenty of plate armour, he had removed his helm and was scratching his blonde head, clearly nonplussed at the idea of any girl talking back to him. Sassing him, even. The brain clearly balked at handling such conundrums.\n\nHe said, \"We are ten men \u2013\"\n\n\"Then I have you outnumbered, one to ten. I like these odds.\"\n\n\"What? Are you quite mad?\"\n\n\"Now you're being downright insulting,\" she observed mildly. Need? This royal was holding court! \"Gentlemen, I'll give you one last chance. Turn and flee right now, or I cannot be held responsible for the consequences.\"\n\n\"I'll squash you like a bug, little girl!\"\n\n\"Oh, no! My Dragon's right behind you!\"\n\nThe knight shouted, \"What kind of an idiot do you take me for \u2013 get back here!\"\n\nDragon snuck his paw around the tree. *Squish.* One down.\n\nArrows whirred through the trees and bushes, but Azania had dived and rolled, wriggling beneath a spray of brambles. Two men tangled themselves up and fell back, cursing, as she used her tiny size to best advantage and sprinted with great agility between the trees. The knight and his men blundered after, shouting and brandishing their swords. She ran right up to his paws.\n\nShe grinned. He grinned back.\n\nThe knight charged around a tree, and ran straight into Dragon's fist. *Blam.*\n\nOn his backside, the man looked up and saw his doom smiling down at him. His stomach made a horrid gurgling noise. One second later, the full whiff hit Dragon's nostrils. *Blergh!*\n\n\"That kind of idiot,\" Azania said.\n\nTwo of his men tripped over him. The knight shook, and lay still. Dragon herded another four wailing men-at-arms aside with his tail, and smashed them to the ground. \"Shut up, you yapping fools!\"\n\nHe turned. One of his own men had accidentally run his sword through the knight's neck. Oh well. One less fool to use up Solixambria's good oxygen.\n\nThe Princess clashed swords with another man, then knelt and cut his leg smoothly out from beneath him. The blade smacked audibly against his thigh bone, a terrible cut. Tigers were definitely easier prey. They did not stalk that last man with a Dragoness-inspired wriggle of their hips; paralysed by indecision, the last of the knight's men stood stock-still as Azania smashed the fist holding the hilt of her sword up beneath his chin. Inch-perfect uppercut.\n\nShe wrung her fingers. \"Ouch. He won't be eating for a few weeks. Broke his jaw, I think.\"\n\n\"I hope so. Juggernaut would be proud.\"\n\n\"And this other Dragon I know?\"\n\n\"Oh, he thinks you're turning out to be as dangerous as a wrathful Dragoness. So cool under pressure.\"\n\nA smile touched her lips. \"You are kind. I should not have let them sneak up on me in the first instance. I just thought it would be a great deal quieter here. Maybe we should give Fara'ane the skip? Yardi did warn us they were unlikely to be cooperative.\"\n\n\"We are behind schedule.\"\n\n\"Aye, I know. Want to finish off any more of these fools?\"\n\n\"Not so much. Gratuitous slayings are not my style, unless your honour demands it? Nay, even then I would \u2013\"\n\n\"We've done enough.\"\n\nWith that, they left the scene of the battle behind and walked on.\n\n[ Until Mornine ]\n\nIt took a few hours of hiking before the one with paws worked out what had been bothering him.\n\nHe said, \"We're flying at the wrong time of the day.\"\n\nAzania replied, \"I was just enjoying the walk, and now you're talking about flying again? What does it take to make a Dragon happy?\"\n\n\"Aye. Not right now. We're behind schedule, because the coastal wind always rises in the afternoons. We need to fly in the evening, or early morning and rest in the afternoons. No point in killing ourselves; just wait for the wind to die down and carry on.\"\n\nShe clapped a hand to her forehead. \"Oh!\"\n\n\"Exactly. Except that we need something this size \u2013\" he held up his paw \"\u2013 because that's how silly we've been. Secondly \u2013\"\n\nThe Princess groaned. \"Who woke you up? And, when?\"\n\n\"Here's the deal, my feisty four-foot friend.\"\n\n\"Alright, I'm listening, my fiery four-footed fiend. I mean, friend.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" he snorted. \"Good one. Having applied some actual brain matter to the issue of our onward journey, I have concluded that we either need to move our schedule forward twelve hours, or back twelve hours. Reason being, we do not want to be searching for a tiny reef \u2013 our second stop \u2013 in the middle of a great big ocean in the middle of the night.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2026 rude words.\"\n\n\"In copious quantities, I have to agree.\"\n\n\"This must be the Kingdom of Infectious Stupidity.\"\n\nHe nudged her shoulder playfully. \"Makes me the King of the realm.\"\n\n\"Dragon, I regret to inform you that you really do not fit in around here. I vote for a power nap, a nice snack and flying swiftly on when the wind drops.\"\n\n\"Perfect. I'll race you. First one to start to snore \u2013 zzz.\"\n\n\"Didn't hear you. I'm already asleep.\"\n\nAfter a fine afternoon's investigating the interior of his eyelids \u2013 ahem, that might have been for about ten minutes before he nodded off \u2013 Dragon woke to the curious sensation that he was being watched by predatory eyes. The scaly one not being accustomed to any creature considering him for his edible properties, he flicked open his eyelids and checked the most important detail first. Azania. Compact fire going, roasting something on a stick that smelled delicious but was so tiny, it would not even touch the sides on the way down his gullet. Left, right, up \u2026 aha.\n\nTiger, meet Princess. Princess, run from tiger.\n\nOnly, the unruly non-conformist royal this girl had turned out to be, she was not running from anything.\n\n\"He's been there for a while,\" she croaked.\n\n\"The terrible predator has been there for a while, the extremely edible Princess said,\" he corrected, stretching lazily. \"Following which, the wise tiger bolted for the hills, yowling piteously \u2026\"\n\nUnfortunately, this was not a wise tiger. He was young and salivating at the prospect of a royal dinner. Dragon showed him a very large mouthful of fangs, backed by white fire. This time, wisdom was duly communicated and the tiger leaped down from his low branch, skedaddling at a pace which would undoubtedly ensure a longer life than the one he had been contemplating a few minutes before.\n\n\"You didn't run?\" he purred.\n\n\"Show my back to a tiger?\" she retorted. \"Besides, I only noticed him a minute ago. In case you didn't notice \u2026\" She held out her hand. Shaking like a leaf.\n\n\"You are stupidly brave, Princess. Emphasis on the 'stupidly.'\"\n\n\"Listen, you!\" The left hand perched upon her hip, while the right aimed the skewer at his nose as if she planned to do some excavating with its red-hot tip. \"Exactly how brave do I need to be with a fifty-foot monster guarding my back?\"\n\n\"Good point.\"\n\nHelpful at this juncture not to mention quite how deeply he had been sleeping.\n\n\"To be honest, I really thought a tiger wouldn't come within a mile of Dragon. The tiger's the stupid one around here!\"\n\n\"Followed by a second, equally excellent point. I hereby retract the adverb.\"\n\n\"You are a lucky Dragon.\"\n\n\"That I am.\"\n\nShe blushed at his tone. \"Stop that. Better still, save it for Aria.\"\n\n\"She'd braid four leaves into a garrotte and murder me.\"\n\n\"A third point, far more excellent than the previous two,\" the profoundly wise and perceptive Princess pointed out. Narrowing her eyes, she said, \"You were sleeping with one eye open a crack as you told me you always do, right?\"\n\nBy his sire's egg, she knew him far too well.\n\n\"Ahem \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! You \u2026\"\n\n\"I am embarrassed and deeply apologetic, Azania.\"\n\n\"Apology accepted.\" She blew on her meal to cool it. \"For that, I graciously permit you to bear the royal personage unto the Kingdom of Mornine.\"\n\n\"It shall so be done, and even with my eyes open.\"\n\n\"Wings outspread?\"\n\n\"Don't push your luck, Princess.\"\n\nFlying at sensible times of the day and night, Dragon and Princess made mincemeat of the miles to Mornine. They practised island-hopping, flying as directly as possible between Fara'ane and their destination without taking the ever so slightly longer coastal curve. Their aim was a tiny island off the northernmost tip of Mornine, which Aria had clearly marked on her diagram as the launching point for her epic ocean-crossing feat.\n\nFrom there, Aria had made two shorter hops before braving the perilous eight-hour unbroken stint that would land them on a tiny reef literally in the middle of nowhere. Then, a longer and a shorter hop should bring them safely to the lowest talon of Vaylarn Archipelago. Dragon recited the times in his head. Three, four, eight, five, three, two. Just over a full day on the wing, not counting the rest stops. A mere three hundred and fifty miles across fickle, windswept oceans infested with Sea Serpents.\n\nOne mistake \u2026 aye, better not be thinking that way.\n\nFeeling strong! *Gnarr!*\n\nThe crucial part would be to find that tiny reef during daylight hours and at the start of the low tide phase, giving him enough time to recover before the next stint. Oh, and plead with the weather gods for perfect conditions. If a sea squall blew up, they might need to make a very quick decision to turn back or press on.\n\nThe final island on the sensible side of the mad crossing was a dry, low mound of sparse grass crowned with four copses of towering coconut palms. Pristine turquoise waters lapped upon white beaches. This was a foretaste of the Archipelago. Dragon understood that the climate up there was tropical, but the soils on the whole were not overly fertile. Aria had spoken about the King's programmes to invest in soil conservation and enrichment, which were starting to bear fruit \u2013 literally. Tough climate and salty, sandy soils with little loam, however. Until the Sea Serpents had taken over, they had even been experimenting with importing compost from Hamirythe and Thobe.\n\nThe Isles Dragons had previously lived mostly off fishing. That was now far more dangerous. How were they coping? Speaking from a wealth of first-paw experience, hungry Dragons were not nice Dragons.\n\nNor were impatient ones.\n\nUnfortunately, as they waited and rested from midmorning until their expected mid-afternoon departure, the northern skies began to darken. First, an artist's smudge along the horizon with a piece of coal. Then came a freshening breeze. Over the course of several hours, the horizon turned a fetching version of gloomy green-black.\n\n\"You couldn't pay me to fly into that,\" Azania observed.\n\n\"No, and besides, your ransom is far too valuable to consider tossing you into that storm.\"\n\n\"Did you have to bring up that old nugget?\"\n\n\"Sorry. Any better ideas?\"\n\n\"How's about we go terrify the local populace into giving us a sheltered place to sleep?\"\n\n\"Wicked music to a Dragon's devious hearts,\" he purred, screwing up his muzzle into the most terrible expression he could manufacture.\n\n\"Oh, something stuck between your fangs. Hold on.\" Using the tip of her talon dagger, Azania extracted the offending strip of venison. \"Phew, that's been there a few days. Dragon, before you meet that frisky cobalt assassin, we need to talk about your nasty bachelor habits \u2013\"\n\n\"Nasty bachelor \u2013 WHAT?\"\n\n\"Look, speaking as the only female with the gumption to tell you the truth straight to your face \u2013 but not that straight,\" she said, ducking to one side of his jaw, \"your breath just now, Dragon, does have a certain sewer-special bouquet about it. Last week's buried bones, and all \u2013\"\n\n*GNARRGGHHH!!*\n\nFire spurted involuntarily out of his mouth. That \u2026 pest!\n\nStepping back because of the heat, the Princess said, \"Is that the way Dragons clean their teeth and throats? I can smell roast meat for certain. Do you have to swish the fire around a bit? Gargle fire?\"\n\nHe growled, \"I don't actually \u2026 know.\"\n\n\"Give it a whirl.\" He glared at her. \"Alright, a swirl. Better? Look, you'd rather I told you, wouldn't you? Here, let me hold your big old paw and you follow my lead, alright, Dragon?\"\n\nNow Human baby talk? The Princess had the gall to take a swig out of her water bottle and show him how it was done! After that, immediately on to wondering how big a toothpick a Dragon would require, and where he could find a mirror to work with?\n\nHe prodded her thigh. \"Sharpen this thigh bone, shall I? Looks about the right size.\"\n\nAzania chortled, \"Hint taken. I'll start packing.\"\n\nPutting on his own baby voice, Dragon cooed, \"Here, let me hold your sweet little hand and I'll just lead you inside here, alright, Princess? You just keep going down this nice tunnel until you find my stomach \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon! Get off.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to check my fangs from the inside?\"\n\n\"Not overly. Although, in a pinch, I guess your mouth might make a pretty sneaky hiding place. As long as it doesn't get too warm in there.\"\n\n\"Couldn't imagine us having to do that,\" he said. \"Righto, let's be on our way. My terrible Princess wants to terrify another poor, innocent city. That sounds much nicer than waiting out here for that storm to blast and inundate us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Mornine must once have been a thriving community, but now it showed every sign of dilapidation. Peeling paint. Warehouses left to go to ruin. A large port deserted; the fleet had all been drawn up onto sandbanks higher up the river mouth which the town straddled, and the river blocked with nets. The hulks rotted and rusted up there. Hardly any vessels looked seaworthy. Along the port's main quay, where they landed, old fishermen sat around, telling stories everyone had heard a hundred times before.\n\nHad they needed any further proof of the devastating impact of the Sea Serpent invasion on the coastal trade, Mornine's bedraggled air was more than enough. It had the air of a mildly confused elderly gentleman wondering how the world had changed while he was not paying attention.\n\nHe and Princess Azania wandered up to the ruler's mansion to cash in her royal ticket to a free lunch in whatever kingdom they visited.\n\nHandy skill.\n\nKing Jos Mandar Umalitran tar-Dane, Sovereign of the North and various other titles that he waved his long, thin fingers rudely at, was a non-standard fellow in his own right. He was as skinny as a reed, touching six feet and eight inches tall, had a piratical peg leg and but one eye, but appeared to be as jolly a fellow as they had ever met. He and Gangbuster the Crusher would get on famously. He also nursed a long-running feud with the Terror Clan Dragons, which meant they were destined to be the best of friends, he opined.\n\n\"Miserable weather for two days, and then mixed after that, lass,\" he boomed, waving a drumstick of some unfortunate fowl in Azania's direction. \"You might be dodging squalls up North, my old bones tell me. And these bones never lie.\"\n\n\"How long before the weather settles down?\" Dragon asked from his position on the balcony alongside the King's dining hall. Despite his startling thinness, this was clearly the ruler's favourite place in the entire kingdom, and perhaps in the world.\n\nHe sniffed the air. \"Couple of weeks. Say, big fellow like you, you don't want to go burn out a few Terror Clan lairs while you're about it?\"\n\n\"There's reason for haste,\" he said. \"We'd like to meet the Sea Dragon migration if we can, o King.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said he.\n\nDragon sniffed the tenor of his emotions.\n\nFar more to this carousing King than he let on, wasn't there? Azania's eyes touched his briefly. She might not have outright magical senses, but this feminine intuition she spoke about stopped up that gap in ways he had yet to fathom, but greatly admired.\n\nThe Princess said, \"O King, we'd value your advice. I will tell you of our own discoveries relating to the Terror Clan and our desire to restore the old migration path, if you would share your wisdom as an old salt \u2013\" Dragon blinked at her phrasing, before he realised from context it must be something to do with this man having been a mariner \"\u2013 regarding the behaviour of the tides and the weather.\"\n\nRaising his goblet of wine in salute, the King said, \"I appreciate your candour, Ambassador, especially refreshing in a murky world of kingdom politics. If the Sea Dragon migration could be restored, that would mean everything to us.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"So I understand. I had no idea things had become so bad.\"\n\n\"Aye, that it has, lass. Now, let's speak, and eat. More wine?\"\n\n\"No thank you, lest this Princess disgrace herself by sliding beneath your well-stocked table. Meat, Dragon?\"\n\n\"More fowl would be fair,\" said he.\n\n\"Ah, I cackle at such jokes,\" Jos said, producing a very fine example of a deafening cackle.\n\nDragon bowed and said, \"Most pheasant of you to say so, o King.\"\n\nThey spoke for a long time. King Jos promised to raise an army in support of T'nagru if she and Dragon promised to speak to their kin about the Terror Clan's depredations. They regularly raided all the Human Kingdoms around the great bay area south and west of the Terror Isles \u2013 Mornine, Barine, Hulbine, Onyxil and Ermine. From his description, Dragon realised that the Terrors might well be more powerful and numerous than his own Devastator Clan. How did they thrive so well?\n\nThe King drank like a fish but never grew drunk. Azania soon gave up on even pretending to sip at the rich, heady red vintage he pressed upon her, and moved to fruit juices.\n\nAs the storm swept in, bringing moaning winds and thunderous rain, Jos finally came around to the point he had hinted at regarding the tides. He said, \"If you want to be up north in time for the migration \u2013 if that's where it is these days, north again of the Archipelago - you have three days in this long lunar cycle. You will be landing somewhere on a reef, I assume?\"\n\n\"I apologise, but the exact route is not our secret to share,\" Azania said.\n\n\"No problem. But it's a low landing, hence the timing of your journey?\" the King said, sharp as a brass tack. When they nodded, he picked up a ripe orange and said, \"Let me illustrate it to you this way. Imagine this fruit is the world. My right hand shows our two suns and three moons. As you know, the tides are affected by the complex actions of these bodies as the moons orbit our world, and we move around the binary sun \u2013 at least, according to accepted theories first developed by Dragon astronomers over four centuries ago.\"\n\n\"When the suns and moons all line up, it's like gravity squeezes the fruit \u2013 so \u2013 causing it to bulge and flex. Extra-high tide, extra-low tide. When the moons and suns are more separated, the effects can cancel one another out and create periods of much more even tides, but if you keep your eye upon this orange I am slowly pulverising, you'll notice that those tides are not as low as the lowest tides. A low reef might be permanently covered over during such a time.\"\n\n\"Aha,\" Dragon purred.\n\nJos said, \"To the point. What you need to know is that the tidal almanac you are following, is also subject to an eleven-year cycle. Setting aside all the complexity, over the next three days you will enjoy the benefit of the lowest low tides and not very strong high tides. After that, despite what your almanac says, we pass immediately into a season of unusual medium tides \u2013 the eleven-year tide change. I'd estimate the general ocean level will remain as much as seven feet higher than normal even during a standard spring low tide. That will last for a period of ten weeks.\"\n\nAzania raised her eyebrows. So, Aria had either been very fortunate or very smart.\n\n\"I'd assume the Archipelago will be cut off even by air for this season,\" he added, in case there was any uncertainty about his advice.\n\nThe Princess rose to offer a graceful desert genuflection. \"Thank you, o King. Aye, the mid-landing is very low indeed. Two feet above sea level at low tide. And tiny, according to our records.\"\n\nHe said, \"Best to search for that spot during the daylight hours. The storm will ensure there's no nocturnal phosphorescence for at least a few days \u2013 but you may very well be able to see the disturbance effect of even a small reef from a height, for a distance of miles. Look for colour and pattern changes on the surface. And lastly, I should advise you that Sea Dragons and Sea Serpents ride out storms by going deep. If you're in trouble in a squall, consider landing and swimming for it. Dragons are very good swimmers and you're unlikely to be bothered by Serpents in rough conditions.\"\n\nToasting Dragon with his goblet one more time, he said, \"Especially white Dragons.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Mid-afternoon two days later, the storm scooted away as if chased off by a bigger, more terrible foe. It left pristine azure skies in its wake, but also choppy, troubled waters. Jos had warned of unexpected tidal maelstroms developing as the medium-calm period asserted itself.\n\nTruly, who thought this crossing was a good idea?\n\nBack upon that last, most northerly islet off Mornine, they saw how the tides must have inundated the land and carried off many coconuts. Azania cut one open and tried the milk inside.\n\n\"It's good,\" she reported.\n\n\"Hmm, tasty,\" Dragon agreed, after tossing his half down the hatch.\n\n\"Glutton.\"\n\n\"Need to keep my strength up,\" he said, stretching his wings carefully. \"Ready for this?\"\n\nShe drew an instrument out of her bag. \"Ready once I set this up. Believe it or not, I almost forgot we had it.\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"A Hariskon Celestial Navigator,\" she said. \"This is the most accurate and reliable navigation instrument ever developed by mankind \u2013 actually, in collaboration with Dragons, I believe. It is also Yarimda's gift to us.\"\n\n\"I thought they had all been lost? The art of making these \u2026 it's magical!\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" the Princess said blandly, causing generations of Dragon scientists to turn over in their graves at her crass attitude. \"Alright. Let's see what it does.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Yarimda,\" he whispered to the ocean.\n\nHaving affixed a fist-sized red gemstone atop a short silver metal staff furnished with Dragon-like claws that gripped facets of the gemstone, she fiddled with the buttons and knobs running the length of the hand grip. As a slight hum emanated from the instrument, Dragon's scales prickled. The red colour drained out of the gemstone, leaving the image of a compass suspended inside the clear crystal. It hummed again as it calibrated itself, detecting the suns and moons. Magnetic and true north appeared in tiny script; next, representations of the two suns and the moons.\n\n\"Should change automatically to reading the stars at night,\" she muttered, holding the handle close to her eyes so that she could read the dials. \"Let me get the first leg set \u2026 forty-three point two degrees north of west, to the two pimples \u2013\"\n\n\"The what?\" he snorted.\n\n\"Our first major stop is called the two pimples, Jos told me. Volcanic islands \u2013\"\n\nHe groaned, \"Volcanic? Now you tell me?\"\n\n\"One is dormant. The other \u2026 less so, shall we say? It oozes constantly.\"\n\n\"Ooh, do you have to stoop so low?\"\n\n\"Weak stomach, Dragon?\"\n\nThey peered together at the tiny display. He said, \"I wish it could be larger \u2013 oh!\"\n\n\"Nice feature,\" said the Princess. \"Slightly smaller, please?\"\n\nThe display adjusted again.\n\n\"They certainly don't make them like this anymore!\" he said feelingly.\n\n\"Too right. I'm ready now, Dragon.\" As he punched off the sand with the girl clinging to his neck, he heard her whisper, \"Be with us, destiny. Bring us safely to Azerim and Aria.\"\n\nWith his speed and power, Dragon knew he would be able to compress Aria's flying times on the first stretch. Rather than taking the longer route with the extra hop she had been forced to employ, they set off directly for the memorably named pimples. Due to the constant lava flow, the glow and smoke should make it an unmissable target even during the dead of night. Good in theory. The Princess stiffly dismissed Dragon's needling about Human attitudes toward hot squeezable pimples and other puberty-related bodily delights.\n\n\"Royalty knows nothing about such sordid topics,\" she fibbed \u2013 royally. \"A hair to your left nostril, Dragon.\"\n\n\"What kind of directions are those?\" he grumbled.\n\n\"Amusing ones.\"\n\nProvocative. \"I'm glad we're amusing ourselves back there, Princess.\"\n\n\"Just remember who sits upon whom in this relationship, Dragon. I'm staging a coup.\"\n\n\"The seating arrangement can always be switched around.\"\n\n\"Have I told you recently how wonderful, strong, handsome, noble, powerful, fiery, ferocious, majestic and intelligent you are?\"\n\n\"Mwaa-haa-haaargh! Nice list. I'm flattered.\"\n\n\"Where's my list?\"\n\nDragon peeked back from the corner of his eye. \"What's that you're doing with your mouth?\"\n\n\"It's called a pout.\"\n\n\"What does this expression signify in Human culture?\"\n\n\"That you're absolutely no fun.\"\n\n\"Gnarr,\" he rumbled. \"I think my list for you just evaporated.\"\n\nSpreading his wings, Dragon soared steadily into the storm-washed blue skies. The white sun peeked around the corner of the giant red, turning the colours of sky and ocean starker, literally sun-bleached by the pinpoint power of that white gaze. Ahead, light blue ocean rippled to the horizon and beyond. Behind, that last spit of land slowly sank toward the waves from their perspective. Azania too became quieter as the last, rough-fronded coconut palms disappeared from sight.\n\nHard to imagine there was more land out there.\n\nWith a pensive note in her voice, his Rider said, \"It's like a desert, isn't it, Dragon? A great, watery expanse \u2013 I imagine that there's all sorts of life hidden below the surface, but it still looks as if there's nothing. See how the colours are changing as we go deeper?\"\n\n\"Aye, I do,\" he said, touching the spectacles to reseat them. The focal distance from his eye differed, especially when he was tired, he had noticed. \"This would be a lonely route to travel on one's own.\"\n\n\"Aria did.\"\n\n\"Always focussed.\"\n\n\"Apart from when you turned her head.\"\n\n\"I only wish I knew why.\"\n\nShe kicked his neck. \"Stop being a thumping great misery-guts. Scared?\"\n\n\"Real Dragons are never scared. Honest ones, however \u2026\"\n\n[ Sea Serpent ]\n\nThey flew diagonally toward the setting suns, thrilling to the glorious, infinitely subtle changing of the colours through evening into night. Ignis set the waves aflame with golds, crimsons and orange, sparkling off the swells a mile below their flying altitude. As the belly of the Lumis Ocean swallowed the giant red sun whole \u2013 an impossible illusion if one paused to think about it \u2013 the corona lit up with mighty flares that threaded the deepening purples above. A wide lane of fire burned across the waters toward the awestruck Dragon Rider team. Even when the sphere had vanished, those wispy fires licked heavenward above the horizon for over an hour.\n\nBeauty to scribe sonnets upon the most jaded, fearful of hearts.\n\nAzania said, \"We've passed Aria's first stop. The orb is adjusting to show the stars \u2013 would you like to see, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I would.\"\n\nUnstrapping her thigh belts, the Princess climbed the final arch of his neck, stepped over his skull spikes as if this were the most natural action in the world, and knelt upon the top of his head. A slim brown hand brought the orb into his right-eye field of vision.\n\n\"Slightly further away \u2013 perfect, thank you,\" he purred. \"That's \u2026 wondrous. A celestial starscape inside a crystal. Who would have thought?\"\n\n\"See, there's a hair-thin line tracing our progress?\" she said.\n\n\"Aye, and I make us two royal hairs south of the target,\" he agreed, adjusting the flight path slightly. \"I'm so thankful that this evening is wind-still for a change. Another two and a half hours, do you make it?\"\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" she said. \"Do you mind me sitting on your head?\"\n\n\"Do you mind me flicking over the moons?\"\n\n\"Ha ha.\" After a few minutes, she said, \"Know any good songs?\"\n\n\"A few.\"\n\n\"I'll go one for one with you. Help us pass the time.\"\n\nAlso, it would help them not to think too hard about what might lie ahead. He knew he must face fate head-on. No escaping, avoiding or hiding, as he had done in the past \u2013 but perhaps the hardest trial of all was the waiting. The not knowing. Hope's stubborn breath burned in his hearts, almost paralysing in its intensity.\n\nAzania had a sweet yet slightly husky singing voice which had seen training by her royal tutors. All proper Princesses were musical, of course. He had no formal training, but since Dragons sang at many occasions, among them births, deaths and family gatherings, he had a reasonable command of melody and rhythm. What he did not have, was command of his new voice.\n\nBecoming white was more troublesome than he had imagined.\n\n\"No mind,\" Azania said brightly. \"I'll teach you. Two gold clinkers per song?\"\n\n\"Sold to the pretty girl in black.\"\n\n\"Flatterer.\"\n\nOn and on they coursed, melodiously.\n\nAbout an hour before midnight, Dragon spied the gentle orange glow of lava from afar and they made one more course adjustment, aiming for the second pimple. The one that was not erupting. Grotesque image.\n\nWinging in to land, Dragon observed that the pimples were a decent size, perhaps fifty Dragon paces across, but barely a ridge above the ocean level. The one oozing lava was doing the better of the two, which was not much of a recommendation. The rock was black, igneous and jagged. No problem for draconic paws, but Princess Azania would not be sleeping upon this, if he had his way. He supposed that if the volcanic activity continued, the two pimples would soon merge into one. Still, with a few hours remaining until high tide, they might yet get wet.\n\nAzania agreed. \"Maybe sleep up on your back? Do you think you could fold your wings to make me a decent royal boudoir?\"\n\n\"At your service, Your Royal Highness.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful, Your Fiery Majesty.\"\n\n\"Ooh,\" he purred.\n\nAnd on that note, they both fell asleep within minutes. He stirred when the wavelets touched his nose, but the water only rose to a couple of feet up his body by two hours before dawn, drawing a great hissing and bubbling from the volcanic vents. Due to the position of the moon, the schedule now put the next low tide an unusual eleven hours away on its complex schedule. Aria's notes stated that the reef resting spot would likely only be visible for an hour before and an hour after the tide's lowest ebb.\n\nDespite the dawn's beauty, Dragon rested deliberately until the hour came for their departure. This was the critical leg; the longest and most dangerous. He tested the air with his senses; so fresh, it zinged down his nasal passages and into his lungs. Azania fiddled with the orb.\n\n\"Not sure something out here isn't making it misbehave,\" she said finally.\n\n\"Keep an eye on it, and let's make sure we navigate by our reckoning as well,\" he instructed. \"Or \u2013\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Good. We're agreed to go on?\"\n\n\"More than,\" she growled, checking the straps of the Dragon bow on his left flank. They had packed as lightly as possible, but retained the weapon as a necessity. \"Remember, this is the one day we have to make this crossing. So, eight point four degrees west of north. How many hairs do you make that?\"\n\nTouching her hair with his talon, he said playfully, \"But these hairs are all curly. I'm totally confused.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on!\"\n\n\"For the record, I like your hair.\" The Princess eyed him wrathfully. \"It's all frisky, complicated, unmanageable and frightfully hard work at the best of times \u2026\"\n\n\"Shut those fangs before I shut them for you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"And it gleams like a raven's wing \u2013\"\n\n\"The hole has been dug and you are deep inside, so put a cork in it,\" she informed him pithily. \"Onward, my faithful steed! To the heavens!\"\n\nNorthward they forged, on into the immense unknown. Endless ocean all around. The suns rose and rose, baking Dragon and Rider in a white glare until noon, when the red giant once more eclipsed the white and a northerly breeze sprang up, forcing him to press harder and harder to maintain their tight schedule. They passed over a pod of smallish whales being chased by a wide wedge of light blue Sea Serpents. No small creatures, these. The undulant curves appeared to be twice the length of any of the whales, and they were moving quickly.\n\nAzania peered at their navigation crystal and suggested that it had settled down and that they were on course once more. Time was tight. Once again, Dragon forced his aching wings to pick up the pace. He could feel every mile they had already flown in his body; he had done ten hours on the wing before, but this was both a distance and a time challenge, and that had not included working against a headwind. Was the weather changing again?\n\nInto his sixth hour of flight, he rested several times on the wing before powering on once more. Seven down. Just one more to go, and they should reach the reef. Both sets of eyes scanned ahead and to the sides as they flew at an altitude of a mile and half, where the wind seemed not as strong.\n\nAzania tapped the crystal again. \"Not good. Our path's meandering about like crazy in here, and I know we're steady as she goes, according to the suns.\"\n\n\"Eyes peeled, Princess.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea how nasty an image that is, Dragon, especially since I've seen you eat eyeballs?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't miss them for the world,\" he grinned, easing his shoulders one more time. \"Pop, crunch, slurp \u2013 although, I've never actually tried peeling them. Seems a waste of good juices.\"\n\n\"Deep breaths. Easy does it,\" she advised.\n\n\"Want to climb off and push from behind?\"\n\n\"Wish I could.\"\n\n\"We've got this, Princess. Can't imagine how Aria did \u2013 there! No, that's a Sea Serpent.\"\n\nBoth Dragon and Rider narrowed their eyes, looking off his left flank and ahead. Odd how that serpent was coiled up, however, almost as if it were sitting right atop \u2026\n\n\"The reef,\" they both said at the same time.\n\nAzania said a bad word. Dragon offered one even worse.\n\nShe snarled, \"Of all the freaking places in the Lumis Ocean, it had to pick our reef? What is this? I mean, that's obviously the spot, right? We're on time \u2013\"\n\n\"Aye, and his coils lie horizontally, like one of those desert turbans. On the one paw, we might be grateful he's shown us the exact spot. On the other paw, I've a bad feeling about his size. That's the granddaddy of all Sea Serpents, if I'm not mistaken.\"\n\n\"It's not exactly like we have a choice, is it?\" the Princess snapped.\n\n\"No. We need to fight for our place.\"\n\n\"Against one of the most territorial and aggressive creatures in the oceans? Perfect. I'll go mount the Dragon bow, shall I?\"\n\n\"Let's do this. No quarter!\"\n\n\"Not even a hundredth of a \u2013 whatever. See if you can pinpoint the head. I'm going up.\"\n\nBy up, she meant onto his shoulders. Shortly, he felt her affixing the flexible mount to his uppermost spine spike, and she settled the weapon into place. She double-tied everything down and packed away the navigation crystal. Azania donned her body armour and placed the quiver of eight-foot quarrels where she could reach it easily. Dragon handed back his spectacles.\n\n\"Ready,\" she said.\n\nHe tilted his aching wings into a long, fast dive. By his sire's egg, he was tired \u2013 and they had another five-hour stint to look forward to after this short rest.\n\nOrnery mood?\n\nAye, and then some. He refused to let some overgrown water snake steal their future. Not today.\n\nCloser. Closer still. One brute of a Sea Serpent waited for them upon that reef, its coils half as thick as his body and perhaps three times his length, although it was difficult to estimate given the way it was coiled up, layer upon layer, hiding the head and muzzle.\n\n\"Together?\" she said. \"I'll fire when you're in range.\"\n\n\"Together!\"\n\nDragon swooped. Battle speed. Hit it hard; hit where it counted.\n\nAt the last instant, as the white-hot flame began to spurt out of his mouth, he saw one vindictive yellow eye peeking out of a slit between the coils. Cunning serpent! The Dragon bow sang as Azania let rip; flesh sizzled and burned as he directed his fire right at the eye \u2026 and the coils exploded in front of them. A huge head lunged out, taking a bite that never found its target. Azania cried out as he jinked wildly, holding his fire on target for as long as possible before breaking away and circling.\n\nRipples stilled where the serpent had vanished.\n\nOne tiny cream-coloured reef. Barely wide enough for two Dragons' paws \u2013 how the creature had managed to pile itself atop that, he had no idea. Nor how Aria had known how to find it. That was one smart, courageous Dragoness.\n\n\"Gone?\" she panted. \"I hit the head for certain.\"\n\n\"So did I \u2013 but I don't like this. I've a bad feeling that we only stung the beast.\"\n\n\"What choice do we have? You must rest.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" He shook his muzzle, circling several more times. No movement beneath the water. The ripples had vanished. \"We'll land. I'll try to take a look around underwater. Keep the bow armed and the eyes sharp.\"\n\nThey landed gingerly. Dragon peered about underwater, where to his surprise, his eyesight was clear. The main reef must cap an underwater mountain, he decided. It lay ten to twenty feet below the surface for the most part, and covered an oval area perhaps fifty Dragon paces wide and eighty long. Only this single spire, apparently old coral to the non-expert eye, broke the ocean's surface. Hordes of colourful fish swarmed about the area; the bright neon colours and variation were breathtaking. No sign of the serpent.\n\nHe did not believe it for a second.\n\nFive minutes later, he checked again. Ten minutes. Nothing. He tried to shake out his wings. Azania massaged a restorative oil into the major flight muscles and primary wing joints, bringing a deep-seated, tingling relief that made him groan.\n\nOne more check. Nothing.\n\nDragon forced his muscles to unclench. How much rest could they get away with?\n\nHe watched the ripples in front of his nose. Such a tiny perch. He modulated his breathing, concentrating on oxygenating the blood again after all the energy output, drinking a little seawater to help remove toxins. He could not quite relax.\n\n\"Dragon, fly jump!\" Azania yelled.\n\nAt the same instant as his thighs bunched and launched, a huge wave burst over them, out of nowhere. He tumbled into the water, thinking that the serpent had \u2013 what, spat them off the perch with a jet-stream of water? Flex the wings. Keep to the shallows. Azania had been knocked away, but she hung onto his left wing as the water pummelled them due to the violent movement of a huge body nearby. Dragon surged away as the powerful serpent circled the mound, hunting them. Up again? The Princess needed to breathe.\n\nBarely had he scrambled out and his Rider found her way back to the Dragon bow, when the Sea Serpent struck a second time. Powerful coils whipped toward them. Azania took her shot, burying a quarrel up to the fletching in the blink of an eye, but he was forced to jump and then dive as the muzzle, filled with backward-sloping fangs, struck like a cobra toward his left wing. They hit the water hard, together.\n\nForced deeper by a coil rolling over his back, Dragon pounded the water with his wings and struck out with his talons and fire, gouging bloody trenches and dark, charred channels in the giant Sea Serpent's flesh. Fighting underwater was a strange, almost languid interplay of strike and counter-strike, where every movement slowed down so much that his brain ran ahead while his body lagged behind. He surged through the water to punch Azania away from a sweeping bite. Coils! He arched his back as a muscular, serpentine length slipped beneath his belly, but his forced dodge only found a denser, more confusing thicket of serpentine coils. His fire hissed out.\n\nTrapped! The beast had wound itself around his body! The serpent squeezed him with monstrous strength. Dragon burned and burned it again around the eye; now he was free, gulping a massive lungful of air before the mighty grip tightened again around his middle, and the Sea Serpent dived. Here came Azania! The lithe, tiny girl hung grimly onto the edge of the Sea Dragon's jaw as the water rushed by, the pressure increasing with the depth. He groaned as those powerful muscles clenched again, causing his ribcage to creak. Never had he felt a grip like this!\n\nTwisting a Dragon bow quarrel about in her hands, Azania plunged it deep into the serpent's burning yellow eye.\n\nConvulsions tore them through the water.\n\nMighty as the body was, it thrashed about atop a deeper ridge with Dragon helplessly trapped in its coils. Up again? Down? Where was the surface? He dared not strike out with his fire for fear that he might burn Azania \u2013 there she was! She rolled over and over, helplessly sucked about by the tow. The girl was still trying to draw her Dragon talon dagger to do more damage, when he saw her head strike a lump of coral.\n\nA tiny ribbon of crimson trailed from the spot as she went limp.\n\nReaching out with his forepaw, Dragon somehow managed to snag the tip of her boot as the azure Sea Serpent thrashed into a powerful rotation that wrapped his wings about his body. Then, they were tumbling into deeper water. Sinking slowly as they scraped down the side of the reef, he had a moment to cry in a desperate bugle:\n\n<\u2248Azania! Help us!\u2248>\n\nWhat could he do? She needed air, but could not possibly swim.\n\nThe only option came to him in a flash. He would not be able to use his fire anymore, but he might just save her life \u2013 this girl who had taken on a Sea Serpent a hundred times her size.\n\nHe stuffed her into his mouth and sealed his lips.\n\nCarefully, forcing air up out of his lungs with the help of those terrifyingly powerful coils, he pushed the seawater out, hoping to create a bubble in which the girl might rest. Meantime, he raked the Sea Serpent repeatedly with his talons. It wouldn't let go? He would cut right through this thing! He quarried great hunks of flesh out of the trench he had begun, digging deeper and deeper through the dense muscular layers.\n\n<Come on, Azania. Come on!>\n\nSomething shifted in his mind. <\u2248Come on!\u2248>\n\nSqueeze himself loose! Could he make it \u2013 the Sea Serpent shifted and the grip tightened enormously, almost forcing the last of his air to burst from his lungs. The girl shifted weakly upon his tongue, coughing and spluttering.\n\n<\u2248Alive!\u2248>\n\nWho was that? What was that gorgeous music?\n\nSuddenly, Dragon thrilled to a majestic, sonorous challenge that seemed to arrive from every direction at once. Dimly, from the murky blue, he spied the white form of a Dragoness sweeping toward them. Fire hosed from her mouth, latching unerringly onto the Sea Serpent's head. The creature screamed and thrashed beneath the unrelenting assault, its massive coils finally releasing the pressure. A coil slammed into his bared throat, forcing a reflexive swallow. Whirling away in a gush of water, he backed-kicked as the azure fangs drove toward him once more; by some combination of a complete fluke and incredible skill, his heel smacked the quarrel stuck in its eye, driving it six feet deeper \u2013 perhaps, right into the brain. A terrible scream faded into nothingness.\n\nThe body sank.\n\n<Dragon? Dragon, where \u2013 I'm stuck \u2013 heeeeeelp!>\n\n<Hold on, Azania!>\n\nBoots, hands, knees and elbows scraped the inside of his gullet, far too low down!\n\n<Azania! Stay there!>\n\n<Nooo \u2026>\n\nTerror drove him upward to the surface more quickly than he had ever swum. No! What a fool, this Blitz the Fritz, this accident-prone moron. He had just contrived to swallow his best friend in the world!\n\nBursting into the air in a wild spray of water, he opened his mouth and deliberately punched himself in the gut. Air burst out of him, shifting the Princess upward. <Come on, come on Azania \u2013 climb!>\n\n<Can't \u2026 stuck \u2026>\n\nThe tickling deep in his throat was too much. Dragon vomited up the contents of his food stomach. A painful pressure built in his throat before Azania shot out in a spray of steaming digestive juices, yelling all the way to an awkward landing in the water, which instantly stopped her skin burning, he assumed. And shut her up.\n\nHe fished a very, very bedraggled Princess out of the waves by the scruff of her neck and popped her up onto the scrap of reef.\n\n\"I am so, so sorry.\"\n\nAzania coughed and hacked a bit more, saying between fits, \"No \u2026 thank you \u2026 saving me. I only remember \u2026 sinking, then coming to in your \u2026 aaah! Grief, I feel awful.\"\n\nHe rubbed her back gently. \"Alright?\"\n\n\"Aye. Remind me next time not to take on a Sea Serpent, alright?\"\n\n\"You killed it.\"\n\n\"I \u2013 uh, what? Dragon, that's ridiculous. No-one will ever believe that you almost swallowed me down there to save my life, but \u2026 how?\"\n\n\"You stuck a quarrel in its eye. I kicked it in deeper, and that's what killed the beast.\" Dragon pressed his tail downward, finding the reef so that he could rest without having to tread water. \"It's definitely dead, trust me \u2013 but who was that Dragoness who helped us?\"\n\n\"The who and how much? Oh, do you mean the music we heard?\"\n\nHe glanced about underwater, but whoever their benefactor had been, she was gone.\n\nHow peculiar.\n\n[ Fate's Talon ]\n\nDragon slumped over the scrap of reef, loathe to move a muscle. For the first time in his life, he understood the fear of constrictors. Several of his ribs might have cracked. He was certainly in enough pain.\n\nHe had also turned into the local clothes drying rack.\n\nThe indignity!\n\nHaving stripped down to her bare hide, Azania rinsed out all of her clothing and hung it across his upper back to dry. Aye. The nerve of that girl! Beggared belief. He told himself that had they not just been through a life-or-death battle with a monster Sea Serpent, he would not put up with such behaviour. Then again, what would he not do for a Princess who dared to poke a hundred-and-twenty-foot Sea Serpent in the eye for his sake?\n\nClothing rack? *Pah.* Hatchlings' play.\n\nAzerim had better appreciate her not turning up in clothing slathered in Dragon vomit.\n\nThe tide was beginning to turn.\n\nPrincess Azania paddled just off the tip of his outstretched right wing, which lay flat in the water, taking childlike delight in watching the antics of the tropical fish. He could watch them all day, too. So many peaceful schools drifting about, each one differing in details. Stripes and flashes, rainbows and brilliant, frilly bodies that flaunted their raiment \u2013 he could watch this for years and never run out of subject matter for his paintings. Incredible.\n\nDipping his head lazily, he called, <\u2248Thank you.\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Dragon,\u2248> burble, burble, tweet and sing, which evidently had meaning beyond his current abilities <\u2248\u2013 you? What \u2013\u2248>\n\nHe wished he understood. <Honoured Dragoness, thank you for your timely aid. Where are you?>\n\n<You are of the air? Or, ocean?> Even speaking Draconian, her voice was melodic, yet very, very old. White rose from the depths. Her colour was not pure white, but a delicate rose-white. <I chased our foe to finish it all, even the eggs.>\n\n<Oh. Dragoness, you saved our lives. We cannot thank you \u2013>\n\n<Our? Who is our, o strange Dragon, whose song I recognise from before? Why did you call unto me?>\n\nAs the huge old Dragoness approached \u2013 she had to be every inch of one hundred and twenty feet in length, Dragon estimated \u2013 he had another shock. She was blind! Both eyes were rheumy with age and completely white, with not a hint of fire in them. How she cocked her head confirmed the impression.\n\nIntuition leaped.\n\n<\u2248Wavewhisperer?\u2248>\n\n<Aye, I am Wavewhisperer. Who are you, strange one? What is this tiny fish who paddles beside you?>\n\nFate's talon! Shock and gratitude imploded inside his belly. Of all the coincidences in the world, this one took his breath away.\n\nHe said, <I am called Dragon, and my companion is the Princess Azania of T'nagru, a Human. We are friends of Yarimda.>\n\n<\u2248YARIMDA! O, I COME!\u2248>\n\nHer powerful bugle practically lifted Azania out of the water. The Princess giggled, \"You are Wavewhisperer? Oh, how truly wonderful it is to meet you! We have heard so many things about you. Many, many a story \u2013 all good, I promise you. Will you tarry a moment, please?\"\n\n\"If you tell me, o Princess, who is this Dragon of both sea and air?\"\n\nSwimming closer with easy strokes, Wavewhisperer reached out her paw. <May I see both of you?>\n\n<Of course,> said Dragon. <I am \u2013 I was, a Dragon called Blitz the Devastator \u2013>\n\n<Devastator? Traitors!>\n\n<Please, let me explain, honoured Wavewhisperer. I believe that my sire is Blaze the Devastator \u2013>\n\n<A curse upon his egg, that thief and murderer most foul!> The aged Dragoness thrashed the water in her rage, forcing Azania to hang onto the trailing edge of his wing or be swamped.\n\n<\u2013 and my dam, Sirensong.>\n\n<\u2248You \u2013 the lost egg?\u2248> Melodic wonder! Her fury stilled as if a towering wave had unaccountably frozen mid-break.\n\n<I may be, honoured Dragoness. I wish to find out. Is Sirensong \u2026>\n\n<She's alive, youngling. I saw her during the last migration.> The Dragoness' paws touched him, feeling his musculature, the lay of his shoulder muscles, his muzzle and then his webbed paws. <Ocean you are, yet small for a young adult male. How many cycles \u2013 I mean, years \u2013 have you?>\n\n<Twenty.>\n\n<Can it be? All Sea Dragons thought you lost, murdered by those traitorous, egg-stealing Devastators!> Cupping Azania as if she were a jewel, the Dragoness touched her lightly. <Now, you are a tiny one. Are you a child, as was my Yarimda when first I met her?>\n\n<No, I'm seventeen. I am merely small amongst the Humankind, honoured Dragoness,> Azania replied. Buzzing with excitement, Dragon wondered at the improvement in her spoken Draconian. Impressive. <Are you meeting to travel with \u2026 uh, her?>\n\n<Aye. This Dragon \u2013 he called me, so aye, I came. Ocean always rises.>\n\nWavewhisperer had been living for the last eight years on the far side of the Vaylarn Archipelago, she told them, since she was no longer capable of swimming the annual migration. It had been a lonely time, but several of her friends had spent the last year with her and had now flown North, awaiting the arrival of the pod of Sea Dragons, as she called it. The migration route had changed. Exactly as suspected, since the incident in which his egg had treacherously been stolen by Blaze, Indigofire and several other Devastator Clan Dragons, the Sea Dragons had opted to circumvent the Archipelago rather than travel past Hamirythe as before.\n\nOut of the blue, Wavewhisperer said, <The language will come to you. It is born into us. When you call for Sirensong, you say her name like this: \u2248Sirensong.\u2248>\n\n<Oh, that's beautiful!> Azania said. <\u2248Sss \u2026 ribble?\u2248>\n\n<Humans do not speak Dragoceanic.>\n\n<Could I learn?>\n\nWavewhisperer touched her knee, where she was seated upon Dragon's forepaw. <You remind me so keenly of my friend Yarimda. Do you ride this Dragon's back, too?>\n\n<Aye. We were conspired by you, honoured Dragoness.>\n\n<Inspired,> he corrected delicately. The Princess smacked him nonetheless.\n\nOn her tenth try, Azania managed to say, <\u2248Sirensong?\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Very good!\u2248> Wavewhisperer sang.\n\nShe taught him how to communicate via long-range greeting. There was a particular pitch to the voice that carried afar, even hundreds of leagues, the measure familiar to Sea Dragons. At Dragon's request, she clarified that a league was 3.45 miles.\n\n<\u2248May the ripples ever buoy your wings,\u2248> Dragon repeated carefully, struggling to get the intonations just right. <\u2248May your song resound to the deepest deeps. May your toes curl \u2026\u2248 Uh, what was that?>\n\nBursting into melodious laughter, the Dragoness said, <That is what happens when you begin to learn Dragoceanic, my young friends. It \u2026 rises. I cannot say it better.>\n\nThe Dragoness told them that she knew in her waters that it was Yarimda's time, as it was hers. They would swim one final migration together, the eternal migration. That was where she had been bound when she responded to their cry for help.\n\nAfter an hour of pleasantly getting to know one another, with the tide rising fast, Wavewhisperer said she had to swim on \u2013 both with reluctance at having to leave new friends behind, and great joy at her homecoming. She thanked them for helping Yarimda return to Hamirythe, and wished them the very best fortune in all the oceans. Sirensong would be tumbling in the waves to meet her son.\n\nWhen Dragon bade her swim fast and carefully, she laughed and said, <Usually, we only take on Sea Serpents of this size in pods of no less than ten. I plan to swim fast, younglings. Fast and far. How do you say it \u2013 may your wings soar?>\n\n<Aye,> he rumbled. <May you swim true into eternity, Wavewhisperer. Please give Yarimda one last greeting from us.>\n\n<I shall.>\n\nWith that, she departed swimming in a south-westerly direction, while Dragon and his Princess made ready to make the next hop, a five-hour flight almost due west. This little knob of reef was already underwater.\n\nThe tides of fate waited for no Dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "They flew with their faces set to the suns' fires. However, that was not the full story. Another weather front arced down from the North with ominous bustle and purpose, its brooding battlements picked out in dusky oranges and sooty reds by the departing suns. Not good news. This next island was meant to be another low mound; those coming after were much taller and likely to be safe for landing upon, besides being far closer to the Archipelago mainland. Even from a height, they could observe the swell picking up almost by the minute.\n\n\"Another decision coming up,\" Azania said.\n\n\"Aye, what're you thinking? Neither back nor forward works well in heavy seas. However, if we choose to press on, keeping on track in that blow during the night \u2026 hmm?\"\n\nShe said, \"The Hariskon Celestial Navigator is behaving itself again, as best I can tell. Would you like to review the data with me? I've set in the next two stops, which is the most it can do.\" At his nod, she unhitched and climbed his skull again. \"Here we go. We should reach the next stop an hour after nightfall. If we are able to rest, it is then three hours plus two, unless \u2026 if, and only if you're feeling strong enough, we could choose to go for the toe.\"\n\n\"The talon?\"\n\n\"Whichever works best for you.\"\n\n\"In my most nit-picking voice, dry land is what works best for me. Why don't we see what our stop looks like and how much rest is possible? That three-hour hop might be almost directly into heavy headwinds, whereas the point of that talon would have the partial benefit of a crosswind.\"\n\n\"I agree.\"\n\nBy the time they reached the mound, the low top of what appeared to be a substantial underwater landmass, the wind was already scudding through and the waves breaking with a booming sound audible from afar. White spray kicked up from the crashing waves led them directly to the rest stop \u2013 already, water sheeted right over the top. Not a pretty sight \u2013 spectacular but deeply unwelcome, Dragon grumbled in what might have been a bit of a dire monologue about how much he appreciated all the perils of a changeable ocean.\n\nAzania chirped, \"Doesn't look overly restful, I must say.\"\n\n\"Swimming on land,\" he agreed.\n\nReaching forward, she patted his cheek near his left eye. \"You're the one doing all the hard work here. I'll put up with anything \u2013 so, if you need rest, I'll gladly get soaked.\"\n\nSince someone's wings were about ready to fall off, a rest it was, such as one could attempt whilst being swatted by large waves every ten to fifteen seconds. Perching on a wet rock, pummelled by waves in rain that was becoming more torrential by the second \u2013 oh aye! Perfect. A primal quality to the howling winds and brutal oceanic waves thrilled his Dragon hearts, directly counter to his concerns about Azania. Yet she sat still upon his neck and even dozed a few times, before waking with a snort and a splutter when a particularly large wave inundated them both despite his folded wings covering her seat as best he could.\n\nDragon scented the winds and the mettle of his hearts. Meantime, another huge wave thundered over them. Worsening by the minute, this storm threatened to wash them right off the rock despite his four-pawed grip.\n\nHe said, \"Let's set course for the talon.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\"\n\n\"Between two horrible options, it's the one I have more confidence in \u2013 thoughts?\"\n\n\"I'm with you. One thousand percent.\"\n\nAnnoyed at himself that he found it so countercultural to be asking a female, and a Human at that, for her opinion \u2013 was he truly such an old bag of draconic stodge \u2013 Dragon waited for the Princess to make the necessary adjustments to their navigator.\n\nGruffly, he said, \"Don't lose that thing, alright? Tie it on to yourself, or something. I mean only to say that it's bound to be a rough run.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\"\n\nWhy was she being so agreeable? He was not accustomed to this misbehaviour.\n\nBlinking saltwater out of his eyes, Dragon prepared himself mentally for the launch. It needed to be hard and high before the gale force winds knocked him down again, or deformed his wing strokes enough that he crashed immediately into the water. Despite that his kind were masters of the air, few sensible Dragons would care to fly through a tempest as wild as this. Nor would most try to fly across the open ocean, for that matter.\n\nRough was one word. Insane, another.\n\n\"Ready to fly,\" Azania said.\n\nSpreading his wings, he launched upward into the teeth of the blast, spreading his wings to control his ascent and use the wind to gain altitude. Balance was key. Up, up again. When he began to approach the low, scudding grey clouds, he wheeled with control and rode the blast away to the West.\n\nImmediately, he knew this would be the most challenging flight of his life. The wind was a live animal, like wrestling that Sea Serpent all over again. The gale winds howled their intended direction of travel from a few compass points east of pure northerly, always pushing them away from true west. Go for the slow curve while he still had strength enough?\n\nOn and on he struggled, through a dark, lightning-shot world of rain, heaving waves and shrieking winds. His strength began to fade. Every time his wings wanted to collapse, he took a deep breath and told himself, just one more beat. And one more after that. Azania clung to his neck, calling encouragement every few minutes, and trying to help him maintain the right heading. Despite their best efforts, his fear was beginning to be realised, that they might be swept in to the south of that first talon, and therefore be faced with a longer flight to the first of the three major Archipelago islands.\n\nHe had never flown in winds like this. Winds that shrieked and bullied, threatening to crumple his wings. Could it be a hurricane? The waves were being pounded flat now, the sleet flying in sideways.\n\nDragon turned to face the wind. He had to.\n\nDespite his flapping, they were being blown backward.\n\nHe called, \"Princess, I can't carry on. Are you willing to try swimming beneath everything?\"\n\n\"How? In your mouth \u2013 oh no! Please \u2013\"\n\n\"It's the only way.\"\n\nShe peered around at his eye, shaking her head. Azania was more than soaked. She might as well be already swimming. His Rider was also wan, quite possibly as exhausted as he felt, Dragon realised. Swiping water out of her eyes, she clearly came to a decision.\n\n\"How would it work?\"\n\n\"I can stay submerged for up to fifteen minutes at a time, maybe only ten if I'm working hard. So I'd come up every so often for breath, but otherwise, stay beneath the surface. You call directions from inside.\"\n\n\"You \u2013 you heard me, last time?\"\n\n\"Clearly.\" His voice cracked. \"Every word.\"\n\n\"It's alright, Dragon. I trust you. I'll \u2026 maybe I'll try to tie myself to your fangs, or something. And I promise you, if I go down that gullet again \u2013 *ugh* \u2013 I will cut my way out from the inside, do you hear me?\"\n\n\"Loud and clear.\"\n\nShe growled, \"No swallowing!\"\n\n\"Princess, you taste terrible, I'll have you know.\"\n\n\"Great, thanks.\"\n\n\"I prefer red meat to black.\"\n\n\"That is a tasteless joke and you know it.\"\n\nSince they no longer had a Dragon bow or quarrels to concern themselves about, Azania took her small travel pack in hand, and then unstrapped herself gingerly from her saddle mount. It took some fiddling with buckles stiffened by prolonged exposure to the seawater to loosen herself, then she climbed down into his paw, and from there investigated the lay of his jaw.\n\n\"This is a peculiar form of madness, I'll have you know,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Our relationship always has been.\"\n\n\"I wonder if I can braid your tongue around your fangs?\"\n\n\"Sounds suitably terminal.\"\n\nStepping gingerly over a row of fangs he happened to be rather proud of, the Princess investigated the situation inside. Sheltered. Warm. Could become extremely toasty.\n\nPushing his tongue over with what felt like a foot, she said, \"At least your mouth is dry. Right, I'll tuck in here beneath your tongue. Space enough for a small package. Okay with me tying on?\"\n\n\"Sure, my little scrap of fang floss.\"\n\nDefinitely a kick for that. \"I have been called many things in a short time, Dragon, but that is easily the most insulting of an impressive range of nonsense! Shut your gob and let's get to shore. You've work to do and you're wasting good breath.\"\n\nFeisty and furious.\n\n\"Shutting the pet in her royal cage \u2026\"\n\n\"Drag \u2013 mmm!\"\n\nAh, he loved winding her around his smallest talon. Muffled shrieks inside his mouth. Really, this was far too much fun, apart from the part where they might both die if he didn't do exactly as she said. What surprised him most was how his bodily instincts took over, trying to convince him that something tasty wriggling upon his tongue simply had to be tossed down the hatch. His stomach rumbled hugely.\n\n<Shut up, no, don't do it, Dragon!>\n\n<Do what?>\n\nSigh. Time to explain how the apex predator of Solixambria had certain instincts that most certainly did not include guzzling their best friends, all appearances to the contrary.\n\nMeantime, he dived down to sea level. So strong was the gale now, it was becoming hard to distinguish between the water and the rain sheeting above it. Blasting water filled the whole world. He landed with a jolt and submerged.\n\nInstant calm. By his wings!\n\nThere was nothing to see bar endless fields of blue, but the contrast shocked a tingle back into his weary wings. All was serene just a few tens of feet below the surface. Crazy. And he had been battling so long and so hard, for what?\n\nStretching out his body, Dragon began to rotate his wings in the new motion he had learned \u2013 the much longer, more languid yet more powerful motion of swimming. It strained different muscles and worked the joints in unfamiliar ways, but with a decent effort and concentration, he worked out how to add supporting thrusts of his webbed paws and even an undulation of the tail to which Wavewhisperer \u2013 supremely graceful in her native element \u2013 had introduced him. He surged through the water. Powerful. Agog. Savouring each and every novel sensation in a realm that was half of his heritage.\n\nNo, it did not feel like home. Not yet. Perhaps that would develop with familiarity, but the idea that popped into his head was of a long-overdue homecoming.\n\nHe would always be half and half. The new challenge he recognised now, just as Juggernaut had wisely noted, would be to reconcile his heritage. To become him \u2013 to know who that Dragon was and what he stood for.\n\n<Three nostril hairs and one scale to your right paw, Dragon,> said the voice inside his mouth.\n\n<There's a current pushing us as well, isn't there?> he guessed, making the correction.\n\n<Aye,> the titbit tickling his tongue agreed. <We're getting quite well off course. We'll need to fight to stay northerly enough, I suspect.>\n\n<Alright. Keep calling the compass points.>\n\nIn about ten minutes, he surfaced into howling waters and low, lashing waves, the Lumis Ocean churned up into a frenzy. Diving again, trying to keep the movements smooth, fluid, economical. Strange how close swimming was to flying. Thicker air, essentially.\n\nHe gathered his courage. <No giving up. No rest. Not until I bring my Princess safe to shore.>\n\n<Thinking aloud again?>\n\nThis time, he heard a smile in her voice.\n\n[ Wave Dragonhome ]\n\nSwimming for hours, they cut through storm and ocean, before picking up an unexpected current that swept them in a curve between the lowest talon and the first island southeast of Wave Dragonhome. By this time, Dragon was so enervated that he could barely swish his wings in the water \u2013 but with the aid of this steady current, he did not need to. He lifted his muzzle out several times to peer blearily at the rocky shore they could not possibly reach as they swept past, heading more westerly now.\n\nWas it dawn already? Where had the hours flown? It must be over nine hours since their last stop.\n\nHe must gather his strength. One more barrier loomed ahead. Wave Dragonhome stood atop a magnificent crag, a truly draconic perch from which to survey the world. He could not even see the tops of the cliffs in the storm, but they were every bit as majestic as some of the cliffs in his native Tamarine Mountains. Black and unrelentingly sheer for at least a mile until they vanished into the clouds; dashed by enormous waves at their base. White spray exploded forty and even fifty feet into the air, the dull booming having conducted through the water to their hearing for the last few miles. Jagged, toothy rocks waited like the grimmest of greeting committees.\n\nThey were being dragged toward another pummelling.\n\nAbsolutely no way, either, he could make that flight up the cliffs. Not in this weather. Not in his state.\n\n<Look for a crack or somewhere to make landfall!> Dragon heard himself bellow.\n\n<Alright, alright, keep your scales on.>\n\nPrincess Azania knelt in his jaw, searching avidly, having to shield her eyes from the driving rain and sea spray. Ah, Seaspray!\n\n<Princess, is that something \u2026 a crack?>\n\n<Aye. Take us in easy. I've got the bearing \u2013 maybe a tiny beach? That'll do. Submerge if you need to.>\n\nGood idea. Given how the tide ripped across the rocks, however, he had no illusions about whether the water or the air would be the easier route. Only, taking off right now? No. Instead, they rode the increasingly powerful surges of water as the ocean raced in to land, crashed upon the rocks, and then sucked back with a violent counter-tow. Underwater, white bubbles and froth filled his vision, but he soon became aware of the bottom shelving up. Nothing smooth about those rocks down there.\n\nMaybe ride one of these brutal swells in? Keep the paws ready for kicking off the bottom, but use the ocean's own power to glide over the worst of the danger?\n\nGathering his wings, he waited for a suitable wave. Thrust! Swim! Go, go!\n\nUp and over they surged amidst a massive swell of white water. He could barely see, but he kept his wings moving and his paws scrabbling, taking them over the sharp-edged ranks of rocks in a mad scramble. Left paw! He lunged away from the cliff face, bellowing as something tore his flank and then his trailing tail. Smacking his knees to no end, he lurch-thrust-flopped over the final rank of stone teeth and landed flat on his face on the shore.\n\n<Uhh \u2026 not elegant \u2026>\n\n<Jaw, please.>\n\nEven that took an inordinate effort.\n\nDragon cracked open an eye as the Princess clambered stiffly out between his fangs. They had landed on a pocket-sized beach of pristine white sands, sheltered from the raging tempest by sheer cliffs.\n\nShe touched his cheek. <Well done, my Dragon. You were \u2013 and always are \u2013 magnificent. Welcome to the Vaylarn Archipelago.>\n\n<I feel as if the ocean just regurgitated me.>\n\n<Too true,> she chuckled. <Come on. Drag yourself up a little ways out of the water. Then, you can sleep. I'll keep watch. It's the very least I can do.>\n\n<Thanks.>\n\nStretching her limbs into a star shape that no Dragon could hope to emulate, the tiny Princess turned and smiled at him. <We did it! Happy dance!>\n\n<Ugh, glad you have the energy.>\n\n<Come on, shift that old carcass, you wonderful grump. Up onto the beach now. Two more steps \u2026>\n\n<Pestiferous Prin \u2026> he fell asleep mid-sentence."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Dragon awoke feeling like a sack of lead dumped in an unexpectedly salty desert. Cracking an eye open, he took a moment to try to figure out if he could possibly move. Everything hurt as if he had wrestled all night with a hundred Sea Serpents and come off the loser. Badly.\n\nStill, his best friend slept in his paw.\n\nThat was his Dragon hoard. Right there.\n\nThe navigator orb rested upon her bosom, which rose and fell with each shallow breath. Dragon wondered idly how it was that her Draconian had suddenly taken a giant leap forward in vocabulary, complexity and fluency. Could it be that a process similar to the idea that Dragoceanic was somehow built into the heritage of every Sea Dragon, pertained to the Humankind? The very idea would throw a few scaly noses that he could name severely out of joint. Humans learning draconic languages by innate ability? Unthinkable!\n\nIn Azania's case, the evidence definitely fit the theory.\n\nA firm poke in the eye for draconic scholarship.\n\nAs to why he was muddling through the intricacies of inter-species linguistics right now, he could not imagine. Shaking his head at the random mental antics intruding on sensible thought, Dragon curved his head around to observe the crystal. A laughably wriggly red thread led to their current location; if he had it right, right beneath Wave Dragonhome. Well. Only a couple of hundred miles off course. Nothing to worry one's wings about, right?\n\nThis spotless white sand qualified as the most beautiful, solid, welcoming patch of ground he thought he had ever stepped paw upon. Above, a blue-washed sky proclaimed that the storm had blown over. Several white blobs that he took for gulls drifted across the lapping waves just offshore.\n\nHard to imagine the monstrous swells they had arrived in.\n\nHis dinky Princess chuckled in her sleep. Hmm. A fond scent memory? Warm thoughts of the egg sac that bore her? Mammals had wombs. There his brain went again. Insert arbitrary information lifted from his cranium.\n\n\"Are you watching me, Dragon?\" she murmured.\n\nNot even opening her eyes?\n\nHe said, \"You smiled in your sleep, which distracted me while I was looking at our route.\"\n\n\"As tangled as my hair?\"\n\n\"Almost. Some pretty spiffy navigating there, Princess.\"\n\n\"I only applied what King Jos taught us about the likely route of the currents,\" she protested. \"We certainly put a few miles under our belts, didn't we, my strong and totally awesome friend?\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" he purred. \"Beneath our wings, you mean.\"\n\n\"Same thing.\"\n\nDecline the bait. \"So, game for a short flight, Princess? Hop to the top and meet the mighty Dragonesses of the Archipelago. Hope they are vaguely friendly toward a large foreign male and his sidekick, the dark assassin of the desert?\"\n\n\"Intriguing pair. I simply must meet them,\" she joked back, yawning and stretching. \"Mid-afternoon already?\"\n\n\"I'm surprised they haven't found us yet. Aren't you?\"\n\n\"Quite.\" She rose with a lithe flexion and dusted the sand off her trousers. \"Given how relentless and martial Aria was \u2013 very odd indeed.\"\n\n\"Too right.\"\n\nForced by the size of the bay to wade out into the sea before launching into the air, Dragon drifted a short ways along the dark cliffs before finding the updraft he had been searching for. The steady flow of tangy, briny air made the ascent straightforward, despite that the cliffs were half again as high as he had imagined. Only the seabirds nesting on the cliffs did not appreciate their arrival. A raucous chorus of honks and caws accompanied their rise to the top, a truly majestic vantage point that commanded a view out over the sparkling Lumis Ocean to the south and east. Spinning slowly in the air with a stirring action of his wings, he and Azania gazed over the Archipelago with growing delight.\n\nFrom phenomenal dark cliffs on the near side to craggy volcanic mountains alongside palm-fringed white beaches in the distance, the first island, sometimes called 'Dragon Island,' had many kinds of beauty that somehow blended into a seamless whole. The interior mountains and cliffs were uncompromising, talon-edged massifs that appeared to have shrugged off the effects of time and erosion. The talons off his right wing completed the Dragon's paw effect to perfection. The two they could see before a headland obscured their view, were stark stone surrounded by the bluest of oceans. Away to his left, the landscape mellowed into offshore coral reefs, green meadows, rampant piles of wildflowers and hundreds of the ubiquitous coconut palms.\n\nDragon realised he had mistaken the location of Wave Dragonhome. Here atop the cliff was nothing bar what he took for a quartet of combat circles. The real action happened beneath his paws, inside the cracks and tunnels that his careful survey revealed created a honeycomb effect that might penetrate deeper into the headland than he had imagined.\n\nThe Dragons must have lairs below, yet all was quiet. Eerily quiet.\n\nFire stood hot in his chest as they completed the circle. Nothing and nobody; only the haunting cries of the seabirds.\n\n\"Let's go find our \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, you're bleeding!\"\n\n\"Oh, so I am. Quite a lot, come to think of it.\"\n\nThe Princess stared along his flank. \"Is that part of your intestine dangling in the breeze?\"\n\n\"Seems so. Pretty good cut, right?\"\n\nShe shouted at him. A lot. Apparently, flying about with a seven-foot rent in his soft new hide, with a fat coil of silvery intestine poking out of it, was rather far from a courageous show of male draculinity, in her worldview. Claiming she should not worry was a slap in the face of friendship, as it turned out.\n\nHumans had the oddest ideas.\n\nThey also steamed up impressively when they were mad at someone they cared for. That, he understood \u2013 but what of wearing one's wounds with pride? No. Far from it. Clean, stitch and hide was the Human way.\n\nAccordingly, one narked Dragon and one fuming Dragon Rider burgled the lair of the most dangerous Dragons either of them knew. Death wish, plus.\n\nIt took them several tries before they found a narrow slash in the cliffs that led into a complex cave system inside, all lit by quartzite crystal inclusions that must conduct light from the surface deep into the dark igneous caverns. Or, were these ancient watercourses? Lava flows? Dragon puzzled over the phenomenon as they explored the lairs. Unnerving. Not a breath of a Dragon about, yet everything looked as if it had simply been left, abandoned, on a moment's notice. Every sign and scent pointed to this fact.\n\nIn low tones, they discussed a way of life very different to what he was accustomed to. The workshops were amazing, producing fine pieces of skull, scale, paw, neck and tail jewellery for the adornment of Dragons. Another workshop appeared to be a perfumery. Glittering golden hoards stood unguarded. They found a whole area of tunnels where these Dragons appeared to grow vegetables in the semidarkness. Soon, they wandered through unattended forges of a design he had never seen before. Each furnace stood a hundred feet tall. Here, Dragon artisans must produce the mighty blades Aria had wielded, by a process that had to combine ores, Dragon fire and heat, and magic. Here was a mighty cavern clearly designated for combat training, carried out in a wide, clearly demarcated circle. Weapons racks and armour stood to the sides.\n\nThere were no eggs, no young, no old, no sign of life anywhere, yet recent paw prints on the sandy cavern floors abounded.\n\nWhat could drive Dragons out of their lairs?\n\nMight there be no natural predators or enemies, so everything could simply be left \u2026 he shook his muzzle.\n\n\"At last, this looks like a healer's cavern,\" Azania exclaimed.\n\n\"I wonder what they'll make of Human boot prints all over their caverns when they return?\" Dragon said glumly.\n\nThe Princess grinned. \"I think we plan to be very far away by then, don't we? I mean, if we can't find a single Isles Dragoness up here, we're going to have to hunt further. Maybe fly on to Zunityne and ask around there? Can't imagine where they've all disappeared to.\"\n\n\"Aye, good plan.\"\n\n\"Found the needles.\" Wicked grin.\n\n\"Here's thread, and a nice little fountain for cleaning me up. Perfect. Naughty Princess, I hope you were paying attention in your needlework classes.\"\n\n\"Not enough. Come over here, you big, bad Dragon, and stick out your tongue.\"\n\nShe waved a needle as long as her hand.\n\n\"Very funny,\" he groused.\n\nDragon taught her the basics of cleaning and stitching \u2013 first the intestine itself, cut in three places, and then the inner layer of abdominal hide and muscle, and finally the outer hide itself. The wound was large but not serious, unless infection set in, but this healer's cavern was well stocked with antiseptic powders and even scale-cloth, a metallic weave which they glued over the rent. It should come off naturally in a couple of weeks. He chewed up and swallowed a couple of large mouthfuls of healing herbs.\n\nAzania moved to the second cut on his tail.\n\nBy now, the light had faded noticeably. They decided to backtrack to an underground pond they had found, where Azania washed the crusted salt out of her clothing, and he warmed her brown hide by carefully blowing his fire nearby.\n\n\"What would Azerim make of this?\" he gurgled, reaching out.\n\n\"Dragon! We do not prod a lady \u2026 there.\"\n\n\"Your haunches? Why ever not?\"\n\n\"I'm nude.\"\n\n\"You are as you were born, which is perfect. Clothing is such a silly affectation anyways. Can't imagine why your kind bother \u2013 oh, do you mean that if you were fully clothed, that gesture would be fine?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Not even with Az \u2013\"\n\n\"Don't you start with me, Dragon. Would you touch Aria's haunches just like that? No! You'd lose a talon before you could blink with those kaniaxi blades of hers.\"\n\n\"Very true,\" he agreed judiciously.\n\n\"Same goes for Human females. So, keep your paws to yourself, you reptilian reprobate.\"\n\n\"Pernickety Princess.\"\n\n\"I am so not the pernickety one around here, mister he whose wings must be arranged in exactly the same way every night before he falls asleep.\"\n\n\"And you wonder why I'm so tempted to swat you into shape. May your dreams soar, Princess.\"\n\n\"And yours too, my adorable Dragon.\"\n\n\"Clobber, pummel, flatten, roll out, twist into a lovely pretzel with strangely fuzzy bits hanging out of it?\" he growled.\n\n\"What an eloquent master of debate you must be. Zzz. Already asleep.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The following morning, Azania woke him with a joke. \"Say, which side of a Dragon has the most scales?\"\n\nHe checked his wounds. \"Definitely the right.\"\n\n\"The outside!\" she chortled.\n\n\"Oh, by my wings, what a groaner. It's far too early for that.\"\n\n\"Wakey wakey, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Somebody's excited to go find Azerim,\" he growled balefully.\n\n\"Terrorcited,\" she agreed.\n\n\"Quite. Well, the early Dragon makes the kill.\"\n\n\"All things considered, I'd prefer not to kill my man right away, if that's quite alright with you?\"\n\n\"If he has another woman \u2026\" He punched his fist into his palm. *SMOOOSH!!*\n\n\"Why, you do care. Permission granted.\"\n\nOn that note, he and Azania chuckled their way up to one of the entryways, and Dragon launched out into a perfect isle dawn. Rose reds blushed over the ocean. White, cream and azure seabirds were out in force on an early fishing expedition, bombing the waters offshore in great, swirling battalions. Adjusting his spectacles, Dragon looked on as dozens of Sea Serpents cut through the waves and mayhem, hunting as a pack. Frightening.\n\nThis Dragon liked his nice, new white hide minus rents and holes, he decided.\n\nCurving westward, they set course for the Human city of Zunityne, a long day's flight downwind. That was the saving grace, a gentle easterly breeze that buoyed up his aching wings. The route cut over the rocky coastline with its many tiny offshore islands and back over the mainland again, becoming much lower and smoother as they reached the western tip of this major island after three hours on the wing. Phew. Dragon rested on a perfect white beach in the shade of thick clumps of coconut palms, beside a sparkling blue ocean. So idyllic. He took note of the soil issues that Azania had spoken of. Much was sandy and sparse, the interior sedge grasslands and khaki green swamps they had passed over, salty and unfit for most cultivation.\n\nToward noon, they lifted off once more and crossed the wide, turbulent channel between Dragon Isle and Human Isle. This one had a fringing of dark cliffs again facing the east, but they were more fractured and they caught sight of their first Human dwellings nestled in a few of the pristine bays. Simple grass-woven huts with palm-leaf roofs hid in the thick tropical foliage alongside the beach, occupied by brown-skinned people.\n\nDragon snuck a little closer to take a look.\n\n\"They're naked,\" Azania whispered.\n\n\"You'd fit right in.\"\n\nShe kicked his neck with her heel. \"Behave. Azerim did say that some of the remote tribes were cannibals.\"\n\n\"I guess we haven't seen much of the more primitive side of Human civilisation, given as we've been hopping from one city to the next,\" he agreed. \"Very different out here, however. They must be very poor.\"\n\nThe Princess waved to a few of the children on the beach.\n\nOne waved; the rest screamed and stampeded back to their huts.\n\nOn this island, the vegetation was thicker and more tangled, a real tropical jungle in places. The heat and humidity built up as the day wore on, but the sea breeze kept them cool enough. Dragon powered along past the first signs of active cultivation, rude roads carved through thick brush and a few small interior towns with red tile roofs and whitewashed limestone walls, before they passed around a range of small coastal mountains with the characteristic conical tops of volcanoes. The slopes were green and lush; he wondered why the volcanic soils here were not useful for cultivation, or at the very least \u2013 aha!\n\n\"Orchards,\" he said, pointing with a talon.\n\n\"Aye, and vineyards.\"\n\nHe swept low over the mountainous slopes, scenting the air with delight. Floral fragrances abounded, along with the more citrusy zest of fruit and the thicker, heavier scent of tropical undergrowth. Pockets of tall hardwood trees grew in sheltered gulches, and a number of rivers wandered down from the mountain slopes toward a pair of pretty lakes. Beyond that, resplendent in the red-golden late afternoon sunshine, lay Zunityne.\n\n\"Gorgeous!\" Azania gasped.\n\nQuite right. The city nestled in the arms of a bay no self-respecting artist could have described as anything but a tropical paradise. Unspoiled curving beaches, extensive flower gardens and coconut palm plantations, a gleaming turquoise ocean with the characteristic darker, dappled patches of coral reefs just offshore, hundreds of colourful houses and larger buildings with red tile roofs tucked in amongst lush stands of purple, orange and red bougainvillaea \u2013 absolutely picturesque. Five larger oceangoing vessels stood upon the sands; they must have been rolled up there somehow, he assumed, in order to keep them out of reach of the Sea Serpents.\n\nHe frowned and pointed ahead. \"Why's a flight of Dragons leaving the city?\"\n\n\"No idea, but they're in quite the flapping hurry, aren't they?\"\n\n\"Aye \u2013 go down?\"\n\n\"I don't like it either,\" she agreed, shivering slightly.\n\nHis exact feeling! Immediately, he flexed his wings, hurtling them into a steep descent that concealed their approach behind a green hill just a couple of miles shy of the city.\n\n\"Are you scenting what I scent?\" he said. \"Wrongness \u2013\"\n\n\"Aye, I think so. It could be linked to Wave Dragonhome being empty, or not, but \u2013 are those all Dragonesses?\" He agreed eagerly. \"Is it just me, or are they flying \u2026 suspiciously?\"\n\nDragon shrugged. \"Couldn't have said it better myself.\"\n\n\"Aria wasn't \u2013\"\n\n\"Seven reds, three oranges, four yellows, a pale purple and light and dark greens numbering five, but no blues and definitely no cobalt.\"\n\n\"Wow, someone was watching those tails most diligently.\"\n\nHe gurgled with pleasure, touching the spectacles. \"Thanks to these, I have just experienced the particular affliction known as male eye strain.\"\n\nOh, those butterfly wings, those razor edges, those flashing glances he could only imagine from this distance. Never had feminine splendour come so deliciously sharp, so perilous, so irresistible. Was he mad to think this way? Smitten? A foolish Dragon with a death wish?\n\nAzania pretended to preen like a Dragoness and patted her own behind. \"Oh, I hope to cause Azerim great suffering.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure 'suffering' is entirely the term we are after, in this instance.\"\n\n[ Trouble's Odour ]\n\nLanding on a grassy slope behind the bare knoll, Dragon and Princess stalked up to the top and peeked over. The flight of Dragonesses made snappy speed toward the West. Not from Wave Dragonhome, then? Or were they? Discussing the oddity in low tones, they agreed that they had too little information about the lairs and politics of the Archipelago to make much of a judgement. Ariamyrielle had revealed that her labour for the Human Kingdom was not popular in all quarters, but exactly how the draconic power hierarchy worked, apart from the structure being matriarchal, they had no idea.\n\nWas something afoot, or a-paw? Almost definitely. Should have pressed her for details while they had a chance.\n\nThe city had no gates, but several times they caught sight of squads of soldiers with red-feathered helms rushing about, and dark, oily smoke rose from three locations. Suspicious.\n\nAzania said, \"Why don't we go down into the city to see what's going on? They're used to Dragons being around, from what Aria said. We find the Palace, but instead of me introducing myself as a Princess, why don't you pretend to have an urgent message for Azerim, or the King and Queen? Let's see how they respond. I'll stay in the background.\"\n\n\"Good. That's better than any of my ideas so far.\"\n\n\"You had ideas?\"\n\nHe mimed blowing through his empty paw. \"Lots of nothing.\"\n\n\"That's unlike you \u2013 but if I know you at all, you need information to feed that brain. I think I'll wear my grey travel cloak and my desert veil. If anyone asks, I'm in mourning.\" As he began to raise his head, she placed a cautioning hand on the side of his muzzle. \"Wait. Those Dragonesses aren't out of sight as yet. You're unusual enough to attract attention.\"\n\n\"Highly attractive. That's me.\"\n\n\"If you say so, o scaly hulk of conceit.\"\n\nAfter forty minutes on the wing, the Dragonesses disappeared into the westering suns. Azania donned her veil and drew up the hood of her nondescript travel cloak.\n\n\"Best paw forward, Dragon. Fly casual.\"\n\nAh, her favourite saying for times such as these, when the odour of trouble filled the air, but they chose to fly directly toward it anyways. As they neared Zunityne, it became more than clear that the city was under the control of the red-feathered soldiers, but no obvious battles raged, so it was impossible for visitors to tell who was actually in charge. Sailing over the harbour, they observed many heads turning to track their progress. Agreeing on the most impressive-looking building, a mansion painted the colour of the sky, with red roof tiles and many gorgeous colonnades, they landed outside of the gates \u2013 a deliberate choice both for social niceties, and practicalities. The grounds held many tall trees and little space for a large Dragon to land or take off.\n\nAzania slipped down immediately, as agreed, and kept pace with him as he strolled up to the heavily-guarded gates. Tiny shadow. Hulking brute.\n\nThese were not a friendly bunch by any means.\n\n\"Greetings,\" he called amiably. \"I bring an urgent message for King Azerim.\"\n\nDespite the tropical climate, his announcement introduced a most wintery nip to the air.\n\nA soldier wearing golden epaulettes upon his natty crimson blazer stepped forward and saluted smartly. \"The King is not present, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Oh. Where's he gone?\"\n\nBleak glares. Hands hovered near the pommels of swords.\n\nHe said, \"I do apologise. We seem to be rather late; the rest of our group just left, I believe?\"\n\n\"Aye. They're bound for Mykita Lair, with the rest of your kind.\"\n\nThe soldier's glare suggested he ought to know exactly where that was, and why they were going there. It also managed to invite them to depart forthwith; all in all, a decidedly eloquent operation for a mere glare.\n\nAha. So, they knew where the Wave Dragonhome Dragons had flown? Interesting. Mykita lay on the next and last major island West, the trailing heel of the Archipelago. He opted to make an amiable bow, something Humans did \u2013 but this only deepened their frowns.\n\nUgh. Mistake?\n\n<King and Queen,> Azania's voice tickled his ear.\n\n\"My good fellows, I do hope you can help,\" he said, with a pacifying grin. Two dozen brown-skinned soldiers contrived to become as pasty as Hamirythe white at the sight. \"Could I perhaps deliver my message to the King and Queen? I have heard they were ill \u2013\"\n\n\"They are, and are taking no visitors!\" the leader barked. \"Give it to me. I'll see that the message is passed on.\"\n\n\"It is of a somewhat \u2026 sensitive nature,\" Dragon temporised. \"I'm \u2013 well, dash it all, this is so awkward. I'm late for Mykita, you see, and I'll get into serious trouble if I don't catch up. You know what those Dragonesses are like!\"\n\nTo a man, they flinched. Hmm.\n\n<Good angle, Dragon,> Azania spoke again. <Back to Azerim \u2026>\n\nExtending his every sense and trying for his best pleading tone, which did not come easily to a Dragon, one might argue, he added, \"Perhaps I might catch up with the younger King, wherever he has gone? Could you please \u2013 I wouldn't normally ask, but I'm new at the job and if I don't get this right \u2013 you know.\"\n\nHe made a cutting gesture across his neck.\n\nThe hard-eyed leader had the nerve to guffaw. \"Too right. You'll find our King has departed to attend Aria Seaspray's \u2013 nuptials, I think you Dragons call it?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, trying his best to look like Blitz the Fritz, confused and gormless.\n\nNot hard. <Nuptials!>\n\nRip out his hearts and toss them to the Sea Serpents! Please, by his sire's egg, by all that Dragons held sacred, let this news earthquake not be true \u2026\n\n\"Over at Mykita Lair!\" the soldier said impatiently. \"You'll have to give it your best to be there by sundown for the ceremony \u2013 good luck, Dragon. You'll need it!\"\n\nHis men laughed nastily.\n\n<Mount up, Azania,> he said, very quietly. \"Thank you very much. You've been most helpful.\"\n\nThe soldier saluted flippantly.\n\nDragon parked him at the top of his menu, main dish. Filthy liar!\n\nSensing the Princess' weight upon his neck, he waited a second for the *click* of her belt buckle, before coiling his thighs and springing into the air with tremendous power. Flexing his wings, he pulled away out of bowshot before the soldiers could get any ideas.\n\n\"Freaking imposter!\" Azania steamed.\n\n\"Aye, plus he was lying through his fangs about Azerim. Do you think this is a coup, Princess? Surely \u2013\"\n\n\"Without a doubt, something smells rotten in Zunityne. Dragon, we need Aria, and we need her fast. How long until the suns set?\"\n\n\"This season? Two and a half hours, maybe?\"\n\n\"Mykita is a straight westward run from here. Why would all the Dragons go there at once?\"\n\n\"For Aria's nuptials?\" He hated how his voice broke.\n\n\"Is she that important on the Isles?\"\n\n\"Look, why don't we just ignore that, and turn around and sack Zunityne until we find Azerim?\"\n\nThe Princess had the grace not to point out that was unarguably the stupidest idea he had ever voiced, nor to suggest where it might have originated and why. Instead, she said, \"The crystal says it is eighty-eight miles to Mykita.\"\n\n\"Too far. Look, the suns \u2013 we're much farther north \u2026 so my guess \u2013\"\n\n\"I've already adjusted for the latitude. Besides, 'too far' would be true if we were talking about most Dragons. However, we are not talking about your average Dragon here. I happen to be seated upon the biggest, baddest, strongest and fastest Dragon in the Tamarine Mountains, and perhaps in all of Solixambria. Do you know what else?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He's a fighter and a lover.\"\n\n*Gnarr.*\n\n\"That soldier was lying about Azerim, right?\"\n\n\"Aye. He lied about Azerim, but not about the nuptials. As best I could smell out, that was the absolute truth.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Then, for both of our sakes and the sake of this Kingdom, Dragon, we need to shift tail for Mykita Lair. I am sorry. Azerim needs us \u2013 and I am not implying your love life is worth less than mine. You cannot stop her nuptials if you are not there.\"\n\n\"Stop the \u2013 Princess! The dishonour!\"\n\nShe patted his neck, which had gone stiff with outrage. \"No, you silly old stick. Please listen. Am I allowed to be the female in your life who can speak a pinch of wisdom when needed?\"\n\nHe growled, \"Alright! Uh \u2026 alright, in a less belligerent tone of fireball. I'm listening.\"\n\n\"Thank you. So, speaking as a female, you need to give her the choice. Let her know you are present. Then, you must trust her to make her choice.\" He said a rude word. \"Aye, your very presence might make that choice unbearable; it might make all the difference, either positively or negatively. Yet if you are not there, you will never know for certain and neither will she. And that, Dragon, you would regret for the rest of your life. I have a sense of how you feel about her. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for you, especially given your history, but hear this: I know for a fact you are the better Dragon. I don't care who that other male is. I know you. I know your courage and your mettle and your fire.\"\n\n\"I \u2026\"\n\nSpeechless.\n\nFive hearts he had, but they all seemed to be fighting for space in his throat at once.\n\nQuietly, she said, \"We have flown together many a mile. My friend, Ariamyrielle Seaspray would be a fool to choose any other, and that is a fact. Trust my judgement, especially if you cannot trust your own hearts to speak true through the pain and fear, just now. This is your moment, Dragon. You must seize this day and make it your own.\"\n\nHe choked out, \"This \u2026 this is why you are my Rider.\"\n\n\"Aye?\"\n\n\"This is why this Dragon is honoured beyond measure to bear you aloft. Because you soar, Princess. You soar.\"\n\n\"Then, let's fly into the suns, my Dragon.\"\n\n<INTO THE SUNS!!>\n\n\"Again!\" she cried, raising her fists to the sky.\n\n<ARIA, I COME!!>\n\nHis thunder brought the city below to a standstill."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Dragon churned the air with his wings. Higher meant faster. Could he maintain altitude and keep them both safe with the magic he had learned from Inzashu, yet bring them eighty-eight miles in what would have to be the longest, fastest Dragon sprint in history? He had heard of Dragons making thirty miles an hour; forty when swooping from a height during battle. No story he had read or report of Dragon capabilities had his kind sustaining such a burst for more than a couple of minutes at a time.\n\nThen again, how many half-ocean half-air Dragons were there?\n\nThe Dragon and his Rider shot away from the shores of Zunityne as if a thousand Sea Serpents were snapping at their heels. He moved straight to the powerful swimming stroke he had discovered, while Azania made herself small against his neck, even drawing up her feet so that he could lengthen his body, shielding her from the blast with the edge of his skull ruff.\n\nAs he mounted into the sky, the Archipelago spread around them. Several smaller islands stood offshore of Zunityne, covered in mangrove swamps in which narrow waterways glistened secretively. They understood from the maps they had pored over together that Mykita Lair lay right on the north-western tip of this third island they saw in the distance. Coral reefs festooned this area, leaving only the narrowest shipping lanes, but there were numerous Human fishing vessels with tiny white sails pottering about the shallow oceans \u2013 perhaps shallow enough to stymie any Sea Serpent attacks?\n\nHarder! Harder! They rose into a patchy layer of cumulous clouds.\n\n\"Disguise,\" Azania breathed.\n\nHa. She was right. White Dragon against white clouds. Could do worse.\n\nNow, he cruised amongst beauty. Soft, innocent flotillas of clouds surrounded them, flattish on the undersides and cotton-puff fluffy on their tops. The suns dipped toward the horizon, slowly, yet never faster in his opinion. If only one could arrest time. Just this once, tell the suns not to go fishing in the farthest oceans.\n\n\"Breathtaking,\" the Princess said.\n\n\"Aye. Even I'm pausing for a peek. My life might just be about to end in a headlong dive into a cliff, but I'm definitely going to go out enjoying the view.\"\n\n\"That's the attitude,\" she said sarcastically.\n\n\"I know. I'm a sunbeam on wings.\"\n\nThe resident sunbeam rested twice for thirty seconds at a time, before resuming the relentless wingbeat. More power. More! No, smoother wing strokes. More cunning, more dextrous awareness of the changeable winds and air pressures that kept them aloft. This one for Yarimda. This next, for Wavewhisperer. Another for Inzashu. One more that would bring him closer to his dam. Ten for his Rider. Twenty!\n\nPouring over the last of the channel's thirty-mile width and on to the next island, the greenest yet, Dragon groaned at the strain. Pretty useless if he burst a few hearts trying to get there on time.\n\nAzania said, \"As best I can tell, we're bang on target.\"\n\n\"If we can sustain this pace. I'm in agony.\"\n\n\"Spectacles?\"\n\n\"You look for us. I'm afraid they'd only blow off my head.\"\n\n\"Alright. I think I can see that group of Dragonesses ahead. It's heck of a far, however. We might overhaul them before they get there.\"\n\n\"Serves them right. Slackers.\"\n\n\"Only because you're so quick, Dragon. Next idea. Focus your magic into yourself. You were able to help Inzashu with healing, right? So, heal yourself.\"\n\nHe tried, and after a few minutes, found some measure of relief. Ten minutes later, he was gasping again, however, his wings burning and shaking. Risk a swift glide? He had to.\n\nShe said, <I wish I could do something to help him. This beautiful Dragon's doing all the work and here I sit like an overgrown, less wrinkly version of a prune \u2013>\n\nA gasp of laughter tore from his chest. <A prune?>\n\nAzania's turn to gasp! She said, \"How did you know what I thought, Dragon? I didn't speak aloud.\"\n\n\"No? Not a word of a lie?\"\n\n\"I said I didn't!\"\n\nHe said in his mind:\n\n<O beauty serene,>\n\n<Her soul's breath trembles,>\n\n<The clouds of doubt \u2026>\n\n<Now, poetry? Whatever moves your wings faster, you great big lug! Save your breath for flying.>\n\nDragon bit his lip. Impossible!\n\nYet, had they done this before? How else might she have developed a sudden command of fluent Draconian, if not by this route \u2013 this togetherness of mind? <This energy called \u2026 telepathy?>\n\nShe said, \"Now is not the time to be silly, my friend. Energy is for flying.\"\n\nHe thought, <No, energy is for hanging disrespectful Princesses off the nearest cloud and thwacking their pert behinds into shape.>\n\n<Dragon! You are so inappropriate!>\n\n<It's only a thought.>\n\n<Only a \u2013> she pulled up at last. Her body quivered against his neck. <So do you hear this \u2013 go stuff a cork up your left nostril, you impossible nuisance?>\n\n<Cork, left nostril \u2013>\n\n<No way! I'm thinking like a Dragon.>\n\n<At last. The first Human being in history to achieve enlightenment.>\n\n<Dragon!> She laughed, however. How she laughed! Then, she said, <Some things in life are truly unexpected, like paws appearing through tower walls, and having a secret language to share with my best friend. This is so amaaaaa-zing!>\n\nThere she went with her happy dance routine.\n\nWhy had her zest for life ever annoyed him? She was the perfect foil to his trenchant inner voice, the one that flayed him more surely than his family ever had.\n\nAzania said, <Alright, then. If we can do that, try this.>\n\nAfter a long wait, she explained that she was trying to share her strength with him, just as Inzashu and he had been able to support one another.\n\n<Excellent idea!> he enthused.\n\nThe distraction of experimentation was more than welcome. Azania, mentally, was the diametric opposite of her sister. Inzashu was structured, trained, disciplined. Everything she did felt well thought-out and logical. The older sister was a bonfire, spitting with ideas and capability but no framework within which to realise what she was capable of. Yet, as always, their compatibility somehow seemed rooted in difference rather than likeness, as deep as Dragon and Human, black or white, male or female. Perhaps Aria was similar to her; perhaps that was the cause of the spark between them?\n\nTo be honest, he had no real idea. Why was the wind?\n\nWhy was \u2026 love?\n\nToo many doubts swirled in his mind to allow that word sway. How could he allow himself to think of her that way, when he hardly knew her at all? At most it must be attraction, a lethal infatuation.\n\nThen, he and Azania found one another. What was this between them? They shared strength, the miles now flowing joyously beneath their wings, the stroke strong and smooth and indefatigable, the drifting clouds their company only for so long as it took them to overtake and leave them far behind. His hearts sang. His powerful body rejoiced in its labour.\n\nDragons said that there was nothing new under the suns, yet here they were. Dragon and Dragon Rider. Stronger together.\n\nGet through this, and there might be hope of rescuing Azerim.\n\nThat must be his hope. Should all else fail, he must do what was best for his Princess.\n\n[ Fiery Nuptials ]\n\nFive miles away, the dormant volcano of Mykita Lair cut a stark, lonely outline against the backdrop of the setting suns and the fiery ocean beyond. The cone was green and lightly forested, silhouetted against the vast bulk of the giant red sun, which touched the horizon now, sinking by the second.\n\nCreeping up his skull, Azania pressed his spectacles into place. \"What do you see?\"\n\nMany Dragons winged toward the site. He had entertained notions of arriving like a white thunderbolt from the blue. Now, he considered a different approach.\n\nSneakily does it.\n\n\"There's Aria! I see her! She's right in that clump of Dragons that are just flitting over the rim, Highness.\"\n\nThey watched the Isles Dragons disappear within.\n\n\"Going to be close,\" she commented.\n\n\"I'm sure there will be oodles of draconic pomp and ceremony before any actual vows are exchanged.\"\n\n\"Plan?\"\n\n\"I plan to land on the far rim, against the setting suns. See what's happening. That group behind us won't arrive for another hour at least. Before then \u2013 whatever happens, happens.\"\n\nWhat might just happen beforehand was the final demise of his wings.\n\nReady to drop off.\n\nHis flight muscles burned like never before. His chest ached, the joints protested every movement, and the strain of exhaustion burned through both of their bodies. If any fighting was required, he would just have to request a recess until the morrow. This Dragon was done.\n\nA mile off, they both startled and cried out as a knot of draconic bodies burst out over the rim, fighting as only fabulous martial artists could. The Dragonesses swirled into the air and around the cone, at least two dozen in hot pursuit of none other than an unmistakeable cobalt beauty, Ariamyrielle Seaspray. Even from this distance, they beheld her panic and fury. She knocked out four in a blur of action before the mass subdued her and wrestled her back toward the dormant caldera.\n\nAzania let out a breath she had clearly been holding. \"That looks familiar.\"\n\nIt took him forever to work out what she meant \u2013 a reference to the day he had found her, chained to a bed in that high tower with Prince Floric fully prepared to violate her honour. What kind of nuptials were these if these Dragonesses had to subdue the victim?\n\nAria was not going quietly.\n\nThe Princess snarled, \"What the hells are you waiting for, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Right you are.\"\n\nFolding his wings, he plummeted from the sky.\n\nNo time to think anymore. No time for plans. All he knew was the whistling rush of the wind in his ears, and the incongruous sight of a flower-festooned flight of male Dragons turning stately loops inside the caldera. The Dragonesses appeared to be mesmerised by the performance. Not one looked up as the speed of his drop hit terminal velocity.\n\nAzania clung to his neck like a limpet. <I'm fine. Don't slow down.>\n\nDeath dive? No. This was a life dive.\n\nThere had to be five hundred Dragons packed inside that caldera, many more than he had expected. The females were small and razor-sharp, like Aria, and all were armed with the deadly kaniaxi blades Aria wielded to such incredible effect. The males were chunky and plump in the belly. Indeed, what he would have taken for Dragons being rather overweight must be a most desirable trait here in the Archipelago, to the point that their wings looked faintly ridiculous. Could they even fly far, or did they waddle?\n\nThe younger set stood around the fringes, intermingled with the hatchlings, fledglings and egg-heavy females.\n\nIn contrast to the green outer slopes, the interior of the caldera was black volcanic sand, with a murky, circular crater lake right in the centre. Beside this stood a male \u2013 he assumed \u2013 festooned in quite the most astonishing collection of jewellery Dragon had ever seen. He wore so much gold and silver and gemstone finery, the poor thing could barely stand, let alone could one tell his actual colour with any certainty. A king's ransom had nothing upon what that chump wore \u2013 the lucky groom, to jump to his second conclusion.\n\nWas it wrong to hate his guts at first sight?\n\nNot far from the groom, a pile of bodies twitched and twisted as if possessed of a weird, alien form of life. Eventually, Ariamyrielle Seaspray emerged with three Dragonesses holding either wing, several clasping each paw and her tail, and two sitting upon her back to hold her down. Two more gripped her head and neck in what looked to be painful headlocks.\n\nA larger copper female took a stance between the shy male and the spitting mad female.\n\n<Let me guess,> Azania said heavily. <Surprise wedding?>\n\n<Oh!> Finally, what he was seeing made sense. Aria must have been royally duped.\n\nThe Isle Dragons fairly filled the caldera from rim to rim, but they all stood upon the sands and a little ways up the sides. The centre looked awfully uninviting. Might as well hop onto a Dragon-sized gallows and pull the noose tight by himself. The copper female began to make a speech they could not hear. Her audience ruffled their wings in time with her statements and thundered their approval. Morons.\n\n<I heard that.>\n\n*Gnarr!*\n\n<Oh, I agree. Now I see why Aunt Ignita taught us that every culture has its dark secrets. Remember that lecture?>\n\n<Aye, I do.>\n\nHow bad \u2013 whatever that meant \u2013 must Aria have been to merit this treatment from Clan and kin? Certainly, she could not have told him the full story. Far from it. Nor did she know much of his history, he reminded himself, because he still found it difficult to share details about what he had been through.\n\nSo many scars.\n\nMaybe they had more in common than he had imagined?\n\nWhatever that speech was all about, the copper female held them in the palm of her paw. Not one Dragon noticed the white comet plunging from the skies. Annoying and an ego-crusher, but actually rather useful in the greater scheme of things, for he had never in his life enjoyed direct confrontation. It rubbed against the lay of his scales.\n\nFlaring his wings, Dragon brought them to a hard landing just ten Dragon paces below the rim on the outside, and willed his numb knees to do something useful.\n\nGallop up there. Show himself. Invite instant death.\n\nPerfect plan.\n\n<So, my daughter. Ready to make your vows and do your Clan proud?>\n\n<Not on your \u2013> her voice choked off.\n\n<She's ready,> the female announced. <Dragons of the Isles, let this joyous day roar to the heavens! By the right vested in me as the First Warrior of the Isles, Potentate of Dragonesses, Mighty Sceptre of Oceanic Justice and Ruler of the Waves, I, Charielle Seaspray of the Dragons of the Archipelago, declare these nuptials open. First paw, according to Dragon tradition, if any creature has reason under draconic law to object to the long overdue union of my first and most precious egg, Ariamyrielle Seaspray, to this choice male of the finest lineage, let her voice her thunder now, or forever hold silence in all five hearts!>\n\nEvery Dragon held their breath. Aria squirmed and struggled, but the two bigger Dragonesses holding her had her jaw clamped shut. Nonetheless, she still managed to make a decent racket. That would be Aria, through and through.\n\nHis throat worked. <Aria, o Aria \u2026>\n\n<I object!>\n\nAt first, he had no idea where the scream had come from.\n\nPrincess Azania! She stood upon his neck, screaming defiance and shaking her fists in a fury. The only problem was, those in the centre did not hear her above the sounds of Aria's struggling. A couple of heads beneath them turned as if casting about for a sea bird which had the temerity to caw at the wrong moment.\n\nRaising her right forepaw, Charielle Seaspray said, <I there \u2013>\n\n<III \u2013 AAAMM \u2013 DRRRAAGGOONN!!>\n\nThe belling of his draconic outrage cracked across the caldera. Dragons and Dragonesses alike almost tripped over their paws as the sound waves, with the benefit of excellent acoustics, echoed around the space multiple times.\n\nTo his shock, Azania popped a finger out of her ear. <I knew you'd do that. Voice your objection, Dragon.> She closed her ear again.\n\n<I object!!> he boomed.\n\n<Very objectionable of you,> she agreed brightly. <Alright. Next move?>\n\n<Hold on tight.>\n\nThe Isles Dragons watched in stunned tableaux as he tipped off the rim of their caldera and floated down toward the centre upon wings that threatened to buckle at any second. Landing neatly between Aria and her dam, he gathered his paws beneath him and gazed down upon Charielle Seaspray with what he fervently hoped was an expression of terrible majesty.\n\nTerribly tired, more to the point. Ready to pitch forward on his nose for a second time, and sleep for a year. Now that would be truly majestic.\n\nSummoning up his inner younger brother, he snarled, <I don't believe I was invited to the nuptials.>\n\n<Who are you, noble \u2026 Sea Dragon?>\n\n<Tell me, Charielle Seaspray, is it common at such a happy event for Isles Dragons to chain down the male so as they cannot move, and to force meaningless oaths and vows into a female's mouth?> For once in his life, words flowed from his tongue, rich with sarcasm and ripe with meaning. <May I meet the intended couple fortunate enough to merit this tender care from the Dragons of the Isles, whose reputation flies so high?>\n\nTurning his flank upon the prickly copper Dragoness as if she did not matter, Dragon courteously made a paw step to help Azania to alight. He formed his shoulders into an intimidating bunch as he stepped toward Ariamyrielle Seaspray \u2013 more for her captors, than her. Did she recognise him? Not as yet, perhaps. She suspected much \u2026\n\nThe Isles Dragonesses murmured in shock and amazement at a Human turning up amidst their congregation.\n\nCharielle spat, \"You \u2026 dare? Who are you?\"\n\nThrowing back her hood, the tiny girl bowed all around. <Honoured Dragons of the Isles, I am the Princess Azania of T'nagru, the Desert Kingdom, appointed Ambassador to the Dragons.>\n\nAria's jaw would have dropped if it were possible.\n\nHer despairing eyes flickered with new fires as she mouthed, <Dragon?>\n\nThe Dragoness roared meantime, <Why are you here? What is this \u2013 a sand crab riding upon a Dragon?>\n\n<Our kingdom being under threat of invasion by the Skartun, who enslave Dragons, lock them in metal cages and torture them in the most unspeakable ways,> Azania explained, <Dragon and I flew over the ocean to seek aid from the mightiest Dragon warriors of all, the fabled Dragonesses of the Isles. You are these, are you not?>\n\n<Of course we are!>\n\nFocussing upon Aria, Dragon thundered, <Release her at once!>\n\nHalf of the Dragonesses holding her sprang loose, assuming defensive postures that reminded him how hatchling-soft his nice new hide was, and how much he preferred it un-holey, while the others clung on tighter.\n\nReleased to speak, the Cobalt Dragoness spluttered, <D-Dragon? You \u2013 it's you, isn't it?>\n\n<Aye, Aria. The new, improved me, come to \u2013>\n\n<Mmm,> she purred, before clamping her jaw shut, but it was enough. Too much.\n\nUtter betrayal of her feelings.\n\nAria's dam screeched, <Unacceptable! Vows will not be broken while I am potentate of these isles. Warriors, seize this ridiculous foreign male!>\n\nFour warrior Dragonesses sprang at him, intent on some sort of disabling nastiness.\n\nHe did not pause to ask questions or comment on how pretty their butterfly-like wings were. <STOP!!> His sonic thunderclap reverberated out of his chest, smashing two down and two aside. They landed in moaning heaps; one Dragoness bled out of both ear canals. <I would not suggest you try that again.>\n\nOoh. He actually sounded as if he knew what he was doing.\n\nNovel.\n\nIn a flash, Ariamyrielle Seaspray wriggled free of her stunned captors and rushed to his side \u2013 one, to greet him with a stinging wing flick, and two, to assume a protective, belligerent stance before his nose, wings outspread, fangs bared, slender Dragoness haunches gleaming \u2026\n\n<Surprise?> he managed to splutter.\n\nMight have been a second's distraction there, but he was not telling.\n\n<A world better than today's first surprise,> she snarled. <Anyone who wants a piece of this Dragon will have to come through me! It \u2026really is you, Dragon? You've changed.>\n\n<Quite a bit, I guess \u2013 uh, you haven't? I mean \u2026> He flicked her back with his wingtip. <You look as dazzling as ever, but we've a small problem \u2013>\n\n<The hundred Dragonesses lining up to tear us limb from limb?> \"Princess Azania!\" Reaching out a paw, Aria touched the girl's shoulder, and then drew her firmly back to her side. \"Welcome to the Isles. Good flight?\"\n\n\"The best.\"\n\nTo his surprise, the talon dagger sprouted from her right hand. Ready for action.\n\nThis was all the greeting they had time for. The copper Dragoness stalked toward them with sinuous menace, backed by two hundred steely-eyed predators. The males just stood around looking bemused. Was intelligent thought even part of the deal around here? On the contrary, the Dragonesses looked more than prepared to kill, which was expected. What he had not expected, was how a large Dragon could feel exactly as if he were a choice portion of meat about to be reduced to kebab-sized portions and grilled in the twinkling of an eye.\n\n<Why did you come?> Aria hissed from the corner of her mouth.\n\n<Long story, but I am here for you, Aria.>\n\n<For me?>\n\nConfident in her superiority now, Charielle Seaspray purred, <I see how it is, now. This foreign Dragon has distracted you from your true purpose, daughter, and twisted your hearts away from your sworn word. What promises has he made to turn your wilful head? Riches? Power? Honour? None of these matter. At the end of this day, your honour, loyalty and service belong to your Clan by blood-right and birth. You shall obey \u2013>\n\n<This is honour?> Azania queried.\n\n<Human child, you know nothing of our ways, nor of this Dragoness' history of headstrong, anti-draconic behaviour,> the copper female responded.\n\n<I know no other crossed the ocean to save a King and Queen.>\n\n<In flagrant disobedience to the direct orders of her elders! She is reckless, impulsive and unbiddable. No. The time has come for my daughter to stand by her betrothal promise and be bound to a good, steady male \u2013>\n\n<Unlike me?>\n\n<I don't even know what you are, let alone who,> she spat back.\n\n<I am the Dragon standing between your daughter and the dishonour of this unwanted, joyless, loveless match. I am here, because I want to give Ariamyrielle Seaspray the chance to choose her own future.>\n\nThanks to the Princess.\n\nIn most of the Dragonesses facing him, he read only ire \u2013 but many, perhaps fifty or more, stood a little aside from this main body. They were younger Dragonesses, perhaps around Aria's age and a little older, and they wavered between the chains of tradition, obedience and elder-honour, and the desire to stand beside Aria. Her thoughts or inclinations, he could not read at all. He baulked, shutting down his senses, even though they trembled on the cusp of touching her chaotic feelings.\n\nPlease, please, please let her understand!\n\n<Choose? We will rend you limb from limb, foreigner, and she can choose your spineless carcass!>\n\nHe raised his muzzle. Stand tall. For once in his life, he would stand tall and proud, and not yield. <You have no idea what I am capable of.>\n\n<Dragon, please \u2026> Aria begged.\n\n<How many of you are prepared to die?> he snarled.\n\n<Dragon, I \u2013 I would stand with you, but I could not \u2026 if you were to perish \u2026 I \u2026>\n\nThat warrior demeanour cracked like a dropped vase. Aria gave a grieving sob, a lamentation, that tore his hearts. She feared for him. By coming here, he had placed her in an invidious situation, where she would choose that other male only for the reason that it would ensure his survival.\n\n<I must do this for you, Aria.>\n\n<Dragon, no!> she cried.\n\nThe Princess called, <Is it not strange, Charielle Seaspray, that troubles beset King Azerim at precisely the same time as all Isles Dragons and Dragonesses are present at this event, eighty-odd miles away? We passed a late contingent of Dragonesses inbound from Zunityne on the way. What were they up to, over there?>\n\n<What?> Aria gasped.\n\n<Coup,> Dragon said tersely. <Red feathers on their helms \u2013>\n\n<Lord Gazaram?>\n\n<No idea. City full of soldiers, King and Queen not available, Azerim vanished \u2026>\n\nCharielle smiled thinly. <Human problems are no concern of the Dragonkind, apart from some few of our ranks who take pity upon the poor creatures. Now, Dragon and your \u2026 Rider, I will give you but one chance at mercy. Extraordinary mercy, which is not often exercised beneath my iron paw, as my own daughter will tell you. Fly on. Fly home and take this little leech with you.>\n\n\"Dragon,\" the T'nagrun Princess said firmly. \"A word?\"\n\nHe was unwilling to be separated from Aria, but she led him only as far as the small pond. Standing on her tiptoes to reach his ear, she said in her mind, <Drink. You're far too dry for what you're planning.>\n\n<I am?> Bending his neck, he took a nice, long drink. Horrible water, mind.\n\nHe had not even noticed the absence of his fires, but now, that still unfamiliar bubbling and rumbling ignited in his belly. Dehydration after the ultra-long sprint. What would he do without this girl?\n\n<You are amazing, do you know that?>\n\n<If you insist,> she smiled uncertainly. <What now? Fly and escape?>\n\n<No, that will not solve anything. I think I need to shame Aria's dam without killing her. Shame her into giving Aria a choice.>\n\n<Alright. Do you think that'll work?>\n\n<It's the only idea I have. It'll go one of two ways. She'll agree to a bargain, or she'll refuse and try to kill me anyway. Can't imagine they'll just let us go. Talon in the back and all that.>\n\n[ What Aria Sang ]\n\nStalking back over to aria's side in a deliberate display of strutting male arrogance, which he doubted any of these Dragonesses had ever seen in their lives, he pointed a fore talon at Charielle, and purred, <I'm calling you out, Dragoness. Let's settle this, you and me. Single combat.>\n\nAria gasped, <Dragon, no!>\n\n<Single combat? You fool, we don't fight gentle males. They're too valuable.>\n\n<She'll murder you! Dragon \u2013>\n\n<Listen to my little Aria, foreigner. Listen to her song. Leave while you still have wings upon your back.>\n\nAlright, brothers. They had taught him a thing or two about how to speak. He sneered, <Why, are you only brave when you have a few hundred Dragonesses to back you up, Charielle Seaspray? Tell you what, I'll make you beg for mercy. When you do, you will give your word to allow Aria free choice.>\n\n<No deal,> she grinned.\n\n<Afraid? How many others would you like to die with you? Five? Ten? I'll fight as many of this miserable bunch as you want \u2013 as many as it takes to fire your courage like a true Dragoness!>\n\nA volley of snarls greeted his insults, punctuated by Aria's plea, <Dragon, what are you doing? Are you mad?>\n\n<No, Aria. Do you trust me?>\n\n<I \u2026> she shook her muzzle slowly, but said, <I do.>\n\nThe flat sincerity in her voice rocked him. She did? What had this Dragoness ever seen in him? Why did she treat him so well?\n\nA mystery for another time.\n\nStrengthening his voice, Dragon roared, <I say Isles Dragonesses are fireless fools, bereft of honour and lacking true leadership! No Dragon or Dragoness should be forced into making an oath. It is not right. We are creatures of the suns and of the winds, free to fly where we please. Our loyalty is given for honour; the deeds of our paws are best shaped by the true and pure fires that rage in our hearts. I say this Charielle Seaspray has forgotten her fires. I flew across the oceans to the Vaylarn Archipelago in search of the greatest warriors of our age. What a shocking disappointment you are.>\n\nNo reply; just that toothy, pugnacious smile from the Dragoness. Her audience shifted closer, bellies low to the ground, waiting on her signal.\n\nRaising his right wing, he draped it over Aria's shoulders in an intimate, lingering gesture. <I intend for Ariamyrielle Seaspray to become \u2013>\n\nHe missed the moment Charielle moved. So quick was she, the copper Dragoness was already in the air, sending a brutal tail-whip in his direction, before his right paw even twitched off the ground. He twisted his head to lessen the impact at the same time as he managed with an awkward swipe to partially block the blow with his upraised paw, breaking her momentum. That paw went numb. She spun off in pursuit of likely her real target, his left wing. Aiming to disable him from the start.\n\nDragon flamed her backside in passing.\n\nThe action was not at all planned. As she ripped past along his flank, her wing's razor edge opened a long cut, but then she shrieked in agony as the pain bit deep, completely missing her wing strike. The Dragoness, rear end aflame, hurtled into the watching circle of her warriors where she sat inelegantly and then rolled on the black sand, snuffing out the blaze.\n\nGnashing his fangs, he roared, *GRRRAAAOOORRRGGGH!!*\n\nNo fires. He had to save those. This was the battle challenge of an adult male Dragon, full-throated and deafening.\n\nTwo Dragonesses came at him from the corner of his vision. Dragon began to swing about, but Aria was far faster, rolling smoothly over his back to smash into them with a blistering series of kicks, punches and bites. He set another female backside \u2013 a very fetching set of green haunches \u2013 afire with a reflexive burst of flame. Screaming, the Dragoness rocketed off to splash down in the pond in a great spray of water and steam.\n\n<I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nHis triumphal bellow set them on the back paw. No doubt these Dragons had seen white fires before, but only ever in the ocean. They were not without courage, facing him as a massed group standing shoulder to shoulder, but he wondered briefly if there was not something primal about the unique power of white flame and bellicose thundering that gave them pause. A second's hesitation. In that moment, he spat a fine stream of fire out from between his fangs, shaping the flow with his tongue and lips. He did not aim to hurt or maim, but directed the fire as close to their forepaws as he dared, blistering the sand and creating a sweep of volcanic glass from the extreme heat.\n\nThe bulging eyes that greeted this feat were a sight to behold. Utter disbelief. Only he knew that his breath weapon was not half as invincible as it must look just now. Quick. Change \u2026 something. Anything!\n\nPlacing his wing once more over Aria's shoulders, a draconic statement of possessiveness, he said, <Ariamyrielle Seaspray, will \u2013>\n\n<I choose you!> she bugled sweetly. <Oh Dragon, I choose \u2026 you! This is my song!>\n\nJoy detonated inside his chest. For the longest time, he could not remember how to breathe. Were his hearts even beating? Then came the pang of self-doubt, the acidic voice that told him he could never deserve a creature like her. What was he even thinking?\n\nHe blurted out, <Do you \u2026 uh, really? What?>\n\n<Shall I twist your wing off to prove my point? Nothing could make me happier.>\n\nWas that the thought of twisting off his wing, or \u2026 chuckling softly at himself, he dared to nuzzle her cheek. Her scale scent was tropical flowers. Heady stuff! He replied, <Me happier, too much. Uh, I mean \u2013 what did I just say?>\n\nShe whispered, <Dragon, you're so \u2013>\n\n<Enough of this! ENOUGH!> Charielle Seaspray staggered toward them, clearly in significant pain. Her scales were burned and blistered in wide patches. Her paws gripped the hilts of her twin kaniaxi blades as she snarled, <So, your true agenda is revealed. You would overthrow the order of law and rule around my Isles. Traitors! This is what you planned all along.>\n\n<That is not the case, honoured Dragoness,> Dragon said respectfully. <These are my demands. One, grant me permission to court your daughter with the honour and in the fashion she deserves. Two, allow us to attend the annual migration in peace, where I hope at last to find my dam. Three, support us in taking forces to King Azerim's aid, and condemn those Dragonesses who helped stage or abet the coup against the Human Kingdom. Four, permit me to recruit a warrior force to fly back to the mainland in support of those kingdoms beset by the Dragon-enslaving Skartun.>\n\nShe snarled her hatred deep in her throat.\n\nHe said, <I've zero desire to overthrow your rule. However, if a mistake has been made, I expect redress of fitting nature \u2013 not to me, but to these fine Dragonesses and Dragons you lead. We shall leave you now to your deliberations. May your fires burn with all wisdom this evening, Charielle Seaspray.>\n\nHer fury burned, but she could find nothing to say. Not immediately.\n\n<Azania? Aria? Are you with me?> he said.\n\n<Always,> they chorused.\n\nHe could not even feel his wings as he stroked up and over the rim, and set course for a beach just a mile to the north. This time, it was not the tiredness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Just like old times; only, it was not. Aria, Azania and Dragon camped on the wide white-sand beach, watching the cream crabs scuttling up and down into their holes above the high tide line. Clumps of boulders the size of Human houses dotted the beach and the nearby ocean, giving each pocket of sand a cosy, sheltered ambiance.\n\nHe felt as awkward as a fledgling experiencing his first flare of fires for a Dragoness. The cobalt marauder clearly felt exactly the same way. They lay close upon the warm sands, but could not quite bring themselves to touch.\n\n\"So, did you \u2013\" they said at the same time.\n\nAwkward grins.\n\nAzania said, \"May I describe what we saw in Zunityne, Aria? So, we flew in. There was fire rising from three buildings, and soldiers all over the city wearing crimson jackets and gold helms decorated with a tuft of red feathers \u2013 like that parrot we saw, weren't they, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Gazaram!\" Aria spat.\n\n\"Aye, that's right,\" he said. \"We landed at the Palace. They lied, telling us that Azerim was up here at Mykita Lair \u2013 where is the actual lair, by the way?\"\n\n\"That headland up there,\" Aria pointed with her left wingtip. \"More sea caves.\"\n\n\"Oh. I guess we didn't notice, as we were in such a flaming rush to arrive.\" Dragon settled his wings deliberately. Dignity and gravitas mingled with the tingling urge to crash through the waves in jubilant dance. \"You see, we arrived in Zunityne just after mid-afternoon. They also told us that the King and Queen were not receiving visitors, and that all the Dragons were here at Mykita Lair \u2013 surprising you?\"\n\n\"Surprising me is one way of putting it.\" The radiance of her eyes dipped toward darkness, before strengthening once more. \"I never expected my dam to act so \u2026 ruthlessly, and decisively. I have been avoiding Charnal \u2013 that's the male whom I was promised to. Inventing errands, flitting here and there, helping Azerim and his parents, who are much better, by the way. Weak, but recovering. That poison was brutal. We hope they'll be able to walk again.\"\n\nHow he wished now that they had brought Inzashu up to the Isles!\n\n\"I'm glad they're better. Where do you think Azerim could be?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Best guess? Lord Gazaram will be holding him hostage in his high-security tower. He's very proud of it \u2013 a metal-clad stone tower that's part of his fortress. It lies on the northern tip of the Human Island, as far from Zunityne as one can get and still be on the same landmass. He's long had ambitions regarding the throne.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"Aria, do you also think that the timing stinks?\"\n\n\"Like a week-old fish.\"\n\nThe early evening was wind-still, but the waves kept lapping and hissing on the seashore, foaming gently as they arrived and pulled away. Looking out to sea, Dragon noticed white breakers at the edge of the reef, about two hundred Dragon paces offshore. Another magical location. What lay out there? The Sea Dragons must know. Would they be able to see the migration from here, or would they have to fly out to wherever they rested and could be found? How did a Dragon live all their life in the water and never leave it?\n\nAria touched his paw. <Today's best surprise was you two. I just couldn't believe it; first that yell \u2013 I had no idea where that came from \u2013 then, 'I am Dragon. I object!'>\n\n<That was the objective,> he joked gruffly.\n\n<Around you, he loses all objectivity,> Azania put in.\n\nDragon pretended to smack her as Aria's eyes brightened toward gleaming yellows and zesty blues. He growled, <Must I confess?>\n\nA definite edge entered Aria's voice. <Did you \u2026 mean it, Dragon?>\n\n<Which bit?>\n\n<How are the fires of a Dragoness' hearts a topic for joking?> Her talons scraped the sands with a rough, rasping sound, reflecting the turbulent state of her emotions. <I didn't give you the chance to finish before leaping in \u2013 you do feel the same way, don't you?>\n\nDragon growled, <With respect, razor wings, we nearly killed ourselves crossing a small ocean for you!> Ugh. And now he sounded like a grumpy grand-sire. Deliberately risking life and limb, he shuffled closer and extended a wing over her sharp spine spikes and tense shoulders. <Ariamyrielle Seaspray, I appreciate that in your culture, Dragonesses are the pursuers. Although I do have a few questions regarding how that works with arranged mate-matches, being as \u2013>\n\n<The skills and crafts of males are valuable, so there's a great deal of jostling over \u2013 will you just answer my question?>\n\n<Pithily,> Azania put in. <Dragon's never short of words, counting in thousands, that is. Or pedantic cartloads, linguistic budgets the size of small kingdoms, and so on.>\n\nSnaffling her into his paw, he tucked the girl beneath his chest and wrapped both paws around her, muffling her protests. <There. Much better.>\n\nThe Dragoness' face was a picture. 'You treat females like that?' it said.\n\nHe pretended to look unconcerned.\n\nAria said, <Razor wings?>\n\n<A reference to but one of your lethally attractive features.>\n\n<Oh. I see. Is this a term of endearment?>\n\nDragon pretended to consider her question. <Does it cause an insolent male to lose a paw? If not, then aye.>\n\n<Am I truly that terrifying?>\n\n<Me moth, you candle.>\n\nHer flanks shook with laughter. <Dragon, you are so different \u2013 obviously \u2013 to any other Dragon I have ever met. I am sorry if I misunderstood. Do you \u2013 how do I even ask this? Whatever's happening in my hearts is beyond my experience.>\n\n<Mine too.>\n\n<I'm not even sure what happened back there, but I do know that this is right. I've never been so certain about anything in my life.>\n\n<Aye \u2026> at some point, he would remember how to breathe, wouldn't he?\n\nCurving their necks, they stared into one another's eyes for the longest time. He was so much larger than her. Several times the tonnage, far bulkier in the shoulders, his back five feet taller when they lay alongside each other, his muzzle wider, blunter and taller than hers by a large margin. His fires sighed all at once, causing her lips to curve slightly away from her fangs. So perfect. Her tropical aroma teased his nostrils, reminding him that one of the caverns they had peeked into at Wave Dragonhome was a perfumery.\n\nA Dragon feared to speak to break the stillness, for this starlit evening breathed life's greatest magic. Finally, he managed to distil the million things that he wanted to say to her into just four words. Epic feat, but in the end, doable.\n\n<Aria, I choose you.>\n\nReaching out a paw, she caressed the soft scales beneath his left eye. <You're so beautiful.>\n\nHe blinked.\n\n<Uh, I mean, is it alright to say that to a male? You are. No insult intended. These scales \u2013 I say, the scales suit the Dragon. Majestic. And your white fires \u2026 stars above, this female's wings tingle.> Very softly, she said, <I feel a little shy around you. I've never imagined feeling this way about anyone.>\n\nHe tucked her closer with his wing.\n\nAfter a little while, the Princess tapped his palm. Oh. Forgot his captive might need also to breathe occasionally. He let her out. To his surprise, she did not have a snarky or teasing word for him. She merely winked and seated herself cross-legged on the sand before their muzzles.\n\nAzania said, \"Aria, what do you think will happen now?\"\n\nShe said, \"I know some of those Dragonesses who arrived late to the caldera. They are part of a faction opposed to my dam's rule; known troublemakers. I suspect that when my surprise nuptials were arranged, they took the chance to install a new power in Zunityne following some secret arrangement aimed at bringing power or prestige to their position. Gazaram, Hozim, Larazu and Jenarzam are four northern Lords who oppose the crown. Azerim and his younger brothers, possibly, will be held hostage against the King and Queen's abdication.\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"How does it work with two Kings?\"\n\n\"It's a strange arrangement, but under Archipelago law, a King can be appointed to support the work of the Crown, so aye, two Kings are completely possible. Azerim being the active one during his father's long illness, and his father, Varazim, effectively being a figurehead, yet under law, holding the ultimate authority. He could strike down a decree of Azerim's, for example, or refuse to sign something into law. That's my best understanding.\"\n\n\"Peculiar.\" Azania shook her curls. \"Never in the desert, that's for sure.\"\n\nThe Cobalt Dragoness touched her knee. \"Princess, we will find your Azerim, never you fear.\"\n\n\"Your dam \u2013\"\n\n\"Trust me, she's a wily one. She'll come out of this smelling like the best perfume. In Isles Dragon culture, such a plot regarding my future is highly regarded. Desirable, clever, warlike, draconic and a true talon of leadership.\" Aria grinned at their startled expressions. \"As is my right to wriggle free of the arrangement. Aye, Dragon, to break my word is dishonourable, but \u2013\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Sorry? I will rip that word out of your entrails!\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Just tugging your wings, handsome,\" she purred coyly, making all his fires go *whomp-a-whooosh!* \"Clean blades slice best. Prediction?\"\n\n\"I will never say sorry again,\" he promised, which in itself, was predictable.\n\n\"Don't,\" Aria agreed. \"Let me tell you why. You are \u2026 well, at least half Sea Dragon, right? The white fires, the scales, so sleek and gleaming and mrrrr-yum!\"\n\n\"Right!\" he yelped, shivering at her teasing touch. \"My sire is Blaze the Devastator, my dam, to my best knowledge is Sirensong, a Sea Dragoness. We hope to find her in a few weeks, when the migration passes by. I've never met her.\"\n\n\"That would be amazing,\" Azania put in.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Aria nodded gravely. \"So, I predict that the Dragonesses will assess your value in certain set dimensions \u2013 economic, political, military, potential to sire powerful hatchlings \u2013\"\n\n\"What?\" he gasped.\n\nThe Princess chuckled merrily.\n\n\"They will conclude that to have you on the side of the Isles will be a tremendous boon,\" Aria smiled. \"You have courage, an aura of dominance and an incredible breath weapon. You crossed the ocean to reach the Archipelago, a notable feat that demonstrates your strength and intrepid spirit. Having faced down Charielle herself, you proved you are skilled both in battle and diplomacy, and you represent a link with the Sea Dragons. Times are not easy here on the Isles. We Dragons feel isolated. Maybe you could change all that. And aye, your potential to sire eggs will merit lively discussion. Many Dragonesses will slaver over your brawny muscles and hefty size, and wonder openly at the dimensions and potency of your \u2013\"\n\nShe pointed a wicked talon at his nether regions.\n\n*Eeep!* he managed to splutter.\n\nAzania hooted with laughter. He blushed so furiously, his white scales began to glow from within. Robbed of speech!\n\n\"I might have to fight to keep you. And as for these parts \u2013\" she waved her paw illustratively \"\u2013 I plan to keep those very much for myself. Deal?\"\n\nFanning her face, the Princess said, \"And I thought you were the inappropriate one, Dragon?\"\n\n\"I fear I may have been eclipsed,\" he groaned, trying and failing to gain control of his fiery blushes. No chance. His glowing scales now lit a patch of beach around them. Interesting effect. Aria seemed suitably impressed! \"Still, with regular, vigorous exercise and experimentation to learn the best techniques \u2013\"\n\nAzania squealed, \"Dragon! Honestly? Here they come \u2026 no, they're only fighting, it seems.\"\n\nSoberly, the threesome regarded the fangs-and-talons m\u00eal\u00e9e which briefly appeared over the rim of the caldera, before sinking out of sight again. No quarter? That must be a battle to the death, or otherwise, these Dragonesses enjoyed tearing each other to pieces for the entertainment provided by all that blood and gore.\n\nThe cobalt warrior growled, <As I said, a lively discussion. Since it might take a while, do please tell me what you two have been up to since last we met? Every last detail. When last we parted, you wished me all happiness and that I would know who it is that I am and what I want. I cannot say I know who I am, for that is only starting to become clear, but I believe that you both have a part to play. But I do know what I want.>\n\n<What's that?> he asked.\n\n<Rescue Azerim, save the Human kingdom, normalise relations between Humans and Dragons around these Isles, help you find your dam \u2013> her fangs gleamed again as she ran out of talons on that paw, and started on the other \u2013 <romance your every scale, thrash a few Sea Serpents, raise an army and go pound the Skartun into the desert sands \u2013>\n\n<All at once?> Azania quipped, drawing a chuckle from the Dragoness.\n\nHe said, <Knowing Aria, that's only the beginning.>\n\n[ New Dragon ]\n\nLate that evening, a battered, bloody and jubilant crew of Isles Dragons flew over to invite them back to the caldera, where the male Dragons promptly whisked him aside to take part in a traditional dance. Aria joined her dam. Far from being cowed or apologetic, Charielle Seaspray acted elated, proud of her daughter and every inch in charge.\n\nAs it turned out, the detriment of Aria's dishonour was easily outweighed by snagging herself such a well-proportioned, desirable monster of a white Dragon \u2026 blah blah, he let the compliments wash over him in a daze of happiness. Quite the catch. Surpassingly handsome. Strong as the very ocean. <Mmm,> he thought, <I'll savour that one!>\n\n<So you should,> Azania agreed, ever so droll.\n\n<Nuisance.>\n\nHer dark eyes twinkled. <You love the attention, really.>\n\nBidden to roar, he gave them his best, <I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nNice one! Making over two hundred Dragonesses shiver deliciously in their scales did happen to do wonders for one's self-image. Truly miraculous.\n\nAhem. As a male, that would be part of the territory.\n\nOn a rather less egotistical note, he then went through the wringer repeatedly as Aria fought five eager challengers for his paw. Having nearly died of nervous anticipation five times over and bellowed himself hoarse in her support, she snuck up to him afterward and whispered in his ear that the bouts were really just for show, and wasn't he a nice male to be so anxious and vocal for her sake? *Gnarr.* Tradition demanded it. Oh, and the broken hind paw she had inflicted upon one of her assailants? Their fault, they should have given over rather than trying to wrench free from her submission hold. Hmm. From the way they fought, he had concluded the other Dragoness would rather have chewed off her own paw than give up.\n\nAfter the formal bouts, four Dragonesses returned from hunting in the deep waters ten miles offshore, bringing a fifteen-foot, seventeen-hundred-pound whopper of a black marlin which they dropped at Dragon's paws.\n\n<A promise gift,> they said.\n\n<What do I do with this?> he inquired.\n\nCharielle said, <You prepare the fish for your promised one, Dragon. This is Isles tradition.>\n\n<Hmm,> he purred, chest swelling at the prospect of proving what a domesticated beast he was. <Any herbs and spices about?>\n\nHis request almost triggered a minor war. Thirty Dragonesses immediately offered to fly to Mykita Lair to fetch whatever he needed. With that underway, he contemplated how best to approach this demonstration of the appropriate male household skills. Aye, chief cook, cleaner, Princess-napper and worshipper of all things cobalt. Very well. He could do domestic with the best of them.\n\n<Bring me ten palm fronds and ten coconuts!> he demanded.\n\nAnother mad scramble.\n\nExcellent. Cracking open his jaw, he snipped the fish's head right off and set that aside. Then he sliced it open lengthwise and deboned it with the efficient application of work he had learned on river fish, only on a far smaller scale. Everything in the ocean was bigger. He cleaned out the guts and threw the mess onto the sand. Picking through the offerings of herbs and spices, he prepared a tangy blend together with the coconut milk and liberally basted the inside of the fish, before husking several of the coconuts and adding neat talon-cut slices to his preparation. Picking up the great fish between his paws and pinching it shut, he flame-grilled the monstrous portion with plenty of attitude intended to disguise his decidedly unreliable control of his fires \u2013 flexing the muscles, adding snarky commentary, paying attention to every detail.\n\nOnly the best for Aria!\n\nMeantime, the excited Dragonesses added a chorus of encouragement of his efforts, much of which was decidedly blush-worthy.\n\nWhen the steam and piquant scents combined with char reached what he judged to be their peak, Dragon tried to strip off the skin. Fail. It did nothing of the sort.\n\nAria popped over for an inspection. <I like it crunchy.>\n\n<I haven't much experience of preparing ocean fish,> he admitted.\n\n<Smells fabulous.>\n\nVery good! Laying out the monster on a bed of palm leaves, Dragon flipped it open to release a rush of fragrant steam. Oh, by his wings! His stomach vented a great rumble.\n\n<I'll take that as the cook's own compliment,> Aria gurgled. <Right. We take turns to feed one another.>\n\nHe cut her a respectable portion and popped it into her jaw. Aria eyed up the fish, mimed looking at a three-foot section, and to rowdy cheers, played to her crowd by suggesting bigger and bigger portions. Each time she pretended to have decided, she took another look at him \u2013 shoulders, chest, haunches and aye, between his hind legs \u2013 and increased the size of what she intended to cut for him.\n\nDragon then picked Azania up and used her to measure his suggested portion, provoking howls of laughter amongst even the males.\n\nShe folded her arms across her chest, and teased, \"You'll pay for that!\"\n\n\"On the contrary, expensive Princess, I expect your ransom to cover any outlay on my part. She's very valuable,\" he explained to Charielle.\n\n\"You sell royals?\"\n\n\"Barbaric custom with a long and sordid history, I know,\" he agreed.\n\nHis prospective dam-to-be eyed him balefully, and purred, \"You had better be pulling my leg, Dragon, or I'll pull yours right off. Do we understand one another?\"\n\nLike dam, like daughter, eh?\n\n\"Perfectly,\" he said, with his most diplomatic face pasted in place.\n\nToward midnight, as Charielle Seaspray drew her daughter aside for a private consultation, he sought out Charnal to speak with him. What a shy, gentle Dragon! A little prodding revealed that he was a master perfumer; Aria was wearing a personalised scent he had created for her. The real customers for his magic-infused brews, however, were the males. They were the most fragrant group of Dragons he had ever met, bar none, and it was nothing like the normal musky male odour he was used to, especially in bachelor quarters.\n\nCharnal held nothing against him, he said.\n\nAs he chatted with the much smaller Dragons, he had a sense of being a bigger brother among friends. These males would have been the ones excluded by his kin; laughed at and jeered roundly for their soft-spoken ways, yet perhaps for the first time in his life, he felt he stood among peers. They could not believe he was an artist like them. Different aptitudes, but the similarity in spirit was more than clear to him. The males chortled politely at the notion of such a big bruiser having a softer side. Their disbelief, funny on the surface, struck a niggling nerve within. Hide it. No need to antagonise any more creatures here; had he not done enough already?\n\nWhat a result, though!\n\nRe-joining Princess Azania, he noticed in her eyes how tired she was. Oddly, her weariness seemed to rush over him as he realised he could not even stop dragging his tail about. His final steps were tiredness-drunk.\n\nShe said, \"So, one love life underway, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Certainly appears positive,\" he grinned.\n\n\"She can't keep her eyes off you, in case some unobservant males have failed to notice the lay of the sands, or however you say that in Draconian.\"\n\n\"I have to admit, I'm so tired I'm not really seeing straight anymore.\"\n\n\"Need your Princess to tuck you in?\"\n\n\"Sounds brilliant. As long as I get a bedtime story as well?\"\n\n\"So demanding.\"\n\nLying down upon the warm black sand, he offered his paw. She came gratefully to him. He tucked her close beside his lower left chest, curved his muzzle protectively about the nook he had created and slipped his wing down to complete the picture. How many times had they slept like this? How many more times would there be, if she found Azerim and he had Aria? Would that change everything?\n\nWhat would he not give to guarantee for her the same fortune which had smiled upon him?\n\nSo many questions. Would Aria tolerate King and Princess as friends, as his Dragon Rider; might it be possible for the young King to become a Rider, too? Would anyone else want this special relationship he shared with Azania?\n\nSoftly, he whispered, \"Tomorrow, we go rescue your King from his high tower, where he pines for sight of his Black Rose of the Desert, weeping copious bitter tears \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, you're so silly. In the tales, Kings are never stuck in towers.\"\n\n\"That's what makes this real life, Princess.\"\n\n\"Aye. Is it ridiculous to admit that I still want to pinch myself, sometimes, when I think about who I am with and where we are?\"\n\n\"No, it isn't.\"\n\nHe snuck a peek at Ariamyrielle. Her fangs flashed in an immediate smile. So happy!\n\nThat was the thought that followed him into the hinterlands of his Dragon dreams. He had made someone happy. Just now, at this moment in his life, his paw held this power.\n\nAs incredible as the whitest of fires."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Dragon woke slowly, with the sense that he needed a crowbar to peel his eyelids off his eyeballs to stand even half a chance of waking up. Empty paw!\n\nHe was up and snarling before his brain caught up. Oh. Princess Azania chatted amiably with Aria just a few feet away. Fifty or so Dragonesses looked on, their forms wreathed in a chilly sea fog. As one, they startled at his sudden movement and then sighed over his rightful concern for his promised one.\n\nOr \u2026 something like that.\n\nWas he dreaming?\n\nBrain-befogged in his own right, he gaped at the audience. Did fifty-odd warrior Dragonesses often stand around waiting for a Dragon to wake? Pretty crew. All armed to the fangs. Colourful butterflies with decidedly nasty intentions that he fervently hoped were directed exclusively at his enemies. Oh. These were the younger Dragonesses? Must be. One or two were older, distinguished by their scars and larger size, but the rest were the younger set who had stood apart in apparent support of Aria.\n\n<Dragon, you're awake at last,> the Cobalt Dragoness fluted. <Bad dream?>\n\n<No. I missed Azania from my paw. Uh \u2026>\n\nThat smile! He pinched his paw surreptitiously. Awake. Not dreaming. The most stunning Dragoness in Solixambria was making fiery eyes at him. Five hearts frolicked within his chest.\n\nShe said, <Dragon, meet our army. Dragoness army, meet my Dragon.>\n\n<Haai-arr!!> The group roared as one, drawing their swords so fast he only realised they were saluting him once the gesture was completed.\n\n<By my wings!> he grunted, taken aback. <At \u2026 ease, warriors?>\n\n<Haai-arr!!> The small forest of kaniaxi swords miraculously returned to their sheaths without amputating random body parts.\n\nHe glanced about. <Fog?>\n\n<Unseasonable but welcome, Dragon,> one of the older Dragonesses called.\n\nAria said, <Last night, my dam gave me command of fifty-two fine warriors. These Dragonesses have promised to follow us to the far side of Solixambria in support of the T'nagrun people. We just need to work out how to cross the ocean.>\n\nAzania nodded. <Also, Charielle apologised for 'testing my mettle' last night with her comments regarding Humans \u2013> how very dry her irony \u2013 <and promised a new era of cooperation with Isles Humans and beyond if the Ambassador to the Dragons can live up to her mighty title.>\n\n<Ooh, the draconic backbite?> he groused.\n\n<Quite. The rule of talon around here is to test a warrior's mettle,> the Princess replied. <Being female, I am also up for testing.>\n\nInteresting leadership style. Certainly one way to keep one's allies and enemies alike on the back paw, while providing a convenient excuse to wriggle out of blunders, too. Smart. He did not admire or condone the strategy, but he could see how it would work. Azania was more than up to the task. Not that he was biased. Not even to the tune of four feet and eight inches of snark-a-licious Human royalty.\n\nShowtime.\n\nFlexing his muscles in the most massive display he could physically achieve, Dragon twizzled his neck, flexed his wings, and prowled over to Aria with predatory intent. He distinctly heard her belly fires hit a pitch of excitement as he paused before her, and then lowered his muzzle to nuzzle hers, cheek to cheek in the draconic way.\n\n<May dawn's fires burn as brightly in your eyes as upon your scales, Ariamyrielle Seaspray,> he declared in ringing tones. Unorthodox. Hope that melted her hearts!\n\n<It's rather foggy out,> she grinned.\n\n<The metaphorical shall become literal the instant this fog burns away,> he chuckled. <Good morn, Princess. What's the plan for the day?>\n\n<Why, I wish to catch me a King,> she purred.\n\nMore than fifty Dragons around her inhaled as one. Dragoness! So authentically draconic, even the Princess caught the vibe and played it up by pretending to flick out her wings and check her talons. Then, she bared her neat row of white teeth. <Who's ready to fly?>\n\nThe murmur that rose from the Dragonesses was at once approving, zealous and the stuff of chills running up and down his spine.\n\nAria said, <Flying to the south, we'll pick up a troop of Anhoyal Rangers. We'll need their help in two phases; firstly to infiltrate Zunityne and activate, brief and organise loyal forces there, and secondly, to help us infiltrate Lord Gazaram's fortress and secure the King. We've learned that it's deliberately been Dragon-proofed. Also, we need to learn the fate of Azerim's four younger brothers and then plan our next move accordingly.>\n\n<Four more brothers?> Dragon echoed.\n\n<Aye, but as the crowned King, he's the key,> the cobalt warrior explained. <We're concerned that the hostages might have been split up as well. One for each rebel Lord, or something like that. The older King and Queen will be easily controlled due to their illness, and confined to their royal chambers.>\n\n<That sounds messy,> he growled unhappily. <One thing I do know, is that the Palace building could be controlled by a small number of Dragonesses with orders to hold particular chambers or floors.>\n\nPrincess and Dragoness stared identically at him.\n\n<We should isolate the royal chambers. It's an idea,> he said, on the defensive. <How do Humans communicate quickly around these islands?>\n\n<Homing pigeon,> Aria said.\n\n<Then we know what to do, don't we? It might take more than our number, however.>\n\nAria narrowed her eyes. <Do what, Dragon?>\n\nOh. Was she not used to taking opinions from a male \u2013 did she not know him? Or could this be a culturally tricky moment? Hmm.\n\nBest paw forward.\n\nWith careful respect, he said, <Aria, if we can isolate the north of Human Island from being warned by pigeon, we take these Rangers and go hit the Palace \u2013 hard and fast. Dragon bombardment. Land them on the roof, the grounds, on balconies, whatever it takes. Is your dam still around? We'd need a screen of Dragons right across the width of the island to make this work.>\n\nThe Dragoness shook her head slowly, eyes narrowed in calculation. Then, she smacked him upon the shoulder. <Excellent idea. Council?>\n\nThe two older Dragonesses plus three younger joined them and discussed the strategy briefly.\n\n<One more thing,> he said. <Who among these warriors is willing to carry a Human upon their neck?>\n\nAria growled, <Dragon, you are too much!>\n\n<It's a question of timing,> he argued. <We need to move fast. You aren't going to catch anything infectious, or is this idea a stain on a warrior's honour?>\n\n<Not mine,> said one of the older Dragonesses.\n\nAnother agreed, <Nor mine. Carrying allies into battle is like carrying additional weapons. Whatever gets the job done.>\n\n<Show of paws!> Aria roared. <Who is prepared to carry a Human Ranger into battle?> About thirty Dragonesses raised their paws. The sweep of her eyes came around to Dragon. <And what's this?>\n\nHe checked his splayed talons. <I'll carry ten. Just saying.>\n\nWith an exasperated huff, she growled, <You'll do as you're told, Dragon!>\n\nBest let that one go.\n\nTen seconds later, with a hop, skip and a jump, the Princess strapped herself aboard in her usual place. Dragon launched into the air the instant he had wing space, chasing the Dragonesses up into the thick, salt-scented mist.\n\n<Turning into quite the rascal, aren't we?> Azania thought privately to him.\n\n<It's catching.>\n\n<Are we having fun yet?>\n\n<Picked up the attitude from this crazy desert Princess I kidnapped in the south.>\n\n<Mister 'I'll carry ten,' who were you trying to impress?>\n\nOne guess.\n\nAfter communicating with Charielle Seaspray and receiving her agreement to support their plan, the Dragoness army swept south in a flying wedge, slipstreaming one another in perfect formation. Frightening discipline. Aria was one of four blues. Another was the oldest Dragoness, fifty-one year-old Yalia, who was a much lighter blue than Aria, the colour of ocean shallows over a reef. The other two were a most unusual pair, twins hatched of a single egg, primarily turquoise in colouration with the usual dramatic wing flares and features that gave them that deceptive butterfly-like appearance.\n\nFifty-three cutthroat warrior Dragonesses, one Human Princess, and the white behemoth bringing up the final position of one arm of their wedge. Best escort beneath the suns. His chest hurt from feeling so swollen. Or was that the aftereffects of yesterday's sprint?\n\nThey cut wing across the jungle-bearded spine of the island toward a wide bay said to be dotted with myriad, heavily overgrown islands. The foliage dripped in the mist, with individual trees rising out of the ghostly atmosphere to a height of two hundred feet. Dragon did not see too many dots, but as they headed out over the waters again after a three and a half hour flight, the mist began to lift enough for him to see the plethora of small, bougainvillea-overrun islands where the King's crack regiment, the Anhoyal Rangers, had a jungle training camp.\n\nJust the kind of place to do nasty things to fresh recruits.\n\nHowever, the lead Dragoness spied a white sail just vanishing into the mist several miles ahead \u2013 how, Dragon had no idea, because the outer end of the bay was still soupy at best \u2013 and so the Rangers had the memorable shock of being tracked down by a flight of Dragonesses.\n\nThey saluted when they recognised Aria.\n\nDragon liked them at once. Gruff, rangy and nut-brown of skin, the Rangers were lightly armed and armoured, but had that air of understated confidence that pointed to them being men and women of action. He knew Dragons like this: Gangbuster and his own sire, Blaze, to name but a couple.\n\nIn neat formation, the small, speedy sailing craft pulled up on a sandbank large enough to accommodate fifty feisty, fiery females.\n\nAria brought over the Sankir, or troop captain, to meet her crew. The rest of his troop lined up neatly nearby. Eighty men and women on their way to Zunityne, having just received word of the coup, he was telling Aria.\n\n\"I am Sankir Farizam, ma'am, Dragons!\" he saluted smartly.\n\n\"Sankir!\" Azania smiled.\n\nPoor fellow. He did a triple-take. Face, outfit, face. Tan as he was, he coloured as he realised that he had just looked the girl over with far more than polite interest. \"Uh, ma'am \u2026 you do look familiar \u2026\"\n\nOof. He stank of embarrassment.\n\n\"You are not allowed to say, 'my, how you've grown,' because that would be wholly untrue.\"\n\nHer smile reached her eyes, daring him to make the connection.\n\n\"Princess! Princess \u2026 Azania, of T'nagru! Your Highness, what are you \u2013 excuse my astonishment \u2013 doing all the way out here? And, how? How wonderful you look, Highness. You've grown into a most striking young woman.\"\n\nShe said, \"It is lovely to meet you again, Sankir. It has been far too long \u2013 I recall that you were Azerim's bodyguard during your tour of the kingdoms. We met in the Kingdom of Ayren, correct? You rescued me from a dreadful fate when Azerim and I were playing and we knocked over that sculpture.\"\n\nSo, he must know that Azerim and Azania had made friends. What thoughts must be rushing through his mind just now? Dragon could almost hear his brain fizzing as it jumped to conclusions.\n\nHe grinned, \"Aye, that I did. Soldiers! We have royal company \u2013 this is the Princess Azania of T'nagru, the Black Rose of the Desert.\"\n\nEyes popped, but they all bowed respectfully, taking a step forward before swooping low in a style that must belong to these isles. Azania returned one of her flowing desert greetings. Once again, she was the smallest by a head; these islanders must be tall and rangy in frame, he thought, unless they only recruited to a particular minimum height? All were nut-brown of skin, shades lighter than her, however.\n\nThe soldier said, \"The sea lanes cannot be open, surely?\"\n\n\"Sankir, I flew to the Archipelago with my Dragon.\"\n\nDragon rumbled, \"The Princess of T'nagru is my Dragon Rider, and I am honoured to fly together with her.\"\n\nEpic jaw-dangler.\n\nHe and Azania gave a wicked laugh at exactly the same time.\n\nTurning to the men and women, the Princess said brightly, \"So, given the rush to get to Zunityne, who would like to fly there aboard a Dragon?\"\n\nExactly two women leaped into the air, shouting, \"Me!\"\n\nThe rest gasped as if she had slugged them each in the gut, simultaneously.\n\nRiders Aloft!\n\nThe chosen dragonesses stared at the Humans, and shuffled their paws in the sand. The chosen crack troops stared at the Dragons, and shuffled their boots in the sand.\n\nDragon pictured kicking sand in everyone's faces.\n\nAzania clapped her hands sharply. \"Wake up, everyone! We've a kingdom to plunder!\" Only Dragon chortled at her joke. She said, \"Alright \u2026 uh, Dragon. Any ideas how to make this happen?\"\n\n\"Me? I think \u2026 aye. Here's what we'll \u2013\"\n\nHe paused as Aria growled, \"Would you two just like to take over?\"\n\nOh dear. Issues of a romantic nature. He said, \"Sorry. With your permission, my little Drag \u2013 oh, help! That came out all wrong!\"\n\nWithering glare. Keeping her lethal paws to herself, however, she purred, \"I promise to make you pay for that audacity later, handsome.\"\n\n*Whooooff!* His fires raged to life at her coquettish tone. The watching Dragonesses chortled in smoky appreciation. Nothing for it. Before he conducted an unfortunate decimation of their new allies, Dragon jerked his muzzle aloft and let rip with a thunderous roar and a plume of flame that raged eighty feet tall. When he felt ready, he cut it off and returned to the conversation.\n\n\"Sorry, fire breathing is quite new to me,\" he explained. \"Bit of a lack of control, sometimes.\"\n\nAria did not look unimpressed. Nor did the rest of their army.\n\n\"Permission granted,\" she said, with a fangs-flashing smile coupled with a saucy wink.\n\nDragon almost lost it a second time.\n\nSwallowing back all the unruly fire, he said, \"Right. Dragonesses, I want you to sniff your way down the line. Trust your instincts. When you find the right person, pair up with them. Get them onboard and settled. Men, mind your manly jewels when you mount up. These Dragonesses are sharp.\"\n\nMany of the women chuckled; one called, \"And what about us, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Don't pop those bosoms, ladies!\"\n\nThat cracked the tension like a clay pot dropped off a cliff. Suddenly, an air of nervous excitement overtook the entire congregation as Aria led her way down the line, picking a tall, strong brown-haired woman. The other Dragonesses jostled behind, picking here and there until Dragon was left with the remainder.\n\nAll females.\n\n\"Are you trying to tell us something about male Dragons and harems?\" Azania sniped, drawing a poisonous glance from Aria.\n\nThat would be a jealous Dragoness. One and one only, that glare told him.\n\nOr, a fate indistinguishable from death.\n\n\"Let's get these women tied on,\" he said grandly. \"Use your belts, little Humans, and hang on tight, especially on takeoff. My crew, we'll try a running, skimming takeoff to make your first flight as smooth as possible for you.\" He curved his head to eye the women seating themselves gingerly between his skull spikes. Eight above his shoulders and down his back, two behind Azania on his neck. \"Hold onto one another, and trust me to do the flying. I've flown Princess Azania from T'nagru to the Archipelago without dropping her once.\"\n\n\"We did have a long swim, however,\" she put in.\n\n\"Not helpful, Princess,\" he growled. \"You see, she was inside my mouth at the time.\"\n\nMaybe that wasn't the most helpful comment either.\n\nHe watched the Dragonesses launching into the sky. Their pretty but highly flexible wing structures did things he could only dream of. Soon he was left alone, along with the soldiers who would return some of the vessels to their base camp, before setting sail for Zunityne to support the Rangers there later. After walking up to one end of the sandbank, he dug his talons into the soft sand and called, \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Is that possible?\" one of the soldiers called.\n\nHer squad leader clipped her around the earhole. \"Respect the Dragon.\"\n\nAzania said, \"She's right; there's nothing quite like Dragon flight. Dragon, show them what you're made of.\"\n\nThe extra weight he bore had to be over half a tonne, he reminded himself as he raised and flexed his wings back and forth, loosening up the muscles. Time for a run. Digging in his talons, he pressed into a powerful sprint along the sandbank. Enough speed and the slight headwind in his favour, and he could call a warning before leaping into the air with a tilt of his wings that took him clear of the water for the all-important initial wingbeats that gained altitude and flying momentum. A couple of the Rangers whooped.\n\nHe gazed ahead at the Dragonesses disappearing into the bank of sea fog ahead. \"Is it normal that it sticks around like this?\"\n\n\"This weather can occur around the changing of the seasons,\" said a Ranger on his neck, sounding breathless. She had the right idea. \"Colder currents from the north bring in the fog; usually, it's a sign that the Sea Dragon migration is near, because the cold waters bring important nutrients to the oceans around these isles. Used to be you could see them from this side of the islands, but nowadays, they pass around to the northern side. Some years they rest up and around the talons for a few weeks, playing, mating and hunting Sea Serpents, but they never stay long. Restless creatures. I do wonder what drives them.\"\n\n<Will I want to take part in a migration one year?> he thought privately.\n\nAzania said, <Do you feel the itch?>\n\n<No. But what an experience it would be. Imagine seeing the world that way?>\n\n<Incredible, without a doubt.> He sniffed the mischievous purples and pinks popping into her emotions as she said, <You know, it would be easy to get lost in this fog. What say you we beat Aria and the Dragonesses to the eastern tip of this island, where we agreed to rest?>\n\n<How you lead me astray, Princess.>\n\n<I'm just along for the ride,> she chuckled, patting his head.\n\nHardly! Yet he well knew how fragile confidence could be. Would she ever grasp all that she had done for him? Could he find a way to tell her? Build her up from the inside?\n\nA gristly thought to chew upon.\n\nPicking his wingbeat, he accelerated smoothly into the enveloping greyness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Rolling on his back on the warming beach sand, Dragon peered sideways to see Aria spearing out of the dissipating fog bank with a certain vexed gleam in her eye. Loving it!\n\nShe led her Dragoness army in at a healthy clip; every last one of whom was doubtless wondering what their leader should do with an insubordinate male like him. This must go against the grain of their culture like a paw rubbing scales up the wrong way. Playing it cool, Ariamyrielle brought her army in to a neat landing beside the stream which ran across the beach and into the ocean. The Dragonesses paused to slake their thirst, just as he had done, first at the stream and then in the ocean. His body needed salt, a strange new compulsion.\n\nAria called, \"Council. Princess. Sankir. Dragon \u2013 stop fooling around over there.\" She clicked her talons at him, as one would summon a naughty hatchling! \"Come. Let's talk assault strategy.\"\n\nWith a low growl, he stalked toward her, hot words burning unsaid upon his tongue.\n\nThe cobalt warrior frowned. \"Something I said?\"\n\n\"The talon click!\"\n\n\"Oh. Oh! That's just how we talk to males on the Archipelago. Is it \u2013\"\n\n\"Insulting? Gnarr! Highly, where I come from.\"\n\n\"A cultural difference, then. You're a big Dragon. Swallow your pride. We've more important things to talk about.\"\n\nAzania laid a hand upon her neck. <Easy, Dragon. Later. Help me focus on the mission. Please?>\n\nShaking with suppressed rage, he joined the team watching Sankir sketch in the dirt. Neat hand, he approved, as a map of the Palace grounds and a section of the main building appeared in the dirt. The Ranger explained that King Varazim and Queen Vyioli \u2013 her family were originally nobles but also refugees from the destroyed Kingdom of Taribonli, who had resettled on the Archipelago \u2013 had private chambers on the third floor of the east wing. The initial intelligence his team had received pointed to the royals being held under house arrest there; they would be heavily guarded, but mostly from inside the building, with other enemy troops stationed in and around the grounds.\n\nAzania pointed to the elevation sketch of the building. \"How tall is that balcony, Sankir Farizam?\"\n\n\"Over thirty feet,\" he said. \"The doors are solid and the windows armoured, and \u2013 oh!\" His dark eyes twinkled; Dragon suspected he had a very soft spot for the Princess. \"We would consider deploying a very large Dragon, methinks?\"\n\n\"As I thinks, so I do,\" she joked.\n\nDragon put in, \"Well, these small Dragonesses could not easily reach that height, but if the doors or windows are large enough \u2026\"\n\n\"Mrrrr-yum, I like your idea,\" Aria agreed, touching his left wing. Apology included?\n\nRather less grumpily than a moment before, he explained, \"Open windows, insert Dragonesses and Rangers. That should take care of matters inside the royal chambers. I could not be useful inside that building, judging by the dimensions. If there are catapult emplacements or enemy squads deployed inside the grounds, however \u2026 squish-gnarr-SPLAT!\"\n\n\"Nice!\" Azania growled.\n\nThe Sankir's eyes popped wide.\n\nDragon said, \"We've fought battles together, Sankir, most notably breaking the Skartunese siege of N'ginta Citadel. Azania is smart, quick on her feet and a deadly shot with a Dragon bow. We should tell you our story when we have time. Now, how long do we have to hit the capital? When's the best time? Aria, just point this angry Dragon in the right direction!\"\n\n\"Fire to my hearts,\" the Dragoness purred.\n\nBack on track.\n\n\"Let's talk troop numbers and walk through the assault in detail,\" said the Sankir. \"One, we infiltrate the city and tap our contacts, confirming the royals' location. Two, hit the Palace hard. Three, secure the building and the perimeter if possible.\"\n\n\"Four, try to learn exactly where Azerim and his brothers may have been taken?\" Azania suggested.\n\n\"Aye, good,\" he agreed. \"Aria, thoughts on the timing?\"\n\n\"They will expect a night or pre-dawn assault, if anything,\" she said. \"I suggest we attack half an hour before sundown, right out of the setting suns. Today is Taramis ascendant. Which means, five, we should prepare contingency plans and alternative options for the Palace assault, and six, immediate plans to split up and fly north as quickly as Dragon wings can take us. Let's do this. We have an hour and a half at most. I want to hear all ideas and concerns. Keep it snappy.\"\n\nThey put their heads together.\n\nHalf an hour later, Dragon, Azania and two Rangers left for the first mission. He winged rapidly across the bay, keeping so low to the ocean that his wingtips regularly kicked up small splashes of spray. Three miles before the city, he took two terrified Rangers and one smug Princess into the snug confines of his jaw and submerged. They swam for the coastline, aiming for a small, secluded bay known to the Rangers, where an associate should be waiting for them.\n\n<Associate?> Dragon gurgled.\n\n<I wonder if poor old Azerim knows how many ways his nice kingdom can be burgled?> Azania's mental voice was one huge grin, but it failed to hide her deep concern.\n\nFrom several hundred Dragon paces offshore, he popped his jaw up briefly to give his cargo a breath of fresh air. Three persons used up his air supply much more quickly than one.\n\n\"He's there,\" the female Ranger said, wriggling on his tongue. \"Let's go terrify him.\"\n\n\"That's the spirit,\" Azania approved.\n\nA primordial beast walked out of the ocean, terrifying the local populace, numbering one.\n\nThe monster cracked open his jaw, revealing three Human heads who were terribly grateful not to be decorating his fangs, or sizzling delicately in his digestive juices.\n\nAfter that the local populace emerged from hiding, quite possibly more shocked by the tightness of Azania's trousers than the size of the fiery quadruped hulking behind her, to said quadruped's vast annoyance. Although, when it came to his attractiveness to the Human male, he could not exactly compete with the Black Rose of the Desert. Might as well accept his fate.\n\n<Stop it, Dragon, you're making me blush.>\n\nOops. <Sorry. Thinking aloud is a bit of a habit.>\n\nThe Ranger had plenty of information for them; most importantly, that the King and Queen were definitely being held in their private chambers. He even knew how many troops were stationed inside each room, as well as outside the doors.\n\n\"Have to make it a smash and grab raid,\" Azania noted. \"Securing the royals is the number one priority.\"\n\n\"They're still mostly abed,\" said the Ranger, eyeing up the royal legs.\n\nDragon flexed a talon beneath his nose. \"Eyes.\"\n\n<Dragon, please.>\n\n<Dragon, please chop out his nasty little eyeballs?> he grumbled back.\n\nIntriguing to see how brown people could turn pale. Almost chameleon-like in ability, when properly threatened. No, he was not repentant. Not where her honour was concerned.\n\nAfter the Ranger associate had shared all of the important points he had to make, Dragon took his Princess in jaw and slipped away across the reef once more. Gorgeous tropical fish, corals and plants! He had never imagined the ocean could be so colourful. Once they rescued this King and blew his little mind with all that was Azania, he would love to spend some time painting some of these scenes he had captured in his mind. Just \u2026 take a rest, from all this traipsing around Solixambria. Wars, coups, political shenanigans and romance.\n\nBusy times made for busy Dragons.\n\nThis Dragon's head spun as he slipped through a deeper channel between the reef and out into more open water offshore of Zunityne. He kept a close lookout for Sea Serpents, but the islanders had already told him that they preferred deeper, cooler waters rather than the shallow, considerably warmer coastal waters. The bottom here was sandy, about fifty feet deep, with scattered patches of green or purple seaweed.\n\nSo cool and lovely. How had he never awoken to this awareness of the glorious embrace of water?\n\nThree miles offshore, he attempted his first in-water takeoff. The actual attempt was rather less elegant than the theory stuffed inside his head, but by dint of diving deep and then exploding upward in a vertical breach, he was able \u2013 just \u2013 to clear his wings and thrash his way into the air.\n\nPhew. Water was also heavy.\n\nBack across the channel they skimmed, making top speed, meeting up with Aria's force about two-thirds of the way to the far shore. Re-joining the wedge of warrior Dragonesses in the right wing position just behind Aria's lead, they relayed the information received from the Ranger. It was gratifying to know that the kingdom's forces were still working for the crown, the Cobalt Dragoness noted with satisfaction. Exactly as she had expected.\n\nHow had her work for the crown developed, Dragon wondered privately? Why the sympathy for Humans, which went against trends amongst his kind? He must ask for the story when they had a private moment together.\n\n<Didn't even swallow any Rangers along the way,> he put in once the serious talk was dispensed with.\n\nShe grinned. <Feeding that beastly big gullet of yours must be quite the challenge.>\n\n<Do you cook, Aria?>\n\n<NO!!>\n\nPah. Another cultural gaffe.\n\nThe Princess said, <Aria, question. What will eat more than a Dragon?>\n\n<A very hungry Sea Dragon?>\n\n<No, two Dragons.>\n\nShe guffawed merrily. In another cross-cultural surprise, Isles Dragonesses appreciated the sense of humour Dragon and Princess loved most.\n\nEncouraged, Azania said, <And, what happens if you kiss a Dragon?> When no-one knew that, but the Dragons had finished expressing disgust and a few married Rangers had exchanged bawdy suggestions with their spouses, she said, <I don't know either, but you could ask a piece of burned toast.>\n\nRoars of laughter!\n\nMid-air, Dragon received onto his back the six Rangers chosen to lead the assault into the Palace. Several commented that the challenge of aerial transfer reminded them of their early Ranger training, which majored on physical, mental and survival tests and the odd bit of hazing of recruits. He knew a thing or two about hazing! They swapped a few stories before, of one accord, Dragons and Humans alike dropped the banter to focus on the mission.\n\nFlying northeast, they swung in line between the city and the setting suns. Taramis emerged as predicted, bathing the tranquil early evening ocean in brilliant white light. Anyone on the lookout in the city would have to look directly into the white-hot sun to see them coming. Absolutely the idea.\n\n<Remember, only red jackets and red feathers are enemy,> Aria called. <Take guidance from your Rangers. Dragons, battle speed!>\n\nHe switched into his sprinting stroke, only for Azania to immediately warn him against racing ahead. Sigh. Throttle back and try not to be too narked when Aria growled at him to maintain the correct timing for the initial strike.\n\nThe city came up faster than expected. They blew over a ridge liberally tufted with tropical trees covered in great streamers of a flowering purple creeper, and suddenly the clay tile roofs flashed beneath them. Teams of ten Dragonesses apiece peeled off efficiently, bound for the Palace roof, different areas of the grounds, and an assault on the front door \u2013 more a feint than a serious attack, to throw the enemy soldiers off their real intent.\n\nDragon angled for the east wing.\n\n\"See that line of windows below the roof, Dragon?\" Sankir Farizam pointed. \"From the end count three, then there's a balcony door. The next two windows are the royal bedchamber. Then, that next door's their private balcony. Got it?\"\n\n\"Clear,\" said Dragon.\n\nAria smacked his haunches with her right wingtip. \"Go!\"\n\nHe surged into the lead. Four red-plumed helmets stood on the roof. Timing his arrival with a swing of his head, he hurled fire in their faces. Flare the wings! Brake hard! Stalling with a series of powerful wingbeats, he touched down only with his hind feet, gripping the balcony railing with his forepaws. The Rangers ran up his forearms and stood aside. Taking half a glance at the incoming Dragonesses, Aria in the lead, he smashed in the balcony doors in an explosion of glass and wood splinters, but the window only reverberated and stayed whole. Drawing back his fist, he hit the glass with flame and fist simultaneously at the same instant as the rushing wind of Aria's wings brushed his back, and the Dragoness punched through what was left.\n\nThe Rangers darted through the broken doorway a second before the next Dragoness arrived. Perfect entry to the gap. Even though it scraped her flanks either side, she somehow had her wings folded back and out of the way. She skidded through on the marble flooring, shovelling soldiers out of her way.\n\n\"Azania!\" Aria called. \"King and Queen.\"\n\n\"Coming!\"\n\nLight footsteps ran up to his paw; he tossed her lightly through the doorway. She took the boost smoothly, dashing inside to check on the royals. Aria had contrived to land upon their oval bed in such a way as to shield them with her body; with her right forepaw, she waved an eight-foot kaniaxi sword to devastating effect. Catching sight of a red helmet cowering beside the window hangings on the near side of the room, Dragon reached through the window and plucked him out before he developed any ideas regarding actual bravery. Meantime, three more Dragonesses whipped through the balcony door in quick succession.\n\n\"Your Majesties, are you well?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"Thanks to you,\" the King rasped. \"Who are \u2013 who \u2013 I know Ariamyrielle, but girl, you look \u2026 T'nagrun?\"\n\n\"We know you,\" the Queen whispered.\n\nAt the same time, the Princess said, \"Azania of T'nagru at your service, Your Majesties, with a Dragon army.\"\n\nShe glanced up as Aria's body quivered at an arrow shot point blank into her flank. One of the other Dragonesses sliced the enemy warrior in half, literally cleaving their torso in two. Two stood ready at the doors of the royal chambers, prepared to storm the rest of the apartment. With his free paw, Dragon caught Rangers tossed down to him by incoming Dragonesses. The quarters for Humans were luxurious, but less so once one tried to stuff rooms full of murderous scaly beasts.\n\nQueen Vyioli nodded eagerly. \"The little Princess! You remember her, don't you, darling?\"\n\n\"Of course I do. King N'gala's youngest, correct? What joy you bring \u2013\"\n\nShe bowed briefly. \"Catch up later. Do you know where your children are?\"\n\n\"Taken to the North,\" Vyioli quavered.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Lord Gazaram's citadel, we assume.\"\n\nDragon eyed the soldier clasped in his fist. \"Do you know? Tell me!\"\n\n\"Not speaking.\"\n\n\"TELL ME!\"\n\n\"My lips are sealed,\" he said defiantly.\n\n\"We'll see if we can't peel them open,\" he snarled. Ignoring an invitation to do his worst, he shifted his grip and then set about melting the man's boots. \"You see, I'm a Dragon.\" He paused to take stock; the man did not stop wailing. \"I'm not a nice, friendly soldier. Not even an enemy soldier. I like my meat grilled. Left foot or right?\"\n\nBrutal he may be in Human eyes, but Dragon's idea of mercy was to leave the man injured but alive. It took a few minutes of demented screaming, but eventually he tore from the soldier the names of the Lords and the children they had taken captive. Those who warred on children? He had no sympathy. Dropping the man off with several Rangers at the base of the building, as the sounds of fighting drew farther away, he rose up on his hind paws once more, and called to Aria and Azania.\n\n\"It's more complicated than what we thought. They've split the children up between Gazaram, Hozim, Larazu and Jenarzam. Each Lord holds one hostage, but he didn't know the whereabouts of the youngest \u2013\"\n\n\"My babies!\" the Queen cried out, and fainted.\n\nDragon nodded slowly. For the first time, he understood why Humans fainted. Somewhat.\n\n[ The Gift of Fire ]\n\nLeaving Azania briefing the king, who sounded moderately awful but grateful, Dragon took to the air to do a little cleaning and tidying around the Palace grounds and building. Between them, the Dragonesses and Rangers had left slim pickings. While fighting still raged deeper within the building, the east wing was now reportedly secure. Dragon surprised a squad of Gazaram's finest trying to sneak out of a side entrance.\n\nMan meat done medium-rare, anyone?\n\nPausing to tank up from one of the handy ornamental fountains, he sprang into the air and wandered off for a few minutes to see if he could not find any of those pretty red plumes about Zunityne. Not a very large city. He found one pocket down by the harbour and did a round of cockroach extermination at the expense of no less than nine javelins in his hide. Perhaps being called cockroaches fired them up? Either way, they had to be the javelin champions of all Humankind. One lodged deep inside his left nostril, which was now bleeding and jolly sore after he had been forced to pick his own nose with the equivalent of a large pointed stick.\n\nPerhaps Dragons who went looking for trouble might get their just desserts?\n\nJust desert that smoking heap of bodies. Move on!\n\nUgh. His puns really were on a downhill run. Swooping back over the city, he surprised a squad of red jackets on the move up toward the Palace, and turned them into dessert, flambeau-style. Quite an improvement, if he did say so himself. Barely a shriek escaped the raging barbecue.\n\nBack at the Palace, Aria had gathered her Council and the Sankir in front of the east wing for a quick consultation. Her eyes brightened perceptibly in his blurred vision as he swept in to land, having to execute a quick vertical drop between the tall trees and the azure Palace building. He noted a green Dragoness stationed at each window of the royal chambers. The Sankir's troops had barricaded the front door of the Palace building. Four Dragonesses prowled alertly on the rooftops.\n\nTurning to him, Aria said, <Seen battle, Dragon?>\n\n<Tidying up in town.>\n\nThe Sankir said, \"We were just discussing a swift assault on the army barracks in town before taking off for the North.\"\n\nWhile the cobalt warrior looked gratified by his holey state, Dragon's gaze took in the Princess standing on the balcony. She gave him the desert death-stare.\n\nThat glare could freeze a Dragon's very fires.\n\n<Paw down, Highness?>\n\nAs she stepped onto his upraised paw, he realised a singular truth. He was not the only one who felt protective of their bond. A vision of a glittering Dragon hoard stood clear in his mind, symbolic of the worth she represented not in a functional economic sense, but in much deeper ways that elevated his draconic soul. He struggled for a moment to put words to his feelings. When had a simple collaboration between a Dragon and his Princess come to signify all this?\n\nWhy was the wind? Why was friendship or companionship or love?\n\nWith Aria he had a romantic connection, but none of these complicated ideas introduced by a Dragon Rider. All he knew, was that this was why Humans were not fleas, not even this tiny Princess who rode upon a large Dragon's back. That image was wholly wrong.\n\nPrivately, he said, <I apologise if I hurt you, Azania. Too hasty, these fires.>\n\n<I wasn't there for you.>\n\n<I didn't let you be \u2013 I \u2026 I ran away>. He started at the insight. <I suppose I was trying to prove something that ought not to need proving.>\n\n<Ah, I never thought about it that way. I'm also trying to prove something, I guess. To whom? And why? There are times a girl just feels so \u2026 little, inside. And out.>\n\n<Even a thumping paw monster feels the same.> His five hearts warmed as they shared a mental smile, a realisation of mutual understanding. <One paw in front of the next, Princess.>\n\nShe clasped his wrist as he deposited her upon the ground beside Aria. <Thank you, Dragon.>\n\nSo much more than gratitude for the paw ride.\n\nHe made a gracious gesture. \"So, what's the plan?\"\n\nThe Sankir said, \"We estimate at least six hundred of the King's troops have been jammed into the holding cells beneath the barracks. The barracks are a square of buildings arranged around a central courtyard. Battlements and defences atop, with a small open-topped tower on each corner. Now, if we can free those troops, we've permission to use the Palace as a fortress while we clear the rest of town. It's solidly built, I can tell you that much. Aria, would your Dragonesses be willing to help free them? The barracks are well-defended by Gazaram's men, and supplied with catapults and ballistae.\"\n\n\"We'll take them out!\" Aria snarled.\n\n\"If I may?\" Azania asked.\n\n\"What, Princess?\"\n\nIgnoring the clack of fangs toward her shoulder, she said, \"We faced a similar situation in Skartun. I suggest a coordinated attack. We feint at the ground level to draw their attention. Meantime, a couple of Dragonesses attack every emplacement from above. Catapults aren't built to fire vertically. The best they can do is to cover one another, which will be the basic design, correct?\"\n\n\"Correct,\" the Sankir agreed.\n\nAria smiled, \"I can see why you value this Princess, Dragon.\"\n\nHmm. A touch of feminine jealousy? Very draconic.\n\nHe said, \"As you can tell, Aria, I make a very large, very visible target and I am not half the warrior any of your army are. Would it forever stain my honour in your eyes to confess that a certain leaning toward staying alive in order to continue to thrash the enemy does influence my thinking?\"\n\nShe gave a delighted roar. \"O Dragon! You're hilarious. We are not unthinking warriors. Efficient, intelligent attacks are our style. I'm not used to working closely with Humans on military issues, by my dam's egg, but I'll take all the help I can get.\"\n\nA clash of fiery gazes!\n\nAria added, not without a challenging snap to her tone, \"Even if I am a proud warrior, and a dominant Dragoness.\"\n\n\"We have much to discuss,\" he flirted brazenly.\n\nBy his wings, that was playing with fire, but she merely gave a smoky chuckle, \"Later. Sankir, draw us a map. Let's get this done. After we free the troops, we must fly north with all speed.\"\n\nOne thing about the military-minded, they did not waste time. Not a second. Within five minutes, the combined force, minus twelve warrior Dragonesses and five Rangers who remained behind \u2013 to be supplemented just as soon as possible \u2013 poured aloft and through the streets. It was evening, the skies darkening rapidly now. Down below, no red helmet was spared. The Dragonesses made an enormous racket, bellowing and raging and vowing vengeance on the enemies of the crown. They rolled up to the barracks, situated upon the northern edge facing the taller hills, hurled a few boulders and bellowed threats, and promptly peeled off behind the nearest houses as the defenders responded.\n\nAt the same instant, Dragon's battle challenge pummelled the air.\n\n<FEAR THE TALON THAT CARVES YOUR DOOM!!>\n\nQuite the mouthful. Perhaps only Azania understood the import of the thunder shaking the square, fortress-like building beneath them, for she gave a small chuckle.\n\nNo, he was not writing a scroll.\n\nHer bowstring sang as his wings flared, making a man on the battlement cry out and pitch over the edge. His white flame roared over the triple emplacement on the corner, meant to cover the angles. Thunder and challenges shook the air as other Dragonesses hit their targets simultaneously. Most went in with flame and then claws, picking up the catapults and ballistae and tossing them aside, regardless of the men and women manning them. Rangers flipped off their necks, swords flashing.\n\nOn Dragon's neck, the Sankir pointed to a long building on the western side. \"Under there.\"\n\nMeantime, Aria waved in her other troops. They whirled out of hiding and charged the walls. Suddenly, the red-feathered troops stationed there discovered three undeniable truths. One, the barracks buildings were not very tall, even with the battlements atop. Two, their covering fire had just vanished. Three, courage and discipline were fearfully hard to maintain with vengeful Dragonesses stalking the rooftops behind them, as well as a sword-wielding charge coming in from the fore.\n\nMany broke and tried to flee, but a number formed knots of resistance.\n\nOne young red Dragoness toppled off a sloping tile rooftop with a severe wing injury. Others picked up javelin, arrow and sword injuries as they mowed through the defenders and broke into the barracks buildings, seeking to secure the area. Dragon swerved for the red as she clawed at the wall and guttering, her weight breaking stone, tile and wood.\n\n<Got you.> Plucking her up by her waist, he brought her to safe landing.\n\n\"Nice catch,\" Azania said. \"Sankir \u2013\"\n\n\"With me, Princess!\"\n\n\"Right behind you,\" Dragon said.\n\nNot exactly. He could not hope to fit inside. Forced to watch and then track her by scent and sensory magic, he huffed in frustration as the Sankir, plus the Princess and a squad of six Anhoyal Rangers disappeared below ground. A frustrating wait followed. Rangers combed the other buildings, but it quickly became apparent that the King's soldiers must have been rounded up and herded below ground en masse. No-one could find the keys.\n\nThe Princess popped her head out of a ground floor window. \"Dragon. Looks like they're stuck down there and were left to rot, no food or water. They've been trying to break out with a couple of daggers they smuggled in.\"\n\n\"No chance of smashing down the doors?\"\n\n\"The quarters are very narrow. Aria barely fit inside the entry tunnel. She tried the door, but it is ironbound. She could only rattle it.\"\n\n\"What's the distance?\"\n\n\"Hmm. Good thinking.\" Turning, she pointed. \"It's down that stairwell you see behind me, and then twenty paces along.\"\n\n\"Fifteen,\" said the Sankir, popping up behind her. \"Twenty if you're \u2013 you know.\"\n\n\"Vertically challenged?\" Dragon purred.\n\nThe Princess smacked his nose. \"Shut it, Mister Large.\"\n\nLanding in the courtyard area between the barracks buildings, Aria paced over to him. Her scales gleamed in the lantern light. Some kind soul must have lit the lanterns around the courtyard just before the attack.\n\n\"Plans?\"\n\nHe said, \"Kick down this wall, insert my muzzle as far as it will go down that stairwell \u2013\"\n\n\"While I spank your backside?\" Aria inquired.\n\n\"What?\" he spluttered.\n\n\"Won't that make the fire squirt out faster?\"\n\n\"Aye!\" To his embarrassment, his scales heated up at her tone.\n\n\"There,\" she said. \"He's primed for action. So predictable. I do love the glowing effect.\"\n\n*Gnnnrrr-gnarr-GRR!*\n\nAria just winked at the Princess. \"Could not agree more. Come on, I don't pay you for your prettiness, you know. Put those mighty muscles to work.\"\n\n\"Did someone call for a demolition?\" he rumbled.\n\n\"Most certainly did!\" the Sankir agreed. \"Just let us get out of your way first, Dragon.\"\n\nOnce the little Humans had cleared the way, Dragon flexed his muscles and checked his hind paws. A dozen Dragonesses looked on with interest as he lined up his back-kick. *BOOM!* Right beside the window. *BOOM-BOOM!* The building shook. Between kicks, he heard the Sankir down below shouting through the dungeon door to the troops.\n\n\"That block's shifting,\" Azania advised.\n\n\"Stand back!\"\n\nWinding up, he cracked the block out beside the window. Then another. A whole section of blocks collapsed back into the room \u2013 each was solid sandstone, three by two by two feet in dimensions. Eager Dragonesses swarmed into the gap, pulling out the rubble.\n\nThe desert Princess said, \"I love a Dragon in demolition mode, don't you, Aria?\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" she purred. \"Watch out!\"\n\nIn their eagerness, the Dragonesses provoked a small landslide as part of the wall and the floor above abruptly collapsed. He must have undermined a roof beam, but the place was well built. The breach did not extend far. Dragon waded in gallantly to lift the beam off an overzealous yellow Dragoness, whose wingtip pat of thanks nearly put Aria into murder mode. With a couple more well-placed kicks that did nothing for the bruising probably developing on his heel \u2013 ignored with massive draculinity, of course \u2013 he opened the room to the night air.\n\nAria growled, \"I'm going to call you Wrecker from now on.\"\n\n\"Wrecker the reckless?\" he grinned.\n\nMaking an extravagant desert-style bow, Azania declaimed, \"I hereby name thee Lord of Destruction and Wrecker of Human civilisations, thou Paw of all Pestilence, harbinger of the fiery winds of Taramis itself, the mighty White Dragon!\"\n\nHe blinked. \"By my wings, is that an official statement, Ambassador?\"\n\n\"Would you like it to be?\"\n\n\"Gosh, I think it might make me sound a little pompous, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"Poetic license.\"\n\n\"Any decent poet would be turning in their grave right now.\"\n\n\"Oh hush, Dragon. News is what we make it.\"\n\n\"That's fake news.\"\n\n\"Who cares if it's fake? It sounds good, and besides, it's satisfying. Rolls off the tongue.\"\n\nWriggling a little to get beneath the roof level, he pressed over to the stone stairway. It was a simple affair protected by a solid trapdoor which had been thrown back by the invaders.\n\nThe Sankir trotted up the stairs beneath his nose. \"Right. The blasted door is straight ahead of you. I have the men and women inside pressed back as far as they can, so no need to withhold \u2013 but the space is tight. If you can, direct your white fires more to your right paw, because that's where the locking mechanism is. Pardon my question, but are you sure your fires are hot enough to melt metal?\"\n\nPausing to glance at Aria, he smiled, \"Metal, Dragonesses, it's all the same to me.\"\n\n*Whoosh!* She coughed fire.\n\nAzania leaped aside with a yelp. He reached out to slap the flame off her buttocks \u2013 gently. One did not want to launch one's best friend over a nearby building by mistake. Jolly good thing those trousers had been made fireproof, wasn't it? The Cobalt Dragoness apologised. So did he. After all, he had to confess that someone had set her off.\n\nChecking her rear end, the Princess growled, \"I'll have no indecent jokes from you, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Why, can one not talk about a flaming hot rump in your culture?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Not even if it's true?\"\n\nThe Sankir's grin flashed in his brown face. \"No, we all go about pretending it isn't true, whilst thinking something else. That's the way Humans work. All sorts of silly taboos.\"\n\nAzania said, \"You are not exactly helping. Dragon, go stick your face down that hole and stay there until the job's done. Sankir, get over here. Are you married?\" When he shook his head, she growled, \"Well, you should be. Anyone on the horizon? Aria?\"\n\n\"No idea,\" she growled. \"Fight your own battles, Princess.\"\n\nWhile he stuck his nose underground and took aim, Azania pestered Sankir Farizam to confess. To his surprise, the hard-bitten Ranger's reaction revealed that he was definitely hiding something. The Princess was not oblivious \u2013 the female equivalent of his colourful emotional sense. What surprised him was her persistence. He drowned out her voice by directing his fire down the tunnel. Brilliant light irradiated the dark, dry dungeon walls, carved out of solid sandstone if he was not mistaken. That must have taken some labour. At the end of the passage, about seven or eight Dragon paces away, was a sturdy door meant to keep the riffraff in.\n\nHe played with the thin stream of fire. Tongue control. Hmm \u2013 three locks, if he was not mistaken. Shortly, a yell from inside gave him pause.\n\n\"What is it?\" Incoherent yells? Rather testily, he boomed, \"Can I hear from less than ten at a time?\"\n\n\"Sorry, mighty Dragon, your flame cut right through.\"\n\n\"Everyone alright?\"\n\n\"One burned arm, but it's not serious, sir.\"\n\n*Gnarr.* Call him sir, and it would get serious. Fast. \"Fine. Sorry! I'm aiming high next, and then I'll try the lower lock.\"\n\n\"Everybody duck!\"\n\n*Quack,* he thought, making Azania giggle.\n\nFire, too much fire, not the right fire, the right fire but not in the right place \u2026 he grumbled to himself as he went back to work. Amazing how fast one went from fire poverty to complaining about the fire one had. Was he ungrateful for the gift of fire? A metaphor which could readily be applied to life, and he must remember this lesson well.\n\nA couple more longish burns later, and the Sankir braved the heat in the passage to go and encourage the dungeon door to swing open with the aid of a large sledgehammer he had discovered somewhere.\n\nAnything to escape Azania's relentless enthusiasm for romance.\n\nSuitably encouraged, the door gave way and hundreds of dishevelled but grateful Vaylarn Archipelago soldiers began to pour out of the dungeon. After thanking Dragon, they one and all made a collective dash for the lavatories.\n\nDragon peered at this phenomenon in startlement. Humans, eh? So little control of their bodily functions. Still, he perfectly understood the desire not to defecate beneath one's own paws. Even Dragons disposed of their pellets in a reasonable fashion, and decried bombing other creatures from a height, unlike the disgusting seabirds around these parts.\n\nHe growled, \"Could I have a \u2013\"\n\n\"Trough of water right here,\" Azania said. Hmm. Mind reader?\n\n\"Did we lose a \u2013\"\n\n\"One Dragoness is too injured to fly,\" she replied before he even posed the question. \"Plenty of minor injuries, but that one was an unfortunate accident due to the snap-recoil of a ballista. Fractured her secondary wing bone, left side. Aria's having a hard time convincing her to stay.\"\n\nIt struck him that Aria might resent his interference, but they were also short on time. If any single message got through that the capital city had been retaken, Azerim or his brothers might be endangered.\n\nHe walked over. <Gyrielle, is it?>\n\nThe orange Dragoness nodded, straightening as she realised he knew her name. She said, <Dragon?>\n\nHe said, <I know this is not what you want to hear, Gyrielle, but if Aria's asking you to go up to the Palace and swap out with another warrior, then please do that. We need you back on the wing as soon as possible. I am asking you, please, please be ready to fly south with us. There will be battles against Sea Serpents here and the Skartun slavers in the south. We will need the full measure of your swords, your fire and your courage.>\n\nGyrielle arched her neck proudly. <I want to fight!>\n\n<That you will, that's a promise. When the enemy rises against us in their tens of thousands, Gyrielle, that's when we will need you most.>\n\nAria put in, <Furthermore \u2013 thank you, Dragon \u2013 I need a squad to finish clearing this town. The Sankir tells me there are still substantial enemy forces from the four northern Lords at work here, endangering the citizenry. Three more volunteers to join Gyrielle and the kingdom's soldiers!>\n\nThe Dragoness genuflected fiercely. <This, I shall accomplish.>\n\n[ Dark Fortress ]\n\nPowering upward into the fully dark night sky, sprinkled with constellations he could recite by name, Dragon tuned his ears to Azania, riding his neck with the Sankir in second position. *Gnarr.* Put his arms around his Princess, would he? Those hands had better behave themselves, or he'd chew them off slowly!\n\nAzania said, \"Your men told me you were married before, Sankir Farizam?\"\n\nOh. Had he misjudged the man? He tuned in to listen.\n\n\"Aye, for six years. I lost my wife and three children to Sea Serpents.\"\n\nHeat like heartburn built inside his chest as the desert Princess whispered, \"I'm awfully sorry. I had no right to \u2013\"\n\n\"That's alright. She was a merchant's daughter from the Isles, but her father originally came from the Kingdom of Onyxil. He found the Archipelago very much to his liking. Still lives about twenty miles from here, actually, out near the mangrove swamps. She was returning from Onyxil with our children when they were attacked and sunk. They must have drowned, or \u2013\" his voice cracked \"\u2013 or worse. Ever since, I've hated myself for not going on that trip.\"\n\n\"You wanted to die with them?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"That's so hard,\" she said, clasping his hands in hers.\n\n\"It was nine years ago, before we were forced to close all the shipping lanes,\" he added. Grief still shaded his tone. \"We were aware of the danger, but I guess \u2026 I guess we just thought it would never happen to us. The ship had a Dragoness escort, even. All three were killed in the battle \u2013 shot out of the air and drowned or crushed, is what I heard. There was only one survivor, a young man. He never recovered his right mind afterward.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear of your tragedy,\" he rumbled, causing the man to startle. The eight Rangers on his back murmured between themselves.\n\nAzania said, \"Sankir, I'm sorry if my teasing was hurtful.\"\n\nAfter a long silence, he said, \"I have told myself I should be over it by now, but how do you ever recover from such a grief?\"\n\n\"I lost my father a few months ago. It's \u2026 impossible. I have no answers.\"\n\nFarizam touched her shoulder in sympathy.\n\nDragon spread his wings into a resting glide position. He flew wing-second to Aria's lead. He wanted to tell her that he moved a great deal more wind than her and was the more powerful flier, so he should take the front position. No. When it came to warrior Dragonesses, her place was at the forefront of the flying wedge. The Dragonwing already found his presence strange enough. Pick one's battles. Sneak his ideas into their heads slowly.\n\nEven the fact of a male flying with them into battle was novel enough!\n\nBy his dam's egg, he was weary in every bone of his body. They faced another long haul up to the northern edge of the island \u2013 not far from where Aria's personal lair was located, he had learned during one of their briefings. Two Lords lived on headlands of this island, one on the large island between the major Human and Dragon domains, and one just shy of the interior mountains, on the western slopes. Gazaram's fortress was regarded as easily the most challenging to penetrate. The others were more standard castles, vulnerable to an air attack. Almost as if Gazaram had expected such a day \u2026\n\nTo Aria, he said, <I am concerned about Lord Gazaram's level of preparedness. We should scout the castles with extra care before engaging.>\n\n<We know this,> she said, but her tone invited explanation.\n\n<The detail of the metal tower bothers me. Why should he expect Dragon attack? We know they likely worked with this faction against your dam. It seems an unusual precaution to take. Either he's playing the long game, or he knows something we do not. I \u2026 could not say what that might be, but my scales itch.>\n\n<Your scales, Dragon?> the orange Dragoness to his left wing queried.\n\nBefore he could reply in wrath, the Princess put in quietly, <For example, were there ever any suspected links to the Terror Clan?>\n\nAria said, <Not to my knowledge.>\n\nAt the very same time, the light blue Yalia said, <There were rumours.> The Dragonesses eyeballed one another over his back. <You were much younger then, Aria Seaspray. This was before \u2013 I forget. Maybe ten or twelve years ago? Just around the time your dam assumed leadership of the Isles Dragons. We were much more fragmented then, as you'll know from the histories. What I know is two things: one, there were rumours of Terror Clan visiting our shores, and two, rumours that they were the sinister talon behind Faylielle's assassination. I have no proof. Your dam might well know more. As to potential cooperation with the Humans? No idea.>\n\nThe cobalt nodded. <I did not know this.>\n\nDragons and Humans alike digested this for a few minutes.\n\nTurning, the Cobalt Dragoness called, \"Be on the alert for dark magic at the citadels. Let's reconfigure the teams to distribute our most capable magic users amongst the four hit squads. We leave no stone unturned when we scout, we hit them hard and acquire each target as planned. Rendezvous at my lair after the mission is accomplished. Remember that the youngest brother, the six year-old, has not yet been located. Upon acquisition, question your target about him. We must find little Varazim \u2013 they call him 'tay-Varazim' after his father.\"\n\nAcquisitions. Targets. He had the impression Ariamyrielle Seaspray liked to acquire targets of the large scaly variety.\n\nOnward they sped, making for the southerly tip of the small but rugged mountain range that formed the spine of this island. They passed the lantern lights of seven towns along the way \u2013 more than Dragon had expected, although they were individually quite small. In general, each was the heart of a single Lord's domain. Here and there, they saw the pinprick lights of tiny hamlets. Indeed, there were so many thousands of small islands and reefs offshore, the Sankir was telling Azania, it was a standing joke that every Human owned their private island. At least one palm tree and a strip of beach. She tugged his leg about inviting him to her private beach \u2013 the whole of T'nagru.\n\nJust missing the water.\n\nCharielle the copper Dragoness joined them in the sky, seeking news. Three homing pigeons had been destroyed that she knew of; Aria related developments in Zunityne and what they had learned before her dam left again. They would keep the line until after dawn, by which time they hoped to have good news.\n\nAt last, they saw rising ahead the silhouettes of the mountains one hundred and twenty miles northwest of Zunityne, and to their right paws and hands, a gleaming silver bay. The Lumis Ocean put on its most glorious show. Dragon ached to immerse himself in the phosphorescent gleam. He pictured a midnight swim with Aria. How romantic. Even Azania must be impressed by the sappy sonnets of his Dragon hearts.\n\nThe Cobalt Dragoness brought them in for a landing on a wide white strip of beach fringed with tall, tufty palm trees heavy with a fine crop of coconuts.\n\nDragon sniffed the air. \"Humans nearby?\"\n\nThe Sankir said, \"How do you smell them upwind?\"\n\n\"You Humans have your own very special reek,\" he suggested, elbowing the man in a comradely fashion. Dumped him in the sand. \"Ah, sorry.\"\n\n\"Save it for someone else,\" he growled, coming back with a shove of his own.\n\nDragon lurched toward the water, and decided that was a good idea. Salt. Yum! \"Join me?\" The Human leader walked to the water's edge with him while Azania helped one of the Rangers to redo a bandage. He said, \"Just between us males, I scented earlier that you might indeed have someone special. Am I right in thinking this person might be up at Gazaram's fortress?\"\n\nHe laughed curtly, \"Is much hidden from you?\"\n\n\"I sense emotional states, sometimes. Call it a Dragon sense.\"\n\n\"Much more to you than just the lumpy muscles, isn't there?\" he said, wading into the shallow, lapping surf. Lowering his voice, he added, \"I'm afraid you and Azania read me all too well. I must be an open scroll to you both \u2013 aye, she is Gazaram's bondservant, and \u2026 special, to me. I have four times tried to buy her back. No chance.\"\n\n\"This bond is a kind of indentured slavery?\"\n\n\"As good as.\"\n\n\"So, shall we just kidnap her for you and be done with?\" He rubbed his paws in simulated glee. \"I have experience with kidnapping damsels in distress. I can highly recommend it.\"\n\n\"Azania claims she kidnapped you.\"\n\n\"Close enough. I was a hopeless, lonely sack of misery when she came into my life, kidnapped my Dragon hearts, and with her inexplicable feminine wiles helped me change into what you see today. Brown Dragon to white. A runaway weakling to a creature who is \u2026 more \u2013 one who crossed an ocean, and has hope for the future. Those are not inconsiderable achievements.\"\n\nSankir said, \"What I hope for would be \u2026 inappropriate.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"She is twenty-three. I am thirty-seven.\"\n\nDragon shrugged. \"Age gap? Pah! Don't be ridiculous. Is that all?\"\n\n\"No. There's a story. When she was six and I had just entered the King's service, I was stationed up here for a few years. Chanize \u2013 that's her name \u2013 had an accident while she was exploring out on the reef. She stepped on something called a Hybraki Stonefish. Both feet. The poison is slow-acting but invariably lethal. I saw her in trouble as the tide was rising, swam out there, and brought her back. The surgeon had to amputate both legs at the knee to stop the poison from spreading. She lived.\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, he said steadily, \"When she stepped on that fish, she knew she'd lose her legs. She begged me to leave her out on the reef, to let her die. But I had to be the hero. I brought her back and gave her over to the surgeon. Her feet were already turning black. Chanize said she's happy to be alive and that she's always been grateful to me \u2026\"\n\n\"So, I'm not great with Human emotions.\" Dragon put his forepaw around the man's shoulders and squeezed gently. \"Help me to understand. Am I hearing that you feel torn between guilt and a sense that any feelings she might profess for you would be clouded by obligation?\"\n\n\"Aye \u2026 aye! Can't believe I'm having this conversation with a Dragon.\"\n\nHe wiped his eyes.\n\nDragon felt the same, although his weak eyes failed to leak. \"Have you spoken with Chanize about these things?\"\n\n\"No! I can't! Well, physically I can't, because Gazaram keeps her under lock and key. She's one of the finest seamstresses in the kingdom and so her contract is profitable. Amazingly \u2013\" how bitterly the word rang in the night air \"\u2013 she has not managed to pay off her debt as yet. I smell a rat. And obviously, she can't just run away. One needs the use of legs for that. Look, most of all, I just want her away from Gazaram. He's misusing her and that is wrong.\"\n\n\"Right you are.\" He squeezed the man's solid shoulders one more time. So much bigger than his Princess! \"Leave it with this Dragon. May I inform Aria and Azania?\"\n\n\"Perhaps that would be best. My judgement might be clouded.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Clouded judgement might better be described as the sensation of being the only male Dragon amongst a Dragonwing of forty, flying alongside and behind the beauty whose every wing flexion made his hearts turn rapturous somersaults. Close enough. Maybe less poetic, but the effect was no less devastating. He occasionally found the patterns and movement so hypnotic he had to look elsewhere for a moment, or he might have flown headlong into a mountainside without even knowing what had hit him.\n\nClouded also described the weather, which was for the better. Cover for nefarious deeds. Localised storm? He scented moisture and stronger winds pushing at the ever-restless oceans.\n\nThe Dragons split up as planned. Two hours after midnight, Aria led her smaller battle group out over a rocky isthmus and around via a coastline that once again, on the eastern edge of an island, was a jag-toothed Dragon lying in wait for the unwary. Up here rocky teeth bit the sky with savage intent, while deep cracks and canyons abounded. Some were inlets for the ocean. The single access road \u2013 one used the word with a wince \u2013 visible a mile to the interior, was a white-paved, torturous failure to tame the wild landscape.\n\nCarts just gave up out here. For the last twenty miles, Lord Gazaram had donkeys haul his goods up to his citadel.\n\nThe castle, home to the crustiest, most infamously bad-tempered Lord in the Archipelago, certainly made a statement. It stood upon a solitary island just off the mainland, reached by a well-defended bridge, surrounded on all sides by water. Not only were the black battlements windswept and rugged, some thoughtful designer had decorated them with spikes and busts of traditional island creatures \u2013 all the friendly sorts, like spitting sea serpents, spiny urchins, barracuda, stonefish and poisonous corals, to name those Dragon could recognise through his spectacles.\n\n<Sure looks like the architectural equivalent of an angry porcupine,> he grumbled as they swept in low along the coastline, hugging the shore for cover.\n\n<Glasses?> Aria raised her brow ridges.\n\n<They help me to see. I'm good underwater, I've discovered. Useless above it.>\n\n<What's the exact issue?> she asked.\n\n<I'm pretty badly short-sighted. Everything's blurry from about the length I can hold my paw in front of me. I was sort of hoping that once I discovered my true fires, this debility would \u2026 go away.> He smiled wryly. <Azania has many times been my eyes in battle.>\n\n<I see.>\n\n<Me, not so well.>\n\nShe chuckled softly, <And here I thought you were just fluttering your eye membranes at me. We never spoke about the details before, did we? Not apart from your need to consult an optometrist regarding your severe conjunctivitis \u2013 how's that been?>\n\n<Actually, I haven't thought about it in weeks.>\n\nAzania said, <I wonder if the regular immersion in salt water is helping? You're right, Dragon. You've stopped itching. However, your sight is still worst when you're tired.>\n\nHer perceptiveness still had cause to surprise him. He nodded. <Aye, that's right.>\n\nThe Cobalt Dragoness said, <Alright. So, that's the main fortress. You'll enjoy Gazaram's favourite iron tower. It's something else.>\n\n<Just as tasteful? Majoring on the 'evil overlord' d\u00e9cor and cladding only a self-respecting executioner would be proud of?>\n\n<Dragon!> Azania snorted.\n\n<Well, clearly some men like to wear their dungeons inside out.>\n\nAria stared at him as if he were mad.\n\nThe strike team drifted along past the fortress. One last, very tall sea stack stood at the far end, separated from the main castle by another short bridge. What a miserable, eerie place. He squinted into the darkness. The stone stack, some eighty Dragon paces tall, almost completely surrounded a sheer metal tower which had been built inside what he took for a dormant volcanic pipe. Only the top twenty feet or so surmounted the encircling stone. Those twenty feet were as heavily armoured as he had ever seen. Narrow slits for ballistae. Thick metal. An air of foul magic, the cawing of crows about the place as if they had been attracted here by carrion. The magical and other echoes around this place made him shudder.\n\nBelow, the Human-sized entryway was a barred metal gate set between two imbedded gatehouses. A couple of vertical cracks in the stone showed that the metal tower inside was smooth and unrelieved, with almost no space for any Dragon to manoeuver around it.\n\nImpregnable? And then some.\n\nHis scales prickled. That sense of dark magic, that focussed <intent \u2026> he bellowed at once, <Evasive action!>\n\nA hail of ballista quarrels hissed out of the darkness. Had they not been forewarned, the flight of ten Dragons would have been cut out of the sky. As befitting the largest target, he now wore two shots in his left shoulder. The others hit did not fare as well. One Ranger died instantly as a shot pierced his chest, and one green Dragoness tumbled toward the waves.\n\nHe dived at once. More quarrels whipped through the darkness. Where were they even firing from? How were they so accurate?\n\n<Split up! Execute the plan!> Aria roared.\n\nRescuing one of their number was far from the letter of the plan, but a couple more holes in his hide would only add to his long list of aches and pains. Extending his talons, he gripped the Dragoness by the shoulders and dragged her bodily sideways through the air, ending up beneath the bridge between the mainland and the castle. Unconscious? Draping her atop a flattish rock, he heard Azania unbuckle. She jumped down and put her ear against the Dragoness' throat.\n\n\"No heartbeat!\"\n\nStopped her hearts? What magic was that?\n\nAt once, he pushed her over onto side and raised his fist. *Thump! Thump!* \"Check her.\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\nHe hit again, twice and then three times, to no avail.\n\n*Thump!* The Princess added her own, fists-doubled punch. She listened again. \"There it goes!\" Azania mopped her forehead.\n\nThe Sankir said, \"One Ranger to stay. Brief her and get her back into battle if you can.\"\n\n\"Me!\"\n\n\"Thanks! Let's go,\" Azania said. \"We're needed up at that tower.\"\n\nThe Sankir pressed a bow into her hands. \"Heard you're useful with one of these. If you see a tall, greasy-haired man with a love of flashy black leather cloaks \u2013 he's our rebel Lord.\"\n\nDragon launched sideways, taking advantage of a sea breeze to whisk him aloft. Time to sniff out the stench of evil magic around this dark citadel, and end it. Otherwise, he had an awful sense of what Azerim's fate might be. Backed into a corner, the Lord might just decide to end his captive's life.\n\nHe hissed, <Gazaram, fear the talon that carves your doom!>\n\n[ Talon Magic ]\n\nImmediately, he came under fire from the so far ridiculously accurate defenders. However, they faced a capable enemy. Five Dragonesses swarmed over the battlements, kicking catapults and slicing apart ballista crews with horrific precision. They never seemed to be quite where the defenders expected them. Azania picked off a couple of defenders on the battlements, while he rapid-fire hit a series of arrow loop slits lower down, silencing the archers behind. They wheeled past a fierce battle for the inner keep.\n\n<Tower door lower right. Hit it!> Azania yelled.\n\nA stream of white fire ignited the defenders trying to bar the door against ingress.\n\n<And the left! Hit the keep door!>\n\nHe spat again, surprising himself with a precision blast that set the front doors of the inner keep alight. In that glow, he saw a silver-edged black cloak swirling away; a big man who moved like animate shadow, marshalling the defenders.\n\n<Gazaram!>\n\n<I know,> the Princess panted. <Took a shot but missed him. To the tower!>\n\nHe burst over the short gap, alert for more mischief. What he saw was Aria diving toward the tower, only to veer off and come within a scale's width of braining herself on the rock below that top section.\n\n<What the \u2026 WHAT?>\n\nThe world turned upside-down. Jangled to his core, Dragon veered off instinctively and achieved two things: one, a stream of fire that still managed to hit the target, and two, he bounced off the summit of the sea stack with a great deal less elegance than the cobalt warrior. The warriors on his back cried out, rattled like him.\n\nWheeling away, he collected his senses. The sky and ground switched places and behaved themselves once more.\n\n\"Dragon, what was that?\" Aria's call alerted him.\n\n\"Dark magic!\" one of the Rangers cried.\n\n\"Some kind of directional pretzel magic,\" he spluttered, \"plus a very powerful repulsive force. I mean, it completely scrambled my balance and seemed to flip my vision?\"\n\n\"Mine, too,\" his Princess agreed. \"We have to break in there. Fast.\"\n\n\"Effect on Humans?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nil. I sensed something going on, but nothing like \u2013 Aria duck now!\"\n\nA silver ballista quarrel hurtled past the cobalt warrior as she flicked out of its path with the most incredible reactions Dragon had ever seen. The quarrel grazed her chest before arcing away into the pounding surf, where it struck a rock and detonated with a *crack!* Electricity! At once, his mind spun back to the lightning machine the Skartunese had used to strike him down. Somehow, these quarrels stored an electrical charge powerful enough to stop a Dragon in their tracks. Was this a new Terror Clan technology?\n\nHe summarised this information for the openly shocked cobalt Dragoness; whirling toward the rest of the fight to warn her team, she ordered him to stay away from the tower until she returned.\n\nHis ears, however, detected a different sound above the rising hissing of the wind \u2013 a whine he recognised all too well. The weapon needed to be recharged. A window of opportunity was open if they acted swiftly. Three warrior Dragonesses circled the metal tower. Seven Rangers to land on the summit, if they could.\n\n<Azania, how can we \u2013>\n\n<I'll be your eyes. Close them.>\n\n<WHAA \u2013 GNARR!!>\n\n<Nice Dragon. Good boy,> she said, patting his neck. Her tone did not exactly make matters better. Humans talked to hounds like that! At once, however, her mind explained, <Speed of thought. Trust me. We can shut that weapon down if we work together, but you'll need to \u2013>\n\n<I do trust you.>\n\nTrust someone else to be his eyes? This might be the hardest thing he had ever done. Even though he knew Azania better than any other, and they had flown together for months, the act of giving over was one of the hardest things he had ever done. It spat in the eye of draconic pride. Yet the way the dark magic had turned his brains into scrambled egg \u2013 it was defence on a whole new level. The Terror Clan knew what they were doing. He would try to protect his mind, but if he did not understand the first thing about how the magic worked \u2026\n\nHe called, <Dragonesses, we'll try to shut that weapon down. Will you feint for us? Be wary of that foul magic.>\n\nOne snapped toward him, <Aria's orders!>\n\n<NOW!>\n\nSqueezing his eyes shut, he readied himself for the Princess' directions.\n\n<Farther around, farther \u2026 ninety degrees to your left wing \u2013 right now! Aim \u2013 higher,> her thoughts came in thick and fast. By his sire's egg, he was not used to being peppered like this. <Hundred, ninety, eighty \u2026 FIRE!>\n\nThe world rotated around him, but even as she was yelling at him to remain steady, he found his steadiness \u2013 her mind. A rock amidst chaos. Following the minutest promptings of his mind, he focussed his fire and directed it slightly farther upward, before breaking off a millisecond before a violent yet muted explosion smashed against his ears.\n\nThe Princess gave a crow of triumph. <That'll show them!>\n\nThe whirling and tumbling did not abate, but she guided him to a swift landing on the rocky collar around the top of the tower. The Rangers deployed swiftly. Their mission was to find a way inside, to locate and secure King Azerim with all speed. His nostrils flared. The scents of smelted metals, Human flesh and other strange odours filled his senses. His stream of fire must have blown up whatever they had been using to collect or amplify electrical energy. Frightening power. He tried to risk a glance over at the main castle, but his eyes were not doing what they ought to. Towers smeared across the night sky, outlined by one of the moons which lay low but full to his left wing. Was that south? Or north? No way of knowing.\n\n<Let's go help Aria,> the voice inside his mind said. <Still with me, Dragon?>\n\n<I'm good. Lead on.>\n\nThe fire-breather led by the flea.\n\nToo funny. His humour sliced through her stiff response.\n\nThey whipped off the sea stack again, her trickle of response suggesting that the mighty Princess had just kidnapped herself a Dragon. Immediately, her thoughts threw eight or ten quarrels at him at once; Dragon slewed between the onslaught and avoided all but one, which pinned him beneath the tail adjacent to the sensitive male parts. Close one. He planned to put those to good use one of these or those days. Would not do to field an injury just there, now!\n\nAzania sent him screaming around the castle, winkling out knots of enemy soldiers, catapults and the odd ballista. Frustrating how good her eyes and battle awareness were. Less impressive how it took them three or four attempts on average to hit any given target, especially since there were ridiculously talented warrior Dragonesses to avoid at every wing flip. Swallowing back a great lump of stinging pride \u2013 it helped that they smashed straight through a flagpole she had not seen and warned him about in time \u2013 he set about figuring out if he could do more. Could he enhance her awareness, somehow? Perhaps he might filter smells and mix in a draconic awareness of emotions seeping from behind battlements and deep inside well-hidden, crafty lairs that housed archers and ballista engineers alike? Not that one! Innocent children \u2026\n\nWithin fifteen minutes or so, it became obvious that the tides of battle were turning. Only the odd ballista was left in operation. He helped burn and smash open the doors to the inner keep. The Rangers rushed within to disable many booby traps and find their way to the staff.\n\n<Where's Gazaram? Find me Gazaram!> Aria thundered from the far side of the castle. <Dragon. Tower plan four!>\n\nThat was code to inform him that matters were not proceeding well with the Rangers attempting to penetrate the tower. After accepting a fresh quiver of arrows from a Ranger, the Princess directed him over to the far side. Both searched every shadow for sign of the Lord.\n\nSo many places to hide. Nooks and corners and spikes, archways and monsters and overhangs. This castle was a maze.\n\nFlying over to the tower, they found the defenders silent, but the metal structure stood inviolable. Rising winds plucked fitfully at his wings. His emotion-sensing magic could not detect the man either. Dark magic was devilish stuff. He had to get better at this.\n\nThe Sankir met them up top. \"Haven't gotten inside as yet. We think Azerim's being held two levels down from where you blew their machine up.\"\n\nDragon shook his head. His eyes wandered in opposing directions. Headache! \"Defenders?\"\n\n\"Thick on the ground and persistent. Orders seem to be to hold at all costs. We think the King is fine so far, but haven't got eyeballs on him. Do you think you could melt a way inside?\"\n\n\"Give it my best shot.\"\n\nPuff out that chest. A touch of swagger. Azania certainly rolled her eyes behind his neck as he acted the male Dragon, but she helped him to focus on a spot a foot beneath the room they had blown up, and he started the hard work of melting down the metal. So thick! If he cracked open one eye or another, the stream of white fire appeared to wander sideways, bent toward his paws or bled up into the moon. Only Azania's presence of mind kept him on track.\n\nThe tower's metal cladding glowed red hot, white where his fire struck it directly.\n\n<It's going. Melting slowly,> she encouraged.\n\n<Gazaram!>\n\nAria's cry distracted him. The man advanced onto the bridge at the head of a wedge of warriors all identically clad in unfamiliar banded silver armour. They bore tall oval shields. In the centre of each was a single green stone he recognised with a cold shiver \u2013 literally. Coldstones! Only, he also knew them as verdelite, a carrier of magical power. They must have uses apart from keeping an atmosphere cool. Was this stone at the heart of Terror Clan magic?\n\nHe bellowed a warning to Aria. Was she even listening? Swooping, the Dragoness clashed violently with the group of men, but they repelled her attack with apparent ease. She did not even appear to harm them despite multiple strikes that were faster than his eye could follow, or Azania's. After she had beaten them back a couple of feet, the Lord's warriors drew their swords and advanced upon her.\n\nThe weapons glowed with an unholy, greenish light.\n\n<Not looking good down there,> Azania muttered. <Keep drilling that hole!>\n\nHis flame stuttered.\n\n<Blergh.> Perfect timing \u2013 no, there it went again. A fresh rush poured out of his throat. The metal hissed and bubbled as he stepped toward it, focussing the brilliant beam of white light, willing it to cut deeper, deeper still!\n\nDashing to the edge, the Princess peered down. <They're pushing her back, Dragon! Some kind of shield \u2026 I think?>\n\n<Go help?>\n\n<She might kill us afterward, but better that she's alive to do so!>\n\n<Faultless logic as always,> he grumbled as she swung onto his neck. <Doesn't it ever get boring?>\n\n<When I'm flying with you? Never,> she glibly deflected. Sweet little thing. He had five hearts and every single one of them had a fiery spot for her. <What the heck is that weapon Gazaram's wielding?>\n\nAs he cleared the tower, his vision finally rushed back together again, from opposite ends of Solixambria, it seemed. Clever trick.\n\nGood thing he still had a brain. This dark magic was a fearful thing, even for a bruiser like him.\n\nGazaram wielded a metal staff about six feet in length. A shining two-foot blade protruded from either end. The shaft was liberally studded with gleaming green verdelite gemstones, useful both as handgrips and to supply the eerie power with which he was steadily beating Ariamyrielle Seaspray backward. Her mighty blades smoked where they clashed. Clearly, the warrior Dragoness was at the 'what the infernal hellfire am I facing here?' stage of working out her combat strategy, because she gave up ground steadily. Was she concerned about the state of her weapons?\n\n<Gnarr-blasted-death!> he swore furiously as one of her swords snapped just as he thought about it.\n\nDive! Dragon collected his fire inside his chest. One hit. One was all it should take. He would sweep Gazaram right off that narrow bridge and smash his followers into oblivion.\n\nLord Gazaram's dark cloak swirled around his tall, blocky frame as he whirled his staff through the air, more than holding up against what Dragon would have taken for Aria's far superior martial arts skills \u2013 or was she now in the tower's ambit, as confused as he had just been? Multiple cuts appeared on her body and wings as if by magic in the couple of seconds it took him to hurtle down to the level of the bridge, which arched about forty feet above the surf.\n\nIn the instant his leathery wings snapped open and Dragon made his swoop for the men, fire gathering behind his fangs, the man whirled and plucked from amidst his men a small, squalling bundle of humanity.\n\nThe youngest brother!\n\nAzania cried out like a lone gull, despair and rage mingled in her voice.\n\nA gust of wind picked him up and hurled him toward the bridge. Hold fire! At the last second, he yanked his left wing up and out of the way, slewing sideways as he shoulder-smashed Gazaram's guards into the ocean below. Both he and the Princess snatched for the boy, bundled up in black cloths, but their adversary swung him away from their grasp with a low laugh. He back-thrust with his strange sword, gashing Dragon's neck deeply.\n\nAs they hurtled away, both Dragon and Rider turned to glance over their shoulders. No need of sound to hear what the man said.\n\nHolding the writhing bundle aloft, he called, \"Why don't you play catch?\"\n\nWith that, he tossed the child off the bridge.\n\nAria dived in an instant. The shadowy figure swirled past her, hacking into the frilly trailing edge of her left wing as he vanished into the gloom around the tower's gate.\n\n<Azerim!> he gasped.\n\n<Drink some seawater, quick. You're dry again.>\n\nHow did she know and he didn't? Dragon dipped his wings, taking them down to skim over the surging water. Experimental. Lowering his jaw, he let the cool water froth between his fangs and down his throat.\n\n\"Darn, he hit me,\" Azania growled, sounding aggrieved.\n\n\"Where? Are you alright?\"\n\n\"My \u2026 uh, right breast,\" she said. \"No jokes.\"\n\n\"I hope Azerim is good with bandages,\" he chortled on cue, earning himself a slap. \"Up we go.\"\n\n\"It's bleeding more than I'd have expected.\" As they raced up the weathered side of the sea stack, she dug a length of bandage out from her belt pouch, tried a couple of things, and with a sigh, stuffed her cut full of cloth. \"It'll have to do. I haven't got anything long to tie around your neck \u2013 besides, your blood's very hot.\"\n\n\"I'll live,\" he muttered.\n\n\"You'd better!\"\n\nThis was all the conversation they had time for. Re-joining the Rangers at the top, they met with the Sankir. \"Hole's tiny. Maybe big enough for one,\" he suggested, looking at the Princess.\n\n\"No,\" Dragon growled.\n\n\"There's a barred window lower down where you can see the King,\" he added. \"He's chained up pretty thoroughly. Wrists and neck to the wall, hood over his head. I've no doubt Gazaram's going for the kill. We've two archers watching the window, but from what I just saw down on the bridge \u2026 we've a minute. Maybe two at most.\"\n\nAzania eyed the hole they had quarried earlier. \"How hot \u2013\"\n\n\"Red hot,\" said the Anhoyal Ranger leader.\n\n\"Toss me through.\"\n\n\"NO!\" Dragon growled. \"You are not facing that man alone!\"\n\n\"We've no time. Azerim's dead otherwise. Throw me through, and then try to deepen the hole to get a couple more Rangers inside, alright? The second you hear me call, get your scaly butt down to that barred window \u2026 you'll know what to do.\"\n\n<For Azerim?> he asked.\n\n<I've no choice.>\n\nHe nodded at once, sensing her frustration, desire and courage. <I understand. Let's do this \u2013 together?>\n\nShe clutched his upraised paw. <Always.>\n\n<If you see any large green gems in there, destroy them \u2013 from a distance, alright?>\n\n<Got it.>\n\nShuffling toward the tower \u2013 one of three in his vision just now \u2013 Dragon prepared to do what he hated most. Aye, this despairing Dragon planned to toss his Princess directly into danger.\n\nShe unstrapped from his neck and stepped down into his paw. \"Get me close. I'll dive through, I think. Practised this plenty of times during my illegal gymnastics classes, but never through a red-hot window. Lower, lower \u2026 good. Steady paw, please.\"\n\nRight. He had to hold his wrist with the other paw. Shaking like a reed.\n\nHer feet pressed down briefly, and then she arced through the hole like a trout disappearing into a waterfall.\n\nAzania tucked and tumbled neatly. A second later, she was back at the smoking hole, saying, \"All good. There's a hatch here. Bow, quiver?\"\n\nHe tossed them through gently. \"Be careful.\"\n\n\"Stay close, Dragon?\"\n\n*GNARR-AAAYYYEE!!*\n\n\"Eloquent.\" She knelt, working the hatch mechanism. \"Open that window quickly. Might need help fast.\"\n\nHe smelled death in the air; whatever had been located inside that room, it was a pile of smoking slag and the men or women operating it had perhaps been vaporised. Nothing recognisable was left, anyhow, as best his muddled vision could make out.\n\nDrawing back, he let loose again, trying to achieve the ultimate cutting focus with his white fire. Make the hole bigger. Get some Rangers through to support the Princess. Fury lent his efforts power and heat. He carved through the ridiculous ten-inch metal cladding, causing huge showers of hissing white sparks to fly free, and then he hit the foot of stone beneath. The Sankir meantime briefed him that two Rangers on ropes were watching the King's window thirty feet below. Another Ranger helped him to direct his flame.\n\nSuddenly, another explosion shook the tower.\n\n<Azania!>\n\n<Fine \u2026 shaken some, but \u2026 whoa!>\n\nWhoa indeed! Another silly expression, but it perfectly described all his senses rushing back together and behaving themselves again. Excellent. Meantime, Aria flitted to a landing right beside his flank.\n\n<Wrong boy. Decoy; not the King's little brother. I left him with helpers below.>\n\n<Azania's dropped the tower defences.>\n\n<Got three Dragonesses trying to break in below. Gazaram's inside. How's it going here?>\n\n<Far too slow!>\n\n<Inner hatch open. I see Azerim,> he heard from the Princess.\n\n<She's reached Azerim.>\n\nAria narrowed her eyes. <How are you communicating with her?>\n\nTime to drop her jaw. <Thought.>\n\nMission accomplished! As he continued to try to carve that gap around the window wider, he saw her mouth unhinge slowly. <Telepathy \u2013 you \u2013 and her? Impossible \u2026>\n\nDisbelief, jealousy and more.\n\nIf there was to be something between them, Dragon realised with sinking hearts, she would have to learn how very different a creature he was. He had never been one to fly with the Clan. Difference could be painful and lonely, or beautiful and unique, and everything in between. Much would hinge on her ability to accept who and what he was \u2013 and he, her uniqueness.\n\nAzania's cry arrested his thoughts. \"Gazaram! Stop right there!\"\n\nDragon froze.\n\n[ A King to Save ]\n\nThe gasp of his fear gushed fire out of his throat. Stone and metal exploded back toward his face. Dragon ducked instinctively, protecting the Rangers beside him with an outthrust wing. Molten metal splattered his wing and hide, drawing a pained grunt from him.\n\n\"Gazaram!\" he snarled.\n\nThe Sankir shouted, \"Swords! Clear that window. Get Rangers inside, now! Go, Dragon.\"\n\nAnother space into which a very large Dragon ought not to be trying to insert himself. Just not a good idea. The window, with two Rangers dangling beside, was fifteen feet below the top level of rock that surrounded the metal tower. Head down. Off he went.\n\nAs Dragon slithered downward, trying to extend his neck and make his shoulders small, he heard a sharp scuffle inside. A male grunted in vexation. Clash of sword blades. *Thonk!* That horrid sound preceded a man's muffled groan, and another curse rose from the Lord:\n\n\"I'll kill you, puppet King!\"\n\nA low, female scream, \"Over my dead body! Take that!\"\n\n\"Unh! Dead will suit you just fine.\"\n\n\"Try me.\" *Cling! Clang!* They clashed robustly.\n\nGazaram roared, \"Who by the hellish Northern Lights are you, girl?\"\n\n\"Your worst nightmare.\"\n\n*Skiss!* \"Aargh! What the \u2013 what's your magic?\"\n\nWhat? Had the talon blade done something to Lord Gazaram that Aria's blades had not achieved? His slide snagged and snapped one of the ropes holding a Ranger, but he caught it a fraction of a second before the end whipped out of his paw.\n\n\"Sorry. Grab my paw, here.\"\n\nShe climbed into his grip as he braced himself between rock and metal. Peering through the bars, he took in the scene. At the far end of a metal-clad, circular chamber, Gazaram tried to wrench his blade free of the King's boot \u2013 Azerim must somehow have blocked a blow. He was chained to the wall. That blade looked deeply embedded. Blood spurted out of the wound as the Lord struggled to free his staff. Another wound on the chained man's lower left thigh was so severe, he saw a white glint of what he took for bone.\n\nIn the same instant, Azania darted forward, spearing one of the green gems on the staff's length with the point of her talon blade. The gem fizzed and sparked violently. The Lord swung a heavy boot. The Princess rolled smoothly to Azerim's side, dodging the blow and causing him to lose his balance.\n\nGazaram fell heavily. \"Curse it, you black demon!\"\n\nDart! She destroyed another gem. And another! Tactical!\n\nWith another violent twist, he freed the staff and swung at her. The Ranger in his paw fired an arrow, which skimmed the man's neck as he spun with frightening grace. Azania blocked the staff's shaft with her blade. As the man pressed to overpower her, cursing that he would remove the King's head, she scraped the blade along toward his fingers. Gems exploded in sequence. He had to drop his grip or face having a few digits amputated.\n\nDragon lined up his muzzle. Unfortunately, Gazaram stood between him and the Princess. The shot would skim the circular staircase in the centre of the chamber. Misfire, however, and he'd roast his Dragon Rider, or the King. His eye touched hers, as did his thoughts.\n\n<Bellow,> she breathed.\n\nAt the same instant, she tripped over Azerim's waving leg. Poor man. Beneath that heavy, padlocked black leather hood, he must have little idea of what was going on save that someone was trying to kill him and someone else, an unseen defender, had just sprawled over his lap.\n\n<I AM DRAGON!!>\n\nHis sonic blast punched the Lord in the back. A silvery blade flicked upward at the same instant as the man lurched forward, losing his balance. Azania pierced his bowels deeply. Stuck beneath his toppling weight, she could not escape and neither could he fire, but the King twisted his chained body with a great groan, sliding them sideways. The ultra-sharp talon ripped its cut inches wider.\n\n*Blergh!* Nasty. Now he knew what Human guts looked like. So \u2026 organic. A greyish-purple colour, like a small octopus dangling its tentacles out of that rent.\n\nLord Gazaram's black gauntlet snapped out, gripping Azania by the neck with enormous strength. \"Now you'll die, little girl!\"\n\nShe choked, fighting hard, trying to kick him off.\n\nMust be galling to be gutted like a fish by a person he took for a child.\n\nAt the same instant, soldiers boiled out of a hatchway in the floor, while the Sankir came down the stairs four at a time, unleashing an arrow that punched into the Lord's shoulder. For a second, he found himself surrounded by four of Gazaram's men, fighting for his life. Then, another Ranger leaped free of the stairway, her daggers glinting. Beautiful strike. One soldier died instantly, the other at her left hand, staggered as her dagger embedded deep in his shoulder.\n\nFreed, the Sankir beat back the remaining two and lunged for Gazaram. Still tangled up with the Princess, his hand gripped her throat relentlessly. She kicked his neck, but the man only bore down with maniacal strength.\n\nAzerim kneed him in the man-treasures, and appeared to collapse.\n\nAs the Sankir bullied the Lord off Azania, she coughed and heaved a relieving breath. The Lord's men tried to pull him backward toward the window, shielding him with their bodies. Aiming through the bars, the Ranger in his paw placed a shaft into one of the backs facing them. More soldiers rushed up through the hatch, but a Ranger's arrow struck one of them through the face visor, blocking the stairwell with a dead body.\n\nThe tall Ranger and the tiny Princess stalked Gazaram in tandem. The man swiped at them with his sword; a male Ranger knelt beside the King, quickly binding his thigh with a robe, while another worked expertly at his locks with a set of picks. Two more had joined the soldiers.\n\nCatching Dragon's eye, the Sankir roared, \"You'd better hide your Lord well, men, for I am bent on revenge!\" He waved his sword in clear threat. \"Come on, Gazaram! Where's the youngest Prince?\"\n\n\"Taken care of!\"\n\nThe man lunged; the Sankir blocked his thrust, but his block impelled the blade into Azania's arm. Blood welled immediately.\n\nShe lunged. \"Take that, Gazaram!\"\n\nHe recoiled. At the very same instant, her thought touched his mind. Dragon thrust his fully extended talons between the bars. The blow was anything but elegant; the longest point of his fore-talon pierced the nape of the Lord's neck, despite his armour. Just three inches or so, but in the case of a Human, a deadly strike. Blood spurted out of the cut. Drawing back his talon, he warned Azania with his mind as he very, very gently blew fire onto the men's backs.\n\n\"Get the King out! Mind the lower hatch,\" he roared.\n\nThe Rangers retreated; the men in front of the window screamed and broke. Nothing like overheated Dragon halitosis playing down one's spine to liven up a man's dancing skills. Meantime, the Princess skipped forward to execute a rapier-like strike with her talon blade, opening the Lord's throat to complete the job. He collapsed; she retreated just as rapidly.\n\n\"Lower hatch!\" he thundered again, shaping the fire roughly with his tongue. It swept across the floor to the lower entrance, sending the men climbing up there into a scuttling panic.\n\nStooping, the Sankir hefted the limp King onto his shoulder. \"Up the stairs! Go!\"\n\nWith the way cleared by Dragon fire, the Rangers fled up the spiral staircase. The King left a trail of blood behind him. Briefly, Azania and a female Ranger clashed over who would be last. The Princess staggered upstairs first, clutching her side. The Ranger followed; a second later, he heard the trapdoor squeal shut. Drawing a huge lungful, he filled the chamber with clouds of pearly white fire. As much as he had breath for, until the flesh inside stopped sizzling and there were no more sounds of movement inside. So much did he give, the heat radiated back out of the window, forcing him to withdraw the Ranger he still held in his paw.\n\nNow he was properly stuck.\n\n<Aria! Help!>\n\nChuckling rather grimly, she ordered four Dragonesses to grab him by anything that mattered and drag her Dragon out of the hole he had created for himself.\n\nTook a bit of doing.\n\nAfter all, from this viewpoint, his haunches obscured the entire sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Working quickly, the Dragonesses extracted the Rangers and royals through the window the creature who possessed a welding torch for Dragon fire had thoughtfully carved out for them. They had padded the hole with a layer of robes which had been soaked in seawater, but the cloth smoked heavily and burst into flame as the last Ranger popped free.\n\n\"Azania! Alright?\"\n\n\"Good thanks, Dragon. Various cuts and bruises, but \u2013\" He caught her as she wobbled. \"Mostly alright. I need to sit down.\"\n\n\"You did great in there.\"\n\n\"And then, the draconic backstab. Epic,\" she said, swatting his upraised paw with her hand. \"Nice work, you!\"\n\n\"Azerim needs help, fast,\" Aria put in. \"Dragon \u2013\"\n\n\"Right on it. Castle courtyard?\"\n\n\"Let's move.\"\n\nScooping up the King, he leaped out hard and fast, taking them on a quick tour of the delightful battlements before folding his wings to execute a swift landing. Warriors both scaly and not patrolled above; the keep had been breached, and even before they touched down, the Sankir began to yell at his Rangers to find the youngest brother, or at least, find out his location. The staff had gathered inside the entry hall. Amongst them, the Lady of the castle stood apart, railing bitterly at everyone and everything.\n\nAfter discovering that the castle did not have a surgeon of any capability and the Lady was not exactly willing to help, Dragon poked his head into the hall and summoned up his most sensitive self.\n\n\"Lady Gazaram! Your husband is dead and if you don't shut your lying, treasonous trap, I promise I will immortalise you in charcoal as well!\"\n\nShe collapsed in a dead faint. Perfect.\n\nHe glared at the rest of the servants. \"Anyone else in a mood not to help?\"\n\nTurned out they were all incredibly zealous. Amazing. However, the best they could offer was a nurse and a seamstress capable of very fine stitching, one Chanize. Aha \u2013 that would be the sweet-looking young blonde woman sitting in a rolling chair. His fires brightened.\n\nDoth yon Dragon devise a devious scheme? Something like that, anyways.\n\nDragon pointed with his talon. \"Rangers. Get King Azerim on that table. Nurse, clean his wounds and you, girl, stitch whatever it is that's bleeding so badly in his leg. Get the artery closed properly, hear me?\"\n\n\"Sir!\" the pair quavered in tandem.\n\n\"Where's the nearest capable surgeon?\"\n\nOver the waters at Lord Jenarzam's castle was the agreed answer. The debate then became whether to move the King and do just one trip, or to go there and fetch the man in rising storm winds, which would take valuable time. Azerim was in bad, bad shape. Despite the boot, his foot had almost been cut in half and the gash in his thigh was deep \u2013 it had only nicked an artery, but he had lost a great deal of blood. The seamstress bent over him, needle and thread moving steadily while the nurse pinched off the flow and mopped up with her free hand.\n\nOutside, Aria gave her orders. No sign of the little boy so far, but the Anhoyal Rangers had not yet finished their search. One of the servants thought he might have heard Gazaram talking about hiding the boy somewhere out along the coastline, but he did not know where.\n\n\"Can someone get me up onto the table?\" Chanize asked, wiping her brow. \"Can't see from here \u2013 oh, Sankir Farizam?\"\n\n\"Chanize. May I help?\"\n\n\"Gladly.\"\n\nDragon scented the emotions between them. All the colours of a mountain meadow in the high summer. He grinned toothily, summarily terrifying every single person who was looking at him just now. High time for draconic mischief after all this brutal fighting and killing. He looked on as the girl put her arms around the man's neck and he lifted her easily onto the table. That bloom of colour in her cheek. A hitch in his breath and the care he took with her person.\n\nAye! *Gnarr.* Move over for the Dragon in the house!\n\nBrusquely, he said, \"Once you've shut off that bleeding, let's plan to sprint with the King over to Lord Jenarzam's castle. Who can pack travel bags for the nurse and the seamstress?\"\n\nChanize glanced up. \"Uh, my Lord Dragon \u2013\"\n\n\"Congratulations. You have just been accepted into the service of the Crown.\"\n\n\"I have?\"\n\nSqueaky. Just how he liked his women.\n\n\"That's right,\" Azania agreed, smelling the romantic subplot with infallible instinct. \"Royal authority, straight from the King and Queen themselves. We have the power to put this rebellion to rest and secure the King and his brothers by any means we deem necessary.\"\n\n\"You can't do that. She's a bondservant,\" the Lady Gazaram groaned, having recovered a few of her senses, by the sounds of her whining.\n\n\"Oh, I can and I will,\" Dragon growled. \"I require her service.\"\n\nThe nurse said, \"And me?\"\n\n\"Bind that leg and foot. We need to minimise the bleeding until the surgeon can see him.\" He leered at the servants. \"Woman. Go pack, or must I persuade you?\" Fire leaked from between his fangs.\n\n<Don't overdo the tyranny,> Azania half-laughed half-scolded playfully.\n\nShe knew exactly what he was about.\n\nAlso, Chanize was now properly terrified of him. Sigh. Best rectify that detail once they were up in the air. He gave her a parting snarl as she wheeled out of the hall. The Sankir looked desperately unimpressed. Obviously some peoples' brains were exhausted and misfiring badly. He'd get the idea just as soon as this despotic Dragon executed part two of his wicked scheme. Just now, he demanded that Azania's injuries also be seen to so that she could embark on a flight.\n\nAria stepped up beside him. <We might find ourselves searching this area on foot and by wing. I'll see what the other groups have come up with; see that as many Princes as possible are secured.>\n\n<They might be keen to help with the search,> he suggested.\n\n<Good idea. You're as full of ideas as you are mischief, aren't you?> He rumbled immodestly. <So, here's the plan. You sprint for Jenarzam and I'll rendezvous with the other teams at my lair as planned. I would have wanted to show you my place, but our job is far from complete. We'll come find you when we can. Saving King Azerim is our top priority. Fly safe and strong, Dragon.>\n\n<You too, Aria.>\n\nHis undisguised longing surprised them both.\n\nAfter a moment, she stroked his flank with her wingtip, a gesture definitely on the intimate side of friendly. <I've never appreciated having a big, powerful male at my back as much as today. You shone in battle, Dragon.>\n\n<Thank you!>\n\nWith that, she was off to make more arrangements. He buzzed with elation. What a high compliment from the lethal Isles Dragoness!\n\nDragon arranged his little Humans to his satisfaction. The Princess would take his neck, of course. They fastened the King to a stretcher and perched him atop his shoulders, alongside the spine spikes, before slinging ropes about his chest to fasten him in place.\n\n\"Up top,\" he ordered. \"Nurse, seamstress, Ranger, in that order. Get yourselves tied on.\"\n\n\"We \u2026 fly?\"\n\nChanize's little brain had evidently just turned up the right conclusion. About time.\n\n\"I'd attach wings to your wheelchair if I could,\" he said. \"I'm sorry if this is second best.\"\n\n\"Second best?\" Her eyes grew round and shiny.\n\nHe said, \"I'll carry your wheelchair in my paw, for when we arrive on the other side. Now, milady, paw up?\"\n\nHe delivered a speechless young woman into the Sankir's capable hands. Farizam helped her to settle on a temporary pad and took the seat right behind her. Both women's hearts thrashed madly as he checked they were secure, and then, with a gruff warning, he stepped up the stairs and climbed up onto the dark battlements. No launch that would jolt the King. Various gasps ensued as he gripped with his talons, testing the rising winds. Tailwind. This promised to be a good flight.\n\nTurning to check over his shoulder, he growled, \"Sankir, you'll need to call directions. Everyone, hold on tight. I'll be flying very fast. Sankir, you're responsible for that girl in front of you. Forgive me, but for the sake of her balance, I'd prefer you hold her firmly about the waist.\"\n\n<You old fraud!> Azania snorted fondly.\n\nThe dark-haired Islander's face was a study in angst.\n\n\"Dragon's orders!\"\n\nWithout waiting to see what the man would do, he tipped forward from the battlements and spread his wings upon the breeze. They had a King to save."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Pumping his wings with all his strength, he shot out over the channel dividing Human Isle from the Dragon one. There was only a small enclave of Humanity on this first large island of the Archipelago's Dragon paw; it was the most populous but also the poorest Archipelago. The King had been of the opinion that Jenarzam might have been coerced by the other three Lords, but that his actions might be forgivable \u2013 possibly. Of the four, his death had been desired the least.\n\nA Dragon appreciated such a codicil.\n\nGazaram had merited no such special treatment. Fancy trying to hurl a youngling to his death for the sake of a feint? Despicable. Aria had rescued the boy, but many other soldiers, servants and several Rangers had perished. Two Dragonesses had not survived the battle.\n\nAbout ten minutes into the flight, he checked back over his shoulder and called, \"Chanize?\"\n\n\"You know my name?\" she gasped. Despite the very late hour \u2013 perhaps three hours before dawn now, he estimated \u2013 the girl appeared quite awake.\n\n\"Of course I do. I take pains to learn the names of all my valuable captives.\" He grinned. \"Just teasing. Good flight? Comfortable?\"\n\n\"Aye, thank you, uh \u2026 Dragon?\"\n\n\"Is the Sankir holding you properly, Chanize? Do you feel quite safe?\"\n\nHer medium green eyes brightened. Not that it was possible for a fireless Human, but he was quite sure he detected a spark in there. Or was that just a glint of reflected starlight?\n\n\"I am quite scared, Dragon.\"\n\n\"Sankir! You are failing in your duty,\" he grumbled.\n\nThe man guffawed, \"More of those 'Dragon's orders,' eh?\"\n\n\"Let me advise you to obey,\" the desert Princess put in, wide-eyed. \"He gets incredibly grumpy, otherwise. He's also a complete tyrant when it comes to arranging matters to his satisfaction.\"\n\nDragon said, \"Could not have said it better myself.\"\n\nAfter a second, the girl pressed her head against Farizam's chest, and his hands tightened about her waist. He might not have been aware, but his habitually soldierly expression softened, and his nostrils flared slightly as he took in the girl's scent. Beneath his body, he made a surreptitious fist pump.\n\nWin goes to the Dragon.\n\nOne more thing. With a displeased huff of hot air, he said, \"Chanize, I dislike bonds of servitude. Would you like me to petition King Varazim on your behalf to have you released from Lord Gazaram's service?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 I could not ask such a thing.\"\n\n\"Would it make you happy?\"\n\n\"Over the moons!\"\n\n\"That's good enough for this Dragon.\"\n\n[ Sunshine ]\n\nCompared to lord gazaram's architectural monument to a misshapen desert cactus, Lord Jenarzam's castle was positively homely. A broad, tan-coloured rough pentagon, it enclosed a hilltop commanding a view of Seal Bay, a sparkling teal estuary that played home to an estimated fifty thousand playful silver seals. They could play right down his throat, *mmm.* Tasty. Beyond the bay lay a further sprinkling of black-tipped coastal mountains, their green grassy sides dipping at dizzying angles into the bay and the Lumis Ocean beyond. Tan coastal plains surrounded the castle, but soon gave way to the tumbling, flower-festooned tropical vegetation he was starting to take a fancy to.\n\nGorgeous view.\n\nRight on top of the broad, flat top of the Lord's gatehouse, a chunky white Dragon was busy deciding if he could be bothered to shift his chunky backside a smidgen to better enjoy Taramis' brilliant white glare. Nah. Too much like actual effort.\n\n\"Refreshments, my Lord Dragon?\"\n\nAh, that would be his private butler. What a wonderfully civilised notion.\n\nOne might almost argue that Lord Jenarzam's apology was hitting its full stride. Eye to the future and all that. He had good taste. Talking about taste, he idly picked over the offerings and treated his gullet to a nine-foot length of moray eel roasted to perfection. Succulent.\n\n\"Do convey my compliments to the cook,\" he rumbled. \"The fare is excellent.\"\n\n\"I shall, sir. Would sir like anything else?\"\n\nIf sir had not been feeling so lazy, he might have bitten the earnest middle-aged man for calling him sir, a Human title. No, he was feeling magnanimous. Let this fellow escape with his head. Especially since his stomach was ever so appreciative of the attention.\n\nHe said, \"No, thank you. Before you leave, allow me to relieve you of your burden. This red fish is particularly excellent.\"\n\n\"The Ruby Snapper, sir?\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nDragon's ear quickened to a light footstep. Azania. A touch awkward in her gait, however. He curved his head at once to check her over as she ascended to the rooftop. Arm, body and breast. The Princess wore her wounds proudly \u2013 as well she should, having saved Azerim's life fairly much single-handedly. She also wore her talon blade prominently on her hip. Stars above, he loved her attitude. Sass, spark and zest. That young King had no idea how lucky he was to have captured prime place in her heart.\n\n\"How are you, Princess?\"\n\n\"Stitched up and sore, but fine. You, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Feeling exactly the same; thinking deep and positive thoughts about closing all of these holes in my hide.\"\n\nHer smile quirked up at the corners. \"I see. Very hard work. Deep thoughts.\"\n\n\"Quite. So, is our King still as handsome as when you plucked that evil hood off and beheld his chiselled jaw and rugged good looks once again?\"\n\n\"Dragon, you're a pest.\" Walking around his head, she leaned against his upper shoulder, in the protective curve of his paw. \"Confession? That jawline is infeasibly chiselled. If I start any unsociable drooling, you have permission to poke me with a \u2013 ouch. Thanks, I think.\"\n\nHe grinned, withdrawing his talon. \"Like that?\"\n\n*Gnarr.*\n\n\"What about that wild hair, Highness?\"\n\n\"Mischievous,\" she agreed. \"Longer than I expected. I have to say, spending days with one's head locked inside a stuffy leather hood is not generally regarded as beneficial to any Human hairstyle.\"\n\n\"Nut brown with blonde highlights and a hint of aesthetic waviness?\"\n\nShe wiped her lower lip. \"Oh, stop it.\"\n\n\"Much more importantly, how is His Majesty doing?\"\n\n\"Still asleep. The surgeon piped a fair amount of restorative brew down his throat.\" Her sigh conveyed a weight of worry. \"Says he needs to sleep for as long as it takes, and he'll have himself and an assistant on hand all hours to monitor him. Chanize did a fantastic job. Fine hand on the essential stitching. The right foot \u2026 that's not great. Dragon, thanks for trying to strengthen him with your magic. You almost collapsed.\"\n\n\"It was nothing.\"\n\n\"A highly significant nothing, then.\"\n\nDrawing his Dragon Rider against his scales in a hug that enveloped her tiny person, he said, \"Now to the waiting and the healing. This is the hardest part.\"\n\n\"Isn't it just?\" She patted his neck, and in a muffled voice, teased, \"Don't you worry now, Dragon. I'm here for you. You can cry on my shoulder. I'll hold your little paw and tell you everything's going to be just fine.\"\n\n\"Rascal!\" he snorted.\n\nAfter a long, long hug that he appreciated more than perhaps any other Dragon would have admitted, she added, \"We did it.\"\n\n\"We did it. You did it! I was just watching through the jail bars.\"\n\n\"As if. You're amazing, Dragon.\"\n\n\"You're pretty impressive yourself, for a cute desert blossom.\"\n\n\"If I had fangs, you'd be toast right now.\"\n\n\"How is that statement logical?\" Chuckling, he added, \"To catch you up, there's no word from the search as yet. We had a Dragoness report half an hour ago \u2013 apart from, that the Princes are having the time of their lives. Boys racing around the Archipelago on Dragonesses. You get the picture.\"\n\n\"I do. Missing Aria yet?\"\n\n\"It's only been a matter of hours. Would I be so shallow? Don't you dare \u2013 you dared!\" *Grrr!*\n\n\"Grrr yourself.\"\n\nOn that mature note of history-changing significance, the Princess settled down between his forepaws and breathed out a gust of air. Bone-weary. Healing. Victorious!\n\nShe did not snore. Just a faint snuffling as she nodded off.\n\nDragon's eyes lidded. He jerked awake as a shadow crossed his nose; just an attractive orange Dragoness flitting overhead on patrol. *Pah.* Unfaithful thoughts. Aria certainly had her troops hopping. They had lost five Dragonesses in the assaults on the four Lords; eight more had been laid low with severe wounds but should recover in time for the flight south to the mainland. The King was their biggest worry. If infection set in, he could be in real trouble \u2013 and he was fairly sure Lord Gazaram had not been the sort to concern himself with the cleanliness of his blades before he stuck them into people, judging by the tales told by his servants.\n\nTime to work on his majestic snoozing in the sunshine. A skill wholly necessary to his personal growth as a creature of fiery intelligence and bourgeoning combat prowess."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "When a Dragon sense awoke, it was like a claw pricking at the back of his mind. Cracking open an eye, he checked his surroundings without giving anything away. Aha. That emotional scent, as evocative as her personal scale scent \u2013 Ariamyrielle, sneaking up on him from behind. Wicked Dragoness!\n\n<Appreciating the view back there?> he purred.\n\n<Dragon!> she snorted in delight. <Playing at the sleeping predator, are we?>\n\nShe rubbed along his flank and flicked his wing edge playfully as she approached, slinking with feline intent up to where he could best appreciate the yellow-white flame filling her eyes. How he shivered at her ardour!\n\nNuzzling her neck, he purred, <Fancy meeting you here, o treasure of the Vaylarn Archipelago.>\n\n<Not every day I get to meet a true monster around my Islands,> she purred, tickling his chin with her talon tip. <How's our scale-sized desert rose?>\n\n<Very sore, I fear, but recovering. Your wing?>\n\n<Bad, but improving. We brought the Princes back for the night. They want to keep searching for their brother in the morning. We covered a great deal of ground, but not enough, it seems. And, they would like to meet you two. Unsurprisingly! They've been in to see their brother, and are currently destroying the cook's best offerings in the hall.>\n\n<Under guard?>\n\nShe gave him the fiery eyeball.\n\nWry grin. <Obviously, I am half a mile behind the plot, as usual.>\n\n<You do the handsome part, I'll do the intelligent.> Ooh, fighting talk! He mock-snapped toward her shoulder. <Come on, he whose scales dazzle whiter than white. Time to meet the Princes of the realm.>\n\nHe shifted slightly to check on the precious cargo.\n\n<I'm awake.> Azania's voice was a smile.\n\nAria hopped down from the battlement with another of those ridiculous, butterfly-like manoeuvres her complex wing structure and far lighter body weight allowed. Her left wing did react noticeably differently to the right, courtesy of all the bandaging and stitching. For his part, Dragon took the scenic route, with slightly more than seemly gravitas. Hop, spread the wings, land like a mobile boulder beside the far more delicate Dragoness. He popped Azania onto her feet.\n\nWhat a gentlemonster. Chortle.\n\nThe Humans had thrown open the doors of their Great Hall for visitors of a size and bulk they did not often entertain. Their original building calculations, however, had failed to account for one who was half Sea Dragon. Wrapped up in chatting to Azania, he promptly got his shoulders stuck in the doorway. Or, one might argue, some Dragon might have discovered an opportunity to showcase his massive physique.\n\n\"Oh, I'm stuck!\" he said loudly.\n\nAria did not even turn. \"I doubt it. Shake a wing, Dragon.\"\n\nHe scraped a little this way and that, and then flexed his upper body and flight muscles, making the doorposts groan alarmingly. *Mwaa-haa-harr!*\n\n<Show-off,> Azania said politely. <Oh look, they're like peas in a pod.>\n\n<Close. Different-sized peas in a pod.>\n\n<Pedantic.>\n\nThe young Princes, said to be sixteen, fourteen and ten years old respectively, had graduated from goggling at the beast filling up the doorway to gaping at the Princess. The most beautiful woman in the seventeen realms tended to have that effect on a room, Dragon had observed. Take, for example, the servitor just exiting the hall through the servants' door, who had just introduced his nose to a doorpost of his own. Or the other fellow, who barked his shins on a bench. Ouch. Deserved that.\n\n\"Oh, you are stuck,\" Aria purred in a way that promptly introduced 'stuck' to the flow of his thoughts.\n\n\"Aye, so it appears,\" he agreed. With a little forethought, he inserted one paw and shoulder through the door, wriggled his shoulders, lashed his tail in annoyance and flattened a servant behind him \u2013 made an apology \u2013 and managed to scrape through. That said, his intended swagger was more of a stagger.\n\nWhat a hero.\n\nAs they approached, the three Princes stood up politely and made their stiff, formal Archipelago bows. Like they had a javelin stuck up their spines. Princess Azania responded with a fluid desert n'gandila-vaa, a formal greeting for royalty, he understood. The boys instantly mislaid all rational thought and stood about gaping like a trio of trout bereft of water.\n\nAh, Princess power. Nothing quite like it under the suns.\n\nCatching up \u2013 in his world, that meant taking three large strides across the hall \u2013 he nudged Aria delicately. \"Are these the fine Princes of the realm?\"\n\nSubtle.\n\nAria nodded, stepping on his right forepaw as she bowed. \"Your Royal Highnesses, may I present Her Royal Highness Azania, Princess of T'nagru, called the Black Rose of the Desert. Azania, these are their Royal Highnesses Gathazim, second in line to the throne, and Harazim and Tahluzim. We are only missing King Azerim, and tay-Varazim, the youngest, whom the Princes have spent all day searching for.\"\n\nDragon almost chuckled. Azania was of a height with ten year-old Prince Tahluzim.\n\nAll were deeply tanned of skin, with the same wavy hair varying in shade from medium brown in Gathazim to black for Tahluzim. They wore tough tan trousers and identical light blue shirts, which contrasted pleasantly with their brown skin.\n\nWith a second bow, Azania smiled, \"I understand that you three became Dragon Riders today?\"\n\nThey nodded eagerly.\n\n\"This is my Dragon, whom I am honoured to ride. He is a Dragon we simply call Dragon \u2013 it's a bit of a story. Dragon, Princes. Princes, Dragon.\"\n\nThree sets of royal eyes popped in ways that did pleasing things to someone's ego.\n\n\"I didn't know Sea Dragons walked on land?\" Harazim blurted out. His colour deepened when he realised everyone was looking at him. Dragon pegged him as the shy one, and a lover of lore like himself.\n\n\"Perceptive, Prince Harazim,\" he approved. \"I believe I am half Sea Dragon.\"\n\nAria said, \"Naturally, the tiniest Princess gets the biggest Dragon.\"\n\n\"Naturally.\" Azania winked at the Princes. \"I am awfully demanding, especially when it comes to having the biggest and best \u2013 with respect, Aria!\" The cobalt warrior stepped on his paw a second time, audibly annoyed by the gaffe. \"Right now, I demand dinner. Is there space at this table? And who will volunteer to tell me the most embarrassing stories about Azerim you can remember? I definitely need ammunition for when he wakes up. How's he doing?\"\n\nHard to believe that much charm could exude from so tiny a person. Within a minute, the Princess had her audience twisted around her smallest finger \u2013 the pinkie, a very odd word where a black person was concerned. Maybe if she dipped it in paint!\n\nDespite her shenanigans, Aria was as tired as he. They slept alongside one another in the courtyard, and woke at dawn. The search must continue.\n\nThree excited Princes and an amused Princess took off after breakfast, bound for the eastern edge of the island which lay south of Lord Gazaram's territory. Village hopping. Most of the Humans acted overawed by the unexpected visitors, and were quick to offer help. Indeed, word of the search had even spread overnight. The royal cavalcade gained cheers and admirers everywhere, but to their frustration, they unearthed plenty of rumours \u2013 helpfully offered \u2013 that always turned out to be fruitless.\n\nThey paused on a remote beach to take stock.\n\n\"Far too imaginative, you Humans,\" Dragon growled at Prince Gathazim, who skipped out of his way with aplomb.\n\nAt six feet and five, he was the tallest of the brothers. He was also the most skittish around Dragons. A brave and bluff warrior, he talked a good talk, but was desperately worried about the youngest brother, which Azania quietly told him was very sweet. Harazim was a quiet, studious lad, not at all the warrior type. Tahluzim openly hero-worshipped Azerim. He had very moist eyes by the end of the afternoon, when Aria started to talk about needing to return around suns-down.\n\nAll in all, these boys were no perfect family, but their care for one another shone. How he wished he could have enjoyed the same with his siblings.\n\nDragon clacked his fangs at no-one in particular.\n\nGathazim jumped again.\n\n\"Stop tormenting him, Dragon,\" Aria growled.\n\n\"I wasn't \u2013\"\n\n\"Relax! Stop trying to steal the limelight. Just be a normal male for once.\"\n\nNormal? Something inside of him shrivelled.\n\nWas that what she wanted?\n\n<No, don't you ever try to be normal,> Azania's thought interrupted.\n\nNausea spread through his stomach. Aye, but to some, different was not cause for celebration, it seemed. An accident of birth, a dam he had never met and a heritage he was still grappling with. Normal was the thing he would never be, not around this Archipelago, nor in his native Tamarine Mountains. Nor among the Sea Dragons, he suspected. What if he was overcome with the desire to migrate with them? Leave behind everything he had here?\n\nEnough misery! He sent Azania a mental picture of him pulling up his big-Dragon trousers.\n\nHer giggle made Aria round upon them. \"What! What exactly is so funny? We've a lost Prince to find and not enough hours in the day to find him!\"\n\n<If only she knew you as I do,> slipped through Azania's mind.\n\nAloud, she fibbed royally, \"Dragon and I were just outbidding one other. He said ten, I say twenty more hamlets. What say you, Prince Tahluzim?\"\n\n\"I will do thirty on my own!\" He punched his chest. \"Uh, if Valyrielle is willing, that is?\"\n\nThe orange Dragoness grinned. \"Lightweight. We'll do forty, minimum.\"\n\nDrawing a steadying breath, Aria ordered, \"Let's go. Spread out and keep going \u2013 the moons will be full tonight. Let's not leave a single stone unturned.\"\n\nHer look aimed at Dragon was unreadable.\n\n<Normal.> He feared he'd be sick.\n\nTracking south, the Dragonwing spread out from the coastline to the mountains, rising and falling in regular cadence as they visited different hamlets and homesteads. The suns dipped behind the mountains, sending long fingers of shadows searching across the thick jungles. Since he was too large to land easily amongst tall, creeper-covered tropical thickets, Dragon and Azania had drawn the coastal strip. Many times, the hamlets were within walking distance of one another \u2013 he ran \u2013 and often tucked up along streams that reached the coast. It struck him that people were not afraid of Dragons here. Not like on Solixambria's mainland, where the arrival of a huge paw-stomper was so often cause for fear and panic.\n\nAzania questioned the villagers efficiently. Each time, after finding out that the young Prince was not present, they found out where the next hamlets or houses were.\n\nMove on.\n\nAs Ignis poured down beneath the horizon as if the land or ocean were glugging away the enormous red sun, they encouraged one another. One more. Another. Rinse and repeat. There came a false alarm that brought everybody winging over in great excitement, only \u2026 he was not the Prince. Startling resemblance, but no.\n\nHe and Azania returned to the coastline as the moons rose, turning the shallow ocean waters as silver as a Princess' jewellery. They searched now by candlelight, lamplight, firelight and scent. Digging his talons into the white beach sand, Dragon rushed from house to house. Always the same.\n\n\"Shall we fly over that headland?\" Azania asked.\n\nDragon peered ahead. A rocky jumble rose sheer out of the waters \u2013 isolated from the beach by a rising tide. A few tropical bougainvillaea tufted the top like a very bad Human haircut.\n\n\"There's a boy \u2013 look,\" she said.\n\n\"I just smelled him. What's he doing?\"\n\n\"Taking a load of driftwood out to those rocks \u2026\" she mused. \"Someone lives there? Scent the \u2013\"\n\n\"I'll scent the \u2013\"\n\nThey chuckled quietly. Same thought. He shrank back into the cover of a dune. They watched the boy wading along until he disappeared into the darkness around the boulders, holding his bundle of bleached sticks high to keep them dry. He was not the Prince. Too old. He had a Dragon sense about that place, however. Danger? Too far for his senses to detect anything.\n\nDrawing his magic about them, he stalked up the beach. Just a large patch of white. No. Why not use the water, his supposedly native element? Changing direction, he waded out into the waves about a quarter-mile from the rocks.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" the Princess asked.\n\n\"Making sure you don't stink when you see Azerim again,\" he said, submerging until only his head and hers showed.\n\n\"Wow, thanks for the compliment.\"\n\n\"Scrub those armpits, my dear Princess. Festering cesspits of nastiness.\"\n\nShe took pause. \"Are you smelling infection?\"\n\nDragon said something very rude. \"Aye! Sorry, I didn't add one talon to the next \u2026 I believe the salt water immersion should help. Are you alright, Princess?\"\n\n\"I don't feel great. The water's cooler than it ought to be, if that makes any sense at all.\" She wriggled against his neck. \"Oh \u2026 it's my breast. Hot and \u2013 ouch. That can't be good.\"\n\n\"Usefully, I shall refrain from referring to your breasts as 'hot' around King Azerim. Deal?\"\n\n\"Deal!\" she chortled.\n\nKeeping low in the water, he paddle-scrambled over the reef toward the rocks, approaching from the ocean side. He definitely smelled someone in there now \u2013 quite a few people, he realised belatedly. The scents of their emotions were not as he remembered from Gazaram's castle. More \u2026 wary, perhaps, and not enemies or dark-hearted as he would have expected of men holding a young Prince. What was this? Could it be \u2013\n\n\"Halt! Who goes there?\"\n\nIn a second, the Princess scrambled to her feet, waist-deep in the surf. She called, \"We are with King Varazim, searching for Prince tay-Varazim.\"\n\nHad she listened in to his thoughts?\n\n\"Who are you, o dark spirit of the ocean?\" Fear trembled in the voice. \"Stay back!\"\n\n[ The Little Prince ]\n\nAmongst the names she had been called, to his knowledge, this was unique. Was it because she had emerged seemingly from the deeps? Easy to imagine how Archipelago Islanders might be superstitious about creatures which rose from the surrounding ocean. Most of the people they had met this day had never imagined someone being as dark as her; again, most found her an exquisite curiosity, like an exotic painting or animate artwork.\n\nBracing his paws upon the reef, Dragon rose. And rose. The quartet of roughly dressed men and women who had emerged from a gap high amidst the rocks, drew back in shock.\n\nHe said, \"Dark, aye. Spirited, most definitely \u2013 but this woman is flesh and blood like you Humans, and no spirit. We are Dragon and Dragon Rider, and we seek the young Prince tay-Varazim, in the name of the King. This is Princess Azania of T'nagru.\"\n\n\"T'nagru? That's on the other side of the world,\" one of the men exclaimed.\n\n\"They are said to be dark,\" the other noted.\n\n\"Aye, and wont to dislocate men's eyes from their sockets,\" his female companion added sourly. \"Be off with you both. There's nothing for you here.\"\n\n\"Lord Gazaram is dead,\" Azania noted politely.\n\nDragon sniffed the air meantime, and listened intently. Was that a younger, faster heartbeat back inside the rocks somewhere?\n\n\"We'll believe that when we see it,\" the first man blustered.\n\n\"Unfortunately, I did not leave a great deal to examine, unless you feel like picking through his ashes.\" He did not intend to threaten, but a hint of irritation was more than enough to convey that impression.\n\n<I'm sure they're hiding him,> he added for the Princess' benefit.\n\n<Call Aria?>\n\n<Aye. Might be the safest option.> Aloud once more, he said, \"Do any of you know Ariamyrielle Seaspray? And the other Princes?\" A stifled gasp within the rocks. At their nods, he said, \"Since you do not believe us \u2013 which I do understand, given the circumstances \u2013 shall I summon them here? They are nearby.\"\n\n\"Aye, you do that,\" said the sour woman.\n\nRaising his muzzle to the sky, he almost lost it with a guffaw as the Princess stuck her fingers into her ears. Wise. He let out a wild, triumphal bugle that must have echoed for a mile about, and launched a bolt of white fire just as high into the sky, where \u2013 to his eternal shock \u2013 it exploded in a wide burst of sparks.\n\n\"Pretty,\" his companion approved. \"What do you call that Dragon power?\"\n\n\"I have absolutely no idea.\"\n\n\"It's kind of an explosion \u2026 an artwork \u2026 of fire?\"\n\n\"Fire-art-work?\"\n\n\"Firework for short?\"\n\nHe purred, \"Excellent. Time to update the dictionary.\"\n\nTo the men and women, who must be soldiers in disguise, he said, \"Don't go anywhere. We will not trouble you meantime.\"\n\nWithin seconds, the bugle began to pass down the chain of nearby Dragonesses. They called to one another, summoning the whole force to the coastline. Eyes grew round as Dragonesses shaded the moons. At their forefront was Aria, and beside her in wing position, none other than Charielle. He was not aware she had joined the search.\n\nFive hearts thumped together inside his throat. Hope he was right \u2026\n\nAzania pointed. \"The Princes come riding on Dragons.\"\n\n*Kerpoof.* Little brains, blown. They clearly recognised both Ariamyrielle and her dam; the three Princes were a bonus. The fact that Anhoyal Rangers and Princes alike rode Dragons was too much. Jaws catching flies. He loved it!\n\nGathazim called down, \"Isles greetings! Is our brother here? Have you found him?\"\n\n\"Here!\" A scream came from inside the rocks. \"Here I am, brother!\"\n\nThe Princes alighted as quickly as they were able; Gathazim was so keen, he almost took a very bad fall before one of the soldiers snapped out an arm to steady him, along with Dragon's paw. Harazim and Tahluzim were more circumspect for the time it took their boots to touch rock. Then, they collected a little brown-haired thunderbolt in their arms. A big, scrambled brotherly hug with many moist eyes, backslaps, a surreptitious tickle or two and a great deal of yelling ensued. Azania dabbed at her eyes. Dragon discovered a boulder-sized lump in his throat.\n\nThis made it all worth it. He had begun to fear they would never find the little Prince, or worse discover a very small grave somewhere. As it turned out, these faithful soldiers had kidnapped him from the kidnappers and brought him here for safety.\n\nThey apologised at least fifty times to Azania, who remained gracious throughout.\n\nNot so much to him, but it did not matter. Not when his Princess had a case of the sniffles, the brothers nearly had a small war over who would get to fly with the youngster back to the castle, and Charielle complimented her daughter on a job well accomplished.\n\nQuite the day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Perfection would have been to return to news that King Azerim had woken and was doing much better, but he had not, as yet. The surgeon wanted to make plans to transport him to Zunityne in the morning, where he could receive further treatment. He delicately opened the cut upon the Princess' right breast and drained an infeasible amount of nasty-smelling pus, before closing and bandaging it again, and dosing her up to the eyeballs with medicines.\n\nShe spent the entire night being violently ill.\n\nCome morning, he had two patients to fly to Zunityne. Marvellous.\n\nAt least the prone patients balanced out atop his back. He flew with Chanize and the Sankir once more, taking up Azania's habitual position on his neck, while the patently terrified surgeon travelled with the patients up top.\n\nBetter be terrified. Touch the Princess one more time or suggest any more of those foul concoctions, and this Dragon would dump him somewhere far from shore! *Gnarr.*\n\nAria had flown to Wave Dragonhome with her dam before dawn, seeking to deal with the draconic politics arising from those Dragonesses who had dared to help the four rebel Lords. She left with a kind word, however.\n\n<Fly true, Dragon. I've sent twenty Dragonesses ahead with the Princes, since none can possibly keep up with you in flight. We need someone close, especially someone trusted, near the King and Queen at this time. You are that someone. Keep the family safe. I would not have wished to deal with these duties now, but \u2026 needs must. I will come to Zunityne as soon as I can. I'll miss you.>\n\n<Likewise,> he said, wondering if she meant it.\n\nDid she need time to think over their relationship, such as it was?\n\nCrooking his neck, he eyeballed the Sankir with a certain unmistakable intent.\n\n\"Right behind her,\" he said at once.\n\n\"Make sure you keep it that way,\" he growled balefully. \"Chanize, you'll tell me if he doesn't hold you tight every second of the way?\"\n\n\"I am your humble servant, Dragon,\" she managed to splutter.\n\n\"No laughing, you two. I'm being deathly serious.\"\n\nThey both straightened their lips at once, and snuggled with gratifying submission to the very letter of his command.\n\nFeeling somehow better about life, since having a minor tyrannical tantrum was all it took to lighten his mood these days, Dragon stretched up and climbed onto the Lord's battlements. The ease of a large Dragon walking up a twenty-foot height in one step always seemed to mesmerise these little Humans. Aye. Think about what might be done to such a fortress. Think long and hard, rebel Lord!\n\n\"Riders, cover your ears, please,\" he ordered crisply.\n\n<I am dragon!!> he boomed, shaking the castle down to its roots.\n\nOff like the wind!\n\nChasing downwind on a brisk Archipelago breeze, he set a spanking pace for the first leg over to the Human Island. No way were those Princes, with barely one and a half hours' lead, getting to Zunityne before him. Plus, he needed to move the King as fast and with as little fuss as possible.\n\nFast air stretcher.\n\nAll part of the service he offered.\n\n<Do I really have to fly lying down?> Azania grumbled.\n\n<Just don't throw up on my nice white scales. I'll never forgive you,> he advised acidly.\n\n<The fresh air's good for me,> she whispered. Still so weak. Rough night, and then some. <Azerim \u2013 could you touch him once more with your magic? I know you don't feel it's done any good \u2026>\n\n<I'll do it.>\n\n<Thank you, Dragon. Do you mind if I sleep?>\n\n<Blergh. Thus was the mighty Dragon demoted from stretcher-bearer to being a flying royal crib.>\n\nShe chuckled faintly.\n\nStretching his wings, he accelerated smoothly.\n\nWithin the hour, they were over Human territory once more. Dragon smoothed out and lengthened his wing stroke, trying to find the most efficient configuration. They raced into the heart of the Island, the suns at their backs and a bright green jungle before.\n\nAbout three hours into the flight, Dragon had just spotted the Dragonwing carrying the four Princes in the distance, when Azania snuffled and woke abruptly, as if wrenched from a bad dream. The surgeon supplied her with water and was about to arrange shade for her face and head, when Azerim stirred too, and said distinctly:\n\n\"Why's the sky moving?\"\n\nEveryone jumped, especially the one with the wings.\n\nHe peered back over his shoulder. Azerim gazed at the Princess with an expression of utter stupefaction pasted upon his face. Giving every village idiot who had ever lived a run for his money. She must be smiling, although from his angle, it was hard to tell and so he had to resort to sniffing out her emotions to be sure.\n\n\"A-Azerim?\" she faltered at last. \"It's me, Azania.\"\n\n\"I know you \u2026 Aza \u2026 where are we?\"\n\n\"Flying to Zunityne upon a Dragon's back.\"\n\n\"Am I \u2026 dreaming? Must be \u2026 dead \u2013 so confused. I feel terr \u2013\"\n\nHis body went limp. The surgeon gave a low cry as he reached forward to check the royal, but after a minute, he said simply that King Azerim had passed out once more.\n\nAs far as reunions went, Dragon decided with a huff of vast annoyance, that was decidedly underwhelming. He would have to arrange a redo. Round two. Otherwise, a sneaky Dragon might seize his chance to knock a bit of sense into His Majesty's indestructible cranium before anyone noticed. Fancying he must be dead. How incredibly rude and inconsiderate of him.\n\nLanding to give his Riders a comfort break and his own wings a fifteen-minute rest, he was even more narked to discover that Azania was feeling perky enough to be released from her stretcher. Why, when he was playing captive Princesses and Kings, did she have to spoil the party?\n\n*Murgh-hurgh-harr!* What a nasty Dragon he was. Time to vex someone.\n\nHe sniffed loudly at her breast. \"Ah, much better.\"\n\n\"Dragon!\"\n\n\"I still detect a tang of infection, however.\"\n\nThe surgeon said, \"In which case, I should change the dressings at once. Come aside with me, Princess.\"\n\nDragon gave him a look promising instant death. Astonishing how rapidly his superior attitude evaporated. With a meek bob of his head, the surgeon scurried off to do his duty.\n\nMurder was too good for that man. Now, what form of slow torture would be most enjoyable? Evisceration? Stake him out for the desert ants and vultures? Pickle his eyeballs and serve them up with a tangy garnish of \u2013\n\n<Dragon, behave yourself.>\n\n<Gnarr,> he complained mildly. <Why do Humans make such a fuss over milk glands?>\n\nExasperation! She snorted, <Why do male Dragons hide their bits beneath an armoured shield and not wave them all over Zunityne, eh?>\n\n<Might make all the smaller males jealous?>\n\n<Oh, excuse me, mister monstrosity, your ego nearly slapped me all the way back to T'nagru, there.>\n\nLaughter gurgled in his throat.\n\nWith another sea storm sweeping down from the north, harbinger of what Aria had warned him would be a week or two of more unsettled weather caused by the changing of oceanic currents, they elected to fly on quickly. They joined the Dragonwing carrying the Princes shortly thereafter. Perplexed Dragonesses! Ah, the day was shaping up nicely. Someone might have been guilty of making a small show of having to slow down for them. No Dragon he could name, mind.\n\nTo his further surprise, the older Dragoness Yalia ordered her compatriots to shift over so that he might take the lead position in the flying wedge.\n\nOnly because he was carrying the King. *Grrr!*\n\nAh, but now a compliment about how he eased their slipstreaming? Better. One must always be sure to paddle in the shallows and eschew deeper waters.\n\nAround mid-afternoon, the red tile rooftops of Zunityne hove into view. The weary Princes revived with miraculous aplomb, especially the youngest, leading the Sankir to request that Dragon announce the royal return in suitable style. Bugle or roar, he inquired archly?\n\n\"Shut your ears, everyone!\" Azania advised.\n\n<III \u2013 AAMM \u2013 DRRAAGOONN!!>\n\nHis melodious roar shattered the sticky afternoon, sending thousands of sea birds into a cawing panic over the city. Full retreat!\n\n<For the king!!> He added, causing everyone who had thought he was done, to complain about their ears.\n\nStretching out his wings, he signalled a slow swoop over the city. Time for the populace to see and believe two things. One, their younger King and his brothers had arrived home. Two, people rode upon Dragons. Aye, perhaps it was na\u00efve to believe that others would find what he and his Princess enjoyed, but could he help wanting to share? How else would his life ever have changed if not because of her, and moreover, what they brought to one another?\n\nHis hearts squeezed inside his chest as the first cheers rose from people rushing into the streets. The Princes waved madly. Even the fierce Dragonesses responded to the mood in the air, their butterfly wings finding a statelier cadence, their expressions changing from stern to bemused and even cautiously gratified. Perhaps in their culture it was not often that warriors received such adulation apart from in combat in front of one's peers. One's dignity precluded any overt show of vanity, but the underlying changes to their emotions were more than clear to his senses.\n\nGiven their numbers, he led the Dragonwing to a landing along the road just outside the Palace gates. They paraded inside as servants burst out of the building, all pretence of orderliness or decorum thrown to the winds. The King and Queen made an appearance on their balcony, although the Queen was seated in a rolling chair like the one he carried in his right forepaw.\n\nKerfuffle! Cries! Tears! Cheers!\n\nMad Humans everywhere. The Princes leaped down from their Dragons and rushed inside the building, hugging random people along the way. The Sankir commented that security was commendably tight, as he had expected. Dragonesses and Rangers. Soldiers stationed on the rooftops and guarding the building in a visible show of force.\n\nHere came the crowds, a swelling, murmuring mass. The older King ordered them to be let into the grounds.\n\nBefore his Riders dismounted, Dragon rose onto his hind paws to allow them to see their son, and for Azania and Sankir Farizam to brief them quickly. The Princess told them Azerim had saved her life, taking a blow that Lord Gazaram had intended for her neck \u2013 even while he had been hooded, and unable to see who it was that he defended.\n\nDragon glared at her. He had not known that!\n\nThe King leaned out to kiss Azania upon the cheek. \"My dear Princess of T'nagru, how can I ever thank you for your service to our Kingdom?\"\n\n\"We \u2026 had a great deal of brave help, Your Majesty,\" she stumbled, her cheeks heating up noticeably. \"The Anhoyal Rangers, the Dragonesses from Wave Dragonhome \u2026 we lost a number, but prevailed in the end.\" Her eyes flicked guiltily to Azerim. \"I'm sorry we couldn't bring your son back unscathed. We did our best.\"\n\nThe King's dark eyes considered her at disconcerting length. Then, he bowed very deeply. \"Your Highness.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty.\"\n\nDragon wondered what exactly the exchange meant.\n\nKing Varazim extended his hand. \"Dragon.\"\n\nThey shook gravely. At least he understood this gesture!\n\nThe King said, \"The power of your paw has shaken our islands, mighty Dragon, earning the undying gratitude of myself, my Queen and all our people. We are indebted.\"\n\nHe said, \"Thank you, my King and my Queen. It was the least we could do. It's my personal hope, sire, that Azania and I will be able to usher in a new era of co-operation and friendship between your people and the Dragons here. Now, if we are only able to move the Sea Serpents along as easily as a few traitorous Lords, I shall be satisfied \u2026\"\n\nThe royals chuckled incredulously.\n\nQueen Vyioli smiled, \"I would not put anything past the pair of you \u2013 Dragon and Dragon Rider. Who would have thought?\"\n\nThe Princess said, \"The flame for justice burns bright in my Dragon.\"\n\nHis muzzle quivered as he considered her words. Did it? Judging by her sharp inhale, the insight appeared to strike her with unexpected force.\n\nThen, the Princes burst into their parents' chamber like a hurricane.\n\nQuietly, he padded away to take King Azerim to the ground floor infirmary. He popped Chanize into her rolling chair while the servants came with ladders to unstrap the King from his back. Meantime, King Varazim made an impromptu speech from his balcony thanking everyone for their concern and assuring them that order was indeed restored to the island kingdom.\n\nHe prodded the Sankir in the ribs. \"Where will you take her?\"\n\n\"There might be a private apartment available in the Palace servants' quarters, near mine,\" he said. \"It's located on the ground floor. I'll need to prod a few people to install ramps where needed, as the floor is not entirely even. We'll work out the details.\"\n\nChanize put in, \"I'm not sure what my future holds, as yet.\"\n\nClasped hands. Unconscious closeness. Smiles. Here came this ridiculous Human behaviour again, the pretence that something which most definitely existed, could not even be mentioned. Yet it was delicate, a bud that should not be disturbed.\n\nNot even by a dictatorial paw.\n\nClearing his throat, he waggled a talon beneath her nose. \"I'll be keeping an eye on you, young lady. After all, I do not indulge in the kidnapping of exceptional damsels for no good reason.\"\n\n\"I am hardly a damsel in distress,\" Azania put in bluntly.\n\n\"Watch this eye roll I'm about to make,\" he teased. \"Can't you even pretend? Just for one minute?\"\n\n\"You're already insufferable.\"\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\nAs the Sankir wheeled Chanize away to help her settle in, the Princess murmured, \"Oh, would you look at how he's taken command of her wheelchair? How gallant.\"\n\nEvery bit as dryly, he said, \"Very honourable of our Sankir \u2013 gnarr-harr-harr.\"\n\n*Mwaa-haa-harr,* she agreed, making several of the nearby servants look at her very strangely indeed.\n\nTogether, they walked King Azerim over to the royal infirmary. Dragon made himself a nuisance by insisting that the wide windows be kept open, the better for him to lurk near the royal personage and wreak, according to the doctors, despicable draconic misdeeds about the place.\n\nUse his magic, in other words.\n\nNo, he was no Inzashu-N'shula. Compared to her rapier skills, he was a large club wielded by a clumsy paw. However, from the window he could reach over and touch Azerim and strengthen him; one of the nurses shortly admitted that after he did that, the young King did breathe easier and his temperature came down a few notches.\n\nAzania busied herself at a desk in the corner \u2013 meant to be a nurses' station, he understood \u2013 writing up their most recent adventures, and also making a list of Dragon-related topics she needed to discuss with the King. Taking her Roving Ambassadorial job very seriously indeed. Dragon propped his muzzle on the windowsill and amused himself by suggesting alternative wordings in a few places. Well, every few sentences. Just to keep the quill-wielding scamp honest.\n\nAfter an hour, she stretched and came over to chat with him, leaning on the windowsill facing the world outside the window, where Ignis was doing his best to set the sky afire. Gorgeous early evening. The vibrant reds and bonfire oranges made his paws itch to be painting.\n\n\"Do you think the Palace would be willing to source me canvas, an easel and painting equipment?\" he asked. \"I assume we'll be marooned here for a few days at least, getting the King back on his feet.\"\n\n\"Aria didn't say how long she'd be delayed?\"\n\nThe King's hand twitched on the bedlinens. One advantage of having widely separated eyes with a broad field of vision, like most predators enjoyed, was that he could appreciate the suns setting to one side whilst keeping a check on Azerim on the other. The young King lay propped up on wide linen cushions in a comfortable wooden bed. His wounded leg had been fixed by a sling raised by a pulley on the ceiling. Terribly uncomfortable position, Dragon felt. He wore no shirt, for several other wounds upon his chest, back and shoulders had required attention. The medical staff had openly wondered how strongly he had resisted his kidnappers, for many of the wounds betrayed perhaps several beatings he must have suffered; a large bruise was purpling up a treat on the left side of his face, spreading from the point of his jaw right up to his ear.\n\nHe said, \"No, but she implied it'll be several days at least. It's challenging to position the Dragonesses for something new when the factions are so divided.\"\n\nMoodily, she added, \"Azerim had my picture up in his chambers. His brothers took great pleasure in telling me.\"\n\n\"That's encouraging.\"\n\n\"I think they desperately want \u2026 well, instant romance, to be perfectly honest.\" Over on the bed, a pair of clear green eyes cracked open. In Azerim's deeply tanned face, the colour was a startling flash of light, like the green-blue of shallow ocean waters dappling over white sands. \"The King and Queen are already treating me like the daughter they never had, and it's \u2013\"\n\nShe bit her lip.\n\n\"Hard? I can only imagine,\" he said gently.\n\n\"I never had anything like this with my parents. I never knew my mother, really, and father \u2013 well, you know how beautifully that went.\" The Princess shook her curls, drawing the young King's attention. \"Do you think he'll even remember a girl he once met? It's been five years. I was twelve, then, and \u2026 things change. People change, Dragon. Just look at us.\"\n\nAs she spoke, the royal eyes lit upon the Princess with yearning so plain, it speared a sharp pang in his Dragon hearts. Disbelief. Craving. Appreciation so intense, he would have set the doctors scrambling to treat a fever had they been present. Dragon tried to see it from his perspective. A slender, dark Princess leaned over the windowsill, in a posture that presented her tiny haunches and woefully slender legs most advantageously for him to scrutinise. Sable curls tumbled down her back. She bore a sword in the King's very presence \u2013 no-one had yet dared to inform her that this simply was not done. The low, liquid tones of her desert accent rose and fell melodiously in earnest, unselfconscious conversation with a perfectly enormous white Dragon filling his window!\n\nPoor fellow. Struggling to breathe over there, was he?\n\n*Gnarr-harr-harr.* He knew that feeling. The flicker of Aria's wings could stop up his throat in an instant. Really, that much beauty packed into one Dragoness was extremely hazardous to the health.\n\nShe whispered, \"I'm just not sure I'm ready for this, Dragon. It's all a bit \u2026 overwhelming, and \u2026 scary. Am I being silly? I mean, what if after all this, he doesn't see me for who I am, and there's the complication of you \u2026 and all the Dragonesses, and war on the horizon \u2026\"\n\n\"Shh. Now, that is silly, Princess. These fears are wholly unfounded.\"\n\nAzerim's reaction said it all.\n\nBehind her back, Dragon winked at the King and made a 'come on' crooking gesture with his fore talon. Aye. She had no idea how hard he swallowed just then.\n\n\"Dragon, how do you know?\"\n\n\"Oh, call it a mysterious Dragon power.\"\n\nHer breath hitched. In that second, she realised he was playing the tease; she must have sensed why, but her body lacked the capability to respond to her volition.\n\n\"Azania,\" the King rasped. \"Princess Azania \u2013 wow!\"\n\nTurning with a low gasp, she bowed \u2013 to Dragon's eye, appearing more than a little flustered. \"Your Majesty \u2026\"\n\n\"Wow, look at you,\" he repeated.\n\nHe wanted to wave a paw to clear the atmosphere. Funny how there were ways other than breathing fire to make a room very hot indeed. Sweltering!\n\n\"So it was you in the tower, Azania?\"\n\nShe smiled shyly, lowering her eyelashes yet gazing hungrily at him beneath. \"Aye \u2026\"\n\n\"Then, I owe you my life.\"\n\n\"If someone hadn't stuck out his big boot to stop Gazaram's blade, I wouldn't be here to talk about it,\" she said, in a rush. \"How are you, Your Majesty? Are you in pain?\"\n\n\"Please, call me Azerim. May I be so bold as to greet my saviour and old friend with a hug?\"\n\n[ Old Friends ]\n\nWhen Azania hesitated, the king did the same. Then, he smiled, \"We're rather huggy around the Vaylarn Archipelago. Sorry. This place should have come slapped with a few cultural warnings, Princess \u2013 but I am the King. Am I allowed one very small demand?\"\n\n\"A demand, o King? Your will is my command.\"\n\nHis pulse leaped like a scared rabbit, but he managed to say steadily enough, \"Then, approach the royal bedside, o Princess, that I might thank you properly.\"\n\nWhen she stepped over as if in a dream, he placed an arm about her shoulders, and pressed his lips very decorously to her cheek. Over her shoulder, as they embraced, his lips formed another 'wow!' Aye, her fears were that badly unfounded. This young man was besotted, or he was a luminous purple shrimp and no Dragon.\n\n\"Sit with me.\"\n\nAzania's eyebrow arched. \"That's two demands, my King.\"\n\nDragon rumbled, \"She's always like this, I'm afraid. I've tried to beat it out of her, but some Princesses just won't fit the mould.\"\n\n\"So I see,\" he agreed, sounding discomfited but somehow emboldened at the same time. \"Princess Azania, would you please sit with me? I'm afraid I present myself in a rather tatty and bedridden state, but I would like \u2013 heavens' sakes, what's going on in my kingdom? What are you doing here on the Vaylarn Archipelago? With a Sea Dragon of stupendous size, with whom you seem very well acquainted? And how did I leap from the delights of Lord Gazaram's finest accommodation back to the Palace? Was I flying Dragonback, or was that just another dream?\"\n\nPatently, he did not want it to be any kind of dream.\n\nNor could he stop smiling.\n\nPulling up a stool at his bedside, Azania said sweetly, \"You'll be glad to be lying down for this, Azerim. In short, we crossed the ocean to recruit a Dragon army, but discovered your kingdom was in trouble, and so lent a hand and a paw of aid. This is Dragon. He is called Dragon \u2013 long, involved story \u2013 and we are acquainted as Dragon and Dragon Rider.\"\n\n\"I \u2013 what? What? Hold your Sea Dragons!\" he spluttered.\n\n\"If you insist,\" Dragon put in.\n\nAzerim queried, \"You're a Dragon Rider? When did that happen?\"\n\n\"After he captured me from the King Tyloric's tower \u2013 that's in the Kingdom of Vanrace. Technically, I am still his captive Princess, but we're sort of ignoring that inconvenient detail at present. Aye, we transported you by Dragon from Gazaram's place to here. You really were flying.\"\n\n\"As in, you ride on a Dragon?\"\n\n\"Into battle, all around Solixambria and across oceans,\" she explained. \"You did, too.\"\n\n\"Wow!\"\n\nAzerim's new favourite word.\n\nHe scratched his modest chin-scruff, and said, \"Excuse my ignorance, but is Dragon-Riding a new thing? I had thought Tamarine Dragons far too aloof to even consider such an arrangement.\"\n\n\"Brand new, but very old,\" Dragon replied.\n\n\"I'm remarkably persuasive,\" said the rascally Princess, batting her eyelashes.\n\n*Pop* went his concentration.\n\n\"One moment,\" said Azerim, and pinched his arm firmly. \"Aye, most probably awake. So, we have a Dragon-Riding Princess rescuing the kingdom from rebellious Lords, all of my brothers \u2013\"\n\n\"Returned safely,\" Azania said.\n\n\"Mother and Father?\"\n\n\"Resting upstairs in their chamber, guarded by warrior Dragonesses.\"\n\n\"By the Isles!\" King Azerim's green eyes twinkled. \"Tell me, what happened to that shy twelve year-old I remember being so smitten by, I could barely speak a word in her presence? She grew up \u2013 I see that, although, not so much 'up' as \u2013\" he chuckled as she waved her finger warningly \"\u2013 as even more beautiful than ever. I do feel as if I'm living in a land of dreams and I never, ever want to wake up.\"\n\nHer black eyes twinkled at him.\n\n\"Ever,\" he insisted.\n\nThe Princess said, \"Maybe you are dreaming, but I assure you, it's all totally Dragon's fault.\"\n\n\"I doubt that.\"\n\nHe smirked at Azania. \"I'll leave you two to get reacquainted, shall I? Or would it be politic if I told your family that you're awake, first? Because once you ask Azania for her story, you're liable to be stuck here for a good many hours. Captive audience.\"\n\n\"Captive King, don't you mean?\" she chirped, with a bright smile that audibly snaffled all the wind out of his sails.\n\nAzerim said, \"Oof.\"\n\nAzania added, \"Besides, wouldn't you say that, 'The mighty Dragon-Riding Princess liberated the King from abject captivity in the most nefarious tower in all the land,' has a nice ring to it?\"\n\n\"Oh, demoted to the sidekick in this plot line, am I?\" Dragon growled.\n\n\"Whatever suits.\"\n\nAzerim said, \"If I am asked for honesty, I'd have to say, 'Aye and nay.' Nay because that place was hateful, but aye because you came to rescue me.\"\n\nTheir glances danced shyly for a moment.\n\nTime to work on some actual diplomacy, for a change. How to withdraw?\n\n\"Dragon, please do inform my family that I'm awake, if you'd be so kind, or we'll never hear the end of it. I'm ravenous as well. Jail rations do not agree with this man's appetite. Azania \u2013 wow!\" He flushed. \"I'm saying that a lot, aren't I?\"\n\n\"You're forgiven.\"\n\n\"Just admit it's her trousers,\" Dragon put in, helpful as always.\n\n\"A gentleman would not look,\" he said gallantly. \"However, I shall evermore blame a drug-induced delirium for my severe failings.\"\n\n<Dragon, I'm going to spread your guts on toast,> she informed him pleasantly.\n\n<Oh, don't stop. This is far too much fun.>\n\nRising from the stool, she walked over to the window, pirouetted, and said, \"You like, Azerim? Give me a moment, I'll just kick this rude Dragon out.\"\n\n<His eyes appear to be pinned to your hips, Highness.>\n\nPlus, his jaw was in distinct danger of dislocation. Nice one, Princess!\n\nShe pushed the window shut on his muzzle, grinned at him through the glass, and said, <My heart's wriggling with happiness. Dragon, you're the best. Thank you!>\n\n<You're going to make such beautiful children together \u2013>\n\n<Dragon! You're impossible!>\n\nMaybe he was, but spreading love and happiness was also infectious. He wandered off to inflict wonderful news on a few more people, raising screams of joy from the younger two brothers, undignified yelling from Princes number two and three, another near-faint from the Queen and loud demands from the older King for a wheelchair and his robe, this instant!\n\nWhy was it that other peoples' families were oftentimes easier than one's own?\n\nSame for Azania. He must help her navigate this. Still, he knew that she would manage far more graciously than he."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "King Azerim slept the deep sleep of a young man exhausted by three days of chatting up the most beautiful woman in the seventeen realms. Dragon sympathised. Once the seventeen year-old Princess and the twenty-one year-old King managed to start to relax around one another, and the family left them alone for a change \u2013 Queen's orders, wink, wink \u2013 there was a great deal to talk about.\n\nYawn.\n\nHuman romance. Might they even progress to holding hands soon?\n\nCharcoal sticks scraped upon a set of new sketches he was producing for the royal family. When he completed the King, Queen and their five sons, he planned to produce a much larger composite artwork framed in his mind; that of their reunion about Azerim's sickbed, with tiny Azania perched right in the middle of the boisterous family. He had also sketched out and was now beginning to colour an underwater reef scene \u2013 oh, and he had a picture of Wavewhisperer in progress, too. His art never seemed to stand still. Inspiration always overtook him in eager waves.\n\nWith Princess Azania assisting at a meeting on Human-Dragon relations this afternoon, he had been left to his own devices. Time enough for the draconic viewpoint later. The King wanted to lay careful groundwork, especially considering what had just been done to his four northern Lords.\n\nPeople wanted assurances.\n\nHe loved the solitude. Oh, alright. He also loved the fact that hundreds of people lined the Palace fence just to get a glimpse of the scaly white artist.\n\nTomorrow, the two Kings planned to receive visitors at this very window \u2013 to open the grounds to the public in a celebration of his homecoming. Also, there might be an opportunity to show off the Black Rose of the Desert. There would be music and cultural dancing, and free food and drink.\n\n*Blergh.*\n\nMust plot his escape. All this being nice to everyone gave a Dragon a fearful itch.\n\nAzerim said, \"Have I told you how deathly boring it is waiting for a few cuts to heal, Dragon?\"\n\nHe looked up from his work. The clear green eyes were open again. Someone had artfully trimmed the royal bush and turned his stubble into what looked like flames rising from the line of the King's jaw. Azania would love that! Still no kissing yet, either. Apparently the relationship was too embryonic and nuanced for that kind of mischief, despite what he was beginning to learn was a very wide rebellious streak in the joker of the family, one Azerim.\n\nNot that the couple needed encouragement. He had never seen a pair of creatures more enraptured with each other. Quite sickening, actually. Mush central. Doe-eyed looks, sighs, endearments, the whole caboodle was leagues worse than the soppiest scroll he had ever read.\n\n*Gnarr.* Who was in a bad mood? More to the point, why?\n\nHe eyeballed the King. The King eyeballed him.\n\nHe purred, \"Sire, the aerial view of Zunityne enraptured Princess Azania. It is truly spectacular, especially seen in this red-golden light caused by a partial eclipse of the suns. There's a certain luminous quality to the air at this hour.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Azerim mused.\n\n\"Plus, the Lumis Ocean is surpassingly beautiful seen from above,\" he said airily. \"The islands lie scattered like bright jewels upon a glittering turquoise tapestry. The tropical foliage is so lush, especially when it's been dampened by a recent storm.\"\n\n\"Sounds \u2026 amazing.\"\n\n\"It truly is.\"\n\n\"I wish I could see it.\"\n\n\"Has your leg improved, do you feel, sire?\"\n\n\"Doesn't ache nearly as much as before,\" he said. *Ker-ting!* The eyes narrowed. \"It's really quiet around here this afternoon, isn't it, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Almost too quiet,\" he agreed.\n\nHalf a minute later, the royal bedsheets lay flat as two mischiefs absconded into the bright sky.\n\nFor the sake of his wounds, Dragon carried the King lying flat in his forepaws, cradled, in fact, like a young Dragon hatchling. His laughter was not like any hatchling, however. His genuinely overwhelmed reaction captured all that Dragon was starting to warm to in Azerim's personality. He soaked in the experience so deeply and completely, it was impossible not to laugh with him, this man who had so easily stolen his Princess' heart.\n\nHe took him on a long, stately circuit of the city.\n\nAfter a long time, Azerim's laughter stilled and he said, \"I wanted to thank you for everything you've done for the Archipelago, Dragon, and on a more personal note, for Azania.\"\n\n\"No need to thank me,\" he said gruffly.\n\n\"No need to be so modest! I had no idea of all you've accomplished until I managed to winkle the full story out of Azania. Truly, we owe you our kingdom and very lives, and she tells me you're still planning to do more. Speaking as a King, this is service beyond all expectation. Speaking as a man \u2026 well, let me put it this way. I realised while she was speaking that you share something together, something special and unique and profound, which despite my closeness to Aria Seaspray, we never even imagined. Yet, you were willing to risk all of that by bringing her here, to me.\"\n\nHe was close to Aria? Intriguing, and also encouraging.\n\n\"Dragon, can I make a confession?\"\n\n\"Confess away. Anything you say can and will be used against you \u2013 flagrantly.\"\n\nWith an awkward chuckle, he said, \"I'm sensing that despite our differences, we might feel somewhat the same. I am incredibly jealous of what you share with Azania. As in, seaweed green around the gills; nothing manly or noble about what's churning about in my gut; chewing on my own tongue sort of jealous. It's clear she thinks the world of you.\"\n\n\"For my part, I've been trying very hard not to see you as a threat.\"\n\n\"And how's that going for you?\"\n\n\"Badly.\"\n\nThe admission surprised him. Dragon felt a sorry fool, but perhaps because Azerim had been the first to voice his jealousy, putting a label to his own feelings became that much easier. By his sire's egg, they were not even the same species! Yet to trust another male with her protection, most especially of her heart? No easy matter. Especially considering how well he had been taught from early on to guard his own heart against an unrelenting siege from without.\n\nAll he wanted to do was to fly away over the horizon. However, he had chosen this route for his Princess' sake. Now he must complete the course.\n\nQuietly, he said, \"My King, I am sorry to admit that I'm finding it very difficult to unclench my paw.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 understand. That is why I want you to know, Dragon, that I care very deeply for Azania, and I plan to treat her \u2026 well, like a queen. Goes with saying, I believe.\" Drawing a deep breath, he added, \"And whatever choices we make regarding the future will include you, Dragon \u2013 that's my promise to you, man to \u2026 uh, male to male. Otherwise, I face breaking her heart, and that I would never do. It might get pretty complicated, I guess, once we throw Aria into the mix?\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\nThey shared a chuckle as the double meaning floated, all too obvious, between them.\n\n\"More on the Aria front than the complicated business,\" Dragon explained, unnecessarily.\n\n\"I know. It'll take trust, and I'm sorry, but trust is just one of those things in this world we can decide upon, but no matter what we've decided, it just takes time to grow deep, strong roots that will weather any storm.\"\n\nWise. Dragon turned his words over in his mind.\n\n\"I can work with that.\"\n\nAzerim nodded. \"Thank you. There isn't really a great overarching plan yet, but I'm hoping that I might somehow be able to fly with you when you fly to Solixambria with the Dragonesses. Get to know you both better. Figure out if we can make this work, somehow. I mean, it isn't even a relationship triangle. Those are easy compared to a relationship quadrangle. Four very different personalities and creatures in the mix.\"\n\n\"Quite. A lot depends on how things go with Ariamyrielle,\" Dragon replied. \"I don't know the dynamics here very well. Tell me about your relationship. How did that develop?\"\n\n\"We used to pay the Dragonesses for protection for our shipping. As you know, the Sea Serpent problem started about twenty years back, and went from bad to intolerable. We worked together for each other's benefit \u2013 bringing food, trade goods and essential items from the mainland that benefitted everyone. However, when it became very bad, we Humans started to lose ships and crews, and the Dragons started to lose warriors and valuable artworks. I can't tell you how much salvage there would be on the sea floor between here and Solixambria, were it not for the Serpent menace.\"\n\n\"Anyhow, as you can imagine, the crisis gave rise to suspicion and opposition on both sides. We came pretty close to outright war. It came about that Aria was one of the guards assigned to my vessel to and from Solixambria, when I first met Azania and was shipwrecked on the return journey. She and I were the only survivors \u2013 but we would not have survived, were it not for help. We never found out who our benefactor was. Perhaps one of the Sea Dragons. We've always wondered.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Dragon asked.\n\n\"She saw me unconscious in the water and tried to pull me out. A Sea Serpent intent upon the spoils tried to take her out. That's all she remembers. I came to a long ways from the Archipelago upon a piece of driftwood. Aria washed up upon a remote reef \u2013 very, very fortunately, one might suggest.\"\n\n\"Hmm, indeed?\"\n\nAzerim shrugged. \"The shared tragedy brought us close. She lost her sire that day, and I lost a great many close friends and shipmates. We resolved that together we would try to avert bloodshed between Humankind and Dragonkind, and divine a solution to the Sea Serpent issue that was driving both of our peoples into the ground \u2013 I mean, you don't see the impact so much right now, because we've had two years of outstanding harvests. Not every year is like these, however.\"\n\n\"On the Human-Dragon question, we fairly much got nowhere and earned ourselves a great deal of trouble in the doing. Two years ago \u2013 well, nearer three now \u2013 my mother and father were poisoned by inside agents most likely linked to the northern Lords, but that was never proven. That led to my coronation. Aria's incredibly brave and loyal, and as you likely know, when she puts her mind to something it takes more than a small storm or an uncrossable, deadly ocean to stop her. She nearly killed herself trying to get over to the mainland to find help \u2013 and that's where she met you. My parents are alive and have a kingdom, thanks to you two. Twice over. I wish I could do something for you in return.\"\n\n\"You might save me from the trouble winging toward us. I think our little excursion may have been noticed.\"\n\n\"Head back to the infirmary?\"\n\nDragon said, \"I'll think about what you've said, King Azerim. For now, let me assure you that we're allies and not enemies. After all, we'll need to work together with cunning if we are both to gain what we want.\"\n\n\"That we are. It's a deal, Dragon.\"\n\n[ Calling Afar ]\n\nWhen dragon landed, Azania was waiting inside the infirmary. Coldly furious. He read that in the tilt of her chin and the colours of her emotions. There was relief from the guards, hissing from the Dragonesses, and tears from the Queen.\n\n\"Don't you ever do that to me again!\"\n\n\"Mother \u2013\"\n\n\"When you disappeared, Azerim,\" she sobbed, \"it all came rushing back. You've barely begun to recover. Whatever were you thinking?\"\n\n\"I wanted to see the kingdom from above \u2013\"\n\n\"You foolish boy! You went \u2013 up there, on a pleasure jaunt, while I was dying down here? Who put such a stupid idea in your head; that Dragon?\"\n\n\"Aye, I'm afraid so,\" he said.\n\n\"No, it was my idea,\" Azerim insisted. \"It might sound stupid, mother, but I was just bored, and I wanted to get to know Azania's Dragon better. I got this idea in my head, and you know what I can be like. I'm sorry that \u2013\"\n\n\"Azerim, do you have any idea what I've been through this past hour?\"\n\nFuming! Dragon swallowed back his pride. Perhaps not the smartest move, yet it was past time he and Azerim spoke at a deeper level to one another. The time had been precious.\n\nBowing his muzzle, he said, \"My Queen, I apologise for taking your son without informing anyone. It was insensitive and unwise. It shall not happen again.\"\n\nAzerim said, \"Likewise. I'm sorry we caused you so much distress, mother.\"\n\nReaching his paw through the window, Dragon popped the King back into his bed as carefully as he could. The scent of his emotions betrayed that the excursion had perhaps been too much. He glanced about for his paintings and drawings. Oh. Someone must have moved them.\n\nThe nurses pushed the King's windows shut.\n\n\"Dragon, don't settle there, please,\" the Sankir said brusquely. \"We're putting a guard detail outside his window tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, but Aria said \u2013\"\n\n\"You can take a break. Pick up again in the morning. We'll work out a schedule and let you know when you're needed.\"\n\nHis tone begged for understanding.\n\nThat was the moment that he put a few talons together and made a pawful. <I'm being punished? Azania, surely you didn't \u2013>\n\n<I suggested it.>\n\n<I'm sorry, did I hear right?>\n\n<You heard just fine. This immature stunt you pulled this afternoon ruined all of our delicate negotiations. When are you going to realise that this isn't just about you and your whims, Dragon? There are others involved here, other lives and needs and \u2013>\n\n<I needed to speak with Azerim. It was important.>\n\n<Important, was it? We're trying to build trust here, not wreck it!> she stormed, not caring now that she spoke aloud. The only saving grace was that it was in Draconian, but her tone communicated much. <Far from discharging your duty, you took the severely injured King of the realm off on some little joyride.>\n\n<It was pretty flaming obvious we didn't go far.>\n\n<But the Queen \u2013>\n\n<I apologised!!> \"Is that not enough?\"\n\n\"Don't you roar at me! Go cool off somewhere. Go on. Shoo!\"\n\n\"I'm not a hatchling! You can't talk to me like that.\"\n\n\"Then don't act like one.\"\n\n<You always have to have the last word, don't you?>\n\nShe turned her back, clenching her fists at her sides. <I'm so mad at you, Dragon, I don't know what to say anymore! Please just \u2026 leave. Take your stupid swagger and your fake bluster and go!>\n\nHe staggered. Blind with despair. Here it came. At last, his best friend in all the world had turned against him, as he knew she must. It had been inevitable from the start. A despised Dragon could not change his scales. Even after all he had done for them, these idiotic Human insects could not see his heart, nor could they bring themselves to trust a Dragon. Not even his Princess. She hated him. Wanted him gone. How could the very best work of his paws break even this bond he had thought inviolable?\n\n<Azania, please \u2026> his voice broke.\n\n<Go away!>\n\nHer tiny finger pointed at the sky in negation.\n\nTerrified he would do or say something he would forever regret, he took two steps past his once-companion and friend and launched into the sky with such a violent surge, the rush of air slammed and broke several Palace windows.\n\nBlitz the Fritz. Wrecker of everything.\n\nWhat had just happened?\n\nHe fled blindly into the evening, neither knowing nor caring where he went. All he knew was that he wanted to be as far from Zunityne and all Humans as a Dragon could be in this sanity-forsaken Vaylarn Archipelago. Why had he ever flown up here? She had lost no time in ditching a misfit, misfiring Dragon for the King she had dreamed of for so long.\n\nIt came as a shock when he flew above water once more. The ocean glistened like mercury in the moonlight; he kept low, for a white Dragon did not want to be seen or tracked easily. Up in the night sky, he'd shine like a comet.\n\nOn and on he raced, so close to the lapping waves that the spray and moisture wet his scales, and the scent of salt filled his nostrils. Maybe he would take a swim. No, only when he reached the end of all land. When he could go no farther, then it would \u2013 he spied an oddly shaped white shell in the water. An upturned fishing vessel! Braking hard, he swung around, searching for survivors. No-one would just leave a fishing vessel like this, surely?\n\nThere! A dark head bobbed in the water. A man clutching an oar. He looked ready to slip under.\n\nLanding carefully nearby in the water, Dragon stretched his wings and swam toward the boat. Had it been attacked by Sea Serpents? The fang marks and long scrapes on the hull suggested as much \u2013 if so, where were they? Why had they given up?\n\nReaching the man with a few smooth strokes, he raised him up from the water and patted his back. \"Come on, there. You've got this.\"\n\n\"Uh \u2026 wife \u2026 children \u2026\"\n\n\"Where are they?\"\n\n\"Underneath. Hiding. There were Serpents,\" he coughed. \"Serpents in the water, but they fled \u2026 music, do you see?\"\n\nPoor fellow. Delirious. Taking the man in paw, Dragon startled as he realised he must have a broken leg. It should never fold like that near the ankle. He swam to the small fishing vessel and looked it over. Nothing here. Only \u2013 he tapped upon the hull with his knuckle.\n\nA muffled voice called, \"Mikian? Help, I'm so tired, I can't hold on anymore \u2026\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I'm here.\"\n\n\"Mikian? Who's there?\"\n\n\"Emrici, it's a \u2026 it's a Sea Dragon!\"\n\n\"I'm here to help,\" he reassured them. \"Come on. Let's get you out of there. How many are you under there?\"\n\n\"Five.\"\n\nDragon shook his head. This mother had kept four children \u2013 very small children, as it turned out \u2013 alive and afloat beneath the overturned vessel in the face of a Sea Dragon attack? The power of motherhood never failed to amaze.\n\nOne at a time, he drew them into his paw. The oldest was barely the age of the youngest Prince; then came twins no older than two years of age, and a babe in arms. The mother slumped gratefully upon his back, lifting her children up top, thanking him with every other breath. The husband dragged himself up too, shivering with shock. Tears of thankfulness wet his face as he embraced his wife; he took the twins onto his lap as best he could.\n\n\"Mikian and Emrici, do you need the boat? Where were you travelling at this time of the night?\"\n\n\"Dragon, we were returning from a family get-together over on Izni Isle in the early evening.\" Dragon winced. Must have been adrift for hours. \"We live near Lord Jenarzam's lands on the western shore. Are you the white Dragon we heard about?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I am, but please, tell no-one I was here. Agreed?\"\n\n\"Oh aye, we won't tell a soul.\"\n\n\"Mummy, why are we swimming on a Dragon's back?\"\n\nThe mother patted his shoulder as he righted the damaged boat, and tipped it up to pour out the seawater. \"Because he's a nice Dragon, that's why.\"\n\nNice. Worst word in the world.\n\nIn his experience, the nice Dragon never got anything at all. No hoard, no female and no honour. Was that not the way things were?\n\nPulling the small fishing vessel along, he swam them up the coastline and eventually, with directions, right to the front door of a simple hut located on the coastline. He drew the boat well up onto the beach and carried the husband up to his bed. After foraging for wood for a warming fire, he hunted a Ruby Snapper for the family in the shallow reef waters.\n\n\"Mikian, there's a good surgeon up at the castle. You'll need that ankle seen to in the morning.\"\n\n\"We're thankful, but we can't afford something like that,\" he said.\n\n\"Put it on my bill.\"\n\nThe couple acted openly shocked.\n\n\"Since I helped to save the kingdom this week, I figure they owe me a bit. Please try. If they give you any trouble you can tell them that the white Dragon will be paying a visit. Here. Take one of my scales as proof.\"\n\n\"As you command, Dragon,\" said the woman. \"Thank you once more.\"\n\n\"I'll leave you now to rest.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Dragon left the sleeping family in the early hours, covering the broad width of Dragon Isle during the remaining hours of darkness. His hearts knew nothing but that he needed to keep going. Going, until there was nowhere left to go.\n\nGrowing weary, he kept going until he found a clifftop perch from which to watch a gorgeous white dawn blazing over the eastern oceans. This side of the island was so rugged! Steepling black cliffs, lonely seabirds nesting in the most infeasible cracks above frothing waters, a light mist drifting over myriad tiny islands. He gazed out over the most northerly of the four 'talons' of the Archipelago, wondering again at the extraordinary likeness to a draconic paw print.\n\nIt almost implied design. When did one move from a scientific perception of complexity to a theory of design? Did that even make sense? He had read a couple of scholarly articles on the debate without coming to any personal conclusion. Fascinating topic.\n\nSo fascinating, he took a long, contemplative snooze upon the matter.\n\nIn the late afternoon, he took a long, pleasant flight up that northerly talon, first crossing a churning sea channel before playing in the frisky breezes along the talon. Despite its narrowness, the mountains were over a mile high to start with, but tapered off as he approached the talon tip.\n\nPowerful tides ripped through dark blue channels. The colourful reef became restricted to a few smaller, sheltered inlets, with what the water colour proclaimed were steep drop-offs into far greater depths. Yet when he crossed to the south side, he found strips and pockets of pristine white beaches perhaps never trod by the foot of Man or the paw of Dragon. He tried not to think about how he missed the Princess, or what she must be thinking or feeling just now. She had sent him away. Only fair that he obeyed, that he allowed the silence and beauty of this place to permeate his being. He must marshal his inner strength. That fumbling fool was not him anymore.\n\nWould there be pursuit? What would it take to excise this pain from his soul?\n\n<I'm not a hatchling! Then, don't act like one \u2026 go!>\n\nHe shuddered.\n\nAcross another channel was one final larger island, then just a few dots that made the final talon tip. This island, to his surprise, was shaped like a runic E in draconic talon runes, with an elongated upper bar which was broken in several places, creating a curved, beautifully sculpted bay on its south-eastern side. Well sheltered from oceanic storms. This made it both the most northerly and most easterly place in the Vaylarn Archipelago. Deliberately, he flew out further, right to the last rock that remained unwashed by the pounding surf, where he surveyed the endless blue with a strange hunger deep in his hearts. Out there, the Lumis Ocean was said to be far larger and more treacherous than the crossing he and Azania had completed.\n\nWilds of ocean, monsters of the deep.\n\nAs he perched on that boulder watching the glorious colours change all around him, he spied the first Sea Serpents he had seen during his journey. A family, perhaps. He did not attack. Observing their speed and state of exhaustion, he found himself wondering again why that family had not been attacked and consumed. According to Aria, this was a distinct danger in those deeper channels between the major islands, away from the reef.\n\nBending forward, he drank deeply from the ocean without taking his eyes off the azure Sea Serpents. These were not large, perhaps thirty to forty feet in length. They swam adeptly in a sinuous side-to-side motion supplemented by small, fan-like pairs of fins located along their bodies.\n\nHe watched them round the point and wriggle off to the south.\n\nAnimals. Despite their size, they gave no sign of intelligence, unlike the Sanbris Whales. They responded to external stimuli like any beast.\n\nStimuli \u2026 like music?\n\nThe oddity of Mikian's observation gave him pause. Paws for thought? Nay, wings!\n\nBefore Wavewhisperer came to their aid out on the reef, there had been a burst of underwater music which preceded her much more powerful, yet no less melodious battle challenge. Did the Sea Dragons sing their way around the oceans? Was that why the Serpents had fled?\n\n<They flee the song \u2026>\n\nHis wings twitched of their own accord. Leaping forward, he extended his neck and tucked his paws close, spearing into the ocean with a degree of grace he had always thought would evade him. Fifty-foot white javelin. Bubbles burst around his body, tickling his hide as he tested the swell and felt the powerful, cooler current tugging at his body. To his surprise, there was a busy reef below his body, but it lay at least two hundred feet beneath the surface. Much stonier and harder-looking than the reefs he had paddled or stepped over.\n\nHowever, all that was pass\u00e9.\n\nNo music? No, there was none, save slight, haunting hints of what he took for whalesong. He drifted there in the cool, quiet waters for ten minutes, waiting.\n\nNothing.\n\nDid he dare? He knew her name in Dragoceanic, and he knew how to call. He must brace himself for disappointment. Yet when hope went to war against timidity of hearts, Dragon knew there could only be one winner. Rising for a brief, enlivening breath, he dipped his muzzle and swam deeper.\n\nThis was it.\n\nA resounding bellow rippled through the water, sending the bright tropical fish flitting for cover. <\u2248Sirensong.\u2248>\n\nNo, that pathetic effort was not at all what Wavewhisperer had taught him.\n\n<\u2248Sirensong!\u2248>\n\nBetter. Good resonance, but he still had not achieved the tonal quality she had been capable of. Surely, such a sound would not travel \u2013 well, he had no idea how far it needed to travel. Yet, the ocean knew, because \u2026 <ocean always rises.> Gathering himself, he sang:\n\n<\u2248SIRENSONG!!\u2248>\n\nShiver his wings and tickle his talons, that was a production worthy of the name! The sound shot away from him in invisible waves that quivered his body and senses in ways he could not fathom.\n\nDragon lurked, and waited.\n\nHe took another breath, and waited.\n\nYawn.\n\nHe practised his backstroke and wandered down to take a closer look at the deep reef. The colours appeared less vibrant than the shallower ones; more blues, greys and greens than the silver sparkles and luminous yellows higher up, and he saw larger fish cruising where the waters became more deeply shadowed \u2013 indeed, Ignis' crimson blaze filtering through the waters like flame, was fading fast now toward the night.\n\nHe tried to do a few sums in his head. Sound travelled just over four times faster through water than through air, he had learned \u2013 a fact that had always stuck with him. 767 miles per hour in the air, Dragon scientists had calculated. That made sound's speed through water somewhere decently north of 3,000 miles per hour. Wavewhisperer had implied that Sea Dragons could communicate at inordinate distances underwater, which meant \u2026 well, if they were far away, he had better practice the patience that was coming so badly to him at this moment. Such conversation must be weird. Speak, get a reply ten minutes later. Or more. A great deal more.\n\nNight fell. *Clonk,* he said to himself. Chuckle. Poking his head out of the seawater, he saw that he had been slowly swept southward by the current. Back to the point, Dragon. He must wait faithfully for a reply if one was in the offing.\n\nWhen the change came, he found himself utterly unprepared. A sudden tingling in his tail made him imagine a jellyfish sting must have penetrated his scales. Head down. Checking his surrounds, when the weirdest tingle rushed up his spine and spat out through his wingtips, before seeming to gather and implode deep in the centre of his chest.\n\nMusic! A song of inexpressible wonder washed around his being, reverberating from the shoreline in wave upon wave that ascended to an impossible crescendo.\n\n<\u2248WELCOME!!\u2248>\n\nLike wavelets, individual voices began to resound at different pitches and intensities, <\u2248Welcome.\u2248 \u2248Welcome.\u2248 \u2248Welcome.\u2248 \u2248Welcome.\u2248>\n\nHe spun beneath the water, overwhelmed.\n\n<\u2248MY WAVE IS SIRENSONG!!\u2248>\n\nFreeze.\n\nShiver! No way! The interrogative was clear, even in the Dragoness' presentation of her personal melody. The Dragoness wanted to know who it was that called her name from afar. How long \u2026 he shook his muzzle dazedly. Over an hour. Perhaps an hour and a half. He should have thought to note the time \u2013 by his sire's egg, they must be distant indeed! Another hasty calculation suggested, if he took the time the sound required to reach them and then return, that the Sea Dragons must be in the region of two and a half thousand miles away!\n\nThe mind boggled at such distances.\n\nHis body buzzed as if it had been set alight. Could this truly be his dam's song? Never had he dared to imagine this moment. Joy fizzed like starlight in his veins, lighting the dark ocean all around him. The music played in diminuendo about his body, causing his wing membranes to quiver uncontrollably. How did they do that?\n\nHe must reply. What could he even say in Dragoceanic?\n\n<\u2248I AM DRAGON!! SIRENSONG \u2026 EGG!! WAVE \u2026 DRAGON!!\u2248>\n\nThat would confuse the life out of them. A Dragon who called himself Dragon. With his current linguistic ability, however, channelled into this form of long-range communication, his options were limited in the extreme.\n\nOne hour and thirty-five minutes later, by his best reckoning, the tingling arrived again and this time \u2013 despite mental preparations \u2013 the music was a tsunami that pummelled him against the shoreline. Not all was welcoming. The immensity of voices wanted to know who the unknown voice was who summoned Sirensong from afar; how could an egg even speak? Who was this imposter who did not undulate with the pod of Sea Dragons? Who had tarried behind upon the currents? For they had made tabulation and none were missing.\n\nThat was as best he could make translation of their speech inside his head.\n\nWhat he did understand was the demand to wait where he was for his kin to arrive. They were two weeks away. Two weeks! How fast and far did they fly underwater?\n\nAt last, that softer, feminine voice queried, <\u2248My wave is Sirensong. How old is this egg?\u2248>\n\nThe music faded.\n\n<\u2248Sirensong, I am \u2026 four paws of talons old. I am \u2026 wave!\u2248> Assuming they had paws like his. His supposed racial memory refused to serve up the word for 'twenty' as yet.\n\nToward midnight, the reply came in gruff, belligerent male tones, <\u2248Dragon, do you truly claim to be the wave of Sirensong?\u2248>\n\n<\u2248I am Sirensong wave.\u2248>\n\nNo reply arrived after that.\n\n[ To the Point ]\n\nIn the morning, dragon found the four Sea Serpents resting in the shallows off the pristine beach. He ambushed them and killed two before they began to respond \u2013 sluggishly, it seemed to him. Thereafter, he fought a hard but ultimately satisfying battle to destroy the remaining pair. He left them for the scavengers.\n\nAfter waiting all day for word, in the early evening, the music caught him by surprise yet again.\n\n<\u2248Dragon, where is Dragon?\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Sirensong, I \u2026\u2248> Dragon gnashed his fangs angrily. <I run out of words? Great!>\n\nSomeone might have been guilty of a day-long mooching session. Now, he did not know what to do. Would Azania want him? Would she come for him? Should he go back to her, dragging his blasted overblown pride through the dirt, and make amends? What would Ariamyrielle Seaspray make of his absence? Why could he not bring himself to take wing and return? Why not be the bigger creature, the one who would bend for the sake of them both?\n\nWhat a struggle. Big and physically strong he might be, but this required a kind of strength he was not sure he possessed. Dragon pushed these thoughts away.\n\nHe had not seen a single Dragon out here. One might as well be alone in the world.\n\nStrange how rooted he felt at this location. Could this be a Dragon sense that he was meant to be right here? He did not understand. Perhaps it was somehow special or sacred to the Sea Dragons?\n\nHe waited in the surf, resting above a white, sandy ocean floor encompassed by a semicircle of vibrant reef that together with the island itself, protected this beach from all quarters. Truly, the quality of the water here was incredible. Like silk upon the scales. As if an unheard resonance communicated to his very soul \u2013 not that he was a mystical sort, but it made sense if he tried to keep logic out of the equation.\n\n<\u2248My wave is Sirensong! Wait! Respond!\u2248>\n\nAh, he nearly jumped out of the water. When would he become used to the special thrill of those faraway voices? Grumpily, he rearranged his wings and smoothed his scales back down with anxious paws. Undeniable power, mind. How big were Sea Dragons?\n\n<\u2248My wave is Dragon! I will wait! Respond!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248We're coming faster. Wait.\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Waiting.\u2248>\n\nThe following evening at the same time, they repeated the exact same exchange. Word for word.\n\nNext night came the same phrasing again \u2013 he had to lurk beneath a pounding storm, but as always in the depths, there was calm unthinkable at the surface level.\n\nAgain.\n\nCrazy how he slept so badly, missing a tiny person breathing in his paw. Her voice. Her light footstep, laughter and joy in life. When had that happened? Dragon spent his days hunting and exploring the waters around the talons, getting to know their scent and flow and moods, until as the suns dipped toward the horizon, he would return to the point and wait for the Sea Dragons to communicate. Each time, the conversation was noticeably faster as they closed the distance toward the Archipelago. This evening was the fastest yet, just above an hour. What a feat of physical endurance and power! He estimated that they must be covering close to two hundred and fifty miles a day.\n\nNo Dragon of the air could cover that distance day after day after day.\n\nThe longer he tarried, the harder it became to contemplate a return. Especially since his dam was so close. Delays on the repetitious exchange were down to less than forty minutes now.\n\nJoy swelled in his breast, uncontainable.\n\n<Imprinting.>\n\nThe word popped into his mind. Were they making a verbal bond \u2013 was that the point of these exchanges? <\u2248We're coming faster.\u2248> Was this because of him? If a certain pedantic Dragon dared to estimate their time of arrival now, they must surely arrive within ten days of when he had first heard from the Sea Dragons, rather than the promised two weeks. Perhaps they had caught a beneficial current? Or \u2026 could it be because of him?\n\nHis body glowed unceasingly now, as if Sirensong's melody or the wider melody of the pod burned within him, giving rise to white fires that somehow seethed beneath his scales. He was his own light beneath the waters in the evenings. The fish certainly thought he was amazing.\n\nThe day that the communication returned in a mere twenty-two minutes, Dragon surfaced to find Princess Azania standing upon his favourite boulder, the very last in the Archipelago.\n\nAs if a fist had gripped his hearts, sweet pain spread inside his chest.\n\nNo sign of Aria.\n\nShe knelt, and then bowed her head to the rock with her arms outstretched. He gazed at the top of her curls in consternation. What was that supposed to mean? Best guess \u2013 a formal apology or appeal for mercy in a desert style. Stirring the water with his wings, he scrambled up beside her and reached out a paw to clasp her shaking shoulders. Only the slightest hesitation on his part.\n\n\"Precious Princess, I \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, will you ever forgive me?\"\n\nHe said gruffly, \"You certainly came a ways to find me. It's been quiet out here.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry if I'm disturbing \u2013 oof,\" she complained as he drew her against the side of his neck with his paw. Big, big, big hug! With a chuckle that betrayed enormous relief, her arms tightened about his muzzle. \"I see how it is.\"\n\n\"Do you? I meant to say how terribly I missed your incessant whinging.\"\n\n\"I missed your snoring like an earthquake.\"\n\n\"At least I smell like a Dragon now, and not some girly perfume.\"\n\n\"Ah, that macho whiff?\"\n\n\"Much-o whiff,\" he agreed.\n\nShe rubbed the scales near his eye gently. \"I'm so, so sorry I lost my rag with you. How's my renegade Dragon been? I guess I didn't expect you to actually do what I asked. Ordered. Screamed at you \u2013 ugh! You took some finding, you know. We went in totally the wrong direction to start with. It was only after the Rangers uncovered a story of a capsized family you rescued, that we began to suspect where you might have gone. Then, we tracked you by your light.\"\n\n\"My light?\"\n\n\"The Dragonesses observed an unusual radiance lighting up the overcast off the talons, one evening. They thought it might be a storm like the one that hit us, but Aria guessed differently. Too regular a phenomenon.\"\n\n\"You saw that from how many miles off?\"\n\n\"Who's a pretty boy, then?\" she cooed. \"You're the literal light of my life!\"\n\nDragon eyed her askance. Clearly, this rascally Princess was in need of some squashing back into shape. A nip here, a tuck there. Maybe a decent thrashing. Pop her into his hoard, lock it up and throw away the key.\n\nWhat he heard escape from his traitorous lips was, \"Your flying out here means more to me than you'll ever know. You're a wonderful friend to worry about me so.\"\n\n\"Oh, I wasn't worried at all.\"\n\nLiar. His five hearts throbbed as one \u2013 an unfamiliar, concerted rhythm that rocked his entire body.\n\nWiping her eyes, she sniffled, \"To tell the truth, I was so afraid \u2026 I couldn't stand to lose you, Dragon. This time, it was me who acted like a beast, like all those Dragons who ever rejected you and drove you out. I can't imagine how much that must have hurt you. For the record, I adore your swagger and your bluster, because I know that beneath lie the five hearts of a true champion \u2013 a Dragon who doesn't just claim nobility as his due. He lives it. And aye, I like that you outshine the rest. You're different, you're unique, and you're mine.\"\n\nHis turn to gulp. Hard. \"I never want to lose you either, Azania. I've been so afraid, despite all my bluster and noble words, that you and Azerim would just \u2026 you know, sink into one another and forget all about me. That's what seemed to happen. I bolted for the farthest place I could find. Just like that cowardly Dragon from before.\"\n\n\"Azerim and I have been awfully selfish,\" she admitted. \"All that intense catching up \u2026 Queen Vyioli gave us both quite the talking to.\"\n\n\"It's understandable.\"\n\n\"Leaving out everyone else? Not noticing you were gone-gone for two whole days? You're being far too kind.\"\n\nHis eyes dropped to the jewel she touched at her neck. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"It's a promise locket.\"\n\nAzania showed him the delicately diamond-frosted casing in the shape of \u2013 well, a Dragon's head and muzzle, remarkably similar in shape to a large white fire breather he could have poked with a short talon just then. Hmm! Draconic in design? It depended not from a chain, but from a flexible, finely-tooled golden torc that encircled her slender neck. The gold looked fabulous against her dark skin. Truly, a gift fit for a Queen! Had Azerim come up with this idea?\n\n*Ping!* A few thoughts collided inside his brain and spat out a conclusion. \"A promise \u2013 you're engaged? Oh Azania, that's wonderful news. Congratulations!\"\n\nShe ducked her head self-consciously. \"Not quite yet. Azerim made it clear that our engagement would depend on \u2026 uh, well, you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" he spluttered. Clean out the ear canals and try again. \"Whatever do you mean?\"\n\n\"On your permission, specifically.\"\n\n\"Then, of course I \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, shh.\" She could never shut his lips with a finger; the use of both arms carried the idea without covering even a third of his maw. \"This is serious.\"\n\n\"Mussht be sherioush,\" he slurred around her arms.\n\n\"Dragon! Honestly, you're terrible. You did miss me, didn't you?\"\n\n\"You'd think with all this peace and quiet and time to think out here, I'd be sleeping like a hatchling. But no. Seems I've grown accustomed to the presence of this pestiferous person I dare to call a friend.\"\n\nSmiling uncertainly, Azania said, \"It's more a promise of a promise. You see, we realised that there's something new going on under the suns \u2013 something that involves a whole new way of being between Dragons and Humans. We don't want to damage that. Being a Dragon Rider is hard to put into words. Friendship, companionship, soul mates \u2026 battle buddies \u2026\"\n\nHe chuckled, \"I agree! How does it feel?\"\n\nThe girl considered this, head askance. He scented her perfume and a new, different oil she must have used in her hair. It looked utterly lustrous, like delicate filaments of the darkest night. Yet she was still Azania, vibrant and brimming over with concentrated mischief. Ever so beautiful.\n\nPressing her forehead against his eye, she murmured, <Like this.>\n\nImages flowed into his mind. Friends patting aside the clouds they flew through. The comfort of a huge paw clasped about her body, knowing that she slept beside living fires. The clash and heart-slamming adrenaline of battle. Patching up one another's wounds. Peeking around his thigh to snoop on his work as he focussed on mixing just the right blend of colours for a fiery sunset over rippling waters. Swimming together. Feeling the detonation of delight in his body as he saw clearly for the first time through his spectacles. Sharing meals upon lonely mountaintops, snorting with laughter and chasing off errant knights, talking and telling stories and loving one another as the very best of friends. The extraordinary gift of knowing he had her back at all times. No flinching. No regrets.\n\nDragon sighed, <Oh, that's beautiful. One day you really are going to make me weep real tears.>\n\n<Those would be jewels of white flame.>\n\n<Ooh. As for me \u2026>\n\nThe loneliest Dragon in existence moseyed about his lair, crushed beneath a burden of angst and self-pity and futile rage. No fires. No hope. A future full of nothing. He could not be or become, because he could never believe. Then, in a flash of outrage, he made the best decision he had ever made.\n\n<You're so sweet, Dragon!>\n\nHe threw her a picture of Prince Floric tumbling over and over down his stairs. <For you, I'd do that all over again, save for having you suffer that fool and his vile threats.>\n\nThen, he showed her what it meant to find his fires, how a Dragon had changed his every scale, all for the sake of the courage and confidence a treasured Dragon Rider had instilled in his hearts. She melted against him, sobbing \u2013 for joy, it must be. He even admitted how miserable he had been out at the end of the talon without her, and how he had feared all was lost. Azania reassured him without words that it was not so.\n\nHe said, \"Oh! It's almost time!\"\n\n\"Time for what?\"\n\n\"Do you want to hear the Sea Dragons, and my dam's voice? They're just days away now!\"\n\n\"Right \u2013 of course! That's why you're glowing!\" She bounced on her toes. \"Oh, Dragon, that's just the best news since \u2026 whenever!\"\n\nAargh, girls. Leaking again. Maybe he was learning to love that Human reaction.\n\n<Aria!!> He bellowed.\n\n\"Honestly, I'm not going to have any ears left by the time you're done.\"\n\n<You thundered, o mighty denizen of the deeps?>\n\nThere she was! With a smile that squirted fire through the portals of his Dragon hearts, the cobalt warrior Dragoness winged toward him from where she must have been watching their interaction from a quarter-mile away.\n\n<Submerge quickly, and listen.> Snaffling the Princess into his paw, Dragon hurled himself out over the last boulders. <Deep breath, Azania!>\n\nSplash. Oh, the music! Her eyes popped wide; he was not sure where Aria was, but he imagined her response must be similar. It was a symphony of draconic horns and bugles at a level of musical complexity that befuddled the brain with its intense, intricate beauty. Next came the words:\n\n<\u2248We're coming faster. Wait.\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Waiting with my two best friends beneath all the waves!\u2248>\n\nOh. That was new.\n\nFlummox his white wings, oceanic language really did seem to have a mind of its own. He could not fathom it \u2013 pun intended.\n\nAzania signalled upward. Losing air already? He helped her to surface, pushing that part of her which had so distracted a King. She burst into the air with a yell of amazement, splashing so haphazardly, he gripped her waist lest she sink again.\n\n\"What was that? Dragon! That was \u2013 it really was your dam?\"\n\n\"Aye, after the music. She said, 'We're coming faster, wait.' They say the same thing every day at this time. I've been tracking the incoming migration from over 2,500 miles away.\"\n\n\"Whoooo-wheeee! No wonder you got stuck here.\"\n\n\"I think that was more about my fears than \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon!\" Aria burst out of the waves about four Dragon paces away, swamping them both as she lunged into the air, only to realise that he was still bobbing in the surf. \"That was your dam? Incredible! They're that close?\"\n\n\"A little under six hundred miles,\" he smiled.\n\nJaw-dropper.\n\nPerhaps he ought not to enjoy confounding her quite as much as he did.\n\n\"Dragon \u2013 you!\" she spluttered at last. \"You've got some explaining to do. Come over here and let me tell you how much I missed you, and how when I thought you were lost \u2026 ah, a Dragoness despaired to the depths of her hearts.\"\n\nHe eyed her playfully. \"Aria, if you're expecting intelligible sentences and rational thought, maybe we should keep a healthy distance?\"\n\n\"Mrrrr, you get that stupendously attractive hide over here right now, Dragon, or I'll have to threaten you with a range of unspeakably delicious torments.\"\n\n*Whadda-whomp!* His fires ignited.\n\nJudging by the way he was now steaming, getting dry would not be an issue.\n\nLooking extremely pleased with herself, Aria added, \"Have I told you recently how much I despise the words, 'healthy' and 'distance'? Ghastly idea. Especially when it involves you going missing on the far side of the Archipelago with so much remaining unresolved between us.\"\n\nWith that, she blew his concern that she was merely content with a renewed flirtation, right out of the water.\n\nNo, he knew nothing about females.\n\nWrong. He knew one thing. Underestimate them at one's peril, Dragon!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The Princess of T'nagru wandered off along the beach, collecting shells. Ahem. In other words, removing herself from the ambit of fiery romance. Subtle. Besides, the beach promised hours of delight for a child of the desert. Her realm was all sand and a lifelong struggle for water. Here was water in incalculable measure, albeit too salty for any Human to drink.\n\nWith the evening drawing in, Dragon picked a pleasant spot on the soft white sand against a cosy-looking boulder, well above the high tide line. <Let's overnight here, Aria. Is it \u2026 just you two?>\n\n<Just us. Azerim was fighting off an infection. My Dragonesses returned to Wave Dragonhome for a brief space. They understand that this is a personal matter.>\n\n<You take the boulder.>\n\n<Thanks. I am tired, I'll admit. We flew from one end of the Archipelago to the other, searching for you.>\n\nShe curled up with her flank against the boulder. Dragon tried to judge how she was lying, before wedging his tail beneath her neck and making his much larger, taller body into a bulwark of protection, bending about her much smaller frame with draconic limberness until his muzzle rested within the ambit of her hind paws. Tail to muzzle they lay, but their necks curved inward until their eyes lay only a couple of feet apart, and their warm breath mingled in the space between.\n\nFor the longest time, they simply lay close. No need to speak in this cosy lair for two. At last, he realised that their breathing had synchronised, for he felt the rise and fall of her flank against his neck and cheek.\n\n<Comfortable?> he rasped. <Not squashing you, am I?>\n\n<I've never lain like this with any Dragon before, let alone one who fires my hearts as you do. It's \u2026 intimate.> He inhaled sharply. <I have a deficit in that I was never raised to know much affection and intimacy. We're taught it's not the warrior way, that males exist to serve us with their gifts and talents. Emotion is excess. Yet I have seen how you are with Princess Azania. I saw her as competition. Can I be honest with you?>\n\nHe purred encouragement.\n\nAs she spoke, her voice took on more of that exotic, lyrical quality which had kept him spellbound from the very first. <Dragon, when I said I chose you, I think I meant a male in the image in my mind. I became confused. Seeing you here amongst our kind \u2026 I would still choose you in a heartbeat, but not with the arrogance I showed before. I am sorry I put you down, treating you as the lesser creature. You see, I feel a very great weight of expectation upon me as the daughter of Charielle, one expected to lead the Isles Dragonesses one day, and I bowed to that pressure. Tradition. Values and conduct. I'm not sure the Dragonesses know what to make of you \u2013 a male who cannot be cowed, who has artistic gifts, yet prefers a totally different way of \u2026 being.>\n\n<The Dragon Rider question has thrown us all into a tailspin. That is what I was dealing with when I dismissed you so harshly, and unfairly. I demanded you be normal according to my norms. That was wrong. Perhaps it is us who are not normal.>\n\nWorking that out would be hard. Her tone said she understood nuance, another matter upon which he had concluded she fell short. Had he entirely misjudged her hearts' fires?\n\nCarefully, he said, <We're different. Neither way is right or wrong, Aria. A warrior's skills are not honed overnight. Nor is any relationship.>\n\n<Am I too much \u2013 those razor wings? Can you be you, and not be sliced apart?>\n\nHe reflected aloud, <I find Azerim's whole family dynamic very hard. They're so close. So perfect. I never had that. Neither did Azania, nor you, I've come to realise.>\n\nThe Cobalt Dragoness sighed, <I'm trying to say something, but it's not coming out very well.>\n\n<What's that?>\n\n<I \u2013> she drew her gorgeously patterned wings over her eyes, as if she could neither bear to see his reaction, nor hear his words \u2013 <I don't just like you, Dragon. I \u2026 something-other \u2026 you.>\n\n[ New Beginnings ]\n\nDragon found his voice in an incredulous snort, <You something-other me? Aria!>\n\n<A lot!> she insisted, but did not come out of hiding.\n\nHe plucked playfully at the silky edges of her butterfly-like wings. <You are something else. Something and someone special. I sense you might be referring to a something-other in which our feelings \u2026 wing together, as one.>\n\nHer eye peeked out of the wing folds for a second. <You something-other me, too?>\n\n<I rather think so. Although, I would perhaps have put all that something and a lot of other into different words. If we are talking about the same something other, and not another something. Now, will you come out?>\n\n<No.>\n\n<No?>\n\n<I'm too shy.>\n\nHe burst out laughing. <Forgive me, but here's a side of you I never quite imagined.>\n\n<It's just \u2013 in this culture, the female always makes the something-other-ish declaration first, do you see? But I want to honour you and your ways.>\n\nDragon eyed the fierce warrior with consternation, rising respect and no little indecision. She truly was trying! Words led to direct, uncompromising action in her worldview. There was no wastage of sentiment \u2013 which meant, by extension, that she was not playing the tease here. She knew what she wanted, but a pause to rethink what it meant to him was precious beyond measure.\n\nPerhaps she only needed help framing her response.\n\nUnfurling his wing, he caressed the length of her back with the sensitive tip. <Something-other like this?>\n\nThe fires of her half-hidden gaze whitened. <Umm \u2026>\n\n<And this?> With his forepaw, he cupped her chin, and stroked the pulse of her neck, before circling the scales beside her eye with his thumb. <I something-other you, Ariamyrielle Seaspray.>\n\nShe shivered at his touch. <I \u2026 oh, Dragon!>\n\n<There might be details and complications to work out,> he whispered, <but you need to understand, in every part of your being, how deeply I care for you. You are worth caring for, Aria. You deserve every breath we share.>\n\nThe Dragoness made that same keening sound she had made when faced with the possibility of her kin attacking a brash male and ending him there and then. Her wings folded back a little, framing her slim, elegant muzzle.\n\nHe said, <I'm not one for the standard storyline, razor wings. I never have been. Maybe it's to do with the strangeness of my birth and heritage, maybe to do with the way I grew up. We are good for one another, better together than apart. I don't apologise for not following the standard script. I was fireless, yet I kidnapped the first Princess to be kidnapped in over thirty years. I value Human companionship, honouring a Dragon Rider. I breathe white fires and thrill to the presence of the ocean. I don't know whether, one day, I will feel the need to migrate with my kind. Do you think you'll be able to put up with all that?>\n\n<Putting up with you is awfully hard, Dragon,> she smiled, lying through her fangs.\n\n<I thought so. That's why you're allowing this big, bold male to trap you against this boulder and whisper sweet somethings into your ears.>\n\n<I'm fighting talon and fang here, but I just can't seem to escape.>\n\nActually, her hearts were thrashing as if she were in the throes of mortal combat. He did not point out the obvious, however. Not when she seemed to be exploring a new freedom of being in her own right, a way of romancing a male that had to be entirely alien to her upbringing.\n\nHe said, <Here's a suggestion. On the Archipelago, I'll submit to your lead and try not to make such a nuisance of myself, if you'll allow me to be the brash male around my kin, over in the Tamarine Mountains. What do you think?>\n\n<Sounds good. I might, however, need to call on you to occasionally cut through situations which might arise in your inimitable, great-white-Dragon way,> she suggested, with a cunning rosy tint to her gaze. Even more wickedly, she added, <Used well, you could be more than an asset in so many ways. We'll agree a secret signal \u2013>\n\n<Upon which I galumph over your enemies?>\n\n<Perfect.>\n\nHe caressed her cheek again. Her scales were deceptively soft, like the silken edge of a perfectly whetted talon.\n\n<Aria, if indeed we feel the same way, shall we make our declarations together, on a count of three talons?>\n\nShe nodded eagerly. <Good idea. We say it three times. A thrice-bound oath is never broken.>\n\n<Works for me.>\n\nDeep breath. Huge! Had the world stopped turning just for this moment, or was he imagining things?\n\nHe counted down with his talons. Three. Two. One.\n\n<Ariamyrielle Seaspray, I love you, I love you, I love you.>\n\n<True Dragon of my hearts,> she sang in beautiful melody, <I love you, I love you, I love you. I am yours forever, faithful and true.>\n\nHe echoed, <I am yours forever, faithful and true.>\n\nThat was not a Tamarine Mountains saying, as best he knew, but it expressed his deepest feelings toward this Dragoness. Each pressing forward, they nuzzled and then twined their necks together, symbolic of the promise of draconic love.\n\nShe chuckled self-consciously and nibbled at his skull spikes. <You're so huge! You do know that Sea Dragons are said to grow all of their lives, don't you?>\n\n<Eh? No, I didn't.>\n\n<Slower in the adult years, but inevitably. How much of you am I going to get to enjoy?>\n\n<All of me.>\n\nAria blinked in acknowledgement, her fires softer and more beautiful than he had ever seen them. Mesmeric eyes.\n\nShe said, <Dragon, may I wait with you for your dam's arrival?>\n\n<I'd like nothing more. You honour me.>\n\nWas it possible for a soul to sigh in relief, and burn white with the fires of joy?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "A short while later, Azania returned from her shell-collecting. Her boots scrunched along in the soft sand as she approached them, saying, \"The evening's growing cooler. You two look cosy.\"\n\nDragon popped up his head and gave her a solemn wink. \"It's very warm in here.\"\n\nShe eyed the intertwined bulk of their bodies. \"How does one \u2013 ah, thank you, Dragon.\"\n\nGripping his proffered talon with her hands, she walked up his tail and then over Aria's neck, before dropping into the small sandy space between them.\n\n\"Cosy?\" Aria purred.\n\n\"Positively balmy,\" the Princess agreed. \"Without being an awfully nosy busybody, do I sense that your chat went well?\"\n\nThe Dragoness drew a little circle in the sand around the desert Princess with her fore talon, and said, \"Just enough room for one more, I think. That would complete our little family \u2013 what do you say, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Aye. Indeed, I have the perfect candidate in mind.\"\n\n\"You two! What's been going on here?\"\n\n\"Oh, we were whispering sweet and fiery somethings to each other,\" Dragon said airily.\n\n\"Spelled, 'L-O-V-E,' \" Aria clarified.\n\nAzania gave a squeal of joy. \"You did? You did! Oh \u2026 I'm so happy for you both! How does it work with Dragons? Are you mated, now? Or is this a beginning?\"\n\n\"A beginning, similar to your engagement promises,\" Dragon said. \"She'd like to rush straight to the mating part, of course \u2013\"\n\n\"Dragon, that's so untrue!\" Aria gasped, blushing in her every fire.\n\n\"\u2013 me being such a handsome, irresistible example of draculinity and all that \u2026\"\n\nReaching around the Princess, she cuffed his jaw mischievously. \"First Dragon scents his own brand. I'm glad you're so impatient, because I'm going to make you so happy \u2026\" She winked at Azania. \"Wouldn't you agree, Princess?\"\n\nThe tiny hands came down off her ears. \"Did you say something? Phew, it's like an oven in here.\" Holding up a white nautilus shell to the radiance of his scales, she said, \"This makes me think of love. You see, in this direction of the spiral, it gets infinitely deeper and closer and more intimate. In this direction, it grows ever larger over time. Isn't that right? About shells, I mean.\"\n\n\"Absolutely right,\" Aria purred.\n\n\"Beautiful image,\" he agreed.\n\nThen, they settled down together as night enfolded the Archipelago in robes of sable. A family of three, soon to become four.\n\nStrange, different and perfect."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "The following day, they swam, relaxed on the beach in the suns, and practised at sparring. They talked at length through all the politics related to developing a force of Dragon Riders to fly south from the Archipelago if and when that even became possible. On both sides, there were strong blocs opposed to the idea. Aria had been trying to sell it as a test, but even her more progressive younger Dragonesses had their reservations. When she noted that Chanize and Sankir Farizam planned to fly south along with them, Dragon felt he had to object.\n\n\"Chanize? Surely not.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Aria asked. \"She's more than capable with her hands. She already sharpens a mean blade, and she knows leather work in addition to being an outstanding seamstress.\"\n\n\"You plan to fly a woman with no legs into battle?\"\n\nAzania said, \"I flew a Dragon with no fires into battle. What's the difference?\"\n\n*GNARR!!*\n\nBoth females gave him a hefty case of the fiery eyeball.\n\nGrinning with all his fangs, he growled, \"Gnarr-thing, evidently. I stand corrected. What's the plan for her saddle?\"\n\n\"Extra support at the back, but we're struggling with her balance, since she doesn't have calves or ankles with which to grip a Dragoness' neck,\" Azania explained.\n\nHe considered this for a moment. \"Oh, that's easy.\"\n\nMore of the fiery eyeball. In tandem.\n\n\"My dear and very lovely females, all you need to do is to think like a male.\" Holding up his talons, he said, \"One, you stuff the girl into skin-tight leather Dragon Rider trousers, thereby wrecking the Sankir's concentration forever. Two, you fit the material as snugly as possible to her \u2013 I don't know how to say this politely \u2013 leg stumps. Three, you make appropriate attachments at the ends and waist to fix her to a saddle with strong ratchet straps. No need for actual calves. Balance? No problem.\"\n\nNo end to the staring, apparently.\n\nReaching out his forepaws, he chucked them identically beneath the chins. Much softer for Azania, of course. \"You know, when you two glare at me like that, you could be twins?\"\n\n\"We are not twins!\" Aria snarled.\n\n\"You're so rude!\" Azania snapped.\n\nDragon shrugged in the most annoying way he was capable of.\n\nDragoness and Princess glanced at one other. A second later, they were rolling in the sand, hooting uproariously.\n\n\"Glad I'm employed for my comedic value,\" he snorted.\n\nAzania clutched her stomach and nearly wet herself laughing.\n\nAs sunset drew corals, oranges and rose tints upon a faraway cloudbank, Dragon, Aria and Azania nipped up to the point to wait for the Sea Dragon music. It swelled right on schedule, making the waters physically tremble. How did they do that?\n\n<\u2248My wave is Sirensong! Wait! Respond!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248My wave is Dragon! I will wait! Respond!\u2248>\n\nTwelve minutes! Only twelve \u2013 they must be around three hundred and thirty miles away now, he estimated. By his wings, how could he stand to wait?\n\n<\u2248We seek your song. Why not swim out tomorrow evening to meet us joyously beneath the waves?\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Wait. How will we find you, mighty Sea Dragons?\u2248>\n\nFor the first time, an immense, musical wave of guffaws arose from the pod.\n\nSirensong laughed, <\u2248You cannot miss us, strange one called Dragon. You will know us by our song, and our welcoming fire that sets the oceans alight.\u2248>\n\n<\u2248We will come.\u2248>\n\nHe translated for his friends. Both agreed this was a good idea. They could calculate to meet the Sea Dragons up to three hours offshore, depending on the weather, for both he and Aria could manage that length of flight and a similar return with no issues.\n\nHow he fretted! Having slept badly, he grouched his way into the morning, staring at an innocently glorious sunrise with baleful ire. Shake it off, Dragon! Today was a day for joy. Nonetheless, he could not help but fear that the Sea Dragons would not accept one who was only half like them. His egg had been born out of what must be tragic circumstances, stolen and raised by another dam; whatever had existed between his sire Blaze and his dam, Sirensong, had been shattered by a staggering act of treachery.\n\nHe and Aria trained with care. Neither wanted a wrenched wing joint to spoil the flight north.\n\nAt last, when he had nearly perished of impatience, the afternoon grew long enough that it was time to fly into the unknown. Azania mounted up upon his neck, and patted his scales. Quiet encouragement. He fitted his spectacles. No short-sighted Dragon wanted to miss this event!\n\nAria said, \"Lead on, Dragon.\"\n\nThey flew ten degrees west of true north, the direction he had most keenly felt their communication coming from. The last reefs and islets disappeared below the horizon. Nothing out here but ocean, vast and tranquil, but also a beast which could be roused to an unimaginable fury, the untameable power of nature.\n\nA cloudless late afternoon coloured into a massive, fiery sunset as Ignis turned the waters into his personal bloodbath. Onward they flew. Dragon wondered if he should take to the waters to receive the usual communication, just as the upper curve of the sun disappeared beneath the horizon. Alright. Do it. After transferring Azania to Aria's back and handing over his spectacles, he plunged into the cool waters.\n\n<\u2248Sirensong?\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Dragon, why did you not reply? We've been calling for hours.\u2248>\n\nHe did not know how to apologise, so he tried to communicate contrition in the tone of his reply. <\u2248Coming. Show the way, please?\u2248>\n\nAlmost immediately, her response boomed all around him, <\u2248Of course, you're flying above the water! How foolish we were to think otherwise. SEE US COME!!\u2248>\n\nAlright, that last bellow almost lifted him clear out of the water. Tingling madly, he popped his head up to see Aria pointing more westerly of where they had been headed. Out there, the Lumis Ocean glowed white, brighter than he had ever seen before.\n\nHe submerged and got a wriggle on, hurling himself free of the surface so that he could climb up to their altitude. As they flew onward, the glow spread. Miles wide and long.\n\n<How many of them are there?> the Princess whispered.\n\n<How big are they?> Aria gasped.\n\n<Mmm, I'm feeling in a bright mood. Look at me glow!>\n\nHis companions chortled on cue. Azania sighed, <O Dragon, truly, you are the luminary in our midst.>\n\nGroan. \"Delightful pun,\" he agreed.\n\nDouble groan!\n\nStill, he had to admit there was something catching about whatever was making him radiate white light \u2013 could it be some kind of communal effect?\n\nThe brilliance tracked like a foaming wave rushing through the darkling ocean. The darker the night became, the stronger the incoming Sea Dragons shone. His wingbeat stuttered for awe; he had to consciously keep himself going. He was part of this? This was his heritage? Joy cramped his throat. Fires and chills ran rampant through his body. At their combined speed it seemed they rushed toward one another at least twice as fast as his brain was prepared to accept. Faster. Faster still!\n\nThe Sea Dragons must have been well aware of his light gleaming against the backdrop of stars, for when they were yet a mile off, the first mighty white body breached the surface in a breathtaking leap, wings outspread to shimmer delicately above the waves. <\u2248Welcome!\u2248>\n\nBarely had he remembered to breathe again, when another pair leaped free, as if they were low-skimming seabirds. <\u2248Welcome, our kin!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Brother!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Friend!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Kinsdragon of the air!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Be welcome, o kin of the wave!\u2248>\n\nSuddenly, as one, the entire pod surged free of the water, spreading their mighty wings to float for long seconds above the surface before they slipped smoothly beneath the waters once more. Dragon's eyes nearly popped out of his head. Thousands! They must cover a surface area of tens of square miles. Or was that just because of the thrilling play of lights spangling off the ocean?\n\nAs their comparatively miniscule Dragonwing of two plus one drew overhead, the Sea Dragons breached a second time. Celebratory white fire gushed from their throats, rumbling across the waves like thunder. Instinctively, he responded with a massive salute of his own:\n\n<III \u2013 AAMM \u2013 DRRAAGOONN!!>\n\nThunderclap!\n\nAs they submerged, the white fires continued to bloom beneath the waters. He became dimly aware of unfamiliar chemical or magical processes firing off due to their power, and then a single female soared from their midst. She had to be all of seventy or eighty feet long, muzzle to tail, and wider still through her wingspan. Her colour was the lustrous white of pure pearl.\n\n<\u2248My wave is Sirensong!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248SIRENSONG!!\u2248> His very hearts poured into the outcry.\n\nDragon glanced across at his companions. They both gestured: <Go on!>\n\nNothing could have stopped him now. Pouring all of his strength into his wing stroke, he shot over to his dam. Laughing. Mewling with grief-joy. Every scale on his body tingled. This was her, at last, at last!\n\n<\u2248Join us!\u2248>\n\nHow did they know? How were they certain? Every iota of their welcome proclaimed that something had changed during the days since he had first contacted the Sea Dragons; was it his tell-tale white glow, or something to do with the sound imprinting they had insisted upon?\n\nWho cared?\n\nHe rocketed into the water ahead of his dam, and had the shivery pleasure of seeing her have to leap to avoid him, for with his poor eyesight he had completely underestimated her speed. Now that he was underwater, matters resolved. A minnow thrashed between giants, getting in every Sea Dragon's way as they rushed around him, chortling, spinning him in their wake and stroking him with their passing wingtips; then, an immense song boomed over him and a huge, hoary beast caught him up in paws that bracketed his body with ease, and righted him as an adult would correct a wobbly-kneed hatchling.\n\n<\u2248My wave is Thundersong, your great-grandsire!\u2248>\n\nOverwhelmed, he tried to twitch his wings in time with the behemoth.\n\n<\u2248My wave is Lifesong, your great-aunt!\u2248>\n\nVoices chimed all around him, <\u2248Echosong!\u2248 \u2248Lightsong!\u2248 \u2248Farsong!\u2248 \u2248Ripplesong!\u2248 \u2248Starsong!\u2248 \u2248Eversong!\u2248 \u2248Descantsong!\u2248 \u2248Sweetsong!\u2248 \u2248Truesong!\u2248 \u2248Lovesong!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248SWIM WITH US! WE ARE SONG!\u2248>\n\nApparently, his family were the Songs, and there were far more of them than his poor little brain could process. *Kerpoof!*\n\nThe mighty paws of Thundersong gripped him from his upper torso right down to his hind legs, hauling him through the water at a crazy speed. He knew at last how Azania must feel. Thundersong had to be four times his size. This much Dragon was impossible for him to fathom. Amongst the Tamarine Mountains Clans, he had always been a creature of unusual size. The awkward heavyweight in the corner. Now, he was a guppy. Outmatched by everyone apart from a few fledglings and hatchlings of the Songs who swam rings around him, giggling in a state of high excitement that matched the frantic pulsation of his Dragon hearts.\n\nThundersong passed him over to his dam, roaring, <\u2248Swim with us, o wave of my loins! Swim, sing and be free!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Son, I know you by your voice. Wave never lies,\u2248> she sang to him.\n\n<\u2248Mother! O my dam!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248My long-lost treasure, how majestic your wave. My hearts sing louder than the ocean itself!\u2248>\n\nHe wept.\n\nOcean, Arise!\n\nDragon staggered out of the water onto the beach, shattered. Had he been in any doubt whatsoever as to the power of Sea Dragons, well, he had no illusions now. A couple of hours and he was ready to drop. These creatures had been swimming for months.\n\nThe northerly bay where he, Aria and Azania had spent the night was now cluttered with white Sea Dragons \u2013 and these were just the Songs. His pod was pure white. Further pods \u2013 the equivalent of the mountain Dragon Clans \u2013 had spread out all around the Archipelago's talons, and from Wave Dragonhome all the way around to Aria's lair on the north-western tip of the island, he understood. Jubilant bugles and the musical chatter of Sea Dragons filled the night.\n\nMost disconcerting.\n\nCreatures who looked like him teemed everywhere. His immediate range of sight took in hundreds, from younglings the size of Aria, to that great-grandsire who floated in the shallows above the reef, watching his half-air half-ocean progeny wheezing fit to burst a lung.\n\nRight. Up on the paws, Dragon!\n\nHe glanced about curiously. Each family pod had a subtly different colouration \u2013pale, delicate shades of teal, mauve, pink, green and eggshell yellow predominated, with subtle variations of scale, wing and underbelly patterning. However, since every Dragon glowed like a white T'nagrun lamp, it was difficult to distinguish the precise differences without closer observation.\n\nA deep sense of connection arose when he glanced at the giant white Sea Dragon, but far deeper and more poignant was the tingling sense of belonging he enjoyed as he stood beside the lustrous, striking Sirensong. Dam. Mother. Bearer of his egg. She was sleeker than him, built in the mould of highly streamlined Sea Dragons, but the similarities in detail \u2026 he shook his muzzle slowly, reassured when Aria fluttered down beside them, a sole patch of cobalt amongst the enormous throng.\n\nSirensong's gaze captivated him. The shape, quality of inner fire and pattern changes of her eyes, which were as unique as Human fingerprints were said to be, were like looking at himself. Even Thundersong's gaze had that mesmeric, familiar quality about it.\n\nHis dam held him jealously against her side, as if daring any Dragon in the world to tear him away once more. Her mate, Everdeep, also positioned himself alongside, smiling until he proclaimed that his jaw ached. Dragon noticed that the larger, older Dragons did not come ashore, or at least, lay toward the edge of the restless surf. They seemed able to breathe just as well on land as in the ocean, although none flew aloft. Why was that? Sheer size?\n\nHe stepped forward to greet Aria and Azania; the Dragoness genuflected respectfully, spreading her wings before settling them upon her back in a peaceable gesture. Azania alighted too, her dark eyes gleaming with delight as she took in the mighty throng, especially those who stood closest to him.\n\nSwitching to Draconian, Dragon said, <This is my promised, Ariamyrielle Seaspray of the Isles Dragons, and my companion and friend, Princess Azania of T'nagru. She is my Dragon Rider.>\n\n<As Wavewhisperer had Yarimda for her honoured Human friend?> Everdeep rumbled, stealing the wind and about fifty billion problematic explanations from Dragon's sails in one brief sentence. <Theirs was a legendary friendship, the first wave of understanding between our kind and yours, Princess Azania.>\n\nHe stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar name.\n\n<Does she understand us?> Sirensong asked.\n\nAzania bowed fluidly. <My heart soars to meet you at last, my Dragon's precious family. I cannot contain my joy. I do speak Draconian, honoured Sirensong, but not Dragoceanic, apart from \u2026 your name.>\n\nShe smiled as the Dragons made rippling bugles of astonishment and bade her demonstrate, of course. She sang, <\u2248Sirensong!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248Excellent!\u2248> the Sea Dragons agreed.\n\nThe Princess said, <This Dragon is a creature of mighty deeds, Sirensong. I owe him my life, and together, we defended my kingdom from a terrible invasion.>\n\n<What Azania isn't telling you, honoured dam, is that she was the crucial factor in my discovering my white fires just a few months back. I used to be a brown Dragon, believe it or not.> Murmurs of astonishment! <I thought I was of the Tamarine Mountains Dragons. Then, when we discovered my fires, I shed the scales of my old colour and became as you see now, white and brown-gold. I \u2013 I have been called Blitz in the past, but I was rejected from my Dragon Clan, because \u2013>\n\n<We will have you here!> Everdeep roared. <You are ours! You are Song!>\n\nSirensong caressed her mate fondly with a wingtip as Everdeep's outrage caused him to spit white fire.\n\nAye, his dam was seventy feet in length, and his sire-by-bond, easily over a hundred. Double his own measure! He towered above in a way that made him feel like a hatchling all over again. Aria looked like a beautiful toy beside him, and Azania \u2026 hope no Sea Dragon stepped upon her by accident, especially Thundersong!\n\nHis dam said quietly, <They called you Blitz the Devastator, and kept your heritage hidden from you all these years?>\n\n<Aye.> He hung his head.\n\nShe voiced a grieving note that stilled all conversation around them.\n\nComing up beside him, Azania laid a hand upon his neck. <Sirensong, who are Dragon's kin here?>\n\n<We are many!> she fluted, her voice lilting with wonder. <Let me see. There's Thundersong, our Elder \u2013 indeed, he is the oldest and biggest of all Sea Dragons. He is your great-grandsire, my son, a titan of the oceans who has enjoyed one hundred and forty-two cycles beneath the suns. My sire and dam are here, Echosong and Starsong. Here are Descantsong and Farsong, your surviving grandsire and granddam respectively. You have two brothers in Lightsong and Eversong, and three sisters in Echosong, Farsong and Ripplesong.>\n\nEverdeep nudged him fondly. <You'll remember all those waves first time around, right?>\n\n<Eh \u2026 I'll try?>\n\nHe could not feel his paws. Sisters? Brothers? Relatives covering the beach?\n\nToo much!\n\nHis befuddlement must have communicated all too clearly, for Sirensong spent a few minutes chatting to Aria and Azania before returning to him with eager joy. Her wings spread over him with great longing; they nuzzled for the umpteenth time, breathing in the wonder of being together at last.\n\nNext, his sisters and brothers gathered about him, jostling and teasing one another good-naturedly to squash their long-lost brother as flat as a Human welcome mat.\n\nSomehow among the jolly huddle, Sirensong whispered into his left ear, <There is something which must be done without delay. He's itching to tell you.>\n\n<He \u2013 who?>\n\nThis Dragon was still trying to find his paws, and struggling to decide that he was not dreaming. Aye, he had just discovered what it was to be the little brother. Siblings!\n\n<In our clan, my precious son, there's a tradition of naming eggs according to respected clan names drawn from our history,> his dam told him. <We call this custom 'Naming the Wave.' Before the Devastators stole you, your egg was named. Would you like to know who you are among us?>\n\n<It's \u2026 alright to have two names?>\n\nMany Dragons around him chuckled in appreciation.\n\n<This will be your name in Dragoceanic,> Sirensong said. <Friends and family, draw close!>\n\n<\u2248FAMILY!!\u2248>\n\nDragon nearly jumped out of his skin at the mighty roar that rolled over the beach. Thundersong stood in what for him were shallows, waters over thirty feet deep above the reef. His immense stature made every Sea Dragon around him seem tiny. Although he was over two hundred feet in wingspan and a towering fifty feet tall at the shoulder, his flame-white eyes crinkled inside with patterns of enormous fondness and goodwill.\n\nA mighty paw gestured toward Aria and Azania. <All our family, attune your waves to what I shall proclaim. This day, a long-lost wave has returned to our shores. Our joy is as unbounded as the very oceans of our birth! So long did we grieve the treacherous theft of this egg, even I lost faith, but I should have known better. Today, our sorrow turns to joy! Our grieving is drowned in exultant song. For I declare: \u2248Ocean always rises!\u2248>\n\n<\u2248OCEAN ALWAYS RISES!!\u2248>\n\nA thousand voices sang in deafening salutation. Aria's eyes shone. Azania dabbed helplessly at her eyes, smiling with her entire being.\n\nLowering his muzzle toward Dragon, he said, <This Naming of the Wave gives me particular pleasure, for you see, my great-grandson, you were Named to follow in the wave of my paw.>\n\nHe shook his muzzle, not entirely following.\n\n<Oh!> Azania squealed.\n\n<Oh, indeed,> the titan smiled down at her. Stepping forward, he laid a talon upon Dragon's forehead. <Everdeep, please translate for our guests.>\n\nDragon gazed up at his great-grandsire, effervescent with wonder. So brilliant had his colour become, he could scarcely make out the browns anymore \u2013 yet he knew the colour was present, for he would always retain the distinction of being half a Dragon of the air, and half of ocean born.\n\nHe said, <\u2248Speak, honoured great-grandsire.\u2248>\n\nDrawing a rasping breath, Thundersong declaimed, <\u2248Wave of my Wave, Song of my Song, Name of my Name, I declare before our assembled pod that you are a true wave of ocean born, the son of Sirensong, who is son of Farsong, who is son of Thundersong \u2013 a name of renown which we now share. It is with pride as deep as our very oceans that I Name your Wave, THUNDERSONG!!\u2248>\n\nThe beach exploded with joy, <\u2248 WAVE OF OUR WAVE! HAIL, THUNDERSONG!!\u2248>"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Fanuilh",
        "author": "Daniel Hood",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "mystery"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragon protagonist",
            "Fanuilh"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "The feast was a thing Liam Rhenford had never thought to see in Taralon and because of that, and his general feeling of being an outsider, he allowed himself a little too much of the hot, spiced wine.\n\nOf course, the merchant Necquer was not really Taralonian; he was an expatriated Freeporter, and their sensibilities were less easily offended. Liam had spent a fair amount of time in the Freeports himself and was not offended, but he found himself wondering if any of Southwark's other merchants, Necquer's competitors, would consider such a feast with anything other than disgust.\n\nClerks and overseers in their rough best drank noisily in Necquer's home; stevedores and sailors, shorn to the ears in the traditional haircut of Taralon's lower classes, ate his food and sang dirty chanteys in his hall; spinning and weaving girls danced, giggling, to the minstrels Necquer had hired. Even in Southwark, the southernmost city of Taralon's southern duchies, position and the bounds of class distinction were well observed, if not as rigidly as in more northern parts. The merchant, however, had thrown propriety to the wind.\n\nIn his own home, Liam could hear other merchants saying, he let them dance in his own home, and smiled to himself over the social outrage.\n\nNecquer's home was beautiful in a cramped way; a high, narrow wooden building nestled in the Point, Southwark's tiny rich quarter. Gleaming parquet floors shone under vibrant, imported rugs; light and warmth radiated from countless silver candelabra and roaring fireplaces. Fine food piled high on trestle tables disappeared almost as soon as it was served, and wine and ale flowed in silver and pewter mugs. Freihett Necquer was entertaining his lowborn workers in a style normally reserved for his social equals as if it were nothing and his workers, in tum, accepted it without question. Glass-paned doors at the rear of the house opened onto a rain-dark stone porch overlooking the harbor; a group of sailors formed a circle there, encouraging two wrestling men with catcalls and shouts. A trio of musicians played loudly, and the sound of Necquer's employees dancing, eating and celebrating was louder than the rain or the surf crashing below.\n\nI had no idea he was so rich, Liam thought, casting admiring eyes about the merchant's home. I should have charged him more for those maps.\n\nOstensibly the feast was in honor of the upcoming Uristide, but the real reason was that Necquer was alive and well, and in a mood to celebrate. He had survived one of the worst storms in Southwark's memory and\u2014by a miracle\u2014come home with a cargo of immense value.\n\nWhen Necquer's workers talked, which they did only rarely between laughing and eating and dancing breathlessly, they talked of that miracle, and many slyly hinted that Necquer had never kept a Uristide before, and probably did not know who Uris was.\n\nThe miracle was the disappearance of Southwark's Teeth, the towering, jagged rocks that guarded the city's harbor. Rising black and ominous from beneath the sea like the spine of a submerged sea-dragon, they stretched for miles from the west to close off most of the harbor, leaving only a small entrance to the placid harbor. They took a greedy toll for the protection, however, in the form of ships smashed against their unyielding sides, keeping many safe in return for the occasional wreck sent down to the Storm King. A week before, another merchant's caravel, bearing a fortune home from Alyecir, had been crushed into the Teeth. Three men out of a crew of sixty had escaped. Four days later, Southwark woke, blinked its eyes, and saw the Teeth gone. The sea rolled unstopped into the roadstead, and the coast looked barren, for all the world like an old man without his natural teeth. A day after that, Necquer had led four merchantmen limping into port. Experienced seamen declared it a miracle: battered as the ships were by the late season storms, they could never have negotiated the Teeth. And that morning, the day after Necquer's safe arrival, Southwark woke to find that the unknown thief had repented, and the Teeth were back, resuming their posts as if they had never left.\n\nNecquer had more than enough reason to celebrate, and his employees\u2014common sailors, poor clerks, burly stevedores and longshoremen, the girls who spun and wove his trade goods\u2014accepted it wholeheartedly.\n\nLiam listened to everything he could, circulating aimlessly around the noisy, crowded house, taking long sips of wine. He spoke to no one, because he knew no one, and thought more than once of the invitation extended to him by Necquer's wife.\n\nHe had arrived almost an hour after sunset, delayed as much by the fact that he would not know any of Necquer's employees as by the rain. The house was already full of people celebrating, and though the music had not started yet, the noise was deafening. He took a deep breath and shouldered his way into the feast.\n\nNecquer had spotted him after a few minutes and jostled his way over.\n\n\"Rhenford! It was good of you to come!\" The merchant was almost as tall as Liam, but far broader. Almost forty years old, in many ways he was a typical Freeporter, dark of hair and skin, easygoing and unpretentious. He clasped Liam's hand and shoulder, smiling broadly. Over his shoulder, he called out: \"Poppae! Poppae! Come over here! There's someone you should meet!\"\n\nAn expensively dressed young woman separated herself from an obviously painful conversation with a weaving girl and threaded her way through the press. She was beautiful in a quiet way, finely formed, porcelain features framed with a mass of curling, glossy black hair. She was young, barely into her twenties, and she looked almost childlike compared to her husband. Necquer watched her make her way towards them, and it struck Liam as he bowed over her hand that the merchant was carefully scrutinizing their introduction.\n\n\"Poppae, this is Liam Rhenford, the gentleman who drew the maps that have made us rich! Rhenford, my wife Poppae.\"\n\n\"Sir Liam,\" Poppae murmured, a slight smile playing over her lips.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm not a knight, Lady Necquer,\" Liam corrected politely. He had grown used to the southern habit of indiscriminately applying titles of respect. In the north, where he was raised, the degrees of rank: were carefully delineated and scrupulously denoted with countless specific names, each signifying a slight difference in class. Southerners, on the other hand, tended to use whatever title came to mind, as long as it broadly approximated the subject's position.\n\nNecquer suddenly breathed hard, as though disappointed in the conversation, and turned away abruptly. Liam watched him go, slightly surprised. Lady Necquer showed no interest in leaving. In fact, she gazed at him curiously.\n\n\"I suppose I owe you my husband's long absences, Sir Liam?\"\n\nHe let the honorific pass this time. She spoke the southern dialect, but not as thickly as most he had met in Southwark, and her eyes were disturbingly enormous, sad and blue.\n\n\"I am afraid you are correct, madam. I did draw some maps for your husband, but had I known they would cause you pain through his absence, I'd never have done it.\" He had, in fact, given her husband a secret few others knew about. Alyecir and the Freeports, the main trading destinations of ships from Taralon, lay to the west. But to the east and south a number of cities existed on coasts undreamed of by Southwark's merchants, unvisited because of a Taralonian superstition about sailing the Cauliff Ocean. Liam had reached them by traveling overland, but he knew they could be reached from the sea. Late in the summer, it had occurred to him to sell the maps he had made, and he had chosen Necquer primarily because he was a Freeporter, and might not share Taralonian superstitions.\n\nAs hoped, Necquer had no objections to trying the Cauliff, and on Liam's assurance that the journey would be short, had departed as soon as he could ready four ships, even though the fall storms were approaching. That had been a little over six weeks before, and already he was back, and if the size of his feast was any indication, the trip had been very successful.\n\nLady Necquer looked at him with new respect, and edged a little closer, giving in to pressure from the ever-growing crowd.\n\nLiam let his eyes rove over the crowd, nervously refusing to meet her eyes. It had been a long time since he had had to deal with anyone of even Lady Necquer's station, and the social pitfalls their conversation presented loomed large in his mind. On the other hand, he had noticed the discomfort with which she spoke to Necquer's more common employees. He supposed that, clean-shaven and well dressed as he was, he represented a far more interesting companion than longshoremen and tars straight off a three-month voyage. And bowing over her hand had probably not hurt his image.\n\n\"You speak passing fair, Sir Liam, and with a Midlands tongue, 'less I'm mistaken.\"\n\n\"You are not, madam. I was born in the Midlands.\" He could not help feeling that he sounded stiff and stilted to her, but it had been a long while since his breeding had been required of him.\n\n\"My husband's tongue was schooled Midlands,\" she said with a smile, \"though a very Freeporter he is. He learned in Harcourt and the other western ports. But tell, how does a Midlands tongue come to speak so far south? And to draw maps of lands even further south?\"\n\nLiam dropped his gaze to his boots, taking in the tooled leather, uncomfortable speaking about himself. \"When I was a youth, certain ... family problems forced my departure from home. I have traveled widely since,\" he finished lamely.\n\n\"No first son's legacy for you, then?\" she said sympathetically. \"You were a second son?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he lied. It was far easier to claim the anonymity of a lesser position than to explain to the curious woman that he was an only child, and that his birthright had been stripped from him in war. And far less painful.\n\n\"And so you traveled. But not as a sailor?\" she asked, and he detected a note of hope in her soft voice.\n\n\"No, madam. Sometimes as a surgeon, or navigator, and twice as captain. Most often merely as a passenger. The charts I drew your husband were taken from my notes.\"\n\n\"Navigator, captain, surgeon, e'en? You are a man of several parts, Sir Liam, though you are no knight.\" She laughed brightly. Liam caught on only after a moment, and then laughed with her.\n\n\"It would very much agree with me to hear further of your travels, Sir Liam.\"\n\n\"Even in a Midlands tongue?\" he asked with mock humility, beginning to warm to Lady Necquer's sad eyes and gentle manner. She smiled at him.\n\nNecquer suddenly loomed up behind his wife, smiling as though he had heard the joke.\n\n\"Eh, Poppae, we seem to be ready for the minstrels, don't you think?\"\n\nThe question was asked without any detectable overtones, but Lady Necquer paled slightly, and caught her breath.\n\n\"Faith, I suppose we are, lord.\" She made to move away, but Necquer took hold of her tiny waist and kissed her soundly on the cheek. She snuggled against him, raising one hand absently to his sea-roughened cheek. He smiled at Liam over her shoulder.\n\n\"Has Rhenford been regaling you with tales of his journeys, my dear?\"\n\n\"Boring her, I'm afraid,\" Liam said with a slight bow.\n\n\"Nonsense, Rhenford. You're the most interesting man I've met in a long time, and I'm sure Poppae agrees. Don't you, sweet?\"\n\nLady Necquer nodded eagerly. \"I was just asking Sir Liam to tell me more of his travels, lord, but he is a fierce keeper of secrets.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll have to change that, eh, Rhenford? Why not come some night to dinner? You can tell me where to trade next season, and then entertain Poppae. I'm leaving for Warinsford tomorrow, or I'd ask you then, but I'll be back in a few days. You'll dine with us then, eh?\"\n\n\"Must you leave so soon?\" Lady Necquer seemed genuinely upset, but her husband's answer sounded rehearsed, as if they had had the same discussion earlier.\n\n\"The snows won't start for another month, and a great deal of what I brought back may spoil, sweet. It must be soon.\" He kissed her again, and Liam shifted uncomfortably, as though intruding on a private moment.\n\nLady Necquer returned his kiss absently. \"But could not Sir Liam come and entertain me while you are gone? Mayhap just to while away an afternoon?\" There was a freight of meaning behind her words, and a plea that Necquer caught, though it flew past Liam.\n\n\"Certainly, certainly,\" Necquer said after a moment's thought. \"He shall come tomorrow, then? What do you say, Rhenford? Will you entertain my wife tomorrow afternoon?\"\n\n\"I ... of course, of course.\"\n\nLady Necquer smiled gratefully at her husband, who admonished Liam to remember his appointment, and whisked her away. Liam stood, confused but strangely happy. He had been in Southwark for over four months, but until then he had spoken\u2014spoken for no purpose other than pleasure\u2014with only one other person.\n\nHe smiled to himself and shouldered gently through the throng of celebrating workers to find himself a cup of wine. He drank six more before the end of the evening, eating little, talking no more, and watching a great deal.\n\nNecquer's employees enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They shouted and danced the large group dances favored in the south, encouraging each other with whistles and clapping. The three minstrels kept pace, playing louder and more wildly as the evening wore on. Liam looked on, listening to snatches of conversation about the miracle, and watched Lady Necquer. As close as they seemed, something was not right between the merchant and his wife. He recalled a comment he had not understood. A clerk at the buffet had told a companion that there might be more than one reason why Necquer had hurried home, and received a wink and a snicker in return. Liam guessed now that they were referring to a mistress. It might explain the strangeness he had detected in the merchant's manner, but he found it hard to believe anyone would be disloyal to a woman as young and beautiful as Poppae Necquer.\n\nTall as he was, Liam found it easy to keep track of the diminutive beauty as she moved around her home; and it was easy to catch Necquer watching her too, with slitted eyes and an expression that occasionally grew grim. She seemed aware of it, but not disturbed. It was as if she were waiting to show him something, but could not find it in the crowded room.\n\nTowards the bottom of his seventh cup of wine, Liam realized that the room was stiflingly close, and that the feeling was gone in the tip of his long nose. Recognizing an old sign, he prepared himself to go, looking around for his host. He shoved less gently than before through the crowd towards the back of the house, his misjudgement of the gaps in the milling crowd justifying his decision to leave.\n\nNecquer was not to be found in the rear of the narrow house, though several drunken sailors were taking turns walking the length of the rain-slick balustrade that rimmed the porch, ignoring the long drop to the harbor below. Someone should stop them, Liam thought hazily, but not me. He turned and began threading his unsteady way back through the crowd.\n\nHe saw Necquer in the middle of the hall, pressed to one wall by the thick, rowdy crowd. His face was taut and grim, and he was staring across the hall at his wife, who was behind one of the tables that had once been covered with food and now held crumbs and bones. She was staring, pale and unhappy, towards the street door, where a young man stood framed by the lintel. He was brushing rain from long, ash-blond hair, his handsome face swinging to and fro, looking for someone. Necquer followed his wife's gaze, and Liam saw him mouth a curse and begin pushing through the crowd towards the door.\n\nStung by curiosity, Liam followed after, losing sight of Necquer in the crowd. He did, however, see the young man's eyes suddenly widen, and pushed harder against the crowd when the man spun quickly and dashed out into the rain.\n\nThe crowd and his own unsteadiness slowed him, and by the time he reached the door and stepped out into the street, the youth was gone. Necquer stood on the cobbles, his fists bunched by his sides, and Liam almost lurched into him. One fist raised, the merchant spun on him, and lowered his arm reluctantly.\n\n\"Rhenford,\" he said, rain trickling down his face into his beard like tears.\n\n\"I thought I should thank you before I left,\" Liam slurred, wiping rain out of his face with a hand that felt unnaturally hot.\n\n\"Rhenford, you're drunk!\" Necquer gave a laugh, loud and heartily out of proportion, Liam felt, to how drunk he was, but he said nothing. The merchant seemed to need to laugh.\n\n\"Who would have thought a few cups of wine could undo a man who'd traveled the world over?\" Necquer laughed, immensely amused and immensely relieved by something.\n\n\"I thought I should thank you before I left,\" Liam repeated, very uncomfortable and feeling very serious.\n\n\"You're not leaving yet, Rhenford, not in this rain. At least let me send a servant with you. You'll fall in a gutter and catch your death! Wait in the hall, I'll send a servant for you.\"\n\nLiam let the merchant guide him back into the house, where he leaned against a wall. Necquer started away, then turned back, looking seriously at Liam.\n\n\"You will come tomorrow, won't you?\" There was an earnestness in Necquer's voice, but Liam was feeling unnaturally hot all over now, and waved the question away.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Wait here. I'll send a servant.\"\n\nNecquer strode off into the crowd and almost immediately, Liam pulled himself away from the wall and walked, stumbling slightly, into the rain.\n\nIt was a cold, light rain, and went a long way towards sobering Liam up. He wove only slightly back and forth across the narrow streets, turning his face up to the rain to try to clear his head. By the time he had wound his way down out of the rich quarter, further inland to the neighborhood where his rooms were, his head was far clearer, the haze mostly driven out by a piercing headache, like a spike driven into his forehead.\n\nWhen he had arrived in Southwark during the spring, he had not looked far for lodging, taking directions from the first longshoreman he met. He had been directed to an establishment run by a captain's widow, and she had been glad to offer him her attic garret, the largest room she had.\n\nClimbing the five flights of rickety stairs, he cursed the choice, and when he slammed his head into one of the room's low-hanging beams, he cursed again, loudly. The room ran the whole length of the house, with a low ceiling and one window at the front, where he had placed a cheap table. Apart from a straw pallet and an iron-bound chest, the table and its attendant chair were the only furnishings. Several books and stacks of papers littered the rest of the room, and Liam remembered how impressed his landlady had been.\n\n\"A very scholar, aren't you, sir? Never had no scholar here before,\" she had said, respect like cloying sugar in her voice.\n\nMost of the sheets of paper were blank, but she had not noticed that. He had wondered if Mistress Dorcas could read, and decided that she was probably illiterate.\n\nHe managed to light a candle after several attempts, and finally sat down on the chair, which creaked ominously at his weight. He thought of writing, but dismissed the idea almost immediately, the pain in his head a warning against any attempt at serious work. Instead, he stared out the glass-paned window at the rain and offered a blanket prayer to whichever gods kept the attic roof from leaking, and to those who had kept him from throwing up on his way home.\n\n\"No more wine,\" he muttered, scratching with a thumbnail at the spine of one of the books on the table. \"Not for a long time.\"\n\nThe candle guttered, disturbed by a crafty draft that had found a chink in the window. Liam shifted slightly and blew the candle out. He undressed in the dark, tossing his soaked breeches, boots and tunic away, and crawled beneath his two soft blankets. It was cold in the garret, and the smell of mold curled lightly into his nose. Rain pattered heavily on the roof for a while, and he thought he might fall asleep to it, but it tapered off, leaving him with a loud silence.\n\nRestless and uncomfortable, thinking of nothing for over an hour, he finally got off the pallet and searched in the dark for his candle. When it was lit, he opened his chest with the key hung around his neck, and dressed anew, in dry clothes. He started for the door and then, as an afterthought, returned to spread his wet clothes on the chair.\n\nThe rain had stopped, but water still gurgled in the gutters, and the clouds had not broken. He hesitated in the street, unsure where he wanted to go. He could simply wander the city, but the Guard frowned on that, and there was nothing in Southwark he had not already seen.\n\nHe thought of visiting his only friend iii Southwark, and then rejected the idea because it was late.\n\nThen again, he thought, Tarquin's a weird one, and a wizard; perhaps he's still awake. And it's somewhere to go.\n\nTarquin Tanaquil was really more of an acquaintance than a friend, but he seemed to tolerate Liam, and the two got along well enough. The wizard lived outside Southwark, beyond a belt of farms and pasturage on a beach to the east of the city, fifteen minutes' ride away.\n\nLiam set off purposefully through the rain-glistening streets, thinking better of whistling.\n\nIt took him almost an hour to reach Tarquin's beach on foot, and his headache was gone by the time he arrived. Happily, lights still burned in the house.\n\nThe wizard's home occupied a bend in the high seacliffs where sand had gathered, forming a long, secluded beach. A narrow path cut into the cliffs led down to the waterfront, and Liam stood at its bottom for a minute, admiring the view.\n\nFar out over the sea, the clouds had broken, and the moon turned the horizon silver. Closer in, all was dark, the massive breakwater a looming shadow, the sand black. Only the wizard's home was lit, a warm and cheery presence. It was a villa, a rich-looking house: one-storied but long and deep, white plaster and red tile roof with only a slight peak. A broad, stone-paved patio lined the front with steps leading right onto the sand. The wall of the house facing the sea was almost entirely glass, more glass than Liam had ever before seen in one place. Warm yellow light spilled out onto the patio.\n\nLiam sprinted across the sand, packed down with the rain, and sprang up on the breakwater. Broad as a roadway, it led him along the beachfront to a spot directly in front of Tarquin's door.\n\nIt was the breakwater and the beach that had led him to meet the wizard. The coastline near Southwark was almost entirely high cliffs; larger, more stolid cousins to the Teeth. In his early explorations, Liam had learned that there were almost no places where one could swim in the sea, except for Tarquin's cove. Mistress Dorcas had told him about the magician, spouting the normal warnings and superstitions, but one day he had gone down the path, strolled up to the door, and asked if he might swim from the wizard's beach.\n\nThe white-haired old man grudgingly gave permission, and from there a sort of suspicious acquaintance began. As the summer wore on and the weather grew hotter, Liam's visits to the beach grew more frequent, and the occasions when the busy wizard recognized his presence grew as well. One time he invited Liam to sit on the patio with him, and they had spoken briefly. From there, it had only been a short while before he was invited in, and their conversations had grown longer.\n\nStanding on the breakwater, alternately looking out to sea and back at the villa, Liam thought that he would never have woke the wizard merely to tell how he had gotten drunk and could not sleep. But since the house was lit, he felt it would be no imposition.\n\nHe hopped off the breakwater and strolled across the sand to the patio and the glass-fronted house. He rapped once on one of the thick panes, and waited. There was no reply, so he opened the door, more of a window that slid aside in grooved wooden tracks, and stepped inside.\n\nThough it was chilly outside, the house was warm. Sourceless light filled the entrance hall, bringing out soft highlights in the polished wood of the floor. Corridors and more sliding doors, these of solid wood, led off the room.\n\n\"Tarquin?\" Liam asked softly, and a shudder ran through him. He had never been further than the entrance hall and one small room off it, a sort of parlor overlooking the beach.\n\n\"Tarquin?\" he called again. The sound of the waves lapping against the breakwater sounded louder inside than out.\n\nBoldly, he strode down one of the corridors leading towards the rear of the house, and found himself in a stone-paved kitchen, with a huge wooden table and a cavernous baker's oven. No wizard. He noticed that the table was unscarred, the sanded planks unmarked by use.\n\n\"Tarquin?\" he called again, raising his voice. No response.\n\nHe left the kitchen and returned to the entrance hall, choosing the second corridor. Two doors opened off it, one open. More of the sourceless light spilled out, and Liam saw the foot of a bed.\n\nFilled with a dread as sourceless as the light, he approached the door slowly. Then he plunged into the room, awaiting a shock, something loud and frightening. Nothing happened, and he breathed a sigh. Tarquin was in his bed, his hands clasped on his chest. His full white beard spread luxuriously over his scrawny chest.\n\nThe room was small, meant to hold nothing more than the bed, which was broad and canopied, carved with dancing figures and covered with a red blanket. There was nothing on the walls, no rugs or rushes on the floor. Only the bed, and its solitary occupant.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tarquin, I didn't know you were asleep.\"\n\nLiam paused, his relief dissipating. Tarquin had not moved, though his eyes, sunken in the mass of wrinkles that served the wizard for a face, were open, and Liam would have sworn they were not when he first came in.\n\n\"Tarquin?\" He tentatively put a hand to the wizard's shoulder and pushed. Even through the blue cloth of the robe, Liam could feel the chill.\n\nA trance, he hoped, let it be a trance.\n\nHe pushed again, this time at the wizard's hands. They fell away to either side in what might have been a gesture of supplication. The palms were stained red. The hilt of a small knife jutted from his chest. The blue robe was dark with blood, and the ends of Tarquin's beard were red, like the bristles of a brush barely dipped in paint.\n\nLiam's eyes narrowed and he leaned over the bed, looking at nothing in particular, taking in the whole. Tarquin looked like he had been laid out for burial, legs decorously together, robe smoothed. The red blanket barely registered his presence, neatly hanging over the edge of the bed, unwrinkled.\n\nThe sound of waves slapping the breakwater suddenly intruded on Liam's thoughts, brought into focus by another noise closer at hand. A thin, dry coughing whispered from out in the corridor.\n\n\"Fanuilh,\" Liam whispered. He was thinking of Tarquin's familiar, a miniature dragon. Where was it?\n\nWithout a thought, he rushed from the bedroom. Another whispered cough came from behind the second door in the corridor. He pushed open the door and stepped in.\n\nHe had a glimpse of a workroom, three long tables, a wall lined with books, another lined with jars of murky fluids and dried things. Another cough.\n\nThen there was a sharp pain in his leg, and a jolt that traveled the length of his body. The pain swelled like blossoming light, flooding to his head. Something within him was being stretched, racked beyond its limits. Pressure built and built, pulling the thing, cracks appearing in its smooth surface. Frozen upright by the pain, he felt the thing in him finally begin to split, tom in two. Absurdly, he thought part of it slipped through him and out the leg where the pain began.\n\nSoul? he thought, and fell."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Liam woke at sunrise, feeling hung over. His head pounded, and ripples of uneasiness radiated out from his stomach through his whole body. He did not open his eyes for a long while, lying instead on his back on the floor, examining his aches internally.\n\nHe noted the dull, throbbing in his ankle, and remembrance flooded in. Slowly, he forced his lids up and stifled a shout. He gasped silently, turning the shout into a longdrawn breath, and did not move.\n\nTarquin's familiar, Fanuilh, was lying weightlessly on his chest, its wedgelike head curled between its paws. The little creature stirred restlessly in its sleep, dull black scales rippling, leathern wings flaring briefly to settle back against its gently heaving sides.\n\n\"Fanuilh,\" Liam breathed, and the dragon's eyes flicked open. It heaved itself unsteadily up on its forepaws, slipped slightly, recovered its foothold. Liam could see the dragon's neck and belly, covered with yellow scales as dull as the black ones on its back. For a moment, they were both still, Fanuilh's yellow, catlike eyes boring into Liam's blues. A slim tongue flicked out of the sharp-toothed mouth and ran over the dragon's tiny chin, where the scales gave way to a tuft of coarse hair.\n\nWe are one.\n\nThe thought intruded in Liam's head, like a flash of illumination. It stayed there, his other thoughts revolving around it. For a moment he thought he might have heard it, but it remained, and did not dissipate. It was a thought in his head, but obdurate and unyielding. He tried to think other things, questions, but they could not force it out.\n\nWe are one.\n\nJust as suddenly as the foreign thought had appeared, it went, and Fanuilh shuddered and collapsed again on his chest.\n\nLiam lay on the floor for long minutes, unwilling to touch the creature on his chest. Finally, when its breathing grew even in sleep, he forced his hands up and gently surrounded the form. Slowly, with fear as much as tenderness, he picked up the sleeping dragon and placed it beside him on the floor. The scales, instead of feeling hard or metallic, were like ridged cloth, moire or corduroy, soft and warm. As he moved it, Fanuilh exhaled, and its breath was rank and foul.\n\nLike a dead man's, Liam thought, and repressed a shudder until he had put the sleeping dragon down. Then he rolled away and up to his knees, feeling his stomach turn over. His hangover was well out of proportion to the amount he had drunk.\n\n'We are one,' he remembered and shook his head in denial. He stood shakily, and stumbled for the door of the workroom. On impulse, he stopped in the doorway and turned to look at Fanuilh. Sleeping on the floor below him, and not on his chest above his face, the dragon looked harmless, and Liam suddenly bent and scooped up the creature, cradling it against his chest as he looked for a better place to put it.\n\nThe worktable nearest the door was empty, and Liam deposited Fanuilh there. The creature did not stir, and, after a moment staring at it, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.\n\nHe limped blindly for the kitchen, ignoring Tarquin's bedroom, his pounding head and raw throat calling for relief. He could think of nothing but cold water, and perhaps bread, or a hot bun. A type of pastry he had once eaten in Torquay sprang to mind, and his stomach rumbled unpleasantly. The sea, when he saw it through the glass walls of the entrance hall, was shiny pink with the new sun, the clouds of the previous evening gone. Morning filled the hall, streaking the shadows of the window panes across the floor like bars.\n\nIn the kitchen, the sourceless light still ruled, banishing shadows. He searched bins and cupboards, hoping only for bread and water. Water he found in a jar by the tiled stove, far colder and sweeter than it had any right to be.\n\nTarquin's magic, he thought, and grimaced, thinking of the hilt rising from the old man's chest.\n\nHe lifted the jar to his lips and drank deeply, washing away bile and roughness, gasping with the intensity of the cold: When he put the jar back next to the stove, he felt heat on the back of his hand and stepped away from the stove suspiciously.\n\nWhy not?he thought, and yanked open the metal door on the oven's front. Banked coals lay beneath a metal rack, on which rested four small, round buns, piping hot, just like the ones he remembered from Torquay. Hunger took over from caution, and he snatched one of them, juggling the hot pastry back and forth between his hands until he could drop it on the table.\n\nHe picked up the jar and drank again, then put his attention to the bun. It was almost too hot to eat, but his stomach roiled, and he forced a bite down. By the time the taste registered, his stomach was quieter.\n\nIt was delicious, exactly like the ones in Torquay, laced with currants and nuts, lightly spiced with cinnamon and something sweet and sticky he could not identify. It was wonderful\u2014and clearly magic. The buns were certainly fresh-baked, not reheated, and the coals were as hot as if they had only been lit for an hour. More magic, he supposed, wolfing down the rest of the bun. He had never connected magic with small things like hot cinnamon buns and ice-cold water. Only things of magnificent proportions\u2014calling forth demons, sinking ships, destroying armies. It made him think differently of Tarquin.\n\nThinking of Tarquin brought him to the corpse in the bedroom, and he frowned. Snatching two more buns from the oven, he went back to the bedroom.\n\nTarquin was stiffening; that much he could tell by looking. Dead at least twelve hours, as far as his experience as a surgeon and soldier could tell. He leaned against the doorjamb and stared at the corpse, absently eating some of the delicious bread.\n\n\"Murdered,\" he said aloud, and might have laughed at the obviousness of the conclusion.\n\nBy whom? Why? He realized he did not know Tarquin well enough to even hazard a guess, and supposed the only one who might know was Fanuilh, and Fanuilh was only a brute beast.\n\nOr was it?\n\nWe are one.\n\nThe thought had not been his. And the creature had been staring at him so intently. Liam had heard stories that wizards and their familiars were bound in special ways, but that was the result of complicated spells and dealings with supernatural beings, the sort of thing reserved for those who worked with magic.\n\nSwallowing the rest of his second bun, he left the corpse and went to the workroom. Fanuilh was still asleep, curled up with his snout touching his hind legs.\n\nLike a dog, but scaled and winged and clawed and able to send its thoughts into my head. Liam winced and moved away.\n\nThe workroom's large windows looked out onto the narrow stretch of sand separating the villa from the cliffs, and let in a gray, shadowy light to illuminate the room. The first table held only Fanuilh, the second a single empty decanter of glass, but the top of the third was completely covered. Liam had not seen it in his brief glimpse the night before, but the morning light showed the table's display, and he wandered over to it.\n\nIt was like the sand-table models he had seen engineers make during sieges, but far more complex. It repoduced, in miniature, the coastline around Southwark; but where a mercenary engineer would have been happy with crude representations, the model in Tarquin's workroom was perfect in every detail.. The Teeth lay exactly at the center of the table; water on one side, the harbor and city on the other. The town was the most impressive part, completely detailed, right down to the Necquer's harborside porch, and Liam's own garret window. Tiny ships with full rigging rode at anchor, and Liam saw that they actually rode, swaying slightly as if on swells. Acting on a hunch, he put his finger down into the harbor. The ships were moving, and the water, when he brought his finger to his mouth, tasted of salt. What he had thought well-sculpted whitecaps proved on closer inspection to be real breakers, flowing constantly against the Teeth. The Teeth themselves were rock, and felt as cold and wet as their larger brethren.\n\nLiam whistled in awed admiration and the dawning of an idea.\n\nAt the far end of the table stood a lectern, over the edge of which hung a heavy chain. With his eyes fixed on the model, Liam moved around to the lectern. A massive leatherbound book lay open on it, held down with the chain. Tarquin's spellbook, Liam supposed, and read the first few lines on the page that lay open. Abstract,.theoretical language, studded with phrases in some foreign tongue Liam had never met; nonetheless, he understood enough of what was written in Taralonian. It was a spell for removing matter to another plane of existence; \"translating substance,\" the text called it.\n\n\"He made the Teeth disappear,\" he whispered. \"Damn!\" As a last act, Liam thought, there could be few better. A final testament to Tarquin's power, grandiose proof of his reputation in Southwark as a truly great wizard. Liam wondered if Tarquin knew that it would be his last spell when he cast it.\n\nA paper-thin piece of wood projected from further on in the book, marking another page. Liam pushed the heavy pages aside and scanned the lines of the second spell. Much of the language was the same, and he recognized some of the foreign phrases, but the point of this one was to cloak matter, to make it invisible.\n\nIf Tarquin had been trying to decide which spell to use, he must have chosen the one for transforming matter, or else Necquer's ships would have been resting quietly beneath the sea, not to mention Necquer himself.\n\nCould someone have killed the wizard for that?\n\nLiam's eyes lost their focus on the page as he thought.\n\nWho would want to kill Tarquin? As far as Liam knew, the old man had no enemies\u2014at least none that he had spoken about. Then again, he did not know much about the wizard. When they had spoken, it had only been in generalities, about faraway places or things long past. Nothing about each other's lives in Southwark, or their present business. But then Tarquin was a wizard, and they made enemies everywhere. They quarreled among themselves, they had disagreements with those ,who sought their services, they were marked out by power for the fear and suspicions of the masses. It would not have been hard for Tarquin to acquire enemies, but it was strange that a man who could alter the work of nature in such a way could not defend himself.\n\nI am awake.\n\nIt was a thought like the first; hard-edged and stony, brazenly pushing other thoughts away to grab his attention. His head snapped over to look at the table where he had put Fanuilh.\n\nYou have eaten. I should eat as well.\n\nThere was no doubt the thought came from Fanuilh, and\n\nLiam remembered the bite. Why had the thing bitten him?\n\nSo that we would be one. I must eat, but I am weak.\n\nLiam crossed the room slowly, eyeing the little dragon. Its yellow eyes never left his.\n\n\"Are you doing this? Putting thoughts in my head?\"\n\nYou do not need to speak. Only think. And I am.\n\n\"How?\"\n\nWe are one. May I eat?The serpentine head nudged at the final bun Liam held in his hand. Liam knelt by the edge of the table, so that his eyes were on a level with the dragon's, and held out the food.\n\nFanuilh's head snaked out and ripped off a large bite, chewing and swallowing in rapid gulps. Liam watched, fascinated, as the dragon ate more, gulping down the whole bun in seconds. When it was done, it began very gently licking its claws, though it continued to stare at him.\n\nYou are confused.\n\n\"How are we one?\"\n\nYou know already. You are wiser than you seem.\n\n\"Then\u2014you are like a familiar to me? Bound in that way?\"\n\nAs you are bound to me. We share a soul now; your soul rests partly in me, and partly still in you.\n\nLiam rose, shaking his head in confusion. \"Why did you never speak like this before?\"\n\nWe were never one before. This can only be done between those who are one. Look.\n\nSuddenly, Liam's sight went black. He cried out, and then his vision returned, but his perspective was wrong. He was looking up into an angular, unlined face, framed with close-cropped blond hair. Pale blue eyes rolled sightlessly on either side of a long, thin nose. It was his nose; he was looking at his own face.\n\nYou see with my eyes.\n\n\"I want to see with my eyes!\" he said, and there was another sickening jolt of blindness before he returned to his own perspective. The dragon's head was cocked to one side, regarding him curiously. \"Never do that again!\" he admonished shakily.\n\nYou can do it as well.\n\n\"I don't want to!\"\n\nPerhaps you will.\n\nThere was a long silence. Liam wondered, and then stopped wondering, realizing the dragon could read his thoughts.\n\n\"I want you out of my head!\"\n\nYou can keep me out.\n\n\"How?\" he demanded.\n\nI will show you, but you must do things for me.\n\n\"Do things for you? You've stolen my soul, you little beast! I want you out of my head!\"\n\nI am sorry. It was necessary. I was dying. We may\u2014\n\nLiam felt the edge of the thought, notched like the blade of a broken sword, as the dragon paused\u2014We may make a bargain.\n\n\"A bargain! What have you got in return for my soul?\"\n\nWe only share it. I would not have taken even a small pan, were it not necessary. Master Tanaquil thought my gifts wonh a small pan of his soul. And it does you no harm. But if you help me only a little more, I can teach you things.\n\n\"What things?\" Liam demanded.\n\nThere are things that must be done, and then I will teach you.\n\n\"What things?\"\n\nHow to keep me out, how to see with my eyes. Other things as well.\n\nDespite himself, Liam was intrigued.\n\n\"Magic?\"\n\nNot much. You do not have the mind for the complicated kinds. But smaller ones, perhaps, and other things. I can help you write your book.\n\n\"My book? How did you know of that?\" The dragon cocked its head again, and Liam raised a hand. \"No, never mind. I understand.\"\n\nI shared all these things with Master Tanaquil. I can teach you. If you will do things for me.The dragon still looked directly at him, but there was no expression in the creature's eyes.\n\nLiam heaved himself to his feet, favoring his unbitten leg. \"What things?\"\n\nFirst, you must bring me more food. In the kitchen, think of raw meat, desire it, and look in the oven.\n\n\"I noticed that. An easy enough condition.\" He limped to the kitchen, and though it was difficult to make himself desire raw meat, eventually the oven produced an uncooked cut of beef, which he brought back to the dragon.\n\nFanuilh tore into it, biting and chewing in the same convulsive gulps. It did not stop sending its thoughts, however.\n\nSecond,the message appeared in Liam's mind, you must tell the Duke's man in Southwark of Master Tanaquil's murder. His name is Coeccias. Can you find him?\n\n\"The Duke's man? The Aedile? Yes, I can find him. I would have told him in any case. What else must I do?\"\n\nThird, you must nurse me to health. As painful as the sharing was for you, it was much worse for me. I almost died when Master Tanaquil was struck down.\n\n\"When he was struck down,\" Liam echoed, and then asked intently: \"Do you know who killed him?\"\n\nI do not.\n\nLiam mused over this, disappointed, and the dragon did not interrupt him for a while. Then:\n\nI am weak. It will perhaps take a month for me to recover.\n\nBrought out of his reverie, Liam nodded. \"Yes, of course. Simple enough. Is there anything else?\"\n\nOne other. I will tell you when you return with the Aedile.\n\nLiam balked. \"Tell me now.\"\n\nIt will be simple enough for you, and there will be time enough when you return with the Aedile. You must be sure he brings a ghost witch.\n\n\"A ghost witch? What's that?\"\n\nHe will know. Tell him that. Is it a\u2014again, the shorn-off thought, as though the phrase was unfamiliar\u2014a bargain?\n\n\"Yes,\" Liam said, after a moment's thought.\n\nThen go.\n\nStung, he turned abruptly for the door, only to tum back. \"Why don't you know who killed Tarquin?\"\n\nMaster Tanaquil could exclude me from his mind at will. He often did.\n\n\"You can teach me to do that?\"\n\nI can. I will, when you fulfill the last thing I will ask. Now go.\n\nStill Liam paused, wondering to himself. It was strange to talk and receive the response directly in his head; it was strange to take orders from a tiny, weak dragon; it was strange not to argue\u2014but what, he asked himself, could he do?\n\nIt is as strange for me to give orders as it is for you to take them. When you have fa/filled my last request, I will teach you how to be my master.\n\nWith that in his head, Liam limped out of the house and onto the beach.\n\nBetween Liam's limp and his distracted thoughts, it took far longer to return to Southwark than it had to come out the night before.\n\nFanuilh had taken part of his soul, but for some reason he felt neither violated nor angry. Liam knew himself to be accepting by nature, taking what was given and making the best of it. There was, really, nothing he could do: he had heard enough about wizards and their familiars to know that the link could only be broken through the death of one of the sharers. He had no idea what would happen to his soul if Fanuilh died, and he had no intention of finding out.\n\nAs he thought of it, he reasoned that the experience must indeed have been worse for the dragon. He still had his soul; part of it was simply resting in Fanuilh. The dragon, for a time, had not had a soul. Liam tried, but could not imagine what that would be like.\n\nOn the whole, he thought he should pity the little creature, but he could not manage it. It was, perhaps, the nature of the thoughts Fanuilh sent into his head. They were just that\u2014thoughts, without any emotional content. He had never realized just how important the voice was in conveying feeling. Fanuilh's thoughts could not reveal pain or humor or sadness, only information.\n\nDid the little dragon feel emotion?\n\nThe tasks it had set out for Liam were relatively simple and, apart from nursing the dragon back to health, would take very little time. It seemed a small thing to do, and when the nursing was over it would teach Liam to close off his mind, and maybe other things of greater value. It seemed a fair bargain, if the dragon could be trusted.\n\nHe reasoned all this out on the long walk back to Southwark, through the still-damp pasturage and stubbled fields. The sun was two hours above the horizon before he reached the city, hanging weak and watery in the fall sky, lending no warmth. It was chilly, and he felt dirty and hungry again. He decided to return to his garret before searching out the Aedile.\n\nWalking up the steep hill to his lodgings, he realized that the pain in his ankle was lessening, and he could place more weight on it. He stopped in the street and examined his boot. There were two punctures the size of large nails in the tough leather. He scowled, wondering what sort of holes had been left in his flesh.\n\nOnce in his rooms, he called the landlady for hot water. She brought it up to him in a bucket, with an indulgent expression.\n\n\"Overmuch wine, Master Rhenford?\" she asked, arching an eyebrow and grinning. \"I thought scholars never indulged.\"\n\nHe exaggerated a frown and shooed her away. Sitting in the chair, he tenderly tugged off the punctured boot and checked his ankle, prepared to wash away a crust of blood and bandage a wound.\n\nHis ankle was clean, and only two small, circular scars indicated where Fanuilh had bitten him. He gave a short whistle, shook his head, and stripped to wash.\n\nRefreshed by the hot water and feeling much less sick, he dressed in clean tunic and long breeches and felt ready to find the Aedile. He snatched a warm cloak from a peg on the wall and went out.\n\nThe Duke in whose lands Southwark lay was a great believer in the very old ways of Taralon. The title Aedile was taken from the language the Seventeen Houses brought with them to the land; so all titles used to be, before the last king of House Quintus died childless and the throne fell to lesser lines.\n\nEven in Liam's Midlands, where they prided themselves on maintaining the old customs, such a man would have been titled colloquially, called Sheriff, or Constable. But Southwark's Duke held to the old ways, and the man was called Aedile.\n\nIt impressed Liam, this respect for the days when Taralon was strong under the Seventeen Houses.\n\nHe found the Aedile at home, directed there by a member of the Guard who was hurrying home from his shift. It was a small house on the fringes of the rich quarter, neat and well maintained, though somehow out of place beside the larger houses of merchants and rich tradesmen.\n\nA bald servant reluctantly let him in, and bade him wait in a spartan parlor.\n\nA bachelor, Liam thought, noting the decorations\u2014swords and armor, a few hand-drawn maps of the city, the worn but comfortable-looking furniture. He knew little of the Aedile except his name, and a reputation for tough but fair dealing. He had heard that Coeccias would rather break up a tavern brawl with his own fists than take the brawlers into the Duke's court.\n\nNothing in the Aedile's appearance contradicted his reputation. He was short and broad, heavily muscled, with a thick mane of tangled black hair hanging down below his shoulders. Water beaded in his untrimmed beard, annoyance in his small eyes. Veins and scars ridged the hand with which he curtly waved Liam to a seat.\n\n\"Your name, sirrah? And what business,\" he grated, \"that needs must break my breaking fast?\"\n\nThe Aedile held a buttered piece of bread in his hand, and crumbs dotted his simple black tunic.\n\n\"Rhenford, Aedile Coeccias, Liam Rhenford. And there has been a death.\"\n\nCoeccias laughed loudly. \"Come, Liam Rhenford, death is commoner than cheap bawds, and those are very common in Southwark. Surely my breakfast is worth more than mere death!\"\n\n\"Not mere death, Aedile,\" Liam contradicted politely, still standing, \"but murder. The wizard Tarquin Tanaquil has been murdered.\"\n\n\"Has he? In truth? Now that\u2014that might be worth more than my breakfast. That might, in truth.\"\n\nLiam explained the circumstances, avoiding any mention of Fanuilh, and watched Coeccias take it all in, suitably sober, nodding. When he had finished his brief account, the Aedile nodded firmly once more.\n\n\"Well, it seems there's more in it than in my breakfast. I must see the body. Y'have a horse?\" Liam nodded. \"Good. Collect it, and meet me at the city gate.\"\n\n\"Wait a moment, Aedile. Shouldn't we have a ghost witch present?\"\n\n\"Aye, that we should.\" Coeccias paused and regarded him strangely. \"It'll little like Mother Japh to be dragged out of her house this early, but we should. I'll fetch her.\"\n\nThe burly man bustled him out of the house into the street, and strode off towards the heart of the city. Liam turned towards the stable where he kept his horse.\n\nIt was only a few moments before Diamond was saddled and ready, and Liam was mounted before he thought of his appointment with Lady Necquer. He called the stable lad over and offered him a small sum to take his regrets to the merchant's wife. The dirty boy grinned hugely at the amount and dashed off without a word.\n\nShaking his head, Liam spurred his mount towards the city gate.\n\nHe had a suspicion that Coeccias was not the man to find Tarquin's murderer, unless it could be done easily. And he feared it would not be easy. Honest and competent as the Aedile might be when it came to keeping sailors in line and patrolling the streets at night, Liam did not think he could pry secrets out of Tarquin's corpse.\n\nWhich, he further thought, was a shame, since there was no one else in authority to pursue the matter, and he already liked the blunt Aedile.\n\nSouthwark had no wall; the steep inland sides of the rise on which the city sat and the jagged Teeth seaward had always been considered protection enough. So it had no gates to speak of, but the beginning of the track to the east that led past Tarquin's cove was marked by two standing columns of worn gray stone, and this was called the city gate.\n\nLiam arrived there before Coeccias and waited on his mount beside one of the pitted stone columns, watching the traffic of farmers' carts and horsemen that straggled along the muddy track.\n\nHe had waited far longer than he thought necessary, and. for the tenth time was about to go back into the city to look for Coeccias when the Aedile's voice called to him.\n\n\"Liam Rhenford! Hark, man!\"\n\nCoeccias now wore a tabard over his black tunic, gray linen emblazoned with the Duke's three red foxes, and he rode a mare that looked worn down beside Liam's snorting roan. Two mounted Guardsmen carrying upright spears flanked him, the Duke's foxes on gray badges sewn to the shoulders of their boiled leather cuirasses. Behind them, astride a walleyed pony, was an ancient woman bundled in shapeless, faded robes, her face wrinkled as an old apple.\n\n\"The ghost witch,\" Coeccias said, when he noticed Liam's glance. \"Mother Japh. This is the man who found the corpse, Mother.\"\n\nThe old woman snorted and mumbled.\n\n\"More like the fool saw the master in a trance; he isa wizard, all said.\" Her voice was no more than a whisper, but Liam caught it.\n\n\"It may well have been a trance, Mother,\" he said politely, \"but I was not aware wizards cast spells with daggers in their chests.\"\n\nThe woman sniffed indignantly, and Liam arched an eyebrow at the Aedile, who, it seemed, could not decide whether to laugh or frown. He settled for taking charge.\n\n\"We'd best to't, then.\"\n\nHe booted his mare into a walk, and the Guardsmen followed suit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "\"No spirits,\" the wrinkled old woman announced in a soft voice, returning to the entrance hall, where Liam and the Aedile waited.\n\nThey had waited for her judgement for over an hour while she wandered around the house, humming a little tune to herself, her bright, birdlike gaze darting here and there. She passed through the entrance hall several times, each time favoring Liam with an unpleasant look.\n\nAfter Liam had satisfied Coeccias that Tarquin was indeed dead, the Aedile had drawn him out into the entrance hall and nodded to Mother Japh, who began her work.\n\n\"We mustn't disturb the witch while she searches for spirits,\" he whispered.\n\n\"How does she do it?\" Liam whispered back, wondering. The Aedile shrugged and spoke nonchalantly, his hand resting lightly on the hilt of his shortsword. \"Truth, I don't know. But if Tarquin's sprite's here, angered or hot on revenge, she'll feel it, and it may be she can learn something from him.\"\n\nLiam had never heard of a ghost witch, and the idea interested him. If she could speak with Tarquin's ghost, she might be able to find his killer. He studied the witch closely whenever she appeared.\n\nThe two Guardsmen stayed on the stone veranda despite the chill wind off the sea, which the watery sun did nothing to relieve. Coeccias had grumbled irritably when they silently took up their posts, but he did not argue with them.\n\n\"And as no ghosts haunt the pile,\" the witch went on, \"and no sprites linger, angry or the like, it follows that the killer's not here.\"\n\nWhen the witch had rendered her judgement, she suddenly offered Liam a warm smile, and Coeccias scowled. Liam started and flushed red. He turned on the Aedile.\n\n\"You thought Idid it? You thought Ikilled him?\" Coeccias scowled fiercely at the old woman, who offered him a placid smile. \"I suspected, but\u2014\"\n\nLiam cut him off angrily. \"Then why would I fetch you? Why would I tell you, if I did it?\"\n\n\"Easy, man, don't rate me. Many's the man's covered his deed thus, and I was only making sure. And y'are Liam Rhenford, are you not?\"\n\n\"So?\" He could not believe the man had suspected him. He prepared to revise the friendly opinion he had devised of the Aedile.\n\n\"Truth, it's known that you had traffic with the wizard, more traffic than anyone in Southwark ever had, and who else was there to suspect? And you'd never've known what I thought, if this foolish old woman had kept a still tongue!\" He scowled again at the witch, and Liam stalked away, fuming.\n\nA touch on his arm brought him around, and he glared down into Mother Japh's wrinkled, beaming face.\n\n\"Take no affront, boy. I thought you'd done it, too. You've an innocent visage,\" she said, \"and that's the worst mark against a man that I know.\"\n\nLiam did not reply; Tarquin had once said something like that to him. They had been discussing a question of history; Liam had made a point he felt was particularly telling, and the old wizard had begun to laugh. \"Get you a beard, Rhenford,\" he had said. \"None'll believe so innocent a face.\"\n\n\"And now, Aedile Coeccias, it likes me to go home, if you can spare one of your frightened soldiers to take me there.\"\n\nCoeccias shook his head and dispatched one of the Guardsmen to escort the ghost witch back to Southwark. When he returned to the entrance hall, Liam was still thinking over what Mother Japh had said, and how it echoed Tarquin's words.\n\n\"She hit the mark, Liam Rhenford. Y' are too innocent for your good.\"\n\n\"Perhaps if I got a hideous scar, or lost an eye and wore a patch I'd be better off, eh?\" he asked sarcastically.\n\nCoeccias laughed and clapped Liam on the shoulder, and his anger slowly dissolved. He gave a small smile.\n\n\"A scar, a patch! Aye, those'd serve!\" The Aedile laughed a little more and went on, still amused. \"Unfortunately, Mother Japh's rare wrong, and I can't clap you in for the murder. Which means there's nothing for it but to try and find the killer. We'll search the house.\"\n\nHe led the way with Liam trailing curiously in his wake, eager to explore more of the house. The Aedile questioned him as they went, gleaning details of his relationship with the wizard.\n\n\"And you've no idea who might have wanted him dead?\" \"None. I didn't really know him well\u2014only from swimming off his breakwater, and the occasional talk. No clues there, I'm afraid.\"\n\nThey stood in Tarquin's library, just beyond the parlor. Books lined every wall; there were no windows in the walls, though a small glass cupola in the roof let in a dim light. Coeccias gave Liam an incredulous look when he mentioned swimming.\n\n\"You swam? In the sea?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Liam said.\n\n\"No one swims in the sea!\"\n\n\"I do,\" Liam said simply, offering no explanation, and the Aedile shrugged in disbelief.\n\nFor a moment they stood quietly and marveled at the innumerable books, each impressed in his own way. Liam paced along the shelves, running a finger down leatherbound spines, checking the titles inscribed or painted there. Coeccias stood directly beneath the cupola, turning around in a circle and taking it all in.\n\n\"And when did you say you found him?\"\n\n\"Last night. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Last night?\" the Aedile snapped. \"Why didn't you fetch me then?\"\n\nLiam goggled for a moment and started to tell about Fanuilh. A thought stopped him.\n\nI was drunk ...\n\n\"I was drunk, you see,\" he finally said, embarrassed. \"And when I saw him, I, well, I fell, and hit my head.\"\n\nShow him the bump.\n\n\"I have a bump, you see.\" He fingered the back of his head, and noticed for the first time a distinct swelling at the back of his head. \"I didn't wake up until early this morning.\"\n\n\"Cupped, eh?\" The Aedile smiled and Liam relaxed, though his face was still red with embarrassment. \"I suspect that's the only thing that'd make a man bother a wizard in the night.\"\n\nHe left the library, and went across the hall and down the corridor to the bedroom. Liam followed, angry, wondering if the dragon had known they would suspect him.\n\nI thought they might, came the response, hard in his mind. He stopped in the corridor. That is why I told you to bring the ghost witch.\n\nCoeccias paused before the door to the workroom, looking back at Liam.\n\n\"Will y'attend me?\"\n\nLiam shook himself and hurried down the hall. The Aedile was looking at the table where Fanuilh lay, its slitted yellow eyes staring balefully back at him.\n\n\"Now whatever's this? The wizard's pet?\"\n\nHe stepped lightly over to the table and slowly extended his .hand towards the dragon's neck, trying to appear open and friendly. Fanuilh followed the Aedile's hand, swiveling its head as Coeccias reached for its neck, fingers bent to scratch. At the last moment the dragon snapped weakly, and Coeccias withdrew in shock.\n\n\"Little beast!\"\u00b7 he exclaimed, rubbing his hand as if the dragon had bitten him, though Liam knew it had missed.\n\n\"It's a shame the little creature can't speak. He might tell us everything.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Coeccias muttered, then threw a cursory glance around the room. \"Naught disturbed here,\" he said, and left abruptly. Liam stayed a moment, looking at the dragon. Slowly, as the Aedile had, he extended his hand; Fanuilh let him scratch, arching its back in pleasure against Liam's nails. The softness of the scales was still strange to him, and he rubbed them curiously for a moment. No thoughts came, so he patted it once more and left.\n\nThere was only one other room, with a cupola like the library but wide windows as well. Motes danced in the weak beams pouring in.\n\n\"Anything missing?\" Coeccias asked.\n\n\"I don't know. I've never been in here before.\" Strange objects filled the white-plastered room, hanging from the walls and arranged in free-standing cases of dark, polished wood with glass tops. A collection of thin, elaborately carved wands on a bed of felt in one case; coins with inscriptions Liam could not read in another; jewelry of strange design\u2014rings, bracelets, phylacteries\u2014in another. On the walls, a small tapestry the size of a hearthrug, depicting a stylized eagle soaring powerfully over purple mountains; a stringless, round-bodied lute hung by its neck; a sword and shield, simple and battered, beside a horn chased in silver.\n\n\"Truth,\" the Aedile said, turning to go, \"it seems there's naught stolen, so I needn't bother the fences.\"\n\nLiam reluctantly followed him. \"Eh?\"\n\n\"I needn't bother the fences.\" Liam's questioning look remained, so Coeccias went on. \"Naught stolen, Liam Rhenford. So checking the fences won't discover the murderer.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, yes. I see.\" His mind was still on the strange objects on the walls and in the cases, and he wished the Aedile had stayed there longer.\n\n\"So, with no thievery, we've only personality. Did anyone hate him? Hate him enough to stick him, that is?\"\n\nLiam shook his head. \"I wouldn't know. I don't think he knew many people in Southwark\u2014 except me, that is.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think many people knew of him, if you see, and there's tales enough of some having dealings with him. I'll see about that, and see if he has a testament.\"\n\n\"A testament?\"\n\n\"A will.\" Coeccias instantly supplied the synonym, interpreting his hesitation as confusion over the southern dialect. \"He might have left one, registered with the Duke's clerk. Some do, you know.\"\n\nLiam said nothing; he did not think Tarquin was the kind to leave a will.\n\n\"And then there's the interring. Someone'll have to bury him.\" The Aedile looked expectantly at him.\n\nI will take care of it.\n\n\"I'll take care of it,\" Liam said suddenly, paling at the intrusion. \"We spoke of how he'd want it once. Theoreti, cally, of course. I never thought ...\"\n\nThe Aedile's expectation turned to puzzlement, and Liam fidgeted. The dragon was arranging things in a way he did not understand, prompting him along paths he couldn't follow. But Coeccias misunderstood his reaction.\n\n\"How old are you, Liam Rhenford?\"\n\n\"Thirty,\" he responded.\n\n\"Thirty,\" the Aedile mused. He was easily ten years older than Liam, and the harsh lines around his eyes softened. \"And never seen a corpse ere this?\"\n\nLiam frowned. He had, many times. More times, he guessed, and deaths far worse, than the Aedile had.\n\nGo along.\n\n\"No,\" he said shakily.\n\n\"Shall I leave my man to help you?\"\n\nNo.\n\n\"No, I think ... \" He paused, with a convincing gulp. \"I think I can manage.\"\n\n\"Well enough,\" Coeccias said at last. \"I'll be about my business, then, if y'are sure.\"\n\nLiam nodded briefly.\n\nThe Aedile nodded as well and went for the door, stopping to ask where Liam was lodging.\n\n\"In\u00b7 case I hear anything, or need to speak with you, if you see.\"\n\nWhen Liam told him, the Aedile took his leave, collecting the other Guardsman. Liam went out onto the veranda and watched them wend their way up the narrow path. When they had topped the cliff, he went back in.\n\nFanuilh still lay on the table in the workroom, looking up at him serenely.\n\nThe scratching was good.\n\n\"And I suppose you'd like some more?\" Liam asked sarcastically, but he put out his hand and scratched the clothlike scales. \"How much of that did you know would happen?\"\n\nI anticipated a great deal of it.The dragon stretched pleasurably, if stiffly, underneath his hand, the simple, happy motion at odds with the cold thoughts.\n\n\"Why did you make me lie about hitting my head?\"\n\nYou know.\n\nLiam was surprised to find he did know. Coeccias had called the dragon Tarquin's pet; he did not understand about familiars, and if Liam had tried to explain he would have presumed that\u2014\n\n\"You didn't want him thinking we'd killed him together, you and I.\"\n\nIt would undoubtedly have occurred to him, and it would have made things difficult.\n\n\"So now he thinks I'm a weak fop, a man who turns squeamish at the sight of blood. One who's never seen a corpse before.\"\n\nDo you really care?\n\nWordlessly, Liam shook his head, and pulled his hand away from the dragon, struck by a thought. He imagined Fanuilh, a dagger stuck in his claws, hovering over Tarquin's sleeping body.\n\nA thought crashed down on the image, blotting it out.\n\nThat is foolishness. I could do no such thing.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Liam said hastily, stepping away from the table. It was foolishness, after all. The dragon could not have known he would come along, that there would be another soul for it to share.\n\nThere are things to do. You must fulfill our bargain.\n\n\"Yes.\" He shook his head, scattering the shards of his image. \"You'll teach me how to keep you out?\"\n\nYes, and more.\n\n\"And all I have to do is nurse you to health?\"\n\nAnd the other.\n\n\"The other,\" Liam repeated blankly, then remembered:\n\n\"The one you said you'd tell me when they'd gone?\"\n\nYes.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nYou must find whoever killed Master Tanaquil.\n\n\"Find the killer? That's what Coeccias is for,\" he said doubtfully.\n\nYou do not think the Duke's man can do it.\n\n\"I don't think he can, no. But if he can't do it, how could I? That's foolishness.\" He straightened and walked over to the model, his back to the dragon.\n\nYou knew Master Tanaquil better than the Duke's man. I knew him better. Between us, we can imagine who might have done it, and find the person. Besides you have done this before.\n\n\"Only a few times, and ... \" Liam whirled. \"How did you know that?\"\n\nWe are one. Your memories are mine, and mine would be yours, if you knew how. I know your thoughts everywhere.\n\nThere was no special emphasis on the last, but Liam imagined it, and blushed.\n\n\"You know what I was thinking, in the city?\"\n\nOf course.\n\nHe shook his head, trying to drive the thought out. \"No matter. Those were a long time ago, and the circumstances were different. I was very lucky.\"\n\nNonetheless, you have searched out murderers before. And you think you carry Luck with you.\n\nThat much was true, and that was how he thought of it Luck, personified, like a deity who watched over him. And he had, once or twice, unraveled mysteries.\n\n\"Even granting that I thought I could find the killer, why? Why do you want me to? Why bargain for that?\"\n\nFor the first time, Fanuilh's thought swirled, shapeless. It took what seemed a long time to form.\n\nI do not know.\n\n\"What would we do when we found out?\"\n\nAgain, the thought coalesced slowly.\n\nI do not know.\n\n\"Give the murderer to the Aedile?\"\n\nI suppose so.\n\nLiam wondered if the dragon was harboring dreams of vengeance, and blushed again when Fanuilh responded.\n\nI do not think so. It is simply something I feel must be done. Master Tanaquil was good to me.\n\nLiam sighed, turning back to the model of Southwark, losing his gaze in the intricate details. He thought of Tarquin, and their all too few conversations. The man had been interesting, if somewhat reserved. Pleasant in his way, seemingly harmless, an eccentric recluse claiming wizardry. But he had made the Teeth disappear, and he had a room filled with strange artifacts that Liam wanted to explore.\n\nI can show you how they all work. They can be yours. Is it a bargain?\n\nHe sighed again, leaning forward, resting his hands carefully on the edge of the model.\n\n\"See if you can't stay out of my head for a few moments, will you?\"\n\nHe had already decided to do it, he realized. If for no other reason than that the old man had let him swim off his breakwater. And if the dragon was lying, in any way, about anything, well, then ...\n\nBut he did not finish the thought. He simply let it swirl away, broken off, unsure of what he would do.\n\n\"Very well, it's a bargain. I'll need to know everything you can remember about Tarquin.\"\n\nFour hours later, as the pale sun sank down towards the horizon, Liam rode the muddy track back to Southwark. His stomach was queasy again, and though the ache in his ankle had not returned, he found the lump on the back of his head throbbing.\n\nHe had questioned the dragon closely for a long time, dredging up every detail of anyone who visited Tarquin. He was surprised at how many people besides himself had made the trip out from the city and down the cliff path, and, at the same time, how little Fanuilh knew about his master's business. The dragon could remember some names and most faces, and snatches of conversation, but apparently Tarquin had made a practice of excluding his familiar from his thoughts and his dealings. It seemed strange to Liam, to hide yourself from one you had voluntarily chosen to share your soul, but Fanuilh had not thought it out of the ordinary.\n\nIt had taken very little time to bury the wizard. He and Tarquin had never discussed their preferences for interment, but Fanuilh assured him that the old man had had no preference, and that simple burial would be enough.\n\nLiam had gone up the beach and found a spot close by the cliffs where the sand was heavier and more like dirt. Using a board, he scooped a deep narrow hole, cursing as the sand ran back into the grave. Finally, sweating through his tunic despite the cold wind off the sea, he decided it was deep enough and returned to the house for the body.\n\nHe wrapped it in the scarlet blanket and gingerly put his hands beneath it. Though the old man had been scrawny, his corpse was far heavier than Liam expected, but the stiffness was familiar from several battlefields. He managed to get the body to the grave, cursing his stupidity in choosing a site so far from the house.\n\nWhen he finally had Tarquin in his resting place, he stood for a moment, looking down at the red-wrapped bundle. It looked pitifully small at the bottom of the sandy trench, like a bright toy lost or forgotten by a careless child. The smell of brine and rotting seaweed filled his nostrils, stinging and cold.\n\nLiam had spent so long among strangers, peoples with strange gods and alien rites, that he could not think of whom to pray to, or how to pray. Undecided, he thought of nothing, listening instead to the slap of waves against the breakwater, and the rumble of the sea beyond.\n\n\"I suppose I can only ... \" he finally said, and left the sentence unfinished.\n\nIt did not take as long to shovel the sand back in.\n\nHe went back to the house only long enough to take his leave of the dragon.\n\nYou do not have to go back to the city, the dragon thought as he stood in the doorway of the workroom.\n\n\"I can't stay here,\" he muttered.\n\nIt would be easier.\n\n\"The answers you want are in Southwark. It'll be easier if I stay there.\"\n\nThere is that. But you will eventually stay here.\n\nSomething in the thought\u2014something imagined, Liam said to himself, though he felt it had been there\u2014implied certainty.\n\n\"It's not mine,\" he said. \"I'll be back tomorrow morning.\" With that, he walked away, and the dragon thought nothing more at him.\n\nIt was cold, as the year crept into its old age, and Liam folded his cloak closely about him. A procession barred his way briefly as he entered the city; he sat his horse patiently, waiting for it to pass. There was a small number of shaven-headed acolytes in pure white robes, carrying blank wax tablets and chanting sonorously. A gaggle of lay worshippers followed, heads bowed, and behind them came a crowd of solemn children. Liam wondered what it was all about, and then vaguely remembered that a number of processions in honor of the Goddess were supposed to be performed before Uris-tide. He noted that the omnipresent beggars were silent as the procession went past, and that the one-armed man who squatted in the gutter by him only rose to grasp his stirrup and moan when the marchers were out of sight. Tossing the wretch a coin, Liam spurred Diamond away.\n\nHe stopped at a stall that sold hot foods after he had stabled Diamond, and bought sausages and steaming bread, thinking of the magic oven in Tarquin's villa. He pushed the thought away. He hoped the sausages would stay hot until he got home, and hurried to his garret.\n\nThey did, and the grease had soaked into the bread. He thought they tasted wonderful, after he had carefully cleared all the papers and books off his table. He savored every spiced bite, and sucked his fingers when he was done.\n\nOutside his window, lights showed in some of the darkened streets, flickering torches and lanterns marking inns or temples; orange flames marched purposefully up and down lanes, and he thought of the Guard making their dusk patrol, checking doors and shooing beggars off the streets.\n\nSighing wearily, he washed his hands in the cold water left from the morning and set about sharpening his quill and preparing ink. Then, with several blank sheets of paper before him, he set to work outlining what Fanuilh had told him.\n\nIn the week before Tarquin had died, four people had visited him. It seemed like a large number, but when Liam thought of him as a wizard and not as an eccentric recluse, the visits did not seem so strange. An apothecary Tarquin had known well; a handsome young man who might have been a minstrel; a merchant of high standing with a bodyguard of toughs; a woman heavily cloaked. He dutifully wrote them down along with all that the familiar could recall about them, filling a sheet with his neat, cramped handwriting. All might have an innocent reason for seeking the help of a wizard, dangerous as that was held to be.\n\n\"Ask a wizard's help to find silver,\" ran an old saying that his landlady had sententiously quoted him, \"and be prepared to pay him gold.\"\n\nLiam wondered who made up those sayings, and whether he might be the one who had put a dagger in Tarquin's chest.\n\nShaking his head fiercely to clear away the thought, he turned his attention to the list he had made, and chose the apothecary to begin with. Fanuilh said the two had had a fight, or at least a very loud discussion, and that the druggist had stalked away grumbling darkly.\n\nIt seemed the best lead, not only because of the argument, but because the apothecary was the only person of whose name Fanuilh was sure. Ton Viyescu.\n\nTomorrow, Liam thought, I'll go see Ton Viyescu. And what will I say to him? 'Pardon, Master Druggist, but did you murder Tarquin Tanaquil? Or perhaps I should put it this way: are you missing any daggers?'\n\nHe pursed his lips sourly. Fanuilh had read his mind correctly\u2014he had searched out a mystery or two, but on those few occasions he had had authority. He had been allowed to ask questions, and piece together facts, and there had been armed men to back him up.\n\nCursing, he suddenly recalled the dagger. He had not looked at it closely, and it had not been there when he buried Tarquin. Coeccias must have taken it, though Liam had not seen him do it. His respect for the Aedile went up a notch.\n\nI'll have to see it, to know if it's important. And how do I do that? 'Excuse me, Aedile, but could I look at that knife? You see, I've lost mine, and I was wondering if the murderer might have picked it up...\n\nHe thought of telling the dragon he could not do it, simply could not search out the murderer, but then he remembered its cold eyes and hard-edged thoughts. Fanuilh would never let him out of the bargain.\n\nA knock interrupted his mental wanderings, and he strode slowly over to the door. It was his landlady.\n\n\"Your leave, Master Liam. I knew not you were in, or I'd have brought this sooner. A message from a lady, Master,\" she added. With a meaningful look and a knowing smile, she held out a folded, sealed piece of paper. He snatched it, almost but not quite rudely, his mouth narrowing at her insinuations.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he growled, and began to shut the door. She would have stopped him, but he stopped himself. \"Mistress Dorcas,\" he began, thinking to ask her what she knew of Ton Viyescu.\n\n\"Aye?\" Her very eagerness dissuaded him. She was a decent woman, he knew, but entirely too given to gossip.\n\n\"No, nothing. Thank you.\" He smiled warmly and firmly shut the door over her protests.\n\nThe letter, when he had finally stopped peering curiously at the intricate wax seal, was from Lady Necquer, forgiving his absence and asking him to come the next day. There was a note of pleading to it, he thought, as though she desperately wanted him to come. She even named the hour, and the comment she added about being deeply insulted if he failed to arrive might have been light, but hinted to him at something more serious. Not that she'd be insulted, but . ..\n\n\"Perhaps she's fallen in love with you, you handsome rogue,\" he said aloud. \"Liam Rhenford, breaker of hearts.\"\n\nHe laughed harshly at himself, and felt better for it.\n\nStill, there was something about the letter that made him decide to keep the appointment. The hour she had set was in the afternoon, and he could speak to Viyescu and make whatever other cautious inquiries he needed to in the morning.\n\nAs Liam lay in his bed later, trying to sleep, faces circled in his head, their clamoring keeping him awake.\n\nCoeccias, Mother Japh, the merchant Necquer and his wife, his landlady, Tarquin and Fanuilh. In the four months since he had arrived in Southwark, he had counted a day eventful if he had gone to Tarquin's to swim. And suddenly he was drunk at parties, receiving invitations from rich women, investigating murders and losing part of his soul.\n\nIt was a great deal for him to think about, after four months of isolation. The faces pressed around him, a rabble of voices and new memories. And above them all, for some reason, loomed the diminutive dragon, and its slitted cat's eyes, and solid thoughts like bricks in his head.\n\nLiam was a long time getting to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Even as long as Liam was getting to sleep, he woke shortly after sunrise, the noise of the stirring day rising up through his window. Carters shouted, it seemed, directly below, wagons creaking and oxen bellowing for the sole purpose of waking him. Children had gathered as well, their high-pitched games designed with his ruined sleep in mind.\n\nGrumbling, he pulled himself from his pallet and used the slight dampness at the bottom of his water bucket to wash the film from his eyes. When he felt he could see sufficiently, he searched for and lit a candle.\n\nThere was little light in the garret; the window was small and the sky clouded over, filled to bursting with big-bellied rain clouds.\n\n\"Rain,\" he muttered miserably. \"And I had such hopes of a ride in the countryside.\" The joke made him smile a little, though, and he picked up the bucket and went down the stairs two at a time, whistling by the time he reached the bottom.\n\nHis landlady was not up, as he knew she would not be, but there was a kettle heating in the huge kitchen hearth. A thin, gray-looking girl, the landlady's only servant, froze when he came down, whistling a sea chantey. Her eyes bulged, and he realized he had not put on his tunic.\n\nLiam let his whistling slide off and grinned wolfishly at her; she took one look at his scarred torso and his whipcord muscles before fleeing wordlessly into another room.\n\nWhat would Lady Necquer say if I arrived shinless? His grin widened, so wolfish the poor drudge would undoubtedly have fainted, and he filled his bucket with hot water from the kettle.\n\nBack in his room, he scrubbed himself thoroughly. While he dried, he scraped away the thin growth of stubble on his face with a pumice stone, wincing at the abrasion. He thought of Tarquin's comment on his beardlessness, and Mother Japh's.\n\n\"Hang them,\" he growled, and tried his wolfish grin again, liking it. Dressing in his best, a forest green tunic with white piping and matching breeches, he felt better than he had in a long while.\n\nSince he had come to Southwark, he realized, and swiped at the dirt on his high boots, managing to bring a shine to a small circle of leather. He looked at the rest of the muddy, stained bootleather, and shook his head.\n\nNot good enough to shine my boots, but better than in a long while.\n\nHis hangover was gone, the lump on the back of his head much smaller than the day before. And he had something to do. Not since long before he came to Southwark had he had something worth doing, and the thing he had come to do\u2014his book\u2014had simply not happened. Now he was in the middle of something. He had little idea how to go about it, but it was good to wake with a purpose.\n\nFilled with the wonder of this small discovery, he belted up his tunic and took money from his seachest to fill his purse. As he put the money away, he saw a small knife in a plain sheath and hesitated only a moment before picking it up. The last time he had tried to solve a mystery, a dagger had proven useful.\n\nLiam closed the chest, locked it, and hung the knife on his belt. He put his hand on the hilt and tried the wolf's grin again, laughed at himself, and went downstairs.\n\nThis time he did not startle the drudge, who looked at him with relief, as though in his fine tunic he fit the mold of a respectable scholar much better than he had when halfnaked and whistling dirty sailors' songs. He did not smile at all when he asked her if she knew where the druggist Viyescu's shop could be found.\n\nShe did not, but timidly suggested he try Northfield or Aurie's Park, two sections of the artisans' quarter. He smiled very gently at the poor girl and thanked her politely before leaving. He switched over to the wolf's grin as soon as he was out the door, and chuckled to himself as he walked the few blocks to the stables.\n\nThe lad he had sent with his message the day before was not there, but a boy who might have been his brother was more than willing to carry a message for him.\n\n\"Tell the Lady Necquer I'll be glad to wait on her at the hour she suggested,\" he said, and then when the boy dashed off down the street, \"Hey, boy! The message can wait until you've fetched my horse!\"\n\nWhen the shamefaced boy had retrieved his mount and repeated the message to his satisfaction, he sent him running again, and set off himself for the city gate.\n\nThe fat, slate-gray clouds put him in mind of winter, though the breeze from the sea was not very chilly. He remembered his previous winter, spent in a land where the sun shone hot and full all the time, and even the rains had seemed dazzlingly bright. He rode past pastures of cold, colorless grass and fields shorn clean, stripped. naked for the coming winter, and smiled. It would be his first winter in Taralon in a long time.\n\nFanuilh was waiting for him, still on the table in the workroom. The villa was warm, though no fires burned. Liam noticed for the first time that there were no fireplaces where they could bum. This was more of Tarquin's magic, he realized, still working even after the wizard's death. Liam had not known magic could work that way.\n\nThe spells are powerful, as was Master Tanaquil.\n\nThe dragon was looking at him, and again he found it difficult to connect the placid serpentine face with the stoneblock thought in his head.\n\n\"You're up early,\" he said cheerily, trying to dispel some of the silence that echoed loudly along the gleaming wood and clean white walls.\n\nI need little sleep. Would you get me food?\n\n\"Raw meat it is, little master. By your leave,\" Liam said, bowing deeply before the dragon. It stared up at him with what Liam guessed passed for curiosity, and he hurried off to the kitchen, thinking hard of uncooked steak.\n\nAs he watched Fanuilh neatly snap up mouthfuls of meat, he paced eagerly around the room, stopping and starting as one thing and another struck his imagination.\n\n\"What are all these things in the jars?\" He was looking at one in particular that might have been the preserved head of a dog. He shuddered and moved on, not waiting for an answer.\n\nYou are very light today.\n\n\"Well, my little master, if you could read my mind, you would know why.\"\n\nYes. You have accepted the bargain fully. You are eager to begin. I thought you would be.\n\n\"Did you?\" This sobered Liam slightly, and he paused before the tiny model of Southwark.\n\nYou carry Luck with you, and are checking to make sure you have not lost it.\n\nHe laughed out loud.\n\n\"True enough! I'm like a man come from the market, patting his purse to see if it still holds his gold. Only I can't feel for my Luck\u2014I have to prove it the hard way.\"\n\nFanuilh chewed placidly while Liam chuckled over its judgement. When the last of the meat was gone, it rolled slowly over on its back and exposed the dull gold of its belly.\n\nScratch? it thought. Liam could almost see the question mark, like black ink in his head. He hastened over and rubbed the dragon's stomach with his knuckles. The feeling like ridged cloth fascinated him.\n\nYou will see the druggist today?\n\n\"Viyescu? Yes, he seemed the proper place to begin.\" What will you say to him?\n\nLiam frowned, concentrating on evening out the area of his scratching, switching to his fingernails. \"I don't know,\" he said at last, flashing his wolf's grin. \"I'll find out when I get there, I suppose.\"\n\nDo not smile like that at him.\n\nHe laughed again, and the dragon squirmed impatiently beneath his hand, indicating that it had had enough scratching.\n\n\"If Your Highness has had enough, I'll be on my way,\" he said.\n\nDo not smile like that at him, the dragon thought again, and Liam threw a groan at the ceiling and left quickly.\n\nHe frightened his roan by leaping heavily into the saddle and kicking hard with his heels, urging the horse up the narrow cliff path at a fast trot.\n\nHe frightened himself with his own high spirits. With the cold and the shorn fields and the lowering gray clouds, with a dragon holding part of his soul and his only acquaintance dead, he should have been depressed.\n\nInstead, he was eager to begin his search.\n\nViyescu's shop was on the landward side of the city, in a quiet section of the artisans' quarter called Northfield. The rise on which Southwark sat was steep on the south, so that the houses of the rich quarter rose above each other on streets like mountain paths; but the slope was far gentler to the north, and the streets of the artisans' quarter were broader and less steeply inclined. Cobblestoned in the same black stone as the rest of the city, they nonetheless seemed brighter because the houses had fewer stories and more of the gray vault of sky showed beyond the peaked gables.\n\nA helpful washerwoman and a colorful sign directed him to the apothecary. Above the scrubbed doorstep hung a yellow board on which a skillful hand had painted a wreath of ivy over a steaming thurible. The brand was heated by a stooping woman whose breath was flames.\n\nUris, Liam remembered. Though Uris-tide was not celebrated. in the Midlands, he knew enough of her from the sea, where she was honored as the Giver of Direction, the inspirator of navigators and charters. He also remembered her as the patron of alchemists, herbalists, and druggists, though most of those that he knew gave her only lip service.\n\nTon Viyescu, it seemed, gave her more credit than that.\n\n\"A religious man,\" Liam said to himself and, assuming a grave expression, walked into the shop.\n\nViyescu looked almost exactly as he had expected, almost familiar in a tantalizing way Liam could not put his finger on, but the state of the shop was unexpectedly different. The druggist was short and gnarled like the roots he sold, with a magnificently tangled expanse of bushy black beard flecked with gray creeping up his cheeks and endangering his tiny, gleaming eyes. He wore a stained leather apron tied over equally stained fustian that might once have been white but was now an ugly yellow-gray. His hands, composed almost entirely of huge knuckles, rested impatiently on the wooden counter. He stood behind it like it was a wall and Liam a spear-shaking raider.\n\nThe shop, however, was not the musty, disordered mess he had expected from his other experiences with apothecaries. It was crowded, but each thing seemed to occupy its proper place. Herbs hung in bunches from dowel racks, the spacing between each leafy bundle exact; roots in open boxes filled shelves, their names carefully painted in clear letters on the shelf beneath them. Flasks, pottery jars and heavy glass decanters lined the higher shelves, ranked like soldiers and labeled like the roots. The druggist's protective counter was bare and clean; behind him ran another counter, on which were neatly arranged the tools of his trade. Several mortars with pestles in attendance, a tiny brazier with glowing coals, a thick-bottomed glass beaker for boiling, and a rack of glass and copper tubes of different lengths, jointed and beveled so they could be attached one to the other.\n\nA precise man, Liam thought, as well as religious. It came to him where he had seen Viyescu before: he had been in the procession the day before, at the front of the lay worshippers.\n\n\"You are the apothecary?\" He managed to achieve a decent Torquay accent, thick and musical.\n\n\"I am Ton Viyescu,\" the druggist growled, eyeing him rudely, and Liam assumed it was his normal manner. His accent marked him from the far northwest, a harsh land by any standards, and not likely to breed politeness.\n\n\"I only ask because I have, well, I have important business, and I wish only to deal with a, well, with someone who really knows.\"\n\nViyescu squinted suspiciously at him, his beady eyes almost lost in wrinkles. \"I know what there is to know about herbs, Master ...?\"\n\nThe question was so pointed that Liam could not ignore it. \"Cance,\" he answered. \"Hierarch Cance, from Torquay.\" He chose a religious title, and it seemed to affect the druggist.\n\n\"Ah, well, Hierarch, what can I do for you?\" There were no protests of humility, but the hunched man's attitude loosened a little, and he stopped squinting and shifted his hands slightly on the counter, indicating a willingness to serve, if not an eagerness.\n\n\"You see, I came to Southwark to meet a man, a wizard\"\u2014he whispered the word, as though it were dangerous in itself\u2014\"and now I find he is dead. Murdered.\" He nodded somberly, but inwardly he cursed. The druggist was nodding also, not the least surprised, although he seemed a little puzzled.\n\n\"And who would this wizard be, Hierarch?\"\n\n\"One Tarquin Tanaquil,\" Liam responded cautiously. \"Perhaps you knew him?\"\n\n\"Oh, I knew him. I knew him well enough.\" His tone; indicated that the acquaintance had not been pleasant, and there was something else, a change in his eyes, like the shutting of a door.\n\n\"You sound as though you did not like him,\" Liam said, but continued before the druggist could respond. \"I ask, you see, because he was engaged on, well, on certain works for us that are of some importance. Uris-tide is almost upon us, you know.\" He filled the last sentence with as much importance as it could hold, and let it hang in the air of the shop, competing for preeminence with the musty smell of dried herbs.\n\n\"Hm. So it is,\" the druggist finally said, nodding himself. \"He did not seem the sort of man who would care much for Uris-tide. A nonbeliever, he seemed to me, Hierarch.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, the ends of the gods are often served by those who do not know them,\" Liam said hastily.\n\n\"Still ... Tanaquil was a strange tool for the gods, if you ask me. A filthy man, of filthy habits.\"\n\n\"How filthy? Evil? Did he serve the Darker Gods?\"\n\n\"No, no, not that,\" the druggist said quickly, his hands finally leaving the counter to protest the accusation. \"Simply not a godly man. A worldly man, like so many, given to his pleasures, and not much bound by the heavens' laws,\" he continued bitterly. \"And proud, very proud. He would not listen to others. I meant nothing else.\"\n\n\"You knew him well, then?\"\n\n\"Better than most, I suppose. We had reasons for dealings\u2014I sold him certain roots he had difficulty attaining.\"\n\nLiam gave a sigh of relief. \"Then you knew of his business. Tell me, did he\u2014\" He got no further, stopped by Viyescu's dark scowl.\n\n\"I did not know his business, Hierarch,\" he said flatly. \"Oh.\" He did not need to fake disappointment, only a reason. \"I had hoped ... you see, the work he was engaged in was very\u00b7 important, and when 1 heard he was dead, I thought he might have confided in a colleague.\"\n\n\"We were not colleagues. He was a wizard; l am an apothecary. The two are not the same.\" Viyescu spoke coldly, crossing his arms firmly on his chest, but Liam sensed something beyond the distinctions of professional pride.\n\n\"I know, but there are no other wizards\u00b7 in this benighted city, and I thought, 'Who else would a wizard have dealings with?' and thus came to you. And when I saw Uris on your sign, I allowed myself to hope.\" He also allowed himself a small sigh.\n\nViyescu relented a little, letting his hands drop to the counter. \"I am sorry, Hierarch, but my business with the wizard extended only to selling him certain roots, and occasionally procuring the rarer types for him. No more, Hierarch, no more.\"\n\n\"Yes, I see, I see.\" His head dropped, deep in troubled thought. \"You wouldn't by any chance have sold him any Percin's Bane, would you?\" Percin's Bane was very rare, Liam knew, and only grew in the King's Range; he chose it because it was uncommon.\n\n\"No,\" Viyescu responded immediately. \"There is no Percin's Bane in the south.\"\n\nLiam waited, hoping the druggist would go on, but Viyescu showed no sign of continuing, so he shook his head resignedly and walked to the door. As he was opening it, the druggist's voice stopped him.\n\n\"May I ask, Hierarch, how you know Tanaquil was murdered?\"\n\n\"I was there,\" Liam answered, and then hurried on: \"At his house, yesterday. The morning, actually, after he had been killed. One of the Sheriff's men told me about it. I was quite shaken. The enchantment was so important to us.\" He let the door close and turned back, trying to inject innocence into his question. \"Is the death not common knowledge? I would think the death of a wizard as powerful as Master Tanaquil would be instantly known.\"\n\n\"Tarquin was very reclusive. I doubt if half the town even knew he was alive.\"\n\n\"May I ask how you know of his death?\" He arched an eyebrow politely, but Viyescu still stiffened.\n\n\"The Aedile\u2014the Sheriff\u2014told me of it when he came to question me. He apparently had the same thought as you.\"\n\nLiam gnawed a knuckle worriedly. \"I can only hope he was not killed by those who would stop our work. Tell me, had he any enemies? Perhaps among the foes of religion?\"\n\nViyescu laughed harshly, like crunching gravel. \"The foes of religion were least likely to be his enemies, Hierarch.\" He stopped and thought, weighing something, and then went on firmly. \"Though I cannot imagine any others who would be. He was very jealous of his privacy, as I've said.\"\n\nConsidering this for a moment, Liam gnawed more. \"Tell me, if you would, when did you see him last?\"\n\n\"Only a week or so ago, Hierarch. I went to see him on an unimportant matter.\"\n\n\"I thought you only had business dealings with him?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Viyescu said slowly, \"yes, only business dealings. Yes.\" He tugged at his bushy beard, chewing a little at the end of his mustache. He was considering some\u2014' thing of even greater importance than before, and finally spoke uneasily, choosing each word with care, measuring the effect on Liam. \"There was a woman, really a girl only, who was in trouble.\" Liam assumed a questioning air, and the druggist went on reluctantly. \"Caught in sin, Hierarch. Pregnant.\" He spit the distasteful word out.\n\n\"And so you went to see Master Tanaquil? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"The girl came to me, trying to buy an herb called santhract. It can destroy a pregnancy, Hierarch.\"\n\nLiam meant only to show curiosity, but Viyescu seemed to misread his expression, and his cheeks burned red with anger beneath his upward-creeping beard.\n\n\"I do not sell this herb, Hierarch, and so I told her! I told her only to pray, but she cursed me, and said some. thing about Tarquin, so l went to him to warn him of her sin.\" He spoke thickly, indignation and righteous anger and something else, maybe desperation, making him slightly frightening.\n\n\"You did right, Master Apothecary,\" Liam said softly.\n\n\"Thank you, Hierarch,\" Viyescu said, still angry, and Liam detected more disappointment than gratitude in the words. He murmured some thanks of his own and headed for the door.\n\nIn the street, with the thick door between him and the angry apothecary, he breathed a deep sigh of relief, and offered up an apology to Uris on her sign for impersonating one of her priests. Then he apologized to his fluttering stomach. Though his face felt cool and there was no sweat on his forehead, the back of his neck was flushed, and heat gathered in his armpits and at the small of his back.\n\nHis roan was skittish, smelling his disquiet as he swung up into the saddle, and he soothed the horse. with a steady hand and a gentle, \"Easy, Diamond, easy.\"\n\nDamned horse is more upset than I am, and he didn't even pretend he was a priest. Which I'll never do again, he thought, urging the horse to a trot through the uncrowded streets.\n\nViyescu had not been particularly threatening, for all his gruffness and angry talk of sin, and the weird edge of desperation that had hung like smoke around him. But it was dangerous to pretend to be someone he was not, he decided. Though he was a relative stranger to the town, the possible complications were enormous.\n\nStill, for his first attempt, the interview had yielded some results. A cursing girl, deep in sin, who muttered things about Tarquin. She was not on his list, and perhaps she should be.\n\nAfter all, who might have gotten her pregnant?\n\nHe remembered an afternoon early in the summer, drying in the warm sun on the breakwater. The sound of laughter had roused him from his heat-induced torpor, and he had swiveled his head around to look at the stone veranda. Tarquin had been hugging a young woman, who was struggling with him and giggling. She pulled away finally with an embarrassed glance at Liam, and scurried up the path, holding her skirts high. And the old wizard had rubbed his hands briskly together, tipping Liam a lecherous wink before going inside again. It was before he and Tarquin had ever really spoken, and Liam had gone back to the sun thinking only that it was amazing for such an old man. But then, he was a wizard after all, and he had heard of spells ....\n\nWho would risk killing a wizard?\n\nAn angry husband or father, or even the kind of woman who would try to buy santhract from a worshipper of Uris. Or a druggist who detested sin, and perhaps had a more personal relationship with the young woman than he wished to reveal.\n\nIt was not much more than speculation, Liam knew, a kind of daydreaming; but it might lead to something more, and it was the only clue he had.\n\nAnother thought struck him as he rode south out of Northfield, into the narrower, steeper streets of the poorer quarters, where his lodgings were. The Aedile had been there before him. He felt sure he knew far more than Coeccias did about Tarquin's doings, but the idea of having the blunt man precede him around town did little to quiet his stomach. And it was entirely possible that his name might be raised in the course of the Aedile's questioning, which would make his own investigation more difficult.\n\nBeing little known in Southwark might 'have meant he could continue to pretend to be someone he was not, though his own inclination was against it; but if someone caught him out because of something Coeccias had said, it could be dangerous. On the other hand, being little known also meant he knew little. If he had had more information about Viyescu, he might have gotten more out of him.\n\nHe tried to think who might supply that kind of information. Barkeeps and the like, of course, though they were often unreliable. His landlady was certainly a great gossip, but he knew she was unreliable, and gossip often ran both ways.\n\nHis stomach grumbled, and he realized it must be long past noon. There would be time to eat, he hoped, before his appointment with Lady Necquer.\n\nSuddenly, the wolf's grin spread over his face. Lady Necquer ,very much wished to hear about all the places he had been, and he very much wished to hear about the place they were.\n\nPerhaps they could help each other.\n\nLiam had misjudged the time; it was only a little after midday when he stabled his horse, and he had almost two hours before he had to be at Necquer's home. He ate lightly at a tavern near his garret, taking his time, thinking of polite ways to question the .merchant's wife about Southwark.\n\nWhen he was done, he went back to his room and gathered up a few maps and some books. Then he set out on foot for the Point, climbing the steep streets with his papers tucked under his arm. Bells clanged faintly over the Duke's court, the sound muffled by the heavy storm clouds. A ragged bootblack squatted by the side of the road beside the ironbound door of a merchant, and Liam had the boy shine his boots, tossing him a coin far larger than the job deserved. The boy peered up at him for a moment with what seemed like scorn; Liam shrugged and strode away, up the hill towards Necquer's.\n\nAn elderly servant in a simple smock opened the door for him before he could knock, and led him through the house towards the stone porch at the rear. Without its crowd of celebrating commoners, the house seemed hallowed, almost templelike: delicate furniture lightly carven, gilt-framed mirrors and tasseled tapestries from far lands, crystal and silver, rich, dark woods. Traces of Necquer's occupation showed in the distant origins of some of the crystal and the foreign landscapes in the tapestries, but on the whole it was quietly Taralonian, restrainedly opulent. A hush hung over everything.\n\nLady Necquer was on the porch, looking out at the rough sea. Wrapped in a heavy cloak of dark wool, she huddled in a high-backed cushioned chair; her fine dark hair whipped wildly around her face, which was pointed anxiously westward, at the Teeth. The wind, blocked out of the street by the high, densely packed houses, clawed fiercely at the exposed porch, howling off the whitecapped ocean. The cold had brought crimson spots to her cheeks, and she frowned pensively.\n\nHe came level with her chair and bowed politely. The servant coughed.\n\n\"Sir Liam, madam.\"\n\nThe concern that had wrinkled her brow lessened, and she started up, a hesitant smile on her lips.\n\n\"Sir Liam! I thought you would not come! Lares, hot wine for us, when we go in.\" The servant bowed and retreated. Lady Necquer returned her gaze to the sea, and Liam looked at her.\n\n\"Hard and cruel to look on,\" she murmured, stepping away from her chair to the stone balustrade. The wind tugged at her heavy cloak. Liam pressed his books and maps firmly beneath his arm, and felt compelled to speak, as though she had invited comment.\n\n\"Yes, it is, but at peace the sea can be the most beautiful thing in the world.\"\n\nShe shifted her gaze to look curiously at him.\n\n\"I spoke not of the sea, Sir Liam. Those\u2014\" She gestured vaguely towards the Teeth, and then suddenly shivered. \"It grows cold. Come, let's in.\" She led the way, shuddering, into the house. Liam followed.\n\nIn a parlor on the second floor, with coals glowing in the small grate, the same servant brought them mulled wine. Lady Necquer removed her wool cloak, showing a highnecked gown with full skirts, completely unrevealing in the fullness of its dyed purple pleats and folds. Her moodiness was gone, and she smiled at him.\n\n\"You must forgive my distraction, Sir Liam. The cold days like me not. I grow foolish, and I sorely doubted your coming. You wronged me not to come yesterday. I placed much on it.\" She faltered, and then went on in a different tone. \"But I see you've brought books and charts; come, begin your discourse, and I'll attend with a ready ear.\"\n\nLiam took a sip of the mulled wine, and began unfolding his maps.\n\nRain was pattering against the thick-paned windows long before he thought of the wine again. Charmed by her interest and attentiveness, he spoke for a long while, finding more to tell than he thought he would. He had been a great number of places that were only rumors to her, and many more she had never heard of, and he detailed strange customs and foreign peoples for her, drawn on by her obvious interest. With the maps and the books, he traced some of the long pattern of his wanderings, and barely scratched the surface of what he had seen.\n\nFascinated as she was, she leaned towards him, and her eyes sparkled as he described wonders from far away. Sometimes he caught the hint of a sweet scent and remembered her beauty, but she maintained a detachment, a sort of sexual neutrality in the way she pored over the maps with him. He could not tell if she was being wise or merely innocent.\n\nHe did not speak of half he had seen, and almost none of what he had done. He left out the wars he had fought in; the crimes he had, on occasion, had to commit; the worst of the horrors he had seen were glossed over without comment; but she asked shrewd questions, drawing inferences and connections he had never considered.\n\nThe lecture became a conversation, and though her eyes darted fairly often to a sandclock on the sideboard, her interest never flagged. In fact, it seemed that the more the afternoon wore on, the more questions she asked, the harder she tried to prolong their talk.\n\nFinally there came a pause, and Liam relaxed in his chair, giving his attention to his now-cold wine and the sky outside. It was full dark, the drops of rain trickling down the panes, silver and gold with reflected candlelight.\n\n\"I think I must go now, madam. It is dark, and I'm sure you must be tired.\" He did not move, waiting for her response.\n\nShe did not speak for a long minute, and when she did, it was not to\u00b7 excuse him.\n\n\"Tell me, Sir Liam, in your travels, have you ever seen a mirror of the Teeth?\" The question came from far away, and she seemed to have relapsed into her earlier depression.\n\n\"A mirror of the Teeth?\" It was the question that put him off, but she presumed it was her dialect.\n\n\"Their semblance, I mean. Anything like them.\"\n\n\"Well, I have seen shoals and reefs of great size, and some coastlines almost as rocky as Southwark's, but nothing as impressive as the Teeth, no.\"\n\n\"Impressive?\" she echoed, and it was almost a hiss. \"Say rather murderous, or Dark\u2014anything but impressive!\"\n\nHer eyes were wide and deep with anger, and her cheeks flushed. Liam stood up hastily.\n\n\"It is late. I believe I should go, madam.\"\n\nLady Necquer's anger disappeared, and she sank back in her chair, deflated.\n\n\"It would be well, I suppose, Sir Liam.\" She stood wearily, as though it were an effort. \"I should invite you to dine, but with my lord gone, it would not be seemly.\" She ventured a wan smile.\n\n\"Will he be long in Warinsford?\" Liam inquired politely. \"He returns in two days, ere Uris-tide. I anticipate his return eagerly.'.' The smile grew more natural.\n\n\"As do we all, I'm sure. Goodnight, madam.\"\n\nShe followed him to the stairs, thanking him for entertaining her.\n\n\"A most gentle discourse, Sir Liam, and one I would gladly repeat. Perhaps\u2014\" She stopped high on the steps, her smile draining away. From the hall came the sound of voices, the servant's polite husk and another, smooth and refined, but angry:\n\n\"I tell you, man, I've an appointment with the lady!\" Lady Necquer clutched Liam's arm.\n\n\"Relay to Lares that I am sudden sick, if you would,\" she whispered, and then continued, more fiercely. \"And please, Sir Liam, return tomorrow!\" He began to equivocate, but she pressed his arm. \"Please!\"\n\nHe took a deep breath and nodded once. She turned and fled back into her parlor. With another breath and a bemused shake of his head, Liam descended to the hall.\n\nThe handsome young man who had fled Necquer's party stood in the doorway, glaring down at the servant. A rainstained cloak mantled his broad shoulders, dripping water on the wooden boards. With an arrogant flip of his head he looked Liam over, and dismissed him by raking a hand through his sodden mane. He returned his attention to the servant.\n\n\"I'll repeat it once more, churl: this is the appointed hour of my meeting, and I mean to have it!\"\n\nLiam's eyes narrowed, examining the angry man in detail. A perfectly drawn face, strong chin, nose just sharp enough, widely set, flashing eyes; broad chest, tall, well muscled. His voice echoed magnificently, eloquent and musical. A golden, leonine hero to Necquer's dark tradesman.\n\nNow why would a woman like Poppae Necquer spend an afternoon with the likes of me, and then flee such a one as this? Liam wondered.\n\n\"Lares,\" he said, \"the lady asked me to inform you that she is indisposed.\"\n\nBoth the servant and the handsome man turned to him.\n\n\"Aye, Sir Liam,\" the servant said gratefully, but the young man glared at him with deep hatred. Liam returned the stare impassively, and suddenly the other spun on his heel and marched out of the house, slamming the door loudly behind him.\n\nIn the moment of silence that followed, the two men shared a look\u2014indifferent surprise for Liam, immense relief for the servant. Liam broke it first.\n\n\"I wonder, Lares, if you could find me a piece of oilcloth. I'm afraid the rain would do little good for my papers.\"\n\nHe indicated his books and maps with a small smile, and the old servant scurried off willingly to look."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Liam hurried home through the dark, slippery streets, and found his landlady waiting for him, wringing her hands anxiously. He was soaked to the skin and tried to ignore her, wanting nothing more than to go to his room and dry off.\n\n\"Oh, Master Liam,\" she exclaimed as he brushed past her, \"the Aedile was here only an hour gone, conning about for you!\"\n\n\"Was he,\" Liam said politely, heading for the stairs with a bright, empty smile.\n\n\"Think you it was about the wizard's death?\"\n\nThat ground him to a halt, and he turned slowly.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I thought, you having passed more than the odd hour with him, that the Aedile might suspect you!\" She mispronounced \"Aedile\" to rhyme with \"ladle,\" but he did not correct her.\n\n\"Did he say that? And how did you know Tarquin was dead?\"\n\nThe stem edge in his voice unnerved her, as though it had confirmed her fears. \"No, not so I recall. He mere said he'd have words with you, but I thought that you knowing the wizard\u2014\" Liam cut her off.\n\n\"How did you hear that Tarquin was dead?\"\n\n\"Well,\" she fretted, \"I didn't exactly know to be. certain until the Aedile came, but's being bruited around the town by some. I heard from one who knows a member of the Guard.\"\n\nLiam smiled grimly and started up the steps.\n\n\"But, Master Liam, what should I do if the Aedile comes again?\" she called after him, and he laughed at her worry.\n\n\"Show him up,\" he called back, \"and pronounce his title correctly!\"\n\nIn his room he unwrapped his papers from the sheet of oilskin Lares had given him, and checked them carefully to see if they had gotten wet. When he was satisfied they had not been harmed, he changed to dry clothes, a far simpler tunic and long trousers of gray flannel. He draped his wet tunic over his chair and eyed his boots with displeasure. The punctures from Fanuilh's teeth had let water in, soaking his feet, and he put them aside, hoping they could be repaired. He slipped on a pair of low felt shoes and lay down on his pallet to think.\n\nCoeccias had come looking for him, and if it wasn't already, the news of Tarquin's death would soon be common knowledge to those who cared to know.\n\nThe first could mean any of several things. Possibly there were some simple questions the Aedile had forgotten to ask him. More likely something had come up that had caused the man to suspect him anew, despite Mother Japh's judgement. Least likely, of course, was that the Aedile had decided to share whatever information he had. Liam frowned at the thought.\n\nThe fact that the death would soon be common knowledge meant he had been right to presume his investigation would become vastly more difficult. It also made Lady Necquer's uselessness more disappointing.\n\nThere was something desperate going on with her, concentrating her so completely on herself that she would have little interest in helping him. It revolved around the handsome young man, obviously, and Liam's visit and her insistence on it had been along the lines of a distraction from her greater problem. Or perhaps, he realized, as protection.\n\nWhatever the reason, she was in no state of mind to involve herself seriously in the affairs of a dead wizard. Nonetheless, he found himself curious about her problem. What danger the young man presented Liam could not guess. If he was a lover, she had no reason to fear him. He could not threaten exposure, as Liam had known lovers to do, because it was clear from his behavior at the party that Master Necquer suspected something. It was equally clear that he did not blame his wife.\n\nWhat, then, could be the problem?\n\nAlthough he was partly aware that he had a more important riddle to unravel, he gave himself over for a while to considering the distraught young woman.\n\nThe heavy tread of boots on the stairs and Mistress Dorcas's voice interrupted him after a while. She spoke loudly, repeating \"Aedile Coeccias\" several times, and it was painfully obvious that she was trying to warn him. He got up quickly and surprised the Aedile by opening the door before Coeccias could knock.\n\n\"Rhenford!\" he said, blinking his eyes. \"It's well y'are in. I've been conning for you.\"\n\n\"So I've heard, Aedile. Please come in.\" He smiled over Coeccias's shoulder at his landlady, who was hovering nervously on the stairs and rolling her eyes. \"Thank you for showing the Aedile up, Mistress Dorcas.\" He deliberately stressed the proper pronunciation.\n\n\"I'm afraid you've frightened my landlady, Aedile,\" he continued when he had shut the door firmly in her face. \"She thinks you mean to arrest me for Master Tanaquil's murder.\"\n\nCoeccias ran a scarred hand through his now-trimmed beard and looked around the garret with mild curiosity. \"Truth, Rhenford, I may well do that ere long. I've seen some rare parchments this day.\" He stood by Liam's table, idly shuffling the papers there, occasionally sparing a glance out the window. Liam leaned casually against the door.\n\n\"Oh?\" he said, with as much indifference as he could muster.\n\n\"Oh? Oh, indeed. Rare parchments, I say, rarer than rare. The wizard's testament, booked and noted in the Duke's own court, by the Duke's own clerks, and waxed with the Duke's own seal. A rare testament, that.\"\n\n\"How rare, Aedile Coeccias?\"\n\nThe burly officer found something that interested him in the papers on the table, and Liam thought belatedly of his list of suspects.\n\n\"Y'are a scholar, Rhenford?\" Coeccias asked suddenly. \"I have studied,\" Liam began, wincing over the list.\n\n\"Tarquin must've liked scholars, Rhenford. He left you all.\"\n\n\"What?\" He could not hide his astonishment, and forgot the list. \"Left me all?\"\n\n\"Seat, fortune, goods-all. Y'are amazed?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Liam stammered. \"I hardly knew him!\"\n\n\"Better than anyone else, it seems. It'd be a strong stroke against you, in the Duke's court.\"\n\nThe return of Coeccias's suspicion hit Liam hard on the heels of the news of Tarquin's will. \"You know, in the days when your title was coined, if a man were falsely accused, his accuser was held guilty for the crime,\" he said coldly.\n\nCoeccias chuckled. \"I'd expect a scholar to know that, but I'd also expect him to know that the Aedile's office exempted him from the same statute. How else to uphold the law?\"\n\nStung, Liam flushed. He had not thought the roughlooking Aedile would know the law's qualifier. His hands bunched at his sides, but he said nothing. Coeccias dropped his eyes to the paper that had interested him.\n\n\"I'll admit, Rhenford, I came intent on clapping you in. I thought the testament would unnerve you, and if pressed hard, you'd break. But now I think I've erred. Y'are a poor actor, Rhenford, too poor for a killer. And I uncover this scribbling.\" He held a piece of paper up, nothing but mild curiosity in his voice. \"Now, it strikes me strange that a scholar should have a list of a dead man's acquaintances, with notes of arguments and visits all within the last sevennight. Truth, very strange. I'd almost say that scholar was idly scribbling a list of who might have taken off the dead man. Wouldn't you?\"\n\nHe gave a small smile, and Liam frowned but said nothing.\n\n\"Can you think of a reason why a scholar should make such a list?\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Liam said slowly, trying to control the anger he knew should be directed at himself for leaving the list out, \"perhaps he thought the Aedile was too much of a fool to find the murderer, and decided to do the job himself.\"\n\nCoeccias roared with laughter, filling the garret with the surprising sound. He slapped his knee with the list.\n\n\"Truth, perhaps he did! Perhaps he did! Oh, y'are a rare murderer, Rhenford, a rare murderer!\" Fresh laughter exploded out of him as he folded the list carefully in quarters and stowed it in his black tunic. Liam had no idea what to do, and simply waited while the Aedile finished his laughter.\n\n\"Come,\" Coeccias said finally. \"I'd have you eat with me, Rhenford.\"\n\nIt was drizzling still, but Coeccias chose a tavern nearby, and ducked quickly through the cold shower without a word. Liam sat across the plank table, looking at the Aedile with distrust only half-concealed as the larger man called across the almost empty common room to order beer and food. When the keeper had recognized his order, he turned to Liam with a serious look.\n\n\"So, the eyes that scan tomes now con a murderer.\" Liam nodded, wondering what the Aedile was thinking. \"Truth, Rhenford, that likes me not. I'm not sure I need you murking the waters with ill-advised questions. Now, I know you think me a clown\"\u2014he held up a hand to forestall Liam's denial\u2014\"and you may have the right of it. The eagle's eyes are not mine, and I don't see into shadowed hearts. I'm certainly simpler than a scholar, no matter how innocent his face. Yet I'm still Aedile.\"\n\n\"Which means?\" Liam had begun frowning deeply at the mention of his innocent face. He found it difficult to contain his uneasiness, and drummed his fingers on the table, looking around the tavern through the smoky rushlight.\n\n\"Which means I can't very well allow you to search out an assassin on your own. Yet you have a list of possibles that I'd never have had, and you knew the wizard best. Not well, perhaps, but better than any else. And I can't tell you not to search.\"\n\n\"So?\" He was on the brink of being rude when a serving girl came by and placed beer in clay steins on the table, along with a basket of bread, salt and boiled eggs. The Aedile dug in, salting a torn piece of bread and an egg and eating them in big bites. He left Liam waiting impatiently until he had washed down his first egg with a gulp of beer, and then spoke as he set about preparing a second egg.\n\n\"So, Rhenford, I'll find you running about the town, as I said, murking the waters and making my work harder. And,\" he said, gesturing significantly with his egg before biting into it, \"you'll find me doing the same to you.\"\n\nLiam took an egg and nibbled at it unsalted, some of his irritation dissipating as he guessed where the Aedile was headed.\n\n\"So we are in each other's way, Aedile. That will be inconvenient if either of us is to resolve this.\"\n\n\"Truth, inconvenient is too small a word for such a large stumbling block.\"\n\n\"What will we do about it?\"\n\nCoeccias once again paused as the girl put down two steaming pies on wooden platters.\n\n\"I could ask you not to involve yourself,\" he said, steepling his fingers over the pie and examining Liam's face, and then waved away the suggestion with a laugh. \"But I've enough sense to know you'd not. Y'are serious about it? Not merely dabbling to satisfy a scholar's curiosity?\"\n\n\"Very serious.\" Liam began eating, cutting into the meat and vegetable pie, highly spiced as most food was in Southwark. He waited for the Aedile this time, who only spoke after he had gone through several bites of his own pie, and then only around a large mouthful.\n\n\"I know not why, but I'll warrant you mean it. Then if you'll not keep out of it, and are serious, and my position mearis I can't keep out of it, and must be serious, then sense says we work together.\"\n\nIt was what Liam had guessed, but he kept his satisfaction from his voice.\n\n\"That would seem to be a good idea.\"\n\n\"Good. Then lay out what you know, Rhenford.\" Liam eyed him with a half-smile. \"How do I know you won't simply listen and then arrest me to keep me out of your way?\"\n\n\"Truth, you don't,\" Coeccias said with a wolf's grin that looked far more natural than Liam's earlier one. He must have blanched, because the Aedile snorted and held out his hand, after wiping it on his black tunic. \"Would my word suffice?\"\n\n\"No, no, I'll trust you,\" Liam said hastily, and Coeccias withdrew his hand with another snort.\n\nWithout mentioning Fanuilh, he elaborated on the list the dragon had given him. He had thought it would be difficult to explain knowing so much about Tarquin's visitors, but the Aedile asked no questions, simply nodding as Liam ticked off each visitor and what he knew of them. Finally he came around to his interview with the druggist Viyescu, his imposture of a Hierarch, and what he had learned from it.\n\nCoeccias listened in silence, working his way through his entire pie before Liam was finished. When he was done with the meal, he pushed the platter away and leaned back from the table with a sigh.\n\n\"Well, I'll admit you've a great deal more information than I. I did ill not to clap you in yesterday and examine you closer.\"\n\n\"So what do you know? Apart from the will, that is?\"\n\n\"Only what you've told me, Rhenford. Truth, I knew little enough about the wizard.\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" Liam exclaimed. \"You know nothing? It looks like I've made a poor deal!\"\n\n\"I, on the other hand, have made off surpassing well, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nLiam massaged his brow roughly, but he had to chuckle at the Aedile's sated-cat grin. \"Well, then,..\u2014 he finally said, \"the least you could do is try to live up to the bargain.\"\n\n\"It would seem fair,\" Coeccias grinned.\n\n\"What about the knife? You took it, I assume. Was there anything special about it?\"\n\n\"Only that it was of the sort used by rude players, jugglers and the like. They come in pairs, and have uncommon broad hilts; in one of the pair, the blade retracts harmlessly. For death scenes and the like in entertainments.\"\n\n\"Well, then, that would point to the minstrel\u2014\" Liam began eagerly, but caught himself when Coeccias started to interrupt. \"Or a clever man who wished to put the blame elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Y' are quick enough. A clever man who wished to point as far away from himself as possible. If he chose a player's knife, that would make him high-born, or at least rich. That would indicate the merchant you saw. And 'less I miss the mark, he would be Ancus Marcius. Oft he travels with the sort of rough boys you described, and is given to the sort of blustering you heard. When did you say he came to the beach?\"\n\nFanuilh's memory had been good, but his sense of time was inexact; the only way to place the date of the merchant's visit was by the weather.\n\n\"A day or two after the last of the really fierce storms. I don't remember the day exactly; it was gray and overcast, but didn't rain all day.\"\n\nCoeccias grumbled thoughtfully. \"That would be just after Marcius lost his richest ship on the Teeth.\"\n\n\"The Teeth? You're thinking of Tarquin's model?\"\n\n\"Truth, it struck me as an interesting plaything for a wizard. Perhaps he failed in some business of Marcius's. The merchant's not very forgiving, I've been told.\"\n\n\"Then maybe you ought to question him.\"\n\nFrowning, the Aedile poked at the remains of his pie.\n\n\"Better ask the wind to stand still, or summon the stars to court, than question Marcius. He's high-placed and highhanded, and the offense he'd take would be worth my post. I'd rather you did it.\"\n\n\"Me? If you can't question him, how can I?\"\n\n\"Make out you're a Hierarch again, or better yet, play the King of Taralon. He'd answer quick enough.\" Liam grimaced at this reminder of his play-acting with Viyescu, and Coeccias snorted a laugh before going on more seriously. \"Best of all, Rhenford, go to him as a scholar seeking employment. Give him your various qualifications, and tell him your previous master, a certain wizard of much power, has been murdered. You seek a \u00b7 new master of sufficient position to protect you from your farmer's enemies.\"\n\n\"And shock him with Tarquin's name so that he slips up?\"\n\n\"That'd do.\"\n\n\"And then he has one of his guards knock me out and the next thing I know I find myself a galley slave on one of his ships.\"\n\n\"That'd not do, but if y'are careful, it shouldn't happen. Be meek and mild, innocent as a babe. If he's clever enough to've planted the player's blade, he'll never think a mere pen-nibbler could've found him out. Cleverness and pride go hand in hand.\"\n\n\"Your opinions on human nature pale before the thought of several years chained to a galley seat.\"\n\n\"If you don't return from his offices, I swear I'll personally search every one of his galleys before it leaves Southwark,\" Coeccias answered cheerfully.\n\nLiam laughed ruefully.\u00b7 \"And offer me your best wishes for a pleasant journey, I'm sure. But that'll have to do, I suppose. I'll go see him tomorrow. What will you do?\"\n\n\"Since you can't go after Viyescu anymore without full religious vestments, I'll search him out again, and maybe trail him with one of my men. Mayhap we'll see if he has any pretty, sinful women in his life.\"\n\nThey left it at that, and Liam let Coeccias pay for the meal, arguing that since he would be facing a possibly murderous merchant the next day, he was doing far more than his share of the bargain. While Coeccias laughed over that, he left the quiet inn and hurried home through the rain.\n\nSleep was not as long in coming as the day before; in fact, it was all he could do not to drop off as soon as he stretched out on his pallet. There were, however, some things he wanted to think through, and he stayed awake for a few minutes, hands laced behind his head, staring at the pitted wooden beams over his head.\n\nTaken together, the day could not in any way be considered a failure. His visit to Viyescu had provided him with an interesting possibility, and a line of investigation he had not imagined. That a woman of any kind could be involved fascinated him, though he found it hard to imagine Tarquin begetting children at his age. The vague memory of the flushed young thing on the beach that summer morning came back to him, and he turned it over in his head for a while.\n\nHe let it go with a sigh, thinking that however interesting it was, as a motive for murder it was less than adequate. More important was his new partnership with the Aedile, which promised him far more of a chance at discovering Tarquin's killer than anything he could have imagined. However simple the burly man looked, he was much shrewder than Liam had guessed, and he knew that Coeccias would make a better source of information on Southwark's inhabitants than Lady Necquer, who had enough distractions of her own to worry about.\n\nIn a sense, it was more important that he liked the Aedile. He felt at ease with him, able to joke and talk naturally, unconstrained by the notions and proprieties that kept him almost formal around Lady Necquer.\n\nMy luck again, he thought.\n\nPleased with the alliance, he considered the merchant, Ancus Marcius. From Coeccias's description of his highhanded and often brutal dealings, both in business and in private, Liam thought Marcius considered himself more of a trading prince than a mere merchant. The ship he had lost on the Teeth had been only one of many, but rumor had it that he was taking the wreck almost personally, and had even gone so far as to send threatening notes to several of the local temples, demanding more vigilant prayers and services on behalf of commerce.\n\nLiam smiled in the dark at the man's arrogance, and thought that Marcius's own high self-opinion would make it easy to play the meek scholar in search of a position.\n\nNonetheless, he was not at all sure. that anything of worth would come out of the interview he would have to arrange the next day, unless he could somehow persuade Marcius to take a more than passing interest in him.\n\nFanuilh, he thought, might be able to help him there. Perhaps there was a spell of some sort ....\n\nWith a great and sudden yawn, he turned over and began to let sleep claim him, thinking about the dragon. He wondered why it wanted Tarquin's killer found so much. It would have been natural if the \u00b7 creature were enraged, or wildly vengeful, or showing anything approaching emotion, but it betrayed no feelings of any kind. In fact, Fanuilh never seemed angry or amused or depressed or anything at all; it was just there, and following its own obscure purpose.\n\nThat night Liam had a dream he had not had in a long time, in which he stood helplessly by and watched his father's keep burned to the ground by the host of another lord. The building that was burning, however, was his landlady's, though the logic of the nightmare insisted it was his father's keep, and the miniature dragon flew crazily about through the smoke and flames, suddenly as huge as one of its larger cousins.\n\nWhen he woke up to the leaden knocking of rain on his window, he dismissed the dream, which had recurred on and off for most of his adult life, along with its strange new additions.\n\n\"I thought I'd left that one far behind,\" he muttered, dragging himself from his warm bed to face the wet and dreary day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "It was not wise of you to tell the Aedile, Fanuilh thought at Liam, after he had brought meat from the kitchen. Soaked to the skin despite his heavy cloak and unhappy at having had to make the ride all the way out to Tarquin's house in the early morning rain, Liam snapped back.\n\n\"Well, there wasn't much I could do otherwise! He could have made it very difficult to go on! He's not as stupid as I thought, you know.\"\n\nYes, I know.\n\nIrritably shaking out his cloak, Liam went on. \"Besides, I would have had to tell him once I found out, wouldn't I? Unless you were thinking of having me search out Tarquin's murderer just for the personal pleasure of knowing. Justice would have to be served, right?\"\n\nThe dragon's thought formed slowly.I suppose ... perhaps I did not think it out completely.\n\n\"Well, I did, and I think I didn't have any choice about telling him, and I think I have a much better chance of finishing this business with his help. And it's done, so there's no use arguing about it.\"\n\nThe dragon did not reply, lying on the table and giving its full attention to the meat Liam had brought. He tried to wring some of the wetness from his cloak but gave up finally, hooking it over one of the shelf uprights.\n\n\"Since you're so interested in giving advice,\" he said, \"I don't suppose you have any idea how I can interest Marcius enough to gain a little of his time.\"\n\nThe thought that came back was interrogatory, like a question mark stamped down on his thoughts.\n\n\"I don't know, maybe some spell that will make me irresistibly fascinating, so that he can't tear himself away from me. Maybe a love potion, so he'll confess all his soul's secrets to me ....\"\n\nI know very few spells, and none like that.\n\n\"I was joking,\" Liam explained. \"Have you any practical ideas on the subject?\"\n\nI am not sure if Marcius is the proper suspect.\n\n\"I'm not sure either, Fanuilh, but there has to be some sort of order to my investigation, or I might as well just send out criers asking the killer to show himself in the town square at noon.\"\n\nI understand. I simply do not believe it is worth spending the time.\n\n\"Well, then,\" Liam said with an exasperated sigh, \"it's a good thing it's not you who'll have to spend the time, isn't it? Besides, he may lead elsewhere, like Viyescu. I'd never thought a druggist could kill, and still am not inclined that way, but he told me about this mysterious girl. I presume you know what I'm talking about?\"\n\nThe dragon cocked its head and looked at him, as though the question were strange.\n\nOf course. I can\u2014\n\n\"Pluck the thoughts right out of my head?\" he said ruefully. Another thought began slowly to form, but he tensed and hurried on. It faded away. \"Do you remember what she looked like?\"\n\nI did not see her. I only heard a voice.\n\n\"How did she sound? Young? Old? Angry? Sad? What?\"\n\nSeductive.\n\nFanuilh replied with such certainty that Liam was momentarily taken aback. By the dragon's recollection, the woman had visited Tarquin on the afternoon Viyescu's sinner had stormed out of his shop, but if she had been angry with the wizard for getting her pregnant, would she have sounded seductive? Perhaps Fanuilh had misunderstood her tone.\n\nShe cooed.\n\n\"All right,\" he said aloud, \"I believe you. She was seductive. But why? Viyescu implied that someone, perhaps Tarquin, had gotten her pregnant, and that she was angry about it. So why coo?\"\n\nI do not know. I only heard her coo before Master Tanaquil sent me away.\n\nLiam began pacing thoughtfully around the room, idly picking up glass jars and books and strange tools without paying them much attention. He leaned against the middle worktable, where a single lonely glass decanter stood. Picking it up, he tossed it from hand to hand as he thought. The label, a small square of white paper pasted to the smooth surface, read VIRGIN'S BLOOD, though the beaker was empty and a thick black X lay over the words. Liam grimaced and put the decanter down.\n\nThe dragon did not interrupt him, but he found it annoying to know that all his mental processes were constantly open to observation. He itched to be able to keep his head to himself. Despite the irritation, however, he came around to an idea.\n\n\"Fanuilh, do you remember a woman who was here during the summer? Sort of pretty, dark-haired, a girl, really?\"\n\nDono\u00e9. Master Tarquin called her his 'little barmaid.'\n\nPleasantly surprised, Liam smiled. \"His 'little barmaid', eh? Did she come often?\"\n\nPerhaps three or four times, but she was not the one who cooed.\n\n\"I didn't think so. Do you know where she was a barmaid?\"\n\nYou think she might help you find the cooer.\n\n\"It's a possibility, you have to admit.\"\n\nI do not know where she worked.\n\n\"Then perhaps Coeccias can scour all the taverns in the city, eh?\" He only half-meant it.\n\nNot all the taverns. Only the ones Master Tanaquil was likely to frequent. There should not be so many of those.\n\nLikely to frequent, Liam wondered. \"Did he go to the city often?\"\n\nOnce or twice a week; more often during the\u00b7 summer. I do not know what he did there.\n\nThe model of Southwark caught his eye, and he went to it. \"Fanuilh, this model\u2014do you know why he made it?\"\n\nFor a spell. I do not know for whom the spell was intended. He rarely included me in that aspect of his business.\n\nHe could think of no other questions, but stayed in the workroom, dipping a finger in the miniature waves with a distracted air. The pattering of the rain on the windows lulled him, and his thoughts wandered and grew unfocused. The Teeth of the model, small though they were, duplicated the grandeur of the original, inspiring a sort of awe and no small amount of fear. With an effort, he eventually shook himself and tore his gaze from the tiny rocks. He took his cloak from the shelf and frowned to find it still damp.\n\n\"I have to go,\" he said, putting the clammy cloth-around his shoulders. \"Unless you can think of anything else to tell me.\"\n\nThere is nothing.\n\nLiam shrugged irritably. \"Fine. If you think of anything ...\"\n\nI will let you know.\n\n\"Are you sure there are no spells that would help? Or maybe one of those things in the other room? The one with the cases?\"\n\nNo.The thought was firm, and brooked no questioning. Pursing his lips in consternation, Liam left.\n\nFrom Coeccias's and Fanuilh's description of his manner, Liam had expected Ancus Marcius to be a big man, but the figure on the docks was small, pretentious only in dress.\n\nIgnoring the light drizzle into which the morning's downpour had resolved itself, the merchant stood among a group of stevedores, shouting instructions about the unloading of a battered carrack. Though the rest of the waterfront was empty, Marcius's men bustled along as though there were nothing unusual, stepping briskly in accordance with the merchant's commands. They brought bales and chests down the gangplank and loaded them onto a line of carts drawn by mules waiting miserably in the icy drops. The harbor was quiet except for the slap of bare feet on gangplank and wet stones, and the water was a still and metallic gray, pocked with rain and curtained by a bank of mist rising off the sea. The Teeth hovered across the harbor, vague black shadows.\n\nMarcius was short and slight of build, and his cleanshaven face bore what seemed a perpetually sour look. His clothes, though sodden, were magnificent: doublet and hose of silk dyed a delicate blue, with a heavy cloak of deep purple and low boots of shining leather. Liam thought of his own boots, and the water that was even now soaking his feet through the holes left by the dragon's teeth.\n\nFor a few minutes, Liam watched the merchant and the activities he was directing .. Then, keying himself up, he crossed the slick stone of the waterfront to where Marcius stood.\n\n\"Speed, you knaves, speed! Do you think this wetting likes me?\" the merchant shouted. Liam stopped a few respectful paces away and coughed politely. Marcius did not turn, but the man by his side did, showing an ugly face made worse by a long, jagged scar running across his face from ear to ear, bisecting his mouth. A bodyguard, Liam knew, and he made himself quail slightly beneath the man's contemptuous look.\n\n\"What do you want?\" the guard lazily sneered, dropping a hand to the small cudgel at his belt. Drops of rain gathered on the puckered edges of his scar.\n\n\"A word or two with your master, if I might.\"\n\n\"Your name?\"\n\n\"Liam Rhenford, a scholar.\"\n\n\"Well, Liam-Rhenford-a-scholar, Master Marcius has no time for you now. Be off.\" The guard scowled and jerked his head to indicate the quickest path of retreat.\n\nLiam cringed and begged. \"Please, sir, I've something he might find valuable, if only he'd give me a moment. It's very valuable, on my life.\"\n\n\"Heard you what I\u2014\"\n\nMarcius, who, though only a few feet away, had not given any hint that he was paying attention, suddenly spoke without turning to them. \"If the fool took a wetting to speak, it'd only be right to hear his piece. Speak, scholar.\"\n\nThe guard scowled again and moved aside, letting Liam move up to the merchant's side.\n\n\"Many thanks, Master Marcius, many thanks. You'll not regret it, I swear.\" The fawning sounded ridiculous to Liam, but Marcius seemed to expect it, and he kept it up. \"I've come off a bad time, Master, and my situation is not very sound. I'm in a bad way, and I need money somewhat desperately.\"\n\n\"This smacks of a loan, scholar. Where's the value for me?\" Marcius still did not look at him, but spoke impatiently. He was much shorter than Liam, who hunched himself abjectly and allowed his hands to grab each other in supplication.\n\n\"I'm coming to that, Master, soon enough. I only want to show you my position. My former master, you see, has died,\" he lowered his voice confidingly, \"has been murdered, you see, and I am left to a hard lot.\"\n\n\"Murdered?\" the merchant said in a normal tone, and Liam bobbed anxiously, imploring quiet.\n\n\"Yes, Master, and I'm afraid I may be marked.\"\n\n\"Marked, you say? Who was your master?\" He still did not look at Liam, but his voice registered interest.\n\n\"Tarquin Tanaquil, Master, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Tanaquil, you say?\" The merchant gave him a hard glance. \"The wizard?\"\n\n\"Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"I did not know Tanaquil had any apprentices.\" Marcius's eyes narrowed with interest \"How far were you in the art?\" \"I was not his apprentice,\" Liam said regretfully, \"just a scholar he employed for certain correspondences.\"\n\nMarcius lost his interest with a grunt, turning back to the ship and irritably flicking an errant lock of his stylishly long black hair back into its damp place.\n\n\"If y'are no mage, what use can you be to me?\"\n\nThe guard took this as a hint, and laid a rough hand on Liam's sleeve, but he spoke up quickly.\n\n\"Before I came into the wizard's employment, Master, I traveled a great deal. I have maps to many places.\"\n\nMarcius turned slowly to him, his curiosity back, and nodded imperceptibly at the guard, who removed his hand reluctantly.\n\n\"Your name again, scholar?\"\n\n\"Liam Rhenford, Master.\"\n\n\"Rhenford,\" the merchant mused, looking up at Liam with as cold an appraisal as he might have given a shipment of goods. Perhaps colder, Liam thought, wiping cold streamers of rain off his narrow nose; he would at least know how much the goods were worth.\n\n\"Rhenford,\" Marcius repeated. \"I've heard of a scholar who sold Freihett Necquer a set of charts. Could you be that scholar?\"\n\n\"I am, Master,\" Liam said nervously.\n\n\"Those charts brought him a bulky fortune this season. And now you say you worked for Tanaquil?\"\n\n\"I was in his employ, sir, yes.\"\n\n\"Have you the charts here?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Liam responded eagerly, and began digging into the satchel at his side.\n\n\"No, no, no,\" Marcius said with evident disgust, \"don't be more of a fool than the gods made you, Rhenford. I don't want to peer at maps in the rain. Bring them to my offices, early tomorrow. You know where those are?\"\n\n\"Certainly, certainly. I'll be\u2014\"\n\n\"Early, Rhenford. And bring your mappery.\"\n\nThe merchant walked away without another word, ignoring the stevedores, who continued their work. The guard trailed along behind, offering Liam a sarcastic half-bow and a menacing grin, horribly distorted by his scar.\n\nAs soon as the merchant was out of earshot, Liam muttered an insult. I'm no dog, to cringe and cower, he thought, and let his posture settle back to normal with a relieved grin. It was more fun to be a mysterious, self-important hierarch than a cowardly clerk, he decided, and set off in the opposite direction.\n\nLiam climbed the steep streets that led up from the harbor to his lodgings. Dirty rainwater rushed whispering through the gutters. down to the harbor. He stopped when he was high up in the city and looked back.\n\nThe work that still went on around Marcius's carrack might have been . performed by ants, and the other ships riding at anchor might have been those of Tarquin's model, the forest of naked masts and spars mere twigs in the distance. He felt as though he might reach out and brush the leaden waters of the madstead, or pick up one of. the ships with his hand. Or, if the mist had not hidden . them, take hold of the Teeth and tear them out of the sea, roots and all.\n\nHad Tarquin felt like that when he cast his spell? Like a god on a high mountain with a storm raging unnoticed around him, reaching down a massive hand and rearranging the world to suit his whims? It was a strange idea, and Liam shook rain out of his face and cursed his soaking feet before resuming the climb to his garret.\n\nHe smiled gently at the kitchen drudge and greeted her politely. She shuddered and hid her face, remembering his wolfish grin. Shrugging ruefully, he beat a retreat up to his room.\n\nThere was nothing more for him to do before his afternoon visit to Lady Necquer. When he had changed into his third and last set of clothing, and spread that morning's wet ones out to dry, he realized he had time to kill, and sat himself with a sigh at his table by the window. His papers were still there, and some of his books. So many blank pages.\n\nWhen Liam had arrived in Southwark, he had fully intended on filling those pages; had, in fact, bought particularly expensive paper for the task. Hundreds of sheets of it, and in four months he had covered exactly three of them with writing. All he had to show for his intentions were three pages of notes and outlines and, of course, the maps of his travels. He wondered where the time had gone.\n\nWandering the town, exploring it without noticing the sights. Daydreaming at his window, staring out at the harbor and ignoring the view. Swimming off Tarquin's breakwater.\n\nHe shuffled the pages of notes around, debating trying to do something with them. His list of suspects no longer lay beneath them, stowed safely now in Coeccias's pouch, but he remembered it clearly. He now had faces to attach to some of the names.\n\nThe druggist, the merchant, the cooing woman, the minstrel. He thought he might as well add the barmaid, Dono\u00e9. The last three he had not seen, and he wondered how he could ever possibly find them on Fanuilh's sketchy remembrance. He was getting places, he knew, but if he had to continue running around the town in punctured boots and a perpetually sodden cloak, he thought he might confess to the murder himself.\n\nWith an explosive sigh he pushed the papers away and went to his trunk. Beneath a layer of small clothes and trinkets lay a bulging sack made of sailcloth. He snatched it out and upended it on his blanket.\n\nSilver and gold coins clinked together with the happy sound of large amounts, and two or three gems winked dully, their vibrant color only a memory in the shadowy garret.\n\nA fortune by Southwark standards, where a single silver coin was his monthly rent. He had over fifty, and a like number of gold coins, and he knew it little mattered that the faces and inscriptions on them were of kings and in languages that had never been heard of in Southwark. Gold was gold and silver was silver, no matter whose head was on the coin.\n\nHe picked out two of the gold coins, and hesitated before picking out a third and dropping them into his belt pouch. When the sack was back in his trunk with its contents replaced, he left his room and walked briskly out into the street.\n\nLiam bought himself a new, heavier cloak that was supposed to be weatherproof, and ordered several suits of warm winter clothes from a tailor in the rich quarter. The man bustled and fawned nicely when shown the gold coin, and promised \"eminently satisfactory results\" in a few days. Liam left feeling slightly better, and warmer already in his new cloak.\n\nA cobbler repaired his holed boot while he waited, and took an order for two new pairs with gape-mouthed pleasure. A leatherworker yielded up a beautifully tooled belt and a proper scholar's writing case, made to hang from the belt, with pockets for pens, paper and ink, blotter and seals.\n\nHis maps rattling around in the roomy writing case, snug in his waterproof cloak and dry toes wriggling in his. fixed boots, Liam felt good despite the rain and the blank pages in his room. He bought himself a large lunch in the inn Coeccias had led him to the night before and enjoyed it thoroughly.\n\nWhen he was done, tolling bells announced that it was time to visit Lady Necquer, and he set out for the merchant's home. The rain still poured steadily down, now gurgling in the overflowing gutters, and the afternoon sky might well have been night, but he whistled, and felt well.\n\n\"Master Rhenford,\" Lares said with unaffected pleasure when he opened the door. \"The lady was not sure you'd come.\"\n\nLiam merely smiled and allowed himself to be let in and led up to the second floor.\n\nLady Necquer looked pale, but delighted to see him, as though he were a reprieve.\n\n\"Sir Liam! I doubted your coming!\"\n\n\"I could not stay away, madam. It is a great pleasure to enjoy your company.\" He spoke blandly, the statement only a pleasantry, but her breath caught.\n\n\"I ... \" She faltered, and a silence yawned in which Liam fidgeted uncomfortably. He wondered what he could possibly have said, and thought of the handsome, angry young man at the door the other day.\n\nLady Necquer smiled weakly and fixed her eyes on her lap, spots of color reddening her pale cheeks.\n\n\"I beg your pardon if I am skittish, Sir Liam. I thought you were ... an echo, perhaps.\" She forced herself to look at him and the smile grew more assured as she gestured him to a seat across from her. \"Please, sit, and tell me more of your travels.\"\n\nHe took the offered seat, peering curiously at her. \"I'm sorry to be a mere echo, madam. I don't think your husband asked me to come to bore you with repetition.\"\n\nSomething in his tone, or perhaps his mention of her husband, relaxed her, and the unnatural blush faded. Glad of it, he went on.\n\n\"If there is anything you need to discuss, madam, or if you'd rather be alone, I would gladly ... \" He let the sentence hang, expressing his readiness to help with open hands. She shifted in her seat. allowing the smile to drop. The look of unhappiness that wrinkled her forehead and pursed her lips seemed very pretty to Liam, and the openness with which she shared her feeling made him feel somewhat special. It had been a long while since anyone had taken him into their confidence.\n\n\"Your tendered help is as salve to my troubles, Sir Liam, and I thank you. Yet I am beset by troubles that I may not share with you, much as I'd like. For the time, it is good of you to keep me company. Now,\" she said briskly, trying to banish the tension with a bright smile, \"we'll only have light talk. Tell me such things as you remember made you laugh.\"\n\nHaving set the subject, she sat back and waited, her brow clear and her eyes bright. His mind was blank for a few moments. Nothing particularly funny had ever happened to him, and he found that all he could remember were the faces of other women, one and all in attitudes of sorrow or depression.\n\nLiam did not tell her this, but his look of consternation led her to prompt him a little, and presently he recalled a puppet show he had seen in a caravanserai in a desert country.\n\nBefore long, he had a string of stories to tell, halfremembered snatches of the highly stylized comedies popular in his student days in Torquay, the antics of acrobats and clowns from the courts of distant kingdoms, folk tales told by wizened men in a hundred markets, and songs heard in taverns around the world. He even brought out an entire verse of \"The Lipless Flutist,\" a fairly clean one, and half-sang, half-recited it for her in an embarrassed way.\n\nShe laughed and clapped her hands when he was done, and he was struck anew by her youth and prettiness. He wondered again what could have upset her so, and thought angrily of the youth. Her unhappiness was obviously connected with him, and Liam cursed the man mildly.\n\nA comfortable silence followed her good-natured laughter at his poor rendition of \"The Lipless Flutist,\" and he only spoke after a while because the question popped into his head.\n\n\"When did you say your husband was returning?\"\n\n\"Your pardon?\"she asked, starting from some daydream. \"Oh, he returns tomorrow, I hope. He is so often away.\"\n\nHe regretted the question, but she went on, sighing sadly. \"So often I sit here alone, and feel his absence strongly. I wonder if he is wracked at sea, or taken by pirates, or bandits-they say there are bandits much abroad this year; On land, bandits wait for him; at sea, giant beasts, storms, the Teeth ... oh, the Teeth are far the worst.\"\n\nShuddering, she dropped her eyes to her lap again, and Liam berated himself for upsetting her, though her returning to the Teeth interested him. So many lives in Southwark seemed to revolve around the grim rocks\u2014Lady Necquer with her morbid fear, Marcius with his sunken ship, Tarquin with his spells. The only teeth in Southwark that had harmed him were Fanuilh's, and a cobbler had fixed that. He almost chuckled, but did not.\n\n\"I'm sure he'll return in perfect health.\"\n\nShe drew a deep breath and caught a smile. \"Oh, I'm even surer than you, Sir Liam. But you'll grant me the right to worry, I hope.\" He offered her a small bow from his seat, and she continued lightly. \"Now tell me, have you ever left anyone to wait for you? I'd wager you must have left weeping women in a hundred ports.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said seriously, \"I don't think so. I am very easy not to miss.\"\n\nShe scoffed. \"I can scarcely credit it, Sir Liam. Surely there is some love who drew you here to Southwark, a beauty who was planted on the docks, awaiting your return with weepy eyes and a kerchief soaked with tears.\"\n\nLady Necquer was not flirting, he decided, but teasing. He shook his head, and noticed how dark it was outside. Raindrops still trailed gold and silver on the panes. He would have to go soon.\n\n\"Then if it was no woman, what drew you, who've seen the world over, to so remote a comer of it as Southwark?\"\n\n\"I had been shipwrecked for some months, madam,\" he lied, \"on a desert isle far east and south of the Freeports. The ship that rescued me was bound here, and I was in no position to argue about its destination.\" He had indeed been stranded on an uncharted island, but the conditions were somewhat different from a shipwreck, and the things he had seen there would have unduly upset her, he was sure.\n\nEven the mention of a shipwreck dampened her spirits more than he would have wished.\n\n\"I had no idea, Sir Liam. It must have been horrible.\" It was clear from her veiled eyes that she was imagining her own husband in such a position, and he frowned.\n\n\"Oh, by no means. Very comfortable, really. It did not rain half so much as it does in Southwark, and was warm as summer the year round. I left it with some regret. Of course, I had none such as you to return to, madam. If I had, I probably would have swum the ocean to return.\"\n\nLady Necquer smiled gratefully, and he rose reluctantly. \"I'm afraid I must leave you now.\"\n\nShe rose as well, and though she protested that he must not leave, she led the way to the stairs. There she made him promise to return the next day.\n\n\"My husband is due to return in the evening. I am sure it'd like him if you waited with me, and dined with us.\"\n\nShe seemed to mean it, and he assented with pleasure.\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs, Lares waited with his cloak. With a smile he took it, ignoring the man's attempt to put it on his shoulders, knowing either he would have to stoop or the short old man stretch to accomplish the feat.\n\n\"Tell me, goodman,\" he asked while he tied on the cloak, \"who was the young fellow that was here yesterday?\"\n\nThe servant grimaced with disgust, and probably would have spat if he were outdoors.\n\n\"That one! A conunon player, from the Golden Orb Company, rabble all! Lons is\u00b7 his name, sir, and he plagues the lady unmercifully, all because she let him sing a few songs for her once. Most disgraceful, he is. He fits the old list, good sir, you know: 'vagrants and sturdy beggars, rogues, knaves and common players.' A very rogue, he is!\"\n\nLiam smiled at Lares's vehemence, but the old man did not notice.\n\n\"He was lurking about earlier, sir, but I happened to mention in a carrying tone that you were visiting the lady, and he skulked off in high dudgeon, I can tell you! A right rogue, that one!\"\n\nHis cloak secured to his satisfaction, Liam shook his head in proper disapproval at Lons's knavery, and left before he laughed.\n\nOnce again he felt good in the rain, daring it to penetrate his snug cloak and patched boots. Even though it was a fair walk from the Point to his garret, he arrived with little more than a few drops on his face and hands, and decided that he had never spent money \u00b7so well.\n\nMistress Dorcas was waiting for him in the kitchen, a folded piece of paper clutched in her hands. She handed it to him, apprehension clear on her face.\n\n\"It bears the Aedile's mark,\" she whispered fearfully, still mispronouncing the word.\n\nAnnoyed, he tore the paper open and read the note quickly. Coeccias's unruly scrawl invited him to the same tavern they had visited the evening before, the White Grape, and suggested a time.\n\n\"Is all well, Master Liam?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said grimly, \"I'm to be executed tomorrow at dawn.\" He went up the stairs without another word.\n\nThe hour Coeccias had set was only a little while off, but he took the time to put away his writing case, talcing out the maps and placing them on the table. When he went downstairs, his landlady was still holding a hand to her chest, breathing heavily.\n\n\"Y'ought not to say suchlike,\" she scolded. \"I thought my heart would leap from its seat, to hear of such, even in jest.\"\n\n\"Well, why else would the Aedile summon me if not to execute me?\"\n\n\"Faith, I know not, Master Liam, but y'are very wicked.\" He was almost at the door when she regained enough composure to be nosy. \"What was his discourse?\"\n\n\"He wanted to dine with me,\" Liam called over his shoulder as he left. \"The condemned's last meal, he called it.\"\n\nHe shut the door on her leaping heart.\n\nCoeccias was not at the tavern yet, but the White Grape was almost full and Liam was glad to catch the last open table. The girl who brought him the wine he asked for looked at him strangely, recognizing him from the night before and that afternoon.\n\nSipping the vinegary wine, he rested his elbows on the table and surveyed the customers of the inn. They were quiet, respectable types, not so rich as to belong in the quarter further up the hill, but not given to the noisy dens lower down by the harbor. They sat close to their tables and talked in low voices that suggested sobriety and mildly serious talk, not secrecy. He thought he and Coeccias had probably looked that way the night before and would look that way tonight, and wondered how many more nights they would look so before they had found Tarquin's murderer.\n\nOr before we give up, he mused over a particularly sour mouthful. If the dragon will let us give up.\n\nHe did not want to think about Tarquin, or Fanuilh, and cast back to his afternoon with Lady Necquer. She was a pretty, refined young innocent, such as he had forgotten existed. Years at sea and in foreign lands had left him unused to dealing with Taralon's well-bred, though he had once been counted high in their ranks. Her problems interested him. They were different from his own, problems of the living, not the dead, and he turned to considering them.\n\nThis Lons, a mere player, hounded her, undoubtedly out of passion, because of her pale beauty. A part of him did not blame the man, but mostly he disliked Lons's arrogant voice and handsome face, as well as his rude presumption.\n\nThe man was an actor, traditionally one of the lower classes. The list Lares had quoted was from an old law, naming players and the others as undesirables who might be subjected to various fines and punishments just for being what they were. The law no longer stood, but the old prejudices still survived. Though Liam did not share them, he understood them, and knew it must be painful for Lady Necquer to be plagued by one she must consider beneath her.\n\nShe must unwittingly have led the boy on, asking him to sing for her and probably showing the same warm approval as she had shown his stories.\n\nOf course, she doesn't think I'm likely to pester her like Lons, because I've such an innocent face.\n\nLiam grinned ruefully into his cup, and looked up to see Coeccias.\n\n\"Now what brings such sunny summer to your visage, Rhenford? Have you flushed our quarry?\"\n\nShaking his head, Liam gestured the Aedile to a seat, which he took with a wry smile.\n\n\"No, just enjoying a joke at my own expense.\"\n\n\"Then the day has not gone well for you?\"\n\n\"No worse than yesterday.\"\n\nCoeccias eyed him curiously and gave his order to the serving girl.\n\n\"You should not drink the wine here, Rhenford. The best they have in the house graces the wooden board over the door.\"\n\n\"I'd noticed.\"\n\nThe girl brought Coeccias a mug of beer, and he sipped from it before speaking in a low tone that seemed to fit the quiet tavern.\n\n\"Had you no luck with Marcius?\"\n\n\"I have an appointment with him tomorrow. very early. I told him I had served Tarquin, and that seemed to give him a start. He asked me if I knew any magic, and was very disappointed when I did not. I'll try to sound him out a little more tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You think he killed the wizard for a failure of magic?\" The theory clearly attracted the Aedile; he leaned even further forward with\u00b7 an almost laughably serious expression.\n\n\"Well, it was one of his ships that crashed on the Teeth. If he'd had some contract with Tarquin, then it would seem Tarquin did not live up to it.\" Coeccias leaned back with a small smile of satisfaction, and Liam qualified his statement. \"I would not be in too much of a hurry to arrest him, though. He didn't exactly go white and confess when I mentioned Tarquin's name.\"\n\n\"Shrewd ones never do, Rhenford. But I'll grant your doubts. And as it seems you've done your work, I'll report on mine.\"\n\nHe had gone to see Viyescu early in the day, and hinted about a girl who was known to have been an acquaintance of the druggist, and who had bragged in her cups of knowing a certain powerful wizard.\n\n\"Though by straight and true I'm not supposed to do such, it was wondrous effective, a great spur to him. There were no bloody confessions, true, but just a few hours later he barred his shop early and found his way to a suite of rented rooms in the lower quarters. A man of mine followed him, and when our druggist left, sore disappointed, he made some discreet inquiries.\"\n\nThe Aedile paused, it seemed, for effect, and leaned back, waiting smugly to be asked the outcome of the questions. Liam waited too, and looked around the common room with an ostentatiously apathetic air. For a few moments, both were silent, before Coeccias's desire to tell overcame his desire to make Liam ask, and he resumed his report with a sour grunt.\n\nThe rooms, the owner of the house reported, were rented by a young lady who always arrived masked and cloaked, though the rent was brought to him by a common messenger. The lady was only there a few nights out of every month, but had, on occasion in the past, received a robed and hooded visitor, presumably male. Neither had been there recently, but the rent was still brought by the messenger every month.\n\n\"So, what make you of that?\"\n\n\"Viyescu keeps a mistress.\"\n\n\"No,\" the burly officer said scornfully. \"A hooded, robed visitor? Rented rooms and great secrecy? It's clear we've found the wizard's bawd!\"\n\nLiam frowned and shook his head. \"Wizards aren't the only people who wear robes, Master Aedile. Priests do too, and some officials, and I've known rich men who affect them to seem sophisticated. What's more, men who value their appearance of virtue have been known to wear disguises when indulging their vices. You think Viyescu went there to warn the girl about your investigation. What I think is far more likely is that Viyescu went there so that his mistress could soothe his fears and worries. You must have startled him a great deal, and he felt the need of her comfort.\"\n\nIt was Coeccias's turn to frown, and Liam pressed on.\n\n\"Next month's rent will be due in two days. I'll wager if we wait until then, we'll find that the messenger brings it, which'll prove the girl wasn't Tarquin's. And I'll wager even more that if we trace the messenger, we'll find he gets his money from a man in a neat little apothecary's shop.\"\n\nThe Aedile scowled unhappily, recognizing the validity of Liam's argument.\n\n\"Still, it bears searching out,\" he said stubbornly. Liam agreed, but only on the principle that they should make the best of what they had.\n\n\"There's something else I'd like you to check on. I remember a girl Tarquin once mentioned, a barmaid named Dono\u00e9. I think it might be worth our while to talk with her. Can you have your men find her?\"\n\n\"Seek out a single barmaid? In all of Southwark? Better ask us to find a pearl dropped in the harbor! Have you any idea how many taverns and inns and bars there are in this city?\"\n\n\"Not that many that Tarquin would have gone into, let alone struck up an acquaintance with a barmaid there. I bet you won't even have to look beyond the rich quarter, and there are none too many bars there.\"\n\n\"All right, all right, I' 11 send someone round to con for this barmaid. Dono\u00e9 is her name?\" At Liam's nod, the Aedile repeated it with a humph of displeasure. \"Barmaids! I offer you th' assassin complete in this rented girl and her monthly rooms, and you throw it away on barmaids!\"\n\n\"Not just on barmaids. There's still Marcius, and the minstrel we haven't met yet.\" An idea struck him, left over from his thoughts of Lady Necquer. \"Say, Master Aedile, what's the Golden Orb Company?\"\n\nConfused by the sudden change of subject, Coeccias replied slowly, trying as he spoke to figure out the connection.\n\n\"A troupe of players here; they put on a series of entertainments and performances the year round. They've two theaters in the city, a summer amphitheater and a covered one for winter. Often in the winter I close them out, and send them packing to the heath, to perform for the villagers and keep the pest at bay. A close theater in the winter breeds the plague like a she-rabbit coneys.\" Enlightenment suddenly dawned around the neatly trimmed beard. \"You recall the knife, if I guess aright, and think to find your minstrel there! Shrewd, very shrewd, Rhenford'! I hadn't thought to comb that rabble for him!\"\n\n\"No, no, that's not what I meant,\" Liam said hurriedly. \"That's not what I was thinking at all.\" He began to explain his afternoon with Lady Necquer, but thought better of it. \"I just heard the name earlier from my landlady, and I hadn't heard of it before. I thought I might go see a performance.\"\n\n\"Truth, a passing excellent idea! I'll wait upon you, and if you espy the minstrel, that'll be one more way for us to look.\"\n\nCoeccias smiled happily and dug hungrily into the food the girl put before him. Liam felt a flutter of discomfort. He could not identify the minstrel, because he had not seen him; Fanuilh had, but he couldn't explain that to the Aedile. They might sit through a hundred performances with the minstrel in every one, and Liam would never know it.\n\nHe ate his own meal with much less interest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The covered theater the Golden Orb Company used in the winter was in the Aurie's Park section of the artisans' quarter, far from both the sea and Liam's lodgings. Half-timbered, it towered windowless over the surrounding homes and shops, cut off from them by narrow lanes on two sides and wide streets on the others. High above the street a giant gilt ball hung from a projecting hook, rain sparkling on its surface; the places where the golden paint was peeling were barely visible in the light leaking from the entrance. With only its bottom hemisphere visible, it looked impressive, like a strange moon.\n\nA sizable crowd stood outside the theater's three sets of wide wooden doors, waiting to get in, and more jammed into the small lobby. They were mostly rough-looking men and women, apprentices and seilffien, clerks and workers, inured to the rain and cold. With no obvious resentment they allowed the occasional better-dressed patron to move through their ranks directly to the entrance, shoving aside to create a path for the rich or well-to-do that closed up immediately behind them. Liam and Coeccias were allowed to pass this way, like ships cutting a wake through the sea, and came up to a man seated behind a barrel, wearing a tunic of motley, the squares of brightly colored cloth marking him out from the plainer clothes of the audience.\n\n\"Good even, Master Aedile. Come to close us out?\" His eyes sparkled and his lips twisted with a combination of humor and good-natured malice.\n\n\"No, Master Player, only to watch the process. If the play likes me not, belike then I'll send you packing to the countryside.\" Coeccias smiled as well, and gestured to Liam. \"He'll quit us, for a box.\"\n\nLiam frowned and dug out a silver coin. The Aedile had seen the coin he used to pay for his dinner and, deciding that Liam had done the least work of the day, told him off to pay for the evening. Liam dropped the coin on the barrelhead; the player in motley bowed dramatically over the money and waved them inside.\n\nThe small lobby was even more closely packed than the street, but the crowd parted for them again. Before him, between heavy, crudely squared wooden pillars, Liam could see the stage, raised above the heads of the people jostling in the pit, but Coeccias led him away to the left and up a narrow flight of steps. The second floor of the theater was a gallery, segmented into booths by the heavy pillars continuing up from below. The Aedile took one of these booths, and motioned Liam to sit beside him on the cushioned bench.\n\nInside, the Golden Orb's theater was hexagonal, with the raised stage a disproportionately large edge. Two stories of boothed galleries made up the other edges, while the floor was open and seatless. The poor massed there, a sea of heads talking noisily and gaping impatiently at the stage, while the rich who had cut their . way through the crowd filled the galleries; each booth framed expensive clothes and well-fed faces.\n\nLooking around at the others in the galleries, Liam whispered to Coeccias, \"I don't think we 're appropriately dressed for the boxes.\" He indicated the Aedile's crumb-strewn shirt of unrelieved black and his own simple cloak and tunic. Coeccias nodded absently, his own attention fixed on the empty stage.\n\n\"I suppose not. But those're guildmasters and merchants and high tradesmen in the other boxes, who needs must impress with their wealth their apprentices and drudges below. Y'have neither employees nor servants in the pit, and I hope none of my Guard is down there, or I'll have their heads. And what's more,\" he added after a thoughtful pause, \"they have to impress each other. I think neither you nor I need to do that.\"\n\nLiam digested this, inspecting the theater with idle curiosity. The huge wrought-iron chandelier reminded him of the great theaters in Torquay, as did the layout of the stage, with its curtained recess and small balcony. He remembered the few plays he had gone to see when he was a student in the capital, and was surprised that Southwark boasted a theater so niuch like Torquay's. Of course, the roof was thatched, not stone-arched and groined, and the proscenium, balcony and recess were made of plain, undecorated wood, not elaborately carved marble; still, the basic design was the same. And what the Golden Orb lacked in sumptuous decoration and formal sophistication, it made up for in excitement.\n\nThe theaters in Torquay had seemed strangely joyless, dark rituals of culture and sobriety; in Southwark, the crowd buzzed and chattered eagerly, excited and impatient for the show to begin. He wondered what the play would be like. He had not bothered to ask Coeccias about it, and as he was about to speak, a sudden wind gusted throughout the theater, cold and foreboding. It rushed outward from the stage with a roar, over the heads of the groundlings, and circled the galleries, rising upward, almost visible in its loud progress, before plunging at the chandelier. Hundreds of candles flickered and guttered wildly, dispersing monstrous shadows before they died. Then the wind died as well, leaving the audience suddenly silent in complete darkness.\n\n\"Watch,\" the Aedile whispered, lightly touching Liam's arm. Liam jumped at the touch in the dark, and peered intently towards where he thought the stage was.\n\nA clean, white light like that in Tarquin's house slowly grew over the stage, evenly illuminating the acting space and limning the expectant faces of the audience, drawing just their features out of deep black shadow. A rowdy groundling called out, \"Knave Fitch!\" and the cry was taken up with happy applause and whistles from the pit as the growing light revealed a fat man in motley poised in an attitude of thoughtfulness.\n\nWith overly dramatic gestures he announced himself to be the Knave Fitch the groundlings had called for, and their loud shouts of approval clearly showed that he was a great favorite. He gave a prologue describing . the action of the play, garbling the lines for comic effect, and the groundlings responded with hoots of laughter. Coeccias laughed as well, and Liam smiled at the clown's posturing.\n\nWhen he was done with the prologue, Fitch bowed grandly, tripping on his cloak in the process, and exited to general applause.\n\nThe sourceless light dimmed and\u00b7 then swelled to the quality of a summer day, and a troop of women dressed as princesses skipped on stage, primly gathering flowers in an imaginary forest. After a few lines of introduction, the lead princess called for her ladies to provide music, and a tune suddenly invaded the theater. The lead princess, dressed in a diaphanous dress cut startlingly short, stepped forward and began a graceful dance in time with the music. The lesser princesses ranged themselves around the stage, watching the princess dance respectfully.\n\nShe looks like Lons, Liam thought with some amazement. She did indeed resemble the actor Liam had come to see. If anything, she was more attractive than the young man, with shining golden hair hanging below her shoulders and strong, bold features that hinted at sultriness despite her regal attire and almost prurient dance.\n\nEven as he thought how pretty she was, however, the music shifted slightly, the beat faster and the tune wilder. One by one the lesser princesses rose and began dancing as well, keeping behind the leader. She, in turn, changed the style of her dancing, gradually losing all pretense of prudishness. The pure, pastoral aura that had hung around the scene disappeared, and she danced wantonly, the high cut of her dress revealing tantalizing stretches of well-formed thigh. Her dress clung strategically to her breasts and certain other points of interest, blousing over her stomach to pull in around her thighs. She danced with wild abandon across the stage, following the music as it swelled, rising through a series of crescendos to a peak that was clearly meant to be sexual.\n\nLiam watched, fascinated and, he had to admit, aroused by the intentional sexuality of the dance, and blew out an astonished breath when it was over, and the lead princess dropped to her knees, flushed and panting, her hair disarrayed like a golden nimbus around her head.\n\n\"Small wonder the guildmasters say the theater is a degenerate influence on their apprentices,\" Coeccias whispered, as impressed as Liam.\n\nHe was going to respond when a figure entered who caught his attention. He hissed\u00b7 in a . breath at the sight of Lons striding over to the breathless dancer, and leaned towards the rim of the booth.\n\n\"What?\" Coeccias asked immediately. \"Is that our minstrel?\"\n\nLiam waved the question away, focusing his attention on the actor, who walked across the stage to the breathless dancer and helped her to her feet. At first he thought they were supposed to be lovers, but as the scene progressed it became clear that they were brother and sister. When it was over, and the sourceless light dimmed again, he settled back on the bench and frowned. Coeccias poked him impatiently.\n\n\"Truth, Rhenford, speak! Is that our minstrel or no?\" \"I'm not sure. I'll have to see him again.\"\n\nThe Aedile snorted impatiently, and settled back to watch. The princess's face and form swam before Liam's eyes, and he compared her to Lons, surer now that he had seen them together that they were related. He thought with displeasure of Lons's haughty bearing and his arrogant handsomeness. Just the sort to plague the poor lady, he thought, a self-involved rake, presumptuous and crude. Liam found he disliked the actor intensely. The sister-princess, on the other hand, drew him powerfully as, he realized, she probably drew every other man in the audience. She was stunning, attractive in an inviting way that was completely foreign to the beauty of Lady Necquer. He compared the two women, and pictured Lons between them.\n\nScene followed scene, and the play progressed. It concerned the various misadventures of the prince and princess, with the ridiculous antics of Knave Fitch as their court jester thrown in for comic relief. The princess only danced once more, but with the same breath-stopping effect. The sourceless light dimmed often, rising again to reveal different scenes. Several magical creatures made appearances, startlingly real on the stage. Liam thought the makeup and scenery remarkably well done, until a dragon entered to menace the prince and princess, and breathed a\u00b7 gout of fire across the audience.\n\nCoeccias leaned over. \"There's a wonderful. illusionmaker in those wings,\" he said, as if he were letting Liam in on a secret with which he was familiar.\n\nLiam smiled faintly, because he had seen the big Aedile flinch at the dragon's appearance. The mention of the illusionmaker who was projecting the marvels that .crossed the stage, however, brought Tarquin into his mind. He should have been looking for his murderer, not enjoying himself at provincial theatricals.\n\nStill, Lons's well-shaped and already well-hated face kept revolving through his thoughts, along with that of his enchanting play-sister. She spoke little, but her movements held his attention, and he watched her more than any of the other actors, including Lons, who, as the hero, had by far the most lines.\n\nThere was no intermission, and the play lasted for over two and a half hours. The audience, however, never lost interest. Between Lons's heroics, Fitch's obscene jokes, the illusionmaker's phantasms and the princess's sultry beauty, it was a tremendous spectacle, and the eventual denouement was breathlessly awaited.\n\nLons and his sister confronted the evil duke who had hounded them throughout the play, beating off his minions until they faced the villain himself. There was a long, tense display of swordplay between Lons and the duke, filled with flourishes and narrow escapes, and the crowd gasped and shouted over each pass.\n\nDuel or no, Liam could not take his eyes off the princess, who spent the scene pressed against the proscenium arch, watching in palpable anxiety. Her sheer dress disarrayed to display just enough, her breast heaving with intense fear, she was perfect\u2014or so she seemed to Liam. He believed her completely, and was only vaguely aware of it when Lons finally triumphed. Blood spurted high, more magical illusion, and the hero let fly with a well-chosen epithet on his evil foe, but Liam was watching the princess.\n\nThe crowd shouted and cheered madly, but the victory was only conveyed to Liam by the princess, by the delicate way she turned her head at the death blow, and the noble way she forced herself to look on the bloody corpse.\n\nHow often he had seen people look on the dead like that! While the rest of the audience noisily celebrated the conclusion, he sat enthralled and deeply impressed. She was magnificent; looks and figure aside, she was amazing, an artist such as he had never suspected the theater to hold. He doubted Lons had carried off his reaction to the death nearly as well.\n\nShe was\u2014\n\nVision died, the theater went black, and for a split moment he thought the illusionmaker must have failed. Then he knew he was blind. His hands bunched convulsively, fiercely gripping the cloth of his breeches. He strangled a scream, and groaned instead.\n\nHis breath came in quick hisses, and he knotted the cloth above his knees over and over again.\n\nCalm.\n\nThe thought crashed down on his fear, but the terror of blindness rose up again and he groaned a second time ...\n\nThe hero is the minstrel.\n\n... and then a third, as the blackness swirled and resolved itself into the stage and the theater, and Coeccias's face. The beard and the reflected illusionmaker's light hid his concerned look in a diabolical mask, but Liam barely noticed.\n\n\"Truth, Rhenford! What's amiss?\"\n\n\"The minstrel,\" he grated, lurching to his feet in the haze of anger that washed away his paralyzing fear. \"The hero is the minstrel,\" he finished, and bolted out of the box towards the stairs, brushing off Coeccias's hand.\n\nIn the street he marched grimly towards his quarter, oblivious to the rain.\n\n\"Bastard,\" he muttered. \"Damned bastard in my head.\" He ground the curses and worse between his teeth, bringing them in and flinging them silently at the dragon.\n\nBlinded me! The bastard!\n\nFanuilh did not respond, but Coeccias's heavy hand on his shoulder brought him to a stop.\n\n\"Truth,\" he said,\u2014 honestly confused, \"I knew not whether to stay or follow. What's possessed you, Rhenford? Is that minstrel Tarquin's assassin?\"\n\n\"No, no, I don't know,\" Liam scowled fiercely, unable to explain. \"I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"ls he or no? What know you?\" The Aedile's voice sank into suspicion, and he cocked his head to look at Liam from the side. \"What aren't you telling?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Liam hastened to assure him, trying to hold onto his anger. \"There's just something I've remembered. I don't know whether it'll mean anything. You'd think it ridiculous.\" Coeccias started in heatedly, but Liam cut him off. \"I've just got to check on it. Look, have one of your constables find out where Lons lodges, and meet me tomorrow at the White Grape at noon. We'll go over and see him.\"\n\nHe winced when he realized he had said Lons's name, because there was no way he could have known it. Coeccias must have caught it too, but Liam did not give him a chance. He swung around and ran off into the rain.\n\n\"Rhenford!\" He heard the Aedile bellow behind him, and then: \"Damn!\" But the curse sounded resigned, and he kept on, trotting through the rain.\n\nIn the hopes of dredging up his dying anger, he deliberately recalled the sight, or lack thereof, of complete blindness. He had been hung over and ill the first time, in no condition to appreciate the experience. It had been different in the theater. The complete absence of visual input\u2014even the normal phosphorescence of closed eyes\u2014had been terrifying, and the damned. beast had inflicted it on him without a moment's hesitation.\n\nBy the time Liam reached the stable, the bells were tolling midnight, and be had given up on rebuilding his. anger to its first flaming height. Still, he pounded on the door until the night lad woke and grudgingly let him in. A silver coin wiped the sleep from the boy's eyes, and by saddling Diamond himself Liam improved the lad's mood tenfold.\n\nDriven by the last of his ire, he made the cold, wet trip out to Tarquin's, and shuddered as he led his mount down the narrow path in the cliff, imagining the belltowers in Southwark ringing one o'clock.\n\nThe sea was. an indistinct mass to east and west, though a pier of golden light stretched out from the wizard's home, spilling warm and golden from the glass front over the sand and across the water in a spike to the horizon. The beach was firmer underfoot than usual, condensed by rain. He felt a stab of anger rise up as he stamped into the quiet, well-lit house, tearing off his clinging, damp cloak.\n\nFanuilh lay in the same position on the table in the workroom, calmly gazing at the door through which Liam stalked.\n\nI will not do it again without asking, the little dragon thought at him, and though the block in his head was as empty of tone as ever, he imagined how it would sound if spoken. As if they had discussed the matter, calmly, and reasonably come to the conclusion the dragon thought to him.\n\nLiam was not pleased by his imagination, and his anger briefly and pleasantly flared.\n\n\"You're damned right you won't do it again, you bastard! Because if you do, I swear I'll leave you alone here to starve to death, do you hear!\"\n\nHe felt better when he had shouted, and though he would have preferred it if the dragon had showed any reaction other than stony calm, it was enough. The last dregs of his anger swirled away.\n\n\"Don't the lights in here ever go out?\" he asked after a while.\n\nIt was important to know. The hero was the minstrel.\n\n\"Really? They don't ever go out? How interesting!\" He chuckled wryly to himself, since Fanuilh would not do it for him.\n\nI will tell you about the house when you live here. When you have fulfilled your bargain, you will be master.\n\n\"And you'll stay out of my head and show me many things I never dreamed of and all will be well with the world,\" he said wearily. \"Let's not go into that again.\"\n\nYou will have to stay here tonight. It is too late to return to Southwark. You should go to sleep now, so that you can meet the merchant in the morning.\n\n\"It's not my house.\"\n\nIt is, but for the moment that is not important. You should sleep.\n\nHe suddenly felt wide awake. The icy cold was leaving his bones, his numbed fingers and ears were thawing, and he felt more awake than he had in the theater.\n\n\"I'll sleep here, but first ...\"\n\nHe left the room briskly and went to the kitchen. The house felt strange, full where he had expected it to be empty. There were none of the flat echoes one finds in abandoned rooms. As though it were waiting, he imagined, and drove the idea away with the image of a jug of chilled red wine, beads of moisture trickling down its sides. He was careful not to look at the jug\u00b7 by the stove for a moment, but when he did its sides were slick, and an exploratory finger came up wet with wine. And excellent wine, by the taste of the drops sucked off his finger. Shaking his head, he dispelled the wine and conjured a raw haunch of meat, feeling a little ridiculous as he closed his eyes and bunched his face with effort.\n\nWith the haunch on a wooden platter thoughtfully provided by the magic oven and his own imagination, the jug under his arm, Liam returned to the workroom. He dropped the platter in front of Fanuilh and sat crosslegged on the floor by the table.\n\n\"Eat up, familiar of mine. I need you to clear up some points for me, and you'll need your strength.\" He started to go on in the same vein, but stopped and changed tracks. \"How is your strength? How are you?\" The thought blocked immediately.\n\nBetter, but not completely well. I cannot fly yet, though I can move a little. Perhaps a week more.\n\nAn image of the tiny dragon skimming over the sand and looping up to dart out over the sea entered his head, and he remembered seeing it fly during the summer, silhouetted by. the sun. He had been greatly impressed when he first saw it, but over the course of the summer had come to take Fanuilh for granted, another possession of Tarquin's, like the wizard's fantastic beach house.\n\nLiam nodded as though something important had been decided.\n\n\"Well, I think I'll stay here for a week then, and nurse you lovingly back to health.\"\n\nThat would be good. The house is yours. Now you wish to clear some things up.\n\nToneless though the thought was, it nonetheless conveyed to Liam that the dragon knew exactly what he wanted to discuss. How could it not, when it could read his mind?\n\n\"I certainly do. Your memory's far from perfect, familiar of mine, and things are moving a little quickly for me to be wandering around with an incomplete schedule of events. Let's begin from the beginning, shall we?\"\n\nThere were two events around which to arrange Fanuilh's imperfect sense of time: the death of Tarquin and the disappearance of the Teeth. It had apparently flown over the Teeth the day before, and, returning the next day, noticed their absence.\n\nBetween Liam's coaxing and puzzling and the dragon's willing answers and descriptions of the weather, they formed a sketchy timeline, to which Liam added his own observations.\n\nThree days before the Teeth disappeared, Ancus Marcius had appeared at the door of the beach house with his thugs, rude and demanding. He had left after a short time, and his feelings about the interview were not apparent to Fanuilh, though Liam added that only a day before a rich ship of his had been smashed to splinters on the Teeth.\n\nOn the same day in the afternoon, Lons sought the wizard out, and remained closeted with him for some time. Fanuilh, told off and bored with waiting, had flown down the beach, and did not see him leave.\n\nTwo days later the most violent of a season of violent storms raged all day long, from early in the morning until just after dark. That evening, the woman with the seductive voice had come, and Fanuilh had been shut out again. And she was hooded and cloaked, it explained, so it had not seen her face.\n\n\"Even if she had been naked,\" Liam said consolingly, though nothing in the thought had conveyed regret or a sense of guilt on the dragon's part, \"you probably wouldn't have seen her anyway. It was pitch dark all day, and the night was worse.\" He himself had endured most of the storm wrapped in a blanket in his garret, watching quietly as the Storm King howled and\u00b7 spat his defiance at the world.\n\nTarquin spoke with her at some length, and Fanuilh was only allowed in the house several hours later. Liam coughed over this, wondering if they had done much talking, but he let it pass. The wizard had been preparing something since the day Ancus and Lons had visited him, and that night he set Fanuilh to watching the house for spirits.\n\n\"Spirits?\"\n\nThey can ruin a great magic. The power draws them from the Gray Lands, like moths. They flutter about it, and get in the way. Master Tanaquil drew them often.\n\n\"And you can drive them away?\"\n\nI have a form of power that can decoy them away.\n\n\"Well,\" Liam said, impressed by any subject he did not understand. \"Well.\"\n\nThey went back to the timeline.\n\nTarquin remained in the workroom all night, casting the spell. He went to bed at dawn, exhausted, releasing Fanuilh from his watch almost as an afterthought. As a welcome break, the dragon had flown over the Teeth, and found them missing.\n\n\"Or rather, didn't find them missing,\" Liam mused, running a long-fingered hand through his fine blond hair. The dragon snapped down the last of the meat and gazed at him incuriously. He took another gulp of wine, which was still wonderfully cold.\n\nThe wizard received no visitors for the next three days, as far as Fanuilh knew. He remained in the house, mostly in his bedroom, ordering his familiar to bring him food.\n\nRemoving the Teeth from this world took a great deal out of him.\n\n\"so you're sure it was him?\"\n\nWho else?\n\n\"And he removed them? He used the spell the book was opened to, not the illusion spell?\"\n\nI flew down to where they should have been. They were not there. And a mere illusion spell would not have cost him three days of rest.\n\nChastened, Liam went on.\n\nOn the second day of Tarquin's rest, a messenger had arrived from town, bearing a folded, sealed letter. The wizard had read the paper, laughed and mentioned Marcius's name with a chuckle. Then he burned it. That was the day Freihett Necquer made his miraculous return, Liam remembered.\n\nThe next day\u2014Surprised, Liam realized it was only four days ago\u2014Tarquin stayed in his room till early evening. At dusk he called for Fanuilh to heat water for bathing, and cleaned himself thoroughly. Then he dressed in his. most impressive, wizardly robes, the blue ones Liam had found him in, and shut the dragon out for the evening. He had rubbed his hands in the peculiar way that meant he was happy about something, and mentioned extra payments in a deliberately cryptic manner. That was the last time Fanuilh had seen him alive.\n\nHe was murdered at approximately midnight. Fanuilh knew this because it bad felt Tarquin's death, felt the soul leaving its master, and had collapsed to the sand outside the house. From there it crawled inside, and Liam arrived only an hour after that.\n\nLiam knew the rest. He sat against the wall, sipping at the wine, which was still cool, though he had to hoist the jug high and angle his head uncomfortably to get at it.\n\nTarquin died at midnight. That would allow Lons enough time to finish whatever performance he was in and get out to the beach. Marcius's whereabouts he did not know, but if the merchant were involved, he probably would have sent one of his hired swords. Viyescu's movements were a mystery as well, and he did not even know who the woman with the seductive voice was. It did not look encouraging when he pieced it all together, and he realized that he had done little more than scratch the surface.\n\nYou had not visited Master Tanaquil for a long while. He mentioned your name often. The block erased his own thoughts, and he looked dazedly up from the jug.\n\n\"He did?\"\n\nTry as he might, he could not understand the portrait Fanuilh had painted. At one moment, Tarquin dismissed the dragon like a mere servant, simply sent the bearer of half his soul away like an inconvenience. Then, apparently, he took the time to wonder about a man less than half his age whom he only saw rarely.\n\nTanaquil was a good master.\n\nAs usual, there were no hidden overtones to Fanuilh's communication, but Liam felt he had offended, and fumbled an apology.\n\n\"I meant to come, but the rains had set in ... and the ride is long. It is a rather out-of-the-way place.\"\n\nIt will not seem that way when you live here.\n\nDid that mean his apology was accepted? That whatever spirit he had offended could rest?\n\nThe wine suddenly affected him all at once. His head felt thick but weightless, detached from the rest of his body. He eyed the long legs that now stretched out in front of him as if they were not his.\n\n\"I'd better\u2014 get some sleep.\"\n\nWith an effort, he managed to gain his feet, and the dragon's eyes followed him, the sinuous neck angling up as he rose.\n\nWhere will you sleep?\n\n\"I'll find a place. Goodnight.\" Deliberately watching each step, he made his way out of the workroom and around to the kitchen, where he deposited the jug with elaborate care. He even patted it once, to reassure himself that he had put it there.\n\nNo more thoughts came from the dragon, and his own were pleasantly unable to form, skipping from one to the other without being able to settle anywhere. With the same measured tread, he sought out the low divan in the library. It did not occur to him to sleep in the bedroom where Tarquin had died.\n\nCurled up on the couch, blinking blearily at the rows of book spines on the shelves, he cursed himself tiredly for not finding a blanket. He knew, however, that he would not need it. The library was warm, just warm enough to sleep in without a blanket. He was perfectly comfortable in his clothes. Only the light was annoying, bright and intrusive, but even as he thought this, it began to dim, dying evenly to a dull glow that was strangely peaceful.\n\nWrapped in the warmth and dimness of the wine and the magical house, he fell softly into sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "WAKE.\n\nLiam was not dreaming until a few seconds before he woke, when suddenly he was walking through an ancient ruin that subtly reminded him of one he had seen years before. There, however, the giant sandstone pillars had been inscribed in a sinuous script he could not read; in his dream they were covered with the word wake in huge letters, like a command.\n\nWAKE. WAKE.\n\nThe stones were in better shape than he remembered, as though they had just been carved, and the message k on an urgency the old ruins had not possessed.\n\nWAKE. WAKE. WAKE.\n\nHe snapped away from the desolate city of his dreams, and knew he was in his library.\n\nTarquin's library, he reminded himself.\n\nYou are fully awake?\n\n\"Yes.\" he muttered, then raised his voice. \"Yes, Fanuilh, I'm fully awake.\"\n\n. He got up quickly from the couch to forestall any further questions, and scrubbed at his eyes. Then he went to the kitchen and pictured warm water and spiced buns. Mists of steam rose from the jug after a moment, and he found hot rolls in the oven like those he had eaten the first day. He slicked back his unruly hair and washed his face, fingering the stubble. Then he had the stove conjure up another platter of uncooked meat and went to the workroom to present it to Fanuilh.\n\n\"In case you get hungry while I'm gone,\" he said. \"At least it won't get cold.\" He laughed at his joke, but the little dragon just cocked its head. Liam rolled his eyes, and the empty decanter on the second table caught his attention.\n\n\"Why did Tarquin leave that out?\"\n\nI don't know.\n\nThe lack of expression in Fanuilh's thoughts maddened him; he felt as if the creature was hiding something from him, using a sort of mental poker-face. \"I don't know,\" when spoken, could mean a hundred different things, or a thousand. It could carry any significance, different by shades, determined by tone and pitch, the speed with which the words were spoken. A wealth of information could hide in the quavering of a syllable, the length of a vowel.\n\nI am not hiding anything. I simply do not know why he left it out.\n\n\"I know, I know. It's just ... frustrating.\" It was not fair to blame. the dragon.\n\nIt is strange, though. Master Tanaquil was very neat. He did not usually leave things lying about unless he intended to use them.\n\n\"Time to go,\" Liam said abruptly after a moment. \"I'll be back later.\" He walked quickly outside to his horse, munching on a bun as he went.\n\nYesterday's rain had stopped, but the skies were still overcast, and everything was wet. The trees along the road back to \u00b7 Southwark were a sodden, lifeless black, stripped of their leaves by the winds of the past two weeks. Rich, musty smells rose off the muddy fields. The fields and the sky, and Southwark when he finally came in view of it, looked colorless and leeched out, a painting composed only in varying shades of gray.\n\nNonetheless, he had slept well in the magic house, and the sweet taste of the buns lingered in his mouth like a pleasant memory. He felt good, and he smiled at his landlady's worried chattering over his being away the whole night. He did not even tease her, stopping only to reassure her and pick up his writing case before stabling his horse.\n\nMarcius's offices were in a warehouse a few streets back from the waterfront. They were not difficult to find, but Liam walked back and forth on the cobbles for a few minutes before going in, thinking of how to handle the interview. His hand dropped to the writing case at his belt, where his maps were securely settled. Then he slumped his shoulders meekly and knocked.\n\nThe warehouse fronted directly on the wide street, built of salt-stained gray boards, blank and featureless except for the huge wooden doors. His knocking sounded feeble; and he raised his knuckles again when a smaller door, cleverly set into its larger brothers. opened, and a ratlike head was thrust out and snarled lazily.\n\n\"What would you?\"\n\n\"Please, I have an appointment with Master Marcius. My name is Liam Rhenford.\"\n\nThe ratty man looked him up and down disdainfully and then withdrew. A few seconds later the inan from the waterfront the day before appeared and gave Liam a mean smile constricted by his puckered scar.\n\n\"The scholar comes to serve his time! Enter, good scholar!\" He stood aside, motioning for Liam to enter, but when Liam stepped forward he suddenly put himself in the way, so that Liam had to stop short. The rat squealed a laugh, and Scar's eyes gleamed.\n\n\"Well, come in, scholar! Why hem? Why haw? Do you wish to see Master Marcius or no?\"\n\n\"Please, I have an appointment,\" the Rat mocked in falsetto.\n\nLiam studied Scar, noting the cudgel at his belt and his heavy build. \u00b7 A regular thug, though the scar was from a sword and not a knife. A soldier, maybe? Liam was taller, with a longer reach, and thought he could probably have taken the guard; but he had more important business.\n\n\"I swear, sir, I have business with Master Marcius;\" he whined. \"You were there when the appointment was made.\"\n\nScar dropped his restricted smile and heaved a bored sigh, letting Liam pass. \"Aye, I was there. Come in, you womanly scholar. Marcius cannot see you yet; you'll have to wait his leisure.\"\n\nNodding gratefully, Liam eased past him and into the warehouse. It was long and lofty, empty space rising uninterrupted to the raftered ceilings. Crates, boxes, bales, barrels and jugs filled little more than a third of the floor space, clearly the result of a poor year's trading. The cargo of one big carrack might have filled the rest of the room. But that carrack, Liam thought, was just then rotting sixty feet below the sea at the base of the Teeth.\n\nThe two guards took seats around a barrel on which a stub of candle flickered. Scar ignored him, settling himself comfortably with his treelike legs stretched out. He ran a dirty-nailed finger along the trench that bisected his face. The Rat kept glancing in Liam's direction and chuckling. Liam chose a barrel several feet away from them and took a seat, focusing his attention on the stairway that ran along one wall of the warehouse.\n\nIt was exposed, made of the same weathered gray boards as the building, and ran the length of the wall to a closed-in loft at the rear of the room, illuminated along its way by torches placed in irregularly spaced sconces.\n\nLiam waited for almost an hour. Scar and the Rat carried on a desultory conversation, almost but not quite oblivious to his presence. He did not listen to them, but looked around the room, particularly at the staircase, or at his maps. Impatience grew, and he wanted to get it over with, afraid he would lose all his carefully prepared meekness if he were angry. He prepared himself a dozen times to tell Scar or the Rat to ask if the merchant would see him yet, but always decided against it.\n\nWhen he was going over the advantages and disadvantages of pressing his appointment for the thirteenth time, the door to the closed-in loft was flung open and he stood up as Marcius called out angrily.\n\n\"Is the scholar here yet?\"\n\n\"Aye, he's just arrived, Master Marcius,\" Scar called loudly, with an evil grin at Liam. \"Just this moment!\"\n\n\"Send him up immediately!\"\n\nThe door slammed shut and Scar came over and shooed him to the stairs, trying hard to keep his ruined face straight. \"Heard you the master, scholar? Immediately! Go to, go to!\" He fluttered his hands towards the stairway, and Liam hurried over to the accompaniment of the Rat's squealing laughter.\n\nThe stairs were dilapidated, creaking ominously beneath his weight, and Liam skipped over them as lightly as he could. The door of the loft had no latch, and swung open beneath his knuckles. He peered into the room as owlishly as he could and inquired politely:\n\n\"Master Marcfos?\"\n\n\"In, in! Stand not by the doorway, sirrah! Y'are late enough as it is!\"\n\nLiam inched into the room, anxiously rubbing his hands together.\n\nThe merchant sat on a high stool beside an expansive secretary laden with papers and account books bound in goldstamped leather. Open braziers filled with glowing coals flanked him, shelves and pigeonholes stacked with ledgers and scrolls spread around the walls. Wrought iron candelabra bore clusters of candles, reflected as tiny constellations in Marcius's sourly appraising eyes. Dry and perched high on the stool, he was impressive: his oiled, ringleted hair hung perfectly to his shoulders, his clothes hung beautifully from his spare frame, and the height he gained from the stool allowed him to look down his aristocratic nose at Liam.\n\n\"Well and well, scholar,\" the merchant said after peering at him coldly for a minute. \"Report says you've a whole store of goods to vent\u2014maps, charts, directions, soundings\u2014the rounded whole wanting for a rich voyage. Report has it you've made Necquer far richer than he's any right to be.\"\n\n\"I gather he has done well,\" Liam said guardedly, unsure where the merchant's elaborately casual conversation was heading.\n\n\"I wonder then, why you come to me to vent this mappery? Why not sell them to Necquer?\"\n\n\"Master Necquer does not appreciate my services, Master. He won't even pay me what he owes me, and I must leave Southwark soon enough, so I need ready money. The whole city speaks well of you, lord, and I thought to try my luck here.\"\n\nMarcius considered this for a moment, apparently indifferent.\n\n\"Necquer won't pay you, eh?\" He smiled dreamily, contemplating something that pleased him. \"Your fault of course, sirrah scholar. 'A Freeporter's purse is drawn tighter than a crossbow,' they say. Your fault entirely.\"\n\nLiam's agenda was not being followed to his satisfaction, and he tried to turn the talk away from Necquer with a fresh spate of whining.\n\n\"Oh, please, Master Marcius, I am in a desperate position. Now that Master Tanaquil has been murdered, I have no protection in Southwark. If you'll only buy these charts, I can leave\u2014\"\n\n\"Why?\" Marcius interrupted without heat.\" Why should I buy your charts, when it were just as easy to follow Necquer's ships next season? Can you tell me that, scholar?\" He smiled to himself, as though he had just made a telling point, but Liam was prepared.\n\n\"Ah, now, a shrewd, a very shrewd question, Master, \" he said in a flattering tone, \"but I've an answer. You see, Master Necquer was impatient. He bought only a single set of my charts in the middle of the summer, after most of his ships were gone. He only wanted the maps to those ports he could easily reach. And those are the poorest of the ones I can guide you to. If he had bought other charts earlier, he might have reached far richer ports, but as it was he barely made it back by the close of the season, and only the miracle kept him safe .... \" He let the silence draw out, but Marcius did not react to the hint about the Teeth. Instead; the merchant seemed to consider his words for a moment, then spat out a question suddenly.\n\n\"How do I know you won't sell me your charts and then go speak with Necquer? Twice as much for you, eh?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, Master, I'd never deal with Master Necquer again. Why, he has not paid me for the first set of charts! Besides, I must leave Southwark soon.\"\n\n\"Your harping on that theme is most tiresome. Why are you so anxious to part our city?\"\n\n\"I've explained, Master. I fear I'm in some danger from those who killed my former master, the wizard Tanaquil.\"\n\n\"Know you who took him off!\"\n\n\"I ... no, Master Marcius, I don't.\"\n\n\"Then how do you know y' are in danger? You, a mere cowering scholar?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Master. I'm simply afraid. It was murder, after all.\"\n\nMarcius considered this as well, and Liam wondered if he had gone too far. The merchant had shown no reaction that was clearly incriminating, and Liam felt frustrated. How much of Marcius's suspicion was due to business shrewdness, and how much to guilt, he could not tell, and the uncertainty tempted him to further baiting.\n\n\"Well and well, Scholar Rhenford, for all y'are a low time-serving wretch, let's see your maps.\"\n\nOpening his writing case, Liam burst into exclamations of joy. \"Then you'll buy! Oh, Master, you will not regret this at all! You'll be rich, I promise, and I can flee Southwark!\"\n\n\"I said nothing of buying, fool, only looking. Spread them out\"\n\nChastened, Liam tried to be meek as he laid a few of his maps on the secretary in front of Marcius.\n\nFor over an hour, the merchant studied the various papers intently, asking clever questions at every tum. At first, Liam stood by his shoulder, explaining different points, but then Marcius loudly complained of a stench. Liam, remembering that he had slept in his clothes, took the hint and went to the far side of the secretary, though he could detect no odor. More of the merchant's snobbery, he guessed.\n\nWhenever he could, he brought Tarquin into the conversation, using him as a reference and a source of information, bemoaning his death and extolling his virtues. Marcius made no comment, focusing his attention entirely on the maps, and the details Liam supplied about the customs and goods of different ports and cities.\n\nAt the end of the hour, Marcius decided to buy three of the maps, \u00b7with a show of reluctance. that Liam knew was feigned. The merchant prince was eager to get his hands on them, but did not want to seem so.\n\n\"I suppose I could purchase a few of these, scholar. They'd best be true, or I'll see you suffer for it.\"\n\n\"Oh, Master Marcius, they're true, I'll answer for it! And Master Necquer's riches will answer for it as well. He's made a huge pile this season, I assure you.\"\n\nDespite the dig implicit in comparing Necquer's fortune with Marcius's own sunken one, the merchant prince did not rise to the bait, and Liam grimaced inside. He could raise no reaction in the man, which made him think the merchant dangerous, which reinforced his earlier suspicions. A hard, clever, vain man, who would stop at little, Liam judged.\n\nReaching into the depths of one of the drawers of the secretary, Marcius brought forth a flat metal chest with a key already in the lock. He turned the key and, keeping the lid between him and Liam, opened it.\n\n\"We've not discussed the cost.\"\n\nA price was arranged, far higher than Liam would have asked, confirming that Marcius's reluctance was feigned. The merchant prince counted it out in silver coins, a tidy stack of them. Liam reached for the money, but Marcius slapped his band away and covered the coins with a protective hand.\n\n\"Here's more to our deal, scholar. You'll straight leave Southwark?\"\n\n\"Of course! I cannot stay, not if Master Tanaquil's killers are after me!\"\n\n\"And you'll not stop long enough, perhaps, to resell your charts to good Master Necquer?\"\n\n\"Why, no, Master Marcius! I swear\u2014\"\n\nThe merchant stopped him with an upraised palm.\n\n\"Don't forswear yourself, scholar,\" he said, pitching his voice low and stem. \"It'd not like me to find you'd given me the lie and dealt with Necquer. It'd like you to part Southwark, and escape your master's murderers. So take the money, and make short work of your leavetaking. Am I clear?\"\n\n\"Very clear, Master Marcius,\" Liam responded, licking his lips nervously. \"It will only take me a day or so to arrange my departure.\"\n\n\"Then see to it immediately.\"\n\nHe nodded, and Liam scooped up the money and the maps Marcius had not bought, bowing anxiously. As he was pulling open the latchless door, Marcius spoke again.\n\n\"One last, scholar. Where are you lodging now?\" Thinking of the peaceful night he had just spent, he almost said Tarquin's, but a second thought intervened, and he mentioned his landlady's. The merchant prince nodded with a frown of disgust, as though the knowledge were important and the address distasteful but not unexpected.\n\nLiam bowed again and scurried out onto the stairs, shutting the door quietly behind him. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his face was twitching with honest nervousness as he hurried down the staircase, but Scar and the Rat let him pass with no more harassment than their scornful smiles. The high squeal of the Rat's laughter followed him into the gray street, mocking.\n\nOnce outside he hurried a few blocks away, not thinking, and then stopped to breathe deep lungfuls of the cold sea air. He almost wished it were raining, to cool down his heated face, and wash away the trickles of hot moisture running down his back and under his arms.\n\nI completely botched that, he thought, though he could not exactly say why he felt that way. His dissatisfaction with the whole interview, he guessed, stemmed from the fact that nothing had come of it. Frustrated with Marcius's nonchalance, he had mentioned Tarquin too many times, trying to get a rise out of the merchant.\n\nHis conduct, even the veiled threat about Liam's wanting to avoid Tarquin's killers, was ambiguous. He might have been hiding guilt beneath a facade of snobbery and indifference, or the facade was real, and he was innocent. Liam could not come to any conclusion.\n\nThe interview had produced nothing but silver coins he did not need.\n\nIt was not until he was within a few blocks of his lodgings that he realized with a jolt what really bothered him about the conversation. He had agreed to leave Southwark.\n\nThe idea loomed enormously before him, presenting untold complications. But he would not consider them, ignoring the problems in favor of a second idea that came fast on their heels.\n\nWhy was Marcius so anxious to have him out of Southwark? He could not imagine it was solely to keep him from selling the same charts to Necquer. It must mean something more, and there was only one thing it could mean, he supposed.\n\nFeeling suddenly better about the morning's work, he turned away from the narrow streets where his garret was, and headed up to the rich quarter and the tailor he had seen two days earlier.\n\nHis clothes were ready, and he spent a few moments admiring them before he had the tailor bundle them up. He paid, and retraced his steps to his garret. There was almost an hour before noon, when he would have to meet Coeccias at the White Grape, so he had the drudge heat water, and washed himself in his room, shaving as well. Then he put on one of his new sets of clothes, a deep blue tunic with soft breeches of owl gray. His good boots and new cloak completed the outfit, and he wished for a mirror to admire himself. There was none, so he went downstairs.\n\nThe drudge was the only person in the kitchen, and she stared at his new clothes fearfully. When asked, she stammered that she did not know where his landlady was.\n\n\"Well, then, could you tell her that I probably won't be in this evening, so she should not worry. Will you tell her?\"\n\nHe wanted to laugh at her eager, wide-eyed nodding, and went to the White Grape.\n\nAs usual, the tavern seemed empty, though the common room was more than half full. The lunchtime conversations were quiet, and the tables were placed well apart so that sound did not carry. The serving girl recognized Liam, and gave his clothes a second, approving look before coming to his table.\n\n\"I doubted you'd come,\" Coeccias said when he arrived, standing behind his chair for a moment before sitting. \"You've tricked yourself up nicely, Rhenford.\"\n\n\"New clothes,\" he responded, waving a hand in dismissal.\n\n\"Well, then, what news?\"\n\n\"I met with Ancus Marcius this morning.\"\n\nCoeccias seemed to be waiting for something, edging around a question.\n\n\"Anything come of it?\"\n\n\"Enough to buy lunch, but not much else.\"\n\nWhile they ate, he described his conversation with the merchant, and the Aedile listened with occasional murmurs of comprehension.\n\n\"I think the warning is genuine,\" Liam finished. \"I think he killed Tarquin over the Teeth, and wants me off the scene because he thinks I may have some information.\"\n\n\"Or he took you for the fool you presented, and played you out your own fears, so you wouldn't deal with Necquer. Your suspicion wilts under that complexion.\"\n\nIt did indeed. Once again he swung back to thinking he had wasted the morning, and his only interview with the proud merchant prince.\n\n\"And Marcius expects me to leave Southwark,\" Liam added gloomily.\n\n\"Aye, he does. Naught bettered, Rhenford, and maybe much made worse.\" The blandness with which the Aedile announced his failure stung him, and he hung his head over his untasted food.\n\n\"Well, there's nothing to be done about it,\" he muttered. \"Truth, nothing. So we'll not nag at it. Let's consider something else, such as where you flew off to last night, eh?\" Frank disapproval rode the Aedile's heavy brow, and Liam winced.\n\n\"I ... I was not feeling well.\"\n\n\"The play was not so poor as to be sickening, Rhenford. No excuse. Have you a better?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nLiam raised his gaze to Coeccias's, and held it against the Aedile's probing stare. After a long moment of tension, the heavy man sighed and relaxed.\n\n\"I trust y'are feeling better,\" he said with heavy sarcasm.\n\n\"Much, thank you,\" Liam replied in the same manner.\n\nThere was another tension, but it broke when both smiled tentatively. Coeccias spoke first.\n\n\"If y'are feeling well enough, we've other business.\" He began to describe what he had found out. His men had not discovered the barmaid Dono\u00e9, but they had not been searching the rich quarter. He had reserved the best taverns there for himself, and expected to go the rounds the next morning.\n\n\"They're good men all,\" he explained, \"but I'd rather they not fright the poor girl. I'll handle it, and assure the outcome. You may want to attend me.\"\n\nIt was agreed that Liam would go with him, as he knew what he wanted to ask the girl, and might think of more questions when he saw her.\n\nThe Aedile had also arranged to be informed if the rent on the mysterious hooded woman's lodgings was paid.\n\n\"We'll know by tomorrow noon whether Tarquin was keeping her or no. But more than all this,\" he went on, growing brisk, \"is the player. When we thought him a minstrel, and did not know his face, I was not so hot to clap him in. Now we have his face and his station, and as an actor, he'd've had access to the sort of knife as killed the wizard. He seems most likely to me.\"\n\n\"Then you want to arrest him?\"\n\nFrowning, Coeccias tugged at his beard and spoke thoughtfully. \"No, truth, I don't. See him, yes, clap him in, no. Strikes me, all proposed to the killing were clever enough to fix the blame elsewhere. And of the choices, the player would be first in my mind to sacrifice\u2014he's the basest. Viyescu's respected, the woman unknown, Marcius nigh untouchable without good cause.\" He stopped, as though there was more.\n\n\"And ... \" Liam prompted.\n\n\"And ... he doesn't look the sort. Truth, did you see him stab that villain in the piece? Now, certain it is that duke earned his death more than Tarquin did his, but the pretty boy winced at it\u2014and that only in a play! Did see?\"\n\n\"I was watching the girl.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Coeccias laughed. \"Aye. Well, l think he couldn't have done the real deed, if he blanched at its counterfeit.\" \"I agree. I've seen him elsewhere, and he doesn't seem the type to fight.\" At the rise of the Aedile's eyebrows, Liam briefly outlined bis sight of Lons at the Necquer's party.\n\n\"All Necquer had to do was start for the door, and Lons was off like lightning. He wouldn't fight unless he was pushed, I guess. Too afraid his handsome face'd get hurt. And Tarquin wasn't the kind to push too hard.\"\n\n\"Still and all, it'd like me to see him, and maybe fright him a little. If he is our man, he's been cool enough till now, staying the time in town, and acting his plays. We'll talk with him, and set a man to watch him. He may try to take his leave after our little discourse. If he does, we'll have him.\"\n\n\"And if not, we may still scare him enough to make a mistake.\"\n\n\"Agreed. We'll to the theater. The players practice their performances in the morning, and sup just at noon. If we're quick, we'll catch him before his afternoon's work. Attend me.\"\n\nLiam dropped one of Marcius's silver coins on the table and they hurried out of the White Grape.\n\nA dullness clung to the theater, like a midnight lover in the morning. The golden orb looked gaudy and the doors had a desolate air, as if the building had been abandoned. They opened, however, and Liam and Coeccias went into the lobby, which felt cold and unused. Though there was a broom in one corner, and the plank floors had obviously just been swept clean, Liam imagined they would feel dusty, or perhaps moldy, if he knelt and touched them.\n\nHe did not.\n\nIn the theater itself a number of actors sat or stood around the pit, eating their meals and talking in low voices. A few candles flickered weakly in the windowless building, and despite the voices and people, it was gloomy.\n\nThe man who had greeted Coeccias at the door the night before detached himself from a whispered conversation and came to stand before them, dressed now in a commoner's smock instead of his colorful motley. He executed a grand, mocking bow.\n\n\"Your servant, milord Aedile. Have you come to close us out?\"\n\nCoeccias frowned, ignoring the actor's bantering tone. \"Nay, player. I'd have words with one of your company. Where is Lons?\"\n\nThe actor widened his eyes in girlish admiration, and spoke with ironic reverence. \"Lons? Our great hero? Lons the Magnificent? I fear me his lordship is not here, milord Aedile, but if you stay a moment, I'm sure he'll grace us.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Soon.\" The actor dropped his joking. \"He's gone to sup elsewhere, and'll be back soon. You may await him here.\" With another grand bow, he twisted away and clapped his hands loudly, calling for the beginning of the afternoon's rehearsal.\n\nCoeccias frowned sourly at the actor's back.\n\n\"I'll not be sad to pack him off to the heath.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" Liam asked, watching the actor marshall his company on the stage.\n\n\"Kansallus. He pens their sorry scripts, gives them their readings. Owns a share of the theater as well, if rumor's to be credited. A very rogue, but with some excellent parts: wit, voice, good sense. He never fusses when I close him out.\"\n\nThere was a small tinge of admiration in the Aedile's voice.\n\n\"If you like him so much, why do you shut up his theater?\"\n\n\"The Duke'd have it so. He doesn't take with the stage, and especially so when they allow women on it. So, a few days after Uris-tide, it's off to the country with them.\"\n\nCoeccias sighed ruefully, and they fell silent, watching the actors rehearse. It was a pastoral comedy complete with shepherdesses and faeries, in which Knave Fitch played a large role as a drunken farmer. Even with little practice, the clown brought humor to the part, and both men in the lobby chuckled.\n\nHearing them, Kansallus backed out to the lobby, stopping beside them but leaving his eyes on the stage.\n\n\"It pleases your' he asked, trying and failing to mask bis eagerness.\n\n\"Truth, it's a goodly thing.\"\n\n\"Yes, very much. It's funny.\"\n\nKansallus drank in the praise, bobbing his head happily at the stage, as if. to encourage the actors.\n\n\"But why,\" Liam asked during a pause while the scene shifted, \"don't you have that girl play the lead shepherdess'? The one who played the princess last night'? She'd be spectacular.\"\n\n\"That one,\" Kansallus said, rolling his eyes. \"It'd be worth my life and my jewels at once to suggest it. She only plays tragedy, look you, tragedy only. She esteems herself a great actress a lofty actress. No low comedy for her. Mug? Wink? Trip and pratfall? Never! Her feet would rot off before she'd play comedy!\"\n\n\"A shrew, eh'?\" Coeccias asked with a wicked grin. \"Pity. She's a fair leg.\"\n\nLiam nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Oh, in faith, I cannot deny it. A fair leg, and a fair ankle, bosom and face to keep the leg company. Enjoy what you see on the stage, good sirs, because you'll never see more of Rora anywhere else, least of all warming your bed.\"\n\n\"Rora'?\" Liam thought he would have done well to find Kansallus long before, when he was searching for someone who knew Southwark and would tell what he knew.\n\n\"Rora,\" the actor confirmed. \"No one's bauble is Rora, to be dandled and played with and warmed on a winter's night. Pure? enough to hunt the unicorn, our Rora, and too good for comedy\u2014No! No! No! Fitch, you mutton-headed, wool-pated, poxy, dripping ... \" He ran forward, shouting, to the stage, where Knave Fitch was standing with an elaborately innocent face while the rest of the cast collapsed in hysterics around him.\n\n\"It is no error of mine, Master Playwright, if my fellow actors cannot restrain their ... \" His voice, rippling with rolled r's, drifted to them from the stage, but the door behind them opened suddenly, and they both turned.\n\nFramed in a wash of gray light from the door, Rora entered, and Liam thought his heart might have stopped. Even bundled in a warm cloak she was stunning, the fullness of her red lips and the perfect beauty of her white complexion etched in the gray light. It turned her hair to dusty gold, and Liam fleetingly compared her to Lady Necquer, dismissing the latter in an instant. She stopped when she saw them. Over her shoulder, Lons loomed curiously.\n\n\"Good day, Aedile Coeccias,\" she said in a rich, musical voice. Her eyes rested on Liam, however, smiling a little mysteriously and arching an eyebrow, clearly aware of her affect on him.\n\nMaybe if I bring my jaw up from my knees, he thought ashamedly, and looked at Coeccias, who cleared his throat.\n\n\"Ah, y'are the actor Lons?\"\n\nThe handsome man, not expecting to be addressed, did not reply at once.\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"We'd have words with you, if you can spare a moment.\" \"But I've a practice\u2014\"\n\n\"Kansallus will not mind,\" Coeccias interrupted firmly, crossing his arms on his wide chest.\n\n\"Well, then, I suppose ... \" He edged his way in. past Rora, who continued to stare at Liam. Liam, in turn, kept his eyes fixed on the other two men, horribly aware of the blush that was creeping up his long neck. He decided that it was a point in Lady Necquer's favor that she did not seem so keenly conscious of her beauty.\n\n\"What did you want, Aedile?\" Lons seemed a little surer of himself, now that he was out from behind Rora and facing Coeccias. The Aedile gestured significantly at the woman.\n\n\"Would you not prefer to be alone?\"\n\nLons stiffened, as did Rora. \"Anything you can say to my brother you can say with me as witness,\" she said coldly.\n\n\"Well enough,\" he said agreeably, turning back to Lons. \"Pray you, brother, do tell what business you bad with Tarquin Tanaquil?\"\n\nStammering, Lons clenched bis bands. \"Tanaquil? The wizard? He's called you? The bargain's not fulfilled. the terms not met, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Lons,\" Rora warned.\n\n\"Still!\" Coeccias hissed at her out of the side of bis mouth, but the moment was enough for Lons to regain bis composure.\n\n\"Our business was that,\" he said formally. \"Ours. And as it is not finished, there's no need for you t'interfere.\"\n\n\"{ doubt but there is, goodman player. You'll have no more business with Master Tanaquil.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lons exclaimed angrily. \"You can't make me\u2014\" Liam watched Coeccias draw the young man on, and scrutinized the handsome face carefully.\n\n\"None'll have business with Master Tanaquil. He's gone beyond business, Lons, sped on bis way by a dagger.\"\n\nLons gaped, stunned.\n\n\"Tanaquil? Murdered'!\"\n\nLiam bad to remind himself that the man was an actor. His astonishment seemed unfeigned, real to a fault. Liam was disappointed, but not surprised. Much as he disliked the actor, he did not believe him capable of murder; Coeccias, however passed on.\n\n\"So you see, sirrah, what was your particular business is now my business, and the question stands. Why did you have dealings with the wizard?\"\n\nLicking bis lips, the young man looked from one face to another, Liam's and Coeccias's expectant, Rora's wary and warning.\n\n\"I needed bis help in a ... in a small matter of the heart.\" Rora nodded approvingly, but the Aedile laughed heartily.\n\n\"A love potion? You sought a wizard for a love potion? My granddam could've made you a love potion!\"\n\n\"The lady,\" Lons said with barely restrained anger, \"required a great service of me. I lacked the power for it, and sought the wizard's help.\"\n\n\"She needs must have set you a great task,\" Coeccias said, angling for more.\n\n\"The Teeth. She wanted the Teeth removed, to protect her husband,\" the actor supplied, over his sister's hissed objection.\n\n\"You commissioned that?\" The Aedile was clearly awed. \"I hope the lady was worth it.\"\n\n\"She is,\" Lons replied, with a glance at Liam, who nodded agreement, allowing himself a sidelong look at Rora.\n\n\"And the lady's name? Her husband's station?\"\n\n\"Is unimportant now,\" Liam said quietly, drawing a surprised stare from the Aedile and a sneer from Lons. \"I'll explain later. For now, I've a question.\" He addressed himself to the actor.\n\n\"Tell me, how did you propose to pay Tanaquil? Wizards are costly, and I know the spell took a great deal of effort.\"\n\n\"I proposed no payment. He named a sum, and I agreed.\"\n\n\"What sum?\"\n\n\"Ten thousand, in gold,\" the actor said, with a touch of pride.\n\nRora gasped and Coeccias gave a low whistle, but Liam only nodded thoughtfully.\n\n\"And he took you at your word that you could pay?\" \"I presume he knew my state. He accepted my compact.\" \"But you don't have ten thousand in gold.\"\n\n\"No.\" Lons shifted under the questions, perplexed.\n\n\"And so you couldn't have paid him, but he undertook the spell anyway.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he knew he was doing a noble deed-helping true love find its course.\" Again, there was the touch of hard, wounded pride, the sense of disdain at having his affairs discussed. Liam barked a laugh.\n\n\"More likely you dressed yourself up in the richest costume the Golden Orb. has and let him think you a rich merchant's son.\"\n\nThe young man blanched, but said nothing.\n\n\"And now that he's dead, you don't have to pay, do you?\" \"I did not kill him,\" Lons said thickly, licking dry lips. With the wolf's grin he had practiced, Liam agreed. \"Certainly not, certainly not. No one's suggesting such a thing. It would not be worth murder to catch a beautiful woman, get rid of an unpayable debt, and avoid a powerful wizard's wrath. Certainly not.\"\n\nThe wolf's grin worked nicely, leaving the young man speechless and gaping.\n\n\"I think we're done here, don't you, Aedile Coeccias?\" Liam raised an eyebrow to the officer, who looked intently at him for a moment, and then nodded once.\n\n\"Thank you, Lons, for your time. I don't think we'll be bothering you again.\" Smiling the wolf's grin again for effect, he ushered Coeccias to the door and let him pass out first.\n\nRora recovered before Lons did, and began stammering furiously.\n\n\"Who are you? How dare you question us\u2014\"\n\nHe dropped the grin and assumed a polite smile to match his words, which were offhand but firmly interrupted her.\n\n\"An interesting thing, Maid Rora. The knife that killed Tarquin was one that players often use. One of a pair, I'm told. It would be interesting to see if the theater were missing any, wouldn't it?\"\n\nWith a friendly smile, he dipped his head to her, and then turned to Lons, putting his back to the girl.\n\n\"Stay away from Lady Necquer,\" he whispered quietly. \"Do you hear? Stay away.\"\n\n\"I'll not,\" Lons said, trying and failing to sound firm. Liam's remarks had greatly upset him.\n\n\"Stay away from her,\" he repeated. \"If Necquer hears\u2014\"\n\n\"Necquer,\" the actor interrupted eagerly, as if he had found an attack he could answer, \"deserves her not! He's naught but a pandering, strutting\u2014\"\n\nRora hissed a warning and Lons stopped. glaring angrily and desperately at her.\n\n\"Just stay away from her,\" Liam said into the sudden silence, and received a sullen nod from the actor. Denying himself the last look at Rora that he wanted, he went out the door to join Coeccias."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Coeccias was waiting further down the street, leaning against a wall and watching a group of boys scuffle around a leather ball. He looked up with a slight chuckle at Liam's approach.\n\n\"It should be branded on your front, Rhenford: 'Take no surprise; I may do anything.' Branded in bold letters, or sewn into your clothes in characters of red.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nThey started off, leaving the boys behind and heading by tacit consent towards the Point. Coeccias ticked his reasons off on thick, blunt fingers.\n\n\"Firstly, you discount the player, and throw your weight behind the merchant. Y'ignore the player whiles we talk, to gawp and stare at his sweet sister. Then, of a sudden, you turn on the player again and fasten your teeth into his throat. You warrant him a motive and an opportunity, and show a familiarity with his affairs I'd have never guessed at. You fair prove him the murderer. And then\u2014then you ask his pardon and go your way! You as much as say 'Y'are a killer, sirrah,' and then leave him at large!\"\n\n\"You didn't argue,\" Liam pointed out, and the Aedile threw up his arms in exasperation.\n\n\"Oh, no, nor call you the wooden fool y' are, nor clap Lons in as I should! I've grown as wooden as you! And yet I give you my service. That of value I have in this I have from you, and all I see you do makes you out a bloodhound. Y'have an acute nose, Rhenford. Perhaps I'll just give you rein and follow you to the murderer.\"\n\nLiam shrugged uncomfortably under the praise, and glanced around the street before dropping his gaze to his boots, not looking at Coeccias.\n\n\"You could also follow me nowhere.\"\n\n\"I'd wager not. Y'are strange in thought and manner, but I'll be led by you in this, Rhenford, and I doubt not but it'll be to my profit.\"\n\nThey lapsed into silence, Coeccias satisfied and content, Liam wondering.\n\nHe had as much as said Lons was a murderer, and all the clues pointed that way. The knife, the debt, the timing almost everything indicated Lons, but he was reluctant to accept that. For one thing, he was afraid his dislike had colored his judgement, that his connection with Lady Necquer made him anxious to find Lons guilty. For another, there was Lons himself\u2014Liam simply could not find murder in the self-involved actor's character. Pride and arrogance, yes, but it seemed the sort he had often found in cowards, men who shrank from blood. And lastly, there was Lons's sister. Rora had taken a powerful hold on his mind, and he found it difficult to remove her. She was an amazing presence, he thought, and though he had felt something cold and disdainful in her, she drew him, her image fluttering around inside his head.\n\nNow that he had warned Lons away from Lady Necquer, he was inclined to find his murderer elsewhere, and he favored the merchant prince. Marcius's motives were muddied, and the evidence did not single him out, but he had the sort of strength of will and capacity for violence that Liam expected to find in a killer. And his threats, even veiled and obscure ones, had the ring of truth.\n\nLiam told none of this to the Aedile. Instead, he thought it out, eyes fixed on his feet as the two men made their way south through the city. Other considerations sprang to mind. He remembered Lady Necquer's comments on the Teeth, and heard now a note of morbid fascination he had not noticed at first. She had been so afraid of them and the danger they presented to her husband that she had agreed to sleep with the man who could remove them.\n\nAnd Tarquin had been responsible for it; could she be suspected? Or her husband? A series of questions formed themselves in his head, almost involuntarily, that he would ask her that afternoon. He felt instinctively that she was not involved. but her husband might be, if she had told him about Lons's courtship. That Necquer should strike at Tarquin and not Lons was strange, and argued against the suspicion, but the questions interested him in and of themselves, and he resolved to ask them.\n\n\"Your face's dark as the sky,\" Coeccias said finally, with a gesture that took in Liam's wrinkled brow and the cloudy sky. They were back in the neighborhood of the White Grape, and a pall of black hung over the sky.\n\n\"Thinking about murderers and rainy days make for a depressing combination.\"\n\n\"Truth, they do. Would a drink help?\" The painted signboard of the White Grape hung further down the street, swaying slightly in the stiff, storm-bringing breeze from the sea.\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\nA bottle of the tavern's watered-down white wine sped away the time, and Liam looked up from the dregs to hear the bells announce that it was time for his daily visit to Lady Necquer. He stood up from the table with mixed feelings. Coeccias reminded him of the next day's work, looking for the barmaid Dono\u00e9, and they agreed on an hour to meet\n\nIt was strange, Liam reflected as he walked towards the rich quarter, how Coeccias's attitude had changed. Only a few .hours earlier the Aedile had been highly suspicious of him because of his abrupt departure from the theater the evening before. Now Coeccias was practically giving up, throwing the weight of the whole investigation on Liam. Had his questioning of Lons been that impressive?\n\nHe was not entirely comfortable with the idea of himself as a sort of human bloodhound. He did not picture himself as particularly astute where people's darker motivations were concerned. If he were like that, he could not imagine why people accepted his presence; he knew that he would not want to be with someone who could smell out his deepest secrets.\n\nYet people did accept his presence. Tarquin had spoken freely around him, the Aedile shared meals with him. Lady Necquer actually seemed to look forward to his visits. Did that mean that, even though they felt he could see into their souls, they felt secure enough with themselves to ignore it?\n\nWas that what Fanuilh had seen in him? The thing that made the dragon entrust him with finding Tarquin's murderer?\n\nLiam Rhenford, human bloodhound. Liam Rhenford, before whom men's souls are laid bare. Liam Rhenford, the perfect investigator.\n\nSuddenly he laughed harshly, repressing the grandiose thoughts.\n\nI'm just asking questions, he thought, grinning, and they just happen to be good ones. I'm carrying my Luck with me.He laughed again, and felt better. The narrow street with its border of high walls where the Necquers lived was just ahead.\n\n\"Master Liam, at th'appointed hour, as usual!\"\n\nLares's bow was small out of familiarity and friendliness, not disdain, and the old man ushered him in with a smile.\n\nWell, at least the old man isn't uneasy around me, Liam thought with relief, and offered Lares a smile in return.\n\n\"It's becoming a ritual, Lares. They set the tolling of the bells by me.\"\n\nLady Necquer awaited him in the same upstairs parlor, and started up with a smile when Lares announced him. She came to him and, taking his hands, kissed him formally on the cheek. Thinking of the questions he wanted to ask and his unfavorable comparison of her with Rora, he coughed nervously and reclaimed his hands as soon as he could.\n\n\"Well, Sir Liam,\" she said, sitting gracefully, \"what discourse have you prepared for me this day?\" Bright color suffused her pale complexion, and a smile broke out uncontrollably on her face. She seemed intensely happy about something, and he smiled mildly, infected by her mood.\n\n\"I'm afraid I haven't prepared any talk for this afternnoon. But you, I think, must have some news. If you grin any harder your face will split in two. What makes you so happy?\"\n\nHer grin widened until it took possession of her whole face, and she suddenly leapt up and danced around the room.\n\n\"Oh, Sir Liam, my husband comes home this day, and will not leave me again for winter entire! My heart is full to bursting!\" She hugged herself, and Liam smiled at her childlike joy. He took a breath and spoke heartily.\n\nChildlike joy. He took a breath and spoke heartily . .. \"Soon. When does soon, be soon! arrive?\" He'll dine with me this night!\" She danced thought of further, Rora's twirling dancing in around the the theater, whole the exact room, and oppositehe of with Lady a radiant Necquer smile, s pure, she girlish danced past giddiness. his chair, Favoring laying hima hand \"He is briefly in the on his city even shoulder. now, attending pressing business, but \"That's he'll be excellent home soon, news, and madam, mine for and I the think winter!\" I have some other that will increase your happiness.\"\n\n\"oh?\" She came to a reluctant halt, her full skirts whirling around her, and beamed abashedly at him. \"You must excuse me, Sir Liam. I'm hardly company I can think little else but Freihett. But come, your news.\" Eagerly, she came and offering sat her beside whole him on the divan a hand on his arm, offering her whole attention with a forced serious look that threatened to break into a wild grin at any moment.\n\n\"It so happens,\" he began slowly, \"that I had occasion to speak with someone who I believe was causing you some discomfort.\"\n\nShe nodded, still seriously, but the smile threatened hugely. He went on.\n\n\"A young man, an actor, who was presenting unwanted attentions.\"\n\nThe threat of a smile vanished, and she took a deep breath.\n\n\"There are some things I know about him that could have caused him a great deal of trouble, and it so happened that I was able to ... well warn him off if you see what I mean. I don't think he will be bothering you again. I did not mean to pry, madam, but the opportunity presented itself. I know it was not my place\"\n\nTaking her hand from his arm, her voice was strained and eyes downcaset on her lap, where her hands were clasped fiercely. \"No, it was not your place ... how did you happen to speak with him?\"\n\nLiam stood and took a few steps to stand before an elegant hanging. He fingered its tassels absently, his back to her. \"I was well acquainted with a wizard named Tarquin Tanaquil. He .. died recently, and several things indicated that Lons was involved in the death. I spoke with him about his involvement, and took the opportunity to sugest he leave you alone.\"\n\n\"The wizard was murdered?\" The strain in her voice was greater.\n\n\"Yes. And certain things indicate Lons was responsible.\" He turned to look at her, and almost flinched at the pain on her face. \"Lons had commissioned Tarquin to make the Teeth vanish, but couldn't pay the price. The knife that was used was a stage blade. His guilt could be established with these.\"\n\n\"He would not do that,\" she whispered, almost choking on a sob. \"He hasn't the strength.\"\n\nLiam went and sat beside her. \"I don't think so either. Tell me, why did you want him to get rid of the Teeth?\"\n\nHer words came slowly, with great difficulty. He writhed inside at making her talk about it, but was also grateful that she was speaking freely, and had not chosen to be angry with him. He had feared she would think he had tricked her, had wormed his way into her confidence just for information. But she seemed wrapped up in her sorrow and confusion.\n\n\"He ... he wooed me, professed undying love. The summer entire, while Freihett was at sea. He spoke with such heat, so truly ... he said he needs must, that he needs must ... know me. I gave him no encouragement, no sign of returning his feelings, but he pressed and pressed. And all while Freihett was at sea, and those cursed Teeth waited to take him down, to crush him beneath the cold blue.\"\n\nShe gasped at the intensity of her vision, at the depth of her fear for her husband, and Liam waited silently for her to go on. Tears brimmed in her enormous blue eyes, but were not shed, and suddenly she smiled bleakly, looking defenselessly at him.\n\n\"I thought if I tasked him impossibly, he would give,me peace. I claimed the destruction of the Teeth as my price, and sent him away, sure he could not achieve it. It was a fond and foolish thought, wasn't it?\" Liam shook his head sadly, and she took a deep breath, steadying herself. \"But be did it. The wizard succored him, and he saved my husband's life. What could I do? I could not surrender to him.\"\n\nAfter a long pause, she looked earnestly at him and added: \"I did not surrender to him, Sir Liam, though he continues to plague me. He was to come to me on the day the Teeth vanished, but I put him off, feigned sickness, and on the day after my husband was home ... I broke my word, and did not pay him for my husband's life. I have transgressed doubly, in breaking an oath and entertaining a lover while my husband was away. You understand?\"\n\nIt was important to her, and he nodded again, gravely. \"Yes, I do understand. Does your husband know?\"\n\n\"Yes. I gave him the whole story when he was well. The journey had taken much from him, you know.\"\n\n\"I can imagine. What did he say about it?\"\n\n\"Naught, or very little. He credited me, and said he would not bold it against me. But he was terribly irked, l know. If Lons had been there, or he'd come across him, there'd have been more than harsh words.\"\n\nIt was time to stop, Liam decided. Lady Necquer's brave smile held, but her lip trembled, and he knew enough for now. She had not thought to wonder about his interest, nor to think that be might connect any of what she said with Tarquin's death. He bated himself for prying, but offered a directionless prayer of thanks that she had not realized what be was after.\n\n\"Come,\" he said, rising, \"there's no reason to think on it any longer. Right or wrong, I think he'll stay away, and Master Necquer is back now to stay by your side.\"\n\nAt a sideboard he found wine, and filled two crystal goblets. He brought the goblets back to the divan and handed one to her. She took it gratefully and drank. Tears still brimmed in her eyes, dangling from tier eyelashes. He wanted very much to brush them away, but was afraid it might seem forward. Instead, he walked back to the hanging and examined it, sipping his wine.\n\nAfter gulping down her glass, Lady Necquer went to the sideboard and poured herself another, from which she took a smaller sip before speaking in a deliberately bright manner.\n\n\"Now, Sir Liam, enough of all that. Enough and too much. We must regain our wonted mirth, and find a way to pass the time more in keeping with my husband's homecoming.\"\n\n\"What shall we talk about? I'm afraid we've covered what I know of the rest of the world pretty thoroughly.\"\n\n\"Well then,\" she said with a smile halfway towards her earlier happiness, \"we shall cover you. I know where you've been and what you've seen, but nothing of you. Come hold discourse on Sir Liam Rhenford.\"\n\nSmiling apologetically, he followed her back to the divan. \"That is a very boring topic, madam. The rest of the world is far more interesting.\"\n\n\"I'll judge that, Sir Liam. You may begin.\"\n\nFolding her hands in her lap, she assumed a very grave demeanor, as if she really meant to judge him. He laughed, and she joined him tentatively.\n\n\"Come, go to, go to! Tell me about you!\"\n\n\"Very well,\" he said, pleased to see her smiling.\"What would you like to know?\"\n\n\"What you do in Southwark,\" she answered promptly, and he had to pause and think.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he said after a while. \"Nothing, really.\"\n\n\"Nothing? Naught? I'll not believe that. You certainly don't idle your time waiting to attend me in the afternoons!\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose I am recovering. I have been a long time away from Taralon, and I thought it was time to get back.\"\n\n\"After your shipwrack?\"\n\nHad he mentioned that to her? He did not remember, but he was sure he had not told her the whole story. Now that he thought about it, he realized once again that he was not sure why he was in Southwark. The experience on the island had worn him out, and when he had finally reached Southwark, he was so grateful to be back in Taralon that he had settled there instinctively. To fill the time, he had half-invented the idea of writing, but that was not the real reason he. stayed in Southwark. It was safe, a part of Taralon that held no memories for him at all, but that was a part of his home nonetheless.\n\n\"Yes. I'm also writing.\"\n\n\"Stories?\" she asked eagerly. \"Or a play? Or poetry? I'll wager your verse is passing fair.\"\n\n\"Neither, I'm afraid. History. Or rather, my history, with some of the history of the places I've been.\" He smiled at her obvious disappointment, and spoke with a hint of reproach. \"You seemed to think my stories of where I'd been somewhat interesting.\"\n\n\"Well, and they were,\" she admitted grudgingly, \"when you told them. But if you cage them with bars of ink and walls of leather, they'll be stuporous, sleep-inducing, for it was your tongue that gave them life. You'd do better to make of them a romance, or better, a string of poems. Yes! A string of poems addressed to the sweetling who awaits you on shore!\"\n\n\"But I didn't have a sweetling on shore,\" he protested.\n\nBrushing aside the objection, she went on. \"No matter; invent one! Call her ... call her Larissa, and pine longingly for her as you view the lusty beauties of the strange scenes you've visited! Mince your words and file your phrase, and harken back to her shining face whenever you mention some far-off wonder!\"\n\nThey went on in the same vein for a while, as Lady Necquer mapped out the collection of poems she expected from him, and he objected to it every step of the way, laughingly complaining that he was no poet, and had had no girl waiting for him while he traveled.\n\nThe idea seemed to inspire her, and though she too giggled at her own high-flown fancies, there was a seriousness as well.\n\nIf I were a poet, Liam thought, itwould make good verse. But I'm not, he reminded himself, and reminded her as well, an objection she countered with the suggestion that he perform vigils with the priests of Uris.\n\n\"Oh, and Uris-tide is nigh! If you begin tomorrow, you can complete the course of the devotions by midnight of the feast! The goddess'll surely inspire you!\"\n\n\"I doubt that; Uris is not widely worshipped in the Midlands, and would hardly look favorably on me. Besides, don't men have to shave their heads to attend the vigils?\"\n\n\"They do,\" she agreed, and looked at him for a long moment before bursting into giggles at the image of him without any hair at all, with even eyebrows shaved, as was required of supplicants to Uris.\n\n\"It sounds a high price to pay for poetic inspiration,\" he said, but she did not hear, trying to stifle her own mirth. She did, however, hear the heavy tread on the stairs and the voice that came from outside the door of the parlor.\n\n\"Poppae! Poppae! I'm home!\"\n\nToe door swung open, and Necquer entered, still in his dusty traveling cloak and mud-spattered riding boots. Her giggles subsided in a gasp, and she leapt to her feet and ran to him, kissing him quickly and often without discretion. He staggered under her affection, and put his arms around her to steady himself, smiling indulgently. Then he noticed Liam, and greeted him with an ironic nod.\n\n\"I'd shake your hand, Rhenford, but mine are full at the moment.\"\n\nSuddenly, Poppae cried out, and ran her hand delicately down Necquer's cheek. Just above the line of his beard a bright purple bruise was blooming.\n\n\"You've taken a hurt!\"\n\n\"It's nothing,\" he murmured brusquely, taking her hand in his and drawing it away. \"An unruly pair of highwaymen, without the sense to be afraid of my guards.\" She made to fuss about it, but he stopped her with a brief kiss. \"It's nothing. You won't even notice it in a few days. Now, Rhenford, I must say I'm glad to see you here. I take it you've been entertaining?\"\n\n\"Actually, I've just been trying not to be boring.\"\n\n\"Go to, go to,\" Lady Necquer scolded, shifting so that she could see both men, but leaving her arms around Necquer. \"He has kindly borne my maunderings and incessant weeping over your absence, and entertained me most regally. He has even promised to pen me a string of poems!\"\n\nNecquer smiled at Liam's look of surprise. \"Poems, eh? You're more talented than I realized, Rhenford.\"\n\n\"More talented than I realized, Master Necquer. I didn't know I was a poet.\"\n\n\"Well then, you'll stay to dinner and maybe Poppae can instruct you in the art.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, do stay, Sir Liam!\"\n\nLiam was surprised to notice that Necquer honestly meant the invitation, though his wife's agreement had been hasty and not entirely heartfelt. And the merchant had not been at all disturbed to find his wife closeted with another man, even though he had recently found out someone was wooing her. Had he ruled Liam completely out as a threat?\n\nLady Necquer's obvious desire to be alone with her husband would make that a fair judgement, he thought wryly.\n\n\"I'm afraid I cannot. I promised I'd dine with a friend tonight.\"\n\nFrowning, Necquer accepted the refusal, to his wife's ill-concealed delight. \"Another time, then,\" he said, disengaging himself from his wife to offer Liam his hand.\n\n\"Certainly,\" Liam said, and took the merchant's slim hand, which was warm and moist with sweat. \"You really should wear some armor, and a helmet.\" He pointed with his free hand at Necquer's cheek.\n\n\"I do,\" the merchant laughed, letting go his grip on Liam's hand. \"They tried to sneak up on us in the night.\"\n\nLiam smiled and headed for the door with a slight bow. Lady Necquer, perhaps regretting her fickle change in interest, stopped him and kissed both his cheeks warmly.\n\n\"I'll expect you on the morrow, Sir Liam, though earlier. Say noon, if you've no objection. You'll not slip out of that string of poems so easily. We will discuss it then.\"\n\n\"Your servant,\" he said with a tremendous show of humility and a low bow, and backed out of the room.\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs Lares stood gazing reverently up.\n\n\"It's no small blessing t'have him back, eh, Sir Liam?\" \"No,\" Liam said with a chuckle, thinking of Lady Necquer ecstatically greeting her husband. \"No small blessing indeed. Goodnight, Lares.\"\n\nA small wave of anger broke over him in the street. He had spent his afternoons entertaining her, turning his own life into an amusing tale to while away her waiting hours, and she had abandoned him the instant Necquer had come back. Necquer, who left her alone for months at a time!\n\nThe anger passed into reproach. It was foolish to think that way. Necquer was her husband, and obviously loved her dearly, despite what Lons had said, while he was only a recent acquaintance. And she had not simply abandoned him; she had asked him back the next day, as though nothing had changed.\n\nSmiling a familiar, well-worn smile at himself, he wandered through the darkening streets. It was dusk, the clouds now beginning to shred into tatters beneath the onslaught of the sea breeze. Cold and stinging, the breeze scoured the sky and the rapidly emptying streets, molding his cloak to his back and legs as he walked north. Stars glittered, impossibly distant and small between the rents in the clouds.\n\nLady Necquer was, after all, almost a child. In her midtwenties, he thought, and thus only five or six years younger than he, but different, in a way he sought to name.\n\nSheltered, he eventually thought. The only sorrows she knew were hers, while he had seen those of many others. In ports and lands Southwark had never heard. of, on seas her merchants had never sailed, Liam had seen many other people's sorrows, and with an unconscious selflessness, he judged them greater than his. Greater than his burning home and his slain father, greater than being alone in a strange city and alone, for that matter, in the whole world.\n\nIt was for that reason, perhaps, that he had not objected to being linked with Fanuilh, or to finding Tarquin's murderer. One was a tie, a bond of sorts, and the other a duty that one might offer to family. He did not delude himself into thinking of Tarquin as a replacement for, or symbol of, his father; no thought could be more ridiculous. But it was a duty he wanted to fulfill, a purpose that went beyond food or shelter or survival, an unnecessary duty, and thus one gladly undertaken.\n\nLiam thought of the house on the beach, and the quiet, dreamless night he had spent there, and decided that though it was not his yet, he would try to make it his.\n\nBut he did not want to go there yet. He wanted a drink, and something to eat, and the sound of other people enjoying themselves. And perhaps a glimpse of Rora, to take his mind off the weighty subjects he was now embarrassed to have thought about. He set his feet to the Golden Orb, the wind from the sea pushing steadily against his back, urging him on.\n\nThe theater was not yet open, he found when he arrived, his ears and the tip of his nose scarlet with the cold. It was too early for the evening's performance. Exasperated at his own foolishness, he searched the streets around for a tavern. There was no one to ask; the shops were closed and it was so early that the street in front of the theater had not yet filled up with the evening's audience.\n\nHe found a tavern on a side street only a few blocks from the Golden Orb, between a house like his landlady's, where the fourth and fifth stories leaned precariously out over the street, and a building with a crudely lettered sign that announced the school of a private teacher of rhetoric and grammar. Liam noticed with amusement that the sign had three misspellings. The tavern was called the Uncommon Player, and the wooden board that swung creakily over the door was painted with a figure in motley juggling three balls of flame. Noise trickled out, like the murmur of the sea from far away.\n\nInside, the common room was long and narrow, and the noise swelled to a din like battle. The tavern was packed to bursting with laughing, shouting, singing men and women, hectically enjoying themselves. Behind the bar, three men were busy trying to serve enough beer to keep the huge crowd happy. It was hot, and sweat streamed freely down many of the faces, but the smell was oddly pleasant, even with the thick banks of smoke that hovered overhead. Close, but not stifling, and fresh. The evening had only just begun, and the odors and the fun had not had time to sour. He wondered distastefully what it would be like in a few hours, and looked around for a place to sit.\n\nThere were only a few tables, inadequate for the large groups that were crammed around them, and all the standing room was taken by the raucous clientele. Even as he stood uncertainly in the doorway, however, four people stood up from the table nearest him, and Liam recognized them as actors from the rehearsal. One of them, a man, shouted loudly and waved towards the rear of the room, while the others settled with the harassed serving girl.\n\n\"Fitch! Fitch!\" the man called, gesturing urgently. \"Call!\" Liam followed his pointing and saw Knave Fitch's flushed face nod comprehendingly towards the door and then resume talking with the group gathered around him. The man shook his head and led his three fellow actors out of the Uncommon Player.\n\nLiam instantly installed himself at the vacant table, amazed that the four actors had managed to fit around it. He thought it barely adequate for one.\n\nAn earthenware tankard suddenly dropped to the table before him. He caught it instinctively and looked up at the hard-pressed serving girl, who nodded in approval at his quickness.\n\n\"I didn't\u2014\" he began, pitching his voice above the roar. \"All the drink we serve, master,\" the girl cut in, and turned abruptly to waltz away into the mass of thirsty customers.\n\nShrugging, Liam tested the drink and found beer, remarkably cold and far better than merely drinkable. He downed nearly half of it, looking idly around the room. The customers were not the same dour, quiet types as those in the White Grape, but they seemed better off for it, laughing and shouting and drinking hugely, unaffected by the cramped space or the din or the smoke from dozens of cheap tapers and even cheaper pipes. He liked it, assuming a blandly smiling expression while he wondered at the number of people and the pleasure they seemed to take in each other's company.\n\nThe serving girl appeared again, dancing gracefully through the unmoving crowd with a huge platter balanced above her head. She slammed the platter down on his table and breathed a huge sigh of relief before holding up her hand to stop his question.\n\n\"I know you did not order it, master, but you needs must take it, for that y'are at a table, and at the tables you needs must pay for food, even though y'eat not.\" She waited for a second and he smiled. She nodded and whirled away again to fight her way to the bar.\n\nHe had seen the public houses and taverns and restaurants and saloons of hundreds of cities, and had learned to be comfortable eating alone, so he turned his attention to the platter without a qualm.\n\nPleasantly surprised, he saw that the Uncommon Player offered nothing cooked, relying instead on quantity to make up for heat. There were three huge wheels of cheese, each spiced differently, and large loaves of flat bread. Nuts, apple slices and butter were arrayed around the \u00b7cheese and bread. in workmanlike profusion. There was even a small pot of honey, and he remembered the knife at his belt with relief. The Uncommon Player apparently saw silverware as an unnecessary item.\n\nAs he ate, the crowd grew smaller, drifting out in a hail of noisy farewells, until it seemed there was only the small group gathered around Knave Fitch, He held court raucously, shouting witty obscenities and insults at his companions, who rewarded him with gusts of laughter and refillings of his tankard. Liam smiled at some of the clown's jokes, and noticed that there were three musicians at the far end of the room, playing furiously on lute, pipes and a small set of skin drums. They could only occasionally be heatd over Fitch's constant stream of filth, mostly when he stopped to take monstrous gulps of beer.\n\nLiam stared at the platter, which was still more than half full, and gave up. His stomach strained uncomfortably, and he felt short .of breath; it was by far the most food he had eaten in a long while.\n\nHe pushed the platter carefully away, as though afraid some of the food might leap off it and try to run down his throat, and gave Fitch his full attention.\n\nThe clown managed two or three more rude jokes before the door of the Player burst in and Kansallus appeared like an angry god.\n\nA short, angry god, Liam amended,\u00b7 and watched the proceedings with even more interest.\n\n\"Fitch, you bastard!\". Kansallus screamed, his face purple with anger. \"Call was an hour since! You've less than ten minutes to be on stage, you damned, double-damned, triply-damned ass!\"\n\nThe little playwright stormed over to the clown, who was draining his tankard unperturbed, and clamped his fingers on Fitch's upper arm in a way that made Liam wince, remembering an old tutor who had done the same thing. With the thumb and forefinger pressing into the meat of the muscle, it could be exquisitely painful, but Fitch took it in stride, handing his empty tankard to a barkeeper and allowing himself to be dragged to the door. Kansallus propelled him through it with a vicious kick to his ample behind, and slammed it closed behind him.\n\nLiam applauded softly, and Kansallus turned, his face suddenly calm and amiable, and bowed deeply. When he rose, he smiled agreeably.\n\n\"How now! It's the gentleman of the afternoon that appreciates true art! Might I?\" He gestured at the empty chair across from Liam as he sat in it. \"I know you not, sir, but you strike me as a man of some discretion, of some taste if you'll allow me to say so.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Liam said, and signaled the serving girl.\n\nKansallus laughed loudly, and then again when the girl brought two fresh tankards to the table.\n\n\"Is it a problem when Fitch drinks before a performance?\" Liam asked as the playwright downed most of his beer.\n\n\"Not in the least,\" Kansallus answered, smacking his lips and beaming happily. He had sharp eyes, Liam noted, but there were shadows in them, a sort of defensive mask. \"He'll outshine the stars tonight, and send the groundlings to their knees weak as babes with mirth. He's best when pickled.\"\n\nNoting the way Kansallus's eyes dropped to the half-full platter, Liam pushed it across the table and bade him eat, if he was hungry.\n\n\"As a rule, I don't sup on the leavings of men to whose names I'm not privy,\" the playwright said with a smile, though the defensive shadows were thick, ready for rejection. \"I'm Kansallus, scripter and part owner of the Golden Orb.\"\n\n\"Liam Rhenford.\" He held out his hand, which the playwright took briefly and with unshadowed eyes before digging into the platter like a starving man. \"You seem hungry, Kansallus of the Golden Orb. Is it not so profitable?\"\n\n\"Profitable enough,\" the little man muttered around a huge mouthful, \"but not so luxurious that I'll refuse a freely offered meal. Pray you,\" he said after washing the mouthful down, \"if I'm not too bold, what brings a man who walks the day with an Aedile to the Unco' Player at night?\"\n\n\"I thought I might see your performance tonight. I enjoyed the other one I saw very much.\"\n\n\"Ah, then, y'are as much caught by Rora as any other.\" Nettled by the man's amused tone, Liam feigned indifference. \"Rora?\" The other smirked, spilling a handful of nuts into his mouth, and Liam smiled guiltily. \"You must admit, she's a beautiful woman.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye, passing fair, until you know her well. She can be hideous as a witch, if you take my meaning. I'll disappoint you further: she's not on tonight.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"She's this night free and the next, for that Uris-tide is nigh. She's a very zealot,\" he added, with a wink that suggested the opposite.\n\n\"No great temple-goer?\"\n\n\"Not by half. Though no sinner, mind. Pure as the unsunned snow, our Rora.\" Strangely, he seemed to mean it.\n\n\"Then the way she dances is ...\"\n\n\"Intuitive,\" Kansallus supplied with malicious humor.\n\n\"An imposture of a knowing wench. And all the more impressive for it, if you see.\"\n\n\"I suppose I do.\"\n\nThey fell silent, Liam pondering the idea of Rora's dancing while Kansallus wolfed down the rest of the platter. When he had finished it, he pushed away from the table and began picking his teeth with an immaculately clean fingernail. He was startlingly neat; though his artisan's smock was a little ragged and his thin, reddish hair unshorn, both were clean, and a slight smell of soap arose from him.\n\n\"If you do,\" he said, as though the conversation had not been interrupted, \"I'll thank you for the meal with advice: stay clear of Rora. Any fancies you have on her she's sure not to fill, and more like to box your ears or scratch the jelly from your eyes.\"\n\n\"I'll keep it in mind,\" Liam said, laughing at the transparency of his interest. On the other hand, he imagined that Kansallus and Rora's fellow actors must be used to men showing that kind of interest.\n\n\"I'm no wagerer, friend Rhenford, but if I were, I'd have one for you.\" The playwright was looking at him with friendly appraisal.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'd wager\u2014though I'm neither snooper nor gossip\u2014 I'd wager that whatever else brought you to the Orb this afternoon revolved 'round a certain rich merchant's wife.\" Kansallus was indeed the man he should have talked to when he first began investigating.\n\n\"And you might have won, had you phrased the bet properly. She was not the focus of the business, but a part of it.\"\n\nThe playwright nodded judiciously. \"Lons is an arrogant, silly ass. He deserves to have panted after her, puppylike, for the whole summer. Strange, now, isn't it, that Lons, handsome piece of work that he is, should have such trouble getting what he wants, while his sister has so little getting what she doesn't?\"\n\nLiam agreed, and bent forward at the playwright's beckoning finger.\n\n\"Though there are some,\" he whispered furtively, \"knaves and caitiffs all, mind, but some nonetheless, who say that Rora may get that trouble she wants, but only from a certain individual troubler.\" He nodded again and leaned back, finishing his tankard with an air of having imparted a great secret.\n\n\"And that troubler?\"\n\nKansallus shook his head and sighed regretfully. \"A cypher, a mystery, an unknown quantity of indistinct parts. None of the caitiffs and knaves and vicious gossips who say it can warrant it, and I'm of a mind t'ignore it, but there you are\u2014it's been bruited about.\"\n\n\"I see.\" He rose to go, and dropped a handful of coins on the table. \"It's been fascinating, friend Kansallus, if disappointing as regards a certain dancer. I think there's enough there for another few tankards, if you don't have to go back to the theater.\"\n\n\"I don't, bless you,\" the playwright said with a broad smile. \"And for it, I'll tell you this\u2014have ever seen Knave Fitch scratch at's ear while on the boards?\"\n\n\"No,\" Liam admitted. He decided not to mention that he had only seen the clown three times, one of them within the last few minutes.\n\n\"Well, he does, from time to time, and the common run think it a pose of comic thought, but's not.\" Kansallus paused and smiled secretly. \"It's a scar he's scratching from the teeth of a maid.\"\n\n\"Rora,\" Liam supplied, and was rewarded with a firm nod.\n\n\"I know, to look at, Fitch's no rake\u2014but he's a fair number of maids under's belt, and we all at th'Orb give him first crack at any wench. So it chanced when Rora was newly with us as a dancer out of some house on the Point and on her brother's vouching, we stood back and let Fitch go to work. The very next day he appears with a bandaged head, and tells us all she's a hellcat for her virtue, and to stay away. So, that's the dancer\u2014and my warning. Go for tamer flesh.\"\n\n\"I'll bear it in mind. Now I must go.\"\n\n\"Say, friend Liam,\" Kansallus stopped him again, \"one last. I note a writing case at your side. Y'are not, by chance, a scripter as I am?\"\n\n\"No,\" Liam answered, looking curiously down at the playwright. \"Only sometimes a scholar.\"\n\n\"Excellent news,\" Kansallus said, the smile deepening. \"There's enough of scribblers 'round the Orb, and I'd hate to find this meal a sop for your taking away my livelihood.\"\n\nStill laughing, Liam made his way through the darkened streets, guided only by the stars and the occasional torch. Kansallus made an excellent source of information, as well as an interesting companion. Not that Coeccias was a bad sort, but he lacked the playwright's good-natured but malicious tongue.\n\nThe night was cold, even colder after the warmth of the inn, and he had to fight now against the freshening sea breeze. The doors to the Golden Orb were still open, but he passed them by, wondering what Rora was doing with her evening off.\n\nSounds were few and far between, the streets empty, and he started once at what he thought was the sound of feet behind him. Then he heard the coo of a pigeon and the flap of wings and smiled with relief. Coeccias might not be very good at searching out murderers, but in four months of frequent night walks he had never been accosted, and that reflected well on the Aedile. The streets were clear of the common run of villains, if private houses weren't safe from the uncommon run.\n\nNonetheless, he found himself looking over his shoulder more than usual, unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched. Try as he might, he was on edge for the length of his walk, and reached the stables with\u00b7 a genuine feeling of relief.\n\nThe boy let him stand inside, out of the cold, while his mount was saddled. Once on Diamond, he felt better, and, trotted quickly out of the city towards Tarquin's house on the beach.\n\nMy house on the beach, he reminded himself, and smiled at the thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Once again the house was lit before he arrived, and the warm yellow light spilling from its windows helped him find his way down the narrow path in the moonless night. The surf was unseen but loud, crashing in the blackness like the shouting of giants. He tethered Diamond in the small shed, apologizing for the cramped quarters. He thought about bringing out a blanket to keep the chill off, but noticed that the air of the shed had already grown warmer. Tarquin planned for everything, he thought, and patted the restive horse soothingly before going back to the house.\n\nYou are home earl, Fanuilh thought at him as soon as he had closed the door. Liam bit off a retort and waited until he went into the workroom.\n\n\"Yes, I'm home early,\" he said pleasantly when he could see the tiny dragon's face. \"I decided that even murderers must sleep, and that if they'd been avoiding me with as much energy as I've been searching for them, they must be tired.\"\n\nThat is not why.\n\n\"No, of course not. Why would I bother lying to you, when you can read my mind? I'm joking, though that seems to be as useless as lying, since you don't have a sense of humor.\"\n\nI find different things funny.\n\n\"I'm sure you do.\" There was a long pause. Liam frowned, wondering what Fanuilh would find funny, and the dragon simply leveled its yellow cat's eyes at him. Dragon humor was beyond him, he finally decided, and thought back to his meal at the Uncommon Player. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nYes.\n\n\"I'll get you something.\"\n\nThe dragon's head snaked in a sinuous nod, and Liam went to the kitchen and desired raw meat as hard as he could, discovering with a mixture of satisfaction and disgust that it was no longer so difficult.\n\nFanuilh tore into the meat with its usual gusto, and Liam watched for a few minutes before beginning to wander absently around the workroom. The empty crystal bottle still lay alone on the empty middle table. He picked it up.\n\n'Virgin's blood.' It no longer held the same repulsion for him; it had become simply a relic, devoid of meaning, a jumble of letters that he should have been able to decipher.\n\nHe wondered why it was empty, and why the label was crossed out.\n\nWhat is important about the beaker? It is empty. What can be important about\u2014\n\n\"I don't know, but I might if you'd let me think,\" he said, and though he could not hear the words over the silent block of Fanuilh's thought, the dragon accepted it, and the block lifted. Liam crossed his arms and tipped\u00b7 the beaker at the dragon.\n\n\"The vanishing spell does not require virgin's blood, correct? It's not mentioned in the text of the spell. But he had it out on his table, and he never left things lying around; you said so yourself. This must be important.\"\n\nThe number of spells that require virgin's blood is enormous. Tarquin must have over a hundred of them in his catalogues. The uses to which they can be put are a hundred times a hundred.\n\n\"How can you read my mind and be so stupid? Maybe one of those was the one Marcius came about,\" Liam shouted, tired of the dragon's apparent obtuseness. \"And Tarquin cast it\u2014the bottle is empty\u2014but not to Marcius's satisfaction!\"\n\nWhy are you so certain the merchant is the killer?\n\n\"Because he could be a murderer!\" He shouted louder, trying to justify what was really only a feeling.\n\nMany men could be. You could be, the dragon pointed out. Though he knew the creature was incapable of real irony, Liam could not help feeling that its impassive face and toneless thoughts masked a greater sarcasm.\n\n\"But you know I'm not!\"\n\nNot of Tarquin, yes. But you have killed, and you could kill again. I know, as well as you do. You would regret it, to be sure, but you could kill.\n\n\"Enough! I'm in no mood for you to be my conscience. Did you do this to Tarquin? Small wonder he ordered you away so often. And that's not a question you're meant to answer!\" he added hastily, and the dragon obliged by staying out of his head. He went to stand by the lectern.\n\nThe color and texture of the pages did not match, and they differed in size from spell to spell. Sometimes the inks varied, though most of the writing was in black, in Tarquin's clear, blocklike script. As he flipped idly through the tome, he noticed a page covered with red in a wildly different handwriting.\n\nAnother mage's spell, Fanuilh supplied, its back to Liam, still intent on the meat. They can trade them back and forth, or steal them. It is the instructions that matter, not who wrote them. That book was only stitched together very recently. It contains all the important spells he had collected over his career.\n\nLiam tried to lift the heavy tome, and found he needed both hands. The chain clanked.\n\n\"These are all the spells he collected? What about the books on the shelves? And in the library?\"\n\nAll the important spells, the dragon qualified. The books behind you are instructions for mixing and preparing the elements of the spells, and one or two lengthy reports of experiments. The library contains thirty or forty texts on the enchanting of objects; the rest are histories, or poetry, or philosophy or collections of fables. Master Tanaquil liked to read a great deal.\n\n\"I gathered as much from his conversation.\"\n\nFanuilh did not respond and Liam turned to the shelf, leaning back against the lectern to examine the books. There were few with marked spines, most of them unadorned leather or wood, many cracked and beginning to fall apart from long use.\n\nHe wondered which described the uses of virgin's blood. The empty bottle and its crossed-out label annoyed him.\n\n\"Tell me, Fanuilh, what spells do you know?\"\n\nThe thought was a long time in forming.\n\nI know very few. Only those appropriate to an apprentice, as they do not generally require speaking and use few precious ingredients. Master Tanaquil taught them to me from the spellbook he had when he was an apprentice.\n\n\"What can you do?\"\n\nPut a man. to sleep, light a fire, stop blood flowing if the wound is fairly small, cause itching, or uncontrollable laughter. Maybe a dozen others. Useful things, and some that were merely for practice in the discipline.\n\n\"You can cause uncontrollable laughter?\"\n\nYes.\n\nShaking his head with a smile, Liam left the lectern and walked to the door. He stood there and stretched luxuriously.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\"\n\nBetter. The soreness fades. Soon I will be able to fly again.\n\nLiam received the news with an approving nod.\n\n\"I'm going to go to sleep now, if you don't need anything else. Wake me two hours after sunrise, will you?\"\n\nThe dragon's head bobbed gracefully and Liam left the workroom, suppressing a yawn.\n\nHe did not go right to the library, but wandered curiously through the house he had accepted as his own. The light was even throughout the house, but the empty, echoing sound was gone. The parlor, the kitchen, the trophy room all felt comfortable, almost welcoming. He did not disturb anything, just entered each room briefly and surveyed the furnishings, smiling the lightly bitter smile that even after ten years of use had not creased his face.\n\nIt's not Rhenford Keep, but it will do, I suppose.\n\nStill smiling, as much at himself as at his house, he went into the library to sleep.\n\nFanuilh woke him precisely at the hour he requested, though there was no accompanying illusion of stone cities from his travels. The call in his mind felt normal, proper in a strange way.\n\nI used to wake Master Tanaquil this way, came the dragon's thought as Liam sat on the edge of the divan, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He did not comment, but went to the kitchen and imagined another platter of meat for it. He brought the food to the workroom and laid it on the table.\n\n\"Eat your fill,\" he said cheerily. \"I want you well and whole soon, so you can begin holding up your end of the bargain.\"\n\nYou think you can fulfill your end soon.\n\nLiam thought for a moment, his eyes on the intricate model by the window, and on the jagged Teeth that dominated it.\n\n\"Yes, I do. Today will answer a number of questions.\" They were silent for a while, Liam lost in thought, his eyes unfocused on the model. Fanuilh did not eat, but stared at him. He grew aware of the dragon's gaze after a moment, and started with a guilty smile.\n\n\"What was I thinking?\" he challenged.\n\nNothing. Your thoughts were diffused.\n\n\"What is that like? Looking at diffused thoughts, I mean? How does it appear to you?\"\n\nThe dragon's stare impaled his, holding it till he grew uneasy, wondering. Finally, the block formed in his mind, and he realized the creature had been searching for a way to express the idea.\n\nLike a flock of birds that explode suddenly from a city square, so scattered and intermingled that you cannot follow any single one. It is confusion.\n\nWith even more surprise, he saw that the idea was his, drawn from a memory he had of the birdsellers and their flocks in Torquay.\n\n\"I was daydreaming, not confused.\"\n\nNo, but you allowed your thoughts to fly apart. You do that often, letting many lines go their ways, not following any particular one. Master Tanaquil never did that. His thoughts were orderly, like the steps in a ritual. It was easy to follow them.\n\n\"Well, then, it's a good thing you won't have to look into my head much longer. We'll finish this business in the next few days, and you can teach me. Now, if there's nothing else, I'll be on my way.\" The dragon shook its head in wide, sweeping arcs. \"Fine. I suggest you study up on what you have to teach me while I'm gone.\"\n\nThe dragon stopped moving its head, and tucked it down between its forelegs, like a dog preparing for rest.\n\n\"Good boy,\" Liam muttered, and went to get his horse.\n\nThe morning was colder than the night, and his breath plumed out in clouds that the sharp breeze tore to tatters. Diamond was not cold, but restive, unhappy with the cramped confines of the shed. He tossed his mane and snorted when Liam led him out onto the beach, kicking up spurts of sand that the wind caught and whirled, stinging, into Liam's eyes.\n\nHe calmed the horse with a soft word, and once they were up the cliff path, gave him rein. Thundering over the frozen ruts of the road, they passed fields dusted with frost, and Liam had to duck his face down into his cloak to escape the bite of the wind.\n\nCheeks tingling and scarlet with cold, he gave the snorting horse over to the boy at the stables, and set off briskly for the Aedile's house. The sun was bright and the sky a pale blue that reminded him of summer, but there was no warmth in the light, and a deep chill lingered in the shadows cast by the bleached gray stone and wood of the city.\n\nCoeccias's servant let him into the house and directed him to the small kitchen at the rear. The Aedile was there, using a ladle to stir a large pot hung on a swivel hook over the fire.\n\n\"Rhenford, y'are here just in time. I'll have you test this brew, and escape it myself if it's foul.\" He filled the ladle with steaming liquid from the pot and shoved it in Liam's face. \"Go to, go to! Drink!\" he commanded.\n\nInclining his head, Liam sniffed suspiciously and then hazarded a small sip. It was mulled cider, and though it scalded his tongue, it slid down his throat smoothly, to form a warm, spiced ball in his stomach. He nodded appreciatively and took another sip.\n\n\"It's not just cider,\" he accused, to the Aedile's amusement.\n\n\"And should it be?\" Coeccias pulled two pewter mugs from the mantel above the fire and filled them from the pot, which he then swung further away from the fire. He gestured Liam to a seat at the cluttered wooden table that filled most of the kitchen, and placed one of the steaming mugs in front of him.\n\n\"It's a hint of the very water of life, to add the inspirational tone. I've to make a greater batch for Uris-tide, and this is but a test.\" He took a sip of his own mug and smacked his lips with closed eyes. \"It'll do.\"\n\nA scent of cinnamon rose from the cider, mingled with the hint of liquor, and Liam sipped again approvingly. Coeccias called his servant, and when the man appeared, gave orders for his breakfast.\n\n\"You'll eat?\" he asked Liam, and without waiting for an answer, told the servant to double the breakfast. Liam smiled into his mug as the heavy man took the seat across from him.\n\nThe servant busied himself cutting \u00b7 up bread and bacon and setting them to cook by the fire. The seated men sipped at their mugs for a moment. Liam let the spiked cider warm his hands and stomach, looking around the kitchen. It was messy, but well stocked, with bunches of herbs and vegetables hanging in no particular order from the rafters, pots and utensils scattered everywhere, mingled with half-eaten loaves and scraps of cheese and meat and dirty dishes. Reflecting on the Aedile, it did not surprise him, but it did not bother him either. The suggestion was not of filth, but of comfort and a relaxed attitude towards cleanliness. Liam liked it, in the way he liked Coeccias\u2014with tolerance for obvious faults.\n\n\"I thought we were going to look for the bannaid.\"\n\n\"Truth, so we are. But we needs must be fed, eh? And the cider calls for tasting. It'd be blaspheming to offer good Uris an untested brew. It likes you?\"\n\n\"Yes, very much. But why do you have to make a bigger batch?\" Liam gestured at the large pot, obscured by the servant's back as he knelt before the fire, prodding the crackling bacon. \"You have enough there to last a while.\"\n\nLaughing, Coeccias said, \"Enough? I'll swear there's little enough there for the first libation! Why, there'd be none left for the worshippers, if that was all I put up. Know you nothing about the uses of Uris-tide?\"\n\nThe servant began laying out dishes on the table.\n\n\"No, in the Midlands we never made much of Uris. She was a city god to us, of little use to fanners and husbandmen. There are not many mechanics or apothecaries there.\"\n\n\"What of your vintners, tanners, smiths, armorers, tinkers? Have you no brewers or candlers in the Midlands? Y'are yourself a scholar, and from the Midlands. Uris is patron of all these\u2014how can Midlanders ignore her?\"\n\n\"I suppose the trades just seemed less important. We paid more attention to the harvest gods.\"\n\nCoeccias snorted and frowned his way through the rest of his mug. Liam decided not to mention that there were hundreds of places that had never heard of Uris, and that credited her gifts of craft and trade to other gods.\n\nThe bacon and toast were ready, and the servant placed. them before them in silence, taking their mugs to refill them at the pot. Butter and salt were brought and Coeccias dug in, making huge sandwiches thick with butter. Liam, made hungry by the smell, copied him, and the kitchen was filled with the sound of their chewing.\n\nThe Aedile's frown deepened at each bite, and then broke out into a question.\n\n\"Truth, you know nothing of the rites of Uris-tide?\"\n\n\"Very little,\" Liam admitted.\n\n\"And you a scholar,\" Coeccias marveled. \"Well,\" he went on, carefully putting his third sandwich to one side, \"the true rites are complex, and the sole sphere of the priests. Only the divines are allowed in the fane when they are performed, but there're numerous lesser rites for the common run of worshippers.\"\n\nSolemnly, he described the lay rituals that led up to the actual day of Uris-tide. Daily processions through the streets began six days before, and every true worshipper was supposed to walk on at least one of the days. Some, the very devout, made more than one. Viyescu, the Aedile pointed out with no hint of sarcasm, walked every day, displaying an unparalleled devotion. Each day's procession was led by a progressively higher-ranked priest, and so more worshippers attended the later ones. The procession Liam had seen was one of the first, and consequently one of the smallest.\n\n\"Today's is the most important. I'll be marching, as the Duke's man, and the richest of Uris's images will go forth as well, gilt and jeweled. It was gifted the temple by the Duke himself, and cost a fortune. The Duke subscribes the old ways and worships right strongly.\"\n\nBeginning at midaftemoon in the square at the heart of the city, the procession would go from there around most of Southwark, offering Uris's blessing to all and particularly to artisans and craftsmen. It would be led by the second most important priest in the local temple and include the highest of the city's officials and the richest of her artisans, as well as a large number of commoners. The last procession, scheduled for the next day, would be comprised only of clergy, led by the hierarch of the temple, and carry a very simple image of Uris, and ancient relic handed down from the earliest days of her worship. That night the secret ceremonies would begin in the temple, and the common worshippers would eat only the simplest of foods. Unleavened bread, sauceless meat, milk and water, to symbolize life before Uris gave her arts to the world.\n\n\"The cider is reserved for Uris-tide itself. It's a strange brew, liquor and cider and spices, but it goes well with the stuffs served. Look you, on that day, we eat fancifully, with sauces and pastries and dishes that are long in preparation and complex in design, like unto the arts Uris herself gave us, and we offer portions of all to her as grace. I'll bring the pot to my sister, and celebrate with her. She's a large get of children, and many others'll be there from her husband's family, so I needs must make a greater punch than this test here.\"\n\nCoeccias stopped and picked up his sandwich again. He chewed absently, calculation in his eyes as he looked at Liam, who stared into the rich brown depths of his mug, wondering at his companion's obvious belief.\n\n\"Look you,\" the Aedile said at length, \"would it like you t'attend the feast? At my sister's?\"\n\nLiam was surprised, but immediately interested. \"I suppose, yes, that would be nice,\" he answered, trying to conceal the attractiveness of the idea.\n\n\"Come, come,\" Coeccias blurted impatiently, \"Uris-tide is no time to rest alone. It'd be improper for you to spend it in that empty house. You'll come to my sister's.\"\n\nThere was no room for objection, so Liam simply nodded his agreement\n\n\"Good, then,\" Coeccias said gruffly. \"We'd best get to it, if we're to find this barmaid before I must prepare for the procession.\"\n\nGulping down the rest of his cider, Liam followed the Aedile out of the house.\n\nThere were seventeen inns, taverns and public houses in the Point, as well as a few private clubs and special establishments that Coeccias . thought worth checking.\n\nThough the streets of this quarter were as narrow as those in the rest of the city, the area was much better laid out, with something approaching a plan. They were able, therefore, to follow an orderly route, covering. the relatively straight roads one by one. Further down in the city the roads twisted and angled in mazelike complexity, joined by uncountable alleys and hidden courts, all of which could harbor an eating house or wineshop, and Coeccias explained that his men had had to spend a great deal of time to cover a small area.\n\n\"I should have thought Tarquin unlikely to frequent the lower haunts, but it struck me not. Happily, there're not so many up here. We'll be through by an hour after noon, and if this Dono\u00e9 exists, we'll search her out.\"\n\nPolished ,paneling and expensive fittings, gilt and silver, foreign hangings and crystal goblets, intricately painted signboards\u2014the inns and restaurants were expensively decorated, the rich accouterments proper for the neighborhood's merchant princes and giants of trade. Some even had their offerings painstakingly painted on large boards, for those customers who could read. The proprietors were quiet, polite men, singularly colorless, who could scarcely be bothered to remember the names of their wives, let alone their serving girls.\n\nIt was early in the day, and most of the places they stopped had not even opened yet, but Coeccias's title gained them entrance at every one. It was unfair, Liam knew, to compare these sophisticated restaurants and taverns with the Uncommon Player, but he could not help it. Two hours before noon, they could not be expected to have customers, but they still seemed unnaturally somber, depressing in the stilted formality of furnishings you were afraid to touch and proprietors who acted like courtiers in a tyrant's court. He silently praised the Player, and vowed to avoid the rich quarter if he wished to enjoy himself.\n\nThey were most of the way through Coeccias's mental list when they came to a stone building that fronted a stretch of street that was inordinately large for the quarter. It had a full portico with fluted columns a foot thick above which rested a triangular frieze, and broad steps made of carefully fitted blocks of white stone. There was no painted sign or nameplate to announce its purpose, and Liam laid a hand on the Aedile's arm as he started up the steps.\n\n\"What's this? It's someone's house.\"\n\n\"No house this,\" he muttered, and surprised Liam by flushing. \"Come along.\"\n\nBas-relief panels adorned the double-leafed doors, but Liam did not have a chance to examine them, because the Aedile pulled one door open hastily and ushered him inside.\n\nWhite and pink marble greeted them, totally at odds with the gray exterior, and Liam paused, unable to believe what he saw. A sweeping flight of marble stairs curved up and away from a huge foyer, lined with niches holding amorously entangled statues and potted plants. Banks of exotic flowers bloomed in vivid reds and oranges, filling the air with heady scents. Water danced and splashed in a. fountain at the center of the room, two stone lovers entwining in the pool. Two young women appeared far away at the top of the steps and then fled, giggling.\n\n\"Gods, Coeccias,\" Liam exclaimed, \"it's a whorehouse!\"\n\nThe Aedile silenced him with a staggering punch to the arm and a frantic \"Hsst! Not so loud!\"\n\n\"Why 'Hsst,' milord Aedile?\" The speaker appeared smoothly from behind a heavy arras concealing a doorway. She was tall and bore herself proudly, with an elaborately curled headdress of gleaming black hair and an artfully painted face. \"Though we glaze it over with 'house of pleasure' and 'night palace,' we are indeed a whorehouse: The man has the right of it.\"\n\nShe stepped in front of Liam and gazed with imperious amusement at him. \"He needs must have seen one before to recognize it so quickly.\" She held out a ringed hand coolly, and Liam bent over it, suddenly embarrassed.\n\nHer laughter was loud but not harsh. \"Your pardon, sir, but men rarely say that here. In this house, it is more often a woman who gives that office.\" She turned to Coeccias, leaving Liam crushed and flustering in her wake. \"Coeccias,\" she said warmly, giving him a lingeringly formal kiss on both cheeks. \"What brings you to my house?\"\n\n\"Business, Herione. A few questions for you, if you've the time.\"\n\n\"Ever business, Coeccias,\" she murmured, and slid her arm through his to draw him towards the arras. \"Come along, servant,\" she called over her shoulder to Liam, who followed along hanging his head.\n\nBehind the arras a corridor led towards the rear of the palatial whorehouse, and Herione went directly into the first room they came to. Walking side by side, arms linked, she and Coeccias seemed matched in size and height, appropriate to each other. Herione was broad, but not fat, statuesque, even in a girl's gown that had no hint of girlishness.\n\nThe room was her office, a fact attested by the ledgers in racks on the walls and the tidy columns of coins on a small writing table. A slate board bore a painted diagram of the house, with a woman's name and a blank line chalked into each room; Liam read th women's names and smiled; each was a princess or queen from history or legend. After the lavish entrance hall, the office seemed spartan. Herione gracefully motioned them to a pair of straight-backed cane chairs, and settled herself in a more comfortable padded seat behind the writing table. She traced Liam's gaze to the slate board, and gave a smile that did not reach her eyes.\n\n\"Y' are impressed, sir? Blue blood and true, one and all. Only royalty here.\"\n\nNoting the coldness of her smile, Liam spoke nonchalantly, peering with studied consternation at the slate lists. \"I was just wondering if you knew that Princess Cresside was a hunchback in life.\"\n\nHer smile began touching her eyes. \"Well, sir, with no queen worth a whit in Torquay, we needs must take our royalty where we can.\"\n\n\"Well, how can there be a queen in Torquay?\" Liam responded, grandly flinging a hand at the slate board. \"You have them all here!\"\n\nThe smile reached her eyes finally, and Liam thought he might have made up for his gaffe in the hall.\n\n\"Tell me, Coeccias,\" she said, turning to the officer, who had fidgeted through the exchange, \"is this your business? T'upbraid me for the naming of my stable?\"\n\n\"A scholar, Herione. It's his business to know such things. He meant no offense.\"\n\n\"Coeccias, y'are wooden,\" she sighed. \"I know't, he knows't; why make you amends? Now come, your business.\" She steepled her hands before her on the table among the coins, and became serious.\n\n\"Have you a girl named Dono\u00e9 here? A barmaid, or serving wench?\"\n\n\"None such,\" she replied instantly.\n\n\"Not perhaps one of your empresses?\" Coeccias asked, raising an eyebrow at the slate board. Herione shook her head definitely.\n\n\"None such. Why do you ask?\"\n\nThe Aedile glanced at Liam, who shrugged absently, still looking at the slate board. \"We're looking for a girl of that name, who may've known the wizard Tanaquil.\"\n\n\"The murdered wizard.\" She did not seem fazed by the news, but she did look curiously at Liam. \"Do you always string along a scholar when you con a murderer, Coeccias?\"\n\n\"No,\" the Aedile rasped at the playful tone in her voice. \"He knew the wizard best of any, and's proved helpful. So, no Dono\u00e9, and we're to't again. Come, Rhenford.\"\n\nHe stood, but Liam waved for him to stop.\n\n\"Wait a moment, if you would. I've a question or two the lady may be able to answer, if I may ask.\"\n\nCoeccias muttered, \"'Take no surprise' \"to himself, but remained standing behind his chair. Herione shifted polite interest to Liam, who moved his gaze from the slate board to her.\n\n\"Your questions, sir?\"\n\n\"Has Ancus Marcius ever come here?\"\n\n\"Ever? More than ever, sir. Quite often. Twice, thrice a moon. And's good for a solid gold each visit,\" she added meaningfully to Coeccias. \"I'd hope this won't reflect on him.\"\n\n\"If he's a murderer, bawdry won't soil him any more.\" Herione offered a slight nod in agreement.\n\n\"Truth,\" she exclaimed softly.\n\n\"One other question, if I may. Has Freihett Necquer ever come here?\"\n\n\"Necquer?\" She frowned into her memory.\n\n\"A Freeporter merchant.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, yes. Necquer. Once, perhaps, a long while since, over two years. He took a wife not long after, and has not returned since.\"\n\nLiam nodded, gratified. \"Thank you, lady.\"\n\nCoeccias muttered his thanks and the two left, going unescorted through the empty foyer with its gurgling fountain and out into the cold street.\n\nLiam paused for a moment on the steps to look closely at the bas-relief panels set into the doors. They depicted strange scenes, large groups of people engaged in uncertain acts. The carvings were not explicit and, in fact, were strangely tasteful, almost artistic. He tried to trace the intricacies of one scene with the point of a long finger, and then gave up and went down the steps to join Coeccias.\n\n\"An acquaintance?\" He phrased the question as casually as he could, though he was more than a little curious. There had been undercurrents running rampant in Herione's office that went beyond Coeccias's responsibility for keeping tabs on the local houses of pleasure. Yet he could not imagine the stolid, bulky Aedile having anything to do with the quick-witted madame.\n\n\"What's Necquer in this?\" Coeccias shot back, ignoring the issue. \"Is his wife Lons's taskmaster?\"\n\n\"She is, but I don't think Necquer's involved. I asked for ... personal reasons.\"\n\nLiam took it as a measure of how little the Aedile wanted to talk about Herione that he did not press about Necquer. That was all right; it was Coeccias's business, after all, and the visit had dispelled his suspicions of Necquer. If the merchant had been unfaithful to his wife, as Lons had suggested, he would have done it in Herione's house, clearly the most expensive in the city and, from its unassuming front, the most discreet.\n\nSo discreet, Liam thought, that in four months I never heard of it. What else is there in this city that I've missed? The Golden Orb, the worship of Uris, Herione's house, so much I've missed, and so little I can say I've seen.\n\nPreoccupied with his own morose thoughts, he did not hear Coeccias the first time, and had to ask him to repeat his statement, which he did after clearing his throat.\n\n\"I said she was somewhat of an acquaintance. The Duke requires a man to register the houses. The office is mine.\"\n\nLiam accepted the tight-lipped explanation with a noncommittal sound and remained prudently silent. Coeccias strode along the street with a heavy thunder in his thick brows.\n\nThe owner of the second-to-last inn on their list somewhat nervously said that yes, he did have a serving girl named Dono\u00e9. When Coeccias had allayed his fears that the girl was a criminal, and convinced him that they only wanted to. ask her a few questions, he bustled off, shouting her name.\n\n\"Fortune bears us only a small grudge,\" Coeccias growled at the innkeeper's retreating back. \"She saved us from one last house; quite generous of Her.\" Liam nodded absently.\n\nThe inn seemed appropriate to Tarquin. It was comfortable, without the ostentation of the others in the rich quarter. The woods were blond, and light flooded in from a large window, and it reminded Liam slightly of the wizard's home on the beach. For a man who had chosen to live outside a city, it would be a good place for a quiet drink when he had to be there.\n\nDono\u00e9, when she was dragged from the kitchen by the anxious proprietor, was the girl he remembered. Hiding her fidgeting hands in a wet cloth, flushed and eyeing Coeccias subserviently, she was a far cry from the laughing young woman Tarquin had so gallantly sent on her way in the summer, but he could not mistake her looks. She was very young, perhaps only sixteen, and had the sort of prettiness that is mostly youth and innocence, and only really noticeable when informed with happiness. At the inn, confronted with the Aedile's bearlike scowl, her prettiness faded into fear, and she was not worth a second look.\n\nLiam regretted it, recalling her happy smile in the summer, on Tarquin's veranda. Coeccias made it worse by snorting as soon as she appeared, which frightened her even more than her employer's peremptory summons.\n\n\"Herself?\" Coeccias asked him, and when he nodded, went on gruffly: \"Well then, to't. You wanted her.\"\n\nWincing at the words' effect on the wilting girl, Liam cleared his throat and spoke to her as pleasantly as he could, indicating one of the tables.\n\n\"Perhaps you'd care to sit? Coeccias, could you get us something to drink?\"\n\nThe Aedile trudged grudgingly off to the proprietor, and the girl reluctantly took a seat at the empty table, staring wide-eyed at Liam, who smiled reassuringly.\n\n\"Do you remember me?\"\n\nShe shook her head vehemently.\n\n\"You're sure? On the beach, maybe? You were there a few times.\"\n\nThough her eyes could not get any wider, they changed expression from fear to recognition, her hands clapping to the tabletop to emphasize it. \"From the beach! You were at the wizard's!\" Recognition changed back to fear, and she practically wailed. \"Oh my lord, is that the matter? I swear I'd nothing to do with his taking off, I swear!\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" he assured her hastily, aware he was handling it badly. \"I only want to ask you a few questions, Dono\u00e9. I know you haven't done anything.\"\n\n\"I was sore sad to hear he'd died, sore sad, my lord!\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I know, but I have to ask you a few questions.\"\n\nHe patted her hand gently, which seemed to calm her a little, and Coeccias brought two cups of wine with ill grace, which gave her some time to \u00b7 collect herself. The Aedile retired to the bar, leaving them alone.\n\n\"Now, Dono\u00e9, I have to ask you a few questions,\" he repeated, when she was more sure of herself. \"About Tarquin. I need to know if you knew anything about his affairs.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, my lord, I never pried nor gossiped, my lord, I swear!\"\n\n\"Let me ask that a different way. Do you know if he saw any other women?\"\n\n\"Other women?\" She was clearly puzzled.\n\n\"Did he bring any other women home that you know of? Any, maybe, that he met here, or elsewhere?\"\n\nShe thought for a moment, and suddenly looked full into his eyes in shock.\n\n\"My lord!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You think I ... I ... you think he knew me!\" She whispered it fiercely, in disbelief and accusation, and Liam colored instantly. Hewas handling this very badly, he knew, but took comfort from the fact that Coeccias probably would have bungled it worse.\n\n\"Well, I suppose, I\u2014\" he stammered.\n\n\"He did no such,\" she stated indignantly. \"I'm only a poor serving girl, I know, but I'm chaste, and Master Tanaquil was a true gentle! He'd an oath of purity himself, he said!\" Momentarily stunned by her vehement defense of her virtue, Liam sought for words, and finally asked tentatively, \"Then what were you doing at his house?\"\n\nIt was her tum to color, and though he had thought the question natural, it seemed to deflate her rage at his insinuation.\n\n\"He wanted blood,\" she whispered, lowering her head in shame.\n\n\"Blood?\"\n\n\"The blood of a virgin.\"\n\nHe had to strain to hear the words she spoke into her lap, but they disappointed him deeply. The empty decanter had held her blood, and Tarquin had probably crossed out the label because he had used it all. A hundred uses for virgin's blood, Fanuilh had said. Tarquin might well have gone through gallons of it, and the clue he had thought so much of was nothing.\n\nDonrn! lifted her head and glared defiance at him again. \"But it hurt not a bit, and Master Tanaquil was a true gentle, and paid me well, and there's naught wrong with what I did! I'm chaste, you, and Master Tanaquil was a true gentle! He'd an oath! I tell you, you've no right to slander me nor him, serpent!\"\n\nShe was standing by the end of her tirade, though he thanked all the gods he could remember that she did not raise her voice. She did, however, tum on her heel after labeling him a snake, and stalked back to the kitchen with all the terrible dignity of an affronted and wrathful teenage girl. She even shouldered her employer aside.\n\nThough he had not heard all of their exchange, Dono\u00e9's abrupt exit and Liam's chastened expression told him enough, and Coeccias laughed loudly, coming to the table.\n\n\"Come along, 'serpent.' Y'have insulted enough of Southwark's maids.\" He propelled Liam out of the inn to the street, leaving the cups of wine untasted.\n\n\"That,\" Liam sighed, \"was very bad.\"\n\n\"Y'have no talent for searching into the innocent,\" Coeccias commented cheerfully, drawing him along the street, \"and if that's a murderer, I'll scale the Teeth. Now, if she'd been a killer with blood on her blade and it at your throat, you'd have battered her to her knees with questions. No shame not to hone your wit on girls, Rhenford. Now, what'd she relate?\"\n\nStill unhappy with the way he had conducted the interview, Liam told what he had found out: the origin of the virgin's blood, the purpose of Dono\u00e9's visit to the beach, and most importantly, the oath Tarquin claimed he had taken.\n\n\"A vow to remain chaste, eh? I've heard wizards do stranger,\" the Aedile said. \"It fair puts Viyescu's mystery maid out of thought.\"\n\n\"And leaves us with Marcius, and Lons.\"\n\n\"It leaves us with Lons,\" the Aedile said. \"There's naught that's proved against the merchant.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\nCoeccias rolled his eyes in exasperation, but Liam did not notice. A piece of Dono\u00e9's story had lodged itself irritatingly in his head.\n\n\"If you were a wizard,\" he suddenly asked, \"wouldn't you have to test to know if your virgin's blood was good?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Do you think Tarquin had a test? A way to know if she were still a virgin?\"\n\n\"Truth,\" Coeccias answered with a smile, \"I scarcely know her, but I'd wager that trull'll be a virgin on her deathbed.\"\n\nLiam ignored the Aedile's joke; he had not been thinking about Dono\u00e9 at all. He pushed the idea to the back of his head, and took up considering more immediate questions. They walked towards the outskirts of the rich quarter, the Aedile smiling at the warmthless sun bright in the sky, Liam staring at the cobbles, tracing his thoughts there.\n\nWhy had he mishandled Dono\u00e9 so badly? Was the other man right, he could only be sharp with people he truly suspected? In a certain way, it was comforting to think that he was not completely suspicious, that only those who deserved it called out the bloodhound in him. And in the end, he had gotten the important information.\n\nOn the other hand, they were left with Lons, a conclusion he could not believe.\n\nThey left the confines of the rich quarter without saying a word, passing into an area of smaller buildings of poorer construction and pushed closer together. Suddenly remembering his appointment with Lady Necquer, Liam stopped.\n\n\"I just remembered; I am supposed to meet someone soon, back there.\"\n\nWithout a trace of anything more than casual curiosity, Coeccias said, \"Poppae Necquer?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Liam answered shortly, refusing to be surprised by what the rough-looking man picked up.\n\n\"Then we'll part here. I'm to prepare for the procession. We ought to meet later, to see if there's any current news.\"\n\n\"The White Grape for dinner?\"\n\n\"No, the Grape grows stale for me, and I've all that cider to finish. Come to my house after the procession. You'll know it's done by the bells. The priests'll toll all when the procession gains the temple.\"\n\n\"Your house, then,\" Liam agreed.\n\nCoeccias smiled and suddenly stuck out his heavy hand, and Liam took it firmly.\n\n\"Though y'are only a scholar, y'are a good hound, Rhenford, and a better man. Don't fret so over a silly girl, nor over the player. We've got to see justice done\u2014 I for my office, and you for the wizard. Whatever we do, whatever we've done, is to a higher end.\"\n\nLiam fidgeted, but Coeccias would not let go of his hand until he relented.\n\n\"I suppose so. I suppose you're right.\"\n\nHis hand was released, and the two men bid each other goodbye diffidently, as if embarrassed by their words and thoughts. Coeccias went down the street to the city's heart and his procession. Liam turned around and traced his way back towards the Point and the Necquers' house."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Liam was not far from the Necquers' when he left Coeccias, and the bells had only just begun to \u00b7 announce noon when he knocked on their street door. Lares received him as usual, but did not usher him up to the parlor. Instead, he motioned for Liam to wait and, avoiding his eyes, hurried up the stairs himself.\n\nA few minutes later, Lady Necquer came down in a whirl of skirts, her face drawn and pale. She stopped on the bottom step and shot a fearful look back up before coming quickly to him.\n\n\"You must away, Sir Liam,\" she whispered anxiously. \"I cannot receive you this day.\" Her eyes kept returning to the stairs, as though she were afraid something horrible would come down them.\n\n\"May I ask why? Are you ill?\"\n\nShe laid a hand on his arm, and quickly withdrew it. \"My apologies, Sir Liam, but I beg you not to press. I simply cannot receive you. You may come tomorrow, at this hour, if y'are careful.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" He did not move, not understanding, and her face screwed up suddenly before she burst out:\n\n\"My lord would not have you so much about! Now please, Sir Liam, do not ask the wherefore; only go!\"\n\nBewildered, Liam hesitated in the face of her distress, shifting from foot to foot.\n\n\"Please,\" she begged. \"Come tomorrow, and let none see you.\"\n\nHis thoughts scattered, and he retreated, sketching a hasty bow. She shut the door firmly behind him. Standing in the street, he stared at the closed door and blew out a heavy breath.\n\n\"Necquer won't have me around so much,\" he wondered aloud, then turned away down the street, shaking his head and muttering. \"And just the other day he asked me to dinner. Freeporters. Hah.\"\n\nThe afternoon stretched emptily before him, with nothing to do. He had hoped to fill a large part of it with Lady Necquer, listening to her outline the series of poems he could not write. The odd hour he could fill with wandering, or maybe a visit to the Uncommon Player. Now there was nothing, and it was far too early to go to a wineshop.\n\nA long lunch was a poor second, he decided, but it was all he had. Over the course of the morning, he and Coeccias had been into every tavern in the Point but one, and he chose this last one to eat in, solely because it was the farthest from the Necquers' and would take the longest time to reach.\n\nIt did not take as long as he wished to get there, but the service made up for it by being extraordinarily slow. He could almost feel the minutes creeping away.\n\nIn a way, his impatience for the afternoon to be over amused him. It had been quite a while since he had anything to wait for, and he had watched so much time slip profitlessly away that it was strange to begrudge the hours.\n\nHe was anxious, he saw, for the whole business to be over. For Tarquin's murderer to hang, for Fanuilh to be shut out of his mind, to resume his quiet life. The activity that had brought him bouncing out of bed only a few days before was now tiresome. It had brought him the contact with other people that he belatedly realized he needed, but the investigation had begun to color the contact.\n\nLady Necquer had sent him packing, after all, and he had grown used to their daily conversations.\n\nSo much so that now my afternoon seems empty as a keg after a feast, he reflected ruefully. Heartily sick of the search for Tarquin's killer, and even sicker of his own maudlin thoughts, he gratefully turned his attention to the lunch he had ordered.\n\nThe meal was huge, and the cost equally large. Just past the soup, a thick broth delicately spiced, and into the fish, sole with a fiery-hot sauce, he managed to put his concerns away and keep them at bay for the rest of the meal. The afternoon light crawled slowly across the front of the nearly empty tavern, and when he was done, over an hour had passed.\n\n\"Not late enough,\" he cursed. Hours still lay in wait before him, and like stubborn crows, his thoughts swung back to pick at what he had learned from Dono\u00e9. By her report, Tarquin had sworn an oath of chastity which, if true, effectively destroyed any theories about the wizard having gotten the hooded woman pregnant.\n\nOr did it?\n\nHe had a happy inspiration concerning the rest of his afternoon, settled his score quickly, and set out for Northfield. His stomach groaned for time to deal with the heavy meal he had put down, but he gave it as little thought as possible.\n\nViyescu was in his shop, and clearly wished he hadn't been. He twitched when the door opened and Liam walked in, and set down the mortar and pestle he had been using with a heavy thud.\n\n\"Hierarch Cance,\" he grated unhappily.\n\n\"Master Viyescu. I'm sorry to bother you again.\"\n\nThe druggist shrugged to indicate that it did not matter, but there was no fluidity in the gesture: his shoulders were a single block of tension.\n\n\"I wanted to ask you some more questions about the wizard, and the pregnant woman who mentioned him.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't spare the time, Hierarch,\" the druggist said, in a strange tone that bordered on pleading. \"I must prepare for the procession.\"\n\n\"Ah, the procession,\" Liam answered airily. \"Of course. You'll be marching?\"\n\n\"I always do, Hierarch.\" Viyescu sounded almost miserable, and Liam fixed his gaze squarely on the man's eyes.\n\n\"Of course. I only wish more followed your example. But I must detain you for only a few moments, and as you know, the business with the wizard is quite important to the temple in Torquay.\"\n\n\"As you wish,\" Viyescu acceded nervously. Liam noted with mild astonishment that the druggist had actually begun to sweat.\n\n\"It has to do with the woman who mentioned Tarquin to you. I think I misunderstood you when last we spoke. I thought you implied that the wizard had gotten her pregnant, but I have it on the best of information that he had sworn an oath of celibacy.\"\n\nThe words seemed to strike Viyescu with physical force. He stammered for a moment, and then controlled himself with visible effort. \"I apologize, Hierarch, I did not mean to imply that. He did not get the girl pregnant; he did not sleep with her.\"\n\n\"I see. So some other man was the father, then? Not Tarquin?\"\n\n\"No, Hierarch. Not Tarquin.\"\n\n\"You see, I've been trying to figure out what has happened to him, because he was important to us, if you take my meaning. Tell me, did this woman ask you for any virgin's blood?\"\n\nThe question drew a complete blank from Viyescu, who shook his head as if he might have misheard. \"Virgin's blood, Hierarch?\"\n\n\"Never mind. She only asked for santhract?\"\n\nViyescu nodded eagerly. He was being more cooperative than he had been before, and Liam wondered why.\n\n\"How does one take santhract?\"\n\n\"Powdered, Hierarch,\" the druggist said instantly, \"in wine or cider to cut the taste. But I never sold her any,\" he added quickly. Indecision suddenly flickered behind his eyes, and he began to add something before cutting himself short. Liam waited for a moment and then went on, disappointed.\n\n\"And she wanted it to terminate her pregnancy?\" Viyescu nodded again. \"She must be very deep in sin, Master Apothecary. Very deep.\" He intoned the words deeply, with as much of the piousness of a Torquay priest as he could remember. It sounded silly to him, like a poor imitation from his student days, but the sound clearly hit Viyescu another way.\n\nHe began to speak, faltered, and gazed deeply into Liam's face, searching for something. Liam willed himself to remain impassive, hoping that whatever was sought would be found, but apparently he disappointed the apothecary because he only said, \"Yes, Hierarch, very deep,\" before snapping his mouth shut.\n\n\"Did you know the woman when she came to you?\"\n\n\"No, Hierarch,\" Viyescu said, firm once again, but Liam knew he was lying. \"I had never seen her before.\"\n\nThe sound of a horn echoed out over the city, and Viyescu looked up in alarm.\n\n\"The procession! I must go now, Hierarch, if I'm to be on time. You'll excuse me?\"\n\nLiam gestured graciously, though inwardly he was angry and frustrated. The druggist had been on the verge of telling him something of importance, something about the woman. Watching him pull off his stained apron, Liam cursed himself mentally. It had been very close. What was Viyescu hiding?\n\n\"I must go upstairs to change,\" the druggist said when he had hung his apron on a peg, pointing vaguely towards the rear of his shop. \"Don't you have to prepare for the procession, Hierarch?\"\n\n\"I have a dispensation for this Uris-tide,\" Liam said smoothly, and allowed himself brief mental congratulations for having thought it out earlier. \"I will be watching, of course, but the business Torquay has sent me on is terribly important.\"\n\n\"No doubt. I, on the other hand, must prepare myself.\" Liam understood the dismissal. \"Certainly, certainly. Perhaps we can talk again?\"\n\n\"I do not know what else I can tell you, Hierarch.\"\n\n\"Of course. Well, then, I'll be on my way.\" He turned and started for the door, and then stopped, his hand on the latch. \"Master Viyescu,\" he said, smiling pleasantly, though he wanted to shake the man until he spoke. \"My prayers will go with you in the procession today.\"\n\nIf it was not what the druggist had been looking for in his face a few moments before, it was certainly very good. Viyescu's expression softened, and he nodded once.\n\n\"Thank you, Hierarch\" he said, his voice suddenly thick. \"Perhaps you would do me two small favors, Master Viyescu,\" Liam risked. \"Perhaps if you see this woman again, you would not mention my interest in her? And perhaps you would pray for me as you go in the procession?\" \"I am not worthy,\" Viyescu said, his eyes dropping to the floor.\n\nWhat does that mean? Liam wondered.\n\n\"Who is? Nonetheless, I would appreciate both.\"\n\n\"As you wish,\" Viyescu mumbled, and then quickly left the room.\n\nLiam paused for a moment in the empty shop, wondering about the man's strange behavior. The sound of the horn being winded again called him back to himself, and he went out into the street.\n\nThe horn sounded twice more, and he noticed a few people hurrying towards the center of the city. Towards the forming procession, he guessed, and set his steps to follow. He had, after all, told Viyescu that he would watch.\n\nOrdinarily the square at the heart of Southwark bustled with people, selling goods or buying, gawking at jugglers or clowns or musicians. Rival birdsellers sent their disciplined flocks charging into each other from either side of the square, the object to confuse the other birds into joining the strongest flock. It was a game Liam had never tired of watching, and he had never passed through without stopping for a moment.\n\nThere were no flocks that day, however, and no men with elbow-length gauntlets urging on their feathered soldiers with whistles and high-pitched cries.\n\nThe squat stone bulk of the jail and the imposing, columned facade of the Duke's court on the western side of the square did not usually deter the chattering crowds, and on most days the wineshops, cafes and stores scattered around the other sides did a brisk business.\n\nThe square seemed less active today though it was thronged with people who spilled into the sidestreets and approaching lanes. Hundreds obscured the pavement, most dressed in their brightly colored holiday finest, but they were hushed, expectant.\n\nBy discreet pushing and taking advantage of his thinness, Liam managed to edge his way into the square proper, but the crowd was so thick that he found it uncomfortable, and shoved his way along the fringes of the square until he came to a two-storied wineshop. It was empty, and his footsteps echoed loudly as he entered.\n\nAll of the staff of the wineshop were at the galleries on the second floor, gazing in reverence out over the square. Liam coughed politely, and the barkeep whirled in fury at the interruption, then stopped himself when he saw Liam's expensive clothes.\n\n\"Ah, my lord,\" he fawned, \"you'd grace us to share the process with us. If it please you, sit here.\" He shooed a crowd of serving girls and tapboys from the table in front of the central gallery and installed Liam there, cheerfully ignoring his employees' sullen looks.\n\n\"Something to go with, my lord?\"\n\n\"Just wine,\" Liam said.\n\nThe barkeep brought it quickly, smiled obsequiously, and dashed to another gallery, forcing a spot for himself between two angry serving girls.\n\nLiam sipped at his wine, turning his attention to the square below.\n\nA platform had been erected at shoulder height against the grim stone steps of the jail, and Liam noted with a wry smile that there were fixtures that would allow it to be changed to a gallows. Around the platform, a small space had been cleared by members of the Guard, resplendent in black surcoats emblazoned with the Duke's three foxes and polished, ornately useless ceremonial armor. Inside the circle of armored men several people had gathered. A small knot of shaven-headed acolytes of Uris talked quietly amongst themselves; Ancus Marcius held silent court over three other prominent merchants; and Ton Viyescu stood alone in a blindingly white full-length robe, his face screwed up in a sour expression beneath its encroaching beard. Coeccias, his shaggy hair painstakingly combed, his own surcoat and armor crumb-free, scowled at a man dressed in the everyday uniform of the Guard. The man was speaking at length about something, and in the middle of his speech, Coeccias began scanning the crowd impatiently. As Liam watched from the gallery, the man finished his report and the Aedile dismissed him offhandedly, his eyes still searching the crowd. Then he looked directly at the second floor of the wineshop, started, and grabbed the departing man, pointing in Liam's direction.\n\nThe man nodded and pushed his way into the crowd, crossing the packed square towards the shop. The gathered worshippers parted silently for him, their attention still held by the empty platform. Liam, however, watched him with interest until he disappeared below. Then he turned his gaze to the stairs, expecting the messenger to appear at any moment.\n\nWhen he finally heard footsteps on the stairs, he rose himself and walked towards them, meeting the man at the top.\n\n\"Are you looking for me?\"\n\nThe messenger stared at him, obviously not having expected to be met at the head of the stairs.\n\n\"Y'are Liam Rhenford?\" he asked suspiciously.\n\n\"Yes. Coeccias sent you?\"\n\n\"Aye, to carry you these news. The rent's paid on the lodgings, sir, and so not by the wizard. Someone else keeps the hooded woman.\"\n\n\"That's all?\" Liam said after a moment. It did not surprise him\u2014Viyescu had just told him that Tarquin had not kept the woman.\n\n\"Well, sir, just that the owner said the coins used were the most fantastic he'd seen, though neither clipped nor light. Good gold, but strange.\"\n\nLiam raised an eyebrow in politeness, but was not interested. He was more concerned with figuring out Viyescu's strange behavior. What had the druggist been about to tell him? More importantly, was it connected with Tarquin's death?\n\nThe sound of the horn called him to his surroundings, and he turned back to the gallery, the messenger following behind wordlessly.\n\nThe horn was winded only once this time, and Liam saw that one of the shaven-headed acolytes was standing on the platform, raising a silver-chased ram's horn to the sky. He sounded it twice more, and a clash of cymbals answered the third, at which he hurriedly left the platform to join his fellows below. All eyes in the crowd turned to the north, where the main point of the procession was approaching.\n\nTwo young boys led the way, crowned with wreaths of laurel and dressed in short white tunics despite the cold. They spread rushes in the path the crowd cleared for them, walking solemnly. Behind them followed a single man in complicated flowing vestments of white sewn with pearls and gold and silver threads. He wore a tall scarlet mitre and carried a golden lantern and an oversized book bound in tooled, painted leather. His massive belly bobbled beneath the vestments, and his beard straggled over three extra chins, giving rise to Liam's blasphemous thought that Uris's second-highest priest would not enjoy the next day's fast.\n\nThe priest did manage to look grand, however, pacing measuredly on the carpet of rushes strewn by the pageboys, aloof and proud under the silent scrutiny of the crowd.\n\nBehind him, borne in a litter carried on the muscular shoulders of eight bald acolytes, came Uris's image, shrouded in a snowy tarp. Last in line was a group of musicians, piper and drummer and the man with the cymbals, marching unobserved in grave lockstep. The attention of the crowd was divided equally between the fat priest in his magnificent clothes and the covered statue.\n\nOnly the rustle of sandals on rushes and the sigh of the wind could be heard as the procession moved into the circle of Guardsmen. The pageboys went up the narrow steps to the platform, leaving rushes behind, and the priest folloed them, moving to the edge to face the crowd. The litter bearers brought their load to rest in front of the platform, neatly turning around so that Uris, when uncovered, would face her worshippers like the priest. Coeccias, Viyescu and the merchants stood in ranks to the left of the litter, looking up at the priest; the other acolytes knelt to the right. Finally the musicians took up their position at the bottom of the steps leading to the platform.\n\nWhen they were ready, the piper nodded to the priest, who handed the lantern to one boy and the book to the other. Liam was struck by the awe with which they received their burdens, and the way they held them firmly in their hands but away from their bodies, as if afraid to soil them.\n\nJust a book and a lantern, Liam thought. He had never had much use for organized religions, though he knew the gods were there. Meet the Storm King face to face, he thought somewhat scornfully, and see how much you care for a book and a lantern.\n\nThe ceremony was interesting, he had to admit, if only for its aesthetic and historical value. Once rid of his book and lantern, the priest raised his hands and began a chant in a high-pitched voice that swept over the silent square. Rising and falling in a stately, cadenced rhythm, the chant described the wondrous gifts Uris had bestowed on the world in an obscure, highly refined dialect of High Church Taralonian. Liam vaguely recognized it from his student days in Torquay, and was able to follow haltingly along, despite the complex syntax and the strange, inverted poetry. He wondered if anyone there besides the priest, the acolytes and himself understood a single word of it.\n\nAfter several verses lauding Uris in general and her two major gifts\u2014medicine and writing\u2014the chant broke into song. The shaven acolytes raised their voices with the priest's, ranging around his high tenor in a complex and surprisingly merry harmony. At first the drummer was the only musician playing, giving the singers a simple beat, but then the piper began, and the man with the cymbals joined in as well with carefully muted crashes. They were, however, only the framework of the music, a steady undercurrent for the voices of the celebrants.\n\nThe singing went through two repeated verses, and then subsided into just the priest's chant, though the drummer continued to beat out a more subdued rhythm for the chanter to follow.\n\nIt went on for almost an hour, breaking from chant to song back to chant, going into detail about Uris's contributions to almost every civilized craft, illustrating the gifts with old myths and legends. First the piper wove into the chant and then the cymbalist as well, until the only way to tell chant from song was by the participation or silence of the shaven chorus. The crowd of worshippers remained silent, and Liam gave a moment's admiration to their stoicism, packed closely into a cold square listening to a long service in a language they could not understand. For his own part, he was too absorbed in translating it to himself to notice the length, and he grudgingly admitted to himself that it was beautiful in a strange way.\n\nFinally, with the sun little more than an hour above the western horizon, the singers and musicians brought their last burst of song to a halt, and an imposing silence descended on the square. Flushed with his exertions, the priest on the platform retrieved his book and his lantern from the pageboys and raised them high for the adoration of the common worshippers. He let a suitably dramatic pause go by, and then pronounced a blessing they could understand.\n\n\"Uris, Light of Our Dark and Teacher of the World, bless this city and this gathering!\"\n\nA muttering of \"So be it\" rose from the assembled crowd, and every person in the square and the wineshop galleries where Liam stood bowed their head. On cue, two of the acolytes caught hold of the immaculate tarp that covered the image on the litter and pulled it back, so that it slid up the front of the statue and then fell back from its shoulders.\n\nLiam almost whistled, but checked himself. The statue was incredible, an eight-foot-tall woman bearing a book and a lantern and a benign expression. Uris had been rendered in exquisite detail, but what struck Liam was the obvious cost of the image. Carved of wood, barely an inch was free of some expensive decoration, from the cloth-of-gold robes to the chips of jade that were inset in her fingers to stand for nails. Her eyes were multifaceted diamonds, her hair uncountable wires of beaten silver; the book and lantern were gold, and in the heart of the lantern, representing the flame, was an enormous winking ruby. Countless smaller gems glittered from her robes, sewn into the cloth-of-gold.\n\nAbsurdly, Liam thought of a thief he had once known who would then and there have resolved to steal the statue, and then made good on the resolution. Thievery, however, was far from the minds of the worshippers in the square, who could not decide whether to gaze devotedly on their goddess or hang their heads in humility.\n\nOnce he judged the people had had their fill of the statue, the priest walked down off the platform and allowed the procession to form behind him. Without any discernible scurrying, everyone found their places; the pageboys once again in front, joined by the acolyte with the horn, followed by the priest, the litter, the rest of the acolytes, then Coeccias and his Guardsmen dressed in their ceremonial armor. As the only layman who had made all the processions of the week, Viyescu walked alone next, with the musicians behind him. Last in the official procession came Marcius and his gaggle of prominent merchants.\n\nThe horn sounded again, the musicians struck up a tune, and the procession began to move fairly quickly out of the square to the south. As soon as Marcius and his group were past, the general crowd fell in behind them, beginning to raise up songs and shouts. Instruments appeared among the hitherto silent worshippers, and the noise swelled into a happy celebration, loudly heralding the unveiled Uris through the city.\n\nThe procession was headed down towards the harbor and moving rapidly, the hundreds of worshippers pressing hard after, bearing their noisy celebration with them.\n\nLiam watched until the last had straggled out of the square, leaving a loud silence in their wake. A long pent-up sigh escaped from the messenger, calling attention to him.\n\n\"Where will they go?\"\n\n\"To the harbor, sure;\" the man said, as though it should be obvious. \"And then they'll up through Aurie's Park and Northfield, and so back to Temple's Court.\"\n\n\"I've never seen the celebrations for Uris-tide before,\" Liam said, thinking with pity of the litter bearers and their heavy cargo.\n\n\"They're every year,\" the man said, looking at him like he was an idiot. \"How could you not?\"\n\nHe began to explain, but then decided not to bother. If the man couldn't figure out from his accent and his name that he was a Midlander, why bother enlightening him? Instead, he simply shrugged and sat down at the table, pulling his unfinished wine to him.\n\nThe messenger stayed for a moment to bestow a pitying look on him, and then left.\n\nLiam stayed at the wineshop for another half an hour, reflecting on the ceremony through two more cups. Few other Taralonian gods required processions, even in Torquay, which was noted for its zealous maintenance of ancient rituals.\n\nAt length, however, he could not keep his thoughts from the investigation, and he felt compelled to do something, even if it was just to walk\u2014which he did, at length.\n\nThe procession's taking a long time, he thought as he strolled the nearly empty streets, with even more pity for the litter bearers.\n\nHe walked west from the square, past the outdoor theater he now realized was the summer home of the Golden Orb's company, and into the Warren, the sprawl of narrow, twisted streets and tortured lanes that housed most of the city in ramshackle houses that stretched impossibly high. They seemed to rely on each other for support, leaning forward across the streets, almost touching as they reached four and five stories.\n\nOrdinarily he would not have gone there, but the spirit of the celebration must have taken hold, and there were few people in the streets, some of whom looked like they might actually have been cleaned to honor the goddess. Even the ranks of the beggars were thinner, many undoubtedly gone to try their luck with the processors.\n\nAnd besides, Coeccias had told him that the apartment rented by the hooded woman was in the Warren. He pondered Viyescu's strange behavior once again. For some reason, his questions about the woman had upset the gruff druggist, but Liam found it difficult to understand why. It might have something to do with Tarquin, but it might have been that the druggist was simply unwilling to discuss the intricacies of sin with a priest. He might well have tripped himself up again with his religious imposture, closing off an avenue of investigation with an ill-chosen ploy. Or maybe Uris herself was frustrating him, as a punishment for pretending to be one of her Hierarchs.\n\nStill\u2014Viyescu had wanted to tell him something, and had not. Until he knew what it was, he could not dismiss the inkling at the back of his mind.\n\nHis thoughts as aimless as his footsteps, he was well into the Warren before he heard the bells tolling from far to the east in Temple's Court. On hearing them, he pulled up short and immediately turned around. There was little for him and Coeccias to talk about\u2014the news about the rent being paid made little or no difference, and his impressions of his conversation with Viyescu were better kept to himself\u2014but at least his afternoon of waiting was over.\n\nLiam began to hurry through the city to the Aedile's house, and had to concentrate to slow down, to give Coeccias time to get home from the Temple of Uris. He even managed to make himself stop to buy a jug of wine, thinking it appropriate to bring something with him.\n\nHe need not have bothered. Coeccias opened the door himself when he knocked, and there was a steaming mug of mulled cider in his hand.\n\n\"Ah, y'have brought a small something, have you?\" Relieving Liam of the jug, he ushered him in and then led the way back to the kitchen, which was considerably neater than it had been in the morning. Noticing Liam's appreciative glance, Coeccias laughed. \"Burus was busy all the day, setting straight for the morrow. Cleaning's forbid on the eve of Uris-tide.\"\n\nThe servant looked up from stirring the steaming pot of cider and smiled sourly, handing Liam a cup without preamble.\n\n\"If it please you, Rhenford, we'll save the wine for another time, and finish this batch of cider. I'll not drink it tomorrow, and by the next it'll be fairly undrinkable.\" He sat at the table, motioning Liam to sit opposite him, and raised his mug. Liam touched his mug to the Aedile's, and they drank in silence for a moment.\n\n\"Truth, it's a blessing to be out of that infernal armor,\" Coeccias said after a moment. He had changed into his usual stained black tunic, though his hair had stayed perfectly in place. As though reminded of it, he ruffled it with his free hand. \"I'd just as soon make a trifling donation than march that process again. It's a passing trouble.\"\n\n\"I imagine it must be worse for the men who have to carry the statue.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye,\" the Aedile agreed. \"I'd sooner wear the armor than carry the goddess, but I'd even sooner just worship from afar. Not for me are pomps and displays, I'll tell you, though I'm as deep in for Uris as any other.\"\n\nBurus apparently decided the cider was sufficiently stirred, because he stood and left the room.\n\n\"Now say, Rhenford, what think you of the moneys handed out?\"\n\n\"The rent? It's paid, so we know for sure that the woman was not Tarquin's\u2014though I never really thought she was. We're still left with Lons.\"\n\n\"Ah, I note y'omit Marcius from your accounting, at last. Y'are convinced, then?\"\n\n\"I can't imagine or prove anything else, though I still think Lons doesn't have it in him.\"\n\nHe did not mention Viyescu. What he had discovered\u2014what he thought he had discovered\u2014he could not put into words. He thought the druggist wanted to reveal something, wanted to come forward, but it was only a fleeting feeling, a hunch. Not worth bothering Coeccias with.\n\nCoeccias shrugged. \"I'd agree, for argument, but thinking's no place here\u2014the knowing is all. We know the player had a right good reason, and the knife was that of a player. All points to him, though why he's not fled is beyond me.\" For a moment, the Aedile stared into the depths of his mug, then looked up and spoke in a different tone.\n\n\"There's another thing, though, that'll interest you. The druggist recommended himself to you.\"\n\n\"Viyescu? He mentioned me?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Coeccias nodded. \"At the fane, after the procession. He must have seen me post the messenger to you, for he came to me when all was done, and asked if I knew the hierarch. It took a moment, but then I recalled your imposture, and said I did. He said there was something he'd thought of to tell you since your last talk, something that might interest you.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Truth, he mumbled and muttered and jigged around it, saying he'd only come to tell it through pure meditation on Uris and a lot of other pious rambling, but the pure and straight of it is that 'the woman' had come to him again, just the other day, and begged once more a dram of the poison from him. Now this is our woman, is it not?\"\n\n\"Yes, but we already know Tarquin wasn't keeping her,\" Liam said, shaking his head.\n\n\"Remind me: what was the herb?\"\n\nSanthract, but it doesn't matter. Tarquin was dead, not pregnant.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Coeccias admitted. \"Though here's more on it: this hooded and cloaked beldame must've put a mighty fright to our druggist, for that he was shaking leaflike, and pale, and looked around him oft.\"\n\n\"So?\" Liam could barely restrain his frustration. Viyescu's information was scarcely to the point, gone the way of his interviews with Marcius and his decanter of virgin's blood. Wasted breath and effort poorly spent. He was annoyed with the business, and with Viyescu. The puritanical druggist's problems had nothing to do with Tarquin's death, of that he was suddenly sure. Lons was the killer, though he did not want to believe it. \"So some temple-soft fanatic is frightened by a woman? It's not proof, it's not knowing, and the knowing is all, isn't it?\"\n\nWas that what Viyescu had wanted to tell him? That he was frightened of the woman? It did not matter.\n\nHe regretted his tone, but fortunately the Aedile did not take it amiss.\n\n\"Truth, you've the right of it. More like Viyescu was afraid to talk with me, or to utter ungodly thoughts in Uris's fane. The knowing is all, and we know it's our player. Perhaps we'll clap him tomorrow.\" He fell to pondering his cup of cider, and when he saw it was almost empty, lumbered over to the fire to refill it, taking Liam's cup as well. Bending over the pot, he muttered heavily. \"I'll say, though, that I'm wondering wherefore he hasn't fled. If I were him, I'd to the heath before we were a street away.\"\n\nLiam accepted his refill. \"He has probably guessed you have someone watching him, and that the proof is circumstantial. It is circumstantial, though damning.\"\n\n\"Enough to hi,mg him, if need be, though I'm loath to do't,\" Coeccias said ruefully, resuming his seat. \"A confession' d do my heart good.\"\n\n\"He probably guesses that as well, and is hoping we'll give up. Or maybe he thinks my warning was all the punishment he'd get.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Coeccias said, his eyes lighting with malicious humor, \"then that was the matter you had when you let him off! To keep him off the Lady Necquer!\"\n\nNodding miserably, Liam cursed himself. He had bungled it, bargaining with their best suspect for an unimportant tangent.\n\n\"Y'have a soft spot for the gentler sex; Rhenford, that much is clear. Perhaps he thinks we'll not take him for the murder because you're overfond of his sister, eh?\"\n\nThe jibe stung, though a smile lit Coeccias's eyes, and Liam hung his head.\n\n\"Well, on the morrow we'll clap the player, and the matter'll be done.\"\n\nLiam drank unhappily to the resolution. Strangely, he thought of Fanuilh. With Lons's arrest, he would have fulfilled his part of the bargain, regardless of his numerous missteps; he wondered if the dragon would carry out his part as ineptly.\n\nThey sat for a while, drinking the cider. Coeccias refilled the mugs twice, and Liam's face flushed with the spiked drink.\n\nSuddenly the Aedile boomed out a laugh and slammed his mug to the table.\n\n\"Why sit we here like maudlin old crows?\" he shouted, his teeth beaming hugely in his black beard. \"We've conned and caught our killer! It's done! We're done with it! On the morrow he'll take up residence in the jail, and I' II to clearing drunken tars out of taverns, and you'll to your books! We're clear! Come! Bring the pot!\"\n\nThe Aedile jumped to his feet and careered out of the kitchen. Liam stood more slowly, and felt the blood rush dizzily in his head. He had drunk more than was good for him, but lie had the sense to use a rag to hold the hot ring of the pot he took from the fire. Coeccias's sudden good cheer both surprised and amused him, and he gratefully allowed it to distract him from his melancholy mood.\n\nCalling for Burus to light a fire in the parlor and to bring food, Coeccias then saw to the fire himself, and cursed the servant good-naturedly when he appeared.\n\n\"Damn your slowness, Burus! I've the fire in hand! You to the food, and mind you bring your pipes as well, and a third mug! Now, Rhenford,\" he called when Liam came in, carefully carrying the pot, \"hang it on the fire, and see yourself to another mug!\"\n\nBurus came back with a huge tray covered with cold meat, cheese and bread, and a flute under his arm. Liam perceived through the rapidly descending haze of the cider that the servant's smile was sour by a trick of his face, and that he was well acquainted with his master's sudden moods. He left the food on a chest that stood by the fire, and stood back to check his flute.\n\nThough his lunch had been large, Liam attacked the platter, both because the spiked cider had given him a new appetite and because he was afraid of the haze it had imposed.\n\n\"Now, Burus,\" Coeccias said while Liam stuffed sausage, cheese and bread indiscriminately down his throat, \"it's not yet Uris's appointed fasting time, and Rhenford and I've finished up a business the like of which I've never seen in my office, and there's most of a pot of cider to down. So, you'll have a mug, and we'll have a tune.\" Gesturing imperiously, he filled the extra mug and thrust it at the servant, who took a deep draught before setting it down and commencing a high, lively air on his flute.\n\nCoeccias burst out laughing and applauding at once, and stamped his feet in a ragged approximation of time.\n\n\"Go to, go to, Burns! He knows,\" the Aedile bellowed confidingly to Liam, \"that that's my favorite.\" Liam was busy with the food he had heaped in his lap, but he managed to look up and nod appreciatively, though he had never heard the tune before.\n\nBy the end of the song, Liam had finished a large portion of the food on the platter, refilled his mug and begun beating out the rhythm on his knees. Burns was more than a fair musician, and Liam recognized his next song with a bright grin and an emphatic nod of approval. The servant had . started in on \"The Lipless Flutist\" over the strenuous objections of Coeccias, who wanted to hear the first song again. As soon as he saw that Liam was engrossed in the song, however, he stopped shouting for the old one, and came and sat by him, slurring his question slightly.\n\n\"It likes you?\"\n\n\"Very much,\" Liam replied, running over the obscene words to the song in his head and noticing the mischievous glint in Burus's eye as he cocked his head over the plain wooden flute. It seemed as though the servant was daring him to sing.\n\n\"Then sing it,\" Coeccias roared in his ear, swaying perilously.\n\n\"I can't sing.\"\n\n\"Play?\" When Liam, wanting only to hear the song and recall its lyrics, ignored him, the Aedile grabbed him and shouted his question again. \"Can you play?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes.\"\n\n\"The lute?\"\n\n\"Yes, the lute, a little,\" Liam said, willing his friend to be quiet. To his great disappointment, however, it was Burns who was quiet, laying aside his flute and looking at his master with an unvoiced question. Coeccias lurched to his feet and went to the chest. Dropping the platter on the floor, he flung the lid open and rummaged for a moment, coming up with a much-battered lute case. He opened it tenderly, and revealed a rosewood lute of tremendous craftsmanship, with ivory pegs and silvered edges. He presented it to Liam and then took a seat on a caned chair off to one side of the room.\n\n\"Will you, sir?\" They were the first words Liam had heard Burus say, and he was surprised to hear a courtly voice issue from the sour face. He noticed suddenly that Burns was older than Coeccias, the thin hairs that straggled across his bald head a dirty gray.\n\n\"I suppose, yes, just let me tune it.\"\n\n\"It'll need no tuning, sir.\"\n\nShrugging, Liam picked out the first few notes of \"The Lipless Flutist,\" and heard that Burus was right. Encouraged, he went on more confidently, and the servant joined in soon. After a few minutes, the rust in Liam's fingers wore away, and the two matched each other. Coeccias started singing the most common verse once they had run through the main theme twice. His range was poor, and he shouted more than sang, but the words came out clear and loud, and the words were the most important part of \"The Lipless Flutist.\" Liam entered the singing almost right away, and though the mix of the two men's voices was hardly pleasant, it was not outright offensive, and seemed to fit the ruder lines quite well.\n\nThe variations on the song's basic theme\u2014the adventures of a flute\u2014player with no lips\u2014were almost endless, and Coeccias and Liam diverged radically after three verses. The Aedile tried to return to the beginning, but Liam went on, into a verse he had once heard in Harcourt. Coeccias joined him on the refrain, though, and they brought the song to a rousing finish, shouting and laughing, with the heavy official jigging across the parlor.\n\nLaughing, Liam flexed his fingers, pleased that he had remembered how to play. Another thing he had not done in a long time.\n\n\"Y'have a fair hand for the lute,\" Burus commented, cheeks red from playing the furiously paced song.\n\n\"And y'have a saucy, impertinent tongue, rascal!\" Coeccias shook with laughter and clapped his servant on the shoulder, rocking the slighter man.\n\n\"I only learned because of that song,\" Liam said. He had indeed learned to play because of \"The Lipless Flutist,\" taking up the lute to fill long hours on deck and as a way to remember the countless verses that had amused him in taverns and wineshops and camps in a hundred lands. He smiled at the pervasiveness of one song, and recalled a particular version.\n\n\"There's a variation to it, if you'd like to hear it.\" Coeccias loudly left no doubt that he was in favor of it, and Burus smiled indulgently.\n\nHe led them through the variation, called \"The Lipless Flutist and the One-Armed Lutist,\" laying out each new line for Coeccias to roar along. He included a few of the special rills that went along with mention of the Lutist, and found Burus accompanying him easily, while Coeccias clapped with drunken joy. They sang the new verse twice, and then paused, drinking much more cider and laughing with the Aedile as he tried and failed to remember the lines Liam had just taught him.\n\n\"You' 11 write them out for me, Rhenford,\" he said angrily, and then called for another song.\n\nLiam began one of the few others he knew, a sailor's song, high-spirited but relatively clean for the normally filthy genre. Burus picked it up effortlessly, and added a number of flourishes that enhanced the simple melody. As he bent his head to check his fingering, Liam marveled at the gnarled old servant's skill. He was a true musician, not a dabbler like Liam, who had only learned individual songs and not the theories or ideas behind them. He could play the songs he knew, but Burns could learn a new one easily, and make it better.\n\nThey played two more songs that Liam knew, and Coeccias remained silent, staring fixedly at a space between them. When they were done, Liam bowed over his lute at Bums.\n\n\"You're a fine player, Bums. A really fine musician.\"\n\nThe servant flushed and scowled, and the Aedile roused himself from his stupor to take another gulp of cider and fix his attention on the lute Liam held.\n\n\"And so he should be, Rhenford! My father had the teaching of him, and my father was the rarest that ever served the office of Duke's Minstrel!\"\n\nBurus's scowl deepened, but he did not speak angrily. \"That lute was his,\" he said, pointing with his flute, \"and though you do it no disgrace, he was as far your master as a king is a swineherd's.\"\n\n\"Aye, a rarer there never was, a rare man for a song,\" Coeccias muttered morosely, and then suddenly burst out laughing. \"And the rankest time-server and flatterer the Duke's court ever saw! How think you I came to my own office? Son of the Duke's favorite, and good for naught but chucking tosspots into the street-so off with him to Southwark, and create him Aedile!\"\n\n\"Y'have done credit to it, Coeccias,\" the old servant said mildly, and the Aedile nodded firmly.\n\n\"Truth, I've done my all, and few could do better. But go to, another song!\"\n\nBums began a slow, mournful song, a dirge to Laomedon, the God of the W odds Beyond. He peered questioningly over his flute, but Liam shook his head and smiled, carefully putting the beautiful lute back into its case before refilling his mug.\n\nThe pot was finished by the time Bums had gone through four more songs, three of which Liam did not recognize. Finally, the servant put aside his flute and drained the last of the only cup he had taken.\n\n\"If there's nothing else, I think I'll to my cot.\"\n\n\"No, naught else, good Bums, beside my thanks.\" Coeccias seemed to be over his earlier wild drunkenness, and nodded gravely at his servant's bow.\n\nLiam whistled after the old man had gone, now far worse off than his friend. The haze was fully extended now, and he was glad the pot was empty, because the thought of even another sip made his stomach ache.\n\n\"He's a fine musician,\" he whispered in awe.\n\n\"Truth, a fine man as well.\"\n\nUnsteadily, Liam made his way to his feet. \"It's time for me to go.\"\n\nCoeccias did not argue, but he did stand and open the door for him with a wide smile.\n\n\"Y'are no poor player yourself, for all Burus's roundabout way of saying it. Y' ought to come again, and let him teach you some other tunes.\"\n\n\"That would be good,\" Liam said thickly, trying forcefully to regain control of his reluctant legs. Their talk of Coeccias's father had brought to mind his own, and he felt inexpressibly sad beneath the numbness of the cider.\n\n\"On the morrow, then,\" the Aedile said, as Liam went out the door.\n\n\"Yes, tomorrow,\" he muttered, waving a hand over his shoulder.\n\nThere was a cold breeze in the street, and it thinned the haze enough for him to realize that trying to ride out to Tarquin's would be pointless, if not dangerous. With that muddled thought, he forced himself to start for his garret.\n\nThe stairs seemed to stretch interminably ahead of him, but eventually he reached the top, bumping from wall to wall. Sad, fuzzy thoughts of his father and muddled curses for Coeccias's wickedly spiked cider echoed in his head. Fully clothed, he collapsed onto his pallet and into sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "As usual when he was even slightly drunk, Liam slept poorly, plagued by nightmares.\n\nIn Tarquin's house, which the dream meant for his father's keep, a wild revel was going on, and he, as a crippled jester, was being baited like a bear. Hounds snapped savagely at him, biting his legs and hands. Blood streamed down his legs, but he could not move to defend himself. This greatly displeased the revelers who circled him. The wizard himself, Dono\u00e9 at his side, his face a demon-mask with the flickering orange candlelight, laughed disdainfully at Liam's pitiful gestures. Coeccias tossed a seemingly endless supply of lutes at his head and growled encouragement to the dogs. Lons and Lady Necquer, lying together on the same couch, shrieked with delight as a particularly large bite was tom from his leg. Others he had met\u2014Viyescu and Marcius, Kansallus and his actors, even Mother Japh the ghost witch-gorged themselves on wine and roasted meat, screaming for the dogs to dispatch him.\n\nWeaker and weaker, Liam tried to avoid the pack, but the laughter and the hatred of the revelers discouraged him, and he allowed himself to fall.\n\nThe dogs pounced on him from all sides, rolling him over with the pressure of their attack, and he gazed up into Fanuilh's eyes. The dragon was hovering high above him, gazing imperturbably down on the dog's feast. Suddenly, it flapped its wings gently, and at each downstroke a sound like thunder echoed through the suddenly silent chamber. The revelers stopped indulging themselves, and looked in awe at the dragon as more peals of thunder rang out. Liam looked helplessly into the creature's eyes, searching for something he could understand.\n\nKnocking at his door, subtly like thunder, woke him up, and be left the dream with a muffled gasp. He. jumped to his feet, disentangling himself from his blanket with difficulty. He could not have slept very long; it was still dark out, his candle was still burning, and he was still slightly drunk. There was another knock and he jumped, . then took a deep breath to steady himself and hurried to the door.\n\nRora stood there, a concerned look on her flawless face. Liam recoiled in surprise and her concerned look grew troubled.\n\nMust be a dream, Liam thought; where are the dogs?\n\n\"Master?\" she said, taking his sweating palm in her own cool one. \"Is all well? Your face's a fright.\" Her voice was a wellspring of good intentions and honest worry, and her hand felt wonderfully cool and smooth, but he pulled away roughly and turned into the room, soddenly aware that it was wrong for her to be there.\n\n\"Nothing. Just a dream.\" He scrubbed at his hot face and swiped his hair back, knowing enough to know his wits were not with him. He did not hear her come up behind him, and jumped again when she laid her hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"Master, is all well?\"\n\nHe saw his chair by the window and, convinced it was a refuge, threw himself into it.\n\nRora followed, dropping her heavy cloak on the bed, and knelt by him. Her skirts ballooned out from above her waist in a black mushroom, and he focused on them, sternly forcing himself to ignore the low cut of her bodice. She laid a light hand on his knee.\n\n\"Master Rhenford, y'are not well, I fear.\" Her hair was held away from her face by a simple clasp, and rippled down her back. A sweet perfume crept like a thief behind what was left of the cider's haze, and he stirred and shoved at her hand.\n\n\"I'm fine, fine. What do you want?\"\n\nShe took his bluntness in stride.\n\n\"Faith, Master,\" she said, rising smoothly and pacing a few steps away, \"I must beg a boon.\" She turned on him, her eyes sparkling with tears, pressing her hands tightly palm to palm.\n\nI'm not up to this, Liam thought, feeling very stupid.\n\n\"You'll clap my sweet brother in for a crime he had no hand in, Master, and I must plead his innocence! On my body I swear his soul's free of taint!\"\n\nOh, gods, why did she swear on her body? I'm going to regret this.\n\n\"Plead to the Aedile,\" he snapped, shaking his head in wide arcs he almost could not control. \"I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\"The Aedile! Even I can see y'are his genius! I pray you, Master, speak with him! Plead my brother's half, bespeak his innocence, I pray you!\"\n\nShe knelt again squarely in front of him, claiming his wandering attention. He could not look at her for longer than a few seconds; the only thoughts that came to mind were dangerous.\n\nIf only she'd go away, he thought vainly, I could stop worrying about looking at her breasts.\n\nTwo tears welled up, and then traced perfect courses down her fair cheeks, and he knew he was going to make a mistake.\n\n\"I'm only a common player, I know, Master, but I've as much honesty as a gentle! Lons is guiltless in this, I swear! By Uris I swear, Master!\"\n\n\"Don't call me that; I'm not your Master,\" he protested feebly, waving his hand at the entrancing vision, hoping it would go away.\n\n\"Y'are, Master,\" she cried, and her hands flashed spontaneously to his knees.\n\nMuch higher than before, he thought with alarm, and though he tried to move them, could not. She tried to bury her head in his lap, beginning to weep in earnest, but he managed to fend her off.\n\nI can't let this happen.\n\n\"I pray you, Master, bespeak the Aedile as you can! You know you can turn him off that track! I'd do anything to prove Lons honest!\"\n\nAnything? No.\n\nShe managed to get her head onto his lap, and continued to plead, though her sobs were muffled.\n\nThis is so wrong, he thought, and tried to stand up, which was a mistake;\n\nRora came up with him, and somewhere in the confusion of rising, her lips met his. The cider and conversation had left him flushed and hot, his lips dry, and hers felt cool and moist, tasting slightly of salt from her tears.\n\nDamn cider, damn Coeccias, damn Lons and Poppae Necquer. I'm making a mistake.\n\n\"I'd do aught,\" she whispered, her voice suddenly low and throaty in his ear.\n\nDamn me.\n\nSometime later, she stirred beside him on the pallet, and then, even later, Liam rolled over and found her gone. The cider, too, was gone, and his head was clear enough to allow him to curse himself soundly.\n\n\"Damn, damn, damn, damn,\" he chanted into the darkness, with his hands knotted behind his head. He had made a mistake, he knew, and tried to console himself by cursing Coeccias' s cider and thinking about how\u00b7 long it had been since he was with a woman. It did not work. Would she expect him now to leave her brother alone? That was ridiculous, of course; Lons had had every reason to kill Tarquin, and despite his alibi, everything pointed to him. There was no way he could convince Coeccias otherwise without some new piece of evidence, and it was entirely unlikely that one would come his way. If only Marcius had done something, or if Dono\u00e9 had told him a different story, then he might have supported his belief that Lons was not the killer. As things stood, though, there was no other conclusion.\n\nBut Rora would not see it that way, naturally. With his foolish, stupid, damnable drunken acquiescence, he had as much as told the tearful, pleading innocent that he would help her brother.\n\nInnocent? Her perfume lingered, and he imagined his blanket and mattress still held a hint of her warmth. Naive, perhaps, but not innocent. She had been ... amazing, he thought guiltily, so that even a half-drunk man might look back on the experience and shake his head in wonder, and regret that it was over. And doubly regret that it had happened at all. Kansallus had only partly guessed about Rora. No virgin, certainly.\n\nLiam groaned out loud, trying to express the mix of sensual reminiscence and self-condemnation, or at least drive it away.\n\nPoised over him at one point, she had looked down on him, flushed and deeply involved in what she was doing to him with her body, her hair in wild disarray.\n\n\"You're going to get fat,\" he had murmured, running his hands over her silky, sweat-damp skin.\n\n\"Too much wine,\" she had laughed. 'You know players .... \" The rest was lost, spoken into his throat as she arced downward to begin again.\n\nThe memory was so vivid that Liam had to sit up in bed and rub his eyes to keep from actually seeing it.\n\nIt had been so long that he only wanted to revel in it, but he could not allow that. He had to do something, anything, to avoid remembering, or it would only strengthen his guilt.\n\nHe had effectively pledged to help her brother, and racked his brain for a way to do it. He went over the investigation point by point, rethinking every clue, reexamining each possibility. Was there something he and Coeccias had missed? Some old idea they had put aside that might be dusted off?\n\nThe sky outside his window had taken on the deep royal blue of predawn before he thought of even one thing he might check. Viyescu's hooded woman, and her desire for new poison. It was almost surely pointless, but the druggist had for some reason thought it worth telling. And there was Coeccias's report of Viyescu's nervousness and, more important, his own strange meeting with the druggist. What if the mystery woman had threatened him? What if they had gotten closer to the truth with Viyescu, and then passed it up for the easier explanation that Lons afforded? What if, what if. Since Marcius had not seen fit to confess, it was the only thing he could imagine as a possibility, however slim. He decided to visit the apothecary again, to ask the questions he should have asked before, and just then noticed the color of the sky.\n\nIt was far too early to go to Viyescu's, he knew, but he was afraid to sleep, afraid that Coeccias would arrest Lons before he could unearth a new clue to protect the player, and his sister. He shifted uncomfortably on the pallet, wondering how to occupy the time before he could go to Northfield and, worn out by the hard cider and his exertions, fell instantly asleep.\n\nPanicking, Liam woke all at once, jumped up from his pallet, and ran to the window. The sun was still low; he had only been asleep for a few hours. Still, he felt a tremendous pressure to be out and on his way to Viyescu's. He stripped and splashed the entire contents of his washbasin over his body, then dried himself patchily with his blanket.\n\nLying directly in front of his door was a folded piece of paper, pure white and of good quality, one of the sheets he had bought on his arrival in Southwark. Sunlight from the window slanted onto it, and he frowned as he knelt to pick it up. It was too far into the room to have been shoved beneath the door; Rora must have left it. There was no name on the outside of the paper, and he opened it as if it might contain a dangerous animal.\n\nWincing, he read the short note through twice. The writing was crude, the letters poorly formed, the spelling atrocious, and the message painful.\n\nI know you won't fail me, Master, not now. Pray you, bespeak the Aedile on my sweet brother's part. I swear his innocence!\n\nGrowling, he almost crumpled the page, but instead threw it towards the table. He did not wait to see it flutter to the ground like a wounded dove, several feet short of the table. He hurried passed the shrinking drudge and out into the street, buckling his belt as he went and haphazardly tucking his breeches into his boots. Outside, the sky stopped him for a moment. It was a fine morning, just cold enough to chill the wet spots left by his uneven toweling, and the vault of the sky was unbroken blue, pale and bright. A line of black clouds, however, like waves in the sky, were building up far out over the sea, and he knew that by afternoon the day would be shattered by storms.\n\nIt made little difference to him. He was concerned with his own stupidity, and the obligation he had foolishly assumed. He found he was grinding his teeth, and he strode through the streets like an ill wind, cursing himself. Beggars, seeing his clenched fists, did not try to stop him, but he did not notice.\n\nGods, let the druggist have something.\n\nLiam was grasping at straws, and knew it, but when he allowed himself to consider the fact his mind dropped back to the night before, and to what he had tacitly agreed. So he tried to reorder what he knew, and cast about for new constructions that would, if not find another murderer, at least clear Lons.\n\nViyescu turned white beneath his untamed beard and began shaking when Liam entered. Dismissing it as the product of his own undoubtedly grim appearance, Liam crossed to the counter.\n\n\"Hierarch,\" the druggist whispered anxiously, \"what brings you here again?\"\n\n\"I spoke with the Aedile yesterday, and he gave me some news from you.\"\n\n\"Yes, certainly, but surely there's no need to\u2014\"\n\nLiam cut the strangely distressed apothecary off. \"The woman who mentioned Tarquin came back?\"\n\n\"Yes, Hierarch.\" Viyescu was subdued, accepting questions much more easily than before.\n\n\"And asked for more santhract?\" Viyescu nodded. \"You didn't sell her any?\"\n\n\"I've said, I don't sell it; it likes me not.\"\n\n\"But she frightened you?\"\n\nStartled, Viyescu goggled at him.\n\n\"She frightened you. The Aedile said you looked frightened.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he hemmed, \"it was naught; I just\u2014\"\n\n\"Did she threaten you?\"\n\n\"Perhaps she spoke some in anger, but it was naught, if it please you, she\u2014\"\n\nThe apothecary was lying, Liam felt sure; the woman had threatened him, but he did not want to admit it. Liam let it go.\n\n\"I see, I see. I've just one more question for you, then.\" Viyescu was visibly relieved, and Liam wondered at his change of attitude. His stem, puritanical righteousness was gone, as well as the subtle hinting of their meeting the day before. Viyescu clearly regretted having said\u2014or having begun to say\u2014anything. \"Santhract is used only to .. . terminate pregnancies, correct?\"\n\n\"Yes, Hierarch.\"\n\n\"And then only in small doses?\"\n\n\"Yes, Hierarch.\"\n\n\"What if someone was given a larger dose? Could it kill a man, say?\"\n\nSweat broke on the druggist's brow, and Liam had to try hard to keep calm. What was making him so nervous?\n\n\"Could it?\"\n\n\"I have so heard,\" Viyescu stammered softly. A hot stab of hope and relief went through Liam. He had latched onto something.\n\n\"How much did the woman want?\"\n\nThe druggist leaned forward with wide eyes, as though he had not understood the question.\n\n\"I'm wondering if she wanted enough to kill a man,\" Liam explained.\n\n\"But\u2014but Master Tanaquil was stabbed, was he not?\"\n\nLiam shrugged, as though the question meant nothing. \"It doesn't matter, of course\u2014you don't sell santhract; it likes you not, eh?\" Here was something much more than he had hoped for, and he could not avoid lacing the question with acid irony. Viyescu shook his head instantly.\n\n\"And of course, you still don't know who this woman is?\" Viyescu shook his head again, obviously unwilling now to speak, not trusting his tongue.\n\nLiam did not care. New ideas crowded out the druggist's worried face, a hundred possibilities spun half out of the few small revelations he had gotten and half out of his guilty need to exonerate Lons.\n\n\"Of course,\" he murmured. \"Thank you, Master Viyescu. Your help will not go unnoted.\" He turned and left the druggist behind his counter.\n\nThe black line of clouds was noticeably closer but Liam paid them no attention, his thoughts fully occupied with the web of suppositions he was weaving. He ambled out of Northfield back towards his garret, staring with unseeing eyes at the cobbles. Beggars let him go again, frowning at the tall, distracted figure.\n\nWhat could the poison mean? And what had Viyescu so upset? It must have to do with Tarquin, or the druggist would not have sent the news to him through Coeccias. So the woman and her poison must be connected with the wizard's death. That was a thorny problem, because if Dono\u00e9's story was to mean anything, Tarquin could not have gotten the woman pregnant, and besides, he had been stabbed, not poisoned.\n\nA thousand new questions rose from that. If Tarquin had not gotten her pregnant, who had? And why was the wizard involved? Could the murderer be a person he and Coeccias had never considered, namely the hooded man who came to the unknown woman's sometime lodgings?\n\nToo many new questions. The neat fabric of their solution seemed likely to unravel beneath the weight of his new thoughts. And to further complicate matters, he suddenly wondered if Rora might perhaps have been far less innocent than he thought. The encounter could easily have been planned as a sort of blackmail, to try to tum him away from Lons.\n\nShe could not have known he would be drunk and thus vulnerable, but his admiration for her had been obvious. If Coeccias had commented on it, she must have noticed it, and Kansallus had said that she was used to being sought after. What if Lons had sent her there? If he had, it put the guilt firmly on his shoulders.\n\n\"Gods,\" he groaned, \"I've been so stupid.\"\n\nThere was nothing for it, though, . but to go on trying to clear the actor. Rora might have come to him on her own, unsure of her brother's innocence but determined to protect him in her own way. Again, the possibilities were enormous, and a hundred lines of thought stretched away into uselessness. He and Coeccias had settled, however reluctantly, on an explanation that now seemed simple-minded.\n\nLooking up, he saw that his feet and his musing had carried him to the street where his lodgings were. He stopped uncertainly at the corner and gazed with mild distaste at the high, dark house and the tiny window that fronted his garret. He thought how much better it would have been if he had gone to Tarquin's the night before. Remembering the house, he remembered Fanuilh. He had given no thought to feeding the little creature and, feeling guilty, headed for the stables.\n\nThe mass of new and complicated questions weighed heavily on him as he rode, and he attempted to sort it out by going over the information he had, and poking holes in it.\n\nThe mystery woman was still looking for poison, and Viyescu somehow connected it with Tarquin's death, and was frightened about something. Lons had not tried to escape, but his sister had tried to turn suspicion from him. The decanter, his treasured decanter with the crossed-out label, suddenly seemed a clue again, unreadable but nonetheless a clue. And the illusion spell Tarquin had marked in his book might hold significance. Marcius had done nothing, but Liam would not dismiss him. Despite his inactivity, he might still fit into the puzzle's unexpectedly wider dimensions.\n\nAll he needed was a way to fit everything together. His mind revolted at the new complexity, somehow feeling that simpler explanations were better. Still, he juggled the pieces around, hoping for a way to clear his conscience.\n\nHe saw the mounting clouds from the beach, and put Diamond in the shed. The wind had picked up, scouring the beach with cold, stinging sand. He let himself into the house.\n\nI did not think you would come.\n\nLiam waited until he was in the workroom before answering.\n\n\"I almost forgot. I've been busy.\"\n\nI know. Fanuilh's flat cat's eyes and toneless thought stung more than the wind-flung sand. Sleeping with the dancer was not wise.\n\n\"It was the cider,\" Liam muttered abashedly, unable to meet the dragon's gaze. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nYes.\n\nHe hurried out to the kitchen and fixed his thoughts on the oven. When the raw meat was ready, he brought it back and laid it silently on the worktable.\n\nCoeccias thinks the player killed Master Tanaquil, Fanuilh thought after several large mouthfuls. It moved more easily, and Liam wondered how long it would take to recover completely.But you do not think so. Your thoughts are scattered on the subject.\n\n\"That's because I'm not sure now why I think he didn't do it,\" Liam admitted. He went to the second worktable and picked up the empty beaker with its obliterated label. \"I don't think Lons is the sort who would kill, but now I have to wonder if I think that because of Lady Necquer, and because of Rora. That's why my thoughts are scattered. If you'd let me tell you things,\" he said more strongly, \"instead of picking them out of my head at random, this might be easier.\"\n\nEven as he spoke, he knew it was foolish. The dragon would know\u2014because he knew\u2014that his thoughts would be scattered whether or not it invaded them. Fanuilh let it pass, putting all its attention to the meat.\n\nStaring at the beaker, Liam suddenly struck his forehead with his free hand and cursed. It was such a simple question, but he had never thought to ask it.\n\n\"Fanuilh, when did you first see this decanter?\"\n\nMaster Tanaquil had it for many years.\n\n\"No, I mean, when did . you first notice it here, on the table? Empty?\"\n\nThe morning after Master Tanaquil removed the Teeth.\n\n\"The morning after the woman visited him.\"\n\nYes.\n\nLiam set the decanter down on the worktable and went to the book of spells on the lectern. It was still open to the spell that had caused the Teeth to vanish, and he ran his finger along, looking for a list of ingredients.\n\nSymbol components, appeared the thought in his head, and he looked over at the dragon, which had its back to him and was busy gnawing bones.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nThey are not called ingredients; they are called symbol components, and there is no list. Where they appear in the text, they are underscored.\n\nShrugging at the unresponsive scaled back, Liam rechecked the spell, and saw that the dragon was right. After the initial abstract paragraphs came the actual instructions, and several words were underlined: pitch, purified water, a white-hot brazier of coals, and others, some of which he could not identify. But there was no listing for virgin's blood. Disappointed, he scanned the spell again and found nothing, then flipped through the book to the illusion spell.\n\nThere, to his relief, the words \"an ounce of virgin's blood\" were underlined. He barked a triumphant laugh that brought Fanuilh's head around.\n\nWhat have you found?\n\n\"Well,\" he said, repressing his grin and going over the words of the spell, \"virgin's blood is not called for in the vanishing spell, but it is in the one for invisibility. And since the decanter wasn't on the table until after the woman came, we can reasonably suppose that she requested the spelt\"\n\nThat does not necessarily follow.\n\n\"Not necessarily, no, but for the sake of argument\u2014\"\n\nIt might have been for Marcius.\n\n\"Yes, it might,\" Liam said impatiently, \"but we're not going to work that idea just yet. We're going to focus on this woman.\"\n\nIt would help if you knew who she was.\n\nLiam closed his eyes and massaged his brows. \"Fanuilh, how is it that you can read my thoughts and remain so impenetrably stupid?\" His eyes snapped open and he held his hand out, palm up, to stop the dragon. \"Don't answer. Just be quiet.\"\n\nIn blessed silence, he checked the ingredients\u2014symbol components, he reminded himself\u2014for the spell of invisibility, and then compared them with those for the other spell. Both called for pitch, water and coals, and two of the unidentifiable items from the latter were required by the former. The only difference was that virgin's blood was listed under invisibility, while there were three items underlined in the vanishing spell whose names he did not recognize.\n\nThe theory behind each spell seemed the same; the difference in effect was accounted for by the three unknown components in the more powerful one. Intrigued, he checked the texts with more care. The vanishing spell often referred to a \"representation\" or \"model\" as the focus of the spell, while the casting of invisibility centered around a \"homunculus\" or \"mannikin.\"\n\n\"Fanuilh,\" he began, but the dragon's thought cut him off.\n\nInvisibility is usually cast on a person, hence the homunculus; a doll, really. Vanishing is for objects, hence the model.\n\nIt was looking at him, the long neck twisted sinuously over its shoulder.\n\n\"So Tarquin would have had to have a little doll of a person to cast the spell\u2014or could he use this?\" He pointed at the model, and Fanuilh's wedgy head shifted to look on the miniature Southwark. No thoughts came for a while, and Liam began to fidget. Finally, a tentative thought snaked into his head.\n\nHe might have. I believe the spell can be cast on an object. Before Liam could say anything, another thought came in. But I am not sure.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Liam said, \"nor am I. But I've one more question. Did Tarquin have a test for Dono\u00e9?\"\n\nFor her blood? No. He trusted Dono\u00e9. He trusted people often.\n\n\"As he trusted Lons,\" Liam mused. \"To take a man's word for that much money ....\"\n\nThe player did look like a rich merchant.\n\n\"Yes, yes, but what man\u2014no matter how rich a merchant\u2014will pay that much gold for a woman? Why just take his word?\"\n\nMaster Tanaquil was a powerful wizard. He had no need for money\u2014he called the fees he charged \"gauges of need.\" How much someone would pay, or what they would be willing to do, for his spells indicated how much they needed them.\n\n\"So when Lons agreed to 10,000, he showed his need. Now the question is, what did the woman agree to? How great was her need?\"\n\nI do not know. I cannot follow your thoughts on this. They are very scattered.\n\n\"Of course they are,\" Liam agreed, smiling broadly, already on his way out. \"It's a tenuous connection at best, very tenuous.\" He stopped to stroke the dragon's clothlike scales, and feel the creature arch happily under his hand. \"I'll be back tomorrow morning.\"\n\nDo not forget.\n\n\"I won't,\" he called from the hall.\n\nDo you really think this is important?\n\nHe stopped in the doorway and shouted back. \"I hope so. I'd hate to think I came all the way out here just to feed you.\"\n\nDiamond safely stabled, Liam went back to his garret to get his writing case and the letter from Rora. He did not really need his writing case. The letter was more important. He did not want it lying around for his landlady to see and, thinking of the way Coeccias had gotten hold of his list of suspects, he did not want the Aedile to find it. They had become friends, to a certain extent, and he was ashamed to think of the things he had to hide.\n\nHis landlady was holding court in the kitchen, ordering the drudge around when he walked in. She smiled broadly and began speaking at once, almost as though she had been expecting him.\n\n\"Master Liam! Uris bless us, you've just missed some gentlemen who came calling for you.\"\n\n\"Really? Who?\"\n\n\"None I'd ever seen,\" she said, pitching her voice in a whisper that seemed to invite the exchange of confidences. \"And they'd not leave their names, or business,\" she added significantly.\n\nLiam grunted noncommittally and went up the stairs, glad to frustrate her and thinking of the letter and the rest of the day. There was still an hour before noon, when Lady Necquer had told him to come back. He was not sure if he would bother. First he had to see Coeccias, and find out what he thought, and then he would decide if he could spare the time to go up to the Point.\n\nWith the letter secure in his writing case on his belt, he started back down the stairs.\n\n\"Master Liam,\" his landlady called peevishly from the kitchen. \"The men who're asking after you are here.\"\n\nHe thought more of her irritated tone than of the visitors she had announced. I really shouldn't go out of my way to annoy her, he thought. She's just a harmless old gossip.\n\nThe man who stood just inside the kitchen door was a stranger, though Liam knew the type from his short-cut hair and the way he smacked his fist into his palm. The Rat stood behind him, and as Liam came off the last step into the kitchen, Scar stepped through the door, his ghastly smile wide and unpleasant.\n\nDamn, Liam thought. At least they're not armed.\n\nThe three. toughs began moving in, the Rat around one end of the table and the unknown tough around the other. Liam waited until all three were away from the door, and then moved.\n\n\"Run and fetch the Aedile,\" he shouted at his landlady and her drudge, and ran at the Rat. The drudge, young and smart, dodged past Scar, but the older woman found her way blocked by Scar's widespread arms. She backed away, gaping and goggling like a landed fish.\u00b7.\n\nThe Rat was not prepared to be attacked, and Liam hit him twice in the stomach, doubling him over. Liam was surprised how easy it was; the Rat was obviously no brawler. The man he did not know, however, was, and came up behind him before he could tum and caught his arms.\n\nScar grabbed the terrified landlady and thrust her angrily at the gasping, teary-eyed Rat. \"Hold fast, jack; the woman'll not harm you,\" he sneered, and shoved past the other man to confront Liam.\n\nWith his arms tightly held behind him, Liam could only kick at Scar, but the bigger man swatted his leg away easily. The man who held him wrenched at his arms and hooked one foot around his, drawing\u00b7 him off balance. Scar snorted with laughter and waded in, slamming his fists into Liam's stomach with a sound like the thump of heavy sacks.\n\nLiam's face mottled with pain and sickness, his sight grew blurry, and he became aware that the man behind him had eaten onions. The strong smell washed over his neck and face.\n\nOnions, gods, he thought, and closed his eyes against two more punishing blows. Then he felt himself slipping to his knees, let go, and a rough hand grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. He opened his eyes weakly. Scar's face was only a few inches away, and he focused with difficulty on the puckered edges of the man's disfigurement. It was a livid purple, a shallow trench across the face.\n\n\"There's a man we both know of that's not pleased you've been to another man we both know of,\" Scar said, \"and this man fears y'ought to part Southwark soon. Y'understandr'\n\nHe shook Liam's head by the hair he held, which did not help Liam's concentration.\n\n\"I haven't been to anyone else,\" he managed over the roaring ache that was his stomach and chest.\n\nScar stood up and let go of his head, sending him straight to the ground. The stone floor of the kitchen was wonderfully cold.\n\n\"You lie, Rhenford.\"\n\n\"Aye, and at full length,\" the man who had held him laughed, and aimed a perfect kick directly between his legs. Liam tried to curl up, but his stomach screamed in protest and he simply lay prostrate. Somewhere in the room, the Rat giggled.\n\n\"Remember,\" Scar's voice came to him, close to his ear, \"part Southwark soon. This day.\" A rough hand cuffed his ear, but the stinging was nothing compared to his other pains.\n\nHe heard a number of footsteps hurrying out of the kitchen, and then the slamming of the door, but he did not open his eyes. The floor felt good against his burning face, and his muscles would not allow him to move much.\n\n\"Oh, Master Rhenford, what've they done!\" His landlady was kneeling over him, tentatively touching the back of his head, but he was aware of it only as an annoyance.\n\nWell, he thought dimly, at least Marcius has done something."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "By the time Coeccias came bustling in with the drudge, Liam was sitting up on the stairs, hugging his stomach. Mistress Dorcas hovered, pestering him with unwanted attention.\n\n\"You're awfully quick,\" he said sourly to the Aedile, moving an arm to wave away the piece of steak his landlady was shoving at him, and wincing at the movement.\n\n\"You don't seem to've taken much hurt,\" the Aedile said. \"The girl had you drawn and quartered three times over.\" He gestured with a wry smile at the drudge, who was staring unashamedly at Liam's pallor. \"Who was it?\"\n\n\"Some of Marcius's playfellows.\" He finally pushed the landlady gently aside as she tried to probe a particularly delicate area. \"Please, madam, I'm fine. And steak is only good for black eyes.\" He wondered where she had gotten the steak; she never served anything so good to her boarders.\n\n\"Y'are all right, then?\" Coeccias moved to his side, and Liam quickly nodded, not wanting the Aedile' s blunt fingers added to his landlady's.\n\n\"I'll be fine. Just winded.\"\n\nHe was much more than winded. Bright yellow and dull blue bruises blossomed in his imagination, counterparts to the ones he knew would soon appear all over \u00b7 his torso. Still, Scar had done his job remarkably well, for all the apparent indiscriminateness of his blows. No broken ribs, nothing damaged internally. He had checked himself over as thoroughly as possible, and saw none of the telltale signs he remembered from seeing more badly beaten men.\n\n\"And soon to bruise,\" he added. \"But then, I bruise easily.\"\n\n\"I've heard scholars do,\" Coeccias said in a strange tone, as if something else was occurring to him. \"So, Marcius has thrown's hand in?\"\n\n\"It seems so. Why don't we discuss it upstairs?\" He nodded significantly at his landlady, who was wringing her hands and clucking with sympathetic concern as well as watching them greedily and pricking up ears for every word. Amused, the Aedile bent forward to help him up, but Liam forestalled him with a grunt.\n\nHe made it to his feet and then began to sway, seized with dizziness. The Aedile casually steadied him, and gave him his arm to lean on as they went slowly up the stairs.\n\n\"Our thanks, madam,\" he said over his shoulder, \"if you'd send up some wine?\"\n\nLiam lowered himself gingerly into the chair by the window and slumped slowly over the table, unspeakably happy he had not eaten that morning. The nausea was receding, but bright points of light still squirmed at the edges of his vision. They merged with the motes dancing in the mild beam of light lancing through the window, and he closed his eyes and leaned into it, trying to warm away the dull pain.\n\nCoeccias paced silently around the room, waiting, apparently, for the knock at the door that revealed Mistress Dorcas herself with a jug and two mugs. He took them and pressed a coin into her hand with a stem look.\n\n\"For the girl,\" he warned. \"A good lass, and quick-legged. Our thanks again.\"\n\nThe landlady let him shut the door in her face without so much as a word.\n\nWith his own cup filled, he put one down by Liam's open hand, and began pacing again.\n\n\"Truth, I'd have never thought Marcius to be so open in his businesses.\"\n\nLiam gave a questioning grunt and tilted the mug to his mouth without raising his head. The wine slid coolly down his ragged throat, and quieted what was left of his dizziness.\n\n\"It surprises me that he'd only beat you, and leave harsher measures by. If I were Marcius, and I thought you could finger me a murderer, I'd've had my roughs beat you more than senseless.\"\n\nWhat started as a laugh turned to a drawn-out \"oh\" of pain, and Liam gave it up. \"Marcius didn't have his roughs beat me senseless because Marcius isn't worried about being connected with Tarquin's death. One of them said that Marcius was terribly unhappy with me for having seen a man we both knew.\"\n\n\"And what of it? The man's me, and Marcius wanted to fright you from helping me.\"\n\n\"No,\" Liam smiled limply, his head still on the table. It would have been ridiculous, if his stomach and chest did not hurt so much. \"Marcius wanted to fright me from helping Freihett Necquer. Remember the maps I used as such a clever pretext for seeing him?\"\n\nCoeccias's face went blank, and then broke out in a sheepish wince. \"It liked him not that you might sell the same over again, to another merchant. We misjudged how slight a thing would draw his ire. For mere mappery he'd beat a man; but think what he'd've done to a man who failed him in an important spell. It argues against him with the wizard.\"\n\nSpeaking was less of an effort now; even as Liam listened to the Aedile his body was reconciling itself to the beating. \"It does, a little, but I don't think it's in any way we've imagined, if at all.\"\n\nCoeccias glowered and crossed his arms.\n\n\"Pray you, Milord May-Do-Aught, how not? What news have you to change your mind and redraw the whole argument? No, don't tell, I'll guess\u2014now you think the player's the man, accompliced by the high priest of Uris. Well? Do I hit the mark?\"\n\n\"Not even close,\" Liam laughed, and regretted it instantly. He quickly told what he had learned that morning from Viyescu, and what he had figured out from Tarquin's spellbook. The Aedile pursed his lips at the new information, as if he had just sucked a lemon.\n\n\"And so we're not done. You'll want to search out this woman, and hope to substitute her for the player. You never gave him up as guilty, did you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Liam admitted, annoyed that Coeccias had struck so close to home. There was no need to mention Rora, he figured. It would only lessen Coeccias's confidence in him.\n\n\"Then what would you? How do we gather her in? Do we set a crier out, begging all cloaked and hooded women gather in the square this day week?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Liam said, ignoring the sarcasm. \"I think we could talk with Viyescu again, and maybe have him followed. I think he knows her better than he lets on; perhaps he'll lead us to her.\"\n\n\"And what with the player? Do we take him, or leave him loose?\"\n\n\"That's up to you.\" He forced himself to say it, though his conscience firmly admonished him. \"Take him if you like. He's still the best suspect.\"\n\nThrowing his hands up in a familiar gesture of exasperation, Coeccias began his heavy-footed pacing again. \"If you'd your way, I'd have to leave him forever, while you con the town for some unfaced woman who, by reason of some broken clues, only may have a hand in this. You see what you put me to?\"\n\n\"Are you satisfied that Lons killed Tarquin?\"\n\n\"Truth, satisfied enough!\" He was clearly not satisfied however, and let his anger fall away, deflated. \"If you'd a plan, it'd be easier to let this play on. Have you any plan?\"\n\n\"I still think Viyescu knows more than he says. He's frightened of her, though.\"\n\nCoeccias snorted. \"Of a maid! Ha!\"\n\n\"Not of violence, obviously, not from a pregnant woman. But she may know something about him, some secret sin, that keeps him from telling.\"\n\n\"The threat of revelation?\"\n\nLiam shrugged. \"Maybe. He was all bluster the first time I went to see him, and changed his tune when I said I was a Hierarch in disguise. He accepted it right off, as if he was expecting me to pronounce divine judgement on him.\"\n\n\"And he so devout,\" Coeccias breathed. \"It would mock his pious marches and professions. An interesting tum.\"\n\n\"If there were a way we could find out more about him, something about drink, perhaps, or women ...\"\n\n\"Herione'd know it, if it's to be known, or she'd know who might know. I'll to her now. Is there anything else I should ask?\"\n\n\"Oh, anything that comes to mind,\" Liam said airily, drawing a grin from the Aedile.\n\n\"Perhaps I should ask if she knows who killed the wizard.\"\n\n\"It couldn't hurt.\"\n\n\"Truth, it couldn't! I'll do it.\" Chuckling, he paused in the doorway, and looked back thoughtfully. \"Perhaps I'll send some men to look for Marcius's roughs to boot. We can't have our poor, milky scholars beaten in their own homes. What were they like?\"\n\nLiam described Scar and Ratface vividly, and gave what he could remember of the third man.\n\n\"A scar so big should shout itself about the city. We'll have them in soon enough.\"\n\n\"Tell your men not to be too gentle with them,\" Liam called as the Aedile closed the door behind him.\n\nLess than twenty minutes later, Liam was closing the door himself. Much to his landlady's dismay and the drudge's obvious admiration, he managed to clear the kitchen without falling over.\n\nThe clouds, and with them a bleak chill, had reached the city from the sea; the blue sky was only a thin memory to the north. Still, the cold air cleared his head and took the edge off his aching. He kept to the side of the street, trailing his hand along the walls of stone and wood, unsure of his wobbly legs.\n\nOn reaching the Point without collapsing, he counted it a minor victory. It was undoubtedly stupid to go out, but he felt less sick. Leaning against a wall a hundred yards from Necquer's house, he caught his breath. The stone of the wall spread numbing fingers through his cloak and around his back, reaching to dull his throbbing muscles. The cold would feel even better if he turned around and let it touch his chest directly, but that would not do. People were already giving him strange looks as they passed.\n\nCan't have people making love to walls in the Point, he thought, and kept the laugh in his head to save the pain. Maybe in the Warren, or even Aurie's Park, but certainly not the Point.\n\nThe wall he was leaning against was a real wall, not just the side of a house, high and smooth, the stones closely fitted. From Tarquin's model he knew that inside the wall lay a small garden, lovingly .tended. The miniature in the workroom was perpetually in bloom, with two tiny rosebushes and three flowerbeds like intricate needlepoint. Now, the real thing would be on its last legs, drawing in on itself for the approaching winter.\n\nIdly, he wondered who owned the garden. It might be the woman he was looking for, a pregnant woman who casually asked for poison and frightened fanatic apothecaries and might think nothing of murdering a powerful wizard. He imagined her like some warrior-queen, tall and broad and spectacularly pregnant, her belly swollen to the size of a cauldron, with a dagger in her hand shaped, for some reason known only to his imagination, like an icicle. The picture was surprisingly vivid, and he closed his eyes and sculpted more, a face stem and without beauty, shrewd eyes blazing thunder. A chin ships could be wrecked on. He smiled. She might own the garden he rested outside.\n\nOr she might not.\n\nHe shook his head and forced himself slowly away from the wall. Though twelve bells had rung half an hour ago, he did not hurry, shuffling the last yards to Necquer's door at a comfortable pace.\n\nLares was long in answering the door, and he allowed himself to slump against the door frame while he waited.\n\nThe old servant's face screwed up when he saw Liam, and he ushered him in reluctantly.\n\n\"Good day, Lares.\"\n\n\"And to you, Sir Liam.\"\n\nThey stood facing each other in the foyer, Liam bracing himself with his legs spread wide so he would not fall, Lares shifting his weight uneasily and studiously examining a small section of the floor.\n\nWhat's wrong with you? Can't you see I've been beaten by a merchant prince's toughs and can barely stand up? Isn't it obvious? Liam's face twitched at the questions he left unasked, stifling a laugh.\n\nAs Liam cleared his throat, Lares finally spoke, and he sounded miserable.\n\n\"If it please you, you should not've come, Sir Liam. I know I'm a mere pantler, and y'are a very gentleman, a good and noble, and you mean no harm, And Uris knows you've kept the lady's spirits high and diverted. But you should not've come. The Master's said he'd be gone the most of the day, but if he were to spy you here ... \" He left off, shaking his head woefully, and Liam spoke soberly, his lightheadedness effectively crushed.\n\n\"I won't stay long, Lares, I promise.\"\n\nThe servant looked him full in the face for a moment, as if judging how much his promise was worth, and then nodded.\n\nFor once, Liam did not mind the slowness with which the old man ascended the staircase. It covered his own weakness, and gave him time to think. He probably should not have come; but had not Lady Necquer told him to? And he wanted to know why her husband did not want him around. If she would just tell him that, he would leave.\n\nLady Necquer did not rise to meet him, but heard Lares's introduction in silence and waited on her couch. She sat in a simple, unaffected beige frock, her hands folded in her lap, and Liam was surprised by the depth of unhappiness on her face.\n\nMaybe Marcius had her beaten as well, he thought, and instantly felt distaste for the joke wash through his mouth. Her eyes were puffed with tears barely restrained, she was unnaturally pale, and her voice caught when she spoke.\n\n\"Sir Liam.\"\n\nShe was not being cold, he knew, but keeping her reserve in order not to lose control completely. Necquer must have impressed his wishes quite forcefully.\n\n\"I won't stay long, madam,\" he replied, and remained standing.\n\n\"Pray you, Poppae,\" she blurted, and then regained her composure. \"I think you might call me Poppae.\"\n\n\"Very well, Poppae.\" He wanted to sketch a bow to accept the intimacy, but had to settle for a nod. \"I won't stay long, and I certainly don't want to cause any trouble between you and your husband. I just wondered ... well, I wondered why Master Necquer would so suddenly want me kept away.\"\n\nHer eyes fixed on the patterned carpet at her feet, she took a deep breath. \"He says I've been too free with my confidences.\"\n\nLiam pretended to take his time digesting this, though he knew exactly what she was talking about. \"You mean about Lons,\" he said at length.\n\n\"About the player, yes.\"\n\nHis long silence this time was genuine. \"But I helped! He won't bother you anymore.\"\n\n\"You misconstrue, Sir Liam,\" she sighed heavily. \"My husband feels th'affair more than you can fathom, and so attaches more import to its every aspect than he should. He ... he introduced Lons to our home.\"\n\nThe sentence came from her mouth like lead, a bare recital of facts. Liam found nothing to say, and she went on in the same way.\n\n\"Before he left for the ports on your charts, he went to the Golden Orb, and there saw a spectacle that he said had amused him no end. He commissioned a number of the players to give a private performance here. Lons was among them, as well as the clown, Fitch, and the beautiful dancer, and the other chief actors. Some two days after, Freihett parted, and Lons commenced his calls. I thought it no harm at first. ... \" She stopped suddenly, and then resumed quickly: \"But you know the rest.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he murmured.\n\n\"And so my husband feels it partly his shame that all this has come about. He was most grieved that I took you into our secret. He guards his privacy jealously, Sir Liam, you must understand.\"\n\n\"I do, I do.\" Liam stood, torn. She looked extremely young, and unhappy, and he compared her unwillingly with Rora. The two were probably the same age, somewhere in their early twenties, but while the dancer was a mere actress, the lowest of the low, she faced her problems with fire and determination. She had sought him out, and gained his assistance, while Lady Necquer, her superior in wealth, breeding and position, allowed him to be sent away, Strangely, he felt only a grudging admiration for Rora's spirit, but he pitied the woman he was with, and wanted somehow to console her.\n\nHe would have gone to her on the couch and tried, not out of any desire to be near her, but because he sensed that was the way it was done, with quiet words and innocent caresses. However, he was not sure how she would interpret it, and moreover he did not know if he could carry it off. A lifetime in the company of men, a widowed father and scholars locked in musty books, and then rough mercenaries and sailors, had given him little chance to practice. The few women he had known would never have submitted to Lady Necquer' s lot, and had never needed that kind of comfort.\n\nSo, he cleared his throat and managed a small bow, despite the twinge it sent through his bruised body.\n\n\"I will leave you then, madam.\"\n\nShe did not move, so he turned and moved slowly to the door.\n\n\"Sir Liam!\"\n\nHe stopped and turned around, to discover her on her feet right behind him. Before he could say anything she brushed his cheek with her lips and then backed away.\n\n\"You are very kind,\" she said wistfully. \"I would I could hear more of your stories. Perhaps when you've written them?\"\n\n\"When I have finished them, I'll send you a copy,\" he said, bowed again in haste, and left."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "A last, thin strip of blue sky limned the northern horizon and, as Liam walked back to his garret, the clouds were rushing down to blot it out. They were coal black, roiling and angry, but the cold wind that bore them felt good. The clean salt smell supplanted the odor of Mistress Necquer's perfume.\n\nHe walked a little faster, but not much, and still kept close to the walls. The streets were emptying rapidly in anticipation of the approaching storm, and even the beggars were throwing foreboding glances at the sky. Imagining the purple bruises soon to appear over most of his upper body, he allowed himself a groan, and when he reached his house, sank into one of the kitchen chairs.\n\nMistress Dorcas was nowhere to be seen, but the drudge edged up to him and shyly inquired if there was anything he needed. Touched, he got a coin from his pouch and asked her if she could get him something to eat. She snatched the coin and disappeared out the door before he could specify what he wanted.\n\nThe drudge was back quickly, with a covered pot and a few loaves.\n\n\"Broth,\" she explained, laying the pot and the bread before him. \"All that can be got on Uris's Eve, but best if y'are ill about the stomach,\" she added, biting her lip, afraid she might have gone too far.\n\nHe nodded. \"You're wise, girl. I've known warriors who showed less sense.\"\n\nShe blushed and brightened at once. \"Y'have?\" Dipping a spoon into the broth, he laughed. \"I once knew a prince\u2014the envy of armies, the hope of his country\u2014who won a great battle, though he took a wound to his stomach. Afterwards, he stuffed himself full of wine and roast meat, though I advised him not to, and was so sick that he missed his own victory celebration.\"\n\n'Then he died,\" the drudge whispered, fascinated.\n\n\"No, he just lay in his bed for a day, moaning and groaning, sure someone had poisoned his food. They had to postpone his triumph, and his reputation was greatly diminished. The defeated army sent a present to the cook.\"\n\nShe giggled, and stopped, remembering his money. From the pocket of her smock she produced a sweaty handful of coins.\n\n\"Your money, Master,\" she said, and laid the change down beside his pot. He eyed it for a moment, and tasted his soup. It was only lightly spiced, not too hot, and the warmth soothed his throat. He waved his hand at the money.\n\n\"Keep it; you've done me a great service. The broth is just what I needed.\"\n\n\"Oh no, Master, I daren't.\" She shook her head and backed away from the table as though he had suggested something indecent.\n\n\"Go ahead, take it. Consider it my thanks, please.\"\n\nShe only shook her head and gazed fearfully at the street door, through which suddenly stalked his landlady. The thin, angular woman shot the drudge a commanding glance that sent the young girl scurrying away.\n\n\"Y'are better, then, Master Liam?\"\n\n\"Much, madam, thank you. Your girl has been good enough to get me some soup, and I took a short walk that has cleared my head a great deal.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" she sniffed, and Liam sensed that she was unhappy about something. \"I only hope the Aedile has nabbed the monstrous roughs who did this shameful thing.\"\n\nIt was not a question, but he answered it anyway. \"He is looking for them right now.\"\n\n'Then he'll have them, that's sure.\" She frowned again, but he was busy with the soup, which was doing wonders for his stomach. She puttered aimlessly around the kitchen while he ate. \"Perhaps it's none of my affair, Master Liam,\" she said at length, \"but, might I ask, why did they assault you?\"\n\n\"A small disagreement, of no importance,\" he said, waving his spoon airily.\n\n\"If it please you, Master Liam, I think it could be of some note, for my part at least.\"\n\nThere was a tone in her voice he had never heard before, and it surprised him; it was firmness. She had always been such a sycophant, flattering and sucking up to him because he had money and had allowed her to believe him a scholar. He set his spoon down and steepled his fingers, looking at her curiously over the tips.\n\n\"It was a disagreement over the terms of a sale. I sold their master some information, and he thought I had sold the same to another man. I had not.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said doubtfully. \"Well, you needs must see my position, only a widow, and with my name to protect and this house to manage. I can ill afford any smirch to be attached to this house by the general opinion, you see.\"\n\n\"It won't happen again.\"\n\n\"Faith, how can I be sure, Master Liam?\"\n\nIf he hadn't been conscious of his tender sides, Liam would have laughed. She was trying to find a way to throw him out\u2014him, her star boarder, the eminently respectable scholar. Then he thought about the last few days, and realized how it must look to her. Tarquin's murder, the Aedile suddenly calling, fights in her kitchen.\n\nAnd midnight visits from beautiful young dancers, he thought with dawning comprehension. She must think he had grown depraved.\n\nHe decided to make it easy for her.\n\n\"You can't be sure, madam, and I see your point. Your house's reputation must be protected, and even though I haven't done anything in the least improper, I can see my presence is disturbing. I'll pack my things, and leave in two days, after Uris-tide.\"\n\nShe was taken aback, clearly not expecting this sudden capitulation. He allowed himself a small smile, and returned to his soup.\n\n\"You may keep the deposit for the room.\"\n\n\"Faith,\" she stammered, \"I meant not that\u2014\"\n\n\"No matter,\" he interrupted with his spoon, \"I wouldn't dream of damaging your reputation. Consider me gone.\"\n\nFor a few moments she lingered while he studiously ignored her in favor of his broth, and then she skulked off unhappily.\n\nLiam could not tell why she should be unhappy. He had agreed to leave in order to protect her \"reputation,\" or what little she had. Near the bottom of his broth he thought of an answer. She would probably have been willing to sacrifice her good name for an increase in rent. Shaking his head at her malleable virtue, he pushed aside the empty pot and tried to make himself comfortable in the rigid wooden chair.\n\nThe money the drudge had left caught his eye. The rungs of the chair's ladderback pressed into a sore spot, and he leaned away from it to pick up one of the coins.\n\nA small silver piece, stamped with the face and name of Auric IV, dead a hundred years but still well-defined on his currency. The noble profile \u2014and the laurel wreath were easily made out, despite a century's use, and most of the inscription of his name and title could still be read. The other coins, mostly copper and of more recent minting, showed age, worn smooth, simple discs of cheaper metal. They made better coins in the days when being King in Torquay meant something.\n\nSomeone had mentioned coins to him recently. Who? He moved the coin over the back of his hand, from finger to finger, wondering, a trick he had learned in his youth. It helped to have thin fingers. The silver piece made the trip from index to little finger and back three times.\n\nHe had it: the messenger Coeccias had sent him in the wineshop above the square, who had told him about the mystery woman's rent being paid. He had said something about the coins being strange, the strangest he had ever seen. Why would he say that?\n\nSouthwark sent ships as far as any other city in Taralon, trading in lands as far apart as Alyecir and the Freeports. A certain amount of foreign currency could be expected to come in from those places; besides, since the decline of the monarchy, any local lord could mint his own, thus adding to the mix. Provided the coins were really of the metal they claimed, no one would be interested in the origins. The coins would have to be strange indeed to arouse comment. So why had the landlord mentioned it to the messenger?\n\nIf the gold was good, it would mean the engraving was strange, which must mean that it was not impressed with the profile or head of the minter. One head on a coin was much the same as another, Liam knew, and he had seen a greater variety than most. So the coins must have been carved with a different image.\n\nSome of the lands he had been to engraved their coins with local animals or buildings or landscapes that would seem strange to the people of Southwark.\n\nTo most of the people of Southwark, he thought, except for Freihett Necquer, whom Liam had sent to some of those lands in search of trade.\n\nPerplexed, he missed his fingering and the coin slipped to the floor, where it rolled away under a heavy cupboard. He ignored it, cautioning himself against his own thoughts.\n\nJust because Necquer had been to lands no one from Southwark other than Liam had ever heard of did not mean that the coins were his. They might have come from a member of his crew, or from some tradesman to whom he had paid them. They might not even be from one of the cities on Liam's maps, but from the mint of a Taralonian noble with strange tastes. It might mean nothing, and Necquer might not be involved at all.\n\nBut it might mean that Necquer kept the hooded woman. Lons' s comment came back to him. He had said that the merchant did not deserve fidelity.\n\nIt could not hurt to check. If he was right, he could tell Coeccias who the hooded woman was, and that would settle a great number of things. With trembling fingers, he gathered up the coins, shoved them in his pouch, and left.\n\nThe bells were tolling three as Liam passed the city square. The sky was alive with writhing black clouds, but he did not think about the imminent storm. Coeccias had told him where the woman's apartment was, deep in the Warren. He would look there, and try to find out what made the coins strange.\n\nHe walked faster, and though he still kept close to walls, the dizziness was almost gone. The soup had settled his stomach, and all that was left was a steady, uniform aching. It was relatively easy to ignore.\n\nThe Warren was less uninviting than usual, the poor being smart enough to clear the streets well in advance of the storm. The lodgings he was looking for were located off a court that was approached from two separate streets by long, narrow alleys. His footsteps sounded like the slithering of wet snakes on the slick, gritty stones, slipping on mounds of sodden refuse. In the summer, he knew, he would not dare enter the hidden court for fear of the stench, but with the rains the smell was held down, and all that reached his nostrils was mildew. He hurried into the court, gazing wistfully up at the thin ribbon of gray sky far above him.\n\nEven on a sunny day, little light would have filtered down to the tiny courtyard, ringed in by topheavy buildings. With the clouds, he had to squint Jo make anything out. Fragile porches climbed the walls like ivy, hung with washing. There were few windows in the walls, and those were small and showed no lights. A heap of broken furniture and staved-in casks took up nearly half the floor of the courtyard. Two thin children, a boy and girl as far as he could tell, clambered over the jumbled pile with the agility of mountain goats.\n\nLiam called to them, and they approached silently, arm in fearful arm, with wide, respectful eyes. The girl, no more than ten, took in his clothes and attempted a clumsy curtsy. At a pinch from her, the boy knuckled his forehead. Liam asked them if they knew the owner of the building at the east end of the courtyard, the one whose entrance was almost blocked by the wooden junk they had been playing on.\n\nThe girl shoved the boy, who turned and ran, nimbly climbing over the pile and disappearing into the building.\n\n\"My brother'll fetch'm m'lord,\" the girl said, curtsying awkwardly again. Liam nodded and looked around the courtyard. There was nothing to see, so he turned his eyes back to the girl, who still stood before him, staring with unabashed greed at his rich clothes. He blushed under her scrutiny. She was no more than ten, with dirty, colorless hair and a child's smock, but her eyes seemed to take him in and dissect him, weighing every piece of him for value. Apparently she rated him high, because she shared a confidence with him.\n\n\"He's a fat rascally knave, m'lord, is th'owner. For that he's so long in coming.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\" Liam did not know what to say. He had never penetrated this far into the Warren, never left the larger streets, and he had never felt at ease talking with children. He was relieved to see the boy clambering back over the pile and to hear behind him the cursing of a full-grown man trying to make his way around.\n\nThe girl had told the truth: the owner was fat, and sweating heavily despite the chill. He had the poor man's haircut, shaven until just below his ears, and he cursed like a sailor until he caught sight of Liam. Then he stopped and wiggled his way past the last projecting piece of garbage and bowed as deeply as his belly would allow. He knuckled his forehead as well, with the ease of much practice. The boy and the girl drifted back to their playing.\n\n\"How now, my lord? If it please you, what office can I perform?\" He was obsequious in exactly the manner Liam disliked, rubbing his hands together with an oily smile.\n\n\"The Aedile Coeccias sent a man to you recently, about one of your lodgers.\"\n\nThe fat man nodded eagerly, dropping his grin for an expression of considered interest.\n\n\"You told him the rent had been paid this month in foreign coins.\"\n\n\"Faith, m'lord, the strangest coins I ever saw, most strange.\"\n\n\"Can I see them?\"\n\nThe man stiffened, and his face alternated between suspicion and contrition. \"No, if it please you, my lord, for that I've spent them. On wood, my lord, and warm clothes, with winter almost on us, my lord.\"\n\n\"Well, never mind; can you tell me why they were strange?\"\n\nHe scratched his bare neck and shuffled. \"Strange indeed, strange indeed. They showed beasts the like I've never seen, even in the menageries as travel down from Torquay and can be seen for a copper. Great beasts, my lord, like-well, like naught so much as a bull, but with a whip in place of a muzzle, and so large that a city stood on its back.\"\n\n\"Were there others?\"\n\n\"No my lord,\" the man said regretfully, \"only those.\" \"Well, thank you.\"\n\nIt did not matter; he knew the coins to which the man was referring. They came from Epidamnum, one of the ports on the maps he had drawn for Necquer, and represented what were called elephants. The Epidamnites used them for war, and put towers on their backs. He had only seen elephants on coins from that land, which meant that it was likely that only people from Necquer' s crew could have them.\n\nThe man still shifted from foot to foot, as though expecting something. Liam cleared his throat and dug into his pouch.\n\n\"Thank you again,\" he said, pressing a coin into the owner's hand. The fat man smiled and knuckled his forehead, then retreated behind the mound of junk where the children played, bowing his way.\n\nLiam called to the girl, and she reluctantly climbed down from her playground to stand before him. The boy stayed perched atop the pile, poised and watchful.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Liam said and held out two coins for her. She snatched them, dropped a quick curtsy, and ran back up the pile to the boy, holding the coins high like a prize. The boy smiled shyly.\n\nIt had grown darker in the courtyard, and Liam hurried out one of the alleys. The street it opened on was broad, marking the edge of the Warren and the beginning of the waterfront district. A row of brick warehouses stood across the way. Necquer's offices were only a few streets away.\n\nThe clouds had grown angrier, agitated by the harsh wind from the sea; it would rain soon, but there was time to visit the merchant before it broke. Necquer would not be happy to see him, certainly, but what did that matter? He would simply ask a few harmless questions, and make sure Epidamnum had been one of the ports the merchant traded in. And since Necquer was already displeased with him, he could afford to annoy him a little more.\n\nNecquer's warehouse was more attractive than Marcius's, red brick and long-fronted with a wide strip of clean windows near the roof. There was a large sign as well, painted in elaborate letters, announcing \"Freihett Necquer, Factor and Merchant.\" Liam had been there before on three occasions, while selling his maps. There were no guards, only an old doorkeeper who seemed to recognize him. He let Liam in, and bid him wait while he went to announce him.\n\nThere were more goods in the warehouse than in Marcius's, kegs and boxes and bales reaching to the raftered ceiling in tidy stacks, and they filled most of the floorspace. Between the stacks at the center of the warehouse, an aisle had been left that led back to the offices. The doorkeeper appeared again after a moment, and waved Liam on.\n\n\"He'll see you,\" the old man called.\n\nLiam went down the aisle and passed the doorkeeper into the merchant's offices. There was a large area with tall secretaries and the high stools that went with them. The other times he had been there, clerks had perched precariously on the stools, busily scratching away at ledger entries and bills of lading, making jokes and speaking among themselves. Now there was no one, all gone for Uris's Eve, Liam supposed, and the silence was eerie. Necquer's private office was beyond the clerks' area, behind a stout wooden door. He knocked at the door and then went in.\n\nNecquer sat at a simple table, papers piled neatly before him, pen and inkpot and blotter arrayed with military precision. Sea charts and maps of Taralon hung on the walls, but Liam did not see his own charts. Too valuable to be displayed, even for Necquer's own clerks.\n\n\"Rhenford. What may I do for you?\" He spoke formally, sitting rigid in his chair, his affability replaced by a brisk, businesslike demeanor.\n\n\"Well, Master Necquer,\" he said, smiling brightly, \"I had the afternoon free, and it struck me that we never really discussed the outcome of your journey.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Naturally, I'm interested to know more about it. The maps, after all, were mine, and I'm glad to have heard you did well by them. But I'm really more interested to know how you found the lands themselves. Some of them I have not visited in a long time.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes. For instance, I was wondering how things were in Domy\u2014I spent six months there, and found it a very pleasant place. Did you find it so?\"\n\n\"The trade was good.\"\n\nThe merchant's apathetic answers were exasperating. He decided to simply ask.\n\n\"Ah. And Sardis? And Epidamnum?\"\n\n\"We did not make Sardis. Epidamnum was fairly profitable.\" He mentioned the second port without hesitation.\n\n\"I would like to discuss your journey in more detail, Master Necquer. Compare notes, you understand. Perhaps if you could spare an hour or so?\"\n\n\"I am occupied at present, Rhenford. I have work to fill the afternoon.\"\n\nLiam could sense that Necquer was getting impatient, but he wanted to know how far he could push him. It couldn't hurt, as the merchant's attitude towards him was already obviously negative.\n\n\"I see. Maybe this evening, then? Only an hour or so, I promise.\"\n\n\"Tonight is Uris's Eve, Rhenford. I will be working until eight, and then I must attend the vigil at her fane. I cannot spare you any time.\"\n\nHe spoke the last in such a way that the word \"ever\" was clearly attached, and Liam decided to take the hint.\n\n\"That's too bad. I would have liked to hear what you thought. Well, perhaps some other time.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Necquer said coldly, and pointedly picked up his pen and began writing.\n\nLiam nodded and left, still smiling brightly to show that he had not taken offense. The merchant paid him no attention. The doorkeeper was waiting outside the clerks' room, and escorted him out.\n\nA fat drop of rain stained Liam's cloak. The storm was only a few minutes away, and he walked as quickly as he could towards the city square and the jail.\n\nLay worshippers were not allowed into the Uris's Eve vigils, Coeccias had told him. Necquer knew he was a Midlander only recently arrived in Southwark, and would not expect him to know that. But why then say he was going to attend the vigils? A convenient lie to avoid meeting with him, or did Necquer have somewhere to go at eight? More likely the first, but it was just possible that the merchant had a rendezvous scheduled. And if it were in the Warren, with a certain hooded woman ...\n\nLiam hurried faster, happy Scar had left his legs alone. The drops of rain began to fall sporadically, spotting his cloak, and by the time her reached the jail, it was a solid drizzle.\n\nCoeccias was not there, but the Guardsman on duty let him sit on a hard bench in the small, cold antechamber.\n\n\"Th' Aedile's to be back soon,\" the Guardsman said, and left him alone. As he waited, he thought through what he had found, and how he would present it to Coeccias.\n\nIf the hooded woman was Necquer's mistress, then he had gotten her pregnant. It would make sense, in a way, for her to want to get rid of his child\u2014it would not do for a prominent merchant to have an illegitimate child in the Warren. Therefore the santhract, which Viyescu had presumably sold her, though he denied it. There was nothing, however, that tied the affair to Tarquin's death, except the fact that the woman had mentioned his name and had, perhaps, visited him.\n\nWhat did the virgin's blood mean, and the second spell for invisibility instead of total disappearance? It seemed as though he had stumbled on a separate mystery altogether, in which Tarquin's death was only a secondary event. There were too many extras for them all to revolve around one set of circumstances. The hooded woman, he feared, would tum out to be nothing more than a pregnant mistress, and worse, a dead end.\n\nFor a moment, he thought about ignoring Necquer's appointment and letting Lons stand guilty. The player's knife and the motive were enough to damn the young man, and Liam could explain to Rora, if he had to, that there was nothing he could do.\n\nHe rejected the idea at last, though not because of any debt he felt he owed to the dancer. He admitted he owed her the effort, but the real reason he was interested was because he wanted to know who Necquer' s mistress was. He wanted to compare the hooded woman with Lady Necquer, and even more with his own image of her.\n\nWhen the Aedile tramped grumpily into the antechamber, soaking wet, Liam had figured out what he would tell him.\n\n\"The very sky's cracked, and the gods weep themselves dry in wetting the earth,\" Coeccias complained, spraying sheets of water from cloak, hair and beard, and taking Liam's presence for granted. \"You were not at home when I called. Should you be walking, after your heavy exercise of the afternoon?\"\n\n\"It didn't tum out to be as bad as it felt,\" Liam replied, standing up. \"I found something interesting.\"\n\n\"Truth, I've news as well, if you'd hear it.\"\n\nLiam nodded over-graciously for Coeccias to precede him.\n\n\"Come in first,\" the Aedile said. \"I've need of something, for it's cold and wet.\"\n\nLiam followed him into the headquarters of the Guard. It was essentially a barracks, with a couple of rough cots and a number of pegs on the wall, some holding cloaks and hats. Halberds huddled in every comer, and there was a huge keg in the center of the rush-strewn floor. A door in the far wall, bound in iron and barred by a thick wooden beam, hid the jail proper. Two cavernous hearths flanked the room, and the Guardsman who had kindly allowed him to shiver in the anteroom was busy building a roaring fire. He barely nodded at Coeccias, who nodded back and went straight to the keg, catching up two tin cups from one of the cots. He filled them at the keg, and handed one to Liam.\n\nExpecting beer, Liam drank deeply. It was some kind of hard liquor, and he almost coughed it up before it burned out his throat. Coeccias sipped appreciatively, and his eyes twinkled at Liam's distress.\n\n\"You'd be wise to drink small, Rhenford.\"\n\nLiam coughed and spluttered his agreement.\n\n\"Now, for what's been discovered to me. Herione relates that Viyescu had indeed been to her house, perhaps twice, but it was long since, perhaps two years. She did not remember what he wanted, or what he did\u2014she sees the whole book and catalogue of vice there, so the sins of a wretched apothecary would not impress themselves strongly on her mind.\"\n\n\"Still, even a single visit would impress itself strongly on a fanatic prude like Viyescu. Particularly if he enjoyed it, or maybe went somewhere else afterwards. Herione's women are expensive, aren't they?\"\n\n\"To bed a princess or a queen should be,\" Coeccias laughed, but he was following Liam's thoughts avidly. \"Y' are thinking he found out a form of entertainment less dear, and the memory plagues'm?\"\n\n\"Anyone who knew would be able to hold it over his head. It would destroy his little part as Uris's prime lay worshipper, wouldn't it? At least in his own head, and that's where his devotion carries the most weight.\"\n\nCoeccias laughed again, this time in half-mocking wonder at Liam's conclusion. \"Y'are a seer, Rhenford, better than a bloodhound. Y' are an eagle, peering down into the puny souls of men, and reading their hearts like open books. So, we've some proof that Viyescu may be led by the hooded woman\u2014what of it?\"\n\n\"Nothing, yet. We have to know what she wanted of him, other than santhract, and why. And we'll know that when we find out who she is.\" He paused, he admitted to himself, for effect. \"And I think I know how we can do that.\"\n\nWith the cocking of a bushy eyebrow, Coeccias invited him to explain how.\n\n\"I may be wrong, but I think the woman will be meeting her benefactor tonight. I'd like to be there.\" He did not say how he had guessed at the rendezvous. If there was no connection between the hooded woman and Tarquin' s death, there was no reason for anyone to know of Necquer's infidelity.\n\n\"To peer deep into her soul and pry her inmost secrets to light? You'll want company, then, I'd guess.\"\n\n\"No,\" Liam said slowly. \"As I said, I may be wrong, and I'd rather be wrong alone, with no one to see.\"\n\nCoeccias laughed hard and walked over to the Guardsman, who was still tending the fire. \"Truth, well said, Rhenford, well said! 'I'd rather be wrong alone,' that's well said. Withal, the Warren at night in a storm's no place for even a bloodhound. You'll take Boult here with you,\" he said, indicating the kneeling Guardsman with a thick forefinger. Liam began to object, but the Aedile ignored him and began talking to his underling, who had looked up sourly. \"And Boult, my lad, if you see anything that Master Rhenford tells you to forget, say, if you see a man going somewhere he oughtn't, you'll clean it from your mind, like a forgiven score on a tavern board, wiped away. Won't you, my good Boult?\"\n\nThe Guardsman nodded with ill-disguised displeasure, and the Aedile grinned up at Liam. \"What time should my good Boult join you?\"\n\n\"A little before eight.\" Once again, Coeccias had anticipated him and had understood Liam's sensibilities better than he had himself. Why the Aedile did not solve the mystery on his own was beyond him. The blunt, rough-looking man could be as perceptive as anyone Liam knew.\n\n\"Well then, Boult, can you make the schedule?\"\n\nBoult acquiesced with ill grace to his commander's lighthearted question.\n\n\"Then you'd best to your garret, Rhenford, before the storm waxes too great to walk the streets, and await the ever-cheerful Boult there.\"\n\nLiam agreed, and left the rest of his liquor untasted on the keg."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "THE STORM HAD moved beyond mere drizzle when Liam left the jail, but it did not achieve its full strength until after he had reached his garret. As he shook out his cloak, thunder exploded and the patter of rain on the roof swelled into a constant drumming, then one continuous rumble, like the passage of a herd of horses. He cursed Necquer soundly for choosing a night like this for a meeting.\n\nIt was warm in the garret, and he looked at his bed, thinking how little he had slept the night before. Ignoring the reasons why, he decided to make up for it. He carefully spread out his cloak to dry and threw the rest of his clothes onto his chair, pleased that the new cloak had kept out most of the wet. When he blew out his candle, a flash of lightning lit the room, and he stopped for a moment before settling down on his pallet. The rain was coming down so hard that it was difficult to tell it was rain at all in the darkness, falling like a curtain across his window. It was quite a storm.\n\nEven with the constant rumble on the roof, or maybe because of it, and his own missed sleep, he dropped off almost as soon as he crept beneath his blanket. The last thing he managed to do was turn onto his back, to spare his abused front.\n\nA slackening in the rumble overhead woke him. The worst of the storm's fury had spent itself. Having been unable to wash Southwark away, it gave up, and wasted itself in a rain that seemed almost gentle in comparison with its previous power. The change woke him, and he thought for a moment as he sat in the dark that the storm had stopped altogether.\n\nHe felt more clearheaded for the nap, but his body was a solid ache from neck to waist. He debated dressing in the dark, to avoid seeing the damage Scar and his friends had done, but fumbling for his clothes without a light would undoubtedly lead to bumps that would aggravate his bruises. With a wince at every movement, he fumbled around in the dark for his tinderbox, and got a light the first time.\n\nBruises had bloomed all over his chest and stomach, a dark purple that was intriguing and revolting in the flickering yellow light of the candle. His body looked like an abstract tattoo, and he shuddered at the thought while he climbed gingerly into dry clothes.\n\nBoult had not arrived yet, so he presumed it was before eight, and he was glad he had not had to be woken by Coeccias's surly Guardsman. He wondered what time it was, and a knock at his door satisfied him. It would be Boult, and it was time to go to the Warren. He went to the door.\n\nNot expecting Rora, he stood for a moment in shock while she slipped into the room. Her cloak left a trail of water behind her, and beads of rain gleamed in her thick golden hair.\n\n\"Master,\" she said breathlessly, nestling close to him.\n\nSpeechless, he backed away, holding her shoulders to keep her at a distance.\n\n\"Forgive me, I could not stay away,\" she pleaded, ignoring his shock. \"Have you bespoke the Aedile?\"\n\nWhat was she doing there? He forced his frozen jaw to open, and to speak. \"No\u2014yes, in a sense. I've spoken to him, but\u2014\"\n\n\"You've not!\" The fury in her eyes at his betrayal, and the accusation in her tone, frightened him.\n\n\"Yes, yes I have, but in a different way.\" He hurried to pacify her. \"I couldn't just tell him not to arrest Lons; he'd have been suspicious. I have to find out who really did it, or at least come up with enough evidence to suggest that it might have been someone else.\" He wanted to shout at her, to push her out, but the anger in her eyes stopped him; and yet she was pouting in a way that was irresistible. And the memory of her, panting over him in the dark, rose like an ugly ghost in his mind. What time was it? When would Boult get there?\n\n\"But what if you can't find the killer? What then?\" She spoke with an effort, though he could not tell if it was because of her anger or the fact that the possibility frightened her.\n\n\"Then I'll make Coeccias leave Lons alone,\" he lied, unable to say anything else. \"But not till I've tried to find the real killer.\"\n\n\"Who did it, think you?\" The question, and the intense way she asked it, startled him.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he stammered. \"I have an idea, but I need time to prove it.\" That was a lie as well: he had no ideas, only clues that did not lead to conclusions. What would Boult say if he saw Rora there? Would he tell Coeccias?\n\nTo his immense relief, she relaxed. \"It was wrong to come, I know,\" she said sorrowfully, then looked at him with forlorn hope. \"But you'll help, will you not?\"\n\n\"Of course I will,\" he assured her, and began herding her to the door. \"Now you must go; I'm expecting someone who must not see you.\"\n\n\"I'll go. I must to th'Orb in any case.\" Without warning, she flung herself at him and kissed him soundly, feverishly, letting him go reluctantly. \"Grace you, Master,\" she said, and slipped out the door, her large, promising eyes turned over her shoulder at him until she was out of sight down the stairs.\n\nLiam let go an explosive breath, and walked shakily over to his chair to collapse. While she was there, he had been aware of her closeness only because of the stupid desires it had raised. Now his chest throbbed painfully where she had hugged him. He could not slump, because it bent tortured muscles, so he had to sit upright. Instead, he heaved several sighs.\n\nGods, I'm a fool, he thought, a lucky fool, but a fool nonetheless. He offered several undirected prayers of gratitude that Boult had not walked in on the middle of the conversation. He had no idea what he would tell her if he could not prove Lons innocent, and could only hope it would not be necessary.\n\nTo avoid wondering about it, he forced himself to think about the night's business. If he could find out who Necquer' s mistress was, it might give him a start. He doubted it, but would not allow himself to consider the doubt.\n\nThe hooded woman was pregnant, most likely by Necquer. She had told Viyescu she would go to Tarquin, and then done it, speaking to the wizard in a seductive voice. She had presumably commissioned a spell, an invisibility spell that would have been cast on the Teeth, because there was no other model in Tarquin's workroom.\n\nThat, he thought with consternation, made little sense. Whether Lons had intended it or not, it was the spell cast for him that had saved Necquer' s life. If the hooded woman wanted Necquer dead, why not just entice the wizard to cancel the spell entirely? Why choose another spell that would make it look like Lons's had worked? And where had the virgin's blood come from? A pregnant woman would obviously not have any virgin's blood around her. He imagined the woman as he pictured her, nine months gone, handing Tarquin the decanter over her swollen belly and calmly proclaiming it virgin's blood, and her own.\n\nLiam listened to his own laughter, and was scared to detect a note of hysteria in it.\n\nTwo hard knocks on his door steadied him, and he took a deep breath before granting entry.\n\nBoult came in, dressed in a heavy riding cloak and high boots, as unconcerned with showing his unhappiness as before. \"There's still a heavy storm, and the gutters run like a river in spate. Y' are sure you wish to attempt the Warren this night, Questor Rhenford?\"\n\n\"Questor?\" He was used to the indiscriminate way the people of Southwark flung titles about, but he had never heard this one attached to himself before. Questor was an old name used for special agents of the king in Torquay; it had lain unused for decades. As long unused, Liam realized, as the title Aedile.\n\n\"Aedile Coeccias said I was to call you that, for that it signified you were an officer of his, and gave you the right to command me.\" Boult could not possibly have cared less, and Liam found he liked him for it. He was almost perfectly average for Southwark-black hair shorn to just below his ears, neither short nor tall, skinny nor fat, with a blank face and heavy-lidded, black eyes. He looked bored, in a way that suggested he could be put to better use.\n\n\"Well, I'm afraid there's nothing for it, Boult. There's something I need to see in the Warren, and the good Aedile doesn't think I should go there without an escort.\"\n\nBoult shrugged, with more than a hint that Coeccias might be right.\n\n\"I appreciate your confidence, Boult,\" Liam said sarcastically. \"Let's go.\" Secretly, he was delighted with the taciturn, insolent Guardsman: He would not be the sort to talk about what he saw.\n\nBoult had exaggerated his report of the weather: the gutters were full, but not overflowing, and the storm had resolved itself into a steady, icy downpour. The drumming gave rhythm to the gurgling melody of the rushing gutters. Snug in his cloak, with the Guardsman at his side holding a shielded lantern, Liam was strangely elated. The prospect of discovering just who the hooded woman was filled him with excitement. He began to feel confident that it would solve the mystery to his satisfaction, and he would be able to fulfill his obligations to Coeccias, to Rora, and to Fanuilh. He envisioned the explanation in vague terms, and saw himself giving it to each in a suitably modest way. He smiled behind the hood of his cloak.\n\nThe rain, though still thick, allowed the light of the lantern and the glow from the occasional window to play over the street. There was\u00b7 no one to be seen, and the hissing and drumming of the water closed in on his ears, shutting off all other noise, but twice he faltered, an itch between his shoulder blades. He felt watched, but put it off to the rain and the dark, and submerged the anxiety in thinking of what was to come.\n\nOnce they reached the Warren, Boult let him take the lead and the lantern, winding through the streets heading for the courtyard. It seemed to take longer than he remembered, and he was afraid he had gotten them lost in the maze of streets, when suddenly the swinging beam of the lantern showed the mouth of the alley he remembered from the afternoon. Breathing his relief, he turned down the alley, Boult at his back.\n\nLights showed in many of the windows surrounding the courtyard, but none on the ground floor. The yard was left in darkness, which suited him well. He had not given much thought as to how they would wait for Necquer and the woman, and he began to plan.\n\nBeckoning for Boult to follow, he squeezed around the left side of the pile of wreckage, jabbing his sore body several times, and once walking hard into a piece of wood at chest height. He had to stop for a moment, tears springing to his eyes, before he could go on. It had looked much easier in the dry daylight, and the lantern did not help much, illuminating only a tiny section of the heap. Finally, however, he was around, and standing before the door of the tenement, which sagged on leather hinges. He handed the lantern to Boult and pushed at the door, which moved a few inches and then ground to a stop. He could see from the gap between door and jamb that it was neither locked nor barred, so he grabbed at it and shoved up and back. It moved easily, lifted over a pile of unseen rubbish. A single candle flickered high on a wall in the room beyond, casting suggestive shadows over a railless staircase and more rubbish, heaped against the walls like talus at the foot of a cliff.\n\nNot the most likely place to house a mistress, Liam supposed, but convenient to Necquer's warehouse, and well out of the sight of his social peers on the Point.\u00b7 He only took a few steps into the room, to look up the stairwell. It rose in flights far up the building, to the top floor as far as he could tell. There seemed to be no other entrance to the stairs. Boult prodded at a large, unidentifiable mound with his toe, and muttered, \"The Warren,\" with disgust.\n\n\"All right,\" Liam said in a low tone, \"here's what we'll do. We wait outside. When the person we're looking for arrives, you follow them inside, at a decent distance, and .go up the stairs with them. Find out which door they go to, and pass them. As soon as they're in whatever room they're headed for, come back and tell me. Clear?\"\n\n\"Most obvious, Questor, \" the Guardsman said with only the slightest trace of irony, \"except, if it please you, how'm I to know who we're looking for?\"\n\nLiam grinned, and Boult granted him a small one in return. \"I'll let you know when he arrives. Now come on.\"\n\nBoult shrugged and followed Liam back into the courtyard and beyond the pile. They settled themselves between the wall of the court and the right side of the high tangle of used furniture and rubbish. Liam could see the doorway of the building, and hoped that with the garbage and the rain, they would remain unseen. As a precaution, he took back the lantern and hooded it completely, leaving them in the dark.\n\nThey waited interminably, but Boult said nothing, and Liam tried not to allow his high spirits to ebb. It was difficult, with the rain seeping slowly through his cloak, the wet chill setting his bruises to aching, and the mental itch returning to his back. He thought hard on the clue he was about to get, and succeeded at least in pushing the last worry away. There was no reason for anyone to have followed him, or to be spying on him. There was no way for anyone to know how close he hoped he was to catching Tarquin' s murderer. He thought of Marcius, but dismissed the idea. Having delivered his warning, the merchant would surely wait at least a day to see if it was carried out.\n\nSo he convinced himself that the suspicion was merely his nerves, and began to tum over his clues again.\n\nWhy the second spell? If Tarquin had cast it, it would have meant Necquer' s death; surely his mistress would not want that. But what if she had? Ignoring the why, which he hoped he would understand when he knew who she was, he focused o the how. She had gone to Tarquin for the spell, but the wizard had not cast it, and Necquer had made it to port safely. Was that reason enough to kill him? Again, he would know better when he knew who she was.\n\nThe waiting dragged on, and several times Liam was sure he heard the bells tolling eight, though he knew hearing them through the rain was impossible. They both shifted their positions several times, trying to minimize the discomfort of rain and projecting garbage. Liam was in the middle of an extensive rearrangement when Boult laid a hand upon his arm and he froze, one leg raised, searching for a secure spot in the unseen mess underfoot. Boult steadied him without a word.\n\nA figure glided out of one of the alleys, shrouded in a voluminous cloak and hood. The woman, Liam knew at once, and squinted at her through the rain, willing her hood to fall away. It did not, and she came on, slipping around the pile like a ghost, mere yards from them. She was shorter than he had imagined her, but the cloak billowed so much that it could easily have hid the prodigious belly he had given her. Only when she had gone through the door did Liam realize she had not carried a lantern, and had negotiated the streets easily in the dark. The idea disturbed him.\n\nBeside him, Boult let out his breath, and Liam did the same, allowing his weight to settle back on both feet with relief.\n\n\"That our man?\" the Guardsman whispered, touching Liam's arm again for his attention.\n\n\"No. Wait.\"\n\nIt did not take as long the second time, and Necquer announced his presence well in advance with the light of a lantern. He came hurrying down the same alley the woman had used, but with none of her weightless grace. They heard a distinct ripping sound as he negotiated the rubbish heap, followed by a curse, startlingly loud. Liam placed a restraining hand on Boult's shoulder, and waited while the merchant opened the door. He stood in the doorway, threw back his hood, and examined a large tear in his cloak, shaking his head and spitting in anger. Liam recognized his face for certain, and gently shoved Boult.\n\nNecquer entered, and the Guardsman disappeared around the pile, to reappear seconds later at the door. He paused a second, listening, and then went in. Liam waited as long as he could stand it, and began creeping around the pile himself. By the time he managed to cross the garbage, Boult was back, leaning with crossed arms against the doorsill.\n\n\"In th'attic,\" he said, gesturing up with his thumb. \"I near followed him up, but stopped in time.\"\n\n\"Did someone greet him?\"\n\n\"He knocked thrice, in a peculiar way, and a woman's voice bid him enter. You can hear through the walls as through the thinnest kerchief.\"\n\n\"Better and better.\" He would not be able to see the woman, but he could hear her at least, and their conversation might give something away. \"Shall we?\" He started for the stairs. Boult obediently followed with an apathetic shrug that seemed his only method of expression. At least it was dry indoors.\n\nThe stairs creaked ominously as they walked, and Liam winced even on the first flight. Going slowly and planting his feet carefully only seemed to make it worse, and the cries of old, creaking boards flew straight up, he was sure, to the attic where Necquer waited. He was struck by what he was doing\u2014spying, basically, invading the most private moment of another man and woman. The parallel with Fanuilh did not escape him.\n\nThere was a candle on the second-story landing, but none beyond. Light showed from underneath some of the doors on the floors they passed, but this only emphasized the pitchy blackness of the stairwell. Liam's heart began to beat faster, and his skin was damp beneath the cloak. Sounds came from some of the apartments they passed, bodiless in the dark: a young girl singing to a crying child, a hissed argument between two men, the sounds of a meal in progress. The two men crept on, and the sounds died away as they reached the fourth floor, accompanied only by the creaking of the treads. Above him, Liam sensed space, a black void where the stairs to the attic would be.\n\nBoult stopped him, and leaned close to whisper. His breath was warm in Liam's ear.\n\n\"It's the next flight. Your boots, Questor. The boards fairly shout here. The quarry made Hell's own clatter going up.\"\n\nDid the Guardsman think Necquer was his quarry? He did not bother to correct him. He was after the hooded woman, and what she knew about Tarquin.\n\nShe tried to get Tarquin to substitute Lons's spell, he thought, bracing himself against the unseen wall to pull off first one boot, then the other.\n\n\"Wait here,\" he whispered to Boult, and wondered if he nodded in the darkness.\n\nSwitching spells would have meant Necquer' s death. Why would she want that? And why would she kill Tarquin when he didn't perform the spell?\n\nThe darkness was absolute, palpable in a sense, like warm water pressing around him. He put his stockinged foot on the first step, and hesitated. His heart beat loud, his mouth was dry. It was just spying; he had done it before in a dozen places. In wars. This was not a war; this was the merchant Necquer betraying his wife in adultery, which was entirely his business, and none of Liam's.\n\nAnd why didn't Tarquin perform the spell? He had the virgin's blood, and if he had been stupid enough to believe Lons would pay him, he would certainly have believed the seductive voice.\n\nHe forced his other foot to move, and gained two steps. There was a thin line of orange above his head, the bottom of the door to the attic. It was a goal. He made two more steps with only a single stifled squeal from the decrepit wood. Suddenly he imagined the door above swinging open, and Necquer glaring angrily down at him.\n\nI'd piss my breeches, he thought, and had to clap his hand to his mouth to stifle a giggle.\n\nThe door stayed closed, and he forced himself up three more steps. Sweat trickled down his face. He heard a voice from above and stopped, his heart hammering.\n\nIt was Necquer's, from the sound of it, though he could not discern the words. +\n\nHad she killed him because he did not cast the spell? Was that reason enough? Or had he figured out why she wanted the spell cast, and threatened to reveal it? If he knew why she wanted Necquer dead, he could understand.\n\nIf she wanted Necquer dead. If that was what the spell was for. If\u2014\n\nHe cursed himself viciously and silently. He would never know if he did not go further. Three more steps, stooping, his hands groping for the treads in front of him, the wood brittle and ridged beneath his fingers. Traces of wet from Necquer's boots, and whatever shoes the woman wore.\n\nHe could hear Necquer's voice now, suddenly very clear, as if he were right next to him. His heart lurched, and he swayed in the darkness. The line of warm orange was on a level with his eyes, and he brought his legs up with infinite care, so that he was squatting on the step.\n\n\"You should buy better wine,\" Necquer was saying, apparently just beyond the door. He heard a clink. Goblets? His mouth was dry. \"I certainly have enough money to afford some decent wine.\"\n\nThere must have been a reply, because the merchant was silent, but Liam could not hear it.\n\n\"No expense too great for my sweet chuck,\" the merchant laughed.\n\nYour sweet chuck would have been happy to see you rotting in the sea, he thought, grinding his teeth, and wanted to shout to the woman to speak tip. The woman in his imagination had a stentorian voice, a voice like a trumpet, a voice that carried across miles as well as attic rooms. She did not even whisper when she stuck daggers in wizards. Why was he so sure?\n\n\"You're not going to start that again, are you?\" said Necquer, exasperated. \"I've told you, she's my wife. There's nothing else for it. You're looked after well enough.\"\n\nShe wanted him to leave his wife. She was pregnant, and he would not leave his wife.\n\n\"That's a good girl,\" Necquer said after another pause, reassured and magnanimous. \"No more arguments, then. I've only got one other cheek.\" He laughed.\n\nOne other cheek? One other cheek to bruise. She had hit him, not some nonexistent bandit. When he came back from Warinsford, he went to see her first, before his wife. And she had hit him, hard enough to leave a mark.\n\n\"Then you'll be rid of it?\" The merchant's tone was more serious; there was uncertainty in his voice, and a shade of apprehension. \"There are herbs, I know. See Viyescu, he can get them. You're not so far along, are you? It's not even showing.\"\n\nRid of the child he had sired. That was a reason to kill a man, Liam supposed, because he had gotten you pregnant and would not marry you and ordered you to get rid of it. But she had already gone to Viyescu for the santhract. And after Tarquin's death she had frightened him enough to get it for her. So why try to kill Necquer, if she was prepared to do as he wished?\n\nHe clearly heard the rustle of skirts across floorboards. She was moving, and, by the sound, towards him. For a moment, he thought irrationally that she was going to open the door and find him, and then he caught hold of himself. She was coming to Necquer, and he heard another sound, the brushing of cloth against cloth. Was she embracing him? Then a loud kiss. Yes. He prayed with all his might, squinting his eyes in the dark with effort. Please, please, please, speak.\n\n\"I'll attend to it soon,\" she said, and his eyes sprang open and his mind reeled. \"Soon. For now, drink your wine and let's to bed.\"\n\nGods, what have I done?\n\n\"A fine idea, my sweet,\" Necquer said, the smug smile practically audible.\n\nLiam heard the merchant's words, but they were eaningless to him.\n\nHe knew the voice, though he had never heard it used seductively, the way Tarquin had. A dozen revelations fell on him with stunning force, and his arms trembled so much that he had to lower himself to the stairs, resting his forehead against the damp wood.\n\nShe wanted Necquer dead for his betrayal, for refusing to spurn his wife, because she was fierce that way. She had killed Tarquin, he was sure, because he had threatened to reveal her.\n\n\"Finish your wine,\" she said with an indulgent laugh.\n\nAnd he had done that because he had discovered that the virgin's blood\u2014so hard to come by, so useful, and Dono\u00e9 couldn't possibly supply enough, however willing she was\u2014had not been real. How could it be, when she was not a virgin? So when the illusion spell failed because of the faulty blood, the wizard had cast the spell Lons wanted instead and threatened to reveal her. And for nothing, nothing at all. She had agreed to lose the child, to reconcile herself to his wishes, to go to bed with him again.\n\nLiam did not want to move. Self-reproach held him in an iron grip, and he wished the dark would surround him and become complete.\n\nGods, I have so completely bungled this whole damn thing. His mistakes were beyond repair.\n\nHe could not tell Coeccias, he could not tell Fanuilh. He could not tell them, because then he would have to tell them what he had done in his weakness and imbecility.\n\n\"When I've more of a thirst, after.\" After what was clear. Necquer gave the word a lecherous weight. There were footsteps, moving away.\n\nAfter, Liam thought miserably. After I've crawled back down these steps and ridden as far away from Southwark as I can.\n\n\"Careful, it'll spill,\" the beautiful, musical voice laughed. \"You'd best drink it now, or it'll end on the rugs.\"\n\nWould she not shut up about the wine? He did not want to hear her anymore. He. wanted to get Diamond from the stables and ride north, to Torquay, maybe, or the Midlands, or maybe further.\n\n\"You want me drunk, do you?\" Necquer laughed aloud.\n\nDrunk, of course, drunk, Liam thought, shaking his head bitterly, drink the wine, drunk if she can't have you dead. Drunk is\u2014\n\nHis head jerked up in the dark, and he gaped at the door. Drink the wine\u2014\n\nBecause you powder santhract and take it in a cup of wine or cider to hide the bitter taste, and the right amount of santhract will terminate a pregnancy and too much will kill a man.\n\nHe scrabbled to his feet and jumped forward, stumbling on the stairs but gaining his balance again as he hit the door.\n\nIt burst open and he slid to a halt in his stockings.\n\n\"I didn't think\u2014\" he began, and stopped, because what he had not thought of was what to say.\n\nNecquer and Rora stood in the middle of an expensive carpet, swaying close to each other, shocked, the merchant's hand on her exposed breast, the cup in his other hand at his lips. A broad bed, with snowy sheets, a wide window to the right. A huge number of candles, shocking after his time in the darkness of the staircase.\n\n\"Poison!\" Liam shouted. \"Santhract!\" He pointed at them, and Necquer dropped the cup, still staring. Only a little wine spilled out. Rora's face twisted in rage.\n\n\"Questor,\" Boult gasped hesitantly from behind him. When Liam had suddenly burst open the door, he had hurried up.\n\nRora lunged at him, her teeth bared in an awful snarl, but Necquer instinctively grabbed her arm and pulled her up short. The momentum carried her around toward the window, but she turned back with a dancer's grace and lunged again, snarling furiously at Liam. No one heard the soft thump that came from the roof above.\n\n\"She's trying to kill you,\" he shouted at the merchant, afraid to let her speak. What would she say? He felt guilty, terribly guilty, as though he had used. her. It never occurred to him to think of it the other way around. So he shouted, trying to drown out denunciations she did not try to make. \"Santhract in your cup. She killed Tarquin Tanaquil, because he would not help her, and would have told you about it.\"\n\nHe went on, shouting disconnected facts at Necquer, who hauled the hysterical dancer to him. The merchant held her roughly by the shoulders, trying to see her face, and she suddenly spat furiously at him. Her nails flashed up towards his eyes. Liam and Boult both started toward the struggling couple.\n\nThe large window shattered, and a dark shape hurtled towards Rora in a shower of broken glass and wood. It lit on her back, water gleaming on the scales, and a single beat of the wings drove Necquer back. Blood fountained from Rora's neck, where the wedgelike head had buried itself. She screamed.\n\nFanuilh rose off her back and darted in the air around in front of her to plunge at her face. Shouting now, she flailed her arms at the creature, but it came at her like a whirlwind, biting and scratching and pushing, silent except for the flap of its wings. It pulled back for a moment and then leapt again, forcing her back against the windowpane with its remnants of glass and wood, and then over.\n\nShe fell, and the dragon disengaged itself, hovering in the window. It turned its head over one shoulder, between the lazily sweeping wings, and fixed its gaze on Liam.\n\nDone, Master.\n\nThen it dove out the window after Rora.\n\nFor long seconds, the three men remaining in the attic room stared at the shattered window. Gusts of rain blew in, spraying successive patterns of moisture on the rug, darkening it.\n\nNumb, Liam could only think of Fanuilh's weakness, its constant protestations of soon, soon.But the dragon had killed her.\n\nSilenced her, he thought, and stirred to drive the idea away.\n\nBoult moved as well, and the spell that held them was broken. \"Questor,\" the Guardsman said shakily, his voice uncertain.\n\nLiam shook himself, like a dog shedding water, and looked at Necquer. The merchant's face was white, his eyes bulging and his lips moving without producing any sound. Even when he slipped bonelessly to his knees in the broken glass, Liam took it for shock, but when the merchant heaved convulsively and clasped his stomach, Liam rushed to his side.\n\n\"Go get Coeccias,\" he barked at Boult. \"Get him and make him bring Viyescu. Tell him to tell Viyescu that the Hierarch said he needed an antidote to santhract. He'll understand.\" He knelt by the contorted merchant, and found the Guardsman at his side. \"Go now,\" he shouted angrily. \"Tell him it's santhract\u2014he'll understand. Go!\"\n\nAfter a secorid's gawking, Boult shrugged\u2014his all purpose reaction\u2014and darted out the door.\n\nThe merchant was feverish, his skin slick and gritty and radiating unnatural heat. He crouched on his knees, one hand splayed out on the ground while the other clutched at his stomach. He took in great lungfuls of air with croaking sobs, as if he was desperate to breathe. His head swung in wide arcs, like a frightened cow.\n\nGlass was digging into Liam's knees and stockinged toes, and he could see trickles of blood run, mingled with rainwater, from beneath the merchant's outflung hand. Grimacing, he put one hand around Necquer's waist and took hold of his chin with the other, probing a long finger between the clenched teeth.\n\n\"Stop fussing,\" he muttered as Necquer tried to roll his head away, and managed to shove his finger down the merchant's throat. Necquer's teeth closed momentarily, and then his mouth and throat opened, and vomit gushed out, lukewarm and thick on Liam's hand and arm.\n\nAs he held the spewing merchant, mechanically urging him to get rid of the contents of his stomach, he looked vacantly out the window.\n\nFanuilh killed her. No recriminations, no heaping on of guilt. She could never reveal what he had done, what he had allowed to happen.\n\nHe could not decide how he should feel, and, for safety's sake, felt guilty."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "BOULT RETURNED QUICKER than Liam had expected, but without the Aedile. Coeccias, he explained, had gone to get Viyescu, and sent him back to help, if he could.\n\nThere was little for him to do. Necquer had gotten rid of everything in his stomach but was wracked by dry heaves, and his breathing was still labored. Liam held him around the waist and shrugged at the Guardsman, who set himself to brushing the broken glass and wood into a pile with his foot. The window had no shutters, and the rain still blew in.\n\nTaking the lantern, Boult edged towards the windowsill, and risked a soaking by leaning far out. He dangled the lantern below him, turning his head this way and that. When he ducked back in, Liam was looking at him.\n\n\"She lit not on the ground,\" the Guardsman said in simple explanation, with yet another shrug.\n\nThe idea horrified Liam, but he did not let it show. What would Fanuilh do with her?\n\nCoeccias arrived then, followed by Viyescu, who was carrying a bulging satchel. He did not seem in the least surprised when he saw Necquer's state, but darted ahead of the Aedile and took charge of the situation. They laid Necquer out on the bed at his orders, and then Liam stood aside as the druggist removed several flasks and twists of paper from his satchel.\n\nConcentrating on Necquer, Viyescu kept his head down, as though unwilling to recognize the others around him. Liam kept his eyes and thoughts on the merchant as well, though he spoke a little to Coeccias.\n\n\"Boult explained?\" he asked without turning his head.\n\n\"Some, not all. The maid, though? l'd've never credited it, had you told me before.\" There was a note of admiration in the Aedile's voice, as if he thought Liam had suspected Rora all along. It set Liam's teeth on edge, but he only grunted noncommittally.\n\nIn order to get his antidotes down the merchant's throat, Viyescu needed him upright, and he called Liam to help him. He spooned semiliquid pastes into Necquer' s slack mouth while Liam held him behind the shoulders.\n\nBoult had returned to looking out the window, and suddenly called for Coeccias. The Aedile went to the window, and their voices were drowned out by the rain. Viyescu took the opportunity to speak.\n\n\"Hierarch Cance,\" he said in a voice so quiet Liam almost did not hear, \"I needs must beg your forgiveness for my sins.\" He did not look up, staring rigidly at the spoon he was inserting between Necquer' s teeth.\n\nLiam had been expecting something else, and it did not help that he had almost forgotten the name he had used. How could the apothecary still think he was a Hierarch? But it seemed he did, because he waited for a moment, and when Liam did not answer, went on, tight-lipped.\n\n\"There're things I've done, Hierarch. I'm sure you know\u2014the woman and I\u2014I beg your forgiveness. The woman and I ...\"\n\nNot able to stand anymore, Liam spoke, more harshly than he meant to.\n\n\"Save this man and all is forgiven.\" It sounded silly to him, melodramatic and, worst of all, unpriestly. He cringed, but Viyescu merely paused, and then nodded.\n\n\"My thanks, Hierarch,\" he said after a moment. \"Uris grace you,\" he added. He gave the merchant a few more mouthfuls, and then motioned for him to be let down. Then he waved Liam away and set to checking under Necquer' s eyelids and taking his pulse.\n\nAt the window, both Coeccias and Boult were leaning out, careful of the jagged glass still left in the sill. The Guardsman was pointing something out. Liam wandered over as the two men\u00b7 pulled their heads back in.\n\n\"Something?\"\n\n\"The maid,\" Coeccias said. \"Caught on a gable, I think.\" Liam blanched. Fanuilh had not taken her, of course. It was ridiculous to think he could have. Still, the thought unnerved him. He asked if he could go, and Coeccias nodded after a moment's thought. He and Boult could handle getting her up, or they could get another member of the Guard.\n\n\"Will y'attend me at my house? Burus'll let you in. There's still the Uris's Eve fast to break.\"\n\nLiam refused, as politely as he could, but the Aedile pressed him to come to the feast the next day at his sister's.\n\n\"There're matters,\" he had said in a gruff, strangely gentle tone, \"that require our discourse, if not this night, then tomorrow.\" He was obviously concerned about Liam's distracted air and pale face. \"Come to my house at midday tomorrow.\"\n\nLiam agreed, and left as quickly as he could, ignoring the glance Viyescu threw at him. He sat in the dark on the stairs and pulled on his boots. Miraculously, the broken glass had not cut his feet, but he did not think of this.\n\nHe knew that Coeccias had let him go because he thought him a weak scholar who had never seen blood before. It did not bother him: better to appear a coward than face Fanuilh' s handiwork, and the corpse to which he had unwittingly led the dragon.\n\nThe rain pelted him as he walked slowly back through the Warren, but he only hugged his cloak closer to him. Perhaps the worst of it was that he had not expected anything like this, that the adventure he had so blithely embarked on only a few days before had turned out so very different.\n\nUnable to face the ride out to Tarquin's in the rain, and unwilling to face what might be waiting for him there, he went to his garret. Mistress Dorcas was not in the kitchen when he entered; he heard her conducting the Uris's Eve meal with the other boarders in the dining room. Relieved, he slipped upstairs, not bothering with a candle.\n\nHe threw off his cloak and sat in his chair in the dark. The window bothered him, however, with the rain pelting it, and he decided to try his luck with sleep.\n\nHis luck held, and he only had time before he slipped off to think one thought three or four times.\n\nI'll have time to think about it tomorrow.\n\nA weak, underwater light filled the room when Liam woke. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, and the clouds, now only light gray, had retreated much higher into the sky. It was almost ten, he guessed.\n\nHe was stiff and sore, much sorer than the day before. The tattoo on his chest had begun to tum a sickly yellow at the edges.\n\nHealing well, he thought, and turned a groan of pain into a laugh.\n\nMoving slowly, he dressed and packed his few belongings into his seachest. It was light, even with all his possessions in it, but he managed to bring it downstairs only at great expense to his aching muscles.\n\nThe boy from the stables brought Diamond round to the kitchen door, and helped him lift the chest to the horse's withers and tie it tight. The boy's generally merry air and the nonchalant way he accepted a large tip reminded Liam that it was a holiday. It also explained the small number of people in the streets, and the fact that Mistress Dorcas was not up yet. On Uris-tide, she obviously believed she could sleep in.\n\nThis suited Liam well; he did not want to see her. He mounted Diamond slowly and set him to a gentle, easy pace. It took almost an hour to reach Tarquin's house, but Liam was not unhappy with the ambling gait. There was plenty of light, even with the clouds, but he knew even if it had been a beautiful, sunny spring day he would not have wanted to approach the house.\n\nFanuilh, however, was nowhere to be seen, and no thoughts crashed into his head as he walked tentatively from room to room, calling the creature's name. Bemused, he went out to the beach and let the trunk tumble off Diamond onto the sand. Then he half-dragged, half-carried it into the entrance hall.\n\nFeeling he had pressed his luck enough, he left it there, mounted Diamond again and started back for Southwark.\n\nHe did not want to see Fanuilh, and was glad he had not. He did not want to see Coeccias at the moment either, but he had promised, and there were things that he would have to explain. He purposefully dawdled on the way back, because he did not want to arrive early.\n\nCoeccias was waiting for him, opening the door himself and ushering Liam in.\n\n\"How was your sleep?\"\n\n\"Good,\" Liam said, surprised to find it was true. \"I'm sore.\"\n\nThe Aedile laughed. \"Your friends' 11 be in hand soon.\" He led the way to the kitchen and put the finishing touches to a positively monstrous cauldron of cider while they talked.\n\nLiam outlined the story, filling in the details he had learned or figured out the night before. It was remarkably easy.\n\nRora was pregnant and Necquer would not support her. Kansallus's talk had hinted at a certain pride and vengefulness in her; if anything, he had underestimated them. She had obviously been much more fierce than Kansallus had guessed, even with the evidence of Knave Fitch's mangled ear. And the way she had used Viyescu to get her the poison to murder Necquer and then threatened to reveal whatever had passed between them indicated the depth of the ruthlessness hidden behind her beauty.\n\n\"I don't think she was altogether right in the head,\" Liam commented, and Coeccias grunted his agreement.\n\nSo she was set on killing Necquer. Lons must have told her about his deal with Tarquin, and she convinced the wizard to switch the spells, in return for some of her blood. Why she chose the illusion spell was not clear; perhaps she did not want to ruin her brother's arrangement, and thought that as soon as the Teeth disappeared, Lons could claim his reward. It would not matter if Necquer tried to enter the harbor the very next day and was smashed to pieces. Perhaps she thought it would be fitting, a sort of double revenge: give his wife to another man and then kill him.\n\n\"She was clearly somewhat mad, for all her cunning.\" Liam amazed himself with his own tone of voice. He sounded cold and analytical, describing the events from a pitying distance. He wondered how he was able to do it.\n\nTarquin had tried to cast the spell she wanted, but it had failed\u2014Rora had had no real virgin's blood to give him\u2014so he cast Lons' s original request, maybe as a kind of revenge. When Necquer returned unharmed, she went to see Tarquin, most likely to upbraid him for not casting the spell, not knowing he had figured out her deception. He threatened to reveal her plot to Necquer, so she killed him.\n\n\"Of course,\" Liam said finally, talking to Coeccias's expansive back as the Aedile crouched over his boiling pot like a gnome or dwarf from a story, \"there's little pure proof. Much of it's only circumstance, and motive. The santhract she put in Necquer' s wine proves something, I guess, and she was pregnant. Really, it just fits best.\" He paused, reflecting. He knew she had done it. \"And Tarquin's familiar certainly thought she did.\"\n\n\"Truth. Curious, that,\" Coeccias said at last, rising from the pot. \"But I grant you all\u2014she must have done it. There's naught else that makes sense. And I've something from Herione, as well: Rora used to dance for her\u2014just dance, you mind-nigh on two years past. We'll say that's when Viyescu met her, and Necquer as well.\"\n\nFor a moment, the stout man regarded Liam intensely, as if trying to pry a secret from him; then his features softened into admiration. Liam realized Coeccias had been wondering how he had figured it all out. In telling the story, he had left out both Rora's visit to him and Fanuilh's part. Thinking back, he realized he had sounded like quite the natural investigator, and the cold, confident tone he had assumed had not hurt. It was Luck, again, the Luck he carried with him, that allowed him to handle something incompetently and somehow come out looking all the better for it.\n\nIt made him feel very uncomfortable, and he hung his head to hide his guilty blush. He suddenly thought that he had not said Rora's name once while telling what he knew. He had said \"she\" or \"her.\" Not her name. It made him feel worse.\n\n\"When do you want to tell Lons?\"\n\n\"I've already done it, last night,\" Coeccias said. He and Boult had brought Lons his sister's body, recovered from the gable where it had lodged in her fall. Liam was shocked by this, but the Aedile hastened to explain. Fanuilh had not been vicious\u2014scratches on her back, and a single bite at her throat. He and Boult had washed away the blood from her face and hands, and covered the wounds pretty well. \"The Golden Orb's company parts Southwark tomorrow for the heath, and Lons'll with them.\"\n\nThere was nothing else to say about the investigation, and Coeccias suggested they go to his sister's. Liam wondered how they would get the cauldron of spiked cider to her house, but it turned out that she lived only a block away, and Coeccias simply filled a smaller pot to bring with them.\n\n\"One of the whelps'll run back for more when we've drained this one.\"\n\nCoeccias' s sister was like him, broad and short, with weight to spare but a warm, matronly face. She kissed her brother warmly and made much of Liam. Her husband was a cooper, and they had an uncountable swarm of children. They held Liam, as a stranger, in awed respect, but mobbed Coeccias affectionately at first, and then Burus when he appeared.\n\nSeveral relatives of Coeccias's brother-in-law soon arrived, bringing huge amounts of food and an army of small children to the feast. The tables groaned under the weight of the food, and afterwards, stuffed to bursting, the whole family gathered around to sing to Burus' s piping. They were merry, and Liam felt out of place. There were things he wanted to think about, and though he would have liked to stay, he knew he could not contribute to their celebration, and left soon after the music began.\n\nHe spent three days alone at Tarquin's, exploring the house and thinking about all that had happened. He slept on the couch in the library and spent the days idly leafing through the books or examining the items in the wizard's trophy room.\n\nMany times the image of Rora floated in his mind, cursing him, saying all the things he had been afraid she would. She reviled him, called him a betrayer and a fool, a heartless monster. He knew he was not these things, that she had used him, and that he was not responsible for her death. He knew them, but he could not shake a feeling of responsibility.\n\nAt other times he thought of Viyescu, whose darkest, deepest kept secrets he had effectively exposed in the guise of a priest. He hoped that the druggist might have taken his hasty absolution in the attic to heart, but did not think that even that excused his deception.\n\nAnd there were Freihett and Poppae Necquer to consider. He would not be able to see them, to deal with the husband or pass an idle afternoon with the wife. What he knew of them, and their awareness of some of his knowledge, would make such encounters extremely uncomfortable.\n\nStill, what else could he have done? He could not have known things would turn out the way they had.\n\nIn the end, he simply acknowledged that he had not handled the whole thing well, and vowed to leave it at that. In time, he thought, he might well be able to.\n\nOn the second day, Boult appeared at his door, rousing Liam from a book of history he had found in Tarquin's library. The Guardsman had brought a copy of the wizard's will, as proof of ownership. The diffidence and hang-all attitude Liam had liked in the man was gone, replaced with a sort of uneasy respect.\n\nCoeccias had been telling stories about the investigation, Liam knew, and portraying him as some sort of omniscient seerinto men's souls, whose only weakness was a certain queasiness at the sight of blood. He was surprised to find that he did not mind the picture as much as he might have. He felt a little guilty because the result was more Luck than omniscience, but at heart he was secretly pleased.\n\nBoult also brought a note from the Aedile. It was very short, scrawled wildly across a piece of paper. In it, Coeccias invited him to dinner the next day, \u2014and mentioned that Necquer had recovered completely from the santhract. Finally, he wrote that Scar, Ratface and their friend had been caught, and were currently residing in the Aedile's jail awaiting judgement.\n\nLiam asked Boult to tell Coeccias that he would come to dinner.\n\nBetween all of this, he stood on the beach, or sat on the balustrade of the veranda, and scanned the sky for signs of Fanuilh. The little dragon did not return for three days.\n\nHis feelings were mixed about the creature. It had lied to him when it said it was still too weak to fly, and he knew that it had followed him to Rora. That bothered him, but he reflected that there was little he could have done about it. The dragon could see into his head at will.\n\nThat, really, was what bothered him most, and he thought angrily of their deal. And he had thought of something he had to attend to, with which the dragon might help.\n\nWake. Wake.\n\nOn the morning of the fourth day after Rora's death, he was wandering in a dream through the old temple, and the walls were inscribed again with the single word:\n\nWake. Wake.\n\nHe woke on the couch, and looked deep into the dragon's glittering cat's eyes.\n\n\"You're back,\" he muttered.\n\nYes, Master. I had to hunt, and I thought you would be angry with me.\n\nSitting on its haunches, neck bent, Fanuilh looked like a dog awaiting a well-earned whipping.\n\n\"I was,\" Liam agreed, putting his feet to the floor and running a hand through his tousled hair. He was much calmer than he had thought he would be. \"You didn't tell me you were going to kill her.\"\n\nThe thought was a long time forming: It seemed appropriate. She killed Master Tanaquil. Another idea formed, very quickly, and just as quickly disappeared. When we joined, it came to me that it was something you would do.\n\n\"Me? You mean you got the idea from me?\"\n\nYes. You did such a thing once.\n\nLiam laughed, but it was bitter, the kind of laughter he directed at himself. \"Yes, I did. But I was much younger then. Much younger. And I've paid for it as well. He had an insight into the creature's nature, how little it understood of men, and how it must pick and choose its ideas from its master.\n\nI am sorry, Master.\n\nThere was a long pause.\n\n\"Then you recognize me as your master?\"\n\nYes.\n\n\"And you'll fulfill your part of the bargain?\"\n\nI will serve you as you wish. I have done what I ... There was a break in the solid thought, as though Fanuilh had never used the concept in connection with itself before .... what I wanted.\n\n\"You'll teach me how to keep you out of my head?\"\n\nAnything you wish, Master.\n\n\"Do you know what I want to do now? What I want to take care of?\"\n\nYes. The dragon lowered its head, as if ashamed to admit that it could still read his mind.\n\n\"Can you help me with this thing I have in mind?\"\n\nYes.\n\n\"You'd best tell me how. I want to do it today.\"\n\nWith Fanuilh's help, it was easy. Liam rode into Southwark alone that afternoon and left Diamond at the stables. He told them he would be keeping the horse with him after that night, and settled his account.\n\nThen he strolled down towards the harbor and the one thing he needed to make sure of. The clouds had rolled away a day before, leaving a bright sky out of which a cold, invigorating wind blew. His soreness was gone, and he felt well.\n\nThe harborfront was busy, men and animals straining to move the last of the season's cargo. He walked alone to Marcius's warehouse, and knocked at the smaller door. An unknown face appeared, and ordered him off. There was no activity around the building, and Liam smiled to himself spitefully. There was no activity because Marcius' s best hopes were at the bottom of the sea. He found he could not muster much sympathy.\n\n\"I think your master will want to see me,\" he said, and pushed his way past the ugly face into the warehouse proper.\n\nTwo new men waited behind the doorkeeper, who now thrust his face into Liam's and growled.\n\n\"I think you\u2014\" he began, and then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped heavily to the ground. Liam stepped back, startled, and saw that the other two guards had dropped as well.\n\nFanuilh fluttered to the ground behind them.\n\n\"They're all right?\"\n\nAsleep. It will not last long.\n\n\"Then we'd better hurry.\"\n\nHe walked to the stairs, and with a lazy beat of its wings, Fanuilh rose and settled on his shoulder like a bird. It was large, the size of a dog, but Liam barely felt the weight, and he imagined he looked quite fearsome. Fanuilh rocked gently to keep its balance as he hurried along the creaky steps.\n\nMarcius's perfectly coiffed head snapped up as his office door slammed open, and a shout of anger died on his lips as he saw Liam stride into the room with Fanuilh on his shoulder.\n\nFrom the merchant's sudden pallor, Liam judged that he did indeed look frightening with the tiny dragon in tow.\n\n\"Master Marcius. Do you remember me?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the merchant stammered, and before he could recover himself, Liam plowed on, as much to keep Marcius off balance as not to laugh at what he was saying.\n\n\"It was not wise of you to fool with a wizard, Marcius. Do you understand that?\"\n\nMarcius nodded once.\n\n\"The things that can result are unpleasant, you see.\" Marcius nodded again.\n\n\"And I would not want to have. any unpleasantness. Your men are in prison, now, and will remain there. I allow them to escape lightly, because I know they acted on your orders. You will rescind any such orders you may have since given, and will leave me in peace. Do you understand?\"\n\nMarcius nodded several times, his eyes on Fanuilh, who was yawning widely, revealing needlelike teeth.\n\n\"The maps I sold you are good, and will not be sold to anyone else. l suggest you put them to good use, and forget about me. Is that clear as well?\"\n\nThe merchant was still nodding when Liam left, because Fanuilh stayed behind.\n\nI will leave here in a few minutes, Master, and wait for you at the beach.\n\nNot used to thinking to the dragon, Liam simply nodded and walked out.\n\nOnce on the street, he indulged in a broad smile. He had achieved the effect he was looking for, and knew the merchant would not bother him again. He was pleased with his own performance, absurd as it seemed in retrospect, but knew that most of the merchant's fear had stemmed from Fanuilh's presence.\n\nAnd the dragon had acted completely in accordance with Liam's wishes. It was truly his servant. The thought buoyed him up, inspiring another secret smile.\n\nWondering what else it could do, he let his imagination play with the idea as he walked to dinner at Coeccias's.\n\nThere was still a great deal of cider left from the Uris-tide batch, but between the heavy meal Burus served and a misguided attempt on the part of the three men to go through all the verses of \"The Lipless Flutist,\" they finished it by midnight."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "The Krusible of Avonoa",
        "author": "H.R.B. Collotzi",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "Avonoa"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "Like most tragic stories, it all began with two sisters falling in love with one man.\n\nHe was an apprentice, training alongside his best friend, to the shaman of the faerie council. While most faeries practiced majik in one form or another, the shaman to the faerie council was the most accomplished of faeries in order to attain the position. To apprentice with him was a great honor.\n\nTwo daughters of another council member both fell in love with the young faerieman. The elder sister loved to star gaze \u2013 finding peace in the stars, but also glimpses into the future. Using her limited understanding of majik, she found a spell that would enhance her eyes to see the stars better, growing them to twice the size of other faeries'. The younger sister was vain. She only used the most reliable spells to make her hair softer, her lips fuller, her wings shimmer more and other common beauty enhancements.\n\nThe young apprentice soon revealed that he was in love with the elder sister and not the younger. Upon learning this, the younger sister sought revenge against her elder sister. So, through deceit and trickery she turned her elder sister into a centaur. Thus, the first centaur was created.\n\nHowever, the elder sister accepted the change gracefully, glad for the chance to be different from her sister. The apprentice only loved the eldest more for her forgiving nature. The younger sister also selfishly made her own dream possible to take her mother's place on the faerie council, seeing as her elder sister was no longer a faerie. But neither of these circumstances could stave off the younger's desire for revenge, and instead she only became further enraged.\n\nIn this season of the faeries, the race actively sought to breed dragons. Since dans, the brown and gray male dragons, had only one heart to break, they often sired only one or two offspring with one of the bright and multi-colored dames. Many faeries experimented through majikal means to replenish the species. But unbeknownst to the faeries, the multitude of spells they created released unbridled majik into the world, the results of which could not be predicted.\n\nOne common practice was to separate the dans and dames and only allow mating through controlled and majikal environments. Many dragons, male and female, were adopted by faeries and kept as pets. Because of her mother's high position, the eldest daughter kept a female pet dragon, one often sought after to breed with through majikal means.\n\nSeeing the eldest sister's kind and compassionate heart, despite finding herself a centaur, the young apprentice made a spell to give her pet dragon the gift of speech. Finding her voice, the dragon begged for a specific mate and for her mate to be able to speak as well.\n\nWhen the two dragons were finally brought together, they expressed their love for each other and produced an egg. When the egg hatched, it was discovered that their precious new daughter could also speak. The gift had been passed along in the species, altering the course of their future.\n\nEver spiteful, the younger faerie sister discovered the frivolous use of majik and revealed the culprits to the council. Immediately, the council imprisoned the apprentice until they could undo the majik of the dragons' speech. The elder sister learned of the imprisonment and begged the council to free the young faerieman.\n\nHowever, the council members, including the most accomplished shaman, were not able to reverse the spell entirely. They could reverse the original spell and quell the parents' speech, but not remove the daughter's gift. Finally, the council deemed that the young faerieman must die for the spell to end.\n\nMeanwhile, the humans lived a barbaric life. They fought amongst themselves for land and took each other as slaves. They attempted to force faeries to give over their majikal secrets to use as advantages against other humans, and they often hunted dragons for sport, as a symbol of power. Faeries avoided humans at all costs.\n\nSince the spell of the dragons' speech was so unintentionally powerful and implicated the faeries' ruinous lack of regulations over the use of majik, the council decided to use the young apprentice's death to enact a great spell that would ensure a harsh lesson learned: the spell would confer immediate death on any faerie who spread the truth of the dragons' speech and intelligence to the vile humans. Sacrificing one or more of their own species to ensure no human would ever learn the truth came at an even greater cost: the council would also take a second faerie's life during the process of making the spell. Thus, it was decided that the apprentice must die to reverse the power of his transgression, and the eldest daughter must die to ensure the potency of the great spell.\n\nThe mother of the two daughters was a council member but could not agree to her daughter's death, therefore she secretly informed her eldest daughter about the council's decision and helped her escape. She herself then left to warn the humans of the dragons' intelligence and the impending alteration of the species.\n\nShe knew she must find a human king she could suffer before she was prevented from speaking the words she wanted to share. Upon entering the kingdom and insisting upon seeing the king on urgent business, she felt the great spell take effect before she could warn them. To cover her real reason for being there, she thought of a ruse and decided she would instead make a grand gesture with an unexpected and powerful gift. She would use the opportunity to help the humans overcome their barbaric ways by announcing the faeries' gift to the humans of the majikal Five Swords of Avonoa.\n\nThen, having no council, family or home to return to because of her presumptuous betrayal, the faerie mother changed her name and lived out her life in solitude as a simple shaman named Shampy.\n\nIn the meantime, while hiding from the council's threat to kill her, the elder sister spread the news of the impending great spell among the faeries before it was performed. As word traveled, the faerie population was divided over how to bear it. Half of the faeries chose to attempt a different spell in order to avoid the great spell's effects. And the other young apprentice, best friend of the imprisoned faerieman about to die, discovered that if any faeries transformed into centaurs, they would escape the curse. Thus, half the population of faeries chose to transform moments before the great spell took hold.\n\nThe elder sister witnessed the young apprentice's execution from afar, along with the newly gifted white dragon, daughter of the first dragon to speak.\n\nWhen the young apprentice was killed for his crime, the white dragon and the eldest sister wept bitterly. While crying the white dragon saw visions of the future in her tears. With majik and power in her words she made a great prophecy:\n\n\u2003Curse you faeries t'ward every way,\n\n\u2003For precious blood you spill this day.\n\n\u2003Instead of beauty, true and fair,\n\n\u2003Become the monsters your hearts bare.\n\n\u2003Until the morn The One shall come,\n\n\u2003And you accept your salvation.\n\n\u2003For when his heart be made un-whole,\n\n\u2003One will die by the life they stole.\n\n\u2003Human and dragon accountable,\n\n\u2003Unite in ways unimaginable.\n\nUpon hearing the fate of her kin, the elder sister saw Visi's prophecy as justice enough, because she knew there would always be a fate worse than death."
            },
            {
                "title": "Distortion",
                "text": "Human. Cold. Soft. Fragile. Small.\n\nThe pure black dragon, Hiro, looked down at his claw and heaved a sigh. Still a claw. He looked up at the dripping stones dripping down onto the stone floor of his cavern lair in one of the many floating mountains of the Rock Clouds.\n\nThose should be much farther away, he thought before his mind drifted to the human men he had trained alongside in the Noble army. Squad 3-4, or 'claw' as the common term the men used, were the closest thing he had to friends among the humans, having spent so much time as a human training with them. Hiro had to figure out how to best use his ability to change from dragon to human and back again in hopes of saving both species \u2013 or living forever as only one of them.\n\nThe men in my claw would laugh at the ridiculous sight of a dragon practicing changing into a human \u2013 they wouldn't even be frightened. As he thought it, the ceiling seemed to shrink away from him. He looked down at his hand, covered in soft brown skin. Yes, a hand!\n\nHuman, he thought to remind himself how it felt. Cold air on my skin. Soft flesh wrapping my arms and legs. Fragile bones inside those limbs. Looking up at everything and everyone. Well, almost everyone. Thinking about other humans or dragons helps too.\n\nHe stood for a moment feeling the stone under his soft feet. Those feet had hardened in his weeks as a human, but they still couldn't compare to the comfort of the scaly pads of his dragon claws.\n\nHe scrunched his eyes. Dragon, he thought. Hard. Burning. Large. Fierce.\n\nHe looked down at his hand again. Growling inside, he bared his fangs and struck the rock under him with a claw.\n\nA claw.\n\nThis is meaningless, he rumbled to himself, Anna won't take me in either form.\n\nThe moment he thought of her, he felt the cool air brush his skin. Looking down at his hand, he sighed again.\n\nI have to figure this out, he thought, staring at his hand. There must be a reason for it.\n\n\"Hiro?\" Tog's voice called from outside the cave. Tog, his best friend. The keeper of all of Hiro's secrets\u2026except this one.\n\nHiro bolted on two legs to duck behind a small outcrop in his cavern home, only to fall onto all fours, skitter across the ground and ram the two long horns on his head against the stone wall. Dragon again.\n\nFear \u2026 anger, he thought, anger works especially well. He remembered being angry during his training and feeling the fire burn in his belly. He felt that fire in great detail now and decided he could use that feeling in the future.\n\nTog, a large gray dragon known for his two toggling eyes like that of a chameleon, landed in the mouth of the cavern. \"What are you doing?\" he asked with a queer look on his face.\n\n\"Sleeping,\" Hiro grumbled, hoping being woken up would be a good enough excuse for the sour attitude.\n\nTog seemed to accept the answer with a shrug. \"Sorry to wake you, but Prak and I need your help speaking with Rakgar.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Not entirely sure,\" Tog admitted, \"Prak thinks you can help influence Rakgar. Some say he wants any and all knowledge of our efforts to fight the humans while keeping well clear of the action. Which reminds me,\" he turned one of his toggling eyes on Hiro, \"any progress with the other problem?\"\n\nHiro shook his head. The 'other' problem was Hiro's own personal assignment to find out who betrayed the dragons to the faeries. Flarote, a tiny, red, bulbous mushroom-like plant grew in many places, most of them warm and moist. A few caves, including Rakgar's lair, grew the little mushroom during most seasons. The ones in Rakgar's lair were used by many in the ruck to heal injuries, even those that a dragon suffered close to death. However, dragons knew to never tell the faeries or humans or centaurs about the fact that flarote could kill them if they ate too many. But one had.\n\nThe seemingly harmless plant and information had been used to make a deadly dragon poison which the humans were currently producing and using on arrows to kill dragons. Hiro had discovered this fact a short time ago while imprisoned within Kingstor Noble as the human named Owyn. Anna had helped him escape the dungeon and revealed the treacherous act at the same time. Hiro was tasked to find the culprit.\n\n\"I can't find out anything here, among dragons,\" Hiro said. \"To find them I need to be on the surface. Follow their tracks, stalk our enemies and their friends. I need to get out of here.\"\n\n\"But you're still not feeling well?\"\n\nHiro nodded. He had confessed previously to Tog that the fire in his belly, the life of a dragon, had been weak and guttering off and on for some time. What he hadn't told anyone, especially any dragon, is that the same fire sputtered out completely, and continued to do so, every time Hiro turned into Owyn, a human. It had all started shortly after he fell in love and his heart broke for the human woman, Anna. He had been forced to confess his ability to change species to Anna when she helped him escape the castle dungeon. In fact, he often pondered the fact that she had accepted his changing without much reaction, even come to the conclusion of it herself without any explanation.\n\nHe still struggled to keep the changes under control and he wasn't sure if he could trust himself on the surface. But he had no more time to practice.\n\n\"Will it keep you from meeting with us at all?\" Tog asked.\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder, making sure to feel his powerful dragon body and fire in order to help keep his current form. \"No,\" he said, \"let's go.\"\n\nHe knew changing could be difficult, but staying the same was easier. He followed Tog to the edge of the cave and the two dragons leapt into the bright sky.\n\nRakgar's cave was the largest of all the lairs since the dragon ruck had many uses for it. The foremost cavern was so large it could fit more than a hundred dragons, although the ruck didn't often need that capacity. Rakgar \u2013 in faerie tongue, leader or king \u2013 used it to counsel with the dragons of the ruck he oversaw.\n\nInside the cavern, thousands of wet dripping stones dripped from the ceilings with mound-like mates of spilling stones jutting up from the floor. Some dripping pairs met in the middle, forming columns scattered in the chambers, many as thick as a dragon's body. Two chambers separated by rock columns led off either side of the central chamber.\n\nIn one of the side chambers, along with the ruck's supply of flarote, usually hung meat collected over the summer and autumn and dried by dragon fire. Unfortunately, with human armies surrounding the Rock Clouds as they had of late, hunting had been sporadic and difficult. The danger was that if dragons went too long without eating, the fire in their own bellies would consume them, turning them to embers as swiftly as if someone had slit their throats in the night as they slept.\n\nBeyond the food chamber and hidden around a corner was a small chamber where Rakgar slept. Opposite the food supply, a small tunnel led away from the massive central chamber to Priya's lair but, upon Priya's insistence, neither Hiro nor any dragon he knew of had ever been down it. Most of the other tunnels off the main chamber were too small for any dragon to access. Very little light reached beyond the main chambers, with daylight coming only from the entrance and a large opening to the sky at the top of the central chamber.\n\nSeveral dragons gathered with Rakgar in the main chamber of the lair, including the brown dan brothers, Milah and Mitashio. Siblings were rare among dragons, but the rivalry between the brothers and Hiro and Tog was common and well known. Although the four of them had been thrown together recently and seemed to agree more often, the brothers never stopped arguing the points opposite of Hiro's.\n\nBehind the brothers, the sun dazzled a small pile of gold, gems and other precious items collected over their many clashes with humans. Humans erroneously believed that a dragon would spare their life if they offered it something shiny.\n\nSince Hiro had returned from his secret life among the humans, he'd kept to his own lair, practicing changing. He hoped that maybe by feeling the expression of his body in both forms he could choose which life to live. But he knew if anyone discovered his ability, he wouldn't be able to live in either world. So he stayed in his lair, ignoring the rest of the world while he figured himself out. But he knew the war couldn't wait forever.\n\n\"The hatchlings will starve,\" a small red dame spoke to Rakgar. \"They won't last much longer.\"\n\n\"They're stronger than you think,\" Rakgar answered. He sighed and wouldn't meet her eyes. Perhaps because his held so much malice. Perhaps because he didn't care. Hiro still couldn't believe that Rakgar didn't care. This is the same dragon that had trusted Hiro's father unwaveringly until Tusten's death. Could he really just stop caring about dragons?\n\nHiro and Tog stepped up as the red dame snorted flame and whipped her tail around to leave. Prak stepped up in her place.\n\n\"She's right, Rakgar.\" Prak's demeanor had altered recently in such a way as to make his nasal voice sound demanding rather than annoying. He was a small brown dragon, smaller than most other dragons even though he was fully grown, but he was as tough as the two rows of spikes running down his back and tail would lead one to believe. \"We don't have the stores we need to wait out the humans. Now that the centaurs are on their own, they'll never get to all the human supply groups alone. The humans will be fed as they wait for dragons to descend from the Rock Clouds, and we'll starve up here on our own. The hatchlings will be first to die, then where will that leave our ruck? With no one to take up our memories? We can't just\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Hiro said, his brows knit together in concentration. \"What do you mean the centaurs are on their own?\"\n\n\"Just what I said,\" Prak snarled. \"Rakgar has ordered that all dragons stay in the Rock Clouds. No one is allowed to leave. No hunting parties or raid parties. No one. Even the Watch perimeter is being closed in tighter.\"\n\n\"Not even hunting parties?\" Hiro turned toward Rakgar.\n\nRakgar was an enormous dragon, larger than any other in their long history. Although a dull gray, like Tog, he displayed several large horns, spikes and barbels mostly around his head making him look somewhat like a lion. The bravest of dragons cowered before the intimidating Rakgar \u2013 but not Hiro. Rakgar had always been kind to Hiro. He doted on him as young Dakoon (Hiro's birth name) and let him get away with all kinds of mischief. Now, as they both aged, the older dragon seemed to diminish in Hiro's sight, in both respect and aspect. The fire in Hiro began to burn brighter.\n\nRakgar rolled his eyes. \"I don't expect either of you to understand how to maintain an entire ruck.\" He looked at all the dragons present around him. \"I have ordered this because I believe that the humans will get bored and leave. Especially since they can't reach their prize.\" He looked down on Hiro. \"If the prey evades the hunter, the hunter persists. But if the prey ignores the hunter who can't reach them, the hunter leaves to find easier prey.\"\n\nHiro growled. \"And what if the hunter gets help to reach the prey as the prey sits idle and slowly dies?\"\n\nRakgar glowered down at Hiro. \"Don't tell me you still believe the faeries have anything to do with this.\"\n\nHiro stamped his front left claw. \"They have everything to do with it,\" he snapped back. Rakgar glanced down at the claw and Hiro stretched out his smallest talon for emphasis. It was the only one cut to half as long as the others. The faeries had cut it off while torturing him in the courtyard of the human castle. They physically tormented him, trying to coerce him into speaking before the humans. Hiro still believed those faeries didn't act alone.\n\nRakgar bent his neck and slunk down, snout to snout with Hiro. He barked, \"Prove it.\"\n\nHiro's temper flared in him. He had tried to tell Rakgar and the others that the faeries were always lurking in the human kingdom of Kingstor, constantly whispering to the king, but he couldn't prove it because he couldn't pass them his human memories. Beside the fact that he wouldn't want to pass any memories of his life as a human, he also couldn't pass memories of him being friends with Princess Anna. She was the only human he trusted and who was willing to help him find out more about the humans' and the faeries' plans of attack, but he couldn't explain any of that to anyone. He had to allow the ones who trusted him to do so. He knew in his heart that the faeries would find a way to get the humans into the Rock Clouds.\n\n\"We can't,\" Prak spoke up, probably to keep Hiro from picking a fight with Rakgar. Successfully distracted, Rakgar swung his head to meet Prak's eyes. Hiro noted no fear in Prak when Rakgar stared him down. \"We can't do anything unless we're allowed to leave the Rock Clouds. If you let us leave, we'll bring you proof that the faeries are aiding the humans.\"\n\n\"A few rogue faeries are nothing to fear,\" Rakgar said, sitting up straight again.\n\n\"No,\" Tog spoke this time, \"but we'll find proof that all the faeries are in on it.\"\n\n\"Still not enough of a threat,\" Rakgar grumbled.\n\n\"Then,\" Hiro spoke carefully, \"we'll prove that they have the means to send the humans into the Rock Clouds. All of them. The entire army.\"\n\nThe cavern grew deadly silent. All eyes hovered either on Hiro or Rakgar.\n\n\"It's not possible,\" Rakgar whispered.\n\nHiro sat up. Not knowing why he said it or how he planned to accomplish it, he said, \"It is. And I'll prove it.\"\n\n\"Hmpf,\" Rakgar cracked a mocking grin, \"so be it. If you can bring me proof that the faeries can and will aid the humans and get them into the Rock Clouds, I'll allow you to retaliate against the humans. With supervision and caution.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Tog said. \"Until then, we'll bring food back for the hatchlings. Then we can\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to Rakgar again. Several maws hung open.\n\n\"But the hatchlings\u2026\" Tog tried again.\n\nRakgar sat a moment in silence, then stared back at Tog. \"It would take too long and our movements would appear too much like we'd planned them ahead. It would expose too many dragons. No. The hatchlings will have to wait.\"\n\n\"But they\u2014\"\n\n\"NO!\" Rakgar roared, slamming a heavy paw on the ground to shake the cavern walls. \"You'll have to figure it out in time for them and DON'T COME BACK UNTIL YOU DO!\"\n\nHiro pried his eyes from Rakgar and scanned the other dragons in the cavern. \"Who will go with us?\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Rakgar roared, \"I didn't say\u2014\"\n\nPrak advanced on Rakgar, much like a half-witted mouse before a lion. \"You already gave us leave!\" he bellowed up at the leader, something he never would have done only a few weeks ago. Then turning to the rest of the dragons, he yelled, \"Who will help us?!\"\n\nEvery dragon in the room roared in agreement. Prak roared, Tog joined but Hiro couldn't. He watched as the dragons followed Prak and Tog from the cavern into the shining blue sky. Even Milah and Mitashio, uncharacteristically silent, gave Rakgar one last look and walked out behind the others.\n\nWhen the cave was empty except the two, Hiro walked away from Rakgar.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Rakgar called, interrupting the echo of Hiro's claws on the stone. \"The hatchlings will only last another week without food. You might want to remember that as you go about your personal crusade.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Disruption",
                "text": "The ceremonial bell chimed five times. Philip stepped up to the dais from the back. He had practiced the ceremony several times with his best friend and royal general, Torgon, and Tierni, Torgon's sister and the only woman to capture Philip's heart, helping him. Even Ruther and Murthur, brothers and his close personal servants, had taken turns helping him memorize the wording. But now at the real event he still felt as if a rock the size of a scorrand egg sat in his belly.\n\nHe motioned for the groom, Lord Dieko of Selevyn, to join him on the platform. He recited the names and titles Dieko currently claimed. The man was still dressed in furs and boots as if it were a winter day, not the sunny, breezy autumn afternoon they enjoyed. Yet he didn't sweat a drop. He must be using majik, thought Philip. The furs only seemed to emphasize the man's graying hair and drooping jowls; obviously near twice Anna's age, he exemplified nobility. Or, at least, he tried to in his every move. Grateful that weddings were required to take place outdoors, Philip slowed himself and took a deep breath of the warm, autumn air before focusing on what he needed to do next.\n\nTowering over Dieko on the dais, the young king was relieved when he could step back to allow the royal high priestess to take his place. Reciting her name and customary titles, Philip stepped around closer to Anna. Careful not to touch her blue wedding gown, he extended his hand. He was grateful for his height, and hence, the reach of his arm as he took her hand. It was forbidden for all but the high priestess to touch the wedding gown. Philip had been told it would \"tarnish the majik and poison the marriage\". Even the king would be punished for the infraction, according to religious law. The gown's skirt was so large, he wondered if a shorter man could have even reached Anna to take her hand.\n\nHe forgot the cumbersome dress when he realized that her hand was clammy and cool despite the warm sun. He attempted a firm but gentle touch as he led her to the platform in front of Dieko and the priestess. Before he released her, he took the blue ribbon tied around her wrist and passed the end of it to Dieko's wrist, tying them together.\n\n\"That these two shall be wed in the presence of the people,\" Philip continued, standing in front of them with his back to the audience, \"to witness their union is blessed by the High Gods.\" He took Anna's and Dieko's hands and joined them in front of the priestess. Behind the couple, the priestess began to murmur quietly to herself, rubbing majik ingredients, produced from a hidden pouch, into her hands. Travaith the royal majishun stood nearby, chanting quietly to assist the priestess in her majik.\n\nPhilip took another long blue ribbon from one of the men Dieko had requested be his Seven Men. The man grinned as he handed it over, but not at the couple. He and the other six watched Philip gather the ribbon, as if waiting for him to make a mistake. Philip felt their eyes on him but brushed away the suspicious feeling in order to focus on the ceremony.\n\n\"In the sky of Tartaku over you,\" Philip said as he wrapped the second ribbon around Dieko's wrist along with the first. He didn't watch as the sky above the couple shimmered with majik. \"With the joy of Tarka to lift you,\" he said while wrapping the ribbon around Dieko's hand. The couple and the priestess lifted ever so slightly from the ground, Anna's golden hair swirling around her to create a halo. As the couple lifted into the air, Philip couldn't help but glance at the older man only to see his nose in the air, avoiding the eyes of the princess.\n\n\"Tarsa's wind shall whisper counsel,\" Philip said, returning his focus to the ribbon as he wrapped it around Dieko's fingers where they joined with Anna's. The wind stirred around the group, brushing Anna's dress and Dieko's furs. Philip wanted to murmur his own prayer of thanks that he had insisted on light clothing for his ceremonial robes.\n\nThe air became more solid, settling over them in a swirling fog. \"The clouds of Kruh will soften your hearts,\" Philip said as he swung the ribbon over the fingers of the couple again, \"and your future shall sparkle like the stars of Khurta.\" He passed the ribbon over Anna's fingers as specks of light danced over Dieko's soft hand covered in rings and Anna's rougher hand, now quivering. \"The moon goddesses of Shurta shall bless you with fertile wealth.\" He brought the ribbon over Anna's hand while three beams of silver light shone onto their hands.\n\nBefore he could finish the ceremony, Philip risked a glance at Anna. She stared blankly at her husband; the fierce fire in her brilliant green eyes that Philip had grown accustomed to seeing was gone. Extinguished. Philip imagined he could see pain and even sorrow in her eyes even as her features remained impassive. The pit in his stomach jolted and he couldn't take his eyes from her face.\n\n\"And with Shurka's sunlight to purify,\" he muttered as a bright, golden light enveloped the couple, \"these two shall be one.\"\n\nAs he said these last words, Anna closed her eyes and a tear slid down her cheek.\n\n\"Try not to stare at her too much, huh?\"\n\nTorgon's voice jolted Philip. He had been staring at Tierni again. She stood with her friends from the laundry, giggling at the juggler. While Philip had appointed Torgon his royal general on a whim, knowing he could trust the man, Torgon's sister and the rest of his family remained at a lower station. It wasn't exactly illegal for the two young people to have a relationship, but some in the kingdom might not agree that his attraction to her befit his noble role. A difficult position to be in when you led the Noble Kingdom. Philip wished Tierni could be sitting next to him at the wedding feast. He imagined holding her hand and smelling the sweet scent on her dark brown hair. Most of all, he wanted to stare into her intoxicating blue eyes. But Dieko had put his foot down, citing law. Servants weren't allowed to sit with nobles at a celebration. Philip ground his teeth and reluctantly tore his eyes away from her.\n\n\"How could I let this happen?\" the young king leaned in toward his best friend. \"How could I let Dieko dictate whom I sit next to at a wedding?\"\n\n\"It is his wedding,\" Torgon replied. He nodded and smiled as dancing girls flashed past, but the royal general's eyes flickered toward the newlyweds. \"He does have the final say, no matter what the king wants.\"\n\nPhilip allowed his eyes to drift to the couple as well. Dieko sat with his back to Anna, smiling and talking with his Seven Men. With only a wan grin, Anna watched the dancers silently. Philip's stomach churned again and his gaze slid onto the untouched plate of food in front of him.\n\n\"Philip,\" Torgon grinned at the courtiers seated around them. With little movement to his lips he said, \"Try to look like you're having fun. Smile. Be happy.\"\n\nTrying not to grimace instead, Philip picked up his wine cup, the only thing he'd touched all night. \"I can't,\" he said behind it, \"I feel like I'm going to be sick.\"\n\nTorgon turned, inspecting Philip's face briefly, but looked back at his food. He stabbed a thick slice of beef and twirled it in front of him. \"Sick or not, you have to remain present for your sister's wedding party or it will appear you don't approve.\"\n\n\"I performed the wedding myself,\" Philip countered, \"Isn't that approval enough?\"\n\nTorgon shrugged. When he put the fork back on his plate with the meat uneaten Philip realized Torgon had no appetite as well. \"What have I done?\" Philip whispered.\n\n\"What's done is done,\" Torgon said. \"You have every reason to be happy. You have kept your word to the faeries and not told Anna anything about the poison or the plans. But you told them that you would no longer keep it from her once she was married.\" He turned to look at Philip with a genuine smile on his face. \"You can tell her everything now. Perhaps she is on the other side of that imagined locked door. Perhaps she has insight to help you.\"\n\nPhilip sighed, feeling some sense of relief, but stifled it. \"That's true, but that also means I have to tell Dieko.\"\n\n\"And how do you feel about that?\"\n\n\"To be honest,\" Philip glanced at Dieko again as the man brushed food off the table away from himself and onto Anna's lap, \"not good.\"\n\n\"Me neither.\"\n\nPhilip's eyes met Torgon's, then together they glared at Dieko.\n\nThe call came in the small hours of the night after the wedding party finally dwindled.\n\n\"DRAGON! DRAGON! DRAGON!\"\n\nPhilip leapt from his bed on the second call and threw on some nearby clothes. After he tied a heavy cloak around his shoulders, he pulled his sword from its sheath and marched out into the corridors.\n\n\"Where?\" he shouted to the nearest guard.\n\n\"In the upper town,\" came an answer from down the hall.\n\nPhilip ran behind the guards as they led him to the tower overlooking the town. Instead of scrambling to the top of the tower where the guards shot at the beast, he stopped atop the open battlements. A small, smooth, green dragon belched flame onto rooftops of the houses below, then landed on them and tore at the stonework.\n\n\"Shoot her!\" Philip bellowed to the guards on the tower. But he knew they didn't have a decent target from their vantage.\n\nHe looked down below to see who might be available to help. There in the street stood Dieko, in his nightclothes and a cloak. He held a sword before him, but stepped back toward the guards gathering around him. As Philip watched, the man shoved the guards roughly in front of himself and backed away toward the castle.\n\nPhilip's eyes swung to the building the dragon was currently attacking. \"No,\" he whispered. \"NO!\" he yelled as he ran for the stairs that would take him out to the street.\n\nHe screamed for someone to find him a bow and quiver as he unlatched every door until he ran into the street.\n\n\"Anna!\" he bellowed as he ran for the home into which she and Dieko had retreated for their wedding night. \"Anna!\"\n\nAs he watched in horror, the dragon tore at the rooftops of Dieko's home and those nearby. Someone tapped Philip on the shoulder and exchanged his sword for a bow. Finally feeling useful, he ran forward, firing repeated shots at the green monster. Unfortunately, they weren't poison-tipped arrows, but she was low enough that they pricked her side and wings. Feeling the sting, she hovered in the air above the homes, then wheeled around and dove away from her foes.\n\nOnce the dragon was out of sight, Philip burst into the newlyweds' house. With the guards' help, he tore through the rooms searching for his sister. The first floor was littered with pieces of the structure, charred and scattered. The tops of the walls still crackled with fires the guards rushed to douse. No one could reach the second floor in the grand house because the staircase was gone, open to the night sky above, with the walls and roof torn to shreds. The only portion of the home still intact was the kitchen and servants' quarters in the lower section.\n\n\"She's not here, Sire,\" a man finally said as a large group of guards dug through the remains of the house.\n\n\"Perhaps she got out,\" another man offered.\n\n\"Pray to the gods that she did,\" Philip muttered.\n\n\"If she did,\" the first guard said, \"she would have run. Possibly to another home.\"\n\nPhilip nodded. \"You're right,\" he said. \"Spread out. Knock on doors, search the streets.\"\n\nHe ordered a few men to stay behind and continue the search and clean up as well. As he returned to the street, Torgon ran up to him. \"Did you find her?\"\n\nPhilip shook his head.\n\n\"Maybe Dieko knows where she is or which way she might have gone to escape.\"\n\n\"Where is Dieko?\" Philip asked. When Torgon shrugged, they both scanned the growing crowd of guards, nobles and people around them.\n\n\"I\u2026I think he might be in the castle, Sire,\" one guard answered sheepishly.\n\nAs the group headed back to the castle, Philip looked at Torgon. \"Where did it come from?\"\n\nThe royal general shook his head. Philip assumed he must have been on duty because he was wearing his daily uniform after having changed from his ceremonial uniform following the wedding party. \"I have no idea,\" he answered. \"She appeared out of nowhere. The first sign of her was when the guard saw her attack Dieko's home. I was directing from the walls when I saw you run into the street.\"\n\nBefore Philip and the group reached the castle entrance, Dieko ran toward them.\n\n\"Sire,\" he said, breathless, \"I was coming to look for you. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Where's Anna?\" Philip asked, ignoring the comment.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Dieko answered. \"I was more concerned for my king.\"\n\n\"Your king? Not your new wife?\" Torgon growled. \"Where was she when you last saw her?\"\n\n\"She,\" Dieko hesitated, his beady eyes bouncing between the younger men, \"she was upstairs when the dragon appeared.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Did you not go after her?\"\n\nTorgon shouted to the guards to get more men to search the area, then the two men turned back to Dieko. Silence.\n\n\"Philip?\" It was Anna's voice. Weak, but Anna's.\n\nThey heard her, but didn't see her immediately. They followed the sound to see her appear from the shadow of a small alley between houses. Her night clothes and robe torn and singed, she stumbled toward her brother and fell into his arms.\n\n\"She's hurt,\" Torgon whispered, indicating her arm and side.\n\n\"They're just scratches,\" Anna mumbled. She righted herself, gingerly covering the wounds.\n\n\"I'm pleased you're safe, my dear,\" Dieko muttered, not at all sounding pleased. \"Come,\" he said, placing his arm around her shoulders and turning her toward the house.\n\n\"Dieko,\" Philip said, grabbing the man's arm to stop him, \"she needs a healer.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Anna said.\n\n\"I'm her husband,\" Dieko said, \"I'll see to her. We won't let this interrupt our wedding night.\"\n\nPhilip's grip on the man's sleeve tightened. \"It already has,\" he said, but he tried to calm his voice. \"Your home is in shambles. Your wife is in shock. Come and stay in the castle until all is put to right.\"\n\nDieko bobbed his head in agreement and led Anna back toward the castle.\n\nTorgon placed a hand on Philip's arm to wait. Once the couple and most of the guards were outside of hearing, he leaned in toward Philip's ear. \"One of the guards just told me,\" he glanced toward Dieko who was no longer supporting Anna's weight, \"he was waiting out the attack in the castle!\"\n\nPhilip ground his teeth. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"That he's a coward, for one,\" Torgon whispered, \"but whatever else, I don't know. Did he somehow bring on the attack? I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"One thing is certain,\" Philip said as he began following, \"he's a coward that warrants watching.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Conspiring",
                "text": "\"We need to go to the other rucks,\" Milah said.\n\n\"He's right,\" Prak echoed. \"We need help, but we also can't spare the dragons.\" Prak had sent the other dragons who had accompanied them to rejoin the centaur groups attacking the humans and searching for proof that the humans could get into the Rock Clouds. Then Hiro joined Prak, Tog, Milah and Mitashio to meet the centaurs.\n\nJoss, the leader of the centaurs, only denoted himself as leader with a single leather band around his black hair. His brother, Rylan, one of the few centaur majishuns, wore leather straps twisting up his bulging arms and his brown horse's body was adorned with pouches full of majikal ingredients. His only weapon, the brilliant Silver Sword of Allegiance, which his sister had stolen from the humans, was sheathed on his back. Ashel, their sister and leader of the warrior centaurs, wore numerous knives and swords strapped to her brown body, as well as a leather binding across her bronze chest. But her real weapon she wore slung over her shoulder, and the quiver and arm bracer with it indicated her powerful use of the bow. Pure black and intimidating, with a massive scar running the length of his face, Vikal, Ashel's right-hand comrade and friend amongst the warriors, waited on the banks of Centaur River.\n\n\"I don't need your approval,\" Milah sneered at the younger dragon. One of two brown brothers, neither he nor Mitashio had ever esteemed Hiro or Tog or, by association, Prak.\n\nPrak rolled his eyes. \"And I don't need to agree with you, but I do. However, we can't spare many.\"\n\n\"It hasn't been easy without your help,\" Ashel grumbled, catching Prak's attention with her large eyes. \"I don't know if we can spare any at all.\"\n\n\"We've made do and we will continue to do so,\" Joss said, \"because we'll need every claw later. It's more important that we have help when the real fighting starts and not just these skirmishes.\"\n\nAshel nodded, swinging her black hair. \"Milah and Mitashio should go,\" she said, \"one to each ruck nearby. Then each move on to the next ruck. Deliver your request for help to all of them and come back as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"Desert Ruck!\" Mitashio shouted, laying claim to first visit the most comfortable location.\n\nMilah twisted his face at his brother. \"Fine, I'll go to the Ice Ruck.\"\n\n\"Don't bother,\" Hiro said. \"The last time I saw them, they weren't willing to help. I'm going that way, so I'll try again to convince them.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Milah grumbled, \"I'll go to the Island Ruck. But if they drown me trying to make me catch fish, I blame you!\" he yelled at Hiro as he and his brother slapped tails and leapt into the sky.\n\n\"Where will you go?\" Ashel asked, turning to Hiro.\n\n\"Where else?\" Tog grumbled, sitting off to the side of the gathered group.\n\nAshel bared her teeth in a very dragon-like manner. Hiro knew Ashel hated the idea and risk of a dragon meeting with a human. But she couldn't argue about it with Vikal present because he didn't know the situation. Hiro still didn't know if she had told Joss and Rylan, but neither of them asked questions.\n\nHiro sighed. \"She's the only one with any information at this point.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Ashel growled.\n\nHiro shook his head to cover the rumble of his shoulders. Thinking of Anna made his body want to change into human form again. But Ashel's loathing helped him maintain his current state.\n\n\"She's married by now,\" Hiro lowered his voice, \"that was the deal. If she married, she'd learn\u2014\" he glanced at Vikal \"\u2014everything.\"\n\nVikal sat in stone-still silence. He might have been an ebony statue for all the response he gave. Either he knew more than he should or he had been tutored not to ask questions. Joss and Rylan, however, listened with intent, not hiding their curiosity.\n\n\"As much as I hate to say it,\" Prak grumbled, \"she might be the only one who either has answers or can get them. We can't exactly interrogate random humans.\"\n\n\"In the meantime, what do we do here?\" Ashel asked, indicating herself and Tog and Prak. \"Lie back and wait for you to return?\"\n\n\"The hatchlings only have a week,\" Tog said.\n\n\"Then we'll search here,\" Prak offered. \"We'll use all our senses to search the trees for traces of faeries or their majik. We won't stop until we either find proof of them or hear from you, Hiro.\"\n\nHiro stared at him and waited. He knew Prak had more to say.\n\n\"Ok, ok,\" the little dragon finally said. \"Of course, we're also going to sneak food to the hatchlings. It won't be easy and it may take some time and I don't know who will be here when you get back, but you know we're going to try SOMETHING. I just felt you needed to focus on what you need to do. I didn't want to say it so you could tell Rakgar that you had no idea about it. But don't worry about Rakgar or the hatchlings. Leave them to us.\"\n\n\"Keep a messenger on the riverbank or stay nearby,\" Hiro said as he moved to an opening in the trees.\n\nAshel trotted after him. \"Wait, how will you\u2026?\" She let her voice trail off.\n\nHiro assumed Ashel wanted to know how he would get to see Anna. \"Don't worry,\" he said as he opened his wings, \"I have a plan.\"\n\nOk, not really a plan. Maybe just an idea, Hiro thought to himself. But it will be enough. It has to be enough.\n\nSoon enough, the small village came into view. It was as if the troubles of the rest of the world hadn't touched it. Jarek's farm spread all the way to the mountains, his fields waving lush green at the black dragon as he flew over. The people of the village, called the Hamees, were different from other humans in more ways than one. Not only did they believe in only one god, but they were also friends with a dragon.\n\nMonths ago, Hiro, in dragon form, had helped Anna save these people after they had risked everything to save him. As he flew over the houses, the humans in any other village would scream and run for cover, but the Hamees looked into the sky with smiles. Some even waved at the dragon.\n\nAlthough he trusted Jarek, Hiro knew he couldn't just land and take human form. He decided instead to let the village see the dragon first, then he would change and ask for help as a human. Owyn, his human persona, could claim to be friends with Anna if they had seen her \"pet\" dragon first. Hopefully.\n\nAfter circling the village a couple times, Hiro flew in behind Jarek's barn. The first time he was there he'd given himself away by leaving claw marks. This time he wanted to leave human prints as well so it would appear as if he was traveling with someone as Anna's pet. He rolled his eyes at the debasing thought, then rolled his shoulder and began altering his form.\n\nHe had practiced changing along the way and improved the process by focusing on making his fire burn or extinguish. It wasn't perfect, as his emotions still tried to overtake his control, but he was getting better. Once he had tried to change in mid-air and learned the painful way that he needed to account for distance.\n\nJust as he landed behind the barn and before Jarek could show up, Hiro changed into Owyn, focusing on the fire in his belly cooling and dying. He limped back and forth with bare feet in the soft dirt. Then he changed back into a dragon by imagining the fire reigniting in his belly. After trodding the ground a little with his claws, he changed back into a human. With a grin, he realized he was getting better at changing faster and easier by focusing on his fire. Then, not watching where he was stepping, he tripped on a rock. His leg twisted under him and he fell, face first, into the dirt.\n\n\"Aargh!\" he yelled as he crumpled on the ground. Stupid human feet!\n\n\"Who's there?\" Jarek's voice came from the other side of the barn.\n\nAs Owyn lay rubbing his sore leg, Jarek came from around the corner. \"Please,\" Owyn stammered with forced humility, \"I need your help.\"\n\n\"I can see that!\" Jarek laid aside the large pitchfork he held in one hand. The other hand lay against his side covered in a glove. \"Wait here.\"\n\nBy the time he returned, the pain in Owyn's leg had subsided. Jarek draped a large blanket around Owyn and helped him to his feet.\n\nThe conversation was not going well.\n\n\"You know Anna?\" Boorda, Jarek's wife, repeated for no one in particular. She sat across from Owyn at a little wooden table in their home. Her soft brown hair was pulled into a neat bun at the back of her neck.\n\n\"Yes,\" Owyn answered again anyway.\n\n\"And you need to see her?\" Jarek asked again. He stood behind his wife, occasionally pacing and fidgety.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And you want us to help you get into the castle to see her?\" Boorda said.\n\nOwyn sighed. He had explained everything he thought he could without attracting undue curiosity. He knew Princess Anna. He'd arrived here on her dragon, and he needed to speak with her. About what, he couldn't say; it was a private matter.\n\nThe couple had been kind and patient. Boorda made him some food to eat and Jarek gave him clothes to wear, although they were obviously too small and fit him poorly. But something clearly bothered both of them about Owyn's story, and Owyn couldn't figure out what.\n\n\"Why can't you just go to the castle on your own and ask to see her?\" Boorda stared into his eyes without blinking. She hadn't turned her kind, round face from him once during the conversation, as if trying to read him.\n\nBut, no, he couldn't tell them why. \"It's difficult.\"\n\nJarek nodded. He leaned against the wall behind his wife, his one gloved hand tucked under his arm. His brown hair had grown since Owyn had last seen him as Hiro. He tucked the edges behind his ear. \"I guess it would be,\" he finally said, \"seeing as you're a wanted man in the entire Noble Kingdom.\"\n\nOwyn glanced up at Jarek and lowered his eyes again. \"I didn't want to share my troubles with you, but\u2014\" he looked into Boorda's inquisitive face \"\u2014I mean no harm. It was all a misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"Threatening Princess Anna?\" Jarek asked, while Boorda seemed to stare deeper into Owyn's eyes. \"How is that misunderstood?\"\n\nOwyn hung his head. How am I going to get these humans to help me? They risked much more helping me as a dragon. Why won't they help me as a human?\n\n\"I'm sorry I can't say more,\" he said, \"but I had to get out of there. And I need to reach her again, now. She should know I have her dragon, and I \u2013 I just have to talk to her\u2026 I\u2026\" He let his voice trail away. What else could he say? How could they be convinced to help him?\n\nBoorda reached her hand across the table to touch Owyn's. When he looked up, her eyes, the color of Anna's green eyes and Jarek's brown eyes mixed together, stabbed like a knife while sparkling with intuition. \"You care for her, don't you?\" she asked.\n\nOwyn could only nod. He remembered her knowing gaze and gentle touch when he had surprised her as a dragon. He could tell she wasn't afraid of him then and she wasn't afraid of him now.\n\nJarek finally stood up straight. \"Owyn,\" he said, \"allow me to discuss this with my wife.\"\n\nThey left Owyn sitting at the table with the empty plate in front of him. He listened to them leave the small kitchen and go into another room. The home reminded Owyn of Adair's \u2013 the first man Owyn met as a human \u2013 except Jarek's place was much larger. The walls were made of wood and mud and very little adorned the rooms except furniture. Tables and chairs, but no beds made up in the corner. Owyn assumed the beds were in the upper level of the house. Fortunately, Jarek and Boorda had no idea of his extraordinary hearing, so they only stepped into the adjacent room.\n\n\"He's clearly insane,\" Jarek mumbled. \"How do we get rid of him?\"\n\n\"By helping him.\"\n\n\"You can't be serious,\" he whispered back. \"He was naked and covered in dirt.\"\n\n\"So was Anna when you found her.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered, \"but we should just send him away and be done with him. I don't want him to hurt her.\"\n\n\"He doesn't mean to,\" Boorda whispered back.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"He loves her,\" Boorda said.\n\n\"There's no dragon in him?\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" she countered, \"he's almost all dragon. Practically a dragon in human form. But he's not deceitful and he's not here to harm her. I'm certain.\"\n\n\"He's still a criminal, no matter what the circumstances are.\"\n\n\"And you've never helped anyone else who was afraid of the guards,\" she said, \"have you?\"\n\n\"I learned my lesson then,\" he said. \"We're risking everything just taking him in.\"\n\nWhen Owyn heard this, he remembered Jarek's scream as he, in dragon form, blew white hot flame across his hand to destroy the earth wraith. That scream haunted Hiro's and Owyn's nightmares. With that, Owyn realized that he couldn't put them in any more danger.\n\n\"You know,\" he said from the next room, loudly scraping his chair across the floor and standing, \"I shouldn't have bothered you. You've been very kind, but I can't keep you from your lives any longer.\" When Jarek and Boorda stepped back in, Owyn met Jarek's eye. \"I'll figure it out without asking any more of you,\" he told them.\n\nJarek nodded, \"We'd like to help you.\"\n\n\"You have,\" he indicated the empty plate, \"and I'm grateful.\"\n\nAs he turned to leave, Jarek spoke up again. \"Remember, you're a wanted man in Kingstor. Your face is posted. With or without a dragon, the guards will arrest you the moment they see you.\"\n\n\"I'll be careful,\" he said and pulled the door open.\n\n\"Oh, spit in Tarsa's eye!\" Boorda exclaimed. Once she had the men's attention, she turned to Jarek. \"You'll be going there later today, won't you? On Dugger's wagon? To deliver goods to the market? Right?\"\n\nJarek seemed a little confused, but finally nodded. \"Oh, y-yes,\" he stammered, \"yes, we'll be going into Kingstor. Would you\u2026uh\u2026like a\u2026ride?\" Boorda placed a hand on her husband's arm. \"Oh, that's right,\" Jarek said, \"they check all the wagons going in or out of Kingstor.\"\n\n\"Except,\" Boorda said slowly, \"maybe the saddle box.\"\n\nOwyn held back a smile. \"No, thank you,\" he said, \"no, I think I'll walk.\"\n\nBoorda and Owyn shared a knowing grin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Separation",
                "text": "\"I don't like it,\" Kradik growled at Philip. \"You swore you wouldn't tell her anything of our plans.\"\n\n\"And I won't,\" Philip answered as he put a couple last-minute items into his saddlebag. \"I'm going to show her.\"\n\n\"That was not part\u2014\"\n\nPhilip tugged on his horse's girth a little hard before he decided not to take out his frustrations on the animal. He spun to glare down at the black, vacant cowl of the faerie. The faeries covered themselves with the darkened garment to hide their transparent skin. But Philip didn't need to see their judging eyes and sneers without feeling them.\n\n\"Look,\" he muttered low enough for the others around them not to hear, \"I made her a promise a long time ago. She has met my requirements to show her trustworthiness. I gave her my word and you have no right to say otherwise. Nor choice in the matter.\"\n\nKradik grunted but stalked away from the king.\n\nPhilip took a deep breath. That felt good, he thought.\n\n\"I don't like it,\" Torgon said, joining Philip alongside, holding his own horse's reigns.\n\n\"What now?\" Philip muttered, but allowed Torgon to speak his mind.\n\n\"I don't like your departing with Dieko and me leaving for the Rock Clouds tomorrow,\" Torgon said while watching the older man mount his own horse. \"You saw how he\u2026\" Torgon lowered his voice further, \"how he dealt with a dragon attack. He left his new wife behind!\"\n\nPhilip sighed. He watched the couple \u2013 who didn't act much like newlyweds \u2013 while he spoke with Torgon. Word had reached Philip that the two hadn't slept in the same room since the wedding night, and others had noticed they didn't even look at each other if they were in the same room. Anna spoke with Tierni while Amethyst, her maid, filled her saddlebags. Dieko barked orders at the guards from atop his mare.\n\nAmidst the chaos of departure preparations in the courtyard, Philip noted that Amethyst turned abruptly and went back into the castle. Everyone seemed to be upset about the party leaving and who was coming and going. Everyone had something to say or complain about. Amethyst and Anna were normally inseparable, except when Anna disappeared into the mountains. Even then, Amethyst often went with her or at least knew her whereabouts. This time, she simply nodded and left without saying goodbye. Philip brushed the thought aside to address his royal general's concern.\n\n\"Torgon,\" Philip said, \"you're the leader of the Noble army. You must go to the Rock Clouds and join the army there. I promised Anna she would learn all of our plans if she married. As for Dieko,\" they both glanced at the man, \"he'll need to learn everything anyway. For better or worse, if anything happens to me, he'll have to run the Noble Kingdom. He needs to know what's going on.\"\n\n\"Murzod and Dieko? You'll be surrounded by bullies and cowards!\" His eyes fell on Dieko.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Philip said, \"I'm leaving you with Kradik.\"\n\nTorgon grunted. \"Keep an eye on the old fool,\" he said as he stepped away.\n\n\"I will if you will.\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" another voice said behind him.\n\n\"No one seems to!\" Philip exclaimed, but spun at the words to face Tierni, her lips pressed firmly together and her arms crossed over her chest. He didn't realize just how intimidating those Black Saber uniforms were until he came under the scrutiny of the wearer, no matter how small she was.\n\n\"Don't like what?\" he finally spluttered.\n\n\"I don't like you leaving with my lady, the woman you assigned us to protect, without the Black Saber accompanying her in order to fulfill our duty.\"\n\nPhilip looked around to see everyone watching the conversation from the corners of their eyes. Except Dieko, who blatantly stared at them. Philip reached out and touched Tierni's elbow, indicating she follow him to move away from the audience.\n\nWhen she finally moved aside Philip leaned in close. Perhaps noticing it wasn't totally necessary, but he could smell the scent of flowers on her while they spoke. \"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"I know you don't approve, but we're bringing Hilde as a maid and protector and Anna can use a sword for herself as well.\"\n\n\"I'm her second,\" Tierni insisted, \"I should be alongside her and you know it.\"\n\nPhilip glared at the ground. He could feel anger and frustration welling inside him. When he felt it almost ready to overflow, he finally looked into her blue eyes. \"I know it,\" he said, barely able to keep his voice steady, \"but I also know this will be a dangerous journey. Not just the journey, but the destination is dangerous as well. I haven't had any control over anything for a very long time, not the faeries, not the war, not a single decision has been completely mine. So the one decision I am making now is to keep you from danger.\"\n\nExpecting another outburst, Philip had to blink hard when Tierni's countenance softened. She looked down at the ground momentarily before meeting his gaze again. \"I suppose Hilde's presence will suffice for now.\"\n\nPhilip, slightly baffled, turned toward his horse again.\n\n\"Majesty,\" Tierni said, and Philip turned back. \"You can't keep me from danger forever.\" She stood on her tiptoes and leaned in as if she wanted to whisper in his ear. When he bent toward her, she pecked him on the cheek. \"I'll see you in the Rock Clouds,\" she said before striding back into the castle."
            },
            {
                "title": "Tangled",
                "text": "Are we there yet? Owyn asked himself for the thousandth time. But no matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn't dare move. The bottom of the wooden box on the wagon smashed against his face. He could feel tiny slivers of wood working into his cheekbones with every bump. He couldn't move away because the top of the container sawed into his shoulder on the other side. His knees pressed into his chest. He felt like a hatchling crammed into an egg, but he couldn't explode from this one whenever he desired.\n\nThe saddle box was the only enclosure on the entire wagon, hidden underneath where the men sat, with a hatch on the side of it, next to Owyn's head. While Jarek visited with Dugger inside his home over drinks, Owyn had removed most of the contents of the compartment, with the exception of a thick blanket, then stuffed himself inside. He kept the blanket, hoping it would cushion or warm him, but instead sweat dripped relentlessly from his nose and the blanket smelled of animal waste, turning his stomach. In the end, he had shaped the blanket against the hatched door and around him as much as possible to hide his form.\n\nAfter the one-thousandth-and-forty-second bounce that jammed his cheek further into the walls of the wooden box, the wagon slowed. Owyn heard the wheels rattle over the bridge outside the city gates, then they stopped altogether, and he heard the two drivers talking to the guards. They were informed of the need to search the wagon and Owyn's spine prickled worse than the slivers digging into his face.\n\nOne guard poked around in the back of the wagon, but the other walked around the outside.\n\n\"What's in here?\" Owyn heard as the door to the saddle box swung open. Owyn's heart jolted. Ice spread through his lungs as he stopped breathing. The blanket puffed out of the door, but miraculously clung to the edges of the opening without falling out entirely.\n\n\"Extra saddle,\" the man accompanying Jarek answered. \"In case the wagon breaks.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" the guard grunted and shoved the blanket back in before closing the door on it.\n\nWith the door shut again, Owyn closed his eyes and took a shallow shaky breath. Heat washed over him, but he no longer felt hot. He could feel his blood pounding against his ears. The fear of being discovered threatened to change him into a dragon again. He felt his tail pull away from his leg ever so slightly before he took a deeper breath.\n\nAnna, he thought, I'm going to see Anna. The thought seemed to get his form under control. He focused on the cool sensation in his stomach.\n\nFinally, the guards cleared the men to leave. Owyn breathed easier as the wagon rolled on into the city. When they eased to a stop again, Owyn noticed the quiet and lack of clamor around them. The men jumped down from the wagon and Owyn heard the area quickly go still when their footsteps and voices faded away. Braving a look, Owyn shoved the hatch and pushed the blanket out of the opening.\n\nNot seeing anyone around or hearing any reaction to his motion, Owyn gradually wriggled himself free of his hiding place. He checked his surroundings before making sure to replace the blanket and close the small hatch on the saddle box. The wagon was pulled alongside one of the buildings in the center of the town and he assumed the men had disappeared into it. Streets slanted off at angles, but he couldn't see a way that led to the castle.\n\nHe rubbed and stretched his legs slightly as he hobbled down the street away from the wagon. No matter what happened next, he didn't want to get caught in Jarek's company. He couldn't place any suspicion on the man. He owed Jarek too much already.\n\nOwyn remembered the layout of Kingstor Noble from flying overhead. All the major roads seemed to slant away from the castle and wandering on foot through those same streets now made it much more difficult to find his way. Houses and buildings towered over his head. He stumbled up a street that he assumed would eventually wend its way to the castle gate. However, he reached an end where the only option was to turn to either side. He could smell horses on the other side of the wall in front of him, but there seemed to be no way over the blockade, as it reached almost a full dragon-length taller than he was. His choice of direction only led him into another street that curved away from the castle.\n\nWhile getting more and more frustrated with the confusion of the streets, Owyn's stomach began to distract him as well. Several buildings he passed displayed shelves full of meats and breads and things Owyn had no reference for, but they smelled delicious all the same.\n\nWhen he stepped into one of the buildings to ask for some of the food arranged to see from the street, he came face-to-face with a picture of a man on a wall near the door. Since Addil had taught Owyn to read, he was able to quickly interpret the description. A wanted criminal, at least three dragon claws tall, dark skin, black hair, \"to be arrested on sight for threatening bodily harm to Her Royal Highness Princess Anna.\" He slipped back out the door before the man inside could notice his resemblance. He decided his rumbling stomach wasn't nearly as important as not being arrested. Then he wondered how much the picture of the man really looked like him.\n\nHe bumbled along through the jumble of streets, hoping he would find some way toward the castle, but the layout of the town seemed determined to send him away. He would follow one way only to come to a dead end, and turning back he would find another way where he hadn't seen it before.\n\nHe eventually figured out the jagged roads that didn't appear to follow through to another road would eventually lead to the castle. It took the keen vision of a dragon to find them. Owyn was on his way but suddenly found himself blocked by a large gate with guards standing in front of it. Hanging on the wall behind the gate was another picture of himself, the fugitive. Luckily his quick movement away prevented the guards from seeing his face, but Owyn's progress was thwarted and he was forced to head back into the maze of Kingstor Noble streets.\n\nStill lost, Owyn accidentally slipped into an alley between buildings and found himself navel-to-nose with a short, round little woman in an apron.\n\n\"Who are you, then?\" she snapped at him.\n\n\"I\u2014um\u2014I just\u2014\"\n\n\"What'd you think you're doin' wandering int'a private residence?\"\n\n\"I'm\u2014uh\u2014lost.\"\n\n\"Too well, you are,\" she looked straight up at him. The top of her head barely met his chest, but she brandished a large wooden spoon as if she could lop off his head with it. \"You're not the one bin nippin' my loaves, are ya?\"\n\n\"Loaves?\"\n\n\"Don't think your size'll save you if you 'ave.\" She jabbed the spoon against his chest so hard he backed up. \"Keep your grimy 'ands off and stay out!\" Owyn backed into the street and set off at a run to avoid the dangerous little spoon-wielder.\n\nBefore much longer the sun began to descend in the sky. As it dipped, Owyn's stomach gurgled outright. The smells from the many buildings enticed him. With or without his picture on the wall, he would have to find something to eat soon and, hopefully, someone who would help him.\n\nHe came to a building with a large sign above the door showing a moose with the wings of a falcon. The sign read, \"Public House: Food, Drink, Rooms to Let\", and he stepped inside.\n\nA short hallway led to a large room that opened up before him. Several tables were arranged in front of a cold, unlit fireplace. The room was warm and multiple lighted candles hung overhead and were attached to the walls. A few people sat at the tables murmuring together, and two sat on tall chairs alongside a long, raised table with a solid front that stood along the side of the room. A skinny man stood behind the tall table, close to the door.\n\n\"Need something?\" he grunted, while focusing his attention on something behind the table top.\n\n\"Your sign said 'food',\" Owyn said, hanging back in the hallway. \"I was hoping I could get some.\"\n\n\"Long as you have money,\" the man said, without looking up.\n\nOwyn shook his head. \"I don't have any money.\"\n\n\"Well,\" the man finally put down whatever was in his hands and looked up at the newcomer, \"I can't rightly give\u2014\"\n\nWhen he stopped, Owyn's stomach clenched. The man's eyes widened, then darted to something on the wall beside him.\n\n\"You!\" he said.\n\nOwyn stepped forward to look around the corner of the opening and saw the familiar notice with his face hanging on the wall.\n\n\"You insulted the princess,\" the man's voice rose with each word. Two men and a woman looked toward the disruption.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Owyn began as he slowly backed toward the door.\n\n\"You threatened her life!\" the man yelled. He raised a shaky finger to point at Owyn and three men stood, the two at the tall table and one from near the fireplace.\n\n\"I didn't\u2014I would never\u2014\"\n\nBefore Owyn could concoct a defense, the three men rushed him. He fled toward the door but got pulled back into the common room. A woman yelled. Men grabbed at him. Fortunately, Owyn's size and swift dragon reflexes helped him push off the hands.\n\n\"Get the guards!\" the man behind the tall table yelled as Owyn launched himself over a shorter table to the back of the room. He pulled one of the men coming at him, used the momentum to spin him around, and shoved him into the other men pursuing him. At the back of the room he saw another door and threw himself at it.\n\nThrough another door after that and Owyn burst into a small courtyard with stables. He jumped over the fence into an empty stall. He heard the shouting of the men in pursuit. His heart pounded in his chest as he ran through the stalls toward an opening to the outside at the far end.\n\n\"Stop him!\" a man behind him yelled.\n\nA young boy with wide eyes stood in Owyn's way, but Owyn pushed past him, knocking him into a stack of hay.\n\nOnce in the street again, Owyn ran from the flying moose sign only to bring himself to an abrupt stop, seeing one of the women at the end of the street with two men in blue tunics. Owyn knew those tunics. The woman pointed at Owyn and the Kingstor guards headed for him.\n\n\"Stop!\" they yelled as Owyn ran the other way.\n\nHe squeezed into a small alley for cover to gain some distance, but the guards followed at the scream of a woman he ran into on the other side. Shoving past her he burst through another door into the next street, but he nearly tripped over a dog who growled and barked, and the guards followed.\n\nStill able to run at top speed, he praised the training he had received in the army until he realized that the guards behind him had the same advantage. Plus, the guards had armaments \u2013 long staffs with sharp pikes on the ends. He urged his feet to move faster.\n\nOwyn fled as fast as he could down the street, hoping to out-distance his chasers. He thought he had gained on them until he heard them shout.\n\n\"Stop him!\" the guards yelled.\n\nOwyn looked ahead and saw four more guards duck around the corner. He swerved to the left to avoid them and jumped over a wall with the use of a barrel sitting to the side. Another alley zig-zagged behind the buildings. Owyn knew that the alley ended at the side of the castle wall and would turn in both directions, so he stretched his legs to get there before his pursuers.\n\nWhen he reached the castle wall, Owyn could smell horses and animals on the other side. The wall rose higher than the adjacent rooftops, but the stacks of crates piled in the alley alongside the adjacent building gave him an idea.\n\nHe turned to the right just as the guards yelled at him again to stop. Using every ounce of his given strength without actually changing into a dragon, Owyn jumped off the crates, kicked off the castle wall, pushed from a window ledge and kicked off the castle wall again to finally pull himself onto the building rooftop. He didn't dare look down but he heard the guards come around the corner in the alley just as he rolled onto the shingles and out of their sight.\n\n\"He can't've gone far,\" he heard them say below. As the guards below scrambled through the alleys, Owyn crept across the rooftop to hide behind a chimney, avoiding the castle guards looking out from the towers.\n\nThe guards below pounded on doors and asked the occupants if they had seen the fugitive. Owyn lay still, not daring to peek from his hiding place until he heard something that would force him to move.\n\n\"Inform the castle guards,\" one of the men in the alley said to another. \"Perhaps they can search from the wall. You, search the rooftops!\"\n\nOwyn craned his neck around the chimney. While the streets were cast in shadow now, the sun still shone enough to reflect off the helmets of the guards on the castle towers. He watched as they paced back and forth, only occasionally throwing glances at the sky and earth and town.\n\nHe watched them until he heard movement in the building below him. The guards were coming up to the rooftops and the castle guards would be searching for him soon as well. He had to move. Making certain the tower guards were looking away before he budged, Owyn stood and ran across the roof toward the castle wall. As he scrambled, he remembered how his tail had begun to pull away from his leg when he felt the same kind of fear in the wagon box. He wished he could use his strong back dragon legs now, just strong enough to propel him off the roof. He didn't look down, but he felt power surge through his legs stronger than he knew his human legs could push him as he jumped. With the strength he could muster, he threw himself from the roof across the alley and up to the edge of the castle wall. He caught the very edge of the wall with his fingers, but that would be enough.\n\nPulling himself up to the edge, Owyn waited. He peered over the side of the battlements. The curved merlons hid him perfectly while he watched the tower. Once the tower guards turned away again, Owyn threw himself past the merlons to the walkway atop the wall.\n\nLanding on the walkway beyond didn't afford him the relief he sought. He felt exposed. At any moment the tower's guards would turn and see him. He searched his surroundings, first glancing at his legs to make sure he wasn't in part-dragon form. On the other side of the wall was a long row of covered stables. Landing from a jump would make noise and he would have to depend on the neighing inside to cover for him. But to get any further into the castle he knew he would have to run across the roof of the stables, revealing his presence in the waning sunlight.\n\nHe lowered himself carefully onto the stable roof, but slipped on the awkward angle of the shingles. In order to stay silent, he allowed his body to roll with the momentum. Unfortunately, he rolled onto his side and slid into a narrow crevice between the stable wall and the castle wall. He jostled down the small opening until his shoulder bumped against dirt at the bottom. With his body wedged and his bottom arm pinned under him, he listened to the tower guards run up and down the wall in the search. He heard orders being shouted. He even heard men running through the stables on the other side of one wall that held him.\n\nQuietly, Owyn twisted his shoulders but they were held fast and wouldn't move. His top hand could stretch but he couldn't reach anything beyond scraping the walls with his fingers. He could wriggle his hips but they were also stuck fast. Even his chest could barely expand to breathe comfortably. When he tried to inhale deeply, his chest pressed into the boards in front of him. Guards peeked over the battlements toward the stable. Owyn froze \u2013 not that he could move anywhere, nor could they see him wedged below \u2013 until their gaze moved on. While a remarkable hiding place, he couldn't help but compare it to the cell and chains he had previously endured in the dungeon. And if he couldn't get himself out of this predicament, he would probably be returned to the cell soon enough.\n\nOnce the guards on the walls moved on, Owyn began to methodically work against his walled confines. He knew the guards in the stables were closing in on his position so he pressed harder into the stone behind him, pushing his feet to budge himself. Looking ahead toward the far end of the stalls, he used his only free arm to reach up and pull himself along. His chest and back unexpectedly scraped against the stone and wood and he couldn't stop a gasp from escaping. Out of Owyn's sight on the other side of the stable wall, a searching guard stopped and turned toward the sound.\n\nOwyn held his breath at the sudden quiet. He closed his eyes, silently praying to Khurta to save him. When the guard finally moved on in his search, Owyn almost prayed thanks to Khurta, until he remembered the deadly trap he now lay in."
            },
            {
                "title": "Intrepid",
                "text": "As the horses clambered to a halt, Philip dismounted quickly. He checked his horse to see wide lids and darting eyes. The ride had been fast because the faeries had given Travaith, his majishun, a concoction for the horses and for the men who walked to speed them along. His horse had run at a steady gallop the entire way to the halfway-point encampment, as had the men on foot. Philip felt the horse's sides heaving and the beast's heartbeat pounded a faster-than-healthy rhythm under his palm. He silently decided he would never ask to try the potion himself.\n\nDieko stepped next to him, having handed off his own horse to a guard. \"Where's the commander of this hovel?\" he said, wrinkling his nose.\n\n\"I'm sure he'll be along shortly,\" Philip answered, although he was certain Dieko wasn't talking to him.\n\nPhilip saw a guard take his horse's reins and pull him away faster than normal to lead the animal to a rough pen. All the other men in their group had used the majishun's speed potion, as had Torgon's group and the majority of the Noble army. As far as Philip knew, the armies from the other kingdoms were using it as well.\n\nHe turned to watch the others in their party and stepped over to Anna. She and Hilde stood together, stroking their horses. Anna calmly whispered to soothe hers. A guard stood nearby, bouncing slightly on his toes as he waited for the princess to relinquish the animal. She looked into the beast's eyes with concern before she allowed it to be led away.\n\n\"Doesn't seem natural, does it?\" Philip said as Anna watched it go.\n\n\"No,\" she said shaking her head, then her eyes flitted to the guards around her. \"I can only wonder how it affects the men.\"\n\nFollowing her eyes, Philip noticed many guards twitching while they unloaded gear. Most rubbed down the horses with surprising vigor. Some wandered into the woods and back again for seemingly no reason except to keep moving. Before he could comment, a short man in a blue tunic with two swords embroidered on his shoulder, signifying him as a captain, walked quickly toward the party.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" the man said with a small bow. The man's brown hair melted into a receding hairline lower than Philip's gaze, but Philip tried to remember to keep their eyes connected. \"Welcome to our humble waystation. Please, come inside.\"\n\nThe group was ushered into the closest and largest of the rough encampment buildings. Inside, the captain indicated a large table with chairs for the king and his officers. Having been in the saddle all day, Philip declined the proffered chair, but stood beside it. Dieko took a seat with Anna beside him. Anna's companion, Hilde, stood behind Anna's chair. She looked impassive, neither uncomfortable nor interested in the proceedings.\n\n\"I'm Captain Leo Eisley,\" the short man said with another bow. \"I welcome all of your royal highnesses to our small outpost. If there is anything\u2014\"\n\n\"Refreshment,\" Dieko said before the man could finish.\n\nCaptain Eisley nodded to a guard by the door, who stepped into the next room.\n\n\"We're so happy to host your highnesses,\" Eisley continued with a smile.\n\n\"A map!\" Dieko barked as if he had been thinking of something to yell at the smaller man and only waiting for the opportune moment.\n\n\"Of course,\" Eisley said graciously with another bow. He shuffled to a cabinet against the wall and withdrew a large diagram of the Noble Kingdom. After laying it out on the table, Eisley motioned for the guard to set the tray of goblets and decanter he'd fetched next to it. Although the decanter was positioned directly in front of him, Dieko lifted a goblet and jiggled it slightly, expecting service, while his eyes wandered to the map.\n\n\"Where, exactly, are we?\" he asked no one in particular.\n\nPhilip accepted a full goblet from Eisley and stood over Dieko to point at the map. \"Here,\" he said, wishing he could \"accidentally\" spill the contents of his drink on the man's head. When had Dieko become so arrogant as to appear intentionally unpleasant? \"We're on the eastern edge of the Torthoth Range, halfway to the Great Northern Mountain.\" Before he might fulfill his own wish, he stepped away from the older man to remove the temptation. \"We should arrive tomorrow night if we use the faeries' speed potion on the horses again.\"\n\n\"Must we?\" Anna said, accepting her own beverage. \"It doesn't seem good for them.\"\n\n\"They'll be fine, Anna,\" Dieko said.\n\nAnna's jaw clenched when he addressed her and she looked at Philip for a response.\n\n\"Unfortunately,\" he said, \"I think we must. We need to hurry our progress so we can join Torgon at the Rock Clouds.\"\n\n\"Why are we wasting time and resources going to the Great Northern Mountain?\" Dieko grumbled. \"Why don't we go directly to the Rock Clouds? It would be preferable to sleeping somewhere that smells like a stable that hasn't been cleaned for months.\"\n\nPhilip took a deep breath and tried not to appear exasperated by the older man. \"I need to inspect production before we leave for the Rock Clouds, and I want to explain our plans to you. And my sister, too, of course.\" He nodded to Anna and received her small nod in return.\n\n\"What is it you're going to explain?\" Dieko asked. \"What are these mysterious and brilliant war plans you have that you're keeping to yourself?\"\n\nThere hadn't been an appropriate time along the road to divulge the information about where they were going. As well, Philip hadn't been comfortable, yet, with filling Dieko in on the details of his plans. He had held off until the last possible moment. Pressed by Dieko as he was, that moment appeared to be now.\n\n\"We have a secret weapon against the dragons,\" Philip said.\n\n\"Numbers aren't enough?\" Dieko snipped.\n\n\"Against one dragon, never mind an entire ruck?\" Anna said. \"Do you remember our wedding night?\"\n\nAs Dieko turned and opened his mouth to speak, Philip cut him off quickly before he could anger Anna further. \"Exactly,\" he said. \"All the Kingstor guards against a single dragon and it still escaped. But when we get to the Rock Clouds, we'll have a more powerful weapon.\"\n\nDieko turned back to Philip. \"Like what?\"\n\nPhilip looked at Eisley, who now stood silently nearby. \"Do you have a sample, Eisley?\"\n\nFrom behind the cabinet, Eisley produced a quiver of arrows. Pulling one out, Philip showed Anna and Dieko the blackened tip.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Dieko muttered. \"Dragon killer bolts would be more effective. They do more damage to a dragon than an arrow.\"\n\n\"Not with this,\" Philip said, pointing to the black tip. \"This black substance is dragon poison.\" Dieko's face slackened. Anna's seemed to harden.\n\n\"The faeries,\" Philip continued as Dieko plucked the arrow from Philip's hands, \"researched it in the castle at Kingstor. They found an effective recipe and have been producing the poison in the Great Northern Mountain with men from the Noble army to assist. Bolts have a higher chance of bouncing off a dragon's hide if not properly aimed. The smaller arrows are better at slipping between dragon scales. These arrows are being produced in the mountain and sent to our armies and our allies' armies in preparation for the attack on the Rock Clouds. We're going to check on production and escort a supply delivery to our own armies.\"\n\n\"What if we get attacked?\" Anna said, with a trace of fear in her voice.\n\nDieko nodded. \"I've heard the centaurs are attacking supplies and caravans.\"\n\n\"We'll have the arrows with us in case of dragons,\" Philip answered. \"And I plan on bringing men from the mountain to join us at the Rock Clouds. We should be a sufficiently large number for the centaurs to leave us alone.\"\n\nDieko shook the arrow. \"Are these safe? Around humans, I mean? Won't they harm centaurs too?\"\n\nRemembering Torgon's lack of fear when he drew the blackened arrow tip across his palm at the faeries taunt, Philip pointed at Dieko's hand. \"Try it and see,\" he said with a grin.\n\nPhilip stared at Dieko, testing the man's mettle, until Dieko reached his other hand toward Anna, palm up.\n\n\"Anna?\" he said.\n\n\"What?\" Anna gasped.\n\n\"If it's safe for me,\" Dieko said, turning to his young wife, \"it's safe for you, yes?\"\n\n\"No!\" Hilde pushed herself between the newlyweds. \"I'll not allow it!\"\n\n\"How dare you!\" Dieko hissed. He stood to confront Hilde, but the woman's size made him halt.\n\n\"You want to test it?\" Hilde said. She yanked the arrow out of Dieko's hand and drew the point of the blade across her own palm.\n\nEveryone flinched from the perceived pain, but couldn't take their eyes off her hand. The cut, just as Torgon's had so long ago, slid back together seamlessly. Hilde threw the arrow on the table and, wiping her bloodied hand on her black shirt, stepped away from Dieko to move back behind Anna. She never once took her eyes from Dieko.\n\nAfter an awkward silence, Philip cleared his throat. \"We have no means of knowing how it would react with a centaur, but an arrow is still an arrow. Tomorrow, I'll show you how it's made.\"\n\nAfter another moment, Dieko glared at Eisley. \"Where are our quarters?\"\n\nEisley wrung his hands. \"I'm sorry,\" he said, \"but we only have one room with a bed besides the barracks for the men. We're still rebuilding. I assumed the king would use those quarters.\"\n\n\"No,\" Philip said. \"I'm having my tent put up.\"\n\n\"Then,\" Dieko said, lifting his chin, \"Anna and I will take the quarters.\"\n\nPhilip shook his head. \"And what,\" he said, \"let Hilde sleep in the barracks?\" Before Dieko could balk, he spoke to Eisley. \"Let the ladies use the bedroom. Dieko and I can sleep in our tents. I'm sure Dieko agrees that any other arrangement would be rather inappropriate.\"\n\nPhilip could see Dieko's jaw grinding his teeth together. Finally, the man drained his goblet and stormed from the building.\n\n[ Shrouded ]\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nThe guards had quieted their search some time ago. They wouldn't have been able to access the tiny hidden space where Owyn lay trapped anyway. The sun was fully down and Owyn crept along by the feel of his one hand groping the wall and his body scraping against it.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nOwyn fell into the rhythm after another short break. Bare feet flat against the stone wall behind him, he used the pressure to push himself ever so slightly along the wall. He wriggled his hips to shift himself and push his shoulders a little farther. Then using his free hand to grip whatever he could against the rough wooden wall of the stable stall in front of him.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nOne week. The hatchlings only had one week. He might not even be out of these stables by then.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nFocusing on the rhythm helped distract from the pain. Every claw's length of movement of his shoulders felt like sword blades drawn across his back. The shirt and breeches Jarek had given him tore away easily as he scraped along. The stench of the horses and their excrement threatened to turn his stomach and the pain in his back doubled the pain in his stomach.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nSeveral times he debated whether to turn himself into a dragon and burst from the confines. Each time he remembered there was no way to know if the guards at Kingstor Noble had poison-tipped arrows that would kill him. So he inched along.\n\nHe was actually closer to the other end of the stables, if only he could move backward. In fact, he'd tried to move himself to the nearer escape, but had found it easier to use his feet to propel him forward. So he scratched and squirmed toward the far end of the stable wall.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nFeet. Hips. Shoulders. Hand.\n\nAfter what felt like an eternity, he stretched his arm to reach a vertical post between two stalls. Hooking his fingers on the edge, he pulled hard to gain more distance, but almost cried out as he felt small portions of skin peeling from his back. In the back of his mind, he wondered if his wings would survive.\n\nHe took another short break. Feeling pain as a human was slightly different from feeling pain as a dragon. The stabs of icy pain were similar, but burning often followed. As a dragon the burning would be a good sign; but it would only bring more pain to a human. The throbbing would usually briefly subside into numbness, but what he felt now didn't subside. It burned until the pain concentrated itself into stabbing prickles.\n\nResting and trying to hold in his screams, he tried to see the area around him. It seemed the guards had given up on finding him. From his place between the two walls, the sky appeared fully dark. Even the horses had stopped much of their chomping and clomping noises. Somewhere, though, a light burned, giving Owyn just enough vision for what he needed to see.\n\nOnce he started inching along again, he noticed a crack in the stable wall just over his head. He could see the horse's hooves through the slats of the wall. Part of the wooden slats had been shaved away, weakened by the horse's chewing or scratching perhaps.\n\nOwyn rested quietly for a moment. He remembered a piece of information he had been taught as a soldier in the Noble army. Horses, especially those untrained to be a war horse, spooked easily. And never walk behind a horse in case it becomes scared and kicks you. He realized this horse must not be a war horse or it would already be at the Rock Clouds.\n\nThe horse stood with its head down and one hoof resting directly in front of the weakened part of the wall. Bringing his free hand up higher along the wall, Owyn swung it down quickly to bang on the wall. Although the noise wasn't enough to alert anyone else to his presence, it was enough for the horse. The scared horse's head jerked up and his back leg struck the wall behind him, opening a large crack.\n\nOwyn lay silent again, wondering if anyone would come to inspect the noise. No one came. The crack in the wooden slats wasn't large enough to free him, but it was significantly close. Owyn waited until the animal quieted. Again, he banged on the beams and again the frightened horse kicked the wall behind him. This time the wall cracked in another spot and a small piece fell away.\n\nBefore Owyn could inch closer, he heard footsteps coming. Some of the other horses had woken and were snorting and neighing. The horse before him stamped and protested at being disturbed.\n\n\"Shady,\" whispered a voice, \"quiet there. What's wrong with you?\"\n\nA stable hand fumbled to open the stall door on the other side of the wall from where Owyn hid. He could hear the person walking around the stall, probably inspecting the horse. Would they examine the wall? See the crack?\n\n\"What did you do?\" Apparently, they would. \"Did you hear a mouse or something?\" the person whispered to the horse. \"Well,\" they sighed, \"we'll fix it in the morning. No extra oats for you if you're going to make more work for me.\" The person closed the stall and stalked away, grumbling.\n\nAfter he was sure the stable hand was gone, Owyn pulled himself up to the cracks in the wall.\n\n\"Don't mind me, Shady,\" he whispered to the horse. The last thing he needed was to scare the animal again and get kicked in the face. \"I'll just work on this hole a little more myself.\"\n\nHe wiggled the boards back and forth and after some effort the cracks grew bigger. After more work the boards cracked and pushed out of the way. Eventually, Owyn wriggled himself through the hole and into the horse's stable.\n\nHe lay in the hay at the horse's feet for a while, feeling the sting in his back, chest and arm. Sitting up, he rubbed life back into the flattened arm and his legs. Standing up, he rubbed the horse before turning to leave. \"Thanks for your help, friend. Hope I've never eaten one of your friends.\"\n\nThe horse snorted as Owyn unlatched the door and tiptoed out of the stall.\n\nCarefully slipping from shadow to shadow, Owyn regularly glanced up at the guards on the towers. Only sparsely placed torches lit the pathways because three bright moons gave more light than a fugitive might desire. Caught off guard as he crept along, Owyn saw one guard marching straight down the pathway from the castle to the stables toward him, but he ducked into the shadow of a barrel just in time not to be seen. A small glowing cube hung from a chain around the guard's neck, the cube a common majikal item that humans used to see better in the dark. As the guard passed Owyn, the shadows and light shifted around him, threatening to expose him. Owyn knew he would have to keep to the deeper shadows.\n\nHe had no idea where Anna's chambers might be or any idea how he would get there. He assumed he would find the tower where she placed the red banner as a sign to him that she needed to speak with him, but with as many guards as he had seen prowling around, he doubted he could get there tonight. Especially without being seen.\n\nAnother guard with a cube of light crossed the path in front of him between two outdoor walkways. More guards peered over the edge of the battlements. More watched from the towers. Owyn began to move from one of the shadows but caught sight of a guard peeking out from a window. Was it always this busy at the castle? He didn't remember nights with this much activity while he was chained here as a dragon. Perhaps more guards were on watch because word had passed around of Owyn's appearance in town.\n\nOwyn shifted to another shadow only one dragon claw away. Moments after he flattened against the wall, another guard crossed in front of him. He had to stifle a cry of pain as he leaned against the wall on his torn back.\n\nBy the time I get to Anna the armies will have attacked the Rock Clouds, he thought as he rolled his eyes to the night sky. Seeing the black sky speckled with stars gave him an idea. But it wasn't without risks.\n\nWhen enough time had passed that Owyn thought the guards had cleared the area, he moved away from the wall to the middle of the pathway.\n\nAnger. Dragon.\n\nSilently, he jumped into the air and spread his wings. Aches and pinpricks of pain speckled Hiro's wings. They felt as if someone had tried to use them as a talon sharpener. His borrowed clothing fell to the path beneath him. Beating his wings against the air, he gained height until he rose above the lower rooftops of the castle.\n\nUsing one of the shingled roofs, Hiro kicked off to gain more altitude. Surprisingly, he didn't hear the call until he flew toward one of the towers.\n\n\"DRAGON!\"\n\nThe call echoed from all the towers in turn, then the walls, then the ground. Hiro flew close to the towers as the guards slung their bows. On the second tower, one of the guards took a swing at him with a sword. He didn't taunt them too much for fear of poisoned arrows.\n\nHiro shot into the night sky. He hoped the men would lose sight of him in the dark. He gained as much altitude as he dared before plunging to the ground. Aiming for the front of the castle to keep his pursuers in chase, he dropped a wing at the last second and spun in mid-air. Streaking toward the far tower, he flew up the side facing the castle courtyard and slipped silently over the top. The men on the tower ducked as he skimmed over their heads. When they recovered their senses and ran to the other side of the tower, the black dragon had disappeared.\n\nDragon, dragon, dragon, dragon\u2026 Human!\n\nHowever, a naked man clung silently to a window ledge partway down the tower. Luckily it was still the warm side of autumn. The window remained open in the nighttime to allow a gentle breeze. Owyn waited until he heard the tower guards report that they had lost sight of the black dragon. He finally pulled himself level with the window ledge and unexpectedly met the eyes of a young maid with soft brown hair and a blue apron. But rather than scream with alarm, the young woman waved one hand at Owyn and shook her head. \"Not yet,\" she whispered.\n\nStill shocked by the encounter, Owyn lowered himself back under the window ledge just in time to hear the guards from the tower rumble down the stairs past the window. While he waited for them to clear, he wondered, Who is this woman? She had almost seemed to expect him. She certainly wasn't shocked or frightened at his presence, as he had been at hers. Once the guards passed, he mustered his courage to peek over the window ledge again. When he pulled himself up, the maid gestured for him to climb inside.\n\nClambering through the window into the stairwell, he could see the young maid holding a long black cloth in one hand and a glowing cube in the other. Once Owyn's feet found the floor, the maid stepped in front of him.\n\n\"You are the black dragon, are you not?\" she asked, looking directly into his eyes without wavering.\n\nOwyn scrunched his face, unsure how to answer her.\n\nThe maid took a step closer to him. Her face, devoid of fear, appeared hard and determined. He remembered her now. She had flirted with one of the guards to distract him so that Anna could free him from the chains keeping him in the courtyard. She must know many secrets. Perhaps all of Anna's.\n\n\"You are the black dragon, are you not?\" she repeated.\n\n\"How do you\u2026? Who\u2026?\" he stuttered.\n\nThe diminutive maid pursed her lips, transferred the cloth to the other hand and grabbed Owyn by one arm. She turned him enough to see the black outlines of his wings and tail on his back and leg.\n\n\"Of course, you are,\" she said as she released his arm.\n\n\"How do you\u2026\"\n\nShe held up her cube to stare into his eyes. \"Your eyes,\" she said, \"they're as black as a dark cave on a starless night.\"\n\nOwyn pulled his head away from her inspection. \"I need to see Anna. Can you take me to her?\"\n\nThe maid lowered the cube slightly. \"My mistress's eyes are green.\"\n\nAs Owyn tried to discern whether he could trust a young woman who couldn't or wouldn't explain herself, the maid began wrapping the cloth in her hand around his waist, showing no hesitation despite his nakedness. Perhaps Adair, who had taught him much about being human, wasn't exactly right about the body parts that shouldn't be shown to other humans. Or perhaps the important point wasn't that they shouldn't be shown, but when.\n\n\"Wrap this here,\" she said, using deft hands to secure the cloth. The cloth clung to itself at the top around his waist, allowing his legs to move freely. \"Follow me. Quickly.\"\n\nShe led him into the castle by the light of her small cube. She walked so fast that Owyn thought he might lose her if he blinked. Twice she stopped him, counted to herself, then whipped around corners before he could ask questions. Finally she led him through a door into what seemed to be a bed chamber.\n\n\"I'm Amethyst,\" she said, leading him to another door. \"My lady told me to wait for you.\"\n\n\"How did she know\u2014\"\n\n\"In here,\" she motioned. She led him into a large room filled with gowns. Owyn recognized many of the gowns he had seen Anna wear before. In the back of the room, behind all the others, stood a large blue gown held up by a frame to keep its shape. Owyn immediately recognized it as the gown she had worn in his visions. The ones in which a blue ribbon was wrapped around her wrist. It was her wedding gown.\n\nAmethyst set down her cube to pull a couple of long metal hooks from the wall. Without a glance at him, she ordered Owyn to follow her to the back of the room.\n\n\"What are those for?\" he asked, trying to indicate the hooks.\n\nUsing the hooks, she lifted the skirt of the blue wedding gown at the bottom hem. \"I'm not allowed to touch it. Get under,\" she ordered.\n\nOwyn pointed with a question on his face. \"Am I allowed?\"\n\nShe stood holding the skirt of the dress up and glared at him. \"Don't let them find you.\"\n\nOwyn took that as a 'no'.\n\n\"Hurry,\" she said, \"the guards will be here any moment.\"\n\nWith one more glance at the door, Owyn dove under the garment and she dropped the skirts around him. He squeezed his knees in tight, but even so, he could feel his legs, feet and shoulders brushing against the soft fabric. No sooner had he ducked underneath and the maid dropped the hem with the hooks, they both heard a knock at the door.\n\nOwyn heard Amethyst replace the hooks on the wall, pick up her glowing cube and leave the room. She closed the door behind her, but he listened as she walked to the other door in the outer chamber.\n\n\"Sorry to bother at this late hour,\" the man's voice said as he entered, \"but we're inspecting the entire castle.\"\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\" Amethyst insisted. \"My lady isn't even here. And thank Shurka she isn't.\"\n\n\"If she isn't here,\" the man said as Owyn heard more feet enter the room and wander around the bed chamber, \"why are you attending to her quarters?\"\n\n\"Not that it's any of your business,\" she answered, \"but there's always work to be done. I find it easier to get tasks done while my mistress is away.\"\n\n\"At night?\"\n\n\"Sometimes.\"\n\nAfter a moment, the man ordered, \"In there.\" The man's voice sounded familiar, but Owyn didn't have time to think about it before he heard the door to the room where he was hidden open.\n\n\"Shurta's tangles!\" Amethyst exclaimed. \"What do you hope to find in there?\"\n\nAfter a startled pause, a couple men entered the room. \"A dragon flew overhead only moments ago.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Amethyst said, \"and I have, of course, hidden the beast in my lady's petticoats.\"\n\nSilence among them. Then a few snickers.\n\nOwyn could hear their heartbeats inside the chamber. He thought the men must have brought more light with them because he could see a faint shadow falling across the cloth in front of his face. His own heart beat a rhythm so loud he thought the men might hear it.\n\nFinally, Amethyst broke the silence. She must not have liked the look on the men's faces.\n\n\"No,\" she whispered. \"How can you even consider such a thing?\"\n\nFootsteps walked toward Owyn's hiding place.\n\n\"It's forbidden for all but the high priestess,\" Amethyst insisted.\n\nThe shadow on the fabric grew small.\n\n\"Not even the king can grant you quarter if the high priestess finds out!\" she shouted.\n\nOwyn saw the form of a hand come clearer into focus as it reached for the skirt.\n\n\"General!\" Another man's voice called to him from near Amethyst. The hand halted. \"Please, sir. The men and I would rather not lose a good commander. There's no dragon under there.\"\n\nThe hand drifted away.\n\nOwyn exhaled silently. He listened in relief as the general backed away and the guards left the area. Before leaving the chamber where he hid, Owyn heard the general mutter under his breath, \"Why is it always this dragon?\"\n\n[ Trouble ]\n\n\"How do you know who I am?\" Owyn mumbled through mouthfuls of slices of cold meat, cheese, bread and even some juicy round red vegetables. He preferred the meat over the others, but his human stomach rumbled so loud that he ate everything the young maid placed in front of him. He surprised himself by rather enjoying the red plants.\n\n\"You're the reason I'm here instead of with my lady,\" Amethyst grumbled, \"as I should be,\" she added quietly. She sat on the bed behind him, gingerly dabbing at his cuts with a cloth. Her eyes never fully connected with his even when he turned to look at her.\n\nThat didn't quite answer his question, but he let it slide. She hadn't answered any of his questions directly. She had only permitted Owyn to come out from under the gown after she counted to one hundred. She told him \u2013 more like ordered him \u2013 to sit on the bed so she could tend to his wounds, but she also pulled out the large plate of food. She hadn't spoken much, only enough to dodge giving answers that would satisfy Owyn.\n\n\"Anna must have a crystal ball,\" he said between gasps of pain and mouthfuls of meat. \"How long have you two been planning all of this?\"\n\n\"She's not here,\" Amethyst said, after once again waiting for Owyn to hold still.\n\nOwyn waved at the empty room. \"I can see that.\" He thought that maybe by simplifying his questions he might get a straight answer. \"Where is she?\"\n\n\"She has the answers you seek,\" she said putting the cloth down and grabbing a small vial of liquid.\n\n\"Did she tell you anything? Does she know what Philip is planning?\" he asked. Anna obviously knew more than she would have told anyone else. But why would she leave her maid behind without a message for him?\n\nGlancing over his shoulder, he saw Amethyst shake her head.\n\n\"If she hasn't told you anything, then I must find her,\" he answered. \"Immediately.\"\n\n\"You'll sleep here tonight,\" she said as if she hadn't heard him. \"The remainder of the army and complement, including me, will leave in the morning.\"\n\n\"And me?\"\n\nThe young woman stopped; after another beat, she splashed the liquid on a different cloth. \"If I told you to go to the Rock Clouds and await her there, would you?\"\n\nOwyn gasped again as the liquid she applied seared into the skin on his back. The extra pain didn't help his thoughts, but he focused on his questions as best he could. Why would Anna be in the Rock Clouds? Could he just sit and wait for her? Should he? How much does she know? Where are the poison arrows? Did the humans have a way to get into the Rock Clouds? How could they stop the spread of the poison? But most importantly, does Anna know who the traitor is among the dragons? Has she found out yet? Does Philip even know who it is? The hatchlings didn't have long to live. If Anna had the answers, he had to get them. Now. Could he stay away until then? Could he wait with nothing else to do but hope to see Anna soon?\n\nAnd how in the world does such a small vial of liquid spread a blinding icy fire across his entire back?!\n\n\"Owww!\" he whispered loudly.\n\nHe realized Amethyst had gathered the rags and stood, but she stopped next to him. He turned to her and she glared back in frustration, almost to the point of anger. She ground her teeth and turned her head.\n\n\"I have a uniform for you,\" she said. \"You'll need to blend in with the men until everyone leaves.\"\n\n\"Where am I going?\"\n\nAmethyst shook her head slightly, still not willing to give away what she knew. \"You will find her at the Rock Clouds, but for now, she has gone to the Great Northern Mountain,\" she finally said. \"She's gone with the king. He swore to explain everything to her when she married.\"\n\n\"Anna is with the king?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she nodded, \"and her husband, Lord Dieko of Selevyn.\"\n\nOwyn stiffened.\n\n\"They have no idea,\" she grinned, staring at something across the room, \"they'll get much more than they wished for.\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked. When she didn't answer immediately, Owyn left the plate and stood in front of her. \"What will they get?\n\nAmethyst smiled up at him. \"A dragon, of course.\"\n\nOwyn nodded. Of course they would. He would follow that blasted woman to the gates of the World of Souls.\n\nAmethyst woke him before the sun came up, a pattern he remembered from his training in the army. She had ordered him to lie down and rest for the night, then slipped into an adjacent chamber. But he didn't sleep well, and not because of his back. No, whatever she had applied to his wounds had helped them heal faster than they would have done on their own. Amethyst had kept the doors locked and the windows closed and covered. Through his fitful night, Owyn had worried about Anna and the hatchlings and the dragons and the centaurs, but each time he woke and slept and woke and slept, he stayed human, thank Shurka.\n\nAmethyst threw a uniform at him but told him to keep the cloth she had wrapped around him the previous night. \"Wear it when you change and it will change with you. It was made for your black scales.\"\n\n\"Who made it?\" he wondered aloud, not really expecting an answer.\n\nShe shook her head at him. \"I can only assume you are the reason all of this has been so difficult.\"\n\nShe went back to ignoring him as she packed several large trunks. But she didn't seem to be concerned about what went into them as she threw in some empty tonic bottles and what looked like an old hairbrush. After sunrise she fetched two plates of food; the larger one she passed to Owyn.\n\nWhile they were eating, she suddenly jumped off the bed, threw the plates into a trunk, and slammed a helmet on Owyn's head.\n\n\"Tell me I can't take all these trunks down,\" she said. Her eyes flitted to the door. \"Now!\"\n\nBefore he could question her, the door opened.\n\n\"You can't take all of those,\" Owyn said quickly, trying to sound demanding.\n\n\"He's right,\" the guard said as he came through the door. Owyn pretended to scan the trunks surrounding them to keep from facing the guard. He knew his old claw's rival, claw 7-2, had been stationed at the castle. It was a good guess that one of them might recognize him if they saw him.\n\n\"She is a lady!\" Amethyst shouted at both of them. \"She's a princess and if the worst should happen, she'll be the queen! She needs to be at her best at all times!\"\n\n\"Doesn't she already have everything she needs with her?\" the guard said.\n\n\"One trunk,\" she pleaded. \"Just one more trunk.\"\n\n\"No, not one more,\" he said. \"Only one!\"\n\nAmethyst huffed, punching her fists on her hips. The motion caught Owyn's attention, reminding him very much of Anna.\n\n\"Fine!\" she threw up her hands. Checking the trunks, she pointed to one. \"Take that one down.\"\n\nWithout another word, Owyn hefted the trunk in his arms.\n\n\"And take that with you!\" Amethyst yelled, throwing Owyn's long black cloth, bundled into a roll, on top of the trunk.\n\nOwyn pushed past the guard, carrying the trunk down to the courtyard, leaving the bickering servants behind him.\n\nWalking the halls and wandering amidst the army of men preparing to leave, Owyn folded and unfolded the black cloth to make himself look busy every time someone came by. Owyn went unnoticed in the scurry to get the last of the castle's complement on the journey. Finally, several minutes later, with everyone except the bare minimum castle staff being left behind, the large group was ready to depart. Unbeknownst to the men of the army, Owyn, the Noble Kingdom's fugitive, marched out the castle gates behind them.\n\n[ Omission ]\n\nPhilip dismounted his horse in the large cavern opening. They had ridden far, but the men and horses still seemed jittery to continue. Instead of trying to soothe the beast, Philip was distracted by the enormity of the view under the mountain.\n\nThe cavern opening could easily allow two dragons to fly inside. Deep into the vast space, paths wound past cauldrons of different sizes, racks filled with rows of arrows, ladders, tables filled with bowls and scales, all covered in ash. Rivulets of molten lava flowed under the cauldrons. Men climbed ladders and stirred pots of bubbling black fluid. Black-tipped arrows overflowed large crates near the entrance.\n\nTo one side of the enormous space, stairs twisted up to several doors. The barracks and rooms for officers. Philip headed that direction when a familiar face came into view.\n\n\"Welcome, Sire,\" Murzod's slimy voice intoned. His beard was much longer than last Philip saw him and he looked more unkempt than ever. His receding hairline emphasized the heavy beard. \"We're so pleased you could take the time to inspect our humble facility.\" Behind him a faerie drifted away toward the cauldrons.\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't come sooner,\" Philip said. And he meant it.\n\nHe noticed the haggard glances from the guards around him. How long had they been here? Their clothes were torn and thinning. Their faces, dirty and dripping. Dozens of men had bandages wrapped around their hands, wrists and feet.\n\nThe heat intensified as they walked farther into the cavern. The rivers of lava flowed from the back of the cavern into the ground along the sides. When the streams were too wide or too many ran together, a small bridge hovered over them, allowing access to the other side.\n\n\"If you'll follow me, My Lord,\" Murzod said, ignoring Philip's wandering eyes. \"I'll show you to your quarters. I know how arduous the journey can be.\"\n\n\"That sounds perfect, Murzod,\" Dieko said, stepping forward. \"Do you have any rooms with windows? It's stifling in here.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Murzod said. \"The two large rooms next to the side of the mountain are for that purpose. Our special guests receive fresh air to cool them from the heat generated by our production.\"\n\nDieko insisted they move on to their rooms but Philip stopped. Bothered by the ignorance of Murzod and Dieko, Philip walked away from them.\n\n\"I wish to see the facility first,\" he finally said. He wasn't going to wait. He didn't like the idea of the dragon poison. He didn't like the idea of the war to begin with. The one thing he cared most about and the one thing he could do something about, he would. The men. He inspected the men working and their surroundings.\n\nMurzod caught up to the king and began pointing out the different functions of the many apparatuses around them. Philip already knew the basics of making the poison, but he didn't realize the intricacies. However, he couldn't listen as Murzod explained the process. He saw haphazard ladders that someone could easily fall from. He saw tables propped on large boulders. Steam drifted from the boulders and the floor. Sweat dripped from the men and sizzled on the floor around them. Several times, Murzod warned Philip away from unsafe areas where men were clearly laboring.\n\nAs they came to the back of the cavern, Philip saw the point where the lava flowed in a huge river from the back wall. The light from the lava blinded his eyes in the dark surroundings. As he began to turn, Anna, who he had almost forgotten was there, called out.\n\n\"What are those men doing there?\" she said, pointing.\n\nPhilip turned to where she indicated and after his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a small group of men huddled next to the wall beside the thickest of the lava flows.\n\n\"Nothing of note,\" Murzod grumbled. \"If you'll follow me, Your Highnesses?\"\n\nPhilip didn't move, gazing intently at the men. \"That can't be safe.\"\n\nAnna walked closer. \"Are they chained?\"\n\n\"Only one of them,\" Murzod answered, as if that was acceptable.\n\nPhilip ground his teeth and turned to the captain. \"Explain yourself, Murzod.\"\n\nWhen Philip looked into his eyes, Murzod straightened his back. He didn't quite meet Philip's height and Philip stood up even taller.\n\n\"It is a means to discipline my men,\" he said. \"We need to have order. Especially in such a dangerous environment.\"\n\nThat made sense to Philip. He had been raised with Bragon teaching him the challenges of how to discipline. He knew that punishing someone was often more difficult for the punisher, and was reasonable only if it achieved justice.\n\n\"Only one violated a rule,\" Murzod answered. \"He hit a superior officer.\"\n\nIgnoring warnings to keep her distance from the searing lava, Anna walked briskly toward the men. Philip and Murzod followed her, knowing the danger. Dieko stayed back, well away from the fiery heat.\n\n\"You there,\" Anna pointed to one of the men, the largest man among them. \"What's your name?\"\n\nThe man stood respectfully with his head lowered. \"Name's Thaddeus, My Lady. I had the honor to be sworn into the army by Your Highness.\"\n\n\"And what happened here?\" she asked. \"Why are you men being punished like this?\"\n\n\"My Lady,\" Murzod blurted. \"You don't\u2014\"\n\n\"SILENCE!\" she yelled at him. Turning back to Thaddeus, she said in a firm, but kinder tone. \"Please explain. Everything.\"\n\nThaddeus glanced at Murzod, who shook his head ever so slightly, but that only seemed to embolden the larger man. He stood up straight and spoke clearly.\n\n\"Addil,\" he said, pointing to a small man with broken spectacles on his nose, \"he's not the strongest in the group. He was struggling one day. When Murzod came over to beat him, Maelin, that's your man chained to the wall, stood between them. When Murzod tried to hit Maelin, Maelin took the first swing. He was only standing up for the men in his claw, my lady.\"\n\n\"Maelin hit Murzod?\" Philip said. While understanding the need to discipline the men and the rule that a subordinate must never hit a superior, Philip knew something else must be going on.\n\nThaddeus nodded.\n\n\"Why are all your claw's men together over here?\" Philip asked. \"Why aren't the rest of you working?\"\n\nThaddeus shifted uncomfortably. \"We take our punishment as one in claw 3-4. Seeing as any of us would have done the same for another.\"\n\nAnna paced closer to the lava and back. \"You're also trying to shield him from the heat.\"\n\nPhilip noticed most of the men sat between Maelin and the heat of the lava. A few rested on the more temperate side of their leader.\n\nThaddeus stared at the ground a moment, then said, \"We take it in turns, Highness.\"\n\n\"And how long will they be like this?\" Philip asked.\n\nMurzod tilted his head. \"It depends. Only one man is under punishment, the others are disobeying orders by staying here and not working. If their behavior doesn't improve, they'll all take a turn in the chains.\"\n\n\"For how long?\" Philip asked again.\n\n\"Several days.\"\n\nAnna huffed, crossing her arms over her chest. \"The heat could kill them.\"\n\nMurzod shrugged. \"It happens,\" he said with stony features.\n\nPhilip struggled to keep his teeth from grinding. \"Well,\" he said, when he found his voice. \"you'll have to find some other means of punishment, because production won't be able to stay in this location much longer.\"\n\n\"Unless you plan on trapping them here,\" Anna added. \"The ice on the surrounding sea is melting. The facility will have to be abandoned for the season or else you'll have no way out and will be forced to stay here much longer than planned.\"\n\nMurzod glanced at Anna, then looked over at Philip. \"Kradik said we need to produce enough arrows to fill the quiver of every man in the five kingdoms' armies. That total is much more than we have now. We plan to continue the work here and deliver supplies by eagle.\"\n\n\"Eagle?\"\n\n\"Who cares about supplies when these men are likely to die under these conditions?\" Anna almost shouted. She marched to Murzod and held out her hand. \"The key,\" she spat.\n\nMurzod looked to Philip. The young king could see both sides of the debate but he knew he wouldn't be so hard on his men. How long had this treatment been going on? He knew it was much too dangerous and Anna was right. These men had certainly suffered enough for being loyal to each other. He finally shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to exacerbate the situation, and nodded to Murzod. \"She has the power to grant pardons,\" he said.\n\nMurzod handed the key to Anna, who spun around fast enough to whip him in the face with her hair.\n\nAs she freed the man from his chains, Philip and Murzod joined Dieko on the cooler side of the lava. \"I'll need good men at the Rock Clouds for the battle ahead of us,\" Philip devised. \"I believe you should accompany us when we go, Murzod. We also need a strong contingent to escort us to the front lines. We'll have to pull most of your men away from their duties here.\" From the corner of his eye, Philip noticed some of the working guardsmen nearby perk up at these words.\n\nMurzod seemed thoughtful before asking, \"How will we maintain the production we need to continue supplying the weapons?\"\n\n\"I'm sure we have plenty for the time being,\" Philip said. \"You've been operating at the highest possible efficiency and our quivers will be plenty full for this battle. Make no mistake, production will return to 100 percent when the lake is frozen over again, but I think we can put someone else in charge of this place. I'd rather have good men and strong leaders with me during the battle ahead. Wouldn't you agree\u2026 General?\"\n\nMurzod's eyes widened a moment, but he smiled quickly at the change in title. \"Of course, Sire,\" he said with a bow.\n\nPhilip gazed at the men while Anna attended to Maelin's discomfort after standing up without his shackles. \"Where is your lieutenant?\" he asked. \"We should let him know that he'll be in charge when you leave.\"\n\n\"Uh,\" Murzod hesitated, \"he\u2026um\u2026he passed\u2026a while ago.\"\n\nThis time Philip didn't bother to hide his shock and Anna's eyes flashed again. \"Passed?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sire,\" Murzod said. \"He died from exposure.\"\n\nMurzod tried to hide his glance to Dieko, but Philip caught it. Dieko quickly straightened to confront the young king and defend Murzod. \"He said it happens,\" the older nobleman said. \"I received a few reports from Captain\u2014I'm sorry, I mean General Murzod\u2014at the request of Royal General Torgon. He's been doing his best here but some of the men aren't as hardy as they need to be for this assignment.\"\n\nSomething clicked into place in Philip's mind. A little louder, he said, \"Someone will need to be in charge of moving these men to the Rock Clouds. We don't have the luxury of them resting while we do the fighting.\" Before Murzod could counter him, Philip called to the man being half-dragged toward the barracks. \"Maelin, is it?\" he said.\n\nThe men of claw 3-4 stopped as one and turned to their king. The men didn't salute as they probably should have otherwise, as they didn't seem to even be able to lift their feet to walk. The two men carrying Maelin shifted so he could look at the king. \"Yes, Sire,\" he croaked through parched lips.\n\nPhilip stood to his full height, hoping the other men around them could hear everything he said. He needed witnesses and allies. \"You'll be in charge of getting all of these men and their belongings to the Rock Clouds. I expect\u2014\"\n\n\"Sire,\" Murzod began to argue quietly.\n\nPhilip glared him down until he dropped his gaze. Returning his attention to the men, he continued. \"I expect you and all of these men to depart here in two days. You will leave hours behind us and maintain the pace without faerie potions to speed you. Am I clear\u2026Lieutenant?\"\n\nSilence followed, only punctuated by the bubbling lava around them. After a moment, Maelin lifted a shaking hand from the shoulder of the man carrying him, closed it into a half-fist, and placed it against his chest. The other men in the claw gathered their height and saluted as well. Philip noticed a grin tickle the lips of the smallest man in the group, his eyes darting to Murzod, but away again before it could be noticed.\n\nAs the men stumbled away to the barracks, Philip and his group moved toward the cooler rooms set aside for guests. As soon as they were behind closed doors, Murzod scoffed, \"You're putting him in charge? And promoting him? How is that a punishment?\"\n\nDieko rolled his eyes, but Philip couldn't be certain if it was at the whole situation, or in agreement with Murzod's assessment of it.\n\n\"I think they suffered enough, Murzod,\" Anna hissed.\n\n\"You shouldn't get involved, Anna,\" Dieko said without looking at her. \"You have no idea how to keep order in a man's army.\"\n\nHilde leaned forward, but Anna placed a hand on her arm. The two women glared but said nothing.\n\nPhilip couldn't help but see Dieko's remark as an insult to his leadership as well. After all, he hadn't been ruling long and had never led men into battle. But he didn't let the comments deter him. \"You're both right,\" he said, attempting to placate both sides. \"If Maelin can't get to the Rock Clouds fast enough, he'll be demoted. But he'll need the authority to organize the men here. Besides, how better to teach a man the importance of discipline than to make him oversee the unruly? Maybe it's selfish of me, but I want both you, Murzod, and you, Dieko, by my side in the Rock Clouds, and I prefer not to leave either of you behind to complete such a distasteful task.\n\n\"Now, if this business is settled,\" he continued, seating himself at a table in the guests' quarters, \"I'd like Murzod to describe to us exactly how the poison is made.\"\n\nThe group settled into an uneasy silence as Murzod cleared his throat. Philip allowed the older, more frustrating man to condescend to explaining the functions of the facility as he dwelt on how to get his hands to stop shaking from standing up to him.\n\n[ Abduction ]\n\n*CRASH!*\n\n\"AAAAUUUGGGGHHHH!\"\n\nPhilip sat straight up in his bed as the wailing screech tore every living being from their sleep. A guard shot through his door.\n\n\"Are you alright, Majesty?\" the guard asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Philip answered. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Not sure yet, Sire.\"\n\nThe guard left the room and Philip jumped to his feet. Pulling on a robe, he rushed from his room and saw several guards gathering at Anna's door in the common area between the two guestrooms.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked as the guards and Murzod arrived, but no one answered.\n\n\"Anna!\" Hilde barked, pounding on the door to Anna's and Dieko's room. A crash and a muffled cry issued from within. More crashing erupted as Hilde shook the door's handle and leaned against the door. She spun on the watching guards. \"Help me!\" she yelled. As if only waiting for the order, the group of guards and men leaned against the door with her and each other. Philip followed, pressing his shoulder into the crowd.\n\n\"Ready!\" Hilde yelled over the noise. Philip felt the bodies sway back and forth. \"One, two, three!\"\n\nAs one, the mass moved together and the door gave way. They had to continue pushing with force for it to fully open. Someone passed forward a lighted cube to illuminate the room and Hilde wailed. Philip pushed to enter as the crowd poured into the room.\n\nThey saw that such force was required to open the door because the entire bed had been thrown against it. Bedding and clothing were strewn across the floor, much of it charred or burning, mostly dripping in red. Trunks and furniture had been smashed or displaced and destroyed. Down from the mattress and pillows slowly fluttered to the floor with spatters of blood soaking into the remains. Glass shards splayed across most of the floor as pieces of the window dangled loose from its frame. Large chunks of the frame lay outside, burning along with the vegetation around the opening. Many items inside smoldered and water was called for, but the majority of the burning remained outside. Philip's legs shook as he took in the sight.\n\n\"Over here!\" a guard called from the far wall. He pulled away the canopy drapes that were still attached to the ceiling but torn to shreds. Dieko lay there, slumped against the wall. Large swaths of red stretched across his upper and lower body, as if he had been thrown against a sword rack. Only a messy stump existed where one leg was missing and one arm was as black as charcoal. His eyes stared into the World of Souls.\n\n\"Anna,\" Philip whispered, feeling the blood draining from his body. His hands shook as he reached for the wall to steady him.\n\n\"She's not here,\" Hilde said. She knelt in front of the mutilated window, her rumpled uniform and hands covered in blood and soot. She sagged as she pointed to a piece of Anna's night dress stuck on a glass shard. Blood dripped onto the floor from handprints on the sill. On the ledge and carved against the walls, furniture and torn clothes, the rest of the marks couldn't be mistaken for anything else. Dragon claws.\n\nA guard rushed to the window, pushing past the broken glass and daggers of wood. Three bright moons lit the night sky. After peering out, he pointed. \"There! I see movement!\"\n\nAnother guard joined him, holding a majik lens against his eye, a tool of the night watchmen. \"I see it, Sire,\" he said with little enthusiasm. \"But I\u2026I can't be certain\u2026\"\n\n\"The night watch,\" Murzod grunted. Before Philip could ask, the man pushed past everyone.\n\nMurzod led the way out of the room. Almost everyone followed, but Philip was closest on the older man's heels. They darted past the stairs and ignored the guards coming from the barracks to inspect the commotion. Murzod practically ran outside.\n\nJust outside the entrance to the mountain cavern, several guards stood with arrows nocked, some posed as if they'd already fired.\n\n\"What happened, man?\" Murzod barked. \"Why didn't you give the alarm?\"\n\nOne of the men turned to face his commanding officer. \"She must have come around the far side of the mountain,\" he said. \"There was nothing we could do. By the time we saw her, things were already\u2026\" The man trailed off waving a hand in the direction of the destruction.\n\nPhilip's knees felt weak. His stomach curled and his breathing came in short, ragged gasps. Someone nearby grabbed his arm to steady him. \"She?\" he asked, staring at the ground. \"It wasn't the black dragon?\"\n\n\"No, Majesty, to be sure \u2026\" a small man with spectacles stepped forward. When Philip met his eyes, he recognized the little man from the loyal claw that had defended Maelin inside. On his face, the spectacles shimmered with multi-colored light. They were enchanted. \"It was a female. A small, green dragon, Majesty. And\u2026\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nAfter a moment, the man added, \"She had a bundle in her claw.\"\n\nThe weakness in Philip's knees disappeared. Anger replaced his fear and raised him to his full height. Blood returned to his head and burned through his veins. His teeth ground together at the thought of the dragons who haunted him and his family and his people. His vision swam with thoughts of killing every dragon until he could find his sister again. Turning to Murzod, he growled through clenched teeth, \"Get these men moving. Forget waiting two days. We leave at first light.\"\n\n[ Comrades ]\n\nLittle vials of potion got passed around amongst the men of the army. The women of the Black Saber refused the potion as they would all be riding, then the large group left the city behind. Owyn only pretended to take a sip, not knowing what it was or what it would do to a part-dragon. But the remains he licked from his lips sent a tingle down his throat. It tasted awful and his hands shook. He noticed the men at the front of the lines marched faster than their normal pace. It took him a moment to realize that he shouldn't follow them. His heart raced, urging him to move ahead, but he stayed at the back of the formation.\n\nAs the contingent marched, he shifted to the side of the group. His eyes darted from the effects of the potion and he could perceive that no other eyes were on him. He ducked into the trees to the side of the path so fast that he knew no one had seen him. The men kept moving ahead without him, their eyes forward. He could hear their hearts pounding as fast as their boots. With difficulty, he fought the urge to spring into the air. He waited until he knew no one would come back and look for him.\n\nWhen all was quiet around him, he undressed. Assuming he would need human clothing later, he wrapped the uniform in the black cloth Amethyst had thrust on him and secured it to his back leg. Returning to the path, he jumped into the air.\n\nDragon, he thought, and he spread his wings. It was finally getting easier. He flew away as a dragon.\n\nThe lick of potion pumped through him, urging him to lift higher and move faster. He felt his wings shake when he tried to slow or glide. His wings pressed harder against the cold air, so cold that he shouldn't have been able to feel it. But he did feel it. Then his snout numbed and his wings seemed to move on their own. His tail whipped in the frozen air as his legs clawed to move him faster. Before long, Hiro watched the distant mountain range of the Ice Ruck approaching. His wings finally began to slow.\n\nHe knew he had flown much farther, much faster than humans could move. The residue of potion had urged him on. He didn't know when he would get to the Great Northern Mountain, but he assumed he had plenty of time to stop without losing track of Anna. Surely, she couldn't leave the mountain so quickly. He would catch up to Anna soon enough. His eyes drifted toward the Ice Ruck. He had told Milah that he would try again to get their help, so he dipped his wing and shifted course.\n\nI'll have plenty of time, he told himself as he flew into the mountains of the Ice Ruck. It was a completely different scene than when he had visited before. On his first visit, the mountains were covered with snow and ice. No matter how much the ice dragons assured him it wouldn't remain that way, he hadn't believed them. Now, he couldn't deny it.\n\nHe remembered the sight of a frozen waterfall. That same waterfall now roared down the mountain. Around him water poured in rivulets, pooling, then splashing down further. Green grass and tall trees covered the mountains. The grass was a darker green than even in the Rock Clouds, but the summer landscape looked the same as it did there, only here it was rooted to the earth. The sun beat down on dragons lounging in the warmth outside of their caves. Groups of hatchlings chased some deer. Six dames flew out to hunt. Rabbits, deer, lydik, even a scorrand could be seen wandering the many forests and green carpeted areas. The land was alive and thriving.\n\n\"Welcome back, floater!\" Maggoran, the pale bluish-gray young dragon that had greeted him last time fell into his wake.\n\n\"Shining days, Maggoran,\" Hiro answered, ignoring the slang term for 'stupid visitor'. \"I need to speak with Rakdar.\"\n\n\"Again?\" Maggoran's eyes wandered to the bundle attached to Hiro's leg, but Hiro pulled his leg in tighter to his body and Maggoran lost interest in it. \"Don't you ever just come to visit?\"\n\n\"I wish I could. This place is just as magnificent as you described it could be the last time I was here,\" Hiro said, and he truly meant it. This might be the perfect place to get away from a war or a rejected love or anything else that might darken his days.\n\n\"Then what do you need to see Rakdar about?\" Maggoran asked, turning and taking the lead to the dame's lair.\n\n\"War,\" he said. \"I've come to beg for help.\"\n\n\"Not you too,\" Maggoran whined.\n\n\"Me too?\" Hiro started. \"Who else has been here?\"\n\n\"Your friend, Priya,\" he said.\n\n\"Priya? When was she here?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Maggoran's eyes glazed over slightly, \"the gorgeous green one. She was here a few months ago. Claimed a war was coming and she would need our help eventually. I would certainly follow her into war!\"\n\nHiro's own heart pinched with a hint of jealousy at the sentiment \u2013 or was it just protectiveness \u2013 before he remembered Anna. For the briefest moment he wondered how it was possible for him to feel any jealousy about Priya. But he shook his head and dismissed the thought.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, \"the time for that war has come and this might be your chance to fight alongside her.\"\n\nThey had reached the narrow chasm where Rakdar's lair was situated at the bottom. Hiro didn't stop to wait for Maggoran or anyone else \u2013 he flew straight to the lair. Landing at the entrance, he crawled into the glowing cavern. Maggoran and the watchers outside followed him in.\n\n\"Hiro Tekla!\" Rakdar said with surprise, looking up from the lydik she had been sharing with a few others. Her lair was much the same as that of Rakgar's in the Rock Cloud except for the glowing green spilling stones that gave this one light. She pointed her angled eyes at Hiro. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nRakdar hadn't given Hiro a friendly welcome and he knew why. She didn't approve of the fact that he was so flippant about speaking while on the surface or among the humans. She didn't know about Anna, but she had blatantly refused to help him hunt down anyone from their joint attack on the humans. Without a reason to kill them, she saw no need for a hunt. She needed a reason to kill, which made her a logical leader. But she also needed a convincing reason to take any drastic actions at all. Which could make her unreliable.\n\n\"Shining days, Rakdar,\" Hiro gave her a polite greeting, realizing that, at the moment, he respected her more than his own Rakgar. \"I've come to beg your assistance.\"\n\n\"Beg?\" she asked, her purple, feathery scales rippling as she sat down. \"I don't believe you the type to beg. I don't believe your Rakgar should let you out of the Rock Clouds either, but that's not my decision to make.\"\n\n\"Humans are surrounding the Rock Clouds,\" he said. The statement was met with silence in the cavern. \"So, yes,\" he said, \"I'm willing to beg.\"\n\nRakdar stared at Hiro. \"Explain,\" she finally said.\n\nHiro explained about the humans gathering and Rakgar banning the Rock Cloud ruck from the surface. He explained that the faeries were helping the humans and his quest to figure out their plan to get into the Rock Clouds.\n\n\"The poisoned arrows that you helped destroy were only a part of the supply,\" Hiro finished. \"Without your help now, the rest of the supply will get through to the human army.\"\n\n\"Again, Hiro,\" Rakdar said. \"I will not forbid anyone in my ruck from joining you or assisting you. But, as I told Priya, sending our full force to join you against the humans would show intelligence and planning.\"\n\nHiro hung his head. \"If you don't help us, we'll all be killed and the secret of Avonoa won't matter anymore.\"\n\nThe sun was only one or two dragon lengths into the sky when the Great Northern Mountain came into view. Hiro's heart burned as he beat his wings harder against the cold.\n\nWhile the Ice Ruck Rakdar hadn't promised anything, Maggoran and others had offered a place for Hiro to stay the night while they discussed what they might do for him. In the morning, Hiro had awoken early after having another fitful night. He had abandoned any more attempts at sleep in the dark hours of the morning and at sunrise he'd sent off the few dragons who agreed to help him to meet with Ashel and the centaurs.\n\nBefore a warning of his arrival could be made to the humans at work inside the mountain, Hiro dipped toward the ground. The frozen sea, which acted like a moat around the mountain, offered him no cover to change, so he swung closer to the tree line. As he descended, he realized he wasn't as close to the mountain cavern opening as he'd thought he was, and he still had farther to go. He landed and continued on claws, covering the stretch of slushy snow quickly, being careful to stay outside of view from the opening.\n\nOnce he was close enough to see human movement inside, he used the coverage of the sparse vegetation, wagons, boxes and human paraphernalia outside the entrance to change into a man himself. He dressed with the clothes he'd carried tied to his leg, and added the layer of the black cloth under his tunic. He was extremely grateful to Amethyst for including boots in the bundle.\n\nOwyn slipped inside the cavern and crept behind some crates before shuffling past tables laden with arrows. Knowing he wasn't completely hidden, he picked up one of the black-tipped arrows and pretended to inspect the tip. He knew what was on the tip. He knew the damage it could do. He remembered the piles of ash and ember and felt the burn of the poison seeping into his blood.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" a harsh voice shook him from his thoughts.\n\nLooking up, he met the eyes of a guard across the table. \"Uh,\" Owyn hesitated a moment, then grabbed a fistful of arrows. \"I was told to move these arrows into the crates. For transport.\"\n\nThe guard looked him up and down. \"Clean uniform? You must have come in with the king's group. You obviously don't know how things work around here.\" The guard yanked the arrows from Owyn's grip and slapped them onto the table. \"These don't go into the crates. Faerie couriers deliver them in satchels.\"\n\nOwyn, not wanting to miss an opportunity, looked at the table laden with hundreds of arrows. \"Satchels? Must be lots of faeries and giant satchels.\"\n\n\"Only one,\" the guard said. \"One faerie. One satchel. At least, one at a time. The satchels are enchanted to hold thousands of arrows. Expanded majikally or something like that. Centaurs are attacking large parties, but the faeries knew they would. One faerie traveling alone doesn't seem like a threat.\" The guard looked around, then continued. \"Why didn't you leave with the king at first light?\"\n\nOwyn shrugged, hoping he could lie his way through this interrogation. \"I stayed behind to help.\"\n\nThe guard grunted, \"Slept in, huh?\" he shook his head. \"The effects of the potion can be draining like that. You're lucky I found you instead of one of the men who brought you. Go outside and help haul the feed.\"\n\nStumbling back outside he met several men loading large barrels into wagons. He recognized some of the items the dragons had come across while raiding the human parties. Now, at least, he knew where the arrows came from and how they were being distributed.\n\n\"\u2026not the black one?\" one man finished his sentence as Owyn approached.\n\nTwo men in dirty tattered uniforms rolled a barrel toward a wagon. One man had bright orange hair and freckles all over his body. The other had dirty yellow hair with hairy patches on his chin. When Owyn approached, they eyed him warily.\n\n\"I was sent to help,\" he said.\n\n\"We could use a fighter to lift these,\" the orange-haired man said. Owyn struggled a little with the weight but heaved one of the barrels into the wagon.\n\n\"I'm Brack,\" the orange-haired man said. \"That's Dergin.\"\n\n\"Owyn,\" he said, introducing himself. He paused, worried that someone might recognize the name, then he remembered that Adair had claimed it to be a fairly common name when he gave it to him.\n\n\"I'll stack,\" Dergin said, climbing into the wagon.\n\nWith a last glance at Owyn, Brack sauntered back to the barrels to roll another one toward him. \"Anyway,\" he said as he grasped one and rolled it, \"it wasn't the black dragon.\"\n\n\"What wasn't the black dragon?\" Owyn asked in shock before he could stop himself. He knew the guards often discussed happenings in the kingdom, but he didn't know why they would be discussing him here.\n\n\"The attack,\" Brack said with a sneer. He looked Owyn up and down again, almost in disgust.\n\n\"Attack?\" Owyn feigned ignorance. His mind immediately remembered the many past coordinated attacks with centaurs and dragons. Perhaps the men were discussing one of those. \"Which one?\"\n\n\"Which one?\" Brack choked.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" Dergin questioned.\n\nOwyn, desperate not to give himself away, mumbled, \"I came in with the king's group. I haven't been here long.\"\n\nBrack shook his head, \"Then you were here last night, weren't you? Or did you slip away and come back before dawn?\"\n\nWhen Owyn could only stare back in stunned silence, Dergin saved him. \"It's probably the potion. I bet you're one of the cracks that slept through all the commotion. Haven't you heard everyone talking about it all morning?\"\n\nOwyn just shook his head. So much for blending in. As he passed the barrel up, the man in the wagon relayed everything with great passion.\n\n\"The night watch didn't even see her coming,\" Dergin said. \"I heard it was a small green dragon. She swooped in, killed Dieko, destroyed their sleeping chamber, then flew out the window with the princess!\"\n\nOwyn stopped, paralyzed with the realization. Why would Priya kidnap Anna? What was she doing here? Could it have been someone else? No, only Priya would think to take Anna. But why? \u2014Ouch!!\n\n\"Hey!\" Brack smacked Owyn on the back of the head. \"Keep moving, the lieutenant's coming this way.\"\n\nOwyn lifted the next barrel to the wagon as another man joined them. He started turning toward the newcomer but stopped when he recognized the man's face. Instead of acknowledging the superior officer like he had been taught to do, he turned back and pretended to struggle with the barrel to prevent Maelin from recognizing him.\n\n\"If you don't get these wagons harnessed immediately,\" Maelin barked, \"we'll leave you and the horses to the centaurs. We're leaving now, with or without you.\"\n\n\"Yes, Lieutenant,\" the other men said while saluting with a fist to their chest.\n\nLuckily Owyn couldn't salute without dropping the barrel, so he remained bent over and watched from the corner of his eye as Maelin stalked away.\n\nBrack rushed Dergin off to return with the horses and harness them to the wagon while he and Owyn shoved the rest of the barrels on board. When time ran out, Brack left several barrels behind. They barely brought up the rear of the trail of men leaving the Great Northern Mountain for the Rock Clouds. As they hurried to catch up to the others, Dergin pointed out the large dragon claw prints in the melting snow.\n\n\"Keep an eye out,\" he told Owyn. \"You're taller, so you can see more.\"\n\n\"They're probably from the one last night,\" Brack said, \"but be aware, just in case.\"\n\n\"Do you think the other men saw them?\" Owyn asked.\n\n\"Who could miss them?\" Brack said. \"We're probably just too far back for any of the others to warn us.\"\n\n\"We'd better get moving if we're going to catch up,\" Dergin said.\n\nOwyn could barely see the men ahead in the main group. \"Are they using the faerie potion? Aren't we all going to?\"\n\nDergin shook his head. \"Nope, not allowed, are we? Part of Lieutenant Maelin's punishment. We gotta move just as fast as if we had used it, though.\"\n\n\"Punishment,\" Brack snorted. \"If you ask me, king doesn't care how fast we get there. It's a blessing getting us out of there.\"\n\nThe two men did urge the horses on to join the main group because the wagons would need the protection of the guards around them. But Owyn lagged behind.\n\nWhat was Priya doing here? he thought as he trudged through the melting ice. Amethyst said I would 'find' Anna in the Rock Clouds. Did she know Priya would take her there? Why wouldn't she just tell me? He snorted to himself, thinking of his frustrating conversations with Amethyst, the maid who couldn't \u2013 or wouldn't \u2013 speak straight.\n\nHe decided something had to have happened that led to all this, and he had to find out what it was. He would have to, once again, break away from the group of men and guards to disappear into the forest and mountains. He would find Anna using his own devices, but would he ever stop chasing her?\n\nOwyn had fallen behind, but he stayed close enough to the men still trudging to the Rock Clouds. His claw marks finally fell behind the group and after traveling much of the day the soggy, frozen mush turned to soggy, muddy grass. Suddenly Owyn stopped. He looked up and \u2013 momentarily forgetting his worry about Priya and Anna \u2013 searched their surroundings. They had been walking at a good pace for a long while and just entered a narrow canyon pass that would take them through the Torthoth mountain range. He knew this pass. He had used it. Surveyed it from above. Watched and waited. From above.\n\nOwyn's breathe caught in his throat. The few men walking on the outside of the caravan searched the mountains around them. Owyn noticed Koris, one of the first men to befriend Owyn when he changed into a human and one of the men in his former claw, watching the trees. On the other side of the caravan, he could see Thaddeus. His huge fighter bulk could be seen for miles. He searched the trees on the other side. They would be among the first to die.\n\nRooted in place, Owyn's better-than-human eyes also searched the trees around them. The centaurs were good at concealing their presence. Even as a dragon, he couldn't locate them when they wanted to stay hidden in the forest. Then he realized, the centaurs wouldn't be the first to attack. The centaurs would come from one side only after\u2026\n\n\"Dragon!\" the call came.\n\nAs all the human heads went up, Owyn realized he didn't have any time. He would have to chance being seen.\n\nHe changed just as the centaurs erupted from the trees with knocked arrows on bows. He leapt from the back of the caravan to the front with only a few swipes of his wings. He landed on his side, facing Koris, as the arrows bounced off the scales along his back.\n\nStanding, Hiro unleashed a burst of flame toward the centaurs. He looked into the sky to see Prakyndar. The small brown dragon wheeled away toward the side of the canyon opposite from where the centaurs had come. He was retreating.\n\nBow in hand, Ashel skidded to a stop in front of Hiro. Hiro stood his ground between her and the humans until she finally lowered her bow. The centaurs flanking her did the same, albeit slower. Hiro could see her teeth grinding. Her large eyes flashed between Hiro and Koris. Hiro snorted at her and her eyes locked on his.\n\nFinally, after a moment of silent argument between the two, Ashel straightened her back. Her eyes met Koris's. \"You have fortunate allies,\" she bit at him. Then she turned and galloped back into the trees from where she'd come.\n\nAs the centaurs left, Hiro turned to look at Koris. Then, seeing their human weapons half-drawn, Hiro inched backwards, away from them. He saw Maelin step forward, watching him carefully. Slowly, Maelin extended one hand to signal the men to stay their weapons.\n\nFinally, Hiro launched himself into the sky. Behind him he heard someone say, \"Aren't we supposed to kill dragons?\"\n\nThe last voice he heard was distinctly Maelin's, saying, \"That dragon just saved our lives.\"\n\n[ Cut Off ]\n\n\"What happened?!\" Ashel yelled. She had obviously given up caring if the humans heard her. Or else she knew their hearing wasn't as good as the dragons'. \"Has your heart hardened for the humans?\"\n\nShe doesn't know how close she is to the truth, Hiro thought.\n\n\"There's no need to kill them,\" he said.\n\n\"No need?\" she said. \"This is war. That's how you finish it.\"\n\nHiro had flown farther down the canyon after the confrontation, hoping the humans wouldn't associate him with the centaurs. He'd also wanted the group of humans, which included his old claw 3-4, to feel safe enough to continue on the path they were going.\n\nBack on ground, however, Hiro had doubled back to meet Ashel and Prak in the trees overlooking the canyon. The men had advanced much farther by the time he met the leader of the warrior centaurs, but he still thought her yelling might carry to the Rock Clouds and beyond.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Prak said as he landed next to them. His route back to them must have been even longer. \"Hiro, where have you been? What did you find out? Why did you stop us? You appeared out of nowhere. I didn't see you until you were there. What happened?\"\n\n\"Apparently, Hiro has grown a conscience,\" Ashel growled at Hiro. \"He says we don't need to kill the humans.\"\n\n\"You don't,\" Hiro said.\n\n\"Why not?\" Prak asked.\n\n\"Those humans didn't have the arrows,\" Hiro finally answered.\n\n\"So?\" Ashel said. \"They're still reinforcements.\"\n\n\"And it's fun,\" Vikal mumbled from behind Ashel.\n\n\"We're not going to win this war unless we act,\" Prak said. \"That's what you said. That's why we're doing this at all. What else are we supposed to do?\"\n\nHiro shook his head. He had to give them something, some reason to spare the humans. \"The individual travelers,\" he said, \"usually faeries. They're the ones carrying the arrows. They have enchanted satchels to transport supplies. They knew you would let lone travelers through.\"\n\nAfter a moment of silence, Ashel broke her bow with a resounding CRACK! \"Shurta's tangles and Khurta's claws!\" she cursed as she threw the bow and added more curses into the sky.\n\n\"We've been spitting in Tarsa's eye,\" Vikal grumbled as the other centaurs cursed and shook their heads as well.\n\nPrak shook his head and closed his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He closed it again and opened it a couple more times.\n\n\"Prak,\" Hiro began, but he didn't exactly know what to say.\n\n\"Let me think. Let me think,\" Prak said. He stared into the sky and mumbled to himself, getting louder and louder. \"We've been chipping away at them. Bits and pieces, yes, but\u2026fewer men is fewer men. We were going to have to withdraw back to the Rock Clouds soon enough anyway. We knew it was a risk\u2026\"\n\n\"What was a risk?\" Hiro asked.\n\nPrak sighed. \"We risked staying out here longer. Being closer to the humans' waystation. We knew the humans might beat us to the Rock Clouds, but we thought it might be worth it to find the arrows. We were hoping to find the chain of transport.\"\n\n\"Break camp!\" Ashel yelled, spinning on the other centaurs. \"Send a message by eagle and wolf for all groups to retreat back to the Rock Clouds.\" Several centaurs, including Vikal, galloped into the trees. She turned to face Hiro and Prak. \"Let's hope they're slower than we thought and we can still get through.\"\n\n\"We can't get through!\" Vikal yelled as he galloped toward Hiro.\n\nAfter only a day and a half, the groups of dragons and centaurs had gathered on the east side of Centaur River. Tog and Prak and many other dragons had joined them, including the Ice Ruck helpers. Vikal, Tog and a few others had scouted ahead before the sun fully set, only to come back with dreadful news. They had arrived just after sunset at the banks of the river. Now the groups rested in the darkness of the Black Forest to decide how to proceed.\n\n\"Human camps stretch for miles in either direction,\" Vikal reported.\n\n\"We're cut off from Joss and Rylan,\" Ashel said. \"So they have no idea we're here and they can't get any help through to us.\"\n\n\"We can fly you over,\" Prak said.\n\n\"We've discussed that,\" Ashel said, as they had debated back and forth for the entire previous day and a half. \"It would take too many trips and too long. You would look like you're either highly trained pack animals\" \u2013 Tog growled low \u2013 \"or you're organized to know exactly what you're doing and expose the dragons' higher reasoning.\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" Prak mumbled. \"The humans might strike early, change tactics, or any number of countermeasures, each more fatal than the last.\"\n\n\"Besides\u2026\" Ashel looked into Prak's eye, \"flying over would be too dangerous for all of you, now that we know they have the arrows.\"\n\n\"That's not all,\" Tog said. He admitted to taking a few low passes over the trees to distract the humans from the scouting centaurs. \"I saw large wooden structures beneath the trees.\"\n\n\"I saw them too,\" Vikal said.\n\n\"What are they?\" Ashel asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Tog answered. \"They look like huge, flat platforms. Looks like they could hold several dozen humans or\u2026\"\n\n\"\u2026or a handful of dragons.\" Vikal finished.\n\nHiro shook his head. Prak searched everyone's eyes, but no one had an answer.\n\nAshel shook her head. \"Now what do we do?\"\n\n\"We fight on two fronts,\" Vikal said, puffing his chest. \"It could be a tactical advantage.\"\n\n\"Only if Joss knew where we were and what we're planning,\" Ashel said.\n\n\"You can go back to your land,\" Prak said. \"The other centaurs might need protecting. Follow the river and protect your people. The faeries might go there next because they know you've been helping us.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Ashel rolled her head along with her eyes for emphasis, \"the leader of the warrior centaurs scampers off home instead of defending her allies.\" She snorted. \"I wouldn't be leader of warriors much longer.\"\n\n\"But you'd be alive,\" Prak muttered.\n\nAshel growled low, \"I'd rather die defending you.\" She seemed to catch herself and her eyes skipped to Hiro's. \"All of you.\"\n\n\"That,\" a deep voice grumbled, \"is what I needed to hear.\"\n\nHiro recognized the voice, but couldn't say anything before the small, gray-skinned king of goblins appeared out of nowhere in the middle of their circle. He wore an adorned circlet atop his dark red hair but his brown clothes stood out for their plainness. As soon as he materialized, a knife pinged off a majikal shield around him. Ashel's hand dropped in consternation.\n\n\"King Svorgh,\" Hiro said, stepping toward the leader. \"What are you doing here? How did you find us?\"\n\nShvika appeared next to her father. \"Anna,\" she said, spitting the name like a curse. She continued to glare through the frame of her blood-red hair at the centaurs surrounding her, hand on her sword.\n\n\"Is she ok?\" Hiro asked before he could stop himself.\n\nShvika shared a look with her father before answering only, \"She's in the Rock Clouds.\"\n\nSvorgh stepped toward Ashel and Prak, his hands turned toward the centaur. Ashel's hand inched toward another knife strapped around her belly.\n\n\"We've come to help,\" he said.\n\nAshel's hand stopped. She shared a glance with Prak and they simultaneously leaned down to inspect the king, not hiding their intrigue at the little man's gray skin, red hair and circlet bedecked in gems.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she asked him.\n\n\"More like, what are you?\" Prak said.\n\n\"How are you going to help us?\" Ashel asked without waiting for a response.\n\n\"How can we trust you?\" Prak said in turn.\n\nHiro realized that Ashel and Prak must have spent an awful lot of time together, speaking in turn the way Milah and Mitashio did.\n\nSvorgh held up his hands to slow the questions. \"We are goblins,\" he said.\n\n\"Phantoms,\" an invisible presence near Vikal was heard to say.\n\n\"Ghosts,\" another presence said from behind Tog.\n\nSnickering swelled around them. Ashel didn't stay her hand. Before the giggling subsided, she held a long dagger in each fist. Vikal and the other centaurs did the same.\n\nSvorgh waved a hand. \"Enough,\" he said, loud and firm. When all eyes returned to him, he looked to Hiro. \"We are allies,\" he announced.\n\nAshel swung her dagger to point at Svorgh. He was just tall enough and her blade long enough to point it at his throat. Shvika tensed, but was as steady as a stone carving. \"Hiro,\" Ashel said, \"do you know this creature?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Do you trust him?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Hiro hemmed, \"he did choose to not kill me.\"\n\nAshel raised an eyebrow at Svorgh, who shrugged. \"It wasn't his time,\" he said.\n\nAshel's eyes darted as she slowly put away her blades. \"Let me see you,\" she said. \"All of you.\"\n\nA blue gem glowed briefly on the side of Svorgh's circlet. Shvika's also glowed. She moved her hand from her hilt as several goblins materialized around them.\n\nSvorgh indicated himself, then Shvika. \"I am Svorgh, King of the Goblins. This is my daughter, Shvika, she is the leader of our warriors.\"\n\nHiro recognized Keeahrspi, his bulging arms covered in glowing tattoos, and Mlika and Morkni, with their fluorescent yellow hair, as they appeared before them. Keeahrspi came to stand beside Shvika while most of the goblins gathered behind Svorgh.\n\nAshel looked to Prak, who stepped forward. \"Other than the ability to be invisible,\" he asked, \"what help do you offer?\"\n\n\"We'll fight,\" Shvika said.\n\n\"You're not suggesting,\" Vikal sneered, indicating the short swords on their hips, \"that those little pins can do any real damage?\"\n\n\"I suggest nothing,\" Shvika said, \"but I can show you.\" She took one step toward Vikal and a purple gem glowed on her circlet. With her next step, there was a flash of purple and she became a large white centaur with the same blood-red hair. As she pulled out her small silver sword it extended from its sheath and grew into a long, two-handed blade of pure black \u2014 handle, hilt and blade. She held it to Vikal's throat before he could move.\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?!\" Ashel shouted. Hiro thought she should be more concerned about Shvika holding a blade to Vikal's throat rather than being captivated by the blade itself.\n\nPrak began to bounce in one spot. \"Is that the Just sword? Where did you get it? How did you get it? Is it real?\" He remembered himself and calmed down even as his eyes bounced between Svorgh, Shvika and the sword, waiting for an answer.\n\n\"Shvika claimed the sword last night,\" Svorgh said, \"from the human king's own tent. She's using an illusion to hide it.\"\n\nShvika's eyes imitated the mischief in her voice. \"Call me a dragon, but I just can't resist something shiny.\" Her words quoting the same previously from Ashel's own mouth.\n\nAshel gasped and threw a hand to her mouth. Turning to Prak, she exclaimed, \"I like her. Can we keep her?\"\n\nA grin spread across Vikal's face that agreed with the sparkle of admiration in his eye.\n\nAs Shvika returned to her original form and position by her father, Prak turned to Svorgh again. \"You obviously have impressive abilities,\" Prak said. \"What are you proposing?\"\n\n\"You have tunnels,\" Hiro said, remembering them. \"Passageways. Can you, somehow, get us to the Inner Mountain? To where the others are gathering?\"\n\n\"We don't have anything close enough or that can transport all of you. But we do have these,\" Svorgh reached into a small pouch at his side, producing a handful of silver circlets, each with a brilliant blue gem embedded in them.\n\n\"I always wanted to ask you about these circlets,\" Hiro said. \"What are they?\"\n\nSvorgh tapped the circlet on his head with the simple ones in his hand. \"These are dragon gems,\" he said. \"Different gems with different powers. They are gems created from thousands of years of dragon ash. Each gem has a unique power derived from the dragon whose ash created it. The blue sapphiragons are connected to each other to allow concentrated thoughts to move between them.\n\n\"There will be a distraction,\" he said, offering the circlets to Ashel. \"My troops will move ahead invisibly and guide you through the human camps. The sapphiragon will allow us to communicate to navigate the dangers efficiently. We can regroup and plan on the other side. With your brothers.\"\n\nAshel accepted the tiny silver bands. She kept one and handed the others to Vikal. She threw a questioning look at Svorgh, who simply tapped his own head. Although the circlet was no bigger around than Ashel's arm, she lifted it with both hands over her head. As she lowered it, it grew to fit her head perfectly. With grudging acceptance, she looked down on the little king and said, \"I want one like yours.\"\n\nThe diminutive king grinned up at her. \"Maybe someday, my dear.\"\n\n\"You said there will be a distraction,\" Prak said as the centaurs fitted their circlets. \"Will you provide one? Or can you tell the future? When will we know?\"\n\nSvorgh turned to Hiro. \"I know many things,\" he said, staring deep into Hiro's eyes. \"Nothing distracts like a criminal.\"\n\nA distraction, Hiro thought.\n\n\"No,\" Tog said, shaking his head, \"a dragon flying over the humans' heads will only alert them that more might be coming or passing.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Prak said, \"we can't have the humans looking up.\"\n\nA criminal, Hiro thought as he stared back at Svorgh. \"Don't worry,\" he said, \"they won't be looking up.\"\n\n[ Expectations ]\n\n\"Lieutenant Maelin, squad 3-4 reporting, sir.\"\n\nPhilip looked the lieutenant over. He seemed to have healed well and quickly from his ordeal in the Great Northern Mountain. He may have brought the report specifically for Torgon, but Philip wanted to listen in. He couldn't help but respect this man and his squad after what they'd suffered.\n\n\"Is all in order, Lieutenant?\" Torgon asked.\n\n\"All men and supplies from the Great Northern Mountain and laboratory are accounted for, General,\" Maelin said, standing at attention.\n\n\"Then why is a lieutenant reporting to me instead of your captain?\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Maelin answered, \"I technically don't have a captain yet, sir. Murzod was my superior\u2014\"\n\n\"And you obviously don't have any respect for him,\" Philip put in, noting the absence of Murzod's title in the lieutenant's reference.\n\n\"No, Sire,\" Maelin said. \"I would request a different superior.\"\n\nTorgon nodded. \"I'll see to it. Is that all, Lieutenant?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Maelin hadn't hesitated to complain about Murzod, but for the first time he seemed nervous. \"There was an incident.\"\n\n\"Explain.\"\n\n\"While we were traveling through the Torthoth mountain range, at the Pass of Scurlyn, we were attacked by centaurs.\"\n\nPhilip sat up. \"Centaurs?\"\n\nTorgon glanced at Philip, but asked Maelin, \"Your men survived?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Maelin said. \"All survived, as did our cargo.\"\n\n\"How is that possible?\" Philip couldn't help himself. \"Centaurs don't leave humans alive.\"\n\n\"I'm not entirely certain what happened either, Your Majesty,\" Maelin stood tall and noble, and managed to look Philip and Torgon in the eye. \"In one second, centaurs were dashing from the trees to attack; in the next, a dragon stood in the way. The centaur female only said we have 'fortunate allies' and they all left.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to\u2014\"\n\n\"What color?\" Torgon blurted.\n\nPhilip, barely noticing Torgon's interruption, glanced over at his royal general and a knowing look passed between them.\n\n\"What color was the dragon?\" Philip repeated.\n\n\"It was a black dragon, Sire.\"\n\nTorgon dropped his head to bang his forehead on the desk next to him. \"Why is it always that dragon?\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Wait,\" Philip held up a hand, \"a green dragon kidnaps Anna and kills Dieko. Now the black dragon is protecting humans from centaurs? What in Shurta's tangles is going on?\"\n\nTorgon sat up, a visible red mark in the middle of his forehead. \"Why is it always that dragon?\" he grumbled a little more forcefully.\n\nMaelin didn't twitch.\n\n\"Why would he protect you?\" Philip said. \"Why would a dragon,\" he placed a hand on Torgon's arm to stop him from repeating the same question, then continued, \"any dragon spare, no\u2026protect humans?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Sire,\" Maelin said. \"Honestly, Your Majesty. We all discussed it in our travels here. Four different claws made up our group. The only difference between any of the claws was\u2026\"\n\nTorgon sat up straight. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Maelin hemmed slightly. \"Please understand,\" he hesitated, \"I'll submit myself for any discipline necessary, but I don't feel my men, or myself for that matter, have done anything wrong.\"\n\n\"But?\" Torgon barked.\n\nMaelin stood up taller. \"When my claw took our oath to the Noble Kingdom and the Noble family, there was a man among us that was\u2026well\u2026different.\"\n\n\"Different?\" Philip asked. \"How?\"\n\nMaelin sighed. \"Name's Owyn, he was the man who insulted Princess Anna.\"\n\nPhilip and Torgon stared at Maelin. Finally, Torgon said, \"That's it?\"\n\n\"Is he the man Dieko wanted killed?\" Philip asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Torgon nodded. \"Then this man, whoever he was, threatened Anna and used her to escape the dungeon.\"\n\n\"What did he call her?\" Philip asked. He had never bothered to get the whole story before Dieko had taken charge of the problem.\n\n\"He said she was disgusting, Sire,\" Maelin said. He didn't seem at all bothered by answering truthfully. \"But she said we could say whatever we wanted. She said he had the right to speak his thoughts.\"\n\n\"And he did leave her behind unharmed when he escaped,\" Torgon added.\n\nPhilip nodded thoughtfully. \"Do you think she's disgusting?\"\n\n\"Of course not, Your Majesty,\" Maelin said.\n\n\"I can't decide,\" Philip said, as only a brother would.\n\n\"That's not the point,\" Torgon said, pursing his lips at Philip. \"The question is, why did the black dragon choose to put himself between your men and the centaurs?\"\n\n\"I don't know, sir,\" Maelin said. \"We thought a beast like that might be provoked by the markings Owyn, the escaped man, had on his body. Brilliant markings of dragon wings that spanned his entire back, as if a dragon had folded them up and placed them there. And markings of a tail that ran the length of his leg down to his ankle. The tattoos were black as a moonless night.\"\n\nTorgon nodded. \"And the man, Owyn. What do you make of him?\"\n\nMaelin shook his head, unable or unwilling to answer.\n\n\"Speak, man,\" Torgon said, not unkindly. \"This is your chance to be heard.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Maelin hesitated, then cleared his throat. \"He was different, but I trusted the man with my life. I believe I still would.\"\n\nPhilip and Torgon shared another glance. With promises of no disciplinary actions against Maelin or his men, Torgon excused him.\n\nAfter Maelin left, Philip sat pensively biting the inside of his lip.\n\n\"What is it?\" Torgon said, facing him.\n\n\"Do you trust him?\"\n\n\"Who, Maelin?\"\n\nPhilip nodded.\n\nTorgon sighed and slumped back to his chair. After a moment he said, \"I'd like to hear what you think first. You're a better judge of character than most men I know.\"\n\nPhilip paused before answering. Maelin carried himself nobly. He was confident, honorable, brave and loyal to his friend. He stood up for the men he'd trained and fought alongside. He acted with respect toward his king, but wasn't afraid to look him in the eye. Maelin hadn't looked over Philip's head the way Dieko had, but he didn't lower his eyes, either.\n\n\"Yes,\" Philip whispered, \"yes, I do trust him.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" Torgon said.\n\n\"Good,\" Philip said. \"I'd like Maelin and his men with us when this disaster starts.\"\n\nWith a nod of agreement, Torgon slipped from the tent.\n\n[ Poisonous Faith ]\n\nHow could he know, Owyn thought to himself, and how much does he know?\n\nOwyn distinctly remembered Svorgh telling Anna he knew more about her than she would like him to. How much could he know and of what?\n\nHe picked his way through the trees on the northwest side of Centaur River, moving ever closer to the human armies. He had flown away from the group as a dragon and landed in the trees as a human. The black cloth Amethyst gave him did, indeed, change with him. He hadn't thought about the human clothing ripping to shreds when he changed to save Koris and the others. He didn't once think about the need for clothing while he was a dragon.\n\nBut thank Shurka, Anna had thought of it. Anna knew that Owyn would come for her. She left Amethyst behind to help him. Anna was the one with the foresight to give him the cloth. Had she procured it after she found out that he could change into a human? How did such a cloth even exist? If she knew so much about Owyn, about Hiro, did she also know how to contact Priya to fly her away from the Great Northern Mountain? Or did a different green dragon come to Anna's rescue?\n\nNo, he concluded, any other dragon would have killed her if she had tried to contact them.\n\nWas it Anna's idea to get Priya to take her to the goblins? Had she pled with them to help the dragons? Did she know what the large platforms were to be used for? But most importantly, where was she?\n\n\"You will find her at the Rock Clouds,\" that's what Amethyst had told him. Even Shvika said Anna was in the Rock Clouds. He had to continue on course to send everyone to the Rock Clouds, then join them there. Priya was probably there with Anna at this moment. If only he could get everyone else to the Rock Clouds as well.\n\nThrough the trees, Owyn saw the lights from a fire. He saw a few men ahead staring into the trees. Lookouts. Behind them, other fires were dying down. Only a few men appeared alert in the deepening darkness. Most men were probably in their tents asleep by now. The human camps were dark and mostly quiet.\n\nOwyn stepped carefully on rough bushes and fallen branches. When he had noisily broken quite a few of them, he was finally discovered.\n\n\"Who goes there?\" one of the men shouted into the dark trees.\n\n\"No one,\" Owyn answered. He had wrapped the black cloth around his waist to cover what Adair claimed to be the more 'private' parts of his body. Owyn's own darker skin helped obscure him from the men's view.\n\n\"Who are you?\" the man shouted again. \"Show yourself!\"\n\nThe men pointed their long staff weapons at Owyn as he emerged from the trees. He held up his hands as if placating the men. \"I'm just passing through,\" he said.\n\n\"Through to where?\" the man asked. \"What's your name and what's your business?\"\n\nAn idea struck Owyn. \"I've come to see the king,\" he said.\n\n\"The king?\" The men looked at each other and looked Owyn up and down. \"And why would the king want to see you?\" The man asked him again, \"Who are you?\"\n\nOwyn stepped forward enough for the light to catch his face. He glared down at the men until he saw the recognition in their eyes. \"Oh,\" he grinned at them, \"he doesn't want to see me.\"\n\nWithout waiting for an attack, Owyn grabbed the bottom end of one of the guards' staffs. Tucking it under his arm, he used the fact that the guard still clung to the weapon to swing him into his companion, knocking both guards over. He leapt over the small fire behind them as they untangled themselves to pursue him. He uprooted tent poles, threw boxes and barrels at the men behind him and made as much noise as possible.\n\nThe two guards yelled behind him and tried to keep up. But their legs being shorter than Owyn's didn't give them much chance. Their only chance would be to alert someone ahead of Owyn.\n\n\"Traitor!\"\n\n\"Catch him!\"\n\n\"Stop him!\"\n\n\"He's after the king!\"\n\n\"Traitor!\"\n\nThe calls drifted behind Owyn as he scrambled through the camp. He picked up a sword and staff and began slicing tents as he ran. Occasionally checking behind himself, he saw heads and bodies jumping from tent openings toward the ruckus. They weren't looking up.\n\nOver the trees in the distance, Owyn could see stars winking. Meaning the dark shapes of dragons must be slipping overhead unseen.\n\nOwyn continued to make as much noise and trouble as possible as he ran through the field of tents and humans. He knew roughly where the king's tent might be, having viewed the camp from a distance in the sky. He tried to move in a straight line toward it to fool his chasers about his intention and direction. Finally, when he found a stretch where no one was in view, he dropped the weapons he'd gathered up. Then forgetting everything else, he sprinted in the opposite direction.\n\nHe almost made it to the trees before he saw men running along his previous path toward the king's tent. When they weren't looking in the direction he'd gone, he slipped into the trees on the fringes of the camp. But as he jogged away with a smile, another tent came into view.\n\nSet off but still in view of the others, this tent was different. It was taller, round rather than square and was lit inside. The decorative scrolling around the bottom made Owyn stop. Faeries.\n\n\"What is it?\" a voice came from inside.\n\nOwyn heard movement on the far side. Someone was coming out. He ducked closer to the tent but avoided touching it. He knew he couldn't stay here. He was exposed. The light from inside the tent spread his profile in shadow beyond for anyone from the human camp to see if they looked in that direction.\n\nListening, he heard one of them walk around the side closest to where he had sent his pursuers, so he slipped around the opposite side.\n\n\"I don't know,\" a voice said. It sounded distinctly female. \"I can't see anything.\"\n\nCrouching, Owyn watched his feet and tried to avoid twigs and rocks. As he snuck past the tent, hoping to get away, he heard something that made his heart stop.\n\n\"It's probably centaurs,\" the other voice said from inside. The one was a male's, dripping with bitterness, and familiar. It could only be Kradik inside. \"We don't have any information on their whereabouts or what they're doing.\"\n\nInformation? Owyn thought. What other kind of information do the faeries have?\n\nPainstakingly slowly, Owyn lowered himself to the ground beside the faeries' tent while the female went back inside. The bottom created a wedge as it pulled away from the ground slightly over a depression, providing a small hiding spot. Had Owyn been a smaller man, he might have been able to squeeze into it fully. He imagined Addil or Taka would fit better, but he wedged as much of himself in as possible.\n\n\"As the representative of the council,\" the faerie woman said, \"I need to tell you that not many are pleased with the position you've put us in.\"\n\n\"I've told you everything I know, every step of the way,\" Kradik said. He didn't sound happy about it. \"What else can I do?\"\n\n\"Is there no way to gain more control over the dragons? By majikal means, maybe?\"\n\nControl the dragons? How would they even try that?\n\n\"No,\" Kradik answered. \"He's done everything he can for us without being discovered.\"\n\n\"So you've been telling the council all along,\" she said. \"But surely you've been researching spells with your time. The situation isn't ideal, and the council wants to know if you have a plan or if we must prepare for defeat? Certainly, you've been experimenting on him to find more and better ways to control a dragon.\"\n\nWho? Owyn begged silently in his mind. Who is the traitor? A name!\n\n\"Time to research? Control a dragon?\" he retorted. \"Are you mad? What time have I had? Flying back and forth between you, the council, the humans, the mountain. What resources? Other than those the humans have to offer. What good would it do anyway? As the situation stands, he said Visi knows everything and watches everything. And the black dragon, Hiro, is the one causing the most trouble.\" When Kradik said it a smile tickled Owyn's lips. \"Hiro is everywhere he shouldn't be, riling the dragons. Making them fight. He desperately wants Hiro dead. Almost as much as he wants Priya dead. If we have the chance, we must kill them first. You want to control the dragons? Take out their leader. Maybe that will take the fight out of them, but I have no more courses of action.\"\n\nThe smile disappeared. Priya isn't the traitor, but for some reason the traitor wants her dead. But who is the traitor? Does Anna know? Did she find out and alert Priya somehow?\n\n\"Well,\" the faerie woman sighed, \"I can't say your efforts are enough for the council, but no decisions have been made as to your fate. If the massacre goes off without a problem, you might even gain a seat on the council. But if the dragons fight back and they're not all killed, you might be\u2026punished.\"\n\nKradik growled. \"How is this my fault? It was Skorkot who started it all! She and Rakgar!...\"\n\nThe rest of the tirade drowned in Owyn's ears by the pounding of his own blood. His stomach churned. It couldn't be.\n\nRakgar.Traitor? No. Never.\n\nHe didn't want to fight the humans, but he had good reasons. Tell the faeries about the flarote? He'd always protected the secrets of the dragons. Why would he want Hiro dead? He was like another father to Hiro. He had spoiled him when he was young, allowing him so much leniency that other dragons protested.\n\nWant Priya dead? Why? She's his daughter! He couldn't be the\u2014\n\n\"Rakgar sought out Skorkot,\" the woman bit back, \"he gave her the key ingredient for the poison. It was Rakgar's plan to kill the dragons with flarote; Skorkot was nothing but a messenger for his vengeful ideas.\n\n\"You discovered how to use those ideas. You created the poison. You positioned the humans to kill the dragons. You pull the king's strings even now. How are you not to blame if the dragons aren't killed? Or worse, if the curse doesn't end.\" She lowered her voice and Kradik's fight seeped out of him. \"Many faeries have died trying to end this curse. If killing the dragons doesn't work, you'll just be next in a long line of failures. The council will move on.\"\n\n\"Then we must see that it doesn't fail.\"\n\nAs the two began arguing about who was in charge, Owyn burst from his hiding place. He didn't care if they heard him escape. They couldn't stop him. His heart burned as hot as the deepest embers of a fire as he exploded into the sky. In the back of his mind, he knew he should be concerned if the centaurs and other dragons made it through to the Inner Mountain, but he didn't care. He had to face the real traitor.\n\n[ Testify ]\n\n\"He's disappeared,\" Torgon announced, entering Philip's tent. \"Again.\"\n\n\"Too bad,\" Philip grumbled. \"I was kind of hoping for a physical altercation with someone who might actually fight back.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't want to fight this one,\" Torgon said as he found his chair next to the king. \"He's huge.\"\n\n\"That's good, I wouldn't suffer as long.\"\n\nTorgon sighed. \"You're suffering now?\"\n\nPhilip put the papers down on the little table in front of him. Reports of how many men were assigned to each platform, how many arrows were assigned to each man, how long it would take to get into the Rock Clouds, and the last page was an estimate of casualties \u2013 dragon and human. Far too many casualties in Philip's mind \u2013 on either side. He noticed there was no estimate of faerie casualties.\n\n\"We shouldn't be here,\" Philip grumbled rubbing his face. \"We should be looking for Anna.\"\n\n\"You said yourself that she's here, in the Rock Clouds.\"\n\n\"She's survived a dragon kidnapping before.\" Philip had been searching his own feelings. Anna disappeared all the time, often of her own accord. But this was the first time he saw evidence of destruction where she'd last been. The chaotic remains of their sleeping quarter and the lifeless body of Dieko had scared him. He felt his own mortality. He realized that his people might face the same threat. \"Hundreds could die because I want to retaliate against one dragon for taking one person, and we don't even know if she's dead or alive. How will any of this improve the situation?\"\n\n\"Don't forget,\" Torgon almost whispered, \"a dragon took my father too.\"\n\nBefore Philip could respond, the captain stationed at his door stepped in.\n\n\"Sire,\" the man saluted. \"There are men outside requesting to see you.\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" Torgon asked, standing.\n\n\"The man said his name is Jarek. He's one of the Hamees.\"\n\nTorgon turned to Philip, mirroring the same quizzical look on Philip's face. Philip shrugged. \"What do they want?\"\n\n\"He said he has information of the black dragon,\" the captain said.\n\nTorgon threw his hands in the air in exasperation.\n\n\"Let him in,\" Philip said.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Torgon whispered as the captain slipped out, \"they hold the answers to that riddle of yours.\"\n\nMy ever-present riddle, Philip thought. He and Torgon had argued the point many, many times. This situation was like Philip standing at a locked door. Kradik wanted him to raze the \"building\" to the ground, but Philip had the burning desire to discover what was on the other side.\n\nPhilip straightened himself. Torgon adjusted his tunic and stood at his king's side as three men entered. They wore simply stitched clothing. Their hair and boots bore no marks of stature or nobility. They removed their hats upon entering and held them in their hands. The man in front wore a glove on only his left hand.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" the first man said. He fell to his knees and wouldn't look Philip in the eye. The two men behind him did the same without a word.\n\n\"Your name is Jarek?\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"Please stand, Jarek, and look your king in the eye.\"\n\nSlowly the man stood and the other two did likewise. Jarek's eyes wandered about the room, to the table, to Torgon and finally to Philip. Although the other men kept their eyes cast downward, when Jarek met Philip's eye he seemed to gain his confidence.\n\n\"I've come to talk to you about the black dragon,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Philip answered. \"What information do you have about it?\"\n\n\"We've seen it,\" Jarek said. \"We've had more than one dealing with it.\"\n\n\"I seem to recall,\" Torgon said, \"that a group of Hamees reported sighting the beast before we captured it almost a year ago.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Jarek nodded at Torgon. \"That was our village. But we've seen it more since.\"\n\n\"Sightings?\"\n\nJarek shook his head. \"More than just sightings.\" He looked to Philip again. \"I've taken an oath of honesty and I wish to tell you all, but there are aspects of my story that would do harm to others. That would conflict with my other oaths.\"\n\nPhilip nodded. He knew a little bit about the Hamees' oaths but apparently not enough to get around them. \"You obviously came here for a reason,\" he said. \"Tell me what you can.\"\n\nJarek took a breath. \"The black dragon isn't your enemy. He saved our village from the wraith last fall. He saved my life. He's a tame dragon.\"\n\n\"Tame?\" Torgon asked in shock.\n\n\"Tamed by whom?\" Philip asked.\n\nJarek pursed his lips.\n\n\"This would cause the harm?\" Philip asked.\n\nAfter Jarek nodded, Torgon said, \"You think we would do them harm?\"\n\nBefore Jarek could answer, Kradik entered. \"And you would be right,\" he said. \"Any man who\u2026tames\u2026a dragon is our enemy.\"\n\nThe blood drained from Jarek's face. The other men got fidgety.\n\n\"No one is going to harm you, Jarek,\" Torgon said.\n\nJarek swallowed. \"I hoped to dissuade you. I don't think the dragons are\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014are what? The enemy?\" Kradik spat. \"You have no idea what they are capable of.\"\n\nJarek looked into the dark cowl of the faerie. Without a word, he dropped his hat on the ground, reached up and pulled the glove from his other hand. Under the glove, the skin on his hand was shriveled and black. He held it up to the faerie.\n\n\"I have felt dragon fire,\" he said. \"It saved my life and the lives of those I love most.\"\n\n\"Peculiar alliance,\" Kradik said, partially echoing the centaur's suggestion of an alliance with the dragons, as reported by Maelin. \"Dragons rampaging wild is dangerous enough, but if someone can use...that power\u2026harness it\u2026somehow\u2026 All the more reason to be rid of the beasts and anyone who might be sympathetic toward them.\"\n\nA thought struck Philip. \"Captain,\" he called, standing. When the man entered, the king indicated Jarek. \"Take these men and give them food and shelter for the night. They may rest here until their journey home. Jarek, I thank you for the information. You have shown fealty to the Noble Kingdom.\"\n\nWhen the Hamees men had been shown out, Philip turned to Kradik. \"Is that what this war is about? The feud between faeries and centaurs?\"\n\nKradik snorted. \"Don't be absurd.\"\n\n\"The centaurs are protecting dragons,\" Torgon said.\n\n\"Joss and those drivel will have their time,\" Kradik hissed. \"For now, this war is about you doing what I tell you. And I'm telling you to kill dragons and anyone else who gets in your way!\"\n\nThe air seemed to be sucked from the tent as the faerie stormed out.\n\n[ Why ]\n\nRakgar. Traitor.\n\nHe'd told the faeries about the effects of flarote on the dragons. He'd helped them make the poison. He even now was plotting to keep all the dragons in the Rock Clouds to await a massacre. How could he betray all dragons? He was a blood and ash traitor! That's why the Allegiant Sword had such a strong effect on him, Hiro realized as he remembered the encounter with the centaurs and the majikal sword. He was plotting to have all dragons killed!\n\nSuddenly a memory assaulted his mind.\n\nHiro and Tog entered the cave together. \"He gets worse every day,\" Tog, Hiro's best friend, grumbled next to him. Tog scrubbed smoke out of his protruding eyes as an orange dame scurried out of the cave opening they had come through and took off into the air. \"He sent Trakillyn and Sanatab to cut down fifty oak trees,\" Tog whispered once she had gone. \"He gave no reason for it. He sent Makki to stack them, again with no explanation, he just ordered him to do it. Then he forced Burrabill and Hakkil to carry the same trees into the Black Forest and leave them there. No explanation, and ordering them around like a human king. Like he has the authority.\" Their claws beat a rhythm against the stone as they walked through the cave toward Rakgar's lair. Tog lowered his voice even further in the silence, ensuring that only Hiro could hear him. \"He told Makki not to tell anyone, and insisted on his wyrd. The only reason I know any of this is because I stumbled upon Makki while he was at it.\"\n\nThat had happened months and months ago. At the beginning of spring. Cutting down trees. Stacking trees. Delivering trees. Probably more than anyone was aware of. The platforms. Rakgar had been planning these platforms for several seasons.\n\nThe fire in Hiro's belly burned brighter and hotter as he flew. He would challenge Rakgar. He would force his leader to confess, if it was true. He flew higher and faster than he ever had before. He didn't feel his wings or legs. He didn't see the night sky. He didn't feel cold or warm. He only saw the Inner Mountain. He saw the Rock Clouds. His home. He would protect it.\n\nHe flew high enough that even the Watch didn't stop him. He flew straight past them, directly to Rakgar's lair. Rakgar had stationed two of the Watch at the entrance. Hiro roared and blasted them with flame as they tried to intercept him.\n\n\"HIRO, STOP!\" Visi jumped in front of him, spreading her wings. Startled, he stumbled to a halt. When he righted himself, he only glared past the old seer at Rakgar. The leader, although confused, narrowed his eyes. Anger. Hatred. Hiro realized that he had been seeing an increasing amount of these emotions in the leader's eye. He did want Hiro dead.\n\n\"Go home, Hiro,\" Visi growled at him.\n\n\"He's\u2014\"\n\n\"I know!\" she yelled, cutting off Hiro's words.\n\nHiro allowed his eyes to find Visi. The fragile dame pleaded with her eyes. \"You know?\" he asked. \"Of course, you do. How can you\u2014\"\n\n\"He'll kill you,\" she whispered. \"Without the help of your friends,\" Visi continued, \"he'll kill you and then his plan will succeed.\" Then, leaning in close, she put her nose to his. A warm breath of memory overlaid his vision.\n\nHis father lay on the ground in a forest, a hole torn through him and pieces of his body falling away into ash. Hiro, called Dakoon then, stood over his dying father.\n\n\"I must,\" Tusten forced through clenched teeth. He drew a long breath through his nostrils then allowed his eyes to rest on Dak. \"Ido,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Dromdan,\" Dak replied. He remembered their pleading sorrow as they used the revered titles for father and son in faerie language.\n\n\"Ido,\" his father forced out. \"Of all the things I taught you, I failed you in the most important matter.\"\n\n\"No, Dromdan.\"\n\n\"You must understand,\" Tusten groaned. \"The most important question in the world is\u2026why?\"\n\n\"'Why,' Father?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he nodded. \"You must ask 'why' \u2013 always. There is a reason for every action. A purpose to every word. Understand why I taught you the things I did and you will understand me.\"\n\nThe memory faded and Hiro allowed his eyes to slip from Visi to Rakgar and back. She must be reminding him of this, the most painful of his memories, for a reason.\n\nHis fire burned hotter, if that was possible, as another thought came. \"Is he the reason my father is dead?\" he growled low to the old dame.\n\n\"You'll never know,\" she whispered back, \"unless you do as your father told you.\"\n\nWhy? He fought through the fog of anger. I must figure out why he would do this. And alert the others.\n\nHiro glared at Rakgar a moment longer, then turned and ran out.\n\nHiro landed in his cave with a roar so loud the walls shook and a few dripping stones fell to the ground. One of the spilling stones in front of him absorbed the fire from his angry roar and burned red hot to light the cavern, much like the green stones did in the Ice Ruck lair.\n\n\"Well, it's nice to see you too.\"\n\nWhen Hiro could clear his vision from the anger and see again in the darkness, he saw Priya stand up from the bed of grasses he left in the corner.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" he growled at her.\n\n\"Believe it or not, Hiro,\" she said, a sneer in her voice at his name, \"I've been doing something about this war too.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\nShe sat on her haunches haughtily in front of him. \"Seeking allies.\"\n\n\"Like Anna?\" he barked. \"And the Ice Ruck?\" he added at the last moment.\n\n\"Perhaps.\"\n\n\"Where is she?\" he snapped at her.\n\nPriya stared at him.\n\nWhen she didn't answer, he snapped again. \"Her maid said I would find her here. What did you do with her?\"\n\n\"She's safe,\" she answered. \"And so am I, by the way. And what were you doing talking to her maid?\"\n\n\"By Kurta,\" he roared again, \"what have you done with her?\"\n\nPriya crouched in an attack posture. She hissed. \"She's safe on her own. She doesn't need you and neither do I!\" She roared and swiped a claw across Hiro's nose.\n\nHiro blinked. His snout stung. Her claws were small but sharp. \"What's wrong with you?\"\n\n\"What's wrong with me?\" she yelled back. \"What's wrong with you? You tear in here full of anger, only caring about your precious little human.\"\n\n\"I don't have time for your feelings,\" he growled. There wasn't time for anything; he needed to make sure Anna was safe and he needed to tell the others about Rakgar. If Anna was anywhere in the Rock Clouds, he needed to get her away quickly. \"I don't have time to apologize, again, for not loving you. We've got to find Prak and the centaurs and end this war. I need to know where Anna is.\"\n\n\"Since she's all you care about, she's in my lair,\" she hissed. \"And as to your love,\" she shook her head. The muscles in her jaw clenched. She bunched her legs and spread her wings. Hiro could see the fire building in her eyes. \"Don't speak to me of your love.\" Her voiced climbed with every word. She lifted into the air with a final scream echoing, \"You're in love with a human!\"\n\nAs he watched her tail whip out of sight around the edge of the cave, he noticed Tog sitting silently outside the cave entrance. Tog's normally gray scales were lit with a bloody red glare from the burning, spilling stone. He must have heard everything. He blinked at Hiro. \"It's not true,\" Tog said, but Hiro could hear the doubt in his flat tone.\n\nHiro couldn't answer. There was no more time for lies. He knew his best friend would have to find out about his broken heart sooner or later. He had hoped to explain how it happened and why. He wanted to heal relations between the humans and dragons before it came to light. He was out of time.\n\nTog swung his head slowly, seemingly attempting to expel what he was holding inside. The revelation and anger visibly rose in his belly in the form of burning fire. Eventually, realization forced him to meet Hiro's eyes. He bared his fangs at his best friend and turned away.\n\n\"Tog, wait,\" Hiro called to him before he could leave. The memory of the vision of this moment stung at his heart.\n\n\"No!\" Tog snapped around to face Hiro and roared, \"YOU'RE A BLOOD AND ASH TRAITOR!\"\n\nHiro watched, helpless as his best friend disappeared into the dark sky. He hung his head. His best friend had abandoned him, as Visi had predicted. At the time when he needed him most.\n\nRakgar wanted him dead. Hiro's anger turned to fear. His knees felt weak. He couldn't protect himself against the massively powerful dan. His breath came ragged from his throat when he thought about fighting Rakgar. Visi had saved his life by stopping him.\n\nHe couldn't protect all the dragons from the waiting hoard of humans at their doorstep. He had seen what the poison could do. It hadn't killed him, but only because he'd been able to change into a human. The other dragons couldn't change. They would all be killed by poisoned arrows. At any moment, he would be surrounded by dragon ash. He couldn't protect the woman he loved from the angry dragon now probably on the way to kill her.\n\n\"Hiro?\"\n\nHiro's head jerked up. He sucked in a breath.\n\nPrak.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he asked the little brown dragon.\n\n\"We heard you roar,\" came the answer.\n\n'We'. Prak must have been with Tog and they'd both heard him roar at Priya. They'd probably come to Hiro's lair together and heard everything. At least he knew they'd made it through to the centaurs.\n\n\"You should go,\" Hiro told him. \"You shouldn't be seen with me.\" He knew the information that his heart had broken for a human woman would spread among the dragons faster than fire on a dry plain with a high wind. He would be exiled, if not killed. Rakgar would have justification to kill him now. His original reasons, whatever they were, wouldn't matter anymore.\n\nPrak stepped further into the lair. \"I'll be seen with whomever I choose, thank you. Nothing stopped me before. Why would it stop me now?\"\n\nHiro flopped onto the ground. This is the last time he would probably be in his lair ever again. \"Didn't you hear what they said?\" he grumbled. \"I'm a blood and ash traitor.\"\n\n\"I heard,\" Prak said. \"Everything.\"\n\nHiro studied him as the little dragon who had annoyed him so much over the years laid down next to him.\n\nAfter a moment of silence, Prak looked up at Hiro. \"I know why everyone calls me 'Prak', you know.\"\n\nHiro just blinked. His name was Prakyndar. His dame named him that because he was so smart. Prakyndar meant 'point or pinnacle of knowledge'. But everyone called him 'Prak', meaning 'point', 'pointed' or 'thorn'. As in\u2026annoying.\n\nHiro shook his head, \"I don't know\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, you do.\" Prak grinned. \"Everyone calls me Prak because I'm annoying. Obnoxious voice. Ask too many questions. Follow you around.\"\n\nAshamed, Hiro dropped his head.\n\n\"I forgive you,\" Prak mumbled.\n\nHiro lifted his eyes. He saw a new dragon in front of him. The small, nasally little brown dragon had the eyes and claws of Prak, but he was confident and strong while also meek and merciful.\n\n\"The thing with friends,\" Prak continued, \"is that you have to choose who you're willing to forgive, how often, and for what. I've forgiven you every time you called me Prak, Hiro. You've always treated me as more of a friend than others have. So, I won't call you Traitor. You haven't done anything to me to deserve it. Besides,\" he said standing up, \"we still have a war to fight. We need you.\"\n\nPrak was right. Hiro stood next to the little dragon. \"Thank you,\" he whispered. \"Visi told me that I was the blade on a dangerous weapon and I must be mindful who wields me.\" He met the small dragon's eyes. \"I choose you, Kodoran.\"\n\nPrak smiled, \"Don't call me 'commander' yet. Maybe when we win this war and find the real traitor.\"\n\nHiro almost choked as he remembered. His own pain had rid it from his mind. \"But I have,\" he said, \"I know who the real traitor is. I know who wants the dragons dead.\"\n\n[ In Control ]\n\n\"This is what you want me to see?\" Philip asked, not hiding the annoyance in his tone. \"The platforms?\"\n\nHe stood at the edge of the Noble Kingdom's camp, just outside the firelight. Considering the number of men in their contingent, it was no small journey to get here. Kradik had requested Philip's presence and naturally he'd brought Torgon with him as well. The three stood admiring the large wooden platforms tucked under tree cover. Each could comfortably support fifty men. With five platforms, they would send two hundred and fifty men into the Rock Clouds at a time. As thrilled as Kradik seemed, the sight only served to depress the young king. The night was late and Philip wished for his bed to delay dealing with the war until the morning.\n\n\"They're all ready,\" Kradik said proudly as he waved his hand.\n\n\"All of them?\" Philip asked. He knew when the platforms were finished and enchanted they would be fully prepared for the attack. He was running out of time and holdup tactics.\n\n\"We have five more sets like these,\" Kradik said, admiring his workmanship. \"One for each kingdom. The faerie council arrived yesterday. We now have the majikal power to finish this war.\"\n\nTwelve hundred and fifty men could reach into the Rock Clouds at a moment's notice. Philip's stomach churned. The first wave would carry approximately two humans for every dragon, each with at least twenty poisoned arrows in their quiver. They might not even need a second wave. Then they'll move onto the next ruck.\n\n\"We attack at first light,\" Kradik said.\n\nEven with his face completely blacked out in the cowl of his cloak, Philip could hear the smile in Kradik's voice.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Torgon said, at Philip's side.\n\n\"Your Majesty!\"\n\nBefore Torgon or Philip could demand an explanation from Kradik, the three turned toward a set of newcomers.\n\nA man in a black tunic with a silver sword embroidered across the front of it announced the small party. \"His Royal Majesty, King Grisivere Ido Griffin of the Just Kingdom requests to speak with King Philip Ido Paudie of the Noble Kingdom.\"\n\nThe servant stepped out of the way as the short, round king stepped forward. The top of his bright red hair barely reached Philip's chest, but somehow Philip always felt the urge to prostrate himself in front of this man. But this time, he felt no such urge. He glanced at the black sword hanging from the other king's hip.\n\nGrisivere noticed the glance. \"Yes,\" he nodded, placing his hand on the hilt. \"It is a fake. The real Sword of Justice was stolen.\"\n\n\"Stolen?\" Torgon asked. \"I thought the Just Sword couldn't be stolen.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, there are ways,\" Grisivere answered him.\n\n\"By whom?\" Philip asked. \"When?\"\n\n\"We haven't discovered the thief,\" Grisivere answered, \"but rest assured, when we find them, they will be punished to the full extent of the law.\"\n\n\"Is this what you came to discuss?\" Philip asked. In the back of his mind he considered other options.\n\n\"Not fully,\" Grisivere said. \"While I have my doubts as to any of my kingdom being the culprits, I believe the theft was not a coincidental event. We are also plagued by some form of\u2026attacks\u2026\"\n\nAs the man's voice trailed off, Philip's brow furrowed. Grisivere had never been the type of man to be uncertain. The nature of the Just sword provided him with answers to questions most people would find unanswerable.\n\n\"Attacks?\" Philip asked. \"From the centaurs? They have certainly been plaguing us as well.\"\n\n\"No,\" Grisivere crossed his arms. \"We're not certain what's going on, to be honest. Men have disappeared in the night, only to turn up in the morning bound and gagged. Under their own beds. That very thing has happened several times over the past few nights. Food has gone missing, and many of our weapons \u2013 including the poisoned arrows \u2013 are either gone or destroyed. In fact,\" he grumbled and shifted on his feet, \"my own tent disappeared while I slept. That happened last night, and the sword disappeared with it. I knew the only Just thing to do would be to confess to you that I have lost control of my soldiers, my camp and my resources.\"\n\n\"Your soldiers?\" Torgon asked. \"Surely they haven't turned on you because of these attacks?\"\n\nGrisivere glanced at the few men who had accompanied him to Philip's camp. \"Not all,\" he said, \"but some. Most of the men are terrified. They claim they've heard voices and threats, with no one around to be seen saying them. They've seen horrible things too, visions, ghosts and phantoms. All of the ghosts and voices have one thing in common\u2026they threaten the men, saying they'll kill them if they attack the dragons.\"\n\n\"Majik?\" Philip asked.\n\n\"Of course, it's majik,\" Grisivere said. \"No one knows who's doing it or why. But my men know they can believe the threats.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because my majishun tried to fight back when the ghosts attacked him. He ended up hanging from a tree by his ankle with no ropes and a sign attached to him that said\u2026\" the stalwart king hesitated and muttered, almost embarrassed, \"'I can't majik'.\"\n\nPhilip grabbed his nose and pinched his face to keep from laughing. Glancing at Torgon it seemed the general had better luck controlling himself. Then he turned to Kradik. \"The attack will have to wait until we get the Just camp under control,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" Torgon said, his voice dangerously low.\n\nKradik stepped closer. \"This war will end tomorrow, whether Grisivere can control his men or not,\" he hissed.\n\nPhilip's teeth ground together. \"I'm the king here.\"\n\nKradik cackled. \"Do you still think you're in charge?\" When Philip didn't answer, the faerie went on. \"You want something to be afraid of?\" He reached up and yanked back the cowl of his cloak. Everyone gasped except Philip, whose voice stuck in his throat. As Kradik spoke, Philip watched the muscles on his cheeks pull away to bare his teeth. \"You're only here to do as I say. If you don't, I'll see to the destruction of your entire kingdom.\" He glanced over Philip's shoulder to Grisivere. \"Hopefully for you, your men will see that the faeries are the real threat, not your phantoms.\" Turning back to Philip he hissed, \"Have your men ready to attack at dawn.\"\n\nThe faerie didn't wait for a response. He lifted into the air by his wings and flew away, leaving Philip helpless to do anything but stare after him.\n\n[ Tenuous Trust ]\n\n\"We have to warn the others,\" Prak said, or Kodoran as Hiro would call him, as he and Hiro dashed from the cave. He lifted into the air to hover in front of Hiro. The hour was late, but the moons offered some vision. \"I don't know if Milah and Mitashio have gone to speak with him yet. I don't know where Priya has gone.\"\n\n\"She's probably gone to her lair,\" Hiro answered. \"I'll try to get anyone else away from him and back to the centaur camp.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you can resist the temptation to fight him?\" Kodoran asked.\n\nHiro set his teeth. \"I will try\u2026for now.\"\n\nKodoran nodded. \"I'll go back to the camp and wait for you and the others there.\"\n\n\"If I don't return\u2026\"\n\n\"I'll know what happened,\" Kodoran finished the thought.\n\nWith a final nod to the little brown dragon, Hiro flew in the direction of Rakgar's cavern. He didn't know what he would do if the enormous gray leader was there to meet him. He didn't know how he could convince the others to leave Rakgar's counsel and go back to the centaurs with him, but he had to try. Rakgar wanted Priya dead too and he would kill Anna without a second glance. He had to assure their safety.\n\nAs he had divulged what he knew to Kodoran feira Prakyndar, the fire of anger swept through him, burning brighter with every word. Now, while that fire pushed him faster toward the cavern, Hiro had to remind himself not to engage the treacherous leader. Kordoran had warned Hiro not to fight Rakgar. \"He'll kill you,\" he had said. \"We have to make a plan first.\"\n\nSo Hiro landed on the lip of Rakgar's lair quietly, hoping not to see the massive dragon. He knew he wouldn't be able to resist a fight if they came fang-to-fang. Tip-taloning into the huge cavern, Hiro didn't see anyone. Passing the side caverns, he noticed a large pile of flarote in one. The cave in which stockpiles of dried meat was usually stored for barren months was completely empty. Hiro realized Rakgar must have avoided sending hunting parties out so the ruck would remain consistently low on food and threaten the hatchlings. It made his fire boil again.\n\nAs he passed the large empty rooms to the sides of the main cavern, Hiro spotted the tunnel that led to Priya's lair. He had never been in her lair, she had made sure of that since a young age. She was very strict and never allowed anyone inside. He knew she used a couple of ways in and out of the Inner Mountain, but he also knew that Anna was probably down in Priya's lair now.\n\nHe checked to make sure no one was visible from the opening, then darted inside. Priya might be fuming mad, but he had to get both her and Anna out of there. He wandered down the tunnels as a dragon but got turned around easily. With several branches in many directions, he had to choose carefully and keep track of the ones he'd been down. Many were too small to enter as a dragon, so he could only follow the larger ones. Those didn't lead much of anywhere, and some looped around. He knew he'd passed a few smaller openings closer to the entrance. Priya might have told Anna to go into one of those so no dragon could get to her. With a smile, Owyn headed back up to the lair's entrance.\n\nGetting closer, he could hear voices in the main cavern. He stayed in human form, knowing he could hide much better and even slip into one of the cracks in the wall to avoid any dragons.\n\n\"\u2026Hiro claims to know them,\" Milah growled as he entered the large lair.\n\nOwyn couldn't be certain but it sounded like he and others had come from the opposite direction of Priya's lair. They must have come from Rakgar's sleeping cave. The brothers probably woke Rakgar.\n\n\"Of course, he does,\" Rakgar grumbled. \"But, honestly, how much can you trust him?\"\n\n\"Not much.\" That voice most certainly belonged to Tog. Owyn's heart pained at the sound of his former best friend counselling against him to Rakgar. \"He has lied about many things. Some of which I'm only learning about now.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" Rakgar asked.\n\n\"Many things,\" Tog said. \"I'll have to verify before I claim anything.\"\n\nOwyn heard the hesitation in Tog's voice. His best friend had yet to betray him entirely, but he seemed to be working up to it.\n\n\"He's been to the surface several times,\" Mitashio piped up.\n\nMilah fluidly continued his brother's thought, \"He could have met these\u2026\"\n\nNO! Owyn shouted in his head. No! Don't tell him of our one secret weapon!\n\n\"\u2026creatures\u2026\"\n\n\"\u2026goblins,\" Mitashio finished. He said it like it was a dirty word.\n\n\"Goblins?\" Rakgar asked. \"Are you sure what you saw was real?\"\n\n\"They were real,\" Mitashio said.\n\n\"They're ugly,\" Milah said.\n\n\"And dangerous,\" Mitashio said.\n\n\"And powerful,\" Milah said.\n\n\"Please,\" Rakgar grumbled. \"I hate it when you two speak like that. Just one.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Milah said, without much sincerity. \"The goblins are very real. Now that we have their help, we might actually be able to fight back. They can disguise themselves\u2026\"\n\nAnd now that Rakgar knows, Hiro thought, he will tell the faeries and they will stop the goblins.\n\n\"They could possibly even disguise the dragons so we can look like centaurs and fight,\" Mitashio interjected, forgetting the apology.\n\n\"We can fight the humans,\" Milah said.\n\n\"We should fight the humans,\" Mitashio insisted.\n\n\"No,\" Rakgar said. \"What if the disguise fails? What if these goblin creatures are just a ruse of the centaurs? Have you met these goblins, Tog? Did you know of them?\"\n\n\"No,\" Tog answered, \"I've never met them or heard about them. But they could be another secret Hiro has been keeping.\"\n\n\"They're certainly no ruse of the centaurs,\" Milah said. \"With the goblins' help we might actually survive this attack.\"\n\n\"NO!\" Rakgar roared. He took a breath, but it didn't seem to calm him. \"In fact, in the morning I want all the dragons gathered here. Spread the word that the entire ruck, everyone, must gather here in the morning.\"\n\n\"Everyone?\" one of the brothers asked quietly.\n\n\"Everyone,\" Rakgar growled. \"Unless they answer to a different Rakgar.\"\n\nOwyn could hear the anger and hatred in the leader's voice. He didn't understand how the brothers and Tog couldn't hear it. Then he remembered that he hadn't heard it before now either.\n\nAs the brothers left the cave, Owyn prayed silently that he would catch up to them before they went very far. He couldn't spend any more time looking for Anna in this maze Priya called a lair.\n\nRakgar sniffed briefly at the entrance to Priya's space. Owyn held his breath, hoping the huge dragon couldn't hear or smell him. Before Rakgar turned away, he whispered into the lair whose opening was too small for him to enter. \"You'll be dead soon.\"\n\nOwyn froze. He listened as the leader-turned-traitor trundled back to his own sleeping chambers. Owyn could tell he wasn't hurrying, and he didn't bother looking back on the chance that Priya might appear and attack him. Then he wondered how many times her own father had whispered those words to her through the darkness when no one else was around?\n\nCarefully controlling his temptations, Hiro waited until the massive dragon was gone before tip-taloning from his hiding spot.\n\nTomorrow, he decided silently, tomorrow this will end.\n\nThen it hit him like a blast of ice water. Tomorrow. He's gathering the dragons. Tomorrow. The humans must be attacking.\n\n\"Kodoran!\" Hiro shouted as he neared the center of the centaur encampment. \"Kodoran, they're coming!\"\n\nDragons and centaurs came running as Hiro landed in front of Kodoran, who was meeting with the centaurs Joss, Rylan and Ashel and the goblins Svorgh and Shvika. Milah and Mitashio were already there nearby and followed the sound, grumbling as he landed.\n\n\"Please,\" Milah moaned, \"tell me we're not calling him that.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Kodoran asked, ignoring the comment. \"How do you know? What makes you think so? What did you hear?\"\n\nOk, Hiro sighed to himself, maybe he hasn't completely grown up.\n\n\"Rakgar is gathering the dragons,\" Hiro said. \"First thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"We've already told them, Hiro,\" Mitashio said.\n\n\"Prak,\" Ashel said, but then hesitated with a glance at the dragon, \"I mean, Kodoran, just told us as well.\"\n\nHiro shook his head, unable to speak what he knew into existence, but Kodoran answered. \"You don't understand \u2026 it will be easier for the humans to kill all the dragons if they're gathered in one place,\" he said with utter realization.\n\n\"Wait,\" Milah stepped forward, \"what are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Rakgar is setting us up,\" Kodoran hissed, \"or as I should call him, Taynor.\" He used the faerie word for traitor to indicate his deception.\n\nThe brothers were suddenly stunned to silence along with several dragons surrounding them. Hiro's heart chilled a little when he noticed Tog wasn't there.\n\n\"It's not possible,\" Milah said.\n\n\"Unfortunately, it makes sense,\" Rylan said to growls from the dragons. \"Who else would have known about\u2026I mean,\" he glanced at the other centaurs around him, \"\u2026how to make the poison?\"\n\n\"He had them gather logs,\" Mitashio whispered to his brother. In the silence, everyone heard it.\n\nMilah ground his teeth. \"The platforms.\"\n\n\"Skorkot,\" Hiro offered, \"the faerie who counselled with him, tried to kill me.\"\n\n\"We remember,\" Milah said.\n\n\"I heard the faeries discussing it,\" Hiro said. \"It's all been Rakgar, from the start.\"\n\nMilah lifted his eyes slightly to Hiro's. \"Show me,\" he said.\n\nHiro shifted and rolled his shoulder. \"I can't.\"\n\nMilah met Hiro's eyes with defiance this time. \"Why not?\" he asked. \"You call our Rakgar 'traitor' but don't have proof?\"\n\n\"I give you my wyrd,\" Hiro said. \"May you strike me down if I'm lying.\"\n\nMilah's maw worked as if he were about to scream back at Hiro. Before he could open his mouth, Kodoran spoke up, \"And you have mine,\" he said.\n\nMilah, Mitashio and Hiro looked to the little dragon. \"You have my wyrd,\" he continued, but he indicated all of the dragons surrounding him. \"You all have my wyrd that Hiro is telling the truth. Rakgar is a blood and ash traitor to all dragons.\" He added the last to Milah's face. \"I'll stake my life on Hiro's claims, with or without proof.\"\n\nMilah's jaw stopped. After a moment longer, he turned to Hiro and inclined his head.\n\n\"So,\" Ashel barked, \"what do we do about it?\"\n\nKodoran looked at Hiro, who looked at Milah, who looked at Mitashio, who looked to the other dragons surrounding him. No one wanted to say it, but Kodoran stepped up again.\n\n\"We kill him.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Wait,\" Ashel said, \"didn't you say the humans are going to attack? Shouldn't that be our first priority?\"\n\n\"They're attacking at first light,\" Svorgh said. When Hiro shot him a questioning glance, he shrugged his shoulders. \"I was prepared to report it when you arrived.\"\n\n\"You seem to know a lot,\" Hiro said to the minute leader. \"Did you know of Taynor?\"\n\nSvorgh's gaze didn't waver. \"We knew a dragon would betray dragons. However, we don't have the time or resources to search the past, present and future of every dragon. We knew it would happen how it should.\"\n\n\"What about you,\" Hiro asked, trying to keep the pain out of his voice when he looked at Ashel. \"You watch the stars. They didn't warn you?\"\n\nAshel lifted her chin slightly. \"Stars are difficult to interpret. For example, I told you your star was being surrounded by five others that I believed represented the five human kingdoms. I now believe they represent the five intelligent species of Avonoa. I just didn't know one of them existed.\"\n\nHer large eyes dropped to Svorgh and Shvika.\n\n\"Did your stars tell you what to do about the humans?\" Milah grunted.\n\n\"No,\" Ashel glared at him. \"However, my keen sense of strategy tells me that the centaurs and goblins will need to run interference with the humans until you deal with Taynor.\"\n\nAshel stepped away from the dragons as the group sectioned off instinctively. The centaurs and goblins began deep conversations about how they would slow the attack in the Rock Clouds. The dragons faced each other in silence.\n\n\"Someone has to kill him,\" Kodoran finally said.\n\n\"Hiro is The One,\" Milah said. \"Doesn't that mean he should fight him?\"\n\n\"Shouldn't The One be Rakgar?\" Mitashio finished.\n\nHiro shook his head. \"I'm not The One,\" he said.\n\nMitashio's eyes popped open. \"But that's what Visi said!\"\n\n\"She said what you needed to hear,\" Hiro said.\n\nMilah threw up a claw and rolled his head to the sky. \"Then what are we doing this for?\" he exclaimed.\n\nKodoran stepped forward, glaring at Milah. \"You're doing this to fulfill your own prophecy,\" he said.\n\nHiro remembered and said, \"your ambition and talents will be utterly wasted, unless you listen to your betters. In this case\u2026\"\n\nAll eyes fell on Kodoran, who grinned.\n\nBoth brown brothers groaned at the same time.\n\n\"Does that mean you're going to fight him?\" Milah asked.\n\nHiro shook his head. \"No one of us would ever beat him.\"\n\nKodoran whispered, \"Not alone.\"\n\n[ Hasty Appearance ]\n\n\"What is this?!\" Anna yelled as she burst into Philip's tent. \"You're attacking tomorrow? As in, in a few hours, tomorrow?\"\n\nPhilip tumbled from his pallet bed at the outburst. He hadn't been sleeping, but he'd hoped to at least get a few hours of quiet rest before going into battle against dragons.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Sire,\" a captain ran in with a glowing cube, averting his eyes from the princess.\n\nFor good reason. Anna had come into the room with a simple fine robe thrown hastily over her shoulders and only a brilliant green cloth wrapped around her body under it. Philip had a hard time looking at her with so much skin showing, but the shock of her unexpected appearance distracted him.\n\n\"You're alive?\" he shouted back.\n\nTierni ran in \u2013 fully clothed, thank Shurta. \"I tried to stop her, Sire,\" she said, carrying a bundle of what Philip hoped was Anna's missing clothing. But when she looked at Philip, she averted her eyes as well. He realized he was only wearing his undergarments and no shirt, so he quickly pulled a blanket off the bed to cover himself.\n\nWilling the attention back on Anna's sudden appearance, he said, \"Where have you been?\"\n\n\"Never mind that now,\" she said, pushing away Tierni's attempts to clothe her and probably responding to Philip's question as well.\n\n\"What's going on in\u2014!\" Torgon yelled before being cut off at the sight of Anna and Philip. Instead, he turned to Tierni. \"What am I missing?\"\n\n\"The question is, what are they missing?\" she mumbled.\n\n\"I thought you were dead!\" Philip said. He couldn't help staring at Anna in awe. How did she keep surviving dragon attacks? \"I was going to use your name as a battle cry for the men when we attack.\"\n\n\"In the morning?\" she bit.\n\n\"At first light,\" he said. \"But, how\u2014\"\n\n\"Why?\" she asked. \"Why at first light? Can't you delay it?\"\n\nHis shoulders dropped. \"Don't you think I've tried? The faeries have given me no other choice.\" He hated to admit it, especially in front of Tierni. He felt helpless. A weak and useless king, his helplessness on display as much as his body right now. She would never respect him.\n\n\"There's always a choice, Philip,\" Anna said.\n\nHe slowly trained his eyes on hers. He saw hope in her face. And kindness. She knew his difficulty. Somehow she knew the torment he'd been suffering.\n\nShe stepped toward him and grabbed his hands. He remembered the clammy feel of her cool hands at her wedding. She had been terrified and miserable and he thought it had been his fault. Her hands now were warm and gentle, despite her haste and seeming anger. She cared for him. She wanted to help him, he knew. \"You must lead the battle and make yourself seen \u2013 by everyone,\" she said. \"Get to a platform.\"\n\n\"Are you mad?\" Torgon shouted. \"It's bad enough the faeries are forcing our men to use them. He could fall or be snatched by a dragon. It's too dangerous!\"\n\n\"Philip,\" Anna said, ignoring the general's response. Her voice softened. He could see it in her eyes. She did care. He could tell she knew more than she was revealing, but he realized that she must have a good reason for holding it back, because she definitely had fear and concern for her brother in her eyes. \"You must trust me. If you want this war to end, you must be seen by the dragons.\"\n\n\"If this war ends and we're still alive,\" Torgon said, \"the faeries will kill us. All of us in this tent, will be the first to die. Then they'll either seize control of the kingdoms or kill the rest of the humans.\"\n\n\"Don't you mean if the war ends before the dragons die?\" Tierni said.\n\nTorgon shook his head. \"No, I mean when it ends, however it ends. The faeries want complete control.\"\n\n\"Please, Philip,\" Anna squeezed his hands tighter. \"Trust me.\"\n\nHe couldn't think. He hadn't slept properly in days. He couldn't eat. The faeries forced him in directions he didn't want to go and couldn't see any way out of. Now, finally, someone was cracking the unopenable door the slightest bit. He didn't know if he could trust her completely, but in that moment, he knew he had to take the chance.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"I'll see you there safely,\" a rough voice joined them. A small gray man with blood red hair appeared at the wall of the tent.\n\nEveryone jumped at the apparition. Torgon reached for his sword, but the sheath was empty. The captain dropped the glowing cube, the only light in the tent, and leveled his staff at the small stranger. The little man reached out and touched the tip of the staff. Immediately, the captain yelled in pain and buckled at the knees.\n\n\"Svorgh!\" Anna yelped.\n\nWith the captain incapacitated, the gray man looked up at Anna. \"You kept your word,\" he said. \"I will keep mine. I'll see you in the morning, young king,\" he said over his shoulder as he walked out the tent door. Before he passed through the flap, he disappeared.\n\nAnna reached out and grabbed Philip's wrist again. \"Trust me,\" she said quickly. Then she turned and ran out the door as well.\n\nTierni ran out behind her, calling to Anna. The captain stood and excused himself on shaky legs. Torgon stood staring with his mouth hanging open at the tent flap where the little man had disappeared into thin air.\n\nPhilip stood in his small clothes, his blankets on the ground at his feet, staring at the door to his tent and whispered, \"What just happened?\"\n\n[ Horrific Confrontation ]\n\nAs the sky became a deep indigo, a large group of dragons, led by a pure black dragon, flew from the centaur camp to the Inner Mountain. Many of the dragons who had watched and listened to the plans of Hiro and his group followed, but hadn't quite decided what to believe. They simply wanted to witness what would happen.\n\nThe group landed outside the lair. There were so many that Hiro held them back from going inside.\n\nAt the mouth of the cavern, Hiro bellowed into it, \"TAYNOR FEIRA RAKGAR!\"\n\nHe didn't know what he expected, but he prepared for some kind of outburst or anger. Instead, they were met with silence.\n\nHiro glanced to the others surrounding him. Kodoran shrugged. Milah shook his head.\n\nKodoran stepped in front of Hiro. \"TAYNOR FEIRA RAKGAR, I CHALLENGE YOU!\" he screamed into the pitch.\n\nSilence.\n\nMitashio whispered, \"Maybe he ran.\"\n\nHiro glared into the cavern, \"Then he concedes.\"\n\n\"I concede nothing,\" the Traitor formerly Rakgar purred from the dark.\n\nThe many dragons stepped back as the massive gray dragon appeared from the darkness. Any anger, hatred or rage within him was covered by a calm, even serene, demeanor. \"You call me 'traitor' yet you challenge me as Rakgar. Unless you offer proof of my treachery, I am still Rakgar.\" He growled. Then, searching the eyes around him, he whispered, \"Who challenges me?\"\n\nIn answer, Kodoran launched himself at Taynor. He went straight for the throat. Rakgar roared and batted him away, but Kodoran slipped away from the claw that was almost the size of his entire body.\n\nHiro and the others watched as the two fought. Kodoran, faster and smaller, slipped in to scratch and bite, while Rakgar swatted and kicked at the nuisance.\n\n\"He's quick,\" Milah said to Hiro. \"Better than I expected.\"\n\n\"Don't watch Kodoran,\" Hiro said. \"We should be learning.\"\n\nMilah nodded and settled into an anticipatory silence.\n\nThe fight between the massive and diminutive dragons lasted much longer than anyone expected. The small brown dragon darted away from the enormous claws, biting and scratching every angle he could reach. A couple of times, Rakgar caught the smaller dragon with a claw or a tail, slamming Kodoran to the ground or against the side of the mountain. But Kodoran always jumped up, slower each time, but rise he did.\n\nKodoran began drawing blood early. He ripped scales from the behemoth dragon. He didn't attack the body, but the legs and neck. As stars overhead began to wink over the Inner Mountain, the little dragon grew in the sight of every other dragon present as the left front leg of Rakgar trembled with missing scales and gushing ash onto the stones.\n\nUnfortunately, Rakgar connected once with his claws to Kodoran's back and a second time raking his rear claws across Kodoran's shoulder. He threw Kodoran into a tree, breaking the tree under him. Hiro wasn't sure if Kodoran didn't get up as quickly because he was tangled in the branches or because his strength waned. When he finally returned to his feet, however, Hiro watched the young dragon's claws falter on the rocks. His tail was cut, his wings bore pin pricks that seeped light, a clawful of the spikes running along his spine had been broken off. He was missing scales and bleeding from one gouge in his shoulder and one in his leg, but he walked toward Rakgar.\n\n\"Kodoran,\" Hiro said, low, \"you can concede.\"\n\nHe could only shake his head in response.\n\n\"'Kodoran'?\" Rakgar scoffed. \"How in Khurta's name can you be a commander?\"\n\nKodoran looked up. \"I lead by example,\" he said, right before he jumped, slid under the larger dragon's belly and raked his claws along the soft side by the legs.\n\nRakgar roared at the pain. Kodoran had sliced next to both left legs. As the bigger dragon's legs buckled to that side, Kodoran rolled out from under him. Rakgar saw the dragon rolling and kicked him with one right leg into the boulders on the mountain behind him.\n\nBoth dragons lay still for a moment. All the others held their breath until Rakgar began to rise. He walked over to Kodoran and lifted his claw to end him.\n\n\"I concede,\" Kodoran said softly, but decisive.\n\nEveryone could see the pain Kodoran was in. Hiro could see the rage in Rakgar's eye. And the temptation. Kodoran had done serious damage to the older and larger dragon. Hiro knew the small dragon might be an equal adversary one day, given some growth and training. And Hiro knew that if Rakgar struck him down now, he would kill a rival, but confirm his own status as a murderer. He would be swarmed and killed for the crime. Releasing the smaller dragon would ensure his life, at least for the time being.\n\nSlowly Rakgar lowered his claw, but as he opened his maw to sound the three roars pronouncing his name and title of Rakgar, another voice sounded.\n\n\"I challenge you!\"\n\nAll eyes turned to Milah.\n\nRakgar bared his fangs. \"You?\" he growled. \"You, who were once my counselor, challenge me?\"\n\nMilah crouched. \"I challenge a blood and ash traitor.\"\n\nRakgar nodded. \"So be it.\"\n\n[ Unrestrained ]\n\n\"Well, I've lost her again.\"\n\nPhilip could almost sense Tierni before he heard her. He turned to see her with Hilde and a handful of Black Sabers in her wake. All dressed in their black uniforms and black armor, they were a terrifying sight, even for the most accomplished swordsman.\n\nPhilip knew he'd taken too long enjoying the mesmerizing sight of Tierni when she said, \"Anna \u2013 Philip, I've lost Anna again.\"\n\nPhilip couldn't help but chuckle. \"Now you see what I've had to deal with,\" he answered.\n\n\"Did you ask her maid where she went?\" Torgon said, half-heartedly. He had, after all, been tried by Anna's disappearances alongside Philip for the same amount of time.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tierni answered with a bite in her voice that she reserved just for her brother. \"I think she's lost her mind. She only said, 'You'll see her' and 'My job is done'. Strange girl.\"\n\n\"Weren't you and she friends in the laundry?\" Torgon asked as they all strode toward the horses' corral.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tierni said, stealing a glance at Philip, \"but she's changed since she's been in Anna's service. The two are constantly speaking in whispers, counseling at all hours of the night, and she doesn't even seem to do any work anymore. Every time I try to speak to her, her mind is somewhere else entirely and sometimes she'll scamper off in the middle of a sentence.\"\n\n\"That still doesn't mean you\u2026wait\u2014\" Torgon stopped as he and Philip began to mount their horses for the ride out to the platforms. \"Where are you going?\" he asked his sister.\n\nTierni stopped in the middle of mounting her own horse. \"Where do you think?\" she answered. When Torgon looked ready to argue, she cut him off with one finger. \"Anna's gone. We have no one to protect here. We will accompany the king because he is likely to be the first person made aware of her discovery.\"\n\n\"But,\" Torgon started, then lowered his voice and glanced around, \"what about Mother?\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Tierni said. She jumped onto her horse, arranged herself with her reins and began to trot away. At the last second, she yelled over her shoulder, \"She's already there!\"\n\nPhilip shifted to stare at Torgon. \"Your mother?\" he said, low so no one else would hear. \"You're going to allow your mother to be at the front line of a war with dragons?\"\n\nTorgon, who had been staring after Tierni, spun on Philip. \"Have you ever tried to keep a woman in my family from doing something?\" He didn't even bother to keep his voice down. \"I don't recommend it, as it could be more dangerous than any battle with dragons!\" He swung up onto his horse and, waving a hand after Tierni, he yelled at Philip, \"And that's what you have to look forward to!\"\n\n[ Mortality ]\n\nThe sky lightened to a pale purple as the two beasts threw themselves at each other. Hiro skirted the fight, circling around to the injured Kodoran. Mitashio kept his eyes locked on the fight, unblinking.\n\nWhen he got to his side, Hiro crouched next to Kodoran. \"Can you walk?\" he asked.\n\nThe little dragon shook his head. Hiro turned to Mitashio, next to them. \"He needs flarote,\" Hiro told him.\n\nWith a quick dip of his chin, Mitashio ran to the entrance of the cavern and slipped inside.\n\nHiro's eyes moved to Rakgar as he fought, but Rakgar watched Mitashio run inside. Then his eyes met Hiro's and fell on Kodoran. He bared his fangs, but the distraction was enough for Milah to reach up for Rakgar's shoulder. The mighty dragon bellowed in pain and returned his attention to the fight.\n\nSoon, much sooner than Kodoran had lasted, Milah conceded. Again, Rakgar left his challenger on the verge of death. As he started anew to roar in victory, Hiro stood, but Mitashio appeared and roared, \"I challenge you!\"\n\nDropping the flarote at Hiro's feet, Mitashio threw himself into the fight. Kodoran's wounds slowed and he was able to right himself. Hiro ground his teeth watching their would-be leader tearing down dragon after dragon mercilessly. Dragons who Hiro had thought to be his own enemies were now following his lead. Dragons who he thought would follow him, he realized he would follow instead. He couldn't let these dragons die or suffer more.\n\n\"What's going on?\" a dragon from the crowd asked Kodoran from behind.\n\n\"We need your help,\" Kodoran answered. He placed his nose against the other dragon.\n\n\"He's a traitor?\" the dragon said. \"How? Why?\"\n\n\"I can't give you the rest,\" Kodoran said with a flit of his eyes to Hiro. \"But show others. It must be known.\"\n\nThe dragon ran off with the memory. Hiro assumed it was the memory of himself telling Kodoran of Rakgar's treachery.\n\nHiro ran into Rakgar's lair. They needed more flarote. Kodoran followed him.\n\n\"Gather all of it,\" Kodoran told him. \"Hopefully others will join us \u2013 we may have to use all of it.\"\n\nThe two dragons limped outside the cave with heaps of flarote in their claws. They piled it by Milah, trusting he and his brother to protect and give it to those who need it.\n\nWhen Mitashio conceded to Rakgar, Kodoran threw himself into the fight again.\n\n\"You did well,\" Milah said as he fed his brother flarote.\n\n\"Lasted longer than you,\" Mitashio whispered.\n\n\"Did not,\" Milah scoffed.\n\nMilah took another turn against Rakgar when Kodoran was thrown into a large pine and didn't emerge from the branches. Everyone heard his strangled cry of concession before Rakgar could stagger over to him.\n\n\"He's wearing down,\" Mitashio said, seeing his brother get up to fight again.\n\nAs they watched, Tog came to sit next to Mitashio on the other side, away from Hiro. \"Is it true?\" he asked Mitashio. \"Did Rakgar really betray us?\"\n\nMitashio grunted. \"Do you really think I'd risk my life like this if I didn't believe it?\"\n\n\"You mean, believe him,\" Tog said, flicking one eye to Hiro.\n\nMitashio sighed. \"I never thought it possible, but yes,\" he said., \"Though you've abandoned your friend, I believe him.\"\n\nHiro chanced a look at Tog. Mitashio didn't see the look on Tog's face. Hiro could see the pain sear through him. He knew Tog was remembering Visi's words; words telling him that he would abandon his friend in their greatest hour of need.\n\n\"I concede!\" Milah yelled before Rakgar could swipe at him again.\n\n\"It's my turn,\" Hiro growled.\n\n\"No!\" Kodoran limped toward them. \"We can do more, Hiro. You have to save your strength to take him down. The rest of us will continue until we can't take more flarote.\"\n\nTog's eyes widened as they took turns and the battle continued. He watched Kodoran go back in to fight the enormous enemy. His eyes flitted between Hiro, Rakgar and whoever happened to be Rakgar's challenger at the moment.\n\nWhen Kodoran, Milah and Mitashio could finally take no more, Hiro thought his time had come. The others were broken, cut and bleeding ash onto the ground even with the help of flarote to heal them. Rakgar waned, but still stood strong. He seemed to have the strength of ten dragons. Rakgar roared twice after his last bout with Mitashio and the anger in Hiro burned brighter. Hiro didn't know if he could beat him, but he knew he would die trying. As he opened his mouth to shout his provocation, Tog roared first.\n\n\"I challenge you!\"\n\nHiro watched dumbfounded as his best friend, until recently the only dragon to know his secrets, stepped between himself and Rakgar.\n\nRakgar growled and bared his teeth. Though he was prepared to continue the fight, Hiro could tell he must have tired from the constant challenges. He wanted to be done with this as much as Hiro and the others, but he was willing to attempt taking down as many as necessary before ending the confrontation.\n\nTog turned to Hiro. \"I'm sorry, Hiro. I shouldn't have\u2026I'm sorry. For everything.\"\n\n\"How noble,\" Rakgar sneered, then lifted his claw while he wasn't looking and batted Tog, knocking him into the side of the mountain. Tog stood, but slowly. They fought as more dragons from the ruck gathered around them. Surneen, Tog's mate, growled as Rakgar swiped a massive claw across Tog's ribs. Tog roared at the gashes along his side. But Surneen stood straighter when Tog added a large slash of claw marks across Rakgar's neck.\n\nRakgar eventually stopped swatting at the smaller, younger dragon and waited for his challenger to come to him. When he did, Rakgar would simply anticipate which way Tog was going, then rake his claws across him. Where Rakgar had tried to bite and attack Kodoran and the brothers previously, now he waited for Tog to make the first move. Tog's energy seeped quickly.\n\nAs Hiro watched them fight, his belly burned in anger toward Rakgar. Now he knew that this massive dragon who had always watched over Hiro and Tog had turned on them long ago. Tog had been shocked and appalled at the revelation of his heart breaking for Anna, but that was understandable. Tog felt betrayed by the secret. He had probably gone back to his cave to sulk and felt terrible ever since.\n\n\"I concede,\" Tog finally called out before Rakgar could strike him down. The crowd of dragons surrounding the fight heaved a sigh. Surneen ran to Tog's side, ignoring Hiro's cry.\n\n\"I CHALLENGE YOU, TAYNOR FEIRA RAKGAR!\" he cried. He wanted to make sure every dragon heard it.\n\n\"How dare you try to name me Taynor. If any dragon here is traitor, it is you!\" Rakgar rumbled. \"To think you know better than me. To think you know the answers to questions you have yet to ask. How dare you challenge me?\"\n\nHiro didn't wait. He ran at the massive dragon, feigning toward the throat and waiting for the coming strike. When it happened, he spun away from the claw and clamped his jaws around the limb. As he continued this form of attack, feigning and spinning, he knew his strength would soon exhaust like the others.\n\nHe began attacking the legs. He had seen Kodoran's attacks on the legs force the leader to move away or falter for pain. While Hiro was able to threaten the massive dragon with similar swipes, eventually he realized Hiro's purpose. Rakgar used his tail and claws to strike at Hiro when he went low toward the legs. In this way, he landed many painful strikes, often using his claws to slam Hiro into the unforgiving mountain floor.\n\nAfter the third of these strikes, Hiro struggled to stand. His left front leg felt broken, causing much more agony than when Shampy had drained it of marrow. He couldn't extend his wings with the pain slicing through them. An icy cold spread across his neck, back and shoulder. A stiff ache swelled in his eye. Joints trembled as they pressed against the ground when he tried to stand. Hiro could feel his fire slipping away as if a strong wind blew across it. Rakgar lifted a claw over Hiro.\n\n\"I challenge you!\" Kodoran yelled from behind Rakgar.\n\nRakgar stilled his claw but didn't look away from Hiro. \"You can't challenge until the current challenge has relinquished,\" he muttered. Hiro could hear the weariness in his voice.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Milah crouched near Hiro, but kept an eye on Rakgar. \"Hiro, you must concede.\"\n\n\"No,\" Hiro whispered, \"he must die for his crimes.\"\n\n\"He will die,\" Milah whispered. \"After all, we know Kodoran will be Rakgar, don't we?\"\n\nRakgar, claw dangling over Hiro, blinked. His claw dropped onto Hiro, pinning him to the ground, but he snaked his head around to look at Kodoran. Rakgar opened his mouth to bare his fangs at Kodoran, then turned to Hiro again.\n\nRakgar threw his teeth toward Hiro's neck, but before they could connect and end him, Hiro yelled, \"I concede!\"\n\nMilah huffed a sigh of relief as Rakgar was forced to stepped off Hiro. He slowly turned toward Kodoran.\n\nHiro shook from the icy pain. Milah shoved a flarote bulb into his mouth as Rakgar and Kodoran began another fight. Once the flarote fire burned through him, dulling the pain, Hiro tucked his legs under him to sit on the ground and wash his wounds with fire.\n\n\"I'll just have to repeat my challenge,\" he said to Milah.\n\nMilah nodded. \"Kodoran believes the rest of us only have one more chance. I can already feel the flarote burning too bright.\"\n\n\"Are any others willing to help?\"\n\nMilah shook his head. \"They're all waiting to see what happens,\" he said.\n\nHiro turned to watch Kodoran. He still flew around the giant dragon, slipping around his defenses and past his giant claws. When one strike would knock him down, he would get back up and slip away once more.\n\n\"He's like a leppi,\" Milah whispered while they watched Kodoran fight Rakgar. \"Small, but able to incapacitate a much larger creature.\"\n\nStartled to hear such praise for Kodoran, Hiro turned to Milah in shock.\n\n\"Oh, snap it,\" he said when he saw the look on Hiro's face. \"If you ever tell him I said that, I'll break off your horns.\"\n\nHiro grinned after him as Milah ran to take the fight from Kodoran.\n\nHiro limped over to Mitashio, who rolled his previously injured shoulder, testing it, and Tog, who lay on the stones, tentatively stretching his hind legs. They watched in silence as Rakgar fought Milah.\n\nHiro noticed that dragons from all over the Rock Clouds gathered around them. Not just the ones who heard the news from the centaur camps, but all the rest who had been told to gather too. He knew they were running out of time.\n\nMilah switched to Kodoran's tactics. He slipped in and out of Rakgar's reach, scratching and biting. He slid under the massive dragon's belly and tore at his legs again. At one point, Milah launched himself onto Rakgar's back. Hiro could see the flarote burning energy into Milah's movements.\n\nEmboldened by Milah's fiery burst of energy, Hiro shouted, \"Finish it, Milah!\"\n\nMilah threw himself into the air, flipped over Rakgar's outstretched claws and landed with his claws digging into Rakgar's neck and shoulder. With a grin, Milah bit into Rakgar's shoulder. Roaring, Rakgar shrugged his shoulder \u2013 rather than jerk back as another dragon might have \u2013 and lifted his claw under Milah, effectively plunging the smaller dragon into his jaws. With a single snap of the massive maw on Milah's neck, the young brown dragon disappeared into a pile of ash and ember.\n\n[ Incredible ]\n\n\"You're going where?\" Kradik shouted. He floated on wing next to Philip on his horse.\n\n\"To a platform,\" Philip said. He couldn't have imagined saying that to Kradik before last night, but now he barked his answer with confidence. He knew he could trust Anna and it felt better than ever having not trusted her.\n\n\"You should be in your tent,\" Kradik ordered, \"commanding men from nowhere near the front line. I will assist you in communication as I always have.\"\n\n\"No,\" Philip said, \"I will lead my men into battle. They deserve to see me go before them, facing the dragons with them. It's the right thing to do. It's the noble thing.\"\n\n\"And if the dragons kill you?\" Kradik sneered. \"You have no heir \u2026 perhaps I will rule in your stead.\"\n\n\"You're not a human,\" Philip said, not letting the threat move him. He kept his horse steady on. \"Unfortunately, Torgon will be forced to rule if the worst should happen.\"\n\n\"Which is why,\" Torgon said from astride the horse next to him, \"I'm going along to make sure the worst doesn't happen.\"\n\nBoth young men grinned at each other, then at the faerie. Philip could have sworn he heard the faerieman's teeth grind.\n\nThey had ridden for some time, having woken and dressed before dawn. Finally, they approached the platforms as the light of the sun fully topped the edge of the world. Philip hadn't slept and couldn't eat, but he hadn't felt more clear-headed since Kradik had arrived in his kingdom.\n\nPhilip hadn't been able to escape the notice of many people as he mounted his horse that morning. Torgon had placed General Tommak in charge of Maelin and his claw of men. They all walked directly behind the king and Torgon. However, General Riddig, an associate of Lord Dieko \u2013 and constant condescending thorn in Philip's side \u2013 had decided to not only accompany the king, but bring along Murzod as well. Philip couldn't refuse. While in the Great Northern Mountain he had insisted on having Murzod by his side at the Rock Clouds. At the time, it was an excuse to end production on the dragon poison, now he must suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, Riddig and Murzod also brought an entire claw of men with them. Philip couldn't be certain he could trust Riddig's men. Tierni, Hilde and a dozen Black Sabers brought up the rear, by Tierni's choice. The entire party dismounted in front of the middle of five platforms.\n\n\"I won't do it,\" Kradik barked. \"I won't lift your platform.\"\n\nPhilip and Torgon shared a glance. Philip didn't know how the platform would work without the help of a faerie. The faerie council was spread thin as it was and several more shaman had been called upon to help raise the platforms. Only two other faeries hovered nearby and after a glance from Kradik, they settled on the ground with their hands folded in front of them.\n\n\"I'll do it, Your Majesty.\"\n\nPhilip turned to see Travaith, the king's majishun, walking up behind them in his sweeping blue robes with a determined grin spread over his face.\n\nPhilip turned back to Kradik. \"It seems we won't be needing your service anyway.\"\n\nAs the faerie began to puff out his chest, waiting for a chance to bellow, Murzod slapped his gloves together. \"Don't worry, Your Majesty,\" Murzod nodded toward the faeries, \"I'll deal with him.\" He ushered the faeries away from the group and began speaking to them in low tones.\n\nAlthough not entirely comfortable with the situation, Philip turned back to beam at Travaith. \"Pleased to have your help,\" he said to the royal majishun.\n\nTorgon sidled in close to Philip and Travaith. In a low voice, he asked, \"Are you sure you have the power for this, Travaith?\"\n\nThe old majishun stood up tall but kept his voice low too. \"I couldn't save either of your parents, Your Majesty. I haven't done nearly as much with my majikal training as I would have liked. I will do this, even if it's the last thing I ever do.\"\n\nTorgon glanced at the seething faeries and muttered, \"It might be.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Philip said to the majishun, hoping to buoy his spirits. \"You have always served the royal family with nobility. I am and will continue to be proud to have you by my side.\"\n\nTravaith mumbled his thanks as the entire party tramped onto the platform.\n\n\"No!\" Kradik shoved past Murzod, yelling. \"I won't allow you to do this. You jeopardize everything we've worked for!\"\n\nPhilip placed his hand on the bright blue gem on the pommel of his sword. \"You mean war,\" he said. The months of being bullied by the faeries bubbled to the surface as Philip felt his face flare. \"You've been working toward war. I only jeopardize that by seeking peace.\"\n\n\"Threaten to hurt him.\"\n\nPhilip heard the words in his head. He had been trained from a tender age to hide shock or surprise, or any reaction at all, really. He searched the area quickly with his eyes and saw no one else reacting to the sound. Waiting to see whose words he'd heard, he watched Kradik for a response.\n\n\"There can be no peace,\" Kradik hissed. \"Between us or the dragons.\"\n\n\"Threaten to hurt him,\" came the words to Philip's mind again.\n\nPhilip's mind immediately went back to the invisible presence from the previous night's interruptions. He remembered that the small man had promised to see Philip safely to the platforms this morning. The man must have more powers than Philip knew of. Power to be invisible? Power to speak to Philip in his mind? Power to\u2026?\n\n\"You're not the only one with power, Kradik,\" Philip said awkwardly. It didn't sound natural or confident by any means, but he managed to get it out.\n\nKradik grunted. \"You dare\u2026\"\n\n\"Touch his arm,\" the voice in Philip's head said. Svorgh, is that what Anna had called the little man? Philip could definitely hear the same lilt as that he'd heard in the voice last night. He reached out and brushed three fingers against the faerie's arm. He didn't touch his skin.\n\nImmediately, Kradik yelled. He threw his head back as his knees gave way and he fell to the ground, panting.\n\nWithout waiting for anyone else to react, and to hide his own shock, Philip spun on his heel and bounded onto the platform.\n\n[ Last Offensive ]\n\n\"NOOOOOOOOOO!\" Mitashio screamed in rage, running toward Rakgar.\n\nRakgar grinned at the grief in Mitashio's shout and opened his mouth to roar. Kodoran and Tog both dove at Mitashio, pinning him to the ground. \"I chall\u2014!\"\n\nKodoran clamped his claws around Mitashio's snout before he could finish the call to challenge. Looking up at Hiro, Kodoran shook his head. \"He can't fight now,\" he said. \"He isn't thinking straight. He'll get himself killed.\"\n\nMitashio wriggled and shook under the claws and bodies of his friends. Tears seeped from his eyes. Burning fluid leaked from his nose and corners of his mouth as he tried to breathe fire and roar.\n\n\"It's up to you now, Hiro,\" Tog said. \"You have to kill him.\"\n\nHiro turned to challenge Rakgar again, but the massive dragon stood over him.\n\n\"Yes, Hiro,\" he sneered. \"It's up to you.\" Without another word, Rakgar slammed his claw onto the pile of flarote. Then he picked up one of the few pieces outside the squashed mess and threw it into his mouth.\n\nHe turned to smile at Hiro. \"You wouldn't want to tempt fate, now would you?\" he said, then he turned and spewed fire onto the pile of flarote mush.\n\nHiro could only watch in shock as Rakgar turned the little pile into black slime, then backed away.\n\n\"Hurry, Hiro,\" Kodoran said, \"before the flarote can take effect.\"\n\nHe nodded Hiro toward Rakgar, Mitashio limp and shaking in the two dragons' grasp. Tog shook his head. \"It's too late, Hiro,\" Tog countered. \"He'll kill you.\"\n\nHiro felt the fire flare in his belly as he watched Rakgar tromp over the embers of Milah. \"Then he'll kill me,\" he whispered.\n\nAs the sky brightened into an orange glow, in the distance, beyond Rakgar's hulking mass, Hiro watched wooden platforms filled with humans lift into the Rock Clouds.\n\n[ Irregular Ambush ]\n\nOnce all the platforms were filled, including the platform baring the royal party, Philip nodded to Torgon and Torgon nodded to Travaith. Travaith stood on the ground nearby. He said he would be steadier and thus stronger with the ground's stability underneath him. The older majishun closed his eyes and bowed his head. He began chanting inaudibly and slowly lifted his hands.\n\nAfter a moment, the platform shook. Everyone kept their footing as the heavy base shook free of the earth and lifted smoothly into the air. The other Noble platforms also lifted in turn.\n\nAs the wooden transports glid into the sky, Philip heard the voice in his head again. \"Keep your hand on the pommel of your sword and only think the words you want me to hear.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" he said in his mind. He struggled to keep his lips from moving.\n\n\"I am King Svorgh of the Goblins,\" he answered. \"I am the one you saw last night. I'm here to help you.\"\n\n\"How do I know that?\" Philip asked. \"How are we communicating?\"\n\n\"We are speaking to each other through a blue dragon stone embedded in your sword's hilt,\" Svorgh answered. \"If you release it, I won't be able to hear your thoughts or speak to you without others hearing us.\"\n\nCareful not to draw attention as they continued moving upward, Philip glanced down at the pommel his hand rested on. It glowed with a soft blue light.\n\n\"And the first matter?\" he asked the supposed king in his head.\n\n\"You will know I am here to help you by two admissions,\" Svorgh said. \"First, I am the one who pained the faerie. They need to know that you are strong. If not you, then your allies. For now, it was necessary for you to take the credit.\n\n\"Second,\" Svorgh continued, \"I followed the man who pulled Kradik aside after he was injured. The man is one of yours, but it seems they are previously familiar with working together. He told Kradik he was going to try to kill you by pushing you off the platform. The man told the faerie to kill the majishun on the ground and he would toss you from the height so it looked like an accident, or even better, like it was the majishun's fault. Unfortunately, they both seemed amenable to the idea.\"\n\nPhilip couldn't keep his eyes from widening but he continued to stare straight ahead. \"What should I do?\"\n\n\"I would advise you to hold on.\"\n\nPhilip searched around him. With his height, he could see most of the people on his platform and the other platforms surrounding him as well. He worried about those on the platform with him, but his gaze also wandered to the other transports. He had put all these men and women in harm's way. He had agreed to place the lives of everyone in the hands of the faeries. At any moment, the faeries might decide to turn on them and drop all these people to their deaths. \"The others,\" he asked the voice in his head. \"Can you save them?\"\n\n\"I'll do all I can.\"\n\nPhilip watched the platforms around him floating higher in the sky. The people on the other Noble platforms watched Philip as they lifted together. He saw platforms far to the north and south rising into the sky at the same time. He could even see specks rising on the horizon to the west on the far side of the Inner Mountain.\n\nAs the king's platform lifted, the sun shining from behind lit an odd scene on the mountain in front of them. Dozens, possibly hundreds of dragons sat with their backs to the humans floating by. Roars echoed from the mountainside. A commotion centered in front of a large opening in the Inner Mountain. Most of the dragons faced the Inner Mountain and watched the chaotic happening before them, their attention turned away from the beings on the platforms.\n\n\"What are they doing?\" Philip whispered.\n\nA few dragons at the back of the gathering noticed the intruders. Some lifted casually into the air to fly away. Many others shifted at the interruption but kept their gazes away from the oncoming humans.\n\n\"Is this what we've come to?\" Torgon asked from Philip's side. \"Attacking animals while they ignore us?\"\n\nSuddenly, a deafening roar made Philip flinch and turn. Everyone on the platform scanned the skies to find dozens of dragons of all different shapes, sizes, colors and configurations flying toward them on all sides.\n\n[ Tender Memories ]\n\n\"Go!\" Hiro barked at Kodoran. Without another word, Kodoran spoke low in Mitashio's ear. Kodoran ran away to launch into the sky. Tog allowed the mourning dragon to slowly rise.\n\nWith a glance at Rakgar, Mitashio growled low. \"Kill him, Hiro.\" The two nodded to each other and most of the rest of the dragons flew off to face the humans.\n\n\"I challenge you,\" Hiro said, keeping his voice low. The embattled leader of the ruck didn't move as Hiro flew into his face.\n\nJust as he raked his claws across Rakgar's snout, Hiro heard a scream of protest behind him.\n\n\"Hiro, no!\" The early morning sun sparkled on Visi's white scales as she flew above them. Hiro only registered her presence for a moment before Rakgar struck back. He was thrown into a boulder, knocking the air out of his lungs.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Visi said as she landed beside him, \"you don't understand.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Hiro said. He threw himself at Rakgar again. He slipped under a claw to scratch at the healing wounds Kodoran and Milah had carved into his leg joints, reopening them.\n\nRakgar roared, recoiling his leg before pushing Hiro away with it. Visi ran to him as Hiro landed against another rock. At least this time the push didn't have enough force to harm him\u2026much.\n\n\"You can't let him kill you!\" Visi yelled. The sound of the battle raging around them muffled her words as Rakgar ran at Hiro. Hiro dove out of the way and Visi did too. He couldn't be sure, but it seemed as if Rakgar had tried to run into both of them.\n\n\"You're not The One!\" Visi yelled past Rakgar to Hiro.\n\nRakgar looked at Visi then back at Hiro. He spun further than necessary and knocked Visi away with his tail. \"Don't interfere, witch!\" he roared.\n\nHiro jumped at Rakgar, latching onto his neck with his claws. The biggest risk he had taken, the mighty gray dragon clawed at Hiro while Hiro bit into his neck.\n\nRakgar ripped Hiro away from his neck. Hiro ignored the gouges in his sides from Rakgar's claws as he spat the chunk of scales and flesh that turned to ash on the rocks.\n\nVisi ran to him again. \"Hiro,\" she whispered urgently, watching Rakgar from the corners of her eyes, \"my memories.\"\n\nHiro decided to risk it. It would only take a moment and he had dealt a heavy blow to Rakgar. He moved his nose to hers.\n\nThe view was disorienting. Hiro's perspective hovered high above the cavern of Rakgar's lair. He looked down upon two dragons, one large and gray \u2013 the Rakgar Hiro had always known \u2013 the other smaller and brown, with dark gray patches and two tails.\n\n\"The others won't understand,\" the smaller brown dragon said. \"I need you to be Freeg.\"\n\n\"I will always be your friend,\" the large gray dragon said. Horns and barbels spread from his head and neck, down his shoulders, spine and tail. This was a memory from the time when the Rakgar Hiro had always known was only called Freeg, friend to the former Rakgar. Hiro knew the large gray dragon as Rakgar feira Freeg.\n\n\"As you always have been,\" said the former Rakgar, the smaller brown dan Hiro observed in the familiar lair below. \"But we must find a human to befriend. If one of us befriends a human, we can create a bridge between our species.\"\n\nFreeg nodded. \"You can't do it. You have other duties here as Rakgar.\"\n\n\"The others would also see me as a traitor,\" the brown dan said.\n\n\"I might scare off any humans,\" Freeg suggested. \"I might be too imposing for the job.\"\n\n\"Just be a friend,\" the brown dan answered. \"The humans are capable of understanding more than anyone realizes.\"\n\nFreeg nodded again. \"And we might just break the curse while we're at it.\"\n\nHiro's eyes widened when the memory ended. He turned to Rakgar in time to dodge a strike of his claws.\n\n\"You believe,\" Hiro muttered, the shock of the memory sapping his anger and strength to fight. \"At least, you did once.\"\n\nRakgar roared in response and lunged at Hiro. Hiro didn't dodge this time. He allowed Rakgar to tackle him. He wrapped his body around the much larger one. Reaching his head around, he couldn't reach Rakgar's neck so he bit into his shoulder. Rakgar bellowed and ripped Hiro off of him again.\n\nHiro used his wings to slow his trajectory and lessen the impact of his body on the rocky mountainside. When he looked up, Visi stood before him. Without a word, she pushed her snout in front of his.\n\nHiro was in a forest meadow. It was familiar. A grassy ridge to one side of the meadow hid the scene of a beautiful human woman walking through it. He thought it was Anna from the way her golden hair sparkled in the sun. But when she turned at a sound in the forest, he saw her face was slightly different. Hiro, watching through Visi's eyes from behind a tangle of trees, saw the woman walk toward the sound in the trees. Then he recognized her. He had seen this woman as an apparition from the World of Souls, almost a year ago.\n\n\"Is someone there?\" she asked the shades.\n\n\"Yes,\" came a reply.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"A friend.\"\n\n\"If you're a friend, then come out and let me see you.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" the low, deep voice answered. \"You'll fear me.\"\n\nShe straightened. \"I won't,\" she said with a set jaw.\n\n\"Do you promise?\" the voice said across the space. \"Swear you won't run? Or scream?\"\n\n\"I give you my word,\" she answered. \"I'm Queen Annette of the Noble Kingdom, formerly of the Courageous Kingdom. I don't fear you or anyone.\"\n\nThe trees rustled again. This time, a massive gray dragon emerged into the sunlight of the meadow. Annette's eyes widened, but she didn't move. She didn't flinch or take a step away.\n\n\"You spoke,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I did,\" Freeg said as he walked toward her.\n\nAnnette smiled. \"Somehow, that makes you even less frightening.\"\n\n[ Yielding Stability ]\n\n\"Brace yourselves!\" Philip yelled as the dragons flew at them. \"Ready weapons!\"\n\nHe pulled his own bow from his back and began to string it. When he looked up again, he had placed a black-tipped arrow.\n\nThe original plan was to lift the platforms from the surface and set them against some of the larger floating rocks, the ones with trees and foliage for cover. Then the men and women would dismount and the faeries would guide the platforms back to the ground to load the next wave of warriors.\n\nThe platforms to Philip's sides glid forward under a wave of buffs from the dragons. People were almost immediately knocked down or burned, but the platforms gradually positioned themselves and bumped against their targeted floating mountain.\n\nHowever, the platform Philip stood on halted its progress. The soldiers' armor and weaponry rattled as the platform shook in mid-air. It rocked back and forth as the riders attempted to steady themselves.\n\n\"Hold on!\" Philip shouted, echoing the advice from the invisible man. \"Swords!\"\n\nPhilip heard the repeated swish and thunk, thunk, thunk as everyone with a sword, saber or staff plunged them into the wood at their feet. As Philip's fingers wrapped his hilt, the surface under him dropped away from his feet.\n\n[ Guilt ]\n\nRakgar growled, aware of the humans around them on the mountain and holding back his speech. He batted Visi to the side. As Visi tumbled into the onlooking dragons, Rakgar turned to Hiro. He swiped at Hiro, but Hiro dodged, shifting to simply avoid the enormous claws. Hiro realized the larger dragon was getting careless, he wasn't waiting for the attack. Something was distracting him. Rakgar continued to claw at the air, so Hiro slipped underneath his mass and raked at his belly again. Flying back out again, he bit into the gray dragon's tail. Hard. He felt bone crunch in his teeth and knew he would get a response. He let go and ran out of reach as Rakgar roared in pain and swiped at the spot where he expected Hiro to be.\n\nHiro skittered away, but stopped at Visi's side. This time, he placed his nose in front of hers.\n\nHe was back in the meadow, watching from the same spot, but an entirely different season.\n\nThe massive gray dragon tip-taloned toward the human woman, Queen Annette, in the sunny meadow while she admired some flowers. He kept his body low to the ground, as if that would help his cover, but he was so large even the towering trees could barely hide him. He crept up to her with a cautious grin on his lips. At least his claws sunk into soft earth and muffled the sound of his steps.\n\n\"I know you're there, Freeg.\" The woman didn't turn at first. A smile lit her face and she spun on her heel to face the mighty gray dragon, her golden hair flying as if it might help her take flight.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes at her. \"I was as silent as death. How did you know I was there?\"\n\nShe narrowed her green eyes in return. \"After all these visits, I can sense you,\" she said with a grin.\n\n\"Well, then.\" He gave up all pretenses of stealth and kromped into the clearing. \"I saw your flag,\" he said as he curled into a comfortable position on the forest floor with the grassy ridge to his left. The meadow, the location chosen to meet the queen for its seclusion, was the same place he, Hiro, had also used to meet with Anna.\n\nFreeg's eyes met Annette's. Her grin faded and he noticed redness around her eyes. He lifted his head to face her. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I saw the faerie shaman you told me about. Shampy.\" She swallowed hard but couldn't keep her chin from quivering slightly. She placed one delicate hand on her bulging belly. Without warning she launched herself at the dragon and wrapped her arms around what she could reach of his neck. \"Freeg,\" she cried into his scales, \"she said it will be a girl!\"\n\nAlthough taken aback by the suddenness of her contact, he seemed anything but repulsed by it. He picked up one claw and attempted to stroke her silken hair while also pulling her in tighter to the embrace. His claws were so large that he simply covered her, unable to show the tenderness he felt. \"It is an honor to bear a female, Annette. I, myself, would be proud to ever have a daughter.\" Hiro knew Annette's reaction would confuse Freeg. Female dragons were providers. Although the genders were thought equal, the dames were known to often be fiercer and craftier than the dans. Hiro knew from his experiences with Anna that human thoughts about the genders weren't always the same.\n\nShe pulled back from him long enough to look into his onyx eye. \"I might be proud if\u2014\" she cut herself off sharply.\n\nHe released her. They stared into each other's eyes, lost in thought that Visi could only imagine. Thoughts that Hiro assumed were the same ones he had experienced himself. 'What is he doing?' 'What might be?' 'How could this happen?' Hiro could practically hear the questions as they tumbled between the two beings before him.\n\n\"You are the only male to ever be kind to me,\" she said, as she broke the connection to curl into the crook of his shoulder and lay her head against him. \"That is the world my daughter will grow up in. Human men do not treat their females as equals. Perhaps in the Allegiant Kingdom, but not here. My husband will force my daughter to marry someone she does not love for the sake of an alliance, as my own father did. And worse,\" her voice cracked as a fresh flood of tears suddenly fell from her eyes, \"he will probably want to try to get a male heir.\"\n\nFreeg froze. Hiro knew what was happening. He could see it in the dragon's eye.\n\nFreeg's eyes popped open wide, as Annette continued her tirade against the king. \"I don't hate him, Freeg. He simply has no idea. He was forced into our marriage just like me, but I still can't forgive him...or myself.\" Freeg choked back a small cough, but she didn't notice. \"I hate the monster growing inside me. It doesn't come from love. I don't know what it comes from.\"\n\nFreeg tried to swallow. \"Annette\u2026\" he coughed.\n\n\"My father said I would grow to love him, but I can't!\" She ranted, unaware of the struggles of the dragon next to her. \"I wish I could fly away with\u2026\" She turned to see Freeg choking. \"What's wrong? Are you well?\"\n\nThe dragon gave one last cough and a gray teardrop-shaped gem slid from his mouth. He scooped it up in his claw. His heart had broken for the woman Annette. The smoky gem glittered against his scales. Silently, he offered her his heart.\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?\" she whispered. Hiro assumed over the course of time and their growing relationship Freeg must have explained many things about dragons to the woman. He must have told her how a dan's heart only breaks once, for one dame\u2026or woman.\n\n\"Yes,\" he confirmed. \"If you accept it, I am yours\u2026forever.\" That meant Annette could control Freeg if she wished. Hiro thought of the implications. She could compel him to do anything. He could resist, but learning how took time and practice. Hiro could only imagine what Annette might ask him to do.\n\nShe scooped the heart out of Freeg's claw. It was big enough that she had to use both arms to hold it. She knelt in front of the dragon and wrapped her arms around the heart, hugging it against her chest. Tears flowed down her pink cheeks.\n\nHiro watched deep emotions rage inside her. She shook her head, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and looked back up at Freeg. \"I\u2026\" she started, but she couldn't finish. She searched her surroundings in quiet desperation, unable to meet Freeg's eye any longer. \"This\u2026\" she tried inspecting the heart in her arms, but, again, she couldn't put words to the war inside her.\n\nFinally, with Freeg watching patiently, her face scrunched together and a sob tore from her throat. \"Freeg,\" she cried, \"end this!\"\n\nLeaves ceased their rustle. Birds stopped in mid-sky. Kiket chirps silenced. The cool summer breeze held still. Flames wrapped around Annette while Hiro watched helplessly. For a moment he thought she might survive. A look of peace came over her and she gazed up at the large dragon who had been her friend. She threw back her head victoriously to the sky as his flames immersed her. Flames tinged with gray, a symbol of his love for her. Her body shriveled in an instant. A moment later, her blackened body fell.\n\nWhen Freeg finally closed his maw, his grief spilled forth in a roar. When it stopped, he heard his anguish echoed in the scream coming from a man at the top of the ridge. The man sat regally on a bejeweled stallion. Although fifteen dragon lengths away, Hiro heard his accusation with the perfect clarity of a dragon's ears. \"What have you done?\" the king whispered as he stared at the charred remains of his wife below. He lifted his eyes suddenly to lock them with the dragon's. \"What have you DONE?!\" He bellowed in a rage!\n\nHiro realized what the man, King Paudie, would have seen as he heard more men top the rise on their steeds. The next man to appear, a man Hiro himself remembered killing in the forest to save Tog, yelled to more companions, \"Kill that monster! He's killed the queen!\"\n\nHorses thundered from the other side of the ridge, following the second man. The men howled their defiance. Freeg readied for flight, opening and pumping his wings. Before he flew, the draft from his wings shifted the ash from the remains of Annette. A shimmer caught Freeg's eye and was reflected in Hiro's. From something on the ground amidst the smoking ember remains of the woman. Under the smoldering ash and soot sat a bright green teardrop-shaped gem twice the size of the heart she had been given. With the cavalry bearing down on him, Freeg snatched the egg and vaulted into the sky.\n\nHiro blinked several times. He stared at Visi. He didn't see Rakgar throw himself at the pair.\n\nInstead of attacking only Hiro, Rakgar gouged a claw into each of them, tearing them apart. Hiro flew and spread his wings again to slow himself. He watched as Visi rolled away from Rakgar, three deep holes visible in her belly and chest.\n\nHiro roared. He knew Rakgar was trying to keep him from discovering the whole truth. He dove toward Rakgar, landing on his head. He clawed at the massive, lion-like dragon. With all the horns surrounding the head and neck, Hiro couldn't latch on properly. He tried to dig his claws into anything, but only accomplished scratching Rakgar's face as he shook him free.\n\nHiro landed close to Visi. Scrambling to her side, he watched as Rakgar lifted a claw to stomp him.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Visi whispered, as Hiro rolled away from the deadly strike. \"This is not your fight to win. Be mindful who wields you and learn to understand why they do.\"\n\nWith those words, Hiro knew he had to get what memories he could from her. He remembered his own father's dying words. He had to know more. He rolled next to her after another strike landed and pressed his nose to hers.\n\n[ Hatchling ]\n\nWatching from the shadows of an unknown corner of the cave, Hiro could see the enormous and intimidating gray dragon known as Freeg alight on the lip of the Rakgar's lair. Clutched in his gray claw was an oversized, green, teardrop-shaped egg. The empty cavern echoed with the sound of Freeg's talons clacking on the floor as he landed.\n\nOnce inside, he held perfectly still. Only his eyes moved as he peered into the darkened corners of the cavern. Visi, as usual, had chosen the perfect hiding spot. Hiro, from her viewpoint, watched as the gray dragon relaxed slightly, assuming he was alone. Hiro saw Freeg place the brilliant green egg in the deep shadows against the far wall, out of sight.\n\nWith the egg tucked away, Freeg calmly turned to the sound of another dragon approaching.\n\n\"Freeg!\" The brown dan Rakgar in this vision was much smaller than Freeg. And no matter one's station in life, having a friend that dwarfed other dragons had its advantages. \"I can't tell you how happy I am to see you return, my friend. I need an ally right now.\" Freeg didn't respond but watched as Rakgar crossed the cave, flicking his tails in obvious anxiety. \"I have sown the seeds, but they weren't well-received.\" Rakgar shook his head. \"Mordok practically challenges me with his every word. I'm sure he plans to do it openly soon.\" Rakgar turned pleading eyes to Freeg.\n\n\"I'll deal with Mordok,\" Freeg said quietly, but didn't meet Rakgar's imploring gaze.\n\nRakgar sighed, \"Thank you, my friend.\" He resumed his pacing across the floor. \"The other dragons resist any notion of interactions with the humans. They're set in their silence. If our plan is to succeed, we need the human.\" He stopped his pacing, glanced either direction, then asked in a whisper. \"How goes your association with the woman? Would she be willing to come here? Will she help us?\"\n\nFreeg growled low. \"She is dead.\"\n\nRakgar's shoulders dropped and his head hung. \"No.\" Looking back up at Freeg, he asked, \"We don't have the luxury of time to befriend another human. What happened?\"\n\nFreeg couldn't meet the Rakgar's questioning eyes. Although his size protected the egg tucked into the wall behind him, his eyes instinctively flickered toward it. Before he could cover his mistake, Rakgar caught a glimpse of the gem-like egg.\n\n\"What is that?\" His eyes grew twice their normal size. \"Is that what I think it is?\" He took a step toward the egg, but Freeg growled and blocked his path.\n\n\"It's not your concern,\" Freeg growled.\n\n\"But the woman is,\" Rakgar said. \"Our plan can't possibly proceed without\u2014\"\n\n\"Your plan,\" Freeg emphasized, \"was folly to begin. Humans are the monsters.\"\n\n\"My plan? Monsters?\" Rakgar stepped away as Freeg advanced on him. \"But you agreed from the start\u2014 we planned this together\u2014\"\n\n\"I supported my Rakgar,\" he said, but glanced at the entrance as three dans stepped into the cavern with a dusty brown dragon in the lead. Freeg turned back to Rakgar. \"But no longer.\"\n\n\"I must speak with Rakgar,\" the brown dragon at the entrance said.\n\n\"You'll wait your turn, Mordok,\" Freeg snapped at him as he continued his advance on the cowering leader.\n\n\"Freeg,\" Rakgar whispered, \"don't do this.\"\n\n\"You have betrayed the dragons with your notion of befriending humans! I challenge you, Rakgar, for your name and position!\" Freeg's words echoed through the cave and around the stunned observers. Even Mordok glanced questioningly at his companions.\n\nRakgar shook his head, but his eyes traveled back to the egg. He closed his eyes and shook his head. \"Is it even possible\u2026?\"\n\nFreeg launched himself at the leader to stem further words, slashing at his head with his front claws. \"Will you fight for your position?\"\n\n\"It wasn't your fault!\" Rakgar cried as he scurried out of Freeg's reach before his talons could fully get hold. \"I don't want to fight you, Freeg.\"\n\n\"Then you concede?\" he roared in return.\n\nRakgar shook his head. \"You know I can't do that,\" he whispered.\n\nFreeg settled back into an attacking crouch. \"Then you will die.\"\n\nRakgar mirrored his attack position. \"I will fight for the ideals you once believed in.\"\n\nThe two dragons shot toward each other, claws and tails lashing in every direction. As large as it was the cavern might have had plenty of room to maneuver, but Freeg forced their path outside to prevent the egg from being discovered by anyone else present. Hiro assumed Visi knew Freeg would do this and thus positioned herself where she needed to be. With the four witnesses behind them, the challenging dans rolled outside the cavern in a mass of fire and fury.\n\nVisi emerged from her hiding spot, listening to Rakgar's occasional exclamations to Freeg outside. He appealed with, \"It's not your fault!\" over and over again. But when he tried explaining his position with, \"We believed that\u2014\" or \"The humans aren't\u2014\" he was quickly shut down by Freeg's gigantic claws.\n\nHiro knew instinctively what Visi would do. He knew the challenge would distract the observers from anything she might do. The only problem would be getting away from Rakgar's lair without the enormous gray dragon seeing her. Hiro ran to the egg and, scooping it into her white claws, both Visi and Hiro felt the weight of the fully-grown being inside.\n\nAs she pulled it into her clutches, a vision she had seen many moons ago returned to her mind. Hiro's vision flickered with the added memory. The broken shards of the green egg lay on the cavern floor. A small green dragon stared up at Freeg, but was immediately struck down. Visi knew this hatchling's only chance of survival was for the egg to be taken far away.\n\nBecause the egg was fully mature, it was much larger than the partial heart it started as. Had it been that small, Visi could have easily smuggled it out of the cave. But large as it was, she tucked it partially under one wing and holding it with a claw, she limped out of the opening.\n\nThe two dans continued to fight, advancing lower down the mountain as Visi slowly crawled up the incline. She knew Rakgar wouldn't last long against Freeg. She prayed he would last long enough for her to disappear. She listened to the roaring and clashing of the dragons below without turning her head to watch. Although wanting to see what the other dragons were doing, Hiro knew she would lose her nerve if she saw Freeg's immense frame.\n\nFreeg was the largest of all the dragons. Seeing him grow so large, everyone wondered why the gods had blessed him with such an advantage over all the others. Hiro especially questioned their choice now.\n\nRakgar had relied on Freeg's intimidation for many years. They were friends before Rakgar won his position. In fact, he had only won the position because of Freeg's subtle hints to the previous Rakdar. Everyone wondered why Freeg had turned on Rakgar at the time, now Hiro realized that Visi had known all along.\n\nStepping lightly through the few pine trees from her perspective, Hiro saw her refuge ahead. A rushing waterfall. If she could slip into its waters, her white body would be hidden. She could watch from the waters until the challenge ended.\n\nHiro could feel the misty spray bouncing off the rocks when the decision was made. A mighty bellowing roar up the mountain told Visi the challenge had been decided. At any moment the new Rakgar would look up into the trees. Pushing off the ground with her back legs she jumped under the falling waters as another triumphant bellow sounded below. She looked down at the bright green egg in her arms from an alcove under the falls as the third and final bellow announced the death of the former Rakgar and a new Rakgar taking his place.\n\nVisi sat quietly for a moment, waiting. More memories flickered as Visi remembered visions in her crystal ball. Freeg had noticed her during the fight, but he didn't know why she was there. She peered out of the veil of water \u2026 just as the enormous gray dragon's eyes moved past her hiding place.\n\nA tear in Visi's eye blurred her vision and, in turn, Hiro's. The roaring water around them turned dark and cold, like the cave walls the new Rakgar stared at now. He looked at the empty shadow the egg had occupied. He turned to glare out the entrance of the cave. Blood dripped from his fangs. As he narrowed his eyes, the gash on his jaw wrinkled and released another great crimson drop. But his anger subsided as Mordok and his friends entered the cave. Rakgar knew the egg was lost to him. He couldn't do anything about the loss \u2013 or his grief.\n\nVisi's and Hiro's vision returned to the spray of water around her. She would hide the hatchling for as long as needed\u2014seven years, as Hiro remembered it. She would be forced to go to the new Rakgar and acknowledge his ascension, but first she would see the egg to safety. When Freeg ambled into his new lair as Rakgar for the first time, the ancient white dragon came out from under the falls. The bright green egg clutched tightly in her two front claws, she lifted into the sky toward her home at the top of the Inner Mountain.\n\nBlink.\n\n\"Where is it?\" the enormous gray Rakgar rumbled at Hiro through Visi's memory. He kept his voice low so as not to be heard outside the cavern.\n\n\"Safe,\" Visi answered.\n\n\"Give it back,\" he rumbled again, \"or I'll have you and it killed.\"\n\n\"It?\"\n\n\"It's a monster.\"\n\n\"You're the monster,\" she spat back. \"She's a hatchling child.\"\n\nRakgar bared his fangs. \"I could kill you now, then find her and kill her as well.\"\n\n\"But you won't,\" Visi didn't flinch a muscle. \"Because that would make you a murderer. Plus, she's being cared for. They know what to do if I don't return. You would never find her again.\"\n\n\"You don't know that for sure.\"\n\n\"I know you would spend your weary life searching,\" she said. \"And that might be better than the alternative. So, yes, I'm willing to die.\"\n\nRakgar grumbled a moment in thought, then turned. \"Give me your wyrd. Your wyrd that you will never tell anyone of her parentage.\"\n\n\"She's your daughter. I cannot hide that fact.\"\n\nRakgar struck the stone with his claw. \"Her OTHER parentage. And I will not hunt you.\"\n\nVisi glared at him. \"I give you my wyrd\u2026 If you will extend the same to her.\" Rakgar growled but Visi pressed on. \"When she is old enough, she will need to be introduced to the ruck. Extend her the same chance at a normal life and both our lives will be yours.\"\n\nHiro's vision cleared just as another claw came down. He rolled away, but he was flagging. He watched Rakgar. He wasn't tracking Hiro's movements as quickly as he had, but he followed him and lifted a claw.\n\nThis is not my fight to win, he remembered. He gazed past Rakgar to the dragons and humans. Platforms were depositing humans on some of the floating mountains. The humans loaded and shot arrows at the dragons as the dragons attempted to land on the rock mountains in front of them. Arrows bounced off the hard scales in all directions. Dragons landed and swiped humans down with their claws. As Hiro watched, a purple and blue dame in flight tried to grab a human from mid-air. As she reached out, the human shot an arrow into her belly and she dissolved instantly to embers.\n\nHiro couldn't even roar at the sight. His heart ached. He had to help them. He had to stop this slaughter.\n\nLooking up at Rakgar, Hiro wanted to keep fighting, but he caught sight of a flash of bright green.\n\nPriya hovered behind the monstrous leader.\n\nBe mindful who wields you, Visi had said.\n\n\"I concede,\" Hiro shouted before Rakgar's claw could land on him again. He tried to catch his breath as the traitor dragon set his claw down next to him.\n\n\"I do not,\" Priya said from behind. \"I challenge you!\" she yelled as she flew onto Rakgar's back.\n\nShe clawed at his wings as he attempted to dislodge her. Finally, he dropped to the ground and rolled. But Priya jumped before he could harm her. As he rolled onto his back, she flapped in the air a moment, then dropped on his belly to claw and bite at the soft joints underneath.\n\nPriya was even more adept than Kodoran. She slipped into cracks in Rakgar's defenses that even Hiro didn't see before she was in and back out again. As she flew in, scratched or bit and flew out again, Hiro imagined that she and Visi had trained to the point of a semi-coordinated attack, knowing Rakgar's every move.\n\nAs much as he wanted to watch Priya and jump in if she needed him, he heard Visi nearby.\n\n\"Hiro,\" she whispered. The few hits she'd taken had made her weaker than he'd ever seen her.\n\nHe crawled to her. Prying his eyes away from Priya, he placed his nose in front of hers.\n\nHiro stared down at the large green dragon egg. The light caught the many facets of the polished emerald-like gem. Being many times the size of a dragon's heart, Hiro guessed it was ready to hatch. Visi must have known the egg would hatch soon and he felt the strong emotion of anticipation through the memory. Finally, the egg shook. It rocked back and forth, gradually gaining momentum. It swung and shook then rattled across the floor until it rolled against a large, jutting rock.\n\nNormally, a dragon hatchling would scratch at the egg from the inside and eventually use their strong claws to gain their escape. This egg crashed noisily into the rock and the pointed top of the teardrop shape cracked and broke. The rounded bottom rolled away from the shattered top and Hiro caught sight of the bright green color inside. When the egg finally stopped its movement around the cave floor the cracked bottom faced Hiro's field of view.\n\nVisi slowly moved around to peer into the hollow of the egg where the hatchling rested. Hiro saw bright green wings pull back against the body as the creature emerged. But he caught his breath as a chubby pink face ringed with bright golden hair smiled up at him, with the trace of a shining green tail on her leg.\n\nWhen Hiro's vision cleared, he saw Rakgar's claw flying toward him. Thinking the mad dragon had abandoned the fight with Priya to attack Hiro again, Hiro rolled. But the claw didn't land on Hiro. With a deafening crunch, Rakgar stomped on Visi. Many dragons roared as Visi howled beneath his claw. As the dragons encroached on him, he held up another claw.\n\n\"She gave me her wyrd!\" he told the onlooking crowd. \"I claim the right!\"\n\nHiro couldn't move his eyes from Visi. She hadn't turned to ash so he knew the impact hadn't killed her immediately. Her head and eyes lay still as stone, but she lifted a claw toward Hiro. Despite the danger around them, Hiro crawled over the rock to her. Gently, he placed his nose against hers.\n\n\"But I don't want to go,\" a small human girl of perhaps ten years old stood in a dank cave surrounded by an odd assortment of cloth and herbs. Visi's cave. She wore a simple white cloth wrapped around her body and her golden hair spilled over her bare shoulders.\n\n\"I know,\" Visi said from Hiro's point of view, \"and it will be dangerous.\"\n\n\"Then I shouldn't go at all!\" the girl said. \"Why can't I stay here and continue training with you? We can dispatch the old worm later. Together.\"\n\nVisi shook her head. \"I'm afraid not,\" she said. \"While you've been training with Sar, I've been crystal gazing. You will meet friends in the ruck. Good friends. They will help you and they are instrumental to your survival.\"\n\n\"I can help myself survive,\" the girl said, punching her fists on her hips. \"Don't forget, I'm still a dragon.\"\n\n\"As am I, and as are they,\" Visi said kindly. \"I will visit often because we will need to make many plans together. If we are patient and smart, you'll have your chance to end your father, but you will need the strength of your friends' help. Don't worry,\" she purred, \"you will kill him soon, little one.\"\n\n[ Trembling Conflict ]\n\nThe platform lifted, shifted, tilted and dropped. Philip could only imagine what Kradik might be doing to Travaith on the ground. He searched the eyes of the people around him. Tierni held onto her saber, stuck fast to the wood. Maelin and Thaddeus, closer to the platform floor as they clung to their staffs, attempted to stabilize anyone within reach nearby. Tommak's sword stood abandoned. With blood dripping from his fingers, he clung to Hilde and her saber.\n\nTorgon used his belt knife as an extra hold to shuffle to the side of the platform. He leaned over the edge and his face collapsed. When he finally pried his eyes apart, they found Philip's. He shook his head. Travaith was dead.\n\n\"Sire!\" Murzod yelled as the platform continued to shake. He wrenched his sword free and stumbled toward Philip.\n\nPhilip knew he couldn't trust the man. Hoping the bucking platform would cover his actions, he tried to step back but ran into someone or something behind him.\n\n\"Yes,\" Riddig yelled while attempting to cling to his own sword, \"protect the king! His majishun is trying to kill him!\"\n\nPhilip shook his head again as Murzod advanced. He tried to keep his hand on his sword as the floor beneath him continued to shake.\n\nMurzod reached him and took hold of his wrists. \"Allow me to help you, Sire,\" he whispered.\n\nPhilip felt Murzod attempting to pull his wrists away from the hilt of the sword. When Murzod realized that Philip's larger, younger and stronger hands wouldn't budge, he shifted. The shorter man put one arm around Philip's shoulders, the other on his top hand.\n\n\"Don't let go, Your Majesty!\" Murzod shouted over the noise of fighting and yelling going on around them every time the platform tilted or dropped. All the while, the older man tried to pry Philip's hand away from his only hand hold.\n\nFinally, the treasonous man succeeded in pulling one of Philip's hands free. As Philip reached for the sword again, Murzod grabbed it with his own hand, stopping him.\n\nTorgon used his sword and belt knife to work his way back to Philip's side but he was too slow. Murzod had worked his way around to Philip's front side. Once in place, he effectively concealed his actions as he blocked Philip's free hand from swinging at him. He put both of his hands over Philip's tight attachment to his sword and began prying the fingers away.\n\nPhilip wanted to thump the man in the back or head, but it seemed every time he tried, the platform lurched and rendered the blow either harmless or off-target. Finally, he couldn't hold onto his sword any longer. His fingers were torn free and Philip fell flat to the floor of the platform.\n\nThe platform tilted, sliding Philip toward the middle of it, then dropped from under him only to slam upward into him again, knocking the wind from his lungs. It tilted again, sliding him toward an edge, but a sword blade blocked his way. He rolled away from it only to bump into the legs of one of the guards. With so many bodies rolling and tumbling, Philip couldn't be sure who to trust and who to avoid. One guard, intentionally or not, fell over and kicked the king hard in the shoulder. Had the platform been pitched otherwise in the air, the kick might have landed on his head.\n\nAnother guard yelled for his king and lunged for Philip, but Maelin intercepted him. Not able to anchor himself, Maelin tried to grab the guard around the shoulders, but the guard shoved Maelin back as the platform swung wild, spinning the two away from each other.\n\nSomeone caught Maelin before he could catapult off the platform, but another guard, seemingly prompted by Riddig or Murzod, pointed at them, yelling, \"They're trying to kill the king!\"\n\nPhilip and Torgon knew better, but a fight broke out all the same and everyone got tangled up in it. The two factions of men on the platform fought against each other: Tommak, Torgon and Maelin's claw against Riddig, Murzod and his guards.\n\nTierni and the Black Saber took neither side, deciding instead to keep anyone they could reach from falling over the edge; although Tierni seemed to train a careful eye on the fight. The two claws fought each other under impossible conditions, with the ground underneath them quaking as if trying to shake them all free of it. In the back of Philip's mind, he thought the scene might be rather humorous to watch, seeing as most of the blows and kicks didn't find a mark. The attempts only served to further destabilize and hinder any footing or safety. Many of the men fell either into the swords that were stuck into the platform or into each other, with only a lucky blow landing here and there, and harming the attacker more often than the attacked.\n\nPhilip found himself flat on the floor of the platform while men around him fought and tumbled into him, and the women watched judiciously while clinging to sabers or each other to keep from falling. Then Murzod advanced. His bow long since lost, Philip pulled his boot knife. \"Don't\u2014!\" he yelled, but was silenced by another lurch and drop.\n\nMurzod, holding to a sword, stomped a foot onto Philip's hand. \"Oh, I'm so sorry, Your Majesty,\" he said quietly enough that not many would hear the words dripping with spiteful sarcasm. He bent to pick up the knife, placing the other hand on Philip's shoulder and giving him a shove.\n\nPhilip slid in synchronization with the tilt of the platform. He swung around, looking for a handhold, but only swords surrounded him, like some vicious, unforgiving forest of blades. He rolled to his back just as his feet slipped over the edge of the platform. He rolled again, onto his stomach, and his legs flew over the side. At the last moment, the platform tilted again, and Philip caught himself by his arms near the edge, grabbing at anything to find a hold on the solid floor.\n\nWhile he struggled, he watched Murzod and Torgon look first at each other, then at Philip. They both scrambled, legs and bodies swaying, to get to Philip. Murzod was the closer.\n\nThe vicious man fell to the floor of the platform. He grabbed Philip's arm and pulled it away from what little hold the younger man retained.\n\nPhilip tried to yell over the noise, but Murzod grinned. As he slowly pushed Philip over the edge, he whispered, \"You'll never demote me again.\"\n\nHearing a yell from behind him, Philip watched a blade project from Murzod's chest. The older man continued to grin, pushing Philip toward the edge. But slowly his grip slackened, as did his face. Confusion overtook him as he inspected his chest. The blade twisted as they watched. Finally, Murzod's face drained of emotion, then color, then life. With a final shove, Torgon pushed the traitor over the side.\n\n\"NO!\" Riddig came bounding through the chaos on the platform. As it tilted, he fell and slid directly into the king and his royal general.\n\nBoth younger men slipped over the edge.\n\n[ Transformation ]\n\nHer father. The girl. Priya. Her parentage, Hiro thought. It all hit him at once. His eyes searched out Priya's.\n\nHer eyes were locked on his. With a slight nod, Priya faced Rakgar. Rakgar raised a threatening claw. In a blink, Anna stood in front of Rakgar. She was wrapped in a brilliant green cloth, the exact color of her scales, her hair blowing around her like a golden halo. Hiro immediately remembered the vision he'd had of Anna standing before Rakgar as he lifted a claw in rage.\n\nBut the claw didn't fall. Hiro saw the blood dripping across Rakgar's face from Hiro's attempt to claw at his head. Rakgar's claw stilled, then slowly lowered as he said, \"Annette?\"\n\n\"No,\" Anna said, her eyes locked on Rakgar. \"My name is Priyanna. I am the daughter of King Paudie of the Noble Kingdom, Queen Annette of the Courageous Kingdom, and the dragon known as Freeg of the Rock Cloud Ruck.\"\n\nThe dragons surrounding them were as still as stone. Hiro couldn't imagine what, if anything, the humans could see and were thinking.\n\n\"You're a monster,\" Rakgar growled.\n\n\"No,\" she shook her head. \"You're the monster. You killed her. You killed Annette and you've never forgiven yourself for it\u2026nor her for desiring it.\"\n\nRakgar threw his head back and roared. Not a roar of triumph, but a roar filled with anger for himself and the pain of losing Annette. The bellowing roar overpowered the noise of the scuffles around them. Priyanna was right, he had never forgiven himself for the death of Annette. His hatred for himself had merely shifted to include every dragon. In his eyes, they all deserved to die.\n\nBefore the painful roar could subside, Priyanna changed back into a dragon and shot toward the exposed neck of her father. She latched her strong jaws onto his neck where Hiro had weakened it. Rakgar's cries gurgled to a stop. He clawed at the small dragon attached to his neck, but the strength of his mighty arm diminished. He fell toward the ground, still scratching at his daughter, but his head hit the ground as a pile of embers and ash.\n\nPriyanna flew down to land next to Hiro, but she didn't look at him. Her eyes locked with Visi's. As Hiro watched, Visi smiled at Priyanna, then dissolved in a cloud of ash and ember.\n\nHiro tried to connect to Priyanna's gaze, but she kept her eyes on Visi's remains and bowed her head.\n\nHiro, however, heard the sounds of the battle around them. Scanning the skies, he saw ice blue and purple dragons diving and attacking the humans on the platforms as they reached into the Rock Clouds. He saw green and blue dragons the color of crystal-clear waters from the Island Ruck far north. They slithered through the sky around the humans like water that burned all that touched it. As he watched, one of the silky teal dragons flew toward a human and opened her mouth to unleash her fire. The human shot a poisoned arrow directly down her throat and she evaporated into ash around him.\n\nWithout glancing back at her, Hiro growled. \"Priyanna, we have to stop Kodoran!\"\n\n\"Kodoran?\" she said. \"Who has been named the commander?\"\n\n\"Kodoran feira Prakyndar,\" Hiro answered. \"I named him.\"\n\nPriyanna nodded. \"Well named,\" she said, \"but I have a different name in mind for him.\"\n\nHiro searched the fight surrounding them. \"We don't have time to discuss it,\" he said. \"Sound your roars of triumph here and perhaps we'll get the attention of most of them out there.\"\n\nPriyanna nodded. She flew a little higher to perch above the main cavern where Rakgar had resided. Opening her maw, she sounded three ear-splitting roars to declare her victory and pronounce herself the new Rakdar of the Rock Cloud Ruck.\n\nSeveral dragons turned their heads at the sound, but the message to return to the Inner Mountain was drowned in the fighting. Some of them stopped to listen, but many of them either didn't hear the call or were overwhelmed with the effort of trying to defend themselves and others. Luckily, Kodoran feira Prakyndar heard the call and went.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Kodoran asked as he landed next to Hiro. \"Taynor feira Rakgar is dead, but the fighting has already begun. Dragons are dying!\"\n\n\"We have to stop the fighting,\" Hiro said as he watched a sleek, teal-colored dame with only back legs and gills burst into embers in mid-air.\n\n\"How?\" Kodoran shot back as Tog and Mitashio landed next to him.\n\n\"Priyanna,\" Hiro said to her, \"you and Visi have had all of this planned from the start.\"\n\n\"Priyanna?\" Kodoran asked.\n\nHiro leaned over and passed the memories from Visi to Kodoran, then to Tog, then to Mitashio.\n\n\"Visi knew everything,\" Mitashio whispered. Hiro could only imagine he was thinking of his brother's death.\n\n\"Yes,\" Kodoran said to Priyanna. \"What do we do? You must know!\"\n\nPriyanna shook her head as she watched a dark blue-gray dragon dive at another platform lifting into the air. The men on it were all knocked to the ground hundreds of dragon lengths below, but as he picked himself up another human already stationed on one of the floating mountains shot a poisoned arrow at him. Ember tumbled to the surface of the platform before he could lift into the air.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" she said. \"There are too many variables now. Too many possible outcomes. We couldn't discern anything after the victory over my father. We couldn't even be certain of that!\" She looked to the small brown dragon. \"You have to lead us now, Kodoran.\"\n\nKodoran feira Prakyndar puffed up a little. \"Bring everyone in,\" he said. \"Get them back to the Inner Mountain, call them in from the outer Rock Clouds,\" he said. \"But not to Rakgar's lair. We can't let them pin us in. We'll have to go higher. Try to get out of reach of the humans and their arrows.\"\n\n\"Tog,\" Kodoran continued, nodding to the dragons indicated as he spoke, \"go to the dragons on the west; Priyanna, go north. Hiro go east and Mitashio go south.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?!\" Hiro yelled as he watched the small brown leader run and leap into the air.\n\n\"To the centaurs,\" he called over his shoulders.\n\nAs they flew in different directions, Kodoran roared and dragons below him heard and followed him. Hiro knew most of them were used to following him when they worked with the centaurs. Whenever a head would turn in his direction, Hiro would swoop in, pass the memory with the information to return to the Inner Mountain, and move on.\n\nAs the others did the same, Hiro watched dragons withdraw only a few at a time to head to the Inner Mountain. Perhaps it might seem like they were organizing, but he knew that wouldn't matter much longer.\n\nSearching for more fighting dragons to call in, Hiro stopped his gaze at one of the platforms. It hovered at a point most of the way into the Rock Clouds, but it shook violently. He couldn't tell if the humans on the platform were holding on for their lives or fighting amongst themselves. One figure, with a golden circlet on his head, dangled over the edge.\n\nThere he was, King Philip, clinging to the edge of the platform. Hiro watched as one human stabbed another through the heart and flung the dead man over the edge. As the human then helped King Philip, a third man attacked them both, pushing them into a free fall.\n\n[ Revolution ]\n\nPhilip felt his fingers slip from the surface of the platform. In a brief moment of serenity, he hoped Anna could be found to serve the kingdom in his stead. He worried that seeing their king fall, the warriors might lose their nerve at the beginning of the battle. Then he worried they might get even more angry at seeing their king die, and rush into the battle with fresh rage. He couldn't decide if he would wish to see them stop or press on. Either way, the faeries had won.\n\nSuddenly, his body jerked from the middle. His head almost hit his toes as he folded in half around something large and scaly. He sucked air back into his lungs after it had been so forcefully expelled and touched the thing around him. It seemed to be a dragon claw. In fear, he looked up.\n\nThe black dragon.\n\nThe image of the black dragon flinging him and his body smashing against the side of the mountain popped into his head. He started to struggle against the claw, then realized that it wasn't squeezing him the way he expected it would. He certainly wasn't uncomfortable, and no talons dug into him.\n\nHis attention was caught seeing Torgon in another of the dragon's claws. He wasn't struggling, but he didn't look necessarily happy about his life being saved in this manner either. When Torgon looked up and saw Philip, he yelled, \"You see? It's always the black one!\"\n\nThe dragon, holding the men in his claws, coasted toward the ground. The men on the ground had arrows nocked but seemed afraid to fire for fear of hitting the king or general. As they neared the ground, Philip wondered if the dragon would plant his claws first and land on top of him and Torgon, or throw them into the crowd. Both would be deadly.\n\nSuddenly, the dragon reversed his body position and instead of diving, he pushed his back legs forward. He spread his massive wings and pumped them against the force of the surface to slow his descent. The heavy draft from the dragon's wings knocked many of the men to the ground, including, to Philip's pleasure, Kradik and the other faeries.\n\nThe faeries righted themselves in time to halt the one platform still loaded with humans that was freefalling toward the earth. At the same time, several centaurs pounded through the humans on the ground, knocking them aside and heading straight for the center of the action. The platform settled on the ground next to them. The guards and Black Saber dashed off it with swords drawn, pointing at the dragon that held the king in his claws. More centaurs thundered into the center of the group, led by a brown female with her sword drawn. A second, brown dragon flew overhead, but circled a little farther off as the centaurs rumbled into the waiting humans. Everyone converged as the black dragon gently set Philip and Torgon on the ground.\n\n\"Stop!\" yelled Philip as the humans began to aim their weapons at the dragon. He didn't know why he was stopping them. Other than \u2013 maybe \u2013 out of gratefulness to the beast? Hadn't that Hamees man said this dragon was tamed? What if the centaurs had tamed him? Then why would the black dragon want to rescue humans, but the centaurs want to attack? Whatever the motives or training, this dragon had just saved his life and that of his closest aide. Two lives that might have been lost if a handful of humans had their say.\n\nAs Philip ordered everyone to stop, the black dragon spun his back on the humans and spread his wings in front of them, roaring at the centaurs to make them stop as well. The brown dragon hovered overhead.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Torgon said from Philip's side.\n\nPhilip hadn't noticed Torgon standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him between the humans and the dragon.\n\n\"Hold your fire!\" Philip called to the men and women surrounding them. To Torgon he muttered, \"I don't know. What are you doing?\"\n\n\"This dragon may be the most backwards, deranged animal in all of Avonoa,\" Torgon said, \"but it just saved my life.\" The young friends shared a glance, but Torgon's face wrinkled like he'd been asked to eat dung.\n\nPhilip studied the people around him. The humans lowered their weapons. The few faeries stood watching. As he turned, he saw the centaurs still pointing their weapons at Maelin and his men. The men in Maelin's claw hadn't lifted their weapons and so, stood defenseless. That was probably the only reason they were still alive.\n\nThe black dragon growled low and bared his fangs at the centaurs. It inched in front of the centaurs' drawn swords and arrows.\n\n\"They killed Vikal!\" the centaur leader screamed. Tears made her large eyes glow and her face burned in anger. Even as she screamed her sword point held steady in Maelin's face. In the back of Philip's mind, he acknowledged the control she possessed, besides the fact that her words were clearly directed at the dragon.\n\n\"You're right!\" Philip called to her, without thinking. She spun the sword point at him, but he already knew what he had to do. Defenseless and at her mercy, he held up his hands. \"You're right,\" he said again in a milder tone. \"The killing needs to stop. For everyone.\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Kradik hissed.\n\n\"Ending what never should have started,\" Philip said without taking his eyes from the centaur. He stepped toward her. \"I'm calling a cease-fire,\" he said. \"Torgon.\"\n\nBeside him, Torgon turned to the men who had been waiting on the ground. \"Cease fire!\" he said. \"Send the call.\" Philip noted a hint of hesitation in his tone, or was it anger? Several guards ran off to relay the message.\n\n\"This has to end,\" Philip said to the centaur.\n\nOverhead, the smaller brown dragon drifted lightly to the ground. The centaurs standing around and behind the female shifted aside to allow the dragon to land. The brown dragon quietly crept up behind the centaur to bump his nose gently against her flank.\n\nWith pure rage in her eyes, the centaur glared at the black dragon a moment, then burst with a guttural scream. She lifted the sword over her head and thrust it into the ground at Maelin's foot. The sword sank almost to the hilt.\n\nGlaring at Philip, she hissed, \"You're a fool for ever allowing it to happen.\" Her eyes shot to the faeries, then the dragon, before she spun and the group of centaurs galloped away behind her. Once they were gone, both dragons glanced around, jumped high into the air and flew away without looking back.\n\nPhilip knew the female centaur was right. He was a fool. He had let this war between the species go on for far too long. What had he expected would happen? He knew people would die. He knew dragons would die. He thought he could deal with the human losses to be rid of the beasts. The human kingdoms of Avonoa hadn't seen such war in decades. This was wrong and he'd known it all along, but he'd been too weak and scared to do anything about it.\n\n\"She's right,\" he said searching the faces of the men around him. \"I am a fool.\" They stared at him with blank eyes until he turned to the faeries. \"I'm a fool for ever having listened to you!\" he yelled at Kradik.\n\n\"On the contrary,\" Kradik said, his voice low. \"You're a fool for not believing in my promises.\"\n\nHe spread his hands and lifted into the air, mumbling at first before his voice grew louder. The song issuing from his lips sounded beautiful and alluring. Then the other faeries joined in. But as Philip watched, all the faeries \u2013 one at a time or in groups \u2013 lifted into the air, singing distinctly sinister words.\n\nPhilip didn't know enough faerie language to understand what they said, but he didn't have to wait long to find out. Everywhere, guards began falling to the ground. Men fell from the Rock Clouds. Platforms crashed to the ground. The men on the platforms bounced, unconscious, atop the platforms. The men underneath them were crushed. Horses fell unconscious, crushing unconscious men and women who had stood next to them. Every human guard surrounding the royal group fell to the ground, lifeless.\n\n[ Authority and Accord ]\n\nOnce the young king had called a cease fire, Hiro and Kodoran fled back to the Inner Mountain. As they flew past the new Rakdar's lair, further up the mountain Hiro could see very few dragons flying amidst the Rock Clouds. Some, he knew, were dans protecting hatchlings. A few dames hovered beyond the reach of the humans' arrows. Hiro knew that, slowly over time, no more humans would arrive in the Rock Clouds to assist them or deliver more arrows.\n\nHe and Kodoran feira Prakyndar landed in the center of hundreds of dragons. The Rakdars and Rakgar of the other rucks stood snarling at Priyanna, the new Rakdar of the Rock Cloud Ruck.\n\n\"You want us to WHAT!!??\" The Ice Ruck's Rakdar roared the last word. She shook her feathery purple mane in disgust, but kept her eyes on Priyanna.\n\n\"The humans need to know that dragons have the gift of speech and intelligence,\" she said.\n\n\"What you're suggesting is sacrilege!\" Maggoran spoke from the Ice Rakdar's side.\n\n\"Blasphemy!\" someone yelled from behind them. A few roars and bouts of flame lit the air.\n\n\"No,\" Hiro said as he stepped into the center. \"The faeries taught us to think that, and only for their selfish purposes. Now they've turned on us.\n\n\"The faeries,\" he continued, \"want to kill dragons because they think it's the only way to end their curse.\"\n\n\"Their curse is their problem,\" the Desert Rakgar said.\n\n\"Until they started killing dragons,\" the Island Rakdar said.\n\nAs she said it, the sound of an eerie song drifted to them on the wind. The entire group searched the skies for the new threat. They watched as some of the human men fell from the mountains, and those that didn't fall buckled to the ground beneath them. The platforms plummeted from the skies. Faeries could be seen as far as a dragon could fly, lifting into the air and singing.\n\n\"The faeries are turning on the humans,\" Hiro whispered.\n\n\"Why?\" Kodoran asked.\n\n\"Because Philip called a cease fire,\" Hiro answered. As the last words left his tongue, Hiro's vision swam. His eyes threatened to close and his legs began to buckle. He shook it off and stood up.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Priyanna said, \"are you alright?\"\n\nHiro straightened and focused on her. \"They're doing something to the humans.\" He didn't know how he knew it, but the faeries were attacking the humans somehow and he knew whatever they were doing must also be affecting him.\n\n\"It must be something we didn't see,\" Priyanna said, thinking of Visi. She blinked and looked toward the Noble Kingdom. \"Philip,\" she said. \"We have to get to him. We have to explain\u2014\"\n\n\"Silence!\" the Ice Rakdar hissed, cutting her off. Her eyes dug into Priyanna like Ashel's sword that was probably still plunged into the earth. \"You have no say here, human!\"\n\nThe memory of Priya changing into Anna and announcing who she was must have spread through the rucks faster than any dragon poison could take effect. Once dragons returned from the Rock Clouds, the story began to spread. The entire story was passed from memory to memory. In moments, every dragon on the Inner Mountain knew the truth.\n\nPriyanna roared, setting back with her haunches raised. \"I am the Rakdar of this ruck,\" she growled back.\n\n\"You're just a human in dragon scales,\" the Ice Rakdar hissed again. She maintained her standing position. She obviously didn't plan to fight. Her attitude projected that it was beneath her to even notice the green dragon's stance. \"You have no right to speak for a ruck. You're not fully dragon.\"\n\n\"I agree with the Ice Rakdar!\" The Rakdar from the Island Ruck stepped forward. She and her warriors crawled forward fluidly, every movement like water trickling over stone. The Island Rakdar was a shade of blue and green mixed with spots of deep blue across her back like raindrops.\n\nThe Island Rakdar faced Priyanna. \"Our islands haven't taught our hatchlings to fear humans like the other rucks do, simply because we haven't the need,\" she said. \"We could easily agree with you to speak with the humans and find peace, but that order cannot come from one who isn't fully dragon.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the Ice Rakdar nodded firmly. \"You, being only part dragon, have no say in the matter. I don't recognize your authority as Rakdar of the Rock Cloud Ruck.\"\n\nHiro looked to the Desert Rakgar with pleading in his eyes, but the mighty brown dragon only shook his head. \"They're right,\" he said, his voice as low and soothing as his temperament, \"I'm afraid I would agree that only a dragon can lead a dragon ruck.\"\n\n\"Don't you see?\" Kodoran barked. \"She's The One! She's meant to unite the humans and dragons!\"\n\n\"That's a myth,\" the Island Rakdar hissed.\n\n\"A scary story for hatchlings,\" the Ice Rakdar echoed the sentiment.\n\n\"Unite in ways unimaginable,\" Hiro muttered. He met Priya's eye. \"She's The One. She united humans and dragons in a way none of us could imagine. She was the first to be part dragon and part human. And she wields my heart.\" He finished and earned a smile from Priyanna.\n\n\"But she does not wield us,\" the Ice Rakdar said.\n\n\"Let me get this right,\" Kodoran said, stepping into the mix. \"You all agree that speaking to the humans is\u2026\" he tilted his head at the Ice Rakdar, \"\u2026inevitable, if nothing else?\" The group around him nodded. The Ice Rakdar looked at the others and eventually shrugged her shoulder.\n\n\"Ok,\" Kodoran continued, \"but the order, or suggestion, to extend ourselves in peace to the humans, you will vehemently deny unless it comes from one who is only and fully dragon?\"\n\nThe others looked uncomfortable but said nothing.\n\n\"Then I have a solution,\" Priyanna said. \"But first, I have to get to my brother.\"\n\n[ Deadly Intimidation ]\n\n\"No,\" Philip mumbled. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nTorgon ran to one of the guards and felt the man's neck. He dropped his head momentarily but turned back to Philip. \"He's alive,\" he said. \"Hopefully they all are.\"\n\n\"For now,\" Kradik called. He floated down to them on humming wings, allowing the other faeries to continue the spellcasting around him.\n\n\"Why?\" Philip called up to him.\n\nKradik drifted slowly to the ground. He calmly lowered his hood. The eerie grin on his face made worse by his transparent skin, he walked in a wide circle around Philip and Torgon to stand among the fallen men. \"I live up to my promises, King,\" he hissed at Philip.\n\nPhilip's breath caught in his throat as Kradik bent to pick up a sword. His smug grin widened as he held the sword over one of the guards. Philip felt the blood drain from his face as the faerie knocked aside the man's helmet to gently press the blade into his throat.\n\n\"No!\" Torgon yelled.\n\n\"I'll kill them all,\" Kradik hissed. \"Rest assured, they won't feel any pain.\"\n\nPhilip reached a hand out to Torgon without taking his eyes from Kradik. He could feel his royal general shaking but didn't know if it might be from fear or anger.\n\n\"Torgon,\" Philip said, ignoring the tremor in his voice, \"we have to continue the fight.\"\n\nTorgon's jaw clenched as he ground his teeth. He stood beside Philip, but said nothing. \"We'll do as you say,\" Philip muttered to Kradik, allowing his voice to crack. He didn't care. He couldn't allow his people, the entire kingdom and all the other kingdoms, to die. Helpless. Both he and his people. Helpless.\n\n\"No,\" a voice came from behind them. Philip didn't realize that Maelin and his men hadn't fallen to the faeries' spell. \"Your Majesty, you can't do it.\"\n\n\"We don't have a choice,\" Philip said, keeping his eyes on Kradik.\n\n\"There's always a choice,\" Maelin and Torgon said at the same time.\n\nThe familiar words echoed in Philip's mind. The same words that Torgon had said long ago. The same words that Anna repeated only a few hours ago. The same words that his own father and General Bragon told him his entire childhood.\n\n\"Please, Sire,\" Maelin insisted. The other men in his claw came to stand beside him.\n\n\"How are you all still awake?\" Torgon asked.\n\n\"Um\u2026\" the little man with the spectacles cleared his throat. \"We didn't take the faeries' potion for speed.\"\n\n\"The potion,\" Torgon breathed. \"That's how you did this? You used the potion to\u2026\"\n\n\"Render humans as incompetent as they have already proven themselves to be,\" Kradik nodded at the body beneath him, the blade still pressed against the man's throat.\n\nPhilip shook his head. \"That doesn't change anything,\" he said. \"I made the choice to allow the men to use the potion. I must make the choice to allow them to live.\"\n\n\"They will only live if they can defeat the dragons,\" Torgon said.\n\nPhilip finally tore his eyes from Kradik to turn them on his best friend. \"I've done this, Torgon, I've set this in motion. Me. He'll kill them,\" he nodded toward Kradik. \"Right now. In front of us. I can't\u2026\"\n\n\"Sire,\" another man from Maelin's group said, \"all these men would die for you if they knew you truly believed your choice to be the right thing to do.\"\n\nPhilip's hands shook. A chill ran down his spine. \"Only to be killed by a dragon when they wake up? Possibly by the same dragon that I just ordered them to put down their weapons for? Allow them to die for one dragon?\" he whispered.\n\n\"A dragon,\" Maelin said, \"that saved my life.\"\n\n\"And yours,\" Torgon said to him.\n\nPhilip met Torgon's eye. Torgon dipped his chin, remembering the fall. The black dragon had saved his life. Then Philip had saved the dragon's life by not allowing the men to shoot it. If Philip ordered all the dragons' lives saved, he would lose all the lives of his people. Save the black dragon, or fight all the dragons and save the humans? What was the right thing to do?\n\nPhilip's breath came ragged and sharp down his throat. His head pounded to the sound of his own heartbeat. A human heartbeat. This choice could end tens of thousands of lives. He knew he couldn't continue the path the faeries had set for him. His ears buzzed. He couldn't feel his fingers.\n\nHe pulled in a breath that felt like knives going down his throat. He ignored the tears that leaked from his eyes. \"I won't,\" he said, but his voice stopped in his throat. He swallowed and forced it out louder. \"I won't do what you ask,\" he whispered. \"I won't kill the dragons.\"\n\nKradik's smile faltered. His swift nod acknowledged the expected refusal. With a flick of his wrist, he slid the blade across the unconscious guard's throat.\n\nPhilip sucked in a breath but paused. He stared at the man on the ground. Kradik had to look twice as all those gathered stared at the man under him. No blood spilled. His throat remained whole. The man breathed evenly, as if sleeping peacefully.\n\n\"Wait!\" yelled Philip as Kradik lifted the sword to plunge it into the man's neck. The sword bounced away before it touched the man's skin.\n\nKradik threw the sword to the ground. He sank to the ground beside the man and reached for his head. His hand bounced off an invisible barrier before he could make contact. Finally, with a grimace, Kradik looked up, but not at Philip or his men. He scanned the surroundings, and baring his teeth, he screamed, \"Where are you, demon?!\"\n\nPhilip watched, confused. But Torgon kept his wits.\n\n\"Lieutenant,\" Torgon growled, motioning to Maelin, \"arm your men.\"\n\nMaelin and the men in his claw scurried to recover their weapons and their senses. Philip did the same, arming himself with a nearby bow and quiver. In the back of his mind, he thought of the little gray invisible man and wondered if he'd had anything to do with the shift of power and protection of the unconscious men.\n\n\"Shoot them down!\" Torgon yelled, pointing his sword at the faeries still chanting the sleeping song. A couple of the men took aim and fired. A couple threw daggers. The few faeries around them dodged in the air and continued singing, though the song quivered.\n\nPhilip lifted his bow. He watched as the other men shot. Knowing which way the faeries would dodge, he anticipated and fired seconds after the first. He stuck one faerie in the leg and another in the shoulder before the singing stopped and all the others zipped away toward the faeries in the north.\n\nSeeing them flee, Kradik flew up in the air. \"Don't you see, young king,\" he said as he drifted on the breeze, \"the potion is already in them. We have the power to\u2014\"\n\nBefore he could finish his threat, a streak of black came at him from the sky.\n\n[ Curse ]\n\nThe black dragon tackled Kradik to the ground, while two other dragons, a brown and a green, hovered over them. When they stopped tumbling, the dragon stood atop the faerie. Philip assumed the beast would bite his head off or maul him. Instead, he held his claw on the faerie's chest, pinning him to the ground. The dragon bared his fangs and pressed.\n\n\"Do it!\" Kradik yelled. \"End it!\"\n\nThe dragon stopped. He blinked and pulled his maw away from the faerie.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nPhilip then broke every rule he'd ever been taught. He didn't contain his emotion. He didn't contain his shock. He stood staring at the black dragon, his mouth agape. \"Who\u2026?\" he breathed.\n\nThe dragon snaked his head around to look Philip in the eye. \"I did,\" he said.\n\nPhilip felt the blood drain from his face. His eyes searched the faces of the men around him and saw the same shock reflected. He felt cold and his hands got clammy like they did every time he saw Tierni. \"You can speak?\" he muttered.\n\n\"Yes,\" the dragon said. Pushing off the faerie, who gave a satisfying groan, the black dragon approached him. \"And we don't want this war any more than you do.\"\n\n\"Hold your fire!\" Philip called, reminding the men to stay their weapons as the other dragons landed. The men who were conscious repeated the order as the other men and beasts around them were roused. The faeries had ceased their song, restoring, at least momentarily, the Noble army.\n\nTorgon ignored the order, leveling his sword at the dragon's throat. \"How can we believe any of this?!\" Philip wondered at his friend's sanity as he yelled up at the beast. \"You have plagued our kingdom for nearly a year, you and your kind. You've killed hundreds of us. How do we know this isn't another trick? How can we trust you?\"\n\nThe dragon sighed. Philip looked into the dragon's eye and in an instant the dragon was no longer in front of them, but a man stood in his place. This man was as tall or taller than Philip himself and couldn't have been more than twenty years old. His skin was soft and brown, his hair was black and a black cloth was wrapped around his waist. Philip saw the tattoo of a black tail wrapping down his leg to his ankle.\n\nMaelin, recognizing the man, took a step forward. \"Owyn,\" he said.\n\n\"My name,\" he said with momentary hesitation, \"is Hirowyn. Hiro as a dragon. Owyn as a human.\"\n\nTorgon shook his head. His sword hadn't moved. \"You're a criminal.\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Maelin pushed past the other men. \"He's not.\"\n\nTorgon didn't blink. \"He insulted the Princess.\"\n\n\"That was no crime,\" Maelin insisted.\n\n\"But he threatened her life too.\"\n\n\"That's my fault,\" the green dragon stepped forward this time.\n\n\"You,\" Philip breathed, staring at the green dragon, \"you're the one who kidnapped Anna.\"\n\n\"No,\" she shook her head and a moment later Anna stood in her place. \"I am Anna. Priyanna. Priya as a dragon. Anna as a human.\"\n\n\"Anna?\" Philip muttered, baffled by this conversation and what was taking place before him.\n\n\"Yes, Philip,\" she said, stepping toward him. She was once again dressed only in a green cloth that wrapped around her chest, waist and the top of her legs. Her yellow hair tumbled over her bare shoulders. But her nakedness didn't influence Philip, still befuddled. He glanced at the green dragon tail tattoo wrapping around her ankle, which he hadn't noticed last night. The rest of his mind reeled over the many new revelations.\n\n\"I allowed Owyn to threaten me so he could escape,\" she told Torgon and Maelin. \"It was actually my idea.\"\n\n\"This changes nothing for us,\" Kradik, who still sat in the dirt, growled from under the brown dragon's gaze. The faerie ripped off one of his gloves. \"It does nothing!\" he yelled, shaking his hand at them.\n\n\"Actually,\" Anna said calmly, looking down at the faerie, \"it does.\"\n\n\"Visi and I discovered early on,\" she said, \"that the curse would end if the leader of the dragons spoke to the leader of the humans.\" Turning to Philip, she stated, \"Your Majesty, I'm Rakdar, the leader of the Rock Cloud dragon ruck.\"\n\nAs everyone watched, Kradik's skin fogged with a soft blue glow. By the time he pulled his other glove off, everyone could see the opaque glow of lavender covering his skin. He shook his head while staring at his hands. \"I don't understand.\"\n\nEveryone, even the dragons, jumped when a little gray man popped into existence, saying, \"I'll explain.\"\n\n[ Sifting Allies ]\n\nPhilip immediately sent out written orders for a cease-fire. Runners were sent to every kingdom with orders to cease hostilities and a request for the kings and queens to attend a meeting. Before the end of the day, horses with each of the kingdoms' representatives galloped into the Noble camp, to the tent of King Philip.\n\n\"What have the faeries said?\" Queen Sarador of the Allegiant Queendom asked Philip from her seat next to her daughter and soon-to-be queen, Samat. The two women were intimidating not only for their beauty, but they wore divided skirts and armor much like the Black Saber's. Philip knew they also hid weapons in those skirts.\n\n\"They only said that they must convene,\" Torgon answered, \"like we are.\"\n\n\"Ours left as well,\" Sarador answered. \"Once the message came, they fled without a word.\" The other kingdoms indicated the same abandonment happened in all five kingdoms' camps. \"Has no one heard from them since?\" Sarador asked.\n\nPhilip had gotten as much new information as he could handle before leaving the dragons and centaurs that morning. After he sent the messages and began preparations to receive the delegates from the other kingdoms, he and Torgon spent the day attempting to put together the pieces of what they'd learned. They requested Svorgh attend the meeting to answer further questions. His daughter, Shvika, stood behind him, looking wholly the warrior with a sharp face and suspicious eyes. Philip also insisted Maelin join them with the rest of his claw nearby.\n\nThe rest of the group was made up of kings and generals from all the kingdoms. All of Philip's generals attended as well as several more from every kingdom. Most of them stood quietly behind their rulers, except two of Torodov's generals and Philip's own General Riddig. Riddig stood off to the side of the group, glaring at Philip and Torgon.\n\nPhilip spent a good amount of time trying to convince the other royals that the dragons could speak, and that two of them, including his own sister, were humans as well as dragons. Torgon, Maelin and Svorgh were there to corroborate the details. Indeed, the very existence of Svorgh, and a previously unknown race of intelligent beings, convinced the royals more than anything that shocking things were more than possible in the world around them.\n\n\"Well,\" King Torodov of the Courageous Kingdom said. \"Has the faerie council convened? What are they deliberating? Are they furious? Are they placated? What are we to assume?\"\n\n\"We are to assume,\" Philip said, \"that the faeries no longer influence the human race.\"\n\n\"But the war,\" King Theodor of the Honorable Kingdom said, \"the war was their doing. Their idea.\"\n\n\"They nearly killed every human,\" Riddig sneered from behind. \"If we make a decision they don't like, won't they just follow through on that threat?\"\n\n\"My people,\" Svorgh said, \"are ready and willing to assist.\"\n\n\"Can you protect everyone?\" Riddig asked.\n\nSvorgh dropped his eyes.\n\nPhilip shook his head. \"I don't know about the rest of you, but I prefer the willing ally to the forced.\" He inspected the eyes around him. He had set up their chairs in a circle in his large tent so they all faced each other and could openly discuss\u2026well, everything. \"The centaurs are allies with the dragons, and the dragons have requested peace and hopefully an alliance with the humans as well.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the goblins,\" Svorgh spoke from his seat in the circle. \"We are allied with the dragons and centaurs. We would also be allies of the humans, if you see fit.\"\n\nRiddig grunted. \"And you, master\u2026goblin, or whatever you are.\"\n\n\"King!\" Philip and Torgon said together, but Torgon deferred to Philip.\n\n\"He is a king, Riddig,\" Philip said, purposefully excluding the man's title, \"and you will address him as such.\"\n\nRiddig pursed his lips but continued. \"King Svorgh, then,\" he said, \"what do you offer the Noble Kingdom and ask from us?\"\n\nSvorgh shrugged. \"Our people have many things to offer,\" he said. He tapped his circlet. \"We mine gems of great power that we can offer in trade to the humans, centaurs, dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014and faeries?\" Riddig interrupted.\n\nSvorgh stared him down. \"To all who wish to benefit from our alliance.\"\n\n\"You shocked Kradik,\" Torgon said from Philip's side.\n\nSvorgh nodded. \"We can do many things. Including producing a gateway to the location where the dragons have indicated they will meet with us tomorrow.\"\n\n\"We wouldn't have to use the platforms?\" Sarador asked. Svorgh shook his head and a noticeable sigh of relief was heard throughout the group.\n\n\"To get into the Rock Clouds?\" Torodov asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Svorgh nodded. \"The gateway would also be permanent. It takes a good deal of energy to create such a connection. It will not come down easily.\"\n\n\"It would give us an escape,\" Theodor said. \"If the dragons or centaurs turned on us, we could get away.\"\n\nSvorgh nodded. \"But you didn't let me answer the rest of the general's question,\" he said. \"He asked me what we have to offer, but also what we ask in return.\" He searched the eyes around him.\n\n\"What do you ask?\" Sarador said.\n\nSvorgh searched every eye before answering. \"We ask that the Five Swords be redistributed.\"\n\nThe room stiffened as one. \"What are you talking about?\" Philip muttered.\n\n\"I'm talking,\" Svorgh said, \"of the fact that there cannot be a balance of power in Avonoa if one race has the five most powerful weapons.\"\n\nThe room sat in silence. Finally, Riddig stepped forward. \"You can't ask that,\" he hissed. \"You can't ask us to give up our only advantage.\"\n\n\"Your advantage,\" Svorgh said, \"is in your numbers. The swords were meant to bring about peace for the humans and they have served their purpose. Now the swords are meant to bring peace between all the races of Avonoa. And it must be done willingly.\"\n\n\"Mine was stolen,\" Sarador said suddenly. All eyes turned to her. She nodded toward Philip. \"Before your coronation. I have been trying to find it, but\u2026\"\n\n\"Allegiance is easily changed,\" Svorgh said. \"Not to worry, I know where the sword is.\"\n\nPhilip sat up. His eyes wandered to the only silent man in the room. \"King Grisivere,\" he said, \"you don't have an opinion on the matter? As king of the Just Kingdom, you are the Avonoan expert on justice.\"\n\nGrisivere lifted his gaze from the floor to stare at Svorgh. \"You took it,\" he said. \"Didn't you?\"\n\nSvorgh crossed his arms. \"It was my right,\" he answered.\n\nGrisivere nodded. \"He's right,\" he said to Philip and the rest of the room. \"It's the only way to ensure justice.\"\n\nAs the nobles and royals around the room nodded and agreed in silence, Riddig stepped forward again. \"This is a mistake,\" he growled, \"and I'll have no part of it.\" He stormed from the tent. Philip wasn't sad to see him go and didn't send anyone after him.\n\n[ The Krusible ]\n\nPhilip, Torgon, Tierni, Tommak, Hilde, Maelin and several other generals and guards rode up the edge of the Inner Mountain. Amidst a plethora of large boulders, Svorgh sat on a smaller one, his daughter, Shvika, tenderly rubbing his back.\n\nPhilip still wasn't sure what he thought of the man. He claimed to be a king, yet he did the things a staff guard would do. Relaying messages, doing majik \u2013 he didn't even wear fine clothes or emblems of his station. Although the circlet around his head held many more gems than the other goblins' circlets he'd seen, the man didn't seem to put himself above anyone else. It reminded Philip of the young woman who had volunteered to be The Voice and brought him a message he needed that could have ended her life. Hadn't she said that King Theodor listened to all his people equally? Philip dwelled on his own virtues as a king while Shvika spoke gently in her father's ear. As the group arrived, Svorgh slowly lifted his head. The little gray man's skin had a green tinge, with green lines under his eyes and across his forehead.\n\nWorried for the little man, Philip asked, \"Are you alright, Your Majesty?\"\n\nSvorgh gave slow, somber nods. Shvika looked up at the dismounting party. \"My father told you last night that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to create a gateway. He's been working several hours, but it is done.\"\n\nAfter dismounting and closer inspection, Philip could see the king's hands shaking and sweat dripping down his back. \"Why didn't you have another perform the majik?\" he asked.\n\nShvika shook her head. \"It is required that only the king perform such powerful majik. Fear not, he will recover soon.\"\n\nAs she turned her attention back to her father, Philip searched their surroundings. Between the largest of the boulders a large black archway yawned at them. Wide enough and tall enough for two fully grown dragons to enter side-by-side, he was almost certain this was the gateway the goblins promised.\n\nThe ground at the bottom of the gateway seemed to drop away. It didn't fade into darkness gradually the way a natural cave might appear to do, it just\u2026ended. The top and sides appeared much as a natural cave might, with a simple, wide opening cut into the rock and side of the mountain. But, perhaps because of how the morning sun struck at the correct angle, the bottom of it seemed to quickly drop away into nothingness inside the opening.\n\nWhile Philip and the Noble party waited, the royal parties and armies of the other four kingdoms of Avonoa arrived. King Svorgh began to look better and gained the energy to stand, but Philip saw his knees shaking.\n\n\"Is this the gateway?\" King Theodor asked upon his arrival.\n\nSvorgh and Shvika affirmed that it was.\n\n\"Is it safe?\" Queen Sarador asked.\n\n\"More so than traveling by dragon,\" Shvika confirmed.\n\nBefore Philip could move, Torgon strode forward. Without hesitation, he thrust his hand into the consuming darkness. His hand and part of his arm disappeared at the threshold as if they had been sliced off with a sharp sword.\n\nA few in the large groups of humans gasped. Torgon stood for a moment before withdrawing his hand and arm from the opening, apparently testing how it felt to move through the gateway, when the thundering of hooves rumbled toward them.\n\nDozens of centaurs galloped up the incline toward the hesitant humans. Most of them wore swords and knives around their waists. Several had a bow slung over their backs. The female who had threatened Maelin was in the lead. She stopped long enough to take in the view of humans around her.\n\nPhilip was struck by the beauty of her large eyes and flowing black hair. But admiration turned to concern when he saw the weathered bracer on her arm. She was a seasoned archer. She might even have been the one leading the attacks on the humans. Philip stiffened at the sight.\n\nHer eyes fell on Torgon, standing in front of the dark opening, then shifted to Svorgh and Shvika. \"Is this it?\" she asked, indicating the gateway.\n\nShvika nodded.\n\nThe warrior centaur female turned to look back at two male centaurs. One wore a leather band around his head like a circlet. The other wore a bright silver sword slung on his back. The female nodded to the male with the sword. The sworded centaur nodded to the circleted centaur, then the nods reversed course. When the female received confirmation, she yelled, \"Go!\" and the herd moved forward as one. Without the briefest hesitation, the centaurs thundered through the threshold as if they were being chased by a dragon.\n\nTorgon dodged out of the way but stayed near the opening until they were gone. When he nodded at Philip, all the humans gathered there moved forward. Torgon stepped in front of Philip.\n\n\"Shouldn't the king go first?\" Philip said low so only Torgon would hear.\n\n\"Shouldn't the royal general protect his king?\" Torgon muttered back.\n\n\"Do I get a choice?\" Philip asked.\n\n\"When it comes to your safety,\" Torgon answered, \"absolutely not.\"\n\nWhen Philip stepped through the opening, he tried not to watch his front foot disappear. He thought he might lose his nerve if he saw it detach. He shut his eyelids in a blink that was probably longer than absolutely necessary, but he didn't close his eyes. Definitely not. After the briefest sensation of falling, he blinked again in the morning sun.\n\nTorgon walked ahead of him, carefully taking stock of the people and beasts surrounding them. They soon arrived in something Hirowyn had called the Krusible. He'd said it was a secluded and safe place to meet. Philip looked past the jagged edges of the Krusible to see the tops of some of the floating mountains around them. He thought they must be very high in the Rock Clouds, but the smooth bowl-like impression of the Krusible was still attached to the Inner Mountain. Philip had noticed a large protrusion from the Inner Mountain above them, and now he realized he was setting foot amidst the clouds within the dragon ruck's homes.\n\nPhilip was wary of meeting on the dragons' territory, but Hirowyn had said he could bring as many people as he wanted, with all of their weaponry. They would not be asked to surrender their armaments and would be guaranteed safety. After all, the dragons' weapons could not be surrendered. The only thing Hirowyn requested is that the humans not bring the poisoned arrows.\n\nWhen Torgon stopped, Philip stood next to him. Tierni stood on Torgon's other side; Hilde and Tommak were behind her. Along with Maelin's claw 3-4, a general from an outlying district named Arrys and several of his guards and several Black Saber women all stood behind them. Philip's hand rested on the Noble Sword at his hip. It might be the last time he possessed it.\n\nWhile the rest of the kingdoms' representatives followed them out of the gateway into the Krusible, Philip focused on the scene in front of him. His breath caught for a moment. It was unimaginable.\n\nSeven dragons sat waiting in the smooth bowl shaped out of the mountainside. Although the morning was cool, Philip's palms began to sweat as he walked toward the large dragons. In front of the dragons stood Owyn and Anna, being in their human forms. Anna donned the same green cloth as she had worn the previous day. Owyn wore his black cloth, although he hadn't bothered to wrap it around his upper body as Anna had; she had skillfully wrapped it around her shoulders as well.\n\nThe centaurs who had barreled through the gateway ahead of them now stood next to the dragons. Thankfully, their weapons stayed sheathed. Philip's heart beat a triple-time rhythm in his chest.\n\nComing through the gateway last, Svorgh and Shvika joined a few dozen goblins on the opposite side of the dragons from the centaurs. Many of them wore sashes across their chests with brightly colored designs or writing across them. They gathered in groups of five or six, unified by the same color sash lettering, and sported a wide variety of hair colors and designs. Their clothing also ranged widely in colors as well as style. Some had etched blue lines across their grey skin. Most, if not all, wore circlets on their heads \u2013 some with only a few gems, some with several. None contained as many gems as Svorgh's.\n\nPhilip's stomach lurched when he thought of the majikal powers those gems contained. His instinct to question and suspect peaked. Should he even be here? Should he instead have listened to Riddig and not trusted the dragons? Should he trust this small man who had the ability to disappear in the blink of an eye? Should he trust a man who was a criminal in his own kingdom? Could he trust Anna? He turned to Torgon questioningly. Torgon, catching Philip's eye, gave him a slight nod before Philip set his jaw and turned his attention to the would-be black dragon.\n\n\"King Philip,\" Owyn said. \"Thank you for coming here. Do you know if the faeries accepted the invitation as well?\"\n\nPhilip shook his head and turned to the other kings and queens of the five kingdoms. He saw that they were all looking at him for confirmation. \"We haven't spoken to the faeries or the faerie council since yesterday.\"\n\nAs he said it, Owyn was the first to look up. After a moment, Philip heard the unmistakable hum of faerie wings in flight. Turning, they watched as several faeries flew over the rough edge of the Krusible.\n\nWith their hoods thrown back and hands and feet bare, everyone could see their softly opaque skin. In different shades of purples, blues and greens with a pearlescent sheen, their appearance was beautiful to behold. They had even changed their clothes. Philip remembered stories of faeries dressed in creamy whites and silvers like the ones before them now. These were the beautiful faeries of old. They alighted just past the lip of the bowl and walked, almost gliding, toward them.\n\nHumans at the back made way for the faeries to come up the middle to the front. As the band neared Philip, he noticed two in the back. One wasn't a faerie at all, but Riddig, draped in one of the old brown faerie cloaks and supported by a slender, silver-haired faeriewoman.\n\nThe faeriewoman unceremoniously dumped Riddig at Philip's feet then moved back behind the other faeries. The older general's face was marked by a black eye and a cut lip. He was pale, with deep purple circles under his eyes. He didn't bother to raise himself in front of his king.\n\n\"What happened to him?\" Philip asked, while Tommak stepped forward to inspect the general.\n\n\"He came to us last night,\" Qialla answered from the front of the group. Philip had never imagined the bitter old faerie could be so beautiful. His pale purple skin shimmered in the sunlight and brilliant silver hair framed his face. Even his voice had become more melodious than Philip thought possible.\n\n\"He wanted you dead,\" Qialla continued. \"He and his nephew, Murzod, have been plotting and scheming for several months. I'm ashamed to say that I was party to these plots and will submit myself to your disciplinary actions. He has been punished by our system of justice and we turn him over to you for yours.\"\n\nPhilip couldn't speak. He stared at Riddig. He knew the man was arrogant, rude and often vile. But treason? His nephew, Murzod, had indeed tried to kill Philip on the platform, so he couldn't deny the plausibility of his uncle agreeing to it. But to hear it said out loud. It stung. Philip glanced at the royals around him. They all watched to see what his reaction would be. Then his eyes wandered to Anna.\n\n\"He knew Dieko,\" he whispered to her across the gathering.\n\nAnna stepped forward. \"Yes,\" she said, \"they were plotting against you. Dieko discovered your ruse to find a loyal noble. They decided together that he would marry me and they would dispatch you and he would be king. It's the only reason he married me.\"\n\n\"You\u2026?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she nodded, \"yes, I killed Dieko.\"\n\nPhilip's breathing became ragged when he realized he might have to try his own sister \u2013 she being part dragon \u2013 for murder. He pointed at Riddig and cast his eyes to his side, looking for Tommak. \"Get him out of here,\" he said, straining to keep his voice steady. \"He'll have a fair trial when we return to Kingstor Noble.\"\n\nHe looked into Qialla's face. The serene features were so peaceful, as if nothing in the world could upset him. His countenance calmed Philip. \"We'll discuss your involvement later,\" he said. Qialla dipped his head and moved away.\n\nFinally, gaining control of himself with a deep breath, he met Anna's eyes. \"How many?\" he asked. \"How many humans have you killed?\"\n\nShe hesitated a moment. \"As a human, or as a dragon?\"\n\nPhilip couldn't stop his teeth from grinding. \"You.\" He spat.\n\nBefore she could answer, Torgon pointed his sword at Owyn. \"You killed my father. How many humans have you killed?\"\n\nOwyn shook his head. \"Too many to count,\" he admitted.\n\n\"But he saved human lives too,\" Maelin said from behind.\n\n\"Well, I keep a list,\" the female centaur said, folding her arms over her chest. \"And if it's a contest, I'm up to 394 dead humans. Do I have six volunteers so I can even it out?\"\n\nAngry murmurs grew among the humans as Torgon stared her down, but the centaur with the leather band around his head spoke loudest.\n\n\"This is no laughing matter, Ashel,\" he said.\n\n\"Joss is right,\" the centaur with the shining silver sword said to her. Philip noted the sword and wondered if he recognized it. \"You shouldn't take this subject lightly. None of us should.\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" Ashel snapped. \"But how many dragons and centaurs and even goblins were hurt or killed in all of this? There has been death and betrayal on all sides.\"\n\nHer voice cracked on the last word. Her angry eyes blinked and she turned away from the other centaurs. She trotted toward the dragons and leaned against a small brown dragon with two rows of spikes running along his spine, keeping her eyes lowered and her arms wrapped around herself.\n\n\"For the second time, she's right,\" Philip said, finding his voice. His words earned a glance from the intimidating centaur female. \"There has been death and betrayal on all sides. Blaming won't help it. We need to own our misdeeds.\"\n\nTorgon grunted at his side, so Philip turned an eye on him. \"You know your father would say the same.\"\n\n\"He would,\" Tierni reaffirmed Torgon.\n\n\"But,\" Owyn said, \"the humans were only acting according to the information you had. It is the fault of the dragons for not speaking up sooner.\"\n\nSeveral of the dragons hissed. One dragon muttered loud enough for all to hear, \"So says the blood and ash traitor.\" At those words, the other dragons growled amongst themselves.\n\nThe small brown dragon snapped, \"Unimaginable, you worm,\" he said. \"Not treacherous. Priya is The One. Not Hiro.\"\n\nAt that point, the dragons began arguing among themselves. The centaurs jumped in as well. Ashel defended the little brown dragon. The humans began muttering \u2013 not arguing, but thoroughly confused as to the accusations. The goblins sat quietly watching.\n\nPhilip saw Svorgh watching the entrance of the gateway he had created. His daughter tried to say something, but he held up his hand to her.\n\nUnsure of what he was watching for, Philip followed the eyes of the minute king just in time to see a small, hunched faerie come bounding through the gateway opening.\n\n\"Oh, spit!\" she cried. \"Have I missed it?\"\n\nHer long, straggly gray hair hung sparsely, and her purple skin was darkening in spots. One side of her head was shaved and an iridescent snake tattoo swirled around her ear and down her neck and arm. She bounced into the Krusible, but Philip couldn't make out if she was jumping on her own or if something that supported her bumped her along. She finally landed on the ground and scurried forward as fast as her knobby knees and hunched back could carry her.\n\n\"He's not the traitor!\" she yelled. \"Freeg did it and the faeries are murderers!\" She cackled at no one in particular. Then she turned aside and muttered, \"It is NOT animal cruelty, you thankless creature!\"\n\nSvorgh nodded. Owyn looked at the old faeriewoman as if she were crazy, which she very well seemed to Philip.\n\n\"Shampy?\" Owyn said. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Shurta's tangles!\" she cursed. \"Did you think Visi was the only one that knew these things?\" She spun around and pointed to Svorgh. \"Yes, Svorgh, I knew about you too. If my kangaroo would listen to me, I would've been here sooner.\"\n\n\"No one invited you here, Shaman,\" Qialla said, stepping forward.\n\n\"Of course not!\" Shampy threw her hands in the air. The only cloth she wore wrapped around her body came dangerously close to exposing more than those around her wanted to see. \"You don't want me here because I know, that you know, that I know everything you know\u2026and more.\"\n\nA perplexed silence followed.\n\nFinally, Philip brushed aside the confusion, intimidation, fear and anger.\n\n\"What do you know?!\" he yelled. \"Everything. From the beginning.\"\n\n\"Oh, big, little king,\" she hummed. \"We could be here for a year.\"\n\n\"The short version, then!\" Torgon called.\n\n\"The short version, he says \u2026\" Shampy clapped her hands and reached behind herself. Philip feared she might push aside the tiny covering she wore. Instead, she directed a clawed hand at the stone behind her. It liquified until it shaped itself into a large mound. The little faeriewoman opened her wings and flew to the top of it where everyone could see her, then opened her mouth to pronounce:\n\n\u2003\"The faeries made the dragons speak,\n\n\u2003a choice they wouldn't share.\n\n\u2003They made a spell no word be said,\n\n\u2003no faerie ever dare.\n\n\u2003The centaurs disagreed of course\n\n\u2003and so they ran away.\n\n\u2003A prophecy came from the pain,\n\n\u2003The One to come someday.\n\n\u2003The faeries' curse turned ugly soon,\n\n\u2003await The One to come.\n\n\u2003Darkness took their hearts\n\n\u2003as well as they hid from the sun.\n\n\u2003Then Freeg fell in with sweet Annette,\n\n\u2003but she don't love him too.\n\n\u2003From her death and with his heart\n\n\u2003they made a baby coo.\n\n\u2003The One was born with golden hair\n\n\u2003and dragon scales of green.\n\n\u2003But she would hide from all beside\n\n\u2003the father she had seen.\n\n\u2003Once Freeg now leader of his ruck,\n\n\u2003he did betray them all.\n\n\u2003The faeries and dragon Taynor\n\n\u2003did plot and plan with gall.\n\n\u2003They tricked the young king Philip\n\n\u2003into taking all the blame,\n\n\u2003as humans hunted dragons\n\n\u2003and with poison in their aim.\n\n\u2003But Visi knew all ins and outs\n\n\u2003with Shampy she did plan.\n\n\u2003Create did we a dragon\n\n\u2003with the heart of a tall man.\n\n\u2003With these we played like little pawns\n\n\u2003and made sure they would meet.\n\n\u2003Because all things befell on them\n\n\u2003as their two hearts did beat.\n\n\u2003They must to kill the traitor\n\n\u2003but first to take a throne,\n\n\u2003before they speak to humans\n\n\u2003and a new world they could hone.\"\n\nSilence echoed through the Krusible until Shampy held up her hands and yelled, \"Now clap!\"\n\nA smattering of polite applause followed as the old faerie flew down from her perch. The stone melted back into the mountain floor when she landed.\n\n\"The faeries lied to me,\" Philip mumbled as the clapping ceased. \"It felt wrong, but I didn't\u2026I couldn't\u2026\" his voice trailed off as guilt swept over him.\n\n\"It's not your fault.\" Hearing this, Philip looked up into the eyes of the tall man, Owyn. \"No one blames you,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" Svorgh said from across the Krusible. \"No one blames the humans. It's the faeries who are without honor.\"\n\nHe stood and walked to the middle of the gathering. Shampy hadn't stepped aside. Instead, she stood in the middle of everyone, appearing to whittle away with nothing in her hands, watching Svorgh.\n\n\"The centaurs,\" he indicated the group, \"are and have been loyal to their allies to their core.\"\n\nThe centaur removed the sparkling silver sword from his back. Philip realized it was the Silver Sword of Allegiance. Stealing a glance at Queen Sarador, he saw the sharp woman purse her lips at the centaurs, but she said nothing.\n\n\"They have,\" Svorgh continued, \"by their very actions, claimed the highest allegiance in Avonoa. As have the goblins claimed in the Just.\"\n\nSvorgh pulled the small sword from his side and it grew into the long Black Sword of Justice. Torgon's and Philip's heads snapped to Grisivere.\n\nKing Grisivere stood tall. \"The sword cannot be stolen,\" he said. \"It can only be claimed by the Just.\"\n\nPhilip and Torgon shared a glance.\n\n\"As for the other swords \u2026\" Svorgh continued. He indicated each and the humans still in possession of them removed them from their sides as Svorgh approached.\n\nHe first approached Torodov. Torodov shot Philip a questioning look. Philip nodded \u2013 he couldn't go back on his word now. Besides, Svorgh could easily take the sword; better to hand it over willingly. Torodov relinquished the Gold Sword of Courage to Svorgh.\n\nAlthough this sword, as well as the others, was easily double the length of his height, the small king handled them deftly. Taking the Gold Sword of Courage, Svorgh walked it over to Philip.\n\n\"I believe,\" he said, \"King Philip has, at such a tender age, shown that he has the courage to face adversity. He is the only one capable of leading the human race into a world with four other races who have more power and majik than himself and his kind. He will lead with courage into this bold new existence.\"\n\nHe handed the sword to Philip, who accepted it. Switching the gold sword to his left hand, Philip pulled the Blue Sword of Nobility from his sheath.\n\n\"I shouldn't have two swords in my care,\" he said.\n\nSvorgh shook his head in agreement and took the blue sword. As the sword moved away from him, Philip felt an equality settle on everyone around him. He realized that the faeries were no more honorable than bullies and he felt bolstered by the fact that he had withstood them. He looked around at the kings and queens around him and knew they were all equal with the guards and servants behind them.\n\nTierni smiled at him and he knew there was no difference between her and Queen Sarador besides a title. He knew nothing would stop them from being together.\n\nSvorgh walked the blue sword to Owyn, but the tall man held out a hand to stop him. \"Dragons have no need for swords, customs or titles,\" he said.\n\n\"And they don't need shiny things either!\" Shampy yelled. Cocking her head as if speaking to someone next to her, she mumbled, \"That was a myth created from Freeg and Annette too.\"\n\n\"Dragons are the most noble creatures in Avonoa,\" Svorgh said to Owyn, ignoring Shampy. \"That is why only dragons can claim the Noble Sword. You don't believe nobility to mean you're above anyone in status or better than anyone else, but you strive to better yourselves.\"\n\nOwyn tentatively received the sword.\n\n\"Perhaps the faeries should strive to better themselves,\" Ashel grumbled.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Svorgh said as he walked away from Hirowyn. \"But the faeries' virtues would eventually lead them to believe they are better than others and start all these problems again.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said a faerie Philip knew he had met but couldn't quite put a name to her, \"we shouldn't receive any sword. We created them. We would only corrupt their value.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" Svorgh stopped in front of Theodor. Again, the older king looked to Philip for approval before handing the red sword to the goblin king.\n\nSvorgh brought the sword to stand before the faerie council. \"The other four swords will go to the races of Avonoa who already embody the traits of those swords. But this,\" he said, handing the Red Sword of Honor up to the faerie woman, \"goes to the race who most needs to cultivate its honor.\"\n\nThe faerie shook her head. \"I cannot swear that every faerie will live up to the expectations of owning this sword.\"\n\n\"Nor can any other race,\" Svorgh said, indicating the others in attendance. \"There will always be exceptions. There will always be certain variants. The power of a sword works on those closest to it and those willing to succumb to its effects. It will guide leaders and influence the lives of the people. That understanding of its power is all that is required.\"\n\nThe faerie dipped her head, accepting the sword. \"We have already decided, as a council,\" she said, \"that the faerie race will diminish. We must focus on curing the diseases of our own hearts before we thrust our judgment on others again.\"\n\nThey turned to leave, but a shout rang out.\n\n\"Wait!\" It was Ashel. She stood up tall, pointing to the faeries. \"Don't they need to pay for their crimes? They started a war and tried to wipe out an entire species of intelligent creatures all for the sake of their own vanity! Centaurs and dragons have died!\" After a nudge from the brown dragon, she waved a hand and added, \"And humans.\"\n\nIn a singularly unique reaction, the faeries turned and bowed their heads at the accusations. They said nothing.\n\n\"And you killed them,\" Sarador spoke up. \"You and your centaurs destroyed our supply caravans and our people. Your hands are no cleaner than theirs.\"\n\nAs everyone began to speak and accuse each other at once, Svorgh raised his hands to quiet them, but the taller beings yelled over his head. Instead, Shampy flew up over the crowd. Clapping her hands together, a force swept over the gathering, knocking everyone, even dragons, back a step.\n\n\"By Shurta's tangles,\" the old faeriewoman cursed again, \"get control of yourselves! Everyone has a share of the blame. We just have to find the beginning.\"\n\nShe drifted down to stand next to Svorgh again, who nodded to her. Or did he wink at her? Philip wasn't sure so he begged himself to forget it.\n\n\"It started when the faeries came to Kingstor Noble,\" Torgon said. \"They told us that the dragons were going to kill everyone.\"\n\n\"So,\" Philip jumped in, \"they insisted we kill the dragons first.\"\n\nOwyn shook his head. \"But we don't blame you for\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, I do!\" Torgon shouted.\n\nPhilip searched his best friend's face. Torgon's eyes brimmed. His face flushed with color and a vein stood out on his neck. He had to wonder how long his best friend had been holding onto this pain and anger and never shown it. Philip counted himself a dismal friend for not having seen it and helped him sooner.\n\nHe stepped closer and tried to speak with him, but Torgon shoved his king and friend aside. \"No,\" he said, pointing at Owyn. \"You, the black dragon, killed my mother's husband. He led the guards into the mountains to ambush you. When he captured one of you, you killed him and all his men.\"\n\n\"We couldn't let them live,\" a larger gray dragon said.\n\n\"Yes, Tog,\" Owyn said, \"we could have.\"\n\n\"You removed his head,\" Torgon said. Torgon's eyes were bright red. Somehow he held back the tears, but his entire face seemed to turn deeper and deeper red. He might burst into flames himself. \"I had to grieve with my mother and watch my best friend grieve over his father at the same time.\"\n\nOwyn nodded. \"Then that's where it started, so let it end here. Your father killed my father, so I killed him. I give you my life in compensation.\"\n\nAnna tried to stop him, but Owyn stepped away from her toward Torgon. \"My life is yours in amends.\"\n\n\"No,\" Torgon shook his head. \"You didn't take my spouse.\"\n\nHe turned. Philip hadn't realized the number of servants who had accompanied the guards and generals into the Rock Clouds and the Krusible. They parted and from behind walked a short, older, graying woman. Her face held the sternness of Tierni's and the laugh lines of Torgon's. She wore a simple blue dress and a black apron. Embroidered on the bottom hem of the apron was a small blue sword.\n\nShe didn't dip her head once while walking forward to meet Owyn in the middle of the gathering. As soon as she was within arm's reach of Owyn, he opened his mouth to speak, but she swung her arm at him. His face lurched sideways from the slap, with a loud CRACK echoing through the Krusible.\n\nDefinitely Tierni's mother, Philip thought.\n\nWhen Owyn's vision cleared and he swung his head back to face her, the woman pointed a finger at him. \"A man didn't kill my Bragon,\" she said.\n\nInstantly, the man changed into a black dragon. He prostrated himself in front of her.\n\nStanding over the humble yet mighty dragon, she slowly brought her hand forward and gently placed it on his head. \"I forgive you,\" she said, \"as long as you spend the rest of your life protecting that which you took. I constrain you to protect the lives of humans the rest of your days.\"\n\nThe huge black beast looked up at her from the ground. \"I give you my wyrd. My life is yours if I break it.\"\n\nAs the dragon changed back into a human again and agreed to her terms, Philip leaned over to Torgon. \"You do realize that that dragon might have just killed her if he'd really wanted to,\" he whispered.\n\nTorgon nodded as the two embraced and everyone around them cheered. \"Yes,\" he answered, \"but then he would have had to deal with the wrath of Tierni.\" He met Philip's eye, who forced an expressionless look. \"And, by Khurta's claws, he wouldn't have stood a chance.\"\n\n[ Complication ]\n\nEveryone in the Krusible agreed that the rest of the day be spent in mourning. The centaurs asked that they be allowed to bring their dead to the Krusible for the proper burning rites. The dragons extended the same opportunity to the humans and goblins. The goblins hadn't sustained any losses, but they agreed with the inclusion of all.\n\nAshel admitted to killing many human men. After returning to the surface and placing Vikal's body on one of the platforms, she helped stack the human remains. The bodies, enough for five platforms, were lifted into the air by Hiro and several more dragons and brought to the Krusible.\n\nWhile many dragons removed bodies of the fallen after proper rites were conducted, groups of huntresses left to hunt. The young ones were fed elsewhere, but some of the huntresses brought back several lydik and giant two-headed scorrand. The centaurs insisted on feasting with their new allies, as was their custom. The humans assembled some of their own cooks and chefs. The woman who had forgiven Hirowyn earlier for her husband's death \u2013 who was, as Hiro learned, Torgon and Tierni's mother \u2013 cooked and shared food with goblins, centaurs and dragons alike. With a splash of mint here and there, even the dragons enjoyed the feast. Now the five intelligent races of Avonoa ate and talked together around a massive fire in the middle of the Krusible.\n\nAs the evening wore on, Owyn surveyed the scene. Several groups consisting of most of the five races of Avonoa sat and talked and laughed and mourned together. The humans wanted to learn more about the dragons. Everyone was curious about the goblins, and the goblins were amenable to divulging their secrets and joining the world once more. Most of the faeries didn't partake in the sharing and the mourning because they'd suffered no losses. A few hung around to converse and learn, but before long most either returned to their own camp or had already set out for home.\n\nThe centaurs took to an alliance with the humans quite easily, especially considering the prior bloodshed. The alliance may have been possible only with the assistance of the Allegiant Sword. But with the sword's aid, once allied, always allied.\n\nAt one point during the course of the day, Owyn found Jarek and the Hamees men among those from the Noble Kingdom. They were there to help gather bodies and see to the proper rites, but they had no desire to participate in the social gathering, citing that they had not participated in the war and felt they would be an intrusion on the mourning. However, they accepted a ride from the dragons to speed them home sooner the next morning, and stayed on the surface in the Noble camp for the night..\n\nWhile returning from the Hamees, Owyn passed Adair's circle of friends who were interrogating a few goblins and stopped to talk.\n\nAdair, the first man to befriend Owyn, sat with his own claw of men from the army where, to raucous laughter, he relayed how Owyn first started out as a man.\n\n\"Chinkle!\" Adair laughed. \"He said he had to chinkle!\"\n\nThe entire group laughed and Owyn could only shake his head, remembering those first few days. \"Blame Anna,\" he finally answered. \"She's the one I heard it from and I had no idea what was happening to me!\"\n\nHe laughed as he walked away from the group to rejoin Anna. They sat in a large circle of different species with Philip, Torgon, Tierni, Ashel, Joss, Rylan, Kodoran, Tog, Surneen, Mitashio and the men from Owyn's claw. Owyn's claw consisted of Maelin, the leader and lieutenant; Koris, Adair's brother-in-law; Thaddeus, the second largest man in the claw; Brandell and Taka, the two men as close as brothers and as mischievous as children; Nolan, the former nobleman; Tua and Darwick, the quieter, kind men and Addil, the brilliant, small man that saved the group from trouble most often. These men were the most comfortable with Owyn and had the most questions for him about his species change. The king trusted them all and enjoyed their company.\n\nAshel, still grieving over the loss of Vikal, lounged against Kodoran's side in melancholy. Occasionally she would throw out a question or flash a small grin. Whenever she got too quiet for his comfort, Kodoran would whisper to her and she would smile again.\n\n\"Why are you so good with a sword if you've never trained with one?\" Koris asked. They had been peppering Owyn with questions for a while.\n\n\"My dragon senses,\" Owyn answered, \"allowed me to see better and react faster.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Addil said, \"what about those senses? I've heard dragons have better hearing, smell, sight, touch, all of them! Are your senses better than a normal human's?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Owyn nodded. He glanced at Tog, who widened the one eye watching him. \"For the most part. I have increased hearing and smell, and sight\u2026during the daytime.\"\n\n\"And at night?\" Addil said. \"I suppose a dragon can see better at night. Or do you use your other senses at night?\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Owyn watched Tog, waiting for his consensus. When he finally looked back at him, the gray dragon nodded at Owyn to continue. \"I have never had very good night vision.\"\n\n\"That was Visi's doing,\" Anna said. \"She had to bless you as a child with an enchantment so your heart would break and turn you into a human. But she said it might have some side effects.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Kodoran said. \"I've always wondered. You never acted like you were superior that way, but I thought you were just humble.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Owyn continued, \"I had to hone my other senses because of the poor night vision. So I have better-than-average senses of smell and hearing.\"\n\n\"Like, how much better?\" Koris asked.\n\n\"Well, I could hear you snore at night!\" Owyn answered.\n\n\"Really?\" Brandell said. \"You could hear Koris over your own snoring? That must be outstanding hearing!\"\n\nEveryone laughed and Anna poked him. \"I told you dragons snore!\"\n\nOwyn shook his head. \"Alright,\" he said. \"The human snoring was tolerable. Much more than their smell.\"\n\n\"Our smell?\" Tua shook his head. \"I smell like daisies!\"\n\n\"Daisies?\" Owyn laughed. \"I could follow you across all of Avonoa, just by your odor. And it certainly wouldn't lead me to any daisies!\"\n\nAfter the laughter died down, Torgon spoke. \"The time in the rocks,\" he said, almost whispering. \"After you destroyed our halfway point for the arrows. Why didn't you kill me and my men? You could've. By the sounds of it, you should've. There were only a few of us and we weren't armed with much. You must have heard us and followed us by our scent. What made you leave us alone?\"\n\nThe others waited while Owyn thought. \"I smelled Anna,\" he finally said, \"\u2013or, Priyanna. I thought I was following her. I thought you had taken her, but her scent tracked away from yours and so I followed it. I didn't want to hurt you.\"\n\n\"How many times could you have saved us all this trouble,\" Philip murmured, \"if you had only spoken to us in your dragon form.\"\n\n\"Not many,\" Anna said. She sat next to Owyn on the ground but leaned against a log someone had brought up for the humans to rest on. \"Visi had many, many years to delve into possible futures. While it isn't possible to see everything, she knew the general path we would take to get us to this point. We wouldn't have this peace without her foresight and guidance.\"\n\n\"Or the faeries' pride,\" Torgon mumbled.\n\nTalking amongst the group quieted. Everyone wanted to hear the faeries' side of the story, but it would have to wait for another day. Before leaving, the faeries claimed that they needed to hold many trials yet and plan the appropriate punishments. But many in the Krusible group shared the belief that the sword of honor would keep the faeries from getting involved in other races' affairs unless they were specifically called upon.\n\n\"Don't be too hard on us,\" Shampy came floating over. She had been buzzing around the fire offering majik, company and answers to many, mostly the goblins. Svorgh didn't seem to mind her presence, but Shvika couldn't stand the crazy old witch. \"Don't forget, the centaurs weren't under the same spell. They could have told the humans about the dragons whenever they wanted.\"\n\nAs the crazy shaman flew away, cursing a red flower under her breath, Ashel glared after her. \"How dare she,\" the centaur began to complain.\n\n\"She's right, though,\" Joss said, stopping Ashel's rage from flaring. \"I believe the centaurs didn't say anything at first because they agreed that the humans couldn't handle it. Then, being former faeries, a hint of fear of the curse still had an effect on us. More recently, we enjoyed seeing the curse backfire on the faeries. There's been so much hatred between us for so long, it will be a struggle to gain any trust. For both sides.\"\n\n\"Which reminds me,\" Keeahrspi said, popping into existence in front of Rylan.\n\n\"You're not supposed to do that anymore,\" Rylan said, swatting away the goblin like shooing a fly.\n\n\"Do what?\" the little gray man said, stumbling away from the centaur with a cup of ale in his hand.\n\n\"Be invisible,\" Anna said.\n\nKeeahrspi squinted at her. \"Was I inbisivle?\"\n\nEveryone laughed. Even Ashel cracked another smile.\n\n\"There you are!\" Shvika shouted, running to Keeahrspi's side. She pulled the cup from his hand and threw his arm over her shoulder. \"I think you've had enough for tonight.\"\n\nShe swung him away from the group, but he jerked his arm away and turned back. \"I was aksing a questiosh,\" he said.\n\nPointing at Anna, he said, \"Do you get both swords now?\"\n\n\"That's not our affair,\" Shvika scolded, pulling him over her shoulder again. As he fought her off, she threw him over her back. Despite their difference in size, she handled him with ease. She apologized to the group and promised not to let him bother them again.\n\nOnce they were gone, Philip turned to Anna. \"He's right, you know,\" he said. \"Aren't you the leader of the dragons now? It hardly seems fair that you have access to both the Noble Sword and the Courageous Sword.\"\n\nAnna shook her head. \"I'm not Rakdar,\" she said, drawing everyone's attention. \"I've conceded the name to one greater than I.\"\n\nEveryone followed her eyes as they landed on the small brown dragon next to Ashel, who nodded to Anna in return.\n\n\"No,\" Mitashio grumbled. \"No, no, no! Milah is probably throwing a fit in the World of Souls right now. No. It's not possible. I won't acquiesce to this. No.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on,\" Rakgar feira Kodoran feira Prakyndar said to him. \"Milah liked me! He wouldn't say so, but I know he did. I'll be a good Rakgar and he would agree. I'll be better than Taynor, no doubt. And Milah would agree with that too.\"\n\n\"He admired you,\" Owyn said, remembering Milah's last words to him. \"He told me so. He also said he would tear off my horns if I told anyone he did, but I think that danger is in the past.\"\n\nRakgar grinned. Mitashio grumbled, but laid back down, shaking his head.\n\n\"I'll still need counselors,\" Rakgar said to him. \"I'll need someone who can tell me when I'm making a bad decision. Someone who can be brutally honest. Someone who won't hold back.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Mitashio said, \"I'll do that no matter what.\"\n\nAshel threw her arm around Rakgar's shoulder. \"I knew dragons were smarter than they looked.\" She grinned up at him and their eyes held each other's a moment.\n\nSuddenly, Rakgar's eyes popped open. \"Uh,\" he breathed, but instead of speaking he choked back a small cough. His eyes searched out Owyn and Tog. \"I have to go,\" he said, jumping from his position next to Ashel.\n\n\"What?\" she said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I just\u2014\" he said, and coughed again. \"I just have to go. I'll be back.\" Cough. \"I'll come back as soon as I can.\" Cough. \"I promise, I'll\u2014\" Cough, cough.\n\nWithout another word, Rakgar flew away.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" Ashel asked the group.\n\n\"He's fine,\" Owyn said, stifling a smile.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Tog offered, not bothering to hide his own smile. \"I'm guessing he'll come back feeling better than ever.\"\n\nOwyn and Tog shared a smile and a nod.\n\n\"More secrets?\" Philip said. \"I thought we were past those.\"\n\nOwyn shook his head. \"This is someone else's secret and it's best left alone.\"\n\n\"At least,\" Tog said, \"until the owner is willing to share.\"\n\n\"Like you?\" Philip whispered to the ground. When he lifted his eyes, he looked at Anna. \"Are you willing to share any of your secrets?\"\n\nAnna lifted her chin. \"Anything,\" she said.\n\n\"Then start at the beginning,\" he said.\n\nAnna nodded. \"I am the daughter of King Paudie and Queen Annette,\" she began.\n\n\"We know that part,\" Torgon said.\n\n\"But you don't know the rest,\" Owyn told them.\n\nAnna continued. \"The dragon Freeg fell in love with Annette and his heart broke for her. Married and pregnant with the king's child, she was miserable about her circumstances and told Freeg to end her life. Because she was holding Freeg's heart when she begged it of him, he was under her control and he had no choice but to comply with her plea. And so, unable to control himself, Freeg burned her to death with his fire. But dying in his fire as she held his heart, the heart transformed into an egg with a child inside, created from both the woman and the dragon. However, Visi predicted Freeg's grief and knew he would kill me. So she spirited the egg away to her lair at the top of the Inner Mountain.\" She stopped to take a pause as everyone stayed rapt with attention.\n\n\"I was born as a human from a dragon egg. I've been able to change between the two species my entire life. Visi raised me on the Inner Mountain and taught me how to control when I changed. Then when I was old enough and she deemed me prepared enough, she took me back to my dragon father, by then Rakgar feira Freeg, and introduced me to the ruck. But she had always told me he would try to kill me, so I lived in constant fear of him.\" Her eyes drifted to Owyn. \"Except when I was with my friends.\n\n\"As I grew,\" she continued, \"Visi had me trained as a noble.\"\n\n\"With Sar?\" Philip said. \"Or is Sar not real?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sar was real,\" Anna's gazed shifted. \"Visi taught me to tell as much truth as I could, especially to you.\" She looked directly at Philip, indicating he knew more than he realized.\n\n\"You were raised in the mountains,\" he said.\n\n\"The Rock Cloud mountains, not Torthoth like I said, but yes,\" she replied. \"Although, I spent a good deal of time in the Torthoths, training with Sar, hunting\u2026\"\n\n\"Did you kill her?\" Philip asked.\n\nAnna couldn't meet his eyes. After a moment, she answered. \"She would have ruined everything. I saw it for myself. The faeries would still be cursed. Most of the dragons would have died. The Noble Kingdom would be decimated, and the faeries would go on a rampage through the other human kingdoms. I only ever did what I had to do to prevent that outcome.\"\n\nOwyn gently placed a hand on her shoulder as they all took a moment to mourn Sar.\n\nAfter the silence, Torgon cleared his throat. \"What about your sword training?\" he asked, changing the grim subject. \"I've seen your work. You fight like my father.\"\n\nAnna grinned. \"That's because he trained me.\"\n\nTorgon's mouth fell open, but Anna shook her head. \"Not like that. We watched in Visi's crystal ball the two of you practicing. Day after day, I mimicked you the best I could. I could never be your equal, but I was trained by the same man.\"\n\n\"That's a match I would pay to see,\" Brandell muttered at the edge of the fire.\n\n\"Where did you always disappear to?\" Philip asked.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind knowing that one myself,\" Tog said.\n\nTorgon and Owyn nodded emphatically.\n\n\"It varied,\" Anna said, chuckling. \"When I disappeared from the castle, I was usually meeting with Visi or Hiro. Visi and I had to plan many things, but recently I left with Hiro when you all thought he had kidnapped me.\"\n\n\"Quite the struggle, I'll say,\" Owyn added.\n\n\"Or when I went to him for help with the wraith,\" Anna said.\n\n\"I knew it was a wraith,\" Addil smacked Darwick on the arm. \"I told everyone, I\u2026\" he trailed off at the stares.\n\n\"So,\" Tog said, training one of his toggling eyes on Anna. \"Whenever you disappeared from the Rock Clouds, were you in the Noble Kingdom?\"\n\n\"Yes, and no,\" she said. \"Over the past year that is only partially where I've been. Owyn, I told you I had been busy as well, remember? Well, I'd been visiting the other rucks, begging for their help and warning them of the dangers to come.\"\n\n\"The only reason they showed up,\" Surneen said from beside Tog.\n\nAnna nodded. \"I knew when and where to meet them. I had a rough guesstimate of what I could or should say. Even up to while you were fighting my father. I had to time everything perfectly.\"\n\n\"You have been busy,\" Owyn said admiringly. As she nodded, he thought back to the time in his dragon cave when she told him she was seeking allies. \"Wait a second,\" he said when a thought occurred to him. \"You yelled at me!\"\n\nAnna scrunched her eyebrows. \"Which time?\"\n\n\"In the cave,\" he said. \"My cave. You yelled at me for loving a human! For loving you!\"\n\n\"Ah,\" she answered, looking abashed.\n\n\"You did,\" Tog said. \"Prak and I heard it. Sorry,\u2026 I mean, Rakgar.\"\n\n\"Yes, well,\" Anna hemmed. Her face grew pinker and her skin warmed. \"You have to understand that Visi trained me well to think of myself as two very different beings.\"\n\n\"So, you were jealous?\" Ashel asked.\n\n\"Of yourself?\" Owyn added.\n\nAnna shrugged. \"In my defense, I knew that if you had fallen in love with me as a dragon, things would have gone a lot easier. I did try to get your heart to break for me as a dragon. But you always have to do things the hard way.\"\n\nAs the laughter drifted away, a different centaur trotted up to the group, someone no one had seen before nor recognized. While the other centaurs usually wore some kinds of weapons, leather adornments or decorations in their hair, he wore nothing. No decorations in his short, scruffy, brown hair. No weapons, armor or anything else strapped around his brown horse belly or brown human chest. The only thing he possessed was carried in one hand and turned just enough for the others not to see it.\n\nNot quite as tall as her, he stepped beside Ashel. Ashel, clearly not recognizing him, stepped away hesitantly. He looked at her reaction, watched the others in the group for a moment, glanced down, then in a familiar, nasally voice said, \"Well, I suppose this is yours.\"\n\nHe held out a small, smoky brown gem in the shape of a teardrop toward Ashel.\n\nAshel stared at the heart a moment, then met the centaur's eyes. \"Prak?\" she whispered.\n\nAfter a moment of quiet contemplation, Ashel reached out and scooped the heart out of Prak's hand. She smiled and threw her arms around him again.\n\n\"Mitashio!\" Prak said over Ashel's shoulder. \"It would seem you might be Rakgar after all.\"\n\n\"Oh, spit,\" Owyn muttered. \"It's contagious.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Temeraire 9) League of Dragons",
        "author": "Naomi Novik",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "alternate history",
            "adventure",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "The chevalier was not dead when they found her, but the scavengers had already begun to pick at her body. A cloud of raucous crows lifted when Temeraire's shadow fell over the clearing, and a stoat slunk away into the underbrush, coat white, muzzle red. As he dismounted, Laurence saw its small hard shining eyes peering patiently out from beneath the bramble. The French dragon's immense sides were sunken in between her ribs so deeply that each hollow looked like the span of a rope bridge. They swelled out and in with every shallow breath, the movement of her lungs made visible. She did not move her head, but her eye opened a very little. It rolled to look on them, and closed again without any sign of comprehension.\n\nA dead man sat in the snow beside her, leaning against her chest and staring blindly forward, in the ragged remnants of what had once been the proud red uniform of the Old Guard. He wore epaulets and the front of his coat was pockmarked with many punctures where medals had once hung, likely sold to whichever Russian peasants would sell him a pig or a chicken for gold and silver. Flotsam from Napoleon's disintegrating Grande Arm\u00e9e: the dragon had most likely been driven by hunger to go too far afield, searching for food, and having spent her final strength could not then catch up the remaining body of her corps. She had come down a day ago: the churned ground beneath her was frozen into solid peaks, and her captain's boots were drifted over with the snow which had fallen yesterday morning.\n\nLaurence looked for the sun, descending and only barely shy of the horizon. Every scant hour of daylight now was precious, even every minute. The last corps of Napoleon's army were racing west, trying to escape, and Napoleon himself with them. If they did not catch him before the Berezina River, they would not catch him; he had reinforcements and supply on the other side\u2014dragon reinforcements, who would spirit him and his troops safely away. And all this devouring war would have no conclusion, no end. Napoleon would return only a little chastened to the welcoming cradle of France and raise up another army, and in two years there would be another campaign\u2014another slaughter.\n\nAnother laboring breath pushed out the Chevalier's sides; breath steamed out of her nostrils, billowing like cannon-smoke in the frigid air. Temeraire said, \"Can we do nothing for her?\"\n\n\"Let us lay a small fire, Mr. Forthing, if you please,\" Laurence said.\n\nBut the Chevalier would not take even water, when they melted some snow for her to drink. She was too far gone; if indeed she wished any relief with her captain gone and a living death already upon her.\n\nThere was only one kindness left to provide. They could not spare powder, but they still had a few iron tent-poles with sharpened ends. Laurence rested one against the base of the dragon's skull, and Temeraire set his massive claw upon it and thrust it through with a single stroke. The Chevalier died without a sound. Her sides rose and fell twice more while the final stillness crept slowly along her enormous body, spasms of muscle and sinew visible beneath the skin. A few of the ground crew stamped their boots and blew on their hands. The snow heavy upon the pine-trees standing around them made a muffled silence.\n\n\"We had better get along,\" Grig said, before the final shudders had left the Chevalier's tail; a faint note of reproach in his high sparrow-voice. \"It is another five miles to the meeting-place for to-night.\"\n\nHe alone of their company was little affected by the scene, but then the Russian dragons had cause enough to be inured to cruelty and hunger, having lived with both all their days. And there was no real justification for ignoring him; they had done what little good there was to be done. \"See the men back aboard, Mr. Forthing,\" Laurence said, and walked to Temeraire's lowered head. The breath had frozen in a rim around Temeraire's nostrils while they flew. Laurence warmed the ice crust with his hands and broke it carefully away from the scales. He asked, \"Are you ready to continue onwards?\"\n\nTemeraire did not immediately answer. He had lost more flesh than Laurence liked these last two weeks, from bitter cold, hard flying, and too little food. Together these could waste the frame of a heavy-weight dragon with terrifying speed, and the Chevalier made a grim object lesson to that end. Laurence could not but take it to heart.\n\nHe once more bitterly regretted Shen Shi, and the rest of their supply-train. Laurence had already known to value the Chinese legions highly, but never so much as when they were gone, and all the concerns of ensuring their supply had fallen into his own hands. The Russian aviators had only the most outdated notions of supply for their beasts, and Temeraire, with all the will in the world, had too much spirit to believe that he could not fly around the world on three chickens and a sack of groats if doing so would put him in striking distance of Napoleon again.\n\n\"I am so very sorry Shen Shi and the others had to go back to China,\" Temeraire said finally, in an echo of Laurence's thoughts. \"If we were only traveling in company, perhaps\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off. Even the most relentless optimism could not have imagined a rescue for the poor Chevalier: three heavy-weights together would have had difficulty in carrying her. \"At least we might have given her some hot porridge,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"If it is any consolation to you,\" Laurence said, \"remember she came into this country as a conqueror, and willingly.\"\n\n\"Oh! What would the dragons of France not do for Napoleon?\" Temeraire said. \"When you know how much he has given them, and how he has changed their lot: built them pavilions and roads through all Europe, and given them their rights? You cannot blame her, Laurence; you cannot blame any of them.\"\n\n\"Then at least you may blame him,\" Laurence said, \"for trading so far on that loyalty to bring her and her fellows into this country in a vain and unjustified attempt at conquest. It was never in your power to prevent her coming, or to rescue her. Only her master might have done so.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Temeraire said. \"I do blame him, and Laurence, it would be beyond everything, if he should escape us now.\" He heaved a deep breath, and raised his head again. \"I am ready to go.\"\n\nThe men were already aboard; Temeraire lifted Laurence to his place at the base of his neck, and with a spring not as energetic as Laurence would have liked, they were aloft again. Beneath them, the stoat crept out of its hiding-place and went back to its feasting.\n\nThe ferocious wind managed to come as a surprise again, even after so short a break in their flying. The last warmth of autumn had lingered late into November, but the Russian winter had come with a true vengeance now, more than justifying all the dire warnings which Laurence had heard before its advent, and to-day the temperature had fallen further still. He was used to biting cold upon the deck of a racing frigate or aloft upon a dragon's back in winter, but no experience had prepared him to endure this chill. Leather and wool and fur could not keep it out. Frost gathered thickly on his eyelashes and brows before he could even put his flying-goggles back on; when at last he secured them, the ice melted and ran down the insides of the green glass, leaving trails across his sight like rain.\n\nThe ground crew traveling in the belly-netting, shielded better from the wind, might huddle together and make a shared warmth; he had given his scant handful of officers permission to sit together in twos and threes. He could permit himself no such comfort. Tharkay had left them two weeks before, on his way to answer an urgent call to Istanbul; there was no-one else whom Laurence might sit with, without awkwardness\u2014Ferris could not be asked without reflection on Forthing, and equally the reverse; and he could not ask them both, when they might at any moment be attacked. They had to be spread wider than that across Temeraire's back.\n\nHe endured the cold as best he could beneath wrappings of oilcloth and a patchwork fur made of rabbit-and weasel-skins, keeping his fingers tucked beneath his arm-pits and his legs folded. Still the chill crept inexorably throughout his limbs, and when his fingers reached a dangerous numbness and ceased to give him pain, he forced himself to stand up in his straps. He carefully unlatched one carabiner, working slowly with thick gloves and numbed hands, and hooked it to a further ring; he then undid the second, and made his way along the harness hand-over-hand to the limits of the first strap before latching back on.\n\nThe natural hazards of such an operation, with half-frozen hands and feet and on a dragon's back made more slippery than usual with patches of ice, were outweighed by the certain evil of staying still for too long in such cold: he had to stir his blood. At least the instinctive fear of the plummeting ground below was in this case his ally, rather than an enemy; his heart jerked and pounded furiously when his feet slipped and he crashed full on his side, clinging to the harness with one hand and one strap, trees rushing by in a dark-green blur below.\n\nEmily Roland detached herself from a nearby knot of huddled officers, and clambering with far more skill came to his side\u2014she had been dragon-back upon her mother's beast nearly since her birth and was as much at home aloft as on the ground; she expertly caught his loose strap as the carabiner came banging against Temeraire's side, and latched it to another ring. Laurence nodded his thanks, and managed to regain his footing; but he was flushed and panting when he regained his place at last.\n\nTemeraire himself kept low to the ground, his eyes slitted almost shut against the glare and the breath from his nostrils that came streaming back along his neck: it made clouds filled with needles of ice that stung Laurence's face. Grig flew behind, making as much use as he could of the air churned up by Temeraire's wings. Below them rolled the endless snow and the black bare trees frosted with ice, the fields empty and glittering and hard. If they passed so much as a hut, it remained invisible to them. The peasants had taken to covering their houses in snow up to the eaves, to conceal them from the sight of the marauding feral dragons: they ate their potatoes raw, rather than light a fire whose smoke might betray them.\n\nOnly the corpses remained unburied, the trail of dead that Napoleon's army left behind it. But even these did not linger in the open long: a host of feral dragons pursued them, savage as any murder of crows. If a man fell, they, too, did not wait for the body to grow cold.\n\nLaurence might have called it the hand of justice, that Napoleon's army should now be hunted and devoured by the very ferals he had unleashed upon the Russian populace. But he could not take any solace in the dissolution of the once-proud Grande Arm\u00e9e. The pillage of Moscow trailed grotesquely behind them: silken cloth and gold chains and delicate inlaid furniture discarded along the sides of the road by starving men who now thought only of bare survival. Their misery was too enormous; they were fallen past being enemies and reduced to human animals.\n\nTemeraire reached the rendezvous an hour later, on the edge of nightfall. He inhaled a grateful deep breath of the cooking-steam from the big porridge-pit as he landed, and immediately fell-to upon his portion. As he ate, Ferris approached Laurence: he was holding several short sticks which he had tied together at the top, making a skeleton for a miniature tent. \"I have been thinking, sir, if we propped these over his nostrils, we might drape the oilcloth over them, and have his nose in with us after all. Then his breath shan't freeze in the night; and we can open a chimney-hole at the top to let it out again. Whatever warmth we might lose thereby, I think the heat of his breath will more than make up.\"\n\nLaurence hesitated. The responsibility of their arrangements was the duty of the first lieutenant, and ought to be left in his hands; the interference of the captain on such a level could only undermine that officer's authority. Ferris would have done better to apply to Forthing rather than to Laurence, allowing the other man to take the credit of the idea, but that was a great deal to ask when Forthing stood in the place that should have been his; that had been his, before he had been dismissed from the service.\n\n\"Very good, Mr. Ferris,\" Laurence said, finally. \"Be so good as to explain your suggestion to Mr. Forthing.\"\n\nHe could not bring himself to refuse anything which might improve Temeraire's situation, already so distressed. But guilt gnawed him when he saw Forthing's cheek color as Ferris spoke to him: the two men standing mirror, the one stocky and squared-off in shoulders and jaw, and the other tall and lean, his features not having yet lost all the delicacy of youth; both of them equally ramrod-straight. Forthing bowed a very little, when Ferris had finished, and turning gave stiff orders to the ground crew.\n\nThe oilcloth was rearranged, and Laurence lay down to sleep directly beside Temeraire's jaws, the regular susurration of his breath not unlike the murmur of ocean waves. The warmth was better than anything they had managed lately, but even so it was not enough to drive out the cold; at the edges of the oilcloth it waited knife-like, and slid inside on any slightest breath of wind. Laurence opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see a strange rippling motion in the cloth overhead. He put a hand out and touched Temeraire's side: the dragon was shivering violently.\n\nThere were faint groans outside, grumbling. Laurence lay a moment longer, and then groggily forced himself up and went outside. The fur he had wrapped over his coat was useless as armor against the cold. The Russian aviators were up already, walking among their dragons and striking them with their iron goads, shouting until the beasts stirred and got up, sluggishly. Laurence went to Temeraire's head and spoke. \"My dear, you must get up.\"\n\n\"I am up,\" Temeraire said, without opening an eye. \"In a moment I will be up,\" but after a little more coaxing he climbed wearily to his feet and joined the line the Russian dragons had formed: they were all walking in a circuit through the camp, heads sagging.\n\nAfter they had walked for half an hour, the Russians permitted their dragons to lie down again, this time in a general heap directly beside the porridge-pit. A thick crust of ice had formed over the top; the cooks at regular intervals threw in more hot coals, which broke through the crust and sank. Laurence urged Temeraire to huddle in as well; a great many of the small white dragons curled in around him. The oilcloth was slung again; they all returned to the attempt to sleep. But it seemed to him the cold grew still worse. The ground beneath them radiated chill as a stove might have given off heat, so intense that all the warmth which their bodies could produce was not adequate to push it back.\n\nTemeraire sighed behind his closed teeth. Laurence drifted uneasily, rousing now and again to put his hand on Temeraire's side and be sure he was not again shivering so dangerously. The night crept on. He roused Temeraire with the other dragons for another circuit. \"The banners of the Monarch of Hell draw nigh, Captain,\" O'Dea said, he and the other ground crewmen stamping along with Laurence alongside Temeraire's massive plodding feet. His hands were tucked beneath the arm-pits of his coat. \"No wonder if we are o'ertaken, and the dawn find us locked in ice eternal; God save us sinners all!\" Then the cold stopped even his limber tongue.\n\nThey returned to their place; they slept again, or tried to sleep. Laurence stirred some unmeasured time later and thought morning must be coming near, but when he looked outside the night remained impenetrable: the light was only from torches. A Cossack courier had landed, his small beast already crawling into the general heap. The other beasts made grumbling protests at the cold of her body. Her rider was chattering so badly he could not speak, but waved his hands in frantic haste in the faces of the handful of officers who had gathered around him, the movements throwing wild shadows through the torchlight. Laurence forced himself out into the cold and crossed to join them. \"Berezina,\" the man was saying. \"Berezina.\"\n\nA young ensign came running with a cup of hot grog. The man gulped, and they closed in around him to give him some little share of their own warmth. His clothing was coated white, and the ends of his fingers where he gripped the cup were blackened here and there: frostbite.\n\n\"Berezina zamerzayet,\" he managed; one of the officers muttered a curse even as the courier stammered out a little more around another swallow.\n\n\"What did he say?\" Laurence asked low, of one of them who had French.\n\n\"The Berezina has frozen,\" the man answered. \"Bonaparte is running for it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "They were aloft before sunrise, and reached the camp of the Russian advance guard as the dawn crept over the frozen hills. The Berezina was a clouded ghostly lane between high-piled snowbanks. To the north of the Russian camp, a handful of French regiments were streaming across the river in good order, men marching two abreast, with narrower lines to either side of camp-followers and soldiers who had fallen out of the ranks, struggling across alone as best they could: women and children with their heads down, hunched against the cold; wounded men leaving bloody marks upon the ice as they limped along. Bodies lay prostrated beside the lines, and here and there a figure huddled and unmoving. Even with escape open before them, some had reached the limits of their strength.\n\n\"That cannot be all of his army?\" Temeraire said doubtfully: there were not two thousand men. Upon the hills of the eastern bank, a small party of French dragons huddled together around a pair of guns, established to provide cover for the retreat, but there were only four beasts.\n\n\"They are spread out along the river to the north,\" Laurence answered, reading the dispatch which Gerry had come running to bring him. The division was a clever stratagem: if the Russians came at any one crossing in strength, Napoleon might sacrifice that portion to save the rest; if the Russians divided themselves to attack more than one, Napoleon could use his advantage in dragons to concentrate several of his companies more quickly than the Russians could do the same. Each group remained large enough to fend off the Cossack harrying bands.\n\nLaurence finished reading and turned to the crew. \"Gentlemen,\" he said, \"we have intelligence that Napoleon has declared to his soldiers that he will not go dragon-back while any man in his army remains this side of the Berezina; if he has not lied, he is somewhere along the river even now.\"\n\nA low murmur of excitement went around the men. \"If we can only get him, let the rest of them get away!\" Dyhern said, pounding his fist into his palm. \"Laurence, will we not go at once?\"\n\n\"We must!\" Temeraire said urgently, hunger and cold forgotten. \"Oh! Why are the Russians only standing about, waiting?\"\n\nThis criticism was unjust; the Russian sergeants were already bawling the men into their marching-lines, and even as Laurence ordered his officers to make ready for action, orders were sent running around the rest of the dragons: they were to go and survey the French crossings, and bring back word of any company of unusual strength. \"Temeraire,\" Laurence said, as he loaded his pistols fresh, \"pray have Grig pass the word to look for Incan dragons in particular: there were not many with the French, and those few will surely be devoted to Napoleon's protection. Ma'am, I hope you will be comfortable in camp,\" he added, to Mrs. Pemberton, Emily Roland's chaperone. \"Mr. O'Dea will do his best for you, I trust.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am, whate'er can be done,\" O'Dea said, reaching to pull on the brim of a cap he no longer had; his head was swathed instead in a makeshift turban of furs and flayed horsehide, flaps dangling over the ears and the back of the neck. \"We'll strike up a tent and do what we can about some porridge, Captain.\"\n\n\"Pray have not a thought for me,\" Mrs. Pemberton said; she herself was engaged in low conversation with Emily and handing her an extra pistol, one of her own, and a clean pocket-handkerchief.\n\nThe French dragons on their hill lifted wary heads when they saw the Russian dragons coming, but did not immediately take to the air themselves; the guns beside them were heaved up, waiting if they should descend into range. Laurence looked across at Vosyem, the Russian heavy-weight nearest him; there was little love lost between himself and Captain Rozhkov, but for the moment they were united in their single goal. Rozhkov looked back, his own flying-goggles blue, and they shook their heads at each other in wordless agreement: Bonaparte would not be with this company, the most exposed to Russian attack; in any case, there were no carriages nor wagons, and very few cavalry.\n\nThey flew northward along the line of the river: already a dozen marching antlines dotted across the frozen white surface. Behind them, the French company fired up signal-flares in varied colors, surely signaling to their fellows ahead. As the Russian dragons closed in on the next crossing, a volley of musketry fired to greet them, and they had to go higher aloft: painful in the cold weather, and there was not an Incan dragon to be seen; only a few French middle-weights gathered by their guns, who eyed the mass of Russian heavy-weights with some anxiety.\n\nThere were, however, a dozen wagons crossing the river under guard by the company, pulled by teams of horses, many of them having lost their hoods: they went frantic and heaving with the dragons overhead. And the wagons were laden not only with wounded but with pillaged treasure, and in alarm Laurence heard Vosyem rumble interest, cocking her head sideways to peer down, as one of the wagons toppled over, and a load of silver plate slid out across the snow, blazing with reflected light.\n\nLaurence heard Rozhkov shout at her, and haul brutally upon the spiked bit she wore, to no avail. The other Russian heavy-weights had seen the treasure as well\u2014they were snarling at one another, snapping, throwing their heads violently to shake their officers off the reins. \"Whatever are they hissing for?\" Temeraire said, craning his head about. \"Anyone can see Napoleon is not there. Napoleon is not there!\" he repeated to the Russian dragons, in their tongue.\n\nVosyem paid no attention. With one last heave of shoulders and neck, she flung Rozhkov and his two lieutenants off their feet, leaving them dangling by their carabiner straps, and her reins were loose. With a roar, she banked sharply, her wings folding, and stooped towards the baggage-train. The other Russian heavy-weights roared also and flung themselves after her, all of them, claws outstretched: worried more about which of them would reach the laden carts first than about the enemy.\n\n\"Oh! What are they doing!\" Temeraire cried; Laurence looked away, sickened. In their savage eagerness, the Russian beasts were making no effort to avoid the hospital-carts or the camp-followers, and wounded men were spilling out across the ice with cries of agony. The Russian dragons skirmished among them, heedless; others were smashing the rest of the carts, dragging them up onto the bank, mantling at each other with hisses and displays of their claws and teeth.\n\nTemeraire turned wide circles in distress aloft, but there was nothing to be done. He could not force a dozen maddened dragons to come to heel, even if the Russian beasts had not already disdained him. \"Temeraire,\" Laurence called, \"see if you can persuade the smaller beasts to come along with us. If we can only find Napoleon, we can return and perhaps by then marshal the other heavy-weights; we can do nothing with them at present.\"\n\nTemeraire called to Grig and the other grey light-weights, who were not unwilling to follow him; none of them could hope for a scrap of treasure with so many heavy-weights engaged. Even as they turned away, two of the Russian dragons went smashing into the frozen surface of the river, clawing at each other, rolling over and over, and the ice broke with a crack like gunfire: three wagons and dozens of screaming men and women sank at once into the dark rushing water beneath.\n\nTemeraire's head was bowed as he flew northward, leaving the hideous scene behind them. They flew past another four crossing-points: Marshal Davout's regiments, much diminished yet still in fighting-order. He had few guns and almost no dragons left, most of them forced to flee ahead of the retreat outside Smolensk, but his soldiers had climbed up onto the edges of their hospital-wagons, holding their bayonets aloft to form a bristling forest of discouraging points. \"A courier has told him, I suppose,\" Temeraire said, \"how the Russian dragons were behaving: oh! Laurence, I hardly know how to look at them. That they should think I would do such a thing, go after a hospital-cart, and only for a little silver!\"\n\n\"Well, it was quite a lot of silver,\" Grig said, in a faintly envious tone, then hastily added, \"which does not of course mean they were right to do it: Captain Rozhkov will be so very angry! All the officers will, and,\" he finished glumly, \"I expect they will take away our dinners.\"\n\nTemeraire flattened his ruff, not liking this speech very much. He beat away quickly, urgently. The river swung back eastward beneath them, snow blowing in little drifts across the ice. Over the next stand of hills, they found one smaller crossing already completed: tracks through the snow on both sides of the bank, and the ground atop the highest point on the eastern bank trampled and bared of snow, where dragons had lifted away the guns and followed the company. But the soldiers had already vanished into the trees on the western bank.\n\nLaurence swept the countryside and the river ahead with his spyglass, anxiously. As little as he wished Napoleon to escape, he feared crossing the enemy's lines. The Russian light-weights were not accustomed to any combat beyond their own internal skirmishing; they did not make a strong company, and now there were French dragons on every side, backed with guns and companies in good order. \"We must begin to think of turning back,\" he said.\n\n\"Not yet, surely!\" Temeraire cried. \"Look, is that not a Cossack party, over there? Perhaps they will know where Napoleon has gone.\"\n\nHe flung himself ahead, eagerly. It was indeed a Cossack raiding party: seven small beasts, courier-weights perhaps half Grig's size, each of them carrying a dozen men hanging off their bright hand-woven harnesses. The Cossack men were armed with sabers and pistols; their clothing was stained dark in places with dried blood. Parties such as theirs had been harrying the French rear all the way from Kaluga; they had been largely responsible for the speed of Napoleon's collapse, but they had neither the arms nor the dragon-weight to meet regular troops. The chief man waved them a greeting, and Dyhern shouted back and forth with him in Russian, through Laurence's borrowed speaking-trumpet; they landed, and Temeraire came to earth beside them. Dyhern leapt down and went to the Cossacks, carrying Laurence's best map; after a quick conversation, he came back to say, \"The Prince de Beauharnais is crossing over the next two miles with nine thousand men and twelve dragons: none of them are Inca.\" Laurence nodded silently, grim with disappointment; but then Dyhern moved his finger further north on the map and said, \"But there are two Incan beasts with the Guard company crossing here, where the river forks, with a carriage and seven covered wagons.\"\n\n\"Only two dragons?\" Laurence said sharply.\n\nThe Cossack captain nodded and held up two fingers, to confirm, and then moved his hand in a circle and flung it in a gesture westward, conveying flight. \"He says all the other Inca dragons flew away west four days ago in a great hurry: they took nothing with them,\" Dyhern said.\n\n\"They must have run out of food,\" Temeraire suggested, but Laurence doubted. For the Incan dragons, all the potent instincts of personal loyalty were bound up in their Empress, now Napoleon's consort. He was the father of her child, which had secured their devotion to him. That in extremis he should have chosen to send away those beasts who could have been relied upon to protect him, first and foremost, seemed unlikely.\n\n\"But we have not seen any other French heavy-weights, either,\" Temeraire said. \"None, except that poor Chevalier\u2014so perhaps he had to send them all away, and kept only those two.\" He was hovering, looking yearningly north, his ruff quivering. \"Laurence, surely we must try. Only imagine if we should learn that he escaped us, so near\u2014\"\n\nLaurence looked again over the map. Only the merest chance, and between them and the fork lay a force of twelve French dragons, and a strong company of men and guns. If the French should see a danger to Napoleon, and turn back in force\u2014\"Very well,\" Laurence said. He could not bear it, either. \"Dyhern, will you ask them to show you a way to come at the fork from the east? We must go around de Beauharnais, far enough to be out of sight, to have any hope of coming at his chief.\"\n\nTemeraire flew low, just brushing the snow from the tree-tops, and flat-out; setting such a pace that the small Russian dragons fell behind, just barely keeping in sight. Laurence did not slow him. Speed was the only chance, if there were any. If the Cossacks' intelligence were good, then Temeraire alone could halt Napoleon's party, if he arrived in time to catch them out in the open; then the Russian light-weights might catch them up, and provide a decisive blow. But if the Cossacks had been mistaken, if there were more heavy-weight dragons or more guns, a company too great for Temeraire alone to stop, then the Russian light-weights could not make victory possible. There was no chance, either, of going back to get the Russian heavy-weights\u2014and just when their power might have told significantly, if the French truly had sent away all of their own larger beasts.\n\nLaurence was well aware that if they found a force too large for them, he would have a difficult struggle against Temeraire's inclination to keep him from an attempt which could only end in disaster. When Temeraire turned at last sharply westward again, going back towards the river, Laurence stood in his straps, despite the still-ferocious wind and cold, and trained his glass ahead of their flight. The trees broke; he could see the two branches of the river flowing, the marshy ground around them, and then his heart leapt. A very large covered wagon was trundling up the far bank onto a narrow road, being pulled not by horses but by one of the Incan dragons; and behind it rolled a carriage, large and ornamented in gold, with a capital N blazoned upon the door. Another Incan dragon waited anxiously beside the guns on the eastern bank, its yellow-and-orange plumage so ruffled up the beast looked three times its size\u2014but even so, not up to Temeraire's weight. There was not another dragon in sight.\n\n\"Laurence!\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, his own much-restrained spirits rising; two dragons and guns, and on the order of three hundred men, to guard only a carriage and a wagon-train? He reached for his sword, and loosened it in its sheath. \"At them, my dear, as quickly as you can. Mr. Forthing! Pass the word below, ready incendiaries!\"\n\nTemeraire was already drawing in air, his sides swelling; beneath his hide trembled the gathering force of the divine wind. Faint cries of alarm carried to Laurence's ears as the French sighted them; the Incan dragon in the lead abandoned the wagon and leapt aloft, beating quickly, and the second came up to join it, both going into a wide, darting, back-and-forth flying pattern, making themselves difficult to hit. The men on the ground sent up a volley of flares even as Temeraire swept in.\n\n\"Ware the guns,\" Laurence shouted to Temeraire; a flick of the ruff told him he had been heard. Twelve-pound field guns, two of them, spoke together, coughing canister-shot and filling their approach with shrapnel; but Temeraire had already beaten up out of their range, skimming the top edge of the powder-smoke cloud, and as he swept over the emplacement, the bellmen let go a dozen incendiaries.\n\n\"Ha! Well landed!\" Dyhern shouted: fully half of the incendiaries were exploding among the French gun-crews. Others rolled away; one burst on the river and sank into the hole it had blown itself in the crust. And then Temeraire was past; he doubled back on the guns and unleashed the divine wind against their rear\u2014the endless impossible noise, ice-coated trees on the bank shattering like glass bottles, the housing of the guns cracking and coming apart. One still-smoking barrel rolled down the hill and carried away two massive snowbanks; it struck the back wheel of the carriage, shattering it, and the cascade half-buried the entire vehicle in snow.\n\nThe Incan dragons dived, ready to make raking passes along Temeraire's vulnerable sides. But Temeraire twisted sinuously away to one side and traded slashing blows with the heavier beast: blue-and-green plumage with a ring of scarlet around its eyes, which gave it a fierce look. There were nearly two dozen Imperial Guardsmen on its back; rifle-fire cracked from their guns, the whine of a bullet passing not distant from Laurence's ear, and six of them leapt for Temeraire's back as the dragons closed.\n\nThe sky wheeled around them, a tumult of colors and cold wind; then Temeraire pulled away, leaving the Incan beast bleeding. \"Make ready for boarders!\" Forthing was shouting. The Guardsmen had leapt across to Temeraire's back latched one to the other; only two of them had made hand-holds, but that had been enough to hold the rest on.\n\nThe Guards made intimidating figures: they were all tall, heavily built men, bulky in leather coats and fur caps drawn tightly around the head, with broad sabers and four pistols each slung into their harness-straps. They steadied one another until they had all latched on; then in a tense, disciplined knot they came forward swiftly along the back, covering one another's advance with pistols held ready.\n\nLaurence now had cause to regret his threadbare crew. He had but few officers; his choices had been scant, in New South Wales, and of that motley selection only a handful had survived the wreck of the Allegiance: small Gerry, who could not yet hold a full sword, brandishing a long knife instead; for midwingmen, besides Emily Roland, he had only Baggy, still gangly in the midst of getting his growth and only lately advanced from the ground crew; and thin, stoop-shouldered Cavendish: brave enough, but likelier by the look of him to be blown overboard by a strong gust of wind than to cross swords with one of Napoleon's Grognards.\n\nLaurence had not wanted to take men from his fellow-captains; Harcourt had offered, handsomely, when they had parted ways in China. But Laurence knew he and Temeraire were deep in the black books of the Admiralty; he might have been reinstated, as a matter of form and necessity, but no-one could imagine that those gentlemen would turn a kindly eye on any officer coming from his crew. That consideration might now doom the men he did have, or even Temeraire.\n\nBy unconscious agreement, Roland and the boys were thrust back to make a final defense between the oncoming boarders and Laurence\u2014a prospect which he could only find grotesque; and yet the fault was his own, for not taking more pains to fill out his crew. Forthing had no second or third lieutenant behind him, no older midwingmen who might have bolstered their resistance; there were no riflemen aboard.\n\nFerris and Dyhern drew their swords; they joined Forthing, clambering along the line of Temeraire's back to meet the Frenchmen. Laurence drew his own sword and his pistol\u2014the metal painfully cold to the touch; he could only hope it would fire.\n\nThe world turned over again, a dizzying spiral, and then suddenly they were in a steep climb: the Incan dragons were pursuing Temeraire hotly, trying to prevent him getting his breath back again; they were wary of the divine wind. Laurence had learned the trick of leaning hard into his straps, his boots planted firmly against hide, to keep from falling over during hard flying, but even so he could not avoid a disorientation that blurred all the world into meaningless shapes and colors.\n\nHe shook his head and blinked streaming eyes. The Guards had all kept their feet. Forthing climbed into range\u2014he stood up in his straps\u2014he fired his pistol; one of the Guards fired his at the same instant. A cloud of smoke, and the Guardsman fell; Forthing jerked, twisting around in his straps. A spray of blood burst from his cheek and was slapped back onto his skin by the wind, bright red around a torn bleeding hole: the bullet had gone into his mouth and through the side of his face. Another pistol fired off, the grey smoke anonymous; Laurence could not tell whether the shot was on their side or the French.\n\nDyhern was grappling with one of the Guardsmen; he was a big man himself, but the other, a younger man, was bearing him down. Ferris looked down Temeraire's back, and then, greatly daring, reached down and unlatched his second strap, and let go the harness: he fell ten feet straight down onto the man overpowering Dyhern, and managed to catch onto one of his straps. Before the Frenchman could recover, Ferris had pistoled him in the face. He thrust the spent pistol into his belt, and bent to latch himself on in the dead man's place; the corpse went falling away.\n\nAll sensation of weight abruptly vanished. Temeraire had opened just enough distance from his pursuers to turn; now he arced over, mid-air. He hung suspended a fraction of a moment, and then he was plummeting, down onto the two Incan dragons so close on his heels. The dragons shrieked, bending their heads away to protect their eyes from Temeraire's claws and teeth, entangled with one another. The world fractured: Temeraire roared in the dragons' faces as they all fell, the divine wind drumming beneath his skin again; he roared again, and a third time, his wings beating the air wildly. They were falling, all falling together; Laurence clung to the straps, straining, and saw the other men doing the same. Like being in the tops mid-gale, struggling to reef a sail. And then Temeraire smashed the two dragons together down into the riverbank beneath him, tree-limbs snapping, snow and ice erupting all around like gunpowder smoke.\n\nLaurence shielded his eyes with his sleeve, but the flying snow thickly coated the top of his head, covered over his mouth and ears. They had stopped moving. If Temeraire had been wounded in the fall\u2014\n\nHe dropped his arm only to see one of the Guardsmen slash his own straps and come leaping in four quick strides directly towards him. Emily Roland lunged at the man from one side, Baggy from the other; but he had more than a foot in height on either of them, and bulled his way past them. He had a saber ready in his hand; Laurence pulled up his own pistol and fired\u2014with no result; the powder was too wet. He flung the pistol into the Frenchman's face instead, and met the descending sword on his own: a brutal impact. The Frenchman pounded down on Laurence's sword with main strength, trying to beat it out of his grip, and seized his arm.\n\nThe surface shuddered beneath them, Temeraire shaking himself free of the coating of snow. The Frenchman let go his hold on Laurence's arm and seized his harness instead, to keep his footing. They were close enough to have embraced; Laurence managed to lean back far enough to club the man across the jaw with the guard of his sword-hilt. The man shook his head, dazed, but struck down again with his saber; the Chinese sword shrieked as the two blades scraped against each other, but held.\n\nThey were matched and straining; then the bright crack of a pistol, and hot blood and brains spurted into Laurence's eyes. He jerked aside. Emily Roland had shot the man in the back of the head. Laurence wiped blood and ice from his face as Temeraire reared up onto his feet and shook himself steady. The two Incan dragons lay still and broken beneath him, shattered by the divine wind more than by the fall; the green-blue-plumed head had fallen back limply across the ice, a blaze of incongruous color.\n\nLaurence looked back. The last two Guardsmen on Temeraire's back had surrendered: Forthing was taking their guns and swords, and Ferris was binding their arms. All their fellows upon the dragons had been slain: the bodies of men lay scattered around the wreckage of the beasts.\n\nFurther up the river, the soldiers around the carriage stood frozen and staring back at them, clutching their rifles, pale. Laurence felt Temeraire draw breath, and then he roared out once more over all their heads, shattering, terrible. The men broke. In a panicked mass they fled, some scrambling and slipping up the river in blind terror; some flying back eastward, undoubtedly into the waiting arms of the Cossacks; most however ran for the western bank, vanishing into the trees.\n\nTemeraire stood panting, and then he threw off the battle-fever; he looked around. \"Laurence, are you well? Oh! Have you been hurt? What were those men about, there?\" he demanded, narrowly, catching sight of the prisoners.\n\n\"No, I am perfectly well,\" Laurence said; his shoulders would feel that struggle for a week, but his skin had scarcely been broken. \"It is not my blood; do not fear.\" He laid his hand upon Temeraire's neck to soothe him; he well knew what the fate of the prisoners would be, if Temeraire imagined them responsible for having harmed him.\n\nFor once, however, Temeraire was willing to be diverted. \"Then\u2014\" Temeraire's head swung back towards the gilded carriage, standing now alone upon the bank and still buried deeply beneath the snow. He leapt, and was on the riverbank. He pushed the large wagon away, with a grunt of effort, and scraped the bulk of the drift away from the carriage with his foreleg. Laurence sprang down, with Dyhern following; they went to the door, which had been thrust half an inch open against the snow before it stuck, and dragged it open against the remnants of the drift.\n\nTwo women inside were huddled in terror half-fainting against the cushions: a beautiful young lady in a gown cut too low for respectability, and her maid; they clung to each other and screamed when the door was opened. \"Good God,\" Dyhern said.\n\n\"The Emperor,\" Laurence asked them sharply in French. \"Where is he?\"\n\nThe women stared at him; the lady said, in a trembling voice, \"He is with Oudinot\u2014with Oudinot!\" and hid her face against the maid's shoulder. Laurence stepped back, dismayed, and looked back at the wagon: Temeraire reached for the cover with his talons, seized, tore.\n\nThe sun blazed on gold: gold plate and paintings in gilt frames; silver ornaments, brass-banded chests and traveling boxes. They threw back the covers: more gold and silver and copper, sheaves of paper money. They had taken only Napoleon's baggage: the Emperor was safely away.\n\n\"It does not seem reasonable,\" Temeraire said disconsolately, \"that when I should have liked nothing more than to have a great fortune, none was to be had; and now here it is, just when I should have preferred to catch Napoleon. Not,\" he added, hurriedly, so as not to tempt fate, \"that I mean to complain, precisely; I do not at all mind the treasure. But Laurence, it is beyond everything that he should have slipped past us: he has quite certainly got away?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Hammond answered for Laurence, who was yet bent over the letters which Placet had brought them all from Riga. \"Our latest intelligence allows no other possibility. He was seen in Paris three days ago, with the Empress: he must have gone by courier-beast the instant his men had finished crossing. They say he has already ordered another conscription.\"\n\nTemeraire sighed and put his head down.\n\nThe treasure remained largely in its wagon, which was convenient for carrying. Laurence had insisted on returning those pieces which could be easily identified, such as several particularly fine paintings stolen from the Tsar's palace, but there were not so many of those; nearly all of it had been chests full of misshapen lumps of gold, which had likely been melted in the burning of Moscow, and which no-one could have recognized.\n\nTemeraire did not deny it was a handsome consolation; but it did not make amends for Napoleon's escape, and while he was not at all sorry that the Russian heavy-weights now looked on him with considerably more respect and had one and all avowed that in future they would listen to him when he told them not to stop, they would not believe that he had not done it for the gold. \"I was doing my duty,\" he had said, stiffly, \"and trying to capture Napoleon, which is what all of you ought to have done, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" they all answered, nodding wisely, \"your duty: now tell us again, how much gold is in that middling chest with the four bands around it?\" It was not what he called satisfying.\n\n\"And now Napoleon is perfectly comfortable at home again,\" Temeraire said, \"having tea with Lien, no doubt; I am sure she has not spent the winter half-frozen: I dare say she has been sleeping in a dozen different pavilions, and eating feasts. And we are still here.\"\n\n\"Still here?\" Hammond cried. \"Good Heavens, we took Vilna not three days ago; you cannot consider our residence here of long duration.\"\n\nBut Temeraire personally did not make much difference between Vilna and Kaluga; yes, he could see perfectly well that upon the map there were five hundred miles between them, and it was just as well to have crossed them, and anyone might say that they were in Lithuania instead of Russia; but he found little altered, and nothing to be very glad of, in their present surroundings. The coverts, on the very fringes of the city, were unimproved; the ground frozen ever as hard as in Russia proper, and though there was more food to be had, it remained unappetizing: dead horses, only ever dead horses. Laurence had arranged for a bed to be made up for him of straw and rags, which daily the ground crew built up a little more, but this was a very meager sort of comfort when Temeraire might look down the hill at the palace in the city's heart lit up with celebrations from which dragons were entirely excluded, although the victory could not possibly have been won without them.\n\n\"Indeed I am almost glad,\" Temeraire said, \"that the jalan had to return to China; I should not know what to say to them if they had met with such incivility; not to speak of ill-use. It is one thing to endure any number of discomforts in the field, on campaign; one must expect these things, and I am sure no-one would say we were unwilling to share in the general privation. It is quite another to be left sitting in mud, in frozen mud, and offered half-thawed dead horsemeat, while the Tsar is feasting everyone else who has done anything of note, and yet he never thinks of asking any of us.\"\n\n\"But he has,\" Hammond said earnestly. \"Indeed, Captain,\" he added, turning towards Laurence, \"I am here to request your attendance: it is the Tsar's birthday to-day, and it is of course of all things desirable that you should attend as a representative not only of His Majesty's Government\u2014\" Temeraire flattened his ruff at the mention of that body of so-called gentlemen, but Hammond threw an anxious look at him and hurried on. \"\u2014but of our friendship, indeed our intimate ties, with China; I wondered if perhaps you might be prevailed upon to wear the Imperial robes of state, which the Emperor has been so kind as to bestow upon you\u2014\"\n\nDespite a strong sense of indignation at being himself neglected in the invitation, Temeraire could not help but approve this idea, wishing to see Laurence, at least, recognized as he deserved. But Laurence had a horror, a very peculiar horror, of putting himself forward. He would at once refuse, Temeraire was sure; he always required the most inordinate persuasion to display himself even in honors which he had properly earned\u2014\n\n\"As you wish,\" Laurence said, without lifting his head from his letters; his voice sounded distant and a little strange.\n\nHammond blinked, as though he himself had not expected to meet with so quick a success, and then he hastily rose to his feet. \"Splendid!\" he said. \"I must do something about my own clothes as well; I will call for you in an hour, then, if that will do. I hope you will pardon me until then.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, still remote, and Hammond bowed deeply and took himself out of the clearing nearly at a trot. Temeraire peered down at Laurence in some surprise, and then in dismay said, \"Laurence\u2014Laurence, are you quite well? Are you ill?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"No, I am well. I beg your pardon. I am afraid I have received some unhappy news from England.\" He paused a long moment still bent over the letter, while Temeraire held himself anxious and stiff, waiting: what had happened? Then Laurence said, \"My father is dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Lord Allendale had been a stern and distant parent, not an affectionate one, but Laurence was conscious that he had always had the satisfaction of being able to respect his father. While not always agreeing with his judgment, Laurence had never blushed for his father's honor, both in private and in public life unstained by any reproach; and in this moment, Laurence was bitterly conscious that his father could not have said the same of his youngest son. His treason had broken his father's health, had certainly hastened this final event.\n\nLaurence did not know if his father could ever have been brought to understand or to approve the choice which he had made. He had reconciled himself to his own crime only with difficulty, and he had before him every day all the proofs which any man could require, of the sentience and soul of dragons. He had seen those dragons dying hideously, worn away by the slow coughing degrees of the plague; he had with his own eyes witnessed their agony and seen the carrion-mounds of a hundred beasts raised outside Dover. He had known what the Ministry did, in deliberately infecting the dragons of Europe with that disease: a wholesale murder of allies and innocents as much as of their enemies.\n\nAll this had been required to turn his hand to the act, to make him bring the cure to France and give it into Napoleon's hand. And even so, he had recoiled from the act at first. He had dreamt of the moment of crisis again only three nights ago; of Temeraire saying, \"I will go alone,\" and afterwards in the dream Laurence found himself in an empty covert, going from clearing to clearing, calling Temeraire's name, with no answer.\n\nWith an effort, Laurence recalled himself to his circumstances: Temeraire's head was lowered to peer at him, full of anxiety. \"I am well,\" he said again, and put his head on the dragon's muzzle as reassurance. \"I am not overset.\"\n\n\"Will you not take anything? Gerry,\" Temeraire called, raising his head, \"pray go and fetch a cup of hot grog for Laurence, if you please; as we have nothing better it must do,\" he added, turning back down. \"Oh, Laurence; I am so very sorry to hear it: I hope your mother is not hurt? Have the French invaded them again? Ought we go at once?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"The letter is a month old, my dear; we are too late for the funeral rites.\" He did not say that he should scarcely have been welcome, with or without a twenty-ton dragon. \"He died in his bed. My mother is not ill, only much grieved.\" His voice, low, faded out without his entirely willing it to do so. The letter was in his mother's hand, brief, sharp-edged with sorrow. His father had been hale and vigorous five years ago, still in his prime; she might justly have hoped not to be made a widow so soon. When Gerry came running with the hot cup, Laurence drank.\n\n\"In his bed?\" Temeraire was muttering to himself, as if he did not understand; but he did not press any further for explanation; he only curled himself around Laurence, and offered the comfort of his companionship. Laurence seated himself heavily upon the dragon's foreleg, grateful, and read the letter over again so he might at least have the pleasure of being unhappy with those whose unhappiness he had caused.\n\n\"I am sorry, Laurence; I do not suppose he could have heard that your fortune was restored,\" Temeraire said, looking over at the wagon-cart, still piled high.\n\n\"He would have known me restored to the list,\" Laurence said, but this was only a sop to Temeraire's feelings. He knew that neither his fortune, nor his pardon and the reinstatement of his rank, which might restore him in the good graces of the world, would have weighed at all with Lord Allendale. That gentlemen could more easily have brooked his son's public execution, on a charge he knew to be false, than to see his son laureled with gold and praised in every corner, and known to him as a traitor.\n\nHe might have told his father that worldly concerns at least had not weighed with him; he had acted only as his conscience had brutally required. But he had not seen his father since his conviction; he had not presumed to write, even after his sentence had been commuted to transportation, nor since his pardon. And they would now never speak again. There would be no opportunity for defense or explanation.\n\nAnd Laurence could not but regard Temeraire's extravagant hoard with dismay, although the Russians had been more astonished by his being willing to return any part of the treasure than by his keeping it entirely for himself. Laurence had asked how and where they should surrender the pillaged goods; the other aviators had only stared uncomprehending, and asked how he had managed to persuade Temeraire to surrender even the Tsar's paintings, which could not have had a plainer provenance. He knew perfectly well what his father would have thought of a fortune obtained with so little character of law to the process.\n\nBut there was something too much like bitterness in that thought. Laurence made himself fold up the letter, and put it away in his pocket. He would not dwell upon what he could not repair. They were still at war; the French Emperor might have escaped, but the French army was yet strung out between Vilna and Berlin, what was left of it, and there would surely be more work to do soon enough.\n\nThere were other letters; letters from Spain: one from Jane Roland and one from Granby, with an enclosure addressed to Temeraire directly. Laurence meant to open them, but Temeraire said tentatively, \"Laurence, I suppose you must begin to dress: Hammond will be calling for you in a quarter of an hour. Roland,\" he called, \"will you pray bring out Laurence's robes? Be sure you do not track them in the dirt.\"\n\nToo late, Laurence recalled the conversation he had not attended; too late, protest sprang to his lips. Emily Roland was already with great ceremony and satisfaction unfolding the immense and heavily embroidered robes of silk which belonged to the son of the Emperor of China, and not to that of Lord Allendale."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "When Laurence had gone, Temeraire brooded, watching the celebrations get under way. Even the magnificent display of fireworks which opened the evening did not please him: a stand of trees blocked a great deal of the covert's view, which he felt might have been taken into account, and the faint drifting smoke only reminded him that he and every other dragon had eaten nothing but porridge and burnt horse for months.\n\n\"And it is not as though they did not know any better, anymore,\" Temeraire said resentfully. He had refrained from making any remarks, while Laurence might be distressed by them any further, but after he had left for the celebration, Temeraire could no longer restrain himself. \"It is not as though they had not seen, for themselves, that dragons should like to eat well, or live in a more orderly fashion; they have seen the arrangements of the Chinese legions.\"\n\nChurki, Hammond's dragon\u2014or rather, the Incan dragon who had decided, quite unaccountably in Temeraire's opinion, to lay claim to him; Hammond by no means wished to be an aviator, nor even liked to fly\u2014lifted her head out of her ruffled-up feathers; she had huddled down to await his return. \"Why do you keep complaining we have not been invited to that ceremony? Plainly it is a gathering of men: how could any dragon come into that building where they are holding it?\"\n\n\"They might make buildings large enough for us to come into, as they do in China,\" Temeraire said, but she only huffed in a dismissive way.\n\n\"It is inconvenient for people to always be in buildings built to our size; it means they have too far to go to get from one thing to another,\" Churki said, which had not occurred to Temeraire before. \"Naturally they like to have places of their own; there is nothing wrong in that, nor that they should hold their own celebrations. And as far as I can tell, you are the senior dragon here; who else should be offering thanks for victory, and arranging the comforts of your troops, but you?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, abashed. \"But how am I to arrange any comforts, when we are only thrown upon a miserable covert, and have nowhere else to go?\"\n\nChurki shrugged. \"This does seem a poor city,\" she said, \"and there are no large plazas of stone where dragons would ordinarily sleep or gather; but something may always be contrived! There is good enough timber in those woods there, and it would not be more than a few days to put down a floor of split logs, if you sent all those Russians to fetch a few dozen. Then you must pay men and women, if you have not enough in your own ayllu to carry out the work, to prepare ornaments and a feast. I do not see that there is any great puzzle about it,\" she added, rather severely.\n\n\"Well,\" Temeraire said, and would have protested that the woods were certainly property belonging to someone or another, but he could not help feeling it would be really complaining, then; the sort of complaining that shirkers did, when they did not want to work. Laurence had a great disgust of shirkers. \"Ferris,\" he called instead. \"Will you be so good as to go into town for me, and make some inquiries? And pray can you see where Grig has got to?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "The crush of the ballroom would have been sufficient to stifle a man wearing something other than heavy silk robes. Laurence endured grimly both the heat and the attentions of the company. The robes were meant for a man presumed by their makers to be the natural center of any gathering he attended, and in this setting they had the happy power of ensuring him that position; he certainly outshone every man present, and most of the women. Hammond was aglow with delight, presenting him without hesitation to men of the highest rank as their social equal, and presuming upon the association to address himself to them. Laurence could not even check him, in public as they were, when Hammond was the King's representative.\n\nAnd the solitary one here, even though he was not even properly an envoy to Russia at all, but to China\u2014but no other British diplomat had managed to keep up with the Tsar during the tumult of both retreat and pursuit. Lord Cathcart had been forced to flee St. Petersburg early on when Napoleon's army had seized it; the ambassador in Moscow had decamped that city shortly before its fall, and Laurence had no idea what had become of the man. Only Hammond, with the benefit of a dragon as traveling-companion, had been able to stay with headquarters all the long dusty way.\n\n\"I am entirely reconciled to Churki's company\u2014entirely; I cannot overstate the benefits of having made myself so familiar, to the Tsar and his staff,\" Hammond said, in low voice but with a naked delight that Laurence could not help but regard askance. \"And, quite frankly, they think all the better of me, for being as they suppose her master; they value nothing so much as courage, and I assure you, Captain, that whenever we have caught them up, and I have been seen dismounting her back, and instructing her to go to her rest, without benefit of bit or harness, I have been received with a most gratifying amazement. I have arranged to have it happen in sight of the Tsar three times.\"\n\nLaurence could not openly say what he felt about such machinations, or about Hammond saying, \"My dear Countess Lieven, pray permit me to make you known to His Imperial Highness.\" He could only do his best to escape. A storm of cheering offered him an opportunity at last: the Tsar making his entrance to the pomp of a military band, and soldiers strewing the path that cleared for him with prizes: French standards, many torn and bloodstained, symbols of victory. Laurence managed to slip Hammond's traces and take himself out onto a balcony. The night air, still bitterly cold, was for once welcome. He would have been glad to leave entirely.\n\n\"Ha, what a get-up,\" General Kutuzov said, coming onto the balcony with him, surveying Laurence's robes.\n\n\"Sir,\" Laurence said, with a bow, sorry he could not defend himself against any such remark.\n\n\"Well, I hear you can afford them,\" Kutuzov said, only heaping up the coals. \"I have not heard so much gnashing of teeth in my life as when you brought that wagon-load of gold into camp, and all the rest of those big beasts nursing along scraps of silver, over which they nearly quarreled themselves to pieces. Tell me, do you think we could buy off these ferals with trinkets?\"\n\n\"Not while they are starving,\" Laurence said.\n\nKutuzov nodded with a small sigh, as if this was no more than he expected. There was a bench set upon the balcony. The old man sat down and brought his pipe out; he tamped down tobacco and lit it, puffing away clouds into the cold. They remained in silence. The revelry behind them was only increasing in volume. Outside on the street, on the other side of the back wall around the governor's palace, a single shambling figure limped alone through a small pool of yellow lamp-light, leaving a trail dragged through the snow behind him: a French soldier draped in rags, occasionally stopping to emit a dry, hacking cough; dying of typhus. He continued his slow progress and disappeared back into the dark.\n\n\"So Napoleon has got away,\" Kutuzov said.\n\n\"For the moment,\" Laurence said. \"I believe, sir, that the Tsar is determined on pursuit?\"\n\nKutuzov sighed deeply from his belly, around the stem of the pipe. \"Well, we'll see,\" he said. \"It's good to have your own house in order before you start arranging someone else's. There are a thousand wild dragons on the loose between St. Petersburg and Minsk, and they aren't going to pen themselves up.\"\n\n\"I had hoped, sir, that you had thought better of that practice,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Half my officers are of the opinion we should bait them with poison and hunt them all down. Well, what do you expect, when they are flying around eating everything in sight, and sometimes people? But cooler heads know we can't afford it! If it weren't for you and those Chinese beasts, Napoleon would have had us outside Moscow last summer, and we wouldn't be here to chat about it.\" Kutuzov shook his head. \"But one way or another, something must be done about them. We can't rebuild the army when our supply-lines are being raided every day. You'll forgive me for being a blunt old man, Captain,\" he added, \"but while I can see why you British would like us to finish beating Napoleon to pieces, I don't see much good in it for Mother Russia at present.\"\n\nLaurence had already heard this sentiment murmured among some of the Russian soldiers; he was all the more sorry to hear it espoused by Kutuzov himself, the garlanded general of the hour. \"You cannot suppose, sir, that Napoleon will be quieted for long, even by this disaster.\"\n\n\"He may have enough else to occupy him,\" Kutuzov said. \"There was a coup attempt in Paris, you know.\"\n\n\"I had not heard it,\" Laurence said, taken aback.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Kutuzov said. \"Two weeks ago. That is why his Incan beasts went racing off home\u2014back to that Empress of theirs. She seems to have managed everything neatly enough: all the men involved were rounded up and shot before the week was out. But Bonaparte is going to be busy enough at home for some time, I expect. Anyway, as long as he doesn't come back to Russia, I don't see that it's our business to worry about him. If the Prussians and Austrians don't like their neighbor, let them do something about him.\"\n\nAt this juncture, Hammond appeared to retrieve Laurence and draw him back into the ballroom; he was worried and yet unsurprised when Laurence related the substance of the conversation to him. \"I am afraid far too many of the Russian generals are of like mind,\" Hammond said. \"But thank Heaven! The Tsar, at least, is not so shortsighted; you may imagine, Captain, how profoundly he has been affected by the misery and suffering which Bonaparte has inflicted upon his nation. Indeed he would like a word with you, Captain, if you will come this way\u2014\"\n\nLaurence submitted to his doom, and permitted Hammond to usher him up to the dais where the Tsar now sat in state; but when they had approached the Tsar rose and came down the steps, much to Laurence's dismay, and kissed him on both cheeks. \"Your Highness,\" the Tsar said, \"I am delighted to see you look so well. Come, let us step outside a moment.\"\n\nThis was too much; Laurence opened his mouth to protest that he was by no means to be treated as royalty; but Hammond cleared his throat with great vigor to prevent him, and the Tsar was already leading the way into an antechamber, advisors trailing him like satellites after their Jovian master. \"Clear the hallway outside, Piotr,\" the Tsar said to a tall young equerry, as they came into the smaller room. \"Your Highness\u2014\"\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Laurence broke in, unable to bear it, despite Hammond's looks, \"I beg your pardon. I am foremost a British serving-officer, and a captain of the Aerial Corps; I am far from meriting that address.\"\n\nBut Alexander did not bend. \"You may not desire the burden which it represents, but you must endure it. The Tsar of Russia cannot be so uncouth as to insult the emperor who chose to bestow that honor upon you.\" Nor, Laurence unwillingly recognized, be so unwise as to insult an emperor who could send three hundred dragons to Moscow; he bowed in acknowledgment and was silent.\n\n\"We will take a little air together,\" Alexander said. \"You know Count Nesselrode, I think, Mr. Hammond?\"\n\nHammond stammered agreement, even as he cast an anxious sideways glance at that gentleman, who certainly meant to begin issuing demands as soon as his Imperial master was out of ear-shot of haggling: demands for money, which Hammond was far from being authorized to meet on Britain's behalf. But Laurence could do nothing to relieve his discomfiture. He followed the Tsar out upon the balcony.\n\nA greater contrast with the scene which he had overlooked, from the other side of the palace, could scarcely be envisioned: the streets before the palace gates were thronged with celebrating Russian soldiers, shouting, screams of laughter, a blaze of lanterns, and even the occasional squib of makeshift fireworks contrived from gunpowder. Alexander looked with pardonable satisfaction upon his troops, who had pursued Napoleon across five hundred barren miles in winter, and yet remained in fighting order.\n\n\"I trust you were not put to excessive trouble to return the portraits, Your Highness,\" the Tsar said. \"I was given to understand it quite impossible to extract prizes from the beasts, once taken.\"\n\n\"By no means, Your Majesty,\" Laurence said. \"I must assure you that dragons, while having no more natural understanding of property rights than would a wholly uneducated man, may be brought to an equal comprehension; Temeraire was entirely willing,\" this a slight exaggeration, \"to restore all the stolen property to its rightful owners, if only provenance might be established.\" Laurence paused; he disliked very much making use of an advantage he had not earned, but the opportunity of putting a word into so important an ear could not be given up. \"It is a question of education and of management, if you will pardon my saying so. If a dragon is taught to value nothing but gold, and to think of its own worth as equal to that of its hoard, it will naturally disdain both discipline and law in the pursuit of treasure.\"\n\nBut Alexander only nodded abstractly, without paying him much attention. \"I believe you were speaking with good Prince Kutuzov, earlier this evening,\" he said, surprising Laurence; he wondered how the Tsar should already have intelligence of an idle conversation, held not an hour since, in the midst of his ball. \"I am sorry to have dragged him so far from his warm hearth. His old age deserved a better rest than his country\u2014and Bonaparte!\u2014have given him.\"\n\nLaurence spoke cautiously, feeling himself on the treacherous grounds of politics; did Alexander mean to criticize the old general's views? \"He has always seemed to me a great deal of a pragmatist, Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"He is a wise old warrior,\" Alexander said. \"I have not many such men. And yet sometimes the wiser course requires such pains as may make even a wise man shrink from them. You, I am sure, understand that Bonaparte's appetite is insatiable. He may lick his wounds awhile; but who that has seen the wreck of Moscow could imagine that the man who went on from that disaster to continue a futile pursuit will long be dismayed?\"\n\nThe pursuit had not seemed nearly so futile at the time, to one among the prey. If Napoleon had been able to feed the Russian ferals for another week, if the Chinese legions had reached the end of their own supply a week earlier; on so narrow a thread had the outcome turned. But Laurence did not need to be persuaded of Napoleon's recklessness. \"No,\" he said. \"He will not stop.\" Then slowly, he added, \"He cannot stop. If his ambition was of a kind which could be checked by any form of caution, he would never have achieved his high seat. He does not know fear, I think; even when he should.\"\n\nAlexander turned to him, his face suddenly alight and intent. \"Exactly so!\" he cried. \"You have described him exactly. A man who does not know fear\u2014even of God. Once even I permitted myself to be lost in admiration of his genius; I will not deny it, though I have learned to be ashamed of it. And yet at that time, it seemed to me such courage, such daring, demanded respect. But now we have seen him for what he is; in the ruin of his army he has been revealed: a fiend who gorges on human blood and misery! If only we had captured him!\"\n\n\"I am very sorry he should have escaped,\" Laurence said, low.\n\nHe had tried to comfort himself, after the first bitter disappointment, with common sense: Bonaparte would surely not have left himself exposed in any way that might have rendered him vulnerable to capture. He had undoubtedly crossed with a strong company, in good order, and remained always in the very heart of his Old Guard. There had not been any real chance. But common sense was insufficient relief; Laurence feared Alexander was too right, when he said that Napoleon would not be checked for long. He would raise a fresh army, the drum-beat would begin again. The Russian Army and the Russian winter had won them not a year's reprieve.\n\n\"I am determined it will not be so,\" Alexander said. \"He may have slipped away; but we will not allow him to escape justice forever. God has granted us victory, and more than that, has left our enemy weakened. We must seize this opportunity of destroying his power. It is our duty to liberate not only Russia but all Europe from this scourge of mankind. I will pursue him; I will see him brought down! When my soldiers stand in Paris, as his trampled into Petersburg and Moscow, then I will be satisfied to go home again; not before!\"\n\nAlexander's face was flushed with vehemence. Laurence regarded the Tsar soberly. It was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his inspired wrath. But the Tsar spoke not of forcing Napoleon to sue for peace, or make concessions of territory; he spoke of driving Napoleon from his throne. To take Paris\u2014the very idea was fantastical. All of Prussia yet lay under the yoke of France; Austria was docile and shrinking before him; and Napoleon would surely defend the heartland of France desperately, with every resource in his power\u2014which, Laurence well knew, included a vast and devoted army of dragons. And behind them, the greatest cities of Russia lay in rubble and in ruin; feral dragons roamed the countryside pillaging at will. Kutuzov's might be the loudest voice, but it would not be the only one advising Alexander to go home and put his own house in order."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"Well,\" Hammond said, as they left the palace together, a little while after, \"I suppose I will either be knighted, or sent to prison; I have left the Government very few alternatives.\"\n\nLaurence regarded him with concern. \"What have you promised the Russians?\"\n\n\"A million pounds,\" Hammond said.\n\n\"Good God!\" Laurence said, appalled. \"Hammond, what authority have you to offer a tenth such a sum?\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014\" Hammond gestured impatiently. \"I am overstepping my orders, but the plain truth is, it cannot be done with less; likely it must be twice as much. Their finances are in the most monstrous wreck imaginable.\"\n\n\"That, I can well believe,\" Laurence said. \"Can it be done at all?\"\n\n\"I am not going to tempt fate by making any such prediction,\" Hammond said. \"Bonaparte has overturned too many thrones and armies. But I will say\u2014if it is ever to be done, it must be done now. He has been pushed over the Niemen already; Wellington is ready to strike in Spain. We will not get a better chance. But if we are to get anywhere at all, we must bring the Prussians over; and to do that, we must empower the Russians to make a real showing. I will call it cheap at the price, if a million pounds should have that effect.\"\n\nHammond concluded almost defiantly, as if he were making an argument before the king's ministers, rather than in a half-deserted street in Vilna, before a man nowhere in their good graces. Laurence shook his head.\n\n\"Sir,\" he said, \"I think you have forgotten one critical point. Can you conceive that the King of Prussia should ever agree to join us in opposing Bonaparte while his son and heir remains hostage in Paris?\"\n\nHammond said, \"His officers will force him to it. All of East Prussia longs to throw off Bonaparte's yoke. A few Russian victories, and his own generals will be ready to mutiny to our side if he does not embrace the effort\u2014\"\n\n\"And then what do you imagine will happen to the prince?\" Laurence snapped; Hammond paused, as if so minor a consideration had not occurred to him.\n\n\"Bonaparte cannot mean to offer any harm to the boy,\" Hammond said, uneasily.\n\n\"His father may be less willing to rely upon such a conviction,\" Laurence said.\n\nTemeraire could not help but enjoy Laurence and Hammond's surprise, when they came back into the covert and found the work quite advanced: a central plaza already laid out, full of squares framed with logs. The Russian light-weights were filling these with stones and sand, which they were gathering from the riverbed and the hills near-by, using the water-troughs for shovel-scoops.\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said, with what he felt was a deserved complacency, \"we are further along than I should have expected. I did not imagine that the heavy-weights would make themselves any help at all, but once they understood that I meant to feast them, many of them became quite interested.\"\n\n\"But what have you done!\" cried Hammond. \"You must have torn up an entire stand of timber\u2014\"\n\n\"We have,\" Temeraire said, \"but that is all right: I paid for it, and the owner told Ferris he did not mind at all, as long as we would not eat his cattle; and then I bought those, too, so he was perfectly satisfied.\"\n\nThe cows were already roasting upon spits over a roaring fire, under the interested supervision of Baggy. \"Only, I thought it would be a shame to see such good beef go to waste, sir,\" he said, looking at Laurence sidelong. \"And Temeraire said he thought there wouldn't be any harm this once\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, very well,\" Laurence said, not entirely with approbation.\n\nTemeraire privately did not understand why Laurence considered cooking strictly the province of the ground crew, as it seemed to him quite one of the most important functions of his crew as a whole, but he knew that Laurence was strict with Baggy: the boy had been promoted from the ground crew, to try and fill the dearth of officers, and there seemed to be some need to keep him only at an officer's tasks. \"I hope you do not mind, Laurence,\" Temeraire said apologetically, \"as it is for the party, and not just ordinary eating: so it needs a close eye upon it. Yardley will let the meat overcook, and say that it is healthy, when it is only quite inedible.\"\n\n\"I am sorry that he has not learned better; I will contrive to hire a proper cook, if I can,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"That,\" Temeraire said, \"would be splendid. Oh! How lovely it is, Laurence, to be in funds again\u2014although of course,\" he added hastily, \"ten thousand pounds' worth of the treasure is properly yours, not mine: I have not forgotten my debt, in the least.\"\n\n\"I know of no debt whatsoever you owe me,\" Laurence said, very nobly, although Temeraire knew that Laurence had lost all his money in a law-suit, which had been settled against him because everyone had thought him a traitor at the time. That hideous memory had long preyed on Temeraire's spirits, and he could not help but rejoice that he had the power to restore Laurence's fortunes at last; he did not at all mean to let Laurence refuse, out of generosity. But Temeraire was puzzled, a moment, to think how he might induce Laurence to take the gold; Laurence certainly could not have carried it himself, if Temeraire pressed it upon him.\n\nInspiration struck. \"Perhaps you would prefer if I should arrange repayment in some nicer form,\" Temeraire said. \"\u2014I suppose there are jewelers, somewhere near?\"\n\n\"I do not suppose it,\" Laurence said, very quickly. \"Let us by all means put it into the Funds; I will see if I can find a banker, instead.\"\n\n\"That will suit me perfectly, if you prefer,\" Temeraire said triumphantly, and then belatedly wondered if there had been something unpleasantly smacking of artifice, in this maneuver; if it were the sort of thing that Lien might have done. He almost asked Laurence, but realized that he could not do so without undermining the good effects, so instead he excused himself privately that no-one could really complain of being given ten thousand pounds.\n\n\"And,\" he added thoughtfully, \"I do not suppose, Laurence, that you might put us in the way of some fireworks of our own? I should like to have them set off from that mountain-ridge, up there, so we can see them very clearly from this plaza; and also, if it might be arranged, some musicians.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Laurence by no means begrudged Temeraire or the dragons a share in the feasting; and indeed he could scarcely wish Temeraire to spend the pillaged treasure of Russia better, than to feed her army's dragons. He only chafed to be arranging entertainments rather than engagements; but the latter could not be had merely for the asking. There was no supply for heavy-weights ahead of them, nor likely to be, unless Hammond's outrageous promise were fulfilled.\n\nIn the meantime, they should have to sit in Vilna and watch Napoleon's army fleeing westward, knowing that the disordered companies and solitary officers who this day escaped would be marching back to meet them in springtime: their ranks fleshed out, their equipment restored, once again the instruments of their master's limitless ambition. Laurence thought again of the Grand Chevalier, panting out her life in slow gasps on the frozen ground; the corpses in their dotted lines running all the way from Moscow. Pale faces stared from the corners of his mind, and he could not help seeing among them his own father's face, equally pale and still, lying blind in the chapel at Wollaton Hall. A sense of futility dragged upon his spirits as he walked from the covert the next morning, to be thrown off only with an effort; Laurence thought perhaps he ought be glad for any employment.\n\nHe presented himself to the colonel of the foot artillery regiment stationed nearest the covert: the soldiers had been among those who had been borne dragon-back during the escape from Moscow, and had lost some of their fear of dragons. \"Your Highness,\" the colonel said, bowing deeply, when Laurence had been shown in; Laurence sighed inwardly, and accepted the greeting as well as the far more welcome offer of a cup of tea\u2014strong and flavorful, although the Russians did not know anything of introducing the beverage to milk.\n\n\"I should be grateful for the loan of your regimental band,\" Laurence said, after the niceties were observed, \"if they should not object to coming into the covert this evening. The men should not need to remain the night,\" he added, \"\u2014only until we have drunk the Tsar's health: in vodka, of course.\" He was well aware of the power of this inducement to obtain the cooperation of many a reluctant soldier.\n\nThe colonel looked rather relieved than otherwise, and far from objecting, expressed his gratitude at their having been singled out for such an honor. He could not have meant this with any sincerity; likely the man had been expecting some far more egregious demand, presented on the grounds of his supposed rank.\n\nWhatever the cause, however, Laurence could only be pleased by the extraordinarily stirring marches that evening, which accompanied the fireworks from the heights. Any remaining hesitation he might have felt at what seemed frivolity was overcome by the fixed and rapt expressions upon the faces of all the Russian dragons, while they stared skywards and their tails beat upon the ground in an unconscious accompaniment to the martial music.\n\nThis was succeeded by dinner: roast cattle, each stuffed and laid upon a bed of boiled potatoes and turnips, sufficient to sate even the hungriest beast. It had proven impossible to find even one dragon-sized vessel of brass, much less anything like an elegant service, but Temeraire's ingenuity had contrived a solution: the bed of a wagon had been taken off its frame, painted gaily and festooned with tinsel, and this was loaded up and ceremonially presented to each dragon in turn, while Grig, at Temeraire's side, described the military achievements of that beast in glowing terms. The dragons swelled visibly with both dinner and pride, and those still anticipating their turn were loudest in applause.\n\nNot all the dragons had come, at first; some were restrained by their own disdain, and some by their officers. But the noise and the aroma drew the laggards in by degrees, and not only them; some of the Cossack dragons looked in, and after this even some wholly unharnessed dragons whom Laurence supposed must be the local ferals. These were not the half-starved Russian beasts escaped from their breeding grounds, but small wild dragons, green and sparrow-brown, with narrow heads and large bony crests atop them in stripes of oranges and yellows.\n\nThey were wary, but full of yearning, and Temeraire was quick to welcome them: he nudged the other beasts to make room and called them in; they were invited to gnaw upon the roasted carcasses. By way of making thanks for this hospitality, the ferals made a great deal of approving noise after every speech Temeraire made describing the work of the fighting-dragons; so there were no objections to their presence.\n\nWhen at last every beast of three dozen had been fed, and they lay sprawled out and nearly somnolent upon the floor, Temeraire straightened up and cleared his throat, and made them all a long speech in the Russian dialect of the dragon-language. Laurence could not follow this very well, but it was certainly well-received; the dragons snorting approval, and sometimes even rousing up enough to roar. And then, at its conclusion, Emily Roland and Baggy came solemnly forward and presented each military beast with a chain of polished brass, upon which hung a placard carved\u2014a little crudely, but legibly\u2014with the dragon's name.\n\nA more thunderstruck company, Laurence had never seen. The Russian heavy-weights had been used to spend their many hours of leisure squabbling ferociously, and even skirmishing with one another; the light-weight beasts had to devote their energies to stealing scraps for their dinners. They had never been taught anything of generosity or of fellowship, and before now they had been too resentful of being pushed aside to learn anything from the practices of the Chinese legions, except to envy them their more regular supplies of food. But even the most disdainful beast was overcome by this display; they presented their heads low in orderly turn to receive their decorations, and as they departed to their several clearings, each almost humbly thanked Temeraire for his hospitality, while their officers stared in amazement. The success of the evening was complete."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"I do think it came off well, Laurence, do you not agree?\" Temeraire said, in a victorious mood. He was settling at last to sleep upon the floor, with the pleasant company of four or five small ferals huddled around him, their bodies warming him. The remnants of the feast were being cleared away: the bones, picked clean, had been heaped up onto the wagon and driven away to be put into the porridge-pot for tomorrow. \"Even if it cannot compare to the dinners which we have enjoyed in China,\" he added.\n\n\"Your company was entirely satisfied, which must be the aim of any host,\" Laurence said. \"I cannot think they found anything wanting.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" Temeraire said, \"even if it is because they do not know any better; but I am too pleased to be unhappy tonight, Laurence, and that dinner has set me up entirely. Do you suppose we will be sent forward to rejoin the pursuit tomorrow? Surely Napoleon is getting even further away while we are waiting here.\"\n\nBut Laurence said, \"My dear, I am afraid there can be no question of that.\"\n\nTemeraire had been drifting to sleep even as he spoke, but this unwelcome news woke him quite. He listened in dismay as Laurence explained: more supply was needed, and more money, and the Prussians should have to throw in with them, and it seemed the Austrians were wanted, too, and any number of conditions.\n\n\"But Napoleon and his army are running away now,\" Temeraire said in protest. \"You and Hammond were saying only yesterday that we cannot afford to let them escape, if we are to defeat him in the spring.\"\n\n\"It will certainly make the task more difficult,\" Laurence said. \"But we cannot defeat him in the spring in any case, unless we have the Prussians; if they will not join us, the Russians cannot risk pressing on.\"\n\n\"I do not see why the Prussians should be so necessary to us,\" Temeraire said. \"Napoleon beat them quite handily at Jena, after all; he rolled up all the country in a month's time. If they would like another chance to show what they can do, of course they might have it, but as for waiting for them\u2014!\"\n\nHowever, there was nothing to be done without supply. That much, Temeraire understood reluctantly. He had not liked to say so to Laurence, but he had really not felt like himself, those last few weeks of the campaign, when it had been so cold, and with not nearly enough food. There had been no use complaining\u2014one could only keep flying, and hope that sooner or later one came to something to eat. But the gnawing in his belly had been extremely distracting, and he had often felt a strange distance from himself; once to his horror he had even found himself looking at a dead soldier down in the snow thinking that the fellow might go into the porridge, with no harm done anyone.\n\nTemeraire shuddered from the memory. \"If the Russians will not send forward the supply, we can do nothing,\" he said, \"I do see that much: so how are they to be worked upon? When will the Prussians come in?\"\n\nBut this was evidently to be left to diplomats. As Temeraire had very little confidence in those gentlemen accomplishing this or any task in any reasonable time, he was by no means satisfied, and when Laurence had gone to sleep, he yet lay wakeful and brooding into the night, despite his comfortably full belly and warm sides.\n\n\"Pray will you stop shifting?\" one of the little ferals said drowsily: they spoke a dialect not far at all from Durzagh, the dragon-tongue, although flavored with a variety of words borrowed from Russian and German and French. \"No disrespect,\" she added, \"only it is hard to get warm if you are always moving.\"\n\nTemeraire hastily stilled his claws: he often could not help furrowing the earth when he was distracted, even though he was ashamed to have so fidgety a habit, and this time he was still more annoyed to see he had accidentally torn up some of the handsome new flooring. \"I beg your pardon,\" he said, and then he asked, \"Tell me, do any of you fly over Prussia, now and then? It starts two rivers over from here, I think. Have you seen any Prussian fighting-dragons, in the breeding grounds there? Or perhaps further west? I suppose Napoleon would not have kept them close to their officers.\"\n\nThe ferals conferred among one another: they had not, as their own territory stopped at the Niemen. \"But I am sure we can pass the word, if there is someone you would like to send a message to,\" one of them said.\n\n\"That,\" Temeraire said, \"would be very kind of you; I should be very grateful for any news of a dragon named Eroica, in particular.\"\n\n\"One of the dragons who live near Danzig might know something,\" the first feral said. \"They take a lot of fish there, so a few of them like to change places now and then with one of their neighbors, and they get the news there. We will have a wander over to their territory in the morning, if,\" she added, a bit craftily, \"we don't have to spend too much time looking for breakfast.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "\"Not as much as would fill a cup of tea!\" the quartermaster said belligerently, when Temeraire would have let the ferals take a share of the porridge, the next morning.\n\nTemeraire flattened down his ruff. That Russian officer had spent all the day before scowling at the preparations for the feast, as though he did not like them doing anything to feed themselves. Temeraire had very little use for him anyway; in his opinion, the man might at least have improved on horsemeat by now if he had only made a push to be useful. The quartermaster added something in Russian, which Temeraire recognized as impolite, and put his boot on top of the large lid.\n\n\"I do not see myself why we ought to be sharing with those dragons,\" Grig said, peering over Temeraire's shoulder.\n\n\"That is because you are very shortsighted,\" Temeraire said, but he knew perfectly well that he could not start a quarrel with the quartermaster over the food: that was a sure road to having all the Russian dragons join in, all of them trying to get more of it for themselves, and then all the food would be spoilt, or nearly; he had seen it happen more than once. \"Laurence,\" he called instead, and when Laurence came from his tent, he explained the circumstances.\n\n\"That the attempt ought to be made is certain, and cheap at the cost of some porridge: I will speak to the quartermaster,\" Laurence said soberly. \"But pray do not speak of this project before Dyhern: it can only be cruelty to raise hopes whose fulfillment is so uncertain. I very much hope that your efforts will be answered, but you must not expect a positive reply. We are a thousand miles from France, and I would be astonished if Bonaparte had not taken the cream of the Prussian aerial forces straight to his own breeding grounds.\"\n\nHe went to draw the quartermaster aside. While they conferred, Temeraire considered Laurence's warning; he could not help but see that it would be very difficult to get word from so far away. The ferals should certainly grow bored, or decide that they did not want the trouble of crossing through someone else's territory.\n\nWhen the porridge was finally served out, and the ferals had eaten, Temeraire announced, \"And if someone should really bring me word of Eroica, I will even give them\u2014\" he drew a deep breath and went on, heroically, \"\u2014I will give them this box full of gold plate. Roland, will you unlatch it, if you please?\"\n\nNot without a pang, he watched her lift the lid to display the contents: the heaped plates of Napoleon's own service, stamped with eagles around the letter N, lustrous and beautifully polished. The ferals all sighed out as one, as well they might: Temeraire could almost not bear to really mean it, although he had steeled himself to make the offer.\n\nHe drew his eyes away with an effort. \"But,\" he added sternly, to the wide upturned eyes of the ferals as they looked at him, \"I do not mean to be taken in; I must be able to tell that the message really is from Eroica, otherwise I will certainly not give the reward.\"\n\nThe ferals flew away, fortified and inspired, already making plans with one another gleefully about how they should share the treasure, or a few loudly announcing that they should find Eroica all alone, and not have to share it at all. Temeraire looked dismally at the box. \"Pray close it up and put it away, Roland,\" he said, feeling it was already lost; he sighed and felt that after this, at least no-one should say he was unwilling to make sacrifices for the war.\n\nWhat is happening with the egg? You have been very slow in sending me reports these last few weeks, and I cannot see any good reason for it, when the French have just been running away and you have not even had any fighting.\n\nWe have been very busy here ourselves. I am sorry to say that Wellesley, or Wellington, or whatever his name is at present, insisted on our retreating back on Ciudad Rodrigo for the winter, only because Soult and Jourdan came up with half a dozen dragons and some few thousand men; and to make matters worse, the food was all sent by the wrong road, so we none of us had anything to eat, not even porridge, for four days. Fortunately, we discovered there were a great many handsome pigs running wild in the forests, which made good eating; and it was not in the least my fault if some of them ran away across the army's march, nor can I call it unreasonable that the soldiers should have shot a few of them to eat. I cannot see why Wellington should have made such a fuss over it.\n\nBut I took it very meekly when he shouted, and I did not even snort a little fire in his direction: I have decided I will not quarrel with him at all. I had a word with him when I came, about making Granby an admiral, and Wellington said he is quite certain Granby deserves all the honors which a grateful nation might possibly bestow, and he has promised will see they are given, if only we should get the French out of Spain.\n\nWe will certainly manage it in the spring, even if everyone is lazing in winter quarters at present. I do not suppose you will have got them out of Germany by then, however. It is a great pity you have let Napoleon get away.\n\nISKIERKA\n\nPS: The Spanish fire-breathers are much smaller than I am.\n\nTemeraire received this piece of provocation with strong indignation. \"And this, when I wrote to her only three days ago,\" he said, his tail lashing in expression of his sentiments, and threatening to demolish a stand of young ash-trees, \"as soon as we had come to Vilna, and after we have had so much trouble: nothing to eat for four days, she says, with pigs running wild everywhere just for the taking! I should have given a great deal for a pig, anytime these last four months.\"\n\n\"You must make some allowances,\" Laurence said absently, reading between the lines, where Granby's hand had noted the rather more alarming numbers which had actually provoked the retreat: 90,000 men & cavalry. \"The courier-route to Portugal is sadly beset by French aerial patrols, and nearly all the post must go by sea. Iskierka will not have received your letter yet.\"\n\nThis did not much incline Temeraire to forgiveness, however, and worse yet, Iskierka's complaint only increased his brooding concern over their egg. As this wonder of nature was presently resting within the precincts of the Imperial City in Peking, tended and watched over by a dozen anxious dragon nursemaids and a battalion of servants, he might reasonably have remained free from alarm. But while they had traveled in company with the Chinese legions, Temeraire had enjoyed near-weekly reports about the egg, relayed by Jade Dragon couriers to and from the Imperial City, and had indulged himself in any number of inquiries, suggestions, hints\u2014every form of eager interference by which he might assure himself of the safety and welfare of his future offspring. Now that those lines of communication had been severed, their keenly felt absence made Temeraire more anxious than he might have been if they had never been opened at all.\n\n\"You do not think, Laurence,\" Temeraire said, fretful, \"that one of the Cossacks might go, perhaps? They seem very handy at traveling light; and I am sure it is not above three weeks' journey, through friendly territory.\"\n\nThis was a very fanciful way of describing a route across four thousand miles of frozen, half-deserted countryside, lately ravaged by two enormous armies and full of savagely angry feral dragons and equally angry peasants, either of which might offer violence to one of the feather-weight Cossack beasts. These, in any case, were neither especially speedy nor inclined to travel alone: as raiders and scouts they were matchless, but they were not reliable couriers.\n\n\"I am afraid not,\" Laurence said, and Temeraire sighed.\n\nHammond had been on the other side of the clearing, giving a final reading to his own dispatches, which would go by the return. As Temeraire's voice could not be called confidential, and Hammond had no notion of respecting privacy, he now intruded upon their conversation. \"You are quite certain it is impossible, Captain?\" he asked, which could only encourage Temeraire. \"I had thought perhaps Captain Terrance might go\u2014\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Placet said, cracking open an eye: the aforementioned Terrance was fast asleep upon the slope of his back, hat tipped over his head and snoring, having dosed himself liberally with brandy against the chill of the flight from the Baltic. \"Fly to China? I should like to see us do any such mad thing. No, indeed: we have enough to do, flying back and forth to Riga, and going all over the sea trying to find wherever the ships have got to, to-day.\"\n\n\"Only it is naturally of the greatest importance to re-establish our communications with the Imperial court,\" Hammond said to Laurence, as they walked together to the next of the dinner-parties: Laurence's attendance had become de rigueur, by virtue of the Tsar's having recognized his rank.\n\nThat doing so was of the greatest importance to Hammond's position, Laurence had no doubt. Hammond could hardly be considered to be fulfilling his duty as Britain's ambassador to China when he was halfway around the world from any representative of that nation. But what value such a connection should have to the war effort, Laurence doubted extremely.\n\n\"We cannot expect that the Emperor will once more consent to loan us any considerable force, when we have been unable to maintain the previous one,\" he said.\n\n\"I am by no means of your mind, Captain,\" Hammond said quickly. \"By no means\u2014I think you give insufficient weight to the spirit of amity which has been established between our nations, and the sense of alarm which the extent of Napoleon's ambitions have raised, in the better-informed members of the Imperial court\u2014\"\n\n\"An alarm which his defeat in Russia must now greatly allay,\" Laurence said.\n\nFor this Hammond had no answer. After a brief pause, he resumed by saying, \"Perhaps if we were to establish a way-station, as it were? I have consulted some of the Russian maps of the northern coastline, and I thought perhaps I might propose to the Admiralty that a frigate be stationed in the Laptev Sea\u2014\"\n\nLaurence stared. Hammond trailed off, uncertainly. \"Sir,\" Laurence said, \"if you are willing to delay until next August, when I believe some portions of that body of water may have melted, I suppose a ship could be navigated along the Siberian coast; she should have to get out of the Arctic before October, however.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Hammond said, and lapsed into a gloomy silence. He had given Terrance the fatal packet, with its extravagant promise of a million pounds. In three days' time it would arrive in London; within a week, he would have an answer, and might well be recalled to England in disgrace. And if Hammond were recalled, Laurence knew he would likely be ordered back as well. Once back in Britain, he and Temeraire would undoubtedly be sent to the most unpleasant and useless posting which malice might contrive: some isolated sea-washed rock off the western shores of Scotland, with no chance of any action at all, nor communication with other dragons who might be influenced by Temeraire's heretical notions of justice.\n\nHe might refuse that order, of course, if it came. The Admiralty would court-martial him again, Laurence supposed, with a kind of black humor; he knew he should feel a greater distress at the prospect than he did. But indeed, the event could not cause him much pain. Even under his present circumstances, he could scarcely envision any future where he might resume a place in British society. So be it: he would let them try him in absentia, this time, and ignore the outcome. He would only need to grieve another conviction insofar as it retained the power to distress his mother.\n\nThey had reached the steps of the house; the footman was holding the door. Laurence could not but find the contrast absurd, to step from such thoughts onto the threshold of a glittering ball and find generals and archdukes bowing to him; it lent the scene a kind of unreality, as though he sojourned briefly in a fairy-world which would vanish away as soon as he had left it.\n\n\"They must see the necessity,\" Hammond murmured worried, to himself. \"They must, they must. If you please, Captain, I should like to present you to Prince Gorchakov\u2014\"\n\nLaurence moved through the room still suffused with that feeling of falsehood, all the world a theater-stage; the men and women he spoke to flat as playing cards, all surface and no substance. Everyone spoke of the same things, repeated the same remarks: Napoleon had been seen in Paris, Napoleon was raising another army. Ferals had destroyed the estate of Count Z\u2014and the summer house of Princess B\u2014. The two threads were often wound together, and Napoleon almost blamed more for having unleashed the starved and chained dragons than for his invasion, it seemed.\n\n\"Murat should be hanged like a spy, in my opinion,\" one gentleman declared, whom Laurence did not recognize: he wore a uniform free from decorations. \"And his master after him, if he had not been permitted to escape! And the beasts slaughtered, one and all. A few porridge-vats full of poison\u2014\"\n\n\"And when Napoleon returns, with a hundred of his own beasts in the air?\" Laurence said, distant and dismissive; he would have turned away.\n\n\"Then poison them, too!\" the man said, glaring and belligerent. \"At least I hope some hero might be found, who would go into a French camp and make the attempt, instead of this rank folly where tenderly we nurse monsters who would devour us all. Now I hear we are to take porridge out of the mouths of our own serfs, over whom God has set us as fathers and mothers, and set it out to feed the beasts\u2014Oriental corruption! Because they are slaves to their own dragons, they would see the rest of us brought low and groveling in the dirt beside them\u2014\"\n\nHe was drunk, Laurence realized, cheeks suffused with a stain that owed more to wine than heat. It did not matter. \"Sir, you are offensive,\" Laurence said. The company around them were drawing away, slightly; faces turning aside, hiding behind fans. \"You must withdraw the remark.\"\n\n\"Withdraw!\" the man cried. He shook off the hand of another gentleman, who was trying to whisper in his ear. \"Withdraw, when murdered children cry out for justice, from the serpents' bellies? By all the holy saints, when I think that God above sent a plague, which would have cleansed them one and all from the earth\u2014!\" Here he was forcibly interrupted, by his friend and another officer, who were both speaking to him in urgent low Russian. But he paused only a moment, and shook their hands off. \"No! I will not knock my head to a man who chooses to parade himself around under the supposed dignities bestowed by a barbaric king\u2014\"\n\nHammond's hand was on his own arm, but Laurence took it away, and struck the man sharply across the face, breaking him off mid-sentence; the man fell stumbling back into the hands of his friends. Laurence turned away before he could get up again and walked for the door, quickly. People made way murmuring, glancing towards his face and looking away again. Laurence did not know what they saw written there. He felt only weary, and disgusted, and angry with himself: if he had been less distant from his company, he must have seen that he was speaking with a man too drunk to be answered. But now there was nothing to be done.\n\nHammond caught him by the door and trotted down the steps beside him, his face stricken. \"I hope you will act for me, Mr. Hammond,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Captain,\" Hammond said, \"I must ask whether\u2014if the gentleman should seek satisfaction, then\u2014as I understand, there is a prohibition against dueling for aviators, strictly enforced\u2014\"\n\nLaurence halted in the road and turned to stare at him. \"Mr. Hammond, if you can explain to me how, having agreed to call myself the son of the Emperor of China, I am to make amends to a man who has so egregiously insulted him to my face, and call myself a gentleman, much less a prince, in future, I am ready to listen.\"\n\nHammond gnawed on his lip. \"No, no,\" he said. \"No, I quite see; it would entirely undermine the claim,\" as though he merely considered the matter in a pragmatic light. \"Ah! But wait; I am certain\u2014I am almost certain, the gentleman is neither a prince nor an officer. As an Imperial prince, your rank, your elevated rank, must preclude your meeting anyone of such markedly inferior rank\u2014you cannot distinguish someone so far beneath you. I must find out his name; I must speak to Kolyakin, in the Imperial household\u2014I will call on him in the morning\u2014\"\n\nLaurence turned away from Hammond's mutterings and back to the drudgery of the ice-crusted snow, his head lowered. He could not quarrel with Hammond's point, and it aligned too well with what he knew to be his duty; and yet all feeling revolted at making such a use of the distinction which the Emperor had bestowed upon him\u2014to deny satisfaction to a gentleman whom he had so deeply and deliberately offended. And yet the severity of the insult had merited the reproof. Laurence had struck the man precisely because he had felt he could not accept anything but an apology so complete as to be abasement. But he had done so with the intention of giving satisfaction if asked for it, as the man surely would.\n\n\"You will speak with the gentleman's friends, first, I hope,\" Laurence said heavily, \"and make it known to them that I will consider an apology. I should be glad to excuse his behavior on the grounds of drink.\" He did not like soliciting an apology for an offense so great, and he did not see how the other man could offer one remotely satisfactory without appearing a coward, after receiving a public blow. But he could not stomach giving the man no recourse at all.\n\n\"Oh, yes, naturally,\" Hammond said, already looking more relieved with every moment. \"I will certainly arrange the matter.\"\n\n\"And if you cannot,\" Laurence said, \"I must ask you to inform the gentleman's friends that they must be ready to get him away instantly, should any mischance befall me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Temeraire roused when Laurence came back to the covert, and peered up at the stars. \"I did not expect you another two hours, Laurence. Are you taken ill?\" he asked, anxiously. He had overhead some of the Russian officers say that more than a thousand men had died yesterday, of some sort of fever, and Temeraire could not but recall that Laurence's father had died in his bed, where nothing ought to have menaced him.\n\n\"No, I am well. I did not care to stay,\" Laurence said. \"Shall we read something?\"\n\nThe temporary relief brought by this answer vanished by the next day: Temeraire was quite certain Laurence was not well after all. He was very silent, and spent nearly all the morning in his tent, writing letters and arranging his papers as though before a battle.\n\n\"Would there be any chance of some of the French army coming this way, after all?\" Temeraire asked, when Laurence came out at last; perhaps Laurence had not said anything, because he did not wish to raise hopes.\n\nBut Laurence answered too easily. \"I am afraid not,\" he said. \"I believe they have all crossed the Niemen, by last report.\" So it was not that, either. Temeraire did not like to pry; he knew Laurence felt it a great rudeness to ask questions, and solicit information which had not been volunteered. But Laurence remained too-silent and grave all that day, and did not eat much of his dinner, which he took at the covert that evening for the first time since they had come to Vilna.\n\nTemeraire had nothing to occupy him sufficient to distract him from these anxious observations. The Russians had no notion of aerial drill under ordinary circumstances, and on the amount of supply they possessed, all the dragons were inclined to sleep more than fly, anyway. Temeraire had made arrangements, through Grig, for some of the smaller beasts to spend the afternoon in his clearing, where Temeraire recited some poetry to them, and afterwards tried to spur them to discussion. But they mostly yawned, and then he yawned, too, and it was so very easy to drowse, even though Temeraire took very much to heart the instruction, from the Analects, that a dragon ought not spend more than fourteen hours of the day in sleep.\n\nHe tried to read alone, or have Roland read to him from the newspapers, when one might be found in a language which she read sufficiently well\u2014Temeraire again felt the injustice that Sipho should have gone away with his brother and Kulingile; Kulingile had gone to the Peninsular Army, where would be no shortage of English newspapers, and perhaps even books, which anybody at all could read to him; and meanwhile Roland could only read in three languages, and not very well in any of them\u2014or he might amuse himself by doing some mathematical problems in his head, only these made him drowsy as well.\n\nSo he was very much at leisure to worry, and think up new sideways questions which might approach the question of Laurence's health. None of these produced a satisfactory answer. Laurence was not tired; Laurence was not too hot, nor too cold; Laurence did not have the head-ache. Laurence did indeed recall vomiting over the side during that typhoon in the year six, but he did not feel the least inclination to be similarly ill at present.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Temeraire said finally in desperation, \"perhaps you have heard of typhus?\"\n\n\"I have,\" Laurence said. \"It is going through the hospitals, I am afraid; poor devils.\"\n\n\"Oh! The hospitals only?\" Temeraire said, much relieved. \"You would have no thought of typhus, would you?\"\n\n\"What, of being ill? None whatsoever. Whence has this sudden concern for my health arisen?\" Laurence said, raising his head from his pistols, which he was cleaning.\n\n\"Only, I do not quite understand,\" Temeraire said, \"how your father seems to have died in his bed, and you have been so very quiet\u2014\"\n\nLaurence said, \"My father was seventy-two, and had been ill a long time, my dear; I may hope for another two score years myself, if nothing should\u2014\" He stopped very abruptly.\n\nTemeraire was immediately alarmed, and only more so, when Laurence said, \"Temeraire, I beg your pardon. I am not ill; but it is true that my thoughts are occupied. I am sorry that I should have let you see it, when I cannot confide their subject to you; honor demands my silence at present. Having said so much, I trust you will not press me further.\"\n\n\"And I did not, but I very much wished to,\" Temeraire said to Churki, unhappily, that afternoon, when Laurence had left with Hammond on yet another social occasion. Laurence's speech had done nothing to make Temeraire feel less uneasy: entirely the reverse. Laurence's idea of honor was very peculiar, and nearly all-encompassing; it had led him into dangerous situations before now.\n\n\"I should think so,\" Churki said. \"Why did you not insist on being informed further at once? What if he has got himself into some difficulty, which you ought to manage for him? Men do not always like interference, and by and large,\" she added, \"I do not hold with unnecessary interference; they ought to be allowed to manage their own affairs. But there are some matters which a respectable dragon ought not allow to go forward among her people; why, I have known men to be lured out of their ayllu to visit a woman in another, and then they are snatched up by some other dragon and never seen again, all because their own dragon did not intervene soon enough.\"\n\n\"Well, I am sure Laurence has not been visiting some woman,\" Temeraire said uneasily; it did occur to him that Laurence had been attending all these parties, at which he understood there were a great many ladies all in very dazzling gowns; and Laurence did have odd notions about what might be due the reputation of a gentlewoman. \"Perhaps you are right; perhaps I ought to inform myself. Roland,\" he said, turning to break in on her sword-drill with Baggy, \"Roland, you would not happen to know which party Laurence has gone to, this afternoon? You might go after him, and just keep an eye upon him.\"\n\nBaggy dropped his sword at once and sat down looking grateful for the respite: he was finally filling out his well-stretched frame little by little, but remained still very lanky.\n\n\"I mightn't at all,\" Roland said, with feeling, wiping sweat and strands off her brow; she wore her sandy hair braided in a queue, but a great deal of it had escaped during the practice: her enthusiasm for the exercise was considerably greater than Baggy's. \"I should have to put on a dress. You had better ask Forthing to go after him, or Ferris: he can do the pretty when he has to.\"\n\n\"Ferris, certainly,\" Temeraire said, mindful of the wretched condition of Mr. Forthing's coat, which he could hardly bear to have seen even within the confines of the covert, much less out in the world, as associated with any officer of his; neither was his appearance at all improved by the large wadding of bandages bound up over the wound in his cheek. \"\u2014pray ask him to go at once, if you please.\"\n\n\"I'll go!\" Baggy volunteered, and scrambled up and away with a flailing of thin limbs and an expression of relief.\n\nFerris went out in a condition of which any dragon might be proud: in a neat grey coat, freshly sponged down and with a golden stick-pin in the lapel, trousers faultlessly white and boots well-polished. \"I will find him, never fret, Temeraire,\" Ferris said. \"I have enough Russian to ask about, and there aren't so many aviators about that people won't remember a flying-coat.\"\n\n\"And perhaps you might find Grig for me,\" Temeraire said to Roland, after Ferris had gone, just in case: if any other dragon had been nosing about Laurence, Grig was sure to know of it.\n\nBut Grig did not need to be summoned: he was at that very moment darting into the clearing in a rush. \"Temeraire, some of those ferals have returned, that you asked to go west for you; but they have come in over Symerka's clearing, and he thinks they are trying to get at his treasure.\"\n\n\"Oh! What treasure has he got to speak of, but three silver plates, dented!\" Temeraire said, in some exasperation.\n\nBut this paucity in no wise deterred Symerka, who was indeed beating aloft furiously, launching himself at the two cowering ferals, who together could have fit under one of his wings. Temeraire had to roar very loudly to get his attention; so that the entire infantry battalion at the foot of the hill burst out of their tents and began milling around, and a few of them fired guns in panic.\n\n\"These are my guests, who have come to bring us intelligence, not to take anything,\" Temeraire said to Symerka severely, putting himself in front of the ferals. \"You cannot be supposing everyone a thief, and jumping on them without so much as a word.\"\n\n\"Well, as you are vouching for them,\" Symerka said, \"I suppose they are all right; but I am sure that one looked towards my plates,\" he added, stretching his neck as he flew back and forth before them a few more times, before at last subsiding and returning to his clearing.\n\n\"I am sorry you should have had so unfriendly a welcome,\" Temeraire said to the ferals: it was their chief come back again, and one other with her, a thin pale-grey creature almost as white as Lien, except with grey eyes instead of red. Temeraire was sorrier yet when the feral chief declared herself quite overset, and in need of restoration after their fright: she could not speak a word until they were fed. The quartermaster refused to be of any use, and in any case the dinner porridge would not be ready for another four hours yet. Roland had to be sent down to the city with a gold coin, and Temeraire then had to see this go down the gullets of his visitors in the form of two handsome round-bellied pigs.\n\n\"Now then,\" Temeraire said pointedly, when at last they had licked the last specks of blood from their muzzles.\n\n\"First,\" the feral chief said, uncowed, \"I should like us to be very clear on terms. I suppose you would agree I have had a share in bringing you the message, even if I don't bring it myself, so long as I introduce you to someone who does?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Temeraire said, \"and that is quite enough of terms to discuss, until there is such a message, as I suppose you mean that you don't have it.\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" she said, \"not yet: Bistorta here was not ready to believe me, that there was gold in it, and she says it is getting dangerous to go into France.\"\n\n\"They are all gone mad for this Napoleon down there,\" the pale-grey dragon said, in French, when Temeraire inquired of her. \"All of them, whether they are harnessed or no. It has come to be so that they will herd you down for questioning as a spy if they do not know you. But your Prussian friends are there, yes, in the breeding grounds outside Moirans-en-Montaigne: I have seen them. It used to be I would take a sheep off their herders now and then, before the patrols grew so unfriendly. But these days, I would not risk going in except for gold, and as I told Molic here, I will believe in gold when I see it in front of my face; although you have certainly given us a handsome meal,\" she added, \"and so behold, I am ready to be persuaded.\" She folded her wings neatly and tucked her head back in an expectant curve.\n\nTemeraire sighed deeply and resigned himself to salting the wound: Roland and Baggy were told off to display the golden plate service once more, and the appreciative sighs of his guests only made him feel, all the more, what he would be losing. But he cheered himself that Bistorta could not say for certain whether Eroica himself were there, nor recall the names of any particular Prussian dragons; she might be entirely mistaken.\n\n\"But I will certainly attempt it,\" she said, after one last acquisitive squint at the engraving upon the largest platter. \"Oh! Will I not! But tell me now what I must say to this fellow Eroica, when I find him.\"\n\n\"If you should find him,\" Temeraire said, with emphasis, \"you shall tell him that Dyhern is quite at liberty, and here with us, and we should like him to rejoin; and also all his comrades. Roland,\" he turned his head, \"I do not suppose you can learn from Dyhern which other Prussian aviators have been set free? Without telling them why, of course: Laurence is quite right that Dyhern ought not be distressed, when very likely we will not find Eroica after all.\"\n\nThis list took some time to obtain; the ferals did not object to the delay, nor to eating a substantial share of Temeraire's dinner when the porridge did at length finally come. \"Eating fat, morning and night,\" Molic said, with a replete sigh; her belly was noticeably rounded. \"It makes you think twice about harness, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"No, it does not,\" Bistorta said positively. \"I mean no offense,\" she added, \"but it is not for me: following orders from one, who takes orders from another, for the sake of a third. Some of those dragons in France, they have never met this Napoleon at all, yet now they are ready to fight if you so much as hint he is not made of diamonds, all because he has given them a few pavilions and firework-shows. For me, I will stay in the mountains and be free; I would rather sleep in a meadow than beneath a painted roof.\"\n\n\"Firework-shows,\" Temeraire muttered, in fresh irritation: he was quite sure that the French dragons did not have to arrange their own entertainments; Napoleon would certainly see them invited to any general triumph.\n\nAt last Roland came with the list, written out in large letters, and Temeraire read it out to Bistorta; she listened carefully and permitted Roland to strap the list onto her foreleg, wrapped in several layers of oilskin and tucked into a map-case. \"That will do,\" she said, shaking it to be sure it wouldn't fall off. \"As long as I can take it off with my teeth, if I need to.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we had better stay until morning?\" Molic said hopefully, meaning breakfast, but Bistorta had been too much inspired by the display of gold to wait; she nodded a farewell and was aloft, Molic trailing after her with a little more reluctance. Temeraire saw them go, and then noticed the aviators were going to their beds; it had grown late.\n\n\"Why, Laurence has been gone a long while,\" Temeraire said, \"and Ferris is not back, either\u2014I suppose he has found them, and has stayed in their company,\" he added, striving not to be anxious, unnecessarily anxious. \"I wonder where they are.\"\n\nA carriage had been waiting for them, as close to the covert as the driver and his horses were willing to come. Hammond led Laurence to it with a miserable and anxious look, but in silence. Laurence had nothing he wished to say, and Hammond did not breach the wall of reserve which had risen around him.\n\nThe streets were busy with mid-day traffic, and their progress was slow. Laurence sat in the close stuffy box and watched the city move past through the window. \"I am sorry for the inconvenient timing,\" Hammond at last ventured. \"The gentleman's friends would not agree to meet earlier; they expressed doubts of his being entirely sober, by then.\"\n\nLaurence only inclined his head. He could not find any emotion within but a concern for Temeraire's unhappiness, and this he could only permit himself to feel distantly. Hammond blamed himself that matters had come to such a pass, but wrongly; he had made every effort\u2014he had made too much of an effort. His discreet inquiries to the Russian Imperial household had brought an instant answer: Baron Dobrozhnov was certainly beneath a prince of China, and the Tsar would as certainly order his immediate execution, for having offended an ally of such importance.\n\n\"But of course, you need make no official complaint,\" Hammond had tried, desperately, after he had very reluctantly conveyed the message to Laurence.\n\n\"Have you heard from the gentleman's friends?\" Laurence had said, ignoring him, and to do Hammond credit, he did not pursue the attempt; it was absurd to suppose that the world would not know of it, if Laurence refused to meet Dobrozhnov by standing on the grounds of his Imperial rank.\n\nHe was not afraid; some deadening of the natural instinct of self-preservation had grown habitual, from long use, and he did not think he had anything to fear but his own harm or injury. The usual arguments for the prohibition of dueling, by an aviator, did not hold in his own case. Most dragons little felt the significance of their fighting work; they received no encouragement to be attached, themselves, to the causes for which they fought, and when their captains died would not remain in the field. But Temeraire would not abandon the struggle against Napoleon only because he was bereaved, thinking of nothing but his own grief and caring nothing for the larger cause; Temeraire would carry on their work.\n\nPerhaps half an hour past the city walls, the carriage slowed as the wheels turned into a dirt lane and halted. Laurence opened the door: they had halted near a small stand of trees, on a narrow street barely dug out of the snow, ice mingled with pebbles and dust underfoot. A small solitary farmhouse stood atop a nearby hill, dark, with a peculiar weathercock in the shape of a rabbit; a few shaggy dark cows with snow dusted across the tops of their backs were browsing at a pile of hay in a nearby meadow. They were alone as yet: the cattle watched incuriously as Laurence and Hammond walked through the packed snow towards the trees. Beneath the laden branches, the ground was nearly clear, browsed down to the grass beneath.\n\n\"Perhaps he will not come,\" Hammond said. \"Maybe his friends have persuaded him\u2026\"\n\nLaurence did not listen; he marked out the clearing and its length with his eye, noted that the wind was high enough to alter a bullet's course. He was sorry that Dobrozhnov was not a military man; he disliked having so much advantage, where he could not be conciliatory. The wind was cold, and he walked back and forth, swinging his arms, to keep his blood moving. Hammond shivered beneath his heavy fur coat and hat. The time dragged. Laurence was conscious of the slow shift of the shadows of the tree-branches upon the snow.\n\n\"You are certain you have not mistaken the place?\" he said finally.\n\n\"Quite certain,\" Hammond said. \"Baron Von Karlow mentioned the rabbit; and that is his groom up there with our driver, who gave us the direction. But Captain, if the other gentleman is late, perhaps has chosen not to come\u2014\"\n\n\"We will wait another quarter of an hour,\" Laurence said.\n\nAt the very end of this period, they saw in the distance a carriage approaching slowly; in another ten minutes it had drawn up, the horses only lightly exercised. \"You have certainly made very poor time,\" Hammond said, sharply, when the gentlemen descended; a doctor followed them out of the carriage.\n\n\"I am very sorry,\" Baron Von Karlow said, heavily, with a strange emphasis. Laurence knew him a little: another Prussian officer who had thrown in with the Russians rather than accept the French yoke, like Dyhern; he had distinguished himself in the battle of Maloyaroslavets. The friendship had likely a pecuniary ground: Dobrozhnov was wealthy, and given to sponsoring Prussian officers who required some support.\n\nVon Karlow bowed to Laurence very stiffly; his look was unhappy and constrained. Laurence belatedly understood: they had not come so late by accident. Dobrozhnov had kept him waiting, in the cold, deliberately.\n\nThat gentleman looked better than the last time Laurence had seen him; clear-eyed and his skin no longer flushed with drink, although the bruise across his cheek had purpled. He avoided Laurence's eyes, and said, \"Well, let us get on with it,\" and walked away to the other side of the clearing.\n\n\"Captain,\" Hammond said, low and angry; he, too, had understood. \"I will require a delay, and see if we cannot arrange for something hot to drink; the goodwife of the farmhouse, perhaps, would provide\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. He felt a heavy weariness and dismay, as if Dobrozhnov had gone to his knees and begged for his life. \"There is no need. I have killed men in colder weather than this.\"\n\nHammond took the dueling-pistols to the center of the clearing, and met Von Karlow there; they inspected the weapons together. Hammond took some time over the examination, and carried the pistols back with the case tucked under his arm and his ungloved hands wrapped around the guns, warming them. Laurence was grateful, for the sentiment more than the act; the fire of Hammond's indignation lifted some of the oppression from his own spirits. He took one of the pistols, checked it, and nodded to Hammond; Von Karlow turned from his side and nodded as well. He walked back to the middle of the clearing and held up his handkerchief.\n\n\"On a count of three,\" he said, \"when I have dropped the handkerchief, you may fire.\"\n\nLaurence turned his side, to present a narrow target, and took aim; Dobrozhnov also turned, and Laurence was sorry to see the man's hand trembling, a little. He did not look at the gun, or the man's face; he looked at his chest, chose his point, and adjusted his pistol for the wind. \"One,\" Von Karlow said. \"Two\u2014\"\n\nDobrozhnov fired. Laurence all in one moment heard the explosion, saw the smoke, and felt the impact in his whole body; a sharp, shocking blow, knocking the air from his lungs. Then he was on the ground, without any consciousness of the fall. \"My God!\" Von Karlow cried aloud. He sounded far away.\n\nHammond was kneeling by his side in the snow, bending over him, ashen. \"Captain\u2014Captain, can you speak? Here, Doctor, at once!\"\n\nLaurence drew a shallow breath, and another. The pain was startling, but general; he could not tell where he had been hit. Hammond's hands were on him, and the doctor's, opening his coat and his shirt, and then the doctor was sliding his hand down over Laurence's back. The doctor was speaking in Russian. \"Thank Heaven! He says it has gone cleanly through,\" Hammond said. \"Captain, do not move.\"\n\nThat was not, at present, a necessary instruction; Laurence's arms and legs felt weighted down as though by iron bands. The doctor was already working on him with needle and thread, humming to himself, a strangely cheerful noise. Laurence scarcely felt anything beyond a little pressure; a deep chill was traveling through his body. Hammond spoke to the doctor and then he bent down and took the pistol from Laurence's hand and stood. Laurence heard him saying, with icy formality, \"Sir, I hope you will agree with me that a return of fire is required, under the circumstances of this unhappy accident. I am ready to oblige your party at any time.\"\n\n\"I agree, unquestionably,\" Von Karlow answered, his voice harsh.\n\n\"It was an accident,\" Dobrozhnov was saying, his voice trembling, \"\u2014a perfect accident. Bozhe! My finger slipped\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped talking; neither of the other two men spoke. After a moment he said, \"Of course\u2014of course. But we should see if the gentleman will recover to take his own shot\u2014a hour can do no harm\u2014\"\n\n\"Such agitation of his wound can in no wise be recommended,\" Hammond said. \"Nor that he go on lying here, in cold, any longer than he has already been kept in it. I add, sir, that I will be delighted to stand for another exchange of fire, should the completion of the first not achieve a decisive result. We may alternate, and so go on as you have begun.\"\n\n\"I agree to your proposal on behalf of my party,\" Von Karlow said.\n\nTheir united coldness was not less palpable than the frozen ground; Dobrozhnov said, \"\u2014yes. Yes, of course.\"\n\nHis footsteps crunched away a small distance, and then halted. Laurence opened his eyes. He had not been conscious of closing them. The doctor was still humming, and putting a thick compress upon the wound. The sky above had that peculiar blue brightness of a very cold day. The sun had already passed its zenith. Laurence heard, a moment later, the explosion of a second pistol, and Dobrozhnov's exclamation.\n\n\"Well, sir?\" Hammond said. \"Can your party continue?\"\n\n\"My arm is hit,\" Dobrozhnov said.\n\n\"A graze to the off-arm,\" Von Karlow said. \"The wound is not grave.\"\n\n\"I do not know any reason why I must wish the other gentleman harm,\" Dobrozhnov said. \"I am very willing to consider the matter closed.\"\n\nVon Karlow said, after a moment, heavily, \"Do you consider honor satisfied, sir?\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, I think I must request a second exchange,\" Hammond said. \"Your party may fire whenever ready.\"\n\nThere was a brief pause. Laurence was already a little more aware of himself. He would have tried to sit up; the doctor pressed his shoulders back to the ground with the firmness of a nursemaid to a small child. Laurence shut his eyes again, and heard the pistol-shot, a thick hollow wooden thump; the bullet had hit a tree.\n\n\"You may fire when ready,\" Von Karlow said, after a moment.\n\nA second shot. Dobrozhnov gasped. The doctor made an impatient grunt, and pushed himself up and left Laurence's side. Hammond was there in his place, a moment later. \"Pray hold still, Captain,\" he said. \"I will get the driver; we will remove you to the farmhouse in a moment.\"\n\nHe stood up again. \"Sir, is honor satisfied, on your side?\"\n\n\"My party cannot answer, but I consider the matter closed,\" Von Karlow said. \"I hope you will permit me to express my regret for any irregularity; I would be glad to shake your hand, sir, if you would take my own.\"\n\n\"I am very glad to do so, sir; I find no fault in your arrangements,\" Hammond said.\n\nA fence stile was brought, and the driver helped Hammond put him on it. Laurence was by then conscious only of cold; the movement caused him some discomfort, but this was brief, and he knew very little of the next passage of time. Bare tree-branches like lacework crossing over his field of vision; the warm stink of cows and pasture; the cry of several anxious chickens; the thump of a fist on a door, and then finally warmth again: they lay him near the fireplace, a roast on the spit turning and a sizzle of fat on the logs. Footsteps came and went around him; voices spoke, but they largely spoke in Lithuanian\u2014a peculiar music not at all like Russian or German to his ear. He drifted, or slept, or dozed; then he opened his eyes and looked at the window. It was dark outside. \"Temeraire will have missed me,\" he said aloud, and reaching groped for something to help him sit up.\n\nHe could not manage it. He fell back gasping to the floor. A woman came to his side\u2014he stared up at her: a girl not twenty years of age, extraordinarily beautiful with clear green eyes and dark-brown hair; she returned the stare with immense interest. A sharp word drew her away; Laurence turned his head and found her mother glaring at him, with the same green eyes. Laurence inclined his head a little, trying to convey his lack of ill-intentions, if that were necessary under the circumstances.\n\nHis chest ached. A dressing was wrapped around his body, pressing upon the ribs. Blood had not quite soaked through the topmost level on the front. \"Captain,\" Hammond said, kneeling beside him. \"Are you\u2014do you feel improved?\"\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence said, saving his breath.\n\n\"Von Karlow has gone back to town,\" Hammond said. \"He has promised to send a message to the covert that we have been asked to stay the night at a hunting-lodge, outside the town. Pray try and rest. Are you in a great deal of pain?\"\n\n\"No.\" There was no use in saying anything else. Laurence closed his eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Forthing read out Laurence's note loudly: it was brief, but quite clear; Laurence would not come back to-day. \"Oh,\" Temeraire said, disappointed; he had anticipated with pleasure revealing the initial success of his scheme. Laurence would surely approve all his arrangements, and in particular the generosity of his offering so remarkable a reward, and the result which it had already achieved. Indeed, Temeraire had quite counted upon that approval to salve the regrets which could not help but assail him, when he thought too long about the burnished luster of the golden plates, and imagined himself handing them over.\n\nAt least he had hoped to enjoy the satisfaction of showing Laurence that he, too, was not a slave to fortune; that he was quite willing to make the most extraordinary sacrifices in a worthy cause. There did not seem to Temeraire to be any need to defer that enjoyment until the final outcome was determined; after all, he had already made the gesture, and even now suffered the pains of anticipation. Even if Bistorta should not find Eroica in the end, Temeraire had still committed himself, and might as well have the credit of so doing.\n\nSo he sighed; but he only meant to resign himself to waiting, and thought nothing more of the note, until Churki said, \"There is something I don't care for going on here. Lay that out where I can put an eye on it.\"\n\nThere was a great deal of sharp authority in her tone; Forthing had automatically spread the letter open on the rock before he recalled she was not properly entitled to give him orders. But by then Churki had already bent her head, and was peering closely at the small note; she said, \"I thought so; it did not sound like something Hammond would have written, and that is not his hand. Is it your Laurence's?\"\n\nTemeraire peered at the letter very closely. It was difficult to make out the very small letters, but finally he decided that it was not.\n\n\"And the contents are too scanty for my taste. Where is this hunting-lodge, and who is their host?\" Churki said. \"Hammond is not given to sailing off without good reason, and he dislikes hunting extremely; whyever has he gone to such a place? None of this looks reliable. Whatever peculiar business your Laurence is engaged upon, it looks to me as though he has drawn Hammond into it, too.\"\n\n\"When Laurence has only been going about town because Hammond has made him go into society!\" Temeraire said, but this protest was distracted; if anything had happened, it was surely not Laurence's fault, at all, but in every other respect he found Churki's remarks uncomfortably plausible.\n\n\"And we will have a bad time of searching,\" Churki added. \"There isn't a moon to-night.\"\n\n\"Searching!\" Forthing said. \"What do you mean, searching: flying about and roaring and scaring good people in-doors? No talk of that, if you please. You are both working yourself up over nothing. Here's a note that Captain Laurence and Mr. Hammond very kindly asked someone to send for them, so you shouldn't worry when they came home a little late even though they are two sensible gentlemen perfectly able to take care of themselves, and instead here you are brewing it up into a proper conspiracy for no reason.\"\n\n\"I do not think it is no reason, at all,\" Temeraire said, with dislike. He did not think Forthing was as devoted to Laurence as he should have been, considering how Laurence had condescended to have him as first officer. Churki might be a little over-fretful on account of how Incan dragons were giving to stealing one another's people, but certainly there was no harm in being cautious. \"Only it would do no good anyway for us to begin flying around without knowing anything of where Laurence and Hammond are: we will never find them without some direction. Who brought the letter, Roland, and where did they get it?\"\n\n\"Just one of the street boys, the ones who aren't afraid to come near the covert,\" Roland said. \"We'll see if we can catch him; like as not he'll have gone for one of the bun-sellers down the road.\" She tapped Baggy and Gerry, and went running with them for the gate of the covert.\n\nBaggy returned the first, some twenty minutes later and out of breath. \"Tisn't my fault,\" he said, when Churki demanded what was taking them all so long. \"When we found him, he could only say he brought it from a message-boy who brought it this far but didn't want to come in the covert; so we had to go after him, and it is only luck I even got that one at all. And then he said it came from an officer, a Prussian officer named Von Karlow, at a public house near the German Gate, and that is all the way on the other side of the town.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" Dyhern said. \"Von Karlow: I know the man. I have fought with him: a good man\u2014an honorable man. He would not send you a lie, Temeraire, I am sure.\"\n\n\"There, you see,\" Forthing said.\n\n\"I do not see,\" Churki said. \"I have never heard this man's name. How does he know Hammond or Laurence at all, and how does he know that they are at this lodge? Why should it be his business to send a letter on their behalf? I am by no means satisfied.\"\n\nForthing was inclined to argue with her, but Temeraire interrupted. \"Dyhern,\" he said, \"if this gentleman is your acquaintance, perhaps you will oblige me by going to call upon him, and asking him the direction of this lodge. After all, it must be outside the city somewhere; there could be no real harm in our going to look in upon them, and if they have only stayed the night because of their horses being tired, we might bring them home.\"\n\nHe finished decidedly, with a flip of his tail, and felt he had struck a sensible, a reasonable course of compromise, without permitting himself to grow overly alarmed as Churki had. But Forthing, of course, could only bleat objections. \"There is no call for your chasing off after Captain Laurence,\" he said. \"What if he should have left by the time you got there? He would come straight here, and want to know what had become of you; meanwhile you would be flying about half-distracted, supposing the worst, and what if we should get orders to fight?\"\n\n\"We will not get orders to fight,\" Temeraire said. \"We have wanted orders to fight for three weeks, and we have not had any; we are not going to get some now.\"\n\nHe turned his head even as he spoke: at last here was Ferris coming back into the clearing. Forthing said, \"Mr. Ferris, I hope you have word from the captain; I am sure you will tell us everything is well, and there is no reason for any sort of alarm.\"\n\n\"Oh, will I,\" Ferris said, and Temeraire, looking closely, saw that his face was set and furious. \"He is gone to a meeting; some caper-merchant Russian lag-wit insulted the Emperor of China to his face at a party last night, and he struck the man. I cannot find anyone to tell me where it is, but I have learned for a certainty that one of the man's friends called on Hammond this morning, some fellow named Karloff or Karlow.\"\n\n\"Good God!\" Forthing cried, and there was a general noise of excitement and babble among the crew, which made it quite impossible at first for Temeraire to understand what exactly had happened, and why they should be so distressed that Laurence had\u2014quite justifiably\u2014chastised a rudesby, and what any of this had to do with meetings or hunting-lodges. \"Captain Dyhern, pray will you go at once,\" Forthing was saying, and Dyhern was already coming out of his tent, in his coat and his hat, and Baggy said, \"I will run ahead and get you a carriage, sir,\" and pelted away towards the street again.\n\n\"What is the to-do?\" Roland said, looking as Baggy flew past her; she was coming back the other way. \"Did Baggy have any luck finding the message-boy?\"\n\n\"Roland,\" Temeraire said, putting a forefoot before her, so she could not be swallowed up in the general chaos, \"pray tell me at once what it means, that Laurence has gone to a meeting.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't,\" she said, but at once said, \"Oh, but he would, wouldn't he; has he?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said, gripped with horror. \"Roland, what is a meeting?\"\n\n\"The worst nonsense anyone ever heard of, and he knows perfectly well better; if Mother were here, she would throw him in stocks for it, if he has not got himself shot,\" Roland said, stormily.\n\n\"Shot?\" Temeraire said blankly. \"Shot?\"\n\n\"He has gone to fight a duel,\" Roland said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Nearly the most dreadful hour of Temeraire's life followed on this intelligence: an hour in which he could do nothing, knowing all the time that somewhere not an hour's flight away, Laurence might at this very moment be stepping upon a field of honor. This was aptly named, it seemed to Temeraire, as honor was a word which seemed associated with every worst disaster in his life: a hollowness for which Laurence had before now been willing to die in the most unnecessary fashion, and this one more unnecessary than ever. \"For no-one could suppose Laurence was a coward,\" Temeraire said. \"Not even anyone who disliked him extremely: I have heard the Admiralty tell him he had not enough fear.\"\n\n\"It isn't the captain that anyone would call a coward, sure,\" O'Dea said, \"but the other fellow that he struck; and the captain's too much a gentleman to hit another and not let him have satisfaction, if he ask for it. Ah, the sword and the pistol have made much food for worms ere now out of men of honor, and watered the soil with blood and the tears of their relics. I have known eight men shot dead in duels, on the greens of Clonmel.\" He patted Temeraire's foreleg, in what perhaps was meant to be a comforting gesture; but Temeraire was too stricken to feel any sense of gratitude.\n\nHis crew had scattered out into the city, all of them trying to learn where the duel was to be held, and when; Dyhern was engaged in canvassing his acquaintance among the Prussian officers to find some intelligence of Von Karlow. Temeraire had thought of flying passes over the town, but Ferris had dissuaded him. \"As likely as not, they are fighting somewhere outside the city, or beneath some trees, and if you terrify everyone into hiding behind closed doors and shutters, we will never find out where in time.\"\n\nHe spoke of in time, but Laurence had been gone so long already; and every minute dragged onwards. Some of the crew came straggling back, without anything to report, until a pale and sweating Cavendish came back; he said, \"Is Mr. Forthing anywhere?\"\n\n\"He has not come back yet,\" Temeraire said. \"What have you heard?\"\n\n\"What about Mr. Ferris?\" Cavendish said, and then he wished to wait for Captain Dyhern to return, and then desperately, \"Well, perhaps Roland will be back, in a little while,\" and Temeraire realized he was trying to put off bad news.\n\n\"Tell me at once,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"I don't know anything,\" Cavendish said, but a low awful growling was building in Temeraire's throat, thrumming against the ground, and Cavendish swallowed and said, \"I don't, nothing certain! Only I went along of Captain Dyhern to the public house, where that Karlow fellow is supposed to have rooms; he wasn't there, so Captain Dyhern went on, but I overheard a couple of fellows in the taproom, from an infantry regiment, talking over a duel\u2014but they didn't know anything, not really; they didn't know it was our captain\u2014\"\n\n\"What did they say?\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"They said,\" Cavendish said, \"they said someone had fought a fatal duel, somewhere outside the city,\" Temeraire felt the world drag to a halt, suspended, \"and they said\u2014they said it was Von Karlow's own fault, seconding a coward, because\u2014because his man fired ahead of the signal.\"\n\n\"He is dead, then,\" Churki said. \"And without even a single child! I am so very sorry, Temeraire.\"\n\n\"No,\" Temeraire said, \"no; he is not dead,\" blindly, and Dyhern came panting up the hill, shouting, \"He is not dead! He is not dead, thank the good God.\"\n\n\"He is not?\" Temeraire said, thrusting his head down low to the ground, the world lurching back into motion.\n\nDyhern caught Cavendish by the ear and shook him. \"What do you mean by repeating nonsense like that, you young sow's head? Keep your mouth shut, next time. He is not dead,\" he repeated, and had to let go the wincing Cavendish to bend himself double, hands braced on his knees, to get back his air: Dyhern was a big man, and though he had lost a great deal of flesh to grief and to winter, his wind was not so remarkable that he could cheerfully run up the steep hillside to the entry gates.\n\n\"Then what has happened?\" Temeraire cried.\n\n\"The other man,\" Dyhern said, \"is dead.\"\n\n\"Oh! That is just as well,\" Temeraire said, immensely relieved. \"If he were not, I should certainly have killed him; but I am glad Laurence has already done so. Why has he not come back?\"\n\n\"He did not kill his man,\" Dyhern said. \"Hammond did.\"\n\n\"What?\" Churki said, sitting up sharply. \"What has Hammond to do with killing anyone? He is not a soldier!\"\n\nDyhern did not say anything more, waving away the questions as he heaved for breath; then he went to his tent and came out with his harness. \"I will tell you all, once we are in the air,\" he said. \"We are flying west. Von Karlow has given me their direction. Here, be useful now,\" he added, to Cavendish, \"and get aboard. We may need hands. You there, O'Dea, you will tell the officers where we have gone. Give me your paper, I will write the direction.\"\n\nTemeraire did not argue, because he agreed with Dyhern: Laurence was alive, and all further intelligence might be deferred in the interest of going to him at once. He waited impatiently for Dyhern to finish scribbling his note, and then held out his claw for him and for Cavendish, to put them up more quickly on his back. \"Well?\" he said. \"Have you latched on?\" and hearing the carabiner-clicks did not wait for an answer, but launched himself into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Laurence woke in the night coughing, a sharp pain in his side, and found Dyhern bending over him and the household in weeping terror. \"Take him, take him!\" the goodwife was saying in rough German, making pushing gestures at Laurence with her hands. \"Give the dragon!\"\n\nDyhern calmed her with a stern speech in that language, too quick for Laurence to follow, and turning back said, \"Rest, Captain, I will tell Temeraire you cannot be moved,\" and then was gone again. Laurence fell back into fitful and uneasy sleep and woke again with the household in fresh dismay, shrieks rousing him: it was daylight outside, and Temeraire had put his enormous eye up to the window to peer in at him.\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence tried to say, and then he was dreaming again, of beef: fresh hot roast beef, the juices running red and rare, until these became rivulets of blood dripping from Dobrozhnov, a dead groaning corpse who came close and closer and put out clammy hands to grasp Laurence's arms; he woke with a jerk in an unpleasant but welcome sweat, too warm: his fever had broken. There was a pot of beef broth cooking over the fire.\n\nHe drank nearly all of it, and then realized that the groaning soul in the cot across the room from him was Dobrozhnov: still alive, despite a bullet gone through his chest. \"Good God, why is he here?\" Laurence said to Hammond.\n\n\"I am very sorry for the circumstances, Captain; he could not be moved, and indeed, we hardly foresaw any reason to do so,\" Hammond said uneasily, looking towards the cot. \"The doctor was quite sure of his being dead before now. But I am very glad to see you so improved: will you eat a little more?\"\n\n\"With pleasure,\" Laurence said, \"when I have spoken to Temeraire.\"\n\nThis required the support of Dyhern's strong shoulders, and the use of the household's only bed and its meager supply of pillows; limping across the chamber was even so a remarkably painful process of transfer, and when Laurence at last was lying upon the bed, he was forced to accept another swallow of laudanum from Hammond, and catch his breath for some twenty minutes before he could again speak to let them know they might open the door.\n\nTemeraire put his head up to it, anxious, deeply distressed. \"Anyone might have guessed,\" he said with immense reproach, \"that the sort of person who would insult the Emperor would cheat, and here you are wounded!\"\n\n\"I assure you I feel very much better,\" Laurence said, although he was indeed in severe pain, which the laudanum only served to cloud and not remove. He heard and understood only distantly: his attention was fixed on his own words, struggling to keep in mind that he must say nothing of Dobrozhnov, still lying helpless in the room behind him. Temeraire could not know him still alive.\n\n\"I have been speaking with Dyhern a great deal on the subject of dueling,\" Temeraire said, \"and it seems plain to me that something must be done. You must give me your word, Laurence, that if anyone ever should insult you again, they must be told at once that I will insist on being your second myself. I am very much indebted to Mr. Hammond for having killed that wretched fellow, but in future, if anyone likes to prove they are not a coward by insulting you, they may fight me, and then they cannot complain of not having had satisfaction: I am sure everyone will agree they were brave, once they are dead. Pray promise me, and then you must go have some more beef broth,\" he insisted.\n\nLaurence said vaguely, \"As you wish,\" having become unable to follow the conversation, and was grateful to be carried back to the fire, still in the bed, and to eat a little more broth. This the daughter of the house brought him, and sat by him for a while frowning, and then in a little awkward German spoke to him, asking quite seriously if the dragon obeyed him because he was a devil. This notion she proposed with an air of interest more than horror, and seemed reluctant to accept Laurence's denial. When he awoke from a long drowse, he did so finding her carefully putting his hand onto the family crucifix, and in some exasperation he took hold of it, showed her he had not the least hesitation in doing so, and kissed it: a Popish gesture, but convincing. She seemed however disappointed, and demanded to know how he did control the dragon.\n\n\"Ask Hammond,\" Laurence said, too weary to struggle on in German, of which he had very little even under better circumstances. \"He has a dragon also.\"\n\nHammond was meeting with very little success in controlling his dragon in any manner, however: Churki was in a mood of great severity, which had been not at all improved by learning the details of Hammond's behavior in the duel, which she loudly characterized as ridiculous and inappropriately dangerous. The next day Laurence felt improved enough to be carried out of doors for a brief airing; he was glad to escape the cottage briefly despite the cold, as Dobrozhnov persisted in not dying and had begun to moan almost incessantly from pain. By then he found a serious quarrel brewing between the beasts: Churki was inclined to blame him for having dragged Hammond into the affair, and Temeraire was inclined to blame Hammond for the reverse, and an atmosphere of resentment had settled between them.\n\n\"A pretty thing to be accusing you of,\" Temeraire said, snorting with sufficient force to blow the snow before him into a cloud, \"when you are so badly wounded you groan day and night,\" and then he paused with a sudden puzzled expression and looked over at the cottage, from which had just issued one of these groaning noises.\n\n\"I do not cry out, I assure you,\" Laurence said hastily, hoping to divert Temeraire's attention: Temeraire would certainly kill Dobrozhnov at once if he learned of the man's survival, and very likely have the house in ruins on all its occupants besides. \"\u2014I am not uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"Still, you are the one who has been shot,\" Temeraire said, not mollified, and it was of no use to point out that Hammond had stood the same hazard; indeed Laurence found it best not to discuss the particulars of the duel at all.\n\nThe remainder of his crew had arrived the previous day, driving the wagon-load of gold and treasure\u2014much to Temeraire's relief\u2014and Laurence could not help but be aware that his officers were very shocked; their disapproval was a palpable thing. Of Jane Roland's reaction he was left in no doubt, from Emily's furious looks, and he was uncomfortably certain that the absent Granby, too, would have upbraided him in the strongest terms. The ground crew, who did not themselves suffer from the prohibition against dueling, were more tolerant, and indeed rather more pleased than not to have a captain who would fight a duel in the teeth of prohibition; they considered his ferocity as reflecting well upon them. But Laurence did not care to have an act of unpleasant necessity be approved as barbarism, so this was not much consolation.\n\nThe officers of course could not express their feelings through any open reproach, but they were worsening the quarrel by ranging with Churki in blaming him. Temeraire was now torn between his own anger with Laurence and his unwillingness to cede ground to Churki, and Laurence was very dismayed to find the quarrel migrate onto the person of Miss Merkelyte. Hammond had introduced this young lady to Churki, by way of answering her questions and, he hoped, reconciling the family to the continuing presence of two large dragons in their acreage. Churki found much to approve in the girl's youth and beauty\u2014too much to approve; she informed Temeraire, in haughty tones, that she would accept the young lady, on Hammond's behalf, as a kind of apology.\n\n\"Well, I am not going to make her an apology,\" Temeraire said, indignant on very wrong grounds. \"I do not see why Hammond should have her at all. She is very beautiful, at least all the crew tell me so. She may marry Ferris.\"\n\nLaurence would have upbraided both beasts for their scheming, as an insult to the already-unwilling hospitality of their hosts, but when he had marshaled Dyhern and Mrs. Pemberton to make apologies to Mrs. Merkelyte and ask her to keep her daughter in-doors, that lady held a conference with her daughter, and then demanded instead to know the situations of both gentlemen, and the particulars of bride-price and settlements. They were serfs, despite their relative prosperity, and had much to be wary of in seeing their nation absorbed by Russia, where their caste was notoriously oppressed. It was perhaps not surprising that Mrs. Merkelyte was ready to seize an opportunity of lofting her child to the security of a far higher sphere of society, even at the cost of losing her.\n\nThe proposed grooms were more hesitant. Ferris, while by no means indifferent to Miss Merkelyte's charms, had sufficiently disappointed his family, through no fault of his own, to wish to further provoke them by presenting them with a wife of whose birth and education they would have strongly disapproved; meanwhile Hammond had vague but firmly held plans to ally himself with a woman of wealth and influential family, when he should have achieved sufficient success to recommend himself to such a lady. Laurence could not blame them, but the natural consequence of their failing to come up to the mark was to permit every other man of their company, of remotely marriageable age, to imagine himself as the lady's partner instead.\n\nForthing, whom Laurence was sorry to learn a widower, hinted himself willing to pay his addresses, while Ferris reddened with indignation; Cavendish quarreled with Baggy though they had not half a beard between them. Even O'Dea made it his business to sit by Laurence's bedside and recite poetry, casting soulful looks across the room while struggling to contrive rhymes for Gabija.\n\nNo young lady who had been so thoroughly sheltered could be blamed for enjoying such attentions; meanwhile her mother kept a hawk's eye on the proceedings, but did not demur so long as her sense of propriety was not crossed. Temeraire hurled fuel upon the fire by regularly ordering some item of his treasure brought out from under the tarpaulins, to be polished and displayed in the thin wintry sunlight. Churki grew incensed with the competition offered to her own ambitions and began to hold long insistent conversations with Hammond, from which he escaped with an expression so mortified that Laurence could not imagine what had been said.\n\n\"What has not been said?\" Hammond paced the room, pale with red spots. \"I will not forbear to say, Captain, that the morals of dragons are very sadly flexible,\" and Laurence realized appalled that Churki was proposing that Hammond take the girl into his keeping, if he did not wish to marry her.\n\n\"Well, of course there is no reason for her to go into Hammond's keeping,\" Temeraire said, \"but she might go into yours. Indeed, that seems to me an excellent solution: we can pay bride-price now, and she may choose which of my crew she likes when she is ready. Or perhaps she might marry someone else,\" he added, struck as though by a remarkable inspiration, \"and then they should join my crew also: I have thought, Laurence, that we might do well to have a few more officers.\"\n\nAfter this conversation, Laurence said to Hammond, \"For God's sake, send for that doctor and ask if I am not well enough to be moved before we have more to reproach ourselves with than we already do; I am sure neither of these wretched beasts would scruple to make themselves procurers, only to win their point.\"\n\nThe doctor came and pronounced Laurence on the mend, but not well enough to be allowed a flight in cold air; after this disappointment he inspected Dobrozhnov, and further complicated the situation by announcing that the gentleman evidently meant to live after all.\n\nDobrozhnov still moaned incessantly that night, but by the following morning, he began to be well enough to sit up and make an even worse nuisance of himself. Most unfortunately, he spoke Lithuanian. Nor felt, so far as Laurence could tell, any compunction about abusing the hospitality he had received: indeed he was no sooner well enough to speak, than he began to make clear by his behavior that he considered Miss Merkelyte fair game, and himself entitled to enjoy her favors, if only he should conquer her resistance ahead of his competitors. Laurence did not understand the words with which he addressed her, but the tone was so familiar it might have been better suited to a bawdy-house, and covered her with confusion.\n\nLaurence had been determined to say nothing to the man; indeed, to ignore his presence insofar as possible: the situation was impossible otherwise. But he could hardly sit by and watch the progress of the seduction of an innocent girl, whose character was so alarmingly threatened, and not least through the actions of his own crew. \"Hammond,\" Laurence said, \"he must be induced to leave that girl alone. Can you get rid of him?\"\n\n\"I hardly know how,\" Hammond said dubiously. \"We can scarcely get him out of the house without the dragons seeing him: they are watching the door every minute to see who is coming in or out to speak with Miss Merkelyte.\"\n\nJust when he would have preferred to be ill for longer, Laurence found his own recovery speeding; he was well enough to stand up by himself the next day, and when he went slowly and haltingly outside, on Ferris's arm, the cold did not bite with more than its usual ferocity. But he could not avoid knowing that their own departure would now leave the girl unprotected. Dobrozhnov had spent an hour in close conversation with the mother that very morning, and Laurence had seen gold change hands\u2014ostensibly in thanks for the house's hospitality. The coins were a trifle to a man as wealthy as Dobrozhnov, but to the household they meant ten years' work and good fortune, and Mrs. Merkelyte plainly did not conceive that such a sum had been pressed upon her by a man with anything other than serious intentions; nor did Dobrozhnov have any hesitation letting her imagine he meant to offer her daughter a respectable marriage, rather than an arrangement as dishonorable as it was likely to be of short duration.\n\n\"Forthing,\" Laurence said at last, grimly settling on the least of the many evils from which he had to make his choice, \"will you marry her?\"\n\n\"If\u2014if she likes,\" Forthing said, a little uncertainly; he had not received much encouragement. He was not rich and had never been handsome, even before the fresh scar which marred his face, nor were his manners of a sort that could impress a young woman, and he was besides this a little too practical to be entirely in love himself. \"Only, I don't know what I'm to do with her. I could send her to my sister. I suppose she'd learn English quick enough?\"\n\n\"Whatever use is that?\" Temeraire said, objecting immediately. \"Why should she go away? I wish her to remain with us.\"\n\n\"We cannot be taking her to war,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Why not?\" Temeraire asked. \"Roland comes to war, and so does Mrs. Pemberton. And Laurence,\" he lowered his head, if not much his voice, \"must it really be Forthing? I am sure she is too beautiful for him: only look at his coat!\"\n\n\"Pray come and speak with her mother,\" Laurence said to Forthing, deferring this argument; he felt not a little guilty at Forthing's doubtful expression, but under the circumstances he could see no better solution.\n\nHowever, Mrs. Merkelyte was grown particular: not entirely remarkable, when she had a wealthy Russian baron sleeping on her floor making a pretense of courtship, and two dragons busily trying to offer her the choice of a British diplomat and a younger son of the nobility, however unwilling these latter two might be. Dyhern awkwardly demurred from serving as go-between, for which Laurence could hardly blame the man, so Hammond had to be recruited to the task. He tried to persuade her through the barrier of German, but he was nervous lest he make a remark too easily misconstrued to commit him as the bridegroom, rather than Forthing. The discussion continued for only a little while; mother and daughter exchanged a glance; the girl looked away\u2014the mother shook her head. Meanwhile Dobrozhnov watched all the proceedings sidelong from his own cot, with an amused and half-incredulous expression, as though he thought the offer absurd; Laurence was conscious of a strong desire to knock him down again.\n\nGabija did not admire Dobrozhnov; her own preference was quite certainly for Ferris, on whom her eyes often lingered: with his sword and pistols and flying-coat, and the military carriage which had never deserted him, he presented the qualities of an officer even though he no longer possessed the rank. He had a smooth high forehead beneath auburn locks, and over the course of the preceding year he had filled out in muscle to match his height; if not a match for her in beauty, he could reasonably have been called handsome even by a judge with more basis for comparison. She was too shy to even attempt to speak to him, but she made excuses to be in his way, and even dared to linger near Temeraire, who might be relied upon to call Ferris over whenever she was by.\n\nBut despite these evident signs of calf-love, Laurence feared her susceptible to Dobrozhnov's persuasion: she plainly did not wish to settle, any longer, for the quiet country life which would have been her natural lot. If no better offer were made her, she might well be persuaded to accept Dobrozhnov's suit, without understanding what fate she embraced.\n\nAnd yet Laurence had reached the end of what solutions he might offer: he could not press Ferris to marry under the circumstances. Temeraire however felt no such hesitation, and when the failure of Forthing's suit had been reported\u2014to Churki's visible and ruffled-up satisfaction\u2014he urged at once, \"Ferris, are you sure you would not like to marry her,\" while Laurence, catching his breath upon the camp-chair which had been arranged for him, could not yet object.\n\n\"I must beg to be excused,\" Ferris said, and dragged his eyes away from Miss Merkelyte's appealing glance with an effort: she was feeding the chickens in the yard, and made a remarkably charming portrait with her dress hiked up to her knees, and curls of her dark hair escaping from under a kerchief. He swallowed, and added with some bitterness, \"It would be too much to prostrate my mother a second time,\" and took himself away.\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence said, \"you cannot be tormenting him so: leave off.\"\n\n\"But if we do not object, I do not see why he ought to imagine his mother will; after all, she has never seen Gabija,\" Temeraire began, but he stopped and raised his head, his ruff pricking up.\n\nA small dragon came dropping out of the clouds in the distance: one of the local ferals, green, with a remarkable bony crest atop her head in orange and brown stripes. She sighted them and came on, circled once and descended. \"So here you are!\" she said, in accusatory tones. \"What do you mean by hiding yourself away like this?\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Temeraire said, glacially. \"I have come here to look after Laurence, who was injured in a duel; and I do not propose to let anyone object to it, either.\"\n\n\"Hm,\" the feral said, \"well, as long as you aren't trying to get out of it, at least: I hope you wouldn't be that sort of dragon.\"\n\n\"I am not that sort of dragon, at all!\" Temeraire said. \"And it is quite outrageous that you should come flitting back again to accuse me of any such thing. It is not as though I were going to wait about forever on the very thin chance that you should return. After you have found Eroica, then it will be very well for you to start talking about my trying to get out of it: as though I were a scrub.\"\n\n\"What?\" Dyhern said, standing up; he had been sitting upon a log near-by, occupying himself with whittling while Laurence spoke with Temeraire and Ferris, and to Laurence's regret, he had heard his dragon's name mentioned.\n\n\"All right,\" the feral said, \"so go on and bring out the plate, then: we are here, aren't we?\"\n\n\"I believe,\" Temeraire said in awful tones, \"that there was a small matter of proof, and as for we\u2014\" Here he stopped, and Laurence heard Dyhern make a short, sharp inhalation, audible even across the farmyard, and then he was running, his arms open wide as a boy as he pelted downhill, shouting: there were half a dozen heavy-weight dragons breaking through the cloud cover, wisps of fog boiling away over their grey and brown bodies, and Eroica was in the lead.\n\nLaurence had rarely seen a man so overcome: Dyhern could not manage any language but German, and his speech was so choked with tears that it could not have been comprehensible if he had been speaking the most fluent English, but he wrung Laurence's hand with fervor enough to make words superfluous. Eroica, too, was beyond words, attempting as well as any dragon of twenty-three tons and armored in bone plates might to make himself a lap-dog, nearly knocking Dyhern over with attempts at caressing, while his fellows crowded around with enormous anxiety and peppered Dyhern with questions, asking after their own captains, their own officers. The noise was extraordinary.\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence said, almost too baffled to share in the delights of so unlikely a reunion, \"I suppose you must have engineered this, but I cannot conceive how.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, in despairing tones; he was regarding the touching scene with his ruff flattened so thoroughly against his neck as to make it nearly impossible to see at all.\n\n\"Well?\" The little feral popped up to prod Temeraire, nudging him with her nose. \"I suppose now you cannot argue we haven't done our part.\" Another small feral dragon landed, a grey-white beast with suspicious eyes for the crowd of Prussian beasts, and joined the first. \"We are here. We have brought them. Where is the gold?\" she demanded. \"I want to be on my way: I mean to get it somewhere safe, before there are a lot of rumors about it.\"\n\nTemeraire heaved an enormous gasp, his entire chest bellowing out, and said chokingly, \"Ferris, will you pray have the gold plate brought out\u2014Napoleon's service? I do not suppose, Laurence,\" he added, in a sudden burst of desperation, \"that you object to my having offered it as a reward? If you think it an excessive gesture\u2014\"\n\n\"My God,\" Laurence said, with feeling, \"if you have bought us half a dozen Prussian dragons, you might have spent every last ounce of coin in your wagon, without my raising the least objection,\" and Temeraire gave a shudder and put his head under his wing, as the plate was brought out and handed over to the two exultant ferals.\n\nThey fell almost at once to squabbling over the equal division of their spoils, which the presence of various serving-vessels of varied size made difficult. Temeraire flinched from the dispute. Laurence could not pretend to share his feelings, but nevertheless laid a hand upon his muzzle to try to comfort him. \"My dear,\" he said, \"I am very sensible of the pain which this sacrifice must have given you; will you permit me to say that I rejoice in the character which you have displayed in enduring it? And to urge you to console yourself by observing the pleasure you have given our friends, entirely aside from the manifest benefits to our war effort.\"\n\n\"I am very happy to have been of service, of course,\" Temeraire said, monotonously, but Hammond emerged from the cacophony quite nearly incandescent with his own joy, and seized his hand and cried, \"Laurence, Laurence, the beasts say there are another forty of them, spread across Prussia, the entire Prussian aerial corps: they have all run for it. I cannot conceive how they were persuaded.\"\n\n\"Well, it's plain enough, isn't it?\" the grey feral demanded, lifting her head. \"If this Napoleon isn't knocked down, they will never see their captains again, who might all as well be dead. There wasn't any sense in their sitting about in the breeding grounds anyway, and they weren't even being bred, for that matter.\"\n\n\"What?\" Temeraire said, lifting his head, at least briefly distracted from his unhappiness.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I gather this Lien dragon doesn't think much of the Prussian lines: she even had them kept apart on purpose, the males and females, so they shouldn't have any eggs.\"\n\n\"Why,\" Temeraire said, \"how insulting, and when they were so brave\u2014even if they did insist on formation-flying, that was not their fault, really, and they did not know any better; Eroica, I am very sorry you should have endured such rudeness,\" he added, but Eroica reared his head up away from Dyhern, his yellow eyes widening suddenly, and cried out, \"Mein Gott!\"\n\nHe lunged back onto his feet, with such force that tremors ran through the ground; Laurence had to put a hand on Temeraire's leg to steady himself. \"Eggs! Temeraire\u2014forgive me! That I should not tell you at once! She is a fiend, a fiend\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course she is, but whatever are you talking about?\" Temeraire said, pulling his head back on his neck, wary.\n\n\"The white dragon came to the breeding grounds not two weeks ago,\" Eroica said. \"Her insulting remarks\u2014I will not repeat them all! But this we overheard her say,\" and he turned his head one way and another, to the other Prussian dragons, who all nodded energetically, \"that she considered it her duty to protect the lines of France no less than the lines of China: that she meant to prevent our breeding even as she meant also to see to a mongrel egg, which a traitor to her kind had produced, to seal a corrupt alliance between China and the most evil nation of the West\u2014\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Temeraire oversaw the hasty packing with blank calm. \"I see now, Laurence,\" he said, \"that you are quite right, that one must not be a slave to fortune: if I had kept all the gold plate, and never offered the reward, I should never have known that the egg was in danger, and Lien might have\u2014\" Here he faltered, with a shudder which wracked his entire frame; he did not wish to imagine what Lien might have done to the helpless, too-fragile egg. \"But will you be well enough to travel?\" he added instead, with dull anxiety.\n\n\"I will do,\" Laurence said. \"But Temeraire, you and I must go alone; we cannot take the crew with us on such a journey.\"\n\n\"As you think best,\" Temeraire said. The ground crewmen took the lid off the porridge-pit, and he put his head within to eat as much as he could, though he felt no sense of appetite.\n\nHammond and Forthing and Ferris had already been arguing with Laurence in low voices, telling him that it was madness to try to cross all Russia in the worst cold of winter, without escort; they redoubled their arguments now. Temeraire overheard, but made no answer. It would be very difficult, of course, but there was no alternative: to take the southern road would be a loss of three months' time.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" Laurence said, without looking up from his writing-table, where he leaned heavily upon his elbow as he slowly scratched out a letter, \"Temeraire will go: do you imagine there is any question of that? Therefore I am going. Mr. Forthing, I will give you a letter for Whitehall, but until you receive further orders, I hope you will be guided by Mr. Hammond's advice. I imagine that there will be a great want of men to crew the Prussian dragons, and you cannot, I think, do better than to return the favor which Dyhern has done for us heretofore. Mr. Hammond, I would be very much obliged to you if you will ask safe-passage for us from the Tsar.\"\n\n\"Good God!\" Hammond cried, \"as if he can give you any such thing, with five thousand mad and starving ferals scattered across his countryside. Captain, I beg you to try all your influence, all your energies\u2014\"\n\n\"Those,\" Laurence said, cutting him off, \"I must conserve for efforts more likely to succeed.\"\n\nHammond gave over arguing, but a little while later, when Laurence had gone into the house to eat a little supper, he came to Temeraire and made a final attempt. \"Temeraire,\" he said, \"I must say to you what Captain Laurence will not: this journey will be his death. He has scarcely risen from his sickbed; he is weak and ill. To attempt to cross a frozen wasteland in his condition, with insufficient food and shelter, will be a death sentence even in the absence of any other hazards which you might encounter. Will you insist upon taking him to so cruel a fate?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Temeraire cried. \"That you should speak to me so: why is he weak and ill, but that you put him in the way of this wretched duel, and did not let me know anything of what was happening? You may be sure I would not have permitted him to be shot by a worthless coward.\"\n\nSo he sent Hammond packing, but could not help but feel all the force of the argument: Laurence lost his breath so easily now, and looked very weary and grey. It was not two days since he had been first able to stand. Temeraire furrowed the ground uneasily, and then he leaned over and roused Eroica, who was sleeping after his long and arduous flight. \"Will you come and have a word, if you please?\" he asked, low, and when they had padded a little distance away\u2014carefully, so as not to knock down any of the sheepfold or the trees\u2014he summoned his resolve and said, \"Eroica, Laurence cannot come with me\u2014he must not come with me\u2014he is not well. But I must go to the egg, of course. Will\u2014will you look after him for me, until I return?\"\n\n\"Temeraire, best of friends!\" Eroica said. \"I swear to you I will guard him like my own captain: how could I do any less, when you have restored Dyhern to me?\"\n\n\"I hoped you would feel so,\" Temeraire said, although a deep hollow sensation of unhappiness made itself present in his breast, as though having spoken, he had already parted from Laurence. His head bowed with misery.\n\nEroica leaning over nudged his shoulder beneath Temeraire's and offered its massive breadth for support. \"Courage! That you will save your egg and come back again, I have no doubts. And while you are away, Dyhern and I will make it our business to keep your captain safe. So, too, will all my companions: there is many a dragon of Prussia who owes you a happy reunion.\"\n\nTemeraire tried to accept this consolation, but it was hard; he told himself he left Laurence with an immense treasure, and many friends to watch over him, but he could not pretend he was not also leaving Laurence exposed in the midst of war. But the egg\u2014Lien would send assassins, or pay them\u2014Temeraire trembled all over again, envisioning the egg\u2014smashed, that delicate opalescent shell in pieces across the marble floors of the Imperial City, all its guards murdered\u2014\n\n\"I must go,\" he gasped. If Laurence were not coming with him, there was no need for packing; no need for preparation or supply. He would go on the wing, and hunt as he flew. \"Eroica, pray tell him\u2014pray tell Laurence\u2014\" But here Temeraire's invention failed him; he could not suppose what there was to tell Laurence that Laurence did not already know.\n\n\"I will tell him you are sorry to leave him behind,\" Eroica said, \"and that I will stand in your stead as his protector, until you have returned.\"\n\nTemeraire only bobbed his head blindly in agreement, then flung himself aloft; he beat his wings in great scoops of air and lifted away, turning his head to the east, and flew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Laurence heard the shouting outside, and saw the great shadow crossing the fields, and knew at once: Temeraire had gone without him. He was sitting at the rough-hewn table which stood in the house's kitchen. He did not immediately make a push to gather his strength to stand: it was already too late. Temeraire would not be caught by any dragon here, not when he went unarmored, unburdened, and stretching himself to the limits of his speed.\n\nHammond appeared in the doorway, stricken, and Laurence looked him in the face; Hammond hesitated, saw that he already understood. His face fell; he did not speak.\n\n\"You will pray send to the Tsar for a safe-passage regardless,\" Laurence said quietly. \"It is not likely to be of much use, but the Russian couriers may at least pass the word ahead, so he will not meet any official obstacles.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Hammond said. \"Captain, I must beg your pardon\u2014\"\n\nLaurence forestalled him with a hand, and shook his head. There was nothing to be gained by upbraiding Hammond now. He pushed himself up from the table and went back to the cot: there was nothing more he could do at the moment.\n\nHe slept, and woke in the late hour of the night to the sound of a soft scuffling across the room. The embers of the fire lit Dobrozhnov in orange: he was sitting sideways upon his cot, smiling, and holding Gabija by the wrists; she was pulling against his grip and whispering urgently. He said something in cajoling tones, pulling her down towards him, and Laurence pushed himself up and said, \"You damned blackguard, let that girl go, or I will have my men horse-whip you in the yard.\"\n\nDobrozhnov let her go, his face purpling with indignation, and she ran from the house in long fleet strides, gasping like a deer set loose from a snare. The mother's head popped out of the bedroom door, frowning, and a moment later Ferris wrenched wide the front door and stormed in, tall and furious with his sword drawn, and said, \"Now you will give me satisfaction, you wretch\u2014\"\n\nHe was only restrained with difficulty from dragging the man from his sickbed at once; a difficulty only increased by Dobrozhnov saying contemptuously, \"What a to-do! I am not going to fight you over a warm peasant armful, you young ass; make a fool of yourself if you wish.\"\n\n\"You cannot kill a wounded man,\" Laurence said tiredly, \"nor force a coward to face you, Ferris; leave off. Tomorrow he will go back to the city in a wagon-cart, and we will return to the covert, and there will be an end of the matter. Hammond, tell that woman to keep her daughter in the bedroom until we have all of us left.\"\n\nMost of the Prussian dragons had already been sent back to the covert, where they could be supplied. Eroica alone had remained. When Laurence emerged that morning, the great dragon came to the door and earnestly assured him of his protection, a promise which Temeraire had evidently extracted from him before departing. \"He is sure to return very soon,\" Eroica said, with draconic optimism. \"So pray have no fear for yourself, or this magnificent treasure which he has left you: be assured not so much as a single coin will I permit anyone to take from it!\"\n\nDyhern was in equal earnest, though more conscious of the grave danger which Temeraire now faced. \"But while there is life there is hope, as my own example may show,\" he said, \"and you must permit us to make what small returns we may for the gift you and he have given us. Come. We will go back to Vilna. You will rest, you will recover. And Laurence, though your dragon is gone, duty remains: you must be our instructor. The old ways are of no use against Bonaparte; Jena taught us that. It will not be enough that we renew our discipline and our daily practice. We must have new tactics, from the East, and you are best fitted to aid us in contriving them.\"\n\nDyhern's voice, and the example of his conduct, could not fail to carry enormous weight: while imprisoned, he had struggled for his liberty; while grounded, he had pursued service afoot; while his nation had been pinned beneath treaties, he had gone even to Russia to make himself of use in the struggle against the tyrant. Laurence nodded silently. Duty remained.\n\nThe wagon-cart was unnecessary: Dobrozhnov tried to protest he was not yet well enough to travel, but when it had been borne in upon him forcibly that his alternative was to be flung out of doors, he sent for his well-sprung coach and was borne into it by his tall footmen, still groaning and muttering protests. They drove away, not before he pressed a little more gold into the mother's hand, and gave Gabija a broad wink which brought fresh color to Ferris's cheek. Dobrozhnov might well intend to send for her, or return when he was well; but for the moment he was gone from the house, at least. Laurence could see little more that they might do, and he could only trust to society to distract the man with more satisfying entertainments than he might have found while prostrated in a solitary farmhouse.\n\nThe treasure had been well-packed into its carrying-wagon, and Churki and Eroica fed; she was urging Hammond in a low voice, making one final push to persuade him to bring the girl along. Ferris had gone away to Eroica's other side, and busied himself with unnecessary harness-work, to avoid looking upon Miss Merkelyte. He at least had no further cajolery to face, although he looked as though he might have wanted some; his obligations to a family both distant and already disappointed perhaps seemed less compelling than the attractions of the lady before him.\n\nBut when Laurence had been helped carefully aloft, and secured beneath blankets and oilcloth, he looked down Eroica's shoulder and overheard Dyhern asking, \"My young friend: you are determined not to pursue her? I wish to be certain you have made your choice.\"\n\nFerris kept his head bowed and swallowed, then said in stifled tones, \"Thank you, Captain; I cannot.\"\n\nDyhern nodded. \"Well, you are a young man, and there will be many young ladies yet! I have some heart to put into you, also: will I not write to my King's ministers, and request your commission in his service? We have more dragons now than men to fly them, and I need not even ask Laurence if he would release you to us: his answer is a certainty.\"\n\nFerris flushed scarlet in his fair skin; he averted his eyes. \"I\u2014I am very much obliged to you, sir,\" he said, unsteadily, and bowed; Dyhern clapped him on the shoulder and left him, and Ferris came aloft. Even distracted by the mingling of anticipation and unhappiness, he clambered up with all the nimble speed that youth and practice could offer; he hooked on his carabiners with a habitual motion, and sat staring down at his hands. The ground crew were loading their gear and adjusting the makeshift harness, which had been cobbled together for Eroica out of the one Temeraire had left behind, and only imperfectly fitted him, as his breadth and bony plates gave him an entirely different configuration.\n\nThe officers were coming aboard; Hammond had persuaded a disgruntled Churki to give up her matchmaking and put him upon her back at last. Dyhern was speaking with Mrs. Merkelyte and her daughter, making their last farewells. Laurence shut his eyes; he had drunk laudanum against the pain, so he might not be unmanned by the flight, and he felt dizzy and ill. He opened them again: Ferris had made a small startled noise behind him. Dyhern had taken Gabija's hand, and was speaking to her earnestly, gesturing to Eroica; she was looking up at him with surprise, a little shy. She glanced once at Ferris, who was staring down at her. But then she bit her lip and raised her chin, and nodded to Dyhern.\n\nDyhern spoke to Mrs. Merkelyte again, who held a low muttered conversation with her daughter, and then laid her hand in Dyhern's, and nodded her blessing over them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Dyhern flew back to the farmhouse the next morning with a special license, and returned to the covert with his bride. Eroica had by then gathered enough from Churki's openly expressed indignation to be very satisfied with his own captain's victory, as he could not help but see it. He was however gracious in his temperament, and assured Churki heartily that Hammond was sure of finding a splendid partner very soon, if not one quite so lovely and charming as his captain's wife.\n\n\"I hope you do not blame me, Laurence,\" Dyhern said candidly, stopping by Laurence's small hut the following morning to see his progress. \"But I am sure the boy will get over it soon enough: at that age, I did not think much of women when there was battle to be had. Six years grounded is long enough to cool a man's head, however: I have had much time to be sorry that I had nothing to occupy my mind and my days, when my dragon was gone.\"\n\nLaurence could understand his sentiments; he would himself have been grateful for distraction, any distraction, from his own fear and anxiety. When Dyhern had left, he spread out the maps and reports again, which he had politely put aside during the visit, and returned to his self-appointed torment: marking out the likely routes which Temeraire might pursue, and referring to the dispatches to learn all the worst of the circumstances which he might encounter. These were unhappy indeed. Ferals had devoured and ruined so many stores in the western part of the country that famine was spreading widely; the nobles were paying peasant bands by the head to slaughter dragons while they slept.\n\nWhen pain and fatigue overcame Laurence's strength, and he closed his eyes to sleep a little, he walked through thick crusted-over snow, between black trees and a leaden sky above, and found Temeraire's corpse lying still and alone in a field with a red-mouthed stoat feasting on his sides.\n\nWhen Temeraire scraped away the snow around the protruding hoof, he discovered why the horse had not yet been devoured: the rest of the corpse was barely visible beneath several feet of blued ice. He contemplated it wearily, but he had not seen anything else left to eat, anywhere, so he gathered himself and roared at the block of ice: the divine wind thrumming through his chest and cracking the surface. He roared again and dug into the block with his talons; at last the ice broke apart. The corpse broke, too, but that was just as well; he picked up each piece with his jaws, held it in his mouth until it thawed a little, and then he could swallow it.\n\nHe was shivering when he had finished, but at least he did not feel quite so ravenously hungry. The light was beginning to fail, though, and he could not go much further. He went aloft to try to find something like shelter: after half an hour's flight, he caught sight, to his grateful surprise, of a large barn\u2014not quite a barn; it only had one rough wall of heaped stone, and a roof of half-rotten planks held up on columns, so the other sides were open to the elements. It seemed to have been left half-finished: a heap of tall logs stood to one side, as though waiting to complete the building and forgotten.\n\nEven so, it was better by far than the stone wall he had sheltered against last night; the ground beneath was heaped with leaves and even some hay, and nearly clear of snow. He landed, and crawled with some difficulty beneath the roof. Once within, the close quarters were all to the better; he was out of the worst wind, and by lapping his wings to either side and tucking his head beneath them, he warmed a little.\n\nHe slept almost at once and deeply, exhausted with worry and effort. He was aware of nothing until he stirred some hours later, still in the dark, coughing and puzzled by his own warmth: he was uncomfortably warm. That seemed unimaginable, but when he tried to move his head out to see what was burning, he could not: something was keeping his wing in place. He managed to wiggle the wing-tip down a little, and discovered in alarm that while he slept, the heavy logs had been put up to complete the walls, and beyond them a great fire was crackling up from heaped tinder which had been buried beneath the snowbanks. He uttered a cry as a burning ember fell upon his back, between his shoulder blades, and looking up discovered the whole roof was heaped with tinder also. The hay beneath him was catching.\n\nVoices were shouting to one another over the crackle of the fire, in Russian. Temeraire peered out between the logs with one eye and saw shadows moving, men with pitchforks, and he called out, \"Help! Help!\" in that language, and saw them turning to stare and cross themselves. But none of them came near, and he realized, despite a peculiar groggy dullness, that they had set the fire deliberately: they meant to burn him alive.\n\nHe tried to draw breath to roar, but the smoke rasped his throat and set him coughing instead. He tried to wriggle, but the logs had been driven deep, and there were so very many of them. His wings were cringing against his body as more cinders began to rain upon him. He had no other choice; he set his legs beneath him and pushed: sharp searing pain along his wing-blades where the heat scorched the delicate membranes, and the roof pressed as heavily upon him as though they had loaded it with boulders. He pushed once, twice; he had to stop, coughing dreadfully\u2014a third push, and the roof creaked and groaned.\n\nThe men began shouting; they ran in closer, and thrust pitchfork-jabs at his head and his forelegs; he squeezed his eyes shut with a cry as one sharp point sliced the flesh and skin tight along the muzzle-bone, only just barely catching upon the heavy ridge of bone beneath his eye. The man drew back for another attempt, and Temeraire with real desperation gathered all his strength and heaved up, straining.\n\nThe roof cracked abruptly above him. Heaped stones like hot coals came raining down upon his body, and the flames roared suddenly roasting-hot everywhere all around him. He tried to leap aloft, but his legs and wings were unwilling to answer; he floundered up and forward, smashing through the collapsing structure, gasping for the clear, cold air. Clouds of steam and smoke boiled furiously out of the furnace of the fire. Temeraire blundered away through them, his whole body scorched and stinging, until he could fling himself into the snow and roll over onto his back, writhing vigorously to try to cool the burns.\n\nBut the men came again, shouting, and Temeraire had to roll back to his feet. They were running towards him, carrying scythes, pitchforks, axes all raised; the metal glowed orange-red in the firelight. Temeraire pushed himself with an effort up on his haunches, and opened his wings wide; he spread his ruff and roared out his pain, furious, and as a breaking wave they crumpled to the earth before him, and lay still.\n\nThose men further behind slowed, halted, their heads tilting back as they stared upwards at his full breadth. They dropped their weapons and torches and they ran. Temeraire dropped to four legs and stood trembling and panting. His wings stung dreadfully; he gingerly brought them forward and could see the orange-dyed snow through the burns, his membranes pierced in many places by ragged holes like worn-through sailcloth.\n\nHe dug himself into a snowbank for a little more relief, but soon he was cold again despite the burns. He shivered in the frigid air, and he could not keep himself pressed into the snow for long. He even crept back a little towards the raging fire afterwards to warm himself, and curled into a heap near it: exhaustion trembled through him, and yet he could not sleep. The men might come back; they might return with guns. He flinched as the last corner of the false barn crashed down into the rising bonfire, orange sparks erupting in a blaze of fireworks-glory.\n\nHe thought of trying to fly away some distance, but he did not want to try his wings. They stung so, and ached along all the ribs, and his throat was rubbed-raw and painful. And the night was so very cold.\n\nBut he had evidently closed his eyes; he was sleeping. He opened them again at an unpleasant clanging noise, very close by, and reared his head up and away from a sharpened iron pike planted point-downwards in the snow, scarce inches from his eye. The man holding the shaft stared up at him, a face ringed in fur like a lion, and then in the next moment was already running away, his heels kicking up clods of snow behind him. Another man was still standing by the head of the pike, a drawn sword in his hand, which he had used to deflect it.\n\nTemeraire gazed down at him dully: it was Tharkay, although that it did not make any sense, of course. However, there was a more pressing matter: there was a horse running away, too, in the distance. \"Is that your horse?\" Temeraire asked. \"Would you mind a great deal if I eat it?\"\n\nHe could only hope that the answer was not yes, because he could not bring himself to wait to hear it: in a few moments more the horse would be out of sight in the trees ahead, and perhaps lost. His wings stung and ached dreadfully when he unfurled them, and he had to overfill his breath to keep aloft\u2014he felt ungainly, a lumbering hulk in the air, but none of that really mattered; the world had narrowed to a line of small hoofprint indentations in the snow, shadowed deeper blue, and the dark body of the running horse ahead.\n\nHe devoured her hooves and tail one and all; he only remembered to spit out the saddle because the stirrups caught on one of his teeth. The hot blood ran comfortingly down his sore throat. When he had swallowed the last bite, he could be a little ashamed, and looked around guiltily as Tharkay trudged towards him, breaking a path through the snow. \"I am very sorry,\" he said apologetically. \"And I will certainly get you another horse, as soon as ever I can; at least, once there are other things to eat. But what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Looking for you,\" Tharkay said. \"Or rather, for the army you are with: I supposed that a message should reach you quicker, if I found the lines of communication, than I could bring it to Vilna myself. I was able to hire a dragon to bring me to Kiev, but no beast would go further north than that, nor any closer to the Russian Army.\"\n\n\"Well, they are quite sensible to refuse,\" Temeraire said, \"for I have never met any people so unfriendly as this, anywhere, at least not when I had not given them cause to be unfriendly. But Tharkay,\" he said, misery seizing him fresh, as he recalled his circumstances, \"I cannot take you to Laurence\u2014I must go on. I must get to China\u2014\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon for interrupting you,\" Tharkay said. \"But I think you will find you are mistaken: you must get to France. They stopped in Istanbul with your egg, two days ago. There may yet be a chance to intercept them, I believe, in the Alps.\"\n\n\"Well, Laurence, you have a gift for establishing yourself in the more benighted places of the world,\" Tharkay said, his voice rasping with the cold even after they had warmed their hands and throats with a cup of tea. Laurence could hardly quarrel with the remark: they were huddling upon a ledge inside an icy crevasse which plunged away beneath them in rings of blue shading to midnight-dark, even though above their heads the clouds wheeled across a wide and sunny sky.\n\nThey were at least not in present danger of a fall to their deaths: Temeraire, crouching, filled the pit beneath them very much like a cork sitting in the neck of a bottle, looking entirely as uncomfortable as this description might suggest despite a thick matting of dried leaves and straw which protected his hide from the walls. But he was very nearly invisible against the dark; two French patrols had flown directly overhead in broad daylight to-day, quite clearly visible from their hiding-hole, but Temeraire had not been spotted even by the sharp eyes of the Pou-de-Ciel dragons.\n\n\"I will admit this is an unsurpassed bolt-hole,\" Tharkay added. \"I imagine I could walk past the opening a dozen times without the least suspicion, even if I had the certain knowledge you were within a hundred yards of me.\"\n\n\"I cannot think it so splendid as all that,\" Temeraire put in, a little plaintively. \"It is very strange to feel that there is nothing beneath me: I feel as though I am flying, but I am not; and these walls are quite cold. But pray let us look at the maps again, and see if you can tell a little better, which way they are likely to come?\"\n\nThese Laurence had just finished tacking to the walls of the crevasse with small nails, and they were more the work of his hands than their original surveyors' by now, with a great many alterations drawn atop the long line of the Alps, and dozens of passes marked for being shut by snow and ice. The ferals had made a great many snickering comments about the quality of the maps when he had first displayed them for their consideration; dragons made considerably better surveyors than men.\n\nThe French company might fly over a closed pass, but he thought it unlikely. Great inconvenience would attend such a choice: the dragons required places to rest the night, safe from avalanche and rockfall, and their passengers would have little comfort trying to make camp. Even French couriers going with all speed back and forth to Italy avoided the closed passes, and the company from Istanbul would have no reason to suspect they needed to brave so inhospitable a route: these were the walls around the very heart of France, and Napoleon did not yet suppose his citadel likely to be stormed.\n\n\"You do not suppose they will try that crossing Bistorta told us of, where her friend was nearly buried?\" Temeraire shuddered. \"Oh! If they should let the egg be smashed, or frozen\u2014\"\n\n\"You may rely they will do no such thing, having brought it so far, so carefully,\" Laurence said. Even if Lien would have preferred to see Temeraire and Iskierka's egg destroyed, Napoleon plainly did not mean to discard so priceless a cross-breed, nor hesitate to use it to his best advantage: whether to bring Celestial and Kazilik blood into his own lines, or perhaps even to compel Temeraire and Iskierka to surrender to him, removing them from the field of battle. The egg might remain unhatched and vulnerable for another year, perhaps even as much as two.\n\n\"They have alternatives enough, without risking any of the worse passes,\" Laurence finished. \"Our best chance must be to ask our friends to disperse themselves widely through the passes, and bring us news of any unusual party of dragons seen coming into the mountains. Was there a heavy-weight among them?\" he asked Tharkay, who nodded.\n\n\"A Fleur-de-Nuit, I am sorry to say.\" It was indeed unwelcome news: the party might well travel by night with such a guide, and if caught at such a time would have all the advantage of the night-flying breed's better vision.\n\n\"Only find them for me,\" Temeraire said, with unwonted savagery, \"and I will answer for any number of dragons, if they even have the gall to try and defend egg-stealing to my face: I wonder they should not be heartily ashamed of themselves.\"\n\nThat evening, the Alpine dragons promptly scattered on this mission\u2014they were none loath to accommodate the request, Temeraire having brought two substantial chests packed brim-full of gold plate and handsome jewels\u2014and after devouring the goat which they had brought him, Temeraire fell into a fitful drowse, his head curled awkwardly atop his body, which rose and settled uneasy in the bottle-neck of the chasm with every breath.\n\nThe ferals had also brought another load of hay, likely pilfered from some highly perplexed farmer more used to dragons stealing his sheep than their feed. With this, Laurence and Tharkay repaired the gaps which had opened in Temeraire's protective waistcoat; an operation which, requiring them to clamber precariously around the ice-walls secured only with a pickax while they thrust handfuls of straw down Temeraire's sides, left Laurence shaking and weary when it was done. He climbed only slowly back up to the ledge that was their shelter; Tharkay was adding the rest of the straw into the matting that was their own protection from the ice.\n\n\"This is a peculiar sort of place for convalescence, Laurence,\" Tharkay observed as they huddled back beneath their makeshift heap of oilskins and furs, gnawing the dried meat which was all the supper they could have: fire could not be risked in the night, where the glow would illuminate all the crevasse for any Fleur-de-Nuit within fifty miles to see. \"I cannot recall when I have seen either of you look more ragged.\"\n\n\"There is nothing to be done for it,\" Laurence said shortly. He was almost too cold to speak. The bullet-wound pained him deeply\u2014an ache which drew all the chill of the ice into his body, and barred sleep. He dug out his brandy-flask, and swallowing handed it on to Tharkay. \"I am sorry if your work in Istanbul was interrupted.\"\n\n\"No,\" Tharkay said, permitting the change of subject. \"My work was finished, some days before the French dragons came through. It was just as well to have an excuse to leave. It is a very damnable thing, Laurence, to be forever reminded that one is too much betwixt and between to belong to any settled place.\" He drank deeply, and handed the flask on. In the dark, his face could not be seen, and his voice had kept light, but Laurence was sorry. He thought he knew what had sparked that rare flash of bitterness: Tharkay had gone to Istanbul to see Avraam Maden, whose daughter had married another man.\n\n\"How did you manage to hire a dragon, for your passage?\" Laurence asked quietly.\n\n\"An hour's ride east from the city, I found an isolated place and staked out a handsome cow, and waited; a couple of ferals landed at twilight. They were inclined to be suspicious, but they understood Durzagh well enough for me to make myself understood, and bribery did the rest. They flew me over the Black Sea, nearabouts to the outskirts of Odessa, and made my desire to be carried onward known to the dragons there with whom they could speak, and handed me over to them like a piece of peculiar baggage. In this fashion I arranged to have myself bundled along. I cannot call it a comfortable way to travel, but for speed it was remarkable.\"\n\nThey exchanged the flask a few more times, choked down the rest of the meat, and eventually slept, curled almost as awkward as Temeraire over their own knees, pulled in tight to make small warm knots of their bodies. Laurence jerked awake at uncertain intervals from discomfort and shrieks of wind, in pitch darkness, only Tharkay's presence at his side and the steady low hissing of Temeraire's breath to orient him. The sky above turned, stars in their paces, and the night crept onward; he woke again with the first brightness creeping into the sky, and dozed fitfully until the dawn was fully advanced. No word had come.\n\nThey built their small fire, and Tharkay made the climb to the top of the crevasse to pack a pailful of snow to be melted. They brewed tea, and soaked their hard bread and dried meat until it became a little more edible. Temeraire stirred, and looked longingly up at the open sky, but did not propose risking even a short flight. The day crept even more slowly than the night, and when Bistorta dropped into the crevasse at dusk, Laurence was not more startled than he was glad. She had brought Temeraire a small sheep, but no news: no party of dragons had been seen coming into the mountain, nor even a single heavy-weight.\n\n\"But Tharkay did say they were visiting at the Sultan's palace,\" Temeraire argued with his own disappointment, \"and I dare say meant to stay in Istanbul a little while, so we ought not have expected them yesterday: to-night, perhaps, or tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Or the day after, if I misjudged their haste,\" Tharkay said.\n\nLaurence did not say, that it had taken Tharkay three days to find Temeraire, and more than a week to reach their present camp, where the search had consumed another; that the egg might already be gone into France, and beyond their reach.\n\n\"Well, perhaps it will be to-night,\" Temeraire said, low, half to himself.\n\nBut there was no sighting that night or the following, and by the third Temeraire was in a fever of anxiety: the possibility that the egg was near acted upon him as a goad. Only the strongest persuasion kept him from struggling out of their bolt-hole and attempting his own search, and Laurence had no confidence that even this would restrain him when the next dawn came.\n\nBut in the late dark hours, the moon having set, he jerked awake as Temeraire moved, scrabbling against the ice walls: he looked up and saw the outline of a small dragon against the stars, peering in: Bistorta. \"Laurence,\" Temeraire was saying, urgently, \"Laurence, quickly, at once.\"\n\nTemeraire put them up out of the crevasse, small showers of snow and ice drifting down as the ice walls shivered and groaned around him. He had barely put them down before he came scrabbling out himself, emerging like some unexpected monstrous beast from the depths of the earth. Great chunks of ice crashed away beneath him with a shattering noise as he heaved himself onto the slope, back legs clawing for purchase at the mouth of the crevasse. Then he shook himself, put out a taloned forehand, and caught Laurence and Tharkay up and put them on his back: barely a moment for them to clip their carabiners onto his abbreviated harness and he was launching aloft, his still-ragged wings churning furiously, and circling up into the air.\n\nHe could fly no quicker than his guide, for which Laurence was grateful, as otherwise he feared Temeraire would have pressed past his strength. Even keeping Bistorta's pace, his whole body was laboring, his breath coming with some difficulty; they were neither of them, as Tharkay had said, having a healthy convalescence. Thin blades of mountain air drove through the gaps in Laurence's own huddled-on wraps, the corners of his oilskins escaping often to flap noisily in the wind until he could catch them back around himself.\n\nThe mountains were shadows, black shapes jagged against the sky. Bistorta and Temeraire did not talk; they flew and flew southward, and after perhaps an hour's travel Bistorta landed and made a small sharp whistling noise, piercing, and then stood with her head cocked, listening. No reply came; she came back aloft and said, \"Further!\"\n\nAfter perhaps another ten minutes, she tried again; this time in the distance a similar whistle answered her, and she altered their course slightly. Another brief span, and the whistle was very close: then another of the small dragons was leaping up to meet them, chirping to Bistorta and to Temeraire: Laurence could not follow much of the conversation, but they wheeled after this newcomer and plunged into a valley between two of the tall sharp peaks. The new guide led them to a narrow ledge\u2014narrow by Temeraire's standards, at least; he had to stand on his hind legs almost embracing the cliff face to keep himself upon it. \"They are coming,\" he said to Laurence, his voice trembling with urgency. \"A heavy-weight dragon, but not a Fleur-de-Nuit; they do not know what she is, he says.\"\n\n\"Alone?\" Laurence said, and looked at Tharkay, who shook his head doubtfully.\n\n\"What I heard in Istanbul was three dragons, traveling in company,\" he said, \"but rumor on the streets is often amplified; I would not rely upon it.\"\n\n\"I must stop them,\" Temeraire said, \"but I must be sure not to hurt the egg\u2014oh! If I should use the divine wind upon them, and the shell were to\u2014\" He could not finish, his voice breaking off into misery.\n\n\"We must try and pen them in,\" Laurence said, looking at the narrow pass, \"and ask the ferals to make something of a screen above them. If it is not a Fleur-de-Nuit, we may well take them by surprise, and they will not be sure the size of our party; caution may persuade them to surrender the egg. You are sure the other dragon will not think of harming the egg?\"\n\n\"Unless it is Lien, herself,\" Temeraire said venomously. \"She would do anything, I am sure, even to a helpless egg: you see what she has done already!\" He twisted his neck about to look as another feral landed, to chirp a new report: their quarry was perhaps ten miles distant, coming quickly.\n\nThey could not use the divine wind against the mountainside for fear of warning the oncoming dragon; but Temeraire's weight and fury served well enough to tear down a great heap of stone and ice and snow to block the far mouth of the valley: still a terrible noise, but not an unfamiliar one in those mountains. On the ledge, Laurence cleaned and loaded his pistols, and the rifle he had brought with him from Vilna, and put fresh wicks on his pair of incendiaries. They would not do much to bring down a heavy-weight, but they might do to make a convincing show of arms; he lined the guns up in a row, ready to be fired off as quickly as possible. Tharkay also added his own pistol and rifle to the collection.\n\nAnd then Temeraire returned to his perch, and they all held stiff and cold and silent, listening for the rhythmic flap of wings. The ferals\u2014another five or so had joined them\u2014gathered on either side, but in a much more celebratory spirit; they were quiet but chirping softly to one another, and Laurence caught more than once the exultant word for treasure passing among them.\n\nBut their voices fell silent, soon, and then they were listening, too: their prey was close. The Alpine ferals all sat up alertly, their narrow heads giving them a look of eager greyhounds trembling for the sign to spring. Laurence heard the dragon coming: if Granby had been here, he might have been able to say what the breed was, by the wing-gait. Laurence could not guess, but the beast that passed below their ledge was certainly a heavy-weight and a large one, throwing a long sinuous shadow blue on the blue snow, with drifting scraps of cloud clinging to its sides.\n\nTemeraire managed to restrain himself until the dragon had gone through the pass; then he flung himself off the cliff in a leap, twisting as he did mid-air to come about, and then he roared\u2014not in the dragon's direction, which might have threatened the egg, if the other beast was carrying it, but at the rock face.\n\nThe shattering force of the divine wind blasted the snow-laden peak on the other side of the pass, and an avalanche came roaring down: rock, snow, ice all together, a great cloud. Laurence squinted through his flying-goggles as snow spattered his face; the Alpine ferals had all jumped aloft and were keening their high-pitched hunting song as they went in circles over the valley, forming a ceiling for their trap. The cloud of snow and ice hid the other beast. Temeraire roared again, not the divine wind this time, only a challenge; he was hovering mid-air, darting a little to one side and then another, waiting for an opening to dive in.\n\nLaurence glimpsed the shadow of the other dragon as it twisted around upon itself wildly, taken by surprise, turning towards them, and then a long painfully brilliant gout of flame came erupting through the cloud, dissolving the blizzard into boiling steam. A tongue of fire licked at the mountainside, and Laurence and Tharkay dived into the snowbank as the flames came spilling up the rock and past their ledge, heat and cold both intolerable at once. The dragon came roaring out behind its flames and struck Temeraire mid-sky, and the two beasts rolled, twisting around each other, hissing and furious. Alarmed, Laurence dug out of the snow, squinting uselessly: Flammes-de-Gloire did not travel alone; they were too rare for that; were there more beasts coming? He could see almost nothing of the struggle: his eyes were streaked with dazzle from the flames, and a handful of trees and scrub in the valley below had caught like dry tinder, blazing small suns that made the night around them into pitch.\n\nBut he did not need to see: he heard the snarling of the fire-breather's voice saying, in clear wrathful English, \"Oh! How dare you leap on me out of the dark, like a coward! I will tear you into pieces, see if I don't!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"Whatever are you doing here?\" Temeraire said, struggling with a crushing sensation of disappointment. But if the egg had not come this way, surely it had gone another; he turned without waiting for an answer to Bistorta, who had at last crept cautiously back: the other ferals had scattered in high alarm at the torrents of flame. \"What do you mean, setting me on Iskierka?\" he demanded. \"She is not a French dragon, at all; and where is the egg?\"\n\nBistorta defended herself smartly. \"How were we to know she was not a French dragon?\" she said. \"They have so many peculiar kinds; and anyway, you did not say you wanted a French dragon, you said you were looking for a heavy-weight and a fighting-dragon, and you cannot say she is not that.\"\n\n\"What am I doing here?\" Iskierka said, paying no attention to their conversation. \"I am here for my egg, which you promised me and promised me would be perfectly safe in China, and should have an emperor as companion, and now only look what has happened! Why are you jumping out upon me out of nowhere like this? Granby, did you put him up to it? I did not think you would betray me so,\" she added reproachfully, her head swinging around.\n\n\"I didn't, but you may be sure I would have done it in a heartbeat, if I had any notion of his being anywhere near,\" Granby said without even a little hesitation as he clambered down her side. \"Hell-bent on going straight into France, and bearding Lien in her den,\" he told Laurence and Tharkay, as he shook their hands. \"Nothing would hold her, when she knew. It was all I could do to persuade her we had to swing out over the Med, and not fly straight across over every Frenchman and French gun in Spain.\"\n\nHe sat heavily down upon a boulder and rubbed his arm across his forehead. The golden hook which had taken the place of his left hand gleamed with reflected flame: half a dozen bushes and scrubby trees were still alight, where they clung to the walls of the mountains. His brown hair was unbraided and in a wind-tangled mess, his clothing disordered and his face unshaven, as though he had been flung dragon-back without any warning and dragged across Europe for days, very likely the case. He gratefully accepted the offer of Laurence's canteen.\n\n\"Well, that is quite absurd,\" Temeraire said, \"for if ever Lien gets the egg, she will have it well-hidden, and any number of soldiers and dragons guarding it.\"\n\n\"It is not absurd,\" Iskierka returned. \"Of course we must go to her, if she has the egg. What use is there going anywhere else?\" Which had an uncomfortable ring of truth to it, Temeraire had to admit; only that was plainly hopeless, so he could not allow Lien to have the egg, yet.\n\n\"When I have scorched her a few times, I dare say she will turn it over,\" Iskierka continued. \"What good did you suppose it would do for you to leap upon me?\"\n\n\"I did not mean to!\" Temeraire said. \"We have been laying a trap for the dragons who are bringing the egg back from China.\"\n\nIskierka snorted. \"I see how well that plan has worked. If you cannot tell the difference between me and an egg-stealing French dragon, I do not see how you ever expected to get the egg back this way.\"\n\n\"It is dark!\" Temeraire said. \"And I could not go and look closely at you, or else the element of surprise,\" on which he laid especial emphasis, as a point of strategy that surely even Iskierka might understand, \"should have been lost.\"\n\nShe remained unimpressed. \"It was certainly a surprise, because it was a ridiculous thing to do. What if the egg-stealer should be one of those night-flying dragons? I dare say she should have flown straight around you. I saw one of them yesterday evening at a distance, while I was trying to work my way around these wretched mountains, and I thought I should make her show me the way; but as soon as it was dark she managed to lose me, even though I should have had her in an hour in daylight\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" cried Temeraire, seizing upon this intelligence. \"Where did you see her?\"\n\n\"You are not paying attention; what difference does that make?\" Iskierka said crossly, but when Temeraire had made her understand that a Fleur-de-Nuit had stolen the egg, and very likely it was the same one she had seen, she ceased to be quarrelsome at once.\n\nThere was no sense in retracing her steps, but Laurence, dear Laurence, had brought his maps; Temeraire remembered with a moment of shame how he had privately resented Laurence's taking those few moments, when they had been leaving the crevasse, to take them down and pack them up: how useless they had seemed in the moment! And how priceless now, as Laurence drew them out and laid them before Granby, who squinting by the light of a torch found the place where Iskierka had sighted the Fleur-de-Nuit. From there, they found the nearest pass she would have taken through the mountains, perhaps twenty miles distant. Their best chance\u2014Temeraire refused to name it their only chance\u2014was to catch her on the western side. Inside the borders of France.\n\n\"The ferals cannot match your pace,\" Laurence said, as he rolled the maps up again. \"But ask them to follow us, so long as they are able and willing: we may well be grateful of their aid at the end; or they may sight her coming out of another pass, if we have mistaken her course.\"\n\nHe did not say, This Fleur-de-Nuit may only have been a patrol-dragon; you must not raise your hopes, or It has been a day and a night; the egg may already have been carried deep into France, or Iskierka was sighted, they are looking for us; we are sure to run into a French patrol.\n\nLaurence said none of these things, and nevertheless Temeraire was unwillingly conscious that Laurence might have said them. He did not wish to think these things; he struggled not to think of anything so much like despair and surrender, but the long dragging weeks of fears and searching had worn away at his own blind determination. It seemed his mind would fix upon them, no matter how he tried to evade the thoughts.\n\n\"If you would prefer to leave us,\" Laurence was saying to Tharkay, low, \"we might bribe the ferals thoroughly enough, I think, to buy your passage back to some company of the Russian army: the Cossacks were already nearing the Oder.\"\n\n\"That is a sufficient distance to make it likely I should meet a company of Frenchmen, first,\" Tharkay said.\n\nThey were in headlong flight by then, Iskierka outpacing him badly; a circumstance which on any other occasion would have been deeply mortifying. At present, Temeraire did not care. Iskierka might outfly him by a hundred leagues, so long as she reached the egg before the Fleur-de-Nuit reached the ominous mark upon Laurence's map: the great network of caverns just beyond the Alps labeled simply, L'ARM\u00c9E DE L'AIR: the training grounds where the French aerial corps hatched most of their beasts, and trained their recruits.\n\nTemeraire's wings ached, but he fixed determinedly on the thin pale cloud of steam that trailed Iskierka's flight and pressed onwards. To the east, the edge of the mountains, ragged like an unsharpened knife, steadily grew more visible. The sun was coming."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The sky was deep rose-grey when they finally climbed over one last gasping ridge of mountains and plunged gratefully into the pass, an hour later: Iskierka still in the lead, but Temeraire had caught up a little, navigating the higher elevations; he had grown more used to the thinness of the air. Still he was dull and laboring, and he only distantly heard Tharkay say, \"Laurence,\" and then a moment later, after the click of the spyglass, Laurence replying, \"I see it.\"\n\nHe said nothing more, and Temeraire only flew on; slowly his mind turned it over and over and finally he said, \"Laurence, what is it?\"\n\nLaurence did not immediately answer, and then gently said, \"There is a small camp in the valley directly behind us, with the remains of a dragon's meal, I think.\"\n\n\"But that is splendid!\" Temeraire cried, and meant to call to Iskierka with the news; but the tone of Laurence's voice held him. \"Surely we are on their trail?\" he added uncertainly.\n\n\"The fire is cold, my dear,\" Laurence said. \"The Fleur-de-Nuit would have spent her day there; she will have been on the wing since nightfall.\"\n\nThey were a full night's flying behind her, then. Temeraire's heart sank, but then Iskierka gave a sudden roar, and even jetted a gout of flame: he jerked his head forward and saw in the distance a small dark figure against the sky, sunlight breaking over the crest of the mountains and catching its wings, and the dragon ducked its head away from the light, as if it disliked the brilliance, and dived back into shadow.\n\n\"Oh!\" Temeraire cried aloud, and flung himself after Iskierka, all worry, all fear forgot; he beat desperately on even as she stretched herself out her full length, coils unraveling into a single red-and-green banner and steam hissing furiously from every spike. \"How far, Laurence? How far?\"\n\nLaurence was standing in his carabiners and peering through his glass. \"Not five miles distant. Surely they must have gone further in a full night's flying.\"\n\n\"It might not have been their camp,\" Tharkay said.\n\n\"It ought to have been, unless they made remarkably bad time the night before last,\" Laurence said, \"and they had good reason to make haste.\" And then sharply he said, \"Temeraire, wait\u2014Temeraire! Listen to me,\" but waiting, listening, no; Temeraire could not bear to listen to anything which should make him wait. He roared out instead, a challenge that split the air, and saw the Fleur-de-Nuit\u2014it was a Fleur-de-Nuit, it was!\u2014pop up again from the valley, looking their way. And wrapped against her breast\u2014impossible to be certain, for it was thickly swaddled in netting, in layers of white padding stark against the dragon's grey-black hide\u2014oh! Impossible to doubt; it was the egg, the egg\u2014\n\nLaurence was shouting through his speaking-trumpet now, but Temeraire did not hear what he said; fury dimmed all his senses, and drove him in a surging rush forward. He and Iskierka were ranged alongside each other, their minds for once as one; he felt the churning steam of her fires jetting against his side and welcomed it even as the bitter air froze it to his scales. He was breathing in vast expanding gulps, the divine wind thrumming beneath his breast, rattling in his throat. The Fleur-de-Nuit had dived into the valley again, and as they came blazing into it they saw her cowering back against the cliff wall\u2014too ashamed of herself to fly or fight\u2014as well she should have been, Temeraire thought hotly, and he flung himself to the ground and roared well above her head.\n\nShe cringed down before him. \"How dare you take my egg!\" Iskierka hissed, landing beside him and pouncing forward; the Fleur-de-Nuit cried out as she raked her back, and the harness came loose\u2014\n\n\"Be careful!\" Temeraire leapt forward and caught at the forward edge of the netting as the whole mass of it came loose and the egg\u2014\n\nThe egg fell out, unraveling into nothing more than a mass of cotton wadding and rags, empty. The netting hung on Temeraire's claws. His breath caught: the egg, where was the egg? He could not think, could not understand.\n\n\"Temeraire, it is a trap!\" Laurence was shouting, hoarse as though he had been shouting it a long time. \"Temeraire!\"\n\n\"A trap,\" Temeraire repeated, numbly, as four heavy-weight dragons came down around them: all of them under full harness, loaded with men and guns, and a cloud of middle-weight beasts circled in the air aloft.\n\nLaurence surfaced in the pleasant manner where sleep by imperceptible degrees became wakefulness, and the world only slowly intruded upon his consciousness. In the final stages of the process he at last opened his eyes, sunlight illuminating the woolen bedcurtains of deep blue, snugly drawn against draughts. A vast and cheerful noise was rising outside, roughly what might have been expected of a herd of elephants engaged in a melee. He rose and went to the window of his chamber\u2014a window barred with iron, but set in a spacious and comfortable room elevated by the presence of a truly handsome wooden desk he would not have disdained to own himself, and a chamberpot of porcelain painted in flowers.\n\nA species of chaos was under way in the large courtyard: dragons in harness descending, their crews spilling off their backs, and one and all making their way to tables. Even the dragons ate out of large clay bowls they carried for themselves, taken from heaped stacks at one side of the grounds to be filled in the cooking-pits at the other: Laurence could see the clouds of steam rising. The men were doing likewise, on a smaller scale, and the companies then gathered together again to devour their meal. The operation was not a novel one to Laurence, but it was the first time he had seen it executed in so expert a fashion by any Western army; he might again have been with the Chinese legions, save that there was a greater and motley variety to the dragons.\n\nLaurence did not think he saw a single breed to recognize, but the characteristics of many scattered and shared out among many beasts. To his surprise, the light-weight Pou-de-Ciel was perhaps the best represented, mixed it seemed with larger and more notable sorts; one beast, with the conformation and size of the smaller breed almost exactly, had the brilliant yellow-striped black coloration of the Flamme-de-Gloire, a cross he would never have expected. Many others bore in varied patterns the long feathery scales of the Incan breeds.\n\nHe had been standing by the window for perhaps a quarter of an hour, watching, when the bell rang half-past noon and all quitted the field, the dragons and the men alike carrying their bowls to an enormous washing-trough, with large bundles of stiff straw tied above to serve as scrubbing-brushes, so they could scrape clean their dishes before depositing them back onto the stacks.\n\nThen they lifted away, and exposed the large and sun-drenched field beyond them. Now Laurence could see the cooking-pits in their neat rows, still emitting a steady cloud of warm steam\u2014which wafted tenderly, moistly, over the just-exposed shells of what seemed a thousand dragon eggs and more.\n\nLaurence stood staring in appalled horror for some half an hour, trying to make an accurate count. It was not an easy task: the eggs were all half-buried in heaps of sand and surrounded by small fires, which a busy crowd of workmen tended out of wheelbarrows laden with wood, moving constantly up and down the rows. He was interrupted finally by a chambermaid knocking tentatively with his coat, cleaned and pressed, along with fresh linen; she asked him timidly if he would come to dinner. He washed and dressed; he would have liked to shave, but they had not left him his razor. The maid led him downstairs\u2014trailed by two guards\u2014into a small room, also barred and well-guarded, where Laurence found a disheartened Granby before him, attempting to make pantomime conversation with a handful of glum, grey Prussian officers.\n\n\"Well, Laurence, we are in the soup properly,\" Granby said, when they had sat down to table. \"He is going to drown us in dragons if we give him another year. How he means to feed them all is a large question, but I dare say he has worked out some cleverness for that, too.\"\n\nTheir own dinner was brought out then, and Tharkay still had not come. Laurence turned and spoke to one of the guards: \"Our companion, is he ill? Il est malade?\"\n\nThe young man\u2014very young, his mustache still a weak and struggling thing\u2014stared at him so blankly that Laurence wondered too late if Tharkay might have contrived to pass himself off as a servant, or a ground crewman, and if he were in danger of undermining the ruse. Then the youth said suddenly, \"Oh, you mean the spy? They are sending him to Paris to be shot.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "\"I hope they do not mean to try to put me in a cave, for I will not have it,\" Iskierka said loudly, with a snort of flame for the benefit of the two large dragons presently guarding them, who eyed her nervously. The training grounds stood at the foot of a steep cliff wall pockmarked with wide cave-mouths, and many dragons were peering out of them interestedly at the prisoners. Temeraire for his part had lived in a cave before, and in any case had no heart to defend his prerogatives against any kind of insult at the moment. He felt his spirits would have been ideally matched to a tenancy in a dismal swamp, or perhaps upon some comfortless lichen-covered rock.\n\nBut they were not taken to a cave. A small dragon, something between a Pou-de-Ciel and a Pascal's Blue, landed before them and announced in an incongruously deep voice, \"Follow me, if you please,\" in French; he brought them over the wide martial fields to a spacious building, constructed of stone, with a small but elegant fountain in front. Plainly it had drawn upon the dragon pavilions of China for inspiration, but in style Temeraire had not seen anything like it: the roof was raised up on tall smooth round pillars, and there was something very pleasingly mathematical about the proportions of the rectangular floor, made of white marble and marvelously warmed through from beneath. Iskierka immediately sprawled herself to her full length upon it with a sigh. \"Well, I call that something like,\" but Temeraire sat on his haunches and curled his tail about himself, resentful of this reminder of the perversity of the world.\n\n\"I wonder that you can make yourself comfortable under these circumstances,\" he said bitterly. It seemed to him almost heartless.\n\n\"I do not see that the circumstances are so very bad,\" Iskierka said maddeningly. \"I was quite tired and hungry, and you could not even keep up with me, flying. Now we will have a rest, and eat something, and then we will find out where the egg and Granby are, and we will go and take them back.\"\n\n\"You are being unutterably stupid,\" Temeraire said. \"They will not keep them in the same place. If we should try and get Granby and Laurence, the French will order us to put them back or else they will hurt the egg; if we should try and get the egg, they will order us to leave it or else they will hurt our captains. We are prisoners twice over, and there is nothing we can do about it. I dare say Lien is congratulating herself all this time,\" and he added, low, \"on how well her plans have come about.\"\n\n\"I think you are the one being stupid,\" Iskierka said, mantling in some heat. \"It is quite the other way round. If they should hurt Granby, even a little, or the egg, even a little, I will certainly burn up all of them, and they must know it. They will not dare harm them, I am sure: you see how respectful they are being.\"\n\n\"Oh! There is no use arguing with you,\" Temeraire said, but secretly felt a little comforted: perhaps there was something in what Iskierka said. The French did know enough to be wary of them both.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Iskierka said, \"it is just as I told Granby, and as I told you: if they have the egg, there is no use our being anywhere else. I am just as pleased to be nearer the egg, and having a good dinner: here it comes! Now pray don't be absurd and sit there without eating: as though that would do any good.\"\n\nThe dinner was not elaborate, but a good hot porridge flavorful with meat, and it was brought to them in large bowls. \"There was no time to make anything more,\" the deep-voiced dragon, whose name was Astucieux, explained apologetically, which implied there should be something better in the morning, and seemed to bear out Iskierka's way of thinking. Temeraire found his appetite quite restored by the thought, and made a hearty meal, but when the dishes had been removed, they were left alone again with their guards, a ring of large dragons, who became silent, looming shadows as the light failed.\n\nFar off he still heard companionable chatter, voices calling to one another from the caves; the warming orange glow of firelight shone all over the large nearby field, and faintly in the distance he could glimpse yellow squares of windows looking out of a large building, if he stretched up on his rear legs. He sank down again. The distant noise only made him feel their isolation more, and his worries returned afresh. After all, how would they know if anything had happened to Laurence or to Granby or to Tharkay; or to the egg; the French would certainly lie to conceal it, if any of them came to harm.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" he called out to the guards, and one of them came close, warily: she was a Grand Chevalier, very near Maximus's size\u2014and Temeraire realized in surprise she was not under harness, and indeed looked rather ill-kept, as French dragons went; her scales between her shoulders, where she could not have reached with her snout, were even dirty.\n\n\"What do you want?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I am Temeraire,\" he said, meaning to be polite. \"Will you pray tell me your name?\"\n\n\"I am Efficatrice, but I don't see why you should care,\" she said. \"Unless you mean to make up to me, and you can stop that right away, if you do. I am not stupid, and I mean to win my harness: so don't suppose you can practice any tricks upon me.\"\n\n\"Win your harness?\" Temeraire said, baffled, but the Chevalier evidently thought she was being insulted, for she drew herself up and regarded him very coldly out of narrowed eyes.\n\n\"I shall,\" she said, \"see if I don't, even if I am too large,\" which was not a complaint Temeraire had ever heard leveled against any dragon before, in the West.\n\n\"Well, it would be silly to say you are not large, but I do not see that you are any larger than you ought to be; I have seen Chevaliers nearly your size before,\" he said, \"and I am sure I wish you every success, although perhaps I shouldn't,\" he amended, \"since you are on the French side, but Laurence is quite friendly with De Guignes, after all, so I suppose it does not matter in that way: but whyever cannot you have a harness, if you want one?\"\n\n\"We eat too much,\" she muttered, after a moment, \"and we quarrel with other big dragons, and so cannot work well together. But I will not quarrel,\" she finished.\n\n\"You are certainly being quarrelsome with me,\" Temeraire said, \"even though I am being perfectly civil, when anyone would agree I have been badly wronged: when all of you are egg-stealers. And all I want is for you to take a message, to whomever has charge of this place, that I can repose no confidence whatsoever in the safety of my egg, and require assurances at once.\"\n\n\"Of course no-one has hurt your egg!\" Efficatrice said. \"No-one of us would hurt an egg, at all; there is no call to be rude.\"\n\n\"There is every call,\" Temeraire said, \"when I think how you have snatched my poor egg from a safe place and carried it off halfway around the world, through the greatest dangers imaginable\u2014barren deserts, winter cold, icy mountains\u2014past armies and through battles\u2014and not so much as a word to let me know that it was safe.\"\n\nEfficatrice flinched and looked conscious, which was at least a small grain of satisfaction. Feeling all the moral force of his position, Temeraire drew himself up. \"So I do not trust any of you, and I hope you may go to your commanding officer and tell him so, and that if I am not given certain proofs of the good condition of the egg, I will assume that these cannot be given because my egg is not safe, and you have been lying about it.\"\n\n\"And if you have been lying about it,\" Iskierka put in, having roused enough from her napping to follow the conversation, with slitted eyes, \"you may be quite sure you will all be sorry: if anything has happened to my egg I will burn everything between here and whatever house Napoleon is hiding in, and then I will set that on fire, too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The senior officer overseeing the camp was Admiral Thibaut: at only a few years Laurence's senior, he was a young man for his rank and post. Napoleon would soon need a host of trained officers, when he had so many new beasts to man. But at present Laurence had other, more immediate concerns, and could only be grateful that Thibaut had been so willing to receive him: a single request passed through the guards on their mess had almost at once brought him to the admiral's office.\n\n\"No, sir, I thank you,\" Laurence said, refusing the amiable offer of a glass of brandy, \"I have come to urgently beg you to permit me to acquaint you with the peculiar facts of Mr. Tharkay's position, and then I hope I can rely upon your sense of justice not to prosecute so deadly a charge against a man who is in every way entitled to be treated as a honorable prisoner of war.\" Admiral Thibaut indicating with a courteous bow that he might continue, Laurence marshaled his arguments and plunged forward.\n\n\"\u2014I grant that Mr. Tharkay's circumstances might have justly raised questions. He is a British officer: but he accepted his commission from His Majesty's Aerial Corps under the demands of exigency, when your master launched his invasion of Britain: I trust you agree no gentleman could do otherwise, in those conditions, than make himself of use to his country in whatever manner was asked of him. His active service then was but brief and irregular. I do not deny that in this last campaign, he was for all intents a member of my crew, and served in Russia in that capacity; but he had lately taken his leave of us, and rejoined only a few scant weeks before to-day, under such circumstances as made it impossible to provide him with anything in the way of uniform or insignia, or indeed anything but the bare necessities of survival. For this, I can offer as proofs the appearance which I myself make before you, which I trust you will do me the courtesy to believe not the manner in which an officer of His Majesty would present himself under conditions allowing otherwise.\n\n\"Besides this, I must also express to you the evident\u2014\" Here Laurence caught himself back, not wishing to offend where he must court, \"\u2014rather, what seemed to me the evident truth that no man in my service could expect himself to be taken for anything other than a member of Temeraire's crew, when captured in his company, regardless of his appearance.\"\n\nThe admiral's frown deepened as Laurence spoke, but it was an expression less angry than concerned; somehow disquieting. With a sense of urgency, Laurence added, despite a sense of delicacy which would otherwise have forbidden him to mention the point, \"And if it should weigh with you, sir, I should mention that we took many of your own country-men prisoner in this last campaign, behind our lines, whose clothing at that time could not by any stretch of imagination have been made to resemble a uniform, and without calling them spies for it.\"\n\nHere he finished; after a moment the admiral said, \"Captain Laurence, I beg you to believe that I have permitted you to speak at such length in the hopes, the greatest hopes, of finding myself persuaded of there having been a mistake of some kind. No Frenchman\u2014no French aviator\u2014who knows what you have done for our dragons, and the sacrifices which you have endured in consequence, could wish anything but to oblige you in any manner where it fell in his power and his duty. But I fear greatly that to pardon M. Tharkay does not fall within my own. I thought perhaps you might say we had mistaken the gentleman, that he was not M. Tharkay at all, or perhaps a different M. Tharkay\u2014a relation?\u2014but all you have said must indeed confirm the reverse.\"\n\nLaurence said slowly, \"Sir, he is the only man of that name of my acquaintance.\" It was the truth, and therefore the only thing he could say, despite a certain faint wheedling hint in the admiral's words, to suggest that the man might almost have welcomed a lie.\n\nThe admiral nodded. \"I am desolate, Captain, but your friend has not been taken up on the grounds of a mere lack of uniform, or even a suspicion of disguise: there is indeed a considerable price lately laid his head, for spying, and I am informed M. Fouch\u00e9 desires conversation with him at the earliest moment.\"\n\nLaurence could not answer; taken aback, and yet not enough so, to say with conviction that the accusation was mistaken. He had known that Tharkay often served as an agent of the East India Company; his movements had always been secretive, and he had rarely volunteered his motives. That he should have been acting on behalf of Whitehall instead was not so unusual; certainly there were few men better suited for ranging across the world, if he could have been persuaded to undertake the work.\n\nThe admiral was regarding him with regret\u2014sincere regret\u2014but without any hesitation, and indeed Laurence could not ask the man to betray his duty, which certainly would have been to execute a spy so notorious to his nation. Only one course remained: almost intolerable, and Laurence could only be surprised that his voice remained steady. \"Sir, I wish I could tell you there had been a mistake: I cannot, with certainty, nor can I dispute your understanding of your duty. I can only ask you to postpone the sentence, if you will be so kind as to permit me the time to seek his pardon from\u2014from one who has the right to give it.\"\n\nThe admiral was quite willing; and gave him pen and ink, though Laurence could as cheerfully have drawn his own blood for the task. But the letter had to be willing.\n\n\u2002Sir, Laurence began,\n\n\u2002You at one time expressed a sense of obligation to me, for having brought you the cure for the dragon plague, an act which as you know I performed only from an understanding of my duty as a man and a Christian. I therefore cannot claim that obligation as my right, but if you should nevertheless be glad of a chance to discharge it, I would solicit\u2014\n\n\u2002There he had to pause a while before he could continue, slowly, and finish the note: a clumsy, graceless thing unfit to send to any gentleman, much less the emperor of half Europe: Laurence feared every word betrayed his resentment. He would gladly have cut his own throat before accepting any reward or personal recompense; he did not want thirty pieces of silver for betraying his country's interest, and he knew better than to seek anything which might have altered the course of the war\u2014Temeraire's freedom, the return of the precious egg: Napoleon was a sovereign before he was a gentleman.\n\n\u2002But a pardon, Napoleon might grant, as he would not any larger request. Would almost surely grant, his own vanity gratified by a gesture which would cost him little: he might as well keep Tharkay in a prison as cut off his head. That knowledge did not make the request easier to make; only more imperative. Laurence could not let Tharkay die when the sacrifice of his pride might save him.\n\n\"I will be glad to send the letter,\" the admiral said, \"and glad to delay. I will hope with you, Captain, for a favorable answer.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Laurence passed his evening in his comfortable cell with its uncomfortable view. By now he had counted several times over: although he had reached a different tally each time, there were certainly more than a thousand eggs laid out so widely across the field, perhaps even twice as many. Four rows of large eggs in the middle were easily distinguishable by their blue-and-yellow shells: Granby had mentioned them in particular. \"Fleur-de-Nuits,\" he had said gloomily. \"A whole company of them, and nearly ready to hatch, by the dullness of those shells.\" Such a company could threaten an entire army encamped at night, and strike to devastating effect while others were halted by darkness.\n\nAnd the rest of that enormous host was not so far from hatching, either. The first ranks had already begun to hatch, Laurence suspected, for he could pick out the signs of unfledged youth among many of the dragons in the camp, the hint of ungainliness where some limbs were disproportionate, or as yet unfamiliar to their possessors.\n\nWatching the dragons jostle one another at the feeding troughs for their evening meal, a memory broke into his thoughts, in the slightly peculiar way they now from time to time resurfaced, vivid as though newly experienced: the morning after Temeraire's hatching, that neat, self-possessed creature all absurdly tangled up in the hanging cot in his cabin, no larger than a dog and furious at the loss of dignity. But Temeraire had never been graceless; he had always seemed to be just his proper size throughout, so that Laurence could recall no single day when he had been struck by the vast transformation under way, when he had looked at Temeraire and thought, Look how large he has become! or seen him clumsy with new growth.\n\nThe same was not true here: many among the crowd of young beasts were inclined to snarl their wings upon a talon, or overfly and dump themselves into a squalling heap upon the ground. But soon enough they would outgrow their awkwardness.\n\nThe young dragons lifted their heads from their meal all at once: their attention had been arrested by a sudden flaring light somewhere near the base of the mountains, bonfire-high flames leaping. Iskierka? Laurence wondered, but could not tell; at this distance there was only a golden-red bloom of light, which vanished away nearly at once. He was not so very surprised, however, to hear footsteps come along the corridor not a quarter of an hour later: a young officer knocking on the door, asking him if he pleased to step along.\n\nAdmiral Thibaut received him and Granby in his dressing-gown, and after polite apologies for disturbing their rest said, \"We have had a little difficulty, which I would not wish to conceal from you: Temeraire and Iskierka have formed the notion that if we do not immediately demonstrate the good condition of their egg, and their captains, the worst must have happened; they are some way along to convincing themselves of the case, with all the evil consequences this must entail.\"\n\nLaurence's first thought was fear for Temeraire: they were not at present in circumstances where rebellion could have anything but a fatal result. The dragons here would be neither sympathetic nor persuadable, as the beasts of the British breeding grounds had been, and there were too many of them: even a simple headlong flight could have been stopped. But Granby said, in heat, \"And who has set them going, I would like to know, putting word about that their egg is unfit, and talking of smashing: a handsome way of going about your business, I will not scruple to say.\"\n\nLaurence looked at him in surprise: Granby had a temper, but not an ungovernable one, to be provoked to such an outburst; and then his meaning became clear.\n\nIt had not before occurred to him that Lien had deliberately spoken in so inflammatory a manner about the precious egg. But as soon as the idea had been proposed, it was hard to imagine anything else. Laurence recalled that had never seen any dragon face with complacency the idea of outright, deliberate harm to any egg; it was a crime universally reviled among them. He had supposed Lien's hatred of Temeraire to have overcome this instinctive reluctance, but her hatred had never been of a fiery, violent nature. How much more likely that calculation had spoken instead, and made so hideous a threat exactly to lure Temeraire into a cold, malicious trap.\n\nAt once Laurence understood, and at once shared Granby's feelings. It was an underhanded piece of scheming, as vicious as threatening the life of an infant to induce its mother to come running headlong into danger for its sake. Even the admiral was silent before the accusation in Granby's voice, as though he could say nothing in defense of the act, and therefore in duty could say nothing at all. \"We wish to do our best to reassure their feelings,\" he said only, with a small bow.\n\nThey were put on a smallish dragon called Souci: somewhere between a heavy courier and a light-weight combat-beast, with a certain lean greyhound look reminiscent of the Jade Dragons: a fast flyer, certainly, and big enough to hold an armed guard of six men along with them. \"All goes well back there?\" the dragon asked, snaking his head around on a long and flexible neck, without any sign he thought it unusual to speak to his passengers without the intermediary of a captain. \"Good! Up we go,\" and launched himself with a grunt and a spring, and after a startling amount of flapping he leveled and was off like a shot towards the mountains, tearing so rapidly along that Laurence's eyes streamed.\n\nSouci landed panting not a quarter of an hour later. They had come down near a large building incongruously like an ancient temple: as though a Roman troop had marched out of the dim reaches of the past to erect it, then marched away again leaving it planted here in the French countryside. It was all of a piece with Napoleon's affecting the trappings of Caesar, and yet not impractical, Laurence realized, as Temeraire and Iskierka came pouring out between the enormous columns, eager for a glimpse of them.\n\nHe was asked to stand up, and Granby also: the guards held lanterns near their faces to make them visible. Laurence raised a hand hoping to reassure: they were too far distant to speak. Even so, the dragon nervously took a nimble hop back when Temeraire and Iskierka would have approached a little. \"That's enough, then,\" the little beast said, too hastily: Laurence would have liked some more reassurance himself of Temeraire's health. There were a few lanterns hung on the pavilion, but these showed very little of a black dragon in the dark, and Temeraire did not spread his wings.\n\nBut Souci would not linger; he thrust himself into the air again, with that same storm of flapping, and as quickly as they had come dashed back across the camp. When they had dismounted, he indulged himself in a shudder of his whole body. \"That is more than I undertake to do again!\"\u2014this to the admiral, in reproachful tones. \"Those two monstrously large beasts! Going right up to them like that and dangling their captains in front of them just as if to say, Look what I have got, ha ha! I am all astonishment they did not leap upon me at once. I hope they did not get a clear look at me. If ever they saw me again I am sure they would not let it pass.\"\n\n\"I beg you not to repine upon it,\" Laurence said. \"Temeraire understands well that orders must be obeyed, and will not hold it against you; he knows it was not in your power to deliver us to him.\"\n\n\"Well, but it was,\" Souci said, not conciliated, and Granby said nothing reassuring at all. Iskierka did not allow of assurances of her behavior, good, evil, or otherwise.\n\nThey were returned by their polite but firm escort to their rooms, and Laurence did not try to speak with Granby, both silent with their own shared and private unhappiness, and shared anger as well. Laurence had in some sense felt they deserved to be captured: that it had been the only reasonable outcome of skulking about on the very borders of France. That feeling had spared him real regret, like a gambler at the table who had staked all upon one unlikely throw, knowing all the while it would not come, and even in despair had accepted the natural course of the event. But now the trick dice had been uncovered: indignation burned in his chest, the resentment of having been taken by what felt a low cheat.\n\nHe slept well, despite it all. He could have slept for a month. In the morning, he was asked to the admiral's rooms for breakfast, and met with a bow. \"Captain Laurence,\" Thibaut said, \"I hope to gratify you,\" and handed to him a letter; Laurence steeled himself to meet with a reply which, however generous, could only stoke his still-hot indignation.\n\nBut surprise banked the fire. The letter was addressed to Thibaut and written in the neat hand of a secretary, but the words, abrupt and decisive, were all Napoleon: Tell me you have shown him every courtesy! Nothing is too good for such a man, adding the phrase, il a bien plus de valeur que les perles, a phrase which Laurence, half-amused despite every will to be otherwise, recognized as the description of the virtuous woman.\n\nNapoleon continued,\n\n\u2002We have sent an escort to bring him and his companions to Fontainebleau, and the dragons as well: let them depart at once. Here they will see the egg in its safe repose, and arrangements will be made for their comfort.\n\n\u2002NAPOLEON\n\n\"I have sent to ask M. Tharkay and Captain Granby to join us for breakfast,\" the admiral said, \"while the dragons of your escort make their own. You will leave immediately.\"\n\n\"You will forgive the emperor's absence,\" Empress Anahuarque said, in quite fluent English, improved still further beyond what she had acquired at great effort in her own country; she had evidently kept up her studies.\n\nLaurence had last met her in her own court at Cusco, dressed in the Incan style in bright-woven wool and adorned in gold; yet she seemed not a whit out of place here in the sitting room where they had been received, nor the least uncomfortable in a morning gown of white made elaborate by gold embroidery, striking against her dark-brown skin, and her black hair bound up behind a tiara of diamonds: overdressed perhaps for a private visit, yet not inappropriate to an empress. Laurence was surprised to find the crown prince of Prussia in her company: a gangly young man of seventeen, who bowed and spoke to them in very fluent French. Her own child, a handsome and sturdy-looking boy with a cap of dark hair and large dark eyes, was playing upon a blanket in the corner of the room. He was overseen by a trio of nursemaids and a fourth just outside the house: the massive feathered head of an Incan dragon, one of the sleek and venomous Copacati, peered in through the barn-wide glass doors at the end of the chamber.\n\nLaurence offered his congratulations on the child, as a little more awkwardly did Granby: difficult to know how to behave to a woman to whom he had so nearly been forced to pay his addresses\u2014and who had ordered an attack upon them, while they had been guests in her court. She seemed not the least conscious of any awkwardness herself, however, and merely inclined her head accepting those congratulations as her due; then she said, \"There will be another in the fall,\" with a calm complacency.\n\nLaurence bowed again; there was nothing else to say, although any enemy of Napoleon might feel some regret at his finding so much success in securing his dynasty, and his alliance with the Inca.\n\n\"My husband wished to be here to greet you, but matters in Paris demand his attention for a few days more,\" Anahuarque continued. \"But I greet you in his stead, and I assure you that you will be made comfortable. Although the unhappy state of war between our nations makes you our prisoners, feeling must make you our guests,\" a pretty sentiment, though of course meaningless.\n\nShe sat with them a quarter of an hour\u2014unusually gracious, particularly as a heap of letters upon the writing-table and a silent and hovering pair of secretaries made plain there were many demands upon her time. It fell to Laurence to carry the conversation on their side; Granby was stifled by embarrassment and by the surroundings, and Tharkay only sat observing with a sardonic expression in his eye. But the Empress was well able to supply her own share, and when Laurence had asked her how she liked her new home, she recounted with charming frankness several amusing stories of the misunderstandings that had plagued her on arrival, and laughed at her ongoing travails in learning to read and write: the Inca had been used to rely instead upon a system of knotted cords to communicate.\n\nThe handsome clock against the wall chimed the hour softly, and a footman came in to speak to her in a quiet voice; the Empress rose to her feet, and they rose with her. \"Gentlemen, I am afraid I must bid you farewell,\" she said, giving them her hand to kiss in dismissal, and they were escorted out past another visitor waiting to be taken in. The gentleman was standing at the other side of the antechamber, studying the large landscape upon the wall; Laurence saw him only briefly and from the back, but some vague sense of familiarity tugged at him, and when they had gone on into the hallway, he almost stumbled a moment in surprise: it had been Talleyrand.\n\n\"A remarkable performance,\" Tharkay said, when they were at last shown to their own quarters\u2014a magnificent suite more suitable for a visiting dignitary than prisoners of war\u2014and private once more, the guards having withdrawn politely past their doors. The garden outside the windows gave a handsome illusion of liberty, if one did not go close enough to see the additional soldiers standing to attention across the paths, just out of view. \"She makes quite the picture of domesticity. You would never think to look at her that she is the absolute ruler of several million people and some five thousand dragons, and a nation larger than Europe.\n\n\"Talleyrand is an interesting visitor for her to host. He quarreled with her husband several years ago, after the failure of the invasion of Britain. I wonder where he is getting his money from these days: Austria, perhaps.\"\n\nLaurence had of course said nothing of the means by which he had engineered Tharkay's release, nor asked anything about the charge laid against him. He only knew as much as he did by unhappy accident; he could invite no further confidences on a subject where he had intruded without invitation in the first place. But nevertheless he could not help but perceive in Tharkay's remarks a professional assessment, and Laurence could not but recoil at the idea of a man taking funds in exchange for his own country's secrets.\n\n\"Spying is not the cleanest business,\" Tharkay said, perhaps reading his face.\n\nLaurence shook his head sharply: he felt certain whatever might be distasteful in the work Tharkay did could have nothing to do with this kind of selfish treachery. \"There can be no comparison,\" he said, and then realized he had betrayed himself unintentionally.\n\nTharkay nodded a little, but did not speak directly to the subject. \"The two are not unrelated, I am afraid,\" he said only. \"A man rarely will compromise himself without assistance.\"\n\n\"That does not justify the act upon his side,\" Laurence said. \"No man may be made a traitor without his consent.\"\n\nHe could speak from experience; he had given his own consent, once. He could not understand the coarseness of spirit which could permit a man to do such a thing for money and not the bleakest imperative of honor.\n\nHe paced the room round twice, troubled, and abruptly asked, \"Are we not obligated by ordinary humanity to warn her she ought not be in his company? A man who would do treason for money\u2014what would he not do?\" Even if Talleyrand was in some sense on their side, Laurence could not help but feel uneasy to have knowledge of his treachery, and yet say nothing as the man was admitted to the private company of the expectant Empress and her small child\u2014the worst fears of Napoleon's enemies realized.\n\nBut Tharkay said dryly, \"You seem to be under the impression she does not know exactly the sort of man he is. At the very least she cannot suppose him fond of her husband; a man who has been publicly called a shit in front of half the Marshals of France by his emperor is not likely to be easily conciliated. In any case, certainly Fouch\u00e9 knows as well as I do that Talleyrand's expenses outrun his public income.\"\n\n\"Why would she entertain such a visitor, if he had not persuaded her of his having been reconciled with her husband?\"\n\n\"He might be safer company, if he were the Emperor's loyal servant,\" Tharkay said, \"but he would not be half so useful, if she cares to maintain any sort of communication with the other courts of Europe when they have declared war upon France.\"\n\nTo reconcile this kind of cold scheming with the charming young woman they had only just left was an incongruous task, but Granby said, \"Well, I am not forgetting any time soon that she set a hundred beasts on our tail hunting us across the Andes, however meek and mild she chooses to look at present,\" which was a useful reminder. \"I am sure I wish Napoleon every joy of his wife: better him than me.\"\n\n\"But not, perhaps, for us,\" Tharkay said. \"Our present circumstances leave a great deal to be desired. Not that I mean to make you regret your happy escape,\" he added, with a faintly amused glint.\n\n\"No fear of that,\" Granby said. \"I don't mean to say I wouldn't rather be back in the Peninsula, where I can do some good, but I would as lief kick my heels in France the rest of the war as be married in Cusco. I don't suppose one dragon can make all that much difference, even Iskierka, when he has a whole horde of them breeding up.\" He sighed.\n\nTharkay was silent; then he said, \"And yet Napoleon does suppose it.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Laurence said.\n\n\"We are not here by accident, after all,\" Tharkay said. \"Temeraire and Iskierka were deliberately tempted here, as you have divined, by those threats against the egg; but if you will pardon me, we have not considered how they were tempted: where you heard these threats.\"\n\n\"The Prussian dragons had overheard them,\" Laurence said, and then slowly, \"\u2014you mean that they were deliberately permitted to escape?\"\n\nTharkay inclined his head. \"You would have been a good deal more skeptical of threats sent directly to you, and having received those threats, you would not have supposed you could intercept the egg. Not to mention that it does pass credulity that some thirty dragons were able to flee the breeding grounds of France without challenge.\"\n\n\"But surely credulity is passed much more thoroughly to suppose that Napoleon let half the Prussian aerial corps loose, just to get Temeraire and Iskierka here,\" Granby said. \"Not that they don't make a good deal of noise, but they are only two beasts: they aren't worth the exchange.\"\n\n\"With as many dragons as Napoleon has in prospect, the relative value of keeping the Prussian beasts captive must have been diminished,\" Tharkay said. \"But nevertheless, you are right\u2014if the dragons were judged solely for their fighting-qualities. Which must mean there are other considerations which have prompted the act.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Lien's unblinking expression, fixed on Temeraire, managed somehow to convey without a word that she was astonished that he should have got himself into such a state, and even disappointed: that her satisfaction in his defeat was somewhat reduced by his looking so ragged, as though it were not much, after all, to have brought him low. Temeraire had not given a thought all this month to his torn-up wings, to his fresh scars; the scales where the fire had burned him worst had grown back hard and dull instead of glossy. None of these had mattered.\n\nBut now he could think of them again, for beyond Lien stood a small but elegant little pavilion, and beneath the roof, an enormous basket lined with silk and much padding held the beautiful shining egg, its delicately speckled shell unharmed, even to the small mark which looked so much like an eight. Half a dozen braziers stood around, warming it, and there were screens to shelter it from the wind, which the servants had drawn aside only to let them see.\n\nWith the worst anxiety eased, others crowded forward to take its place. Temeraire could not help but realize that he made a very disreputable figure at present; as slovenly as Forthing, with no power of repairing his appearance.\n\nIskierka felt no consciousness; she was sniffing around the pavilion with immense suspicion. \"Are you sure that the egg is warm enough?\" she demanded. \"Look at all this snow everywhere around; what if it should take a chill? And how has it been brought here, anyway; did you shake it? Did it get wet at all?\"\n\n\"All proper measures have been taken for its care, of course,\" Lien said, with cool disdain.\n\n\"I don't see what is of course about it when you have been going on and on about smashing, and hauling it all over the world,\" Iskierka said, rounding on her. \"What do you mean by it? How dare you go anywhere near my egg?\"\n\nLien did not\u2014quite\u2014edge away from Iskierka's flaring anger, but she stiffened her back visibly, which Temeraire found a little gratifying. \"Surely one must ask why you left your egg behind in the care of those who were not capable of its protection,\" she answered.\n\n\"Oh!\" Temeraire said: that was too much. \"When you certainly had your friends in China bribe some of the guards, and murder the rest; I hope Crown Prince Mianning puts them all to death just as soon as he is emperor.\"\n\n\"I will have cause for sorrow enough if China should be brought so low,\" Lien said venomously, \"as to have an emperor who has lost all the favor of Heaven: his own Celestial companion lost, and willing to pledge his empire to a nation of low opium-merchants to acquire another. But I will not call it the fault of the egg, nor have I permitted any harm to come to it, poor mongrel creature though it is sure to be; but that is more cause to pity it than harm it.\"\n\n\"So this has all been more of your scheming against the crown prince, after all,\" Temeraire said, nearly choked with indignation at this speech, so wholly different from the report which Eroica had brought him. \"And you never meant to hurt the egg at all? I suppose we are to believe that\u2014\"\n\n\"I care nothing for what you believe,\" Lien said cuttingly. \"And need not care. Through an excess of headstrong anger, you have compromised yourselves and your masters,\" this with a sneering emphasis, \"and now you only see your egg by the grace of my lord the Emperor, who chooses to be kinder to you than you deserve: a reflection of his nobility and not your merits.\" And here she gave Temeraire a look, up and down, to make plain these were few indeed, before she went aloft and left them.\n\nHe returned in some irritation of spirit to their own pavilion\u2014also charming and comfortable, with heated stones and everything nice, standing amidst a garden of stone and pine trees and a pond delicately iced over and traced in frost with patterns like leafy vines. Temeraire could not but feel put-upon even by these luxuries, as though he heard Lien's voice coming from every smooth pebble, saying, Look how well I am situated, and what a poor creature you are, and feeling the truth of the remark all too strongly.\n\nA troop of servants and three small dragons appeared shortly, bearing great steaming water-buckets in yokes on their sides, and offered to bathe them. Temeraire felt so very dirty and wretched that he could not even bring himself to make a grand refusal, and had to be grateful instead to be standing under the hot sluicing water, with delightful scrubbing-brushes going busily at every talon and dirt-crusted scale, and then to lie down on the hot stones to dry, feeling unavoidably refreshed.\n\n\"Now what is the matter?\" Iskierka demanded. \"Everything is going splendidly, and still you keep sulking.\"\n\n\"Splendidly!\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Iskierka said. \"A month ago, we had no notion of where the egg was, or even if it had been smashed; a week ago, we were a thousand miles away. Now here we are, just round the corner, and Granby and Laurence are somewhereabouts, too; now we only need to work out how to get us all away.\"\n\n\"Only that!\" Temeraire said, a little annoyed to find he could make no better rejoinder.\n\n\"We are still better off than before,\" Iskierka said. \"I think you are being very poor-spirited to keep moaning.\"\n\nTemeraire bristled, but did not argue: they were in the very heart of France, surrounded by Napoleon's best guards and legions of dragons\u2014but it did feel rather poor-spirited to mutter about such details when the egg was not only safe but so very near-by, and Laurence as well. However, he was not willing to fully share in Iskierka's satisfaction.\n\n\"And why is Napoleon being so nice to us, I should like to know,\" he said, \"for I am sure there is a reason for it: Lien would not mind at all the chance to keep looking down her nose at us.\"\n\n\"I dare say they are afraid of us,\" Iskierka said, \"as they should be,\" but Temeraire lay his head down and brooded over alternatives, each less pleasant than the next. Perhaps they were only being lulled into complacency, that the pain when at last inflicted should be all the deeper.\n\n\"And what does Lien mean to do with the egg,\" he added suddenly, as a fresh unpleasant thought struck him, \"now that she has it? Very well to say she only wanted to deny it to Crown Prince Mianning, but now what? It is sure to be a large dragon, as we are both large, and France does not want large dragons anymore. What if it is left all alone and companionless\u2014told it must win its harness! How insupportable!\"\n\n\"Now, that is an excellent question,\" Iskierka said, jetting steam from her spines in full agreement. But the guard dragons could not give them an answer, and were anyway not inclined to talk, but only stared pointedly until Temeraire curled back into the pavilion in frustration.\n\nThe gardens sprawled out of sight in either direction; the beautiful house only glimpsed in the distance. \"If only I could be sure Granby were not in there,\" Iskierka said broodingly, \"I would go and set it on fire, see if I wouldn't, and then I am sure they would tell us,\" but Granby was in there, very likely, so that was no help.\n\nAnd escape did look rather hopeless, however sanguine Iskierka liked to be. The estate was nearly swarming with dragons of every size and description, darting here and there over the course of the day\u2014some very large and laden with goods; then a steady stream of lighter beasts, then a large party of French combat-dragons, in war harness: middle-weights and light-weights, and then a stream of small motley companies, very different in character from one another.\n\nTemeraire idly counted some nine or ten different groups, so peculiar and distinct from one another in appearance that he could not work out what sort of dragons they were; none of them even looked like the French dragons he had known. Not even the newer cross-breeds, which at least had some distinguishing feature to remark upon, or at least a consistent shape of the second wing-joint, quite characteristic to most French breeds.\n\nHe could not make any real sense of it, but he was only observing dully, without giving the question much thought: what did any of it matter when half so many dragons would have done to keep them penned up? But late in the evening, a company of heavy-weights in remarkable colors and familiar conformation landed at a pavilion not distant, and his attention finally sharpened.\n\n\"What is it?\" Iskierka said, as Temeraire raised his head to peer at them through the dimming twilight.\n\n\"Those are Tswana dragons,\" Temeraire said slowly. \"What are they doing here?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"Your Imperial Highness,\" Napoleon said, and when he had heartily embraced Laurence in the Gallic manner, with a kiss upon either cheek, he had completed Laurence's discomfiture: a welcome more suited to a fellow head of state and an ally than his prisoner. Not content to finish there, Napoleon with cheerful familiarity greeted Granby, and rallied him a little with a sly apology for having stolen his bride out from under his nose, a bit of pleasantry to which poor Granby was hard-pressed to make answer; then the Emperor noticed Tharkay, saying, \"Ah! So this is the infamous gentleman? Laurence, you do not know how much you are in my debt: Fouch\u00e9 outright gnashed his teeth at me when I told him he must give up his prey\"\u2014a none-too-subtle reminder of the favor Laurence had asked; and Tharkay's narrow glance told him the remark had not passed unnoticed there, either.\n\nThe Emperor was not alone, although the force of his presence at first commanded all attention in the room, but when he had turned to unnecessarily badger the servants to add to their comforts, one of his companions stepped forward to make Laurence a bow, and Laurence was surprised to belatedly recognize Junichiro, his hair pulled back and wearing an aide-de-camp's uniform.\n\n\"I am glad to see you well,\" Laurence said, a little constrained.\n\n\"I would be glad if it were so, Captain,\" Junichiro said forthrightly, \"but I do not presume to expect such consideration from you.\"\n\nLaurence's feelings were indeed divided, and so opposed to one another as to be difficult to reconcile. Junichiro had placed him under such profound personal obligation, in aiding him to escape execution in Japan, that Laurence had given himself no real hope of discharging the debt. That Junichiro had provided that aid not for Laurence's sake, but to save his own beloved master, in no wise diminished that lingering obligation. The boy had made himself a criminal in his own country, had forfeited all hope of rank and place and home.\n\nAnd yet\u2014Laurence had done his best to discharge the debt: he had given Junichiro a place among his crew, and sought to establish him as an officer\u2014not impossible in the motley ranks of the Aerial Corps. He had done everything in his power to secure the young man a respectable future, and to make him comfortable if not happy. But Junichiro had spurned all these good offices, in the end, and gone\u2014gone to the French, hoping to promote among them an alliance with Japan, as counterbalance to the threat he saw to his nation from the deepening connection between China and Britain.\n\nIt was impossible to see him now and not realize that here was the architect of Temeraire's distress and his own. Junichiro had been among their party in China; he had known everything of the negotiations which pledged Temeraire and Iskierka's egg to Crown Prince Mianning, in exchange for the alliance that had sent the Chinese legions to the war in Russia. He had seen with his own eyes the pavilion where the egg had been established in state, and the guard placed upon it. His intelligence had undoubtedly been responsible both for Napoleon's forming the design of capturing the egg, and for its success.\n\n\u2014And yet Junichiro had not behaved dishonorably. He had openly avowed his intentions before resigning Laurence's service, despite the personal risk he ran thereby. And it was by no means clear to Laurence that Junichiro understood his duty to his nation wrongly. While desiring nothing but peace with Japan, Hammond had made no secret of valuing higher an alliance with China: Britain would certainly look the other way should that power decide to turn their attention to their smaller neighbor, an event not so unlikely when Prince Mianning ascended his throne: the crown prince had already demonstrated his intentions to broaden China's reach, and bring his nation more into the world.\n\nLaurence could hardly feel pleasure at finding Junichiro here under these circumstances, and established deep in Napoleon's councils\u2014but if he meant to be civil to Napoleon, who had waged a relentless war upon Europe for near twenty years now, and invaded his own country\u2014and who, for his part, showed no disposition to be less than gracious to Laurence, who had been instrumental in thwarting his destruction of the Russian Army\u2014he could yet greet Junichiro with courtesy, and he returned the bow the young man made him.\n\n\"Captain Laurence,\" Napoleon said, turning back again, having commanded an array of refreshments, the addition of several comfortable chairs, a change of drapery, an increase in their firewood, and the assignment of a footman to carry out their errands, \"I am remiss. You must permit me to offer you my condolences upon the loss of your father.\"\n\n\"I thank Your Majesty,\" Laurence said quietly.\n\nNapoleon remained with them nearly an hour, talking freely and walking the room as though among intimate friends. Laurence could not but be sensible of the compliment the Emperor paid him with such a degree of attention and time, and perplexed by it; if he had not succumbed to Napoleon's blandishments five years before, when by so doing he might have saved his own life and Temeraire's liberty, the Emperor could hardly expect to seduce him now. Or so Laurence hoped, unhappily conscious that he might have given encouragement to such thoughts, in asking a favor, and contemplating with no pleasure the prospect of having to refuse any entreaty which the Emperor might now make him.\n\nBut Napoleon asked him nothing, except his opinion on this or that new provision for the dragons of France, which he had under consideration. There were many of these: Napoleon passed freely from schools for hatchlings, to a scheme of using dragons in laying new trails over the Alps\u2014inquiring for Laurence's opinion on the Alpine ferals as he did so. \"They have resisted all our offers most stubbornly,\" Napoleon said, shaking his head.\n\n\"They have a remarkable bent for independence, I should have said, Your Majesty,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Which you admire!\" Napoleon said, with a keen glance. \"But nothing can be accomplished by one alone and friendless, without support. If I should ride into the field alone, what use would I be? And yet with an army beside me, what can I not accomplish?\u2014They would do much better for themselves to accept the protection of France.\"\n\nLaurence refrained from making a remark about the value this protection had been to the Russian ferals Napoleon had loosed and then abandoned. \"I think you may find them hard to persuade,\" he said only, and Napoleon moved onwards.\n\nHis designs ranged almost absurdly wide. He talked of establishing great trade routes by dragon-back even to India and to China; he talked of building pavilions all across the breadth of Europe and Asia. His plans grew ever more ambitious as he spoke, and Laurence wondered. Napoleon spoke not at all of the disastrous reversal he had lately suffered\u2014betrayed no consciousness either by word or look, or even by moderation, of the wreck of a million men, of ruin and defeat. Indeed he spoke of the war only briefly, to complain of his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. \"He is too openhearted. He has given you quite a generous gift\u2014the Oder!\" Napoleon said. \"All because a few Cossacks have given him a little trouble, and a handful of Prussian dragons.\" Laurence could not but rejoice at the news: so the Tsar had sent his troops forward after all. But the censure in Napoleon's voice made not the slightest acknowledgment that he had left that army wrecked, in an untenable position.\n\nThere was something dreadful in this determined avoidance, as though Napoleon could not bear to recognize his own defeat and had instead to delude himself, even knowing as he must that his audience in this case knew the truth. Laurence was sorry to see it. He had thought in Russia that the Emperor was not himself\u2014sallow, thickened: he had gained another stone in weight and did not carry it well, his face settling into heavy lines. The grey eyes were dulled; he stared into the fire often as he spoke, and did not meet his listeners' eyes often.\n\nBut he remained Napoleon, for all that. Laurence said, wanting only to escape the painful sense of omission, \"We were impressed by your training grounds outside Grenoble, Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Napoleon cried, turning round. \"\u2014you mean, by the number of eggs.\" Laurence could not deny it; he bowed. \"Yes,\" Napoleon said, \"for seven years now we have attended the wisdom of the Princess of Avignon\u2014Madame Lien as you knew her\u2014and you have seen the fruits of our labors. There are four thousand eggs laid upon the sands of France, and soon they will come to their maturity.\n\n\"The old ways of war are done, Captain. You have seen their death-knell,\" Napoleon added. \"The army which can bring more power to bear upon the battlefield, more quickly, will always be the victor: the weight of metal and of men will carry the day\u2014if their generals are wise. You were at Tsarevo Zaimische?\"\n\n\"I was,\" Laurence said, surprised to hear the Emperor now at last mention anything of the campaign: although in some wise the battle had been his triumph.\n\n\"What a morning that was!\" Napoleon said. \"A little of my own sauce, as they say: to be woken in the first hours of the day to hear of five hundred dragons coming for me. You ought to have had me! But you could not bring your full weight to bear.\" His face was illuminated again with vivid satisfaction; he seized upon a scrap of writing paper and a pen, and with a quick hand sketched out the defensive emplacements, his own forces behind their wall of defensive guns and the narrow corridor left; the Russian Army and the Chinese legions spread wide before it. \"\u2014You did not do as you ought. If you had committed your forces decisively, you must have overwhelmed us, and secured a complete victory, the destruction of my army. But you permitted caution to rule you,\" he finished, flipping the pen from his fingers with a shrug; and Laurence knew well that no one would ever say the same of this man.\n\nNapoleon stood studying his own diagram a moment longer, then abruptly said, \"Come, let us go and take the air\u2014you are no delicate courtier; you are a soldier,\" and Laurence had no objection to make; indeed agreed heartily, privately hoping for a glimpse of Temeraire somewhere upon the grounds.\n\nThe gardens of Fontainebleau had been expanded and transformed into a covert, but not resembling any Western notion of that word. Large and imposing pavilions were made private by stands of young trees and elaborate trellises of vines, fountains playing among them: something from an imagined pastoral landscape, only with dragons instead of sheep. Dragons of every description: smaller feral-looking beasts, heavy-weights in every color and conformation, until Laurence, at first bewildered by the variety, spied down a narrow walk the heavy sinuous curve of a Kazilik dragon, unmistakably marked by the steam-hissing spines.\n\nBut the dragon was not Iskierka: the hide considerably more black-green, and Laurence realized only then that these were not all French beasts. These were dragons from every corner of the world: besides the Turkish beast, he caught sight of several not unlike Arkady and his fellow Pamir-dwellers; over there to the north a huddled group of Russian ferals, lean and savage-looking; in a green-marbled pavilion along their way a pair of dragons conversing in broad colonial English. And as they turned back for the house, Laurence saw a dragon he was sure he recognized: Dikeledi, one of the beasts of the Tswana, whom he had last seen sailing for Africa with a transport full of slaves liberated from the Brazilian plantations.\n\nThe dragon took notice of him also, peering back curiously, then turned to speak to a man\u2014to Moshueshue, Laurence realized in deepening astonishment; the crown prince of the Tswana, here? Nothing could account for it, but to suppose that Napoleon had somehow gathered all these dragons here, in secret. Questions trembled on Laurence's lips, although constrained: he was an enemy of France. And yet Napoleon had brought them here of his own volition; he had not needed to promenade Laurence about the grounds, inevitably to notice the presence of so many foreign beasts. Laurence asked, therefore, only a little diffidently.\n\n\"What secrecy has been necessary?\" Napoleon said. \"You, Captain Laurence, know well the willful ignorance cultivated by my enemies of the lives of dragons. I have made no efforts at concealment: what use, when my couriers have gone throughout the world, and spoken with dragons in every part of it? We could not have expected them all to keep it secret, if we wished to. If you have had no intelligence of our convocation, it is no doing of mine: you see there we have even Russian beasts among us.\" He gave a disparaging snort. \"Your old men and generals will not have it that dragons are thinking creatures, and throw a few coins at them to keep them contented. What do they know of it, when my couriers land even in their own breeding grounds, and speak to the creatures they have penned up and expect to remain quiescent even in the face of their outright destruction? You may be sure that the pitiable condition of the Russian ferals has not been forgotten here\u2014those monstrous wing-chains! I wonder that you can with complacency range yourself with the architects of such cruelty.\"\n\nLaurence could not easily answer this charge. He might have said that Napoleon had been little kinder in leaving them to starve and be hunted down, all so that they might wreak havoc among the Russian supply-lines. He might have said that the Russians had been on the point of freeing the ferals. But he could not bring himself to make these arguments. He would have chosen starvation over slavery, himself, and the Russians had been no less calculating in their decision than Napoleon: they had planned to make their ferals into troop-carriers, and that decision had been made only under the duress of Napoleon's own lightning-quick advances. In truth, he had nearly resigned his post and gone when he had learned of the brutalities by which the Russian ferals were kept confined to their breeding grounds: only Kutuzov's assurances that the ferals would be freed, under his and Temeraire's own supervision, had kept them at their post.\n\n\"Not with complacency,\" Laurence said finally. \"But war makes strange bedfellows, sir.\"\n\n\"By your decision,\" Napoleon said sternly, as though chiding a low subordinate. \"You know the masters you serve: you cannot expect otherwise under their rule.\" Laurence closed his mouth on a reply: he could make none that would be civil, nor politic, to an emperor and a gaoler. Napoleon presently seemed to think better of his tone; he added, \"But I will not wound you with reproaches! I know your conscience is not of that soft metal, which bends before a wind.\"\n\nTrue to his word, the Emperor instead returned to enlarging upon those plans he had earlier described\u2014which seemed now less grandiose, if he meant to accomplish them by an alliance with all the dragons of the world, direct: an unlikely but not impossible endeavor, Laurence thought. The evils of the condition of dragons in nearly every nation of the West, and the wholly unimproved situation of most ferals, would offer a fertile ground for Napoleon's proposals: if he could afford them, which seemed the greatest bar.\n\n\"But now you must pardon me,\" Napoleon said, when they had circled back into sight of the palace. \"The guards will see you back to the house. You have my word, Captain, that I will see you are given the chance to speak with your dragons soon, and as often, henceforth, as safety can allow\u2014I know well how bitter that separation must be!\"\n\nHe left them, walking swiftly away down one of the garden paths towards an exceptionally beautiful pavilion of black marble here and there adorned with gold, and set upon the bank of a lake; and as he went a great white dragon head lifted to greet him\u2014Lien's voice musical as she called a greeting in French.\n\nHe had that weapon, too\u2014and an immensely dangerous one. Laurence had seen too many times for his present satisfaction how the power and grace and swift intelligence of a Celestial united to command the respect of other dragons, particularly if supported by self-interest: how many times and how easily Temeraire had persuaded other dragons to act in concert, and tolerate without resentment his leadership.\n\n\"Well, we had better hope they eat him out of all the cattle in France for a month or two, and then go home again,\" Granby said, with an equal pessimism. \"I don't suppose he can talk them all round, but Lord! If he did, it would be a nasty business. Those purple ones near the oak-trees were Nilgiri Cutters out of Madras, or I am a donkey-herder: I dare say they would be glad to serve us out\u2014if he would only give them harness, and guns and powder, and a few dozen cannon to back them! But he would have to stretch a long way to find anything that could make a dragon in the Pamirs care a fig for anything that he says in France, without sending them a chest of gold with every command; or in Japan, I suppose,\" he added in challenge, to Junichiro, who had accompanied them to their stoop: every outer room in the palace had been altered, to have large wide doors that opened onto the grounds, evidently to permit dragons to share in the life of the house.\n\nJunichiro paused by the door; then he said quietly, \"You are mistaken, Captain Granby: he has already made all those beasts a gift which commands both their interest and respect\u2014the cure of the dragon plague.\"\n\n\"It is intolerably unfair,\" Temeraire said, feeling all the indignation of having done a good deed at great cost, nobly expecting no reward, only to see another get both the credit of it and the unexpected fortune of the result. \"What has Lien done for any of them, or Napoleon; they did not find the cure. Oh! When I think of all those hideous messes that Keynes inflicted upon me; even now I cannot but shudder if I get a smell of bananas, sometimes.\"\n\n\"Napoleon however had the power of passing it on,\" Tharkay said. \"I imagine there are few threats which dragons can feel so immediately as disease; the gift must have commanded gratitude.\"\n\nTemeraire wished to ask\u2014longed to ask\u2014if Laurence was distressed. His only hesitation was fear of the answer. \"Still, I do not see why any of them should give Napoleon the credit of the cure. He would not have had it to give, if Laurence and I had not given it to him.\"\n\n\"Just so,\" Tharkay said, in his dry way. \"And now you and Captain Laurence are here at the convocation, to be seen in his company; I am sure Napoleon is delighted to be able to present such a portrait of amity to his assembled visitors. The arrangement must have recommended itself to him highly: enough to make it worth letting the Prussian dragons go, and lure you here.\"\n\n\"So it is all due to you that we are here,\" Iskierka said severely, as Temeraire sinkingly let his head drop to the ground. \"\u2014I might have known.\"\n\n\"Surely no-one would suppose we are here of our own volition,\" he tried.\n\n\"I do not expect Napoleon means to give you any opportunity of explaining the situation to his other guests,\" Tharkay said, very loweringly.\n\nTemeraire had anyway to be glad of the visit, because Tharkay could tell him that Laurence and Granby were housed sumptuously in the palace, treated with enormous respect and every attention to their comfort: a little gratifying, at least. Temeraire brought himself finally to ask, \"And\u2014is he well?\"\n\nTharkay paused and said, \"His health improves daily. His spirits are as well-supported as might be expected,\" which was to say, Laurence was very distressed, and Temeraire did not need to trouble himself to find the cause: to be paraded about by Napoleon, so everyone should think he supported the Emperor's designs\u2014knowing that whatever these should be, they would certainly mean nothing good for England.\n\nIt was intolerable, Temeraire realized, with a kind of terrible blankness\u2014the situation could not be tolerated. He did not need to ask whether Laurence should have preferred to be put in prison, or even hanged, sooner than be used in such a fashion; he knew the answer perfectly well. Indeed, Temeraire was quite certain that if left to himself long enough, Laurence would find a way to arrange something of the sort; it only fell to him to act, before that should become necessary.\n\n\"Will they let you come again?\" he asked Tharkay, slowly, wondering how to speak: a party of some ten guards had come with him, and stood rudely all the while in ear-shot; Tharkay had said, \"I believe these gentlemen would prefer greatly that we should converse in French,\" when he had come: they were certainly going to report every word.\n\n\"I believe I will be permitted to come again next week,\" Tharkay said.\n\n\"Very well,\" Temeraire said. \"Tharkay, will you pray tell Laurence that I beg his pardon, and tell him that I hope he knows how\u2014how highly I value him, and that I should never wish to act in any fashion that would give him cause to doubt my respect and esteem.\"\n\nTharkay paused, looking at him for some long moments, after this speech. \"I will certainly assure him, if assurances are required,\" he said. \"I hope to see you next week, then; although I suppose we must not depend upon it, until the event.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Temeraire said, so he was tolerably certain Tharkay had understood, as far as it was possible for him to understand.\n\nThen he had gone, escorted away back to the house; their own guards were eating their suppers, far enough away to be inattentive. Temeraire turned to Iskierka. \"We cannot wait any longer,\" he said. \"We must rescue the egg.\"\n\n\"I do not disagree; I have been saying so from the beginning,\" Iskierka said, swallowing down a haunch of nicely roasted kid with an easy gulp. \"I am glad that you are coming round at last. I would have gone and taken it already, but there are too many of those guards. And I could not see how I would go and get Granby, afterwards. Have you thought of something clever? You ought to, since this business is all your doing, anyway.\"\n\n\"No,\" Temeraire said, \"I have thought of nothing clever, it is not clever at all; it is only dreadful. We cannot do it: we cannot take the egg without some noise, and they will lay hands on Laurence and Granby at once. There will be no getting at them.\"\n\n\"What use is there in bleating 'we cannot wait,' then?\" Iskierka demanded, with an irritated jetting of steam.\n\n\"That is what I mean,\" Temeraire said. \"We must take the egg, anyway.\"\n\nIskierka hissed at him, bristling up. \"And let them keep Granby?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said, almost choking: scarcely able to think of it. Laurence alone in Lien's power, and surely the object of her malice. \"Napoleon cannot execute them. Not when he is busily pretending Laurence is his good friend, and quite in amity with him; he cannot harm him at all. It would certainly look very strange to all the dragons here, if he did. So this is our only chance. We must go and take the egg, and\u2014and we must leave Laurence and Granby behind.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"Temeraire is certainly planning something,\" Tharkay said, \"but as to the details, I cannot speculate, except that he evidently supposed you might feel slighted.\"\n\n\"That tells me nothing, unless he means to lose me another ten thousand pounds,\" Laurence said grimly.\n\n\"Had we better try and stop them?\" Granby said. \"You know there is no use hoping that cooler minds will prevail, on their end. The madder the notion, the more sure it is to please Iskierka: I would not depend on her to restrain Temeraire from launching a headlong charge on Paris and trying to bring down the Tuileries.\"\n\n\"I cannot see how you mean to do so,\" Tharkay said, \"unless by betraying their intentions to our gaolers, which will certainly preclude any future chance of escape. You can either trust them, or halt them forever.\"\n\nPlaced upon these terms, Laurence found his own decision easy, if no more comfortable. \"That trust I can hardly deny him. The egg is no longer in mortal peril, nor are we. I do not think Temeraire suffers in his present situation the same desperation that drove him to those earlier extremes, which brought us to this pass; he may certainly wish to escape, but I do not believe he would enter into some real folly, in pursuit of that aim, which would endanger the egg or our lives. I do not deny he might overestimate his chances, as judged rationally by a more skeptical eye. But I cannot remove his power of taking action, only because I have no means of approving his course.\"\n\n\"Well, it would be an unhandsome turn to serve him, I don't deny,\" Granby said, \"but what good can he possibly do while we sit here in the midst of Bonaparte's armies? If I could think of anything at all worth the doing, I should be less concerned about his getting up to something. I will be the first to say it is a wrench, going from Spain to a French prison\u2014however pleasant,\" he added, with a reluctant justice almost demanded by their surroundings.\n\nIt had not been enough for Napoleon to see them established in a palatial suite of his own home, attended by servants, made comfortable in every particular. The fire now roared so enthusiastically that they had been obliged to open the doors to the garden to avoid stifling; an urn of silver magnificence dazzled from the sideboard, of a capacity sufficient to three men if those three men had nursed the ambition to drown themselves in tea like Clarence in malmsey; and they had but risen from a handsome turbot filleted in wine and a beef roast of melting tenderness, with six removes and a dish of magnificent oysters with which even Laurence's most exacting standards could have found not the least fault. And Chicken Marengo, it had to be admitted, was excellent, even if there was something vaguely unpatriotic in the enjoyment thereof, and of all their present comforts.\n\nLaurence would have refused every such gesture if offered in exchange for the least form of cooperation; he would have welcomed, indeed, a chance of making such a refusal. But he had not been asked for so much as his parole. He could not easily put aside the dinner laid before him and demand to be fed on gruel and water, or housed in a damp cell, without rudeness and absurdity united; and even if he had, an acquiescence to his wishes would have been a worse, as being a greater, favor: the power to direct his own arrangements. There would have been too much of the quixotic guest about it, instead of the resisting prisoner. He could only share in Granby's feelings, when he lamented the battlefield.\n\n\"We have been doing some proper work, too,\" Granby said, dispiritedly, \"and I was beginning to feel I did not have to blush every time I caught Admiral Roland's eye: do you know, after Salamanca, even Wellington sent us a bullock from his own pocket, and a note I dare say I treasure better than a knighthood: I congratulate you on the disciplined performance of your beast and crew, and it was even more than half-deserved. Iskierka snorted over it, and wanted me to write back that she congratulated him, that not so many of his men had run away from the battle as usual, but I assure you she has been listening better than I had ever hoped to see. She has even, from time to time, condescended to give a little thought to her actions beforehand\u2014and now this,\" and Granby sighed.\n\nLaurence sighed also. As little pleasure as he had found amidst the grim brutality of the Russian campaign, he, too, would have exchanged his place without hesitation for the coldest and most cheerless camp of all the winter. \"But I will not accept that nothing remains to us but to sit quiet in prison,\" he said, \"if only because Napoleon himself evidently sees more for us to do, if only to be displayed as a jewel upon a cushion.\"\n\nHe looked at the open doors\u2014guarded discreetly but thoroughly by six young, hearty, and exceptionally tall soldiers in the uniforms of the Imperial Guard who stood stoically outside upon the stoop. The senior of these, a fellow named Aurigny, had presented himself earlier: he was not much above twenty-and-five, and there was something cheerful in the lines of his ruddy, wind-weathered face, but he had been serious while in conversation: \"I hope, m'sieur, there will be no occasion for our disagreeing with anything you should wish,\" a phrase that captured to a nicety his peculiar orders: to guard prisoners, but without giving any offense, save of course the deepest one of removing their liberty. A little absurd, but suggestive that so long as Laurence cut his desires to the cloth of his imprisonment, he should not meet with contradiction. He would not be permitted to go near Temeraire, surely, but\u2014\n\n\"If I asked to walk about the grounds, to take the air,\" Laurence said after a moment, \"the guards would not like to refuse me, I think.\"\n\n\"Where the dragons can see you?\" Tharkay said. \"No, I imagine not, when displaying you is indeed the Emperor's aim.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Laurence said. \"I will accept that cost, and exchange it for the opportunity, which I hope that my walking the grounds will allow, to try and have a word with Moshueshue. I hope he will remember me; and though we spoke only a little, and once, he impressed himself upon me in that meeting as a reasonable man, nor have the Tswana shown the least inclination to fall in with France for any other than the most practical reasons. At least he may tell me the purpose of this conclave; he has no reason to conceal it, and afterwards he will have the power of telling the other guests, where I myself cannot, that my presence here is unwilling, and that I do not in the least endorse Napoleon's designs.\"\n\n\"But if you do?\" Tharkay said later that evening, after Granby had retired. \"It is a hazard as well to consider before as after meeting it,\" he added, when Laurence did not immediately answer. \"Napoleon cannot have commanded the attendance of so many dragons\u2014so many ferals, and beasts of other nations\u2014only with respect.\"\n\n\"You think he means to lay some proposal before them, which will make a marked improvement to their condition,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"I can see no other motive that would compel them to listen,\" Tharkay said.\n\nLaurence had too many bitter proofs of the disdain and fear which prevailed among his own country-men\u2014his own Government\u2014towards dragons, and the determined persistence of their hostility. He knew which alternative Whitehall would have preferred, between the hideous Russian practice of wing-hobbling and starving any beast that would not go into harness, and Napoleon's eager efforts to win the love and loyalty of his beasts, and bring them into the full life of their nation. Necessity might force the admirals to grant, with immense and grudging reluctance, a few piecemeal rights and liberties: there were too many natural advantages to Napoleon's course to be wholly ignored. But necessity only would move them. England would do nothing for dragons from any sense of justice or charity, while Napoleon worked tirelessly to fling wide the barred gates of breeding ground and covert.\n\n\"But I have this to armor me against Napoleon's most pleasant aims,\" Laurence said, \"that all he does has ever been for his own selfish vainglory. He wishes to be loved by the dragons of France not for their sake but for his. He has had no hesitation in spilling their blood, and the blood of his soldiers, to make himself a perfect tyrant, bestriding the world unopposed. He cannot suffer an equal\u2014and so he cannot be suffered. His means, his immediate acts, may be noble; his ends are less so, and he has shown himself insensible to the wreck and horror of war.\"\n\nHe was silent however awhile after speaking. He knew Tharkay regarded him with concern, which he could acknowledge was not unmerited. He could not be easy to find himself the instrument, in however small and unwilling a part, of Bonaparte's success, and his spirits indeed required all the support which he could give them. His father's death returned to his thoughts easily\u2014too easily; he could not help but indulge privately in a bitter kind of relief that Lord Allendale had not suffered the pain of hearing it put about that his son was, not the prisoner of the French Emperor, but his honored guest, in the midst of war.\n\nLaurence put the thought aside. The evil deed which had occasioned his present circumstances had been finished long ago, and he had since then\u2014not without severe difficulty\u2014reconciled himself to the necessity of its commission. He would not now learn to regret that he had been the instrument of saving so many lives from a hideous and tormented end\u2014that so many of the dragons here present should only have survived, even to become the enemies of his nation, because of his actions. Victory by such a method must have been hateful to any man of honor, and if some claiming that title justified themselves by willfully refusing to acknowledge the sentience of dragons, Laurence was not of their number; he could not so deceive himself.\n\n\"I am satisfied,\" Tharkay said, with a narrow, steady look, \"except on one point. I know how greatly you have enjoyed Napoleon's generous attentions,\" this dryly, \"but you must know I would never have desired, or still less urged you to invite them, for my sake.\"\n\n\"I hope,\" Laurence said, \"that I would not require urging, to undertake any service on your behalf. In any case, we have had too much evidence of Napoleon's desire to make a parade of me to suppose that his attentions would have been long delayed, and he can have wanted neither excuse nor consent to set about them, since I have given him neither.\"\n\nTharkay shook his head a little, dissatisfied. \"I would prefer you not to permit any such consideration to weigh with you again. I undertook the hazards of my, shall we say, occupation, freely and with full knowledge of the consequences were I ever identified to the enemy.\"\n\n\"That cannot make me less inclined to avert those consequences,\" Laurence said. \"But you may be easy. If I have given Napoleon the power of making me appear his friend, I now mean to make him as well as his guests the best proofs to the contrary that I can, and I know you will not speak to stop me.\"\n\n\"Indeed not,\" Tharkay said. \"I am only sorry to have been unveiled so inconveniently.\"\n\nThere was a hard look in his eyes, which made Laurence dare to ask, \"Do you know how it may have come about?\"\n\n\"A reward for success, I imagine,\" Tharkay said. \"My latest report on the political situation in the Porte may have been excessively useful: the Sultan remains Napoleon's ally, and is unlikely to shift his position so long as we are aligned with Russia, but I discovered that a significant vezir was susceptible to persuasion. The Chinese legions we hope for will not encounter any direct opposition, if they come overland.\"\n\n\"That is an excellent piece of news indeed,\" Laurence said, low, \"but how should it have exposed you?\"\n\n\"I imagine the report has circulated a little too widely for my health,\" Tharkay said. \"It so happens that one of my beloved cousins has a minor sinecure, somewhere or other under the Navy Board.\"\n\n\"Good God,\" Laurence said. \"And you suppose him to have turned traitor?\"\n\n\"Oh, I am sure he would call it no such thing,\" Tharkay said. \"I doubt that the report was sold along with my name\u2014which explains M. Fouch\u00e9's eagerness to discuss the operation with me. No, I am sure dear Ambrose merely found it an irresistible opportunity to be rid of me and my inconvenient attempts to assert my right to my patrimony, and at a profit no less.\"\n\nHe spoke lightly, but Laurence knew to measure the depth of Tharkay's feelings less by what he said, than by what he did not say, and Tharkay had not mentioned his paternal family over a dozen times in all the years of their acquaintance. It was to a mere offhand mention that Laurence owed the knowledge of their existence; and to the accident of a shipboard communication that those relations, who had taken pains to furnish Tharkay with every apparent proof of family affection until his father's death, had since that event done everything in their power to steal his inheritance and deny his legitimacy.\n\nThey had succeeded so far to render him friendless and penniless in Britain, dependent on the kindness of an old acquaintance of his father's in the East India Company for even the little and dangerous foreign employment he had been able to obtain, as a go-between and a guide. Only the prize-money paid him, for having recruited some twenty feral beasts out of the Pamirs to Britain's service, had finally enabled him to press a law-suit to recover his rights; but this had dragged ever since.\n\n\"I am sorry to lose the power of disappointing your cousin's designs,\" Laurence said quietly. \"I hope, Tenzing, you know that I wish I hazarded my safety equally with yours.\"\n\n\"Oh, permit me to comfort you on that score,\" Tharkay said. \"Napoleon does not seem to me to care much for being balked. When you have gone romping around his carefully assembled guests, and done your best to overturn his remarkable conclave, I have every hope of your provoking him to all the outward displays of wrath that you might wish. You are as likely to be executed as I am.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The request had been made of Aurigny, and permission came the next morning swiftly and enthusiastically: they were to have the full run of the grounds, although the Emperor regretted they must not go near the northern edge of the gardens where Temeraire and Iskierka were housed. But their escort would gently guide them away if they should accidentally stray too far in that direction, and they would dine with the Emperor and the Empress tomorrow night, an honor Laurence received unwillingly, and Granby with outright dismay.\n\n\"There is not a moment to lose: let us do our best to put him in a towering rage at once,\" he said. \"It won't be too late for him to withdraw the invitation, and for my part, I had rather be in the stocks than at another such dinner table.\"\n\nTharkay's memory of the plan of the grounds was good enough to bring them near the Tswana, not without a little circumnavigation that Laurence could not regret, as serving to deceive their escort of six excellent and determined Grognards. He spoke with Aurigny and his companions a little as they walked the paths; they spoke of their emperor with an extreme familiarity, and cheerfully cursed the vagaries of his will that had put them on \"sheepdog-duty,\" as one fellow put it, and away from the front lines. \"Ah, but he must let us have a little fighting sometime,\" one of them named Brouilly said, a little indiscreetly, \"now that the Prussians are lining up for another drubbing\u2014I was at Austerlitz,\" he added, with pardonable pride, and touching the medal in his lapel with a caressing finger.\n\nTharkay glanced round, when he had made another turn, and Laurence saw he had put them upon a narrow walk, between two pavilions. Beyond them was visible the carved pediment of the particularly large one where they had seen the Tswana, the day before. There remained only to find some excuse to go near enough to speak to them: Laurence regretted Temeraire's absence all the more, for having very little command of the Tswana-language, himself, but they might contrive somehow, if there were will on both sides. Laurence had no aim of concealing from the guards what he said and did: so long as they did not drag him bodily away before he had said as much as he could, he would be satisfied.\n\n\"I must compliment the design of your pavilions,\" Laurence said to Aurigny, not without an inward shading of distaste for this species of deceit. \"The floors are heated, I believe? I hope there is no objection to our making an examination of some few of the buildings.\"\n\nAurigny did not demur, and in a half-counterfeit of interest Laurence went to the nearest pavilion and made a little show of discovering the heating-stove\u2014an invention not of French but of Chinese origin, with which he had long been familiar, although this one had certain clever modifications, which brought the deception nearer truth. Laurence would gladly have acquired plans of the system, although the thought reminded him unpleasantly that he had few prospects of making any use of such a design\u2014heating was not much required in New South Wales, and even if he and Temeraire were ever suffered to make their home again in England, they were not likely to have the power of setting up any pavilions.\n\n\"John, will you have a look?\" he said, calling Granby's attention to the location of the heating-pipes, which carried the hot water from the low gurgling kettle and circulated it into the base of the pavilion, and thought nothing of it when the dragons sleeping within raised their heads to look over at them: two middle-weight beasts, bright sky-blue in color and of a sleek configuration not so far from Temeraire's lines, with large but tightly furled wings and banding across the ridge of a rounded nose not unlike a snake; they had long fangs hanging over their jaws. The guards showed no concern, although perhaps for the youngest of their number, affected no concern: his hand rested upon his pistol, and his eyes remained on the dragons instead of his prisoners.\n\nAnd then one of the beasts hissed inward, a long and threatening whistle of breath, and said, \"British.\"\n\nGranby, anxious over playing his part, had been bent with excessive attention to examine the pipes; he jerked his head up, took one look at the dragons, and said, \"Oh, Lord, they are Bengal,\" and turned reaching for Laurence even as one of the beasts brought a slashing, many-taloned claw down.\n\nInstinct moved quicker, and the shadow of the falling blow: Laurence dived aside and took himself rolling into the brush, while Granby fell back in the opposite direction towards the path. The claws passed with tearing force between them, carrying away two of the hot-water pipes. Clouds of hot steam erupted whistling into the air, and the dragon jerked back its talons with a hiss of pain.\n\nThe guards were shouting protests and drawing their swords and pistols, but a party adequate to guard three men was not sufficient to give pause to an angry dragon. The two beasts came slithering to their full length out of the pavilion, clawing over the ground with startling speed even with their wings still folded to avoid the trees, their heads swinging to either side back and forth searchingly. The meager cover of the steam-clouds was quickly failing as the burst pipes ran dry. Laurence, getting his feet beneath him, made a crouching dash for a stand of trees\u2014and threw himself behind it only just as the trunk groaned, spitting bark to either side of him, with a blow from the dragon's head.\n\nPistol-fire was cracking loud behind him, on the path. One of the dragons had turned that way; another had come after him. She had drawn her head back, shaking off the impact against the tree, and in the brief respite, Laurence dashed for a hollow between a pair of massive boulders, artfully arranged for decorative effect to conceal one pavilion from another; fistfuls of moss tore away beneath his hands as he hauled himself into the small space. The dragon came on after him, putting her gleaming yellow eye to the crack. \"British,\" she hissed again, full of hatred. She wore a neck-collar of gold, very dirty, which looked also as though pieces had been broken off at different times\u2014perhaps to sell, for her keep. She was a lean and older beast, with scales showing the broadening of age.\n\nHe ducked back deeper into his hiding-hole as the dragon tried scraping a couple of talons through the opening, nearly catching him. She clawed against the rocks in frustration, a hideous scraping noise. He might have called out to her, but he had no argument to make which he thought would have any weight with an enraged and vengeful dragon. Laurence reflected grimly that he ought to have considered that not every dragon here would have cause to esteem him; Napoleon would surely have been as happy to recruit more dragons who shared his devoted enmity for Britain.\n\nThe boulders jarred violently: the dragon was hurling herself bodily against them. Dirt shook loose, stinging in his eyes, and both the great stones rocked back and forth, one wobbling out of its place. Another blow would shake them apart. Laurence twisted in the hollow, and squeezed himself out on the other side\u2014and ran, with the hunted speed of any creature with death at its back, hearing the splintering branches behind him, the brute cracking of green wood, as its herald. He did not look back. The hissing breath drew close, but in the distance came the sound of more guns, and roaring: the French had summoned their own dragons to be peacemakers. He could not evade forever, but he could buy time. He twisted sharply to one side, and threw himself behind one of the larger trees; the dragon whipped to follow him, and as she clawed for the trunk he ran directly at her, instead, and passed under the arch of her forelegs. Her head doubled on herself, trying to keep sight of him, and she was forced awkwardly to twist herself around to come after him again.\n\nHe was panting, nearly out of breath. His chest ached. The dragon had made a wall of herself behind him now, and was slowing a little\u2014which might have seemed hopeful, for a moment, and then he saw she was herding him towards the open path ahead: when he was out of the trees, he would be easy prey to spot and seize. A moment's calculation, and then he ran, as quickly as he could, and threw himself across the path and behind the wall of a hedge on the other side.\n\nBut she had anticipated the tactic; she too leapt, a monstrous jump over the path, her wings half-opening, and landed on his far side\u2014herding him once again, from the other direction, and she had closed in on him. Laurence had rarely felt more sympathy for a fox being run to ground: there was something terrible in feeling the quick intelligence of the hunter on his heels, a sentience without mercy. She would have him in another moment; there was only one final hope to hazard. He gulped a breath, then broke onto the path and ran once more, straight and without evading twists, for the Tswana pavilion, not far, and shouted, \"Help! Help!\" in their tongue.\n\nAnd then the world overturned with stunning force. Laurence had a brief peculiar impression of light shining directly through his skull, accompanied by a clamor of bells. Eight bells, he thought distantly, his whole body overcome by a heavy numbing languor. The dragon's head was lowering towards him, teeth bared; she had knocked him down with a claw, and two talons pinned him like a butterfly to either side of his chest. She peered at him. He was conscious of no pain, but he could not move. Evidently satisfied he was stunned beyond escape, she lifted away her head, and raised her claw for the final blow.\n\nStill in that paralyzing stupor, Laurence saw very clearly as she was bowled over and away from him: a much larger dragon in mottled orange and grey knocked her away and put a protective cage of talons over him. She coiled back up to her feet, and drawing up her shoulders unfurled a large frilled flap which extended above and below her head, patterned peacock-bright in blue and green and violets, and hissing bared her long and vicious fangs. One of these was a little broken at the tip, and a touch of greenish ichor dripped from it.\n\nThe Tswana beast, not unimpressed, made a low rumbling comment\u2014Laurence did not entirely follow the meaning, but felt it something vaguely profane and uneasy. But dust was rising from the path, and in a moment two more of the Tswana dragons had landed next to their companion: their massed weight made the blue dragon draw back, and after a moment the frill smoothed itself back down. She hissed at them all again, and slowly backed away down the path, retreating without ever taking her eyes away, until she rounded her own pavilion and was gone from view, the last curve of her tail vanishing.\n\nLaurence found he was trembling in all his parts, in some belated reaction, and a moment later sensation returned: his heart was pounding with violent speed, and he put a hand over his chest involuntarily, imagining he would feel the beat palpable against his fingers. A few deep breaths restored him to something more like equilibrium, and then the sheltering talons came away. He pushed himself up sitting, and turning found himself under contemplation by five dragons, and some ten men wearing the gold jewellery and fur cloaks common to the highest ranks of the Tswana warriors\u2014although their spears had been exchanged for rifles slung over their backs, adorned with exceptionally long bayonets."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "\"We have a little while to sit and talk, I think,\" Moshueshue said, in quite excellent French, pouring him a cup of red-brown tea. \"The excitement is not quite over, it seems, and they will be some time determining that you have not been scattered over the grounds in pieces. I was most interested to find you a guest here, Captain Laurence. I had not expected you.\"\n\nLaurence lowered the cup, for which he was grateful: a hot and pleasant brew, with nothing bitter about it, even if it were not very strong. He had as yet said nothing to explain his situation, but Moshueshue evidently already suspected certain aspects. \"Sir, you are right to be surprised; I am not a guest, but a prisoner.\" He outlined in a few more words the circumstances which had brought him and Temeraire, while Moshueshue listened without comment, and then added, \"I would be grateful to know more of the purpose of this convocation, and to what end my name has been used.\"\n\nMoshueshue did not answer immediately, but sat with a thoughtful and inward-turned expression, which showed nothing of hot emotion. One of the dragons, growing impatient more quickly, spoke to demand an explanation. The prince glanced up, and after a considering moment answered briefly: Laurence understood egg and thief, and was a little startled to see the dragons all draw back their heads with a united hiss of distaste.\n\n\"Egg-stealing is a serious matter with us, Captain,\" Moshueshue said, seeing his surprise, and Laurence realized that it would of course be regarded as nearly the theft of a soul: since the Tswana believed their dragons their own great reborn, and made the belief true by regularly inculcating each egg with the history of the dead while the dragonet formed within, they would object violently to anyone taking an egg from the family and friends who were responsible for conveying that history.\n\n\"Then you can well understand the motive which brought us here, despite all other interest,\" Laurence said, \"and I hope would not see the practice rewarded.\"\n\nMoshueshue smiled very briefly, as if acknowledging a point neatly scored, but he did not pass his words on to the dragons. He was not a man easily read, or easily led; and few, Laurence supposed, better understood how to manage dragons, as he must to have any influence over beasts who considered themselves not only his protectors but his elders.\n\n\"I understand the French have suffered a reversal lately, in the east,\" Moshueshue said, an invitation Laurence was glad to accept, by furnishing him with the details of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign.\n\n\"There will be an army at his gates by the spring, I confidently expect,\" Laurence finished, silently grateful to the cheerful young Imperial Guardsman who had informed him that the Prussians had joined the alliance, \"and perhaps you know something already of the situation he faces in the south, in Spain.\"\n\nHe knew well that he was making an argument. Moshueshue regarded him all the while with a thoughtful expression, and then abruptly nodding said, \"Napoleon has proposed an alliance,\" answering the question Laurence had not yet asked, but wished to. \"Not, as you might suppose, a military one. He desires rather that we should draw up borders among ourselves, among dragons, and he has proposed as well a code of laws, which should govern among us and resolve those disputes which arise over territory. It is a sensible code: its principles are good, and there is much to like in it,\" which Laurence, a little dismally, could well imagine.\n\n\"But it recommends itself to my people mostly,\" Moshueshue added dryly, \"by seeking our opinions on how the world is to be divided. We find you Ropeans are inclined to consult no one but yourselves on these little matters, and decide from the other side of the world how best to divide up a country in which you do not live.\"\n\nHe beckoned to one of his servants, a young boy who ran and brought them the proposal. Looking over the maps therein, Laurence was astonished\u2014although he knew he ought not have been, by any Napoleonic effrontery\u2014to find all Europe and even Russia made into a French province, and from the air divided neatly into territories belonging to various feral dragons who should all owe allegiance to Napoleon direct. Even in England the French flag stood over a quilt of small patched territories. Laurence wondered at it, seeing one marked YELLOW REAPERS, as though Napoleon hoped to acquire the allegiance of the entire breed, and across Scotland a collection of wholly unfamiliar and peculiar names\u2014RICARLEE, VINLOP, SHAL\u2014whose meaning he could not divine. He wished not for the first time that Temeraire were at hand, to be consulted; he could only guess that these were each the name of some particular dragon, like Arkady, who had established himself as chief of a company of feral beasts.\n\nAll Africa below the Sahara had been made over to the Tswana, and Brazil marked out for them as well, abutting the Incan Empire's holdings in the west. Indeed Laurence could see nothing for Moshueshue to complain of in the arrangements, if they had been at all enforceable, with no other European power in a position to quarrel with them.\n\n\"Sir, I can tell you that he has no power to assign any of these lands, though he may claim to,\" Laurence said to Moshueshue, who shrugged a little.\n\n\"Had you the power to assign Cape Town to yourselves, or the Portuguese to claim Louanda? You claimed those places, and acted upon your claims; you took slaves and established your fortifications and your farms, and you would be there yet, if we had not driven you away by force. All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.\"\n\nLaurence looked at those neat lines, which divided the fields of Scotland among a dozen feral bands\u2014who should, he found, reading into the Code Napol\u00e9on Draconique, be entitled to take a certain amount of cattle in their territory, and to call upon one another for aid if their claims met resistance\u2014and he began to understand. He knew well the jealousy of dragons, over anything they considered their own possessions and their own territory in particular, even if very lately acquired, or by dubious means or even outright stolen. Napoleon meant to put all that possessive spirit to his own service: by telling the dragons they were entitled to these rights, he would make them willing to defend them, and by providing them with a network of alliances would enable them to do so\u2014if not forever, then certainly for long enough to be a powerful distraction to the human nations whose borders they occupied.\n\nIt was his stratagem in Russia refined and writ large: he would make all the ferals of Europe into enemies of the very governments who presently fed them in the breeding grounds or ignored their small depredations. That most of those ferals would be slaughtered in reprisal, or starve in the ensuing chaos, he would ignore, save when convenient for him to come to the aid of one or another band, as an excuse for making still more war upon his neighbors.\n\nLaurence looked up from the sheaf of papers. \"And would you lend your aid, to a feral band in Britain, seeking to seize lands not their own?\"\n\n\"Where would you prefer to see war made, Captain Laurence?\" Moshueshue asked softly. \"In your country, or on the other side of the sea?\"\n\n\"War has a habit of spreading, sir,\" Laurence said. \"I would prefer to see peace.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Temeraire settled back down uneasily. \"Well, it all seems to have gone quiet again,\" he said to Iskierka, \"only I cannot see what any of them were about, except some sort of quarreling\u2014it does not seem to have gone near the house, or near the egg, so I suppose it can have done no real harm.\"\n\nHe felt unconvinced by his own words: he did not at all like the sound of gunshots so near-by, and such a squabbling of dragons. He had seen five all together go skirmishing aloft; a bright blue dragon fighting three and finally four of the French middle-weights, until they had harried him back to the ground. Temeraire had not recognized the breed at all, and so knew nothing of his allegiance, but what should any dragon be doing here, if not a friend of France, and if a friend, why starting up such an enormous fuss?\u2014and why putting on so disheartening a display? The French dragons had brought him down so very skillfully, even though he had been quite large and old and impressively scarred. Temeraire had not liked observing it at all. As dreadful as it must be to think of leaving Laurence behind in captivity, to save the egg, it was far worse to think of being captured in the attempt to do so\u2014the egg taken away again, and locked up this time somewhere in secret, so there would be no second chance.\n\n\"You will insist on making trouble as though we hadn't enough,\" Iskierka said, eating her cow with unconcern bordering, in Temeraire's opinion, on a complete lack of sensibility. \"So what if they are quarreling among themselves? If you ask me, this is as good a chance for us as anything. We had much better stop worrying and just go at once, while they are busy with the nonsense over there.\"\n\n\"Why,\" Temeraire said, beginning to explain why this was a singularly bad idea, as Iskierka's always were, and then discovered he could not find a satisfactory argument against it. He struggled a moment longer, then said, \"Oh, very well, then,\" and gulped the last hindquarter of beef out of his own bowl\u2014they had complained falsely of hunger, and asked for beef in the British tradition. Temeraire had felt a bit guilty at putting their guards to such trouble, but they could not be sure of getting anything much to eat between here and Dover. He and Iskierka had settled it between them they should make for the covert there.\n\nThe bowls were clean; they had drunk deeply from the fountain. The evening was fast approaching: the lights of the house shone golden against the blue night. Laurence was there now, perhaps, Temeraire thought miserably\u2014safe and well, his health improved and all consideration taken for his comfort\u2014and by this evening, when their flight was known, he would surely be taken from there, hurled into a cold dank prison cell, made wretched and ill\u2014\n\n\"Let us go at once,\" Temeraire said, before courage and resolution failed him.\n\n\"Very well, but if anything should happen to Granby, I will never forgive you,\" Iskierka said, adding not a little to his unhappiness.\n\n\"Be quiet, and start that fire going,\" Temeraire said resentfully. He rose up on his haunches and spread out his wings, making as large a screen of himself as he could manage. They had surreptitiously scraped together a heap of old branches and leaves into the back corner of their pavilion over the course of the day; Iskierka put her head low to them and blew a narrow line of flame upon the pile until it had fairly caught, and the fire began to lick up the columns of the pavilion. In a moment, the roof was blooming with small flames, surprising Temeraire by a wholly unaccustomed feeling of deep terror, which sent him jerking out of the pavilion with a gasp of dismay.\n\nIskierka followed him out, snorting. \"Whatever is it? What if they look over and see us too soon?\"\n\n\"The fire is far enough along,\" Temeraire said, striving to sound calm and sensible, and to be so as well; when really he wanted only to be gone, aloft and away from the flames. He shook out his wings and looked them over, covertly\u2014surely some embers had caught upon them? There was no sign of so much as a spark, but as soon as he turned away he felt the small stinging sensation of prickling heat upon the membranes. He looked again: there was still nothing there.\n\n\"Come on, then,\" Iskierka said, and there was no help for it: he reared up with her and together they fanned the flames energetically with their wings, until it climbed rapidly into a towering pillar, crackling and roaring as the roof went up. Temeraire managed to remain in place, but he was grateful when the cries of alarm rose behind them and he and Iskierka went aloft at last, circling away, the blazing flames making them invisible against the night to their guards.\n\nThe pavilion of the egg was not far, and Iskierka had been right, after all: half the guardians were absent, and evidently had gone to help with the squabbling on the other side of the grounds. Five remained, alert and peering into the night, but Temeraire roared furiously as he and Iskierka descended, at the stand of elegant trees bordering the clearing. As the divine wind shattered their branches into splinters, Iskierka blew a sheet of flame over the fragments, so they caught and rained down upon the guards like a hail of fire, piercing and scorching all at once.\n\nCries of pain reproached Temeraire; many of the dragons covered their eyes and folded in their own wings; he shuddered with sympathetic agony. But the attack served its purpose. Together, he and Iskierka seized the edges of the roof and tore it away, and he snatched up the egg and all its nest together into his talons\u2014carefully, so carefully\u2014\n\nImmense relief washed over him the instant he had it safe. \"I have it!\" he cried, \"I have it!\" and Iskierka flung her head back and swathed the air over their heads with flame, snaking her head back and forth all the while she breathed out her fire, leaving a streak of violet-green dazzle upon the night sky. Temeraire was beating up as quickly as he could\u2014up and through a wall of hot air, but as soon as he got his wings cupped over it, he began to rise swiftly, and Iskierka was on his heels.\n\nThe guards were clamoring below, bells ringing wildly out. \"Quick, there!\" Iskierka called.\n\n\"No!\" Temeraire said. \"They have already lit the lamps on that side of the grounds, we must try to the north\u2014\" But there were lanterns coming alight in that direction as well, hemming them in.\n\n\"Over the house, then!\" Iskierka said, \"and we may as well have a go at picking Granby up, after all.\"\n\n\"Don't be foolish,\" Temeraire said. \"Our only hope is that they will assume just that, and all go to the house, and we must choose a way to get past whoever is left elsewhere. We must go over the lake, and then we must try for a woods somewhere to hide, or a very large barn.\"\n\n\"I cannot hide in a barn!\" Iskierka said. \"And neither can you, so don't you be foolish! The lake is a dreadful idea: if they should catch us there, and I breathe fire on them, they have only to duck into the water, or knock me into it, and it will be of no use, or at least much less. Be careful with that!\" she added.\n\n\"I am being careful!\" Temeraire said. \"Only it is shifting all on its own,\" and as soon as he had said it, he realized, with a shock of breathless outrage, that the ungrateful thing was hatching, now, after all their trouble.\n\nBut there was no help for it: the egg was rocking so that it was sure to fall out of his grasp. He was forced to drop hastily into a small clearing just to the east of the great house. He had the small satisfaction of being proven right: in the lights of the house he could see nearly twenty French dragons milling about in the air, and there was a great noise going forth inside; they were certainly securing Laurence and Granby even now, he thought despairingly, as he put the egg down on the ground\u2014very carefully, despite his resentment. But when the egg split wide down the middle in a single loud crack, and the dragonet inside popped up, Temeraire was entirely of a mind with Iskierka, who snorted a small tongue of flame and said, \"Well, I like that! Why didn't you hatch yesterday, and save us all this trouble?\"\n\nThe dragonet sneezed twice and shook the slime from her wings\u2014quite mature, and certainly able to have come out anytime this last fortnight, Temeraire noted with some indignation\u2014and answered without a qualm, \"I hadn't made up my mind to hatch just yet. The situation did not seem entirely auspicious. But neither of you seems to know where you are going.\"\n\n\"It is no joke to find a way out when we are in the middle of the French Army, I will have you know,\" Temeraire said. \"And what of Laurence and Granby? They will certainly be put into prison: we will never get them out of the palace now.\"\n\nThe dragonet turned her head to look at the building. \"So that is a palace!\" she said. \"It is very handsome. But if you want someone out of it, I suppose you must go and take them.\"\n\n\"There are twenty dragons over it!\" Temeraire said. \"Iskierka, perhaps if we only go back to our pavilion now, quickly, and pretend that it caught fire by accident, and we had only taken the egg and gone to the lake to be safe\u2014perhaps they will not punish Laurence and Granby, after all.\"\n\n\"Yes, but then you will be prisoners again,\" the dragonet put in, \"and they will require an answer from me.\"\n\n\"What answer?\" Iskierka said suspiciously, and Temeraire felt quite baffled himself.\n\n\"The French Emperor wants me to take his son to be my companion,\" the dragonet said. \"I did not want to come out and at once have to say yes or no, when I did not know what was best. There is so much that is unclear from inside the shell! I have been trying to think how I might arrange to avoid committing myself. It would certainly be best if we should get away quietly, before anyone knows I have hatched.\"\n\n\"Well, now you are out of the shell, you will have to manage things for yourself,\" Iskierka said. \"I am certainly not going anywhere without Granby now.\"\n\n\"Or Laurence,\" Temeraire added, with a feeling of strong indignation: so all his fears had been for nothing, and the egg had never been in any danger of indignity at all. So much for Lien talking of poor mongrels\u2014at least Napoleon could recognize true quality, in a dragon. \"We are not going to abandon them, only because you cannot make up your mind.\"\n\n\"That,\" the dragonet said, \"is quite rude. I hope I am not to be called indecisive, only because I mean to make a careful choice. But I will pardon you, as of course you are anxious for your companions. I do not expect you to abandon them! Besides, we will never get away with everyone looking for us like this. Plainly we must have a diversion, and at once.\" She looked over at the palace, and tipped her head consideringly. \"It is a pity, of course, but I cannot see any alternative.\"\n\nTemeraire was just about to inquire what additional sort of diversion she imagined they might be able to produce, which would not merely draw everyone's attention to them straightaway, when she shook out her wings and leapt into the air. \"No!\" Temeraire hissed out in alarm. \"Wait, come back; you will be seen at once!\"\n\nShe was flying directly towards the house. The heads of several of the dragons were already turning towards her wingbeats.\n\n\"That is all that we needed,\" Temeraire said, despairingly. \"We had better go back to our pavilion at once, before she has got herself caught. Perhaps she will take the blame for it all: and serve her right.\"\n\n\"I don't want to go back to our pavilion!\" Iskierka said. \"We will only go back to being prisoners, and I am sure they will lock Granby away much better, no matter what excuse we give. Anyway, what do you suppose she is planning?\"\n\n\"I do not know, and I don't suppose she has planned anything,\" Temeraire began, only to jerk his head around as a thin shrill whine pierced all the clamor, very like a pot boiling underneath a badly fitted lid. His ruff flattened against his skull involuntarily: a truly dreadful noise, and it kept rising so. The rest of the dragons began to make complaining sounds\u2014not merely the guards but everywhere through the grounds, heads rising up on all sides.\n\n\"Why must she make that dreadful noise?\" Iskierka said, jetting out a ring of steam in expression of her own displeasure. It was indeed the dragonet, Temeraire realized\u2014she was hovering directly over the house now, escaping notice because all the other dragons were twisting their heads away from the noise, and then abruptly she pointed her head down and blasted out a stream of white flame directly along the ridge cap of the immensely long grey roof. It was quite thin, but it ran away from her with tremendous speed, rippling strangely, and a moment later a shockingly loud thunderclap noise followed it, as nearly every window in the building burst.\n\nTemeraire found he had hunched into himself, head ducked under a wing for shelter, entirely without meaning to. He shook himself out. Glass was raining down with a tinkling noise, like the box of magnificent porcelain he had seen shattered on delivery, in New South Wales, ruined beyond repair\u2014he still remembered the carnage with regret\u2014and the roof was in flames, all over. \"Laurence!\" he cried out in staring horror, and flung himself into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"Is it Temeraire?\" Granby shouted over the dreadful shrieking noise, and Laurence could only shake his head without answering. It was like nothing he had ever heard in eight years of his experience of the divine wind, but Temeraire before now had managed to make some new and unexpected use of his abilities, and Laurence could not be sure. Their guards at least had no doubts, he saw from their faces, nor any lack of horror. Brouilly's grip on Laurence's arm, above the elbow, was bidding fair to squeeze all the blood from that limb as Aurigny led the way, the guards dragging them urgently down the staircase, surely towards some holding-place below.\n\nLaurence was in an odd state to be flung into a dungeon: he had been dressing for dinner, and he was yet in the evening clothes which had earlier been sent him by the same emperor who had now commanded his imprisonment: knee-breeches with polished buckles, silk stockings and slippers, and his cravat just properly creased; a new coat in deep aviator's green, lined with golden-yellow silk. The guards had burst in upon them unannounced just as Laurence had shrugged his way into the coat, and without ceremony or explanation had bundled them all off at once down the hallway. Laurence understood well enough; he had not even been unprepared, thanks to Tharkay's earlier news. Temeraire and Iskierka had acted; they had been seen in some act of rebellion or escape, and the French now meant to secure their hostages. He would have liked to know what had happened, but there was no chance to ask in the confusion, and the guards in no mood to answer.\n\nThey had been bundled, pell-mell-tumble fashion, all the way along the hall and down one turn of the stairs, towards the ground floor and the kitchens. Then the thunder had come. Laurence looked round with his ears still ringing, and all down the full length of the hall the massive windows burst: a noise like a broadside full-on through the stern cabin of a first-rate, glass and splinters flying. A sheeting wave of white flame came washing down the outer wall, and reached in roaring through the shattered frames.\n\n\"Good God!\" Granby said, shouting and yet muffled in Laurence's half-deadened ears. The carpets were already aflame, and smoke was pouring into the hallway through every crack and open door, grey waves accompanied with screaming.\n\nBrouilly, single-minded in the face of disaster, tried to continue onwards onto the cellar stairs, but Laurence caught the corner of the wall and planted himself. \"No,\" he said, shouting to be heard. \"No: I would rather be shot here, than driven below to roast alive. I have no idea what has happened, but there will be no escaping this house in ten minutes. We must get outside at once: where is the nearest door?\"\n\nBrouilly looked down at his senior; Aurigny halted two steps down the stairs and turned, staring up at them a moment out of the dark, irresolute; abruptly he came back up and demanded, \"Monsieur, will you swear you had no part of this?\"\n\n\"I can give you my word as a gentleman,\" Laurence said, \"and although I cannot answer with certainty for my dragon, I will say Temeraire is not a fool, and I do not suppose, even if he could accomplish the act, that he would willfully set fire to a house where he knew perfectly well I was prisoner. I do not know what has happened, but he is hardly the only one who might wish your master any ill: where is he?\"\n\nThis decided the matter; Brouilly said to Aurigny, \"My God! What matter if they do go free, if the Emperor is lost?\" and deserting their prisoners, the Guardsmen turned and rushed up the stairs they had just descended, going in leaps and bounds over the smoke that came rolling down the stairs to meet them in eddying waves.\n\n\"We seem to be abandoned to our own devices,\" Tharkay said. \"May I suggest the nearest window, however, in preference to a door? I will take being singed over choking.\"\n\nLaurence halted in the landing, halfway to following him, when a dreadful thought struck: \"The child,\" he said abruptly, as Granby and Tharkay turned to look back at him. \"The Emperor and Empress meant to dine with us; the boy would have been in the nursery by now.\"\n\nThe smoke was growing ever thicker as they forced their way up, past the torrent, back to their own landing. Men and women were running down the stairs in a frenzy to escape, coughing and half-blind. Laurence stepped into the hall to seize one of the enormous vases along the wall, full of flowers; he flung the flowers down and wetted himself and his cravat, wrapping it over his face, and handed it on to Granby and Tharkay.\n\n\"I suppose this is a judgment on me, for saying I should be grateful for any excuse not to go to dinner,\" Granby said, grimly, dousing himself thoroughly. \"Let's hurry: I am damned if I am going to die trying to rescue the crown prince of France.\"\n\nThey went up another flight. In their rooms they had now and again heard a noise of childish wails and nursemaids singing, coming from above; now they ran down the halls, opening every door, until they found a room strewn with toys: the curtains ablaze and the silken carpet beginning to catch, and the loud determined cries of a distressed child coming from behind another door.\n\nWhile Tharkay and Granby took the bottom edge of the carpet and dragged it away from the flames, folding it double and stamping upon it, Laurence ran to the inner door and threw it wide to find the bedchamber thick with smoke: one of the nursemaids lying on the floor by the window screaming, on the sooty wreck of a blanket that been used to smother her, her hair blackened and her blistered hands covering her face, while another huddled against the back wall with the crying child in her arms. The third was standing before them, beating at the flames catching around them with a wetted rag.\n\nLaurence hurdled a line of flames and caught her by the arm. \"Get out of the room!\" he said, and the young woman cried out and pointed: he turned to find a single monstrous smoke-reddened eye peering in anxiously through the shattered glass and flames, calling.\n\nLaurence dredged up a few words of Quechua: \"This way!\" he shouted out to the dragon, motioning to the next room. He turning caught the second nursemaid, with the child in her arms, and wrapping the wet sheet around her dragged her through the flames, the child between their bodies. Granby had pulled down the curtains with his hook-hand, arm wrapped in his sodden cloak, and now the dragon was tearing out the burning window-frame, emitting howls of pain as it did.\n\nAll at once wood and brick gave way, crumbling open a wide gap in the wall. The Incan dragon put its foreleg through the hole, and they got the nursemaids and the child carefully into its talons. Laurence and Tharkay dashed back into the burning bedroom\u2014the other woman had fallen silent, and she lay heavy and limp in their arms as they carried her out, her skin red and scorched. As they heaved her into the dragon's claw, a roaring from outside, and the sound of beating wings: through smoke Laurence glimpsed Lien, her white belly lit brilliant orange by the flames, hovering before the house. She was calling something out; the Incan dragon called back, \"Wait, wait!\" urgently, and snatching its precious burden drew its talons out of the opening.\n\n\"Maintenant!\" Laurence heard Lien call, and from above a sudden deluge of dirt and water came pouring down the sides of the house, splattering enormous gouts through the gap in the wall. Laurence put his head out, afterwards, for a quick look up: fires still burned inside the house, licking out of the windows, but at least the outside had been smothered.\n\nHe turned as the door behind him flung open: Napoleon, with a party of Guardsmen crowding behind him, Aurigny among them\u2014the Emperor also resplendent in a magnificent coat of red wool, now badly marred with soot. He stared at Laurence wildly, with the momentary bafflement of one trying to make sense of an unexpected meeting, and then leaping forward seized Laurence by the arms. \"My son?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Safely away,\" Laurence said, pointing out at Lien, and the Incan dragon that had gone to join her.\n\nOne of the guards sprang to the opening\u2014unwary, as Lien called out, \"Encore!\" and a second torrent came down the walls and carried him out of the window-hole and away, his feet slipping in the mud already present. The wave subsided; out of the hesitating body of guards Aurigny leapt forward, and cupping hands around his mouth bellowed, \"L'Empereur est ici!\"\n\nTwo others followed him, all calling together, and Lien's head swung around as though pulled on a string; she had heard. She dived through the smoke, and the Guardsmen pushed him forward in a knot as Lien reached in for him. \"The Empress!\" Napoleon said, resisting.\n\n\"Safely out by now, Sire!\" Aurigny was shouting as the men thrust him into the urgent talons.\n\nLaurence started: Tharkay had his arm and Granby's, and was drawing them back. \"There is a room with no smoke coming out, three windows down the hall,\" he said, low. They covered their mouths and ran through the haze of the hallway to the third door, and kicking their way in found a bare room halfway through cleaning, the curtains stripped and in a heap on the floor. One of the window-frames was burning, but the other, though blackened, had not caught. They unhooked the window and pushed it wide. Down the side of the building, Lien was lifting away with Napoleon, and two middle-weight dragons were crowding in to the window to rescue the Guards.\n\nThere were many ledges running along the outside walls, some as wide as a man's foot, and the building was not pitching back and forth, which made the climb down light work for a sailor, much less an aviator. In ten minutes, they dropped down onto the lawns, not too wretchedly singed and bruised, and as he rolled to his feet Laurence heard a voice over the pandemonium, calling, \"Laurence! Laurence!\"\n\nThere was nothing to do but hope the confusion would save them: Laurence shouted, \"Here! Temeraire, over here!\" and Temeraire came down beside him with a gasp of relief.\n\n\"Oh Laurence!\" he said, snatching him up at once. \"I flew round and round and I could not see you in the least. I will wring her neck, see if I do not!\"\n\n\"Don't tell me Iskierka has done all this!\" Granby said, already tumbling into Temeraire's other claw with Tharkay.\n\n\"No!\" Temeraire said. \"It is not Iskierka's fault, except it is, for she would have an egg with the divine wind and fire both, and just look where that has landed us!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "\"Free, and with your captains,\" the dragonet said, which silenced Temeraire and Iskierka, in the midst of their heartily upbraiding her. She lifted a claw and licked her talons neatly\u2014bloodstained, as though having fired the palace, she had taken a moment to go get herself something to eat. Recalling the voracious appetite of new-hatched dragons, Laurence supposed this was indeed the case, as she would otherwise have been complaining extremely. He stared down at the deceptively small creature in some dismay. She seemed entirely untroubled by the enormous chaos she had wreaked: in the distance behind them, clouds of smoke still blotted out half the night sky, and the palace was still limned in the reddish glow of embers.\n\n\"But that is only by good luck!\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"I do not deny there was a risk,\" the dragonet said judiciously, \"but one must take risks occasionally to achieve one's ends, when there is no better way of going about it. There is no sense lamenting a necessary evil.\"\n\n\"It was not necessary for you to nearly burn up Granby,\" Iskierka said stormily, \"and the next time you mean to take risks, you may take them with your companion, and not mine. Why you couldn't have made up your mind to take Napoleon's son, I am sure I don't know. He will be an emperor, too: it is all muchwhatlike.\"\n\n\"That,\" the dragonet said severely, \"is an extremely shortsighted remark. As though one emperor were just the same as another, to all purposes!\"\n\n\"It would certainly not be as good, as to be companion to the Emperor of China,\" Temeraire said, \"but for my part I do not see why you should have ever needed to consider becoming a traitor, and joining the enemy.\"\n\n\"That term I reject, for I should have betrayed no-one in making such a choice: my loyalty has not been given either to China, or Britain, or France,\" the dragonet said with a martial light in her eye, drawing herself up and thrusting her head forward in challenge towards Temeraire, although his muzzle loomed larger than her entire body. \"I recall you telling me quite clearly that the choice of companion should be my own: did you only mean, so long as I should choose a companion agreeable to you?\"\n\n\"Oh, well,\" Temeraire said, and drew his own head back to rub against his flank in a gesture of embarrassment; Laurence indeed recalled overhearing him make such muttered lectures to the egg in its shell, when it had first sat in state upon the Potentate. \"But I do not see why you should at all want to join the French, after they stole our egg, and after Napoleon has caused so much trouble for everyone.\"\n\nSatisfied to have defended her honor, the dragonet settled back down onto her haunches. \"I cannot say that I have perceived any distinction among the nations of the world,\" she answered, \"which should entitle any of them to either my full approval or condemnation. I have heard more than enough, being carted here and there and exchanged from one side to another, to persuade me that none are without blame for this unhappy state of quarreling and perpetual warfare. That, I can heartily condemn. It seems perfectly plain to me that it is war itself which must be halted, without wanting one side or another defeated in particular.\"\n\nShe spoke severely. Laurence supposed her time in the shell had certainly been an alarming period enough to give her a distaste for its cause, if she had been aware through much of it to remember; but she did not seem to have grown shy\u2014perhaps not surprising, when she had already produced a disaster of such magnitude while not yet the size of a pony. It augured ominously for her future capabilities, and he could not help but be concerned to find her so willing to entertain all suitors.\n\n\"Certainly the war must be halted,\" Temeraire said. \"That is precisely why we mean to defeat Napoleon.\"\n\n\"That would stop this war,\" the dragonet said. \"But I am quite certain that it would not end all war. I dare say you and your allies would all quarrel among yourselves straightaway, and start a new one.\"\n\n\"Well, if there were no war, anywhere, how could one ever take a prize?\" Iskierka put in. \"That would not be agreeable at all.\"\n\n\"I would be very happy to see war come to an end, myself; although a neat little skirmish now and then, with a prize after, no-one could really object to, I think,\" Temeraire said. \"But I should like to know a great deal how you suppose anyone should accomplish that.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know, yet,\" the dragonet said, \"but I mean to find a way: just because the business will be difficult is no excuse for not making the attempt. But of course my choice of companion is of great importance. I am not sure that the Emperor of France would not be best situated, after all, to help me.\"\n\n\"You may be sure Napoleon will not want anything to do with you after this,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" the dragonet said. \"Most likely he does not even know I have hatched yet. Since you have escaped, I dare say he will blame the two of you, instead, and if anyone did see me do it, why, I am newly hatched, and no-one could expect me to know exactly what I was doing. Perhaps it was only an accident, or perhaps you even set me on it.\"\n\n\"We did not, at all!\" Temeraire said, with a gasp of indignation.\n\nThe dragonet flicked her tail-tip back and forth to wave this away. \"I am only saying there are any number of reasonable explanations he might settle on, should he wish to excuse me. And I am sure he would wish to, if I chose to join his side; I imagine he will be quite impressed with what I can do,\" which was inarguable. \"I did hope it would answer,\" she added, with a note of satisfaction, \"after all this talk I have heard in the shell of the conjunction of the divine wind and fire-breathing, but I could not be quite sure until I had tried it. I am glad to have made proofs of it!\n\n\"But I cannot yet tell whether the Emperor of China or the Emperor of France will be better suited to assist my task. Or,\" she added, earnestly, \"perhaps the King of Britain: I hope you do not think I am unwilling to consider him. So hadn't we better be getting under way? Which way is this Dover of yours, that you want to get to?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "\"Laurence,\" Granby said, when at last they bedded down just before dawn, \"what a perfect terror: what are we going to do with her?\"\n\nThey were some ten miles from Dieppe as best Laurence could guess\u2014they had found an isolated farm in disrepair, the house and barn abandoned, the latter with a collapsing roof: Temeraire and Iskierka were now hunkered down behind it, with a stand of trees and undergrowth to screen them from at least a first glance, if not a second. The dragonet, having slept nearly all the day on Temeraire's back, had roused only long enough to go and fetch a heap of straw out of the gaping hayloft; she made herself a nest in the warmest hollow between her progenitors, and satisfied with her arrangements went directly back to sleep.\n\nLaurence was arranging handfuls of dry straw himself, with splinters, to make tinder for the armful of wood Granby set down. The fire would be a fresh risk, but in the half-light of morning the smoke might pass unnoticed: they were a good distance from any road but a half-overgrown track. The night had been cold, and they had none of them been dressed for flying: even huddled with Granby and Tharkay in one of Iskierka's talons, and held against the churning warmth of her belly, a heavy chill had settled deep into Laurence's limbs; he thought they must have a little warmth before they dared sleep.\n\n\"What Napoleon would make of her, if she should throw in with him, I don't like to think,\" Granby went on. \"Of all the dragons to come into the world unharnessed!\"\n\n\"We will deliver her to Dover,\" Laurence said firmly. \"I am sure Whitehall will be delighted to restore her to Prince Mianning, and repair the alliance with China thereby. I trust we can rely upon their skill in the handling of dragons, from there, to make her happy to be the future Emperor's companion. You will recall that they do not harness beasts, until later in their lives, at all.\"\n\n\"I suppose we can't do better,\" Granby said. \"The Chinese may say what they like, and I am sure it answers for them; but I should be a great deal easier if this one had a captain to call her to order from the moment she came out of the shell.\"\n\n\"You will permit me a little skepticism as to the hypothetical man's likely success,\" Tharkay said, coming back into the barn and putting down an armful of potatoes and carrots, which he might as well have conjured out of the air. \"There is a vegetable garden against the side of the house; it seemed likely,\" he answered their surprised looks. \"We are fortunate in our choice of hiding-place, I think: there were some letters inside from a son gone to be a soldier, written to a widowed mother\u2014the latest half a year old, from Smolensk, and unopened. I dare say there are many young men who will not be coming home.\"\n\nThe sunrise was giving a mellowing warmth to the weathered grey boards of the barn, and gilding the edges of the bare branches. There was a comfortable familiarity to all the arrangements of the farm that made the absence of life all the more disquieting. There ought to have been lowing cows and a gabble of chickens, and a farmer hurrying with half-closed eyes to tend his stock. Instead, empty stalls and silence, and untended fields just beyond the doors: the cost of Napoleon's wars.\n\nThey roused Iskierka just enough to start the fire with a gout of flame spat onto their carefully scraped ground; her eyes lidded down again at once. The half-frozen bounty of the garden roasted in the coals as they warmed their hands and numbed feet, and melted snow to drink hot out of a tin pail left hanging on a hook. Laurence scratched in the dirt his best memory of the coastline, and they considered the distance.\n\n\"We had better go by sea, if we think they can manage it,\" Granby said.\n\n\"I will be so bold as to be certain that we are scarcely a hundred miles from Eastbourne, flown north-north-west,\" Laurence said, \"and once we are fairly into the Channel, most ships of the blockade can throw us out some pontoons if we should get into trouble with a cross-wind. We may have some difficulty signaling, if they do not recognize us.\"\n\n\"That don't worry me,\" Granby said. \"It would be wonderful indeed if any captain who has been in the Channel since the year seven didn't remember Iskierka, and curse to see her coming to snatch a prize out from under his teeth. They would be heartily delighted to see her drown, but I suppose they shan't turn us away if we appear on their doorstep, as it were. We'll have to go on from there to Dover straightaway, though\u2014there's a covert at Eastbourne, but it is not much more than a courier-stop; they won't like us dropping by with a couple of heavy-weights and a fresh-hatched beast.\"\n\n\"Do you insist upon making for a covert?\" Tharkay said, unexpectedly. \"I trust you will forgive my raising a point of concern,\" he added, when they looked in puzzlement, \"but do you suppose your hatchling likely to be impressed by the conditions she will find at Dover, compared with those she has lately left behind\u2014before she set them on fire, that is.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Granby said, and halted there. Of course he could not without pain admit any evil of Britain's coverts, when held against those of France, and Laurence shared his sentiments of loyalty to the service; but there was no denying that the disparity would be a marked one, unless such changes had been made in their five years' absence as they could hardly hope for. Temeraire had kept up an irregular correspondence with Perscitia, a comrade of his breeding-ground days who had energetically pursued in his absence the liberties\u2014and prosperity\u2014of dragons. Her letters when they came were universally a litany of complaint, cataloguing obstruction in every direction.\n\n\"Let us get out of France, first,\" Laurence said, after a moment. \"We must content ourselves with escaping Bonaparte's borders before we can entertain other concerns.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Laurence stirred in the late afternoon, conscious of some near presence, and opened his eyes to find the dragonet staring very intently directly into his face, the long arrow-shaped head extended to the full length of her serpentine neck. He could see her colors now, and also the difficulty of making them out: the underlying color of her hide was certainly black, but heavily overlaid with an opalescence of red and green and blue which became dominant at the extremities of limbs and wings, almost casting off a reflection.\n\n\"Good,\" she said, drawing back to let him sit up. \"You have woken up. I am very sorry to be the cause of difficulty, but I am afraid I must have some more food at once.\"\n\nShe was not wrong about the difficulty. The sun was still well up, despite winter, and neither Temeraire nor Iskierka could possibly go aloft in settled countryside like this and not be noticed at once against the sky. The farmers would certainly raise an alarm, and even if there were no pursuit close enough to pounce upon them immediately, the entire coast in flying distance would be roused against them.\n\n\"Over the Channel, Temeraire will certainly be able to get you a decently sized tunny to eat,\" Laurence said. \"Can you only wait until sunset?\"\n\nShe looked up at the sky, and then turned back and said firmly, \"I cannot.\"\n\n\"I don't see that we must wait. I would not mind a cow myself, now I think of it,\" Iskierka muttered, having been half-roused by the discussion.\n\n\"That is all we need,\" Granby said, rubbing a hand over his own face as he sat up.\n\n\"Perhaps we might make some broth, if anything more can be found,\" Laurence said.\n\nThey all dug in the garden for a few more leavings of vegetables, and Tharkay managed to take a squirrel with a stone, although this was not much to put into their stolen pot. A few handfuls of old barley were the only other addition, found in a cupboard. As they stirred the fire urgently, Granby said to Laurence, under his breath, \"Are you sure you don't want to try and put some harness on her? I suppose Temeraire wouldn't like it in the least, but a dragonet's hunger is no joke. Her patience will go hang before we can make this fit to eat, I expect.\"\n\n\"I would not like it in the least, either,\" the dragonet said, poking her head up over the rim of the soup-cauldron unexpectedly, having overheard. \"Besides, I am perfectly capable of seeing for myself that concealment is of the essence, at present. So that is quite enough of that sort of talk.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" Granby said, with a start.\n\n\"You might hurry up that soup, instead,\" she added, in reproachful tones.\n\n\"We are hurrying it as fast as ever we can,\" Granby said. \"And in the meantime, you may as well decide, what are we going to call you? I suppose you can't wait for a captain to hand you a name, if you don't mean to settle for anything short of an emperor.\"\n\n\"You may call me Lung Tien Ning,\" the dragonet said. \"That will satisfy the Emperor of China, as he does not expect to name his companion, but requires me to be considered a Celestial; and the Emperor of France may always give me a French name later, if I like.\"\n\n\"As though she has any right to be called tranquility,\" Temeraire muttered to Laurence, who could not disagree.\n\nBut Granby's pessimistic shake over the soup was at least mistaken: Ning did pounce upon the pot immediately the barley was toothsome enough to chew, but she waited patiently until they had pronounced it ready, and even then drank the soup down slowly in measured delicate swallows, pausing halfway through to demand that they add some more snow to the pot and heat it up again: evidently trying to trick her own belly into a temporary complacency.\n\n\"There,\" she said at last, having licked the pot not merely clean but dry, \"I think I can manage until dark, now. I hope it will be soon!\"\n\nShe slept again afterwards, and so managed to last until sunset: but then she had reached her limits. She roused Laurence again with a sharp nudge of her head, the sun lowering and golden beneath the tree-tops and a grey chill descending. \"How long until I can have that fish?\" she demanded.\n\nThere were lights clustered ahead of them to the west, gathering more closely as they neared the coast where five years before Napoleon had mustered and launched his invasion. Only a quarter-moon rising, fortunately. Ning hunched on Temeraire's back, restless and scraping the sides of her claws against his scales\u2014a dusty noise that crept forward into Laurence's ears and along his spine.\n\nHe had preferred to stay aboard Temeraire for this flight, despite the cold, when they might too easily be separated from Iskierka during the crossing. There was too much uncertain in their position, under British law, for him to be glad to send Temeraire flying alone, without anyone who might more easily be heard by a naval captain who knew more of their disgrace and transportation than of their more recent pardon. Those men might remember Iskierka's pillaging their prizes, but they would remember also the final disaster of the invasion, the sinking of Nelson's fleet, and all accomplished by a single Celestial. The silhouette of the sinuous body, the horns and frilled ruff, had been the subject of many an artist's mourning, and whether dark or light would be unwelcome overhead to any ship or shore battery.\n\n\"There is a Fleur-de-Nuit flying out there, I think,\" Temeraire said low, turning his head back a little. \"I saw someone cross against the stars, there to the south: she may have seen us.\"\n\nLaurence nodded. The word would be out for them by now, all up and down the coast. He leaned forward to look down past Temeraire's shoulder, a cupped hand shielding his eyes against the wind: the bobbing of fishing-boats tied up on shore and the lighthouse flashing near Dieppe a firefly-beacon. They were nearly out over the water.\n\nAnd then a sudden flare going out, mid-air, blue and hissing\u2014in its burst, Iskierka was lit vividly against the flattened black of the sky, her reds and greens made shades of black and grey, and to the south, not three miles distant, were three Fleur-de-Nuit dragons all hunting together. Temeraire stretched out long and flew, as the beacon-fires went up beneath them.\n\n\"By god, to have spent two days mid-air for this,\" Wellington said. \"No, you may not have Roland. If you want another admiral in Spain, you may find another general while you are at it, and I will go home and sleep for a month.\"\n\n\"Your Grace, I beg you will understand the Admiralty's position,\" the Prime Minister said wearily. He threw a glance of distaste in Laurence's direction, which would not have had the power to wound him, save that Perceval had known his father, and been welcome in their home: he had only the prior year at last shepherded through the formal abolition of the slave trade, and had even begun to open tentative relations with the Tswana, in the teeth of much opposition from those whose estates, in the West Indies, relied heavily upon slaves. Laurence could not be glad to meet with disapproval in such a quarter, even if he were not surprised.\n\nWellington only snorted. \"I understand well enough: you dislike requiring the services of a man you would rather see hanged. Since you do require them, more's the pity, you must take your bread as you find it and stop asking for pudding.\"\n\n\"Your Grace,\" Mr. Yorke said\u2014the present First Lord of the Admiralty\u2014\"surely the urgency of the situation in Prussia\u2014\"\n\n\"The situation in Prussia!\" Wellington said. \"I have not fifty British dragons, with three hundred ragged Spanish and Portuguese beasts, most of them half-feral, to match against five hundred trained French dragons, and you want to bleat at me about Prussia. Bad enough you called Roland and myself away for a week: I dare say we will find half a dozen villages reduced to rubble by the time we get back, and the Flechas threatening to burn down Madrid. Now you tell me,\" with a sharp wave in Laurence's direction, \"that Bonaparte will have four thousand beasts to throw at us in a year, half-trained and half-grown or not. And you want to snatch my aerial commander and waste her as a false front? Nonsense.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, indeed,\" Jane said, later that evening, in her house near the London covert. \"Worse than nonsense. I am just as glad they did leave me out of the conference, after all. I do not trust what I would have said to them if I had been there. I have got spoilt, Laurence; I have not had to deal with any foolishness of this sort for a year and more. The Spanish officers would try and fuss me a little, at first, but I have got them flying straight by now.\"\n\nShe sighed, and reached for the decanter of port. She was incongruous in her heavy boots and aviator's coat amidst the velvets of her sitting-room, which better matched the coronet than its owner. Laurence knew she had applied to his own mother for advice on setting up her establishment, and her house-keeper was familiar to him\u2014she had once been a young scullery-maid at Wollaton Hall and willing to permit a small boy to snatch an occasional pastry when a banquet was in the offing.\n\nAn informed taste had left its stamp upon the house, and its comforts were many: the fire laid to the precisely right degree, excellent wine at dinner, and all the furnishings of the best. Jane alone was out of place, and Excidium drowsing in the wide courtyard behind the house: his head was just visible through the windows, with the bone spurs gleaming white in the lamp-light.\n\n\"I have gilded the tool-chest, and kept the rusty old hammer inside,\" Jane said, reading his face, and laughed at him when he tried to demur. \"No, I meant to do just that. The place is my sacrifice to propriety. I have even given a dinner here, if you can conceive it,\" she added. \"It was your mother's notion, and I felt I owed it to her, after all her efforts on my behalf. I oughtn't have doubted her, either, as it worked marvels: a dozen girls applied to the Corps the week after. They were all ladies of small fortune, who preferred it to going for governesses, except one heiress who preferred it to being sold off like a heifer calf. Their families made a noise over it, but I told their Lordships I wouldn't turn any girl away who could keep her stomach and her feet mid-air, when we have six Longwing eggs in the offing to consider.\n\n\"And speaking of which: how does Emily, when you last saw her? I thank you for her step, by the way.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Laurence said, struggling to decide what to say of Emily's connection to Demane, which had formed under his watch. He had not quite the pain of having failed in his self-appointed duty of chaperonage\u2014although he certainly would have done, if Emily had wished to discard her virtue\u2014but an uneasiness remained; he did not think she was heart-whole. \"Has she spoken to you of Demane?\"\n\n\"She has written volumes of nothing,\" Jane said, \"but that is all right: he has made up for it. He presented himself to me the instant the Potentate arrived in Spain, declared that he should make himself worthy, and raved up and down my tent about Emily's graces for a quarter of an hour before I gave up waiting for him to be done and shoved him along\u2014not too ungently, Laurence, you needn't look so worried. I haven't any complaints of the boy. A milder, sweeter-tempered creature than that monster of his, I have never met: it is just as well for Kulingile's captain to have some fire in his belly, when his beast has none. Do you mean to tell me Emily is going to break her heart over him?\"\n\n\"Not break it, I hope,\" Laurence said, but slowly, and Jane read most of what he wished to say in his face. She shook her head a little.\n\n\"I never had much sensibility, myself\u2014as you have cause to know, dear fellow. I have found it a luxury beyond my means. But she might as well marry him as not. I put my foot down and insisted they legitimize her, when they put the titles on me: if Wellesley can hand his coronet on to his brats when he spent all of ten minutes begetting them, damned if Emily was not getting mine. But there was quite the squabble over it, and I doubt they'll let it go a second generation. So if she cares to hand it onwards, she will need to marry someone, and Captain Dlamini is respectable enough for anybody, I imagine.\"\n\nJane imagined incorrectly, at least so far as the polite world would see it: an orphan boy from Africa with only a dragon to his name made no match for Lady Emily Roland, the daughter of one of England's great heroes and the heiress to a coronet and a fortune. Of course, that Lady Emily was herself an aviator diminished her own luster a little, but when that service was the source of her titles, much would have been forgiven. Still, Laurence knew those considerations weighed not at all with Jane, who said only, \"But she will scarcely see him one year to the next, chances are. Excidium is for Dover, and Kulingile will certainly be for Gibraltar, if ever we muddle our way back to peacetime. Well, it is a hard service.\" She rubbed her mouth. \"I suppose I may as well keep him with me, and give them more of a chance to forget one another. I had considered sending him along to Prussia, and taking Granby back\u2014but we have the Flechas for fire-breathers, even if they are not so handy as Iskierka, and you may be in want of Granby's advice, in any case. So they are giving you your flag?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, staring into the wine glass. It seemed still to him almost a subtle mockery; he had not understood, until nearly the end of the meeting, that the ministers were arguing with Wellington over naming him to the aerial command, forming now, which would join the allied effort in Prussia. \"Or at least, that seemed their intention, by the close; I can scarcely conceive they will do it.\"\n\n\"Oh, they will,\" Jane said. \"A little bird has sung in my ear that the Tsar wants you: how did you manage that? I have never known you to ingratiate yourself with anyone whose influence would be really useful to your career, when you could make yourself as inconvenient to them as possible instead.\"\n\n\"I cannot claim any personal success in the matter,\" Laurence said dryly. \"I appeared on his borders with an army of dragons when he was in imminent danger of defeat; I suppose it must have produced a degree of warm feeling.\"\n\n\"Well, we won't hold it against your record,\" Jane said. \"And he is the man of the hour, make no mistake. I am never quite easy with these God-is-in-my-pocket sorts\u2014begging your pardon\u2014but if it keeps him zealous to be the savior of Europe, I shan't complain. We will certainly never get another chance at Boney, from what news you bring. Four thousand eggs! Our breeders would dearly like to know how he has managed it, and our supply-officers how he means to feed them. For my part, though, I will settle for having good old fat Louis back on his throne before they are grown.\"\n\nShe reached over to fill his glass: the port had been drunk, somehow. Laurence sat back into his chair, restless. The Tsar's request made the Admiralty's difficulty more clear: if Alexander had asked for Laurence, they must send him; and sending him, they could supersede him only with an officer of greater seniority, who must furthermore by necessity possess a dragon whose stature would outweigh or at least equal Temeraire's in the eyes of their fellow dragons. There were few British officers who could claim either distinction: thanks to Hammond's machinations, Laurence had been fully reinstated, so his seniority dated not from Temeraire's harnessing, but from his being made post as a naval officer, some five years prior to the date.\n\nAnd yet that was not sufficient argument for his fitness for the task: nearly all his own education at sea, not eight years on the wing, and that spent in an irregular fashion. He could not sensibly recognize himself as anyone's first choice for command, even independent of animus.\n\n\"Should you not come to Prussia, Jane?\" he said, low. The Admiralty might think to send Jane as a comforting fiction drawn over his presence, but Laurence knew her abilities; and Excidium, with his long and storied career, and a Longwing's deadly vitriol, would easily command the respect of any fighting-dragons. Temeraire had been willing to defer to him before now. \"If he is to be defeated, he must be beaten in Germany.\"\n\n\"No, Laurence,\" Jane said firmly. \"He must be beaten in France.\"\n\nHe fell silent. To fight Napoleon back across the Rhine and the Pyrenees both, step by hard-won step, taking back all the victories fifteen years of war had won him: it loomed an impossible project.\n\nJane set her glass down, after a final swallow to toss down the rest, and drew open one of the rolled maps littering the table between them. \"Don't look quite so gloomy. I dare say you have no notion how many men he is losing in Spain. The numbers from the battlefields don't tell the tale, but my scouts see it from aloft. The guerrillas nibble nibble nibble, like little mice, and his armies melt away on the road.\"\n\nShe drew her finger along the map, the jagged mountain-lines marking the borders between France and Spain, and then let it go to roll up again. \"We will have Soult by next Christmas, or call me a liar. But it has taken Wellington three hard-fought years to stitch up this army, and it is held by frayed thread and dull tacks. There ain't someone to take my place in the air. I left Crenslow in charge this week, and you would have thought I was sending the poor man to the gallows, from the looks he gave. At that, there were seven Spanish and Portuguese officers at my heels clamoring for his head by the time we took flight.\n\n\"I don't say that you won't have troubles of your own in Germany, but the Prussian dragons have good cause to love you, and the Tsar can make the rest of them dance to his tune. So you must get across the Rhine without me, and we'll meet again in Paris, by and by,\" she finished.\n\n\"Granby would do better,\" Laurence said.\n\nJane snorted. \"Iskierka won't,\" an inarguable return. \"Besides, you can give him ten years on the list and more. No, their Lordships haven't any other choice. Aside from everything else, we are all hoping for some Chinese beasts to appear. Unless, could they put this Hammond fellow in charge?\"\n\nLaurence almost smiled at the thought of Hammond made an aerial commander, and that gentleman's certain dismay. \"His dragon might do. She has forty years' experience as an officer with the Incan armies.\"\n\n\"If you wanted a prospect less likely than their Lordships' making you admiral, giving the command to an Incan dragon will do nicely,\" Jane said. \"Not that the creatures don't know their business, I can tell you: we have had a dozen of them to worry about since last August, and they are worth three times their fighting-weight in other beasts. The only saving grace is they hate to lose even a single crewman, and if we manage to heave over a boarding party of four or five, well-secured, we can bargain them out of the day's fighting just to save a single bellman's life, even if they outnumber us three to one. Well-secured being the real difficulty: they are quick as lightning at throwing us off, otherwise. You will have a wretched time with those thieves in the Commissariat, by the bye,\" she added. \"It has been nothing but bales of rotting leather and rusted buckles, and what they call oilskins I call barley-sacks,\" as though he were already in command.\n\nShe paused, seeing his look, and added, \"You won't refuse it?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said after a moment. \"No, I will not refuse.\" Whatever his quarrels with the men of the Admiralty, there was in his own understanding of duty a wide gulf between the necessary defiance of an immoral order, and refusing to undertake a task only because it was difficult, or demanded any private discomfort. If he could have proposed a man better fitted for the urgent task, he would feel the matter differently, but from that escape he was barred by the continuing resentment of all the ministers and officers he had offended: they would argue far more vigorously than he for the virtues of any conceivable substitute. If he were offered the command, he might be sure he was the only choice.\n\n\"But Jane,\" he said abruptly, \"I will not\u2014I cannot accept unless they reinstate Ferris, and promise him his chance. I cannot. That I should be reinstated, promoted, appointed to command, and he still bear the stain of the crime which I committed, entirely without his knowledge\u2014it is intolerable to every feeling.\"\n\n\"Oh, I dare say that can be managed,\" Jane said. \"His is an old family in the Corps, and they have a great deal of influence. The wolves were howling for blood too loudly at the time for them to make any difference, but this will change matters. I will write old Admiral Gloucester, who served with Ferris's great-uncle, and we will set the wheels turning.\"\n\nThey discussed the command a long time onwards; she gave him names of men to search out and others to avoid, both in the Commissariat and in his officers\u2014as best he could; Laurence knew better than to suppose he would have much power of choice save among Temeraire's own crew, and perhaps not even there. The Admiralty was certain to name all the beasts of his company. But he made note of the men she recommended and spoke against; on the battlefield, the Admiralty would be far away, and the decisions his.\n\nHe had written a sheet both sides and crossed it, full of her good advice, and the clock had struck ten; then Jane said, \"You may as well stay the night, if you like,\" and he was staring at a meaningless scratch of ink, his mouth gone abruptly dry with want. He had not permitted himself the license of hoping\u2014of coming near enough hope even to think of\u2014\n\n\"Jane,\" he said, all at once vividly aware of her bare hand on the table between them, strong and square, thinned a little by the years but deeply known, familiar, save for the yellow-jeweled signet and the white scar running between the two last fingers down the back, which had not been there before\u2014before the shattering of his life. It had been late summer, an August night hot enough that they had left off the coverlet and lain naked together with the windows open, a devil's bargain between the London stench and the stifling heat. The next night he had betrayed her, and his country, and flown with Temeraire to take the cure to France.\n\nHe had not touched her since. Nor any other woman. Not from loyalty\u2014loyalty a word he had no right to use with her\u2014but a deadening of some inward vital part, necessary to desire. They had spoken together; he had even been alone with her. But the door had been closed. He had not conceived that it might ever again open. \"Jane,\" he said again.\n\nShe looked at him, with a little surprise, and then said, \"Why, Laurence,\" and reached to take his hand.\n\nHe had been raised on decorum, that it should come as easily as breathing even in the face of death and tragedy. But his hand was twisted into her hair, the neat snug braid coming apart around his fingers, and the other shaking as he pulled open her neckcloth, on the Turkish rug before the sitting-room hearth with the table shoved over, the maps scattered and stirring in the draught.\n\nHer mouth was wide and glad beneath his, laughing a little when he let her get her breath, and her hand bracing up his back. He dragged his cheek across the soft skin of her breast where the shirt hung loose, kissed her throat, luxuriated. He could not remember to be careful. They tangled themselves up, almost wrestling, until she said amused, \"You will have us in the cinders: back your wings a moment,\" and sat up to push his coat off his shoulders.\n\nHis hands slid under the fine linen of her shirt, over the warm generous curving of her back, as she threw a leg over his hip. \"Ah, there,\" she murmured, pleased. They moved together. The fire was crackling low, dying; she gasped.\n\nHe worried distantly that he might bruise her, his grip tight on her as he raised them both, her muscles shifting sweetly beneath his hands. She caught both her hands into his hair and bent forward to lean her forehead against his, smiling in the small, secret dark place between them, and he shuddered suddenly and completely, despite all the will in the world to hold off. He groaned in apology. \"Graceless as a boy,\" he said, rueful, when he had his breath back again, and he tumbled her over onto her back to better use his hands to bring her. \"I hope you will pardon me,\" he said, when she had sighed at last.\n\nShe laughed and kissed him. \"I don't leave for Spain until tomorrow afternoon,\" she said. \"You can make me a better showing in the morning,\" and then, practical, rolled up and went to wash.\n\nThey went upstairs carrying their boots, hand-in-hand, and left them in a heap in the corner of her bedroom. She pillowed herself comfortably against the headboard and lit a cigar, and blew a long, satisfied plume of smoke. He refused the one she offered him, lying flat on his back beside her and contemplating the canopy without seeing it, his mind already catching on the hooks and burrs of planning, the immensity of the problem suddenly laid across his shoulders. \"How many beasts will they give me, do you think?\"\n\n\"Not more than twenty, I should think,\" Jane said. \"If we can even supply that many. Two formations from Dover, and another from Edinburgh, I would expect.\"\n\nLaurence was silent. He had learned enough of dragon-supply, he hoped, to make material improvements over the traditional standards of the Corps. He could not be fully confident of success, and he was wary of letting his force outstrip their means, but\u2014twenty dragons would do very little, against the force assembling against them in France, and any legions from China would not arrive before late in the spring. \"Would the Admiralty let me have more?\" he asked. \"If I should take unassigned middle-weights, and light-weights?\"\n\n\"Light-weights are in short supply,\" Jane said. \"Unless you can make Temeraire talk some ferals out of the stones for you, which I don't put past him. Of middle-weights, the Yellow Reapers have recovered nicely since the plague, most of them, and we have a good crowd of them ex formatio. There's a likely Reaper-Parnassian cross, too, a yearling now at Kinloch Laggan, under Captain Adair\u2014a decent fellow. I expect they'd let you have her, if you ask after they've given you the rest of the beasts. How do you mean to feed them?\"\n\n\"On corn and salt pork, and not beef,\" Laurence said. \"Jane, I will undertake to bring them to the battlefield, but I cannot set myself up as a tactician against officers with ten years' more experience in the air.\"\n\n\"The finest formations ha'nt done anyone in Europe a particle of good against Bonaparte these last six years,\" Jane said, \"so as far as that goes, you know as much about facing him as anyone in the Corps: more, if you have learnt anything from the Chinese, which you ought have done. Besides, once you are in the air, the beasts will be following Temeraire, you know, and not really you, if that is a comfort.\" She snorted. \"No-one can say he isn't a fair hand at talking other beasts into line. Although I hear he has met his match at last: tell me about this new terror you have visited upon us. I understand she is the despair of Whitehall, and has been issuing demands to be introduced to our prince, poor fellow, in case he should be more useful to her than Napoleon's heir, or the future Emperor of China?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "\"And I wish to assure you, Temeraire, that I did mean to give this Prince of Wales of yours a fair trial,\" Ning said. \"I would not like you to feel that I have acted with disrespect to your companion's nation and your home. But I am afraid it will not do: this business of Parliament must be an excessive inconvenience.\"\n\n\"That,\" Perscitia said, much ruffled beneath her sash and medal of office, which marked her as a member of that body, \"is only because you do not properly appreciate the importance of the legislature, and its necessity to the promotion of our interests.\"\n\n\"I am afraid I cannot allow its advantages over a more direct exercise of power,\" Ning said.\n\n\"You are describing Tyranny,\" Perscitia said grandly\u2014Temeraire heard the capital letter quite distinctly\u2014\"and a moment's reflection will show you its numerous flaws: only one can be a tyrant, and therefore such a political system will rarely be just, or serve the needs of all.\"\n\n\"That is lamentable, to be sure,\" Ning said practically, \"\u2014unless one should happen to be the tyrant, whereupon it makes everything very easy.\"\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Perscitia said, when Ning had finished her cow and gone to sleep again, already ten feet longer than she had been that morning; now roughly three times the size of an elephant. \"Temeraire, I hope you will forgive me, but that hatchling of yours has some peculiar notions.\"\n\n\"I am not certain she is wrong, however,\" Temeraire said doubtfully. Laurence had a very low opinion of tyranny, he knew, and therefore he felt himself obliged to despise it by commutation, but there was no denying that it had its uses. He looked around the London covert with some disfavor, remembering too well the beautiful grounds at Fontainebleau. There was a pavilion for them to sleep in now, which would once have seemed to him the height of luxury; but there was only one, extremely crowded, and not even as nice as the one where he and Iskierka had been housed at the training camps near the Alps.\n\nThere was nothing to beautify the arrangements, no fountains or even a pleasant courtyard; the pavilion had only been erected in the midst of the old clearings where they once had slept on bare dirt, and the paths among the trees were too narrow for anyone but a human to walk. The stones were not properly heated, either: there were several braziers going for warmth, but in all, the establishment did not stand up well to comparison with their recent prison.\n\n\"But it is entirely unreliable,\" Perscitia said. \"Now Napoleon has decided to be fond of dragons, because he has learned to make us particularly useful in fighting his wars, and for that matter, quelling any of his enemies in France itself\u2014but what of the tyrant who will come after him? What if the next emperor should decide that he does not like dragons? I would rather have the protection of law, and tradition, and know that whatever we have gained cannot be as easily taken away again. Temeraire, we must give real thought to the future. One day they will cast a cannon that can take a Regal out of the sky with one shot fired, and then where will we be?\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Temeraire said uneasily. \"I have been shot two dozen times myself, and there has been nothing so terrible about it. Of course a cannonball would be very unpleasant, but unless one goes too close to the ground, or flies into their path, they are not so difficult to avoid.\"\n\n\"There were no guns at all, five hundred years ago,\" Perscitia said. \"I have been assured of it, by my secretaries.\"\n\n\"That is quite false,\" Temeraire said, glad to be able to contradict her. \"They were invented during the Song dynasty, a thousand years ago: I have read of them in China.\"\n\n\"But even so they were invented\u2014they did not always exist,\" Perscitia said, turning his information around to serve her own argument, which seemed to Temeraire unfair. \"And Chinese guns are not as good as ours are now, and therefore guns have improved, and they will go on improving. What do you suppose will happen when they do not need us to make war anymore, and we are only very inconvenient and eat a great deal, and frighten most of them? They were quite willing to let a great many of us starve, when we were too sick to fly and hunt for ourselves, and they couldn't get eggs out of us anymore.\n\n\"No, it is no good our relying on any one king or emperor, and it is no good letting them only use us for battle. Oh! I am very glad you are come back, Temeraire. Even though I have been elected, there are still any number of dragons who will not listen to me at all, only because I am not large and do not like to fight all the time,\" she added peevishly. \"But they will certainly mind you, and I am sure you can understand, if you only make a little push to do so.\"\n\nTemeraire was not at all sure he wanted to understand. Perscitia did like to take alarm at things unnecessarily. It was surely nonsense to talk of shooting down heavy-weights as though they were geese\u2014but Perscitia was clever, and he felt uncomfortably she might not be entirely mistaken about the march of progress.\n\nIn one thing at least, however, they were in perfect agreement: he did not at all trust the Government. They certainly would let dragons starve, if they could, and perhaps worse. He had seen worse in Russia, now, and could describe it; he shuddered again at the memory of the cruel hobbles.\n\n\"I see no reason why we shouldn't have more of us in Parliament anyway,\" Temeraire said. \"And for that matter, why we oughtn't go into some sort of business, too. I must tell you more of this John Wampanoag fellow, that I met in Japan.\"\n\n\"You needn't,\" Perscitia said, \"I am corresponding with him.\" Temeraire blinked in surprise. \"I thought from what you said he must be well-known there, so I had one of my secretaries send a letter to Boston, marked very clearly to his name, and it did find him, for he was kind enough to write back. We have discussed arranging an overland trade route from Portsmouth to China, or perhaps just to India to begin with.\"\n\n\"For my part, I cannot see that we need this Parliament, or to trouble ourselves about business, either,\" put in a small beast, who Temeraire realized with a start had been listening all this while to their conversation.\n\nHe had been easily overlooked: he was sitting in the corner of the clearing beneath a windbreak of pine-trees, and was himself mottled dark green with a belly in purplish brown, just barely topping the line between light-weight and courier-weight. He was of no breed Temeraire recognized, although his accent was quite distinctly Scottish, and wore no harness. Smaller ferals had always slipped into the coverts to sneak some leavings when they could, and now the practice was grown more widespread: the porridge-pots made it easy to make them welcome, and once they were there, the aviators could even trade them meat for their labor.\n\n\"But it's a deal of work, carrying heavy things from one end of the earth to another,\" the green feral continued, \"with not even a sheep to be sure of at the end of the day; and you may keep your Parliament. A vote never filled anyone's belly that I heard of, nor this pay we are meant to be getting, which I have never seen. I like that map of Napoleon's, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"What map is this?\" Perscitia demanded, as Temeraire flattened his ruff in irritation: they certainly had not asked him.\n\n\"Napoleon has had the splendid notion of offering dragons territory which he has no right to offer, nor any power to give,\" Temeraire said, \"and trying to trick them into fighting for it, all to distract his enemies: I had not supposed,\" he added coolly, \"that any British dragon would be taken in by his chicanery: as though we had not learned before now that all he wants is to take all our territory for his own, and bring his own dragons over here.\"\n\n\"He hasn't any quarrel with me and mine that I know of,\" the feral said. \"All right, he invaded, but that was to beat that mad old king the men have over here, and I didn't see any of his beasts setting eggs while they were here, did I? Meanwhile the men in this country go about taking our eggs when it suits them, and hunting up all the game, and coming after us with guns if we want a sheep to eat now and then. I'd just as soon take a chance on a fellow who has done right and proper by his own dragons. Two of my wing were in France lately for his big hullabaloo, and said their leavings at breakfast are better than what we get for dinner, and their pavilions make this,\" he flicked his tail dismissively at the small pavilion, \"look like a wet hole as you'd put a pig in, to keep for later.\"\n\nBy the end of this speech, more than one of the other dragons sleeping inside the pavilion or around the fringes of the clearing had lifted their heads to listen. The Scottish feral\u2014his name was Ricarlee\u2014was informed well enough to sketch out Napoleon's map in the dirt for them all to examine, and Temeraire was sorry to see the interest it produced, particularly among the feral beasts. The Yellow Reapers crowded round the side of northern England which had been allotted to them and murmured thoughtfully in a way that made Temeraire uneasy, and not only the unharnessed ones, either.\n\n\"Outrageous,\" Perscitia said loudly, and, \"Mercenary,\" and \"A return to the Dark Ages, even if it worked, which it shan't,\" but she was the only one to raise a protest.\n\nEven little Minnow, who had stopped by the covert to say hello to Temeraire, only gave a shrug, even though she had done rather well for herself since the invasion. She and Moncey, and the rest of the Winchesters from their old company, had established a private courier-route. They carried packages and urgent messages and the occasional passenger, for anyone who could afford their rates, and the leather satchel which she wore over her neck and forelegs was beautifully trimmed in gold and pearls.\n\n\"You can't blame anyone, can you?\" she said, nevertheless. \"It is our territory, too, or else why did we all fight, in the invasion? Why oughtn't we have the right to take a sheep or cow\u2014along sensible lines, that don't spoil the herds, or anything else stupid.\"\n\n\"But the sheep and the cows are not simply there, by accident,\" Temeraire said, glad to have worked through this very subject with Laurence on several occasions; he had found it quite baffling, himself. \"The humans have arranged their being there, by raising them and looking after them, and growing grain to feed them. Naturally they are angry if a dragon swoops down and snatches one, without making any return for all their trouble.\"\n\n\"Ah! Easy enough to say, it is all their work!\" Ricarlee said. \"And if those herds weren't there, and those great fields of grass the humans like to plant? Why, then there would be some wild goats or pigs, or a tasty venison, free for the taking. I have seen it myself a dozen times in the North: here comes a farmer, cutting down the trees and plowing under the earth, and soon enough the game have all gone away and there is nothing to eat but the sheep. Just because a man is small don't mean a hundred of 'em can't steal our territory if they work at it together, and I don't see why we ought to put up with it.\"\n\nAnd Temeraire was sorry to see the dragons all around the clearing nodding enthusiastic agreement."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "\"Laurence,\" Temeraire said reluctantly, when Laurence returned to the covert in the morning, \"I think, I am afraid, we may be going to have some small difficulty\u2014some awkwardness\u2014\"\n\n\"Certainly we shall,\" Laurence said. \"Have you heard already, then? I was coming to tell you, but I cannot be surprised that the couriers have passed you the word. I am glad you recognize the magnitude of the challenge before us. The Admiralty have already named me a dozen of our captains, and half of them the most hidebound formation-flyers of the service; how we shall use them without Napoleon bowling us over as thoroughly as he did the Prussians in the year six, I have very little notion at present.\"\n\n\"Our captains?\" Temeraire said, puzzled, wondering what on earth this had to do with the ferals of Britain threatening to go over to Napoleon en masse.\n\n\"De jure, at least,\" Laurence said. \"But judging by their choices, the Admiralty mean to assign those men they think more likely to disobey me than otherwise.\"\n\nTemeraire hesitated, still at sea, and then Granby came into the clearing with his hat, beaming, and said, \"Well, Admiral Laurence, may I congratulate you?\" and shook Laurence's hand.\n\nIn half-appalled wonder Temeraire said, \"Laurence, they have never made you admiral? Not that there is anyone better deserving the rank\u2014!\" he added hastily, only that the Admiralty should have done it was almost incredible. And yet it seemed they had\u2014a very meager, very late sort of apology after all their misdeeds and unjust punishments, and nevertheless astonishing they should have made it at all.\n\n\"It has been done very unwilling,\" Laurence said. \"Likely at the Tsar's behest, and in hopes of more aid coming from China. But yes, it has been done, and I have my orders. We leave England in a week. John, I have a favor to solicit: I must give a dinner for the captains, and I hope you will ask Iskierka to permit me to make use of her pavilion for the occasion.\"\n\n\"A dinner?\" Granby said dubiously. \"Laurence, have you heard who they have\u2014I won't say saddled you with, but I do say it; I don't know what they can be thinking.\"\n\n\"They are thinking to have men at my back who will counter my heretical spirits, and who will not hesitate to disobey my orders if they suppose me to be doing anything contrary to Britain's interests,\" Laurence said. \"They have chosen as well as they could, for that purpose. But I have no choice; I must take them, for all that. So we must begin with the fiction of ordinary relations, and hope to make it truth in time.\n\n\"But, Temeraire, I fear I must ask you to find some excuse to exert yourself, on the occasion, and if possible give their beasts cause to respect your abilities. I am sorry to make the request: offensive to those who must witness it, as implying they require any such display to maintain discipline, and painful to you to make, as implying the respect which ought to be due you cannot be taken for granted. But I think the urgency of the situation demands it.\"\n\n\"Oh, I do not mind that at all,\" Temeraire said, \"but Laurence,\" and he opened his mouth to explain that there was an entirely different source of difficulty and trouble\u2014to tell Laurence that Napoleon's Concord had somehow reached Britain, and the ferals thought much of it, and several of them were even trying to forward the arrangement.\n\nBut Laurence looked up at him, and Temeraire halted. There was color in Laurence's face, and though he had spoken so seriously, he was despite that smiling a little, as though some inward happiness buoyed him against all the difficulties of his new position. Laurence had said before that he did not grieve the loss of rank and fortune, of his reputation. But of course, he had been trying to save Temeraire's feelings. Temeraire could not bear to spoil this moment of vindication and triumph. And if he spoke, Laurence would at once report to the Admiralty, of course, as he would say was his duty; and undoubtedly they would find some way to blame him for it, and perhaps even take back the command, after all.\n\n\"Yes?\" Laurence said.\n\n\"\u2014ought you not have another set of golden bars for your coat?\" Temeraire said faintly.\n\nLaurence laughed\u2014laughed, quite aloud!\u2014and said, \"I thank you for the reminder; indeed I must make shift to acquire them at once.\"\n\n\"He must not learn of the Concord going around,\" Temeraire said to Perscitia anxiously, when Laurence had gone with Granby to begin arrangements, for the golden bars and for the dinner. \"At least, not until we have contrived some solution; only what am I to do?\"\n\n\"Laurence, I have been thinking,\" Temeraire said. It seemed an opportune moment: Laurence was busily engaged in figuring in a very large ledger the various expenditures required to fit out Iskierka's pavilion for the dinner. \"I have been thinking, it might be suitable for me to host a dinner as well\u2014for some of my old friends from the breeding grounds\u2014veterans, and unharnessed fellows\u2014and perhaps some ferals might stop in\u2014\"\n\nLacking a better idea, he had seized on Laurence's strategy as his own: a dinner, as he already knew, worked splendidly to solve any number of difficulties, and perhaps it should serve in this case, too. He did not quite know how to explain to Laurence why he wished to host a dinner, but as it proved, he did not need to: Laurence lifted his head instantly from his work.\n\n\"You answer the wish I had not yet made,\" Laurence said. \"We must try to bring on some more light-weights and middle-weights, and I would be glad to take as many of the ferals and unharnessed beasts with us to Europe as you can convince to take the King's shilling. You may offer them the usual rate of pay for harnessed beasts; their Lordships have grudgingly allowed as much\u2014do you think some of them will come?\"\n\n\"I will certainly make every effort to persuade them,\" Temeraire said, feeling relieved and also uncomfortably as though he were practicing deceit\u2014although it did not really deserve the name; after all, he was not trying to hide anything from Laurence for his own benefit, but only for Laurence's; that ought to have some mitigating quality, even if the English language did not seem to offer a more satisfying and accurate alternative to the word. In any case, he would do his best to persuade as many dragons to come along as ever he could: that would certainly be a splendid solution, if everyone should come along to the Continent and help fight against Napoleon instead.\n\n\"Will you need my assistance with the arrangements?\" Laurence asked. \"You would not expect over twenty dragons, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Well, I do not precisely know,\" Temeraire said, even more uncomfortably; just that morning, Perscitia had spoken very darkly of hundreds of silly beasts ready to take Bonaparte aboard, \"but I thought perhaps the feeding station outside Dover would not object to our making use of their provisions for the day, and let us have the liberty of preparing them\u2014I will be very happy to welcome any dragon who likes to come and eat, even if they do not think they will choose to come along with us.\"\n\nThis station had been established by degrees over the last few years, by a reluctant Government grudgingly recognizing that feral dragons meant to frequent the place, and had better be fed on the nation's terms than allowed to feed themselves. It was not yet officially a breeding ground\u2014the Ministry finding it hateful to contemplate declaring a breeding ground in any insufficiently benighted location, and the many wealthy landholders in the area maintaining a loud rear-guard protest against the encroachment\u2014but as many dragons were choosing to make it their home, and some of them as nesting grounds for their eggs, which the Corps gladly collected, there was as a practical matter very little difference.\n\nThere was no definite border to the territory, but if there had been, Temeraire's own pavilion would have stood near the center\u2014the pavilion Laurence had built him, ages ago it seemed, before treason and invasion and transportation, and the loss of Laurence's first fortune. \"We can hold it there,\" Temeraire said, thinking of the distance from Dover, and the isolation of the place; there would be few people about to report on the meeting, and perhaps Laurence would never need to know.\n\n\"Splendid,\" Laurence said, and made the necessary arrangements, which was to say, he wrote Temeraire a draft on his bank.\n\n\"And perhaps you would be glad to stay here in Dover, and leave the rest to me,\" Temeraire said, \"as you must worry about your own dinner; I should not like to add to your work.\"\n\n\"If you think you can manage the feeding-station master,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Oh! There will be no difficulty there; it is good old Lloyd, who used to run the breeding ground at Pen Y Fan, and who managed our supply for us during the invasion\u2014and Perscitia has a handy group of fellows now, who will do anything for her if they are only paid for it,\" Temeraire said quickly. \"No, we can manage perfectly, I am sure,\" and Laurence yielded. But that was surely doing him a service, and could not really be called concealment, Temeraire felt almost sure, as he hastily flew away to meet with Perscitia.\n\nUnfortunately, his poor pavilion had never been very grand, and was lately much neglected. It had been used as a shelter for the sick dragons during the plague, and since then as a resting-place by any dragon who happened to like being an easy hour's flight from the coverts of London and Dover, at least for a night\u2014which was a great many dragons: couriers, ferals sneaking around to get scraps off the Corps, unharnessed beasts who liked to get work in the quarries, or in the ports, or doing portage. None of them had taken the trouble to keep it at all nice. The corners of the chamber really could not bear too-close examination, and when Temeraire put his head in and sniffed too deeply, he jerked his head back out again with distaste.\n\n\"Well,\" Perscitia said doubtfully. \"Perhaps we might find another\u2026?\"\n\nThere were some others near-by, although none as large. After the invasion, some of the unharnessed dragons had used their share of the proceeds from the golden eagles they had captured to build themselves pavilions\u2014more or less; three buildings and half a dozen unfinished structures clustered in a loose line. But of these, only Perscitia's own was not equally a mess\u2014but that was not saying much, as hers was very small, and made of plain red brick and grey shingles, lacking entirely in elegance or charm.\n\n\"It is easier to keep neat, if it is not so big that men cannot clean it out without an enormous amount of trouble or expense,\" she said with a defensive note, as Temeraire eyed it from outside, \"and also, I do not find the size at all a disadvantage: if it were any larger, and some heavy-weight took it into his head to say she was claiming it from me, I should have no recourse\u2014unless I liked to try and take her to court, and just you watch how much remedy the law would give a dragon.\"\n\nThat was all very practical, Temeraire supposed, but he did not see why the pavilion needed to be a shut-up box, with only the most meager openings for air and light, and not a hint of decoration. \"It is very nice,\" he said tactfully, \"and so long as it suits you, I am sure no one else could find anything wanting,\" although she might at least have dug a garden, and put some interesting rocks along the side.\n\nBut she was quite right about the expense of keeping a larger pavilion clean: Perscitia's secretary said she could not arrange to have his cleaned properly for under fifty pounds\u2014fifty pounds, when Perscitia's men had already to be paid fifteen pounds for their cooking services! A perfectly outrageous sum, and Temeraire could not bring himself to spend it only on cleaning; only he did not see how else it was to be done. He tried bringing water in a large barrel, and simply sloshing it over the floor, but he knew very well what Laurence would have said of this sort of house-keeping, and it did not have much effect. His attempt at using a small tree to brush out the corners met with little better success, except he did manage to knock away a piece of the wall.\n\n\"We could ask Iskierka to burn it out,\" Perscitia suggested, but this was impossible: Granby and Iskierka had already gone to Edinburgh to take charge of the second half of Laurence's force, which should leave from there instead of Dover due to some byzantine mystery of supply.\n\n\"I will ask Ning,\" he decided.\n\nThat, at least, could be managed, as she was still in London. The Admiralty had sent a courier to escort her to the training grounds at Kinloch Laggan, while they awaited an answer from China, but she had very politely said, \"How excellent military training must be! I will certainly consider your kind invitation, when my time is not so occupied as at present. In the meantime, you may wish to consider sending some workmen to enlarge this pavilion, and perhaps arrange a higher quality of food.\"\n\nTemeraire waited until cover of night to fly back to the London covert\u2014only out of consideration, to avoid distressing the populace and the horses, and not of course to conceal his presence\u2014and roused Ning out of the pavilion. She listened to his request with a tilted head. \"It seems peculiar to me that you should be so urgent to clean this pavilion when you are imminently departing for the Continent,\" she said interrogatively.\n\n\"I mean to hold a dinner there,\" Temeraire said, a little warily. \"Laurence wishes me to persuade some of the unharnessed dragons to come and join us,\" which was perfectly true.\n\n\"Will this dinner entail a great deal of difficulty and expense?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said, with a sigh.\n\n\"Do you expect many of these dragons to join you?\" she inquired.\n\n\"It is just as well to make an attempt,\" Temeraire said, and surely at least a few of his old friends would come, although he did not have the highest hopes\u2014it was not like the invasion, when everyone had been worried about the French dragons taking their territory, and there was no denying that the Government had behaved in a scurrilous fashion since then; few dragons would believe in pay tomorrow when their accounts were a year in arrears as it was.\n\n\"Hm,\" Ning said thoughtfully, but she acquiesced without further argument. Temeraire carried her on his back to the pavilion, and once there, she spat out a single small ball of her white flame directly into a corner\u2014very neatly, Temeraire had to admit\u2014and the refuse scorched up instantly.\n\n\"That is a very interesting phenomenon,\" Perscitia said, lowering her head to examine Ning closely, even trying to peer down Ning's throat. Ning drew her head back and gave her a flat stare, which Perscitia quite ignored. \"How is it accomplished?\"\n\n\"Pray let us step outside until the air has cleared,\" Ning said in a stiff and dignified fashion, turning away.\n\nTemeraire flung water onto the overheated stones and fanned away the hissing cloud of steam that resulted. Fortunately, the stink went away with the smoke. The corner was a little blackened perhaps, but he was sure that no-one would notice that much, particularly at night.\n\nNing was quite willing to repeat the operation, too. \"That is very handy of you,\" Temeraire said approvingly, when all the pavilions were clean, if somewhat smoky. \"Now I had better fly you back,\" but Ning demurred.\n\n\"I will stay for the dinner,\" she announced, to his dismay.\n\n\"What have you to do at dinner?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I am hungry,\" she said, which was no explanation at all; the dinner was not until tomorrow, and meanwhile they would certainly feed her in London today, if she went back, but when Temeraire tried to point this out, she only yawned delicately, and said, \"I beg your pardon, I am so very fatigued! I will rest now,\" and then closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep.\n\n\"There is nothing wrong with that,\" Perscitia said. \"She may as well stay: anyone who has heard of her will be impressed to have her on our side,\" except Temeraire was not certain Ning was on their side, or of anything she would do for that matter: it was an uncomfortable feeling, being round her, when she might at any moment burst out into some new and alarming start.\n\nPerscitia's men\u2014who it turned out were mostly women; Temeraire had mistaken them, because they all wore pantaloons beneath their skirts, and hiked these up to their waists while they worked\u2014had already been engaged all that day in putting beef and mutton on roasting spits. There would be nothing really elegant about the meal, Temeraire mournfully recognized, but Perscitia had firmly rejected his every suggestion for more elaborate presentations. \"We may have near a hundred dragons to feed,\" she said, \"and many of them have never even had anything cooked: that must be enough novelty. Otherwise we will have half of them turn their noses up at it, and not enough for the other half, who will complain we are slighting them. No, a simple roasting must do, and we will make mash with the drippings, for anyone who is still hungry after they get their share of the meat.\"\n\nShe had been sending couriers everywhere, and dragons began to arrive early the next morning. They came hungry: Temeraire had a deal of work to do trying to keep them off the meat until dinner-time, particularly the Scottish ferals. A great number of those had come, including Ricarlee, who was rude enough to begin talking up Napoleon's Concord to them all. \"I ought to run him off,\" Temeraire said, fuming. \"He should hold his own dinner, if he likes to promote Napoleon's plans.\"\n\n\"I would not advise it,\" Ning remarked, from behind half-slitted drowsy eyes. \"You ought to have quietly disposed of him before he came\u2014\" this sounded rather ominous, and Temeraire eyed her sidelong, \"\u2014but now it is too late: you will only give more credence and force to his arguments, if you establish him as worthy of being chased away. Allow him to speak, with a tolerant air, and do not permit anyone to see you think there is anything of sense in what he says.\"\n\n\"So you do want us to beat the French now?\" Temeraire said, skeptical. \"Or why are you offering advice?\"\n\n\"You are very suspicious,\" Ning said. \"You are my progenitor; I am not ungrateful.\" Temeraire did not swallow this, and stared at her until she flipped a dismissive point of her wing. \"Are you proposing to destroy the French entirely? To annihilate every one of them?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Temeraire said, aghast. \"We must only beat Napoleon properly, so he will stop having wars everywhere.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Ning said. \"So far we are agreed.\"\n\nTemeraire remained doubtful, but he could not stay to pry a better answer out of her: a Winchester and a couple of the Scots dragons were creeping up on the beautifully roasted mutton that Perscitia's men had just finished turning.\n\nHe was more than a little exasperated by the time the dinner-hour at last arrived, and grew even more so when Ricarlee\u2014who had the advantage of being smaller, and less nice in his manners\u2014finished his own portion quickly and seized the floor to say, \"Well, this is a handsome dinner indeed! I wouldn't mind eating so more often than once in ten years, I will say,\" and began again to rhapsodize about the Concord, and how it would ensure them an endless supply of delights.\n\nMore than one dragon made supportive noises, including, Temeraire was sorry to see, some of his old comrades from the invasion. Annoyed, Temeraire swallowed down his own side of beef more quickly than he liked\u2014he privately could admit there was a great deal to say for the flavor of a nice piece of beef, properly spit-roasted, with only a little salt, and he would have preferred to savor it.\n\n\"That,\" he said loudly, \"is nonsense. I do not deny that the Concord talks a great deal of sense, where it proposes rules for governing among ourselves, but there is no use imagining that Napoleon can give us rights to cows and sheep that have been raised by men who do not owe him allegiance. You must all see that Napoleon cannot really give you any land in Britain, as it is not his. He only means to set us quarreling with the Government here because they are his enemies; he wants us to fight them for his benefit, and bear all the cost, while he gives us nothing.\"\n\n\"There's something to what you say,\" Ricarlee said thoughtfully now, but before Temeraire could congratulate himself on swaying the Concord's most fervent supporter, he went on, \"I don't see why we ought to do all the work, and Napoleon get the good of it all alone. We should make him pay us, in gold, if he wants us to fight.\"\n\nThis dreadful suggestion attracted many murmurs of enthusiasm, to Temeraire's horror, until he sat up as tall as he could and said loudly, \"That is treasonous!\" to interrupt them. \"And it will only end in the most dreadful way you can imagine. When I committed treason\u2014and not for any selfish reason, but only to share the cure\u2014they took Laurence's entire fortune away\u2014ten thousand pounds, lost!\" This silenced the audience, except for several faint hisses of dismay. Temeraire, relieved to have headed off the worst, added, \"If you did get any gold from Napoleon, the men here will only confiscate it, when he has been beat, and he is sure to be beaten; Laurence and I are going to the Continent this coming week, to finish him off. And even if he did win, it would only be after the British had killed any number of you, and then you may be sure he would sail in and snatch it all for himself, and give all your territories to French dragons, instead.\"\n\n\"Well, what else are you proposing, then?\" Ricarlee said. \"You are brim-full of doom, indeed, and reasons why we oughtn't listen to Napoleon, but I ha'nt heard any better notions from you, other than we shouldn't say boo to a lieutenant of horse. It's all very well for those who have wagons full of gold and admirals in their pockets to tell the rest of us we may put up with nine shillings threepence a day, which don't add up to a sheep in a sennight if it is ever paid, which it isn't.\"\n\nTemeraire flattened back his ruff. \"It is true my situation at present is an enviable one,\" he said coolly. \"But my gold was won fairly on the field of battle, by doing my duty, and I do not think anyone can disagree I have acted in a most disinterested fashion where the welfare of my fellow dragons was at stake.\"\n\nHe might have added that there was no wagon full of gold anymore. Ferris, back in Vilna, had arranged the sale of all the treasure they had been obliged to leave behind when going to the Alps. Through mysterious but\u2014Laurence had assured him\u2014reliable means, the value thereof had appeared in a bank account of his very own in Britain, and was now invested in the Funds and producing that very delightful thing, interest. But this was not a point on which he felt he ought to enlarge when talking with those who did not have so much as five pounds to their credit, and could not have gotten it out of a bank again, if they wished.\n\n\"Wagons of gold are not commonly found save upon the field of battle, I find,\" Ning put in unexpectedly, in a thoughtful voice, loud enough to carry.\n\nTemeraire eyed her warily, but she made no further remark. \"In any case,\" he went on, \"there is a considerable difference between my saying you oughtn't simply swallow this plan Napoleon has held out to you, when anyone can see he has only made it up for his own ends, and my saying you must put up with our Government behaving in a scaly manner, which I do not say at all. Indeed,\" sudden inspiration striking, \"we should make our own concord\u2014and it needn't be one that is so unreasonable as to force a quarrel.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed!\" Perscitia said, sitting up sharp. \"We must propose a bill, to Parliament, with our requirements.\"\n\n\"Now that,\" Minnow said, to Temeraire's satisfaction, \"is the most sensible thing I have heard. It stands to reason we are better off not fighting with the people here: they have plenty of guns in this country, after all, and anyway we most of us have friends among the harnessed dragons, and don't care to put them in an awkward position. Now then, what do we want to ask their Lordships for?\"\n\nFortunately, Perscitia's secretary Mrs. Elsinore was on hand to take notes. Her hand was excellent, although she had some difficulty in keeping up with the lengthening list of demands and requests: higher pay, more frequently and more honestly paid, and even for those dragons who did not choose to fight\u2014\"But then you ought to do some work for it,\" Temeraire said, to which Ricarlee a little disgruntledly said, \"Oh, aye, some work; if they give us aught we can do without breaking our backs,\" but at least he and the ferals agreed to that much\u2014and a host of improvements which Perscitia suggested, to make casting one's vote easier.\n\n\"And we must have more seats in Parliament for dragons,\" she added firmly. \"We must ask for thirty, and allow ourselves to be bargained down to twenty; we must not accept less than twenty,\" which provoked some protests on the part of other dragons, who said they were happy to sit on stone, and would rather have more money.\n\n\"I do not mean chairs!\" Perscitia said. \"I mean members: there must be more dragons who have a share in making the law. Oh! And we ought to insist that they make some dragons officers, too. It is nonsense, only having humans as officers in the Aerial Corps.\"\n\n\"Yes, be sure and put that on the list,\" Temeraire told Mrs. Elsinore, and so forth and so on, until they all finished and looked at the list with some satisfaction\u2014everyone pleased, and agreeing that they would all pledge themselves to enforce it, and then Perscitia announced, \"I will take it to Parliament on Monday, then, and read it to the other members\u2014perhaps I can arrange for them to hear Bonaparte's Concord, too,\" she added thoughtfully, \"so that they have the contrast before them\u2014I think it will be highly instructive\u2014\"\n\nTemeraire suddenly woke to the realization that he had averted one disaster only to produce another. For the Concord to come to the Admiralty's attention would have been bad enough, but no-one would ever be persuaded that he had not had a hand in this new document\u2014as indeed he had, but the point was that Laurence was sure to be blamed for it with even more violence. \"You cannot read it!\" he said hurriedly.\n\nPerscitia scowled. \"It is not my fault I was not taught early enough,\" she said, injured. \"Besides, Mrs. Elsinore will read it to me until I have it by heart. You may be sure I will not make any mistakes.\"\n\n\"No, I meant,\" Temeraire said, but fell silent; he could not say, Do not read it, for Laurence's sake. That would be unfair, and worse than unfair; it was just what the Admiralty wanted of him and of every harnessed dragon, that they should betray their own interests and those of their fellow-dragons just to please their captains\u2014and Laurence would not even be pleased; Laurence would never wish it of him.\n\n\"I only meant,\" he said, struggling, \"that we must proceed with more delicacy. After all, if you should spring it upon the Parliament without warning, I dare say they will all refuse to listen. Laurence has told me how often the question of the slave trade has been argued, and how much difficulty there has been in getting the ban through.\"\n\n\"One cannot spring anything upon Parliament without warning,\" Perscitia said, with a lecturing air. \"I shall announce tomorrow that I will make a motion to read in a bill, so everyone will know that it is coming. Of course I must first marshal support for the measure, but I have already thought of that. There are several gentlemen of the Opposition who will be glad of a chance to embarrass the Government by putting a question to the Speaker about Napoleon's Concord, which shall furnish me with an excellent opportunity of warning of all the dire consequences should it be adopted by England's dragons, and be the best introduction for our bill\u2014which, by the bye,\" she added, \"must be properly named\u2014and I shall argue that the Government ought to adopt it, and thereby present an example of enlightened leadership to the nations of the Continent, and their dragons\u2014\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "\"Laurence,\" Temeraire said, feeling rather desperate, \"I must have a word with you.\"\n\n\"I am at your service,\" Laurence said immediately, turning away from the pair of wide-eyed young runners who had been delivered by courier that morning from Kinloch Laggan, along with four ensigns, seven riflemen, three lieutenants, and a ground crew of twenty men, all of whom had already been pressed into varying forms of service to prepare for the party.\n\n\"Oh\u2014to-night will do,\" Temeraire said cravenly. \"Or tomorrow; tomorrow will certainly be good enough, I am sure.\" The pavilion looked so splendid\u2014lanterns hung everywhere, and silk hangings, and even if braziers and hot bricks were the source of warmth, there were so many of them as to make a really comfortable glow. The smell of the roasting cows rose marvelously over the fresh sea-air crashing on the cliffs below, and the pavilion's prospect could not be improved upon: the wide expanse of the Channel was already dark, as the sun sank westward, the boats with their lanterns bobbing jewel-like. The tables were laid with great magnificence: porcelain and crystal and silver all ablaze upon the inner, large platters of brass for the dragons set behind every captain's place, and liveried footmen already arranging themselves at intervals around the table. \"How grand everything looks!\"\n\n\"Yes, I mean to dine in proper state,\" Laurence said. \"If only captains might be impressed so certainly by such things as their dragons, I would be content. But at least they will have no cause to feel I slight them, and I admit that I hope the formality of the table may encourage a like formality in the behavior of the guests; I can rely on no amiable feeling among them.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Laurence knew this was a polite understatement, but he had no intention of letting Temeraire know that Captain Poole had five years ago loudly expressed to Laurence's face the opinion that he ought to have been drawn, quartered, and thrown to dogs, in the good old fashion; nor that Captain Windle had on the same occasion struck him\u2014in the midst of a general melee broken out in camp, where Laurence had been able to return the blow in kind rather than take insult\u2014and still less that Windle's first lieutenant had tried, drunken and ineffectual though the attempt had been, to stab him with a table knife.\n\nTemeraire, if he knew, would certainly have objections of his own to express to all of these gentlemen; violent objections. But Laurence himself could not blame them for their feelings, nor the honesty of their open avowal. The Admiralty had been brutal indeed in spreading the blame of his treason across all aviators, then compounding that injustice by postponing their own sentence and keeping him alive. Since then they had transported him, restored him, and now, to crown all, promoted him. Their actions implied too plainly that better was not to be expected, from aviators; that they were to be regarded much as were their beasts, as unreliable, half-controlled, and lacking in all discipline\u2014a bitter swallow for officers who loved the Corps, and aspired only to perform their loyal duty to the Crown. Laurence would have gladly counted himself among their number, once; only extremity had driven him out of their ranks. The men who objected to his pardon were guilty only of loving their service, and resenting the insult to its honor.\n\nHe was nevertheless relieved that the first to arrive was Jane's recommendation, Captain Adair, whom the Admiralty had grudgingly allowed him. Adair was of an older Corps family and a gentleman; he and Laurence were even connected distantly, fourth cousins somewhere on the maternal side, and while he could not be called warm, his manners were punctilious. His dragon Levantia was young and not a little nervous; she had the claws of a Parnassian and the cheerful yellow coloration of a Reaper, and an anxious habit of mind distinct from either breed. But she was squarely middle-weight, well-trained and well-crewed, and Laurence had every hope of her making a solid anchor for their defense against the screen of light-weight dragons which Napoleon liked so well to put up at the head of his offensive maneuvers.\n\nThe rest of the party arrived in slightly tardy stages, and made Laurence greetings stilted when not verging on outright rudeness. Captain Poole did not verge: did not offer a hand, nor even make the smallest bow, and said only, \"Laurence,\" in a cold and remote voice.\n\nLaurence paused and said quietly, \"Admiral Laurence; or you may report yourself to Whitehall for insubordination.\"\n\nPoole stood a moment. Thin and thin-lipped, with almost a pared quality, as though someone had whittled him down like a stick; there was a hardness in his face, and his hair was shingled close to his head. But he was a young man still; he had been a lieutenant when Laurence had last seen him, on the eve of the ill-fated Battle of London. He had won his step sometime in the intervening years; his young Anglewing, Fidelitas, was larger than most of that breed, solidly in the heavy-weight class, and was likely one of the eggs bred up while the plague had been ravaging the British ranks with no prospect of a cure.\n\n\"Admiral,\" he said finally\u2014adequate; Laurence nodded and stood aside. Poole immediately continued into the pavilion and crossed the length of the table to join Windle and three other captains, who were holding themselves well apart from the rest of the company, and speaking in low voices; the glances they threw at Laurence from across the table left little doubt of the likely subject of their conversation, nor their sentiments thereupon.\n\nThe dinner was not a success by any measure Laurence would ordinarily have used: the conversation stilted and labored, and the atmosphere heavy. His preparations achieved the quelling effect he had desired, but not by mere elevation of tone. He was sorry to realize that several of the captains had never before been confronted with the full array of a formal dinner service, and found themselves at a disadvantage. A quarter of the gentlemen refused soup until nudged by their neighbors, and nearly all of them plainly had to remind themselves at regular intervals not to eat from their knives. Captain Whitby called out across the table to say, \"Hi, Alfred, light along those mushrooms you have there by you,\" only to make poor Alfred\u2014Captain Gorden\u2014startle violently and knock over his glass when one of the footmen made a desperate leap from behind him to fetch the desired dish before he could reach it.\n\nSo Laurence had without intending it established a distinction of social standing, and if he had made his captains polite, he had also made them uncomfortable. But the dinner succeeded in avoiding the worst dangers he had foreseen: there was no open rudeness, and the conversation though not lively was unobjectionable. The most resentful of the captains had been scattered around the table by the correct order of seating\u2014although a little whispering had been required to arrange that, aviators as a rule not much given to working out their exact precedence\u2014and as a result, had less opportunity for speaking among themselves in a small group. Laurence was willing to have their dislike a little transmitted, in exchange for having it dispersed and thereby restrained.\n\nHe proposed the loyal toast to the King, and afterwards necessarily saluted Windle, as the most senior captain present; all raised their glasses, even if Windle looked sour at the honor, and from there the round of toasts proceeded without incident. The excellent wines had a mellowing effect upon the company, and Temeraire meanwhile was having some success among the dragons seated in the outer ring to enjoy their own meal\u2014an arrangement which if it surprised them and their officers plainly recommended itself to the former. On landing, one captain had said, loud enough to be overheard, \"Bellamar, if they should try to feed you any foreign mess, or some nonsense of gruel, be sure I will see you properly fed back in Dover,\" but when they were ushered inside the pavilion to their places, the glittering array of the tables had an appeal which not the strongest captainly opprobrium could entirely overcome.\n\n\"Is this a dinner-party, then? Why, they are very splendid after all; I did not know how it should be,\" said Windle's own Obituria, a large Chequered Nettle, to the visible and scowling annoyance of her captain. It was a sentiment much repeated, particularly once the beef was served\u2014one entire side to a dragon, roasted beautifully and showing to advantage upon the brightly polished platters, with whole oranges stuck upon the points of the ribs. Many harnessed dragons had developed an expensive taste for strong spice, much used during the plague to overcome the deadening of their appetites, which they of late had little opportunity to indulge. The curried sauce, delivered in large tureens, went around to especially loud enthusiasm, and, it had to be admitted, equally loud consumption.\n\nThe wheat porridge served after, which might have occasioned protests, was presented to them decorated with large lumps of rock sugar that had a look almost of jewels, so that several of the dragons leaned forward to ask their captains in undertone if they were really meant to eat such marvels, rather than take them away to keep. Temeraire had to give the company their lead and say, \"Are the sugar jewels not remarkable? Pray tell me your opinion,\" to Obituria, on his right, as he took his own first large swallow.\n\nThe porridge-bowls were cleaned bare all around the table, and then the dragons' second course brought out: fish, overlapped and arranged on the plate into the shape of a sea-serpent, each appropriate to the size of the guest, with an enormous stuffed pumpkin for a glaring orange eye and masses of stewed greens for the ocean waves, oysters and clams and mussels in quantity rounding out the sea-bed, and for each plate a handsome lobster bright red as a flourish. Delight reigned; even Poole's dragon might be overheard whispering\u2014as dragons whispered\u2014\"Roger, but he cannot be so very bad, only look at my plate\u2014and the lanterns!\" Poole looked irritable.\n\nLaurence was glad to establish Temeraire, at least, in the esteem of the dragons. Meanwhile, at the officers' table every man had been toasted, as well as Nelson's memory. The second course was carried away in satisfactory ruins, particularly the same turbot which had furnished the dragons' dish, and the cloth being removed Laurence took his chance and rising said, \"Gentlemen, we leave for the Continent in three days' time. We confront a tyrant whose genius for war has made him the dismay of every army he has faced, and the architect of misery in nearly every part of the world. He has seemed at times unassailable and invincible. But we have proven him otherwise here on England's soil and in Spain; the Russians have lately proved it in their own country. The hour advances when we shall prove it in Germany and in France, God willing. May we all of us, man and beast, do our part in ensuring his defeat.\"\n\nIt was not a long speech, nor very elegant, but it served the purpose: \"hear, hear,\" went around the table, every man drank, and Laurence sat again conscious of relief and having bound his officers in at least so much unity of purpose. The dessert was spread out over the table and the company might now circulate more freely, but those early knots of opposition had been broken up, and the captains did not move far from their dragons, who were murmuring raptures over their own pudding, flickering blue with a monstrous expenditure of brandy. Laurence counted it well-spent to the last shilling for the ecstasies it produced among them. A small group of musicians\u2014intrepid and overpaid\u2014had been set to play for the company, and now began their work. Laurence had been used to this form of entertainment after shipboard dinners, if more informally produced by the hands, and if the music served to dissuade low conversations, that, too, was just as well.\n\nHe had never before given a dinner with so much calculation, but there was a familiarity to the undertaking: just so his mother had on many an occasion organized her political dinners, more akin to a military campaign than a convivial gathering. He thought of her with brief pain, and looked down at the black riband on his arm tight against the green coat. He would have no opportunity to see her: there was no time to fly to Nottinghamshire, and she had no heart to come to town; she had written to tell him so, and to congratulate him on his flag. She had not said, Your father would be proud. Laurence could not have persuaded himself to believe her, if she had. But that pain stood for a moment at a remove from the practical necessities of the moment, and he found the bitterness lessened, also. He could never have his father's pardon; but he had Jane's, and was content as he had not expected ever again to be.\n\n\"Oh, and look,\" Temeraire said, as the dragons finally emerged from the pavilion onto the crest of the hillside for some air, \"there is the Spartiate, beating up the Channel. Let us salute her: I am sure if we roar all together, it will be as loud as a broadside, and it is only due her,\" that ship being the one survivor of the wreck of Nelson's fleet, after the battle of Shoeburyness.\n\nThe dragons were nothing loath, and even the most sour captain could hardly have made objection. The roar they made was a prodigious noise, once, twice, and then the third something else entirely. Laurence was braced, as was Granby; but all the other guests man and beast fell silent as Temeraire unleashed the full unthrottled roaring of the divine wind over all their united voices, and drowned them beneath that endless wave of noise. All was silent when he finished: the stones beneath their feet still trembling with resonance, and faint splashes coming from the surf below as gulls fell out of the sky dead into the sea.\n\nThe Spartiate\u2014Laurence had sent a courier to her captain to warn him of the honor to be paid her\u2014took a moment to recover, but then answered with all her guns, a distant rumbling at the distance but full of glowing fire and smoke. She was a fine and martial sight against the growing dark, enough to lift any heart with zeal.\n\nAfter the ship had passed, Temeraire with sudden inspiration leaned over and whispered, \"Laurence, ought we give everyone one of the lanterns, to take back to their coverts?\" and the dragons, at least, were won. They carried away their paper baubles as jealously as gold, with many abjurations to their captains to be careful of the sides, and the hanging-cords, and not to let them fly off during the passage.\n\n\"Well, my dear,\" Laurence said to Temeraire with some satisfaction, when the company had gone, \"I think we may have won the field, so far as it could be won. What did you wish to speak to me about, earlier?\"\n\nThe freshly minted dragon rights act 1813 received its first reading in Parliament unopposed, to the great dismay of the Government: evidently no-one had felt equal to raising objections to Perscitia's face, or rather teeth. Laurence was well aware that the reception he met at the Admiralty, the next day, was restrained only by the almost unwelcome intelligence, arrived that very morning, of the Chinese having promised six hundred dragons to the allied forces.\n\nHe faced Yorke and his subordinate ministers with something almost like amusement, knowing those men wishing to violently castigate him for the one event and stifled by the other. Gong Su had been sent with the news by Crown Prince Mianning, and he had insisted on attending the conference, smilingly. He sat with a placid and benevolent expression that implied\u2014very falsely\u2014that he had only a vague understanding of the proceedings, and his presence forced the admirals to maintain the appearances of respect towards Laurence.\n\n\"It seems you have once more encountered difficulties with your King's ministers,\" Gong Su observed afterwards, as they walked together from Whitehall\u2014that gentleman's elaborate and impressive robes, and mandarin's cap and button, as well as his long queue, drawing much fascinated attention from the Marines on duty and every other passerby in the courtyard.\n\n\"I am grateful, sir, that your lord seems to have overcome the objections of his own,\" Laurence said.\n\nGong Su did not answer immediately. Only when they were ensconced in the privacy of a hackney carriage did he resume the conversation. \"Matters in China have altered since your departure. It is my very great sorrow to inform you, Captain, that your dread imperial father is in failing health.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to hear it,\" Laurence said, although he understood at once how Mianning had carried his point against the conservative faction. Men who might stand against a crown prince many years from his throne would not risk the same opposition when he would very shortly be their emperor. \"And sorry as well that he should have been robbed, since we last met: I believe their Lordships have already told you of the hatching of the egg.\"\n\nGong Su inclined his head. \"It is part of my instructions from His Imperial Highness to visit the hatchling and make observations on her character, whenever it should be convenient.\"\n\nLaurence still did not hold himself very knowledgeable in the court etiquette of China, but he had learned enough to know that this meant \"without the loss of a moment.\" He opened the window and spoke to the driver, who very unwilling had to be reminded thrice of his obligation under the hackney regulation, and promised a half-guinea before he would carry them even to the intersection of Portland and Weymouth, still a quarter-mile's walk from the gates of the covert. To do the man justice, only so far would his horses go, either; they were already restive and stamping as Laurence and Gong Su disembarked, and shied at the shadow of a Winchester courier falling upon the cobblestones in passing. Fortunately Gong Su was accustomed to the isolation of British coverts, and the alarm the general populace took from dragons; Laurence did not have to make excuses, and a gaggle of braver chair-men were waiting by the corner, hoping for similarly abandoned passengers, who could be prevailed upon to pay twice the going rate to be carried the rest of the way.\n\nWhen they had reached the covert, Laurence took Gong Su to meet Ning, not without the liveliest concern; he could not help but fear the consequences of an unfavorable report of her behavior. The alliance between their nations was too tentative and gossamer a thing to easily support the weight of disappointment: not much interest united them, except the desire to see Napoleon overthrown, and a great deal divided. The Chinese port in Australia and its sea-serpent hordes were still thriving, to the ongoing chagrin of Whitehall, and the opium trade continued to evade Imperial restrictions, to the wrath of Peking; resentments which would easily stir up into a quarrel, on only slight additional grounds.\n\nBut Ning comported herself with perfect decorum, rousing from another nap for the introduction and inclining her head to Gong Su politely. \"I am deeply honored by the concern shown me by His Imperial Highness, and it is my great hope soon to have reached that maturity of body and spirit which should fit a dragon to assume the august responsibility of making herself a comfort to one who supports the will of Heaven,\" she said, in fluent Chinese. \"Lung Tien Xiang has with great generosity furnished me with his copy of the Analects, as well as many other works of significance and real value, that my education need not suffer excessively on account of the unfortunate events which caused the removal of my egg from its harbor in the precincts of the Imperial City and prevented the ordinary course of my hatching therein. I would be very glad of any further guidance for my reading.\"\n\nLaurence could not but notice that this speech in no way committed her, but Gong Su was satisfied. \"I rejoice to have the pleasure of informing my lord that you are in excellent health, and that no evil effects have attended on the theft which took you with such harsh abruptness from your home,\" he said. \"He will take much comfort in hearing that you have endured the upheaval with a spirit of resolution and equanimity. I will make every small and humble effort in my power, such as it is, to acquire at least a few manuscripts for your further pleasure. As well, Captain,\" he added, to Laurence, \"I would be honored deeply if you would permit me to offer on behalf of your elder brother,\" this another courtly fiction, as Laurence could give Mianning seven years without a stretch, \"the proper festivities of welcome and celebration due the hatching of a new Celestial.\"\n\n\"I would like nothing better than to oblige you, sir,\" Laurence said, wary of how he might be expected to figure in such a ceremony, \"but I must inform you that my present orders do not allow of any delay. We must leave for the Continent at first light tomorrow morning, and I go back to Dover to-night. That need not halt your plans; I trust my absence would not be felt with such a motive.\"\n\n\"If I may be forgiven for expressing an opinion in such a matter,\" Ning interjected unexpectedly, \"I should feel it more appropriate to wait for a more auspicious moment. As I understand it, we stand upon the eve of war, where the armies of China shall strike against the very one who has so grievously offended the Celestial Throne by thieving away my egg. A celebration of my hatching might better be deferred until we may unite it with a celebration of victory, and thereby magnify the joys of the occasion.\"\n\nGong Su paused, and then said thoughtfully, \"I receive your wise proposal humbly and with gratitude, Lung Tien Ning, and without substituting my own judgment for that of the Son of Heaven, believe there can be no objection to a temporary postponement under these circumstances.\"\n\n\"I am gratified by your kindness to our guest,\" Laurence said to Ning, afterwards, when Gong Su had left to return to his hotel, \"and your patience in the matter.\" He was surprised to find her willing to postpone a ceremony which should certainly have gone far to establish her reputation in the eyes of the world.\n\n\"This island is too isolated,\" Ning said matter-of-factly, \"and your own position too irregular: it does not seem to me very likely that any particularly notable persons are likely to attend, should Gong Su offer a feast at present on my behalf\u2014certainly no heads of state, or other personages of importance; I understand from Temeraire that he has never met your own king at all.\n\n\"When Napoleon has been defeated, it is certain a gathering will recommend itself to all the allies to decide how best to divide the spoils of victory: every ruler shall send a representative, and any formal celebration held at that time will naturally attract guests of the best quality, who will not wish to miss any chance of furthering negotiations to their advantage. And the presence of the expected force from China can only add to the consequence of that nation, and therefore myself. It will do much better. Do you find any flaw in my reasoning?\" she asked; perhaps Laurence's expression showed something of his feelings.\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"No; your reasoning seems to me eminently sound. And if we should lose?\"\n\n\"Such an unhappy outcome cannot really be taken into consideration,\" Ning said cheerfully: but certainly having avoided any public display of loyalty to China, or its future emperor, would make it less notable a treachery if she allowed herself to be won over by a victorious Napoleon, to claim the post of companion to his heir.\n\nLaurence felt a qualm at visiting this scheming creature on an unsuspecting Mianning, who if he did not really have a familial claim upon him had certainly earned his gratitude. But an emperor of China required a Celestial, and Ning had at least proven she could be circumspect when her situation demanded. She might not indeed be so poor a companion for a ruler much beset by conspirators, once she had finally committed herself to his service.\n\n\"Meanwhile,\" Ning went on, \"after consideration I have decided it would be best should I accompany you to the Continent. Although I cannot take part in the fighting directly, as the Chinese will think it inappropriate, I feel there will be much for me to learn by observation, and I expect there will be more opportunity of acquainting myself with other officers of high rank while in your company, now that you have been made an admiral\u2014so long as you were not demoted to-day?\" Her head came swiveling down to inspect him, tilting an eye towards the bars upon his shoulders. \"There were some remarks I overheard made among the couriers that supposed this might be the case.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said dryly. \"I am happy to say I remain an admiral, and of more use.\"\n\n\"That is excellent,\" Ning said, quite unruffled. \"It would have been inconvenient otherwise.\"\n\n\"I must however demur: you are not yet up to the flight,\" Laurence said. \"We have near six hundred miles to cover in three days' flying, and every dragon of our company will be under full weight of harness and men; none of them can carry you. You must remain here.\"\n\n\"That will not do,\" Ning said. \"No-one comes to this covert except low officers and couriers, and too few of those besides. But pray do not worry,\" she added. \"You are beset with many cares, and must be desiring to return to Temeraire at once. You may dress for flying; I will make all the necessary arrangements.\"\n\nLaurence did have to dress, so he deferred further argument even while wondering what arrangements she thought she might make. There was no dragon in the covert who could manage her bulk and the necessary speed of their flight both: she was growing with the same explosive speed Laurence recalled from Temeraire's early weeks, and more nearly approximated the size of a light-weight than a courier beast, by now. In an emergency, she might have been carried, but he would not slow the entire company for her and her unknown purposes.\n\nBut when he emerged from his cabin, she looked only satisfied and said, \"Good, you are ready; our transport is nearly here.\"\n\nNearly in this case proved to mean the better part of an hour, and only when Laurence was on the point of refusing to wait any longer, and taking a courier, did a heavy ponderous flapping of large wings aloft clear the landing-ring of the covert. The massive Regal Copper of Temeraire's acquaintance from the breeding grounds, Requiescat, came thumping down.\n\n\"I regret that it was not possible for you to be more timely,\" Ning said, rather coldly.\n\n\"It ain't my fault,\" Requiescat said. \"I don't fly a mile straight up for my own pleasure. But you can't guess the fuss the groundlings make, only if I choose to coast in at a decent height\u2014'stampeded everyone on Rotten Row,' \" he mimicked a whine. \"They don't take much stampeding, let me tell you. Climb on, since you're in such a hurry, and let's be off.\"\n\n\"A moment, if you please,\" Laurence said.\n\nThe Regal startled and peered very carefully down. \"Why, I didn't see you there,\" he said, addressing a shrub somewhat to Laurence's left. \"Who are you, then?\"\n\n\"I am Temeraire's captain,\" Laurence said in some asperity. \"Do I understand that you are volunteering to come to the Continent with us? And fight?\"\n\n\"I might as well, I guess,\" Requiescat said. \"I am tired of carrying rocks around. It may be good money, but it gets stale, there's no denying.\"\n\nLaurence contemplated without enthusiasm the project of feeding a Regal Copper, with six other heavy-weights to manage already among their force\u2014but there was no denying the breed exerted a kind of moral force upon their fellows disproportionate to even their immense scale. He was sensible of the advantage Requiescat's presence should offer not merely in battle, but in securing the uncertain discipline of his company. His worst fear at present was not defeat, but a mutiny among his captains, which might rob them of a victory otherwise in reach\u2014and he would hold himself responsible regardless of the ill-management of the Admiralty which had served him with such officers as made that mutiny a prospect more probable than unthinkable.\n\nLaurence looked at Ning, who regarded him with placid mien. How she had prevailed upon an unharnessed and indolent beast to volunteer for war, Laurence did not know, and suspected some inducement had been privately offered, which might well be held to his own account in future. But so far as the practical side of the matter, she had indeed found a solution: Requiescat could certainly manage her weight, even if he were armored to boot.\n\n\"Very well,\" Laurence said, yielding. \"If you are set on this course, you are welcome; and you may accompany us as well, if you choose,\" he added to Ning, \"but I think I will require your promise that so long as you remain with us you will undertake no action inimical to Britain's interests, nor hold any conversation with the enemy.\"\n\nNing considered this demand long enough to make Laurence glad he had made it, and at last judiciously said, \"I believe I can commit myself so far: you have my word,\" and he could only hope that would be sufficient bond to keep her from either imprudence, or a dishonorable excess of the reverse."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "\"Requiescat is welcome: he is very handy in a fight when he likes to be, even if he does want the biggest share of everything, always,\" Temeraire said. \"But I do not understand why Ning wishes to come along, and\u2014Laurence, of course I do not mean to imply there is anything wanting in a dragon of my lineage, only I am afraid Ning\u2014that she is\u2014\" He stopped, wondering how best to put it into words, without inviting any reflections on her breeding.\n\n\"Just so,\" Laurence said with a sigh, \"but we are most likely better off bringing her than leaving her behind; she would certainly make some form of mischief in our absence.\"\n\n\"I am quite content to come,\" Ning herself said, when Temeraire tried to suggest that perhaps she would be better off remaining out of the noise and tumult of war, where she might easily be injured, particularly at her small size. \"I will be careful to evade any danger.\"\n\n\"I am sure she will,\" Temeraire muttered, disgruntled, but there was no more time for persuasion to act upon her; the last furious bustle of preparation was under way, and Challoner, the new second lieutenant, was begging his pardon, but they needed his help with the armor.\n\nTemeraire had scarcely remembered the enormous effort involved in getting a British heavy-weight under full arms and under way, and the size of the crew required to make the operation possible at all. He had once taken it for granted. Now he had learned to look with a critical eye upon the service which had then been all his world, and yet the cheerful ordinary shouting and cursing still had the power to raise a pang of pleasurable nostalgia\u2014officers and ground crew all scrambling in every direction, checking over every buckle; the supplies all laid out and going aboard in their orderly fashion, as unchanged as sunrise. There was even something satisfying in the imposing weight of harness and chainmail, and more still in knowing his belly-netting held nearly fifty incendiaries, and a full complement of seven riflemen were already gone aboard his back.\n\nHe had been luxuriously scrubbed yesterday, under Challoner's supervision\u2014Lieutenant Challoner herself entirely satisfactory, with a silver-buttoned coat in bright green, hair neatly braided and tied at the end with a matching ribbon, everything about her deeply comforting to Temeraire's sense of what was due their new rank and stature. She had also the charming quality of being the sister of one of Temeraire's former officers who had died at the Battle of Dover, and therefore seemed rather like a lost valuable recovered: although it was puzzling Rebecca should have described herself to him as the younger sister, when she was older than Dilly had been; but Temeraire put this aside; he did not like to think too much about the way time passed for people.\n\nShe had gracefully accepted Temeraire's hints on the subject of the appearance he should like the crew to present, and acted upon them: there was not an officer who did not have a tidy black neckcloth and a freshly pressed coat; their boots were all blacked to an equal shine, and the ground crew, too, were all tidy and had clean shirts and clean leather vests. The whole clearing offered a handsome portrait of industry and order to Temeraire's survey, and he could not help but regret that Forthing should very soon mar it again with his own disgraceful appearance, quite likely leading a good number of the crew astray with him.\n\nHe had tried to broach the subject with Laurence\u2014\"Surely we ought have a first lieutenant more\u2014more suitable\"\u2014but Laurence had firmly put a period to the discussion.\n\n\"My dear, I must ask your pardon. I know you are not fond of Forthing, but you must see the injustice of having accepted his toil and service all this long and thankless way, only to push him aside at the first opportunity where that service might receive its just reward. He has served honorably and to the best of his abilities, and I cannot entertain the suggestion of replacement.\"\n\nTemeraire sighed again, but consoled himself: at least he had no reason to blush for his crew now, and battlefield conditions might excuse the lack of that formality and neatness of uniform which were under better circumstances considered appropriate.\n\nHalf their company was leaving under Granby's command from Edinburgh, but even the two formations which would back them made an enthusiastic noise full of consequence. Temeraire only wished he could think better than he did of the dragons behind him. Obituria, the senior heavy-weight among them, was impressive in the physical sense: she was a large Chequered Nettle, with a fourteen-barbed club of a tail which she could lay about as skillfully as if it were another leg, but she was a stolid, dull creature who flew her formation-patterns without the least spirit of inquiry. She would never say, Why are we turning left and upwards here? Would that not expose our flanks to those little French harriers? No, she did as her captain told her, and Captain Windle was as dull as his beast: seemed to only speak in words of one syllable, or two if he were much pressed.\n\nThen there was Fidelitas, their Anglewing, who had the very peculiar habit of being almost interesting. If they were ever near each other, breakfasting at the pen perhaps, and Temeraire struck up a conversation with him, very soon he would be talking animatedly and getting quite excited\u2014and then abruptly he would stop as though someone had clapped his mouth shut for him, and go wooden. There was no accounting for it, and anyway Temeraire nursed a private irritation against his captain, Poole, who often forgot entirely to call Laurence \"sir\" and never touched his hat.\n\nBut they certainly made a good enough outward show, with their formations assembled behind them, to make Temeraire pleased to lead them. It was not as glorious of course as flying at the head of the massed legions of China, but one could not have everything, all the time. And their complete equipage was perhaps even more impressive\u2014if not attractive; Temeraire did not see why the Corps could not spare a thought, when laying out their gear, to provide them with banners, perhaps, or streamers\u2014narrow streamers of thin cotton, attached to the front wing-edges, would have produced quite a remarkable effect, he thought.\n\nAt least Requiescat added admirably to their color. The formation-dragons were more than a little startled when he landed as they were forming up; he had been outfitted with mail, and Perscitia had further sent him along a new leather-and-steel head covering of her own devising, which only made him look more impressive. \"I would have ordered one made for you,\" she had told Temeraire apologetically, \"but it requires a great many measurements, to ensure it does not obstruct vision, and in any case I am not confident it would do for you, what with the divine wind\u2014like being inside a bell when it has been rung, very likely.\"\n\n\"So, we are off to give the French another good drubbing, are we?\" Requiescat said genially, as Ning leapt aboard his back and settled herself, with a rather preening stretch of her neck, between his wings. \"Where is everybody?\" he asked, looking around.\n\n\"The other formation is leaving from Edinburgh,\" Temeraire said, feeling this an unjustified aspersion on the size of their force: they had two formations, and besides that another dozen unharnessed beasts had been persuaded to join up.\n\n\"I don't mean formations,\" Requiescat said, \"but there they are coming, I guess,\" and Temeraire looked round to see a cloud\u2014no, a flock of birds\u2014no, it was dragons; at least fifty smallish light-weights, all coming towards them\u2014\n\nIt turned out to be Ricarlee, with a crowd of the Scots ferals. They produced a near-riot on their arrival\u2014they had no notion of order, and directly they had landed they were scrambling into everyone's clearings, rousing up the Channel dragons from their sleep, poking their noses into the feeding pen, until finally Temeraire roared loud enough to secure their attention, and also to knock over one old oak, which crashed down into a barracks cabin and brought out a dozen ground crewmen shouting and cursing.\n\nThis noise quelled the better part of the horde. \"Requiescat, go and round up those fellows away from the officers' mess there,\" Temeraire said, more than a little exasperated, \"and Fidelitas, pray chase those others out of the pen. It is quite intolerable your fellows should be making such a mess of all our arrangements,\" he added severely to Ricarlee, who had landed with a handful of lieutenants\u2014small dragons in dark shades with bright blue streaks painted upon their hides. \"If you are here to steal, we will serve you out as that deserves straightaway; if not, you had better come to order and explain yourselves and this behavior at once.\"\n\n\"No call to be unfriendly,\" Ricarlee said. \"You can't blame anyone for wanting a bite to sup. We are for France, isn't it? A long way to go on an empty belly. Now then,\" he sidled in peculiarly close, and put his head near Temeraire's. \"It'll be share and share alike, I trust?\"\n\n\"Share and share alike of what?\" Temeraire said suspiciously.\n\n\"Ha ha,\" Ricarlee said, winking one eye in a strange fashion, \"very good, I understand you. So long as we're agreed.\"\n\n\"I do not understand you,\" Temeraire said. \"You cannot expect to eat as much as we heavy-weights.\"\n\n\"Hmmrph,\" Ricarlee said. \"Oh, aye, fair enough,\" in a tone of one yielding on an important point at a bargaining-table.\n\n\"Laurence, whatever do you suppose he is talking about?\" Temeraire asked, in an undertone, while the covert's harried quartermaster began a scurrying effort to put out some hot mash with leftover beef bones for the blue-streaked ferals, mostly to keep them from hanging about the pen peering wistfully through the stakes and terrifying all the cattle within.\n\n\"I suppose that word has got about that there are heaps of treasure to be had, in fighting Napoleon,\" Laurence said, \"undoubtedly aided by legends of your recently acquired gold.\" He was conferring with Challoner and his own supply-officer, a Lieutenant Doone. \"We will have them, if they will come: I had not expected so many to answer your lure, but I think we can manage it, even if our commons must be a little short.\"\n\n\"Do I understand correctly, sir,\" Captain Windle said\u2014he had walked over from Obituria\u2014\"that you propose to saddle us with this unruly gaggle for baggage, and feed them out of our supply? The winter is a hard time for feral beasts, I am sure, and as a form of charity this must recommend itself; I would be glad to know what military purpose you intend they should serve.\"\n\nMore than you, Temeraire would have liked to say, his ruff going back at Windle's tone, which he felt thoroughly disrespectful, but Laurence answered as though he had asked the question without rudeness.\n\n\"I propose, Captain, that they should be a screen for our formations, and a constant threat to the enemy's supply and cavalry\u2014what he has left of it, after Moscow. If we cannot contrive to feed them, they must supply their wants somewhere, and better in French territory than in Scotland. We will not, however, delay our departure any further for their sake. Temeraire, they must be ready to go now, or not at all. Pray pass the word to check harness.\"\n\nTemeraire called out with a pleasant sensation of significance, \"Let everyone see to their harness, if you please,\" and himself spread his wings and rose onto his haunches to give himself a thorough shaking, politely ignoring the young rifleman Dubrough who lost his footing and mortified had to haul himself back up along his carabiner straps.\n\n\"Ha ha, like geese,\" Ricarlee said, too audibly, but from every side the dragons were calling back, \"All lies well,\" and Captain Windle scowling retreated to Obituria as Laurence stepped into Temeraire's ready claw to be put up.\n\n\"Temeraire, your heading is east by north,\" Laurence said, clasping his own carabiners onto the harness.\n\n\"East by north,\" Temeraire called. Fidelitas and Obituria returned, \"East by north,\" correctly, and then\u2014a leap, a beating of wings, and they were all aloft, the formations taking their arrow-head shapes behind him to either point of wing as they climbed. Temeraire would have liked to pause hovering to look over the display, or at least to crane his head around for a good look, but it would have spoilt the picture they made and reduced his dignity; he restrained the impulse. Distantly he heard Ricarlee and his fellows coming along after them in a clamoring mass.\n\nWhen his ear could catch no more of the beating sounds of dragons in their first climb, he wheeled away from the coastline and over the open water. A rush of bracing air met him coming in from the Channel, and he let the warmer air beneath his wings carry him up above it. It was a fine clear day, and the harbor speckled with white sails and rowboats, faint cries of people seeing them streaming past\u2014only for a moment; then they were already whipping past and out to sea.\n\nTemeraire settled into a comfortable pace, flicking out his wing-tips on the upper crest to make sure everyone behind him saw the beat. A quick glance to starboard made sure he had not exceeded Obituria's pace\u2014she would be their limit. She was certainly making an effort, but not unduly so, Temeraire judged. He would have to slow a little in an hour, perhaps, to give her a rest, but it was so lovely to fly swift at the start of a journey, after so long in covert; he was sure everyone must be glad of the chance to stretch themselves.\n\nThe cliffs had fallen away behind them; the Continent was a faint smudge on the horizon. One of the large ships of the blockade\u2014a first-rate, or a second-rate? He should have to ask Laurence\u2014was beating up the Channel on patrol, working against the wind that was diving beneath them. Only mizzen and mainsails spread, but she was still impressive, and to Temeraire's surprised delight she fired a salute as their shadows came streaming over the waves and ran up her sails.\n\n\"Laurence, what is that ship?\" he asked.\n\nLaurence trained his glass upon her and after a moment said, \"My dear, that is the Temeraire, herself.\"\n\nIskierka's flame scorched the air just short of Temeraire's leading wing\u2014\"I beg your pardon,\" Temeraire said indignantly. He wheeled round, and then discovered half the ferals had abandoned their positions, wreaking merry havoc among a handful of French supply-carts on the road to the south, quite away from any fighting.\n\n\"Temeraire, we must try and establish control over the left flank,\" Laurence called, his glass trained upon the field below, where all the infantry of both sides were tangled in what Temeraire found an indistinguishable mass, clouded by stinking wafts of black powder smoke. \"I think we are near to breaking them. A run of incendiaries, united with Wittgenstein's advance, would have a material effect, if it can be done\u2014a quarter of an hour from now, I think, or a little more.\"\n\n\"But Laurence, look what the ferals are doing,\" Temeraire protested. \"If I do not go and chivvy them back into line\u2014\"\n\n\"We knew not to expect better from them, my dear,\" Laurence said. \"This is not the moment to concern ourselves with their correction.\"\n\nTemeraire without pleasure resigned himself to ignoring the ferals' pillaging; he recalled with pain the behavior of the Russian beasts, over the Berezina\u2014and those dragons had not been under his command; it had not reflected on him. Now here they were with nearly the entire city of Berlin observing, and all their allies\u2014General Wittgenstein himself was at that very moment taking a courier on an arc to the east, watching the battle through his glass\u2014and everyone could see that nearly half his troops were behaving in this scaly and disorderly fashion. He writhed inwardly with mortification and threw a glance towards their right flank, where Dyhern and Eroica were maneuvering with their fellows. Perhaps they would not notice?\n\nHe turned his attention back to the battle and called to Iskierka, \"Can you take that blue-green fellow over there, or will you need some help?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Iskierka gave her present victims, a pair of French light-weights, a last pursuing gout of fire. \"As though I should need any help to manage anyone at all,\" and she was tearing off after the big French cross-breed, who was serving as the anchor of their artillery-cover.\n\nQuite naturally, a handful of the middle-weights from the left flank came to help screen him. \"There,\" Temeraire said. \"Requiescat, pray knock us a hole on the left.\"\n\n\"Do you mean their left, or my left?\" Requiescat said, circling him lazily, as though they had all the time imaginable. \"And which is the left; I am no hand at remembering.\"\n\n\"Over that large building with the green steeple!\" Temeraire said irritably.\n\n\"Have him take the rest of the ferals with him,\" Laurence said, and Temeraire passed along the order\u2014for what it was worth, as nearly all the Scottish dragons were busy rummaging through the sacks of the shattered wagons below; but some half a dozen of the smaller ones went after Requiescat when he called them to order, even if they were not likely to be much use.\n\nMeanwhile, however, Temeraire's new signal-ensign Quigley was putting out the flags\u2014ready incendiaries and fall in behind leader. Temeraire fended off an attempt by a couple of over-daring young French beasts, who did not know better than to come at him from his lower flank\u2014a quick hovering twist and he was doubled on himself. He roared at them as they closed. Both wheeled away with cries of anguish, a lighter lesson than they had asked for, Temeraire felt; but he did not have time to pursue them at present. Requiescat had gone barreling through the lines, his head down and the rifle-fire pinging harmlessly off his helm, and the ferals had gone in after him clawing about the dragons who had been first bowled out of the way and were struggling to beat back up into place.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Laurence said. \"Make your pass when ready, Temeraire,\" and Temeraire plunged into the disorder of the French line with his legs tucked in carefully, the long-unaccustomed feeling of his bellmen scrambling about in the rigging below, which was growing noticeably lighter as they cast off the incendiaries in their careful way\u2014he could feel each one being handed along a line of men until it reached the end of the rigging, just below his tail, and there down a line of three men suspended by lines, to the last one who ignited the fuse and let the bomb drop.\n\nObituria and Cavernus were with him\u2014Cavernus another of their formation-leaders, a Malachite Reaper, who had come over with Granby from Edinburgh; she was a bit standoffish, and not above middle-weight, but a really clever flyer. All their formations came behind them, their crews dropping their own bombs. Not one in five landed anywhere useful, of course, and each one was necessarily small; that was the trouble with incendiaries\u2014and worse, there was no sign of Fidelitas, who ought to have come along, too. Temeraire, startled, did a quick survey over the battlefield as he finished his pass; the dragons of Fidelitas's formation were circling uncertainly, many of them having small unhelpful skirmishes with French beasts\u2014and Fidelitas himself was down among the baggage-carts, with the ferals.\n\n\"Oh!\" Temeraire said, indignant.\n\n\"Can you manage another pass?\" Laurence called, at the same moment; they had created some noise and confusion on the ground beneath, but not as much as one might have hoped\u2014not as much as four formations should have done. But the French dragons were recovering from their buffeting now, coming for them in their dangerous swarming numbers, and if he tried to lead the others back through that cloud instead of going round back to their own lines, Obituria was sure to take some injury; she was not quick enough. Fidelitas would have been, Temeraire thought resentfully.\n\nHe cast an eye quickly over the ground below\u2014the incendiaries had at least thoroughly disordered the twenty gun-crews covering the French center; those would take several minutes to begin firing again. \"Laurence, I might take those guns, myself, if the others could keep the French dragons off my back a little longer,\" Temeraire called back, proposing an alternative, and Laurence gave the word. The signal-flags flashed out, telling the rest of the dragons to cover his pass. But Obituria seemed perplexed; she was already climbing up out of combat-height to circle back to the allied line, without any orders at all, and even though the signal-ensign on her back ought to have been watching the flag-dragon, she did not turn round. Fortunately, Cavernus rallied her own formation to make a shield\u2014but the smaller dragons, unsupported, would not be able to hold for long. Temeraire calculated quickly\u2014he would have to go straight at the gun-crews, flying over the French infantry before them; he could not afford the time to circle round and come from their rear.\n\nThere was no more time to consider; either he must go at once, or they must give up, accept that their pass had failed in such a clumsy manner in front of everyone, when it ought to have gone well. Temeraire whirled and dived low even as he caught a glimpse of Laurence raising the speaking-trumpet to call him off, and steeled himself against the frantic spattering of musket-balls that struck his chest and legs from the French infantry below\u2014like being bitten all over by rats or something equally unpleasant, and he could not even give vent to a hiss of displeasure; he required every last ounce of breath.\n\nHalfway from the guns, he began roaring at measured intervals, just as though he meant to raise up a wave. Men and horses collapsed and scattered even before the shorter roars, and most of the already-disordered artillery-crews broke and began to flee in every direction; faintly he heard voices crying, \"Le vent du diable!\" as they ran. But one brave crew had stayed by the third gun in the line\u2014blood streaming over their faces and hands, and the ground near them still smoking where an incendiary had landed not far away, but they were holding fast, exhorted by a tall young officer in a shako with its once-proud plume replaced by a makeshift bunch of chicken feathers. They were trying to bring the gun to bear\u2014on him.\n\nThe wide mouth of the iron cannon gaped hideously round as they struggling turned it inch by inch. Staring down its dark maw, Temeraire tried not to think of all the dreadful things Perscitia had said about being struck by cannon-shot, and especially not of poor Chalcedony, who had gone down so horribly in the Battle of Shoeburyness with a ball to the chest. He could only try to outrun them: if he shifted his course now, the divine wind would collapse, and it would not do against all those guns; it was not enough just to destroy one.\n\nHe kept his roars coming, kept flying, even as the gunners frantically tamped down the wadding, and loaded in the shot. And then he was close enough: even as they were putting the slow-match to the tube, he gathered one last breath and roared enormously, collapsing the other waves into a single monstrous force, and the divine wind rolled out over them.\n\nThe gun rang so violently it might have been church-bells, pealing. The crew fell away like rag dolls, collapsing; Temeraire glimpsed with sorrow the officer with his feathers sinking, his eyes gone red with blood. And then the barrel exploded. Flames and bits of iron and splinters, red-hot and smoldering, flew in every direction. All along the ridge of the low hill, the oaken carriages of the guns were shattering as though they had been struck by cannon-fire. Those men who had not fled fast enough or far enough littered the ground unmoving, in a wide fan-shape marking the path of the divine wind.\n\nAnd as Temeraire lifted away, wincing, the entire hill upon which the guns had stood abruptly collapsed, as though some essential foundation had shattered. Dirt and sand and pebbles cascaded away in a tremendous wash, burying the nearest ranks of French infantry to their ankles where they had not already been decimated by the hail of metal.\n\nThe French ranks near-by were dismayed by the attack, and the dragons above reeled back; Cavernus and her formation wheeled into a diamond-shape round Temeraire, sheltering him as he got back aloft, and together they climbed out of fighting-height and dashed back to the safety of the allied lines. Temeraire had the satisfaction of seeing Eroica's signal-ensign dip flags in a quick salute, as they swept past. His breath was short, and now that the moment of crisis had passed, the bullet-wounds stung fiercely; there seemed a great many of them.\n\n\"Report, Mr. Roland,\" Laurence called.\n\n\"Flinders lost, Warrick wounded, sir,\" Emily Roland called, hanging off halfway up his side. \"A dozen hits to the chest, and the bellmen cannot stanch two.\"\n\n\"Mr. Quigley, signal Iskierka that we are going to the field-hospital, and to hold the line until we return,\" Laurence called.\n\n\"Surely that can wait until the battle is over,\" Temeraire said, flinching; oh, how he hated the surgeons. \"Truly, Laurence, I do not feel them in the slightest.\"\n\nBut Laurence was inflexible; with a sigh Temeraire put down at the clearing, and tried to console himself that at least Keynes was with them again\u2014the finest dragon-surgeon of Britain's forces, and the quickest hand at getting the wretched musket-balls out. It was not a very good consolation, however.\n\n\"What the devil were you about, giving them your whole belly for washing?\" Keynes demanded in great irritation, having ordered Temeraire to sprawl on his side\u2014a highly uncomfortable position, nearly squashing one wing\u2014while he clambered about with his savage long-bladed knives, and his assistants scuttling behind him with the dish.\n\n\"Well, I did not want to!\" Temeraire said, protesting. \"But there was nothing else to be done, after Obituria had flown off. It would scarcely have gone better if I had circled around while Cavernus and the others were bowled over, and then the French could have come at me from aloft. Ow!\" Another ball had dropped into the dish, with its inappropriately pleasant chiming sound, and the hot searing iron had been pressed to the wound to close it. \"Surely that is all of them.\"\n\n\"I know a bullet-hole when I see one, damn your scaly hide,\" Keynes said, jabbing him again.\n\nLaurence had with difficulty restrained his first instinctual reaction on the battlefield, which had been a murderous one; but hearing Temeraire say straight-out what ought to have been plain\u2014which surely had been plain, to Obituria's captain\u2014renewed his rage afresh. For a moment sight dimmed, one of those too-vivid memories seizing him, and he was in the night sky over the ocean, the Val\u00e9rie below them: her lanterns and the muzzles of her cannon glowing red-hot, the only lights upon her decks. The wind in his face and the shock of impact: the barbed ball tearing into Temeraire's chest from her skyward guns.\n\nHe shook the darkness away and stood again in daylight, torn grass and mud churned up with thick rivulets of dragon blood spattered across his boots, the low groans of injured dragons and men. Temeraire still bore that scar, a knot the size of Laurence's fist, drawn flesh and dulled scales; he liked to paint it over sometimes for vanity. If there had been a skyward gun in the French emplacement; if they had fired off that last round in time, a difference of half a minute\u2014\n\n\"That is all of them,\" Keynes said, straightening up, \"and more than there ought to have been.\"\n\nLaurence did not let anger go, but dismissed it to return later; the battle was not over. \"Can he fly, Mr. Keynes?\"\n\n\"I cannot keep out of the fighting,\" Temeraire protested immediately, pricking up his ruff.\n\n\"I should prefer a week's rest with no flying,\" Keynes said, \"but I do not insist upon it\u2014yet. Keep him out of musket-fire range, and see he has a side of raw beef to-night.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Laurence said. \"Has Mr. Warrick been taken off, Mr. Challoner?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Challoner answered, from the belly-rigging; she herself had a bandage wrapped snugly about her left arm, and few of the bellmen had not been marked likewise.\n\nTemeraire craning around to peer at them said anxiously, \"You are not badly hurt, Challoner? I am glad to hear it. Where are they taking poor Warrick? And are you quite certain Flinders is dead? Perhaps he will wake?\"\n\nFlinders had lost nearly half his skull to a flying scrap of iron, likely a fragment of a cannon-barrel, and would certainly never wake again before the Judgment; Temeraire unhappily accepted the news, and said, \"We will be sure to look in on his wife and children, Laurence, will we not?\u2014I am very sorry he should be lost to them, and us.\"\n\n\"We will,\" Laurence said, going back aboard. He was not surprised at the inquiry, for Temeraire had before now shown all the signs of taking to heart the many strictures Churki had lain down for the duty of care the Incan dragons felt due to those men and women in their charge. Temeraire had begun to apply these even while crewed by the sorriest gang of untrained sea-dogs, conscripted under their duress and his own after the wreck of the Allegiance\u2014the dregs of the Navy and half of them drunkards and former convicts pressed out of the bowels of Sydney Harbor. It was not wonderful that those sentiments should have enlarged themselves rapidly on so much better matter as his new crew offered: men of the Corps, trained up in the service and among dragons from childhood, and all of them respectable even if not nice in their manners.\n\nBut it was a novel expression to those men themselves, used to the European mode where dragons were encouraged to bind all their affections up in their captains, in hopes of giving that one hand a strong rein to pull upon. Laurence knew many crewmen thought it unremarkable to have gone ten years in service on a dragon, without ever once exchanging any conversation with the beast, direct; even most lieutenants spoke with them only rarely. He mounted back up hearing approving murmurs, mingled with the same anger he felt himself: the misconduct of Obituria's captain had left them, too, exposed to the danger their dragon had faced, and there was not a man who did not feel that Flinders need not have died.\n\n\"I will certainly have words with Obituria,\" Temeraire said, as he pushed aloft again with a few stifled hisses of discomfort to belie his earlier bravado. \"I do not see what business she had going off in that fashion. Oh! And as for Fidelitas\u2014!\"\n\nThey reached fighting-altitude above a battlefield much altered by their handiwork, and the passage of three-quarters of an hour. Dyhern and the Prussian dragons holding the right still struggled against the more numerous and nimbler French\u2014but they were making a far better showing than at the disastrous battle of Jena, where so many of the Prussian dragons had been brought low.\n\nThe Prussians had indeed turned the French strategy back upon them: the big dragons had exposed themselves early on, pretending to cleave to their old formation-flying habits, but their captains had been hiding below, safe in the belly-netting. As soon as the French boarding parties had dropped onto their backs, the heavy-weights had raced at top speed to the back of the lines, where the French boarders were seized at once by the many eager hands of their ground crews and imprisoned. It was a blow even larger than the mere loss of numbers: the French could ill afford to spare trained veterans at present from any part of their army, and with so many young and half-trained beasts among them, skilled aviators were an especial loss.\n\nBy now the French had belatedly grown wary of this maneuver. The boarders had ceased to go, and in their absence, the sheer muscle of the Prussian heavy-weights made a solid wall which even the numbers of the French dragons could not penetrate. Many of the young French beasts felt all the natural hesitation of a twelve-ton beast confronted by one of eighteen tons, spiked and plated in the bony armor common among Prussian heavy-weights. They had thus reached a stalemate, and below them the Russian and French guns were arguing the question back and forth, with an equal lack of resolution.\n\nBut on the left, the hole Temeraire's assault had opened was proving worth the cost: the French flank was weakening, and from their lofty distance Laurence could see the wreckage of two French infantry squares, broken by the explosion of the guns and trampled by the Russian light cavalry; another gun emplacement was being overrun, and Russian guns had been dragged forward and now unopposed were rapidly clearing away the French dragons from the air.\n\n\"We will let them work,\" Laurence said, watching the guns boom and thunder. \"Temeraire, we can turn against the center, I believe. Mr. Forthing, signal a charge; Iskierka to take point, if you please. We will keep to the rear\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, Laurence!\" Temeraire protested.\n\nLaurence continued firmly, \"\u2014and make a feint at threatening their guns on that hill near the green barn. We have put some fear in their bellies, I hope, and we may do more good there, by drawing away a significant portion of their force for an unnecessary defense.\"\n\nBut Temeraire's entire frame quivered with restive unhappiness all the while he hovered and darted around the hill, even though he was keeping a full six French dragons thoroughly occupied\u2014two of them heavy-weights, and the French aerial center weakened materially thereby. Laurence was thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement, but Temeraire plainly not\u2014and least so when he had to watch Iskierka lead a dazzling and ferocious charge straight at the French center, only to plunge with startling speed beneath the braced and waiting lines, and come up from beneath them.\n\nThe French were so entirely taken by surprise by that dive\u2014contrary to all received wisdom, as putting the British dragons vulnerable below their claws\u2014that they did not act to seize the advantage it offered them swiftly enough. Iskierka as quickly looped back up between their two ranks, followed by the full company, who then broke into two groups: middle-weights twisting to pounce upon the French light-weights in the forward rank, while the light-weights and heavy-weights together fell upon the larger beasts to the rear.\n\nIt was a daring maneuver\u2014one which Temeraire himself had proposed, but it was perhaps not wonderful that its success should not be enough to content him when he was forced to see his design enacted by another. His ruff lay so flat against his neck that he looked nearly an Imperial dragon again. \"I do not see why Iskierka needs to be flaming off in that showy way,\" he said, \"and she quite nearly fouled Latinius's wing, on that last turn,\" this referring to the small Grey Copper from Fidelitas's formation, who was hanging on Iskierka's coattails and making clawing passes at the eyes of her recoiling targets, with every evidence of high delight.\n\nLaurence laid a comforting hand on his neck, and told Forthing, \"Pass the word to Requiescat.\" The massive Regal Copper smashed through the wavering French light-weights. Dragons scattered in every direction as he rolled onwards over them, and the British middle-weights turned eagerly to join the others in their assault in the remaining French forces.\n\nTheir own boarding parties now began going over. So many of the French dragons were unharnessed as to make the usual practice, aimed at capturing a beast's captain, ineffective. Instead men on long tethers leapt over, in moments planted spikes deep into the unharnessed dragon's bare back, and flung heavy cables over the side before they swung off themselves and were pulled back to safety. The crew of the light-weights seized the dangling ends and their dragons swiftly looped over and over around the enemy beast. Thus entangled, the French dragons had to flee or have their wings pinned, and more than one beast lost its wind and plummeted to the ground in a dreadful crash.\n\nLaurence watched the operation without pleasure. The same technique had been used in the medieval age by the dragon-slayers of the Norman court, who mounted on their own beasts had undertaken a ruthless culling of the wild beasts of the British Isles. The method had for a thousand years made harnessed dragons with their large crews inevitably the masters of the unharnessed, at least in the West; and these French dragons were too young and unpracticed to have mastered the Chinese dragons' skill at defending one another from similar attacks.\n\nPoole had suggested the tactic at the conference Laurence had held with his officers, three nights ago, with an air of challenging him to object\u2014as though he thought Laurence some sort of idle romantic, instead of a serving-officer who had been at sea since the age of twelve, and at war nearly all his life. He wondered in grim amusement how Poole himself would have liked to be on the deck of a sixty-four taking a broadside, trying to keep his feet on blood-washed oak. Laurence did not have the kind of squeamishness which consisted in a refusal to harm the enemy upon the battlefield, in open and honest combat.\n\nBut there was still nothing like pleasure in seeing half-trained young dragons flung down, and they were going at a shockingly rapid pace. Ten French light-weights were felled in less than a quarter of an hour, and then Cavernus made a daring effort on one unharnessed Petit Chevalier. She dropped a dozen boarders on the heavy-weight dragon's back, then she rounded up the ferals to help: every small dragon seized on the dangling ropes and whipped around the Chevalier, who grew clumsy with alarm and fouled wings as they drew more than twenty loops around him: he might have bulled his way loose at first, but the ferals were beating about his head, and abruptly his wings were pulled too tight against his body.\n\nHe dragged a breath, struggled\u2014one of the ferals took a sharp tumble, another was raked by outflung talons\u2014and fell, fell, roaring in terror, to smash upon the ground below, crushing an entire company of cavalry beneath his massive bulk.\n\nThe French aerial line broke: dozens of unharnessed dragons fleeing away towards the Elbe, their panic infecting the harnessed beasts and carrying many of these along with them; the remainder milling in uncertain confusion only to be harried away by Iskierka, pouring out flame as she descended on them. The center was theirs.\n\n\"Signal bombardment,\" Laurence said, and all the harnessed British dragons circled back, finding their formations, and began to sweep back and forth over the French infantry, freely dropping their incendiaries among them. The French were trying to turn their guns skyward; Fidelitas\u2014now returned to the field\u2014led his formation in a raking pass across two emplacements, and Cavernus went after another. But there were other guns beginning to threaten their position, and in any case Laurence judged the beasts would by now have spent the better part of their incendiaries. \"Withdraw to heights,\" he said, and as the first gun-crew began their firing sequence, the British dragons were already circling up and higher, out of range.\n\nThey were also beyond the range of doing much damage direct, but Laurence was satisfied: they had established a secure command of the air. \"Temeraire, if you please, send one of those ferals round to ask Dyhern if he could use a formation or two: we will spare him Cavernus and Fidelitas, if he requires their aid,\" he said.\n\n\"Very well,\" Temeraire said unenthusiastically, and collared one of the circling Scots, who had got herself a table-cloth out of the wagon-carts and thrust her head through it, so it now hung on her like a sort of capelet. \"Oh, all right,\" she said, rather grumbling, but she went off in a hurry.\n\nMeanwhile, the guns kept firing a steady barrage to keep them far aloft, but these were no longer trained upon the allied forces, steadily pressing their advantage, and then Laurence distantly heard as the Prussian cuirassiers shouted as one. Their horses were hooded and blinkered and nose-muffled from any glimpse of the dragons above; they made a thundering roll of a charge across the field, into the lessened hail of iron, and fell upon the guns. Laurence lowered his glass. He had seen enough: the day was theirs."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Laurence saw Temeraire settled in the field-covert with a side of beef and a bowlful of hot beef blood, sent over by way of thanks from the Prussian corps. \"Mr. Keynes said he will look in on us in an hour, Admiral,\" O'Dea said, \"and we will trust in the saints to keep himself,\" meaning Temeraire, \"from taking blood-poisoning before then, or going mad from lead in the humors; like as not the knife has missed a ball here or there.\"\n\nThis provoked Temeraire to say uneasily, \"I am sure there cannot be much lead left in me, after all of that wretched rooting about. Laurence, is going mad very uncomfortable?\"\n\nLaurence sighed privately. He would have been glad for a different ground-crew master, if he had dared ask for a replacement: O'Dea was clever enough, but untrained, and given to excess of both drink and poetic lamentations. In his case, Laurence would have had no compunction in removing him from the r\u00f4le and keeping him on as a personal secretary instead. But the Admiralty would surely have assigned them another scowling half-spy, or a man who would resist every advancement in practice. If O'Dea did not know his work as well as he ought, at least he had less to unlearn, and seven months' observation of the habits of the Chinese legions made him nearly as much an expert as any man in Britain.\n\n\"If you can feel any other metal remaining, pray inform Keynes; I am certain you will have no ill-effects before he comes. I will return directly I have seen my staff, and attended to the wounded,\" Laurence said, and went to collect Granby.\n\nIskierka had established a handsome bonfire in her clearing, for her crew, and was also eating; she was pleased with herself, as indeed she had a right to be. By her count, which was only a little exaggerated, she had told for some eight beasts, most heavy-weights, besides keeping their forward line clear and leading their telling strike. She had paid little for her daring: a few glancing musket-balls, fired from enemy dragons more interested in evading than fighting her, and one raking scratch already closed by the time she had come to earth\u2014now poulticed and bandaged for the night by her surgeon, in an excess of caution which had provoked Keynes to mutter about mollycoddling. \"And you may tell Temeraire for me that he did not do so badly, himself,\" Iskierka said. \"I liked what he did with those cannon: it was quite handy, although I do think he might have been more clever about getting shot.\"\n\n\"A rotten mess,\" Granby said, when they were far enough from the clearing to be out of earshot from his crew, along the paths: their field-covert sprawled nearly two miles over a long stretch of foothills, with most dragons crammed in three and four to a clearing, but Temeraire and Iskierka were established on the upper heights, in prime clearings, and a considerable distance from the central farmhouse where Laurence had established his command. \"Damn Poole, anyway; he ought to be broken the service.\"\n\n\"I cannot say so, John,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Nor I, anyone would tell you,\" Granby said, \"but I say it anyway. He wasn't overborne by some wild start of his beast; he took Fidelitas down, after those mad Scots beggars, and you will never convince me otherwise.\"\n\n\"You will oblige me by pretending, however,\" Laurence said wearily, and Granby raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"You have something deep in mind, I suppose,\" he said. \"Do you mean to turn out a politician, after all?\"\n\n\"God save me such a fate,\" Laurence said, with more force than hope behind it. He felt an inward revulsion at his own present thoughts: a species of scheming against his own officers, those in whom he had been used to repose the fullest trust. He had been assigned officers before against his will, men of limited abilities or whose characters he could not wholeheartedly admire. He had nevertheless always felt himself their captain and not their enemy; his work had always been the straightforward task of helping them to do their duty, and there was a bitter taste to finding himself instead obliged to contrive against them.\n\nBefore the battle, he had hoped\u2014had felt nearly certain\u2014that the engagement, well-carried, would see his command brought in tune. The joy of seeing Berlin liberated, its citizens cheering, and knowing their joint efforts responsible for pushing the French over the Elbe, ought to have swept all small and petty quarrels away, and established that urgently necessary esprit de corps which would sustain them through the long campaign ahead.\n\nBut instead all the satisfactions which their victory ought to have brought, all the sense of good-fellowship and shared struggle, had been wasted. Or worse than wasted. There was not an officer, not a dragon, in their command, who did not know that Poole had deliberately flouted discipline, that Windle had avoided his duty, and that Temeraire and Cavernus and her formation had been forced to run a dangerous risk to cover for their failures. They and their subordinates could not feel themselves part of the victory.\n\nAnd no confrontation was possible, which might have cleared the air. Unquestionably they knew they had acted wrongly, and by now must have been feeling the shame of having done so, but Laurence had no expectation of that emotion procuring anything like an apology. They could not acknowledge fault to him, whose guilt was so much the greater in their eyes. Instead Poole would say that Fidelitas had seen the ferals pillaging, and had thought himself entitled to claim his own share of whatever treasure there was to be had; Poole had not thought it his duty to check him, as Laurence had done nothing to check the other beasts. Windle's reply would be equally pat\u2014the ordered run had been accomplished, and he had known they lacked the dragons for a second pass. His slower beast was vulnerable to the highly maneuverable French light-weights converging upon them. He had acted to preserve her, as was his own paramount duty.\n\nLaurence did not wish to hear their excuses\u2014did not trust himself to hear their excuses without making such an answer as would only serve the Admiralty, who longed for any justification to remove him, which a quarrel with his senior captains could be made to provide. And he could not dismiss them, either: the Admiralty would delightedly send them back, confirmed and approved in their behavior, and a certain wreck to the discipline of the entire force: there would be nothing left to him then but to resign, and quit the field entirely, with all the evil consequences not merely to himself but to the entire war effort.\n\n\"What will you say to them, then?\" Granby asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Laurence said grimly.\n\nHe stopped at his quarters and armored himself in dress uniform, then summoned the captains to conference, where he maintained the most formal reserve his manners could support: he inquired only after particulars\u2014casualties, injuries taken, armaments consumed\u2014and silenced two attempts at officers trying to say anything more of their dragons' conduct. No refreshment was offered; he concluded the meeting in remarkably short order, and dismissed them to their dragons. It was a cold reception for men who had won a notable victory against a larger force, and he was sorry not to be able to give a warmer word to Captain Ainley, whose dragon Cavernus had done such work for them today. But he could not say anything, without saying too much. As he preferred not to hear Poole and Windle make excuses, he could not chastise them openly at all, and if he could say nothing to them, he must say nothing to any man.\n\n\"You must make some answer, though,\" Granby said afterwards, as they walked back to the clearings together. \"They must be thinking you are keeping silent for fear of the Admiralty. If you don't check them, they will only get worse.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Laurence said. They had reached the crest of the hill now, and a bright spring wind came rustling the trees; he took off his hat to let the cold air stir against his forehead, looking out over the battlefield: bobbing lanterns traveling over the ground as the corpse-robbers picked over the dead.\n\nTemeraire looked around for Laurence in vain the next morning, all through breakfast and having his wounds dressed fresh\u2014including the two additional bullet-wounds which he had reluctantly confessed to Keynes on the second visit. He had regretted doing so directly afterwards, but he had to admit that to-day they were much better; he did not feel any twinge at all, except if he extended his wings all the way back as far as they could go, and even that was not so very bad.\n\nHe had been ordered to rest, but there was no need to fly: the French had all pulled across the Elbe. Everyone was jubilant that Berlin had been liberated, and all the church-bells had been rung in rejoicing that morning; there was no fighting going, so there was no need for Laurence to be gone, and where?\n\n\"You do not suppose Laurence would ever fight another duel,\" he asked Emily finally, growing anxious when the noon hour had come, and Laurence was still away.\n\n\"No, not when he has given you his word,\" she said, \"and anyway he is admiral now: I don't suppose you can go about challenging your officers, even in the Navy.\"\n\n\"Why would he challenge one of his officers?\" Temeraire said frowningly.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Emily said hastily. \"Nothing\u2014those are the only fellows around, after all. He can't challenge someone he don't talk to.\"\n\nShe darted away before Temeraire could press past this bit of transparency. He tried to question several other of his officers, but Forthing only looked blank, and Challoner said forthrightly, \"Roland oughtn't have said anything. Pray don't keep asking around, Temeraire: that will get around, and gossip will only make it worse,\" which only increased his worry, and removed any power he had of addressing it, at least until Laurence should come back.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" Ning said, breaking into his brooding thoughts, \"but do you think you will eat that lamb you have there?\"\n\n\"Certainly I will eat it,\" Temeraire said, rather indignantly: Ning had refused any part of the battle, even though she might certainly have been of material use, if only she had consented to set a few French guns afire. She had not earned any delicacies. Then he sighed: worry was interfering with the enjoyment of what ought to have been a treat, as the lamb had been sent him in the line of medicine, for his wounds, and Baggy had seen it roasted beautifully on a spit.\n\n\"Do your wounds distress you a great deal?\" Ning asked. \"You seem out of sorts, despite our victory.\"\n\n\"It is not my wounds, only no-one will tell me why Laurence should be angry with his officers,\" Temeraire said. \"And I do not have confidence he will not fight a duel, if any of them should have insulted his honor.\"\n\n\"I am afraid I do not understand,\" Ning said.\n\n\"Well, Roland let it slip, that Laurence should like to challenge one of them,\" Temeraire began, but Ning flicked her wings negatively.\n\n\"No, no,\" she said. \"I do not understand why you are perplexed: surely there was ample cause for anger on his part, in the failures of your wing dragons during the battle yesterday? You yourself remarked, last evening, that you intended to speak with them.\"\n\nTemeraire paused: this construction had not occurred to him. \"But whyever should that make Laurence angry with his officers?\" he said. \"Iskierka has behaved ten times as badly, on other occasions, and that was certainly not Granby's fault; besides, those ferals were worse than anyone else, and they have no officers to blame.\"\n\n\"Ah! Well, one does not like to speculate,\" Ning said, but she tilted her head as though she had something else on the tip of her tongue to offer. Temeraire nudged over the platter of lamb towards her. \"Why, that is very kind of you,\" she said, and swallowed down an entire haunch in one neat gulp, crunching the bones with satisfaction. \"Well, your admiral is not an unreasonable man, I think\u2014\" Temeraire enjoyed again, privately, your admiral, \"\u2014so perhaps you must consider if there might be some cause to have provoked his anger against them in these circumstances. I will regretfully mention,\" she added, \"that I have heard Fidelitas's captain make certain unfavorable remarks, about Admiral Laurence, on a few occasions when I breakfasted in the southern clearing.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to say that Poole gave Fidelitas orders to go and pillage, while we were all still fighting?\" Temeraire said, in dawning outrage. He could scarcely believe it, but when Laurence had at last returned, he did not refute the supposition.\n\n\"I must beg you not to repeat it, however,\" Laurence said wearily. \"No good can come of such gossip: there is no proof, and I hope to God I shall be given none; I must not act upon it, if action can be helped.\"\n\n\"This is what you were afraid of, Laurence, all along, I see now,\" Temeraire said, seething. \"Oh! It is beyond all that is shocking, and when I think that Fidelitas knows, perfectly well, how like a selfish coward he was behaving: I will certainly have words with him.\"\n\n\"You cannot,\" Laurence said. \"He cannot be blamed for following his captain's orders.\"\n\n\"I do not see why not,\" Temeraire said, \"when he knew perfectly well that those orders were outrageous. Told to behave like a greedy guts who doesn't care to know any better, when everyone else was keeping in line, and fighting\u2014I wonder he is not ashamed to show his face at the porridge-pits. Laurence, you cannot mean to let him behave in such a scaly manner, without reproof.\"\n\n\"We cannot chide the dragon, and not chide the man,\" Laurence said. \"And he is protected by the Admiralty, who would be glad of the excuse to force my resignation. No, my dear, I am afraid we must cut our coats according to our cloth. He cannot be punished directly: we can only withhold reward.\"\n\n\"Reward?\" Temeraire said, pricking up his ruff.\n\n\"The Cossacks seized a French wagon-train fleeing the battlefield, last night,\" Laurence said. \"Laden with charqui, and enough of it to feed us for two months. Wittgenstein has sent it over to our supply-officers.\"\n\n\"Why, that is excellent news,\" Temeraire said. \"But I am afraid, Laurence, that one cannot really call charqui a reward: indeed, you would not credit how stubborn some of our company are, when it comes to eating anything but raw meat. Fidelitas would not even taste my dinner, the day before the battle, though that new cook we have hired did the mutton so very nicely, all rolled around the barley and chestnuts, with that charming sauce with all the peppers\u2014he looked as though he would have liked to try it, so I felt obliged to offer him a bite, but he pulled back straightaway and said no, no, he would not.\"\n\nTemeraire paused even as he finished speaking, and flattened his ruff. \"Is that part of this same nonsense? Do you mean, Laurence, that he has been acting so very strangely at his captain's prompting?\"\n\n\"That, I am afraid, must be the least of it,\" Laurence said. \"But we cannot correct, so we must attempt to lure. Tell me: would you consider four thousand pounds a sufficient incentive, in the way of prize-money, to stimulate their interest, if divided among our force?\"\n\n\"Four thousand pounds!\" Temeraire cried, quite unable to stifle his delight. \"Laurence, how splendid: of course it would. But wherever has four thousand pounds come from?\" he asked, a little worried\u2014he hoped Laurence did not mean to propose that he should furnish such a sum.\n\n\"The greatest unhanged scoundrels of the service,\" Laurence said dryly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "It was with the greatest satisfaction that Temeraire set himself up at the head of his clearing, later that afternoon, when the other dragons began to assemble: Iskierka and Requiescat, and all the formation-leaders, as well as Ricarlee and a handful of the other senior unharnessed dragons as well. Minnow had been sent round, to summon them all, and Temeraire received them with a stately calm he felt befit the solemn occasion, and frowned down Ricarlee into order, when he would have gone poking into the simmering leavings of breakfast. \"What's it all about, then?\" the unrepentant feral demanded.\n\n\"You must wait and hear with everyone else,\" Temeraire said coolly, \"although I do not scruple to say, it shall be something of the greatest interest, and to the advantage of any honorable dragon, who is a member of our forces.\"\n\n\"Temeraire,\" Laurence said, walking into the midst of the gathered circle, \"I hope you will oblige me by writing down these accounts as I read them off, large enough for all the beasts to read.\"\n\n\"Of course, Laurence,\" Temeraire said. \"Baggy, light along my writing-table, if you please.\"\n\nHe settled himself above it, as Laurence opened the large leather-bound book he had brought\u2014not printed, but full of numbers written by hand, organized in small neat columns. \"I trust every one here will share in my satisfaction,\" Laurence said, \"that the senior commander has ordered that our forces should receive the equivalent of four thousand pounds in prize-money, in recognition of our labors yesterday.\"\n\nTemeraire, forewarned, preserved his countenance and the appearance of calm satisfaction; the other dragons did not manage as much, but made a great swelling noise of delight among them: they all knew pounds, of course, since they were paid now, and just what so dazzling a sum meant, in gold and in cattle.\n\n\"As there may be future prizes of this sort taken, I think it desirable that every beast should understand clearly the division of awards, both in this case and henceforth,\" Laurence went on, \"and find it easy to call to mind at any moment during our campaign the reward due their efforts. As there are presently one hundred dragons in our company, our base unit will be a one-thousandth share, equal in this instance to four pounds.\" He nodded to Temeraire, who quickly wrote 1/1000\u2014\u00a34 upon his paper, and displayed it large.\n\n\"Middle-weights and heavy-weights are entitled to a double share,\" Laurence continued, \"and formation-leaders to a triple share. Iskierka, Requiescat, Levantia, and Ricarlee, as flying captains, shall be counted as formation-leaders.\"\n\nLaurence paused a moment, amidst a perfect hush: everyone had stopped murmuring and pricked their ears forward to hear all the details. \"Naturally,\" he said, \"any prize distribution will omit dragons who prefer to take private pillage in the course of a given battle.\"\n\nThis produced a half-cry of protest from Fidelitas, stifled, and an outright one from Ricarlee, who sat up sharp. \"Why, there's naught fair in that,\" he said. \"There wasn't anything in those carts we took but some sacks of grain, and a few scraps of this and that.\"\n\n\"I see nothing to dislike in it,\" Cavernus said, very loudly, and the other formation-leaders murmured in agreement.\n\n\"You may have a fair share, earned with the company, or you may scrape along as chance serves you,\" Temeraire said crisply, when the murmuring had died away. \"We are certainly not going to encourage selfish pillaging, or even make an attempt, which anyone might see could only lead to endless argument, to carry out an accounting of pillage after every engagement.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" Laurence said, \"any remaining shares will be allotted after each engagement in accord with the usual principles of prize-money, to encourage valor, attention to orders, and reward the wise exercise of initiative. Temeraire, if you will be so good as to make note of the particular awards. I am delighted to recognize Cavernus, first, for steadfastness under fire, and for bringing down the Petit Chevalier: ten additional shares.\"\n\nThis fascinating and highly agreeable proceeding occupied the entire golden afternoon to the satisfaction of all, except, it seemed, the captains, who began to fidget even before the first hour had concluded. Poole was even so rude as to break in and say, \"How much longer are we meant to stand for this litany of\u2014\"\n\n\"Roger!\" Fidelitas hissed, with a glance of mortification, while every other head turned censorious looks in their direction, especially Cavernus, whose wing dragon Maxilla was presently being allotted two additional shares for having held position in the face of a heavier beast opposite.\n\nNone of this silenced Poole. \"You have already been shut out,\" he said to Fidelitas, just as though he were insensible to the importance of understanding the rules of division which should apply to future instances, \"and you must be hungry by now; you have not eaten to-day at all, yet.\"\n\n\"Any dragon wishing to be excused may of course consider themselves dismissed,\" Temeraire said in austere tones.\n\n\"No, no!\" Fidelitas said, curling his tail around Poole to block him from general view, and bending his head down to whisper urgently, \"I will eat later.\"\n\n\"Pray, Admiral Laurence,\" Cavernus said loudly, her eye still fixed on Fidelitas, \"will you be so kind as to repeat that last award? I should be sorry not to be able to convey the exact particulars to Maxilla.\"\n\nLaurence obliged her, of course, and the other captains at least made no further attempts to interrupt, although they were all of them\u2014even dear Granby, Temeraire was sorry to see\u2014unreasonably inattentive, and insisted on walking up and down in the clearing and talking to one another instead of paying close attention to all the highly interesting details of the awards. Several of the captains even had to be nudged to the edges of the clearing by their beasts to keep them from becoming a distraction.\n\nSadly, one could not indulge in such pleasures forever; at last, Laurence had to finish. The lovely ledger was closed, and Temeraire with deep satisfaction reviewed his scroll, and the charming way in which the full tally of shares added precisely to one thousand, and how each number of shares should individually be multiplied by four, and many of them thereby increased to two digits.\n\n\"I should add,\" Laurence said, to crown the glorious occasion, \"the goods taken having consisted in charqui, that any dragon wishing to take some portion of their share in this meat may have it at the value of two pounds three shillings the bale, equal in ration to a cow of twelve pounds six shillings four pence, for which they shall be credited.\"\n\nThe meeting broke up on this delightful conclusion, as everyone collected their captains and went away engaged in calculations. \"Why, Windle, only think: that is ten pounds and three shillings difference,\" Obituria said, \"and I have four shares, that is sixteen pounds, so I can buy six bales, and when I have exchanged those for the cows, that will make seventy-three pounds and eighteen shillings.\" Windle only gawked up at her in the most muttonheaded way, as though he had not followed.\n\n\"I will have it brought round to every formation-leader's clearing,\" Temeraire promised, of the scroll, as the others left, several of them inquiring about a chance of looking it over. \"And to yours as well,\" he added to Ricarlee, magnanimously; he felt a good deal less irritated now by the ferals' pillaging. \"Gerry, pray roll it and tie it carefully, and I suppose you had better have a couple of the ground crewmen to help you carry it\u2014steady men, if you please, Mr. O'Dea, who will not let it get wet, or spattered, or dirty.\"\n\nWhen everyone had gone, Laurence sat heavily down in a camp chair with rather an explosive sigh and said to one of the new runners, \"Brandy-and-water, if you please, Winters.\" He drank this off without a pause and said aloud, \"Like a very damned merchant,\" incomprehensibly, \"but we will see if it answers; I think it may.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Laurence was half sorry to find the extent to which his and Temeraire's stratagem, which he could not help but find a little contemptible, did answer. He was surprised to discover in the circuit he made through their encampment the next day that the dragons had set their signal-ensigns to drilling them in the flags\u2014this, even though older dragons by and large had a great deal of difficulty in learning anything resembling a new language. Laurence could not understand it immediately, until he reviewed the list of awards and discovered that he had mentioned close attention to signals seven times. And when Laurence visited the Scottish ferals' clearing, he found them all present and accounted for: the first time since their departure from Dover that such a remarkable event had occurred. Not a one had stolen out of camp overnight to try for private pillaging. The handful of Ricarlee's beasts who had stayed aloft and fought with Requiescat\u2014and who had been rewarded with an extra share apiece\u2014were cock-of-the-walk, and the subject of envious sighs.\n\nHe grimly accepted his own victory, and having finished his rounds asked Minnow to take him into the city, where the new headquarters had been established: Major-General von Wittgenstein beaming and delighted with everybody, and despite the surfeit of hangers-on surrounding him and the general chaos produced by too many men without any real work to do, a spirit of energy and confidence suffused the entire establishment, which Laurence could not but witness with a pang of envy.\n\n\"Admiral Laurence!\" Wittgenstein cried, on seeing him, and came around to shake his hand again. During the terrible struggle of the previous year, he had been forced to abandon St. Petersburg to Oudinot and Saint-Cyr, and his satisfaction at liberating Berlin had been doubled into joy by having now avenged that painful loss. \"The Cossacks tell me they have all certainly crossed the river: there is not a French soldier east of the Elbe, God be thanked! They have fallen back on the Saale. I have just sent couriers to the Tsar and to His Majesty King Frederick with a full accounting of the battle, and you may be sure they have both been acquainted with the noble performance of your beasts.\"\n\nLaurence could not be encouraged by this generous remark, to him a painful reminder that their commanders had very little expectation of the discipline of dragons; he could only be glad in a sour way, that the report would go far to strengthen his own position. \"Is there any word about Napoleon himself?\" he asked.\n\nWittgenstein waved a hand. \"Still in Paris, they say!\" but added, \"Come, step inside,\" and took him to a smaller back chamber; here were only a couple of staff-officers, laboring intently over a sheaf of intelligence-reports. \"The latest word is he has raised an army of nearly two hundred thousand men and four hundred dragons, at Mainz,\" Wittgenstein said quietly, when the door was closed; a piece of intelligence that could not be called heartening, and it was no wonder he preferred to share it in private. \"Bl\u00fccher will cross into Saxony next week, to liberate Dresden and Leipzig, and we hope persuade the King of Saxony to join the alliance. I do not need to tell you, Admiral, how necessary to that end it will be to avoid pillage in his countryside. I understand from Admiral Dyhern that you are supplying your entire force on twenty kine, daily?\"\n\n\"And twenty tons of wheat, sir,\" Laurence said slowly, already anticipating the coming question.\n\n\"Admiral Dyhern has been ordered by His Majesty to join General Bl\u00fccher,\" Wittgenstein said\u2014Dyhern having himself also been promoted; most of the senior Prussian officers had been quietly retired in the years since Jena, and every chance taken of pushing forward younger and more competent men. \"In my judgment, and that of Field Marshal Kutuzov, you and your dragons are urgently wanted there, and our victory here to-day only makes that more desirable. But we do not demand it, Admiral, if you do not think it possible to supply your force there.\"\n\nThe question was a difficult one indeed. Laurence could manage it, he thought, but not without putting all the dragons on porridge, even the ones whose captains demanded the official ration of meat, and not without the risk of going hungry for a day now and again. Ordinarily he would have scorned such small concerns under these circumstances: if Napoleon truly had raised four hundred dragons already at Mainz, he could not be held unless the British dragons came. But Laurence could not rely on his captains to reconcile their beasts to short commons, and dragons themselves had little tolerance for going hungry when there was a handsome sheepfold to be seen over the next hill, whether or not the sheep were theirs for the taking.\n\nThis last concern at least, Laurence could air to Wittgenstein without feeling that he exposed the Corps to any particular shame; then he had only to swallow his personal pride, at asking for what seemed to him almost the power to bribe his own beasts. \"If you will pardon me, sir,\" he said unhappily, \"I will say what I know must have an unfortunate appearance of self-interest: it would be of inexpressible value to me to have further captures of supply, of the sort you made over to us yesterday, which I might award as prizes among the beasts to encourage them to maintain discipline.\"\n\n\"Among the beasts?\" Wittgenstein said, frowning. \"I do not understand. You mean your officers\u2014you think they will keep them in line, if\u2014\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Laurence broke in, preferring to be rude than hear so mortifying a character given to his officers. \"Sir, I beg your pardon; no, I mean among the beasts themselves.\"\n\nWittgenstein stared, then gave a small explosive snort of laughter. \"What do dragons care for prize-money? We do not have heaps of gold to give them.\" But when Laurence assured him that the beasts did indeed care, passionately, he was ready to believe. \"But money is in short supply everywhere, Admiral,\" he said.\n\n\"I am aware of it, sir,\" Laurence said. \"I do not require funds: if you can only grant us further quantities of charqui, or cattle, or grain, acquired from the enemy, that will do.\"\n\nHe did not describe how he intended to convert these supplies into funds. Wittgenstein surely knew enough of the wretched graft of commissaries to suspect something of the method. Laurence had indeed made an evil use of Jane's intelligence about corruption in the Supply-Office: before leaving England, he had called upon those men she labeled as the most rapacious, and had quietly discussed with them the high price of meat on the Continent, and the difficulty in transporting even salt pork, much less cattle, to a force which traveled as the dragon flew.\n\n\"And may I say, Admiral, that it is a great pleasure to speak with a man of so much sense and understanding in these matters,\" the worst of these villains had said to him earnestly, shaking his hand, when they had tacitly agreed that the cattle meant for them would be sold in port, instead, and the funds made over to Laurence personally in gold. Certainly a handsome quantity of the sums would end in the pockets of his suppliers; just as certainly, they assumed an equal quantity would end in his own, while he fed his dragons on rotten meat, or off the farms of starving peasants.\n\nLaurence had forced himself to care only that this arrangement would permit him to replace much of the exported cattle with local grain, and feed three times the number of dragons, more healthfully, at half the cost. He knew very well what Whitehall would have said, if he had proposed the substitution to them directly. Jane was feeding her dragons in Spain on corn and horsemeat, but officially the Commissariat was shipping her five hundred barrels of salt pork per day, not a quarter of which reached her. But the rules of supply were a wheel that did not easily move from the deep-worn rut in which they traveled. The thieves in Dover might take half the money they could get for the meat, and still leave Laurence with more than enough for their needs.\n\nOnly after the battle, when Wittgenstein had sent him the vast quantity of bales of captured charqui\u2014\"I understand you have a use for this peculiar stuff, Admiral,\" the accompanying supply-officer had said doubtfully, delivering him wagons loaded with enough of the dried and salted meat to feed two hundred dragons for a month\u2014had it occurred to Laurence that he might instead use those funds to furnish prize-money, and thereby both persuade the dragons to eat the charqui, and make them more enthusiastic for their duty.\n\nThe entire business left an evil taste in his mouth, the sense of having pushed his hands deep into rotting effluvia. But Wittgenstein was only looking thoughtful, saying, \"Admiral, I believe it can be arranged.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"You shall have whatever supply I can scrape together, if it will serve you for prizes,\" Bl\u00fccher promised him, without hesitation. The old Prussian was loyal to a fault, when his loyalty was given, and he had before now decided for Laurence on the strength of Dyhern's testimonials, and the rescue of the Prussian beasts. \"I cannot promise the quantity will be great.\"\n\nThe rewards were indeed not large, but it did not seem to matter to the dragons whether their share was worth four pounds, or one shilling threepence as was more commonly the case; nor was this due to any misunderstanding or mathematical confusion on their part. Every British dragon seemed able to maintain a full and perfect accounting, down to pence, of their funds. Even when there had been a further four allocations, after small seizures of individual wagons taken in skirmishing, there was still not a beast among them who could not stand before all the separate scrolls\u2014Temeraire now kept these posted up outside his own clearing, under guard\u2014and in an instant calculate the exact value of the shares of any dragon on the list, and compare this against their own.\n\nThis facility in no way diminished their desire of having the numbers written out for them, however, much to the dismay of their captains. \"I had no idea of Iskierka's being so handy at sums,\" Granby muttered, as she announced with great satisfaction, \"I believe I have one hundred twenty-four pounds sixteen shillings threepence, and Requiescat has one hundred twenty-one pounds eleven shillings tuppence; now pray check it for me, Granby, and show me all your work,\" which entailed a quarter of an hour's hard-fought calculations for him, with one mistake along the way, which Iskierka pointed out severely before he had quite finished writing it down.\n\nAviators did not get a great deal in the way of formal schooling. Mrs. Pemberton finally took pity upon the officers and offered her services to make individual copies of the lists, and as her head for mathematics was good enough to satisfy them, the dragons were eager to accept the substitute, although after a week she was obliged to begin charging them a shilling apiece for the copies, or she would have been applied to for a fresh set by every beast, every day.\n\nOne difficulty briefly reared its head: Windle, plainly resentful of the mechanism which had made his dragon an earnest advocate of pleasing Laurence's judgment, loudly said, \"It is nonsense, Obituria. Where do you suppose this money is, really? It is jots on paper, not cash in hand, and so it will remain. And meanwhile you are eating this smoky charqui stuff instead of good fresh beef; you have dropped two stone of flesh, I dare say, in this last week.\"\n\nObituria had, and looked far the better for it; Laurence knew what General Chu would have said of the regular diet of British dragons. But she looked uncertain, and Ricarlee, never backwards in suspicion, presented himself that same afternoon demanding his funds in some less ephemeral form.\n\n\"Very good,\" Laurence said however, having prepared himself for this eventuality, and presented Ricarlee with a neatly bound sheaf of paper money, and a scattering of shilling coins and pence, which the dragon could not have held conveniently in any manner. \"Perhaps you would prefer me to deposit it with your bank?\" When Ricarlee professed himself innocent of any accounts, Laurence added, \"Temeraire banks with Rothschild, and has had no cause for complaint, I believe.\"\n\nHe was glad, now, to have been forced to grapple with the difficulty of managing Temeraire's funds. Drummonds' and Hoare's had balked entirely; they refused to do anything but put the money into an account in his own name. Tharkay had come to his rescue: Avram Maden had a considerable acquaintance among the notable Jewish families of Europe, and the Rothschild bank in London had as a favor to him offered Laurence an appointment.\n\nThe young man he had first spoken to, in their offices, had been polite but skeptical; their business was ordinarily more in the line of coin-dealing, Laurence vaguely understood. But unexpectedly the head of the bank had come into the room: Mr. Nathan Rothschild, who had been distantly acquainted with his father through Mr. Wilberforce. The gentleman had paid Laurence his condolences, listened to the difficulty before him, asked briefly about the rate of pay dragons were entitled from the Admiralty and the length of their life spans; shortly thereafter Temeraire had become the proud possessor of an account, and if the bank-book were inconveniently small for his talons, at least he showed no signs of needing to consult it.\n\n\"Well, if Temeraire banks with them, I suppose I will allow them to hold my money, too,\" Ricarlee said loftily, willing to be satisfied by whatever Temeraire possessed.\n\nThe bank was equally willing; indeed, after all the hundred dragons of their force had followed suit, a representative was even sent to pay a visit to their camp. That young gentleman plainly entered the field-covert in a spirit of calm desperation, and as he hailed from the Frankfurt branch, his command of English was imperfect, which increased his miseries: the dragons\u2014who had awaited his advent with a fervor rather like idolatry\u2014kept putting their heads down to hear him more closely. But when no one had devoured him after an hour, he began by degrees to be less anxious, and to speak more fluidly of markets and shares to the enraptured attention of his audience, who by the time he left had all begun a lively debate on the merits of putting their money into the Funds as compared with speculating in currency or investing in shipping ventures.\n\nStill, Laurence could not rejoice at his success. There was something low in this method of bringing dragons to heel, something nearly ignoble. He could not fault Poole's silent but visible indignation; even Granby looked a little distressed during the regular conferences which the dragons demanded, where Laurence announced each division. The entire enterprise had a quality of interference in it, thrusting himself between captain and dragon, which Laurence knew very well was anathema in the Corps. But even Poole could scarcely make a complaint that his commander was keeping his dragon in good order, against his will.\n\nNevertheless, he seethed visibly, and many of the other captains were more discreetly resentful, when they ought to have been in alt. Bl\u00fccher had marched into Dresden and Leipzig nearly unopposed, and still Napoleon's growing army had not stirred out of Mainz: the campaign would begin well into the territory France had formerly conquered, and in every other part of the army, confidence brimmed over, with an eagerness for battle; meanwhile in the field-covert, his officers were sullen and silent, and performed their duties grudgingly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "\"It seems to me I ought to get another share, for carrying her about,\" Requiescat said, squinting at the rolls. He and Iskierka had come by Temeraire's clearing to look them over and argue their divisions, yet again. \"No-one else is lugging about another dragon on their back, and she ain't much like a feather anymore, either.\"\n\n\"I don't see why that should mean you get anything more. She hasn't done anything of use, herself, so it is not as though you are doing anyone a service by bringing her.\" Iskierka snorted a bit of flame disapprovingly.\n\n\"Certainly I am being of use,\" Ning said, popping her head up from the other end of the clearing. \"Simply because you cannot yet see the Chinese legions does not mean they are not coming, and they are coming because I am here. And you must all hope they arrive,\" she added, \"because otherwise, you will lose.\"\n\nTemeraire flattened his ruff in some annoyance at this dismal interjection. \"We will not lose,\" he said, \"although naturally the legions will come, and be of great use, but that is not the same as saying we will lose, if they do not.\"\n\n\"Well, you will,\" Ning said. \"I have been stretching my wings, while you all lie in camp all day\u2014\"\n\n\"And why are some of us tired, and you not, I'd like to know,\" Requiescat interjected.\n\n\"\u2014and I have met any number of ferals, in these parts. Their conversation has been most illuminating. However, I do not mean to quarrel,\" she added, \"and I am sure I wish you all every success.\"\n\n\"Then you might as well do your part, when we next fight,\" Temeraire said. \"That fire you can make would have been very handy indeed in Berlin, if only you had bothered to exert yourself a little. I am sure if you did, Laurence would be perfectly pleased to award you a suitable share of the prize-money,\" he added.\n\n\"And what about me, hey?\" Requiescat said.\n\n\"Perhaps Ning ought to then make over some of her share to you,\" Temeraire said, \"for your services in ferrying her: that would be perfectly suitable.\"\n\n\"I must beg your pardon,\" Ning said, with some asperity, sitting up on her haunches, \"but before you have quite concluded making these arrangements on my behalf, I must demur. I am doing my part, to preserve the alliance with China, and with that you must content yourselves.\"\n\n\"Doing her part not to take any side, until she knows who is going to win,\" Iskierka said, with a sniff, and Temeraire could not disagree.\n\n\"I know you are not cowardly,\" Temeraire said to Ning, after Iskierka and Requiescat had both gone away still arguing, \"as you have been perfectly willing to defend yourself, when necessary.\" There had been more than one occasion when dragons new to their camp had tried to deny Ning precedence\u2014she was still small, although nearing the size of a light-weight by now\u2014and she had firmly though politely made plain she would not stand for it; three or four dragons still sported a badly scorched toe, or tail-tip. \"So I cannot see why you would not like to do your share, and earn your share thereby. Surely you must see it gives a very strange appearance for you to be nowhere on the rolls, at all: you have not a single shilling to your name!\"\n\nNing did cast a quick, wistful glance over at the rolls, but she only answered, \"It is very well to count shillings and pounds. What is a shilling? It is the money that here, to-day, will buy you a rabbit. But in London, before we left, it would buy you two.\"\n\n\"Rabbits are harder to come by here than in London,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"Just so,\" Ning said. \"Because there is a war, and an army tramping through the fields, so there are fewer rabbits, and more mouths to eat them. Therefore, if the war were not occurring, there would be more rabbits, and perhaps you might even buy three rabbits, with your same shilling. Why therefore should I content myself to gather pounds and shillings, when I might instead command their value?\"\n\n\"But so long as I have more pounds and shillings than another dragon, I may buy more rabbits, no matter what they are worth,\" Temeraire said. \"And so long as you have no shillings, you can buy none, no matter how many there are.\"\n\n\"A consideration which would occupy my attention a great deal, if I did not have the prospect of becoming companion to a wealthy and powerful sovereign,\" Ning said firmly.\n\n\"Yes, but which sovereign,\" Temeraire muttered to himself, when she had curled herself back up to sleep. He did not mean to say so, but it made him feel a little uneasy that Ning did not care to join their side properly, just yet. Ning might talk of rabbits all she liked, but no dragon could really wish to be left out of anything so nice as prize-money, so she was only refraining because she really did think they might lose. She was wrong, naturally, but he would have liked to inquire a little further as to why, if he could have done so without suggesting he meant to believe her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "\"And still the Austrians are flying back and forth between Vienna and Dresden every day,\" Dyhern said, grumbling even as he offered Laurence a cup of remarkably good coffee. \"If he gives us one good knock, they will scurry back into his pockets, you may be sure.\"\n\nThey were encamped outside Leipzig, near the small town of L\u00fctzen, waiting for the order to move onwards. The headquarters of the allied forces had been moved forward from the east and established in Dresden: the Tsar himself was there with Field Marshal Kutuzov\u2014whom report had very ill, which was certainly doing nothing to improve the coordination and communications of their army. And then the word had come last night: Napoleon had left Paris. Napoleon was coming to the front. The whisper had traveled around every campfire at a rapid pace, throwing an evil shadow over every man. Laurence had heard the murmurs as he walked through camp that morning, past the stirring fires and the dim wash of dawn, lightening a heavy grey sky.\n\nHe was meeting with Dyhern and the Russian Admiral Ilchenko, to review the supply manifests for the week ahead. Laurence had not managed to acquire more than a smattering of Russian in the last campaign, and Ilchenko was entirely innocent of English, while Dyhern's French left much to be desired; they communicated therefore in a patchwork of languages, often translating the same remark more than once, to be sure they had understood. But this awkwardness was the least of their difficulties.\n\nFurther reserves had joined them from the east as the Prussian Army mobilized fully, and more Russian dragons had come from the heartland, now that spring was reducing the need for them to keep the ferals from raiding. In numbers, they now even approached Napoleon's reported tally of four hundred beasts, although numbers alone were not a sufficient measure.\n\nThe Prussians now could field some 130 beasts, many of them having been liberated on the way to Berlin\u2014but half of these were slow-flying heavy-weights. Even their middle-weights stood on the heavier side, and they had very few light-weights at all. Laurence would privately have preferred to keep the large beasts ferrying men and guns\u2014especially guns. He knew it was a general tenet of the Chinese legions that dragons above middle-weight were a waste of muscle, but a middle-weight could not carry a twenty-four-pounder for any distance, and a heavy-weight could. Napoleon had previously made just such a use of his own heavy-weight dragons to bring a far greater weight of metal to bear upon the battlefield than horses over bad roads could arrange. But Laurence could not direct Dyhern, who with his comrades not unnaturally hungered for more avenging victories in the field. And in any case, the Prussian artillery-men were in no hurry to mount dragons.\n\nOn the Russian side, they claimed eighty beasts, but in practice only the thirty heavy-weights were under military discipline, and these could be used for nothing but battle. They cared too little for men\u2014indeed barely acknowledged their existence save as the occasional providers of food and treasure, or the brutality of bit and hobble. A week gone, Vosyem had sent three hundred soldiers plummeting to a grisly death, because a knot of the carrying-harness had irritated her under the wing. She had not complained to her officers; she had simply turned her head round mid-air and torn away the silk with a few quick slashes of her serrated teeth, ignoring the cries and pleas of her passengers and the frantic spurring of her officers. The infantry had since refused to go aboard any of the Russian beasts, and Laurence could scarcely blame them.\n\nAs for cargo, one could give a Russian dragon almost anything to carry, but one could not rely on getting it back again. Only the day before, Admiral Ilchenko had very grudgingly come to Laurence to ask for Temeraire's assistance: Jevionty, one of his newly arrived dragons, would not surrender a cannon he had been ordered to carry from Vilna to the waiting artillery company whose charge it was, and he had begun to snarl and hiss at any officer who even attempted to approach him.\n\n\"Do not hiss at me,\" Temeraire said with great dignity, when he had descended into the clearing. \"If I wanted a gun of my own, I should buy one, with my money,\" and Jevionty a little abashed had muttered apology: the reputation of Temeraire's treasure had spread widely among the Russian dragons. \"And I cannot see what you want with this cannon. They are not pretty to look at, and they are no use unless you have men to fire them for you.\"\n\n\"It is mine,\" Jevionty said obstinately, \"and it is valuable, or else why do they want to steal it from me?\" He had lost his own hoard in the devastation of Moscow, and was keen to rebuild it in any manner possible: the Russian beasts counted standing among themselves almost entirely based on their possessions.\n\n\"Well, they are an artillery company and they can fire it, so it is worth a great deal to them,\" Temeraire said. He scratched a claw thoughtfully along his eye ridge. \"It is true that the value of things may depend upon how much someone else wants them. But I cannot call it anything but mean to keep it for yourself when you can get no good from it, and anyway, where are you going to keep it? You had much better let the men fight it for you. Have them paint your name upon the top of the barrel, so you can always see which gun is yours while you are flying above it, and then let them manage it for you.\"\n\nAfter a little more nudging, and the promise of gold paint, Jevionty was persuaded to accept this solution, but the episode did not inspire any confidence in the Russian dragons as porters.\n\nMeanwhile, the large body of Russian light-weights, who would have been by far the more valuable as part of their unified force, were nearly impossible to make use of or even to count: their numbers in camp varied widely from day to day. Barring a handful of beasts like Grig, who had established a stronger relationship with one or another of the officers, they would only perform errands given to them in the moment and with the promise of an immediate reward of food.\n\n\"The heavy-weights must eat first,\" Ilchenko answered flatly, when Laurence suggested he might establish a regularity of feeding time, to create the beginnings of discipline among the light-weight greys. But the ferocious heavy-weights were the pride of the Russian forces, and Ilchenko refused to care that they often left their feeding pits scraped clean, or spoiled what they did not eat with hot squabbles. So the greys were left to scrounge for scraps, and likely to go stealing from the local farmers. At least the irregular Cossack troops fed themselves: their fly-weight beasts were well practiced in living off the land without excessively offending their neighbors, and ate a cheerfully indiscriminate variety. But they were no use in a pitched battle, or against the French dragons, unless they came across one of them alone and unwary.\n\nAll the dragons were by now reconciled to the porridge-pit, but while this made feeding their enlarged force possible, it did not make it easy. With so many bellies of such enormous capacity to fill, their supply was in regular danger of running out and required the most careful and constant attention.\n\nLaurence straightened up from the ledgers when they had finished their tallies, and nodded to the young aide whose duty it was to send their numbers on to Bl\u00fccher's staff. He stretched backwards, hands pressed into the small of his back, thoroughly stiffened after the hours bent low: he ruefully thought he felt his years more sharply after an afternoon in a tent than after two days aloft. He and Dyhern stepped outside together, while Ilchenko stayed in to finish the letter which he would send to the Tsar with his report: a rather more formal affair.\n\n\"I cannot delight in this book-keeper's work, Laurence,\" Dyhern said, \"but I have no right to complain. When I think how we gnashed our teeth at you for twenty dragons, before Jena! And look upon our coverts now. My heart must be appeased.\"\n\nThey were encamped in the bowl of a nameless valley perhaps a hundred miles from Leipzig, dragons strung along the heights and hillocks all around like decorations, nearly covering all the open ground. The steam rose in pearlescent gusts from the cooking-pits, in the center of the camp, and on every side the voices of dragons\u2014the hissing of their breaths, their deep rumbling speech, the dry rustle of scales rubbing over one another. The sheer number of them echoed the tales of the uncountable hordes of the Huns, of fairy-stories; Laurence could well share Dyhern's dissatisfaction and pleasure both, in the scale of their force and the difficulties of its management.\n\nA tiny figure came gliding down over the tree-tops to the north-east, a bird Laurence thought at first, but moving very fast; the sentry-dragons did not even lift their heads until she was already far beyond them, and before they could raise a warning, she had darted twice across the bowl of the valley, her head seeking, and then dropped with startling speed to the ground directly before Laurence, folding her disproportionate green wings in. \"Yu Li,\" Laurence exclaimed, very surprised, as the Jade dragon bowed very low as well as she could, with the dragging ends of her wings.\n\n\"Forgive this clumsy one's rude and hasty approach,\" she said. \"I have been sent to establish lines of communication with Your Imperial Highness and Lung Tien Xiang\u2014\"\n\n\"Why, you are very welcome to startle us all ten times over, on that account,\" Laurence said, and turning to Dyhern explained, \"She is the leading edge of the Chinese legions.\"\n\nBut Yu Li was not finished. \"Honored Brother of the Dread Lord,\" she said, and Laurence turning caught the change in her address, and realized with a start that the Emperor must have died, and Mianning by now crowned, \"I beg your forgiveness for my hasty and improper address, but I have grave news to impart. Having mistaken your location, I first sought to find you in the small town not three hundred li from here, where a great many noble officials were encamped.\"\n\nBy small town she must have meant Dresden; any Western city would bear a peculiarly shrunken character to a Chinese dragon, who expected to find in these places thoroughfares and pavilions suitable for draconic inhabitants and not merely humans\u2014which meant, in turn, that she had flown some one hundred miles in an hour, a remarkable achievement even for one of the Jade Dragons. Her chest was indeed heaving rapidly, and her wings trembling. She extended one limb towards him, the golden mesh upon it carrying a letter.\n\n\"I was honored to meet there with your advisor Mr. Hammond,\" she said, \"who has entrusted me with this letter and begs you consider it as soon as you think wise.\"\n\nLaurence took the letter\u2014a note, not even enclosed, and scrawled in an irregular and hasty version of Hammond's usually tidy hand, at least large enough to be easily legible. A moment was enough to read it; he handed it on to Dyhern and turned to Yu Li. \"Did you see the French advance, yourself?\"\n\n\"Yes, august one, and in hopes of offering you further intelligence, I crossed their body from aloft,\" she said: Jade Dragons flew at a far higher altitude than most dragons, and with her small size, she would certainly have been taken for a bird, even if anyone had glimpsed her. \"Their beasts are not very orderly, so it is difficult to properly tally their numbers, but there were in excess of five hundred assembled. Their carrying-harnesses held perhaps a hundred men, for each dragon, and the larger carried guns, as well.\"\n\n\"My God!\" Dyhern said. \"He will smash them to pieces. There are not twenty beasts at Dresden, and those convalescent.\" He turned to explain the situation to Admiral Ilchenko, who had come out of the tent at the commotion; Laurence had seized pen and paper from his runner and was hastily scrawling a reply. \"Yu Li,\" he said, \"will you take this back to Mr. Hammond at once, if you please?\" She accepted the note with another bow, and as soon as it was stowed away she gathered herself, leapt, and was gone.\n\n\"What is to be done?\" Dyhern said.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" Laurence said, \"I am taking every beast that can travel at speed\u2014every one that can sustain sixteen knots or better. Les Cossacks, il faut que je les emmener avec moi,\" he added to Ilchenko, who was nodding intently. \"Dyhern, you must take my heavy-weights, and your own, to our depot at Leipzig. Stupefy every pig and sheep in the place with opium and bring them, with all the grain you can carry. The Russian heavy-weights must remain with Field Marshal Bl\u00fccher here. We must take it as a certainty that the rest of the French infantry is coming up on our rear. Napoleon plainly intends to cut our lines of communication and supply\u2014perhaps even capture the Tsar\u2014and then smash us between the two wings of his force. We must try and hold him at Dresden long enough for you to come up behind him, instead. Do you agree?\"\n\nThere was so little room to dispute the plan that Laurence had not hesitated to send to tell Hammond that he was coming: his force was the only one substantially composed of dragons who could manage the speed necessary to catch the French; certainly neither Eroica nor Ilchenko's dragon Sorokshest could do so. They shook hands in agreement, and Dyhern took Hammond's letter. \"I will go and speak with Marshal Bl\u00fccher,\" he said. \"Begin your preparations! I will send as soon as he has confirmed the order of battle.\"\n\nIskierka did not hide her delight that Requiescat had to be left behind, to go with the Prussians; although her pleasure was a little dimmed by Laurence's saying to him, \"You may be sure that the r\u00f4le of providing supply to our forces is no less urgent, and will merit no less recognition, than direct engagement with the enemy\u2014if we cannot eat, after the battle, then hunger will rout us as thoroughly in victory as any defeat Napoleon might inflict.\"\n\n\"But surely I will have better chances to earn additional shares,\" she muttered, with a narrow glare at the rolls. Temeraire sighed a little. He understood Laurence's position that it would scarcely be fair for him to award shares to his own dragon; and as the flag-dragon he was entitled to a handsome five shares of every division as a matter of course, but it was sadly disappointing to see Cavernus and Iskierka and Requiescat reaping the benefits of their labors, while he could not.\n\nHowever, Temeraire was determined to hold himself above petty competition. He was for his own part not very sorry to leave Obituria, who was also too slow to come. Fidelitas could make sixteen knots, however\u2014respectable, even if not up to his own pace, and Laurence meant to divide them into two companies anyway.\n\n\"The ordinary order of flight must be suspended,\" Laurence was saying to his captains, and several of the Prussian officers who had dashed over to hear his orders\u2014one of them Ferris, who had been made acting-captain for one of the Prussian middle-weight dragons. Temeraire had meant to object to this in strong terms, until he had met her: she had a wild, hollow-eyed look. Her captain had died, during her long captivity. \"I will have vengeance,\" she said, low and harsh. \"I will, I will,\" and Temeraire had not had the heart after all to demand that she give Ferris up.\n\n\"Captain Poole, you and Fidelitas will take in charge all our Yellow Reapers, and the Prussian middle-weights, as well as the middle-weight ferals. All those dragons who can sustain a pace of twenty knots will come forward with us. When you arrive, if possible we will resume our formations, with the Prussian middle-weights forming a loose phalanx in the center under the command of Captain Ferris, for the ease of his transmitting British signals to the rest of the force. Captain von Tauben, Captain Wesselton, j'entends que vous parlez bien Fran\u00e7ais: voil\u00e0 ce deux ensign-signaleurs qui allons monter avec vous, de relayer les commandes.\" He nodded to the two ensigns, who went a little timidly to the Prussian captains he had named.\n\n\"Captain Poole, should you come and find that we are already overwhelmed,\" Laurence said, \"you must consult your judgment. It is of the first importance that the French should not capture the Tsar. Lung Yu Li will report to you, when you arrive, if he should be in danger. Midwingman Roland will go aboard Fidelitas to translate for you.\" Temeraire flattened back his ruff; he did not see why Roland should go anywhere, much less to Fidelitas; he had certainly done nothing to deserve her, and after all, Gerry could speak a little Chinese by now, too. But with an effort, he restrained himself; he could not quarrel with Laurence on such an occasion, even if Emily's expression was perfectly flat, and she certainly did not wish to go. At least, Temeraire comforted himself, she would not ever stay with Fidelitas\u2014she would return as soon as she could.\n\n\"Temeraire, if you will be so good, take all the dragons to eat, as much as they can hold,\" Laurence said. \"Porridge first, and eat your meat on the wing, as much of it as you can carry: anything we leave will only go to feed the French. The Russian greys have leave to eat now as well: they are coming with us.\"\n\n\"We will go at once,\" Temeraire said, and leaping aloft he roared for attention, and then called, \"Pray will all the heavy-weights go to your porridge, three to a pit; then middle-weights and light-weights fill in around them, and no jostling if you please: we must all eat together.\"\n\nHe went down himself, and after a little chivvying to keep everyone in order, he nudged a couple of the Scots out of the way to eat himself. But he had scarcely taken a bite when the Russian greys descended and began a really frenzied attack on the food. He had to interrupt his meal and go and pin several of them down\u2014which made them squall and begin to plead for mercy, as though he were going to hurt them, and it took a small roar before each of them would quiet down enough to listen to him say, \"You are welcome to eat, only stop clawing anyone else out of the way, or gobbling so quick that you spill half the porridge out of your mouth onto the ground: there is enough for everyone.\"\n\nWhen he had repeated himself some nine or twelve times, to different dragons\u2014and once to the same dragon, which annoyed him very much; \"If I catch you at it again, you will have to sit out until everyone else has eaten,\" he told her sternly, the second time\u2014at last the greys calmed down. By then they had all got something into their bellies, and also the rest of the light-weight dragons, especially Ricarlee and his fellows, had taken up the work of prodding them into better behavior using thwacks and nips, as they could not speak to one another. One could not help but feel sorry for the greys, they did look so thin and hungry; and when at last they saw most of the British dragons finishing and going away, with plenty of porridge still left, they did look a little abashed, and began to eat more sedately.\n\nTemeraire heaved a sigh and went back to his own delayed meal. He had time only for a few bites more when Grig landed beside him\u2014having finished eating already, Temeraire noted, disgruntled. \"We have been allowed to eat first,\" Grig said full of gleeful malice, with a belch entirely disproportionate to his size, \"before all of the heavy-weights: you should have seen Vosyem scowl! And that Laurence of yours says we will be fed again tomorrow, too, if we can only keep up with this Fidelitas, and do something on the battlefield: now, which one is Fidelitas, pray?\" He asked the question very intently: even he looked rather hungry, although he was his captain's pet, and usually ate better than most of the greys.\n\nTemeraire had to swallow down a gulp of porridge to answer. \"He is that Anglewing, over there. The golden-yellow one.\"\n\n\"Almost all of you British dragons are yellow,\" Grig said, peering over in that direction. \"That one?\"\n\n\"No, that one, the large one with the extra ribs to his wings, and the darker shade,\" Temeraire said. Fidelitas was indeed talking to several of their Yellow Reapers, but the shape of the head was distinctly different, in Temeraire's opinion, and anyway Fidelitas did not have white stripes.\n\n\"We will be sure to keep up with him,\" Grig said, nodding firmly. \"What ought we do on the battlefield?\"\n\nTemeraire considered this as he ate, doubtfully: he was well aware the Russians never troubled themselves with trying to train the light-weights, and only bullied them into coming along with the heavy-weights to distract the enemy and get in the way. \"Well\u2014if you see any of the French dragons trying to gather for a run at us, you should dash at them and bat them around the heads; or if you see anyone beset by too many of the enemy, you should go and help them. And whenever there is a chance, you should form into a long pack and go flying all around us, and especially in front of the enemy, to keep them from working out just what we are trying to do\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off; he could tell, from the doubtful flick of Grig's ears, and that dragon's glance over at his fellows, that the greys would very likely do none of this. \"Wait a moment,\" Temeraire said, struck by a sudden thought, and called, \"Ricarlee, will you come here, if you please,\" and presented the two small dragons to each other, which was made possible by Grig's English\u2014although this had been acquired to spy upon them in the last campaign, which Temeraire had not quite forgiven. Still, it was handy that the greys were better than most dragons about languages.\n\n\"Ricarlee and his fellows have grown very smart about harrying the French,\" he said, which made the feral thrust out his chest proudly, \"and there are a great many of them, and they are nearly your size. Ricarlee, I should like you to pair off each of your fellows with one of the greys, before you come to the field. Then,\" he said to Grig, \"you may tell your friends they need only do whatever they see their partner doing, and stick with them through the battle.\"\n\nGrig nodded thoughtfully. \"And naturally the Scots will report if anyone runs away and just hides through the battle, and they will have to eat last.\"\n\n\"Yes, I suppose,\" Temeraire said, a little taken aback; he had not thought of it that way, and it seemed very peculiar to him that any dragon would hide during a battle\u2014although he recalled that Perscitia did not quite like fighting, either; but then, she was a very peculiar dragon.\n\n\"I will tell everyone, you may be sure,\" Grig promised. \"We will do our share, and,\" he sidled up a little, with his head slanted, \"perhaps those who distinguish themselves particularly, who assist you in some notable fashion, such as keeping others in order, will be entitled to a little more consideration, after the fighting?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said, a little anxiously. He did not know if Laurence meant to include the greys, in the distribution of prizes\u2014they were pretty sure to get a prize in this battle, Temeraire felt. \"I certainly cannot make any promises,\" Temeraire said, as he dismally contemplated dividing the same thousand shares among more dragons, but privately he had the sinking feeling that Laurence would do just that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Laurence for his part would have been glad for any hope of his having prizes to award after the coming engagement. While the dragons took their meal, he himself swallowed some bread and cold meat and drank a little wine, writing all the while: messages for the Admiralty, and for Jane; if Napoleon smashed them here, she must be warned before another five hundred dragons appeared on her doorstep. \"I'll reach her, never fear,\" Minnow promised, as she ducked her head into the letter-harness. Laurence did not care to lose even a single beast at present, but Winchesters were so small they could do very little good in combat even against other light-weights, and Minnow was clever enough to slip her way along the coast past Napoleon's forces. Captain Wesley and his Winchester Veloxia had already gone for Whitehall; they would make for Berlin, and see the message relayed from there.\n\nThen the dragons were finished eating, and everywhere the harness went on. The ground crews would have to be left behind, to march with the infantry; likely a good deal of equipment and mat\u00e9riel would be lost. But there was no help for it. Winters came hurrying with Laurence's flying-coat, struggling under the weight; Laurence took it from the small girl and shrugged into the heavy leather, checked his pistols and his sword\u2014he would never forget having gone aloft with only a dress-sword in his belt, but his beloved Chinese blade was a satisfying weight there now\u2014and stepped into Temeraire's ready talons to be put up.\n\nThe weather was extraordinarily beautiful, and the sky studded over with small puffs of charming white cloud which sadly shortened their field of vision. Laurence rarely took his glass from his eye, and the lookouts kept their own out, straining for a first glimpse. Beneath him, Temeraire's wing-muscles beat in steady lapping strokes, working nearly to his limits\u2014his speed was extraordinary for a heavy-weight, but he was in armor, although with a quarter the usual weight of incendiaries. Only the fastest of the dragons had come with him: Iskierka, their light-weights, and the Cossack ranks behind them in their clannish groups, some forty dragons each carrying ten men crammed aboard. There would be no real hope of defeating Napoleon: they could only try to hold him long enough for more of their forces to concentrate upon the field.\n\nIt was three hours to Dresden at their break-neck pace; it would be another hour before the rest of the force could join them. Laurence put firmly from his mind the unwanted awareness that those desperately needed dragons would arrive under the command of an officer who hated and despised him, and who would be glad of almost any excuse to see him brought low. There was no use in entertaining the thought; Fidelitas was by far the senior of the dragons in the second wave. For a moment he had entertained leaving Granby and Iskierka back to command it\u2014but only for a moment. If there was anything to be gained in the space of that first hour, it would only be gained by the most ferocious defense they could put forward.\n\n\"Smoke off forward wing, one point to starboard,\" Belleisle called urgently\u2014one of his lookouts. Laurence immediately turned his glass in that direction. At first he was uncertain: smoke, or only a wisp of cloud in shadow? But the thin grey wisps were rising from the ground: smoke.\n\n\"I think we will go to battle-stations, Mr. Forthing,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Forthing said, turning to pass the word to Challoner, but this was scarcely required: every man was already in motion, their speed a mark of how tightly wound their spirits: like arrows held at the limits of their bow reach, ready to be loosed.\n\nThe smoke gathered rapidly ahead of them, not only from their drawing nearer: the city was burning. \"Laurence, that is Accendare there on the other side of the city,\" Temeraire said, \"I am sure of it,\" and Laurence scanning the sky managed to pick her out briefly. The Flamme-de-Gloire was nearly the largest dragon to be seen, and stark in her yellow and black as for a moment her wings hung open against the sky in their direction.\n\n\"She has never done all that herself,\" his midwingman Ashgrove blurted out, aghast. He was a young officer, and had come from a dragon run on rather looser lines of propriety than Laurence liked to see; but the remark was not unprovoked, as their passage brought the city further into view: a city bathed in flames. Easier to have counted those houses which were not burning, many of them emitting soldiers forced to flee stumbling through the lanes and alleys of the city. Napoleon had evidently declined to fight through the streets; he was smoking out his enemy\u2014a brutality that bid fair to be as effective as it was callous. But Laurence, too, could not imagine how Accendare, for all her fearsome reputation, had single-handedly fired the entire city, its houses largely built of stone and well-supplied with water.\n\n\"Wing to larboard!\" cried the fore larboard lookout. Not one wing but a hundred, two hundred, more: a cloud of dragons was rising en masse from a previously hidden valley, where they had evidently been resupplying. In pairs they carried large iron cauldrons suspended from yokes, steam rising from the innards, and as they turned and swept over the city, they tipped them over to pour out long billowing streamers of smoking tar and pitch. Behind them came a second wave, throwing out incendiaries to ignite the hot tar\u2014these sometimes bursting in mid-air.\n\nHis glass trained upon the still-distant mass of dragons, Laurence could not escape the feeling there was more variation among them than he would have expected to see\u2014variation not merely in color and size and pattern. There were too many dragons of sharper distinctions\u2014the shape of the skull, or the mounting of the wings. \"Roland,\" Laurence said, before he remembered she was gone. \"Mr. Forthing,\" he said instead, \"do you mark anything peculiar about those dragons?\" He would have liked to consult Granby, but failing that any man who had been an aviator all his life, and more familiar with the variety of dragons.\n\nForthing peered over, holding determinedly to the straps of his flying-cap, which had lost its buckle in their tearing speed and now threatened to quit the field at any moment; he was trying to tie up the loose straps instead. \"A lot of queer sorts, sir, if that is what you mean. Ferals\u2014he has scraped the barrel, I suppose.\"\n\nLaurence shook his head, dissatisfied. \"Would you call them French ferals?\"\n\n\"One feral's much like another,\" Forthing said uncertainly.\n\n\"Sir,\" Lieutenant Challoner put in, \"I have been in the colonies, lately, and while I would not swear to it, those green ones on the left flank there have a look of Naskapi beasts\u2014those are the natives up north of Halifax.\"\n\n\"What, Indians, here?\" Forthing said. \"How should they ever get here, and why would they?\" But Laurence had already put his glass on the green dragons, who were carrying sacks of incendiaries, and although it was too far to make anything of facial features, the men aboard were certainly not French officers\u2014one only to each dragon, wearing long leather coats embroidered all over in patterns, fur-collared. Their beasts had the same angular, narrow-muzzled heads common among the Incan beasts, although their scales were not of the long feather-like sort.\n\nHe shook his head, dissatisfied and puzzled, but he could not spare the matter more thought: in five minutes more they would be upon the battlefield, if they continued on their straight-line course. They could strike directly at the bombing run: the slow pace and coordination required for the operation meant that even a little opposition would be sufficient to disrupt it. But the city was plainly lost already, and the only hope of defeating Napoleon was to save the army, if it could be done.\n\nThe breadth of that monstrous force would make any rear-guard defense hopeless without the support of guns. But there ought to have been guns: at least three hundred of them. All lost, in the fires? On that chance all hung: if they could establish artillery positions, a successful retreat might yet be accomplished. \"Temeraire,\" he said after a moment, \"we will come around by the south, and get a better look at what Accendare is doing on the road over there.\"\n\nThe signals went out, and they swung wide around the burning city: people below streaming into the countryside, carrying the wreckage of their lives\u2014small carts laden, wheelbarrows, mothers with babes in their arms, a parade of misery. Accendare herself was flying over a rise of land near the eastern gates, circling with a crowd of light-weight hangers-on, mostly P\u00eacheur-Ray\u00e9s. She had nothing to do with the fires in the city at all: she was instead striking at the efforts of the allied forces to establish a line of defense across the eastern highway, along which a straggling line of Prussian infantry were attempting to retire.\n\nInfantry squares stood in tight formation, locked in defense around the artillery-crews struggling to bring their guns to bear. Their bristling bayonets held off a direct assault, but Accendare's flames scorched and seared them, and the P\u00eacheurs, having spent their incendiaries, were dropping anything to hand upon them. One dropped a torn-up sapling, and crushed six men in a row\u2014but the soldiers beside them heaved out the sapling and closed ranks, keeping their bayonets up; one of the fallen struggled up again, and another took the fallen rifles, and planted them in the dirt with the bayonets jutting up. Nearly every square was bristling with these unattended spikes, testament to the grinding toll the assault had been taking upon them.\n\nLaurence could not help but admire the courage and steadfastness which had preserved the order of the Russian and the Prussian infantry under an aerial pounding so unopposed; he did not see a single beast in the air working to defend them. But no small force of dragons could have hoped to hold long against such a disparity of numbers.\n\nNor could his own. Still, he closed up his glass and nodded, not with relief but with certainty; the decision was made, and now there was nothing to do but to fight it out. \"Tell Iskierka to take Accendare,\" Laurence called to Temeraire, \"and we will put a stop to that bombardment, across the eastern side of the city at least: we must give the infantry some chance to get onto the road.\"\n\nHe gave the word to Quigley to signal the Cossacks to follow Iskierka: the smaller dragons clustering about Accendare were plainly French regulars, and the Cossacks were all veterans who had refined their boarding techniques against those troops over two years now of hard fighting. Granby's signal-officer waved an acknowledging flag, and then Iskierka tilted and peeled away with her following, leaving Temeraire with a sadly diminished band\u2014only thirty dragons, many of them only out of courier-class by a generous assessment\u2014half a dozen of the Scots, two Prussian Mauerfuchs, and then seven Grey Coppers and five Xenicas robbed from the British formations; none of them with real muscle to speak of.\n\nBut Laurence signaled them into a diamond-shape, behind Temeraire, and their sheer furious pace made its own impact upon the enormous cloud of French dragons. Temeraire roared out, the divine wind opening a path before them like the sweep of some enormous scythe, and even when the echoes had faded the fear of it kept the dragons spilling away to either side. There was no slackening. All the small dragons packed tightly in a mass behind Temeraire, the chop chop chop of their wings beating close and frantic, and they carved a channel directly through and burst out over the eastern gates, leaving the bombing-pass disrupted: cauldrons spilled too soon, incendiaries fallen too late.\n\nThey nearly passed Accendare, fleeing back to the safety of the French lines as Iskierka gleefully scorched her escort, and the faint sound of huzzahs reached them from the ground, a few shots fired off by way of greeting or celebration. But for the most part the Russians and the Prussians were making urgent use of every moment that had been won them. The guns sheltered inside the bayonet-bristling squares of infantry were now dragged swiftly into a line on the low hills overlooking the road, and began almost at once to fire steadily, establishing a slender cordon of safety the French dragons could not fly across with impunity. And almost at once, the main body of the corps began to make an orderly retreat\u2014men marching out from the back walls of the city, despite conflagration behind them, and streaming away along the road to the east.\n\nIskierka and the Cossacks swung back to join Temeraire. They still made only a very small band, against the French numbers. And this retreat they should now have to defend with only that thin support of guns, for an hour. The French were already halting the bombardment, Laurence saw: the dragons were going to ground, in companies, and setting down their burdens. In a moment the full force of that attack would be upon them.\n\n\"We can make very little plan of battle, ignorant as we are of all knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, and so outnumbered as we must expect to find ourselves,\" Laurence had said before their departure, to his small knot of captains. \"If a defensive line can be established, Temeraire and Iskierka will give the lead: let your beasts do their best to support them. We will at all times attempt to remain above boarding-speed, and accept the sacrifice of accuracy. I have full confidence that every man\u2014every officer\u2014and dragon will do his duty,\" he finished, a little awkwardly altering his remarks, as among the company stood all five women under his command\u2014whom he should now have to expose to so extraordinary a risk. But the Xenicas were the heaviest of the fast dragons, and could not be spared.\n\nThe sacrifice of accuracy was complete indeed at the pace which Temeraire now set, freed from the constraint of slower beasts in his company. He led one furious corkscrewing pass after another, knocking or simply terrifying the French dragons out of his path, which the lighter dragons behind him mauled enthusiastically. Wind and a riot of colors tore at Laurence's eyes: he could not distinguish one dragon from another in the speed of their passage, but even when Temeraire slowed to turn back for another pass, he found it nearly impossible to make any sense of the battlefield, or the enemy's forces.\n\nLaurence and his officers fired their guns blindly as Temeraire swept along, hoping more than certain that they occasionally hit a target: one pistol and another, and then the struggle of reloading mid-air, grains of powder blown scattering from the packet, pistol-balls slipping away from numbed fingers. On his left, Baggy uttered a wordless exclamation and clapped his hand to his forehead: a bright red line drawn across the entire front as though someone had meant to take off the top of his head, blood running freely down his face; he had been grazed by a ball. Half a wingbeat slower, and he would have been killed: a shot impersonal as a bolt of lightning, in a sky full of storms.\n\nIt was very like doing battle with locusts\u2014every blow landed, but there seemed no hope of headway. Temeraire savaged this dragon, roared another into recoiling flight\u2014and still more came to take their place, erupting from the smoke-clouds like spirits boiling up from some infernal region. The French came at them endlessly, trying to win past to overturn the roaring guns and destroy the retreating army.\n\nLaurence was conscious of every moment of that hour as he had never felt time in a battle before. There was nothing he could do to aid Temeraire but keep a lookout in every direction and warn him if the enemy approached\u2014but the enemy was always approaching, and there was no respite to be had. If Temeraire slowed for anything but the briefest turn, the French converged on him at once. If he retired for a breath behind the safety of the guns, the French instantly resumed their attacks upon the artillery. It was not an effort that could be sustained for long, not after three hours' brutal flight.\n\nHis speed began to falter. Their destruction came on, steady and inevitable; Laurence searched the horizon after every turn. He had lost all sense of time, and the sand-glass had become useless thanks to Temeraire twisting in his evasions, frequently turning himself entirely over. The sun was shrouded in smoke.\n\nLaurence measured minutes in increments of despair, and was nearly at its limits when one of the lookouts set up a cry. The glass nearly slipped from his fingers as he wrenched it from his belt just as Temeraire dived again, but then he climbed, and Laurence did not need the glass: the line of dragons approaching was visible in the distance, Fidelitas in the center of the force.\n\nTheir speed was slowing as they made their approach. The French rear-guard were swinging guns around to set up an unwelcoming barrage, and abruptly the air lightened around them as several dozen of the French beasts pulled away to try to bar the reunion of their forces. Poole would have to choose whether to force a way through, at great risk, or sweep wide of the city with the French skirmishing to delay him every step of the way, a safer course which would mean the loss of another half an hour before he could come to their aid.\n\nHalf an hour they did not have. There were more than enough dragons remaining to face them, and even as Temeraire's flagging energies were renewed by the sight of their fellows, so was the enemy's determination to bring him down before his relief came. Seven dragons surged at his head from all sides, a sudden penning-up. Captain Gaudey flying alongside sent up a shout, and her Xenica Glorianus made swift merciless work of the exposed side of one red-and-blue Garde-de-Lyon attempting to foul Temeraire's left side, letting him escape\u2014but Temeraire had been checked for a moment; long enough for a dozen boarders to spring over from the gathered enemy dragons, firing pistols and swinging curved swords\u2014Napoleon's famed Mamluk troops, their red trousers brilliant against Temeraire's hide.\n\nLaurence knew nothing of the larger battle, for the next five minutes. The world narrowed to the span of Temeraire's neck. Carabiners clacked against the harness-rings as they were all flung off their feet\u2014Temeraire fighting furiously, earth and sky whirling around them and blurred together with smoke. Laurence half-blinded by wind and speed tried to reload, to block sword-swings he could not see. Forthing went down before him, stopping one blade; Laurence shot the man behind him\u2014\n\nThe world righted itself, and stopped\u2014or did so at least by comparison; Temeraire had slackened to a resting pace. He was falling back, behind the guns, and behind a wall of allied dragons: Fidelitas had taken the risk and come straight through, after all. Calloway clubbed the last boarder across the back of the head with a rifle, knocking the man down, and shouted, \"Mr. Ashgrove, pass the word for bandages, and four hands to spare. Sir, you aren't hurt?\"\n\n\"No, nothing to signify,\" Laurence said, though breath was a struggle; he had taken a blow to the ribs. He managed to haul himself around on his straps. Forthing sagged in his carabiner straps, bleeding and dazed. Fidelitas and Cavernus and Levantia had rounded up the light-weights of their formations and were raking the French, Ricarlee and his fellows making a gleeful rampage among their leavings with the Russian greys interspersed among them. Below, the allied troops were streaming away, bayonets bristling at their backs and cavalry guarding their flanks, guns rolling over the road.\n\nTemeraire was conscious mostly of weariness, leavened occasionally by the deep ache in his wing-joints, which throbbed unpleasantly whenever he stirred them. The half-healed musket-wounds in his chest made small knots of pain as though someone were steadily pressing a blunted knife, not sharp enough to pierce scales, against the flesh. Beside him, Iskierka, too, ate through her porridge with dull silent effort, her own head hanging. He paused and sighed heavily after a swallow: he had never quite noticed, before, how tiring it was to gnaw away at a large piece of meat in one's jaws, even if it had been stewed some time.\n\nBut he persevered, the food went down little by little, and he gradually became aware of a strangely general silence around the feeding pits. All of them from the first flight were very tired, of course, but no-one from the second flight was speaking, either\u2014none of the usual chatter or squabbling. Even the Russian greys were eating quietly, with many sidelong glances over at Fidelitas, who had a hunched, strange expression as he ate\u2014half-ashamed, and he avoided Temeraire's look, even though he had done so well during the battle and come to their rescue.\n\nWith a sudden sharp anxiety, Temeraire said, \"Where is Roland?\" No-one answered him. \"Challoner!\" he called urgently\u2014but she had gone to eat something; Forthing was still with the surgeons\u2014\"What has happened to her?\" he demanded of Fidelitas directly.\n\n\"What?\" Fidelitas said, with a startled\u2014a guilty, Temeraire thought\u2014flinching. \"I do not know. Who is Roland?\"\n\n\"She is my officer,\" Temeraire said, infuriated by this cavalier response, \"who was lent you only for this one engagement\u2014lent.\"\n\nHe was about to add several remarks about the care he might have expected, in exchange for such a gesture, when Baggy put down his own bowl of porridge\u2014he had been gulping it with no benefit of a spoon\u2014and belched and said, \"Here, now, what's the fuss? Roland is with the admiral.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Temeraire said. \"She is not hurt?\"\n\n\"No?\" Baggy said. \"Why would she be?\"\n\n\"Well, I am very glad to hear it, although someone might have said so, sooner,\" Temeraire said, but he was not entirely placated; he still did not know what made Fidelitas look so strange\u2014nor Cavernus, who also wore a stiff, disapproving expression.\n\nPerhaps they were distressed over having retreated. But no-one could truly have complained of the day's outcome\u2014no-one, at least, who had seen Dresden in flames\u2014the scale of the opposition\u2014the situation which had confronted them; no-one could fail to be impressed. They had escaped, and nearly all the Prussian and Russian soldiers, too, with their guns; or at least half of them. No-one would have called it likely that morning, knowing what they had faced. Of course it was not exactly like a victory\u2014but only look how the Russians had beaten Napoleon last winter, all by running away in a particularly clever manner, and anyway Temeraire called it churlish to be dissatisfied, all things considered.\n\n\"Well, well,\" Churki said, coming down next to him, with a flurry of her feathers. \"So here you are, after all, and here is the army still in one piece! I would not have looked for it this morning,\" she added, as though to affirm Temeraire's own thinking, and with strong approval. \"That was some fine soldiering. Would there be anything to spare?\" And then she even waited very politely until Temeraire made room for her to join him and eat. He did so with a dignified bow, although it made his wing-joints ache again: he felt it only due her own courtesy, and also the very good sense of her kind remarks; he hoped everyone else should have overheard, and that it might make them cease behaving so wooden.\n\nChurki at least felt no constraint herself. \"Naturally when I understood the circumstances, I knew Hammond had to be removed from the city at once,\" she said, as she ate: she had been with him in Dresden early that morning when the first desperate scouts had reported the oncoming force. \"There were not more than ten other dragons in the whole place, except the couriers: there was no use trying to fight. So I brought him away, along with that young Tsar fellow\u2014I do not think much of those Russians, let me assure you! Not one of them properly looking after their own emperor; and would you believe that he is not married, either? There is something very wrong in the management of men in this part of the world, I must say. I did not feel I owed them any assistance, but Hammond was distressed, so I agreed to take him along and that poor old Marshal as well. He did not sound very well. I told them he had better be wrapped up better, but they would be off, without blankets or hot bricks.\" She shook her head censoriously over the whole enterprise.\n\nShe had flown further east, to a town named Bautzen which was their destination, and there had waited until Yu Li had reached them with the news of the army's escape. \"Which I did not expect in the least,\" she said. \"Of course, then Hammond would have nothing but coming back to rejoin you. But if you ask me, he has no business being here, and neither does the Tsar. No-one could call this Emperor Napoleon a sensible man, after that war he ran in Russia, but there is no denying he is worth ten times over any general we have.\u2014And he has fathered four children.\"\n\n\"Only one,\" Temeraire protested, \"although Empress Anahuarque means to have another, Laurence says.\"\n\n\"Four,\" Churki said firmly. \"He has two more by two other women, in France, and one in Vienna, all of them old enough to walk; I inquired of Hammond on the subject. So the Sapa Inca is already expecting another child?\" She emitted a sigh thoroughly laced with envy. \"Maila cannot complain of her choices\u2014if only Hammond would find a woman who had proven her fertility half so well as this French Emperor of hers! And that Lithuanian girl means to have a baby for Dyhern, I understand,\" she finished, in disgruntled tones.\n\nTemeraire had almost forgotten completely about Miss Merkelyte\u2014Mrs. Dyhern. It did not seem entirely fair to him, either, that Eroica should have simply appeared and snatched her out from under them\u2014but there, he did not mean to be annoyed with Eroica, who had not done it on purpose, and who had been so remarkably helpful with the treasure: a true friend.\n\n\"But I see your Laurence, too, has done nothing in that line,\" Churki said. \"Even though he is an admiral now? Surely that must make it easier for him to command the interest of a worthy woman. Not,\" she added, \"that I see why you insist on being so choosy. But if you do not mean for him to marry Mrs. Pemberton, you had better settle her with someone else, so at least she may begin having children.\"\n\nBy then nearly everyone was finished with their meals, and moving away to make room for the cooks to scorch the pit clean and begin stewing tomorrow's porridge. Fidelitas had taken himself off as quickly as he could, so Temeraire took the opportunity of nudging over to Cavernus to ask quietly, \"Why is everyone so awkward? What has Fidelitas done?\"\n\n\"He has done nothing,\" she said, but refused to say anything more. \"You had better talk to the admiral about it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "\"I trust, Midwingman, that nothing more will be said on the subject,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"I am not a goose, to go about honking everywhere,\" Roland said. \"But there shan't be any keeping it quiet, sir. Every man topside heard him, and every man aboard heard Fidelitas, and I dare say a dozen beasts heard Cavernus putting in her mite on the subject; it shan't stay a secret.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said, \"but it may be known, without being formally brought to my notice.\"\n\n\"It might be better if it were, now,\" she said pointedly.\n\nLaurence knew what she meant. He had certainly just saved the allied army, through extraordinary efforts, and Whitehall could not dismiss him at this particular moment; if he meant to call Poole to any official account, now was the time. \"That will be all,\" he said. She frowned, then touched her hat and left the room. Laurence sat back heavily in his chair\u2014a more comfortable one than many he had used on campaign; he had been assigned a house for his quarters, large enough to boast a sitting-room inhabited by a writing-table. He understood Roland's resentment\u2014shared it. But any court-martial convened against Poole would face the remarkable difficulty of convicting him of dereliction of duty when his duty had in fact been performed to the utmost: when his dragon had led a dangerous charge and had won through to relieve Temeraire and Iskierka, just in time, and secure the retreat.\n\nThe case could only be won by a public argument that Poole had tried to persuade Fidelitas to do otherwise\u2014and that his efforts had failed; that his dragon had willfully disobeyed him. That knowledge was even now traveling through the Corps at the speed of rumor, surely to the anger and anxiety of every officer who had taken it as truth that dragons were devoted blindly to their captains. Laurence was not even sure that a court of aviators would be willing to admit that it had happened. Poole would be invited to say that he had changed his mind and had told Fidelitas so, too quietly to be overheard. Many would refuse to believe that a dragon had committed the act from any sense of duty; he would either have done it at the behest of another dragon, or, by a still more uncharitable interpretation, for the sake of prize-money.\n\n\"And I cannot say Poole was unquestionably guilty, in any case,\" Laurence said tiredly. \"He might well have argued that the risk of a charge outweighed the value of saving us\u2014that he desired to take a safer course.\"\n\n\"But if he had gone round, he should never have come in time to save the guns, which were in much more danger than I was,\" Temeraire said, with an optimistic gloss upon his own peril. \"And without the guns, everything should have been lost, anyone could see that. Poor Fidelitas! I am very sorry I was so abrupt with him to-day: he was behaving so oddly that I was sure he had done something to be ashamed of, but I see it is only that he was ashamed of Poole, and everyone else was pitying him. We must do something for him, Laurence. I do not suppose there is any hope of a prize?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. They would be on short commons, if anything, by the end of the week. A great deal of supply had been abandoned behind the enemy lines.\n\n\"Then a medal,\" Temeraire said decisively. \"He certainly ought to have a medal.\"\n\n\"We will consider the matter tomorrow,\" Laurence said. \"For now, you should be asleep: I made sure you would be so when I came, and I am sorry to have found otherwise. You have eaten enough?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Temeraire said. \"All the third flight handsomely said they would go without, because they had eaten in the afternoon before they fetched the supply here, so we ate well. And really I am not very tired,\" but here he yawned, enormously, and moments after putting his head down murmuring, \"but now that Emily is back, and you have assured me all is well\u2026\" he was snoring in a remarkably stentorious way, which made the shrubs near his nostrils tremble violently with every exhalation.\n\nLaurence rested a hand on the soft muzzle and left it there a few moments, feeling the steady thrumming of breath moving beneath, before he continued on to the courier-clearing, where Yu Li awaited him, herself drooping with fatigue. Laurence hesitated; he had heard enough of her report that he knew he must urgently hear the rest, and take the news on to the headquarters, but she had been going back and forth all day in their service and now was shivering badly; the night had turned cool, and Jade Dragons did not have the flesh to keep them warm when they were not flying. He looked towards the large manor, overlooking the encampment, where the senior staff were assembling, and slowly asked, \"Do you think you might be able to come inside the house?\"\n\nShe followed his courier to the manor, and came up the stairs behind him, to the great consternation of the guards. She was only some eight feet long from head to tip of tail, but her talons and teeth were remarkable enough for all that. But Hammond flung open the door from within and rushing out onto the top of the stairs seized Laurence by the hand, nearly wringing it in greeting. \"Admiral!\" he cried. \"He has halted on the road outside Dresden. He has certainly halted. We have it confirmed beyond a doubt.\"\n\nHe required no antecedent, and the guards overhearing the news brightened as much as did Laurence. \"I cannot think why,\" Laurence said, though he returned Hammond's handshake with all the enthusiasm this news invited, and came into the house with him, forgetting his own company. \"He could have had us in striking-distance in two hours' flight\u2014you are sure he has not merely stopped to bring up stragglers?\"\n\n\"His stragglers are three-quarters of his army,\" Hammond said. \"Now that Bl\u00fccher has rejoined us, he does not have enough men to meet us. He has sent half his dragons back to Erfurt, to bring the rest of his infantry along by portage. We will have three days, at least. Come in, you must come in at once,\" Hammond continued, and drew Laurence along into the large dining room where the senior staff was assembled, without even noticing the dragon trailing behind them.\n\nEven there, Yu Li at first escaped observation\u2014Marshal Bl\u00fccher coming forward to greet Laurence with a fervent embrace, and the other officers acclaiming him with all the energy of men who knew very well how closely they had skirted disaster and defeat. \"His Majesty will wish to see you,\" Bl\u00fccher said. \"You have eaten?\"\n\nA stifled yelp interrupted their greetings: Yu Li had inquisitively come up to the table, which was littered with maps tacked together to form a sweeping whole. She put her head out on its long neck to examine their positions, very much startling the young staff-officer next to her, who nearly knocked over his neighbors as he went stumbling back. \"I beg your pardon,\" Laurence said hastily. \"Gentlemen, this is Lung Yu Li, who has been sent from the Chinese legions.\"\n\nThere was an enormous silence. Yu Li broke it herself, saying in Chinese, \"This is a very handsome map, but those men are not over there,\" while leaning forward to make several alterations to the disposition of figures with the talons of her foreleg, nudging some here and there in small increments until she was satisfied with their arrangement. She straightened up from the table and blinked around at the company, who wore a general expression of disquiet: a dragon did not generally appear in a dining room, and even Laurence had to admit of a vague sense of something decidedly out of place, as though a caricature from the Gazette had abruptly come to life.\n\n\"Sir,\" Laurence said to Bl\u00fccher, \"her news does not permit of any delay, further than has already been occasioned. Marshal Kutuzov ought to hear it at once, if he can be disturbed.\"\n\n\"Ah! He cannot,\" Bl\u00fccher said heavily. \"Marshal Kutuzov has died.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "The men gathered around the table with the Tsar were divided neatly by dress: the statesmen neat and in good order, the serving-officers unshaven and in clothing stained with sweat and retreat; their faces were equally bleak, however, and Yu Li's news was not calculated to make them less so.\n\n\"By the Dread Lord's order, the legions departed from Xian directly on receiving the Dread Lord's order,\" Yu Li said, \"and proceeded without delay through Yutien and made the crossing of the Taklamakan Desert. Since then we have encountered a steady resistance which has hindered the secure establishment of our supply. As a consequence, we must establish a sufficient presence at each depot to defend it, and our supply-flights must travel in larger groups, which in turn necessitates an increase in supply, and thereby greatly delays our advance.\"\n\n\"Feral raiding?\" a Russian officer asked, when Laurence had translated this far. \"I dare say they do not know how to manage wild beasts, when they have none in their own country, but any respectable guards ought to be able to fend them off.\"\n\nLaurence was sure Yu Li did not refer to ordinary feral attacks as might be made on any army's supply, and when he asked her of the arrangements made to avoid these, she said, with a severe eye upon the officer who had spoken, \"Naturally, as is necessary to any civilized army, we have a sufficient supply allocated to be able to give appropriate presents to those dragons whose territory we must cross. But our gifts have been refused. These attacks are bent upon destruction, not theft.\"\n\nThere was a pause, as this sank in. Every man there knew that Kutuzov's intention had been, as nearly as could be managed, to arrange a trap almost exactly like the one which had nearly closed upon Napoleon's army in Russia, in the last campaign. He had meant to penetrate as far westward as he could during the winter, and on meeting Napoleon's advance retire by small piecemeal stages, grudgingly surrendering territory and stretching the French lines of communication, until the arrival of the legions from the East should abruptly shift the balance of aerial power, and allow him to strike a crushing blow\u2014with, they had all confidently expected, the assistance of the Austrians, who would under those circumstances have finally come off the fence. Napoleon had already overset much of this design by leaping forward to seize Dresden and force them so far westward in a single blow. Even a small delay in the legions' arrival would now have been a cause for concern.\n\n\"How long?\" Wittgenstein asked finally, breaking the silence.\n\n\"General Zhao Lien regrets that it will not be possible to assemble along the Vistula before two months have passed,\" Yu Li said.\n\n\"We do not have two months,\" Bl\u00fccher said. \"We do not have two weeks.\"\n\n\"If the Austrians came in?\" one man said.\n\n\"The Austrians will not come in while Napoleon is on their border with five hundred dragons and two hundred thousand men, when we have half those numbers,\" Hammond said. \"Count Metternich is entirely with us in spirit, gentlemen, but he is not a fool.\"\n\n\"If I may be so bold,\" Laurence said, \"we ought first consider how Napoleon has obtained the services of five hundred dragons. Eugene had a strong aerial force at the Elbe, and Davout reportedly has two hundred dragons at Hamburg. The beasts here cannot all have been French. Not after Bonaparte's losses in Russia, which to our knowledge were immense. There were too many dragons of unusual conformation with them, and Yu Li's reports must further give rise to the suspicion that he has also established relations with the dragons in the east\u2014that he has anticipated the legions, and arranged these efforts to delay their arrival.\"\n\nA conclusion less to the taste of any man present could hardly be imagined: all Kutuzov's aims shattered. But the rational force of the argument was difficult to avoid, and no-one objected; Laurence paused a moment, saw that no-one would speak, and said forcefully, \"This is the work of his Concord, gentlemen. Do any of you doubt it? He has for the cost of pen and ink bought a thousand dragons, who otherwise would have spent this war sleeping idle in remote caverns. Have there been reports of increased raiding, on our own supply?\"\n\nA steady rumble of muttering around the table. There had been, everywhere\u2014\n\n\"The consequence of so much strife and unrest, we thought,\" a Prussian general said slowly, but at last a full understanding was taking hold among them, which Laurence had despaired of in the past months, when his every attempt at raising the specter of the Concord had been met with dismissal\u2014ferals were of small numbers, of no account; Napoleon's offer could not even reach them, for the lack of language and letters; they would not believe in it, if it did.\n\n\"If he has truly gained the allegiance of the feral beasts, the unharnessed beasts, we must root them all out. How can it be done? Poison\u2014\" one officer began.\n\n\"He has gained it,\" Laurence snapped, \"because this is the answer you would make them. When you offer them slaughter or even the mere slow dwindling starvation which has been their lot, these last few centuries, and Napoleon holds out the promise of liberty, and the enjoyment of rights in the territory which they consider their own, there can be hardly any wonder that they should flock to his banner. Do you imagine the harnessed dragons now in our service will long remain loyal, when they know you mean to destroy their fellows?\"\n\nWittgenstein held up a hand, and with an effort, Laurence silenced himself; he felt as though his heart beat with a palpable force against his ribs. He saw Hammond glancing at him sidelong, worried, and Yu Li, despite being unable to follow his words, had understood his passion; she had sidled over to take up a position flanking him to the left with her forelegs held high\u2014apparently at rest, but the muscles of her legs were gathered as though to launch her with all their considerable force, if necessary. He felt entirely capable of violence himself.\n\n\"The Tsar has summoned me to Bautzen,\" Wittgenstein said to the silent room\u2014the Tsar undoubtedly meant to name him commander, in Kutuzov's place. He was nearly the only choice, and could scarcely refuse, but the position he would inherit could not have been less enviable. \"I must inform him of this intelligence, and learn his will. We will convene tomorrow morning. For now, gentlemen, go to your rest. Mr. Hammond, if I may ask you for a word\u2014\"\n\nHammond went away with him, not without an anxious backwards look, and Laurence turning walked from the house and returned to the field-covert still in that settled mood of wrath. \"Come, you will sleep warmer with Temeraire,\" Laurence told Yu Li, when they had landed. She tucked herself beneath Temeraire's wing, which he raised murmuring without even opening an eye, but Laurence could not rest. He paced his fury out the length of Temeraire's body\u2014aware as he did that his officers and crew watched him out of their tents, and whispered. He could not care.\n\nThe reply would come by morning. He did not know what the Tsar would decide. In Russia, Alexander had ordered the release of his own feral dragons from the hobbles that kept them imprisoned in the breeding grounds. But he had done so only from expediency\u2014he had hoped to persuade those dragons to take carrying-harnesses, and transport his infantry, in exchange for their liberty and their bread, and to keep Napoleon from recruiting them instead. That same expediency might now induce him to attempt the wholesale destruction of the feral dragons, if he thought it easier to achieve.\n\nLaurence knew with perfect clarity that he would not obey such an order, nor even stand by and see it done\u2014and he did not have to wonder what Temeraire would think of it. They had met a like choice, once before. His steps slowed at last, and he halted by Temeraire's sleeping head, the calm of resolution settling upon him. He had determined not to regret his choice; if he were now to be taken at his word, and that determination tried, he could not complain. Their course would be clear enough, if as wrenching as he could imagine. He had refused Napoleon his service, twice over, when he could have served his own interest. But for this, they would go to him.\n\nAt least the distance would not be long, Laurence thought, with a black humor, and almost might have laughed. He breathed deeply once instead, and mastered himself. Six bells had lately rung\u2014there were a few hours yet until morning. He was still wearing his flying-coat; he climbed up to the crook of Temeraire's foreleg, wrapped the leather skirts close around himself, and shut his eyes; sleep came easily and all at once, as though he lay in his cot, twenty years ago, without a care but the direction of the wind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Temeraire felt really exasperated, the next morning, when everyone was very quiet all over again\u2014his crew, this time, and once more for no reason which anyone would tell him. It was all shrugs, and \"I don't know anything, I'm sure,\" except for O'Dea, who would only make dark hints of some mysterious terrible event which was certain to occur, and then say, \"Ah, but I don't know anything, I'm sure,\" which was not to be preferred.\n\nLaurence had gone to meet with the generals again\u2014he had looked so very fine this morning, Temeraire had noted approvingly. He had woken to find all the runners scrambling, for once summoned away from their schoolwork, and Laurence shaving while they sponged his best coat and ironed his best shirt, ordinarily kept in the chest with Temeraire's talon-sheaths. Temeraire had seized the chance of offering a few suggestions\u2014and Laurence had very obligingly put on his medal of the Nile, and freshly polished the hilt of his sword, and taken his dress hat with its handsome cockade, much to Temeraire's satisfaction; but then the hour had grown late and Laurence had gone in a rush, and only then had Temeraire realized, from the behavior of the crew, that he ought to have asked what cause merited the display.\n\n\"Very well,\" he said, in some irritation, \"then I am going to the porridge-pits to see if anyone else does know anything, as you are all quite useless.\"\n\nMost of the ferals liked to gather there, and have a smell of the food even if it was not ready for eating yet; and at least one of the big dragons had to sleep near-by to keep them off it: it had been Iskierka's turn last night, so she was lying beside them, but she had nothing to offer. \"I don't see there is anything to know,\" Iskierka said, yawning. \"Granby, is there?\"\n\n\"I don't know, I'm sure,\" Granby said\u2014Temeraire looked at him with a strong sense of betrayal, but at least Granby had the grace to look troubled. \"I did hear Laurence was in a taking, last night, but you know what he is: if anyone tells you he gabbed about what set him off, you can be sure it comes straight from Banbury. Perhaps it is only old Kutuzov dying like that; no-one can like the commander popping off in the night with Napoleon on our heels. They say it is going to be Wittgenstein next, I hear,\" which was interesting at least, but did not answer Temeraire's immediate concern.\n\nGrig landed near the pits and said loudly, \"Is there any chance of an early bite?\" which brought Iskierka's head up for a warning snort of flame. \"I don't mean anything by it, I'm sure,\" he said, with a small hop that brought him over by her head, to make an apologetic bob, and then he pitched his voice very quiet and said, \"Temeraire, what do they mean to put the poison in, have you heard?\"\n\n\"What?\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"I will not blab,\" Grig said hurriedly. \"Not to anyone you don't like\u2014\"\n\nTemeraire put his head down and nudged Grig firmly back towards the outer ring of trees. \"Now you will explain yourself at once,\" he said, and everything came spilling out: a few of the small Russian dragons of Grig's acquaintance had eavesdropped upon a conversation among their officers, and passed the word to him, in hopes he might be able to learn how to avoid the traps.\n\nTemeraire heard out the hideous plan, first with bafflement\u2014it could not be, it was too infamous\u2014but when he recalled that it came from those same men who had kept their beasts chained, hobbled, all in order to make them starved prisoners in breeding grounds, he ceased to doubt, and a settled, wrathful calm descended.\n\nHe had all too much confidence in their power of achieving such a dreadful goal. Everyone was so very hungry now\u2014there was not enough food anywhere, it seemed, and ferals did not even have the advantage of porridge, to stretch what there was. If men only put out some cooking-pits full of food, in the pretense of keeping the ferals from raiding, many would eat, and sicken, and die. And with their numbers broken by this first slaughter, still desperate with hunger, the remainder would be easier prey for all the forms of entrapment that men could devise. Temeraire remembered with a shudder the burning frame so close around him, the crowding pitchforks\u2014and those had only been peasants; those men had not had guns.\n\n\"Yes, I understand,\" he said, when Grig trailed off at last. \"I understand very well.\"\n\n\"Then you see why I would like to know\u2014\" Grig began, but Temeraire rumbled a warning, and silenced him.\n\n\"I would certainly give you no private hints, if I had them,\" Temeraire said, speaking clearly, to be heard and understood by all the other dragons, who had been already listening in with interest, stretching to overhear. \"I will not be satisfied, nor should any right-thinking dragon, to escape destruction only for myself and my personal friends\u2014I will not stand by, and see such a project carried out. And neither will Laurence, you may depend upon it.\"\n\nHe was angry, and his voice betrayed it\u2014Grig cowered away from him and the rising thrum. Temeraire closed his jaws until the urge to roar had subsided. He would not blame Grig, who had been raised so badly, and had never learned to trust any other dragon, or had any person worthy of trust, either.\n\n\"We will certainly put a stop to the entire business,\" Temeraire continued, when he trusted himself to speak again. \"And any dragon, who does not care to be poisoned or shot for the convenience of men, may help us, if they choose\u2014that is all I have to say on the subject, and when Laurence comes back, he will certainly agree; he will never obey such a command.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Grig said, a little doubtfully. \"But did you not say that you lost ten thousand pounds by it, the last time?\"\n\nThis gave Temeraire a sharp moment, a painful start\u2014and after he had only just restored Laurence's fortunes!\u2014\"I will lose as much again,\" he said, with an effort, and immense resolution. \"I will do it again, if need be; if I really must. Even that consideration will not stop me.\"\n\nHaving made this painful declaration, Temeraire went aloft and returned to his own clearing, to pace its confining limits round and round and making distracted apologies if he should knock over a tree, to the inconvenience of his crew. Laurence had certainly gone to stop the whole business\u2014Temeraire saw it now. Laurence meant to stop it, and to tell Temeraire after the whole monstrous plan had already been averted, exactly to spare him the distress of the prospect which now lay so horribly close before them. If Laurence did not succeed\u2014Temeraire shied away from too much contemplation of the consequences.\n\nHe turned his attention, rather, to the nearly as daunting consideration of how they should proceed, if the worst were to come to pass. They could not chase all over the Continent, themselves, to warn everyone. \"We shall have to pass the word through the ferals,\" Temeraire said aloud, but what if not everyone should believe them? He turned around again, sweeping over two tents without really noticing. \"I had better speak to Ricarlee\u2014and I must try and get word to Bistorta, and to the ferals of Lithuania.\"\n\nHe was so engaged in planning out this network of communication that he did not pay any attention to movements outside his own clearing, until with a start he raised his head at several shadows moving in perpetual circles over his clearing, rudely, and looking around found Obituria and Fidelitas and their formations gathered closely around him, with their wing dragons circling overhead.\n\n\"What is it?\" Temeraire said to Fidelitas, who ducked his head away with a queer, jerking unhappy movement, but said nothing.\n\n\"Why, I don't know,\" Obituria said maddeningly. \"I have only come along on orders: we are to take up stations around your clearing. Is there going to be a battle? I did not get to fight, last time,\" she said glumly.\n\n\"I should not think so, for Napoleon was three days off, yesterday,\" Temeraire said, puzzled, but Granby was coming down the path\u2014Granby, in a rage, halting where Captain Poole and Captain Windle had gathered with their officers, across the entrance to Temeraire's clearing.\n\n\"What the devil do you mean by this?\" he snapped. \"You will explain yourselves, gentlemen; you will dismiss your dragons, and explain yourselves, at once.\"\n\n\"We will do no such thing,\" Poole answered, very coldly\u2014he looked very pale, with red splotches come out upon his forehead, \"and I hardly would have supposed that explanation would be required by an officer of His Majesty's Corps\u2014a loyal officer; I do not think any such man could entertain the least confusion, after the performance to which so many of us were witness not an hour since, about our actions, or indeed their necessity.\"\n\n\"By God, I will see you broken the service for this,\" Granby said. \"You have deserved it twice over before this, in one campaign, and this crowns all\u2014\"\n\n\"That you should dare to speak of the service, in these circumstances, beggars all belief,\" Poole spat back. \"When we consider what your own behavior ought to have been even before now, and when you have heard an outright avowal of the intention to commit treason, by those whose willingness to do it can hardly be denied\u2014by those who ought long since have been put past the power of repeating their crime\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" Temeraire said, in rousing wrath. \"Am I to understand that you\u2014that all of you\u2014\" he turned to Obituria and Fidelitas, \"have come here, have taken up positions against me\u2014in defense of this poisoning scheme? That you are here to help poison other dragons, and not even enemy dragons; to poison and murder the smallest, starving ferals, who have not a bowl of porridge to be sure of, who have no coverts, nor crew, nor any sort of treasure at all, who are not a quarter of your size\u2014\"\n\nThe dragons were all drawing back from him uneasily\u2014the divine wind was a growing echo in his throat, and he felt not the least inclination to rein it back. \"And you would let them all be made sick, and left to die\u2014I suppose you think,\" he stormed at Gaudenius, Obituria's wing dragon and a Yellow Reaper, even as that beast shrank ashamedly back, \"that they would not think of poisoning the Reapers in Yorkshire, the ones who do not care to be harnessed? And none of you should mind it if dragons like Ricarlee and his fellows, who after all have been good wing-mates all this while, should be tricked into eating poisoned sheep, and pushed into pens to be burnt up? To this, you mean to lend your assistance\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh! I don't, at all!\" Obituria burst out, aghast. \"I don't! How can you say such dreadful things? We are only here because our captains have asked us.\"\n\n\"That is as much to say, that you have not troubled to find out what they are about,\" Temeraire said. \"I do not suppose any of you wondered, when they told you to take up a fighting-post over my clearing, what they meant by it?\" He looked at Fidelitas, who could not meet his eyes, but dropped his head miserably.\n\n\"Do not listen to that treasonous, seditious beast another moment,\" Poole called angrily. \"Fidelitas, you know you have never been disobedient a moment before you met him\u2014you must see how he is bent on leading all of you astray.\"\n\n\"Astray, I suppose, from your wishes,\" Temeraire said, swiveling his head down to Poole, \"which have never consulted his, or those of dragons, at all.\"\n\n\"And this is what your marvelous actions are to get us,\" Granby snapped to Poole. \"\u2014a pitched fight, between our own dragons, in our own camp.\"\n\n\"Better that, than seeing treason go by, unopposed!\" Poole said. He stepped back from Granby and drew his sword. \"I will gladly die\u2014I will die by my own dragon's teeth\u2014\" Fidelitas cried out in horror at this dreadful suggestion, but Poole only flung onwards, \"before I will turn a blind unseeing eye to treason, before my face. When I am called to give testimony, I will not say, I knew nothing, bleating.\"\n\n\"Why, damn you,\" Granby said, reaching for his own sword, and all the officers were suddenly shouting at one another, and Challoner and the crew, staring, were running to Granby's side, and they were all so closely packed in that Temeraire could not see a way to get a claw in among them, if needed\u2014\n\n\"What is the meaning of this display?\"\n\nLaurence's bellow had rarely been so welcome. Temeraire gasped in relief; Laurence was there, on the path\u2014and then his gasp became horror, for with a swift springing turn, Poole was by Laurence's side, and he had laid the edge of his sword at Laurence's throat.\n\nTemeraire froze, halted completely. One push of the blade, and Laurence\u2014Laurence might die, might be killed, right before his eyes. Fidelitas made a low terrible noise, crouching\u2014of course he knew that Poole would die, too, immediately afterwards. But that could count for nothing with Temeraire; what would anything matter, when Laurence was dead?\n\nLaurence stood very calmly, and looked Poole in the face\u2014Poole panting heavily, his jaw clenched. Temeraire felt he saw and tracked every droplet of sweat that trickled down into Poole's collar, every slight\u2014too slight\u2014tremor of his arm. \"Put up that sword, Captain,\" Laurence said. \"You are overset.\" He looked at the other officers, paying not the least attention to the blade still at his neck. \"Captain Granby, I am obliged to appoint you acting-admiral, of our forces\u2014\"\n\n\"Laurence!\" Granby cried, taking a step.\n\n\"I have been required to assume the united command of the allied aerial forces,\" Laurence continued, as though he had not been interrupted. \"We have only a few days before Bonaparte will be on our heels, gentlemen. We are to use them to recruit or sway every feral we can find to our cause, and make whatever defense of them we can. I do not despair of our success. Winters,\" he called\u2014and after a moment, Winters timidly ran out to him, through the crowd of uncertain, stilled men.\n\nLaurence reaching up pushed the blade by the flat away from his neck, easily. Poole watched his arm move as though he had no power to halt it, and then let it fall to his side. Laurence did not look at him, but took out an envelope from his coat and handed it to Winters. \"Take that to Mr. Challoner, and have her set every man with a clear hand to copying it,\" he said. \"Gentlemen, if any of you have any man in your crew who has any Durzagh, from serving with Arkady and his Pamir ferals at the Channel, you will oblige me by sending them to me at once.\"\n\nHe came down the path, through the men who cleared a way for him, and to Temeraire's side. He put a hand on Temeraire's foreleg. With a shudder of relief, as though he had seen a slow-match put out before it reached the cannon, Temeraire put his head down and nosed Laurence over carefully. Fidelitas was snatching Poole up, and flying away, but for the moment Temeraire gave that no attention; he only made certain Laurence was well, and after he had assured himself that there was no scratch, no drawn blood, he gave a great sigh and then asked, \"Laurence, what is that?\" meaning the mysterious document which Laurence had brought, which seemed so important.\n\n\"It is your bill,\" Laurence said. \"Yours and Perscitia's. The Tsar and King Frederick have agreed to its terms.\"\n\n\"You must also consider,\" Temeraire said earnestly, \"the Frenchbreeding program, and what it should mean for all of you, on the Continent. You must recall they mean to hatch no less than four thousand eggs.\"\n\n\"It does give one pause,\" Bistorta acknowledged, while a murmur traveled the gathered ferals\u2014a great many Alpine ferals had come in answer to his urgent messages, and others from Saxony had come along out of curiosity. Naturally none of them could fail to be concerned with so many dragons hatching in a territory neighboring their own. \"It does, but it does not therefore mean we can rely on your friends. I don't think there are any of us who have not heard of this very terrible business in Russia, now.\"\n\n\"I have seen one of those beasts who was hobbled up myself,\" one feral piped up, \"going around with the French. His scars! I did not like to believe it, before then, not truly. But nothing else could account for scars like that.\"\n\nBistorta nodded firm agreement. She wore the largest, most magnificent of the platters from the golden dinner service around her neck, upon a chain\u2014it gave Temeraire a faint pang still, every time a flash of the firelight gleamed off the lovely engraving\u2014and the others were all very respectful of her. \"I do not know I would not rather see this Napoleon win, when by all accounts he has behaved handsomely by dragons.\"\n\n\"I am the last to say anything in defense of the Russians' behavior,\" Temeraire said, \"except that they have learnt better, and are showing they mean to do better, for the very same reason that Napoleon has been behaving so nicely to dragons lately: because they want our help. Napoleon's concern, like theirs, is first for himself and his own empire. I do not believe he is to be relied on, further than any other government. It is only that they can all see the importance of having us on their side, now, which makes them eager to be our friends. Of course, Napoleon has been quicker to see his advantage\u2014I believe no-one has ever denied he is very clever. But that is not as much as to say he is the keeper of our interest.\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" Bistorta said, \"but it does not make him less so, than this come-lately Tsar, who did not think anything of hobbles.\"\n\n\"And if the outcomes of their respective victories were equal, I should agree with you,\" Temeraire said judiciously. \"But you must see that they are not. Napoleon only need hold his enemies off until all his new dragons have hatched and grown, and then he will have his own way, all across the Continent. There will be no-one to match him for ten years, no matter what the rest of us should choose to do in future.\n\n\"But if the allies should win, there will be many powers in Europe\u2014Russia, and Prussia, and Austria, and England, and France, besides Spain, and any number of smaller nations and principalities. If any one of them should fail to keep faith with us, or should begin to treat dragons poorly, we shall have the power to threaten them by alliance with one or more of the others. So you see, it is very much to our advantage to have a balance of power upon the Continent\u2014however thoughtful Napoleon may have been of dragons, personally.\"\n\n\"I do not know I would call it thoughtful, myself, to hatch out four thousand dragons without so much as a word to assure us he has enough food for them all,\" muttered one rather lean-looking Alpine beast, with narrowed eyes.\n\nThey all went away murmuring among themselves, and Temeraire congratulated himself that even if they had not been swept away entirely by the force of his arguments, some at least had been persuaded\u2014there had been several inquiries about the rules of prize-money, and ordinary pay, which would hardly have been made if no-one thought them worth joining. He stretched his wings, and went to have a long drink of tea to wet down his dry throat: there were another forty dragons due to arrive in\u2014only an hour, he realized in dismay, as four bells was rung. It seemed he had done nothing but talk, and talk, and talk, for two days.\n\n\"I do not suppose Napoleon will attack to-day?\" he asked Challoner wistfully.\n\n\"No, I shouldn't think there is any likelihood of it,\" she said. Temeraire sighed.\n\nBut his labors were bearing some fruit: Bistorta came back the next morning for more conversation, along with many of the other dragons, and a little later Molic arrived also with some two dozen Lithuanian and Prussian ferals in tow. Temeraire spoke with all of them again, and also with a handful of Persian ferals, who had flown all the way from the east; Yu Li had promised to leave word with them, if she could, on her way back to the legions.\n\nThe Persians expressed a loud and very useful sense of injury. \"For we were told we might have our territory back, and eat all the cattle that grazes upon it, if only we pushed to keep others out of it,\" their chief Tushnamatay said, complaining, \"but instead we have been having one fight after another with these red fellows from China, who are extremely nasty if there are any number of them\u2014all sorts of tricks.\"\n\n\"When you engage to fight the Imperial Legions of China,\" Temeraire said, not a little loftily, \"you must expect to run into difficulties. I am not surprised that Napoleon should have misrepresented the situation to you, but I do not see why you should feel obliged to him for putting you in so awkward a position, and why you should keep on fighting us instead of accepting the respectable gifts the legions would be happy to make you.\"\n\n\"Gifts are all well enough,\" Tushna said, \"but they do not make up for men rousting us out everywhere.\"\n\n\"I do see that,\" Temeraire said, \"and I am willing, if you choose, to add you to our own separate concord, and to make every effort to persuade the men in your territory to agree to join it and give you your rights. I will not make extravagant promises I cannot be sure to keep\u2014unlike some,\" he added significantly, \"but I can say, we will take your part, if you take ours; and besides that, if any of you should choose to provide us with active assistance, you shall be entitled to prize-money, in a fair share\u2014and you may ask any dragon of my company, that it is fair.\"\n\nHe was interrupted here by a clanging alarum, and Moncey dropping into the large clearing. \"Well, we are in for it,\" he said cheerfully. \"He has dropped ten thousand men on the road ahead of us at Bautzen, with sixty guns.\"\n\n\"I am very sorry to interrupt our conference,\" Temeraire lied to the listening dragons, \"but naturally I must go at once. We should be very glad to have any of you, who would like to help\u2014you need only follow along with Ricarlee, that grey dragon there with the blue markings, and he will show you where to go to have a share of the fighting.\"\n\nHe returned to his own clearing, Laurence already coming down the path himself shrugging into his flying-coat. \"The army will fall back on Reichenbach,\" he said. \"We must open the road, and then hold them for five hours.\"\n\n\"I am sure we can do it, Laurence,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"Best not to take it on credit, my dear,\" Laurence said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "But Temeraire's confidence was answered, in this instance; when they landed late that evening at the new field-covert established outside the small village of Reichenbach, Laurence might dismount with a sense of weary satisfaction, and know they had balked Napoleon of his prey one more time. And Minnow was waiting for them as they came down, a little stained with travel but bright-eyed and with a letter from Jane; and before Laurence's boots had touched the ground she announced without preamble, \"We have rolled Marshal Jourdan up at Vitoria\u2014Joseph Bonaparte has fled over the Pyrenees, to France.\"\n\nEvery man in ear-shot shouted with joy, as tired as they all were, and the news spread outward in ripples that eddied back and demanded still more huzzahs; it was some time before Laurence could open his letter, and read, with inexpressible satisfaction:\n\nI think he is nearly done in Spain, and if I say so myself, we have done a neat enough job of the thing. We will be over the Pyrenees soon: Wellington would like to cross as soon as we have mopped up Pamplona and San Sebastian, and I have my eye on that breeding ground east of the Nive. I would not say no to a few dozen French eggs, still soft in the shell, and neither would the Spanish, I am sure. Would the Austrians like a few? If it would help to tempt them in, by all means make them any promises you like.\n\nYou may tell Emily that Demane came through without incident. Kulingile got boarded halfway through, but Demane restrained himself properly, I am glad to say, and let his topmen do their work; they pushed the boarders off again after only a little squabbling, and his first lieutenant took a nicely heroic scratch, which should let me promote the fellow, and has made them something like a happy crew.\n\n\"Where is Hammond?\" Laurence said aloud. \"He must know of this, at once,\" and took a hasty leave of Temeraire; but he met Hammond hurrying out of the courier-clearing, with so delighted an expression that at first Laurence thought he must have heard the news already, by some other avenue.\n\n\"He has agreed to a cease-fire,\" Hammond cried, beaming as he seized Laurence's hand, before Laurence could say a word. \"The courier came not an hour ago: Metternich has persuaded Bonaparte to listen to mediation. A week, Admiral, he will give us a week!\"\n\nIt was difficult to say which of them pleased the other better, by their exchange of intelligence; Laurence took Hammond back to the small cabin set aside for him, where Dyhern and Granby shortly joined them in equal transports of delight, and with several bottles of a handsome port that had been unearthed somewhere by one of Granby's runners. They toasted Victoria, Wellington, Roland, Emperor Francis, and Metternich all in turn, rejoicing. That Napoleon should allow them even a week's respite, on the cusp of the Austrian border, with all the slow-moving advantages of supply and fresh troops creeping towards their side out of Russia, was as nearly inconceivable as it was desirable.\n\n\"Bonaparte is hoping to keep the Austrians from throwing in with us, of course,\" Hammond said, expansive with his happiness. \"Metternich has done it as prettily as can be imagined! The Austrians cannot be ready to march for another month in any case; we will not be worse off by a moment for the lack of their aid.\"\n\n\"But can we be sure they won't throw in with him, while they are talking?\" Granby said, a little dubious. \"I should not give much for our chances if they do.\"\n\nHammond only snorted. \"If he offers them half of Italy, accepts the natural borders of France, and agrees to hand over three-quarters of those eggs he has been at so much trouble to breed up, Metternich may find it hard to call him unreasonable, but I dare say something might yet be contrived. I cannot think it very likely the count will be put to the trouble. No, Captain: I am quite certain\u2014quite certain\u2014that Austria is of a mind with us; we all know very well that Bonaparte is the one insurmountable obstacle to any lasting peace.\"\n\nLaurence could not wholly admire a stratagem which bought military advantage with something so much like deceit, but he consoled himself that the power to make acceptable terms, to make a real peace, nevertheless remained in Napoleon's hands. If his enemies expected him to prefer improving them through the hazards of battle, that was scarcely unreasonable, as he had always before now done so.\n\nSo he raised his glass to Metternich again willingly, when Hammond proposed another toast to that gentleman's diplomatic skill; and afterwards to the King, and then in justice to the Tsar, and even to Bautzen\u2014officially recorded according to the day's dispatches, which Hammond had brought them, as a victory, although this was stretching the fabric of truth to the point of transparency\u2014until at last they saluted one another in turn as well, still rejoicing.\n\nThe night ended in a thick fog; but by the morning Laurence was on his feet, only a little cloudy, and ready to work with a will. He well understood that the commanders of their force wished mainly to make use of his reputation and Temeraire's, and by that expedient recruit sufficient numbers of ferals to their cause, or disaffect enough of Napoleon's allies, to shift the balance of aerial power in their favor. Well enough: but given this priceless week, he meant to exercise his new authority further than those who had given it to him had perhaps intended.\n\nThere were guns strung out along all the roads from Russia, making a dawdling progress westward, and in a week Laurence thought they might gather up as many as three hundred of them, if the Prussian beasts were sent to carry them. Dyhern did not resist the order, beyond sighs, now that Laurence had the authority to give it.\n\nThe Russian greys he decided, not without some trepidation, to put to the task of supply. They were so ideally fitted-out for the task in every respect but their own unmanageable hunger: they could pick up languages with almost as much facility as Temeraire himself, could outcarry beasts nearly twice their size; besides this, they were not of much use on the battlefield, being neither particularly swift, nor maneuverable, and inclined to timidity whenever they felt themselves unobserved. Laurence had every expectation of their being far more valuable as a kind of replacement for the supply-dragons of the Chinese legions\u2014so long as they did not go flying off madly with the supply to gorge themselves and hoard the excess in some concealed place.\n\n\"Oh?\" Temeraire said, when Laurence had made the proposal, with a look so doubtful it nearly dissuaded him.\n\n\"We will make a single trial, at least,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Perhaps it may be a small trial?\" Temeraire said, with an anxious look over at the porridge-pits.\n\nLaurence gathered the greys together, and with Temeraire and Grig as interpreters laid his intentions out for them. \"You shall be responsible not merely for carrying the army's supply, but for knowing its state,\" he added, \"and in particular its state after you yourselves have eaten; you must deduct your own share and eat first, to save the cost of carrying your own day's food.\" He emphasized this point with some calculation: he knew very well it would recommend the duty to all of the greys, irregularly fed as they were.\n\n\"And you must all keep in mind,\" Temeraire added, with a far more narrow and stern look from his lowered head, swept in a suspicious circle across the assembled dragons, who shrank away a little, \"that anyone who should steal food will of course never again be trusted with so important a task. We have made these special sashes to mark those dragons allowed to receive supply,\" here he nosed at a heap of rather ragged strips of fabric, each embroidered with something approximating the shape of a number, which had been hastily produced by the hands of many ground crewmen, \"and anyone who steals will have their number revoked at once.\"\n\nThe greys asked many skeptical and repetitive questions\u2014\"We may eat every day? Even if we do not fight? We may eat first? Truly, every day?\"\u2014which illustrated so well their miserable state, and how little expectation they had of anything better, that Laurence had an effort not to upbraid Ilchenko, when he muttered none too quietly that the food would be thrown away.\n\nTen beasts were chosen for the first run, and returned the next morning full-bellied and heavily laden with sacks full of wheat and pendulous nets of stupefied pigs, much to the envy of their fellows. A second trial sent twenty along with the first ten; the third day saw sixty more gone, and by the fourth day all of the greys had been spread out across the Continent, bringing in supply on so steady a pace that the aerial forces for the first time exceeded their own requirements, and Laurence's supply-officer Lieutenant Doone was jubilantly reporting himself able to offer grain to the infantry, instead of enduring the scowls and mutters of their quartermasters for begging it of them.\n\nLaurence received the news in his cabin with grim satisfaction, as he studied his maps urgently: two days only remained of his precious week, and a battery of small red flags, presently scattered along the line of the Caucasus Mountains, marked the still-distant positions of the Chinese legions. \"How many more dragons of middle-weight size might we support?\"\n\n\"Forty comfortably, sir, I should say,\" Doone answered.\n\nLaurence nodded. He had not dared to ask the legions to send him any troops, when he could not supply them; now the time was short, but he thought not insurmountably so. He had to write at once, but Temeraire was their drillmaster now, and Laurence did not mean to distract him for even a moment from that task. Every fighting dragon of their force, and all the ferals who now steadily came in to join them, had been delivered to his rather ungentle care, and no small effort was required to bring them into any kind of unified order.\n\n\"Send me Midwingman Roland, if you please,\" he said, and sent Winters to find him a narrow paintbrush, and paper large enough to support a letter to a dragon.\n\nRoland knew more of writing Chinese than any of his other men, and together they made an attempt. The result, Laurence had to admit, was not very graceful. \"We might ask Ning if she can make it out,\" Roland suggested doubtfully, when they had finished.\n\nRequiescat had flatly refused to carry Ning any further, after the battle of Dresden; he had been responsible for carrying two long guns, the whole day, as well as a great number of infantrymen. But she had only said, \"I can fly for myself now, I expect, and I will catch you up if I must fall behind.\"\n\n\"And why haven't you been doing it before now, I would like to know,\" Requiescat said indignantly.\n\nNing had indeed managed to mostly keep pace with the company throughout their retreats, appearing perhaps a few hours after they made camp. She had established herself on a smallish outcrop on the heights, adorned by a delicate waterfall trickling over mossy rocks and exceptionally difficult to reach on foot, which gave her an excellent view of the maneuvers of the beasts under Temeraire's tutelage.\n\nAfter Laurence ordered some flags waved in her direction, she flew down. \"How energetic they all seem!\" she remarked, landing. \"I must congratulate Temeraire on his efforts. I wonder if he has noticed that those large and quarrelsome dragons from Russia are flying in an awkward way?\"\n\nLaurence laid the letter before her, and Ning regarded it as sorrowfully as a master gardener presented with a scraggly and unwatered seedling. \"It is decipherable,\" she said, in tones of enormous generosity, \"but perhaps you might wish to fix that character, in the second row: I do not believe you mean to say that you will attack the legions' supply.\" She drew the corrected version in the dirt, which omitted one careless streak of ink.\n\n\"It is indeed to be hoped that some part of the legions will arrive in time,\" Ning added thoughtfully, as she watched Emily repair the letter. \"I have noted the increase of your ranks, and the improvement in your supply, but from what I have seen of Napoleon's forces, I still fear he must defeat you in battle, if you do not have any of the legions. Do you suppose they will come?\"\n\n\"I cannot allow your conclusion,\" Laurence said, although he felt a disquieting pang at Ning's certainty: their position would indeed be markedly more vulnerable, without the legions, although he did not subscribe to such a degree of pessimism. \"But I think there is every likelihood of their arriving in time.\"\n\nHe climbed the heights after to observe their forces at drill. They were certainly improved already; Laurence could give himself the pleasure of believing that much. But he saw, also, what had inspired Ning's certainty: their forces were heavily slanted towards the separate ends of draconic size, light-weights and heavy-weights; looking upon them he could almost see the hollow space which that trained core of middle-weight beasts would neatly fill.\n\nWell, the message had gone, and there was nothing more that could be done to bring them. He went down from the heights, and refused to permit himself dismay. Two days remained."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "And yet they disappeared all too quickly. \"I would be glad of another two weeks,\" Temeraire said, yawning extremely wide, exposing all his teeth and a considerable stretch of gullet traveling back into a darkness which had lately enveloped many gallons of porridge and a haunch of venison besides, \"but I think we will really do quite well, most of us. There is no teaching the Russian heavy-weights anything; that is the only point on which I cannot call myself satisfied. They are all delighted with the notion of prize-money, but they will not pay attention to signals at all. They will only go straight in and start fighting. Do you suppose there is any chance of armoring them better? I would just as soon load them with spikes and mail, so they cannot be either boarded or brought down, and then we may send them in whenever we should need some very hard fighting. One must do them justice; they are very good at fighting, if not at listening.\"\n\n\"I will see what can be done,\" Laurence said. \"We may be able to shift something from the Prussians. I am inclined, if you think we can spare them, to place their heavy-weights entirely at the service of the artillery, even on the field. Napoleon will still have us outgunned, but if we can swiftly bring more metal to bear where it is most needed, we may overcome his advantage.\"\n\nTemeraire murmured his agreement, but he was already falling asleep. Laurence rested his hand on the breathing muzzle a little longer, and sighed; he would have given much for two more weeks as well. But the armistice was over. No treaty had emerged from Dresden, where Metternich had reportedly spent the entire week closeted with the Emperor. Napoleon would be on the move at first light, and peace would be won only on the battlefield.\n\nLaurence walked back to his cabin by way of the courier-clearing\u2014a route which took him nearly half a mile out of his way and wasted precious sleep; but he could not help making one final visit. By his best estimate, the answer from the legions might have come yesterday, ought to have come to-day, and could yet come tomorrow without disaster. After that, hope would have failed: they would face Napoleon again before even a small part of the Chinese legions might join their force.\n\nWord would be sent to his quarters at once, if a Jade Dragon landed; Laurence knew it very well. Nevertheless, his feet took him past the courier-clearing, and as he drew near, he heard the leathery flap of wings aloft, a dragon coming down, and saw the two blue flares and one green, which were the safe-passage signal for their camp. His steps quickened to an undignified pace, and he nearly ran up onto Hammond's heels: that gentleman was standing at the edge of the clearing, his hands clasped anxiously, and staring up into the dark.\n\n\"I beg your pardon, Mr. Hammond,\" Laurence said, extremely surprised to find him there.\n\n\"Oh\u2014! Admiral!\" Hammond cried aloud: equally surprised, with less right to be so, and a look of anxiety Laurence could not understand.\n\nThe dragon came down. She was an unfamiliar beast, a heavy courier in Austrian colors, wearing a white flag of parley. She was carrying passengers: gentlemen passengers, swathed thickly in furred oilskins for the journey, who climbed down with the awkwardness of men not used to go aloft very often.\n\nOne of them had especial difficulty, and required the support of a gold-handled cane when he reached the ground; Laurence appalled realized it was none other than Monsieur de Talleyrand himself, whom report had restored to Napoleon's service\u2014as though Hammond had chosen to invite a pair of the Emperor's eyes to come and wander about their covert, and look in on all the latest arrangements of their aerial forces.\n\nThat Hammond was responsible was plain: he had already gone forward to his guests, greeting the second passenger as Count Metternich. He had surely united the ministers here for some secret final attempt at negotiation. Laurence was sorry to learn of anything so plainly not meant for his own eyes, but any sense of intrusion he might have felt was under the circumstances exploded by Hammond's indiscretion, which he now evidently meant to crown by leading Napoleon's minister along the main track which led down into the field-covert and directly past their assembled forces\u2014including all the ferals which had lately been recruited to their cause.\n\n\"Mr. Hammond, sir, forgive me, you have been turned around; I think you must mean to take this path,\" Laurence said loudly, and catching Hammond by the arm drew him to the slighter track at the opposite end of the clearing, which swung out wide around the covert to reach the headquarters, and was used by those nervous of coming too near the dragons. \"Sir,\" he said, low but sharply, \"if you have not before considered the material value to Napoleon of any intelligence about the disposition of our aerial forces, I must ask you do so now. Keep Monsieur de Talleyrand from sight of the clearings, and do not bring him back here. I will send the beast on to headquarters to wait for you.\"\n\nHammond colored and stammered an apology at once. \"Very sorry\u2014I assure you there was no\u2014all my apologies, Admiral, you are right, of course,\" and after a moment's hesitation added, \"We will be on the west slope, at the green farmhouse\u2014I did not like to trouble you for a passage\u2014\"\n\n\"Then I will have one of our couriers escort the Austrian courier there,\" Laurence said, not much appeased; Hammond ought not have put such a peculiar value on asking for the small inconvenience of an escort for his courier at the cost of exposing them all to the bright, curious looks of Talleyrand, who even now observed their whispered conversation placidly, and without any evident qualms at overhearing whatever he might. The only comfort was the lateness of the hour, which should have bleached away the colors of the dragons and sent most of them to sleep; Talleyrand could have got no very exact count from aloft.\n\nBy the time Laurence had made the arrangements and seen the ministers off to their negotiations without further harm to secrecy, an hour had been consumed, and the full dark had descended. No other couriers had come.\n\nHe knew he ought to seek his own rest. But he lingered a little longer, to the ill-concealed disgust of the watch, who plainly would have liked nothing better than to go to sleep themselves even though they were on duty. He paced away another half an hour, by the glass, before at last he took himself away.\n\nHe was at the very door of his cabin when one of the watch-officers came running after him, even more disgusted now and panting, to tell him a Jade Dragon had arrived, and to hand him a scroll, written in Chinese. Laurence turned it right-way up and read it swiftly. \"Very good\" was all he said, and the watch officer went away even more disgruntled, without even gossip to carry; but Laurence went into his cabin and shut the door, and when he fell upon his cot he slept at once, dreamlessly, and well.\n\n\"Laurence,\" Temeraire said, a little nervously, \"I think we have done it, although perhaps I ought not say so; but surely we have won a battle at last? Really won it, I mean, not only in the dispatches.\" He did not quite dare to believe it: after so much tiresome running away, to see the French retreating for once was very unusual, and he worried perhaps it might be a trick of some sort. \"Perhaps we ought to send some scouts to our rear,\" he added, \"to be sure there is no-one coming up behind us. Where is that Davout fellow? I still remember how very unpleasant it was when he nearly surprised us, at the battle of London.\"\n\n\"Davout is in Hamburg,\" Laurence said, which was very comforting, as that city was several hundreds of miles distant, \"and we are quite certain that Napoleon has no troops anywhere in our rear; no, I think we have carried the day.\"\n\nThe poor little village of Reichenbach had not survived its encounter with two quarrelsome armies: there was scarcely a building left standing, and the sad wreck of a big French Papillon Noir lay sprawled in the smashed heap of a barn, fragments of stone and shingles and the corpses of soldiers scattered all around his body. The legions were methodically pressing the French corps back all along the leading edge of battle, exposing ever more of their artillery and infantry, and now at last Temeraire could really see some use in the Russian heavy-weights: it was not that they had begun to listen better, or follow sensible tactics at all, for they had not; but it did not seem necessary. Laurence had set a sizable bounty upon each gun captured, and in their eagerness the Russian beasts flung themselves ferociously and heedless down into the French ranks and began laying about with teeth and claws, and the poor artillery-men were fleeing wildly in every direction at once.\n\n\"I think we must add a bonus, the next battle, for guns taken unspiked,\" Laurence said: he was observing the same, through his glass. \"We will take at least a hundred to-day, I think. Temeraire, pray will you pass the word to the legions to concentrate their attentions upon the French right flank? If we can break that group of middle-weights there, we will open them nicely to the Austrian advance.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Temeraire said, and roared a low sequence of three notes, which brought one of the Jade Dragons to his side immediately to relay orders, but before he could issue his commands, Yu Shen backwinged a little distance away in a respectful attitude, and Ning suddenly came up on his right and hovered beside him. Now she appeared, when all the hard work had been done, Temeraire thought resentfully; he had barely landed all day, and had scarcely had time for more than a few gulps of porridge, and that cold.\n\n\"Well, what do you want?\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"I wonder if you might consider sending the legions against the center,\" Ning said.\n\n\"No, not in the least,\" Temeraire said. \"The Imperial Guard is anchoring the center, with a hundred Incan beasts, besides their Grand Chevaliers, and you can see the guns for yourself. We should be rolled up straightaway if we pressed the attack, and then our general advance would be broken. The suggestion is quite absurd\u2014whyever would you propose such a thing?\" he added, belatedly curious. He could not make out any reason for it, unless perhaps Ning meant to lead them into a trap for some peculiar reason of her own, but even then, she would have had to think them really quite stupid to listen.\n\n\"All you have said is perfectly true,\" Ning said, \"until one considers that there are sixty heavy-weights approaching the French rear. If you should draw the French center forward even by quite a small margin, you should weaken their line, and thus expose their entire retreat.\"\n\n\"But why should there be sixty heavy-weights in the French rear, and where have they come from?\" Temeraire said. As a wish to be granted by some particularly benevolent spirit, perhaps the God that Laurence was so fond of, the notion appealed to him greatly: it would only be justice that they should come up from behind Napoleon for once, although he did not see how they could have managed it. \"It cannot be Excidium and Lily, from Spain; they have only just crossed the Pyrenees by now, and they had a great many dragons to manage over there, anyway.\"\n\nHe finished on an interrogative note, hoping despite himself, but Ning said, \"It is not them: it is the dragons from the convocation, the ones you called the Tswana.\"\n\n\"There is no reason it should be the Tswana,\" Temeraire said. \"Not that it would not be very handsome of them to help us,\" he added, \"but I do not think they care a fig whether we should win, or Napoleon.\"\n\n\"However fruitless it may be to guess at their motives,\" Ning said, \"one may nevertheless conclude their intentions, from their having taken up a position ideally calculated to fall upon Napoleon's rear, and having failed to offer him any assistance in his present difficult circumstances. In any case, I can hardly call their motives very obscure: if we should defeat Napoleon, they must prefer to have us in their debt.\"\n\nTemeraire noticed, not without a little irritation, that suddenly Ning had decided to include herself in their ranks, with all this we and us. \"Yes, but we\u2014Laurence and myself, that is, and our friends,\" he pointedly noted, \"\u2014will not defeat Napoleon with one battle,\" but then he looked at the field again, and imagined sixty heavy-weight dragons added upon it, and slowly said, \"Laurence\u2014Laurence, if we should break their center\u2014if we should rout the guard, and the Tswana should block a retreat to the west\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laurence said, his voice taut. \"Yes: we might have a chance to capture him, if the guard should break.\"\n\n\"One might have expected,\" Ning remarked a little tartly, \"that my advice would be well-founded: had you not better get about it?\"\n\nLaurence stood up in his carabiner straps and stepped to the side of Temeraire's neck, looking down at her. \"Ning,\" he said, in Chinese, \"I beg your pardon: I must ask you to give me your word before these witnesses,\" and he beckoned to Yu Shen and also Yu Guo, who had come a little closer to listen in, \"that the situation is as you have described it.\"\n\nNing said thoughtfully, \"Well, I am prepared to give my word that the Tswana are there, and that they number between forty and seventy beasts, the better part of whom are heavy-weight, and that they are ideally placed to strike at the French rear; however, more than this I will not avow. If you disagree with my conclusions, you may draw your own, and proceed as you like. I consider that I have discharged my duty to China, in offering you the fruits of my observation and my own advice, and if you now choose to discard so notable an opportunity, for want of assurances which I cannot provide with perfect certainty, I cannot hold myself responsible.\"\n\nLaurence was silent; Temeraire curved his head back towards him. \"We surely ought not miss the chance,\" he said anxiously: he perfectly understood the caution Laurence must have felt, and of course they would be in a very nasty position if the Tswana did not attack in the end. But he felt he could scarcely bear to let Napoleon slip away, again; and who knew but that he would find some clever new way of defeating them. \"Perhaps we might send someone around to see, and have a word with them?\"\n\nBut Laurence said, \"There is no time. Whatever chance there is must be a thin one; even a narrow avenue of escape must suffice for Napoleon to evade capture, and he will certainly begin his own withdrawal in short order now; the course of the day is decided, if nothing should change.\" He shut up his glass with a snap and said, \"Pass the word to concentrate our assault upon the center, at once,\" and then went on, to Temeraire's rising delight, \"and we must go in ourselves, to offer both support and reason; Napoleon and Lien especially will wonder less at the incaution of a frontal assault if we give them the excuse of your exuberance.\"\n\nLaurence sent Yu Guo to inform Granby of the plan, and then they were flying across the field: Temeraire felt himself loosed as though from a cannon-mouth, with a wild propulsive energy behind him. The armies below were engaged in a thinning struggle: everywhere French soldiers streamed westward into the trees and fields, in rout and retreat, and on the flanks, the Cossack cavalry was harrying them along. But in the center the Imperial Guard still held their positions, magnificently firm, their tall shakos like ranged checker pieces from above in even rows, and above them Temeraire counted half a dozen Grand Chevaliers in full equipage, with a surrounding cloud of Incan beasts too large to enumerate. He did spy two Copacati, the venom-spitters, and Maila Yupanqui himself was here, circling nervously above the rear.\n\n\"I am surprised he should not have insisted on staying behind with the Empress,\" Temeraire said, with a snort.\n\n\"Napoleon can ill afford to leave his staunchest supporters behind in Paris, in his present circumstances,\" Laurence said.\n\nThey were closing: Temeraire gathered his breath and roared out his challenge, envisioning the force of it thundering like a wave upon the ranks of their enemies and crashing upon them. He roared again, and once more as he drew into striking range, the legions falling into place at his rear and roaring with him, heartened. The screen of lighter dragons at the fore of Napoleon's force tumbled away like pebbles in surf, and Temeraire had the gratification of seeing Lien's head come up, her ruff spreading wide as she heard his approach.\n\nShe bent down towards a man on the ground beside her: Temeraire was able to pick Napoleon out, when she spoke to him. The Emperor wore a plain grey coat and blue hat with no decoration at all; he looked plainer than his Guardsmen. It would be so very easy to miss him in the crowd, Temeraire thought anxiously, but he had to take his eyes away: half a dozen Incan middle-weights were converging upon him, bent on checking their advance.\n\nThe Incans' feathery scales had the effect of making them seem larger than their size, and were handy besides for turning lead balls and canister-shot. Forthing shouted, \"Fire at will!\" and the sharp retort of the rifles went off as the middle-weights closed, but the Incan beasts did not flinch.\n\nTemeraire turned to slash with his talons and met an Incan middle-weight's peculiar eye, vivid green on the outer rim, yellow-blue-streaked on the inside; she looked squarely at him, their paces matched for a moment, and then darted her head down trying to bite his wing-joint. He folded his wing in on that side and rolled sideways into her, blowing out a little of his wind; his weight landed squarely on her and drove a great gasp of air from her body. He kept rolling until he came off her other side, and both of them dropped a hundred feet or so below the cluster of dragons.\n\nHe snapped out his own wing again and caught an updraft as she tumbled away struggling to right herself. A scattering of bombs fell away from his belly-netting, Challoner calling the orders faintly below, and the Incan lost another hundred feet in evasions and had to turn back and hurry to the safety of her ranks.\n\n\"Temeraire, ware above!\" Roland called: and he darted a quick look up. He had lost some height himself, and one of the Copacati meant to try to seize the advantage, a silver-green arrow darting towards him.\n\n\"Pass the word to ready boarders,\" Laurence said, and Temeraire flattened his ruff. Of course it would be splendid to take a Copacati prisoner, if they could\u2014this one was rather larger than the one Iskierka had dueled, back in Talcahuano, he thought. But Challoner would naturally lead the boarding party, and it would be of all things wretched to lose a fine lieutenant just when he had finally got a satisfactory one, and Temeraire had a struggle to repress the instinct to twist away too quickly for anyone to go over.\n\nThe Copacati spat: a thin black stream of poison jetted narrowly into the air, but with a skillful twist of her body she pulled up and fanned her wings at the stream twice, dispersing it into a fine cloud of mist. \"Temeraire, your eyes!\" Laurence shouted, and Temeraire shut them tight at once and twisted aside, Laurence calling the mark as he whirled blind through the sky. One hapless middle-weight came into his way, trying to claw at him, and was bowled over for his trouble; Temeraire cracked open an eye when the poor fellow began crying out noisily as he himself was caught by the mist of venom.\n\nBut Temeraire had got out of range himself; with a quick double-thrust of his wings he closed in on the Copacati as she circled back for another pass, too quick for her to spit again, and seized her from below, belly to belly. The feathery scales now offered him an advantage, better purchase than he might have had otherwise; he gripped onto her shoulder-joints and snapped at the underside of her neck, forcing her to dart her head up and away from him.\n\nShe raked at him with her back legs, hissing, and he could not roar, either, while he had to keep her head off him; but his bellmen were throwing grappling-hooks up to catch on her harness, and swarming up the lines.\n\n\"Pray be careful, Challoner,\" Temeraire called as he twisted away, when they had gone over, \"and I will certainly have words with you, if you lose her,\" he added to the Copacati, in the Incan tongue.\n\n\"Then you shouldn't be sending her jumping through the sky!\" the Copacati returned smartly, not without some justice Temeraire had to admit, and made another darting stab at him with her long glistening fangs. \"Perhaps I will keep her,\" she added tauntingly.\n\nTemeraire flared his ruff angrily, and with an enormous heave twisted them bodily over and thumped the Copacati soundly at the base of her neck with the side of his head. The blow made his jaw ache, but it was worth it to check that sort of talk, and it shook all her own scanty crew loose and dangling from their carabiners, so at least they had no advantages over his own boarding party gone over.\n\n\"Temeraire, we must fall back,\" Laurence called: the French forces were taking the bait, pressing forward everywhere to meet them.\n\nTemeraire reluctantly let go and threw himself away from the Copacati, beating furiously, and managed to roar briefly into her face. He could not build enough resonance to properly roar and knock her back, but she recoiled enough he could open up some room between them. He fell back on the legions, who had split into their three-beast squadrons, and were skillfully fending off the French beasts pressing upon them.\n\nThey could not hold their ground long against numbers and weight so much the greater than their own force. They did not really want to hold it, of course: as they fell back, the French dragons pressed forward to keep on them, and in so doing left exposed the infantry and guns of the Old Guard at their rear.\n\nBut Temeraire began to feel a little anxious, as their position was becoming undoubtedly awkward. The flanks of the French aerial corps had begun to close in upon their sides, and they were increasingly in danger of finding themselves enveloped. Many of the Chinese dragons were beginning to take real injury: it seemed that in every direction Temeraire looked, he saw one of the red-gold beasts falling out of the ranks to retreat to the surgeons, many of them trailing black blood as they flew. The remaining squadrons pulled together, and re-formed themselves in a disciplined manner: along the line in reverse order from left to right, any dragon who lost a fighting-partner shifted over to fill a gap in the next squadron with an opening. It was elegantly done, without disruption to their maneuvering, but their ranks were steadily compressing as a consequence, exposing the survivors to more of the enemy's force.\n\nThe Chinese commander Zhao Lien winged around from her position at the rear of the force to join Temeraire. \"Honored one, may this humble soldier suggest that we make arrangements to withdraw over the shelter of the artillery, if it is not inconvenient,\" which was a polite way of saying he had got them thoroughly into the soup, and there was now no way out of it except to simply run away, which would certainly give the French every opportunity to wreak disaster on the allied troops beneath them, and perhaps even turn back the tide of the battle as a whole.\n\nNapoleon, too, had seen their plight; perhaps even before they themselves had marked it. Down on the ground, the ranks of the Old Guard were moving forward, and with that anchor the French withdrawal everywhere was halting. Companies were re-forming and wheeling around, light-weight beasts dropping to pick up cannon and replace them in firing position, the enormous clockwork of Napoleon's war machinery turning under its master's hand.\n\nBut the movement was accompanied from some distant place over the hills by a steady deep drum-beat, growing louder and louder even above the cannon-roars, a great pounding noise that resonated peculiarly in Temeraire's skull as it climbed, and climbed still further. The other dragons around him all paused, turning as they looked back towards the French rear. Shadows were forming out of the deep bank of grey clouds to the west, and then the clouds were streaming away as a wide row of dragons was suddenly pouring down over the western slope directly at Napoleon's rear: dragons in every vivid color, and on every back a drummer sat, pounding furiously to keep the time of their wings.\n\nTheir bellies had been covered with pads of thick grey leather. They did not fly separately or even in formations, but in short lines of four and carrying a peculiar device that looked like the front edge of a plow more than anything else Temeraire knew. The teeth were made of curved elephant tusks, bound into a thin frame of wood and metal. The Tswana dragons plunged them down among the troops and swept forward, turning over men and guns and earth all together.\n\nThe French dragons wheeled around in alarm to meet their advance, but as they did, a second wave of Tswana dragons came arrowing down from far overhead: they must have climbed very high, to be able to come swooping out of the clouds so, and their plummeting speed was enormous; they struck the body of the French corps with shocking force, and drove dozens of beasts to the ground, smashing them into their own artillery and men before they climbed a little shakily off again, and shook themselves and jumped back into the air.\n\nTemeraire stared, a little. He had never seen the Tswana fight properly, dragon to dragon: he had seen them tear apart the Cape Town settlement, and its fort, but that assault had been carried out in a fury of rage and revenge by dragons maddened at the loss of their tribes, and anyway it had nearly been over, by the time he had arrived. This was a great deal more systematic and impressive, not to say a little alarming; but after a moment he shook himself off, and roared a welcoming challenge before he led the legions forward to help. The French center was collapsing entirely; Iskierka and the Prussian dragons were turning their left flank, forcing the remaining dragons there onto the already-great disorder behind them, and as the dragons cleared the field and began a steady bombardment of the infantry squares below, the Russian and Prussian cavalry charged, sabers raised and shouting, into their disorganized ranks.\n\nThe French retreat, half turned around, now fell into complete rout. Men were fleeing the field in masses, companies disintegrating. Temeraire swept back and forth trying to see past the confusion and pick out Lien. On the left flank he could see Marshal Saint-Cyr lifting away on a Petit Chevalier with a clinging mass of staff-officers aboard, making their escape towards the western road still held by the French rear-guard, their guns firing steadily and hot.\n\nThe Old Guard had drawn together, above and below, to make themselves a sheltering box with the Emperor inside. Blowing horns were summoning the heavy-weights back into a knot, and Temeraire roared in fury as he saw Lien at last, well-hidden behind a screen of artillery and heavy-weight dragons: Napoleon was being thrust bodily aboard her back by his soldiers. \"Laurence, Laurence, she is getting away!\" he cried, hovering, half-hoping Laurence would order him to charge, to throw himself through that crowd of dragons.\n\n\"I am sorry, my dear,\" Laurence said heavily. \"There are too many of them\u2014\"\n\nBut suddenly there were not. The Tswana had gathered their first fruits of surprise, and now re-formed into a large company on the French right flank, spear-shaped, preparing to sweep around and engage the French heavy-weights. There were sixty of them; Temeraire had thirty left of the Chinese legions at his back, and Eroica was leading some forty Prussian beasts, with Iskierka supporting them. The French had nearly a hundred beasts still gathered, and in tight formation could have held for an hour even against all of them pressing in.\n\nBut the Tswana roared, and Temeraire roared with them, and suddenly Maila Yupanqui, who had climbed aloft, gave a loud bugling cry\u2014and broke.\n\nTemeraire stared in astonishment. It was not just him, either. All the Incan dragons were turning to follow him as he fled, snarling up all the other French dragons in their passage. The proud ranks of the Imperial Guard's aerial forces scattered. There were only thirty dragons left together, in the center, and Temeraire heard Laurence shout; his wings were already beating, launching him forward even as Lien flung herself into the sky.\n\nLaurence endured with some impatience another two dozen congratulatory messages as he returned to Temeraire's clearing from the headquarters, the morning's dispatch still crumpled in his hand. It was a slow progress: officers he had never met stopped him to make him their bows, and as he passed he overheard himself pointed out by his aviator's coat, over and over again.\n\nHe would have been honored by the acclaim and grateful for the warm feeling, if bestowed for his own labors. Indeed, half his irritation was for the sense of being robbed of his and Temeraire's justly earned laurels, in exchange for a crown of fool's gold. But the dispatches said nothing of the daring assault upon the center by the Chinese legions, which had lured Napoleon into exposing his Guard to the Tswana attack; indeed the Tswana themselves had been given only a grudging part in the victory at all, a brief mention of their strike into the French rear. And nothing whatsoever was mentioned of the collapse of the Incan ranks. Instead, so far as Laurence could see, the world was to believe that he and Temeraire had, in a fit of valor and what should have been the most extreme stupidity, flung themselves headlong through a hundred dragons, and defeated Lien in a single chivalric combat, presumably while those hundred dragons looked on and did nothing to interfere.\n\nHe had read the dispatch that morning himself, appalled, but no-one at the headquarters had listened to his protests long enough to promise any correction; they had been too busy to shake his hand, and even the Tsar himself, who had received him personally, had only clapped him on the shoulder, and interrupted to praise his modesty.\n\nSo he returned the bows shortly, and walked onwards without making much conversation except to return the compliments to his service. All through his slow progress a disquiet crept over him by degrees, and even when he at last passed beyond the reach of his well-wishers and reached the clearing where Temeraire stood vigilant over Lien's silent and huddled form, Laurence could not take his ease, or settle to the large obligation of letters and reports which waited on his desk.\n\nHe came out of his tent again, restless, and put a hand on Temeraire's side. \"I do not see why they need so many guards upon him,\" Temeraire said, a little disapprovingly: he referred to the cottage visible near-by which was now Napoleon's prison, ringed by three companies of heavy infantry all standing to close attention. \"It is not as though I would not see, if he tried to come out and rejoin Lien; they might trust me for that, I think.\"\n\n\"Their presence must discourage any hope of a rescue, which his Marshals might yet entertain,\" Laurence said. \"Even you might be distracted briefly, if they managed to descend with a large force of dragons.\" He stood looking at the small house, and then said abruptly, \"I will return soon, if you will pardon me.\"\n\nHe walked to the cottage slowly. He felt little compunction about the worry which his appearance caused the Prussian colonel in charge of overseeing the guards, who plainly did not like to deny entry to the hero of the hour; but Laurence did fear his presence might be felt as an insult. \"Pray ask His Majesty if he will receive me,\" Laurence said. \"I would not wish to intrude.\"\n\nThe colonel, relieved, sent to inquire; he plainly thought and hoped that the Emperor would refuse any visitor whom he could avoid, and was crestfallen when Laurence was invited to go inside. \"I would scarcely try to take him out of his prison,\" Laurence said to the man, taking pity, \"when I put him in it, only yesterday.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" the colonel said, dismally, and let him go in.\n\nThe cottage interior was dark, after the brilliance of the morning sun; Laurence stood blinking in the entryway, and then went down the hall to the one real chamber of the house. Napoleon was standing before the small window, looking down the hill towards Lien, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. He turned round at Laurence's step, and inclined his head: calm and composed, even amidst the wreck of his hopes. \"Captain\u2014or Admiral, I should say: I hope you are well? You took no injury in the battle?\"\n\nLaurence bowed. \"I am, Your Majesty.\" He hesitated, then; he did not know what to say. He did not fully know what had brought him, except a dislike of being given more credit than was his due, but that could hardly matter to Napoleon. Nor could Laurence make him any kind of apology: he could not be sorry to have captured the Emperor; still less to see peace finally within reach.\n\n\"You are a dull companion,\" Napoleon said, breaking the silence. \"What stifles your tongue? Have you been sent to offer me terms?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said, with a private relief; he could imagine no task less to his taste. \"No; I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, I only wished to\u2014\" Here he halted, struggling again, but the Emperor came to his rescue.\n\n\"Ah, come,\" Napoleon said, crossing the room to him, and holding out his hands, clasped Laurence by the shoulders; he drew him close and kissed him on both cheeks, in the Gallic fashion, and then more familiarly patted him upon the cheek gently with a hand. \"Do you suppose I would ever reproach you, of all my foes? I am sorry only to have faced you across the field, when you ought to have been by my side. Loss is the hazard of battle. One who cannot bear to taste it cannot be a soldier. Now come and sit with me, and tell me how the fighting unfolded, from your side. There is nothing like being dragon-back for observing, but I could not always be aloft, yesterday, myself.\"\n\nThey sat together talking quietly of the battle and sketching maneuvers on the top of the one small table with the charred end of a stick from the fireplace. Laurence had never admired him so well in victory as in defeat: the Emperor's resolution in the face of disaster, and his generosity to the man most directly responsible for his captivity, had true grace in it. No-one disturbed them for nearly an hour, and then a noise from the hall drew Napoleon's head up suddenly alert, the attention of the hawk. Steps came along the hallway, softer than boot-heels, and Laurence rose as three men entered the room, attired formally: Hammond, who started to see him there, accompanied by Talleyrand and Count Metternich.\n\n\"Admiral Laurence,\" Hammond said, nearly stammering, \"I wonder at\u2014have you\u2014\"\n\n\"His Majesty was gracious enough to receive me,\" Laurence said, and would have excused himself, but the Emperor waved a hand.\n\n\"Perhaps you will give the Prince de B\u00e9n\u00e9vent your chair, as there is none other,\" Napoleon said, meaning Talleyrand, \"but there can be no objection to your remaining. What is done in this room must soon be known in all Europe, and you cannot leave it with a tale of dishonor, save if I fail in my oaths to France, which I trust these gentlemen know I will never do.\" He spoke with an almost jocular air, but there was steel in the grey eyes.\n\nThere was a pause, an awkward silence, as the three ministers exchanged looks. Hammond in particular plainly wished Laurence anywhere but in the room, and Metternich looked little better pleased. But Talleyrand said genially, \"Surely His Majesty only speaks the truth,\" and limped over to the chair; seating himself he leaned in to the Emperor and said, \"Sire, I have the pleasure of delivering to you this letter, from the Empress: by the courtesy of the Tsar, I was granted the liberty of sending her a courier to inform her of your good health, and to receive this reply for you.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" Napoleon said, and seized the letter with real enthusiasm; he opened and read it with an intent, hungry look, nodding to himself a little. It was not long: he read it over quickly, twice, and then put it away in his breast. \"I am grateful for your kindness to Her Majesty. Now, gentlemen, I beg you not to hesitate further. Speak plainly: there is nothing to be gained by delay.\"\n\nTalleyrand bowed towards him from the waist, in his chair. \"Sire,\" he said, \"I will obey. It is the united demand of the allied forces that you must be removed from your throne as the price of peace. I regret that those who stand arrayed against France, on the cusp of invading her territory, refuse to consider any other outcome.\"\n\nNapoleon made a gesture of impatience, a quick flicking up of his hand: this was of no importance. \"My enemies know my life is in their power. They may kill me or banish me, as they please, but do not let them suppose that either to preserve my life or my freedom I should ever willingly yield my throne to the Bourbons, nor sacrifice the gains which the Revolution won for the French people.\"\n\nTalleyrand remained placid in the face of this dramatic speech. \"It has been agreed that Your Majesty shall abdicate in favor of your son,\" he said, \"with the Empress as regent.\"\n\nNapoleon paused, silenced. After a moment, he said, \"What of France?\"\n\n\"Upon your abdication, the enemy nations are prepared to sign an immediate armistice, recognizing her natural borders,\" Talleyrand said. \"So long as France yields to each of the allied nations a share of the dragon eggs presently laid in her breeding grounds.\"\n\n\"Belgium?\" Napoleon said quickly.\n\n\"Flanders shall be made part of the Netherlands,\" Talleyrand said. \"Wallonia remains to France.\" There was another brief silence. \"In exchange,\" Talleyrand continued, when Napoleon had made no answer, \"you are to surrender your throne, and retire permanently to the island of St. Helena. The British,\" here he nodded to Hammond, who had a stiff, uncomfortable expression, \"will undertake to guarantee your safety and comfort there, and that of your faithful dragon.\"\n\nLaurence overheard all this, standing awkwardly by the rough fireplace and staring at the dully glowing logs, conscious of both the impropriety of listening and the impossibility of doing anything else. He was determined at first not to really hear, to listen only in the base shipboard sense of some audible noise reaching his ears by the accident of enforced proximity, which was not to be understood or repeated, or treated as knowledge in any way. But he could not help it; he heard, and knew, and he was surprised\u2014there was no other way to describe his feelings. He was very surprised.\n\nThe exile would be a remarkably harsh one. St. Helena was an isolate half-tenanted rock under the control of the East India Company, valuable only as a way station on the sea-journey to Asia. Its population had been entirely imported, more than half of them as slaves, and there was but a single town which catered only to the shipping. Its distance from any other shore would make it a secure prison even for a dragon, and even the long-range couriers came but infrequently, which would bar any regular communication. To imprison Napoleon there, divided so thoroughly from his wife and child and all the world, was undeniably a cruelty, and of a sort which he had never visited upon his own conquered enemies despite many opportunities to do so.\n\nBut in every other respect these were terms offered to end a war, not ones dictated afterwards by its victors. Laurence knew it had long been the position of the British Government that Belgium must be wholly stripped from France, to safeguard Britain from another invasion; it had long been the position of all the monarchs of Europe that the legitimate kings of France should be restored. If Napoleon had been free, with all France eager and united at his back, Laurence would have been surprised to hear him offered such terms; when he was prisoner, after a sharp defeat, they seemed absurdly generous.\n\nHe was not alone in surprise. Napoleon, too, said nothing. He sat back in his narrow, hard-backed chair, gazing at Talleyrand for a period of silence with an almost baffled expression, as though he did not know what to make of what he heard. And then abruptly his face changed. The confusion went out of it, and for one moment his hand went to his breast-pocket, where the letter from the Empress had gone. He sprang up out of his chair and walked away to the window and stood there, his back to the room; his shoulders were very straight.\n\nLaurence stared at him, his own confusion unabated, and then looked round at Hammond. Hammond did not meet his eye, giving every appearance of finding the bare wooden floor of their chamber an object of intense interest, and Metternich also had a constrained expression, very still and controlled, with his hands clasped before him. Talleyrand only made no appearance of discomfort or consciousness; his looks remained perfectly easy and open, milky mild. He was the one to break the silence, gently prompting, \"Sire, will you make an answer?\"\n\nNapoleon moved his hand slightly to his side, a gesture not of refusal; only of denial. He was silent a little longer, then he said, \"You have the papers?\"\n\nMetternich produced a document from his coat; after a moment Napoleon turned from the window to take it. His face was changed wholly, gone utterly remote; he might have been cut out of stone. He read over the papers quickly, without sitting down, then put them on the table and reached for his pen and bent over and signed with a single swift flourish: Napoleon. He turning handed them back to Metternich, who received them with a bow.\n\n\"If I may express to Your Majesty\u2014\" Talleyrand began.\n\n\"You may not,\" Napoleon said over his shoulder, cold and contemptuous; not what the work of a servant who had brought him such remarkable terms ought to have deserved. He went back to the window, his hands clasped behind his back; a dismissal without a word."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Coming out of the cottage behind the three ministers, Laurence lengthened his stride and caught Hammond by the arm. \"Mr. Hammond,\" he said, \"I hope you will come and greet Temeraire: he will be glad to know you are well.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Hammond said, stifled. He looked longingly at the sedan-chair waiting to carry him away, back to the headquarters, and then said, \"Gentlemen, I hope you will excuse me,\" with a bow to his counterparts.\n\nHe walked away with Laurence across the field towards Temeraire, stumbling now and then, and picking his buckled shoes up out of the churned ground. Laurence waited until they were private enough, out of earshot, and said, \"I find myself in a false position, Mr. Hammond, and I would be glad of your assistance to escape it: I am sorry that all the dispatches, this morning, should have spoken in such excessive and inaccurate terms of my and Temeraire's part in the Emperor's capture yesterday.\"\n\nIt was a shot at a venture, but it bore fruit: Hammond darted a look at him, hunted\u2014enough, if Laurence had needed anything more than Napoleon's own reaction, to tell him there was something underhanded at work.\n\n\"I will certainly correct the misapprehension, as widely and as soon as I may,\" he continued grimly. \"If the Tswana had not disrupted his retreat, we could have done nothing, and our final capture depended entirely on the panic and flight of Napoleon's Incan escort. The dispatches have all proposed that we captured him in the face of an enormous force of dragons, making us figure in a truly heroic light, when we have only done our duty, in I hope an honorable but not an astonishing manner.\"\n\n\"Admiral,\" Hammond said, \"I beg you not to repine upon\u2014not to make an effort to\u2014There are certain considerations\u2014\"\n\nLaurence stopped and turned to face him. \"And what would these considerations be, Mr. Hammond, which have induced you and the ministers of four nations to jointly publish a fabricated report of the battle?\u2014And moreover, to have made the French an offer of terms which I should have been astonished to hear London approve under these circumstances: the Emperor our prisoner, the war certainly ended, and yet you hand the throne on to his son\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off even as Hammond raised an anxious hand to try to halt him. Too late: Laurence had understood at last. He saw before him suddenly the inexplicable flight of Napoleon's escort\u2014the vivid colors of the Incan dragons fleeing in a pack, the handful of Grand Chevaliers and the other French dragons swept up in their midst.\n\n\"Or I should say, to his wife,\" he finished, after a moment, with a sour taste of disgust in the back of his throat. \"Tell me, Hammond, how long have Talleyrand and the Empress conspired with you, to deliver the Emperor into our hands?\"\n\n\"Admiral\u2014\" Then Hammond flung up his hands in frustration, letting them fall limp, and said bluntly, \"Laurence, what would you have had us do?\"\n\nHe turned and walked away, his shoulders bowed, back to the sedan-chair. Laurence stood alone in the field, the cottage in the distance small and dark against the brilliancy of the blue summer sky, and the shadow of a man standing solitary by the window.\n\nThe empress, standing at the head of the stairs of the palace, kept one hand lightly resting in the crook of the Tsar's elbow as though she were fatigued by the effort of maintaining her position, and required his support to welcome the guests ascending to the Tuileries. For his part, he gave that support with a regal, cool expression, and if he felt any concern regarding the slate of highly anxious Incan dragons, all ruffled up into enormous size and peering over at the proceedings from the square, he did not show it, though more than one guest threw alarmed looks in their direction. She let go his arm for a moment, however, to welcome the King of Prussia with an embrace, and beckoning to reunite him with his son, standing beside her.\n\n\"I regret that I never met his mother,\" she said, \"but I have tried to offer him a little of that comfort which I might wish my own son to find if he were ever a guest in your own court, and I hope he one day shall be, now that our nations stand once more as dear friends.\"\n\nHer voice was clear, and projected well; Laurence overheard it where he stood waiting his own turn on the stairs, and the low approving murmurs which followed. \"They say she protected the prince, even after we came into the war,\" he overheard one Prussian officer saying to another. \"Who knows what would have become of him, otherwise, in Napoleon's power!\"\n\nThe celebration was very little to Laurence's taste. He had not yet learned to reconcile himself to the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument, and he had no pleasure in being presented to the Empress and being obliged to receive her hand. He said as little as possible, but he suspected his looks spoke for him, and said more than they should; the Empress looked at him with a certain thoughtfulness when he straightened.\n\nHe knew it for certain, later that evening, when little Winters came tapping on his door all yawns and a rumpled nightshirt, roused from her bed to find Laurence: an escort of French Guardsmen had come to take him to the Empress. His former gaoler Aurigny was at their head, bowing, and Laurence did not feel he could refuse the summons, as little as he wished to speak with Anahuarque again.\n\nLaurence silently followed his escort through the hallways to the Empress's sitting room, a small snug chamber with a balcony overlooking the garden where Maila Yupanqui slept with a slitted eye trained upon her lit window. Music still drifted over the trees from the distant ballroom, but the Empress had taken off her elaborate gown, and sat now in a brightly woven dress in the Incan style, loose and comfortable, which nearly disguised her growing belly. \"Come and sit with me, Admiral,\" she said, and nodded a dismissal to the guards, who glanced to one another in some concern for a moment before they reluctantly withdrew.\n\n\"I hope Your Majesty is well,\" Laurence said, remote, and only bowed rather than taking the seat she had offered him; he preferred to preserve all the distance which the intimacy she offered would have closed, and he was resolved to behave only with formal courtesy.\n\nBut she said, \"I am as well as can be hoped,\" as though lamenting the loss of the husband she had so neatly disposed of, and Laurence could not suppress a tightening of his jaw. She smiled a little, as though she had seen what she expected. \"But I think few of the Emperor's friends regret him as much as do you, his enemy.\"\n\nIn the face of this provocation, Laurence could not restrain himself. \"That some, on whose love he ought to have been able to depend, do not regret him, is certain.\"\n\n\"And you think me among that number,\" she said bluntly. \"You are wrong.\" She paused a moment, regarding him with her steady, dark eyes. \"I would like you to understand me, Admiral; I should be sorry that you thought such evil of me.\"\n\nAnd would be sorrier, Laurence thought, if he spread a story that did her so little credit. Few others had the power to do so, and he the only one who did not have good cause to conceal it. \"Your Majesty scarcely owes me any explanations, nor can I invite your confidence.\"\n\n\"I do not seek your silence, beyond what your judgment should consider best,\" she said. \"It grieves me that you should imagine me happy in the present circumstances. If I could have my husband here at my side, triumphant, once more the conqueror of Europe, only then could I call myself a happy woman.\"\n\n\"You might have had him here as the Emperor of France,\" Laurence said. \"Would that not have been enough?\"\n\n\"But I could not,\" she said. \"You know that I could not. You know my husband, Admiral.\"\n\nThis silenced him. Anahuarque added, after a pause, \"You may more justly say, I should have been content to go into exile along with him; to take him away to Pusantinsuyo. But it was my husband's duty to hazard everything for victory\u2014mine, to rescue our empire from defeat.\"\n\nUnwillingly, Laurence did begin to understand her a little more, and that peculiar retreat of her dragons in the final instants: she had offered only to let Napoleon fall into their hands, if he had already been defeated in battle\u2014and thus to end a war swiftly that had almost certainly been lost, but which his gifts and determination could have long prolonged.\n\n\"Tell me, if the choice had been put to him, do you think he would have preferred to flee with me to my country, or to keep his son upon the throne he won?\" Anahuarque asked, watching his face. \"Do you still accuse me of disloyalty?\"\n\nThere was much to be admired, in the strategic sense, in a plan which had permitted the Empress to enjoy the chance of complete victory, while hazarding very few of the risks of defeat. Laurence could only despise it a little less, for being a more limited conspiracy. But he remembered too clearly the father running through flames at Fontainebleau to save his son, heedless of his own risk; the swiftness with which Napoleon had signed the documents to accept his own exile, in exchange for handing on his throne.\n\n\"You have chosen, Your Majesty, as he would have chosen,\" Laurence said briefly. That, he could not deny.\n\nHe did not think she would ask him to say more, and indeed she nodded his dismissal, satisfied. He left angry, because she was right to be satisfied; she had indeed silenced him as thoroughly as she might have wished. He would have liked to spread the infamy of the conspiracy widely, and to heave away the credit he had not earned; he would have liked to expose her and those who had abetted the betrayal of which he had been made an instrument. But he could not, without serving a worse blow to the man who had been their victim. That she would keep Napoleon's son upon his throne, Laurence could not doubt, nor that Napoleon would have preferred that outcome to any other form of defeat."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "\"But Laurence, surely we have been trying to see Napoleon defeated, all these years,\" Temeraire said, a little perplexed. \"Do you mean that you are sorry, now, that he has lost?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"No, I would not see him restored if it were in my power, only\u2014\" He halted and shook his head, as though he could not put his feelings easily into words.\n\n\"Well, Napoleon has never seemed to me such a very bad fellow, but I am not in the least sorry that Lien has lost,\" Temeraire said. \"And this exile is by no means less than she deserves after the very underhanded way in which she behaved about the egg. I only wish they planned to put more guns on the shore, at that island, and they ought to station four heavy-weight dragons there at least. I do not think they properly respect what she is capable of doing.\" He sighed a little.\n\nLaurence shook his head in silence. He had given his opinions briefly, and advised how best to safeguard against Lien's sinking the ships, but he thought she could not be held captive long by guns or guards, however numerous. A single accomplice ship equipped with pontoons, somewhere off the shore, would make escape possible. Napoleon's true gaoler would be his own son. The ministers had bribed him so, to keep to his island, and so long as they left the boy on the throne, Napoleon would keep the bargain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "\"I should like to express my gratitude,\" Temeraire said a little uncertainly: he had come to the clearing where the Tswana dragons had made their camp with only the best intentions, and they had received him, but none of them had returned his introductions, and they would all stare so unblinkingly, as though they expected him to do something alarming; it gave him the uneasy feeling they might be right. \"\u2014mine, and of course Admiral Laurence's as well; and I dare say everybody else is grateful also, even if they have not shown it as they ought, yet. But I believe Mr. Hammond means to speak to your prince, when the opportunity arises, and discuss perhaps reopening some of your ports, at the Cape or\u2014\"\n\n\"He may save the trouble,\" one of the Tswana dragons, a large fellow in orange and green, interrupted rudely. \"You do not suppose we are ever going to let any of you slavers back in our territory?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Temeraire said, a little indignantly; he was not a slaver. \"I am sure I have no idea why you wanted to be helpful, then, if you choose to lump us all together.\"\n\nAnother dragon snorted. \"Why should we have helped any of you? We didn't want this Napoleon running things, and he would have, with a few thousand dragons under his hand. Now the rest of you can squabble it out among yourselves, and leave us alone.\"\n\n\"And I had meant to be so gracious,\" Temeraire said to Lily afterwards, when he had flown back to their own covert: which was not at all like a British covert, but a handsome ring of pavilions, each large enough to comfortably house a dozen heavy-weights, or more if they did not mind leaving a tail or a leg poking outside, and piling in. They were situated atop a high hill overlooking Rochefort harbor, presently a very picturesque scene with three dragon transports and a second-rate in harbor, and a flotilla of frigates and ships' boats scattered around them. In addition, the pavilion floors were raised from the ground with room to put coals beneath, in the best design; the weather was not so unpleasant that they were needed today, but thought had been given to the matter. It was rather an unhappy reminder of the conditions which did not await them in Britain, when at last they boarded those waiting transports and sailed back up the coast. \"I had even meant to make them a present.\"\n\n\"What sort of present?\" Lily asked interestedly. She and all the old formation had been gratifyingly pleased for his good fortune, and had come from the Peninsula with their own to report: King Joseph had attempted to flee Spain with tremendous heaps of treasure, and they had captured a caravan with no less than six wagons of silver plate, the prize-money for which had made them all respectably rich, even divided up.\n\n\"A golden chain,\" Temeraire said, \"with some very handsome emeralds: that Incan dragon gave it to me, when she so wanted to keep Challoner.\" He sighed a little; but as the Copacati had professed herself perfectly willing to go into the Aerial Corps, it meant Challoner should make captain straightaway, and Laurence had persuaded Temeraire that they could not stand in her way. Temeraire could not really like it, but the necklace had been a handsome consolation. \"I am sure it could not fail to please, but of course I am not going to give it to them now, when they have been so churlish.\"\n\n\"You might give it to me instead,\" Ning said; she had been apparently sleeping in a comfortable curled place upon the stones in the sun, but she lifted her head as though she had been listening, all the time.\n\n\"Whyever would I?\" Temeraire said warily.\n\n\"As a gift for the Emperor,\" Ning said, \"a gesture of respect and gratitude, and of congratulations on his ascension. I would be delighted to present it to him on behalf of yourself and Admiral Laurence.\"\n\nTemeraire flattened his ruff. \"So you are going to China, after all, and want to make a handsome appearance when you get there; I see.\"\n\n\"Yes, I think it the best course of action at present,\" Ning said calmly, ignoring his remarks. \"I cannot find that the new Emperor of France will even be able to talk for two years, much less go flying, and in any case one should like his situation to be of somewhat longer standing. In a few years, it may be time for me to pay a visit, and see how matters are progressing, but for the moment certainly I ought to be in China.\"\n\n\"I do not know why you mean to come back to visit, then; you cannot have both of them,\" Temeraire said.\n\n\"I do not see any reason against it,\" Ning said. \"They are both excellently placed, strategically, for the coming century, and one ought to plan ahead. It would not do to close any doors unnecessarily. Which is why you ought to give me the necklace,\" she added, \"and preserve those ties which the present victory must render much less politically useful. After all, the need for an excuse to make alliance is past, and with the death of the Jiaqing Emperor, the adoption of your admiral must have considerably less personal force. You would be well-advised to strengthen bonds with the new Emperor now, while the satisfaction of a joint victory warms his feelings towards you. It cannot but serve you well in future to have the relationship recognized. After all, I cannot find that Admiral Laurence will even have a post, when you have gone back to Britain, and he does not seem a particular favorite with your rulers.\"\n\nThis last understated the case, and Temeraire had not really considered that of course, now that the allied armies were disbanding, Laurence was no longer in command of anyone. He realized uncomfortably he did not really know if Laurence was even still an admiral at all.\n\n\"Oh, on that you may be easy,\" Excidium said, when Temeraire had roused him for a consultation, \"for my Jane was still an admiral even when those croakers in the Admiralty had stripped her of her post, back before Napoleon invaded us. But they may send you to the north of Scotland to fly patrols, or some other make-work. Anyway, Ning ain't wrong that it is always good to have more influence. Jane has said to me that she would collect a year's worth of letter-writing in influence by taking her coronet to some hostess's rout for a night, even if she would as lief be hanged as go to a ball. So it is well-worth preserving the connection, if you have it.\"\n\n\"And which I am sure Ning likes preserved for her own sake,\" Temeraire muttered afterwards, \"perhaps so she has an excuse to come visiting.\" But that did not mean she was not right; however, perhaps Laurence would not like to send such a gift, after all.\n\n\"Certainly I should not like to be encroaching,\" Laurence said, however, \"but I can hardly say he has not acknowledged the relationship, in a manner which permits me to ignore it. Aside from all the very real service Mianning has done our nation, his personal kindness to us more than merits the greatest warmth and respect, and it must be for him to first grow cold, before we can consider ourselves to be pursuing an unwanted connection. Perhaps you might consult with Gong Su, as to whether the gift would be suitable; some gesture at least, I think must be desirable.\"\n\nAnd naturally Gong Su was of the opinion that an elegant golden chain sized for a dragon, of the finest Incan craftsmanship, adorned with a dozen beautiful and valuable jewels, would be an eminently pleasing gift: who would not be pleased, Temeraire would have liked to know. So there was no help for it, and Temeraire disconsolately saw it laid into a handsome wooden box, with much padding of soft wool, and delivered to Ning just before her departure: the legions had already nearly all flown back, leaving only an honor-guard of forty dragons to accompany her home.\n\n\"Well, old fellow, at least you didn't have to buy it,\" Maximus said, nudging his shoulder by way of consolation as the box flew away; which was some comfort, except if one considered the lovely alteration the chain would have made to his bank-book, if it had been sold instead, and viewed its departure as the loss of that amount."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "\"Fare thee well, and I hope we have seen the last of him,\" Jane said, joining Laurence on the dragondeck of the Vindication. The Bellerophon was visible out on the horizon, with Lien a little awkwardly disposed on the deck, a heavy band of chain marring the clean white line of her neck. They were making sail. Jane shook her head. \"I shan't give ha'pence for the chance, though. I dare say that beast could make shore from St. Helena in a day and a night if she put herself to the trouble, and it is sure enough he will find some excuse to be off, after he gets tired of the place; and there ain't any cause not to grow tired of it, either. Perhaps his wife will have him poisoned, and save us the excitement, though.\"\n\n\"I dare say your hopes may be answered,\" Laurence said.\n\n\"Very good,\" Jane said approvingly. \"That was almost uncharitable: we will make a cynic of you yet. You are for Dover in the morning, and London?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Laurence said, and heaved a breath. \"I will see you there, I think?\"\n\n\"Yes, though the Lord knows they are running out of honors to heap on my shoulders, and Wellington is in even worse case: I think they will have to make him a new order of knighthood. You are getting off lightly by comparison, with your mere baronetcy. But I have come to drop a word in your ear: I have been invited four times in letters this last month to say something about the need for a strengthened presence in Halifax. Will you go if you are ordered there?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laurence said. \"I mean to retire, when we have returned. I have enough money to keep Temeraire, now, and enough of a countenance to ask my brother to put us up on one of the farms.\"\n\nOr they might return to Australia, or to China: Temeraire had every right to ask that of him, now that the war was won. Laurence did not mean to refuse him; he only hoped to go back to Wollaton Hall first, and find a way to carry it with him, somehow. He longed in a deep inward part for Britain, for home: to see the house standing at twilight with all the windows lit, a child's memory of peace. He could even be grateful there for the counterfeit honors that had been heaped onto his head, if they gave his mother some peace, and if his brother need not be ashamed to give him a field for Temeraire to sleep in, for a little while."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "\"I am glad to know,\" Edith said, low, when Laurence had finished. She sighed once, deeply, and looked out into the south field, where her son was now climbing all over Temeraire's forelegs with Laurence's three nephews. They had spent the first week of Temeraire's residence plastered to the windows of their nursery, under the confining hand of their nurse; but a few of the village boys, less supervised, had made a game of daring one another to come and touch Temeraire's tail, and observing them from the window had been too much for high spirits to endure. The middle boy had dared his elder, the dare had been reciprocated, and by the time Temeraire had woken, the boys had managed to scale his back and were busily defeating Napoleon in a grand aerial battle bearing a strong resemblance to the highly fictional accounts which had lately filled the newspapers.\n\n\"Well, that is not how it happened at all,\" Temeraire had informed them, turning his head round, and all three children had gone very still and quiet, but the story recommended itself too highly not to overcome what, their exasperated mother lectured them that night, was a relatively slight concern for the preservation of life and limb.\n\nHer lectures and the protests of their nurse had not had much effect. Old wooden swords had been unearthed from a chest the next day, and endless battles fought since then. Edith's son had lasted five minutes clinging to her skirts before he had run out through the garden gates to join the irresistible game, and she had not held him back, though her hands curled in her lap as though she half-wished to restrain him.\n\n\"I am glad he should not be afraid of dragons,\" she said, despite a little anxiety in her looks: the boy was her only child.\n\n\"I assure you Temeraire will have a care,\" Laurence said to her. Temeraire indeed was in danger of showing too much care, as he had begun to inquire of Laurence whether the boys might not really be considered as under his protection, by virtue of their connection.\n\n\"Churki writes,\" he had said a little wistfully, \"that she has met Hammond's family at last, and there are twenty-six of them, if one counts the smallest children and his cousins, which she does.\" He sighed a bit enviously. \"She has already set about building them a larger house,\" he added, \"and helped their tenants plow their fields more quickly, which she says was of the greatest assistance, because so many of the young men have been away at the war, and are not returned yet. Laurence, oughtn't we plow this field?\"\n\n\"No, it is resting this year,\" Laurence had answered. \"But if you are in want of occupation, I am sure my brother's steward would be delighted to have your assistance.\" He had been surprised to find a thriving clan of Yellow Reapers established just outside Nottingham, who were now a regular sight throughout the city and the surrounding countryside, most commonly carrying large loads of coal from the pits but willing to take on other work as well; they had been of use on the estate more than once, his brother had said.\n\nTemeraire had indeed found some satisfaction, since then, in bringing in prodigious loads of timber and stone required for repairs, and offering to bring more, if they should care to repair the ruins of the abbey behind the house, which had burnt down sometime in the eleventh century. He had even offered his services to their neighbors, one of whom was Edith's father.\n\nLady Galman had included Laurence in a subsequent invitation for the families to dine together, and he had with some hesitation accepted. No number of accolades would ever make him easy going into society again, but he had wished to speak with Edith. He had written long years ago, by his mother, to acquaint her with the manner of her husband's death during the invasion of Britain, which had borne a sufficiently heroic character for him to wish her to know of it, in hopes of its relieving some of the pain of her loss. But he felt the inadequacy of such an indirect account, and the obligation to do better, if she wished to know more.\n\n\"I am glad to know,\" she said now: they had spoken briefly at dinner, and she had called this morning, for a chance of more privacy. \"And glad to have the power to tell my son, when he is older. I only wish\u2026\" She stopped a moment, and Laurence was not certain she meant to continue. \"I only wish I might not feel Bertram had pursued a course for which no training or inclination had fitted him,\" she said finally, low, \"in an effort to secure my good opinion. He ought to have been certain of it.\"\n\nLaurence was silent. It had been long years since he and Edith had spoken on such terms of intimacy, but there had been long separations between them before, demanded by a naval career, and he did not pretend that he did not understand her. If Bertram Woolvey had never made himself notorious, neither had he made himself notable, before his death. He had been a gentleman, and he had offered his wife a comfortable home and a place in respectable society, when Laurence could no longer aspire to either. But a man might well have wished to figure in his wife's eyes as something other than a safe harbor, if she had once looked for more.\n\n\"His aid was material,\" he said finally: the only comfort he could give. \"I do not know if we would have succeeded in freeing Iskierka, without his help, and her loss would have been disastrous.\"\n\nEdith nodded a little, her head still bowed. Then she lifted it and smiled at him, with an effort. \"Will you be in Nottingham long? Or does duty call you away again soon?\"\n\n\"Duty, no. I have retired from the Corps,\" he said. \"Inclination may yet: Britain is not a hospitable country for dragons. But we have made no plans.\"\n\nThat night, after the light had begun to fail and Laurence had closed the book, Temeraire said, \"Laurence, there does not seem to be anything more that needs doing, on the estate, where I can be of any material use: Mr. Jacobs,\" this being his brother's steward, \"has assured me of it.\"\n\n\"It was kind in you to undertake the effort,\" Laurence said. \"You need not feel that you must earn your keep, my dear: we are well in funds. We ought not outstay our welcome, but we have not done so yet. My brother has assured me he does not regard our presence as an inconvenience, nor does the neighborhood object.\" Laurence had rather met with expressions of satisfaction that Britain's heroic dragon was staying near-by. As the news of Temeraire's presence had spread, he had even lately seen plates with Temeraire painted upon them displayed for sale in the city, and coaches were given to pausing, on the road passing the estate, so passengers might climb out and have a look from afar. He did not expect the fad to last for long, but he was glad not to have forced his brother to endure the complaints of his neighbors.\n\n\"No, only, I am not quite certain what we ought to do with ourselves,\" Temeraire said. \"I thought I had deferred so many things for the sake of the war, and now I cannot think of any of them; or perhaps I am thinking of all of them at once, so none of them are coming clear in my head.\" He sighed a little. \"I am glad you have retired, and the Admiralty cannot send us anywhere unpleasant now, but there is no denying there was something useful in being sent, and given something to do.\"\n\nLaurence drew a deep breath. \"Do you wish to return to China?\" He had expected as much, and prepared for it. He was only glad to have had the opportunity to come home for so long. He had seen his mother, and seen her at peace; she had moved to the dower house, only a little distance from the main, and he had ridden across the fields to see her daily. He had knelt by his father's tomb. But spring had gone to summer, and summer would soon enough go to fall, and there was no building on the grounds where Temeraire might sleep; nor would Laurence trespass so far on his brother's good-will as to propose putting up a pavilion. In any case, if they meant to go to China, the overland route would be the easiest to take, and the sooner they set out, the better weather they would have.\n\nTemeraire was silent. \"I would like to visit China again,\" he said slowly, \"but I do not know what there is for me to do there, if we were to remain, besides being as awkward a guest as here. And I would be sorry to leave all my friends, just when we finally have the power of seeing them anytime we like. It is only half a day's flight to Dover, and Lily and Maximus, or to Edinburgh, if I would like to see Iskierka\u2014not that I would precisely like to see Iskierka,\" he added quickly\u2014there had been a certain degree of unbecoming smugness on the subject of Granby's promotion to Admiral, which had provoked a quarrel that was not yet made up, \"but Granby is with her, of course, and you should like to see him sometimes, I am sure.\n\n\"It is not as comfortable here as in China, of course, and even where there are pavilions they are not nearly as nice, but I must be fair: things have come along a considerable distance. I remember when I could not go anywhere, without people running and screaming\u2014I thought it was only something people did, like cows. And now they wave handkerchiefs at me from the hill, if I look up at them, and the steward spoke to me in a perfectly sensible way. Perscitia tells me that it is because of our work\u2014well, she says it is mostly due to her work, but I know she would rather have me stay, and help her. Only, I am not sure how we would go about doing so, if we did.\"\n\nA carriage had been coming along the road as they sat together, the lanterns bobbing to show its progress through the twilight, and the well-hooded horses clopping along steadily, blissfully ignorant of Temeraire's near presence. The carriage had halted on the road, and a gentleman had come out of it; he had not been content merely to observe from afar, but had come across the field towards them, and now Temeraire raised his head, his ruff pricking up, and said, \"Why, Tharkay, how elegant you look.\"\n\n\"I hope you will forgive the intrusion,\" Tharkay said; he was indeed dressed with unusual splendor, in magnificently polished Hessians, with a many-caped greatcoat, and a walking-stick topped in gold.\n\n\"You are very welcome, Tenzing,\" Laurence said, rising to shake his hand, \"if unexpected: we looked for you in Paris.\"\n\n\"As enjoyable as the display of the Empress's powers must have been to observe, I was called away on my personal business,\" Tharkay said. \"One might have supposed a law-suit which has consumed the better part of twenty years might support a few weeks' further delay, but under the circumstances, I did not wish to hazard it.\"\n\n\"You have won your case, then?\" Laurence said.\n\n\"I have,\" Tharkay said. \"Not without several interventions on my behalf: I must thank you again for your testimony.\"\n\n\"I suspect it has served you more ill than good, since I made it,\" Laurence said, \"but if my present fame has made it of value again, I can only be glad.\"\n\n\"Oh, your star falls and rises with enough regularity that it was only a matter of time,\" Tharkay said. \"And Her Grace's power is at present very great.\"\n\n\"So you have your estates at last!\" Temeraire said jubilantly, and without delay inquired, \"And pray, what is the rent-roll; do I have that right? Or the income per annum?\"\n\n\"Shamefully low,\" Tharkay said. \"My cousins and the trustee have neglected all improvements, and plundered as much as they could; it will be some time before I have restored things to order. However, in one particular, the estate is desirable: perhaps you know about the new seats which have been set aside, for dragons?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes!\" Temeraire said. \"Twenty of them; Perscitia wrote to me.\"\n\n\"The Government has established nearly all the seats in isolate regions of the countryside, and managed to put all the population of serving-beasts and retired dragons, in the breeding grounds, into three: the boundary-lines have been quite creatively drawn. The others are peopled almost entirely by ferals, and the Government supposes them unlikely to appear for voting.\"\n\nTemeraire snorted. \"We must trust them to always carry out their promises in the most scaly manner, I suppose. Well, Perscitia and I must just manage it. I will ask Ricarlee to run: I am sure Parliament deserves him.\"\n\n\"I am informed,\" Tharkay said, \"that my own lands fall in one such empty district. As the area is entirely devoid of dragons so far as I know, I am sorry there is not much company on offer, but I have a notable forest for deer-hunting, and I should be delighted to make you free of any place you like to put up a pavilion, and make yourselves at home.\"\n\n\"I am afraid we are inconvenient houseguests,\" Laurence said, bemused. \"Are you certain you wish to make so extended an invitation?\"\n\n\"I quite look forward to figuring as a tyrant in the imagination of my tenantry,\" Tharkay said, in his way. They spoke a little while longer, as the sun went down, and made arrangements to meet for breakfast the following morning, at Tharkay's hotel; then he took his leave again, with the tact that plainly meant to permit them private conversation.\n\n\"Why Laurence, I call that handsome,\" Temeraire said. \"Do you suppose you should like it? But perhaps you would rather we went back to our pavilion, in Australia: I know you are not fond of politics.\"\n\nFor a moment, the sun rose out of the Blue Mountains and shone red-gold on the cut stone floor of the half-finished pavilion, spilled down light into the valley below and over the softly lowing herd of cattle: another memory of home, of peace and simplicity. But that could only be a flight, almost a surrender. The reward of true service, surely, was to be asked for more; and Laurence could not claim Temeraire's work was done, even if his own might have been called so.\n\n\"No, my dear,\" Laurence said. \"I do not think a life of quiet retirement is our lot, nor yet should be; and our valley will wait until that has changed.\" He laid his hand on Temeraire's muzzle and looked north and west, towards the curve of the ocean, towards home. \"Tharkay's estates are in the Peaks: I think you will like the countryside very much.\"\n\n\"I am sure I will, Laurence,\" Temeraire said. \"And surely it will be famous, to be in Parliament.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragons 3) Dragons on the town",
        "author": "Thorarinn Gunnarsson",
        "genres": [
            "urban fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Bones to Pick",
                "text": "Wind Dragon drifted quietly through the night sky, passing like a dark cloud above the lights of Bennasport. She moved effortlessly without a sound, her magical lift and propulsion vanes operating in complete silence. Autumn was settling once again over this hilly coastal town and the air was cold and fresh, the night so deep that the red and blue stripes of the ribbed stabilizing sails behind her four lift vanes and the smaller steering stabilizers rigged to her bowsprit were faded to bands of grey. Although she was a small ship, hardly more than a schooner, her dark shadow passing before the stars appeared vast and menacing. And yet she might well have passed completely unnoticed above the sleeping town, unless someone had happened to look up at just the proper moment.\n\nFrom her position at Wind Dragon's, helm, the esteemed sorceress Kasdamir Gerran had much the same point of view. Seen from above on a dark night, Bennasport looked like just so many lights scattered across a rolling black landscape. An airship was actually quite easy to fly at night, as long as navigation was limited to charts and compasses. Finding one house in an entire city, when she could not even see the city, was another matter altogether.\n\n\"Here they come, Lady Mira!\" Dooket, the taller of her pair of young hired mercenaries, called from the bow.\n\nMira looked over the side of the ship, and almost immediately she saw the dark forms of the faerie dragons, their broad wings spread against the night as they hurtled past. A moment later they circled back and came up the other side of the ship, slowing greatly to match speed. They stood off a short distance to Wind Dragon's starboard side for a moment until they were certain that they had Mira's attention before they began to drift slowly away to the side. Mira understood their message and turned Wind Dragon slowly to follow them, spinning the rudder wheel only a couple of turns so that she did not overshoot them in the dim light. It was hard enough even to see them.\n\nSir Remidan came up the steps from the middle deck, his armor clinking softly as he walked. As a Knight Errant of the Loyal Order of Stewards, that being a very elite group and not entirely obsolete even in this modem age, his armor and weapons were magical in origin and curiously light, cool and comfortable to wear. Which was just as well for Sir Remidan, since he insisted upon wearing his armor at all waking hours. He even wore the damned thing to bed, for all Mira knew. Plate armor had one universal disadvantage, particularly for those who were not wearing it themselves: almost every armored warrior that Mira had ever met tended to smell rather bad, at least as the day wore on. Remidan was one of the very few exceptions, and even he tended to smell a little shabby at times.\n\n\"Help me to keep an eye on those dragons,\" Mira directed. \"They can see so well at night, they tend to forget that we cannot.\"\n\nRemidan paused and leaned well out over the siderail, staring out into the night for a long moment. \"Bless me, but I don't see them at all.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not,\" Mira agreed. \"Boys?\"\n\n\"Dragons, ho! Dead ahead!\" they shouted back. They normally stood duty somewhere near the front of the ship, where they could be at hand for either lookout or to tend the ropes and cables of the stabilizers in Wind Dragon's bowsprit. Airships were fairly massive flying machines built almost entirely of wood and ropes, and the only magic was involved in making them move and not in keeping them together. Flying them was best done with a great deal of blind trust and a certain amount of reliable help. Mira had to trust in luck.\n\n\"Staemar will be happy enough to be back on the ground,\" Remidan remarked as he walked over to stand beside Mira at the wheels. \"He is a bold and loyal steed, but this has been a great trial for him. He hardly knows which he fears more, the flying or the dragons.\"\n\nMira glanced at him. \"Where did he learn to talk? I've never heard of familiars taking the forms of horses.\"\n\n\"He is enchanted, of course,\" Remidan explained softly, for this was obviously a delicate matter. Staemar was standing on the middle deck, and he had excellent ears. It helped that they moved. \"He used to be a knight like myself, until he fell afoul of a common enemy.\"\n\n\"The Dark Sorceress Queramael?\" Mira inquired succinctly. Remidan and Queramael had been mortal enemies all their adult lives, and apparently for the latter portion of their childhood as well. The ill effects of a poorly aimed spell of uncontrollable lust had improved their relationship for only a few hours, and a certain lingering side effect on Queramael's part had caused matters to deteriorate very quickly from that point.\n\n\"Down slowly,\" Erkin, the shorter of her barbarians, called out.\n\n\"Right, boys!\"\n\n\"Staemar... Sir Staemar, I suppose I should say, was caught unawares at a time when he did not have his magical armor and its protection against most magic. That is why I hardly ever remove my own. So it was that Queramael turned him into a horse.\" Remidan caught her dubious glance and shrugged. \"Actually, she enchanted his mortal spirit into the body of his own warhorse. That of course left the horse as the new tenant of his former residence, as it were. The poor, stupid thing proceeded to eat grass with its former appetite and soon died of a bowel obstruction. Thus, with no human body to inhabit, he is stuck with the horse.\"\n\n\"Left fifteen degrees!\" Dooket called.\n\n\"Right, boys!\"\n\n\"No, left!\"\n\n\"Clowns,\" Mira muttered to herself. \"So how did Queramael manage to catch him outside his armor?\"\n\n\"Well, yes...\" Remidan coughed, looking very uncomfortable. \"After her slight miscalculation with me, it seems that she managed to refine that spell of overwhelming lust. It is quite a spell, I assure you. A temptation well beyond even knightly restraint.\"\n\n\"Yes, quite,\" Mira agreed quickly.\n\n\"Alas, poor Sir Staemar.\" Remidan paused to wipe a noble tear with a silk handkerchief. \"He is now subject to various mortal fears that one encounters upon finding oneself a domestic animal. He does fret so about being eaten. And as for having him shoed, I fear that I must first get him fairly tipsy on wine. The nails, you understand.\"\n\n\"You might try glue,\" Mira suggested.\n\n\"I dare not even mention the word to him.\"\n\nMira would have never suspected the tragic and frankly preposterous tale of how Staemar had become a horse, but it was very much along the line of the thoughts that she had been contemplating for the last three days. Her young protege Jenny Barker had been evicted from her own body without the benefit of a true destination, and still lingered in partial life because she now shared the body of the faerie dragon Vajerral Foxfire, her first cousin by adoption on her father's side. But Jenny was only a silent partner in the arrangement; she could only move or speak for herself when Vajerral allowed. Mira had been considering a replacement body for Jenny, but that meant either a body that had no inhabiting spirit or one that could be accommodated. In the former case, she had certainly met a great many people in her career whom she suspected would be none the worse for having no souls, but she knew of no one already in that state. And as for the latter case, that involved evicting some other poor soul from its rightful home. Again, Mira could think of many people who would benefit from the process, but the only practical answer was to use an animal.\n\nThat always brought the debate back to the same conclusion: it would be best to do nothing until they consulted Dalvenjah Foxfire, Vajerral's mother and perhaps the most capable of the faerie dragon sorceresses anywhere. Her command of dragon magic was strong, and the possession of dragon magic in itself gave her a tremendous advantage over Mira's relatively simple mortal magic. The only trouble that Mira anticipated was finding the illustrious and all-knowing Dalvenjah Foxfire, who was a very busy dragon indeed. The last that Mira had heard, Dalvenjah had been trying to talk to a dead dragon. That was not so strange as it may seem, since the dead dragon in question had been loitering about with Mira's group. With that in common, Mira was almost surprised that Dalvenjah's path had not already crossed her own.\n\nWhich was just as well for Mira, considering what she had been doing the last few weeks.\n\n\"Down, Lady Mira!\" Dooket called.\n\nMira looked up, perplexed. \"How much down?\"\n\n\"Until we say stop.\"\n\nMira frowned fiercely, knowing that this was no way to fly an airship. It was not the airship she distrusted as much as her two barbarians. The ship needed time to react to a change in the angle of the control surfaces, especially at such slow speeds, and she doubted that the boys could judge such matters accurately enough. Wind Dragon had been through a lot herself lately, so much that Mira was already worried about her frame. The airship might not take another hard landing, and it was easy enough to lose a vane to a tree at the best of times. The tree had the advantage of bulk over a fragile vane or bowsprit, and there was not very much in nature which lived and grew that could beat a tree for traction. Or stubbornness: trees never got out of the way.\n\nA grey form glinting with metallic gold shot past the ship and circled tightly to move up close beside the helm deck. Mira recognized Vajerral, the smaller and rangier of the two dragons, still a slightly immature example of the species. Faerie dragons were as a rule extremely clever, and telepathy helped to make up for anything they might have otherwise missed. Vajerral had perceived the need and dropped back to direct the ship. Ordinarily Mira would have had as many misgivings about that, knowing Vajerral's remarkable talent for poor judgement. At the moment, the young dragon did benefit from having Jenny on board, with her own experience at flying the airship.\n\nNow there was a possibility, Mira thought. Two minds were said to be better than one, and stupid people might stand to benefit from sharing their bodies with someone as bright and well educated as Jenny, to provide ready advice and information. There might actually be a market for this.\n\n\"Descend slowly five hundred feet,\" Vajerral called, struggling to keep herself not only flying but balanced at such a slow speed. There was a faint glow of lift magic surrounding her, since her wings were not getting enough lift of their own. \"Turn left some fifteen degrees or slightly less.\"\n\n\"Flying by approximation,\" Mira muttered as she spun both of the wheels. This was better than Dooket's instruction, but hardly perfect. She wondered just who was giving the advice.\n\nWind Dragon responded very smoothly, considering her size, even at such a sluggish speed. Fighting a strong wind, she could feel like a hundred feet of dead bulk. There were of course massive freighters and flying battleships nearly six times her length and ten times her weight, twice the size of any wooden ship that had ever ridden the waves. Surprisingly, the larger airships were considerably more stable, too massive to be bothered by normal winds.\n\n\"Jenny says to straighten out,\" Vajerral reported, although her doubt was obvious.\n\nMira decided to trust Jenny's judgement and spun the rudder wheel about. The girl knew Wind Dragon's ways from long experience at the helm, that it took a brief moment to straighten the rudder and a longer moment before the mass of the ship agreed to stop rotating. The result seemed to please the dragon, who was watching ahead carefully but declined to comment. Mira was far from satisfied, however. She was still flying blind, and her guide had turned out to be a committee. It was up to her to figure out which of the two was actually talking and to decide accordingly how much she trusted the advice. Vajerral dropped back just behind the ship and suddenly darted in, catching hold of the rail and pulling herself aboard. She hurried to the front of the helm deck, on the starboard side above the steps leading down to the middle deck, and hung her long neck over the siderail so that she could peer straight down. Sir Remidan, overcome by curiosity and a misdirected idea that he was being helpful, leaned over the rail beside her.\n\n\"What do you think?\" the dragon asked.\n\n\"Well, I don't...\" Sir Remidan began in a voice that tried very hard to deny the fact that he did not know a thing.\n\n\"Not you. Jenny,\" Vajerral said, and paused. \"Slow up.\"\n\nMira stared expectantly, aware that this odd scene meant that Vajerral was conferring with Jenny, a process complicated by the fact that they were in the same body.\n\n\"What, so soon?\" the dragon asked herself. \"Unless you want to circle around, and we were very lucky to get Mira on course so easily the first time. Well, I don't know... Will you just keep quiet and let me do this? I've flown this ship, and you have not. If you insist.\"\n\nShe lifted her head and looked back over the shoulder of her wing. \"Level the ship and begin slowing. You will be hovering at a full stop in about five hundred yards.\"\n\nMira considered it a miracle that they were able to work together well enough to make one dragon fly, let alone guide an airship.\n\n\"Slower,\" the dragon warned.\n\n\"I don't see anything,\" Sir Remidan complained.\n\n\"Neither do I,\" either Jenny or Vajerral replied, not looking up. \"Steady now. There is not much of a wind, but it must be dead behind us. Now, cut your forward thrust and let her drift to a stop. Perfect.\"\n\n\"Are you satisfied?\" Mira asked blandly.\n\n\"Yes, I believe so. Now, begin to drop the ship straight down.\"\n\n\"Winch down the wheels, boys!\" Mira shouted. \"We seem destined to land somewhere.\"\n\nMira decreased the lift thrust until Wind Dragon began to descend, so slowly that she could not even feel the motion. That suited her perfectly; she was mostly flying by sound, waiting to hear the cracking of branches or perhaps even a roof. As she watched, the dark shapes of trees began to rise about her on all sides, although she still did not hear the protest of anything from below. Then she peered forward, realizing that the massive shadow just ahead of the bowsprit was Wind Dragon's shed, and the airship settled smoothly to the ground a moment later. Tally up a point for the faerie dragons and their keen eyes. Vajerral leaped over the siderail, spreading her wings to break her fall.\n\nA storage locker against the siderail opened and J.T. the cat lifted his head, looking around. \"Are we down? Thank goodness!\"\n\n\"Boys, take down the rigging and fold back the lift vanes,\" Mira directed as she set the brakes. \"You can roll Wind Dragon into her shed with the winch when you are done.\"\n\n\"Right, Mom!\" they called back.\n\nMira hesitated in her stride, pausing to reflect that she was going to slay a certain male dragon for starting that business.\n\nThen she sauntered blissfully down the steps to the middle deck and to the boarding ramp, still folded up against the ship as a part of the siderail. She needed only a moment to release the latches and lower the ramp to the ground. Then she turned and stared meaningfully at Staemar. Sir Remidan stood at her side and stared also. Staemar, a large white stallion decked out in equine plate armor and chain mail, just stood in the center of the deck with his legs braced solidly on the boards and his head down.\n\n\"We are on the ground, Staemar,\" Mira told him. \"Are you feeling better?\"\n\nStaemar rolled one eye, peering out through the opening in the steel armor of his faceplate. \"You just go ahead.\"\n\n\"There really is no reason to be afraid,\" Remidan told him.\n\n\"I am not afraid,\" the horse declared proudly. \"I just want to go down that ramp in my own good time, with no one watching.\"\n\n\"As you will,\" Mira told him. \"Have the boys show you to the stables as soon as you are ready, and do have them bring you anything you require to make the place suitable to a horse of your station.\"\n\n\"I will be around shortly to undress you,\" Sir Remidan added.\n\nThey descended the boarding ramp, finding the two dragons waiting for them at the top of the path leading to the house. Mira paused a moment to glance back. \"That poor horse is nervous about everything. Pride goeth before a fall, they say.\"\n\n\"Pride goeth after a fall, I believe, is what worries Staemar,\" Remidan explained. \"That ramp is very steep, and he is in armor.\"\n\n\"What did you mean, that you would be around shortly to undress him?\"\n\n\"He cannot remove his armor by himself, of course. And he is very sensitive about who sees him naked.\"\n\n\"Really? I can't imagine that!\" Mira exclaimed. Then she noticed that the knight was affording her a very curious stare. \"A horse being nervous about being naked, I mean. As you point out, he is only a horse on the outside... Oh, never mind.\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah Foxfire is going to undress the whole lot of us right down to our bones when she finds out what we've been doing,\" Kelvandor reminded them. He was the largest of the two faerie dragons, although Mindijaran, as they were called in their own flowing language, were the smallest of all breeds of dragons. And generally the most civilized. \"We tried to do something we knew better than to even attempt, and it turned out about as wrong as possible. She is going to be furious, and I can hardly blame her.\"\n\n\"I am not afraid of any dragon,\" Sir Remidan declared proudly.\n\n\"You have never met my mother,\" Vajerral said softly. \"She is not going to be pleased. Oh, no, my precious. Not pleased at all.\"\n\nMira paused a moment, staring up at the dark form of her house. There were more lights in the windows than she thought should be normal, considering that only Dame Tugg and possibly Adenna Sheld were at home. Mira was thinking about her great, gaudy, comfortable home and what it would be like to run away and live in the wild for the rest of her life. That whole ill-conceived plot of tempting the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons had been her idea.\n\nShe sighed heavily and led the way to the back door. \"Unfortunately, the august and ill-tempered Dalvenjah Foxfire is exactly the one we have to see, and as soon as we can get away. We could leave in the morning, if we must. But I would prefer to take two or three days to have Wind Dragon checked out and some of her parts replaced, after all that she has been through. The one question is, where can we possibly find Dalvenjah? The last either of you two had heard, she has been on some quest of her own, looking for the ghost of a dragon who was looking for us.\"\n\n\"All I can think of is to go home and wait for Mother to show herself,\" Vajerral offered. \"If she is moving through different worlds, then she will be coming and going from there. If you want to follow, then you will need Kelvandor to open a Way Between the Worlds for you.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is quite beyond any mortal magic that I know,\" Mira admitted as she opened the back door, pausing to look back at them. \"And if you do find her first, you might begin breaking the news to her. After all, you do have Jenny with you. She isn't likely to want to kill the two of you, whatever dire fate may be in store for me. But above and beyond all else, there is one thing that Dalvenjah Foxfire must not know for now...\n\n\"And just what is this bit of news that Dalvenjah Foxfire must not know at the cost of your life?\" a voice asked from the darkness within the house. A moment later, the very dragon in question moved forward into the light, a golden Mindijarah with a sapphire blue crest and jade green eyes.\n\nLady Mira took one look at the dire glint in those large eyes and drew back in alarm. She was not the only one contemplating a hasty retreat, and she might have already made her escape if the way had not been blocked by dragons, a cat and a knight in armor. In her hesitation the moment was lost. Two large golden hands reached out and took both Mira and Vajerral firmly by the ear. Vajerral's ear was large, pointed and very mobile, but even that did not help it to escape.\n\nCommanding her captives by such a tender rein, Dalvenjah marched the pair of them through the dark corridors of the house. Kelvandor, Sir Remidan and the cat followed behind, too surprised to know what to do and too fearful of their own lives to intervene. As the procession made its way through the halls of the mansion, Mira happened to see Dame Tugg retreating judiciously into a comer. The elderly housekeeper, wearing as always the habit of a Wansorian nun and riding boots, appeared for perhaps the first time in her life to be quite speechless. The retired Abbess had been trapped in the house with the dragon since her arrival.\n\n\"Tea, Dame Tugg!\" Mira called after her. \"Lots and lots of tea!\"\n\n\"Where will you be?\" Dame Tugg asked.\n\n\"Just follow the screams and shouting.\"\n\nDalvenjah propelled her prisoners mercilessly around a corner and into Mira's own office. The lamps were lit and Allan, Dalvenjah's mate and a dragon slightly larger even than Kelvandor, waited expectantly in the middle of the room. Sir Remidan, J.T. and Kelvandor retreated as far as they were able into one corner of the room, into the windowed alcove that overlooked the garden, first the knight and then the dragon bumping into the small table and chairs. Vajerral and Mira were given no such chance to hide themselves, for Dalvenjah did not release their ears until they were in the center of the room.\n\n\"Now, where is Jenny?\" she demanded, glaring first at Vajerral and then at Mira.\n\n\"Oh, well. Jenny.\" Mira, who had never been intimidated by anything in her adult life, did not dare to look the dragon in the eye. \"Ah, yes. No problem there, I assure you. Jenny is still with us.\"\n\n\"Outside?\" Dalvenjah asked suspiciously.\n\n\"No, inside. Inside Vajerral, to be precise.\"\n\nDalvenjah glared at Vajerral, who grinned sheepishly. On a dragon, that expression came across as nothing but exceedingly ridiculous. Then she glanced at Kelvandor and Remidan, who were still arranging chairs around the table as quickly as the dragon's tail and the knight's sword would knock them aside. \"Come over here and sit down, all three of you. That includes you as well, cat. Unless you want to take up the violin the hard way.\"\n\nThey all three looked at each other, the dragon and the cat with their ears laid back and Sir Remidan's drooping mustache mimicking the gesture. They meekly walked over and sat down, Remidan and J.T. on the sofa while Kelvandor sat back on his tail on the floor beside Allan. The two dragons glanced at each other. Even Allan looked quietly subdued, and he was not in trouble.\n\nMira turned her head and frowned at Sir Remidan. \"Do you use oil on your joints?\"\n\n\"Yes, certainly.\"\n\n\"Then get your armor off my sofa.\"\n\nDalvenjah took Mira by the collar and drew her close until they stood nose to nose. \"There was something you wanted to explain to me.\"\n\n\"Did I?\" Mira found herself looking up the dragon's long nose and right into a pair of large green eyes that were glaring hard enough to crack ice and frighten large dogs. \"Ah, yes. This is one of those proverbial long stories. Would you care to hold me by the neck the whole time, or may I proceed at my own pace?\"\n\nDalvenjah let her down. \"I will not hold you by the neck, just as long as you proceed at a pace which suits me. Would you prefer to relate your little tale hanging upside down while I tickle your ass with my flame?\"\n\nMira just stood and blinked stupidly, at a complete loss for words. She was used to being on the other end of a sharp tongue. \"Ah, well now. It all sort of began like this. One night several months ago I was hosting a party, when this rather strange girl named Jenny Barker and this dragon who claimed to be her cousin arrived. Jenny was to be my special student, while I never did quite figure out why Vajerral was here except to eat prodigiously. You arranged it all, so you should remember.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do remember,\" Dalvenjah agreed coldly. Then she turned to glare at Sir Remidan. \"Sit down!\"\n\n\"Where was I?\" Mira mused.\n\n\"About to be hung upside down for failing to proceed at a pace which suits me,\" the dragon told her.\n\n\"Ah, yes. Well, a friend of mine, Adenna Sheld by name and a fine concert singer, had recently toured in the South. When she came back with tales of the new Empire and barbaric doings, and I recalled what Jenny had told me about the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons, then I thought to myself, 'Ah-ha! We should stand up to that silly prophecy and kick it right in the nose, and have a good look about down South at the same time.' But first I thought that we should visit my old teacher, the Sorcerer Bresdenant, since he is the leading expert on the doings of the old Alasheran Empire and the Dark Magic due to a lifetime of research on the subject. But on the way to see him, Wind Dragon was attacked by an Imperial airship and a group of winged demons, and that was a very fierce battle, I can tell you, but we prevailed through fortitude, cunning and excellent leadership, if I do say so myself. And it was a most enlightening experience in a way, since we did not know until then that the Empire had airships of its own, even if they did have to steal them. And the winged demons as well, if you take my meaning.\"\n\nDalvenjah rolled her eyes. \"If you don't mind.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I mean, I am trying!\" Mira protested, then turned her head to glare at Sir Remidan. \"Get your tin britches off my sofa!\"\n\n\"Allan, fetch me a rope!\" the dragon declared.\n\n\"This is all very complicated, but I will be as brief as possible,\" Mira assured her. \"You see, it was from Bresdenant that we first heard about the prophecy of someone else whose name I don't offhand recall, but it was very important.\"\n\n\"Maerildyn,\" J.T. offered quietly.\n\n\"Yes, the Prophecy of Maerildyn. You know:\n\n\u2002'Dragons gold and dragons black\n\n\u2002Seek to gain what each may lack.\n\n\u2002White and black, red and blue,\n\n\u2002Fortune hangs between the two.'\n\n\"That was what Bresdenant told us, anyway. Of course, we could not at the time begin to make sense of what it was trying to say.\"\n\n\"I doubt that the lot of you could interpret the signs correctly if your pants were on fire.\" Being a dragon, Dalvenjah could not help but think about setting fires when she was angry, and she seemed to have a fixation about just what she wanted to roast. She glared at Sir Remidan. \"Sit down.\"\n\n\"We returned home then, which was where we found Vajerral and Kelvandor, and then we were off again. Except that this time we were attacked not by one Imperial airship but three, and a whole flock of flying demons. We did get the better of them, of course, but Wind Dragon was a mess. Oh, yes, and Jenny was wounded by an arrow and needed a couple of days to recover. We put in at Woody Bog for needed repairs... to the airship, of course. And we met the biggest damned demon you could imagine, lurking about in the basement, but Jenny had such a way with dragon magic, it was no problem.\"\n\n\"Had?\" Dalvenjah asked politely.\n\n\"Has, of course,\" Mira hastily amended. \"Then we found old copper-bottom and his neurotic horse\u2014Blow your butt off my sofa!\u2014stranded on a deserted island. We continued on to Alashera and were warmly received by an old friend of mine, Dasjen Valdercon, who actually turned out to be the most recent incarnation of the High Priest Haldephren. Well, he kidnapped Jenny and was about to sacrifice her to the Heart of Flame inside the neck of the volcano, but I arrived with Sir Remidan and the boys just in time, and then the two dragons came at them from the other side. Jenny and I sent both him and the Heart of Flame into the volcano, which had the unexpected effect of causing the whole damned island to explode. That was a close one, and we barely got away. They had hidden Wind Dragon inside an underground tunnel and we had to follow that all the way down to the sea with lava just behind us, and then we had to ski the airship across the harbor on her struts as the volcano exploded, and we just barely got the lift vanes rigged before the tsunami got us.\"\n\n\"Is that it?\" Dalvenjah asked suspiciously.\n\n\"Well, you actually did forget the part about Wind Dragon's brake cables being cut while you slept,\" Sir Remidan offered. \"I was not yet with you at that time, of course, or things might have turned out different...\"\n\n\"Things turned out just fine, thank you!\" Mira said hastily to shut him up. \"And sit down.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"But not on my sofa!\"\n\nDalvenjah sat back on her tail and lifted her head as she sighed loudly, supplication to the Dragon Gods for patience. Dragons generally were not known for their patience, at least not when they were angry, and certainly if there was no promise of food or sex involved. \"Now just why do I get the impression that you have not told me the whole dirty story?\"\n\nMira looked hurt. \"Would you think that I would hold out on you?\"\n\n\"If you thought that you could get away with it. Let me put it to you this way. On this one little airship of yours, there was yourself, Jenny Barker the Immensely Curious, Vajerral of the Profound Blunders and Kelvandor, Blithe Spirit of Good Intentions. A boundless potential for misfortune, and you tell me that that was all the trouble you got into?\"\n\n\"Oh, well. I just did not want to bore you with the small details, and you did say to keep it brief.\"\n\n\"You have not kept it brief, and you have already bored me to distraction with the glorious highlights!\" Dalvenjah declared, picking her up again by the collar. \"What did you do with Jenny?\"\n\n\"That is a bit more complicated, and you really should hear it all,\" Mira protested, and the dragon released her reluctantly. The sorceress straightened her collar and swallowed loudly. \"That dead dragon you were looking for, your half-brother Karidaejan. He has been hanging about Jenny from the start and muttering cryptic warnings. The night after Alashera exploded\u2014what was that, three or four nights ago?\u2014 Karidaejan approached Jenny again. He explained to her he had gone into her native world and discovered that the original object of the Prophecy, Jenny's uncle Allan, had been bom male and therefore ineligible to fulfill the Prophecy. Then he had taken mortal form as the one you knew as James Donner and sired Jenny himself; he was her real father, and so she had always been a faerie dragon in mortal form and never aware of it. Then Haldephren came and they fought. Karidaejan was able to defeat Haldephren and force him to withdraw, but Haldephren stole his body and forced his spirit to serve him. That night, the Emperor Myrkan forced him to distract Jenny until the Emperor came himself. He expelled Jenny from her own body and gave it to the Dark Sorceress Darja, to return her to life.\"\n\n\"And Jenny?\" Dalvenjah demanded. \"He must not have captured or released her spirit, or you would be even more frightened.\"\n\n\"No, I have her,\" Vajerral said.\n\n\"You do?\" Dalvenjah asked, and she relaxed into a fairly decent mood for the first time that night. \"Perhaps you have finally outgrown that blundering phase you were going through.\" Mira paused in mid-squirm, too dumbfounded to remember to be properly terrified. Dalvenjah Foxfire might be a dragon of mercurial moods, but this defied explanation. Just when Mira was certain that Dalvenjah would roast her fanny without even waiting to hang her up, the dragon almost seemed pleased.\n\n\"You don't seem particularly surprised,\" Mira observed, even though her hindquarters began to sweat in anticipation. \"I thought that was the most surprising part.\"\n\nThat, she thought to herself, and Jenny's explanation of how to make love to a dragon.\n\n\"I had always suspected something odd about Jenny's origin,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"She was able to perform dragon magic from the start, even when I first met her years ago. You know yourself that no mortal should be able to perform even faerie magic, while dragon magic is the highest and most elusive form. Then more recently, when I discovered that Karidaejan had been in her world, I began to suspect the truth. That was the real reason why I was trying to find Karidaejan. That, and to give the two of you time to set the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons properly into motion.\"\n\nMira thought about that for a moment, and a little bell rang inside her head. \"That was why you sent Jenny to be my student, when there was nothing about magic that I had to teach her? You knew at the time that I am the other half of the Prophecy.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" the dragon agreed guilelessly. \"Now ask the last important question.\"\n\nMira looked as if she had been hit between the eyes by a stone. \"What last important question?\"\n\nDalvenjah sighed again; the Dragon God of Patience was feeling generous. \"When things were looking the worst and you would begin to regret that you ever got yourself involved in this business, what question did you ask yourself most often?\" \"Why me?\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" Dalvenjah declared, her ears standing straight up. \"What was your part in the Prophecy?\"\n\nMira made a face that looked more bewildered than thoughtful. \"I assumed that I was along to help, perhaps to provide mature guidance.\"\n\n\"You were the true object of the Prophecy,\" Dalvenjah told her bluntly. \"Jenny was the distraction. Having the Dark Emperor and his allies focused on her kept all attention away from you. She was never the one they should have been after, but you. Now they have been tricked into making their first major mistake.\"\n\n\"What?\" Mira demanded incredulously. She felt weak in the knees and light of head; she had gone too long without tea. Either it was not yet ready, or Dame Tugg did not dare to face Dalvenjah's wrath to bring it.\n\n\"The Emperor Myrkan, the High Priest Haldephren, the Dark Sorceress Darja, indeed the entire Alasheran Empire, were products entirely of your own world and the native magic of that world,\" the dragon explained. \"There are the four magics: natural magic, mortal magic, faerie magic and dragon magic, but never entirely the same in any two worlds and most often very different. That was a tie with you, a common ancestry as it were, that they never could have with Jenny. Doubly so, since she never was mortal but a dragon, even if she did not know it. And who, I ask you as objectively as you can possibly manage, is the greatest sorceress alive in your world today? The Sorceress. Darja was meant to have your body.\"\n\nIt all made tremendous sense, which was why Mira had to sit down on the sofa for a moment to think about it. Unfortunately, thinking about it only caused it to make even more sense. And now she had a double measure of guilt to bear. It had been her idea to face the Prophecy bravely and engage in some spying in the South, the last place that Jenny should have gone. And now she learned that Jenny had paid the terrible price of the Prophecy in her place. She glanced over at the other end of the sofa and saw J.T. staring up at her, looking as miserable as she felt. At least the cat chose to be gracious; his kind usually preferred a smug \"I told you so.\"\n\nMira stared up at Dalvenjah. \"Why do you seem so pleased with the way that things have turned out?\"\n\n\"Pleased is not entirely the correct word,\" she explained. \"Things are progressing the way they must. I sent Jenny to you for the very reason of having the two of you together, knowing that trouble would come to you soon enough. I did not anticipate that you would go looking for trouble, but the result has been the same.\"\n\n\"What result? You could have kept Jenny safe in some other world. Did you send her as bait to distract them from me?\" \"Although it turned out that way, I did not know until this night that not Jenny but you are the object of the Prophecy. Only when I was certain that Karidaejan was indeed her father did it occur to me that the Sorceress Darja would not want her body, if she knew. And as for keeping her safe...\" Now the dragon began to grow angry again, although her rage was now directed at her own pain and frustration. \"The time was past for keeping her safe. Do not think that I have failed to examine my motives. I am compelled to do what is best, at any cost.\"\n\nAnd what was best, Mira realized, was not necessarily best for Jenny. Or for Mira. Or even for Dalvenjah herself; she had already lost her half-brother to the cause. Mira also realized that it was time to keep her mouth shut on that subject. This game was very ugly and unpleasant, and the stakes were high enough to demand sacrifices. Punishing Dalvenjah\u2014or herself\u2014would only slow them down, and they were already beginning to fall behind.\n\n\"The point now is that Jenny's misfortune is also the misfortune of our enemies,\" Dalvenjah continued when Mira said nothing. \"History tells us that Darja was unique among sorcerers. She is in some way a creature of magic herself at the same time that she is mortal. She possesses the ability to control and channel any source of magic no matter how great, and in the past she could command the great crystals of power such as the Heart of Flame, something not even the Emperor himself could accomplish. But because of her nature she lives a dreamlike existence, lacking any desires or ambitions or even much sense of personal identity. She is subservient entirely to the will of the Emperor, living vicariously through his desires and passions, but even he cannot compel her will.\n\n\"Darja lives again, and the magic at the Emperor's command has increased at least a hundredfold because of her ability to identify and command any source of natural or accumulated magic. But she is in the wrong body, one less able than she suspects. More importantly, one that is a creature of magic alien to herself but tied to the dragon magic, and one that is not even in its proper form. These are disadvantages that we may be able to use against her.\"\n\n\"How?\" Mira asked.\n\nDalvenjah twitched her ears. \"I wish to hell I knew!\"\n\nMira sat at the table in the alcove of her study, looking out her window as she enjoyed her morning tea. The early sun was bright but it looked cold, and there were no colorful flowers in her garden, only leaves that were beginning to turn brown and grey. Winter was coming, and that was generally a very productive time of year. The snows of Bennasport could be deep and lingered long into spring, and Mira would be given a good deal of time for her research and practicing her magic. She was pleased to have a long winter to attend to some necessary work, since the rest of the year was entirely too interesting to spend days and weeks at a time locked inside her study. That was why the first thing she had done when she had moved into this large house was to have this alcove built onto the study, so that she could have her favorite place for working in the same room as her favorite place for thinking.\n\nBut now Mira had every reason to suspect that this winter would not be so simple. The dragons would be moving on soon, probably this very day, and she could not yet guess whether Dalvenjah Foxfire meant for her to go with them. She was not entirely sure what she had to offer. She was still a part of the Prophecy. Indeed, she had turned out to be the most important part of the Prophecy, but the possibility was that her own part was done now that the Dark Sorceress Darja had made off with the wrong body. That all depended upon what Dalvenjah should happen to think best. And considering what Dalvenjah Foxfire thought about a certain Kasdamir Gerran, it did not seem likely. Upon reflection, Mira was even less certain that she even wanted to go.\n\nMira paused and looked up, seeing that J.T. had entered the study. The cat was ambling along in the slow and sleepy manner that his kind practiced to perfection, hesitating halfway through the room to stretch first one long hind leg out behind him and then the other. He leaped up on the other side of the table and seated himself daintily, then began to wash his face for breakfast.\n\n\"Tea?\" Mira inquired.\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"Two lumps?\"\n\nJ.T. glanced up from his washing. \"Three, if you don't mind. After last night, I need my fortification.\"\n\n\"You have a sweet tooth worthy of a dog,\" Mira remarked as she removed the lid from a tray. \"Dame Tugg has already brought your kipper.\"\n\nJ.T. bent his head and sniffed the grilled fish daintily before returning to his washing. He delighted in his kipper for breakfast, a beloved delicacy, but being a cat he could never allow himself to demonstrate the slightest interest. Cats saved their enthusiasm for those rare times when they could make complete and appalling asses of themselves.\n\n\"So what about it, Jay?\" Mira asked. \"Did we blow it?\"\n\n\"That depends entirely upon your perspective, I suppose,\" the cat answered without looking up.\n\nShe stared at him, surprised. \"Perspective? I am sure that the Emperor is pleased with how things have turned out, although he probably could have done without our destroying Alashera.\" \"That was one perspective that I was not considering,\" J.T. said shortly. \"I was referring to your level of objectivity. If you consider the matter entirely from the perspective of the Prophecy, then it is a good thing that the Emperor made off with Jenny's body rather than your own. If it is any consolation to you, then you might think that you were fated to be an agency for placing Jenny in danger to fulfill the Prophecy to that desired end. In other words, it is better in the long run that it was her rather than you. On a more personal level, of course, it was not a desirable end at all.\"\n\nMira frowned, thinking about that very carefully for a long moment. She glanced over at the cat. \"Did Dalvenjah know enough to stop this? Or did she want this to happen?\"\n\nJ.T. paused in his exploration of his kipper. \"That is the part that I cannot fathom, for it makes no sense however I turn it. I agree with putting the two of you together, but Dalvenjah seemed to know that something would happen. Her anger last night, however, indicated that she never expected that you would act the way you did, taking Jenny into the South when you knew about the Prophecy. All I can say for certain is this. If she knew that she could not protect both you and Jenny forever, and if there was real danger that the Emperor or the High Priest would realize their mistake and come looking for you, then she had to, in a sense, toss Jenny to them to prevent a far greater disaster.\"\n\n\"What do you suspect, even if you are just guessing?\"\n\nJ.T. twitched his ears. He was a familiar, a creature of magic that exits to provide information, and he disliked having to guess. \"Dalvenjah seems to have been appointed by fate to unravel the Prophecy, and she has to remain objective in her judgement. If she is to resolve the Prophecy and defeat the Emperor and his ilk forever, then she has to play it through to the end. The only way she can control the Prophecy is to invite the Emperor to steal the wrong body for the Sorceress Darja, a potentially fatal mistake on his part if she can then exploit his mistake.\"\n\n\"Then why is she so angry?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Because you sprang the trap too soon. The Emperor has made his mistake, but Dalvenjah was not yet ready to act upon it.\" He paused, lifting his ears in alarm. \"And speaking of a certain malevolent Mindijarah, you are about to have company for breakfast. If you would just open a window?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Mira agreed.\n\nShe rose and turned the latch on the nearest window, then lifted it a short distance. J.T. leaped through, carrying his kipper in his mouth to enjoy in the seclusion of the garden. Mira closed the window and sat down quickly, lifting her cup and saucer to pretend that nothing had happened. Dalvenjah and Allan entered a moment later, and Mira moved to the other side of the table to make room for them.\n\n\"Your familiar left without his tea,\" Dalvenjah said, indicating his cup. \"He also had nothing to say that you did not already know. Stupidity is not one of your faults.\"\n\nMira frowned fiercely. \"There are no secrets from you, are there?\"\n\n\"Faerie dragons are tremendous natural telepaths,\" she said. \"Your cat knows that perfectly well. He was not trying to hide from me, but to leave you to face any potential wrath.\"\n\n\"The traitor!\"\n\n\"I have expended my wrath for the moment,\" the dragon continued. \"In fact, I feel in the mood for questions. I might even force myself to answer most of them.\"\n\n\"Oh, my!\" Mira had been anxious enough about meeting Dalvenjah again this morning that she could have followed the cat out the window. Now it seemed that she was to be rewarded with privileged draconic information. She hardly knew what to ask. \"Was J.T.'s little guess on target?\"\n\n\"Close enough, considering his limited information,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"Curiously enough, our battle so far has been based entirely upon the direction and misinterpretation of various prophecies. Our enemy has been acting largely upon what they could determine from the Prophecy of Haldephren, made two thousand years ago during the final defeat of the old Alasheran Empire. My understanding is that Haldephren himself does not remember making the Prophecy, but he did die almost immediately afterward.\"\n\n\"It was fortunate for him that someone thought to write the damned thing down at the time,\" Allan remarked.\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"That of course is exactly their problem. Not only is their copy of the Prophecy of Haldephren secondhand, but there is that added confusion of meaning inherent in trying to cast a Prophecy in verse. Mortals seem to have this need to cast their prophecies in verse, as if that gives them an added magnitude and veracity. I guess simple prose sounds entirely too mundane to be a warning of future disaster. That is also the problem of the Prophecy of Maerildyn. They have surely heard of that prophecy by now, but I suspect that it seems to them like nothing more than a lot of gibberish.\"\n\n\"Exactly the point,\" Mira agreed. \"I now understand White and Black, Red and Blue. My hair is red and Jenny's is blue, so the final triumph of Light or Darkness depends of course upon which of us got stolen by the Dark Sorceress Darja. But Dragons Gold and Dragons Black Seek to Gain What Each May Lack is beyond me.\"\n\n\"The Gold Dragons are obviously the Mindijaran,\" Dalvenjah said. \"The Black Dragons might not be physically black in the sense that we are gold in color, but Dark Dragons in general. But as far as I know, the Emperor has not yet dared to attempt an alliance with the Dark Dragons. Above all else, he is still mortal and they are not. He will have to command a great deal more power than he has already if he expects to approach them as an equal, for his magic is still very much subservient to their own.\"\n\n\"Even then, he would not get anything from them,\" Allan added. \"He can offer little to entice them to serve him, even if their pride allowed, and he would need control of tremendous magic indeed to be able to command them.\"\n\nThe dragons sat in silence for a time as Dame Tugg arrived, bringing their breakfast in covered dishes on a rolling cart. She set their plates before them and left again without saying a word. For Dame Tugg, not to say a word was so astounding and unusual that Mira stared in amazed silence. The two dragons lifted the lids to their plates and found to their consternation that they each had a dozen kippers.\n\nMira stared. \"My word! Cat food!\"\n\nDalvenjah took a fork and poked at a kipper cautiously. \"And on that same subject, they did not know about the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons until very recently, if they know it even yet. They certainly cannot know how to interpret it.\"\n\n\"You dragons never cast it in verse?\"\n\n\"In words,\" she said. \"Dragons foresee in their dreams, the gold dreams. The Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons exists only in the form of a dream, a complex series of images that tells its story much better than a few choice words. When you tell the story to someone who has not seen the dream, then only the words are left.\"\n\nMira reflected upon that. \"Yes, I suppose I understand what you mean. Another question?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"What next?\"\n\nDalvenjah laid back her ears, considering that briefly. \"I do not know where the Emperor has taken the Sorceress Darja, but I have discovered some disturbing ties between the Empire and the world of Jenny's origin. That is the best place I know to look. But the first problem is to get Jenny's spirit out of Vajerral and into a more permanent form of her own.\"\n\n\"You can do that?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"I cannot give her a physical body,\" she explained. \"I can restrain her spirit from attempting to find its way into a new life, as the Emperor did with my brother Karidaejan. She is, after all, a faerie dragon in spirit, and that is now her natural course. But I think that I can do much better for her than to leave her a weak and insubstantial ghost. Vajerral and Kelvandor will be leaving with me this very morning for my own world.\"\n\n\"I will not be going?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Not to my world, no. Allan will take you and your airship into Jenny's world, where you will wait for us to join you. You will spend that time with Jenny's parents, learning to speak the local language. Then we will see what we can do to resolve this matter.\"\n\nShe paused, seeing J.T. streak across the garden and leap completely over the flowerbed, landing on the outside window ledge so hard that he slammed into the window pane and fell back into the shrubs. She wiggled her ears. \"I suspect that your cat wants in.\"\n\nMira reached over to open the window, and the cat hurtled through as if he had been kicked. He ran straight up Mira's shoulder and sat on her head. Then he reconsidered, leaped across the table and ran up Dalvenjah's back, where he held on tightly to her horns with all four legs.\n\n\"I always wondered why these creatures were called familiars,\" Dalvenjah said, staring at the cat with crossed eyes. \"They presume upon their familiarities.\"\n\n\"There's a demon in the woods,\" J.T. insisted, shaking so hard with fright that Dalvenjah's ears wiggled.\n\n\"If you piss on my head, I'll give you to Allan to make strings for his cello,\" she said. \"Now what is this business about demons?\"\n\n\"A big demon,\" J.T. insisted. \"A very big demon.\"\n\n\"What does it look like?\" Dalvenjah asked patiently.\n\n\"A dragon demon,\" the cat said. \"A real dragon, that is. Not like you.\"\n\nDalvenjah removed him from her horns and tossed him across the table into Mira's lap. She shook herself, as if to rid herself of the contamination of idiocy, or at least stray cat hairs. She turned to Allan. \"When was the last time you hunted demons before breakfast?\"\n\n\"A quarter past three in the morning, last Wednesday,\" he answered without hesitation. \"That was the last time that we were attacked by demons. You were there. Friday night, it was just after dinner. And yesterday morning, not half past nine, we found five winged demons sitting on Mira's own roof like a flock of crows.\"\n\n\"We did dispatch them,\" Dalvenjah added, and glanced at Mira. \"Emperor Myrkan seems to think that I represent a major nuisance. He also seems to think that he can get rid of me with demons. Well, even vile masters of the Dark Magic can't be right all the time.\"\n\n\"Yes, Jenny and I happened across one or two demons in our travels,\" Mira agreed. \"Nasty things, demons. No manners at all, frightening poor cats.\"\n\n\"Yes, quite.\" Dalvenjah turned to Allan. \"Do you suppose that we should deal with this very big demon, before it makes a complete shambles of Mira's shrubbery?\"\n\nAllan frowned at his kippers. \"What, before breakfast?\" \"Yes, I'm afraid so.\"\n\n\"Very well, but let's not make a habit of this.\"\n\nThere was certainly no point in getting the cat to show them where to find the demon. By the time they stepped outside, the demon had found them. Or at least it would have found them if it had been facing the right direction. Even Dalvenjah had never seen a demon anything like this. It looked somewhat like a large, flightless dragon in the middle, with a thick, slightly flattened body supported by eight pairs of legs. Of course, no real dragon had ever had eight legs, and its heavy armor looked more like the segments of a centipede. The most curious thing was that it had no tail, but segmented necks growing out of each end. Each long neck ended in a massive head with fanged jaws that worked from side to side and immense powerful claws like those of a scorpion jointed at the back of the head, perfectly located to pull its prey toward those jaws. All in all, it was an extremely unpleasant thing to discover in the garden before breakfast.\n\nThere remained of course the question of how a monster with a head at each end could have been facing the wrong direction. At the moment, it was bent around in a circle with both heads contemplating the problem of eating an ornamental stone cherub. As they watched, one end of the demon bit the head off the cherub and chewed it up whole.\n\n\"If two heads are better than one, I wonder how stupid that thing would be with only one,\" Mira commented. \"How does something like that crap?\"\n\nDalvenjah glanced at her. \"Would you want that in your yard?\"\n\nThe other head took a bite from the cherub. The crunching of stone from two sets of jaws sounded like gravel in a cement mixer.\n\n\"Are you going to do something?\" Mira asked impatiently.\n\n\"Should I fetch the pink flamingos?\" Allan asked.\n\nDalvenjah seemed to be considering the problem carefully. \"Do you think that we can dispatch it quickly, or should we lead it away for an extended battle?\"\n\n\"This beggar must be eight to ten times the size of the largest that we have ever fought,\" he said. \"Is its size going to make it that much more resistant to our magic?\"\n\n\"That has not been the case in the past, but I hesitate to prediet with types that I have never seen,\" Dalvenjah said. \"All the same, I think that we should give it a try.\"\n\n\"I might sneak around to the other side of the garden and provide a distraction,\" Allan offered.\n\n\"Be very careful. Distracting a monster with two heads is likely to be a complicated and dangerous task.\"\n\nAllan moved quietly down the steps, walking gingerly on all four of his long legs. Mira watched him with growing curiosity. If this was his idea of being unobtrusive, then he had to have no idea just how large he really was. Being the smallest breed of dragon by over a ton, perhaps Mindijaran thought of themselves as far more dainty than they actually were. But if Allan's technique lacked subtlety, the stupidity of the demon seemed to balance the scales. The beast was too preoccupied with Mira's lawn ornaments to notice.\n\nRealizing that he might actually slip by unnoticed, Allan stopped short and seemed to consider his options. He coughed, then waited a long moment to watch the demon. When nothing happened, he rolled his eyes and coughed again. One head of the demon spied a marble sundial and both ends moved in with deep, rumbling demonic cries of delight, purring with a noise somewhat like a long train rolling slowly past. Allan looked over his shoulder at Dalvenjah, his ears standing straight up. Getting a demon's attention had never before been a problem that they had encountered; in the past, they usually found it just about impossible to avoid the attention of demons. None of the demons that they had ever met were especially bright, but they did what they were designed to do very well. Ordinarily they would have liked nothing better than to eat little golden dragons. Admittedly, not even Dalvenjah would have ever thought of baiting them with lawn ornaments.\n\nMira came out from behind the shrub where she had been hiding for a better look. The sight of a faerie dragon teasing a giant demon in her own garden was sorfiething that she was likely never to see again.\n\n\"You could put on a pointed hat and pretend to be a stone garden gnome,\" Dalvenjah called softly, watching from the top of the steps.\n\n\"You just be ready,\" Allan called back.\n\nHe aimed himself at the middle part of the demon and took a deep breath, obviously about to release a tremendous blast of flames. He was just at the deepest point of his inhalation when one end of the demon suddenly whipped arouhd and hurtled straight toward him. Caught by surprise, Allan leaped back with a startled cry and fell over on his back, and in the next instant the tips of both pairs of the demon's claws buried themselves in the ground to either side of him. That did not necessarily make Allan feel particularly safe, since those powerful, cherub-chomping jaws were now coming up through the middle. It was such an alarming situation that Allan exploded; all of the fire that he had been saving erupted like Vesuvius. The demon's entire head disappeared in a flash of flames.\n\nAllan was up and running in the next instant, making a very hasty retreat on all fours, although his tail was tucked so far up between his legs that it stuck out in front while his head was bent all the way around to see where he had been. There was perhaps something to be said for having a head at both ends, but not much. Dalvenjah, of course, had not been idle during this time. As both ends of the demon oriented on Allan, she spread her wings to glide to the bottom of the steps, then lowered her head and hurled a fireball directly at the middle of its tremendous bulk. It was no simple dragon-fire but some of her strongest magic, for the fireball was a blue so deep that it was almost black. The demon was consumed almost instantly, burning away in misty blue flames.\n\n\"Well, it worked!\" Dalvenjah sat up on her haunches, looking immensely pleased with herself. \"I am dragon. Hear me roar!\" \"You sent it back where it came from?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"What would be the point in that?\" she asked. \"I dematerialized it. That is the quickest and most certain way of killing them, and also the easiest. How do you dispatch demons?\"\n\n\"In actual practice, I've always had Jenny to do it for me,\" Mira admitted frankly. \"The best that I've been able to do is to set spells on our weapons. That, and I can make your clothes disappear.\"\n\n\"Then I should consider myself lucky that dragons are not in the habit of wearing clothes,\" Dalvenjah said, then turned to Allan as he came up the steps from the lower yard. \"You really should be more careful.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Spirit Is Moved",
                "text": "Evening was just beginning to settle dark and silent as the three dragons descended to the landing outside Dalvenjah's home in the mountains of the world of the Mindijaran. They had left Lady Mira's ostentatious abode more than twenty hours before. Since the Ways between the Worlds delivered the traveler to a corresponding point in the second world and not to his desired destination, by the expectations of their internal clocks it should have been dawn; such was the result of time changes between worlds. Dalvenjah had waited just long enough to see Mira, Sir Remidan and the Trassek twins in Wind Dragon follow Allan through the Way Between the Worlds that he had opened. Dalvenjah had her doubts about the quality of her mortal allies, and she thought that she would have little need of them unless she found the need to establish a circus. But Mira was still a part of the Prophecy, and Dalvenjah did not yet know whether or not she might yet be useful.\n\nDalvenjah's house was an abandoned fortress that she had adapted for her own. It was far less ornate and conspicuous than Mira's great gaudy palace but a good deal more cozy and comfortable, better suited to a dragon's more civilized tastes. It had certainly been home enough for herself and Vajerral, and even better when Allan had come to live there too. Dalvenjah had been fond of Allan from the start, but turning him into a dragon had helped her decide that she wanted to take him home. But now this place reminded her most of Jenny, for reasons that she did not entirely understand. Certainly Jenny had lived the second half of her childhood here, but the girl had been gone, away first at college and then to study with Lady Mira, for nearly the past five years.\n\nDalvenjah trotted quickly to the front door; faerie dragons were very long-legged and short of body, and they trotted on all fours very well. She stepped inside and silently ordered the magical lamps to full brightness, then glanced about quickly as if to assure herself that no part of her household had escaped in her absence. She turned back at Vajerral and Kelvandor, who were standing about aimlessly just within the door.\n\n\"Amuse yourselves quietly,\" she told them. \"I must consult my books on the care and manipulation of disembodied entities. It is not a common subject, since there are not that many dead dragons needing manipulation. Since we have been away for so long, you might see if the kitchen needs any attention.\"\n\nVajerral waited quietly, her ears alert, as her mother disappeared into her study and closed the door behind her. \"Do you get the impression that the children have been dismissed?\"\n\n\"I sometimes get the impression that your mother looks upon herself as one of only a very few adults in whole worlds full of children,\" Kelvandor said as he opened the curtains over the long bank of windows in the back of the main room, looking out from a high cliff into darkness. He frowned. \"I know that it is time for breakfast in Mira's world, but why do I have this idiotic craving for kippers?\"\n\n\"Well, I for one am grateful to be home,\" Vajerral said as she sprawled her full length on a pile of cushions, her long neck hanging limp. \"Mortals are fine, as far as mortals go, but they all smell a little funny. All except for Jenny.\"\n\n\"Jenny was from a more civilized world, from what I understand. Nor was she in the habit of wearing metal and leather,\" Kelvandor reminded her. \"Have you noticed that the ones who wear armor are the least fond of bathing? Except for Sir Remidan, of course. But Jenny was also secretly a dragon, and that might have affected her scent.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Even Jenny's mother smelled funny, so... Vajerral paused, and her head shot up in alarm. \"Hey, watch it! Sorry, I tend to forget about you. And stop talking about me as if I was already dead.\"\n\n\"Jenny, I hardly ever hear you speak anymore.\" Kelvandor gently interrupted their odd argument of two people with one mouth. \"Why do you never have anything to say?\"\n\n\"I feel somewhat guilty about asking Vajerral to surrender herself for me,\" Jenny explained, turning her head away in a reticent gesture. Vajerral had withdrawn herself, allowing Jenny full command of her body. \"And, I have to admit, even I tend to forget that I am not already dead.\"\n\nKelvandor settled silently on the cushions beside her. He did not want her to know how alarmed he was that she was losing her sense of identity so quickly. Her spirit was doing as well as ever, but her mind, perhaps even her sanity, was reacting to an almost completely passive state of existence. She needed to be separated from Vajerral into some existence of her own, so that she could be able to enjoy at least the freedom of independent motion and the ability to speak and interact for herself. But she ultimately needed the return of a physical form and all the actions and sensations that were familiar to both mind and spirit.\n\n\"You have never told me what you think about being a dragon,\" he said.\n\n\"I always knew that I must become a dragon to protect myself from the Emperor,\" Jenny replied vaguely. \"Dalvenjah always insisted upon it, but never enforced it. I see now that it would have likely alerted them to the true nature of the Prophecy.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But now you know that you always were a dragon, regardless of the form you wore.\"\n\n\"Well, that was surprising,\" she admitted.\n\nKelvandor-smiled to himself. Jenny was and always would remain Jenny. The prospect of changing form or even existing disembodied did not upset her too much, not when her insatiable curiosity welcomed almost anything that happened to her as a new and challenging experience. A lesser, or more normal, person would be holding up much worse under the circumstances.\n\n\"I never worried too much about us, about you and me, because the answer seemed to be a part of the problem,\" she continued after a brief moment. \"The Prophecy had come between us, but I had the assurance that protecting myself from the Prophecy would eventually force me to become a dragon, and that would solve any awkwardness in our relationship.\n\nFinding out that I always was a dragon in spirit actually took away the guilt about the rightness of the whole situation. As I see it now, my heart knew something that was hidden to the rest of me.\"\n\nKelvandor made a vague gesture. \"What was my excuse for debauchery?\"\n\n\"Well, get on with it!\" Vajerral declared suddenly.\n\nJenny turned her head to glare at herself, failing in the attempt. \"Vay, what the deuce are you talking about?\"\n\n\"You know where my room is,\" Vajerral said. \"This is your first chance to keep company as one dragon to another. I won't intrude. I promise!\"\n\nHer brightly eager expression turned abruptly into one of outrage. \"What do you mean, you won't intrude? How can you not intrude? It's your damned body!\"\n\nHer long dragon's face underwent another of its instant transformations. \"I'll be good. I will just keep quiet and enjoy myself.\"\n\nHer face returned to infuriation mode. \"Enjoy yourself? What the hell do you think the problem is? I don't mind making use of your body, but I don't like the thought of you loitering in the background drinking it all in. I know you promised, but I also know you better than that. You could never keep your damned mouth shut, especially during the hot and heavy parts.\" The innocent face returned. \"How could I say anything? You would have my mouth otherwise engaged.\"\n\n\"Vajerral!\"\n\n\"Well, you know what I mean.\"\n\nThe annoyed face returned, but it slowly softened to an expression of consternation. \"It's just not that simple. You are a fine dragon, and the best friend I have. But there are simply some things... Kelly, you tell her.\"\n\nKelvandor had been sitting quietly, looking bemused and wiggling his ears one after the other. \"Why can't you ever call anyone by their real name?\"\n\nOne of them, most likely Jenny, turned to stare at him, so he thought about that very hard. \"Vajerral, you simply are not welcome.\"\n\n\"Aw, nuts!\" Vajerral muttered, looking vastly disappointed. \"There is more to it than just that,\" Jenny added as soon as she regained possession of their mouth. \"I feel so remote and insulated in your body. No matter how much control you allow me of your body, everything remains so distant. My hearing is muffled and my sight is dim. I hardly have any sense of touch or smell at all. I cannot make love to Kelvandor in your body, regardless of your presence.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" When Vajerral returned, she made their face look even sadder. Then she lifted her head and perked her ears. \"Then can 1 make love to Kelvandor, and you watch?\"\n\n\"Vajerral!\"\n\n\"You sound like my mother,\" Vajerral said, amused. \"Right now, you even look rather like my mother. I was just trying to change the subject.\"\n\n\"Excellent notion,\" Kelvandor agreed.\n\nThey just sat quietly for a long moment, three dragons, two mouths, and nothing to say. Admittedly, the circumstances were a little difficult. Jenny and Kelvandor could not even enjoy a private conversation, much less anything more adventurous. And Vajerral was still just young enough to occasionally find it difficult to relate to adults, at least in quiet conversation. Having been to Jenny's world from time to time, she had learned to appreciate the passive company of the television. Kelvandor, of course, had no idea what a television was, and would have denied that such a thing could possibly work without the aid of magic.\n\n\"Do you know what worries me more than anything?\" Kelvandor turned to her, shifting his ears. \"What is that? Ah, Jenny?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's me,\" she said. \"I was just thinking that it is about to start all over again. I had tried to tell myself that I would have a rest from being frightened and anxious. But being stuck inside Vajerral only reminds me over and over that the hard part has only begun.\"\n\n\"Well, there is one important difference,\" he reminded her. \"This time, Dalvenjah and not Mira will be in control.\"\n\n\"Mira does have her methods,\" Jenny agreed, with obvious reservations. \"She does manage to get a lot accomplished, although never quite what she had intended. The worst part is that she seems to be contagious. I recall the sight of you hanging by just your horns from the bottom of that Imperial airship.\"\n\n\"I recall that as well, although by no means fondly.\"\n\n\"How did you get yourself into that one?\"\n\nKelvandor frowned fiercely, laying back his ears. \"The last thing I remembered was looping around the back of Wind Dragon and seeing you standing completely naked at the ship's wheels.\"\n\n\"1 never knew that you were the type of dragon who would harbor a taste for human flesh.\"\n\n\"Ordinarily no, but I always found yours interesting. Of course, I do prefer virgins.\" He saw that she was regarding him skeptically, and he made a vague gesture. Dragons tried, but as a rule they were miserable at telling jokes. \"Vajerral has told me the legends of your world. Actually, the sight of you flying an airship while standing naked in a snowstorm was a startling sight. Of course, a naked human is a startling sight at the best of times.\"\n\n\"You did not object before,\" Jenny observed.\n\nHe bent his neck so that he could rub the side of his muzzle against her own. \"Now you can never doubt that my love was true, if I could ignore the way you used to look.\"\n\nShe smiled demurely. Then she suddenly turned her head away, stuck out her long tongue and made an incredibly rude noise. She followed up by trying to glare at herself in outrage. \"Vajerral! I am sorry, Jenny, but that was the most sorry excuse for love-talk that I have ever heard. Well, you can still keep your little opinions to yourself.\"\n\n\"And we were doing so well,\" Kelvandor added, looking so ridiculously dejected that Jenny, although not Vajerral, knew that he was up to something. \"You know, if you were to stay quiet long enough, we might forget that you are even there.\" Vajerral brightened. \"Say, yes!\"\n\nA large, tapered hand appeared suddenly, taking Vajerral firmly by one ear and hauling her up from her seat on the cushions. Dalvenjah paused only long enough to glance at Kelvandor. \"If you will excuse us, I suspect that I can solve at least part of your problem.\"\n\nKelvandor stared, but he remained where he was and even more wisely elected to say nothing. The expression that Vajerral was wearing suggested a very strong desire to protest, but she had the weight of long experience to teach her what Kelvandor only guessed. Her mother led her quickly and rather unceremoniously into her study, pushing the door closed behind her with a quick sweep of her tail. The study was a fairly large room with all the things a dragon sorceress needed to ply her trade. All of the walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of books, and there was a pile of cushions where she could read, a large drawing table, a selection of her favorite weapons and a large barrel of cider. The very image of the scholarly dragon at home.\n\n\"Take the two of you over there and look in that mirror,\" Dalvenjah told Vajerral, although she went herself to collect a book from the table.\n\nThe young dragon looked around quickly, spying the large mirror that stood in one corner of the room. It was not a magic mirror as far as she knew, and it had been in the house for as long as she could recall. There were no magic mirrors as such, but a mirror could be a useful tool for the manipulation of visually oriented magic, and some mirrors were magically prepared for optimum use. Apparently Dalvenjah had already prepared this mirror for some purpose. Vajerral did not see her own reflection at all but the image of Jenny's lean and rather long-limbed form. There was room to spare for the girl, since this was a full-figure mirror for a dragon.\n\nVajerral sat back on her haunches and hid her long nose behind her arm, as if holding up a cape. \"Blah! Blah! Do not be afraid. All I want is to use your phone.\"\n\nThen she paused, fascinated to see that every move she made was copied exactly by the reflection, just as if it was her own. She lifted one arm and put it down, then the other. Mindijaran differed from all other dragons in the fact that they were mammals, bearing live young and suckling, although their breasts were usually fairly small except when they were nursing. Jenny, being so slender and rangy, was not greatly endowed even as mortals went. Vajerral jumped straight up, just enough to set things in motion, staring in amazement as Jenny's breasts jiggled in a manner that was strange and slightly horrible to a dragon. Delighted with the effect, Vajerral began to hop up and down, flinging out her arms and legs first to one side and then the other.\n\nThen she hesitated, seeing the reflection of her mother's face staring into the mirror behind her. Dalvenjah was wearing one of those quiet, pensive expressions, so it was hard to tell whether she was equally fascinated in the reflection, or containing an anger that was building to an explosion like a volcano, or if she was wondering whether her little dragonet had dried up her brain breathing fire out her ears, or if she was just waiting to make some particularly cutting remark. One of the latter explanations seemed the most likely. Vajerral slowly lowered her head almost to the floor.\n\n\"Are you quite finished?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"I suspect that I am,\" Vajerral agreed quietly.\n\n\"If you like your ears and wish to keep them, then you just stand right there and do not move until I tell you otherwise.\" Vajerral suspected that the threat was serious, for she had certainly feared for her ears often enough in the past, once her mother took hold of them. Dalvenjah made a few magical gestures in the direction of the mirror and muttered the appropriate words under her breath. Then she reached out and snapped Vajerral very firmly on the top of her tail, where a dragon would have otherwise had a rump.\n\n\"Now run along, and close the door quietly behind you,\" she said. \"And tell that amorous friend of yours that no one but Allan is to come through that door until I say so.\"\n\n\"But Jenny...\"\n\n\"She is here with me, now.\"\n\nVajerral turned away and made a fairly hasty retreat toward the door. When her mother told her to go then she went, and was glad to be making her escape. But even after she was gone, the image of Jenny lingered in the mirror.\n\n\"As fond as I am of Vajerral, I am glad to be rid of her,\" Jenny said, her voice thin and distant. \"At least I think so. Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"I can hear you just fine,\" Dalvenjah insisted as she turned back to the mirror.\n\n\"Can I ask just one question?\"\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\n\"What happens if the glass breaks?\"\n\nDalvenjah laughed to herself. \"You will be safe enough. For one thing, you will not be in there that long. And I am here to intercept your spirit if it should escape.\"\n\n\"And now?\"\n\nThe dragon frowned fiercely, having a talent for it. \"I really should leave you in there to punish you for behaving foolishly.\" \"Did I really have any choice?\" Jenny asked.\n\nDalvenjah knew what she meant, and considered that carefully. \"I do not know what to say. Faerie dragons do not accept the theory of predestination on moral grounds. We are, as you may have noticed, strongly independent and determined creatures. That leads to one of the greatest incongruities of being a Mindijarah, because we are all subject to the gold dreams. From time to time we all dream of the future and know, to varying degrees of detail, what is going to happen. I dream a great deal more than is good for me, and my dreams have the bad habit of coming true.\"\n\n\"Are you explaining or avoiding?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Is it hard to tell?'\n\n\"Digression is another of your special talents.\"\n\n\"Then I will be brief, which I find difficult. And I will teli you one of my greatest secrets. Can you handle all of that at once?\"\n\n\"I am an evicted spirit in temporary residence inside a dragon's mirror, one short step from being honestly dead. I feel that I can handle anything.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"Have you ever wondered why I seem to know so much more about the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons than anyone else?\"\n\n\"Because you cheat?\"\n\n\"Right. The Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons was assembled from the dreams that all the Mindijaran had on the same night. My dream was just a whole lot more detailed than anyone else's. So the answer to your question is yes.\"\n\nJenny concentrated very hard. \"What was my question?\" \"Did you have any choice but to act in any way other than you have. So the answer is really no. My mistake. But you have to promise me that you will tell absolutely no one else.\"\n\n\"I promise,\" Jenny insisted. \"But why?\"\n\n\"Well, there is one thing, of all the monsters and horrors of the hundred worlds, that your Auntie Dalvenjah fears. Your mother.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because she is family. I cannot just kill her and be done with it.\"\n\nJenny smiled, the idea appealing to her enormously. \"But there are a few more things I would like to know.\"\n\nDalvenjah arched her long neck, looking surprised. \"You seem to think that this is your lucky day. What would you know?\"\n\n\"Why are you so secretive? I can understand why you could not interfere with the Prophecy before now, but I get the feeling that you still have a few secrets left to play.\"\n\nDalvenjah shook her head sadly. \"I honestly wish I did. I enjoyed a certain confidence in knowing that the Prophecy was actually working according to plan, as hard as it was to encourage apparent disaster by allowing matters to follow their proper course. You see, I was not allowed to see the conclusion of my gold dream.\"\n\n\"What?\" Jenny demanded incredulously. \"There was more? What happened, did the gods of good dragons withhold the important part?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Dalvenjah admitted, looking decidedly uncomfortable. \"You see, I woke up at that moment with an overwhelming need to piss.\"\n\nJenny stared in disbelief, then rolled her eyes impatiently. \"Do you mean to tell me that the fate of whole worlds hangs upon the capacity of a dragon's bladder?\"\n\n\"You must understand that Allan had only just become a dragon, and we were still learning how to be romantic with each other. We had stayed up late that night, throwing darts and drinking mead.\" Dalvenjah made a small gesture of helplessness. \"Perhaps even that was meant to happen. Prophecies are notoriously elusive in nature. Perhaps we are not allowed to see exactly what we should do from start to finish so that we may maintain our sense of free will. You wait right there, and I will see about getting you out of that mirror.\"\n\n\"Am I going anywhere?\"\n\nAlthough she had said that facetiously, it did start Jenny thinking about her present situation. From her point of view, she was standing in a perfect replica of Dalvenjah's study, although the wall she faced was missing and a sheet of glass prevented her from stepping out into the real world. She certainly was not frozen in place as she feared she might be, but could move about freely. The fixtures of the room were solid to the touch but she could not feel their texture; there was carpet beneath her bare feet, but it might as well have been smooth floor. But she could not figure out if that was because her room was a visual reflection, an illusion, or because she was only a ghost, with no physical form to respond to anything solid.\n\nLured by her own curiosity, Jenny crossed the room and cautiously opened the door leading out into the main room. But the room beyond was completely dark, illuminated only by a strip of light through the open doorway. The real main room was of course brightly lit, and Kelvandor and Vajerral might have still been there. This was only the portion that could have been seen in the mirror when the door was open, and the reflection must have been captured at that time and remained hidden after the door was closed. There was even a back of the door, which would have been seen when it opened. But when Jenny reached around the doorframe her hand encountered no obstruction even past the point when half of her arm should have emerged through the wall beside her, which of course it did not. She closed the door quickly and backed away, fearful of what might have happened if she had stepped through, particularly if she had closed the door behind her. She suspected that it would have been far worse than white rabbits and tea parties.\n\nThen the door suddenly opened of its own accord, and no one was there. Jenny was so startled that she jumped back and nearly screamed, although that would have embarrassed her so much that she elected to blush instead. She turned back to the glass wall and saw that her uncle Allan had entered the real study.\n\n\"Well, that is safely done,\" he announced, then paused when he saw Jenny standing in the mirror. As she moved closer to the glass, her apparent height returned nearly to full size. He stared critically. \"Hello, Jenny. Nice to see you, I suppose. Do you realize that you are naked?\"\n\nJenny did not see fit to answer, knowing that he was teasing. Allan was a dragon in all ways, which was to say that he hardly cared about her nudity on either a personal or an objective point of view, although some dragons might have had something to say on the topic of aesthetics. She had also lived with these dragons for years and she had not always been in the habit of wearing her clothes even then, at least until the novelty itself began to wear off.\n\n\"Mira, Sir Remidan and the boys are safely delivered to Dr. Rex's cabin at the lake,\" he continued. \"Rex and Marie were not there, but I did talk to my sister briefly on the phone. The faerie centaurs will see that they stay out of trouble.\"\n\n\"Did you explain matters to Marie and Rex?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Yes, well enough,\" Allan agreed vaguely, although he lowered his head and laid back his ears. Even Dalvenjah professed to be afraid of Marie, Jenny's mother and Allan's sister, although Jenny privately doubted that.\n\nDalvenjah twitched her ears. \"What do you mean, well enough?\"\n\nAllan shrugged. \"I told her that Mira would explain.\"\n\n\"But Mira does not speak English.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know,\" Allan said, beginning to look slightly mischievous and self-satisfied. \"Marie is not yet aware of that, of course. Mira has only a few days to be ready for our arrival, and magic alone does not seem to be enough. I thought that she would learn most quickly if she had a very good reason, such as having my sister standing over her all day and half the night beating the language into her. Marie is going to be furious to find out what happened, and I admit to dropping certain hints that something was up.\"\n\n\"And it will have the added benefit of leaving Mira tame and biddable by the time we arrive,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"That was very sneaky and even slightly cruel. I must say that you have certainly learned how to be a proper dragon.\"\n\nShe turned abruptly to Jenny. \"Why do you look like that?\" Jenny almost flinched from the challenge in the dragon's voice. \"Because I cannot find anything in here to wear?\"\n\n\"What are you?\" Dalvenjah insisted.\n\n\"A ghost?\" she ventured, knowing that her answer was not enough.\n\n\"Whose ghost?\"\n\n\"My own ghost, I suppose.\"\n\n\"And what are you?\" the dragon asked again. \"Are you any less or any different in thought or mind than you were when you were walking about in a hundred and some odd pounds of animal? Was the true definition of what you are to be found in the flesh that you have lost, or in the spirit that can never be taken from you?\"\n\n\"I am still me,\" Jenny agreed pensively. \"Memory does seem to be largely a function of the flesh. My memories already seem distant, and I fear that I will begin to forget if I remain in spirit form too long. But I believe that the essence of what I am will remain forever.\"\n\n\"So it shall be, even after you pass from this life in truth and are reborn,\" Dalvenjah assured her. \"Now, what are you?\"\n\n\"I am ..Jenny paused, knowing that the answer would not be the most obvious one. Then she thought that she understood. \"I suppose that I am a dragon.\"\n\n\"Then why do you look like that?\"\n\nJenny frowned as she thought about it. \"Strictly speaking, I am the ghost of a dragon. This is the part of me that always has been the same, even for all those years that I thought I was something completely different. But does the spirit really have a form, or is that entirely arbitrary?\"\n\n\"It is,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"You appear as you do because this is the way you imagine yourself to look. In your imagination, you do not yet think of yourself as being a dragon. Indeed, you have never seen your physical form as a faerie dragon, so you cannot know how it looks. But for all practical purposes, it hardly matters.\"\n\n\"Then why did you bring it up?\"\n\n\"To give you something to think about. And to begin the process of teaching you to think of yourself as a dragon. That is now more important than you might think. You must assume the form of a Mindijarah, any form that you might wish, and wear that form from now on. You must learn both the gifts and the limitations of what you are.\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"So what does that have to do with getting me out of the mirror?\"\n\n\"You can leave the mirror any time you want,\" Dalvenjah told her. \"I just do not recommend it. When you are outside the mirror you will be nothing more than just a ghost, and subject to the two dangers that any ghost most face. One is the fact that your spirit could easily be captured and commanded against your will.\"\n\n\"What?\" Jenny asked, alarmed. \"Here, even in the world of the faerie dragons?\"\n\n\"At this point I will put nothing beyond the Emperor and his minions, and I no longer have the means to predict his actions. Keep in mind that there are very few faerie dragons in this world, which is as large as any. And if the Emperor happened to discover two very disturbing facts, that he stole the wrong body for the Dark Sorceress Darja and that we have maintained your spirit, then he might want you.\"\n\n\"Would he not rather go after Mira and the body that he needs?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Allan agreed. \"I have also arranged for fifty of the most capable Veridan Warrior-sorcerers of the Mindijaran to guard her from a very discreet position. Your mother would have a fit if she knew that the woods around the cabin is crawling with dragons. She was having trouble enough accepting Mira, a knight in armor, a talking cat and two adolescent barbarians.\"\n\n\"And the second danger?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Yourself,\" Dalvenjah said simply. \"The mirror protects you from your own natural need\u2014your spiritual instinct, if you will\u2014to complete your passing from this life and seek rebirth.\"\n\n\"Then I have to stay in this mirror forever?\" Jenny asked, dismayed.\n\n\"No, not forever,\" Dalvenjah assured her. \"I can work the magic that will give you a more solid and secure spiritual form, although not an actual physical body. That is a very difficult thing. It must be done at a very special place of magic, far from here, and I will need the help of a great many dragon sorcerers. That will take some time to arrange, ten or perhaps fifteen days.\"\n\n\"That long?\"\n\n\"Would you like to go back inside Vajerral?\"\n\nJenny kept quiet, aware when she was well off.\n\nThe moon of the dragon world rose full and golden, pouring its cool, magical light into the depths of the dell, illuminating the dozens of faerie dragons that sat patiently on the many stone ledges and steps that ringed the steep walls. Allan stood patiently with Vajerral and Kelvandor as they waited in a silent group a short distance behind Dalvenjah, all of them looking up from the small grassy glade that filled the bottom of the dell, in form very much like a natural amphitheater. Allan had never been here before, but he knew the history of this place. Dragons had been coming here for thousands of years, once as a forum of law and government and always as a place of strong and unique magic. He was certainly dragon enough to feel the electric tenseness that seemed to flow through the ground and fill the air.\n\nIt said much about Dalvenjah's reputation, as young as she still was, that so many dragons had not just answered her request for assistance but had come eagerly, willing to help in any way they could. Even Dalvenjah knew only half of them from personal experience, the other half only by name and reputation. She had not requested anyone specifically, and even she was surprised and a bit flattered by the ones who had responded. For his own part, Allan still felt occasionally daunted in the company of true dragons, especially by such a large and august body as represented here, more than four dozen of the wisest and most capable sorcerers and the most powerful Veridan Warriors. It was true that he was now a very capable sorcerer in is own right, and warrior enough to make himself valuable to Dalvenjah in a fight. But such meetings served to remind him that he had not begun life as a faerie dragon, and he had often been fearful that someone would say that he did not have the right to the power, the magic or the immortality that Dalvenjah had made possible for him when he had taken this form.\n\nOf course, that immortality was only theoretical. Considering the lives they led, there was a very good chance that either he or Dalvenjah would be gone within the next century. And considering the struggle they faced in the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons, there was a strong possibility that neither one of them would survive the next few weeks. Dragons accepted that, secure in the knowledge that they would always be reborn, knowing that the only harsh price that death demanded of them was the loss of old loves.\n\nDalvenjah stepped forward to the center of the glade, holding a large stoppered bottle of colored glass. For a long moment she stood staring up at the moon as if she awaited a sign, her broad wings folded on her back and her long, sinuous neck lifted. At last she set the bottle securely in a small nest in the deep grass and pulled the large wooden stopper, then took a couple of steps back.\n\nAllan watched with quiet interest, half expecting that a fountain of smoke should emerge from the bottle and slowly take the form of a genie. Because he had actually seen the process before, usually at least once a day since the start of their long journey a week earlier, he knew what to expect. Jenny arose from the bottle after a long moment, flying straight up, at first so small that she fit through the neck with room to spare but expanding in the blur of an instant to her normal size. She settled to the ground to stand beside the bottle and facing Dalvenjah, still wearing the appearance of human form, meaning of course her usual skinny and naked self.\n\nAfter a few initial jokes about the Jenny that lived in the bottle, they had all become fairly used to the situation. Except of course for Jenny, who considered existing in an immaterial state in a magically protected glass bottle to be only slightly superior to being trapped inside an adolescent dragon. The mirror was better than this; there are few abodes more boring than the interior of a glass container.\n\n\"You are not thinking of yourself as a dragon,\" Dalvenjah admonished.\n\n\"Perhaps not very well, but I am learning to do a line imitation of an imported champagne.\" Jenny shrugged. \"I will do what I can.\"\n\n\"Save yourself the effort for the moment,\" Dalvenjah told her. \"The time has come that we can give you a more durable form. Are you prepared?\"\n\n\"Is it going to hurt, or anything?\"\n\nDalvenjah hesitated only briefly. \"I cannot say how this will seem to you, since magic of this nature is hardly ever needed. It was not recorded how you should expect it to feel. There might be a certain amount of stress, for it is violent magic. But I doubt very much that it will hurt, for you lack the capacity to feel pain as such. Courage and resolution are needed, and in that respect I ask you again if you are prepared.\"\n\n\"In as far as I can be prepared, for this is also beyond my experience and I cannot know whether my courage is equal to the test until the task is done,\" Jenny answered, then had to try very hard to keep from frowning. Dalvenjah Foxfire's manner of speaking was sometimes as contagious as it was eccentric.\n\nDalvenjah did not answer, lifting her head high and arching her long neck around to stare up at the moon. It seemed almost to respond to her call, and if it could not pause in its journey then it granted her request, sharing its gift of magic freely. The light that poured down into the bay became brighter and even more golden. The dragons waiting on the ledges lifted their heads as well, staring up toward the stars. The night became tense, filled with magic and a sense of expectation. Then, after a long moment, the dragons all turned their heads as if at an unspoken command, looking down at Dalvenjah.\n\nBut Dalvenjah turned her own head suddenly to fix Jenny with a sharp, commanding gaze. \"Who are you?\"\n\nJenny drew back a step, so great was her surprise and confusion. She had apprenticed for years in the daunting presence of Dalvenjah Foxfire, and her fearful response was a part of the acquired instincts of her childhood. She remembered too well those spontaneous quizzes, stem questions to be followed by thunder and lightning if she did not know the answer. But this was a part of the magic, she was sure, and important.\n\n\"I am Jenny,\" she answered uncertainly. \"Jenny Barker.\"\n\n\"That is only your name,\" Dalvenjah said sharply, even as a cool breeze moved through the dell, brushing softly through the leaves of the trees. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I am just me, a person.\"\n\nDalvenjah shook her head impatiently. \"That is not enough. Who are you?\"\n\n\"Right now, I'm a damned ghost,\" Jenny answered bitterly, then wished that she had not used that particular combination of words.\n\n\"That is not true,\" the dragon insisted. \"Your spirit is forever a part of you. Now tell me the truth, and tell me all that you know. Who are you?\"\n\n\"I am a dragon,\" Jenny said, remembering what Dalvenjah had been trying to teach her for the past few days.\n\n\"You are indeed a dragon,\" Dalvenjah agreed. That finally seemed to be the right answer, but not yet enough. \"That is the essence of what you are, even if you never knew. You must now take that form as your own, even if only for the sake of the appearance. In your present state, appearance is almost as important as reality.\"\n\nJenny had to concentrate very hard, learning from experience that forcing a continuous change in her visual aspect was far more difficult than a momentary illusion of change. This was a matter of changing the way she thought about herself, rather than a convenient form as she wanted others to see her. After a moment her form began to waver and then collapsed suddenly in upon itself, expanding rapidly into the long-limbed, winged shape of a faerie dragon.\n\n\"Now at least you seem to know what you are,\" Dalvenjah remarked. \"Now, again, who are you?\"\n\n\"I am Jenny the faerie dragon,\" she answered. Then she almost felt herself leave the ground, as if a powerful hand had suddenly taken her in a crushing hold. She could still feel no pain, but she was acutely aware of the tightness that encircled her. For the first time ever, she became aware that she did not breathe.\n\n\"For the final time,\" Dalvenjah insisted. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I am Jenny Barker, Sorceress and Veridan Warrior of the Mindijaran,\" she proclaimed, forcing those words against the weight that was threatening to crush her with increasing force.\n\nIt was as if the golden light of the moon had merged and concentrated into a single lash of lightning that reached down, not to destroy her with a sudden blast of immense power but to gather her up in its fiery embrace and make her a part of itself. Jenny twisted frantically in its hold, suspended in that crackling shaft of golden light a few feet above the ground, clawing uselessly with her long arms and legs and moving her wings in long, slow beats. She felt as if she was being taken apart, bit by bit, and then put back together again in the next instant, like a wave moving slowly through her entire being.\n\nThen the pressure returned, not crushing her this time but bearing her down. She drifted back to the ground and, as the pressure increased, she bent her back and long neck beneath the unrelenting stress, bracing herself on her haunches with her long arms spread wide against the ground. She still had no material form, and she could not understand what was happening. She knew only instinctively that she must fight, that the magic would not release her until she overcame it. The magic pressed down upon her even harder, a waterfall of golden light battering her draconic form before it spilled in waves across the grass, vanishing into mist. But Jenny fought back. After a long moment she shouted some inarticulate cry of fury and denial and thrust herself upright, her arms lifted and wings spread. The magic retreated from her, a rush of golden lighting ascending into the clear night sky.\n\n\"My, that was certainly theatrical,\" Dalvenjah remarked. \"Jenny, are you well?\"\n\nJenny was not entirely certain, as it happened. She slowly folded away Her wings as she lowered her head and peered about in a confused and rather self-conscious manner, as if she had just managed to embarrass herself without even trying. She no longer felt any stress or discomfort, of course. In fact, as the first few moments passed in long silence, she became aware of small, unexpected things. She no longer felt empty and vaporous, but as though she possessed a sense of mass that was in some odd way different, as if she still lacked weight. The ground felt solid beneath her, and a slightly numb sense of touch, of heat and cold, had returned to her. The sense of being isolated, of being a mind without a body, was nearly gone. She still lacked any physical form, but at least she now had the illusion of one.\n\n\"Now you are protected,\" Dalvenjah continued when it became obvious that Jenny had made the transition well. \"No one can now capture your spirit and command you against your will. I also doubt very much that anyone could hold you captive physically, since you still have the advantages of your immaterial form. Now we are ready to continue.\"\n\n\"Ready for what?\" Jenny asked fearfully.\n\n\"Ready for our most difficult task yet,\" the sorceress explained. \"Now we must face your mother. And collect that... that Mira person.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Detectives and Dragons",
                "text": "The rift opened with a single point of flame that burned away quickly in a widening circle of fire, filled within by the unending night that was the Way Between the Worlds. The flames were not as easily seen against the cool, bright morning sky as that deep pit of blackness, suspended in the air just over an open, grassy ridge surrounded by the tall pines of the mountain forest. The Way Between the Worlds opened just enough to allow the forms of four faerie dragons to slip through, bright golden with crests of sapphire blue, and the passage closed quickly behind them.\n\nAs the dragons gained altitude and circled around, Jenny very quickly fell behind. Inertia wanted to treat her as three hundred pounds of dragon while the wind considered her as insubstantial as tissue paper; Jenny was trying to bend the rules of Newtonian physics, and Newton was out for revenge. She was beginning to appreciate the real reasons just why ghosts were known for their generally bad dispositions. Everyday existence became very annoying when you could walk through a wall but not a stiff wind. She was only able to fly in the direction she wanted by crabbing at a very pronounced angle into the wind, and she gave the surprising and very ungainly appearance of flying sideways. In fact, she was flying sideways.\n\nKelvandor quickly dropped back to fly by her side, having a hard time himself keeping pace with her uncertain aerobatics. He was in a very awkward position all his own, compelled to offer help, knowing that there was nothing he could do for her, and aware that she might not be in any mood for him to start behaving more like a fearful mother than an understanding mate.\n\nHis own situation was not any better for the dream that he had had the night before. He had imagined that Jenny no longer liked him now that they were both dragons. She had declared that she wanted a mixed mating, and had run off with a dwarf.\n\nIt was, of course, a ridiculous notion. Dwarves did not associate with dragons of any breed even to this day, not if they could help it. Love did not necessarily conquer all, at least when it came to guarding one's hoard.\n\nThe dragons circled out over the lake and came in around the cabin from the side. The place still looked very much as it had when Dalvenjah and a very young Vajerral had come there for the first time, years before. There was one car parked in the usual place, a white imported sports car that could only belong to Dr. Rex, Jenny's father. That reminded Jenny that her mother would be there, and the thought of Marie Barker frightened her so much that she lost her balance and nearly fell. Wind Dragon, Mira's airship, was settled in the clearing in front of the cabin. Assuming that the language lessons had gone well during the last three weeks, at least Jenny would be spared the dire necessity to trying to explain things to her mother. Marie would have had time by now to adjust to the fact that her daughter was not only a dragon, but the ghost of a dragon.\n\nOf course, Jenny did regret missing her mother's reaction upon learning that she had once been married to Dalvenjah Foxfire's half-brother.\n\nKelvandor landed ahead of Jenny and then stood ready to help her if she needed it, knowing that she had the same troubles getting back on the ground as dirigibles and other things that were lighter than air. The thought was well intended but hopeless; Jenny passed right through his arms and landed in a sprawling pile on the ground.\n\nDalvenjah glanced over her shoulder, wearing one of those adult looks that mothers did best, one of slightly impatient disapproval. She punctuated that by twitching her ears, one after the other. \"Put on your monkey suit, Jenny. We do not want to alarm your mother too much.\"\n\nJenny concentrated on her monkey suit, wishing that Dalvenjah could find a more beneficent term for Jenny's human form, and after a moment her shape collapsed in upon itself and expanded quickly into the appearance of the person that she had been most of her life. Jenny concentrated again and was able to summon jeans and a light sweater for herself, something that would help in the process of avoiding causing her mother alarm. The illusion of clothes was an easy one for Jenny to manage, since she was used to thinking of herself in clothes. She hoped that she would not be forgetful now that she was once again in mortal company.\n\nWhen the dragons held back, watching her, Jenny realized that they were expecting her to enter first, another part of the process of avoiding alarm. Jenny had her doubts, but she also doubted that it was important enough to argue. She opened the door.\n\nOf all the sights she might have expected when she stepped inside the cabin, Mira still managed to surprise her. Mira was seated in a large easy chair in the middle of the room as she watched the reruns of The Jetsons, a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream and a bag of Snickers bars at hand. The second surprise was that Mira had shrunk considerably, looking like a child in that large chair. Sir Remidan was nowhere to be seen, but Dooket and Erkin were seated on the floor making castles with the same building blocks that had once been so entertaining to a four-year-old Vajerral.\n\n\"Jenny!\" Mira exclaimed in English, although somewhat imperfect English. She leaped straight up, standing in the seat of the chair to recapture the height she had lost. \"Bosom buddy! Lifelong pal!\"\n\nSomething about that greeting seemed immediately familiar. Jenny glanced at the television, and remembered The Flint-stones. Barney Rubble had been fond of saying that. Jenny knew now where Mira had been getting a large part of her language lessons. In her time, even Dalvenjah Foxfire had communed with Kermit the Frog.\n\nJenny's mother Marie entered at that moment from the direction of the kitchen, still drying her hands on a dish towel. Almost in quiet contempt of Dalvenjah's concern, all she seemed to see was the dragons. \"So there you are. If I had known you were coming, I would have cooked a ox.\"\n\n\"I see that everything has gone well enough,\" Dalvenjah remarked.\n\n\"And just how do you imagine that?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"Well, both of you are still alive,\" the dragon said, although she was staring uncertainly at Mira. \"Indeed, you have, as they say in your world, cut Mira down to size. What did you do, wash her in hot water? Tumble dry?\"\n\n\"You reverted!\" Jenny exclaimed.\n\nMira shrugged. \"There is so little magic in this world, I had to let go of the spell that made me taller. I thought that 1 should save my magic for more important things.\"\n\n\"Do you mean that this is Mira's actual size?\" Allan asked. \"Yes, she used to be a midget in the circus,\" Jenny explained, forgetting for the moment that Mira might not wish to have that part of her past discussed, at least not in front of the dragons. \"They found her doing magic tricks and working as a clown, and took her away to the Academy. Once she had learned enough magic, she decided that she was tired of being so short.\" \"Tired of being stepped on by dragons,\" Kelvandor added in his own broken English, which he had been learning from Jenny and Vajerral over the past few weeks.\n\n\"Hey, watch it, dudes!\" Mira snapped, becoming irritated. \"These smaller breeds are known for their short tempers,\" Dalvenjah said glibly. She could be a very glib dragon, when she was in the mood.\n\nMarie afforded her a stem glance. \"We are not finished with you. Indeed, we have not even started. Certain glib dragons should not be so cocky.\"\n\nDalvenjah twitched her ears.\n\n\"Now, we are going to have a very lengthy explanation,\" Marie continued. \"There was this funny thing. Allan brought me this flying ship of fools with barbarians, a knight in armor, and a shrinking sorceress who, he declared, would explain everything. But lo, none of these strange people speak a word of the indigenous patois.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Marie said, looking confused.\n\nMarie paused for a moment as Dr. Rex and Sir Remidan entered the room from the kitchen. The honorable knight was now dressed in a tweed suit complete with a sleeveless sweater and light jacket that had leather patches on the elbows, looking for all the world like an Oxford professor. They were both drying their hands on towels, having been conscripted by Marie as slave labor in the kitchen. Galley slaves, as it were.\n\nMarie turned back to the others. \"So after considerable effort, I was finally able to piece together the report that someone had stolen Jenny's body but that she was doing well enough inside Vajerral, and that it all had something to do with the fact that she had been talking with her real father, and that it turns out that I was once married to a dragon who was Dalvenjah's brother, and that you were trying to do something about it. Is that essentially correct, or did I simply misinterpret the message?\"\n\n\"Half-brother,\" Dalvenjah corrected her.\n\n\"I am half relieved to hear it,\" Marie said. \"But now Jenny stands before us, looking very much the same as always. She does not appear to be a ghost, and she certainly does not look like a dragon.\"\n\n\"Actually, it is a lot more complicated than that,\" Dalvenjah admitted. \"At this time, Jenny is a ghost and able to assume any form that she desires. For as long as she is in this world, it is convenient for her to be human.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Dr. Rex asked.\n\nDalvenjah shrugged. \"Easier for her to get through your narrow doorways. Allan and I should perhaps have been there to protect her, but this was fated to be. And we were distracted by tracing the source of a secret stronghold of the Emperor and his Dark Sorcerers in a place that we should have never expected. This world, I am afraid to say. For now, it is important that you call Wallick and Borelli and make arrangements for all of us to go to New York. There is someone there whose help I need very much.\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Rex looked perplexed. \"Don't you mean London?\"\n\nBy the time Dave Wallick arrived the next morning, he was by no means alone in wondering if the worthy Dalvenjah Foxfire was completely out of her gourd. She had been in this world often enough to know that there was no Sherlock Holmes. The others tried to tell her that there was no Sherlock Holmes, and that even if there had once been a Sherlock Holmes, he had gone into retirement decades before, way back when Miss Marple was only middle-aged and before Lord Peter Whimsey's habits had gone out of style. Wallick tried to sit her down and have a good talk with her. Surely she would listen to an FBI agent.\n\nHe was not successful.\n\n\"But you do agree that Sherlock Holmes was a character invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a century ago,\" Wallick insisted.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Dalvenjah agreed easily enough.\n\n\"Then of course he is not real.\"\n\n\"That does not necessarily follow. I am a dragon and real enough, and yet you yourself would have once said that I could not exist.\"\n\n\"That is not at all the same,\" Wallick said, and sighed. \"Sherlock Holmes is and always has been just a character in a book, not real like you and me.\"\n\n\"My argument is that he is both, and I must find him,\" Dalvenjah answered simply.\n\nWallick watched her for a long moment, and he could see that he was not going to be able to talk her out of this. For her own part, Dalvenjah was watching him just as closely, and she could see that Wallick was not convinced that the necessity of this outweighed the trouble involved. Taking Dalvenjah Foxfire and her Magical Misfits to New York to look for someone who did not exist was asking for endless amounts of trouble; not only could she see this, but she agreed with his concerns.\n\n\"The matter is this simple,\" she said. \"The Emperor and his Dark Sorcerers have come into your world. Why?\"\n\nWallick looked surprised, and troubled. \"There is either something here he wants, or he is looking for Jenny.\"\n\n\"He was establishing his base in this world long before he captured Jenny the first time,\" she said. \"I doubt very much that he has discovered his mistake, much less looking for either her or Mira. There is something here that he wants.\"\n\n\"Technology?\" Wallick asked immediately.\n\n\"The obvious answer,\" she agreed. \"But I do not consider that very likely. There is nothing of this world that would be of any use to him. Your technology is too easily subverted by magic.\"\n\nWallick glared at her suspiciously. \"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"Yes, quite,\" she insisted. \"By magic, I can deflect bullets or divert ballistic missiles. Anything electronic, especially computers, is very easy to defeat or even control.\"\n\nDragon hackers. Wallick found it an especially frightening thought. \"So what do they want here?\"\n\n\"I have no certain idea. That is why I must find Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nWallick had known even before he had started that he was going to give in, if he could not convince Dalvenjah that she was making a mistake. He had been with her during her battle with the steel dragon Vorgulremik and he felt compelled to trust her, even in the face of certain logic. Indeed, everyone was inclined to go along with her quest for fictional detectives, even if certain members of the party doubted the results. Allan trusted her, as did Jenny, based mostly upon long familiarity with her ways. Kelvandor trusted her, but he did not understand this matter of people who did not exist, and he would have been just as willing to set out for Camelot to find Captain Nemo or Peter Pan. Vajerral had no opinion one way or the other, while Dr. Rex was hoping that they did find Sherlock Holmes.\n\nGetting four dragons, much less all the rest of this retinue, to New York was in fact the hardest part. Wallick would have preferred to make arrangements to fly them all to New York in a cargo plane, and he would have left behind as many members of this menagerie as possible. Dalvenjah Foxfire, of course, had other plans. She wanted everyone present and accounted for, and Wind Dragon near at hand in the event that they had to move quickly into another world. The only ones who would not be going along were Marie and Rex, who were given the task of staying behind with the faerie centaurs and the mortal students at the school of magic and guarding against attack. In other words, Dalvenjah had invented an excuse to be rid of them.\n\nWallick considered briefly the thought of disguising Wind Dragon as a blimp; her length was adequate, but her four wide lift vanes made that difficult. The only solution seemed to be having the airship flown by a polar route, as it were, flying only at night and along a carefully plotted course that kept her away from areas of large population and bright lights, until she was well into northern Canada. Then she would proceed east until she reached the Atlantic and finally south over open ocean until she came to the area of New York. The fact that Wind Dragon moved fairly swiftly and in complete silence was very much in her favor, while the fact that she was the size of a small airliner was not. There was no point in trying to arrange for an escort, since planes or helicopters would have only attracted attention with their noise. As long as the military was warned to leave her alone, Wind Dragon should be safe enough.\n\nThe next problem was the matter of a pilot. Mira was now too short to see over the siderails well enough to steer the ship safely, and she could no longer command enough magic to keep the ship in the air for long. She had already had to release the spell that kept her tall for absence of magic, for mortal magic was in very short supply in this world and even a sorceress of her caliber was suffering from the lack. She had not been expecting it when she had brought Wind Dragon through the Way Between the Worlds following Allan, and she had nearly lost control of the ship before she could get it landed. The dragons would have to pilot Wind Dragon on this journey, since their command of the dragon magic had not been as seriously effected.\n\nNot only was Jenny on the duty roster, she found herself at the top. Being dead had not seriously interfered with her abilities as a sorceress. Indeed, it had not been nearly the inconvenience that she would have expected. And she was the only one of the group with experience at flying the airship, something that the other dragons were curiously hesitant to attempt. Of course, it was presently a little hard for the others to think of Jenny as one of the dragons, even the other dragons. For as long as they were in this world, Dalvenjah agreed that it was best for her to remain in her \"monkey suit.\"\n\nWind Dragon remained Mira's ship, and she was still the captain. She remained on the helm deck with Jenny through the night, helping in any way she could with navigation, evasion and simple companionship. Since Jenny no longer had any need for sleep, and was immune even to tiring physically, she ended up flying the airship through most of the night. Mira would stay devotedly at her side, or at least in the near vicinity. She explained that since she now weighed about half as much as she had at her full height, she needed only half as much sleep, and she could do that during the day easily enough and avoid the company of Dalvenjah Foxfire.\n\n\"It is also a very effective plan for losing weight, half of whal you weigh in only three weeks,\" she added. \"The way that everyone in this world worries about losing weight, I could bottle it and make a million dollars. But then, what would I do with a million dollars? Dollars mean nothing where I come from.\" \"With the side effects of your diet plan, you would have to get out of this world in a hurry,\" Jenny remarked. \"Besides, I have a better diet plan. I don't weigh anything.\"\n\n\"Dragon, ho!\" Dooket called from the bow.\n\nJenny could see the dark form of a dragon approaching rapidly out of the night, circling wide around Wind Dragon's bow and then moving up to fly level with the helm deck. The three dragons had been taking turns flying ahead of the ship and scouting the way. She finally recognized Allan.\n\n\"Lights ahead. A small town, at least,\" he reported. \"Turn some twenty degrees to north.\"\n\n\"Right away!\" she answered as she spun the rudder wheel, and Allan hurried on ahead to scout the way. Jenny watched the compass as the ship came around, then straightened Wind Dragon in time to stop her slow turn at twenty degrees. She saw that Mira was watching over the side, having to stand on a wooden box that she kept handy. \"We will be out of this world soon enough. Then you can restore your height.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't really mind being short,\" Mira insisted.\n\n\"You don't?\" Jenny regarded her skeptically. \"For something that you don't really mind, you went to some trouble to do something about it.\"\n\n\"That spell is completely passive, and no trouble to me at all,\" Mira insisted as she turned to lean back against the rail. \"1 will admit I used to be very embarrassed about being short, especially when I was a child. The worst was when I was in the circus. Then it seemed that my main worth to the world was as a freak, an object of mirth and self-ridicule. Doing a few magic tricks allowed me to be something besides just a clown. But I got over that very quickly once I went away to the Academy at Tashira. Given the chance, I soon discovered that I was very happy with myself. I never would have bothered to do anything about it, except for one thing.\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"Being very small in a big world is damned inconvenient,\" she explained. \"It kept getting in the way of the things I wanted to do and enjoy. I had learned that I no longer hated being a midget, but I can't say that I ever became particularly fond of it either.\"\n\nEverything went well enough. Jenny was pushing Wind Dragon as much as she dared, getting more than sixty knots out of the ship. Dalvenjah had the dragons scout their way carefully, so that the airship could take to the sky late in the afternoon before it was completely dark, and continuing on sometimes an hour or so after sunrise. Fortunately it was autumn, and the nights were getting longer.\n\nDalvenjah considered that they were far enough north at the end of the third night that they could go on through the day, flying now without stop, and she even took the wheels herself for a while. She insisted that at least two dragons fly ahead of the ship during the day, looking for areas of habitation. She was also less worried about being seen, as long as Wind Dragon was out of range of most guns. Wallick had already arranged for both the American and Canadian military to ignore the airship, and the civilian authorities along Wind Dragon's flight path had been discreetly warned that no one should be alarmed if they happened to observe the test flight of a special \"stealth aircraft.\" Mira had been instructed to keep her ship high enough that no clear details of her unusual design could be seen.\n\nJenny still found herself piloting Wind Dragon almost the entire time. She did not tire either physically or magically, and so she also had no need to rest or recover. Flying the ship was less boring than hovering about watching someone else fly it. And as long as she was at Wind Dragon's wheels, the dragons were free to scout ahead or to rest.\n\nThe last part of the journey had promised to be the most difficult, but the answer turned out to be simplicity itself. Wind Dragon settled into the sea just out of sight of New York Harbor and waited for night. Then, with her lift vanes and stabilizers carefully packed away and her running sails raised to catch the wind, the airship slipped quietly into port surrounded by an escort of Coast Guard cutters, looking very much like any of the other sailing ships from a past century that occasionally came to call. The sails were of course only for show, since Wind Dragon was not a sailing vessel and could not easily be tacked. Jenny was actually driving the ship with its propulsion vanes, and her only problem besides fighting the drag of the wind on the sails was holding the ship's speed low enough to keep her landing struts hidden in the water. Wind Dragon was a functional hydrofoil, whether or not that had been the intention of her builders.\n\nMira was standing on her box at the siderail, captivated by the lights of the city. \"My word, I must have died and gone to heaven. This place is bright and gaudy beyond my wildest dreams.\"\n\n\"I have died,\" Jenny remarked. \"Spending the rest of eternity in New York is one thing, but I don't know that I would call it heaven.\"\n\nThey were directed to a dark and remote section of the naval shipyards, their destination illuminated in a sudden wash of lights. Jenny held the ship dead in the water for a few minutes while the Trassek twins furled the sails and unstepped the masts and cranked down the wheels in the landing struts; then she drove Wind Dragon straight up a concrete launching ramp and into the open doors of an empty warehouse. The two FBI agents Wallick and Borelli came aboard as soon as the boarding ladder was released, along with a tall man none of them recognized.\n\n\"So, you made it,\" Wallick declared. \"Any trouble?\"\n\n\"None at all,\" Jenny insisted.\n\nDalvenjah Foxfire emerged from the hatch leading below, turning and ascending the steps leading to the helm deck. The tall, quiet man who had come aboard with Wallick and Borelli took a step back as she approached. He had obviously been warned about the dragons, but he understandably found the sight of his first dragon to be a little overwhelming... or at least disconcerting. Dalvenjah was much larger than most people, as small as she was for her kind, but also a creature of rare beauty in bright gold with emerald eyes and a sapphire crest.\n\n\"Everyone, this is Clark Bowenger, with the FBI locally,\" Wallick said as dragons continued to emerge from the lower deck. \"He is here tp help convince you that there is no Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\n\"I hope that he is also here to help me find Sherlock Holmes,\" Dalvenjah remarked tartly.\n\n\"From our point of view, it is the same difference,\" Wallick assured her. \"The only thing that worries us is how long you intend to look for Sherlock Holmes before you're ready to admit that he does not exist.\"\n\n\"If things go well, I will only need a couple of hours,\" she insisted. \"I will need some way to travel unobserved about the city. Myself, Jenny, also Allan and Mira, if that can be arranged.\"\n\n\"That should be easy enough,\" Bowenger assured her. \"I already have a large delivery truck standing by. When do you wish to start?\"\n\n\"It is very late tonight,\" the dragon mused, mostly to herself. She seemed to come to some decision. \"Tomorrow, then. What is a likely time that two dragons can move between your truck and a building without causing too much trouble?\"\n\n\"Right now, actually,\" he said. \"It really is not that late, only just past seven-thirty. Do you suppose that Mr. Holmes will still be receiving visitors at this hour? If you're not ready tonight, then I would recommend waiting until this time tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"I am ready,\" Dalvenjah said, then looked around at Sir Remidan. \"Would you mind making certain that the boys finish settling this ship? I am going to take the ghost and the midget to meet Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nHardly half an hour had passed before a large, brown delivery truck came to a stop at the main doors of a small but very expensive apartment building in a fashionable part of the city. There it sat for a long moment, dark and silent. The driver, Clark Bowenger, glanced at his companion in the front of the van. Wallick shrugged, and they both turned to look over their shoulders at Dalvenjah Foxfire.\n\n\"This is the place,\" she insisted.\n\n\"Are you absolutely sure?\" Bowenger asked.\n\n\"Have you ever known me to be wrong?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not in my half-hour of experience, no.\"\n\n\"I was asking Mr. Wallick.\"\n\nWallick sighed heavily. \"When you asked that question, I was thinking of the first time you came into this world and went looking for the most powerful sorcerer you could find.\"\n\n\"Was I wrong?\"\n\n\"No, but you couldn't have convinced me of that for the longest time. That is why I went along with this business, no matter how certain I am that you must have kibbles in your brain.\"\n\n\"Thank you for that unqualified vote of confidence,\" the dragon remarked wryly. \"Why do we not just step inside and see if your good faith is to be rewarded, no matter how certain you are that it will not be.\"\n\nWallick and Bowenger stepped out of the truck and stood for a moment looking around, trying so hard to look inconspicuous that anyone watching would have probably called the police. For one thing, people who drive delivery trucks do not normally wear business suits. There was no one else to be seen on either side of the street on that block, although there were a few farther along in either direction. Since things were unlikely to be any better any time soon, they hurried to the back of the truck. Jenny was waiting outside the closed doors.\n\n\"How did you get out?\" Bowenger asked.\n\n\"I stepped through the doors,\" she said. \"I am dead, you know.\"\n\nThere did not seem to be any point in arguing. Wallick opened the rear doors of the truck and the dragons leaped out, hurrying to the main doors of the apartment building that Bowenger held open. Last of all Wallick reached in and lifted out Mira, setting her on the ground. It was undignified, but so was climbing down the bumper.\n\n\"So this is what you FBI agents out west do,\" Bowenger remarked as they followed the entourage into the building.\n\n\"When we aren't after horse thieves and other odious desperados,\" Wallick said.\n\n\"Don't you mean ornery?\"\n\n\"That is a word I save for dragons.\"\n\nThey entered the main lobby of the building just in time to see the elevator door close on the two dragons. That was enough to lead the two agents to the edge of panic, especially Bowenger. He had assumed that his role was that of supervisor or at least guide and he was beginning to feel that he had lost control of the situation, a common complaint of people who had to deal with Dalvenjah Foxfire. Bowenger was beginning to think of some of his own words for dragons. Even admitting that there was not enough room in that one small elevator for them all, he still thought that he should have gone first. Of course, there was also some virtue in getting the dragons out of the lobby as quickly as possible. Fortunately Jenny had the second elevator waiting by the time they arrived.\n\n\"Follow that elevator?\" she asked as she waited for them to enter.\n\n\"How do you know which floor?\" Bowenger asked.\n\n\"Mystic divination or logical deduction?\" Jenny inquired, and pressed a button. \"Dalvenjah said that they would be waiting on the fifth floor. I thought we might look there first.\"\n\nThe two agents were both beginning to have the same thought at about that same time. How did Dalvenjah know where she was going? They had both thought that she would wander about the New York area for a while looking for a person who did not exist, but she did seem to have a very definite idea of her destination. The doors of the elevator opened at last and they found the dragons waiting just beyond. Wallick pushed out quickly ahead of the others, hurrying to intercept Dalvenjah.\n\n\"Don't you think that I should go first?\" he asked. \"Just in case... I mean, perhaps I should warn Mr. Holmes about you dragons first, so that we do not startle him.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should, if it makes you feel any better,\" she agreed. \"And just in case there is no Sherlock Holmes, we do not want to frighten some unsuspecting person unduly.\"\n\nSo much for trying to put anything over on Dalvenjah Foxfire, Sorceress and Veridan Warrior of the faerie dragons. Wallick remembered being told not to make the common mistake of talking to crazy people as if they were stupid; it only upset them. Just then the nearest door opened and a portly gentleman in white hair and a three-piece suit stepped out, then stopped short when he saw the company that was keeping in the hall.\n\n\"Ah, Watson?\" Wallick asked cautiously.\n\n\"No, Svensen,\" the gentleman said in an accent that was not English. He nodded politely and stepped back within his apartment. Then, with a final glance at the two dragons, he closed the door.\n\n\"Perhaps I should lead the way after all,\" Dalvenjah said impatiently.\n\nWallick stepped back to allow the others to pass. Bowenger stood quietly at his side. \"Watson, indeed. I'm not entirely certain, but I think that we just frightened the Swedish Consul half to death.\"\n\n\"Well, he reminded me somewhat of Nigel Bruce,\" Wallick said defensively. \"That's all I know about Sherlock Holmes.\" \"Are you saving any new words for your dragons?\" \"Exasperating comes to mind,\" he said. \"It's a fairly common word, but it has the virtue of five syllables.\"\n\nBy that time Dalvenjah had reached the door she wanted, and she knocked boldly. There was the wait of a long moment, enough time for the two agents to arrive, and then the door was opened by a most unusual man. He gave the appearance of being tall, for he was very light and lean of build, but graceful and strong like a dancer. If this was indeed Sherlock Holmes then the descriptions of him had not been quite right. His eager, hawkish look was mostly a matter of expression, for the true delicacy of his features was hidden by a demeanor that was alert and cunning, even predatory.\n\n\"Ah, so it has come at last,\" he said sadly, seemingly not at all surprised to find a dragon on his doorstep. \"I suppose that you should come in quickly.\"\n\n\"It is perhaps not what you think,\" Dalvenjah told him as the others filed in. \"I am not of your world.\"\n\n\"You say that as if you mean it to be reassuring,\" he remarked as he closed the door, although he was obviously surprised. \"The faded Realm of Faerie of this poor world had only limited contact with the other worlds, and the gates closed as the last dregs of faerie magic died away, long ago.\"\n\n\"But there were survivors even yet,\" she assured him. \"I have myself sent most of them to safety, years ago.\"\n\nTheir curious host afforded the group a slow, appraising stare as they took their seats in the main room of the large apartment. The furnishings of the room were elegant enough in a rather stolid sense, the furniture itself heavy and primarily in dark woods. The room, although large, had a cozy, almost self-contained look, giving the sense that the cold wind of a winter's night howled outside.\n\n\"You two gentlemen are Federal agents, probably FBI, although I would not put this matter beyond the CIA, when dragons are involved. You are definitely local,\" he said to Bowenger, then turned to Wallick. \"But you are not, and I would suppose that you have come here recently from some very different climate, possibly one of higher altitude.\"\n\n\"Sherlock Holmes,\" Wallick muttered to himself. \"I am Dave Wallick, and this is Clark Bowenger. FBI.\"\n\n\"This young lady is of Scandinavian descent,\" he continued, turning next to Jenny where she sat beside Mira on the sofa. \"I also perceive that you are a sorceress, that you are not mortal despite appearances, and that you are doing a very good imitation of life when you are in fact a ghost.\"\n\n\"Bingo! Jenny Barker. My father was a dragon.\"\n\n\"How did you know that she is a ghost?\" Mira asked. \"Because she has no scent, as your dragon friends could probably tell you. And you, my most remarkable woman.\" He actually bowed to her, and kissed her hand. \"You are mortal and a sorceress, but not of this world. Are you perhaps responsible for this dear girl?\"\n\n\"I am indirectly responsible for her current condition,\" Mira admitted, unexpectedly blushing from the chivalrous attention. \"I see. Are you a medium?\"\n\n\"At the moment, I happen to be a small.\"\n\n\"Ah, Mira,\" Dalvenjah interrupted. \"If you will excuse her, she has a very limited familiarity with the local language, and an attention span to match.\"\n\n\"And I hope that you will excuse me as well,\" he added. \"You do know of my habits, I am sure, even if only indirectly by reputation.\"\n\n\"Are you Sherlock Holmes?\" Wallick asked, unable to contain the question any longer.\n\n\"No, I am not, nor have I ever been,\" he answered directly. \"For all practical and convenient purposes, I am Malcolm North, an English expatriate who has been living in this country for some years. Some ninety years to be specific, although that is not commonly known. But you may call me Sherlock Holmes, if that is your wish. I suspect that you will anyway. Would anyone care for tea?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, please,\" Mira agreed eagerly, and turned to Jenny. \"Did you know that they have tea in this world? Well, of course you do.\"\n\n\"Since you seem to be the one who knew where to find me, perhaps you can explain things to your friends,\" he suggested.\n\n\"Yes, certainly,\" Dalvenjah agreed, pleased to explain her own brilliance. \"I became acquainted with the stories of Sherlock Holmes during my past visits to this world, and I had noticed something unusual from the first. In every description of Holmes that I have read\u2014the original Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle, of course\u2014everything about his appearance and manner suggested to me an elf. That led me to realize that the literary Sherlock Holmes had to have been based upon an elf, in particular a wise and learned elf lord, one who had grown old with the world and knew all its secrets. Someone who had lived among men for a thousand lifetimes and knows them better than they know themselves.\"\n\n\"That is so,\" Holmes called from the kitchen. From the sounds, he had just set a kettle of water on the fire. \"In a very distant past I was Lord Alberess of the northern kingdom of the elves. But my kingdom was crushed beneath the ice of the north, the advancing glaciers of the last Ice Age as you mun-danes would say, long ago. That left me homeless and without purpose. Then, as the first kingdoms of men arose in the south, a certain remedy to my boredom seemed to suggest itself.\"\n\n\"To make a long story short, you eventually found yourself in England just over a hundred years ago,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"Just in time to meet a young writer named Arthur Doyle. Whether you intended it or not, you must have made quite an impression upon him. Your centuries of wisdom, logic and learning were far beyond those of mortal men, the exact qualities he wanted for his perfect detective. The Sherlock Holmes of the stories, of course, had to be mortal to seem believable, but that only made his abilities seem even more amazing.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, an elf?\" Bowenger asked. \"I thought that elves were tiny, cute little things, and naked. I've read Xanth novels.\"\n\n\"Xanth novels?\" Wallick demanded incredulously. \"Get real, man! Go read some Tolkien.\"\n\n\"I may have outsmarted myself on that account,\" Holmes said, ignoring them both. \"Sir Arthur had already published the first story by the time I knew what he intended. Then he kept writing more and more. He insisted that I should not worry, that this Holmes business was just a minor fad that would pass soon enough, and everyone would have forgotten the name of Sherlock Holmes within the year.\"\n\n\"But it soon became awkward, I suppose,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Your resemblance to Sherlock Holmes was obvious enough to those who knew you, especially those who knew that you were acquainted with Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon, even people you had met only for the first time began to notice. Changing your identity did not help. Eventually you thought of coming to America, where everyone thinks of all Englishmen as unusual.\" \"Precisely so, although I fear that I am never entirely free of the name of Sherlock Holmes,\" he said as he returned with the kettle and a tray of cups. \"If you will excuse me for remarking upon it, but you seem to possess a keen intellect equal to that of my literary alter-ego.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Dalvenjah replied. \"It is a great pleasure for me to say that you are certainly no slouch yourself. If anything, Arthur Conan Doyle failed to do you justice.\"\n\n\"If the two of you are quite through preening like a pair of hens,\" Allan suggested. He was not entirely sure whether this had turned into a meeting of their mutual admiration society, or if they were simply sharing a private joke between them.\n\n\"As odd as this may seem to outward appearances, your particular command of the language clearly identifies you as a native speaker,\" Holmes told Allan as he poured a cup of tea. \"For you, little lady, I would anticipate two large spoons of honey with your tea, and a small amount of Irish Cream.\"\n\n\"How did you know?\" Mira asked suspiciously.\n\nHe glanced over at her. \"Admitting that you are not familiar with the tales of Sherlock Holmes, I thought that you might have guessed by now from our conversation.\"\n\n\"Conversation?\" she demanded. \"I can't understand half of what you say!\"\n\n\"Jenny could translate everything into words of one syllable,\" Dalvenjah remarked.\n\n\"She could as easily translate into my own language,\" Mira remarked testily as she accepted her tea. \"I speak the language as well as anyone could hope after only three weeks of magical memorization and daytime television, and I endure enough insults from this dragon as it is.\"\n\nHolmes frowned. \"My good woman, surely there is no reason for you to be so short.\"\n\nMira just glared.\n\n\"A poor choice of words, I agree,\" he admitted. \"It takes no great feat of logic to conclude that you are here for my help. What may I do for you?\"\n\n\"That is a very long story, as they say,\" Dalvenjah replied. \"And one that will have to wait,\" Bowenger added. \"We need to get these dragons back out of here while it can still be done without their being seen. We do have very fine accommodations prepared for them down by the shipyards. The rest of you are free to come and go as you need.\"\n\nHolmes regarded him suspiciously. \"If you don't mind, I think that I would first like to know just who is in command of your little expedition.\"\n\nBowenger sighed heavily. \"I've been firmly instructed to assist Dalvenjah Foxfire any way I can and not to question or interfere in her actions no matter how strange they may seem.\" \"All of the resources of the FBI?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"As well as the CIA, various New York area police departments, the postal service, the armed forces, and the United Nations Security Council.\"\n\n\"The postal service?\"\n\n\"They make wonderful spies.\"\n\nHolmes looked thoughtful. \"Is this situation as dire as all that?\"\n\n\"Apparently so.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Sherlock Holmes should not come out of retirement for anything less.\"\n\nThey certainly had not expected trouble that night, but they found it waiting for them when they returned to the warehouse at the docks. Dooket and Erkin, Mira's two allegedly barbarian henchmen, had decided to make a trip out on the town and had simply disappeared from the area of the warehouse. There were three essential problems with their little wenching expedition. First was the fact that they barely spoke a word of the local language. To make matters worse, they were still dressed as barbarians, including weapons and armor; that was their idea of how to impress girls, and it tended to work in certain worlds.\n\nLast of all was the fact that they did not have the slightest idea of how to conduct themselves among the natives. Dalvenjah had not considered it necessary to instruct them in such matters, rightly believing that they did not have the wit or subtlety for the task.\n\nBowenger got on the phone immediately. As a credit to his abilities, he had them tracked down in only four calls. As he returned to the others, it was hard to tell from his expression whether he was appalled or amused.\n\n\"They must have been picked up only minutes after they left here,\" he said. \"They went straight to the nearest bar and made such a spectacle of themselves that someone called the police right away. It was an Irish pub near the waterfront, and they were too strange even for that crowd. Dooket was throwing daggers at the dartboard, while Erkin was telling women that he was a federal mother's milk inspector.\"\n\n\"They went along peacefully?\" Mira asked.\n\nBowenger nodded. \"They apparently thought the policemen were taking them somewhere to pick up girls. When the police tried to get some story out of them about who they are, it seems that they got scared and decided to tell the truth. Right now, they have a suite all their own on the sixth floor of City Hospital.\"\n\n\"The mental ward,\" Allan explained to Mira and the dragons.\n\n\"Well, they should feel right at home,\" Jenny quipped.\n\nMira engaged one of her quaint little expressions. \"I know that I will regret this for the rest of my unnatural life and probably a good deal longer than that, but I suppose that I do need them back. Is that possible?\"\n\n\"It can be arranged,\" Bowenger said. \"Would you be willing to testify that they are sane?\"\n\n\"Heavens, no!\" Mira exclaimed, then she looked chagrined. \"Well, if I cannot say that they are sane, I might as well turn myself in also. People have been telling me all my life that I must be insane, but I always assumed that sanity must be a state of mind.\"\n\n\"Then we should...\" Bowenger paused and stared at Mira, wondering if she had meant exactly what she had said. \"Then we should hurry. You will have to come along with me. Can you be discreet?\"\n\n\"My word, the questions this man keeps asking!\" Dalvenjah exclaimed.\n\nMira glared sullenly. \"Oh, piffle!\"\n\nRetrieving the truant barbarians was simple enough, once Bowenger showed his credentials and invented an elaborate story to explain their obvious eccentricities. Dooket and Erkin, he explained, were the sons of the Ambassador from Ruritania, very new to the country and not yet aware that they should not wear their native costumes and weapons in public. Their unusual stories were the result of a practical joke that had been perpetrated upon them in their innocence; their English was actually so poor that they had not known what they were saying.\n\n\"Ruritania, eh?\" the doctor remarked as he signed the release. \"You know, their story sounds better than yours.\"\n\n\"Truth is stranger than fiction,\" Bowenger said tightly. Something had gone wrong with his little plan, but he hoped to bluff his way through with that tough, no-nonsense professional attitude that agent cadets were required to practice in front of mirrors until they had it right. Department motto: Posturing Saves Paperwork.\n\n\"If you're going to go to so much trouble to convince me that this is none of my business, then I'll take your word for it,\" the doctor said. \"If those two are of any worth to you, you can have them.\"\n\nJenny and Mira were waiting outside with Holmes; Sir Remidan had elected to remain with the airship, not really trusting the locals, and the dragons had no choice. Jenny had been telling Holmes what she could of the history of the Alasheran Empire and of the schemes of the Emperor Myrkan and the High Priest Haldephren, especially of Mira's and her own journey to Alashera, where they had unintentionally destroyed the entire island/city and Jenny had become a ghost... in separate incidents. The matter of the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons was a difficult one to relate, since she did not understand it completely herself. Holmes did, once she had explained everything she knew. In fact, he seemed more impressed than ever with Dalvenjah Foxfire's cold logic.\n\nBowenger returned at last with the two barbarians, who were looking both confused and contrite. They were also dressed in more conventional clothes, which Bowenger had wisely remembered to bring along, their various pieces of armor, mail and leather packed away in canvas bags that they carried.\n\n\"So there you are!\" Mira declared. She took the boys aside and proceeded to chastise them thoroughly in their own language.\n\n\"She reminds me oddly of the Empress Cleopatra. They are of very similar stature, although Cleopatra was more tall and more round,\" Holmes mused. \"If she finishes any time soon, there is a certain restaurant I know that should still be serving. I do not intend to ask much for my services, but a dinner or two should not be out of the question.\"\n\n\"Of course. I have a company credit card,\" Bowenger said. \"Strictly off the record, what would you ask for your services?\" \"Two things only. First, I intend to stay with these dragons for as long as they will have me. Second, when the quest is done and the dragons return home, I wish to accompany them.\"\n\n\"You will be leaving us forever?\" Bowenger asked. \"I feel like we've only just found you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not forever,\" Holmes answered, choosing his words carefully. \"I have been in this world for more centuries than I care to recall. I will not say that familiarity has bred contempt, but it has engendered a certain degree of boredom.\"\n\n\"I think that I can assure you that no one on this end will attempt to interfere with your plans. But you will have to convince Dalvenjah Foxfire. She seems to be very much in charge here.\"\n\nMr. Holmes's restaurant was still open. It was not particularly large, not particularly expensive, and not at all crowded at that time, all very important considerations as far as Clark Bowenger was concerned. A couple of tables were quickly pushed together, mostly so that the Trassek twins could be located as far as possible from the adults. Mira stared in consternation at her menu, her passing familiarity with the language not quite up to the task as far as reading was concerned; Dooket and Erkin put their menus on their heads and pretended to be Chinese. Jenny just looked quietly distressed.\n\n\"Are you not hungry?\" Bowenger asked discreetly.\n\n\"That is an understatement of vast proportion,\" she explained quietly. \"I not only lack the need but the capacity to eat. One advantage to being dead is that you will never starve to death.\"\n\n\"Order an appetizer,\" Holmes suggested. \"Something that the rest of us could quietly remove from your plate.\"\n\nThe waiter came to take their orders very quickly, in the process somehow quietly removing the breadsticks, crackers, and little packages of sugar and coffee creamer from within easy reach of Mira's two bodyguards. He returned a couple of minutes later with their drinks. Mira regarded her glass cautiously for a moment and even sniffed it, but she did not dare drink. \"What is this?\" she asked at last.\n\n\"Tea,\" Jenny said.\n\n\"Are you sure? There's ice in it.\"\n\n\"That's iced tea. People here like it that way.\"\n\n\"Tea with ice in it?\" Mira mused, and made a face. \"And just when I was beginning to think that this was a civilized world.\" \"That brings us eventually back to the discussion at hand,\" Holmes reminded them, then blinked as a soda straw wrapper hit him in the nose. The twins, who had been aiming at Mira, giggled nervously, but he chose to ignore them. \"The whole matter seems to focus on this Dark Sorceress Darja. Why does the balance of victory or defeat rest upon her return to life? Who is she?\"\n\n\"The records are unclear,\" Mira said. \"In the days of the ancient Empire, she appeared suddenly long after the Emperor Myrkan and the High Priest Haldephren had already come to power. She spent a lot of time standing about at the Emperor's side, and she traveled around with Haldephren learning to do really atro... attol... nasty things. The only really funny thing was that in the defeat of the Empire, they killed her themselves and left her spirit in some safe place to await their own return.\" \"There was something different about her,\" Holmes said, speaking mostly to himself. \"Her spirit was something valuable. Something to be protected. But how in the world does the fact that she is in the wrong body alter her influence upon the future? A body should, for her purposes, be just a body, once the previous owner is evicted.\"\n\n\"Nothing about my body would be an advantage to her,\" Mira said. \"At the moment, I have to ask waiters for phone books to sit on.\"\n\nHolmes waved that aside impatiently. \"That we know already. It is not a matter of any advantage in having your body, although I am not as convinced as the Sorceress Dalvenjah seems to be that the unexpected disadvantage of inhabiting Jenny's body is quite that important. You misunderstand my question because I did not say aloud exactly what I was thinking. What is Darja going to do that will be upset by the fact that she is not aware that she inhabits an immortal form? It has to be something magical, and of prime importance to their cause. That is the thing that we must discover.\"\n\n\"I'd have thought that you would have it all figured out by now,\" Bowenger said seriously.\n\nHolmes nearly laughed aloud. \"I might allow you to call me by that name, but I am not the Sherlock Holmes of legend. Even if he was here at this very table, we would both withhold judgement until we have heard everything there is to know. So, what do we know so far? They wanted a very specific body to return the Sorceress Darja to life. They have the wrong body, and they do not know that. They are apparently doing something in this world, the very reason that Dalvenjah Foxfire has come to consult me. Now, put it together and what have you got?\"\n\nMira shrugged. \"Bippity Boppity Boo?\"\n\n\"Where do we begin?\" Jenny asked, ignoring her.\n\n\"Right here, in New York,\" he said. \"Dalvenjah says that her own trail has led here. They are at a disadvantage here, unaccustomed to the ways of this world, lacking in magic and unable to move freely. If we can discover what they want here, in a world without magic, then the other answers will be much easier to find. I just wish that Dalvenjah had some clue about where specifically we might begin.\"\n\n\"Ah-ha! We know!\" Dooket declared, and then both of the Trasseks began babbling furiously in their own language. \"What is it?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"I'll try to make sense of their ravings. I've had a lot of experience with that,\" Jenny said, and she and Mira both spoke with the two barbarians for a long moment. She turned at last to Holmes. \"They say that when they were in jail, they overheard two men in the cell next to them speaking in the Alasheran language.\"\n\n\"Are they certain of that?\" Holmes asked suspiciously. \"From Jenny's story, I suspect that it is a language that none of you actually speak.\"\n\nPerhaps Erkin understood what he said, for he quickly pulled out a folded piece of paper and passed it to Mira. At the same time, Dooket was offering some explanation.\n\n\"Dooket says that they recognized too many words for it to have been a coincidence,\" Mira reported. \"They wrote down everything they heard, and it happens that I do speak the language.\"\n\n\"Well, they are not only clever but reasonably literate,\" Hplmes remarked.\n\nMira read through the page quickly. \"It's mostly a lot of nothing about lawyers and such. Yes, here we have something. When they get out, they are expected to return to the warehouse of the blue fish.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense,\" Bowenger mused.\n\n\"No, you must remember the circumstances,\" Holmes said. \"If these people are indeed servants of this Emperor Myrkan, then they are most likely of very little importance or they would not have foolishly gotten themselves arrested. They might speak the local language well enough to get by, but they would have little reason to learn to read. They probably find their way about the city by visual references of their own invention. If there is no warehouse known by the name Blue Fish, then I would suggest looking for a warehouse that has the symbol of a blue fish somewhere about it.\"\n\nBowenger nodded. \"I can get on that first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Find out from those two barbarians which cell this was in relation to the one they were in, and discover for me who they were\u2014or at least who they claimed to be\u2014and why they were arrested,\" Holmes added. \"Then we may have to pay a visit to their lawyer and threaten him with anything from heresy to high treason, as long as we get him to talk to us.\"\n\n\"It might be easier to send Dalvenjah to him in the middle of the night, just like the ghost of Jacob Marley,\" Bowenger said. \"I've had a fair amount of experience with lawyers. The smart lawyers are almost always the honest ones, since they make a better living winning cases for honest clients. The stupid lawyers have to bite and scratch and get themselves involved in dirty games, but they tend to be too cocky and stupid to know when they've gotten into more trouble than they can handle.\"\n\n\"I could go,\" Jenny offered. \"Being a ghost, I can poke around his office all night if I have to. If I can't find what we need, then Dalvenjah and I could try Scrooging him at home until his bell cracks.\"\n\nBowenger frowned. \"That is breaking and entering, at the least.\"\n\n\"That's only half right,\" she told him. \"I don't have to break anything to enter, and I'm immune to alarms, cameras, and all forms of personal injury. Besides, if he is in deep with the Empire, then Dalvenjah might not frighten him quite as much as you expect.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Battle of New York",
                "text": "One of the disadvantages of being a genius super-sleuth is the pressure of live performance. A great detective operating in real life is like a magician on a stage: unless he pulls the rabbit out of the hat on clue, he feels that he can lose his credibility with the audience very quickly. The greatest problem faced by the Elf Lord Alberess, alias Malcolm North, alias Sherlock Holmes, was that he was competing with the reputation of the greatest fictional detective who had ever lived. Well, who had ever lived on paper. The fictional detective has the advantage of having a writer who already knows how the crime was committed, the identity of the villain, and how the story ends, and who can even invent new witnesses and clues along the way should his sleuth run into trouble. Mr. Holmes envied his fictional counterpart. At the same time, he would not have wanted to have been Sam Spade.\n\nThe trouble from the first had been a lack of information. Agents of the Alasheran Empire were in this world; they had even been found in New York. Holmes had been given the problem of discovering where they were and why they were here, and he simply had nothing to work on. The two agents that the Trassek twins had overheard in prison had been rescued by a lawyer who firmly believed that his services had been retained by an international shipping firm, and his statements had survived the careful probing of both lie detectors and dragon magic. The names and addresses supplied by that same lawyer had led nowhere. The one thing that remained was the possibility that the warehouse of the blue fish could be found.\n\nHolmes had long since moved into the apartments that had been arranged for the off-worlders, meaning of course the dragons and Lady Mira's strange crew and company. Such was the state when Clark Bowenger arrived early in the morning of the fourth day with no idea how to proceed. The apartments were in fact a group of unused offices in one portion of a building, decked out with inexpensive and rather dated-looking furnishings so that it had the appearance of some cheap hotel. The first thing he found was that Holmes was playing his violin, just like in the story. What was surprising was that Allan was accompanying him on the cello, although the only way that the dragon could play it comfortably was to sit back on his tail and hold his instrument up to his shoulder like a violin. Not wishing to interrupt, Bowenger went into the next room to discover that Mira, J.T. and the Trassek twins were watching Yogi Bear. Jenny was sitting on the ceiling.\n\n\"What are you doing up there?\" he felt compelled to ask, knowing that he would not like the answer.\n\n'Pennants,\" she explained simply.\n\n\"Penance?\"\n\n\"No, pennants,\" she insisted, and showed him. She was trying to attach a Mets pennant to the ceiling with tape.\n\nBowenger had to step aside as Dalvenjah Foxfire came shuffling into the room, walking slowly and heavily on all fours, dragging her tail and almost dragging her head, it hung so low. He knew that the dragons had been flying over the city at night, hoping to sense the presence of Dark Magic somewhere below. She looked more like a dragon who had tipped a few too many bottles. Dalvenjah ignored him completely and kept going, eventually disappearing into the kitchen.\n\nBowenger turned to Holmes, who had just arrived from his impromptu concert with the dragon. Both of them were still carrying their instruments. \"Did the fictional Holmes learn to play the violin from you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Holmes insisted. \"Before I became Sherlock Holmes by accident, I enjoyed a very successful career as a concert violinist. You have heard, perhaps, the name of Paganini?\"\n\n\"Used to play shortstop for the Yankees?\" Bowenger asked suspiciously. Holmes often teased him about having been famous people of history, since both he and Wallick had wondered about that. Holmes also insisted, when he had answered that very question frankly, that he had always preferred to take an interesting but anonymous role in history.\n\nDalvenjah came shuffling back from the kitchen at that moment, this time walking awkwardly on her hind legs so that she could carry a mug of cider and a large roll stuffed with cheese and roast venison. A nutritious part of this complete breakfast. She glanced up only briefly at Jenny, who was still sitting on the ceiling, and sighed heavily.\n\n\"New York, the town that never sleeps,\" she said, and stuck out her long tongue to make a rude noise. She glared at Allan. \"All of us were flying all night long.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I awoke to the sound of strings. I just had to join in. Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've played Mozart?\"\n\n\"I awoke to the sound of strings. I just had to get up, whether 1 wanted to or not.\" Dalvenjah paused a moment to stretch her neck in a long, slow wave that began at the top of her neck and rolled down the full length of her tail. \"Is there any hope in asking if there is any news?\"\n\n\"No, there is not,\" Bowenger told her simply.\n\nDalvenjah stretched her wings, spreading them both as wide as they would go and then holding them half-open while she fanned them furiously, working the deep flying muscles in her chest. The exercise created quite a little bit of wind. Jenny, who had been drifting back down from her perch on the ceiling, was caught by surprise and sent tumbling across the room and through the door, tossed like a piece of paper.\n\nDalvenjah frowned. \"I resent every passing day that Jenny must be left in that disembodied form. I must do something about it.\"\n\n\"I am going to do something about it,\" Holmes said. \"The nightly reconnaissance of the dragons is a good idea, in as far as it goes. Your advantage is in your command of dragon magic, the strongest magic any of us have. Your disadvantage is that you are obliged to keep yourselves some distance above a rather large and brightly lit city. Now, I believe, is the time that the rest of us who possess some magic go out for a closer look of our own. I possess some small faerie magic even yet, and Mira has held her remaining magic in reserve. But most important, J.T. is a familiar with the ability to detect all sources of magic, and Jenny still possesses her full dragon magic.\"\n\n\"Not only that, I have the ability to go anywhere and move unseen,\" the girl added eagerly.\n\n\"Besides, it is time that Sherlock Holmes takes a more direct part in the solving of this mystery,\" he continued. \"Since the real Sherlock Holmes is not here, then I must do my best.\" Bowenger looked very concerned. \"Do you mean to say that you intend to search this entire city in the company of a talking cat, a midget sorceress and a ghost?\"\n\n\"No, just the waterfronts.\"\n\n\"Oh, well! I cannot tell you how much happier that makes me feel.\"\n\nJenny had made the acquaintance of elves of many types in her travels, and she knew they were capable of many great and wondrous things. She did not normally think of elves as driving cars, certainly not the white compact van made out to look like a florist's delivery truck that Bowenger had supplied. Thinking about him as Sherlock Holmes did not help; then she would have expected a horse-drawn cab. One of her two consolations was the fact that she could not be hurt in an accident; being dead had its advantages, aside from its devastating effect upon one's sex life. Her other consolation was the fact that Holmes seemed to be a very good driver.\n\n\"Where should we look first?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Well, I have been thinking about that,\" Holmes said as he drove, watching the rows of dark warehouses and dusky, cluttered shops roll past. \"I am, of course, working on the assumption that they faced the same requirements that we found when we arrived. I admit that they might be landing their airships elsewhere and then entering the city by more conventional methods. But if they are forced to make a quick escape out of this world, then they must have their own ships at hand. The only way I can conceive that they could have gotten even one of their ships within the city is the way you did, sailing it into the harbor and then parking it inside a warehouse. That of course means a waterfront warehouse, a private one in their case, and the fact that we have been looking for a warehouse known as the Blue Fish seems to support this. I suspect that we will find them not far from our own base.\"\n\n\"That sounds reasonable,\" Jenny agreed. \"Those are some amazing deductions on your part, I must say.\"\n\n\"Elementary, my dear child,\" Holmes replied, then frowned. \"Damn the man. I never used to say that.\"\n\n\"Arthur Conan Doyle?\"\n\nHolmes smiled slyly. \"It amuses me now to think that he spent the last years of his life looking for ghosts.\"\n\n\"Magic ahead,\" J.T. warned suddenly. \"Still some distance yet, at least at walking speed. As this thing moves, no time at all.\"\n\n\"Then I suppose that we should walk,\" Holmes said as he directed the van into the nearest parking space. \"What manner of magic are we discussing?\"\n\n\"Mortal magic, definitely,\" the cat replied. \"I also sense something far nastier, but I cannot say just what. Possibly demons.\"\n\n\"What would they want with demons in New York?\" Jenny asked.\n\nHolmes shrugged. \"Protection against muggers?\"\n\nHe parked the van against the curb and they all climbed out, trying their best to look inconspicuous. That was not exactly a word that one would have chosen to describe their little group. Holmes looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps David Bowie's older brother. Mira, striding forth with her absurd, congenial arrogance, looked like a cross between a hobbit and Auntie Mame. Jenny was the most normal-looking one of the lot, and she was a ghost. Stranger still, they all appeared to be following a black and white cat. In fact, they were following a black and white cat.\n\nThey passed slowly up the street, ignoring the frequent stares they met as they stalked unobtrusively toward their prey. Jenny kept thinking that it was getting about time to quietly retreat and go for help, setting Bowenger and the FBI to discover what information they could, or consulting Dalvenjah and Allan about their next step. But Mira and Holmes seemed so sure of themselves that she could not bring herself to interrupt. Jenny had learned to distrust Mira's judgement some time ago, but Holmes represented a strong second opinion that she could not ignore. They proceeded a full block past old, dusty brick buildings, making their way boldly through a scattering of silent, evil-looking people who watched them like hungry predators. That was what she liked about being in parts of New York where you definitely did not belong; did you ever notice how the eyes seem to follow you? She found herself checking to see if her wallet was still in her pocket, reminding herself that her pants were an illusion.\n\nHolmes stopped suddenly at one corner and pointed. \"There, you see? The Blue Fish?\"\n\nWhat he indicated was a small, disreputable-looking bar squeezed tightly between a group of old, run-down buildings across the street. The name of the bar was the Blue Dolphin, complete with one of the animals in question leaping over the waves, all rendered in flickering blue neon.\n\n\"Of course,\" Jenny said. \"There are no aquatic mammals at all similar to whales and dolphins in Mira's world. Then could this be the warehouse you were expecting?\"\n\n\"It could be,\" Holmes said guardedly, watching the immense warehouse that seemed to fill the entire block on that side of the street just ahead of them.\n\n\"There is one way to find out,\" Mira declared, and turned abruptly to the nearest person. \"Yo, homeboy! What be these digs?\"\n\nHolmes, Jenny and even J.T. turned away, as if pretending they did not know her.\n\nThe young, rather tall man\u2014looking at the moment easily twice as tall as the diminutive sorceress\u2014turned to her. He might have been a reasonable person at all times, or simply too startled and amused at the moment to take offense. \"Just an old warehouse. All I know about it is that it's for sale. Has been for years. You looking to buy?\"\n\n\"So what are you, dude? A real estate agent?\" She flipped him a coin. \"Hang loose, brother.\"\n\nMira turned to the others, who were all giving her their best \"Are you quite finished?\" look. She shrugged. \"I don't want to sound like a tourist. Besides, there is one thing I learned when I was very young. When you're a cute little tiny person full of cute little spunk, you can get away with any shit.\"\n\nHolmes glanced at Jenny. \"She became like this watching television?\"\n\nJenny considered that. \"No, she always has been like that. Television only taught her to do it in English.\"\n\nHe turned and glanced up the alley. There was only the harbor to be seen at the far end, and about halfway down the ramp and platform of a loading dock for trucks that could be backed down the alley. Holmes stood for a moment, contemplating this matter carefully. They had their source of magic, obviously a hidden stronghold of the Empire. He could suppose, but he could not know that this was in fact the only stronghold of the Empire, or even the main one. He could bring in the dragons now and have done with it, and possibly never know the truth until it was too late. In spite of his misgivings, he thought that they should go in for a better look.\n\n\"Well, I suggest that we see if anyone is at home,\" Holmes declared confidently, as if that was the most logical thing in the world for them to do next. It was not logical but he did consider it necessary, which possibly meant that it really was logical after all.\n\nMira shrugged. \"Sounds great to me.\"\n\n\"It is a good day to die,\" J.T. added solemnly, like an old Indian.\n\nNeither Holmes nor Mira cared much for entering the alley, as wide as it was. There were only two ways out, one at either end, and it could become a very effective and dangerous trap if their enemies came at them from both sides at once. J.T. was not greatly worried, knowing that he was small enough to find some way to escape, and Jenny was not at all concerned for herself. Since she was immune to physical attack, able to go anywhere she needed with ease and possessing strong dragon magic, she was considering whether she might return to New York when this was all over and set herself up in the superhero business. Unlike the comic-book superheroes, however, she was still trying to think of some way to make the business pay.\n\n\"There is one thing that I've been wondering about for the past couple of days,\" Mira ventured as they walked quietly along the alley.\n\n\"And what is that?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"If a nudist accidentally sees you naked, should you be embarrassed?\"\n\n\"Mira!\"\n\nThe near end of the loading dock was the flat side where trailers were backed up for loading, so they went around the ramp on the far side and sent J.T. on ahead for a quick look. There was only a single wide door that rolled up overhead, now closed up as tight and silent as a bank vault. Holmes followed the cat to the top of the loading platform a moment later and found that the door was securely locked, although it seemed to his trained eye that the lock was very large and heavy and not nearly as old as the door, as if this one had recently replaced a smaller lock.\n\n\"This loading ramp has been used in the past two days at the latest,\" he said, indicating a small patch of greasy liquid. \"That is hydraulic fluid, probably from a forklift or similar machine, and you might notice that very little dust has collected on the surface.\"\n\n\"A forklift,\" Mira mused. \"I've never had any trouble lifting my fork. The problem is knowing when to put it down.\"\n\n\"I also detect a faint scent not unlike mustard,\" Holmes added.\n\n\"What would that indicate?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Hot dogs.\"\n\nHe bent a moment to look at the lock, then took a small leather case from the inside pocket of his jacket that Bowenger had reluctantly given him. He opened it and spent a moment inspecting the small, slender tools that it contained. He had a good theory of the working of locks but, unlike the literary Holmes, he had very little actual experience. Mira stepped up quietly to look under his shoulder.\n\n\"Let me give it a try,\" she said after a moment. \"I have had experience with this. Besides, I'm short enough that I don't have to bend over much to see the lock.\"\n\n\"Do you intend to return yourself to full height when you leave this world?\" Holmes asked as he gave her the case of tools.\n\n\"Yes, of course. I have lots of neat clothes at home that don't fit my present height.\"\n\n\"Like your Alasheran party dress?\" Jenny asked, teasing her quietly. The Alasherans had apparently believed that bare breasts had a definite place in high society, and they had adapted their fashions accordingly.\n\nMira ignored her.\n\nAs it happened, Jenny was thinking about something else. To be specific, she was thinking that it would be very easy for her to step through that door and unlock it from the inside... if it could be unlocked. At the same time, she was hesitant to point out anything so obvious to the faux Sherlock Holmes, as hard as he was trying to live up to his image. And as for Lady Mira, bent over only slightly while she picked and prodded at that lock, Jenny simply did not have the heart. Instead she aimed her own dragon magic at that lock, imagined herself making the proper gestures of command, and the lock made a very loud and satisfying click.\n\n\"Ah-ha!\" Mira declared, and stepped back.\n\nJ.T. glanced up at Jenny; being a familiar, he was never fooled by the use of magic. For once, however, he chose to keep his mouth shut, as much as she knew how he would have liked teasing his mistress.\n\n\"Now, perhaps we will have just one quick look at what is inside,\" Holmes said. \"Very quietly, now. Guards with guns and big dogs would be the least of our troubles, if we are caught.\"\n\nHe took hold of the handle in the center of the door and slowly lifted it all the way up, with only a minimum of creaking and clanging. The effort was wasted, unfortunately. There was a dragon just inside the door. It was not particularly large as far as real dragons went, although it was a giant compared to even the largest of the faerie dragons like Allan and Kelvandor and it must have weighed twice as much. Its legs were shorter than those of the rangy Mindijaran and it was more massively armored, deep metallic silver in color.\n\nHolmes turned to Mira and Jenny. \"Is this anyone you know?\"\n\nJenny shook her head. \"That's a male Karravethi, a silver wyvern, the largest of the breeds of wyverns. You sometimes see them in the world of the faerie dragons.\"\n\n\"Indeed? What is the difference between dragons and wyverns? It cannot be size, unless faerie dragons are really wyverns.\"\n\n\"Well, some do argue that Mindijaran are an intermediate form between the true dragons and wyverns,\" Jenny explained learnedly. \"Wyverns are civilized, meaning that they live together in communities, they make things and in most cases they even read and write. Most dragons, except of course for our very urbane faerie dragons, are too predatory to live like that.\" \"Is that a fact?\" Holmes turned to the bemused wyvern. \"New York is a strange place for such a fine fellow as yourself. Why in the world would you be in the pay of the Empire?\"\n\n\"Pay is exactly the word,\" the wyvern said, curiously in English. \"These Alasherans think a great deal of dragons, even wyverns, and they are willing to pay fortunes for your service and they don't even expect you to serve the Dark. If you want to get ahead, you need a good hoard.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Well, it has been very good to meet you.\" Holmes reached up for the handle of the door. \"Please excuse us.\"\n\nHe pulled down the door very quickly until it slammed loudly shut, and Jenny reversed her previous spell to lock it. \"And what do you suggest, Mr. Holmes?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"I do believe that we should run like hell.\"\n\nIt seemed like very good advice. Holmes jumped down from the flat end of the boarding platform, logically selecting that end because it was the closest to the street, then paused a moment to lift Mira down from the top. They would have probably been better off using the ramp. Holmes stepped back onto J.T.'s tail, causing the cat to protest rather shrilly, which in turn caused him to drop Mira. A moment later a large wooden crate exploded through the center of the door and hit the brick wall of the building across the alley, exploding in a shower of splintered wood and skateboards.\n\n\"Skateboards!\" Jenny exclaimed. \"What would agents of the Empire want with skateboards?\"\n\n\"I doubt very much that the contents of that crate were anything the Empire had intended for its own needs, but goods placed in this warehouse for some other owner,\" Holmes said. \"But they might now offer us a means to escape, since we can hardly run all the way back to the van. I suggest that we each procure a skateboard.\"\n\n\"A person could die waiting for you to say what you mean,\" Jenny complained. In fact, the wyvern was at that very moment ripping the door apart from the inside. \"The rest of you go ahead. I have to fight that wyvem.\"\n\n\"Dear child...\" Mira protested, but Jenny interrupted.\n\n\"I am a dragon, remember,\" she said as she assumed her dragon form. \"I am also a ghost, so I am in no danger. Go get the cavalry.\"\n\nOn skateboards? Jenny thought to herself. Get real.\n\nHolmes selected a skateboard, aimed it down the alley, then leaped aboard and pushed away. If he did not exactly look graceful, at least he was competent, although Jenny suspected that he had never ridden a skateboard in his considerable life. She had spent an entire year of her childhood learning to do as much. One sight you certainly do not see every day is an elf riding a skateboard. Mira followed as well as she was able, with J.T. standing upright on the board behind her and holding tightly to her right leg, although she needed levitation and magical enhancement of her strength and balance to keep herself going.\n\nJenny turned her attention back to her own problem. The wyvem would be coming through that door at any moment, and wyverns could generally move much faster than skateboards. A faerie dragon was more than a match for any wyvern, but Jenny had never tested her ability as a fighting dragon, much less the ghost of a fighting dragon. About the only effective weapon she had at her command was her flame, which was something even a dragon's ghost could do. Since everything about her appearance was entirely arbitrary, she increased her size until she was larger than the wyvem. Perhaps, between bluff and her immunity to damage, she could hold her own. She could sense at least a dozen wyverns inside that warehouse, now that they were no longer hiding themselves.\n\nThe warehouse door peeled inward in two different directions, pulled by the powerful hands of wyverns, and the armored head and long neck of a wyvem appeared through the opening. Jenny arched her own neck and released her best flame, just to show what she could do, and the wyvern afforded her a very startled look. Unfortunately, he did not look particularly frightened.\n\nHolmes came to the end of the alley and brought his skateboard to a reasonably smooth stop, pausing a moment to look along the street in both directions. Mira saw no reason to hesitate, or at least there was nothing she was able to do about it. She shot across the street at full speed and just in front of a large truck, the cat clutching her leg screaming in terror, and disappeared into the alley across the way. Holmes gave his skateboard a kick and started after her, but Mira returned a moment later. He caught her by the arm, swinging her around in a circle three times before he was able to get her stopped.\n\n\"What about Jenny?\" Mira insisted. \"This might be a trap for her, if they know they have the wrong body.\"\n\n\"Why would they want her?\" Holmes asked. \"They would be after you to give your body to the Sorceress Darja, and simply throw Jenny's away. For now, I suggest that we get back to the van, before anything else happens.\"\n\nIt was a little late for that. Even as they stood there in the middle of the street, the large front doors of the warehouse were thrown open with a crash and the nose of an airship rolled out into the street. It really was not a very large ship, at perhaps forty feet only a fraction of the size of even a schooner like Wind Dragon. Nothing larger than that could have navigated the streets of New York, rolling on its struts, even with its lift vanes folded against its hull, although the stabilizers in her bowsprit were rigged for flight. Worse yet, there were half a dozen archers in her bow.\n\n\"Time to go,\" Holmes said. \"Hold on, Lady Mira. I am going to try to get us away from here by employing a little elfin magic.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" J.T. asked. \"Make cookies?\" Magic no longer came quite so easy to Holmes as it once had. If nothing else, he had not practiced what little was left of his magic in a great many years. A great many centuries, as a matter of fact, but it worked. Using levitational magic much the same way that airships did for forward propulsion, he began to move forward with increasing speed, pushing Mira before him. She had all she could do to stay on the skateboard, its wheels buzzing and snapping on the pavement.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, this was a very stupid idea,\" Mira shouted, certain that she was going to fall at any moment.\n\n\"Do you want to hear another stupid idea?\" J.T. asked. He was holding to Mira's leg, looking back. \"I believe that we need to go a lot faster. An airship is trying to pass us.\"\n\nAn arrow suddenly skipped off the pavement to one side, and Holmes glanced back only for a moment. The airship was slowly gaining on them, now less than thirty yards behind. The archers were lining up on her bow for some serious target practice, and at this range they would not continue to miss for long. He increased their speed just a little, then glanced back when he saw their white van flash past. It was too late for that under any circumstances, although he did not at all care for a running chase through the streets of New York all the way back to the FBI warehouse, certainly not on skateboards. He had just one thought. While his own mode of transportation was hardly very maneuverable at high speed, an airship was even less so. The ship behind him was the size and weight of a large truck, but without power brakes, power steering, and with its pilot trying to control the vessel from the rear.\n\n\"Left, Mira,\" Holmes warned with an uncharacteristic economy of words.\n\nMira looked horrified at the thought, and J.T. obviously liked it even less, but it was too late to protest. At the next intersection they executed as wide a turn as they could manage into the next street, which had the added disadvantage of being one-way in the wrong direction. There were only three cars and those moved quickly to one side of the street as Holmes aimed their skateboards right up the middle. That was just as well for the cars, since the airship hurtled around the comer a moment later, moving so fast that the two inner wheels lifted briefly from the pavement. One archer, preoccupied with aiming an arrow, hit the top of his head on a traffic light and put himself out of the action.\n\n\"Right, Mira!\" Holmes warned at the very next intersection.\n\nHe was hoping that his rapid and unpredictable changes of direction would cause the ponderous airship to overshoot its turn or possibly even overturn itself. His best hope, he knew, was to lose the airship in traffic, but there was a disgusting lack of traffic at that moment. Holmes had a sudden thought and brought their skateboards around in as tight a circle as he could manage as they entered the intersection, ignoring the screams of the frightened cat, until they were facing back the way they had come. Holmes at least had to crouch low to pass beneath the hull of the airship, and then they were clear. He remembered Mira saying that airships were tricky to steer running backwards, and that their thrust vanes gave very little power in reverse. He suspected that they would go around the block before they would try backing up even a short distance.\n\nHolmes turned them back onto the first street with every hope that it would soon take them back to the Navy warehouse and the faerie dragons. The sound of a very loud horn immediately behind them was nearly enough to cause all three to leap from their skateboards, and they glanced back just long enough to see a large and rather impatient truck coming up quickly behind them. It was actually not all that fast for a truck, but by skateboard speeds it was very fast indeed. Worse yet, there were two large wyvems a hundred yards or so ahead, ready to grab them as they went past. It seemed certain that the truck would get them much sooner.\n\n\"Bend down very low,\" Holmes ordered.\n\n\"Only J.T. can bend down low enough to go under that machine,\" Mira said, but she still complied.\n\n\"That is not what I have in mind.\"\n\nThe truck closed the distance very quickly, and its bumper connected with Holmes's protruding rear end. The result was surprisingly similar to hitting a tennis ball with a hammer, and the skateboarding trio hurtled through the grasp of the waiting wyvems, who then had to move very quickly to get out of the way of the truck. Holmes kept them moving along quickly with his magic; he was as surprised as anyone that they had managed to stay atop their skateboards after that little exercise. It was just as well, since at that moment he could not have run. For that matter, he doubted very much that he would be able to stand up straight for a while.\n\n\"That was certainly using your head,\" J.T. remarked facetiously.\n\n\"Do you, perhaps, know the meaning of the term sacrificial lamb?' Holmes asked him politely. \"Under the circumstances, it involves throwing a smart-mouthed cat to the wyvems.\"\n\n\"Yarg!\" Mira exclaimed.\n\n[ It was a very forceful and well-intended Yarg and it got their attention immediately, and they suddenly became aware as ]\n\nMira had that the bowsprit of an airship was moving into the intersection just ahead of them. The airship that had been following them must have been forced to its best possible speed to move ahead and cut them off, in spite of their assistance from the truck. It was just as well that they were already crouching, for they passed beneath the bowsprit with only inches to spare. The truck that had been following them, of course, did not have the capacity to crouch, and it impacted into the hull of the turning airship with a tremendous crash of breaking timbers. The ship's forward right strut was broken off in the impact and the bow collapsed heavily to the pavement, an added strain that broke the ship's hull completely through at the point where it had been hit by the truck.\n\nBut they were not out of the woods yet, meant of course only as a figure of speech. The two wyverns were coming back and this time they were in the air, hurtling between the tall building to either side of the street. This time Holmes could envision no easy solution to the problem; the wyverns had the supremacy of air power on their side. He was beginning to think that it was about time to abandon the skateboards when three of the faerie dragons dived suddenly at the pair of wyverns and sent them into a very rapid retreat. Kelvandor circled back to follow the three on skateboards, shouting down words in Mira's language as he passed. His English was the most imperfect of all the dragons.\n\n\"He said to turn right at the second intersection,\" Mira translated without being asked.\n\nEasier said than done. Holmes had been concentrating on making them go forward as fast as he could and he now had them moving along at a fair clip, but he had never given a thought to the matter of stopping. At least by the time they came to the street the dragon had indicated, they had slowed enough to make the turn with some difficulty. He had noticed by then that all traffic on the streets had come to a stop, and there was no one to be seen walking in that immediate area. By the sounds of sirens, seeming to fill that entire side of the city, all of New York was under attack. Of course, the eternal battle of Good and Evil is not just another gang fight.\n\nAs they came out between the buildings, they saw Wind Dragon sitting on the waterfront before them, her vanes rigged for flight. Dooket and Erkin, once again in armor, were standing in the bow of the airship with their crossbows while the two FBI agents, Bowenger and Wallick, held rifles and wore bulletproof vests. Dalvenjah leaped from the helm deck as they approached, spreading her wings to slow her fall.\n\n\"What? Dalvenjah Foxfire was flying my airship!\" Mira exclaimed. Then her skateboard hit a crack and she was sent rolling, having fortunately waited until they were nearly stopped before she decided to fall.\n\n\"Get on board,\" Dalvenjah said simply, then picked Mira up and tossed her over the siderail. She treated the cat similarly. \"Mr. Holmes, you have been busy. We just wanted to know where they were and what they were up to. Now there are wy-vems and airships all over this end of the city.\"\n\n\"And I still do not know what they want,\" Holmes admitted. \"Perhaps if I were to go back to that warehouse...\"\n\n\"Not just now,\" Dalvenjah said as she lifted him up and tossed him over the rail as well. Then she leaped to the top of the rail and hurried over to the helm wheels. \"I will have to find Vajerral to fly this ship, since I know that neither of you can presently command the necessary magic. I still do not know where Jenny is in all of this confusion.\"\n\n\"The last we saw, she was still at the warehouse fighting wyverns,\" Mira said, watching with considerable concern as the faerie dragon took the airship back into the sky.\n\nHolmes was still dusting himself off, obviously very surprised about something. Apparently the act of being thrown onto an airship by a disgruntled dragon was a fairly instantaneous cure for the effects of skateboard crouch. All the same, Mira knew that she would not want to have his butt in the morning. Then she entertained herself for a moment by rearranging the meaning of those words.\n\nJenny returned at that moment. She was still wearing her dragon form, but there was no question that it was her. She passed right through the middle of the ship before drifting over and landing gently on the helm deck. She glanced briefly at J.T., who was sitting in one comer weeping silently. He had seen many horrors in the past, but it seemed that skateboarding through the streets of New York was the worst.\n\n\"Did you know that demons can bite ghosts?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"No, but it does not surprise me,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Demons are not alive as we know it, neither are they ghosts. Something between the two. Did it hurt?\"\n\n\"No, that is not exactly the word, but it did not feel good. Since I have not felt anything since I became a ghost, it came as something of a surprise. It did no damage that I could tell, but I knew that I should be afraid of letting a pack of them get me down. I think that they could have turned me into a more permanent type of ghost.\"\n\n\"Just what manner of demons were they, and how many?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Oh, those nasty flying demons that you just can't kill. I saw about two dozen, but I cannot promise that there were not more. Demons, wyverns and airships are still coming out of that warehouse.\"\n\n\"Then you take control of this ship,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Allan and I are the only ones who can manage demons. Kelvandor is a fine fighting dragon but his strengths are the more obvious ones, not subtle magic. And all I can say for Vajerral is that it is a good thing that dragons do not wear shoes. Her laces would never be tied. She is younger than she likes to admit.\"\n\nWind Dragon hesitated a moment as Jenny's own magic took over control of the vanes, but she kept her Mindijaran form as she moved behind the ship's wheels. Dalvenjah leaped over the side without a single glance back, flying quickly along the waterfront in the direction of the warehouse, the one with winged demons circling above it like crows.\n\n\"Well, now what?\" Mira asked. \"New York needs us.\"\n\n\"If New York was lacking anything, it was you alone,\" Holmes remarked. \"I wonder what they must think now?\" Jenny was already moving Wind Dragon directly toward the warehouse, still several blocks ahead. Dalvenjah and Allan probably could handle the winged demons by themselves, as the dragon insisted, but there were other problems needing attention as well. They still had no idea why the Empire was in this world in general, and New York in particular, and Dalvenjah Foxfire was the one most likely to find that answer. There were spears and arrows aboard Wind Dragon magically enhanced to be deadly to demons, and Mira's exploding bolts could make short work of enemy airships, as they had proven in Mira's world. Then Jenny saw that a fair number of the winged demons were headed toward Wind Dragon with intentions of their own, and two large airships were moving in quickly across the water.\n\n\"Rig the ship for battle, Mira,\" Jenny said. \"We're destined to have a fight on our hands no matter what. And put those two FBI agents on the catapults. Those guns are going to be little use against airships, and no use against demons.\"\n\n\"Considering our past experience in battle, you should be happy with one thing,\" Mira said as she hurried forward.\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\n\"That spell of mine can no longer make your clothes disappear,\" the sorceress called back. \"You don't wear any.\"\n\n\"Those ships are as big as our own,\" Holmes said as he watched over die rail. \"They are coming straight across the harbor from New Jersey, so they obviously had another stronghold somewhere. I should have known.\"\n\n\"Catapults, Mira!\" Jenny called. \"And get those arrows out right away. We are going to be up to our poop deck in demons any moment now. Mr. Holmes, I might need a little help back here. How are you with a bow?\"\n\n\"Why, funny you should ask, my dear,\" he said as he hurried to the front of the ship. \"You have heard me play the violin.\" Jenny rolled her eyes. \"First he thinks he's Sherlock Holmes, and now he's Groucho Marx.\"\n\nShe looked over her shoulder\u2014dragons had good necks for that\u2014and saw that perhaps a score of the demons were closing very quickly. She had found herself in this position before; she was less vulnerable than the last time she had been flying Wind Dragon during an attack of winged demons, but there were also more demons. Holmes and Mira both returned within moments, the first carrying a bow and a carefully sealed package of spelled arrows while the other had an assault rifle.\n\n\"I suddenly realized that the damned bows are now too big for me to draw,\" Mira explained. \"I cast the same spells on the ammunition that we use on our arrows, so the guns might work about as well.\"\n\n\"And what do you know about guns?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Well, pilgrim, I'd say I know about as much as a cowboy needs to know,\" the sorceress drawled in a very bad imitation of The Duke. \"At least I can shoot the gun. My arm isn't long enough to pull an arrow, and I'm too short to aim the catapults.\" Jenny glanced at Holmes. \"And you want a bow?\"\n\n\"I've never shot a gun in my considerable life,\" he said. \"But I was a master of the bow thousands of years before the mortals of this world stole the technology from the elves.\"\n\nThe first of the demons were coming up quickly behind the ship. Holmes took an arrow from the pack and, in a single move almost too quick to be seen, shot it directly into the mouth of the nearest winged demon. The arrow went all the way through\u2014 Jenny missed seeing how that happened\u2014and embedded itself in the chest of a second. Both demons disappeared in a sudden flare of blue flames.\n\n\"Yo, pilgrim!\" Holmes declared. \"Tally up a point for the elf with the bow.\"\n\nMira propped the barrel of her gun on the ship's rail, took careful aim and let off a shot, which caught a second winged demon in the head and dispatched it neatly. It was an amazing shot for someone who was not only firing a gun for the first time, but had never even heard of firearms until only a month ago. No one who knew her had ever doubted Mira's abilities, only her judgement, her sense of propriety and her taste. Of course, the weapon that she had been given by the FBI agents was a rather small, lightweight version of an automatic assault rifle, convenient to carry but with a kick like a mule. Mira suddenly found herself sitting on the deck, looking immensely surprised.\n\n\"That never happens in the movies,\" she complained.\n\n\"Mira, you could hurt someone,\" Jenny told her.\n\nMira's unexpected response, after a look of sudden alarm, was to aim the weapon directly at Jenny's head and fire two rapid shots. The winged demon that had been about to close on her neck fell screaming onto the ship's rear deck, then vanished in blue flames. Jenny jumped straight up, entirely a reaction of alarm, leaving the ship's wheels free to turn on their own for a moment. She grabbed the wheels and brought Wind Dragon quickly back on course, glaring at Mira the entire time.\n\n\"How did you know that would work?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I was thinking about what you had just said,\" Mira explained patiently as she picked herself up and returned to stand watch at the rail. \"When you said that I could hurt someone, I immediately thought that it would hardly be you, since bullets would go right through. But I did remember you saying earlier that the bite of the demons did hurt you, and that it might be dangerous to you. So when I had to shoot through you to get the demon, I naturally assumed that the bullets would be less likely to hurt you than the bite, especially if the damned thing took you by the neck.\"\n\n\"Excellent reasoning, Sorceress,\" Holmes congratulated her. \"Elementary, my dear Holmes.\"\n\n\"Of course, the bullets that you had spelled to be deadly to demons might also have been harmful to her,\" he added.\n\n\"A calculated risk, old boy,\" she said, and shot another demon that was closing on the ship. \"The moment was so brief, I never thought of that.\"\n\n\"Mira, those other ships are turning away,\" Wallick called from the front of the ship.\n\nJenny lifted her head to the full extent of her neck to look ahead. The two Imperial airships had not turned away from Wind Dragon as much as they were trying to cut across and well below her bow, almost skimming the waves. Both ships had increased their speed, moving probably as fast as they could be pushed, nearly equal to Wind Dragon's best speed. It obviously was not fear of Mira's schooner that had frightened them, but a pair of police helicopters coming up behind them, still some distance behind but closing quickly. Most helicopters could outrun even the fastest airships. Apparently the captains of the Imperial ships were not aware that police helicopters were not likely to carry any weapons that could seriously harm an airship, which is for the most part several tons of heavy wooden planks. An old-fashioned cannonball would have probably bounced off their hardwood hulls like Old Ironsides. Shotguns and assault rifles would, at best, ruin the finish.\n\n\"I think that we should help them out,\" Jenny said. \"If they realize that those helicopters are unlikely to do them any harm, they might turn. And those fool pilots, like most modern folk, are not going to realize that an arrow can damage an engine or pierce a Plexiglas windscreen.\"\n\n\"They are heading into town,\" Holmes said, as if musing aloud. \"Uptown, unless I miss my guess, and the largest buildings in the city. Will the span of their lift vanes clear the streets?\"\n\n\"Barely, but I think so,\" Jenny answered. \" Wind Dragon's span is shorter, to reduce drag. The vanes are broader, to make up for the lack of length, and that of course makes them stronger. Do we go after them?\"\n\n\"You are the pilot, and Lady Mira is the captain,\" he pointed out.\n\nMira looked at Jenny. \"I can't fly this ship. If you feel capable of flying Wind Dragon up Fifth Avenue, then have at it.\" \"If a seven-story balloon in the shape of Bullwinkle J. Moose can do it, so can we,\" Jenny decided. \"We might even be able to catch them before they get there, if the boys are as good with those catapults as they were over the mountains. I do have one good question for Dalvenjah, next time I see her.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" Mira said.\n\n\"Who is flying their ships? You're one of the best sorceresses of your world and you can hardly get Wind Dragon off the ground, and their sorcerers come from the same world.\"\n\n\"That is curious,\" Holmes agreed. \"I wonder why I did not Ihink of it.\"\n\nJenny was already pushing Wind Dragon to her limits, even though the ship was bucking and shaking against the strain. She worried about causing the main spar to break, ripping the lift vanes from the hull; it was something that did happen, and the fact that Wind Dragon had been built solidly for speed did not mean that she would survive every punishment. Jenny was thinking very hard about what they might do. She doubted that she could encourage the Imperial airships to break off their run and turn to fight; they acted too frightened of the helicopters still half a mile or so behind Wind Dragon. But she did believe that she could get the ship close enough to launch a brief attack on the slower of the two.\n\n\"Question, Mira,\" she said at last.\n\n\"What is that, child?\"\n\n\"Do you suppose they can shield themselves against arrows and bolts, as we have seen them do in the past?\"\n\n\"I hardly know,\" the sorceress admitted. \"J.T.!\"\n\n\"How should I know?\" the cat demanded.\n\n\"Can you tell whether a mortal, a faerie or a dragon would be flying those ships from the magic?\"\n\n\"I know that Jenny's magic feels different when she is flying Wind Dragon from your own,\" he said, then he sat for a moment with his head raised as he sniffed the air. \"Definitely mortal. Just like every other Imperial ship we have fought. And yet it is focused, as if artificially enhanced in some way.\"\n\n\"Do they have some manner of amplifier that could boost the strength of their own magic?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Not in the way I think you mean,\" Mira said. \"This is probably more like surrogate magic. There are great crystals, like the Heart of Flame that we destroyed in Alashera, that can store tremendous amounts of magic and then release it at command to enhance a sorcerer's abilities.\"\n\n\"That must be what they are doing,\" J.T. agreed.\n\n\"Then can they shield themselves?\" Jenny asked again.\n\n\"I imagine so.\"\n\n\"But would they bother until we come within bow range?\" Holmes asked, as if he was musing over an idea. \"Mira, can you keep the winged demons away for a minute? I must talk with those two FBI agents.\"\n\n\"Oh, fine thing!\" Mira muttered in disgust, turning her attention back to the winged demons that were about to close on Wind Dragon from behind.\n\nJenny turned her head to look back. \"Does it seem to you that there are even more of them?\"\n\n\"Yes, damn it,\" Mira agreed, staring back for a moment. \"There must now be four, perhaps five dozen demons, and they're all after us. I wonder what those dragons are doing?\" \"If I know Dalvenjah, they are probably in even more trouble than we are,\" Jenny said. \"How much ammunition do you have?\"\n\n\"This box,\" she answered, showing Jenny what she had. \"Then put that gun on automatic if they come at you all at once. Just remember to be very sparing. A gun like that will go through its ammunition much quicker than in the movies.\" Mira braced her gun on Wind Dragon's siderail and took careful aim, picking off the nearest demons with surprising accuracy. It generally took her three or four shots for each demon, but those were fairly good odds; at that rate, she would run out of demons a long time before bullets. Apparently Mira's abilities with the bow and crossbow had translated well into this new weapon.\n\nJenny could spare no more of her attention to what lay behind. Wind Dragon was closing slowly on the second of the two Imperial airships, following by no more than five or six hundred feet. If Holmes had any plans in mind, then he needed to do something soon. She lifted her head as far as her neck would allow and then a little bit more; being a ghost had many advantages, but she sometimes felt like a Looney Toons character. What she was able to see was the two FBI agents Wallick and Borelli crouched down like sharpshooters behind the rail to either side of the bowsprit while the Trassek twins stood ready at the crossbows mounted on their stands a few paces behind, all of them intent upon the nearest of the two Imperial airships. Holmes was standing patiently in the center of it all, directing whatever attack they seemed about to launch, as stem and noble as Caesar leading his armies into battle, calm and certain of victory.\n\nJenny hoped that Holmes intended to do something very quickly, since they would be over land in a matter of seconds and she would rather not send an Imperial airship crashing in flames on the West Side of New York. The mayor was going to love them for this. Alas for New York, Jenny reflected. What had New York done to deserve this? There was always Staten Island or New Rochelle. Something like this would have put Poughkeepsie on the map. Why did bad things always happen to New York?\n\n\"Helicopters, Jenny!\" Mira shouted suddenly.\n\n\"What?\" Jenny looked around quickly and saw that the two police helicopters had closed the distance very quickly, coming up on Wind Dragon's stem very quickly. \"Comfustication! The damned fools don't know that we're the good guys. Bowenger!\"\n\n\"Jenny?\" he called back.\n\n\"Do you have any sort of radio?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Tell them to clear the sky. Those helicopters are coming after us.\" She glanced over her shoulder and saw the barrel of a rifle aimed right at her from an open side window. \"Mira, get to cover.\"\n\nA bullet passed completely through Jenny and splintered the rail to her left; Mira needed no more encouragement than that to duck behind the siderail. At least Jenny was herself in no danger, but she worried about other members of her crew. Did the policemen in those helicopters have the slightest idea of what was really going on, or was the police department simply responding the best it could? Jenny had to bring Wind Dragon around sharply when the two Imperial airships turned suddenly and dropped down to pass hardly fifty feet over the street, right between some of the tallest buildings on that side of the city. She could see that the vanes of the ship ahead of her were clearing the walls of some of the nearest buildings with perhaps two feet of space on either side, and Wind Dragon's span was only slightly narrower. It would have been bad enough at a crawl, and these ships were moving at better than fifty knots.\n\nThe helicopters followed them in for a short distance, but gave up the chase after a moment and climbed above the buildings. Now that their deadly blades were gone, the demons renewed their attack on Wind Dragon\\ Jenny was almost surprised that the demons had even the simple intelligence to recognize and respect the danger. Since Mira found it easy enough to keep them away with her rifle, Jenny turned her attention back to the Imperial airships. They were locked on a very straight course as long as they stayed low between the buildings, which was perfect for the purposes of whatever plan Holmes might be contemplating. She forced Wind Dragon just a little faster, closing the distance to the second ship.\n\nWallick and Bowenger shot their rifles, only one shot each, at almost the same instant. Jenny lifted her head to look, but she could not see anything at first except that the two agents both rose, standing at the bowsprit and staring ahead, and Holmes stepped forward to stand between them. A long moment passed, and then the airship ahead of them slowly nosed over and then began to fall with increasing speed, so that Jenny had to take Wind Dragon up sharply to avoid its masts. Finally it hit the street below with a noise of breaking wood and the ringing crashes of metal that seemed to go on forever; the ship had not crashed as much as it had crash-landed, sliding along the street on its keel even after its skips had sheared away, wrapping its vanes around light poles. Its shattered hull grated to a stop after sliding the better part of two hundred feet, taking a couple of dozen parked cars with it in death but doing no more damage than that.\n\nJenny had left her neck stretched out invitingly in the air for t0o long, and a winged demon suddenly dived in and fastened itself to her. She thrashed and fought, but she dared not throw herself around too hard or dematerialize for fear of Wind Dragon catching a vane on a building. There was no pain such as she might have expected from a bite, but a tremendous feeling of pressure that increased steadily, bringing with it a growing sense of panic. The ship's forward left vane grated against the side of one building, in spite of her best efforts, but the impact only nudged the ship clear again. Mira had been there the whole time, trying to get a clear shot, but Jenny's previous fear and Holmes's warning about possible danger had made her hesitant. At last fear of what the demon's bite might be doing to Jenny forced her to fire anyway, shooting twice through the dragon's chest. The demon released its grip at last, arching its neck in a mortal scream of fury before it dissolved into blue flames, still clinging to Jenny's back.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Perfect,\" Jenny insisted, already giving Wind Dragon her full attention.\n\nMira looked back at the wreckage of the Imperial airship, then paused to brace her gun on the rail and shoot two more demons. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Holmes had Wallick and Bowenger shoot her pilot,\" Jenny explained. \"With no one to fly the ship, or at least channel the latest magic that was giving power to her vanes, the ship simply lost lift and fell.\"\n\n\"Was he not shielded?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Under the circumstances, he probably could not channel the magic both to fly the ship and shield himself. He had a soldier in armor standing behind him with a shield, which would have stopped all the arrows we could throw at them. Not being of this world, he did not know the power of rifles. One of the agents shot the soldier, through both the shield and his armor, and the other got the pilot.\"\n\nJenny found that things always seemed to happen quickly when she was flying Wind Dragon in battle. She was just beginning to close on the remaining Imperial airship when two helicopters, no doubt the ones she had already met, moved slowly out from between the buildings a couple of blocks ahead. At least this time they seemed to be trying to help, but roadblocks generally do not work in three dimensions. The Imperial ship immediately lifted its bow and began to ascend toward open sky. Jenny did not hesitate to follow, but Wind Dragon, although a faster ship, had a smaller lift-to-weight ratio and could not climb as quickly. She was not used to having the disadvantage, and the other ship was slowly moving away.\n\nAs soon as Wind Dragon came above the tops of the buildings, Jenny was able to see that they were not alone. Five more airships were ascending from the city along with a dozen wyverns and about twice as many demons, all that were left, all converging together as they moved out over the harbor. The four faerie dragons were close behind, but Wind Dragon was otherwise alone in the pursuit.\n\n\"We seem to have the better of them,\" Holmes said as he hurried to the helm deck, although the ship was climbing at such an angle that he had to move carefully. \"I suppose that they are returning to their other base. Wherever they are going, we cannot allow them to escape us.\"\n\nA spark of flame appeared suddenly a couple of hundred yards ahead of the leading Imperial airship, expanding rapidly into a circle of fire that opened upon a pit of blackness. With nowhere else to run, the Imperial forces were escaping into another world. The wyvems were already disappearing into the Way Between the Worlds, but the demons were circling back to engage the faerie dragons, covering the retreat of the airships.\n\n\"Push Wind Dragon as hard as she will go,\" Mira told Jenny. \"If we are close enough behind them, they won't be able to close the passage until we come through.\"\n\n\"No, something about this is wrong,\" Holmes said.\n\nJust then Dalvenjah circled in close behind the ship's stem. \"Hold off! They want us to follow them.\"\n\n\"My thought exactly,\" Holmes agreed. 'This was all a great farce with no purpose except to get us too involved in chasing them to stop.\"\n\n\"An astute observation,\" the dragon remarked.\n\n\"Not at all. Their intentions seem obvious enough if you just watch what they are doing with a level head.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" Dalvenjah said. \"After you blundered into the middle of their first trap, I am grateful that you were more cautious about the second. Chase them to the very edge of the passage, but do not follow.\"\n\nShe turned then and streaked away, evading a small pack of five demons that had suddenly decided that she looked good enough to bite. Holmes and Mira shot at the demons as they passed, picking off four of them.\n\n\"Well, I like that,\" Holmes declared, although he was not offended. He knew that Dalvenjah was teasing him, and that he deserved it.\n\n\"You are only an imitation Sherlock Holmes,\" Jenny pointed out. \"She is the real Dalvenjah Foxfire.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Thinking Caps",
                "text": "Jenny brought Wind Dragon down in the water just outside the naval warehouse, and Mira immediately ordered the Trassek twins to fold back the lift vanes and unstep the masts. Another running battle was over and this time they had brought her ship out unharmed, which was to say that they were improving. Or at least getting luckier. Wallick and Bowenger were standing in the bow and looking as if they felt required to offer their help, knowing as well that they did not know the first thing about an airship's rigging. Even Wallick looked a little bewildered, and he was a veteran of Dalvenjah's battle with the steel dragon Vorgulremik. Demons were enough to get on anyone's nerves, like some venomous creature that can kill with only one bite. The winged demons were the smallest of any type that Jenny had ever seen, but they were swift\u2014something most demons were not\u2014and they were nasty, and there had been a small army of them.\n\nJenny did not even want to think about the damage there might have been on the ground. She certainly did not want to think about trying to explain it all. That was what Bowenger was for. With Imperial airships wrecked on the streets, she doubted that this could be simply covered up. There had probably been film crews crawling over the hulks of those ships quicker than the police could get there.\n\nMira was quietly hiding her assault rifle in one of the weapons lockers built into the deck, no doubt wondering if anyone would ever think to ask for it back. Mira collected the damnedest souvenirs.\n\n\"I wonder if we won or lost,\" Mira remarked.\n\n\"We won,\" Jenny said. \"We did not follow them into their trap.\"\n\n\"So now what do we do?\" the sorceress asked.\n\n\"Now we start all over again, oh joy of joys and delights everlasting.\"\n\n\"Holmes!\" Mira called. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"I am surprised that you would ask me,\" he said as he climbed the steps from the middle deck. \"My deductions seem to be amiss.\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah seemed to think that your abilities were of great worth,\" Mira reminded him. \"She brought us all the way here to find you.\"\n\n\"We will have to review all we know and start over again,\" Holmes said. \"I hesitate to know how to begin without Dalvenjah's assistance.\"\n\n\"Ready to go in!\" Dooket called. \"Mr. Bowenger says to hurry.\"\n\nJenny began easing Wind Dragon forward, moving slowly until she felt the ship's wheels push against the ramp. She was perfectly willing to hurry; an off-world airship in the middle of New York Harbor on a bright morning was not a wise or safe place to be, especially after a running battle with wyverns and demons. At the same time, she was beginning to worry quite a lot about this old ship, especially her struts and backbone. Wind Dragon had taken a lot of abuse, and she probably had a lot more ahead of her. Jenny wondered if she could talk Bowenger into getting some people in to look the ship over for stress.\n\nShe moved Wind Dragon into the warehouse, and the doors were closed as soon as the stem was clear. She felt a little better as soon as that was done, as if it protected her from prying eyes. She was still in her dragon form and that made her even more nervous, and yet she had no intention of changing her appearance. Her dragon form was secure and familiar, for reasons she could not understand. Dalvenjah Foxfire had been a bad influence on her.\n\nHolmes was already releasing the boarding ramp. \"Hurry along, Bowenger. I must get back to that warehouse, and I need transportation.\"\n\n\"What did you do with that van I loaned you this morning?\"\n\nBowenger asked, returning from the bow to help lower the ramp.\n\n\"I left it parked about a block from that warehouse,\" he said. \"If you want me to drive it back, then you must take me there.\" \"Then 1 am going,\" Mira declared. \"I happen to be the greatest expert in this entire world on the Empire and the Alasheran culture. In fact, I happen to be one of the greatest experts in my own world. How are Dalvenjah and Mr. Holmes supposed to make brilliant deductions from what they find if they do not even know what it is?\"\n\nBowenger had no time to answer. Sir Remidan appeared, dressed in full armor and carrying his weapons, and looking as if he was going into battle. Actually, he looked more prepared for murder than for war. He stopped at the bottom of Wind Dragon's ramp and stood glaring up at Mira.\n\n\"Why did you people go into battle without me?\" he demanded in his poor but improving English.\n\n\"How should I know?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Because he was in the shower at the time,\" Wallick suggested quietly.\n\n\"Because you were in the shower at the time,\" Mira repeated, louder. \"They could hardly wait for you to get into your armor. It was nasty out there.\"\n\n\"Well, I could hardly bathe in my armor,\" the knight insisted. \"It might be magical and not subject to rust, but you just do not take chances. What good does it do you, anyway? I can get into my armor in moments.\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah would not wait,\" Wallick reported.\n\n\"Hey, blame that Dalvenjah Foxface,\" Mira declared. \"She was the one who jumped aboard my airship and took off without even asking, and you know how she is. Time waits for no man, and neither does the dragon.\"\n\n\"Well, it's just not fair,\" Sir Remidan muttered. \"I am a knight, after all.\"\n\n\"Stop complaining, or I'll leave you stranded in this world,\" Mira warned. \"Then you would have to make your living in Hollywood, and spend the weekend with the SCA to get your jollies.\"\n\nSir Remidan made a vile face.\n\n\"Are you going with us to the warehouse?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Under no circumstances.\" He turned to walk away.\n\n\"He misses his horse,\" Mira explained to the others. \"Shall we proceed with our investigation?\"\n\nAlthough it was against his better judgement to take this troupe back out into the city, Bowenger loaded them into a car and took them back to the warehouse. At least he was spared the problem of having to deal with Jenny, who now seemed reluctant to leave her dragon form; she declared that she would meet them at the warehouse and simply disappeared.\n\nThey had only just started when Holmes announced that they must first see the wreckage of the airship that had been hit by the truck, only a few blocks along the waterfront from their own base at the naval warehouse. The police were there in force and had already blocked off the area, but they had made no attempt to clear the wreckage. Indeed, they seemed reluctant to go anywhere near the damaged ship; fire trucks were standing by, common enough in the presence of a downed aircraft, but the lack of fuel seemed to confound them. They were willing enough to let Bowenger through when he showed his identification. Holmes and Mira attracted a fair amount of interest and J.T. even more so, but no one wanted to follow them aboard. Bowenger stayed behind to talk with the police.\n\nJ.T. disappeared into the ship ahead of the others, and the cat came leaping back out of the interior of the hull as soon as the rest were all aboard.\n\n\"There is nothing here,\" the cat insisted with vague impatience. \"I suggest that we get ourselves to the warehouse before those dragons muck everything up.\"\n\n\"That particular possibility does not greatly concern me,\" Holmes said as he assisted Mira in climbing back down. \"I am only worried that the dragons might find some important lead and choose to follow it before we can arrive. Perhaps we should not have been so quick to have Wind Dragon stowed away.\" Bowenger saw that they were returning and hurried them back to the car. They were on their way to the warehouse only moments later.\n\n\"It would have made things much easier for us to have live, talking prisoners, but we have been unlucky there,\" he explained. \"One archer from this ship hit his head on a stoplight several streets back and they have him at the hospital now, but he is unlikely to wake up and remember who he is any time soon enough to be useful to us. The other members of the crew of this ship simply disappeared after the wreck. There were no survivors from the crews of the other wrecks.\"\n\n\"What about wyverns?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"The wyverns seemed to have kept a safe distance from the dragons during the fight,\" Bowenger answered. \"The dragons didn't take any of them, and we certainly didn't see any from Wind Dragon.\"\n\n\"I suspect that they were only here to provide distraction,\" Holmes said. \"Having done their part, they fled. They were only mercenaries, and the one I spoke with seemed a decent enough chap. Indeed, I suspect that they were never meant to fight the dragons in the first place.\"\n\nGetting into the warehouse proved to be much more difficult. As it happened, the New Jersey National Guard, convinced that a foreign invasion had landed, had commandeered boats to cross the harbor in force. The fact that they had no jurisdiction in the state of New York had not bothered them in the slightest, considering that they also assumed that they had the authority to declare martial law. For reasons that never were discovered, they had descended upon this warehouse as a suspected den of communist infiltrators and had refused to let anyone in, from the New York police to the FBI, declaring that they were the highest military authority present and that they would remain on guard until a representative of the regular military arrived to take control of the situation. Fortunately an officer from the naval base arrived at that same time to take the rather young and inexperienced leader of the guardsmen aside and explain certain realities to him, including the fact that he had better get his troops back across the water before New York declared war on New Jersey.\n\n\"Have you ever noticed that when really stupid things happen in New York, New Jersey always seems to get the blame?\" Bowenger asked no one in particular as he led the others down the alley.\n\nEverything seemed to be very much as they had left it. The overhead door at the top of the boarding platform looked as if a truck had run through it, and the wreckage of wooden crates and skateboards littered the alley.\n\nBowenger drew his gun. \"Be ready for anything. We have no idea what could be waiting for us inside.\"\n\nThey all drew the guns that they had been given, Bowenger on one side and Holmes on the other with Mira and J.T. in the middle, and they leaned forward to look inside through the break in the door. The room inside was large, dark and mostly empty except for a few crates and cardboard boxes. Then they all jumped back as a large, shadowy form, not unlike one of the wyverns, seemed to glide quickly past the door. They glanced in cautiously, their guns ready, and discovered to their vast and everlasting astonishment that it was one of the faerie dragons riding a skateboard. In fact, it was Kelvandor. Allan and Vajerral hurtled around the corner on a skateboard of their own a moment later and ran right into him, sending all three of the dragons flying.\n\n\"You see,\" Allan said as he picked himself up. \"Once you learn how, you never forget.\"\n\n\"You seemed to have forgotten something,\" Kelvandor complained. \"Steering comes to mind.\"\n\n\"I never said that I learned it very well.\"\n\n\"I had to believe this to see it,\" Bowenger said quietly, too confused to realize what he had said. \"The New Jersey National Guard invades New York to stand guard over a waterfront warehouse full of skateboarding dragons. You know, my mother wanted very much for me to be a gastroenterologist like my cousin Andy. To think how close I came to missing sights like this to spend my life looking up assholes.\"\n\n\"How did you get in here?\" Holmes asked as he climbed through the door.\n\n\"Jenny saw that most of the demons had come out of a door in the roof,\" Allan explained as he righted his skateboard for another attempt. \"Dalvenjah wanted to have a look around before anyone else came in here, so it was easy enough to enter from above.\"\n\n\"And where is the esteemed Dalvenjah Foxfire?\" Holmes asked. \"There should be at least one mature mind trying to make sense of this business.\"\n\nDalvenjah arrived almost at that very moment, whipping around the comer on a skateboard of her own. Her skateboard suddenly shot out from beneath her and flew across the room, and the worthy sorceress was thrown onto her tail. A dragon's tail is a mixed blessing in the fine art of skateboarding; it was an awkward bit of weight to upset one's balance, but it did wonders in breaking a backward fall.\n\n\"The voice of wisdom and maturity approaches with dignity and restraint,\" J.T. observed succinctly.\n\n\"There you are, Mr. Holmes,\" Dalvenjah said and she rose and tucked her skateboard under one arm, obviously intending to keep it as a prize. \"I would like very much for you to look through this building and see if you agree with my conclusions. I have discovered the most amazing thing.\"\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\n\"Absolutely nothing!\" she declared. \"There is every indication that they have been waiting for some time, several months at least. But there is not even the smallest hint that they were doing anything but simply waiting for us to arrive.\"\n\n\"I expect that your judgement is correct,\" Holmes said. \"That is going to make our next move much more difficult to determine. Where is Jenny? Did she ever arrive?\"\n\n\"Quite some time ago,\" the sorceress replied. \"Just now she is looking between the walls and beneath the floor for hidden clues. She does that very well, you know.\"\n\nHolmes set about his own search of the warehouse for clues, assisted by Mira and J.T. Being a familiar, J.T. did possess certain advantages where the investigation of all things magical was concerned, and he generally kept his comments to himself. Mira was less helpful than she imagined herself to be, but she was always eager. Insatiable might have been a better word. And she did prefer the company of Holmes to that of Dalvenjah Foxfire, one of the few forces in the universe that she respected and feared. Especially so, now that Mira had shrunk to the size of three good bites for a dragon.\n\n\"Mr. Bowenger, I must go to New Jersey,\" Dalvenjah said as soon as the others were gone. \"Have you heard anything about the location of the base where those larger airships were hidden?\"\n\n'The last time I called in, they had a very good idea,\" he answered. \"I can get an exact location as quickly as I can arrange transportation, I am sure. Will all the dragons be going?\"\n\n\"If we find more demons, you will need all the dragons you have.\"\n\n\"I see your point. Let me find a phone and call back to the naval warehouse. The delivery truck can be here in minutes.\" Dalvenjah waited as he climbed out through the hole in the door, then sat back on her tail. \"Jenny!\"\n\nJenny appeared only a moment later, her dragon's head and neck lifting straight up out of the floor. \"No hidden passages that I can find. There are the remains of an ancient pier down there, but nothing that concerns us.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Dalvenjah said. \"We will be on our way to New Jersey as soon as Mr. Bowenger returns with the truck. Do you wish to meet us there?\"\n\n\"Unless I know where you are going, it is not that easy for me to find you again,\" Jenny said as she pulled herself out of the floor. \"Being a ghost is very liberating, but it does not make one omnipotent.\"\n\nTheir day had been a very busy one, and it was four tired little faerie dragons who retired to the naval warehouse that evening. The fifth dragon was immune to being tired, but she was in no better mood than the others. Those dragons who were still interested in such dainties were nibbling dejectedly on rolls with venison and cheese and washing it down with root beer from plastic bottles, while they sat with the others and watched television. The local news could make little sense of what had happened during the day, and the national news did only slightly better; the press was noticeably reluctant to say anything about dragons. As Bowenger had observed earlier, New Jersey was getting most of the blame. One particularly inventive source even speculated that an unknown cargo plane had accidentally dropped replicas of wooden sailing ships on the city. The government, the military and the FBI all seemed to be taking the approach of waiting to see if the press would talk itself into a mundane explanation.\n\nMr. Holmes was in a high state of dissatisfaction over the affair, and he was too busy contemplating the future to worry about past disasters. He was marching back and forth almost furiously on the far side of the room, just behind the television where the others could see him pass easily. From time to time he would stop and stare at his violin, sitting in its open case on a table beside the television, and the others would hold their breath until he resumed his nervous pacing.\n\nDalvenjah made a gesture at the television and the sound became inaudible, as if she had used some magical remote control. She glanced up at Holmes. \"You look like an elf with an idea.\"\n\n\"I have a theory,\" he said. \"I have a suspicion supported by little more than innuendo and the process of careful elimination. I have nothing more than a hunch, but I can foresee no alternatives.\"\n\n\"You have a nasty habit of talking like a thesaurus,\" Allan observed. \"And just what is this hunch, this theory, this educated guess?\"\n\nHolmes turned abruptly to the dragons. \"Why did the Empire come into this world in the first place? There are three major reasons.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"First, this world served as a stopping-off place or transfer point to some other world, their actual destination. Not a very supportable theory, as far as it goes.\"\n\n\"No, not at all,\" Holmes agreed. \"That would mean that the force they left behind to meet us was a decoy. Why would they do that? The decoy only called attention to the fact that they had been here. The best way to cover their trail was to have left nothing here at all.\"\n\n\"Secondly, the decoy was itself the end to the means,\" Dalvenjah said. \"It did seem to me that we were being invited to follow their retreating forces. Perhaps we were being led into an ambush.\"\n\n\"That idea does have some merit,\" Allan agreed. \"We were not expecting any danger from sorcerers in this world, where no magic except for dragon magic works very well. They might have expected that we would be careless and pursue them into a battle in a place of their choosing, a place where we would not have otherwise gone, and against greater forces than we had expected.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Holmes agreed cautiously. \"That still seems like quite a lot of trouble. In your experience, Lady Mira, would the Empire behave in that way?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, hardly. They might be decadent in their tastes, but they have always been fairly obvious and simple in their strategies.\"\n\n\"Unless the trap was meant to capture Mira,\" Kelvandor added. \"They might know by now that the Dark Sorceress Darja has the wrong body.\"\n\n\"But their base in this world has been here for several weeks, certainly before they captured Jenny,\" Holmes pointed out.\n\n\"Then that leads us finally to the theory that they are looking for something in this world,\" Dalvenjah concluded. \"We had discussed that question before and rejected it. They would not want technology as a weapon of either attack or defense because technology can always be defeated by magic.\"\n\n\"But they would want power in the form of magic?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"And that is the very thing that they hope to find. I submit that the decoy was to lead us back out of this world before we could discover the true purpose for their presence. They are trying to claim the lost magic of this world.\"\n\nThe others looked so surprised and mystified, especially the dragons, that Holmes could see that they had not followed his logic at all. As far as that went, he could hardly blame them; he was not entirely certain that his reasoning was completely sound. He paced the room three more times, as if to recapture lost momentum, and turned to face the dragons. \"In all that you have ever heard or read, has a world that once possessed strong magic ever lost that magic?\"\n\n\"There has never been a hint that any world has ever lost its magic,\" Dalvenjah said. \"According to accepted theory, that is impossible. Magic simply is. It should never evaporate or run short. That is the very thing that has always intrigued me about this world.\"\n\n\"Exactly the point,\" Holmes agreed. \"And yet this world is different. According to our most ancient legends, this world has not always had magic. It came into being long ago, bringing forth the age of faerie, and the slow loss of magic destroyed the age of faerie, a process that is only now coming to completion.\" \"That is only a legend,\" Dalvenjah observed. \"You are discussing a time that must be at least several million years old.\" \"Very old, as a matter of fact,\" he agreed. \"There are certain supporting facts that make it a very compelling legend, however. The bones of the legend state that some one hundred million years ago, a race evolved slowly from the creatures that we would now call dinosaurs, or perhaps pterodactyls to be more precise. A race that was known as the Dragon Lords. Now at that time they possessed very little magic but they were a proud and predatory people and in their way quite wise. In time they discovered a place that they called the Fountain of the World's Heart, a vast cavern or pit, and a group of Dragon Lords descended into that place to explore. No one knows what they found, but they somehow released reserves of magic into the world so vast that it changed the shape of the world forever, destroying much of what had existed before but bringing forth new orders of creatures both mortal and magical. All of this happened some sixty-five million years ago.\"\n\n\"I see what you mean,\" Allan agreed. \"So much for the meteor theory.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Holmes agreed. \"Now the dragons were always apart, for they had existed before the coming of magic and they were never completely a part of the Realm of Faerie but different in subtle ways. They were really not at all like the dragons of Saint George or Siegfried but more like the Chinese dragons, immensely wise and enormous in their capacity for life, as quick to laugh as to anger. But they were not civilized as I understand faerie dragons and wyverns to be. They lived in the mountains and made nothing of their own except for some small things they needed. They had no lords or kingdoms but traveled as they pleased.\"\n\n\"Would it be possible to find a dragon?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"I doubt that very much. I believe that the last dragons died long ago.\"\n\n\"That is no great problem,\" she said. \"I have spent quite a lot of my time lately trying to talk to dead dragons.\"\n\n\"I am a dead dragon,\" Jenny added quietly. That was not, of course, entirely true. She was disembodied, not dead, although the effect was very much the same.\n\nDalvenjah frowned, an expression that worked extremely well on a dragon's face. \"I agree with you. We must find this Fountain of the World's Heart.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know where it is,\" Holmes insisted. \"The Fountain of the World's Heart is said to be on a great island of rock and ice, known in the faerie language as Dhulamarie, or to mortals as Thule.\"\n\n\"Iceland?\" Allan asked, surprised.\n\nDalvenjah bent her long neck to look over her shoulder. \"Mr. Bowenger?\"\n\nClark Bowenger peered around the comer a moment later. \"Sorceress?\"\n\n\"We are about to do you a tremendous favor. Call Mr. Wallick and tell him that we will be leaving for Iceland immediately.\"\n\n\"Immediately? I mean, Iceland?\" he asked. \"Why? What do you expect to find in Iceland?\"\n\nDalvenjah considered that briefly. \"Ice?\"\n\n\"Fair enough. If I were then to ask just how many of you are going to Iceland, would I get a straight answer?\"\n\n\"We will all be going, I suspect,\" the dragon replied. \"And I suspect that we will be leaving in the middle of the night when Wind Dragon is less likely to be seen, anticipating your next question.\"\n\nClark Bowenger would not be going on with Wind Dragon. His purpose had been to serve as their guide and liaison in New York, and New York was where he would stay. The fate of the world might well be resting in the hands of the Dragon Sorceress Dalvenjah Foxfire and her brave companions, and he knew that he would sleep better at nights if he did not have to see it. For better or worse, Dave Wallick would be going across the great blue waters on Lady Mira's little airship. His duty was to relay messages for Dalvenjah in the event she needed anything, such as NATO.\n\nThey were all generally happier to have left mortal civilization, even the mortals in their group. The dragons obviously enjoyed being free to move about when and where they wished rather than hiding in warehouses fearful of being seen. Sir Remidan had been in a bad mood the entire time they had been in the city, since his own talents had been fairly worthless to their task and his command of the local language had been so poor that he had been left very much to himself. Mira was contemplating that she might soon find enough magic to allow her to reinstate the spell that made her taller. Dooket and Erkin were of course as content as stones wherever they might fall, but they always seemed to respond especially well to traveling.\n\nThey were well out over the ocean by daybreak and Jenny was, as always, at the ship's wheels. That was just as well, since all the other dragons were incapacitated. Mira had taken a turn in the galley that morning and she had attempted what she considered an improvement upon one of the local dishes, preparing pepperoni, bean and sauerkraut burritos. That had, for some reason, hit the dragons especially hard. They were lined along the downwind side of the deck, bloated like toads and passing enough gas to float a blimp. Being a ghost, Jenny had not eaten and it seemed that, like spiders and snakes, Mira was immune to her own poison.\n\nWhich was not to say that Mira was going to survive her catastrophic meal. She suspected that the dragons were going to kill her for certain, and that they would do so just as soon as they could stand themselves. Four sad and weary shapes were hanging their long necks over the rail in the front of the ship. Mira had joined Jenny on the helm deck, as far away as she could get. Holmes sat on the rear rail, contemplating the waves.\n\n\"I am seeking out the company of ghosts, since I am about to become one myself,\" the little sorceress lamented.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Jenny insisted. \"If nothing else, you are too valuable to the Prophecy.\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, I have been thinking about that,\" Mira said. \"If Dalvenjah Foxfire skins me alive and eats me, then the Dark Sorceress Darja can never get my body and the Prophecy will be safe. That dragon is a clever one. I'm sure that she figured that out a long time ago.\"\n\nJenny laughed. \"Dalvenjah would never eat you. She would just toss you overboard.\"\n\n\"No, she would put me in a bottle and give you my body,\" the sorceress decided. \"An imperfect solution, since you now seem to be a dragon. When did you come to that conclusion?\"\n\n\"It became inevitable during our visit to New York,\" Jenny explained. \"They say that you can never go back again. Ever since I learned that I have always been a dragon in the appearance of mortal form, I have begun to feel a distance between myself and mortals. Indeed, I find that I actually like being a dragon. Is that wrong?\"\n\n\"No, I doubt that,\" Mira said. \"Do you recall when we were fighting the Imperial airships and you were hit by an arrow? The damned thing went right through you. That would have been very serious damage to a mortal, but you took it very much in stride and recovered in a couple of days. Only a dragon, or something that was essentially a dragon on the inside, could have endured that so well.\"\n\nThey paused a long moment, trying very hard to keep a straight face as the dragons in the front of the ship began another volley of explosions of excess gas. Jenny had grown up in the company of faerie dragons, and even she had been unaware that they were capable of so much noise.\n\n\"We, who are about to die, pollute you,\" Jenny remarked very quietly, her ears laid back. \"Every time they let loose another round, I have to steer into the direction of the fart. We could line them up along the back rail and have the first rocket-propelled airship. I'm amazed at their capacity. They should be swollen like balloons. How do they do it?\"\n\nHolmes looked up. \"Alimentary, my dear child.\"\n\n\"You've waited a hundred years for that line, haven't you?\" \"I have to resist the urge to put matches under their tails,\" Mira said. \"Then we would see them breathe fire out of both ends.\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah really would throw you overboard.\"\n\n\"That alone restrains me. How long do you expect until we arrive?\"\n\n\"Not until late tomorrow,\" Jenny said. \"We might be following about the same path that Lindbergh took, but at only half the speed. The Hindenberg made better time than this. And with your cooking, this ship is just as likely to explode.\"\n\nThey arrived a little ahead of Jenny's schedule, since a strong following wind had added speed to their flight that had not registered on the airship's indicator. Jenny had stood at the ship's wheels the entire time, tireless in her present metaphysical state. Indeed, she was quite noticeably stronger than she had been only days before. Her magic was more powerful and more precise, while her ability to interact with the physical world had been steadily increasing to the point that no one would have known her for a ghost, she seemed so real and solid. At least someone might have taken her as alive until she did something like lengthen her neck to see ahead of the ship, or pass through the deck.\n\nThey passed inland until nightfall, then landed for the first time since leaving New York to make camp. Holmes had spent some time with maps and books about Iceland and he decided that the Fountain of the World's Heart, if it looked anything the way legend described, could not be found in the hospitable regions to the west and south of that large island or it would have already been discovered by the mortals of that land. He expected to find it in the northeastern third, and his plan of searching was in two parts. The four dragons would look for it on the wing, covering as much ground as they could by sweeping out large areas in careful patterns, while J.T. would try to locate it by its magical presence as Wind Dragon moved in larger, slower circles.\n\n\"This is Iceland?\" Mira asked as she kicked at the deep grass. All she had seen was a wet, green but treeless land of rough, often tumbled terrain of deep valleys, ridges and mountains. \"Where are the Eskimos?\"\n\n\"There are no Eskimos in Iceland,\" Wallick told her. \"And no polar bears or penguins, for that matter.\"\n\n\"Iceland is in most ways a part of Scandinavia,\" Holmes added. \"Even though most geographers consider it, with Greenland, to be a part of North America. For that matter, you might consider that Greenland has little green but a considerable amount of ice and that Iceland has a lot of green but very little ice.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Mira commented sourly. \"Nothing in this world is named the way it looks. We just spent several days in New York and New Jersey, and neither of those places looked particularly new. Beratric Kurgel will have a thing or two to say, if he ever has the chance.\"\n\nJenny lifted her head. \"We must be getting closer to a source of magic. Mira has not invoked the mythic name of Beratric Kurgel in weeks, and I will swear that she must be half an inch taller as well.\"\n\n\"I will dispute any claim that Mistress Mira is taller,\" J.T. declared. \"But there is magic somewhere in this land. I will admit that I have not felt this good in weeks, but it is a long way from what I would call normal.\"\n\n\"Can you find this place?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Some distance northwest of us,\" the cat said, pausing to lick his hind leg. \"If I might amend our plans, I would say that we should proceed in that direction with the dragons sweeping out the area to either side. As we come nearer, I should be able to locate our destination with increasing accuracy.\"\n\nWallick frowned. \"Where did you learn to speak English like that?\"\n\n\"From listening to Mr. Holmes, the same as those dragons.\" Holmes looked up from the map he was scrutinizing. \"I learned English in the most precise manner. I have been around through a very large part of the evolution of the language.\" \"You've been around for a very large part of evolution,\" Wallick remarked. \"Do you mind if I ask a few questions?\" \"Oh, why not?\" Sir Remidan demanded. \"All we ever do is talk and talk. We never do any fighting.\"\n\n\"Well, you missed the last one, tin-britches,\" Mira told him, and turned to the others. \"He missed out on getting a skateboard for himself.\"\n\n\"If you come through this way again, my government will gladly furnish you with skateboards, bobsleds and little red wagons,\" Wallick assured the knight.\n\n\"Why does he rate such consideration?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"He was the only member of your little expedition who in no way made a spectacle of himself either on or over the streets of New York,\" the agent said. \"My first question is about this mysterious magical place you consider to be so important. The last time anyone went down into this thing, it brought the dinosaurs to extinction and changed the shape of the world?\"\n\n\"That is what they say,\" Holmes agreed.\n\n\"But no one knows what is down there?\"\n\n\"Not that I have ever heard.\"\n\n\"But you propose to take four dragons and this hardwood blimp into this place?\"\n\n\"We must go.\"\n\n\"This next question is the big one,\" Wallick said. \"Can you possibly avoid a repetition of what happened the last time? Or would you be offended by my asking if that is exactly what you have in mind?\"\n\n\"No, I would not be offended,\" Holmes replied pensively. \"As the only representative of both your government and your species, you would be remiss in failing to confront that question. The answer is quite simple. The age of faerie that I knew is past, and returning magic to the world will never bring back all the things that used to be.\"\n\n\"The survivors of the Realm of Faerie went into exile long ago,\" Wallick reminded him. \"Dalvenjah Foxfire sent the last of them out of this world when I first met her several years ago. You could bring them back.\"\n\n\"If anything, the choice is mine to make,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Mr. Holmes is very clever but he has very little magic left to him, only a fraction of what Allan or myself can command. Might does not necessarily make right, but it does convey a certain authority. The dragons will decide what will happen, and I see no advantage in restoring magic to this world. Indeed, we must go into the Fountain of the World's Heart to prevent the very catastrophe that you fear.\"\n\n\"You see what I mean?\" J.T. asked. \"Mr. Holmes is contagious. He has us all talking the way he does.\"\n\nWallick ignored him. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I have every reason to believe that the Emperor Myrkan has already taken the Dark Sorceress Daija into the Fountain of the World's Heart,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"I cannot guess exactly what they will do, but I do know that they want vast amounts of magic for their own purposes. Whatever they plan to do will almost certainly not be to the benefit of your world, at least as it exists now.\"\n\n\"I thought that all the magic had gone out of this world,\" Wallick protested. \"You seem to be saying that there are vast amounts of magic somewhere near.'\n\n\"That would seem to be the case,\" the dragon said. \"Emperor Myrkan and Sorceress Darja certainly believe it to be true. There was no magic for most of the history of this world, until the Dragon Lords revealed it. That seems to indicate that there is magic there somewhere, and that it can be found.\"\n\n\"You make it sound as if it can be turned on and off like a faucet.\"\n\n\"I doubt that it is that simple, but it does seem to be controllable.\"\n\nThey were under way early the next morning, keeping at a low altitude as the airship's swift shadow chased over the ground just below them. The land was green and deeply carpeted in grass at first, just as it had been the day before, washing over a strange country of deep valleys and towering cliffs. But as mid-day approached, they began to move deeper into the volcanic regions near the center of that large island, leaving the grass behind for a land of cinder cones and deep flows of cold lava. This was how the whole world might have looked before the coming of life, a cold and barren place of broken rock and black lava, tortured by constant vulcanism and movements of the land. As Dave Wallick reminded them at one point, the Apollo astronauts had trained here because of the resemblance of this place to the moon.\n\nJ.T. stood in Wind Dragon's bow, his nose twitching almost constantly as he stared ahead. He would frequently share his observations with Dalvenjah, who would then convey navigational instructions back to the helm deck. Allan, Kelvandor and Vajerral were overboard most of the time, flying ahead of the ship, although they had little enough to report. Kelvandor returned to the ship quickly in the middle of the afternoon and came down for a landing on the helm deck, having finally perfected the technique after months of practice.\n\n\"There are two little air machines about three miles north of us,\" he reported quietly, as if fearful of being overheard. \"Very little ones with cloth wings like kites.\"\n\n\"Ultra-lights, I believe they are called,\" Holmes said, returning to the upper deck. Most crewmembers left the flight deck while dragons were landing. \"I doubt they could match our speed.\"\n\n\"Allan recognized the symbols on their wings,\" the dragon added. \"He says that they are from the Cousteau Society.\" Jenny lifted her ears. \"Should we consider ourselves warned? We are not fish.\"\n\n\"Allan thought that you might be interested.\"\n\n\"Why, did he plan to make introductions?\" Jenny asked. \"What a concept! Jacques Cousteau and Sherlock Holmes have tea with dragons.\"\n\nHe frowned fiercely. \"Why do I even bother?\"\n\n\"Because you love me,\" she told him, flirting outrageously. \"It was your misfortune to want me for a mate.\"\n\n\"I was just after your body,\" Kelvandor insisted.\n\n\"Everyone has been after my body, but someone else got it. What did you want with it, anyway? It was the wrong type.\" Kelvandor decided that it was a very good time to jump over the side.\n\nLater that afternoon, J.T. called back that they must be getting where they were going in a hurry and that they should slow down or else they would soon be looking in the wrong place. Jenny understood what that meant, which was to say that she ignored every part of that message except the part about slowing down. Dalvenjah went overboard for a closer look, and soon after the other three dragons were seen circling back. Allan circled around again and fell in beside his mate, while Kelvandor moved around behind the ship. Holmes and Mira took one look and descended the steps to the middle deck. Jenny was a ghost and had nothing to fear from being crushed beneath a falling dragon.\n\n\"Go to the top of that plateau,\" he instructed. \"There is something very strange about this place.\"\n\nJenny brought Wind Dragon up somewhat higher and steered a course for the middle of the top of the plateau. The strangeness of the place became apparent as soon as they could see the top clearly. For one thing, the top of the plateau was not level but in the shape of the top half of a large, oval doughnut, sinking in the middle into what appeared to be the neck of a large volcano. That in itself was not especially strange; volcanoes throw themselves up and erode down into any number of shapes. What was strange was that the dull grey stone that formed the entire mesa was weathered granite, not a rock that regularly came out of volcanoes and, not incidentally, a rock that was unknown in Iceland, oh fair land of pyroclastics.\n\nJenny landed Wind Dragon on her struts on the highest, most level ground she could find, leaving the ship's wheels retracted for fear that she might roll in either one of two disastrous directions, and Mira had the Trassek twins fold away the lift vanes as an added precaution. The dragons had been flying circles around the opening during that time and they had looked it over from every angle, but none of them was willing to descend inside. Holmes and Wallick were standing as close to the edge as they dared. There was no actual, broken-off edge; the ground just got steeper in a hurry until it was going straight down.\n\nMira and Jenny joined Holmes and Wallick at the rim, and the three dragons flew down to meet them a moment later. The opening was more than a thousand feet across and descended straight down as far as they could see, disappearing into darkness after several hundred feet.\n\n\"Well, here we are in the wilds of Iceland, brave explorers looking down into a deep, dark hole leading to the center of the Earth,\" Wallick said. \"Jules Verne must be laughing at us from somewhere in the realm of departed souls.\"\n\n\"Give me a few minutes and I'll find out,\" Jenny said.\n\n\"If it was that simple, I would have you find the dragons who went down here the first time,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Perhaps they could tell you how deep this hole is and what they found at the bottom.\"\n\nWallick stared into the pit. \"And you intend to go down there?\"\n\n\"I really have no choice,\" Dalvenjah said. \"You might not have noticed, but a short distance from where Wind Dragon is parked you will find six sets of scratches on the rocks consistent with marks made from the three sets of landing struts from a very large airship. And there are the marks of three additional airships nearby. The Empire has been here already, and I would suspect that they have already descended into the pit in force.\"\n\n\"A reasonable deduction,\" Holmes agreed.\n\n\"How could they have taken such a large ship into that hole?\" Vajerral asked. She remembered the Imperial battleship she had seen when the Emperor had taken Jenny's body.\n\n\"An airship is very easy to control,\" Jenny explained. \"Even the largest airships are only about six hundred feet in length, perhaps half the width of this tunnel or a little more, and the extended vanes are even narrower. It would be simple enough to take an airship down in a descending hover.\"\n\n\"You will have every chance to prove that in the morning,\" Dalvenjah said, watching Jenny's reaction. When the young dragon still did not seem at all concerned, she decided that it really must be simple enough, at least for an experienced pilot.\n\n\"Then I should get on the radio and call our base at Keflavik,\" Wallick said as he turned to walk back to the ship. He would be accompanying Wind Dragon no farther, but would establish a base here. The dragons could call for help on the radio if they needed it, assuming that the radio still worked, and he would also be on hand to do something if Imperial airships came out first.\n\nDalvenjah noticed that J.T. was staring into the depths and stepped over to join him. \"What do you sense?\"\n\n\"Disturbance and distortion,\" the cat said. \"Like a storm of magic. I hope that Jenny can manage the ship.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Islands in the Sky?\n\nA group of large military helicopters arrived early in the night, landing in a loose cluster not far from the airship. Dave Wallick and the officer in charge took aside all the personnel who had flown in and had a good, long talk with them about certain things they were going to see, and then they were all introduced to Jenny. This group had been carefully selected and told what to expect before they had left, but it seemed to bear repeating. And if someone still found it a little much to accept, Jenny had the proven ability to take bullets from high-powered rifles without a scratch. There was quiet industry all night long, and morning found a couple of buildings sheltering anti-aircraft guns and small missile launchers aiming into as well as away from the opening of the pit from all directions. If the Empire contemplated leaving or sending down reinforcements, they were going to be in for a surprise. Dalvenjah had obliged by casting spells on the weapons that would protect them against magical deflection or tampering.\n\nWind Dragon was rigged for flight, her ropes and lines tight and all goods stored or lashed down for rough travel. Wallick came over to make his farewells, and to receive his final instructions from Dalvenjah.\n\n\"If we do not return, I hardly know what to tell you,\" the dragon said. \"I doubt that there is anything you can do for yourselves. If you go down there or if you throw in bombs, you are likely to get the very results that you do not want.\"\n\n\"You do not think that closing the passage will help?\" Wallick asked. \"That is exactly what this outfit is prepared to do, if things begin to look bad. But the decision is not yet final.\"\n\nShe shook her head slowly. \"I honestly do not know. I doubt that it would do any harm, except perhaps locally. This passage has kept itself clear since this world was new. Then again, it might work. I would save that for really big last-resort type stuff, though. How do these fine people propose to fill a bottomless pit, I ask you?\"\n\n\"If we had any smart ideas, we wouldn't be contemplating the stupid ones, would we? I would throw garlic and wolfsbane down that hole, if I thought it might work.\"\n\n\"You will have to rely upon dragons, midgets and cats.\" Dalvenjah went off to check on the airship a final time, and Wallick turned to Holmes. \"Will you ever come back to New York?\"\n\n\"That remains to be seen,\" he said. \"But I have learned one important lesson already. Never again will I open my door to anyone who inquires for Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nWallick regarded him suspiciously. \"Would you have really missed this?\"\n\nHolmes considered it carefully, and shrugged. \"I suppose not.\"\n\nThere was a great deal of interest from those on the ground, at least from cautious distance, as Wind Dragon lifted from the stone and drifted slowly out over the dark opening of the Fountain of the World's Heart. The dragons had been over it often enough to know that there were no dangerous air currents in the tunnel, although there was a lazy updraft during the day and a downdraft at night. It was just barely enough to stretch the canvas of the sails behind the ship's vanes, providing a small amount of braking and added stability. Jenny edged the airship out just over the center of the opening while the dragons flew around for a final check, but there was plenty of room to spare. She turned around to face the wall of the tunnel behind her, knowing that she would be fine as long as she kept the same distance between herself and the side of the passage.\n\n\"Has it occurred to you that this is another false lead, and that we are going down into nowhere?\" Mira asked quietly.\n\n\"Do be quiet,\" Holmes said sharply. \"This is simply not the time to be thinking about such things.\"\n\nThe dragons circled around a final time and began coming aboard, a much simpler matter when the airship was not moving. Dalvenjah was the last to return. \"You can begin taking the ship down when you are ready.\"\n\n\"What speed?\" Jenny asked. \"I would suggest a reasonably quick rate or we might never get there.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"As fast as you dare without risking control of the ship. The rest of us will watch below, to warn you of obstructions and other dangers.\"\n\nWith their long, supple necks, the dragons were very well suited to hanging their heads over the side. J.T. was also on duty to sense magical dangers before they became visible, assuming of course that such danger would ever become visible under present circumstances. Darkness became a problem almost immediately, so that magical lanterns were lit on the deck of the ship and two more were lowered on ropes for some distance from either end of the ship. They could still see nothing except the rough surface of the wall of the tunnel, rippled and occasionally barklike, but so straight and regular in width that it might have been bored by machine. As it happened, it was not entirely natural in origin, although it certainly had not been made by a machine.\n\n\"We are coming down into a region of stronger magic fairly quickly now,\" J.T. reported, with a look of consternation on his feline face. \"I never thought that magic would behave in that way.\"\n\n\"We may be able to rewrite the books on the nature of magic after this,\" Holmes said. \"I have been trying for half a century to determine how magic figures into the Einsteinian view of physics and the universe. Unfortunately the equations just keep getting longer, and I never was entirely brilliant at mathematics in the first place.\"\n\n\"Lights below!\" one of the dragons warned.\n\nEveryone except Jenny leaned well out over the side. There seemed to be a light mist or fog several hundred feet below, visible by its own pale light even though it had not yet come within range of their lamps. Jenny was prepared to slow the ship to a crawl, knowing that they would have to put out poles and tap their way down like a blind man if she could no longer judge their distance from the walls visually. But as they came nearer, the others could see that they would not actually pass into the fog, which did not fill the tunnel but which clung to the walls in a thin sheet. As soon as Wind Dragon had passed completely into this new tunnel of mist, the entire ship began to shudder and roll slightly, while Jenny fought to maintain her control. More alarming to the others was the fact that they suddenly found themselves in free fall, clinging to the rails to prevent themselves from drifting away. Their first thought was that Wind Dragon's, lift had failed and she was plunging into the depths, but they quickly noticed that the airship was actually floating in place.\n\n\"What is it?\" Dalvenjah called as she flew toward the rear deck with slow, careful strokes of her wings.\n\n\"We seem to be in an area of no gravity,\" Jenny said as she returned both of the ship's wheels to even. \"I had to cut our lift or we would have started back up.\"\n\n\"I had wondered about this,\" the dragon remarked pensively as she held to the rail, her drifting tail curling like a snake. \"This tunnel is actually a passage leading to some other world or perhaps to some nether region of magic, such as the Realm of Demons. I suspect the latter.\"\n\n\"Are we in danger?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Not immediate danger, although I am only guessing.\" Dalvenjah turned her long neck to look at Jenny. \"Do you have any control over this ship?\"\n\nJenny nodded. \"1 could fly her without upward lift without any problem, as long as we are moving forward fast enough to get enough airflow over the rudder and elevator in the bowsprit to give steering control. The only thing I cannot do is rotate the nose of this ship down, at least not without taking us into the mist of the tunnel that is now in front of us. I suspect that we want to avoid that.\"\n\n\"Yes, I believe so,\" Dalvenjah agreed.\n\n\"Do you suppose that you dragons could fly up to the bowsprit and push the nose of the ship over with your wings and lift magic?\" Jenny suggested. \"It should not be hard.\"\n\nIt was not quite as easily done as said; the dragons pushed the ship's nose over easily enough, but just getting themselves there was a problem. Everything they knew about flying was designed to work against the pull of gravity, while a realm of perpetual neutral buoyancy was a very new experience in which tremendous wingspans and long, slender necks and tails became liabilities. The dragons quickly learned to propel themselves with small, quick snaps of their wings that looked more like swimming than flying. All four of the dragons positioned themselves along the length of the bowsprit and pushed, their forms glowing briefly with the pale light of lift magic, and the nose of the little airship rotated downward. Fortunately Jenny had been thinking ahead and applied thrust to begin moving the ship forward fast enough to get some wind over the stabilizers, correcting the ship's roll by angling the elevator. Otherwise Wind Dragon would have been left doing slow somersaults in the middle of the great magical nowhere.\n\n\"Why are you not drifting?\" J.T. asked Jenny as he held tightly to the rail with his claws.\n\n\"I am a ghost,\" she reminded him. \"The magic that Dalvenjah used to allow me to exist independently permits me to respond to gravity easily, but I am still not subject to it. The only reason that I don't always float through the air like a real ghost has been for the sake of appearances.\"\n\n\"Did anyone leave any fires burning below?\" Mira asked aloud. \"You know, if you went to get yourself a drink, there would be nothing to entice the water to leave the cask.\"\n\nDooket and Erkin looked at each other, then began to pull themselves toward the hatch leading below. Mira sent them back to their stations with a sharp wave of her hand, somehow getting a sharp rebuke worked into that simple gesture.\n\nSeveral members of the crew suddenly crashed to the deck, all except for Holmes and J.T., who had kept themselves held in a normal standing position, and for Jenny, who felt that she was above the laws of common physics. The curious thing was that Vajerral and Kelvandor, who had been holding loosely to the ship's upper rigging, stayed just where they were.\n\n\"In spite of what just happened, the ship itself is still in free fall,\" Jenny reported.\n\nDalvenjah had observed the odd reactions\u2014or lack thereof\u2014of the two dragons in the upper rigging right away. She jumped up lightly, her wings partly extended to catch herself, and dropped back to the deck immediately. Then she jumped higher, and kept going right up the mast to join the others in the rigging.\n\n\"The ship itself has become a source of gravity,\" she called back. \"It reacts normally at very close range, but you push yourself free of it very quickly and easily.\"\n\n\"Indeed, it seems that all objects have become a source of gravity, but all things now possess equal gravitational attraction regardless of their size in the real universe,\" Holmes amended. He stepped over the siderail and stood on the side of the ship, at a right angle to the others on the deck. \"The ship is simply so much more massive that it washes out all smaller sources of gravity, but the cumulative effect does not increase either its intensity or its range.\"\n\n\"Things are finally getting themselves straightened out,\" Sir Remidan commented.\n\n\"In a normal universe, the mass of this ship would generate so little real gravity that it would be hard to measure, even in a weightless environment,\" Holmes continued. He had returned to the main deck and now tried to walk up the mast, but he failed that completely. \"Ah, I see that I must correct my earlier observations. It is not true that all objects generate gravity here, only that all objects above a certain mass generate the same gravity. It seems that the laws of physics are rewritten in this place.\"\n\n\"Is that not what magic is all about?\" Allan asked.\n\n\"No, you know that yourself. The laws of the physical universe are the framework within which magic works. In either physical or metaphysical terms, you need far less energy to counteract natural forces such as gravity than you need to negate such forces, if indeed you could ever command enough magic to negate a major natural law. The vanes of this ship lift it, but they do not make it immune to the effects of gravity.\"\n\n\"In that sense, antigravity would be more trouble than it is worth since it would probably require so much energy?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"You are on the right track,\" Holmes said. \"However, gravity itself is a nonpolar force, unlike magnetism or electromagnetic energy. Magnets have north and south poles, while electricity travels between positive and negative poles. Gravity simply is, regardless of the direction from which you approach it, and therefore it has no negative or antigravity. Think of the consequences if a planet's gravity operated in a polar manner like its magnetism. The planet would always be trying to turn itself inside-out in a vast convection along its line of polarity.\"\n\n\"Then what is happening here?\" Mira asked. \"Are we in a place where the laws of physics are different?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Or else the magic of this place is so strong that it simply overwhelms the common laws of physics. Supersede or supplant the laws of physics might perhaps be a better term.\" \"Actually, we are in a magical singularity,\" Dalvenjah said as she dropped down to join them. Holmes stared at her, and she shrugged. \"Mindijaran have discovered places like this before. They are like pockets of magic in the real universe, some so large that they seem to be universes in themselves. When the Imperial sorcerers summon demons, they came from a place like this. That is why they seem so unnatural, for they are the product of the laws of an unnatural environment. Of course, you usually have to open your own passage into a magical singularity. This is the first one that I have ever heard of that had a permanent natural opening.\"\n\n\"This must be a very benign one, in most ways like the real universe,\" Jenny added.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Because we\u2014or perhaps I should say the rest of you\u2014are still alive,\" she explained. \"Singularities are environments unto themselves, and not often very conducive to life as we know it.\" \"Look! There are images in the mist!\" J.T. shouted in alarm. He belonged to a school of thought that believed that magic was more an art than a science, and so he had been paying more attention to their surroundings than to that learned discussion.\n\nThe tunnel of mist had begun to glow gently in great patches or streaks of various soft colors, and now distant scenes could be found illuminating some areas of the mist. There were dim, faded visions of forests, mountains and deserts, of seas that were both calm and restless, at night or day and in all seasons and climates. Some of those scenes were of cities or civilizations, always distant and impersonal. The first were familiar enough, scenes of recent history processing steadily backward in time until they had come to an age before the rise of mortal civilization. For a time they looked upon only more sea and landscapes, and then they began to catch glimpses of a far more ancient time, cities that were curious in form and lit with magical lights. They saw the feasts of elves and of centaurs in deep forests, the hidden realms of gnomes buried within their mountains, misty places of coral and shell under the waves, and dragons singing to the stars on cold peaks.\n\n\"The Realm of Faerie!\" Holmes exclaimed. \"We are seeing visions of the Realm of Faerie. These are not mere illusions, for I recognize many of these times and places.\"\n\nMira looked surprised. \"You recognize these times? Just how old are you, anyway?\"\n\n\"Far older than I care to admit.\"\n\n\"How long do faeries live, anyway?\" she asked.\n\n\"Until someone gets sick to death of their eccentricities and hits them over the head with a large stick,\" J.T. commented drily.\n\n\"Then do you know where we are going?\" Dalvenjah asked. Holmes shrugged helplessly. \"I cannot guess. We seem to be moving back through time, or at lest through the images of times past.\"\n\nThe dragon lifted her ears. \"I wonder if we are to be allowed visions of the Dragon Lords and what they did when they released the magic of this world the first time. That would be a very useful thing to know before we get there ourselves.\"\n\n\"We can only hope,\" Holmes told her. \"These visions seem to be entirely random rather than events of any historical importance. I would suppose that the chances of seeing any single historical event that you want are not that good.\"\n\n\"It is important enough to try.\"\n\nBut Jenny was becoming aware of a certain problem of her own, and she was beginning to suspect that they were headed into serious trouble. \"Dalvenjah, something ahead is drawing us forward.\"\n\n\"Is it serious?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"I am no longer using any forward thrust, and we are still moving ahead as fast as ever and even accelerating slowly. If we double our present speed, I will have trouble holding this ship to the center of the passage. If our speed triples, we might be in danger of losing our vanes. And you might have noticed that the passage is beginning to narrow.\"\n\nThe others had been so preoccupied looking at the images that they had not seen that the tunnel of mist was now perhaps two-thirds of its original width of about a thousand feet. Dalvenjah looked up with an impatient gesture when she saw that Vajerral and Kelvandor were still clinging to (he rigging. \"You two young idiots get down on deck immediately. I suspect that we will be coming into some very rough running, and 1 do not want any of us getting separated because of such foolishness.\"\n\nLooking thoroughly chastised, the two young dragons pulled themselves down through the rigging to the deck. Kelvandor was actually the oldest dragon of the group; even though Dalvenjah was his aunt, he was still more than two hundred years her senior. Age among dragons was most often a measure of authority than actual years, and in that accounting Dalvenjah Foxfire was a fossil.\n\nWind Dragon continued to accelerate, and Jenny was soon engaging all the limited reverse thrust that the ship had to offer in a hopeless attempt to keep their speed under control. Worse yet, the tunnel of mist continued to draw slowly narrower, and now the ship was beginning to encounter turbulence as strong, fitful winds began to move through the passage. She would have considered these winds a nuisance in an open sky, but they made it nearly impossible to keep Wind Dragon centered in the tight passage. No matter how quickly she turned the wheels, the system of ropes and pulleys was always slow to adjust the angle of the stabilizers in the bowsprit. She would have felt better about allowing the airship to weave and bob in this way if she could have known whether or not there was still rock on the other side of the wall of mist.\n\n\"Can we turn the ship?\" Dalvenjah asked. She was desperate for any glimpse of the Dragon Lords, and the images were now moving past so quickly at the same time that the winds were pulling at the walls of mist tearing and distorting the visions.\n\n\"I could never control the ship,\" Jenny said. \"The only hope I see is to ride the winds straight down the passage until it ends. Do you suppose that we will be going back in time to when the Dragon Lords released magic into the world, or all the way to the beginning of the world? If it takes this long just to get back a few million years, just think how long this passage must be if we have to ride out four billion.\"\n\n\"I might be able to assist you somewhat,\" Holmes said, and hurried to the front of the helm deck. \"Mira! Do you have any spare sails? Any large sheet of canvas should do. And I need some long, sturdy lengths of rope.\"\n\n\"There is a trim sail in a deck locker there on the helm deck, just behind you,\" Mira shouted back. \"And there is two hundred feet of rope or more that we left at the back rail when we pulled in the lantern.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\"\n\nHolmes tied the rope to one corner of the sail, then attached the other end to a stout mooring pin in the rear of the ship. The sail rattled and snapped like thunder in the wind as he released it overboard behind the ship, feeding it out slowly to the full length of the rope. The twins brought him the running sail as well, usually reserved to provide extra speed when the airship had a strong following wind, and Holmes deployed that at the end of a slightly shorter rope. The length of the two sails at the end of their long ropes acted very much like a sea anchor behind an ocean vessel, or perhaps like the tail of a kite, their drag both slowing and steadying the ship.\n\n\"Does that help?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Enough to keep us going a while longer,\" Jenny answered.\n\n\"Very well.\" He turned to the others. \"All eyes overboard, if you take my meaning. If we are to be given a glimpse of the Dragon Lords and their mysteries, then it will be coming up any moment now.\"\n\nUnfortunately, the moment never came. Wind Dragon began to roll slowly to starboard, even though Jenny tried desperately to control the roll by applying thrust with the starboard lift vanes against the direction of rotation. It was as if the airship had been caught in a powerful vortex that they could not see. At least down always remained the deck of the ship, and that was perhaps the only thing that kept everyone on board and reasonably intact. Even so, the ride was so rough that no one except Jenny could have remained at the wheels fighting to keep the ship under control. As long as she had something that she could hold onto, the fierce winds that might have otherwise blown her away like tissue paper passed right through her. The others simply held on to anything they could find, except for J.T. He had hidden himself in an empty sail locker and closed the lid.\n\nWind Dragon was plunged into sudden darkness as she was thrown through the core of the vortex into what appeared to be a raging storm. Lightning flashed frequently in the distance, briefly illuminating the banks of clouds that never broke, and sheets of cold rain or sleet would occasionally sweep across the deck. At least Jenny was finally able to bring the ship under reasonable control, even though it continued to weave and pitch unpredictably. The fact that down remained the center of the ship helped to keep the crewmembers on the deck, but Jenny was still flying in a free fall and that made controlling the ship all the more difficult. If nothing else, gravity was a convenient source of orientation and it was a constant and predictable force that always pulled on the ship from the same direction, adding stability. Now, when the ship was blown in every direction, there was nothing to stop it from going in that direction forever, like a three-dimensional billiard ball.\n\nAnd if that was not bad enough, Jenny was flying blind with no place to land and no way to find it if there was. She suspected that she had flown right out of the frying pan and into the fire.\n\n\"How did an Imperial battleship survive that?\" she asked.\n\n\"If there was no storm on this side at the time they came through, they might have had a very easy time of it,\" Holmes said. \"Of course, they might have also smashed their ships to splinters on the way through, and we would never find the wreckage.\"\n\n\"That might explain why the Emperor had such a start on us but has not seemed to have done anything so far,\" Dalvenjah added. \"What would be the best way to ride out the storm in this hulk?\"\n\n\"Assuming that the storm ever ends,\" Jenny muttered. \"All I can do is to ride the winds to keep them from tearing this ship apart, and maintain enough speed to keep the control surfaces responsive. Mira?\"\n\n\"Yes, Jenny?\"\n\n\"Can you take the boys below and check the main lift vane spars? Both sets, but especially the rear vanes, seem to be flexing a little more than usual.\"\n\n\"We don't need the lift for flight,\" Mira reminded her. \"It would not give us much trouble if a spar did fail.\"\n\n\"They might not give us lift, but they are very essential to stability,\" Jenny said. \"I've been using lift on first one side and then the other almost constantly to keep us from rolling. Wait, I have another idea. Have the boys pull in the canvas sails behind the lift vanes. Since they were designed to support the full weight of ship and cargo, it must be the sudden jerks of this wind changing direction that has damaged them. Then check those spars and do what you can to brace them.\"\n\n\"Right away.\"\n\n\"What if a spar breaks?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"I can maintain control, as long as it's only one,\" Jenny said. \"I would still have one lift vane on either side of the ship. I would still prefer to have a whole ship at my command if we run into any more trouble. We need to find shelter.\"\n\n\"I am not certain that there is any shelter to be had,\" the dragon said. \"I certainly would not know how to find it. We can hardly see beyond the ends of our lift vanes. If we did find shelter, we would likely run into it.\"\n\n\"Why did it never occur to me to get radar from Wallick?\" Jenny looked over at Dalvenjah. \"Do you have any magic that would do the same thing?\"\n\n\"I will have to think about that.\"\n\nJenny turned to Holmes. \"Is there something in your vast experience and wealth of knowledge? Can you build a radar out of Vajerral's boom box and a large piece of aluminum foil?\" \"All-you-men-ee-um,\" Holmes corrected her in his most English voice. \"And no, I am not an electronics expert. Can you teach a bat to fly ahead of us and lead the way?\"\n\nJenny found land sooner than she had expected, and in a way that she did not. want. The snapping of the top of the mast brought her attention overhead, and she was very surprised to see that it had snagged in the top of a tree. Jenny had just one thought, that by no means was she about to crash this ship upside-down in a place where gravity could not be predicted, and she rotated Wind Dragon completely over as quickly as she could manage. What she could not have anticipated nor avoided even if she had known was how quickly the unseen land came up that was now beneath the ship. Wind Dragon shuddered violently as her landing struts contacted hard ground and were crushed trying to bring the ship's tremendous weight to an abrupt halt, slamming her hull against the rocks hard enough to break her back in a thundering, ripping crash of breaking timbers.\n\nThe impact had not only ripped Jenny from the ship's wheels but thrust her halfway through the deck, one half of her metaphysical self on either side of the unbroken deck planks. She pulled herself out and made a quick survey of the damage. Most of the crewmembers were already picking themselves up, even if most of them were moving very slowly. At least none of them were making any injured noises, which was encouraging.\n\n\"Land, ho!\" she announced with little enthusiasm.\n\nAs it turned out, the crew had survived the unscheduled landing in better shape than they deserved. The dragons had all gone overboard while Jenny had been rotating the ship over, and they had circled around and landed in their own good time. Dooket and Erkin had been kicked over the side by the impact, but they were young and made of rubber and had bounced with only scratches and light bruises. J.T. the cat had also gone over the rail and was the worst of the lot with a broken leg, but he was also knocked unconscious and not to be found for some time. The combination of events left him in a predictably bad mood, and the broken leg kept him in a bad mood for a very long time. Sir Remidan insisted that his armor broke his fall. Lady Mira was so close to the ground that the fall had not bothered her. Holmes had been holding to the rigging and had not even fallen.\n\n\"What do you mean, your armor broke your fall?\" Mira demanded impatiently.\n\n\"Well, the magic came back, you know,\" Sir Remidan explained happily, and even hopped up and down a couple of times. \"Do you see what I mean? It hardly weighs anything again.\"\n\nMira was certainly not pleased, and having Sir Remidan all but giggling about his magical suit of armor did not make her any happier. Wind Dragon was wrecked in about the worst imaginable place, the weather was the pits and the cat was missing. Even though the wind was still driving occasional sheets of wet sleet, she had the Trassek twins drop the boarding ramp and took them overboard for a look around. Curiously, the vanes that Jenny had been so worried about had survived intact, even though their internal spars had been broken and they now sagged heavily to the ground. Unfortunately, the hull was splintered from bow to stem, and the struts had been reduced to kindling. She glanced up as Dalvenjah shuffled around from the other side of the ship to join her.\n\n\"Well, we seem to be stranded,\" Mira observed.\n\n\"You seem to be stranded,\" Dalvenjah corrected her. \"Some of us can fly.\"\n\n\"You are indeed a wicked thing,\" Mira complained. \"Do you, by any chance, have insurance?\"\n\n\"No, of course not.\"\n\n\"Then it's a good thing that I do. If this weather breaks any time soon, I can get Jenny to venture an opinion on what she can salvage.\"\n\n\"Mira, I just found your cat,\" Kelvandor called from the other side of the ship.\n\n\"Is he alive?\"\n\n\"Dead cats do not use that kind of language.\"\n\nMira was involved for the next hour or so in setting and splinting J.T.'s broken leg and restoring what she could of his fractured temper, both things accomplished easily using magic and generous doses from the bottle of liqueur that Holmes had brought along. At last he was taken to his bed in a cabinet that served at his cabin, not yet actually asleep but gurgling and cooing between crude attempts at singing. When Mira came back on deck later, she was surprised to find that the storm had disappeared completely, revealing a blue sky but no sun and a scattering of floating islands like the tops of hills that had been broken off and thrown up to hang suspended in mid-air. They were in form like irregular disks, thickest in the middle, bare grey stone on the bottom but green and even forested on the top. Curiously, they were all oriented with their green sides facing in the same direction, giving a false direction of up.\n\nMira was so preoccupied with looking up that she bumped into Holmes, who was leaning over the rail. She lost her balance and nearly fell, but Holmes caught her.\n\n\"How is your cat?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"He is presently a very pickled puss. Your bottle was very appreciated, I can tell you. My only regret is that the bottle won't last for the weeks that he will have to wear that splint.\" She looked around quickly. \"Where are the dragons?\"\n\n\"They went off on a reconnaissance as soon as they could see where they are going,\" he explained. \"Since there is no gravity only a few feet above the islands, the dragons can fly effortlessly. Their wings do not have to support their weight and they are not pushing against gravity when they sweep their wings, so they do not tire quickly. Indeed, you will find it very easy to fly yourself, with only a small effort in lift magic.\"\n\n\"Have you tried it?\"\n\nHolmes drew himself up regally. \"My dear woman, flailing about in mid-air is hardly dignified.\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly,\" Mira said, knowing that he was teasing her. \"Is Jenny anywhere around here, or did she go off with the other dragons?\"\n\n\"No, she is down below somewhere.\"\n\nMira descended the boarding ramp and walked slowly around the shattered hulk of her ship. Wind Dragon looked every bit as bad in the clear light of day, even if daylight here was noticeably softer than in the real world. The airship's lift vanes were being removed and set safely aside. She found Jenny still in the process of removing the forward port vane, the last of the four, her arms and long neck reaching through the planks of the hull to detach the vane from the spar. A living person would have been stuck having to climb in and out of the ship several times to remove each lift vane.\n\n\"Will she fly again?\" Mira asked.\n\nJenny removed her head from the hull. \"This ship will fly only slightly sooner than pigs will. She might not look so bad from the inside, but this hull has been shattered from front to back. The keel and ribs are splintered, and I hesitate to tell you what the bottom looks like.\"\n\n\"We had stressed the ship to the point that something was due to fail even before this happened,\" Mira said. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I sent the dragons out to look for trees,\" Jenny explained. \"I believe that the best plan is to get this ship off the ground so that I can cut away the bottom of the hull and the keel as extra weight and mount the top of the ship on a large raft made of several tree trunks laid side to side. That also means attaching the lift and thrust vanes to the raft, since no remaining part of this ship can carry the strain.\"\n\n\"How do you plan to lift the ship?\"\n\n\"The other dragons and I can levitate it, I am sure.\" She turned her head to look at the sorceress. \"Why don't you and Mr. Holmes take a walk? Give this island a good looking-over and see if you can find anything useful.\"\n\n\"Yes, something to eat,\" Mira speculated.\n\nNow Mira knew quite well that she was being given an excuse to make herself scarce, just to keep her out of the way. That was probably for the best all the way around. For one thing, Jenny had a college degree in engineering and had proven herself to be quite clever in building things, and she could instantly arrange in her head complex mechanical schemes that most people could not have put together even on paper. Besides that, Mira had suspected for some time that the girl harbored secret wishes to take the little airship apart. Given time and the proper tools, two things they did not have, Jenny could have rebuilt Wind Dragon exactly the way she had been. On the other hand, even though Mira was herself quite handy, they both knew that it was best if she did not stand around and watch her ship being cut up like a side of beef.\n\nSir Remidan gallantly declined to accompany Mira and Holmes on their walk about the island, pointing out that he must be on hand to lead the Trassek twins in the event that danger threatened. Mira would have said that the twins needed someone around just to tie their shoes for them, but she decided to keep such comments to herself. Sir Remidan was in an exceptionally good mood now that the magic had come back to his armor, and she did not want to spoil that. She was led to wonder if the reason that he had been in such a bad mood during their visit to New York had been because his armor had grown so heavy once the magic had left it. That, and the fact that the reruns of Mr. Ed had made him so lonesome for his own talking horse. She knew now that it was a mistake not to have encouraged him to watch more Yogi Bear.\n\nTheir investigation of the island soon brought out two important facts. First, they had landed near the highest ground, on the slopes of the low, shieldlike mountain that dominated the center of all the larger islands that they could see. Second, the island they were on was a rough oval some five miles or more wide by three across. They crossed to the nearest edge, a walk of more than a mile in itself.\n\n\"I do wonder what the formula is for determining the circumference of an oval,\" Holmes mused. He was beginning to speak more and more in Mira's own language, having learned both it and the language of the faerie dragons in good time. He would still resort to English, however, when talking to himself or when he needed big words. Holmes seemed to be addicted to big words, and he would get nervous tremors if he was not allowed to exercise his expansive and frequently arcane vocabulary with a certain regularity. Something just like that, you see.\n\n\"What was that?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"I was wondering how long it would take one to walk along (he edge of one of these,\" Holmes explained. \"Do you realize that the area of an island of average size, such as we can see from here at least, is quite large enough to support a small village and its surrounding farmlands?\"\n\n\"Are you going into real estate?\"\n\n\"No, just wondering if this strange environment might be inhabited,\" he said. \"There is certainly life here, both plant and animal.\"\n\n\"I suppose that you could raft them together,\" Mira speculated.\n\n\"No, I doubt that. Either these islands are held in place by forces we cannot see, or else they repel each other by some means. Otherwise these islands would have started bumping into each other from the first, breaking each other to bits and forming by their curious gravitational attraction into a small planet. That must be why they are still flat.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"The gravitational attraction of this one island is equal to that of an entire terrestrial planet,\" Holmes explained. \"That much force should be acting to pull these islands into a more spherical form. Perhaps it is the case that this curious gravity only acts between objects, but a single object is not affected by its own gravity.\"\n\n\"That seems very simple to me,\" Mira said. \"These islands are not just one big piece, but made up of rocks, and sand and soil grouped together. A rock that you might be standing on can be placing tremendous force on the rock just beside it, but it has no effect on rocks even a short distance from it. The effect of gravity here is not cumbersome...\n\n\"Cumulative,\" Holmes corrected her.\n\n\"Cumulative, so there is no larger force acting to collapse the entire island.\"\n\n\"By George, that is right! My word, you are indeed a clever one.\" Holmes stopped short, already musing upon the next mystery. \"Of course, what made the islands flat in the first place?\" Mira looked even more mystified. \"Who is George?\"\n\nThey came at last to the edge. Mira had been expecting something a little more dramatic, but Holmes was not surprised. The edge of the island was gently rounded and the grass simply dragged over the side until halfway through the curve, to the point where it circled back beneath the island. One of those little mysteries that Holmes had been contemplating was the fact that all the islands were oriented facing upward directly toward the source of light, even though there was only more blue sky and no actual source of light to be seen, so that the only shadows were those under objects. There would have been vegetation on the lower sides of the islands as well, except for the fact that the undersides were always in the shadows. Another thing was that the edge, which looked paper-thin on the other islands, was actually several yards deep.\n\nMira began to realize that Holmes was secretly fascinated with the curious gravity within the magical singularity, not just as a scientific peculiarity but also as a great, delightful toy. He walked right over the edge without the slightest hesitation until he came up standing upside-down on the lower side of the island. Mira joined him somewhat more cautiously and they spent some time exploring the mysterious dark side, which was not as barren as it looked from a distance but covered with grey and brown moss and by whole vast communities of mushrooms. It was also noticeably cooler in the perpetual shade.\n\n\"Does it ever get night here?\" Mira asked as they made their way back to the edge.\"\n\n\"Not that I can tell so far,\" Holmes said. \"There is simply no mechanism to allow it.\"\n\n\"What about the islands? Have you been watching them?\" \"Yes, I have.\"\n\n\"Do they move?\"\n\n\"I saw no evidence of motion even just after the storm had ended, so they were not affected by the winds. If they are in motion, then they are all moving exactly together in fixed positions.\"\n\n\"Like traffic.\"\n\n\"Essentially.\"\n\n\"Do you ever get tired of people asking you questions all the lime?\"\n\n\"It goes with the job.\"\n\nMira preferred to ask questions, since it took her mind off the fact that she was in extreme torment. She was on an upside-down island of mushrooms with no way to know if any of them were poisonous, and she had never been more hungry in her life. Actually, she had been this hungry from time to time, but when the stomach lust hits hard and heavy then it seems like nothing could have ever felt so bad. As soon as they reached the top, she headed for the nearest shade tree, took off her pack and sat herself down.\n\n\"I say, Holmes old boy, it does seem to be time for lunch, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" He consulted his watch. \"Actually it seems to be half past one in the afternoon in the wilds of Iceland, if that means anything.\"\n\n\"It means that I am starving.\"\n\nHolmes sat down beside her, then leaned over for a quick look inside her pack. \"There seems to be nothing in there but food.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"You did eat right before we left,\" he reminded her.\n\n\"That's right.\" She handed him a granola bar.\n\n\"Did you expect to be gone for several days?\"\n\n\"No, not at all. Can you keep a secret?\" She looked around quickly, as if expecting to see the long, narrow faces of dragons peering out at her from every bush. \"Am I beginning to show?\" Holmes was so surprised that he nearly stood up. \"My dear lady! Don't tell me that you are pregnant?\"\n\n\"No, of course not!\" Mira insisted, pale and shaken at the very thought. \"No, I've just reinstated the spell that makes me taller. It does have one serious disadvantage. I can hardly stoke it in fast enough to keep up with my rate of growth.\"\n\n\"I had noticed your discomfort,\" Holmes remarked. \"You might almost say that your growing pains are all in your stomach.\"\n\n\"Almost.\"\n\n\"And how soon will you be back to the height you desire?\" \"Five days,\" she said. \"The first time I did this, I allowed it two weeks. I dislike having to rush it like this, but I want to have the better part of my height back before we get into a fight. I packed extra food for my own need.\"\n\nShe took a cup from the pack, placed a tea bag inside and filled it with water from her bottle, them made a few quick gestures with one hand. The water began to steam almost immediately. As she waited for her tea to brew, she glanced at Holmes shyly, an expression that she did not practice often. \"Mr. Holmes, could I ask you a rather personal question?\"\n\n\"I am blushing in anticipation. Please do.\"\n\n\"You are an elf, and several hundred years old.\"\n\n\"Several thousand, to be more precise,\" he told her.\n\n\"Well, I have been wondering about this from time to time, and having lunch like this brought it back to mind.\" She bit her lip. \"When a person lives that long, what do you do after you wear out your teeth?\"\n\nHolmes flashed her a toothy grin. \"Like the rest of me, my teeth are magically protected against wear, aging and disease. Even if I should happen to lose one, and in all the time that I have lived I have had the occasional unexpected accident catch up with me, then the tooth grows back.\"\n\nThey had only just finished packing up again from lunch when Holmes, whose elvish eyes had also not deteriorated with time, looked up to check the positions of the nearby islands and saw a distant shape moving slowly toward them. Although he could not yet determine what it was, he considered it a very good idea to return to Wind Dragon. They hurried as much as they were able, the problem being that Mira's legs were really not any longer than they had been. They were unable to see the mysterious object during most of their journey back because of the forest, so they did not yet know what it was or if it might have already arrived, but Holmes was certain that it was moving slowly but directly toward the wreck of the airship. They had not speculated so far about what manner of people they might find living within the singularity, but it was certainly possible that such beings would most likely be creatures of faerie or the higher magic such as dragons.\n\nWhat they found when they reached Wind Dragon was certainly strange enough but not immediately threatening. The faerie dragons had returned, and they had brought with them something unusual that they had picked up somewhere. It was all shiny steel or aluminum, in shape somewhat like a submarine or the body of an airplane with a large tail and small, downswept wings located near the front. To be a little more precise but somewhat less technical, it looked like a big metal shark with the top of a gunboat built on its back, except that it had been wrecked, damaging its wings and lower rudder, and reducing the propulsion units to an unrecognizable ruin. The only frightening thing about it was the fact that it was even larger than Wind Dragon, and that the dragons, who had been pulling it with ropes, were now trying to figure out how to get it onto the ground and those last tricky couple of feet when it responded to gravity.\n\n\"How much do you suppose it weighs?\" Dalvenjah called down.\n\nJenny regarded the hulk speculatively. \"Does it have any engines or other pieces of heavy equipment on board?\"\n\n\"No. It is just the hull, frame and decks.\"\n\n\"Is it steel or aluminum?\"\n\n\"Aluminum, I am sure. It does not weigh as much as you would expect when you pull it.\"\n\n\"That is mass, not weight,\" Jenny muttered. \"That makes it the weight of an aircraft body of about the same size, without engines or other equipment. Say, a B-l. Twelve to fifteen tons, then.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\"\n\n\"No, I really have no clear idea. That is just an educated guess.\"\n\n\"With a degree in engineering, your educated guess is worth something. All we can do is give it a try. The five of us can levitate this, I am sure.\"\n\nFor all of that concern, landing the ship was accomplished without the slightest problem. Jenny made a curious purring noise and leaped aboard the ship with every intention of looking that hulk over inside and out from front to back and top to bottom including all the places where only she could look without first dismantling the ship. The other dragons watched her for a long moment, as if wondering if she would ask anything of them, but she disappeared inside without a sound except for one last contented purr.\n\nDalvenjah turned to Mira. \"If I had been thinking, I would have had it gift-wrapped for her.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"With any luck, it might well be the hull of your new airship,\" the dragon explained.\n\n\"Really?\" Mira gave the thing another appraising stare. \"It looks like a great silver shark. Do you think that Jenny would take exception if I painted eyes on it?\"\n\n\"There is a general conspiracy to keep you away from everything when you have a paintbrush in your hand,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Did you possibly leave anything for four hungry dragons to eat?\"\n\nMira stared at her. \"You know?\"\n\n\"You are beginning to show, dear,\" Dalvenjah told her solicitously. \"Just don't hurry things along too fast, now. You might get stretch marks.\"\n\n\"Oh, you are good,\" Mira exclaimed, escorting the dragon to the wrecked ship. \"Did I ever tell you about Adenna Sheld?\"\n\nMira joined the dragons in a second dinner, for she was already starving from her need for even more bulk to turn into added size. She did check on J.T. in the event that the convalescent cat was ready to join them, but he was still well under the effects of his own brand of anesthetic and probably would not recover for several hours more. At that time he would very likely awaken feeling just as bad as when he had taken that particular painkiller. Curiously enough, Jenny hurried over to join them as soon as they sat down to eat, when they would have expected that she had decided to haunt the curious little ship permanently. As it happened, she had a very good reason for abandoning her inspection. She was curious.\n\n\"Where did you find this amazing little miracle of a shell?\" she asked impatiently.\n\n\"We found it abandoned on an island only half the size of this one, about fifteen miles from here,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"If you will allow, I will now anticipate several of your next questions. My suspicion is that the ship's whirlyblades were wrecked in a storm...\n\n\"Whirlyblades?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Vectored fans, we call them in the mortal world,\" Jenny explained. \"By what I can tell, the ship was moved by large, flat-bladed propellers inside metal cylinders that directed the stream of air. The fans could be rotated to aim the thrust down to lift the ship or back to move it forward.\"\n\n\"Anyway, the ship was adrift,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"When she came down on that island, she slid in under some trees where she could not be seen. The crew survived, obviously, since they stripped provisions and furnishings from the ship. They must have moved to a remote part of the island, since they were unaware that we were stealing their ship until after we were gone. They shot a couple of arrows at us, but we were already out of range.\"\n\n\"What she means to imply is that we did not know they were still around until they shot at us,\" Allan added. \"It was a surprise for us all.\"\n\n\"Arrows?\" Jenny asked. \"You were lucky.\"\n\n\"And how is that?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Well, I looked inside one of the motors,\" she explained. \"I found it curious that there were no fuel or power lines. It works on much the same principle as our lift vanes, except that applying lift causes the armature to spin just like an electric motor.\" \"Ingenious,\" Holmes remarked quietly.\n\n\"It gets more so,\" Jenny said. \"That little ship is no freighter. She has the smooth, lean lines of a ship made to run fast and no real cargo holds. And she also has guns. They use a linear application of the same principle as the vector fans to kick projectiles down a tube. I doubt that it gives the projectiles much of a kick compared to gunpowder, and probably very little speed or range. But the accuracy of the thing must be frightening, since (here is no gravity to arc the trajectory.\"\n\n\"Can we fight them?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"With the catapults and the exploding bolts,\" Jenny said. \"That gives us slightly less range but about the same punch. They use exploding projectiles with both pressure-sensitive (riggers when they hit their target and a timer to self-destruct. You don't want these things drifting about in free fall like wayward mines. In certain respects they are more like inertia torpedoes than artillery shells.\"\n\n\"And what plans are you hatching in your ethereal mind?\" Mira asked. \"Can you get that ship flying again?\"\n\nJenny sat back on her tail, looking very much like a young dragon who was extremely pleased with her thoughts. \"These people never learned how to project fields from large vanes. They use small vane segments to produce strong local fields of force. In spite of appearances, I doubt this ship could manage forty knots. Wind Dragon's thrust vanes will move her at better than sixty. I intend to mount the lift vanes where the vector fans used to be. Once the ship is in flight, the lift vanes can be rotated back for extra thrust. I cannot begin to predict the top speed that might give us, but bursts of a hundred and fifty knots would hardly surprise me. We'll need that when we go against the Emperor's battleship and fleet.\"\n\n\"Unpleasant realities intrude upon this idyllic scene,\" Mira complained softly. \"What can we do?\"\n\n\"You can keep the twins and Sir Remidan away from that ship,\" Jenny said. \"The rest of you do what you can with the interior of the ship. Lining the inside of the hull with planks from Wind Dragon will do a lot to contain the damage and keep pieces of metal from flying about if we are hit. I will do the mechanical work.\"\n\nThe work took the better part of three days, Iceland Time, according to Mr. Holmes's watch, or only a day and a half in local time. Contrary to what he had predicted, darkness fell rather quickly only a short time after the dragons had returned, and it stayed dark for the next twenty hours. Another unpredictable matter was the weather. Without gravity to stratify the atmosphere by pressure, clouds moved about indiscriminately like grazing cattle rather than in layers and groups. They would sometimes have to pause in their work while a cloud moved across their island in the form of a thick, white fog, departing as abruptly as it would come. The winds generally moved up and down, relative of course to the tops of the islands, in a fitful convection that was driven by the mysterious source of light and heat in this universe of floating islands.\n\nJ.T. awoke at last, looking and feeling like something the cat had dragged in. His head hurt so much that he did not even notice his leg, so in a strange way the alcohol was still working to relieve the pain. As it was, he hurt so much and felt so weak that he could not work himself into a seriously bad mood as he would have wished. Holmes offered him a taste of the hair of ihe dog that had bit him, to see if that would help. The term so offended the cat that he swore off drinking entirely.\n\nJenny's part of the repairs was slowed down slightly when she decided that she had to build herself a forge for metalworking. Magic served to give her all the heat she required for her work, and being a ghost she had no need to protect herself. The others were often amazed and unnerved to see her doing things like holding red-hot pieces of metal in her bare hands while she swung a hammer with the other, and Dalvenjah quietly reminded her to be careful about picking up any bad habits that might prove to be dangerous when she was returned to her body.\n\nAs it was, Jenny actually finished her part of the rebuilding before the others. They came to realize that the ship had not been stripped as much as they had originally thought; the machine had to be very light so that the four ducted fans could kick it the short distance to get it clear of an island's gravity. The thin aluminum of its construction hardly weighed a thing, but it was not very strong in some places; even an arrow would have pierced it. Planking the interior of the ship actually made her frame a great deal stronger, especially after Jenny showed the others how to lay the hardwood boards between the metal ribs and braces in a way that added the most strength.\n\nJenny recovered Wind Dragon's wheels and skids and attached these to new struts that she had mounted onto the hull of the metal ship, removing its two forward, downswept wings in the process. Then she cut each of the lift vanes into two equal lengths and mounted these inside short, thick wings, using the wings that she had taken from the front of the ship for the forward pair and making a second set from aluminum panels that had been taken from inside the ship where they were no longer needed as walls. These wings were then attached at the sockets where the ducted fans had been, the internal frame and pivoting mechanism already being strong enough to bear the weight of the ship. The wings themselves did not rotate, but the lengths of lift vanes inside the wings could be turned to direct their thrust.\n\nWhen the ship was not in flight, the wings were hinged to be folded up against the side of the hull for storage like the forward fins of a submarine. Magic gave Jenny the ability to easily build anything she could design.\n\nSoon enough the new ship was ready for flight, and there was nothing to be done but to take her up for a trial run. Mira, who had come from a less technical world, had some doubt that metal flaps could work as effectively as canvas sheets in steering the ship. Sir Remidan had much stronger doubts that a metal ship could fly; he was certain that it would never float. At least this place was a test pilot's dream, since the only thing that could go wrong short of deliberately flying the ship into an island was stupidly flying it into the ground on landing. Any mechanical failure or insufficiency could be easily controlled by simply stopping, since the ship was not going to fall.\n\nJenny and Mira took the ship up for the first time, since they had the most experience in flying airships. Jenny of course could not be injured, and Mira could jump overboard if things went wrong. Conditions being what they were, she could swim through the air with some effort and even drop back to the ground without harm. The twins had discovered fairly quickly that there were some places where a person could jump, such as off the top of a large stone, and not come down again.\n\nJenny took the ship up a couple of hundred feet and brought it to a stop, cutting off all lift from the vanes. The ship remained mostly where it was, drifting at the barest crawl with the light wind. Jenny began to ease the ship forward. \"She certainly flies stable enough.\"\n\nMira stood up to look over the protective flaring that lined the forward edge of the helm deck, located high above the center of the ship rather than in the stem. Mira had been growing quickly in the last few days and was now only a few inches below her previous height. \"Steering is the only part that I'm worried about.\"\n\n\"We can try that right away.\"\n\nJenny began putting the ship through a series of maneuvers. The ship was certainly stable enough to satisfy her at any speed, but she did not like the steering. There were three wheels compared to Wind Dragon's two, with rudder and elevator in the tapered stern and ailerons for pitch control in the wings, a necessary matter in a place without gravity. The wires and pulleys that altered the control surfaces were designed so that small turns of the wheels caused large movements in the flaps, biting hard into the air at the lower speeds the ship had been limited to. Under her new speeds, that overreaction of the controls made her very difficult to steer precisely. Jenny knew that she would have to design a better control system as soon as possible. For now, however, they had to be under way immediately.\n\nKeeping to lower speeds, Jenny was able to maneuver the ship in for a landing easily enough. \"Well, your ship is ready to fly. Do you have a spare bottle of wine?\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"We need to dedicate your ship,\" Jenny said. \"What is her name? Is she still Wind Dragon?\"\n\nMira frowned. \"I guess that I'll have to think about that.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "A Most Unfriendly Altitude",
                "text": "Jenny wanted nothing more than to let the little airship loose and see just what it could do, but she did not trust the ship's handling enough to push it past sixty knots. That would have been a very respectable speed indeed for the old Wind Dragon, but Jenny was only using power from the forward lift vanes. That seemed to be the most stable application of power, pulling the ship like front-wheel drive rather than pushing it from behind with the thrust vanes. Jenny had already wrecked one ship in the last few days and she had felt guilty enough because of that. Building a new, better ship had helped her to feel that she had paid a part of the debt that she owed Mira for the loss of Wind Dragon.\n\nBesides that, they simply could not afford the delay of another extensive repair. The Emperor's fleet was ahead of them by at least several days and possibly several weeks, and they had to begin making up that lead in a hurry. After some thought on the subject, Dalvenjah and Holmes had agreed that they did not need to track the Emperor and the Dark Sorceress Daija, something they could not figure out how to do anyway. They could possibly save a great deal of time and trouble by proceeding directly to the very center of the magical singularity, the source of all magic. That was more easily said than done. Some argued that the center of the singularity must be the source of light and heat, but Dalvenjah found that answer a little too easy.\n\nThe Dragon Sorceress had a surprisingly simple answer to the problem of determining the direction to the source of magic, although it sounded so silly that all the others had assumed that she was teasing. All except for Mira the reconstituted, who was fond of silly ideas. They took Jenny down into the ship's main hold, the largest single cabin aboard, shut the door and placed wet towels around the cracks. Then Jenny was told to allow herself to drift, an exercise that had always before left her hanging in mid-air for hours at a time. This time, however, she drifted slowly toward the floor, no matter how many times they repeated the experiment. If they turned the ship upside-down, she would drift toward the ceiling. As Dalvenjah then explained, Jenny was now a creature entirely of magic with no physical presence at all, and she was reacting to the source of magic.\n\nThe trick now was trying to decide whether Jenny was being pulled toward the source or pushed away from it, indicating whether the source of magic was also the source of light or in the opposite direction. At least the choices had been narrowed down to only two. Holmes argued that the source of light had to be driven by some other force, most likely the source of magic. Dalvenjah agreed that he was probably right, but not necessarily so. At last Jenny made herself very small and held herself as straight and stiff as a board, and Mira set her spinning rapidly end over end. Holmes called for heads and Dalvenjah for tails. They had to wait some time while Jenny's faint resistance to the air slowed her to a stop, and she came up with her tail pointing mostly toward the ceiling. Since no one was satisfied with that answer, even Dalvenjah who had called tails, they proceeded immediately toward the source of light.\n\nDetermining their exact course was a piece of ingenuity of Jenny's making, since the compass and altimeter from Wind Dragon did not work in this place and there was no actual source of light to be seen in the middle of that great blue sky. There was a slender metal pole, obviously a flagstaff, in the bow of the ship that was straight up relative to the deck. Jenny tied a piece of cord to the base of the staff, measured out a short distance and attached the other end to the exact center of the deck so that the cord made a line down the long axis of the ship. As long as the shadow of the staff lay on top of the cord, they were moving directly toward the source of light.\n\nLooking at the tops of the passing islands, with their forests and plains and low, flat mountain in the center, it looked as if the airship was standing on her tail. Mira seemed to find that disconcerting every time she looked. The sorceress insisted upon remaining on the helm deck at all times, even though Jenny served as their only pilot and was all for practical purposes in complete command of the ship. Jenny was the only one who really understood how the more complex arrangement of thrust vanes and control surfaces really worked, and she was certainly the only one who could keep the ship's rather obvious idiosyncracies under control.\n\n\"Have you noticed that it does not get any brighter or hotter as we move toward the source?\" Jenny asked. \"Of course, the distance might be so great that we simply have not come far enough yet to make a difference.\"\n\n\"It is nice to have the helm deck somewhere that you can see where you're going,\" Mira observed. \"There are no masts or rigging or bowsprit to get in the way of your forward view. How is she handling, by the way?\"\n\n\"Well enough,\" Jenny said. \"I do want to put down on one of the islands soon and made some adjustments on the steering before we find ourselves in any strong winds.\"\n\n\"Sir Remidan should be pleased with that,\" Mira said softly. \"For some reason, flying the ship through these drifting islands makes him very nervous. He almost looks airsick when we go past a close one.\"\n\nJenny glanced at Mira, then did a quick double-take. \"Lady Mira, you seem to be getting shorter again.\"\n\nMira made a disgusted face. \"Oh, piffle! I am getting shorter. I realized just a while ago that I got the magic wrong when I started putting on my height. Now I have to start over again.\" Jenny suddenly lifted her head straight up, her ears perked. \"What is that?\"\n\nMira listened for a long moment. The ship itself made hardly any noise, less so even than the old Wind Dragon with her crude aerodynamics and the wind humming and whistling in her rigging. \"I honestly don't hear a thing. I just don't understand it. Your ethereal ears seem a lot more sensitive than the material ears of the other dragons.\"\n\n\"That might be why,\" Jenny replied. \"My shape is arbitrary, so I don't really have ears. I respond to sounds in a more direct manner.\"\n\nMira just looked confused. \"That sounds complicated. How do you ghosts manage to hear without real ears or see without real eyes?\"\n\n\"What worried me more is how I think without a brain,\" Jenny told her. \"I think that you should yell for Dalvenjah to come up here, and have her bring the World's Greatest Elf Detective with her.\"\n\nHolmes and Dalvenjah came up to the helm deck immediately, and Jenny had them turn an ear to the wind. Mira could still not hear a thing, but she had to admit that elves and dragons had better hearing. Dalvenjah engaged one of her moderately fierce dragon frowns. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"Nothing within the normal experience of a dragon,\" Jenny explained. \"But I would bet my ectoplasm that we are hearing a bank of very large ducted fans, much larger than the blades that were on this ship. My guess is that we are somewhere near a ship that is either quite a lot larger than this one or built for far greater speed. Proceed with caution.\"\n\n\"This worries you?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"This little ship had obviously been built for fighting, since it had guns and not much else. My personal suspicion is that no one is in the habit of building and operating military machines unless one has a present or possible future enemy to handle. If we meet another ship, it could be either a friend, an ally or an enemy. We have no way of knowing what their response will be until it comes. And since we have no flags or colors of our own to fly, we could be treated as pirates or smugglers.\"\n\n\"Imagine trying to control smuggling in a place like this,\" Mira mused.\n\n\"The point that I am getting to is simple,\" Jenny continued. \"If we run across the natives, we might not like it. What should we do?\"\n\n\"Can we evade a hostile ship?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"The handling is a little squirrelly,\" she said. \"We might be able to do sixty or seventy knots, but the Hindenberg could do that. I can't promise that we would be able to outrun everything we might find. That is exactly why I want to adjust the steering of this ship.\"\n\n\"I suspect that the question just progressed from a matter of speculation to one of greater immediacy,\" Holmes remarked.\n\nIt took the others a moment to figure out what he was trying to say. By that time, they could see for themselves. Coming across the top of a large island to their left was a ship that looked vaguely similar to their own, a curious mixture of submarine and dirigible with the superstructure and gun turrets of a battleship on top. One important difference was that this ship was at least nine hundred feet long, nearly eight times the length of their own. The massive metal cylinders of four ducted fans luted each side of the ship, each one twenty feet or more in diameter. Jenny was uncertain about the speed of this behemoth. I 'ven though it seemed to be crawling, she estimated that it was pushing thirty-five knots. But judging by the heavy droning of iis fans, it was laboring.\n\n\"Watch her guns,\" Jenny warned, looking over her shoulder. \"If any of them swing around in our direction, I will need time to evade.\"\n\nDalvenjah, Mira and Holmes just stood and stared at the larger ship, which had so far maintained it course and speed, giving no indication that it was even aware of their presence. Jenny bent her neck around and stared at the others. \"Hello, there. Any thoughts on the subject? Did you want to turn around and have a word with Mighty Mo, or do we just keep going?\"\n\n\"I was hoping for some indication of their attitude toward strangers,\" Dalvenjah said. \"I wonder if they realize that we are not one of their own. They might not have taken a good, close look at us yet.\"\n\n\"Or they might be just as slow as us in making up their mind,\" Mira added.\n\nWhatever the reason, the battleship was some time in responding. The deep, rumbling drone of her engines eased back suddenly to a low idle and the flaps of her wings and fins were adjusted to bite into the wind. Jenny could see from the set of her flaps that they were trying to bank the ship and bring her around to follow, although the sharp reduction of her speed suggested that the gesture had not been intended as hostile. The fact that the guns of her two forward turrets continued to remain inactive supported that suggestion.\n\n\"It does seem that they want to talk,\" Jenny told the others, wondering if they would agree with her judgement. The battleship was only now beginning to respond to her sudden change in direction, swinging her long nose around in a slow, graceful arc. \"Is that an indication of their attitude?\"\n\n\"I suppose that it is,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"I suggest that we circle around and discover what they have in mind.\"\n\n\"What if they want us to pay for this little ship that you just happened to find?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"That is simple enough,\" the dragon declared. \"It is Mira's ship.\"\n\nMira rolled her eyes and afforded the faerie dragon a very impatient expression. \"Piffle.\"\n\nJenny began to coax the little ship into a turn, banking sharply in a copy of the maneuvers of the larger vessel. Banking was something that the old Wind Dragon could not do easily, and Jenny was interested in experimenting with it. Tilting the top of the ship into the direction of the turn did counteract the ship's tendency to want to slide through a turn. Unfortunately, the ship seemed to have some very definite ideas of her own. Only a third of the way into her turn, the ship suddenly overreacted and spun around out of control to stand on her tail.\n\n\"Yarg!\" Mira declared, picking herself up from the deck. \"I cannot tell you how happy I am that we didn't do that under normal gravity.\"\n\n\"I'm rather pleased with that aspect of the situation myself,\" Jenny said as she moved the ship forward fast enough to get it under control and bring it around. \"Mira, you might consider having the boys stand by with catapults and your dandy exploding bolts, somewhere that you can't be seen but could have your weapons on deck in a moment. Hit them in the fans and control surfaces. Dalvenjah, you might warn the Air Force to stand by.\" \"What can dragons do with metal?\" she asked.\n\n\"Thin aluminum will burn like paper under direct flames. Fireballs might be more effective than regular flames.\" \"Jenny!\" Holmes warned sharply.\n\n\"Oh, fardles!\" Jenny exclaimed when she saw the hull of the larger ship rising before them much sooner than she had expected.\n\nShe had only a moment to wonder why she had been so inattentive, pushing the ship much faster than she had intended and forgetting to watch where she was going. Such a lapse of attention might have been normal for a person with a tired mind, but she was a ghost. She spun the wheels to execute a sharp turn, but the little ship overreacted once again and stood straight up on her tail, hurtling belly-first toward the hull of the larger ship rising like a silver wall before them. The controls were unresponsive in that position and Jenny struggled to engage the lift vanes. But she found that her magic, although it seemed stronger than ever, was erratic and strangely resistant to her own con-irol, and her surprise at herself made things all the more difficult. She brought the ship to a dead stop in mid-air at the very last moment, and began returning the wheels to neutral to move away.\n\nWhat she had forgotten was that the battleship was turning in that very direction. The two left landing struts of their ship impacted almost at the same instant with force enough to pierce I he metal plates, the hull of the battleship echoing like a drum from the collision, and the two right struts slammed against the hull of the larger vessel a moment later with slightly less force. Jenny stood ready to move her ship away as soon as they were thrown clear by the impact, but the airship clung tightly to the hull of the larger ship, her left struts locked in the broken plates. The fans on the battleship were shut down a moment later.\n\nMira lifted her head and looked around. \"I don't see that I have to pay for this one.\"\n\n\"I must be losing my mind,\" Jenny muttered, watching the blades of one immense fan roll slowly to a stop not twenty feet away. \"Mr. Holmes, will you please go over the side and check those trapped struts for damage? Tie a rope to yourself, so we don't lose you. If they prove to be unfriendly, and heaven knows that they have no reason to feel very friendly toward us, then I will have to pull straight out and run for it. Mira? Do you want to go up to the top and speak with the good people? Politely?\"\n\nMira made a very unhappy face. \"What about Dalvenjah?\"\n\n\"She's a dragon.\"\n\n\"Well, I know that,\" Mira said impatiently. \"Is that meant to indicate some special draconic privilege, or just her inability to be polite?\"\n\n\"They who dominate have no need to be polite,\" Jenny told her. \"I want to keep the dragons discreetly out of the way until we know more about what we have here.\"\n\n\"Yes, very well. Very well,\" Mira grumbled as she entered the hatch that led through the armored wind baffle to the forward deck. \"Who died and left you in charge?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\nMira walked up to the front of the forward deck, which soon brought her level with the deck of the battleship. Her new ship was by no means small; indeed, its actual hull length was nearly as great as that of Wind Dragon's hull and bowsprit. The battleship was so much larger that the ship fit diagonally up the height of her hull, with only a couple of yards poking over the top and the last four yards of her tapered stem and tailfins below. Mira reflected that as long as they were in this position, at least those big guns could not be brought to bear on her little ship. At the same time, repelling a boarding party would be hellish.\n\nA tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, ruggedly handsome with a greater emphasis on handsome than rugged, looked over the edge of the battleship's deck at her. \"Hello, there. Are you in need of assistance?\"\n\nMira was so surprised that she took a step backward and sat down on the deck.\"\n\n\"He spoke English,\" Jenny said quietly.\n\n\"I heard Mindijaran,\" Dalvenjah reported. \"That is an aspect of the magic of this environment.\"\n\n\"Duke Telmar, Lord Admiral of the Imperial Fleet of Acquessa and Captain of the Fortress Harrier,\" the tall gentleman proclaimed himself.\n\n\"Ah, Mira. Lady Kasdamir Gerran, Captain of the Star Dragon,\" Mira said somewhat breathlessly, finally giving her new ship a name in the process. \"My friends call me Mira.\" \"Oh, no, it's going to be one of those,\" Jenny said softly. \"Mira can be very susceptible where these suave, sophisticated types are concerned, and this fellow reminds me too much of her last boyfriend.\"\n\n\"What was that?\" Allan asked as he came up to the helm deck.\n\n\"The High Priest Haldephren.\"\n\n\"He looks human enough,\" Dalvenjah observed. \"I wonder if his kind came down from the surface at some time.\"\n\n\"Not unless they fell in,\" Allan said.\n\nMira talked with their host for a while before she hurried hack to the helm deck. She cast a final glance above, but Cap-lain Telmar and his crew had drawn away from the edge. \"I don't much like this, I do admit. That fellow reminds me too much of Haldephren.\"\n\nJenny looked surprised. \"I would have never thought that good sense and caution would have ever overcome your lusty impulses.\"\n\n\"I've been teaching myself not to act on impulse. It hurts,\" Mira said.\n\n\"Are you certain that it is not Haldephren?\" Dalvenjah asked. \"Fairly certain. Haldephren was always too smooth. This Telmar is very full of himself. He's trying to keep me under control by charming me with civility and concern, but I doubt that he would go so far as actual seduction. I've been losing my height again in a hurry, and he obviously considers himself above a midget. No pun intended.\"\n\n\"What does he have in mind?\" Dalvenjah asked. \"Does he expect you to pay for appropriating this little ship?\"\n\n\"Finders keepers, apparently. But he is very interested in our propulsion systems. He wants to keep us around to talk to us about secrets,\" Mira said. \"I told him that we seem to be having steering problems, and he has asked us to follow him home so that we can make repairs.\"\n\n\"Have these people seen anything of the Emperor's fleet?\" \"He says that a group of strange ships moved through an area quite some distance from here about a month ago. They seemed to be lost, or looking for something. Since they have been attacking anything they see, and since their ships are faster and their magic too strong, the Eolwyn have given up trying to fight them and just stay out of their way. I assured him that we are not a part of the Emperor's fleet.\"\n\nHolmes climbed back over the side to join them. \"Very good news. We seem to have sustained no damage from the impact at all, and the other ship has only light damage. We can pull free and be on our way any time.\"\n\n\"Is there any reason why we would want to stay around?\" Jenny asked, her own suspicions obvious.\n\n\"Three that I can think of immediately,\" Dalvenjah said. \"If these people have been under attack from strangers, then why was this Telmar so friendly with us, even before he knew that we are not associated with the Emperor's fleet? I suspect that there is more going on here than he is willing to admit. I want to know the truth about their actual standing with the Imperial fleet, and I also want to know more about them and whether they will interfere with our business. I want to discover what they know about the nature of their own realm of existence, if they know what and where the source of magic is and if they have told the Emperor.\"\n\nJenny looked from Dalvenjah to Mira and back again. \"Why do we always have to do it the hard way? We find someone we don't trust, and we allow them to take u'S home for dinner. That's what got us in trouble last time.\"\n\n\"We have to take the chance,\" Dalvenjah insisted. \"We have been guessing what we need to do, but the time we lose if we are wrong will be disastrous. If we can find out when the Imperial fleet came through here, where they are going and possibly even what they expect to do, then a delay of a day or two would be worth it. Besides, if you can redesign the ship to run faster, then we will make up the time. You have threatened to do that anyway.\"\n\nJenny agreed reluctantly; she might be allowed to give orders when the ship was in flight, but Dalvenjah Foxfire was still very much in charge of the expedition. She seemed prepared to be sullen and argumentative over the whole matter, behavior that even she knew was uncharacteristically childish for her, but she was hardly given the chance. She was directed to pull Star Dragon away from the Harrier's side, dragging her struts clear with only a little more damage to the hull. In terms of strength of construction, these ships were much closer akin to dirigibles than battleships, possessing tremendously strong frames but thin shells. Jenny brought Star Dragon around and landed her on the battleship's rear deck, being very careful to bring the struts down on hard points supported by underlying framework. There was no danger of crushing the larger ship, since the two ships were in fact attracting each other only at the area of contact, and the Harrier's deck was supporting only a ton of Star Dragon's total weight.\n\nCaptain Telmar was under the impression that Star Dragon was in a much poorer state than she actually was, and both Dalvenjah and Mira encouraged him to maintain that belief.\n\nBoth he and quite a few members of his crew gave the little ship a good looking-over as soon as it was aboard. Her thrust vanes were obvious enough but the lift vanes were completely hidden within the two pairs of short wings, but Telmar restrained himself from asking and no one volunteered that information to him. Star Dragon was strapped down to the deck and they were under way almost immediately. Mira added power from the thrust vanes to boost the Harrier's eight massive fans, which made enough noise and vibration to make a pleasant cruise impossible. Mira took the watch to free Jenny to work on the steering, and she deliberately kept her own contribution of power to a minimum to avoid revealing just what the vanes could do.\n\nJenny's earlier estimates about the speed of these ships had been fairly precise. Even though Lord Captain Telmar was in a hurry to get home with his new friends, the air-speed indicator on Star Dragon refused to budge past thirty-five knots even with the smaller ship pulling her own weight and giving a little more besides. Jenny, as curious as ever, made herself invisible and undertook a close inspection of one of the Harrier's engines, located directly on the driveshaft in the central hub just ahead of the fan. Even though it was almost the size of a radial aircraft engine of about two thousand horsepower, she assumed that it was putting out only a third of that force. Power was provided by magic-users of fairly low grade, one to each engine; Jenny did not wish to dignify them with the word sorcerers.\n\nVery soon they began to pass among inhabited islands, where the usual stands of trees had mostly been cleared for fields and pastures. There was, however, one important thing about these places that several of the others noticed almost immediately. These were not island-villages, each one supporting its own population of rustic farms. These were large, well-organized and efficiently run plantations, or in some cases groups of islands forming a single large plantation. The core of each plantation was a fortresslike manor house, its massive dome like a stone umbrella providing the stoutest defense turned toward the sky, the most likely direction of attack. Storage and servant quarters were either carved into the stone of the islands itself or in the form of long, lightly fortified buildings like barracks.\n\nAll of this provided two important hints about the structure of the local society. This was a nation frequently at war, not necessarily with itself, and subject to sudden if not unexpected attack. This was also apparently a feudal society, where lordlings ran their own pocket-sized empires with armies of serfs or slaves.\n\nAfter some three hours, Lord Telmar led Mira, Holmes and the dragons to the bridge of his ship, set high in the central superstructure for the view it gave of the rest of the ship. He was still trying a little too hard to be congenial, treating them all like old friends and pretending that the faerie dragons, creatures unlike any that he had seen in his life, were in fact so familiar to him that he took no notice. It sometimes strained him considerably to force himself to take no notice. Somehow, he had acquired the notion that Mira, Homes, Dalvenjah and Allan were lords of rank, while Jenny, Vajerral and Kelvandor as well as Sir Remidan and the Trassek twins were peons. Of course, the boys were peons.\n\n\"There she is!\" Telmar exclaimed gallantly, pointing ahead to the largest island that they had seen yet. \"That is Acquessa, my home. There are, you must understand, only eighteen continents in all the Eolwyn Empire. Acquessa is more than two hundred and fifty miles across by nearly two hundred wide.\"\n\n\"My word, is all this yours?\" Mira exclaimed in her best \"little ol' me\" southern belle manner.\n\n\"Duke Telmar Vanryekess of Acquessa, at your service,\" he replied with a heroic sweeping bow. Whether he knew it or not, he had the southern gentleman role down fairly well. Depress-ingly enough, it probably came naturally. \"You must understand that Acquessa is the third largest industrial center in the Empire. The continents differ from the islands not only in size but in the fact that they have the only large deposits of metal, particularly aluminum needed to make our ships. Needless to say, that also gives us almost all of the gold, silver and gemstones as well. Each Duke is given his own territory to govern, and it is his responsibility to protect the islands in his domain. To that end, we collect taxes from the islands in our domain for the building of our navies. The Dukes, in turn, give over a portion of our ships and their maintenance to the Imperial fleet. In that sense, the Imperial fleet is our offensive navy, while the ducal navies are entirely defensive.\"\n\n\"One would guess that you are at war,\" Mira ventured cautiously. The magical translations they heard were fairly precise; in this case, Duke was not a rank of aristocracy but the tide of supreme war leader.\n\n\"I fear that it is so,\" Telmar admitted. \"We have been at war with the Quentarah for as long as our history records, and the Empire is more than twelve thousand years old.\"\n\n\"Why have you been at war for so long?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"There can never be, I must admit, any hope of peace between ourselves and the Quentarah.\" He frowned, and continued softly. \"They are not our kind, you see. Not as different from ourselves as you and your dragon friends, but still they are another creature entirely. They are small, for one thing, and they are ruled by their females.\"\n\n\"That might be inconvenient,\" Mira commented. She did not have to remind him aloud that she was both small and female.\n\n\"It really is all a matter of their attitude,\" Duke Telmar was quick to explain. \"They are alert and industrious little beggars, I will grant you that. But you can't get decent work out of any of them you take captive, and the next thing you know they disappear. They all have so much magic that it is almost impossible to keep them under control. The best thing you can do is kill them when you can.\"\n\nIf this was his idea of being discreet, then they knew that they were in for some real surprises. These boys would get along with the Alasheran Empire quite well. Holmes, of course, liked to keep things in perspective. Because these people built all-metal, engine-driven flying ships, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that they were fairly advanced. But he had yet to see anything on the ground to support that conclusion. The policies and attitudes that Duke Telmar expressed would have been fairly typical and even expected in the mortal world that he had just left, even within that very democratic and civilized country where he had been living, within what was to him very recent times.\n\nSince their destination lay well toward the center of the continent, they still had a flight of some three hours yet ahead of them. Night had fallen by that time; Holmes and Dalvenjah watched the process carefully this time, and they still did not have a clue about how it was done. Holmes decided that it was time to approach the question of what this place was like, and the matter of day and night where there was no sun was a good place to start.\n\n\"Oh, that is simple enough,\" Telmar explained. \"Our world is in the shape of a sphere if you are looking from the outside, but the shape of a vortex or cone as you come nearer the center.\"\n\nThe others quickly realized that when Telmar was describing his world, he meant not just the inhabited islands but all the empty space between. By his definition, his world and his universe would be the same thing. He just had the advantage in that his universe, as far as Holmes could translate the distances, was about twenty thousand miles across and completely filled with air. Curiously, the distance from the outside to the middle, at least as far as the Eolwyn had ever dared to go, was about sixteen thousand miles. The Eolwyn were not particularly curious about anything that did not turn a profit, and they had found nothing profitable about exploring the mysteries of their world.\n\n\"What about the change of night and day?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"That is all a matter of magic,\" Telmar said. \"When magic radiates from the center, it causes a region of the air surrounding the center to glow with light and soft heat. But the center of the world rotates, or perhaps the world rotates around the center. As the center turns away, and so directs the flow of natural magic away, the the air ceases to glow.\"\n\nDalvenjah put on a face that only a dragon could wear. \"My head hurts.\"\n\n\"Wait until we go down the middle,\" Holmes reminded her quiedy.\n\nThe city of Acquessa was not as impressive as they had expected, certainly not the members of Mira's group who remembered Alashera. Of course, the Alasherans had possessed both the wealth and the security to indulge their decadence, while the Eolwyn appeared to be under the threat of constant attack and had to build defensively. The city was built largely into the slopes of the low but rather steep peaks, one of several in the rugged terrain near the center of the continent. The main castle that dominated the top of the peak was certainly massive enough to deserve that name, intricate if not beautiful in its sprawling design, it spiral-topped turrets and vast domes meant to turn an attack from above.\n\nSince Harrier was the Duke's own ship, she passed the military shipyards to land at the castle. Star Dragon was cast off first and Jenny landed the smaller ship on the pavement a short distance away, a matter that suited her just fine since it would make sneaking away much easier if the need arose. Four sets of long, wide rails were swung down on struts from the battleship's lower hull and locked into place, so that only the lowest three feet or so of her rounded hull was actually within reach of gravity from the ground, perhaps thirty tons to provide a stable anchoring platform to keep the otherwise weightless upper portions of the hull from being blown about by the wind. Jenny finally realized that the immense ship was not built so lightly so that it could lift itself; in the real world, it could never fly. The fighting ship was as light as possible to make it agile in turns, quicker to accelerate, and to minimize inertia. She soon discovered that the freighters, which were built with sturdy steel and carried thousands of tons of cargo, needed several minutes to come to speed and miles to make a turn.\n\nDuke Telmar wanted to take his guests up to the castle for a welcoming dinner immediately. According to local custom, the list of those he considered his guests was limited to those he considered to be of aristocratic rank, meaning Mira, Holmes and the two dragons Dalvenjah and Allan. Vajerral went along in the guise of Dalvenjah's personal servant, and Sir Remidan, still in his armor, was explained off as Mira's bodyguard. The others were expected to stay with the ship, to await the pleasure of their masters. Jenny preferred that arrangement just fine. She still needed to complete her modifications of Star Dragon, and the Duke granted her authority to requisition anything she wanted from his own supplies. That also left a sizeable guard aboard Star Dragon to discourage spies.\n\n\"That was surprisingly generous of the Duke,\" Kelvandor observed. \"What can he be trying to do?\"\n\n\"He already thinks of Star Dragon as his own, of course,\" Jenny explained. \"He plans to learn all that the others will tell him voluntarily, then put them in prison to extract the rest by force.\"\n\n\"Should you warn the others?\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah already knows,\" she assured him. \"Duke Telmar has been very free in giving out his own secrets, since he believes that we will not benefit from them. As soon as she knows enough, we will be on our way. I must have this ship ready to run at full speed within the next six hours. Dalvenjah has given me that long, since we must be under way before light.\"\n\nThe Eolwyn went to bed as soon as it turned dark, since they had been awake and working for the last twenty hours of light. By their own habits, they would sleep for a few hours, work through the middle of the night and go back to bed for a few hours more until light returned. Dalvenjah thought that they should wait until some time near dawn before they should leave without saying good-bye. At that time nearly everyone would be back in bed for the second time, resting up for their next twenty-hour marathon of delightful serfdom. Light would be returning soon after that, giving Jenny a clear view to run the ship at full speed. Whacking the bottom of an island at a hundred and fifty knots would make ghosts of them all.\n\n\"I've sent word ahead that we should like some dinner before retiring,\" Duke Telmar reported as he led his guests to the castle. \"I am back a day early from my patrol and my return was not anticipated, so I fear that we will have to take what we can find for dinner.\"\n\n\"I would assume that you do not fly with your ships often,\" Holmes said. \"Your other duties must be numerous.\"\n\n\"The Harrier is my own ship, and I am her only captain,\" Telmar explained. \"That is a traditional duty within the Empire. I must admit, however, that I can only take her out on a three-day patrol every fifteen days. Not so much for the value of the patrol itself, but to have a personal look at the state of all the islands in my domain. In the event of an attack, of course, I will usually take Harrier out immediately.\"\n\nEolwyn architecture looked very much on the inside as it did on the outside, thick walls and ceilings of heavy stone reinforced by many buttresses and wide columns. Not to support the weight of the stonework, because the gravity was not cumulative, but to give strength against impacts during an attack. As it was, the place looked like bunkers for heavy cannons. The Eolwyn were also not given to ostentation. Since the climate was mild and the season never changed, there was no need to make provisions for heat or cold, and storms were frequent but never lasted for long. The biggest problem with the weather aside from wind damage and lightning, was that the winds would often pick up debris from other islands. Since it would not fall, it might be carried by the winds for days, long after the storm had passed, before it just happened to find an island in its way. One could never know when sticks or stones might come hurtling out of the sky, often with force enough to break one's bones. After one of the larger storms, whole trees might be set adrift in the winds.\n\nIt also seemed that the Eolwyn did not have much wealth to spare for furniture and decoration, even in the Duke's own palace. To Holmes at least, that indicated a society that was not as advanced as it looked, was not very productive, or else had to channel a large part of its wealth into the military. Duke Telmar spoke of the war as if it was nothing more than petty skirmishes from the Quentarah and counterattacks, but he was beginning to suspect that large amounts of ships and property were lost regularly.\n\nThey were taken to their rooms to wash up, as Duke Telmar pointed out to them rather plainly with his usual awkward excuse for discretion, before he led them downstairs to the dining hall. This was actually the lesser dining hall, since the main dining hall seated a hundred and fifty without bringing in extra tables and could have doubled as a hangar if only it had a door big enough. The lesser dining hall was much more cozy, with all the charm of a missile silo.\n\nDalvenjah sat back on her tail at her place at the table, dragons being unable to sit properly on a chair because of the rather sizeable appendage that was attached in that location. She regarded her plate and saw that it held a fairly large piece of some animal that had been properly cooked. At least Telmar had not served her raw meat, something that was known to happen with people who were not familiar with dragons.\n\n\"Do not eat anything,\" a voice said very softly into her ear. \"It has been poisoned.\"\n\nShe lifted her head in surprise. \"What?\"\n\n\"I will explain in a minute.\"\n\nDalvenjah looked around quickly, but there was no one there. Duke Telmar looked up at her. \"Excuse me, Sorceress? Is there something you require?\"\n\n\"No, not at all.\"\n\n\"Please eat, by all means,\" Telmar said, watching her closely. Dalvenjah was beginning to think that invisible words of advice might be correct.\n\nAllan had been cutting up his own meat into manageable slices and was just about to attack with draconic ferocity, when he paused and sat in silence for some time, obviously listening to something that no one else could hear.\n\n\"Your ships have intrigued me, I do admit,\" Holmes was saying. \"How long have you been building such ships?\"\n\n\"Oh, some seven thousand years now,\" Telmar answered. He was seated at the head of the table with Mira and Holmes on either side, acting as a buffer between himself and the dragons. \"The engines we use serve well enough, but we would certainly like to find a better, more powerful system.\"\n\nHint. Hint.\n\n\"What did your people do before you had those engines?\" Holmes asked, to move the subject into safer territory.\n\n\"Oh, like some of the primitives still do, we would have used sails when the wind was right, which is really most of the time. And as many primitives are still required to do, our ships used to be rowed.\"\n\n\"Rowed?\"\n\n\"Well, yes.\" Telmar seemed to think that the word had no meaning to these strangers. \"Groups of slaves would move long shafts that had large fans on the end, pushing enough air to make the ship move. That is slow, of course, and generally reserved for tight maneuvering.\"\n\n\"How do they launch and land such ships?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Launching is the easy part; I've seen it myself. They slide their ships along ramps that carry them out past the edge of the island, or off a cliff. Landing is the tricky part. They just sort of thump down into their cradles, which is less rough than coming down on solid ground. Hitting the cradle can be a bit difficult, so they throw ropes overboard and people on the ground pull them down.\"\n\n\"Sorry to leave you hanging, but I had to warn Allan,\" the voice said, and Dalvenjah recognized it as Jenny's. A piece of meat suddenly teleported itself from her plate. \"You were the one who made him such a big dragon, so you know how he can shovel it in. Anyway, I thought that if I were to follow His Nibs Squire Telmar around while none of us were in his company, especially after we first landed, then he might say a few things worth hearing that we would not get from him otherwise. He decided right away that the dragons are too dangerous to try to control as prisoners, so he is determined to do away with you and get the information he wants from Mira and Holmes. I saw him poison the meat himself. I warned Vajerral earlier, since she and Sir Remidan are to be fed in the kitchen with the hired help.\n\n\"It gets even more interesting. His Nibs had a talk with his admirals or secretaries, whatever they were. To make sense of this situation, you have to realize that this Empire has no Emperor as such, but the Duke who commands the most power, prestige or respect gets to tell the others what he thinks should happen in this council they have. Well, Emperor Myrkan approached the Eolwyn some time ago and dazzled the yokels with the speed of his ships, some twenty-five knots better than the best battleships can manage, even though they are only wooden ships. The Eolwyn thought they had the upper hand at first, and they were surprised. Anyway, His Nibs here thinks that he can capture us and our ship because we are not a part of the Alasheran fleet and no one cares piddly squat what happens to us. Once he gets our secrets, he intends to adapt his own ships in a hurry, put the Alasherans in the place where he believes they belong, capture control of the council because his ships would be faster than anyone else's, eradicate the Quentarah very easily after several thousand years of war, and make a bundle selling improved propulsion systems to his buddies all at the same time.\"\n\nAnother piece of meat teleported itself into oblivion. \"So I was thinking that if it appears that you have eaten your dinner, then His Nibs is going to be caught off guard when all the dragons don't suddenly fall over dead but go on living as though nothing ever happened. He might even learn to be a little afraid of us.\"\n\n\"I am happy to hear that someone has everything figured out,\" Dalvenjah said very softly.\n\n\"Thanks much,\" Jenny said, ignoring any possible sarcasm. \"Anyway, I want to come back after dinner and find out what the Duke's reaction will be when certain dragons don't die.\"\n\n\"I do want to be out of here as soon as it is light enough for you to see,\" Dalvenjah added. \"When poisoning fails, Duke Telmar might try something a little more direct.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can see well enough right now,\" Jenny insisted. \"I don't actually see the way you do. Do you know how, when you are flying at night, your magical awareness will tell you where there are trees and such? My awareness is so acute that I can distinguish shape, detail and even color as well as you can see, and the lack of light is no problem. That is how I see what things are like from the inside, you know.\"\n\n\"Then we can leave now?\"\n\n\"Well, not right now. I have Star Dragon dismantled. I will be back in touch with you soon.\"\n\n\"Isn't that right, Lady Dalvenjah?\" Mira interrupted her suddenly.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Dalvenjah responded, looking around quickly. She had been sitting with a blank expression for some time while she had spoken with Jenny. Mira was watching her with quiet concern, while Holmes had a speculative expression suggesting that he had an idea that something was up. Telmar was staring at her with wide, fearful eyes, as if he expected her to roll over on her back with her legs in the air at any moment.\n\n\"I was telling Duke Telmar that most of a dragon's flying speed comes from magic.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is so,\" Dalvenjah agreed, realizing that she was expected to give that very answer for some reason.\n\nRealizing that Holmes and Mira were up to something, Dalvenjah decided that she should pay better attention. The subject was Star Dragon's method of propulsion, and the two of them were filling Telmar full of misinformation. Although they would say nothing definite, they were encouraging him to believe that only dragons could fly an airship, since the principle was similar to their own lift magic. There was no question to the exact moment when the full realization of their implications sank in; Telmar suddenly looked up at the two dragons with an expression of incredulous surprise. Dalvenjah was determined that, if he had the audacity to offer them an antidote, she was going to force-feed him the leftovers.\n\nDuke Telmar soon decided that it was time to retreat and regroup, to see if he could make sense out of this mess and contemplate new tactics. He really was not quite as stupid and incompetent as he seemed, but he was short on subtlety and completely overwhelmed by the opposition, with Holmes attacking him on one front with logic and Mira attacking on the other front with illogic. The poison that he had given the dragons was supposed to have a delayed effect, so that they would have died quietly in their rooms some time soon after dinner. Now that he wanted them alive, he was afraid to let them out of his sight. But he needed time to think even more, and at last he seemed to have decided that if his dragons really were going to die, then he would feel better about the loss if he did not have to see it.\n\nHis tactic for controlling his guests during the night was simple: divide and conquer. As long as they were shuffled off into different rooms, then they would not be talking among themselves and hatching up ideas of their own. And since it would have made Holmes and Mira suspicious when the three dragons fell over dead, it seemed easier all the way around if they simply did not know. Since they were in a transitory state between guests and prisoners anyway, it was also a simple matter to put guards in the halls outside their doors. The chambers were large, even lavish in size and, at least by local standards, in appointment, with massive beds and various items of furniture that appeared to have been cobbled out of timbers, although the workmanship was solid, and rather unimaginative carpets both on the floors and doubling as hangings on the walls. The windows in their rooms were too narrow for them to climb out and escape by walking down the outside of the wall, a very real concern here. No one would build windows very large here, partly for the sake of defense and partly because this would have been a cat burglar's paradise otherwise.\n\nAt least an hour passed before Jenny put in her appearance. \"It's now eight hours past nightfall and well past a third of the way into the night. Unfortunately, the night shift just came on duty down at the docks, the same people who work the day shift as a matter of fact, so there is no getting away until nearly everyone goes back to bed later.\"\n\n\"What about Duke Telmar?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Oh, His Nibs is a tired little trooper and he was just tucked into bed. He tried to work on his schemes, but all he managed was to get moderately sotted instead. He is absolutely overwhelmed with curiosity about when you are going to die and he wishes very hard that you do not, but the only way he can think of to find out is when he invites all of you down for the midnight feeding. It never occurred to him that he could simply have someone walk around the wall and peek in the window at you.\"\n\n\"You don't like him very much, do you?\" Allan asked.\n\n\"The only thing worse than evil is incompetent evil,\" the ghost explained. \"Perhaps he really is not as stupid as he seems, but he is scared to death of us. It seems that these people are not very capable sorcerers, even the best of them, which puts them at a disadvantage with many of their enemies. And whatever the Emperor Myrkan did when he came through here, it scared these people half to death. Duke Telmar is rattled, and he actually hides it very well. I might add that deductive reasoning is something that these people do not do well at all, whether it's inherent in themselves or simply something that was never adapted well into their culture. That might be because none of them have a very strong sense of individuality, even His Nibs. He's trying to handle this situation according to what is expected of him by tradition and duty, not so much his own initiative. That might be why these people needed thousands of years to come up with the few tricks they do have.\"\n\n\"They probably stole the technology they do have,\" Allan added. Then he grinned. \"It sill amuses me to think that there are whole fields of magic-based technologies. The two words magic and technology seem that they should be mutually exclusive.\"\n\n\"There are some who believe that they should be,\" Dalvenjah said in her best holier-than-thou voice. \"Magical technologies are a crutch for people who are magically challenged, or just plain lazy.\"\n\n\"Like Mira?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Mira is socially challenged in ways that defy description.\"\n\nJenny returned the final time about an hour before daylight with the announcement that it was time to leave. That left only one little problem: trying to figure out how. Jenny at least had the advantage, since she had already taken a look outside and knew not only the exact number of guards but where they were located. She did not, however, immediately know what to do about it. There were no less than forty guards watching six people in three suites, and no one was going out those doors until something happened. She sat down together with the dragons to check their mental file cabinets under D for damned good ideas.\n\n\"How do you kill forty guards all at the same time without making enough noise to bring more guards?\" Vajerral asked. She had been installed in the suite's adjoining servant's chamber, just as Sir Remidan was in Mr. Holmes's suite, and she had come over to join the others.\n\n\"His Nibs seemed to remember that he left the rest of us with the ship, and that we might get ideas of staging a rescue,\" Jenny said. \"The guards are all in groups outside of the doors, with no less than twenty guards outside of this room, ten on either side. That makes sneaking up on them hard even for a ghost, since they would notice and make noises if they started falling over.\" \"What about noise?\" Allan asked. \"If all of us come out that door spitting fireballs in ever direction, we can probably run right through any limited opposition we might find and be on our way before the natives can get themselves organized.\" \"That would certainly work,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"I would still prefer to save that for our last resort. Old faerie dragon proverb: sneaky is safer. Ideas like that work much better in adventure stories.\"\n\n\"I wonder if there is some way to make them all go to sleep,\" Jenny mused. \"I seem to remember something like that in an episode of Star Trek.\"\n\nAllan looked at her. \"What do you plan to do, go around pinching all of their necks with your little invisible hand?\" \"Something only slightly like that,\" she said, and turned to Dalvenjah. \"What is the quickest, quietest way to put someone to sleep by magic? The bubble?\"\n\n\"That is not particularly quick, making someone breathe their own air until they pass out,\" the sorceress mused. \"The only advantage is that any fool can work a bubble. A remote shock to the brain is quick and quiet, but very hard to do. If I tried to do it to forty people, even one at a time, something will go wrong soon enough. Are these people exactly human?\" Jenny shook her head. \"No, they seem to be closer to elves, although they are not true immortals but grow old. They also have tails.\"\n\nVajerral looked surprised. \"What? Tails?\"\n\nJenny shrugged. \"Little hairless tails. They keep them inside their trousers. I can't blame them for that. They are such pitiful, worthless tails.\"\n\n\"How did you find out about that?\"\n\n\"His Nibs took a bath after dinner,\" she explained. \"He also had three of his favorite bimbos in the tub with him. They all had tails.\"\n\nDalvenjah looked disgusted. \"Three at once? I had thought these Eolwyn too Spartan for such self-indulgence.\"\n\n\"Well, it was a very big tub.\" Jenny paused as she considered something. \"You know, that gives me an idea. I'll be back in a minute.\"\n\nShe disappeared before anyone could say a word.\n\n\"Well, I like that!\" Dalvenjah said, hardly knowing whether to be annoyed or amused. \"It has turned out to be rather useful, having a ghost about. And there I was, thinking that magic was the most useful thing in the world.\"\n\n\"If we were all ghosts, we would have been out of here already,\" Vajerral observed. \"I still don't recommend it.\"\n\n\"No, Jenny has the advantage of having a body out there waiting for her when she finishes with being a ghost,\" her mother said. \"I do know the magic that would move you right out of your body in a moment, but do you want to leave it here? It would be the end of your sex life.\"\n\n\"Don't tease the poor girl,\" Allan said. \"She hasn't been laid in weeks, and she can't get Kelvandor to take pity on her. He's devotedly waiting for Jenny to get her own body back, and I'm sure that he's made reservations.\"\n\nVajerral seemed to be trying very hard to blush. Having a dragon's armor made that very difficult.\n\n\"What about that business with tails, though?\" Allan continued. \"Do you suppose she was making that up?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so,\" Dalvenjah answered. \"She seemed to have a hard enough time believing it herself. It's not the sort of thing you see every day.\"\n\nAllan grinned wickedly. \"It's not the sort of thing you normally go about looking for. Having a little hairless tail hanging down in the middle seems very awkward for the gentlemen, don't you think? I mean, if you happened to see them without their pants on, but only from the waist down, you wouldn't know if they were coming or going.\"\n\n\"Allan!\" Dalvenjah exclaimed softly. \"J.T. is right, you know. We are all beginning to talk like Holmes.\"\n\n\"Sure, and it's a blessing that Sherlock Holmes wasn't an Irishman, isn't it now?\" Allan asked.\n\nJenny returned at that very moment. \"Well, what do you know? It worked, and on the very first try at that. Mira would die, if she knew. She always did have such trouble with that spell for dispatching demons.\"\n\nDalvenjah regarded her patiently. \"Would you be willing to explain your brilliance right away, or do you wish to be wheedled first?\"\n\n\"Oh, something you were saying earlier brought it to mind,\" Jenny said. \"When you mentioned Star Trek and bubbles, I just put the two together and came up with the most wonderful idea.\"\n\n\"You mentioned Star Trek\" Dalvenjah reminded her. \"You also brought up the subject of bubbles. What the deuce does Captain Kirk have to do with being forced to breathe your own air until you pass out?\"\n\n\"That made me think of warp drives, and I was wondering if 1 could use magic to bend time and space in a very localized and controlled environment. It seemed to me that if you could make it work, then you could do very much what you want with it on the inside.\"\n\nAllan looked very startled and alarmed. \"You were playing with advanced physics in a place that has its very own laws of relativity?\"\n\n\"Well, I never thought of that,\" Jenny admitted. \"I suppose that I could have been the first person to make my very own black hole.\"\n\n\"Don't count on it,\" Dalvenjah said. \"So where did you go? I suppose now that you have thoughts of making Star Dragon do warp factor nine?\"\n\n\"No, I don't use it to go anywhere,\" Jenny insisted. \"I just use it to phase myself outside of normal physical reality.\"\n\n\"What, you were here the entire time?\" Allan asked, trotting out his most surprised expression one more time.\n\n\"Yes, and I heard everything,\" she told him. \"I rearranged the furniture, and none of you saw or heard a thing. It was almost as if everything in the warp field with me had become a ghost.\" Dalvenjah lifted her ears and looked around. The bed, two heavy wardrobes and a large writing table had been piled in one comer of the room. \"Well, I'll be a dinosaur!\"\n\nJenny's little discovery opened up whole new realms to the time-honored art of being sneaky. Dalvenjah had decided already that she needed to find something else to call this little trick, since it seemed like too much trouble trying to explain Star Trek and quantum physics to dragons who might not care for the idea that the universe is a mathematically precise structure. Jenny extended the field around them all and they left by simply walking through the door and right past the unsuspecting guards. She left the three dragons in a safe place and went back to collect the others. By the time she had them all assembled, she was unable to sustain the field any longer.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Capt'n. She canna' take no more,\" Jenny said. She would have been panting, but that was irrelevant to her condition.\n\n\"That must take tremendous effort,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"You cannot expect to go around bending the universe and get away with it. We probably do not need to walk through any more walls, so we might try ordinary invisibility. Mr. Holmes, are you able to make yourself invisible?\"\n\n\"I do know how,\" he said. \"Regretfully, I have not had much practice in the use of my magic in the last few thousand years.\" \"Then I will cover you, Vajerral can protect Mira, and Sir Remidan can go with Allan,\" she said, then noticed that the knight was holding a bottle. \"Sir Remidan, have you been drinking?\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes and I have been chipping away at that bottle all night, and you know how long the nights are,\" he insisted defensively. \"It seemed like too nice a bottle to leave behind.\" \"Suit yourself. Just try to keep your armor quiet.\"\n\nThey made themselves invisible and were on their way again. Now the real problem with being invisible was that they were also invisible to each other, and that made it very hard for them to keep from bumping into one another all the time. At least there was no danger of them getting separated from each other; they were making to much noise for that.\n\n\"I've never been invisible before,\" Sir Remidan observed quietly. \"At least not that I ever recall. This would have been very handy, when I was a squire for Sir Tesdramode. I wonder what the old boar is doing these days.\"\n\n\"He was Queen Merridyn's Ceremonial Protector for a while,\" Mira told him.\n\n\"Yes, I knew that. Did he retire?\"\n\n\"Well, some have greatness thrust upon them; for Sir Tesdramode, it was retirement,\" Mira explained. \"You see, Sir Tesdramode has been getting rather blind lately, but he refuses to have anything done about it. He's always had this curious prejudice against magic, you know. He seems to think that if everyone isn't allowed to have magic, then nobody should have it.\"\n\n\"He was always rather suspicious of magic,\" Sir Remidan agreed. \"I never knew that he had carried it that far.\"\n\n\"Anyway, Queen Merridyn had gone off to a party hosted by a wealthy merchant who was hoping for some government contracts, and she was wearing rather startling pants and tunic completely covered with shiny silver disks, like the scales of a fish. Well, Sir Tesdramode had been out of town and had returned to the palace that night, but with the Queen away he retired to his room. Quite some time later, he was wandering about the halls for some reason when he heard someone ratting about the Queen's chambers. It was Merridyn herself, of course, but the old knight was so blind that all he saw, or thought he saw, was someone wearing bright chain mail in the Queen's own chamber, and he assumed that it must be an assassin. He chased the Queen down the hall, out the door and across the yard until three squires tripped him.\"\n\nSir Remidan made an apprehensive face. \"I can imagine how that went over, the Queen's own protector chasing the Queen herself across the yard in the middle of the night. I also remember Merridyn when she was younger. If she'd had a sword of her own, she'd not have run.\"\n\nThey fell silent, and everyone stood perfectly still for a long moment while a pair of guards marched past.\n\n\"Anyway, Queen Merridyn had just about forgiven him when he struck again,\" Mira continued. \"I don't know if you recall Dame Gherdys Caldeben, but she had passed away about a year ago. Well, Sir Tesdramode somehow got it into his head that it was his Great-Aunt Gherdys, his grandfather's youngest sister by some twenty years who had married Sir Bethmond of Oshglaid and who was damned near a hundred years old. So there they were at the funeral, with Queen Merridyn walking up the aisle amid two thousand mourners from the aristocracy and the leading merchant families, with Sir Tesdramode at her side as her protector. They bowed low before the casket, then Sir Tesdramode took one look irfside and exclaimed, 'That's not my Aunt Gherdys!' in that great, deep voice of his.\"\n\n\"The two of you can gossip until your ears fall off as soon as we get to the ship,\" Dalvenjah snapped. \"Right now, I want a little quiet or I'll leave you here and you can wander these halls invisible, like Bilbo Baggins.\"\n\n\"Who is...Mira started to ask, but then she was sure that Dalvenjah was glaring at her, or at least trying to, and she closed her mouth.\n\nThey soon came to the main ramp leading down to the ground floor of the castle. Ramps were very popular here, since the direction of gravity would shift and the surface always seemed perfectly level to the person walking it; a ball placed on the ramp, as steep as it was, would not roll. Below was the main entrance foyer of the castle, a long chamber of considerable size, rising up through six levels of the castle and serving as a junction of various ramps and doorways, the main outer doors on the far side. Fortunately it was all very dark just now, and it seemed to be deserted. There was no sound at all, except the clanking of Sir Remidan's armor.\n\nThe moment they reached the bottom, however, several lights were uncovered and they found themselves surrounded by a couple of hundred soldiers that had been hiding in the shadows. To make matters worse, a large portion of them had crossbows that would pierce even Sir Remidan's armor, much less that of the dragons. To make matters even worse yet, these were not the local guards but a battalion of Alasheran Legionnaires. Then, just to make things really nasty, an abrupt surge of magic caused their spells of invisibility to collapse, revealing them all as they stood just below the base of the ramp. All except for Jenny, who was invisible by nature.\n\nA tall, almost boyishly handsome young man in bright Imperial armor stepped out to confront them. He was practicing a truly evil smirk, the type that could only be acquired by embracing true evil. \"Well now, faerie dragons. I assume that I am in the company of Dalvenjah Foxfire. Duke Telmar has told me that he tried to poison you, and it didn't work. Now why would he want to poison such a lovely golden lady as yourself?\"\n\n\"He wanted to get the secrets of our propulsion vanes for himself before you arrived,\" Vajerral said, stepping forward and speaking in a voice that was an overly dramatic imitation of her mother's. That would allow Dalvenjah, the most dangerous magic-user of their group, to remain unobtrusively in the background, and the tactic seemed to work. \"He seems to be afraid of dragons, and he thought that my mortal friends would be easier to control. No doubt he meant to make some excuse to you.\"\n\n\"Duke Telmar is a daring fellow,\" the Alasheran said. \"Frankly, he can do what he wants with your friends. I am here to make certain that you do not attempt to interfere in the Emperor's errands in this quaint place, and the only way to insure lhat is with your death. So you see, our good friend Duke Telmar was very much on the right track.\"\n\nVajerral looked surprised. \"Your Emperor does not mind if the Eolwyn try to steal your technology?\"\n\nThe Alasheran laughed. \"We plan to give it to them. We do all think very much alike, don't you agree? If Duke Telmar had ever met with us in person, he would have known that. Your information appears to be based upon what he believed, and his own information was somewhat lacking.\"\n\nVajerral shrugged. \"If it was easy for me to be perfect, your Emperor would be dead already. You certainly got here quickly enough.\"\n\n\"My ship and I had stayed behind as emissaries to the Eolwyn not twelve hundred miles from here. And it seems that you do not know about the magical message-sending equipment I he Eolwyn have, not unlike the radio in that world we passed through on our way here.\"\n\nOne surprise after another. They had not known about that because there had been no such equipment in Star Dragon when they had found her. If there had been such equipment, it had been taken from the ship by the survivors of the wreck. And it had not worked, or they would not have still be stranded.\n\n\"Duke Telmar was in contact with us immediately after you made contact with him, or rather will his hull,\" the Alasheran continued. \"So you see, he was not really trying to betray us, just to profit by the whims of fortune. We can appreciate that.\" \"You also don't have the strength to punish him if you wanted,\" Vajerral added. \"Then again, you might very well be the best of friends. As you just pointed out, you are much alike.\"\n\n\"Now why do 1 suspect that I have just been insulted?\" He laughed again, then bowed gallantly to Mira. \"It is very good to see you again, Lady Kasdamir Gerran, although I must say that you have come down in the world.\"\n\nMira stared at him. \"Just who are you?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't expect that you recognize me,\" he told her. \"You might have changed, but I have changed even more. I am in a new body, to be precise. I am Ellon Bennisjen.\"\n\n\"What?\" A thundering, disembodied voice shook the stone walls. Jenny appeared in the middle of the room, wearing her dragon form about five times normal size, staring down at one very frightened Alasheran. \"Did you say Ellon Bennisjen? You slimy little son of a bitch!\"\n\n\"Ah... I beg your pardon?\" Ellon looked as if he might wet his armor.\n\n\"You don't recognize me?\" she demanded. \"I've changed even more than you have. I'm Jenny Barker.\"\n\n\"But you're dead!\" Ellon insisted.\n\n\"That's right, bucko!\"\n\nJenny drew herself up on her hind legs and began to move slowly toward Ellon, her long arms and claws extended menacingly. Ellon drew back in alarm. He did not know what to make of this thirty-foot-high faerie dragon who claimed to be someone he knew to be dead, but it was thoroughly terrifying. Dozens of crossbows snapped, but the bolts only passed through the immense dragon without harm. She reached out with one large hand and lifted Ellon from the ground, shaking him sharply a few times just to hear his armor rattle. Ellon was making some frightened noises of his own.\n\nIn the next instant, Jenny's form suddenly dissolved from that of an immense dragon to that of a swirling vortex of mist, shot through with flashes of white and red, while sheets of lightning rippled over its surface. Ellon disappeared, screaming his terror inside the vortex, and a long moment passed before pieces of his armor began flying out in every direction. The tail of the vortex whipped around sharply and took the bottle from Sir Remidan's hand. With a final flash of lightning and explosion of thunder, Jenny returned to the form of the large dragon. The glass bottle lay on the ground before her, its top fused shut.\n\n\"So, who wants to be next?\" she demanded, her voice echoing.\n\nThe Alasheran soldiers all decided that they should leave in a hurry, dropping their weapons as they ran for the door. As soon as they were all gone, Jenny returned to her normal size and turned to the others, grinning wickedly.\n\n\"Special effects by Steven Spielberg,\" she said. \"I think that we can leave now without any problem.\"\n\n\"What did you do with Ellon?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"I'm tired of these people popping up again every time you kill them,\" she explained as she collected the bottle. \"I stuck his spirit inside the bottle and closed the top permanently. Having spent some time inside a bottle, I can assure you that it makes a most fitting punishment.\"\n\nThey encountered no further opposition on their way out, although they had been concerned that Ellon might have sent other soldiers to guard Star Dragon. Jenny had indeed been busy during the night, or at least she had been keeping Kelvandor and the boys busy. She had enclosed the helm deck with a metal roof and glass windows along the side. A large portion of the rear deck had been enclosed as well, although the second half of the roof slid back under the front to open the deck. If this ship could run as fast as she anticipated, the ship needed a roof to prevent members of the crew from being blown away. She had also covered wheels and struts in streamlined darings. Kelvandor and the twins had the ship ready for flight.\n\n\"Eolwyn battleships have been moving out from the island for the last few minutes,\" Kelvandor reported as he helped Mira on board. \"I suspect that they are maneuvering to bring their guns to bear as soon as we leave. There's an Alasheran airship landed on the other side of the castle.\"\n\n\"Allan, I believe that we should eliminate that ship,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Jenny, take this ship to safety and wait for us to return.\"\n\nThe two dragons spread their wings and flew away into the night.\n\n\"Kelly, I need for you and the boys to stand by the catapults,\" Jenny instructed. \"Mr. Holmes, will you help Mira to crank up the wheels as soon as we leave the ground? We will be going to full speed immediately. Oh yes, and can you find a very safe place for this?\"\n\nKelvandor looked closely at the bottle Jenny had given him. \"What is this, spirits?\"\n\n\"No, just one.\"\n\nJenny quickly checked out the controls of the ship, then released the brakes and rolled the ship forward across the court. She engaged just enough lift to kick the ship clear of the ground, sailing out over the parapet at the outer edge of the court and moving Star Dragon into clear sky. Now that they were free of gravity, she rotated the ship's nose straight up and began to accelerate rapidly. Even though it was still night, she was able to see through the heavy darkness easily. No less than nine Eolwyn warships, including two of the massive battleships, were spread out in a loose formation overhead. But it seemed that the Eolwyn could not see well in the dark at all, since the ships were moving slowly with what seemed to be a great deal of concern for running into each other, their recognition lamps brightly lit. Star Dragon was a relatively small ship with no lights, and without moonlight or starlight to reflect from her metal hull she was nearly invisible.\n\n\"All strapped down?\" she called to Kelvandor.\n\n\"Ready,\" he assured her.\n\n\"Have everyone hold on, and tell the boys not to hang their heads out the windows. We're going to see what this heap can do,\" she said.\n\nShe pushed forward the lever that rotated the lift vanes into the horizontal thrust position, then she began teasing all of the vanes until they were giving nearly full power. Star Dragon accepted the power, accelerating smoothly and responding with very acceptable precision to her controls. The rebuilt air-speed indicator moved to a hundred knots and climbed quickly beyond that. At a hundred and fifty knots the ship still had power to spare, but the deck canopies that she had installed, although they smoothed down the ship's aerodynamics overall, were beginning to give buffeting from the drag of their open ends. Jenny decided that she had all the speed she needed without fighting that drag until she was more familiar with the way this ship handled at speed.\n\nStar Dragon was past the Eolwyn ships within moments, but Jenny kept them going at speed until she thought that they must be outside of reasonable range of the guns, the distance when friction with the air would slow even projectiles from the most powerful guns. Then she cut speed and began to circle. The two dragons had done their work, leaving the Alasheran airship drifting as she burned rather violently in the night. They passed completely unseen through the Eolwyn fleet and were back on board Star Dragon shortly, testing their own generous speed in free fall. Jenny had already clocked Vajerral as the young dragon completed a level flight over a mile's course in only twelve seconds, giving her a speed of about three hundred per hour.\n\n\"That was smartly done,\" Dalvenjah commented as she joined Jenny on the helm deck. \"Your command of magic seems to be growing tremendously.\"\n\n\"1 don't know about that,\" Jenny said as she eased Star Dragon back up to her new cruising speed. \"I was just thinking about something. I suppose that finding Ellon brought it to mind.\"\n\n\"What would that be?\"\n\n\"Well, it was back on the Island of Alashera, there inside the volcano when Ellon and the High Priest Haldephren held me captive,\" she explained. \"Haldephren knew that I was important to their prophecies, but I just realized that even he did not know how. He was trying to subvert me to evil. Since all that I, or perhaps Mira, was supposed to do what to provide a body for the Dark Sorceress Darja, his efforts to subvert me were absolutely pointless.\"\n\nDalvenjah considered that. \"Yes, that does seem right. I would suppose that he did not know the exact meaning of the Prophecy because Emperor Myrkan had never told him. Myrkan has existed only for the pursuit of power for the past two thousand centuries, and he seems to have always been a suspicious sort. He once sent Haldephren after me, knowing certainly that Haldephren would not survive the encounter. Haldephren is often played for a stooge by his own master, and he has not figured that out in twenty centuries.\"\n\nJenny smiled. \"I do recall that he was devious enough when he was making the rules, but he seemed simple and shallow trying to deal with surprises. But why would the Emperor keep such an important secret?\"\n\n\"By not revealing the full nature of the Prophecy to anyone, perhaps he meant to insure that it would never come about unless he was there himself to make it happen. It was the Emperor himself who gave your body to Darja. At least now we know that the Emperor has been loitering about securing allies rather than pushing directly toward his goal. Why? He knew that I might be close behind him. Did he really think that the Eolwyn could stop me, or even slow me down that much?\"\n\n\"What course do I strike, then?\" Jenny asked. \"Do we look for the Emperor or do we go straight in? If we get there first, we can defend it against him when he arrives.\"\n\n\"On to the center for now, but we will have to consider that,\" Dalvenjah said. \"The source of magic is their most logical destination, but it might not be that simple. The Emperor might still be out here because the source of magic is not his goal after all. I wish that Ellon had gloated just a little longer before you killed him. He was a mine of information.\"\n\nJenny thought about that for a moment. \"I might just have a way to answer that question for us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Friend or Fur?\n\nJenny brought the bottle out of the small wooden box where Kelvandor had hidden it, packed in rags to protect it against breakage. She laid the bottle gently in the center of the lower rear deck, then stepped back until she could lower her head to look down at it comfortably. The bottle was firmly capped, the glass melted until the lip had fused completely shut, and there was a small amount of liquid still in the bottom. All such things were certain to make its inhabitant's stay very unpleasant.\n\n\"Is he still in there?\" Kelvandor asked.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Jenny answered softly. \"And he will stay in there until the bottle is broken, something that he does not have the power to do for himself. Nor can he see or hear outside the bottle, unless I make that possible. His personal universe consists of a disembodied mind and the inside of a bottle that he cannot touch. Distilled eternity. Open this bottle in a few weeks and you will find only the essence of madness. There is no greater torture than utter and complete boredom. Soon he will begin to welcome insanity as the only relief for his pain.\"\n\n\"Enough, Jenny,\" Dalvenjah admonished her gently. \"Just open him up and talk to him. If it is as terrible as you say, and I do not doubt you, then a couple of hours in that bottle should have left him in a more receptive frame of mind. Assuming that his sanity survived what you did to him.\"\n\nJenny had not considered that possibility. She did not remember having been left disembodied herself, only that she had suddenly found herself inside Vajerral. She had ripped Ellon Bennisjen bit by bit from his body, and he had still been screaming when she had sealed him inside the bottle. She did not actually open the bottle itself; she just made certain changes that permitted him to see and hear something of what was happening outside. She knew from her own stay inside a bottle that being able to see and hear outside took away from the boredom only slightly, but added greatly to the frustration of being trapped. Having Ellon at her mercy pleased her more than she would have ever thought possible.\n\n\"Ellon Bennisjen, are you in there?\" Jenny asked, then waited a moment for him to answer. \"Ellon, I know that you are in there. Talk to me, or I must assume that you have lost your mind and I will put this bottle in the bottom of the ship until I can find a safe place to hide it.\"\n\n\"Bottle?\" a thin voice demanded incredulously. \"What bottle? What have you done with me, you fire-breathing bitch?\" \"Temper, temper!\" Jenny warned him in a sweet voice. \"Do you know who I am? The name is Jenny Barker, object of prophecy and one sexy chick. You wanted my body very much at one time, but then so did your Emperor and the Dark Sorceress Darja. A silly mistake, as it turns out, since I was really a dragon in mortal form. Now I am a dragon's ghost, so I know what it's like to be stuck inside a bottle.\"\n\n\"You put me inside a bottle?\" Ellon asked.\n\n\"It seemed like the best thing to do with you,\" she explained. \"I was not about to kill you again and let you come back on me as a recurring infestation of crab lice. I put you into the bottle where I could keep an eye on you, as it were. Boring as shit, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You must let me out of this thing,\" Ellon insisted, his voice already sharp with panic. \"What can I do to convince you to let me out of this?\"\n\n\"Well, I can tell you right now that I am not about to let you out until our little adventure is over. But there are a few things that I want to know for now, and I am willing to bargain. If you will talk to me, then I will release you into true death, to whatever awaits mortals when they pass away into the next realm, as opposed to loitering about in this one. If you will not talk, then I will seal this bottle inside solid stone where you will never be found and you will never see the light of day for a hundred million years when erosion will finally wash you out to sea. And with your luck, the bottle would just be buried again in the silt, and there you go again for yet another hundred million years.\" \"You do have a way with words,\" Ellon remarked sourly. \"You seem to think that you will win. All I need to do is to wait for my companions to defeat you and I will be rescued.\"\n\n\"And who is to know that you have taken up residence inside a bottle of sky-island brandy?\" Jenny asked. \"You're magically isolated inside the bottle, so no one will sense your presence and you cannot call out. Now, would you like to reconsider doing things my way?\"\n\n\"Yes, very well.\"\n\n\"Trouble!\" Mira declared.\n\n\"Oh, brother!\" Jenny declared. She gave the bottle to Kelvandor for him to pack into the wooden box, then she hurried to the central helm deck.\n\nThe problem was obvious enough, once Jenny had a chance to look about. She had left Mira and Sir Remidan to watch the helm while she had been having her little talk with Ellon of the flagon, and Mira had blithely flown Star Dragon into the middle of a fleet of Eolwyn warships. Mira did not yet trust her new ship enough to take it up to speed, cruising at what would have been only a brisk pace for the old Wind Dragon, and the larger ships were moving in quickly to intercept them. There were already ships above and below them as well as to each side and more were moving in behind, so there was no easy direction of escape. Jenny suspected that their intentions were to capture their prey, since their present tactics made it impossible for them to bring their weapons to bear for the danger of hitting each other.\n\n\"How did they get ahead of us?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Ellon said earlier that they have a system of communication that must be not unlike radio,\" Holmes explained. \"Apparently they took note of our direction and prepared an ambush.\"\n\n\"We have to make a hole in that fleet before they can move in against us,\" Jenny mused, speaking mostly to herself. Then she lifted her head to look at the other dragons. \"This is our fight, fireballs into the very center of their fans, directed from the front. I will do what I can about their control surfaces.\"\n\n\"That leaves me with the ship,\" Mira observed. \"Should I have the boys stand by with the guns?\"\n\nJenny shook her head. \"Only you can work the guns. There are projectiles in the chambers, so just aim the ship when you're ready. But save it, to get you through if something gets in your way. Have the boys stand by with their catapults and the bolts with the exploding heads. Have them aim at the fans, and not at the dragons.\"\n\n\"Where am I going?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Hold back for a time to give us a chance to attack some weak point in their assault, then follow us through quickly. We will do what we can to clear the way, but you might have to follow up our attack with all of your own weapons and throw them into confusion just before you break through. And keep in mind that they will feel free to shoot at you when you come out the other side.\"\n\nJenny led the dragons overboard, using the greater speed they commanded flying without gravity to dart toward a group of larger ships almost directly ahead. Mira was not immediately reassured about their choice of targets until she realized that the larger ships were too slow and heavy to maneuver, their massive turrets too ponderous to turn quickly enough to track a swift target like Star Dragon. The smaller vessels could support each other, moving to fill any hole as quickly as the dragons could make one. Mira turned Star Dragon in the other direction, circling wide well inside the wall of the Eolwyn ships but still moving fast enough to discourage attack.\n\nThe faerie dragons concentrated their first attack on one of the immense Eolwyn battleships, darting quickly in and away to avoid any small weapons that were being turned on them from the deck of the ship. They soon discovered that a single blast from one of their potent fireballs was usually enough to disable one of the large ducted fans. The magically activated motors were, like the rest of the ship, made almost entirely of aluminum and were packed in large quantities of thin oil to contain the heat of friction that would have otherwise weakened the light metal. Engine fires were apparently a frequent problem, since the fans of the larger ships were built with ejection devices that kicked the burning fan from its pivoting axle and away from the ship. As Jenny had reminded the dragons earlier, aluminum was perfectly willing to bum while exposed to flame; fires had to be controlled quickly.\n\nThe dragons had divided themselves into teams of two, each pair going after a large ship. For her own part, Jenny was attacking ships where they were most vulnerable: from within. All of the cables from the rudders and elevators in the tail of each ship came down from the bridge and then back through a wide conduit through the center of the hull. The cables were thick but they were also braided aluminum wire, burning through as easily as rope under her flames. She could hamstring a ship in this manner in half a minute, leaving it only limited up-and-down motion by pivoting its fans. And with the others picking engines off ships like nuts from a tree, they could have disabled the entire fleet within minutes.\n\nMira had already discovered that they did not have that much time. Small ships, most no larger than Star Dragon and quite possibly of the same make as her original hull, had separated from the main fleet and were moving in, trying to get into a position where they could safely use their smaller guns. Mira took just enough time to scratch her head twice and decided that the dragons had already created enough confusion to buy her the lime to get her ship through the Eolwyn line. Burning fans that had been ejected from disabled ships were burning lazily with thick, black smoke; the lack of gravity prevented natural convection to feed the flames with fresh air. About a dozen ships had already been disabled to various degrees, many drifting without their ducted fans while others dared not move because of their inability to turn. This seemed like a very good time to be on their way.\n\nUnfortunately, Jeniny's little plan for making a diversion had not worked out quite as predicted. With an entire section of their fleet crippled, other ships were moving quickly to strengthen that line. Mira spun the wheels and turned Star Dragon sharply, heading back toward one section of the line of Eolwyn ships well removed from the fight and, according to her own reasoning, not paying very strict attention. In this case, as indeed happened with surprising regularity, Mira's curious and imperfect logic actually paid off. Star Dragon slipped between a loose collection of medium-sized warships that did not even begin to respond until she was streaking past. Dooket and Erkin took advantage of the moment to take out fans on two of the nearest ships with their exploding bolts.\n\nMira expected that they should have been free and clear, leaving the Eolwyn warships far behind. Perhaps it was fair to assume that nothing was ever supposed to be simple; there would be no purpose in life if it was not complicated enough to be worth doing. Even as Star Dragon was moving toward open sky, an Eolwyn ship turned to follow and began to accelerate with unexpected speed. Looking back, Mira saw that the ship was unusual in design, about half the length of one of the battleships but very narrow and tapered of hull, a slender rail to serve as a platform for six pairs of large fans and over-sized fins and wings for agility. This beggar was built for running.\n\nMira knew that she had the faster ship, but she did not yet trust running Star Dragon at full speed and she was less certain that she could match the maneuverability of the Eolwyn cruiser. She urged her ship to a little more speed, seeing that the cruiser was actually closing the distance between them, and steered a heading for open sky. The problem was that the sky islands were small and very thickly clustered in this region, no doubt the reason why it had been selected by the Eolwyn for their ambush. Mira knew that she should not try to fight unless she had no choice, or unless she had an advantage that she could not ignore. It was better to run for now and wait for the dragons to come to her rescue, since their speed of nearly three hundred knots would allow them to make short work of the chase.\n\nJust because they were needed, fate had its own way of making certain that the dragons were slow in coming to the rescue. Mira began to wonder if her unexpected change of tactics had gone unnoticed, and if they might still be waiting for her to bring Star Dragon through their own hole in the Eolwyn line.\n\nMira looked up to see something pass only a few inches over the roof of the helm deck, and she realized that the Eolwyn ship was shooting at her. She glanced back at the long, slender ship, and she was dismayed to find that it was gaining on her. While it had only light weapons, it did have the speed and maneuverability to use them very effectively. Whether she liked it or not, she was going to have to push Star Dragon a little faster. Mira spun the wheels to strike an evasive course, trusting that her little ship was still the more agile of the two, and Star Dragon turned only just in time. A moment later, a shell from the Eolwyn guns tore completely through the tapered rear hull just above the main thrust vanes, the delayed fuse exploding the shell about twenty feet from the left rear wing.\n\n\"Kill it, Mira!\" Holmes warned, already on hand to survey the damage. \"The thrust vanes are about to rip loose. Convert your thrust to the directional vanes inside the wings.\"\n\nMira urged thrust out of the vanes located in Star Dragon's two sets of wings, and the right rear vane began to shake and buckle almost immediately. She looked over the side at the wing, seeing that it had been ripped through at several points by fragments of the exploding shell. Either the main spar inside the wing was about to fail, or the pivoting hinge for the vanes had been damaged. The only thing she could do now was to shift all of the ship's thrust to the two forward vanes, the only remaining pair, although the ship seemed to steer very loosely with only the forward vanes pulling the greatest part of its mass. And with two of the three sets of vanes down, Star Dragon no longer had the speed to evade the Eolwyn cruiser.\n\nMira considered her options and mentally flipped a coin, which only came down on the side she wanted anyway. The daring plan might not be the best, but it was certainly her style.\n\n\"Stand by the crossbows, boys!\" she shouted as she banked the ship and spun the rudder wheel. \"We can't run, so we have to fight!\"\n\nThe Trassek twins shouted something that she hoped was approval; they were committed to doing this anyway, so it would be better for them if they thought it was a good idea. Mira brought Star Dragon around as tight as she could manage while maintaining her speed, completing the turn with the two ships standing bow to bow only a hundred feet apart. And at their combined speed, they were coming at each other very fast indeed. Mira had only a moment to align her ship before she activated the first bow gun. For having never done this before, she was lucky; the nearest fan on the Eolwyn's port side exploded into flames. Mira turned Star Dragon out and then back in again, bringing the other gun to bear on the second fan; this time she was luckier than she deserved to be. Unfortunately, she was also out of loaded guns. She steered straight down the length of the other ship's hull, close in and slightly below, and Holmes and the twins took out the three remaining fans on that side with Ihe exploding bolts from their crossbows.\n\nMira turned Star Dragon straight down, the only direction in which the disabled ship was unable to shoot at her. Her one intention now was to make herself and her little ship very scarce, disappearing among the maze of sky islands before any other Eolwyn ships found her and tried to follow. The dragons appeared only a few minutes later, hurrying to the rescue as fast as they could fly. Mira was still relieved to see them, so later really was better than never.\n\nJenny circled around the little ship twice, surveying the damage before she came aboard. She looked far from happy with the situation, but at least she had the decency to keep her comments to herself. Mira understood the matter perfectly well; if she had not been afraid of Star Dragon's full speed, the ship would have evaded the attack easily.\n\n\"Mira, can you watch the ship a little longer?\" she asked. \"1 want to put as much distance between ourselves and this place as we can before we put up for repairs. If I can tie down those rear thrust vanes, we might be able to double our speed.\"\n\n\"We were fortunate that the shell passed completely through the hull before it exploded,\" Holmes said. \"How does it look to you?\"\n\n\"Not bad, really,\" Jenny said. \"It should be a simple matter to rebuild the frame and brackets under the thrust vanes, and I have enough sheet metal to repair the hull. The difficult part will be opening up the wing to repair the spar. Perhaps, since I can dematerialize myself and work from the inside, 1 will not have to take very much apart to get at it.\"\n\n\"And what do you need for now?\"\n\n\"Rope, Mr. Holmes. When I said that I am going to tie down the thrust vanes, 1 meant it.\"\n\nJenny realized that they could not safely land the ship without the rear set of lift vanes as well, so she cut a couple of wooden braces to hold the damaged wing in place. Star Dragon was still lame either way; the ship could fly forward on the propulsion of the front lift vanes and the thrust vanes, but the rear vanes could only be engaged for lift since they were braced only in that direction. Jenny took command of Star Dragon after that\u2014as if she had not been giving the orders all along\u2014and she brought the ship back up to speeds that Mira had not dared at the best of times.\n\nThe days were long in the world of the sky islands, and by nightfall they had crossed the better part of fifteen hundred miles according to the log on Star Dragon's air-speed indicator. They had come within sight of one of the floating continents, which seemed like a very good place to spend the night to some members of the crew and not a good idea at all to others. The continents were the most likely to be inhabited. At the same time, Jenny saw that this place had forests deep enough to hide Star Dragon and her shiny hull. Since Jenny was driving, she got to choose where they parked.\n\nMr. Holmes came out at dawn the next morning for a good look around. He had been the most resistant to landing here, since he was certain that any of the larger pieces of real estate were probably occupied. It seemed to him that the very essence of logic would be to find out for himself if anyone was about before someone found them. First he thought that he should see how Jenny was doing with the repairs, just in the event that they should have to leave in a hurry. He walked around Star Dragon's bow and found that Jenny was just about finished with her work.\n\nThen he noticed that there was something wrong with the young dragon. Admitting that she was a ghost, her form had always looked solid enough. Now her image was blurred and indistinct. She spun herself around as if he had startled her, understandably enough. Then she lowered her long neck and lifted her crest, and in his limited familiarity with faerie dragons he still knew that for a posture of attack. She glared at him, as if she saw only an enemy.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she demanded, her voice soft but threatening. \"It seems that I have seen you before.\"\n\n\"You know me well enough,\" he told her, keeping his own voice calm and even. \"I am your friend and companion, Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\n\"There is no Sherlock Holmes!\" Jenny declared, drawing herself up as if to strike. \"Sherlock Holmes is just a story.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is so,\" he admitted. \"I am in truth the Elf Lord Alberess, but I am sometimes called Sherlock Holmes. That is liow you have always known me.\"\n\nJenny hesitated, and her rage collapsed in an instant. She shook her head and her form became more real and solid. \"Please excuse me, Mr. Holmes. I don't know what happened.\" \"You have been working hard all night,\" he assured her gently. \"Perhaps you are just tired.\"\n\n\"I'm dead,\" she reminded him. \"I don't get tired.\"\n\n\"You are disembodied,\" Holmes said. \"I imagine that you have been concentrating very hard all night. Your mind can still grow tired, I suppose, and likely to play tricks on you. How is the ship?\"\n\n\"Everything works, so we can leave in a hurry if we must. I've cut the new sheet metal for the hull and wing, but I've waited until morning to ri-vet them down because of the noise.\" She bent her neck around to look up, seeing that J.T. was peering over the top of the siderail. \"Good morning, cat. I see that you have decided to rejoin the living.\"\n\n\"That's a funny remark, coming from you,\" the cat said. \"My hind leg finally stopped hurting enough for me to get around. I thought that I should make my presence known before things get entirely out of hand. They tell me that you have been running things.\"\n\n\"It amuses Dalvenjah Foxfire for her to permit me to command this ship,\" Jenny replied. \"Perhaps because it amuses her less to think of Lady Mira in control.\"\n\n\"Then should I talk to you or Mira?\" J.T. asked. \"Someone is coming. About a hundred someones, to be precise. They already have us surrounded.\"\n\n\"You might have come to the point a little sooner,\" Holmes admonished him.\n\n\"I would have, if it had been important. These ladies mean us no harm, as long as we can make a good accounting of our trespass. Remember that we are flying what looks to be one of the ships of their enemies. I suggest that a certain dragon should show herself, to give them something to think about.\"\n\n\"Show myself?\" Jenny asked. \"I'm already naked.\"\n\n\"Cute, dragon. Just do it.\"\n\nJenny turned to face the forest that surrounded the ship, lifting her neck and standing well up on her hind legs. Fortunately, Dalvenjah and Allan came out on deck at that moment, and Vajerral was close behind. Seeing that Jenny and Holmes were watching the forest expectantly, they also lifted their heads to look around.\n\nApparently knowing that they were expected was enough to convince J.T.'s someones to show themselves also, and they were certainly worth looking at. They were furry little female persons, their bodies those of small women, none of them more than four and a half feet high and covered in a short, thick pelt of brown or tan fur. Their faces were more feral than human, with large, dark eyes, blunt snouts with black button noses, and long, pointed animal ears poking out of long manes of black hair that was the same color as their bushy tails. They all wore armor that looked vaguely Greek or Roman, with fringed skirts and short sleeves of stiffened black leather and full breastplates that appeared to be aluminum, and they were armed with small bows or long, slender spears. They were certainly spunky little things. Although the dragons could have dispatched them easily, they appeared coldly determined to stand their ground.\n\n\"These must be the Quentarah that Duke Telmar mentioned, the dire enemies of the Eolwyn,\" Holmes said. \"We can hope that the fact that we share a common enemy predisposes them to be our friends. In spite of their fierce attitude, they do have the look of reasonable people.\"\n\n\"They look like Amazon Chipmunks,\" Jenny remarked softly.\n\nThe leader of the Quentarah, or so they assumed, stepped out from the group of warriors to face Holmes and Jenny. Her armor was gold-trimmed, and her cloak was black rather than deep red that the others wore. Jenny felt quietly envious of her beautiful tan fur; Mindijaran were the only mammalian dragons, so there was no reason as far as she was concerned why they should not be fur-bearing as well. She shook her head, realizing that her mind was wandering.\n\n\"Travelers,\" the little warrior said, stopping several paces away. \"I am Hadera, Captain of the Citadel Guard. You are on land that belongs to the Quentarah. Have you come as friends?\"\n\nSimple and direct. Perhaps Mr. Holmes was correct. Since she had brought them here, Jenny thought that she should explain. \"We are travelers from a very distant place. We came here pursuing enemies who have since allied themselves with the Eolwyn. When our ship was destroyed in a storm, we rebuilt it from the wreckage of an Eolwyn scout. Unfortunately, our ship was damaged when we tried to evade an ambush.\"\n\n\"Are the Eolwyn pursuing you?\" Hadera asked.\n\n\"If they are, they will be a long time in finding us,\" Jenny said. \"The ambush took place yesterday more than fifteen hundred miles from here, and we left more than half of their ships disabled.\"\n\n\"Your little ship must be fast indeed. What weapons do you have that you can fight an Eolwyn fleet?\"\n\n\"Dragons, actually,\" she explained. \"Dragons fly ten times as fast as an Eolwyn battleship under their own power, they breathe fire, and there are five of us. Given time, we could take on every ship the Eolwyn have.\"\n\n\"Don't boast,\" Dalvenjah said very, very softly. \"They might take it to be a promise.\"\n\nApparently that was food for thought to Hadera, who spent a good, long time chewing it up. \"I do believe that you are good people, and you look reasonable.\"\n\nMr. Holmes looked startled, but said nothing. The leader of the Quentarah glanced at her sisters, who put away their bows and spears and gathered around to stare in open curiosity at the dragons. Hadera bowed. \"You would honor us greatly with a brief visit, if you could spare the time from your journey. We will prepare a feast in your honor, and our queen would certainly wish to speak with you.\"\n\nThere was no help for it, although the Quentarah would have certainly let them continue on their way without a fuss. Jenny could not think of anything to be gained by staying; she still felt tired, and she seemed to have a hard time concentrating. But both Dalvenjah Foxfire and Mr. Holmes wanted more information about where they were going, and these little furry ladies were in the mood to be helpful.\n\nGetting Star Dragon to the Citadel of the Quentarah was not as easily done as said, since the ship was not yet in perfect flying condition. Having observed that the airship had wheels, that being something of a novelty in itself locally, the leader of the Quentarah patrol suggested that they simply drive. After following the warriors down a path through the forest for hardly a hundred yards, admittedly with some trailblazing to clear a path for the ship, they came upon a wide road that led to the capital city of the Quentarah Empire only twelve miles away; Jenny's search for a secluded place to make repairs had nearly landed Star Dragon in their laps. In spite of their weapons and armor, the. Quentarah were actually more advanced than the Eolwyn. They had attached their magical motors to a transmission and had built themselves great, lumbering trucks. The warriors packed themselves into two of these machines, and they were away.\n\nNeedless to say, Star Dragon drove like a trawler on roller skates and Jenny was greatly relieved when they arrived. The last little bit was the most difficult part since they had to make their way through the wide streets of the Citadel. It had been built very much on the style of the Eolwyn city, buildings of heavy dressed stone with thickest defensive portions facing upward against attack from above. Jenny was certain by this time that it would have been easier to fly. Star Dragon had never been meant to drive like a truck; her size was ungainly, her acceleration was uncertain and her brakes were inadequate to her weight, so her handling was more a matter of taxiing her like an aircraft. Mira still seemed to be spooked of her new ship and that left Jenny to do all the driving, even though she still seemed to have trouble concentrating.\n\nThe city and its curious inhabitants were certainly interesting enough. The favorite article of fashion among the Quentarah was the short skirt, no doubt because it gave their tails someplace convenient to go. The skirts were very short and usually split up the back to accommodate their tails and the flaps often stood open, so it seemed that the Quentarah were not in the habit of wearing clothes out of any sense of modesty. But they still never seemed to go naked, although their short but very thick fur made any clothing irrelevant. They seldom wore shoes except for the light sandals that the warriors wore as a part of their armor.\n\nAll in all, they kept a very clean and orderly society. Their city reminded Jenny of much of what she had seen of Mira's world, late renaissance but with a growing industry based upon magic-based machines and industrial technics, in some respects quite advanced technologically. Unlike Mira's people and more like immortal races such as elves or the faerie dragons, all of the Quentarah possessed magical abilities to some degree. None of them looked old, a fair indication that they were immortal. Living closer to the center of their universe and the source of their magic might have had some influence in their inner essence.\n\nSince all of the Quentarah warriors were female, the visitors had naturally wondered if theirs was indeed a matriarchal society, as Duke Telmar had listed as a chief cause of complaint of the Eolwyn. As it happened, both sexes of their society lived on a very equal basis, the only difference being that there were very few males, no more than one in twenty. They never married but wandered in and out of relationships, reproducing enough to keep the population going. This demanded a lot of each male, keeping his statistical twenty females properly entertained, but they possessed the amorous inclinations required of them. The male Quentarah reminded Jenny curiously of Pepe Le Pew, the Looney Toons skunk with the wayward libido. The females found them quaint and amusing for a few weeks at best, when they could no longer stand their concupiscent males and tossed them out. Which was just as well, or Quentarah society would have never worked.\n\nStar Dragon was parked in the yard of the Inner Citadel, and Hadera conveyed them into the presence of Beradoln, the Queen of the Quentarah. Now Beradoln was a very canny lady indeed. All Quentarah behaved as if they were nobility, from the Queen herself to the lowest shepherdess, and they treated each other as equals in rank and dignity. While Beradoln was the queen of a considerable realm, she was also as alert and crafty as a clever merchant in the middle of a tough bargain, generous but never foolish in her trust, cold and calculating to her enemies. She listened to Hadera's report of the abilities of the dragons and their curious ship and immediately saw for herself the value of having such allies. She wished to reserve for herself the judgement of whether to welcome them as friends.\n\n\"We have all manner of enemies,\" she said. \"We know their manner well, and we have heard every lie that ever crossed a villain's tongue. There is no sense of that about you.\"\n\nWith introductions aside, that was very much the end of it for that time. Queen Beradoln was a busy person and they had arrived at a bad time; there was the morning's business to be attended to before she had time for anything unexpected, at least anything that would keep until later. Jenny was allowed to go back to Star Dragon to complete her repairs, attended by Kelvandor and the Trassek twins, while the others were shown to rooms within the Citadel. At least this time they did not worry about having to sneak away in the night, nor did Jenny feel the need to snoop about invisible.\n\nHardly an hour had passed, however, before Holmes, Dalvenjah and Lady Mira were summoned to a private meeting with Queen Beradoln. She had quite literally squeezed them into her schedule. As Queen, she was also war leader of the Quentarah; she set aside two hours each morning for gymnastics, archery and spear-chucking, and she invited the others to join her. This gave them a chance to endear themselves to the Quentarah. Dalvenjah was impressive enough in herself. Mr. Holmes was an archer of prodigious talent. And Mira, who had dropped back to her natural height, was of a size that the little furry ladies could relate to. She was also a competent archer in her own right.\n\nThe Quentarah went to the practice field naked, in the legendary manner of the ancient Spartans. That was Dalvenjah's natural state and Mira hardly cared less; she was smaller even than the Queen, and she simply looked diminutive and cute. Mr. Holmes, a proper English gentleman, made his one concession to nudity by removing his jacket.\n\n\"Your arrival has been most timely,\" Beradoln said, flipping another arrow into her target. \"We have heard that the Eolwyn have recently made a treaty with strangers, wizards from outworld by what 1 am told. You can do much to help us, even if all you can offer is information and good advice. You are from outworld yourselves?\"\n\n\"We are all from different worlds,\" Dalvenjah explained cau-(iously, unsure how much she should try to explain and fearful I hat the Quentarah would know if she was holding back. \"Mira comes from the same world as these wizards from outworld, and we have pursued them now across four worlds.\"\n\n\"Three,\" Mira corrected her as she stepped up to face the target and drew her bow.\n\n\"Four, if you include this one,\" the dragon said, moving away with less than perfect discretion. \"Your new enemies are Emperor Myrkan of Alashera, his High Priest Haldephren and the Dark Sorceress Darja. We believe that Darja is the one to watch out for. She has Jenny's body, for one thing. You might have noticed that Jenny is a ghost.\"\n\n\"Jenny? The distracted one?\" Beradoln asked, although her identification startled Mira. \"Then Darja is also a dragon?\" Dalvenjah rolled her eyes and sighed. \"That gets a little complicated. At the time, Jenny was wearing another form. Like Mira's people, only taller. Of course, most of Mira's own people are taller.\"\n\n\"Watch it, lizard.\"\n\n\"The Dark Sorceress Daija is the key to some ancient prophecy,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"She is to somehow provide the Emperor with tremendous power, all the magic he needs to conquer whole worlds. Now we do not know what this source of magic will be, but his trail has led us here. Our suspicion is that Darja can give them access to the source of magic at the center of your world, since that is the only relevant source of magic here.\"\n\n\"Their new alliance with the Eolwyn is not enough in itself?\" Beradoln asked.\n\n\"The Eolwyn are fairly irrelevant to the Emperor's plans.\" Holmes said. \"Jenny was not boasting when she said that Star Dragon and the five dragons in our company could, given time, defeat the Eolwyn fleet. Whatever the Eolwyn themselves may believe that they are receiving in this alliance, I suspect that the Emperor is only using them to delay us long enough to complete his quest. The curious thing is that the Emperor has been wasting his time here in the outer world rather than pressing his advantage of time in reaching his goal ahead of us. If only we knew what they are planning.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we do,\" Mira remarked, then looked up at the dragon. \"We still have Ellon packed away in that bottle, and Jenny was about to talk to him when we flew into the middle of the Eolwyn ambush. Perhaps we should continue that little talk.\"\n\n\"Who is Ellon?\" Beradoln asked. \"One of your enemies?\" \"Another ghost in our keeping,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"We are keeping him in a bottle, as a matter of fact. Ellon was the henchman of the High Priest Haldephren, and neither of them seems to have a clear idea of what is happening with the Prophecy so they have been running about doing general mischief.\n\nYou must also understand that the Alasherans have an especially nasty habit. They are mortals, meaning that they grow old and die in a relatively short period of time, at least as you or I would view it. They compensate by having their spirits transferred into new bodies, dispossessing the rightful inhabitants. If you kill them, they come back. Jenny interrupted the process for Ellon by imprisoning his spirit inside a bottle.\"\n\nQueen Beradoln twitched her ears one after the other, the same gesture of consternation that Dalvenjah was fond of using. \"You know some very nasty people. Perhaps we should talk to Ellon immediately, if you know how.\"\n\nAnd that was the end of morning archery practice. They hurried to where Star Dragon had been parked, only to discover that the ship had been moved to the Citadel's military yard where Jenny could find the tools she needed to complete her work. The young ghost did not notice them at first as they came up behind her; she was busy drilling out old rivets. The hinge mechanism that rotated the lift vanes within the damaged wing had failed during the first test, having been more severely damaged than she had thought. Holmes tried tapping her on her bent back, but his hand passed through. Jenny did not even feel it, although the Queen was certainly impressed. The Quentarah were not especially superstitious, but she had not known what to make of the news that Jenny was a ghost.\n\n\"Jenny?\" Dalvenjah said softly.\n\nShe jumped, startled, and spun around to face them, holding (he drill as if it were a gun. Holmes's insatiable curiosity was immediately captivated by the tool, a cordless power drill. \"How do you recharge that?\"\n\n\"I never worry about recharging it,\" Jenny said. \"I have another way of making it work.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Holmes had to contemplate that for a brief moment. \"Well, of course. How stupid of me not to have figured that out for myself long ago. I might have saved a tidy sum on my electric bill.\"\n\n\"I like my sums big and messy,\" Mira commented.\n\n\"Where did you get that?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"I found it aboard Wind Dragon, after the wreck. 1 assume that Lady Mira stole it from the naval shipyard in New York, along with two assault rifles, a boom box, five disposal lighters, an Arnold Schwarzenegger poster, a Little Mermaid pop-up figure book, and assorted power tools.\"\n\nMira grinned sheepishly and blushed furiously at the same time. \"What can I say? 1 like Arnold. I need something that big to satisfy my ambitions.\"\n\n\"We have this saying about your eyes being bigger than your...\" Holmes thought about what he was saying, and he blushed as well.\n\nThey seemed to have Beradoln's full attention. As they were to discover later, the Quentarah talked about their recent sexual experiences with the same candid delight that tourists would compare their travels; apparently the males were not the only libidinous members of their race. The furry little Queen was quietly curious about the mating habits of the dragons, thinking that it must be splendid. Of course, such speculations had often entertained Mira as well.\n\nJenny saw that Mira was wearing Quentarah armor and light sandals. \"Where are your clothes? You don't have so many clothes that fit. Don't you plan on stealing that, unless you expect to stay that size.\"\n\n\"I might just grow fur and stay here,\" Mira said defensively. \"Besides, she has my clothes.\"\n\nJenny noticed for the first time that the Queen was wearing Mira's jean jacket and Muppet Babies shirt. Since the pants were not designed to accommodate her tail, she was still naked from the waist down. She had a very pert little bottom, if furry.\n\n\"We wanted to continue our talk with Ellon,\" Dalvenjah said firmly. \"Do you believe that he might be at home?\"\n\n\"I suspect that he might be somewhere about the bottle,\" Jenny answered. \"I will have to ask him if he is receiving visitors today.\"\n\nEllon Bennisjen was indeed receiving that day. He refused to believe that it had only been little more than a day since the last time they had spoken to him, swearing that it must have been long, cruel weeks. As Jenny had predicted, the absolute nothingness of his disembodied existence had left him desperate to escape the bottle, even if the only way was through death. He wanted out of the bottle as soon as possible, no longer willing to wait even had he known that his masters would eventually rescue him; death had become preferable to him to another day of this torment. He was so fearful and wretched that the others were moved to pity him. All but Jenny, whose vengeance was boundless. Dalvenjah let him know that he could buy his release, and he would have done anything to please her.\n\n\"I must know what the Emperor and the Dark Sorceress Darja are doing in this place,\" Dalvenjah told him. \"What are they going to do? Have they gone on into the center?\"\n\nThe bottle almost seemed to shake. \"Pity me, Lady. You are my mistress now, and I belong to you. I would give you anything you ask of me, as long as it is mine to give. I do not have the answers to your questions. Such matters were never for my ears, as close as I have stood in the High Priest's favor.\" \"Perhaps you know more than you think,\" Dalvenjah said, speaking softly to sooth his fears. \"Do you know why the Emperor made an alliance with the Eolwyn when he might have gone directly to his goal?\"\n\n\"He feared that you would follow,\" Ellon insisted. \"The Emperor fears you greatly, Dalvenjah Foxfire, and Haldephren has told me that the Emperor has feared nothing since the end of the last war. He fears only you, and he knew that he must first have great power to defeat you. He also wants this pocket universe swept clean of all life before he tries to make peace with the new god. The easiest way to accomplish that was to seed war.\" \"What new god?\" Dalvenjah demanded.\n\n\"I thought you knew about that,\" Ellon told her, eager to please.\n\n\"Who is this new god? Darja herself?\"\n\n\"That I do not know. All that I have ever heard is that the new god is to awaken, and that the Dark Sorceress is going home.\" That was all the information that Ellon had to impart, although Dalvenjah questioned him long and carefully and he* tried to answer her as fully as he could manage. His mind seemed distracted and remote from everything except his own torment and desperation.\n\n\"Release him,\" Dalvenjah directed Jenny at last, then seemed to think the better of it. \"Give him true death. I suspect that you will not be satisfied unless you have destroyed his spirit.\"\n\n\"He is evil,\" Jenny declared, seething with cold fury. \"He deserves it.\"\n\n\"That he does not!\" Dalvenjah told her sternly. \"True death is the greatest of equalizers. He will not remember the evil that he became in this life nor the evil that he has done, if you will free him of the evil that binds his spirit to his masters.\"\n\nJenny was not happy, but she did as she was told. Queen Beradoln walked slowly back to the Citadel with Dalvenjah, with Holmes and Mira close behind. Most of the Queen's subjects did not seem to recognize her, and those who did were obviously curious that their Queen was walking about strangely dressed in the company of these unusual visitors.\n\nBeradoln could not easily comment on Ellon's contention that there was a new god lurking in the center of her world. For one thing, the concept was very confusing to her. The Quentarah, like all other races of their world, knew that great power in the form of magic emanated from the center of their world, and that it was the source which had created and still controlled all aspects of their existence. But they had never considered that the source might be a person or a conscious entity in any sense; it simply was, like the sky and the land.\n\n\"There are two things to know about our world that might be important,\" she continued. \"Our world becomes steadily more magical as you come closer to the center, as you may have noticed already. On the fringe are the mortal barbarians. Farther in are the Eolwyn, who are human but immortal, although magic is inconsistent in their race. As you come closer to the center, the races become less human and more fanciful. Of the civilized races nearest to the center, the Quentarah are most removed from human in form, but our magic is the strongest. The Eolwyn consider us the first of the true monsters.\"\n\n\"There are monsters nearer to the center?\" Holmes asked. Beradoln nodded emphatically. \"Going inward, you will come to a region where the sky is clear and the islands do not exist. Then you will come into the region of darkness, where the monsters dwell. They are true monsters in form, fanciful and complex in their design, no two the same but all of them horrible to behold. I fear that we will soon be monsters ourselves.\" \"The region of darkness is expanding?\" Dalvenjah assumed, then saw that Holmes was staring at her. \"It only makes sense, you realize. There always used to be a balance of magic between the singularity and the outer world, but something has stopped the dissipation of latent magic into the outer world for the past several thousand years. That has to have had some effect here.\"\n\n\"We know of the outer world,\" the Queen added. \"Others have come before, if rarely. And we know that the balance between the two worlds must be restored, or else our entire world will in time become a place of monsters. Can you help us?\"\n\n\"I cannot promise that until 1 know the cause of your problem,\" Dalvenjah said. \"It might be that the solution to our problem will also solve your own. I will do what I can. It seems inevitable to me that we must soon go into the center of your world.\"\n\n\"We have never been able to penetrate the Region of Darkness, and we do not know what lies in the center,\" Beradoln said. \"No doubt your dragons and your fast ship will carry you safely past the monsters.\"\n\nThat the spunky little Amazon Chipmunks had found the Region of Darkness to be too dangerous was not encouraging news. It hardly seemed that they would have been afraid of much, and if they were afraid then there must have been a very good reason.\n\nThat evening, the Amazon Chipmunks threw a party as only they could throw a party. There were wilder parties to be had throughout the various levels of existence, and some that might have better food, drink or entertainment. But no other parties in any world had the Quentarah. It was a matter of endless fascination and delight to watch them. They were so bold at the same time that they were careful to maintain their pride and reserve. They possessed a boundless love of life, but they worked so hard at guarding their dignity. Their flirtations were a meticulous game of manners, and yet they seemed to have a serious problem staying in their clothes... as if it really mattered. Observing the meticulously balanced choreography of their social manners was almost enough to make one dizzy.\n\nComplicating the festivities was the matter of the guests, in particular their appearance and the behavior of certain members of their party. Mira was the belle of the ball in her Quentarah armor. Jenny had gone one better by taking the form of an Amazon Chipmunk, but she had some trouble remembering to stay fully materialized and her armor kept falling off. She had turned herself into an extremely voluptuous Quentarah, and Queen Beradoln, who was certainly no slouch herself, was still wearing Mira's clothes without the pants, so they made quite a pair. To make matters worse, Jenny's behavior was extreme even by Quentarah standards; she could teach the amorous Chipmunks a thing or two about flirtation.\n\nFortunately, matters were not likely to get out of hand. The females found her cute and the males thought that she was lively and witty, returning her flirtations on her own terms but shying away at the last minute. They all knew by now that she was a ghost, which had aroused their curiosity but little else. They assumed that she was playing and responded accordingly. And that was just as well, since Jenny was not physically able to perform if she had gotten lucky. The worst part of her behavior was her thoughtless cruelty to Kelvandor, who loved her. He was left to seethe quietly until, like most of her companions, he began to realize that something was wrong. This was by no means her normal behavior.\n\nThe travelers worried that a party like this could go on the better part of the night, and the local nights were twenty hours long. As it happened, things were over sooner than they had expected; the Quentarah were Spartan in many of their habits, including going to bed early. The handful of males were snapped up in a hurry. The remaining females talked about fighting and warfare and began wandering away. That gave Dalvenjah, Allan and Kelvandor a chance to get Jenny started in the direction of Star Dragon.\n\nJenny had returned to her dragon form, but her mood was increasingly hostile. They had convinced her to go back to the airship to stand guard; Star Dragon was the only thing that always held her complete and devoted attention. The others left quietly, returning to the rooms that they had been given within the Citadel. Then they paused, hearing that the two dragons were in the middle of a serious argument.\n\n\"If you want love, tell me,\" Kelvandor responded to something Jenny had said very loudly, but which they had not caught. \"I will do the best for you that I can.\"\n\n\"But you can't touch me!\" Jenny lamented. \"Don't you understand? I can't feel it. I don't even remember clearly what it is like! All I have left is the excitement of teasing, and even that is hollow. You have been so solid and understanding, I will admit. But even you treat me like I'm already dead.\"\n\n\"You are dead, and I hardly know what to do. Tell me what you want of me, and I will give it.\"\n\n\"Kelly, you're my own half-brother,\" Jenny reminded him. The others waited for a long moment, but their conversation after that become so silent that even the dragons could not hear. Allan shook his crest, as if suddenly shy about their eavesdropping. \"Jenny and Kelvandor share the same father, Dalvenjah's brother Karidaejan. Such matters are irrelevant to dragons, but Jenny was human most of her life.\"\n\n\"What is wrong with her?\" Mira asked in a voice softer and more uncertain than they had ever heard her use. \"Is she just frustrated with being a ghost?\"\n\n\"I wish that it was that simple,\" Dalvenjah said. \"In a sense, each of us is two beings existing in perfect harmony. The spirit is the essence of being while the mind is the source of conscious ihought. We make the mistake of believing that our memories, our character and our self-awareness is our true identity, but those are only the transitory aspects of physical life. Jenny no longer has a mind, but her spirit remembers her mind and has existed for a time with the illusion that her mind still exists. But the spirit of a dragon also possesses the instinct to seek rebirth, and the first step toward rebirth is to lay aside the memories and habits of the previous life.\"\n\n\"And that is happening to Jenny?\" Mira asked. \"She is forgetting what it was like to be alive?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, that is only the cause,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"The slow loss of her identity, all the trappings that turned her base spirit into the person that was Jenny Barker, is destroying her mind. And her mind is very vulnerable, since it is only an illusion maintained by her spirit. This has happened much sooner than I had expected, perhaps because she has been so active. I could have kept her spirit in stasis, preserving her mind. That is surely what the Emperor has done with the spirit of Karidaejan, who has been dead for years. But we needed her to find the way for us, through her link to her former body. That is why I have allowed her to be our leader.\"\n\n\"Can we get her body back to her in time to save her?\" Allan asked.\n\nDalvenjah shook her head sadly. \"The damage is done. Indeed, the damage was done long ago. We could give her back her body, but that will not restore her mind. We would have the Jenny that we knew before, doomed to a lifetime of insanity. And dragons live a very long time. It would be better for us to let her go, to start again.\"\n\nMira turned away suddenly. Putting her arms around Sir Remidan, she began to weep. She had always been so tough and practical that the others were surprised and moved by her distress. But Remidan had known Mira for a long time, and he knew that she had loved Jenny as her own child. Lady Mira was pragmatic enough that she gave her love sparingly. But when she did, her devotion was absolute.\n\n\"I cannot make it right,\" Dalvenjah said sadly. \"I never had the opportunity to make things right for her. I fear that she will not be with us much longer. But even then, I have made such arrangements as I can.\"\n\nThe next morning was one of surprises. The Amazon Chipmunks were quite taken with the fashion trend that Lady Mira had accidentally started, and they had been busy with their needles through the night. By morning, all of the Quentarah within the Citadel who were not in armor or uniform were sporting their own versions of the wardrobe that Mira had given to Beradoln, light jackets and shirts decorated with drawings of unusual creatures, mostly faerie dragons. They were all otherwise bare from the waist down, not including their rather discreet coat of thick fur. And because Mira had made off with the Queen's sandals, they were all barefoot as well. It seemed that the only good that the Quentarah saw in clothing was in satisfying their delight in dressing up, to whatever degree they happened to find desirable.\n\n[ The travelers were beginning to think that this world had not been at all conducive to Jenny's continued mental health; between the painfully obvious duplicity of the Eolwyn and the perky eccentricities of the Quentarah, they were all feeling a little confused. At least Mira's loss of stature had left her wearing the children's clothes that Dr. Rex and Marie had brought her, as strange as it was. Bare-bottomed, bushy-tailed chipmunks were bad enough; the very thought of what they had done with ]\n\nMira's usual gaudy fashion sense boggled the mind. It gave Allan a horrible vision of an entire race of spunky little chipmunk women all dressed like Rosalind Russell.\n\nThe morning was still young when the Queen sent messengers to collect the various members of Star Dragon's crew, discounting the ones there was no point in trying to talk to. Mira arrived to find that Dalvenjah, Allan and Mr. Holmes were already waiting in the Queen's council chamber; she would have been there sooner herself if she had not been soaking herself in the heated pools at the practice field. Beradoln had also gathered more than a dozen of her captains, all of them dressed for battle. They were all wearing serious expressions, but the Quentarah looked up with quiet curiosity when Mira entered wearing her black-and-white panda jogging suit, courtesy of the children's department at J.C. Penney. New Chipmunk fashion trends were in the making, and Mira found herself a reluctant guru of vogue. But when it came to pants, she had been a complete failure.\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" Beradoln said, seeing that Mira had arrived. She was in one corner of the room folding up the royal Muppet Babies shirt so that she could put on her own armor. \"An Eolwyn fleet is approaching, and they are led by a group of large wooden airships with wings of canvas. Dalvenjah believes lhat it must be the Alasheran fleet.\"\n\n\"I wonder how the Emperor managed to get an entire fleet through the outer world and down that volcano,\" Mira remarked. She was also wondering why the Queen seemed to value her opinion so highly. Probably because she was the owner and theoretical captain, at least now that Jenny was incapacitated, of Star Dragon, the new secret weapon in the Quentarah fleet. It could not be entirely due to her fashion sense.\n\n\"They might have opened a Way Between the Worlds there at the volcano, once they knew what they were looking for,\" 1 lolmes said. \"They might have brought through any number of ships. The descent should have been easy enough for them. We were just unlucky enough to emerge in the middle of a storm.\"\n\n\"That is not an encouraging thought,\" Mira remarked. \"Just how close are they?\"\n\n\"About two hundred miles,\" the Queen said. \"By the best speed of the Eolwyn fleet, they are still at least ten hours away.\"\n\n\"But the Alasheran airships could be here in only four hours.\"\n\n\"I have sent Allan and Vajerral out to take a look,\" Dalvenjah said. \"They will fly as fast as they can, so they could be there and back again in as little as an hour and a half. Vajerral has seen the Emperor's flagship before and perhaps she will know if he is here.\"\n\n\"Will that make a difference?\" Beradoln asked.\n\nDalvenjah was wearing a big dragon frown. \"As I see it, there are certain questions that I would like to have answered. Is the Emperor with the fleet? If so, does that mean that he already has the power that was promised to him in the Prophecy, or is he coming to face the problem that we represent to him first?\"\n\n\"If he has that much power coming to him, why risk a fight with us first?\" Holmes asked. \"Is it only because he already knows what will be involved when he takes the Dark Sorceress Darja into the center, and that he will be vulnerable for that time?\"\n\n\"That is the only thing that makes sense to me,\" Dalvenjah agreed.\n\n\"Because time is short, I must speak candidly,\" the Queen said. \"What are your own plans? Will you try to reach the center before the Emperor, if you find that he is here? Will you stand and fight with us? And whether we fight alone or together, what are our chances of winning? I will admit that I do not have the forces gathered here to win this battle, not from the reports that I have about the size of that fleet.\"\n\n\"The fight is because of us,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Therefore we will fight. Better I think to force this battle here and now. I believe that the Emperor has not yet found the power granted to him by the Prophecy. If he commanded such power, then we would have become insignificant to him. He is putting himself to a great deal of trouble, and that must mean that he expects to have a fierce battle on his hands. But he has never fought faerie dragons, and I believe that he does not know what we can do. And Star Dragon, with a crew of Quentarah gunners, is a formidable ship in herself. But only if you will learn that you must not be afraid of her speed. That speed is your ship's defense, as you discovered the hard way in our last battle.\"\n\n\"I want to practice first,\" Mira said.\n\n\"For the rest, they are very vulnerable to us,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"We have proven that dragon-fire is very effective against the fans of the Eolwyn ships, and the Alasheran airships are only wood, rope and canvas. I suggest that the dragons should strike at portions of their fleet at a time, moving through quickly with Star Dragon and the Quentarah ships to follow us in and destroy the ships that we have disabled.\"\n\n\"There is just one problem,\" Mira reminded her. \"The Alasherans have always used winged demons in the past to keep our dragons busy.\"\n\n\"That is so,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"If that happens, the dragons will attack the demons. Star Dragon and the Quentarah will have to take on the fleet, and I fear that their task will be harder. We must teach the Quentarah the spells that will make their arrows and spears dangerous to demons.\"\n\nMira was still far from satisfied, and she looked it. \"What about Jenny? Will she be in the fight?\"\n\n\"I do not see how we could stop her,\" the dragon said. \"We have benefited greatly from her cleverness on this journey. She has become fierce lately, and I do not trust her judgement enough to permit her to fly Star Dragon. But her magic is as strong as ever, and she is still cunning. Above all else, she is absolutely invulnerable.\"\n\nThere was nothing to be done for now except to prepare for battle. The Quentarah put out the call throughout that region of their realm for ships and troops. Not just those that had a chance of arriving in time for the battle but others that could not arrive until later, providing reinforcements if the fight turned into an extended siege. Fortunately the Quentarah possessed the same magical communication devices that the Eolwyn used, so that warships were already on their way, and they could be directed in flight to join the main fleet at the scene of battle. The Queen was cautious and canny, having the garrisons send in only a lithe of their ships so that other portions of the realm would not he undefended.\n\nThe Quentarah were more clever in the construction of their ships than the Eolwyn. The ducted fans of the Eolwyn were simple, but they were also vulnerable and not especially efficient in getting a ship off the ground. The Quentarah ships looked more like aircraft, if only vaguely so. The hull was wide and flat, with a pair of short wings at either end and a long, tapered tail giving stability. The ship took off and landed by the means of retractable landing gear that expanded mechanically to lift the entire ship well above the pull of gravity or drop it back down again, needing only small directional fans to maneuver the ship. The Quentarah ships were more heavily armored and could carry more cargo. And their larger, more powerful engines were embedded within the hull like jet engines in a fighter, protected by the ship's armor.\n\nThe Quentarah ships were much faster; even their largest battleships were capable of cruising at more than a hundred miles per hour with short-range bursts of nearly twice that. The only problem was that the Quentarah could not build as many of their ships, which were far more complex and required greater resources which they had only in limited supply. They also had to devote a large number of ships to their extensive patrols, leaving only a few for defense, and they gave a fair number away to their most trusted allies. Their interest in Star Dragon was not for her speed but for her absolute silence and the simplicity of her operation.\n\nFor Mira, the next couple of hours were spent learning to fly Star Dragon at high speed. Jenny took the airship up first for a quick test, satisfying herself that everything was functioning normally. Mira was trying very hard not to think that she was being taught to fly a ship that had been repaired by someone who was fading in and out of sanity. It was more than a matter of her own peace of mind; she did not want Jenny picking up her thoughts, as the girl had been likely to do in the past. It was disquieting to think that Jenny was really only a magical spirit maintaining an illusion of physical and mental presence. There was really less of her left than it seemed.\n\nComplicating Mira's driving lessons were about two dozen Quentarah who had come aboard as Star Dragon's new gunners and boarding party. Jenny and Mira had retreated to the helm deck, letting the warrior women settle themselves into their stations.\n\n\"Mira, your ship is overrun with Amazon Chipmunks,\" Jenny observed.\n\n\"At least they have the skirts on their armor,\" Mira said. \"I admit that I was afraid that they would take the skirts off their armor, all because of my little fashion trend. Every warrior shot through the butt would have been my fault.\"\n\n\"This lot looks like they would never let fad and fashion interfere with business,\" Jenny remarked very softly. \"This is a special squad of their best warrior women, you know. They all have PMS.\"\n\n\"Be kind, child.\"\n\n\"They do have nice legs,\" Sir Remidan remarked as he stepped up quietly behind them. A slightly mischievous smile was peeking out from behind his mustache.\n\n\"They have muscley legs,\" Mira commented sourly.\n\nAllan and Vajerral returned as predicted, making the round trip of some two hundred miles each way in about an hour and a half. That was a long, hard pull for a Mindijarah, even flying in this place of no gravity. They might have sent Jenny, who was faster than any of the others and did not tire, but Dalvenjah kept in mind what she had done to Ellon and feared how she might react to the presence of the High Priest Haldephren. Jenny was rational most of the time, but she was finding it harder and harder to keep her mind focused and when she lost it, she went right over the edge.\n\nThe two dragons returned directly to the Queen's council chamber, where they were expected. The Queen herself was out at that moment, taking stock of exactly how many ships her people could get into the sky, but an aide hurried to fetch her. Dalvenjah and Mr. Holmes were there at about the same time, all of them arriving so quickly that Vajerral was still panting in one comer from her exertions. Mira was, of course, learning to fly her little ship like a madman. She had a qualified teacher.\n\n\"Something very strange is happening,\" Allan reported immediately. \"The combined Eolwyn and Alasheran fleets are approaching at the best speed that they can manage, little more than twenty knots. I counted eight Alasheran warships of considerable size, the largest wooden ships that I have ever seen. There were also about eight hundred Eolwyn ships, although I am not sure of the exact count. Half are larger ships and half are scouts.\"\n\nBeradoln frowned. \"We cannot fight that ourselves. I doubt that we could have three hundred ships on hand in time.\"\n\n\"You might not have to fight anyone,\" Allan told her. \"The Alasheran ships are flying black flags above their own colors, and the Eolwyn ships are all making a great mess of smoke from burning pots at the ends of long poles suspended from the sides of their ships. That suggests to me a desire to parlay. Perhaps they are arrogant enough to call for our surrender, but I hope that the Emperor wishes to keep this fight between ourselves.\"\n\n\"How many fires to each ship?\" Beradoln asked eagerly. \"Quite a few, on some of the larger ships,\" the dragon answered.\n\n\"There will be no fight, unless this is a trick,\" the Queen said. \"The burning of the fire pots makes a ship deliberately visible, the smoke during the day and the light of the fire at night. One fire in the stem is a signal to parlay. Several fires is a signal to surrender. The smoke obscures the aiming of the turrets, and the light blinds the gunners at night. It is a gesture of putting yourself at a disadvantage.\"\n\nDalvenjah sat back on her tail, then laid her head on the floor and sighed. \"Surrender. Why would they offer a surrender? In the game of traps, that is an ineffective one at best and the Emperor would not underestimate me. What could they possibly have in mind?\"\n\n\"Do you advise that we should go out to meet them?\" Beradoln asked.\n\n\"Meet them, certainly. And I suggest that we should move out to meet them soon. If it does turn into a fight, we must give ourselves time to work that fleet over at our own pace. Their smaller or faster ships will likely try to outflank us, causing us to divide our forces.\"\n\n\"We can get nearly all of our ships into the sky within the hour,\" the Queen said. \"Only seven of our ships need repairs that could keep them on the ground, and we can get even those flying at need.\"\n\nThere was certainly little danger in flying a malfunctioning ship. Once it cleared the pull of gravity, it could hardly crash.\n\nDalvenjah turned her head, seeing that Holmes was watching her. \"Can you suggest anything?\"\n\n\"Nothing, except caution. You know these people best.\" He paused a brief moment. \"I do not recommend speculation as a basis for drawing conclusions, but it does occupy the mind and suggests solutions until more facts become available. What do you suspect?\"\n\nDalvenjah sighed again. \"If the Emperor does mean to surrender, then he has gone ahead of us and he knows that the Prophecy has turned against him. Perhaps that power has been lost to him. Perhaps the Dark Sorceress cannot get him the power he wants. But that power must be available to us. He is afraid, and he wants peace between us while it is still to my advantage to make peace with him.\"\n\n\"Under those same circumstances, he would desire most to destroy you and your allies,\" Holmes reminded her.\n\n\"Unless he knows that he cannot win,\" she said. \"Our fight with the Eolwyn ambush might have shown him what dragons can do. Remember also that he must know by now that the spirit of Jenny is still with us, and he will have heard what she did to Ellon. Perhaps she is the one he fears.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should discover the answer to this question for ourselves,\" Queen Beradoln suggested. \"We can take our fleet and meet them at a time and place of our choosing.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Cthulhu Dawn",
                "text": "The only complaint that the Quentarah had with their new allies was the surprising and unsettling fact that they proposed to send their males into battle. They were not exactly shocked or appalled, but they obviously thought that it was a very bad idea. Being Quentarah, of course, they were not about to insult their friends by making an issue of it. They were fond of saying, \"Opinions are like assholes: everybody has one, and they all stink.\"\n\n\"There really is no problem,\" Dalvenjah assured Queen Beradoln quietly. \"We have enough males that we can spare the losses. I can think of at least two of our own males that we could easily afford to lose.\"\n\n\"Oh, it is not that so much,\" the Queen insisted. \"We would allow our own males into battle if we thought that we could trust them. Their judgement is bad enough at the best of times. When they get excited, they have absolutely no sense at all.\" The dragon laid back her ears. \"I have that same problem with Vajerral.\"\n\nThe Quentarah fleet began assembling into formation within an hour after Allan and Vajerral had returned from their reconnaissance. They practiced until they were prepared for the worst, but they still had the better part of three hundred ships to get into the air and that took half an hour. Most of their ships were scouts and cutters of less than a hundred feet, and those could be launched into the sky in flocks. But there were also ninety of the larger ships, most of them five to six hundred feet in length. These vast machines moved rather ponderously at low speeds and they needed room to get themselves up to the speed at which they would begin to handle predictably.\n\nIn the end, the Quentarah had seven larger ships that had a motor or two down for repairs but which were otherwise fit to fly and even fight, if they were needed. Once in the air, their ships were quieter than those of the Eolwyn, who used oversized fans rotating at relatively low speeds to make up for the lack of gearing on their motors. The Quentarah engines used a powerful high-speed motor running a series of compressor blades not unlike those of a jet engine, but there was no burning of fuel within the engines and they were buried deep within the armored hull, muffling their sound.\n\nEven so, the Quentarah quietly coveted Mira's little ship and they were enormously pleased that she was willing to share the secret for making thrust vanes. Star Dragon was only slightly faster than their own ships, but the vanes could maintain full speed indefinitely and needed little maintenance due to the fact that they were magical solid-state, with no moving parts. They were also absolutely silent and, in the arrangement that Jenny had designed for Star Dragon, tremendously versatile, able to direct thrust for vertical takeoff or quick maneuvers.\n\nOnce the fleet was in formation, Star Dragon was installed in the lead beside the Queen's own flagship and they accelerated smoothly to cruising speed at about a hundred knots. The cutters ringed themselves defensively about the larger ships, and the scouts moved out in small groups to guard against sudden attacks, moving through the clusters of islands to insure that no enemy ships might be lurking in hiding waiting to fall in behind the fleet. Quentarah scouts had been watching the Eolwyn armada very closely, arriving in increasing numbers soon after the first patrol had found the enemy fleet. So far, the Eolwyn had kept to a tight group with every appearance of surrendering, sending out no vanguard or scouts of their own, following the wooden Alasheran airships dutifully. Of course, their torches were making so much smoke that it was hard to tell if they were trying to hide anything in the middle of their fleet.\n\nQueen Beradoln, speaking from the experience of several thousand years of war with the Eolwyn, found it hard to believe that they were interested in a permanent surrender of their hostile plans of conquest. The Eolwyn were not a very complex or subtle people, whatever they might wish to believe about themselves, but they were greedy and violent. Even if the Alasherans were honest in their desire to surrender, the Eolwyn were only going along with it out of expediency; meaning that they were afraid to cross the Alasherans, the faerie dragons, or a possible future combination of those two forces joined in an overpowering alliance. Beradoln's suspicion was that the Eolwyn would play along only until they discovered the secret of the lift vanes.\n\nThe Quentarah moved their fleet into position a short distance ahead of the Eolwyn armada and stopped at a place of their choosing, an open space in the sky islands where they could see clearly for several miles. The Eolwyn came into view a few minutes later, the Alasheran airships in the lead, and their entire group drew to a stop almost immediately. Their intentions known, they extinguished nearly all of their torches and the smoke cleared quickly to reveal nothing unexpected. Then the Emperor's own flagship moved forward into the center of the clearing. Several Eolwyn battleships followed at a discreet distance.\n\nAllan and Dalvenjah flew out to the Emperor's airship, never landing on the deck but standing off to one side. After a minute they hurried back, and Dalvenjah flew directly to the Quentarah flagship. Queen Beradoln was waiting on the forward deck.\n\n\"The Emperor is waiting on his ship, but the High Priest Haldephren and the Dark Sorceress Darja are not here,\" the dragon reported quickly. \"They have no weapons out and they could not defend themselves if we attack. The Emperor wants to talk with me, and he is willing to come alone to Star Dragon. I am inclined to speak with him. Will you come?\"\n\n\"In the company of dragons, I feel no cause for concern,\" Beradoln said. \"I will accompany you.\"\n\nMira brought Star Dragon close enough alongside the Quentarah flagship for Queen Beradoln and two of her captains to jump aboard, the lack of gravity allowing them to cross the space between the two ships easily. The transfer was less simple when Star Dragon went out to meet the Emperor's flagship, an immense airship that was dark of hull with vanes and stabilizers that were as black as night. Lines were thrown between the two ships and Star Dragon was hauled in until the two ships were side by side, the smaller ship rotated slightly so that her wings settled on the rail of the battleship's center deck to form a bridge between the two. Emperor Myrkan, nothing more than a tall, slender figure in a dark, hooded robe, was assisted to the top of the rail, but he walked across the wing by himself. The lines were loosened and Star Dragon moved off a short distance.\n\nDalvenjah hesitated only a moment before she reached down and lifted the Emperor over the siderail and set him on the deck. Myrkan bowed his head to her politely, then he pushed back his hood and smiled. His features had been changed tremendously by the magic he commanded, his deeply lined face almost that of an animal, in its way more alien than even the Quentarah. His mouth and nose had merged nearly together into a blunt canine snout, his eyes deeply set but large and bright, his brows heavy. His bony hands looked half again as long as normal. And yet his smile was warm and pleasant and completely without guile, that of a kindly old man who was pleased with his world and honestly happy to see them. The crew of Star Dragon stared in wordless amazement. This was hardly what they would have expected of a man who had been the embodiment of evil for two thousand years.\n\n\"This is a fine world in its way. A very pleasant place indeed. Never hot nor cold, and the view is always spectacular,\" he said, looking up at the sky. Then he turned to Dalvenjah. \"So we meet at last, Dalvenjah Foxfire. I hope that I have not disappointed you, but I have lost my will to fight.\"\n\n\"If you are sincere, then you certainly will not find me disappointed,\" she assured him.\n\n\"Then you will not be disappointed,\" he told her. Then he turned to Lady Mira and nodded. \"Sorceress Kasdamir Gerran. Even among your enemies, you hold a reputation as a sorceress of tremendous stature.\"\n\n\"Oh, piffle,\" Mira complained. \"Even among my enemies, all I get is short jokes. Now you understand what I like about the Quentarah.\"\n\nMyrkan laughed. \"Your forgiveness, Sorceress. I feel very good, I do confess. I think that I have never felt so good in all my life.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we might go below and have a little talk about whatever it is that has made you so happy,\" Dalvenjah suggested. \"I confess that I would like to hear something to be happy about as well.\"\n\nJenny was left on the helm deck to watch the ship, the assumption being that she was safer there than in the company of the Emperor where she might hear something that would set her off. Her extended out-of-body experience had resulted in an out-of-mind experience that left her untrustworthy. Vajerral was left to keep her company and to serve, if necessary, as a secondary conscience and a calming voice if anything went wrong. Dooket and Erkin stayed at their posts with the Quentarah gunners, and Sir Remidan was asked to keep watch on deck. In other words, pone of the ship's cabins were very big and Dalvenjah had to think of every excuse she could to expel several would-be participants and make them like it.\n\nThe Emperor was given a comfortable chair in one comer of the large cabin that had been serving as a combination galley and meeting room, and Mira put on water to make tea. Under the circumstances, she cheated by casting a spell on the teapot that heated the water instantly, and she was able to pass out cups about as quickly as everyone was seated. The two dragons, of course, sat on their tails, a peculiar habit of their kind. Emperor Myrkan sat back in his chair and stirred his tea, smiling pleasantly like someone's old uncle come over for a visit and a game of bridge.\n\nMira reminded herself once again that this was the most evil, ruthless man that her world had ever known. She had always heard rumors about his appearance, and he looked more than half like the demons his followers were fond of summoning. But his manner was so unexpected and bizarre that she was inclined to believe that he must be pretending. She felt herself compelled to say that he seemed to be doing much better now that they had changed his medication, but by force of will she was able to keep that to herself.\n\nDalvenjah ignored the tea and got herself a mug of mead, which she had learned to like cold after spending several weeks in Allan's home world several years back. She had actually learned to tolerate cold beer, since mead had been rather out of fashion there for some time, but that had given her the idea for cold mead.\n\n\"May I introduce my associate, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\"\n\nDalvenjah began. \"And this is Queen Beradoln of the Quentarah.\"\n\n\"My pleasure, Your Majesty,\" Emperor Myrkan said, bowing his head to her politely.\n\n\"I hope that you will not mind if we get down to business right away,\" the dragon said. \"To tell you the truth, I will feel much happier very quickly if you will answer certain questions that I have. Feeling happy was to be the subject of our conversation, you might recall.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do recall,\" the Emperor assured her. \"We might begin by making it perfectly understood that, while my mood has improved, I have by no means lost my wits. I have not become simple, nor am I insane. Do not think that I could have brought the Eolwyn here to surrender, much less my own people, if they had thought me foolish. Now I suspect that I do not have to say this to you, Dalvenjah Foxfire, but it must still be said.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"That is understood. My first question, if I may. Have you been to the center of this place?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have.\"\n\n\"And that made you very happy?\"\n\n\"No, that was rather disappointing,\" the Emperor said, and frowned. \"Perhaps it would be easiest and quickest if I anticipated your questions in order of occurrence, and leap all the way back to the beginning. Now, it all began several thousand years ago.\"\n\n\"This sounds like the beginning of a very long story,\" Mira said to herself.\n\nThe Emperor laughed. \"I will be brief, I promise you. As you may already know, the source of magic of this place was once the source of latent magic for the world above as well. Several thousand years ago, the bridge between this world and the one above became weaker, so that the latent magic failed to dissipate into the outer world. When that happened, the latent magic became increasingly concentrated here, overflowing as it were at the source. A part of that excess magic eventually became a god, an entity of immense powers. Such occurrences happened often, but these beings almost always move away, exploring the ways of their new existence before any serious disruption of magic occurs. This one was stupid and obstinate, or perhaps just excessively cautious, staying in the vortex thousands of years growing stronger.\"\n\n\"I have heard of such entities,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"They will generally lose interest in mortals and quasimortals like you and me when they grow out of their childhood.\"\n\n\"Yes, but that childhood may last many thousands of years,\" the Emperor said. \"Two thousand years ago, my followers and I were seeking the power we needed to command our entire world. We sought the source of all magic, and I realize now that in a rudimentary way we learned to open a Way Between the Worlds. But there is no place like this in our own world; the magic escapes too freely. Our efforts to bridge a way to the source of magic led us instead to this place. It was here that we met the immortal one.\"\n\n\"Your people have been through here before?\" Queen Beradoln asked. \"We have never heard of visitors from outworld going into the center before this.\"\n\n\"We were being sneaky, you understand,\" he told her. \"No one around here was interested in going into the center, and we were not about to generate any interest in that direction. We never wanted anyone else to go talking to our god, you know.\" He sighed heavily, setting aside his cup and saucer. \"We were fools in those days. We worshipped evil with absolute devotion. We had found a virgin god and we pledged ourselves to him, if he would only become a god of evil. That poor creature hardly knew what we were talking about, his experience was so limited. The entity would not leave this place, and we could convince him only to agree to send a surrogate consciousness in the form of the Sorceress Darja to observe life in the real world, gather knowledge and experience, and then return with her experiences. When Darja merges with her parent entity, then everything that she has become will form the basis of his new consciousness.\"\n\n\"But Darja has not been able to merge with the entity,\" Dalvenjah said.\n\n\"Fortunately, no,\" the Emperor admitted. \"Something prevents it. Now you must destroy Darja before it can happen.\" \"Your news reassures me tremendously,\" the dragon told him. \"I do not believe that it will ever happen. You see, something went fatally wrong with your prophecy long ago, and it was your fault. As I understand it, the Dark Sorceress Darja did not survive the great defeat of your Empire nearly two thousand years ago. Her spirit needed a new body. But unlike you and your followers, she needed a very specific body, and you waited a very long time to find it.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is so.\"\n\nDalvenjah cocked her head. \"You gave her the wrong one.\" Emperor Myrkan looked both frightened and then relieved, as if realizing for the first time how close he had come to disaster was honestly important to him. \"But, how can that be? The Prophecy clearly indicated the girl Jenny.\"\n\n\"The Prophecy also indicated Sorceress Kasdamir Gerran,\" the dragon said. \"Did you dismiss that aspect because it made no sense to you? There were two choices, one right and one wrong, and you made the obvious choice. You were guided by the Prophecy of Maerildyn, which makes only a passing reference to Mira's existence. The Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons only seemed to confirm what you already believed. You also knew, even at the time when you first bound the spirit of Darja with Jenny's, that she was in truth a faerie dragon in mortal form. Perhaps you thought that was all the better, for dragons are not mortal. You forgot that dragon magic is something apart from the latent magic that you know. Jenny's body leaves Darja incompatible with the entity, and she cannot merge with him. Your greatest mistake was in assuming that the prophecies existed for your benefit.\"\n\n\"Yes, I see that now,\" Myrkan agreed. \"I also understand the danger in having you point out my mistakes to me, the danger to you and to myself, and 1 cannot believe that you have not realized that for yourself. You know that I will not be going back.\" \"Going back where?\" Holmes asked, speaking for the first time. \"I was under the impression that you have brought the Alasheran fleet here for the purposes of surrendering.\"\n\n\"The High Priest Haldephren is not yet accounted for,\" Dalvenjah reminded him. \"Perhaps this has something to do with whatever left you disappointed enough to abandon your plans.\"\n\n\"That is exactly the point,\" the Emperor agreed. \"My journey has been a very enlightening one. Darja is everything that I once would have expected of a god of evil. She belongs to the Dark.\n\nAnd I have come to realize that I have been betrayed in ways that I had never expected. I had dedicated myself and everything that was mine to the service of Evil, and now I have learned that Evil simply does not care. The Dark consumes everything and never gives any lasting reward. Evil never creates except for the purpose of even greater destruction. That was never what I wanted. I wanted to rule. I wanted the Dark to be the absolute power throughout the universe. Now I have learned that the ultimate aim of the Dark is to destroy until nothing is left except Evil itself. 1 worshipped the Dark but I value accomplishment and prosperity above all else, and so you see why I looked upon the true face of evil and was bitterly disappointed. Then I realized that perhaps I was not as evil as I had always believed.\"\n\n\"Is it really all that simple?\" Mira asked, looking profoundly surprised. \"Those of us who reject the Dark understand that almost instinctively.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" the Emperor agreed. \"Unfortunately, some of us cannot see that so plainly. And I fear that some, like Haldephren, can never understand that simple truth.\" \"Haldephren, of course, did not agree with your decision to betray the Dark,\" Mira observed. \"He always was too shallow to appreciate such subtlety of thought.\"\n\n\"I played him for the fool for hundreds of years, and he never realized that,\" Myrkan said. \"From his way of thinking, I was the betrayer. But I will not try to deceive you. I have followed the Dark for a very long time. Too great a part of what I am has been given over to the Dark, and too much of the Dark has entered into what is left of me. I see the deception, but I am not cured of its influence. That is why I have come to you.\"\n\n\"I cannot sever your ties to the dark,\" Dalvenjah told him. \"Indeed you can, although the cure is a desperate one,\" Myrkan told her gently, his smile warm and reassuring. \"My followers and I have come to you because you surely must know how to free us from the Dark. We want you to help us to die, finally and in a way that the Dark can never again claim us. And it must be soon, before the Dark finds some new use for us and attempts to seduce us to return. You can help us, can you not?\"\n\nThe others turned to Dalvenjah, who looked troubled. \"Yes, it can be done that way. Indeed, Jenny has already freed Ellon, that self-important little boy-thing of Haldephren's, and he never willingly renounced the Dark.\"\n\nThe Emperor looked surprised. \"Jenny? But I took Jenny Barker's body for Darja some weeks ago.\"\n\n\"True, but her ghost has been haunting us ever since,\" Dalvenjah said, and she smiled wickedly. \"We came prepared.\" Emperor Myrkan watched her suspiciously for a moment, then he sat back and laughed. \"There was never any profit in evil with people like you about. You have been too clever, and too lucky.\"\n\nThe Emperor returned to his ship in the company of Dalvenjah Foxfire, and they retired to his cabin with a bottle of his favorite wine. They talked and laughed together for a couple of hours, and in the end only the dragon returned. Dalvenjah was, as always, grimly efficient.\n\nThere remained many other troublesome matters to be concluded. Some three dozen of the Emperor's closest followers, in particular his chief advisors, captains, sorcerers and dark priests, all needed to follow their master into peaceful death, their courage and resolution fortified by his example. The dragons attended to that matter. All except for Jenny, who found this whole matter disquieting, and also for Vajerral, a proven and capable warrior but whose mother deemed her too young to be dispatching people who wanted to die and certainly needed to. The crews of the Alasheran fleet were given two of their ships and sent home. These poor folk were not true servants of the Dark; being Alasherans, they had only been behaving as they believed they should. The curious fact remains that Evil has very few devoted followers, but a great deal of hired help.\n\nThe last problem was the Eolwyn fleet, which had been standing off in tight formation that suggested morbid fascination. Dalvenjah had wondered at first why the Emperor had found it so necessary to bring them along, and all the more why they had agreed to come. They were greedy and often cruel people but not true servants of the Dark, whatever they pretended to the Alasherans. They had been enormously impressed with their visitors, especially the cold, complex evil of the Emperor in the days before he had found the enlightenment of disillusionment and his consequent happiness. They had been even more impressed and also very frightened when Emperor Myrkan had returned from his visit with an evil god ready to denounce the Dark and escape its command upon him through death. The Eolwyn had seen the light, but Queen Beradoln knew from long experience that it would not last.\n\nIn that, the Queen was probably right, and Emperor Myrkan had known it as well. This mass surrender served three purposes. They had seen that Myrkan's determination to escape the Dark was absolute, which would serve to reinforce the lesson. He had brought them to make their capitulation to the Quentarah, their chief enemies, a serious political and strategic embarrassment that would seriously damage their influence throughout their world. And they would see for themselves that the Quentarah would be receiving the magical secrets of the outworld airships, a matter of vastly important military implications. These things were meant to break the Eolwyn Empire and prevent them from ever again being a serious threat. Dalvenjah decided that the best she could do was to leave the matter in the hands of the capable and cunning Queen Beradoln, who was already thinking of countless ways to exploit this situation to advantage.\n\nThat still left Dalvenjah with the most important of problems to solve for herself. The High Priest Haldephren and the Dark Sorceress Darja\u2014servants of the Dark are enormously fond of their silly titles\u2014were already at the center, where Darja was trying to turn a magical entity into a god of evil by booting herself up like software. At least she knew now that the matter would probably keep until she could get there, since she doubted that Haldephren was capable of figuring things out for himself and Darja was too abstract to take much notice.\n\nDalvenjah was still walking around shaking her head. Later that day, as Star Dragon was finally able to turn back to the Quentarah Citadel, she was finally able to sit back on her tail in the middle of the helm deck and shake her head to her heart's content.\n\n\"He looked into the face of Evil, and it did not live up to his expectations,\" she said, and looked up at Mr. Holmes. \"He was disappointed, and an Empire that might have conquered worlds comes to an end. It all sounds very stupid, when you think about it.\"\n\n\"Then pray don't think it,\" Holmes told her. \"Count your blessings and be on your way, and may all of your enemies be conquered so easily. How do you suppose I feel? You brought me along to assist with matters of logic, and there is precious little logic to be found in any of this.\"\n\nDalvenjah sighed, and shook her head yet again. \"What is happening? We are making progress, but have we been clever or just very lucky?\"\n\n\"A fair amount of both, I should say. We have just been very lucky, and a major victory has just fallen into our laps. Our next battle will be our last and we will have to be very clever.\"\n\n\"Can they get Darja to merge with the entity?\" Mira asked. \"If they identify the problem,\" the dragon answered. \"Knowing that it is Jenny's body that causes the incompatibility could lead them to think about ways to force the merger directly between the entity and Darja's spirit.\"\n\n\"Well, what was so special about my body that Darja needs it?\"\n\n\"Absolutely nothing. Your Alasheran friends get certain mystical ideas in their heads that have no reality. Darja needs a mortal body. Any mortal body would serve.\"\n\n\"Oh, my.\" Mira realized certain frightening implications; Haldephren could transfer Daija to any mortal body at hand and get what he wanted. \"But why was Darja called the Consort?\" \"Jiminy Cricket, how should I know?\" Dalvenjah demanded, turning her head to glare. \"The Emperor certainly never intended to marry her, you can be sure of that. Of course, Haldephren never knew what she really is until recently. Myrkan was a suspicious sort who kept certain secrets to himself. Perhaps the title Consort was meant to be misleading.\" Queen Beradoln offered to send a fleet of her best ships to accompany Star Dragon into the center, and it was a generous offer indeed. Even the fearless Quentarah had never dared to penetrate the Region of Darkness and its population of nasty things, but they would go eagerly for Dalvenjah Foxfire, whose wisdom they admired, and for Lady Mira, who had taught them to dress in a sophisticated manner. But Dalvenjah knew that Beradoln needed every ship she had to prevent the Eolwyn from getting sneaky ideas, especially now that the dragons and their airship were leaving. The Eolwyn had respected the Emperor, and they feared the Mindijaran after the ambush that had cost them a dozen of their best ships in half as many minutes. Now the Quentarah would have to deal with them alone.\n\nAs it happened, Queen Beradoln had solved most of her problems by the next morning. She had spent a large portion of the night negotiating the surrender of the Eolwyn, and she had arrived at terms that left both sides feeling that they had won. The Eolwyn actually preferred farming and simpler crafts; they had established their empire to protect themselves from pirates so that they could pursue their first loves of agriculture and carpentry. Their giant ships flew so slowly in part because they had a nervous fear of flying and were subject to motion sickness. They were also not very clever about administration and bureaucracy, and they seemed to know it. On the other hand, the Quentarah loved their ships and they delighted in adventure and travel. They were very good with machines but were rather indifferent to fanning and other forms of puttering.\n\nThe Queen's idea, which the Eolwyn agreed to with hesitant optimism, was to allow everyone to do exactly what they did best. The Eolwyn would farm and produce handcrafted products to their heart's content. The Quentarah merchant ships would move their products about the entire world quickly and efficiently while their fighting fleet would protect the Eolwyn and each of their respective allies from pirates and primitives. Queen Beradoln had already talked the Eolwyn into surrendering their ships for refitting; in this way, she had insured that they would no longer have the means for making war even if they decided to return to their old habits. The observation that the Eolwyn were not very bright had already been made, and the negotiations had been seriously influenced by the fact that the Amazon Chipmunks had stopped wealing their skirts.\n\nDalvenjah was still shaking her head when Star Dragon set sail the next morning. Jenny was at the helm for the first few hours, but she was becoming increasingly distracted. Mira relieved her some time later, and after that she spent most of her time hanging her neck over the side or sitting in the bow letting the wind blow through her metaphysical substance. J.T. would often join her. Although he would not be back to normal for the remainder of their journey, his leg had improved to the point that he could tolerate it, and his mood had improved to the point that the others could tolerate him. Actually enjoying his company was a rare event at the best of times.\n\nThe sky islands became smaller and farther apart during that first day of travel. The islands of the Quentarah were among the closest to the center of their world, although without gravity it was hard to say whether they were highest or lowest. Star Dragon laid over for the night on one of the last of the small sky islands; without Jenny to navigate through the darkness with her remarkable ability to see, flying at night presented too much danger of running into something dark and hard. There was also no reference for navigation that even Jenny could have seen. She had been able to navigate at night because the tops of the sky islands, the sides with trees, had always pointed upward, or inward. It was all a matter of perspective, but they had also run out of islands.\n\nThey left the last sky islands behind the next morning, which meant that they now had to find their way toward the center using the string-and-shadow arrangement that Jenny had devised. The sky was a bright deep blue, completely open and featureless in every direction. Mira pushed the ship to its fullest stable speed, well over a hundred knots, although she blew J.T. and Jenny both off the forward deck and nearly rebroke the cat's leg in the process. The Quentarah had reported that there was about six thousand miles of open sky to cross before Star Dragon came into the Region of Darkness, admitting that it might have expanded a mile or two since the last time they had checked. Mira wanted to cross that distance as quickly as they could, even if it meant flying Star Dragon in the dark. As it happened, Mr. Holmes had regained enough of his magic and the control to make it useful, and he was now able to take turns with Mira at the helm.\n\nAfter the third day of open sky, they made the transition into the Realm of Darkness rather suddenly. For one thing, the Realm of Darkness was not dark; the sky turned as black as night, but the source of light remained and they were able to navigate with the same string-and-shadow trick. Dalvenjah explained that they had already reached the center of the singularity and had now taken a dimensional right turn, and were now proceeding down through the center of the center itself. Holmes understood what she meant readily and the other dragons had a fairly good idea of the mechanics involved. Curiously, Mira had little trouble with the concept. Of course, her sense of reality was skewed at the best of times. Because they had approached during the day, they knew that the way was open before them by the simple fact that light was coming out of the vortex. Dalvenjah and Holmes both expressed a keen interest in staying around until night to see what the back of the vortex looked like, but their two most popular theories on what they would find argued that they would see nothing at all or else an infinite amount of nothing. That sounded boring in either case, so they just kept going.\n\nBecause the Quentarah had been so adamant that the Region of Darkness was full of monsters, Mira decided to cut Star Dragon's speed to about seventy knots. That, she explained, was to give herself time to change course so that they would not run into any. Although they were flying toward the source of light, the effect was not at all the same as looking toward the sun and they were able to see ahead fairly well, if there had actually been anything to see. They certainly did not see any monsters in their first full hour. J.T. yawned and announced that he was going below to look for monsters under his bed. All the same, everyone stayed off the open bow deck and the moveable roofs were kept closed over the center and rear decks.\n\nWhen they did find a monster, it was everything that they had been led to expect. And Mira very nearly did run into it. The thing was so big and complicated in its form, and it moved so quickly, that they never did get a very good look at it. Because the monsters had evolved in an environment without solid land or even gravity, they lacked the need for legs or any other support and their build lacked any specific orientation. And because there was precious little about to eat, they were largely designed around abilities to feed themselves. The first one they met had certain aspects of a squid, but with a large beaked head at the top rather than below and similar beaks at the ends of each of its ten long tentacles, although these lesser breaks were apparently meant only for biting and not actual eating, with a cluster of smaller tentacles surrounding each beak to form a crude hand.\n\nThe thing took one good look at Star Dragon, which was only about four or five times its own considerable size. It raised all of its tentacles as if to give this community of beaks a chance to take a good look as well, and each of the hungry little mouths licked its chops. Then the monster attacked with surprising speed and no obvious method of propulsion except for magic, making a great shrill, roaring noise that had to be heard to be believed and even that stretched credibility.\n\nMira turned sharply to one side and advanced Star Dragon's speed in an effort to avoid the monster. The object was to continue their journey by getting the ship to the other side of the monster, but the great, ugly beast was just fast enough to make that difficult. Mira was certain that she could manage it, but she was never given a chance to try.\n\nJenny suddenly leaped into the bow of the ship by simply passing through the deck. She lowered her neck and arched her back, challenging the monster with the half roar, half bark of the Mindijaran. As small as she was in comparison, the monster seemed to recognize her immediately not as prey but as something akin to its own kind, and a threat to its possession of the great aluminum delicacy that it had selected for its dinner. Then Jenny leaped into battle with a speed that no living dragon could have matched, darting rapidly in and out to tease the monster with her flame and snap at the beaked tentacles. Mira cut speed quickly and prepared to circle back, but Dalvenjah was there on the helm deck immediately.\n\n\"No, just go on,\" the dragon said. \"Jenny is in no physical danger. The beast cannot harm her, and her magic is stronger. But she has lost all wit and reason at the moment, and she is as much a danger to us as to our enemy. If her sanity returns, then she will follow.\"\n\n\"Can't you do something for her?\" Mira demanded, although she obediently turned the airship back on course.\n\n\"What could I do, except place her inside a bottle?\" Dalvenjah asked. \"You know the dangers of that, after seeing Ellon, and placing her spirit inside one of the dragons would only endanger both. I believe that she will return, but perhaps it would be best if she did not. The spells that I cast upon her spirit to confine and protect her as a ghost have begun to deteriorate rapidly since we have entered the Region of Darkness.\"\n\n\"You could renew those spells,\" Mira insisted.\n\n\"I have been renewing those spells all the time,\" the dragon explained. \"That no longer has any great effect. Soon now Jenny will lose all sense of identity from her past life, and she will know only the instinct to seek rebirth. There is only one thing more that I can do for her.\"\n\nWhatever that was, Dalvenjah did not say; she left the helm deck at that very moment and went below. Jenny did return within the hour, unharmed, although she would not speak of her battle. Considering her mindless battle fury and the disquieting inclination for cruelty that Jenny had displayed lately, Mira did not doubt that she had destroyed the monster. Would she give battle to every monster they found? Mira wondered if the girl was possessed by some will for self-destruction, forgetting that she was dead already. Jenny sat alone in the very stern of the airship, sitting back on her haunches with her tail wrapped around her long legs, staring into the starless night. She would not be with them for very long now, perhaps no more than a few hours more.\n\nHolmes came up to the helm deck a short time later, and he saw that Mira had been weeping. He was not surprised, for he could guess the reason why.\n\n\"I have to keep thinking that it was my fault,\" she said. \"It was my idea to rush off to Alashera, putting her into the reach of her enemies. I knew better, I really did. I used to be so damned sure of myself, when I was younger and taller. We were supposed to be too smart to let ourselves get caught.\"\n\n\"The Prophecy had to take its course, so perhaps your judgement had been influenced by forces you did not expect,\" Holmes told her. \"Although the cost has been Jenny's life, that sacrifice was necessary to force Darja to reveal herself and lead us to the entity. And that is a matter that must be resolved at any cost.\"\n\nHe paused a moment as if listening, then stared down at the deck. \"Is it my imagination, or is this ship swaying slightly from side to side? Have we encountered any crosswinds?\" \"That is not the wind,\" Vajerral said, coming up on the helm deck. \"Allan and Dalvenjah went below some time ago. They seemed to think that they had something important to do.\"\n\n\"Are they making something?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"If they are making anything, then it will be a little dragon,\" Vajerral explained succinctly.\n\nThat certainly came as a great surprise. Holmes and Mira had observed that Allan and Dalvenjah enjoyed a purely platonic relationship. Vajerral and Kelvandor, who knew them better, realized that they enjoyed a largely platonic relationship with occasional attacks of raw, fiery lust.\n\n\"What a time for those two dragons to decide to go frolic in the autumn mists,\" Mira remarked with obvious displeasure. \"Even my own animal passions respond to some sense of propriety.\"\n\n\"And what about your height?\" Holmes asked, as if he saw some need to change the subject. \"I had assumed that you would make another attempt to restore yourself to your desired stature, now that you have returned once to your original height.\"\n\n\"Not in this place, I'm not,\" Mira insisted. \"The magic here is too strong and unpredictable. You can imagine the unexpected results I might get if I tried to change my physical structure now.\"\n\nMira sent Vajerral and Kelvandor overboard, flying ahead of the ship just far enough to send back warning when they found additional monsters in their path. That gave Mira enough warning to steer a wider course around the great beasts, for she wanted to avoid provoking another attack. The plan worked well enough for the most part, although a few of the most fierce, or at least the most obstinate, monsters chased the dragons. Since they were twice as fast even as the airship, they found it easy enough to lead the monsters away from Star Dragon and then leave the creatures behind.\n\nNo one was exactly certain when Jenny left them for the last time.\n\nDalvenjah was not surprised to find that Jenny was already gone. She seemed to believe that the time was right, whatever that could mean, and that it was all for the best. They would be coming to the center soon enough, in no more than two or three days and perhaps as soon as just a few hours, and she quietly reminded the others, especially Mira, that they really did not want Jenny with them at that time anyway. The girl's wits were so far gone that she had become too unpredictable, no longer able to tell friend from foe. Under the circumstances, she might well have been responsive to the will of the Dark Sorceress Darja, for there was a link that remained between the two of them.\n\nAlthough they had been inside the Region of Darkness for less than a day, the tremendous magic inherent in that place was beginning to have an effect upon certain members of the crew. The mortals remained essentially unchanged but Holmes, who was responsive to the same latent magic as themselves even though he was of a race of faerie, had begun to change quickly. He was no longer the small, slender hawk of a man that he had been for centuries but more like the elves of ages past, taller and younger in appearance, massive in his shoulders but delicate of feature. Mira remarked that he looked like the muscle-bound boys in beefcake calendars, and she had taken to cooing quietly whenever she saw him.\n\nJ.T. recovered from his broken hind leg within hours, and his own appearance began to change. His black-and-white patterns of fur became a full, solid black and his size had doubled by the end of the first day. Even the faerie dragons had changed, becoming larger, longer of leg and more slender of build with powerful muscles moving beneath their soft hides. Their eyes of jade green became large and soft, their muzzles longer and more delicate, and their crests of sapphire blue were long and full. Holmes suggested that they were becoming increasingly purer examples of their various races until those very qualities had reached the point of exaggeration, what he called hyper-faerie. He also said that they should do what they needed to do and get out again as quickly as possible, for fear that the process would continue until they became true monsters. Neither he nor Dalvenjah could predict if they would ever return to normal.\n\nMira thought that it was all very unfair. The others had become taller, stronger and more graceful, while all that she had ever gotten out of this journey was shorter. Sir Remidan was inclined to agree with her. His magical armor was getting slowly larger, and he feared that he would no longer be able to wear it should the process continue for long.\n\nIt seemed an awkward time aboard Star Dragon. Getting used to the fact that Jenny was no longer with them was a part of it, but several of them were distracted from their own concern and grief by the surprise and even fear for what was happening to themselves. They knew also that they were going to their final confrontation with their enemies, and that the Prophecy would be played out for better or worse very soon now. Time was short, in spite of their assurance that the High Priest Haldephren might not be clever or patient enough to complete the Prophecy for himself. Dalvenjah was not greatly concerned about Haldephren; the two problems that occupied her most were knowing what to do about Darja and the entity itself. Simply killing Darja or expelling her from Jenny's body would only free her spirit to merge with her parent entity, completing her mission to create a god of evil. Darja's spirit had to be contained, and Jenny's bottle trick seemed the best idea until Dalvenjah had the time to destroy her spirit completely. Containing the entity was more daunting, since she doubted that she possessed the magic necessary to compel the entity to get inside the bottle and she did not have a bottle that big in the first place.\n\nTheir problems were far from over, even if they had been lucky so far. Dalvenjah honestly did not know how they could win, or even survive. But they still had to try, and she would feel much better for having some idea of how to go about it.\n\nContaining Darja was the important part, and that was relatively easy. Although she did not know just how much magic the Dark Sorceress Darja might command, she was fairly certain that she and Allan could strip her right out of Jenny's body and stuff her down a bottle. As long as Darja could not merge with the entity, then the entity itself presented no immediate danger. She could come back and solve that problem in her own good time, meaning that she could go home and research the matter of destroying juvenile godlings before she gave it a try. And that might in itself solve the problem that the Quentarah had asked of her, the matter of excess latent magic building up within the singularity. What the release of that magic would do to the outer world was a problem in itself, and that made it Dalvenjah's next problem.\n\nDalvenjah preferred to face her problems in reasonable numbers, no more than twenty at a time.\n\nWith all of these problems facing her, Dalvenjah did not need any stupidity. Unfortunately, that was exactly what she got. The Region of Darkness was exactly like the Outer Regions in one certain respect; anything that was thrown overboard did not fall but continued to float exactly were it had been left. Dalvenjah encountered this effect unexpectedly upon returning to Star Dragon from a turn patrolling ahead of the ship. She was coming up for a landing on the stern deck, the roof opened to allow room for the dragons, and approaching to the right side of the tail planes so that Allan could come in from the left. As it happened, Dooket and Erkin had just pissed over the side of the ship.\n\nNow in any possible world, it was never, ever a good idea to piss on the esteemed Sorceress Dalvenjah Foxfire, whether one had intended to or not. Mira locked the boys into their cabin for their own protection. Dalvenjah might be willing to forgive and forget, but not any time in the foreseeable future.\n\nThings began to change within the next few hours. The black sky began to be crossed by slender pathways that glowed softly in pale colors, things that the crew of Star Dragon assumed must be either optical illusions, arcs of raw latent magic or a simple phenomenon of the local weather. The dragons went out for a closer look and found that the truth was rather more than they had expected. The arcs were actual physical structures, as if the light had solidified in a slender strand. They were indeed caused by arcs of latent magic, although completely benign in nature and safe enough even to touch.\n\nStar Dragon continued on her way, now having to dodge the multicolored arcs as well as the monsters, which were becoming steadily bigger, nastier and uglier. Apparently competition squeezed the little ones to the outside, where the magic they fed upon, at least in part, was not as strong. Although the monsters seemed perfectly willing to try eating dragons and aluminum airships, Dalvenjah and Holmes were both fairly certain that they sustained themselves in some way directly upon latent magic. Mr. Holmes then pointed out that they were not at all certain that the monsters fed upon anything but magic, which also seemed likely. Their only excuse for attacking either the dragons or the ship might have been entirely an attitude and behavioral problem.\n\nStar Dragon proceeded inward toward the center, and two things became obvious over the next few hours. The first problem was that the multicolored arcs were becoming more numerous, eventually forming a vast spider's web that filled the dark sky. The arcs were a hazard to navigation in themselves, but they were also a favorite lurking place of the monsters that were steadily becoming larger and more common. The dragons had to scout very carefully now, finding a path that kept the ship as far as possible from the arcs to prevent ambushes from nasty things that bumped about quite a lot in this perpetual night. When the ship could not avoid the arcs by several hundred yards, then the dragons had to look on the back sides of the arcs to see if anything was bumping about out of sight.\n\nThe other problem was that Star Dragon was slowing down, which only made the matter of monsters even more dangerous. There was no reason for the problem that either Dalvenjah or Holmes could find at first. Mira was soon giving full power to all sets of the vanes, then had to cut back slightly; the superabundance of magic caused the vanes to develop too much thrust, and the powerful wing vanes, originally intended to support the full weight of a ship, had made some noises suggesting that their mountings were about to fail. The vanes were reactionless drives that actually produced no true thrust but pushed against the fabric of space, but the effect upon the ship's frame was essentially the same.\n\nWhen Kelvandor came in to trade his watch with Allan, he reported that the dragons were experiencing the same phenomenon. Of course, the dragons boosted their natural flying abilities with their lift magic, which worked much the same way as Star Dragon's vanes. But when they propelled themselves by their wings alone, they still found themselves moving slowly. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Star Dragon's air-speed indicator insisted that the ship was still making over a hundred and fifty knots, even when it seemed that they were doing barely a fifth of that in real distance. And to confuse matters even more, the dragons found speeds returned rapidly to normal at very close range; they might spend two minutes or more coming up the last two hundred yards behind the ship, then suddenly find themselves hurtled forward the last twenty yards. That resulted in three aborted landings and seven near disasters until the dragons got the feel of things.\n\nThat last part was the clue that Dalvenjah and Holmes needed to figure things out sufficiently. It was not speed that was affected, but distance that was distorted. Calculating from the reports of the dragons on their approach runs, Holmes determined an expansion ratio of four point four to one, so that four hundred yards of apparent distance was indeed a mile. Ten hours later, that ratio had become an even five to one. Aside from the fact that it was a great intellectual curiosity, it was also both good news and bad news. The good news was that they had much more time to escape when they found a monster. The bad news was that they had a lot farther to go than they had anticipated, and that distance would become much greater as they came closer. Mira pointed out that they had no idea how far they had to go in the first place, so the matter was irrelevant. That made perfect sense to her.\n\nThe first serious problem came suddenly and unexpectedly, although Holmes and Dalvenjah both insisted afterward that they should have anticipated it. Vajerral and Kelvandor had been flying ahead on patrol when the younger dragon flushed a particularly large monster that had been hiding behind a group of the colored arcs. The monster chased her as she had expected, and she had been leading it away from the ship according to their usual plan when she realized that this one was just a little faster than herself. In spite of her partially deserved reputation for bad judgement, she kept her head and continued leading it away from the ship; if she could not outrun the thing, then Star Dragon never could. She was much smaller and probably the more agile of the two in the air, since her wings could assist her in tight turns, so she believed that her best bet to lose the beast would be in darting rapidly in and out among the arcs.\n\nUnfortunately, the monster was just too fast for her. When fighting became inevitable, then she elected to turn and fight before she tired herself in the chase. Her fireballs and sustained flame were deadly, but the monster was big and fully as obstinate as it was stupid. Her best defense was the fact that she could circle the monster faster than it could turn its bulk to face her, giving her time and opportunity to attack swiftly and dart away. Kelvandor had realized the problem and was already well on the way to her assistance. Dalvenjah had also become aware of the matter even before Vajerral had turned to fight.\n\n\"Allan!\" she called urgently, and his head and long neck emerged from the main hatch a moment later. \"Vajerral just picked a fight with the largest monster that we have seen yet. I suppose that she needs our help.\"\n\nAllan lifted his head even higher and looked around. \"What possessed her to want to fight? Was the thing too fast for her?\" \"Exactly. Kelvandor has gone to assist her.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Allan frowned. \"I suppose that we should go and help them.\"\n\nNeither of them wanted to speak too critically of the abilities of the two young dragons, but they seemed to be finding it hard not to. Kelvandor, of course, was not a young dragon but the oldest of them all, more than twice as old as all of their ages combined. He was a very capable and competent fighting dragon and sorcerer in his own right, but he was completely overshadowed in both ability and personality by his aunt Dalvenjah and he knew it. For that matter, Allan and Dalvenjah both possessed stronger fighting magic, their flames were stronger and with greater range, and being smaller they were both swifter and more agile. But in a fight with a monster that was noticeably larger than Star Dragon, all four of the dragons would have to work together.\n\n\"I suppose that we should be taking Star Dragon out of the way,\" Mira remarked quietly.\n\n\"That would probably be advisable,\" Holmes agreed.\n\nMira did not want to run. The monsters had so far proven extremely resistant to damage, even flame, and they all knew that four dragons could not easily fight one this large. It was at times like this that they missed Jenny most, particularly her ability to stay in tight, giving full punishment with endless endurance as well as immunity to harm. The living dragons were distracted by the need to protect themselves from a vast creature that may or may not be trying to eat them but which certainly took exception to the fact that they were not yet ghosts. Lady Mira, possessor of truly erratic motherly instincts, wanted to intervene.\n\nMira gave all the power she dared to every set of vanes, although the ship seemed barely to crawl. The battle with the monster appeared to be no more than a few hundred yards away, but the fivefold distances of this place made that at least five or six miles. Mira thought that it would make very little difference whether she got Star Dragon past in a hurry; the dragons could not escape the monster until they defeated it, or at least effected a major alteration in its attitude. Dalvenjah and Allan had nol yet even joined the battle, and while Vajerral and Kelvandor were holding their own they were not about to convince their adversary to make any fundamental changes in its philosophies.\n\nMatters took a turn for the worse quite suddenly. Mira was unable to see exactly what happened, except that Vajerral suddenly found herself much closer to the monster than she had intended. The young dragon was either struck or bitten; she let out a barking roar that could be heard all the way to the ship, although the sound took a little time to get there. Kelvandor threw himself into the face of the monster with boundless fury and a complete disregard for his own safety, and his flames and the snaps of his tail were enough to distract the beast sufficiently to give Vajerral a chance to get herself away. He had to hold his own for several long seconds, but Dalvenjah and Allan came to his assistance before he got in trouble himself.\n\nVajerral was still unable to escape. It seemed that she could not fly, but was bent over in the air holding her right hind leg. Mira spun the ship's wheels, turning Star Dragon without hesitation toward the battle.\n\n\"Weapons, boys!\" she shouted. \"Exploding bolts. Mr. Holmes, can you act as our gunner?\"\n\n\"Yes, I believe so,\" he agreed cautiously, although he did not yet begin preparing the weapon for battle. \"You believe that the dragons will benefit from your assistance?\"\n\n\"You're damned right!\" she declared. \"If nothing else, we have to carry Vajerral to safety. Would you not agree that this course of action is our only logical and honorable alternative, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Oh, I must concur entirely. I just required the reassurance of knowing that you were aware of what you were doing.\"\n\nPushed to her limits, Star Dragon was perfectly capable of doing three miles a minute. Even at that speed, she still needed two minutes to cross the distance to the battle of the dragons. Although the Trassek twins and Holmes needed that time to prepare their weapons for battle, Mira begrudged the delay. At least Vajerral was using her wings again, carrying herself farther away from the monster that the other three dragons were harassing to little effect, but she seemed hardly to have the strength to move herself and her right wing appeared damaged as well. Jenny was gone already, and Mira was not about to lose another of those brave, beautiful dragons. She still felt that this was all her fault, resulting from her spying mission in Alashera. \"Fire in the hole!\" Dooket called suddenly.\n\n\"What?\" Mira demanded, wondering where he had picked up that expression. She turned and saw that thin, black smoke was escaping from the main hatch leading below. It did not seem immediately dangerous; since the ship carried no fuel and was made mostly of metal, she was not worried about swift fires consuming her ship. \"Check it out.\"\n\nDooket disappeared below deck, leaving Erkin to set up the catapults on their mounts. Mr. Holmes hurried to the bow and removed the barrel plugs on the two larger guns built into Star Dragon's hull. By the time he returned, Dooket had also come back up on deck.\n\n\"Small fire in the galley,\" he reported. \"Somebody left a large pan of potatoes on the stove to cook. The water boiled out and the potatoes were starting to bum. I cut the fire and secured the pan for a rough ride, but those potatoes are still burning.\" \"Good enough,\" Mira said. \"Back to your station. We will be in battle in a few seconds.\"\n\n\"But the potatoes...\"\n\n\"Damn the potatoes, full speed ahead!\" Mira declared. \"Mr. Holmes, stand by the main guns. We will try to get off a shot or two, if we can get a clear aim through those fool dragons.\" Mira began easing off the ship's speed at the same time that she set a course directly at the middle of the beast, slowing enough to give Mr. Holmes a chance for a couple of good shots. The charges of the guns were ordinarily no more effective than the fireballs of the dragons, except for the penetrating power of a sharp point backed up by thirty-five pounds of weight accelerated to several hundred miles per hour. Nothing less would be very effective against a monster of this size; Holmes was worried whether it would be enough. Apparently the dragons saw what Mira was planning and elected to oblige her; at least they decided to get out of the way while they could.\n\nAs soon as the dragons were clear, Holmes let off both shots in rapid succession. The guns launched their projectiles with no dramatic bang; there was no explosion of gunpowder to set the charges in motion, and the charges themselves were thrown at speeds that were just barely subsonic. Their aim was very good, and both shots hit the monster squarely in the middle of its whatever. But they had not counted upon monsters being made out of rubber, and the shots hardly dented it before their charges exploded. Under those circumstances, the charges did no more damage than the dragons' fireballs.\n\nMira took in the situation in short order, no pun intended, and came up with a very quick fix. It was probably not one of the very best decisions of her career, but it was fairly typical.\n\n\"Brace for impact!\" she called.\n\nHolmes ducked down under the wind baffle with his back to the bulkhead, having no time to explain to the sorceress that she was either insane or just stupid. Mira could only hope that the boys had protected themselves; she had completely forgotten that J.T. was somewhere below. Things proceeded very simply and quickly from that point. Star Dragon rammed the monster fairly well in the middle, and Mira engaged full power to all the ship's vanes to push it backwards quickly before it could recover from the impact. The collision in itself was unlikely to have done any more damage than the charges had, but Mira pushed up their speed, driving the beast back before it could recover enough to attack the ship.\n\nMira rammed the creature backwards into one set of arcs with unexpected results, for the arc shattered with a tremendous flash of light and a flare of inert magic that rippled across the monster's hide like chain lightning. This time the beast was harmed, apparently by the magic itself far more than the effects of the impact, for it roared in pain and began to smell especially bad. Mira kept full power to the vanes, hurtling the monster back with even greater speed into a spider's web of intersecting arcs. The arcs did not break this time, although another flare of energy engulfed the monster. Mira was not inclined to stay around at this point. She backed the airship away and turned tightly, then accelerated away at the best speed the little ship could manage. She knew that she could not outrun the monster; she hoped only to put some distance between it and her ship before it could recover enough to turn its attention to a new attack.\n\nFortunately the dragons arrived at that point, giving the airship more time to escape. Dalvenjah tried something especially clever at this point; noticing that the monster was backed up against the web of arcs, as if to guard its back against attack, she directed all three of the fighting dragons to send fireballs into the web itself around the monster. The results of that tactic were so spectacular that the crew of Star Dragon was unable to look back for some time. By the time the flare was beginning to fade, the airship was slowing to come up beside Vajerral. Holmes and Sir Remidan hurried to help the injured dragon aboard. Mira immediately brought the ship back up to full power and returned to their original course.\n\nThe other dragons returned within a couple of minutes, although they took Vajerral below without a word. Mira could at least take that to mean that they were no longer in danger, and she eased Star Dragon back down to a low cruising speed before they flew blind into another fight. They were flying slow enough now that she could send the boys out onto the airship's long, slender bow to access their damage, now that they had rid the ship of burning potatoes and had vented it to blow out the smoke. Since she suspected that the two barbarians did not really understand the modern metal complexity of the new ship, she asked Mr. Holmes to go along as well.\n\nThe report was not bad, but not good. The frame of the ship itself had held fairly well, due in part to the reinforcement of planks and timbers from the old Wind Dragon inside the hull. The shell of the hull had suffered buckling and small tears along the first ten feet or so. The only serious damage was in the form of several long rips along the right side of the hull, the worst being a large hole that opened the cabin within. If Star Dragon had been on the ocean, she would have already gone down. As it was, the damage was not critical. The only serious problem was that they no longer had Jenny to repair their damage, and Holmes was uncertain about his ability to drill out the rivets of the broken plates and cut new ones. He was called down to assist Dalvenjah soon after that, which did not in itself seem like a good sign.\n\nMira endured in silence for a good, long time, not daring to interrupt the dragons to discover how Vajerral was doing. Dalvenjah herself came out on deck well over an hour later, looking tired but not greatly concerned. She climbed up the helm deck and lifted her head to look about.\n\n\"You are insane, Lady Kasdamir Gerran,\" she remarked after a long moment.\n\n\"But I get results,\" Mira reminded her. \"I will not see another young dragon die on this quest. It still all seems like my fault, you know.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded slowly. \"Vajerral will be just fine, although she will not fight again for the remainder of this journey. She was bitten high on her right leg, and there was venom in the bite. Fortunately the venom was magical rather than chemical, easier to nullify, and it caused more pain than true harm. But I do not know how we could have protected her if you had not come when you did.\"\n\n\"Is the monster dead?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"I am not certain that they can be killed entirely, although the parts that were left were hardly in fighting condition.\" The dragon paused, and frowned. \"I fear that we did lose one member of our crew, all the same. We cannot find your cat. We suspect that he was in your cabin, which was ripped open during (he fight. He must have been lost overboard when the ship rammed the monster.\"\n\n\"You looked in all the storage lockers?\" Mira asked, and the dragon nodded slowly. She shrugged. \"He was a brave cat.\" Dalvenjah perked her ears. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\"No, not hardly,\" Mira admitted, and smiled. \"What indeed can I say of this cat? In life, he shared great adventures in the company of sorceresses and precocious dragons, traveling the skies of many worlds in magical airships. Of course, that was never by any plan of his. He would just as well have spent many a long year asleep on a window ledge. Of my cat, I can say only this. Of all the cats that I have met in my travels, he was the most worthless.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"He will not be missed.\"\n\nMira smiled. \"So much for solemn occasions. You must promise me one thing, dragon. If I do not survive this journey, I want a great, gaudy marble tomb with stone cherubs and acorns. And carve this epitaph over the door. 'She was the light of our dreary lives. '\"\n\n\"You flatter yourself, Sorceress.\"\n\n\"A nasty job, but someone has to do it.\" She looked ahead, standing well up on her box to see over the forward baffle. \"I suspect that it will not be long now. Perhaps you dragons should rest yourselves and lick your wounds.\"\n\nDalvenjah stuck out her tongue and made a face, that being no expression that faerie dragons were in the habit of using."
            },
            {
                "title": "This Is All Very Confusing",
                "text": "When they arrived in the center, there was certainly no question about where they were even if it was not at all what they had expected. At that, Mira still found it a little hard to believe. She called the others on deck, for them to take a good look and offer opinions.\n\nWhat they found before them was a structure of immense size, like a palace or fortress thousands of yards across, seeming to be made of white marble and crystal glowing with an inner light. In truth it more closely resembled a palace, for it looked like an apparently endless assembly of tall, thin towers, vast domes and countless other structures too numerous and varied to identify clearly. It looked too delicate to have been intended as a defensive structure, in no way like the massive stone fortresses of the Eolwyn or the Quentarah with their heavy defenses turned outward against attack. There seemed to be no sky island forming its core, unless the island itself was completely enclosed within the structure. Most likely it was exactly what it appeared to be, a single immense structure floating free in space.\n\nIt also appeared to be completely deserted.\n\nFarther beyond the floating palace, the walls of the singularity closed in rapidly into a long, narrow funnel, the glowing arcs of magic eventually becoming so thick and overlapping that they seemed to form almost a solid wall. Mira was reminded more of the web tunnels leading into the lairs of certain spiders. Star Dragon's string-and-shadow guide indicated that the source of light lay beyond the palace somewhere down that tunnel. The only blessing was that there were no monsters in this place, perhaps because they were unable to handle a diet of pure magic so near the source.\n\n\"That palace is vast,\" Kelvandor observed. \"Why would anyone build a thing like this if no one lives here?\"\n\n\"I do not believe that this place is as deserted as it appears,\" Dalvenjah remarked. \"And when you are a god, there might be no such thing as too large or pretentious.\"\n\n\"Maintaining a proper professional appearance must be hell,\" Mira agreed.\n\nMr. Holmes had been staring ahead, and he now turned back to the dragons. \"Then I beg your indulgence for just one question. Is this floating palace in the very center of the singularity?\"\n\n\"No, the actual center must be at the point where the walls of this universe merge,\" Dalvenjah said.\n\n\"Then should we not find this virgin god in the center?\" \"That is two questions, and you begged me to indulge you for just one,\" Dalvenjah reminded him.\n\n\"Indulge me just a little more.\"\n\n\"I was hoping to avoid another of our long and pointless philosophical debates,\" the dragon said, and sighed heavily. \"No, I would not expect to find a magical entity evolved in the center of a singularity. The force of magic would be too strong and pure. It would have to happen somewhere very close but far enough for eddies to form in the flow, disturbances that break the uniformity of pure magic to permit it to begin to recombine into new and more complex forms.\"\n\n\"Yes, that makes perfect sense,\" Sir Remidan agreed in one of his most heroic voices.\n\nDalvenjah glanced at the Knight suspiciously. \"There is also the fact that the space for some distance about the palace is completely free of arcs of magic, when this area should be so completely filled with them that we would be unable to fly this ship. Something within this palace has been consuming vast amounts of magic for a long time indeed.\"\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Holmes admitted. \"An illusion. My own suspicion is that an illusion of that palace has been cast to distract us from our true goal.\"\n\n\"An illusion would not require as much magic as I sense disappearing into that place,\" Dalvenjah insisted. \"We will proceed carefully, testing against traps. But this is the place we must look first.\"\n\n\"Airships behind us!\" Erkin called from the stern. \"At least they must be airships of some type. But there certainly is a whole swarm of them.\"\n\nThe others had already looked back long before he finished his report, and they had seen for themselves. The ships were very unusual in design compared to anything they had seen. They were silent, propelled by thrust vanes much like those of Star Dragon rather than magical engines. They were metal rather than wood in construction and they were all like catamarans in design, two long, slender hulls joined by two or three short wings, with steering fins at the ends of each hull. This design was probably meant to enclose a set of lift vanes within each hull, the wide spacing of the pair giving a stable balance. Perhaps it worked better under gravity; here, the ships were bobbing and pitching slowly, as if they were not inherently stable.\n\nDalvenjah sat back on her tail, her ears laid back. \"It seems to be just one thing after another. Now just who do you suppose this is?\"\n\n\"Those are not Alasheran ships,\" Mira said. \"Nothing from my world has that much metal, except for what some of us wear for clothes.\"\n\n\"I wish we had one of the Quentarah along to tell us if these ships had originated somewhere within the singularity,\" Holmes said. \"I doubt that very much, however. These ships had never been built to fly in free fall, unless they have idiots for designers. I suspect that their basic instability is due to the fact that they are fighting their own lift. Granted, of course, that they might be far more stable at lower speeds. Distances here make things look deceptive, but those ships are moving at better than a hundred knots.\"\n\n\"And if they have followed us, they must have been able to match our best speed,\" Dalvenjah added. \"And it seems to me a fair assumption that anyone who has been following us without making themselves known cannot be any friends of ours.\" \"Could they be new allies of the Alasherans?\" Mira asked. \"The High Priest Haldephren might have left them lurking about to intercept us.\"\n\n\"I doubt that,\" the dragon said. \"The Emperor said nothing about any new allies beyond the Eolwyn, and I know that he would have told me. And if they had been ahead of us and waiting in ambush, they should have attacked first rather than let us by.\"\n\n\"Unless Haldephren's ships are on the other side of the palace, and we are caught between the two,\" the small sorceress pointed out.\n\n\"Haldephren has only three ships.\"\n\nThe problem with having Sherlock Holmes along on their journey was that they had gotten into the habit of trying to answer every question by logical deduction. Even Holmes was quick to point out that deduction worked only as long as they had information that could be processed into a logical sequence that provided answers, but he was still as bad as any of them. He was also quick to remind them that he was not really Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes they could only wait for answers to come to them, and such answers certainly seemed to be on their way. The small fleet of unidentified flying catamarans, an even dozen in all, slowed to a stop; a very slow stop indeed, or so it appeared because of the distance distortion. Only the lead ship continued to approach, and that at reduced speeds. Apparently a parlay was in the works.\n\nMira had been holding Star Dragon in place. The other ship looped around wide to come up behind her, perhaps aware and respectful of the fact that her main guns were in her bow, its starboard hull drifting to a stop barely ten yards from Star Dragon's wing tip. From closer range, it could easily be seen that the strange airship was actually fairly primitive in design, closer to the level of technology of Mira's own world for all that it was built entirely of metal. The design of the ship was very simple, nothing more than two very long, thin hulls joined by three wing segments that were rather long and thick and which Holmes recognized as a very basic high-lift design for low speeds, comparable to the wing designs for a late 1930's bomber. If these ships were local then the lift was needed to get the ships away from the gravity of the sky islands but interfered in free flight. The Quentarah solved that problem by lifting their ships clear of gravity, the Eolwyn by having no wings at all, while Jenny had possessed an advantage in designing the aero dynamics of Star Dragon by her degree in engineering.\n\nA tall, dark man with sharp features stepped up on the deck of the strange ship. He was dressed richly in a manner that suggested both wealth and command, and he was holding a cat. Several members of Star Dragons crew were startled by the sight of him.\n\n\"A Dark Elf!\" Holmes declared. \"That is a Dark Elf, the evil equivalent of my own race. I had thought that their kind had died out long ago, but I can see now that some survivors of their race must have taken refuge down here.\"\n\n\"Who cares about that?\" Mira demanded. \"That son of a bitch has my cat!\"\n\nThe stranger smiled with amused satisfaction. \"You are both perfectly correct. I am Dourkess An-shallestern, Captain of the Dark Elves. Our people and certain of our allies retreated into this place many thousands of years ago, when it became obvious that the outer world was becoming uninhabitable to our kind. It was never a part of our nature to foolishly endure our decline, as certain others of the faerie races did.\"\n\n\"And you assume that this place belongs to you?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Our numbers were small enough from the start, and we have been slow to recover,\" he explained, suspiciously quick to justify why his people did not rule the entire singularity. \"We have been biding our time, keeping ourselves secret so that others would not fear us and bring war upon us before we are ready. We had never assumed that there might be an entity existing within the deepest core of this world. In those days, our ships were not yet up to the standards demanded of this place.\"\n\n\"You still don't know jack shit about shipbuilding,\" Holmes remarked. His annoyance and distaste was very plain, particularly in his ungentlemanly use of language. Dalvenjah was looking quietly amused.\n\nDourkess ignored him, with noticeable effort. \"Our surprise could not have been greater when the Alasherans established contact with the entity and even made arrangements to make it into an evil god to serve their own purposes. In all that time since, we have been trying to discover some way to undo that. In time we sent our agents to the world of the Alasherans, where they discovered the prophecies that would lead eventually to these very events we face now. Unlike the Alasherans, we unravelled the prophecies to mean that Lady Mira, not Jenny Barker, was the true object of Prophecy. We hoped to use that knowledge to our own advantage, although by no means could we permit the Alasherans to know that. We sent a spy to watch your every move.\"\n\nHe set J.T. on the rail, and the cat bowed his head. \"We meet once again, Kasdamir Gerran. I hope that you will excuse me for jumping ship a few hours back, but it seemed like a good time. I knew that my friends were following close behind.\" \"But... you?\" Mira stared in disbelief. \"You are my familiar. How could you be a spy?\"\n\n\"Think about how we first met,\" J.T. suggested. When it was obvious that she did not remember, he sat down and sighed. \"Well, you were fairly tipsy at the time. I came to you.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah!\" Mira agreed, understanding matters at last. \"Why, you little bastard! You eat my kippers, and then you turn on me. Just like a cat!\"\n\nDalvenjah rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly. \"Here we go again. Well, what do you want? Have you come to claim the virgin god for yourselves? That seems to be very popular among the servants of evil these days.\"\n\n\"We may be of the Dark, but we are not servants of Evil,\" Dourkess was quick to protest, as if there was a real difference. \"Those foolish mortals might be satisfied to find themselves a god to fear and worship. We are quite satisfied with ourselves and our own plans of conquest, and we will not work and fight and die for the entertainment of any godling. We have come to destroy the entity.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, that's what we plan to do,\" Mira observed brightly.\n\n\"We can do that just as well, after we destroy you,\" Dourkess declared. \"J.T. has already told us all of your secrets. We know, for example, that our greatest concern now is to keep the Dark Sorceress Darja from merging her own consciousness with that of the entity.\"\n\n\"Yes, but do you know how to destroy the entity itself?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\nDourkess paused, looking sternly displeased. \"Do you?\"\n\n\"I know who does.\"\n\nHe had to think about that very carefully. \"The entity is really of no immediate importance to us. We do want to destroy it eventually, so that the magic will return to the outer world and restore the age of faerie, but we can bide our time. The immediate problem for us is confining Darja and destroying the Alasherans before they do something regrettable.\"\n\nDalvenjah sat back on her tail. \"Why are you explaining all of this to us? What good does it do you?\"\n\nDourkess smiled wickedly. \"Years of secret planning on my part have brought me to sudden victory over you, something that none of your other enemies has ever managed. I just wanted the last laugh.\"\n\nDalvenjah lifted her head, her ears perked. \"You seem very sure of yourself. Has your cat not explained to you the flaw in your plans? You cannot hope to take us with only twelve ships.\" \"The ships are a minor concern,\" Dourkess told her. \"I also have three dozen of my own dragons at my command.\"\n\nHe turned and nodded to someone they could not see, and the airship began to move away quickly. At that same moment, J.T. gathered himself together and leaped over the rail, hurtling himself toward Star Dragon. Mira reached out and snatched him out of the air, hauling him aboard. Still, she did not seem particularly pleased to have him back; as a matter of fact, she was trying to strangle him. The cat was desperately trying to explain himself, his efforts complicated by the fact that he could not breathe. Holmes and Sir Remidan pulled her hands apart long enough for J.T. to speak.\n\n\"I'm a double agent!\" he insisted. \"I have been for years. I just never told you because I feared that you would react inappropriately.\"\n\n\"You still went overboard and returned to your former associates,\" Holmes reminded him.\n\n\"I knew that they were following and that they would attack,\" the cat explained quickly. \"I had to go to them as arranged to discover what they were planning. Tell the faerie dragons that the creatures that Dork-head called dragons are things that the Dark Elves brought with them down from the outer world. They won't be very effective in a fight against real dragons. They have little enough magic, and less intelligence.\"\n\nDalvenjah heard that for herself, and it was all she needed to know. She called Allan and Kelvandor to her and they went overboard immediately, ready to give battle. She had to trust that Mira and Holmes would prepare the ship for battle; whether or not Mira strangled the cat was now irrelevant. The other ship was moving away slowly; it was indeed a local design but powered by large and apparently very inefficient versions of Star Dragon's lift vanes, producing enough power to drive the ship but not enough in itself to lift it. The three dragons made a wide circle behind Mira's airship before Dalvenjah turned and darted forward, flying faster and faster as her entire form began to glow with golden light before she disappeared entirely within a shaft of flame. Mira had often heard of the ability of the faerie dragons to assume their fiery form, but she had certainly never seen it.\n\nThe other two fighting dragons turned to follow Dalvenjah a moment later, although Kelvandor seemed to have some trouble assuming his fiery form; this was something that not even all of the Veridan, the Warrior-sorcerers of the faerie dragons, could accomplish easily. Dalvenjah had overtaken Dourkess's airship within the first few moments and she circled it a couple of times as if contemplating what her magical enhancement could do to a metal ship; this was a trick that she had only used against Dark Dragons and wooden ships in the past. She apparently remembered what Jenny had once told her about the inclination that aluminum had for burning and darted in, hitting the starboard hull squarely in the center. That entire portion of the ship disappeared in a tremendous explosion of flames, while the dragon passed completely through the hull and emerged from beneath. She circled around tightly and struck the other hull, and the ship began to break up in flight.\n\nAfter that the three dragons moved on to decimate the remainder of the enemy fleet, and it became impossible to tell them apart. The matter became irrelevant, beyond the fact that they were all three moving through the fleet with deadly efficiency. The dragons of the Dark Elves were attacking from Star Dragon's other side, and that was quite enough to command Mira's attention for the moment. They were not true dragons, of course; they did have large wings but fairly small bodies and no forelegs at all, just small hind legs, short necks and long, narrow heads. Since they were entertaining or inspiring themselves by making a great deal of loud, obnoxious but fairly insipid noises, they probably were not very intelligent. Mira could imagine that the ship's main guns would be fairly ineffective, since she could hardly turn the ship quickly enough to track such small, swift targets. It seemed best to her to let the boys have their bows and catapults. She opened the weapons locker on the helm deck and took out the two assault rifles that she had snitched from the FBI.\n\n\"We don't have a lot of ammunition for those guns,\" she said, handing one to Holmes and Sir Remidan. \"You need to let them come in close and make each shot count. Our dragons should be back around to help us in a couple of minutes or so.\"\n\n\"You know this weapon better than I do,\" the knight reminded her.\n\n\"I can hardly fly the ship and shoot at the same time,\" she told him. \"If nothing else, the kick of that weapon would knock me off my box.\"\n\nAs it happened, she would have never given him a gun if she could have helped it. Sir Remidan's grasp of nonmagical technology had stalled out somewhere between water faucets and remote controls.\n\nThe false dragons had a simple but effective tactic for attack. They came straight in at the airship, then turned aside at the last moment and increased their speed to intercept the three dragons. The faerie dragons were still finishing up their own attack on the Dark Elf fleet, although they had dropped out of their fiery forms and were hitting the few remaining ships with fireballs. Mira was left to wonder if their tactic had stolen too much of their strength early on, leaving them too tired to protect themselves. She turned Star Dragon about sharply and forced all the speed she could out of the ship before she enjoyed the luxury of swearing furiously.\n\nHer one consolation was that the false dragons were olive green, so dark that they were almost black, not easily confused with the golden Mindijaran. That gave her some reason to hope Sir Remidan or the boys would not shoot their friends by mistake.\n\nNaturally enough, it had to be Holmes who shot one of the dragons by accident, and it had to be Kelvandor who got it. As it happened, it was a reasonable enough mistake; Holmes had shot one of the false dragons in the head and the bullet had bounced off a particularly hard skull, hitting Kelvandor who was in fact some distance away. The dragon took the shot in a place that is not nearly as delicate as most people imagine, although less well padded in dragons, and the bullet had actually lost a good portion of its energy before it had hit. Kelvandor reversed himself very quickly, thinking at first that he had been bitten by one of the false dragons. He was not seriously harmed but he could not have been more surprised; it was hard for those on the ship to hide their amusement and pay attention to the task of shooting false dragons.\n\nThe battle was over very quickly, even though Kelvandor returned to Star Dragon to attend to his wound. This was the first battle in which the group had been around to witness the after-math, and they were surprised by the amount of mess. Because of the lack of gravity, everything stayed very much where it had fallen. There was on the one side the wreckage of the airships that the faerie dragons had destroyed, some of it still burning. There were also a fair number of survivors who had dived overboard and were swimming for all they were worth, although that was a very ineffective method of travel. In a gesture of either desperation or extreme optimism, they were headed away from the center, going home the hard way. The remains of the false dragons were drifting about on the other side, quite a few of them done to a turn from dragon flames.\n\n\"What a great, damned mess,\" Mira declared. \"I suppose that it will just hang there for years.\"\n\n\"I doubt that,\" Dalvenjah remarked without looking up from her work. She was tending Kelvandor's wound. \"A few monsters should be along in the next few hours, looking to see where all of those idiot Dark Elves are coming from. They might be kind enough to pick things up, at least the bodies. We do serve meat in various stages from rare to well done. The shame is that we never did determine whether or not they actually eat their prey.\"\n\nShe glanced at Kelvandor, who had his neck bent around as far as it would go to watch her. \"Hardly more than a scratch. The bullet seems to be already gone somewhere.\"\n\n\"I teleported it out, of course,\" Kelvandor said defensively. \"It was very hot.\"\n\n\"You will be staying with the ship, all the same.\"\n\nKelvandor looked more worried than indignant. \"I am not so badly wounded. You have said that yourself.\"\n\n\"That is beside the point,\" the sorceress said, speaking softly. \"Vajerral is not doing so well. Jenny's disappearance has depressed her, and this place is not cheerful. She is in no condition to defend this ship herself and yet our companions must have this ship to leave here, even admitting that we could pull or carry them if we must. Do you want to fly two thousand miles with those two barbarians hanging on your tail?\"\n\n\"You expect to go overboard any time soon?\" Mira asked suspiciously. She had already been moving the airship away from the area of their battle.\n\n\"I belive that we must go in quickly now,\" the dragon said. \"Our battle will have very likely made the entity aware of our presence here.\"\n\n\"Being a god, he surely knew that we were here the moment we arrived,\" Sir Remidan remarked.\n\n\"That great, worthless creature is not a god,\" Dalvenjah said sharply. \"It is a magical being of vast powers and limited experience, and it probably lacks the common sense to watch out for itself. I felt very certain that we could easily catch it by surprise, but we have now made quite enough magical noise that it has to have become aware of our presence no matter how obtuse it might be.\"\n\nHolmes frowned. \"Considering what you have said about the entity, is it likely to make any difference even if it does know that we are here? It would probably not even recognize the danger, or at least know how to respond if it did.\"\n\n\"Don't complicate things at this point, Holmes,\" the dragon said. \"The time for logic and reason has passed. Let's go kick some ass, so that we can go home.\"\n\nActually, things were not quite so easily done. The palace was vast in proportions and, for all they knew, the entire structure was a maze of rooms and passages. Mr. Holmes compared it to trying to find their way about the Smithsonian, the Kremlin and the Palace of Versailles all joined together, without a map or any other means of knowing where they were going. Searching the entire thing was possible but certainly not desirable, not if they could find some clue or make some logical deduction about where to begin. Dalvenjah reminded them that their time would be limited from the moment they landed, so they needed to know where they were going.\n\nAs it happened, it was J.T. the cat who provided the solution. He still insisted that he had been a double agent, although the wiser members of the crew suspected that he had not decided finally upon the idea of becoming a double agent until he had realized that the Dark Elves intended to attack Star Dragon without the numbers or weapons they needed to win. The Dark Elves were wise, cunning and powerful in their magic; if not for their serious lack of numbers and a racial paranoia that required them to keep themselves hidden, they could have ruled the entire world of the sky islands easily. But their strength was in subterfuge, deception and bluff. Their tremendous arrogance made them terrible warriors, since they invariably overestimated the value of their own abilities, weapons and ploys. J.T. had only been vaguely impressed with them, and that at a time in his life when he simply had not had the experience to know any better.\n\nOf course, J.T. was still a familiar, and his natural talents were his abilities to identify and locate sources of magic. In spite of the tremendous wash of latent magic radiating from the core, he still knew exactly where to find the entity. The only trouble was knowing whether or not to trust him. At this point, curiously enough, Mira was his greatest advocate. She had known him for a long time, and she was certain that his cat-spitting hatred of the Alasherans was real enough. Dalvenjah pointed out that the cat could very well hate the Alasherans but still be devoted to the entity. She also had to agree that his plan was best.\n\nStar Dragon drifted slowly over the palace, and J.T. led them to a point that he thought was about as close to the entity as they could come from the outside. His report was confirmed when they discovered three Alasheran ships parked in the shadows behind some of the larger buildings. Since the ships were not guarded, it seemed that Haldephren had never seriously expected that Star Dragon would get through. Mira and the boys went aboard each ship for a quick look about, and they loosened certain bolts that attached the lift and thrust vanes in a way that promised trouble if the ships were taken back into the sky. Mira thought it was better to be safe.\n\nIn the few minutes they were gone, the others had made some very quick preparations for their last battle with the Alasherans. Vajerral had brought herself up on deck, her hind leg still splinted because of the broken bone she had received from the monster. She was given a post on the helm deck and a crossbow so that she could defend the ship without stirring herself too much, freeing Kelvandor to fight in the way of dragons. Dooket and Erkin were to stay aboard Star Dragon as well, to tend the ship and assist the dragons if they were attacked. Dalvenjah at least was not satisfied with the disappearance of the crews of the Alasheran ships, unless they had been undermanned in the first place or had lost much of their crews on the way down. Mira reported that all three ships had suffered from attacks by monsters.\n\nThey were ready to begin within a few minutes. Dalvenjah lifted the cat down from the deck, but she did not put him down again. \"I believe that I should carry you, at least until we find what we are seeking and we know how things stand.\"\n\n\"I can walk,\" J.T. assured her fearfully.\n\n\"I do insist,\" she said, placing one of her large, strong hands on his neck. \"How odd. I do believe that a faerie dragon could wring your delicate little neck without the smallest effort.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do believe one could.\"\n\n\"1 know that I could. And if you lead us wrong, I certainly will.\"\n\nJ.T. just swallowed nervously.\n\nDalvenjah smiled; on a dragon, even that looked frightening. \"Cheer up, cat. Your reputation will be restored or destroyed very soon now.\"\n\n\"I like your confidence,\" J.T. remarked sourly. \"I keep thinking that the question of my reputation might become irrelevant very soon now.\"\n\nBecause things had been going so generally well for them lately, certain members of their group had been inclined to forget just how dangerous this final confrontation could be. Fighting the sky-island airships, with their slow speeds and ineffective weapons, had been simple enough, especially with the deadly secret weapons that the faerie dragons had proven to be. They had been both lucky and clever in New York, finding Mr. Holmes quickly, and his advice had helped them to avoid the traps and false leads that had been set for them. If it had not been for his knowledge and ingenuity, even Dalvenjah would have never known where to look. And the Emperor Myrkan's decision to defect from the Dark had been a bonus. Although magic abounded in this place, no one had tried to use anything potent against them. Their only real setback had been the battle with the monster in which Vajerral had been injured and the ship damaged.\n\nAnd, of course, the loss of Jenny. But that had been unavoidable, as it had turned out, and not a direct result of anything that had occurred in the course of their journey.\n\nThe odds had become rather more stacked against them now, and Dalvenjah at least knew it perfectly well. Her first hope was that the entity would remain uninvolved in the contest between her people and the servants of the Dark, as blissfully indifferent as ever. Under those circumstances, she expected one of two results. Either they would dispatch the High Priest Haldephren, the Dark Sorceress Darja and their henchmen in due course, or else Darja herself would prove to be rather more than they anticipated and they would themselves come to a bad end. The third possibility was that the entity would take sides against them, perhaps because Darja had already found the secret to merging with it or simply out of loyalty to its old friends. And so it turned out that they were in serious trouble in two chances out of three. Dalvenjah still believed that most of the advantages remained on their side, but she realized how quickly things could turn against them.\n\nEven if things turned out badly, she still had a hidden ace up her metaphorical sleeve; in reality, dragons ran about as naked as Spartans and they were not given to playing cards. The trouble was that her little surprise was very unreliable.\n\nThe way in was fairly obvious, once they knew where to begin. J.T. led them to a large doorway\u2014the doors themselves had been left open\u2014and after that they made their way through several wide corridors and descended a series of broad, flowing stairs. The architecture of this place made even less sense on the inside than the outside, as if the designer, or creator, had at least some awareness of appearances but little knowledge of substance. It did become apparent very quickly that practical considerations had not been an important factor, since corridors led to halls without purpose and stairs descended at irregular intervals. There was a general lack of any habitable chambers but whole regions that existed only for the sake of appearances, as if the entity welcomed company but wished to discourage anyone from staying the night. Holmes estimated that at least half and perhaps as much as three-quarters of the interior space was solid stone.\n\n\"Movement,\" J.T. warned suddenly. \"There are several beings of fairly strong magical ability moving in to surround us. I suspect that an ambush is being prepared.\"\n\nAs it was, they were in the middle of a very large chamber or hall at that moment. This was not a very good place for an ambush, leaving more than enough room for the dragons to move about for a counterattack, and so Dalvenjah was not immediately concerned. Even so, she was not surprised when the attack began almost that same moment. The initial assault came in the form of magic, a concentrated barrage of magical flames that swept across the chamber to center upon their group. Allan and Dalvenjah drew back hastily, forcing the others into a tight group that they could protect with a force barrier. Black flames poured over the invisible wall they had created, and for the moment they were safe.\n\nImmediately after the first attack had begun, forcing the dragons on the defensive, small groups of Imperial warriors marched out smartly from smaller side corridors, took their positions and bent their bows. The first volley was rather wild, their aim disturbed by the black flames of the Dark Sorcerers. The dragons were quick enough to avoid the arrows, and Sir Remidan saved Mira from one arrow by the simple tactic of stepping out before her. His magical armor rang like a bell, and it was not even scratched. Then Mira and Holmes corrected the situation simply and effectively by stepping out with their assault rifles and spraying the area generously. The survivors broke and ran for their lives, fleeing down the main corridor at the far end of the chamber. The two dragons leaped after them, meaning to put an end to any future threats of ambush.\n\n\"No more bullets,\" Mira remarked sourly, removing the clip from her gun with some effort. The gun was almost too large for her to handle.\n\n\"No more bullets?\" Holmes asked, and checked his own clip. \"I have only three. Fortunately, our need for these weapons may well be behind us now.\"\n\nMira reached into her small pack and produced two more clips, handing one to the elf. \"I certainly hope so. This is all I have left. I've regretted from the first my lack of foresight in not stealing more. At the time, three clips each seemed like a bountiful supply, perhaps because of the number of actual bullets that represents. An equal number of arrows is considered to be a generous amount. I never realized what a glutton this weapon can be.\"\n\n\"That is the principle advantage of the automatic rifle: it solves certain problems very quickly, but it demands a price,\" Holmes said. \"I suspect that we should follow those two dragons. They might not need our help, but we could easily need theirs if the Alasherans circle around us.\"\n\nFollowing the dragons proved to be easy enough. They had run down the main passage after the Alasherans, catching Imperial warriors and sorcerers one at a time and quickly wringing their necks, then tossing the bodies aside. It all had the look of simple efficiency, made easy by the size and strength of the faerie dragons; J.T. swallowed nervously to see it.\n\n\"One would think that they thought it sport,\" Holmes remarked. \"That is what I like about those dragons. When logic and deduction have run their course, they can follow up with mindless mayhem.\"\n\n\"They might be wise and gentle, but they are still dragons,\" Mira reminded him. \"That wildness in their nature makes them such forceful personalities. Dalvenjah is simply more wild than most.\"\n\n\"Vajerral and Kelvandor don't seem particularly wild.\" \"They can certainly get in touch with it when they want to,\" Mira said. \"I've seen them fight more often than you have.\" Their concern now was that the dragons would have to run too far ahead of them, as unlikely as it seemed that they would have forgotten. Dalvenjah was indeed a dragon and given to passionate extremes, but only within the limits of the cold, calculating fury of her kind. Mindijaran were, in their way, the most dangerous of dragons, for their emotions never obscured their keen wits. And even if she ever was inclined to get carried away, Allan was as solid and understated as dragons came. As it happened, the two dragons simply ran out of necks to twist after a few hundred yards, so they stopped to wait for the others to join them.\n\n\"Did you enjoy yourselves?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"It was very satisfying, as a matter of fact,\" Dalvenjah said. \"I have wanted to break a few necks since that first night in Mira's house. Cat, are you paying attention?\"\n\nThe cat swallowed loudly. \"Yes, ma'am. The High Priest Haldephren is just ahead, not six hundred yards. The Dark Sorceress Darja is just beyond him. Aside from those two, and ourselves, I doubt that there is anyone else alive in this place. Keep in mind that I cannot clearly sense the presence of mortals, especially the more magically inept. Haldephren might still have a few of his apes in leather lurking about.\"\n\nThis passage was clearly the main one, and they had come now into regions that had apparently been intended as more habitable. This area was designed more like a conventional palace, with side passages leading into whole suites of rooms as well as armories, kitchens and storage chambers. After the Outer Regions, this was absolutely homey. Apparently the Alasherans had had some influence in the construction of this place, although the entity had either seen no need to accommodate large numbers or else meant to discourage any major invasions of houseguests. Gods, like dragons, did indeed have a reputation for being antisocial.\n\nThe passage ended suddenly in a pair of wide, heavy doors. Before J.T. could give warning, Dalvenjah pushed through the doors without hesitation and marched boldly into the chamber beyond. This was a hall of immense size, an oval dome easily three hundred yards wide by two hundred and perhaps fifty yards high; Mira could have circled Star Dragon in this place. The walls were carved in the appearance of great columns and rafters, flowing upward in great smooth arcs, but with so many gathered together into groups that portions of the dome looked almost fluted. It was, all in all, a superabundance of so many long, clean lines that it became cluttered.\n\n\"Rococo art deco,\" Holmes commented. \"Who would have thought?\"\n\nDalvenjah raised her head and was looking straight up. The center of the dome was a large flat panel like a single sheet of glass, an oval two hundred feet or more across. There were stars in a black sky. \"How very odd.\"\n\n\"It looks perfectly normal to me,\" Mira said.\n\n\"Anywhere else, perhaps. It definitely goes somewhere, since more stars appear from behind the edge as we walk. But we just came from outside, and we know that there were no stars.\"\n\nMira shrugged. \"When you're a god, you can have any view you wish.\"\n\n\"Such a view requires a tremendous amount of magic,\" Holmes told her. \"It seems strange to think an entire world of faerie died to indulge the whims of a single entity hardly conscious of its own existence.\"\n\n\"The entity has been consuming most of that magic itself,\" Dalvenjah said. \"If it had not been such an absolute lump, it would have gotten itself up and moved on to explore long ago, and your world would have been saved.\"\n\n\"An old friend is waiting just ahead,\" J.T. warned them.\n\nA second set of large doors stood at the far side of the chamber, above a series of steps that ended in a wide platform. A second, much smaller platform, a tall wooden dais of very recent and rather hasty construction, stood a short distance out from the doors. A large wooden throne stood upon the dais, and upon that throne sat a man. He was a tall man, handsome and strongly muscled, still young enough to be considered in the prime of life. He was no one any of them had ever seen before, but that was hardly unexpected.\n\nHe sat back in the throne and smiled, looking sincerely pleased to see them. \"Sorceress Kasdamir. It really has not been all that long, and yet I hardly know which of us has changed the most. You look as cute as ever, I must admit. I am reminded of the time many years ago in the golden canals of Serras...\n\nMira lifted her gun and pointed it right at him. \"Not another word, asshole. That was years ago, and you were operating under false pretenses, Lord Dasjen Valdercon. You owe me. You owe Jenny Barker a lot more, and I mean to make you pay.\"\n\nDalvenjah stepped forward. \"You owe me something also. I want my brother back.\"\n\nHaldephren did not look as entirely pleased to see her. \"Ah, yes. We still have something to settle. If you win, you can have him back. I have him in stasis, of course. Go to my cabin aboard the flagship. Look for the large emerald on the heavy gold chain.\"\n\n\"Oh, well.\" Mira reached inside her jacket and brought out the very chain and emerald in question, holding it up for the dragon.\n\n\"You little thief,\" Dalvenjah remarked, taking the (jmerald. \"What has happened to you? Ever since you lost your height, you have become a regular kleptomaniac. Did becoming short again bring out your childhood tendencies?\"\n\nDalvenjah opened the chain and fastened it around her own neck, although it was barely long enough to fit. Presumably she knew what to do with it, since it did not look very much like her brother at the moment.\n\nShe looked up at Haldephren. \"That brings us to the next question. Where is the Dark Sorceress Darja?\"\n\nHaldephren glanced briefly over his shoulder. \"She is in there, beyond those doors.\"\n\n\"She is with the entity?\"\n\nHe frowned, considering the question carefully. \"I realize that you must know enough of the truth already. Something has gone wrong with the Prophecy. The new god will talk to us. He will talk to anyone who possesses magic enough to speak directly to him. But he will not permit Darja to merge with him. He insists that he does not yet recognize her, and he seems to think we might be trying to pass off a substitute. Darja is in the inner chamber, but she is not allowed to pass the final set of doors.\"\n\n\"And what are you waiting for?\" Dalvenjah asked. \"Did you think that you would find your answer?\"\n\n\"Darja says that Jenny Barker will know the answer. And we have known since your arrival in New York that she is still with you. We have been waiting for you to come to us.\"\n\n\"So you laid your trap to destroy the rest of us,\" Holmes concluded. \"How does the fact that we are still alive affect your schemes?\"\n\n\"Not seriously,\" Haldephren said, although he seemed less certain. \"Now you will have to fight Darja herself. You are in her element now, and she has the power to destroy you.\" Dalvenjah lifted her head. \"Can she stop me from first separating you from your present incarnation?\"\n\nHaldephren laughed. \"If it pleases you, then go ahead. I will be back again, soon enough.\"\n\n\"Then the time has come to complicate your plans,\" Holmes said. \"Jenny is no longer with us. You probably know yourself what would have happened to Dalvenjah's brother if you had not kept him in stasis. She lost her sense of identity and reverted into true death only a couple of days ago.\"\n\nWhatever response he might have expected, the one that came was very much a surprise. Even while Haldephren was still trying to think of what this must mean, the doors behind the throne were pushed open and a large black dragon stepped forward. She was in form a faerie dragon, slender and long of leg, except that she was as black as utter darkness with silver eyes and a crest of purest white. She was also much larger than a Mindijarah, easily the size of a true dragon. Haldephren rose from his throne and turned to face her, his gestures eager and servile, although the black dragon ignored him completely as she stood with her head raised above him, glaring coldly at the smaller dragon sorceress.\n\n\"Is this the truth, Dalvenjah Foxfire?\" she asked.\n\n\"It is the truth, Sorceress Darja,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"I see that you have discovered the true nature of the body that you stole.\"\n\n\"The body was stolen for me, but I have adapted it for my own purposes,\" Darja said. \"1 have discovered the dragon magic, and I have made it a part of my own essence. I am now like yourself, a being of the dragon magic.\"\n\nDalvenjah cocked her head inquisitively. \"Is that a fact. There is no going back, once you have changed your inner name to define your new essence.\"\n\nDarja lowered her head. \"It is so.\"\n\n\"Oh, good.\" Dalvenjah sat back on her tail, and she honestly looked to be relieved. \"That means that you can never merge your essence with that of the entity. You have discovered already that the entity will not acknowledge you as the true Darja for as long as you were wearing Jenny's body. Even in human form, she still belonged to the dragon magic, incompatible with the common magic that forms the essence of the entity. Now you cannot succeed even if you abandon Jenny's body because you have made your very spirit a part of the dragon magic.\" \"Then it's over?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Well, everything just became much simpler,\" the dragon said. \"Now at least I have very little concern about the entity becoming the god of evil that the Emperor and the High Priest always intended. Is that why you have been called the High Priest, in anticipation of your new god?\"\n\nHaldephren drew himself up proudly. \"I am the Emperor, now that Myrkan has proven himself a traitor.\"\n\nDarja had been thinking things over very quickly and thoroughly in the last few moments, and she seemed to have come to the conclusion that she was not especially upset with the way things had turned out. Merging with the entity would have meant the end of her own existence entirely. That would not have been a matter of any concern to her in the past, when she had little enough awareness of her own existence. But that had changed recently, and she was beginning to think of herself and her own schemes at least as much as of the original purpose of her existence.\n\nAfter a moment, she sat back on her tail and smiled wickedly. \"That is all the better. Now I know exactly how to merge with the entity. I still possess that ancient tie with the entity, and I can use that to draw it to me and make it a part of myself. The entity has little sense of self, far less than 1.1 can convert the entity's essence from its own magic into dragon magic and make it a part of my own, and then I will be a god.\"\n\nDalvenjah stared at her for a long moment, then laid back her ears. \"Oh, shit! And just when I thought it was over. I really must learn to keep my mouth shut.\"\n\nDarja turned and walked slowly back into the chamber beyond the throne, as if she was no longer concerned that she was in the presence of her most dire enemies. Dalvenjah, fearful of what she might intend, hurried after her, and the others followed quickly. The chamber beyond was not as large as the oval dome although the walls and ceiling were adorned with much the same flowing stonework. This chamber was in the form of a long, narrow hall with a high ceiling, thirty yards or so wide but perhaps two hundred yards long. Yet another set of doors stood at the far end of the chamber, and these looked even more massive and secure, appearing to have been cast in some grey metal that looked oily or waxy. Two heavy bars of bright metal prevented the doors from being opened. The entity had a most un-subtle approach to discouraging unwanted visitors.\n\nDarja had spent weeks in this chamber, trying unsuccessfully to force those doors to open. The far end of the chamber was littered with the various books and magical paraphernalia that she had employed, as well as many items that she had collected in her growing awareness of her own comfort.\n\nAs soon as the company from Star Dragon entered the chamber, some very unexpected things began to happen. The two bars closing the door glowed briefly for a long moment and then shattered as if they had been made of ice, the shards falling away. Then the doors themselves opened slowly, although the only thing that lay beyond were broad steps leading down into the glare of brilliant white light. The entity itself was hidden even deeper within the core of this place.\n\n\"What happened?\" Allan asked quietly.\n\n\"Mira's presence must have made the difference,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"Any mortal body might have served Darja's purposes, at least before she took her new inner name and became a true faerie dragon, but the Prophecy named Mira specifically and the entity recognizes her presence. Having Mira and Daija here together must have confused the thing.\"\n\nDarja's own reaction to this unexpected turn of events was predictable, considering her last declaration of intent. She rushed forward to the doors and then stopped, obviously thinking things over very carefully. Although she now had access to the entity, she wanted to proceed with that contact under her own terms. Even yet, it might have been entirely a matter of her own instincts that drew her toward that door, aware she had been created for this very moment.\n\n\"Yes, good day, everyone. How very nice to see everyone again, myself included.\"\n\nThey turned quickly to discover that they had company in the form of yet another giant faerie dragon, although this one remained in the true colors of her kind, golden with a sapphire crest. She stepped through the outer doors and sat back on her tail, cocking her head as she regarded Darja curiously. The black dragon seemed to captivate her full attention.\n\n\"Who is that?\" Holmes inquired quietly.\n\n\"The ace up my sleeve,\" Dalvenjah responded. \"It could only be Jenny.\"\n\n\"Then she is still alive?\" Holmes asked, then frowned. \"Still communing with the living, I should say.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is once again with us. I knew that the spells I had used to keep her in the state we knew would last for some time yet, so the fact that she had left us hardly meant that she was finally dead. I also suspected at the time that she would be coming here, drawn by the link she still possessed with her living body. So you see, I had every reason to expect that we might see her once again.\"\n\nDarja began to pace slowly back from the inner doors, glaring at Jenny with suspicion and growing concern. \"Who are you? This is no place for you, and you should not have come. Tell me now who you are.\"\n\n\"You don't know me?\" Jenny asked. \"I would have thought that you knew me very well. You've been walking around looking like me for the past few months, although I can't say that I like what you've done with me. Would you mind giving me back to myself now?\"\n\nDarja was so surprised that she sat back on her tail and stared. \"I had expected that it must be you, although they told that you were gone. Your sense of identity seems to have suffered in a most remarkable manner.\"\n\n\"Hey, it's easy to lose your mind when you don't have a brain,\" Jenny said as amiably as ever. \"Being dead is nearly as enlightening an experience as being alive. The shame of it is that all enlightening experiences are given to those who need them the least and hardly ever come to those who could best benefit from a broadening experience. You have certainly improved from having worn me around for the past few months. That borrowed brain you like so much is just full of useful experiences and concepts. Have you thought about what you want to do with that degree in mechanical engineering?\"\n\n\"I like what I have become,\" Darja answered obliquely, although she had shown the patience of sitting and listening.\n\n\"Then I will make this bargain with you. The damage that has been done to me cannot be undone. I can take back my body and go through the rest of my interrupted life talking like Robin Williams, and that is a frightening prospect when you never grow old. I must pass on into my next life. In fact, I already have reservations. So if you'll promise to be good and help us to destroy the entity, you can have my body.\"\n\n\"I see no need to bargain for something I already have,\" Darja answered. \"Soon I will be a god.\"\n\n\"Well, have it your way,\" Jenny said, shrugging.\n\nThen she launched herself into the air, hurtling across nearly the full length of the chamber until she impacted with Darja, sending the black dragon tumbling. It was an impossible leap for a real dragon, even one of her present size, unassisted by wings, but Jenny was of course a ghost. She must have learned quite a few tricks about applying the rules of physics to metaphysics, if she could hit a dragon the size and weight of a dinosaur that hard. She came out on top during that initial impact, pinning Darja to the floor. The black dragon twisted, fighting fiercely to escape until she was able to break Jenny's hold. Darja nearly had her by the neck, a vulnerable hold for any dragon, when Jenny simply passed through her enemy and came out on top.\n\nThe others drew back closer to the outer doors, giving the two dragons plenty of room for their fight. It was hard enough to say just which of the two had the advantage, even after watching them for a few minutes. Jenny had a certain quickness and invulnerability that came from being a ghost, but Darja seemed to possess the magic to match her abilities. Even Dalvenjah did not know what Darja could do to Jenny, at least as long as Jenny was careful. At the same time, Jenny might not find the opportunity to do anything effective to Darja. Of course, Jenny was more likely to win a long battle, since Darja would tire and the effects of her misfortunes were cumulative.\n\nHolmes looked at Dalvenjah suspiciously. \"You are putting me completely to shame, I must say. You obviously expected this.\"\n\n\"I have been paying strict attention to the Prophecy, and there was one last point yet to be played out,\" she explained. \"Dragons gold and dragons black seek to gain what each may lack.\n\nWhen I saw that Darja had turned herself into a black dragon, I knew that Jenny must be around somewhere.\"\n\n\"And what do they lack?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"The only thing that they both have seriously lacked in common was a body. Jenny lacks her own body, which Darja received to make up for her own lack.\"\n\n\"And that is what they are fighting over? Jenny has a very valid reason for not wanting her body back.\"\n\n\"Well, I might not be interpreting the Prophecy with complete accuracy, but I do my best,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Which reminds me.\"\n\nShe released the chain that held the emerald, removing it from her neck, and fastened it back into a loop. Then she took three small, quiet steps forward and threw the chain over Haldephren's head, catching him by surprise while he was preoccupied watching the battle of the two dragons. Before he could react, she threw him to the floor and held him down. Haldephren's form began to glow with a powerful light until his features were hardly to be seen, only a black figure within the core of that brilliance. That figure began to flow, becoming larger and taking a new shape. When the light faded, a male Mindijarah lay sprawled on the floor before Dalvenjah.\n\nShe took his arm and helped him to stand. \"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"I feel surprisingly well,\" he said, rising to stand carefully. \"I seem to be back again. The last thing I recall, the Emperor had come to take the body of my daughter and give it to the Dark Sorceress Darja.\"\n\n\"That was exactly what happened,\" Dalvenjah said. Then she noticed that the others were staring. \"This is my brother, Karidaejan. Back from the dead and again with the living.\" \"Yes, and a very neat trick it was,\" Holmes agreed. \"But what did you do with Haldephren?\"\n\n\"I could not allow him to escape, and I did not have the time to dispose of him properly. He is in the jewel.\" She paused, seeing that Mira and Sir Remidan were still staring. \"I gave Haldephren's body to my brother, after I had made certain alterations to make it more suitable. I am afraid that it does not look entirely like the original, but that would have been a little much to expect.\"\n\n\"It will be fine, I am sure,\" Karidaejan assured her. \"But what became of Jenny?\"\n\n\"That is exactly the point,\" Sir Remidan said gruffly, his displeasure obvious. \"It is hardly fitting for a Knight to stand by while a Lady fights a great battle.\"\n\n\"This is not your fight, tin-britches,\" Dalvenjah told him sternly. \"I cannot believe that it will go on for long.\"\n\nIndeed it did not. Jenny thrust herself forward with her head held low, driving in under Darja's chest and throwing the black dragon backwards against the wall behind her. Before Darja could gather herself together, Jenny was on her again, leaping high and strong to land heavily on the black dragon. There was a sudden, brief flash of light as they hit and then Jenny was alone, once again her normal size, sitting back on her tail as she held something small in one hand. She looked over at the others, and they hurried to join her.\n\nAs Dalvenjah came close, Jenny handed her the thing she held. It was a female faerie dragon, adult in appearance but tiny in size, smaller even than J.T., wiggling and straining weakly to free herself. Dalvenjah took the little dragon, careful to hold her diminutive wings closed.\n\n\"Something to remember me by,\" Jenny said. \"Sorceress Darja, lately of the Dark. She might as well have my body, since I will not be returning to it.\"\n\n\"Do you expect me to take this home and feed it?\" Dalvenjah asked.\n\n\"Darja's whole trouble is her attitude. She only just started to be truly alive when she took my body and came under the influence of my character and memories. She needs a little more time to come to terms with life, and she very much needs a positive influence. If she learns her lessons well enough, then you can remove the restraints that I have placed upon her magic and return her to her full size.\"\n\n\"Oh, that poor little thing,\" Mira said softly, peering at the miniature dragon. She could relate to being shrunk.\n\n\"Jenny?\" Karidaejan said softly.\n\nShe turned to him. \"Hello, Daddy! The last time we met, you were the ghost.\"\n\n\"I somehow get the impression that you will not be coming back,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled wryly. \"I have been a ghost too long. You can appreciate the dangers of that, better than anyone. Now don'l go looking so concerned. You did your best, but they look advantage of you. They took advantage of us all, for that matter. I walked right into their trap, even knowing what they wanted of me. You did your best, even when you were under their power.\" \"I will always regret that I could not have done better, all the same,\" he said.\n\n\"I am sure that we all regret that we did not do better,\" Jenny told him. \"Except, perhaps, Auntie Dalvenjah.\"\n\n\"I am not in the habit of making mistakes, and so my mistakes annoy me all the more,\" she answered. \"What will you do now?\"\n\n\"There is still the matter of the entity,\" Jenny explained, indicating the open inner doors. \"He's still waiting for someone to come to him. I intend to merge with him in Darja's place. I believe that I possess the force of will and certain other advantages that come from being a ghost that will compel him to accept me, and then I plan to force him to destroy himself. He has thousands of years of latent magic in reserve, so he should explode in a most spectacular and satisfying manner.\" Dalvenjah did not look pleased. \"Is this what you want?\" \"My life is over,\" Jenny said. \"It ended a very long time ago. I have conserved myself for this moment, so don't think that I'm doing as well as I might seem. At least I can clear the entity out of this hole, and I doubt that you have any other plans for that. Besides, the matter has become rather urgent. I know that the Dark Elves have been here once, and they will be back as soon as they know that the Alasherans are gone.\"\n\nDalvenjah did not answer at once, obviously thinking the matter over very carefully. Jenny sat back on her tail, grinning wickedly. \"How do you plan to stop me?\"\n\n\"I don't like this,\" Mira protested. \"Put yourself back inside that lizard that you want to give to Darja. We can do something to help you later. I feel responsible for what happened to you, and I just don't want to lose you.\"\n\n\"I am not going anywhere,\" Jenny told her. \"Other arrangements already have been made, and I will be with you again in a few months.\"\n\n\"You will have to hurry,\" Dalvenjah added. \"Those arrangements will not wait for you much longer.\"\n\n\"I am not entirely pleased with your arrangements,\" Jenny said. \"Take your little bundle of joy and your long-lost sibling and get the hell out of here. I will hold on here for as long as I can, hopefully as much as ten hours, but I can't promise you more than two. Keep reminding Mira that she must not be afraid of her ship and have her push it as fast as it will go. That ship can give a hundred and eighty knots, and you'll need every mile.\"\n\n\"Do you really expect such a vast explosion?\" Mira asked.\n\nJenny grinned madly. \"I don't know. I've never blown up a god before. Dalvenjah, you must go.\"\n\nDalvenjah closed her eyes, and sighed heavily. \"The time has come that we must go. Every extra minute we take in getting back to the ship is three miles closer we will be when the entity is destroyed.\"\n\nMira looked back, but Jenny had already solved the problem of forcing her reluctant companions to leave by simply turning and walking almost casually through the inner doors. She descended the steps into the misty white light from below, and the doors closed slowly behind her. And that was very much the end of the matter. Dalvenjah hurried the others out of the chamber, although Mira remained reluctant to go even yet and hesitated at the door. The two steel bars that closed the doors were once again in place, so there was hardly any hope of going after her. For better or worse, Jenny was committed to her plan and no one except herself could stop her now.\n\nThey picked up their speed once they were away from the inner chamber, although Allan tossed Mira on his back so that he could run on all fours and she in turn took the cat. Karidaejan was still having some trouble adjusting to having a real body once again, but he was able to keep a pace that made Sir Remidan's armor clang and crash. They returned to the ship within a matter of minutes, and Mira had Star Dragon in the air only moments later. In spite of what Jenny had assumed, she had had a fair amount of experience lately in taking the ship up to full speed.\n\n\"Do you expect an explosion that great?\" Mira asked as she brought Star Dragon around on course and engaged the final set of vanes to bring the ship up to speed. The floating palace re ceded at a frustrating crawl.\n\n\"We are discussing tens of thousands of years of latent magic,\" Holmes reminded her. \"The sudden release of that energy will probably distort this region of the singularity, and it takes quite a lot to bend the shape of any universe. Even one this small. The more it bends, the better.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Bending the universe will absorb large amounts of that energy, but the rest will be channeled down the core into the singularity. We will not be able to get out of the way.\"\n\n\"Something is happening,\" Vajerral warned suddenly. She had stayed up on the deck with Kelvandor to watch; they hardly knew whether to be glad or saddened by the news that Jenny had returned, even briefly.\n\nThe young dragon had not actually seen anything, since there was nothing to actually see. What she had sensed was a sudden shift in the latent magic, as if the singularity itself was about to turn inside out. All of the magic flowing out through the spider's webs of arcs reversed, drawn back toward the palace, and tremendous bolts of lightning leaped out from the arcs to ripple across the maze of towers and domes, cracking and exploding stone. The ship's vanes failed as the magic itself was drawn away. The crew of Star Dragon watched that terrible display of destructive force, allowed only a single long moment to know that Jenny had failed to contain the entity for the time that she had promised, and that they were about to die in an explosion that would make an atomic bomb look small and weak.\n\nAnd then the palace simply disappeared.\n\nDalvenjah lifted her head straight up, staring in disbelief. \"She imploded the entity! At least, I suppose that she imploded the entity. Obviously that was no accident. She knew what she was doing, and she knew that it would work or she would not have done it while we are still so close.\"\n\n\"Admitting that her judgement is somewhat impaired,\" Holmes added, and he was very deliberately being kind, in honor of Jenny's tremendous courage and astoundingly poor judgement. Now that he was better aware of what had just happened, he decided that he had never been so frightened in all his life. And he had stopped having birthdays at twenty-five thousand. \"And what do you mean, you suppose that she imploded the entity? Is it possible to cause magic to implode?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Dragons do it to facilitate home canning. I was just wondering where she put it all. Magic can neither be created nor destroyed; it just keeps popping up again when you least expect it.\" Dalvenjah sat back on her tail, her ears laid back. \"I am also worried about what Jenny might have done to herself.\"\n\n\"She was already dead,\" Holmes reminded her. \"Could any force really do her any further harm?\"\n\n\"That is exactly my concern,\" the dragon said. \"Jenny was a dragon, and a dragon's spirit is tremendously strong. Much stronger and more massive, in fact, than our fragile physical selves, although most of that power and mass is locked in realms of existence that even dragons know only by inference. She would have survived an explosion of any size in this level of existence, but an implosion involves moving tremendous amounts of magic through other levels of existence and turning it inside out at the same time. If Jenny was pulled through with that magic, then I am concerned for her safety. Having parts of her being in several separate levels of existence would, of course, help to anchor her very solidly. Does that make any sense?\"\n\n\"Damned little,\" Mira said, staring over her shoulder. \"Do you know, in all the months of our association, I've understood less than half of those great, long-winded explanations that you rattle off as if it was all the most simple, logical thing in the world. You make magic sound like the lost laws of relativity.\" Dalvenjah looked hurt and confused, her ears laid back. \"Well, it is.\"\n\n\"Yes, and it only got worse when you found Mr. Holmes.\" Holmes smiled wryly. \"Frankly, she sometimes goes right over the top of my head as well. She does have the advantage of the experience of the faerie dragons, while I knew Albert Einstein only vaguely.\"\n\n\"Yes, but what does all of this mean for Jenny?\" Mira demanded. \"When will we know whether or not she survived?\"\n\n\"I suspect that we might not know for some months yet.\" Dalvenjah replied. \"My method of restoring her to full life does take some time. And now, I believe that it is time for me to go home and get to work on it.\"\n\n\"Is there anything I can do?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"You can explain it to Jenny's mother,\" the dragon suggested hopefully.\n\nMira turned back to her wheels. \"Explain it? I don't half understand it myself.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "All's Well That's Finally Over",
                "text": "The blessed event occurred some months later. Dalvenjah Foxfire gave birth to her second child, a tiny female dragonet. And she had not yet eaten it.\n\nActually, faerie dragons were not tigers and they were never known to eat their young. Most of her friends and acquaintances, however, would have assumed that the esteemed Dragon Sorceress Dalvenjah Foxfire did not possess the parental compassion and almost mindless patience required of motherhood, and they had concluded that it would have been better for the child if she had eaten it. As a matter of fact, Dalvenjah had gone to a great deal of trouble to have this child, she wanted it and she was quietly pleased to finally have it, meaning in part that she was very pleased that she was no longer pregnant. She had been through this once before, and she had in fact proven herself to be a patient and devoted mother. The trouble in that case had come when Vajerral had been mostly a grown-up dragon, with a large bulk of her education behind her and of an age when she should have begun showing signs of becoming capable and responsible.\n\nDalvenjah had been reminded often enough that she had been judging young Vajerral by a harsh standard, that being her own dauntingly serious and responsible postadolescence. Vajerral was spirited and, like most dragons her age, she was young enough to prefer adventure to cerebral pursuits. That was an unfortunate state, when one shared a castle with Dalvenjah Foxfire and Sherlock Holmes. Of course, with those two now working in partnership, high adventure would probably turn up at the door often enough.\n\nBut for now, Dalvenjah had a little dragon in her care, and adventures would probably be postponed for a while yet. Mindijaran did not lay eggs like true dragons but bore their young live and nursed them for the better part of three or four years, although the little dragons would supplement their diets with anything they could catch almost from the start. They could walk almost from birth and fly within a month, and they generally grew very quickly for their first four to six years. They would grow quickly again in their tenth year and a final time at about fourteen or fifteen before they would finish filling out slowly during their mid-twenties, usually at that time in their young lives when their sex hormones either became sated or else gave up in raw frustration. Faerie dragons were fairly notorious among the other races as having sexual impulses as big as their wingspans.\n\nDalvenjah waited until the young dragon was about half a year old before she called her various companions from Star Dragon for a formal presentation and naming of the little one. Faerie dragons took serious exception to having their young referred to as baby dragons; they were dragonets in more formal usage\u2014dragonettes to the gentile\u2014and kits in more common practice. After half a year, the little dragon was becoming fairly alert and intelligent, and she was beginning to speak her first words. Vajerral would sometimes explain, at least until it got her into trouble, that her little sister was learning to speak from her mother and Mr. Holmes, that being the reason why no one could understand her.\n\nThat was also, as it happened, the first anniversary of the day that Jenny Barker had destroyed the entity and had herself disappeared. Actually, because of the slight variance between worlds, that same anniversary had already come and gone in other places. It had been three days earlier in Mira's world, and two days earlier in Jenny's own home world.\n\nCalling together all of those Dalvenjah thought should be invited was a difficult proposition, since they were scattered over three worlds. Karidaejan had returned to his own home, which happened to have been not all that far from Dalvenjah's converted fortress. Since the place had suffered from neglect in his twenty years of absence, most of which time he had been dead, his son Kelvandor had gone with him to help in repairs. Vajerral had spent as much time as she could spare from her magical and martial studies to be with Kelvandor, whose company she preferred. Unfortunately, Kelvandor did not prefer her company in ways that she would have wished; they were the best of friends, with frequent attacks of raw lust on Vajerral's part. For his own part, Kelvandor was still loyal to the memory of Jenny, whom he had loved with a devotion that dragons usually found embarrassing.\n\nMira had taken her own assortment of champions, companions and henchmen back to her own world, where she had spent a great deal of time in the South on the Queen's business, letting it be known far and w'ide that the Empire was dead, or at least in serious need of revision. As it happened, most of the Alasherans were themselves perfectly willing to make changes. They were all merchants by instinct and inclination, and they generally felt that empire-building and minding other people's business was too expensive and far more annoying than it was worth. There were precious few actual servants of the Dark left in that world; there had never been that many in the first place, and most of those had met their timely ends in the destruction of the Island of Alashera and on the quest into the world of the sky islands.\n\nStories of the exploits of Sorceress Kasdamir Gerran and her dragon companions had swept through the South quicker than Mira herself could get there, so she found that a considerable reputation had preceded her. Because of her part in the destruction of the Island of Alashera, a fairly solid reputation had already been there waiting. And when Mira arrived in person in her new airship, which the Amazon Chipmunks had been delighted to repair for her, there was no question that she had made a serious impression. Mira let it be known that the North would be building entire fleets of such airships, but she strategically failed to mention that those plans were dependent upon finding a source of aluminum and learning quite a few tricks about advanced engineering.\n\nCertain of Mira's companions did not attend the reunion. Once matters were settled in the South, Sir Remidan and his neurotic horse Staemar had set out on adventures of their own. Remidan still had matters of his own to settle with the Sorceress Queramael, and he had set off with the intention of either defeating her once and for all or else making an honest woman of her. He was convinced that if she was honest then he would be pleased to marry her, and he had now decided that Queramael had turned to evil because he had withheld his affections from her when they were young. Mira had sent him merrily on his way, trusting that he and Queramael deserved each other.\n\nJ.T. did elect to go along, partly because he was more fond of parties than he cared to admit and partly because he thought that he had a good idea of how everything had turned out and he wanted to see if he was right. The Trassek twins remembered only too well that they did not stand very high in Dalvenjah's favor, and they wisely decided to stay outside and guard the ship.\n\nThe first thing that everyone noticed was that Mira had finally returned to her regular height of spitting distance below six feet. Most of the dragons had hardly known Mira at all before she had lost her enhanced height, while both Vajerral and Kelvandor had gotten used to seeing her short, so it took everyone a little time to get used to her new height. Unfortunately, she was now able to return to her old clothes and a fashion sense that was predatory and often blatantly gaudy. This time, she came dressed for hunting. Holmes, like the dragons, had kept the physical enhancements that they had received during their visit to the core of the singularity, and Mira had been lusting after his augmented physique ever since.\n\nMira was the first to arrive, brought into the world of the faerie dragons through a Way that Vajerral had opened for her. She sauntered into the room with her old perky, self-satisfied swagger restored to its proper proportions by the lengthening of her legs. Dalvenjah lay on her side on a bed of cushions near the fire, such as faerie dragons preferred for sitting to talk or read. Her little one was drawn up close to her side, the young dragon hardly any larger of body than a small dog. Faerie dragons were bom lanky and lean, unlike most babies of almost any type, and at any age they were never as large and heavy as they looked. Her brother Karidaejan and Mr. Holmes sat nearby, the three of them in the middle of some arcane conversation. Kelvandor sat by the bank of large windows that looked out over the valley far below, while Vajerral hurried over to sit close by his side and did her inadequate best to flirt for his attention.\n\n\"Well, long time no see!\" Mira declared in a voice intended to wake the dead and get the party rolling. Her definition of the perfect party was the proper balance of intellectual debate and depravity, and the dragons were too fond of the former. \"All of you are looking well.\"\n\n\"You have certainly grown,\" Dalvenjah remarked, frowning. \"Lady Kasdamir Gerran, do you know how to spell 'rude'? This is a solemn occasion. And do not ask; I will tell you when the others arrive.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I could show you to the drinks and food,\" Karidaejan offered.\n\n\"Oh, I would never think of interrupting your conversation. Mr. Holmes can do it,\" Mira insisted. Fire one. Torpedo on target.\n\nHolmes looked over his shoulder. \"Everything is there on the table across the room. Please help yourself.\"\n\nMira frowned and began maneuvering for another shot. Vajerral watched it all, sighed and bent her neck to rub her cheek against Kelvandor's. Since she was rather overaffection-ate in her gesture, she only managed to poke him in the chin with her horn. Kelvandor drew back, fussing and swearing quietly in his own language.\n\nDalvenjah looked up impatiently. \"Why don't you just give her what she wants?\"\n\n\"I once made the mistake of giving her what she wants,\" Kelvandor complained. \"She keeps wanting more.\"\n\n\"Then please take her away and give her more,\" Dalvenjah said.\n\n\"My, we certainly are peevish today,\" Holmes observed.\n\n\"I have a very good reason to be peevish,\" the dragon answered. \"Peevish is a poor word. Today I must explain certain things to certain unreasonable mortal persons. Lady Mira, you did park you ship in some place that will give my other guests room to land on the ledge?\"\n\n\"I rolled her back as far as I could manage,\" Mira said, and turned to Mr. Holmes. \"Perhaps you should come out and make sure that Star Dragon is out of the way.\"\n\nFire two. Torpedo on target.\n\n\"Ah ..Holmes hesitated, running at full speed for room to maneuver. \"Young Vajerral guided you in, and she knew what was expected, I am sure.\"\n\nMira corrected course. \"Meaning no criticism, of course, but the young dragon's thoughts seem to be on other matters.\" \"Excellent point,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"Vajerral, take Kelvandor outside and make certain that Mira's ship is out of the way.\"\n\n\"Mother?\"\n\n\"Find a cold mountain stream and stick your head in it.\" Vajerral certainly did not object to making any brief journeys with the object of her draconic lust, although Kelvandor looked as if he would rather spend the afternoon bathing cats. They were suddenly interrupted by a sound that all of them had heard at some time in their lives, as unexpected as the blades of a helicopter were in the world of dragons. Certain guests would soon be arriving from the mortal world, led through a Way Between the Worlds by Allan. And since magical airships were still unstable in that world, a small helicopter served much the same purpose. The one great advantage of machines was that they would run anywhere. Dalvenjah cocked her ears for a moment, then lowered her head and sighed heavily. Holmes and Mira had long since observed that all dragons were fond of sighing. Their long necks gave them an excellent set of pipes for heavy breathing.\n\n\"The last guests will soon be here,\" she said. \"I wish that I could have avoided this meeting, but in all fairness I cannot.\" \"When have you worried about being fair?\" Mira asked, which was of course unfair of her.\n\nDalvenjah looked up. \"I have often been stem, especially in making others do what was required of them, or what was best for them. I have never been unfair when I could help it.\"\n\nThe little dragon had awakened at the sound of the helicopter, opening her small mouth in great, cavernous yawns, before she lay down again and began to suckle. Dalvenjah looked surprised and then uncomfortable; this was not the best of times, and the dragon felt confined and vulnerable at a time when she needed very much to be in control. If nothing else, this called attention to the fact that her breasts were enlarged to ungainly proportions for nursing, although still small by mortal or even elvish standards.\n\nThe sounds of the helicopter grew louder even through the heavy stone walls of the old fortress, until the machine finally landed on the ledge just outside. A couple of uncomfortable minutes passed before Allan entered with their remaining guests, the three mortals from Jenny's home world who had known the girl best. Most important were her own mother and Allan's mortal sister Marie, she of the Viking temper, and Jenny's father by adoption, Dr. Rex Barker. The last member of this little group was Dave Wallick, the FBI agent who had helped Dalvenjah in her battle with the steel dragon Vorgulremik during her first visit to his world. His former partner, Don Borelli, had been unable to attend, while the New York agent Clark Bowenger had declined the invitation, having decided that he had seen quite enough of dragons to last a lifetime.\n\nKaridaejan lifted his head when he saw Marie, recognizing her even after all the years, and he took a cautious step back. They had been Jenny's true parents, at the time when Karidaejan had taken the mortal form of James Donner in order to provide a sire for the true object of the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons. He had supposedly died in a traffic accident, when in fact the High Priest Haldephren had stolen his body and captured his spirit. He feared what Marie might have to say to him, this strong-willed mortal woman who had once been his wife and mother of his second child, and whom he had been forced to deceive in many ways. Even her memories of him had been altered to excuse his disappearance, although she now knew the full truth.\n\nEven Dalvenjah Foxfire respected Marie's forceful temper, although it was fairer to say that Marie was one of very few, and perhaps the only mortal, who could stand up to Dalvenjah's forceful temper. Karidaejan Foxfire did not share his younger sister's boundless personality, and he knew that he had met his match. Even Dalvenjah dreaded this meeting.\n\nMarie guessed who he must be from his reaction. \"James?\"\n\n\"My proper name is Karidaejan,\" he said. \"I suppose that you must know by now everything that happened, and why.\"\n\nMarie nodded slowly. \"I really don't want to hear any more explanations and excuses just now. If there's one thing that I learned from Dalvenjah, it's that you dragons will always do whatever you seem to think is important. You can be cold, determined and proud at the best of times. I could forgive you easier if it was simply your nature, but you do understand the damage that your grand schemes do to a person's life. So I have to ask just one thing. Why didn't you just do what you needed to do and go away?\"\n\n\"Because I cared,\" Karidaejan answered simply. \"You were the mother of my child and I loved you, in spite of what you looked like. I started something that I did not know how to end. I never expected that things would come out in quite the way they did.\"\n\n\"You brought Jenny to life knowing what you expected for her,\" Marie said. \"You began the chain of events that led to her death.\"\n\n\"He did not begin it,\" Dalvenjah said firmly. \"And Jenny is not dead. She is here in this very room.\"\n\nSeveral of those gathered knew already. Several, most of those mortals, could not have been more surprised.\n\nMira just clapped her hands. \"Ah-ha, I knew it! I knew it when I first came into the room and saw that little dragon.\"\n\nMarie hurried over and looked closely at the tiny dragon, still suckling at Dalvenjah's breast. It was a vision of her worst nightmares. Every member of her immediate family had been turned into faerie dragons; at this rate, she would end up a troll herself and live under a bridge eating goats. She sat down on the edge of the cushion, rubbing her face in her hands and muttering pitiful broken words in Norwegian.\n\n\"It's not so bad as all that,\" Dalvenjah said. \"Look at it from my point of view. After Vajerral, I had no intention of becoming a mother once again for at least a hundred years. Since there was no hope of returning Jenny to her past life, the only way was forward. And since she really is a dragon in spirit, the only proper thing was to offer my parental services. The only other choice was to have Mira bear her, and she would have grown up a midget with a confused sense of height and good taste.\"\n\nMarie looked up. \"What does that mean? Am I her mother, or are you?\"\n\n\"Technically, I am now her mother,\" Dalvenjah explained. \"Under present circumstances, you might consider it a joint effort.\"\n\nDr. Rex was scratching his head. \"Then when she grows up, she will be the same Jenny that we knew before, except in appearance?\"\n\n\"That is something that I do not yet know,\" Dalvenjah admitted. \"When a faerie dragon enters a new life, it is not usual for her to keep memories of her former life. Magical efforts can be made to keep memories and personality intact, at least to a great extent, and I took all necessary measures when I first stabilized Jenny's existence. Unfortunately, I never anticipated that she would magically implode the entity. I do not yet know how much she might have damaged herself, and I doubt that I will know for some years yet.\"\n\n\"Then she might be changed?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"I am not yet certain that this dear child even is Jenny. But that is the name she shall have, all the same.\"\n\nMarie looked as if she was having a hard time being consoled. The thought that her only child was now a dragon's daughter seemed irrelevant compared to the question of whether or not it was Jenny and if she would remember who she was when the time came. She looked down at the little dragon, who did not yet even seem to be aware of her.\n\nShe stared at Allan. \"That means that you're her father!\" \"Well, it does follow, doesn't it?\" Allan admitted, looking embarrassed and slightly bewildered as if he was not yet used to the thought himself.\n\n\"Well, yes ..Marie began to protest, then stopped and stared when a second tiny dragon trotted into the room. This one was even smaller than Jenny, although she had the proportions of an adult.\n\n\"Oh yes, one final member of my loyal band of merry faeries,\" Dalvenjah said. \"The Sorceress Darja, formerly of the Dark. I am now fairly certain that she has mended her ways, although it would be more accurate to say that she has learned for herself what she really wants in life.\"\n\n\"What, to be taller?\" Rex asked.\n\n\"I will return her to her proper size very soon now, and then I will send her and Vajerral out into the wide world to look for boyfriends,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"She is wearing Jenny's old body, you know.\"\n\n\"But it's a dragon,\" Marie protested.\n\n\"Jenny always was a dragon,\" Darja explained in her tiny voice as she sat down beside Dalvenjah's cushion. \"Since returning to her old body would not repair the damage that had been done to her mind, she graciously permitted me to have it.\" \"That brings up one question that I've been wondering about for some time now,\" Holmes said, deciding that it would be best to change the subject for a while. \"The Quentarah have asked us to solve their problems by releasing the excess magic of the singularity into the outer world. Unfortunately, releasing that magic into the outer world would create problems of its own.\" \"Magical creatures would return to our world?\" Dr. Rex assumed.\n\n\"The results would be rather more complex than that,\" Holmes said. \"The return of magic to the outer world will, in the long run, have certain dire consequences. It is true to say that magical creatures will return to that world. Unfortunately, the laws of evolution are hardly that simple. The same conditions that will permit the return of faerie life will no longer favor mortal life. As magic slowly returns, this time you may very well see mortals fading away into insignificance in the dawn of a new golden age of faerie.\"\n\n\"That does not necessarily follow,\" Dalvenjah said. \"There is the very real possibility that their world will become like Mira's, a world of mortals who have access to strong magic.\" \"Perhaps, but I think not,\" Holmes said. \"Having once been a faerie world, I believe that it will once again become a faerie world. Although I will grant you that the presence of mortals may predispose matters to keeping it a world of mortal magic-users.\"\n\n\"And you intend to restore magic to our world?\" Marie asked incredulously.\n\nDalvenjah looked momentarily uncomfortable. \"I'm afraid that it has been done already. When Jenny destroyed the entity, she also removed the obstruction that prevented latent magic from flowing freely through the singularity into the outer world. The entity, you see, was the obstruction. And now that it has been done, I certainly cannot imagine how we might possibly set things back to the way they were before.\"\n\n\"It's been about a year now, and I have observed no change at all so far,\" Rex observed. \"My assumption therefore is that evolutionary change is slow, even magical evolutionary change. It took thousands of years for the age of lost faerie to come to an end, and it will probably take several thousand years for the new age of faerie to evolve.\"\n\n\"That is essentially correct,\" Holmes agreed. \"A very astute deduction on your part, Dr. Barker.\"\n\n\"Elementary, my dear Holmes,\" Rex said, enormously pleased with himself. \"So it all comes down to the fact that the worst-case scenario, from the mortal point of view of course, is that change will be slow and relatively if not completely painless. And when you discuss magical evolution, I am tempted to assume that you mean that mortals will become magical and eventually faerie, rather than the assumption that mortals will simply die out. So if the situation cannot be reversed, at least it is by no means tragic.\"\n\n\"That is essentially correct.\"\n\n\"Indeed, it might actually be good for us.\"\n\nDalvenjah glanced up at Marie. \"It comes from being around Holmes for extended periods of time. We all started to talk like him, even the cat.\"\n\nMarie glanced at the cat, who lifted his head and smiled pleasantly. He was in an exceptionally good mood. Jenny had been one of his favorite people, and he held such a low regard of people in general. It suited him to think that she might very well be back.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Marie mused, rubbing her nose. \"I seem to recall that we were discussing Jenny. I know better than to ask if she is going to stay like this. You were telling us about what her chances might be of remembering her past life, and possibly how soon you might know.\"\n\nDalvenjah laid back her ears. \"I cannot say. I do not know if the spells of containment I had placed upon her would have held through the implosion of the entity. I do not even know if Jenny's spirit survived. The problem now is that Jenny is a child, and we must wait for her to grow up somewhat before she will be able to tell us what she knows. All I can say is that most young dragons will begin to recall their past memories at some lime between the age of four and sixteen. We might have a long wait.\"\n\n\"Is there some way to cast a magic spell and have her tell you?\" Marie asked fearfully.\n\nDalvenjah glanced down at the little dragon. \"No, there is not. At least you might have your answer very soon. Kelvandor will be obliged to wait at least sixteen years or more for what he wants, and he has no assurance that she will even remember who he is.\"\n\nKelvandor was still sitting quietly by the window, wearing a long face. All faerie dragons had naturally long faces, but Kelvandor had just about cornered the market in lugubriousness. Of course, part of the reason for his present emotional state was the fact that Vajerral was still trying to encourage an affectionate response from him.\n\nMarie's eyes got very wide. \"I hesitate to ask, but just what does that great lump of a dragon expect from her?\"\n\n\"Well, he loves her, of course,\" Allan said. It was his turn to break bad news to his sister. \"They were mates, although I hesitate to think how they managed that.\"\n\n\"But, I thought that Vajerral..\n\n\"No, she just wants sexual favors,\" he insisted. \"It's a vicious triangle. Vajerral lusts after Kelvandor, who loves Jenny, whose present interests are limited to dragon's milk. If Vajerral gets her way, Kelvandor will get in a lot of practice by the time he gets Jenny back.\"\n\n\"My word, what a concept!\" Mira agreed eagerly. \"Multiple first-time experiences! No wonder reincarnation is so popular.\" \"Nature never intended that a dragon should remember anything of her past life, and we have that against us as well,\" Dalvenjah said, affording Mira a hard stare. \"Circumstances were such that Jenny never had a chance to enjoy her previous life, and I have done what I could to give her another chance. But you must also remember that it is actually more important to us that the Jenny we knew is returned than it is to her, as long as she is alive. If she does not remember her past, then we must allow her to develop into this new life in her own way rather than expect her to mimic the manners and traits of someone who has ceased to exist. And if this is not even Jenny's spirit in the first place...\"\n\n\"It is,\" J.T. announced calmly. \"It is my business to know such things. I sense beyond any doubt that the spirit of this young dragon is Jenny. What I cannot tell you is whether or not she remembers anything.\"\n\n\"But does she have to be a dragon?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"It is logical that she should be,\" Dalvenjah said. \"She has the spirit of a faerie dragon, and she was bom one this time. Both of her fathers and one of her mothers were dragons, so it's three against one. At least you will perhaps be grateful that I do not insist upon her having a Mindijaran name. I had thought that she should be named Maeridaln.\"\n\n\"Thank heaven for small favors,\" Marie muttered. \"It just needs a little getting used to, that's all. To think that I was once married to a dragon, and that my college-educated daughter is now a baby dragon, and that my own brother is now her father.\" The little dragonet lifted her head and looked over her shoulder, blinking at Marie. \"Ah, mom! It's neat!\"\n\nEveryone stopped and stared for what seemed like a very long time. For those who had been present in their first adventure together, those few words in that tiny, childlike voice reminded them particularly of a very young Jenny of some fifteen years or so earlier, a precocious nine-year-old with a fascination for flying and making herself invisible.\n\n\"Well, that would seem to put any remaining questions to rest,\" Dalvenjah said at last. \"If she remembers everything from her previous life, that at least will make educating her fairly easy. Granted that she is probably the only dragonet with a degree in engineering from Colorado State.\"\n\n\"Then she really does remember everything?\" Kelvandor asked hopefully. Then he dropped his head and laid back his ears. \"I still have to wait.\"\n\nVajerral nuzzled him gently. \"I know some games to pass the time.\"\n\n\"Young dragon, you will be going back to your studies,\" Dalvenjah told her firmly. \"At this time, your little sister is probably better educated than you are. I never intended that I should raise any ignorant dragons.\"\n\n\"So, things are working out fairly well for everyone involved al ter all,\" Mira observed as she helped herself to the drinks. \"So just about everyone gets some sort of happily ever after, even if they have to wait.\"\n\n\"I am happy that you think so,\" Dalvenjah said. \"I hardly know if we will survive this double blessing of maternal bliss.\"\n\nMira hesitated, then decided that she should pour herself a second measure of some interesting draconic liqueur. \"And just who else here is experiencing maternal bliss?\"\n\n\"You are, of course.\"\n\nMira put down her glass and took a long drink from the bottle, then she turned and glared at the cat. \"Did you know?\"\n\n\"J.T. the Cat knows all,\" he said smugly. \"Remembering how you nearly twisted my neck, I have enjoyed keeping that knowledge to myself. I admit that I was beginning to wonder when you would realize just why you were turning green over your morning tea and kippers.\"\n\n\"Is that a fact!\" Holmes was making very little effort to conceal his tremendous amusement. \"Sorceress Kasdamir Gerran is due to be our next little mother? Would it be rude of me to ask if you know who the father is?\"\n\nMira looked surprised, and took another quick drink from the bottle. \"Oh, my! Oh, my! That steel-plated bastard!\"\n\n\"You never should have listened to his story about leaving on a dangerous quest and not wanting to die a virgin,\" J.T. reminded her. \"If nothing else, you might have recalled that he has a proven history of getting sorceresses pregnant.\"\n\nHolmes laughed out loud this time. \"You fell for that line?\" \"Well, I was tipsy at the time,\" Mira explained. \"Otherwise I would have remembered that spell of contraception. This is what I get for not listening to Beratric Kurgel. He always warned me that Sir Remidan is a little too fond of tipping his lance.\"\n\nHolmes had risen from his seat and went now to the table where Mira had been making very free with the drinks. He chose a large bottle of fine wine that had been sitting on ice and began removing the cork. \"And so, our great quest is done at last and we have not suffered too greatly from our trials.\" \"Speak for yourself,\" Mira said sullenly.\n\n\"Your present condition is not a direct result of our journey,\" Holmes reminded her. \"You lost your old ship but you received in exchange your new Star Dragon, the marvel of your world. Jenny lost her life, but she had been given a second chance at the life that should have been hers. Darja has been saved from the dire fate that she had been created to serve and is now free to embrace a life of her own. Karidaejan lost his own life for the sake of the Prophecy, and it was given back. I have found my lost magic and now I am permitted to once again take part in life rather than watch it pass anonymously. Mira will be allowed to discover the joys of motherhood, and Kelvandor will have a fine opportunity to discover the true meaning of patience.\" \"And was it worth it all?\" Rex asked.\n\n\"Indeed it was,\" Holmes insisted as he poured wine into a whole regiment of long-stemmed glasses. \"One world has been liberated from the terror of the Dark, while other worlds have been spared from the danger of the expansion of the Dark. The sky islands are at peace and freed from the threat of being overwhelmed in a flood of latent magic, while faerie magic has been restored to yet another world. These were the goals that we fought to achieve, and we should be grateful that a greater price was not demanded of us.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, I never suspected that you were secretly an optimist,\" Rex said as he helped to pass out the glasses.\n\n\"You must never confuse me with my fictional counterpart,\" Holmes said. \"If everyone of a drinking age has a glass, I would suggest that a toast is in order. Dalvenjah Foxfire, if you would be so kind.\"\n\nDalvenjah looked surprised. \"This was your idea.\"\n\n\"You were our leader.\"\n\n\"And you know what you want to say. I am in no mood to read your mind.\"\n\n\"Then I will indeed propose a toast,\" Holmes said, lifting his glass as an indication for the others to join him. \"To my dear companions. To old friends and new. To dragons, elves, men and even cats. May our roads never end. May we always fly an open sky. May life be grand and glorious. I ask you now to join me in proposing a toast to Adventure. May we always enjoy it in full and proper measure, and never face the grim specter of boredom.\"\n\nThe others hesitated, wondering if they really wanted to join him in that rash toast."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "The Crimson Torch",
        "author": "Angela Holder",
        "genres": [
            "dragons",
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Featherstone and Sons",
                "text": "The ringmaster's voice rang through the circus tent. \"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you\u2026 The Crimson Torch!\"\n\nThe barred doors of Torch's cage flew open. He rushed forward through a burst of smoke and sparks from the pyrotechnics. The crowd roared. The noise swelled as his chain jerked him to a halt and he reared on his hind legs, slashing the air with his front claws and spreading his wings to their full thirty-foot expanse. Torch savored every shriek of fear and gasp of awe.\n\nThe crack of Jom's whip cued his next move. Dropping back to all fours, Torch dipped his head and waited while Jom swapped the chain that ran from his collar to his cage for one attached to a tall pole in the center of the ring. At Jom's signal he prowled the ring, careful not to foul his limbs or wings in the clanking chain, snaking his head from side to side and hissing at the spectators who watched with breathless fascination.\n\nHe opened his mouth and exhaled a teasing flicker of flame, delighting in the crowd's noisy reaction. The sacs extending from his jaws down both sides of his neck bulged with ample fuel for the night's performance. The crystals in the back of his throat struck sparks with every swallow. Torch hadn't left an audience disappointed in the seventy years he'd been the star attraction of the Featherstone and Sons Circus, and he certainly didn't intend to start now.\n\nJom made his usual show of advancing on Torch with his whip, lashing it dramatically close, though he wielded it with such skill it never touched Torch's scales. Torch snarled and snapped, equally careful to keep his sharp teeth a safe distance from Jom's fragile skin. With a display of barely cowed ferocity, he backed to his mark on the far side of the ring, settled into a tense crouch, and waited for Jom's next signal.\n\nTorch knew the ringmaster's speech by heart, but he still paid close attention as the deep voice boomed through the huge tent and the crowd hushed to listen. \"You see before you the most magnificent specimen of reptilia dragania outside the savage wilds of Dragana itself. The Crimson Torch is young for a dragon, just coming into his prime. But you won't find his equal for length or weight or strength anywhere in Forland, or the rest of Aldania either. Nor will you ever see another dragon of such a strikingly vivid color. Thanks to the excellent care he's received throughout his life, Torch far outshines any common working dragon.\"\n\nJom cracked his whip. Torch rose to his full height, spread his wings, and struck a dramatic pose.\n\nMost of the crowd cheered loudly at the display. But here and there on the rows of benches encircling the ring, Torch's sensitive ears picked up discontented grumbles. His nostrils flared and his tail lashed. Before this year, he'd never heard that sort of reaction from the people who flocked to the circus. Now there were more complainers at every show. They must be listening to the lies spread by ISPLD, the so-called \"International Society for the Protection and Liberation of Dragons.\"\n\nTorch was quite certain the members of that organization had no idea what dragons really needed or wanted. Perhaps they meant well, but ISPLD's growing influence did nothing but harm him and others of his kind. He wouldn't be surprised if none of them had ever been closer to an actual dragon than the gondola of an airship.\n\nThey were the reason so many of the seats had remained empty during this year's stand outside Minpoint, the third biggest city in Forland. It was because of them the circus's income had sharply decreased. Torch had listened to Jom and his wife Darah's low, worried voices discussing the subject every night for weeks. For the past few days Jom's shoulders had sagged and his face had creased in the way Torch knew indicated unhappiness in humans. Upsetting his beloved trainer was more than enough to earn ISPLD Torch's enmity.\n\nThe ringmaster continued. \"For three generations, the Bricker family has been The Crimson Torch's trainers and custodians. Nearly eighty years ago, Orwin Bricker traveled to Dragana as a member of the renowned explorer Bazel Prenscoff's third expedition. Those brave men risked life and limb to secure a cargo of dragon eggs. Wild dragons attacked them at every turn, burning three of their ships and slaughtering many of their comrades. But in the end the expedition returned triumphant to Forland, bearing its priceless cargo. As a reward for his faithful service, Prenscoff gave Orwin one of the eggs.\"\n\nThe ringmaster's voice took on a hushed tone, although it remained loud enough to carry to the farthest seats. The audience leaned forward in rapt attention. \"For three long years Orwin tended it as devotedly as a mother tends her child. At last, his perseverance paid off. The egg split open, and a tiny dragon crawled out. His scales and wings were brilliant red.\"\n\nThe gaslights flared. Torch turned so they showed off his color to the best effect. It was his proudest feature. Most dragons were muddy brown or drab gray. Some were shades of green or yellow, but only a rare few were red. And even fewer were as bright as Torch, according to Jom. Torch loved the hours he spent in a relaxed sprawl as Jom or Darah polished each individual scale to a glossy shine.\n\n\"Orwin began training the infant dragon immediately. With great patience and meticulous technique, he quelled the beast's native ferocity and tamed his vicious spirit. He mastered the creature so well that even after growing to his present enormous size, he remains obedient to his trainer's every command.\"\n\nJom cracked his whip and barked \"Hup!\" Torch rose onto his hind legs, spreading his wings for balance. The crowd applauded.\n\nThe ringmaster continued. \"When Orwin retired, his son Philo took over as Torch's trainer. Now Philo's son carries on the family tradition. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for Jomathan Bricker and the Crimson Torch!\"\n\nThe audience applauded enthusiastically. At Jom's signal, Torch returned to all fours and paced around the perimeter of the ring. He extended one wing at a time in response to Jom's commands. He curled his tail into a perfect circle, then snapped it with finely controlled precision to knock down a series of targets. Finally, snarling as if he hated bending his will to his trainer's, he lowered his head and allowed Jom to rest a hand between the horns that swept back from his forehead.\n\nThe crowd reacted with enthusiasm. Jom stepped back and reached into the pouch at his side. He withdrew a walnut-sized ball of compressed brown leaves and displayed it to the crowd. Torch inhaled a deep breath of the familiar spicy, smoky scent.\n\nThe ringmaster gestured to the ball. \"Like all dragons, the Crimson Torch is rewarded for obedience with dragonleaf.\" Jom tossed the ball, and Torch snapped it from the air. He gulped it as the ringmaster went on. \"The plant is native to Dragana. Its cultivation in Aldania nearly three hundred years ago allowed us to domesticate dragons and put their impressive abilities to work in the service of humanity.\"\n\nA rush of warm, languorous happiness washed over Torch. His muscles loosened and his head swam pleasantly. Only the promise of more treats to come kept him from curling up for a blissful nap. The effects of a single ball would wear off quickly. When Jom was pleased with his performance, he doled out five or even six balls over the course of a show, and another two or three after Torch returned to his cage.\n\nJom backed away. Stagehands swarmed the ring, extinguishing gaslights and inserting torches into brackets. As the light dimmed the audience tensed in anticipation.\n\nThe ringmaster swept his hand around the ring with a flourish. \"But enough talk. It's time for what you came here to see!\"\n\nJom raised his whip. Torch sucked in a deep breath. As the lash cracked down, he opened his fuel sacs and exhaled a fine mist of flammable liquid past the sparking crystals in his throat. A burst of fire billowed from his mouth, illuminating the dark tent with its brilliant orange glow. The crowd gasped and cheered.\n\nTo the accompaniment of rhythmic whip cracks, Torch shot precisely aimed jets of flame at each of his namesake torches, setting them alight. He moved around the ring until a circle of fire shone, filling the whole vast tent with dancing light and shadows. The crowd's noise hushed to breathless, spellbound quiet.\n\nJom barked a command. Torch crouched and lowered his head until Jom could reach the iron collar clamped around the narrowest part of his neck. It wasn't as tight or as heavy as it appeared, and Torch was used to the way the chain constrained his movements, but he still looked forward to this point in the show with anticipation almost as eager as the crowd's.\n\nUsing a big, ornate key, Jom unlocked the collar. He removed it and stepped back, raising his whip. Torch gathered his hind legs beneath him, heart racing. This was what he dreamed about during the long, dull hours in his cage.\n\nJom waved the whip over Torch's head, then let the tip fall to tickle him between the eyes. A jerk of the handle sent the whip's tip soaring upward. Torch sprang after it, thrusting his legs and sweeping his wings down. The air supported him as solidly as the earth. Each powerful stroke carried him higher.\n\nJust beneath the tautly stretched fabric of the tent, he leveled out. A slight tilt of his wings and twist of his tail sent him gliding in a wide circle that took him over the heads of the crowd. He reveled in the wind rushing past his snout and filling the membranes of his wings, the upturned faces with mouths gaping wide in wonder, the reckless speed of a dive and the swooping, soaring sensation as he swept aloft again.\n\nAfter Torch had completed three circles around the tent, the ringmaster raised his voice. \"I'd like to thank all of you for coming tonight. This is our last performance in Minpoint, but we'll be back again next year. We hope to see all of you return for more dazzling sights, thrilling feats of strength, death-defying stunts, and spectacular, unforgettable acts!\"\n\nThe whip cracked. Jom waved a ball of dragonleaf. Torch spiraled lower. The offered treat would be difficult to resist if he didn't trust Jom to deliver it once their final trick was complete. And the crowd's reaction always gratified him nearly as much as the intoxicating leaf.\n\nAt the perfect moment, Torch broke out of his descent. With a harsh cry, he soared straight up. Fierce beats of his wings carried him higher and higher. This time, instead of slowing as the fabric of the tent approached, he accelerated. His sharp eyes picked out the zig-zag seam cleverly concealed in the shadows near the tent's peak. After a final powerful thrust, he furled his wings. Tucking his chin so his horns would take the brunt of the impact, he slammed into the canvas.\n\nThe weak threads holding the gap closed broke, and Torch hurtled into the open sky. He flung his wings out and caught the air. Screams rose from below as he climbed toward the stars.\n\nTorch made a long, lazy circle around the tent, surveying the landscape. To the east, flickering gaslamps lined the streets of Minpoint. To the west, mountains rose in the distance. The dark, glossy line of the river wound between them. Beside it ran the road the circus wagons would travel tomorrow on the way to their next stop. Torch knew every twist and turn between here and Chiselport. It had been fifteen years since they'd added the booming seaside town to their itinerary.\n\nAs always, he had to fight the longing to wing away from the tent, toward the forests shrouding the slopes of the distant hills. At least it would only be two days until they reached his favorite camp, beside a lake at the foot of the mountains. There, miles from any human habitation, Jom would let him out of his cage to enjoy the freedom of the sky for far longer than these brief forays allowed. Sometimes Torch flew for two or three hours before exhausted muscles forced him to return to his cage. Jom always gave him a generous meal of well-done meat afterward, and at least three extra balls of dragonleaf beyond his usual ration.\n\nTorch returned his attention to the present. He had a show to finish. The ringmaster's voice rose faintly through the jagged rent, panic belying his reassuring words. \"Everyone remain calm! The situation is under control. The Crimson Torch will return shortly. This is merely a slight, ah, hiccup in our routine. I promise, everything will return to normal momentarily.\"\n\nTorch worked the muscles of his throat, generating a mouthful of sparks. He released a thin mist of fuel, just enough to ignite and remain burning. A tight bank brought him into position. He swept his wings back and dove toward the patch of painted flash paper that blended perfectly into the red and yellow stripes of the tent.\n\nTorch took careful aim. A stream of flame shot from his mouth and burned through the paper with a brilliant glare. He folded his wings and shot through the hole, then threw them open and arrested his descent with a wrenching backstroke.\n\nThe crowd's shrieks filled the air. Torch flapped around the tent, breathing out bursts of fire until his fuel sacs ran dry. When only wisps of smoke and a few sparks emerged from his mouth, he switched to vocalizations, adding his loudest and fiercest roars to the pandemonium.\n\nIn the ring below, Jom shouldered a long rifle. The ringmaster agitatedly explained to the crowd that it shot darts filled with a harmless tranquilizer. Torch swept down, screeching at the top of his voice. Jom tracked his flight for several long, tense moments, then pulled the trigger.\n\nThe bang of the blank gunpowder charge rang in Torch's ears as he mimed a strike to the center of his chest. He jerked backward, thrashed his head and tail, and let his wingbeats falter. For a moment he pretended to recover, then slid sideways, wove drunkenly through the air, and tumbled toward the ground. His wings streamed limp behind him, but he angled the tips so they provided just enough lift to slow his descent. Jom scrambled out from under his falling body. A shout and crack of his whip distracted the crowd at the crucial moment so Torch could brake hard just before he hit. He struck the sand of the ring with one shoulder and rolled, flapping and kicking and thrashing.\n\nJom tackled him around the neck. As Torch flung him frantically back and forth, Jom applied what appeared to be a choke hold. Torch cut off a bellow mid-shriek. Jom wrestled him down, with Torch making a great show of resistance. Gradually his struggles weakened. Jom seized his horns, shoved his head to the ground, and planted his boot on Torch's neck. Torch went limp. The crowd erupted in exultant cheers.\n\nTorch's heart glowed at the intensity of their reaction. His timing had been perfect tonight. So had Jom's. Together they'd put on a spectacular show. Surely even the most skeptical members of the audience must be convinced now that the circus was exactly where Torch belonged.\n\nJom clamped the heavy collar around Torch's neck and hauled on the chain. Torch groggily stumbled to his feet and staggered as Jom dragged him across the ring. Cracks from the whip drove him into his cage. He flopped on the cool metal floor and panted, tired and happy.\n\nHis cage rumbled as stagehands rolled it out of the ring. Jom bowed in all directions. The crowd applauded wildly. As Torch's cage passed through the heavy velvet curtains, Jom turned and strode after it.\n\nArlemus Featherstone, the owner of the circus, clapped Jom on the back. \"An excellent show. You deserve to be proud of what you've accomplished.\"\n\nJom shook him off. His voice was curt, and Torch noticed an oddly choked quality in its tone. \"It makes no difference.\" He dug in his pouch. \"Does it?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\" Arlemus hesitated, then blurted, \"My offer still stands. You don't have to\u2014\"\n\n\"And my answer is still no.\" Jom jerked his head at Torch's cage. \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\nArlemus laughed. \"It's not as if he can understand us.\"\n\nTorch huffed in annoyance. He'd learned to understand Forlish before he was ten years old. But because his mouth couldn't produce the sounds necessary to speak it, few humans realized the true extent of his comprehension.\n\n\"You'd be surprised.\" Jom turned his back and strode to Torch's cage. He thrust a hand through the bars. \"Here you go, Torch. You were perfect tonight. I couldn't have asked for a better\u2014\" He swallowed hard. \"Enjoy.\"\n\nTorch snapped up the three dragonleaf balls from Jom's palm and gulped them down. To his surprise, Jom pulled another handful from his pouch and offered them as well. This time there were five.\n\nTorch blinked at Jom. His trainer must be very pleased indeed to reward him so richly. He'd never given Torch so much dragonleaf at once before. Torch quickly gobbled the balls, lest Jom change his mind and withdraw them.\n\nPleasure flooded his body. Torch sprawled in loose, contented relaxation. He barely even noticed when the stagehands rolled his cage out of the big top and across the field toward the small tent he shared with Jom and Darah.\n\nJom walked beside his cage. He put his arm through the bars and scratched Torch's head and neck, focusing his attention on all the places Torch enjoyed most, especially the tricky tight spot beneath his horns that Torch couldn't quite reach with his claws.\n\nDreamy, floaty dragonleaf haze bore Torch on its soothing waves. A distant corner of his mind found it odd when Jom pressed even more leaf into his mouth, but the rest of him accepted it as a delightful gift. He lapped up ball after delicious ball. Euphoria deeper and wider and higher than he'd ever experienced swelled to consume his consciousness. He felt as if the whole world was one giant ocean of delight.\n\nEven the ragged pain in Jom's voice couldn't penetrate the fog enough to dim his happiness. \"I'm so very, very sorry, Torch. I tried. I swear I did. But my grandfather signed over your ownership to Featherstone and Sons in exchange for a share of the circus's profits. I offered all my savings to Arlemus to buy you back, but it was less than half of the offer he eventually accepted. The damn ISPLD has convinced too many people to stay away. I wish they knew what they've done to you with their stupid, blind idealism. Not that they'd care. They're bound and determined to do away with the practice of keeping dragons in captivity, even if they have to kill every dragon to do it.\"\n\nJom gripped Torch's collar, pulling it uncomfortably tight. Torch might have protested if he hadn't been so deep in dragonleaf bliss. \"I wish I could rip this off you and throw the door of your cage open so you could fly away. If it were only me, I might do it. But I have to think of Darah. If they arrested me they'd confiscate everything we own, and I can't leave her destitute. Besides, they'd hunt you down eventually. Nowhere in Forland is remote enough for you to hide for long. If they couldn't recapture you, they'd shoot you down. A dragon on the loose is too dangerous to be tolerated, even if all he ever does is eat a few sheep now and then.\"\n\nJom fell silent. For a long time he walked beside the cage with one hand resting on Torch's shoulder. Dimly, Torch wondered why they hadn't reached their tent yet. Usually the trip was much shorter.\n\nFinally Jom spoke again. \"At least you're going to a reasonable situation. The Earl of Baromere paid a fortune for you, so he'll be sure to take good care of his investment. And he has other dragons to keep you company.\"\n\nThe scents of coal smoke and hot metal wafted into Torch's nostrils. Jon's voice strengthened. \"You don't have to worry about me. I'm retiring, and Darah and I are moving to Broadbury to live with Lathie and her husband. We'll enjoy spending time with our grandchildren, and Lathie will welcome her mother's help.\"\n\nHe gave Torch a firm pat and withdrew his arm from the bars. \"I gave you enough leaf to keep you dreaming through most of the journey. By the time it wears off you'll be nearly to your new home. Behave yourself and the earl will have no cause for complaints. I pray you'll be as happy there as I like to believe you've been with us. I pray they'll love you as much as we have, and that you'll thrive with them for many years, long after I'm gone.\"\n\nTorch's cage lurched and swayed. Jom's voice came from somewhere below. \"Farewell, Torch.\"\n\nTorch wanted to do something to express his affection to Jom. But he was too relaxed to move, and the thought swiftly fled his leaf-hazed mind. He closed his eyes and drifted into a light doze. Somewhere a high, haunting whistle floated through the night. A series of jolts settled into a steady, soothing vibration. It rocked Torch deeper and deeper into soft, lovely dreams."
            },
            {
                "title": "Baromere Park",
                "text": "Torch woke up slowly, groggy and disoriented. The stink of coal smoke choked the air. He snorted, but the acrid stench remained in his nostrils. Gritty soot coated his tongue and clumped in his eyes. He pawed at his face, finally managing to clear the worst of it. He staggered to his feet, fighting to keep his balance. At least he was in the familiar confines of his cage, although the constant rocking motion and the vibration shivering through his bones felt very different from the usual sway of the wagon. He peered through the steel bars of his cage, trying to understand where he was and make sense of what was happening.\n\nGreen rolling pastures sped past outside, far faster than Torch had ever experienced save during flight. A flock of sheep came into view and was gone before he'd fully formed the wish for a good hot meal of roast mutton. The thought made him aware of the hollowness in his belly. He felt as if he hadn't eaten for days, although that couldn't be true. Jom would never neglect to feed him.\n\nA memory swam up, faint and surreal. Torch shook his head. It had to be a nightmare, brought on by too much dragonleaf. The words spoken in Jom's grief-choked voice were much too horrible to be real.\n\nHe padded to the front of his cage and thrust his nose into his water barrel. It was less than half full, and soot speckled the lukewarm liquid, but he drank it anyway. It helped his thirst but didn't do much for the wooly feeling in his mouth and throat. He felt as if he'd accidentally eaten a sheep's fleece instead of its flesh.\n\nAt first he thought his food box was empty, because he couldn't smell any meat through the smothering coal fumes, but when he pushed up the cover and poked his nose in, he found a good-sized slab of beef inside. It was half-raw and cold, but he could remedy that. His fuel sacs were full and a few careful coughs produced a nice flame. Torch bathed the beef in a gentle wash of fire. Jom usually provided his meals already cooked, but Torch sometimes hunted for himself during his brief free flights, so he had a little experience. He managed to only burn the outside slightly while getting rid of nearly all the disgusting pinkness. And the chunks he tore off were delightfully hot as they slid down his throat to his belly.\n\nThe meal helped drive the last of the leaf fog from his mind. As his thoughts cleared, Torch realized he must be aboard a train. He'd never traveled on one before, although of course he'd seen them many times. By pressing his eye to a gap between bars and peering down, Torch determined that his cage was chained to a flat railroad car. A brisk wind flowed in through the barred sides and door.\n\nWhat was he doing here? Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to Torch before. He tried to think back, but all he could remember was the triumphant final show in Minpoint. Afterwards everything was a blur. Except for that disturbing dream, but it couldn't actually have happened.\n\nCould it?\n\nDread wormed into Torch's belly. It was true that the circus's revenues had fallen sharply since ISPLD had begun its campaign against dragon captivity. They'd been especially critical of those who used dragons for inessential things like entertainment. They'd called for boycotts of circuses with dragon acts. Enough of the general public had responded to send Featherstone and Sons into deep financial difficulties. Never before in Torch's life had the benches held so few spectators.\n\nCould it truly have grown so bad that the circus's owner had decided his only recourse was to sell off the source of the trouble? Torch didn't want to believe it, but the more he thought about it, the more the available evidence seemed to point to that conclusion. Orwin, his first trainer, the man he'd loved as a father, had told Torch about the deal he'd made with the circus. He'd said it was the best possible way to provide for Torch's future. Dragons lived far longer than humans, sometimes as much as eight or nine hundred years, and Orwin had been deeply concerned about how to secure Torch's welfare after he was no longer alive to protect him.\n\nTorch's heart twisted when he recalled the pain in Jom's voice. He'd known Jom since the day Orwin had brought his red-faced newborn grandson to meet the dragon he would one day inherit. Torch had peered in fascination at the tiny human. There were always plenty of babies and young children in the stands, but he'd never seen one so small up close before.\n\nJom's petulant squalls had ceased and he'd stared at Torch, equally fascinated. From that day forward, he and Torch were inseparable. Toddler Jom had crawled into Torch's cage and played around his feet until his panicked mother had dragged him away. Young Jom had strutted behind his grandfather in the ring, cracking a miniature copy of Orwin's whip. Slightly older Jom had taken over providing Torch's food and water and cleaning his cage. From the start he'd done a meticulous job.\n\nThey'd even flown together a few precious times. Jom had been nine the first time he'd stolen Orwin's key and let Torch out of his cage late at night. He'd climbed onto Torch's back and clung with a combination of joy and terror as Torch sprang into the air and wheeled high over the camp. They'd only had a few more opportunities before Jom had grown too heavy for Torch to carry, but Torch had treasured the memories ever since.\n\nIf what he remembered had really happened, Torch would never see Jom again. And it was becoming harder and harder to believe it had all been a dragonleaf dream.\n\nTorch sank to the floor of his cage and buried his head beneath one wing.\n\nBefore his turbulent emotions could settle, the sound of the train changed. The rhythmic chugging slowed in tempo. Hisses and squeals were followed by dragging jerks. Torch was thrown first forward, then back.\n\nHe scrambled to his feet and looked through the bars. Buildings crawled by outside, big and blocky and windowless. The train slowed further, its brakes shrieking, and ground to a halt. Torch's ears rang in the sudden silence.\n\nHe heard the distant sound of people's voices, but for a long time no one approached his cage. Was this his destination, or just a stop along the way?\n\nA large, heavy wagon drawn by two big draft horses pulled into view. The horses snorted and tossed their heads when they caught his scent, but stern words from their driver reduced their reaction to flared nostrils and rolling eyes.\n\nAbruptly a group of men swarmed around Torch's cage. To the sound of shouts and gruff orders, they unfastened the cage from the railroad car and shifted it, lurching and swaying, to the bed of the wagon. Torch tried to brace himself, but a particularly sharp drop sent him sliding until he fetched up against the bars with bruising force.\n\nTwo men watched the proceedings from the ground beside the wagon. One of them, dressed in dark blue overalls streaked with black, remarked, \"It's not as heavy as I expected. We could have gotten by with a crew half this size.\"\n\nThe other, who wore the elegant clothing of a gentleman, answered in a condescending tone. \"Dragons have hollow bones, like birds. It's the reason they're able to get off the ground. I would have thought that was common knowledge.\"\n\nThe first man bristled, but his voice stayed deferential. \"We don't deal in dragons very often in these parts. Not like the stations up around Swarthmoor.\"\n\nThe gentleman sneered politely. \"That's about to change. The earl intends to expand his collection. In the coming months and years we'll be importing the best dragonflesh money can buy from all over Aldania.\"\n\nTorch's cage suddenly dropped from under his feet. It landed in the wagon bed with a thud that rattled his teeth. The gentleman winced and scowled. \"You'll do well to train your men to handle such valuable cargo with greater respect and skill.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind.\" The man in overalls strode toward the wagon, pointing and shouting. His crew labored to tighten straps around Torch's cage.\n\nWhen the work was completed, the crew streamed away and the gentleman climbed up beside the wagon's driver. The horses leaned into their collars, and the wagon rolled forward. It traveled the length of the train until it reached a gate through the fence that surrounded the train yard and passed through.\n\nTorch hoped the gentleman would say more about where they were going, but he ignored both the driver and Torch, staring straight ahead in chilly silence. Torch turned his attention to the passing scenery. The familiar motion of a wagon was soothing after the alien train, and curiosity was a welcome distraction from distress and grief.\n\nMany other wagons filled the streets near the rail yard. Those heaped with coal headed toward the warehouses beside the track. Torch's wagon joined the empty ones on the road out of town. They traveled together for several miles after the buildings ended before the road forked and the coal wagons took the left branch toward a line of hills in the distance. Torch's wagon swerved right onto a wide, quiet road that led through golden fields of grain and meadows dotted with trees and occasional ponds.\n\nThe pleasantness of the surroundings lightened Torch's mood. Perhaps Jom had been right, and his new home would be almost as good as the circus. He'd said there would be other dragons there. The gentleman's words seemed to confirm it.\n\nNervous excitement bubbled in Torch's stomach. He'd never met another dragon. He'd seen them, of course, flying overhead, pulling airships or carrying messages, but never face-to-face. He tried to imagine what might happen. Would the earl's dragons welcome the newcomer, or would they treat him coldly? Might they resent him for invading their home? How would he have felt if a new dragon had joined the circus?\n\nThose thoughts kept Torch occupied until the wagon turned into a tree-lined drive. He pressed his snout to the bars and peered ahead. The gravel drive swept in graceful curves between gentle rises. It passed through a thick stand of trees and crossed a rocky brook on an arched wooden bridge. Finally it curled into a circle in front of a big, stately house. Steps led up to a columned entryway. Window-lined wings extended to either side.\n\nAs the wagon slowed to a halt, a man emerged from the door and hurried down the steps. He was short and plump, with unkempt blond hair. His clothes were made of velvet and silk, but they were wrinkled and a bit too tight. He clasped his hands and surveyed Torch with unabashed delight. \"I say! He is a magnificent beast, isn't he?\"\n\n\"He is, my lord.\" The gentleman descended from the wagon and bowed to the plump man.\n\n\"I was certain they must be exaggerating about his color, but he really is just as bright as they said. 'The Crimson Torch,' indeed! And his spark crystals are intact? They told me he's never been quenched.\"\n\n\"I haven't had the opportunity to examine him yet, but there are scorch marks around his food box, so it seems so.\"\n\n\"Marvelous!\" The man beamed, then frowned. \"You're certain the new den is fireproof?\"\n\n\"It's solid stone, my lord. He can breathe fire on it all day and it will remain unharmed.\"\n\n\"Good, good!\" The smile returned to the plump man's face. \"Let's get him settled in. I can't wait to see him spread those wings. They'll span fifty feet, I wager.\" He clambered into the back of the wagon and squeezed between Torch's cage and the side, staring through the bars with unconcealed fascination.\n\nTorch stared back. This must be the earl, although he was nothing like Torch had pictured. He wished he were able to speak Forlish as well as understand it, so he could greet his new owner and ask some of the thousands of questions that swarmed in his mind. But even Jom hadn't been able to understand the labored sounds that were the closest approximation of human speech he could produce.\n\nThe earl extended a tentative hand through the bars. When Torch stretched out his snout to touch it, he snatched it back. \"You really are quite astonishingly large,\" the earl told him. \"You'll love it here at Baromere Park, I'm certain. I've had a new den constructed just for you. It, ah, might be a touch cramped. I had the architect reduce the scale a bit from what he first designed. People always exaggerate when they're selling something, you know. But I'm sure it will be fine.\"\n\nThe wagon lurched into motion. It turned onto a narrow lane that led around the house. The earl continued to ramble, but he didn't say anything very interesting, and Torch was too busy taking in the surroundings to pay much attention.\n\nAs they rounded the house, a long, grassy slope spread before them, leading down to a silver lake. There were woods to the left, but on the right a broad clear area lined the shore, dotted with several widely spaced structures. Torch's heart raced as a musky scent reached his nostrils. It smelled a bit like his cage when it needed to be cleaned, but more complex. He'd identified three separate components by the time the wagon reached the first structure, a clearly artificial earthen mound with a cave-like arched opening.\n\nA chain rattled, and a dragon emerged from the archway, blinking and sniffing the air. The earl gestured, his voice proud and indulgent. \"That's Flicker. She's the very first dragon I bought. I'd always wanted one, you see, so when an airship company went bankrupt and sold off their teams, I jumped at the chance.\" He waved apologetically. \"Made a few mistakes with her at first because I didn't know what I was doing. But I've learned a great deal since, and Archibahd has set me straight on quite a few things as well.\" He smiled fondly at the dragon. \"She's a bit dotty, I'm afraid, but we love her anyway.\"\n\nFlicker came to the end of her chain and sat up on her haunches. Her scales were dark brown, and she was smaller than the draft horses pulling the wagon. She eyed Torch inquisitively. Her mouth opened and a squawk emerged, followed by a hiss, a squeal, and a few snaps of her teeth.\n\nThe earl laughed. \"If I didn't know better, I'd swear she just said, 'Hello, there. How do you do?\" He laughed again, hearty and jolly, and leaned over the side of the wagon. \"He's called the Crimson Torch! He's going to be your new neighbor!\" Settling back, he grinned at Torch. \"You know, that name of yours is quite a mouthful. What do you say we call you 'Crimsy' for short?\"\n\nTorch hissed in disapproval. He had a perfectly good nickname, thank you very much. \"Crimsy\" sounded inane, like something a lisping child would call a stuffed toy.\n\nThe earl laughed. \"Crimsy it is, then.\" He pointed to the next structure, a boxy stone cabin with an oversize door. \"And that's Blaze. I got him off a bloke who had him from the egg. Kept him as a pet until he grew too big to manage and started causing mischief. Last straw was when he bit the man's son. The beast would have been put down if I hadn't offered to take him off the fellow's hands. No one else wanted a vicious dragon, but there's no way for him to cause harm here.\"\n\nA yellowish-gray head poked out of the cabin door, gave a long snarl and a short hiss, and withdrew back inside. The earl chuckled. \"Now he said, 'I can't be bothered with this nonsense! Go away!'\"\n\nObviously the earl was only joking, but Torch wondered. Did dragons have a language of their own? If the wild dragons in faraway Dragana did, could any dragons in Forland speak it? He didn't see how they could. They'd all either come here as eggs or been born to captive dragons.\n\nEven if they didn't have a language already, perhaps it would be possible to invent one. Maybe it could use sounds both dragons and humans were able to make, so they could carry on real conversations instead of these one-sided affairs.\n\nAs they approached the next structure, a tumbledown stone chapel, a dragon burst from the door and charged to the end of its chain. This one was a dark, rich green, like a pine forest in deep shadow. It rose onto its hind legs, flapped its wings, and bugled a long, wavering cry.\n\nThe earl sighed and shook his head. \"That's Juniper. She used to be a messenger, as docile and obedient as you please. Then one day she started refusing dragonleaf. Wouldn't touch the stuff. After that, no one could manage her. She escaped three times. The last time she evaded capture for a full month before they hunted her down and hit her with a tranquilizer dart. She's lucky it wasn't a bullet; the next time it would have been.\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"I got her for a song, but I'm starting to wonder if it wasn't a bad bargain after all. She makes the others restless. They used to be nice and quiet, barely making a squeak, but now they growl and snarl and carry on all the time. And she's constantly trying to break loose. Last week Archibahd found a link of chain that she'd nearly pulled open. Before that it was the hinge on her collar.\" He grimaced. \"If she ever does get out, we'll have no recourse but to shoot her. Too much prime livestock in these parts to risk letting her go on a rampage.\"\n\nJuniper stared at Torch. He stared back, both fascinated and intimidated. She'd survived on her own in the wild, with no humans to take care of her? Sometimes when Jom had let Torch fly free he'd fantasized about not coming back, but he never would have actually done it. Hunting was hard and unreliable, and breath-roasted meat was nowhere near as good as human cooking. Where would he have found shelter when it rained or snowed? He would have been bored with no performances to give and lonely without Jom and Darah and the rest of his circus friends. And even if he could have endured all those things, there would have been no dragonleaf. It didn't grow wild in Forland, or anywhere else in Aldania. So there'd never been any real question of not returning to his cage.\n\nBut Juniper refused to eat dragonleaf. Why in the world would she choose to deprive herself that way? Didn't she like it? Torch would never willingly forgo the lovely, relaxing pleasure it provided. The aftereffects of the massive amount Jom had given him had been a bit unpleasant, but for the most part even that experience had been delightful, and it had allowed him to sleep away the journey that would otherwise have been uncomfortable and tedious. He was glad Jom had been so thoughtful. He hoped the earl or Archibahd would provide a regular supply of dragonleaf. Starting soon. Hs last portion had been big, but it had been a long time ago, and he was growing anxious for another serving.\n\nJuniper settled back onto all fours. She glanced at the earl, then returned her attention to Torch. Slowly and deliberately she uttered a sequence of three sounds: first a low cough, then an ascending squeal, and finally a soft hiss. Then she gazed at him expectantly.\n\nConfused, Torch tried to figure out what she wanted from him. Were the sounds supposed to have some meaning he could understand? Did she want him to echo them back, or reply with sounds of his own? If this was the dragon language he'd speculated about, he had no way to convey that he didn't speak it. Except what he was doing now, staring at her as blankly as a mindless sheep.\n\nJuniper snorted and turned away. She stalked back into the chapel with a flick of her tail. Torch had no difficulty understanding the disgust she was expressing by her tone and body language. He shook his head and dropped into a crouch. He had a sinking feeling he'd made a bad first impression on his new neighbor, although he had no idea how he could have done better.\n\nThe earl, who as far as Torch could tell had been oblivious to his and Juniper's interaction, turned toward the front of the wagon and gestured grandly. \"And here's your new home.\"\n\nTorch followed his pointing finger. Farther down the shore stood another stone structure. This one was in the shape of an ancient temple like the ones painted on the circus fortune teller's tent. Stone columns crowned with carved flowers supported a domed roof. The circular wall behind them was engraved with twining vines. One portion lay in an artful tumble of stone blocks, as if ruined by the passage of centuries.\n\nThe earl chattered on in proud excitement as they pulled up in front of it and halted. \"After my bad experience with Juniper, I made a decision. No more cut-rate dragons. From now on I'll spend whatever it takes to acquire the best of the best. With coal prices up and my mines more profitable than ever, I can afford it. There's no point in keeping dragons if my collection can't eventually rival the finest in Forland. Hiring Archibahd was the first step. Buying you was the second. You cost me a year's income, but you're worth every twelfthpiece.\"\n\nArchibahd dismounted from the wagon and went to fetch the end of a heavy chain fastened to a sturdy metal post beside the temple entrance. He brought it to the door of Torch's cage and carefully joined it to the last link of his chain with an iron padlock. Only then did he unlock Torch's chain from the ring welded to his cage. \"You'd better stand well clear, my lord.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" the earl said. He scrambled down from the wagon bed and moved a few steps away.\n\n\"Farther,\" Archibahd called. \"He'll be wild until he gets some leaf in him.\"\n\nAs the earl backed farther away, Archibahd produced a sealed packet from his coat pocket. When he tore open the paper, Torch caught a tantalizing whiff of dragonleaf. Archibahd climbed into the wagon and waved the open packet at Torch's face. \"You want this, don't you? You can have it if you behave. Watch.\"\n\nHe dropped a single ball at the rear of the wagon, and another on the ground a short distance away. One went halfway between the wagon and the temple, another on its doorstep. Archibahd ducked into the temple. He emerged a few minutes later crumpling the empty paper and climbed back into the wagon. \"That should keep you busy until you get settled in.\"\n\nTorch huffed. Did Archibahd think he was a cat that need his paws buttered to accept a new home? But when Archibahd urged the earl a few more steps back and swung the door of his cage open, Torch pounced on the first ball of dragonleaf and snapped it up, then sprang down from the wagon and went for the second. The delicious rush began as he hurried to the next, the loop of joined chain dragging behind him.\n\nHe paused and glanced back. The earl was beaming. Archibahd regarded him with smug satisfaction. The leaf spread its cheerful relaxation through Torch's body, making him eager to please his new owner and caretaker. They were the only audience he had, now.\n\nTorch yawned wide, displaying his long, sharp teeth. He stretched first his forelegs, then his hind legs, luxuriating in having plenty of space after the long, cramped journey. He lashed his tail and tossed his head. Finally, anticipating their reaction, he turned to give the earl and Archibahd the best angle and unfolded his wings, spreading them to their full span and stretching every membrane taut.\n\nArchibahd only sniffed, but the earl's long indrawn breath was all Torch had hoped for. Wonder suffused the earl's voice. \"Glorious. Simply glorious.\"\n\nTorch arched his neck proudly and tucked his wings into place along his back. He turned to the temple. The first flush of dragonleaf euphoria was subsiding, and he couldn't wait to replenish it. Hopefully the ball on the threshold would be enough to last until he'd located a few of the balls Archibahd must have distributed around the temple. The caretaker couldn't possibly have had time to hide them very well. Torch would quickly nose them out.\n\nAs he bent his head to snap up the ball waiting in the entrance, a high, plaintive cry stopped him. He jerked up and swiveled to find its source.\n\nJuniper had moved as far toward his temple as her chain would allow. She strained against it, her collar digging deep into her neck. Her eyes dropped to the ball of dragonleaf, then rose to meet Torch's. Slowly, without breaking their gaze, she swung her head from side to side.\n\nTorch jerked back. What right had she to tell him not to eat it? What made her think he'd listen? There was nothing wrong with dragonleaf. She was deluded if she thought there was.\n\nMaybe she'd had some horrible experience with humans that made her distrust their gifts. If so, Torch felt sorry for her, but that didn't mean he was going to pay attention to her mad ideas. Humans had always been good to him. Orwin and Philo and Jom would never have given him dragonleaf if it could harm him.\n\nHe deliberately lowered his head, lapped up the ball of leaf, and looked back at Juniper as he swallowed it. She turned away with a low sigh and slunk back toward her chapel.\n\nTorch marched into his temple, savoring the renewed rush of pleasure. He set about systematically exploring the circular space, devouring each ball as he found it, not stopping until he was certain he'd located and consumed every one."
            },
            {
                "title": "Juniper",
                "text": "Sunlight streaming through the broken portion of wall woke Torch. He yawned and tried to stretch, but the diameter of the round temple was too short to accommodate his full length. He had to keep his spine either awkwardly hunched or curved to one side or the other. It hadn't bothered him while he slept, because he customarily curled up and wrapped his wings around his body like one of the humans' blankets, but it was annoying now that he was awake.\n\nNo matter. He was free to go outside whenever he chose. That was a big improvement over the circus, where he'd spent most of his time confined to his cage. Torch padded out of the temple into the cool dawn. The sun had barely cleared the trees, but it sparkled cheerfully on the lake. He trotted down to the shore, delighted to discover his chain was long enough to allow him to wade a short way into the water. He splashed in the shallows, slurping up the fresh, clean water and washing the last of the soot from his scales.\n\nRefreshed and greatly encouraged about the prospects for life in his new home, he set about exploring the rest of the area within his chain's reach. Sometime during the night someone had brought a platter of meat\u2014pork, he thought\u2014and set it inside a brick box with one open side beside the wagon track. It was cold, but it was thoroughly cooked, so Torch didn't bother to flame it. He was so hungry it tasted delicious despite the congealed fat that covered one side.\n\nHe prowled around for a while longer, finding a shallow pit filled with sand where apparently he was supposed to leave his wastes. That, too, was an improvement over his accommodations at the circus, where he'd either had to wait until Jom took him to the midden or use a pile of straw in the corner of his cage. It was a luxury to have free access to a latrine the way humans did.\n\nThat was it, though. No trees grew in his area, although he found a number of freshly sawn stumps. No bushes, either, nor any other plants besides a little grass poking up through the packed dirt and gravel. He supposed they must be afraid he might accidentally start a fire. Which was ridiculous. He'd learned to control his flame before he was ten years old. He was always aware of exactly where every spark was going. If despite his best efforts one fell into grass or leaves or other flammable material, he swiftly stomped it out. It had been fifty years since his flame had caused a fire, and then it had only scorched a small corner of their home tent before Orwin put it out.\n\nHe was about to return to the lake when he noticed that Juniper had emerged from her chapel. He wasn't sure whether she'd want to interact with him after the way he'd disregarded her last night. But life here could quickly become miserable if he was on bad terms with the other dragons. So he tried to project polite, friendly interest while he approached as close as his chain would let him go. He made a few soft grunts, the way he used to do when he wanted Jom to scratch his head.\n\nJuniper hesitated, but eventually she walked toward him until her chain stopped her. Only about ten feet separated them. Torch was delighted they were able to come so close together. They might actually be able to get to know each other.\n\nJuniper sat down on her haunches like a dog. Torch copied her. He didn't usually find the posture very comfortable, but he wouldn't mind it for a short while. She tilted her head to one side and regarded him. He looked back, trying not to let his gaze become awkward. It wasn't easy when he had no other way to communicate with her.\n\nFinally Juniper drew a deep breath and let out a long sigh. Then she straightened her neck, fixed Torch with a hard stare, and raised one front paw to tap her chest. Her mouth opened and she emitted a scratchy moan followed by a short hiss.\n\nTorch's heart raced. It was a word. It must be. It couldn't be anything else. Juniper must know a dragon language, and she must have decided to teach it to him. If he could learn to speak with her, and maybe Flicker and Blaze, too, as easily as humans spoke with each other, his life would be immeasurably enriched.\n\nShe tapped her chest again and repeated the sequence of sounds. It must be her name. Torch echoed it as accurately as he could and pointed his paw at her to show he understood.\n\nJuniper blinked, her breath coming faster. She said her name again, and Torch repeated it. Juniper's excited pleasure was evident in the way she arched her neck and rustled her wings. Several more times they said the word to each other, until Torch was sure he was saying it exactly as she did and it would remained fixed in his mind.\n\nFinally Juniper bobbed her head. She pointed at him, tilting her head to one side.\n\nTorch opened his mouth, then closed it again, feeling foolish. He couldn't pronounce his own name. Not even close. He would just sound ridiculous if he tried. He shook his head.\n\nJuniper nodded slowly. He thought she looked sympathetic. She studied him, then turned and looked out over the lake for a moment.\n\nWhen she turned back, her manner was decisive. She pointed at him and made a rising snarl followed by a descending moan.\n\nTorch's heart soared. She'd given him a name in the dragon's language. He repeated it with great care. When she indicated her approval, he said it again, then over and over, bobbing his head and flapping his wings. Juniper joined him, and their mingled voices sent his new name echoing over lake and woods.\n\nMore voices joined theirs. Torch looked past Juniper and saw that Blaze and Flicker had emerged from their shelters and approached as close as their chains would let them. They all chanted his name together until Juniper broke off and bounded to the far side of her area. She made a series of rapid and varied sounds, and Blaze and Flicker responded in kind.\n\nTorch could barely contain his delight. If he'd doubted before, he couldn't anymore. The dragons here spoke their own language, and they were going to teach it to him. He vowed to work so hard and learn so fast they couldn't help but be impressed. How long would it be before they could carry on a simple conversation? A week, a month, a year? He'd been around seven years old before he'd been able to understand most of what Orwin said. But he'd been only a baby then. Surely this would be easier and faster.\n\nJuniper left off speaking with Flicker and Blaze and came back to his side. She summoned him to follow with a jerk of her head and led him down to the lake. She dipped her snout in the water, lapped up a mouthful, and shook a glittering arc of droplets in his direction. Her long hiss reminded Torch of the sound of a stream rushing over rocks. That would make its meaning easy to remember. He repeated the word eagerly.\n\nFor more than two hours Juniper taught him words. They covered the names for the limited range of objects available within reach of their chains, as well as the parts of a dragon's body and even a few simple actions like walking, drinking, and flapping. Occasionally Torch got confused and mixed up sounds or meanings, but Juniper drilled him sternly and patiently until he sorted them out. She was a relentless taskmaster, but Torch didn't care, because he was so excited to master the new skill.\n\nAs noon approached, Torch caught the sound of wheels crunching on gravel. Juniper abruptly cut off the word for \"three\" and swept her tail to obliterate the scratches in the dirt she'd used to indicate numbers. She gave Torch a look laden with meaning, spoke a word he hadn't learned yet, and turned to bound with patently false eagerness to the brick box where the wagon track passed her chapel. She plopped onto her haunches and looked uphill toward the big house and its cluster of outbuildings.\n\nTorch's eagerness was genuine. He hurried to his own food box and waited beside it. The morning of hard work had left him ravenous.\n\nA wheeled cart rolled into sight. Torch didn't recognize the man dressed in servant's clothing pushing it, but Archibahd paced beside it. The wonderful aroma of hot mutton floated to him on the gentle breeze.\n\nThe cart stopped in front of Flicker's cave. The servant used a long-handled paddle to transfer a laden platter into her box while remaining beyond the reach of her chain. Archibahd watched her closely as she devoured the meat, then nodded in approval and tossed her a ball of dragonleaf. She snapped it eagerly from the air. He followed it with two more, which Flicker received with equal enthusiasm.\n\nTorch impatiently waited his turn as Archibahd and the servant repeated the routine with Blaze and moved on to Juniper. She gulped the mutton as hungrily as the other dragons had, but when Archibahd produced a ball of dragonleaf, she snorted and turned away. He scowled as she stalked to her chapel and ducked inside. He carefully dropped it and two more in a neat pile on the grass just inside her chain's reach. At his curt gesture, the servant used the paddle to scoop up three dried-out balls from beside the fresh ones and deposit them in a pail attached to the cart.\n\nTorch shuddered at the waste of good dragonleaf, but he quickly dismissed the thought as the servant transferred his own platter of mutton. It had cooled a bit during its trip from the kitchens, but it was still pleasantly warm. It was as plain as the pork the previous night had been. Torch missed the salt and spices the circus cooks had always used, but he couldn't fault the quality of the meat, which was tender and flavorful. He bolted it, then looked eagerly at Archibahd.\n\nThe man's lips stretched into a thin smile. \"I'm glad this one knows what's good for him.\" He tossed Torch a ball of dragonleaf. Torch caught it and swallowed it eagerly, then opened his mouth for the next.\n\nArchibahd tossed it with pleasing alacrity while he continued speaking to the servant. \"I warned the earl that if he shows any sign of mimicking the green one's refusal, we'll have no choice but to force-feed them both. He still doesn't like the idea, but he reluctantly agreed.\" He turned to scowl at Juniper's chapel. \"I almost hope it comes to that. The earl's been far too lenient with her. A dragon without leaf is a disaster waiting to happen. If I can't persuade the earl to listen, someday soon he'll wish he had.\"\n\nThe servant muttered agreement as he turned the empty cart around and wheeled it back uphill. Archibahd tossed Torch his third ball and followed him.\n\nTorch took time to savor the leaf's sweet taste and spicy fragrance before he swallowed. Juniper still hadn't emerged, so he padded down to the lakeshore and sprawled in the sun on the sandy beach. The dreams that floated through his mind were as sweet as the flavor.\n\nWhen he woke, the sun was halfway down the sky. Juniper was sitting at the end of her chain, watching him with an attitude of disapproval. Guilt washed over him, but he shook it off. He'd deserved a break from his diligent efforts to learn. Now he was rested and ready to work again.\n\nShe paced around the arc of her chain's length to their meeting spot. Torch hurried to join her. Without comment she slashed three scratches into the dirt and repeated the word for \"three.\" Torch earnestly echoed it. His mind was a bit fuzzy at first, the lingering effects of the leaf making it hard to concentrate, but after a while it cleared.\n\nJuniper taught him the numbers through ten and demonstrated how to combine them to name larger numbers. Once Torch thoroughly understood the pattern, she paused. Her gaze wandered around, looking for something she hadn't yet taught him.\n\nThere were a great many things Torch wanted to ask her, but the shared vocabulary they'd established was too limited to let him formulate even the most basic questions. Or to understand her answers, probably. For the first time since they'd begun the language lessons, he wondered if what they were trying to do was even possible. How would they ever establish the words for abstract concepts like \"why\" and \"where\" and \"how\"? It was horribly frustrating to know that Juniper undoubtedly understood Forlish just as well as Torch did, yet neither of them could use that knowledge to communicate.\n\nAt least there were a few things he could ask with gestures. He walked over to his food box, looking back at Juniper. She moved as close as she could and watched him attentively. He poked his nose into the box and mimed gulping food. She cooperatively provided a word and he echoed it, although he couldn't be sure whether it meant \"meat,\" \"meal,\" or \"eat.\"\n\nHe hesitated before going on. But there was no way for him to learn without asking. He looked over at Juniper's food box, then nosed the ground next to his. He wished he could reach the three neglected balls of dragonleaf that lay in the corresponding spot by her box. Both so she would understand what he was asking, and so he could enjoy them instead of watching them go to waste.\n\nJuniper shook her head, uncomprehending. Torch looked back and forth between her box and his, then touched the spot. She followed his actions with her eyes, but remained baffled. Torch couldn't think of anyway to be more clear, so he kept repeating the gesture.\n\nHe saw the moment she understood. She froze for a long moment, then rose stiffly. She stalked over to her food box and stared down at the little cluster of balls with loathing. After shooting a glance back at Torch to be sure he was paying attention, she spat a harsh, ugly gagging sound.\n\nFrom beyond her came a bark that sounded very much like human laughter. Blaze was standing at the end of his chain, watching them with amusement. When Torch looked at him curiously, he shook his head, pointed his nose at the corresponding spot by his own food box, and pronounced a different word, this one a high, rising whistle followed by a click of teeth.\n\nJuniper snarled at him, let out a rapid string of words, then whirled back to Torch and repeated the gagging sound.\n\nBlaze shook his head again, then turned and called. Flicker came to the end of her chain nearest him. He gave her what must be an explanation, consisting of a long string of words Torch didn't understand. She seemed confused, asking a few questions that he replied to, but eventually she looked at Juniper apologetically, then turned to Torch, ducked her head, and repeated the whistle and click that Blaze had used.\n\nJuniper glared at her, bared her teeth at Blaze, and strode to the door of her chapel. When she reached it, she glowered at Torch and made the gagging sound again. Then she disappeared inside.\n\nBlaze laughed again. He made sure Torch was watching, then strolled over to the sand pit midden beside his cottage. He flicked his tail at it and made the gagging sound.\n\nFlicker laughed. Blaze wandered over to her, and they conversed for a while. Torch picked out Juniper's name and his own, but beyond that their words remained gibberish to him.\n\nProbably he should listen and try to increase his familiarity with the language, but Torch was too confused and discouraged to try. He retreated to his temple and lay down outside the entrance, propping his chin on his forelegs so he could keep an eye on Juniper's chapel.\n\nHe missed her already, and he wanted to keep learning, but he wondered whether he could trust anything she taught him. Clearly there was something deeply wrong with her. It was going to be a long time before he could ask her why she hated dragonleaf so much. And even then she might either refuse to tell him or lie about it. Even if she told him what she truly believed, he wouldn't know if it was real or some kind of paranoid delusion. There were humans who raved about impossible things, and madhouses where they were confined so they couldn't do harm. Maybe some dragons were the same way.\n\nJuniper still hadn't emerged more than an hour later, when a small group of people walked down the road from the house. The earl was in the lead. Holding his arm was a woman that looked to Torch to be of a similar age, dressed in a flowing blue dress with one of the wide skirts that were currently in fashion. She must be the earl's wife. Two young men and a young woman followed them. Probably their children, though all three of them appeared old enough to be considered adults.\n\nThey continued past the other dragons without pausing and stopped by Torch's food box. The earl gestured grandly. \"There he is. The Crimson Torch. Isn't he magnificent?\"\n\nThe woman peered at Torch. \"My goodness, he's large. And such a lovely shade of red. I wonder if my dressmaker can find fabric to match it.\"\n\nA little admiration was just what Torch needed to raise his spirits. He rose and walked toward the family, slowly so he wouldn't frighten them.\n\nEven so, the young woman stepped back. \"Didn't you say he's not quenched, Father? What if he breathes fire at us?\"\n\n\"Don't worry. He's much too well trained for that. At the circus he performed in front of hundreds of people every night without incident.\" Despite the earl's confident words there was a trace of doubt in his tone, and he edged back a bit.\n\nThe taller of the two young men took a long stride forward. \"Don't be a baby, Abitha. He knows his place. He'd never dare harm a human. Besides, unlike Jumpy over there, Archibahd says he takes his dose of dragonleaf like a good boy. That will keep him nice and tame.\"\n\n\"Juniper's quenched, though. So are the others. It's not the same.\" Abitha scowled at Torch, then turned her frown on the young man. \"And don't call me a baby. Father, tell him.\"\n\n\"Don't call your sister names, Victer,\" the earl said absently. \"I wonder if I can get him to spread his wings for us? I must write to the circus and find out if they trained him to follow commands. I would think they must have.\" He cleared his throat, then shouted, \"Spread!\" He extended his arms wide and flapped them.\n\nIt was annoying to be ordered about like a dog, but Torch wanted to please his new owner, so he obediently spread his wings. The earl grinned in pride, and the rest of his family ogled in various shades of awe, fear, and amazement.\n\nVicter's eyes lit up. \"Is he trained to breathe fire on command, too, I wonder?\" He pointed to the right, away from Juniper's chapel, and imperiously ordered, \"Flame!\"\n\nTorch liked taking orders from the son even less than from the father, but he wasn't going to give them any reason to believe he was uncooperative. Making sure nothing vulnerable was in his path, he aimed carefully in the direction Victer had pointed, worked his throat to set his crystals sparking, and released a generous squirt of fuel. It ignited into a dramatic jet of flame. Torch kept it going until the fullness of his fuel sacs was reduced to a comfortable level. At the circus he'd always conserved his fuel for performances, but here he was going to have to be sure to empty them occasionally, even if the flame served no purpose. Overfilled sacs were uncomfortable and could easily become infected.\n\nTorch ended the flame and closed his mouth, making certain all sparks were out before turning back to the earl's family. They were wearing dazed, intimidated expressions. Torch enjoyed a smug thrill at the impression he'd made.\n\nThe earl's wife was the first to recover. \"We simply must invite all our friends to come see him, my dear. We'll be the talk of society for months. Shall we hold a house party, do you think? That will give everyone the chance to fully appreciate how marvelous your acquisition is.\"\n\n\"Yes, please, Father,\" Abitha put in. \"It's been ages since we had a house party. And I haven't seen Cornita or Zylfa or Elida for months.\"\n\n\"I think it's a splendid idea, Father,\" Victer added. \"Hunting season starts soon. Frankel was asking just last week if we were going to have the gang over.\"\n\n\"I can hardly refuse, seeing as how you're all so set on it,\" the earl said with mock exasperation. He broke into a grin and reached up to ruffle Victer's hair. \"I thought I'd have to suggest it myself. How does the first two weeks of autumn sound?\"\n\n\"Perfect!\" Abitha exclaimed. Victer muttered agreement as he stepped back to disengage from his father's affectionate gesture.\n\nTheir mother nodded decisively. \"That will give me just enough time to send invitations and receive replies.\"\n\n\"It's settled, then.\" The earl beamed at Torch, then turned to guide his wife back to the house. Victer and Abitha followed. All of them chattered excitedly about what must be done to prepare for the party.\n\nThe second young man, who hadn't said a word that Torch had heard, lingered. None of the others appeared to notice. When their voices had faded into the distance, he moved forward to stand beside Torch's food box. He eyed Torch with frank curiosity, and Torch studied him just as intently. He was taller than the earl but shorter than his brother, with neat dark hair and clothes that were fashionable but subdued compared to most of what Torch had seen on circus patrons lately.\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"I don't supposed Father bothered to make any introductions. He's never believed those who say dragons can understand human speech, and of course Archibahd considers the idea arrant nonsense.\" He took another step forward. Torch read tension in every line of his body, but his voice remained polite. \"My name's Bertrom. My father is Norvil Ambrosh, the Earl of Baromere. Mother's name is Floret, and I suppose you probably gathered that my siblings are Victer and Abitha.\"\n\nTorch was glad to learn the earl's proper name, as well as the rest. He bobbed his head. Bertrom took another step forward. \"Father is bound and determined to call you Crimsy, but I think that sounds too undignified for a dog, let alone a dragon. I'll call you by your full name if you prefer, but I think Torch sounds rather nice, if you don't mind it.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head enthusiastically. Bertrom smiled. \"Torch it is, then.\"\n\nDelighted, Torch lowered his head and thrust it at Bertrom. Bertrom gulped but didn't back away. \"Will you let me pet you? The others won't. I think they must have been mistreated before they came here. But you seem friendly.\" He extended his hand.\n\nTorch pressed his cheek into Bertrom's palm. Tentatively at first, then with more confidence, Bertrom patted him. Torch encouraged him with gentle nudges, turning until Bertrom's fingers found the base of his horns and scratched around them. Torch closed his eyes and settled to the ground with a long sigh. No one, human or dragon, had touched him since Jom had bid him farewell. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed it.\n\nMuch too soon, Bertrom pulled away. \"I can't stay any longer. Archibahd will be bringing your supper soon, and he's strictly forbidden anyone to touch the dragons. But I'll come back when I can.\"\n\nTorch made a soft hum of disappointment as Bertrom hurried away. It was good to know he had at least one true friend in this place and that he could look forward to regular visits. He climbed to his feet and stretched, then turned to look for Juniper. Maybe she could teach him a few more words before their meal arrived.\n\nTo his surprise, he saw Juniper standing outside her chapel, staring after Bertrom with deep suspicion in her eyes. Beyond her, Blaze and Flicker were also standing tensely, watching him go.\n\nAs one, the three dragons turned to look at Torch. All three of them shook their heads. Flicker sadly, Blaze emphatically, Juniper angrily.\n\nTorch couldn't understand their warning. Bertrom was perfectly nice. He had the same kindness in his voice and touch as Jom. Why couldn't the others see that?\n\nPerhaps it was as Bertrom had said. Perhaps all of them had suffered mistreatment. It seemed plausible from the earl's brief descriptions of their backgrounds. Perhaps the only thing any of them had known from humans was cruelty and abuse.\n\nTorch knew it was possible for humans to treat dragons well. Bertrom would; he was sure of it. He would keep working to learn the dragon's language until he had the words to tell the others so."
            },
            {
                "title": "Bertrom",
                "text": "Over the next several weeks, Torch settled in to his new home. The routine of his days never varied. Archibahd and the servant, who Torch had finally learned was called Lew, brought food and dragonleaf on a regular schedule. Sometimes the earl accompanied them, but never any other members of the family. Juniper gave Torch a few hours of language lessons each morning, and a few more every afternoon.\n\nTorch's vocabulary expanded to include words for everything the two of them could point at or demonstrate or mime, but it was frustratingly difficult to find ways to express more abstract ideas. Juniper seemed pleased with his progress, but she never attempted to convey any personal information, and she brushed away Torch's efforts whenever he tried to tell her about himself. Blaze and Flicker seemed as if they might be slightly more interested, but they were chained so far away there was no way they could carry on a conversation beyond brief shouted exchanges.\n\nThe one unpredictable thing was Bertrom's visits. He'd only appeared a few times, and then only briefly, but Torch greatly enjoyed having a human who talked to him intelligently and wasn't afraid to touch him. Bertrom had grown comfortable petting him all over, and Torch had even managed to communicate how much he liked being scratched. It wasn't the same as working with Jom every day, but it made life at Baromere Park a lot more tolerable than it would have been otherwise.\n\nOne evening about a month after Torch had arrived, Bertrom showed up soon after the sun had set. Torch was curled in his temple, drifting in happy dragonleaf haze and nearly asleep, when he caught the young man's scent. He shook off his stupor and bounded outside. His friend's visits were too rare and precious to miss for anything as ordinary as sleep.\n\nBertrom met him just outside the temple door. He kept his words of greeting soft and quickly fell silent, but he didn't stint on the petting. Torch luxuriated in his generous, affectionate attention.\n\nFinally, after giving Torch's whole body a thorough scratching and settling in to lavish particular care on the itchy spot beneath his horns, Bertrom spoke quietly. \"Torch, my friend\u2014do you mind if I call you friend?\u2014I'm afraid I won't be able to come see you again for a while. I'm leaving for Bellhold in the morning, and I won't be back until time for the house party.\"\n\nTorch's heart sank. The party was more than two weeks away. Would he really have to do without friendly words and touches for so long?\n\nHe tried not to let his dismay show, but Bertrom must have picked it up, because he wrapped his arms around Torch's neck and gave him a tight hug. \"I'm sorry. I'll miss you, too. I promise I'll come out to see you the minute I get home.\" He stroked Torch's face. \"I wish I could offer to bring you some extra dragonleaf from the city, but unfortunately I'm rather low on funds at the moment. Father doesn't believe in giving his sons more than a minimum allowance. I could understand when coal prices were down, but now that they're up again it seems a bit stingy.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I shouldn't bore you with my troubles. It's not as if you can give me the money to buy a few new outfits before the party. My old ones will be fine. Luckily my friends aren't as shallow as Victer's. They won't care. Much.\"\n\nTorch wished there were something he could do to help. Despite Bertrom's flippant words, Torch picked up real unhappiness in his tone. But the only way Torch knew to earn money was to perform for appreciative crowds, and he was certain the earl wouldn't let his son use his precious dragon for that purpose.\n\nBertrom's breath caught. \"Unless\u2026\"\n\nTorch perked up. He looked inquisitively at Bertrom.\n\nBertrom shook his head. \"No. I couldn't possibly ask it of you. Forget I said anything.\"\n\nNow curiosity joined Torch's desire to help his friend. He poked his snout into Bertrom's chest.\n\nBertrom grimaced. \"It's just that I noticed you have a loose scale on your right flank.\"\n\nTorch had noticed it, too. It had first started working its way out of the smooth, tightly interlocking network of scales a few days ago. It was still bright red, so it would be at least a week before it fell out. Until it dried out and turned gray and fragile, he'd have to be careful not to catch it on anything. Tearing out a loose scale before it was ready was painful and left a raw, bloody patch that formed an ugly scab until the new scale grew in.\n\n\"Since ISPLD persuaded Parliament to ban harvesting fresh dragon scales, an underground market has sprung up. The prices have gone through the roof. Wealthy ladies love their dragonscale jewelry, and some of them don't mind acquiring it illegally. You're such a beautiful color, one of your scales would sell for more than enough to buy several fine suits, and a few pounds of dragonleaf as well.\" Bertrom waved dismissively. \"But it would hurt you if I tried to remove it. I would never do that to you.\"\n\nTorch hesitated. He'd ripped out loose scales accidentally before, and it was highly unpleasant. But it was just a scale. A new one would replace it soon enough. He'd seen dragonscale jewelry, and it was beautiful. When removed fresh and carefully cured, the pigment within scales hardened and retained its luster. The effect was similar to opal or mother-of-pearl, but brighter and richer. No other gem could compare.\n\nBertrom had given him so much. Torch wanted to give his friend something in return. And it wouldn't be an entirely unselfish gift. Archibahd gave him a lot less dragonleaf than he'd received at the circus, barely enough to keep his cravings at bay. Torch would welcome an additional source of the treat.\n\nBefore he could lose his nerve, he pulled his head out of Bertrom's grasp and bent his neck to nose his flank. It took him a moment to locate the loose scale, but before long a twinge of discomfort told him he'd found the right spot. He glanced back at Bertrom, then thrust his snout emphatically at the scale, doing his best not to wince as the motion jostled it.\n\nBertrom sucked in his breath. \"You can't mean that.\"\n\nThe horror in his voice assured Torch that his concern was genuine. Torch nudged the scale harder, fighting to control his reaction. He wasn't sure he could summon enough resolve to pull the thing out himself. He'd rather not have to.\n\nBertrom's voice quavered. \"Oh, Torch. Are you sure? You don't know what this means to me. I promise, I'll buy you the best dragonleaf in Bellhold, enough to last you a year at least.\"\n\nTorch's heart swelled with pride and happiness. He used his head to push Bertrom toward his flank.\n\n\"All right. If you insist.\" Bertrom produced a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to Torch's side just above the loose scale. Gently but firmly he worked his fingers under the separating edge. \"This will only hurt for a moment, I promise.\"\n\nTorch held his breath. Bertrom grasped the scale and gave a sharp yank. It ripped free, sending a jolt of agony shooting through Torch's side. Bertrom pressed his handkerchief hard into the gap where the scale had been, soaking up the blood that welled from the raw flesh. Torch panted as the pain subsided to a dull ache.\n\nBertrom kept the pressure on the wound firm as he held the scale up, turning it so the moonlight caught its shimmering surface. \"It's so beautiful. Just think, now it will stay this way forever instead of turning gray and crumbling to dust.\" He tucked it carefully into his jacket's breast pocket. \"That's worth a little pain, don't you think?\"\n\nTorch wasn't sure he would describe the pain as \"little.\" But he bobbed his head at Bertrom, consoling himself with anticipation of the dragonleaf to come. In Bellhold, Forland's capital city, Bertrom would be able to buy the finest dragonleaf Aldania produced. The leaf imported from Rainvale was particularly renowned. Torch had only had it a few times, back when the circus was at the height of its prosperity, but he still remembered the exquisite taste and the vivid intensity of the dreams it produced.\n\nBertrom peeled the handkerchief away carefully. \"There you go, Torch. The bleeding has stopped. By morning it will be scabbed over nicely.\" He tucked the bloody handkerchief away as he surveyed the site. \"Um, do you suppose you could keep that side turned away from Archibahd and Father for a few days, until the new scale starts to grow in? It would be best if they don't find out about this. Archibahd dislikes me because I disagree with him about dragon intelligence. He might try to convince Father I was mistreating you, when we both know that's the farthest thing from the truth.\"\n\nTorch nodded vigorously. He certainly didn't want Bertrom to get in trouble for accepting Torch's gift. And he'd do his best to keep the patch concealed from Juniper and the other dragons, too. They wouldn't understand, either.\n\nBertrom reached for Torch's horns and gave him a delightfully thorough scratching all around their bases. \"You're a true friend, Torch,\" he murmured. \"You're kind, and generous, and smart. I see that, even if no one else does. You can count on me to stick by you, no matter what happens.\"\n\nAt length he sighed and reluctantly backed away. \"I hate to leave, but I have to get an early start in the morning. Farewell for now, my friend. I'll see you when I get back from Bellhold.\"\n\nTorch waved his wings in farewell. He watched Bertrom walk back toward the house until he vanished over the rise. Then he returned to his temple and curled up, his sore patch carefully on top. The pain made it hard to relax enough to fall asleep, but Torch didn't care. He treasured Bertrom's words until dreams finally took him."
            },
            {
                "title": "House Party",
                "text": "The first rumble of wheels coming up the main drive to the house reached Torch's ears in the middle of his afternoon language lesson. He tilted his head in the manner that indicated he was asking a question. \"Sound. Big cart, horses pull, people in. Word?\"\n\n\"Carriage,\" Juniper told him. Or at least, that's what Torch assumed her falling snarl and rising hum meant. It was similar to the word for cart, but the hum's note went higher. He'd learned that rising and falling inflections were vital to conveying meaning in the dragon's language. They helped expand the limited number of sounds they could make into nearly as varied a repertoire of words as Forlish provided.\n\n\"Carriage,\" he repeated, until Juniper approved his pronunciation. Then he looked up at the house and back at her. \"Many people, house, ten-and-four tomorrows. Word?\"\n\n\"Party,\" Juniper told him.\n\n\"House party,\" Torch added, getting a glum nod of approval in reply. That's what the earl and his family called their plans to invite a group of their friends to stay with them for two weeks. The dragons would be the star attractions, but the guests and hosts would also spend lots of time riding, hunting, picnicking, playing games, making music, conversing, and anything else they found enjoyable. For the past few days the earl could talk of little else. He'd made daily visits to inspect the dragons, and his wife and children had occasionally accompanied him, so Torch had heard about the impending party in great detail.\n\nHe was rather looking forward to being the center of so many people's attention, but Juniper had grown more gloomy and miserable by the day as the party approached. Now she turned to slink back to her chapel, but Torch made a sound of protest. This was too good an opportunity to waste.\n\nWhen Juniper turned reluctantly back, he said carefully, \"Torch party happy. Juniper party not-happy?\"\n\nShe made a disgusted noise. \"Juniper people not-happy. Juniper people much, much not-happy.\"\n\nThey'd finally managed to work out a few abstract words. Torch used one of them now. \"Why?\"\n\nFor a moment he thought she was going to refuse to answer, as she always had before when he tried to question her on personal matters. She cast a longing look toward her chapel. Then she turned back to him, assumed a resolute air, and spoke slowly and clearly. \"People hurt dragons. Dragons work, people money. Dragons tired, people happy. Dragons not-happy, people happy. People feed dragons shit\u2014dragonleaf,\" she amended, although Torch had understood perfectly well what she meant. \"Dragons not-happy, eat dragonleaf, happy. People laugh. Dragons work. People money. Repeat, repeat, repeat.\" She glared at him. \"Juniper not.\"\n\nThat was pretty much how Torch had figured she felt. But he didn't understand it any better for her explanation. He tried to express his thoughts. \"People feed dragons. Meat and dragonleaf. People\u2026\" He scrambled to find a way to use the words he knew to say things she'd never taught him. \"People good dragons. People good touch dragons. People good words dragons.\"\n\nShe glowered at him. \"Not Juniper.\"\n\nHe bobbed his head. \"Yes Torch.\" He spread his wings a little and crouched, the submissive posture a plea for her to listen and try to understand. \"Dragons work, people feed. Horses work, people feed. Dogs\u2014\"\n\nBut she cut him off with a violent beat of her wings and angrily spat words. \"Dragons not horses! Dragons people.\"\n\nTorch floundered, unable to reply with the nuance he desired. \"Dragons not horses, not people. Dragons horses more, people less. Dragons\u2014\"\n\nShe interrupted again, not as angry, but just as passionate. \"Dragons not people less. Dragons people same.\" She made a slash mark in the dirt with her claw. \"One. People talk words. Dragons talk words.\"\n\nTorch had to concede. \"Yes.\"\n\nShe slashed another mark. \"Two. Dragons\u2014\" She said a word Torch didn't know.\n\n\"Word?\" he asked.\n\nShe huffed in frustration. \"Words in head. Talk, no sound.\" She repeated the word.\n\nAh. Torch repeated it. \"Think.\"\n\n\"Yes. Dragons think.\"\n\nAgain, Torch had to concede. \"Yes.\"\n\nJuniper made another slash. \"Three.\" She thought for a moment, then spoke slowly, searching for words. \"Torch hear dragons live far place? Across water? No people?\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head. \"Torch hear.\"\n\nJuniper huffed a relieved sigh. \"Place word.\" She gave a ringing cry.\n\nDragana, Torch thought. He nodded.\n\nJuniper pointed to the third slash. \"Three. In Dragana, dragons, no people. Dragons work. Dragons talk. Dragons think. Dragons eat. No people. Dragons happy.\" She sank back onto her haunches and regarded Torch with a triumphant look.\n\nTorch hated to contradict her, but he knew she was wrong. \"No. In Dragana, dragons hurt dragons. Dragons bad. Dragons not-happy.\"\n\nJuniper glared at him, but her words were gentler than he expected. \"People say dragons bad in Dragana. People say words Torch hear?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Torch freighted his tone with disbelief. \"Dragons say words Juniper hear?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She scowled at him.\n\n\"Dragons here. Not dragons in Dragana. Dragons here think dragons in Dragana good. Dragons here not\u2014\" He floundered, trying to come up with a way to say what he meant. \"Not think-yes.\"\n\n\"Know,\" Juniper said absently. Torch filed the word away in his memory.\n\nJuniper moved forward until her collar dug into her neck. She beckoned Torch to come closer. He pressed to the end of his chain and extended his neck as far as it would go. Their heads were only a few feet apart.\n\nJuniper's voice was so soft and breathy Torch would call it a whisper if it came from a human. \"No repeat?\"\n\n\"No repeat,\" Torch promised.\n\nShe spoke even more quietly, so Torch had to strain to hear. \"Dragons in Dragana say words Juniper hear. Dragons in Dragana fly here, say words.\"\n\nTorch pulled back, staring at her. He couldn't possibly have understood correctly. \"No. No fly here. Much, much, much far, no fly.\"\n\nJuniper sat back. \"Yes fly here.\" She spread her wings and gave a hard thrust downward, lifting her feet momentarily from the ground. \"Dragons in Dragana fly good.\"\n\nTorch shook his head violently. \"Torch think no. Torch think words Juniper hear not-good.\" He wished he knew the word for \"lies.\"\n\nIt couldn't possibly be true. Juniper couldn't actually have spoken with dragons from Dragana. Dragana lay halfway around the world from Forland. No dragon could possibly fly that far. He refused to believe it.\n\n\"Words Juniper hear good.\" Her tone brooked no argument. \"Torch think no, think yes. Juniper know.\" She turned her back on him and stalked away.\n\n\"Juniper!\" Torch called after her. \"Juniper, no! Come, talk more!\"\n\nShe stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him. Her voice was soft but certain. \"Juniper fly Dragana. Many days tomorrow, Juniper yes fly.\"\n\nTorch gaped at her as she walked away.\n\nHe watched until she vanished into her chapel, then sulked to his temple and plopped down in front of it. Fine. Let her be that way. Let her imagine impossible fantasies of someday flying to the dragon's homeland. The idea was less realistic than the dragonleaf dreams she scorned.\n\nAnd even if it were possible, it would be a nightmare. The dragons in Dragana were savage, brutal monsters. They fought each other to the death over food and territory and mates. They were animals, far more so than the dragons who'd been lucky enough to be brought to Aldania in the egg and had grown to maturity surrounded by the civilizing influence of humans. Orwin had told Torch so, and he'd been to Dragana and seen the truth for himself. He'd shown Torch the scars where wild dragons had burned him. He'd spoken with grief in his voice about the companions they'd killed. Torch would never believe it had been anything but great good fortune that his egg had been one of those the expedition had rescued.\n\nHe put his head on his front paws and stared at his food box. He only had to wait an hour or so until Archibahd brought his meat and dragonleaf. Once he swallowed the spicy, fragrant balls, the tension would melt from his stomach and all his troubling thoughts would subside, drowned beneath sweet dreams."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "The first group of visitors arrived with the supper cart, led by the earl. Torch heard his loud, enthusiastic voice well before the group came over the rise into sight. The earl chattered away about each of the dragons as the group viewed them, but he reserved his most voluble, extravagant praises for Torch.\n\nTorch jumped to his feet as they approached. He preened and strutted and spread his wings and breathed bright jets of flame. He even leapt into the air and beat as high as his chain would allow before gliding down in a wide, sweeping circle, reveling in the spectators' gasps and cries of wonder. It was almost as good as being back at the circus.\n\nThe next day the sound of carriage wheels in the drive was nearly continuous, and a steady flow of visitors paraded down the hill to view the dragons, starting just after sunrise and continuing all day. Torch showed off for each little cluster at first, but after a while he grew tired of the constant activity and only put on a display when a sizable group had gathered.\n\nJuniper hid in her chapel, only darting out to eat, then dashing back inside. Inspired by Torch's antics, or perhaps jealous of his popularity, Flicker and Blaze pranced around and flapped their wings as well, but they weren't seasoned entertainers like Torch, so the audience still gravitated toward him.\n\nNone of the dragons talked to each other. Juniper had thoroughly indoctrinated Flicker and Blaze to avoid talking as much as possible when humans were around. Torch doubted he could persuade them to defy her, and he didn't have the heart to try.\n\nThe pattern held over the next few days, although once all the guests had arrived and been given their initial tour, only those most fascinated by the dragons returned to watch them. Torch could hear the distant voices of the rest as they enjoyed the many pleasures Baromere Park afforded, strolling in the woods and boating on the lake, riding through the surrounding fields, hunting foxes and hares, playing piano and harp and singing, and always, always talking. Humans never seemed to get tired of it. He wondered if he would want to talk all the time, too, once he'd had enough practice that his words flowed as effortlessly as theirs.\n\nEventually Juniper started coming out when there weren't too many people around. Torch was pleased, because he'd started to worry about her. Staying cooped up inside cold, dark stone for so long wasn't good for a dragon. But she still wouldn't talk to him, so he couldn't ask her any of the many questions that had swarmed in his mind since their conversation.\n\nOn the sixth day, a sizable group gathered to watch Archibahd feed the dragons their midday meal. As Juniper tore chunks from her slab of mutton, one of the visitors, a boy around ten years old, tugged on the earl's sleeve. \"Please, Uncle Norvil, please, may I ride her? You said she used to be a messenger dragon. I've always wanted to be a messenger and ride a dragon.\"\n\nThe earl ruffled the boy's hair. \"Don't be silly, Wendel. Only commoner children become messengers. It's far too rough and dirty and dangerous a job for a young gentleman like you. Besides, she's not a messenger any more. Since she won't eat dragonleaf she's not tame enough to obey a rider's commands.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, Father,\" Victer put in. \"I'd have been mad to try it when I was Wendel's age. I still would be, if I were lightweight enough for her to get off the ground with me on her back.\" He scooped Wendel up and lifted him onto his shoulders. \"He's strong enough to make her mind. Show him how it's done, Wendel.\"\n\nWendel grabbed two handfuls of Victer's fashionably shaggy hair and kicked eagerly. \"Hup, hup, hup!\" he yelled. Victer loped down the trail, flapping his arms and tossing his head. Wendel hauled on his hair and Victer obediently swerved whichever direction he pulled.\n\nThe earl chuckled as he watched them, but when they circled back around and Wendel dragged Victer to a panting halt, he remained pleasantly unmoved by the child's pleas. \"I'm sorry, Wendel, but the answer is still no. You may look at Juniper all you like, but you're not allowed to go near her, and you're most certainly not allowed to ride her.\"\n\nWendel pouted as Victer set him on the ground, but he soon ran off, flapping his arms and screeching. Victer turned to look at Juniper, who'd watched the whole exchange with a scornful air, although Torch thought he detected a tiny bit of wistfulness in the way she gazed after Wendel. At least she hadn't retreated to her chapel or the lake, the way she usually did when people stared at her too long.\n\nVicter spoke quietly, his tone idle. \"Don't I remember they included her harness and saddle when you bought her, Father?\"\n\n\"They did. They're locked in the barn, and that's where they'll stay. Don't try to persuade me to change my mind.\"\n\n\"It would be good for the boy. The straps would keep him from falling off, and she'd tire out and come back here eventually, even if he wasn't strong enough to guide her. She knows where her meat comes from.\"\n\n\"Are you forgetting she lived wild for a month?\" The earl lowered his voice. \"Personally, I think you're right. I'm sure Wendel could manage to steer her home. She hasn't flown in so long she'd tire quickly. But my sister would never let me hear the end of it. She dotes on the boy, you know.\"\n\n\"All the more reason to let him have a bit of an adventure.\"\n\nThe earl shook his head. \"Not on my watch.\" He crossed his arms and nodded decisively.\n\n\"Yes, Father,\" Victer said meekly, and let the subject rest. But Torch thought he detected sly pleasure in his face.\n\nSo he wasn't entirely surprised when that night, long past sunset, after the sounds of talking and laughing and singing from the house had finally fallen silent, he heard footsteps accompanied by hushed, excited voices. He crept from his temple and slipped as quietly as he could to the end of his chain. The cluster of young men approaching Juniper's area barely glanced at him.\n\nOne of them raised a lantern shielded so it emitted only a narrow beam of light. Torch recognized Victer's voice. \"Juniper!\" he called softly. \"Hey, girl. Want to go for a flight?\"\n\nTorch expected Juniper to ignore him, but he was wrong. She paced from her chapel, every muscle taut, breath coming in rapid, shallow pants. With measured steps she walked to the end of her chain and stood with her head high, staring down at Victer and his friends.\n\nEager hands pushed Wendel forward into the little pool of light. The boy looked equal parts thrilled and terrified. He was wearing a warm wool jacket and hat, leather gloves, goggles pushed up on his forehead, and a wide leather belt with sturdy metal rings on each side.\n\nVicter put a hand on his shoulder. \"You sure you want to go through with this?\n\nWendel hesitated a moment, then clenched his fists and stuck his chin out. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"All right, then.\" Victer squeezed his shoulder and let go. He jerked his head at the others. \"Put the harness on her.\"\n\nJuniper stood stock-still as several of the young men swarmed around her, bearing a complicated tangle of leather straps. They buckled loops around her neck and both front legs and under her belly. A rigid breastplate bearing a faded image of Forland's royal seal went over her chest, and a padded leather saddle was cinched at the base of her neck, between her foreshoulders. She lowered her head to let them fasten the bridle around her cheeks and horns, and opened her mouth for the bit.\n\nWhen everything met Victer's approval, he tapped Juniper's shoulder. She crouched, and Victer hoisted Wendel into the saddle. He clipped straps to both sides of the boy's belt and carefully adjusted their length. \"Everything comfortable? Feel nice and secure?\"\n\nWendel nodded without unclenching his jaw.\n\nVicter handed him the reins that led to Juniper's bit. \"It's just like riding a horse. She has to go where her head is pointed. She'll probably resist at first, but she'll tire quickly and then you'll be able to make her come around. Don't worry. Children much younger than you ride messenger dragons every day. You'll be fine.\"\n\nWendel clutched the reins and nodded again. He stared at Juniper's head, eyes big and round. She turned to give him what Torch thought was a reassuring look.\n\nVicter pulled the goggles down over Wendel's eyes. \"You'll need these to keep the wind out so you can see. Fly for as long as you like, but be sure to bring her back when she starts to slow down.\" He moved to Juniper's neck and produced a key from his pocket. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Ready,\" Wendel croaked.\n\nVicter reached for Juniper's collar and inserted the key. With a click, the hinged metal band fell open. Victer pulled it off her neck and stepped back.\n\nJuniper flung her head up, a look of wild jubilation in her eyes. She raised her wings and crouched. With a mighty thrust of her hind legs, she sprang into the air. Her wings beat, every muscle straining, as she fought to climb into the air. Torch could feel how hard she had to work to lift her rider's weight as well as her own, but she never faltered. Higher and higher she rose, moving over the lake, laboring ceaselessly until she cleared the tops of the trees on the far shore. With a tilt of her wings she switched from gaining altitude to building speed and shot off toward the west. Torch rose to his hind legs to keep her in sight a few more seconds. She dwindled to a tiny moonlit speck against the starry sky, then vanished.\n\nTorch sank back into a crouch. Envy burned in his heart. Why couldn't it be him rising over the trees and soaring on the wind? His collar felt as if it were choking him, and his chain seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. What if he never again got the chance to fly free? What if he never again stepped beyond the length of his chain? What if he stayed bound here for the rest of his life, slowly aging as generation after generation of earls showed off their prized possession to their friends, until at last he sank into eternal sleep with the collar still locked around his neck and his chain still fastened to its post?\n\nVicter and his friends talked and laughed and passed around a jug that smelled of alcohol. After a while they sat down on the grass and stretched out their legs. Torch longed to crawl into his temple and go to sleep, but he couldn't rest until Juniper was safely home.\n\nThe moon moved across the sky. Victer and his friends grew quiet. Torch wasn't sure how much time had passed. At least two or three hours. He would never have been able to stay aloft so long, even unencumbered by a rider's weight, and Juniper had been grounded much longer than he had.\n\nBut messengers flew for hundreds of miles at a time, he reminded himself. They routinely crossed the mountains and stretches of ocean that separated Forland from the other countries of Aldania. Juniper was probably in better condition, even after her long period of forced inactivity, than he'd ever been. If she did get tired, she'd just land and rest for a while before flying back. That must be what was taking her so long.\n\nShe had to come back. No matter how desperately she longed to escape, she couldn't while Wendel was riding her. Torch was certain Juniper would never harm a child. He'd seen how gently she'd looked at the boy and how docilely she'd behaved while Victer lifted him into the saddle. She'd bring him safely home even if it meant returning to the captivity she hated.\n\nWouldn't she?\n\nAbruptly Victer jumped to his feet and strode past Juniper's chapel to the lake shore. He stared off in the direction she'd disappeared for several long minutes. Then he cursed and strode back toward his friends.\n\n\"Father's going to kill me. I'm saddling up and riding to Sheviham to see if she came down there. If not, maybe at least they saw which way she went. Who's with me?\"\n\nHis friends clamored their approval and trooped with him toward the stables.\n\nTorch listened to the voices, whinnies, and hoofbeats until they died away, feeling helpless and alone. He went down to the lakeshore and stared out over the dark ripples. Several times he was certain he caught a glimpse of Juniper in the distance, winging homeward, but it always turned out to be only a bird. As night stretched toward dawn, he fell into fitful slumber, starting awake whenever he thought he heard Juniper's voice, but finding nothing but continued silence.\n\nShortly after sunrise a commotion arose in the house. Torch heard shouts and shrieks and weeping. Hoofbeats came and went. The agitation continued all day. At noon Lew brought the dragons' meals alone. He left a platter of meat in Juniper's box, but no dragonleaf. He dumped Torch's leaf beside his meat on the platter, so the balls got soaked with juices and turned unappetizingly gummy. Torch gulped them anyway, grateful for the brief respite they gave from worry and fear.\n\nJuniper still hadn't returned by sunset. Torch knew she never would. She'd seized the opportunity to flee. He couldn't really blame her. It might have been years before she got another chance. She might never have. She must have considered the sacrifice of one human child insignificant next to the possibility of freedom.\n\nThe next morning a great many men on horseback gathered in the field between the house and stables. Torch smelled gunpowder and hot metal and heard the sharp crack of shots. They milled around for a while, then all rode away in a group down the road that led west.\n\nTorch slept much of the day. A few women and children came to stare at Juniper's empty chapel and speak in grim, hushed voices, but none of them stayed long. Flicker and Blaze exchanged a few wide-eyed glances with him, but they didn't say anything, and Torch didn't, either. Once he heard them quietly talking to each other, but he couldn't make out enough words to tell what they were discussing.\n\nLate in the afternoon hoofbeats thundered on the road, accompanied by joyfully raised voices. Torch rushed to the end of his chain and strained to see or hear what was happening. He caught Wendel's name and a great deal of happy-sounding noise. He sank to the ground in relief. The child was safe. He hadn't misjudged Juniper after all.\n\nBut no one came down to the dragons until Lew brought the supper cart. This time Archibahd was with him. He tossed Torch his balls of dragonleaf without speaking. But as he walked beside Lew back toward the house, Torch heard him say, \"First thing in the morning, give the chapel a thorough cleaning. I'll ask the earl whether he wants to move the red one there, or if he has other plans.\"\n\nEven through the happy dragonleaf haze, Torch's heart plummeted. They hadn't recaptured Juniper, then. They must have shot her the way the earl had said they would if she ever escaped again.\n\nHe crawled into his temple and curled into a miserable ball. He'd grieved like this before, when Orwin died, but that didn't make the pain any less. Juniper had been his first dragon friend. She'd taught him to speak. He'd only begun to get to know her. Now he never would.\n\nHe didn't know how much time had passed when a soft voice roused him from sleep. \"Torch? Torch, wake up.\"\n\nTorch crept from his temple. He was glad to find Bertrom waiting just outside the entrance, but even his friend's presence couldn't cheer him much. Bertrom hadn't come to speak with him since Torch had given him his scale, although he'd glimpsed him at a distance among the visitors a few times since the house party began.\n\nBertrom laid his hand on Torch's neck. \"I can't stay long, but I came as soon as I could. I knew you'd want to hear what happened to Juniper, and no one else would think to tell you.\"\n\nTorch nodded dully. He didn't really want to hear, but he supposed it was better than imagining a thousand grim scenarios without ever knowing the truth.\n\nBertrom scratched beneath his horns. \"Wendel says she flew due west, as straight as if she were following a compass. He tried to turn her, but she never budged, no matter how hard he yanked the reins. He kept his head, because he thought she'd eventually tire out and let him guide her back. He says they flew for more than two hours, until he could see the ocean on the horizon.\"\n\nHe hesitated, then went on. \"She flew lower and slowed down. He was afraid she was going to land somewhere in the wilderness. But she didn't. When they got to the coast road, she turned and followed it until they reached a town. She swooped low and made sure Wendel got a good look, then flew a few miles back along the road before landing in the middle of a long deserted stretch. He says she clawed and bit at her harness until a strap broke and the saddle started sliding around. He knew he'd fall if she took off again, so he unbuckled himself. She crouched so he could dismount, then jumped back into the sky as soon as he was down.\"\n\nA rush of vindication filled Torch's chest. Juniper had made sure Wendel was safe. And she'd managed to escape anyway. Good for her.\n\nBertrom was silent for longer this time before he resumed. \"He says she flew straight out to sea. He watched until he lost her in the distance, and she never changed her course. Then he walked to the town she'd shown him. The folks there took him in and fed him and gave him a bed to sleep in, and sent a rider to bring word to Baromere. We met him on the road. Now Wendel's back safe and sound, although a bit worse for the scolding his mother and father gave him.\"\n\nHe gave a short huff of laughter. \"Father was uncharacteristically subdued. I would have expected him to yell at Victer for days, but he only suspended his allowance and sent him to muck out the stables. I think he must have given them at least tacit permission and feels responsible for the whole fiasco.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head, but Bertrom didn't seem to notice. \"He sent warnings up and down the coast for people to watch out for a feral dragon and notify him if she's spotted, but nobody really expects her to be seen again. The nearest land west of Forland is a few small islands hundreds of miles from the coast. No dragon can fly that far without stopping, not even messengers at the peak of fitness. I think Juniper must have decided she preferred death on her own terms to being hunted down and shot. Or to living the rest of her life at the end of a chain.\" Bertrom cast a bleak look at the empty chapel.\n\nTorch thought he was probably right, but part of him wondered. She'd seemed so certain she'd be able to make it to Dragana someday. Maybe that day had come. Maybe she was on her way to the dragon's homeland right now. Maybe she knew some secret that would allow her to travel thousands of miles across the empty ocean. He hoped she did, even though rationally he knew it was impossible.\n\nBertrom sighed and remained silent for a while. Eventually he patted Torch's neck and pulled away. \"Hey, look.\" He produced a small oiled paper package from his pocket. \"I didn't forget my promise. My tailor's prices have gone up, so after paying for three suits I didn't have much left, but I got the best leaf I could afford. Maybe next time I go to Bellhold you can send another scale and I can buy you some of the really good stuff. I made some contacts who were very excited by the color and quality of your scale. They told me they would buy as many more as I'm able to bring them. So any time you feel like doing business with them, just let me know. I'll be happy to act as your agent.\"\n\nTorch nodded and gratefully accepted the balls Bertrom fed him. Their quality was perfectly acceptable. He didn't care that they weren't Rainvale leaf. They would serve well enough to send him into deep, happy dreams for a good long time. After everything that had happened, a few hours of forgetfulness was the only comfort he could hope for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Oxheart",
                "text": "Juniper's chapel stood empty for many months. It was smaller than the temple, so Torch didn't mind that Archibahd and the earl decided to leave the rest of the dragons where they were. He wouldn't have wanted to be even more cramped at night.\n\nBut he hated being so far from Blaze and Flicker. Sometimes Blaze would consent to talk with Torch, both of them bellowing to be heard across the wide empty area between them, but never about anything important, and never for very long. Torch muttered every word he knew to himself several times a day so he wouldn't forget them, and did his best to think in the dragons' language as much as possible, but he found his limited vocabulary and almost nonexistent knowledge of proper grammar terribly frustrating, and the lack of opportunity to improve his skills even more so.\n\nAfter the house party was over, Bertrom resumed his irregular visits. The leaf he'd bought in Bellhold soon ran out, so the next time one of Torch's scales loosened, he again allowed Bertrom to pull it. When Bertrom returned from the capital city, he told Torch that Rainvale had suffered bad weather and a poor harvest, so their imported leaf was both far more expensive and of much lower quality than usual. He'd guessed that Torch would prefer a larger amount of more modest leaf, so that's what he'd purchased. That was exactly what Torch would have decided for himself, so he bobbed his head earnestly when Bertrom asked if he approved. After that, he looked forward with even more anticipation to Bertrom's unpredictable appearances. The twenty minutes or so of affectionate attention followed by a generous portion of delicious leaf and a night spent deep in blissful dreams were his only breaks from the dreary monotony of life at Baromere Park.\n\nAutumn turned to winter. The cold didn't bother Torch much, but he hated the chilly drizzle that kept him cooped up in the cramped temple for days on end. A few snowfalls blanketed the park in sparkling white beauty, and Torch and the other dragons romped in the clear, frosty air, but always within a day or two it turned to dirty slush and melted, leaving nothing but mud under the leaden gray sky.\n\nTorch slept a great deal of the time. As spring approached, the weather grew even wetter, so the warming temperatures provided little relief. Eventually sunny days became more common, but then the earl and his whole family left for an extended visit to Bellhold. For two whole months Torch saw no one except Archibahd and Lew, who faithfully delivered the dragons' meat and leaf each noon and evening, but never spoke more than a curt word or two, and those only to each other.\n\nTorch tried not to think about spending the many, many long years remaining of his life stuck in the same unvarying pattern. When despite his best efforts the grim prospect overwhelmed him, he understood the desperation that had driven Juniper to brave the vast, empty expanse of ocean. Drowning beneath pitiless waves didn't seem such a terrible fate when life provided so little he'd care about losing.\n\nSo when one bright, sunny morning as spring was giving way to summer a crew of more than a dozen servants descended on the abandoned chapel, the curiosity that filled Torch was almost painfully intense. He watched them scrub the dirt from the interior and exterior of the little building and replace a number of cracked or discolored stones. They pulled every weed that had sprung up in the yard and brought fresh gravel in wheelbarrows to spread across the whole area, raking it until it lay smooth and even. They dug out the midden and filled it with clean sand. Most interestingly, they hauled away Juniper's chain, which had lain in a rusting heap since her escape, and replaced the metal pole by the door of the chapel with one twice as thick. Archibahd supervised as they installed a new chain with links so thick and heavy Torch was sure it could hold one of the elephants a rival circus had featured. He couldn't imagine a dragon strong enough to need such massive restraints. Maybe the earl and Archibahd were just being extra careful after their bad experience with Juniper.\n\nAfter the crew left for the night, Torch called to Blaze, who'd watched the work just as intently, \"Dragon come here?\"\n\nBlaze rustled his wings to indicate ambivalence. \"Blaze think yes. Flicker think yes.\"\n\n\"Torch think yes.\" The conclusion seemed inescapable. Torch could hardly bear the anticipation. Or the uncertainty. He desperately hoped the new dragon would prove friendly, or at least tolerant. But even if they were hostile or indifferent, at least they would be company.\n\nFor two long weeks nothing else happened. At last, on a hot afternoon when Torch had almost given up hope, the crunching noise of a heavily laden wagon rolling up the gravel drive to the house reached his ears. He jumped to his feet and rushed from the lakeshore to the road, straining at the end of his chain for a glimpse. Blaze and Flicker were doing the same.\n\nThey didn't have long to wait. The wagon, pulled by two big draft horses, rumbled around the house and down the hill. A big steel cage, much plainer than Torch's brightly painted circus cage but otherwise almost identical, rested in its bed. Torch's heart raced and his breath came in short, rapid gasps.\n\nThe earl perched beside the cage and chattered eagerly to its occupant, describing Flicker and Blaze with almost the same words he'd used to introduce them to Torch. His arm swept in a broad gesture. \"And that's Crimsy. He used to perform in a circus before I bought him. Isn't he pretty? The ladies and children love him.\"\n\nThe wagon pulled into the chapel's yard and halted. Archibahd went to fetch the chain. His thin arms strained to lift the heavy length high enough for the earl to grab it. Archibahd scrambled into the back of the wagon and reclaimed it.\n\nThe earl eyed it doubtfully as Archibahd worked to padlock its last link to the end of the chain fastened beside the door of the cage. \"I say, don't you think that's a bit excessive?\"\n\n\"Better too strong than too weak. He's spent a hundred and eighty years loading and unloading cargo, and he's got the muscles to show for it. I didn't think you'd want me to take any chances.\"\n\n\"No, no, you're quite right.\" The earl scrambled down from the wagon and backed away as Archibahd placed balls of dragonleaf in a trail to the chapel door.\n\nHe vanished inside for a good ten minutes. When he finally emerged, the earl said, \"I don't remember you using so much leaf with the others. Is it really necessary? The stuff's expensive, you know.\"\n\n\"They keep the dock dragons on a very high dose,\" Archibahd explained as he returned to the wagon. \"They need more because of their mass, and it's vital they remain docile. Once he's settled in I'll start weaning him off the extra. I dare say your guests will enjoy him more if he's a little friskier. As long as he stays on his chain, he won't be able to cause any trouble.\"\n\nArchibahd's voice had remained mild, but the earl flinched. \"No, no. Quite. Do take care of that as quickly as you can. I've been spending far too much on dragonleaf as it is.\"\n\nArchibahd shook his head gravely. \"It's the fault of those ISPLD criminals. The paper this morning said they've burned another dragonleaf farm. That makes three this year.\"\n\nThe earl scowled. \"The authorities should transport the lot of them. Send them to Dragana, I say, if they love dragons so much. See how long they'd last among the wild ones.\"\n\n\"I couldn't agree with you more, but I'm afraid they've got too many members of parliament in their pocket. Even the queen is sympathetic to their cause.\"\n\nThe earl grimaced. \"I didn't account for spending so much on leaf. Something will have to change. I'd hate to sell Flicker or Blaze, but if prices keep rising I may have little choice. Next to Crimsy and now this brute, they're not terribly impressive.\" His brow creased deeper, then smoothed out. \"But you'll get him down to a normal dose soon. As long my coal mines continue to prosper, we should be fine.\"\n\n\"Yes, my lord.\" Archibahd climbed into the wagon. \"I suggest you move back a few more yards before I let him out.\"\n\nThe earl hastened to comply. Archibahd waited until he was well clear, then swung the door of the cage open.\n\nA blunt gray snout emerged and descended to snap up the ball of dragonleaf at the edge of the wagon bed. A thick neck followed. With ponderous, deliberate movements, the dragon stepped out of his cage, down from the wagon, and toward the chapel, efficiently scooping up and swallowing each ball as he came to it.\n\nThe earl's chest puffed out with pride. \"Welcome to your new home, Oxheart.\"\n\nTorch studied the new dragon eagerly. Oxheart wasn't as long as Torch, but much stockier, with bulging muscles packed around the base of his wings and along their mast and spar bones. His scales were a dull steel gray, with barely any shine or glitter. He focused on the trail of dragonleaf balls with single-minded purpose, sparing not a single glance for Torch, Blaze, or Flicker. When he reached the chapel he ducked inside without pausing. For a few minutes Torch heard rustles and snuffling coming from within. Then everything was quiet.\n\nThe earl chuckled. \"All business, that one. How long do you think it will take him to loosen up?\"\n\nArchibahd shrugged. \"As his dose of leaf declines, he'll take more interest in his surroundings. But don't expect him to ever become as active as the others.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" The earl hesitated, then plunged on. \"Victer wants to know if he's strong enough to carry a full-grown man.\"\n\nArchibahd frowned, but his voice betrayed no disapproval. \"Perhaps. He's rated to lift a hundred pounds, the maximum level, although he can probably carry somewhat more than that. But taking off from the ground with a rider is more difficult than lifting a burden once aloft.\"\n\n\"True, true.\" The earl shook his head. \"Supposedly the new steam cranes can raise five times as much.\"\n\n\"So I've heard. Progress is a marvelous thing.\"\n\n\"It is that. Though it's a shame it's put this fine fellow out of a job.\" The earl grinned. \"But his loss is my gain, no? I can't express how pleased I am to have a full complement of dragons again.\"\n\n\"Quite so, my lord.\" Archibahd gestured to the driver of the wagon, who urged the horses into motion and guided them back uphill. He and the earl followed on foot, continuing to discuss the new dragon in voices that quickly became too faint for Torch to make out.\n\nTorch was disappointed not to get to interact with the newcomer, but he reminded himself that he'd behaved much the same way on his arrival. After Oxheart had settled in and relaxed, he'd be more interested in his new neighbors. If he spoke the dragons' language, Torch would do his best to communicate using his limited fluency and convey his desire to learn more. If not, he'd work to teach Oxheart as much as he knew. Either way, the coming days promised to be far more interesting than any since Juniper's escape."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "The next morning Torch was startled from sleep by a bass bellow. Among the burst of angry words was one he knew. \"Dragonleaf!\"\n\nHe hurried eagerly from his temple. Oxheart did speak. Torch searched for words, but Blaze was already squawking and hissing, probably explaining that they didn't get their first portion of leaf until the noon meal.\n\nOxheart glared at Blaze, head low, mouth open to expose his teeth. He rumbled more words, \"dragonleaf\" again prominent among them.\n\nBlaze backed away, spreading his wings apologetically and speaking in a mollifying tone. Oxheart ignored him. He marched to the end of his chain, stared up at the house, and raised his voice in a harsh cry. It increased in volume until Torch's ears rang. After an impossibly long time, Oxheart paused to suck in a deep breath and renewed his call, even louder than before.\n\nTorch retreated as far as his chain would let him. He crouched by the lake with both wings wrapped around his head for at least a quarter of an hour. Every time Oxheart stopped to draw a breath Torch thought he was finished. Every time he was wrong.\n\nAbruptly the noise stopped. Torch poked his head out, ready to snatch it back into what meager shelter his wings offered if Oxheart started up again. To his great relief he saw Archibahd standing by Oxheart's food box, tossing ball after ball into the dragon's mouth.\n\nFinally satisfied, Oxheart flopped to the ground and appeared to fall immediately asleep. Archibahd studied him for several minutes, frowning, before heading back toward the house. Torch shook his head to try to stop the ringing in his ears, but it didn't fade until nearly noon.\n\nShortly before their meal was due to arrive, Oxheart roused and began prowling around his yard. Torch cautiously approached. Oxheart eyed him with disdain, but came to the end of his chain and stood, staring coldly.\n\nTorch raised his paw to his chest and tapped it, just as Juniper had when she taught him her name. \"Torch,\" He pointed at Oxheart and tilted his head. \"Word?\"\n\nOxheart emitted a cough and growl that Torch had to assume was his name. He hoped it wasn't actually some version of \"leave me alone.\"\n\nTorch almost changed his mind. But summoning all his courage, he drew a deep breath and carefully pronounced the speech he'd prepared. \"Torch no talk good. Oxheart know many words. Oxheart give Torch words? Torch talk good, Torch happy.\"\n\nOxheart regarded him for a long time without speaking. Torch's heart fell. Finally, when he was about to slink away in ashamed defeat, Oxheart spoke. \"Oxheart give Torch words. Torch give Oxheart dragonleaf.\"\n\nTorch gaped at him. \"Dragonleaf?\"\n\n\"Dragonleaf!\" Oxheart bellowed.\n\nTorch scrambled back, bobbing his head frantically. \"Yes. Yes. Torch give Oxheart dragonleaf.\"\n\nOxheart sat back on his haunches, smugness in every line of his body. \"Good.\"\n\nBefore Torch could formulate a reply, the creaking sound of the cart announced the arrival of their meal. Oxheart rose and strolled to the far side of his area to watch as Lew and Archibahd gave the other two dragons their meat and leaf.\n\nWhen it was Oxheart's turn, he gulped his meat in three bites and opened his mouth. Archibahd tossed him six balls. Oxheart glowered at him when he stopped, but didn't voice a protest.\n\nTorch tore small pieces off his chunk of hot, tasty roast mutton, trying to figure out what he was going to do. Oxheart couldn't hurt him if he reneged on his promise. Their chains kept them safely separated. The thought of surrendering some of his precious balls of leaf to the other dragon rankled deeply. Six balls a day was already far less than Torch had received at the circus. It was barely enough to get by on. He shouldn't let Oxheart bully him into turning over any of his precious supply.\n\nBut he wanted very badly to learn more of the dragons' language. He wanted to become fluent enough to understand everything Blaze and Flicker said. He wanted to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation with Oxheart instead of sounding like a stupid baby. If the earl someday brought more dragons to Baromere Park, as seemed likely, Torch wanted to be able to talk to them, too. Surely those things were worth a little dragonleaf. Say, one ball a day. He wouldn't miss one ball very much.\n\nAnd it wouldn't have to be for very long. Only until the next time Bertrom visited. Torch would figure out a way to let his friend know he wanted him to hand over all the dragonleaf Torch's most recent scale had bought. He could hide the package in his temple and dole out the balls to Oxheart a few at a time. He could send another scale or even two with Bertrom to Bellhold and buy plenty of leaf to keep both Torch and Oxheart happy.\n\nIf Torch could give Oxheart dragonleaf or withhold it as he chose, he'd be in control. Once Archibahd started reducing Oxheart's portion the way he'd told the earl he would, Oxheart would be furious and desperate. He'd do whatever Torch wanted in exchange for the precious balls.\n\nPleased with his plan, Torch swallowed his last bite of mutton. He stretched his neck and opened his mouth for Archibahd to toss the dragonleaf in. The first two balls he swallowed like always. But the third he shoved into his cheek, pretending to swallow so Archibahd wouldn't suspect anything.\n\nThe spicy, smoky aroma and the sweetness on his tongue were almost unbearably tempting. But Torch steeled his heart. Words would remain in his mind long after fleeting leaf dreams had evaporated. They were worth whatever discomfort he had to endure. It wouldn't kill him. Juniper had done without dragonleaf altogether, and she'd been fine.\n\nTorch waited until Archibahd, Lew, and the cart vanished over the rise. Then he stalked around the arc of his chain to where Oxheart was waiting and spit the ball of dragonleaf onto the ground, out of the other dragon's reach.\n\nOxheart stared at it, longing in every line of his body. \"Give.\"\n\nTorch shook his head. \"Words.\"\n\nOxheart stretched his neck to its full length and reached with his long, sinuous tongue, but Torch had judged the distance well and the ball of dragonleaf remained several feet beyond its twitching tip. Oxheart reared back in frustration, rising onto his hind legs and beating his wings. \"Dragonleaf!\" he roared.\n\n\"Words.\" Torch braced his feet and stared at Oxheart. His heart raced and his wings would be trembling in terror if he didn't have them clamped to his sides, but he wasn't going to back down.\n\nOxheart dropped back to all fours and glared at Torch, breathing heavily. He looked over his shoulder toward the house, then at the little ball of leaf lying between Torch's front paws.\n\nAbruptly he folded his wings and plopped to his haunches. \"Words.\" He raised one paw and pointed at Torch. He spoke slowly and distinctly, but most of his words were unknown to Torch. Among them he picked out \"not,\" \"talk,\" and \"bad.\" Oxheart paused and looked expectantly at Torch. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Torch said. He wasn't sure, but he thought Oxheart had declared he wasn't going to simplify his own speech for Torch's benefit. That was fine with Torch. He wanted to learn to speak correctly. That wasn't going to happen without plenty of examples.\n\nOxheart nodded curtly. He put his paw to his chest, said two unknown words, then his name. He pointed to Torch and said two different unknown words, followed by Torch's name.\n\nTorch started to echo him, but when he reached, \"Oxheart,\" the other dragon burst out angrily, \"No, no, no!\" He pointed at himself again and repeated the first two words and his name emphatically. Pointing at Torch, he repeated the second two words and Torch's name with just as much emphasis.\n\nFor a long moment Torch was confused, but then understanding blossomed. He bobbed his head, laid his paw on his chest, and used the first two words. \"I am Torch.\" He pointed at Oxheart and used the second two. \"You are Oxheart.\"\n\nOxheart nodded curtly. He pointed at the ball on the ground. Two more new words, followed by \"dragonleaf.\"\n\n\"It is dragonleaf,\" Torch repeated. He set his paw on a loose stone and rolled it a few inches toward Oxheart. \"It is stone.\" He jerked his snout toward the lake. \"It is water.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Oxheart looked over his shoulder at where Blaze was watching them from his area. Beyond him, Flicker, too, was watching with interest. This time Torch was certain what the new words he used meant. \"He is Blaze. She is Flicker.\"\n\nTorch repeated the sentences. Rising on his hind legs, he waved a paw at Blaze the way humans waved their hands. \"You are Blaze. I am Torch.\"\n\nBlaze snorted, but bobbed his head. \"Yes.\"\n\nFlicker flapped her wings and called eagerly, \"I am Flicker! You are Torch!\"\n\n\"You are Flicker. I am Torch,\" he shouted back. Happiness bubbled in his heart. His plan was going to work.\n\nOxheart bobbed his head, then looked pointedly back at the ball on the ground. \"Give me dragonleaf.\"\n\nTorch was pretty sure he'd deduced the meaning of the new word correctly. With his snout he sent the ball rolling across the gap to Oxheart. \"I give you dragonleaf.\"\n\nOxheart snapped it up in one swift motion. Without another word, he stalked back to the chapel and vanished inside.\n\nTorch didn't care how rude Oxheart was. He barely minded the jittery, restless feeling that crept over him, or the way his muscles twitched when he lay down in front of his temple. He was so busy going over the new words in his mind he scarcely noticed how long it took to doze off for his nap or how shallow and unsatisfying his dreams were. Before long he'd be able to carry on a conversation with any dragon in Aldania. Beside that, nothing else mattered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Scarred",
                "text": "As soon as Bertrom removed his handkerchief from the raw gap on his shoulder, Torch bent his neck into a deep curve and nosed a scale in the center of his chest. It was barely loose, and would hurt a great deal when Bertrom yanked it out, but Torch could deal with that.\n\nDragonleaf prices kept going up. His stash was running low, even though he'd insisted Bertrom take two scales on his last few trips to Bellhold. The further Archibahd cut Oxheart's ration of leaf, the more the other dragon demanded in exchange for lessons. Torch had made great progress in learning to speak properly, but he still had a long way to go.\n\nBertrom hesitated. \"Really? Are you sure?\" He fingered the scale. \"It's at least three days from being loose enough to come out easily. I have to leave for Bellhold in the morning. And it's right in front, where people can't miss seeing. Archibahd's dropped a few remarks that make me think he's noticed how many scales you've been losing and is getting suspicious. I hate to let it go to waste, but I really think it would be better if we skip this one.\"\n\nTorch shook his head emphatically. Bertrom's trips to Bellhold always lasted at least two weeks, and sometimes as long as two months. The scale would gray and fall off long before he returned. And it might be as long as a month or six weeks after that before his next trip. Torch couldn't risk running out of leaf. He couldn't afford to shed even a single scale without getting full price for it.\n\nBertrom's brow furrowed, but he nodded. \"All right. If you insist. Just please, try to keep it out of sight for a few days, at least. Until I've been gone a while.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head. It had rained several times recently, and the ground was muddy. Archibahd would never notice if the dirt that constantly caked the dragons' feet and legs spread a little farther.\n\nHe exhaled and relaxed all his muscles, which he'd learned helped minimize the discomfort. It took Bertrom a long time and a lot of painful prying to work his fingers far enough under the scale to get a good grip on it. His first yank failed to pull the scale all the way free, and the second time the seeping blood caused his fingers to slip off. It finally came out on his third attempt, with a deep, tearing rip. Torch had to clamp his teeth together to contain a cry.\n\nBertrom murmured in sympathy and pressed his handkerchief into the wound. It took a long time for it to stop bleeding. When he finally shoved the wadded cloth into his pocket, it was soaked with blood, the white fabric black in the moonlight. \"Sorry about that, old chap. I'll be sure to get the best price and bring you plenty of good leaf to make up for it.\"\n\nTorch panted and bobbed his head as much as he could without flexing the muscles in his chest. That had hurt far more than he'd expected. He wished he hadn't done it. In the future he'd know better, but it was too late now.\n\nBertrom added the scale to his jacket pocket with the other two he'd pulled, patted Torch's shoulder, and headed toward the house, whistling. Torch limped to his temple and crawled inside. With fresh wounds on both sides as well as in front, no position was comfortable. He finally settled with his chest pressed to the cool stone floor. It eased the burning pain a tiny amount.\n\nIn the morning the raw patches on his shoulder and flank felt better, as they usually did, but the one on his chest hurt worse. The whole area was swollen and hot. Torch stumbled down to the lake and soaked the wound in the cold water, which helped. By the time noon approached, he was able to walk with only a slight stiffness to his gait if he concentrated hard enough. He found a big mud puddle and waded in gingerly, hating the idea of getting the black, stinking goo on his raw flesh. But once he settled in and wallowed until his whole lower body was covered, he actually found the thick, damp coating rather soothing. It kept the stinging air out and cooled the throbbing heat.\n\nHe walked slowly and carefully up to his food box, getting there well before Archibahd and Lew appeared. He must have feigned his normal eagerness convincingly enough, because neither of them seemed to notice anything unusual about the way he choked down his meat or gulped his dragonleaf.\n\nTorch considered swallowing the third ball. He could dig into the supply hidden in his temple for Oxheart's payment. But he ended up tucking it into his cheek as usual. He could always dip into his stash for himself if the pain grew so bad he needed leaf dreams to escape. But he worried the balls wouldn't last until Bertrom returned with more, so he'd conserve them if he could.\n\nHis afternoon lesson with Oxheart distracted him for a while. They were working on the intricacies of expressing actions which had happened in the past versus those happing in the present, which the dragons' language handled quite differently than Forlish. Torch had finally grasped the basic principle, but now he was working to master all the nuances. Oxheart was methodical and detailed in his instruction, but he hated repeating himself and would quickly lose patience and put an end to the lesson if Torch took too long on any one point. So in order to get the full value for each precious ball of leaf, Torch had learned to shut out all distractions, focus his concentration, and absorb information quickly.\n\nHis intense focus blocked the pain so well that its return when Oxheart munched his ball and Torch finally relaxed was a shock. He staggered down to the lake and soaked until the need to shroud his wound in mud and get into place for supper drove him out. He didn't dare try to walk while Archibahd was looking. The caretaker would surely notice something wrong.\n\nHe gulped all three of his evening dragonleaf balls and retreated to his temple, falling gratefully into dreams. When they wore off halfway through the night, he suffered through an hour of misery before delving into his stash and devouring three more. When those weren't enough to let him sleep, he abandoned all efforts to be frugal and swallowed ball after ball until the haze finally thickened enough to obscure the pain.\n\nTorch roused briefly to the sound of Archibahd cursing. He cracked his eyes open a slit, too dazed for surprise when he found the caretaker standing over him in the gloom of his temple, where no human had entered since Torch had come to Baromere. Archibahd pressed dragonleaf balls into his mouth and Torch gulped them down, desperate to stave off the pain's return. As he dropped back into dreams he was dimly aware of Archibahd scrubbing his chest with a rough cloth and pouring on some sort of stinging liquid. Streaks of fire shot through his body, but the leaf kept the agony distant enough to ignore.\n\nAn indeterminate time later he woke again, certain his flame had somehow escaped his throat and taken up residence in his chest. Archibahd was speaking to the earl. \"The infection is still spreading. It was too far advanced when I found it for the spirits to overcome the corruption. To stop it, I'll have to cauterize the wound.\"\n\nThe earl's voice was distressed. \"You're sure there's no other way?\"\n\nArchibahd was blunt. \"I'm sure. If we don't stop the infection, it will kill him. And it must be done now. If we wait until it reaches the muscles of his legs and wings, the treatment will leave him crippled. If we act quickly, there's a good chance he'll still be able walk and fly.\"\n\n\"It will hurt him terribly, though, won't it?\"\n\n\"I'll dose him so heavily he'll barely feel it.\"\n\nThe earl didn't reply. Finally Archibahd spoke again. \"I can't perform the procedure without your approval. If you prefer not to expend the effort and resources, I recommend you have him put down. It would be more humane than letting him suffer.\" His voice roughened. \"I can take care of that, too. It's your choice.\"\n\nThe earl remained silent for a long time. Finally, so faintly Torch barely heard it, he said, \"Do whatever it takes to save him.\" A gentle hand stroked his neck. \"My poor Crimsy. I'm so sorry.\"\n\nA hand pressed fragrant balls between his teeth. Torch fought to swallow them. He knew what \"cauterize\" meant. Once at the circus, a springboard had broken under one of the acrobats and sliced a long cut in her leg. It had festered until at last they'd been forced to call in a local physician. Torch still remembered her screams and the smell of burning flesh.\n\nShe'd lived, though, and healed well enough to perform again. Torch wanted to live. He wanted to be able to walk and fly. So he buried his terror and choked down the balls Archibahd fed him until he couldn't force himself to stay awake any longer.\n\nDragonleaf dreams took him swiftly, deeper than ever before. Somewhere far away terrible things were happening, but they had very little to do with him. Only the thinnest of threads bound his wandering mind to his suffering body. He floated on a cloud of sweet, soft peace into a long, dark night of oblivion."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "For a long time, whenever pain sharpened and dragged Torch toward consciousness, a hand was there pressing dragonleaf into his mouth. He accepted it gratefully and sank back into dreams. Eventually there was water as well, which soothed his parched throat marvelously. And later bits of meat, warm and tender, which eased the ache in his belly.\n\nSlowly the pain lessened. One day it receded so much he could open his eyes and raise his head. Archibahd rose from a chair just inside the temple door and came to examine his chest. He seemed pleased with what he found. He had Lew bring a bucket of water and a platter of warm mutton. Torch gulped them eagerly. But the slight exercise of eating and drinking tired him so much he gratefully swallowed the leaf Archibahd offered. Only four balls, though. It was enough to let him sleep without dragging him so frighteningly deep.\n\nThe next day Torch woke with a wonderful sense of well-being. Energy surged through his body. The pain in his chest had abated to an entirely manageable dull ache, so much milder than it had been he found it practically negligible. He pulled his legs under him and pushed himself to his feet. He was shaky as a newborn colt, but he was standing. It felt wonderful.\n\nHe cautiously spread his wings until the tips brushed the temple walls. They seemed to function normally. His front legs felt weak, but no more so than his rear ones. He drew a deep breath, and his chest expanded with only slight additional discomfort.\n\nHe blew it out and drew another. He didn't want to look, but he'd have to eventually. Better to do it now and get it over with.\n\nHe vaguely remembered cloth dressings swathing his body, but they were gone. He arched his neck and angled his head to peer at his chest.\n\nIt was bad, but not as bad as he'd feared. A big, irregular patch in the center was bare of scales and heavily scabbed. Around it was a broad ring of distorted, discolored scales, their usual red mottled with brown and gray. No sign of infection remained, and the scabbed portion appeared to be healing well. The damage was extensive, but it seemed to be primarily cosmetic.\n\nTorch closed his eyes and breathed for a moment. Then he shook his head hard and fixed his gaze on the door of the temple. Soft sun spilled in. He was sick of being cooped up in the darkness. He wanted to go outside.\n\nHe took a few steps carefully, until he was sure his legs would hold him. Then he padded with more confidence through the door and into the yard. He stopped and stretched, first his front legs then his hind legs, then spread his wings to their full extent and fanned them gently.\n\n\"Would you look at that?\" Torch turned to find the earl and Archibahd standing by his food box, watching him. The earl clapped Archibahd on the shoulder. \"You've done a marvelous job. I have to admit, for a while I doubted he'd recover. But now he's nearly as good as new.\"\n\nArchibahd inclined his head modestly. \"He'll always bear the scar, but its appearance will improve over time. In ten or twenty years it will be no more than a hand-sized patch.\"\n\n\"A small enough memento of such a harrowing ordeal.\" The earl regarded Torch with melancholy eyes. \"Though it's a shame to see such beauty spoiled.\" He heaved a sigh. \"I suppose it can't be helped. Will he be all right left alone from now on, or do you plan to dose him again so it's safe for you to go back in?\"\n\n\"We'll see how he fares today, but unless he takes a turn for the worse I think he'll be fine without any more hands-on care. He needs to be up and around to complete his recovery. Of course I'll keep a close eye on him until he's entirely back to normal.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" The earl hesitated, then shot Archibahd a wary glance. \"Have you come to any conclusion about how it could have happened?\"\n\n\"Still only speculation. Sometimes loose scales catch and rip out. I could believe that's what happened on his shoulder and flank. But I suspect the wound on his chest was deeper than can be attributed to natural causes, though the infection was already so advanced the first time I inspected it, I couldn't tell for sure. And three torn out scales at once seems unlikely to be coincidental. I didn't find any of them lying about when I searched. In addition, I spotted a number of other places with scales at various stages of growing in. More than I'd expect to find normally. Some of them also showed signs that the old scale had been ripped out instead of falling naturally.\"\n\nThe earl shuffled from foot to foot, not quite meeting Archibahd's gaze. \"You're saying you think someone has been pulling them.\"\n\n\"I'm saying I think we should investigate the possibility. With their striking color, they would bring a high price on the black market.\" Archibahd regarded the earl gravely. \"The culprit would have to be someone with regular access to the park and the dragons.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the earl said bleakly. He sucked in a deep breath and gave Torch a wan smile. \"Keep me apprised of Crimsy's progress. And bring me anything you find on the other matter.\" He turned and strode toward the house. Archibahd gave Torch a last long, searching look and followed.\n\nTorch padded down to the lake and sprawled on the shore, fretting. If they investigated, they might discover what Bertrom had been doing. They'd never believe he was acting as Torch's agent. Torch needed the dragonleaf his scales bought. Oxheart would never agree to keep teaching him if Torch lost the ability to pay him.\n\nAnd it wasn't Bertrom's fault he'd gotten sick. Torch knew better now than to let him pull any scales that weren't already good and loose. It wouldn't be fair if the earl punished Bertrom, when he'd only been helping Torch.\n\nSince there was nothing he could do about it, eventually he shoved the worry to the back of his mind. He dropped his head to his front paws, closed his eyes, and drifted into a pleasant doze. His body needed plenty of rest to recover from its ordeal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Torch had nearly forgotten his worry a few weeks later when he heard footsteps crunching on the gravel late one evening. But when he caught Bertrom's scent, it came rushing back. He flung up his head and peered around, but it was too dark to see anyone who might be lurking. He sucked the breeze into his nostrils, seeking any other scent, but all he picked up was a faint lingering aroma of spilled meat juices from his food box.\n\nBertrom approached Torch cautiously, spreading his hands. \"What's the matter, boy? Why so agitated?\" He followed Torch's searching gaze around the area for a moment, then shrugged. \"I wish there was a way for you to tell me what's got you so upset. Father seemed bothered about something, too, but he brushed me off when I asked if anything had happened while I was gone.\" He reached for Torch's head and set to work scratching around the base of his horns.\n\nTorch relaxed into his touch. Everything was probably fine. He basked in the affectionate attention he'd missed so much. Bertrom devoted a good long time to petting him, and Torch enjoyed every minute.\n\nEventually, though, Bertrom pulled back. He reached into his jacket pocket. \"Here you go. Three pounds of the best quality Forlish leaf. Prices have stabilized, so I was able to get you a generous amount. Don't eat it all at once.\" He chuckled as Torch took the heavy parcel carefully between his teeth and bounded back to his temple.\n\nTorch pried free the stone that concealed his hiding place and tucked the packet inside. The oiled paper did a good job of protecting the leaf from dampness when it rained. Sometimes it was difficult to get the packets open without tearing the paper, but with patience and delicate application of his claws, teeth, and tail tip, he usually managed it. With the dozen or so balls remaining from his last purchase, this batch should last him for several months, at least.\n\nWhen Torch returned, Bertrom ran a hand along his flank. Casually he asked, \"Happen to have any scales loose at the moment? I'm only visiting for a few days this time. My friends in Bellhold don't like it when I stay away too long.\"\n\nTorch curved his spine to angle his hindquarters toward Bertrom and stretched his neck to point out a spot a few feet down his tail. The loose scale was smaller than the ones on his body, but it wiggled freely even though it remained bright red. It would come out easily. It might not sell for quite as much as the larger ones, but should bring enough to buy sufficient dragonleaf to last a while if he doled it out carefully.\n\nBertrom seemed mildly disappointed, but he nodded. \"This one should pop out with no trouble at all. Not like the last one.\" He shook his head. \"It sold for a pretty price, but I don't think we should take one that's so firmly attached again. There's no need when loose ones like this are plentiful.\" He pulled out his handkerchief and reached for the scale.\n\n\"Stop right there.\" Light glared in Torch's eyes, blinding him. He and Bertrom whirled in unison to face the intruders.\n\nThe light dimmed. Torch squinted until he could make out two silhouetted figures. One of them was adjusting a lantern. As Torch's eyes adapted, he realized the one with the lantern was Archibahd, and the other was the earl.\n\nBertrom spoke quickly, his voice cheerful and only a little strained. \"Oh, hello, Father, Archibahd. It's such a pleasant evening, I thought I'd come pay Torch a visit. He prefers that nickname over Crimsy, you know. Much more dignified. He always enjoys it when I spend a little time petting him, especially when I scratch around the base of his horns. I don't know why you're both so dead set against letting anyone touch the dragons. All right, maybe with Oxheart it's a wise precaution.\" He chuckled. \"But I promise, Torch is so gentle he'd never hurt a fly.\"\n\nThe earl remained silent. Archibahd spoke sternly. \"There's no use trying to talk your way out of this, Bertrom. We know what you've been doing.\"\n\nBertrom edged away from Torch's tail, casually tucking his handkerchief into his pocket. \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\nThe earl finally spoke, his voice anguished. \"I didn't want to believe Archibahd when he told me what he suspected. But now I've heard you admit it. How could you, Bertie? How could you hurt a poor dumb creature that way? Haven't I taught you better?\"\n\nBertrom stepped forward, spreading his hands. \"I don't know what Archibahd told you, Father, but I swear, it's not what you think. Yes, I've pulled a few of Torch's scales, but only when he let me know that's what he wanted. I take them to Bellhold and sell them, and buy dragonleaf for him with the proceeds. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.\"\n\nThe earl shook his head. Archibahd's voice remained cold and stern. \"We've spoken to people in Bellhold. We know you've been buying expensive clothes, and gambling, and paying off your friends' debts. We know you've been throwing parties, and hosting evenings at the theater, and supplying your friends with brandy, and otherwise making yourself the most popular young man in town. We know you've been keeping a mistress and lavishing her with expensive gifts. Including a set of red dragonscale jewelry, a necklace and bracelet and earrings. The jeweler said you paid up front, in cash, for him to cut and set the scale you brought him.\"\n\nBertrom backed up, his voice going defensive. \"I act as Torch's agent. I take a percentage of the proceeds as my fee each time I sell a scale. He certainly can't get them to the dealers in Bellhold any other way.\" His voice rose. \"You think dragons are only animals, but you're wrong. They're every bit as intelligent as people. Torch and I communicate very clearly. He's entirely capable of entering into a business arrangement with me if he wants to.\"\n\n\"Shame on you!\" the earl burst out. \"Using ISPLD's lies to justify abusing a poor helpless beast!\"\n\n\"Even if their propaganda were true, what you're describing isn't an equitable business arrangement,\" Archibahd said. \"It's exploitation. One-tenth of what a single scale sells for on the black market would buy a hundred pounds of dragonleaf.\"\n\nThe earl glowered at him. \"The only leaf seller we could find who'd done business with you reported you generally bought one or two pounds each time you were in Bellhold. He was quite pleased that your most recent purchase was a full three pounds.\"\n\n\"Even that's far too much for a single dragon to consume over only a few months. Especially on top of the daily ration we give them. Too high a dose over too long a period causes them to become dangerously dependent on its effects. Their brains can be permanently damaged, and they can become uncontrollably violent if the dose is withdrawn too quickly. That's why I'm being so careful to taper Oxheart's ration gradually.\"\n\n\"Remember what happened with Flicker,\" the earl added. \"I thought I was being kind and generous, but she'll always be addled because of my error.\" He glowered at Bertrom. \"And now my beautiful Crimsy is scarred and ugly. He'll bear the mark for the rest of his life. Show him, Archibahd.\"\n\nArchibahd slid the lantern's guard open and raised it. Torch flinched and turned his head, but he didn't try to evade the light. The flurry of accusations left him confused and heartbroken. He didn't want to believe that Bertrom had been using him to enrich himself. But the evidence seemed too overwhelming to ignore. If it was true, Bertrom needed to see the consequences Torch had suffered because of what he'd done.\n\nBertrom gaped at the scar on Torch's chest. After a moment of horrified silence, he whirled to face his father. \"That's not my fault! Torch insisted I pull that scale. You heard me say I thought it was a mistake! But he wouldn't listen when I tried to persuade him it wasn't ready. He wanted more dragonleaf, and he wouldn't take no for an answer.\"\n\n\"Dragonleaf you could have bought a hundred times over with the scales you'd already taken,\" the earl said bitterly.\n\nArchibahd lowed the lantern. \"Your father and I have discussed what he should do with you. Dealing in dragon scales is a crime. If he turns you over to the authorities, you'll probably be transported to Dreadgarde.\"\n\n\"It would be better than you deserve,\" the earl growled.\n\n\"However, I persuaded him that such a course of action would distress your mother greatly. Also, it might raise troublesome questions about how we could have been negligent enough to allow you to get away with it for so long. Accounts of the scandal would be written up in the papers, which could influence public opinion in favor of ISPLD's most extreme positions. In light of all these factors, he agreed to my alternate suggestion.\"\n\nThe earl nodded sharply. \"I'm confiscating every last twelfthpiece of your blood money. You'll be remaining at Baromere Park for the foreseeable future. Under Archibahd's strict supervision and direct observation, you'll be caring for the dragons, feeding them and mucking out their middens. The rest of your time you'll spend with me, learning about estate management and performing any menial tasks I think might benefit your moral character.\"\n\n\"But Father, I\u2014\"\n\n\"If you find those arrangements unsatisfactory, I'll be happy to summon the local magistrate and present him with the evidence we've collected against you. Including my testimony and Archibahd's concerning what we heard you confess. Is that what you'd prefer?\"\n\nBertrom's shoulders slumped. \"No, Father,\" he said sullenly.\n\n\"Good.\" The earl put a hand on Bertrom's shoulder and steered him toward the house.\n\n\"One moment, my lord,\" Archibahd said. \"Bertrom, where's the dragonleaf you bought in Bellhold?\"\n\n\"I gave it to Torch. He put it in his den.\" Bertrom scowled. \"You're going to take it away from him? After all he's gone through to get it?\"\n\n\"It's for his own good.\" Archibahd studied Torch warily, then turned to frown at the temple.\n\nBertrom laughed, wild and angry. \"Don't let him do it, Torch! Show him you're nobody's fool. If your teeth and claws aren't enough to keep him out, breathe a little fire at him. That leaf is yours, bought with money you earned fair and square. He has no right to take it.\"\n\nArchibahd didn't say anything. Instead he reached into the pouch at his belt and drew out a handful of dragonleaf balls. He displayed them to Torch.\n\nTorch stared at his outstretched hand, breathing hard. Bertrom was right. The dragonleaf hidden in the temple was his. He had every right to defend it against anyone who tried to take it from him.\n\nBut he couldn't do as Bertrom suggested. He'd never threatened to harm a person, except in pretense as part of his circus act. He'd certainly never actually done so. The idea went against every instinct of his mind and heart.\n\nAnd Archibahd had saved his life, after Bertrom had endangered it. His skilled treatment and devoted care had brought Torch through the illness that could easily have killed him. He might believe Torch was only an animal, but he'd acted like a true friend.\n\nBertrom hadn't. He'd only pretended to befriend Torch to win his trust. What he'd done proved it hadn't been sincere. He hadn't even denied the accusations, just made excuses why persuading Torch to let him rip his scales off and sell them and then keeping most of the money for himself hadn't been wrong.\n\nMaybe Torch had been hopelessly naive, but he wasn't stupid. He wasn't going to fall for the same lies twice, and he wasn't going to side with the one who'd exploited him. He wasn't going to threaten or hurt Archibahd because Bertrom told him to.\n\nEven though he couldn't think of any other way to keep Archibahd from confiscating his leaf.\n\nTorch opened his mouth. Archibahd tossed balls of leaf, and Torch caught them. He stuffed his cheeks full of as many as they could hold, then swallowed the rest. As the dreams flooded his mind, he collapsed to sprawl on the ground and closed his eyes.\n\nAfter the earl had marched Bertrom back toward the house and Archibahd had slipped quietly into the temple, Torch spit the meager dozen balls he'd salvaged into the crook of his elbow. He'd have to make them last as long as he could. With a leaden heart even the dragonleaf's euphoria couldn't lighten, Torch draped his head over them and surrendered to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragonleaf",
                "text": "Torch carefully flicked each of the three dragonleaf balls with the tip of his tail. One by one they rolled to a stop at Oxheart's feet. Oxheart scooped them up and swallowed them, then turned to leave as if Torch had ceased to exist.\n\nTorch summoned all his courage, his heart pounding. \"Excuse me, Oxheart?\"\n\nThe gray dragon stopped and snaked his head around to glare at Torch. \"What?\"\n\nTorch fought the urge to flee. What he was about to say was going to make Oxheart angry. But it had to be said. Oxheart would be far, far more furious if they got to the end of their next lesson and Torch failed to produce what he expected. He sank into a crouch and spread his wings a little. \"I'm very sorry, but I've run out of extra dragonleaf. From now on I'll only be able to give you one ball in exchange for each lesson.\"\n\nOxheart stiffened. He turned slowly and paced with heavy, ominous steps toward Torch, only stopping when he reached the end of his chain. \"One ball?\"\n\n\"That was our original agreement, wasn't it? One ball for one lesson?\" Torch stiffened his legs to keep them from trembling. \"I was happy to pay you more while Bertrom was selling my scales. But now that I can't get a supply that way, my only source is what Archibahd gives me. I hope it will be enough to satisfy you. You've taught me so much, but I know my speech is still far from perfect.\"\n\nOxheart regarded him silently for a long time. Torch crouched lower and gazed up pleadingly. He couldn't stop learning now. He'd worked too hard and practiced too diligently to quit before he fully mastered the dragons' language. He was able to understand nearly everything the other dragons said, convey his meaning to them with reasonable fluency, and think in Draganish almost as easily as in Forlish, but he still made many mistakes. Oxheart constantly berated him for getting words out of order, or mixing up rising and falling tones, or using the wrong tense, or any of a hundred other errors.\n\nAnd beyond his desire to speak correctly, he needed the diversion the lessons provided. He couldn't bear the thought of his days returning to the deadly monotony he'd endured between Juniper's departure and Oxheart's arrival.\n\nFinally Oxheart gave a curt nod. \"Two.\"\n\nTorch's heart sank. \"What?\"\n\n\"I'll accept two balls for each day's lesson. One from your noon ration, one from your evening ration.\"\n\n\"But that will only leave me four!\" Torch raised his head. \"Even five isn't enough. With four I won't be able to sleep, my muscles will be constantly twitching, my mouth will dry out, my head will hurt\u2014\"\n\n\"Good!\" Oxheart roared. He reared to his hind legs and beat his wings. \"That's exactly what I've suffered every day since I came to this miserable place.\"\n\nHe dropped back to all fours and glared at Torch. \"At the docks I received ten balls at noon and ten at night, plus another for every load I carried. When I first came here Archibahd only gave me eight and eight, with no chance for more. Now he's down to five and six. He'll cut me to five and five any day now. Even with your three I've barely been able to endure it. Two won't help much, but maybe it will be enough to make it worth putting up with your stupidity. If all you can give me is one, I'd rather spend my time beating my aching head against the wall than listening to your whiny voice butcher Draganish!\"\n\nTorch cowered before his anger. \"All right,\" he said. \"I don't know how long I'll be able to stand it, but I'll try.\"\n\nOxheart's wings sagged and his head drooped. \"I know,\" he said bleakly. He shook his head as wearily as if a fifty-pound weight hung around his neck. \"It's going to be hell on both of us. But we've got no choice but to endure it. Unless we want to stick our heads in the lake and breathe water,\" He huffed bleakly. \"I've thought about it more than once. There's not much reason not to, when they take away the only thing that makes life worth living.\"\n\nTorch peered at him in surprise. \"Is that really how you feel?\"\n\nOxheart rustled his wings. \"Well, I haven't done it yet. We'll see what happens when Archibahd cuts my ration again.\"\n\nTorch spoke impulsively. \"Maybe it would be easier to go without leaf completely than to eat too little. Juniper seemed to do all right without it.\"\n\nOxheart gaped at him as if he'd suddenly started speaking gibberish. \"What?\"\n\n\"The dragon who lived in the chapel before you. She'd been a messenger, but they sold her to the earl because she started refusing to eat dragonleaf. That was before I could speak Draganish very well, so I never got the chance to ask her why, but I think it was because she believed humans use dragonleaf to control us.\"\n\n\"Of course they do, but that's hardly a reason to make yourself even more miserable.\" Oxheart swung his tail and smacked the heavy length of chain that trailed behind him. \"Not eating leaf didn't stop them from controlling her, did it?\"\n\n\"Not at first.\" Torch turned to stare out over the lake. \"But eventually it did. She escaped. She told me she was going to fly to Dragana someday, and then she did it.\" His head drooped. \"Or tried to, anyway. She probably died.\"\n\n\"There you go.\" Oxheart bobbed his head decisively. \"A rotten life is better than death, and a little leaf is better than none.\" He pointed his snout at Torch. \"Two balls.\" He turned and stomped back to the chapel.\n\nTorch wandered down to the lake shore, pondering the conversation. Maybe it really would be better to stop eating dragonleaf altogether. If he no longer needed his portion, he could give it all to Oxheart. That would make the other dragon happy. Maybe even happy enough to treat Torch like a friend, instead of a barely tolerated nuisance.\n\nHe wasn't ready to go that far yet. But he'd think about it. He'd see how he felt eating four balls a day. After he'd had a chance to grow accustomed to that amount, he'd see if he wanted to go further."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Four balls a day was a nightmare.\n\nTorch strained against his collar, yearning toward the cluster of people by Blaze's food box. Even from so far, he could smell the dragonleaf Archibahd was tossing to Blaze. The sweet, spicy, smoky aroma cut through the savory scent of roast beef as clearly as a streak of lightning through a dark sky. The minutes it would take for Archibahd to finish feeding Blaze, feed Oxheart, and walk to Torch's box stretched before him like an eternity.\n\nHis head hurt worse than his chest had at the height of the infection. His legs trembled like leaves fluttering in the wind. His tail twitched uncontrollably. He had to press his wings hard into his body to stop them from shaking. The ground beneath his feet rolled like the deck of the ship the circus had traveled on when they'd played a command performance for the prince of Fogella. His stomach twisted with nausea worse than the seasickness Jom had suffered during the voyage.\n\nTwo or three lifetimes later\u2014or so it felt\u2014Bertrom finally rolled the cart up to Torch's box. He sullenly transferred the platter of meat using the long paddle. At least he'd become skilled enough not to drop the meal in the dirt, the way he had far too many times when he'd first taken over the duty from Lew.\n\nTorch ripped off chunks of beef and swallowed them. The flavor gave him no pleasure. His filling stomach gave him no satisfaction. The only thing that mattered was finishing.\n\nAt long, long last, the moment arrived. Archibahd reached into his pouch. Torch opened his mouth wide, suppressing a pitiful whine. He barely cared anymore whether Archibahd noticed anything wrong, but he still made an effort to conceal his desperation.\n\nThe first ball flew in a graceful arc. Torch snapped it from the air. Heady fumes filled his nostrils. Flavor blossomed on his tongue. He gulped, savoring the lovely sensation as it slid down his throat.\n\nBy the time he caught the second, his miseries were abating and soft, lovely fog was stealing into his mind. He swallowed the delicious ball, basking in the wonderful feeling, while simultaneously steeling himself for the coming trial. It grew more difficult with every meal.\n\nArchibahd tossed the third ball. Torch snapped his mouth closed around it. The urge to swallow was overwhelming. It took every scrap of willpower he could summon to twist his tongue and shove the ball into his cheek.\n\nBertrom was already trundling the cart back uphill. Archibahd turned to follow him. Torch stood stiffly, head down, eyes closed, fighting to resist his overpowering need for more dragonleaf.\n\nAs soon as the humans vanished over the rise, Torch walked stiffly, moving one leg at a time and placing each foot deliberately, around the arc of his chain. When he reached the meeting place, Oxheart was already there, waiting impatiently. He stared at Torch's mouth. With greater effort than it took to lift a full-grown ram into the air, Torch wrenched it open. Oxheart's eyes followed the ball of dragonleaf as it plopped to the ground.\n\nTorch dragged his tail around and positioned it to swipe the ball and send it rolling into the other dragon's reach. But he couldn't quite force his muscles to give the final twitch. The effects of the two balls he'd eaten were already fading. There would be no more until noon the next day. The little damp, sticky wad of brown leaves called to him seductively. Lust roared in his heart. He must have it. He must. He would die if it vanished down Oxheart's gullet. He was sure of it.\n\nHe pulled his tail back and braced both front legs, lowering his snout toward the ball. \"I'm sorry,\" he muttered. \"I can't. I thought I could, but it's too much. I know this means you won't be able to give me lessons any more, but I'll just have to do without.\" His desire to further increase his knowledge of Draganish dwindled to insignificance beside his desire to consume the dragonleaf. \"It's not worth it.\" His head crept closer to the ball, shame at his weakness slowing the movement, but swelling joy at the prospect of scooping it up and swallowing it driving him forward.\n\n\"No!\" Oxheart bellowed, so loud Torch flinched back. The desperation in the other dragon's voice matched that coursing through Torch's body. \"Don't touch it. It's mine. Give it to me.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Torch mumbled. \"I'm sorr\u2014\"\n\nOxheart hurled himself forward, straining with all his strength against his chain. His collar cut deep into his neck. He roared a wild, wordless shriek, his bared teeth and writhing tongue straining toward the ball. Torch cowered, terrified, but still desperate to gulp the dragonleaf before Oxheart found some way to cross the narrow gap between them and snatch it away.\n\nAbruptly Oxheart hurled his body around, flinging his hindquarters at Torch. He scrambled backward, claws digging into the ground, until his collar slid up his neck and lodged beneath his backswept horns. It dug into his throat and strangled his bellows. His tail stretched to its full length and lashed, its tip sweeping only inches from the little ball.\n\nTorch darted forward, but Oxheart gave a mighty wrench, dropping his head and throwing all his massive weight back. One of his horns snapped off. His collar yanked forward, covering one eye and half his face. Oxheart flung his head from side to side, blood from the jagged stump flying everywhere, and jerked backward with all his strength. His other horn tore loose and his collar dragged across his face and off.\n\nOxheart whirled and plunged at Torch, mouth gaping. Terrified and furious, Torch spit a spray of fuel and ignited it. A jet of flame lanced out and struck Oxheart's face. The other dragon screamed and reared. Torch dove to the ground and snapped up the ball of leaf. He swallowed it and scrambled backward, readying more fuel.\n\nWith a cry of rage, Oxheart swept his wings down and leapt into the air. Claws extended, he dove for Torch. Torch blasted him with another burst of fire, but Oxheart ignored it and kept coming. His hind claws struck Torch's chest, knocking him off balance. His front claws clamped onto Torch's foreshoulders and drove him to the ground. His bleeding head, one horn dangling, dove at Torch, and his jaws clamped around Torch's throat.\n\nTorch shot flame, but one gland was blocked by Oxheart's strangling bite and his breath was half choked off. The burning fuel pooled in his mouth, its heat penetrating the fire-resistant surfaces of Torch's tongue and cheeks. But enough bathed Oxheart's scales to force him to loosen his grip.\n\nTorch ripped his neck free and thrashed, flinging Oxheart away with all his strength. The gray dragon's claws slipped from Torch's scales and he sprawled in the dirt. Torch scrambled to his feet, sprang into the air, and fought to gain height before his foe could recover.\n\nOxheart jumped to follow. Their wings beat in a fury of dust and blood. Torch rose faster until his chain brought his ascent to an abrupt halt. Oxheart soared past.\n\nFor a moment Torch hoped he would keep going, fleeing across the lake the way Juniper had, but he bent into a tight turn and circled, glaring at Torch in crazed fury. Thrusting all four feet down, claws spread, he stooped on Torch like a falcon.\n\nTorch dodged, exhaling a gust of flame. He aimed for Oxheart's wing. If he could burn a big enough hole in the thin, vulnerable membranes, his enemy would plunge to the ground.\n\nOxheart, too, sent a stream of fuel shooting from his mouth. He'd been quenched, the sparking crystals in his throat surgically removed, so it was still liquid when it spewed out. But it hit Torch's flame and ignited. Only a frantic twist and plummet kept the billow of fire from engulfing Torch's wing.\n\nTorch backwinged desperately to break his fall. His chain tangled around his hind legs, but he kicked free. His wings caught the air and he swooped as far as the chain would let him. He slammed hard against its end in the faint hope some weak link would give way, but it held firm. Despair loomed. As long as he remained bound while Oxheart flew free, he was at an insurmountable disadvantage.\n\nHe wouldn't give up, though. He'd keep fighting until he couldn't fight anymore. He turned to face Oxheart's next attack. The gray dragon plunged from high above, screaming.\n\nTorch's fuel sacs were nearly empty. He waited until the last possible moment to spend his final shot. The instant before Oxheart's claws raked his wings, he dodged to the side and spat every remaining drop in a blazing stream toward the stretched membrane between the outer two ribs of Oxheart's left wing.\n\nThe skin blackened and split. Oxheart shrieked and tumbled. With a wrench of his right wing and what remained of his left, he flung his falling body sideways and crashed into Torch. His teeth sank into Torch's tail and his claws raked his side. His weight dragged Torch down. Torch beat his wings frantically, but they sank toward the ground faster and faster.\n\nTorch writhed his body and lashed his tail, but he couldn't shake Oxheart free. One of Oxheart's claws slashed a long slice through the membrane of his right wing where it met his body. Torch slewed sideways and fell.\n\nOxheart released his grip and kicked away from Torch, struggling to stay aloft. The ground loomed. With a reflex honed by thousands of performances, Torch flung his wings out to brake his fall, ignoring the scream of pain as his right wing ripped further. He struck the ground with one shoulder and rolled.\n\nA sickening crunch told him Oxheart hadn't fared as well. Torch scrambled to his feet and whirled to face his opponent, bracing for more combat.\n\nOxheart staggered upright. Blood streamed from his broken horns, both wings dragged limp and useless, and scorch marks streaked his body. He stumbled toward Torch, roaring in pain and fury, eyes empty of anything save rage. His right hind leg was twisted at an odd angle, and his left front leg bent where no joint should be every time it hit the ground, but he ignored them and kept coming, somehow gaining speed. His jaws gaped and liquid fuel spurted into Torch's face.\n\nTorch tried to retreat, but his chain brought him up short. He reared and shrieked. Oxheart plowed into him, and Torch went over backwards. He snapped at Oxheart's throat and clawed his belly. His teeth and claws found purchase, but so did Oxheart's. They rolled together, biting and ripping and screaming.\n\nTorch was bigger, but Oxheart was heavier and stronger. The gray dragon pinned Torch to the ground and clamped his jaws around his throat. All Torch's struggles couldn't shake him loose.\n\nTorch fought to breathe. His vision blurred. He kept thrusting his legs, trying to rake Oxheart with his claws, but his strikes grew weaker and clumsier. Darkness wrapped around him like warm wings, urging him to relax into peaceful slumber. But Torch fought on. He knew he was defeated and death was inevitable, but something in his heart refused to surrender.\n\nA deafening crack sounded. Oxheart collapsed on top of Torch. His jaws came loose from Torch's throat, and Torch sucked in a cold, searing breath. Hot blood gushed over him.\n\nAs his vision cleared, Torch glimpsed Archibahd running toward him. His hand clutched a rifle, smoking and stinking of burnt gunpowder. He stopped and raised it to his shoulder.\n\nTorch heaved until Oxheart's limp body slid off him and thudded to the ground. He scrambled to his feet and stood panting, swaying a little. Everything hurt, especially his torn wing, but he didn't think he'd sustained any irreparable damage.\n\nBertrom's voice rose, frightened and angry. \"What are you waiting for? Shoot him!\"\n\nArchibahd didn't shoot, but he didn't lower the rifle, either. \"He's still on his chain.\"\n\n\"What does that matter? He's gone mad! Look what he did to Oxheart!\"\n\n\"Look what Oxheart did to him. We didn't see which of them started the fight. But after Oxheart's collar came off, he could have fled. Torch couldn't. I'm inclined to think he was only defending himself.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head, though he knew it wouldn't do any good. Archibahd didn't believe dragons were intelligent enough to understand human speech. But he was too tired and in too much pain to think of anything else that might convince him. He sagged to the ground and dropped his head to rest on his front paws, closing his eyes. At least he could rest while Archibahd decided whether or not to kill him.\n\nAt length Archibahd sighed. \"Your father will have to decide.\"\n\nPounding footsteps approached. They came to an abrupt halt. The earl's stunned voice said, \"What happened?\"\n\nArchibahd and Bertrom's voices competed to explain. Torch stopped listening. With every breath new injuries made themselves felt: the sharp pain of cuts, the heat of burns, and the dull ache of bruises. He craved dragonleaf. Even as exhausted as he was, he'd never be able to sleep without it.\n\nThe three men walked around Torch and inspected Oxheart's body. The earl and Archibahd discussed what to do with it in hushed, grim tones. Finally the earl sent Bertrom to fetch as many servants and workmen as he could find. They'd bring down the wagon, lift Oxheart into it, and haul him away.\n\nAfter he left, the two men remained silent for a long time. Finally Archibahd said, \"What about the Crimson Torch, my lord?\"\n\nThe earl's voice was dull and hopeless. \"I can't do this anymore. It's too much. First Juniper, then Crimsy's illness, then Bertrom, and now this\u2026 They're such magnificent creatures. But even with your expertise, I can't keep them safe and happy. How long before another disaster strikes? How long before the rest of them die? I see now the whole venture was doomed from the beginning. It will never be the way I imagined.\"\n\nHis voice firmed. \"I've made up my mind, Archibahd. I'm getting out of the dragon business. Clearly they're too much for any private citizen to handle. I'm going to need you to help me dispose of the ones that are left.\"\n\nArchibahd's voice was grave. \"So you want me to put the Crimson Torch down?\"\n\n\"What? Of course not. He's not that badly injured, is he?\"\n\n\"No, my lord. With proper care he could recover. But he fought another dragon. He injured Oxheart badly and came very close to killing him. We won't be able to sell him. No one will buy a vicious beast.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous. Crimsy isn't vicious. We don't have to tell anyone what happened, surely? No one saw but you and Bertrom. We can just say Oxheart broke loose, and that's why you had to shoot him. None of my men will gossip if I warn them sternly enough.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" Archibahd sounded doubtful, but he didn't protest further.\n\nThe earl's voice edged closer to its normal tone. \"I'll send out inquiries. I'm sure we can find good homes for all of them with a little effort. Crimsy in particular should go for a reasonable price, although with the scar I'll never recover what I paid for him. But assuming his wing heals properly, perhaps the messenger corps will take him. They won't care how he looks, only that he's strong and fast. When they sold me Juniper, they asked me to keep an eye out for beasts they might want.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he'd make an excellent messenger, my lord.\"\n\n\"And people have made offers for Flicker and Blaze from time to time. I'll see if any of them are still interested. With any luck, I'll be able to put this whole bad business behind me before winter.\" He rubbed his face. \"Of course none of this was your fault, Archibahd. I hate to let you go, you've been an excellent employee, but I'll be happy to give you a glowing reference.\"\n\n\"Thank you, my lord.\" Archibahd's voice was dry, but respectful as always.\n\n\"Now, go patch Crimsy up. I'll leave you to your work.\" Footsteps crunched away.\n\nThe glorious fragrance of dragonleaf drifted to Torch's nostrils. He opened his eyes and raised his head. Archibahd approached, extending his hand. \"Here you go. Eat up. You need to be good and deep before I stitch up that gash in your wing.\"\n\nTorch opened his mouth and Archibahd tossed a ball in. Torch gulped ball after ball. Bliss washed over him, wiping his pain away. He didn't care what awaited him after he healed. Whoever ended up buying him, at least he could count on receiving a full ration of dragonleaf again. No one in Forland kept dragons without it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Amma",
                "text": "Torch's trainer, Captain Spenser, tossed him a ball of dragonleaf. After Torch swallowed it, the captain held out another in his open palm. Torch bent his neck to lap it up.\n\nWhile Torch's tongue was curling around the ball and drawing it into his mouth, the captain reached for his horns. With swift, deft motions, he slipped loops of leather over Torch's horns and buckled a strap under his chin. He grabbed Torch's snout and pressed on the hinges of his jaw. \"Open up.\"\n\nFeeling pleasantly floaty from the leaf, Torch yielded agreeably. The captain slid a metal bar between his teeth and buckled more straps to hold it in place. Torch worked his tongue against it. The bit felt cold and awkward, but not painful. He supposed he could get used to it. Juniper hadn't seemed to mind hers.\n\n\"Good boy.\" The captain pressed another ball into his mouth. Torch swallowed it eagerly, ignoring the discomfort as the sticky wad of leaves scraped past the healing wounds in his throat.\n\nWhen he'd first arrived at the messenger station, exhausted from the long journey by train and wagon, he'd been given a meal of hot roast mutton accompanied by a generous portion of leaf. Torch had bolted everything and fallen into a deep slumber. At some point more balls of dragonleaf had been pressed into his mouth, sending him deep into dreams. Briefly he was troubled by nightmarish memories of Archibahd burning out the infection in his chest, but they ended and he sank back to sleep.\n\nHe'd woken the next morning with a blazing pain in his throat. When he mustered the courage to spit a little fuel and attempt to ignite it, the liquid splashed harmlessly on the floor of his cage. They'd cut his sparking crystals out. He'd known he would have to be quenched to serve as a messenger, but he hadn't expected it to hurt so much. Even now, more than a week later, his throat still throbbed.\n\nDragonleaf helped, though. That was the best part of life at the messenger station. Captain Spenser rewarded him with leaf whenever he obeyed a command. Sometimes he got as many as twelve balls in a day. After going short for so long, the bounty filled Torch with euphoria and made him eager to do whatever his trainer wished.\n\nThe captain clipped long leather reins to either side of his bit and tied them to one of the posts that lined the barn's wide center aisle. He lifted a thin, padded saddle to Torch's back and positioned it at the base of his neck, between his foreshoulders and in front of his wings. Straps went around his belly, both front legs, and his neck to hold it in place. Finally, across his chest, mostly covering his scar, his trainer strapped a stiff leather breastplate. On it was painted Forland's royal seal, a bright blue shield with a white fish on it, ringed with golden stars.\n\nCaptain Spenser turned to study the youngsters watching from benches on either side of the barn's towering doors. Every time he brought Torch out of his cage an audience swiftly assembled, anywhere from five to fifteen half-grown boys and girls. Today there were a dozen of them, all wearing blue wool coats with the royal seal embroidered on one breast, brown leather trousers, boots, and gloves, fur-lined hats, wide leather belts, and goggles shoved up on their heads. They stared at Torch with naked longing but sat in rigid, disciplined silence.\n\nHis trainer pointed. \"Amma, come try out his paces.\"\n\nOne of the girls sprang to her feet. The other children sank back, disappointment on their faces. Amma hurried across the barn, taking long strides, but distinctly favoring one leg. The boot on that side had a thicker sole than the other, and its toe turned inward.\n\nShe halted in front of Torch's trainer and saluted. \"Reporting for duty, sir!\"\n\nThe trainer frowned at her. \"How long have you served in the rider pool, Amma?\"\n\n\"Three years, sir.\" She stood stiffly at attention, her eyes fixed straight ahead.\n\n\"So you're what, eleven?\"\n\n\"Ten, sir. I passed the tests when I was seven and made it through training in six months.\"\n\n\"Hmm. So you should have three more years at a minimum before you reach retirement weight. Maybe as many as six if you're lucky and follow your regimen strictly.\" He gestured at Torch. \"I haven't seen this one fly yet, but if he's as fast as I suspect he'll be, I'm going to assign him a regular rider. Show me you deserve the promotion, and he's yours.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" Amma remained at attention, nearly quivering with eagerness.\n\n\"Mount up, rider. Take him around the standard training course three times. One warm up lap, one as fast as he'll go, one to cool down. He's been grounded for a long time, so don't push him, but let him have his head. I'll be watching how the two of you get on together.\" He gestured to Torch's saddle.\n\nAmma limped to Torch's side and said, \"Down!\" As his trainer had taught him, Torch sank to a crouch and extended one front leg. Amma grabbed the strap around the base of his neck, planted her good leg in the crook of his elbow, and swung the other over his back. She settled into the saddle, gripping Torch's sides with strong thighs. With practiced skill she grabbed the dangling straps and clipped them to the rings on her belt.\n\nCaptain Spenser untied Torch's reins and passed them up to Amma. \"Do you have control of your dragon?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Amma said. \"Clear to remove restraints.\"\n\nThe captain produced a key and unlocked Torch's collar. For the first time since his final performance at the circus, it fell from his neck. The captain coiled Torch's chain as he walked to his cage, hung collar and chain neatly on their hook, then strode to the barn doors and flung them open.\n\nAmma squeezed her legs. \"Hup!\"\n\nTorch was eager to obey. He rose smoothly and padded toward the wide, tall opening. Outside, the sun shone brightly, a crisp breeze blew, and fluffy white clouds towered in the brilliant blue sky. Torch longed to fling himself into the air, but he waited for Amma's command. If he demonstrated he'd thoroughly learned everything Captain Spenser had taught him and could be trusted to follow his rider's orders, he'd soon be flying every day. That was an even better reward for obedience than dragonleaf.\n\nAs soon as they cleared the doors, Amma leaned forward. Her voice sounded as eager as Torch felt. \"Hup, Hup!\"\n\nTorch crouched and leapt for the sky. He beat his wings furiously, laboring to lift Amma's weight along with his own. It was much harder than taking off unencumbered, but gradually he gained altitude. When the barn and the rest of the buildings of the messenger post had dwindled beneath them and the surrounding fields spread all around, Amma called, \"Hup,\" and Torch leveled into smooth, steady flight.\n\nLight pressure on one rein drew his head to the right. He banked in that direction. When Amma eased the pressure, he straightened and flew toward a range of mountains that rose in the distance. He accelerated a bit, but Amma drew on the reins until he slowed to an easy pace. Confident he understood what she wanted, Torch relaxed into flight, delighting in the vast expanse of the sky. Perhaps this wasn't exactly freedom, but it was closer than Torch had come in a very long time.\n\nThey reached the wavy silver ribbon of a river, and Amma guided him through a turn to the left. They followed the river's course for several miles, then she pulled him left again. Tiny in the distance, Torch recognized the layout of the messenger post. Beyond it the buildings of Bellhold spread, thickly carpeting the banks of a much wider river.\n\nAs they reached their starting place, Amma steered him left again. When he completed the turn, she tightened her legs and leaned forward. \"Hup, hup, hup!\" she cried.\n\nTorch surged forward. Harder and harder he drove his wings. The wind rushed around his body and the ground sped past beneath. They reached the river in half the time it had taken before. Torch banked left at Amma's first twitch of his rein.\n\nHe began to tire as they rounded the second turn. By the time they reached the messenger post again, every muscle in his wings was burning and his lungs were laboring to suck in enough air. But he didn't slow until Amma straightened in the saddle with a quiet, \"Whoa.\"\n\nTorch dropped gratefully back to a gentle pace. Gradually his racing heart slowed and his great heaving pants settled to merely deep breaths. Amma nudged him into a turn, and they followed the big triangular course again. When they turned back toward the post, Amma applied a little pressure to the reins, and Torch slowed further. At her \"whoa,\" he transitioned to a glide, cupping his wings and sliding down the air in a long, shallow slope. They swooped in low over the messenger post, wheeled in a circle around the complex of buildings, and slowed further for a smooth final approach to the broad flat area in front of the barn.\n\nTorch backwinged and set all four feet gently on the ground. He folded his wings and stood panting, tired and happy. Amma patted his neck. \"Good boy,\" she murmured. \"That was the best ride I've had since I joined the messenger corps. Captain Spenser is going to be very pleased with your speed. I just hope he's equally pleased with me. With my foot, I never dared hope I'd be chosen for such a fine mount as you.\"\n\nTorch, too, hoped the captain would be pleased with her. Carrying Amma had been a pleasure. He couldn't imagine any other rider being more gentle in their guidance or more encouraging in their manner. He would be quite happy for Amma's temporary assignment to be made permanent.\n\nHe responded to her soft \"hup\" by padding back into the barn. Much as he'd enjoyed their flight, he was ready to get out of his harness, devour his evening meal and his dragonleaf ration, and curl up in his cage for a good night's sleep.\n\nAmma brought him to a halt in front of his cage. Captain Spenser swung the doors of the barn closed and came to stand regarding them. The look on his face was stern, but Torch was pretty sure he detected an attitude of cautious pleasure behind it.\n\n\"He'll do,\" he allowed. \"His speed is everything I hoped, but he's got no stamina at all. We're going to have to put him through four or five months of conditioning on short runs before he'll be ready for full duty.\" He retrieved Torch's collar and fastened it around his neck. \"You two seem to work together well. How does he suit you, Rider Amma?\"\n\n\"Very well, sir,\" She kept her voice formal, but Torch easily heard the eagerness in it.\n\n\"Good. You are hereby assigned as Messenger Dragon 9023's regular rider. Report for duty first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\"\n\nHe stepped back. \"Your dragon is secured and safe to dismount. Remove his harness, reward him, and return him to his cage before you report to the mess hall.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Down.\" After Torch crouched and positioned his leg, Amma swung off and stepped to the ground. She limped forward, and he lowered his head to give her access to his bridle. With swift, sure motions she removed the bit and straps. He tossed his head, enjoying the relief from the encumbrance. It wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but it felt good to have it off.\n\nAmma stripped off the rest of his gear just as efficiently and hung it on a rack beside his cage. She limped back to Torch, opening a pouch that hung from her belt and reaching inside. He eagerly opened his mouth, and she tossed in a ball of dragonleaf.\n\nAmma glanced around as he swallowed. She waited until Captain Spenser exited the barn through a small door beside the big ones. Then she held out a ball on the palm of her hand. \"I'm not supposed to hand feed you, but you'd never bite, would you?\"\n\nTorch shook his head, then lowered his snout to her hand. He wrapped his tongue delicately around the ball and drew it into his mouth. Amma laughed and patted his neck. She pulled out another ball and offered it to Torch, who lapped it up just as carefully.\n\n\"That's all I'm allowed to give you. They'll be around with your supper shortly, and you'll get another three then. We reward our dragons well for hard work.\" She stroked him a while longer. Torch leaned into her touch, enjoying it even more than the rush of dragonleaf euphoria.\n\nFinally, with a sigh, she pulled away. \"Time to go back into your cage.\" She limped to the door and swung it open. Torch padded inside and turned around to watch as she closed and latched it.\n\nShe backed up a little and surveyed the faded paint around the top of his cage. \"The Crimson Torch. Was that your name? It's a bit fancy for the Messenger Corps, I'm afraid. We're only supposed to call you by your numbers, so we don't get too attached. But everybody knows the regular riders give their mounts names.\" She tilted her head and regarded him. \"Torch. I think that's what I'll call you. What do you say?\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head vigorously.\n\nShe laughed. \"Torch it is, then. Sleep well. I'll see you in the morning.\" She limped across the barn. Torch watched her until she disappeared through the small side door, then curled up with a happy sigh and dropped his head onto his front paws."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "After that, Amma rode Torch every day. At first they just flew the same course around and around, spending longer in the air each time. But soon they started going on short message runs, first from the Bellhold post to the one outside Skiphaven, at the mouth of the Skippervale River, later to the post at Spindlefell, a few miles upstream.\n\nThe dragon messenger service was popular, because it was much faster than sending letters by wagon and rail. Many people in the wealthy areas around the capital city were willing to pay the premium prices they charged. The bags Amma slung behind Torch's saddle were always full.\n\nAs the months passed, Torch's endurance improved. He and Amma were promoted to full duty. They flew routes all over Forland, from Boldfort in the north to Dillomire in the south, from Grayfall in the east to Duskmoor in the west. They traveled to Ravenburgh, high in the mountains, and Slateford, on the coast. They flew over the smoky gray factories of Steelgate and the endless golden wheatfields of Heatherdrift.\n\nAmma talked to Torch whenever they had a quiet moment alone together, rambling about many subjects without seeming to care whether Torch understood or not. She told him about her family. She'd grown up in one of the poorer sections of Bellhold. Her father owned a secondhand clothing shop, and her mother worked as a milliner. They'd never quite gone hungry, but they'd never had anything extra, either.\n\nAs long as she could remember, Amma had longed to join the messenger corps. Only children were light enough for dragons to carry. Both boys and girls were accepted, but girls were preferred because they stayed lighter longer. The pay was so good that in the few short years she was able to serve, a rider could earn enough to support herself and her family for the rest of their lives.\n\nAmma was both small and strong for her age, a combination highly prized by the recruiters. She'd set her heart on passing the tests as soon as she turned seven and could apply to take them. To that end she'd worked endlessly to increase her strength, stamina, and agility. She'd volunteered to deliver heavy loads of clothing from her father's shop to his customers. She'd run all over the city, ridden every donkey, pony, or horse in the neighborhood, and climbed anywhere she could find a handhold.\n\nShe'd been well on her way to accomplishing her goal when tragedy struck. One icy winter day she slipped from the wall she was climbing and fell, landing on her ankle. She told Torch she'd heard the bones crunch when it broke. Her family had no money to pay a doctor, so they set the break as well as they could and hoped for the best. It had healed, but the foot would always be crooked and an inch shorter than her other leg.\n\n\"But you don't need feet to ride a dragon,\" Amma told Torch as they rested beside a mountain stream on their way to Dawnhallow. \"Only legs. And mine were still strong. So as soon as I could stand again I went back to training. And I signed up for the tests when I turned seven, the way I'd always planned.\"\n\nShe'd passed and been accepted into the rigorous training program designed to winnow the many hopefuls down to a handful of the best. Some of her trainers had doubted her ability to accomplish the necessary tasks with her impaired leg, but she'd worked twice as hard as anyone else to prove them wrong. In the end she'd been among those who passed the final exams and earned the chance to ride a dragon.\n\nFor three years she'd served in the general pool, where beginning riders and slower, smaller dragons were paired at random. Six months before Torch arrived at the Bellhold post, she'd been told she qualified to be considered for a regular mount. She'd watched nearly a dozen other children be paired with dragons before her chance had come.\n\n\"Every time a new dragon came in, I hoped, and every time I was disappointed. I thought Captain Spenser hated me, that he believed because of my foot I wasn't good enough. I worried he'd keep passing me over until I got too old and heavy and it was too late. But now I think he was just waiting until a really special dragon came along. None of the ones he picked other riders for were half as big or fast or beautiful as you are.\" She scratched beneath his horns, and Torch leaned into her touch with a sigh of contentment.\n\nTorch had never dreamed he could be happier than he'd been at the circus. But now he was. He loved spending all day, every day flying, only returning to his chain and cage to sleep at night. He loved having a friend who talked to him and treated him with affection. He loved receiving plentiful dragonleaf on a regular basis.\n\nSometimes he missed conversing with other dragons. Now and then he exchanged a few words with the other messengers, but the only time they were together was in the barn at night, and usually they were all too tired and too full of dragonleaf to do anything but sleep. When they did have the energy to talk, he was pleased to find that he could nearly always understand what they were saying and make himself understood. The messengers' fluency varied greatly, depending on how much time they'd spent around other dragons. He even met a few who'd never learned to speak at all. He did his best to pass on the language Juniper and Oxheart had taught him when he got the opportunity.\n\nSometimes he wistfully remembered the times Jom had released him to fly free, and wondered if Amma might ever do the same. Surely she knew she could trust him to return to her. But although she ignored many messenger corps rules with impunity, she was always careful to securely fasten his reins to a hitching post or tree trunk or boulder or some other solid mooring whenever they weren't in her hands.\n\nHe might have been able to break the leather reins with enough effort, but he would never subject Amma to the brutal punishment rumors suggested awaited any rider careless enough to lose their dragon, even if it wasn't their fault. So he savored their flights together. Even constrained by his harness and burdened by Amma's weight and the sacks of mail they carried, he loved being aloft. The sky was where a dragon belonged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Wingfree",
                "text": "Amma frowned around the narrow confines of the cage. \"You're sure this is the biggest you've got?\"\n\nThe head groom of the messenger post in Mizzlestead spread his hands apologetically. \"I'm sorry, Rider, but yes, it is. We seldom get any of the big dragons here. We've never hosted one the size of your beauty before.\"\n\nTorch could tell the complement mollified Amma. She patted his neck. \"He is one of the largest in the corps.\" Her scowl returned. \"I suppose it will have to do. At least it's only for one night. Give him an extra ball of dragonleaf to help him tolerate the cramped quarters.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" The groom saluted. Amma gave Torch a final caress and swung the door of the cage closed.\n\nTorch sighed and tried to find a comfortable position. His normal curl allowed him to squeeze within the length of the cage, but it was so narrow his back pressed against the bars on one side and his snout rubbed them on the other. When his supper came he was going to have to twist like one of the circus contortionists to reach the food box.\n\nHe hoped Amma would speak to her superiors about the unsatisfactory conditions. Mizzlestead was growing quickly because large coal deposits had recently been discovered in the nearby hills. The increasing population produced an increasing volume of mail, which meant that dragons would be flying here more and more often. And the remote location, on a peninsula reaching far into the western sea, meant they'd need to stay overnight. The messenger corps needed to bring Mizzlestead's post up to their usual high standard. Preferably before Torch and Amma's next trip here.\n\nThe hour grew late and the barn darkened to nearly black before a groom came around to light a few weak gas lamps. Then he and the head groom wheeled out a cart laden with platters of meat and rolled it from cage to cage. Apparently the two were the post's entire staff.\n\nTorch found it vaguely insulting that those who cared for dragons were called \"grooms,\" as if dragons were nothing but flying horses. Their scales didn't require any actual grooming, and they left their wastes neatly in the proper place, so cleaning their cages was easy. But that was the term humans used, without concern for how dragons might feel about it.\n\nEventually the cart reached Torch's cage, and the younger groom placed his meal in the food box. Mutton, Torch was happy to see. His favorite. And plenty of it. He needed the generous portion after the long flight. He managed to maneuver his neck into a position that wasn't too awkward and started tearing off chunks.\n\nWhen he finished eating, the head groom tossed Torch his dragonleaf. His usual three, plus the extra Amma had requested. Torch gulped them eagerly. At least his dreams would be deep.\n\nHe curled up tightly as the soft waves engulfed him, almost making him forget the cold bars pressing into his haunches and face. One by one the lamps went out. Everything was dark and silent.\n\nTorch was nearly asleep when a soft human voice whispered, \"Excuse me. I'm sorry to disturb you, but there are things you need to hear that must be said in private. Will you listen? If you understand Forlish and wish me to go on, tap your tail three times against the bars.\"\n\nThe words dragged Torch out of his dragonleaf daze, and he raised his head. His horns smacked into the low ceiling of the cage. Torch swallowed a reflexive yelp of pain. If anyone were to hear and come to investigate, the man would stop talking, and Torch would never find out what he wanted to say.\n\nOf course, the fact the man knew dragons could understand human speech meant little. So had Bertrom, but it hadn't stopped him from taking advantage of Torch's gullibility. Now Torch knew better than to trust whatever a human said just because they spoke to him as an equal. But he was much too curious to refuse to listen. So as he twisted his neck to rub his aching head against his flank, he tapped the tip of his tail three times against the bars near where the voice had come from.\n\nA soft light flared, revealing the face of the younger groom. \"Are you all right? I'm sorry I startled you.\"\n\nTorch nodded briefly. His head still hurt, but he didn't want that to distract the man from their conversation.\n\n\"Good, you do understand Forlish. Some of the young dragons fresh from the breeding farms don't. Do you speak Draganish as well?\"\n\nTorch hesitated, then nodded again. He wasn't sure if the existence of the dragons' language was supposed to be a secret, but obviously the groom already knew about it.\n\n\"I'm sorry I haven't had the opportunity to learn to understand it, so we'll have to keep using gestures. But you can ask for confirmation of what I'm going to tell you from any of the dragons here. They're not all part of our organization, but they all know about it. You can speak of it freely with any dragon, but I need you to agree not to do anything that might let any human who's not already a member find out about us. Even your rider. If you think she might support us, let me know and I'll have someone contact her. A few riders have joined us.\" He sighed. \"Although I have to warn you, most of them are too deeply indoctrinated to accept the truth.\"\n\nTruth? What truth? What organization? Torch wished he could voice the questions. But all he could do was listen and respond. He hoped that would be enough.\n\nThe young groom went on. \"My name's Richerd. I heard your rider call you Torch?\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head.\n\n\"I'm pleased to meet you, Torch. As I hope you can tell, I'm one of the few humans who realize dragons are just as intelligent as we are, if not more so. I'll do my best to treat you accordingly, except when pretense is necessary to protect our secret.\" He grimaced. \"Unfortunately that will be most of the time. I'm the only human member at this post.\"\n\nTorch nodded, then tilted he head to the side, hoping Richerd was aware of the gesture's meaning. His delay in getting to the point was frustrating Torch greatly.\n\nRicherd chuckled. \"Sorry. I belong to an organization that acknowledges and supports the rights of dragons. We're working to end the enslavement of your people in Forland and all Aldania. We call ourselves Wingfree. You've probably heard about our public face, the ISPLD.\"\n\nTorch jerked back, glowering. He didn't care how polite and kind Richerd seemed. His organization was the source of all Torch's troubles.\n\nISPLD's boycotts had forced the circus to sell him. The ban on selling dragon scales they'd gotten passed had created the black market that had prompted Bertrom to rip his scales out. They'd burned dragonleaf farms, causing prices to soar and driving Archibahd to cut his and Oxheart's rations to the bare minimum and beyond. If Torch could speak Forlish, he'd burn Richerd's ears with tales of just how much misery he and his friends had caused with their misguided crusade.\n\nRicherd spoke low and urgent. \"I know ISPLD isn't very popular with dragons. I know people have spread all kinds of lies about us. And I know that some of our actions have had unfortunate side effects. But please believe me, we want nothing but the best for dragonkind. We want the whole world to recognize the truth that dragons are equal in every way to humans. We want every dragon in Aldania to be free. And if it's what you desire, we want to help you return to Dragana, your ancestral homeland.\"\n\nTorch stared at him. Was this where Juniper had gotten her ideas? When she was a messenger, had she flown to Mizzlestead and been approached by Richerd, too? Or had some other member of this \"Wingfree\" spoken to her?\n\nThe groom continued, his voice growing more passionate. \"From the length of your horns I'm guessing you're nearly a century old, so you probably came from an egg stolen from Dragana. From one of the noble kindreds, judging by your color. Freedom is your birthright. It was taken from you by unscrupulous, greedy men. You remain chained because those who profit from your labor continue to perpetrate the lie that your kind are no better than animals.\"\n\nRicherd set down his lantern and paced the length of Torch's cage, hands waving. \"People believe them because it's easy. Because all they see is that you walk on four legs. Because all they hear are bellows and screeches. Because people in Bellhold like to be able to send a letter to their cousin in Slateford and have it arrive the next day. Because they like to be able to take an airship to Grayfall faster than a carriage could take them to Spindlefell. Because they're smug that human slavery was outlawed a century ago, and they don't want to admit that dragon slavery is just as evil!\"\n\nHe stared at Torch, panting. Torch stared back. Torch didn't know whether to believe Richerd's words, but Richerd clearly did.\n\nRicherd spread his hands. \"I know there's little any individual dragon can do. Humans have caused this mess, and it's up to humans to solve it. We're working to persuade as many as we can. Here in Forland, we pressure Parliament to change the laws. In countries where monarchies still wield absolute power, we try to find sympathetic ears among the royalty. We've made significant strides in that direction, especially in Mamourne. We've still got a long way to go, of course, but we're making progress.\"\n\nHe took a step closer. \"There are some things you can do, though. Even if you're not ready to commit to Wingfree yourself, you can spread the word. Tell any dragon who'll listen about us and our goals. Tell them they can speak to me, or to Mirla at the post in Leverton, or to Jaspar in Covepoint. There are a more of us at various posts, but we three handle most of the initial contacts because it's easiest for us to speak to dragons alone.\"\n\nHe looked at Torch expectantly. Torch looked away. He wasn't going to promise to spread propaganda for an organization he thought was doing more harm than good. But he did want to talk to other dragons about it. He wanted to find out what they'd heard about Wingfree and whether they'd had any interactions, good or bad, with them. If anyone he spoke with asked how they might contact the group, he wasn't going to withhold the information. He turned back to Richerd with a noncommittal rustle of his wings.\n\nRicherd nodded. \"I understand. You need time to think about what I've told you. Most of the dragons I approach do. What I'm saying contradicts what humans have been telling you your whole life. Take as long as you need. If you should eventually decide you want to help us, or even become a member of Wingfree yourself, just let one of us know. We'll guide you through the next steps.\"\n\nHe lowered his voice. \"I can tell you a little about what those steps would involve. Most of our dragon members remain in their current situations and support us secretly. As a messenger, you'd be invaluable to our cause. We often need information, money, or supplies smuggled between our bases. We'd ask you to watch and listen for developments that might affect our plans and report whatever you learn to one of our agents.\"\n\nHe stepped closer and dropped his voice even softer. \"And if in time the burdens of captivity should grow too great for you to endure, we could help you escape. It's not hard for a messenger to seize the opportunity to flee when their rider gets careless, but on your own you'd probably be recaptured or killed. We maintain secret sanctuaries where fugitive dragons can take refuge. Although unfortunately, the need to avoid discovery means our residents' activities, flight in particular, have to be strictly limited. Eventually we hope to be able to repatriate liberated dragons to Dragana, but there are issues with that I won't go into now.\"\n\nHad Juniper made it to one of their sanctuaries? Had that been what she'd been trying to tell him, that Torch's limited language skills had led him to misinterpret? She'd be far happier there than she'd been chained at Baromere Park. But Torch would never want to trade flying with Amma for a life spent grounded and hiding. That wasn't freedom.\n\nRicherd went on. \"Most importantly, we'd help you break your addiction to dragonleaf.\"\n\nTorch flinched and shuddered. Richerd gave him a bleak, sympathetic grin. \"The physical effects of withdrawal are horrendous, as you're apparently aware. There's not much we can do except nurse you through the worst of it. But it only lasts a few days, and then you're free. Your mind will be clearer than it's ever been before. Humans will no longer be able to control you, because you'll no longer need what they offer.\"\n\nIt hadn't kept them from controlling Juniper. Torch raised a paw and clawed at his collar, setting his chain rattling.\n\nRicherd's shoulders slumped. \"True,\" he conceded. \"That's why there's not much point in going off it while you remain captive. Some dragons do, even though we recommend against it, but they draw too much attention and usually end up worse off than they started. We've taken steps to restrict the supply of dragonleaf and drive the prices up, though. So at least those who fear your kind so much they drug you into a docile, dependent daze will feel it in their pocketbooks.\"\n\nTorch snorted and shook his head. He felt disoriented and confused. So much of what Richerd had said cut straight to the center of his heart and touched the longing that had always burned there.\n\nBut his mind rebelled. Richerd and Wingfree stood in direct opposition to everything Torch had always believed. Dragons weren't slaves. Their service to humans was beneficial to both species. People like Jom and Amma, and even the earl and Archibahd, loved their dragons and took good care of them.\n\nTorch was happy. He had no desire to give up the many good things about his current life to escape the few irritations. It wasn't as if Wingfree could give him real freedom.\n\nAs his conclusion solidified, he shook his head again, more firmly. Richerd sighed. \"It's your choice, of course. Just please, remember what I've said and reflect on it. You know what to do if you should ever change your mind.\" He retrieved his lantern and moved away. \"Goodnight, Torch. Sleep well.\"\n\nTorch watched until the dim light vanished through the barn door. Then he laid his head on his front paws and stared into the darkness. It was a long time before his thoughts and emotions settled enough for him to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Proclamation",
                "text": "Over the next few years, Torch asked every dragon he spoke with about Wingfree. Many of them knew of it. Some were members and urged him to join their enthusiastic support of the organization's cause. Many more, like him, had been approached by one of their agents but refused to become involved. A number ranted angrily about the ways their attempts to help dragons had hurt them instead. A few maintained their efforts weren't merely misguided, but actively designed to harm dragonkind, a goal they were successfully accomplishing. But none of them provided any information that conclusively swayed Torch's opinion one way or the other.\n\nOthers had never heard of Wingfree. Most of them listened with fascination when Torch described the organization as neutrally as he could. Many asked who they could contact to learn more, and Torch passed on the names. He wasn't going to discourage any dragon from joining, if that's what they wanted. But he wasn't going to encourage them, either, and he wasn't going to get involved himself. Not without a compelling reason. Unless and until something happened to give him one, he was content to remain outside the conflict.\n\nHe and Amma continued to thrive in the messenger corps. They were promoted to the next rank, which made them eligible for international routes. After that they frequently flew across the ocean to Tyrogue and Mamourne and Fogella, and over the mountains to Melthain and Rachenstein. A year later they were appointed to the elite Royal Cadre, the handful of dragons and riders trusted to carry correspondence between Forland's government and the leaders of the other countries of Aldania. Torch enjoyed seeing the diverse landscape and architecture of the various capital cities, listening to the wide variety of languages the humans spoke, and exchanging greetings and gossip with the foreign dragons. They all spoke Draganish, although some with accents so strange it was difficult to understand them.\n\nIn early spring of the fourth year of Torch's service as a messenger, the pace of official correspondence abruptly increased. He and Amma, along with the rest of the Royal Cadre, were kept constantly busy shuttling messages back and forth between Bellhold and the various foreign capitals. The documents they carried were sealed, but Torch could guess at their content from the excited, worried conversations he heard everywhere they went, from both humans and dragons.\n\nThe king of Mamourne was ill, probably dying. His heir was an outspoken advocate of dragon rights. Everyone buzzed with speculation about what Prince Julios might do when he inherited the throne.\n\nOne spring morning Amma roused Torch before dawn, telling him they'd been given an urgent mission. They made the three-hour flight from Bellhold to Legrath, Mamourne's capital. As they approached the city, Torch spotted other messengers flying in from every direction. The air above the palace swarmed with dragons swooping to land.\n\nBelow, Torch noticed what seemed to be a dark haze cloaking the city. He wondered if it might be smoke, but the sky remained clear, and no scent of burning reached his nostrils. Only the buildings were obscured by the clinging pall. The closer they flew, the more puzzled he became. Nothing in his experience suggested an explanation for the strange phenomenon.\n\nInstead of flying directly to the landing field beside the palace the way they normally would, Amma twitched his reins and directed him to circle the city. Torch spiraled lower. Finally, when they wheeled only a few dozen yards above the chimneypots, he realized what he was seeing. Everything was draped with black fabric. It hung in swaths over doorways and billowed from windows. It shrouded bushes and cloaked trees. It covered statues and wrapped lampposts and street signs. Torch banked and turned toward their destination. The palace rose ahead of them, its turrets and arches and columns festooned even more thickly than the rest of the city in black.\n\nTorch swooped down to the fenced lawn beside the palace where messengers were allowed to land, dodging two other dragons who were also approaching. The field teemed with dragons and their riders. He had to hover for a moment until an adequate space cleared. As soon as his claws touched down, he flipped his wings closed and crowded to the side to make room for those soaring in. Most of the dragons' breastplates bore the insignia of the Mamourne messenger service, but he also saw the seals of every other country in Aldania.\n\nEvery hitching post was occupied, so instead of dismounting and securing him, Amma stayed in the saddle. Men in uniforms of the Mamourne royal guard circulated among the dragons, accepting message packets from their riders. When one reached them, Amma paused before handing hers over. \"King Albon is dead?\"\n\n\"He went to join his fathers late last night,\" the guard replied in heavily accented Forlish. \"Long live King Julios!\"\n\n\"Forland's condolences for your country's loss,\" Amma told him as she passed the sealed packet down to his reaching hands. \"Should I wait for a return message, or bear the news to Bellhold now?\"\n\n\"King Julios has asked all messengers to remain for a short time. He wishes to address you in person. The Forlish interpreter will stand there.\" He pointed to a spot on the columned porch of the palace. \"Written messages for your queen and parliament are being prepared and will be brought to you momentarily.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Amma said, but he was already hurrying toward another dragon.\n\nAt Amma's direction, Torch worked his way through the crowd, squeezing between the dragons packed wing-to-wing and snout-to-tail around the edges of the lawn. He was taller than most of them, so when he reached a place where they'd be able to hear the interpreter, both he and Amma still had a good view of the steps that led from the side entrance of the palace to the broad flagstone walkway that bisected the lawn.\n\nThey waited for around half an hour. The inflow of dragons slowed to a trickle. Riders exchanged speculation with those who shared a language. Most seemed think the new king would simply deliver a formal greeting for them to relay to their respective countries' leaders. The dragons were quieter, but Torch gathered that the majority of them shared the same opinion.\n\nA few, however, tossed their heads and lashed their tails in restless excitement. Torch questioned the closest, but she only blinked coyly at him. \"Wait and hear for yourself,\" she told him in a thick Mamournan accent.\n\nFinally the doors of the palace swung open. Trumpets played a fanfare. Guards emerged and took up stations on the columned porch. Courtiers in rich clothing followed and arranged themselves on the steps, leaving a clear space at the top. Officials moved to places between the columns. One of them took the Forlish interpreter's spot and looked out at the crowd of people and dragons. His eyes fell on Torch's breastplate, and he gave Amma a formal nod.\n\nFinally a young man strode out of the palace. He wore the scarlet uniform of a Mamournan general. A heavy fur cape fell from his shoulders, and a plain gold band encircled his dark hair. He stopped at the top of the steps and surveyed the gathered dragons with a grave, resolute expression. Shouts rose from all the Mamournan riders and a good many of the others. Dragons bellowed and screeched.\n\nKing Julios inclined his head and waited. When the noise began to die down, he raised a hand. Everyone swiftly fell silent. In clear, ringing Mamournan he addressed the assembly.\n\nThe interpreter echoed his words in Forlish. \"Greetings, dragons and riders from across Aldania. Your presence is a comfort in our time of sorrow. Official notice of our royal father's passing and invitations to the funeral will be distributed at the conclusion of this address. I ask you to bear them to your respective governments, along with the assurance that normal diplomatic relations between our noble countries will continue without disruption. At least, that is Mamourne's desire.\"\n\nThe king paused to allow the interpreters to catch up. When they all ceased talking, he took a deep breath and continued. The interpreters translated a breath behind. Torch concentrated hard to pick out the Forlish from among the cacophony of languages. \"I am aware that the proclamation I am about to issue might cause some or all of your governments to reevaluate their relationship with Mamourne. If so, be assured that Mamourne is prepared to defend our borders against any and all aggression and to answer force with uncompromising force against those who declare themselves our enemies.\"\n\nMurmurs rose from dragons and riders. Torch's heart raced. Amma's thighs tightened against his sides.\n\nKing Julios gestured and the noise ceased. Everyone waited, breathless, to hear what he was going to say. He held out his hand, and an official at his side laid a roll of parchment in it. The king unrolled it and held it before him, but his eyes stayed fixed on the crowd instead of dropping to read the words. \"As my first official act as king of Mamourne, I hereby abolish the ownership of dragons in all lands over which I hold sovereignty. Every dragon in Mamourne, Vexden, and the Copper Isles is now free. Furthermore, I recognize dragonkind as a race of thinking beings equivalent in every way to humankind. I declare all dragons residing in Mamourne and its territories to be citizens of the realm, possessed of all rights and responsibilities thereof, equal in status and legal standing to my human subjects.\"\n\nThe king stopped speaking as the clamor of dragon and human voices rose to a roar. Every Mamournan dragon in the field was screeching or bugling or bellowing in joy. Many of their riders were equally jubilant, but others displayed shock or anger. Their strident voices rose in harsh counterpoint to their mounts' celebration. The foreign dragons and their riders were agitated, adding their confused or questioning voices to the cacophony.\n\nTorch didn't know what to think or feel. He stood frozen in the midst of the tumult, conflicting emotions assaulting him.\n\nA big part of him wanted to rip off his harness, leap into the air, and declare his allegiance to Mamourne with every breath. But he could never hurt or abandon Amma. And Forland was his home. He was loyal to it. He could never betray his country. He didn't even know if Mamourne would welcome foreign dragons. If they did, they'd quickly be flooded with refugees from every surrounding land.\n\nEventually the noise slackened a little. The king raised the scroll and resumed speaking. \"Dragons and riders from other nations currently in Mamourne have until sunset tonight to leave the country without interference. After that, the following laws will apply to any dragon within our borders. They will be enforced by the Mamournan military and the civilian police forces of Legrath and every other city in the country.\"\n\nHis gaze dropped to the scroll and his voice took on the sing-song cadence of reading aloud. \"One. The practice of chaining dragons is hereby forbidden. Any dragons found restrained by collar or chain will be immediately liberated. After a one month amnesty period to allow news of the new laws to be disseminated, humans found guilty of restraining dragons with collars or chains or any other device will be fined. Repeat offenders will be imprisoned at the crown's discretion.\n\n\"Two. The use of bits and reins on dragons is hereby forbidden. Any dragon who voluntarily consents to bear a human rider must remain free to comply with or disregard their rider's directions as they choose. Such directions may be given by voice or touch only. Also outlawed are throat constrictors, tail spikes, nostril rings, prods, and all other devices designed to compel a dragon's obedience by force or pain.\n\n\"Three. All dragons may freely hunt wild game in all lands belonging to the crown of Mamourne or under our jurisdiction. In addition, during a transition period of no less than one year and as long thereafter as the crown declares, a tax will be levied on all owners of livestock raised for meat, including sheep, cows, goats, pigs, and fowl. One tenth of your herds will be confiscated and used to support liberated dragons while they establish equitable means to earn their own living.\n\n\"Four. Any dragon, from any country, may freely enter Mamourne. From the moment they cross the border, they will be considered free, and no human claim of ownership over them will be honored. All laws of other countries purporting to grant humans such claims are void in Mamourne from this day forward. Any dragon who chooses may become a citizen of Mamourne, subject to all the rights and responsibilities thereof, by pledging their loyalty to the crown.\n\n\"Five. The practice of quenching dragons, surgically or by any other means, is hereby forbidden.\n\n\"Six. All dragon breeding programs are hereby disbanded, and their land and facilities are hereby declared to be property of the crown. The crown assumes custody of all eggs and all juvenile dragons currently in the possession of such programs. They will be turned over to their parents or other dragons of the community as soon as the crown is assured that accommodations for their safe and healthy rearing are in place.\n\n\"Seven. The use of dragonleaf to secure dragons' cooperation and obedience is hereby forbidden. All dragonleaf within the borders of Mamourne is hereby declared to be property of the crown. Any dragon who wishes may require from any human with dragonleaf in their possession a ration of up to eight standard balls per day, four at noon and four at sunset. Any human found to be refusing a dragon that ration, or feeding any dragon dragonleaf at any other time or in any other fashion, will be fined. Repeat offenders will be imprisoned at the crown's discretion. During a period of transition lasting no less than one year and as long thereafter as the crown declares, all dragonleaf will be collected by the crown for distribution. All growing and processing of dragonleaf will be taken over by the crown. The crown will provide support for any dragon who wishes to cease eating dragonleaf, including safe lodgings and skilled care during the period of withdrawal.\n\n\"In conclusion, I, King Julios the First, personally welcome the new dragon citizens of this great nation. I invite you to join me in serving Mamourne with the full devotion of our minds, hearts, and bodies.\"\n\nKing Julios lowered the scroll. \"Copies of this document will be posted at every town hall and public notice board throughout Mamourne. They will be printed for distribution by every press in the country. A copy has been prepared for each of your governments. They will be given to you now.\" He nodded.\n\nA group of uniformed officials emerged from the palace and descended the steps. They moved through the crowd, passing sealed message packets up to riders. Torch felt Amma's weight shift as she reached down to take the one an official held up to her.\n\nWhen all the packets had been distributed, the king rolled up the scroll and passed it to the official at his side. He raised his voice. \"I call on my brother and sister monarchs to follow Mamourne's example. Liberate your subjects who languish in slavery. Likewise, ruling parliaments, legislatures, and councils. Recognize the equality of all those you govern. Join Mamourne and let us walk forward together into a new era of freedom for all, dragonkind and humankind alike.\"\n\nHe made a grand, sweeping gesture. \"Mamournan riders, dismount. Remove the constraints that bind your former slaves. Welcome them to their rightful place as fellow citizens of this noble realm!\"\n\nFor a breathless moment no one moved. Then one of the Mamournan riders swung down from his saddle. His dragon lowered her head. He pulled the bit from her mouth and stripped the bridle from her head with trembling hands and flung them to the ground. She shook her head, raised it skyward with a joyful bugle, then bent her neck to accept her rider's tearful embrace.\n\nSlowly at first, then in an increasing rush, the other Mamournan riders followed suit. All over the field, dragons reared and spread their wings, celebrating with a cacophony of screeches, bellows, and roars.\n\nWhen every Mamournan rider was on the ground and every dragon bearing a Mamournan seal on their chest was unbridled, King Julios raised his hand once more. He waited until silence descended. In a soft voice, echoed just as softly by the translators, he asked, \"Honored guests, will you join us?\"\n\nAmma's legs tensed, but she didn't budge. Neither did any of the other foreign riders.\n\nTorch worked his bit with the back of his tongue. It seemed twice as big and twice as hard as it usually did. The straps around his head felt tight and chafing. He longed to feel Amma yank the buckles loose and peel it away. He ached to feel her arms around his neck, expressing the love he knew she felt for him, not as master to slave, but as one equal to another. He wanted to press into her touch, and crouch to offer her the chance to remount, and carry her wherever her gentle voice asked him to take her. He wanted to speak to her in Draganish and have her answer in Forlish, each of them knowing the other understood their words. He wanted to work together as partners, equally devoted to carrying out their tasks to the best of their abilities. He didn't need to be forced to obey her. He would serve her willingly if he was only given the chance.\n\nUnsurprised, King Julios gestured. \"Mamournans, please make room for our guests to depart.\"\n\nThe Mamournan dragons and riders crowded to the edges of the field, opening a space in the center. One by one the foreign dragons crouched, spread their wings, and leapt into the sky. When it was their turn, Amma tugged on his reins harder than she normally did. Her voice was harsh. \"Hup, hup.\"\n\nTorch obeyed meekly. He thrust his hind legs and beat his wings with all his might. Amma's weight had gradually increased over the years they'd served together, and the narrow confines made launching even more of a challenge than it usually was. But finally his labored ascent raised them above the domed roof of the palace, and Amma's shouted \"hup\" freed him to level out and soar homeward."
            },
            {
                "title": "War",
                "text": "Over the next week, every other country in Aldania declared war on Mamourne. Forland was among the first. After Amma delivered the message packet to the king's steward, it was less than an hour before an emergency meeting of Parliament began. They stayed in session all night, and issued the formal declaration at dawn the next day. Amma and Torch, along with all the other messengers in Bellhold, carried the news to every corner of Forland.\n\nThey spent the next few weeks flying ceaselessly, barely stopping to snatch food and sleep. Most of their journeys took them to foreign capitals. A complicated network of alliances and agreements had kept Aldania at peace for more than fifty years. Now they must all be renegotiated to exclude Mamourne, and the remaining countries must formulate a strategy to deal with the renegade in their midst.\n\nAt first Torch didn't understand why Forland and the other countries were so violently opposed to King Julios's proclamation. Why couldn't the rest of Albania leave Mamourne to do as it chose in peace?\n\nBut gradually the reason became clear. The proclamation's effects reached far beyond Mamourne's borders, igniting chaos wherever dragons learned of it and the hope it offered. If the governments of Aldania let its bold assertion of dragons' equality with humans stand unopposed, they would inevitably face riots, rebellion, and massive disruption within their own nations. It had already begun.\n\nEvery night more of Torch's neighboring cages stood empty. The riders who straggled back to the messenger post weren't supposed to talk about what had happened around the remaining dragons, but Torch picked up enough whispers to piece together a good idea. His fellow messengers had torn their reins from their dismounted riders' hands, or clawed off their harnesses, or simply taken their bits in their teeth and flown across the channel to Mamourne.\n\nAn airship crashed when its team of dragons revolted and dragged it to the ground. Most of its human passengers and crew perished, along with nearly half the dragons. The rest of the team escaped and fled south. A few were shot from the sky, but around twenty made it to Mamourne.\n\nThe docks in Toffstorm were raided by humans who Torch suspected were members of Wingfree. Late one night, ships and warehouses were set ablaze. While the authorities were busy fighting the fires, the raiders slipped into the huge barns and let the cargo dragons out of their cages. Many of the freed dragons broke into the dragonleaf stores and were found sleeping scattered around the port the next morning, but more than a third vanished.\n\nThe rumors Torch heard from the dragons he encountered suggested similar rebellion was breaking out all over Aldania. Now that they had somewhere to go, dragons who'd dreamed of freedom their whole lives were inspired to act. Torch certainly felt the temptation. If he hadn't enjoyed working as a messenger so much, or if he'd been less attached to Amma, he might have surrendered to it.\n\nNot that everything was going smoothly in Mamourne. News of the chaos there was shouted by broadsheet vendors on every street corner in Bellhold. Maybe some of it was exaggerated to discourage dragons from deserting and to rouse the citizens of Forland's anger against their neighbors, but Torch doubted it was completely fabricated.\n\nAccording to the reports, hundreds of newly freed dragons had attacked their former owners, injuring or killing them. Bands of dragons were supposedly roaming the countryside, wantonly slaughtering livestock. Any human with dragonleaf was constantly besieged by dragons demanding their rations. Humans angry about the proclamation had formed rebel militias. Assassins had attempted to kill King Julios on at least three occasions. One had been tackled by a guard as he was raising his pistol to shoot. Other human dissidents had stormed a dragon breeding farm. They'd smashed hundreds of eggs and murdered dozens of baby dragons before the king's forces had driven them away.\n\nOne afternoon Amma stood beside Torch on a cliff overlooking the port at Arcwatch, where the Forlish fleet was assembling. Dozens of ships stood at anchor in the bay. Smaller boats plied between them, delivering supplies. Dragons bore casks of water and crates of food to their decks. Cannons bristled from their sides, and booming rumbles rolled over the hills as their crews drilled, learning to fire the weapons swiftly and accurately.\n\nAmma pointed to a troop of soldiers lined up in ranks on the beach. A small dragon swooped back and forth over their heads. From her harness dangled a long rope with a sawdust-stuffed sack attached to the end. The soldiers raised their rifles each time she passed and shot at the target painted on the sack.\n\n\"They're training to hit dragons,\" Amma told Torch, a tremble in her voice. \"They must expect Mamourne to send dragons to attack our forces.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head. Over the beach, the sack rocked wildly as a volley of bullets slammed into it. Sawdust sprayed out and showered the waves below.\n\nAmma fingered Torch's new reins, which had a core of braided steel wire inside the leather. They were wrapped around a thick tree trunk and secured with a padlock, as newly issued regulations required whenever a rider dismounted.\n\nHesitantly, without looking at him, she said, \"I wonder, sometimes, whether we're right. I mean, I know we can't just let Mamourne get away with what they've done. Look how much it's hurt Forland already. And I know it's ridiculous to pretend dragons are exactly like people. But I know you're smart, Torch. Maybe not human smart, but pretty close. I often get the feeling you understand exactly what I'm saying. You do, don't you?\" She turned to him, her eyes big and pleading, although for confirmation or denial, Torch didn't know.\n\nHe wasn't going to lie to her. He met her gaze and deliberately bobbed his head up and down.\n\nShe laughed shakily. \"See? I could swear you told me yes. But how am I supposed to tell whether you really did, or if you just know I like you to bob your head that way so you do it to please me?\"\n\nTorch shook his head.\n\nAmma laughed again. \"Probably I'm only imagining you can understand me because I want it to be true. I'd like to think that you know you could go to Mamourne and be free, but you stay with me because you want to.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head emphatically. Amma closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. She opened them and gave Torch a wan smile. \"I'll never leave you, Torch. Not if I have any choice about it.\"\n\nWith decisive motions she gathered up the remains of her lunch, which they'd landed so she could eat. She offered the slices of meat and cheese to Torch. \"Here, have a treat. I've eaten plenty.\"\n\nHe eagerly gobbled them. She'd been giving him her leftovers more and more often lately. Probably the mess hall had been packing her bigger lunches. She'd grown a lot since she first became his rider, so they must think she needed more food. Torch was glad she wasn't hungry for all of it. The heavier she got, the harder it became for him to heave the two of them off the ground.\n\nAmma mounted and Torch dove off the cliff and arrowed out to sea, careful to stay well clear of the drilling soldiers. They veered southeast, toward the capital of Tyrogue. On the horizon, Torch caught a glimpse of the long line of Forlish warships blockading the Mamournan coast, prepared to sink any vessel attempting to smuggle goods in or out, and to shoot down any dragon attempting to fly to freedom."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The first battle of the Dragon War took place at the beginning of summer. A fleet of Forlish and Tyrogian ships bore soldiers to Chaunrath, Mamourne's biggest port. Amma and Torch were among the dragons assigned to fly messages back and forth between the invading force and the command post on Forland's coast, directly across the narrow channel.\n\nThey circled overhead as the fleet sailed into the harbor just after dawn. Mamournan ships attempted to turn them back, but they were greatly outnumbered. Cannons boomed and smoke drifted skyward. Every Mamournan ship had been sunk or captured and the invading ships were landing and discharging their soldiers when Amma sent Torch winging west to carry a report on the battle's progress.\n\nWhen they returned, thick smoke obscured the city. Red flashes flickered among the black billows. The popping noise of rifle fire peppered the air. Torch hung back, all his instincts warning of danger, but Amma urged him closer. She crouched low on his neck, peering forward, as he descended toward the fight.\n\nA dark shape burst from the smoke. A jet of flame lanced across the sky. Amma screamed and yanked the reins. Torch wrenched aside. Heat bathed his wing. He dove, hurtling toward the sea below. His foe followed. Gunfire rang in Torch's ears.\n\nTorch flung his wings wide. Air slammed them so hard it felt like it might tear their joints from their sockets. Torch ignored the pain and forced them into the angle that would turn the speed of his descent into forward momentum. They shot across the surface of the water, cold spray stinging Torch's wingtips as he beat with every ounce of strength he possessed.\n\nFrom behind, a voice cried out in Draganish, its harsh tones cutting through the wind far more clearly than any human language could. \"Why do you fight for those who enslave you? Turn around and come with me. Join us. Fight for your freedom and that of all dragonkind!\"\n\nTorch didn't falter, but the voice grew closer anyway. \"Don't worry, we'll deal with your rider. Just slow and turn to give my partner a clear shot.\"\n\nFear spurred Torch to desperate effort. \"Never!\" he cried, as he drove his wings to even greater speed.\n\nThe Mamournan dragon screeched in disgust. \"Traitor! Coward!\" A wave of heat scorched the tip of Torch's tail. \"Flee back to your cage. Tell the other dragons we welcome any bold enough to shed their chains!\"\n\nHis voice faded into the distance, but Torch didn't slow until the coast of Forland passed beneath him.\n\nHe dropped to an exhausted, stumbling landing beside the tents of the command post. An officer hurried up. Amma reported what had happened, her voice urgent and remarkably steady.\n\nAlthough of course she hadn't understood what the Mamournan dragon had said, or even realized he was speaking. She didn't know he'd tried to persuade Torch to betray her.\n\nThe officer's voice was grim. \"Stay grounded for now. All the messengers are reporting similar attacks\u2014those who've returned. Rest and eat, and wait for further orders.\"\n\nFor the remainder of the day, Torch and Amma waited on the beach with their fellow messengers. Around two-thirds of them eventually made it back, many with burns or bullet wounds. Torch wondered how many of the missing dragons had been killed, and how many had accepted the invitation to desert. In either case, their riders were almost certainly dead.\n\nHe didn't mention what the enemy dragon had said to any of the others, and none of them told him about receiving similar offers. But he suspected they had. All the dragons were quieter than usual, exchanging only terse, stilted remarks.\n\nBy sunset, it became clear that the offensive had been a disaster. Most of the Forlish and Tyrogian ships had been burned to the waterline or blown up by their own stores of gunpowder. The few still able to sail retreated across the channel late in the afternoon, bearing as many troops as could escape from the unexpectedly well-defended city. More than a third of the soldiers had been either killed or taken captive. The united might of humans and dragons fighting together had proven far more overwhelming than anyone had suspected.\n\nFinally Torch and Amma were sent home, along with the rest of the messengers. They arrived at the messenger post in Bellhold long after dark. Amma settled Torch into his cage with an extra portion of dragonleaf. \"That's for saving my life,\" she told him as she fed him ball after ball from the palm of her hand. \"I didn't know you could fly so fast. If you'd been even a tiny bit slower, we both would have been shot or roasted.\"\n\nTorch gulped the leaf, desperate to fall into happy dreams in which battle played no part. He needed the sweet haze of forgetfulness to drown the storm of thoughts and emotions raging in his heart.\n\nHe loved Amma. He would die to save her.\n\nSo why did a treacherous corner of his heart regret his choice?\n\nAmma was only human. Before long she'd grow too heavy to serve as a messenger. After she retired, Torch would probably never see her again. In a mere fifty or sixty years she'd grow old and die.\n\nWhile Torch would remain in the captivity he'd chosen for her sake for hundreds of years. He might never again get the chance he'd scorned today. He might never find out what it was like be free.\n\nMaybe he would, though. If Mamourne won this war, maybe in time all of Aldania would adopt the same policies. Maybe if he was patient he wouldn't have to choose between loyalty and liberty. Maybe someday he could have both.\n\nThat hopeful thought finally let Torch slide into sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Falken",
                "text": "A week later, Amma harnessed Torch with rough speed that spoke of suppressed excitement. She wasn't in a talkative mood, so he could only wonder with a mix of curiosity and trepidation what awaited them. As he padded from the barn with her on his back, they passed one of the wagons used to haul the dragons' cages. Torch twisted his neck to see which of his neighbors was being moved.\n\nAmma laughed shakily. \"Want to watch?\" She let him turn and pause. Torch realized why she was so agitated when the wagon halted beside his cage. A team of workmen jumped out and swarmed around it.\n\nTorch shook his head. Amma patted his neck. \"I don't blame you for being confused. We've been transferred to a new training facility outside Grayfall. Captain Spenser told me the strongest, fastest, most reliable dragons and riders from every messenger service in Aldania will be there. He said he was proud to recommend us.\"\n\nThey watched until the wagon rumbled out of the barn and the driver turned it toward the train depot. The gaudy paint on his cage was chipped and faded, but Torch could still make out the shapes he knew spelled his name, though he'd never learned to read any other Forlish writing. Amma sighed. \"We'd better take off if we want to make it to Grayfall in time for lunch.\"\n\nAs they descended toward Grayfall, Torch saw many rows of white canvas tents striping the meadows around the town. He'd heard this was where the Forlish army was training the new recruits who were pouring in from every part of the country. They soared over a field where rectangular formations of men were marching and firing rifles. In another area, long lines of horses trotted side by side, the whole group turning together.\n\nAmma guided him to a big field where a number of dragons were gathered. They landed, and she secured his reins to one of many sturdy hitching posts that had been driven into the ground. After she headed to a big tent on one side of the field, grooms came and served Torch a nice hot slab of pork and his noon dragonleaf ration. He didn't like eating around his bit, but it was often necessary while they were on duty, and he'd long since mastered the skill. His reins were long enough to let him settle to the grass, so after the meal he drowsed in reasonable comfort while he waited. More dragons and riders arrived over the next few hours. Torch chatted with them, but none of them knew any more than he did about why they were there.\n\nMore than three hundred dragons filled the hitching posts by midafternoon, when all the riders emerged from the big tent and came to mount up. Amma guided Torch to join nine other dragons around one of the tall, narrow towers constructed of rough timber that dotted the field. A man in a blue uniform climbed a ladder to the top and stood looking down at the assembling dragons critically.\n\nWhen they'd all taken their places in a half-circle, he spoke in a forceful, condescending voice. \"My name is Sergeant Wilkins. My job is to turn you youngsters into soldiers. The leaders of the allied armies of Aldania have decided that the only way to beat dragons is with dragons. Seeing as how even the strongest dragon can't carry much more than a hundred pounds, that means I'm stuck training a bunch of babes I wouldn't normally take as baggage boys to fight. Using tactics that have never been tried, in battles unlike any ever fought on land or sea. They expect me to take some general's clever notion and turn it into a reality that can whip those Mamournan dragons until they can't tell their wingtips from their snouts.\" He regarded them with an expression of deep skepticism for a long moment.\n\n\"So that's what I'm going to do!\" Torch jumped as the sergeant's declaration boomed over the field. \"When I'm done with you, you will be the finest fighting force this continent has ever seen. You will send those scrawny Mamournan reptiles fleeing with their tails so far between their legs they wrap around their throats. You will show their mad fool of a king that one dragon under the control of a competent rider is worth fifty masterless animals. Now get into the air. Fly to that flag and back ten times as fast as you can so I can see what I have to work with.\"\n\nAmma was one of the first riders to react to the order, and Torch was the third dragon into the air. The flag Sergeant Wilkins had pointed to was only about a mile away, making the exercise more a test of precision and agility than speed or endurance. Torch accelerated efficiently, slowed as little as possible, and reversed direction with tight, clean turns. He gained on the two dragons who'd taken off before him, passing one and nearly catching the other by the time they returned to the tower for the tenth time. The two of them landed practically simultaneously.\n\nTorch eyed his rival. She was slightly bigger than he was, though her color was a nondescript brown. Her rider was a skinny blond boy who appeared to be several years younger than Amma. Dragon and rider regarded Torch and Amma with identical superior expressions.\n\nSergeant Wilkins called out, \"Artur Gunn from Melthain, riding Falken. Take your place at the head of the line.\"\n\nThe brown dragon strutted over to where he pointed. The boy smirked at Amma.\n\n\"Amma Sowell from Forland, riding Dragon 9023.\" Sergeant Wilkins paused. \"Please tell me that's not what you call him.\"\n\n\"Torch, sir,\" Amma called, as she guided Torch into place beside Falken.\n\n\"Much better.\" The sergeant went down the rest of the list in the order they'd landed. Even the slowest had finished the test only a few lengths behind Torch. Sergeant Wilkins' voice remained gruff, but Torch could tell he was pleased. \"Now fly the same course ten more times. This time in formation, nose to tail. Artur, you lead. It's your responsibility to hold Falken to a speed and track the rest can match.\"\n\nThe boy gave a sharp nod and nudged Falken with his heels. She crouched and leapt into the air. Torch didn't wait for Amma's signal before following. If he had to tag behind Falken like a dog at its master's heels, he'd do it flawlessly.\n\nFlying in a line was a challenge Torch had never faced before. At first it was difficult to match pace with Falken, but soon he got the hang of it. He found that if he slid a little to one side, the air flowed around his body more smoothly than usual and it took less effort to maintain a constant speed. He'd seen geese flying in long chevrons, but he'd never realized there was a purpose to the formation.\n\nSergeant Wilkins kept them flying for the rest of the afternoon. He set them many different tasks, so Torch never got bored, but by the end of the day he was so exhausted he wanted nothing but to gulp his meat and dragonleaf and collapse. Amma seemed just as tired when she slid off his back, but she took a moment to wrap her arms around his neck and scratch under his horns before she passed his reins to a groom and headed for the big tent.\n\nTorch was delighted to see that his cage had arrived. It was lined up in a long row with all the rest. The weather was mild enough Torch didn't mind not having a tent or barn for shelter. He crouched eagerly to allow the groom to lock his collar around his neck and strip off his harness and bridle, then hurried into his cage and flopped on the cool metal floor.\n\nFrom the cage to his right came Falken's voice, speaking Draganish with a distinct Melthian accent. \"Greetings. My name is Falcon.\" She used the Draganish word for the bird of prey. \"What do you call yourself in Draganish?\"\n\n\"Torch,\" he told her, peering through the bars of his cage at her. Actually the literal translation was closer to \"burning branch.\" It was the name Juniper had given him when he first came to Baromere Park. She must have overheard his Forlish name and chosen the closest Draganish equivalent. \"Greetings. I'm surprised to find you as my neighbor. But pleased,\" he hastened to add.\n\nFalken snorted. \"Obviously they placed our cages according to our group and rank. That's undoubtedly Hummingbird beyond you.\" Torch supposed that must be the Draganish translation of Collibree, the name of the Fogellan dragon who'd finished the initial race in third place and had spent the rest of the training session immediately behind Torch.\n\n\"Yes, that's me,\" said the dragon on Torch's left. \"Greetings.\"\n\n\"Greetings,\" Falken told him. \"What about you, number four?\" she called. \"What's your Draganish name?\"\n\nHe answered, and Falken worked her way through the rest of their group, exchanging names and greetings. Torch was a little annoyed at the way she'd assumed the role of leader, but he supposed she'd earned it.\n\nWhile the tenth dragon of their group was introducing herself, the grooms arrived bearing carts of food. All the dragons paused to gulp down the hot roasted mutton and balls of dragonleaf. As Torch was relaxing into the warm, dreamy rush of leaf, Falken started talking again. \"Let's each tell a little about ourselves. I'll start. I've served as a messenger for one hundred and thirteen years, under thirty-eight different riders. My current rider took my reins only a little more than a year ago, but already we're one of the best pairs in Melthain. Torch, how long have you been a messenger?\"\n\n\"Four years. My rider is my first. Before that I performed in a circus.\" Torch didn't feel like going into his hiatus at Baromere Park. He didn't much feel like chatting at all. \"But I think we should wait until tomorrow to get better acquainted. We're all tired and full of dragonleaf. Let's dream and sleep now, and talk later.\" A chorus of sleepy squawks and hisses approved his suggestion.\n\nFalken snarled, \"Listen, all of you. I was watching the other groups. None of them can match us for speed and strength, but a few aren't far behind. If we want to prove ourselves the best, we have to come together as a team and learn to coordinate our efforts more smoothly and precisely than any of them. Starting now. The better we know each other, the more we trust each other, the better our performance will be. Our riders will be doing their best. We have to do as much or more if we want to come out on top of the rankings.\"\n\nTorch could already feel the effects of the leaf fading. Falken was going to keep them talking until it had worn off completely, and all the lovely dreams he could have enjoyed were wasted. He snarled back with quite a bit more of an edge than he would have used when he was well-rested. \"Why should we care if we're the best or not? We didn't choose this. The humans brought us here. They're training us to fight other dragons. Why should we try our hardest to learn to kill our own kind at the humans' command?\"\n\nProbably he should have stopped there, but he was too annoyed and worked up to be cautious. Besides, it wasn't as if any of them could report him to Sergeant Wilkins. \"I'm starting to wonder whether we should fight for them at all. To tell the truth, if I didn't like my rider so much I might have gone to Mamourne already.\"\n\nA few of the other dragons of the group hissed their approval, but most stayed silent. Falken's voice was low and dangerous. \"If that's how you feel, break away from your rider and fly for Mamourne tomorrow. I won't have anyone in my group who's less than loyal.\"\n\n\"Your group?\" Torch sneered.\n\n\"Yes, my group. I beat you to win the top rank, and I'll beat you again every time they pit us against each other. I'll fight you for the leadership if you insist. And I'll win.\" She raised her voice so the other dragons could hear. \"We're not fighting for the humans. We're fighting with the humans, for the way of life we love. Would any of you trade being a messenger for the Mamournan's so called 'freedom'? I've heard how it is from dragons who've come slithering back to Melthain with their wings drooping and their tails between their legs, begging to be allowed to serve as messengers again. The dragons in Mamourne must scrape for every bite of meat and every ball of dragonleaf. Most of them are going hungry and dreamless. Hundreds have starved or died of leaf withdrawal. More have been killed by angry, frightened humans. Their country is falling into chaos. That's why they're going to lose this war.\"\n\nHer voice softened. \"Dragons need humans. And humans need us. We all thrive when we work together. Without humans to guide us, dragons descend into savagery. I don't want Aldania to become like Dragana, where dragons fight each other to the death for food and leaf and mates. Where they eat their own eggs to stave off starvation. Where they either huddle together in cold, damp caves or sleep without shelter from rain or wind or snow.\"\n\nHer voice strengthened again, rising to bold, ringing cries. \"That's what Mamourne will become if we don't stop them. We're fighting to help our own. We're fighting to save the Mamournan dragons from the disaster that awaits them if they win. Unless humans and dragons are restored to their proper relationship in Mamourne, dragonkind there is doomed.\" She let out a long, hissing breath, then inhaled softly. \"Does that answer your question, Torch?\"\n\nTorch wanted to believe what she said. He wanted to be able to commit himself to the humans's cause without reservation. But he didn't want to believe dragons were as hopeless and dependent on humans as her thesis required. \"How do you know it would be that way? Even if you're right about Dragana, don't you think dragons like us, who've learned to be civilized from humans, would be able to do better if we had the chance?\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but I doubt it. It's not in our nature.\" Her words quickened, urgent and eager. \"And it's not necessary. Humans are happy to govern us, as their nature suits them to do. When we serve them well, they reward us in kind. That's why our group must do our utmost to perform better than any of the other groups on every task they ask us to undertake. If we're the best, we'll receive the best food, and the best dragonleaf, and be given the best assignments. All of us know that from personal experience. Don't we?\"\n\nSounds of agreement came from the cages to Torch's left. He didn't hear any dissent.\n\nHe was torn. He'd certainly experienced rewards for good work, both at the circus and in the messenger corps. He was pretty sure she was right that if their group excelled, their hard work would be recognized and repaid. He'd just seen enough to know it wasn't always that way.\n\nFalken's tone sharpened. \"Well, Torch? Are you going to commit yourself to this group and strive to outdo all the others? If you can promise you will, I'll be glad to let you remain. You're one of the biggest, fastest, strongest dragons here. Having you as a member will make it easy to dominate the other groups. But I'll do whatever I must to get you taken out of my group if I can't count on you to give us your whole heart.\"\n\nShe probably could get him kicked out. If the other nine dragons turned against him, snubbing him and quarreling with him and refusing to cooperate with him during their exercises, Sergeant Wilkins would get the message soon enough and remove the source of the problem.\n\nAnd Torch knew she was right about their group's potential. He, too, had compared their progress during the day with that of the other groups of ten, and theirs was certainly right at the top. He loved the idea of working with nine other strong, smart, dedicated dragons to achieve excellence. He longed to throw all his effort into a cause he deeply believed in. He couldn't imagine anything more rewarding than working his hardest alongside others working just as hard toward a common goal. He wanted to prove that dragons and humans together could achieve far greater things than either could alone.\n\nHe spread his wings as far as his cage would let him. \"Yes. I will. I promise to do everything I can to make our group the best in Aldania.\"\n\nFalken's voice was warm and enthusiastic. \"Thank you, Torch. So will I, I promise. Now, let's get back to introductions. Hummingbird, tell us a little about yourself.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Flapping Fireworks",
                "text": "Sergeant Wilkins held up a small metal device unlike any Torch had ever seen. He looked down from his tower at the semicircle of dragons with such a profoundly portentous air Torch held his breath and fixed his gaze on him lest he miss a word of what he was about to say.\n\nWhen all the dragons and riders were focused just as intently, Sergeant Wilkins spoke, softly but clearly. \"This is what will make you the most deadly fighting force in Aldania.\"\n\nHe pressed on the two halves of the hinge-like device, showing how they closed, then sprang apart when released. \"It's based on similar devices we've captured from the Mamournans, adapted and improved by our own artificers. Debate has raged among the generals of the allied armies as to whether or not they should be used. I'm pleased to say that your performance for the review committee last week was so impressive that Command has given us permission to begin training you in their use. The committee will be back at the end of the week to evaluate your progress. Based on what they see, Command will decide to either go forward with the program, or scrap it.\"\n\nHis gaze swept around the semicircle. \"You must understand, these are far more dangerous than the firearms you've all worked so hard and so successfully to master.\"\n\nDuring their second week of training, Amma and the other riders had been issued rifles and pistols. Most of their time since had been spent learning to use them. Torch and Amma, along with the rest of their group, had drilled endlessly. Now every one of the riders could reliably hit both stationary and moving targets from their dragons' backs. Torch loved the thrill of sweeping through a swift, smooth turn while Amma's guns blazed, shattering every clay disk the steam-powered launcher flung into the air.\n\nSergeant Wilkins went on. \"We're only entrusting these to you because we have absolute confidence, based on what we've observed, that you can control your dragons. And we're just as confident that should your control fail for any reason, you will act swiftly and appropriately to end the threat. By any means necessary.\"\n\nTorch heard Amma gulp. Beside them, Artur sucked in his breath and put his hand on the hilt of his pistol, staring at Falken's head. She turned and gazed at him serenely. Torch's heart thudded. He didn't dare look back at Amma.\n\n\"I see you take my meaning.\" Sergeant Wilkins nodded gravely. After a moment, he raised the device again. \"This goes between your dragon's teeth.\" With thumb and fingers he snapped the halves together like the mouth of a puppet. Sparks showered out. \"It's got a flint on one side and a steel plate on the other, much like the action of a flintlock rifle. It serves as a replacement for a dragon's natural sparking crystals, which were removed from your dragons when they were quenched.\"\n\nSuddenly the odd device made perfect sense. Torch straightened his neck, straining to get a better look. How hard would it be to use? If it fit into his mouth comfortably and moved smoothly, it could be almost like having his own crystals again. They'd grown back some since his quenching, but it would be several more years before they broke through the flesh of his throat and became usable.\n\n\"Here you go, Artur.\" Sergeant Wilkins tossed the device, and Artur caught it deftly. \"It goes at the back of the mouth, just in front of the bit. Those loops fasten around the bit to hold it in place.\" He stooped to retrieve an identical device from the small chest at his feet. \"Amma, here's yours.\"\n\nIt flew past Torch's head, and Amma snatched it from the air. Torch eagerly twisted his neck and gaped his jaws. It took Amma several minutes of fussing with the device to get it properly positioned and attached to his bit. The metal was cold and bulky and awkward, pressing on his tongue and digging into his cheeks.\n\nAmma finally patted his neck and murmured, \"I think that's it. Give it a try.\"\n\nTorch swung his head around and pointed his snout at the ground. He worked his jaws gently a few times, testing the pressure of the springs and the distance between the open and closed positions. Then, with a thrill of excitement, he snapped his teeth together. A burst of sparks filled his mouth. Delighted, Torch squirted a spray of fuel into his throat and exhaled forcefully. The fuel ignited and burst from his mouth, setting a swath of grass burning. Torch lunged forward to stomp out the flames, just as Orwin had taught him. Amma clutched the saddle and laughed shakily.\n\nWhen every glowing ember around the blackened patch was extinguished, Torch looked up. Sergeant Wilkins was staring at him, muscles tense, jaw clenched. Slowly he removed his right hand from the pistol at his side and returned it to the rail beside his left, clutching so hard his knuckles whitened. \"Very good, Rider Amma. Now take your dragon to the target range we've prepared and work with him on aim and control.\" He gestured curtly toward a large plowed field adjoining their normal practice area.\n\nA glance around the other dragons showed Torch that none of them had yet mastered coordinating the timing of striking sparks and releasing fuel. He strutted past Falken, who was coughing out sprays of liquid fuel and snapping her jaws together furiously. She'd probably never breathed fire before in her life. Likely she'd been quenched so young she had no idea what to do with a mouthful of sparks.\n\nMetal targets were scattered around the field, at the tops of poles ranging from only a foot tall to more than fifty feet high. Amma guided Torch to the nearest and pointed. \"Flame,\" she ordered.\n\nTorch willingly complied. Using the device was different enough from employing his natural crystals that it took him a while to perfect his technique. He kept sparking too early, so his fuel failed to ignite and splashed the target uselessly, or too late, so his jaws were still shut when his fuel hit the sparks, and fire filled his mouth and singed his gums and cheeks and tongue. The inner surfaces of his mouth were tough and heat-resistant, but they weren't designed to withstand sustained direct contact with flames. By the time Torch could consistently produce a steady jet of flame without burning himself, the whole inside of his mouth was scorched and tender.\n\nHe didn't care. Having his fire back was exhilarating. And he couldn't help but feel smug at how much better he was at this skill than the other dragons. Only two of them had progressed to the target range, and both of them were having a great deal of trouble getting the timing down. Falken and Collibree were both still back at the tower, huffing and sparking furiously without producing more than an occasional brief flare.\n\nTorch and Amma completed the course, taking to the air for the final set of targets. Torch dove and swooped and snapped the device, blowing neat tongues of flame into the precise center of each bullseye. He used his last squirt of fuel on the final target. Amma guided him back to the tower, and he landed to the side of where the other dragons were still struggling.\n\n\"Very good, Rider Amma,\" Sergeant Wilkins said. \"It's clear Torch must have had considerable experience breathing fire before he was quenched. Have him demonstrate the necessary technique to the others.\"\n\nAmma saluted. \"Yes, sir!\" She directed Torch toward Falken.\n\nFalken glared at him with a mixture of loathing and desperation. \"How do you do it?\" she choked out, the device interfering with her pronunciation of the words so much Torch could barely understand her. \"What am I doing wrong?\"\n\n\"Please,\" Collibree mumbled. \"Show us.\" The other dragons pressed close and begged for help with equal urgency.\n\nTorch flexed the muscles of his throat, feeling the limp floppiness of his empty sacs. It would take a few minutes for his glands to replenish his fuel enough for a demonstration. \"All right. But show me what you're trying, first.\"\n\nHe watched carefully as the dragons huffed and sprayed and snapped. Soon he had a good idea of the problem. He addressed Falken, but spoke loudly enough for the others to hear. \"You're releasing far too much fuel at once. It's not surprising, because you've only ever emptied your sacs when they got uncomfortably full. For that you just squirt it all out in a stream, as quickly as possible. But for flaming, you have to tighten the muscles in your throat until only a little comes out at a time and sprays into a fine mist. Fuel needs to be mixed with plenty of air to burn well. Try it a few times without worrying about making sparks, to get the feel of it.\"\n\nFalken narrowed her eyes and flared her nostrils at him, but she attempted to comply with his instructions. For several tries she wavered between closing off the flow of fuel completely and allowing it to gush out too rapidly, but at length she produced a spray Torch thought was fine enough to ignite.\n\nHe flexed his sacs, readying the trace of fuel they'd produced. \"That's right. Now watch how I do it. Let out a tiny squirt and snap until you feel it catch. Then quick, open wide and blow out a big breath along with a nice generous spray.\"\n\nHe did as he'd described, carefully aiming the resulting jet of flame well to Falken's side. She watched with fierce concentration. Torch ended the flame and nodded to her. \"Now you try.\"\n\nShe didn't answer, but she gave a curt nod. Torch watched as she drew in a deep breath and paused. Her throat tensed, and she snapped her jaws. Torch lurched to the side as her mouth gaped wide and flame spewed out in a ragged, sputtering burst.\n\n\"Perfect!\" he crowed, as proud as if it were his achievement instead of hers. \"You did it! Now tighten your throat to cut off your fuel, then give a last good blow to get it all out. Close your mouth and swallow to make certain the fire is completely out, then inhale through your nostrils.\"\n\nHe watched anxiously as she did as he'd directed. Dragons had a strong reflex to breathe out through their mouths and in through their nostrils while flaming. Their nasal passages joined their windpipe well behind their crystals and the openings of their fuel sacs, with a flap that closed while inhaling to block them off. But it was still possible to draw a bit of flame backwards into your lungs if you cracked your mouth open at the wrong time. Torch had done it a few times when he was careless. It had been an excruciating experience that made breathing painful for days until the scorches healed. He didn't want Falken to have to cope with that while she was learning.\n\nFalken extinguished her flame and took a breath without any difficulty. She panted, eyes wide. \"I did it. I breathed fire.\"\n\n\"You did.\" Torch wanted to say something about how she'd finally experienced her true heritage as a dragon, but he was pretty sure she'd take it wrong. So he only nodded. \"Good work.\"\n\nFalken arched her neck proudly. \"A little more practice, and we'll be flaming down Mamournan dragons side by side.\"\n\n\"We will.\" The words stuck in Torch's throat, but he managed to get them out. In the excitement of flaming again, he'd forgotten the reason the humans had given them the devices. Their targets weren't going to remain metal disks on poles. Before long they'd be living flesh.\n\nCould he really breathe fire at another dragon, even an enemy? Could he really try to kill one, even if they were trying to kill him at the same time? Could he really risk flames raking his sides and crisping his wings and invading his lungs, in order to inflict the same damage on another?\n\nFalken flapped her wings. \"You'd better move out of my way. I'll work on my aim, but it will probably take a while.\" She drew in a deep breath and her eyes went unfocused as she concentrated inward.\n\nTorch backed away. He wanted to retreat to his cage and bury his fears and doubts in meat and dragonleaf. But it was more than an hour until their lunch break.\n\nCollibree bobbed his head. \"My turn. Show me, Torch. I watched when you showed Falken, but I need to see it again.\"\n\nTorch glanced up at the tower. Sergeant Wilkins was watching the dragons with a peculiar expression on his face. Pleased, but also wary, all underlaid by a hard, blank layer.\n\n\"Good work, Rider Amma,\" he called. \"Have him do it again. We'll see if the others can pick it up by imitating him, too.\"\n\nWith a sinking feeling, Torch knew that nothing the human had seen, nothing he would ever see, could penetrate that barrier. No matter how clearly evidence of the dragons' intelligence played out before him, he'd remain blind to it. His belief was far too solid to be shaken.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Amma shouted. She twitched Torch's reins, guiding him toward Collibree.\n\nTorch heaved a sigh, then plodded over. \"Everyone gather around and watch,\" he told the other dragons. \"I don't have much fuel left, so I can only do this once or twice more.\" He launched into the same explanation he'd given Falken, expanding and elaborating whenever one of his pupils asked a question or seemed confused."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Six days later, Torch's heart swelled with pride as the ten dragons wheeled through a sharp turn in perfect unison and swept up to their target. Ten jets of flame shot out to bathe the dangling wire cage filled with rocks. The dragon carrying it tried to dodge, first in one direction, then another, but Falken followed every swing of the cage, and the rest of the dragons matched her. They hit it with a dozen more coordinated blasts before a shouted order from the tower brought them back to land in a semicircle before it, still in precise formation.\n\nA man in an elaborate blue uniform clapped Sergeant Wilkins on the back. \"Excellent work, Wilkins.\" He turned to the other men crowded onto the little platform. \"Gentlemen, I trust this demonstration has allayed any remaining doubts you may have harbored.\"\n\nA portly older man in expensive-looking civilian clothes shook his head in wonder. He spoke in fluent Forlish, with only a trace of Fogellan accent. \"Goodness gracious. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself. Such precision, such power, such grace! It was like watching a display of fireworks.\"\n\n\"Flapping fireworks,\" a younger man remarked drolly. He wore civilian clothes cut in the latest Melthian fashion.\n\nSeveral of the men tittered, but they quickly fell silent beneath the frown of the oldest man present, who wore a severe black suit. He scowled at the man in uniform. \"Very well, Darlestan,\" he said in Forlish with a heavy Rachenstein accent. \"You've made your point. Command will approve your scheme and give you the rest of the funds you requested. I just hope it brings as swift an end to this war as you've assured us it will.\"\n\n\"Can you doubt it, after what you just saw?\" Darlestan waved his hand at the dragons. \"This squadron will leave for the front lines tomorrow morning. Thirty more squadrons will follow over the next few weeks. Mamourne will surrender before the year's out. I guarantee it.\"\n\nThe old man snorted, but made no other response.\n\nDarlestan gestured grandly at the dragons. \"You are hereby commissioned as the First Squadron of the Allied Aldanian Sky Cavalry. Congratulations.\" He saluted.\n\nTorch felt Amma's weight shift as she joined the other riders in returning the salute.\n\nSergeant Wilkins leaned over the rail as the rest of the men made their way down the ladder one at a time. \"You heard General Darlestan,\" he called. \"You leave for the front at dawn tomorrow. Get your dragons settled, pack your belongings, and then enjoy a few hours of liberty before supper and bed. It's the last you'll get until the war is over!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" all the riders shouted in unison. Amma tugged on Torch's reins, and he turned with the others to pad toward their row of cages.\n\nArtur whooped and pounded on Falken's neck. \"The Flapping Fireworks are going to war! Those Mamournans won't know what hit them!\"\n\nAmma and the other riders joined him in cheering. Falken bellowed, and the rest of the dragons chimed in.\n\nTorch added his voice, hoping no one noticed that it was a bit less enthusiastic than everyone else's. He was just as eager as they were to finally put their training to use. He was certain they were more than a match for any enemy they might face.\n\nHe just wasn't sure their cause was worth fighting for.\n\nIt didn't matter, though. He didn't have a choice. Amma was committed to the fight, and therefore so was he."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Battle of Volimeres",
                "text": "Torch swept across the sky, behind and slightly to the right of Falken. Collibree soared just beyond his left wingtip. The rest of the Flapping Fireworks flew behind them in a tight chevron.\n\nGreen vineyards and golden wheat fields blanketed the rolling hills beneath like a piecework quilt. To the east lay the forested mountains along the border between Tyrogue and Mamourne. To the west, only a short distance ahead, lay Volimeres, the principal town in this region of Mamourne. Command had chosen it as the first target of the Allied Forces's invasion. If they were able to capture it, they would gain access to a clear path to the capital, across a flat, sparsely populated agricultural area with a network of good roads.\n\nScouts had indicated the town was relatively lightly defended. Most of Mamourne's military was concentrated along the northern coast, ready to defend against assaults from Forland and Melthain. The rest was in the south, guarding against advances from Fogella, which had been Mamourne's enemy for most of its history. Tyrogue was weaker and traditionally Mamourne's ally and trading partner. King Julios's allocation of his military forces seemed to have failed to fully account for the change in circumstances.\n\nFalken banked into a turn, Torch and Collibree a breath behind, the rest of the squadron following. They straightened and swept back the way they'd come. On the road below, the Allied Forces's ground troops advanced toward Volimeres, cavalry and infantry and artillery in a broad, disciplined column, stretching back to the east as far as Torch could see.\n\nThe squadron passed over the column and soared a measured distance beyond. Falken led them through another wheeling turn, advancing their path only the small amount necessary to keep pace with the plodding troops below. They'd been flying for an hour, and they were still only halfway from the previous night's camp to the first buildings of Volimeres. Their assignment was to protect the troops below from aerial attack, but so far they hadn't seen any enemy dragons.\n\nAs Torch swept through the next turn, that changed. A flurry of wings rose over Volimeres. His first terrified impression was that there were hundreds of them, but a second look put their numbers closer to thirty. Of course, that still meant they were outnumbered three to one.\n\nTorch breathed deeply, reminding himself that Command had always anticipated they'd face greater numbers and had planned their strategy accordingly. Falken was already implementing it. She angled into a steep climb, beating hard to gain as much altitude as possible. Torch and the rest of the squadron stuck close on her tail.\n\nBy the time the Mamournan dragons reached the head of the column, the Flapping Fireworks were far above them. Torch surveyed the enemy, his heart pounding. Most of them were smaller dragons, less than half his wingspan. He spotted two or three close to Collibree's size, but none as large as Falken or him. About half of the dragons bore riders, while the rest flew free.\n\nThe riderless dragons mounted toward them, gaining altitude swiftly without the burden of extra weight. The rest dove toward the column, where officers were shouting orders and men were scrambling into defensive positions.\n\nFalken cried, \"Stoop!\" A breath behind her screech, Amma echoed the order, along with the other riders. Torch's pulse was hammering so hard he could barely breathe, but his training took over, and he executed the maneuver in unison with the rest of the squadron. Arching his back like a cat, he thrust all four feet downward with claws extended. He stretched his wings high, letting air slip past their sails until he plummeted downward, maintaining only enough lift to steer.\n\n\"Target!\" Falken ordered. The dragons below flew in an undisciplined, unpatterned swarm. Torch oriented on the second highest. He fixed his eyes on the beating brown wings and scaly back, trying to ignore the dragon's uplifted head and dark, focused eyes. He aimed for the other dragon's fiercely flexing midshoulders. A good slash through the muscles there, and his enemy's wings would be crippled.\n\nHe hoped the other dragon would see what awaited and break off his ascent, but his foe's wingbeats didn't falter. Torch stiffened his legs and braced for impact.\n\nThe instant before he hit, the other dragons' neck twisted around and his snout gaped wide. Flames boiled from his throat. Torch slid to the side, avoiding the brilliant lance, but missing his strike. His claws ripped through the trailing edge of the other dragon's wing membrane. A painful injury, but not disabling. The dragon faltered, but didn't fall. It swung its snout around, inhaling for another blast.\n\nOn Torch's back, Amma's rifle cracked. The dragon's head jerked back, spraying blood. Its wings went limp and it tumbled groundward, shrinking in moments to a fluttering dot.\n\nTorch threw open his wings to arrest his descent. All around him, more gunshots were ringing out. Smoke billowed in thick, swirling clouds. Flames flickered in the corners of his vision. Dragons screamed and thrashed and fell.\n\nHe beat hard to climb above the chaos, scanning desperately to see what was happening. He spotted Collibree locked onto the back of one Mamournan dragon while another circled, looking for a chance to flame its enemy without hitting its ally. Torch shot in from above and behind, claws spread, aiming for the second dragon's wing. He scored a long tear between its second and third ribs. The dragon shrieked and whipped his head around, but air rushed through his ripped membrane and he slipped sideways. His burst of flame grazed the side of Torch's neck.\n\nAmma emitted a strangled yelp. Her legs clamped around Torch's neck, the right one pressing hard into the hot pain of his wound.\n\nTerror and anger blazed together in Torch's heart. He wheeled around and arrowed away from the battle, heading toward a patch of open sky. Amma dragged on his reins, but he clamped his bit between his teeth and resisted the pull until they were well clear of the rest of the battling dragons. Then he craned his neck, trying to see how badly she was injured.\n\nHer boot and the leg of her leather trousers were scorched black, but not burned through. Her voice was ragged but loud enough to hear over the rush of the wind. \"I'm fine. Just toasted a little.\" She laughed, grim and a bit wild. \"And it's my bad leg, so it hardly matters.\" Her tone sharpened with concern. \"What about you?\"\n\nTorch's neck hurt, but he didn't see any blood or raw flesh, only a patch of darkened scales. He bobbed his head.\n\n\"All right, then. Let's head back.\" She tugged his rein, and this time he yielded, wheeling back toward the battle.\n\nThe first skirmish was all but over. Torch counted all nine other Flapping Fireworks still in the air. The enemy dragons who'd risen to attack had either fallen or fled. As he headed to his position behind Falken, Torch assessed the damage. Most of the squadron bore wounds, scorches like his or slashes to body or wings, but they seemed fairly minor. The worst was one badly burned tail, with several feet of the tip blackened and blistered and the last few inches gone completely. But Torch's squadron mate squawked her determination to keep fighting, and the rest of them praised her courage.\n\nFalken led them in a broad circle, peering downward. Far below, the rest of the Mamournan dragons and their riders were attacking the column. The Allied Forces were putting up a spirited defense. Several divisions of riflemen fired steadily into the air, forcing the enemy dragons to stay high except for occasional swift strafing runs. Three small cannons were aimed steeply upward. Whenever one of the Mamournan dragons dove, flaming, at the column, they boomed and spewed smoke. Torch saw one cannonball strike an attacking dragon in the chest. He flipped end over end and crashed into a block of infantry, plowing a long swath of crushed and crumpled soldiers before he rolled to a halt.\n\nFalken completed her assessment. \"Down,\" she ordered. \"Prepare to flame.\"\n\nTorch's fuel sacs were still full. The others had also conserved their flame as much as possible. He snapped his sparker a few times to make sure its hinge was moving smoothly. Sparks tingled on his tongue.\n\nFalken tipped into a dive, and Torch followed. His heart was still pounding, but his fear was gone, replaced by anger and determination. Their opponents might be dragons, but they were still the enemy. They had hurt him and Amma. They would kill them if they could. He no longer had any qualms about doing his utmost to kill them first.\n\nFalken timed their approach carefully. The dozen remaining Mamournan dragons appeared oblivious to the threat from above. They clustered into a tight bunch and began a strafing run down the column, hurtling only a few feet over the soldiers' heads, coordinating their breaths to send a constant torrent of flame pouring onto their enemies.\n\nFalcon brought their chevron in over the Mamournan pack, using the speed of their dive to overtake the oblivious enemy. Torch waited impatiently for her to give the order, but she remained silent as she passed the rearmost dragon, then the next. Finally, when all the Flapping Fireworks had foes directly beneath them, her cry rang out. \"Flame!\"\n\nTorch snapped sparks and sprayed fuel. A long gout of flame burst from his mouth, striking a Mamournan dragon directly in the center of one wing. The dragon screamed as its membranes blackened and shriveled. It flapped wildly but uselessly, slewed sideways, and hit the ground, vanishing behind Torch as he soared on. He sought a new target, sparing no more thought for his fallen foe.\n\nBeside him, Collibree shrieked. A horrified glance showed Torch his head enveloped in flames. Then the big yellow Mamournan dragon who'd hit him wheeled around and sent a jet shooting toward Torch's head. He dodged, but lost precious height. His straining wings battered the heads of Allied troops. He didn't have room for enough of a downsweep to push both his and Amma's weight higher.\n\nThe Mamournan dragon whipped through a hairpin turn. Her mouth gaped. Torch stared down her throat, getting a clear look at the sparker between her back teeth. Snout and sparker snapped closed.\n\nTorch dove, folding his wings. Allied troops scattered before him. The jet of flame shot past a foot over his head. But he was far too low to recover.\n\n\"Jump clear!\" Artur screamed. Torch felt Amma yank the release on her belt. Then her weight was gone from his back.\n\nReflex took over. Torch curled one shoulder toward the ground and flared his wings. His joints screamed as his membranes caught air and slowed his fall. He hit the ground and rolled.\n\nWhen he finally tumbled to a stop, Torch flung his head up, trying desperately to get his feet under him. The Mamournan dragon had banked and wheeled and was arrowing straight at Torch. Rifles were cracking all around, but his foe kept coming, mouth opening.\n\nTorch snapped his jaws and sprayed all his remaining fuel through the shower of sparks. A plume of flame engulfed the Mamournan dragon's head. But somehow her jaws continued to gape. Fuel spewed out, igniting on contact with Torch's flame and sending an opposing jet at his face.\n\nA wrench of Torch's neck whipped his head aside. His enemy plowed into the earth, sliding on her belly in a shower of dirt and gravel, wings dragging behind.\n\nAllied soldiers converged on the dead dragon's rider, who appeared uninjured. He blasted one with his rifle, then dropped it and drew a pistol in each hand. He fired until he ran out of bullets, then reversed them and used the stocks to club his attackers. But at last they overwhelmed him and wrestled him into submission.\n\nTorch ripped his attention away as another Mamournan dragon swooped down. Torch leapt into the air, climbing rapidly without Amma to weigh him down. He hoped she was safe. At least she was on the ground, out of the most dangerous part of the combat.\n\nHe shot past the other dragon, who couldn't maneuver as quickly while burdened by a rider. Flame singed the tip of one wing, but only a trickle. His enemy must be out of fuel as well. But her rider was fumbling to reload his rifle. Torch couldn't afford to get careless.\n\nTorch continued to climb, sneaking a peek back to make sure the other dragon was following. She strained upward, laboring mightily to match his speed. Torch slowed until she could keep up, but only if she expended maximum effort. He tantalized her with the tip of his tail, waving it in her face, snatching it at the last moment from her snapping jaws. He led her north of the road, away from her comrades.\n\nShe was starting to flag when her rider raised his rifle to his shoulder. Torch flapped fiercely to gain a few extra yards of height, then braked hard. He dropped back over the other dragon, raking his claws down her neck. The talons of one hind foot closed around her rider's arm. Torch yanked with all his strength. The rider screamed, and his rifle flew in a wide, spinning arc. Torch released him and resumed clawing, tearing several long rents through the dragon's scales before sliding past her hindquarters and tail.\n\nHe beat hard to climb again, watching the other dragon intently to see what she would do. Her wings were still keeping her aloft, even though blood was flying from her wounds. She bent her neck and peered at her rider, who slumped across her neck.\n\nShe whipped around to face Torch. \"Curse you, you evil worm!\" she screamed. \"We'll make you and all your traitor friends pay for what you've done! Go lick your masters' boots and swallow their weed and bend your neck for their chains! We'll burn you along with the humans you love so much!\"\n\nShe snapped her jaws and spit a spray of fuel, but the flame sputtered out before it crossed half the distance from her snout to Torch's. Then she wheeled and sped toward Volimeres.\n\nTorch chased her for a short distance, but when he saw that the rest of the Mamournan dragons were fleeing as well, he slowed and let her go. He watched until he was sure none of the survivors would turn back, then banked and flapped heavily toward where the scattered Allied forces were slowly reassembling into a column.\n\nHe spotted seven of the Flying Fireworks in the air or alive on the ground. That meant one other member of the squadron in addition to Collibree had been killed. Dragon corpses lay in broken lumps along the road and scattered through the surrounding fields.\n\nThey'd won an impressive victory. Yet Torch couldn't muster a sense of triumph. His wounds hurt and every muscle ached with fatigue. All he wanted was to land, gulp some hot, juicy meat, swallow ten or twelve balls of dragonleaf, and sleep for the rest of the day.\n\nNot that he'd get to. Meat, probably, at some point. Dragonleaf almost certainly, although only his usual ration. But Volimeres still lay before them, and the officers wouldn't halt their advance any longer than it took to regroup and get everyone moving again.\n\nThe dragons flew much faster than humans marched, though. Maybe they could take a nice long break, rest, have their injuries tended, and catch up to the column when it neared the town. Cheered by the thought, Torch swooped down and circled the column, looking for Amma.\n\nThere she was, near the front, talking with some of the officers. They broke off and stared at Torch as he passed overhead. He was happy to see Amma standing upright. There were bandages around her leg, but she didn't seem to be favoring it much more than usual. He didn't see any other bandages, so she must not have sustained any serious injuries when she jumped off. Good. All those drills on how to fall had been worth it. Torch banked sharply and backwinged, settling lightly to the ground a few yards away.\n\nAmma limped toward him. Torch rushed forward so she wouldn't have to use her injured leg any more than necessary.\n\nShouts from the cluster of officers drew his attention. He froze, heart thudding. Every one of them had a pistol aimed at his head or chest.\n\n\"Torch.\" Amma's voice was harsh.\n\nTorch jerked his gaze back to her. She, too, had drawn her pistol. One hand held it tautly at her side. She limped a few more steps toward him and extended her other hand. \"Give me the sparker, Torch.\"\n\nHis jaws tightened around the device as he understood. They feared him. With no rider on his back and his reins hanging loose, he might as well be a wild animal that had escaped its cage. With the sparker between his teeth, he was dangerous. At any moment he might open his mouth and flame them. A few minutes ago, twenty Mamournan dragons had done just that. They feared Torch would turn on them with no more loyalty than a dog or horse.\n\nEven Amma feared it. She thrust her open palm at his snout. \"Torch. The sparker. Now.\"\n\nAnger boiled in his chest, sending a rush of temptation into his throat. He would never harm Amma, but Torch badly wanted to send a blast of flame to roast every one of those pompous officers where they stood, still pointing their pistols at his face.\n\nHe and the other dragons had fought and bled and died for them today. They'd defeated a force three times their size. Without their heroic actions, thousands of Allied soldiers would lie dead right now, instead of only hundreds. The invasion of Mamourne would be over almost before it had begun. Dragons would remain free on Aldania's soil and in Aldania's sky. That was their greatest fear, and Torch and the rest of the Flapping Fireworks had kept it from coming true.\n\nAnd this was how they repaid him. It would serve them right if Torch did flame them and fly off to join the Mamournans. He ought to do it.\n\nBut sense reasserted itself. He was practically out of fuel, with only the few drops his glands had produced during his return flight in his sacs. There were twelve pistols aimed at him, with twelve fingers on twelve triggers. He'd never survive if he went rogue now. To successfully desert, he would have needed to stay far away from the Allied column. He could have followed the Mamournan dragons to Volimeres and asked for sanctuary there.\n\nBut he hadn't, because he didn't want to desert. He was loyal, whether they believed it or not. So he only had one choice.\n\nTorch bent his neck until his snout was directly over Amma's outstretched palm. He gaped his jaws until his teeth came free from the sparker and used his tongue to pry it off his bit, just as he always did when a training session was over and Amma asked for it back. The sparker fell from his mouth into her hand.\n\nHer fingers closed around it. With a swift motion she holstered her pistol and reached for his reins. Torch held perfectly still while she grasped them beneath his chin.\n\nShe turned to the officers. \"My dragon is secure, sirs.\"\n\nSlowly, one by one, they lowered their guns. General Darlestan cleared his throat. \"Good work, Rider Amma. Take him to the rear where the grooms are preparing meat and leaf.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Amma stowed the sparker in her belt pouch and saluted. \"Torch, down.\"\n\nTorch crouched and extended his leg. Amma climbed into the saddle, moving only a little stiffly, although from the way she clenched her teeth and pressed her thighs into his neck with far less than their usual strength, Torch could tell her leg hurt a great deal. He padded carefully where she directed him so he wouldn't jostle her too much, both for her sake and to keep her bandaged leg from rubbing against the untreated burn on his neck.\n\nThe rest of the Flying Fireworks greeted Torch with relief. In both dragons and riders Torch saw an odd mix of elation at their victory and grief for their losses. Torch devoured the hot slab of mutton the grooms provided and gulped the four balls of dragonleaf they offered. Then he collapsed to sprawl next to the hitching post they'd driven into the ground. As they spread cool, soothing salve on his burns, he closed his eyes and let the light, pleasant leaf dreams carry him away from grim reality."
            },
            {
                "title": "Surrender",
                "text": "Six months later, Torch stood with the other three surviving members of the Flapping Fireworks at one end of a long arc of dragons, waiting to witness Mamourne's official surrender.\n\nAfter taking Volimeres, the Allied Forces had fought their way across the country to Legrath. The Mamournans, both humans and dragons, had fiercely resisted every step of their advance, but in the end they'd proven no match for the combined might of the rest of Aldania. The Allies had many more soldiers on the ground. They were better organized and disciplined, and their officers were more effective commanders.\n\nThe Sky Cavalry was always outnumbered by Mamournan dragons, but their training proved to be far superior, and the strategy their leaders had devised and continued to refine after every battle resulted in a steady stream of victories against larger forces. By the time all the dragon squadrons had joined the Flapping Fireworks in the field, it was routine for them to triumph even when outnumbered four or five to one.\n\nEven so, the Mamournans might have held out longer had they not faced so much dissension from within. Humans unhappy with King Julios's proclamation had banded together to obstruct his efforts. They'd sabotaged the royal military's weapons and supplies. They'd staged constant guerrilla raids against Mamournan strongholds. Often when the Allied Forces reached a town, they'd found their enemies already tending wounded and burying dead.\n\nAs the Allies converged on Legrath, a group of Mamournan dissidents struck the final blow. They stormed the palace in the middle of the night. Most of them perished, but aided by sympathetic servants and a few turncoat guards, a handful reached King Julios's room, dragged him from his bed, and slit his throat.\n\nThe throne passed to his younger brother, Lusian. King Lusian immediately issued a new proclamation voiding the old one. He declared all Mamournan dragons to be once again the property of their former owners. Foreign dragons who'd fled to Mamourne now belonged to the crown. Any dragon who refused to voluntarily submit to captivity would be subdued by force. Those who resisted too stubbornly would be killed.\n\nKing Lusian sued for peace. During the month of negotiations that followed, the Allied Forces and the Mamournan royal military cooperated in hunting down and capturing dragons. The few who escaped fled the country or retreated into hiding. When no free dragons remained in Mamourne, the date for the formal ceremony had been set.\n\nImmediately in front of Torch, a group of Mamournan prisoners of war huddled, guarded by Allied soldiers. During the hour they'd been standing here, waiting for everyone to get into place, the guards had relaxed their discipline, allowing the prisoners to sit on the grass or walk around the perimeter of the guarded area.\n\nOne stopped in front of Torch and looked up at Amma. \"Hey, rider,\" he called softly in heavily accented Forlish.\n\nAmma glanced at the nearest guard, who shrugged. \"What?\" she asked, her voice icy.\n\nThe prisoner edged nearer. Torch realized he must have been a dragon rider, because though he was clearly an adult, he was the size of a child. Similarly small humans had performed with the circus. As Torch looked closer, he recognized the man as one of those captured in the Battle of Volimeres. He'd ridden one of the first dragons Torch had killed.\n\nThe prisoner eyed Amma with wary arrogance. \"What's your dragon's name?\"\n\nShe hesitated, then said grudgingly, \"Torch.\"\n\nThe man turned to Torch. \"Hello, Torch. My name is Alonso. A dragon named Aloet once granted me the honor of riding her. I believed you killed her.\"\n\nTorch tensed. Did the little man seek revenge? But Alonso spread his hands. \"She died fighting for freedom for her kind. I think she would be glad she didn't live to see this day.\" He sighed. \"She never understood how some dragons could choose to fight for those who enslaved them. Neither do I.\" He tilted his head and regarded Torch ruefully. \"If you wish to attempt an explanation, I'll listen. I understand Draganish.\"\n\nTorch hesitated. He glanced back at Amma. She glared at Alonso. \"Leave my dragon alone, prisoner.\"\n\n\"Our conversation doesn't concern you.\" Alonso squinted up at Amma, then deliberately turned from her to focus on Torch. \"Well?\"\n\nTorch said, \"I love my rider, and she loves me. I'm not her slave. We work and fight together for the good of Forland and all Aldania.\"\n\nAlonso huffed. \"I don't doubt she loves you. But I can't say the same for her superiors.\" He turned back to Amma. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\"That's none of your business!\"\n\nAlonso studied her. \"Around fourteen or fifteen, I'd guess. You show the usual signs of the starvation diet they feed you, but even that can't keep you small forever. You've probably got less than six months until you grow too heavy for Torch to lift.\"\n\nTorch flicked a glance at Amma, then away. It was true. Every time they took off, Torch had to work harder. Every time, he wondered if it would be the last. It couldn't be very long before even his utmost effort would be insufficient.\n\n\"See? He knows,\" Alonso said.\n\nAmma snarled, \"I fail to see why you care. All riders retire eventually. I will step down gracefully when it's my turn.\"\n\n\"Not all riders. Or at least, they wouldn't have to if the messenger service hired dwarves like me.\" His voice softened. \"I applied to join the Mamournan messenger service when I was eight. They refused to let me take the test. They told me dwarves weren't eligible. You've never met a dwarf in the Forlish service, either, I'll wager. Have you ever wondered why that is? When they could easily hire riders who could serve for fifty or sixty years, instead of having to train new ones after five or six years at the most?\"\n\nAmma's voice was stiff. \"No.\"\n\n\"I can't know for certain, of course. I'm not privy to their secrets. But I can tell you what I guess. The messenger services use children because they're easy to control. You're just like me when I was your age. All you want is to ride dragons, and you'll do anything they tell you so they'll let you. You'll follow any order they give without thinking too hard about what you're doing.\"\n\nHis voice dropped. \"And just about the time you get old enough to start questioning, you grow too big to ride anymore, and they get rid of you.\" He balled his fists. \"The last thing they want is a bunch of adults riding dragons. It would be too dangerous. Sooner or later enough of them would realize what dragons really are.\" He looked up at Amma expectantly.\n\n\"I don't know what you mean.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do. You deny it, of course, because you have to believe what they tell you so you can keep riding until the bitter end. But it's impossible to spend as much time with dragons as riders do and not come to understand the truth.\"\n\nAmma's legs dug into Torch's neck. \"What truth?\"\n\nHe laughed bitterly. \"The truth King Julios proclaimed. The truth Aloet and I fought for. The truth your superiors and Lusian are trying to kill and bury. But even if they eliminate all of us who know, they won't succeed. As long as dragons dwell in Aldania, anyone who interacts with them enough will eventually see that they're intelligent and self-aware in exactly the same way humans are.\"\n\nHe turned to Torch, his eyes deep and sad. \"Aren't you, Torch?\" He jerked his head at Amma. \"Tell her.\"\n\nWould she believe him if he did? She never had before when he'd tried. Torch wanted her to. More than anything. Even enough to cooperate with an enemy.\n\nHe twisted his neck around, fixed his eyes on Amma, and bobbed his head.\n\nAmma laughed uneasily. \"He knows I like it when he nods like that. He does it a lot, to please me.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he does.\" Alonso looked at Torch. \"Is there anything you'd like to tell her, while you've got someone who can translate for you?\"\n\nA million things rushed together in Torch's mind. He blurted out the first he could form into words. \"Tell her she's a wonderful rider. Tell her I've been happier since I started working with her than I ever was before.\"\n\nAlonso rolled his eyes skyward, but he turned to Amma and faithfully repeated Torch's words in Forlish.\n\nShe scoffed, although Torch heard a trace of doubt in her voice. \"He didn't say that. Dragons don't have a language, they just make noises. You made up something you thought I'd like to hear.\"\n\nAlonso sighed. \"I doubt we can persuade her, Torch. She's too deeply committed to their lies. But if I were to translate something only you and she would know, she might find it difficult to explain away.\"\n\nTorch thought furiously. What could he say that Alonso would have no other way of knowing? \"My cage. It's the same one I lived in at the circus. Most of the paint is worn off now, but when they first sent me to the messenger service you could still read my name. The Crimson Torch.\"\n\nAlonso grimaced. \"He says you keep him in a cage that originally came from a circus. It's painted with his name, the Red Torch.\"\n\nAmma stared at him. \"How could you\u2026\" She looked at Torch, her eyes wide and wondering.\n\nThen she shook her head hard. \"More clever guesses. Lots of circuses have dragons, and they favor the ones with bright colors. I told you part of his name. All you had to do was look at him to guess the rest. And besides, you're wrong. It's Crimson, not Red.\"\n\nAlonso shook his head. \"See, Torch? It will be the same with anything we try to tell her. She can't let herself believe.\" He turned back to Amma. \"Draganish doesn't have the ridiculous excess of color terms that Forlish does. Neither does Mamournan, for that matter. Do you know how long it took me to sort them all out when I was first learning your language? Although I have to admit, 'The Crimson Torch' has a nice ring to it.\"\n\nTorch tried to think of something Amma couldn't attribute to guessing. Names would be most persuasive, but of course he couldn't pronounce the human sounds, and the names the dragons used with each other were quite different from their equivalents. Except Alonso should be familiar with the Draganish name for the Mamournan capital city. And\u2014 \"Tell her Falcon died in our last big battle, just outside Legrath. Three dragons attacked her from the front, and two more from behind. They flamed her and shot her and slashed her wings full of holes, but she still managed to slow her fall enough for her rider to survive.\"\n\nAlonso winced and laid a compassionate hand on Torch's neck. \"He says Falcon\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey, you!\" A guard grabbed Alonso's upper arm and jerked him toward where the other guards were forcing prisoners to their feet and lining them up in rows. \"Take your stinking hands off that dragon! And get in line. Can't you see the ceremony is about to begin?\"\n\nAlonso looked over his shoulder and spoke rapidly as the guard dragged him away. \"Falcon died in your final battle, outside Legrath, but she saved her rider. It took five Mamournan dragons to\u2014\"\n\nThe guard cuffed him hard on the side of the head, and he fell silent.\n\nAmma's legs dug into Torch's neck with bruising force. He gazed at her, but she refused to meet his eyes, instead staring after Alonso with a scowl, breathing harshly.\n\nTrumpets blew. A delegation of Mamournans emerged from the palace, King Lusian in their midst. Amma yanked Torch's rein. \"Straighten out your neck and look like you're paying attention,\" she ordered.\n\nTorch obeyed. The surrender ceremony proceeded. King Lusian gave a long speech repudiating his brother's actions and affirming Mamourne's renewed commitment to the universal Aldanian policies regarding dragons. General Darlestan made a brief statement accepting Mamourne's capitulation and relaying the willingness of the governments of Aldania to accept them back into the fellowship of nations. The Mamournan military formally laid down their weapons, soldiers filing past in a long line to add their rifles and swords to a growing pile.\n\nFinally, prisoners of war were exchanged. Thin, weary solders from Forland, Melthain, Fogella, and the rest of the Allied countries poured across the field to join their comrades, cheering raggedly. The Mamournan prisoners marched with stiff backs and chins held high to where stern officers awaited them. Torch saw Alonso, along with a number of other small men and women, hustled into a separate line and led away. His stomach lurched. What fate awaited them, now that their native country had turned against the ideals they'd fought for?\n\nHe had to accept, as the ceremony ended and Amma directed him back toward the Allied camp, that he'd probably never know."
            },
            {
                "title": "Retirement",
                "text": "With great relief, Torch stilled his steady flapping and slid into a long, shallow glide. His wings ached in every joint and his membranes burned as the bitterly cold wind rushed across them. The long flight from Boldfort had been made even longer by the need to detour around an autumn storm. They'd spent hours flying through miserable gray drizzle that stung like needles even through his scales. He hated to think how cold and wet Amma must be. Her leather flying gear was sturdy, but she'd foregone her thick woolen undergarments when the weather on their outbound flight had been mild. He'd appreciated the slight relief of the missing ounces, but now he wished she hadn't been so considerate.\n\nThe familiar shapes of the Bellhold messenger station were recognizable even in the dark. Torch settled to the ground as close to the barn as his wings permitted. The gaslamp by the door glowed a warm, welcoming yellow. Only a few more moments, and they'd be inside its homey shelter. Torch crouched and extended his leg, waiting impatiently for Amma to unfasten the straps from her belt and dismount.\n\nIt seemed to take far longer than usual, but finally she swung out of the saddle and her weight landed on Torch's leg. He suppressed a grunt and tensed his muscles to endure the pressure. She lowered herself stiffly, groping with her lame leg for the ground. When it finally found purchase, she dropped the other to meet it and slumped against Torch, breathing heavily. He twisted his neck to look at her in concern.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she mumbled, pushing herself vertical. She patted Torch's head, took a tighter grip on his reins, and trudged toward the barn door. Torch followed eagerly.\n\nAfter a few unsteady steps, Amma slowed, swaying. Torch's reins slid from her hand, and she crumpled to the ground.\n\nTorch stared at her for a shocked instant, then raised his voice in the loudest shriek he could force from his throat. He dropped his head to nudge Amma's horrifyingly limp form with the tip of his snout, then squeezed past her to slam his shoulder into the barn door, bellowing for help.\n\nAfter far too long, it finally swung open. The night groom gaped up at Torch. His eyes went to Torch's freely swinging reins and widened in fear. His hand went to the pistol at his side.\n\nTorch was angry enough he might have flamed the idiot if he'd had crystals or a sparker. He had to resist the urge to clamp his jaws around the man's wrist before he could unholster the pistol. But Amma needed help, and that was far more important than anything else. He backed slowly away, lowered his head meekly, and dropped onto his belly. He whined and crept his snout to nudge Amma's body. Only then did the groom's gaze take in the unmoving shape of the fallen rider.\n\nThe man edged toward her, keeping his pistol aimed at Torch. \"Loose dragon!\" he shouted. \"And a rider down!\" He knelt by Amma and put his free hand on her shoulder, but didn't divert his attention from Torch.\n\nMore grooms rushed from the barn. Torch lay still as several more pointed guns at him. One walked slowly forward until he reached Torch's trailing reins, stooped, and seized them. Only when they were firmly in his grasp did the rest of the grooms relax, holster their pistols, and turn their attention to Amma.\n\nShe stirred under their anxious ministrations. A hand came up to bat them away. \"I'm fine,\" she muttered, barely louder than a whisper. \"Just tired. And cold. Can someone please bring me a cup of hot tea? That's all I need.\"\n\n\"Right away, Rider Amma,\" the groom assured her. Ignoring her protests, he scooped her into his arms. He carried her into the barn, scarcely seeming to notice the weight Torch found so heavy. The groom holding Torch's reins tugged him to follow.\n\nTorch obediently bent his neck for collar and chain, never taking his eyes from Amma. All around the barn, other dragons watched curiously from their cages, though as usual when humans were present they stayed quiet. The groom carried Amma to the big fireplace at the far end of the barn, where a cluster of chairs and couches stood. Riders socialized there while not on duty. Embers glowed in the hearth, although it was late enough all the riders had retired to the dormitories beyond the doors on either side.\n\nThe groom eased Amma onto an upholstered couch. Another emerged from the office with a steaming teapot. As Torch yielded to the groom tugging him into his cage, he heard Amma's weak voice insisting she could sit up and hold her own cup.\n\nTorch peered through the bars. Amma's head peeked over the back of the couch. Eventually one of the grooms placed a platter of warm meat in Torch's feed box, but Torch ignored it. He couldn't relax until he was certain Amma would be all right.\n\nHer voice rose, traveling clearly through the cavernous barn. \"No, I don't want it. Take it away.\" The groom's answer was too quiet to hear, but Amma's reply was strident, with an edge of panic. \"I told you no!\" A crash echoed through the barn.\n\n\"Rider Amma,\" the groom said, distressed. \"You have to eat. Hot stew will take the chill out of your bones. And you're so weak you can barely stay upright. I'm afraid you'll faint again if you don't get a little food in your belly.\"\n\n\"I can't!\" Sobs punctuated Amma's words. \"I have to follow my regimen. I already ate my meal for tonight. I can't eat again until morning.\"\n\nThe groom kept urging her, and she kept refusing. Finally he gave up and withdrew. He spoke in a low voice to one of the other grooms, who hurried from the barn.\n\nTorch longed for the ability to talk in words the humans could understand. They needed to know that when they'd stopped for their supper break, Amma had fed him nearly half of her meal, just as she did every day. She'd done the same thing at lunch. He didn't remember the last time they'd stopped for a meal on one of their journeys and Amma hadn't given him a portion of her food. Certainly not since they'd returned from the war.\n\nHe guiltily went to his feed box and gulped down the generous slab of mutton, which was still pleasantly warm. But despite strong temptation, he left the three balls of dragonleaf lying in the bottom of the metal box. Only after Amma was safe in her bed would he surrender to pleasant dreams.\n\nThe barn door crashed open and slammed closed. Captain Spenser strode past Torch's cage. His stern voice filled the building. \"Rider Amma, what's this I hear about you refusing food?\"\n\nShe struggled to her feet and faced him. \"Sir, I'm only following orders. I must stick to my regimen.\"\n\n\"Have you been sticking to your regimen?\" His piercing gaze raked her up and down. \"Have you been eating all the food the mess hall issues you?\"\n\nShe kept her head up, but her gaze slid to the side. \"Most of it, sir. Sometimes they give me too much.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought.\" He took a step closer. His voice softened. \"Rider Amma, I understand. You're not the first rider to try to delay your retirement this way. But we can't allow it. You must eat. The Messenger Service won't let you starve yourself to death.\"\n\n\"Please, sir.\" Amma's voice trembled. \"Truly, I'm not hungry any more. I ate almost a whole bowl of stew.\"\n\nCaptain Spenser glanced at the groom, who shook his head. \"Three or four bites, sir.\"\n\n\"Bring another bowl,\" the captain told him. To Amma, he said, \"You'll finish one whole bowl. I'll stand here and watch until you do. Or I can retire you right now. It's your choice.\"\n\n\"Sir, no!\" Amma pressed her clasped hands under her chin. \"I'm already so heavy Torch can barely lift me. I eat plenty, I promise. I don't need more.\"\n\n\"Rider Amma, nothing you say will change my mind. We calculated your regimen precisely to provide the minimum nutrition you need. When you don't eat it all, you make yourself ill. You were so weak you collapsed. If your dragon were to rebel, you'd lack the strength to control him.\"\n\n\"Torch would never\u2014\" Amma broke off as the groom pressed a new bowl of stew into her hands. Her fingers cupped its warmth and a shiver went through her body. She stared into the bowl with a mixture of longing and fear.\n\n\"Nevertheless. If you want to fly again, eat.\"\n\nShe picked up the spoon, fixed him with a loathing gaze, and shoveled a spoonful into her mouth. Captain Spenser gazed back steadily. They kept staring at each other while Amma scooped up bite after bite. She tried to remain impassive, but Torch saw the way her movements quickened and her swallows edged toward gulps. She slowed as she neared the end of the portion, but scraped out every last drop and sucked them from the spoon.\n\nWhen she finished, she thrust the bowl at Captain Spenser. \"Satisfied?\" she spat.\n\nHe ignored her lack of proper address and accepted the bowl. \"Yes. Now go to bed. You're on medical leave tomorrow morning. If your eating remains adequate and your strength returns, you can resume duty in the afternoon. From now on you'll be flying a restricted schedule. No longer than half day flights, and only within Forland. All your meals will be eaten at messenger stations, under direct observation.\"\n\nAmma gaped at him. \"But sir, ever since the new wire writer was installed between Bellhold and all the nearby cities, the only routes left are cross channel and long ones!\"\n\n\"The wires to Heatherdrift and Duskmoor won't be complete for a few more months. That will be enough to keep you busy.\"\n\n\"But what about after they're finished?\"\n\nHe looked at her steadily. \"We both know that's unlikely to be a problem.\"\n\nAmma's gaze fell. \"Yes, sir,\" she whispered.\n\nThe captain put a hand on her shoulder. \"Amma, I know this is hard for you. But even if you were able to stop yourself from growing, it wouldn't help for long. The wire writers transmit messages so much faster and cheaper than dragons, I'll be surprised if Parliament keeps funding the Messenger Service for three months after the wires reach Mizzlestead. Maybe they'll keep four or five dragons on the coast to ferry messages back and forth over the channel, but they'll figure out a way to lay wires across the water soon enough. The era of dragon riding is almost over. Be proud you were a part of it.\"\n\nAmma stared at him. \"But what will happen to Torch? And all the other dragons?\"\n\nCaptain Spenser shook his head sadly. \"They'll be sold. I expect most of them will go across the channel. So many Mamournan dragons were killed in the war, they've been buying all they can get.\"\n\nAmma sniffed and scrubbed at her eyes. \"But how can we be sure they'll take good care of him? What if\u2014\"\n\nThe captain patted her arm. \"A well-trained, obedient dragon like Torch is worth his weight in gold to the Mamournans right now. Whoever buys him will be certain to treat him well.\"\n\nHer shoulders slumped. \"I hope you're right.\"\n\n\"I know I am. Now go to bed. A good night's sleep will finish what the stew started. In the morning you'll be back to full strength and feel a thousand times better.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Amma saluted, turned, and walked to the door to the girls' dormitory. Torch was glad to see that her stride was firm and her steps steady, with only their usual unevenness.\n\nWhen the door closed behind her, Torch finally surrendered to the pull of the dragonleaf. As he gulped it, Captain Spenser walked back down the length of the barn. He paused in front of Torch's cage and gave him a long, searching look.\n\nEven through the delicious leaf rush, Torch felt a chill. The captain's expression was so bleak, Torch wondered if his encouraging words to Amma had been true, or if he'd deliberately softened Torch's likely fate to reassure her. What did the captain know that he hadn't told her?\n\nEventually Captain Spenser shook his head slowly and heaved a resigned sigh. He turned and strode out of the barn. Torch flopped to the floor of his cage and closed his eyes, letting the dreams fog his mind and ease his heart with their seductive pleasure.\n\nIt didn't matter. He was going to lose Amma. Nothing he or she could do would change that. He didn't care what happened to him afterwards. He'd do whatever work they gave him and endure whatever treatment they subjected him to.\n\nIt wasn't as if he had any choice."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Three weeks later, it happened.\n\nAmma stepped on Torch's leg and swung into the saddle like always. He padded from the barn, lifting his head to the brisk autumn breeze. They were flying to Heatherdrift today. That was always a pleasant journey, with the winding river and golden fields below and the mountains in the distance to the east. True, they'd flown it so many times recently he could practically do it in his sleep, but he wasn't complaining. Every remaining flight with Amma was precious.\n\nAmma slapped his neck. \"Hup!\" she commanded.\n\nTorch crouched as deep as he could and thrust his hind legs with all his might. He swept his wings down so hard the air slammed painfully into his membranes. Even so, their tips hit the ground. He beat again and again, jamming his wingtips into the gravel on every stroke. He couldn't seem to get any lift. A gust of wind buoyed him up a few feet, and for a moment he hoped. But then it died, and he sank back down no matter how hard he fought to stay aloft.\n\nHe clenched his jaw and summoned up his last reserves of strength. He'd managed to get aloft yesterday, even though it had been a struggle. He'd do it again today. Once they were in the air he could keep them at a decent altitude long enough to reach their destination.\n\nBeat. Beat. Beat. Torch felt as if his wings were tearing from his body, but he kept trying. He tucked his feet up so his claws wouldn't drag in the dirt and slammed his wings down, over and over. But no matter how hard he worked, the ground refused to fall away below.\n\nAmma was screaming at him. He was failing her. His muscles were giving out. In a moment they'd stop obeying his commands. His heart was hammering so hard it felt like it might burst. Maybe if he beat a little bit harder it would, and then he wouldn't have to face his failure.\n\nDimly he became aware of Amma pounding her fists into his shoulders. From somewhere far away, her frantic words reached him. \"Torch, stop! Down! Please, Torch, don't! It's not worth it!\"\n\nDefeated, he let the air spill from his wings and reached for the ground with his claws. They hit before he dropped a foot. He stood, heaving great ragged breaths, head and wings and tail drooping limp.\n\nAmma slid from the saddle without waiting for him to offer his leg. She ran to his head and flung her arms around his neck. \"I'm sorry, Torch. I'm so sorry. I know you tried your hardest. It's my fault, not yours. You're the best dragon a rider ever had. Now you'll never have to try and drag me up into the air again. They'll assign you some little kid so light you'll feel like you don't even have a rider.\"\n\nTorch nuzzled her. They stood there together for a long time.\n\nFinally Torch stretched his aching wings and folded them stiffly onto his back. Amma sighed. She took his reins and led him toward the barn.\n\nThey'd gathered an audience of grooms, riders, and dragons. Captain Spenser stood beside the barn door, his arms crossed over his chest. Amma limped up until she stood directly before him.\n\nIn a grave, steady voice, she said, \"Sir, I have reached retirement weight. I hereby tender my resignation from the Forland Messenger Service.\"\n\n\"I accept, Rider Amma. You are hereby honorably discharged, with every commendation I'm able to offer. You will receive triple the usual retirement bonus, in recognition of your extraordinary service during both wartime and peace. Forland is proud to have had you as a rider.\" He saluted.\n\nAmma gulped and returned the salute. \"Thank you, sir.\" She offered him Torch's reins.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Take him back to his cage and spend a little time saying goodbye. I'll notify your family and summon you when your father arrives to take you home.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\" Amma led Torch into the barn. She clipped on his collar and removed his harness and bridle. When he padded into his cage, she followed. For a long time she stroked and petted and caressed him. She scratched beneath his horns and in all his other favorite spots.\n\nTorch drank in the attention. At first his grief was so overwhelming he didn't know how he could bear it. But Amma dug into her belt pouch and fed him a handful of dragonleaf balls. He gulped them gratefully. After that, she kept them coming in a steady stream until he was floating in a soft, dizzy haze.\n\nHis pain receded, growing dim and fuzzy with distance. He sprawled, loose and limp, aware of nothing outside his dreams except Amma's hand pressing ball after sweet, spicy ball into his mouth. Then even that faded. He drifted through an endless swirl of iridescent clouds into an infinity of dazzling rainbow light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Airship",
                "text": "A big, muscular man surveyed Torch critically. His eyes lingered on the scar in the center of Torch's chest, then moved to catalogue the many marks left by burns and slashes during the war. Torch shrank from his pitiless regard.\n\n\"You've been through the wringer, and no mistake,\" the man said in Forlish, with the broad drawl of Bellhold's lowest classes. \"Hope it's knocked the fancy out of you. I don't put up with posh airs, no matter what pretty color your scales are. You'll do what I say, just like the drabbest brown sparrow, or you'll suffer the consequences.\" He slapped Torch's shoulder. \"No reason a big strong beast like you shouldn't do well on my team. Long as you follow orders and pull your share of the weight, we'll get along fine.\"\n\nHe turned to a pair of waiting men, who bore a tangle of leather straps that was clearly a harness, though of a much different style than any Torch had worn. He barked at them in Mamournan that sounded little different than his Forlish. They chorused their assent in the same language, with an accent much more like what Torch had heard in the past. \"Aiee, Capitan Bleeze.\"\n\nTorch stood patiently as they swarmed over him and buckled the harness around his body, adjusting the straps to fit snugly. A thick padded collar went around his neck and rested against his foreshoulders. Straps cinched his belly both in front of and behind his wings. A wide band with some sort of clockwork device attached circled the narrowest part of his neck, just behind his head, next to his collar. Another like it, but with rows of metal spikes protruding inward, went around the base of his tail. It wasn't very tight, so the spikes were only mildly uncomfortable. Torch couldn't fathom their purpose.\n\nThe grooms unfastened his chain from his cage and used it to lead him out of the long, low shed lined with dozens of dragon cages. The wagon had deposited Torch's cage there late the previous night, after a long voyage by train and ship and train again. The journey to Legrath, which he and Amma had routinely made in only a few hours, had taken more than a week. He'd been given plain but adequate meat and three balls of dragonleaf and left alone to sleep. He assumed it was morning now, although the shed was so poorly lit it was impossible to tell for sure.\n\nThey emerged into brilliant sunshine. Torch blinked and squinted and stumbled until his eyes adjusted. Then he blinked again at the astonishing sight before him.\n\nIn the center of a big, empty field, an enormous airship floated a few yards above the ground. It was shaped like a long horizontal cylinder with points at both ends and fins ringing its tail. Thick ropes bound it to the earth. The gondola tucked underneath appeared tiny until Torch spotted a long line of humans filing into it and realized that the gondola alone was more than twice as tall as they were.\n\nHe shook his head in wonder. He'd seen plenty of airships before, but always at a distance. He'd known they were big, but he'd never realized how big. The thing was so huge he could have easily flown loops inside its hollow interior without brushing his wingtips against its rigid skin.\n\nThe Mamournans led him to the front of the craft, where it was moored to a tall tower. Capitan Bleeze climbed up a ladder on the tower's side. On the ground ahead of the airship, a dozen dragons stood in two parallel lines. Grooms were leading many more up. Torch's grooms took him to the end of the right-hand line nearest the airship and began attaching his harness by a network of straps to a long pole that lay between the two rows of dragons.\n\n\"Um, excuse me,\" Torch said to the dragon being hitched up beside him. \"Have you pulled an airship before? I haven't. What exactly do I need to do?\"\n\nThe dragon, who was dark gray and almost as big as Torch, glowered at him. \"Trust them to stick me with the rookie. It's not complicated. Flap your wings when the capitan yells. My side goes on top, yours goes on bottom. Don't get tangled in your straps. Don't go too slow, or the capitan will stick you with the jabber. Don't go too fast, or he'll hit you with the choker. Follow the leaders; they know where they're going. And keep your mouth shut. The Capitan doesn't believe all that nonsense about dragons talking, but he'll still jab us if we get noisy.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Torch said faintly. It sounded complicated to him, no matter what the other dragon said. \"Um, my name's Torch. What's yours?\"\n\nThe dragon snorted. \"We don't much bother with names around here. But call me Rock, if you must.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Rock. Do you know where we're\u2014\"\n\nThe band around Torch's tail contracted, driving the spikes inward. They were dull enough they didn't pierce his scales, but they jabbed painfully into his flesh. He yelped in surprise. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"The jabber,\" Rock hissed. \"I told you. Now shut up.\"\n\n\"But how does the capitan\u2014\"\n\nThe jabber contracted again. Torch cut off his words and clamped his jaws shut. After a moment the pressure released and the pain eased.\n\nTorch twisted his neck around. Capitan Bleeze sat astride the point of the airship, strapped into something that looked like a cross between a saddle and a throne. Wires led from every dragon's harness to the center pole, where they twined into a thick cable. It ran to a rack of levers in front of the capitan.\n\nBleeze grinned nastily at Torch and pulled a lever. The band around Torch's throat tightened. This one didn't have spikes, but it dug in so hard it cut off Torch's air. He fought to drag a breath into his lungs past the strangling band.\n\n\"The choker,\" Rock muttered. \"Face forward.\"\n\nDesperately, Torch complied. The band relaxed, and he could breathe again. He panted, his heart racing.\n\nShouting voices rose behind him. Torch longed to twist his neck around and look, but he didn't dare. He stared straight ahead, straining his ears to listen. But the only words he could make out were incomprehensible Mamournan.\n\nThe noise continued for a long time. Finally Capitan Bleeze bellowed, \"Fly, you lazy lizards! Moush!\"\n\nRock and all the other dragons spread their wings. Torch flung his out an instant behind them. He crouched hastily and managed to spring into the air more or less in unison with the rest of the team.\n\nRock and the other dragons in the left-hand line soared steeply up, while the dragon in front of Torch and the rest of their line lagged. The pole between them rose, dragging Torch's harness straps upward, out of the way of his straining wings. The team settled into a stacked formation, Rock's line on top, Torch's below. Torch discovered he could fly reasonably unimpeded, as long as he didn't lift his wings too high on the upstroke.\n\n\"Moush! Moush!\" Bleeze bellowed. \"That means you, Red!\"\n\nThe jabber stabbed Torch's tail. He lurched forward. The collar dug into his shoulders. The jabber loosened, but if he eased the pressure against his collar even slightly, it tightened again.\n\nThe team of dragons labored higher, dragging the airship behind them. They didn't have to lift its weight\u2014the lighter-than-air gas inside the huge cylinder did that\u2014but they pulled it through the sky like a team of horses pulling a wagon. Without them it would float wherever the wind carried it.\n\nCapitan Bleeze's harsh laughter carried through the air to Torch's ears. \"That's more like it, sluggard! Keep it up!\" A slight squeeze of the jabber reminded Torch what would happen if he didn't.\n\nAt first it wasn't too difficult. Carrying Amma had made him strong. But as the first hour wore into the second, and then the third, Torch found it harder and harder to keep driving his shoulders into his collar with as much force as Bleeze demanded. But whenever he let up, the jabber spurred him into renewed effort.\n\nFor the last hour, Torch flew in a constant haze of pain from his wings and shoulders and tail. Around him, the other dragons labored in grim silence.\n\nFinally a shout from Bleeze sent the lead dragons into a shallow descent. They pulled the airship through a wide turn as they sank, until they were flying directly into the wind. Its steady force slowed the ponderous craft. Lower and lower they flew, the rooftops of a city streaming below, until a wide field opened before them. They slowed and dropped further. A few yards from the ground, the top line of dragons swept to the left and down. Torch barely avoided fouling his wings in his harness straps as the pole fell to his side. Then there was blessed earth under his claws. He stumbled to a stop. It took all his meager remaining strength to keep from collapsing into the dirt.\n\nAfter a while grooms came to unhitch the dragons. They spoke in a language Torch thought was probably Fogellan. The only word he recognized was Obsidistra, the name of Fogella's capital city. Neither Rock nor any of the other dragons spoke to Torch, and he couldn't muster the energy to speak to them.\n\nHe was put into a cramped cage and fed a chunk of tough, stringy mutton and three balls of dragonleaf. For an hour he slept like a dead thing. Then hands and voices roused him, and he was taken back to the airship and hitched up.\n\nCapitan Bleeze's voice was as vigorous as ever. \"Fly! Moush!\"\n\nThe whole return journey was torture. Torch fell into a numb trance. He felt as if he'd been flying forever and would continue flying for all eternity. The pain of his body seemed far away and dim. But no matter how dull his senses became, he couldn't completely ignore the jabber's cruel stabs. They came with increasing frequency. Each time, he wrenched his burning wing muscles a little bit harder.\n\nThis time when they landed, he did collapse. It took multiple applications of the jabber and a few squeezes from the choker to get him back up so the grooms could unharness him and drag him to his cage. He swallowed his meat and leaf and dropped into a stupor.\n\nThe next morning he was so stiff he could barely move. He staggered out of his cage and stood with his feet braced while the grooms harnessed him. He plodded behind them across the field to the airship.\n\nSuddenly, as the grooms attached the straps to his harness, Torch panicked. He couldn't bear the thought of another day spent in agonizing labor. Rearing, he spread his wings and beat them wildly. He flung his head from side to side and lashed his tail. When a groom tried to grab his collar, he seized the man's arm in his teeth and bit down with savage force. Blood gushed over his tongue.\n\nThe choker clamped around his throat. Torch clenched his jaw harder. The groom's screams beat on his ears, and his vision dimmed and narrowed, but he didn't let go. He welcomed the descending darkness. Maybe it would last forever.\n\nIt didn't. He swam groggily back to consciousness. He was still harnessed. The jabber squeezed his tail, and he staggered to his feet.\n\nBeside him, Rock shook his head. \"It's no use,\" he said, without a trace of sympathy in his voice. \"You can't escape that way. Or any other. You might as well quit trying.\"\n\nTorch trembled. Despair twisted his heart. So this was his fate. He'd spend the rest of his life dragging the airship back and forth from Legrath to Obsidistra, with no hope of reprieve. Without a kind word from dragon or human. With nothing but a few faint leaf dreams at the end of the day for solace.\n\nCapitan Bleeze shouted, \"Moush!\" He applied a light touch of the jabber. The other dragons jerked into motion.\n\nTorch crouched, spread his stiff, aching wings, and leapt into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Free Traders",
                "text": "Torch's spirit hardened along with his muscles. He learned to fly without thinking about anything but maintaining a steady, strong pressure on his collar. He learned to eat and sleep with single-minded purpose whenever he was given the opportunity. He learned to plunge deep into leaf dreams the moment the sweet fog touched his mind. He learned to treat the other dragons of the airship team as the dumb, mindless workbeasts the choker and jabber forced them to be.\n\nFor three years he flew the Legrath to Obsidistra route. After the first six months he was moved to a position in the center of the team, and a new dragon given the place in the rear. Then he was transferred to the longer route to Pluton, the capital of Tyrogue. Eventually he was moved up to the second row of his new team.\n\nTwo years later he inherited the top lead spot when the dragon in front of him fouled her wing in the harness straps during a landing. Torch heard the sickening crack when her mast bone snapped. Their capitan shot her while Torch and the rest of the team watched. Torch had never learned if she had a name.\n\nFor a brief time, learning to carry out the responsibilities of a lead roused Torch's interest. He threw himself into mastering the necessary skills. But once he could guide the team through flawless takeoffs and landings and knew the details of every landmark along their route, he sank back into apathy.\n\nAfter five years flying lead, Torch was reassigned again, this time to a forty-dragon team pulling the fleet's largest luxury airship across the channel to Knapburgh, the capital of Melthain. The challenge of navigating the ocean crossing, with its strong, tricky winds and frequent storms, provided a brief diversion. But soon that, too, became only another mechanical task.\n\nOne blustery autumn afternoon when Torch had been flying the Knapburgh route for three years, he scanned the sky ahead, working to see through the thick clouds and patches of driving rain. The storms had forced them well to the east of their usual path, dangerously near Scuttlehelm Shoals. The cluster of barren, rocky islands in the narrowest part of the Aldanian Channel were notorious both for their treacherous waters and for the pirates who'd used them as a base for hundreds of years. Airships, unlike their oceangoing kin, were untroubled by the former. But worrisome rumors suggested the latter might be becoming a threat.\n\nTorch couldn't be sure, because the humans who worked for the airship fleet seldom spoke to the dragons, so he'd never managed to pick up more than a scattered handful of Mamournan words. But the airship sometimes carried Forlish passengers, and occasionally they came to ogle the dragons as they were being hitched up. A few weeks ago he'd overheard a couple speaking in a worried undertone while their children exclaimed in delight at being so close to real, live dragons.\n\n\"But dear,\" the woman had said. \"The article said they were pursued for miles. That if they hadn't reached the coast, they might have been caught. Can you imagine what would have happened then?\" She glanced at the airship with a shudder.\n\nThe man patted her gloved hand where it rested in the crook of his arm. \"How many times do I have to tell you, you can't trust anything you read in that worthless rag? They'll print whatever scandalous lies they think will sell copies. I promise, dear, we'll be perfectly safe.\" He snorted. \"Pirates using dragons to hawk for airships! I've never heard of anything so ridiculous. Someone has an overly vivid imagination.\"\n\nThe lady had reluctantly conceded that her fears were probably baseless. And indeed, that flight and every one since had gone smoothly, with nothing to suggest the report was anything but the fiction her husband had labeled it. But still, awareness of their current proximity to the pirates' stronghold prickled along Torch's spine like a chill draft, and he carefully scanned the sky before them.\n\nNot behind, though. Capitan Radulfus wasn't as liberal with the jabber as Capitan Bleeze had been, but he'd be quick enough to use it if Torch started craning his neck around. Besides, that would reduce the efficiency with which Torch's steady wingbeats applied pressure to his collar. It would slow the whole team. So he kept his neck stretched forward and his eyes fixed ahead.\n\nWith the nasty weather, the passengers were all inside instead of out on the observation decks. So were the stewards and the rest of the staff. The capitan huddled in his greatcoat with his scarf pulled up and his hat pulled down. No one aboard the airship was looking to their rear.\n\nTorch's first awareness of the attack was a sudden bright flare from behind. At first he thought it was lightning, but it was yellow instead of blue-white, and it endured instead of fading.\n\nThe light was so incongruous in the bleak, drizzly gloom that Torch risked a glance back. The bulk of the airship was between him and the source, but it glowed from somewhere in the vicinity of the tail fins, brightening as he watched.\n\nA shout and jab jerked his attention to the front. He couldn't make out Capitan Radulfus's words over the wind, but he sounded surprised. Torch never gave him any trouble.\n\nSome of the other dragons were turning their heads to look, too. The capitan's voice grew louder and angrier. From his position he must not yet be able to see the glare that was growing brighter every second.\n\nTorch dared another look. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a dark shape silhouetted against the light. It hurtled closer. Torch stared. A small brown dragon skimmed the curve of the airship's back, heading straight for Capitan Radulfus.\n\nThe capitan yanked the lever that jabbed the whole team. \"What are you staring at?\" he yelled. \"Get back to work, you lazy\u2014\"\n\nTorch didn't know what alerted Radulfus, but the capitan broke off and jerked around. It only took him an instant to whip out his pistol and start firing, but that was too long. A lance of flame burst from the brown dragon's mouth and bathed him in its incendiary glow.\n\nThe strangled scream and stench of burning meat were horrifically familiar. A rush of panic flooded Torch, swiftly replaced by the icy calm he'd learned during the course of dozens of battles. His thoughts raced, trying to devise a strategy that would allow him and the rest of the team to free themselves from the burning airship and survive.\n\nJust as he concluded it was impossible, the brown dragon looped around. Torch tensed the muscles around his fuel sacs. With no means to strike a spark he was at a severe disadvantage, but if his timing was perfect he might be able to light his fuel from his enemy's flame. Then at least he could take his killer into death with him.\n\nBut the brown dragon veered and headed for the rear of the team. Torch twisted his neck to watch, along with the other dragons. No one remained to jab them into obedience.\n\nFlames erupted, though their brightness was nearly drowned by the light swelling to brilliant intensity beyond. They hit the pole that bound the team to the airship. The slender wood burned through swiftly. The pressure on Torch's shoulders abruptly ceased. He lurched forward before he could compensate. The team staggered and skewed, still bound together by their harnesses and the remaining length of pole.\n\nTorch's heart hammered. As top lead, the team was his responsibility. They were free of the blazing inferno the airship had become. With calm leadership, they might yet survive.\n\nIn a voice hoarse from years of disuse, he bellowed, \"Keep flying forward. Follow my lead. I'm going to get us out of danger.\"\n\nThe squawks and screeches that answered him ranged from stunned to terrified to furious, but he didn't hear any dissent. The bottom lead, a dragon with decades more experience pulling airships than Torch, said steadily, \"We're with you.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head, turning to stare ahead with eyes half-blinded by the glare. They weren't far from the north coast of the channel. Once they reached it, they could find a place to land and humans who could free them from their harnesses. Surely there must still be messenger stations in the port cities. He couldn't imagine the humans had found a way to string wires between the two halves of Aldania yet.\n\nHe looked back, then quickly away. The airship blazed brighter than the sun at noonday, consumed by raging fire. Heat bathed Torch's tail and hindquarters. Soon it would be intolerable for the rearmost dragons. He devoted his attention to smoothly increasing the team's speed.\n\nA voice screeched from behind. \"Dragons! The Free Traders offer you a haven. Turn and follow me, and I'll lead you to our home. There any who choose may join us.\"\n\nTorch's heart soared, then plummeted. \"Join thieves and murderers?\" He couldn't make out the gondola beneath the burning airship, but every human aboard must already be dead. \"Never!\"\n\n\"We killed no one except your slave driver.\" Unencumbered by rider or harness, the brown dragon was rapidly overtaking the team. \"Look.\"\n\nSkeptical but curious, Torch looked where her snout pointed. Illuminated by the inferno above, several dozen dragons, a few of them bearing riders, clustered around a dark bulk. Shocked, Torch realized it was the gondola. Somehow the dragons or their riders had cut it free from the airship and were carrying it, suspended from a myriad of taut ropes, back to the south. Burning debris showered into the sea, but they were clear of the worst of it.\n\nTorch hesitated. He couldn't make this decision alone. \"What do you say, team? This is your future as well as mine. Should we follow her, or keep flying north?\"\n\nA few voices immediately yelped an answer. More followed, then more, then a noisy clamor. Torch heard two or three scattered \"North\"s, but the overwhelming majority cried, \"Follow her!\"\n\nHis heart sank, but he nodded. \"Lead on,\" he told the brown dragon.\n\nShe whooped and banked hard to the right. Torch guided the team through a smooth turn and fell in behind her. They gave the burning airship a wide berth. The blaze dimmed as its gas was consumed and its framework crumbled. More and more solid portions broke off and plunged into the water.\n\nThe brown dragon led them past the cluster of dragons supporting the gondola, exchanging hails as they passed. She veered east along the channel and flew for several miles, until the dark, craggy shape of an island emerged from the gloom. She followed its coast to a narrow pebbled beach beneath looming cliffs. \"Land there,\" she called.\n\nTorch eyed the confined space skeptically, but he didn't have much choice. The team's skill should be sufficient to get them down safely. The lack of the airship's inertia would make it easier in some respects, although it was also a complication, since none of them had ever landed as a team without it.\n\nHe circled and brought them in low over the ocean, parallel to the beach. The wind hit his right shoulder. He'd have preferred to land straight upwind, but the orientation of the strip of land wouldn't allow it.\n\nTheir capitan would normally have signaled when it was time to make the transition from the two lines' stacked flying position to their side-by-side landing formation. Torch coughed to clear his throat, then bellowed, \"Shift!\"\n\nHe and the bottom lead guided the team through the familiar maneuver. Torch and the rest of the top line slid left and down, while the bottom lead and his line moved right and up. The island loomed rapidly before them.\n\nTorch decelerated to the slowest pace he could maintain without stalling. The harness and pole transmitted the change to the rest of the team, and they matched it. Torch took them down until their claws were nearly brushing the waves. It felt as if they were heading directly into the cliffs. He could no longer see the little beach, only rocks and water.\n\nTorch steeled his heart and resisted a powerful urge to pull up and away. The land was there. He'd seen it. The team was depending on him to bring them down safely. He set a course that would skim the base of the cliffs with barely enough space for his left wingtip to clear the stone.\n\nMiraculously, just when Torch was certain the beach had been nothing but illusion and he was going to lead the team to crashing, drowning death, land appeared beneath him. He kept gliding, heart thundering, toward a massive pile of boulders at the far end of the strip. Only after he was certain twenty full dragonlengths of dry land had passed beneath him did he backwing furiously and reach for the ground with his claws.\n\nThe landing was far from the smoothest he'd ever managed, but he slid to a halt before he collided with the rocks, so he counted it a success. His harness tugged at his body as the other dragons lurched and thudded to the ground. He listened for yelps of pain or shrieks of distress, but heard none.\n\nBeside him, the bottom lead dragon folded his wings. Shallow water lapped his claws. \"Excellent work,\" he told Torch.\n\nBefore he could reply, humans poured from a crack in the rocks. A large man pointed a pistol at Torch and barked something in Mamournan. Torch froze. More humans aimed guns at the other dragons.\n\nWings wheeled overhead. A big yellow dragon, bright scales lurid in the fading light, landed on the boulders in front of Torch. He arched his neck and raked the team with a scornful glance. The brown dragon who'd led them to the island settled beside him and gazed down with equal hauteur.\n\nThe yellow dragon's voice was as condescending as his manner. \"I'm Lightning, and this is Thunder. We're the leaders of the Free Traders. This island belongs to us. Everyone here follows our orders. Isn't that right, Byren?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" the man holding the pistol on Torch said in Forlish.\n\n\"We killed the human garbage that presumed to consider himself your master. Now you have a choice. Any dragon who wishes may become a member of the Free Traders. All we require is that you swear obedience to Thunder and myself and loyalty to our company. In return, we'll give you a home here. You'll receive an equal share of any prize we take. Never again will you bow your neck to a human. Instead, you'll have the opportunity to make them pay many times over for the years of abuse you've suffered.\"\n\nThunder spread her wings. \"Your airship is our richest prize yet, but it's only a beginning.\" She bobbed her head, calling their attention to a tangle of glittering gem-studded strands encircling her neck. \"You, too, can wear diamonds and rubies and sapphires, or even the scales they ripped from our hides. You can feast on all the meat you can eat and swallow more dragonleaf than you ever dared dream of. You can enjoy the attention of human servants who'll leap to fulfill your slightest whim.\"\n\nLightning lowered his head, fixing them with an unwavering stare. \"Or, if you choose to decline our generous hospitality, we can send you back to the humans. We have contacts who'll pay well to put you back in chains. Consider your choice carefully. I warn you, being sold is a far more merciful fate than awaits any who join and then betray us.\"\n\nThunder snapped her jaws and exhaled a puff of flame.\n\nLightning regarded them lazily. \"Any questions?\"\n\nTorch lifted his head as high as he could, although he still had to crane his neck back to look up at the two dragons perched on the boulders. \"What are you going to do with the humans in the gondola?\"\n\nLightning inclined his head. \"Their associates will be given the opportunity to ransom them. Our human servants will handle the transactions. Any who refuse, or lack connections who can afford our price, we'll offer employment, if they have useful skills. The rest we'll\u2026 dispose of.\" His tongue flicked out and licked his snout suggestively. Thunder laughed, her shrill screeches echoing from the stone.\n\nTorch swallowed. \"You're pirates. Thieves. Murderers.\"\n\n\"Those are human words,\" Lightning hissed.\n\n\"Then how can I say them in Draganish?\" Torch's heart hammered, but he couldn't back down.\n\nLightning flicked his tail. \"Dragons who live among humans pick up all sorts of nonsensical ideas. Even I held them once. But after a few years of freedom, I began to shed the oppressive morality imposed by those who enslaved me. I banded together with others who were also throwing off the chains that bound their minds. Together we devised a new code, one native to dragonkind.\"\n\n\"And yet undistinguishable from that of human criminals.\" Torch knew he should stop antagonizing the pirates' leader. Lightning had the power to kill him or consign him to some even worse fate. But he couldn't restrain the words that boiled up from his heart. \"If this is what dragons do with freedom, I want no part of it. Go ahead and sell me. I'd rather stay a slave than help you prove to the humans that they're right about us.\"\n\nLightning snarled at him. \"Very well.\" He raised his voice. \"What about the rest of you? Does this coward speak for all of you, or do you have better sense?\"\n\nTo Torch's right, the bottom lead dragon spoke gravely but firmly. \"My name is Granite. I wish to join the Free Traders.\"\n\nBehind them a chorus of voices rose, fervently echoing Granite's words. Lightning and Thunder arched their necks and ruffled their wings, radiating smugness.\n\nTorch's heart sank, but he held his head high. It was only natural that the other dragons were eager to seize the chance to be free. Likely they'd served on airship teams since they were hatched. All the humans they'd ever known had been either cruel or indifferent. They probably considered the whole species evil and relished the chance to punish them as they believed they deserved.\n\nTorch knew better. He would never forget Orwin or Jom or Amma, no matter how many years he spent with a choker around his throat and a jabber on his tail. Humans weren't superior to dragons, but they weren't inferior, either. Some of them, at least, treated dragons with kindness and respect. His conscience would never allow him to regard them as prey.\n\nLightning raised his voice. \"Release our new members from their bonds and show them to their quarters. Prepare a feast to celebrate our venture's success and to welcome our new comrades into our fellowship.\" He snapped his jaws, and his voice lost all warmth. \"Take the prisoner to a cage. Get in touch with our contacts and find out who's in the market for a big, pretty idiot.\"\n\nHe leapt into the air. Thunder followed a breath behind. Humans swarmed around the team, unbuckling harnesses. More dragons appeared in the sky, calling greetings. A few of them splashed down in the water, crowded onto the narrow beach, and began introducing themselves.\n\nByren kept his pistol pointed at Torch. Another man ran up, holding a collar and chain. He locked the collar around Torch's neck and padlocked the chain to a metal ring set into the stone of the cliff. Only then did Byren holster his gun and come to help. They removed Torch's harness in hostile silence. Then the two men summoned two others, and all four seized Torch's chain. They released it from the ring and dragged Torch toward a crevice in the rocks at the base of the cliff.\n\nTorch considered resisting, but there was no point. Each of the men alone was too heavy and strong for him to overcome. The four of them together could easily drag him wherever they wanted him to go. So he plodded behind them in weary resignation.\n\nThe crevice opened into a narrow fissure, which became a cramped tunnel. Torch ducked his head and squeezed his wings tight to his body, but his sides still scraped the stone on either side. Darkness closed around him.\n\nLuckily the passage was short. After a dozen yards they rounded a bend and flickering yellow light appeared ahead. They emerged into a vast, soaring cavern. Lanterns hung all around the walls, and a big open fire burned in the center.\n\nDragons were everywhere, sprawled on the floor and perched on hundreds of ledges carved into the walls. They flew in and out of several passages that opened just below the ceiling. The whole cavern echoed with a cacophony of screeching, bellowing, hissing Draganish.\n\nHumans moved among the dragons, carrying buckets of water and bowls heaped with dragonleaf balls. More turned spits over the central fire, where at least a dozen carcasses of cows, sheep and pigs roasted. The delicious scent wafted to Torch's nostrils.\n\nThe men hustled him around the perimeter of the cave until they reached a row of cages. They looked just like Torch's own cage and the others he'd been confined in all his life. But instead of dragons, they were filled with humans. More than a dozen huddled in each cage. Most of them wore the fashionable, expensive garments of wealthy airship passengers, now torn and stained and reeking of smoke. The rest wore the blue and gold livery of the airship fleet, similarly worse for wear. They peered through the bars at Torch with a mix of confusion, curiosity, despair, and anger.\n\nByren unlocked the door of the cage on the end. He drew his pistol and used it to gesture to the people inside. \"Out. You two, in there.\" He pointed at a woman in a bedraggled dress and the man with his arm protectively around her shoulders, then yanked the gun to indicate the next cage over, which one of the other men was opening. \"Hop to it.\"\n\n\"But there's no room,\" the woman protested. She pushed limp, sooty blonde hair out of her face. \"They're already packed in so tight they can barely breathe!\"\n\n\"Too bad.\" Byren repeated the gesture.\n\nThe man eyed the pistol grimly and urged the woman toward the other cage. \"It's all right, dear,\" he murmured. He glared at Byren. \"These cretins will regret the way they've treated us when the Forlish government hears about this.\"\n\n\"Take it up with the boss,\" Byren said. He jerked his head to where Lightning was settling to the floor beside the central fire. Human servants rushed up to attend him. \"He's sent you a neighbor.\"\n\nThe other occupants of the cage squeezed tighter to allow the couple room to enter. Byren slammed the barred door shut. The men redistributed the rest of the prisoners among the other cages, then urged Torch into the vacated cage. He trudged inside and flopped to the floor as they padlocked his chain to the waiting ring and closed and locked the door.\n\nIn the cavern, the celebration continued. Heaping platters of roasted meat were served to all the dragons. Torch watched them swallow ball after ball of dragonleaf. Humans carried in various valuable items looted from the gondola and displayed them to the crowd, while Lightning announced the prices they'd bring. Roars of approval echoed through the cavern as the total mounted. They grew even louder when Lightning ran down the roster of captives and their expected ransoms. The loudest acclaim of all met Lighting's account of Torch's refusal to yield and the estimate of what he'd sell for. Torch didn't know whether to be disgusted or perversely proud that the number was higher than any of the others.\n\nThunder led the assembled dragons in what Torch could only assume was some sort of song. It didn't sound anything like human music, but the Draganish words had a sort of rhythm, and the dragons kept time with stomps, thudding tails, and flapping wings. Then some of the humans brought out instruments and played a series of lively tunes. Dragon and human music kept alternating for the rest of the evening.\n\nEventually Byren tossed a few scraps of meat into Torch's feed box. They were the gristly bits none of the other dragons wanted, but Torch forced himself to choke them down. He was going to need his strength.\n\nLater, Byren came back. He pulled a squashed ball of dragonleaf from his pocket. It was speckled with lint and dirt, and it smelled stale, but Torch still couldn't take his eyes off it. It was hours past the time he would usually have received his evening dose.\n\n\"You want this, don't you,\" Byren taunted. He waved it back and forth, laughing when Torch's snout followed it. \"You're lucky the boss doesn't want you getting noisy and keeping him awake.\" He drew back his arm and hurled the ball past Torch's head. His crude laughter echoed as Torch whirled and scrabbled in the back corner of the cage. Torch finally managed to curl his tongue around the ball and pull it into his mouth. The rush of pleasure when he swallowed it was so acute he didn't care how the human mocked him.\n\nByren teased him even longer with the second ball before lobbing it onto his back between his wings. Torch was forced to contort his body and strain his neck to reach it. But the human tired of the game and merely dropped the third ball into Torch's water pail. The binder was dissolving and the outer leaves were coming off by the time Torch fished it out, but enough remained to satisfy the last of his cravings and send fog swirling through his brain. He curled into a tight ball and buried his head beneath his wings to block out the noise, but even so, rhythmic dragon chants thundered through his dreams far into the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Racer",
                "text": "Torch remained caged in the Free Traders' cavern for more than three months. The human prisoners were escorted away by ones or twos as their ransoms were paid. A few of the airship fleet staff accepted offers of employment. The dragons of Torch's team quickly made themselves at home. Several more feasts were held to celebrate the capture of sailing ships, but no other airships were taken during Torch's stay.\n\nThe more he watched the dragons come and go as they pleased, wearing nothing around their necks but the jewelry they'd stolen, carrying riders only when it suited their purpose, waited on by their human servants, the more he feared he'd made the wrong choice. Something deep inside him recognized that this was how dragons were supposed to live. He longed to join his former teammates as they soared through the upper passages into the open sky. He ached to relax with them at the end of the day, enjoying food and conversation and leaf. He wanted to be a part of the thriving, bustling community he watched through the bars. Every day his cage seemed smaller and more cramped.\n\nLate one afternoon, without warning, Lightning flew down and landed before his cage. \"This is your last chance,\" he told Torch. \"Sure you won't change your mind? You can still join us if you want. All you have to do is give the word.\"\n\nNothing but dragonleaf had ever tempted Torch so deeply. But he shook his head. \"No.\"\n\n\"It's your life.\" Lightning shrugged and turned away. \"Load him up!\" he bellowed.\n\nMen swarmed up, hauling a wheeled platform. They hefted Torch's cage onto it and dragged it through the cavern to a large opening on the far side. The passage beyond was broad and straight. It ended at a pier sheltered beneath an overhang, where a small ship was docked. A crane swung Torch's cage aboard.\n\nThey launched under cover of darkness. From what he could see of the moon and stars between the bars of his cage, Torch thought they sailed northeast. He dozed on and off through the night while the voyage continued.\n\nJust after dawn, the ship pulled into the mouth of a narrow river and docked at a rickety pier beside a tiny village. A wagon was waiting; its driver passed a heavy, clinking sack to the ship's captain while the crew hauled Torch's cage to its bed. Without a word to Torch, the driver climbed into the seat and clucked to the horses. Lurching and swaying, the wagon rumbled along a rocky road that paralleled the river north. Thick pine forests blanketed steep mountain slopes to either side of the narrow river valley.\n\nThe sun had passed its zenith and Torch's craving for dragonleaf almost eclipsed his hunger when the wagon reached a good-sized town tucked into a hollow in the mountains. The buildings were constructed from thick wooden beams and white plaster in the style characteristic of rural Rachenstein. The wagon passed through the center of town on the main street. Curious onlookers pointed at Torch and called to the driver in a language Torch didn't know. The driver called back in the same tongue, his tone cheerful and inviting. The townspeople chattered in excitement.\n\nThe wagon arrived at a cluster of tents and wagons in a field. It reminded Torch so acutely of one of the circus's camps that his heart raced. Had a circus bought him? Would he get to perform again? After all this time, had he come home at last?\n\nBut there was no large central tent, only small ones like those the circus performers and crew had lived in. A long row of wagons bore cages identical to the one that held Torch. He caught the unmistakeable scent of dragons as they pulled into camp and the driver guided the wagon to the end of the line. Wings rustled and eyes peered between bars. A few voices muttered in Draganish, too soft for Torch to make out what they were saying. He gulped. They didn't sound happy.\n\nTorch waited impatiently while a handful of rough-looking men emerged from one of the tents and came to unhitch the horses. He wanted to introduce himself to the other dragons, but not while humans were around.\n\nBefore they finished, another man strode up to Torch's cage. His clothes were of good quality, but old and patched and not terribly clean. He narrowed his eyes and studied Torch critically.\n\nAbruptly he said, in Forlish with a heavy Rachen accent, \"They say you come from Forland. Can you understand me?\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head eagerly.\n\n\"Good. Pay attention.\" The man pointed to a yellow flag fluttering from a pole at the edge of the camp. \"See that?\"\n\nTorch nodded again.\n\n\"That's where the race starts. It's simple enough. Follow the flags until you get to the red one. You'll get two balls of dragonleaf when you reach it. Turn around and fly back to the start. If you're first across the line you get all the leaf you can stuff down your gullet before you pass out. Second place gets you ten balls, third place gets you five. After that you get two, unless you're last. Last place gets you nothing at all.\"\n\nTorch tentatively bobbed his head. So he was a racer now? It seemed straightforward enough. He would enjoy entertaining crowds again, even if his new role was a lot less elaborate than his circus act had been.\n\nThe man waved his hand. \"You're big and flashy, so you'll bring in a lot of bets. Give the people a good show, and everyone will go home happy. Understand?\"\n\nConfident again, Torch nodded.\n\nThe man beckoned curtly to one of the workers, who brought a bucket and poured water into the cage's trough. \"I'm Maksem. From now on, your name is Kraznee. That's Red in Rachen. Learn it and answer to it.\"\n\nAnother worker dumped a chunk of meat into Torch's food box. Maksem dropped a ball of dragonleaf on top. \"On race days, you get one ball free. After that, you work for it. Eat up. The race starts an hour before sundown.\"\n\nHe strode away. Torch snatched the ball of leaf and swallowed it. The pleasant rush eased his cravings, but didn't come close to satisfying them.\n\nNo matter. He'd always been among the fastest in any group of dragons he'd been a part of. He should easily place in the top three and earn plenty of leaf as a reward. Even if he finished in the middle of the pack, he'd be all right. He'd survived on five balls a day before. Only if he came in last would he be in trouble. That shouldn't be difficult to avoid. Although he pitied whichever dragon had to go without.\n\nThe meat was cold and half raw, but Torch was so hungry he ripped into it anyway. After he swallowed the last bit, he raised his head and looked toward the next cage. Dark eyes in a charcoal-gray face peered between the bars, watching him intently.\n\nTorch carefully composed a greeting. He spoke the words as clearly as he could, so his Forlish accent wouldn't prevent his neighbor from understanding him. \"Hello. My name is Torch. What's yours?\"\n\n\"Eagle,\" the other dragon said. Torch couldn't tell if his tone was curt, or if that was just his Rachen accent.\n\nWhen he didn't volunteer anything else, Torch went on, a little nervously. \"I think I understand how the race works. Is there anything I need to know that the man who spoke to me didn't explain?\" Torch shook his head, feeling foolish. \"Although you probably don't speak Forlish, so you don't know what he said.\"\n\nEagle snorted. \"I can guess. He gives every new racer the same spiel. It's true enough, as far as it goes. It's just not the whole story.\"\n\nTorch tensed. \"What did he leave out?\"\n\n\"You'll learn soon enough.\" Eagle turned his back on Torch and flopped to the floor of his cage.\n\nA voice came from the next cage down. \"He's upset because you're going to take a share of the leaf he thinks should be his. Serves him right. It's not as if you won't get a special harness most of the time.\"\n\n\"Special harness?\" A thrill of dread shivered through Torch's stomach.\n\n\"The boss can't have the favorites winning every race. He'd have to pay out far too much. So usually, three of the dragons who attract the most bets get the special harnesses. They look just like all the others, but they're lined with lead. Fifty, seventy-five, and a hundred pounds. Enough to slow you down and let the others take the prizes.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" That did change things. Even as strong as pulling airships had made Torch, carrying a hundred pounds would slow him considerably. He'd never be able to beat an unencumbered dragon of average speed.\n\n\"My name's Banner, by the way.\" She snorted. \"I hardly ever get a special harness, because I'm small and drab. I don't win very often, but I usually manage not to lose.\"\n\n\"Don't count her out,\" Eagle growled. \"You can't count anyone out. After two or three losses in a row, the smell of dragonleaf from the finish line is like a whip lashing your haunches. Even the slowest of us can win, then.\"\n\n\"Because nobody's very slow,\" Banner added. \"The boss gets rid of anyone who is. People like to see a fast race.\"\n\n\"Now shut up and let me nap,\" Eagle snapped. \"I got stuck with the heaviest harness yesterday, and probably will again today. The crowd will start showing up in a couple of hours, and nobody can sleep through their noise.\"\n\nBanner obediently fell silent, and so did Torch.\n\nHe curled up and tried to sleep, but everything Maksem and the dragons had told him swirled through his head and kept him from settling. When he finally dropped into a restless doze, it seemed like only a few minutes before excited voices roused him. He cracked his eyes open to find his cage surrounded by pointing villagers chattering in Rachen.\n\nMaksem strolled among the crowd, conversing genially with the spectators and gesturing at the dragons with a long riding crop. He stopped by Torch's cage and expounded for a while. The crowd listened in rapt, wide-eyed fascination. Torch tried to pick out individual words from the steady flow of Rachen, with little success.\n\nWithout warning, Maksem thrust his crop through the bars and prodded Torch. Torch jerked. Concealed by the decorative leather tassel at the end was a needle-sharp spike. It was too small to do any actual damage, but the slender tip slid between his scales and delivered a stinging prick.\n\n\"Get up, you lazy lizard,\" Maksem said in Forlish, while maintaining a cheerful smile. \"Show them why they should bet on you, if you want to eat tonight.\"\n\nTorch climbed to his feet and sidled out of reach of the crop. He spread his wings until they pressed against the bars on either side of his cage. The onlookers swarmed around, staring and pointing, admiration plain in their voices. Torch flexed muscles that his years on the airship team had made almost as thick as Oxheart's had been, reveling in the rising volume and pitch of the crowd's reaction. It had been so long since he'd been admired with such whole-hearted enthusiasm. Surely Maksem would have no complaint about his performance. He saw many among the crowd digging in their purses or heading toward the wagon where men were exchanging slips of paper for coins. They seemed to be doing a brisk business.\n\nAs the sun descended toward the horizon, a team of three men came to Torch's cage. One entered and slipped a bridle over his head. It didn't include a bit, but a leash was attached to a tight band encircling his snout. Spikes protruded inward from the straps under Torch's jaw and beside his eyes. The man gave the leash a sharp yank, and the spikes bit painfully into Torch's flesh. The man said something in Rachen that Torch supposed was a warning to behave lest he receive more such punishment.\n\nResentment smoldered in Torch's heart, but he followed the man meekly when he led him out of the cage. The other two men draped an elaborate harness over his back and buckled it in place. It included wide straps and many brightly colored fabric streamers attached to rings around Torch's neck and tail, but to his relief it seemed no heavier than he would expect from that amount of leather and cloth.\n\nThe man holding his leash led him to the base of the pole with the yellow flag. The dragons and their handlers were falling into line behind a long mechanical contraption. Spectators packed the area beyond a barrier of ropes strung between posts. Torch's handler opened a metal ring on the contraption, looped Torch's leash over it, and snapped it closed.\n\nMaksem stood on a raised platform at the end of the contraption, his hand resting on a lever. He surveyed the crowd with avid pleasure. He bellowed in Rachen, and the crowd cheered.\n\nNext to Torch, Eagle flexed his wings. \"No weight on my harness today,\" he called. \"The rest of you slowpokes might as well resign yourselves to losing right now.\"\n\n\"None on mine, either,\" another dragon said. \"Anyone else?\"\n\nDragons up and down the line reported that they, too, were unencumbered. Eagle snorted. \"The boss must want to see what the new one can do against us when we're all free to do our best.\" He turned and hissed at Torch. \"Don't get your hopes up. No one can beat me in a fair race. That leaf is mine.\"\n\nTorch bristled. \"We'll see who's faster, won't we?\"\n\nEagle started to speak, but he broke off at a shout from Maksem. All the dragons fixed their attention on the pistol in the man's upraised hand. At another shout, they crouched and spread their wings. Torch copied them, watching Maksem as intently as the rest, although he didn't know what he was looking for.\n\nThe pistol fired with a deafening crack at the same instant Maksem yanked the lever. The row of rings on the contraption popped open, releasing the dragons' leads. As one, their wings swept down and they leapt for the sky.\n\nA breath behind the others, Torch sprang into the air. He beat furiously to gain altitude. Wings thundered around him. Everything was a confusion of flashing colors. The air churned with unpredictable gusts in every direction.\n\nGradually the pack of dragons spread out. Eagle took the lead, with two or three of the largest dragons in close pursuit. Torch labored in the midst of the biggest cluster. At the rear, one or two dragons trailed. The distances between them grew and shrank as each dragon strove to overtake the rest.\n\nTorch risked a glance ahead. Yellow flags stretched as far as he could see. This wasn't a sprint, then. Endurance would play a part as well as speed. He eased off a bit, into a pace he could maintain for many miles. Careful maneuvering brought him into fourth place. The three dragons in the lead flew in a wedge, Eagle at the point, the other two trailing him on either side. Torch slid into place just behind and to the left of the one to Eagle's left, where he could take advantage of the way the other dragons' bodies split the air. A fifth dragon claimed the space to his right. The rest of the dragons fell into places on either side of the chevron.\n\nAfter six flags had passed beneath them, Eagle's pace slackened a tiny amount, and the dragon in second place made her move. Her wingbeats accelerated, and she surged up and over Eagle. He dropped back into the space she'd formerly occupied. The dragons settled into their new formation and continued along the line of flags.\n\nTorch hung back, content to let the others bear the brunt of windbreaking. Strategy would play as big a part as speed and endurance, he realized. The dragon in the lead had to work significantly harder than the rest. To win, Torch would have to wait to make a move until precisely the right moment. Too soon, and he'd spend his strength before reaching the finish line. Too late, and he wouldn't have enough time to pass the leader.\n\nThe lead dragon curved to follow the flags, which paralleled the winding course of the river through the mountain valley. Torch estimated they'd flown about fifteen miles when he finally spotted a red flag in the distance. Beneath it, perpendicular to the race course, a line of orange flags waved.\n\nAround him, tension filled the air. The chevron of dragons spread into a line, with many making last-minute maneuvers to seize or hold on to places nearer the center. Each dragon dove downward, aiming for one of the orange flags. Torch arrowed toward the flag two places left of center.\n\nHe watched the leaders out of the corner of his eye so he'd know what to do. The first dragon landed, gaped his jaws to catch the two balls the waiting man threw him, bent his neck to let the man attach a white streamer to his bridle, whirled and leapt back into the air. Torch mimicked him. The dragonleaf tasted incredibly delicious for the instant it was on his tongue. The sweet rush hit Torch so hard his wings faltered, and he lost a few precious seconds. When the chevron re-formed, now pointed back toward the start, he'd slipped to seventh place.\n\nFor a short time new energy filled all the dragons, but soon the distance they'd flown and the sedating effects of the dragonleaf combined to slow them. A few dragons trailed far behind. One leader fell back, then another. Torch found himself just behind Eagle, who'd once again taken the lead. Eagle's wingbeats remained strong, but Torch detected a tension in his shoulders and a tightness in the set of his neck that told him his competitor was nearing the end of his endurance.\n\nTorch, on the other hand, felt fine. His reserves would easily let him expend full effort for the remaining distance back to where they'd started, as long as he could continue to fly in another dragon's wake. If he took the lead, he wasn't so sure. He thought he might be the only dragon among the leaders who hadn't taken a turn at the point of the chevron, but he hadn't thought to keep track, so there might be one or two others. In future races he'd have to pay careful attention.\n\nEagle's speed faltered. Torch shot a glance at the dragon to his right. She, too, was slowing. He debated whether to make his move or wait a little longer. The flags stretched ahead, the racer's camp not yet in sight. He opted to slacken his pace and stay behind Eagle. The whole chevron slowed. Tension mounted. Eyes shifted as each dragon evaluated the state of the others and calculated their chances.\n\nSuddenly a small yellow form streaked below them. Banner's cheerful voice floated back. \"Catch me if you can!\"\n\nTorch surged forward, beating with every ounce of strength he could muster. Eagle and the rest of the dragons fell behind. Banner's tailtip waved before his snout, taunting him. He labored with all his might to catch her, but she, too, had conserved her strength. Inch by inch she increased her lead.\n\nThe camp appeared below. The first yellow flag had been replaced with one gaudily striped in white and green. The crowd erupted into clamor as they approached. Banner, laughing, dove toward the ground at the flagpole's base. Torch folded his wings and plunged after her. But it was no use. Banner landed in a burst of beating wings two full seconds before Torch's claws touched the ground.\n\nThe crowd roared as Banner dipped her head to allow her handler to take her leash, then raised it again to gulp the balls of dragonleaf Maksem threw her. Torch panted as his handler grabbed his leash, then opened his mouth to accept his own prize. The man counted off ten balls in a dramatic voice as he tossed them. Torch savored every spicy, smoky bite. Beside him, Eagle devoured the five balls for third place. The rest of the dragons accepted their two with attitudes ranging from disappointment to resignation to eagerness.\n\nThe last place dragon stumbled to the ground nearly a minute after the first. Torch recognized her as one of those who'd flown near the front for most of the race, leading several times. She staggered, gasping for breath, and crumpled to the ground. Men tended her, but when she twisted to gaze longingly at the dragonleaf Banner was still snapping from the air, her handler yanked her leash. He made a brief, harsh comment in Rachen, with no trace of sympathy in his voice.\n\nWarm, floaty pleasure swept through Torch. He padded behind his handler to his cage and climbed in with a happy sigh, looking forward to the chance to surrender to the delightful dreams swirling in his head.\n\nBefore sleep took him, a stray thought floated through his mind. He'd spent nearly an hour flying free, without chain or bit to restrain him. At any time he could have abandoned the race and fled into the mountains. This part of Rachenstein was so sparsely populated, he could have easily avoided capture. The freedom he longed for could have been his.\n\nHe'd been so obsessed with the promise of dragonleaf waiting at the finish line, he'd never once thought about the possibility. Only now, with his cravings satiated, could he recognize the opportunity he'd wasted.\n\nEvery time he raced, his new owner would restrict him to a single ball beforehand. He, along with all the rest of the dragons, would be bound by their addiction as surely as the strongest chain. Only by returning to captivity could their need be satisfied. Nothing awaited in the mountains but the horrible deprivation Torch had tasted and never wanted to face again. The liberty of the race was an illusion.\n\nOr was it? The Wingfree agent had told Torch that the worst part of withdrawal only lasted a few days. Juniper had survived it. She'd urged him to join her in scorning dragonleaf. Wouldn't it be worth a short span of misery to be free of the humans' control forever?\n\nRight now, stuffed with dragonleaf and drifting into lovely dreams, it was easy to believe it would. After the generous dose had worn off and he was once again starving for a taste, it would be much harder.\n\nAnd really, was there any point? This life didn't seem too bad. Pitting his speed and strength against other dragons was exhilarating. Performing for crowds again was fun. As long as he did well, dragonleaf would be plentiful. Maksem and his crew weren't particularly kind, but they didn't seem to be especially cruel, either. Racing was certainly a big improvement over pulling an airship.\n\nMaybe someday he'd decide escape would be worth what it would cost. For now, though, he'd accept his lot and be content."
            },
            {
                "title": "Escape",
                "text": "Everything changed in an instant.\n\nTorch was beating hard to gain altitude after the mid-race stop. He'd learned to ignore the rush from the two balls of leaf, but afterward he wondered if it had it slowed his reaction a crucial fraction of a second. Or perhaps it was the strain of carrying the hundred-pound harness for the sixth day in a row. Or maybe he was just tired.\n\nWhatever the reason, when one of the other dragons cut across his path, maneuvering for a better spot, Torch took an instant too long to dodge. His right wing came down hard on his opponent's hindquarters, provoking a bellow of outrage and an angry tail lashed in his face. Robbed of the lift the downstroke should have given him, Torch slewed sideways and down. With a mighty wrench of his wings, he recovered in time to avoid hitting the ground. But as he beat hard to regain lost altitude and catch up to the pack, every stroke sent bursts of agony exploding through his right midshoulder.\n\nTorch ignored the pain. After he leveled out, it eased a little. But all his determination couldn't force the injured joint to function with its normal efficiency. He fell farther and farther behind. His flight grew more and more uneven. He limped the final few yards to the flag and stumbled to the ground, more than three minutes after the next-to-last dragon had landed.\n\nSmoky, sweet dragonleaf scent filled his nostrils. He longed for its merciful dreams to carry him away from the throbbing ache in his midshoulder. But he knew he wouldn't get it. During his seven years racing for Maksem, he'd seen plenty of other dragons suffer injuries, and none of them had ever received the slightest consideration.\n\nHis handler jerked his leash, yanking his snout back from its longing drift toward where the winner was gulping ball after ball from Maksem's hand. \"Try harder next time,\" the man sneered, just as he always did when Torch lost.\n\nIt didn't happen often, but the weighted harnesses evened the odds enough that Torch had suffered his share of last-place finishes. The shaking, sleepless, craving-filled nights that followed had always driven him to greater efforts in the next race. Thankfully he'd never had to go without dragonleaf two days in a row, but a few times he'd come close.\n\nTorch spread his wing to its full extent, testing the severity of the damage. He didn't think anything was broken or torn. Probably a strained muscle. He'd dealt with one before, during his time as a messenger. A few days of rest followed by a week of light duty had allowed it to heal with no lasting effects.\n\nBut Maksem never gave his racers a day off. In the cramped quarters of his cage, Torch couldn't extend his wing far enough to stretch the muscle. The next morning, after a restless, miserable night, his wing was stiff and the joint swollen and throbbing. The single ball of dragonleaf at midday did nothing to relieve his discomfort. He forced himself to swallow a few bites of meat, but couldn't manage to finish the serving.\n\nThe crowds didn't seem to notice his condition, admiring Torch with their usual enthusiasm. His grooms slung on his harness with their regular brisk efficiency. Relief swept Torch when he realized it was one of the unweighted ones. It was a small concession, but it made a huge difference. He wasn't sure he'd be able to get off the ground carrying even fifty pounds, let alone the hundred he often bore.\n\nEven so, the race was a disaster. He trailed from the first. He'd hoped exercise would loosen the sore muscles, but instead it aggravated them. By the turn, he was farther behind the pack than he'd ever been before. By the end of the race, his whole right wing burned, and he staggered through the sky in a suffering daze.\n\nSurely the grooms would realize how much pain he was in and give him a few balls of leaf to numb the agony. Not in front of the crowds, of course, or the other dragons. The penalty for losing must remain inviolable. But surely they'd sneak him a few with his supper. Even though Torch knew the hope was vain, when his evening chunk of half-cooked meat arrived without a single accompanying ball, crushing despair descended on his heart.\n\nThat night was even worse than the previous one, an eternity of agitated tossing and turning. The next day his wing didn't feel any worse, but no better, either. Again he limped along behind the other dragons and finished the race in last place. Even the two balls of dragonleaf at the turn only eased Torch's misery for a few moments.\n\nFor a week, Torch lost every race. His wing began to slowly improve, but his dragonleaf craving was so intense he barely noticed. He couldn't think of anything else. His single ball at midday and two balls during the race became more torment than relief. Their intoxicating, spicy sweetness only drove home how inadequate they were to fill the massive need roaring through Torch's mind and body.\n\nThe evening after his seventh consecutive loss, Maksem came to scowl at him through the bars of his cage. \"Listen up, Red. There's no place in my races for dragons who always lose. I've given you more of a chance than I normally would, because you're so pretty people keep betting on you even now that word's gotten around. But sooner or later they'll quit wasting their money, and then you'll be nothing to me but a drain.\"\n\nTorch made a sound of protest and rustled his right wing.\n\nMaksem glowered. \"No excuses. If it hasn't healed by now, I don't have time to wait. We'll be in this backwoods rathole for three more days, then we're moving to Ashgard for an extended stand. If you haven't managed to get your act together by then, I'm selling you. Not much of a market for dragons these days, especially a lame one, but the knackers are always buying. Understand?\"\n\nA dizzy rush of fear swept through Torch. In most of Aldania dragon meat was regarded as unpalatable, but he'd heard that some in Rachenstein considered it a delicacy and were willing to pay high prices to get it.\n\nHe bobbed his head desperately. He didn't care how much his wing hurt. He'd force it to beat fast enough to overtake at least one other dragon. His life depended on it.\n\n\"Good.\" Maksem gave a satisfied snort and walked away.\n\nNone of the other dragons commented on Maksem's words, even though he'd spoken in Rachen, which Torch had learned to understand during his years in the country. They carried on their usual quiet evening conversation, leaving Torch out the way they had since his cravings had become too strong for him to care what they said. They'd forget him after he was gone, just as they'd forgotten Trout and Dove and the other dragons who'd been sold because they were too slow. Had they been butchered? Torch didn't know, but with sinking dread in his stomach he knew that Maksem's warning had been no idle threat.\n\nThe next day, the pain in his wing joint had subsided considerably. Hope drove Torch into the sky the instant the pistol cracked. For a few miles he kept up with the pack. But as they neared the turn, one dragon after another overtook him. Only three landed for their midpoint leaf behind him. All three passed him before they were halfway back. Even though Torch drove his wing until it hurt so badly he feared he'd damaged it again, he couldn't catch even the slowest of them. He finished closer than he'd managed all week, but still a full minute back.\n\nThe next race was worse. His wing hurt horribly. All his frantic effort couldn't make it propel his body through the air with decent speed. His heart thundered as if it would burst. He fell to the ground under the flag, too exhausted to stagger to his cage. Maksem shook his head in disgust as he tossed balls to the winner. Torch's handler had to prod him mercilessly with the sharp crop to force him to his feet and into his cage.\n\nTorch tried to sleep, but oblivion wouldn't come. He stared through the bars of his cage at the cold white stars overhead.\n\nHow had it come to this? All he'd ever wanted was to work hard and please his owners. He'd always done his best to give the humans what they wanted. They'd taken everything he had to give, and now that they'd used up his strength and speed, they were going to devour his flesh and throw his bones to their dogs.\n\nHe should have joined the Free Traders when he had the chance. Robbing and kidnapping and murdering was what humans deserved from the dragons who escaped their clutches. He should have ripped his reins from Amma's hands and flown across the channel to Mamourne. Better to die fighting for freedom than to feed the humans' greed. He should have joined Wingfree and worked for dragon liberation. He wished he could tell them that now he understood their purpose.\n\nHe should have listened to Juniper. She'd told him the truth about humans right at the beginning, but he'd thought he'd known better. Maybe she was the lucky one, after all. Maybe drowning in the ocean trying to reach Dragana was better than letting the humans take one last gloating pleasure in your death. Maybe if he'd given up dragonleaf the way she'd urged him to, his mind would have cleared enough to recognize the truth before it was too late to act on the knowledge.\n\nHe remembered the intense loathing with which she'd regarded the dragonleaf balls. What would it feel like, he wondered, to be free of the desperate craving that knotted his guts and consumed his mind? If Juniper had experienced any temptation to let the delicious dreams wash over her again, she'd given no sign.\n\nA wan chuckle escaped when Torch remembered how he'd asked for dragonleaf's name and she'd replied with the vulgar Draganish word for feces. He was lucky Blaze had been there to set him straight. The dragons he'd met later would have had a good laugh at his expense if in all innocence he'd called dragonleaf shit.\n\nHow had Juniper ever found the strength to give it up? After a week of three balls a day, Torch felt like he'd tear through a brick wall to reach a single ball. Juniper had begun refusing dragonleaf while she was still a messenger, prior to her first escape. How had she looked at the balls in her food box and allowed them to lie there, when every fiber of her body must have been screaming at her to snatch them up? How had she clamped her mouth shut when her rider pressed them to her lips? How had she flown away into the wilderness, leaving all those sweet, spicy, smoky balls behind?\n\nTorch could never be that strong. He hadn't even been able to take the opportunity to flee when the races gave him the chance. Always the promise of dragonleaf had drawn him back to his cage.\n\nHope jolted through Torch like a streak of lightning. His stomach clenched and the air rushed from his lungs. Tremors shook his body so hard his teeth rattled and his wings fluttered like leaves in a windstorm.\n\nIt wasn't too late. He still had one more race. Unless by some miracle his wing healed fully overnight, no dragonleaf awaited him at the finish. Once the rings of the starting gate opened, releasing his leash, nothing would hold him. Nothing would prevent him from flying into the mountains, away from the race, away from captivity, away from humans forever.\n\nAgitation drove Torch to his feet. He prowled around his cage, pacing the three steps the tight confines allowed and back again, over and over. Debate raged in his mind and heart.\n\nHe couldn't. He didn't dare. He'd never succeed. The humans would hunt him down and shoot him.\n\nIf they didn't, he'd plunge immediately into dragonleaf withdrawal. His mind and body would suffer horrors he couldn't imagine.\n\nIf somehow he made it through that torture, he could never survive in the wild on his own. He'd starve.\n\nAnd even if he managed to hunt enough to stay alive, he'd be miserable. He'd never been completely alone before. Without people or dragons to keep him company, loneliness would crush him.\n\nBut what choice did he have? If he didn't seize the chance, he'd die. Unless he managed not to lose the race, Maksem would sell him to be butchered.\n\nTorch halted, panting, and stared at the jagged line of darkness where the mountains met the sky. What if he did force his wing to beat fast and hard enough to finish ahead of at least one of the other dragons? Did he really want to live like this any longer? Always at the humans' mercy, always in thrall to dragonleaf, always one slip away from being discarded?\n\nEven if Maksem were to someday sell him to some much better situation, somewhere as good as the circus or the messenger corps, would that really be an improvement? He'd still be the humans' slave.\n\nHe'd been a slave his whole life. Freedom was the unknown. It terrified him.\n\nCaptivity was familiar, but it was death. A fast death or a slow one. Did it matter which?\n\nTorch curled into a tight ball and buried his head beneath his wing. He knew what he had to do. The only question was whether he'd find the courage to do it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Torch landed at the turn and snatched the two tossed balls of dragonleaf from the air. The last dragonleaf he would ever eat. They should stave off withdrawal for a day or so. Long enough, he hoped, to find some safe refuge where he could hole up before the worst hit.\n\nHe bent his neck to accept the white streamer that proved he'd reached the farthest flag and made the stop. He couldn't let the humans realize anything was different today than every other time he'd raced. He must have succeeded in concealing his tension, because they watched him with the same bored gaze as always as he whirled and leapt into the sky.\n\nHis wing burned as he beat skyward. He hadn't needed to hold back to ensure he'd be the last dragon at the turn. The others were all well ahead now, their eyes fixed intently forward. None of them would notice when he ceased to follow.\n\nAfter two weeks of racing this course, he knew it well enough to choose the best place to make his move. The road the flags followed bent around a mountain spur only a short distance from the turn. Torch rounded the curve. He looked back to make sure the ridge cut him off from the sight of the handlers under the red flag.\n\nNeither humans nor dragons could see him. Torch sucked in a deep breath, banked hard, and shot off perpendicular to the racecourse. He beat with every ounce of strength he possessed, heading deep into the uninhabited mountains.\n\nTorch had approximately half an hour before the race ended and Maksem realized his crippled racer wasn't going to eventually stumble to the finish. Sundown would quickly follow, and darkness would curtail the humans' efforts to search. By morning, Torch must vanish so completely they would never find him.\n\nHe and Amma had flown to Ashgard enough times to give Torch a working familiarity with Rachenstein's geography. He headed north, away from the capital. Northern Rachenstein held vast tracts of wilderness, with only scattered tiny villages tucked into the valleys. Few humans were willing to brave the deep cold and heavy snows that blanketed the region during the long winters. Luckily, it was less than a month after midsummer, so Torch would have time to either find adequate shelter or journey to some more moderate climate before winter set in.\n\nTorch concentrated on speed, laboring to put as much distance between himself and the racer's camp as possible. His injured wing slowed him, but he still traveled much faster than any human could traverse the mountainous terrain, even on horseback. He crossed ridges whenever he could, avoiding the pale streaks of roads and the silver paths of rivers. He spotted an occasional village, but wires had never been strung this far into the backcountry, so there was no way for news of his escape to travel so far until long after he'd passed.\n\nAll night Torch flew. He landed occasionally to drink from an isolated lake or rocky stream, then immediately took to the sky again. At dawn, weariness and hunger combined to force him to stop longer. He huddled on a rocky outcrop near a river. When a herd of wild goats came to drink, he fell on them and seized one in his claws. The rest fled, their panicked bleating echoing in his ears.\n\nWithout fire, he was forced to gulp raw, bleeding chunks, but he did so with methodical determination. He needed to eat, and until his crystals grew back he would have no way to cook his meat. It had been only five years since his last quenching, so it would be three or four more until they broke through the flesh of his throat and he could flame again. Torch stripped the carcass until nothing was left but bones, choking down the last few bites by sheer willpower.\n\nHe flew on, taking rest breaks when he could no longer stay aloft, moving on as soon as he recovered. So far he felt only the same deep craving for dragonleaf he'd experienced every morning since he'd hurt his wing. Urgent, but not yet disabling. After noon, when he would normally receive one ball, it would undoubtedly get worse. After he missed the two he would usually get during the race, he expected full withdrawal to set in quickly. He needed to find a safe place before then.\n\nWhen the sun passed its zenith and started to descend, Torch changed his focus from traveling to finding a refuge. If at all possible, he wanted a cave, to provide shelter both from searching eyes and inclement weather. And there had to be water close enough to reach even at his most incapacitated. Access to food was less of a priority. He doubted he'd feel much like eating for a while. The raw goat sat heavily in his stomach, leaving him no appetite for anything else. It would have to last until he was well enough to hunt again.\n\nIn late afternoon, he found a spot he thought would suffice. It wasn't quite a cave, but there was a pretty deep hollow under a substantial rock outcropping. And a crystalline mountain lake lay only a few steps away across a grassy meadow. Torch noted the location carefully, then kept searching. When he hadn't found anything better before sunset tinted the clouds pink and orange, he returned.\n\nHe'd been wondering for a while if the trembling in his limbs was due merely to exhaustion, or of it was the onset of withdrawal. Now it was so bad he could barely stagger to the lake. He sucked down cold water, but it did nothing to ease the gnawing pain his his gut, which had grown far more acute than his raw lunch could account for. He stumbled across the meadow, the world tilting around him as if he were banking through intricate maneuvers. The pleasant warmth of the summer evening had turned as bitterly cold as deepest winter, though when he pawed at his face his flesh burned to his touch.\n\nHe curled up under the rock outcrop, wrapped his wings around his body, and tucked his head beneath membranes that felt so stretched and fragile he was surprised they didn't tear. The soft dirt beneath him scraped his skin like jagged gravel. His bones ached and his joints burned. Every breath felt as if he'd accidentally inhaled his own flame.\n\nHis head swam. One instant he was falling through endless sky, buffeted by relentless winds. The next the earth had swallowed him and an infinity of rock pressed him beneath its tremendous weight. The next he was drowning in a dense, frigid ocean. Then fire blackened his scales and roasted his flesh.\n\nHe rolled in a field of green leaves, crushing them beneath his body. Their spicy, sweet fragrance rose around him. He breathed out a gust of flame and they dissolved into delicious smoke. But as he sucked in his breath, wind wafted the smoke away. He chased it, but it remained always just beyond his reach, no matter how fast he ran or how hard he flew.\n\nOrwin cradled Torch in his arms. He held a dark, sticky ball in front of his snout. \"Eat,\" he murmured. \"You'll love it. I promise.\"\n\nTorch snapped for the ball, but Orwin yanked it away. Jom waved it over his head. \"Higher, Torch. Flap your wings. You can do it. A little higher.\"\n\nTorch leapt, beating his wings until they caught the air and carried him up, but no matter how high he jumped, his frantic jaws snapped closed just a tiny bit short. Jom cracked his whip and threw ball after ball, always a little farther than Torch's most desperate lunge could take him. The crowd laughed in cruel, mocking derision.\n\nArchibahd laid a trail of balls into a yawning cave. They rolled away as Torch pounced. Bertrom yanked a bleeding red scale from Torch's chest. It transformed into a ball of dragonleaf in his hand, which he tucked into his pocket with a sneer. Oxheart snatched a ball from Torch's mouth the instant before his teeth closed around it. They fought, ripping deep gashes in each other's wings and hides. Beneath them, a pile of balls dwindled to nothingness.\n\nAmma tossed Torch a ball, but it bounced off the sparker between his teeth. He reached to snatch it, but her weight pinned him to the ground. A cannon boomed, and a Mamournan dragon crashed to earth, splintering into a thousand balls of dragonleaf that rolled away in every direction. Torch scrambled after them, the jabber spurring him to desperate effort, but the choker tightened around his throat until he couldn't breathe.\n\nA gasp brought the scent of dragonleaf to his nostrils. Torch followed it for thousands of miles across unbroken ocean. A shore covered with waving green leaves appeared before him. But just as he reached it, Juniper sprang up before him, raking him with her claws. \"Shit, shit, shit!\" she screeched. The leaves turned brown and melted into a puddle of foul goo. The stench of rotting wastes assailed Torch.\n\nHe didn't care. It was still dragonleaf, no matter what it looked or smelled like. One taste would wipe away the agony screaming through his body and soul. He plunged into the pool of sewage, gaping his jaws wide. Stinking, clinging sludge coated his body and oozed into nostrils, but no matter how he gulped he couldn't force even a single drop down his parched throat. The muck closed over his head and he sank into its putrid depths. Torch kept striving desperately but vainly to swallow the precious poison as he drowned."
            },
            {
                "title": "Journey",
                "text": "Torch cracked open dry, bleary eyes. Cool dawn light burned into his pupils like glaring noonday. He ached all over. He was desperately thirsty, but his muscles were so limp and weak he couldn't imagine moving. The stink of his own wastes rose from the ground where he lay.\n\nHis head was clear. Clearer than it had ever been. His thoughts flowed with smooth, purposeful ease. He remembered everything that had brought him here in sharp, vivid detail. He recalled much of his ordeal, although for long stretches he'd been lost in bizarre hallucinations, and toward the end he'd lapsed into merciful unconsciousness. He shuddered. The experience had been far worse than he'd dared imagine.\n\nBut it was over. He'd survived. His addiction to dragonleaf was broken. He was free.\n\nThe joy of that thought lifted him to his feet. He staggered out of the filthy wallow and stumbled across the meadow to the lake. He plunged his snout into the water and slurped long, restoring draughts. Energy seeped back into his muscles.\n\nHis racing harness chafed his scales and trapped grime beneath its wide bands. Torch applied his teeth and claws to the leather straps. One broke, then another. At last the final strap gave way. He dragged it off and kicked it away. Relived of its confining weight, he felt marvelously light and free.\n\nHe waded into the icy lake. The water buoyed him, and he floated effortlessly on its surface. For a while he paddled around like a duck, occasionally diving underwater and bobbing back to the top. Then he returned to the shallows and washed thoroughly, taking a long time to scrub every trace of dirt from his hide. When he emerged, he felt refreshed, renewed, and ravenous.\n\nA panicked rabbit fell to a swoop of wings and snap of jaws. It barely touched his hunger, but it let him take the time for a longer, more methodical hunt that ended with a good-sized deer beneath his claws. The rawness of the meat still disgusted him, but it didn't slow down his eager gulps. Perhaps he could acquire flint and steel somewhere. Surely he could figure out some way to manipulate them deftly enough to ignite a fire.\n\nA full belly completed Torch's restoration. He sprawled in the sunlight beside the lake and thought about what he would do next.\n\nAs lovely as the mountain meadow was, he wasn't going to stay for long. Now that the leaf fog was gone from his mind, he knew what he wanted. What he'd always wanted.\n\nHe wanted to go to Dragana.\n\nHe still didn't know which of the stories he'd heard about the dragons' homeland were true, but that didn't matter. The only way to find out for sure was to see for himself. Once he knew what Dragana was really like, he'd decide whether or not to stay. If Orwin's dire warnings were accurate, he'd find some other place to make a new life for himself. But his search had to start where his egg had been laid. Where he would have lived all these years if humans hadn't stolen him.\n\nWhich left only one question. How?\n\nAllowing his wing to fully heal must be his first priority. He stretched it experimentally. The joint still ached, but much less than before. The days he'd spent wallowing in the stupor of withdrawal had given it a nice long rest. Now he needed to exercise it a little more every day, starting with brief, gentle flights and gradually working to rebuild its strength and stamina. The rest of his body would benefit, as well, because the spell of inactivity had weakened all his muscles. Once he could fly all day without pain or excessive tiredness, he'd set out. Between now and then, he'd consider all his options and decide on a plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "A month later, Torch embarked on his journey. He headed northwest. When he reached the ocean, he turned to follow the coast west toward Forland.\n\nThe landscape was bleakly beautiful, all towering pines and craggy rocks and steel gray water. Torch gave the many small fishing villages generous berths. He flew high, so any upturned eye would see only a tiny winged shape indistinguishable from the plentiful seabirds. At night he sought out isolated mountaintops or small, uninhabited islands. He hunted wild sheep and deer in the forests, but he also learned from watching ospreys and cormorants how to scan the dark water and stoop for the mackerel and herring that swam there. Fish weren't any better raw than red meat, but he learned to tolerate the taste.\n\nHe didn't know which of the many small rivers marked the border between Rachenstein and Forland, but when he spotted the familiar buildings of Boldfort in the distance he knew he'd returned to his native country. Boldfort had been one of his and Amma's regular stops. In the intervening years the town he'd known had expanded into a city. A new web of dark threads radiated outward, supported by lines of poles. Messages traveled along the wires far faster than dragons could fly. That's why the old messenger post, when Torch dared swoop down under cover of darkness to investigate, stood boarded up and deserted.\n\nTorch saw no dragons anywhere. Hissing steam cranes loaded and unloaded cargo at the busy port. At the airfield south of the city, the many airships arriving and departing were propelled by massive arrays of whirling fans.\n\nHe continued traveling along the coast. For a while human towns were plentiful, and he had to make frequent detours inland or over the ocean to avoid them. Then for several days he flew over long stretches of empty, rocky beach and barren scrubland, until he reached Mizzlestead.\n\nHe was disappointed, though not surprised, to find the messenger station there abandoned as well. He took the risk of landing in the field during the darkest hour of the night and investigated all the buildings thoroughly. He peered through a dirty window into the barn where Richerd had once approached his cage and told him about Wingfree. If Richerd was still in Mizzlestead, Torch had no way to locate him. And nothing at the deserted post offered any clue how he might contact Wingfree.\n\nHe considered flying to Leverton or Covepoint, the other towns Richerd had said held Wingfree agents, but he didn't see any point. The whole messenger service had shut down when the wire writers made it obsolete, so he'd only find more boarded-up posts.\n\nWhich meant he would have to follow his backup plan. From the start, he'd been pretty sure that's what it would come to. Finding Wingfree had always been a faint hope. Maybe if he were able to go among the humans and inquire, or could find other dragons to ask, he eventually would, but maybe not. He didn't even know if the organization existed any more.\n\nIn his messenger days he'd often flown the full length of Forland in a single day, but now he wasn't in a hurry, so he took his time traveling south down the coast, waiting until darkness to fly over human cities and stopping to rest or hunt whenever he felt like it. Even so, he reached his destination in less than a week.\n\nLate one night, he turned and flew inland. After a bit more than two hours, faint light from the crescent moon revealed what he'd come to see. The lake at Baromere Park glimmered in its silver rays. The house on the rise looked just as Torch remembered, but the four dens on the lakeshore were gone, replaced by a sloping green lawn and paths that wound between banks of flowering bushes.\n\nTorch steeled his heart against a rush of nostalgic regret. He was glad the earl had kept his resolve and given up keeping dragons. No one deserved to live chained to a post.\n\nDue west, Bertrom had said. As if she were following a compass.\n\nHe circled the lake one last time. He gazed down at the spot where Juniper's chapel had once stood. \"Torch fly Dragana, Juniper,\" he called softly. The Draganish words she'd taught him floated away on the wind.\n\nTorch wheeled until the rising moon was behind him and struck out toward the coast."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Since no one was pursuing him, Torch could afford to be more cautious than Juniper. He was pretty sure his plan would work, but he wanted to test it before committing himself. So he spent the day hunting on land and fishing near shore until close to sunset. Then he drank deeply from a stream and flew straight out to sea.\n\nAfter about half an hour, when the coast of Forland was still a dark smudge on the horizon, Torch settled onto the surface of the water. As he'd first experienced at the mountain lake and had confirmed many times since, he floated almost as easily as a gull or goose. Like birds, dragons had hollow bones. The same light frame that made flight possible made it easier to remain on the surface than to sink beneath. When he dove from a height in pursuit of a fish, he could go fairly deep, but his buoyancy eventually forced him up again.\n\nTorch folded his wings on his back and let his legs trail in the chilly water. Carefully he twisted his neck and rested his chin between his midshoulders. It was difficult to relax, but gradually his muscles slackened. No matter how loose they became, his head stayed in place. Even if it should slip and splash into the water, surely he'd wake before inhaling any significant amount of liquid.\n\nThe waves rocked Torch gently. He closed his eyes and surrendered to their motion. It was easier than he'd expected to drift into a light doze. At first every errant splash or gust of wind roused him, but eventually he sank into deep sleep.\n\nHe woke at sunrise, head still fixed on his back. He raised his snout to the sky and bugled a joyous cry. It was going to work! He could cross the ocean, no matter how long it took. Fish would provide both food and water. He could rest safely on the waves whenever he tired. No matter how far he must journey to find Dragana, he could.\n\nGetting aloft was harder than when leaping from solid ground, but vigorous paddling raised him high enough for his wings to make the first crucial downsweep. He beat upward, shedding a sparkling shower of droplets. Leveling out, he cast a last look back toward Forland, then put the rising sun at his tail and soared west.\n\nHe set a steady but unhurried pace that he could easily maintain for hours. Whenever he spotted the silvery shape of a fish beneath the water, he dove for it. Many times he missed, but he caught his prey often enough to satisfy his hunger. He thought wistfully of fresh water, but as he'd hoped, the moist flesh of the fish proved sufficient to keep his thirst at a tolerable level.\n\nAs the hours wore on, with nothing but cloud-dotted sky above and featureless ocean below, fear crept in around the edges of Torch's mind. It crowded closer as the sun descended and the sky darkened. He was many, many miles from anything safe and familiar, more alone than he'd ever been in his life. It would be so easy to become lost out here, to wander forever in this vast, trackless emptiness. If he were to get in trouble, no one could help him. If he were to die, no one would know. No one would care. He would simply vanish, forgotten. The ocean and sky would remain, unaffected by his life or death.\n\nTorch squelched the thoughts as firmly as he could. His years as a messenger had taught him how to keep a steady course, guided by the sun and stars. The ocean was nearly as hospitable to dragonkind as land. He could live out here happily for the rest of his life, if he had to. Even if he never found Dragana, he would be fine.\n\nHis body was so tired from the long day of flying, he was able to fall asleep despite the fears that troubled his mind. In the morning he woke refreshed and continued his journey.\n\nHis third day out from Forland, Torch spotted a smudge on the horizon, a few degrees south of his westerly course. Eagerly he veered to approach it. It couldn't be Dragana, of course, because it was far too close to Aldania, but he would be happy to spend a day or two on land before continuing westward. Maybe it was one of the islands Bertrom had mentioned. That would mean he'd traveled hundreds of miles. An excellent start to his journey, and proof he could make the rest of it just as easily.\n\nThe temptation to land the moment the sandy beach passed under him was strong, but he took time to circle the entire small island first. A tiny human village, just a dozen buildings and a pier with a few small ships, lay at the southernmost end. The rest was inhabited only by freely roaming sheep. Delighted at the opportunity to enjoy his favorite meal, Torch killed one of them and carried it to a nook among sheltering stones. Even raw, the mutton was delicious after nothing but fish for so long. Fresh water from a rocky stream was even better. Torch settled to sleep, happier than he could ever remember being.\n\nThe next day Torch flew to another island, this one farther north. It too, was home to a few humans and many sheep. He visited several more islands in the small cluster before once again venturing across the ocean.\n\nDay by day he traveled farther west. Sometimes storm clouds towered before him, higher than he could fly, and he was forced to detour many miles out of his path to avoid the worst rain and wind. A few times he spotted human ships below and soared far overhead to keep from being seen. Once he flew over a group of enormous sea animals that blew clouds of mist high into the air. Another time he stopped at a craggy island covered by massive flocks of birds.\n\nHe grew as comfortable sleeping on the water as on land. He learned to recognize many varieties of fish and developed preferences for the flavors of some and aversions to others. He came to feel at home in the vast, wild beauty of the ocean, until he could almost forget he wasn't just another sea bird.\n\nHe wasn't, though. This was a lovely interlude, but he needed more from life. During the long, silent hours of flight, Torch had plenty of time to think about exactly what he was seeking.\n\nHe needed others to talk with. He needed meaningful, interesting work to do. He needed a community to be a part of. Ideally one made up of both humans and dragons, who regarded each other as equals and worked together for a common purpose. The kind of place King Julios had tried to create in Mamourne. The kind of place that didn't exist in Aldania.\n\nDid it in Dragana? Torch didn't know. Hopefully at the end of his journey he'd get the chance to find out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stolen",
                "text": "Torch studied the coastline ahead. It stretched as far as he could see both north and south. If it was an island, it was larger than any he'd yet encountered. He dared hope it wasn't. His heart thudded and his breath quickened. Could this be the goal he'd been searching for? Had he finally reached Dragana?\n\nNothing in the crashing breakers, the broad expanse of golden beach, or the dense forest beyond gave him any clue. The land certainly appeared big enough to be a continent, but he saw no sign of habitation by either dragons or humans. That meant little, though. He'd flown over plenty of wilderness in Aldania. Dragon settlements might lie just beyond the horizon.\n\nWhere should he begin his search, and what should he look for? Orwin had described dragons inhabiting vast networks of caves, but the landscape below was flat and sandy, not the sort of terrain Torch associated with caverns. They were usually found in mountains, or at least rocky highlands.\n\nTorch strained to remember everything Orwin had told him about the expedition that had brought Torch's egg to Aldania. Its leader, Bazel Prenscoff, had sailed to Dragana twice previously. His journeys had been sponsored by Parliament, which had hoped to establish Forland as a center of the dragon trade. Prenscoff's second expedition had brought back so many eggs that Parliament had funded a fleet of seven ships for his third venture. Orwin said they'd sailed up a river into the heart of dragon territory, then traveled inland to the caves where the dragons incubated their eggs. They'd successfully raided the caves, but were attacked on the way back. Dragons' flames destroyed three of the ships, but the other four escaped and returned to Forland, bearing thousands of eggs. Prenscoff had continued to lead expeditions until he was killed during his disastrous ninth trip, but Orwin had remained in Forland and tended Torch's egg.\n\nTorch would need to travel along the coast until he found the river Orwin had spoken of. But should he go north or south? No matter how hard he tried, he could recall nothing to indicate which direction was more likely. Orwin's tales had focused on dramatic adventure, the heroism of his companions and the savagery of their dragon foes, not details of navigation.\n\nIt didn't matter, Torch told himself. He'd choose a direction at random and search for as long as it took. He could circle the whole continent if he had to. Even if it took years.\n\nHeartened by his decision, though a bit overwhelmed by the potential scope of the task, Torch scanned below, looking for signs of fresh water. He spotted a telltale silver glimmer far to the south. Very well. That's where he'd begin. He banked hard and flew with strong, purposeful wingbeats toward the stream.\n\nThe water was brackish and silty, but it was welcome after many days without a drink. He slurped his fill, then took a brief nap in a sunny, sandy wallow. When he roused, the angle of the sun told him that several hours remained before sunset. He could search twenty miles of coast in that time, then find a spot to spend the night. If he got an early start each morning, he could easily cover more than a hundred miles a day.\n\nFirst, though, he'd fill his belly. Torch leapt into the air and flew low over the treetops, his eyes fixed on the ground. He didn't know what sort of land animals might dwell in Dragana, but he was so tired of fish, he didn't care. As long as whatever prey he found was edible, he'd be happy.\n\nA flicker of movement ahead set every nerve on alert. He stilled his wings and glided silently, stretching all four legs forward and spreading his claws. The head that bent toward a clump of grass bore branched antlers. The thought of venison made Torch's stomach rumble in anticipation.\n\n\"Halt!\" a voice bellowed. The deer bounded away, white tail flashing. Torch yanked up his head and flapped hard to arrest his descent. Terror and wonder flooded him. A ring of dragons wheeled above, glaring down at him with cold hostility.\n\n\"Come with us,\" the same voice ordered. The dragon who'd spoken veered closer to Torch, eyeing him warily. Her accent was unlike any Torch had heard before, but he had no trouble understanding her words. \"Keep your mouth closed unless I tell you to speak, and keep your claws under your body. Understand?\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head. When her eyes narrowed, he hastily added, \"Yes, I understand.\"\n\nShe made a coughing sound. Torch couldn't tell whether it was an expression of amusement or disgust. \"Follow me.\"\n\nShe arrowed south. Torch beat his wings hard to match her pace. The other dragons fell in on either side. Torch didn't dare crane his head around to count, but he thought there must be more than a dozen in all.\n\nFor several minutes they flew in silence. Torch studied the leader surreptitiously. She was nearly as big as Torch, and the pace she set was brisk. Her scales were a glossy silver gray. A scattering of old scars marked her hide and wings.\n\nA quick glance around at the rest of the dragons revealed a mix of browns and grays, all large, all scarred. Torch managed to contain his curiosity for nearly five minutes. But when neither the leader nor any of the others offered an explanation, eventually he could remain silent no longer. \"Excuse\u2014\"\n\nA burst of flame missed the tip of his snout by less than an inch. Torch recoiled from the heat. The leader glowered at him. \"I told you to keep your mouth shut! Do you think I'm going to let you crisp my membranes under cover of a friendly conversation?\"\n\n\"But I'm quenched,\" Torch blurted. He cowered away as her jaws gaped.\n\nShe exhaled a threatening wisp of flame, glaring at him. \"That's what all you Stolen say. Most of you are telling the truth. But that scar on my tail came from a big ugly yellow with a snappy metal thing between her teeth. So now I don't take any chances.\"\n\n\"Stolen?\" Torch said before he could stop himself.\n\nThis time her flame singed his snout. She made a harsh sound of annoyance. \"I see you're a slow learner. Listen, because I'm only going to say this once. My name is Sharpclaw. I'm the leader of the ninth division of the Coast Patrol. We keep watch for human ships, and we catch any Stolen who try to sneak into Dragana.\"\n\nHer gaze raked scornfully from his snout to tail. \"Stolen are dragons hatched by humans. No matter what you heard in whatever stinking human-infested midden you came from, you're not wanted here. The humans ruined you. They poisoned your mind and mutilated your body. They made you into the animal they think you are, or nearly so. Yes, I know that's not your fault. No, I don't care. Neither does any other dragon in the Thousand Caves except for a few pitiful whiners. Plenty of us think we should kill you and have done with it, but the noble kindreds are more merciful than that. Or more cruel. I'll let you decide which.\"\n\nShe cut Torch off before he could get his mouth open. \"There's a place for Stolen. That's where I'm taking you. You'll get the opportunity to serve your own kind to the best of your limited ability. You'll have shelter and water and food, such as it is. Be grateful. It's better than chains and cages and drugs to keep you docile.\" Sharpclaw regarded Torch coldly. \"Any questions?\"\n\nTorch was too horrified by what she'd told him to think clearly. How had his eager hopes gone so terribly wrong? He ducked his head. \"Please, let me go. I'll fly back over the ocean. There are islands with no humans or dragons where I can live.\"\n\nSharpclaw laughed with withering scorn. \"And have you sneak back in, now that you know to hide from the Coast Patrol? Or worse, warn other Stolen about us? There's not much chance any of you could pass as Draganan, but even a small risk is too much. No, once you're here, you stay.\" She narrowed her eyes. \"And don't think the fact you're a Red makes any difference. Stolen is Stolen. Your kindred is irrelevant.\"\n\nThe comment left Torch more bewildered than ever, but Sharpclaw turned her gaze forward and fell silent. Torch clamped his jaws shut on the dozens of questions he longed to ask. He didn't dare risk provoking her to flame again.\n\nThe Coast Patrol escorted him rapidly south until long after sunset. When Torch was so exhausted he could barely stay in the air, they landed on a empty stretch of beach beside a stream. A few members of the patrol flew inland and returned bearing a deer carcass, which they divided among the others. One dropped a bloody chunk before Torch.\n\nEach dragon roasted their portion of meat with a precise application of flame. Torch breathed the delicious scent longingly, but he wasn't going to ask any of them to cook his. He steeled himself to consume it raw. But before he could rip off a bite, one of the other dragons made a disgusted noise and shouldered him aside. A few quick breaths, and the meat was brown and fragrant.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Torch said, but the other dragon had already returned to his own meal. Torch tore into the venison. It was done perfectly, crisp on the outside, juicy in the middle, with no trace of pink remaining. After so long, the flavor of cooked meat was a heady, visceral pleasure. Maybe his fate here wouldn't be so terrible, after all, if at least he didn't have to eat raw meat any more.\n\nThe members of the patrol took turns keeping watch and sleeping. At dawn, they roused Torch, gave him a chunk of leftover roasted venison, and hustled him into the air.\n\nThey flew all day, stopping only for a brief rest at noon. Again a few members of the patrol hunted and distributed the meat, this time a tough old boar. Torch gulped the stringy but flavorful meat eagerly.\n\nMidway through the afternoon, they reached a large river. Here the land was rocky, with steep cliffs rising above the shore. The river emerged from a deep gorge carved through the stone. Sharpclaw led the patrol inland, following its course. Mountains rose ahead of them, blue on the horizon. Torch shivered. Surely this was the place Orwin had described. But the excitement he'd expected to feel when he reached it had turned to dread.\n\nThey flew inland for around an hour, following the river gorge into the mountains. Torch started to spot other dragons, both individuals and groups, but they avoided the patrol. Any who came close took a single look at Torch surrounded by his ring of guards and veered away.\n\nAt last they rounded a bend around a towering mountain spur. The gorge opened before them into a broad, deep canyon. Dragons were everywhere, in the air and on the ground. They soared in and out of dark openings in the canyon walls. They splashed in the river or basked on sunny rocks. They relaxed together, chatting, or soared side by side. Hundreds of voices speaking Draganish merged into an indistinct murmur that echoed from the cliffs and floated on the wind.\n\nTorch craned his neck to take it all in, joyous wonder swelling in his heart. This was home. These were dragons enjoying the freedom that was their birthright. These were his kind. He belonged here.\n\nExcept he didn't. A snarl from Sharpclaw quickened his flagging wingbeats. The patrol tightened its ring around him. Sharpclaw led them toward the biggest opening in the canyon wall, a huge, dark, perfectly circular hole midway up the southern side. Intricate stone carvings surrounded it, radiating outward in a spectacular sunburst design.\n\n\"The main entrance of the Thousand Caves,\" Sharpclaw told him, pride in her voice. \"Take a good look. The humans have nothing to match it.\"\n\nTorch had seen many renowned works of architecture in Aldania. Some rivaled this in beauty, but none in size or sheer magnificence. He bobbed his head.\n\nSharpclaw gave a satisfied grunt. She led them through the opening. Inside, an enormous cavern reached deep into the cliff. Passages opened in all directions. Every surface was either adorned with carvings or polished smooth, highlighting vivid bands of color in the stone. Light filtered through many small openings above, illuminating the whole space with a rich, warm glow.\n\nTorch would have loved to fly around the cavern for hours, admiring its splendor, but Sharpclaw veered immediately toward an arched opening low on one side. The patrol fell into single file, with Torch in their midst, and arrowed into the narrow tunnel. Torch cringed, expecting his wings to scrape the walls. But although tiny in contrast with the entrance hall, the passage was amply sized for a dragon, even one as big as Torch, to fly through comfortably.\n\nThe patrol followed Sharpclaw through a network of intersecting tunnels, turning both left and right, traveling both up and down. Torch quickly lost track of the route, although he got the impression that overall they were working their way deeper underground and farther into the mountain.\n\nThey reached the mouth of a tunnel too narrow to fly into. Sharpclaw landed, and the rest of the patrol followed suit. She surveyed them. \"Longtail, Highflyer, help me escort the prisoner. The rest of you are released for the night. Report to our gathering station at dawn tomorrow.\"\n\nThe dragons of the patrol murmured acknowledgment and departed, some back the way they'd come, others forward down the passage. Sharpclaw walked into the narrow tunnel, jerking her neck to beckon Torch to follow. The two dragons she'd named came behind.\n\nThis passage lacked decoration, and the light was much dimmer. It wound a long way with no branching passages. The air grew close and stale. Torch felt as if the entire mountain might collapse upon them at any moment. He fixed his eyes on the stone beneath his feet, where ruts worn deep by the passage of thousands of claws gave evidence that the tunnel had held firm for many generations. Surely it would endure for many more, and not give way just when Torch happened to be passing through.\n\nThey walked for at least half an hour, although time was a hazy concept down here, where the dim, directionless light gave no hint of the sun's position. Finally, when Torch was growing certain they'd keep delving deeper into the rock forever, they emerged into a big open space. It was nearly as long and wide as the entrance hall, but much lower and irregularly shaped. The walls were rough stone. Jagged spikes hung from the ceiling and lumpy pillars rose from the floor, almost meeting in places. They would make it difficult to fly, but Torch thought there was enough space between them for limited flight. Portions of the floor had been cleared and smoothed out. A narrow, dark stream ran through the center, its soft gurgle echoing from the walls. Many cracks and crevices led off into darkness, and the way the ceiling dropped and the floor rose around the edges made it difficult to see how far the space extended in any direction.\n\nTwo dragons stood just inside the entrance. They regarded Torch with bored interest. \"Been a while since we had a newcomer,\" one remarked. He was half Torch's size and a nondescript brown. \"Not like a few years ago, when we were getting dozens every month.\"\n\n\"A Red,\" the other said with a sneer. She was almost as big as Torch, and her scales were light gray. \"Don't think that will get you special treatment. You're Stolen, just like the rest.\"\n\n\"Hurry up and brand him so I can go,\" Sharpclaw said. \"I want to have plenty of time to enjoy myself tonight. Our division is on duty for two more months, and at this rate we probably won't get another trip home until we're done.\"\n\n\"Not many Stolen left over there, from their talk,\" the brown dragon said. \"The humans don't have much use for them anymore, with all the new gadgets they've built. They say the ones that didn't flee here got put down.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Sharpclaw said. \"Maybe soon we won't have to spend months at a time in the wilderness, guarding our borders against intruders.\"\n\n\"We've got more than enough of them to deal with already,\" the gray dragon growled. She turned to an outcropping of stone with a raised round design carved into it, the only decoration Torch saw. Opening her mouth, she sprayed a long, steady jet of flame onto it. The burst of brilliant light glared painfully in Torch's eyes and sent jagged shadows dancing throughout the cavern.\n\n\"We'll still have to guard against the humans,\" the brown dragon said as her fire died. He drew a breath and sent a stream of flame to bathe the outcropping.\n\nThe two patrol dragons pressed close on either side of Torch. They pushed him toward the outcropping, which continued to glow a dull red after the brown dragon's fire was exhausted. Heat radiated onto Torch's face.\n\n\"If you cooperate, this will be quick and nearly painless,\" Sharpclaw said. She tightened her throat and sparks spilled from her mouth. \"Otherwise I'll have to give you a real burn. I don't think you want that.\"\n\nTerror gripped Torch. He fought the pressure of the two dragon bodies shoving him closer and closer to the glowing stone. He drew his neck back as far as it would go.\n\nSharpclaw shook her head. \"Go on. Press your forehead to the branding stone, just below your horns. A few seconds is enough to burn through your scales and leave a good impression. If you should ever slip out of here, we need to be able to identify you as Stolen on sight. We can't have you pretending to be one of us.\" She gaped her jaws and sent a spray of fuel past her sparking crystals. The tongue of flame licked the nape of Torch's neck. \"Do it,\" she ordered. \"A small burn, or a big one. Your choice.\"\n\nHorrified fear nearly paralyzed Torch, but the coldness in Sharpclaw's voice left him no doubt she'd follow through on her threat. The heat on the back of his head intensified until it was even stronger than that beating against his face. Panic drove Torch to take the only escape available. He sucked in a breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and slammed his forehead into the branding stone.\n\nThe stink of burning scales hit him before the pain. For an agonizing instant Sharpclaw's flame kept him trapped. Then coolness washed the back of his neck and he jerked away. Coarse laughter rang in his ears as he scrambled backward, blinded by the throbbing pain.\n\n\"Go dunk your head in the water,\" the gray dragon's voice said. \"Then find some corner no one's claimed yet and sleep it off. You'll be ready for a work crew in three days. Enjoy the rest. You won't get much afterwards.\"\n\nTorch crawled toward the sound of the stream. When water lapped his front paws, he plunged his face into the cool flow. The relief was enormous. He kept his head under until the need for air forced it up. In the moment it took him to suck in a breath, the pain rushed back. It took all the will he possessed to keep from shrieking. Finally his lungs were full and the blessed water once again closed over his wound and quenched its fire.\n\nTorch didn't know how long he crouched by the stream, withdrawing his head from the water only when he had no choice but to breathe. At long, long last the pain abated a little. When the sound of many claws clicking on stone sounded from the entrance, he was able to blink the water from his eyes and watch a group of around fifty dragons shuffle into the cavern before he could bear it no longer and submerged his face again.\n\nMany of the dragons paused to brush a wing against his shoulder and make sympathetic noises, but none lingered for long. When he once again lifted his dripping head, he saw that the small gray dragon currently comforting him bore a round scar between her eyes and horns, as did each of the dragons waiting behind her.\n\nFury blazed in Torch's heart. How dare dragons brand their own kind like so many cattle? He longed to charge the ones who'd hurt him and tear into them with teeth and claws. He'd make them pay for what they'd done.\n\nBut a flood of despair doused his rage. The guards had flame, and he didn't. He'd only suffer more if he attacked them. Assuming they didn't kill him. Maybe he should provoke them to do just that. His future seemed more bleak now than ever before. Even the choker at his throat and the jabber on his tail hadn't trapped him as thoroughly as this stone prison and the brand smoldering on his face.\n\nDragons were no different than humans, after all. Sharpclaw would get along splendidly with Capitan Bleeze. They'd have a good laugh together as they forced the dragons under their control to do whatever they pleased by the threat and application of pain. Cruel power reigned here as it did in Aldania, without regard for species.\n\nAll his life, the idea of Dragana had lived somewhere deep in his heart. Even when he'd believed it a vicious, savage place, he'd known that somewhere in the world dragons existed on their own terms, free from human dominion. That knowledge had shone like a beacon, an unquenchable hope. Torch might never reach that idyllic place, but it was always there, beckoning.\n\nNow that hope was gone. Dragana was as wonderful as his fondest dreams had imagined, but it was closed to him. He was an outsider here. He always would be. Even more than he'd been among the humans. At least a few of them had cared about him. At least a few of them he'd loved.\n\nTorch dunked his head again. He stayed down as long as he could force himself to, wishing he could find the strength to open his nostrils and breathe the cool, soothing liquid into his lungs. The prospect seemed infinitely preferable to facing hundreds of years in captivity he no longer had any hope of escaping.\n\nBut the primal instinct to survive was too strong. Torch yanked his head up and gasped a searing breath. He panted, misery settling like a thick black pall over his heart and mind.\n\n\"Torch?\" an almost forgotten voice said incredulously. \"Is that you?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Reunion",
                "text": "Torch stared at the green dragon regarding him. \"Juniper?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes and dropped her head, her wings sagging. \"Oh, Torch. I'm so sorry. I mean, it's wonderful to see you again, but I hate that you ended up here, too.\"\n\nTorch nearly forgot the pain of his brand in a rush of mingled happiness and grief. \"I feel the same way. It's been so long. Have you been here the whole time?\"\n\n\"Just about. I'll tell you everything after we get you settled. Would you like me to help you find a place, or do you need to soak your burn a while longer first?\"\n\n\"It will be all right.\" The pain was still intense, but bearable now that he had a distraction.\n\nShe shuddered. \"Pressing it against the cool stone, helps, too.\" She raised a paw to brush the round scar beneath her horns. Her eyes raked Torch, lingering on his chest and the scars on his shoulders and wings. \"Looks like you've been through a lot since I last saw you.\"\n\n\"I have.\" Torch wanted to pour out the whole tale, but his legs were trembling and his face was throbbing. \"It's a long story. I promise I'll tell you everything after I rest. Please, is there somewhere I can lie down?\"\n\n\"Of course. Come with me.\" Juniper spread her wings and flapped as she jumped over the stream. Torch forced his aching muscles to follow. They glided a short distance, then Juniper landed and padded toward the far side of the cavern, where the ceiling sloped to meet the floor. Torch trailed behind as she squeezed through a narrow crack and crossed a smaller cavern, then ducked behind an uneven row of stone columns. \"There were only a few of us when they put us in here, so I got one of the best places. There's plenty of room.\"\n\nThe alcove was amply spacious for one, although a bit crowded with both of them in it. Torch collapsed onto the smooth stone floor and curled up as tightly as he could. Once he recovered he'd have to find a spot somewhere else so Juniper could have her full home back. But right now he was so grateful for a safe and comfortable place to rest, he couldn't feel bad about intruding.\n\nHe rested his face on the wall beside him, relaxing as the cool stone absorbed some of the wound's heat. \"Ah. That feels good.\" He squirmed around until he could see Juniper out of one eye. \"All right. I'm not up to talking much, but I can listen. And understand. After you left, I kept finding dragons to teach me more Draganish until I could speak it properly.\"\n\n\"I knew you would. Anyone would think you'd been speaking it since you hatched.\" Juniper settled against the far wall, though in the little alcove that was still so close their bodies almost touched. She moved her head into Torch's line of sight. \"I'm sorry I deserted you so abruptly. I would have liked to say goodbye, but there wasn't time. I had to seize the opportunity when I got the chance.\"\n\n\"Of course you did. I don't blame you a bit. I was glad you escaped, even though I was afraid you'd drowned. But I always hoped you'd made it to Dragana somehow.\"\n\nJuniper blew out a long, gusty sigh. \"That was the easy part. I'd never gotten the chance to try floating before, but Hardscale and Broadwing said it would work, and I trusted them.\"\n\nTorch pulled his face away from the wall and peered at her. \"Who?\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"I suppose I should start at the beginning. You know I was a messenger before the earl bought me?\"\n\n\"That's what he said. I became a messenger too, when he sold me.\"\n\nShe brightened. \"Then you know what it's like. It's by far the best job a dragon in Aldania can have. At least if you have a good rider.\"\n\n\"I agree. It was wonderful.\" Torch sighed. \"But the Messenger Service doesn't exist anymore. Humans invented a way to send messages over wires much faster and cheaper than by dragon.\"\n\nJuniper shook her head sadly. \"I heard. A lot of former messengers fled here.\" After a silent moment, she continued. \"Did any of Wingfree's agents ever talk to you?\"\n\n\"Yes, in Mizzlestead. I didn't listen, though.\" Torch grimaced, flinching as the movement pulled at his burn. \"That was when I was young and naive, before I learned how cruel humans could be.\"\n\n\"No crueler than dragons,\" Juniper said grimly. \"I joined Wingfree the first time they approached me. Everything they said made sense. I hatched at one of the big farms. They were horrible to us there. They whipped us when we didn't obey and drugged us with dragonleaf when we did. Before they sold me to the Messenger Corps, I'd never met a kind human. Even after I learned to trust my riders, I never let my guard down completely. No matter how good they were to me, they always grew up and left.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head in sympathy, then pressed his forehead back into the cool stone.\n\nJuniper's voice dropped into a tone of suppressed excitement. \"One of my riders became a member of Wingfree, too. We carried messages to and from the sanctuaries. There was one in the mountains outside Ravenburg and another on an island north of Duskmoor. That's where I met my first free dragons.\"\n\nShe tilted her head, and her tone grew thoughtful. \"I envied them, but I pitied them, too. Everyone was afraid the sanctuaries would be discovered, so they hid inside cramped, dark buildings all the time. Some of them tried to quit dragonleaf, but when there was nothing to do besides sleep and dream, most of them started eating it again. No one dared venture outside to fly, even at night. They were right, I guess. There'd been a third sanctuary, until it was raided and all the dragons there were killed, along with most of the humans. But still, it seemed like a miserable existence to me. Being a messenger was better, even if I was still chained and caged.\"\n\nJuniper stretched her neck, putting her face close to Torch's. \"Then, on one of our trips to the Duskmoor sanctuary, I met Hardscale and Broadwing. They'd flown across the ocean from Dragana to invite the Stolen home. That was when the Yellow Kindred was in control, before the Reds took over. They told us that crossing the ocean was possible, although a long, difficult journey. They explained about floating and fishing and how you could reach Dragana by flying due west from Forland. The promised us that anyone who reached Dragana would be welcomed.\"\n\nShe made a rude sound, but her voice was rueful. \"They were telling the truth, as far as they knew it. They didn't realize the Reds were already scheming to overthrow the Yellows. Maybe they should have anticipated that a bunch of Stolen showing up would tip the balance in favor of those who hated and feared us, but I can't really blame them for not.\"\n\n\"Explain these Kindreds I keep hearing about. Everyone tells me not to expect special treatment because I'm a Red. I don't even know what that means.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I fully understand, either, but I've picked up a few things over the years. When you hatch, what color you are determines your kindred. So you're a Red, and I'm a Green. Your kindred takes you in and raises you. They're kind of like human families, but bigger. The noble kindreds have a few hundred members each, and the common kindreds have thousands.\n\n\"The three noble kindreds, the Reds, Yellows, and Greens, have ruled Dragana for thousands of years. They constantly struggle with each other for dominance. Usually one kindred holds power for less than a hundred years before one of the others takes over. Sometimes it comes to an actual fight, but more often it's a matter of political maneuvering and winning support within the other noble kindreds and from the Browns and Grays. When the challenging kindred gains enough backing that everyone knows they'd win a physical battle, the ruling kindred usually resigns rather than risk being slaughtered.\"\n\nHer head drooped. \"That's what happened around thirty years ago, right before I got here. The Yellow Kindred, who'd ruled for more than fifty years, wanted to welcome the Stolen back to Dragana as full citizens. I think they hoped we'd support them out of gratitude. The Red Kindred was violently opposed to the idea, probably because they thought the Yellows were right and we'd give them a base of support the Reds would never overcome. So they whipped up the Browns and Grays with lies about how the humans had corrupted us, damaged our minds with dragonleaf and our bodies with beatings until we were brutish, dangerous beasts capable of nothing but the most menial sorts of drudgery. The common kindreds believed what they said. The Greens threw their support behind the Reds, either because they believed it too, or as a calculated maneuver to increase their own standing. The Reds issued a formal challenge. The Yellows knew they couldn't win, so they resigned.\"\n\nJuniper strove to keep her voice nonchalant, but bitterness leaked through. \"All the Stolen were rounded up, branded, and imprisoned. The Coast Patrol, which was originally created to repel human egg-stealers, was given the task of apprehending Stolen refugees. I got to Dragana without any problem, but they caught me a few days later. I suppose the same thing happened to you?\"\n\nTorch nodded, too heartsick to speak. For several minutes they were both silent.\n\nEventually Torch coughed to clear his throat. His voice was only a little rough. \"I'm sorry for distracting you from your story. You were talking about meeting Hardscale and Broadwing?\"\n\nJuniper shivered and sucked in a long a breath. \"I was spellbound by everything they said. I immediately decided I was going to fly to Dragana and started plotting how to do it. I knew I'd have to get off dragonleaf first. I couldn't take enough with me to last the crossing, and going into withdrawal in the middle of the ocean would be suicide. It took me a few years to work up the nerve. I was happy with my rider, and Wingfree needed us. But then he retired, and they put me back in the general pool. I knew I had to take my chance before they assigned me another regular rider and I got attached again.\n\n\"So one day I did. When they brought me my noon leaf, I pretended to eat it, then spit it out. I did the same thing that evening, and again the next day. When withdrawal hit, at first they thought I was just sick, so they took good care of me. The leaf kept disappearing, so they didn't realize I wasn't eating it. By the time they found the balls I'd hidden and started trying to force-feed me, it was too late. I knew what it felt like to think without fog in my brain. I knew what it was like to feel my emotions without a blanket of dullness. I knew who I was in a way I never had before.\" She looked sideways at Torch. \"I guess you understand?\"\n\n\"Completely.\" He shuddered. \"I just don't know how you were able to do it with leaf right there. When the cravings were at their worst, I would have ripped off my own wings if someone had offered to trade them for a few balls. I could never have resisted the temptation of a big pile lying within reach.\"\n\n\"I don't know, either.\" She tilted her head and gave him a sidelong look. \"I put them in the corner where I left my wastes and made sure they got thoroughly coated, so they didn't smell very appetizing. That helped.\"\n\nTorch laughed, his heart lightening for the first time since his capture. \"So that's where your name for dragonleaf came from.\"\n\nShe shrugged, her expression playful. \"Anyway, when I recovered they put me back on duty. I heard them argue about whether they should, but I'd always been well-behaved, and Forland was in the middle of some negotiations with Rainvale that was keeping all the dragons so busy they were falling behind on the regular routes. They decided to risk it. I played the perfect servant for just long enough to convince them I could be trusted. Then during a rest stop in the middle of a flight to Knapburgh, I yanked the reins out of my rider's hands and took off for the mountains as fast as my wings would carry me.\"\n\nJuniper grimaced. \"I didn't know they'd given my rider a tranquilizer gun. She darted me before I'd gone a hundred feet. When I woke up, she was on my back. I fought her, but she yanked my reins until I thought my teeth would break and jabbed me with her knife whenever I tried to claw her off. I finally gave up and went where she wanted.\n\n\"Back in Bellhold, they force-fed me leaf until I was addicted again. This time I was smarter. I escaped from my rider and found a cave to hole up in while I went through withdrawal. But I didn't go far enough, so they found me while I was unconscious and hauled me back. The third time I was sure I was going to make it. I went deep into the wilderness and hid until I was certain they must have given up hunting me. Then I headed for the coast. But one morning I pushed it and didn't get quite all the way past Steelgate before the sun came up. Someone spotted me and alerted the messenger post. They sent out a party to chase me. I'd flown all night and they were fresh, but I still eluded them for half the day before they got close enough to hit me with a lucky shot.\"\n\nShe flopped her head onto her paws. \"That's when they realized they could never trust me again and put me up for sale. The earl bought me, and you know the rest.\"\n\nTorch sighed. They were both silent for a while. Eventually Torch asked, \"Are you sorry? If you'd stayed a messenger you'd have had a better life than you do here.\"\n\n\"For a few years.\" She lifted her head and gazed at him. \"But when the Dragon War came, I would have deserted and joined the Mamournans, and probably been killed in battle or executed when King Lusian took over. If I'd survived, I'd have ended up here anyway, along with the rest of King Julios's loyalists who fled the purges.\"\n\nTorch blinked. \"Some of them came here?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Nearly half the Stolen fought for Mamourne. Five ships got away before the ports were closed. Over a thousand dragons and almost as many humans made the crossing. They might have had a chance against the Coast Patrol, but the fleet got separated in a storm and straggled in one at a time. There was a lot of fighting, but in the end the Patrol captured or killed them all. The Reds used the deaths of the Patrol members who died in the struggle to make the common kindreds hate and fear us even more.\"\n\n\"What did they do with the humans?\"\n\n\"They're kept in work camps. They're even more valuable as slaves than we are, because their hands are so much defter than dragon claws. The Reds have them craft all sort of things. Luxuries, mostly, but also weapons. They distribute human-made goods to those they favor and use them against anyone who might try to challenge them.\"\n\nTorch digested the information. \"Have any other humans come here?\"\n\n\"A few. Some members of the last egg-stealing expedition were captured. Ships come over every year, with humans seeking a place to live outside the control of Aldania's governments or in search of the riches Dragana is rumored to hold. The Coast Patrol burns them and brings any humans who survive to the caves. Last I heard there were more than two thousand human slaves in Dragana.\"\n\n\"And how many Stolen?\"\n\n\"About the same. For a while, new dragons were arriving all the time. When the Messenger Corps disbanded, a lot of the dragons escaped rather than be sold. The same thing happened when the airships switched to steam fans, and again when the breeding farms closed. But that dried up a few years ago. The last Stolen before you got here three months ago.\"\n\nTorch thought about his flight around the northern coast of Aldania. He hadn't seen a single dragon anywhere in the hundreds of miles he'd covered. \"What changed, do you think? Why, when we were so valuable to the humans before, are we so worthless to them now?\n\nJuniper shrugged. \"Wingfree's efforts made humans feel guilty about keeping dragons. The Dragon War made them afraid of us. And the new inventions made it easy to get along without our labor. So they got rid of us. I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand dragons left in all Aldania.\"\n\nTorch sighed. She was probably right.\n\nShe poked his neck with her snout. \"Hey. That's a good thing. You're not sorry they don't want us as slaves anymore, are you?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. It's just\u2026\" Torch shook his head. \"Humans and dragons can do good things together. When I think about my trainer Jom, and my rider Amma\u2026 I'm sad, is all. You know what I mean, don't you? You said you had good riders. What were their names?\"\n\nHer gaze went distant. \"Nat, and Jessa, and Susinnah, and Jarret\u2026\" She shook her head hard. \"It doesn't matter, though. The humans stole us. They kept us in chains. They treated us like animals, even the best of them.\"\n\n\"Not King Julios. Not the people who fought for him. Not the human members of Wingfree.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" she repeated. \"That's over. Humans have Aldania, and dragons have Dragana. It's better that way.\"\n\n\"And we're still slaves,\" Torch said bitterly. He pressed his throbbing brand into the cool stone.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Juniper wearily.\n\nThey were both silent for several minutes. Finally Juniper said, \"I should stop talking and let you rest. If you're able to get some sleep, you'll feel much better in the morning.\"\n\nHis brand might hurt less tomorrow, but Torch doubted he'd feel any better. Maybe Juniper had given up hope and resigned herself to remaining captive forever, but Torch hadn't. He'd worked too hard and come too far and given up too much in pursuit of freedom to stop now. The situation was grim, but he refused to believe it was hopeless. There must be a way out. He just had to keep searching until he found it.\n\nAnd for the first time in many, many years, he had a friend to help him.\n\nTorch pulled his face away from the wall, stretched out his neck and touched the tip of his snout to the tip of Juniper's. \"I'm sure I will. Thank you so much for sharing your space with me and answering my questions so patiently. I'll undoubtedly have a thousand more tomorrow.\"\n\nShe returned the pressure briefly before pulling away. \"It was no trouble. And don't hesitate to ask anything else you want to know. I like having someone to talk to.\" She dropped her head onto her paws and closed her eyes.\n\nTorch bent his neck and tucked his head between his shoulder and the wall, with his face pressed into the stone. \"Me, too,\" he murmured before exhaustion drowned his pain and swept him into sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Work Crew",
                "text": "The dragon guarding the rear of the work crew flew so close on Torch's tail he imagined he could feel her warm breath on its tip. He edged closer to the Stolen in front of him. It was good to be flying again after three days imprisoned underground, even though the crew's escort of guards kept a sharp eye out for any dragon veering even slightly from the path the lead guard set. Still, there were only about twenty guards, and more than fifty dragons on the crew. The guards had flame while the prisoners didn't, but even so Torch thought they might be able to break free if they all acted together. But not without casualties. Torch wasn't going to ask his fellow Stolen to risk their lives until he had a solid plan with a good chance of success to offer them.\n\nIn order to formulate one, he needed information. So despite the lingering pain of his brand, he'd been glad when the guard sorting the Stolen into crews had curtly ordered him to join one. He'd been disappointed but not surprised when Juniper had been assigned to a different group. She'd told him their jailers constantly shuffled the crews and took pains to keep any Stolen who appeared to be friends apart. That would make logistics difficult when the time came to plan their escape, but at least he'd get a first-hand look at the various tasks the crews performed.\n\nThe guard at the front angled her wings and swooped down. The crew followed. She led them to a stump-dotted clearing near the base of the mountain they'd been circling. As Torch backwinged and reached for the ground with his claws, the stench of smoke and hot metal hit his nostrils.\n\nA cluster of crude stone and wood buildings huddled near a yawning hole in the mountainside. Fire glowed at the base of a big dome-shaped structure, and clanging hammers and puffing bellows sounded from a series of open sheds. Humans labored everywhere. Only a few glanced up at the landing dragons, and they soon bent back to their work with an air of weary resignation.\n\nNobody bothered to explain to Torch what he was expected to do, but the rest of the crew shuffled toward the opening in the mountain, so he fell in at the end of the line. The tunnel within was clearly artificial, with tool marks on the walls and wooden bracing supporting the ceiling. It led deep into the rock. The dragons plodded until they reached a big round room from which smaller tunnels led in every direction. Pounding and scraping noises echoed from many of them.\n\nThe dragon at the head of the line stopped beside a mound of broken rock and crouched. Two humans slung a leather harness across his back, over his folded wings. Two more shoveled rocks into the broad, deep baskets attached to both sides. When they were full, the dragon heaved himself to his feet with a grunt and walked heavily back into the tunnel. The humans turned their attention to the next dragon in line.\n\nWhen it was his turn, Torch stood patiently while the humans loaded him. The first dragon was returning as Torch rose. He looked at Torch with rueful sympathy when the unaccustomed weight forced a surprised yelp from his throat. But he didn't speak, just shuffled back to the pile to receive his next load.\n\nThe harness straps dug into Torch's back and chafed his pinned wings. The awkward baskets banged his sides with every step. His claws dug into the earthen floor. His legs threatened to buckle under the strain. He put his head down and panted for breath as he plodded the long, long, way back up the tunnel and emerged into the sunlight.\n\nThe dragons waited in line for humans to dump out their baskets into a pile next to the dome-shaped structure. Torch supposed it must be a smelter, and the rocks some sort of metal ore. Iron, probably, judging from the ringing of hammers coming from the sheds. They must house forges.\n\nTorch's attention was drawn by a voice speaking Draganish coming from outside the nearest shed. \"Tell him Hotflame demands to know when the claw blades will be ready.\" The leader of the guards, a big dragon with dark maroon scales, glared at a tall human man wearing a heavy leather apron. \"It's forty days now past the first estimate you gave her, and you haven't delivered a single usable set.\"\n\nA small human woman, less than half the height of the man, repeated the words in a language Torch didn't know. He thought it sounded like Fogellan. The man glowered at the guard and replied at length in the same language, his hands waving in forceful gestures.\n\nBeside the guard, a brown dragon with a brand on her face echoed the human's words in Draganish. \"The design changes she insisted on make each set take more than twice as long to craft. The ore from the mine continues to decline in quality. We have to smelt three times as much to get the same amount of iron, and even then it's so brittle the blades end up breaking half the time. And you give us so little food, even the strongest of us barely has the strength to swing a hammer.\"\n\nThe guard bristled more with every sentence. Finally she burst out, \"Always more excuses! Hotflame is sick of them. She expects to see the first set tonight. If it's not ready by the time I take the crew back, she ordered me to demonstrate how serious she is.\" She opened her mouth and exhaled brief puff of flame. \"You don't need those ridiculous protruding ears to work iron. Neither does your son.\"\n\nWhen the woman translated, the man blanched and shot a look into the shed, where a young man hammered at an anvil. When his gaze returned to the dragon, Torch quailed at the fury burning in his eyes. He spat a few curt phrases and the brown dragon translated. \"She shall have what she asks. One set is almost ready. The rest will be finished in ten days. But tell her if she threatens my son again, she'll find every set melted to slag in the smelter and the mine and forges deserted.\"\n\nThe guard rustled her wings and looked haughtily down her snout. \"We'd track you down and burn you to ashes before you made it five miles. An act of mercy, to save you from starving to death in the wilderness.\"\n\nShe turned without waiting for the woman to complete her translation. Torch jerked his gaze back to the dragon in front of him to avoid attracting her notice. But as soon as the guard stalked past without a glance and stationed herself beside the entrance to the mine, he looked back.\n\nThe brown dragon had dropped her head and the small woman was scratching the base of her horns, murmuring endearments. The man watched them with a bleak look before striding into the shed and bellowing at the workers there. They gaped at him wide-eyed, then bent back to their work with even greater alacrity.\n\nThe woman gave the brown dragon a final pat and headed into the forge. The dragon hurried toward the line, her heavy baskets of ore swinging on either side. Torch backed up, crowding the dragons who'd fallen into line behind him, and jerked his head at the clear space. She took it with a muttered, \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"No problem.\" Torch waited a few minutes, until he was certain none of the guards were observing them. He kept his voice soft. \"Your rider?\"\n\nThe brown dragon didn't look back, and her words were barely loud enough for him to hear. \"I'm lucky I get to see her. Usually they keep dragons and riders apart, but we're the only ones who can translate Fogellan, and Claudio doesn't speak any other language.\"\n\n\"He's in charge of the forge?\"\n\n\"And the whole camp. Lia told me he came here as part of an expedition from Fogella, seeking new mines to replace their depleted ones.\"\n\nTorch pressed closer to her as the line shuffled forward. He dropped his voice even lower. \"He defies the Draganans?\"\n\nThe brown dragon shrugged. \"As much as he can. But you heard what Swiftflight said. If he delays the order any longer, they'll hurt his son.\"\n\n\"What did she say he's making for them? Claw blades? What are they?\"\n\n\"What they sound like. A set of long daggers that fit over a dragon's claws. Hotflame wants them for all the Reds. The extra reach will make them almost impossible to beat in a fight. For a while Claudio was able to fool her with flimsy ones that bent and broke, or thick, heavy ones so awkward they were worthless, but Hotflame caught on. This time she specified exactly the design she wanted. Claudio put her off as long as he could, but now she's run out of patience.\"\n\n\"Hotflame is the leader of the Reds?\"\n\nShe shuddered. \"More like their master. They're all terrified of her, but they love her because she brought them to power. She's the one that turned the other Reds against the Stolen, and the Browns and Grays, too.\"\n\n\"Why does she hate us so much? Did a Stolen hurt her somehow?\"\n\n\"Not that anyone knows of. I don't think it's personal for her. I think she just realized she could use us to frighten everyone else into doing what she wanted.\"\n\nTorch nodded. The line shuffled forward again. The humans started unloading the dragon ahead of the brown one. Quickly, before the chance was lost, Torch asked, \"Is anyone working on a way to get rid of her? Or to escape?\"\n\n\"Hush!\" she hissed, glancing around fearfully. Seeing no guards, she twisted her neck back, bringing her head close to Torch's. She spoke low and rapidly. \"People are always talking about it, but no one's ever come up with a plan enough others thought would work to get the support it would take. It would have to include the human prisoners as well as the Stolen, because I won't leave Lia behind, and neither will any of the others with riders.\" She flared her nostrils. \"If you think you can figure out a way, we'll listen, but don't expect it to be easy. Hotflame has everyone so frightened of us they'll flame us without a thought. And we can't flame back. Whenever our crystals grow in, they make the humans quench us.\"\n\nTorch covered his words with a shiver that rattled the rocks in his baskets. \"Does Claudio or anyone who works with him know how to make sparkers?\"\n\nShe shot him a wary glance. \"Probably.\" She hesitated. \"They might already have a few hidden away.\"\n\nTorch's heart leapt. \"A few?\"\n\n\"A lot.\" She grimaced. \"Those of us who fought with King Julios know how to use them, but more than half of the Stolen don't. It takes a while to learn, especially for dragons who've always been quenched.\"\n\n\"I know. I've taught dragons to use them. I can do it in a few days, if we've got sparkers to practice with.\" Torch's mind swarmed with ideas. \"Can you ask your rider to get one and pass it to you?\"\n\nShe yanked her head away. \"That would put Lia in danger, and me, too.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Torch's head drooped. \"Think about it, though. Please?\"\n\nShe didn't reply. As the line moved forward again, she said. \"My name's Otter. What's yours?\"\n\n\"Torch,\" he told her.\n\n\"All right, Torch. I'll think about it.\" The humans swarmed around her baskets, and she fell silent.\n\nFor the rest of the day Torch hauled ore out of the mine. He talked with Otter a little more, sharing his background and learning hers. She'd been a messenger in Fogella when the Dragon War broke out. As soon as she'd heard about King Julios's proclamation, she'd escaped her rider and crossed the border to Mamourne. There she'd been paired with Lia, a Fogellan who'd eagerly answered the call for dwarfs to serve as riders. Together they'd fought in many battles. After King Julios's assassination, they'd fled on one of the ships to Dragana. They'd landed safely, but a division of the Coast Patrol had taken them by surprise during their first night on shore.\n\n\"I woke up to screams and flames,\" Otter told Torch during one of their trips into the mine. \"Lia shoved my sparker into my mouth and scrambled onto my back. I got in a few good blasts on wings and heads, and Lia shot eyes and mouths. I'm pretty sure we killed at least a couple of our attackers. But there were so many of them, and only a few of us managed to get into the air. I ran out of fuel while they still had plenty. Then Lia ran out of bullets. One of the Draganans told me he'd flame her off my back unless I surrendered. Five or six others surrounded us, ready to back him up. So I didn't have any choice.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Torch told her.\n\nShe shook her head as they joined the line waiting to be loaded. \"I wonder every day if I should have kept fighting. Maybe we'd both be better off dead than enslaved.\"\n\n\"No you wouldn't,\" Torch said forcefully, as much to reassure himself as her. \"This is temporary. If I can't figure out a way to free us, someone else will eventually. It's only a matter of time.\"\n\nOtter shook her head and sighed. \"I hope you're right.\"\n\nAs the day wore on, Torch found hope harder and harder to cling to. Both he and Otter grew too tired to talk. The ore was much heavier than any load he'd carried before, and he'd never walked so far, even unburdened. By midafternoon his paws were blistered, his claws cracked and torn. His wings had raw patches where the harness straps rubbed. His foreshoulders and hips throbbed. His back screamed with every shovelful of rocks dumped into his baskets. Every step felt like walking on knives. Every breath burned hotter than his brand.\n\nAt long last, when the sun had disappeared behind the mountains and twilight was closing in, Swiftflight called a halt. The humans removed Torch's harness and baskets. He staggered out of the mine one more time, then stood with his head hanging limp, sucking in deep, shuddering breaths.\n\nSwiftflight strutted to the forge where Claudio was supervising the workers shutting it down for the night. \"Otter!\" she bellowed.\n\nBeside Torch, Otter dragged her head up and stumbled over. Lia came running from one of the other buildings. She put her hand on Otter's shoulder, and Otter leaned into her.\n\nSwiftflight glowered, but turned to Claudio without rebuking them. \"Well?\" she demanded. \"Where are the blades?\"\n\nClaudio reluctantly lifted a gleaming metal object from a worktable. Five curving blades, each more than a foot long and polished to a bright shine, protruded from a gauntlet made of leather and overlapping steel scales. \"These are sharp,\" he said, Lia translating his words. \"How will you carry them?\"\n\n\"I'll wear them, of course,\" Swiftflight said impatiently. She sat on her haunches and extended a paw. \"Put them on.\"\n\nClaudio scowled, but moved to obey. He slid the gauntlet onto Swiftflight's spread digits. Each of her claws fit snugly into a slender metal cone. \"Tell Hotflame they would stay on more securely if she allowed me to add straps and buckles.\"\n\nSwiftflight snorted. \"What use would they be if it took a human's help to don them?\" She flexed her claws, the blades moving smoothly in unison, then shook her paw hard. \"A bit of slippage, but not too bad.\" She reached for the workbench with her other paw. When Claudio moved to pick up the second set of blades, she swatted his hand away. \"I'll do it.\"\n\nFrom her look of intent concentration Torch could tell it wasn't easy, but with some careful maneuvering Swiftflight managed to get the other gauntlet on. She rose to her hind legs and slashed both paws through the air. The blades flashed in the orange glow of the forge. Torch flinched. It was all too easy to imagine them slicing effortlessly through scales and skin and wing membranes. An opponent armed with such blades would be nearly invincible against a dragon fighting with only their natural claws.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Claudio warned as Swiftflight sank back to all fours. \"I placed them as high as I could, but they'll still scrape the ground and grow dull unless you set your feet lightly.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" Swiftflight's words remained curt, but the slightly brighter tone of her voice betrayed how much the blades pleased her. Torch wondered if Claudio could perceive the difference. \"Hotflame should find these adequate. She'll be counting the days until the rest are complete. Ten, I believe you said?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"If the next twenty sets are equal in quality to these, she'll want more. Enough for every Red, I expect. If this mine can't supply what you need, she'll move you to one of the other sites you identified, and you can dig a new one. Should I tell her that will be necessary?\"\n\nClaudio glanced at the mine entrance, then shook his head. \"We'll make do. We've sunk too much blood and sweat into this shaft to abandon it.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought.\" Swiftflight turned, taking short, mincing steps to avoid digging the blades into the ground. \"Back in line!\" she barked to Otter.\n\nOtter scrambled to fall in behind Torch. The moment Swiftflight was clear of the buildings, she crouched and leapt into the air. The other guards ordered the Stolen aloft. Torch's aching legs retained barely enough strength to propel him off the ground, and the air bit into his chafed membranes with every stroke, but his wings were well-rested, so once the stiffness from having them pinned in place all day wore off, he could fly with relative ease.\n\nDuring the flight back, he thought about what he'd learned. Ten days from now, twenty more of Hotflame's Reds would get claw blades. If the Stolen were to have any hope of defeating them, they'd need to strike before then. That didn't give him much time to plan, or to persuade the others to join him, or to teach them what they would need to know.\n\nHe'd start tonight, once all the Stolen returned from their work assignments. The guards always stayed close to the prison cavern's single entrance, ignoring the prisoners as long as they didn't try to leave. There were plenty of places in the sprawling network of caves where Torch could speak to the others without being overheard. Juniper would help him, and probably Otter, too.\n\nHe could start right away teaching them how to spray fuel, so that when they got the sparkers from the humans they'd have a head start learning to flame. Otter and her rider could carry messages between the dragons and the humans at the mine. There must be similar pairs who translated for the other groups of human prisoners. They could spread the word. If Torch was able to unite all the Stolen and humans and persuade them to work together, they'd have enough strength to overcome their captors. He was sure of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hotflame",
                "text": "Flying back to the caves the next evening, Torch's thoughts were even busier. Approaching the Stolen had gone better than he'd dared hope. Almost everyone he'd spoken to had responded positively. The veterans of the Dragon War had been eager to get sparkers between their teeth again and had promised to help him teach the rest to flame. Some of the dragons who came from airship teams or breeding farms expressed dismay over his plans to include the human captives, but other former messengers had joined him and Juniper in affirming the possibility of dragons and humans working together. Those who'd fought for King Julios had added their voices. Eventually, although still skeptical, most of the doubters had tentatively agreed to support Torch's plan.\n\nThe day's work had left him tired, but not as exhausted as laboring at the mine. Hotflame had assigned a group of humans to establish farms where prey animals could be domesticated and bred. Apparently, despite strict regulations concerning where, when, and how much the dragons of the Thousand Caves were allowed to hunt, the land for many miles around was nearly empty of game. The barren areas extended farther every year, forcing the citizens of Dragana to travel longer and longer distances to find food.\n\nDragons had attempted various domestication schemes in the past, with little success. The prey species native to Dragana were too terrified of dragons to be tamed, and dragons' lack of dexterity made it difficult to construct enclosures sufficient to hold them. Hotflame and the Reds had seized on the availability of human prisoners to start a new project. They'd sent every human who'd ever worked keeping animals to a flat, grassy plain south of the mountains and set them to building barns and fences.\n\nNow the first phase of construction was complete, and efforts had shifted to populating the new farms. Teams of Stolen accompanied by guards ranged the surrounding lands, hunting for prey that could be taken alive.\n\nIt hadn't been easy for Torch to quell his instincts the first time his team located a herd of the big, black, cattle-like beasts that roamed the plains. But he'd forced his claws to sink harmlessly into the thick fur on a half-grown calf's shoulders instead of ripping through its hide. The poor creature had bawled in terror when Torch lifted it from the ground. It thrashed so hard he nearly lost his grip a dozen times before it finally went limp and fell silent. When he set it down inside one of the fenced lots, it collapsed and lay trembling, staring at nothing with blank, dazed eyes. The humans had seemed hopeful it would recover.\n\nTorch had brought in two more calves and a young boar over the course of the day. His guards had let him kill and eat another boar, so he was pleasantly full as he winged back toward the caves.\n\nHe hadn't gotten a chance to speak to the farmers' translator, but he'd made careful note of the small gray dragon and planned to speak with him as soon as they got back. The farmers had plenty of wood, and they'd learned to make strong rope from one of the grasses that grew wild on the plains. It would be easy for them to quickly put together a large number of hanging seats like those Juniper had described to him. The Draganans used them to transport the human prisoners to their assigned workplaces. Two or three dragons working together could lift even the heaviest human. The Draganans forced their prisoners onto the seats under threat of flame. Hopefully the humans would be willing to cooperate with dragons who were helping them escape.\n\nTorch was so lost in thought he was only vaguely aware when the work crew reached the canyon and the guards herded them toward the huge circular entrance. Only when a shadow fell across his face did he blink and look up.\n\nA dark silhouette haloed by the golden rays of the setting sun loomed over him. A harsh voice echoed in his ears. \"So you're the one they've been telling me about. A Stolen Red. Or rather, a dragon who would have been a Red, if not for the human thieves.\"\n\nThe dragon swept past Torch and looped back. Once the sun was no longer in his eyes and he saw her clearly, a wave of shock coursed through his body.\n\nIt was like looking into one of the humans' mirrors. The dragon's scales were the same brilliant crimson as Torch's. Her wings spread exactly as wide. The distance from the point of her snout to the tip of her tail fell within a foot of Torch's length. Her body and wings bore a similar array of scars to those Torch had accumulated during the war. If not for the blemish on Torch's chest and the brand on his face, they would have appeared as identical as the twins who'd performed with the circus's magician.\n\n\"Take the other prisoners to their cave,\" she ordered the lead guard. \"Leave this one with me.\"\n\nThe guard bobbed his head subserviently. \"Yes, Hotflame. Although are you sure\u2014\"\n\nShe lashed out with a front paw. The long blades she wore whistled through the air, missing the guard's snout by barely an inch. \"Do you doubt I'm a match for one flameless Stolen?\"\n\n\"No, Hotflame.\" The guard ducked his head again, then turned to Torch. \"You heard her! Fall out and go with her. Do exactly as she tells you, or you'll end up ash and meat.\" He sneered. \"You might anyway, if it amuses her.\"\n\nApprehensive, Torch tilted his wings and followed Hotflame as she swooped across the canyon. He considered breaking away and fleeing, but there were hundreds of dragons scattered around the canyon and coming and going from the cave entrance. One bellow from Hotflame would set them all after him, if she didn't deal with him herself first.\n\nTorch had no idea what the leader of the Reds wanted with him. Maybe she intended to kill him. In that case, he should attack first. But even with the advantage of surprise, it would be almost impossible to prevail when she had both fire and steel, and he had neither.\n\nAnd it was possible she just want to talk. Until she made a threatening move, cooperating would probably give him a slightly better chance of survival than fighting.\n\nHotflame headed toward a slender, flat-topped column rising from the floor of the canyon near the far wall. She slackened her pace and gestured with one dagger-tipped paw. \"Fly beside me.\"\n\nTorch accelerated until they flew wingtip-to-wingtip. It was easy to fall into perfect synchronicity with her. Since their wings were so close in size and shape, flapping at the same rate propelled them at the same speed. He couldn't help but think what an impressive circus act the two of them would have made together. The crowds would have eaten it up.\n\nIn conversational tone of voice, Hotflame asked, \"When was your egg stolen?\"\n\nTorch strove to match her matter-of-fact manner. \"About a hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"As I suspected. We're too alike for it to be coincidental. Our eggs probably came from the same clutch.\" She shot him a disdainful glance. \"Don't think that means anything. I know humans set great store by such things, but dragons don't.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Torch said, fighting to conceal his reaction. Hotflame was his sister? Maybe dragons didn't care about family ties, but Torch had been raised by humans. He'd never imagined he might find a relative among the Draganans, let alone one so close.\n\nShe eyed him as she backwinged and settled onto the column. Torch landed beside her a wingbeat later. \"What it does mean is that you may be nearly as smart and strong as I am. If you'd hatched here, you'd have been my rival. We'd have fought for dominance all our lives. The competition would have strengthened us both. No matter which of us ultimately emerged the victor, the Reds would have benefitted.\"\n\nShe flipped her wings onto her back and dropped into a relaxed sprawl, although Torch had no doubt she could spring into action in an instant. \"Instead, the humans ruined you. Now that brand on your face means you can never take the place that should have been yours.\"\n\nHer piercing gaze raked his body, then returned to meet his eyes. \"You must hate the humans. Resentment must burn like fire in your belly. You could have been one of the rulers of Dragana, but they turned you into a slave.\"\n\nUndoubtedly it would be wiser to be cautious and answer her deferentially, but Torch couldn't hold his tongue. \"The humans didn't brand me. You did.\"\n\n\"Your face, perhaps. But they branded your heart. I just made what they did to you plain for all to see.\"\n\n\"That's not true, and you know it. Those of us the humans stole are no different than you and the others who've always lived free. You only pretend we are to justify enslaving us again.\"\n\nTorch expected her to react with anger to his accusation, but instead Hotflame turned to gaze across the canyon, eyes wandering over the sunset-bathed stone formations. \"I never tire of this view. The colors, the shapes, the way the light and shadows change from moment to moment\u2026 Every day it's different.\"\n\nFor a while she was silent. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and reflective. \"I saw a chance for the Reds to seize power, and I took it. The Yellows had ruled for too long. They'd grown lazy and complacent. Dragana was sliding into decline, and they didn't even notice. Prey kept growing scarcer. Fewer eggs hatched every year, and fewer hatchlings survived. More caves were abandoned. Art and music and poetry stagnated, with new works only pale shadows of past greatness.\"\n\nShe scowled at the blades on her claws, flexing each in turn so they flashed in the fading sunset rays. \"Meanwhile the cursed humans with their clever hands were growing stronger. They kept creating new devices to offset the limitations of their puny bodies. We may have stopped their ships from stealing our eggs for the time being, but they'll be back, with deadlier weapons and tougher defenses than before. They'll cross the ocean and strive to take Dragana for their own. It's already happening, and it's only going to get worse. We have to be ready to drive them out. We have to grow strong enough to match them. If the Yellows had continued to rule, we wouldn't have. Under the Reds, under my leadership, we have a chance.\"\n\nTorch wanted to argue, but he couldn't. There was too much truth in what Hotflame was saying.\n\nShe continued, still not looking at Torch. \"My plans require the labor of the Stolen and the human captives. I don't have the authority to order Draganan citizens to do the work that must be done. And there's too much of it to be accomplished by those I can persuade to volunteer. They're used to lazy idleness, and they don't really believe in the threat. Not enough of them, anyway. By the time the humans invade our shores in strength and they wake up to the danger, it will be too late.\"\n\nHotflame turned to Torch. \"But once the preparations are complete, once the tools and weapons we need are forged, once the farms are producing ample meat to feed us all, once the humans have been made to understand that we'll never surrender our land and they'll pay a devastating toll in lives if they attempt to conquer us, it will be different. There will be far less work needed, and far more Draganans will understand the urgency of doing it. At that point, I'll be able to afford to relax my position with regards to the Stolen.\"\n\nHer voice took on a persuasive tone. \"Your kind could be allowed greater liberty. The ability to choose your tasks. Days off work. Even, in time, the opportunity to mingle with citizens. With greater familiarity, the Browns and Grays would come to realize they needn't fear you. Eventually, those Stolen who proved their worth could be allowed to breed. Their offspring would be full citizens. In time, the Stolen would cease to exist. There would be only Draganans, just as it was before humans stole the first egg.\"\n\nShe grew more urgent. \"But that can only happen if the necessary tasks are accomplished first. Right now, the Stolen must accept their fate and devote their strength to preparing Dragana to resist the human invasion. Doomed attempts to rebel will only disrupt and delay the work, maybe even so severely that we fail. Then the humans would destroy Dragana completely. They'd kill as many of us as they could and drive the rest of us from our homes. We'd become exiled wanderers, forced to live like wild beasts in whatever scraps of worthless wilderness the humans deigned to leave us. Citizens and Stolen alike. You don't want that to happen, do you?\"\n\nReluctantly, Torch shook his head. \"Of course not.\"\n\nHotflame looked at him earnestly. \"I need your help, Torch. I need an ally among the Stolen. Someone who understands my purpose and will work to help me accomplish it. Someone who can speak to the Stolen as one of their own. Someone who can persuade them that rebellion is useless and unrest is counterproductive. Someone who can focus their efforts on the goals we share. Someone who believes that the survival of Dragana is more important than any individual dragon's happiness. You do believe that, don't you?\"\n\nTorch ducked his head, lashing his tail. Conflict raged in his heart. He didn't want the humans to destroy Dragana. He wanted dragons to continue to live in peace and freedom and prosperity in their own country. If Hotflame was right and a Stolen rebellion would endanger Dragana's very existence, maybe he should give up his plans to lead one. Maybe agreeing to help her would be the right thing to do.\n\nIf it was only him, the choice would be a lot easier. If his labor was necessary to ensure that dragons would continue to thrive in Dragana, he'd give it willingly. He'd far rather work hard for his own kind than for the humans, the way he'd done his whole life. He could endure the privations of life as a prisoner if they served a greater good. When the dragons's flames drove off the human ships with their rifles and cannons and bombs, he'd know that everything he'd sacrificed had been worth it.\n\nBut there were others he must consider. Could he consign Juniper to lifelong captivity? She despised humans far more than he did, so she might agree with Hotflame's arguments. But she'd still be miserable. So would Otter and the rest of the Stolen. And what about Lia and Claudio and the other humans the dragons had enslaved? They had no reason to defend Dragana. They'd probably hope for their own kind to defeat their dragon masters.\n\nWhen he didn't answer, Hotflame continued, watching closely for his reaction. \"As a Red, you're a natural leader. The other Stolen will listen to you. If you tell them that trying to escape will only get them killed, they'll believe you. If you encourage them to accept their station and devote their energy to their work, they will. By doing so, you'll be playing a vital role in preserving Dragana's independence. One no one else can fill as well as you.\"\n\nTorch wavered. The Stolen did seem eager to follow him. Although probably that was because he was leading them toward a goal they desired. If he switched to discouraging rebellion, they likely wouldn't be so enthusiastic. Juniper, at least, would demand an explanation.\n\nHotflame looked away. Her voice dropped in volume, becoming casual, almost offhand. \"Of course, I wouldn't expect you to help me for purely altruistic reasons. There would be personal benefits for you as well. It would have to be done quietly, so as not to give the other Stolen the wrong idea, but you could certainly enjoy a better quality of food, for instance. You could be assigned to the work crews doing the least onerous tasks. If you wished to feign injury or illness occasionally to be excused from work, the guards would go along. Items to improve the comfort of your quarters could be provided, seemingly by chance. Those benefits could be extended to a few of your companions as well, if you wished.\"\n\nHotflame didn't understand Torch as well as she thought, if she expected bribes to sway him. The offer just made it seem like her other arguments weren't strong enough to persuade him. He wondered if she was exaggerating or even lying about the danger to Dragana. If the Stolen escaped, taking the human captives with them, surely she'd figure out some other way to fortify Dragana against invasion. If better defense was even necessary. As long as humans relied on wooden ships and gunpowder, flame should be the only weapon dragons needed.\n\nHotflame fell silent. For several long minutes she watched the sunset. At last, when the final traces of pink and orange had faded to gray, she turned again to Torch. \"Do you have any questions?\"\n\n\"If I agree, will you stop branding Stolen?\"\n\nHotflame narrowed her eyes. \"I'm afraid that's not possible. At least not right now. If I proposed it, I'd lose support from the Browns and Grays, and many of the other Reds as well. Maybe at some point in the future I can consider it.\"\n\nThe answer didn't surprise Torch. Conviction grew in his heart. Hotflame only wanted to use him to keep the Stolen from causing trouble. She didn't actually intend to improve their lot, now or ever.\n\nHe formulated another question to test her. \"What if I try to persuade them not to rebel, but they ignore me? What if they try to escape anyway?\"\n\nHotflame made a dismissive gesture with her bladed paw. \"I'm sure that won't happen. But just in case, I'll arrange a way for you to report to me privately. If you should learn that any of the Stolen are planning such an attempt, you can let me know in time to stop them. I won't hold you responsible for their actions as long as you tell me whatever you hear as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Torch was certain, now. She was asking him to be her spy and informer. She didn't want him to help the other Stolen, she wanted him to betray them.\n\nHe couldn't let her realize he'd seen through her deception. He ducked his head. \"You're sure there's no other way to stop the humans from conquering Dragana? You're sure they'll win if the Stolen don't remain prisoners? You're sure that's the only way dragonkind can stay free?\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\" Hotflame regarded him expectantly.\n\nTorch let his head droop even further and pitched his voice to a miserable mumble. \"I have to think about it.\"\n\n\"I can give you a few days, but no longer. Three evenings from now I'll pull you aside again. I expect you to be ready to give me an answer then.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Hotflame rose to her feet, pleased confidence in every line of her body. \"I look forward to working together toward a bright future for Dragana.\" She leapt from the column and arrowed toward the entrance of the Thousand Caves. Torch followed, his mind racing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Late that night, long after the guards believed them asleep, the Stolen slipped one by one into the cavern farthest from the prison's entrance until their bodies packed the low, cramped space. When Juniper signaled that everyone had arrived, Torch climbed onto a narrow stone outcropping and coughed softly. Every eye focused on him.\n\n\"My friends,\" he said. \"A few hours ago Hotflame, leader of the Reds, ruler of Dragana, approached me. She asked me to persuade you to abandon our plans to escape.\"\n\nAngry murmurs broke out; Torch waited until they died down. \"I didn't agree, but I didn't refuse, either. It wasn't my choice to make. Some of her arguments were compelling. You need to hear them. Then, together, we can decide what we're going to do.\"\n\nAs succinctly as he could, he explained the threat of human invasion and Hotflame's plan to use the Stolen to build Dragana's defenses. The others listened gravely. Torch could tell they felt the dilemma as keenly as he did. None of them harbored much charity toward the dragons of the Thousand Caves after the way they'd been treated, but none of them wanted to see the only free dragon civilization in the world wiped out, either.\n\nWhen he finished, Torch called for the rest to give their opinions. A hushed but intense debate ensued. Dragons reported things they'd seen and heard all over Aldania that made it clear humans were a real threat to Dragana. Both north and south of the channel populations were increasing, putting pressure on the ability of the existing farmland to produce enough food. People chafed under restrictive governments and spoke longingly about seeking new homes free from their control. New ships were bigger, faster, and better armed than old ones, and new navigation devices made crossing the ocean less risky. Advances in firearm technology continually made guns more accurate and more deadly. The more Torch heard, the more his dread grew. He hadn't realized just how dire the situation was.\n\nBut it became equally clear that the Stolen's current situation was intolerable. Dragon after dragon told stories of abuse. At least three Stolen had been set upon and killed by mobs of angry Draganans. Many more had barely escaped with their lives from similar attacks. Guards routinely burned or slashed those who showed the slightest sign of defiance. Food was withheld on any pretext. Often punishment was doled out for no reason at all. The Browns and Grays who volunteered for guard duty were those who took pleasure in hurting and humiliating those weaker than themselves, and the Reds in charge made little attempt to restrain their cruelty.\n\nEven when they weren't mistreated, the work assigned to the Stolen was backbreaking. Torch's day at the mine had been a mild example. Some crews spent long weeks deep underground, carving out new caverns with their bare claws. Others hauled massive quantities of meat from distant hunting grounds. More cleaned middens and bore stinking loads of waste to dump in the ocean. All the difficult or unpleasant tasks, which had once been shared equally by Dragana's entire population, were now consigned to the Stolen, while the citizens of Dragana spent their days in leisure.\n\nAt length, when everyone had run out of new points to add, the cavern fell quiet. Torch surveyed the gathered Stolen, his heart heavy. \"So what are we going to do?\" he asked. \"Stay and suffer, and help defend dragonkind? Or flee, leaving our kin behind for the humans to slaughter?\" He could see no good solution to the quandary.\n\nJuniper had remained quiet through the whole debate, listening intently to every word of testimony and argument. Now she moved to Torch's side. \"Neither,\" she said, softly but decisively. \"We won't leave Dragana undefended, but we won't meekly endure captivity and exploitation, either. Dragana is more than just the Thousand Caves. After we follow Torch's plans and escape to freedom along with our human allies, we'll establish our own nation elsewhere on this continent. We'll create our own Coast Patrol to guard against invasion. We'll make weapons, both for ourselves and to supply to other dragons. We'll work with the citizens of the Thousand Caves to defend Dragana, not for them. Because we choose to, not because they force us to.\"\n\nTorch's spirits soared as she spoke. Of course she was right. The answer was so simple. How had he failed to see it?\n\nSoftly at first, then stronger, though never loud enough to alert the guards, the rest of the Stolen voiced support for Juniper's proposal. When the consensus was clear, Juniper turned to Torch. \"I think you should pretend to take Hotflame up on her offer. It will put her off guard. Do you think you can act well enough to fool her? You'll only have to keep up it up for a few days.\"\n\nAnticipation and fear combined to make Torch giddy. He kept his voice light. \"I spent seventy years persuading audiences I was a vicious beast. I made them believe I'd escaped my trainer's control and only his heroism saved them from my flames. I played the most dramatic death scene Forland ever saw. I can convince my sister I'm telling the truth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Revolt",
                "text": "Hotflame regarded Torch with undisguised approval. \"Very good work. I knew you'd have no trouble getting them to listen to you. You're sure you can put them off again when the time comes?\"\n\nTorch didn't have to feign confidence. \"It will be easy. They were so willing to listen when I advised a slow, long-term plan of action, I'm pretty sure they're not actually impatient to escape at all. They know that even the most successful rebellion would cost many of them their lives. They're not eager to go up against flaming guards with cold throats. It will be the same next spring. I won't have any trouble coming up with some reason we should delay further.\"\n\nHe ignored the tightness in his stomach that the truth within his lies provoked. Despite everything he'd done over the past nine days to maximize their odds, Stolen were going to die tomorrow. All of them had accepted that fact. It was the price of freedom, and they were willing to pay it.\n\nHotflame flicked her tail and turned to gaze at the sunset with a smug expression. \"Is there anything you'd like as a reward you for your quick results? How about a few days of light duty? Hunting breeding stock for the farmers, perhaps? That's probably the easiest of all the task I've given the Stolen.\"\n\nTorch fought to keep his voice and expression only mildly pleased. \"It's certainly the one I dislike least. Although it's horribly frustrating to restrain myself from tearing out my prey's throat.\"\n\nShe chuckled in sympathy. \"I'll make sure the guards know to allow you a real kill or two. I'll speak to Fireflank and have him assign you there tomorrow, and as often as he can without raising suspicion from now on.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your generosity.\" Torch's heart thudded. The members of the farm crew, along with the mining crew, would strike the first blow in the Stolen rebellion. Since crew assignments were unpredictable, he'd prepared everyone for the mission. He was confident that whoever was chosen for the two crews would be able to carry off the plan, but he was glad that now he'd get to participate, instead of waiting with the rest of the prisoners for news of the outcome.\n\n\"I know how to repay those who serve me well.\" Hotflame rose and shook out her wings. \"When Reds work together, there's no limit to what we can accomplish.\"\n\nThe character Torch was playing wouldn't fail to notice the significance of Hotflame acknowledging him as a fellow Red. He arched his neck slightly to give the impression he was attempting to conceal a pleased reaction. \"I'm glad my efforts have earned your approval.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Keep it up, and I'll let you join the mating next autumn. We need to pass on all the Red blood we can.\" Her nostrils flared. \"If we've matured by then. I was really hoping to go into heat this year, but no luck.\" She huffed a sigh and eyed Torch with frank curiosity. \"What about you? Have you noticed any signs of rut coming on? If we really are from the same clutch, we should mature the same year.\"\n\nFlustered, Torch stared at her. \"I don't\u2026 I mean, I never\u2026 I mean, what, exactly\u2026\"\n\nHotflame laughed and shook her head. \"That's right, humans are silly about mating, aren't they? Probably because they mature when they're still practically hatchlings. Do you know anything about dragon mating at all?\"\n\nTorch turned away. \"Not really. Only rumors.\" Some of the Stolen came from breeding farms, but they hadn't volunteered any information, and he'd had no reason to ask. \"I know we don't mate until we're pretty old.\"\n\n\"Usually somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and ten,\" Hotflame told him.\n\nCuriosity began to overcome his embarrassment. \"Even the dragons I knew who were older than that didn't\u2026 I mean\u2026\"\n\n\"Dragonleaf suppresses the instinct. Mature dragons who don't earn a place in the mating find a field and breathe smoke for a week.\" She chuckled again. \"Lucky for the humans. I'd like to see them restrain one of us at the height of heat or rut. Their chains wouldn't be worth much then.\"\n\n\"So now that I'm not addicted anymore, I'll\u2026\" Torch found the idea deeply disturbing. He'd never experienced even the slightest stirring of that sort.\n\n\"If not next autumn, certainly within a few years.\" She smacked his flank lightly with the tip of her tail. \"Don't look so horrified. From what I hear, it's better than the first hot mouthful of a freshly roasted kill. I'm certainly looking forward to it.\"\n\nTorch recoiled. \"You don't expect me to\u2026 with you\u2026\"\n\n\"What? Oh, yuck, no. That's disgusting.\" Hotflame made a gagging noise. \"We don't mate within our own kindred. And I certainly wouldn't choose some Stolen prisoner if we did. I'm the leader of the Thousand Caves. Dragons will be begging for my favor. I've got my eye on a few well-built Greens, and there's even a Yellow or two I'd consider.\"\n\nHer voice took on a playful tone. \"What about you? How old is that Green you pal around with? If you want, I could approve her for the mating, too, if she's mature. As long as you continue to please me, of course.\"\n\nConsidering Juniper in that light was even more disturbing. Torch shook his head hard. \"No.\"\n\nHotflame flexed her wings. \"Fine. But you've got almost a year to think about it. If you change your mind, just let me know.\" She stepped to the edge of the column. \"As entertaining as this conversation has been, it's time to head back. The other Stolen might get suspicious if the two of us spend too long chatting.\"\n\n\"Yes, Hotflame,\" Torch said dutifully, hiding his relief.\n\nShe kept speaking as she crouched. \"I'll expect another report in three days.\" The snarls and cries of the Draganish words carried clearly over the rush of her wings as she leapt into the air. \"We can talk more then. You're not a bad conversationalist, for a Stolen.\"\n\n\"Yes, Hotflame,\" Torch repeated. At least he wouldn't have to suffer through any of these awkward sessions again.\n\nWas Hotflame lonely? She had to maintain her position of superiority over the other Reds, so she couldn't afford to treat any of them as peers. Maybe that's why she was so eager to talk with Torch, who was no threat to her power. After a few more of these meetings, she might even come to regard Torch as a friend. A brother, the way the humans understood that relationship.\n\nIt was just as well that would never happen. Three days from now, Torch would either be dead or free. Either way, Hotflame would know he'd betrayed her trust. She'd curse the day her long-lost clutchmate had returned to Dragana.\n\nThe thought didn't weaken Torch's commitment to the Stolen cause. But he couldn't help but regret, as he flew across the canyon behind Hotflame, that fate had made them enemies instead of siblings."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "\"Thank you,\" Torch said as the guard finished roasting the deer he'd allowed Torch to kill. The guard grunted acknowledgment and moved on to the next Stolen's kill. The other guard was doing the same for other members of the work crew. Torch tore off a hot, juicy chunk and swallowed it, keeping his gaze downcast so the guards wouldn't realize he was watching them intently.\n\nThey finished with the prisoner's kills and moved on to their own. Torch gulped another bite of venison. He didn't dare act too soon. Every drop of fuel spent cooking was one less the guards could use against them.\n\nFinally the second guard's flame died and he buried his face in the steaming carcass. Torch swallowed, took a deep breath, and hissed, \"Now!\"\n\nHe leapt on the guard and clamped his jaws on the narrow spot just behind his head. Another Stolen landed on the guard's back and locked all four feet around his mast bones, rendering his wings immobile. A third pinned his tail to the ground.\n\nThe guard writhed and spat flame. Torch fought to keep control of his head. He wrapped his claws and tail around the guard's throat and applied choking pressure. But when his flame sputtered, Torch eased his grip. He had to make sure the guard expended all his fuel.\n\nTorch pretended to be weaker than he was and allowed his foe to wrench his neck around. The guard's efforts grew more frenzied. He shot blast after blast toward the dragons pinning his wings and tail. But Torch managed to keep him from scoring any hits, and the three dragons' weight kept him from rearing and bringing his claws into play.\n\nSuddenly the guard whipped his head the other direction, yanking his neck from Torch's jaws. A jet of flame lanced toward the Stolen on the other guard's back. It struck her foreshoulders and washed over her chest and front legs. She screamed but held on. The other guard wrenched his wings up and down, forward and back, but couldn't tear them from her grip.\n\nTorch got his jaws back around his enemy's neck and bit down hard. His teeth pierced the guard's scales and blood filled his mouth. The guard shrieked and flamed wildly. Torch wrestled him around until the fire shot harmlessly across the clearing.\n\nAbruptly the guard's fuel ran out. Torch forced his head to the ground. The guard growled furious curses at him, but the combined efforts of the three Stolen rendered him helpless. A glance showed Torch that the other three Stolen had subdued their opponent as well. Torch panted, gathering his strength. They'd won the first skirmish, but the battle had barely begun.\n\nHe adjusted his claws' grip on the guard's neck, then released his jaws. He put his face close to the guard's and lowered his voice to a menacing snarl. \"I can kill you, or you can yield. Your choice.\"\n\nThe guard coughed a tiny tongue of flame. It grazed Torch's snout, but the sting was so minor he ignored it. \"Hotflame will kill you all.\"\n\n\"If she can.\" Torch tightened his claws. \"Choose.\"\n\nA long pause. Finally the guard growled, \"I yield.\"\n\nTorch kept one foot clamped around the base of his neck but allowed him to raise his head. \"There are three of us and one of you. One wrong move, and we'll kill you. When you make enough fuel to flame again, remember we've got full sacs. We may not be able to light our fuel ourselves, but it would only take one spark from you to ignite it.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" The guard glared at Torch but didn't attempt to break loose.\n\nThe other guard had also yielded to the Stolen. Torch studied the dragon on his back. The scales where the flame had hit were black and shriveled, and a patch of raw flesh oozed blood, but she continued to cling fiercely to the guard's wings. \"Can you fly?\"\n\nShe nodded. Her snout opened a crack, and she croaked, \"I'm fine.\"\n\nTorch could see she was in a lot of pain, but the wound shouldn't hamper her movements much. He doubted hers would be the worst injury the Stolen suffered tonight. He gave her the brief, approving nod of a commanding officer pleased but unsurprised by a soldier's bravery. \"Let me know if it starts to give you trouble. We'll have the humans dress it when we get to the farm.\"\n\nShe bobbed her head in acknowledgement. Torch checked with the leader of the other three Stolen, who was a war veteran. He gave Torch a confident nod. Torch moved to a spot between the two captive guards. \"Flank them,\" he ordered. The Stolen on their backs and tails disengaged and moved to press close to their sides.\n\nTorch looked back and forth between the guards. \"We're flying back to the farm. Cooperate, and no harm will come to you. Resist, and we'll do whatever it takes to bring you down. Three of us fought in the Dragon War. We've killed dragons before, and we won't hesitate to do it again.\"\n\nHe waited until both guards jerked their heads in grim assent, then leapt into the air along with the leader of the other team. They wheeled to watch while the guards and their escorts took to the air, then assumed positions immediately above. Torch's leg muscles remained tense, ready to drive his claws into the guard's back, but as they progressed toward the farm without incident he let himself relax a fraction.\n\nJuniper had wanted them to simply kill the guards, but she'd been in the minority. Most of the Stolen had supported Torch's plan to capture them if possible. They were reluctant to kill Draganans unless absolutely necessary. The veterans, especially, had seen far too much death to want to slaughter more dragons if it could be avoided.\n\nTorch hadn't been sure the guards would yield, but he'd hoped they'd take the chance to survive once they realized they couldn't prevail. They'd become guards because they liked ordering around helpless prisoners, not out of selfless devotion to Hotflame's cause. They wouldn't sacrifice their lives for her if they had an alternative.\n\nHis analysis had proved right, at least for these two. He'd see how the other teams of Stolen had fared when they got back to the farm. If even one guard escaped to warn Hotflame, the odds of his plan succeeding would plummet.\n\nAs they approached the farm, Torch's spirits soared. Two dragons lay trussed securely by ropes swathing their wings and bodies. Mobs of humans surrounded two more, wrapping lengths of rope wherever they could get purchase and staking them to the ground. Torch was pleased to see that the prisoners had multiple loops binding their snouts closed and more immobilizing their claws. They could probably manage to work free of their bonds eventually, but it would take hours, even after the Stolen and humans had left.\n\nHumans swarmed the two guards when Torch and his team forced them to the ground. Torch watched them wrestle ropes into place until he was certain they had matters well in hand. Then he went to find Mouse, the interpreter. The small gray dragon and his human partner were deep in conversation with the human in charge of the farm, a weatherbeaten old Forlish man. All three broke off and turned to Torch as he approached.\n\n\"Are the seats ready?\" Torch asked. Mouse had passed word of their plans to her human partner, and he'd relayed them to the farmers. They'd sent their approval and their promise to comply with Torch's request, but carrying out the negotiations through so many intermediaries made Torch nervous. It would only take one broken link in the chain to ruin everything.\n\nThe old farmer nodded when the human interpreter relayed the question. \"Nearly. Now that we can work openly, it will go faster.\"\n\nMouse started to translate, but Torch interrupted. \"It's all right. I understand Forlish.\" He addressed the farmer. \"Bring as many seats as you've got into the fields, where dragons can easily land to pick them up. They've all got to be finished by morning.\"\n\n\"We'll work all night, if necessary,\" the man told him after hearing the translation. He stepped forward and laid his hand on Torch's neck. \"Thank you for including your fellow captives in your escape. You could have abandoned us, but you didn't. We'll won't forget.\"\n\n\"Think nothing of it,\" Torch told him, uncomfortable with the praise. \"We need your help if this going to work.\"\n\n\"As we need yours.\" The farmer stepped back and gave Torch a brisk Forlish military salute.\n\nMore teams of Stolen winged in, escorting captured guards. Torch moved to the side and watched as guard after guard was efficiently bound. He kept count, breathing easier as the total mounted toward the tally he'd carefully taken that morning.\n\nAbout three-quarters of the teams had returned when a burst of flame erupted in the sky. Screams and bellows echoed over the fields. Torch sprang into the air, beating hard upward as he struggled to make sense of the tangle of dragon bodies and billows of flame.\n\nThree of the Stolen struggled to stay aloft, slashes and burns marking their wings. A fourth frantically sprayed fuel at the two guards' faces. Most of his shots splashed harmlessly across their scales, but as Torch watched one of the guards puffed a tiny, precise tongue of fire. The Stolen's fuel ignited with a roar. The flame flashed through the cloud of mist and into his mouth before he could snap his jaws shut. Torch watched helplessly as the Stolen recoiled, choking. Strangled gasps turned into agonized shrieks. His wingbeats faltered and he dropped, flailing and fighting for breath.\n\nTorch arrowed for the guard, along with many other Stolen who'd flocked to help. They surrounded him and forced him down. More Stolen did the same with the other guard. Once both were safely grounded and humans took over binding them, Torch hurried to where the four wounded Stolen had landed.\n\nHumans and dragons clustered around them. Three were badly injured but would recover, from what Torch knew of battle wounds. The one who'd gotten a mouthful of fire, however, lay limp and nearly motionless, only his agonized, rasping breaths showing he still lived.\n\n\"He inhaled flame,\" Torch heard one of the dragons report. \"His lungs are burned.\"\n\nThe human crouching by the injured dragon's head ceased her efforts to look into his throat. She sat back on her heels, her shoulders drooping. \"It's hopeless, then,\" she said in Forlish. \"There's nothing I can do.\"\n\nThe other humans and dragons fell silent in grim agreement. The wounded dragon's breaths grew slower and more labored. The woman who'd spoken stroked his face and scratched around his horns.\n\nTorch forced himself to stand vigil until the tortured gasps finally ceased. Then he launched wearily into the air and circled the farm, counting the staked, rope-swathed lumps scattered around the fields. When he finished, he let out a long sigh, then counted again to be sure. All the guards were there. The first phase of his plan was complete. The Stolen had won the battle with only a single casualty.\n\nTorch landed and walked among the milling dragons, quietly issuing orders. The humans pumped well water into the livestock troughs and everyone drank their fill. Those who hadn't eaten enough to sustain them before falling on their guards ripped into a few quickly slaughtered beasts.\n\nWhen preparations were complete, Torch led the Stolen into the sky. They assembled into chevrons and winged west through the fading twilight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Henri",
                "text": "Torch might not have been able to find his way back to the mine on his own, but the other Stolen had worked there many times and knew the landmarks to watch for. The chevrons reached the mountain that loomed over the mine as full dark descended. They rounded it, coming in low over the trees so they wouldn't be spotted until it was too late. Their timing was perfect. When they arrived at the mine all the dragons were still on the ground, waiting for the last few Stolen to emerge from the tunnel.\n\nTorch bellowed a battle cry. Flames erupted everywhere. The Stolen of the mine crew turned on their bewildered, panicked guards, snapping sparkers and exhaling fire. The farm crew circled overhead, stooping on the few guards who manage to get aloft, slashing their backs and rending their wings.\n\nTorch searched until he located Swiftflight. The big maroon dragon had rallied a dozen guards into a tight circle, tails inward. They shot precisely aimed jets of flame at any Stolen who approached.\n\nThe veterans on the mine crew could match their skill, but many of the Stolen were flaming for the first time, using sparkers the humans had slipped to them over the course of the day. They'd paid close attention to Torch's lessons and diligently practiced spraying fuel, but no amount of theory could completely prepare them for the reality of actually having one of the devices between their teeth. Showy but mostly ineffectual billows of fire burst from their mouths, threatening their allies as often as their enemies. Torch had reluctantly decided the advantage of smuggling sparkers into the caves wasn't worth the risk of discovery, but now he feared he'd chosen wrong.\n\nHe gathered himself to attack Swiftflight from above, but a shout interrupted him. \"Hey, Torch!\" Otter called, swooping close to his side. \"Catch!\"\n\nOn Otter's back, Lia drew back her arm and thrust it forward. A small, dark shape hurtled at Torch's face. He opened his mouth and snatched it from the air.\n\nThe sparker was Mamournan style, designed to fit over a dragon's back teeth rather than clip to a bit. For several long minutes Torch struggled with it, working his jaws and tongue to maneuver the device into place. At least three times he nearly dropped it, but finally it settled firmly into the back of his mouth. Torch snapped his jaws, rejoicing in the burst of sparks that showered into the night.\n\nHe oriented on his target and dove steeply into the center of the circle of guards, approaching from Swiftflight's rear. Using the discipline he'd perfected during the war, he held his fire until the last possible moment. With Swiftflight mere feet below him, Torch snapped the sparker and exhaled a burst of fuel. The jet of flame struck the nape of her neck between her backswept horns. She reared and beat her wings, bringing them within reach of Torch's claws. A slash tore their membranes into long, fluttering ribbons. Swooping up, he ducked his head between his front legs to breathe a final blast of flame into the face she raised to return his attack.\n\nHe yanked his head to the side and her flame shot past it. Heat washed his neck and chest and forelegs, but only for a moment before his wings carried him out of range. Nothing hurt enough to keep him from banking through a tight turn and huffing another jet into Swiftflight's upturned face.\n\nHer head was a blackened, blistered ruin, her eyes blank cinders swimming in blood, but she oriented on him unerringly and spat the last of her flame into a cloud that enveloped his head. The whole world was fire. Torch clamped his eyes shut, snapped his jaws, and emptied his fuel sacs in a blazing shower.\n\nSqueezing his nostrils closed, he beat into the sky. Only when his body's demand for air became unendurable did he open his eyes. Seeing darkness, he risked a tiny inhale. When it entered his lungs without pain, he gasped a deep, desperate breath.\n\nPanting, he circled, taking stock of his injuries. Everything hurt, but nothing seemed too damaged to function. He scanned the ground below.\n\nSwiftflight lay dead. Flaming Stolen overwhelmed the rest of her circle of guards. Many other guards were pinned beneath clusters of dragons. A few skirmishes still raged, but everywhere Torch looked guards were falling or yielding.\n\nDragon corpses dotted the battlefield. From above, Torch couldn't tell which were Stolen and which were guards. But it was clear the Stolen had triumphed for the second time that night.\n\nTorch joined a handful of other Stolen who were still flying. They circled, watching for any guard who tried to break away. But none did. When Torch was certain every surviving hostile dragon was under control, he gave the signal to land.\n\nTorch backwinged and dropped his claws to the earth in a clear spot near the smoking corpses of the circle of guards. He stared grimly at Swiftflight's body. He'd killed a Red. Hotflame might have forgiven him his other transgressions, but not that. She'd be determined to kill him now.\n\nTorch didn't intend to give her the chance. But he might have no choice but to kill her instead.\n\nTorch breathed deeply for a few minutes, gathering his composure and determination for the next phase of his plan. Just as he was about to start looking for Otter and Lia, a boy ran up, carrying a basket nearly as big as he was. He babbled at Torch in rapid Mamournan.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Torch told him. \"I don't understand Mamournan, only Forlish.\"\n\nThe boy switched to Forlish, speaking just as fast. \"Pardon me, mister dragon, sir. I have a load of sparkers for the prisoners in the Thousand Caves.\" He hefted the basket and shook it, producing a metallic rattle. \"Would you prefer to carry it in your claws, or do you want me to rig a harness to hold it beneath you?\" He sucked in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. \"Or may I ride you and carry it on your back? Please, mister dragon, sir, that would be the best. Much easier and more comfortable for you. I'm strong but very light, so you'll hardly notice my weight, I promise.\"\n\nTorch squinted at the boy. At first he'd assumed he was very young, perhaps five or six. But now he saw that he must be older, probably ten or eleven. Around the age Amma had been when she became his rider. But this boy was much shorter than she'd been even at the beginning, with the stocky torso and short limbs of a dwarf.\n\nThe boy rushed on, his words tumbling over each other with barely a breath between. \"We have a saddle and belt I can use so I don't fall off. It belonged to my father; he rode a dragon during the war. When we heard about the plans to escape, I got it out and cleaned it and sewed up the torn places. Just in case I got the chance to ask a dragon to let me ride.\" He gazed at Torch with big, pleading eyes.\n\nThe last thing Torch needed was a child to worry about keeping safe. But having a human's deft hands available could prove immensely valuable. And he'd be in little more danger on Torch's back than anywhere else during tonight's escape.\n\n\"Maman has a rifle she taught me how to shoot,\" the boy added. \"I hunt ducks and geese when the dragons don't bring us enough food.\"\n\nThat settled it. \"Fetch it, and the harness, too. Leave the sparkers with me.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you, mister dragon, sir!\" The boy dumped the basket at Torch's feet and ran off.\n\nTorch poked his head through the basket's handle and settled the heavy, clanking load against his chest. He headed toward the cluster of buildings to locate Otter, Lia, and Claudio and discuss the night's final task\u2014freeing the rest of the Stolen from their prison in the Thousand Caves.\n\nClaudio was talking earnestly to Otter when Torch found them in front of the settlement's biggest building. The miner turned to Torch and poured out a torrent of Fogellan, his hands waving to emphasize his points. Otter translated. \"I still think attacking the dragons' stronghold is foolish. We should stay where we can defend ourselves. There's room for everyone inside the mine, even after you bring those from the farms here. All Hotflame's legions won't be able to burn us out. We have enough food and water to last for weeks. The gunsmiths will have time to craft weapons for everyone who can shoot. Once we're better armed, we can send sorties to liberate the other human camps. You can free the rest of the dragon work crews while they're out of the caves. There's no need to risk everything tonight.\"\n\nTorch had considered many plans, including that one. He'd discussed the possibilities at exhaustive length with every Stolen and human who'd fought in the war, especially those who'd held leadership positions. In the end, his choice had been clear. But he struggled to recall the reasons. They seemed less compelling now, next to the stark reality of fire and death. \"We have to take Hotflame by surprise. We'll never defeat her if she has time to prepare. Someone's probably already told her the farm crew is running late.\"\n\nThe farm crew was usually the first to return to the caves, since hunting was impractical after sundown. But the other Stolen had told him that occasionally a party ventured many miles into the wilderness after prey and didn't make it back to the farm until well after dark. The guards always waited until the whole crew had reassembled to escort the Stolen back to their prison. Today's delay shouldn't make Hotflame suspicious until they still hadn't returned when all the other crews had reported in for the night. That, combined with the way the light work left them relatively fresh, was why Torch had chosen the farm crew to support the mine crew in seizing the vital sparkers.\n\nTorch eased the basket to the ground and slid his neck and head free while he continued. \"The rest of the Stolen are expecting us. As soon as all the other crews have returned, they're going to rush the guards and overwhelm them. They'll be waiting for us where the prison tunnel meets the main branch.\" Juniper would be leading them. Torch had confirmed her role that morning, when the day's assignments had been announced and she'd been placed on a digging crew. \"You're not asking me to abandon them, are you?\"\n\nClaudio grimaced when Lia translated Torch's words. \"No,\" he grudgingly admitted. \"But I fear what will happen if you fail. Without dragons fighting on our side, my people will have no chance.\"\n\n\"We won't fail. So far everything is going just as I hoped. Better, even. We've taken fewer casualties than I planned for.\"\n\nThe smith glanced around, eyes lingering on the many dragon carcasses strewn about the camp. Torch couldn't blame him for his doubtful tone. \"If you say so.\"\n\n\"I do.\" Torch put all the confidence he could muster into his tone. Hopefully his attitude would come across, even though Claudio had to wait for Lia's translation to learn the meaning of his words. \"You've got the claw blades?\"\n\n\"Over there.\" Claudio gestured to one of the sheds. Dragons crowded around it, with humans crouched by their front feet. Torch recognized several of the veterans he'd chosen to wield the weapons. \"You can pick up yours as soon as you're ready.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Torch surveyed the camp. All the preparations seemed to be going according to plan. Some dragons were already in the air. \"Keep hauling water until everyone's drunk their fill. Finish distributing the blades and sparkers and get harnesses onto those who're carrying riders.\" Otter's saddle was already in place, and Lia was dressed in flying gear, with goggles perched on her head and pistols holstered at her sides. \"We're taking off in a quarter hour.\"\n\nClaudio nodded curtly when Lia finished. \"It will be done.\" He strode off toward the thickest concentration of humans and dragons.\n\nTorch retrieved the basket of sparkers and worked his way through the crowd, stopping to deal with several crises along the way. When he reached the shed, the last of the dragons there was flexing his claws, studying the way the long, curved blades moved. Torch thrust a forepaw at the human holding the only remaining set. \"Put them on me.\"\n\nShe complied, slipping the sockets over Torch's claws much faster and more efficiently than he could have managed on his own. When all five blades were firmly in place, he gave them a few practice swipes, then offered his other foot. After she finished placing the second set, he thanked her and walked gingerly away from the buildings. At first he was nervous that he'd scrape the blades on the ground. But they were set at an angle that allowed him to walk fairly normally without damaging them, as long as he kept most of his weight on his pads and didn't dig his claws into the dirt.\n\nAs Torch reached a clear area, Henri rushed up. The boy had donned flying gear a few sizes too big for him, and a long rifle was slung across his back. He clutched a saddle in his arms, with its harness straps draped over both shoulders. \"Here I am,\" he called, panting. \"Would you please crouch down so I can put this on you?\"\n\nTorch complied. He'd half hoped Henri would forget or back out of his mission, but he should have known better. The boy threw the saddle onto Torch's back and scrambled around him, fastening straps in place. He seemed to be familiar with the task, because he only hesitated a few times, and everything ended up in the right place. Torch extended a foreleg, and Henri clambered up and plopped into the saddle. \"As soon as I get my belt attached, you can pass the basket of sparkers up.\"\n\n\"I think it will work better to keep it around my neck,\" Torch told him. He didn't like the idea of it perched precariously on his shoulders, with only the boy's arms to hold it in place.\n\n\"Are you sure? The handle doesn't rub your scales too much?\" Henri peered at where the basket's wicker handle circled Torch's neck. \"It looks like you got burned.\"\n\n\"It's fine,\" Torch said shortly. In fact, though that portion of his neck was only lightly scorched, the heavy basket drove the rough handle uncomfortably into his tender flesh. But the wicker appeared strong enough to support the sparkers' weight without falling apart, at least as far as the caves. Above them, chevrons were forming as dragons took to the air. \"Are you ready to take off?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" Henri's legs gripped Torch's neck, just the way Amma's used to. Torch shook off the rush of nostalgia. Now was no time to wallow in wistful memories.\n\n\"Hold on tight.\" Torch twisted his neck to glance at Henri as he crouched and spread his wings. \"It will be pretty jerky while I'm climbing. But you won't fall, and things will smooth out when I start flying level.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Henri said again, more subdued than Torch had yet heard him. His legs clamped tighter, and his hands clung to a pair of leather loops attached to the saddle. His face was pale, his eyes round, and his lips a thin line.\n\n\"Pull your goggles down,\" Torch reminded him.\n\n\"Oh. Yes, sir.\" Henri tugged them into place, then renewed his grip.\n\nNothing Torch could say would relieve his nervousness. Only experience could teach him to overcome his fear. Torch hoped the reality of flying lived up Henri's fantasies.\n\nHe leapt into the air and swept his wings down. Henri's weight jolted awkwardly on his shoulders, and the basket of sparkers banged against his chest. But by the time Torch leveled out and took his place at the point of a forming chevron, Henri had figured out how to brace himself against Torch's wingbeats. He whooped, the sound reaching Torch's ears faintly before the rushing wind tore it away.\n\nSatisfied that the boy would be fine, Torch turned his attention to the assembling dragons. He spotted many baskets of sparkers hanging around necks or clutched in claws. Several other dragons also bore riders, all armed with rifles or pistols. Each of the chevron leaders wore claw blades. Torch ran his tongue over his sparker and flexed the muscles around his fuel sacs. They were still mostly empty, but the flight back would give them time to partially refill. None of the dragons who'd spent all their fuel taking the mining camp would be at full capacity when they got to the caves. But they should have sufficient flame to last until they joined the Stolen with full sacs coming from the prison, as long as they were careful about how they used it.\n\nThe chevrons circled until all the dragons were aloft and had taken their places in the formation. Almost three hundred dragons crowded the dark sky over the mine. When Torch was certain everyone was ready, he cried the order to set out and peeled away toward the east. His chevron matched the maneuver, followed by the rest. They winged through the night with fierce, deadly purpose.\n\n\"How are you doing?\" Torch called to Henri.\n\n\"Great!\" A little trepidation still undercut the enthusiasm of Henri's reply, but his legs had loosened from a frantic death grip to one that was merely firm. It was clear he was dealing as well as any human ever did with being hundreds of feet in the air for the first time. His high-pitched voice carried over the wind nearly as well as Draganish. \"What do you want me to do when we get to the caves?\"\n\n\"Just stay put. Don't shoot anything unless I tell you to. Be ready to jump off if I give the order. You know how to use the quick release on your straps?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Torch twisted his neck back to look at his rider. \"I expect you to do exactly as I say, whatever that is. Even if you disagree, or have a better idea, or even think I'm crazy. I'm your commanding officer, and your responsibility is to obey me. Understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Henri nodded sharply.\n\nTorch hoped he meant it. He didn't know how he'd enforce his orders if Henri chose to ignore them. Always before when he'd borne a rider, Torch had been the one obeying. At least the boy didn't know Torch was as new to command as Henri was to flying.\n\n\"Now be quiet until we reach the caves. We don't want anyone to hear us coming until the last possible moment.\"\n\nHenri bobbed his head rapidly, pinching his lips shut. Torch resisted the urge to chuckle and straightened his neck.\n\nIt was wonderful to have a rider again. The years he'd spent with Amma had been the happiest of his life. It was far too soon to hope Henri might become a dear friend and companion the way she'd been, but Torch wistfully imagined the possibility anyway. As a dwarf, Henri would never grow too heavy for Torch to carry. They could be partners for the human's whole life.\n\nGrimly, Torch dismissed those idle thoughts and refocused on the coming battle. His first priority had to be surviving. The odds weren't terribly high he would. If Hotflame and the Reds proved stronger than he'd estimated or surprised him with some unanticipated strategy, this whole rebellion might crumble. Only if the Stolen managed to triumph against far greater numbers and escape without Torch losing his life in the process would he have the luxury of dreaming about the future."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Battle of the Thousand Caves",
                "text": "The canyon was deserted as the Stolen glided toward the dark circle of the entrance to the Thousand Caves. Torch sucked in a deep, relieved breath. The Draganans must not suspect anything yet. They'd retired to their home caves as usual, oblivious to the rebellion taking place. The Stolen would face only the normal handful of guards stationed inside the grand entrance hall until the alarm spread and roused the sleeping dragons. Even then it would take many long minutes for them to assemble from their widely scattered residences. Torch was counting on darkness and confusion to hamper their enemies while the organized, disciplined Stolen made their escape.\n\nA quick glance at Hotflame's favorite column confirmed it was empty. Not surprising, since the last glow of sunset had faded from the western horizon more than an hour ago. Torch didn't know how far Hotflame's sleeping cavern was from the entrance, or where the rest of the Reds would be coming from, but at least they weren't ranged along the canyon's rim, waiting to unleash flame against the rebels.\n\nAccording to plan, the Stolen had changed formation when they neared the canyon without meeting any opposition. Most had fallen into two long lines, the way the work crews always traveled to and from their assignments. Others played the role of guards, flanking the columns on both sides. The groups had split up, one continuing to approach on the straight path from the mine, while the other peeled off and circled to enter the canyon from the direction of the farm.\n\nTorch had taken Swiftflight's place at the front of the mine crew. He was only slightly larger than the dead Red, and in the darkness his brighter color shouldn't be obvious. At Torch's hissed direction, Henri had flattened himself along Torch's neck, and the rest of the riders had taken the same position. A casual glance would show nothing but the mine crew returning home just as they did every evening, with the tardy farm crew not far behind.\n\nTorch's heart thudded as he swooped toward the gaping hole in the canyon wall. His ears strained for the first cry of alarm. His eyes scanned forward and back, up and down, side to side, searching for any movement. His teeth clamped on his sparker and his claws clenched on their blades. Every muscle tensed in anticipation of discovery and battle.\n\nAs Torch passed through the ring of stone into the soaring main cavern, the guards perched to either side called sleepy greetings to Swiftflight. Torch gave them each a vague nod, not daring to meet their eyes or voice a reply. He headed for the tunnel that led to the prison, tail and hindquarters prickling.\n\nHe was halfway there when a guard's voice reached him, its tone rising in puzzlement. \"Hey, Swiftflight, what's that on your\u2014\"\n\nIt broke off, then resumed, sharp and angry, accompanied by a burst of light that illuminated the farthest reaches of the cavern. \"Halt, intruder!\"\n\nTorch accelerated, not looking back. The voice rose to a bellow. \"Alarm! Alarm! We're under attack!\" The cries cut through the cavern, echoing from every surface.\n\nA gun cracked and the voice abruptly fell silent. Flames burned brighter, then went out. Torch didn't slow. The others knew the plan. Some would hang back to guard their rear and keep their path of retreat open, while the rest keep going until they met the Stolen emerging from the prison.\n\nTorch made it into the tunnel and through the first two turns before a dragon burst from a side tunnel and sent a jet of flame at his head. Torch dodged and the dragon behind him returned fire, scoring a hit on the attacker's wing. The wounded dragon screamed and plowed into the stone floor. Torch recovered and kept flying.\n\nMore dragons poured into the tunnel, ahead and behind and from both sides. Torch sent economical bursts of fire at the wings of the enemies in his path, soaring over them when they dropped and leaving them for those behind to finish off. He lurched right, left, and right again, avoiding flames and claws. A slash of his claw blades cut deep gashes in a foe's neck. Blood spurted, splashing Torch's flank. The dragon tumbled to the floor, and Torch kept going.\n\nChoked and breathless, Henri asked, \"Should I shoot them?\"\n\n\"Save your bullets,\" Torch told him. He twisted aside to avoid an enemy's snapping jaws, then ducked to dodge a lance of flame. \"You won't be able to hit anything while we're jerking around so much.\n\nHenri didn't answer, but he must have accepted Torch's order, because no shots sounded from Torch's back. The other riders were holding their fire, also. Only an occasional crack echoed down the corridor, most of them without effect that Torch could see.\n\nThey turned into another tunnel, this one empty, at least for the moment. The prison wasn't far ahead. Another turn would bring them to the low, narrow passage that led there.\n\nA dark shape loomed ahead. Many more crowded behind, on the floor and in the air, completely blocking the passage as far as Torch could see. Despair crashed over Torch as he called an order to land and settled to the stone floor.\n\nHe sucked in his breath, tensing his neck muscles. There was only enough fuel in his sacs for about three more shots. He'd make them count, but he couldn't see any way to defeat the sheer number of dragons they faced.\n\n\"Torch!\" a familiar voice cried.\n\nTorch choked off his breath. Sparks stung his mouth and bitter drops of fuel pooled on his tongue. \"Juniper! I wasn't expecting you to make it this far.\"\n\n\"We didn't have much choice,\" she told him grimly. \"They kept coming, and we kept fighting. It was either advance or retreat to the prison. We decided we'd rather die on our way out than let them drive us back in.\"\n\nTorch gulped. \"How many have you lost?\"\n\n\"Too many.\" Juniper shook her head. \"Have you got the sparkers?\"\n\n\"Right here.\" Torch let the basket slide to the floor and pulled his neck free of its handle.\n\nJuniper poked her snout into the basket. \"Let's get them distributed.\" She took one between her teeth and raised her head. More Stolen crowded up to the basket and snagged the devices.\n\nTorch grimaced as he watched them work their tongues and jaws. The veterans among them settled the sparkers in place quickly, but those without experience struggled. \"This is going to take longer than I planned.\" His heart sank as he tried to calculate just how long. The estimate kept getting longer as the novices' awkward efforts met with little success. \"I didn't realize how hard it would be to get them into position.\"\n\n\"I can help!\" Abruptly the weight on Torch's shoulders was gone and Henri rushed forward. He seized a sparker in each hand and thrust them fearlessly into eager dragon mouths. With him holding them in the proper orientation, the devices slipped into place easily.\n\nJuniper dropped her head so Henri could reach her mouth. He slid his hand between her teeth and adjusted her sparker. Juniper raised her head and peered down the corridor behind Torch. \"How many humans do you have with you?\"\n\n\"More than a dozen.\" While Henri dragged the basket along the tunnel, passing sparkers to Stolen left and right, Torch sent orders down the line. Soon every rider was busy placing the devices between dragon teeth.\n\nTorch sent the newly equipped dragons to spread out among the work crews, whose fuel reserves were nearly depleted. He established defensive positions, stationing veterans with full sacs at both ends of the stretch of corridor occupied by the Stolen. They'd fought off several attacks by the time every Stolen had received a sparker and all the riders climbed back aboard.\n\n\"Make sure to refasten your straps securely,\" Torch warned Henri as he padded toward what had been the rear of the line and was now the front. \"I probably won't get the chance to warn you before I take off again.\"\n\n\"They're nice and tight,\" Henri reassured him. His voice had lost all fear, returning to the brash bravado with which he'd first hailed Torch. \"Do whatever you need to do. Don't worry about me.\"\n\nTorch nodded. He squeezed through the tightly packed crowd of dragons, murmuring words of encouragement, until he reached the cluster of veterans holding the rear. The stench of smoke and blood and burned meat choked the air. Corpses littered the tunnel beyond. Torch didn't ask how many of the dead were Stolen.\n\n\"The fighting was pretty intense for a while, but they've fallen back,\" the veteran in charge reported. \"If we're ready, we should get moving now, before they regroup.\"\n\n\"We're ready,\" Torch told her. \"Let's go.\"\n\nHe gave the order, and the Stolen took to the air. Thundering wingbeats echoed down the tunnel. Torch led the way, following the path through the twisting maze of corridors that he'd burned into his memory over the past nine days.\n\nThey met no opposition. Torch wanted to believe that meant the Draganans had given up and were letting them go, but he knew better. Their slaves were too valuable to surrender that easily. Probably they'd concluded that fighting in the narrow confines of the tunnels was bad strategy. It sacrificed the advantage their superior numbers gave them. Instead, they'd mass their forces where they could surround and overwhelm the Stolen.\n\nTorch had a plan to deal with that. He just hoped he was right, and the Draganans would prefer not to destroy their entire work force if they could help it. The outcome would be nearly as bad for Dragana if all the Stolen died as if they got away. Maybe even worse. If they fled, the Draganans could hope to recapture them.\n\nHotflame might be too proud to admit it, though. Torch feared that if the Stolen appeared to be on the verge of escape, she'd order her forces to slaughter them all. She might rather condemn the Draganans to hauling their own garbage forever than suffer defeat.\n\nTorch landed a hundred yards back from the place where the tunnel opened into the entrance cavern, giving the order to halt. Veterans settled around him. Torch chose a few to accompany him, and they crept forward until they could peer into the cavern.\n\nTorch gulped. The entire soaring space was a blur of beating wings. Flames flickered constantly, casting a warm glow on the intricate carvings decorating the ceiling and walls. To his despairing glance, it seemed as if thousands of dragons wheeled and swooped between the tunnel and the round opening high in the wall to their left.\n\nHe rallied his courage. They didn't have a choice. No matter how hopeless his scheme now appeared, they had to give it their best attempt. It was that or surrender, and Torch knew he'd never persuade the Stolen to abandon the fight.\n\nHe turned to the veterans. \"Let's review the plan.\" He'd covered the basics with everyone, but they hadn't been able to predict exactly who would be positioned to lead the charge. \"When I give the signal, start working your way across the cavern. Everyone with full sacs will be right behind you. Clear the Draganans from the area in front of the tunnel and spread toward the entrance. As soon as you've got a path open all the way across, I'll start sending those who're out of fuel down it. Once they're outside they'll head for the rendezvous at the farm. As you run out of fuel, follow them. Those who can still flame will take your place. When everyone's out of the tunnel, we'll shrink the area we control toward the entrance, until the last of us can\u2014\"\n\nWings swept toward the tunnel opening. Torch whirled to face the attacking dragons, sucking in his breath. But before he or anyone else could spray fire, a voice cried, \"Truce! Hold your flame!\"\n\nTwo enormous yellow dragons, their wingspans even wider than Torch's, swooped into the tunnel and settled to the floor. Torch eyed them skeptically, his heart thudding. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"You're the leader of the Stolen, the one they call Torch?\" One of the yellow dragons studied him, while the other turned to watch out the tunnel mouth. She shook her head. \"They said you looked just like Hotflame, but I didn't realize they meant it so literally.\"\n\n\"I'm Torch.\" The veterans around him bobbed their heads. Their gazes remained trained on the yellow dragon, their necks and jaws tense.\n\n\"Greetings, Torch. I'm Hardscale, the leader of the Yellows, and this is my second-in-command, Broadwing. We want to propose an alliance between our kindred and yours.\"\n\nBefore Torch could respond, Juniper's voice rang out. \"It is you!\" She rushed to his side and gaped in astonished wonder at Hardscale. \"Torch, these are the dragons I told you about, that I met at Duskmoor. I didn't realize you were the Yellows' leaders.\"\n\nHardscale peered at her. \"I remember you. You were a messenger, yes? I remember how intently you listened to us. Few showed such passion.\" She arched her neck, lowering her head. \"I challenged for the leadership three years ago, when our former leader announced her intention to abandon our support for the Stolen and petition the Reds to reinstate the privileges they took from the Yellows when they assumed power. Broadwing and I spoke for those who continued to believe that resigning our kin to their fate was too high a price to pay for a few petty luxuries.\"\n\nBroadwing glanced at them over his shoulder. \"Old Skinnyneck capitulated because she knew Hardscale would take her down like a lame deer.\" He jerked his gaze back to the cavern.\n\n\"Slenderneck,\" Hardscale said in a reproving tone. \"She resigned without a fight, and I assumed leadership of the Yellows. We've been working ever since to regain our former prominence.\" She grimaced. \"Your rebellion forced our hand before we were ready. But even so, if we combine our efforts, I believe that together we can defeat the Reds and free the Stolen.\"\n\n\"Of course we\u2014\" Juniper began.\n\nTorch cut her off. \"What exactly are you proposing? If you're offering to help us escape, I'll listen. But I don't think you are. Because I don't see how that would help the Yellows take power.\"\n\nHardscale hesitated. Finally she dipped her head. \"You're right. It wouldn't. But something else would. You're a Red. You can challenge Hotflame for leadership of your kindred.\"\n\nIce swept Torch's body. \"What? I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Any member of a kindred can challenge their leader,\" Hardscale said urgently. \"I've learned as much I could about you since you arrived. I know you fought in the Dragon War. I know you're strong and fast. Your escape attempt has succeeded so far, which proves you share Hotflame's talent for strategy. I think you can defeat her. Then you can throw the Reds' support to the Yellows. We'll immediately lift all restrictions on the Stolen and grant them full citizenship. The burden of labor you've been forced to bear will be again be shared by all, according to our ancient customs. You'll no longer need to escape, because the Thousand Caves will be your home, not your prison.\"\n\nA rush of joy surged through Torch. This would solve everything. No one else would have to die. Hotflame wouldn't be easy to defeat, but neither would he. He had plenty of combat experience, and he was every bit as clever as his sister.\n\nEven if he lost, the delay would buy the Stolen time for their fuel sacs to refill. Maybe Hardscale wouldn't commit to fight on their side if Torch failed, but she should at least agree to keep the Yellows out of the battle. That would sway the odds greatly in their favor.\n\nWhile if he won, all his dearest dreams would come true. He and the other Stolen would finally be free. They'd be accepted as full members of Draganan society. They'd be a part of keeping Dragana safe and independent, the only free dragon civilization in the world.\n\nHe was about to blurt out his acceptance when a slight shift of the weight on his shoulders brought him up short. He froze. \"What about the humans?\"\n\nHardscale twisted her head. \"What about them?\"\n\n\"What do you plan to do about the human captives? They're our partners in this escape. We won't abandon them. Whatever deal we make will have to include their freedom, too.\"\n\nHardscale drew back, casting an uncomfortable glance at Henri before returning her gaze to Torch. \"We can discuss them afterwards. I'm sure we can work something out that satisfies you.\"\n\n\"No. I need to know where you stand now. Are you willing to accept the humans as full citizens of Dragana, too?\"\n\nHardscale jerked her head up and spread her wings. \"Of course not! How dare you even suggest it? Only dragons can be citizens of Dragana. I would think the Stolen would be the first to demand that never change. Why do you care what happens to them, after all they've done to you?\"\n\n\"We should treat humans the same way they treat dragonkind,\" Broadwing chimed in. \"Keep them in cages, with collars and chains around their necks. Exploit them for their labor. Drug them into eager obedience. It's what they deserve.\"\n\nHenri's legs dug into Torch's neck, but he remained silent. Torch drew himself to his full height and spread his wings. He stared into Hardscale's face, his eyes level with hers. \"Then I can't accept your offer.\"\n\nJuniper shoved past him, slamming into his shoulder so hard he lurched to the side. \"I can! Who's the leader of the Greens?\"\n\nHardscale gaped at her for a moment, then recovered. \"His name is Thickleg.\"\n\n\"Will the Yellows support me if I challenge him? The Reds were able to take over because the Greens backed them, correct? If I win the leadership and throw the Greens' support to the Yellows, will that be enough to let you take power from the Reds?\"\n\n\"It very well might.\" Hardscale examined Juniper critically. \"He's bigger than you, but not by much. Supposedly he was a strong fighter in his prime, but that was a long time ago. He hasn't faced a challenge in centuries.\"\n\nHer breath came faster. \"It would depend on how many of the Browns and Grays took our side, but we've been working among them, and I think we can count on at least a third. With the Greens and Yellows united, that should be enough to convince even Hotflame she wouldn't win a battle. Or in the worst case, enough to defeat her if she insists on fighting.\" She gave Juniper a challenging stare. \"You don't share your friend's concern for the humans?\"\n\nJuniper shrugged. \"Do what you want with them. I don't care.\" She kept her gaze fixed on Hardscale, no matter how Torch tried to catch her eye.\n\nHe looked around desperately for any dragon who might support him. Surely Otter would take the humans' part. Lia could argue for her people. But they were somewhere far down the corridor, probably oblivious to the Yellows' presence. So were Mouse and the rest of the translators.\n\nSome of the veterans around him had carried riders during the war, but Torch's frantic glance showed that none of them were wearing a saddle now. Most of them were watching Hardscale and Juniper with varying degrees of approval. Some met his eyes, but looked away. Finally one spoke. \"We need to accept their offer, Torch. It's the best chance we've got. You can negotiate with them about the humans afterward.\"\n\n\"We couldn't have attempted to escape without the humans,\" Torch argued. \"They made the sparkers and gave them to us. They bound the guards. They treated our wounds and shot the enemies trying to kill us. We can't betray them like this!\"\n\nBut everywhere he looked dragons were shaking their heads or giving him apologetic looks. \"I'm sorry, Torch,\" the veteran said. \"They'll understand.\"\n\n\"No, they won't!\" Torch hated to appeal to Henri. He was only a child. But there was no one else. \"Will they, Henri? Do you?\"\n\nThe boy was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft and frightened, but resolute. \"Papa said dragons are supposed to be free. That's what he fought for. You should, too. Even if that means you can't help us.\"\n\nTorch swallowed and closed his eyes. \"I'm sorry, Henri. I promise, I won't let them keep your people prisoner. Not forever.\" He sucked in a deep breath and turned to Hardscale. \"If Juniper and I both win our challenges, it will be easy. If not, at least we'll have two chances instead of one.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Challenge",
                "text": "Torch perched on the rim of the canyon in the midst of the Stolen. Yellow dragons, ranging in color from brilliant daffodil to tawny orange to dull mustard, mingled among them. The Yellows had eagerly welcomed the handful of yellow-tinted dragons among the prisoners into their ranks. Hardscale and Broadwing crouched on either side of Torch. They gazed down at the scene taking place below, muscles tense.\n\nOn the floor of the canyon, in the broad flat space beneath the entrance of the Thousand Caves, Juniper stood stiff and proud. An olive-green dragon faced her, looking down his snout disdainfully. He was considerably taller than Juniper, and longer as well. Hardscale had said he was old, but the only sign of age Torch could see was the length of his horns. They swept nearly a yard back from his forehead, so smooth and shiny they must have been polished.\n\nOn the canyon rim directly above the entrance, the Greens had assembled to watch the challenge. They looked like a forest suddenly sprung up among the rocks, in shades from springtime leaves to stormy ocean to mossy rocks. Beyond them, the Reds bloomed like flowers, salmon pink to deep rose to sunset scarlet. Across the canyon, Browns in shades of wood and sand mixed with Grays in tones of stone and ash. All of them fixed their attention on the combatants.\n\nJuniper raised her voice. It reverberated from the canyon walls. \"I am a Green. I challenge you, Thickleg, for the leadership of our kindred.\"\n\nThickleg sneered. His voice dripped with scorn. \"You are a Stolen. You have no kindred. I will demonstrate to all dragonkind that you are unworthy of a place in the Thousand Caves, let alone membership in the ancient and honorable Green Kindred.\"\n\nHe paused. Torch's stomach churned. He held his breath.\n\nFinally, with offhand contempt, Thickleg said, \"I will accept your surrender.\"\n\nJuniper stared at him for a long moment before she dipped her snout a barely perceptible degree. \"And I will accept yours.\"\n\nTorch breathed again. Either party could insist the fight go to the death. Now that they'd agreed it wouldn't, both combatants would be required to refrain from attacks likely to prove lethal.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Hardscale murmured. \"I wasn't sure she'd listen to my advice.\"\n\nThe Yellows' leader had urged them both to agree to the milder condition if their opponent offered it. Killing their foes would earn the enmity of the kindreds they hoped to lead, while accomplishing nothing. The humiliation of defeat would discredit the former leaders in their followers' eyes. Magnanimity in victory would make the Stolen appear heroic.\n\nAssuming they won. Torch knew Juniper didn't crave her enemy's death, but he'd feared she might choose to perish rather than return to prison.\n\nHenri leaned against Torch's foreleg, arms wrapped around it and head resting on his shoulder. His clothes were creased and his face was dirty. His mother's rifle on his back was nearly as long as he was. He'd spent the night huddled at Torch's side in the cavern Hardscale had provided. Torch wished there had been some way to return him to his family at the mine. But Hotflame had been adamant that no Stolen or human would be allowed to leave the Thousand Caves before the challenges, and Hardscale had conceded the point.\n\nHotflame had been furious about the challenges, of course. But with the Yellows firmly backing Juniper's and Torch's right to issue them, she'd been forced to allow them to proceed. Torch had watched her eyes travel down the long line of Yellows ranged behind him and Juniper. He'd almost been able to see the calculations going through her mind. Finally she must have reached the conclusion that the two Stolen's chances in single combat were small enough, and the cost of open battle between the kindreds high enough, to make accepting the challenges her better option. Thickleg had blustered, but he'd gone along with her decision.\n\nThe Yellows had escorted the Stolen, along with their handful of riders, to the section of the Thousand Caves their kindred controlled. Hardscale and Broadwing had spent much of the night instructing Juniper and Torch in the traditions and etiquette of leadership challenges and coaching them on what to expect from Thickleg and Hotflame. Torch had fretted about the rest they were missing, but even when the Yellows finally allowed them to retire, he'd only been able to drowse fitfully. Without Henri's warm, trusting body curled against his, he might not have slept at all.\n\nThickleg leapt into the air, followed an instant later by Juniper. They climbed to the height of the canyon rim and leveled out, circling each other. The two dragons made three full revolutions before Thickleg barked, \"Begin!\"\n\nJuniper dove, arrowed beneath Thickleg, and shot a jet of flame upward toward his tailtip, an acceptable target in a non-lethal battle. Thickleg yanked his tail away, the movement ponderous but precise. He wheeled to meet Juniper as she twisted around. She was faster and more flexible, so her flame erupted first. But his aim was more accurate. Thickleg's fire scorched Juniper's wingtip while hers passed harmlessly more than a foot from his.\n\nTorch flinched, but Juniper continued to fly strongly, so the injury couldn't be too severe. She made pass after pass at Thickleg, peppering him with bursts of fire and slashing him with outstretched claws. Her attacks seldom connected, but he was forced to match her rapid pace. He landed several more shots, but gradually his dodges slowed and his wingbeats grew laborious.\n\n\"It's working,\" Broadwing crowed. \"I knew the old longhorn would wear out if she kept him dancing. Keep it up, Juniper! You've got more stamina in your littlest claw than he has in his whole body. Don't let up for a\u2014\" He broke off with a wince as Thickleg lashed out at Juniper's wing and ripped the edge of one membrane into bloody tatters.\n\n\"Her greater vigor won't matter if she keeps letting him wound her,\" Hardscale said grimly. \"She needs to keep her distance and make him work for every hit. Otherwise he'll force her down before she exhausts him.\"\n\nJuniper must have realized the same thing, because she broke away and raced for the far side of the canyon. Thickleg pursued, accelerating as Juniper increased her lead. She dove and twisted, soared and wheeled, crying insults that carried to the spectators. \"You're too slow to catch me, and too weak to hurt me if you do. Give it up, you old geezer! I flew across the ocean to get here. You couldn't fly across a puddle!\"\n\nThickleg ignored her taunts. He flew with methodical economy, cutting his turns tighter and keeping his changes in altitude less extreme than Juniper's extravagant acrobatics. Even as he visibly tired, he drew closer to her.\n\nA rapid turn flung the end of Juniper's tail carelessly close to his head. Thickleg exhaled a stream of flame. It enveloped the tapered green tip. Juniper shrieked and whipped her tail away, but not before several feet crisped to a blackened ruin.\n\nHenri dashed forward, stopping much too close to the canyon's edge for Torch's comfort. He glared at the battling dragons, fists clenched. \"He's going to kill her.\"\n\n\"No, he won't,\" Torch reassured him, though his stomach was churning with fear and empathy for Juniper's pain. \"They agreed.\"\n\n\"That won't stop him. He thinks she should be a slave. He wants to hurt her.\"\n\n\"It was a fair hit,\" Hardscale said. \"Anything that's not likely to kill outright is allowed. Even crippling injuries. They're not uncommon.\"\n\nThe Yellow had said as much while preparing them, but Torch hadn't appreciated just how brutal non-lethal combat could be. He wrapped his tail around Henri's waist and drew him back from the edge. \"Please be careful.\"\n\n\"I'm perfectly\u2014\"\n\nA bellow yanked Torch's attention back to the fight. Juniper dashed away from Thickleg, whose right wingtip was smoking, as dark and blistered as her tail. He chased her with grim, focused fury.\n\nThey must both have been running low on fuel, because when Juniper soared through a twisting loop and came down on top of Thickleg, she raked her claws down his back instead of flaming. He threw his head up and clamped his jaws around her throat. With a mighty wrench, he hurled her over his shoulder. Her wings flailed and she tumbled groundward.\n\nTerror gripped Torch until Juniper's franticly flapping wings caught the air and she swooped up. From Torch's perspective it looked as if she'd come within inches of crashing into the canyon's floor. All around him Yellows and Stolen bellowed in protest. Even the Greens' cheering held a shocked edge.\n\nBroadwing reared, beating his wings. \"That was blatantly illegal! Throats are off-limits, and so are throws. Either the bite or the fall could have been fatal. He's forfeited the challenge.\"\n\n\"Who's going to enforce it? Hotflame? I don't think so.\" Hardscale yanked her head toward where the Red's leader continued to watch the battle, unperturbed. \"She'll be delighted if he kills her.\"\n\n\"While if Juniper kills him, Hotflame will probably declare her victory void because she broke the rules,\" Broadwing said bitterly.\n\n\"Probably. Which means she has to force him to yield. She knows that.\" Hardscale pointed with her snout. \"See? She's not letting him shake her from her strategy.\"\n\nJuniper had resumed harrying Thickleg. She slashed at his wing. Her voice rasped, harsh and furious. \"Hypocrite. You know you can't beat me fairly, so you cheat. So much for your precious honor and tradition.\"\n\nThickleg sneered as he evaded her strike. \"Tradition doesn't protect a worthless piece of garbage like you. The humans broke you and used you up and threw you out. You're a rabid dog in a dragon's body. It will be my honor to put you out of your misery.\"\n\nJuniper didn't reply, but she redoubled her attacks, her body taut with focused rage. She clawed Thickleg's tail until blood flew in a scarlet arc when he yanked it away. She coughed a small but intense flame and scorched his other wingtip. She clamped her jaws around one foreleg and yanked so hard Torch heard a sickening pop. When she released it and wheeled away, the leg hung limp and useless. Thickleg bellowed and drove after her.\n\nJuniper beat skyward, higher and higher, rising far above the canyon's rim. Thickleg pursued relentlessly. Torch rose onto his hind legs, straining to see.\n\nWhen Juniper had opened a substantial lead, she abruptly reversed direction and stooped on her foe. She landed on Thickleg's back, sinking all four sets of claws deep into his hide. Then, to Torch's horror, she folded her wings.\n\nHer weight drove Thickleg down. He beat frantically, but one set of wings couldn't hold two dragons aloft. They plummeted. Thickleg thrashed and bucked and twisted his neck to rip at Juniper's neck and face with his teeth, but she clung with grim determination. They plunged past Torch and dropped toward the canyon floor. Thickleg's frantic flapping barely slowed their fall. Juniper's wings remained tightly closed.\n\nShe was going to kill them both. Torch couldn't bear to watch, but he couldn't tear his eyes away. He sank into a crouch and lunged forward, peering over the canyon's edge.\n\nAt the last possible instant, Juniper's wings blossomed. She released Thickleg and swooped upward. Thickleg nearly succeeded in arresting his fall, but his wings couldn't quite reverse his direction in time. He hit the ground hard. All four legs buckled and his chin plowed into the dirt.\n\nJuniper landed beside him while he was struggling to rise. She put one front paw on Thickleg's neck behind his horns and shoved his head down. \"Surrender,\" she growled.\n\nHe glared up at her with hate-filled eyes. \"Hotflame! I demand you declare this challenge void. The Stolen trash blatantly cheated. That was a lethal attack.\"\n\n\"He's not dead,\" Juniper said. \"If I'd wanted to kill him, I would have.\" She smacked one of Thickleg's unnaturally bent hind legs with her tail. He choked back a scream.\n\nHotflame spread her wings and glided lazily down toward them. Hardscale jumped off the rim and arrowed to meet her. Torch followed a breath behind.\n\nThe three of them landed simultaneously. Hardscale glowered at Hotflame. \"Juniper won fairly. She released Thickleg in time for him to break his fall, which he did. The fact he lives is proof her attack wasn't lethal. If either of them should be disqualified for an illegal attack, it's him.\"\n\n\"Yet Juniper lives. By your logic, that proves his attack was fair.\" Hotflame shook her head decisively. \"The Stolen used an illegal tactic. She's forfeited her challenge. Thickleg remains the Greens' leader.\"\n\n\"I protest!\" Hardscale spread her wings.\n\n\"Noted. But when the leaders of the Noble Kindreds are evenly split, the dominant kindred prevails.\" Hotflame met Hardscale's gaze with quiet menace. \"The Reds rule the Thousand Caves. We will as long as I live.\"\n\nShe shifted her gaze to Torch. He recoiled from the icy fury in her eyes. \"And I will destroy anyone who tries to take my kindred from me.\"\n\nShe turned to Thickleg with barely disguised disgust. \"Get up. Can you walk?\"\n\nHe struggled to his feet. \"Yes, Leader.\"\n\n\"Then clear out.\" She flicked her tail at Torch dismissively. \"I've got another piece of trash to dispose of before I send the prisoners back to their quarters.\" Ignoring Juniper, she turned to Hardscale. \"Get your first defeated challenger out of the way so I can deal with the second.\"\n\nTorch bristled, but Hardscale stepped between him and Hotflame. \"We're ready for the next challenge when you are. Come, Juniper, Torch. There's no need for further protest. Once Torch is leader of the Reds, we can overturn her judgement.\"\n\nTorch sank back. She was right. It didn't matter how convincingly Juniper had defeated Thickleg. Hotflame had never had any intention of letting her claim the Greens' leadership. She would have found some technicality to disqualify her whatever had happened. The only way for Juniper to take her rightfully earned place at the head of the Greens was for Torch to win his challenge, too.\n\nSeveral Greens swooped down and supported Thickleg as he limped toward a ground-level tunnel opening. Juniper ignored the look of haughty satisfaction he shot her. She padded wearily to join Hardscale and Torch. \"I'm sorry. I did my best.\"\n\n\"You've got nothing to be sorry for. You beat him,\" Torch told her. \"That final move was brilliant. As good anything I saw during the war.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, it will all be for nothing unless you defeat that evil tyrant.\" Juniper cast a look of loathing to where Hotflame was speaking quietly with several other Reds.\n\nHer voice took on a note of desperation. \"Are you sure you can do it? Maybe you should withdraw your challenge. We can pretend to be thoroughly defeated and resigned to our fate. In a few months or years we can try again, with more careful planning and better preparation.\" She faltered, then continued in a rush. \"She's going to insist on fighting to the death. I don't want to watch her kill you.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Torch closed his eyes and shook his head. \"I would if I thought it could work, but you know as well as I do that neither of us would survive a week if we tried. Hotflame would have both of us murdered, along with anyone else she suspected might lead another revolt.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Hardscale said. \"This is our only chance.\"\n\nJuniper scowled at her. \"I should have told Torch to stick to our original plan instead of listening to you. We'd all be free now if I had.\"\n\n\"Or dead,\" Torch said quickly. He understood Juniper's anger, but nothing would be gained by antagonizing their ally. \"I can beat Hotflame. Then we'll all be better off than if we'd escaped.\"\n\n\"You'd better.\" Juniper stepped forward and laid her head against his neck. The smooth green scales of her neck pressed into the side of his face. Startled, Torch froze. Then, heart pounding, he returned the pressure.\n\n\"Don't die,\" she murmured. \"I've been looking forward to next autumn ever since you got here.\"\n\nShe pulled away and leapt into the air. Torch stared after her as she flew wearily to join the other Stolen on the rim of the canyon.\n\nThe emotions roused by her words and touch were far too complex to sort out when he would be fighting for his life in a few minutes. Torch walled them away. He'd figure out what they meant later, after the fight.\n\nIf he survived.\n\nJuniper settled beside Broadwing. Torch glimpsed the tiny figure between them and gulped. He turned to Hardscale. \"If\u2026 If I can't, will you make sure Henri gets back to his family safely? They work at the mine. I know you don't care about the humans, but please, do it as a favor to me. Because I tried to help you.\"\n\nHardscale bobbed her head. \"I will. I promise.\" She smacked his rump with her tail. \"Now go show Hotflame she's wrong about the Stolen.\" She launched into the air and soared to join Broadwing and Juniper.\n\nTorch flew the short distance to the spot where Juniper and Thickleg had stood at the beginning of their challenge. The Stolen bugled and screeched their encouragement. The Yellows joined in enthusiastically.\n\nTo Torch's surprise, a substantial number of the Browns and Grays on the far side of the canyon added their voices to the din. Even a few Greens called his name. The Reds remained silent, but when Hotflame finished addressing them and glided down to land before Torch, their calls of support seemed weaker than he would have expected. Although maybe that was only wishful thinking.\n\nHotflame settled to the ground before him. Torch drew himself up to his full height, which matched hers so precisely. They stared at each other.\n\n\"I never trusted you,\" Hotflame said softly. \"Not really. You're too much like me. I knew you couldn't be content for long anywhere but at the top.\"\n\n\"Then you should have known I'd be just as loyal to my kindred as you are to yours.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You should have been more patient. If you'd spent longer working your way into my favor before you betrayed me, eventually I would have introduced you to the other Reds. You could have earned enough of their support to make defeating me a true victory. It won't be now, you know, even if you should pull off some underhanded trick like your friend did. They'll never accept you as their leader.\"\n\n\"Maybe not.\" Torch spread his wings. \"It doesn't matter. I'm not fighting for them.\"\n\n\"Which is why you'll lose.\" Hotflame backed up a few steps and waited.\n\nTorch took a deep breath and put all the force he could muster behind the traditional words. \"I am a Red. I challenge you, Hotflame, for the leadership of our kindred.\"\n\nShe answered him with effortless power, her voice ringing through the canyon. \"You are nothing. I will show every dragon of the Thousand Caves who deserves to lead them.\" She fixed him with a pitiless stare. \"I will not accept your surrender.\"\n\nTorch forced the words out past his thundering heart. \"Nor will I accept yours.\"\n\nShe nodded curtly and leapt into the air. Torch crouched, thrust his hind legs, and swept his wings down. They climbed side by side until they reached the rim of the canyon, then separated and wheeled in opposite directions. Torch felt the eyes of every dragon lining the edges of the canyon on him as he swept through the three customary circles.\n\nHe struggled to remember the strategies Hardscale had recommended. He wouldn't have the advantages Juniper had used against Thickleg. Hotflame matched Torch in youth and strength. She'd fought and won several challenges since the one that made her leader of the Reds, and trained regularly to be prepared for the next. This would be a long, vicious battle. Torch would have to match Hotflame's cleverness and ruthlessness if he was going to win.\n\nHe tensed as they neared the end of the third circle. As the one challenged, Hotflame would call the start. Torch flexed the muscles around his bulging fuel sacs and breathed deeply.\n\nHotflame cried, \"Begin!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "To the Death",
                "text": "Torch flew straight at Hotflame, snapping his jaws and tensing his throat. She drove straight toward him. Torch sprayed flame into her face. It met the gust of her burning breath. The two jets merged and swelled into a fiery ball, neither reaching their target.\n\nTorch kept exhaling. So did Hotflame. At the last possible instant before they collided, both of them veered aside. Torch tried to rake his flame down her neck, but his lungs were empty. He clamped his mouth shut and sucked air through his nostrils. A stray spark went down his throat, but he ignored the streak of pain. Nothing else hurt, so Hotflame's breath must have run out at the same moment his did.\n\nHe wheeled to find her charging him again, spewing flame. He dove, keeping his jaws closed. If she wasted her fuel while he conserved his, he'd be able to get in a few unopposed shots after she ran out. A wash of heat bathed his tail, but before it reached painful intensity he pulled farther ahead and it faded.\n\nTorch wrenched all his downward momentum into a sudden upward swoop. He shot past Hotflame, who'd cut off her flame the moment she realize it was doing no good. She reacted with blazing speed, whipping through a lithe turn before he could reverse direction and fall onto her back. A burst of flame scorched his shoulder, forcing him to slide sideways out of its path.\n\nQuicker than thought, Hotflame followed up on her advantage. She twisted her body and lashed out at his wing with her bladed front claws. Torch couldn't evade the slash, but he wrenched his wing into a steeper angle so the blades struck the leading edge instead of slicing through membrane. They cut effortlessly through its thin layer of scales and taut skin and struck bone. The pain and horrible grating sensation forced a shriek from Torch's throat. But when his wing ripped free of the blades and he beat frantically to escape Hotflame's next slash, his membranes caught the air without the sickening flutter and lack of resistance that would have signaled a crippling tear.\n\nTorch dove to gain speed and streaked across the canyon. At the far wall he whirled to find Hotflame hanging back, watching him with gloating pleasure. She brandished blades red with Torch's blood. \"That's only the beginning.\"\n\nTorch flexed his blades. He disliked the thought of slicing through her scales and into her flesh, but the bursts of pain accompanying every flap of his wing were rapidly dispelling his reluctance. Let her feel the bite of the weapon she'd created.\n\nA plan formed, and he acted on it. Torch let his wingbeats falter, as if the wound disabled him more than it actually did. He made a show of flying straight toward Hotflame, but listed slightly toward the injured side. She laughed and raced to meet him, jaws gaping.\n\nThe instant before her flame struck his body, Torch used the full power of both wings to throw himself back the other direction. He snapped his sparker and blasted a burst of fire at her wing.\n\nShe yanked it away before his attack did any significant damage, but a big patch of membrane had darkened. Torch lurched toward her and flung out a front paw. The tips of his blades sliced parallel gashes across her foreshoulder before she tumbled beyond his reach.\n\nThey pulled apart, recovering altitude and eyeing each other. Torch was disappointed to see that Hotflame continued to fly strongly. He couldn't afford to give her a respite. He drove his aching wing to its utmost effort, striving to gain the advantage of height. But Hotflame matched him flap for flap, until the canyon dwindled to a dark streak far below and the ocean glimmered on the horizon.\n\n\"Run,\" Hotflame called. \"Fly over the ocean. I won't stop you. Go back to the humans you love so much. Bend your neck for their collar and chain and open your mouth for their drugs. Then try and tell them dragons aren't animals. See whether they listen.\"\n\nTorch didn't waste breath answering her. Another plan was shaping itself in his mind. It was risky, even reckless. To pull it off, he'd have to make himself vulnerable to Hotflame. He'd have to let her think she'd won. But he'd learned that his acting could fool her. It was probably the only skill he was significantly better at than she was. They were too evenly matched for him to have much hope of killing her in a straight fight without losing his own life in the process.\n\nNot letting himself think too deeply, Torch committed himself to the new strategy. First he had to lure her into draining her fuel sacs while reserving enough in his for at least one good blast. Without, of course, letting her score a fatal or crippling shot.\n\nWith a frustrated screech to make her believe he despaired of climbing above her, Torch closed the distance between them. He clashed his jaws repeatedly to produce a showy shower of sparks, but kept his burst of fuel brief. It glanced off her wing without doing much damage. Her return jet of flame lanced toward his head. He steeled his nerves and dodged barely enough to keep it from striking. She kept it up several seconds longer than his flame had lasted, but Torch managed to stay just out of its path. He let the last flicker graze his neck and flinched hard from the contact, allowing his wings to falter for an instant before recovering.\n\nTorch fled a tiny bit slower than he could have. Hotflame pursued eagerly. Torch let the tip of his tail creep into her range, and was rewarded by a flare of light and pain. He pumped his wings furiously but held his distance while the agony mounted. A few feet of tail would be a small price to pay for victory. Finally, when the smell of roasted meat reached his nostrils, he folded his wings and dove. Hotflame chased him, her gloating cry echoing in his ears.\n\nThe colorful dots of dragons along the canyon rim were clearly visible when Torch pulled up. He let the pain and desperation coursing through his body show in his wide eyes, ragged panting, and the frantic pace of his wingbeats, exaggerating just enough to be sure Hotflame couldn't miss the signs.\n\nThe confidence he was trying to foster shone in Hotflame's eyes. Her movements trumpeted her certainty. He was failing. She need only keep up her relentless onslaught a little bit longer, and she would triumph.\n\nTorch thrust all four feet forward and lunged for her head. Hotflame causally evaded his rush and swiped with deadly precision at one front paw. Her blades caught the leather mitt holding his blades in place and tore them from his claws. One of Torch's claws snagged in its metal socket and ripped from his flesh. He screamed and flailed, flinging blood in her face.\n\nThe pain was horrible, but Torch clung to the knowledge that the wound was insignificant. It wouldn't inhibit his movement. That was all that mattered.\n\nHe slashed wildly at her with his remaining blades, but she easily avoided them. One of his back feet caught an edge of one of her wings, but did only minor damage before she jerked it free. She loosed a blast of flame at his wing, but it flickered with telltale yellow sputters, and she cut it off before it burned through the membrane.\n\nTorch pulled away. Hotflame had only one good shot of fuel left. Now was his chance.\n\nThey'd descended nearly to the canyon's rim. Dragon voices reached him as he wobbled through the air with deliberate clumsiness. Cries of delight mixed with shrieks of dismay. He ignored them, focusing on his enemy. If his plan worked, for several long minutes his friends would believe him dead and their cause lost. He hated to put them through that, but it couldn't be helped. They'd forget their grief quickly enough if he managed to pull off a victory.\n\nHotflame charged. Torch spun to face her, sucking in the deepest breath his lungs would hold. He snapped his jaws and spit a meager few drops of fuel. They flared and went out before she reached him. Torch slammed his mouth and eyes closed and squeezed his nostrils shut as her flame billowed out and enveloped his head.\n\nAs he'd gambled, the blast lasted only a moment before her fuel ran out. His face screamed with pain, but the heat was gone. Now they'd find out just how good an actor he was.\n\nTorch gasped, making his breath raspy and ragged. He mimicked the strangled, choked shrieks of the Stolen at the farm who'd died after inhaling fire. He thrashed with violent abandon, then abruptly went limp. His wings streamed above him as he fell.\n\nThe cheers of the Reds echoed from the stone walls. The Stolen's gasps of horror fell to stunned silence. Torch cracked his eyelids and peered at the ground rushing toward him. He'd judged his position well. Below was a big area of scrubby bushes growing in sandy soil. Not as smooth as the sand of the circus ring, but much softer than the bare rock closer to the entrance.\n\nJom wasn't here to provide a distracting crack of his whip at the crucial moment. If Hotflame saw him break his fall, she'd know he was faking. If he'd come up with this strategy sooner, he could have arranged with Juniper or Hardscale to do something to draw her attention. But he hadn't, so he'd have to hope he'd played his part well enough to leave her in no doubt that he was dead. Then she might not bother to watch him intently enough as he struck the earth.\n\nTorch waited, judging the distance as he'd done during every performance for the first seventy years of his life. At the perfect instant he flung his wings out. As if the intervening years had been nothing but a dream, a sharp crack echoed in his ears.\n\nTorch tucked his shoulder and rolled. He crashed into the bushes and tumbled end over end. His body tore a long swath through the vegetation and dirt before he finally flopped to a halt and lay still.\n\nA cacophony of dragon voices rose from all around, some outraged, some defensive, but Torch didn't dare look to see the cause. He dampened his breathing to faint, shallow pants and opened his eyes the merest slit. His timing must be perfect.\n\nThe voices stilled and a breathless hush settled over the canyon. Flapping wings heralded Hotflame's arrival. She landed heavily beside Torch. Blood poured from a long graze across her forehead and streamed down her face and neck. Rising to her hind legs, she spread her wings to their full extent. \"The cheating human failed!\" she cried. \"The challenger is dead. I remain leader of the Reds and of Dragana!\"\n\nFaint cheers rose from the Reds' section, but the rest of the dragons remained silent.\n\n\"He's dead!\" Hotflame screamed. \"I won! I kept you safe, you ungrateful worms! From the humans and the dragons they've corrupted! You'll thank me when their ships come and we drive them away!\"\n\nA few more cheers rose, then quickly died. Hotflame gave a long, low snarl as she glared around at them. She dropped to all fours and strode to stand over Torch. He inhaled as silently as he could, but Hotflame was so busy glowering at their audience she probably wouldn't have noticed if he'd sucked the air in with a noisy gasp.\n\nIn accordance with the tradition Hardscale had described, Hotflame lowered her head. The victor in a battle to the death ritually tore out the throat of their vanquished foe. Her jaws gaped.\n\nTorch opened his eyes and met her shocked gaze as he snapped his sparker and exhaled with every ounce of force his body could produce. Fuel sprayed from his sacs and ignited. Fire engulfed Hotflame's head. It filled her open mouth and invaded her nostrils.\n\nShe huffed, trying to return a blast, but her sacs produced only a sputter of fuel. Torch kept flaming. Her scales blackened and shriveled. Her skin split and blistered. She jerked away and stumbled back, but Torch rose and followed, pouring fire over her head even after she fell with a strangled shriek.\n\nTorch's fuel sacs ran dry. He backed away and watched Hotflame thrash and choke and fight to breathe. Her struggles weakened but dragged on and on, pitiful and horrifying. After many long minutes, she finally went limp and lay still.\n\nTorch had expected emotion to overwhelm him with a confused jumble of triumph and grief. Instead, he felt numb. He stared at the burnt ruin that had been a dragon. Then he drew a shuddering breath and looked up toward the rim of the canyon.\n\nJuniper was the first to rise to her hind legs and lift her voice in a low, solemn, wordless cry. Hardscale and Broadwing quickly echoed her. Between them, Henri clutched his mother's smoking rifle and added his high, boyish voice. The Stolen and Yellows joined in. Across the canyon, a few Browns and Grays raised their voices, then more, then nearly all of them. Some of the Greens snuck in, casting furtive, guilty looks at their leader. Only the Reds stayed stubbornly silent.\n\nWhen the cry finally faded, Torch lowered his head in acknowledgment. Then, with stiff, weary muscles, all his wounds throbbing, he leapt into the air and climbed to the top of the canyon. He circled over the Stolen and Yellows, but soared to land in front of the Reds, who'd gathered in a nervous, hostile cluster.\n\nBefore he could speak, Thickleg shoved between them and glared at Torch. \"You cheated. The human hatchling shot Hotflame. His interference means the challenge is void. You have no right to lead the Reds. Let alone the Thousand Caves.\"\n\nJuniper thudded to the ground beside Torch and snarled at Thickleg. \"Torch won fairly, unlike you. Do you want to fight me again, to the death this time? Once I kill you, Torch can lead without opposition.\"\n\nTorch shook his head. \"I appreciate your willingness, Juniper, but he's right. I didn't win fairly. It doesn't matter, though. I'm not claiming the leadership.\"\n\nJuniper gape at him. \"What? That's what this was all about!\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't.\" Certainty welled up in Torch as he gazed around at the silently watching dragons. \"I never wanted to lead the Reds or take over the Thousand Caves. I wanted to free the Stolen. And the humans. I still do.\"\n\nHe turned to Hardscale as she settled beside him, with Broadwing close behind. \"Now that Hotflame is gone, can the Yellows take power without any more help from me?\"\n\nHardscale gave Thickleg an evaluating look, then turned to survey the cluster of nervous Reds. \"I think so. Hotflame eliminated every Red strong enough to challenge her. Those left shouldn't give me any trouble. I'll choose one to sponsor in return for their support.\"\n\nSeveral Reds lifted their heads and sought to catch her eye. Hardscale nodded at them noncommittally, then turned back to Thickleg. \"Are the Greens going to try to fight the Yellows and Reds united? If you are, I'm sure Torch and the Stolen will stay long enough to help defeat you. You just heard how the Browns and Grays feel about him. Do you think they'll join your side if he fights on mine?\"\n\nThickleg stared at her with loathing. \"This is unprecedented. You have no respect for tradition. Never before in Dragana's history has one of the Noble Kindreds staged this sort of coup.\"\n\n\"On the contrary. The Noble Kindreds have always used every tactic available to them to take power. They've schemed and conspired and made secret deals and told any lies they thought would be believed. If Hotflame hadn't used the Stolen against the Yellows years ago, I wouldn't have been able to use them against her today. She created her own defeat.\"\n\nThickleg was clearly unconvinced, but several of the other Greens nodded thoughtfully, along with some of the Reds. Torch suspected many of them had harbored private dislike of Hotflame, probably for a long time. He hoped Hardscale would be able to use that to consolidate a successful ruling coalition.\n\nBut that was no longer his concern. Torch turned to address the Stolen who'd gathered behind him, raising his voice to reach every dragon clustered around the canyon. \"I plan to spend the rest of the day conferring with Hardscale and Broadwing and the other Draganan leaders. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving the Thousand Caves. Any dragon who wishes may accompany me. Hardscale, will you allow the Stolen to depart, along with anyone else who wants to join us?\"\n\nHardscale bobbed her head. \"The Stolen are free. I welcome them as full citizens of Dragana. And according to our ancient laws, citizens of Dragana can come and go from the Thousand Caves as they please.\"\n\n\"What about the human captives?\" Torch stared at her, holding his breath.\n\nHardscale hesitated, then looked away. \"I have no desire to hold them any longer. They're free to go.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Torch murmured. He raised his voice again. \"I intend to travel to some uninhabited location elsewhere on this continent. During my discussions with the new leader of the Thousand Caves, we'll negotiate exactly where. I hope that in return for our pledge to help defend against invaders from Aldania if and when they become a threat, she'll be willing to cede us some of the territory currently claimed by Dragana.\"\n\nHotflame tilted her head. \"That seems like a reasonable bargain. The coast patrol is overextended guarding the entire continent, even those portions we have no use for. They'd be far more effective over a smaller range. If you were to assume responsibility for, say, the northeastern quadrant, all of us would benefit.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Torch said. He drew a deep breath. Hopefully his next words wouldn't alienate all his potential followers. \"Once we choose an appropriate location, we'll found a new nation. One where dragonkind and humankind live together in peace. We'll be equals under the law, and we'll work together to build a thriving community. I invite any dragon or human who wants to be a part of that effort to join us. It won't be easy. I expect we'll face all sorts of conflicts and difficulties we can't even imagine right now. But if we stay focused on our common goals, we can overcome them together.\" He spread his wings wide. \"Who's coming with me?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Juniper declared. Most of the Stolen echoed her words, some quick and eager, others slower and more thoughtful. A handful of scattered voices called from the Browns and Grays across the canyon. A young Red, a few abashed Greens, and one very enthusiastic Yellow announced their intentions as well.\n\n\"I am!\" Henri cried. He rushed up and threw his arms around Torch's neck, panting. Torch realized he must have run all the way along the canyon rim from the place where the dragons had left him. \"And Maman and Lia and Master Claudio and everybody else. It will be just like Mamourne when King Julios ruled.\"\n\n\"That's what I hope,\" Torch told him.\n\nHenri pressed his face into Torch's scales. \"I knew you weren't dead. But she was going to kill you. That's why I had to shoot her. But I missed. I'm sorry.\"\n\nProbably he should scold the boy for interfering in the challenge. But without Henri's perfectly timed shot, Torch wasn't at all sure he could have pulled off his deception. He settled for giving him a stern look. \"When we get back to the mine, I want you to give your Maman her rifle back. Dragons will be hunting enough to feed everyone in our new home, so you won't have any use for it.\n\nHenri wrinkled his nose. \"I guess.\" Suddenly anxious, he peered up at Torch. His voice quavered. \"What about Papa's harness?\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll have plenty of use for that.\" Torch's voice grew rough. \"I'm going to need an assistant with clever hands and a mouth that can pronounce Mamournan and Forlish and other human languages. Who I can take with me wherever I go, so they're always available to help when I need them. Who'll never grow too heavy for me to carry, so I won't have to train someone new every few years.\" Torch had to swallow before he could continue. \"What do you say? Are you interested in the position?\"\n\nHenri's astonished gape and dazzled expression reminded Torch of the children who used to watch him from the circus stands. \"Of course.\" He grinned, one cheek dimpling. \"If Maman says I may.\"\n\n\"I think we can talk her into it.\" Torch nuzzled Henri's chest with his snout, wincing as the the rough fabric of his shirt chafed the scorches left by Hotflame's breath. \"Your first assignment is to go find Lia and Otter and tell them to fetch a human healer who can take care of Juniper and me. Then find Mouse and the rest of the translators and send them over here. I need them to carry messages to the farm and the mine and the rest of the human settlements.\"\n\nWhen the dragons hadn't returned the night before as they'd promised, the humans must have assumed disaster had struck. They'd be relieved to hear about the change in circumstances. Torch hoped most of them would still choose to accompany him, now that they were free to do as they wished.\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" Henri cried. He dashed off.\n\nTorch sighed, then turned wearily back to where Hardscale and Broadwing waited. Beside them, Juniper watched Henri's progress as he wound between dragon's legs and ducked beneath wings, a half-scornful, half-wistful look in her eyes.\n\n\"I'm sure there are other children among the humans who would jump at the chance to ride a dragon,\" Torch told her.\n\nShe snapped her gaze away from the boy and glared at Torch. \"Why would I want to burden myself with some human hatchling when no one's forcing me to carry one?\"\n\nTorch spread his wings. \"I have no idea.\" The motion jarred several of his wounds, and he flinched. \"Ouch.\"\n\n\"You're a mess.\" Juniper studied him with a mix of dismay and sympathy.\n\n\"So are you.\" She looked as battered as Torch felt. He dragged his aching tail forward and waved its blackened tip at her. \"Look. Our tails match.\"\n\nShe shuddered. \"Don't remind me.\" Juniper pulled her own tail forward, but after a quick glance at the charred ruin yanked it back. Swallowing hard, she turned to Torch. She kept her voice light, but he heard the desperation underneath. \"Did I hear you send for one of the human healers?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Torch said. \"They were very helpful at the farm. Hopefully they can bandage us up, and maybe even give us something to help with the pain.\"\n\nJuniper snorted, but her tone softened. \"I guess they're useful for something, after all.\"\n\n\"Does that mean you've forgiven me for choosing to leave the Thousand Caves for their sake?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"I can't say I look forward to clawing out a living in the wilderness when we could have enjoyed a life of luxury here. But it will be a thousand times better than slavery and prison, so I suppose I can't complain.\"\n\nTorch couldn't meet her gaze, so he stared at the ground beneath her front claws. \"You don't have to come, you know. Hardscale would be happy if you stay here. You could challenge Thickleg again, knowing the fight would be judged fairly this time.\"\n\nJuniper shuddered. \"While I'd love the chance for a rematch, I'd better not. I'm not really cut out to be a leader. Every time a Green questioned my orders, I'd lose my temper and toast their snout. They'd get fed up and toss me out within a year.\"\n\nShe fixed her eyes on the scar on Torch's chest. \"Besides, I'd miss you. It's been so nice getting to know you again, now that we can actually talk to each other. It would be a shame to stop now.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Torch said softly. \"Now that you finally have the freedom you've always longed for, I'd like the chance to share it with you.\"\n\nSo low Torch could barely make out the words, Juniper said, \"I'd like that, too.\" She raised her eyes to meet his..\n\nThen she jerked her head around and pointed with her snout. \"Hardscale and Broadwing are being polite, but I'm sure they're getting impatient. You should go talk to them.\"\n\n\"I should,\" Torch agreed, though he knew it was Juniper's discomfort with the intimate turn their conversation had taken rather than any consideration for their allies that prompted her dismissal. He was equally uncomfortable, and relieved she'd broken the mood before it pushed either of them farther than they were ready to go.\n\nIt didn't matter. They had all the time in the world to grow comfortable with each other, now.\n\nHappiness burned in Torch's heart like a flame. His pain and weariness and worry dwindled to insignificance in its light. He was free. So were his friends and all those who'd fought with them. For the first time, they were in control of their own destinies.\n\nIt wouldn't be easy. His future promised to be filled with hard work and conflict and struggle. But also with rewards far exceeding anything he'd dared hope for during the century he'd spent chained and caged and drugged.\n\nTorch spread his wings and leapt into the air, just because he could. He climbed high into the cloudless blue sky. Tilting his wings, he banked in a wide, lazy circle. Then, afire with eagerness and resolution, he swooped down to join his fellow dragons.\n\nA new world was waiting for him to build it. He couldn't wait to begin."
            },
            {
                "title": "New Mamourne",
                "text": "Torch fixed his eyes on the gray smudge on the horizon and accelerated his wingbeats. Henri leaned over his neck and scanned ahead, as eager as Torch for the first glimpse of home. The white sails of the ship dwindled to pale specks behind them. Torch's wings would carry them ashore many hours before it reached the coast of New Mamourne.\n\nThe buildings of Julion took shape as they approached. It would be an exaggeration to call it a city. Compared to huge, sprawling Bellhold, where they'd just spent six long, stressful weeks, it barely qualified as a country village. But every wall and roof and road had been built by free dragons and free humans working together. Torch couldn't have been prouder of New Mamourne's capital if it had spread as wide and shone as brightly as the gaslit streets of Legrath, where its namesake had once ruled.\n\nTiny in the distance, dragons and humans poured from their homes and workplaces, joining those who thronged the streets. Dragons filled the air, a swirling cloud. A dark green speck broke from their midst and arrowed over the ocean, straight toward Torch and Henri.\n\nTorch's jubilant bugle mixed with Henri's exuberant shout. Torch flapped faster, joy driving his muscles. The mission to Aldania had been vital, and Torch couldn't have entrusted the delicate negotiations to anyone else, but he was desperately glad the long absence from his beloved home was almost over.\n\nJuniper closed the distance between them in a rush. She swept around Torch and doubled back to fly at his side, their wingtips nearly touching. \"How did the peace talks go?\" she asked, breathless and apprehensive. \"Is the war over?\"\n\n\"It's over,\" Torch told her, the relief of that truth in his voice. \"The accords are on the ship. I used our new script and Violeta's claw pen to sign my name right below the Queen's and the Prime Minister's.\"\n\nJuniper exhaled a wordless sigh of relief. On her back, her rider Violeta whooped. \"How did it work?\" she called. \"Did my last adjustment finally fix the problem?\"\n\nHenri grinned at his wife. \"Almost. It only fell off three times.\"\n\n\"Oh, be quiet, you!\" She pretended to glower at him, although the delighted welcome in her eyes spoiled the effect.\n\nTorch laughed. It was so good to be back with his family. Violeta had come to Julion five years ago, on a ship full of immigrants from Aldania. Along with many of the others, she was a dwarf like Henri. In Aldania the small humans were often scorned and rejected, but New Mamourne welcomed them eagerly. Violeta's sharp mind and acerbic tongue had quickly endeared her to Juniper, and Henri had been smitten from their first meeting. She'd accepted Juniper's invitation to become her rider and Henri's proposal of marriage within a week of each other.\n\nThat had been a year before the war began. One foggy spring night, Forlish ships had slipped into Julion's harbor and destroyed the docks with bombs and cannonballs. New Mamourne's thriving trade with Fogella, Tyrogue, and Rainvale, which had disrupted Forland's economic domination of southeastern Aldania, had been nearly wiped out. Julion's dragons had retaliated with flames, but metal plates covering the ships' hulls had kept them from burning, and steam engines had propelled them after their sails were destroyed.\n\nThe war had raged for three years. Forland had led the nations of Aldania in a determined effort to conquer the dragons. The Thousand Caves had joined New Mamourne in defense of Dragana's shores. Despite the humans' advanced steam technology and armored ships, they'd never managed to gain a foothold on the Draganan continent. Whenever they tried to establish an outpost, patrols from north or south quickly spotted them and dragonfire drove them back to their ships.\n\nIn the end, Forland had agreed to negotiate a cease-fire. Six months ago Torch and a carefully chosen group of dragons and humans had left for Bellhold to represent New Mamourne's interests in the talks. Hardscale and Broadwing had led a delegation from the Thousand Caves. The leaders of Aldania had been forced to deal with the dragons as equals. With Henri and other humans from New Mamourne serving as interpreters, they'd conducted a long, grueling series of debates. Bit by bit they'd hammered out a settlement.\n\nTorch wasn't entirely happy with some of its provisions, but the dragons had prevailed on the most important points. The governments of Aldania formally recognized New Mamourne and Dragana as independent nations, equal in status to their human counterparts. They could conduct trade freely anywhere in the world, subject to the same laws as all other countries. Any attack on their shores would be considered a violation of the Bellhold Accords and would invite retaliation from the rest of the signers.\n\nTorch conveyed the highlights of the agreement as they winged toward Julion at a much more relaxed pace. Henri lightened the serious discussion with hilarious anecdotes about the Aldanian dignitaries' reactions to dealing with intelligent, talking dragons. Few captive dragons remained in their countries\u2014most had found their way to New Mamourne over the years\u2014but almost all the officials were old enough to remember when domesticated dragons had been as common as horses or oxen. Henri and the other New Mamournan humans had taken great delight in watching them gape and flounder and stutter when confronted with those they'd once considered animals in roles of power and authority.\n\nFunny as they were, however, Henri's stories left Torch in a melancholy mood. He kept up a cheerful demeanor as they landed and exchanged greetings and news with their friends and fellow leaders of New Mamourne. But Juniper's sharp eyes noted what he was hiding.\n\nWhen they finally worked their way through the crowds to the home they shared with their riders, Violeta whisked Henri off to their room for a private homecoming celebration. Juniper barely waited for Torch to stretch out on the broad, padded pallet in the central living area before accosting him. \"Torch, what's wrong? You're hiding something.\"\n\n\"Not really.\" He draped his neck over a cushion designed for the purpose and rested his head on the pillow at its end. \"I never expected to get everything I wanted from the treaty. I just hoped\u2026\" He sighed and shifted his tail, trying to find a comfortable position. Warm afternoon light streamed through the many windows in the soaring wooden walls. Juniper prowled the spacious room, watching him intently.\n\nTorch looked away from her gaze. \"We weren't able to get provisions included to forbid keeping dragons in captivity. Or breeding them, or even to eliminate their international sale. Dragonleaf is still legal. Kidnapping eggs or dragons from Dragana was outlawed, although that scarcely matters because it hasn't happened for decades and we'd stop anyone who tried. But within Aldania, nothing's really changed from when we were there.\"\n\n\"Of course it's changed. Are there even any dragons left there to be affected?\"\n\n\"Not many. But there are a few, mostly held in private collections or a handful of zoos. There are even some circuses that still have dragon acts. I tried to persuade them that those things wouldn't necessarily have to end if they set the remaining dragons free. I would have stayed with Featherstone and Sons if I'd been given the choice. But I deserved the choice. So do they.\" His wings slumped limp from his back. \"But the humans wouldn't listen.\"\n\nHe expected a tart reply. His mate was always quick to balance his idealism with her cynicism. But Juniper's voice was uncharacteristically gentle. \"Torch, that's on them, not you. Because of what you've done, everyone in Aldania knows the truth about dragons. Dragons know they have a safe, welcoming place to come when they escape. The treaty you just negotiated confirms our place in the world, beyond anyone's ability to deny it. In time, the rest will follow.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right.\" Torch sighed and closed his eyes.\n\nAfter a few minutes of silence, she changed the subject, resuming her usual brisk tone. \"Have you decided yet what we're going do when the eggs hatch? We've got less than a month to settle on a plan.\"\n\nTorch welcomed the change of subject. He'd given the matter a lot of thought during the tedious parts of the journey. Officially, New Mamourne's ruling council would determine the policy they would follow, with Torch's vote equal to those of all the other dragon and human members. Practically, they would do whatever Torch recommended. \"I just can't see following the traditional system the Thousand Caves uses. Trying to force New Mamourne's dragons into kindreds after all these years would be an exercise in futility.\"\n\n\"I agree. But what should we do instead? We can't follow the human practice, either. Nobody thought we might want to keep track of whose eggs were whose until it was far too late. And besides, dragons aren't humans. What if some ended up with dozens of hatchlings, and others with none?\"\n\nTorch grimaced in sympathy. Dragons laid hundreds of eggs at a time and kept them in vast communal nurseries. Traditionally, elder dragons who'd reached their seventh or eighth century tended the eggs, keeping them warm and clean and turning them regularly during the ten years they took to develop.\n\nEven with the best care, only around ten percent of the eggs hatched, and many hatchlings died within a few days. Those who made it past their first week were likely to survive to maturity. That was the point when the dragons of the Thousand Caves sent them to be raised by their respective Kindreds.\n\nBut after their experiences in the Thousand Caves, the Stolen had been disinclined to copy their former captors and divide themselves by color, no matter what complications that might eventually raise. In the chaotic early days of New Mamourne, it had been easy to put off the problem until later. They'd constructed nursery buildings in time for their first laying season and persuaded a few experienced egg tenders to relocate from the Thousand Caves. As the years passed and new eggs were added each spring, everyone in the community had taken turns working under the elders' supervision to care for them.\n\nMeanwhile, Julion's society had settled into a unique hybrid of human and dragon customs. Some of the dragons, especially those like Torch who'd grown up in close contact with human families, had chosen to form a long-term bond with a single mate and set up a household together. The rest had clustered with friends and companions in groups of various sizes. Five to ten was most common, but a few were as big as twenty or thirty. Nearly all households included both dragons and humans. Julion's residences combined big open spaces where dragons slept and everyone mingled with small, cozy quarters for when humans wanted privacy.\n\nJuniper finally quit pacing and came to lie beside Torch on the couch. She rested her head on his foreshoulder and he twined his tail around hers. Torch savored the warmth of her body pressed against his. Unlike humans, dragons were only interested in sex during the fall mating season, but they always enjoyed close physical contact with those they cared about and trusted. Torch didn't know how he'd survived his many years of isolation. The freedom to snuggle with other dragons, especially Juniper, was one of the best things about his new life.\n\nTorch kept his voice to a rumbling murmur. \"We need to create a new system, designed just for us. The same way we've done with everything else. I think we should keep it simple. Hatchlings can be entrusted to households to raise, one or two for small ones like ours, more for the bigger ones. It can be random, without regard for color or parentage. Everyone will be expected to participate in their care for the first few weeks when they need to be fed constantly. Later, when they're more independent, we can establish schools where they can spend the day while the adults work. As soon as they're old enough to learn and contribute, they can accompany the adults and help with their tasks. It will take a few years to work out all the details, but I think something along those lines will give the new generation the best chance to grow up healthy and happy and committed to New Mamourne's way of life.\"\n\nShe nodded against his shoulder. \"They'll be like the human children who've never known anything different. I swear, some of them barely notice who's got wings and who doesn't.\"\n\nTorch bobbed his head. The humans, with their much shorter gestation, had already expanded their population considerably. Children swarmed the streets of Jovion. Soon young dragons would join them. They would grow up together, knowing each other as equals from the beginning.\n\n\"Maybe we can teach them the new language.\" The council had assigned a group of dragons and humans to develop a language made up of sounds both species could pronounce. The work wasn't going as quickly as Torch had hoped. What they'd come up with so far sounded awkward, was hard to remember, and made his throat hurt. Henri reported similar difficulties. But a few humans and dragons had become reasonably fluent. \"If someday everyone speaks it, we really will be a single community.\"\n\n\"We already are,\" Juniper said. She snuggled closer to Torch. \"Violeta was talking about wanting a baby. If Henri agrees, and the council goes along with your plan, before long our home will be overrun with noisy, messy, demanding little creatures.\" She made a disgusted noise, but Torch could tell she was joking. Mostly. \"I guess I'll have to get used to it.\"\n\nThe prospect sounded wonderful to Torch. He was so incredibly lucky. He had everything he'd ever wanted. Soon he would have young ones to share it with. They would never have to suffer the miseries he'd endured. He would raise them to love and value their home, so that long after he was gone, New Mamourne would endure. It would grow into a light illuminating the world, a shining crimson torch, revealing what was possible when dragons and humans lived together as equals and friends.\n\nHe stretched a wing to cover Juniper and closed his eyes. \"You will. Wait and see. It's going to be spectacular.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Cycle of Dragons 2) The Betrayed Dragon",
        "author": "Dan Michaelson",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "A dragon roared overhead. I looked up briefly.\n\nIt was massive. All black scales with thick leathery wings that caught the wind, spread on either side. Spikes protruded from its sides, and a long tail seemed to guide it like a rudder on a boat in a stream. Heat radiated from it, something I could feel even from this distance. It circled a moment before disappearing into the heavy clouds.\n\nI turned my attention back to the Academy.\n\nIt was an enormous stone building situated at the edge of the capital city Carlath near the forest. A green lawn spread out before it, leading up to the massive dragon pens containing the dragons that the Academy trained people like myself, among others, to connect to magic. The building itself was rectangular, with a central portion that rose higher, so it looked as if it wanted to peer out over the rest of the capital, though it wasn't so high that it could tower over the palace itself.\n\nI had only been up into the higher levels in the Academy a few times, mostly because doing so was not for lower-level students like myself. Moss grew along the surface of the Academy, giving it a greenish contour, helping it blend in somewhat to the forest nearby.\n\nAnother dragon roared before launching itself into the sky.\n\nI smiled, staring at them as I had often done since coming to the capital.\n\nThere had been a time when I had wanted to simply see a dragon.\n\nNow I was surrounded by them, and eventually would learn to ride them.\n\nAs far as I knew, not everyone in the Academy would learn to connect to the dragons. Most could learn to detect them, and those who could\u2014those like myself, something that I still struggled with\u2014would end up being dragon riders.\n\nA figure at the far end of the dragon pen held her hands out, flames streaking from finger to finger as they swept away from her. Her dark hair fluttered in the breeze, contrasting with the orange flames of the dragon magic.\n\nThat magic was what I wanted, if I dared to dream.\n\nSince coming here, I'd thought about what it would be like if I could connect to the power of the dragons themselves\u2014if I could use that power in a way that would allow me to perform fantastical, magical feats. A dragon mage.\n\nThere were not nearly as many dragon mages within the kingdom as there were dragon riders. The dragon riders had helped defend the kingdom from attack over the years, from the Vard and other enemies, but it was the dragon mages who truly posed the real barrier between the dangers of the Vard and those outside.\n\nI shifted on the bench I sat on outside of the dragon pen, every bit the outsider I had been ever since coming here months before. I had learned to open myself up to the dragons. That had been one of the earliest and easiest lessons, though not one that I had fully mastered. If I couldn't even do that . . .\n\nThen I would train to ride the dragons.\n\nThe thought still made me smile.\n\nThe air was cool, the day early, and I waited for my next testing. Watching the dragons always brought me a measure of solitude and comfort, regardless of what others in the Academy would say to me.\n\n\"Are you ready, Ashan?\"\n\nI looked over to Jerith. He was one of the instructors I had trained with the most at the Academy. He had experience with students of all ages, and had been here for many years. He was dressed in the dark cloak of the Academy, its symbol\u2014a dragon head surrounded by a flowery crest\u2014marked on his chest.\n\n\"I didn't think I had much choice,\" I said, getting to my feet.\n\n\"Only if you want to continue your training to become a dragon mage.\" He smiled at me tightly. \"You have potential. Myself and others who are connected to that power believe you do. You just have to reach it.\"\n\nHe clasped his hands behind him; with his gray jacket and pants, he looked every bit the dragon mage I had always imagined. My gaze lingered on his crest. I was still learning rank, and knew that Jerith was incredibly gifted, but didn't know where he fit in within the dragon mages of the kingdom.\n\n\"And what if I don't?\"\n\n\"There's no shame in failing. There are many who are thought to have potential but never manifest it. Reaching for the connection to the dragons is difficult. It's not something all can do. It's not something all want to do.\"\n\n\"I've been trying,\" I said.\n\n\"I know you have. I have seen it. Others have as well. Now, you just need to find it.\" He motioned for me to follow, and we walked through the grassy courtyard, past the dragon pen and toward the forest. \"What you need is to feel your connection to the dragon. Succeed, and you will continue in your studies.\"\n\nIt sounded so simple when he said it, but at the same time, I knew it was anything but simple. It was anything but easy with what he expected of me. I had to find a way to connect, and if I failed . . .\n\nIf I failed, then I would become a dragon rider.\n\nThat was what I reminded myself each time I thought about failure.\n\nA dragon rider, something I once would only have dared to dream of becoming, was now what awaited me in the event of my failure.\n\nAlison would laugh at the suggestion.\n\nI had thought of my sister and my family often in my time within the Academy. After the attack, Alison had returned home, and the word I'd gotten from her, sent by caravan out of Berestal, had told me that she had convinced our mother to sell the farm. It had allowed Alison to mentor with one of the master weavers within Berestal. Mother was provided for, as well, along with my brother Thenis.\n\nA breeze kicked up out of the distance, carrying with it the scent of the forest, along with a hint of heat that streamered within it. I stood at the tree line, staring into the depths of the forest\u2014I couldn't see anything, though I could feel it.\n\nI focused on the heat. That was the part of the energy that I needed to grasp, the power I needed to master, but the problem was in detecting more than just that fire. The problem was in recognizing how that fire connected to some deep part of me\u2014a part I hadn't known about until I felt like I was too old to do anything about it.\n\n\"What do you feel?\"\n\nI glanced over at Jerith. He watched me, his dark expression frowning almost disapprovingly, as he often had seemed in the months I'd been within the capital. Training here had offered me understanding and a chance to learn about the connection I shared with the dragons, even if I hadn't yet mastered it. It was that failure of mastery that led to the disappointment my instructors shared. Supposedly, I had potential but couldn't reach it.\n\n\"I can feel the heat. I can smell it, too.\"\n\nJerith arched a brow. Doing so gave him a distorted look. He had a long scar on his forehead that I suspected came from a fight with the Vard, though he never spoke of it. A burn on his other cheek most likely came from dragons, but again that was something else he didn't speak of.\n\n\"You can smell it?\"\n\nI shrugged, nodding to him. \"I can smell something in the air. Heat, or perhaps it's merely the energy coming off of the dragon.\"\n\nJerith grunted, turning to look out of the forest. \"Smelling the heat of the dragon is not what most would describe it as,\" Jerith said.\n\n\"Maybe that's wrong then,\" I said quickly.\n\nI was careful with how I reacted to the instructors I worked with\u2014Jerith possibly less than some of them. He'd been the most accommodating to me, and had never really seemed to mind my questions, though I still didn't know whether I needed to be more careful.\n\n\"Nothing is wrong, unless you choose to say it is,\" Jerith said. \"You feel what you feel. And you smell what you smell. I cannot be the one to tell you how to describe it. All I'm looking for is for you to recognize there is something out there.\"\n\nI couldn't see the dragon, though I knew the details of the test and that there was one in the distance. I had to find it by my connection to it.\n\n\"I don't entirely know what it is I feel,\" I said. \"All I can tell you is that I can smell a little bit of heat\u2014smoke mixed with the edge of oak, almost a faint char that simmers in the air.\" As I described it, I flushed slightly. It was most ridiculous to describe magic quite like that, though there was something about that smell that brought back memories of the farm I'd left behind.\n\n\"Your experience is your own. As I said, I'm not here to tell you what to detect. All I'm here to do is to help ensure you recognize there's something here. Once you do, then you can borrow that, and you can stretch beyond yourself, using what you detect in order to find the connection\u2014and the power within yourself.\"\n\nIt was part of what they had been working on with me ever since reaching the capital. On my journey here, Manuel had promised me I would work with others who had similar power as me, claiming that I'd proven I had potential to be more than even a dragon rider. A dragon mage.\n\nOther than the dragon I'd traveled to the city with, I had failed to connect to them. Even with that dragon, I found it more difficult than I would have thought. Power always seemed to be at the edge of my ability to reach.\n\nI had found the instructors to be willing to teach, even eager. Apparently, it was not terribly common for them to find students who had an ability to work with the dragons the way I did. Dragon riders themselves were not all that rare. There were plenty of dragon riders, especially in this part of the kingdom\u2014men and women who were willing to risk themselves in the skies, but far too few dragons to ride.\n\nThe idea that I might be able to use the power of the dragons, summon it and turn it into something external, the kind of power I'd only seen a few times prior to coming to the city itself, had left me doubting myself. It was a far cry from the farmer I had been. I kept wondering if perhaps all of this were a dream.\n\nStill, I couldn't shake the connection that I felt to the dragons from time to time. Power emanated from them, which Jerith tried to convey to me through his instruction. All I needed was to find a way to latch onto that power, to connect to it, and to use it so I could find some other way of summoning it.\n\n\"What happens when I detect the power?\" I asked.\n\n\"All I'm trying to get you to do right now is to focus on what you can detect. Once you master that, the next step is going to be pulling that energy into yourself. The key here is grasping for heat, and then letting it flow through you.\"\n\nJerith set his hands off to either side of him. He positioned himself in a way that I had seen the other dragon mages do. I could feel heat bubbling up from him, much like I could feel the heat from out in the forest. There was almost a direct line between him and the dragon; through that line, I could feel the energy coursing from the dragon into Jerith. It flowed outward, and a soft flame arced from one hand to the other, rippling in the air, leaving streamers of steam and flame.\n\nHe opened his eyes, looking over to me. \"This is calling the heat to you. You can do this when you learn to latch onto the energy you detect.\"\n\n\"I can't call it into myself and concentrate it,\" I told him.\n\n\"There are some who take months to master that,\" Jerith said. \"Others take years. Unfortunately, it's unpredictable how long one will take. Some of the most powerful of the dragon mages have taken the longest to reach their power. You are at a disadvantage in that you came to us later in life. Had you come when you were younger, we might have taught you to focus your power much sooner, and it would be easier for you to control it.\"\n\nIt wasn't the first time that I had heard that from the men and women instructing me. Quite a few of the other students within the Dragon Academy had come here when they were much younger and at a testing similar to what I'd observed in Berestal. I was one of the oldest, and though that didn't bother me, I had a sense it did bother some of the younger students. Especially those who were already far more skilled.\n\n\"I can feel the power,\" I said, focusing on the distant dragon. I breathed in slowly and steadily, feeling the heat and the energy that was there, letting that power drift to me. When I did, I could smell the heat in the air. To me, that seemed to be the most important factor, though I wasn't entirely sure what I might use that power for. \"I can't call it to me.\"\n\n\"The first key is just knowing it's there. Why else do you think we've worked with you over the last few months to open yourself up to that power?\" Jerith turned to me, smiling tightly. His face distorted even more, the scar on his forehead becoming twisted, the burn looking grotesque, the skin tight. \"What you need to do is to find your own connection. Perhaps what you need to do is spend time with the dragon away from the others.\" He offered a hint of a smile, grinning at me slightly. \"I don't think the other instructors will mind, not if it works. If it doesn't, then there is no harm done.\"\n\n\"Which dragon?\"\n\n\"The black one that's out here now. Azithran, we call him. He will work with you.\"\n\nI nodded, though there was a part of me that wished I were able to work with the small dragon that had come to the city with me in the first place. For whatever reason, I felt a connection to him, even if I didn't know if there was anything to it.\n\nI took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, using what I could to strain into the distance and see if I could feel for even more power. Even as I did, I couldn't detect anything more than what I had before.\n\n\"I will leave you here,\" Jerith said. \"Find the dragon. That is the test. Nothing more.\"\n\nI nodded, then frowned. \"How do I get the dragon back?\" That was assuming I found it, which wasn't a guarantee, but if I did, I wanted to make sure I had some way of getting it back to the pen.\n\nJerith chuckled softly. He tapped on a chain hanging from his side\u2014a cuff he had that linked to the dragon. This led the dragon away from the barracks where they were kept, toward the edge of the forest where Jerith had released him. The dragons were generally allowed to wander within the forest, though as far as I knew, the dragon riders had some way of controlling them to ensure they didn't go too far.\n\n\"Don't worry. He won't go anywhere. If you can't find the dragon . . .\"\n\nHe didn't need to finish.\n\nI'd started to suspect what would happen anyway. If I failed to find the dragon, I'd soon find my time training in the Academy come at an end.\n\nI wasn't ready for that. Not yet, and not when I thought I could learn to reach for the dragon power. I just had to figure out how.\n\n\"I'll find him.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Jerith said, regarding me before turning away.\n\nHe reached the road heading back into the main part of the city, leaving me standing by myself. As I stood there for a moment, I focused on the energy of the dragon. There was probably some way of controlling the dragon from a distance I didn't know about.\n\nIn the time since I had come to the city, most of my days had been fairly regimented. Much of them were spent training and studying, trying to understand how to open myself up to the power of the dragons. That was the key, much like Jerith reminded me now. Recognizing the energy of the dragons had been fairly easy, but opening myself to it had been much more complicated.\n\nI had begun to learn how to focus on the heat within myself, to try to find that connection that I shared with the dragons, mostly so that I could learn how to tap into something more. Once I did, then came the more complicated steps. There were patterns, ways of twisting fire, but generating fire was something that was beyond me so far.\n\nI could feel the dragons. Within Dragon Academy, I was almost always aware of their presence. Power seemed to simmer everywhere around me, filling me, and even though I couldn't necessarily grab a hold of that power, I knew that it was there. The challenge was holding it, funneling it, and doing something as simple as creating flames with it the way Jerith had.\n\nI couldn't fail.\n\nI focused on the heat, trailing after the awareness of the energy I felt deep within the forest. I followed it, weaving between the trees. The forest, at least the outskirts of it, wasn't all that dense. A trail made its way through the trees. Even if there weren't the trail, I wouldn't need it for me to know where I was going. I could follow the energy within the forest, use that to guide me to the dragon. Strangely, it felt as if the dragon were moving.\n\nIf the dragon were to run, I wouldn't be able to slow him, or even catch him.\n\nInstead, I focused on the power I felt, the energy that radiated from inside of the forest, tracking that as I trailed after the dragon. I breathed in slowly and steadily, letting that energy come to me as I focused upon it.\n\nIt was there.\n\nThe heat was close\u2014not only the pressure of the heat, the warmth I detected, but also the smell of it. I could breathe it in, and was aware of that energy as it existed around me. I waited, letting that sense continue to flow outward.\n\nGradually, it did.\n\nIt was different than what I had detected when I was within the Academy, where I was surrounded by different dragons, along with different people who were connected to the dragons. I had learned that there were dozens of different dragons within the city, all of them with their own unique power. Here, out in the forest, surrounded by trees and emptiness, I felt some aspect of magic different from what I had detected before.\n\nThe next step beyond opening myself up to the power was filling myself with it.\n\nI haven't spent enough time to work with the power to know whether I could fill myself with the energy, but there was something about it I thought I could feel. I breathed in slowly, drawing in the heat and the energy around me.\n\nPower built.\n\nI could see the dragon.\n\nHad he come toward me?\n\nMaybe I wouldn't fail this test.\n\nHe was only a few dozen paces away, hiding within the trees, though not so hidden I couldn't make out the details. The black dragon I'd seen flying off\u2014I should have known that was the one Jerith would use. He had an affinity for it.\n\nI reached a hand out the way I would with a wild horse.\n\nI watched the dragon. His orange eyes glowed brightly, and a strange surge formed between us. For a moment, that surged intensified, but then it blasted me, throwing me back.\n\nWhen I got to my feet, the dragon was missing.\n\n\"Where are you?\" I muttered.\n\nThis had to be another part of the test.\n\nFind the dragon. Follow it.\n\nI looked around, feeling for that power and energy, focusing on what I could detect.\n\nThat had been real. The dragon had filled me with power, and I had drawn it to me.\n\nI hadn't controlled it yet, but the fact that I'd been able to use it at all was enough.\n\nDistantly, I could feel the energy coming off of the dragon, heat radiating somewhere deeper in the forest. I followed it, making my way through the trees, heading after that energy.\n\nThe air around me began to feel more humid, much more like my home. It reminded me of the forest just outside of the plains, and the time that I had spent wandering through the trees. This one wasn't nearly as dense, and I thought I could follow the trail . . .\n\nI looked behind me. Where was the trail?\n\nI'd been following the sense of the dragon, and using that to guide me deeper into the forest, focusing on the heat and the energy that I felt, but hadn't paid nearly as much attention to my surroundings as I should have.\n\nNow that I was here, deeper into the forest and the trees, I realized I had no idea where I was, and no idea what I would need to do to get back out. If I didn't have the dragon to follow, how was I going to get out?\n\nI stopped. I could still feel the dragon as it drew me deeper into the forest. It was almost as if it were trying to call to me, wanting me to be aware of the heat and energy coming off of it. I could turn around now and follow what I thought was the path that I'd taken in here, but what if I were wrong? It might mean I would end up trapped here.\n\nJerith knew I was out here, but how many others would?\n\nI'd be lost.\n\nThere wouldn't be anyone in the Academy to come for me.\n\nDistantly, a dragon roared.\n\nThat had to be the black dragon, but why would he be so deep into the forest?\n\nThe strange sensation drawing upon me continued to pull, and I decided to follow it. If Jerith wanted me to understand my connection to the dragons, it involved me following what I could feel of them. Even if it meant going deeper into the forest and risking myself, I would do that. I needed to succeed. I had wandered through forests enough times to know that I would eventually find my way out.\n\nIf I couldn't, then I had to hope that the Dragon Academy would send riders out after me. If they didn't . . .\n\nI didn't want to think about what would happen if they didn't send anybody after me. I'd known people who'd gotten trapped in the forest before, ending up wandering. At least here the rains wouldn't come in a deluge like they did on the plains.\n\nI turned, focusing on the energy of the dragon, and resigned myself to following it. I would not fail this test\u2014even if it meant getting lost in the forest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "I 'd been wandering for the better part of several hours, and had felt the ongoing sense of the dragon pulling me deeper into the forest. All of this was a mistake. I knew it probably was, but for whatever reason, I continued heading deeper into the forest. The trees grew closer together the farther I went, and I never felt as if I got any closer to the dragon, though I could still feel his energy as it pulled upon me. Every so often, I would hear the dragon's roar, but then it would fade.\n\nI lost track of which way I was traveling. The heat of the dragon burned within me, a heat that I connected to, something that bubbled up from deep within my core and sent my stomach roiling. It was a sensation that my father had once described to me.\n\nThinking of my father now brought a pang of sadness. If only he could have known what I had learned about myself. If only he had been given the opportunity to see what I might have become.\n\nIf only I had a chance to learn what my father knew of dragons.\n\nI had thought his comments the ramblings of a delusional man, but now I wasn't so sure. None in the Academy had heard of him, but my father had known the heat of dragons.\n\nThose thoughts stayed with me as I followed the heat of this dragon.\n\nThis is what Jerith wanted from me. He wanted me to follow this energy, to see if there was anything I might learn from the dragon, and to discover how to open myself up to them. It still pulled upon me, drawing me deeper into the forest.\n\nCould Jerith have wanted me to follow this far?\n\nI had my doubts. I didn't think this was part of the test, though maybe it was. Maybe this was all part of how they wanted me to prove that I deserved to stay within the Academy. I could feel the energy of the dragon, but they needed to know whether I was connected the way that I claimed.\n\nDistantly, I heard another rumble. This came as a roar, a burst of the dragon crying out to me. I had stopped near a small stream, leaning down and taking a drink, and when the roar came, I paused, looking up and around me. I didn't see anything, though the roar seemed as if the dragon were closer than he had been before.\n\nThat was strange.\n\nNot only had the dragon roared, but it had seemed almost pained.\n\nI probably wasn't accurate in my interpretation of its sound, but the roar certainly had a feel to it. I took another step, going over the stream, and realized something.\n\nThe air had gone cooler.\n\nThat was odd, as well. Only a few paces away, the air within the forest had been humid, almost unpleasantly so, but the farther I came into the forest, the more everything had started to change, getting not only cooler, but also smelling differently.\n\nI suspected that the change was more gradual than I had known, but could it be that I had traveled the wrong way? When I followed the dragon, I wondered how much of the heat had come off of the dragon himself and how much of it had come from something within the forest.\n\nThe energy of the dragon was out there, but it was far enough away that I felt as if I should just turn back. I wanted to prove myself within the Academy. I wanted to prove I could do what was asked of me. And I wanted to prove to myself that I belonged.\n\nSomething about the dragon continued to trouble and pull upon me. Why had it changed?\n\nI didn't think it was injured, at least I hoped not, but as I felt for the changing energy in the air, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps something had happened to it.\n\nThe sense of the dragon had shifted, no longer drawing upon me the way it had. A sharp crack caught my attention. I turned and looked toward the sound.\n\nThat had been close.\n\nI moved near one of the tree trunks to hide. It might be nothing more than a deer, or possibly something even smaller, but I had enough experience to know that I needed to be careful, especially if it were something else.\n\nI waited, but no other sounds came.\n\nDistantly, I noticed the energy of the dragon, and it seemed as if it were farther from me than before. I opened myself to that power, thinking of the exercises I had learned within the Academy. One of them involved breathing slowly, in and out through my nose, to help center myself so that I could feel for the heat within the air and focus on the way the dragon power existed. As I did that now, I felt a faint surge of heat. It flickered within me, and then a surge of warmth worked along my skin, leaving me sweating. I wiped a hand across my brow for a moment before realizing the sudden movement might have been too much.\n\nFreezing in place, I continue to focus on my breathing, then shift to another technique that they taught at the Academy to help open up to the dragons.\n\nIf I were to be a dragon mage, I would need to ensure I could stay open to that power. I had to find some way of connecting to it, drawing it through myself. There was a connection to the heat of my body, some part deep within me that roiled with that energy, connecting with the dragon. The sense of the dragon flared within me. It was closer now.\n\nThe dragon shouldn't suddenly be that much closer to me than it had been before.\n\nI relaxed everything within myself. That was the third lesson I was taught. The first was breathing, then the next was recognizing the heat within myself in order to connect to the dragon heat. The third was relaxation, opening myself to the connection of the dragons, so that once that connection was formed it would draw through me, give me a burst of power and energy, and flare up within me.\n\nI felt it surge again.\n\nEverything felt off. There should be no reason for that surge to come, no reason for it to feel as if the connection to the dragon jumped from place to place.\n\nA scrape came across the ground.\n\nI tensed.\n\nI don't know if I would've been aware of it had I not been so focused. Now that I heard that scraping, I knew there was something here.\n\nI tried to ignore the sense of the dragon.\n\nI heard another scraping.\n\nI readied myself, and instinct forced me to reach for a belt knife that wasn't there.\n\nI cursed myself.\n\nI wasn't dressed for the exploration the way I should be. Had I still been at home, I would have been carrying a knife, possibly a bow, and I would have been prepared for anything that might be out in the forest. It wasn't as if I were incapable of handling myself.\n\nI shifted, sliding one foot around the tree, creeping outward.\n\nAs I did, I paid attention to the sounds around me. My breathing sounded loud in my ears. I had to focus, steadying my breathing, steadying everything within myself, preparing.\n\nPerhaps this was all part of Jerith's plan. He wanted to know whether I was capable of finding my way back. An idea came to me that I hadn't considered before. I'd followed the dragon in the forest, getting increasingly lost the farther in I went, but I didn't necessarily have to follow that dragon back. I could follow others.\n\nI had been so focused on the black dragon, knowing that he had been the one to guide me deeper into the forest, that I hadn't paid any attention to the other dragons to help me find my way back.\n\nThe black dragon could find its own way back.\n\nAnother soft shuffling sound came.\n\nThis one was louder than before, and I followed it, moving carefully as I tiptoed through the forest. I didn't know if I was hunting or if I was the hunted.\n\nIf I didn't have any connection to the dragon power, I was going to have to use my own brute strength. Growing up on a farm and learning to handle livestock had given me a certain physical strength that I could use.\n\nI saw a flicker of movement off to my left. I didn't turn, just watched.\n\nIt blended into the green of the forest. Not an animal, at least no animal I'd known. Maybe the green dragon, but I would have been aware of it and would've felt the dragon by now. This was something else.\n\nI took another step toward it, moving slowly and trying not to draw too much attention. Once again, there came a flicker of green. This time it was even clearer to me that it was somebody dressed in green fabric.\n\nI'd seen something like this before. Only once, but the color was too similar to be anything but that.\n\nWhich meant I'd somehow come across the Djarn.\n\nI spun in place, looking around me. If there was one of the Djarn, then there would be others. More likely than not, there would be their own paths leading to the forest. I could use them to navigate back. As I turned carefully, I realized that were at least two other Djarn around me, even though I had only seen one. There might have been even more, though I couldn't see them.\n\nThe ones I could see had spears pointed at me.\n\nI held my hands out, sweeping my gaze around me, trying to search for more while also trying to open myself to the dragon again, searching for some way of connecting to the power within me. I knew that it was there, that the dragon energy existed; it just needed to come out. I needed to reach it.\n\nWere I closer to my homeland, I wouldn't have thought that the Djarn would attack, but out here, this close to the capital, I didn't know. It was possible they were a different tribe. And if that were the case, then considering how I'd entered their territory, it was possible they might have decided to target anyone who would disrupt their sovereignty. My saving grace, at least as I saw it, was that I wore the emblem of the Dragon Academy on my gray jacket.\n\n\"I'm unarmed,\" I said, turning in place. I could still feel the energy of the dragon. Every so often, it seemed to me that the dragon flickered, as if the power that was out there came closer to me, surging within me.\n\nWhy would there be such a surging of power?\n\nWas there something that the Djarn were doing?\n\nThere had always been rumors about the Djarn, suggestions of power. My parents had never spoken of it, but my closest friend Joran's parents had. His father had some experience with the Djarn, and he had known them better than anybody that I had ever known, going so far as to trade with them, something that very few outsiders were ever permitted to do.\n\n\"I'm just trying to find my way back to the capital.\"\n\nNone of the Djarn moved.\n\nI could see three spears. Had there been three from the beginning?\n\nI knew about two of them, but anything more than that might have been hidden. I had to believe that all of the Djarn in the forest around me were aiming spears at me.\n\nI stared.\n\nI wasn't about to move, and I wasn't about to do anything that would be perceived as a threat. Not with spears pointed at me.\n\nInstead, I took a deep breath, focusing on the faint connection to the dragon. If it came down to it, and if the Djarn decided to attack me, I was going to need some way of reaching for that power.\n\nI steadied my breathing, going through the steps I learned in the Academy\u2014hurriedly moving on to feeling for the heat within myself, then to the relaxation stage. Gradually, the energy of the dragon flickered within me, bursting in an almost overwhelming way.\n\nI had done it.\n\nI'd connected to the dragon.\n\nNow I needed to borrow that power.\n\nI tried to summon that power the way that Jerith and other instructors had taught me. I felt another burst of energy. Then I was thrown back.\n\nGetting onto my feet, I looked around.\n\nThe Djarn were gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Sweeping my gaze around the forest, I didn't see any further evidence of the Djarn. I hurried over to where I had been certain that the two who had spears pointed at me were standing, looking to see if there was anything on the ground, even footprints, but there were none.\n\nNot that I really expected there to be. The Djarn were known to move incredibly silently, and rarely left any tracks behind. They lived within the forest, though very few people had ever seen them. I had found an empty city on my journey to the capital before my time in the Academy. Before that, I had not known anything about them other than how they could disappear completely into the forest, making them a mystery, something more of a myth than a reality, even though they had lived just beyond the plains when I was growing up.\n\nI made a circuit around the area where they had pointed their spears at me, continuing to look for signs of them, but still came up empty. Whatever had been here was gone. I focused on the dragon again, feeling for energy, but even as I did, I couldn't find anything.\n\nThat was gone, too.\n\nI started to focus on the energy within me again, steadying my breathing, then working on connecting to the heat within me before trying the relaxation technique one more time. I didn't feel any trail of power to a dragon this time. I had to believe it was still out there, and must be close, especially since I had felt it before, but the sense of it was gone.\n\nHow could I have lost the dragon?\n\nIt had been there but had suddenly disappeared\u2014unless it had flown away at the first sign of the Djarn.\n\nWhich meant that I had to find another way back out of the forest.\n\nMaybe Jerith really was trying to test me, wanting me to get drawn into the forest and find my way back. The other tests I'd had since coming to the Academy had been a matter of trying to prove that I could connect to the dragon, and given what I'd learned on my journey to the city, I had known that I had a connection to the dragons to begin with, so those tests weren't terribly difficult.\n\nThis might be.\n\nI had no idea where I was. If I had some way of finding one of the Djarn paths, I might be able to navigate out of here, but that wasn't a given. The only other option was trying to latch onto the energy within the dragons back in the city to see if I could find a way of tracking them and using that power to draw me back. It would be faint. I knew that it would be difficult for me to reach, but perhaps that was what I was going to have to do.\n\nI stopped and closed my eyes, focusing. As I did, there came a faint sense of heat within me. It was vague, but enough that I thought I could use it.\n\nI started toward it.\n\nSurprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the sense of the dragon that I thought I felt came from the opposite direction than I believed I needed to be going. As I trailed after it, I let it call to me.\n\nAt one point, I thought I felt another tug of dragon energy, but it was faint and it flickered quickly before disappearing altogether. I stopped, looked around, and realized I was in a small clearing. The stream I thought I'd passed before ran through here; the water rushed past some rocks and caused it to burble. I took a drink. If I were able to make my way back to the city, it was still going to be a long walk.\n\nI might be able to follow this stream. It was possible it would lead me back, though I didn't know for sure. I didn't recall any stream within the city. More likely, I would end up wandering aimlessly, getting lost deeper into the forest. Right now, I had the awareness of the dragons that I could hold onto, and I could use that to guide me back to where I needed to go. If I held onto that awareness, it should guide me to the city.\n\nI followed it.\n\nIt seemed as if every thirty minutes or so, a different flicker of power came, typically behind me\u2014and with each one, I could feel the draw of the dragon power. Maybe there were other dragons out in the forest, and perhaps that was part of the test. I could imagine Jerith placing other dragons out there, using them to see if it would be possible for me to find my way back.\n\nThe sense of those other dragons didn't last very long, flickering for only a few moments before disappearing altogether. I had to believe that mattered.\n\nI continued walking toward the power I felt.\n\nIt was faint and vague, but I used that to guide me. It was starting to grow dark by the time I heard a sound in the trees. It was a soft rustling, little more than that, but it was near to me.\n\nI froze, looking around to see if it was something that might pose a danger. There were wolves within the forest, maybe even the native camin, small catlike creatures that hunted in the treetops, and though it was uncommon for the wolves to attack people, I had to believe that I might seem a particularly easy target. I was unarmed. I had to change that.\n\nPerhaps I should've changed that after the Djarn had surrounded me. Not attacked. But I don't think I did attack. Whatever had happened to me and thrown me back had been my own fault. It had come when I had tried to harness the power from the dragons, trying to open myself to it. I didn't have any control, and if that power had flown through me, then it had knocked me back.\n\nI found a fallen branch that was a reasonable length. Then I started forward, using what I could feel of the distant dragons in the city to guide me.\n\nI hadn't gone very far when I caught a flash of brown fur through the trees.\n\nI froze.\n\nIt might be nothing more than a deer, but the movement felt off.\n\nI started forward again. I tried to make as much noise as I could. Most creatures would be scared off, unless it was a pack of wolves hunting me. I had to believe I was getting close to the city, which would make anything living on the edge of the forest unlikely\u2014at least, anything dangerous.\n\nAnother flicker of fur caught my attention.\n\nIt was large. Larger than a wolf.\n\nThere were very few things of that size that I knew of.\n\nI had some ideas of what it could be. If it were a mesahn, then one of the Hunters would have to be there with it.\n\nI was not under attack. They worked with the kingdom, and would not attack.\n\nI moved forward and continued to bang on trees with the branch I had grabbed. With each tree that I passed, I smacked the branch across it, the crack ringing out. When I neared the edge of the forest\u2014the city now outlined in view, moonlight glinting off of some of the pale stone and the wall surrounding the outskirts of the city\u2014a soft laugh drifted through the forest behind me.\n\nI spun, holding up the branch.\n\n\"You were certainly making plenty of noise,\" a familiar voice said.\n\nI frowned, squinting into the darkness. \"Manuel?\"\n\nHe strode forward out of the forest, and his mesahn prowled alongside him, with Manuel resting one hand on the mesahn's neck. He was dressed in a forest green jacket and pants, and he looked more robust than the last time that I had seen him. He was clean-shaven, at least mostly so, though a faint outline of a beard lined his chin. His hair was cut short, and he had a short sword sheathed at his side. \"I kept thinking that you would see me.\"\n\n\"I saw the mesahn,\" I said.\n\nAnother man stood behind Manuel, tall with black hair and a green cloak so that he blended into the forest, which reminded me of the Djarn.\n\n\"Did you?\"\n\nI turned my attention back to Manuel. The other man was probably another Hunter. \"I saw some of the fur, but I didn't see you, so . . .\"\n\nHe grinned at me. \"You decided to make as much noise as possible.\"\n\n\"I was just trying to get out of the forest,\" I said.\n\n\"Why? Are you afraid of the forest? I suppose after what happened to you before that wouldn't be altogether surprising, but you never struck me as one to be fearful of such things.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I wouldn't be normally, but I got stuck. I was supposed to follow a dragon and ended up a little bit lost.\"\n\n\"Ah. A testing, then.\" He glanced back at the other man, who had slipped away through the forest.\n\nI followed him with my eyes until he disappeared from my view.\n\nTurning back to Manuel, I shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Manuel asked.\n\n\"I got pulled into the forest and ended up more lost than I expected,\" I said. \"Then several of the Djarn surrounded me.\"\n\nManuel stiffened suddenly. \"More than one? They've been moving, but that is surprising.\" He turned to the forest, frowning. The mesahn seemed to tense, the muscles beneath his fur rippling. \"Where were you?\"\n\n\"Several hours into the forest,\" I said. \"Why?\"\n\nManuel turned back to me, locking eyes with me for a moment. \"It's just that it's unusual for us to see the Djarn so close to the city. Unfortunately, we've encountered them a bit more often lately than we usually do.\"\n\n\"We?\"\n\nManuel nodded toward where the other man had disappeared. \"Donathar was with me the last stretch.\"\n\n\"Another Hunter?\"\n\nManuel shook his head. \"Mage. He's been out of the city for a while. I hadn't expected to find him in the forest while I was tracking down . . . ah, I guess what I was doing doesn't matter. Don't think Donathar expected to find me either.\"\n\nThere was something in the way he said it that suggested Manuel was troubled.\n\nI doubted he'd share more with me.\n\n\"Is there a problem with the Djarn? I thought the kingdom and the Djarn had peace.\"\n\nManuel nodded. \"There is peace, but that doesn't mean the Djarn won't cause trouble.\"\n\nHe stared off into the forest, and I had a feeling he might decide to go after the Djarn, though given my experience with them, I doubted he would find anything out there. I had seen them myself and hadn't even been able to go after them.\n\n\"You should get back,\" Manuel said. \"It's getting late, and I'm sure that your instructors will be interested in knowing that you made it back and passed the test.\"\n\nI grunted. \"I'm not even sure if I did pass. I got drawn out of the forest and followed the dragon they'd sent out, but couldn't use him to follow them back. He disappeared from me.\"\n\n\"How did you find your way back?\"\n\n\"I used the dragons in the city,\" I said, shrugging. \"I was lucky I could still feel them.\"\n\nHe studied me for a moment. \"I'm not so sure that was luck. Seems to me that is a bit of skill. Perhaps you've been growing far more than you realize.\" Manuel whistled softly, and the mesahn went bounding off into the forest.\n\n\"You're leaving again?\" I asked.\n\n\"For now,\" Manuel said. Manuel glanced over to the city. \"I don't go into the city very often these days. I find I'm far more comfortable wandering beyond her borders. Sometimes, though, I end up drawn into the city and its politics and all of that, usually against my will.\"\n\nI started to laugh, and realized he wasn't joking.\n\n\"What sort of politics would you get drawn into?\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised,\" Manuel said. \"Unfortunately, there are more politics at play within our city than most are aware of.\"\n\n\"Even with the king?\"\n\n\"I think the king encourages them,\" Manuel said. \"He likes a little bit of drama. I think he needs a little bit of drama, considering how powerful his dragon riders are.\" Manuel fell silent, watching me for a moment. Finally, he turned and stared out toward the forest. \"It's why I wanted to be a Hunter. I'm drawn to the solitude.\" He glanced over at me again, flashing a hint of a smile. \"I suspect you understand.\"\n\nI did, and nodded.\n\nThere were times when I would have wanted nothing more than to be alone.\n\nThat wouldn't teach me how to use the dragon connection though.\n\n\"Maybe I could connect to the mesahn,\" I said.\n\n\"Maybe.\" He glanced toward the Academy. \"I suppose that I should get back to my work. When I heard you banging your way through the forest like some sort of blind person, I had to at least say hello.\" Manuel grinned at me.\n\nI had made a lot of noise as I had come through here. And I wasn't about to feel bad about it, either. I didn't know what was out there, and it could have been some animal.\n\nManuel slipped away, disappearing back into the darkness of the forest. It didn't take long before I couldn't see him at all.\n\nI turned toward the city, heading back at a jog. The closer I got to the city, the more that the energy of the dragons pulled upon me. I could feel the heat within them, the mixture of powers coming from the dragons within the barracks where they were held. Strangely, I still couldn't feel the heat and energy of the black dragon. I figured I should be aware of him, especially as he had to have returned.\n\nWhen I reached the entrance to the Academy situated on the outskirts of the city, I pulled open the oaken door and stepped into the stone hall. Dragon sculptures lined the hallway, lanterns flickering in the jaws of the dragons, as if they were breathing fire in the building itself. I hurried through the halls then paused for a moment. I was tired, especially after a day spent wandering the forest, and wanted nothing more than to go to bed and rest, but I thought that I needed to report to Jerith and let him know that I had returned.\n\nI headed up the wide stone staircase that led to the instructors' quarters. More dragon sculptures were situated every few stairs, flames breathing out from their mouths. The flames never burned, as they were all tinged by the magic of the dragon mages, though they could feel hot if somebody got too close to them.\n\nI paused on the landing of the instructors' quarters and hurried along the hallway to Jerith's door. I had come to know Jerith as well as any of the instructors, and he was generally kind to me, though I was still just a student. I knocked at his door, waiting for a moment.\n\nThere was no sound from within.\n\nI knocked again, and waited still, but there was nothing.\n\nI turned away, heading down the hall, and made my way toward my room in the student section. The hallway in this section was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. There were no decorative dragon sculptures to illuminate the way. Sconces set into the stone glowed with a faint, non-magical light, oil burning in them. I heard voices laughing from the end of the room, a common area in which many of the students gathered. I didn't usually spend time there, mostly because I didn't fit in with most of the other students. Part of that was because I had a connection to the dragons that surpassed that of a dragon rider, but the other part was something about me. Having come from lands practically near the Wilds, I was an outsider, at least according to the other students.\n\nNot that it bothered me. It couldn't.\n\nI was happy enough to learn about the dragons, my connection to them, and what that might do as I continued to work with my power.\n\nI had to go through the common area on the way to my room though.\n\nAs I headed through, I paused. Three students sat at the table near the hearth, tossing dice as they laughed. Mugs were set in front of them, and one of them, an older student with dark black hair and a sharp nose, looked over at me. Brandel was unpleasant, and had been that way ever since I had first met him. He had been at the Academy for the better part of five years, and progressed quickly through it. From what I had learned, he had proven that he would eventually gain dragon mage power, though I also had learned he did not have significant power. At least not yet. According to him, it was only a matter of time. And any connection was more than I had.\n\nThe other two students were younger\u2014maybe 14 or 15, though it was difficult for me to know, especially as I haven't spent much time with Jameth and Rohda. Jameth was slight of build, which made him look even younger, and had pale blue eyes. Rohda was a solid young woman, the kind who looked as if she would have managed well on a farm, and had a pockmarked face along with pale golden hair. They both looked over to me, while Brandel smirked.\n\nI was nearly across the room when Brandel spoke up. \"It took you long enough,\" he said.\n\nI paused, turning back to him. Brandel was large for his age, and only a few years younger than me. I had always suspected it made him feel a bit more entitled than some of the other students. That was partly my own fault. I rarely said anything, and I wondered if he took my silence for an unwillingness to contest what he said to me.\n\n\"What was that?\" I crossed my arms over my chest, frowning at him.\n\n\"You heard me. I just said it took you long enough.\" He smirked at me, getting to his feet and taking a step toward me. I didn't move. Men\u2014or boys, really\u2014like Brandel needed to be handled in a certain way.\n\nI glanced over at the others. Jameth and Rohda watched, and I could sense an almost excited energy from them. They wanted Brandel to take action. Unless I was careful, this wasn't going to end well for anyone here, least of all me.\n\n\"What do you know about it?\" I asked Brandel.\n\nHe shrugged. \"I know you were sent on a test,\" he said, glancing over at Jameth and then Rohda, the grin on his face widening. I had to force myself to take steadying breaths to keep from getting too annoyed with him. \"And I know that it took you . . . what? Most of the day?\"\n\nI stared at him. \"So?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Do you even care to know what it typically takes someone?\"\n\n\"Not particularly,\" I said.\n\n\"You wouldn't,\" Rohda said, sneering at me.\n\nI looked over to her. \"Have I done something to offend you?\" I asked her.\n\nBrandel grunted, and he took a step closer to me. He was only a pace away now, and I looked at him. He was about my height, and unfortunately, also about my build. If it were to come down to an actual physical confrontation, it was possible that I wouldn't be able to handle him the way I would want.\n\nNot that I intended to get into a physical confrontation with Brandel.\n\nIt was more than just the fact that we might be evenly matched. It was also his connection to magic. He was far better connected to the dragon magic than I was, and with that, he would have very little difficulty handling me. Using power against another student wasn't permitted within the Dragon Academy, but that didn't stop people like Brandel from doing so in subtle ways.\n\n\"You've offended all of us,\" Brandel said, watching me. \"You being here. You should go back to the Wilds where you belong.\"\n\nThere was the common insult I got from them. If only I were from the Wilds. \"I'm not from the Wilds.\"\n\nHe snorted. \"Near enough.\" He stepped up to me, and I could feel the stench of his hot breath on my face. \"Do you know what we say about the people from the Wilds?\"\n\n\"That you wish you could be more like them?\"\n\nJameth barked out a laugh, but he cut it off as soon as Rohda glared at him.\n\n\"That we would cut them down for the way they've interacted with the kingdom.\"\n\nI shook my head and went to turn away when Brandel grabbed my arm. I jerked it free.\n\n\"I'd be careful, Ashan,\" he sneered.\n\n\"Go ahead and be careful,\" I said.\n\n\"No. You need to be careful.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\"\n\n\"Do you know what happens to students here who don't succeed?\"\n\n\"They go back home,\" I said. I shook my head at him, having nothing more to say. What was the point, anyway? If I failed at the Academy, and failed at becoming a dragon rider, at worst, I would just return home.\n\nI had long ago resigned myself to the fact that I would be a farmer, and it wasn't even a life that I would resent. I enjoyed time on the farm, working with the livestock, and didn't have any problem with that expectation for me.\n\nThese others . . . by the way they said that failures had to return home, I could tell that whatever life they had left was quite a bit worse than mine had been.\n\nIt should make me feel some measure of sympathy for them.\n\nBrandel glowered at me, though he said nothing more.\n\nI spun away, heading down the hall into my room. As I closed the door behind me, I couldn't help but feel how strange it was that I was more isolated here than I ever had been while living on the plains, despite being in a city with so many people and attending an Academy where I was supposed to learn about my connection to the dragons.\n\nI didn't belong here.\n\nAt the same time, I needed to be here."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The training hall spread out before me. It was an enormous structure, a room within the Academy where we gathered to work with the instructors, and a place where I had come to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to fit in within the Academy, but it had become increasingly obvious that I did not.\n\nSo many of the people who came to the Academy had talent already. While I might have a connection to the dragons, or dragon, I didn't necessarily have anything else. That connection made a difference. Those who had such a connection used it in ways that allowed them to demonstrate their power, but it was more than that. They used it in order for them to prove that they were worthy.\n\nDragon mage worthy.\n\nI might be able to feel the heat in my belly and detect something guiding me, sharing with me that there was something else I could or couldn't do, but that was all I could feel at this point.\n\nI stayed in the back, looking at the others. Brandel remained close to the front of the chamber, talking to others on his level, like Cara and Dominic, both of whom seemed to belong in the Academy far more than I did. Brandel always had others with him, and they leaned forward, hanging on every word.\n\n\"He can be a bastard, but he's skilled enough,\" the voice said behind me.\n\nI turned to see Ames standing there.\n\nHe was younger than me, and had been at the Academy for quite a bit longer. Much like so many who came to the Academy, I suspected Ames had been here since he was young, when he had first demonstrated his connection and talent with the dragons, and had proven that he had real potential.\n\n\"Why does it have to be like that?\" I asked\u2014though as I looked at Brandel, and the way that the others hung on him, I could see it. There was something charismatic about him, almost magnetic. I had known men like him before, but they weren't all bullies like Brandel was.\n\nAnd because he was a bully, there was a part of me that reacted instinctively. I wanted nothing more than to tell him off, but that wouldn't do at all. I was older, and theoretically, I should know better.\n\n\"His father is someone of nobility,\" Ames said. He shook his head. \"Not that I would ever know it by talking to him. That is, if he would let me talk to him.\"\n\nI looked over and frowned. \"Why wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"He doesn't believe that I'm of the right class.\"\n\n\"What class is that?\"\n\n\"His. He's got to become a full mage or his father suffers in the eyes of the king.\" Onas started forward, and I frowned again. He had always set himself apart, more so than most of the students whom I had come to know, but he hadn't been rude to me, not like Brandel or the others who hung on him.\n\nWhen Matthew, the master instructor who was to lead today's session, strode in, his flowing robes hanging over his rotund form, he swept his gaze around the others, holding it briefly on Brandel then the gathered students with him.\n\n\"I would like you to harness your connection to the dragons,\" he said. His words carried, and I didn't know if it had anything to do with how he summoned magic, or if it was simply the contours of the room. The acoustics here might have allowed his words to easily resonate. Certainly in a place like this, where we were expected to continue to study and learn, there would be benefits in having our words carry as his did.\n\nI stayed off to the side of the room. I focused, thinking about the dragons, thinking about the connection that I shared with them, and trying to find something within it.\n\nThere were steps that I could follow, and I did them the way that I had been trained to, but the heat that I could feel in my belly was still not enough. Not nearly enough.\n\nIf only I could feel the same thing I felt when I was in the forest with the Djarn.\n\nI had felt that connection then.\n\nI needed to do so consistently.\n\nEvery so often, I caught Brandel looking in my direction.\n\nIt seemed as if he were amused. Or annoyed. Maybe both.\n\n\"As you hold onto it, what I would like is for you to focus on letting that power flow out from you. You can feel it in your fingers. That is the first step.\"\n\nIn my case, that wasn't the first step. Feeling it in my fingers was just a part of what I knew I needed to do, but I had not even managed to accomplish that. Not yet. I wasn't sure if I even could. The heat was there. And as it burned within me, I focused on it, struggling to see if there was something within that heat that I might be able to push out into my fingers the way that he instructed.\n\nBut I couldn't.\n\nI tried. Each moment that passed, I tried to feel something else, some way for that heat to begin to build, to push it out into my fingertips.\n\nBut I couldn't.\n\n\"See? He can't even do this much.\"\n\nI looked over at Brandel, and found his fingertips glowing with the dragon mage energy. It wasn't the first time that I had seen him holding onto that power, but he had decided to turn his attention upon me.\n\nI didn't need this. I didn't need his arrogance, and I certainly didn't need his attention. It annoyed me.\n\nBut perhaps it shouldn't.\n\nI reminded myself what would happen if I failed.\n\n\"Quiet,\" Master Matthew said, and he swept his gaze around the others again. He said something to the students nearest him, before making his way over to me. \"Are you able to reach for any of the heat?\"\n\nI looked down, focusing on my fingers, before looking up and meeting his gaze. I was here for a reason. And if I could pass enough of the tests\u2014if I could prove that I deserved to be here\u2014then perhaps even Master Matthew would understand. \"I can feel the heat,\" I said. \"I can't always do anything with it.\" Always was an understatement.\n\n\"There are different techniques for harnessing that power. What I would encourage you to do would be to find your focus, and see if you can draw upon the energy within yourself. Perhaps you can find the way to touch that heat in a different manner.\" He cocked his head. He had wide-set eyes and a double chin, and his thin lips pressed together tightly. \"Don't let the others get on your case too much. Everybody has their own technique. You must find yours.\"\n\nIt was the most reassurance that any of the instructors have given me. Well, Jerith had attempted to try to reassure me, but even his reassurances had come laced with questions. It was almost as if Jerith didn't know whether he believed that I could do what I needed to do.\n\n\"What do you recommend?\" I asked.\n\n\"What works for me is to feel the heat. I assume you can feel that, otherwise you wouldn't be here.\" He waited a moment, and I nodded. \"Once you feel it, then you must find a way to push it. At least, that's what I do. I can push that heat along my blood, along my arms, and it heads out to my fingers.\"\n\nAs he did it, an arcing of flame raced from one fingertip to another, sizzling in the air. It created a bright flaming spiral, and then it faded.\n\nDragon mage magic was impressive when seen up close, but had proven to be more challenging for me to draw upon.\n\n\"Do you see?\" he asked.\n\n\"I see,\" I said softly.\n\n\"Then keep trying.\" He nodded, smiling and turning back to the other students as if that were all the answer I needed.\n\nI snorted to myself and focused on the heat. There was no point in trying to do anything else. I could feel that, and tried to draw on the energy that was within me, trying to feel for something else, but each time that I did, I recognized that the heat went nowhere.\n\nIf it were supposed to radiate throughout me, it did not.\n\nI watched the other students gathered, noticing how so many of them had no difficulty with pushing the heat out of their fingertips, leaving him glowing.\n\nSome of them, Brandel included, had a surge of power that went from one fingertip to the next, and they were able to carry power through them.\n\nUntil I could do that, I would never be a dragon mage. But I could feel the heat. It told me that I might be able to do something.\n\nEventually, I grew tired of remaining here. I couldn't draw enough power out, so staying here didn't serve any purpose.\n\nI headed out of the training room, but not before seeing Brandel looking over at me, a smirk on his face.\n\nFrom there, I headed upstairs.\n\nA dark-cloaked man passed me in the hall and it took me a moment to realize it was the same man I'd seen with Manuel the night before.\n\n\"You're the young man Manuel spoke of,\" he said.\n\n\"Am I?\" I looked along the hall, but it was empty save for the two of us.\n\n\"He claims you came from the plains.\"\n\nHe waited for me to speak, and I nodded.\n\n\"I should like to speak to you about your experience. I have not found many with talent beyond the forest.\"\n\nWas that what this would be about?\n\nIf he were a dragon mage, then I knew I had to interact with him, but I didn't need someone to accuse me of the same thing Brandel and the others did. \"If you would like.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Find me later.\"\n\nI nodded, and as he left, I wondered if maybe I could learn something from him. Matthew had mentioned that I would need to find my own way of attaining power. What if the dark-cloaked man could help me find my way?\n\nI reached my room, where I sank down in the chair in front of my desk. I pulled open my book and turned the pages, flipping through slowly and reading the instructions written upon them. I was asked to find myself, the power within me. Channel it.\n\nThese were the same points I had learned from the instructors. They were just written down. Despite that, I still did not find what I needed. How could I? There were no answers. Nothing that would give me any guidance, and nothing that would tell me where I needed to go and what I needed to do. I had nothing other than my belief that I could.\n\nAnd it was a belief that had been pushed upon me by others who seem to think that I have potential\u2014though I no longer knew if I truly had it.\n\nI pored over the pages, looking for answers in the same way that I had every day in the months that I had been in the Academy, trying to understand some way for me to reach for the power of the dragons\u2014not just to feel it.\n\nThere was a section in one of the early parts of the book that spoke of the heat that I was supposed to feel\u2014and because I felt it, I thought that perhaps I could uncover something from it. But the longer that I felt it, the harder it was for me to know if there was anything within it that might be useful to me.\n\nIt talked about finding a pattern within myself.\n\nWhat did that even mean?\n\nThe instructors talked about focusing on the heat, focusing on the breathing, and then pushing that heat out as I connected to the dragons, but a pattern?\n\nIt seemed interesting, only in that it might provide me with a different way of reaching for the power of the dragons. But still, it didn't provide me with any immediate benefit.\n\nA knock came at my door.\n\nI looked up from the book, rubbing my eyes. I felt like I had been studying for the better part of several hours, though I doubt it had been anywhere close to that. It was just that this mental work was far harder on me than I would've expected it to be, especially having been on the farm for as long as I had, being accustomed to physical activity. Thinking the way that I had been drained me almost as much as a full day of work on the farm. I got up from my seat and headed to the door, pulling it open and frowning.\n\n\"Oh,\" Cara said. She had auburn hair and a round face that pouted as she looked up at me. \"You are here.\"\n\n\"Can I help you?\"\n\nIt was best to be polite. I was older than Cara, and though she looked at me with disgust in her eyes, there was no point in me causing drama with her. I had enough drama with others in the Academy as it was.\n\n\"I was told to give you this.\"\n\nShe held out a folded piece of paper, stuffed into an envelope and sealed with wax.\n\nI frowned at her. \"By who?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"One of the master instructors claims it was left here for you.\"\n\nI took it, and before I had the opportunity to do or say anything else, she stormed off down the hall. I stepped back, closing the door, and leaned on it for a moment.\n\nAs I unfolded the envelope, my eyes skimmed the neat handwriting.\n\nIt was from Alison.\n\nThat was unexpected. Not that Alison would not send word. She had promised that she would try to update me, but the fact that she had written . . .\n\nThe letter was simple. Only a few lines. She hoped that it found me well. She was diving into her apprenticeship, which didn't surprise me at all. I had expected that she would be. And she wanted me to keep an eye out for Joran, since he was coming to the capital and wouldn't know how to find me.\n\nThat was it.\n\nI had a sneaking suspicion as to who got the letter here. It was the kind of thing that Manuel would have done, though why wouldn't he have given it to me when I had seen him before?\n\nStill, my heart hammered, and excitement filled me.\n\nJoran was coming to the city.\n\nI smiled to myself, and was left with other emotions I had not anticipated\u2014excitement, yes, but maybe a little embarrassment that I hadn't reached for the magic yet.\n\nHow would Joran react?\n\nMy oldest friend would probably tease me about failing to become a dragon mage, but then he would be jealous when he learned that I could be a dragon rider.\n\nI smiled again. Now I only had to figure out how to find him when he came to the city. I wanted to figure out why he was coming, as well.\n\nIt didn't matter though.\n\nAnd when Joran arrived, my months of feeling isolated here would no longer matter either.\n\nAnd maybe, I had to hope, he could stay for a while."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Heat radiated from the dragons, and I stood outside of their pens, watching them. The dragon pens were made out of metal worked with a hint of dragon magic, the metal itself unlike anything that I had ever experienced before, and perpetually warm. Patterns were worked into the metal, so finely wrought that they blurred into the metal itself\u2014you could only determine what they were by tracing your fingers along it. Perhaps by using power as well, though I didn't have that experience.\n\nThe bars of the pens stretched high above. The only way in was through a gate in the center of the pen. It was not enclosed at the top. There was no purpose in doing so. It was not designed to keep the dragons in, but to keep others out.\n\nThe small greenish dragon that had come back to the city with me was curled up in the corner of the yard, watching. This dragon was small, larger than a horse, but not nearly as massive as so many of the other dragons within the pens. He had grown in the time that we had returned to the capital and now his scaled sides glittered in the sunlight. A heat washed over him, giving him an energy that caught my awareness.\n\nI focused, thinking about the power that radiated between myself and the dragon, using the techniques that I had learned within the Academy. I needed to breathe, to focus, and to find some way to recognize how to channel that power.\n\nThose were the steps.\n\nI moved on from my breathing, trying to feel for the heat within me, though it came suddenly and faint. I steadied my breathing, focusing on each breath within my lungs, thinking about just how much I needed to find some energy buried deep within me.\n\nFinally, I attempted to relax. It hadn't worked all that well for me out in the forest, but while standing this close to the dragon, especially one that I knew that I could connect to, I had to hope that I would be able to feel that connection.\n\nI readied for the possibility that it would strike me in the chest when I did, throwing me back. It had happened when I'd been in the forest.\n\n\"Do you always stand there and stare at the dragons? I don't think they will do anything more than what they have.\"\n\nI turned to see a dark-haired woman watching me. She had on a plain brown cloak, and she watched me with dark oval eyes. There was something almost impossibly alluring about her. I smiled. \"You might be surprised.\"\n\nThe woman approached slowly, and she leaned up against the bars of the dragon pen, squeezing them. When I had been here before, I had never seen anyone other than the students at the Academy who had been willing to approach the dragons so closely.\n\n\"I think they are impressive, but I feel bad for them.\"\n\nI tipped my head to the side, frowning at her. \"You feel bad?\"\n\nThe woman nodded and took a deep breath. \"They're captives here.\"\n\n\"This is only where they sleep,\" I said. \"Most of the time, the dragons are free to travel wherever they would like.\" I thought of the black dragon that had flown away from me, the one that Jerith had used to test me. Those dragons were not in captivity. \"You aren't with the Academy.\"\n\nShe shook her head as she glanced over to me, holding my gaze with her dark eyes. They practically swallowed me. \"Are you?\"\n\nI nodded, staring through the bars of the cage at the dragon. \"I've been here for a few months.\"\n\n\"A few months?\" She arched a brow. \"Most students at the Academy are younger, are they not?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I came here following a testing out beyond the borders of the forest.\"\n\nHer eyes widened slightly. \"The Wilds?\"\n\nWhy did everybody keep assuming that I came from the Wilds? Did so few people within the kingdom know that there was anything beyond the forest? Did everybody really believe that the Wilds were all that was there?\n\n\"Not the Wilds. I came from the city of Berestal. Well, not quite from the city, but outside of it.\"\n\n\"I don't have much experience with those who trained at the Academy,\" she said, \"but I would not have expected someone like yourself.\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I suppose I wouldn't have expected someone like myself either.\"\n\nShe turned her attention to the bars of the cage, staring through. \"Why this dragon?\"\n\n\"No reason,\" I said. She didn't need to know the dragon seemed to call to me. I couldn't really explain it, anyway. There was a sense of power that came from the dragon. While it was similar to what I detected from the other dragons, it wasn't quite the same. It was almost as if this dragon, the one I had connected to first, had bonded to me in a way that was meant to pull upon me differently, more strongly than others. \"Do you come here often?\"\n\nI hadn't seen her before, and I came most days.\n\n\"Not often. Occasionally I come because I feel compelled to look upon the dragons.\" She looked at me and grinned. \"I don't suppose you could understand that. I've always felt drawn to them.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not like someone who has the potential to use the dragon power. This is different, though I feel as if it is no less potent. It's more about a desire to see them. I feel as if we know so little about the dragons.\"\n\nThere had been a time when I had felt similar to her, a time when I was still living out on the plains, still farming, and perhaps even still dreaming of what it might be like for me to gain an understanding of the dragons.\n\n\"I'm Ashan Feranth, by the way.\"\n\nShe watched me for a moment. It seemed as if a debate waged behind her eyes, as if she didn't know whether she wanted to tell me who she was. \"Natalie,\" she said softly.\n\n\"I could bring you closer to the dragon if you like.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I'm not so sure I should.\" She squeezed the bars of the cage for a moment before turning. \"I should be going. It was nice to meet you, Ashan.\"\n\nShe started to move away, and I debated going after her, racing to ask her more questions, to offer to walk with her, to do anything to spend even another moment with her, but I caught sight of Brandel and one of the other students walking toward her.\n\nRather than dealing with a confrontation, I turned away. I tapped on the bar of the dragon pen, leaning toward the dragon, and whispered, \"I really wish I understood how to use your power.\"\n\nI made my way along the enormous caged enclosure, dragging my hand over the bars and looking through them as I went, studying the dragons. There was the smaller green scaled one, but there were others here too. Many of them were quite a bit larger, though not nearly as large as the massive black dragon that I had chased through the forest.\n\nI paused for a moment, staring at a dragon with a mixture of red and gold scales curled up on the ground in front of the cage. He looked up, as if knowing I was there, and breathed out heavily.\n\nI tried to open myself to the dragon, but my awareness of the power and my ability to utilize it were separate.\n\nI reached the end of the dragon pen and started to turn back toward the Academy when a figure sitting on a small bench near the end of the pen caught my attention. He was older with gray hair and a thin beard, and slender. He was dressed in the jacket and pants that marked him as an instructor at the Academy, though I had never seen him there before. Strangely, I could feel energy radiating from him, as if he were connecting to the dragons in a way that permitted me to feel just what he was doing.\n\nI found myself drawn to him, watching.\n\nVoices behind me caught my attention, from Brandel and whomever he had with him\u2014I hadn't stared long enough to know\u2014and I shuffled forward, wanting to be away from them. Hopefully by creeping toward this instructor, I wouldn't draw nearly as much attention. Brandel could be a pain in the ass, but he didn't like to antagonize the instructors. It was how he ensured he kept his position within the Academy, such as it was.\n\nI inched closer to the man. As I did, I could still feel the power coming from him. It stretched between him and one of the dragons inside of the dragon pen, though not the nearest, a pale blue dragon that looked as if he rested. This came from a small brown dragon that seemed to sit up on his legs, staring out through the bars, watching.\n\nI could feel the energy coming off of the dragons too. I could feel the heat and the power, and I could feel his connection to them. All of it left me marveling at just how powerful he must be.\n\nHe glanced over to me, and I blinked, tempted to pull away, but decided to stay there. If he were an instructor at the Academy, then he would most likely welcome a student.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" the man snapped.\n\nSo much for welcoming.\n\n\"I was just noticing your connection to the dragon. Why the brown one?\" I asked.\n\nThe man sat up slightly and looked at me, frowning for a moment. \"The strength of the dragon is not determined by the size of the dragon. Considering your age, you should know that.\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I think I've heard that in some of my classes.\" The instructions were not always clear. I always felt as if I were trying to catch up, always a step behind some of the others, and though it didn't necessarily matter to me, I didn't remember hearing that the size of the dragon didn't determine the strength.\n\n\"What's your name?\" the man demanded.\n\nI forced a smile. \"Ashan Feranth.\"\n\n\"I'm not familiar with that name. Where are you from?\"\n\nThere it was. He would likely treat me the same way as everybody else I'd encountered, using my homeland as some sort of measure to determine that I didn't deserve to be here working with the dragons, understanding their power\u2014as if that mattered. Manuel seemed to think that it didn't, along with the other instructors who had welcomed me. Maybe he was going to be more like Brandel and some of the other students.\n\n\"I'm from a place to the west. A city called Berestal.\"\n\nHe watched me for a moment, and there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes. He knew Berestal. \"How did you end up here?\"\n\nI shrugged, glancing over to the dragons. In the distance, I noticed Brandel and Kane, the other student who had been with them, lingering near the bars of the dragon pen. Either they were trying to listen or they were waiting for me. Possibly both.\n\n\"There was a testing near my home.\"\n\nI figured that was the best answer, at least given the current circumstances. He didn't need to know anything more than that.\n\n\"Ah. You're the one Manuel brought to the city.\"\n\nI blinked for a moment before nodding. \"I am.\"\n\n\"He said you had potential. That you were raw\u2014though most are raw when they first come to us. Potential is only a part of what matters. Skill matters more than strength.\"\n\nFirst Donathar, and now this man?\n\nHow many people had Manuel spoken to about me?\n\n\"Thanks, I guess?\"\n\nThe man grunted. \"I meant no slight by it. Everyone needs to learn somehow. The key is putting in the time and the effort to ensure that you gain the connection to the dragons that you should have.\" He watched me for a moment, and there was a heat in his eyes. \"You said you recognized the connection I shared with the brown dragon.\"\n\nI turned, looking into the dragon pen. Nearby, I could practically feel Brandel smirking at me. I ignored it, holding onto the iron bars that held some of the heat within the air\u2014some of it coming from the bright sun shining down, the rest coming from the dragons themselves. I could feel that energy radiating toward me, through me.\n\nWere I not so nervous, I would try to open myself up to the dragons, to see if I might find a way of holding onto that power. Instead, I allowed myself to feel that energy, testing whether there was some aspect of it that would permit me to feel the connection to the dragon.\n\n\"I could feel the connection trailing off of you,\" I said.\n\n\"Interesting,\" the man said, getting to his feet and making his way toward the dragon pen. He was a little taller than me, and he moved with a strange sort of liquid grace. Heat radiated from him, and I suspected that came from his connection to the dragons. \"What else can you tell me?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Probably not much. I can just feel the connection that you had with the dragon. I don't know what you're doing with it, if anything. Just that the power that connected you to the dragon is there.\"\n\n\"What can you feel now?\"\n\nEnergy shifted from him, no longer radiating in the way that it had before. Now I could feel the way it shimmered, coming from him and through the small, pale blue dragon. It wasn't nearly as potent as the connection to the brown dragon. Heat filled the man, and as I looked over, watching him, I noticed a faint trailing of flames along the dragon pen, streaming from one hand, working up the bars, and connecting to his other hand.\n\n\"Other than the way that you're holding on to the power?\"\n\nThe man nodded. \"Yes. Other than that. What else can you detect?\"\n\n\"You shifted connection to the dragon here,\" I said, motioning to the pale blue dragon. I could feel that connection, that energy, but more than that, I could see the way the dragon seemed to lean forward, perched to hold on to the power. It was difficult for me to know whether or not the dragon minded the way he connected to it.\n\nIt was the first time I'd even considered that, though. Most of the time, the dragons didn't give off any sense they minded what had been done to them. For the most part, the dragons permitted those with the connection to use that power. In this case, I recognized that the dragon gave that energy willingly, almost freely.\n\n\"I did,\" he said. The flames trailed off of his fingers, working around the bars, then drifted up and back down before fading and disappearing. Energy shifted again, this time surging now from the red-and-yellow-scaled dragon. It was a different surge of energy. This one seemed to forge a hint of power, though it was a different sort of power than what the other had.\n\nI turned my attention to that dragon. He had stirred, getting up slightly, resting his forelegs on the ground as he shifted so that he could pay more attention to the man now connecting to him.\n\nI found myself marveling at the control. I had known that dragon mages, especially those who were incredibly skilled, had a connection to multiple dragons, and could use that power in ways that others could not, but seeing how quickly and easily he shifted his touch from one to another, switching between the different dragons as if it were nothing, left me amazed.\n\n\"You detected that as well,\" the man said.\n\nI nodded again. \"I did. I can feel the way you're pulling on power.\"\n\nHe released the connection to the dragons. I felt it when he did, the sudden disappearance of the connection to any of the dragons. He still held some heat within him, and the flames he wrapped around the bars of the dragon pen stretched up and then back down, maintaining a connection for another moment before it faded into nothingness. Heat wasted from him, as if he still held on to some of that buried dragon power\u2014unless he had some magic of his own.\n\n\"You will meet me here tomorrow morning. At first light.\"\n\n\"I have classes in the morning,\" I said.\n\nThe man shook his head. \"No. I will make sure your instructors know I have requested your presence.\"\n\n\"And who are you?\" I asked.\n\nThe man watched me for a moment before smiling tightly. \"Why, I am Thomas Elaron.\"\n\nHe started to move away, and it took a moment for his name to sink in.\n\nThomas Elaron was the king's mage.\n\nThe chief dragon mage.\n\nThe dragon mage who had come to Berestal for the selection.\n\nOf course he would know what happened there.\n\nAnd here I'd been questioning him.\n\nI looked behind me, but Brandel and Kane were gone.\n\nMaybe that was for the best. I didn't want to deal with either of them right now.\n\nInstead, I turned my attention back to the dragon pens, staring through the bars, focusing on the dragons as I tried to open myself up to that power. There wasn't much that I could feel. Only a hint of residual energy.\n\nI lingered there for a while, wondering what Thomas would want from me, and whether it was going to be dangerous. At the same time, a hint of excitement filled me. If I were going to learn about how to connect to the dragons, I had to believe Thomas would be able to teach me. Probably better than anyone else I had worked with."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Thomas was already outside of the dragon pen when I arrived. I glanced up to the sky. It still wasn't first light, so I didn't think I was late, but I worried I might have been further behind than I should have been. Given that he'd offered to work with me, perhaps I should have gotten here plenty early so I wasn't the one holding up my training.\n\nI found Thomas dressed similarly to how he had been dressed the day before, though it seemed as if he had a metal pin worked into his jacket that wasn't there. In the darkness, it was difficult for me to tell.\n\nI could feel energy radiating from him, power that drifted off of him, swirling through the bars of the dragon pen toward the nearest of the dragons. I couldn't tell which dragon he connected to, though there was something about the connection that suggested to me that it was the same brown dragon he had been connecting to when I had come here the day before.\n\n\"You came,\" Thomas said without looking over.\n\nI nodded, standing a step behind him, watching. I couldn't necessarily see anything, though there was a pull of power I could feel. It seemed to pull upon something deep within his belly, a way of drawing that power from the dragon to him. I couldn't tell if he was using that power in any way, or if it was simply meant to fill him.\n\nMy father had described the heat as a burning sensation within his belly, and it was something that I felt around the dragons as well, but anything more than that was still beyond my ability\u2014so far, at least.\n\n\"You told me to meet you at first light,\" I said.\n\nHe grunted, and he released his power as he turned to me. \"Very good. I wasn't sure if you would awaken in time to join me.\"\n\n\"I get up early. I'm accustomed to it.\"\n\n\"Are you?\"\n\n\"Years spent on a farm with roosters crowing at first light has trained me to get up early.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I suppose it would. You were a farmer, then? I thought you said you came from Berestal.\"\n\nI nodded. \"My family owns a farm outside of Berestal. We farm on the plains.\"\n\nI had no idea whether he would even know what that meant, but he watched me for a moment, nodding slowly. \"As far as I know, there are few farms out on the plains. It can be difficult with the storms.\"\n\nI regarded him for a moment. \"It can be. Sometimes the storms are powerful, especially during the wet season.\" Even the storms during the dry season could be incredible. We had encountered powerful storms before I had come this way, storms that were unlike most that we had out on the plains.\n\n\"Who is tending to your farm in your absence? Your father?\"\n\n\"My father is gone,\" I said softly.\n\n\"I'm sorry. What happened?\"\n\nI took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. \"An accident years ago left him addled. He began to worsen and ventured off during a particularly bad storm.\"\n\n\"You lost your father because of the storms?\"\n\nI nodded. \"I did. The rains forced him off of the Kings Road, and . . .\" I shrugged. I didn't really know what else happened, only that by the time I had found him, he was mostly gone. Possibly entirely gone.\n\n\"Do you have anyone else in your family caring for your farm?\"\n\n\"They sold the farm now that I came to the city.\"\n\nThomas regarded me for a moment. \"And if you don't succeed?\"\n\nThe question was almost too harsh, though I honestly appreciated his bluntness. It was better than so many others within the Academy. \"If I fail, then I return to my home. I find a new way.\"\n\n\"That doesn't worry you?\"\n\n\"Why worry about things I can't control?\"\n\nThomas turned away, focusing on the dragons in the distance. \"Hmm.\"\n\nHe fell silent, and I could still feel the heat coming off of him, the connection that he shared with the dragon. \"Do you know the plains and Berestal?\"\n\nIt was a foolish question. Thomas had been in Berestal for the testing. What I should be asking about was Elaine, though since coming to the capital, no one had wanted to speak of it more than what I'd shared with Manuel.\n\n\"I am familiar with most parts of the kingdom,\" he said. \"I'm tasked with ensuring its safety.\"\n\n\"Because you're the king's mage?\"\n\nThomas turned to me, watching me for a moment. \"I wasn't sure if you recognized me.\"\n\n\"I didn't recognize you,\" I admitted. \"I recognized your name and only because . . .\"\n\nHe chuckled. A hint of light started to emerge in the distance as dawn began to break. \"You can say it.\"\n\n\"Because Elaine mentioned it.\"\n\n\"So you were with her.\"\n\n\"Not with her,\" I said, more quickly than I needed to.\n\nThomas watched me for another moment. \"I suppose you haven't been in the capital long enough to recognize me by sight.\"\n\n\"Are you here very often?\"\n\n\"Not as often as the king would like. Those requests draw me away, though in order for the kingdom to remain safe, there are things that pull me away from the capital. And things that draw me back.\"\n\n\"Like the Vard.\"\n\nHe turned and looked at me. \"Like the Vard,\" he said. \"I suppose out on the plains you have some experience with the Vard. Not many do. I am surprised they were so willing to attack a caravan from the capital. Now we have other issues at hand.\"\n\nThe way he said it suggested it was something other than the Vard.\n\nHe didn't say it, but given my experience in the forest, and seeing Manuel, I worried it was the Djarn. With Joran making his way to the capital, I worried he'd find danger. His father believed he had a connection to the Djarn. So few in the kingdom did, and what was known about them\u2014at least, widely known\u2014wasn't enough to make anyone feel completely safe in their forest.\n\n\"Manuel said Elaine and Barton were after a dragon\u2014that they have been after dragons.\" I was careful not to call them Vard. I still didn't know if they were.\n\n\"It would make their assault upon the kingdom more effective,\" he said. \"If the Vard had dragons to terrorize our outlying territories, it would be easier for them. That is part of the reason the king has his hunters patrolling, trying to ensure any dragons are brought to the kingdom for training.\"\n\nJoran claimed the Vard despised dragons. They wouldn't want to use them.\n\n\"That's what Manuel and the mesahn do?\"\n\nHe watched me again. \"It is interesting how much you know, along with how little you know. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. You have a unique experience compared to most who come from the traditional kingdom.\"\n\n\"I didn't realize anything was traditional.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised.\" He smiled tightly. \"Now. I think that rather than continuing to talk about the Vard and their continued threat upon the kingdom, we should begin to focus on what you might learn from me. I don't know how much time I might have to train you, so we should begin.\"\n\nI regarded him for some time. I still didn't know why he had chosen to work with me at all, only that he seemed interested in my ability to detect which dragon he had connected to. Somehow that mattered to him, though I couldn't help but wonder why.\n\n\"I've not been able to do anything other than open myself up to the connection to the dragons. I can feel the energy of them, but I haven't been able to summon that power and use it in any way that is useful.\"\n\nHe looked over, smiling tightly. \"I imagine we can change that.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Jerith suggested I might have come to the Academy too late to gain any meaningful control.\"\n\nThomas's face wrinkled slightly as I said it, and he glanced back to the Academy building in the distance. In the growing morning light, it took on a pale yellow glow, making it almost appear as if the Academy itself summoned the power of the dragons. The main building had a massive open lawn that separated it from the dragon pens, but the entrance to the Academy was visible from here.\n\n\"Anyone with your ability to detect the power of the dragons can learn the control necessary. Do not think you don't have the capability.\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I've tried. They taught me about opening myself up to that power. I tried to do so, using the techniques they taught, but it's not always fully effective. When I attempt to do it, I can feel that power, but I can't concentrate it within me.\"\n\n\"If you can feel it, then you can concentrate it. We will try, and I will see just what it is that you're capable of.\"\n\nI looked over, waiting for him to say something more, but he didn't. I started through the progression. First breathing, then the heat, then the relaxation. When I did, my connection to the distant dragon in the dragon pen flowed to me. I could feel his power, even though there was nothing about it that I felt I could use. I breathed in that energy, trying to call it to me, but as usual, I failed.\n\n\"I can tell you've opened yourself to it. Why don't we try something else.\" Thomas turned toward me, and he pressed the tips of his fingers together, his arms stretched in front of him. \"Do this.\"\n\nI held my hands out and brought my fingers together the way Thomas demonstrated.\n\n\"As you feel that power within yourself, what you need to do is open yourself in the way you have been doing, and the way I can feel you doing effectively, and then begin to draw through your hands. Try to focus on what comes through you and move it back around to you.\"\n\nI started to smile. It all sounded impossible, but then again, there was a time when I would've believed that my ability to connect to the dragons was impossible. Here I was, holding on to power I could never have imagined.\n\nI pressed the tips of my fingers tightly together. It went against the relaxation part of connecting to the dragon, but strangely, it let me feel as if I were tied to the dragon, in a way.\n\nI opened myself to the dragon. The connection was there. It was faint, at least at first. Slowly, I could feel that power building, the energy of the green dragon out there in the yard, and I reached for that heat within myself. When I did, I focused on the connection I shared between my fingers. That was the step that was different. There came a strange stirring deep within me.\n\nI opened my eyes and glanced over at Thomas, then started to say something when he shook his head.\n\n\"Don't speak,\" he said. \"I can see the way the power is beginning to manifest. Continue with what you are doing.\"\n\nI struggled to concentrate again. I had disrupted whatever was happening, and by opening my mouth to speak, I'd run the risk of disrupting the connection to power.\n\nNow I needed to find a way to reach that again.\n\nI held on to the power, holding energy within me. That power flowed, coming from the dragon, surging up through me, through heat within me that seemed to reverberate. Then it stretched into my fingertips. That seemed to be the key.\n\n\"You're nearing it,\" he said. \"Find a way of pulling the power through you. It should be a simple matter. All you need to do is draw that energy between you, wrapping it around you and carrying the power as it courses throughout you.\"\n\nWrap it around me. That was what he wanted me to do. All I had to do was find some way of pulling that power as it coursed through me.\n\nI didn't even know if it were possible, but I had to see if that energy would make a difference. It was not the same as what I'd done before. This was different enough that I had to believe it would work. I could feel that energy. I had to use it.\n\nI focused, closing my eyes, letting that power flow up through me.\n\nThere was a hint of power, a surge of that magic, and it flowed between my fingers.\n\nIt was the first time I'd ever felt that happen.\n\nThe connection that formed, the circle from deep within me that went out through my arms and between my fingers, was different than anything I'd ever encountered before. I held on to that power, letting it cycle, feeling it as it buzzed within me. There was something almost overwhelming about it. I could feel it coursing through me, building, and could practically see it. It bubbled up, and there formed a connection to the distant dragon that rolled through me in a way that allowed me to draw on that power.\n\n\"There. You've done it. What I would like you to do is try to control the bands of power. Don't try anything too complicated. Simply hold what you have, harness it, and let that power flow out from you. What you need to do is wrap the connection to the dragon from one hand to another. Nothing more than that. You will learn to focus that power over time.\"\n\nAs the energy cycled within me, I could feel how it went from one hand to the next, almost as if it were jumping between my fingers. It was the heat and energy of the dragon, and as it flowed, I could feel how that energy built up inside me.\n\n\"I'm having a hard time just holding this,\" I said.\n\n\"Most do, at least the first time. The longer you hold it, the more you feel it cycling through you, the easier it will be for you to recognize that power. What I'd like you to do is simply maintain that connection. Nothing more than that. You don't need to unleash it. You just need to wrap it from one hand to the next.\"\n\nI let the energy flow, and did nothing to try to diminish it. I wasn't even sure if I could. All I wanted to do was hold on to that power, to feel the way that it rolled through me. As it did, I recognized the strange connection that had formed between that dragon and myself.\n\n\"I see you have connected to the same dragon you traveled to the capital with.\"\n\n\"I did,\" I said. \"For whatever reason, I can feel his power more than I can the other dragons.\"\n\n\"That is not surprising. Most find that the first connection they make with a dragon is the most potent. At least until they gain control over them. Over time, you will learn to use the connection you share to the dragons to draw upon any power that you need. It won't matter which dragon you focus upon.\"\n\nI could feel that power flowing through me. It worked from one hand to the other, the energy drifting upward, rolling through me. As it did, I held on to that power, maintaining that connection that I shared with the dragon.\n\nControl involved using the power. I knew that about it. The challenge was owning that power, and concentrating it in a way that could be useful. As I tried to continue to hold on to it, I could feel it flowing from the dragon, through my arms and in between my fingers.\n\nI attempted to concentrate it. Holding on to the power was one step, but concentrating the power was the next\u2014and possibly most important\u2014step. Once I did that, I could use that energy in a way that allowed me to recognize the magic that flowed from the dragon, enabling me to help draw that off and connect to the dragon.\n\nSomething started to unravel. The connection that was within me began to practically vibrate, making it so that I couldn't hold on to it.\n\nI scrambled, trying to focus, squeezing my fingers together. As I did, the relaxation part of opening myself to the dragon magic started to fail. I tried to focus on the heat within myself, but even that wasn't working.\n\n\"You must slow yourself,\" Thomas said. It seemed as if his words came from a distance, and I tried to do what he said\u2014tried to let myself relax so that I could call upon that power in a way that would enable me to still use it, but even as I did, I couldn't feel that relaxation working the way that it needed to.\n\n\"I'm trying,\" I said through gritted teeth. \"I tried to concentrate the power, but it didn't work.\"\n\n\"I did not tell you to concentrate it,\" he said.\n\nI looked over. \"I know you didn't, but I know the next step in my progression with the magic within me is to be able to use it. In order to do so, I have to try to focus the way it flows through me.\"\n\n\"Do you know that now?\" There was a hint of irritation in his tone. He was upset that I would dare attempt to use power without having his instruction.\n\nI couldn't shake the thought that I knew what I needed to do.\n\nWhen I had heard the other instructors discussing the way that power was used, it had always been a matter of concentrating it\u2014trying to hone that power and tightening the connection so that as it flowed through the dragon mage, it allowed them to use it.\n\nOnly, I had not learned to use power from those instructors. Thomas had demonstrated a different technique for me to grasp at that magic, and because of that, I needed to listen to him.\n\nI focused on my breathing, quickly moving on to focusing on the heat within me, and then trying to relax while also pressing my fingertips together. The power shimmered, bouncing through me. Distantly, I was aware of the energy within the dragon, and that energy seemed to surge. It was as if the dragon were pushing more at me.\n\nThat couldn't be the case, could it? The dragon couldn't be trying to cause more discomfort for me.\n\n\"You need to let the power flow. Stop trying to fight it.\"\n\n\"It's almost too much,\" I said.\n\nThomas stepped over to me. Energy radiated off of him, mixed with heat. \"Let it flow,\" he said.\n\nI took a deep breath, trying to calm my breathing, trying to focus on everything else within me. As I did, I felt that power as it filled me. There was a hint of energy, and then it rolled outward.\n\nIt happened slowly.\n\nAnd I recognized I could relax\u2014I could use that relaxation to let the power flow through me. It surged, building with more intensity than had been there before, but at least it continued to flow. It was stable in a way that it hadn't been before.\n\n\"Good,\" Thomas said. \"Now that you have taken control over it again, I want you to simply let it roll through you.\"\n\nI struggled. I tried not to fight it, and I tried to let the power roll through me, but even as I did, I recognized there was some part of me that rebelled against it. It was as if that part of me recognized that the power that filled me exceeded my capacity to contain it.\n\n\"Relax,\" Thomas said. \"It comes easier if you relax.\"\n\n\"What should I be feeling?\"\n\n\"Most who are new to their power recognize the trickle of energy that flows through them, working between their hands. Unfortunately, it can quickly destabilize if you aren't able to relax it. And in your case, you tried to use concentration and a connection to power before you are ready for it.\"\n\nIt didn't feel as if it were a trickle of power in any way. This felt like a torrent of power that flooded through my arms, jumping from one hand to the next, circling through me, as if it were trying to add to the energy within me.\n\nIt continued to build.\n\nThere was something about it that left me unsettled. I could barely hold on to it.\n\nI tried to keep my hands pressed together, trying to maintain the connection Thomas said I needed in order for me to hold on to that power, but even as I did, the power rolling through me was more than what I could maintain. It rumbled, and my hands exploded apart\u2014the force of it tossing me back.\n\nI laid there for a moment, trying to gather myself, trying to understand just what had happened. As that power filled me, it had thrown me away from the pens. It reminded me of what had happened in the forest.\n\nMaybe the dragon decided I didn't deserve to hold on to that much power.\n\nWhen I got to my feet, I found Thomas watching me.\n\n\"You have potential, but your technique is sloppy. I suppose it's to be expected, given how little time you have worked with it. Unfortunately, if you don't gain control over it, you might find you lose it altogether.\"\n\n\"I'm trying,\" I said.\n\nI started to press my fingers together when Thomas grabbed my wrist. He shook his head.\n\n\"I think you need to take a break. Focus on recognizing the power of the dragons first, and once you do that again, then you can once more try to connect to them. Until then, I would hesitate to do anything more than what you have already done.\"\n\nHe turned, and heat built from him. I detected the connection he shared with the brown dragon. It might be my imagination, but it seemed as if he connected to more than one dragon, though the connection with the brown dragon was the most potent. It was almost as if he were touching upon the power of each dragon within the pen. Even the green dragon.\n\nI licked my lips. My mouth was dry and tasted of blood. I glanced behind me where I'd landed, and shook my head, trying to clear it. None of that took away the sense of victory that filled me.\n\nI had done it.\n\nThe next step would be harder. I would have to learn some control over it, especially if I were to become a dragon mage the way I intended, but regardless of anything else, I had reached for the power of the dragon, connected to it, and had managed to have it fill me. I had learned that there was some aspect of it that I could use.\n\n\"You will meet me here again in the morning. We will continue working until you have enough control that you can use it.\"\n\n\"Is there a reason you're working with me rather than the Academy?\"\n\nThomas glanced behind us toward the Academy. \"The Academy can do many things, but there are some who never learn what is necessary from their teachings.\"\n\n\"Like you?\"\n\nI watched him, noticing the expression on his face as he continued looking toward the Academy. There was something about the look in his eyes that suggested he hadn't had the best experience there.\n\n\"I am an instructor at the Academy,\" he said.\n\n\"Were they able to teach you?\"\n\nHe grunted. \"You have a connection to the dragons, Ashan. You need to keep working with it. There are some things those within the Academy can teach you, but there are some things they cannot. Use what you know about the dragons.\"\n\nHe started to move away from me, leaving me standing in front of the dragon pen. The sun had begun to climb, and a bit of warmth spread across the sky.\n\nI knew what he was asking. I needed to practice.\n\nHe had things he could teach me, but only if I would be able to listen and recognize the power. That was what I needed to do.\n\nI gripped the bars of the dragon pen, turning my attention to it, and focused.\n\nIt was time for me to find that power within me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "I paused in the main entrance of the Academy and looked over to see Master Onas. He had been staring down at a book held open in his hands, reading it while walking, of all things. He practically crashed into me. Onas was a small man, with a serious face, and he had thick glasses that always seemed to slip forward on his nose. Rumor had it that he was an incredibly powerful dragon mage, though I had found that it was difficult for me to tell who was powerful and who was not.\n\nHe looked over at me. \"Ashan,\" he said, his voice creaking slightly until he cleared it. \"I was not expecting to see you here. What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I was just outside.\"\n\nOnas looked toward the door before turning his attention back to me. \"I see. I understand that. Many people spend time in the dragon pens, trying to harness a connection to the dragons. It can be difficult, and more than that, it can be frustrating that you do not have the ability to tap into that power in the way that you would like to.\"\n\nI resisted the urge to say anything. He was not wrong, which bothered me. Not that it should. I had no reason to truly get upset.\n\n\"Why don't you come with me?\" Onas asked. \"I'm going to be working with a select few students this morning. I wonder if perhaps I might be able to help you find what you need.\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\nIt wasn't that I wanted to refuse him, but at the same time, I understood that it would be highly unlikely that anything would change\u2014that working with him would make a difference to me or to my connection with the dragons. The more likely outcome was that I would find that I could do nothing. But I had a sense that Onas would not take no for an answer.\n\nHe guided me through the halls and led me to a doorway off the main section of the Academy, into a smallish room. A massive oak table occupied most of the room and flames crackled in the back. Alcoves on either side of the hearth contained books. Two students sat at the table. My heart sank when I realized that Brandel was one of them.\n\nHe looked over at me, smirking. \"Look who's here,\" he muttered to the other student sitting next to him. Dominic looked over to me, but he didn't say anything.\n\n\"I found Ashan in the hall,\" Onas said. \"I invited him to come along. I thought that perhaps it might be better if he has an opportunity to see someone else who has demonstrated considerable talents\u2014and you two have shown potential.\"\n\nGreat. Now I had them thinking that they had considerable talents, knowing that I did not.\n\nOf course, there was no real doubt about my lack of considerable talent. It was obvious, especially to someone like Brandel, who had used that against me time and again.\n\nI took a seat and Onas set the book down in front of him. \"Now, you know that we each have a unique technique for reaching for the power that we can harness. It is a matter of finding the way that it fills us.\" He glanced up at me, his eyes large through his glasses. \"I trust that you can feel the heat?\"\n\nThe fact that he asked was almost enough for me to change colors. A flush rolled through me. I nodded.\n\n\"Very well. I wanted to ensure that you were capable of feeling that heat. It is no shame if you are still learning.\"\n\n\"I can feel the heat,\" I said quickly.\n\n\"Probably not,\" Brandel said under his breath.\n\nI shot him a look. He was younger than me, but more powerful, so in a way, that sort of balanced out.\n\n\"What I would like for you to do is to focus on the heat within yourself. You may find that it burns, or you may find that it fills you. Either way is acceptable. Find the energy and use it.\" He chuckled. \"Of course, that is easier said than done, I am aware. I recognize that the way in which we each draw our power is unique. Why, the way that I tap into the power is different than the way that Master Jerith does. Considerably so, after all. He has such a unique approach.\" He shook his head. \"And different enough from Master Matthew\u2014the two of us share similarities, but also differences.\" He looked back down to the book. \"Now. Once you have touched the heat within you, what I would like for you to do is to see if you can't push that heat out. You must find it flowing through you, and then you can push it beyond, and only when you do, can you find something more.\"\n\nImmediately, Brandel and Dominic pushed on that power, and I could feel it across the table. Strangely, it seemed to have a directionality to it, the way that their power flowed, something that I could detect, though I wondered if perhaps there was something to the way that they were calling on power that allowed me to detect it. Perhaps it was Brandel's way of trying to torment me.\n\nI wouldn't put it past him.\n\nI felt the energy bubbling from them.\n\n\"Very good. The two of you have done quite well.\" He looked over to me. \"And now, you must see if you can do the same,\" he said, his voice creaking every so often, forcing him to clear his throat. \"Do you see what these two are doing? Perhaps utilizing a similar technique would be beneficial for you. I can't say that I know what it is that they are doing, much like I can't say that I know what it is that you need to do.\"\n\nI resisted the urge to say anything more.\n\nInstead, I nodded. How could I do anything else? I had Master Onas willing to work with me, in his own unique manner, but even as he did, I doubted that I would find anything here that would be of much use.\n\nStill, it was worthwhile for me to try.\n\nI continued attempting to summon the connection.\n\nIt did not come to me the way that I wanted it to though.\n\nThe heat was there. Thankfully, I could do that much, but beyond that, there was nothing else. Just failure.\n\n\"Try again,\" he said, looking over at me. \"Feel for the heat, and then begin to push it through you. All you must do is find that. I'm sure that you can do that.\"\n\n\"I . . .\"\n\n\"He won't be able to do it, Master Onas. We've seen that he does not have that talent. He will be relegated to riding on the dragons.\"\n\nHe said it as if it were some slight, but I stared at him, ignoring the barb, feeling as if riding on a dragon were not such a consolation prize.\n\n\"He's far too old for that. He must learn when he's young; otherwise, the dragons will not take to him. He must do this, or he will not proceed.\"\n\nMy heart sunk, and it was only amplified by Brandel's grin as he looked across at me. If I didn't succeed, then I was no longer going to be able to stay here. I wouldn't be a dragon rider. I would certainly not be a dragon mage.\n\nWhich meant that I would return home. I would become a farmer as I had believed I would. I would be a failure.\n\nI couldn't help but sense that Brandel felt amused by my annoyed reaction. I tried focusing on the heat within me, but I'm not sure that it made much difference.\n\n\"You must focus,\" Master Onas said, and he looked at me with an expression that suggested that he wasn't sure whether I would be able to even do what he asked\u2014not at all with the same encouragement I saw from Jerith, though there were times when even he seemed frustrated with me.\n\n\"I've been trying,\" I said carefully, aware that I couldn't get angry. I had to be cautious with what I said, and how I said it.\n\n\"What do you feel when the heat burns within you?\" Master Onas asked.\n\nI looked down at my hands. \"I don't know that I feel much of anything.\"\n\nAcross from me, I could practically feel Brandel snickering. I didn't need to be here. I could be anywhere else, studying in a different way, on my own, or perhaps even with any of the other master instructors, but I was here in the Academy for a reason. I would learn. Why did I care what Brandel thought?\n\nI didn't.\n\nThat thought alone was empowering, even though it shouldn't make a difference.\n\nHe irritated me, but he didn't have anything that mattered to me. He wasn't the one to decide whether I succeeded or failed. That was on me.\n\nI focused on my breathing, steadying it as I had been taught. From there, I began to think about the heat within my belly, the same heat that my father had mentioned feeling around the dragons, something that suggested to me that my father had much more experience with them than I had ever known. After that, I tried to think about what that heat might do.\n\n\"It's there. It simmers.\"\n\nMaster Onas crossed his arms, watching me. \"Let it simmer, then. Work with it. You listen while I work with these others. Perhaps in time you will discover some trick from what they are doing. Keep working with them outside of our sessions.\"\n\nI looked over to Brandel, though I had a hard time thinking that he would be willing to work with me. I had a hard time thinking that I wanted to work with him.\n\nMaster Onas continued to drone on about how to feel the heat flowing within, and then how to push it out, finding the necessary channels. The others seemed to know exactly what he instructed, and all of them, including Brandel, managed to use that power in a way that created flames that went spiraling out from them\u2014and beyond that, patterns that they turned and twisted.\n\nThey would all become dragon mages.\n\nWhen I had focused on the simmering within me for a while, I got to my feet, nodded politely to Master Onas, and stepped out of the room.\n\nI headed back to my quarters when I practically ran into Ames speaking to Donathar.\n\nThey were at the end of the hall, and Ames was looking up at him. Donathar was a large man, solidly built, and looked to me as if he might have done well on a farm. Not that I would ever tell a dragon mage that he could have been a farmer, but he certainly had that build.\n\n\"Have you told any of the other instructors?\" Donathar was asking.\n\nAmes shook his head. I stepped off to the side of the hall, knowing that I shouldn't listen, but at the same time, I didn't want to interrupt, either.\n\n\"You are the first one I came across. I have been working with the dragons for the better part of the day, and the red one didn't return.\"\n\nDonathar nodded slowly. \"I will look into it.\" He patted Ames on the shoulder. \"And you should get back to your studies. You have potential.\"\n\nDonathar headed off down the hall, and Ames came in my direction. He shook his head, muttering something under his breath.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked Ames.\n\nHe looked up, as if suddenly realizing that he wasn't alone in the halls. \"Apparently, it's nothing.\"\n\n\"Something with the dragons?\"\n\n\"Only that one of the dragons didn't return. I wouldn't have paid any attention to it, but I have been working with that one.\"\n\n\"It's probably nothing. The dragon that I used for my testing didn't return right away, either.\"\n\n\"You haven't been here very long. You don't know how unusual that is.\"\n\n\"For the dragons not to return?\"\n\n\"The dragons are safer here in the city. With riders. With mages. That's why we have the pens. Outside the city isn't safe.\"\n\n\"The pens don't hold the dragons.\"\n\n\"They don't have to hold them. They offer safety.\" He shook his head. \"It's probably nothing, just like he said.\"\n\nAmes started off, and I watched him go. There was something about the way that he said it that left me wondering if that were really the case. Maybe there was more to it.\n\nIt was late. The sun had started to set. I'd been standing here for most of the day, taking breaks only to get food and water\u2014and even those breaks had been infrequent. I held the bars of the dragon pen, squeezing them, holding on to the connection I shared with the dragons. I could feel that energy, the same connection that flowed out from the small dragon, and let it roll through me as it worked from one hand to the next, connecting between me.\n\nIn the time I'd been here, I could feel that power building, the connection that formed, and I recognized the power there, even if I couldn't completely control it. I felt as if I needed to find some measure of control within it\u2014though so far, I had not completely succeeded.\n\nI wasn't about to abandon it. I still felt the torrent of power flowing from one hand to another, though I had found a way of controlling that torrent a bit better than I had when Thomas had worked with me.\n\nIf I were to work with him again in the morning, I intended to make it useful. I intended to be ready for him to instruct me and show me what else I might be able to do with this power. I had to hold tightly to that magic and that connection in order for me to know whether I could use that power in ways that would be similar to the dragon mages I had seen.\n\nThe energy was there, rolling through me, a vibrant connection to magic that left me almost trembling. I had come to know how that power worked from one hand to the next, much the way Thomas had demonstrated. The next step was trying to find a way to tighten that power, harnessing it in a way that would focus that energy, narrowing the band so that it could be even more tightly controlled. I strained for that energy, and could feel the way it flowed through me. It seemed to touch upon that deep part of me, that buried heat I could feel, the second step in preparing to open myself to the dragon. But I had to restrict the flow to harness it.\n\nWhen I had attempted to constrict that power before, it had required me to limit the power coming to me from the dragon, though the dragon connection wasn't something I could limit. What I needed to limit was my own use.\n\nWasn't that what I had seen Thomas doing? When he had held on to the power of the dragon then released it, there was still some that lingered, remaining behind after he had let it out.\n\nThat was what I needed to touch upon. If I could find some way of holding that power, letting that flow from me, and maintaining a hold of it, then perhaps I could limit the flow. Later, I could work on what was involved in trying to turn that power into the flames that I had seen other dragon mages using.\n\nFor now, all I wanted was to harness that power, to find a way to maintain the flow and the connection that worked within me, and to master it in a way that enabled me to use some aspect of it.\n\nIt started to boil within me, a roiling sort of heat that stretched from the dragon, filling me. The energy that coursed out from one hand to the next began to bubble up, as if by doing what I was doing now, I somehow limited my connection to the dragon, changing in a way that made it much harder for the dragon to contribute power to me.\n\nMaybe that was a mistake.\n\nThe only part of it that left me questioning whether it was a mistake was the fact that I could feel that heat beginning to build within me.\n\nThe heat seemed to be the key. When I had seen other dragon mages using the power, it had left their energy flickering with tongues of flame. If I could hold on to that power within me, letting it begin to simmer, I might be able to create flames that rolled around me.\n\nI tried to do that now.\n\nAs I did, I could feel the energy bubbling, the power that was building, and I tried to harness it, letting it wrap through me. I tried not to overwhelm myself, not holding too much power as the heat and pain that came with it was almost more than I could bear, but I felt that power there.\n\nI pulled some within me, letting it stay deep inside of me, practically restricted.\n\nIn doing so, I recognized something else.\n\nThere was a hint of a different kind of power.\n\nAs it bubbled up, I recognized that heat, that power, and I recognized that there was some aspect of it that was almost more than what I could fathom. I strained with it.\n\nThe heat exploded.\n\nFlames started to shoot from my hands.\n\nI sucked in a breath, trying to control it, trying not to release too much power, but I couldn't help what was taking place\u2014nor could I help the power that was flowing within me and the energy that expanded out of me. It was tied to the power of the dragon, but it was something more, as well. It seemed to rise up from the heat within me. Flames shot upward, working out of my hands, spinning around my arms\u2014but they didn't burn.\n\nA voice behind me caught my attention.\n\n\"Couldn't do anything with Onas, so he comes out here? Look at him.\"\n\nI spun, the power I had been holding on to disrupted, and watched as Brandel approached. He was with two others. He seemed to enjoy having people hanging on every word he said, and each time he came around me, it seemed as if he were with another person.\n\nThis time, he had two of the younger female students with him. Becca was dark-haired and lovely. She had been kind to me. From what I'd learned, she'd been at the Academy for the better part of four years. She was only two years younger than me, and had I not felt like such an outsider, I might have been interested in her. Cara was pale-haired, a little shorter, and had a sharp tongue that I had unfortunately encountered. I ignored her barbs, mostly because I recognized the nature of her insults as being similar to ones that my sister had used. They were both close in age.\n\n\"What have you been doing out here?\" Brandel asked.\n\nI remained near the dragon pen. I could still feel the connection to the dragons, though it wasn't as potent as it had been before. I wondered if I might be able to harness that energy while talking to Brandel. At least if I could do that, I wouldn't be at quite the same disadvantage with him as I would be otherwise.\n\n\"Practicing,\" I said.\n\nThey approached, watching me, and I could feel energy building from Brandel. I knew that as he continued to build on that power, holding on to the energy within him, he would start to use it on me. It wouldn't be the first time he'd targeted me with his connection to the dragons, but it would be the first time I'd manage to grasp some of the power myself.\n\n\"Didn't you get enough of a taste of failure with Onas?\" He glanced over to Becca who didn't say anything.\n\nCara, on the other hand, just laughed. \"You won't be able to reach anything, anyway. If you could, you would have done so by now.\"\n\n\"I can still learn to connect to the dragons,\" I said.\n\nCara laughed again. \"You're barely going to be able to become a dragon rider. You'll never become a dragon mage.\"\n\nNow that I knew I was too old for even that, the insult stung more than it should.\n\n\"I am studying with Thomas Elaron,\" I said.\n\nI looked at each of them. I expected it would irritate them, but was surprised to see Brandel laughing.\n\n\"Thomas Elaron? You've got to be kidding me. He hasn't been seen around here in ages. My father tells me the king and his Sharath advisor are finally fed up with him.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"He was here yesterday and worked with me.\"\n\nBrandel stormed toward me. As he did, I began to reach for the heat and the connection to the dragons. I had to hope that I could hold on to it, grasping that energy quickly enough for me to draw it through me, but I didn't know if it would be effective. When I had held on to it so far, it had come to me, but there had been some limitation to it. I worried that even though I might be able to call that power, I might not be able to do it quickly enough for a defense against Brandel.\n\n\"What are you going on about?\" Brandel asked.\n\n\"He offered to work with me.\"\n\nBrandel glowered at me. \"Listen. If you think you can intimidate me by your experience working with Thomas . . .\" He pressed his hand up against me.\n\n\"Don't,\" I said.\n\nBrandel cocked his head to the side, grinning. \"And what are you going to do about it?\"\n\n\"I told you don't.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Look at him,\" he said, glancing back at Becca and Cara. \"First he lies and tells us that he's been training with Thomas, and now he thinks that he has enough strength to withstand me?\" He turned his attention back to me. I could feel the heat coming from the dragon that he connected to. I could even trace the dragon. He had a considerable connection, though surprisingly, I also recognized that it was different\u2014and less powerful than\u2014what I had detected from Thomas. Not that I was surprised that Brandel wouldn't have the same power as Thomas, only that I would be aware of it at all.\n\nI focused my breathing, steadying myself, and began to try to call upon the energy from the small green dragon nearby. If I could do that, then maybe I could deal with Thomas in a different way.\n\nHe chuckled again and shoved me back. I staggered back a step, catching myself before spinning to him.\n\n\"I warned you,\" I said.\n\n\"Or you'll do what? I'm not afraid of any boy from the Wilds.\"\n\nPower suddenly flooded through me.\n\nIt wasn't what I called for. I didn't have control over it. I could feel the small green dragon pushing it toward me, as if the dragon itself were aware of what was taking place and wanted to offer me assistance. As that power flooded into me, I had no choice but to open myself to it. My time spent practicing had shown me that I had to let that power cycle through me in order for me to have any sort of control.\n\nI reacted and released it.\n\nInstead of holding my hands together, which would have confined the power in a circle through me, the energy exploded when I pushed outward toward Brandel, slamming into him and throwing him back.\n\nHe grunted and landed on the ground near Becca and Cara.\n\nI looked down at my hands. Had I done that?\n\nI had certainly known that I'd pulled on power throughout the day, reaching for magic, but I'd never known that I could unleash it in that way.\n\nBrandel got to his feet, heat already beginning to build from him. I could tell anything he might do would be unpleasant.\n\n\"Look at who figured out how to connect to the dragons,\" Brandel sneered, coming toward me. \"You might regret that.\"\n\n\"Listen,\" I said. \"All I want is to\u2014\"\n\nPower slammed into me, coming from Brandel. It poured out of his hands, coming from the dragon. It struck me, throwing me back, driving me toward the dragon pen, pinning me against it.\n\nI grunted, breath pressed out of my lungs.\n\nIt was enough that it distracted me from my hold over the dragon. I had to try to find a way to open myself to that power, but even as I tried, I couldn't feel anything within me that allowed me to open myself the way I needed to.\n\nBrandel stepped closer to me and jabbed at my chest.\n\n\"You would do well to know not to attack me. My father\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care about your father.\" I stepped forward, pulling myself away from the dragon pen.\n\nI tried to do all the things my instructors had taught, focusing on my breathing, feeling for the heat within me, relaxing and embracing the energy of the dragons in the distance, but it didn't happen as quickly as I needed it to. I knew that if I were to connect to it in a way that would happen quickly, it would have to become second nature. It would have to become so quick that there would be no choice but to pull upon that power in a way that would release it from me and prevent Brandel from doing anything. As it was, I was slow. I knew I was slow, and as much as I might try to grab for that power quickly, I simply could not.\n\nThat didn't mean I wasn't willing to do anything.\n\nBrandel was a bully. I had known boys like him my entire life. I hated boys like him.\n\nI shoved him, slamming my fist into his chest, and he staggered back.\n\nHe grinned at me, and power exploded.\n\nI felt it and reacted, trying to brace myself, holding on to the connection with the dragon. This time, I wasn't able to push it out, but a different thought occurred to me in the moment before his power slammed into me.\n\nWhy couldn't I embrace that power the same way I could embrace the power of the dragons? I focused on that energy, letting that power come to me, and it flooded into me.\n\nI wasn't thrown back by it. I simply absorbed the power he tossed at me.\n\nHis eyes widened slightly.\n\nI stormed toward him. I was aware of the power around me\u2014some energy coming off of the dragons, particularly the green dragon. That power flowed into me, as if the dragon wanted me to know that he was there and willing to help.\n\nThe energy of it filled me, and I took a step back.\n\nI wasn't going to attack Brandel with dragon magic.\n\nHe glared at me. \"You might think you've figured something out,\" Brandel said, \"but you're still nothing but a boy from the Wilds. The king knows people like you are a joke. You'll never be a real dragon mage.\"\n\n\"Leave me alone,\" I said.\n\nBrandel looked as if he wanted to say something more, but he turned away, and motioned for Becca and Cara to go with him.\n\nWhen they left me, I breathed out, focusing on controlling the aspects of my connection to the power. I could still feel the energy of the green dragon, and I had to resist the urge to call that power through me, to unleash it. I had no interest in unloading that power in an uncontrolled fashion. I needed to make sure I was as careful with it as my instructors had always told me to be. The problem was that I didn't know if I had enough control over it for me to do that.\n\nI'd lost control and lashed out at Brandel, though I may not have meant to.\n\nAnd he might be right.\n\nI knew Brandel's father was some noble with ties to the king. That couldn't be good for my standing in the Academy\u2014or the city.\n\nStill, despite whatever good intentions I might've had, I had reached for dragon power when I'd needed it.\n\nI gripped the bars of the dragon pen. It was strange feeling that I had succeeded and failed at the same time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "I made a point of getting to the dragon pens earlier in the morning than I had the day before. It was still dark out when I arrived, and the morning was quiet and calm. It was early enough that I saw no one else. Most mornings, at least early mornings, when I had gotten up to take a walk around the Academy grounds, I would encounter others who were out at the same time. I wasn't the only early riser attending the Academy. Though I wished that I could sleep in, sometimes it was easier to be up and moving before most of the others.\n\nThe early morning light glittered off of the silvery metal of the dragon pen, and I could almost see the shapes that were worked into the metal itself, as if they were symbols or letters, though I couldn't quite make them out. Somebody with incredible skill must have formed these bars, somebody more powerful than what I could even imagine.\n\nWhen I reached the dragon pen, I wandered along the length of it, trailing my hand across the bars. Heat wafted toward me from the dragons, emanating from inside of the pen. Some of it came from stored energy within the iron bars of the pen, but most of it came from the dragons themselves.\n\nI paused in the middle of the dragon pen, looking through the bars at the dragons. Most of them were resting, though that wasn't altogether surprising. Dragons had different sleep habits. Some were nocturnal, and would be much more active flying and hunting at night, while other dragons were far busier during the daytime. It wasn't always consistent, either. I had seen that some of the dragons present in the pens during the daytime were not always the same dragons there later.\n\nI could feel the green dragon in the pen. He slept much of the time. From what I'd learned, smaller dragons were very active for short spurts of time, but then they would eat and sleep. I didn't know if their activity was tied to the magic they drew upon or not, but considering how much energy I'd connected to from that dragon recently, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps I'd called upon more of his power than I should have.\n\nI opened myself up to the energy, feeling that power. It was there, and it flowed through the dragon and into me.\n\nIt was a vague and faint sense, but I recognized it, and found that I could call it to myself much more easily than I had been able to even yesterday morning. I let that power course through me, starting with the heat in my own core, working through my arms and cycling around.\n\n\"Better,\" a voice said behind me.\n\nI looked over my shoulder, careful not to release my hands from the bars where the power cycled for fear of unleashing power accidentally. Thomas was there, watching me. He had a deep frown on his face, and there was a flash of darkness in his eyes, something that left me troubled and more than a little unsettled. I wondered if he was disappointed in what I had done.\n\n\"You must've been practicing.\"\n\n\"You told me to,\" I said.\n\n\"I did.\" He smiled slightly. \"Though I must admit I wasn't expecting you to have done it. It has been my experience that very few devote themselves to their studies the way they should.\"\n\nTurning back to the bars of the dragon pen, I ran my hands along them, feeling the heat within the iron. They were thick enough that I couldn't close my fist around them entirely, solid enough that they would give off the appearance of protection, though in reality they did very little.\n\n\"I needed to know whether I could do it,\" I said.\n\n\"Have you proven it to yourself?\"\n\nI thought about what happened with Brandel the night before. \"I've proven I can call power to me. Whether or not I do it with the measure of control I need is a different matter.\"\n\n\"Everybody has to start somewhere,\" Thomas said. He was dressed in a heavy black cloak. I realized that there were what appeared to be dragon scales worked into the cloak, and it seemed to ripple as he moved, catching only the faintest hint of the wind. The king's emblem was marked on his left chest. The hood hung back behind him.\n\n\"Where did you start?\" I asked.\n\nThomas glanced over to me, joining me at the dragon pen, holding his hands up against the bars, similar to how I stood. \"I started where you are, at least in a certain sense,\" he said. \"When I first came here, I could not call upon any more power than others. I wanted to learn to connect to the dragons, but I feared for a long time I would be nothing more than a dragon rider.\"\n\nI grunted. \"I'm not so sure that's all bad.\"\n\nThomas nodded. In the darkness, I couldn't make out much about his expression, though I could feel the heat beginning to build from him as he reached through his connection to one of the dragons inside the pen. I wondered which one he connected to, and whether or not I could feel that.\n\n\"Not all bad,\" he said. \"In fact, there are times when riding is superior to anything else I have done.\" He took a deep breath, and he glanced over to me. \"Learning to access the connection is the first piece. What I would like for you to do is to begin to focus that power.\"\n\n\"Isn't that what you told me not to do yesterday?\"\n\nHe looked over, grinning. \"Perhaps I did. But at the time, I would have said you weren't ready.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I'm ready today when I wasn't yesterday?\"\n\n\"I can feel what you have done,\" he said and chuckled. \"Much like I could feel yesterday how you were not ready. Perhaps you will surprise me and develop fine control.\"\n\n\"What sort of fine control would you have me demonstrate?\" I wondered if perhaps it would be the same as what I had done against Brandel.\n\n\"Turn to me,\" he said.\n\nI released the bars, turning to him, and stared for a moment. I focused on my breathing, opening myself up to the dragon. I used the green dragon, mostly because he was the easiest for my connection to reach, though I didn't know if that was all that I needed to draw upon.\n\n\"What do you feel when you draw that power through you?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"When you are calling upon the power of the dragons, what is it that you feel?\"\n\nI shrugged, shaking my head. \"I don't know. I feel the torrent of power as it flows through me.\"\n\nThat seemed about as good a description as any. I could feel that energy as it worked through me, rolling through the entirety of my being. Though I could feel it, I could also tell there was some other aspect to it I needed to control. When I had dealt with Brandel, I'd seen what happened when I released my connection, letting power explode from me.\n\n\"A torrent of power is an interesting description,\" Thomas said. \"Most would call it a trickle.\"\n\nThat was the way he had described it when he had called that power yesterday, but when I felt the power of the dragons rolling through me, it was not a trickle at all. It was something much more. Considerable energy raced through me, forcing me to react to it. I could barely control it.\n\n\"Maybe it's just my inexperience,\" I said.\n\nThomas frowned. There was very little light around us, only a hint of the moonlight that still streamed down, casting a silver shadow across his face. The darkness and the shadows worked around him, making him seem even more irritated than he probably was. \"Inexperience can lead to many things. Unfortunately, lack of control is one of the most dangerous, especially for those who are connected to power.\"\n\n\"I would never have known that power before yesterday,\" I said.\n\n\"Everybody has their own techniques,\" he said. \"In your case, I wonder if it is merely a matter of you finding some other way of connecting to the dragons. Perhaps that is all you need. Or perhaps it is a matter of time.\"\n\n\"Why did you decide to work with me?\"\n\n\"Because you recognized my connection to the dragons.\" He motioned for me to follow, and we headed along the dragon pen to resume our position from the previous day. He took a seat on the ground and waited for me to follow him. When I did, he held my gaze. \"What I want for you to do is to hold on to the power within. When you're ready, let me know.\"\n\nI started to focus on the energy of the dragon, letting that power fill me. It flowed through me, striking the heat within my belly, cycling through my hands pressed together in front of me.\n\nI could feel the energy roiling through me. There was nothing trickling about it.\n\nMaybe it was simply a matter of my inexperience. Given my relatively advanced age coming to the Academy, it wouldn't be altogether surprising that I would feel things were more complicated than they probably were.\n\n\"Do you have it?\"\n\nI nodded. \"The power is there.\"\n\nThomas leaned closer. Faint light gleamed across one of his cheeks. \"Is it a torrent of power?\"\n\nI regretted using that term with him. \"It is.\"\n\n\"Try to tamp that torrent down,\" he said.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"You need to have control over it before you can use it. Most of the instructors within the Academy would like to tell people that they must simply unleash power without having any way of controlling it. They often overlook the key to limiting power at first. They are far too eager to explode that magic from them rather than understanding how it works before they do so.\"\n\n\"How do I tamp it down?\"\n\n\"What have they taught you about reaching for the connection to the dragons?\"\n\nI looked up, meeting his gaze. \"I'm sure it's the same as it always has been. Focus on breathing. Feel for the heat within me. Then relax.\"\n\n\"It never changes,\" Thomas said softly.\n\n\"If it works, then why change it?\"\n\n\"Do you think it works?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I suppose I don't know.\"\n\n\"What I would suggest is trying to find someplace within you that you can push that power.\"\n\nI had tried that once before, and when I had, I had felt the way that power had bottled up within me, almost leaving me overwhelmed with it. Then again, I had also absorbed power from Brandel the night before. I suspected the green dragon had assisted with that, though I wasn't entirely sure.\n\nAs that power rolled through me, cycling, I started to focus on the heat within me. That seemed to be some part of me I could regulate. I couldn't control the power coming from the dragon, at least not without harming myself. When I had attempted to do that yesterday, all I had found was that I had ended up with the power losing control, blasting out of me. In this case, I thought I could stuff some of that energy down, deep into my core, and hold on to it.\n\nAs I began to focus on pushing the power down, I could feel it starting to flow deeper into me. It was still a torrent, but the more I pushed, sending the energy deeper and deeper into the heat within me, the more I could gain a sense of control over the power that flowed throughout me.\n\nGradually, control came to me. I felt it slowing.\n\nThe torrent eased.\n\nIt was still a heavy flow of power coming from the green dragon, almost some sort of a line I could feel, racing through me, but it wasn't nearly what it had been. It seemed as if it dissipated as it flowed throughout me, drifting into some deep and buried part of me before flowing from one arm to the next.\n\n\"I can sense you gaining some measure of control,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"It's strange,\" I said. \"I feel like I need to force it into the heat within me.\"\n\n\"Everybody has a different way of control,\" Thomas said.\n\nEven as he said it, I sensed that he was a bit discomforted by it, as if he were troubled by my way of controlling power. Was there something wrong with how I access that magic?\n\n\"What now?\" I asked.\n\n\"Now you must continue to hold that focus. This is the next step in your understanding of the magic. Feel it flowing through you, control the power within you, and be ready to use it when we work the next time.\"\n\nHe got to his feet and I frowned at him. \"That's it?\"\n\n\"That is it for today. Were you expecting more?\"\n\n\"I guess I expected I would try to learn a little bit more than that.\"\n\n\"There are steps that must be completed.\"\n\nHe started to move away, reaching a point along the backside of the dragon pen. I heard a scraping of metal, and then he was inside of the dragon pen.\n\nI stared into the darkness, trying to make out what he was doing and where he was going, but I couldn't see anything. I could feel his connection to the dragons, though. I recognized he was heading through the dragon pen, reaching for something, though I had no idea what it was or why he was doing it.\n\nAs he made his way across the yard, he suddenly stopped. There was still a connection within him, still some energy that filled him, and as I felt that, I could feel the way that he was using that power, along with how he was forcing that energy out from him.\n\nI still couldn't tell what it was that he did, though\u2014only that I could feel it.\n\nSuddenly, there came a blast of heat. The dragon, whichever one that Thomas had gone to, along with Thomas himself, launched into the air, taking flight.\n\nI could practically see him flying away, drifting into the distance, though I could make out nothing other than a blackened shadow. It was more that I could feel him and the energy he radiated, growing ever more distant as he retreated.\n\nI sat there, focusing on the dragon energy. That was what he wanted me to do. I needed to gain control over it. It was going to be difficult for me, but I had to think I could. He'd proven I could.\n\nI lost track of how long I was there, and how long I pulled on that power. The only thing I was aware of was the flow of power through me. Every so often, I caught voices near me, but those voices faded, disappearing again. I lost myself in the connection, in the way the power flowed through me, and continued to push it into that buried part of me, cycling the energy out. At some point I made the connection the power I cycled out through me also cycled through the dragon. It was as if the connection I formed to the dragon was a part of something more. Something greater.\n\n\"You've been here a long time.\"\n\nI opened my eyes, realizing only then that they had been closed, and looked up to see Natalie standing over me. Her black hair was pulled back and bound with a slip of silk. She had on a simple, light yellow dress, one that practically reflected the sunlight around her.\n\n\"I'm trying to test for a connection to the dragons,\" I admitted.\n\nShe frowned, settling down on the ground next to me. \"Really? What's it like?\"\n\n\"I don't even know how to describe it,\" I said. \"It's profound. Powerful. I can feel the dragon energy as it flows through me, and my instructor asked me to try to learn to gain some control over it today.\"\n\nShe glanced behind us toward the Academy. \"Which instructor are you working with?\"\n\nI turned back to the dragon pens. It had gotten quite a bit lighter in the time that I had been here. From the position of the sun, I suspected it was midmorning, which meant I'd been sitting here for hours. All that time, and I had no idea if I were any closer to gaining an understanding of the connection to the magic. I could feel it flowing through me, but feeling it flowing and having some access to it were different things. At least now I recognize how that power cycled out of the dragon and through me. I could control it, pushing it down into me, but I had no idea what purpose there would be in doing so.\n\n\"All of them are trying to teach me, but today it was Thomas,\" I said, still staring at the green dragon at the far end of the pen. He was resting, curled up, but through the connection that I shared with him, I could feel that power throughout him, and recognize that he was there, along with recognizing his awareness of me.\n\n\"Thomas? As in Thomas Elaron?\"\n\nI glanced over, nodding. \"You know of him.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I think everybody in the city knows of him. They may not know him the way those within the Academy know him, but everybody has seen Thomas standing alongside the king.\"\n\n\"I didn't recognize him at first.\"\n\nShe laughed again. \"That's wonderful,\" she said, clapping her hands together. \"You didn't know Thomas Elaron.\"\n\n\"As I said, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Aren't from the city. I know. It makes you so delightfully ignorant. Perhaps blissfully?\" She frowned, shaking her head. \"I don't really know. Maybe both.\"\n\n\"I know who he is now,\" I said.\n\n\"I suppose that's good. If you didn't know him, he'd probably be disappointed.\"\n\nA shadow drifted across the ground, and I looked up. There was no dragon. Just a cloud. \"That's not the sense I have of Thomas.\"\n\n\"No? What sense do you have from the king's chief dragon mage?\"\n\n\"Only that he has a different connection to the dragons than what I've been learning at the Academy.\"\n\n\"I should say so. He's worked within the Academy for longer than most. At least, he's worked within the city for longer than most. As far as I know, he doesn't instruct very often at the Academy.\"\n\n\"No. I haven't seen him before he suddenly appeared.\"\n\n\"There are rumors he's been out of the city. Hunting the Vard, as it were.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know if that's true or not. He and the king keep private counsel.\"\n\nI found it strange that she would know anything about the king and his counsel, but movement at the far side of the dragon pen caught my attention. The green dragon started getting up.\n\nI leaned forward, looking at the dragon, trying to see if something had startled him, but I couldn't detect anything. There was the energy coming off of him, but nothing more than that. The energy seemed to flow between us, shifting, though it wasn't nearly as potent as it had been before. As I detected that power, I attempted to reach for it in a different way. There came a surge of power between the two of us, a connection from the dragon that bonded me to him, but it dissipated once more.\n\nNatalie watched me. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" I said.\n\nThe dragon moved along the pen, coming toward me. As he did, I could feel the energy within him surging a little bit more. It was as if he wanted me to be aware of the power coming off of him, radiating away from him and moving toward me.\n\nI held on to that, focusing it within myself, letting it roll through me.\n\nHeat began to build, and I had to tamp it down. If I didn't, I would lose control over it. I glanced over at Natalie, and realized that if I lost control of it now, there was a real danger I could harm her.\n\nReleasing power that led to my own injury was one thing. Hitting Brandel with it while challenged didn't bother me as much, either. Injuring somebody like Natalie who had only come to take a seat next to me was something altogether different.\n\nI pushed the power of the dragon down, squeezing my awareness of him\u2014and my connection to him\u2014deeper and deeper into myself. As I did, I could feel power flowing within me, energy that started to constrict. I held on to it, trying to find a way to maintain that control. Unfortunately, it continued to build. The energy intensified as the dragon came closer. I stared at the dragon, trying to warn him away.\n\nI got to my feet and started to move along the dragon pen, trying to get away from Natalie. When I reached the corner, heading toward the distant forest, I found her trailing after me.\n\nI shook my head. \"Don't,\" I warned.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's . . .\" I said.\n\nAt this point, all I could tell her was that she needed to stay back.\n\nThe power continued to course through me. I made a point of keeping my hands pressed together, holding that power as it cycled within me. I didn't want to release it, and certainly didn't want to cause it to explode out from me. I tried to hold that power inside, tried to keep it trapped so it didn't flow in an uncontrollable way.\n\nIt was building.\n\nNatalie trailed after me.\n\nThe dragon followed me inside of the pen, working his way around as if to taunt me, or perhaps to protect me. I didn't know for sure. I couldn't yet know how to know the dragon\u2014how to understand him.\n\nPower continued to build within me. Somehow I was going to have to unleash it. I needed to release that power, needed to cut off my connection to the dragon.\n\nNatalie came up behind me. \"Something's wrong,\" she said.\n\nI shook my head. \"It's . . . it's just I'm losing control over it,\" I said.\n\n\"Does that happen to you often?\"\n\nI shook my head again. \"I haven't really had any control over it before.\"\n\n\"What have you tried doing so that you could get control?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to do as Thomas suggested, but it's not working.\"\n\nAt least, it wasn't working well enough for me, though I could feel that power surging and coursing around through me, and I could tell that if it spilled outward, I would lose complete control. The energy of the dragon would explode, and anybody near me would be in danger. This was more power than I had released upon Brandel.\n\n\"Let it out,\" Natalie said.\n\nI shook my head. \"I can't let it out. I don't know how to do it.\"\n\n\"Haven't you ever released that power before?\" She was watching me with an intensity in her eyes, though there was something else there.\n\n\"I haven't. At least, not intentionally.\"\n\n\"How have you done it unintentionally?\"\n\n\"I almost blew somebody up,\" I admitted.\n\nShe laughed. \"Now I know why you moved away from me. Just try doing what you did before and see if it'll make a difference.\"\n\nIt was worth a shot. When I had accidentally targeted Brandel, I had separated my hands, releasing the power. This time, maybe I could control it. As I kept my fingers pressed together, feeling the energy of the dragon building within me, I wondered if I could let a trickle of that power out. If I could, then maybe I could learn to control it in a way that I had not so far.\n\n\"You should stay back,\" I said.\n\n\"What are you afraid will happen? You think I'll explode in flames?\"\n\n\"I'm not entirely sure,\" I said.\n\nShe backed away, moving down the dragon pen, though she didn't move nearly as far away as I thought she should. I turned toward the forest. That might be a mistake, but if I continued focusing on the dragon pen, then I would run the risk of blowing power into the dragons. I didn't want to do that, either.\n\nI separated my index fingers. Only those.\n\nI could feel the pressure beginning to ease as it cycled through, and suddenly a burst of heat erupted along my arms, coming down my fingers and spiraling, bouncing from one to the next. The flames crackled between my fingers.\n\nNatalie came closer.\n\n\"Don't,\" I said.\n\n\"Look. Fire. And you're concerned you might incinerate me.\"\n\n\"I still might,\" I said. The power flowing through me was still incredible. The pressure had eased, but not entirely. At least I had some way of diminishing it.\n\n\"What if you try releasing a bit more?\" Natalie asked.\n\nI pulled apart my middle fingers. Now the flames that arced out went from my two fingers, and then connected, before the power cycled through me again. As it did, I could feel the energy starting to fade, easing back. The effect was enough that I could finally start to breathe out, relaxing just a little bit.\n\nI separated my ring fingers. The flames twisted.\n\n\"Can you control it?\" Natalie asked. \"Can you use it?\"\n\n\"I'm not entirely sure. I don't know what I'm doing here to begin with.\"\n\n\"What if you hold on to that flame and separate your hands completely?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"If I do that, I think I'll unleash all of the power within me.\"\n\nI wasn't even sure if that were going to be the case, but I could feel the energy, and I could tell the way that power coursed from one hand to the next, and the way it stretched out from me. I wondered if I might be able to control it a little bit better if I were to release another finger.\n\nI pulled apart my pinkies.\n\nThe only thing connecting my hands now were my thumbs. That allowed the energy to continue to flow through me, but flames stretched between the other fingers, arcing from one hand to the next. Surprisingly, there was no pain or heat coming from them. There was only the awareness of the fire.\n\nNatalie leaned close, watching, as if she were studying some aspect of the flames, trying to understand what it was that I did.\n\nI could feel the power coursing through my thumbs. The flames were stretching from one hand to the next, but not with nearly as much power as before.\n\nI started trying to suppress the rest of the power, pushing it down deep inside of me. When I did, I noticed that the flames shifting between my fingers began to twist, changing a little bit.\n\n\"What did you do different?\" Natalie asked.\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure,\" I said. \"I tried to gain a better control over the power within me, holding on to it.\" As I did, I could feel the way that it was rolling through me, held there for a moment, before it began to ease out.\n\nI decided to try one more thing. I separated my thumbs.\n\nFlames exploded, coursing through my hands, arcing from one to the next.\n\nI fought to keep my hands from spreading out wide and spraying the flames all over. It required I tamp more and more power down into that deep center of myself where the heat was located. When I did, I could slow the flames.\n\nGradually, heat became a trickle, jumping from one hand to the next, arcing.\n\n\"You did it,\" Natalie said.\n\n\"I did,\" I said. I couldn't believe that I had done it, considering the way that the flames jumped, but I had done it. Success. Something that I could never have believed was possible for myself, something that I had never believed that I would have been able to do, but here it was. My own power. \"Although I know others who control the power differently than me.\"\n\n\"I've seen some almost creating whips made of flames,\" she said.\n\n\"Whips?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. The nature of how other dragon mages use their power is not widely known. I've just seen how that power explodes outward, and I've seen the way they use it.\"\n\nI glanced over to her, still trying to hold on to the power. There was something in the way she said it that told me a little bit more about Natalie.\n\n\"You've seen dragon mages attacking before, haven't you?\"\n\nShe looked over at me, frowning. \"Most who have spent any time within the kingdom have seen dragon mages.\"\n\nThe only dragon mage I'd ever really seen had been Elaine.\n\nAnd she'd betrayed the kingdom.\n\nPower continued to drift through me. I needed to separate it. I couldn't continue to hold on to the dragon power, and I worried that if I did, I would eventually drain the dragon of energy. I looked over to the green dragon, finding him in the middle of the pen yard, and nodded to him. That was all that I needed. Nothing more.\n\nGradually, the power and the connection between us began to fade, easing.\n\nEventually, I wanted to know how Thomas had shifted his connection from dragon to dragon, and I wondered if in doing so he managed to call upon even more power. Dragon magic couldn't be unlimited, so it would make sense for him to need to shift between dragons in order to maintain that power and control.\n\n\"I should get going,\" Natalie said. \"And you look like you need to keep working.\"\n\nI took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. \"I should,\" I said.\n\nShe flashed a smile at me, then started to walk away.\n\nI watched her go before finally turning my attention back to the dragon. He remained curled up, and yet I smiled. I needed to practice, to improve, to be ready for whatever else I might be able to do. How could I not be?\n\nI needed to master what had just happened.\n\nI focused on the dragon heat. It was a strange thing for me to be aware of, but that heat and energy remained around me, near enough that I could feel it, something that bubbled up from some place deep within me. What I needed more than anything was to find a way to tap into that heat and energy, and to draw upon it in a way that would grant me something more.\n\nI could feel the heat around me. I could feel something that was there, and I could feel that I needed to keep working. Shadows moved, and I spun, looking toward the forest.\n\n\"Manuel?\"\n\nHe strode forward, the dappled mesahn trailing him, looking as if it were ready to attack at any moment. I could feel something from the mesahn, though I wasn't sure what I detected. Whatever it was left me uncomfortable.\n\nHe stopped for a moment. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nI looked over at the dragon pen, hesitating for a moment. \"I have been practicing.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\"\n\nI looked over to the forest. \"What are you doing out there so close to the edge of the forest?\"\n\n\"There have been . . .\" He trailed off and shook his head. \"I'm afraid I'm not supposed to say anything.\"\n\n\"You can say something,\" I said.\n\nHe breathed out. \"Dragons have gone missing.\"\n\nAmes had mentioned the red dragon that hadn't returned. Could it be related? Donathar didn't seem to think there was anything to be concerned about, but he had been willing to investigate. Maybe there was more to it than I realized.\n\n\"How do dragons go missing?\"\n\nManuel shrugged. \"Unfortunately, I don't know. But the king tasked his Hunters with searching for the dragons and asked us to use every bit of our talents to track them down.\"\n\nI looked to the trees. \"In the forest?\" I frowned. \"The dragons wouldn't wander there, would they?\n\n\"Not unless guided,\" he said.\n\n\"Who would guide them?\" He held my gaze for a moment, and I shook my head. \"Not the Djarn.\"\n\n\"They might,\" he said.\n\n\"But the Djarn . . .\" I held off, waiting for a moment. The Djarn had been in the trees, and I had felt them, so I knew that there was a danger to them\u2014to what they might be able to do. They certainly had power, though I didn't know what it was or what it meant. And then there was what Joran and his father had believed about them.\n\n\"If you see something, let me know,\" Manuel said.\n\n\"Are you going to be staying in the city?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" he said. \"I don't know what else the king might ask of me, though if he fears the dragons have been missing, then he might ask other Hunters to continue their search.\"\n\n\"How many other Hunters are there?\"\n\nManuel smiled. \"Sometimes I forget just how little you know.\" It wasn't the first time I had heard that in the last few weeks. \"Don't take that as a slight,\" he said.\n\nIt reminded me of what Thomas had said. \"I'm having a hard time not taking comments like that as an insult.\"\n\n\"Is it because you don't like being the oldest?\"\n\n\"I didn't think I would,\" I said. \"But lately . . .\"\n\n\"You're finding it more difficult?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Do you think the . . .\"\u2014I almost said Vard, but didn't think that was what had attacked before\u2014\"the kingdom will be attacked again?\"\n\n\"Like Elaine?\" He shook his head. \"I doubt the Vard risks the city. They have made their attempt already, and it is unlikely that they will think to make another.\"\n\nIf it had been the Vard, they'd proven they could infiltrate the kingdom.\n\nIf it were something else . . .\n\nThen we still didn't know who or what it was.\n\nOnly that we might still be in danger.\n\nElaine might be dead\u2014impaled by the dragon\u2014but Barton had escaped.\n\nI wondered if I would be asked to try to help. I had helped once before. Maybe Manuel would request me to help again.\n\nOr maybe not.\n\nI was only a student, after all, and one who struggled with having any connection to the dragons\u2014at least, any meaningful connection. Maybe I had a connection, but so far, it had not proven to be the most effective for doing anything.\n\nManuel nodded to me. \"Keep working,\" he said.\n\n\"Did you deliver the letter to me?\"\n\nManuel frowned. \"Letter?\"\n\n\"From my friend Joran. He and his father are coming to visit. I thought . . .\"\n\nMaybe it hadn't been Manuel.\n\nThere were other caravans that came from Berestal. I don't know why I would've expected it to have been Manuel.\n\n\"You keep working. I need to get back to my search. Keep your eyes open.\" He glanced over to the Academy. \"You know better than most the dangers of the Vard.\"\n\nI wanted to say something to him about how I wasn't convinced the Vard had attacked, but decided against it. Instead, I nodded. Manuel glanced to the sky, as if searching for the missing dragons, before whistling and jogging toward the trees, the mesahn loping after him.\n\nI couldn't help feeling as if something were taking place that I needed to know more about, but I knew that there wasn't anything I could do. It was better that I focus on my studies and see if I could master some measure of control over the dragons\u2014if I ever could."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "I fingered the letter that my sister had sent and skimmed through it, working through the timing. I had no idea when Joran would arrive, but considering how long it would've taken Alison to have gotten word to me, I suspected that it would still be another week, maybe more.\n\nI found myself wandering in the early morning. I was supposed to have met Thomas again, but he wasn't there. Maybe I was early. I had been eager to meet up with him to learn more about how to control the power, which he had been trying to demonstrate, but it was more than just eagerness\u2014it was a need.\n\nI walked along the edge of the forest, looking back at the city. It looked like a massive clearing in the forest, as if the trees had granted permission to the city to grow within it. It left the impression that the forest tried to press inward, like it wanted to reclaim its space, but was blocked because of the city and its inhabitants.\n\nPerhaps it was more about the dragons here and the power they possessed.\n\nI reached a narrow road.\n\nThis was where I had come to the city in the first place. In the distance, I saw figures moving along the road. They were pushing a wagon out of the forest.\n\nThere weren't many people who came out of the forest. Could it be the Djarn? They had been moving. I'd seen it. What I didn't know was why.\n\nThey wouldn't have a wagon\u2014and they wouldn't have revealed themselves coming out of the forest.\n\nWhich meant that it was somebody else. I doubted it was one of the Hunters. They traveled with the mesahn, and not with wagons like this.\n\nMaybe it was Joran and his father. His father knew the Djarn, and might have been permitted to travel along the Djarn path. It would be strange to encounter them like this, but I remained hopeful.\n\nI headed into the trees, ducking off to the side of the road, and watched. Waiting. It took a while, but the travelers made their way toward me, and as they did, my hope faded.\n\nIt wasn't Joran or his father.\n\nIt was a couple, both of them a little older, the woman with some gray streaks in her brown hair and the man with close-cropped silver hair. Both of them had deep brown eyes, and I regarded them for a long moment, trying to decide if they looked like the Djarn, or if they were just people of the kingdom.\n\nI backed into the trees, hiding near one of the trunks, and waited.\n\nThey moved past me, pushing the wagon as I stared at it. It was a simple wooden wagon, large enough to carry goods, but not much more than that, though I suspected they had been trading with the Djarn.\n\nInteresting.\n\nOut on the plains, only Joran's father traded with the Djarn, though that was mostly because they were comfortable with him, and I wondered if others would have been granted the same ability if they had had a chance to meet. Very few people wanted that opportunity though. Most feared what the Djarn might do, believing that they might use their strange magic\u2014and everybody believed they had magic\u2014against them.\n\nWhen they were past, I stepped out of the trees and started making my way back toward the Academy. It was still early enough that I could try to catch Thomas, though with the sun rising in the horizon, I suspected I might miss him.\n\nI'd have to wait and hope he'd come the next day. I still had my regular classes at the Academy to attend, so staying here was not going to accomplish anything other than drawing attention to my absence.\n\nBy the time I reached the part of the city where the Academy stretched into view, I was tired, hungry, and thirsty from the walk. As I headed toward the building, a single figure made its way along the road away from the Academy.\n\nI recognized the dark hair, the loping gait, and the solid form.\n\n\"Joran?\"\n\nThe figure pulled to a stop. I hadn't been sure, but knowing that he had been heading to the capital had given me hope that it might be him.\n\n\"Ashan. Damn, I wasn't sure if I would be able to find you. I went to the Academy, and some sour-faced woman\u2014well, girl, I think\u2014answered the door and said you weren't there. She muttered something about you not staying for long, anyway, before she sent me away.\"\n\nI snorted. It was probably one of the other students\u2014though which one? At this point, so many of them were annoyed by my presence that it wouldn't surprise me that they would have told him that I had already been kicked out of the Academy. Not yet, thankfully, though I wouldn't be surprised if it happened soon.\n\n\"Can you describe her?\"\n\n\"Short blonde hair. Pretty, though she looked like she just chewed on a sour berry.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"That would be Cara.\" He arched a brow at me, started to grin, and I shook my head. \"No.\"\n\n\"No? I would think that out here, in the city, surrounded by all of this beauty, you would have finally found someone. It's certainly taken you long enough.\"\n\n\"I didn't have time before. I don't have time now, either.\"\n\nJoran laughed and strode across the distance, then wrapped his arms around me in a quick hug.\n\nI stepped back from him. \"You stink.\"\n\n\"Well, I have been on the road for the better part of a week. It takes a while to get some of that stink off of you. I'd say the same about you, but you still smell how you did when you were on the farm.\" He laughed and glanced over at the Academy. \"So are you really able to use magic?\"\n\nThere was a hopeful expectation in his voice, and I didn't want to do anything to disappoint him, but at the same time, I didn't feel as if what I could do constituted magic.\n\n\"I haven't been here that long,\" I said.\n\n\"You mean you can't learn to become a powerful dragon mage in a little more than a few months?\"\n\nI laughed. \"It's good to see you.\"\n\nI turned my gaze toward the Academy before realizing that Joran had his focus on the dragon pens.\n\n\"You know, I have seen dragons flying, and then that time when they got to the city during the testing . . .\" He tore his gaze away and looked over to me. \"But this is nothing like I would've expected.\"\n\nThere were only three dragons in the pen at this time. Usually there were more, though I didn't often spend too much time with them during the daytime, so it was possible that the dragons that were typically here had been moved away for the day. Dragon mages worked with them constantly, heading off and taking journeys on behalf of the king, or taking them out into the forest, working with them so that they could continue to strengthen their ability.\n\n\"They are impressive,\" I said.\n\n\"Impressive doesn't do it justice,\" he breathed out. \"I mean, these are dragons. And they're just sitting there in these cages.\"\n\n\"It's called a dragon pen, and it really doesn't do anything to hold them\u2014it just keeps you from going in and getting eaten.\"\n\nJoran's eyes widened, and he shot me a look. \"They wouldn't really eat me, would they?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"It depends on what you do to them.\"\n\n\"As if I could do anything to a dragon,\" he said. \"Well, other than try to ride it. Have you done that yet?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Supposedly if I don't learn to be a dragon mage, I can become a dragon rider.\"\n\nOr maybe not. I felt like I wanted to impress him.\n\n\"Do you think you will?\" he asked.\n\n\"I've been trying to work with dragon magic. I can feel it, but doing anything more with it is incredibly difficult for me.\"\n\nHe shook his head, breathing out slowly. \"Gods, Ashan. I can't even imagine what it might be like for you to be able to feel that power. How is it even possible that you can do that?\"\n\n\"It is not easy.\"\n\n\"You're talking about dragon magic! It's not supposed to be easy.\" He looked over at the Academy. \"I'm sure you have training you're supposed to be doing.\"\n\nI did\u2014at least, I should\u2014but having him here, and having an opportunity to visit with my oldest friend and the one who had been with me when I had first begun to realize I had some connection to the dragons, made me think better of rushing back to the Academy. Besides, if Thomas were willing to work with me, and if I could learn from him, then it seemed almost more valuable to do that.\n\n\"I have time.\"\n\n\"You can just leave?\"\n\n\"I'm not a prisoner here,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm not saying that you're a prisoner. But could you imagine if you were? What prisoner is getting away from a dragon?\"\n\n\"Somebody who could control the dragons,\" I said.\n\n\"Right, but other than dragon mages, who else do you think can do that? Wait a minute,\" Joran said, frowning as he looked over to me. \"You didn't seem surprised to see me.\"\n\n\"Why should I have been surprised?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe because your friend from near Berestal just made the journey to the capital and hasn't seen you in the better part of several months.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"My sister sent me a letter.\"\n\n\"But she wouldn't have known until after we had left,\" he said, frowning and glancing to the forest.\n\n\"Which way did you take?\"\n\nJoran glanced to the trees. \"Apparently, the roundabout one.\" He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. \"I didn't realize we'd been taking that long, but it had to have been long enough for Alison to get word here ahead of us.\"\n\nI chuckled. \"Well, you are traveling with your father. Doesn't he always prefer the longer road?\"\n\n\"Too often,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Why are you here, anyway?\"\n\nHe sighed before shaking his head. \"I suppose it doesn't matter all that much, but my father wasn't eager for me to share the reason for our visit with anybody because of my mother and sister,\" he said, shaking his head again. \"Well, I told him about that Djarn city we visited, and do you know what that old trickster did? He snuck off one night, heading into the forest, and went to visit on his own. The only man I know\u2014other than you\u2014who discovered one of the Djarn paths and managed to navigate it. Somewhere along the line, he got caught up in what they were doing, and they asked him to take a journey for them.\"\n\n\"What do you mean 'they asked him to take a journey for them'?\"\n\n\"They asked him to deliver something to another one of the Djarn settlements.\"\n\n\"Why couldn't they have done it?\" I thought about the Djarn that I had encountered in the forest when I was working with the dragon, feeling the heat and energy radiating off of the creature, but there had been no sense from them that they wouldn't have been able to maneuver easily.\n\n\"I don't really know,\" he said, shaking his head. \"He just agreed to do it. I think it's giving him freer access to their trade, and you know how my father is when it comes to the Djarn. Especially when it comes to trading with them. If he thinks it's going to give him something more than what he had before, he's going to take it.\" He clenched his fists, but smiled as he did. \"The stupid fool. It forced us through the forest. I think we were lucky to stumble across one of the Djarn paths. Of course, to hear him tell it, he knew where he was going the whole time. I don't think we even took the path intentionally,\" Joran said, lowering his voice as if sharing a secret. \"And I don't even know what he brought.\"\n\n\"Where did you bring it?\"\n\n\"To another settlement\u2014it's not terribly far from here\u2014and then we had to bring something else here. I don't even know.\" He chuckled again and glanced toward the forest. \"At least I convinced him to take the King's Road back. I don't want to wander through the forest on our way back home if I don't have to. It's so dark in there, but he doesn't seem to mind that, as if he's the only one who's risking himself traveling through there.\"\n\nI frowned and turned my attention to the forest. First, the Djarn surrounded me when I had the dragon, and now this? What were they doing by moving things? It felt strange, but maybe that was only my imagination. Besides, I had no real reason to get involved in any of this. I was just a student, curious but untalented.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asked, looking over at me. \"You look like you're thinking hard. Either that, or you look like you're trying to do a puzzle and failing.\"\n\nI snorted. \"The only puzzle that I can't solve is the one that tells me why you and your father were foolish enough to risk yourselves on behalf of the Djarn.\"\n\nHis face turned serious. \"You know how my father can be. And when it comes to the Djarn, and him feeling like he has to offer them . . . whatever he feels like he has to offer them . . . I just go along with it. Now I've got my mother and sister all tied up in the Vard, sympathizing with them, despite what happened\u2014and they claim not to have known anything about Elaine and her intentions. Can you believe that?\"\n\n\"I have a feeling they weren't really with the Vard,\" I said.\n\nWe fell silent and I sighed. It might be better not to think about all of that.\n\n\"I don't suppose you saw any other dragons on your way to the city.\"\n\nJoran frowned. \"You mean through the incredibly dense forest with a canopy that barely lets any light in?\" He started to laugh. \"No. We didn't see any dragons.\"\n\nI breathed out. That would be too easy.\n\nJoran gave me a soft shove. \"Why don't we wander through the city, if you can. Then you can tell me what's on your mind, and I can tell you how ridiculous it is, the way that we used to.\"\n\nI looked over to Joran, smiling and nodding. \"I'd like that.\"\n\n\"Good. Because you won't believe the place that my father has put us up in. It's terrible. The room is little more than a closet, the bedding doesn't look like it's been washed for the better part of a week, and the food is terrible. You know how much I enjoy food. My mother is one of the best cooks on the plains.\"\n\n\"There aren't that many people out on the plains,\" I said, shooting him a look.\n\n\"Just because there aren't many people in the plains doesn't diminish the quality of her skill.\"\n\nI smiled. \"I think I can help you find food.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose you have money, do you?\"\n\nI laughed, shaking my head. \"Now you need me to buy your food, too?\"\n\n\"Well . . .\"\n\n\"They do provide a stipend, so this time I will, but let's not make it a habit.\"\n\nHe grinned and we started off.\n\nFor some reason, even as we headed away, I felt my attention drawn back to the forest, back toward the trees, and felt my mind drawn back to the Djarn. I had no idea if there was anything there that I should be concerned about, other than the fact that they had shown themselves to me during my testing. But now with Joran and his father having come to the city, on whatever mission that the Djarn had asked of them, I was left with a worried knot in the pit of my stomach.\n\nThere was something at play here.\n\nThere was Thomas's sudden appearance in the city, Manuel and his mesahn, and then there was what Manuel had said to me about missing dragons.\n\nWhat if all of this was tied to the Djarn?\n\nJoran looked over at me, frowning again, and I forced a smile. I wasn't going to let him think that I wasn't thrilled to see him. I was. I had been waiting to see him ever since getting that letter from my sister, and I wasn't going to let any strange questions that I might have spoil our time together.\n\nWe headed away, into the city, and I forced myself to ignore everything else. I forced myself to push away the thoughts that had started to plague me, as there was no point in them, no point in trying to think about what might be; instead, I chose to focus on what was."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "My spirit remained buoyed from my days spent with Joran. We had taken the entirety of the day to wander through the city. I had shown him as many of its sights as I could, including the palace itself, getting close to the gleaming white stone that towered over much of the rest of the city, giving off an aura that I could practically feel throughout the whole city, as if it were a dragon that radiated some massive, powerful energy. Throughout it all, there was a sense of something different that I couldn't quite shake. It was the reassurance that I was spending time with a friend, but it was more than that\u2014it was a feeling of normalcy, even if we were in a different city.\n\nI hurried out to the dragon pens first thing in the morning, not wanting to miss Thomas again. I had promised Joran that we could meet again, but I couldn't keep missing my training, and so I committed myself to working as much as I could. Besides, if I managed to demonstrate significant skill with Thomas, or with one of the other instructors, I might even be able to show Joran and impress him.\n\nDarkness surrounded me, though this time I wasn't beholden to it. I summoned the energy from the dragon, letting it course through me, and as I tamped it down, I felt it build\u2014until I could finally release it, pouring it out from one finger to the next, feeling it stretching between me. The flames built, and I recognized the power that was there, the energy that filled in between my fingers, the power that coursed from the green dragon to me.\n\nDespite the darkness, I could see the outline of the forest just beyond the dragon pens. The wind gusted, carrying a soft rustling through the trees and a shaking of the leaves, giving me a hint of the energy that came from the forest itself\u2014more than what I had noticed before. It was there, real and unsettling.\n\nBut did it need to be?\n\nI could call upon the flames now.\n\nIt gave me the ability to understand that I was no longer helpless here.\n\nStrange to think that I had ever been helpless, but coming to the Academy had given me that feeling, making me aware of my deficiencies in a way that I had never anticipated. When I had been in my homeland, on the farms, I had never thought that I had any real deficiency. I had been a farmer. I had needed to be practical, but I had also known that I had nothing to fear. Now, since coming here, I no longer knew if that were true.\n\n\"You continue to progress,\" Thomas said, approaching from the darkness.\n\nI lowered my hands, pushing away the connection to the green dragon, trying to separate it from myself. I didn't want to sever it altogether, wanting to maintain some semblance of that connection so that I could hold on to it, but I didn't want to hold too tightly to it, either.\n\n\"I worked with it the last few days.\"\n\n\"Again, you have proven yourself an interesting student,\" he said.\n\n\"I was trying,\" I said.\n\nHe nodded to me. \"Show me.\"\n\nI focused on the power flowing through me, the energy that rolled up through the connection shared with the green dragon, letting that power swirl. In doing so, I tamped it down, finding that the more I suppressed the power deeper into me, the easier it was for me to feel it building into something I had to release. It was a strange thing to be aware of, though the more I did it, the easier it became to have some control over.\n\nWhen I did, I found I didn't need to tamp it all the way down to create a thin band of power, which took the form of flames. For me to have a wider band of flame, I had to tamp even more down into myself, as if the more power I stored translated to a greater connection.\n\n\"Interesting,\" Thomas said, watching me. The light from the flames allowed me to see his face, though there no emotion on it that told me how he was feeling.\n\n\"I don't know what else I can do with it though,\" I said.\n\nThomas smiled. \"Then you lack creativity.\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to hold on to control.\"\n\nThomas nodded. \"Control is the first thing you must master, but once you master that, then you can find other ways of using that power. Such as this.\"\n\nHe held his hands up, and flames began to trickle out from his fingertips, spiraling around his forearms and up to his shoulders before fading once more. When the power dissipated altogether, it did so with a slight burst. I noticed how he shifted to a different dragon, as if doing so would grant him a different sort of power.\n\n\"Do you see what I did?\"\n\n\"You forced it along yourself, expanding the connection you have.\"\n\n\"Very good. Everything is a cycle of power when it comes to the dragons. In your case, what I need for you to do is to figure out how to change that cycle. Right now, you are cycling it through you, whether or not you're turning it into flames, and then back to the dragon. The more that you shift that cycle, the more control you have over that power. You can increase your connection to the dragon as you do.\"\n\nI tried to do what he said, changing how that power cycled through me, sending a coursing up my arms, but I had a difficult time doing so. I needed to have fine control over it. Not all the blast of power that I had almost released yesterday. This was going to involve something much different.\n\nI took a deep breath, steadying myself, holding on to that power and letting it flow out from me. In doing so, I could feel it working down my arms, stretching away, and then shifting as it jumped from one arm onto the next.\n\n\"Better,\" Thomas said.\n\nI looked over to him. \"What can I use this for?\"\n\n\"You aren't to the point where you need to worry about how you use it. At this point, it's still a matter of trying to gain control over it. The more you master that control, the more you will find that you can use it.\"\n\nHe turned his attention to the dragon pen, approaching the bars and grabbing them. Flames crackled along his fingers, heading up one bar and down another. I understood the purpose behind it now. I could see how that energy was flowing, the way the fire crackled from one side to the next. In doing so, it maintained a cycle. That seemed to be the key when working with the dragon power.\n\nWould it always be necessary?\n\nHe breathed out. \"I suppose given how quickly you have progressed, I can show you something more,\" he said.\n\n\"What would you show me?\"\n\n\"Come with me.\"\n\nHe released the bars and headed along the dragon pen, making his way to its backside. I followed, and he stopped at a point near the midsection of the dragon pen where the bars were worked into a small doorway. I had seen the doorway several times before, but I had never gone through it. He pulled open the door, barely hesitating as he did, and stepped inside. The connection that he'd been holding dissipated, leaving him standing there disconnected to power. I watched him, debating what I was going to do before I followed him. Thomas had taught me. Regardless of anything else, he was the first person who had helped me connect to this power in a real and meaningful way.\n\n\"What are we doing in here?\" I asked.\n\n\"We are going to have a different connection to the dragons,\" he said, grinning at me. \"I think it would be beneficial for you to have the experience you wanted.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Didn't you say you wanted to know what it was like to ride on one of the dragons?\"\n\nHe rested his hand on a nearby dragon. Heat glowed from Thomas, leaving him radiating a faint warmth.\n\n\"I did, but . . .\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"We won't be going far. I'm not so sure we should, considering the circumstances.\"\n\n\"You mean the missing dragons,\" I said. There was more than just the missing dragons. I worried about the Djarn, as well, though I didn't want to tell Thomas that.\n\nHe nodded slowly. \"I suppose they have spoken about that within the Academy.\"\n\n\"Not much. I've overheard conversations, so I know something's going on, though I have a feeling the instructors don't want to talk about it. One of the other students said something to Donathar about it.\"\n\n\"I doubt he's going to do much unless it serves his own purposes.\"\n\nI glanced over to Thomas, frowning. \"You don't care for him?\"\n\n\"He is a skilled dragon mage.\" He said that as if it were all that mattered. \"Don't concern yourself with the missing dragons. The more one knows about them, the easier it is to be accused of having a hand in their absence.\"\n\nHe mounted the dragon's back. I marveled at the fact that the dragon seemed to simply allow it, leaving his head down, letting Thomas climb onto him.\n\n\"Come along,\" Thomas said. \"This is not my usual dragon, but this one has no difficulty carrying two riders.\"\n\nI approached slowly, carefully, and stepped up to the dragon. There didn't seem to be any easy way to climb onto his back. He had scales along the side, and two massive spikes protruding from his enormous head. Thomas sat positioned in a way that allowed him to reach for those spikes. What would I hold on to when I climbed on?\n\nThomas waited for me.\n\nI climbed up onto the dragon's back. Heat radiated from the dragon's scaled sides, and I could feel the energy coursing out of him. I plopped down behind Thomas, and had barely begun to get settled when the dragon launched himself into the sky.\n\nIt was violent. Abrupt. The air whipped at me, threatening to toss me off if the dragon didn't do it first.\n\nWe took to the air, massive wings spreading and catching the wind. I grabbed for the dragon and found myself gripping two of his scales as I attempted to hold on, clinging to him with everything that I had. Power coursed up from deep within the dragon, and I strained to maintain my seat.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Thomas asked, glancing back. He sat casually and almost comfortably. As the dragon took to the sky, Thomas leaned slightly forward, though there was a hint of tension within him. Maybe he wasn't nearly as comfortable as he appeared.\n\n\"It isn't what I expected,\" I yelled, trying to keep my voice above the roar of the wind that swirled off of the dragon with every pump of his massive wings. The heat radiating upward kept me comfortable at least, though I didn't know if that would shift over time.\n\n\"Just wait,\" Thomas said.\n\nThe dragon suddenly banked, and I squeezed the scales to hold on to his back as we tilted. We streaked above the forest.\n\nWe weren't even that high\u2014just high enough so that I could look down off of the dragon's back and into the forest. I was reminded of when I'd chased the black dragon after Jerith had brought me there, finding the Djarn instead.\n\nI scanned the forest, looking for any sign of the Djarn. Considering how difficult it was to see them from the ground, I didn't expect to have it any easier looking at them from above. There was nothing but an undulating forest. In the darkness, it was difficult to make anything out. Perhaps it would have been different if we had gone in the daylight.\n\nThe dragon moved quickly, sweeping above the forest top, heading west.\n\n\"We're going toward Berestal,\" I said softly.\n\nThomas glanced back at me. \"Are we?\"\n\nI frowned, looking off and trying to squint into the distance, but I couldn't make anything out. \"At least, it would be in this direction,\" I said. \"Whether we're actually going that far is a different matter.\"\n\n\"If we were to travel for much of the morning, we would probably reach Berestal eventually. Even by dragon, it is a considerable distance.\"\n\nI shifted.\n\n\"What are you looking for, then?\"\n\n\"You have proven that you have a way of feeling for the connection to the dragons.\" Thomas looked back at me, practically twisting off to the side so that he could stare at me. \"I would like you to use that technique now.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For the reason you have mentioned. We've lost several of our dragons. It is unusual for the king to have them go missing from within the city. I thought we would look.\"\n\nThat surprised me. What he left unsaid was that it wouldn't be nearly as unusual for them to go missing outside of the city. \"Do you think it's the Vard or . . .\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be the first time that the Vard have tried to acquire a dragon, would it? You've seen that yourself. But there are others interested in the king's dragons.\"\n\nI nodded. \"I didn't think the Vard had anybody capable of using dragon magic.\"\n\n\"That's the belief. Those of us who've dealt with them have tried to convince the king otherwise. There are several of us who believe that some of the Vard are equipped to use that power. It's just a matter of revealing them. So far, the Vard have not done so.\"\n\nHe turned back, sitting upright, and though I could feel his connection to the dragon, I could feel something more. He was testing for something else that was out there.\n\nIt came to me as a faint fluttering of power, then became a surge of energy that stretched away from him, pressing out before circling back around. He was testing for a dragon connection. He was testing for anything that would suggest that there were dragons out there.\n\n\"You think they would be in the forest?\"\n\n\"I'm hopeful they would be. If they aren't, it means something more.\"\n\n\"What exactly does it mean?\"\n\n\"It means there would be others drawing them.\"\n\nHe said nothing else, and I leaned off the side of the dragon, focusing on the energy. I could feel the power of the dragon, though I didn't attempt to connect to it. I wasn't sure if I even could. I wondered if the dragon could tolerate more than one dragon mage connecting to him at once, considering Thomas had already done so. I didn't know if there were limits.\n\nI focused on what I might be able to detect below me. Distantly, I could feel the dragons back in the city, the same way I had when I'd wandered through the forest. Could I connect to the green dragon from here?\n\nWhen I was within the Academy, near the dragon pen, I could feel it easily, but it didn't seem possible to stretch across such a distance. I did what Thomas asked, trying to see if there were anything down in the forest floor that I might detect. After a while, I noticed something. A hint of power down below.\n\n\"I feel something,\" I said.\n\nThomas glanced back at me. \"Where?\"\n\nI pointed. It was off to our right, and the dragon suddenly turned, leaving me wondering how Thomas communicated with the dragon to indicate where to go. The treetops were nothing more than a dark blur.\n\n\"Do you feel anything?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Thomas said.\n\nI focused, straining to feel whether there was anything out there that would change for me. There might be a hint of power down there, but it had disappeared.\n\n\"I lost it,\" I said.\n\nWe began to circle. I closed my eyes, thinking about the dragon energy, but once again, didn't feel anything.\n\nWe veered off.\n\nI looked down at the darkened ground, continuing to search for a connection to the dragons. After a while, I felt another surge of pressure. It was behind us.\n\n\"There,\" I said, pointing back the way that we had just flown.\n\nThe dragon turned, switching directions quickly, and this time he streaked rapidly back in the way that we had come. Then I felt it.\n\n\"It's still there,\" I said.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nI pointed directly down.\n\nWe circled, then the dragon suddenly dived toward the ground.\n\nI tried to hold tightly to the dragon's scales, clutching them, worried that if I were to let go, I would fall. The wind whipped around me, threatening to throw me off of the dragon's back, but somehow I managed to hold myself in place.\n\nWe hit the treetops.\n\nAs soon as we did, the dragon let out a soft roar and heat exploded from him.\n\nStrangely, there came a reverberation of heat and energy that seemed to answer him. We crashed, landing on the ground.\n\nThomas jumped from the dragon's back, flames stretching from his hands, spreading out across the forest floor. They didn't burn anything.\n\n\"Come with me,\" he snapped.\n\nI climbed down, following him. I could feel the connection he shared with the dragon, the way it swooped out from him, cycling through him before returning to the dragon.\n\n\"What are we looking for?\" I asked.\n\n\"What you detected.\"\n\n\"I don't know what it was.\"\n\n\"But it was something,\" Thomas stated, looking back at me.\n\nI could still feel it out there, though I wasn't at all sure what it was\u2014but it was faint and fading, becoming increasingly difficult for me to detect anything.\n\n\"There's something, but I don't know what it is,\" I said.\n\n\"Then we follow.\"\n\nThomas seemed to think it was important enough for us to track it through the forest. In the darkness, it was difficult for me to make anything out. I could feel the occasional sense of power fluttering against me, a surge of energy that suggested there was something out there.\n\n\"Do you feel anything?\" I asked Thomas as we raced ahead. He seemed to have some way of navigating through the forest much more easily than I did, slipping between the trees, a pale light glowing from him. It took me a moment to realize that he used his connection to the dragons to illuminate the path ahead of us.\n\n\"I don't detect what you did, though I suspect there's something there,\" Thomas said.\n\nI continued to hold on to the connection to power to feel for something. What if I connected to the green dragon and used that to probe for something else?\n\nI tried to reach across the distance, to use what I could feel of the green dragon. The sense of it was faint, but the dragon was there. For a moment, I wondered if I had ever separated that connection to the dragon. Strangely, I could feel it in the heat deep within me, without having to do much more to connect to the dragon itself.\n\nI held on to that energy and realized there was something more fluttering from me, flowing outward. It drifted into the forest, probing at what I detected.\n\nThomas glanced back at me. \"What did you do?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I didn't do anything. I just\u2014\"\n\nThere came a strange crack.\n\nI jerked, spinning, and froze. A face in the darkness caught my attention. One of the Djarn. Thomas was there quickly, wrapping power through him, and he sent it streaking toward the Djarn.\n\n\"Don't,\" I said, grabbing for him.\n\nThomas pushed me back. \"Be careful,\" he said. \"They can be dangerous. They've been moving toward the capital.\"\n\nI frowned. \"You think the Djarn are responsible for the dragons?\" Thomas didn't say anything. The face I saw wanted us to know that it was there. I was certain of it. \"If there's one of the Djarn, then there are likely others. The fact that we have seen this one tells me there are probably more in the trees around us.\"\n\nThomas looked over to me, frowning deeply. \"How well do you know the Djarn?\"\n\n\"I've encountered them before. They live within the forest outside of the plains near Berestal, but I haven't had any interaction with them. I have a friend whose father has.\"\n\nThe timing of all of this was more than a little troubling. Not only had the Djarn begun moving, surrounding me in the forest during my test and now here again, but Joran and his father were visiting after having been with the Djarn. I wanted to think they weren't connected, but I had to wonder.\n\nThomas turned back away, focusing on the Djarn. Heat radiated from him, the power of the dragons flowing off of him, flooding toward the Djarn.\n\n\"I don't know what you think you're going to do,\" I said. \"There are probably a dozen of them around us.\"\n\n\"You can feel them?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I can't feel anything. If the Djarn are here, it's because they want us to know that they are.\"\n\nHow is it that I knew this and Thomas didn't?\n\nUnless he'd wanted to come to face the Djarn.\n\nI wanted no part of that.\n\nI wasn't sure how I felt about the Djarn, but I didn't want to see them slaughtered.\n\nThe heat of the dragon swirled around Thomas. It was faint, but it was at least easing, and there wasn't much intensity to it\u2014not at all like it had been before.\n\n\"Go ahead then,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Go ahead with what?\"\n\n\"If you have some way of communicating with them, go ahead and do it.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't have any way of communicating with them,\" I said.\n\nHe glanced over at me. \"You seem to know so much about them.\"\n\nI didn't want to anger Thomas, but it seemed I already had. Now here I was trying to prove that I wasn't somehow siding with the Djarn, but at the same time, I also knew that if I didn't intervene in some way, Thomas would end up attacking. My experience with the Djarn had told me that doing that was a mistake.\n\n\"All they want is to be left alone,\" I said, repeating something Joran's father had once told me, hoping it was true despite what Manuel\u2014and now Thomas\u2014claimed. \"They don't care about the kingdom.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"What do you think you're going to do?\" I asked.\n\nThomas turned toward me, glaring. Heat built from him, and I raised my hands.\n\n\"I'm not trying to challenge you. I'm just asking what you think you're going to do against the Djarn. I can tell you there are more around us than you know.\" Even as I said it, I could feel a hint of power. It seemed to come from the dragon in the distance, but it also seemed to come from somewhere nearby. It was almost as if there were a familiar sensation coming off of that dragon, something that triggered within me and told me that there was a power that I should be aware of. \"Does the king want you attacking them?\"\n\n\"The king wants to ensure the safety of the kingdom,\" Thomas said quietly and carefully, with more than a hint of menace in his words. \"If that involves ensuring the Djarn don't continue their attack, then so be it.\"\n\n\"Continue their attack?\"\n\nCould they be responsible?\n\nJoran had said they wouldn't be responsible for it, and his father had more than a little experience with them, as the only person along the plains who traded with them. I found it easy enough to believe Joran, but what if they held that information back from him?\n\nWhat reason would they have to share that with him?\n\nWhen I had come here before and felt the dragons, I had felt there was some sense of energy that came from the Djarn.\n\nI needed to know.\n\nI looked past Thomas, stepping toward the Djarn.\n\n\"We're not here to harm you,\" I said, holding my hand up. I tried to focus on the connection to the green dragon, feeling that power within me, the energy that connected us.\n\nAs I did, I recognized that there was some hint of connection flowing from the Djarn. That couldn't be imagined. It was real.\n\nIf that were the case, then it meant that the Djarn were somehow connected to the dragons, as well. Could they know something about what happened to the dragons?\n\nI could feel a presence around me, though it was faint. It was enough to know that the other Djarn surrounding me were getting close enough that I could feel them\u2014but not so close I could see them. I kept my focus on the one Djarn in front of me, the only one I could see.\n\nBehind me, I could feel energy coming from Thomas. I had to be careful with him. He had taught me how to connect to the dragons, and I knew he had knowledge and experience, but if he intended to attack the Djarn . . .\n\n\"We're looking for missing dragons,\" I said, stepping forward, holding out my hand as I pressed toward the Djarn.\n\nFor a moment, I felt a surge of power that flowed around us. I glanced over to Thomas briefly to see if he were aware of it, but I couldn't tell anything from his expression.\n\nI turned back, looking for the Djarn. The face I could see was barely visible through the trees. I caught a glimpse of long hair\u2014or so I thought, at least. Pale skin caught some of the light glowing from Thomas. Then it faded.\n\nThe Djarn retreated.\n\nI took a deep breath, moving forward, trying to get closer to the Djarn, but even as I did, I knew they were already gone.\n\n\"Well?\" Thomas asked.\n\n\"I think they're gone,\" I said.\n\n\"Can you follow them?\"\n\nI closed my eyes, focusing on the energy of the dragons, the connection I had felt flowing between the dragons. The energy seemed to have faded, leaving me with nothing.\n\nI shook my head. \"I can't feel anything.\"\n\nHe turned to me. \"You will need to explain yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to upset you.\"\n\n\"I don't mean it that way.\"\n\n\"You don't?\"\n\nThomas shook his head. He whistled softly, and when he did, I could feel power building between him and the dragon. A soft stirring came as the dragon made its way toward us.\n\n\"No. Not to me. What you describe is important, Ashan. Perhaps more than you know. When the time comes, you will need to explain to the king how you detected the Djarn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The halls of the Academy were quiet. It felt like every step I took thundered loudly, disrupting the somber air inside, as if the quiet were determined to mock me for my mistake. I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd somehow angered Thomas and had done something that disrupted his plans, along with the king's plans.\n\nI paused for a moment, looking at one of the dragon lanterns set into the wall. The flame pouring out of the dragon's mouth made it look as if it were breathing fire, leaving the eyes of the sculpture glowing as well. Heat radiated from it, though not nearly as potently as it would feel from a real dragon. I could feel energy coming off of the dragon sculpture and the lantern, but not so much that it felt like a danger to me. I didn't know why I paused in front of this one in particular. It was as if there was something about this lantern that called to me.\n\nI felt like I needed to do something. Ever since returning to the city with Thomas, I'd felt that I needed to do something more. I'd made a mistake approaching the Djarn, keeping Thomas from attacking them, but at the same time, it had felt right.\n\nDragons had gone missing, but why would the Djarn suddenly be accused of being involved?\n\nA strange sense came to me.\n\nAt first, I wasn't sure what it was, but it burned in my belly.\n\nThe power of the dragon.\n\nSurprisingly, this sensation was close.\n\nAlmost as if it came from within the Academy.\n\nI wandered through the halls, focusing on that strange sense, but couldn't feel anything more.\n\nThen it was gone.\n\nAs I was making my way through the halls, I came across Ames. He was staring at his feet, and he nearly ran into me. He muttered a quick apology.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\nAmes looked up. \"Oh. It's you.\"\n\nI had had some interaction with Ames in my time since coming to the Academy\u2014enough to know that he wasn't unfriendly, just sour. \"Is anything bothering you?\"\n\nAmes shook his head. \"You know, I know the others give you a hard time about coming from the Wilds, but sometimes I wonder if you might have it better not having come from the city.\"\n\nI frowned at him, not even interested in correcting him that I didn't come from the Wilds. Something else bothered him.\n\n\"Is there something going on?\"\n\nHe glanced behind him. \"It's just . . . I don't know.\" He lowered his voice, and he leaned closer to me. \"You were there when I told that instructor about the missing dragon. I just haven't heard anything. And the others won't talk about it.\" When I didn't answer fast enough, he shook his head. \"That's what I'm saying about you not being from the city. It is something. If dragons go missing, and if the Vard managed to use them, we might find ourselves facing a dragon war. A full-on battle. And since we are training to be dragon mages, who do you think will be pulled into it?\"\n\nI hadn't given it that much thought, but he was right. That was what all of this training was about, after all. I was training to be a dragon mage. I had some idea of what that involved, but not entirely.\n\n\"What happens if the dragons are missing?\"\n\nAmes shrugged. \"I don't know. The instructors won't talk to me. If you hear anything, let me know.\"\n\nI nodded, and he shouldered his way past me, staring down at the ground as he headed through the halls.\n\nI started toward Jerith's office, hesitating a moment at the door before knocking.\n\nMuch like all of my instructors, his oak door had three dragons etched into its surface; each instructor's dragon etching took a different shape, as if each office were meant to depict the dragons in a different way.\n\nThe door opened and Donathar stepped out. He tipped his head, nodding, and smiled. \"I've seen you working with Thomas Elaron.\"\n\nI blinked. I suspected Thomas would have informed the other instructors that I was working with him. He would have to, especially as it would keep me out of some of my sessions with other instructors. Given that he was the chief dragon mage, I didn't think that would be too much of an issue.\n\n\"Only a little bit,\" I said.\n\n\"You should be careful with him. He may not be here for long.\"\n\nHe winked, then strode off down the hall.\n\nJerith step toward the door, frowning at me.\n\nI looked behind me, back to Donathar. Thomas wouldn't be here for long?\n\nI knew that he traveled, so maybe that was true. He might not be in the city for very long. Which meant that I needed to take advantage of the time that I had.\n\n\"Ashan. I wasn't expecting to see you today.\" He looked along the length of the hall. \"Is everything all right?\"\n\nI nodded. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\"You suppose?\" He started to smile before ushering me in.\n\nI followed him into his office. It was simple, which fit the man that I knew Jerith to be. The walls were all bare, revealing the dark gray stone. A hearth at one end of the room crackled with a warm flame, giving heat to the room. A sculpture of a dragon sat up on the mantle, smaller than some of the other sculptures, though no less intricate for its construction. A small cylinder of pale grey metal resting next to the dragon sculpture had strange writing on it that reminded me of the Djarn. There was a door leading to the back room, where I knew his sleeping quarters to be. The outer room was mostly his personal office, and the place where he, like the other instructors, welcomed students to visit.\n\nI had come to Jerith's quarters a few times over the months I'd been in the city, though I rarely came in the evening. Most of the time, I came with questions about my assignments, and had pestered him, along with other instructors, looking to try to better understand the connection to the dragons.\n\nI headed over to the fire, standing in front of it, and clasped my hands together, focusing on my breathing. Almost without meaning to, I connected to the green dragon within the dragon pen.\n\n\"I understand you've been working with Thomas Elaron,\" Jerith said, taking a seat at his desk.\n\nI glanced back at him. There were stacks of papers and books and sculptures all piled onto his desk. It was the only part of his room that looked messy. The rest of it was sparse. There was a chair near the hearth, a bookshelf with a smattering of books\u2014though not nearly as many as the bookshelf would have allowed.\n\n\"I have,\" I said. \"He found me outside of the dragon pen one evening and decided to work with me.\"\n\n\"You should be honored by that,\" he said.\n\nI turned back to the fire, nodding. \"I was. I mean, I am.\"\n\nJerith chuckled. \"Do you care to tell me what happened?\"\n\nI approached his desk, pacing in front of it. \"He was determined to help me find a way to connect to the dragons\u2014better than I have already.\"\n\n\"That would be welcome. You have potential. We've known that ever since you first came to the Academy, but potential and the ability to reach potential are very different things. In your case, we knew you could and should be able to reach for that power, but it's a matter of you finding it within yourself.\"\n\nI took a deep breath, holding on to the power within the dragons, recognizing the way it flowed. I held my hands together, letting that power flow through me, cycling as it had when I was out in the dragon pen. Gradually I started to separate my hands, forcing some of that power down so that the flames began to crackle with a thin line between my fingertips.\n\nJerith leaned forward. \"I would say it's been successful.\" He looked up at me. \"Very few gain control that quickly. He probably won't be in the city for very long.\"\n\n\"That's the same thing Donathar said.\"\n\nJerith shrugged. \"Unfortunately, it's probably true. Thomas rarely spends much time in one place, especially these days. But while he's available, you should learn what you can. His lessons might be invaluable. What has he taught you?\"\n\nI looked around the inside of his office and considered asking him about Elaine while I was here, but I didn't want to draw that kind of attention to myself. The fact that I had traveled with Elaine outside of the city tied me to the Vard, at least in the eyes of the instructors within the Academy, even though I remained uncertain about whether Elaine had truly been with the Vard.\n\n\"He has been having me work on my connection to the dragons, mostly by trying to get me to reach for the power and feel it flowing through me, cycling through the dragon.\"\n\n\"That would be one way,\" he said.\n\n\"I've been trying to let power come through me. I know you want me to connect to as many dragons as possible, but I find I'm best connected to only one of the dragons.\"\n\nJerith stared at my hands, watching the way that the flames crackled between them. I tried to focus on the power, letting it flow from one finger to another. I hadn't yet begun to work on sending it up my arms, back through me the way I'd been instructed, but I thought I could if I needed to. There was still so much I needed to learn about controlling the dragon magic, but having the ability to do anything was a blessing.\n\n\"It begins with a connection. I suspect that's more than enough for you. The more you hold on to that connection, the more you can begin to know just how powerful it is for you.\"\n\nI forced more of the power down into me, pressing my hands together, then finally released the connection to the dragon. \"I know I need to learn more, but I . . .\"\n\nI turned away, staring at the fire.\n\nJerith chuckled. \"Go on with it. Get it out there.\"\n\n\"I think I made a mistake,\" I said. \"When I was traveling with Thomas out into the forest\u2014\"\n\nJerith got to his feet. \"What do you mean you were traveling with him out into the forest?\"\n\nI turned back. \"He brought me into the forest this morning. I guess he's been looking for the missing dragons. He thought I might be able to help him.\"\n\n\"You're a student at the Academy. A relatively new student, at that. What would he be thinking bringing you out with him? Especially with what has been going on with the dragons.\"\n\nI didn't know how many dragons were missing. There was the red dragon that Ames had noticed, and there was the rumor that Manuel had mentioned, but I didn't know any other specifics. Any dragon missing was too many, though.\n\n\"I don't really know. He brought me there, and . . . well, I felt something. We landed, and we followed what I'd felt, and we came across the Djarn.\"\n\n\"The Djarn shouldn't be so close to us in the forest,\" Jerith said, frowning to himself.\n\n\"I don't know anything about that, but when you had tested whether I could detect the dragon, I came across the Djarn that day as well.\" I hadn't shared that with him before, and that was a mistake.\n\n\"You came across the Djarn near the outskirts of the forest?\"\n\n\"It wasn't so much the outskirts. We were deeper into the forest.\"\n\n\"How deep?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I sort of got lost.\"\n\nI hated admitting that, but it was the truth. Jerith had been good to me in my time at the Academy, and I didn't want to lie to him about what I had gone through and what I had done.\n\n\"That explains it, then,\" he said. \"Why it took you so long to return. I know there were rumors going around about what had happened with you, and while I don't normally put much stock in those rumors, the fact was that you had taken quite a while to get back.\"\n\n\"I followed the dragon into the forest. Maybe I should've told you this before, but when I got deep enough into the forest, I was surrounded by the Djarn.\"\n\n\"They surrounded you?\" He frowned at me, glancing down at something on his desk before looking back up. \"The Djarn shouldn't attack you while on a testing, especially not dressed in your Academy robes.\"\n\n\"There were at least two spears, which suggested there were more that I didn't see. Then they disappeared.\"\n\n\"Did you follow them?\"\n\nI chuckled. \"One doesn't simply follow the Djarn. At least, that's been my experience.\"\n\n\"You have experience with the Djarn where you're from?\"\n\n\"Only knowing they're in the forest outside of the plains. We almost never see them. They decide who they want to work with, and who they want to trade with, and only reveal themselves to a few people.\"\n\n\"You haven't been one of them,\" he said.\n\nI shook my head again. \"I haven't been one of them. I have a friend whose father had traded with them, and he claims to know them fairly well.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Jerith said. He took a seat and started shifting papers on his desk. \"There are several schools of thought when it comes to the Djarn,\" Jerith said. \"There are those who believe them to be a threat to the kingdom, even though in the time that we have been here, situated as we are at the edge of the forest, they've never made their presence known to any but a few. We almost never see them, much like you had experienced in the forest of your home. It's something that leaves some people troubled. Not knowing anything means it's dangerous. At least, according to one school of thought. Others recognize that they're living their lives and we should leave them to it.\"\n\nI took a seat and leaned forward, resting my elbows on my thighs as I watched Jerith. \"We weren't necessarily afraid of the Djarn in Berestal, though we did respect them. Very few people had any real interaction with them.\"\n\n\"There are some who fear the Vard are working with them.\"\n\nI frowned. \"I don't know if that's quite true.\" I shook my head. \"At least, from my experience. We have plenty of Vard sympathizers in Berestal, but I can't think of any who had traveled outside of the city to the forest with the Djarn.\"\n\n\"I can't say that I know. I haven't traveled beyond the forest. At least, not recently. But you should know that the king will find any with the necessary potential to train with the dragons.\"\n\n\"Like sending the delegation out to Berestal to test for potential abilities.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We haven't talked about that.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that anyone really wants to talk about it.\"\n\n\"The instructors at the Academy do not. I would argue that most of the king's dragon mages don't, either. The idea that there could be one among us who had betrayed the king and gone to the Vard is painful.\"\n\nI looked up and met Jerith's eyes. I wanted to tell him that I didn't think that Elaine was working with the Vard, but I held back.\n\n\"You don't need to fear. The Academy grants those who have the necessary potential, such as yourself, the ability to work with the dragons. The king would prefer to have everybody who has that ability work with him and his people.\" Jerith shook his head. \"Out beyond the borders of the forest, out near the plains and Berestal, and in some of the places that have only recently been annexed by the kingdom, it is a little bit different. The people there aren't beholden to the kingdom in the same way, and yet . . .\" He looked down at the stack of papers in front of him, sorting through them as if he were looking for some sort of secret that he had left there. Finally, he looked back up at me. \"I suppose it doesn't matter. The kingdom still hasn't found what we think we need.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\"\n\n\"A way to fully defeat the Vard.\"\n\n\"And how do the Djarn play into this?\" I asked.\n\n\"It depends on who you ask,\" Jerith said. \"Some believe the Djarn, having lived here long before the kingdom existed, have a connection to the dragons. Others think they are simply connected to the forest itself. Given how easily they navigate the forest, and how quickly they disappear when they are seen, that is the most believable.\"\n\nI sat back, thinking about what I felt from the Djarn, the way I'd detected the connection between the people, the same sort of connection I had felt between the dragons and dragon mages.\n\n\"I think they are,\" I said.\n\nJerith nodded. \"It would make sense for them to know the forest. As you've said, they can slip through it without being seen, and very few people know where they are, which gives them\u2014\"\n\n\"I should clarify. I think they're somehow connected to the dragons,\" I said.\n\nJerith leaned forward, watching me. \"Why would you say that?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't know. It was something I felt.\" I closed my eyes, thinking about what I had detected when we had traveled\u2014the sense of power that had summoned me toward it. Had I been so connected to the dragon that I could feel what the Djarn were doing?\n\nThe idea seemed impossible, but at the same time, there was no doubt in my mind that something had compelled me forward, something had drawn me, and when I had encountered the Djarn, there was a certain feeling of power that linked them to the dragons. That was a connection.\n\nThat was what concerned Thomas\u2014and why he wanted me brought before the king.\n\n\"I thought I felt the Djarn connected when I was there with Thomas.\"\n\n\"Did you feel it when you were there the first time?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't. But at the same time, it wasn't until later that I began to feel a different connection to the dragon magic.\"\n\nStill, even then I'd been able to follow the dragon, hadn't I? I had recognized the power of the dragon, and I should have recognized how that power pulled upon me, along with pulling upon the Djarn\u2014if there were such a connection.\n\n\"It might have only been Thomas you detected,\" Jerith said. \"As the chief dragon mage, he does have considerable control over the dragons, along with their power. You may have only sensed him cycling that power.\" He chuckled to himself. \"I never would have described it as cycling before, but it does fit.\"\n\nThe way the green dragon forced power through me was definitely a cycling, even though I had no control over it. And what Jerith said about Thomas was right. I had seen it firsthand. I had seen the way Thomas could borrow from the power of multiple dragons. He had touched upon that power, switching from dragon to dragon easily.\n\n\"None of that's the reason you came to me though, is it?\" Jerith asked.\n\nI shook my head and turned to him. \"He wants to bring me before the king.\"\n\nJerith frowned. \"Thomas does?\"\n\n\"I think he's upset about what happened with the Djarn. That, combined with how the dragons have gone missing, and . . .\"\n\nIf I played it out, and if the Djarn were somehow connected to the dragons, and if they were responsible for calling those dragons away, or even sneaking in and taking them directly, then I wanted to know.\n\n\"Do you think he's accusing you?\" Jerith asked.\n\nI shook my head. \"It's not like I've had much of an opportunity to steal dragons. I've struggled just to have a connection to them at all.\"\n\n\"I don't know if struggling is the right way to describe it,\" Jerith said. \"You have a connection. It's just that you haven't known how to use that connection. Over time, you will master it. As you've already shown. Perhaps all you needed was to have an opportunity to work with someone who can help you better connect to it. I wish I could claim that person was me, but if it had to be somebody, it might as well have been the king's chief dragon mage.\"\n\n\"Have you ever gone before the king?\"\n\nJerith smiled. \"I am a dragon mage,\" he said.\n\nThere was a moment of silence. \"So is that a yes?\"\n\n\"The king is present at every Academy graduation,\" Jerith said. \"I suppose that were you in the city longer, you would've known that. If you serve well, then you're pulled into his dragon elites.\" He looked over to me, smiling and shrugging. \"They are dragon mages who have served the king more directly. They serve directly under Thomas, or at least they used to. These days, with Thomas's absence, the dragon mages have begun to reorganize. That's the reason for Donathar's return to the city. Now they are serving beneath the king's Sharath under the guidance of Donathar.\"\n\nThe Sharath was the king's right-hand man, the one who served him most directly. I knew so little about him other than rumor. I doubted anybody really knew much about him, especially somebody like myself who hadn't spent much time in the city. I had quite a bit of catching up to do still to get up to speed with everything within the city.\n\n\"Do you think Thomas is angry that he's been pushed aside?\" I asked.\n\nJerith watched me. \"What are you getting at, Ashan?\"\n\nWhat was I getting at? I wasn't even sure, to be honest. \"The dragons are missing, is that right?\"\n\nJerith tapped on his chin. \"You have seen the dragon pens, Ashan.\"\n\n\"I was just thinking about what I'd seen Thomas doing,\" I said.\n\nHe looked as if he wanted to cross the distance between us, and he frowned at me, squeezing the tips of his fingers as he pressed his lips together. \"What exactly have you seen him doing?\"\n\nHow was I to explain it? I had witnessed Thomas's connection to the dragons, but he'd focused on each of the dragons, touching upon them.\n\nI had no idea what that meant, or whether it was significant at all, only that I was certain about what I'd detected. I'd seen and felt that connection.\n\nIt mattered.\n\n\"Maybe nothing,\" I said. \"Or maybe it is something. I don't really know.\"\n\n\"Tell me what it is,\" Jerith said. \"We can work through it together.\"\n\nI started carefully. \"When I first met Thomas, he was working with each of the dragons. He touched upon them, and I had felt the way that he used his connection to the dragons.\"\n\n\"What do you mean you felt it?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I don't really know how to describe it. I can tell when somebody is using the connection to the dragon. I can almost see it,\" I said.\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"It's a distinct sensation,\" I said. \"It's a matter of feeling the way the energy flows from the dragon, working not only from the dragon, but also toward the dragon mage.\"\n\nJerith leaned back, steepling his hands together as he watched me. \"Can you feel it now?\"\n\nI focused on what he was doing and whether there was anything to it that I might be able to detect. I realized there was a hint of power coming off of him. It was faint. Focusing on it, I could trail after that connection. Power stretched away from him, feeding from him and all the way toward the dragon pen. It was almost as if there were a string attached to him that he held on to, power that flowed out and around, cycling through.\n\n\"I can,\" I said.\n\n\"What exactly do you detect?\"\n\n\"I detect you holding on to the connection to a dragon. I don't know which dragon.\" Though, as I thought about it, I had to question whether such a thing would even be possible. I might be able to uncover which dragon he connected to if I were familiar with more of the dragons. \"But more than that, I can't really tell.\"\n\nJerith frowned. \"Interesting.\"\n\n\"Why? Is that different than others?\"\n\n\"Yes, your connection seems to be a bit different than others I've trained.\"\n\n\"Different than other students? Or just . . .\" I wasn't even sure what I was asking, only that I didn't like the idea that my connection to the dragons was suddenly so different.\n\nStill, there was value in my ability to detect the connection to the dragons and the way others were bound to it. There might be value to the Academy, as well. Especially if I were to be able to use that connection, use what I'd detected, to figure out if there were some other practical aspect to it.\n\n\"It's just different, Ashan. You don't need to be concerned about your difference. I certainly am not. Although, if that is what you can do, I'm not at all surprised Thomas found you compelling. Normally, detecting the flow of power from a dragon takes years of connection to them, and even then, it's not an exact art, such as it is.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I want to be different,\" I said.\n\nHe smiled at me. \"You don't need to be disappointed that you are different. I would suggest you focus more on what makes you unique.\" He glanced down at the desk. \"And don't worry about what Thomas wants from you. If he intends to bring you before the king, consider it an honor. There aren't many students like yourself granted such an opportunity.\"\n\nI took a deep breath, nodding. Perhaps that was how I had to view it. I needed to think about it as an opportunity. Coming to the Academy, coming to the capital itself, had both been opportunities for me, ones I wouldn't have had otherwise.\n\n\"If there's nothing else, you should get back to your assignments,\" Jerith said.\n\nWhen I stepped out into the hall and headed toward the student quarters, the sound of Brandel's voice caught my attention, so I veered away. I wasn't in the mood to deal with him right now.\n\nI wasn't sure I was in the mood to deal with anyone.\n\nInstead, maybe I'd go back out to the dragon pens, sit there and see if I could figure out anything more about my connection to the dragons and whether I might be able to control some new aspect of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "I waited by the dragon pen, anticipating that Thomas would be there, but he had not yet arrived. Maybe he had come earlier than me and had already left for the day. I made a circle around the pen, touching the bars of cool metal before moving onward. I stared through the bars, focusing on the dragons. The deep green dragon remained inside. I had rarely seen him leave.\n\n\"I've seen you watching them often,\" a voice said.\n\nI looked over to see Donathar. He was dressed in dark navy, the crest of the king on one shoulder, and a playful smile on his face as he regarded the dragons. Much like what I had detected with Thomas, he released power from him that flowed through the bars of the dragon pen and touched upon each of the dragons.\n\n\"I'm just trying to find my connection.\"\n\nDonathar turned to me. \"From what I understand, you have successfully managed to do so.\"\n\n\"Successfully, but it's different.\"\n\nDonathar paused. He tapped on something in his pocket before glancing up at me. \"Different doesn't mean less potent. Different only means different. As you likely learned, all students at the Academy come to understand their connection to the dragons differently. Even Thomas.\" He said his name with a slight tension pulling on his eyes. \"Though if he has managed to demonstrate something for you, I should say that it has been valuable.\"\n\n\"None of the other instructors succeeded in coaxing a connection out of me.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps they just didn't have the time,\" he said. He frowned, glancing over to the Academy before turning toward me. \"If there's one thing I've learned in my time outside of the city, it's that there are many means to reaching the same kind of power.\"\n\n\"Did you learn that with the Djarn?\"\n\nHis face didn't change, though the tension that I had detected in his eyes persisted, if only a little bit. \"My time with the Djarn was challenging,\" he said. \"They are quite secretive, even to those sent to them as emissaries.\"\n\n\"You didn't learn anything?\" That surprised me. Even Joran had learned something, if only because his father had connected to the Djarn.\n\n\"Oh, there are many things that I learned in my time among them, but few were what I had hoped.\" He glanced over and winked. \"I know the stories of the Djarn. I thought many of them true before I spent any time with them. Unfortunately . . .\"\n\n\"They don't have a connection to magic?\"\n\n\"They most certainly have some connection to magic, but finding what it is proved difficult, even for as long as I was with them.\" He shook his head and turned to the dragons. A bit of power trailed off of him, touching from one dragon to the next. When he reached the green dragon, the dragon started to stir, looking over to me, and a bit of heat ballooned within me. \"I had hoped to gain insight about the Djarn during my time there. Perhaps even bring word back to the king that they could be allies, rather than . . .\" He looked at me. \"I shouldn't even be speaking about this around you. I think it was your connection to Manuel, or perhaps that Thomas chose you to teach.\"\n\n\"That was chance more than anything,\" I said.\n\n\"Was it, or perhaps he sought you out.\" Donathar looked over to me, cocking his head as he regarded me. Heat bloomed from him, but it was the only thing that I could feel. Nothing else. \"I'd be happy to work with you myself, if you would be inclined. Now that you have discovered your connection to the dragons, the techniques are much more universal. The patterns might not be. Each instructor has their own area of expertise, as I imagine you have learned. If you are interested, all you would have to do is tell me. I'm sure Thomas wouldn't mind. Especially . . .\" He shook his head, glancing over to the Academy before turning back to me. \"Anyway. It seems as if you have a visitor.\"\n\nI looked over, thinking that maybe Natalie had come again, but I was not disappointed to see Joran.\n\nI nodded to Donathar. If he wanted to work with me, who was I to refuse? I needed the opportunity, especially from an instructor who was willing and as capable as he obviously was.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said. \"I would be honored to work with you.\"\n\nHe nodded, and I hurried off, catching up to Joran.\n\nJoran looked back at the dragon pen for a long moment, shaking his head. Finally, he grinned at me.\n\n\"Where do you want us to go this time?\" Joran asked, guiding me into the city.\n\nThere was a crowd out in the city, and there was more activity going on than there had been in quite some time. I looked out, watching the commotion, and finally turned my attention over to Joran. \"I'll leave that up to you. At this point, it's your choice. You're the one who only has a little bit longer in the city, after all.\"\n\nI tried to suppress the sadness in my voice, but I knew I wasn't so successful.\n\nJoran eyed me, and there was a hint of amusement glittering in his eyes.\n\n\"You can come back,\" he said, before sweeping his gaze around him. \"But I have a feeling you have no interest in doing that.\"\n\n\"It isn't so much that I have no interest,\" I said. \"It's just that I feel like I still have something I can accomplish here.\"\n\n\"I should hope so,\" he said, chuckling. \"Look at what you've done so far. You're going to be a dragon mage, Ashan.\"\n\nI looked away.\n\nWhat had I done?\n\nNot succeed.\n\nNot yet, but I would.\n\nWe paused near one of the strips of shops within the city. There was an open-air market near here, and dozens upon dozens of street vendors converged upon it every day, something that was rare enough in Berestal, but incredibly common here. The sound of shop owners shouting rang out, carrying over to us, and both of us continued onward. We picked our way through the booths, and at one point, we paused to watch a troupe of acrobats as they tumbled and danced, flipping and spinning.\n\n\"It's like a festival, but it's a festival every day.\"\n\nI hadn't really considered it that way, but he was right.\n\n\"You could stay,\" I said to him.\n\nThere was a twitch at the corners of his eyes, and for a moment, I thought maybe he'd agree to it, but then that moment passed.\n\n\"I can't. I still need to get back to my home, and my father's going to need my help getting back.\"\n\n\"Your father can get back without you,\" I said. \"Besides, given his connections,\" I started, deciding not to mention the Djarn out loud here in the city, never knowing who might be listening, \"you don't have to worry about him.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"That's the thing, though,\" he said. \"I like having the festival when there's the festival, and having a bit of normalcy otherwise. Besides, who's going to keep an eye on your sister?\"\n\n\"Careful,\" I said to him.\n\n\"I'm just saying that Alison might need someone to keep an eye out for her. You certainly wouldn't want anything to happen to her.\"\n\nI chuckled, shaking my head at him. \"You know, you can be a complete pain in the ass.\"\n\n\"That's my plan,\" he said.\n\n\"You're doing it well.\"\n\n\"I have to.\" He paused at one booth, looking at the different books that were stacked up. \"Who would buy these?\" Joran asked, turning and looking back at me. \"I mean, who needs books like these?\"\n\nI nodded, and several older men crowded toward the booth. \"They do, apparently.\"\n\n\"Them,\" he muttered. \"Scholars.\" He shook his head. \"I suppose they do, don't they?\" We both laughed and moved on. \"You don't want to come back, do you?\" Joran asked.\n\n\"I'm going to be a dragon mage,\" I said.\n\n\"I know.\" He smiled tightly. \"From the moment you left, I knew the idea of you returning was impossible. I can't say I'm not saddened by it though.\"\n\n\"I'm going to be able to come back,\" I told him.\n\n\"Are you? Because I don't know how many times we've had dragon mages visit the city. Wait. I do. I can think of exactly one time.\" He started to smile. \"Maybe if you return regularly, we could count that more easily, but I have a hard time thinking anything is going to change. If you become a dragon mage, or even a dragon rider\u2014and I can't believe I'm saying that as if that's your worst-case scenario\u2014you wouldn't stay. You might come to visit, but I think we both know that won't be long-lived.\"\n\n\"I don't know what the king might ask of me. Between what's happening with the Vard and the Djarn . . .\" I cut myself off and looked over to him, shaking my head. \"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be saying any of that to you.\"\n\n\"Did you say it just because my family happens to be involved with both?\" he asked.\n\n\"It was a mistake,\" I told him. \"I know your mother and sister aren't fully part of the Vard. Gods, we don't even know if they had been the ones to attack.\"\n\n\"My mother hadn't heard anything of Elaine, and I told you how the Vard view dragons.\" He wrinkled his brow, frowning. \"That's the other thing I wanted to tell you before I left. My mother and sister wanted me to warn you.\"\n\n\"They did?\"\n\n\"Not about of the Vard.\" He added that quickly, and then cut himself off, lowering his voice and looking around. \"But more about what brought you to the city. Tara doesn't really believe you're a dragon mage, so I suppose there's that.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's hard for her to believe it, given how long she's known me.\"\n\n\"I have a hard time believing it,\" he said. \"It means that somebody in your family has to have some connection to the dragons. It has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? Your mother didn't, or doesn't, but do you think your father did?\"\n\nI had thought about it a little bit. I had wondered, especially the way my father acted in the months before his death. \"I never would've thought so before, but comments he said made me wonder. There were times when I started to question just how much my father actually knew.\"\n\nWe had reached the end of the market and the city opened up in front of us; there was not nearly as much of a crowd as there had been before. Now there were rows of homes all crammed in the street. It was crowded, but a different kind of crowding.\n\n\"There were things he said. I think that after his accident, he had started to lose some part of himself, but occasionally he would know things.\" I looked over to Joran. \"And since coming here, I've discovered more truths to what he'd known.\"\n\nJoran started to smile. \"Maybe your father was a dragon rider. Or what if he was a dragon mage who had gone into hiding?\"\n\nI snorted. \"I have a hard time thinking that he was either of those, but I do think that he knew more than what he shared. He mentioned something about being there when the King's Road was built. And he mentioned the dragons. He mentioned feeling the heat in his belly.\" I shook my head. Even now, I could feel the heat of the dragons, and it still struck me the way that my father had described it. \"There was something similar between the way he described it and the way the dragon mages within the Academy describe it.\"\n\n\"Then maybe he really was a dragon mage in hiding,\" he said.\n\n\"As much as I like the idea that my father was some sort of dragon mage, and that he had hidden that from me, I have a hard time thinking that's true. The only thing that I can come up with is that he had potential that was never reached.\"\n\nHe pulled something out of his pocket and twisted it between his fingers. It was long, slender, and had strange writing along the sides.\n\n\"What's that?\" I asked.\n\n\"This?\" He held it up. \"Just something from the Djarn that we brought to the city. Nothing all that exciting. I'm not even sure why we had to make the journey, but I'm glad we did.\"\n\nWe paused, and in the distance, the palace stretched before us. I didn't know if I were the one who had guided us here or if it had been Joran. Both of us tended to wander in the same direction, almost as if we were pulled, some invisible bands dragging us forward, summoning us away from the rest of the city. In the distance, I could see the power stretching, some part of it that was rising around, making me all too aware of what was up there.\n\n\"Do you think there are others in the city who might have that potential?\" Joran asked.\n\nI looked over. \"Like you?\"\n\nHe offered a hint of a smile. \"There was a time that I think I would have wanted to have been given the opportunity to become a dragon rider. Anything more than that was impossible to even conceive of. I could never even imagine the idea of becoming a dragon mage. But here you are. And out in our part of the world, a place where the king rarely sends anyone, I can't help but wonder if there might be others who have that ability, but will never have the chance to develop it.\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" I said.\n\n\"Not just possible,\" he said. \"From what you have described, it would have to be probable, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"There's a reason they came out beyond the forest, out to the plains, and almost to the Wilds. They must have known that there were others who had some potential out there. Whether or not they knew that it was going to be us, or that they would even find anyone, they believed there was something out there.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"And that makes me wonder. How many others are out there like you and your sister?\"\n\nI didn't know, and what was more, I didn't know what to tell him. Maybe there were others out there who had the ability to use dragon power. Not only people like me, or perhaps my father, maybe even Alison, had she been interested\u2014and willing\u2014to come to the Academy, but there was the potential of the Djarn.\n\nI had felt the strangeness when surrounded by the Djarn.\n\n\"What has your father been doing in the city?\" I asked.\n\nHe shrugged. \"He doesn't talk about it. He's been trying to find a few different things, working his way through the market, and has been more than happy to let me wander. Especially since he knew you were here. He figured we'd want to spend time together.\"\n\n\"He needs to be careful,\" I said. \"With whatever's happening with the Djarn, your father needs to be careful. I don't want him to get pulled into something that might draw him into danger.\"\n\nHe started to smile. \"I think my father knows how to manage.\"\n\nI considered telling him how I wasn't so sure, or that there might be something amiss, especially given my experience, but I didn't want to taint the time we had left.\n\n\"Why don't we visit a few of the other shops here?\"\n\n\"You want to keep me away from the Academy?\"\n\n\"Maybe I should. I have enough trouble the way it is.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"You keep saying that, but I have a hard time thinking that you, of all people, would have trouble with anyone.\"\n\n\"There are quite a few people here, especially in the Academy, who seem to think their family connections mean they have reason to act like bullies.\"\n\n\"You know how to handle a bully though,\" he said. \"Remember when we went to Berestal when we were no more than 14 or 15, before your brother and father were injured,\" he said, glancing over to me, as if to see how I might react, \"and we came across that little shit who thought to push us around during one of the festivals.\"\n\nI smiled at him. \"I remember that well.\"\n\n\"And you remember what you did?\"\n\n\"It didn't take much,\" I said. I'd sat on him. I had treated him like I would treat a difficult animal.\n\n\"Do the same thing with anybody who gives you any trouble here,\" he said. \"Knock them in the teeth, tie them up if you have to, and make sure they know that you aren't about to be trifled with.\"\n\n\"I wish you could stay,\" I said to him.\n\n\"I think I would only get in the way,\" he said. \"And besides, this suits you. At least, it seems to suit you. Maybe it doesn't, and I don't know anything. Just don't get too caught up in thinking that the king, his dragon mages, the Academy, and all of this are the only answers there are in the world.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Well, you know my mother and sister. They aren't the dangerous Vard you think them to be.\"\n\nI nodded. I didn't know enough about the Vard. Certainly not enough to know if they were dangerous. \"I know.\"\n\n\"And you know my father. He wouldn't bargain with the Djarn if there were anything for you to worry about there, either.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\n\"And I guess what I'm saying is: find your own answers.\"\n\nI smiled at him. We wandered for much of the afternoon, until he had to leave. Saying goodbye to Joran was difficult. He promised to send word, and I promised to visit, but both of us questioned how easy that would be. There was something leisurely about the time that I spent with him. It was certainly less of an abrupt departure than what we had when I had left him in the forest and gone with Manuel, but it was still not an easy change.\n\nAs I returned from the city, I approached the Academy slowly. I glanced over to the dragon pens, looking for any movement, but other than noticing the dragons inside, I didn't see anything there. It seemed as if there were not nearly as many dragons as there should be. But then, I realized that I didn't pay that much attention to just how many dragons there should be in the pen at any one time anyway.\n\nSeveral students were near the pen, and I veered far enough away so that I didn't have to interact with any of them. I didn't know if it was Brandel and his followers, but I wasn't about to give him the chance to bother me. Instead, by the time I reached the main part of the Academy, I wanted nothing more than to reach my room and settle into my bed, maybe even take a few moments to study. I was hopeful that I could find some new technique in my study guides that I could then incorporate into my lessons from Thomas. I was determined to keep learning.\n\nHushed voices in the hall caught my attention\u2014one of them was a master instructor's. I leaned against one of the walls, not really wanting to listen, but there was something in what they had said that troubled me.\n\n\"We're missing another,\" Master Matthew said, his distinctive voice carrying down the hall. \"That makes how many now?\"\n\n\"At least four,\" Master Onas said. \"We will find them.\"\n\n\"We've gone years without any occurrences, and now we are losing dragons in addition to having one of our own betray us on behalf of the Vard?\"\n\nThey were talking about Elaine. Jerith had made it clear that the instructors and the dragon mages hadn't wanted to talk much about Elaine and her betrayal. I hadn't brought it up, either, so overhearing it now was a little unsettling.\n\n\"She was always questionable,\" Master Onas said. \"Eager to acquire power, never eager to study.\"\n\n\"She had power. She didn't need to acquire it,\" the other said.\n\n\"She had only seen that power. She did not have any of her own.\"\n\nI couldn't tell who was speaking now, only that they were heading off in the opposite direction, neither of them speaking loudly enough so that I could overhear. I poked my head out and around the corner, trying to see who was talking, but could not tell anything.\n\nWhen they disappeared, I leaned back up against the wall.\n\nAnother dragon had gone missing.\n\nI was too new to the Academy, too inexperienced, to think that I might be able to do anything, but at the same time, I had a feeling that if I didn't try to do something, especially given what I had seen out in the forest with the Djarn, there might be even more dragons that went missing.\n\nI needed to go and try to find Joran again, speak with him and his father about what the Djarn had been doing, and try to get some answers. I could bring the dragons back to the Academy, keep my friend and his father out of it, and maybe offer another service to the king in the process.\n\nAs I reached my room, closing the door behind me, I couldn't help but feel as if that weren't going to be enough. Maybe I needed to alert Thomas. I didn't know what he might do or say, but as the king's chief dragon mage, there had to be something he could do.\n\nAnd more than that, I had to hope that he would have more time to visit with me and train me\u2014and that anything I might say would keep him interested in training me.\n\nI pulled one of my study guides out, setting it open on my lap, and started to read. It was difficult to keep myself in it since I remained concerned enough about what was going on, but I forced myself to focus."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "I hadn't been able to find Joran or his father again. I knew they were leaving, and had thought that maybe I could come across them before they departed, but I didn't know where they were staying other than a few vague references that Joran had made. Now I had to wonder if perhaps any opportunity that I might have had to uncover what they were doing\u2014and whether it had anything to do with the Djarn and what was happening with the dragons\u2014had disappeared with them.\n\nI stopped in the dining hall and saw Donathar sitting at one of the tables, Jerith sitting across from him. They were speaking quietly, and I had no interest in interrupting them. A group of students sat at another table, including Brandel and Dominic. Brandel looked over to me, smirking as I stood in the doorway, which was enough for me to turn away, head back out of the Academy, and walk over to the dragon pen.\n\nIt was late, the sun starting to set, and I looked through the pen, staring at the small green dragon, feeling the energy coming off of him. It connected to me, cycling through me the way it had over the last few days, ever since I had come to understand how to use that connection.\n\nI held the power flowing through me, creating the flames that stretched out between my first three fingers, stretching my hands apart as I probed, detecting power.\n\nIt was an easy connection now, and it grew increasingly easier the more I held on to it, struggling to maintain a hold over it. All I wanted was to master that connection in some way, and to be ready when Thomas brought me before the king.\n\nI pulled upon the power cycling through the green dragon, working from him to me, rolling through my arms, and building upward with a vibrant connection. I had gotten comfortable with holding on to the power, letting it cycle through me, the magic of the dragon circling through me, stretching between my fingers.\n\nI had started twisting it, wondering if I might be able to control the flames. I had seen some of the dragon mages use power in that way, twisting their flames, weaving them together, but I had not seen much beyond that. There were levels of instruction at the Academy, and I was in one of the most basic levels, working to try to understand even more. Eventually, I suspected that I could touch upon even more power, but it would be challenging. So far, everything at the Academy had proven challenging.\n\nIn time, I hoped I could. I'd found that the more I stretched the power apart, moving it from one hand to another, the easier it became for me to feel as if I could use it. I started to try to twist the energy when I heard a soft laugh behind me.\n\nI spun to see Natalie approaching. Her dark hair hung behind her, the soft breeze catching it. She was dressed in a lovely blue gown, and she carried a notebook in one hand, striding toward me, just a hint of a smile sweeping across her face.\n\n\"You again,\" I said.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I wondered if I might find you,\" she said. \"I hadn't been certain, but here you are.\"\n\n\"Here I am,\" I said.\n\n\"You don't have to be disappointed to see me,\" she said.\n\n\"It's not disappointment,\" I said. \"I've just been busy.\"\n\n\"Then don't let me get in the way.\"\n\nI frowned. \"I'm not so sure I should be practicing around somebody else yet.\"\n\n\"Why? Are you afraid you might lose control over it?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"I'm not concerned.\"\n\nI turned my attention back to the dragon pen, holding my hands closer together. For a moment, power flared up within me, growing more vibrant and intense, but then I eased it off, letting some of that energy fade and dissipate just a little bit as I started to wrap the connection together.\n\nI could control it when I wove it together like that.\n\nInteresting. Now for me to try to do different things with it.\n\n\"That reminds me of my mother,\" Natalie said, scooting closer to me. She seemed unconcerned about the heat from the flames stretching off of me, though there really wasn't much heat, just flames. I suspected they could burn, but that would require an intention to do so. I had to push harder through them in order for them to truly burn. It was a strange piece of the dragon magic I'd learned. Holding on in this way created fire, but it wasn't traditional fire.\n\n\"How does it remind you of your mother? Was she a dragon mage?\"\n\nNatalie looked down at my hands, watching me twist my fingers as the power wove together. \"She wasn't a dragon mage. She knitted, and I still have a few of the blankets she made for me.\"\n\nThere was something in the way she said it that caught my attention. \"What happened to her?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. \"She was lost,\" she said softly.\n\nLike my father. \"How?\"\n\nNatalie looked up, meeting my eyes. \"You don't want to hear about that. Besides, you were busy practicing. I seem to recall you saying that you didn't necessarily want somebody watching.\"\n\n\"I wasn't trying to dissuade you from staying here,\" I said.\n\nNatalie chuckled and leaned back, resting her hands on the grass as she watched me. Her hair was loose today, and she shook her head, getting it off of her shoulders. She was dressed in a pale blue gown, far more formal than I would've expected for somebody attached to the Academy in any way. I wasn't sure what to make of her. She had been coming here the last week or more studying the dragons.\n\nCould she be the person responsible for the missing dragons?\n\nI had a hard time thinking that, as I'd seen no sign of a connection to the dragons from her in the time that I've been here. If she did have one, she hid it well.\n\nUnless she was working with someone else.\n\nShe kept coming here. That had to matter. I should be on edge, but when I was around Natalie, I found myself on edge for different reasons.\n\n\"You aren't a part of the Academy,\" I said. \"Not a student, at least. You aren't dressed like any servant I've seen in the Academy.\" There were dozens upon dozens of servants who worked within the Academy walls. As employees, they moved around practically unseen. Most were dressed in white, though I'd seen several wearing black clothes embroidered with dragon scales to make it look as if they were wearing the dragons themselves. They tended to serve people of higher rank within the Academy.\n\n\"You can just ask me what I'm doing here,\" she said.\n\nI shrugged. \"I was hoping you'd tell me.\"\n\n\"I've been curious about the dragons,\" she said. \"Others within the city aren't prevented from coming here. I think the king is more than happy to have people aware of the protections the dragons offer.\"\n\nI turned my attention back to the dragon pen, holding on to the power flowing through me. I could feel the energy stretching between my fingers, pressing out of one side and into the other. I tried to continue to hold on to that power, weaving it as much as I could, and as I did, I attempted to do something more with it. I still couldn't.\n\n\"Have you tried stretching it out from you?\"\n\n\"I'm limited on how it works,\" I said. \"It seems to need to cycle through me.\"\n\n\"I've seen other dragon mages who can unleash power away from them,\" she said.\n\n\"You've seen that?\"\n\n\"I have been in the city longer than you,\" she said.\n\n\"I can try, but my concern is that I don't have enough control over it to let it flow outward.\"\n\n\"You won't know unless you try.\"\n\nShe was right. In the time that I had been working with the dragon, feeling for that power, I had come to know the power came from the dragon and through me, but I hadn't done anything with it. Maybe that was something I needed to change. I could try to see if I could loop it out and away from me.\n\nI got to my feet. I wasn't going to do this seated. If something happened and I lost control over the power, I wanted to be ready to run. Not only to get away from the possible explosion of power, but also to go and get help if needed.\n\n\"You might want to get up,\" I said.\n\nNatalie shrugged, staying where she was. \"I don't think it's necessary.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I might lose control over it.\"\n\nShe watched me. \"You said that before, but it didn't happen.\"\n\n\"If it does, I'm going to feel bad about burning you.\"\n\nShe leaned close, getting near the flames stretching out from my fingers. \"Do you really think you would burn me up? That hasn't happened so far,\" she said.\n\nI frowned. Maybe it wouldn't burn her. But I wasn't sure if the shift in my connection to the dragon would make a difference.\n\nI held on to that power, connecting to it, letting it flow out from me, and feeling the energy as it worked outward. Power circled, and I stretched my hands out, tamping down the power so I could pull it around in a cycle, but also attempting to try to keep it from spreading too far from me.\n\nIt created a loop of power that stretched outward. At first it did so only a little, looping out from my hands, still circling through me, but the more I held on to that energy, the more I looped the power around, the easier it was for me to feel a connection form.\n\nI began to push it out.\n\nIt was strange to realize I had that kind of control over it, but I could send it sweeping out from my hands, in a spiral around me. I could control it.\n\nThe flames arced out about five paces from me. It was a wide band. I tried something different, attempting to restrict it, to narrow the band a little bit and see if I could tighten it.\n\nIt worked.\n\nThe band of power narrowed, constricting, and I attempted to tighten it even more. Doing so required I forced down the power within me, but that became increasingly easier the longer that I did it.\n\nCould I force it even farther from me?\n\n\"Can you do more than one band?\" Natalie asked.\n\nI shook my head. I looked back at Natalie, my jaw set in concentration, trying to focus, but more than that, trying not to lose focus. I had the feeling that if I were to do so, I would find that power devastating.\n\n\"I don't know. When I did it before, it was through my fingers.\"\n\n\"Why would this be any different?\"\n\nIt was such a practical question, and I was certain she was right. Why would it be any different?\n\nI tried to push it out from two of my fingers, circling it back around as I pushed. When it happened, I kept focus.\n\nCould I split power out of my other fingers?\n\nI created two separate bands of power that circled around before looping back into me. They sizzled from my fingertips, and in doing so, stretched from one to the next, distinct lines of energy that crackled in the air, and yet I felt no heat from them. It amazed me that I was able to do even this. Somehow, I had to try more.\n\nIf I could do two, could I do three?\n\nI forced a third band from my thumbs. Doing that was increasingly difficult. I wasn't pushing it all that far from me, but it was hard. Eventually, I would lose control, but for now it held.\n\nThe next challenge would be attempting to do something with it, to manipulate that power. I tried to maneuver it.\n\nAt first, nothing seemed to happen.\n\nI wanted to braid it.\n\nThen it happened slowly. I started to manipulate it from one side, twisting the power as it stretched out from me, and as it did, it gradually began to take on the form of a braided rope of flame.\n\nWhen it struck my opposite hand, it was much more intense than it had been before. The pattern had done something to it. I sucked in a breath.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked me.\n\nI glanced over to her. \"I don't know. It feels different in this form, especially when it returns to my body.\"\n\n\"Could the pattern make a difference?\"\n\nI nodded. \"That's my suspicion, though I don't entirely know how.\"\n\n\"Can you change the pattern?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I don't know how to create anything other than a braid.\"\n\n\"Well, there are other ways you can form three strands. Try wrapping one of them around.\"\n\nThe idea that I might be able to use the flames in that way was strange, but then again, so was the idea I had braided the strands of fire.\n\nI tamped down the power, bringing my hands together and collapsing my connection to the dragon, before stretching them out again and forcing the flames out from one hand to another. In doing so, I started to wrap the thumb strand around the other two. It happened very slowly. It was as if that strand crawled along. I continued to weave it, spiraling around it, and by the time it reached my other hand, I could barely contain it. It was incredibly powerful. I struggled to keep my hands together.\n\n\"What is it?\" Natalie asked, getting close to me now. \"I can see something is off.\"\n\nI couldn't hold on to it.\n\nMy hands were forced apart. The band of power exploded out from me, shooting up into the sky in an arc of flame. I tried to control it, tried to bring my hands back together, but I couldn't. The power and the flames were too much. I struggled. I needed to separate from the dragon.\n\nUnfortunately, with the way I'd woven the one strand around the other two, I couldn't anymore. I tried, attempting to loosen the connection, to unwind that power, but it didn't seem to work.\n\nSomehow, I was going to have to find a way. I had to release that over-woven strand.\n\nI forced it out of my hand, tamping down the thumb strand, and then shifted focus to the other two. Without that band wrapped around them, I could ease them back. I squeezed my hands together slowly, finally bringing them back together, forcing the heat and fire out of them.\n\nI let out a long sigh. \"That's better,\" I whispered.\n\n\"It's interesting how such a little change makes a big difference,\" she said.\n\n\"I shouldn't be doing this without having an instructor with me. I'm sure I would be chastised for attempting anything without having somebody to guide me.\" Thomas would certainly reprimand me. Maybe not Donathar. When he'd worked with me, it had been almost friendly. The other instructors all seemed like they wanted me to succeed as well.\n\n\"You mean the same instructors who weren't able to help you learn how to reach for this power in the first place?\"\n\nI chuckled. \"I suppose those same instructors.\"\n\n\"Then maybe they wouldn't know.\"\n\nI didn't know if that were true. \"It's possible,\" I said.\n\n\"And if they don't know, then why would you be concerned about appeasing them?\"\n\n\"It's not a matter of appeasing them. It's a matter of making sure I know what I'm doing and not trying to use power that I'm not meant to.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Have you always been like this? So compliant? It seems you're looking for permission to use power you're connected to. You don't need to wait for somebody else to tell you what you can do. If you have that power, then you should use it.\" She chuckled, grinning at me. \"I would've thought a farmer from beyond the forest would have a little bit more independence.\"\n\n\"When I was on the farm, I did. I had to. You have to get the work done.\"\n\n\"Why is this so different?\"\n\nI looked down at my hands, at the power I could feel still there. There was a faint sense of pressure from the dragon, the connection that seemed to want to course outward, stretching between my hands, flowing from one side of me to the other as it drifted from the dragon.\n\n\"You should use the connection you have. Figure it out by yourself. And if your teachers can help you, let them, but maybe you shouldn't be afraid of what you might learn on your own.\"\n\nBehind me came a mournful howl.\n\nI recognized that sound. It was that of a mesahn.\n\nNatalie sat up and turned to look into the forest.\n\n\"That's just one of the mesahn,\" I said softly.\n\n\"You recognize them?\"\n\nI nodded. \"I've seen one before. I know they're powerful. If there are mesahn, it means the king's Hunters are out there. Probably hunting for the dragons that've been missing.\"\n\nThere was a surprising lack of reaction from her. \"I'm sure you're right,\" she said, settling back to the ground. She still sat with a bit of tension in her, and I wanted to try to reassure her, but I didn't know if I could say anything that would.\n\nInstead, I started to practice with the flames again. As soon as I did, she turned her attention back to me, focusing on the way that I wrapped fire around itself. I wanted to master that technique a bit before heading in for the night\u2014if I could, then perhaps I could use that when I worked with Thomas or any of the other instructors again.\n\n\"You might see if you can add a fourth strand,\" she said softly. \"You can do more with it than you can with three.\"\n\nI frowned. So far, my attempts of pushing out strands of power had been tied to using my fingers, and I wondered if I could focus power that way.\n\nStart small.\n\nThree strands had worked, but could I do four? What about five?\n\nI harnessed the power, focusing on it as it passed from one hand to the next, and gradually began to separate my hands. When I did, those five strands formed. I smiled to myself.\n\nIt was difficult holding on to that connection well enough that I could maintain each individual strand, but as I separated my hands, I began to push power out from one hand to the next, and tried to twist that power. I wasn't attempting to weave it in any way, but merely to twist it. It was not going to be a complicated wrap at all. Even twisting it, though, left a considerable burst of power going from one hand to the next.\n\nI had to loosen the way that I twisted it, not wanting to force quite so much out from me. In doing so, I could feel the pressure beginning to ease.\n\nWhat would happen if I extended how far I pushed it from myself?\n\nI trembled, trying to pull my hands apart, using that power so I could call more magic through the dragon. I connected to the power, holding my hands apart, letting each strand stretch between my fingers. It worked slowly, and I struggled to hold on to the power, trying to twist it in a way that allowed the energy to flow between my fingers. As I held my hands apart, I could feel the power forming, and I hoped that my attempt to twist it would permit me to use it more effectively. Unfortunately, even though I pulled on that magic, I didn't have enough focus for it.\n\nI sagged back, holding the heat between me, tamping down the flow from the dragon through one side of me and to the other. As I did, I began to feel a steady simmering deep within me\u2014heat and energy and magic, all of it threatening to bubble up.\n\n\"That's it?\" Natalie asked.\n\n\"I've done about as much as I can,\" I said. \"I haven't used it this much . . . well, ever.\" I held my hands out, feeling for the power and heat that radiated from the dragon, through me, and breathed out slowly. \"I'm trying to control it, but it's too much.\"\n\n\"Maybe you'll impress your instructor when you see him next.\"\n\nI breathed out, holding on to the power within me, feeling that energy as it flowed up through me, trying to push it from one hand to another, but gave up when I recognized that the power was too faint.\n\nLooking to the Academy, I sighed.\n\nNatalie followed, standing and looking at me. \"Are you going?\" She took my hand. \"We could walk.\"\n\n\"Walk?\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"You know, by using our legs. I imagine a dragon mage such as yourself would much prefer to ride atop a dragon, but some of us aren't quite that lucky.\"\n\nI laughed softly. \"I've only ridden on a dragon once, and that was a bit terrifying, if I'm being honest.\"\n\n\"But you have ridden a dragon,\" she said.\n\nI closed my eyes, thinking about how it had felt when I had soared with the dragon. \"When I was a child, I wanted to know what it would be like to ride on a dragon. I remember the first time I saw one of them, and the king's riders, and I remembered just how impressive they were. At that time, I dreamed I would one day be able to be a rider like that.\"\n\n\"And now you are,\" Natalie said, guiding me around the dragon pen and toward the road leading away from the Academy.\n\n\"What about you? What did you dream of when you were younger?\"\n\n\"Many things,\" she said. \"Mostly, I wanted normalcy.\"\n\nI frowned. \"Normalcy?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"My life has not always been what you would consider straightforward. We moved around quite a bit, and that made it difficult to make friends.\"\n\n\"How long have you been in the city?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, not nearly as long as some, but longer than you,\" she said, chuckling again.\n\nI shook my head. \"I didn't realize you haven't been in the city that long.\"\n\n\"Only because there hasn't been any reason to tell you.\" She glanced over, winking at me. \"Besides, I have been here a little bit longer than you.\"\n\nWe made our way along the street and turned toward the city proper. The Academy was situated on the edge of the capital, a place that would allow students like myself and others to have the freedom to make mistakes without causing problems within the city. That, and there was a desire to keep the dragons outside of the center of the city. When I'd first come here, I had wondered about that. It seemed surprising that we would be concerned about the dragons, as if there were some reason to keep them separated, but the more I learned about them, and how free they really were, the more I began to suspect it was for the best.\n\n\"Where else have you lived?\" I asked.\n\n\"Several places,\" she said. \"I was born in the city of Regar, though I don't have any memories of it. We weren't there very long. We moved on, my father taking us to Jintan, and then to Oshan. I have a few more memories of those places, though even they are faint.\"\n\n\"What did your father do?\" I asked.\n\nShe glanced over to me, saying nothing at first, and then her eyes widened. \"Listen,\" she said. \"Do you hear it?\"\n\nI frowned. \"What am I supposed to hear?\"\n\n\"The music.\" She dragged me forward, pulling on my arm as she raced into the city.\n\nI had no choice but to follow along with her, and yet as we meandered through the streets, wandering past shops that were closed for the night, homes darkened and shuttered, I found myself glancing back at the Academy, wondering if perhaps I should consider returning soon. It might be a mistake for me to be wandering out into the city. We weren't denied access to the city itself, but it could be dangerous for students to spend too much time there.\n\n\"I don't know if I should do this,\" I said.\n\nI had to meet with the king soon. I should prepare.\n\nNot only that, but since I could detect the dragons, I wanted to keep testing for any of the missing ones. I hadn't managed to find anything so far, but I had to believe there would be something.\n\n\"What are you worried about?\" she asked, glancing back at me.\n\nI shook my head. \"I'm not really worried about anything, I'm just\u2014\"\n\nNatalie cut me off with a long laugh. \"If you're not worried, then come along.\"\n\nShe continued dragging me along the street, heading deeper into the city.\n\nAfter a while, I could hear the music she noticed, the sound of it far more obvious than it had been before. I could make out the steady thumping of a drum mixed with a strange horn and other instruments, but throughout it all, there was a chanting. That was where she was leading me.\n\nNatalie pulled on my arm. \"You said you were tired of using the dragon magic. You didn't say anything about being too tired to join me in the city,\" she said.\n\nI shook my head. \"I didn't say anything about that, but . . .\"\n\n\"But nothing. Come along,\" she said, dragging me with her.\n\nI was tempted to argue, but what was the point? I was curious where she would guide me, curious what we might find, and I was open to the idea of doing something other than sitting around the dragons for a while, connecting to their power, feeling the flow as it worked through me. I was willing to do something other than what I had been doing.\n\nI had come to the capital for an opportunity to learn to connect to the dragons, to feel that power, and now that I had done it, maybe it was time for me to live just a little bit. At least, until I had to meet with the king."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The knock at my door woke me, and I sat up, startled.\n\nI'd gotten back late and was tired. Sitting up, my head throbbed from drinking too much ale the night before. Each glass had gone down easier than the last, Natalie encouraging me with each one. I couldn't remember how much she had drunk, though she seemed as if she hadn't struggled nearly as much as I had when it came to stumbling back home. She'd left me near a plaza in the center of the city, and I had been forced to stagger back to the Academy on my own. It was a wonder I'd made it safely, though now that I looked around me, I briefly panicked that I didn't end up in my own quarters.\n\nThe knock came again, a sharp rap against the door.\n\nI got to my feet, staggering. My room was sparsely decorated. I had a bed, a chest of drawers (though very little clothing to put inside), and a small table where I was able to study\u2014that is, when I had an opportunity to spend time here. These days, that wasn't all that often.\n\nI rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, pressing my fingers up against my temples as I tried to suppress the pain, but it did nothing to ease it. The throbbing persisted, making it difficult for me to concentrate.\n\nWhen the knock came again, I grunted. \"I'm on my way.\"\n\nI had no idea who was waiting on the other side of the door, only that they seemed impatient. I didn't think I'd missed any classes this morning, though I had no idea what time it was, so as far as I knew, it may not have even been morning anymore.\n\nWhen I pulled the door open, I found Thomas standing on the other side. He crossed his arms over his chest, watching. \"You are here,\" he said.\n\nHe was dressed in a heavy black cloak, and the dragon scales worked into the fabric caused it to shimmer. The emblem on his left chest marked him as serving the king. A hint of heat radiated from him, enough that I suspected he held it intentionally, wanting to test whether I was aware of his connection to the dragons.\n\n\"Was I supposed to meet you?\"\n\nThomas growled. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Nothing. I just . . .\" I cut myself off before telling him too much. He didn't need to know I'd spent the night out in the city. According to Natalie, it was a celebration of music, one that wasn't altogether uncommon within the city. We didn't have festivals like that in Berestal\u2014not as impressive as what I'd seen.\n\n\"I'm sorry if I was supposed to find you before,\" I said.\n\n\"Come along,\" Thomas said.\n\nI glanced down at myself. \"Do I have time to get dressed?\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Get dressed. Meet me outside.\"\n\nI wasn't in any condition to work with Thomas right now. I wanted to rest. I still felt the effects of sleep, and if it was still early, I wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, to get the last bits of rest that I could.\n\nThe look on Thomas's face suggested to me he would brook no argument, so I closed the door on him for a moment and staggered over to my chest of drawers, pulling it open until I found fresh, clean clothing. I dressed as quickly as I could, though staggered a little bit, still affected by the ale.\n\nWhen I was finally dressed, I stepped into my boots, threw my cloak around my shoulders, and entered the hallway.\n\nThe air was cool and almost damp, the way that it always was within the Academy. I breathed it in, trying to clear my head. I didn't want to go down to train with Thomas and have a foggy mind, but it was a chore to try to get my mind freed.\n\nThe only thing I could think of was that he hadn't told me we were meeting today.\n\nAt least, not first thing in the morning.\n\nUnless he'd expected me to join him every day.\n\nI weaved through the hall, trying to keep from stumbling. Eventually, I rested my hand on the wall, trailing it along the cool stone, pulling it off only long enough to move past some of the dragon lanterns.\n\nWhen I reached the stairs, I heard a familiar voice below me.\n\nI was in no mood to deal with Brandel this morning.\n\nThe alternative was turning around and going the opposite direction, but that meant I would have to wander through the Academy even more.\n\nI had to decide soon. Brandel and whomever he was with were making their way up the stairs. I could hear the loud sound of their boots on the stones, almost as if they were thundering toward me. It was too much.\n\nI braced myself and started down.\n\nWith each step, I tried to steady my breathing and clear my head, forcing myself to be ready for Brandel. When I rounded the landing, he was there with Cara.\n\n\"What are you doing . . . ? You smell terrible,\" Brandel sneered. \"What did you do, bathe in a bucket of ale?\"\n\n\"Out of my way,\" I said to Brandel.\n\nHe blocked me from going down the stairs.\n\n\"He was probably out at the festival last night,\" Cara said. \"Didn't he know we were told not to go?\"\n\n\"He probably thinks he's too good to listen to the rules,\" Brandel said. \"I mean, he's only been here for a few months, and he thinks he's far more advanced than the rest of us.\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to meet Thomas Elaron,\" I mumbled.\n\nIf nothing else, maybe throwing around Thomas's name with Brandel would get him out of my way.\n\nHe and Cara shared a look before Brandel turned his attention to me, crossing his arms over his chest. \"You're mistaken if you think he's going to protect you. He's not even going to be chief dragon mage for long,\" he said.\n\n\"Right,\" I said, starting forward.\n\n\"You need to be careful,\" Brandel snapped, grabbing for my arm.\n\nI pushed him back.\n\nI think it was more the suddenness of the movement that startled him, and he staggered, slamming up against the wall.\n\nI probably needed to be a bit more careful, especially with him. I had no interest in getting into a battle with him, not that it would be one that I would even be able to win.\n\nHe stormed toward me.\n\nI reacted the only way that I could. I called upon the power, the energy that was still stored deep within me, more than I had realized, and I sent it sweeping out, surging from one side to the other. I held on to it, letting it explode outward. Without meaning to, it slammed into Brandel, uncontrolled as it knocked him back against the wall.\n\nHe glared at me. \"It's going to be like that, is it?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't need to deal with you like this right now.\"\n\nHe snorted. \"You're going to have to deal with me eventually. When my father\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care about your father,\" I said, and turned away, starting down the stairs.\n\nIt seemed to surprise him, and he didn't follow, at least at first. I was afraid he might come storming after me, slamming up into my back, and send me flying down the stairs, but he didn't.\n\nI heard him and Cara talking to each other for a moment, neither of them saying anything loud enough that I could hear, though she seemed to be urging him to take action.\n\nI reached the bottom of the stairs and glanced over my shoulder.\n\nHe was still there, glaring at me.\n\n\"We can do this later,\" I said to him.\n\nHe snorted. \"I know we will.\"\n\nI could only shake my head.\n\nI wandered through the rest of the Academy, making my way to the main entrance, and pushed open the door. I expected it to be early, though having seen Brandel and Cara up and in the halls, I don't know why I believed that would've been the case. Instead, bright sunlight shone down. It had to be nearly midday.\n\nCould I really have slept that long?\n\nI thought about how much ale I'd drunk the night before and realized I absolutely could have.\n\nI headed toward the dragon pen, but didn't see Thomas there.\n\nWhen I reached the pen, I made my way around it, still feeling the connection to the green dragon. That power poured through me, almost a continuous cycle now, something I didn't even have to hold on to the way that I had before. It was almost as if the dragon himself maintained it, keeping us bound together.\n\nThere was energy somewhere behind me.\n\nI spun to see Thomas watching from the road outside of the Academy. He had his arms crossed over his chest, a look of irritation on his face. Power flickered from dragon to dragon, as Thomas connected to them, using his unique power and ability to do so. When he did, I could feel the reaction within the dragons, the way that they seemed to tremble each time he touched power within them.\n\nWas Thomas aware of what he did?\n\nI took a deep breath and headed over to him, trying to keep my feet under me.\n\n\"It took you long enough,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said. I looked up at the sky, at the brightness, and shook my head. \"I shouldn't have slept nearly this long,\" I said.\n\nHe grunted. \"No, you should not have.\"\n\n\"I was out a bit late with a friend.\" He didn't need to know which one. I had no idea who her parents were, but didn't want to get her in trouble.\n\n\"The festival,\" he said.\n\nI nodded. \"The festival. I didn't mean to stay out so late, but . . .\"\n\nHe grunted. \"I suppose that is understandable,\" Thomas said, some of his irritation fading. \"When I was younger, I enjoyed festivals as well, though I knew how to handle my ale a little bit better than it seems you do.\"\n\nI frowned. \"I know how to handle my ale.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"You don't smell like you do.\"\n\nI lifted my shirt, sniffing it, but I couldn't smell anything. Then again, Brandel had implied that I stank, so he was probably right. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"Into the city,\" he said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nThomas glanced over, shooting me a hard look. \"Because there are other things you can assist with.\"\n\nI wasn't sure if I liked the sound of that, but at this point, I had to focus mostly on trying to clear my head. Rather than arguing, I followed him as he made his way through the streets. I recognized some of the places from the night before, at least before I had started drinking. I didn't hear any music, nothing like there had been the night before, but I could feel something.\n\n\"Where in the city are we going?\" I asked, after we had been walking for a while. There was much more activity in the outskirts of the city now than there had been the night before\u2014at least, until we had reached the throng of people that we'd found near the festival grounds.\n\n\"Just keep quiet,\" Thomas said.\n\nI followed him, and the shops began to space out a little bit, the street seemed to widen. The clothing of passersby became nicer the farther we went, and I flicked my gaze ahead of me, realizing where we were going.\n\n\"The palace?\" I asked. It was time for me to report to the king.\n\nHe grunted. \"At least you remain a little bit observant.\"\n\nI rubbed my temples again, trying to shake off the vestiges of the ale. Breathing deeply, quickly, I tried to clear my head.\n\n\"Why now?\" I asked.\n\nHe grunted. \"When the king summons, we answer.\"\n\n\"The king summoned me?\"\n\nThomas glanced over to me. \"Not you, boy. Me.\"\n\nToo many thoughts tried to go through my head\u2014and failed.\n\nI frowned at him. \"I'm not a boy.\"\n\n\"When you stay out drinking ale, you are.\"\n\nI grunted. I thought about how disappointed my father would have been to learn of me staying out so late, not getting up first thing in the morning, basically abandoning my responsibilities. He'd taught me to do better. To be better. Of course, when working on a farm, there was no real way to abandon chores. Sleeping in had the effect of tormenting the animals, and I had learned early on that if I were to do anything that would harm the animals, my father would get angry with me.\n\nNot that I blamed him. As I got older, I had come to appreciate the logic of it. We relied upon the animals for our well-being, so with everything that we did, I'd learned to treat them with a measure of respect.\n\nEven now, I felt the same about the dragons. Perhaps that was how I was different than some of the others within the city. I'd grown up around livestock, and realized how tied to them that we were. Of course, the livestock I'd raised had not been nearly as intelligent as the dragons.\n\nI continued to rub my temples as we made our way through the streets, passing a few other people, though many of them were heading toward the palace as well.\n\nI caught sight of a dozen soldiers marching along one of the side streets, their bright chain mail gleaming in the sun. I knew the king had traditional soldiers that complemented the dragon riders along with the dragon mages, though in the time that I'd been within the city, I had not seen any of them.\n\nAs we neared the palace, Thomas didn't slow. I wished he would take a moment, give me a chance to adjust, but unfortunately, I didn't have that chance. He hurried forward and we reached the outer wall leading into the palace grounds.\n\nOnce there, he glanced over to me. \"Are you going to be able to handle this?\"\n\nI licked my lips. \"I'm going to be fine.\"\n\n\"Good. The king has little patience for those who come before him unprepared.\"\n\n\"I am unprepared,\" I said.\n\n\"You can't look as if you are unprepared.\"\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure how I can look like anything else,\" I said. \"I don't know what we are supposed to do.\"\n\nFor that matter, I didn't know what purpose I had for coming to the king. The only thing I knew was that Thomas wanted me to. It was tied to the Djarn, whatever happened in the forest, and perhaps tied to the fact that he wanted to prove that they had a connection to the dragons.\n\nOr maybe . . .\n\nI rubbed at my temple, trying to clear my thoughts. I knew Thomas's ranking had changed. I didn't know anything about it, other than what Brandel had said\u2014and what Thomas had alluded to.\n\nCould that be why he was going to the king?\n\nMaybe Thomas wanted to use me to prove some point to him.\n\nWhen he reached the gate leading into the palace, Thomas nodded to the two guards standing on either side, hands resting on the hilt of their swords. Even healthy, I wouldn't want to mess with them. They were both enormous, with builds that made them look like blacksmiths, and I could imagine that they would have no difficulty wrestling down a wild boar.\n\nThey motioned for us to go past.\n\nOnce inside, I frowned.\n\n\"Just traditional soldiers?\" I asked, glancing back toward the iron gates.\n\n\"You would've expected something else?\"\n\n\"I don't know if it's something else so much as it is . . .\" It was hard for my mind to feel like I could work through the problem, though that was exactly what I needed to do. This was a problem, and I had to come up with the answer. \"Why not dragon mages?\"\n\n\"What makes you think they aren't?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't think so. I would have felt something.\"\n\nThomas regarded me for a moment. \"Would you have?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I think so. I can feel you and your connection to the dragons now.\"\n\nThomas snorted. \"Because I'm holding on to it.\"\n\nWas that it? Maybe it was, though the more I focused on what I felt, the more uncertain I was. Maybe it really was only that he was holding on to that power now, but maybe there was something more to it as well.\n\nI turned and looked behind me, focusing on those two guards, but I didn't feel anything from them that would suggest that they were attached to the dragons in any real way. If they had been, I thought I should feel something coming off of them, and there was no sense of that. It was an emptiness, though not the kind of emptiness I would've expected from somebody who had a connection to the dragons. This was an emptiness tied to an absence of a connection.\n\nStrange that I would be so acutely aware of that. Even stranger was that as I walked alongside Thomas, I could feel his connection to the dragons, and the way power flowed from him, cycling out and toward the dragons within their pen. Every so often, he would shift that connection, sliding over to another dragon, before moving on and attaching to the next. Even now, Thomas was changing his focus, holding on to different dragons as he approached the palace. There had to be something here that he intended, though what was it?\n\n\"Do I need to hold on to my connection to the dragon?\"\n\nThomas looked over to me. \"Have you ever released it?\"\n\nI took a deep breath, and I could feel the power of the green dragon coursing through me, flowing outward as it cycled up and into me. \"Not that I can tell.\"\n\nHe chuckled as we made our way through the garden leading up to the palace. Shrubs lined the path. Occasional flowers were visible through the openings in the shrubs, and their fragrance filled the air. Trees grew in the garden off of the main pathway. Up ahead of us, another pair of guards blocked our way, and I could feel something coming from them. A connection to the dragons.\n\nThose were dragon mages.\n\nI didn't even need to get close to them to know. I could feel the energy and recognize the power that radiated off of them as it pressed outward, sweeping toward me. I didn't know if they were even aware of how they were pulling on power, or if it was something only I was connected to somehow. I glanced over to Thomas to see if he knew as well, but there was nothing from him to suggest that he did.\n\nWhy should I be so attuned to it?\n\nAs we approached, the two dragon mages turned their attention to me, power flowing outward, sweeping across me. Both were men with close-cropped hair, wearing jackets and pants rather than chain mail. Both carried swords, though given what I detected, I doubted that they were their primary weapons. I tensed, prepared for anything, but not at all certain what might happen as their power struck me. Surprisingly, I felt nothing more than a faint stirring of heat deep within me, as if they were trying to trigger the connection to the dragons I had. I watched, waiting for any sign of understanding coming from them, but there was nothing.\n\nThe nearest of the dragon mages nodded. He was slightly shorter and stockier than the other. He had three stars circling the king's symbol on his left chest. \"Thomas Elaron. I was not expecting your visit today.\"\n\nThomas frowned. \"You were not? The king did summon me,\" he said.\n\nThe dragon mage snorted and glanced over to the other. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"If you need to scurry ahead and see if I really have been summoned, be my guest,\" Thomas said. \"Otherwise . . .\"\n\nHe started to push past the dragon mages.\n\nPower built from the other dragon mage, flames starting to course along the man's hands, building out and forming a tight spiral.\n\nSurprisingly, it was a spiral I recognized, having seen it from myself the night before. It was tightly bound, and the speed with which he had created it suggested a comfort and familiarity with it, but it was also one of the weaker forms of power I'd attempted.\n\nThomas glanced at the man. \"Do you really think that will do anything to me?\"\n\n\"You will wait,\" the first dragon mage said.\n\nThomas glared at him.\n\nThe smaller of the dragon mages turned and strode off, in no hurry. The one who remained behind held on to the power, flames stretching from him, looping outward, as if to create some sort of barricade around us. Thomas didn't appear at all concerned by it, and instead just watched, saying nothing.\n\nI remained curious though.\n\nI focused on the way the dragon mage held on to the power, how it circled out from him, and watched it streaming from him, wondering if I might use it in a similar way. He didn't seem to have it coming out of his fingers. It was a single thick band he rotated as it spun out from him.\n\nI could almost feel the dragon he connected to. It wasn't in the dragon pens, not like the one that Thomas had been connecting to. This was nearby. It had to be within the palace.\n\nI frowned, focusing on dragons in general. How many dragons would the king have within the palace? There had to be at least one for this dragon mage, probably more than that.\n\nI leaned over to Thomas. \"How many dragons does the king keep here?\"\n\nThomas frowned at me. \"What was that?\"\n\nThe dragon mage frowned at me too.\n\n\"Within the palace. How many dragons are here?\"\n\n\"There would be none,\" Thomas said.\n\nI shook my head. \"There is\u2014\"\n\nI didn't get the chance to finish. The other dragon mage came jogging back toward us and nodded to the other. \"He has been summoned,\" he said.\n\nThe flames faded before disappearing altogether with a faint pop. The two dragon mages stood off to either side, letting us move through.\n\nOnce we did, Thomas turned, glancing behind him and frowning deeply. \"How many dragons do you detect?\"\n\n\"There's at least the one,\" I said. \"I can feel this dragon mage's connection to it. There might be more, but . . .\"\n\nThomas continued to frown, biting his lip as he did.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Probably nothing,\" Thomas said.\n\nI looked back at the two dragon mages, but neither of them were paying any attention to us; they had turned their attention back to the main part of the garden, looking toward the entrance to the palace.\n\n\"Why shouldn't there be any dragons here?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"I think I need to. If there aren't supposed to be dragons here, and there are, then\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" he said again.\n\nHe had a strange expression on his face. I didn't know Thomas well enough to recognize it, but I knew that something troubled him.\n\nIt had more to do with these dragons than he was letting on.\n\nI might not know everything taking place within the city, or even everything taking place with Thomas, but I could feel the dragon. If nothing else, I could help in that way.\n\nWith every step, I opened myself to the dragon, feeling for power. It was a matter of trying to steady my breathing, feeling for the heat within me, and relaxing. By doing that, I felt some other aspect of it floating through, power that surged through me. I could use that power, but I held off.\n\nBy the time we reached the massive doors leading into the palace, I hadn't counted any other dragons. I looked over to Thomas, wanting to say something to him, but could see he wanted silence. Instead, I started to ready myself for what we might face. I had no idea what I might encounter inside of the palace, but I knew that I wasn't fully prepared to meet with the king."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "As the door swung open, I stood and stared. There was some part of me that recognized how unusual this was. Here I was, little more than a farmer from the outskirts of the kingdom, now on the precipice of entering the king's palace and having a conversation with him. Who was I to think that I had any place here?\n\nAnother part of me wished Joran had remained in the city. He would love to hear about this visit. I'm sure he would have something to say about it.\n\n\"You should remain silent,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"I don't intend to say anything,\" I said.\n\n\"As I said. Silent.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, and then nodded, though I had the feeling that it was mostly for himself and not quite for me. He squeezed his hands, clenching and unclenching them, before walking into the palace.\n\nI followed. There wasn't anything else to do.\n\nThe inside was nicer than any place I'd ever been before. Massive columns of marble stretched from the marble-tiled floor to the enormous, arched ceiling, which was covered in painted murals depicting dragons that looked as if they flew overhead, offering protection or hunting. Sculptures that reminded me of the dragons within the Academy were situated throughout the palace\u2014most of them sat on the floor, though not all. Some of them somehow hung from the pillars, suspended in a way that made them seem like they were flying. Servants scurried around the inside of the palace, barely paying any attention to us. Situated at each pillar was another soldier. It didn't take long for me to realize they were all dragon mages.\n\n\"There are so many,\" I whispered.\n\nThomas glanced over to me then.\n\n\"So many what?\"\n\n\"So many dragon mages here. I guess I didn't know there were that many.\"\n\nThomas swept his gaze around the inside of the palace. We were in a massive entry chamber and halls branched off in every direction. \"How many do you see?\"\n\n\"I only see four, but I think there are probably three more I don't even see.\" I closed my eyes, and I could feel the energy of the dragons flowing, as if it were some sort of rope pulling through me, attempting to draw on me. \"I could be wrong though.\"\n\nThomas sniffed. \"You probably aren't.\"\n\n\"You don't sound like you're too fond of them. I thought you were the chief dragon mage.\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"What happened? I've heard about the dragon mages who are now working with Donathar.\" I should be careful not to assume more than I already knew, but I couldn't shake my curiosity.\n\n\"Donathar thinks to push beyond his place. He doesn't understand the threats the kingdom faces nearly as well as he needs to for him to serve as the chief dragon mage.\"\n\nAs we strode along the marble tile, our boots thundering in the otherwise quiet palace, I watched Thomas. Tension constricted his shoulders and his gaze darted from side to side; there was a level of concern within him that he obviously didn't want to acknowledge, but I could see it.\n\nSomething more was taking place, even if he wouldn't say anything about it.\n\nWe reached a set of double doors. They were closed, and worked into the wood of both doors were a series of symbols along the upper portion. I couldn't read them, but I didn't even know if that mattered. Enormous dragons were carved into the wood, giving it a ferocious appearance; it looked as if the doors had been burned with dragon fire, etching those symbols into place.\n\nA single man stood in front of the doors. Donathar. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he wore the same dappled, deep green cloak that I had seen him wearing when I first came across him in the forest with Manuel. A sense of power radiated from him, something that stretched out from him, as if he wanted everyone to know about his connection.\n\nNot everyone. Thomas.\n\nI focused on the connection I could feel between Donathar and the dragon, though it strained beyond the palace.\n\n\"Donathar,\" Thomas said, his voice clipped. \"I was summoned.\"\n\nDonathar smiled and glanced at me, winking slightly. I still didn't know how to read him. He had been pleasant when I had spoken to him, and he was working to try to find the missing dragons. \"I'm well aware that you were summoned, Thomas.\"\n\nMy involvement here was a mistake. I could feel that, much like I could feel that I needed to be anywhere but here.\n\nThomas was the chief dragon mage.\n\nBut for how much longer?\n\nI had overheard Donathar make a comment about Thomas leaving. Now I had to wonder if his departure might have a more complicated explanation.\n\n\"It doesn't have to be this way,\" Donathar said.\n\n\"It wouldn't be if you had served the way you were supposed to.\"\n\n\"I'm doing what I'm asked.\"\n\n\"We both know that you weren't asked. You pushed. You used your connections to coerce the Sharath into permitting this.\"\n\n\"I serve the throne, as I believe you do. I'm only doing what I was asked.\"\n\nDonathar pushed the door open and waved his hand.\n\nThomas strode forward, and I looked over to Donathar.\n\nHe leaned close, lowering his voice. \"Don't worry about him. He's all bluster. He always has been.\" He winked again.\n\nI frowned for a moment before hurrying after Thomas, then caught up to him.\n\n\"What was that about?\" I whispered, turning back to Thomas.\n\n\"Quiet,\" he said.\n\nI opened my mouth, wanting to say something, when I realized where we were.\n\nThe throne room.\n\nIt was enormous. Much like the outer aspect of the palace, marble was everywhere. The ceiling stretched high overhead, and much like outside, there was a mural painted upon it. In this one, there was only a single dragon, an enormous black-scaled dragon with flames streaking from its mouth. It was painted so that it appeared as if the dragon circled overhead, offering power here.\n\nOn the walls were two massive sculptures of dragons, and I could feel something about them as well, though I had no idea what it could be. I looked over at Thomas, thinking about saying something, but the intensity in his gaze, and the tension in his jaw, made me hesitate.\n\nHe took a deep breath before starting forward.\n\nWe made our way toward the throne at the far end of the room. It was situated between two columns that stretched to the ceiling's high arches. A stained-glass window sat behind it, sunlight shining through and casting the king in a pale white light that made him seem to glow.\n\nThomas moved more stiffly than he had before.\n\nThere were no other dragon mages inside. The only other person was an older man, somebody about my father's age, with gray hair, a slender jaw, and a gray robe that draped over his shoulders and hung to the ground.\n\nThe Sharath.\n\nI had never seen him, but he was the king's right-hand man, and he would have been the only person to be with the king in the throne room. The Sharath's gaze lingered on Thomas for a moment, then he tapped a long staff on the ground before he focused on me. His gaze was heavy, filled with an expression that left me feeling like I was somehow beneath him.\n\nI ignored it. There was no point in letting the Sharath intimidate me. The king, on the other hand, did.\n\nHe was younger than the Sharath, and not that much older than me. When his father had passed, King Dalton was barely twenty, and he had served for the last dozen years, solidifying the kingdom, using the dragons to ensure the stability of the throne. He had wavy, dark hair and a casual demeanor as he sat in his throne, watching Thomas as he approached. He leaned toward the Sharath, whispering something softly, and the Sharath tapped his staff once more.\n\nThomas stopped.\n\nI almost ran into him before catching myself. I whispered a quick apology, but Thomas ignored it.\n\n\"Thomas Elaron,\" the Sharath said. He had a hoarse voice and sounded as if he'd been yelling. \"You have been summoned before your king.\"\n\n\"I answered the summons,\" Thomas said. \"Though I don't know that it needs to be quite so formal as this.\"\n\n\"You have answered the summons. You have been given the requisite time to prove yourself. Have you come to us intending to prove your innocence\u2014or your guilt?\"\n\nI stepped off to the side, looking over at Thomas.\n\nWhat was he accused of?\n\nBetter yet, what had I gotten involved in?\n\nNothing. I'd done nothing. Still, I had come with Thomas, and now, because of him, I was going to be affiliated with whatever he was guilty of.\n\nAll I had wanted was to better understand my magic, and so I had tried to work with him, hoping that I could learn from him, but unfortunately, that seemed to have been a mistake.\n\n\"You and I both know I'm guilty of nothing,\" he said.\n\n\"We know no such thing,\" the Sharath said. \"All we know is that you have been accused. We have your word versus another's.\"\n\nI looked over to Thomas and could see him tensing. He made a point of ignoring me.\n\nWhy had he brought me here? What did he think that he was doing by involving me in whatever issue he had with the king? I looked from the Sharath to the king. Neither of them paid any attention to me\u2014they were entirely focused on Thomas.\n\n\"We both know this was a sham,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Was it?\" the Sharath asked, taking a step toward Thomas and tapping his long staff on the ground. \"We know this?\"\n\n\"We know I have not done what I've been accused of doing,\" he said.\n\n\"What were you accused of?\" I whispered.\n\nThe king and the Sharath looked at me. I could feel the weight of their gaze, and though I knew it was a mistake to have spoken, the fact that I was here tied me to Thomas in a way that meant that I had to speak up on my behalf.\n\n\"Quiet,\" Thomas whispered.\n\n\"Who is this?\" the king asked, leaning forward in his throne. The throne itself was a dark-lacquered chair, the armrests curved so that they looked like dragon heads, flames coming out of the mouths and spiraling downward. \"Who did you bring before me?\"\n\nThomas didn't look at me. \"A student at the Academy.\"\n\nThe Sharath laughed. \"You brought a student from the Academy before your king? What do you think you're playing at, Thomas?\"\n\n\"This student has a connection to the dragons. He felt the drawing of the dragons into the forest.\"\n\nHe looked over to me, his gaze imploring me to speak now.\n\nThe king got to his feet. He started toward us, and it felt as if my mouth had gone dry. I wanted to speak up on behalf of Thomas because he wasn't wrong. I had felt a pulling of power into the forest. I had felt something, but I didn't know what it was, and I didn't know if I had any obligation to say anything now. The only thing that I knew was that Thomas had not shared with me his purpose for bringing me here.\n\n\"Is this true?\" the king asked.\n\n\"Sire, I suspect Thomas has picked anyone to bring with him. He wants to deflect the blame from himself, and so he took a student.\" The Sharath regarded me for a moment. \"And it appears an incredibly old one at that.\"\n\nI ignored the Sharath, holding my gaze on the king. \"I felt something in the forest,\" I said. I glanced briefly at Thomas before turning back to the king. Thomas wasn't paying any attention to me, so I decided I wouldn't pay any attention to him, either. I needed to separate myself from him, not dig myself in deeper and bind myself tighter to him \"I don't know what it was, but Thomas had me join him as we flew over the forest.\"\n\nThe king took another step toward me. \"Thomas brought you with him?\"\n\nI nodded. \"He did. He started working with me a few days ago.\"\n\n\"This one will be with him, then,\" the Sharath said.\n\nI looked over to him. \"What?\"\n\n\"The timing would be right,\" the king said.\n\n\"What are you saying?\" I asked. When neither of them answered me, I turned to Thomas. \"What are they saying?\"\n\n\"Just tell them what you detected,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"What is going on here?\" I demanded.\n\nThe king stopped in front of me, watching me. \"Are you responsible for my dragons?\"\n\nI stared at him. \"I don't know what you're asking about.\"\n\n\"Are you responsible for what's happening to my dragons?\" the king asked. \"I don't know how to phrase it any simpler.\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about what's happening to your dragons. I've heard the rumors like anybody else at the Academy.\" I looked from the Sharath to the king. \"People in the Academy talk. There are rumors dragons have gone missing. I don't know anything about it, but I've detected something in the forest.\"\n\n\"Detected?\"\n\nThe Sharath took a step toward me, and I felt a faint stirring. It was subtle, but it radiated from him, working along the length of the staff before drifting back at me. Was he a dragon mage?\n\nAs far as I knew, the Sharath was not. That was why Thomas was the king's chief dragon mage, or at least he had been. Maybe there was another power.\n\nI looked over at Thomas but he ignored me, keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead of him.\n\n\"What did you detect?\"\n\nI ignored the Sharath. He was the most dangerous one here, I knew that, but at the same time, he wasn't the one I had to convince. I had to convince the king.\n\n\"I can feel a connection to the dragons. That's why Thomas brought me here, I think.\" I glanced over to him again, but he said nothing. Damn him. I needed him to speak up so that I knew what he was playing at, knew what he had gotten me pulled into. \"We traveled in the forest. It was the first time I'd left the city since I came here only a few months ago. I've never ridden on a dragon, and when Thomas took me, I didn't have much choice. I mean, he is the king's chief dragon mage.\"\n\n\"Not for long,\" the Sharath said.\n\nI glanced at him. At least I had a better understanding of what was going on. The Sharath looked like he was trying to replace Thomas. He seemed to have done a reasonable job with it, as well. There were enough dragon mages now who were obviously against Thomas.\n\nHow was I going to be any sort of help to Thomas? That was what he wanted from me, after all. I was just a student, and far too new at it and my connection to the dragons to be of much use to him. Still, there was something that I could offer him. I could tell the truth, which was all that I knew to do.\n\n\"There was something in the forest. When we landed, we were surrounded by the Djarn.\"\n\nThe Sharath tapped his staff on the ground. \"There it is again. Your ongoing belief that the Djarn prepare to move on us,\" the Sharath said. \"I cannot believe you would try this again. And if what this boy is saying is true, you're bringing a neophyte into it?\"\n\n\"We were surrounded by the Djarn,\" I said. \"I've seen them before.\"\n\n\"Have you now?\" the Sharath said.\n\n\"I have,\" I said, turning to him. There was something about the Sharath I didn't care for. Maybe it was his arrogance, or the fact that he obviously had cast judgment upon me without even getting to know me, or maybe it was simply the fact that he was here, and I felt like I had to defend myself from both him and Thomas. \"I've only been in the city for a short while. I came from the plains. Near Berestal. You can ask Manuel, your Hunter.\"\n\nThe Sharath started to laugh, waving his hand. \"Listen to this. He continues to go on with\u2014\"\n\n\"You're the one,\" the king said, taking a step toward me. \"Manuel mentioned his experience and everything he went through. He was more than a little disturbed by the activity he encountered.\"\n\nI took a deep breath. Maybe this would be my way out. I knew only to tell the truth, and given that I hadn't done anything, and was not at all responsible for whatever it was that Thomas was accused of, I didn't know what else to say.\n\n\"Manuel tells me that you chased down the Vard,\" the king said.\n\n\"I went after my sister,\" I answered. \"It had nothing to do with the Vard. I just wanted to get my sister back. I had heard the Vard had taken over the Academy's caravan, and . . .\"\n\nNow wasn't the time to tell him that I wasn't even sure if the Vard were responsible for the attack outside of Berestal. If Manuel believed it, that was what mattered.\n\nThe king offered a hint of a lopsided smile. \"You went after her. Interesting. I have a sister, I suppose you know,\" he said.\n\nI nodded quickly. I'd heard of the princess, though she was known to be quite reclusive. Few saw her, at least according to rumor.\n\n\"You saved her, from what Manuel said.\"\n\n\"I think we got lucky. We managed to free Manuel from the caravan, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Uncovered a traitor,\" the king said. He frowned before glancing over to the Sharath. \"We had one of the Vard among us. We didn't know they had infiltrated so deeply.\"\n\n\"We ensured it wouldn't happen again,\" the Sharath said.\n\n\"Have we?\" He glanced to Thomas. \"Is that what this is about?\"\n\nThomas growled softly. \"I'm not with the Vard, sire.\"\n\nThe king grinned. It amazed me how willing Thomas was to threaten the king, or at least to reveal his irritation. It revealed how comfortable he felt around him.\n\n\"I know you're not, Thomas. The question remains whether or not you are responsible for these dragons you've been accused of taking.\"\n\n\"I am not.\"\n\nThe king tipped his head to me. \"Then why did you bring him here? What are you thinking to do?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking to demonstrate we might have an alternative way of following what's taking place.\"\n\n\"By bringing a student?\" the king asked.\n\nThe Sharath tapped on the ground with his staff, taking a step forward. \"We are getting beyond this conversation,\" the Sharath said. \"This was about Thomas Elaron, and his\u2014\"\n\n\"This has been about me proving my fealty to the kingdom,\" Thomas said, glaring at the Sharath. \"Perhaps you forget how I have defended the kingdom against Vard incursions repeatedly. And recently. Or perhaps you have forgotten how I have defended the king himself, more times than you would care to admit. Or perhaps\u2014\"\n\n\"We know what you have done,\" the king said.\n\nI looked from the king to the Sharath to Thomas.\n\n\"I can feel the dragon energy,\" I said. \"I think that's why Thomas brought me here.\" I looked over to him, waiting for his acknowledgment. He nodded slightly. \"I'm not entirely sure what it means, only that I am aware of the connection when it forms.\"\n\nThe king frowned. \"What do you mean you are aware of it?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I don't entirely know. I can feel it. It's strange, subtle, but the longer I've been working with the dragons, the more I'm aware of that power.\"\n\n\"It is different than other students,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Different?\" the king asked.\n\n\"More developed.\" Thomas looked over to me, studying me for a moment before turning his attention back to the king. \"I suspect it's his age. Had he trained when he was younger, he may not have developed it. Since he came to us later, it has evolved. He helped me track the Djarn. You know how difficult it is to make any headway in the forest, but he felt them.\"\n\nHe looked to the Sharath, holding his gaze a moment.\n\n\"He did,\" the king said.\n\nThomas nodded. \"And I think they have the dragons.\"\n\nThe Sharath laughed, and the king turned to look at him. \"He continues to try to bring up the Djarn as excuses for his failings,\" the Sharath said. \"We both know the Djarn pose no threat.\"\n\n\"We don't know any such thing,\" Thomas said. \"All we know is what we have seen.\"\n\n\"And what have we seen?\" The Sharath glared at him. \"Have the Djarn ever attacked us?\"\n\nThomas frowned. \"No.\"\n\n\"Have the Djarn ever posed any danger within the kingdom?\"\n\nThomas shook his head. \"No.\"\n\n\"Then there is no reason to accuse the Djarn of this,\" the Sharath said.\n\nThe king turned to me. \"What do you think of this?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't know if I'm the right person to ask.\"\n\nThe king chuckled. \"And yet I'm asking you. What do you think?\"\n\nI glanced over to Thomas. \"I think . . . I have a little bit of experience with the Djarn from my homeland. They are happy to trade with the right people, but they are harmless. They want to be left alone.\"\n\nThe Sharath watched me. I didn't care for the expression on his face\u2014there was something about it that left me uncertain. I looked at Thomas again, but he ignored me, the same way that he had been ignoring me ever since we had come here. There was more taking place here than I knew. More than what Thomas had let on, but I had to figure out just what it was.\n\n\"That's not quite all,\" I went on hurriedly. \"The Djarn were present in the forest. I'm not exactly sure what they were doing, only that they did have us surrounded.\"\n\nI almost said something about Joran and his father and the reason they had come to the city, but I already felt as if I had said too much. The king watched me, and my mouth went dry.\n\nI was supposed to serve him. Only, I didn't know how, or what I was supposed to do.\n\n\"What else have you seen?\" the king asked.\n\nI glanced over to Thomas, saying nothing for a moment, before turning my attention back to the king. \"I've seen the Djarn in my home near Berestal.\"\n\n\"Have you?\" the king asked. The Sharath kept his gaze on me, and there was something unsettling, almost predatory, about the way he looked at me. It reminded me strangely of how the mesahn looked at me. There was something dangerous about it, leaving me unsure of his intentions.\n\n\"What have you seen of the Djarn near Berestal?\"\n\n\"That's all. Nothing more than what I've told you,\" I said.\n\nIt seemed as if they were trying to tease out more information from me through their questioning, but the more they challenged me, the more I began to realize that I had to be careful.\n\n\"If he doesn't know anything, then he's not useful to us,\" the Sharath said. \"He can deny it all he wants, but there is only so much that can be\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what he detected,\" Thomas said. \"And I saw the way the Djarn circled us. You may not believe it, and to be honest, I don't really care.\" Thomas turned his attention to the king. \"The only thing that matters is what you believe, sire. We did have an encounter, and regardless of what your man might claim, it was real.\"\n\nThe king frowned, staring for a moment before turning his attention back to the Sharath. \"There have been rumors.\"\n\n\"They are nothing more than rumors,\" the Sharath said. \"Rumors like that can be dangerous, as well. We both know that if rumors are allowed to spread, we find ourselves\u2014\"\n\n\"Under attack,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"We have never been under attack from the Djarn,\" the Sharath said.\n\nThat was what this was about.\n\n\"What do you think, young student?\" the king asked.\n\nI took a deep breath and had to ignore Thomas this time. Even though he had been kind to me, practically good in some ways, I also recognized the need to be careful here. \"I don't know who is right,\" I said, suddenly feeling the weight of Thomas's gaze on me. \"The Djarn have never harmed us. I've spent some time around them. Not as much as Thomas,\" I added hurriedly, hoping that if nothing else, that would mitigate some of his disappointment, \"but I've never heard of them harming us. They had every opportunity to do so with me, but didn't.\"\n\nThere had to have been some other reason that Joran and his father had come to the city, especially with the missing dragons and everything else that was taking place. I was going to have to figure that out.\n\nSomehow.\n\nI didn't even know where they had stayed in the city, or anything about who Joran's father had met up with during his time there.\n\nI didn't know anything.\n\nThat put me into a precarious situation.\n\n\"Out near the plains,\" Thomas said.\n\nThe king watched him, saying nothing.\n\n\"Sire?\" the Sharath asked.\n\n\"I am deciding,\" the king said. \"At this point, I don't know what I need to do.\"\n\nI shifted my feet.\n\n\"We have multiple dragons missing,\" Thomas said. \"We have evidence the Djarn have been calling to them. And we have\u2014\"\n\n\"Your evidence,\" the Sharath said. \"I'm not convinced it is something we can rely on. You have not been the most trustworthy, Thomas Elaron.\"\n\nThe Djarn were calling the dragons?\n\nThomas hadn't told me they had evidence of that.\n\nWhat if that were the reason Joran and his father had been traveling through the Djarn lands?\n\nIf only he were still in the city for me to ask.\n\nThomas glared at the Sharath. \"I have been far more reliable than most. If you want to question my allegiance to the king, at least wait for me to leave.\"\n\n\"You have been trustworthy,\" the king said. \"I think . . .\" He cocked his head, and surprisingly, he looked over to me. \"I think I should like to see you have an opportunity to prove yourself. You have the rest of the week. After that, I'm afraid we will proceed as if you are guilty of what the Sharath suspects.\"\n\nThomas studied the king, glancing over to the Sharath, and then nodded.\n\nWith that, he turned, grabbing me by the arm, and guided me out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "We reached the edge of the wall surrounding the palace, and Thomas still hadn't said anything. He marched forward with an intense gate, storming ahead and leaving me wondering whether I'd done or said something that angered him. I was frustrated though. He'd pulled me into this, making me a part of whatever danger that he was now a part of, leaving me stuck.\n\nWhen we reached the walls, passing through, the two soldiers nodded to us, and I finally spoke up. \"What was that about?\"\n\n\"It's about nothing,\" Thomas said.\n\nI stopped, turning away from him, looking back at the palace. Even now, the draw of the dragons within the palace called to me, a hint of energy I noticed simmering just beyond. It was faint, though not so faint I couldn't trace the source of it, the power that stretched outward and away, an energy that suggested there was something more.\n\n\"This is more than nothing,\" I said. \"You pulled me in. You were obviously accused of doing something to the dragons, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I was accused, but falsely. And it matters not.\"\n\nI laughed bitterly. \"It matters not? Do you really think I should believe that what you've done and pulled me into doesn't matter?\"\n\n\"It does not,\" he said again.\n\nI shook my head. \"This isn't my responsibility.\"\n\n\"No? You're a student at the Academy, are you not?\"\n\n\"I am, but\u2014\"\n\n\"And your training at the Academy has permitted you to be a part of this. Don't think that just because you're a student, you don't have a role to play here,\" he said.\n\nI stared at him for a moment before shaking my head. \"This isn't about me having a role,\" I said, looking back to the palace. I could still feel the dragons, and I focused on their energy, thinking about whether there was anything within them that I might be able to utilize, but even as I started to feel that power out there, I still couldn't detect anything quite as strongly as I would have liked. \"This is about you pulling me into some battle you have with the Sharath.\"\n\nThomas growled softly. \"That bastard thinks to make me the villain.\"\n\n\"Are you?\"\n\nThomas looked over. I was probably a little bit too direct with my questions, and given what he might be responsible for having done, I knew I should be more careful with him than I had been. \"I'm not responsible for what happened with the dragons.\"\n\n\"Who is? I'm not convinced it's the Djarn.\"\n\n\"No? Well, that's what I intend to find out.\"\n\nI debated mentioning something to him about the Djarn and Joran and what they were doing in the city, but decided against it.\n\nI didn't know what to make of Thomas at this point, but I wanted to find the dragons. I'd been looking and had failed. Thomas intended to find them though.\n\nThat meant something to me.\n\nHe started off, leaving me, and I lingered for a moment, considering whether I wanted to chase him down. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something else here that I might find, some answers I might determine, but even as he went, I didn't know whether I should go with him or try to turn around and leave him to his own devices. But I was curious, and I had learned from Thomas.\n\nThat thought stayed with me. I'd gained something from him. Because of him, I knew how to reach for the dragons, how to feel for the power that existed, and I knew there was a connection I shared with the dragons that I hadn't been able to fully uncover before.\n\nThere would have to be something more within that connection that I could master, though given what I'd uncovered in my time at the Academy, I was no longer certain I could do that with the assistance of the Academy's instructors. I needed to have another opportunity to keep working with Thomas so I could continue my progression with the connection to the dragons.\n\nMore than that, I wasn't entirely sure whether I trusted Thomas, considering what was taking place. To be honest, I didn't know who to believe. It could be that I needed to trust the Sharath, though it was difficult for me to know who was right. I didn't know either of them, really.\n\nThe Djarn were up to something.\n\nI'd found them in the forest. Twice. And there was whatever Joran and his father had been doing in the city. Those occurrences were related. They had to be.\n\nI chased down Thomas. When he looked over at me, I said, \"I'm not exactly sure whether I can trust you with this, but I feel like I'm now a part of it, so if nothing else, I want to be given the chance.\"\n\n\"You want to be given what chance?\" he asked.\n\n\"The chance to decide whether or not you're guilty.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"You too?\"\n\n\"I figure if the king and the Sharath aren't certain about you, I shouldn't necessarily openly trust you,\" I said.\n\n\"You should always question. Don't trust everyone's word as truth. Find your own truth.\"\n\nIt sounded similar to what Joran had said.\n\nHe headed onward, and this time I kept pace with him, determined to see just what I might uncover with him. As we hurried through the city, moving beyond passersby and soldiers, I started to feel the draw of the dragons in the distance, the steady pull that came to me from the dragon pens on the outskirts of the city.\n\n\"Are we going to the dragons?\"\n\n\"I was given the rest of the week to prove my innocence.\"\n\n\"Why do you blame the Djarn?\"\n\nThomas glanced over to me. \"My experience with the Djarn is different than yours, I'm sure. You might not think they can do anything dangerous, but I've been around the Djarn enough to know just how challenging they can be.\"\n\n\"What exactly do you think they might do?\"\n\n\"I think they might try to infiltrate the kingdom.\"\n\nI started to laugh when I looked over at Thomas, realizing he wasn't laughing. I could feel the power of the dragons coming off of him as it cycled through him; it became clear to me that he maintained his connection because of his concern about what might happen next.\n\n\"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"I'm dead serious,\" Thomas said. \"The nature of the Djarn is to hide in the forest. They don't want anyone to know where they are, what they're doing, and the danger that they pose.\"\n\n\"I don't think they pose any danger,\" I said, though I increasingly started to question whether that was true.\n\n\"Because you haven't been a part of it. The Djarn have been particularly dangerous, and those of us in the know recognize that.\"\n\nI frowned at him. We didn't have the same perspective, and I wasn't sure that we even could. At this point, nothing was certain to me.\n\n\"The Djarn have not been challenging. I have a friend whose father has been helping them. Besides, if the Djarn were a part of this, wouldn't Donathar have known? He was embedded within them.\"\n\nThomas stared at me. \"Which is the exact reason I'm concerned about him.\"\n\nI watched him, glaring at him for a moment, before chasing after him again. \"What do you intend to do with the Djarn?\"\n\n\"I intend to ensure that if they have taken our dragons, they won't get away with it.\"\n\nI didn't like the sound of that. I didn't really know what he might do, but I knew that I hadn't seen anything with the Djarn that would make me concerned that they would go after the dragons. I had only seen their isolation. There was no reason for us to get involved with them.\n\nWe reached the green lawn outside of the dragon pen, beyond the Academy, and from there I stared for a moment, watching to see if he might go toward the dragons. I glanced briefly to see if there might be any sign of Natalie, but I didn't see anything.\n\n\"When are you going?\" He glanced back at me. \"You obviously intend to go after the Djarn soon.\"\n\nHe headed straight for the dragon pen. There was heat radiating from it, which I could feel, though only faintly. Once inside the pen, he approached the same black dragon he had before and rested his hand on its side, whispering something that I couldn't hear. But I could feel something radiating from the dragon, a hint of energy that suggested he was connecting more thoroughly to it now than he had before. I could feel the way the power cycled through him, flowing from the dragon and over to him, circling out and back.\n\nHe looked over to me. \"Well? I assume you would want to come, especially given your overwhelming concern for the Djarn.\"\n\n\"You knew that Donathar had been embedded with the Djarn, so if they have a hand in this, then he's involved,\" I said. \"He's looking for the missing dragons.\"\n\nThomas snorted. \"He's working with the Sharath.\"\n\n\"Why don't the two of you get along?\"\n\nThomas clenched his jaw, and for a moment, I didn't think that he was going to answer. \"It's complicated. He views the Vard differently than I do.\"\n\n\"All of this is about the Vard?\"\n\n\"You dealt with the Vard. I would think that if anyone would understand, it would be you.\"\n\n\"I . . .\" I shook my head. Thomas was in no mindset for me to respond with what my experience with the Vard had actually been. \"You might disagree with him about the threat of the Vard, but the two of you want the same thing.\" When he frowned at me, I hurried on. \"You want to protect the kingdom. It's not the Djarn.\"\n\n\"You've been in the city for how long?\"\n\n\"A few months.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Not long enough to know the dangers that I know.\"\n\nA flicker of darkness crossed his brow, and for a moment, I wondered if perhaps Thomas was the one I should be trusting.\n\n\"I intend to find the dragons.\" He climbed onto the dragon's back and waited. \"I think that with your potential, you might be able to help. You may not want to, but you are going to have to make a decision. Eventually, that decision will choose your path for you.\"\n\n\"This doesn't have anything to do with me. I'm a student at the Academy. Nothing more.\"\n\nHe laughed softly. \"You might be surprised what it has to do with, Ashan.\"\n\nWith that, the dragon took to the air, launching himself upward and circling before streaking off and out over the forest. I could still feel the energy of the connection to the dragon even as he flew away, and with each passing moment, I recognized the way power flowed from him.\n\nI breathed out slowly, steadily, and then turned my attention back to the dragon pens. Inside, the green dragon had crawled toward me. He remained separated from the others. There was something about him that touched upon me, letting me draw upon his power, and something within him seemed to call to me. I wasn't sure if the calling of power was something I should be more aware of, or if it was something bound to me, only that I could feel the way the dragon filled with power\u2014and the way he filled me with power.\n\n\"I'm not convinced,\" I said, realizing how foolish it was to say anything to the dragon. \"The Djarn are connected to the dragons.\"\n\nA bit of heat radiated from the dragon, and he crawled slightly forward.\n\nThe dragon watched me and I thought I could sense a level of amusement glittering in his eyes, as if he were aware of the struggle I shared, and felt some level of satisfaction with it. I couldn't help but feel as if the dragon were trying to decide whether to help me or to continue to taunt me. Either way, the power he possessed still flowed out from him and through me, cycling, connecting me to him in a way that couldn't happen with any of the other dragons.\n\n\"There are others missing,\" I said softly.\n\nThe dragon lifted his head up, and I felt a rumble of heat and energy coming off of him.\n\n\"You understand that, don't you?\"\n\nThere came another rumble.\n\nNow there was no doubt in my mind that the dragon understood me, but it was a matter of whether he would be able to help.\n\n\"Are the Djarn responsible for what happened to them?\"\n\nThe dragon rumbled again, saying something, though I couldn't tell what it was. The only thing I could make out was the steady rumbling, the power that radiated from him, and some hint of energy that suggested to me that he was fully aware of what was taking place.\n\nI leaned forward, grabbing the bars of the cage. \"The Djarn I've seen in the past haven't seemed like they could be responsible for anything. But Thomas seems convinced,\" I said. \"I think I need to know what Joran's father brought to the city.\"\n\nThe dragon rumbled again.\n\n\"You understand me, which means you understand what's going on.\"\n\nI squeezed the bars of the cage. There was some part of me that felt ridiculous talking to the dragon like this, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel as if the dragon really did know what I was saying.\n\nWhen he had been captured, had he known then what was going on?\n\nIf so, why hadn't dragon done anything to resist?\n\nUnless there wasn't much the dragon could do. He was small, not nearly as powerful as some of the larger dragons; it would take him time to develop that strength and size.\n\n\"I'm trying to do everything I can to help the dragons. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but it seems to me that it's something. Do you think you can help?\"\n\nThe dragon leaned toward me, heat and energy continuing to radiate from him, as if he wanted to make sure I knew what he was doing, but there was something else within his gesture that I thought I needed to grasp\u2014like he wanted to show me the power that existed within him.\n\nThe dragon rumbled. I reached my hand out and some blast of power surged through me. It was that power which felt as if I were connected to the dragon in a way I hadn't been before.\n\n\"I hear you have decided to get caught up in Thomas Elaron,\" a voice said.\n\nI spun and realized Brandel and two of his cronies were there, making their way toward me. I glanced over at the dragon, who remained near the bars of the pen. \"I'm not getting caught up in anything,\" I said.\n\n\"That's not the story I hear. Rumor has it you were at the palace.\" He started to smile.\n\nFor Brandel to have already heard that left me wondering who his father really was. Maybe he was much better connected than I realized.\n\n\"Normally, such a thing would have been a proud moment, even for you, but I suspect you didn't have nearly the exciting moment that you thought you would.\"\n\n\"What do you know about it?\"\n\n\"I know that you were seen at the palace. What else should I know?\"\n\nCara grinned. She had a determined set to her jaw that I had always found attractive.\n\nShe wasn't from the city\u2014not like Brandel, whose birthplace contributed to his smugness. She had come from the south, far enough away that I wouldn't have expected her to have the same smug attitude, but every time I was around her, it seemed as if she echoed his responses.\n\n\"I was at the palace so I could help the king,\" I said.\n\nHe chuckled. \"I know exactly why you were at the palace. My father told me.\"\n\nCould his father be the Sharath?\n\nThat might explain why Brandel didn't care for Thomas.\n\n\"I also know what Thomas has been accused of. Perhaps you don't know the full extent of it. Do you think this is all about missing dragons? If that were it, then he would have sent the dragon mages out sweeping for them. No. This is about something quite different. And in the case of your dragon mage, and the one who you have decided to ally yourself with, it's something that means he will find himself facing the dragon's justice.\"\n\nI stared at him.\n\n\"Let me guess. You don't even know what dragon's justice is?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Why am I not surprised?\"\n\n\"You can go ahead and spell it out for me. You might as well spell it out for Cara, as well. I suspect she doesn't know about this dragon justice either.\"\n\n\"Don't presume to think that you know me,\" Cara said.\n\nI looked over at her. \"Have I wronged you in some way?\"\n\n\"You have done\u2014\"\n\nBrandel raised his hand and she cut herself off.\n\nThere was something about this dynamic that made me feel as if I were missing something, but maybe it was nothing more than the nature of their connection and the fact I was an outsider.\n\n\"The dragon's justice is for those who have become traitors to the king,\" he started. \"And given what I have seen from you, and what you have been trending toward, I wouldn't be surprised if you face the dragon's justice too, just the same as him.\"\n\n\"I haven't done anything,\" I said.\n\n\"You come from the Wilds,\" Cara said.\n\nI turned to her. \"Is that what bothers you so much? If that's the issue with you, then I can assure you that I am just as committed to the kingdom as you are.\"\n\n\"I doubt you're just as committed to anything,\" she said.\n\nI shot her a hard look. I didn't want to have any sort of battle or argument with either of them.\n\nAt this point, all I wanted was to figure out what was going on, especially with the dragons, and how I could intervene.\n\nI ignored them, turning to the green dragon. As I focused on his power, it swept through me. It would be a simple thing for me to reach for that power and use it, turning it upon Brandel and Cara and . . .\n\nWhy was I thinking like that?\n\n\"Aren't you paying any attention?\" Brandel snapped.\n\nI glanced over to him. \"No,\" I said. \"I stopped paying attention to you.\"\n\n\"They will find the dragons you released,\" he said.\n\n\"That I released?\"\n\n\"You were there for the first one.\"\n\nI frowned. \"The first one?\" I looked to the dragon pen and realized he meant the one Jerith had used for my test. \"That dragon returned.\"\n\n\"No, it didn't,\" Brandel said. \"Don't pretend like you weren't involved in freeing that dragon.\"\n\n\"The only thing I was involved in was getting stranded out in the forest,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm sure you were stranded,\" Cara said. \"You probably had help from your friends in the Vard.\"\n\nI laughed. \"If you knew anything about me, then you'd know I'd found a traitor who'd infiltrated the Academy selection.\" I studied them for a moment. \"Or did you know that? Maybe you were involved with her? It's possible Elaine had others who she'd been working with who were tied to her. Maybe that was you?\"\n\n\"You need to be careful with what you accuse others of doing,\" Brandel said.\n\n\"Shouldn't you take your own advice?\" I asked.\n\n\"We'll be watching you,\" Brandel said. \"And the moment you make a mistake . . .\"\n\nI ignored them, turning my attention back to the dragon pen, focusing on the green dragon. The other two started to move away, leaving me alone in the pen. It was better than having them lingering here.\n\nMy mind worked through what I had experienced. The dragon hadn't returned.\n\nHere I thought he had.\n\nWhat had Jerith said?\n\nI glanced over to the Academy building, frowning to myself. I could feel the energy of the dragons around me, the energy of those who were trying to touch upon the dragons, and distantly, even the power of those within the palace connected to the dragons, the dragons themselves hidden somewhere deep within the building.\n\nIt was strange that I should be aware of that, and I didn't know if there were something within me that had shifted and changed, or if it were merely a matter of my strength intensifying. Maybe I should have stuck with Thomas so I could more deeply understand the connection I shared with the dragons.\n\nIf the Djarn were responsible, I wanted to know.\n\nThere was no doubt in my mind that the dragon had been pulled into the forest, though I'd thought that was all part of the testing. If the Djarn were involved at that time, and if somehow they were involved with what happened to the dragon, then shouldn't I let Thomas know?\n\nI tapped on the dragon pen bar. \"I may need your help,\" I whispered to the dragon.\n\nTurning toward the forest, I could still feel the edge of power coming off of Thomas. It was faint and vague, but the sense of it was there. If he was out there searching for dragons, then perhaps I needed to look as well."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "I knocked at Jerith's door. The sound was a dull thud in the hallway, and I looked along the length of the hall, shifting my stance, feeling a bit self-conscious about coming here. I knew there wasn't anything I could even do, but at the same time, I felt that I needed to be here. When there was no answer, I traced my hand along the etched symbol of the dragons on the door.\n\nI had never taken much time to really look at it. The dragons looked to be in flight, three of them chasing each other, flames shooting from their mouths. It was either three dragons playing, or three dragons fighting.\n\nConsidering what I'd seen of the dragons in the pens and those that I had encountered within the city, I had a hard time thinking they fought each other at all. At the same time, I didn't really know. I couldn't imagine what a war fought with dragons would be like.\n\nI waited again before finally knocking one more time.\n\nThere was still no answer.\n\nI turned, looking along the hallway.\n\nI hurried through the Academy, wanting to find Jerith\u2014and find answers\u2014but I also wanted to avoid others in the hall. I didn't need questions. Especially now that I knew how the king viewed Thomas.\n\nIt added an element of danger.\n\nMaybe Donathar would have returned to the Academy. I had questions for him. I needed to ask him about his time with the Djarn. He wouldn't have embedded with them if he weren't willing to understand and work with them. He would have to have a different insight.\n\nInstead, I turned to the forest and heard a soft howl as I reached its edge.\n\nIt was faint, though strong enough that I recognized it.\n\nMesahn.\n\nThat sound was distinct. It was a mournful sort of cry, edged with a bit of violence.\n\nAs I started to turn back, I heard a shout.\n\nI froze.\n\nWhen the shout came again, I decided.\n\nI moved through the trees. It was getting darker, and it was difficult for me to see much of anything. I could feel the trunks of the trees on either side of me, and the air was a little bit cooler. Thomas was still out there. He would have to be. Searching for the dragons. Maybe even for the Djarn. I didn't know if doing either was safe for me, or if that put me in any greater danger.\n\nUnsurprisingly, I could still feel the dragons back in their pen, and they offered me a hint of guidance, showing me where to return. At least I didn't have to fear getting lost in the forest, as I would have otherwise.\n\nI drifted farther along, moving carefully, until I heard the mesahn howl again. There was no further shout. This time the mesahn was softer and fainter, though it seemed to be deeper into the forest.\n\nCould the mesahn have uncovered one of the missing dragons?\n\nI closed my eyes. There was something out there. It was faint, much like the mesahn, which left me wondering if perhaps the mesahn really was chasing after a dragon.\n\nThat was where I needed to go.\n\nDistantly, I focused on the energy and power of the dragon. I wandered as quickly as I could, moving through the forest, picking my way across fallen logs, trying to avoid vines that grabbed at my legs, and suddenly found a pathway through the trees.\n\nIt was one of the Djarn paths. Surprisingly close to the edge of the city.\n\nNot that it was easy to find. I'd come across it more by chance than anything, but it was definitely one of the Djarn paths\u2014and more than that, the draw of the dragon seemed to pull me along it.\n\nCould I have heard one of the Djarn shouting? If so, maybe I could find answers.\n\nI moved quickly, still focusing on the dragon, and now that I was on the Djarn path, it was easier for me to see where I was going. I drew upon the green dragon, cycling some of that power through me, using it to create a band of glowing flames along my arms. At least I could use that to illuminate the path so I could navigate a little bit easier.\n\nThe calling of the power was far easier than I thought. It was almost as if I were using it instinctively. Had something changed for me? Maybe the connection to the dragon had opened something up for me.\n\nThe howl of the mesahn came again.\n\nThis time it was closer.\n\nThe air sizzled with a strange energy. I called upon more power. Strangely, there was a soft tension deep within me as I cycled that power, drawing upon me.\n\nThe mesahn howled yet again.\n\nI jogged forward, hurrying through the forest, and saw a flash of fur. The mesahn didn't turn toward me\u2014if that was indeed what it was. The mesahn would know I was there, which meant that if nothing else, he either ignored me or somehow didn't detect me.\n\nAnother shout came.\n\nThis time it was close.\n\nThe mesahn suddenly growled.\n\nThere came a surge of energy. The dragon.\n\nI raced forward.\n\nI could feel the dragon in the distance, and yet I could feel something else building. It was some strange pressure, almost as if it were trying to work against me.\n\nLight bloomed in the distance. When I neared, I realized what it came from.\n\nThe dragon.\n\nIt was a large, golden-scaled dragon. He was situated in a small clearing, and heat radiated off of him, heat that exploded outward, surging toward me, but also surging toward something approaching the dragon.\n\nThe mesahn.\n\nStrange. Why would the mesahn be approaching the dragon like that?\n\nA Hunter.\n\nThey would be here, somewhere. Likely searching for the missing dragons.\n\nWho had been shouting?\n\nI looked, but I didn't see any sign of them.\n\n\"Easy,\" I said to the dragon.\n\nThe dragon turned toward me and started to rumble, the deep-throated sound I knew would precede a streamer of shooting flames.\n\nI had to connect to this dragon.\n\nDoing so meant I was going to have to ignore my connection to the green dragon, but if I did, I wasn't sure if I would be able to regain that connection if I needed to. It was a risk I would have to take.\n\nI released my hold on the green dragon, then I turned to the golden-scaled one, focusing. I went back to the earliest lessons, the first ones I'd learned, and I started to think about what it would take, and how that power might come to me. All I wanted was to find some way to summon enough energy to connect to the dragon.\n\nI breathed in and out, focused on the heat within myself, and then relaxed.\n\nThere came a fluttering deep within me, the same place where I felt heat when I trapped the other dragon's power as it cycled through me.\n\nHeat surged from the dragon. I stretched out my hand again, trying to connect.\n\nEach time I stepped closer to the dragon, I could feel the heat radiating off of him.\n\nAs the heat surged, I realized that it was more about pulling some of that heat and power inside of me\u2014the same way I had when I held on to the green dragon's energy as it cycled\u2014and less about trying to connect to the dragon in the same way.\n\nThe energy was radiating, building around me; the heat and power coming off of the dragon flared in my belly. It burned, and I could feel the burning and radiating, almost as if the dragon were trying to demonstrate something to me.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I whispered to the dragon. \"I'm not here to harm you. I just want to help.\" The dragon rumbled, though it was a faint sound, one that came slowly. \"I can help,\" I said. The dragon rumbled again. \"Is it the mesahn?\"\n\nI focused on the energy of the mesahn that I detected out in the distance. I could feel power and wondered if perhaps that was it\u2014or not. Every so often, the dragon would start to push pressure through me, and I pulled on its heat. Some of that pressure started to ease, the dragon growing calmer.\n\nA howl echoed in the distance.\n\nThe mesahn.\n\nSuddenly, heat flared within the dragon again, a burst of energy that radiated outward.\n\nThe mesahn must have been out hunting for dragons, and its howl clearly irritated this one.\n\nStrangely, it was almost as if the energy of the dragon itself was locked, unable to move. I feel it as an interruption in the way the connection flowed. There was some hiccup, hesitation as the power cycled from the dragon to me and then back to the dragon. That hiccup was what I had to deal with. It was part of the cycle.\n\nWhat if I pushed?\n\nIt was strange to try to push the dragon's power back to him, but that was what it felt like I needed to do. Heat burned within me from some place deep. It was stored power.\n\nI hadn't quite let go of the energy of the green dragon.\n\nIt was almost as if I had held on to some of my own power, so that I didn't even need to connect to the dragon.\n\nCould I use that? Better yet, could I use the green dragon to help this dragon? The idea of it seemed impossible, but so did the idea that I might find a dragon that needed my help to override whatever was happening. I latched on to the energy of the green dragon, and could feel it building, sliding through me, and then I created a chain, connecting to this yellow-scaled dragon, flowing that power out. I felt the resistance, that strange hiccup, and then blasted through it.\n\nWhen it happened, I made sure to force that power back to the green dragon, creating a strange cycle. I had never linked to more than one dragon, though now that I had, I couldn't help but wonder if this was exactly what Thomas had been doing when he was touching upon multiple dragons within the dragon pen.\n\nThe dragon lunged toward me.\n\nI was too startled to react.\n\nInstead, I braced myself, holding on to the power within me, and then the dragon roared, shooting flames past me and out into the forest. With a surge of wind, the dragon took to the air, circling and then disappearing into the night.\n\nI could still feel him though.\n\nI stood motionless, still too startled to even move. I had no idea what had just happened.\n\nThe sense of the dragon began to grow increasingly distant, though I felt that his injury had been healed. Whatever else happened, at least the dragon would recover.\n\nI turned, making my way into the trees, when I saw the effect of the dragon's flames.\n\nThere was a charred form on the ground. I approached carefully, holding my hands out, still pulling some power through the green dragon. I moved slowly, carefully, but even still, I already thought I knew what I was going to see.\n\nWhen I neared it, the enormity of the creature startled me most.\n\nMesahn.\n\nThe dragon had killed one of the mesahn."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "I reached the edge of the forest late. I was tired, and had focused only on the energy of the dragons near me, trying to get to the edge of the forest as quickly as I could, unable to shake the feeling that something strange had just taken place. It was something beyond my ability to understand. I needed to know why the dragon would attack the mesahn. The Hunter with that mesahn had never appeared, though I'd waited.\n\nNow, even more than understanding the mesahn, I needed to better understand what happened to the dragon and what I had done to it.\n\nI could still feel the vague sense of that dragon, and was surprised it hadn't gone all that far. It was connected to the green dragon still\u2014and that surprised me more than anything. There was a faint stirring, as if some part of the green dragon continued to cycle out, connecting from me to itself to the golden-scaled dragon.\n\nThat mattered, though I didn't know why or what it was, and I didn't know what it might do. The only thing that I knew was that I could feel that power.\n\nI couldn't feel Thomas's dragon, which worried me. He was out there, chasing the Djarn and the missing dragons, and I had no idea what he was going to do. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it. It wasn't my responsibility. Maybe none of this was.\n\nI was a student. I shouldn't be out here chasing a vague sense of dragons.\n\nI trudged through the edge of the forest, making my way to the dragon pen, and then stopped, startled. There was a darkened form there.\n\nThey were dressed in a long, black cloak, the hood pulled up; they weren't tall enough to be Thomas, though given what I had seen from earlier in the day, I wouldn't have been surprised to know that it was Thomas hanging out by the dragon pen after having hunted for the other dragons.\n\nI approached slowly, carefully, and still I think I made too much noise.\n\nThe figure turned toward me.\n\nMoonlight reflected off of pale skin, and I frowned. \"Natalie?\"\n\n\"Ashan,\" she said softly. \"What are you doing out so late?\" She flicked her gaze past me, looking into the forest.\n\n\"Well . . .\" I regarded Natalie for a long moment, debating how much I should share with her. Considering what we'd been through already, I might as well tell her what happened. \"I thought I could try to uncover what happened to the dragons that went missing.\"\n\nThe strangeness I'd detected in the forest lingered with me. An irritant I couldn't shake. It felt like it burned along with my sense of the dragons.\n\n\"Did you?\" She took a step toward me and watched me. \"Did you find them?\"\n\nI took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. \"No. I did not.\"\n\nShe breathed in slowly, tilting her head back as if she were sniffing at the air. \"I always enjoy crisp nights like this,\" she said.\n\nThe sudden change in the conversation was jarring, but Natalie just leaned back, still sniffing at the air. She breathed in and out slowly, and it seemed to me that she was relaxed in a way that I wasn't.\n\n\"What are you doing out here?\" I asked. Could she be responsible for what happened with the dragons?\n\n\"I told you. I came out here because I wanted to enjoy the cool night air.\"\n\n\"It's getting late,\" I said. I looked over to the Academy building, and saw lights glowing in the windows. I needed to get rest, and given what I had gone through, and what I suspected I would continue to go through, I worried that even when I did rest, I still wouldn't have enough sleep. \"Unless you intended to go to the festival again?\"\n\nNatalie looked over to me, smiling slightly. \"The festival is over. We could follow it, if you wanted. It travels, you know.\"\n\n\"I didn't know,\" I said.\n\n\"They moved on to Negler, though they won't be there for long. I suspect an Academy student wouldn't really have the opportunity to travel and find out though.\"\n\n\"I don't think I should go,\" I said.\n\n\"No. I probably shouldn't either.\" She looked behind me, her gaze heading toward the Academy, and then toward the city itself. \"I suspect my father would be concerned if I suddenly disappeared.\"\n\n\"Where is your father?\"\n\nNatalie turned back to me. \"Is that your way of trying to find out where I live? If you want to know, all you have to do is ask.\"\n\nI smiled at her. \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\"I'm on the far side of the city,\" she said. \"Just beyond the temple.\"\n\nI looked out into the city, ignoring that strange irritation that pressed upon my awareness. \"That has to be at least an hour walk for you to get over here.\"\n\n\"It is. That doesn't mean I mind the walk. Sometimes it's nice to get out and stroll through the city.\"\n\n\"Even at night?\"\n\nFor a city the size of the capital, it was relatively safe, but it didn't mean that there weren't dangers inherent in any large city. I didn't like the idea of Natalie wandering back home under the cloak of darkness. There were any number of thieves and cut-purses who might be active in the city, and though there were soldiers who patrolled the streets, along with the occasional dragon mage\u2014though I doubt if they were active at this time of night\u2014I still didn't think it was a good idea for her to wander the streets by herself. For that matter, it probably wasn't a good idea for me to wander the streets by myself. I could use my own dragon magic, and I could keep myself safe, but I couldn't look behind me. A knife in my back would bring me down no differently than it would any other person in the city.\n\n\"I'm not helpless,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm not trying to say that you are,\" I told her. \"It's just\u2014\"\n\nNatalie chuckled. \"You don't have to worry about me. I've lived in the city long enough to know my way around the streets. I know which parts of the city are dangerous, and which parts need to be avoided, especially at night.\"\n\nI looked over at the Academy. I was tired and wanted to sleep, but at the same time, I also wanted to have another moment or two with Natalie. \"I could walk with you.\"\n\nShe regarded me for a moment. \"You don't need to do that.\"\n\n\"I do. Besides, I want to.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Are all men from the plains like you?\"\n\nI smiled. At least she didn't accuse me of coming from the Wilds. Too often, the people in the city had a belief about the makeup of the kingdom, and too many people thought that the Wilds were synonymous with every other part beyond the forest.\n\n\"I don't know. I think most men from the plains would want to walk with a beautiful woman.\"\n\nShe laughed softly. \"Flattery.\"\n\n\"I'm not necessarily trying to escort you home. I just want to\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not saying flattery won't work,\" she said. \"You can walk with me.\"\n\nWe started forward, moving toward the street, and Natalie cast a glance behind her, looking over her shoulder and toward the forest. I wonder what she saw there, but she turned back to me, smiling brightly. \"It's nice to walk at night. It's not something to fear. The city is quiet, and you can almost feel the latent energy of it.\" Natalie closed her eyes as we made our way along the street. \"I just feel as if there is an energy here. You don't feel it?\"\n\nThe only thing that I could feel was the irritated connection to the green dragon, and now the golden dragon. I didn't say anything to her about that, so instead I just shook my head. \"I don't feel anything quite like that.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's just me. It might just be my time in the city. I feel like I have an understanding of it in a way that I didn't when I first came here.\" She looked over to me. \"Perhaps in time you will come to know the same feeling. You haven't been here long enough to detect the energy of the city yet.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's all it is,\" I said.\n\nShe took me down a side street, weaving away from the central thoroughfare that led straight toward the palace. I was distantly aware of the dragons within, or beneath, the palace, and those near the Academy. Every so often, I could feel a surge of energy, something that flared up within me and called to me, letting me know that the energy of the dragons was there. I recognized how that filled me and stayed with me.\n\nI tried not to focus on it, but I couldn't help it. The surge of power continued intermittently. It was almost as if there were dragon mages up near the palace using that energy.\n\n\"You seem distracted,\" Natalie said.\n\nI glanced over to her. \"I might be a little bit,\" I admitted. \"I've been working with Thomas lately and . . .\"\n\n\"And now you've heard the report that he's been accused of betraying the king?\"\n\nI frowned. \"You know?\"\n\nShe laughed softly. In the emptiness of the night, as we passed by darkened storefronts and large homes, the sound didn't carry very far; it was as if the night swallowed her laughter. \"I think most people in the city have heard about Thomas. It is a bit of a surprise.\"\n\nI took a deep breath. \"I honestly don't know what to think about it. I don't know Thomas well enough, but when I visited the king, I saw the dynamic between Thomas and the Sharath. Neither man cares for the other.\"\n\nNatalie started to smile. \"You went to the king?\"\n\n\"I got dragged along with Thomas. He seems to think there's something more to what the Djarn are after.\"\n\nShe frowned but said nothing.\n\nWe walked for little while longer, neither of us speaking. The night was cool, quiet, and calm, and I could feel the dragons from the city. Every so often, I tried to see if I could feel anything beyond the city, dragons that might be elsewhere, but I detected nothing. They were out there. I was certain of it. I had no idea where they had gone missing, but the occasional flare of dragon power told me that they were still here.\n\n\"What do you know about Thomas?\" she asked.\n\nI shrugged. \"Not much, other than that he's the king's chief dragon mage.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"He was almost single-handedly responsible for helping the king expand the eastern territories, pushing back the Vard. That's supposedly what gained him the king's notice. The king has wanted to destroy the Vard since ascending to the throne.\"\n\n\"Destroying them seems harsh, given my experience with them,\" I said.\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\nI forced a smile, realizing that I'd said too much. I didn't need to get into another debate about the Vard with someone from the kingdom. Just because we didn't struggle with them nearly as much in Berestal didn't mean the Vard didn't pose a real danger to others.\n\n\"It's nothing.\"\n\nShe cocked her head, watching me. \"There are stories about him. I don't know how many are real.\" She shrugged. \"Supposedly, Thomas used only a trio of dragons and overwhelmed the resistance from the Erlash. They were their own kingdom up until they were claimed by the king.\"\n\nI knew little about the Erlash, other than that they were a kingdom to the far north and east. \"The plains were on their own, as well. Not a kingdom, not really, but independent. We dealt with the risk of the Vard over the years, and we were always concerned that somebody would attack, either the king or the Vard.\" I smiled.\n\n\"The Vard are too far south to want the plains,\" she said.\n\nI chuckled. \"You know the mindset of the Vard?\"\n\n\"I've traveled quite a bit,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't know if it's so much that the Vard want the plains as it's that they want access to the Wilds. They need the trading route. It's the same reason the king claimed Berestal and the surrounding lands. He wanted the same trading route, wanting access to the resources of the Wilds.\"\n\n\"It's not just the resources of the Wilds he wanted,\" Natalie said.\n\n\"What else would he want?\"\n\nWe reached an intersection and she pulled on my arm, dragging me in a different direction.\n\n\"I thought you said your home was over by the temple,\" I said.\n\nShe grinned. \"It is, but it's such a nice night. I thought we could wander a little bit more.\"\n\nI looked back toward the Academy. Every so often, I could feel the pressure of the dragon energy as it cycled through me. It came slowly, building steadily as it rolled up into me, though with just a hint of power that exploded outward. The effect was considerable, almost as if somebody were there working with the dragons, though I didn't think that anybody in the Academy was still up and doing so.\n\n\"You keep looking back there,\" Natalie said.\n\n\"I feel something,\" I said.\n\n\"What do you feel?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't really know. It's something. A pull on the dragons.\"\n\nAn irritant.\n\nThat was all I could call it, but I didn't know why.\n\nThe longer I walked, the more I felt it.\n\n\"You can feel that?\"\n\n\"I can tell when there is a change in the energy. I don't always know what it means.\"\n\n\"How many dragons can you detect?\"\n\n\"Most of the dragons in the city, but connecting to them and using that power is a different matter.\"\n\n\"I thought a dragon mage could use the power from all of the dragons.\"\n\n\"Maybe somebody who has more experience than me could, but unfortunately, I can't do that yet.\" I had tried, and other than the golden-scale dragon that I had connected to in the forest, I hadn't managed to succeed in reaching any others besides the green dragon. \"In time, I suspect I might be able to find a connection to more of the dragons, but for now, that connection is difficult for me to reach.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\"\n\n\"Why is it interesting?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I've been trying to better understand the dragons. For most of us, they are these mysterious creatures, powerful beasts that have incredible magic. Some people are gifted with the ability to learn to ride them, whereas others are gifted with the opportunity to connect to them and command the magic within them.\"\n\n\"It's not so much a matter of commanding that power. It's a connection to the dragons. Not anything more than that.\" I turned to her. \"When I feel the power of the dragons, it's like a flow through me.\" I shook my head. \"I don't really even know how to describe it as anything else. The energy works through me, connecting me to the dragon, but it never really leaves the dragon. I don't know if that makes sense. It seems like the dragon allows me to access its power and cycles it through me before claiming it back again\u2014at least, whatever power I didn't use.\"\n\n\"Do all dragon mages use the same power connection?\" She shrugged. \"I don't know that I've heard anyone else talking about reaching for power in the same way.\"\n\nI smiled. \"I don't know how others reach it. My instructors have attempted to show me how to open myself up to the dragons, and that has worked well enough, but I haven't managed to connect to the dragons until I worked with Thomas.\"\n\n\"That's why you trust him.\"\n\n\"Trust is a bit of a stretch. I think he's been telling me the truth as he sees it.\"\n\n\"Do you think he's guilty?\"\n\n\"Of what happened?\" I shrugged. \"It seems to me that he is just as interested in finding the missing dragons as the king is. I don't have a sense that he is responsible for it.\"\n\n\"Has he pulled you into his search? I saw you going off with him one day.\"\n\n\"He pulled me in, but it wasn't so much to find the dragons. At least, I didn't think that it was. To be honest, I'm not at all sure what he intended.\"\n\n\"It sounds like he intends to find the dragons with you. That should be reassuring.\"\n\nShe pulled on my arm, and we continued to wander through the city. Every so often, she would stop, occasionally at a small garden, then at a square, and even once outside of the tavern where she leaned close to the building, listening to the music that drifted outside. When I suggested heading into the tavern, she shook her head.\n\nWe wandered for much of the night, talking, sharing stories about our childhood. I spent that time trying to feel for a connection to the missing dragons, and while I felt something, there was no other sign of them. In the time we'd been walking, I felt something that I had never known before.\n\nBy the time we had practically circled around the entirety of the city, and had still not come upon her home, she grinned at me. \"I think you should return to the Academy.\"\n\n\"You didn't let me walk you home.\"\n\n\"I told you that I can walk myself home,\" she said.\n\nI laughed softly. \"You don't have to do that,\" I said.\n\n\"I know. And you don't have to walk me home. I am a big girl, after all.\" She flashed a smile. \"I will see you around, Ashan.\"\n\nShe started off, heading toward the center of the city before taking a side street and disappearing.\n\nI needed rest. In the morning, I had to decide what to do about Thomas, and would have to see what I could find out from others within the Academy about why a dragon would attack one of the mesahn. I would have to approach it carefully, much like everything these days. And I would have to figure out the strange irritation I detected coming off of the dragons\u2014and why it bothered me as much as it did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "I woke to power that filled the inside of the Academy, connecting to a dragon somewhere nearby, though not one I recognized. The irritant persisted, like a sore tooth or a mild headache.\n\nDragon power called me through the Academy, and a sense of energy pressed through me, but I hadn't been able to find it. There had to be something here.\n\nWhat was it though?\n\nIt was far more intense than what I had felt before. This time, what I felt was distinct and powerful, practically overwhelming.\n\nAll the time I'd spent searching for dragons had led me to this point.\n\nI could feel the other dragons. That was what Thomas wanted from me, though his reasoning was more about proving the Djarn responsible.\n\nWhat I felt now . . .\n\nThis was close.\n\nI dressed quickly and followed the sense of power flooding into the Academy, curious about its source. As I hurried through the halls, passing lanterns that seemed to surge every time there came a pulsing of power, I couldn't help but wonder who might be using that much of the dragon magic.\n\nIt was early. Darkness still covered the windows, though a hint of early morning sunlight began to creep up. Despite staying out late with Natalie, I had gotten up at my usual time. Thankfully, I hadn't overslept, but maybe I should have. It might have helped me feel better. Otherwise, I was exhausted, and thankful that I hadn't consumed any ale the night before. That would've made everything much worse.\n\nThe power guided me through the halls, and I came upon a staircase leading down into the depths of the Academy. This was a section I rarely went to, not having any need to spend any time there. The basement consisted of old storage rooms, as far as I knew.\n\nStill, I could feel the energy flowing from here, and surprisingly, it seemed as if the connection to the dragon came from here as well.\n\nMissing dragons. The strange irritation. The mesahn that had targeted the dragon in the forest.\n\nThose thoughts stayed with me.\n\nAnd this dragon wasn't one I'd felt before.\n\nI hurried down the stairs, but paused when I reached the landing. There were no lights here. Though I felt the connection to the dragon, I had no idea where the power flowing around me was, nor any idea who was summoning it. The only thing I could tell was that it came from farther along this hallway.\n\nI started along the hall, moving carefully, and paused when I reached an even darker section of the hall. I focused on the connection I shared with the green dragon, and started to pull that power through me, tamping it down into the heat of my belly, until I could draw upon that energy, creating a faint finger of flame that I stretched between my hands. Nothing more than that. The hallway was illuminated.\n\nIt was plain. Stone walls without any decoration. My boots thudded on the stone floor. The air had that musty odor of darkness and dampness. There were no lanterns like there were in the upper levels. Doors interrupted the wall every so often, most of them stout oak, though the light from my hands reflected off of metal in the distance. I headed toward that, feeling for the energy there, focusing on the power that I could, and came upon a sense from dragon magic.\n\nIt was near enough that I thought this is what I had detected. This had to be the source of it, but what exactly was it?\n\nI paused in front of the door. This one was different than the others. It was oak, much like most of the doors had been, but there were bands of metal lining it, working across the surface, as if they were holding the door together. A symbol was etched into the oak, similar to what was on Jerith's door. I traced my finger over it, feeling the way that the dragon had been carved into the door, feeling for the energy that was there, and recognizing that there was a hint of power that still sat beyond the door. The strange energy that I detected was behind it.\n\nThe dragon energy.\n\nThere should be no reason for a dragon to be there, inside the Academy itself, especially with the pens just outside. We could access the energy of the dragons easily enough, especially once we learned how to connect to them.\n\nI tested the handle.\n\nMaybe I should knock, but I was curious and just wanted to take a look. As I focused on the power, another surge of energy stirred up from the other side of the door, pressing into me.\n\nThat was strange. It was different than what I normally detected when I could feel the dragons. This one had an interrupted flow, as if some aspect of the power had been injured in a way. I focused on it, straining to find a connection to it, and struggling with what I did detect.\n\nThere had to be something here. Why else would there be power flowing on the other side of the door? What might it mean?\n\nI pushed the door open just a crack, and quickly realized I needed to release my hold on the dragon\u2014not entirely though. I let the power flow through me, and rather than tamping it down, I let the energy continue to flow, leaving me connected to the dragon\u2014and connected to finding some access to that power, if it were necessary.\n\nThe room on the other side of the door was mostly dark. A faint light glowed in the distance.\n\nI waited, searching for anybody else in the room, but I didn't see anybody, and I certainly didn't hear anybody. I stepped into the room, pushing the door mostly closed behind me. The glowing in the distance called to me, but it was more than just glowing. There was something there. I could feel it.\n\nIt had to be a dragon. I didn't know why there would be one inside the room, down in the belly of the Academy, but I was certain that was what I detected.\n\nI hesitated.\n\nWhat if this was how the Academy planned to protect the dragons?\n\nThey could hide them here, inside the building.\n\nPower pulled on me, as if calling me forward. That drawing sensation, that strange energy that summoned me, came from the dragon in front of me, along with the aching irritation.\n\nSomehow, the dragon pulled upon me.\n\nStrangely, I could feel the energy cycling from me through this other dragon\u2014and through the green dragon. Distantly, I was aware of the other dragon I had found in the forest as well. It was still out there, though not close. Somehow, the power cycled through him, as well. I could see a flash of scales nearby, nothing more than that, enough for me to tell that it was a dragon, but which one?\n\nI approached him. I had a sense of his size and scale, one that suggested power coming\u2014something screamed to me that the dragon was enormous. In my mind, I had built it up to be this massive, black-scaled dragon, much like the one that Thomas had ridden away from the city, but as I neared, I discovered that wasn't the case at all.\n\nThe dragon was small.\n\nOf course it would be small. Why would I have thought otherwise? In order for a dragon to fit in the lower level of the Academy, it would have to be small.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked, and immediately began to feel foolish. Why or how would the dragon answer me, and how would he understand? Still, I had the same feeling about him as I did with every dragon.\n\nThey were intelligent. Maybe nearly as intelligent as people, though without any way of speaking to us\u2014but maybe they did have a way and I just hadn't found it yet.\n\nThe dragon continued to push power through me, though it was more than that: it was a way for the dragon to connect to and borrow from the green dragon, and surprisingly from the other dragon I detected distantly, as well. It was almost as if he needed a bit more power than what he had access to otherwise.\n\n\"I can help\u2014\"\n\nI heard a soft scraping as the door began to open, and a whisper of wind fluttered in.\n\nI glanced over to the door before scurrying around the back of the dragon, hiding behind him. I had no interest in getting caught someplace I wasn't supposed to be. Most places within the Academy weren't off-limits, but there was a dragon out here, and there had to be a secret reason for it. I held my hand out, touching the dragon's back, pushing up behind him as I approached.\n\n\"I can smell it,\" a voice said from somewhere near the door. It wasn't familiar to me. \"How do you have it down here?\"\n\n\"There are tunnels that lead from here into the forest. There aren't too many who know about them.\"\n\n\"Tunnels to the forest? Who would've made them?\"\n\n\"Those who know better,\" the second person said. I moved, trying to get low enough so that I could hear what this person was saying, and trying to keep myself positioned in such a way so that I wouldn't reveal my presence, but I needed to stay hidden behind the dragon. \"Those who have learned about the tunnels have never discovered where they lead.\"\n\nI could feel somebody coming closer, could feel their heat and energy, though I didn't know if they were aware of me yet. Suddenly, the dragon borrowed power from me, as if it were aware of my thoughts.\n\nThe other two dragons seemed to know what to do, pushing their energy through me and to this dragon. He surged with power and began to glow with a pale yellow light.\n\n\"What happened?\" one of the men said.\n\n\"I don't know. He keeps doing that,\" the other said. \"It seems to be his way of trying to get help.\"\n\n\"Will the other dragons reach him?\"\n\n\"Doubtful. They might know the dragon is here, but the creatures don't have any way of speaking from a distance.\"\n\nI frowned. I had felt something that called me down here.\n\nAnd the aching irritation.\n\nCould they be connected?\n\nWhat if the dragons did have some way of speaking to each other from a distance?\n\nThere was a time when I would've said the idea was laughable, but the more I'd been around the dragons, the more I began to question just what was possible with them. I had no idea what they were capable of, only that the dragons I'd been around suggested a connection and power far more than anything I would've believed possible. Especially after recognizing the way the golden-scaled dragon had connected to the green dragon. There was something about that connection, some aspect of that power, that told me that there was more to it.\n\n\"This is just about completed. That's why I brought you here.\"\n\n\"You brought me here because I warned you we were running out of time. With Thomas out of the city, now is our chance. We don't know how much longer we will have.\"\n\nI frowned, leaning close to the dragon, wondering just what it was that he meant.\n\n\"We don't have much time. We managed to hold only five of them. The others have escaped.\"\n\n\"Because they helped.\"\n\nThey?\n\nWho else was involved?\n\nCould this be the Djarn or was this the Vard?\n\nOr better yet, was it somebody else working with Elaine?\n\nThey started toward me, and I focused on the dragon, feeling for the energy within him, wondering if there was something to what they intended that I needed to be prepared for, but I couldn't tell. The only thing I could be certain of was that they were doing something to the dragon. The more I thought about it\u2014the more I could feel energy and power\u2014the more I was aware of just what it was that they were doing. It involved some connection to the dragon's power.\n\nThat was the strange surge I had detected before. I could feel the way it flowed through the dragon, bursting from the creature, and though it held on to some aspect of the green dragon and the other dragon that I had found in the forest, there was something else about it.\n\nIt had a hiccup.\n\nIt was the same feeling I'd felt before. That couldn't be a coincidence\u2014and the fact that I felt something similar a second time left me troubled.\n\nI had no idea what it meant or whether there was something that happened to the dragon, only that I could feel the energy. There was some aspect to it that I recognized, some burst of power that left me feeling like there was a danger to the dragon.\n\nThat power built, and once again, there came another surge of energy blasting outward, as if the dragon were trying to either fight what happened or possibly to communicate with others. I couldn't tell which.\n\nSurprisingly, it seemed like the green dragon was trying to coordinate with this dragon, using some connection to it to overpower the strange pause in the flow of energy. The green dragon poured power out, and as it did, some of it came through me. A communication.\n\n\"It has very nearly finished storing everything we need. Once this is done, we will have enough to capture the others.\"\n\n\"I don't need 'very nearly.' We need this done. We need the weapons.\"\n\n\"We will have the weapons. You have to have patience.\"\n\n\"We don't have time for patience.\"\n\nWhatever was happening would take place soon.\n\nThe dragon thrashed. I was close enough that I felt the kicking of the dragon, the source of energy coming off of him\u2014I needed to try to move out of the way, but I couldn't. The dragon's body slammed into me, sending me crashing backward. I stumbled, biting back a shout, wanting to keep from saying anything that might reveal my presence. The dragon backed into me then turned toward the other two, heat radiating from him as he attempted to breathe out heat and fire.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nI'd been around the dragons enough over the last few months that I recognized when they were agitated. Some of that came from my ability to open myself to them, recognizing the heat coming from them, but some of it came simply from a familiarity with dragons in general, along with a familiarity with livestock, having grown up on a farm. What happened now was dangerous to this dragon. I could feel his agitation, his rage, and the way he struggled, and I wanted nothing more than to react. Power flowed from the dragon and he attempted to cry out, wanting to roar, but something seemed to constrict him.\n\nI touched the dragon's side, holding on to the connection that flowed between us, and tried to use that connection to soothe the dragon. I wasn't sure if it worked, only that I could feel something coming from him, something that told me the dragon seemed to understand. I pulled upon the power within the dragon, sending it flowing through in a large cycle of energy that circled between me and the other two dragons, and I noticed that the strange pause of power seemed to ease. It was faint, but when it held, power began to surge with even more strength.\n\nI had no idea what I was doing, only that it was now the second time I had connected to another dragon, cycling that power. I also had no idea whether it made a difference or not, only that I could feel something change. The dragon in front of me seemed to swell, as if power began to fill it.\n\n\"The others are in similar places, all difficult to find.\"\n\n\"How much longer will he be out of the city?\"\n\n\"Hopefully long enough so that we can finish this.\"\n\n\"There is no 'hopefully.'\" The voices were both so familiar, but I couldn't move around the dragon to make anything out.\n\nWhatever was happening would take place soon.\n\nMaybe that was why I felt the dragon pull so strongly today.\n\nIt had to have been here before though.\n\n\"We will succeed.\"\n\n\"The other attempt did not.\"\n\nSomebody grunted. \"The other attempt was foolish. Poorly planned. This, on the other hand, is exactly what I told you it would be. I didn't spend all my time there to come back empty-handed.\"\n\n\"If it succeeds, you will be given this territory to oversee.\"\n\nThe voices became more distant, and I moved, trying to slip around so that I could see where they were going and what they had done, but I still couldn't make anything out. Just the steady murmuring of their voices. The door closed, sealing me inside with the dragon.\n\nThey were talking about draining the dragon.\n\nI moved to the dragon's side and realized there were chains around his ankles. The dragon moved, following me.\n\n\"I'll help you,\" I said. \"I don't know what's going on here, but I want to help.\"\n\nThe dragon leaned toward me, and I could feel the heat radiating off of him, but I didn't know if he understood what I was saying.\n\nThere was something here that allowed them to store the power of the dragon.\n\nAnd they were going to use that to attack the kingdom.\n\nMore than that\u2014whoever had come here obviously was comfortable with the Academy. They didn't fear coming through the halls.\n\nIf power flowed from the dragons, and if somehow these two were siphoning that power off, doing something to harm the dragon, then maybe I could interrupt it.\n\nI closed my eyes, focusing on where I had felt that strange pause in the flow.\n\nI stayed with the energy, feeling the way that it flowed out from me, the connection it formed, and recognized there was some aspect of it I could hold. I could feel that steady simmering energy\u2014how it was going out from me, working away and then back to the dragon. The strange hiccup was there.\n\nWhere though?\n\nI followed that power, letting the energy flow through me. It was somewhere in the room. Drawing upon the green dragon, I sent more power flowing through me, and suppressed it down deep, using it to create a band of light that I spread out from me, sweeping around the room in a coil to illuminate everything.\n\nI could feel something.\n\nI headed toward it.\n\nIt looked like a small metallic vase with strange writing along its sides. I had seen something like that before, but where? The same writing had been on the item Joran had carried with him.\n\nCould they have been involved?\n\nNo. I couldn't believe Joran and his father would have been involved in this.\n\nBut who was?\n\nStill, I had less and less doubt that the Djarn were involved now. I had no idea why. They had never made an attempt on the kingdom before, at least as far as I knew. If only Joran and his father were still here, I would have someone to ask.\n\nMaybe Donathar.\n\nI took a deep breath, frowning.\n\nCould he be involved?\n\nHe had spent time with the Djarn.\n\nAnd there was something else. Something that struck me as uncomfortably familiar.\n\nI had seen a vase like this before.\n\nCould Jerith actually be involved?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The vase seemed to hold on to the dragon energy, sequestering it away from the dragon, and diminishing it in some manner. It had to be destroyed. If I could do that, I believed that I could release the dragon's power, and if so, then perhaps I could help this dragon.\n\nEvery attempt I made to destroy the vase failed. I tried everything that I could think of, attempting something new each time\u2014lashings of power, looping dragon energy around it and constricting it, attempting weave after weave in order to find some way to overwhelm it\u2014but I continued to fail.\n\nRegardless of what I did, the metallic vase held more power. It was almost overwhelming\u2014the way it flowed into the metal was more than I could hold\u2014and though I attempted to withdraw power, I found I couldn't stop the metallic vase from holding on to it. Which meant that I wouldn't be able to prevent it from continuing to drain the dragon.\n\nThat was what it did. As I crouched down next to the dragon, next to the metallic vase, I could feel the flow. It reminded me of the way I felt the connection to the dragons as it flowed through me, but rather than some part of me holding on to that energy, the way I did when I looped power through me, this power flowed through the metallic vase and trickled back to the dragon, but the majority of it remained contained.\n\nThat trickle meant the dragon was drained of any additional power. Over time, more and more of it would stay within the vase, and less would remain within the dragon. I attempted to call even more power into me, away from the vase, but it didn't work; during my attempt, I could feel the power gradually replenish within the vase.\n\nThis truly did store the power of the dragons.\n\nI sat in front of the vase, holding on to it, feeling the power flow through it. Here I had thought to defend the Djarn, but there was no doubt in my mind this was Djarn writing. I had seen it before. It just didn't fit with what I knew of them. Why would the Djarn want to steal dragon power?\n\nThe answer came to me easily. The Djarn wanted to defend themselves against the might of the kingdom.\n\nMore than that, why wouldn't they take this risk to avoid the same fate as the Vard?\n\nI didn't think I could leave the vase here. I didn't want to run the risk of Jerith and whoever was with him finding it again. That had to have been Jerith whose voice I'd recognized, though it didn't sound quite right.\n\nIt wasn't only the vase I needed to move.\n\nThe dragon.\n\nThey'd gone missing. Thomas had gone after them.\n\nNow I'd found one.\n\nGiven that it was early in the morning, I wondered if the easiest solution would be to bring the dragon straight through the Academy. I could explain that I'd found it, or felt it, or I could somehow alert somebody else so that they would know the dragon was here. I certainly couldn't leave the dragon alone. Not if Jerith intended to drain him completely.\n\nThere might be another way though. He had said there were tunnels.\n\n\"I'm going to try to free you from these shackles,\" I said. \"Do you understand?\"\n\nThe dragon looked at me, and for a moment, I felt a surge of power, large enough to make me believe that the dragon did understand what I was saying. I focused on the first shackle around one of the dragon's legs, and pushed power out through me, probing into the shackle. I tried to create a looping of flame around it, using what I could to circle it.\n\nI continued holding on to that energy and looping, surging outward.\n\nI could feel something.\n\nThere was power within the shackle.\n\nFor a moment, I worried the shackle would hold, but as I continued circling power, cycling it around the band surrounding the dragon's leg, I could feel the power expanding.\n\nI pulled.\n\nIt snapped.\n\nI breathed out a sigh of relief.\n\nNow to move on to the next one.\n\nThe dragon started to roar and I held my hand up, cycling a hint of power through the other two dragons and into this one, hoping to calm him, if nothing else.\n\n\"You have to be relaxed,\" I said. \"We can't let them know you're free.\"\n\nThe dragon roared again.\n\n\"I need to get you out of here, but you have to leave the way that you came in. Do you remember how you came in?\"\n\nThe dragon leaned forward, pressing his long snout up against my hand, and heat radiated from it. At first, I worried that he might react, but gradually he began to settle.\n\n\"There you go,\" I said. It felt as if I were trying to tame a horse or a stubborn bull; the effect was the same, either way. I had to be calm and confident, and I had to be careful not to make any rapid or sudden movements.\n\nI grabbed the metal vase containing the dragon power. It was large enough that I had to hold on to it, as I wasn't able to store it in a pocket, but I had to think that once I got out of here, I would figure out some way of destroying it.\n\nI headed to the door, pausing a moment, and worried that it might be locked and that I would have to fight my way out, but it came open easily.\n\nRelief swept through me as it did.\n\nI pulled on the door, leaning on it for a moment, and then waited. I didn't see anything along the hallway, but I continued to wait anyway. I wasn't sure whether Jerith and whomever he had been with would return, but I wanted to be ready in case they did.\n\nThe dragon moved across the floor, heading toward me.\n\nI turned toward him, raising my hand and trying to connect to him to push him back, but he had none of it.\n\n\"You have to wait until it's safe to come through here,\" I said. \"Just give me a chance to ensure that it is,\" I added.\n\nThe dragon looked at me, snorting briefly, and then waited.\n\nI breathed out a moment, thankful that he hadn't pushed any farther toward me. I didn't want to have to deal with a wild and violent dragon. There was no other movement.\n\nI turned to the dragon and again asked, \"Do you know how you came through here?\" There came a soft rumbling. \"If you do, then can you find your way out?\"\n\nThe dragon rumbled again. Hopefully that meant yes, though it was difficult for me to know anything for certain when it came to him.\n\n\"I am going to let you through here, but we need to work together to find a way out,\" I said to him.\n\nHe seemed larger than he had been before. The energy that flowed through him, flowing from me to the other dragons, seemed to be even more potent now. Power rolled through the other two dragons, providing something extra for this one.\n\nThe dragon pushed past, into the hall, and started toward the stairs leading up into the main part of the Academy. I chased after him, then raced in front.\n\n\"Wait,\" I said, glancing over my shoulder as I realized just how loud my voice was. I pushed power out from me, and tried to keep the dragon from moving, though I didn't know if it would even make a difference.\n\nSurprisingly, it worked.\n\nThe dragon waited, no longer trying to push past me.\n\n\"We need to go the way you came in.\"\n\nThe dragon surged with a hint of power\u2014his way of responding to me. I had no idea what it meant. He sniffed, and the strange surge of energy continued. Within it came something more, something unexpected. The flow started to cycle, yet I detected a directionality to it this time. Almost as if the dragon tried to guide himself a certain way.\n\nThe dragon turned and slithered along the hallway. He didn't move the way I would've expected, but within the confines of the hall, he had to keep his wings folded into his body and he wobbled as he walked, almost slamming off of the walls. Were he any larger, he wouldn't have been able to come through here.\n\nThe hall narrowed around us, and the ground seemed even damper than it had before. We were sloping gradually down, and surprisingly, the doors along the hall ended, leaving nothing in their place.\n\nWe had reached a dead end.\n\nThe dragon pressed up against the wall. It was the end of the tunnel, which meant that it was as far as we could go. He rumbled softly, a faint roar, and looked over to me as if I were going to have some answer.\n\n\"Here?\" I asked the dragon. \"This is where you came in?\"\n\nThe dragon roared again.\n\n\"There isn't anything here but a wall. I don't know how to get you out of here.\"\n\nThe dragon pushed a hint of power through me. I could feel it cycling, sending a stirring of energy up from the buried place within me. It was as if the dragon wanted me to know something, and it was the only way he had of communicating that with me.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" I said.\n\nThe dragon pushed out again, another surge of energy flowing.\n\nWithin that surge of power, I could feel an urgency within the dragon.\n\nA voice came from behind me. It was muted and quiet, but close enough that I knew if I stood here for too much longer, I'd end up getting caught by whomever it was. Maybe it was Jerith, or perhaps his co-conspirator. Either way, I didn't want to remain here and be trapped by them; I wanted to get away somehow, before they caught up to me.\n\nI pushed out on the connection to the dragon, hoping for some understanding as the energy flowed between us, but there was no understanding. There was only the power that flowed outward. It stretched from this dragon, to the green dragon, to the golden-scaled dragon\u2014a circle of power.\n\nI shook my head. \"I don't understand.\"\n\nThe dragon surged heat again. This time, it burst toward me, coming with a bit of intensity. The dragon looked at me, and there was something in his dragon gaze that suggested I should understand him. It suggested frustration I didn't comprehend, and it suggested an urgency with which I needed to act.\n\nUnfortunately, I couldn't tell what more I needed to do.\n\nI heard the voice again.\n\nWe'd gone all the way down the hallway, so whoever was coming might reach the room and realize the dragon was gone; we would then end up either fighting our way out or being captured by whoever was coming toward us.\n\nThe dragon roared softly.\n\n\"No,\" I whispered. \"We have to be quiet. We can't let them know we are out of the other room.\"\n\nThe dragon sent another hint of surging power outward.\n\nThomas. I needed to find him. He was involved in trying to understand what had happened to the missing dragons, and he was convinced the Djarn were involved. I had denied him, and had ignored him when he'd asked for help, which maybe was a mistake. In hindsight, I should have known better and should have trusted him. He was the king's chief dragon mage, after all.\n\nThe dragon seemed to believe there was some way out here. Maybe there was some hidden entrance, some way for us to escape.\n\nThe voice sounded closer.\n\nI clutched the metal vase up against my chest, holding on to it, and could feel the power stored within it\u2014it circled from the dragons and into the vase where it was stored.\n\nThere was a soft scraping sound along the hallway.\n\nI turned back to the dragon. \"How did you come through here?\"\n\nThe dragon breathed out, a stream of flame streaking from his nostrils, but nothing more. Heat surged within him. It was subtle, but as it burst outward, I could feel just how he used that heat to connect to me and the other dragons.\n\nI had to find a way to hold back the others coming toward us. Did I dare use something to prevent them from getting through here?\n\nI pulled on the power, suppressing it deeply, and began to send spirals of flame out. They knew I was here, along with the dragon, so there was no point in maintaining any semblance of secrecy. I sent spirals streaking away from me, streamering toward the wall behind me, and looped them together, forming a pattern. It was more complicated than anything that I had tried before, but necessity forced me to attempt something new. As I bound that fire to the wall, I created a crisscrossing weave that would hopefully prevent Jerith and his accomplice from getting too close to me before I was ready for them.\n\nI pushed that power out, and found that the other dragons helped in some way. They added a layer of power to what I was doing, and the combined effort allowed me to hold the power much easier than I would've been able to otherwise.\n\nIt bought me time.\n\nI turned to the dragon, holding my hand out. He held my gaze, and in that moment, I couldn't help but feel as if there was some understanding that passed between us. \"I need you to help me find my way out of here,\" I said to the dragon. \"Help me figure out how they brought you in so that we can backtrack and go out,\" I said.\n\nThere came a faint surge from the dragon.\n\nStill, the power was pouring out of the dragon and into the metal vase, flowing in a way that suggested to me the dragon was not completely freed of that influence. Whatever the Djarn had done, whatever connection they formed between the dragon and the vase, had put this dragon in danger.\n\nThe dragon roared softly.\n\n\"You're not helping,\" I said.\n\nI opened myself to the energy of the dragons, feeling for the way power cycled through the others, through me, and felt a shift. Accompanying it was a strange fluttering nearby.\n\nA section of the wall was a little bit different. Darker, perhaps.\n\nI pressed my hand up against it and felt a distant surge probe through me from what I assumed was the green dragon. Then I realized that the green dragon was only a conduit\u2014this surge came from the yellow-scaled dragon in the forest.\n\nIt was as if the yellow-scaled dragon knew exactly what this was and what to do. The power flowed out of me, slamming into the wall, forming a pattern of circles along its surface; power spooled into the pattern until it began to glow. As it did, it took on the heat and energy of the dragon, a sizzling sort of heat that built until something shimmered.\n\nA doorway.\n\nAs it formed, the power continued to build, pressing into it until something shifted and the door opened.\n\nMy breath caught.\n\nBehind me, more and more pressure built. I motioned for the dragon, urging him ahead of me. He proceeded through the doorway but got stuck. I pushed on him.\n\n\"You had to have gotten through here one time,\" I said.\n\nOnly when he had come through here before, he must've been smaller. In the time I'd been around the dragon, I'd felt he had increased in size, almost as if he were swelling with power. It had to be the connection to the other dragons that had enlarged him.\n\nI pulled some of his power out. The dragon cried out, a soft and mournful sound, but I had to pull more of it into myself. Even as I did, I wasn't going to be strong enough. I didn't have enough stores to hold that energy.\n\nBut the other dragons who were connected to us did.\n\nI shifted the energy, cycling it to the green dragon and the golden-scaled dragon\u2014when I did, there was a pulling of power, and it held. The dragon slipped forward.\n\nI chased after him.\n\nAs soon as I did, the barrier behind me exploded.\n\nI staggered through the door and turned, shifting some power against it, and it closed. I attempted to create a seal over the door, but the dragon was running off into the darkness, and I didn't want to lose him.\n\nWe needed to warn the king that the Djarn were not only trying to steal the dragons, but they were preparing for an attack."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "The tunnel had stretched an impossible distance, leaving me jogging for nearly an hour before it ended in a rocky hillside surrounded by trees. I stepped out to find the dragon curled up around the base of the cavern, resting. He had moved quickly through the cave, far more quickly than I could; after a while, I had pulled upon some power, hoping to ensure I was heading in the right direction, but I hadn't been able to draw on enough of it to light up the tunnel all the way to the end. Eventually, the dragon had disappeared from me, leaving me wondering if I was going to lose him altogether.\n\nThe afternoon air in the forest was cold and cool, and there was a hint of dampness in the air\u2014and a hint of energy, unsurprisingly. I looked at the dragon and could feel he was tired.\n\nThat was new. When I had worked with the dragons before, I had been aware of their power, but nothing more than that.\n\nI touched him on his side and he woke with a start, turning his massive brown head toward me, flames beginning to erupt from his nostrils before calming. I pushed power through him, connecting to the other dragons, drawing a bit more power to him to feed him. As I did, I realized something. The connection might be helpful to this dragon, but it was probably sapping the strength of both the green dragon and the yellow-scaled dragon.\n\nI had to figure out how to destroy the vase. If I didn't, the dragons would be depleted of power and all that energy would fill the vase\u2014and I had no idea what else would happen then.\n\nIt was even more reason for me to find Thomas.\n\n\"You need to disappear into the forest,\" I said to the dragon. \"Follow . . .\" I thought about what the dragon could do, whether it would be safer for me to bring him back to the city and to the dragon pens, then I decided that would be a mistake. That would only alert Jerith and whomever he was working with to the fact that I was responsible for sneaking the dragon away. Right now, I had to hope that he had no idea who had been responsible.\n\nThe dragon rumbled.\n\n\"You can follow this dragon,\" I said, holding on to the yellow-scaled dragon's connection, pulling it closer, shifting the dragon's bond to me onto the other dragon. As I did, I could feel the energy coming to us, and I could feel the way their bond had formed; they linked together so that the yellow-scaled dragon created a draw through this dragon.\n\nThe dragon got to his feet, then slipped off into the trees. I watched until he disappeared altogether. Even as he did, I could still feel him, could feel the power of him, but more than that, I could feel the way that his energy was cycling through the others and also into the vase.\n\nDistantly, I was aware of the weave that I'd formed inside of the tunnel shattering.\n\nThat was my signal to leave.\n\nAs I neared the city, the draw of the dragon pen calling to me, I noticed a mournful note in the air. It was the howl of the mesahn. It was close enough that I could practically feel the creature coming.\n\nThe aching irritation stayed with me. I had thought helping the dragon would take care of it, but it hadn't.\n\nOther dragons.\n\nThe voices had mentioned five.\n\nI had only freed one.\n\nIf that were why I felt the irritation, then I had to find the other four dragons.\n\nI didn't have to wait long before one of the mesahn appeared. He prowled forward, dappled brown fur slipping into the shadows, making it difficult to see him, as if he were camouflaged by the forest itself. There was something familiar about the mesahn. Perhaps it wasn't so much the mesahn but the pressure that pushed against me\u2014pressure I felt in a way that I had never felt from the mesahn before\u2014or perhaps it was simply that I had seen the dragon kill one of the mesahn.\n\n\"Shouldn't you be in classes?\"\n\nI spun. I had already begun lacing power together, separating my hands, creating a weave of energy that bound between them, then lashed out.\n\nManuel was there, and he spun off to the side, avoiding my sudden turn of power.\n\nI tamped the energy down deeper inside of me, then released some of it back into the dragons I had bonded to.\n\n\"Manuel,\" I said, looking past him and toward the deeper part of the forest where the tunnel had let out. \"I'm sorry. You startled me.\"\n\nHe looked at my hands, the power that crackled from them, and a hint of a smile curled his lips. His face was lean, and a bit of dirt smudged under the corner of one eye. He was dressed in a brown jacket and pants that blended into the forest when he stepped near the trunk of a tree. \"You've gained far more control than the last time I saw you.\"\n\nI looked past him, still staring into the distance. Was that somebody coming toward me? I could feel the power out there pressing upon me, and I couldn't help but wonder if I needed to keep moving so that I didn't have to deal with whatever Jerith might do.\n\nHaving Manuel here was a bit of a relief though. If nothing else, Manuel would offer me a level of protection. I could share with him what had been going on.\n\n\"I've been studying with Thomas Elaron,\" I said.\n\nManuel's gaze lingered on my hands, and I could feel something pushing on me. That had to be Jerith coming from behind me.\n\n\"Thomas?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Before you say anything, I know the rumors about him. I think he was on to something.\"\n\nManuel frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"He thinks the Djarn are responsible for stealing dragons.\"\n\n\"And you now think the same?\"\n\nI glanced past him again. \"I told you about the Djarn that surrounded me during my testing. And now I've found something, Manuel. There was a dragon held beneath the Academy.\"\n\nManuel frowned again. \"Why would there be a dragon there?\"\n\n\"That's just it. I don't really know. I detected something and went after it.\"\n\nManuel smiled slightly. \"You detected it?\"\n\n\"You don't have to believe me, but I found a dragon trapped in a room beneath the Academy and I freed him.\"\n\n\"You freed a dragon? You understand how that sounds, don't you?\"\n\nI hesitated, looking over to Manuel before shaking my head. \"It wasn't quite like that. I didn't free the dragon to release him. I freed the dragon from one of the instructors at the Academy. I think he was working on behalf of the Djarn.\" I held out the vase and Manuel looked at it. \"This is Djarn writing. I recognized it because I'd seen it back in Berestal. I told you about my friend's father who traded with the Djarn. Some of their items had writing like this on it.\"\n\nManuel held the vase for a moment before turning it, tracing his finger over the letters, then he handed it back to me. \"Are you sure about this?\"\n\n\"The only thing I'm sure about is what I've heard and found. There are other dragons throughout the city getting drained in the same way this one was.\"\n\nManuel pressed his lips together, frowning deeply. \"We need to alert the king.\"\n\n\"I think that was what Thomas tried to do, but when he did, the Sharath had argued with him about it.\" There was more pressure upon me, and it was getting closer. That meant whoever had captured the dragon\u2014maybe Jerith\u2014was getting near. \"Listen, Manuel. I don't know how much time we have left. I know there are other dragons in the city getting drained. When I overheard the conversation between who I think was Jerith\u2014\"\n\n\"Jerith? Jerith Isanth?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why?\"\n\nManuel turned, looking behind me; he whistled something softly and the mesahn went darting off into the forest. He turned back to me. \"Something isn't quite adding up,\" he said to me.\n\n\"I know, but I don't have much time. These other dragons are in danger.\"\n\n\"They're captured. That doesn't mean they're in danger.\"\n\n\"I think it does. I felt what was happening to this dragon\u2014the way power was pouring out of it and into the vase, as if they were trying to empty the dragon of its power. If they do that to the others, they'll destroy them.\" I looked over to Manuel, holding his gaze. \"There aren't that many dragons. They are a precious resource to the kingdom to keep us safe. If we have to deal with the Vard and now the Djarn\"\u2014and whomever Elaine had been working with\u2014\"we're going to need as many dragons as possible to defend the kingdom.\"\n\nManuel watched me for a long moment before shaking his head. \"I think you've learned more than just one thing in your time within the city,\" he said. \"Do you think you could find these dragons?\"\n\nI hadn't been able to before, though I'd looked.\n\nNow . . .\n\nI knew what that irritation felt like.\n\nThat was what I could follow.\n\n\"If they're within the city, I should be able to uncover them.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll go to the king, then. I'll report what you shared with me, and we can get ready for a possible attack.\"\n\n\"Be careful, Manuel. The Sharath seemed as if he were really against the idea of the Djarn being involved in any way, and it makes me wonder . . .\"\n\nManuel frowned at me slightly. \"What makes you wonder?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Nothing. I shouldn't have said anything.\"\n\n\"You really have learned a bit more in your time here.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Only that there are layers within politics. It's not always straightforward. You would do well to keep that in mind.\" He glanced behind him, muscles in his jaw clenching a moment. \"Get going. If you have only limited time, find these dragons and rescue them. We need to stop whatever is taking place.\"\n\n\"We need to stop the Djarn from attacking,\" I corrected him.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Manuel said. With that, he spun and started off before pausing and turning back to me. \"I'm going to need this.\" He grabbed the vase from me. \"The king is going to need to see this as proof.\"\n\nI nodded. \"Take it. I have to find others anyway.\"\n\nManuel left me, and I stood in the forest for a moment before realizing I no longer felt the pressure of Jerith pushing on me. I hadn't felt it ever since the mesahn had gone streaking off into the trees. Manuel had chased him away.\n\nI was tired from my night out with Natalie the night before, and could feel the other dragons, the faint fading energy that flowed out from them, leaving me with an awareness of how that power shifted, drawn toward the vase. I tried to pull it back, shoving it toward the other dragons, and realized I could control it, if only for a little while. It would take focus on my part, and doing so meant I would be limited in my other abilities.\n\nIt might be necessary though. For the dragons to maintain the strength they needed, I might need to continue my effort so they could withstand whatever was taking place. As I made my way through the forest, there was something more I thought I could do. I needed Thomas's help.\n\nThere was one way I could get it.\n\nHe might be distant, far too distant for me to reach, but not so much that I couldn't feel for his connection to the dragon. That was what I needed to latch on to, the power I needed to find. I could focus on his dragon as I had felt it before. Could I somehow signal to the dragon?\n\nMaybe I didn't have to. The other dragons could do that for me.\n\nI closed my eyes. His dragon was faint, distant from me. I imagined Thomas circling over the forest as he hunted for the Djarn. Using the connection I shared with the dragons, I let power flow out from me. It was a signal. Nothing more than that.\n\nThere was nothing else for me to do but wait. Get to the city. Figure out what I needed to do next. Find the other dragons. Trust that Manuel would reach the king and convince him.\n\nI reached the edge of the city, the dragon pens in the distance. The green dragon was there, pressed up against the bars of the pen, looking at me. There was almost something in his eyes that looked as if he understood what I was doing and what help I might need. If only I could release the green dragon to help me with my hunt, but I feared that if I did that, it would attract the wrong kind of attention.\n\nMy gaze was drawn to the Academy. I should be there, studying, working with others, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I needed to find these dragons\u2014and until I did, there was nothing else I was willing to do.\n\nI swept along the edge of the city, searching, but did not find anything. I worried that if I waited too long, there would be no time remaining. And yet, there was also the danger of not waiting long enough. There were others who could possibly cause a danger to me.\n\nAs the day progressed, I found myself drawn toward the Academy again. I headed through the halls, my heart hammering, and searched for any of the instructors who might provide me with answers, but I didn't find any. Every so often, I felt something far away from me.\n\nI needed to return to the dragon pen. That was where I had to go.\n\nI started toward the city and paused as I moved past the pen. Cara was there, one hand gripping the bars, another holding a small canister, power coming from her and going into one of the dragons. I marveled at the nature of the power that flowed out of her. I wasn't expecting her to be quite so potent with the dragons. When I had been around before, I had only known Brandel to be the one to have any sort of strength. This was more than what I had detected from Brandel, and certainly, more than I had detected from Cara in the past.\n\nIt was a surge of power, a pulsing of energy that seemed beyond what she was capable of. It rivaled what I had felt from most of the instructors at the Academy, for that matter. She should not have been able to call upon that much power.\n\nSomething was off.\n\nShe looked over at me, sneering as I jogged past her.\n\nThere came a surge from the green dragon that exploded within me, almost as if the dragon wanted me to turn back. When I did, I frowned. There was something wrong.\n\nThere was only Cara and the enormous power she commanded; it cycled out of her connected to a pale blue dragon resting on the ground, not far from the bars of the dragon pen, and then . . .\n\nThen there was a hiccup. A pause.\n\nThat was what the dragon wanted me to know about. He wanted me to be aware that something happened here. He needed for me to recognize Cara was responsible.\n\nI headed back toward her. \"What's going on, Cara?\"\n\nShe looked over to me, glaring. \"Mind your own business, Ashan.\"\n\nI looked through the bars of the pen, feeling the power coming off of the pale blue dragon, the way it poured through Cara then faded. It dissipated as she used it.\n\nStored.\n\n\"That's a beautiful dragon there,\" I said, looking at the pale blue dragon. \"Powerful, too.\"\n\n\"What do you know about it?\"\n\n\"I can feel it.\" I turned to her. \"Just like I can feel what you're doing.\"\n\n\"What exactly do you think I'm doing?\"\n\nI nodded to the blue dragon. \"Where is it?\"\n\nWhat I knew of Cara came back to me.\n\nShe, along with Brandel and several others, had trained with Elaine.\n\nThat had to matter.\n\nShe glowered at me. \"Where is what? Honestly, Ashan, you people from the Wilds are all alike. Ignorant.\"\n\nI forced a smile. \"Maybe. But I don't have to be that intelligent to feel what's going on here. You're doing something to the dragon.\"\n\nThe green dragon slipped over to the blue dragon, pressing up against him. I frowned, and I felt a surge of power coming through the green dragon, something that alerted me to what he wanted.\n\nTo connect to the blue dragon.\n\nDoing so would defuse the effort drawing on him, but then there was a real possibility that there would be more power coming off of this dragon and the yellow-scaled dragon. If the green dragon connected to the blue dragon, it might not only impact the latter, but the yellow-scaled dragon, as well. I looked around the dragon pen. There were five other dragons resting. About as many as usual.\n\nWould there be some way for me to connect to each of them?\n\nIf I could cycle those dragons, connecting that power in a way that allowed the dragons to link, then perhaps whatever Cara was doing wouldn't impact this one quite so much.\n\n\"Maybe we are all alike, but we have a respect for animals,\" I said.\n\n\"Respect. You do realize the dragons are tools of war? That's the whole purpose of us learning this magic. The king wants to use us. Wants to use the dragons. He wants to use power so that he can continue to expand the kingdom.\"\n\nI looked over to her, watching, and frowned. \"You say that as if you oppose it.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she said, still sneering at me. \"Honestly, Ashan. You really don't understand.\"\n\nI could feel the power fading from the blue dragon.\n\nWhatever Cara was doing was different than what Jerith had done. He had siphoned power off the dragon, but he hadn't pulled it off nearly as quickly. Whatever she was doing was rapid, and it drained the dragon far more quickly than it should. I could feel the way power poured off of the pale blue dragon, the way energy cycled out, held in whatever canister she had, and could practically see the dragon fading.\n\n\"You need to stop whatever you're doing,\" I said.\n\n\"What exactly do you think I'm doing?\" Cara asked, turning to me. \"I'm out here practicing with the dragons, testing my connection, no differently than you or any others have done. Now, if that is all?\"\n\nI opened my mouth to say something, but then realized Brandel and Dominic were approaching. I didn't like the idea of confronting Cara with them there.\n\nMore than that, I didn't know if I had time to linger too much longer.\n\nThere was something I could do.\n\nI focused on the pale blue dragon and formed a connection, adding that to the cycle of the others. The connection formed within me, finding the power that flowed from the green dragon, and sizzled as it stretched between the two of us. There was a burst of power and a flare of fast-fading heat; once it dissipated, I felt a resistance, but more than that, I began to feel the connection.\n\nThere came a brief surge of power coming off of the pale blue dragon, flowing out from him, and it joined with the others. Power stirred, and I began to draw off of what Cara held.\n\nI summoned energy and began to pull power out of whatever canister she used. I could feel Cara attempting to resist, but now that this dragon was connected to the others\u2014and me\u2014it flowed away from her, then disappeared altogether. She staggered back, frowning as she stared at the dragon.\n\n\"Is he bothering you?\" Brandel asked as he approached, looking over to Cara before sneering at me. \"Because if he is, I am supposed to report him to the instructors. Especially given his ties to Thomas Elaron.\"\n\nCara looked over. \"Go ahead. We should report him. He comes out here and demands to know what I'm doing with the dragon. I'm sure he intends to sneak more of the dragons off to wherever he is taking them.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I'm not doing anything.\" I could pull power off of what Cara held and didn't need to link the other dragons, though I wondered if I could. I turned my attention to a smoky gray dragon resting near the far corner of the pen. He had considerable power, which shimmered, though I was unable to connect to it directly.\n\nPower surged between me and the others, forming a connection. That energy built in a way that told me I could link to this dragon. Could I link to the others? I attempted to do so, but didn't know if I had time.\n\nBrandel stormed over to me. \"What do you think you're doing?\"\n\nI looked up at him. \"Practicing, the same as Cara told me she was doing.\"\n\n\"Are we really to believe that's what you're doing?\"\n\n\"You can believe it or not,\" I said. \"I don't really care.\"\n\nHe grinned at me. \"Don't you? You might care when you're brought for dragon justice.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I asked, irritation filling me. I needed to be careful with him, not challenge him, but Brandel irritated me. \"I have some credibility. I did reveal the presence of an infiltrator within the Academy. One I believe you worked with.\"\n\nBrandel frowned, and he glanced over to Cara before looking over to Dominic. \"That was you? You're the reason that Elaine was lost?\"\n\nBrandel approached, and there was a hint of power coming out of him, more than what I had detected before. It reminded me of what Cara had been doing. I could feel the way the energy was cycling out from him, circling away, and heading toward one of the dragons in the dragon yard. Rather than trying to connect to that dragon, I wondered if I could latch on to what he was doing.\n\nI attempted to draw power off him and it circled toward me, filling me.\n\nBrandel pulled on that power, resisting my attempt. He glared at me. \"You're making a big mistake here, Ashan.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I think you're the one making a mistake. What would your father think of what you're doing?\"\n\nMagic flared.\n\nThe power coming off of him was strong enough for me to feel the energy circling out from him, flowing in a way that was difficult for me to fully grasp. I had to limit it. The only way that I could think of limiting him from connecting to these dragons would be by linking them all together. I had to act quickly.\n\nI went from one to the other, adding them to the cycle of the dragon power, linking together as many of them as possible, and using that connection to bridge them so he couldn't reach their power. There came a surge, and suddenly the cycle that flowed through me was even more potent than it had been before.\n\nHe could no longer call on the dragons.\n\nHis jaw was locked in frustration and anger. He darted toward me, bringing his fist back in rage and slamming it into me. It was filled with power when it struck.\n\nHe was not much younger than me, and he had far more experience as a dragon mage than I did.\n\nI staggered back, crumbling to the ground. I hurriedly began to use the connection to the other dragons, letting that power cycle through and then out in a burst of uncontrolled power, which exploded into Brandel.\n\nHe was thrown back, landing near Dominic, who helped him to his feet, along with Cara.\n\n\"You're going to regret that.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I think I understand what's been going on with you.\"\n\nBrandel sneered. \"Do you?\"\n\nI knew Elaine had betrayed the Academy, but I still wasn't convinced she was Vard.\n\nAnd now I knew Brandel and Cara, at least, had a vessel\u2014similar to the one that I had found beneath the Academy\u2014that allowed them to draw upon the dragon power and store it. I was certain the writing on that vase was Djarn writing.\n\nA surge of power came through the green dragon. The circle of power that cycled between me and the other dragons was enormous now; considerable energy connected us. It distracted me, and I turned away from Brandel and Cara, focusing on the green dragon. As I did, I noticed something else.\n\nThe reason that the green dragon had triggered me.\n\nNot only did he want to alert me of something, but he wanted me to get moving.\n\nAt first, I wasn't sure why there was a sudden urgency. I should deal with Brandel and Cara and whoever else might be with them, but at the same time, there was something distant, faint and faded, some hint of power that called to me, warning me.\n\nI realized what it was.\n\nA dragon.\n\nNot just that, but a fading dragon. Power drained from it.\n\nThe irritation.\n\nIt was near enough that I could find it, but not if I waited much longer.\n\nA burst of power struck me, and yet, there came a surge from the green dragon that protected me, almost as if he did so instinctively.\n\nI looked over to Brandel, shaking my head. \"I'll deal with you later.\"\n\n\"You will deal with me now,\" Brandel said. \"Because I've about\u2014\"\n\nI turned away, ignoring him.\n\nThe faint energy coming off of the dragon persisted, but I knew it would soon disappear. I needed to find him now.\n\nBrandel called something out to me, but I ignored him. I focused instead only on the dragon and how to quickly find him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "I could faintly trace the dragon near the outskirts of the city on the westerly edge. I approached slowly and carefully, and found a dilapidated building that looked as if it had once been a tavern or an enormous home, but now was in a shambles. The stones on the outside of the building had cracked and fallen inward. It looked completely abandoned . . . which was exactly the kind of place where I would expect to find a dragon.\n\nI could feel the energy somewhere.\n\nI didn't know that I would be able to head beneath the ground the way I had in the Academy, not if it involved crawling underneath crumbling stone. I might be able to defend myself with a connection to the dragons, but I had to be careful.\n\nThe dragon continued to fade as I neared. I approached slowly, trying to connect to this dragon, but some aspect of it rebuffed my attempt.\n\nI stepped over the outer wall that shifted as I did. The stone felt as if it moved with my step. Once on the other side of the broken and cracked wall, I entered what appeared to be the main hall of this abandoned building. Windows let in faint light, and much like the outside of the building, vines crept up inside.\n\nI focused on the dragon, opening myself to it, following the steps I'd learned in my time at the Academy. As I did, I reached for power as quickly as I could until I felt it flowing.\n\nI was not far from him.\n\nI stepped forward. Then I slipped.\n\nI landed on the stone, which crumbled underneath my elbow.\n\nThat was strange. Why would the stone itself crumble so much?\n\nAs I got to my feet, I breathed in, noticing the faint stench in the air. It was a smoky sort of aroma, one of char\u2014and violence.\n\nDragon fire.\n\nThat was the reason for the stone degrading. The dragon\u2014held and trapped\u2014must have been struggling to get free the entire time. I moved through the building, slipping through a doorway, worried the wall would crash down around me, but thankful it did not.\n\nI found the dragon on the other side. It was small, shriveled, and weak looking.\n\nMuch like the one in the basement of the Academy, this dragon was chained. He barely raised his head as I approached, and when he eventually did, I realized that it wasn't a he but a she. There weren't that many female dragons. Certainly not enough that we could risk losing them.\n\nI had seen this dragon before. She had been within the dragon pen early on during my time at the Academy, but she was one of the dragons that had been absent for weeks. Possibly one of the earliest dragons to have gone missing.\n\nA small metal vase rested near her, power flowing out from her and into it.\n\nI crouched down next to her, touching her on the side. Her scales were cool, not holding the same heat I normally associated with the dragons. Normally, they were filled with enormous heat that exploded out from them.\n\nIn the case of this dragon, the energy within her was faint and fading.\n\n\"Let me see if I can help you,\" I whispered.\n\nShe lowered her head. There was a resigned look in her eyes, and some of the energy seemed to fade even more. I touched the cuffs around her legs, pushing power through them until they snapped open.\n\nShe still didn't move.\n\nI had to find a way to undo what had happened to her. The vase held much of her power. I lifted it, looking at the writing on it, reminded of the Djarn symbols upon it. It was much like the other one.\n\nI focused on the green dragon, feeling for the connection to the others. They were linked through me. I needed that power to go into this dragon. I needed to replenish her. I needed her to have added stores of energy.\n\nOnly . . . I also worried it wasn't going to be enough.\n\nI sent more power out from me, trying to link to her, to connect in a way that would fill her, give her the strength she needed to hold on to life, if only for another moment.\n\nWith more power flowing, I finally began to feel the connection form. It was slow\u2014much slower than when I'd connected to the other dragons before. Power surged through this dragon, linking me to her and to the others. The other dragons seemed to recognize her weakness, and power flowed from them, through me, and into her.\n\nNow that I was linked to her, I could feel the effect of that vase of power and held on to it, pulling more energy back and away from the container. It took everything in my being to do it.\n\nThe dragon raised her head, looking at me. There was a little bit more vibrancy in her eyes. Heat began to build along her scales.\n\n\"You're free. You can slip out from here, head back into the forest, and find one of the others.\"\n\nThe dragon rested there.\n\nMaybe she wasn't going to be able to get up quite yet. She was still faded and weak, and needed time to recover. She had suffered. Until she had a little bit more time and strength, she might not be able to get moving.\n\nI tried to let energy flow through me and into her, filling her with the power of the other dragons. Gradually, it worked. Strangely, I found I couldn't help as much as I had before. It took me a moment to realize why, but it was because of my connection to the other vase and this one. That required most of my focus.\n\nA surge came from the green dragon, followed by a flare of the now familiar irritation. It was a signal for me to keep looking.\n\nThis dragon would survive. I could feel she would survive. I needed to figure out how to undo what had happened to her, but until I did, I wasn't sure that I could do anything more for her.\n\nHow many had Jerith claimed they had? Five, if my memory served me.\n\nI had found two. That meant there were three more. Given what I had felt from this one, I needed to act quickly.\n\nCrawling over the stone and back out onto the street, I stood there, leaning up against the stone wall. Something shifted and the stone crumbled, crashing down behind me.\n\nI looked through the stone, but the rest of the structure stayed intact. Let the dragon get away when she could. The other dragons who were connected to her now could help her. I didn't know how they would summon her, but I believed they had some way of communicating to each other.\n\nI closed my eyes, focusing. That was how I was going to find the other dragons. I had to open myself up to them, find the distant energy of a dragon within the city where it didn't belong. When I did, then I could finish this.\n\nThe sense of it was faint, but I found one.\n\nI raced around the outer edge of the city. Power coming off of the dragon mixed with something else, which left me a little bit concerned. This one was fading, much like the female dragon I had just encountered. I wondered how long I had to find the remaining three. Perhaps less time than I had believed.\n\nI hurried through the city, racing as quickly as I could, passing shops and homes and the smaller buildings that existed on the outskirts of the city. People glanced in my direction, but none looked for too long. I hurried past them, panic driving me. I soon neared the source of that energy, finding it near a temple.\n\nThe temple was three stories tall, with two spires on either end. Vines grew along the sides, and I didn't see anybody coming in or out of it. Could it be abandoned like the last building?\n\nThe temple itself seemed intact, but I had to be cautious. I wasn't sure if the king's justice would extend to me violating the sanctity of one of the temples. That may put me in a different sort of trouble.\n\nI approached, walking around the outside of it. The grass was long and untrampled and the ground was fresh, no signs of anybody having come through here recently. I had to take the chance. What choice did I have if I believed the dragon was inside?\n\nStarting forward, I found an open window. I pushed it all the way open and looked behind me before scrambling inside. I landed in a cloud of dust, my feet thundering on the wooden floorboards.\n\nThe temple was an enormous open structure. Benches lined the interior, all angled toward an altar at one end. Dust covered everything. I focused on the energy of the dragon, straining to find the source, and detected it near the altar. Strange.\n\nSome aspect of power told me the dragon suffered.\n\nAs I neared, I found another chained dragon. This one was pale red and small, much like the female. Shriveled. A metallic vase rested just beyond the dragon's reach, and power cycled out of the dragon and into it.\n\nHow many dragons could I protect this way? There had to be a limit to how much power I could connect to\u2014and how much power the other dragons would be able to restore.\n\nThere came a surge from the green dragon, and I knew that he wanted me to help.\n\nI stepped forward, freeing the dragon from the chains around his ankles, and focused on him. His scales were cool, like the female dragon's. I connected to him and immediately felt the other dragons beginning to add power, buffering him. Power drifted out through him, into the vase, but I used what I had learned from the other dragons and interrupted that flow.\n\nThere were still two dragons.\n\n\"When you are strong enough, slip off into the forest,\" I said to the dragon.\n\nI climbed back out of the window, hurrying along the street, and closed my eyes, focusing on where to find another dragon. The energy had to be there. As I opened myself to that power, I could feel something out in the street, distant from me. It was north. Faint. It suggested to me that whatever dragon was out there would be suffering like the others.\n\nI was surprisingly tired\u2014I didn't feel that I had exerted myself all that much, but it was not so much a physical tired as it was a magical one. I was acutely aware of how I had separated the dragons' power from the vase, and it required me to maintain focus.\n\nThe source of the next dragon was in yet another abandoned building. It looked similar to the first one I'd found, and I stumbled through it, finding another chained dragon, medium-sized and red. I freed it before connecting to it and severing its connection to the vase, as I had with the others.\n\nWhen I was done, I took a seat. I needed to rest and recover, but I had to finish this. After sitting for a while, I got to my feet. I rested my hand on the red dragon, feeling the warmth of his scales. There was something about this one that pushed outward, an urgency that joined with the urgency I felt from the green dragon, whom I was most connected to.\n\n\"I don't know what else I'm supposed to do,\" I muttered.\n\nThe green dragon was there, adding a hint of power to me, as if to try to reassure me. It did little. Even if I were to find the other dragon, I worried I wouldn't be strong enough to sever its connection to the vase.\n\nThe green dragon surged again.\n\nIt was a prompting, an urgency that suggested to me the dragon wanted me to do this. Even if it meant I expended everything within myself, I had to do it.\n\nI got to my feet, wobbling for a moment.\n\nThe dragons cycled power through me and something shifted. I grew stronger.\n\nI hadn't expected the dragons to be able to strengthen me in the same way that they strengthened each other.\n\nI staggered out of the building, standing in the street, looking up at the sky. The sun was starting to set. There was at least one more dragon. I closed my eyes, opening myself up to the power of the dragons. I could feel the four I'd helped. Surprisingly, I realized they were on the perimeter of the city\u2014north, west, east, south.\n\nThe fifth one would be somewhere else.\n\nI carried the three vases with me and found them unwieldy, difficult for me to manage. I shifted them in my arms, clutching them up against my chest, straining to feel for the power of the last dragon I needed to help.\n\nI could feel something.\n\nNot the dragons near the dragon pen, and not the dragons that had drifted out of the city, moving off into the forest. I could feel those, which surprised me. There was even an awareness of Thomas's dragon. He was still distant, though closer than before. Maybe he would come in time. I tried to send a bit more of a connection to that dragon, wanting to signal to Thomas that he was needed, but I didn't know whether it would be received the way I needed it to be.\n\nI felt the remaining dragon near the center of the city.\n\nMy breath caught.\n\nThere was only one other place I could think of.\n\nThe palace. That had to be the location of the final dragon. That had to be where I felt the pulling of that dragon. And yet if so, it meant that the city\u2014and the kingdom\u2014was in far more trouble than I had realized."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Fatigue threatened to overwhelm me as I raced through the streets. I clutched the vases to my chest, feeling the way the energy rolled through them. There was power flowing from the dragons, connecting to me, and out toward these vases. There was not nearly as much of a draw as there had been, though, and as I felt that power flowing through the vases, I thought it had dispersed a little bit. At least enough that I began to feel as if the injured dragons would recover.\n\nEvery so often, I focused on the power I detected in the distance. My tiredness made it difficult for me to pay attention to anything as I breezed past buildings, noticing them as little more than a blur. Every so often, there came a pulse of power that came off of the green dragon as if he wanted to fill me with even more energy. It wasn't enough.\n\nI had poured too much into these other dragons, but more than that, I had linked to these other dragons. That pulled power out of me as much as it did out of them. If I didn't correct it, and if I didn't figure out how to disconnect from what had happened, I wasn't sure I could survive.\n\nGet to the palace. Find the dragon. Free him.\n\nThose thoughts stayed within me, a chant as I ran.\n\nThe walls of the palace loomed into view and I started to slow; they looked to be a seamless stone and vines crept along their surface, though it was not the walls nor the vines that drew my attention most of all. It was the energy that I could feel coming off of the palace\u2014something in front of me. It was the power, but more than that, it was the fear of what I must do. I clutched the vases against me, holding on to them as carefully as I could, and regarded the wall. It was late, a growing darkness sweeping over the city making it so that I couldn't see much other than the shadowed form of the wall's outline. I didn't know how I was going to get into the palace.\n\nThe faint sense of the dragon started to flicker. It was fading.\n\nI had to get inside and figure out where the dragon was. Then I had to somehow link the dragon to the others to restore it. Finally, I would have to figure out what to do with these vases and what it meant that this power continued to flow out of the dragons and into the vase.\n\nOne thing at a time.\n\nI circled around the wall and faced a pair of guards standing there. I didn't have much in the way of options. They looked at me, watching me with darkened expressions that seemed even darker because of the night's shadows. I tried to smile, but knew it did nothing to disarm them.\n\n\"I just need to get in and see . . .\"\n\nWhom?\n\nI wasn't entirely sure, and I didn't know who might be able to help me when I did get inside. At this point, it was possible that I couldn't truly trust anybody. The Sharath had no interest in working with me, given his affinity for the Djarn and my concern that the Djarn were involved. And Thomas wasn't here\u2014the only other person who had any interest in trying to help.\n\nThe king. That was whom I needed to go to. Would he even see me?\n\nI had to try.\n\n\"I need to see the king,\" I finished.\n\n\"The king isn't accepting any visitors,\" the nearest soldier said.\n\n\"I'm working with Thomas Elaron\u2014\"\n\nThat was a mistake. As soon as I said Thomas's name, the soldiers started to tense and reached for their swords.\n\nI reacted, drawing upon the power of the dragons, using what I could considering how weak and tired I felt, creating a band that swept out. I nearly dropped the vases as I attempted to loop around the two soldiers. I jerked on the band of power, and they went stumbling.\n\nWhat was I doing?\n\nI raced through the gate. I had to ignore their shouts\u2014there was no point in acknowledging the cries\u2014and now that I had committed to this plan of action, I had to go through with it. I had no idea if they would have other soldiers on the inside of the wall that could come after me, but I had to hurry.\n\nI ran as quickly as I could, racing along the courtyard leading up to the main part of the palace. Once I reached it, I knew there would be dragon mages\u2014powerful ones, given what I had seen of them before.\n\nI focused on the energy of the dragon I detected. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was the same dragon I had detected when I had been here before. At that time, I'd been convinced that it was tied to some power that the dragon mages were using.\n\nI neared the entrance to the palace. There was a single dragon mage dressed all in black. I could feel the connection to the dragon, though strangely\u2014and perhaps surprisingly\u2014it was a different connection than what I had expected. This was a connection that felt more like the power coming out of the vase than the power somebody might call from one of the dragons in the dragon pens.\n\nHe frowned at me. Heat began to build from him as I approached. His gaze dropped to the vases, and I could swear there was a spark of recognition.\n\nI reacted. I demanded the power of all of the dragons I had connected to and sent it at him in a burst of heat and flame. It struck him and he deflected some, but not all, of it, and was tossed off to the side where he slammed up against the wall.\n\nI staggered forward. I was tired and didn't know how much longer I could hold out. Just a little bit more. The king needed to know what was taking place. The king needed to know that the Djarn had somehow infiltrated his palace. The king needed to know . . .\n\nI felt something coming behind me.\n\nI hurried forward into the palace.\n\nThe light from dozens of lanterns illuminated its entrance, and I looked around, my gaze skimming past marble, sculptures, portraits, and all the other trappings of the kingdom's wealth. I couldn't keep my eye on them for too long, knowing that if I were to do so, I would ignore what I came here for.\n\nFind the dragon. Rescue the dragon. Finish this, and then go to the king.\n\nI could feel the pulling of the dragon. As before, it came from deep beneath the palace. Though I had been aware of it when I had come here before, I hadn't known the source of it. Now that I stood here, feeling that energy rolling through me, I recognized it was below.\n\nI had known before. I had even commented on it to Thomas.\n\nI had to find a way down.\n\nThere would be a staircase.\n\nI stopped in the middle of the hall, pressure starting to build against me, and I felt heat that suggested the coming dragon mage\u2014or mages. There was something about the dragon mage I'd encountered outside of the palace that left me uncomfortable. That wasn't how a dragon mage connected to the power of the dragons.\n\nThe dragon continued to fade, and there was a surge of urgency coming from the other dragons I'd connected to. I searched through the inside of the palace, trying to ignore the thundering of my own heart, the quick breathing in my lungs, and everything within me that told me to turn away. What was I thinking?\n\nThis was not a fight I could have anything to do with. This was not a fight I should have anything to do with.\n\nThis was dangerous.\n\nThe sense of a dragon called me forward, though, and I was helpless to ignore it. I didn't know if I were pushed toward it because of my own desire to help or because of the dragons I was connected to. Either way, there was energy, and that energy filled me, guiding me and flowing from me.\n\nThere was a staircase, though it was narrow. I raced over to it and started down. The stairs spiraled around, seeming to squeeze closer together. If this did bring me down to the dragon, I couldn't help but wonder how the dragon would have ended up down here.\n\nI had to keep going. I had to get as far as I could. I had to find some way. I had to\u2014\n\nThere.\n\nThe stairs ended. In the distance, I detected the fading energy of a dragon, the heat coming off of it, and the fading energy that seemed to call to me. There were flickering lights up ahead, either from lanterns or the dragon itself. If they were from the dragon, the flickering suggested that whatever power the dragon had would soon be gone.\n\nI stumbled, slipping over something, and looked down to see a body.\n\nIt took my tired mind a moment to recognize what I saw.\n\nI stepped back, putting the light behind me, and stared.\n\n\"Manuel?\"\n\nManuel had come to warn the king. Why would he be here?\n\nI crouched next to him, then reached out and checked his neck. He was still breathing, and he still had a pulse. When I touched him, he moaned softly, stirring and looking up at me before his eyes closed again.\n\nMy heart hammered.\n\nWhat was I falling into?\n\nI had to keep going.\n\nNot only because of Manuel, but also because of the dragon and what I felt coming from him. He needed my help.\n\nI raced toward him. I could feel a pulling power, but there was the same pause in power that I'd felt before, something that suggested an injury to him. Then I saw the dragon.\n\nThe hallway opened into a massive chamber, its wall sloping to a roof that stretched high overhead. How was this place situated beneath the palace? It seemed impossible. It was enormous, as if this would rival the palace itself. There was an energy here, as well, and it did not take long for me to find its source.\n\nSituated in the center of the chamber was a dragon larger than any within the dragon pens. It was an enormous, black-scaled dragon, curled up, his head resting along his side, his tail wrapped around its body. Massive spikes protruded along the length of his torso. As I approached, I didn't feel any sense of heat or energy coming off of him.\n\nThe dragon faded.\n\nA faint scratching sound caught my attention.\n\nI moved closer to the dragon and stumbled again, pressing my hand up against his cool side. As I did, I focused, feeling for the connection of the others, and the power that surged out of them as it flowed to me. The other dragons pushed through me, channeling my connection, and formed a bond to this one. It cycled through no differently than the others had cycled. That power struck the dragon. In this case, I was not in control.\n\nHeat started to build within the dragon. There was another vase. All I had to do was interrupt that flow of power. I found it, though rather than sitting off to the side like it had been with the other dragons, this time the interruption seemed to be directly beneath the dragon.\n\n\"You're going to need to move,\" I whispered. There was still the issue of the soft scraping sound I had heard. I had no idea where that had come from, only that it had to be nearby.\n\nThe dragon didn't move.\n\n\"I'm going to need you to get up,\" I urged. \"If you don't, I'm not sure I can\u2014\"\n\nThe scraping sound came again.\n\nIt was a strange draw of power, though it wasn't the same kind of power I detected from a dragon mage. This was similar to what I had detected outside of the palace. It was a loop of energy, though surprisingly, it didn't connect to any dragon.\n\nNot even the dragon directly in front of us.\n\nA figure appeared in front of me and began to glow with energy. I tried to hold on to the power of the dragons, but I didn't have nearly enough strength.\n\nI was tired\u2014I had been helping the dragons and linking them to my cycle, and the dragons themselves had been pulling upon my own energy. I was just as much a part of that cycle as they were, and because of it, I could no longer fight. I would fail here.\n\n\"Look at this,\" the voice said. There was a familiar quality to it. I had heard it before. It took me a moment to realize where.\n\nWhen I did, I started to get to my feet, still clutching the vases against me. It probably didn't matter. The figure approaching had a vase of his own. The one I had given to Manuel.\n\n\"The little apprentice.\"\n\nI recognized the voice from the exchange with Jerith, when they were talking about the dragon. At the time, I hadn't known who it was. Now I did.\n\nDonathar.\n\n\"I know what you and Jerith were planning.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Jerith has his uses. Just like the Djarn have their uses.\" He looked down at the vase. \"I wouldn't have learned about this particular technique had I not spent as much time there as I had. I had to coerce the king into sending me as an envoy, but thankfully he believed the Djarn needed one. Much like others thought the Vard needed one.\" He laughed. \"Because of what I uncovered, we will have found the key to what we intend to do.\"\n\n\"It's not going to matter,\" I said. \"I helped the dragons.\"\n\nHe tapped on the vase he held. I noticed a surge of energy, and something shifted. There was a drawing of power that came off of me, siphoned from me. \"Oh. I'm well aware. I've felt what you've been doing. At first, I didn't know what it meant, but I now realize you were helping.\"\n\nHad I been helping? I had been rescuing the dragons, connecting them so they could . . .\n\nNo.\n\nI'd made a mistake. I'd not only saved the dragons, but I'd linked them with others. With the vases, and a way of controlling the power within it, Donathar could use the power of a dozen dragons\u2014all of whom I had attempted to control and connect to with the intention of saving and protecting them.\n\nDonathar grinned at me. \"You see, don't you.\" His face contorted in a sneer. \"Soon it won't matter. And look. You've brought each of them to me. I thought I was going to have to use the primary vessel to call upon the power of the other vessels, but you've saved me the need to do so.\" He grinned at me again. \"I will take the vessels now.\"\n\n\"You aren't going to have them,\" I said.\n\n\"I think you are mistaken.\"\n\nA surge of energy built from him and slammed outward, cascading toward me. It took everything in my being to try to shift the call of power, but as I attempted to do so, cycling that energy through me, using the energy I felt within the vase, I could feel that he had a greater control over it.\n\n\"What do you intend to do with us?\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Once I have control over this power, then the city\u2014and the king\u2014are an easy thing to conquer. How do you think this city was conquered?\"\n\nHe intended to overthrow the king.\n\nNot Vard.\n\nNot Djarn.\n\nSomething else. Like Elaine.\n\nI needed to stall him while I attempted to figure out if there were some way for me to connect to the dragons that would make a difference. While I already had a connection to them, it didn't seem strong enough to conquer Donathar's actions.\n\n\"You're not with the Djarn, are you?\"\n\nDonathar took a step toward me, grinning. Power flowed from him, and I did everything to resist his hold over me. It was a battle\u2014one I didn't think I could win.\n\n\"The Djarn? They have their uses, but their use is more in the unique connection they have to these creatures.\" He glanced over to the dragon, and power began to fade from it once again. With much more time, the dragon would fade altogether. \"It took me a long time to piece together the key. They thought to intervene, but their devices only delayed us a short time.\"\n\nCould that have been what Joran's father had brought to the city?\n\nDonathar would have known if there were Djarn here, but someone not of their people might have been able to get through.\n\n\"The king had me working with the Djarn. Can you imagine what it's like to live among those savages?\" He shook his head. \"Far easier to understand the rationale for overthrowing them.\"\n\nI frowned. \"It's not the Vard either. You're with whomever Elaine worked with.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Interesting that you would be the one to reach that conclusion. It doesn't matter. We've infiltrated far more than any will ever know.\"\n\n\"Whom are you with?\"\n\n\"We work in the shadows. They'll never see it until it's too late.\"\n\nPower continued to cycle out from me and I struggled to hold on to the energy. I could feel each of the dragons, but each time power circled, all of it ended up drifting into the vases, which made it even harder to hold on to.\n\nThe dragons would fade. Not only the dragons that had initially connected to the vases, but other ones. The yellow-scaled dragon. The dragons within the dragon pen. The green dragon I had rescued.\n\nAll of them would be claimed by him and whomever he worked with.\n\nAll of them would be used to overthrow the kingdom.\n\nI couldn't find any way to separate him from the pull of power. He was too strong.\n\nHe had connected to the vases. Somehow, that was the key. He used that power in a way I could not.\n\nBut why couldn't I?\n\nI could feel the power flowing through and coming out of the vases\u2014and the way he drew on that energy.\n\nIt flowed through me, as well.\n\nWhich meant it flowed through him.\n\nIt was a cycle of power between the two of us. I had formed it unintentionally, building it over time, but that cycle seemed to matter\u2014only I didn't know what to make of it. Energy continued to spill out of him, and I changed my approach.\n\nRather than trying to pull upon the power, and trying to regain control, I did something different. I started to focus on him. If I could affect Donathar\u2014if I could find a way to somehow drain his power into the vase, as mine had been\u2014I could possibly mitigate his advantage.\n\nI worked through my lessons, realizing that they had been taught to me by Jerith, one who had intended to overthrow the king, but they were still useful despite that. I called power to me, focusing on my breathing and the heat within me\u2014that knowing energy that made it feel as if I had swallowed smoldering coals\u2014then relaxed.\n\nI opened myself to that power.\n\nThe dragons flowed through me. That was easy. They had always flowed through me. I connected to their energy and felt for something more. I felt for Donathar. He was a part of the cycle, whether he wanted to be or not. There was no way for him to reach for the power of the dragons without completing the cycle. For him to use these vases, and for him to use the dragons against me, he had to be a part of that cycle.\n\nWhich meant I could influence that.\n\nThere. I could feel him. I began to focus on his connection to the cycle, and the way he was bound within it, and started to shift his flow of power.\n\nI did it subtly. It wasn't something I even fully understood. All I knew was that I was using a bit of power that seemed familiar to me, power that came from the dragons, and guidance that came from them as well.\n\nAll along, I'd wondered whether the dragons had some way of communicating. Perhaps they couldn't speak\u2014though I wasn't at all convinced they couldn't\u2014but they could communicate with me through their connection to power. I just had to be open to it and acknowledge that power. As the energy flowed, I recognized what the dragons were doing and how they guided me. They showed me what needed to happen, sending power sweeping into the vase.\n\nThat power was what I needed to control, what I needed to hold on to\u2014and what I could use.\n\nI started to push it into the vase.\n\nAt first, Donathar didn't seem to know what I was doing. He grinned at me, and I realized he had still been talking. I had been so focused on trying to connect to the dragon energy that I had ignored what he said.\n\n\"Thomas is coming,\" I said.\n\nI needed to delay him. I didn't know what else I might say to him in order to do so.\n\n\"Thomas has gone in search of the Djarn. He's been convinced that they intend to attack.\"\n\n\"Because of you.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I can't deny that. It's been far too useful for me to convince him of that. Much like convincing the king to chase the Vard has served our purposes.\"\n\n\"Thomas is on his way back to the capital. It won't be long before he returns.\"\n\nPower flowed out of him. Before long, he would overwhelm me with it.\n\n\"You have some potential. I can understand why he wanted to work with you. Had you some more time to experience your connection, perhaps you might have understood what needed to be done, but unfortunately . . .\"\n\nHe continued calling power, and it continued to flow out from him, drawing off of me as well. Here I thought I could use what I knew about the dragons and the connection between them\u2014that I could summon that power so I could prevent him from surging energy\u2014but he was far too skilled.\n\nWhat had Thomas said about that though?\n\nThe Academy believed skill mattered more than strength.\n\nThere was an element of skill that was important. I didn't know nearly what I needed to about the power of the dragons, and perhaps I might not learn it quickly enough.\n\nWhat I had was strength.\n\nI could feel it burning within me. That strength was what had drawn Thomas to me, what had drawn the green dragon to me, and what allowed me as an older student to have success in the Academy, where I was not meant to thrive.\n\nThat was what I needed to draw upon.\n\nI could use that. I had the strength necessary to do what needed to be done. I had the necessary power. All I had to do now was open myself to it, feel that energy, and let it flow into me.\n\nAnd I had to stop him.\n\nIt wasn't so much a matter of knowing more than him. He had knowledge. What I had was a connection to the dragons, which granted me strength. I had formed this cycle. There was ownership to it, and that ownership mattered.\n\nI focused on the green dragon. He was the first one I added to the cycle. I moved on to the golden-scaled dragon, and then with each dragon I focused upon, the cycle formed within me more solidly. Finally, I worked through the captured dragons that I had added to the cycle, and then to Donathar\u2014the last part of the cycle.\n\nThen I forced his energy through the vase. I made sure his power went in and what was in the vase came out and to me. That was how the cycle formed, and that was how I could command it.\n\nHe gasped, his eyes going wide.\n\nI dropped the other vases I held and darted toward him, but he reacted. He started to call upon power, though even as he did, I forced more of it into the vase, confining his own energy.\n\n\"You're a part of this as well,\" I said.\n\nHe glared at me. \"Do you think you can hold me?\"\n\nI grunted. \"No.\"\n\nI could still feel something though. There was a new sense of energy nearby.\n\nIt seemed to hurry down the stairs, and suddenly Donathar turned toward it.\n\nHe tried to grasp for the power of the dragons, attempting to wrest control over the cycle from me, but he could not. I had that control. I maintained it. And I made certain to hold onto it, ensuring I trapped that energy here.\n\nI could feel something moving, energy flowing, and I raised my head slightly, turning in the direction of the staircase.\n\nWhen I did, my heart skipped.\n\nI didn't know if I was saved\u2014or doomed.\n\nThomas arrived, the king one step behind him, dressed in a flowing gray gown. The Sharath was with him and his gaze lingered on me before turning to Donathar.\n\n\"What is this?\" the king demanded.\n\n\"It's this student,\" Donathar said quickly. \"I caught him down here. He's been working with Thomas, as you suspected, and has attempted to use the power of the dragons to overthrow you.\"\n\nThe king turned his attention to me. \"Is that true?\" He glanced past me, looking to the three vases now resting at my feet.\n\nIt looked bad. I knew it did.\n\n\"I caught him here,\" I said. \"I felt dragons throughout the city. Dragons that were injured. And then there was this dragon,\" I said, stepping off to the side and motioning to it.\n\nThomas gasped. \"There you are,\" he whispered.\n\nI frowned. \"There who is?\"\n\nThomas nodded. \"This was the very first dragon I bonded to.\" He glanced over to the king. \"This is why you accused me?\"\n\n\"There was an energy signature that suggested your responsibility,\" the king said. \"I didn't want to believe it, which is why I gave you the opportunity to prove yourself.\"\n\n\"It's Donathar. There are others involved. One of the instructors at the Academy. I'm sure you came across Manuel in the hallway. He's injured and needs help\u2014\"\n\n\"He's already had the help he needs,\" the Sharath said.\n\nManuel appeared out of the darkness and stepped into the hall. The king turned to him.\n\nI was fading.\n\nIf Donathar took control of this power, I didn't know what would happen.\n\nCould he overwhelm Thomas? The king?\n\nProbably.\n\nI strained.\n\nI had to hold it.\n\nOnly a little longer . . .\n\n\"Well?\" the king asked Manuel.\n\nManuel glanced from me to Donathar, and finally to the dragon. \"He speaks the truth.\"\n\nThe king frowned. \"Which one?\"\n\n\"Ashan. Donathar attacked me.\"\n\nWith that, Donathar suddenly surged, and he again tried to wrest control of the dragon cycle from me.\n\nI resisted.\n\nPower from the cycle filled me, but I couldn't fully control it.\n\nI created a looping band of flame, sending it sweeping toward him.\n\nHe pulled through the cycle, trying to steal power from me.\n\nWith more time, he might succeed, but a thought had occurred to me. I wasn't strong enough to withstand him, but I didn't have to be.\n\nI pushed him back.\n\nI had enough strength for that.\n\nHe stumbled, landing near the dragon.\n\nAll I'd wanted was to knock him over and give me time. Nothing more than that.\n\nInstead, the dragon did something unexpected.\n\nHe lifted his head, more movement than I'd seen from him in the time he'd been here, and he snapped up Donathar in his massive jaws, ripping him in half with one sharp movement and a spray of blood across the ground.\n\nDonathar cried out but was quickly silenced.\n\nThe power in the cycle flashed\u2014then it poured into me as control over the cycle came free of Donathar's influence.\n\nThe dragon belched out a hint of flame, settling his head back to the ground.\n\nIt all happened so fast that I had no idea how to react.\n\nThe king just grunted. \"Well. That settles that.\" He nodded to me. \"Deal with this, all of you.\" He nodded to Thomas, then to the Sharath, and finally paused on Manuel, leaning in and whispering something to him before leaving. I sank to the ground, exhaustion striking me, and drifted off without meaning to."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "When I woke, I was resting near the massive black-scaled dragon, still in the lower chamber beneath the palace. I was still tired, and everything within me seemed to throb. Power continued to stream off of me, leaving me fading. Whatever was happening meant that energy drew off of me in a way I couldn't completely control.\n\nI sat up, looking over to see the dragon watching me. The power cycling through me and through the vases continued, and it was more than what I could command.\n\n\"You will have to work with me.\"\n\nI looked over to see a familiar face. It took me a moment to process what I was seeing. \"Natalie?\"\n\nShe scooted closer, collecting the four vases and nodding. \"You're going to have to work with me.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nI looked toward the tunnel. \"I mean, what are you doing here? In the palace?\"\n\nShe smiled slightly. The light in the room was dim, only a few lanterns casting a flickering glow, and even that seemed to shift and shimmer every so often. \"I told you my family moved around.\"\n\n\"You did.\"\n\n\"It was because of my father's posts.\"\n\n\"Your father . . .\" I frowned, thinking about something I had overheard the Sharath say about moving around in his service to the kingdom. It fit with what Natalie had described. \"He's the Sharath.\"\n\nShe nodded slowly. \"He is.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"There wasn't any reason to tell you before.\"\n\n\"Were you sent to watch me?\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Not you. I was sent to watch Thomas. My father doesn't care for him that much. Then when the dragons started disappearing, I was to keep an eye on them.\"\n\n\"He's not the one responsible.\"\n\n\"I know. My father knows that now, too.\" She looked up at me, holding her gaze for a moment. \"I'm going to need you to help me.\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I asked.\n\n\"I need you to help me with this so we can release the dragons' energy from here.\" She pulled one of the vases in front of her before moving so that they could all be situated in front of her. I sat up, crossing my legs and watching her. \"If we don't release the energy, the dragons will suffer. Eventually . . .\"\n\n\"Eventually, they're going to fade,\" I said.\n\nShe nodded. \"Unfortunately, I think they would. Do you think you can help?\"\n\n\"What do you need from me?\"\n\n\"What I need is for you to focus on what you can feel from the dragons, and I need you to work with me to help release the power in each of these vases. It's not going to be easy.\"\n\n\"How is it that you're the one doing this?\" I looked toward the distant stairs. Where was Thomas? Manuel? The Sharath?\n\n\"They thought it might be easier for the two of us to do this, given our friendship. Besides, it seems as if the Academy has some accounting to do with those who might have infiltrated it. You told Thomas there was an instructor working with the Vard.\"\n\nI nodded. \"He was.\"\n\n\"Considering that, and what you encountered on your way to the city, I think the king wants tighter control over the Academy. It means Thomas will need to have a firmer hand in its running.\"\n\n\"There were some students, as well.\"\n\n\"I'm sure there were,\" she said.\n\nThere was something about what I had seen from Brandel and Cara that wasn't quite right. I would have to talk to Thomas about it. Elaine's influence. Donathar's attack. They believed the Vard were involved, but I knew better.\n\nOnly, those who could speak the truth were dead.\n\n\"Why is it that our friendship would make this easier?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because it involves something you must have felt with all of this. There is a certain connection required.\"\n\n\"The cycle.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Perhaps. Others might call it something different. It is the connection that formed from the dragons to these vessels.\"\n\n\"I tried to separate the dragons from them, but it didn't work.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It probably wouldn't. You have to know the key.\" She traced her finger over the writing on one of the vases and turned to look at me. \"I need you to hold on to the energy that you control from the dragons. Focus on holding it within you. It's going to be painful, Ashan. I wish there were another way, but for us to separate the dragons from the vessel, the power flowing into it needs to be stored somewhere else.\"\n\n\"You want to store it within me.\"\n\n\"You need to break the connection. Do you think you can do it?\"\n\nI nodded. I didn't know what choice I had, anyway. I had to somehow figure out how to hold that power inside. As I thought about it and what it would require, I didn't know if I had the necessary strength to do so. I had to try though. For the dragons, and for all of them that had suffered, I had to try.\n\n\"Just let me know when you're ready,\" she said.\n\n\"I think I am.\"\n\n\"Good. Now, you should be able to feel the power within this vessel. When you do, I want you to pull it to you, but don't draw more through it. Does that make any sense?\"\n\nI nodded. \"I think I can do that.\"\n\nShe smiled at me. \"Good. Now go ahead.\"\n\nAs I stared at the vase, I frowned. I thought about everything I had seen with Natalie and the dragons, and the way that she had been watching.\n\nObserving closely. Carefully.\n\nAlmost too carefully.\n\nShe had a connection to the dragons. She had to.\n\nBut even as I watched her, I didn't see anything from her that suggested she did, certainly nothing on her face that would reveal that to me.\n\n\"If you understand it, and if you have a connection to the dragons, you can do it too.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, it would only complicate things.\" She looked up at me, smiling. \"Anyway. I think you can do this.\"\n\nI started pulling the power from the vase to me. Rather than letting that power cycle through to the other dragons, I held on to it. As I did, I thought about what Donathar had done.\n\nI glanced over to the dragon, still resting. I chuckled.\n\n\"What is it?\" Natalie asked.\n\n\"Just what happened to Donathar.\"\n\nShe looked over to the dragon, frowning. \"I understand the dragon ate him.\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"That is troubling.\"\n\nOther than losing his testimony about the truth of the attack, Donathar's death didn't bother me. \"He was trying to use power he shouldn't have been using. The dragon was only protecting himself.\"\n\n\"I don't know if it was necessary though,\" she said, watching the dragon.\n\nI didn't know if I agreed. At this point, having Donathar gone was probably the best outcome. I turned my attention back to the vase, pulling power through it. Energy filled me and I held on to it. While this was happening, Natalie did something. She traced her fingers along the vase. As I stored that energy within me, I felt it solidify. It lingered.\n\n\"Hold it,\" she said.\n\nShe continued to trace her fingers along the vase. I held on to the power as best as I could as the vase emptied. \"I don't know how much longer I can hold on to it,\" I said.\n\nShe flicked her gaze up. \"It's almost done.\"\n\nShe did something I couldn't see. My focus was on the power within the vase, trapping it inside of me. I kept it stored deep within me until there came a burst. Then I could feel how I was separated from the vase. It was no longer a part of the cycle.\n\nI released the power and it cycled back to the other dragons.\n\n\"Did you feel that change?\" she asked, looking up at me.\n\n\"I did. It was . . . interesting.\"\n\n\"Interesting and not painful?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"It didn't feel painful.\"\n\nShe flashed a smile. \"Good. We have a few more to do.\"\n\nWe went one at a time. With each vase that we released, the power returning to the dragons, something shifted within the cycle. All of the dragons started to feel stronger. I started to feel stronger. It became easier for me to hold on to power.\n\nWhen it was all done, she glanced over to the large black dragon. \"Only one more.\"\n\n\"I never saw that one.\"\n\n\"Few people have,\" she said softly.\n\nShe stood, going off to the dragon, and whispered something. The dragon got up and moved to the side of the room, the shadows shifting as he did. When he was gone, I saw a circular, opaque item set into the floor. It reflected some of the light around us, but I couldn't make much else out about it.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"That is the last one you have to release the dragons from. It's an old vessel. One of the oldest. It has long been used to keep this place safe. I don't know how Donathar learned it was here. He should not have known about it. More than that, he should not have been able to access it.\"\n\nI crouched down next to it. It was strangely milky looking and seemed to shift colors a bit. I could feel power within it\u2014dragon power cycling through, which I now had a connection to. All of that seemed important, only I wasn't sure why.\n\n\"Why does the king have it here?\"\n\nShe looked over to me, holding my gaze for a moment.\n\nI frowned and glanced down, looking at the other vessels. What had we believed about them? That they were from the Djarn, assumed because of the writing on the exterior\u2014Djarn writing. Which meant . . .\n\n\"This is a Djarn relic,\" I said.\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"And you knew about it. More than that, you know how to release that power from a Djarn vessel.\" I held her gaze, and to Natalie's credit, she didn't look away. \"Which means you're one of the Djarn.\"\n\nGrab the next book in the Cycle of Dragons series: The Lost Dragon.\n\nThe cycle of dragons has changed Ashan. Now he must use it to save the kingdom.\n\nAfter stopping two attacks on the kingdom, Ashan yearns to master his connection to the dragons and finally serve as a dragon mage. He has connected to a cycle of dragons, but he's still only a student and doesn't understand what it truly means to be a dragon mage.\n\nWhen word spreads about Vard movement near his homeland, Ashan learns a terrifying truth about the Vard and the devastating steps the king will take to stop them. Worse, he's the only one who believes that more than the Vard are involved. He needs to find proof, but this time his cycle of dragons might not be enough.\n\nIf he can't stop the attack, not only will his family and friends suffer, but he'll lose the dragons and the kingdom will be destroyed."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Ragond's Portal War 1) Dragon Link",
        "author": "Ava Richardson",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Author: Ava Richardson; Tags: dragons, Genre: fantasy",
                "text": "She wanted a home and adventure\u2014but instead found danger.\n\nFor sixteen-year-old Nova Harris, the last nine years in Florida have been a constant stream of disappointment. With her father dead and her mother missing, she's been shuffled from one foster home to another. The only connection Nova has to happier times is the strange dragon pendant that makes her yearn to reunite with her mother and have a family again. A yearning that seems like nothing more than a childish dream.\n\nUntil a dragon lands at her feet\u2014and offers to help find her mother.\n\nBefore they know it, Nova and her best friend Zephyr are whisked through a portal to Ragond, a realm sustained by magic. Though Nova has no memory of this land, the fantastical inhabitants are well aware of her parents. Because of her family, in fact, Nova is invited to participate in the upcoming dragon rider trials, and Zephyr in the witch trials.\n\nHowever, it soon becomes clear that various factions are threatened by the newcomers and want to send them back where they came from\u2014by any means necessary. Further complications arise when Nova and Zephyr discover twin dragons\u2026and unexpectedly bond with them.\n\nSuddenly, Nova discovers she must choose between searching for her mother and protecting those she loves.\n\nAnd either choice risks embroiling them in an inter-dimensional war.\n\nQueen of the Dragons' Ava Richardson invites you to immerse yourself in a dragon-filled world with epic magic, fearless heroes, and, at its heart, the deep bond between dragon and rider."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Sometimes, the world is too loud.\n\nAs Nova Harris climbed out the window of the old two-story house she currently lived in, she left behind a cacophony of sounds: slamming doors from downstairs, loud music from the room next to hers, crying from a kid out in the hall, and, loudest of all, the screaming voices of her foster parents as they entered the second hour of their latest fight.\n\nIt was a big one, this fight. Nova hadn't heard what had started it, but they'd already touched on the most popular talking points. There were too many kids in this house, and Stephanie hadn't wanted to take the most recent addition, but Todd felt like they'd had no choice, so Stephanie 'needed to get over herself' and do her job anyway. Stephanie wondered if Todd would feel that way if he had to spend all day taking care of 'snot-nosed brats,' which launched Todd into a tirade about how he slaved away all day at work to put food on the table and all he got at home was complaints that he was gone too much.\n\nNova had heard it all before and would hear it all again, but that didn't make listening any easier.\n\nIt had been going in circles like this for a while, but it had been when they'd brought up Nova herself, and started listing all the problems she caused, that she'd finally decided to make her escape. She already knew her grades weren't as high as they could be, thanks. She was aware that she had an attitude problem. And if Stephanie and Todd didn't want her to break their rules, maybe they shouldn't make such stupid rules! She was sixteen\u2014she didn't need a 9PM curfew! She was more than capable of existing outside after dark; she'd done it before and she'd do it again\u2014in fact, that's what she was doing now. She slipped out onto the roof and turned, closing the window most of the way behind her before crossing to the corner of the gable. Outside the view of the living room windows, she lowered herself over the edge until her feet found the banister of the back porch steps. She climbed down the porch easily, as she often did, and left the house behind, stepping out of the light flooding the area from the windows and porch lamp, into the darkness of the nearby woods.\n\nThe warm, mild breeze of winter in South Florida was comforting compared to the hot, stuffy house. The silence of the night, accompanied only by the chirping of crickets and katydids and the occasional hoot of an owl, seemed to Nova like a sort of lullaby after leaving the noises of the foster home. It was almost like a completely different world, and it was only when Nova was out here in the woods at night that she felt truly at peace\u2014or, at least, as close to 'at peace' as she could likely manage.\n\nShe sighed as she walked, adjusting her light jacket and the backpack she'd slung over her shoulders before leaving. It wasn't packed or anything, as she didn't really intend to run away. Not yet. But she liked to keep it with her at all times, just in case, as it contained most everything she could call her own. A couple of books, some headphones, small trinkets she'd collected over the years, and an old sweater and a change of clothes, as well as her wallet and a few keys from old foster homes that she'd never bothered to fish out of the bag.\n\nAs Nova walked, she felt a brief twinge of panic and put her hand to her neck to check for a leather cord attached to a pendant, breathing a sigh of relief upon finding it. She hadn't felt it for a moment and had thought she might have left it in her room\u2014despite the fact that she never took it off. But it had simply shifted under the collar of her jacket, so she adjusted it carefully, looking it over for the hundredth time. The pendant was unique, made of a silvery sort of metal and streaked with colors of green and amber. She didn't know what kind of material the triangular pendant was carved from, but it was pretty, and it had a dragon etched on the front and 'NOVA' carved into the back.\n\nHer thoughts were interrupted as she heard a few branches snap behind her. She didn't have to turn around to know who was following her, just pausing in her walk and waiting for the girl behind her to catch up. Zephyr, one of her foster siblings and her best friend, appeared beside her after a moment, giving Nova a knowing look as they walked on together.\n\n\"Thought I heard you leave,\" Zephyr said. \"Sorry I'm late, but I had to sneak out the back door like a normal person.\"\n\nNova chuckled a little. \"Thanks. I definitely don't mind the company.\"\n\nDespite them being the same age, the two girls contrasted each other in nearly every way, from their appearances\u2014Nova being taller and leaner, with darker skin and dark brown curly hair, while Zephyr was shorter, curvier, and pale, with straight blonde hair\u2014to their personalities. Nova was stubborn, prone to anger, and got into trouble for talking back too much, while Zephyr was more shy and didn't like to cause trouble, and kept her head down because of it. Not that Zephyr's shyness kept her from speaking her mind, though, especially to Nova. She seemed to tell Nova everything while Nova preferred to keep to herself. She didn't like the idea of being vulnerable, of having someone else know the things she thought or the things she felt. She honestly didn't understand how Zephyr could be so honest about things. She was only leaving herself open to being hurt.\n\n\"I thought you wouldn't,\" Zephyr said, speaking quietly, as if trying not to disturb the peace of the swamp woods. \"Though, we can't stay out all night. Again.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"After all, you're on thin ice with them already,\" Zephyr continued. \"If you get in trouble again, well\u2026 I don't want to lose you.\"\n\nNova scoffed a bit. \"It's not like they care what happens to us anyway,\" she grumbled, shoving her hands into her pockets. \"They're too busy fighting with each other to even notice we're gone.\"\n\n\"But if they do notice, they might send you back,\" Zephyr told her bluntly. \"And where would that leave me? I don't want to end up on my own again, wondering if I'll see you in school or if you're gone for good, hoping it won't be too long before we maybe end up in the same house again.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Nova said again, softer this time. She and Zephyr had been in the same house once before, when they'd been younger, and they'd been friends ever since. Nova still remembered when she'd first met Zephyr. They'd both been nine, and it had been Zephyr's first foster home after losing her parents. The girl had been scared and confused, emotional and vulnerable, with no idea how to handle what was going on or what had happened to her folks, and somehow it had fallen to Nova to protect her and help her get used to her new life. They'd been together in that house for about two years before Nova had gotten moved to a new one, and although they'd still gone to school together, it had been hard for Zephyr at home without her. They'd both been shuffled around for a few years after that, and then, when they'd ended up at Stephanie and Todd's a year ago, together at last, Zephyr had made Nova promise not to get into trouble and leave her again.\n\nHonestly, it was the only reason Nova had lasted this long.\n\nThey reached their destination, which was Nova's favorite place in the woods\u2014at least, in this area. She had to find a new favorite place after every move, which was another reason to avoid being sent away, albeit a less important one. This space was a large clearing, maybe more like a rather small field around thirty feet from one end to the other, the foundations of an unfinished or mostly dismantled old cabin lying half-buried in the dry ground. Here, they could lie down without having to worry about getting muddy or finding unexpected bugs crawling on them most of the time, and from the center of the 'house,' on nights like this, they had a perfect view of the stars above them. They got settled, Nova using her backpack as a pillow while Zephyr took off her jacket, wadding it up for her own pillow, and for a while, they just watched the sky.\n\n\"Hey\u2026\" Zephyr spoke up after a bit.\n\nNova turned her head to look at her friend, noting a deep, thoughtful frown on the girl's face. \"What's up?\" she prodded when Zephyr didn't continue.\n\n\"Do you remember your parents?\"\n\nNova froze, turning back to the stars and frowning herself. \"I\u2026yes,\" she said quietly. \"Well, my mother. I don't remember my dad, though. Why?\"\n\n\"Just wondering,\" Zephyr said. \"I miss my dad. My mom, too.\"\n\nNova wasn't sure how to respond to that. She and Zephyr were similar in a lot of ways, but they were also very different sometimes, and this was one of those times. Of course, Nova missed her mother, but it was more like\u2026 she missed the idea of her? She'd been seven when her mother had left, and her memories had faded over the past nine years until they were all hazy, blurry images. Nothing concrete. It was kind of alarming, actually, when she really thought about it. She had a near perfect memory, otherwise; why couldn't she remember one of the most important parts of her life? She'd known a lot of other kids who'd lost their parents around the same time she had, and they all had a lot of memories of their lives before. It wasn't normal for her to have forgotten almost everything, especially as her mother hadn't died or anything\u2014she'd just left. Shouldn't Nova be able to recall more about her and the time they'd spent together?\n\n\"You know what I miss?\" Zephyr continued, her voice betraying a wistful sort of smile. \"Rainy nights, when my mom would put on old movies and make us popcorn. My dad did this thing, sometimes, where he would throw popcorn at my mom to distract her, and then she'd start throwing it back, until no one was watching the movie anymore and we were just making a big mess, and then we'd all have to clean it up later.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026 a really weird thing to miss.\"\n\n\"I know!\" Zephyr laughed back. \"But I do. It's the little things, you know? I mean, I also miss Christmas, and Halloween, and my birthday\u2026but not as much as I miss things like\u2026well, like that, and like my mom and dad taking me on walks. They always brought the wagon because I'd get tired on the way home. And chili. My mom made the best chili. Nobody else ever makes chili right. What about you?\"\n\n\"What about me?\" Nova asked.\n\n\"What do you miss?\" Zephyr rolled onto her side, propping her head up with her hand and leaning her elbow on the ground as she adjusted her glasses, looking at Nova expectantly. \"More than anything else, what do you miss most about your mom?\"\n\nOnce again, Nova wasn't sure how to answer. She glanced away from Zephyr, looking back up at the stars and frowning as she tried to think about some specific thing or moment that she missed. But she came up blank. Her memories were too foggy. It wasn't fair. She'd been seven when her mother had left, only two years younger than Zephyr's age when she had been orphaned, but she didn't have any memories of things like going for walks or watching movies, or the kinds of food her mother cooked, or anything like that.\n\nWhat was wrong with her?\n\n\"I miss\u2026the beach,\" she decided after a moment. \"I don't remember why we were there, but I remember thinking the water was warm, and playing in the sand while my mom was talking to\u2026 somebody, I don't remember who.\" Again, she could only recall a foggy sort of image, the sun shining brightly and the figure of her mother silhouetted against light, the ocean sparkling beside them as her mother talked to the other person. She'd sounded worried, Nova remembered that much. That had been just before she'd left, promising to come back, and then\u2026she hadn't. But Nova didn't mention that part.\n\n\"We went to the beach a lot,\" Zephyr said. \"I remember one time, I got really upset because I couldn't make a sandcastle. It kept falling down, and I wouldn't let my dad help because I wanted to build it myself. I tried to fly a kite, too, but I couldn't manage that by myself, either. That trip was for my birthday, I think, and the kite was a present. I didn't want to share it.\"\n\n\"I think I got this necklace for my birthday,\" Nova told her, turning more towards Zephyr and holding her necklace out a bit, the pendant glinting against the moonlight. She wasn't actually sure if it had been a birthday present, and she'd often wondered where she'd gotten it, or rather, who had given it to her. She thought it was her mother. She could sometimes almost recall the moment. Her mother tying the leather strip behind her neck, brushing her hair out of the way, and saying something.\n\nBut she couldn't quite remember what she'd said, or even what she looked like. She suddenly felt ashamed for not knowing, and after hearing Zephyr's stories, so full of detail and life, Nova wanted to say something more substantial than that she'd visited a beach once. What was the harm in a little\u2026 daydreaming? \"It was wrapped in silver paper,\" she invented. \"With green ribbons, I think. We had cupcakes, and my mom dropped hers on the carpet, so\u2026we shared mine.\"\n\nIt felt wrong to pretend about something like this, but she didn't have any of these real memories like Zephyr did. She frowned down at the necklace, shifting it to gleam in the moonlight again, taking in the etching of her name. Clearly, her mother had cared at least a little; otherwise, she wouldn't have given her something so personal, but if she'd cared\u2026why had she left her alone for so long? She'd said she would be back, but here Nova was, nine years later, making up stories about cupcakes and wrapping paper.\n\nMaybe her mother had tried to find her. Maybe she'd been looking this whole time and couldn't track her down because of how often she moved foster homes.\n\n\"Is this all?\" Nova asked, turning to Zephyr again with a feeling of frustration growing inside her.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Is this all there is?\" Nova pressed. \"Is this all that's left? Sitting out here alone, telling stories about how things used to be?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026yes,\" Zephyr said quietly, her expression dropping a bit. \"At least, for me.\" She rolled onto her back, looking tiredly up at the sky again. \"I can't exactly go back. My parents\u2026they've been dead for seven years now. I have nothing to go back to.\"\n\n\"I want to find my mother,\" Nova decided. \"Or at least find out what happened. She was supposed to come back for me, so what if she's still out there looking? Or, what if she thinks something happened to me and gave up, and that's the only reason she hasn't found me yet? I have to try. I can't just sit here and wait anymore. I have to do something.\"\n\n\"You mean run away?\" Zephyr frowned. \"That's a bad idea, Nova. You're talking like it'd be some adventure from a kid's movie, and I'm not too big on adventures. Come on\u2014you're tired. Let's go back.\"\n\n\"I'm serious, Zeph,\" Nova said, feeling her cheeks heat up a bit at the dismissal, sitting up now and drawing her knees to her chest to rest her arms on them. \"I don't want to stay with Todd and Stephanie, and I don't want to keep moving to new places, either. I think\u2026I'm old enough to be out on my own. I'm sixteen now, and my mother's still out there\u2014I know she is. I could run away, really run away this time, and not come back. I could look for her. I could find her. No more waiting around.\"\n\n\"Nova, that's a really risky plan,\" Zephyr said, sitting up now herself and giving Nova a serious look. \"What if we get caught? We'd be separated, for sure.\"\n\nNova glanced at her, blinking in surprise. \"We?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Zephyr said, reaching out and putting a hand on Nova's shoulder. \"You think I'd let you run off on your own? No way. If you're serious about this, if you're really going to run away, then I'm coming, too!\"\n\n\"You just said you're not big on adventures a few minutes ago,\" Nova reminded her.\n\n\"Well\u2026we're family now,\" Zephyr replied. \"I'm not about to lose you, too.\"\n\nNova shifted her weight, feeling a bit tense. Zephyr was her best friend, and she'd never let anything happen to her if she could help it. And she knew Zephyr would do the same for her. But\u2026 they weren't family. Family was something else; family was what was waiting for her with her mother, and it wasn't the same as being best friends. She wasn't about to tell Zephyr that, though, so she didn't say anything, feeling a bit guilty as Zephyr took her hand from Nova's shoulder, seeming to pick up on her discomfort.\n\nZephyr had been through too much already. She didn't need to deal with Nova's baggage on top of everything else. Nova should say something, she realized. The silence was too awkward now. \"I\u2014\"\n\nShe wasn't sure what she'd been about to say, but whatever it was, it was interrupted by a loud rustling from nearby, the girls both gasping and jumping to their feet as a huge lizard half-jumped, half-fell out of a tree at the edge of the clearing, and then it came darting towards them. Together, Nova and Zephyr jumped back to get away from the thing, which was easily as big as they were if not bigger, Zephyr letting out a slight shriek and grabbing at Nova's arm as Nova pushed Zephyr slightly behind her. But the lizard stopped at once, blinking between them and flicking its tongue, waiting about seven or eight feet away from them.\n\nNova stared at it, briefly having thought it was an alligator due to how big it was\u2014which was stupid, considering alligators didn't climb or jump from trees. Not to mention that the head and legs were completely wrong in shape for an alligator, the head being shorter and the legs more stout and closer to the ground. The lizard's scales were completely different in shape, too, looking much smoother and colored in more grayish tones\u2026almost orange under its neck and chest as opposed to the jagged ridges and deep green of an alligator. But it was certainly much bigger than any other lizard Nova had ever seen, and she couldn't help but draw back a little. Even used to dealing with reptiles, you didn't ignore something like this. What was it? And where had this thing come from? How had it gotten out here?\n\n\"That\u2014that's a komodo dragon!\" Zephyr breathed out behind Nova. \"What's it doing out here?\"\n\nBefore Nova could respond, the lizard let out a curse, and both girls froze, Zephyr clapping a hand over her mouth while Nova stared down at the thing as shock ran through her. It\u2014it had\u2026cursed. The lizard\u2026had just cursed.\n\n\"You never get used to your shape out here,\" the lizard muttered, shaking off a few leaves and then\u2014What?\u2014rearing up, balancing on its back legs and drawing up to a full seven feet, at least, towering over them and looking down at Nova with the most human expression that she'd ever seen on any animal ever. \"I am Korgad,\" it announced. \"I've been searching for you, Nova. Ragond needs you.\"\n\nNova stared at the lizard, unable to move or even breathe as she wondered\u2026 what on earth was happening right now? This\u2026this wasn't happening right now. This was a dream. It\u2026that's what it was. Just a dream, some kind of weird vision because she'd had too much chicken at dinner or something.\n\nThe lizard narrowed its eyes at her, tilting its head, and then it sighed before speaking again.\n\n\"I need you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "If You had the Chance",
                "text": "\"Okay, this is not happening!\"\n\nZephyr's proclamation shook Nova back into the world, and she blinked between Zephyr and the lizard, a surge of relief going through her.\n\n\"Oh good, you heard that, too,\" Nova said. \"Jeez, I thought I was going crazy!\"\n\n\"This is crazy!\" Zephyr exclaimed, grabbing Nova's arm again and starting to pull her back towards the edge of the clearing. \"Come on, let's go\u2026we\u2014we should be getting back anyway!\"\n\n\"Now, where do you think you're going?\" the lizard demanded, dropping his front legs back to the ground and scurrying after them. \"Don't run off now, child; didn't you hear me? You've got to come with me to Ragond!\"\n\n\"We're going home!\" Zephyr snapped over her shoulder at it, wincing a bit and running a hand through her hair as she kept pulling at Nova. \"I can't believe I'm talking to a lizard!\"\n\n\"Ignore it!\" Nova swallowed, picking up her own pace. \"It isn't real. Just keep walking.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's right, ignore me, I'm not real,\" the lizard hissed behind them. \"Silly girl! Don't you want to find your mother?\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Nova said, pulling her arm free and turning back to the lizard in surprise. What did it mean by that?! What did it know about her mother? Had it heard them from the trees? Was this a trick? And the voice sounded familiar, too\u2026where had she heard that voice? A memory stirred, and she got the impression of\u2026a cave? It had something to do with a large cave, and a warmth and a feeling of security she hadn't felt since...\n\nWhat\u2014what\u2026? Was her brain seriously suggesting that she had known this lizard before? That this talking lizard had known her and had been looking for her all this time?! She had a hundred questions whirling through her mind.\n\n\"What\u2026who are you?\" she had to ask, feeling a bit stupid at addressing this thing like this, but asking anyway. \"What's a Ragond? And my mother\u2014how do you know my mother? How\u2014how are you even talking? How can a lizard be talking?!\"\n\n\"It isn't,\" Zephyr muttered breathlessly behind her. \"It's not and this isn't happening, so let's go!\"\n\n\"Touch my head,\" the lizard suddenly demanded, crawling forward a few feet towards them before standing again, bowing its head towards Nova. \"This form is not my best.\"\n\n\"No!\" Zephyr gasped, grabbing Nova's arm again. \"Don't touch it! Don't go near that thing!\"\n\nZephyr was right. Everything in Nova's head was telling her to turn around and keep going towards the house and not look back. But there were too many questions now, and Nova needed answers. She pulled her arm free from Zephyr's grasp, even hesitating, but\u2026this was important. She took a deep breath, slowly approaching the lizard and stretching her hand out.\n\n\"Nova!\" Zephyr hissed. \"Get back!\"\n\nBut Nova ignored her, reaching out and biting her lip before pressing her fingers lightly against the cold, hard scales of the lizard's head, a slight shudder going down her spine as a tingle of warmth traveled through her fingers and up her arm. She closed her eyes as if on instinct, but instead of darkness, an image filled her mind. She could see\u2026a dragon, the colors seeming to seep into her vision like lights twinkling in the distance, copper-green toned scales and burning amber eyes, spreading large, powerful wings and clashing its teeth, a long, deep scar traveling down the left side of its face and over its neck.\n\nShe snatched her hand back with a gasp, the image fading, and stared at the lizard, her eyes traveling over a matching scar on its own features. \"It\u2014it's you,\" she breathed.\n\n\"That is my true form,\" the lizard told her. \"The form I take in Ragond. Now come, stop this foolishness. We must leave here at once.\"\n\nHis true form\u2026he was a dragon. What? That was crazy. Was it crazy? Nova let out a bit of a strained laugh, putting her hand to her forehead as she tried to think about this rationally\u2026as if one could think rationally about a talking lizard who imprinted telepathic images of dragons and, you know, talked. What was she supposed to make of this?\n\n\"This is insane,\" Zephyr was saying now, shaking Nova's arm a little and pulling her away again. \"Come on, Nova, this\u2026it's a hallucination or something! It has to be a hallucination! Snap out of it!\"\n\n\"Pardon me!\" the lizard hissed, drawing up to his full seven-foot height and once again towering over them, his eyes flashing as he flicked his tongue out again. \"I am no hallucination!\"\n\nZephyr let out another slight shriek, yanking Nova farther away and starting to half-run back into the woods. \"No, no, no, no, no!\" she gasped. \"Nova, come on! We\u2014we need to get the freak away from this freakin' giant TALKING LIZARD, right now!\"\n\nRight, she\u2026she was right. Nova finally let herself be pulled away, running with Zephyr back through the woods, tripping over a couple of loose stones or tree roots in their path and ignoring the splashes of the occasional puddle as they ran straight through them. Neither girl looked back this time or listened when the lizard tried calling them back. They just ran. Finally, they made it back to the house and slowed to a stop, gasping for breath and looking back to make sure the thing hadn't followed them. They seemed to have lost it, so Nova relaxed a little, leaning over and resting her hands on her knees. She couldn't believe it. They'd literally been chased from the woods by a talking lizard.\n\nNova turned back to the house, frowning as she realized all the lights were off inside. Stephanie and Todd must not have noticed they were gone and shut up the house and gone to bed with them outside. She could still climb back in through her window, technically, but...she'd totally called it. They didn't care two straws about her or Zephyr, and she knew now without a doubt that she just couldn't go back.\n\nShe turned to the forest again, staring into the trees and biting her lip, a strange sort of excitement coming over her now, her heart beating a bit faster.\n\n\"Nova,\" Zephyr said insistently, grabbing Nova's hand and starting to look panicked. \"Nova, please, come\u2014come inside!\"\n\nBut Nova couldn't move. She was rooted to the spot, torn between two impossible paths. How could she go back into a house where she wasn't wanted, choosing to go back to a life of anxiety and uncertainty, never knowing what tomorrow would bring except that she would never be happy in it? On the other hand, how could she go with the magic, talking dragon-lizard?! It was ridiculous, and she knew that, but\u2026was it really all that unbelievable? Or more like, wasn't it too unbelievable to be nothing more than a hallucination? She was a pretty creative person, but she couldn't ever imagine hallucinating something like that\u2014and the fact that Zephyr had seen it, too, made her think maybe it had been\u2026well, real.\n\n\"Nova, please,\" Zephyr begged her. \"Come inside, please, Nova\u2026\"\n\n\"I\u2026I can't,\" Nova said, stepping away from Zephyr. \"I can't do it. What if I could find my mother?\"\n\n\"No!\" Zephyr exclaimed. \"Nova, are you really going to listen to a talking lizard?!\"\n\n\"Well, which is stranger?\" Nova asked, feeling the corners of her mouth twitch into a bit of a smile, despite the situation\u2014or maybe because of it. \"The fact that it's talking, or the fact that it might know my mother?\"\n\n\"It\u2026I\u2026Nova,\" Zephyr said again, biting her lip and looking even more worried, not offering a response.\n\n\"Look,\" Nova sighed, taking a step back towards the woods. \"I can't miss this chance. I have to try. If you had the chance to see your parents again, even if it seemed crazy, wouldn't you do it?\" She glanced past Zephyr, back to the house, and took another step backward. \"I'm sorry. I can't go back; I'm sorry.\"\n\nWith that, she turned to run back into the trees and left Zephyr staring after her.\n\nShe felt guilty again\u2026but she couldn't stay there one more day, not if there was even a remote chance she could find her mother.\n\nShe made her way back to the clearing, but the lizard wasn't there.\n\nNo\u2026no, it had to still be here, she thought to herself. It couldn't have vanished already! Feeling a sudden sense of desperation, Nova stood still for a moment, not sure how to get it to come back and reaching up to grasp her pendant, looking around. \"Hey!\" she called into the night. \"Lizard! Come back, please. I'll listen now!\"\n\nThere was no response.\n\nMaybe Zephyr was right and she'd imagined the whole thing. She gritted her teeth, shaking away the doubt and starting to search the area. If he'd left, he couldn't have gone far\u2014and if he'd never even existed, well\u2026she'd go home and chalk this up to some weird, confusing dream she'd tell Zephyr about in the morning. But there were plenty of tracks in the dirt which were too large for the kinds of animals that usually came this close to town, and when she made her way to the part of the woods where the lizard had first appeared, she saw plenty of broken branches and scratches in the trees where the thing must have been climbing. At least there was some evidence he'd been there and she didn't feel insane, but\u2026where was he?\n\nMaybe she'd missed her chance. She never should have run away. She'd missed her chance, and now she'd never find her mother, never getting her questions answered! She hadn't meant to screw this up, too. It wasn't fair. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn't go back, she just couldn't\u2014not now, not when she'd been so close to finally leaving!\n\nShe groaned, holding up the pendant around her neck again, looking at the dragon etched there and noting how it seemed to glisten in the moonlight, the orange and green streaks in the shining silver even more pronounced than usual. She felt like it was calling to her, or\u2014or like she was calling to it\u2026. She closed her eyes, giving into a fit of childish, foolish wishing. She had to get out of this place; she had to get out right now. What was the lizard's name again? She frowned, recalling the brief conversation and trying to remember the name it had given, and then, when she remembered it, gripping the pendant tighter and calling it out instinctively.\n\n\"Korgad!\"\n\nAt her call, the lizard appeared in front of her and she instinctively took a step back again, the beast giving her another serious look and then stepping forward, once again bowing his head towards her.\n\n\"Touch my head.\"\n\nNova took in a deep breath, stepping forward and reaching out her hand. But this time, when her fingers rested against the lizard's scales, no image flooded her mind. Instead, the lizard himself lit up in shimmering, copper tones, glowing softly\u2014like her pendant\u2014in the moonlight. The light enveloped him, and under her hand, the beast began to grow and shift, the head changing shape as Korgad's snout elongated and large horns began to sprout from his head, wings unfurling from his back. He spread them wide, the span easily stretching from one end of the clearing to the other, and shook his head like he'd done earlier to lose the leaves, this time doing it as if he were shaking out a new skin, Nova pulling her hand back and easing away from him to get the full image. His scales were different now, too, having shifted from the dark grayish sort of green of a komodo to the more earthy green she'd seen in her earlier vision, and as he opened his eyes again\u2014his large, expressive, fiery eyes\u2014she saw that they'd also changed to that burning amber, his gaze seeming to pierce her soul.\n\nThis was no hallucination. This was real, and it was undeniable, right in front of her, leaving her feeling awed and more than a little humbled.\n\nShe was face-to-face with a living, breathing dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "In the Dark Night Sky",
                "text": "\"There, now,\" Korgad said as he stretched his muscular front legs, which were now the size of tree trunks, with claws the size of Nova's arm digging deep into the dirt. \"This is difficult without the link to my rider, you know, but\u2026\" He stretched his head up, shaking it again. \"You seem to be helping.\"\n\nNova stared, feeling breathless and unsure, as well as just\u2026confused. She opened her mouth to ask what any of that meant but was interrupted by Zephyr suddenly running up behind her, panting as she slowed to a stop, her eyes widening in shock at the sight of Korgad. She let out a slow, anxious sort of breath, closing the distance between herself and Nova to stand a bit behind her again as she peered around her at the dragon.\n\n\"Zeph?\" Nova blinked. \"What\u2014what are you doing here?\"\n\nZephyr opened her mouth, closed it again, and let out a breathy sort of disbelieving laugh, shaking her head like she couldn't believe what she was saying. \"I\u2026I go where you go, remember?\" Zephyr told her. \"You're not leaving without me.\"\n\nThat\u2026was touching, actually. Nova couldn't help but smile, though she tried to bite it back. Yet, she couldn't ask Zephyr to run away with her, to believe in dragons for her; it wasn't fair and she knew it. \"Are you sure?\"\n\nZephyr shook her head again, swallowing as she gave Korgad another wary, wide-eyed sort of look. \"No,\" she admitted. \"But I'm doing it anyway.\"\n\n\"Well, okay.\" Nova nodded, turning back to Korgad. \"You can\u2026take us, to my mother?\"\n\nThe dragon gave her an unreadable look, letting out a huff of hot air through his nostrils, and then he suddenly reared up, swiping quickly at Nova, his large claws grabbing at her, and she couldn't help but let out a bit of a shriek, panic clouding her mind. After all, this was a real, honest-to-goodness dragon, and could very well kill her\u2014but after a split second, she registered that he wasn't hurting her, that his claws were holding her and nothing more\u2014and then a second after that, she heard Zephyr scream, as well. Nova looking around for her and seeing the dragon grabbing Zephyr in his other claw, and then they were being lifted into the air as the dragon flew up, his wings beating so loudly against the wind that Nova stopped being able to hear much of anything else. She clutched tightly at the two talons that were securely clamped over her shoulders, getting the sudden impression of a rollercoaster as his back talons tightened around her waist, her legs dangling freely with nothing to ground them.\n\nThe ground careened away from them and Nova realized she was screaming again, the adrenaline rushing over her and her heart pounding as the wind rushed into her face, blowing her hair wildly out behind her. She choked on the air, no longer able to scream; instead, she gasped for breath as Korgad continued to fly, turning and soaring low over the treetops for no more than a few seconds. The world then disappeared into a flash of white light which dissipated almost as quickly as it had come, the woods and the nearby town just gone, replaced by dark waves and salty air. The wind in Nova's ears started dying down as Korgad dropped towards a pale line of sand, his claws releasing her. She let out another yelp as she fell the last couple of feet, her knees and hands digging a bit into the warm, shifting sand, some of it flying up into her face and causing her to cough as the sound of crashing waves reached her before the loud, shaking boom of Korgad landing heavily distracted her.\n\nShe caught a few gasping breaths, coughing out sand again, and pushed herself up into a sitting position, her legs shaking too hard to do anything more just yet. Wow, that had been intense. She looked around for Zephyr and found her friend nearby, still half-collapsed into the sand herself, trembling violently and looking deathly pale. Oh gosh\u2026 Maybe she shouldn't have let Zephyr come, after all.\n\nKorgad grunted as he straightened, shaking sand off his scales. \"I'm not as young as I used to be. Hmph.\" He glanced over to Nova, tilting his head a touch and narrowing his eyes at her. \"Jumps like that, they take an enormous amount of magic,\" he told her, sounding defensive for some reason. \"Any jump like that can take down a dragon, especially without a real rider bonded to them. Doesn't help, I haven't spent as much time out here. Don't know the geography well.\"\n\nNova didn't answer, not knowing what he was talking about or why he was telling her all this. She turned back to Zephyr instead, sort of crawling over to her and putting a hand on her shoulder. \"H-hey,\" she panted. \"Zeph? You\u2014you okay?\"\n\nZephyr let out a groan, sitting up a bit now and still looking white, and even a bit sick.\n\n\"Zeph, come on, sh-shake it off.\" Nova bit her lip, the guilt coming back. \"It'll be okay, we're fine. You're\u2014you're fine, right? You didn't get hurt?\"\n\nZephyr let out a choked sort of laugh, shaking her head to say that no, she wasn't hurt. But still, she was clearly not okay, and she shouldn't be here. She wasn't cut out for this sort of thing. Nova stood up, her legs still wobbling a bit, but her heart finally starting to calm down, and turned back to Korgad. \"We need to take her back. She can't\u2026this isn't her thing. I have to get her home.\"\n\n\"There's no time for that, as the portal's about to open,\" Korgad said bluntly. \"It took too long to get you to come here in the first place; if we wait any longer we'll miss our chance. Get ready. We're going to fly again.\"\n\n\"What?! Why'd we stop in the first place, if\u2026if you're just going to grab us and rush off again?!\" Nova demanded, but then the dragon grabbed at her anyway, Zephyr letting out another shriek beside her as she was grabbed again, too, and the beach fell away below them as they took off into the air once more. This time, though, instead of the flash of white light there'd been earlier, the dragon flew out over the sea, the mist spraying into Nova's face as a sudden shimmer of crackling blue light flickered into view, sparking violently like lightning, the air around it warbling like a wave of heat and seeming to tear into the dark night sky itself. Nova felt another surge of fear, gripping more tightly at Korgad's talons as he carried them towards the light. She closed her eyes, but could still see it behind her eyelids, too bright to be shut out. The wave of heat enveloped them, cracking and hissing like fireworks, and then\u2026\n\nIt was over. Nova forced her eyes open again, and gasped as she realized\u2014it was day. Bright, golden sunlight cascaded over them and flashed against Korgad's scales, the shock of the change making Nova's breath catch in her throat even more than it already had. What? But they'd been\u2026Nova craned her neck to see behind them, the electric blue light they'd just passed through disappearing with another crackling sort of sound as Korgad lowered them to the ground, once again dropping them\u2014this time in a field of tall, thick grass\u2014before landing roughly himself, his large, beastly chest heaving with huffing gasps as he laid down, resting his chin in the grass and closing his eyes.\n\nZephyr let out a bit of a whimper from where she was lying down next to Nova, and Nova swallowed, pushing herself up and putting a hand on Zephyr's shoulder. \"It\u2014it's okay,\" she said though her own voice was quieter and more shaky than she meant it to be. \"I think he's done.\"\n\nZephyr didn't respond, so after a moment Nova sighed and patted her back a little, shakily getting to her feet and looking around. Where were they? It was absolutely nothing like Florida. A vast green plain of bright, soft grass surrounded them, towering purple mountains and low rolling hills spread out along the horizon and a line of deep green trees in the distance, showing the makings of a huge forest. The midday sky was the brightest, clearest shade of blue she'd ever seen, and the sun seemed\u2026brighter than usual, Nova having to shield her eyes with her arms at the golden glare of it. And a cool, gentle breeze was blowing through the grass, a sweet, fresh sort of smell carrying along the wind, faintly reminding Nova of early spring rain.\n\n\"What happened?\" she asked Korgad. \"What was that light? Where are we?\"\n\n\"That light,\" Korgad repeated, still panting a touch as he opened his eyes to look at her without raising his head, \"as you call it, is a portal. Not the most stable one, either.\" He sniffed a bit, closing his eyes again. \"They're not as easy to get through as they once were.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Nova told him, frowning and moving to sit back down in front of his face, crossing her arms and feeling suspiciously like a child compared to the sheer size of him. She shouldn't have sat down, she realized. It made her realize she was smaller than his head. But she had more important things to worry about than how big the dragon's snout was, or how his eyes were bigger than her fists. Despite her many questions (because, really: portals?), she refocused on what most mattered. \"What about my mother?\"\n\nThe dragon huffed again, lifting his head and sort of rolling a little, then turning his back to her and dropping his head once more, to where she wasn't in his eyeline and couldn't see his face.\n\n\"Hey!\" she snapped, a surge of irritation going through her as she got back up, marching around to face him again and frown. \"You can't just take us to some\u2026some other part of the world and then ignore me! Where are we?!\"\n\n\"Ragond,\" Korgad told her, opening one eye and glaring piercingly at her with it. \"And it's not another part of your world, girl. Ragond is its own world.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"What?\"\n\n\"Ragond is not a part of your world,\" the dragon said slowly, tilting his head a little as he opened his other eye and gave her a searching sort of look. \"Do you understand? It's a world of its own.\"\n\n\"You don't have to act like I'm stupid.\" Nova gritted her teeth. \"Excuse me for being surprised to have you tell me we're on another world!\"\n\n\"You're excused,\" Korgad told her, closing his eyes again.\n\n\"What about my mother?\" Nova pressed, reaching out and tapping at the dragon's head\u2014then pulling her hand back with a gasp and falling back as the dragon snapped his head up, gnashing his teeth a little. She tripped over a root or rock or something, falling to the ground and tensing as she stared up at him, once again realizing that\u2026he was a dragon. His mouth was big enough to bite her head off if he wanted to. Korgad narrowed his eyes at her again and then let out another huff, lowering his head back to the ground, ducking it a little and once more strangely reminding Nova of a cat. Or, more specifically, a cat that knew it had done something wrong.\n\n\"Never poke a sleeping dragon,\" Korgad muttered. \"I told you, the jump takes a lot out of me. I need rest before we can go on. I'll answer your questions later.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Nova said, standing back up and passing him, making sure to leave plenty of space between them as she did. \"But you don't have to snap.\"\n\nKorgad let out a little growl, once again rolling his shoulders to face away from her as she made her way back over to Zephyr, who was sitting up now and looking a bit exhausted and still generally stunned, but calmer now.\n\n\"Hey,\" Nova said, sitting down next to her friend and looking her over carefully. \"You alright?\"\n\nZephyr blinked, turning to her in something of a daze and then nodding. \"Y-yeah\u2026\" She swallowed. \"Yeah, I'm okay\u2026This is really happening. We're on another\u2026we're on another world.\"\n\nNova nodded, looking around. \"It's kind of\u2026nicer than Florida, yeah?\"\n\nZephyr let out a bit of a chuckle, rubbing at her eyes and nodding. \"Yeah. Yeah, it is.\"\n\nNova chuckled back, feeling better now that Zephyr felt better. \"Anyway, I guess the dragon needs to rest before we keep going, so\u2026we probably should try to get some sleep, too. It's like\u2026past eleven back home.\"\n\nZephyr nodded, lying down in the grass and putting an arm over her eyes. Nova did the same, and after all the excitement and adrenaline from their first flight\u2014albeit an interrupted one, with that stop at the beach\u2014it didn't take long for her to drift off herself.\n\nNova woke up slowly, forgetting for a moment what had happened and where she was before a breath of hot air hit her face. She blinked her eyes open, her heart jumping into her throat at the giant, scaly, snakelike face with burning amber eyes staring at her from only about a foot away. \"GAH!\" she yelled, shooting up and pushing away from Korgad as the memories flooded back to her. \"Don't do that!\"\n\nThe dragon backed off a bit, letting out a low, rumbling sort of sound as his shoulders shook. He was laughing, Nova realized.\n\n\"What-what-what!\" Zephyr was gasping, sitting up quickly herself, looking around blearily and seeming incredibly confused before letting out a groan, rubbing her forehead. \"It wasn't a dream?\"\n\n\"Why were you staring at me?!\" Nova demanded of Korgad, feeling her cheeks heat up as she got to her feet and shot him a glare.\n\n\"Come,\" Korgad told them instead of answering, turning to the side and spreading out his wings, crouching low. \"We have no portal to race towards now, but time is still of the essence. Climb onto my back and hold on tightly. We must go on.\"\n\n\"Ngh, no more flying,\" Zephyr groaned, rubbing at her eyes as she stood up.\n\n\"Would you rather stay here, little girl?\" Korgad asked her, tilting his head a tad as he looked Zephyr over. \"In the middle of the plains, with nowhere to go and no way back?\"\n\nZephyr stared at him for a moment, her eyes widening, and then she let out another groan, her shoulders slumping a little.\n\n\"Hey, leave her alone.\" Nova frowned at Korgad, moving over to Zephyr and putting her hands on her friend's shoulders. \"Zeph, it'll be okay this time, trust me. It\u2026if we're on his back, it's not gonna be the same, right? Don't tell me you've never thought of it, of what it would be like to fly on the back of a dragon or giant eagle or something.\" She offered a small smile. \"I know you're not big on adventures, but I'll be right next to you, okay? It'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Zephyr sighed, turning back to Korgad with a look of curiosity, biting her lip a little. \"But I'd better not fall.\"\n\n\"You won't,\" Nova promised, turning back to Korgad. \"Right?\"\n\n\"What's your name, girl?\" Korgad asked Zephyr, tilting his head the other way.\n\n\"Zephyr,\" the girl responded, following Nova reluctantly as they approached Korgad.\n\n\"And you are friends with Nova?\"\n\nZephyr nodded, starting to look suspicious now. \"We've been friends for years,\" she explained. \"I live in the same foster home.\"\n\n\"Foster home?\" Korgad tilted his head, glancing between Zephyr and Nova. \"A home for young fosters, I presume. Hmph.\" He stood straighter again, shaking out his wings and pacing a bit to the side. \"No matter, no matter.\"\n\n\"Yeah, a 'home for young fosters,' great way to repeat what we just said,\" Nova scoffed angrily, narrowing her eyes at the dragon's mannerisms. She got the feeling they were about to be disregarded for being foster kids. It had happened before, but the idea of it happening with a dragon was too much. Besides, hadn't he already known that? He'd mentioned looking for her mother earlier, so why would he react like this now? \"Didn't you know that already?\" she pressed him. \"What about my mother? I thought you could help me find her! Is she here in this 'Ragond' place? Do you know where she is? Could you take me to her?\"\n\n\"Bah.\" Korgad huffed out a steamed breath, shaking his head a bit and stamping his feet on the ground. \"I don't have time for all these questions, girl! We must be off. You're needed elsewhere.\"\n\n\"That's another thing!\" Nova said insistently, following Korgad as Zephyr followed her, looking uncomfortable herself as she watched the exchange with wide eyes. \"Why me? You said you need me here, in this world\u2014you said you'd been looking for me. But why? Why look for me specifically, instead of asking anybody else? Is it because of my mother? Is it because of this?\" She grabbed her pendant, holding it up.\n\n\"I said I don't have time for your questions!\" Korgad growled, whirling around and moving towards her, lowering his head to the ground as he crouched low, stopping with his face only a foot from hers again. Nova instinctively took a step back and pursed her lips. Korgad stared into her eyes for a second as she stood there, holding her breath and clenching her fists, feeling tense at the fiery glare, before the dragon huffed out again, hot air hitting Nova's face as he broke eye contact and turned away. \"All will become clear in time,\" he said quietly. \"Now, come, we must go now.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Nova muttered. She stepped over to Korgad, who crouched down lower and swiped his claws forward again, grabbing Nova and pushing her up onto his back as she gasped at the speed of it. Zephyr backed up quickly but didn't escape the same treatment.\n\n\"Hey, how about\u2014how about you cut that out?!\" Nova demanded, settling onto the dragon's back awkwardly and leaning forward a little as Zephyr scooted up close behind her, wrapping her arms around Nova's waist. Nova frowned, having a hard time keeping situated with how broad Korgad's back and shoulders were, her legs not even reaching his sides as she grasped at some ridges along his long neck, noting now that she had time that his smooth, glassy scales were larger than she would have thought, each diamond-shaped scale about the size of a credit card. Though, the comparison felt inherently wrong, somehow. Like the two didn't belong in the same universe, let alone the same sentence. \"Or at least give us some warning?\" she finished.\n\n\"I'm about to start flying,\" Korgad said, sounding a little amused as he spread his wings. \"To give you some warning.\"\n\nWith that, the beast took off into the air, quickly gaining height like before, evening out about a half-mile over the ground and starting to coast over the plain. The wind was much stronger now, coming from above them and not blocked by Korgad's body, and it also seemed much colder than the wind back in Florida, but it was much less frightening now that there was at least something underneath her. She felt like she was secure this time, with something to hold on to, rather than feeling helpless in the clutches of some bird of prey, being carried off into the night.\n\nAnd now that she could look around more easily, perched up here high above the world, she caught her first real look at Ragond.\n\nThe light of late afternoon spread over the world in golden hues as the sun started to set over the mountains, illuminating sparkling lakes and rivers that wound down through the hills she'd noticed earlier. The forests she'd barely glimpsed before seemed to take over most of the countryside, and now that she could pay attention, she saw that, interspersed among the green trees, flashes of red and gold were going by. This world must be in autumn, then, despite Florida's being halfway through winter. She could also see, from this vantage point, several small towns peppering the plains, but there were no skyscrapers, no sprawling suburban grids, no concrete highways crisscrossing the ground. Sure, she could make out a few dirt roads and fields of crops below them as they flew, but the whole scene looked like something out of a picture book. No telephone wires, no cars, no stoplights, nothing. Nova heard Zephyr take in a breath behind her, as well, and Nova glanced over her shoulder, having to smile at the enchanted look on her friend's face. \"See?\" Nova called over the wind. \"This is amazing!\"\n\nZephyr let out a bit of a laugh again, a grin coming over her face as she nodded. \"Yeah!\" she agreed. \"But where\u2026where are we going?\"\n\n\"To Stonehaven,\" Korgad called to them. \"I must present you to the Council.\"\n\nThat sounded ominous. Nova didn't know many 'councils', but she generally didn't get along with authority figures. Still, she shook the feeling away, distracted as Korgad flew low over a lake and she saw their reflection glittering like gold over the silver waters. She caught her breath at the sight and momentarily forgot all else.\n\nThey flew on for a while, covering a lot of ground as they soared past hills, flocks of sheep, and a few small towns, Nova feeling more and more awestruck at how much everything looked like a fairy tale. Especially the villages. Cobblestone streets, actual thatch-roofed cottages, high wooden walls around the outskirts of towns, the occasional stone tower in the more populated areas. The people here didn't seem to pay much attention to them, with a few small kids waving or yelling excitedly as they passed, but most adults acting like they weren't anything out of the ordinary. Korgad maintained his altitude about a half-mile above the ground, far enough to be removed but close enough for them to see everything, even slowing down whenever Nova or Zephyr pointed or exclaimed at something new, as if he were actively trying to let them get a sense of things. And it was working. Nova hadn't ever believed it was possible, but this truly was another world.\n\nBut then Korgad circled one of the first mountains, and the new world took on a darker tone. Because there, stretching out in the shadows of the mountain's valleys, was the dismal remains of a battlefield."
            },
            {
                "title": "Bone and Blood",
                "text": "Nova drew in a breath at the sight of the battlefield, the first thing to catch her eye being the dark, damp red of blood covering the entire valley, the second being countless dragons sprawled out over the field, all of them unmoving and clearly dead, with hundreds of other, smaller creatures lying where they'd fallen around the larger beasts. Korgad immediately beat his wings faster, shooting up higher into the sky before she could make out what the other creatures were, and Nova swallowed as the new height only betrayed how far-spreading the fight had been. The valley was three or four miles wide at least, from the base of one mountain to another, and although the dead weren't covering every inch of the land, there were still so many down there. What had happened? And what were those other creatures?\n\nAnd, what could have caused the death of all these dragons?\n\n\"Wait!\" Nova called. \"Wait, go back, I want to see what's down there!\"\n\n\"You needn't see anything down there,\" Korgad announced, continuing his ascent. \"Bone and blood along the rock. Pay it no mind, little girl.\"\n\n\"I'm sixteen,\" Nova protested, feeling a surge of irritation come over her. \"Bring us down, Korgad, I'm not afraid of a little blood!\"\n\n\"I don't think that's a good idea,\" Zephyr warned. \"I don't want to see any dead bodies.\"\n\n\"I don't think they're human,\" Nova said, leaning over Korgad's side and craning her neck to try and see, despite the fact she couldn't make them out at all anymore, aside from as small, dark shapes lying near the dragons. \"They looked like monsters. Korgad, bring us down; I want to see what happened!\"\n\n\"Hmph, fine!\" Korgad snapped a little, tilting his wing and starting to circle back around, descending upon the battlefield. As they drew closer, Nova still leaning sideways to try and see as much as she could, she began to get a sense of foreboding at the way the dragons looked, mangled and still, with torn wings still outstretched and claws half dug into the ground. She couldn't imagine a dragon falling easily.\n\n\"How did this happen?\" Nova breathed out. \"How could anyone take out dragons like this? You're so powerful, so strong, how do you lose to monsters that small?\"\n\n\"They have greater numbers,\" Korgad huffed. \"They know their way around a dragon; up against enough of them, we have little defense.\"\n\n\"What about fire?\" Zephyr asked quietly.\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Can't\u2014don't dragons\u2026breathe fire?\" Zephyr asked. \"Wouldn't that be a good defense?\"\n\n\"Dragons don't breathe fire,\" Korgad scoffed. \"What on earth gave you that idea?\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova stared. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"On Earth, the fairy tales all say dragons breathe fire,\" Zephyr told him blankly.\n\n\"Bah, your fairy tales are wrong,\" Korgad huffed, drifting to one of the larger areas that was free of bodies, beating his wings a few more times to slow their descent before landing, and then crouching so the two girls could climb down from his back amidst the field of bodies. Now that they were on the ground, Nova got a better look at the huge carcasses of the dragons\u2014most of which were even bigger than Korgad, though their scales were the same colors and their large, vacant eyes were amber like his. The other creatures, though, were more surprising, and Nova frowned as she looked around at them. There were a lot of different kinds here, some that she recognized and some she'd never seen before, most of them looking at least partially human, but all of them definitely some kind of animal or beast of some sort. She passed a black horse with bloodied, torn wings of its own, spikes protruding along its back. Was that\u2026a pegasus?!\n\n\"Gryphons,\" Zephyr breathed in shock nearby, and Nova turned to her, following her gaze to the corpse of, sure enough, a gryphon. Zephyr looked around, walking a bit further into the field and starting to look amazed. \"Harpies, pegasi\u2026fauns.\" She knelt down a little over a humanlike body, a young man by the looks of it, but with horns sprouting from his hair and the legs of a goat, one of which was bent the wrong way, clearly broken, and again, the man\u2014or faun\u2014was covered in blood, his skin white and his eyes staring blankly ahead.\n\n\"I\u2026I don't understand,\" Zephyr said quietly, standing up and moving back over to Korgad. \"What happened here?\"\n\n\"Mythoi,\" Korgad told her, his voice grim as he looked around at the dragons with narrowed eyes, stamping his front legs a little and moving his tail agitatedly back and forth. \"Creatures of evil from another world. They must have found a portal in this area and tried to invade Ragond.\"\n\n\"Mythoi?\" Zephyr repeated. \"But these are monsters, from Greek and Roman legends! They're not real\u2026they don't actually exist! They can't exist!\"\n\n\"Then what are we looking at, Zeph?\" Nova asked. \"They're all right here, right in front of us.\"\n\nZephyr blinked at her, letting out a slow breath and running a hand through her blonde hair as she looked around again, shaking her head as she stared down at one of the bodies Nova had already identified as a harpy, which appeared to be a human-sized bird sort of thing, with sharp, eagle-like talons and wings, but the head and shoulders of a human woman sprouting up where the bird's head should have been. \"I can't believe it\u2026\"\n\n\"I think it's time to accept all this stuff is real,\" Nova told her. \"It can't get much crazier than this.\"\n\n\"You say that now,\" Zephyr said. \"But I get the feeling we're in for a lot more.\"\n\n\"What\u2014which ones are Mythoi?\" Nova asked Korgad. \"Is that just\u2026anything that isn't a dragon?\"\n\n\"Mostly,\" Korgad replied. \"Though the term doesn't apply to normal beast and bird\u2014only the monsters you see before you. Humankind and Dragonkind live here in Ragond, hunting the wolf and the bear, and keep tame horse and cattle. The Mythoi are these who come from beyond, from Mythos.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Nova asked again. \"What's Mythos? Why are you at war with these\u2026Mythoi?\"\n\nKorgad shrugged his shoulders a bit, turning his head away from her as he continued looking around the battlefield. \"We've been at war for two decades,\" he told her in a low voice. \"This world exists because of Mythos\u2014the world these creatures are from. Both Mythos and Earth give life to Ragond; it is a reflection of both, you could say, and draws its power and magic from the two worlds, through portals such as the one I used to bring you here, and the one the Mythoi used to invade.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova frowned, feeling confused. \"That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean, a reflection? You mean it's like a mirror?\"\n\n\"No.\" Korgad narrowed his eyes a bit, tilting his head. \"Perhaps that was the wrong word\u2026Ragond is a recreation. There, does that explain it?\"\n\n\"Uh, not even sort of.\" Nova stared at him, trying to figure out what he meant. \"It's a recreation of Earth? How is that possible? How did it happen? How long has it been here?\"\n\nKorgad let out a bit of a huff, stamping his front legs again and shaking out his head. \"So many questions,\" he muttered before letting out a deep sigh. \"Ragond exists between two worlds,\" he explained. \"On the one side is Earth, and on the other, Mythos. Both outer worlds are self-sustaining to an extent; they possess enough magic to continue alone. But Ragond is a dependent world\u2014it cannot produce its own magic, and therefore draws upon the magic of other worlds to exist. The portals are the links that shift the magic from those worlds to this one.\"\n\n\"But Earth doesn't have magic,\" Zephyr said blankly.\n\nKorgad let out that rhythmic, rumbling laugh again, though this one sounded more\u2026bitter, than amused. \"Not anymore,\" he told Zephyr. \"At least, not on the surface, though your world still possesses the ley lines, forgotten deep beneath the ground.\"\n\n\"And that's why the Mythoi are at war with you?\" Nova frowned. \"You're stealing their magic?\"\n\n\"Hmph, not stealing,\" Korgad defended with a huff. \"Ragond draws magic from the other worlds, which produce more in its stead. So much more, in fact, that if it weren't for Ragond, the magic being produced in both worlds would continue to amass and place great strain on itself, building up until, with nowhere to go, it would tear apart your very planet, as it would Mythos. Your species certainly hasn't been relieving the leylines; if it weren't for us, they would have burst a thousand years ago. But no, we're not stealing your magic, silly girl. We draw from an endless supply. The Mythoi have always known this, and once upon a time, existed peacefully with us, free to come and go. That was before they grew monstrous, before they turned to darkness and destruction.\" He glared around at the bodies, beginning to walk past them carefully as he paced the battlefield, the girls following in his path. \"They've been this way for hundreds of years now, but it was twenty years ago that they began to attack and fight in earnest, starting this war that has all three worlds destabilizing.\"\n\n\"Destabilizing?\" Nova repeated. \"That doesn't sound good.\"\n\n\"No,\" Korgad agreed. \"It's not good at all. They come through now in hordes, armed and ready to fight, disrupting the balance of magic and leaving the world portals unstable, which is why I had such trouble getting us here earlier. The portals come seemingly at random, popping in and out of existence at a moment's notice, and the rate at which they appear is increasing as well\u2014all while other portals are opening in places they have no business being, and no one knows how or why or when it might happen. The magic being drawn from the worlds is erratic and unpredictable, affecting both Ragond and Earth in ways we've never before anticipated.\"\n\n\"The earthquakes,\" Zephyr said, her eyes wide.\n\n\"Ehh?\" Korgad turned to her, tilting his head. \"What's that, girl?\"\n\n\"On Earth,\" Zephyr explained, putting a hand to her head in disbelief as they kept walking. \"There's been a massive increase in earthquakes and volcanic activity in the past few decades. Could that have something to do with these\u2014these leylines you're talking about, and the unstable power drains?\"\n\n\"Hmm, could be\u2026\" Korgad blinked his large eyes at Zephyr, looking thoughtful. \"Of course, there would be other factors, as well, but yes; if the portals are overdrawing from the magic keeping Earth alive, it could very well cause nature to react in such violent ways.\"\n\nZephyr opened her mouth to say something else, but suddenly one of the nearby creatures\u2014a harpy\u2014lunged upward with a choked, rasping scream, blood streaming from her mouth as she grabbed wildly at Zephyr with her clawed wings. Zephyr screamed, as well, and Nova reacted without thought, grabbing Zephyr's arm and hitting the harpy away as she yanked Zephyr back. They were suddenly knocked backwards by Korgad, who jumped between them and snarled loudly at the harpy, swiping at her with his claws and striking her hard enough to send her flying, the already injured beast crumpling with a sickening thud against some rocks a little ways away before falling to the ground to lay still.\n\nKorgad let out a sharp growl, stamping his front legs again and beating his wings menacingly, but nothing else in the field moved or responded, so he huffed decisively, turning back to the girls and looking Zephyr over. \"Are you hurt, girl?\"\n\n\"N-no,\" Zephyr said, slowly getting to her feet and wrapping her arms around herself as she drew closer to Korgad, looking around warily. \"No, I\u2026she didn't hurt me. Erm, th-thank you. Is she\u2026dead?\"\n\nKorgad turned back to the harpy, moving forward and stretching his long neck out before sniffing at the creature, who didn't move. He straightened back up, sighing deeply as he gave the girls a nod.\n\nNova pressed a hand to her mouth and bit her lip, not having ever witnessed something die before. Beside her, Zephyr let out a bit of a whimper, shuddering and turning away quickly to cover her eyes with her hands.\n\n\"Hmph,\" Korgad grunted, looking around the battlefield again and then crouching low. \"We've lingered long enough,\" he announced. \"Get up. It's time to move on.\"\n\n\"What about\u2026the bodies?\" Nova asked, looking around as Zephyr shakily climbed onto Korgad's back with his help, the dragon boosting her up with his talons again. \"There are dragons here, too. It isn't right to leave them like this.\"\n\n\"Others will come,\" Korgad said, nudging at her with his head to prompt her to start the climb, then boosting her up with his claw. \"The dead are not my responsibility.\" He turned his gaze back towards the sky as he spread his wings, the girls bracing themselves for the flight. \"I tend only to the living.\"\n\nAs he started to fly again, leaving the battlefield below them, Nova looked down for one last glance. What did all this have to do with her? Korgad had been dodging her questions, but that just made her wonder even more. Why her? What connection did she have to this place? She reached up and grabbed her pendant as they flew, frowning at the etching of a dragon along the front. It couldn't be a coincidence. This necklace was the one thing she'd always owned, the only item she'd had from before her mother left. The odds of her happening to own a dragon necklace, considering her present circumstances, were slim. Besides, Korgad had said he could help her find her mother, so he must at least know who she was. And then he'd taken her here, to this other world, through a portal he said was unstable and hard to predict.\n\nWas her mother here in Ragond? Was that why she'd never come back? Had she somehow been pulled into this world? Had she been trapped, trying to find a way back all this time?\n\nBut then, if that were the case, what did Nova have to do with 'saving' Ragond?\n\nUrgh, this was all so confusing, and although Korgad had explained portals and magic and the Mythoi, he still hadn't explained what it all had to do with Nova.\n\nThey flew on in silence, questions circling through Nova's head as they passed mountain after mountain and town after town, until they circled another peak and she was distracted by a magnificent, huge stone structure climbing up the side of the mountain, towers and pillars and a wide balcony rising up from the rock. Tons of dragons milled around the crags and the valley below, and even more people were visible around the structure, climbing up wide staircases and walking in and out of the buildings built into the mountain. As they circled around the structure, Korgad beginning his descent, five other dragons took flight from below, speeding towards them almost impossibly fast to surround them. Nova noticed with a bit of surprise that, although these dragons all bore a resemblance to Korgad, with the same coloring of scales and eyes, they were all significantly larger than him, and she braced herself, catching her breath and tightening her grip on Korgad because she half-expected them to attack.\n\n\"Korgad!\" Korgad announced to the new dragons, his voice taking on a deep, throaty tone, as if it were close to becoming a roar. The other dragons all veered off, circling back around and diving back to the building in a perfect, straight line, zipping down to the huge balcony halfway down the mountain. Korgad didn't follow, instead dropping more slowly down towards the base of the mountain, landing in a field outside the lowest part of the castle among other dragons and a small crowd of curious-looking people, all of whom were keeping their distance but seemed interested in Korgad, Nova, and Zephyr.\n\nAnother dragon landed in the field in front of them, this dragon again larger than Korgad, but different from the others Nova had seen in that its scales were tinged with orange. A young man dismounted, and Nova could tell by the way he walked and the stern frown on his face that he was in charge. Of what, she wasn't sure; she could just always tell whenever she saw a 'man in charge' type. Immediately feeling on the defense, she slid off Korgad, already looking the guy over, noting his leather helmet, goggles, and riding gear, as well as a dagger sheathed to a belt.\n\n\"Korgad?\" the man asked in apparent astonishment as he approached, glancing between Korgad, Nova, and Zephyr. \"The Council wasn't aware you had returned! Where have you been? Who are these children? Why did you bring them here and where are they from?\"\n\nHe didn't seem all that pleased to see them, more stunned and confused than anything else, and Nova got the feeling they were in for a rough welcome.\n\nThis was not a good way to start her search."
            },
            {
                "title": "When a Dragon Sleeps",
                "text": "As the young man drew nearer, pulling the helmet off his head to reveal curly dark brown hair and blue eyes, Nova felt a surge of defensiveness come over her, and she stepped up to meet him with a frown.\n\n\"Hey, hi, we're not children,\" she informed him to start. \"And you don't have to act so shocked that we're here, either. It's not our fault. This was all Korgad's idea.\"\n\nThe young man stopped, glancing at Nova in mild surprise, frustration crossing his expression. \"Pardon me, but I was speaking to the dragon,\" he told her dismissively, turning back to Korgad and opening his mouth to speak, but then pausing, letting out a sigh and pinching the bridge of his nose.\n\nNova frowned and glanced over her shoulder at Korgad, only to see the dragon had laid down in the grass and was either asleep or pretending to be so. Was flying really that tiring?\n\n\"Korgad,\" Zephyr said, biting her lip and casting the young man an anxious glance as she also dismounted, landing next to Korgad and reaching out to shake at his shoulder. \"Korgad, wake up!\"\n\n\"You can't bring us here and fall asleep!\" Nova exclaimed, stepping back over to Korgad and shaking his shoulder herself. \"Coward, wake up and tell him what you brought us here for!\"\n\n\"Brought you here from where?\" the young man asked with a frown. \"Where are you from?\"\n\n\"Florida,\" Nova answered absently. \"Korgad!\"\n\n\"Florida?\" the man repeated blankly. \"Is that a new settlement?\"\n\nOh, right\u2026 This wasn't Earth. Nova hesitated, glancing at Korgad as he slept and wondering if it was alright to tell these people about Earth, or if it would cause panic or mayhem or something like in the movies. \"Korgad, wake up,\" she tried again, but the dragon rolled his head to the side, ignoring her. \"Fine, I'll handle this myself!\" she muttered under her breath, turning back to the guy. \"No, Florida is on Earth. We're from Earth.\"\n\n\"What? You're from Earth?!\" The young man let out a breath, his eyes widening. \"You came through one of the portals?\"\n\nKorgad let out a loud, insincere sounding snore, and the three all turned to him for a moment before the young man emitted a slight chuckle, shaking his head in disbelief.\n\n\"Well, that explains\u2026some of this, then,\" he announced. \"Using a jump or a portal drains a dragon of their energy. He's likely exhausted if he brought you through the world portal and then flew all the way here. Best let him rest.\" He nodded decisively, turning to focus on Nova and Zephyr. \"Pardon my, ah, less than warm reception. Korgad hasn't been seen in well over a decade, so you can imagine my surprise when he arrives unannounced with two unfamiliar young riders. Allow me to introduce myself.\" He bowed his head to them. \"My name's Dafyd Falla. I'm a captain here at Stonehaven.\"\n\n\"Nova,\" Nova told him, holding her hand out for him to shake. \"Nova Harris.\"\n\n\"I'm, um, Zephyr Anderson,\" Zephyr said, shaking Dafyd's hand next. \"I'm from Earth, too.\"\n\n\"And what brings you here?\" Dafyd asked, looking between them curiously. \"Have you come to train as riders?\"\n\n\"What? Oh, no, we're not here to train,\" Nova shook her head.\n\n\"Well, which one of you bonded to Korgad?\" Dafyd asked.\n\n\"Bonded?\" Zephyr frowned a little. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Bonded,\" Dafyd repeated, as if it should be obvious. \"When a dragon and its rider share a mental connection, allowing the two to link energy forces and their magical signature.\"\n\n\"They don't even know what it means to be bonded,\" a female voice scoffed, this belonging to the orange-tinted dragon behind Dafyd, and Nova should not have been as surprised as she was. If Korgad could talk, of course all these other dragons milling around could talk, as well. She should have anticipated that. So much had happened today already, she supposed she just hadn't considered it.\n\n\"Well, Lir, that is why we are here,\" Dafyd said, offering Nova and Zephyr a slight smile as he reached up and patted the female dragon's head. \"Tell me, if you're not here to train, why have you come?\"\n\n\"We're\u2026looking for Nova's mother,\" Zephyr explained. \"We don't really know what she has to do with Ragond, but Korgad mentioned her, so when he brought us here, we thought\u2026maybe she might be here?\"\n\n\"Your mother?\" Dafyd turned to Nova, sobering a little. His eyes fell to Nova's pendant and he blinked, holding his hand out. \"May I?\"\n\nNova frowned, not wanting to take the necklace off even for a few moments. But, if it would help find her mother, she supposed she didn't have much of a choice. \"Yeah, sure.\" She let out a breath and then slowly reached up and untied the leather cord, holding it out for Dafyd and feeling her shoulders tense as he took it.\n\n\"Do you know what this is?\" Dafyd asked.\n\n\"No.\" She shrugged. \"But I've always had it. My mother gave it to me.\"\n\n\"This is dragonite,\" Dafyd told her, handing the pendant back. \"It's a metal that can only be found here on Ragond; your mother must have been here at one point. I can have the records searched in the library and see if anything can be found. What's your mother's name?\"\n\nNova opened her mouth and then froze, cold shock running down her spine.\n\nWhat was her mother's name?!\n\nBefore she could say she didn't know, or even process that she didn't know, Korgad let out a bit of a huff behind them, cracking one of his eyes open.\n\n\"Seren,\" he announced. \"Her mother is Seren.\"\n\nSeren. The confusion and cold chill Nova had felt a moment before melted away at once at the sound of the name, to be replaced by a feeling of warmth and security. A flash of nostalgia hit Nova\u2014an arm around her shoulder, a hand running through her hair as she sleepily watched\u2026a fire, burning away in a hearth, familiar voices speaking quietly over her head, though she couldn't make out the words aside from the one: 'Seren.' It felt like a door had opened in her mind, and Nova latched onto the word, repeating it to herself to try and commit it to memory before it could slip away again. Seren.\n\nShe realized she was staring at Korgad, though only a second had passed, and she blinked as she registered the dragon was watching her, too, his eyes appearing to reflect a deep sorrow before he lifted his head and turned away from her, almost seeming to shudder as he dropped his head back down with his back towards them, like he'd done in the fields earlier that day.\n\nWhat did he know? He clearly knew something about Nova's mother\u2014about Seren\u2014but what? What was he hiding?\n\n\"What? Seren?\" Dafyd stared.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Lir announced.\n\nBut Nova wasn't paying them any attention. \"Korgad,\" Nova pressed, \"where is she? Why won't you talk to me? Tell me what happened!\"\n\nShe started towards him, to pass him and look him in the face again, stop him from ignoring her, but Zephyr caught Nova's wrist, biting her lip and giving Korgad's turned back an apprehensive, sympathetic sort of look, shaking her head a little.\n\nShe was right. Korgad clearly was upset, and Nova didn't want to make him feel any worse. But this wasn't exactly fair, having the dragon drop these incredibly important details and then go silent like that. What was Nova supposed to do, wait around for him to decide he was ready to tell her why her mother had left her alone for nine years?\n\n\"\u2026Erm, ahem.\" Dafyd cleared his throat, shifting his weight awkwardly and glancing between the girls and Korgad. \"I'm afraid, when a dragon sleeps, there's\u2026no waking it for anything.\" He offered an anxious-sounding chuckle, rubbing the back of his neck.\n\nKorgad let out another loud snore.\n\n\"Faker,\" Nova muttered, despite her effort to be understanding and patient.\n\n\"Well, while we're waiting for him to rest up, if you two could follow me?\" Dafyd waved a hand towards Stonehaven, indicating a few of the stone buildings near the base of the mountain. Nova gazed up at the full structure, distracted by the sheer size of it. It stretched up for miles, nestled against the crags and outcroppings of rock, and in the light of the setting sun, the stone took on a golden-pink sort of tone; it was a grand castle with turrets and columns and towers unlike anything she'd ever seen.\n\nDafyd followed her gaze and let out another light chuckle as he took a few steps towards the building. \"Don't worry, we're not going all the way up,\" he told her. \"Most of us fly if we have to be on the upper floors, but with your dragon out of the picture it would be a rather long climb, wouldn't it? But, the Council of Five meets\"\u2014he pointed to a specific building set a little ways away from the others, looking slightly newer and nicer than the rest of the tower\u2014\"on the ground floor.\"\n\n\"I wasn't worried about 'the climb.'\" Nova narrowed her eyes at him. \"I was just looking.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Dafyd blinked at her. \"No offense, Lady Nova. I apologize.\"\n\nZephyr sputtered a bit beside Nova, staring at Dafyd and then laughing outright. \"Lady Nova,\" she repeated.\n\n\"Shut up!\" Nova elbowed the other girl, feeling her cheeks heat a bit at the dorky title. \"Oh my gosh, Zeph, they're all from like, medieval times. It's not a big deal.\"\n\n\"I'm\u2014I'm sorry, did the honorific offend you?\" Dafyd frowned, his own face reddening a little.\n\n\"It matters not if it did,\" his dragon said bluntly, lowering her head towards the girls and looking between them with her eyes, which were\u2014like the rest of her\u2014even larger than Korgad's. \"The Council of Five is awaiting you,\" she told them slowly. \"Please stop wasting time and follow my rider to the Gold Hall as requested.\"\n\n\"Fine, we're going.\" Nova held her hands up with a scoff, stepping back away from the dragon and passing her to follow Dafyd, casting Korgad one last glance over her shoulder as she did so.\n\nHe didn't return her gaze.\n\nNova and Zephyr followed Dafyd to the cluster of buildings, the young man leading them into the one he'd indicated earlier and stepping into a grand foyer with polished stone floors and high columns nearly three stories high, these supporting a grand, arched ceiling. Sunlight streamed in from tall, narrow windows that didn't appear to have any glass in them, the air in the building as fresh and brisk as the air outside. Enormous colored tapestries the size of billboards were hung in rows down the foyer, many of them embroidered with images of important-looking people or dragons, some of them in battle and some of them just standing around looking royal. There were hardly any people in here, only a couple small groups here and there, and no dragons. Most of the people here seemed to be around Nova and Zephyr's age, she noticed, some a little younger and some a little older, but most of them teenagers, at least.\n\nThey were all dressed in strange clothes, too\u2014mostly things Nova had only seen in movies about Vikings or fairy tales\u2026loose-fitting shirts, leather vests, a few fur- or wool-lined jackets here and there, and lots of boots without zippers or laces, some with buckles and others devoid of anything, pulled on and sliding down a bit like moccasins. In fact, she didn't see almost any zippers at all, or denim, for that matter, as she glanced around. Wait, there was one older-looking girl, maybe a young woman, wearing a faded and frayed denim vest over her long-sleeved woven shirt and peasant skirt, which was a new look, but no one else wore anything Nova would describe as modern. It made her own clothes feel incredibly out of place and awkward.\n\nAnd they were all staring at Nova and Zephyr. Nova pursed her lips, following after Dafyd and drawing a bit closer to Zephyr as they walked. She caught the eyes of a few gawkers, frowning back challengingly until they looked away, and she tried to ignore it as they all started to talk again, but this time in pointed whispers. This was all feeling too familiar\u2026like walking to an office to meet with people she already knew she wouldn't like amidst stares and whispers.\n\n\"This place is huge,\" Zephyr whispered as they passed a section of the foyer with two tall sets of double doors on either side of them, one propped slightly open to reveal a glimpse of some kind of gilded ballroom. \"It's like an actual palace!\"\n\n\"I wonder who this 'Council of Five' is, then,\" Nova whispered back. \"One of them has to be some kind of king or something, I bet.\"\n\n\"Mmm, no, Ragond has no king,\" Dafyd told them over his shoulder.\n\n\"Who's in charge of it, then?\" Nova asked. \"Is it a democracy?\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026not exactly?\" Dafyd frowned a little, pausing and stepping aside to let a couple of armored adults pass by. \"Localized areas of Ragond are governed by representatives of the Council of Five, which deliberates over all major decisions and decides as a collective what is to be done for the world.\"\n\n\"So, they're in charge of the whole world. Are they elected to this Council or what?\"\n\n\"There's no need,\" Dafyd said. \"The Council has only had vacancies twice in the past two hundred years.\"\n\n\"What?\" Zephyr blinked in shock, she and Nova both stopping at the strange proclamation. \"You mean the other people on the Council have been there for three hundred years? That's impossible!\"\n\n\"On the contrary, it's quite possible,\" Dafyd told her. \"I'd heard that the people on Earth never live past a hundred years old at the most, but here in Ragond, that's not always the case.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova stared at him. \"How long do people live here in Ragond?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" Dafyd tilted his head a little in thought. \"Hard to say, really. Of course, the common folk age more like the people on Earth. They don't live for much longer than, say, a hundred and ten, in the best cases. But among the magical folk, such as the mages and dragon riders, well, they can live as long as their magic allows.\"\n\nHe turned, continuing to walk through the foyer, and Nova exchanged a glance with Zephyr before following. Dragon riders lived for hundreds of years, then. She looked around at one of the tapestries as they passed it, an ornately embroidered dragon in golden armor standing over a man in white floor-length robes, his sleeves and the hem of his robes lined with gold as he walked ahead of the dragon. The tapestry looked incredibly old, with the colors muted in some places, faded from the sunlight streaming through the windows. But now Nova found herself wondering if the man depicted in the image was still alive. He could be any of these onlookers, his dragon any of the dragons outside, and Nova wouldn't even have known.\n\n\"Mages?\" Zephyr was repeating as they walked. \"You mean, like, sorcerers?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Dafyd said at once. \"Sorry, no. Mages are the holders of knowledge in our world. Historians, philosophers, and the like.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Nova frowned, the correction pulling her thoughts back onto the conversation rather than the tapestries. That was a boring definition of 'mage' if she'd ever heard one.\n\n\"Of course,\" Dafyd remarked off-handedly, \"many of them were witches before they devoted their lives to study, and some do still practice magic, but it's rare.\"\n\n\"They were witches?\" Zephyr exclaimed. \"You're kidding!\"\n\n\"Heh, no, I'm being perfectly serious,\" Dafyd chuckled. \"They don't have witches on Earth either, I assume?\"\n\n\"I mean, well, some,\" Zephyr stumbled. \"But not like\u2026medieval, spellcasting, wizard kinds. It means something different on Earth, I guess, when you find a practicing witch in real life.\"\n\n\"Well, some of ours are definitely spellcasters,\" Dafyd told her, coming to a stop at the end of the foyer before two grand, golden doors. \"Perhaps later you can learn more about them if you're interested. For now, though, it's time to meet the Council. These doors lead into the Gold Hall, and I must admonish you, the Council is comprised of our most respected elders, to be treated with honor and respect.\"\n\nNova let out a snort before she could help herself, and Zephyr nudged her hurriedly, casting her a look Nova knew to mean 'behave.'\n\n\"I'm being perfectly serious,\" Dafyd said again, this time frowning a little at Nova. \"If you want to stay in Ragond even for a short while, or if you want access to our libraries or our help in finding your mother, you must first gain the Council's approval. Without it, you'll be sent back to Earth at once and never be allowed to return. It's in your best interests to show respect.\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, seeing the sense in this, but hating the idea of 'showing respect' to a Council of ancient rulers. She had to get over herself, though. She recognized that. Her problems with authority in the past were childish, and if she wanted to be treated like an adult, she had to act like one.\n\nBesides, maybe these people wouldn't be like the authorities back home. Everything else was different here, so maybe the people in charge would be different, too.\n\nShe nodded to Dafyd that she was ready, Zephyr doing the same beside her, and Dafyd nodded back in response before turning to the large doors, pushing one of them open. \"Please wait here for a moment,\" he said, \"while I announce your arrival.\"\n\nHe stepped inside, the door slowly swinging shut behind him, and Nova let out a breath as she turned to Zephyr. \"This is all crazy, right?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's absolutely insane,\" Zephyr told her, her eyes wide.\n\n\"Hopefully, this 'Council of Five' will be able to actually explain what all is going on.\" Nova frowned at the door. \"Korgad wasn't being helpful at all. Plus, I'm pretty sure he was faking being asleep just so he wouldn't have to talk to me.\"\n\n\"He might've been tired from the trip,\" Zephyr noted.\n\nBefore Nova could argue that he might also have been lying to avoid answering questions, the door opened again and Dafyd stepped back out.\n\n\"They're ready for you,\" he told them, holding the door a bit wider for them to pass.\n\nNova looked to Zephyr again, the other girl taking a deep breath and stepping closer to Nova, and the two stepped inside.\n\nThe hall beyond the doors, though smaller than the grand foyer, was not any less impressive. The ceilings were the same height, but without the windows cut from the rock, and the hall was darker and more austere, candles flickering in polished golden sconces along the walls and hanging from a small chandelier, casting dim light over tapestries that were even more intricate and fantastical than the ones in the foyer. A thick, woven red rug lay at their feet, covering most of the polished, marble floor, and in the center of the room was an impossibly old looking ornate wooden table, polished and shining but full of thick scars and nicks, as if it had been scratched, cut, and broken time and time again, and then every time glossed over with a fresh coat of polish in an attempt to save whatever was left.\n\nWithout the windows, this room was significantly mustier than the foyer, a thick smell of dust and earth coming over Nova as they approached the table, and she realized that with how far into the building they'd walked, this room must have been carved straight out of the mountain. That explained the lack of windows, but it also made the room feel warmer and stuffier, like a long-unused basement or attic cluttered with old boxes and broken furniture.\n\nAnd seated at the table, dressed in fine robes and garments befitting the sorts of people who performed magic and ruled worlds, sat the Council of Five."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Council of Five",
                "text": "\"State the purpose of this meeting.\"\n\nThe speaker, a very old man, was tall and bearded, and sitting in the centermost chair at the head of the table that stood directly across from Nova, Dafyd, and Zephyr. His eyes were narrowed from age, wrinkles stretching underneath them and across his face, and he squinted as he leaned forward to look the girls over in earnest.\n\n\"The dragon Korgad has returned,\" Dafyd announced, \"bringing with him two girls from Earth, one of which he claims to be the daughter of Seren.\"\n\nThe five elders sat in silence for a moment, surprise flitting over their faces as they all stared between Nova and Zephyr. Nova shifted her weight, meeting their gazes and trying to hide how uncomfortable she felt. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but this wasn't it. Plus, judging from the way Dafyd had presented them and the way the Council had reacted, she gathered that they had all at least heard of her mother, which only brought her more questions.\n\n\"Did you say she's the daughter of Seren?\" one man spoke up\u2014a dark-skinned man sitting to the left of the first speaker, with short graying hair and wrinkles of his own, who looked to be around fifty or sixty years old. Though, who knew, given what Dafyd had said about ages.\n\nDafyd nodded.\n\n\"Does she know where Seren is?\" a third man asked at once, this one sitting to the right of the first one (and looking equally as old, the only difference being that his beard was shorter and grayer where the first one's beard was longer and whiter).\n\nDafyd turned to Nova and nodded to her, so she stepped forward, taking a deep breath and speaking for herself. \"No,\" she answered. \"I don't know where she is. That's why I'm here. Korgad showed up in Florida last night\u2014er, I guess earlier today, by you guys's time\u2014and brought me here to help find her.\" She frowned. \"I guess you don't know where she is, either.\"\n\nThe elders all exchanged glances, most of them still looking stunned. The fourth member of the council, a thin and almost sickly looking woman with incredibly pale skin, eyes, and hair, put a hand to her forehead and rubbed at her temples, seeming frustrated, while the two bearded men frowned and the fifth council member, a very old looking woman with long white hair pulled into a loose bun, gave the girls a searching look, as if thinking over the information.\n\n\"Unfortunately not,\" said the dark-skinned man who'd seemed the most surprised about her mother. The man let out a deep sigh, putting a hand to his own mouth as if deep in thought before giving Nova a small, sympathetic sort of smile. \"I'm very sorry.\"\n\nNova swallowed, nodding and clenching her fists. So, she'd come all this way for answers only to have the literal rulers of the world tell her they didn't know anything. What was she supposed to do now?\n\n\"When was the last time you saw your mother?\" the old woman asked.\n\n\"I don't remember,\" Nova admitted quietly, swallowing again and feeling a bit of heat come to her cheeks as she looked away. \"She\u2026she left, when I was seven. I don't know where to.\"\n\n\"And you haven't seen her since?\" the first bearded man pressed. \"Did she tell you where she was going?\"\n\n\"No!\" Nova snapped, starting to feel a bit trapped now and wanting to leave the stuffy, hot room to march right back out to Korgad and demand he take them back to Florida. Why were they asking all these questions? If they couldn't help her, couldn't they at least leave her alone?\n\nZephyr took hold of Nova's hand and squeezed it a little, and Nova let out a breath, immediately feeling comforted by her friend's presence. She squeezed Zephyr's hand back, remembering her promise to stop getting into trouble and resolving to keep it, no matter what.\n\nBreathe in, breathe out, she told herself. Just because these five people didn't know what had happened to her mother didn't mean the search ended here. They would probably at least be able to tell her something, and she could go on from there. She raised her head again to look around at them, biting her lip at the stern looks she was getting from the bearded men and the younger-looking woman sitting across from the older one, but noting the pitying looks she was getting from the older woman and the younger man.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Nova said quietly. \"It's\u2026been a long day.\"\n\n\"That's quite alright, my dear,\" the older woman told her with another understanding sort of smile. \"You must be very tired, and you likely have many questions. We'll do what we can to answer them, but I'm afraid we don't know much ourselves. But, let's start small, hmm? Introductions seem to be in order. I am Gwyn Falla, and I sit on the Council as the High Witch.\"\n\nFalla? Wasn't that Dafyd's last name? And wait, she was a witch? Did that mean Dafyd was a witch, too? Not that it was important right now.\n\n\"I am Tila Newan,\" the other woman spoke up, and Nova looked her over more closely, noting that the woman's haunted appearance wasn't helped by the fact that she was dressed head to toe in pure white robes.\n\n\"Osa the Bold,\" the dark-skinned man said quietly, frowning down at the table and seeming deep in thought.\n\n\"I am Lege D'allos,\" the old man with the gray beard announced, straightening and slightly bowing his head. \"Head of the Five.\"\n\n\"And I am Alon the Old,\" the white-bearded man said, also bowing his head. \"First Commander.\"\n\n\"I'm Nova Harris,\" Nova said back, and then she nodded to Zephyr. \"This is my friend, Zephyr Anderson.\"\n\n\"Hello,\" Zephyr said quietly, hunching her shoulders a little and squeezing Nova's hand again.\n\n\"It's nice to meet you, Nova Harris, Zephyr Anderson.\" Gwyn nodded formally at each of them. \"You are most welcome here in Ragond, and I only wish we could offer you more help.\"\n\n\"What do you know about my mother?\" Nova asked, now that it seemed alright to do so. \"You talk as though you know her, so did she come here before? When she left, was it to come here?\"\n\n\"Come here?\" Gwyn blinked. \"My child, your mother was born here.\"\n\nHer mother had been born here, in Ragond? But\u2026but\u2026then, why had she left Nova on Earth?\n\n\"Seren was a formidable warrior and dragon rider,\" Alon told Nova, looking a little surprised and narrowing his eyes at her. \"One of the most famous riders to ever grace this school, as a matter of fact. You did not know this?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nova said, feeling defensive again. \"No, I didn't.\"\n\n\"We've been looking for your mother for nearly ten years,\" Gwyn told Nova. \"She disappeared without a trace, and no one's seen or heard from her since.\" She turned to the other four Council members. \"Do you suppose she is still on Earth? If she went there with her daughter, perhaps something happened to prevent her from coming back?\"\n\n\"We will send scouts through the portals at once,\" Lege D'allos said.\n\n\"Is that wise?\" Alon wondered. \"With the rate of degradation from the Earth portals as of late, I had thought it best they be used as little as possible.\"\n\n\"We must spare no effort in our search,\" Lege decided aloud. \"After all, we're speaking of Seren. That warrants reopening use of the portals. Speaking of which.\" The man turned to Nova. \"You were brought here through one of those portals, correct?\"\n\n\"I\u2026think so?\" Nova frowned, feeling a bit confused by the question. This was all moving too fast. \"Korgad didn't explain a whole lot about what was happening.\"\n\n\"I think we went through two,\" Zephyr said, seeming a little overwhelmed herself. \"A white one first, that brought us from the woods to the beach, and then a blue one that looked like lightning, that brought us to Ragond.\"\n\n\"So, you came through one of the Earth portals,\" Lege said slowly, giving Zephyr a look as if she'd said something stupid. \"The 'white one,' as you call it, was a link-jump.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Zephyr said quietly, shrinking back a little and blushing deeply, biting her lip in confusion.\n\n\"Link-jump, Earth portal, whatever,\" Nova snapped, gritting her teeth at Lege. \"We were raised on Earth, so how are we supposed to know the difference?!\"\n\n\"A link-jump is magic performed internally by dragons and their riders,\" Alon sighed, frustration leaking into his tone. \"It allows you to move instantaneously between two points within the same world. A portal is an outside force, a naturally occurring phenomenon that opens between worlds, allowing for travel between the two\u2014albeit while draining the traveler of magical energy.\"\n\n\"So, when Korgad brought you from a forest to a beach, he was merely using a link-jump,\" Dafyd explained further, offering them a smile. \"But the second jump, the one that looked like lightning, it opened on its own, and he simply brought you through it.\" He tilted his head a little. \"I've never been through one of the world portals; it must have been quite an experience.\"\n\n\"Ah, for the days when such trips were common,\" Alon said, a wistful look on his face. \"We would travel through the portal and walk the Earth among mortal men, sampling their wares, traveling their cities, listening to their stories\u2026We were as gods.\"\n\nNova let out a bit of a scoff at this strange remark, earning another nudge from Zephyr and another stern frown from Dafyd. Well, what was she supposed to do? The guy had basically called himself a god. \"Ahem, sorry,\" she tried anyway, crossing her arms. \"I guess I don't understand what you mean by that. What does being from Ragond have to do with 'being gods?'\"\n\n\"Perhaps, when you've walked alongside humanity for thousands of years, you'll begin to understand,\" Alon told her disdainfully. \"You might even learn respect along the way.\"\n\nShe 'might learn respect?!'\n\n\"How long have the portals existed?\" Zephyr asked quickly, putting a hand on Nova's shoulder before she could protest this comment. \"For\u2026you said thousands of years? How come we hadn't heard of them?\"\n\n\"The people of Earth are often blinded to that which they wish not to see,\" Lege said cryptically.\n\n\"We've been careful to hide them from Earth folk,\" Gwyn explained. \"The portals have existed for around two thousand years now, but they're hard to find if you don't know what you're looking for. The occasional drifter has found their way in over the last two centuries, but for the most part, the only people who enter do so intentionally.\"\n\n\"The portals were a gift to us,\" Alon announced. \"From the Link Mage.\"\n\n\"The who?\" Nova stared. What was he talking about? What were any of them talking about? They all kept throwing terms and phrases around as if she should know what they meant. Which was stupid if they'd spent much time on Earth. They should know that someone from outside Ragond wouldn't get it.\n\n\"The Link Mage,\" Alon repeated more slowly, giving her another disbelieving look and waving his hand to the largest of the tapestries behind them, which she saw depicted a tall, pale man in a dark blue tunic and silver robes, his face embroidered into a blank look as his outstretched arms indicated two black orbs surrounded by blue lightning. \"The first to use magic to create the portals which allowed us to settle here in the first place.\"\n\n\"I believe this child must be taught her basic history before she can begin any real training,\" Lege sniffed.\n\n\"Training?\" Nova repeated with a frown.\n\n\"Oh yes, of course,\" Alon acknowledged. \"You must begin work right away. You have much to learn if you wish to catch up with the other students.\"\n\n\"Tell me, what are you?\" Gwyn asked, looking between Nova and Zephyr in interest. \"Rider, witch, or mage?\"\n\n\"We aren't any of those,\" Nova told her. \"We don't have people like that on Earth.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Gwyn laughed a little, her eyes squinting upward as she glanced over to Dafyd in amusement. \"And what do you have?\"\n\n\"I dunno.\" Nova shrugged. \"Humans.\"\n\n\"There isn't really magic like this on Earth,\" Zephyr explained. \"There are things like magicians, but that's more like trickery. You know, sleight of hand stuff.\"\n\n\"How can you not be a rider?\" The pale woman, Tila Newan, spoke up, frowning at Nova. \"I thought you linked with Korgad, and now you say you're not a rider?\"\n\n\"Linked?\" Nova repeated. \"You mean like the 'link-jump' thing you were talking about? I mean, Korgad did bring us, but it wasn't like I did anything.\"\n\n\"No, not the link-jump,\" Tila said. \"A Link.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I don't know what that is,\" Nova admitted, gritting her teeth at the confusing language. Link, link-jump, what was the difference?\n\nAlon let out a scoff under his breath, leaning closer to Lege. \"We should expel these intruders,\" he muttered under his breath. \"They clearly are not meant to be here, regardless of\"\u2014he frowned over at Nova\u2014\"alleged parentage.\"\n\nAlleged parentage?! He was implying she had lied about her mother? That she would lie about something like that?! What could she possibly stand to gain by claiming to be related to someone she hadn't even known was apparently famous? Nova sputtered a little, seeing red, and stepped forward ready to fight, but this time it was Gwyn who held up her hand, giving Nova an apologetic look before turning to Alon with a frown.\n\n\"We were all intruders to this land at one point,\" Gwyn told him in a low voice. \"And in case you've forgotten, we're in no position to turn anyone away.\" The woman turned back to Nova and Zephyr. \"A 'link' is a bond between rider and dragon,\" she explained, waving towards Dafyd with a proud sort of smile. \"My grandson, Captain Falla, is a dragon rider not because he mounts a dragon, but because he was able to link his thoughts and emotions to one in a personal mental connection. The two, from that point on, have acted as one. A witch, on the other hand\"\u2014she indicated herself with a smile\u2014\"is someone with the ability to cast spells; an affinity for learning and memorizing countless incantations, studying hard, and thinking creatively, to come up with new solutions to the problems the world faces.\"\n\n\"Memorization and studying,\" Zephyr whispered to Nova. \"Sounds like something I could do.\"\n\n\"And a mage,\" Gwyn continued, \"is a scholar, and acts as a guardian of knowledge in the Great Library. They usually only earn the title after having spent many years as either a witch or rider, but some mages come from the general populace, as well.\"\n\nOkay, well, that was a lot to remember. Nova rubbed at her eyes, feeling frustrated at this entire process and trying to log this all away to think about later. Gosh, she was tired. Tired and hungry. How long had it been since they'd eaten anything? The time-change was throwing her off and making it even harder to process everything they were telling her. She just wanted to get something to eat and go to sleep.\n\nBut the council members were still talking.\n\n\"And you did not forge an unauthorized link with Korgad?\" Lege pressed.\n\n\"No,\" Nova said for what felt like the millionth time. \"I haven't formed any sort of\u2026of 'mental link' with Korgad. I'm not a Rider; I'm just\u2026a girl.\"\n\n\"I feel there's more to you both than you realize,\" Gwyn insisted with a smile, looking more specifically at Zephyr. \"As it happens, you're in luck! We're beginning trials for new recruits in a few months; we can evaluate the two of you and see where you fit in.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Nova frowned. \"We're not planning to stay here! We only let Korgad bring us here 'cause we thought he knew where my mother was. But she's not here.\"\n\n\"You aren't staying?\" Osa spoke up, straightening suddenly.\n\n\"We\u2026we weren't planning on it, no,\" Zephyr said, glancing at Gwyn, who frowned a little.\n\n\"Why not?\" the old woman asked. \"Were you planning on returning to Earth?\"\n\n\"Do you have family there?\" Lege asked Zephyr.\n\nZephyr swallowed. \"No.\"\n\n\"Well, you can't go back through the portal,\" Alon told her. \"At least, not right away, though if we're allowing limited use of the portals to search for Seren, perhaps we might be able to send you back in due time.\"\n\n\"So, we're stuck here?\" Nova clenched her fists.\n\n\"For the time, it appears so,\" Gwyn said. \"But if you have nothing keeping you on Earth, why would you wish to go back?\"\n\nNova opened her mouth but found she had no answer. Why did she want to go back?\n\n\"Well\u2026that's our home,\" Zephyr said, shifting her weight. \"We can't go back through the portal? For how long?\"\n\n\"We'll discuss it in time,\" Alon nodded to the others before turning back to the girls. \"But there's no question over whether you'll take the trials, child. You must.\"\n\n\"I must?\" Nova repeated. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Why? Because of your parents, of course,\" Alon told her. \"We've lost far too many dragon riders in this war, and we need every rider we can find! If you bear the ability to link with a dragon, you cannot simply leave. It's your duty, your destiny, to take your mother's place on the battlefield.\"\n\n\"I'm not fighting in any war,\" Nova said at once, holding her hands up in surrender and backing up a few steps. \"I never agreed to that\u2014I just came here to find my mother!\"\n\n\"We don't need to discuss such matters now,\" Gwyn said, holding her own hand up placatingly. \"The two of you must be tired from the journey; you'll stay here in Stonehaven for now and begin preparing for the trials, and we'll come up with a decision about the possibility of your being returned to Earth in a few days. There, then, it is settled!\" She stood, holding a hand towards Dafyd and placing it on his shoulder when he stepped forward, indicating for him to lean down a bit and beginning to talk quietly with him while Lege and Alon also began to talk together, Tila standing and casting the girls a look as she passed them and left the hall.\n\nThat was it? They were deciding what was going to happen, and Nova and Zephyr had no control over it? This was all feeling incredibly familiar in a very bad way, and Nova wasn't happy about it.\n\n\"I guess the meeting's over,\" Zephyr muttered, fidgeting with her hands and edging towards Nova as she glanced at the others. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nova whispered back. \"Wait for Dafyd, I guess.\" She frowned at the young man, feeling impatient to leave the room and more than a little disappointed in how the meeting had gone down. At least she'd learned a lot, she supposed, but it was a lot to process all at once, and the council members hadn't exactly been helpful.\n\nWell\u2026Gwyn had been helpful, for the most part, but what was with her deciding Nova and Zephyr would stay and do these 'trials' of theirs? It didn't matter where they 'fit in.' They weren't witches or riders, and they weren't going to stay here as fancy librarians, either. Nova just wanted to find her mother and go home\u2026\n\nWherever 'home' even was.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" the younger councilman said quietly, approaching Nova now and giving her a deep, thoughtful sort of frown, holding his hands out for hers and then\u2014What?\u2014grasping her hand in both of his when she went to shake it. \"I am Osa the Bold.\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah,\" Nova said awkwardly, pulling her hand free slowly and taking a step back, looking the man over more carefully. He was tall and rather thin, dressed in deep red robes with a barely visible pattern in lighter red stretching along the edge of the fabric. His hair, cut short, was dark near the roots, but mostly gray, and his skin was somewhat darker than hers. \"You said that during the, ah, introductions.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the man said with a strained sort of chuckle, an awkward smile coming to his face. \"Yes, I did.\" He sighed, looking at her with the same sort of look Korgad had given her earlier, only with more confusion thrown in. \"I am Ayo's father.\"\n\nNova nodded, pursing her lips and running through everyone she'd met that day in her head. Ayo, Ayo\u2026was that Dafyd's dragon? No, he'd called her Lir. \"I'm sorry,\" Nova told the man, shrugging a shoulder. \"I don't know who that is.\"\n\nOsa let out a deep breath, pressing a hand to his mouth for a moment. \"Ayo\u2026was Seren's husband.\"\n\nOh\u2026\n\nOh.\n\nAyo was Nova's\u2026father? Which meant, this man was her grandfather?!\n\nNova took her own step back, suddenly feeling tense and completely caught off guard. She glanced at Zephyr, who looked surprised herself. \"What\u2014what\u2026\" Nova started, turning back to the man and biting her lip, crossing her arms protectively. \"You're, um\u2026Seren's\u2026?\"\n\n\"Father-in-law,\" Osa told her. \"I'm sorry I didn't speak up sooner, during the meeting, but I was\u2026surprised. Shocked, more like. I had no idea my son had borne any children. I was\u2026not as close to him\u2014or to your mother\u2014as I would like to have been.\"\n\n\"Um, okay.\" Nova swallowed, nodding rapidly and starting to feel trapped again, taking another step back and glancing at the door. \"Oookay. Um, so, you're my\u2026grandfather.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Osa said seriously. \"You have been living on Earth all this time?\n\n\"Mm-hmm, yep,\" Nova nodded again. \"And you've been\u2026here.\"\n\n\"I would have looked for you,\" Osa told her, his eyes wide and remorseful. \"Believe me, my child, if I had known you were lost, if I'd known you were alive, I would have looked for you and brought you home, here, to Ragond. I'm sorry; I'm\u2026 Oh, I am so sorry!\"\n\nThe man stepped forward, holding his arms out and wrapping them around Nova in a sudden, unexpected hug, and she froze. She had no idea what to do. This was the single most uncomfortable meeting she'd ever had, and she felt\u2026upset? Angry? Happy? She didn't even know; she was just\u2026confused! She'd known she had a father, as everyone did, but she'd never had any memories of one\u2014not even feelings, like she had with her mother. She'd always assumed the man had never been part of her life. She'd known enough kids who'd had single parents and she'd always sort of thought her mother had been the same. And now this man was hugging her, apologizing for not finding her sooner, acting like\u2026like she was his.\n\nNo. This was too much. Nova pulled away from him, letting out a breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding as she stepped over to Zephyr, instinctively moving behind the girl a bit, knowing she should say something to Osa, but not able to think of anything.\n\nShe had so many questions whirling through her head now, about her father, the man she'd never given much thought to at all. Who was Ayo? What sort of man was he? Was he still alive? Was he a dragon rider like her mother had been? She wanted to ask Osa all these questions and more, but her tongue seemed caught in her mouth, and she couldn't say anything at all. She couldn't even make herself look at him\u2026.\n\nOsa paused for a moment, his shoulders falling in apparent sorrow, but then he nodded once, letting out a deep sigh. \"It is alright,\" he told her quietly. \"I understand, you are\u2026shocked, even more than I am. You need time to come to terms with what you've learned here today.\" He nodded decisively, waving his hand towards the door. \"Come, I will find a room for you here in Stonehaven, until something more permanent can be arranged. Perhaps you might be willing to\u2026Well.\" He shook his head. \"Another time, I will ask. Another time, another time.\" He sighed, looking troubled again.\n\nThis was awkward. Nova nodded again, shifting her weight and moving to the door along with Zephyr. \"Zephyr, too,\" she told Osa. \"Can we stay together?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, of course, you must stay with your friend,\" Osa agreed at once. \"I'll arrange for the finest quarters we have available\u2014come, come!\" He hurried from the room, waving for them to follow him.\n\n\"Oh my gosh,\" Zephyr whispered, staring at Nova in shock. \"Nova! You have a grandfather!\"\n\n\"Er, yeah,\" Nova muttered. Apparently, she did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stonehaven",
                "text": "Nova and Zephyr followed Osa through the large foyer, the stares and whispers from the few groups of onlookers\u2014which seemed to have grown in number, now including some of the crowd from outside\u2014only getting more pointed and excited as the two girls followed along behind the councilman. Nova was still having a hard time wrapping her head around what all she'd learned, and found herself feeling completely tense and vulnerable, watching Osa as they walked. He seemed just as uncomfortable as she felt and also deeply troubled, glancing back at her and then looking quickly away when he caught her eye. She looked away, too, searching for something else to stare at to keep from staring at him, only to blink in surprise when she realized one of the tapestries they'd passed on the way in was a depiction of Osa, red robes and all. This was a lot to take in.\n\nThey moved out of the grander building, and as Osa led them towards the base of the larger structure, Zephyr stepped forward, looking up at Osa and clearing her throat.\n\n\"So, this is, um, Stonehaven?\" she asked, sounding like she was trying to ease the tension.\n\nOsa glanced down at her and then back at the building, nodding once. \"Stonehaven is Ragond's training conservatory,\" he explained. \"It is where all riders and witches come to learn their craft. Many hopefuls arrive every year for the trials, and any who show affinity for either path are accepted into the school to begin their studies.\"\n\n\"So, it's a school,\" Zephyr concluded. \"How long does it take? To learn to be a rider or witch, I mean?\"\n\n\"Well, one's studies are never truly over,\" Osa told her. \"Witches spend their entire lives learning their craft, and the art of dragon riding is ever changing. But most students earn their badges in one or two years. Many of the children here traveled from all corners of the world\u2014or beyond, in some cases,\" he said, glancing down at Zephyr again. \"So, Stonehaven provides free training, room and board, and supplies in exchange for their future service.\" He sighed a little, starting to look absent as he talked, as if going through a recited speech. \"Our military is also housed here, though at present our forces are spread rather\u2026thin, throughout Ragond, in order to defend it from the Mythoi attacks. Not many can link with dragons, so we're happy to train and employ as many riders as we can find.\"\n\n\"What about witches?\" Zephyr asked. \"How many people can practice witchcraft here?\"\n\n\"Oh, anyone can become a witch,\" Osa told her. \"Witchcraft draws on the magic of the world, not the magic of the caster. It is a difficult path, one that requires dedication, patience, and constant study, and without the glory and renown that come with being a rider, but those who excel in it can become powerful indeed.\"\n\n\"Did\u2014did you say anyone can become a witch?\" Zephyr's eyes widened. \"Even if they're not from Ragond? Even if they don't have any special powers of their own?\"\n\nOsa nodded. \"That's right. Were you interested?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Zephyr gasped. \"Oh my gosh, that would be amazing! Me, casting spells and performing magic! Can you imagine it, Nova?\"\n\nNova could imagine it, actually. But why was Zephyr acting like they'd be staying here for years? The entire reason they'd come was to find Nova's mother, not get caught up in some war, fighting for people they didn't even know.\n\nZephyr looked so excited, though.\n\n\"Yeah, I think you'd be pretty good at it,\" Nova admitted, pushing her hair out of her eyes. \"All that\u2026memorizing seems like your thing.\"\n\nZephyr paused, taking in her expression and looking a little uncertain, but not calling attention to it. Instead, she turned back to Osa and continued to ask him questions as they walked. Nova tuned them out after a while as she was distracted by how big Stonehaven actually was.\n\nAlthough she had seen several other buildings from above during the brief time Korgad had been flying them overhead, now she could only see a thick stone roof of sorts, this cropping out from the mountain in a gigantic half-circle miles above them. Near the center of the stone roof was a large rounded building, stretching from the base of the mountain up into the top of the stone platform, reminding Nova vaguely of the pictures she'd seen of the Space Needle in Seattle, only with a more fantasy take on it, as this central tower was covered in ornate spires, turrets, small balconies, and carvings, looking almost like a gothic cathedral\u2026which was strange to see next to the more Grecian-temple style of the Gold Hall. The latter's style was matched by six massive stone pillars surrounding the central tower in a half-moon shape, supporting the edges of the stone plate above them, each column as thick as a small house and as tall as a skyscraper, with deep grooves carved into them like what she'd seen in pictures of old Roman architecture. The columns, central tower, and stone roof created a cover of sorts over the stone courtyard surrounding the tower, although the roof was so far above the ground that the setting sun streamed easily into the courtyard, lighting up the stone from the buildings and the brassy brown scales of the several dragons lounging around in deep golden afternoon light.\n\nOsa led them through the covered courtyard and into the central tower, Nova gaping at the interior as they entered. It was another grand foyer, this one the size of a stadium, designed with polished marble floors and wide stained-glass windows along the walls that cast the warm colors of the setting sun over the room. In the center of the foyer, the ceiling opened up, Nova and Zephyr both letting out breaths of awe as they passed underneath the first outcropping balcony and looked up to see floor after floor after floor expanding upward into the tower, deep red wooden railings along the edge of each balcony where they each overlooked the foyer.\n\n\"What sort of stuff do you do in here?\" Zephyr asked as Osa led them into the back of the foyer, stepping onto a large platform situated between two spiral staircases leading into the upper floors.\n\n\"This building is known as the spire, and mainly contains the offices of our teachers, mages, and military leaders, as well as the private studies of myself and my companions on the Council,\" Osa explained absently, going over to the back wall and taking hold of a brass wheel, then turning it to the side and stepping back as the platform shifted underneath them, beginning to rise up against the wall.\n\n\"It's an elevator,\" Nova realized, stepping a bit closer to the center of the platform, as it wasn't walled in or surrounded by a cage. It didn't even have a safety railing. How people weren't constantly falling off this thing was anyone's guess, but Nova found she kind of liked it. It gave her a bit of a thrill to glance down and see the stone floor of the foyer slowly fall away beneath them.\n\n\"An elevator?\" Osa repeated in mild interest. \"Is that what they call it in Florida?\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah\u2026\" Nova blinked at him. \"What do you call it?\"\n\n\"Here, it's mainly referred to as a lift,\" Osa told her.\n\n\"How does it work?\" Zephyr asked, giving the brass wheel\u2014which was connected not to the wall but to the elevator itself, now that Nova was really looking at it\u2014a curious sort of glance before looking up at the wall they were rising against. \"I don't see any cables or anything pulling it.\"\n\n\"Magic,\" Osa explained. \"When the architects designed Stonehaven, they knew they would climb high into the mountain, and although they built many staircases, they wanted to provide an easier mode of travel\u2014at least for this first leg of the journey, up the spire. One of them was visiting Earth at the time and met an inventor and architect with designs for just such a device, though they improved upon it here, casting spells on it to give it the power to rise and fall. When the wheel is turned to the left, the lift rises.\" He nodded to the wheel, which was turned to the left. \"When we've reached the floor we wish to land on, we turn the wheel back to the center, and it lowers back to the ground for the next passenger.\"\n\n\"But what about people who are already up here?\" Nova asked, glancing out over the edge of the lift as they began passing the other floors, noting two balconies on either side of the lift for passengers to step onto, the space directly in front of them open to the grand foyer below. The balconies circled the rounded wall, creating hallways of sorts with around five large doors each arranged in a half-circle facing the platform, the open space cut off from the balconies with only a banister.\n\n\"What of them?\" Osa asked.\n\n\"How do they get back down if the elevator's at the bottom?\" Nova asked. \"Is there a button to call it back up?\"\n\n\"They go down the stairs,\" Osa said blankly, indicating the spiral staircases next to the elevator and balconies.\n\n\"What about if they have to go higher up?\" Zephyr asked in confusion. \"Like, if they're on the second floor and have to go all the way to the top, do they have to climb down to the lobby to take the elevator up?\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Osa nodded his understanding. \"No, there are ways around it. In days long past, a witch would be given the duty of operating the lift, taking it up to requested floors and ferrying people to their destinations, but, as you can see, the spire is largely uninhabited now.\" He waved his hand over the open area, Nova looking around and noticing that the place did seem rather empty. Aside from one or two people climbing down the stairs, she hadn't noticed anyone in this tower at all. \"Nowadays, if someone is using the floors here and needs to go higher into the spire, or above it onto the upper platforms, they send their attendants down to fetch the lift for them.\"\n\n\"No one's using any of these rooms?\" Nova asked with a surprised sort of scoff as they passed the sixth floor. \"How many offices are on each floor?\"\n\n\"In most cases, four or five,\" Osa told her, nodding to the one they were passing. \"This floor contains only four offices and a war-room, reserved for our top generals, and each office is adjacent to a small parlor so that the generals might have a place to rest when not at work or in their own quarters. However, the generals are away at present, governing forces in other parts of the world; this floor, like many, is empty these days as a result.\"\n\n\"It's so big,\" Zephyr noted, her eyes a little wide as they passed the seventh and eighth floors.\n\n\"Yes,\" Osa nodded. \"The architects who designed the building had the mountain in mind when they planned it. With the mountain providing the structure on which to build a solid foundation, they weren't limited in how high they could go, building into the sky itself.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the lift raised through the ceiling of the spire, coming to a stop in a smaller, more closed off room which was only about eight or nine feet high, with thick stone walls, no windows, and nothing of note besides a single staircase leading up to a small platform with a thick wooden door. Nova realized this must be the inside of the thick stone platform they'd seen from outside, the one that covered the outer courtyard, and she let out a breath at the thought of just how thick the platform must be to have this whole room inside it. Looking up from the ground outside, she'd been able to tell the platform was sturdy, but it was hard to gauge the size of things from that far away, and she hadn't expected it to seem quite this substantial.\n\nOsa led the girls up the staircase, opening the door, and they stepped out onto the mountain.\n\nOr, rather, onto the gigantic platform built on top of the stone roof covering the spire and the courtyard several stories below. The mountain still towered overhead, the rest of Stonehaven climbing up ever higher towards the peak, but for the expanse of what had to be at least half a mile, there was nothing but the flat, stable platform, large enough that it almost felt like it had to be the ground at the base of the mountain itself, instead of lifted halfway to the top as Nova knew it to be.\n\nThe girls both let out awed breaths as they followed Osa across the platform and took in the sights as a large dragon appeared around one of the mountain crags, turning gracefully and gliding towards them, landing on the platform nearby as a rider dismounted.\n\nThat must have been the purpose of the platform, Nova realized. It gave dragons and riders a place to land, without their needing to go inside and take the elevator up.\n\nAcross the platform, where Osa was leading them, the mountain was divided by a tall gorge, the platform built all the way into the divide, two ridges surrounding it and joining together farther up the crags, where they continued on towards the peak. Two buildings were constructed around the ridges. The building on the left ridge only looked to be three stories high, judging by the placement of the windows and small balconies encircling the circumference of the building, and from the outside, it appeared rather small, with a stone bridge leading from the balcony on the top floor towards the other building across the gorge.\n\nThis second building seemed much larger and traveled on for more than the three stories the first appeared to possess, each floor set a little farther back to rest closer to the mountain. In fact, it seemed like the buildings delved into the mountain itself, constructed so naturally that it almost looked as if they had been built first, and the mountain had naturally cascaded down over them.\n\nThese buildings seemed to have larger distances between floors, as well, Nova noticing that in several instances, the gap between floors was so great it actually made the buildings completely separate, nothing connecting them but a wide, ancient-looking stone staircase leading from the lower building to the upper one that sat elsewhere on the mountain.\n\nIt was to this cluster of climbing buildings that Osa led them, the girls taking one last look out at the platform for the view, as the sun had officially set and the world was now dimming into blue twilight, a large, milky white moon just visible beyond the distant peaks as one or two dusk stars started to show.\n\nSo, Ragond had a moon and stars, as well. Somehow, that made Nova feel more\u2026relaxed than she had before. At least she could count on the sky to stay the same.\n\nShe and Zephyr followed Osa into the foyer of the first building, which was much less grand than the Gold Hall or the spire, with plain gray stone slab floors, a few faded tapestries, thick wooden benches, and a couple of framed portraits on the walls, as well as standing brass candleholders casting dim light through the hall now that sunlight wasn't streaming through the windows.\n\n\"What building is this?\" Nova asked Osa.\n\n\"This building is the school and student quarters,\" Osa explained. \"Here on this floor, you'll find the galley where you'll take your meals and the classrooms\u2014although, as a rider, much of your training will take place outside. And the second and third floors contain your dormitories. Beyond that, higher up the mountain, is situated the military barracks and training grounds, the armory, treasury, and personal quarters for the teachers and military leaders, as well as the dragon tunnels.\"\n\n\"Dragon tunnels?\" Nova asked.\n\n\"The ancient caves where dragons dwell,\" Osa told her. \"Stonehaven was built around the caves, over a period of hundreds of years, and many dragons in our ranks nest there now. Best not to wander in without an invitation, however. Dragons are rather\u2026territorial. Even the friendly ones.\"\n\nThey reached yet another staircase in the back of the foyer, and Osa began leading the way up, pausing when they were met by a group of teenagers on their way down.\n\n\"Oh, are these the new recruits?\" one girl asked, the group pausing and looking Zephyr and Nova over in interest. \"I've already heard four or five people mention them.\"\n\n\"Are you really from Earth?\" a boy asked, giving them a bit of a suspicious look.\n\n\"Yeah, we are,\" Nova told them. She glanced up at Osa, wanting to continue to their rooms, but he'd stepped back a bit to gaze out one of the nearby windows as he waited, so she turned back to the group. \"I'm Nova Harris, and this is my friend Zephyr Anderson. But we're not recruits; we're just\u2026passing through.\"\n\n\"Aw, come on, you flew in on Korgad, so you have to become a rider!\" the first girl said with a smile. \"My name's Anasia. I'm starting my second-year training this year. This is Masa.\" She nodded to the boy, who bowed his head. \"And then that's Hilla and Briss.\" She indicated the two other girls who were with them. \"We're all second-year riders, but if you join up, we'd be happy to show you the ropes around here.\"\n\n\"It would be nice to get some fresh blood in our group,\" one of the other girls, Briss, added. \"Especially a daughter of Ayo and Seren, linked to Korgad. You'd be unstoppable!\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, feeling strangely defensive at the reference to her mother and Korgad. \"Well, thanks,\" she said curtly. \"But I'm not planning on staying, and even if I was, I'm not linked to Korgad. I just met him earlier today.\"\n\nThis earned her glances from both Osa and Zephyr, Osa frowning slightly as if he didn't like to hear her say it again, while Zephyr was looking uncertain now, pursing her lips a little as she looked away.\n\nWell, what did that mean?\n\n\"Oh.\" Anasia blinked in response to Nova's comment, the four teens seeming to pick up on Nova's tone and exchanging uncomfortable glances with each other. \"Well, erm, you're likely tired from the journey, so we won't keep you any longer. It was nice to meet you.\"\n\n\"If you change your mind about leaving, we'll see you at the trials,\" Masa told them, giving Nova a thoughtful look before nodding to Osa. \"Esteemed Elder.\" He turned back to Nova and Zephyr, bowing his head again. \"Lady Nova, Lady Zephyr.\"\n\nNova didn't think she'd ever get over being called that.\n\nThe teens all continued on their way down the stairs and Osa stepped forward again, giving Nova another troubled sort of look and leading them into the second floor. The dormitories.\n\nThe front room they entered was large and spacious, set up like a living room with several students lounging on strange-looking couches without backs or sitting around tables that seemed a little too tall, talking and laughing or reading from old books\u2014or even, in some cases, a few scrolls. They all glanced up as they entered, and then most of them stood, bowing their heads at Osa.\n\n\"Please, children, remain seated,\" Osa said, holding his hand up. \"I am here to see to it that these two are situated in one of the Princeps suites, and they would like to be placed in the same room. Where is the floor master?\"\n\n\"Here, Your Excellency.\" A boy who looked to be around Nova and Zephyr's age stepped forward. \"I will be honored to accommodate them.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Osa said with a nod, and then he turned to Nova and Zephyr, offering a smile, his gaze lingering on Nova as he let out another troubled sort of sigh. \"Here, I shall leave you,\" he told her. \"I expect you're very tired, and we all have much to discuss come daybreak, but\u2026I am glad to know you, Nova, and I hope to see you again soon. Very soon.\"\n\nWith that, and without waiting for a response, the man turned and left the dormitory, heading back the way he'd come.\n\n\"This way, my lady.\" The boy waved towards a wide, long hall delving deeper into the mountain.\n\n\"Yeah, um, you can all stop with the 'lady' stuff now.\" Nova cleared her throat, feeling her cheeks heat as she and Zephyr followed the boy. \"We're just normal girls. Right, Zeph?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Zephyr agreed. \"I'm Zephyr, by the way, and this is Nova.\"\n\n\"My name is Torin,\" the boy said, glancing at them as they walked. \"Are you the new arrivals everyone's talking about? The daughters of Seren and Ayo?\"\n\n\"Er, Nova is,\" Zephyr said. \"I'm just\u2026along for the ride.\"\n\n\"Then 'lady' is an appropriate title,\" Torin said. \"But, with your permission, I'll honor your request and simply use your first names from now on.\"\n\n\"Our permission?\" Nova repeated. \"Uh, sure, please call us Nova and Zephyr. How old are you?\"\n\n\"I am sixteen,\" Torin told them, nodding once as he turned down a second corridor that branched off the first. \"And I shall honor your request in the future. As for rooms, you're in luck; there are several suites available befitting your status, and you'll have your pick of them. Would you like one of the outer rooms with a window, or would you prefer an inner room, which is larger and warmer at night?\"\n\nNova exchanged a glance with Zephyr, who shrugged.\n\n\"Surprise me,\" Nova told Torin.\n\nThe boy gave her a bewildered sort of look, but nodded, continuing in silence and stopping at a wide, white door, the frame showing an ornate design of rose vines. He pulled a keyring from a pouch at his side, shifting through them until reaching a small gold skeleton key and detaching it from the rest, using it to unlock the door and then handing it to Nova. She glanced at it, noticing that the head of the key was also carved into the shape of a rose.\n\nTorin pushed the door open, stepping aside so the two could enter, and Nova was immediately startled by the grandeur of the apartment within. She walked through the door, looking around at the large main area displaying white stone floors with a thick red carpet set out in the center of the room, which was itself under a low coffee table made of some kind of pale wood, varnished and shining, with a silver bowl set out on it. There were two more of the backless couches next to the coffee table, these being made of the same kind of wood, with creamy white cushions and red pillows, a deep green throw blanket over one of them. Two desks were placed on either side of a window nearly as big as the wall, and along one side of the room there were two steps leading to a slightly raised platform, two small Grecian pillars separating the platform from the rest of the room. And on the platform were two canopy beds\u2014actual canopy beds\u2014made of the same pale wood, with red curtains surrounding them and cream-colored blankets, white marbled end tables next to the two.\n\n\"Oh my gosh,\" Zephyr gasped. \"This place is amazing!\"\n\n\"No kidding,\" Nova agreed, staring around at the room. It sure beat every spare room she'd ever had in foster homes.\n\n\"And your private bath is through there.\" Torin nodded to another door against the wall opposite the bed area as he began making his way through the room, lighting several candles.\n\n\"Oh, sweet!\" Nova smiled. \"If the bathroom's half as nice as this room, maybe we should stay, after all.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Zephyr smiled, visibly perking up at this remark.\n\n\"Oh no, that was a joke,\" Nova backtracked quickly. \"I\u2026I dunno why I said that. I want to talk to Korgad before I make a decision.\"\n\n\"Right, yeah, okay.\" Zephyr wilted a little. \"Well\u2026I'm starving, anyway. Erm, Torin, is there anywhere we could go to get something to eat?\"\n\n\"I shall have something sent up,\" Torin said, crossing the room to pick up the silver bowl and heading back to the door. \"Would you like anything in particular?\"\n\n\"Uh, something fast,\" Nova told him. \"I feel like I haven't eaten in forever.\"\n\n\"Very well, I shall act in haste.\" Torin bowed again before leaving the room.\n\n\"I wish people would stop doing that.\" Nova frowned. \"It's weird.\"\n\n\"What, the bowing and 'my lady' stuff?\" Zephyr smiled again. \"Yeah, imagine if someone back home heard that.\"\n\n\"These kids would get beat up for sure,\" Nova laughed.\n\n\"Mm, I think anyone who tried would be in for it.\" Zephyr moved over to the alcove with the beds, sitting down on one of them and letting out a breath. \"Oh wow, this is the softest bed I've ever sat on,\" she remarked. \"Crap, I didn't bring my PJs.\"\n\nThis struck Nova as really funny for some reason, and she laughed more loudly than she should. \"Next time a dragon invites us to go to a magical world, I'll be sure to remind you to pack first!\"\n\n\"Thanks, I appreciate it,\" Zephyr laughed back. \"Now come try your bed and tell me this isn't a dream.\"\n\nNova obeyed, going and sitting on her bed and then letting out a breath, lying down completely and sinking into the covers. Oh, this was like a dream. \"Wow,\" she laughed, making herself sit back up. \"If I'm not careful, I'll fall asleep before the food shows up.\"\n\n\"Heh, right?\" Zephyr chuckled. \"Jeez, that was the longest day ever.\"\n\n\"I wonder what's happening back home,\" Nova wondered out loud, standing up and crossing over to the window, looking out over the dark night sky of Ragond. \"They've probably noticed we're missing and sent people out to look for us.\"\n\n\"Oh, definitely,\" Zephyr agreed, getting up and crossing over to sit on the couch herself, letting out a bit of a laugh. \"If I'm right about what time it is there, we just missed math class.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Nova grinned. \"Good. Mr. Grayson hates me anyway.\"\n\nThe two talked on for a short while longer, Nova only feeling more tired and hungry than she had before now that she knew she could eat and sleep soon and was waiting around for it. She didn't have to wait too long, though, as there soon came a light knock on the door, Torin entering after a moment with a small pushcart.\n\n\"I had the cooks make you a bread and cheese plate,\" he told the girls, wheeling the cart to the coffee table and moving a tray to it, along with a silver pitcher and two mugs. Nova swallowed, feeling her hunger spike at the rows of rolls and cheese arranged prettily on the tray. \"And I refilled the bowl with fresh fruit,\" the boy continued, next returning the silver bowl he'd taken, which was now piled high with apples, oranges, bananas, and pears, as well as a large bunch of juicy-looking grapes. \"It's not much, but it should tide you over until breakfast.\"\n\n\"No, this is great\u2014wow!\" Zephyr stared at the food. \"Thanks, Torin!\"\n\n\"It is an honor to serve you,\" the other boy said, bowing again. \"And now I shall take my leave.\"\n\n\"Thanks again,\" Nova said, offering him a slight smile, though still feeling incredibly uncomfortable with the bowing and the way he kept talking like they were royalty or something. \"Uh, see you later?\"\n\n\"Yes, you likely will,\" Torin said, looking a little bewildered again, but returning the smile before he left.\n\nThe girls wasted no time in starting to eat, going through all of the bread and cheese and most of the grapes without stopping to talk much between bites. Somehow, even though it was an incredibly simple meal, it felt more satisfying than anything else Nova had ever eaten. The bread was warm and soft with a sweet flavor to it, and the cheese was rich and flavorful while the grapes were the sweetest, most plump grapes she'd ever tasted.\n\nWhatever strange and special magic the people in Ragond used to grow and make their food was nothing short of a miracle.\n\n\"Ohhh, that was good!\" Zephyr announced when they'd finished, going to lean back on the couch and then letting out a slight yelp as she fell over the backless edge, hitting the ground and bursting into laughter.\n\nNova laughed with her, getting up herself and crossing over to the other side of the table, holding her hand out to help her friend to her feet. \"That's gonna take some time getting used to.\"\n\n\"You're telling me,\" Zephyr laughed, shaking her head as she made her way over to the beds. \"Maybe my head'll be on straight after I get some sleep. You coming?\"\n\nNova glanced at the beds, tempted to go lie down, but\u2026she also needed to talk to Korgad. So much had happened, and she needed answers. She knew that if she tried to sleep now, with her questions all bouncing around in her head, she'd lie awake all night, no matter how tired she felt. \"Maybe later,\" she told Zephyr, heading to the door. \"I think I'm gonna look for Korgad. See if he'll talk to me yet.\"\n\nZephyr frowned at her. \"I don't think you should wander around here by yourself.\"\n\n\"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\"You'll be lost!\" Zephyr scoffed.\n\n\"Have a little faith. I was paying attention\u2014I remember how to find this place.\" Nova rolled her eyes. \"Besides, I won't stay out too late. I'll be fine. You go ahead and get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026okay.\" Zephyr's frown deepened. \"But be careful.\"\n\nNova nodded, leaving the room and heading back through the foyer, ignoring the stares and whispers she got as she looked around for another staircase. Osa had said the dragon caves were at the top of the mountain; she figured that if she kept going up, she'd get there eventually. She saw a large archway leading into a hall even bigger than the one leading to the rooms, and went through it, passing a few other doors and eventually finding a grand staircase to an upper floor.\n\nShe climbed it, careful to keep track of where she'd been, and kept walking, noting that this floor seemed smaller and less nice than the one below, and then she found a third staircase. This one led to a thick wooden door, and she stepped through it onto one of the outer staircases she'd noticed from the platform.\n\nNight had officially come, and she shivered a bit at the chilly mountain wind, pulling her jacket more firmly around her and checking to make sure her necklace was still present as she carefully climbed the staircase towards the next set of buildings.\n\nIt was lucky the moon was big, and that the rest of the stars were out, seeming strangely out of place but shining more brightly than she'd ever seen them on Earth, as they were the only light illuminating the stairs. And now that she was up here, she could see that one misstep would send her careening either into the gorge on one side or the actual mountain cliffs on the other.\n\nShe entered the next building\u2014still determined to reach the top, but feeling less certain now as she passed by one or two adults in armor, remembering that this was supposed to be the military base. She picked up her pace and stuck close to the wall, trying not to pay attention to the strange looks she was getting from these few soldiers, and eventually she found another staircase, and then another, and then one more, this last one leading outside once again. By this point, it was getting darker and colder, and much windier, and Nova had begun to think she'd made a mistake in coming out alone.\n\nIt didn't help that this staircase seemed to be twice as long as the others, with more twists and turns than she'd expected, and when she entered the next building it led to, she looked around only to realize that she had no idea what was supposed to be here. There was no foyer\u2026only a narrow, stone corridor with lots of other halls branching out and a ton of closed doors, as well as a few wrought iron sconces with half-melted candles barely illuminating the labyrinthine area. It didn't take long for Nova to realize the odds of her finding the right hall to get to the next staircase were slim.\n\nShe'd turned around to head back to the dorms when she thought she heard voices coming her way\u2014which was strange, as she hadn't seen anyone on this floor at all. Realizing she might not be allowed up here and could get into trouble if she were caught, Nova ducked down a side corridor, spotting a short wooden table and hurriedly kneeling to crouch under it as the voices grew louder, along with two sets of footsteps.\n\n\"But why now?\" One voice drifted over from the main hall as they passed the side corridor she was hiding in. \"Surely, it's no mere coincidence she would appear today, of all times.\"\n\n\"It's unexpected, to be sure,\" the other voice agreed in a near whisper. \"But too many saw her arrive. She can't be dealt with quietly.\"\n\nWere\u2026were they talking about her?\n\nThe two passed, heading down the hall, and on a whim, Nova crept out from under the table, quietly hurrying after them and pausing at the end of her corridor\u2014not risking turning the corner, but straining to listen as the voices drifted farther away.\n\n\"He can't afford this distraction, you know,\" one said.\n\n\"Well then,\" said the other, \"the distraction shall have to be\u2026dealt with.\"\n\nNova felt a slight chill go down her spine at the statement, waiting where she was until the voices and footsteps faded away completely before venturing out from her hiding space. Dealt with? What did that mean? They were talking about her, right? Who was she going to 'be a distraction' to? Osa? Korgad?\n\nWhoever it was, she didn't want to stick around and risk having those two guys come back and find her, so she turned away to hurry back down the halls and down the long flights of stairs towards the dormitories.\n\nWhat on earth had she gotten herself into?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Legacy",
                "text": "When Nova woke up the next morning to the sound of loud roaring, she forgot for a moment where she was.\n\nShe shot up in bed, blinking blearily around at the half-drawn red canopy of curtains and the expensively furnished room beyond them. Pale pink light from the morning sun streamed in through the window.\n\nRight\u2026this was Ragond.\n\nSomehow, she'd still been sure it was a dream, even after everything that had happened the day before. She'd thought she would wake up back in her own bed in Stephanie's house, in her cramped and cluttered little room, hurriedly getting dressed for school and rushing to grab a bowl of cereal or something before leaving with Zephyr to catch the bus.\n\nBut here she was, in sheets so soft and smooth they had to be real silk\u2014or, at least, this was what she'd always imagined silk would feel like. She laid still for a little while longer, taking it all in and noticing, now that she was awake enough to do so, how detailed and ornate the bedframe was, with roses and thorny vines carved delicately into the pale wood of the bedposts. She sat up slowly, stretching her arms, and then noted that the cream-colored silk sheets and the red curtains around the bed also had roses embroidered into them, subtly and with great care, as if hours had been spent hand-stitching every line. It was gorgeous. This couldn't be real, no matter how much it felt like it.\n\nBut, sitting up hadn't ended the dream. She climbed out of the bed and stepped over to Zephyr's bed, shaking the other girl's shoulder. \"Hey, Zeph, wake up. It's, uh\u2026\" she chuckled, and went on, \"it's all still here, and it's morning.\"\n\nZephyr groaned, sleepily pushing Nova's hand away and rolling over, pulling the covers over her head. Nova sighed, reaching out to keep trying just when there was a knock at the door.\n\nShe hesitated, but then left Zephyr's bed and crossed the apartment to answer the door, seeing Dafyd on the other side. He was smiling and holding out a couple of leather pouches.\n\n\"Good morning, Lady Nova,\" the young man greeted her. \"I've brought you and your friend a change of clothes.\"\n\n\"Oh, uh, you can just call me Nova,\" Nova sighed, though she took the two bags, feeling grateful for the chance to get out of these clothes she already wore, especially after sleeping in them. \"But thanks, I appreciate it.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Dafyd said, nodding. \"Did Osa the Bold show you around the school last night?\"\n\n\"Eh, a little,\" Nova told him, remembering the vastness of the building they were in. \"There was a lot to see, though, and we were pretty tired, so we came straight here.\"\n\n\"Did you see the gallery where you'll take your meals?\"\n\n\"No, actually, we didn't, though I think maybe he said something about it. Where is that?\"\n\n\"The gallery is located on the first floor,\" Dafyd reported. \"Breakfast will be served there shortly. If you and Lady\u2014ah, pardon me\u2014if you and Zephyr would like to get changed and head down to the first floor, you can follow the other students and get something to eat.\"\n\n\"Great, thanks,\" Nova said, nodding.\n\n\"And, afterwards, I'd like the two of you to join myself and a party of new recruits,\" Dafyd continued. \"We're going on a special training exercise this afternoon, an early test of skill, as it were, and it would be a good opportunity to measure your abilities and prepare you for the trials.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to do the trials.\" Nova frowned. \"How many times do I have to say I don't plan to stay here?\"\n\n\"You're here now, aren't you?\" Dafyd raised an eyebrow, giving her an amused smirk. \"Surely, that has to mean something.\"\n\n\"It means we had to spend the night somewhere,\" Nova protested, feeling a spark of irritation at his tone. \"And anyway, I don't know where Korgad went, and he's our ride, so\u2026\"\n\n\"Well, ahem, your participation in this exercise was specifically requested by the Council of Five,\" Dafyd said. \"It's a great honor to be selected for it, as traditionally, only the dozen recruits with the greatest of reputations in combat and valor are selected for it. This isn't a common run-of-the-mill lesson. It's an early opportunity for elite potential riders to get a head start on their training, and for the dragons and the instructors to see firsthand what kind of rider you could turn out to be. And with your heritage, you can't ignore the call to be a rider, especially with the state of the war the way it is. Surely, you've changed your mind about the trials by now?\"\n\n\"No, I haven't,\" Nova insisted. \"Why would I change my mind just because your Council of Five says I have to?\"\n\n\"You can't disregard a request from the Council of Five,\" Dafyd said blankly. \"That's unheard of.\"\n\nNova opened her mouth to keep arguing, but something told her it was a lost cause. This guy didn't seem to get the idea that she didn't have to do what the Council said, and she was too annoyed to bother fighting about it. She didn't need his permission to go, either; she could leave on Korgad without telling him. When she eventually found Korgad again, that is.\n\n\"Whatever,\" she said. \"Thanks for the clothes\u2014guess I'll see you later.\"\n\nShe shut the door on the guy's face before he could respond and carried the bags back over to the alcove, stepping up onto the platform and starting to rummage through them as she went back to trying to wake Zephyr.\n\n\"Zephyr, wake up,\" she said again, shaking the other girl's shoulder once more. \"Dafyd brought us new clothes and told me where to get breakfast.\"\n\nZephyr groaned again, finally sitting up and blinking around at the room in bleary-eyed confusion for a moment before seeming to remember everything for herself. \"What\u2026I'm up,\" she said, rubbing at her eyes. \"Did you say breakfast?\"\n\n\"Yep,\" Nova said, frowning into the bag. \"These clothes are weird. They're like all the fairy-tale clothes the other kids were wearing outside yesterday.\"\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" Zephyr muttered as she got to her feet, blinking at the bags. \"Fairy-tale stuff? What's wrong with that?\"\n\n\"They're just weird,\" Nova complained, dumping them onto her bed. \"Look at this stuff. Leggings, some weird peasant shirt, and this vest looks like leather\u2014I swear I saw like twenty of this exact one on a bunch of other kids last night.\" She picked up a lace-up vest that was indeed made from tan leather, twine loosely latched through the front like shoelaces. \"Then a couple belts and these\u2026weird things.\" She picked up some random leather sleeves that looked like pant-legs, but without the rest of the pants, all held together by leather belts. What were these? She hadn't really noticed or paid much attention to the pants the other students had been wearing yesterday.\n\n\"Chaps,\" Zephyr supplied, taking them from Nova and yawning as she held them up to her jeans. \"They go around your legs like this; it's for riding horses.\"\n\n\"Or dragons,\" Nova realized aloud, now feeling interested as she picked up the second pair. \"Weird.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know about you, but I definitely need a shower before I can change.\" Zephyr sighed, stretching her arms and then starting to gather some clothes from the bags. \"Mind if I go first?\"\n\n\"No, go ahead,\" Nova told her, waving her on as she went over to the table, grabbing an apple and starting to munch on it before walking slowly around the room and taking in all the small details she hadn't noticed before while Zephyr went into the bathroom to get ready.\n\nThe floor tiles were arranged carefully to give an impression of a giant rose. They'd overdone it on the theme, Nova decided with a chuckle, but she found she liked it anyway. The whole layout was peaceful\u2014even though everything here was grand and expensive-looking, there actually wasn't a lot here, making it looked clean and uncluttered. Something told her it wouldn't stay that way for long if she did stay here; she had a habit of never cleaning her room, which tended to drive foster parents crazy.\n\nShe stopped in front of the large window, caught by surprise at the view beyond it. A fog must have moved in overnight because it looked like there was a sea of soft, fiery clouds stretching out below them, seeming to burn in wisps of pink and gold. She could see the distant peaks of the far-off mountains rising beyond the clouds, but not the ground below, giving the impression she was in some kind of heavenly paradise, a palace in the sky.\n\nAs she watched, a burst of golden movement shot into view as a dragon dove down from above, wings tucked in for speed like a shining bullet. Nova let out a gasp of surprise and instinctively took a step back before rushing forward and watching as the dragon disappeared into the clouds, the white, thick mist swirling up like smoke around the beast and catching the light of the sun in a sudden rainbow as it settled back over the spot where the dragon had disappeared.\n\nNova had never seen anything more beautiful, more magical than that little patch of mist touched by a dragon in flight. She watched it breathlessly for the few seconds it lasted, but like all clouds, it shifted away before long, lost in the ocean of light surrounding it.\n\nShe slowly reached up, taking a bite from her crisp, tart apple as chills ran down her spine.\n\nYou can't eat in dreams.\n\nIt took Zephyr a little longer in the bathroom than Nova had expected, but after a while, the girl emerged, her eyes sparkling as she smiled.\n\n\"Oh my gosh, look at you!\" Nova couldn't help but laugh at the sight of Zephyr in her new getup. \"Nice peasant shirt.\"\n\n\"Tunic,\" Zephyr corrected her teasingly, flipping her damp hair over her shoulder and then laughing a little. \"Have you seen that bathroom? It's amazing!\"\n\n\"Well, I did go in last night, when I got back from the caves,\" Nova said. \"But I was really tired and it was dark last night, so I didn't look around much.\"\n\n\"Go look around. It's worth it.\"\n\n\"Alright, I'm going,\" Nova laughed, feeling curious and more than a little eager now as she passed Zephyr, stepping into the bathroom.\n\nHer breath caught in her throat again.\n\nThe room was incredibly large for a bathroom\u2014more the size of a bedroom than anything else, with ceilings as high as the ones in the main room. The floor was a warmly colored mosaic of tiles forming a large sun while the walls were made of cobblestone, arching overhead without corners to give the room a dome-like appearance.\n\nAlong Nova's right was a wide counter with a stone basin on it, filled with cool water Zephyr had apparently poured out of a pale green pitcher next to the basin, two deep red towels hanging on a brass bar on the wall by the door. A large mirror framed in an arch of bricks was set in the wall behind the basin, while the counter was lined with several candles which lit when Nova walked in, as if by magic\u2026which it probably was.\n\nAlong with two potted ferns of some sort, there were two varnished wooden boxes on either side of the basin, with cream-colored silk squares draped over the sides, a silver brush, comb, and hand mirror cradled in each one, along with a glass bottle of some kind of liquid, with a silver pump and nozzle. One box had a toothbrush in it, with a silver handle like everything else, while the other toothbrush was lying on the counter. Nova vaguely remembered using it the night before, though she'd been dead on her feet and hadn't paid much attention to it at the time. She returned the brush to its proper box and then picked up the bottles from within it, spraying her arm once and holding her wrist up to smell\u2026roses. Still with the theme of the room, then. That was actually a nice touch.\n\nBehind her, to the left-hand side of the door, was a pale wicker chair with a red cushion on it, and a wicker table containing more candles as well as another fern, and beyond that was a small, partially obscured alcove containing the toilet, which Nova also remembered having had difficulty finding the night before. Now that she was awake enough to truly make sense of what she was looking at, Nova found the fanciest looking toilet she'd ever seen, built into the wall like a bench with a cover on it, and another basin on the other side of the alcove, this one with an old fashioned, hand-pumped waterspout, and a bar of soap carved into another rose in a silver soap dish. She stepped back into the main part of the bathroom and investigated the back, where three wide stone steps led up into an even larger alcove containing the bath.\n\nThough, it was hard to describe it as 'the bath,' as the round tub built into the ground of the alcove and giving off a light misting of steam seemed more like a hot tub in a resort than anything else. Another large waterspout rose up out of the ground over the tub while candles burned in small niches arranged around the alcove like windows, a little chandelier hanging over the tub with candles burning there, too, to light the space.\n\nWere all bathrooms here like this?\n\nNova usually didn't take much time getting ready in the morning, but, like Zephyr, she took a longer time than she'd meant to just because of how nice this place was. She found everything she needed, too. Soap, shampoo, conditioner\u2014though everything was in fancy glass bottles without labels, so it took longer to figure out what it all was\u2014and then she got changed into the new clothes, having to take the time to figure out how to properly lace her vest up over her tunic and then struggling to put on her new chaps before leaving the bathroom, half-expecting it to disappear behind her, it was unreal.\n\nZephyr was staring out the window, snacking on a few grapes when she heard Nova come in, and turned around.\n\n\"You were right,\" Nova said, biting back a grin. \"That bathroom is the best.\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\" Zephyr smiled back, and then looked Nova over, letting out a teasing laugh. \"You look like a knight mixed with a cowboy.\"\n\n\"Yeah, thanks, you're not much better,\" Nova teased back. \"Those chaps are quite a look, Zeph. Really good look with your Hello Kitty socks.\"\n\n\"Shut up, those weird thick socks he gave us were too big,\" Zephyr complained. \"I just hope the boots fit!\"\n\n\"Right?\" Nova walked back over to the bed, picking up one pair of the brown leather boots they'd been given. She pulled them on and took a few experimental steps in them. \"Hmm\u2026they'll pass, but hopefully I can find something better later. I wonder what they use as money here.\"\n\n\"We'll have to ask about that later,\" Zephyr said, pulling her own boots on. \"They're a little big, but I guess they'll have to do. If I put my sneakers back on with this stuff, I just know everyone's going to laugh at me.\"\n\n\"They can laugh all they want.\" Nova shrugged, pulling her hoodie back on over her tunic and vest, despite the strange mix of modern and medieval clothes, and then she shrugged her backpack on over the hoodie, checking her necklace before heading towards the door. \"You ready?\"\n\n\"Just a sec,\" Zephyr said, stepping back onto the platform and grabbing her glasses from the end table, cleaning them with her sleeve before putting them on and joining Nova by the door. \"Now, where's this breakfast you were talking about?\"\n\n\"Downstairs,\" Nova told her, stepping into the wide hall and leading the way back towards the living room area, which was empty now, and heading down the stairs. Apparently, everyone else was already at breakfast, the sounds of loud talking and laughing drifting through a set of large double doors that were now propped open.\n\nGreat. They would be the last to show up.\n\nAlready bracing herself for stares and whispers, Nova stepped through the doors into a long, wide hall with high ceilings and chandeliers hanging over several long tables, the room easily big enough to accommodate several hundred people, though, like the rest of the castle, it seemed pretty empty, with only around half the tables in use. There were maybe three hundred people here, if Nova estimated right, and all fell silent at once, turning to look at her and Zephyr as they entered. Well, that was a little more extreme of a reaction than she'd been expecting. She felt her shoulders tense up as she looked around the staring faces, spotting what had to be the serving line along the far wall and starting to head quickly towards it with Zephyr following closely behind her, catching a few of the whispers as she walked.\n\n\"There she is\u2014she flew in on Korgad last night!\"\n\n\"Descended from Ayo and Seren, I heard.\"\n\n\"She doesn't look like much.\"\n\n\"Bet she washes out first day.\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, the old familiar anger coming over her again, this time with a confusing new twist. She'd often been the subject of judgmental comments in the past. It came with the territory of being a foster kid, especially with her personal reputation for getting into fights and talking back to teachers. But this was different. This time, she wasn't being made fun of for not having parents, but for having the wrong kind.\n\nShe wouldn't have felt so self-conscious if she knew why they were apparently considered the wrong kind, though.\n\nThe two girls reached the serving line, which was fortunately already almost nonexistent this late in the meal, the last person ahead of them casting the girls a curious look as he hurried forward, the crowd all beginning to talk once more.\n\n\"What will you have today?\" the server asked as Nova and Zephyr stepped up to the counter, Nova glancing over the choices there.\n\nIt looked fairly standard, with some toast, eggs, and bacon, as well as some kind of thin oatmeal and what appeared to be cold ham, which was a strange choice for breakfast. There were also a few trays of fruit and a bowl of hot rolls. Wow, there were a lot of options. And Nova was pretty hungry, so she took a roll, some eggs, and a couple of slices of bacon, and then, at the end of the line, she was handed a large metal mug with some kind of hot tea in it. Zephyr got much of the same, along with some toast, and then the girls turned back to the cafeteria.\n\nAnd now came the age-old question of where to sit.\n\nShe spotted Dafyd at a table near the side of the room, talking with a few other adults Nova deduced to be other instructors, but she didn't want to sit by Dafyd, and so she led Zephyr past his chair, going on past the group of teenagers they'd met on the stairs.\n\n\"Look over there,\" Zephyr whispered, nodding to a table a short way away, where a group of around thirty or forty teenagers in actual floor-length robes were sitting, a couple of them even wearing long, wide-brimmed witch hats, the pointed tips folded over and hanging over their shoulders. \"Witches!\"\n\n\"What's with this new obsession with witches?\" Nova whispered back as they continued to walk, passing the rest of the seated people and stopping at one of the huge, empty tables, sitting there instead. \"Since when are you all about this magic stuff, anyway?\"\n\n\"I mean, I've always liked the idea of it.\" Zephyr shrugged as she picked up a slice of toast, starting to eat. \"Spells, magic, all that stuff. I guess you missed the time when I was really into it, though. I can't believe it's actually real. I mean, it's probably nothing like it is in books, but still, magic is real, and I could do it if I tried hard enough.\"\n\n\"What if you stayed?\" Nova asked quietly, taking a bite of bacon\u2014not liking the idea of leaving Zephyr behind, but unable to ignore how much her friend really seemed to want to be there.\n\n\"What?\" Zephyr blinked at her.\n\n\"I mean it. What if you stayed here and learned to be a witch?\"\n\n\"Nova\u2026\" Zephyr pursed her lips, glancing over at the table of witches with a wistful look before shaking her head with a slight laugh. \"I go where you go. I already said so. Somebody has to stick around and keep you out of trouble.\"\n\n\"But if you really like it here, I don't want to\u2026I don't know.\" Nova shrugged. \"Forget I said anything\u2014let's just eat.\"\n\n\"After we're done, we can go find Korgad,\" Zephyr said with a small sigh, which made Nova feel even guiltier. \"Ask him what the plan is.\"\n\nNova nodded, continuing to eat, and the two fell silent, Nova realizing the crowd was still whispering about her over on the populated side of the room, and feeling even more self-conscious about it now that she was eating. This was ridiculous.\n\nThey hurried through breakfast, afterwards making their way outside to the upper platform, where Nova let out a breath of relief over getting out of the gallery and away from the constant glances and judgmental looks. The air up here was chilly, cast in shadow as the morning sun rose over the other side of the mountain, the air still a bit misty even though the sea of clouds had mostly dissipated by now, and Nova adjusted her jacket more over her shoulders, glad she'd brought it even if it didn't match her new clothes.\n\nAnd here were the dragons again, five or six of them lounging around the large stone platform, stretching their wings or lying curled up on the stone, once again reminding Nova vaguely of cats. And, once again, she was struck with how big they were, each one easily large enough to swallow her whole if they were of the mind to do so.\n\nIf someone had told her yesterday that, within twenty-four hours, she'd be sleeping in palatial dormitories halfway up the side of a mountain in a magical new world and sharing a stone balcony with dragons, she'd have said they were crazy.\n\nZephyr let out a deep breath next to Nova, looking a little incredulous herself before pointing across the balcony. \"Look, there's Korgad!\"\n\nNova followed her gaze to where, sure enough, Korgad was waiting, perched on the edge of the balcony with his tail flicking over the drop-off behind him, distinctive from the few other dragons nearby because of his smaller size and the deep scar down his face.\n\nThe dragon seemed to be waiting for them, crouching lower and stepping off the thick stone railing when he saw them; he paced along on all fours towards them as they walked up to meet him.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" Nova asked as they approached. \"I looked for you everywhere last night!\"\n\n\"Clearly, you did not look everywhere, or you would have found me,\" Korgad told her. \"Silly girl.\"\n\n\"Well, if you'd told me where you were going, maybe I would have.\" Nova frowned at him. \"Instead, you left me and Zephyr to fend for ourselves to that council when we didn't even know the answers to our own questions, let alone all the answers to theirs.\"\n\n\"And it's my job to follow you around and answer questions now, is it?\" Korgad shook his head a bit. \"Hmph, never mind my own troubles, never mind my aching wings after flying you all that way or the pangs in my head after all your pestering the whole journey here; it doesn't matter to you at all, does it?\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't,\" Nova told him honestly, though she was starting to feel amused now, at this ferocious beast whining at her like a petulant child.\n\n\"Bah,\" the dragon scoffed with a sniff, straightening. \"Well, it matters to me,\" he sulked. \"At any rate, I couldn't have followed you into that Gold Hall even if I'd wanted to. Has everything been explained to you?\"\n\n\"No.\" Nova crossed her arms. \"Not even sort of. Why didn't you tell me my mother is apparently some super-famous dragon rider from Ragond? And that, apparently, my father also lived here, and I have a grandfather on a magic royal council? When were you going to drop those little tidbits, hmm?\"\n\n\"Didn't I?\" Korgad asked, his tone sarcastically innocent.\n\n\"You didn't,\" Nova accused. \"Why did you even bring me to this place, anyway? Everyone here isn't even trying to help me\u2014they all just expect me to join their school and learn to fight for them. No one will listen when I say I'm not staying.\"\n\nKorgad turned his head back to her, huffing out a hot breath as he frowned\u2014and, oh gosh, his breath smelled incredibly strongly of raw fish.\n\n\"Ulgh, Korgad, what have you been eating?!\" Zephyr groaned, covering her nose.\n\n\"Jeez, haven't you ever heard of toothpaste?!\" Nova exclaimed, plugging her own nose and turning away in disgust.\n\nKorgad drew back a little, his eyes widening in surprise, and he let out another one of his rumbling, deep-throated laughs. \"No,\" he said. \"What is toothpaste?\"\n\n\"You have got to be kidding me,\" Zephyr muttered. \"Dragons don't use toothpaste?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you humans have it,\" Korgad dismissed her, straightening proudly. \"But a dragon's teeth need nothing, save rock for sharpening and bone for gnashing.\"\n\n\"Ew.\" Nova frowned. \"Okay, but getting past your breath problem, why did you bring me here? And when are we leaving to find my mother?\"\n\n\"Don't be stupid,\" Korgad told her bluntly.\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"I brought you here for a reason,\" Korgad told her.\n\n\"Oh?\" Nova gritted her teeth. \"And what reason is that? Because every time I've asked, you've dodged the question, and I'm starting to get tired of it!\"\n\nKorgad tilted his head at her, narrowing his eyes a bit and huffing again. \"I should have thought it would be obvious,\" he said. \"For one thing, you're in sore need of training. You wouldn't survive this world on your own, and there's only so much I can teach you without a link\u2014and I don't intend to link with you, so don't go getting any ideas.\"\n\n\"I don't want to link with you anyway.\" Nova frowned. He thought it should be obvious? What did that mean? Ugh, he was being cryptic again on purpose to make her stop asking.\n\n\"For another thing,\" Korgad continued, ignoring her jab, \"I've searched the length of Ragond countless times to no avail. Wherever your mother is, she cannot be found by eye alone. We need information, we need some kind of clue as to where she might have gone. The Great Library here in Stonehaven is the largest repository of records in all of Ragond. If there's any place to start your hunt, it's there\u2014and, unfortunately, I'm far too big to enter, and not much on reading anyway. That is why I need you, girl. The search for your mother demands investigation into her past and what she was doing, rather than a common hunt over land. I cannot find her out here, therefore you must find her in there.\"\n\n\"What good will a library do me?\" Nova scoffed. \"You brought me here for a library? What could I possibly 'hunt for' in a freaking library? I don't have time to read, so can't we just leave already?\"\n\nKorgad stood on his hind legs with a bit of a growl, spreading his wings for a moment before dropping back to all fours, staring into her face with his intense amber eyes. \"And where exactly do you plan on going, little girl?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I\u2026I don't know,\" Nova admitted. \"But I know I can't waste time fighting some war with monsters when my mother's still out there! This isn't my fight; I just want to find her and go home.\"\n\n\"What, back to Earth?\" Korgad let out another laugh, this one sounding harsher. \"You think your mother will want to join you there? Why? This is your home. You're from here, girl, and you'd do well to remember that.\"\n\nNova scoffed, feeling her face burn with anger as she clenched her fists.\n\n\"He's right,\" Zephyr spoke up quietly, putting a hand on Nova's shoulder. \"Look, I'll stick by you no matter what you decide, but if everything we heard yesterday is true, then\u2026 you've got a place here, a real chance to belong. You even have family here, Nova.\" She let out a light laugh, looking wistful. \"That's amazing, and you shouldn't give that up.\"\n\n\"What about my mother?\" Nova swallowed. \"I'm not going to give her up, and she's what I'm here for. Not some\u2026some 'legacy' I never even knew I had.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying to give her up, either,\" Zephyr told her seriously. \"But Korgad's right. Where would you even start to look? We don't know the first thing about this world, we don't know how portals or magic works, and we don't even know where the nearest town is. And what if she's in actual trouble? We'd need to know how to fight if it came down to it. This makes sense.\"\n\nNova took in a ragged breath, knowing Zephyr was right but not wanting to admit it. \"But I don't want to stop,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Who said you're meant to stop?\" Korgad asked. \"The library will tell you what you need to know about this world, about your parents and your legacy, and you'd do well to learn it. I see your mother in you, a little. If you took your head out of the sand you might learn some things about yourself and your place in life. And, quite possibly, you'll succeed where the rest of us have failed and learn how to find your mother and maybe even how to bring her back.\"\n\nNova didn't know how to respond to that\u2026. It wasn't fair for Korgad to speak down to her like this, but she had to admit they were right, he and Zephyr both. She didn't know where to begin looking on her own, and the more answers she got, the more questions came along with them.\n\nWas staying here the right choice, though? Sure, she'd get training and be able to learn more about Ragond and magic, but\u2026this wasn't her home, no matter what Korgad said. She didn't have any memories of this place, as she'd lived on Earth for as long as she could remember. And she wasn't completely sold on this 'legacy' idea, either. She'd wanted to find her family, not all this weight and importance that seemed to come with it.\n\nStill, though\u2026 she had to admit it was a little exciting. She was suddenly reminded of fairy tales she'd heard as a kid, where people found out they were secretly royalty. Well, she might not be royal, but she certainly felt like it, with the fancy room and the bows and honorifics and all the whispers about her ancestry, and it felt nice to finally know at least a little about her past.\n\nThe problem was, this new 'legacy' came with a ton of expectations she didn't know if she could handle. Such as Dafyd and the Council of Five expecting her to become a dragon rider, or the other students like Anasia and her friends expecting Nova to be a great warrior\u2014and the kids in the gallery expecting her to fail.\n\nWhat if she did fail? What if she took the trials like everyone wanted her to and couldn't perform them\u2026whatever they even were? What if she got up in front of everyone and made a complete fool of herself, and disappointed Korgad? What if she disappointed Osa?\n\nThen again, why did she suddenly care what Osa thought of her? She hadn't known the man existed until yesterday, and still had no idea how she felt about him now, and yet it seemed somehow important that she not embarrass herself in front of him.\n\nOf course, she got the idea that taking off without even trying would upset him even more.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she finally admitted with a sigh. \"I don't know what to do.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have to be forever,\" Zephyr said. \"We can leave as soon as we know where to go if you want. But I think it'd be a good idea to stay here for a while like Korgad says. We don't know what we're doing, and there's nothing wrong with getting a little help now while we're just getting started.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Nova gave in, nodding and biting her lip. \"I'll stay. But only until we know where to start looking for my mother.\"\n\n\"Smart girl,\" Korgad said, stamping his front claws a little and looking pleased. \"Though, you seem to have forgotten I already told you where to start looking; right in there.\" He nodded to the building across the gorge from the dormitories, the three-story building dug into the mountain. \"The Great Library, open to all students of Stonehaven. I suggest you get to reading, child. There's a lot to sift through in there.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be so pushy,\" Nova sniffed, shooting the dragon a glare. \"Just because I agreed to stay doesn't mean I'm not still mad at you.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Korgad huffed. \"Be angry all you want; just get results.\"\n\nWith that, he turned and headed over to the edge of the platform, diving from it and unfurling his wings as the wind caught them, gliding off and then flying up towards the top of the mountain.\n\nNova gritted her teeth, feeling a bit awed despite her anger as they watched him disappear around the side of the mountain. She took in a slow breath at the sight, a myriad of emotions going through her\u2014most of them negative ones.\n\n\"Jerk,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Well, he is a dragon,\" Zephyr said. \"Maybe they're all hot-tempered like that.\"\n\n\"Whatever. Let's just get to work.\" Nova sighed, starting to head towards the library. \"The sooner this is all over, the better.\"\n\nAnd when it was over, she could go back home to Florida.\n\nThe question was\u2026why did that feel wrong now?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Courage, Determination, or Skill",
                "text": "The Grand Library most definitely lived up to its name.\n\nStanding in the entrance, mouth agape, Nova could do nothing but stare as she took in the sight. The smallish appearance of the exterior was incredibly misleading because this place was huge. It had been dug deep into the side of the mountain, and from the small platform on which they stood overlooking the place, it appeared to stretch on for at least a mile.\n\nThe entry floor was actually the second floor, with tall shelves lining the walls and arranged in aisles throughout the center, comfortable-looking reading spaces set up at various points throughout the room, and ornate stone railings surrounding the open space over the first grand staircase that led down into the floor below. Nova could only see a small section of the lower floor, but it appeared to have even more rows of bookshelves, giving the distinct impression of a maze, while across the entry floor and on either side of Zephyr and Nova, three staircases led up to the floors above, which also contained balconies overlooking this floor, Nova was able to see even more walls of books on the upper two floors, as well.\n\n\"Oh. My. Gosh!\" Zephyr gasped, her eyes wider than Nova had ever seen them. \"This is the biggest library I've ever seen!\"\n\n\"It's\u2026oh wow,\" Nova said, unable to find better words to describe it. \"How am I supposed to find anything in here?\"\n\n\"Is that the lowest floor?\" Zephyr wondered out loud as she hurried forward, running down the steps. Nova took in a deep breath, feeling a little dazed at the vastness of the place as she followed her friend down below, and seeing that yes, this floor was basically a giant maze of musty, dust-covered shelves, some containing books and others containing scrolls. A reading space was set up behind them\u2014and another staircase beyond it led even further downward.\n\n\"Wow, five floors!\" Zephyr gasped, immediately running down the other stairs, gasping again. \"Six floors!\" she called up to Nova.\n\n\"You're kidding!\" Nova exclaimed, following Zephyr down past the fifth floor and into the sixth. This one was the dustiest and most claustrophobia-inducing floor of them all, and Nova couldn't even see any books or scrolls, these shelves being covered in thousands upon thousands of wooden boxes of all shapes and sizes, the ones on the bottom as big as trunks while the ones on the top shelf looked no bigger than ring-boxes, all of them containing small brass locks and none of them labeled.\n\n\"What do you think they keep down here?\" Nova asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Zephyr answered. \"Isn't it amazing? I don't see any more stairs, though.\"\n\n\"Good. Let's go back up to the ground floor,\" Nova said, turning and heading back up the stairs. \"At least there are a few windows up there. Jeez, there's so much dust down here, I can barely breathe.\"\n\n\"I wonder if all these books were written in Ragond,\" Zephyr wondered. \"Or if they have any from Earth. It doesn't seem like a lot of people here have ever been to Earth, but the guy on the Council made it sound like people used to go there all the time.\"\n\n\"Makes you wonder why people on Earth never heard of it.\"\n\n\"Would you believe it if someone told you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nova said, casting a challenging sort of smile at Zephyr over her shoulder as they climbed. \"That's how I got here, remember?\"\n\n\"I mean somebody other than an honest-to-goodness, magic, talking lizard, duh,\" Zephyr chuckled.\n\n\"Oh, then yeah, no, I'd have said they were crazy,\" Nova laughed.\n\n\"And to think, it's been here the whole time!\" Zephyr shook her head in disbelief. \"Just waiting for us to find it.\"\n\n\"I wish I could be as happy as you are about it,\" Nova told her, frowning at one of the nearby shelves as they reached the ground floor. \"I mean, I like books as much as the next guy, but this is\u2026a lot. Like, way too much to handle all at once. I don't even know where to start.\"\n\n\"Well, every library has a librarian, right?\" Zephyr asked. \"I think the lady on the Council said they're called mages here. If we found one, I bet we could ask them for help finding the history section. That seems like the best place to start. Or maybe a directory. Your, um, parents, seem kind of famous, so\u2026maybe there are books about them.\"\n\n\"That would be weird.\" Nova frowned, imagining reading about her parents like she'd read about historical figures in school.\n\n\"But worth a shot.\" Zephyr shrugged. \"I'll start looking down here if you want to poke around the upper floors. If you find a librarian or the history section, come find me again, okay?\"\n\n\"Lady Nova?\"\n\nOh, great.\n\nNova turned to see Dafyd walking towards them from the front door, pausing at the sight of his getup. The young man was wearing the same kind of clothes they were, but where theirs were obviously hand-me-downs, his looked custom-made and personalized. His leather vest was black and polished, seeming to be lined with some kind of thick wool on the inside, while the tunic underneath it was a pale, dusty-blue color, silver designs embroidered into the hem. His chaps, also made of black leather, were buckled into place with shining silver buckles, and he wore gray boots underneath them. His look was completed with a black belt, again with a silver buckle, and a dagger sheathed to his side, as well as a pair of black leather gloves.\n\nNova suddenly felt incredibly sloppy and out of place next to him, and judging from how Zephyr was now hurriedly straightening her own riding gear, she felt the same.\n\n\"You seriously don't have to call me that,\" Nova said insistently as the young man approached them. \"I've told you three times now, you can call me Nova.\"\n\n\"Ah yes, my apologies,\" Dafyd said, taking them in. \"I'm not used to speaking informally, and it continues to slip my mind. At any rate, it's nearly time for the party to leave\u2014we're all waiting on the portico outside.\"\n\nHis eyes were the same color blue as the tunic. Somehow, that annoyed Nova even more.\n\n\"What?\" Zephyr glanced between Nova and Dafyd. \"What party?\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\" Nova frowned. \"He told me when he dropped off the clothes this morning; he wants us to go on some training mission or something. I completely forgot about it, sorry.\" She turned back to Dafyd. \"Is there any way we could skip? We're kind of busy here.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid the Council of Five specifically\u2014\"\n\n\"Specifically requested I go on the mission, right,\" Nova interrupted him, running her hand through her hair in frustration. \"And you wouldn't dare go against what the Council specifically requests.\"\n\n\"No, I would not.\" Dafyd frowned. \"They are our highest elders and have earned our loyalty and respect. I must ask that you cease speaking of them in this offensive manner, as it's quite unbecoming for one of your blood and status.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's 'unbecoming' for someone of my blood and status?\" Nova repeated angrily, stepping forward before Zephyr moved between them with a nervous laugh, putting a hand on Nova's shoulder and steering her back a few steps away from Dafyd.\n\n\"Hey, Nova, play nice,\" Zephyr warned pleadingly. \"If we're gonna stay here, he's gonna be one of our teachers. You don't want to start this off on the wrong foot. Come on, let's go on the training thing and get it over with.\"\n\nAfter a moment, Nova nodded. \"You're right, it's not worth fighting over.\" She turned back to Dafyd. \"Lead the way, Teach.\"\n\nDafyd sighed a little, giving her a mildly irritated and mildly confused sort of look, and then he obeyed, leading them back up the stairs and out onto the midway platform outside\u2014or, the portico, as he'd called it\u2014where around twelve other students were standing by dragons themselves, along with the orange-scaled female dragon Dafyd had been riding yesterday, and Korgad stood waiting a ways behind the group, giving Nova a sulky frown before pointedly looking away.\n\n\"Alright,\" Dafyd announced to the group as he went to stand by his dragon. \"My name is Captain Dafyd Falla, and I'll be overseeing the recruitment training this year. While the official training doesn't begin for another few days, we like to start each year by selecting the dozen most promising candidates to join us on a simple exercise; it will serve as a chance for you all to get a feel for riding and the kind of work you'll be doing for your first two years, if you all pass your trials.\"\n\nHe gave an easy, lopsided grin to the group as Nova and Zephyr made their way over to Korgad, and the other students all let out chuckles. Nova rolled her eyes, deciding now that she really didn't like Dafyd. That had been so fake, and these teens were all eating it up like candy.\n\n\"You've all been chosen based on the promise you've shown in the past,\" Dafyd continued his speech. \"Your renown in your hometowns and cities precedes you; whether you've slain particularly infamous wolves making off with your village's livestock or simply built a reputation as a fine swordsman in your masters' training halls, we've taken note of the work you've put in and believe you've got what it takes to be a top-notch soldier here at Stonehaven. Through courage, determination, or skill, you all earned your place here, and we expect to see great things from you in the future.\"\n\nHis gaze lingered on Nova for a moment and she frowned back, getting the distinct impression he didn't like to have included her in his statement. She hadn't slain any wolves or studied in any 'masters' halls,' true enough. In fact, she'd never even held a knife before, aside from cooking and eating, of course. Yet, here she was, with other teens who'd clearly already done some pretty incredible things, all because she apparently had famous parents. 'Courage, determination, or skill\u2026or special favor.' She could almost hear him say it.\n\n\"Our exercise today is a simple one,\" Dafyd kept speaking after a moment, looking away from Nova and starting to casually pace in front of the group. \"We're flying to Farfell Meadow at the base of Mount Drells.\" He pointed over the edge of the platform towards one of the neighboring mountains along the horizon. \"And familiarizing ourselves with the location. Afterwards, we're going to practice our flying techniques and even some trick maneuvers, if I think you can all handle it.\"\n\n\"Wait, are we both supposed to ride Korgad?\" Zephyr asked quietly, frowning at the new, jeweled saddle the dragon was wearing.\n\n\"Yes,\" Korgad told her. \"How is that surprising, girl? You've done it twice already.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, is there a problem?\" Dafyd spoke up, the other students all turning to them\u2014some looking sympathetic, some curious, and some smirking. How come, no matter where she went, everyone always looked down on her? It had been the same way on Earth, for different reasons, and she was sick of it. Oh, how Nova wished she could wipe those smirks off their faces\u2026.\n\n\"Oh! N-no, erm, no problem, sorry,\" Zephyr said, shrinking back at once and blushing deeply as she bit her lip. \"I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm sorry, it won't happen again.\"\n\n\"Actually, yeah, the problem is there's two of us and we only have one dragon,\" Nova said.\n\n\"Shh, Nova, it's fine,\" Zephyr whispered hurriedly.\n\n\"Ah, I'm afraid we don't have any more volunteers from among the dragons at this time,\" Dafyd said. \"Many of them who are here are working with their own riders and can't be spared from their duties.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026do I have to be here, then?\" Zephyr asked quietly. \"I don't really\u2026like flying. Maybe I could stay here and, um, familiarize myself with the library?\"\n\nA few of the students stifled chuckles as Dafyd paused mid-step, but he nodded. \"There's nothing wrong with not being particularly attuned to flying,\" he told the other students before turning back to Zephyr and Nova, walking a bit closer and lowering his voice. \"Miss Zephyr, as you know, my grandmother, Gwyn Falla, is the High Witch here at Stonehaven, and it seems she's taken an interest in you. Perhaps, you might be more suited to that field of study?\"\n\nZephyr's eyes widened and she took in a breath, glancing over at Nova. Was her interest so obvious that even Dafyd and his grandmother had noticed, and wanted to lure Zephyr away with their magic tricks and spellcasting? Nova felt even more irritated now than earlier\u2014not at Zephyr, but at this situation. When Zephyr wanted to stay, she was allowed and even encouraged, but Nova had to go no matter what. Everyone here thought the Council was playing favorites and giving her 'special opportunities,' but no one seemed to realize they were just bossing her around, and she didn't want any of it!\n\nShe nodded to Zephyr, though, pushing her frustration aside and making herself offer the other girl a smile to show it was alright.\n\nZephyr smiled back, looking relieved, and turned back to Dafyd. \"That\u2014um, that sounds fine, yes, thank you.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Dafyd nodded. \"You may leave.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Zephyr said again, turning to Nova and lowering her voice to a whisper. \"I'll start researching right away, while you're gone,\" she promised before turning and quickly hurrying back to the library.\n\nNova watched her leave, a surge of gratitude coming over her, as well as a bit of shame. Here she was, whining and complaining about how she didn't want to be here and how unfair it was that Zephyr got to stay, going so far as to think her friend was falling for the Council's tricks, when in reality she was still on Nova's side and was doing whatever she could to help Nova, even if that meant putting aside something she herself very clearly wanted.\n\nNova should be more like that. She should be strong and selfless, like Zephyr.\n\nMaybe she should agree to stay here after all.\n\n\"Now then, if there are no more interruptions\u2026?\" Dafyd looked around. No one volunteered anything, so he nodded, offering another smile and then grabbing the leather riding helmet and goggles he'd been wearing when they met, pulling them on over his short brown hair. \"Let's mount!\"\n\nThe other students all started climbing up the saddles on the dragons nearest them, chattering excitedly with the dragons as introductions went on between them all. Nova turned to Korgad, frowning at the saddle and feeling uncertain, examining a series of notches that must be hand-and-foot holds. She grabbed hold of some of them, starting to climb up and feeling surprised at how difficult it was.\n\n\"Need a hand?\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, glancing down at Dafyd as he took hold of the edge of the saddle as if to steady it. \"No thanks,\" she said in a low tone. \"I'll figure it out.\"\n\nDafyd narrowed his eyes at her, but nodded, sighing as he stepped back. \"I'm not sure what I've done to offend you, Lady\u2014ahem\u2014Miss Nova,\" he said quietly. \"But whatever it is, I truly apologize.\"\n\n\"I don't need apologies, either,\" Nova informed him, finally climbing into the saddle and noting that it was a lot easier to sit up here now, as she had something other than Korgad's shoulder ridges to hold on to.\n\n\"The girl is stubborn and argumentative,\" Korgad told Dafyd simply. \"And prone to tantrums. It's no fault of your own.\n\n\"What? Liar!\" Nova accused, letting out an angry breath as she glared down at Korgad. \"You're the one always yelling at everyone and pretending to fall asleep whenever you get mad about something!\"\n\nDafyd let out a laugh at this, seeming to relax a bit and shaking his head at them with a smile. \"Have the two of you formed a bond yet?\"\n\nNova hesitated, glancing at Korgad, who returned her look with narrowed eyes. Honestly, she still wasn't entirely sure what 'connecting their souls' was even supposed to feel like, so she couldn't be sure she hadn't, and she could tell by how people talked that forging a link with Korgad was supposed to be a good thing, but Korgad clearly didn't want it, and she wasn't too keen on it, either.\n\nNova turned back to Dafyd, and then\u2014at the same time that Korgad did\u2014told him, \"We're not bonded.\"\n\nOh, how weird, that they'd said it in sync with each other. Nova bit her lip, glancing back at Korgad, who sort of sighed and turned away again.\n\n\"Ahem,\" Dafyd cleared his throat with an infuriatingly knowing smile. \"Well, perhaps one will form in time.\" With that, he turned and headed back over to his own dragon, stopping along the way to briefly speak to another recruit.\n\n\"Well, what does he know, anyway?\" Nova huffed. \"He can mind his own business.\"\n\nKorgad laughed, his great shoulders jostling the saddle, and Nova gasped as she grabbed on to the front of the seat, holding on. \"Jeez, Korgad, don't laugh while I'm up here!\"\n\nThe dragon only laughed louder this time, flicking his tail from side to side as Nova leaned forward to hold on more tightly, blushing as the other students and Dafyd gave them funny looks. Nice, here she was with some kind of noble legacy to uphold, people to impress, and high expectations to meet, and she was struggling not to fall off of a laughing dragon. She hadn't even said anything that funny!\n\nShe felt a lot better, though.\n\n\"Alright everyone,\" Dafyd called to the group, laughing a bit himself. \"Let's move out!\"\n\n\"Hold tightly, Little One,\" Korgad said, actually sounding happy, for once, and then he took a running leap off the platform. Nova's breath caught in her throat as he dove towards the ground, the wind rushing at her again and blowing through her hair before he leveled out, and then they began to glide over the mountains.\n\nThey flew for around twenty minutes before landing, Stonehaven was still in sight in the distance as everyone began to dismount. Nova climbed from the saddle carefully, her legs feeling a little shaky as she stepped down on the ground. Somehow, flying on a saddle felt simultaneously better and worse than riding bareback. She felt safer, not having to worry as much about falling, but it also felt\u2026colder? Like she wasn't as in tune with the way Korgad moved, with the thick seat of leather separating them like that.\n\nThe opening dive might have contributed to how she felt, as well. It was like getting off a rollercoaster. She'd liked the ride, but it had left her somewhat unstable.\n\nKorgad gently nudged her back with his snout now, tilting his head at her as if checking to make sure she was fine, and it suddenly struck Nova how gentle and even vulnerable the old dragon looked sometimes. The scar on his face and his smaller size weren't helping, and she felt a strange impulse to protect him\u2014which was stupid. She was a sixteen-year-old human and he was an ancient, beastly dragon; he didn't need protection, least of all protection provided by her. She could at least say she was fine after the flight, though. Get him to stop looking at her like that.\n\n\"Well, that was fun,\" she said, offering Korgad a smile as she stretched out her arms. \"I definitely like flying better than popping in and out of portals, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"Link-jumping,\" Korgad reminded her, straightening a touch and looking pleased with himself. \"Much easier to handle here than in that pesky swampland on Earth. It only works if the dragon or rider has previously been to the place they're trying to reach, however. You can't jump to a place you've never seen before.\"\n\n\"And that's different than the portals between worlds,\" Nova checked, remembering what the old councilmen had told her the day before.\n\n\"Correct,\" Korgad affirmed. \"There are only two world portals: the one linking Ragond to Earth and the one linking it to Mythos. Well, there are only supposed to be two, originally formed by the Link Mage. That's part of the problem we have now, you see\u2014the dozens of unmapped portals appearing at random throughout Ragond. At first, we thought they were simply failed link-jumps opened by inexperienced riders or dragons, but once the Mythoi began coming through, we realized the truth.\"\n\n\"How do you think they're getting opened?\" Nova asked. \"What could be causing it?\"\n\n\"The Mythoi is my guess.\" Korgad frowned. \"All this portal business began with the start of their war, and that can't be a coincidence.\"\n\n\"Are you talking about the Mythoi attacks?\" one of the dragons nearby asked, turning his head towards them and stepping closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. \"I heard a rumor that they want to take over Ragond and enslave the dragons as a labor force and herd the humans as livestock!\"\n\n\"Preposterous,\" Korgad scoffed, giving the other dragon a bit of an amused, disdainful look. \"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"I've heard it from a few others,\" the dragon said, stamping one of his own feet as if equal parts excited and offended. \"What do you think they're at war with us for if you know so much?\"\n\n\"Certainly not human meat,\" Korgad said. \"The Mythoi don't eat man, foolish 'let! How old are you? How long have you been with the military?\"\n\nWhat's a 'let?'\n\n\"I am nearly twelve,\" the dragon sniffed, straightening and looking decidedly upset now. \"And I've been flying under the Council's colors since the year of my birth.\"\n\n\"Twelve,\" Korgad muttered, tilting his head at the other dragon. \"What's your name, little captain?\"\n\n\"I am called Garlet,\" the dragon announced. \"And I am not a captain. Not yet, anyway. I'm hardly 'little,' either, or did you fail to notice I'm bigger than you?\" He looked Korgad over with narrowed eyes, now looking curious as he tilted his head. \"Who are you, anyway? One of the retired ranks?\"\n\n\"You could say that,\" Korgad told him, a mischievous shine glinting in his eye now. \"Perhaps you've heard of me; I am Korgad.\"\n\nGarlet let out a bit of a gasping sort of snort through his snout, drawing back and rearing up in surprise, his eyes widening. \"Korgad?!\" he repeated. \"By the Great Mage, I did not realize!\"\n\nKorgad was laughing again, and Nova couldn't help but join in as Garlet shook out his head, crouching back down on all fours and pawing at the ground, his tail sweeping to one side like a dog who knew it had done something wrong.\n\n\"Forgive my impertinence,\" Garlet said pleadingly, bowing his head. \"Should I have known to whom I was speaking, I never would have dared!\"\n\n\"Worry not, little captain,\" Korgad said jovially. \"But it would behoove you not to speak out of turn in the future\u2014there are many dragons in the world far older and stronger than I, with much less patience for upstarts and 'lets like yourself.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Garlet nodded. \"Thank you for your forgiveness, Korgad.\"\n\nThe dragon turned, hurrying off, and Nova laughed again, looking back up at Korgad. \"So, you're famous, too,\" she noted.\n\n\"Mm, somewhat.\" Korgad chuckled, watching Garlet before turning back to Nova and letting out a sigh. \"My fame, however, like yours, comes from association with your mother.\"\n\nNova sobered a little, feeling her interest spark. \"My mother?\" she repeated. \"You knew her pretty well, then?\"\n\n\"Better than most,\" Korgad told her, turning a little ways away and gazing at the distant towers of Stonehaven. \"After all\u2026we were linked.\"\n\nNova pursed her lips, realizing that she'd sort of known that, in the back of her mind. To have him tell her made it more real, though. More important. She let out a breath, nodding and understanding now why he didn't seem to want to link with her. It had to be hard, spending so much time with her now if he'd once had a special bond with her mother, and had been trying to find her for so long.\n\n\"Korgad,\" she started, but before she could say anything else, there were gasps and exclamations of surprise from the others in the group, several students pointing towards the sky in fear as the dragons all tensed, turning their large heads towards the air and spreading their wings.\n\nThere in the sky, high above them, was the same crackling, swirling circle of blue light they'd gone through to get to Ragond.\n\nA portal was opening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Marked with Misfortune",
                "text": "As soon as Nova registered what was happening, she sprang into action, almost instinctively climbing back up onto Korgad's saddle as he beat his wings and leaped back into the air to fly towards the other dragons in the group.\n\n\"You should have stayed on the ground!\" Korgad huffed to her over his shoulder as he flew.\n\n\"As if!\" Nova called back, holding on to the saddle more tightly. \"Alone, without a weapon!? What if something attacked me and you weren't there?\"\n\nKorgad let out a bit of a roar, flying faster to meet up with the others as the portal let out a loud spark of electricity, a flicker of lightning straying from the widening circle and shooting towards one of the nearby dragon and rider pairs. The dragon tucked his wings in and twirled into a quick roll to dodge it, his rider letting out a surprised yelp and clinging on to the beast while Dafyd and Lir shot forward, Lir twisting in midair and flapping her wings to stay aloft as Dafyd unsheathed his dagger.\n\n\"To arms!\" he called to the others. \"Hold fast and remember your training\u2014whatever comes out, we face together!\"\n\nTraining?! But Nova had no training! She gripped the front of Korgad's saddle tighter, her heart starting to race as Korgad turned into a glide and began to circle the portal at a wide distance, around three dragon-lengths away from it, with many of the other dragons following suit. She looked up at the portal, seeing a glimmer of red appear on the other side of it.\n\n\"Korgad!\" Dafyd called, Lir gliding up to them and hovering a little ways above, her wing over Nova's head as Dafyd leaned over in his saddle to be heard over the increasingly loud and high-pitched electrical frequencies sounding off alongside the bright blue jolts of lightning making up the portal\u2014and also the shouts drifting through from the other side, which were audible in some other language. \"Get the girl to Drells! She has no training!\"\n\nOh thank heavens\u2014he didn't expect her to fight the monsters she could now glimpse through the portal; they were the same kinds of monsters she'd seen on that battlefield yesterday. Harpies and gryphons and even a pegasus were illuminated against a bright red sky, the monsters letting out battle cries as they headed straight for the portal\u2014only to have it flicker and spark a few times, so that the monsters disappeared and the sky faded back to blue behind the sparking lights.\n\nHad it closed already? Or was it just unstable, like he'd said, and was going to open again in a moment?\n\nKorgad didn't seem to want to wait around and find out, tucking his own wings in like the other dragon had done earlier and turning his head towards the ground to go into a diving spiral, Nova choking back a scream. This was much faster than anything he'd done with her aboard before, the wind pounding in her face as she almost lost grip of his saddle. She was going to fall off, she felt sure\u2014she was going to slip away from Korgad and go careening towards the ground, to her death!\n\nBut Korgad spread his wings out suddenly, turning into a glide as he leveled out, and then began pumping his wings, keeping his level of speed as he raced towards the nearby mountain. They reached the rocky crags almost at once, Korgad circling past a ridge, out of sight of the portal, and landing on an outcropping of rock to crouch over the landing. \"Off,\" he ordered her.\n\n\"Wh-what about you?\" Nova asked, starting to dismount shakily. Apparently, though, she wasn't going fast enough, because Korgad let out a huffing sort of growl and shook her off the rest of the way, catching her with his talons as she yelped, nearly falling right off the side of the mountain. He dropped her on the outcropping and then pushed off from the rocks, zooming back towards the battle.\n\n\"What? WAIT!\" Nova yelled after him. \"KORGAD!\"\n\nBut the dragon ignored her, disappearing around the bend and leaving her behind.\n\nWhat\u2026? How could he do that?! Nova clenched her fists, a surge of anger and panic coming over her as she examined the rock he'd left her on, her breath coming in shorter gasps now as she quickly determined she was trapped up here, halfway up the mountain, with the slope below far too steep and rocky to climb down safely and no visible path in sight. She was trapped up here, while Korgad and Dafyd and everyone who knew where she was could be fighting to their deaths.\n\nShe remembered the battlefield they'd landed in the day before, the countless dragons who'd been lying dead there and the hundreds of Mythoi. What if that many Mythoi came through now, when there were only twelve fighters?! What if none of them survived?\n\nWhat if Korgad never came back for her?\n\nA sudden surge of suffocating fear gripped at Nova, which she didn't fully understand and could hardly handle, and she let out a breath, putting a hand over her mouth and feeling unexpectedly sick at the idea of being left behind again.\n\nAgain\u2026?\n\nShe needed to calm down. She closed her eyes, making herself take several deep breaths and covering her ears for a moment, trying to think of something safe, something peaceful, to keep her grounded.\n\nZephyr. An image of Zephyr came to her mind, her friend smiling and putting a hand on her shoulder like she did whenever things got to be too much for Nova to handle. Keeping her back from fights, stopping her from doing something stupid or reckless, helping her calm down when she was too angry or upset to think straight.\n\nNova opened her eyes, still feeling anxious about the fight, but at least not sick or panicking anymore, and looked around her small, open prison more carefully. She couldn't get down from here, but she could easily climb up to the ridge Korgad had circled nearby. He hadn't gone far to get her out of the way\u2014just far enough to where he could leave her safely and return to the fight, and she could still hear Dafyd's voice as he called out instructions she couldn't quite make out, a few roars or other voices joining in occasionally.\n\nShe'd always been a good climber. She made short work of the ridge, reaching it and climbing over the edge to look around and see a wider, more sloping patch of grass a little ways below. She slid down to reach it, carefully, and then wiped the dirt off her hands onto her pants as she looked up, able to see the group in full now.\n\nThe portal didn't seem to have reopened, which was a relief. In fact, she couldn't see any sort of light at all, though the dragons were still circling the area where it had opened\u2014some clockwise and others counterclockwise, reminding Nova of videos she'd seen where vultures circled their prey. At this distance, she couldn't quite pick out Korgad, but Lir was obvious to spot, her difference in coloring more flashy and noticeable even under their riding gear. The whole pack of them made quite a picture, and it was one she couldn't help but marvel at, even though there were only twelve of them.\n\nHow the Mythoi could fight them, she didn't know. She'd be scared out of her mind if she had to face down a beast like that. Then again\u2026the Mythoi had to know a secret weakness or something if that battlefield had been any sort of indication.\n\nShe began to pace, wishing Korgad would hurry up and come get her already. If the fight was over before it had begun, what was the holdup? She couldn't believe he'd dropped her here and gone back off to fight without her. If the other recruits had thought she was getting special treatment before, this was just going to make it worse. She'd gotten specially invited on the mission they'd worked hard to earn a spot on, and then, at the first sign of trouble, she'd gotten stuck off somewhere to wait in safety while they risked their lives to stay and fight?\n\nNo way. Next time, she'd be ready. She'd get stronger, learn how to fight, get a weapon of some sort, and then, when they got caught unawares like this again, she'd be ready to step up to the plate and show those smirking, stuck-up jerks who was boss.\n\nWait, what was she thinking?\n\nThere wasn't going to be a next time! She wasn't going to stay.\n\n\"Hear that, universe?\" she muttered. \"I'm not staying.\"\n\nShe sounded like a crazy person, fighting with the universe. But she meant it. She'd never wanted to get involved in this war, she'd never wanted to fight monsters, she hadn't wanted any part of this! She should never have come here in the first place\u2026this world was way too dangerous, and from the sounds of it, her mother wasn't here, but probably lost somewhere back on Earth. Nova was looking in the wrong place, and not only was she in danger because of it, but Zephyr was, too.\n\nNova had been right the whole time\u2014they should go back to Earth. So what if she didn't have anything waiting there for her? Sure, her life wasn't the best, but she'd have Zephyr, and at least they'd be safe, worrying about grades instead of monsters.\n\nSo why, as she looked back up at the sky, did she suddenly want to be there with Korgad right now? There didn't seem to be any kind of fight happening at the moment, as the dragons were still only circling, but more slowly. Distant voices carried on the wind, sounding like Dafyd was calling commands to the others\u2014although they were too far away for Nova to make out what was being said. She should still be there, flying alongside the others, watching the skies and ready to defend against trouble, mounted on Korgad\u2026or maybe not Korgad, as he'd been pretty clear on that. Maybe on a dragon of her own\u2014proving all those other recruits wrong and living up to this sudden legacy she'd inherited.\n\nMaybe, one day, taking Dafyd's place as captain, leading a troop of her own and calling the shots for herself. Oh, now that was an appealing idea! She bit back a sudden smile, but then shook her head, reminding herself she wouldn't have the time to waste on something like that. Even if she did stay, it was to learn to fight and be better equipped to find her mother when she finally got the chance. Titles and promotions were for other people, people like Dafyd.\n\nPeople like Zephyr.\n\nWhat was Nova supposed to do, truly? This choice was impossible!\n\nFeeling her temper flare, Nova let out a frustrated growl, turning and kicking at a nearby rock and sending it flying into a nearby boulder. She turned to go back to her pacing then, but stopped, distracted, when the boulder let out a resounding, echoing thunk. She glanced back at it, feeling surprised. Was it hollow? It seemed pretty big to be hollowed out.\n\nShe walked over to examine it. It was bigger than her, and shaped oddly, the stone surface smoother than the surrounding rocks, and slightly darker, as well.\n\nAnd then the surface cracked under her hand.\n\nShe snatched her hand away with a gasp, hurriedly stepping backwards, and feeling confused and more than a little wary as she looked around at the nearby dragons. Oh, good, they were all flying towards her now. Korgad would know what was going on.\n\nThe rock was starting to crack more now, and suddenly she realized\u2026this wasn't a rock.\n\nNo way.\n\nNo way. This was a dragon's egg?! Was it? She couldn't be sure, but it seemed like it, even though she wouldn't have expected such a thing to look like some random rock. She'd thought dragon eggs would be more polished, more like the smooth, colored stones she'd seen in another foster kid's collection when she'd been younger, or the marbles a different foster kid had also kept. She'd thought dragon eggs would be almost glassy, but this rough, coarse stone was the right sort of 'egg' shape, and\u2026it was cracking!\n\nKorgad landed beside her, looking her up and down with a bit of a huff. \"Thought I left you on the other side,\" he told her.\n\n\"Shh, Korgad, look!\" Nova waved off his comment, pointing to the rock even as Lir and Dafyd, as well as the other dragons and riders, all began landing on various parts of the ridge themselves.\n\nKorgad followed her finger to where it was pointing, narrowing his eyes a little and tilting his head.\n\n\"An egg,\" Lir noted.\n\n\"Great Mage,\" one of the other recruits breathed in surprise. \"It's huge!\"\n\n\"My stars, it is, isn't it?\" Dafyd stared, smiling eagerly as he dismounted Lir, hurrying over to the rock and running his hands over the forming cracks before stepping back himself, waiting expectantly. \"I've never seen an egg this big! This dragon is going to be monstrous!\"\n\n\"Hmph,\" Korgad scoffed, looking up at the crags of Mount Drells and pawing his front claws a little. \"Must have fallen from the high caves. Un-nested. It's already marked with misfortune; bad luck will follow it the rest of its days.\"\n\nNova frowned, feeling a bit irritated at this remark. What, just because the egg had slid down the mountain a little, it was cursed or something? That was hardly fair\u2014the dragon inside hadn't even been born yet and it was already saddled with a curse?\n\nSpeaking of saddled with a curse\u2026\n\n\"Hey, you jerk.\" She turned to Korgad, frowning at him angrily. \"Why'd you ditch me like that?\"\n\n\"Ehh?\" Korgad turned to her, tilting his head. \"What's this? To what ditches are you referring?\"\n\nNova stared, her mouth dropping open. \"I don't\u2026what?\" She couldn't help but laugh a little. \"Ditch, Korgad, you ditched me. That means you took off and left me alone, and it's not a nice thing to do, especially if you ditch me on a cliff with no way to get down while you go off to fight a bunch of monsters!\"\n\nKorgad gave her a look, narrowing his eyes at her and then shaking his head with a huff, turning away. \"What a silly expression.\"\n\n\"Would you rather have risked facing a battle against the Mythoi without a weapon?\" Lir scoffed derisively, pawing her own feet as she looked down at Nova with slitted eyes.\n\nWell\u2026she couldn't exactly say no in front of the other kids.\n\n\"Yes,\" Nova answered challengingly, crossing her arms and meeting Lir's gaze, feeling her defiant nature take over at the dragon's smug tone.\n\nA couple of the other recruits snickered now, though some looked thoughtfully at Nova, and she got the distinct impression they were aiming their snickers more at Lir instead of her, much like whenever she'd talked back to her teachers at school, how the kids there would laugh on her side even if they laughed at her in most other cases. It wasn't the best feeling, getting their approval this way, but enh, it was better than nothing. Nova would take what she could get.\n\nLir didn't seem too pleased at the snickers herself, whipping her head around to shoot glares at the laughers before narrowing her eyes further at Nova. Before the dragon could reply, though, the egg let out a loud crack, a large chunk of shell fell to the ground, and everyone turned back to it.\n\nNova gasped in surprise at the square that had fallen, as the inside of the rock was coated in deep orange crystals like a geode. A gurgling sort of squeal could be heard from inside the egg as more pieces were being pushed out from the inside, and Nova held her breath, stepping closer to Korgad and absently putting her hand on his shoulder as she watched, transfixed.\n\n\"It's coming,\" one of the other recruits needlessly pointed out.\n\n\"My, how exciting!\" Garlet actually whinnied a little, rearing his head back and pawing at the ground, Korgad glancing towards him with another rhythmic chuckle.\n\n\"Now, everyone, don't crowd,\" Dafyd chuckled. \"Newborns can be easily startled, so best not to surround it all at once.\"\n\n\"Shut up, you're ruining the moment!\" Nova snapped at them, leaning forward despite Dafyd's warnings to try to get a better look from their place about five feet away. Then the largest chunk of shell so far fell, and then\u2026\n\nThere it was. The small, scaly head of an infant dragon poking out, mouth open as it let out another one of the gurgling squeaks, reaching out with its talons and clumsily clawing at the sides of the egg. It pushed another bit of geode out of its way and crawled forward, blinking its large, amber eyes open and squinting around at the group. It was no bigger than a large dog, with pale, light green scales that seemed almost translucent, like the wings of the dragonflies that flitted around back in Florida.\n\n\"Well, that can't be right.\" Dafyd frowned. \"It's only half the size of its egg.\"\n\n\"Look!\" another girl gasped, pointing back at the egg.\n\nThey all turned their attention to it as another dragon began climbing out, this one even smaller than the first, squeaking a bit more quietly as it stumbled out of the egg. It immediately headed for the larger newborn and started to attempt to climb on it, both of them falling to the ground and starting to squeal more urgently in reaction. This second, smaller dragon was similar to the first in appearance, with the pale green, flimsy-looking scales, but these seemed to be peppered with dark gray markings.\n\nSpots. The little one had spots.\n\nBoth infant dragons seemed surprised to see each other, and even more surprised to see everyone else, staggering to keep their balance and looking around with their too-big eyes, both of them looking shaky and uncertain as they wobbled around with their oversized heads\u2014both with tiny, rounded horns poking out of their skulls\u2014bumping into each other. This also seemed to shock and amaze the infants, who both pulled their heads away from each other as they stared into each other's faces, the larger one's jaw dropping open to reveal all gums, no teeth, as the little dragon in question let out another squeal.\n\nOh gosh. This was the new most magical moment of Nova's life. She felt a strange sort of stirring as she stared down at the two dragons, only wishing that Zephyr could be here to see this. They were so small, so helpless, and if she hadn't been there, they would have hatched alone.\n\nShe took a slow step forward, ignoring Dafyd's hushed warning for her to stay back, and knelt down in front of the two, who turned their heads towards her\u2014drawing back at first, but then tilting their heads like Korgad did when he was confused or curious, the bigger one taking a few hesitant steps towards her, as well.\n\nShe swallowed, raising her hand and holding it out like she did with friendly strays back home, and the dragon closed the distance. It stretched out its neck, sniffing at her hand and looking up at her with its trusting, unknowing eyes, and then it pressed its head against the palm of her hand, starting to let out a sort of rumbling sort of sound, like a cat purring. She let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding at the cold, slightly damp touch of the firm but delicate scales, a thrill going through her as she couldn't help but smile.\n\nShe was petting a newborn dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Rushing",
                "text": "Nova couldn't believe what was happening. She just couldn't believe it.\n\nAs she knelt on the ground, her hand carefully pressed against the head of the first dragon, the second one let out another squeal behind it, raising its head as if howling and stretching out a pair of tiny wings. They were tiny compared to the wings on the other dragons, anyway, but seemed stiff and a bit too large for the little one itself. Then it let out a slight gasp, craning its neck backwards and staring up at its own wings in wonder and bewilderment.\n\nNova laughed aloud, the look on the small one's face reminding her of Zephyr's face when they'd entered the library. She didn't have much time to pay attention to it, though, as the dragon she was petting shook its head away and then suddenly clamped its mouth down on her hand, its wet, squishy gums causing Nova to gasp as she pulled her hand away, a trail of saliva stringing from her hand to the dragon's mouth. \"Oh, gross!\" she exclaimed, laughing again and hurriedly wiping her hand on her pants. That was disgusting, but as she looked back at the infant dragon's face, the thing tilting its head and looking at her in confusion, she couldn't help but grin wider.\n\n\"Twins,\" Lir sighed behind her, sounding disappointed.\n\n\"Told you it was a cursed egg,\" Korgad noted.\n\nDafyd shook his head. \"What a shame.\"\n\n\"Wait, what?\" Nova blinked, turning around to face the others. \"What's wrong with twins?\"\n\n\"You don't know?\" Garlet stared at her, letting out a bit of a scoff. \"Twins aren't able to form links.\"\n\n\"Once again, you're incorrect,\" Korgad told Garlet, crouching down beside Nova and stretching his head out next to her to sniff at the newborns, both of which turned their attention to him at once, staggering forward and sniffing him back. \"Though it's much harder for them to do so, a twin can still form a link. The real problem lies in the strength of that link, as twins have already formed so strong a connection with each other that other bonds are never quite as strong.\"\n\n\"That, and they're unlikely to grow to a decent size,\" Lir noted haughtily, stretching her own wings out and drawing up to her full height. \"Twins have to share nutrients in the egg, of course, making them weaker, and many end up\"\u2014she glanced at Korgad, looking him over and narrowing her eyes before turning away\u2014\"stunted.\"\n\n\"Eh?! Stunted, am I?!\" Korgad exclaimed, his tail flicking as he pawed at the ground. \"Bah! Insolent youth!\"\n\n\"Are\u2014Korgad, are you a twin dragon?\" Nova stared up at him in surprise.\n\n\"Certainly not!\" Korgad huffed, seeming to bristle at the accusation. \"And I'm certainly not stunted. There are plenty of dragons my size in battle; this younglet merely thinks she can get away with insulting her elders because she got lucky with her bond to her strapping young captain over here!\"\n\n\"Strapping?\" Dafyd chuckled, straightening and looking pleased, though also blushing a touch. \"Why, thank you for the compliment, Korgad, but Lir is a warrior in her own right, regardless of her connection to me. In fact, I'd say I'm the lucky one in our pairing; I wouldn't have had the ability to get where I am without her guidance.\"\n\nNova rolled her eyes again, turning away from them and focusing on the newborns as they both pawed at her for attention. She laughed, reaching down to pet them, but this only seemed to excite them even more, as the two began jumping against her with urgent, loud squeals, the force of their weight shoving her to the ground as they began trying to climb on her lap. Some of the others were still talking behind her, but she couldn't hear any of it, the two little beasts too insistent and too big\u2014despite them both being smaller than Lir's whole head\u2014and demanding her full and undivided attention as she struggled to keep from falling onto her back completely.\n\nOh jeez, this was too much! How was she supposed to stand this much cuteness in one setting? They were both trying to gnaw at her arms, though, as well, and she groaned as she regained enough control to get to her feet and pull her sleeves away, frowning in confusion as both newborns started squealing even louder, these squeals sounding pleading and almost heartbroken as they both looked up at her with wide eyes.\n\n\"You've got to feed them,\" Dafyd told his dragon.\n\n\"Why should I?\" Lir tilted her head at him. \"It was Korgad's rider who found them.\"\n\n\"We were all here when they hatched,\" Korgad protested at once, huffing as he glared over at Lir. \"Any one of us could take them!\"\n\n\"Where are they from?\" Nova asked, looking around the mountainside. \"You said they fell from the high caves? What does that mean? Where's their mother?\"\n\n\"The high caves are where nesting mothers lay their eggs,\" Korgad told her, nodding his head up towards the peaks miles above them. \"Drells is a popular spot. It's rare for an egg to un-nest in this region, however. Perhaps it was purposefully pushed out.\"\n\n\"Purposefully pushed out?\" Nova repeated with a frown. \"Then, these two were abandoned? It wasn't an accident?\"\n\n\"It might have been,\" Dafyd said. \"Someone should go up to the caves and ask around about a missing egg\u2014we might find the mother.\"\n\n\"I will go,\" one of the other dragons offered, raising his wings and taking off towards the peaks.\n\n\"There's no guarantee he'll find the mother,\" Lir said. \"Even if she hears the egg has been found, un-nested eggs are deeply unlucky\u2026and if she hears it hatched twins, she's even more likely to leave them behind.\"\n\n\"What? Well, maybe she should have kept a closer eye on them, then!\" Nova frowned. \"It's her own fault they 'un-nested,' not theirs! And abandoning them because they're twins is dumb.\"\n\n\"Mm, well, she very well might do so anyway.\" Lir narrowed her eyes at Nova. \"Regardless of your opinions on the matter.\"\n\n\"So, what's going to happen to them?\" Nova demanded. \"Are they coming back to Stonehaven with us?\"\n\n\"Someone would have to take responsibility for them,\" Dafyd told her. \"We're not a nursery, we're a military. Unless one of the dragons here agrees to take them on personally, there's nothing we can do for them.\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth and scowled. \"You'd leave them here alone?\"\n\n\"It's not my place to take them,\" Dafyd said before turning to the remaining dragons. \"Do any of you want to take charge of the younglets?\" he asked the beasts, all of whom started muttering out excuses and pointedly looking away, shifting their weight and stamping their feet a little as they did so. \"Come along, someone has to take them.\"\n\n\"We can't leave them behind just because they're twins!\" Nova insisted, turning to Korgad with a frown. \"They can't make it out here on their own! What's going to happen to them if no one adopts them?\"\n\nKorgad gave her a long look, narrowing his eyes for a moment, and then he sighed. \"Never mind all that,\" he muttered to her before turning to Dafyd. \"Fine. If the mother doesn't claim them, and none of these other dragons are willing to step up to the task, I'll take them.\"\n\n\"Ah, Korgad, that's noble of you,\" Dafyd said, visibly relieved. \"I'm sure they'll learn much under your guidance.\"\n\n\"Save your speeches, Falla,\" Korgad grumbled, spreading his wings and jumping off the mountaintop, disappearing down to the plains below.\n\n\"Wait, where is he going?\" Nova asked.\n\n\"Likely to find food,\" Lir told her. \"Before these 'lets eat you alive.\"\n\nSo, 'lets and younglets were what they all called infant dragons, obviously. Good to note.\n\n\"They are getting a bit more insistent about it,\" Nova admitted, pulling her arms away again as the two dragons kept trying to gnaw on them, the bigger one jumping up and leaning against her, accidentally digging its talons into her shoulders. \"Oh gosh, ow-oww!\" she exclaimed, pushing it off and taking a step back. \"Jeez, calm down, Korgad will be back with something soon!\"\n\n\"In the meantime, everyone, these two detours don't mean the training exercise is over,\" Dafyd announced, turning to the rest of the group. \"We've still got to practice our flying maneuvers, though, of course, Nova will have to wait until Korgad returns.\"\n\n\"We're still doing that?\" Nova frowned at him, pushing the smaller dragon back down again and struggling to focus on Dafyd with the two clamoring over her like this. \"After everything that's happened?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid orders are orders,\" Dafyd told her. \"And missions are missions, regardless of what happens to temporarily disrupt them.\"\n\nScrew that. One of the unstable portals everyone was worried about had opened above them and they'd almost gotten into a deadly fight, and then they'd found a hatching dragon egg, and now Dafyd wanted to keep training like nothing at all had happened? There was something seriously wrong with this guy's brain.\n\nThe other recruits all began mounting their dragons again, taking off one by one and circling back down to the plains as Dafyd and Lir waited around, presumably for the dragon who'd gone in search of the infant dragons' mother. Absently, they observed the newborns trying to get attention from Nova.\n\nShe wished they'd stop watching her like that. It was making her feel weird and uncomfortable. She quickly stopped noticing them, however, as the dragons were insistently pawing at her again, crying and squealing, and she caved in to their wants, unable to pay attention to anything else while she had to devote herself fully to patting their heads and pulling her arms from their mouths. Jeez, they seemed to be getting hungrier with every passing minute, and their cries were getting more and more desperate and pleading. Where was Korgad?\n\nFinally, after a few more minutes, Korgad flew back into view, landing on the outcropping as the infants jumped away from Nova and hurried towards him, their crying growing more frantic and excited as Korgad leaned down, opening his mouth and dropping a large load of fish onto the rocks with a loud splash, water running down the crags towards the cliffs.\n\n\"Oh, sick, Korgad!\" Nova jumped away quickly to avoid the pool of water and saliva seeping towards her. \"Give me some warning next time!\"\n\nKorgad let out a deep-throated laugh. \"You knew what I intended to do when I left, silly girl,\" he told her. \"Why show surprise when I return and do it? Besides, what warning could I have given with a mouth full of fish?\"\n\nNova waved a hand at him dismissively, rolling her eyes and returning her attention to the young dragons who were eagerly devouring the fish, once again climbing over each other to do so. And\u2026they seemed to be growing already! As Nova watched, the bigger dragon gulped down a fish in one swallow, blinking and then shaking out his body like a dog shaking water out of its fur, the young dragon raising his wings as they stretched out even longer before Nova's eyes.\n\n\"Wha\u2026how are they already growing?\" Nova demanded of Korgad, stepping closer to see the dragons better.\n\n\"Younglets do most of their growing within the first three or four months of their lives,\" Lir explained before Korgad could. \"They have much growing to do in that time to reach their full size. I assume they'll be around the same size as Korgad by the end.\"\n\n\"They're also much more aware of their surroundings than one would think,\" Dafyd told Nova. \"I shouldn't be surprised if they start trying to talk once they've finished their meal.\"\n\nThe smaller of the dragons paused in its eating at this remark, lifting its head and tilting it at Dafyd, blinking its large eyes curiously.\n\n\"Ah, she heard me,\" Dafyd chuckled a little. \"Intelligent little one, this. Go on, try and speak.\"\n\nThe small dragon tilted her head the other way and then crouched a bit lower, pawing at the ground in agitation and opening her mouth before closing it again, tucking her wings in close and ducking behind the larger one\u2014who was still eating.\n\n\"Shy,\" Korgad said with a bit of a scoff, his tone seeming amused.\n\n\"What are they?\" Nova asked. \"I mean, like, are they both girls, or\u2026?\"\n\n\"The larger one is male,\" Lir told her. \"The smaller one is female.\"\n\n\"Little one,\" Korgad said, crouching low and stretching his neck out to be more level with the small dragon. \"Do not hide from what frightens you. Speak your mind. Stop cowering behind your brother.\"\n\n\"Hey, maybe don't call her a coward.\" Nova frowned at him. \"She's like ten minutes old.\"\n\n\"Ten minutes out of the egg, ten minutes too old for a shell,\" Korgad scoffed. \"Girl, speak.\"\n\nThe small dragon drew back a little more, looking up at Korgad in apprehension, opening and closing her mouth a few more times and then letting out a bit of a squeak, sticking her tongue out and pawing at the ground again before turning back to the pile. \"Fish!\" she announced, her voice high-pitched and quiet.\n\n\"Oh my gosh!\" Nova bit back a grin. \"That's her first word? That's so cute!\"\n\n\"Yes, those are fish.\" Korgad nodded to the little one. \"And you had better keep eating them before your brother takes your share.\"\n\nThe little one let out a bit of a pant, seeming startled at this thought, and turned at once to continue eating while the bigger one now stopped himself, looking at the smaller one in surprise.\n\n\"Do you wish to try and speak now, too?\" Dafyd asked him, walking a bit closer and squatting down next to the two with a slight smile.\n\nThe male infant turned to him, tilting his head as if listening and then nodding seriously.\n\n\"Go on then, 'let.\" Lir lowered her own head to the ground, as well.\n\nThe boy straightened excitedly, his tail flicking behind him as he opened his mouth. \"H-Hake!\" he choked out.\n\nNova blinked, stifling a laugh.\n\n\"I'm sorry, did you say hake?\" Dafyd chuckled.\n\nThe dragon drew back himself now, narrowing his eyes and pawing at the ground as he shook his head. \"Hake, hake!\" he squeaked, and then he ducked his head behind his wings, turning back to his smaller sister and darting to hide behind her.\n\n\"I don't get it,\" Nova commented. \"What's hake?\"\n\nKorgad let out another laugh. \"Nothing,\" he told her. \"That's not a word. I don't know what the 'let is trying to say, but he can't seem to get it out.\"\n\n\"That's twins for you.\" Lir let out a steamy huff of breath as she straightened, nodding decisively. \"One has the muscle, the other the brain.\"\n\nThe two little dragons both lifted their heads, looking up at Lir with wide eyes and blinking a bit in surprise before exchanging a glance with each other, then looking down at themselves and hunching their shoulders a little as they drew closer together.\n\n\"You hurt their feelings,\" Nova announced to Lir with a frown. \"Just 'cause he can't talk yet doesn't mean he's dumb, and her being a little smaller doesn't mean she's weak.\"\n\n\"I don't care if I did hurt their feelings, girl,\" Lir scoffed. \"I was merely stating fact. Tisn't the last they'll hear of it, either.\"\n\n\"Oh, 'cause that's a great reason to make fun of babies.\" Nova rolled her eyes, turning back to the younglets and kneeling down next to them. \"Forget her, guys, she's just stuck-up.\"\n\n\"Impertinence!\" Lir growled, straightening and stretching her wings out to their full length.\n\n\"Stuck-up?\" Dafyd repeated. \"I'm afraid I don't know the meaning of the phrase.\"\n\n\"It matters not what it means,\" Lir huffed. \"It was clearly meant as an insult, whatever it is. The girl is insolent and obstinate, and not worth my attention.\"\n\n\"It means you're totally arrogant and you think you're better than everyone else,\" Nova told her. \"Thanks for proving my point.\"\n\n\"Hake!\" the larger dragon said again, turning to Nova and crawling towards her, pushing his head under her hand and looking up at her seriously.\n\n\"I don't know what you're trying to say,\" Nova told him, unable to help but laugh a bit at the look on the little dragon's face, slowly petting his head and marveling at the paper-like feel of his scales. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Thank,\" the smaller dragon told her. \"Say, 'thank you.' He say, 'thank you.'\"\n\nThe larger younglet nodded, and then let out another rasping sort of sound, opening his mouth wide and coughing squeakily. \"Yah. Ha\u2026Thhhank. Ooh. Thank yooou.\"\n\n\"You're thanking me?\" Nova blinked, looking down at the boy and feeling a little confused. \"What for?\"\n\n\"Ngh.\" The boy shook his large head in frustration. \"Hake! Say, yooou say!\"\n\n\"You\u2026you want me to say it?\" Nova chuckled, her confusion mounting.\n\n\"Nngh!\" the boy growled, backing up a little and ducking his head between his front legs, pawing at the ground. \"Sssaaaaay!\"\n\n\"You say thank,\" the girl told Nova seriously. \"To big one.\" She nodded to Lir. \"He hear you say thank.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova laughed. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"They're babbling,\" Lir sighed. \"You'll likely never understand what they meant.\"\n\n\"If he was trying to say 'thank you' earlier and couldn't do it, perhaps he was reacting to your saying it to Lir in jest,\" Dafyd theorized, smiling a little as he looked down at the male dragon. \"Trying to get you to understand him, which seems to have almost worked.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Nova blinked, turning to the little male dragon as he poked his head out from under his claws, staring up at her. \"Is that what you were trying to say?\"\n\n\"Engh.\" The boy nodded seriously before turning to Korgad. \"Fish!\" he declared. \"Thhhank!\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Korgad said with a laugh.\n\nThat was so cute. Nova couldn't help but laugh along but was distracted as the other dragon glided back down from the peaks and the two younglets returned to their meal, finishing the last of the fish as the others began to talk.\n\n\"Did you find the mother?\" Dafyd asked at once.\n\n\"Nay,\" the dragon announced. \"A few of the nesting mothers are out hunting, but those who remained say their eggs are all accounted for. I've left a message for the ones who will return, but\"\u2014he glanced down at the hatchlings\u2014\"there's no promise the mother will ever come forward.\"\n\n\"Then it is settled,\" Korgad sighed. \"I will look after them until they are claimed, or until they are old enough to look after themselves.\"\n\nThey were going to keep them, then! It didn't matter to Nova whether or not they were 'born from a cursed egg' or if they were twins. If their real mother didn't want them, Nova would take care of them herself. She'd been around foster kids for as long as she could remember, and even though she'd never felt as\u2026attached as she felt now with these two dragons, she'd done her fair share of helping out with younger kids in the past. These two were already acting like toddlers, so they couldn't be too different to care for, and Korgad would do most of the caring anyway. \"What are their names?\" she asked Korgad.\n\n\"They haven't any,\" Korgad said, tilting his head at her. \"They were in the egg fifteen minutes ago, girl.\"\n\n\"I meant, what are you going to name them, dummy?\" Nova rolled her eyes. \"You said you'd take care of them, so now you have to give them names.\"\n\n\"Bah.\" Korgad straightened, shaking out his head in annoyance.\n\n\"She's right, you know, Korgad,\" Dafyd said, his tone sounding a touch teasing. \"You must name them.\"\n\n\"Name!\" the boy said excitedly, stretching his wings out as he looked up at Korgad, pawing the ground as his sister followed him, also looking eager. \"Name!\"\n\nKorgad huffed, tilting his head at the two and narrowing his eyes. \"Girl, you are named Rune, for your markings and your early mark of intelligence.\" He nodded to the spots on the girl's back before turning to the other one. \"Boy, you shall be named\u2026.\" He tilted his head the other way, and then let out another throaty laugh. \"Hake.\"\n\nNova rolled her eyes. \"Oh, come on, be serious.\"\n\n\"I am always serious,\" Korgad announced haughtily. \"Hake, remember that. I am always serious.\"\n\nThe boy tilted his head at Korgad and then nodded again, his eyes wide. \"See-russ,\" he tried.\n\n\"He's lying,\" Nova told him. \"Korgad is a total joker.\"\n\n\"Joker,\" Rune repeated, blinking at Nova and nodding herself.\n\n\"Hahaha, you're going to confuse them,\" Dafyd laughed. \"Excellent choice in names, though, Korgad. Very befitting.\"\n\n\"Twins hatched from a cursed egg and adopted by a cursed dragon,\" Lir scoffed. \"Named for a misspoken word and subjected to a dysfunctional link as their first example of a pairing. I shudder to see how they shall turn out.\"\n\n\"We're not linked,\" Korgad told Lir, narrowing his eyes. \"How does one with such a blatant incapacity for learning reach a rank such as yours?\"\n\n\"Korgad, you're cursed?\" Nova stared at him. \"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"Because I am not cursed, little girl,\" Korgad huffed. \"A few decades of bad luck after five hundred years of perfect service and suddenly I'm 'cursed.' Bah.\"\n\nNova let out a breath of surprise, getting to her feet. \"You're five hundred years old?!\"\n\n\"Aye, five hundred and sixty-seven,\" Korgad told her before turning back to Lir. \"Which is five hundred and forty-odd years older than you, younglet, so mind your tongue, ehh?\"\n\n\"Captain Falla,\" the recruit working with Garlet called as the dragon in question alighted on the outcropping nearby. \"We're awaiting your instructions\u2014are you coming?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes!\" Dafyd nodded, returning to Lir and climbing up the side of his saddle. \"I'll be right there. Go ahead and keep in flight.\"\n\n\"Fly!\" Rune squeaked, spreading her wings out excitedly and jumping a little in the air, clumsily flapping her wings but immediately landing again and looking a little confused as she craned her neck to look back at her wings.\n\n\"No,\" Korgad told her. \"You are too small.\"\n\n\"Fly! Fly!\" Hake gasped, pawing at the ground with his eyes sparkling as he spread his own wings out.\n\n\"I said no,\" Korgad told him bluntly. \"You need to grow first.\"\n\n\"Perhaps let's leave them to it,\" Dafyd suggested. \"Give them a chance to explore their surroundings while the two of you join us in the exercise.\"\n\n\"And leave them to throw themselves off the cliffside in an attempt to fly?\" Korgad scoffed. \"Go and do your silly exercises, Falla, we're going back to the castle.\"\n\n\"But the Council of Five specifically\u2014\"\n\n\"It was pointless for us to be here from the start,\" Korgad interrupted Dafyd, raising his wings and turning his side to Nova, nodding at the spot where the footholds were visible on his saddle. She took the hint and started mounting. \"Your council will have to wait, as more important things are happening.\"\n\n\"Great Mage! Are you disobeying a direct order from the Council?\" Garlet drew back a little, seeming scandalized.\n\n\"Aye,\" Korgad told him, waiting until Nova was better situated and then rearing on his hind legs, grabbing the two small dragons in his claws in just the way he'd carried Nova and Zephyr earlier, earning squeals of surprise from the two. He flapped his wings, starting to lift off as his voice took on a more sarcastic tone. \"What a sorry excuse for a dragon of my rank, I'm sure! Take heed not to follow my poor example, Little Captain!\"\n\n\"I should say not,\" Garlet muttered.\n\n\"Korgad\u2014\" Dafyd started, but Korgad ignored him, turning away and soaring off over the cliffside, gaining speed as he flew away from the group and began heading back towards Stonehaven, passing the other confused-looking dragons and riders who were flying around waiting for Dafyd, the younglets squealing in excitement outside of Nova's line of vision.\n\n\"They're going to be mad at us for cutting class,\" Nova commented to Korgad as they flew.\n\n\"Eh? Cutting class?\" Korgad called back. \"Another one of your Earth sayings?\"\n\n\"Yep.\" Nova leaned forward a little, holding on to the front of the saddle and noting that she felt much more comfortable this time. Maybe she'd just needed to get used to this kind of thing. Or maybe Korgad was flying more slowly since he was carrying the two younglets. \"Cutting basically means the same thing as ditching.\"\n\n\"Fascinating how many words you've repurposed to mean leaving,\" Korgad scoffed. \"I care not how mad Falla and his council will be. The younglets must be taken to Stonehaven, and there was little reason for us to have been there in the first place.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nova agreed, smirking and glancing over her shoulder at the group they were leaving behind.\n\nShe liked Korgad's way of dealing with people, she decided. He knew what he wanted to do and did it, despite what other people told him he had to do. It was how she'd always tried to live her own life, and although it had caused her nothing but trouble with her teachers and foster parents, maybe things would be different now. Especially if she had Korgad on her side, ditching and cutting right along with her.\n\n\"Fortunate your finding the egg, though,\" Korgad told her now, breaking her line of thought. \"I'd wager anything you'll be able to forge a link with one of these younglets before long.\"\n\n\"Forge a link with one of them?\" Nova blinked. \"They're babies! Aren't they too young to be in a war?\"\n\n\"You're all too young for war,\" Korgad informed her. \"Twelve, Garlet said he was. Twelve, and already looking for a rider. I was a solid fifty or sixty before I began training and two hundred before I forged my first link. Those were different times, however\u2026. You were all born into this conflict; from young Falla and Lir, both of them born right at the start of the war, all the way to these two younglets I carry now, you carry the war in your blood, and it seems you will take part in it one way or another. Best to prepare yourselves. Best to prepare the younglets. You're going to be a rider, so why not ride one of them? They'll be big enough before too long.\"\n\nNova sobered, frowning a bit as she shifted her weight in the saddle. \"Everyone keeps saying I have to become a dragon rider,\" she complained. \"I don't want to commit to something when they said it would take two years for me to complete my training. I don't want to waste two whole years in this place.\"\n\n\"Do you forget that, by linking with a dragon, you'll live far longer than you would otherwise?\" Korgad asked her. \"Two years might seem like a great deal to you in your limited understanding, but in reality, it is a remarkably short period of time.\" He let out a deep, rumbling sigh as they flew, the mild tremors feeling to Nova like when she'd rested her hands on a loudspeaker playing music. \"Don't rush your life, girl; take the time to live it right\u2014these years pass by impossibly quickly.\"\n\nNova fell silent, thinking this over as they continued to fly. It felt\u2026weighty. Important. Like something she couldn't fully understand but had to remember. Two years still seemed like a long time to her, but she supposed that, if she'd lived for five hundred years like Korgad had, she might feel differently. She could still hear the younglets letting out squeals of delight and excitement below and frowned...their lives had just begun. They were barely half an hour old at this point and were already talking and thinking and trying to grow up. Did they have five hundred years of life ahead of them, too? What of Garlet? He was only twelve, like Korgad said, and he was clearly full-grown, bigger than Korgad, with ambition and a plan for his future. And Lir was only around twenty or so, and she was linked to a captain in the military. It was clear Korgad thought they were all rushing. So, why was he putting pressure on Nova to link with a newborn if he thought they needed to slow down?\n\nThey flew on until they reached Stonehaven, flying directly to the topmost building near the peaks and then past it, with Korgad heading for a gaping cave, flying low and gliding into it. Nova caught her breath as they plunged into the dark, a thrill of fright coming over her when she couldn't see the way ahead of them at all. Could dragons see in the dark?\n\nThe cool wind from the caves blew into her hair as they continued flying blindly before approaching light, Korgad flying out into a massive cavern that stretched on for what seemed like miles. The roof of the cave loomed high above them, sunlight streaming through hundreds of small holes and illuminating the caves, the light reflecting off glittering veins of what appeared to be silver lining the rock walls of the cavern. There were hundreds of dragons here, their brownish-green scales seeming to take on a slight green glow in the dim light. Most of them slept in alcoves along the walls or even lay curled up on the floor, though a few groups were awake, walking around or talking with each other. Nova tried not to stare as Korgad flew past them, a few of the dragons that were still awake turning to them and looking surprised as the younglets below started letting out awed exclamations.\n\nKorgad turned and flew them over to one of the deeper alcoves against the far wall, near the base of the cavern, and landed on the edge of it, dropping the two younglets into the indentation and crouching down for Nova to dismount. The little ones were already exploring the corners of the smaller cave, sniffing around and squealing wordlessly to each other before returning to Nova and Korgad, jumping up and balancing on their rear legs as they both pushed at Nova as if trying to climb onto her again.\n\n\"Whoa, hey, haha, hold up a minute!\" Nova protested, laughing again and struggling to keep her balance with them crowding her like this, and finally grabbing onto Korgad's saddle for support as she carefully pushed them back down. Jeez, they seemed even bigger now than before, almost as big as Nova herself was as they stood on their hind legs, though maybe a few inches shorter. \"You're gonna make me fall over!\"\n\nHake let out a pleading, impatient sort of whimper, jumping back up and pushing at her again, even clamping his mouth over her hand when she went to push him back down\u2014only, this time, it was surprisingly painful, with several sharp stings shooting into Nova's hand as she yelped, pulling her hand free at once. \"Ow, don't bite me!\" she exclaimed, grabbing at her hand and letting out a groan. \"That hurt, Hake!\"\n\nThe little dragon drew back, blinking at her in surprise and confusion, and then ducking his head low, letting out another whimper. \"Hur?\" he sniffed.\n\n\"You can't bite humans, little one,\" Korgad told him. \"They're too fragile.\"\n\n\"It's fine, Hake,\" Nova told him, rubbing her hand and looking at it. It was marked up where his teeth had pressed in, but it didn't look like he'd broken skin. \"I'm not bleeding, it's okay.\"\n\n\"Hurt,\" Rune repeated apologetically as Hake pushed his head under her hand with a guilty sort of whine.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Nova said again. \"Really.\"\n\n\"They'll likely want something more to eat soon,\" Korgad said. \"I'll go and get some more fish if you can stay here and watch them.\"\n\n\"Oh! Zephyr!\" Nova said. \"Can you bring her here, too? She'll kill me if she misses this!\"\n\nKorgad sighed, rolling his eyes a bit, but he nodded before he took off.\n\nRune tilted her head. \"Zeh\u2026phyr?\"\n\n\"Yeah, Zephyr's my best friend,\" Nova told her, walking a bit farther into the alcove herself and looking around. The space was illuminated slightly by the light streaming through the open mouth of the cave, and it was fairly large, which she supposed made sense, as dragons would sleep here. It was around the size of a spacious living room\u2014not much bigger than Lir, if Nova were to guess. So, not a place for a dragon to live as much as a place to sleep. The ground seemed to have been softened for this very purpose, deep grooves dug into the soft, loose dirt and making it difficult for Nova to walk on as she crossed the alcove and sat down against the back wall, Rune immediately lying down next to her and placing her head in Nova's lap while Hake shoved his own head under her arm, pushing his way into position and lying down next to her, her hand resting on his head. \"She's going to love you two,\" Nova told them.\n\n\"Name?\" Rune asked, tilting her head up at Nova.\n\n\"\u2026Oh, my name?\" Nova blinked. \"Nova. My name's Nova. The dragon who brought us here is named Korgad.\"\n\n\"Kor\u2026Kor\u2026gah,\" Hake repeated next to her.\n\n\"Close.\" Nova grinned, petting his head. \"Korgad.\"\n\n\"Korgad,\" Rune repeated.\n\n\"Kor-gah,\" Hake tried. \"Kor-gah. Kor-gah.\"\n\nThis was too cute.\n\nThe two continued on with their efforts, Hake getting frustrated before too long and giving up on Korgad's name, starting to say 'Nova' over and over instead while Rune prodded him to keep trying with 'Korgad'. Eventually, the dragon in question returned, once more spitting a ton of fish out into one corner of the alcove while Zephyr let out an excited squeal from her place on his back, then jumping off and running over to Nova as the younglets both jumped up themselves, sniffing the air eagerly and clambering over to the pile of fish.\n\n\"Oh my gosh!\" Zephyr exclaimed at once, grabbing Nova's arm as she stood. \"Oh my goooosh, Nova! They're baby dragons! They're baby dragons!\"\n\n\"Right?!\" Nova grinned back, catching Zephyr's enthusiasm all over again. \"They're so cute! Rune, Hake, show Korgad what you were working on while he was gone!\"\n\n\"Ehh?\" Korgad turned to the two in interest, tilting his large head as Rune turned her tiny one towards him while Hake continued to eat. \"What were you working on?\"\n\n\"Korgad!\" Rune squeaked.\n\n\"Ahhh!\" Zephyr grinned, grabbing Nova's arm tighter. \"They can talk already?!\"\n\n\"Somewhat,\" Nova snickered. \"Hake, you try it\u2014come on.\"\n\n\"Fish,\" Hake announced to her, barely looking up before gulping down another fish.\n\n\"Come on, say 'Korgad',\" Nova said, grinning. \"Just try it.\"\n\n\"Korgad,\" Rune said again, turning to her brother insistently. \"Korgad!\"\n\n\"Ngh, No-vah,\" Hake answered, turning his wings back a little as he stopped eating and turned more to Rune, narrowing his eyes.\n\n\"Korgad,\" she repeated.\n\n\"No-vah.\"\n\n\"Korgad!\"\n\nHake opened his mouth, letting out a squealing sort of whiny howl and shaking out his head. \"Kor-gah,\" he muttered.\n\nKorgad let out a rumbling laugh, tilting his head at the little dragons while Rune squeaked out a bit of a laugh of her own. Hake huffed and pawed at the ground, letting out another high-pitched whimper and darting back over to Nova, ducking behind her legs.\n\n\"Oh my gosh,\" Nova laughed, bending over to pet the little dragon's head again. \"Could you be any cuter?\"\n\n\"I can't believe this is happening.\" Zephyr pressed her hands to her mouth, grinning herself. \"Oh, why did I decide to stay behind?! I can't believe I missed them coming out of the egg!\"\n\n\"It was amazing,\" Nova told her as Hake crept back out from behind her, seeming to get over his embarrassment and crawling back over to the fish pile to continue to eat with his sister. \"I've never seen anything like it, Zeph. I wish you'd been there.\"\n\n\"Tell me the whole story!\" Zephyr demanded, sitting down against the back wall, so Nova obliged as she did the same, going over the details of the portal opening, Korgad dropping her off on the mountain, and her climbing over it to find the egg. By the time she reached the part where the two dragons had hatched, the younglets in question had finished gobbling up the fish and made their way back towards Nova and Zephyr, settling down next to the girls with their heads on the girls' laps and listening in rapt attention while Korgad laid down in the opening of the cave, watching them with his head resting against the rock.\n\nThis was\u2026new. Telling a story with people around her, cuddled up to her, listening to her, even relying on her in the case of the two new little ones.\n\nTheir scales were already starting to seem a little harder, she noticed as she petted Hake's head. The dragonfly-wing feel had faded and now it felt more like she was petting thin plastic, and the scales had taken on a slightly darker brownish-green tone, as well. She looked up at Korgad, wondering if the younglets would have the same coloring as him and most of the other dragons in a few months' time\u2014though, of course, if Rune kept her spots, she'd stand out a little more, like Lir did with her orange-tipped scales. The younglets also had small spikes protruding out from the ridges traveling down their tails, Hake having three while Rune had four, and the small horns Nova had noticed earlier seemed a touch longer themselves, Rune's horns growing more flat against her head, pointing backwards, while Hake's horns seemed to be growing a bit more straight up from the top of his head. Nova hadn't noticed the horns on the bigger dragons, and now she once again began comparing the two to Korgad and seeing that he also had horns like Hake, these growing straighter up from his skull and looking sharp and pointed. Nova wondered if the way horns grew was different for males and females, or if they were just different across the board and some only looked similar, like hair or eye colors on humans.\n\nHer reflections were interrupted when Rune opened her mouth in a wide yawn, stretching her wings out and then climbing a bit farther onto Zephyr's lap, reaching her head out and nuzzling it against Hake's shoulder. Hake yawned in response and rested his chin on top of Rune's head, the two starting to breathe deeply as they drifted off to sleep together, and Nova let out a slow breath as she realized her choice had only become harder now.\n\nIf she left Stonehaven, she'd be leaving these two newborns behind, as well.\n\nWhy was everything complicated? But everyone wanted her to stay, and the longer she thought about it, the more she wanted to stay herself, and the more reasons she had to do so. It was the smart thing, the thing that would make Zephyr happiest, the thing that would help her grow stronger, the thing that would give her the knowledge to find her mother\u2026and now it was the thing that would keep her close to Hake and Rune.\n\nWhat was keeping her from making the choice? Everything in her seemed to know it was right, but this wasn't what she'd wanted in her life. Fighting, combat, magic, war\u2026she hadn't wanted all that. She'd just wanted to find her mother, go back to Earth, and be a normal girl for once, with a normal family.\n\nBut now, all of a sudden, as Hake shifted in his sleep and let out a shuddering sigh, nestling closer to her as she absently petted his head, the thought of leaving it made her feel sad.\n\nAnd even though Zephyr said she wanted to stay here in Ragond, Nova couldn't help but feel like her friend was choosing to make the best of a bad situation. Zephyr hated fighting, even if it was nothing more than an argument in school or at the foster home. How could Nova ask her to stay in a world at war? Sure, Zephyr might have fun learning magic and playing with baby dragons, but there was more to staying here than that. If they stayed here, especially if they stayed at Stonehaven, they were signing up for the military. Zephyr wasn't cut out for that sort of thing.\n\nNova sighed, frowning down at the sleeping dragon on her lap. Really, she knew what her decision was. She just hoped that, somehow, it would turn out to be the right decision, even if it felt like the wrong one.\n\nShe was going to stay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Not by Time, Nor Rule of Man",
                "text": "To say that Zephyr had been pleased to hear Nova's decision would be the understatement of the century. She'd squealed and given Nova a tight hug, promising it was the right choice and that they'd learn a lot at Stonehaven\u2026and that it wouldn't be long before they'd complete their training and be one step closer to finding Nova's mother.\n\nKorgad had seemed pleased, as well, nodding and telling her that perhaps she wasn't as silly as she seemed, while when she'd told Dafyd she was officially going to take the trials and wanted to keep training with the group, he'd only said he 'knew she would come around' and that the Council would 'be glad to hear it.'\n\nBut, now, after the excitement of the past few days, it felt almost wrong to Nova to be on her way to class of all things, even if it was supposed to be a magic class. And yet, here she was with Zephyr, walking along behind the other students past the gallery and through a new set of large doors that hadn't been open before. Stepping through them, Nova and Zephyr found themselves in a long room stretching far back and lit primarily by candles, only a little bit of natural daylight streaming through a couple of high windows near the entrance. If Nova guessed, she'd say that this room, like the dormitories upstairs, had been dug into the mountain.\n\nThe stone floor beneath their feet echoed with the clipped sound of footsteps as the other students made their way down the room towards the back, passing by long rows of benches and desks arranged on stone platforms on either side of the main aisle. They were set up like bleachers, each desk easily able to fit four or five students, with stone staircases between the desks to allow the students easy access.\n\nAlthough there was probably enough room to fit a thousand students in the space, the first several rows of desks were completely passed by and left empty, as the difference between the number of desks and the number of students was laughably noticeable. The small crowd, only about a hundred strong, or maybe a hundred and fifty, moved down the aisle until they reached the back, where the student bleachers ended and a new set of five desks stood raised on a platform of their own, facing the student bleachers. The teachers' desks. Even if they weren't arranged in such a way as to make this clear, Nova would have known them by sight due to the fact that they were individual desks, unlike the long tables for five students each, and because they were taller and seemed sturdier, with heavier, more ornate carved wood, each one already being cluttered with candles and scrolls and ancient-looking books.\n\nNo one sat at the teacher desks at the moment, and as the other students all filled the bleachers surrounding them, Nova and Zephyr found seats a little farther from the others\u2014who, as usual, were staring and whispering. Nova looked the teacher desks over curiously. \"Why do they have five teacher desks in the same classroom?\" she wondered aloud. \"Do they all work together, or\u2026?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Zephyr answered, looking a bit more excited than Nova felt as she smiled around the room. \"Maybe this room is more for things like speeches or rallies? Like the gyms or auditoriums back home.\"\n\n\"That'd be strange,\" Nova noted, but her ponderings were interrupted as a door behind the teacher desks was pushed open for not five, but eight adults to enter the room. They included Dafyd and his grandmother from the Council.\n\nThe old woman, along with four other older adults, took their seats at the desks while Dafyd and two other younger people moved to stand next to the middle three desks, Nova noticing that Dafyd stood by the center desk\u2014at which was seated a man looking to be in his mid-forties, rather than at the leftmost desk at the end, where Gwyn sat unaccompanied.\n\nAn awed hush came over the students. Nova glanced around and saw a general look of excitement and reverie that matched Zephyr's, most everyone staring at the teachers now, with those in the farthest bleachers against the walls leaning forward in their desks to get a better look.\n\n\"Recruits,\" the man sitting at the center desk spoke, looking around the room with a slightly distracted, absent sort of look, as if not paying full attention to them. \"You have traveled here from all corners of Ragond. From the grand city of Caravon to the smallest of northern villages, you've each come with a dream in your eye, ready to try to earn your place in history. And now, here in the ancient halls of Stonehaven, your time has begun. For some of you, this will be the start of a lifelong journey, a path of glory, honor, and nobility. For others\"\u2014he pulled his expression into a stern frown\u2014\"a mere memory of a chance once squandered, a ghost of your greatest mistake.\"\n\nWow, that was kind of a harsh thing to say\u2026there wasn't a middle ground? It was either fame or failure? Nova frowned, feeling a little more anxious than she had a moment ago, even as she told herself it probably wasn't as big a deal as this guy made it out to be. He was most likely the equivalent of a principal here and had to give this kind of speech to scare kids away from slacking off or dropping out.\n\nShe looked the man over more carefully, noting his deep green, velvety tunic trimmed in gold, his shining black boots, and a thin gold band resting like a crown over his long, graying brown hair and slightly wrinkled, pale face, deciding right away that she didn't particularly like him. Maybe it was the way he looked around at everyone with disinterest in his eyes, the corners of his mouth set in a frown that looked frozen into place behind his short-trimmed beard. It looked like he didn't quite remember how to smile and had no intentions of changing that. People like that were never good news.\n\n\"I am Commander Traevorlin,\" the man continued. \"I oversee the training of the dragon riders. Some of you are already acquainted with Captain Falla,\" he added, nodding to Dafyd, who bowed his head respectfully with a small smile. \"He will be your main instructor in this field as you prepare for your entrance trials and begin your work in earnest upon passing said trials and forging your link with a dragon. Although this work is the core of your training, there is more to learn than simply the ways of the dragon. To be a true rider, one must be master of both mind\"\u2014he indicated the teacher on his right\u2014\"and body,\" he finished, indicating the one on his left. \"For it is through this trinity of control, through mastery of mind, body, and beast, that you will achieve status.\"\n\nAs if on cue, the two teachers next to him stood, the one on his right speaking first.\n\n\"I am Mage Kamaria-Zahra,\" the woman announced, standing tall with thick black hair bound in a loose braid down her back, clad in dark purple robes tied with a gold-corded belt, a serious look on her brown-toned face and her large, dark eyes taking in the class with a thoughtful glint. \"I oversee our students' scholarly studies: maths, sciences, history, astrology, philosophy. Before your trials, you will be working with my assistant, Mage-Lessar Alana.\" She indicated the young man standing by her own desk, who was a light-haired, slightly tanned man who looked to be in his early twenties, dressed in black robes accented in pale blue.\n\n\"And I am Major Hewlyth,\" the older man on the commander's left said. He was a pale, bald, wrinkled old man with a long bushy beard, dressed in chainmail and armor with a sword sheathed to his side. \"I along with my assistant, Captain Jung-Dae, will be overseeing your physical training: building up your speed, stamina, and strength, and instructing you in the use of melee weapons.\"\n\nSo\u2026he was like a medieval gym teacher. Nova couldn't help but feel a bit interested in the old man and his assistant, a young man who was also dressed in armor, with olive-toned skin and slanted dark eyes. He had a bow and a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder, too. She'd always liked the idea of archery, but of course, growing up in the foster system in Florida, she'd never had the chance to try it. That was apparently about to change, and she found herself actually excited about it.\n\n\"These three courses of study are required of each of you,\" Commander Traevorlin continued as the two teachers on either side of him took their seats. \"As the ability to forge links is a rare and valuable trait, you will all be tested on it during your trials, and those who possess it will be moved on to form squadrons and begin your advanced military training. For those who do not possess the ability, you will be given the option to remain at Stonehaven to train as a witch. Witchcraft, while not as militant as dragon riding, is nonetheless an honorable path and plays a great role in our life here in Ragond. Many of our greatest feats in invention and architecture are from the minds of witches, and we are proud to have trained and employed many of the most famous witches in Ragondan history\u2014including our own High Witch and esteemed member of the Council of Five, Gwyn Falla.\"\n\nGwyn stood from her desk, offering a smile around the room as she bowed her head. \"Greetings, children,\" she said. \"As stated, I am Gwyn Falla, the High Witch. I oversee the general training and employment of witches here at Stonehaven, but more specifically, I am tasked with instructing the art of aerial magic, commonly referred to as 'spellcasting.' This is one of the two base schools of magic, the other being earthian magic. Although some students attempt to study both branches, we recommend focusing your efforts on just one branch for the first few years, learning it thoroughly before cross-training in another. Aerial magic is manipulation or control of the natural elements and relies on the power drawn from the air, hence its name, consisting primarily of spoken word, inflection, tone and pitch of voice, and projection.\"\n\nWait\u2026what? That didn't sound like spellcasting. Well, Nova supposed 'spoken word' could count as spells, but the way it had been phrased made it sound more like\u2026poetry. She glanced at Zephyr, wondering if she'd be disappointed by this, but Zephyr looked ever more interested, leaning forward over her desk and watching Gwyn with wide eyes.\n\n\"Although witchcraft can be performed by anyone,\" Gwyn was saying, \"it is an exceedingly difficult field, one that requires rigorous study, constant practice, excellent powers of memory, great patience, exact attention to detail, and a vivid imagination. It is also an incredibly dangerous path, both for yourselves and others. One misspoken word in a chant can result in the death of the speaker, while a song sung out of tune can result in the deaths of those listening\u2014or, at the very least, a terrible pain in the ears.\"\n\nThe old witch let out a laugh as she took her seat, which gave Nova the impression she'd meant the last part as a joke, but most of the students all looked a bit more focused after hearing the 'death' part, seeming serious and tense, while Nova herself was feeling kind of confused. What was this about singing? Was witchcraft done by singing in this world? That was a real letdown. They didn't get wands or at least staffs or something?\n\nMeanwhile, the witch on the other side of the teacher's platform, a middle-aged man in simple, dark green robes with a coarse apron of brown leather had stood now, as well, Nova and the other students turning their attention to him as he began to speak.\n\n\"I am Professor Dreyan,\" the man announced. \"I oversee the study of earthian magic, the school of magic consisting of the understanding and use of materials of the earth, such as soil, stone, precious metals and gems, plant and animal life, water, and oils. This school of magic has many different branches, including specialized training in medicine, potions work, crafting, and, most difficult of all, the identification and breaking of curses and magical ailments.\"\n\nNow, this sounded more like the kind of magic Nova was interested in.\n\n\"Although it is imperative, like with aerial magic, to be careful and exact in your work,\" Professor Dreyan continued, \"there is a little more breathing room within earthian magic, as you will almost always be working from a book\u2014at least at first. Thousands upon thousands of recipes have been written, collected, and passed down throughout the ages, carried over to Ragond from Earth with the founders of this world and perfected further from there, and although the most experienced of earthian witches have memorized those recipes within their fields of study, many still have their personal libraries on hand for reference, creating less chance of an accident should something slip their mind or escape their notice. Now, I am a master Meddyg\u2014or, a medicine man\u2014and an Apothecary, so if you choose to study with me, your lessons will be focused on those fields, but anyone who chooses to study earthian magic has the option of taking an apprenticeship with another master. There are several here at Stonehaven willing to teach students in the arts of crafting, alchemy, or ritualism, but I'm sure you will find masters of these fields at work anywhere throughout the world, maybe even in your own hometowns, and I have yet to meet an earthian who refused an opportunity to teach.\"\n\nHis speech finished, the man sat back down. In response, Commander Traevorlin stood up, sighing briefly and still seeming mostly disinterested as he addressed the students.\n\n\"The study of witchcraft is optional,\" he announced. \"But we encourage students to at least observe the lessons provided by one of the two base schools; then, if you come out of your trials unlinked, you might still serve Ragond through the support the witches provide our military. However, think long and hard before participating in these lessons, as it is against the law for a dragon rider to practice witchcraft, punishable by death.\"\n\n\"Wait, what?!\" Nova gasped out loud before she could help herself, everyone in the room turning to face her with a collective breath of surprise at her exclamation, this being followed by a few snickers and whispers, the teachers frowning disapprovingly and Dafyd giving her a look as he pursed his lips and shook his head at her subtly. She hadn't meant to cause a disruption, but could she be blamed? What did they mean, punishable by death?! What kind of a school was this?\n\n\"Ahem.\" Commander Traevorlin cleared his throat, shooting her a glare. \"To reiterate: yes, any linked dragon rider caught practicing witchcraft will be executed per the dictation of the law and the approval of the Council of Five.\"\n\nWow\u2026that was heavy. Nova let out a breath, frowning and looking around at the other students, who didn't seem all that bothered or surprised by the information. Was that normal? Being threatened with death for something like that? What was wrong with it, anyway? Why couldn't dragon riders practice magic? Wouldn't it be helpful to have the soldiers know how to make potions or heal wounds or 'control the elements' or whatever? It didn't make any sense to ban something that would make your forces stronger.\n\n\"Now then,\" Commander Traevorlin continued, \"until your trials, you will not be taking part in the military training of the full-time students and instead will be going through your probacio training, overseen by Captain Falla, Mage-Lessar Alana, and Captain Jung-Dae. At the end of each week, you will be assembled here for a progress review, and those among you who are unable to perform to standard will be released at once, invited to either transfer fully to the study of witchcraft or to try again next year. The trials themselves will take place in ten weeks' time, and those who pass the trials will be accepted into our two-year advanced training program and invited to serve in our elite military upon graduation. Train hard, study harder, and give it your all.\" He cast another frown around the room. \"I am not in the habit of tolerating incompetence or suffering fools. If you are not here to succeed, you will fail.\"\n\nTen weeks. That didn't seem like a lot of time to learn all this stuff. The pressure was on, though, and if Nova were to guess from what she'd seen so far, a lot of the other kids had a definite advantage here. They'd grown up in this world; they already knew the ins and outs of how things worked here\u2014even if they didn't have the practical skills\u2014and she would bet a lot of them did have the practical skills. She and Zephyr were starting out from a place of zero knowledge and no practice. They would have to work much harder to reach the same heights.\n\nBut, she realized, that wasn't necessarily new. In fact, now Nova felt even more determined than before to succeed. As the commander began going over some rules and laying out the class schedule, Nova made sure to devote her full attention to him, careful not to miss a word.\n\nFailure wasn't an option, and she was no fool.\n\nAfter the first meeting in the long school hall, the recruits spent the day as promised, beginning their official 'probacio' training with Dafyd and the other two younger teachers, Jung-Dae and Alana. The class structure was different than any sort of schooling Nova had ever done, starting when the five elder teachers had excused themselves from the hall and Dafyd, Jung-Dae, and Alana had proceeded to sort the students into three groups: Caelum, Terra, and Bestia. Although they said the separate groups were set only to determine schedules, allowing them to teach more effectively in smaller settings at one time, Nova couldn't help but note that she'd been put in the Caelum group with around thirty others, including all the other recruits she'd met during the special training exercise a few days prior, while around forty of the shorter or less physically fit recruits\u2014such as Zephyr\u2014had been put in the Terra group, and the nearly sixty recruits in the Bestia group had noticeably shabbier clothes and less muscle than most of the recruits in the other two groups. This struck Nova as suspicious, but she'd had more important things to worry about\u2026such as the fact that, apparently, she and Zephyr would be on different class schedules.\n\nThat wasn't too big a deal, and they'd dealt with it before in regular school, but it was still annoying, and Nova couldn't help but feel like it would be a lot harder to keep her temper and stay out of trouble without Zephyr around to talk to.\n\nAnd then they'd all filed out of the long hall and begun their training in earnest.\n\nAs part of the Caelum group, Nova was first taken to a smaller classroom nearby, where she spent the next three whole hours listening to Jung-Dae lecture, first about physics\u2014which was easy for Nova, since it wasn't anything harder than what she was used to, and kind of interesting to see applied to dragon flight\u2014and then about some battle in the history of Ragond. Unlike the first, this lesson was incredibly confusing and hard to follow because the man kept dropping strange names she'd never heard, and she didn't know if they were places in Ragond or if they were other people fighting the battle or if they were the names of weapons because every single sword and dagger seemed to have an identity of its own here. And then, finally, he closed with some huge speech about what it meant, philosophically, to be a dragon rider, what their duty was, their responsibility to protect the people of Ragond and to serve the Council of Five, and the code of honor they had to uphold.\n\nThis had been by far the most 'school-like' class she could have imagined, and she came out of it feeling like she hadn't really needed to be there, either because she already knew what he'd been teaching or because she hadn't known enough about what he was teaching to be able to register it. Either way, she definitely had a lot of independent reading she wanted to do in the library later, having filled the small scroll she'd been given with her best guesses at spelling the many names she'd heard in order to look them up later.\n\nAfter a break for lunch in the gallery, she went on to Dafyd's class, which wasn't in a classroom at all, and actually just like the training exercise from before, starting on the portico and consisting of everyone mounting a dragon and flying to Mount Drells across the valley to practice flying\u2014this after a brief overview on some basic rules of interacting with dragons (such as avoiding hanging around their tails, which were harder for them to control and easy to get hit by). And this time, no portal opened and no egg was found, meaning Nova had to practice, as well. To make matters worse, Korgad wasn't there to help her, one of the other dragons informing her when she asked that Korgad had to stay behind in the caves to look after Hake and Rune. Which was fine, but also made it a lot harder to do the exercise, as Nova wound up on Garlet this time, and the younger dragon flew much rougher than Korgad, with less gliding and more wing-flapping, so that the constant rocking motion made Nova feel a touch seasick (airsick?) after the fourth or fifth trip. And since Garlet was bigger than Korgad, the saddle was harder for her to sit on, as well.\n\nBy the time they were done with dragon training, her head ached and she felt mentally exhausted, and then it was time to go with Captain Alana for physical exercise. It started with them walking on a hiking trail all the way from the portico to the entrance of the dragon caves near the top of the mountain, which took a solid hour. Nova was already sweaty and panting by the time they got there, at which point everyone got handed a staff and instructed to pair up and start sparring. Nova didn't last long before she got suddenly dizzy, nearly passing out and being excused to watch the rest of the sparring match while she sat on the sidelines and rested with a canteen of water to sip, much to the amusement of the other Caelum recruits.\n\nShe wasn't the only one to experience this endpoint, not by a long shot, but apparently she was the only famous one to do it, so even though she was sitting in a group of around fifteen others by the time the lesson ended, she was the one getting all the smirks and whispered jabs from the others as they made their way back down the mountain. But it was late afternoon now, and as Nova followed the other students into the gallery for dinner, she was honestly too tired, hungry, and sore to care, looking around for Zephyr and making her way over to the other girl once she spotted her.\n\n\"Hey,\" she greeted her.\n\n\"Oh, Nova.\" Zephyr blinked, looking as exhausted as Nova felt. \"Gosh, you look terrible.\"\n\n\"Thanks, you're not bad yourself.\" Nova let out a bit of a dry chuckle. \"That was not what I expected it to be.\"\n\n\"You're telling me,\" Zephyr groaned, rubbing her eyes. \"I can't wait to go to bed and sleep\u2026After the witch lesson tonight, that is.\"\n\n\"Why do they have to have these classes all day?\" Nova complained. \"Who wants to go do witch stuff after all this?\"\n\n\"You're going to the witch lesson?\"\n\nNova froze and turned to the speaker\u2014one of the Caelum girls who'd been doing most of the snickering and whispering all day, and who was now giving her and Zephyr a judgmental look, one of her eyebrows raised and her mouth pulled into a smirk.\n\nNova frowned at her. \"You got a problem with that?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" the girl said. \"I'm merely\u2026surprised, that's all. That someone of your blood wants to be a witch.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with witches?\" Zephyr asked in confusion.\n\n\"You mean besides the obvious?\" The girl rolled her eyes. \"They can't link with dragons.\"\n\n\"So?\" Nova narrowed her eyes. \"I thought only a few people could actually do that anyway.\"\n\n\"And you're going to risk losing the chance by practicing witchcraft,\" the girl said, crossing her arms in disbelief. \"No thank you. I'm not going anywhere near the witch lessons, and if you two are smart, you'll do the same.\"\n\n\"What if I'd rather be a witch?\" Zephyr asked, frowning.\n\nThe girl looked Zephyr over and then smirked. \"It would suit you,\" she decided.\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" Nova demanded, gritting her teeth as Zephyr blushed beside her.\n\n\"I didn't mean anything bad by it,\" the girl said with a bit of a derisive giggle, pushing her hair out of her eyes. \"She simply doesn't have the right figure for riding.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?!\" Nova hissed, feeling her own face flush with heat.\n\n\"She's not tall enough, that's all.\" The girl shrugged, clearly not having been referencing Zephyr's height, though apparently having enough self-preservation to pretend that's all she'd been talking about. \"Though, I suppose she could try to link with one of those twins you found. I know I'm certainly not going anywhere near them at the trials.\" She walked past them then, heading towards the food line in the back of the room, though she did pause and put a hand on Zephyr's shoulder with a giggle. \"By then, they'll probably be the perfect size for you, though.\"\n\nZephyr pushed the girl's hand away and stepped closer to Nova, her face red as she hunched her shoulders.\n\n\"I wouldn't want you near my younglets anyway,\" Nova snapped, feeling her fury spike even more when the girl just waved a dismissive hand and kept walking without looking back. \"How dare she talk to you like that?!\" Nova turned to Zephyr. \"Don't listen to her\u2014she doesn't know what she's talking about!\"\n\n\"It's fine,\" Zephyr muttered without looking up at her, seeming even more upset as she started heading towards the food line herself. \"Let's just\u2026just get our food and forget about it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure, okay.\" Nova clenched her fists, still feeling angry, but knowing if she pressed the issue, she'd make things worse. Great first day, really, she thought. Hopefully, magic class would be easier.\n\nAfter dinner, they made their way across the foyer to an open door near the back of the room, where Gwyn Falla was seated on a large, comfortable-looking high-backed chair with fluffed cushions, shuffling through scrolls as a handful of students\u2014maybe about thirty or forty total, coming from across all three groups\u2014filed in and took seats at various empty desks around the room.\n\nAs they waited, Nova examined the classroom, which was much smaller than the room Jung-Dae had been teaching them in, though this room still had enough seating for around a hundred students and seemed vastly empty compared to how many were in attendance. Unlike in the longer room where they'd get their reviews, the desks here were all individual tables, each one around the length of a small coffee table and the height of a regular desk, a single chair behind each one. Both the desks and chairs were made of pale, ancient-looking wood, faded and creaking, almost as if they were going to collapse out from under the students. There were two teacher desks, as well, one by Gwyn's soft chair, piled with scrolls and books and a box full of tapered candles, and one in another corner, next to a large cauldron and piled with other things such as potted plants, piles of stones, dead twigs and branches, and bowls of dirt, seeds, and water.\n\n\"Take any seat you like,\" Gwyn called to another couple of students as they walked into the room. \"But don't touch anything on the shelves, please\u2014the earthian students leave their projects here for safekeeping.\"\n\nNova looked to where Gwyn was indicating, where a row of shelves along one wall looked to be filled with all sorts of fascinating materials\u2014plants and rocks and bowls of soil like on the teacher's desk, but other things as well, including vials of colored liquids, stacks of dusty, cracked parchment, quills and inkwells, cracked bits of pottery, and burnished metal vases containing wilted, dry flowers. And then there were the broken mirrors, baskets filled with glass fruit, folded bits of linen, necklaces and bracelets hanging from hooks\u2026it was a cacophony of odds and ends, and Nova felt like she could stare at it for days and still not see every piece.\n\nShe didn't have that long to reflect on it, however, as Gwyn only waited a few minutes more, quietly flipping through a book and constantly pushing aside a stray piece of gray hair that had come loose from her bun. In between, she'd smile around at the class, the wrinkles and laugh-lines on her face prominent in the well-lit room. Slowly, she stood, letting out a deep sigh and then smiling at the recruits in the room.\n\n\"Hello, children,\" she said. \"I suppose this's all we're going to get this year. Let's begin. I'd like to start by thanking you for your interest in witchcraft, especially with how much work you've already been putting in as riders. I know some of you would like to study the earthian branch of magic rather than aerial, but rest assured, Professor Dreyan will be instructing classes, as well. Since there are usually only a few of you interested in witchcraft before the trials, we choose to teach the recruitment classes in turns, with myself teaching the basics of aerial on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while Professor Dreyan teaches earthian basics on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. We recommend you only study one branch at first, as both paths require rigorous study and memorization, and trying to learn too much magic in one setting can exhaust you, leaving you prone to costly mistakes. Speaking of exhaustion, I'm sure you're all tired and may already be more interested in earthian magic; if there are any of you here who already know you'd rather rest up and attend earthian lessons tomorrow, please feel free to take your leave and get some sleep.\" She waved to the door with a smile. \"I won't be offended.\"\n\nNova glanced around at the other recruits there, around half of whom did reluctantly stand and make their way back out of the classroom, offering nervous, apologetic smiles to Gwyn as they did so, and honestly, Nova kind of felt like doing that herself. She was so tired, and the other school of magic had seemed way more interesting than this one\u2026but Zephyr made no move towards getting up, so Nova stayed put, as well. After all, Zephyr had agreed to leave her whole world behind and come here with Nova, so it was only fair Nova stick by her friend now in something she chose to do.\n\n\"Very well.\" Gwyn nodded. \"Before we get started with the actual magic, I'm going to address something I know some of you have concerns about and dispel a few rumors while I'm at it. Firstly, I want to assure you that what we learn during the recruitment period is not going to get you into any trouble in the future, whether you become a rider or not. The law Commander Traevorlin mentioned does not take effect until such a time comes when a rider has made an established link between themselves and a dragon\u2014which will not take place before your trials. As some of you might know, and some of you may not, it is always up to a dragon to begin the process of forging a link with a rider in whom it senses potential, and the dragons here in Stonehaven are careful not to forge links with any human unless approached by that human during the trials. Some of them who work with you during your probacio training might be testing the waters, watching you and determining who among you they'll be willing to link with later, but you don't have to worry about accidentally creating a bond during your training as a rider, and if you're released from probacio early and choose to devote your studies to witchcraft full-time, you can still spend time with any dragons you've developed attachments to without having to fear retribution, as if it were any other friendship.\"\n\nA few of the others let out relieved breaths and nodded, Zephyr among them, and Nova felt relieved herself, relaxing a bit in her chair. She wasn't risking losing the chance to become a rider; she was just\u2026setting up a backup plan. After all, if she turned out not to have this special ability only a few people were born with, and she couldn't forge a link at all, she'd feel even worse if she couldn't even manage to do something everyone could do, like witchcraft.\n\n\"Now that that's out of the way,\" Gwyn said. \"It's time to\u2014\"\n\nBut wait, why did the law exist in the first place? Nova raised her hand, and Gwyn paused, looking a little surprised, but she nodded to Nova.\n\n\"Lady Nova,\" the old woman acknowledged her. \"You have something to say?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Nova nodded, lowering her hand. \"Why can't a rider perform witchcraft? Why is it against the law?\"\n\nThe remaining recruits were all staring at her as if she'd suddenly grown two heads and she frowned, feeling confused and self-conscious again. What, did they not ask questions of their teachers in this world? Or was the issue with the question itself? She didn't think it was that ridiculous of a question.\n\nGwyn let out a bit of an incredulous laugh herself, as if the answer should be obvious, and Nova felt a spike of irritation. Even the 'kind old woman' figure here was laughing at her.\n\n\"Why, child, it's far too dangerous,\" the woman told her. \"Magic is a limitless, chaotic force of nature, uninhibited by physical boundaries\u2014hindered not by time, nor rule of man. With the right song, nations could crumble; by a forbidden word, whole kingdoms fall. When a rider becomes linked with a dragon, their inherent power and understanding of the world can come to increase tenfold, and after a thousand years of this, there's no telling how many songs they could learn. It is forbidden for a rider to learn witchcraft because the imbalance of power such a union would afford them is too great for any one person to possess. And, as you will learn over the next three months, balance is the key to all life.\"\n\nSo, it was against the law for a rider to learn witchcraft because they might go mad with power and use it to destroy the world? Nova supposed that made sense, somewhat, but she honestly couldn't see it happening a whole lot. She made a mental note to ask Korgad about it later, wondering if maybe the rule existed because some ancient rider-witch had done so, but deciding to accept the answer for now and nodding to Gwyn to show she was listening.\n\nGwyn nodded back before continuing, turning to the box of tapered candles on her desk. \"If you all will please take a candlestick and follow me,\" she said, waving for the recruits to follow her as she made her way to a small, thick-looking door behind the teacher's desks. \"We are going into the Harmoniums.\"\n\nThe what?\n\nFeeling a thrill of curiosity, Nova stood along with the others, everyone doing as they were told and grabbing a candlestick as Gwyn pulled the door open, leading them into a vast, sprawling chamber that was as large as a stadium and reminiscent of the dragon caves. Only, where the dragon caves seemed rough and carved from the mountain either by claw or natural elements, these chambers looked like they'd been painstakingly carven by hand. Gigantic archways stretched overhead, crossing the ceilings which were supported by huge, twisting columns, thorny vines carved into the stone as if climbing upward naturally. A stage was set in the center of the stadium with a circular staircase leading up to it, the entire room lit by a single stream of light coming from a hole directly above them, though glittering off the walls of the cavern and reflected by thousands upon thousands of gemstones embedded into the walls.\n\nThe remaining students all let out hushed exclamations of wonder, looking around the space with wide eyes as Gwyn led them onto the huge stage, directing them to stand in a circle.\n\n\"We're going to practice lighting a candle.\"\n\n\"What?!\" Zephyr gasped, a smile coming to her face. \"Right now?!\"\n\nGwyn nodded, giving Zephyr a pleased look. \"First, I will teach you the incantation for fire,\" she announced. \"Mo-tah-nn. Again, Mo-tah-nn.\"\n\nThe group repeated it, Nova careful to keep her voice steady as she did the same, the word sounding\u2026warm, already.\n\n\"And now we say 'come to me,'\" Gwyn said softly. \"Like this: Veh-nee mare-ay co-ang-go.\"\n\nAgain, the students repeated the phrase a few times, Gwyn correcting pronunciation and having them repeat it until they could all say it, and then she took a deep breath and sang the whole phrase, her old voice loud and echoing in the chamber, clear as a bell and carrying a mournful tune as she recited it in song.\n\n\"Mo-tah-nn veh-nee mare-ay co-ang-go.\"\n\nThe candle in the woman's hands lit on its own, the golden yellow light seeming much brighter in the dark cave than a candle had any business being, and Nova let out a breath, enchanted at the image. Perhaps she'd expected something different, but this was definitely magic, and very beautiful.\n\n\"There now,\" Gwyn said quietly, smiling at the candle as the flame gleamed in her eyes. \"Beautiful, is it not? One must be careful, however, dear children, to keep one's focus while spellcasting, and to always have something with which to offer the magic. What, do you suppose, would have happened if I had summoned this fire without a candle for it to light, or if I had brought the candle, but had been thinking of something else while bidding the flame to answer my call?\"\n\n\"It would have lit something else?\" a boy near the back of the group tried timidly.\n\n\"Precisely!\" Gwyn nodded. \"As I said before, magic is limitless and unbound by rule of man. When spellcasting, you are saying words and reciting names, yes, but more important than that, you are speaking into life something you will not be able to unspeak, and if you do not give it proper direction, there's no telling where it will go.\"\n\nShe'd turned her gaze to Nova as she said this, and perhaps it was a trick of the candlelight or the deep, dark shadows of the caves surrounding them, but somehow Nova felt struck by a sudden sense of foreboding at the look, the gleam in the old woman's eye feeling\u2026almost sinister. She almost felt like the witch was giving her a warning, a silent message that she wasn't merely talking about a stray spell or a candle.\n\n\"Now then.\" Gwyn turned back to the rest of the group, the brief, unsettling look on her face dissipating as she stepped more into the beam of light centerstage and smiled around at the others once more. \"We're going to practice.\"\n\nNova felt a shiver go down her spine, but she tried to shake the feeling off as everyone, one by one, began attempting to recite the song and light their own candles. She couldn't afford to give in to paranoia, but she also couldn't help but feel anxious. What had that look meant? Why had Gwyn given it so pointedly to Nova? Why hadn't anyone else noticed?\n\nShe tried to focus on spellcasting, saying the words carefully and to the right tune, but she couldn't shake the feeling and couldn't manage to light her candle. Perhaps that was par for the course, however, as the others didn't manage to light theirs, either. And Gwyn was right\u2026Nova was starting to feel even more tired and exhausted than before, as if she were being drained of what little energy she had left, and she hadn't even managed to cast the spell yet.\n\nThey remained in the Harmoniums for nearly an hour, singing the chant over and over, but no one was able to cast the spell, and the more Nova tried, the more she lost focus. She couldn't stop thinking about what Gwyn could have meant by what she'd said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Unwelcome News",
                "text": "By the time the first week of recruitment training ended, Nova was already fed up with it all.\n\nThere was so much to do. She and Zephyr were getting up early every morning to go spend time in the library, struggling to keep up with the history of famous riders, witches, mages, and dragons\u2014such as Brioni, one of the fiercest and most famous of dragons, who'd been involved in many of the greatest battles and wars of the past six hundred years and had a reputation as the most ferocious huntress in Ragondan history. She'd been mentioned at least once every day either in Dafyd's dragon riding class or Alana's history lessons, and finally finding out who she was and why she was important had been like finally solving a difficult math problem. And it was like that with every single name their teachers mentioned, too, like they were cramming for a final on a subject they'd never taken.\n\nAfter studying in the library, the girls would head to the gallery for a quick breakfast before splitting up to go with the Caelum and Terra groups for probacio training. Which, for Nova, meant hours in class with Alana, trying to remember all the names and dates she was cramming into her head each morning, then a lunch break, and then hours training with Dafyd on flying, sometimes on Garlet and sometimes on one of the other dragons. This was followed by the long hike up the mountain and the weapons training they received at the top. And Nova had passed out nearly every day. Captain Jung-Dae had explained it was the thin air at high altitude, but told her she would get used to it in time, and that it was important to train her body to adapt to the high plains if she wanted to manage fighting in midair on a dragon, so she pushed through and tried her best every day\u2026but she was sick of nearly passing out every afternoon like clockwork.\n\nAfter their main classes were over, Nova and Zephyr spent the evenings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in aerial magic class with Gwyn Falla, and perhaps it was the fact that they were exhausted every night, but not a single one of the recruits had managed to light a candle by spellcasting yet. All three nights, it had been the same; standing in the dimly lit Harmoniums, awkwardly trying to sing some ancient language while staring blankly at an unlit candle. Gwyn had reassured the students it took time to harness magic and they were doing fine, but where around twenty students had tried on Monday, only eighteen had showed up on Wednesday, and by the time Friday had come around, there'd been only sixteen of them.\n\nApparently, the regular classes were exhausting enough that even the students who wanted to be witches, like Zephyr, were having a hard time making themselves come to the classes. Nova no longer felt like the law preventing dragon riders from becoming witches was a real problem, and in fact, now she was more surprised at the law needing to exist in the first place, when it was already nearly impossible to keep up with both and they hadn't even finished probacio yet. She couldn't imagine trying to juggle both classes as a full-time student.\n\nAnd then, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, when Professor Dreyan taught the earthian witch recruits, Nova and Zephyr still didn't have extra time to sleep because they spent those evenings in the library, trying to get a head start on the next morning's history reviews and learning everything they could about Ragond itself\u2014while also looking for information on Nova's parents.\n\nThat had been a formative experience in itself. Asking one of the mages in the library if they had any books about her parents, earning a blank look from the mage and snickers from the students nearby before being handed a few scrolls and books containing records and stories dating back three hundred years, because\u2014as Nova had learned in shock\u2014that's how old her mother was. Seren was, according to Ragond history, three hundred and twenty years old, to be exact, and Ayo had been a few years older but died in battle just over sixteen years ago at the age of three hundred and eleven.\n\nConsidering Nova was sixteen, she figured he'd either died right before she was born or right after, and it was strange to read about the man, knowing the whole while that she was reading about her own father, who she'd never known and would never meet.\n\nIt didn't help that most of the stories were presented like legends or fairy tales, describing what sort of monsters he'd fought and the adventures he'd had with her mother. It was honestly unsettling. She'd briefly wondered at one point, while reading a story about Ayo and Seren fighting a particularly nasty flock of Stymphalians (monstrous birds with feathers made of bronze, according to Zephyr), if this was what Hercules had felt like when he'd learned about his own heritage.\n\nIt was even weirder reading about Korgad, though. Since he'd been Seren's dragon partner for almost her entire life, he was a big part of their adventures and featured heavily in the stories. On one hand, it was interesting to read what he'd been like as a younger dragon, most of the earlier stories describing him as overeager, reckless, and hopelessly curious, often being the catalyst that got Seren into whatever mess she had to fight her way out of. It was funny, actually, though when Nova had mentioned it to him one night, he'd scoffed and told her she was 'reading the wrong stories,' whatever that meant. On the other hand, it made her feel kind of\u2026sad? It was like when Zephyr had once shown Nova a picture of when Zephyr had been a toddler, several years before her parents had died. Seeing someone you knew, frozen forever in a moment of time with no idea what was ahead of them, while you knew it was going to get worse.\n\nShe couldn't find any mention of how Korgad had gotten his scar, though...and she also couldn't find any sort of hint about how Seren had disappeared or where she might have gone. Granted, with over three hundred years of history to search through, she had a lot to read, but still. She was struggling with trying to be patient. She felt like she might've been able to find something by now if she hadn't been spending all that time training for the trials.\n\nSpeaking of training for the trials, they'd had their first 'performance review' on Saturday, which had been surprisingly intense. All the recruits had gathered in the large classroom, and one by one, Commander Traevorlin had called their names and read their marks in each of the three main classes. Marks, as in grades, even though they hadn't been given any sort of official test. Apparently, the entirety of probacio training was one giant test, and the three younger teachers were evaluating the students nonstop. Nova had been pretty sure she would wash out since she hadn't done that great in the history portion of Alana's class, she hadn't managed to make it through a full physical training class with Captain Jung-Dae, and she wasn't working that well with any of the dragons in Dafyd's class, either, but much to her surprise, she'd passed, although she'd only earned seventeen 'merits' out of a possible one hundred. That did not feel like passing, but only the students with ten merits or less had gotten kicked out of rider training, so she'd stayed. Zephyr had only gotten eleven merits, and now they were both resolved to work even harder this next week.\n\nAll in all, thirteen students had been expelled yesterday. The rejected students had been upset, too; one boy even starting to cry upon hearing his score of nine. Commander Traevorlin had not been exaggerating when he'd said they wouldn't all make the cut. Nova had been surprised by how tough the teachers were about all this, not a single sympathetic glance coming from the teachers' desks as Traevorlin had read out the names and scores of the 'washouts' and coldly told them to either see Gwyn Falla or Professor Dreyan and sign up for full witchcraft courses or to pack their belongings and clear out of the dormitory before Monday morning.\n\nIn addition to the massive workload and pressure in classes, Nova was also really starting to be annoyed by the rules. Everyone was supposed to be in bed by 'a candle-length after sunset,' which basically meant they were only allowed to light one candle after dark, and after it burned out, you had to go to bed. And, she'd thought candles would last a lot longer than they did. Maybe it was the special candlesticks they were provided in the student dorms, but they usually burned out within an hour. Zephyr was usually too tired at night to last the full candlestick before she fell asleep, but Nova always fought sleep as well as she could in order to sneak out to the dragon tunnels and visit Rune and Hake since she was so busy during the day she only got to see them for maybe an hour unless she did it after dark.\n\nThey were growing incredibly fast\u2014nearly twice their original size even now, just a week later, and growing more every day. They were around the size of horses now, big enough for Nova and Zephyr to climb on them, though the two dragons still insisted on resting their heads on the girls' laps whenever they had the chance. Korgad had barely left their side except for once or twice when Nova had needed him for one of Dafyd's training missions, and although the old dragon acted like the whole thing was a huge inconvenience, Nova could tell he was getting attached to the two little ones. He made sure to bring them food at the same times every day, and he'd been working with them on their speech, the two now able to speak in near complete sentences, though Hake still had some trouble with his pronunciation and even Rune couldn't say words with more than two or sometimes three syllables.\n\nNova couldn't get over how fast they were growing, though, her mind drifting to it over and over. Their teeth had finished coming in a few days after they'd hatched, their scales had hardened, and the spikes traveling down their tails had lengthened and grown sharper. Their scales had turned the same greenish-brown of most dragons, too, though Rune had kept the rune-like spots for which she'd been named. Hake was still significantly bigger than his sister and still only had three spikes on his tail, while Rune and many of the other dragons had four or even five. The young dragon seemed self-conscious about it, often swooping his tail to the side out of sight and huffing or whimpering when it was pointed out, the actions only serving to make him even cuter than before.\n\nShe'd barely gotten to see them this past week, and the two kept asking where she'd been whenever she did manage to find time.\n\nWhich was exactly the reason she felt guilty now, on their first 'day off,' as she and Zephyr traveled with some of the other students to Terrenov, a village on the other side of the mountain, to do some shopping. She'd have preferred to spent the time with Korgad, Hake, and Rune, but as Zephyr had pointed out, they were in desperate need of more clothes, as they'd been given a few more hand-me-downs but still only had enough to last around three days before having to send them down to be washed in the mysterious 'laundry facilities' they couldn't find.\n\nNova couldn't deny the trip was necessary, and anyway, she had been getting tired of looking like everyone else and was looking forward to seeing what other options there were in town. Aside from that, Nova wanted to see about maybe getting her own bow and quiver since she was tired of using whatever spare equipment she could find during practice, and archery was definitely her favorite of the melee options.\n\nSo, here they were, Nova and Zephyr, crossing the lower courtyard towards a group of horse-drawn carriages, a crowd of excited students loading into them as they talked and chattered with each other. Nova had no idea how long it would take to ride into town, but she wasn't looking forward to the trip. Although they'd met many of the other recruits by now and she knew most of their names, she'd specifically tried to avoid getting to know them over the past week. She just didn't want to deal with the complications of making friends here, and on top of everything else she was still kind of reeling from. But now she'd be in a carriage with some of them, clomping along dirt or cobblestone roads on their way to an actual shopping trip. Fate was basically trying to force her into socializing, and she resented that.\n\nSure enough, as they approached the group of carriages, Nova heard someone calling her and Zephyr's names. She turned to see one of the more friendly recruits, a boy around fifteen years old named Rayden, waving them towards his carriage with a smile. Nova let out a bit of a sigh as Zephyr waved back and started heading towards him. Rayden was in the Terra group with Zephyr, and according to her, they'd worked together during sparring and had shared notes during Alana's class. He'd also made a point to sit with them in the gallery at mealtimes and had expressed interest in the idea of a study group when Zephyr had mentioned being part of one on Earth. He'd even begun pestering them about starting one of their own here in Ragond. Nova had tried to hint that she wasn't interested in making friends, but he hadn't seemed to take the hint and Zephyr seemed fine with him, so Nova couldn't very well avoid the boy without seeming rude.\n\nHonestly, she kind of got the impression he had a crush on Zephyr, which made it weirder. But, if Zephyr didn't mind it, Nova wouldn't try to stop it. Besides, Nova might be reading things wrong, anyway. Maybe the boy was just overly friendly. It was hard to judge things here in this other world. People seemed to have different social cues\u2014a different way of thinking and acting. What mattered was how Zephyr felt, and she seemed rather pleased to see the boy.\n\nNova still didn't feel like riding in a carriage with him for a long trip\u2026but she'd get over it.\n\n\"Hey, Rayden,\" Nova greeted him when they reached him.\n\n\"Hello, Miss Nova,\" Rayden responded. \"Miss Zephyr. Good day for a drive, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nA comment on the weather. Nova hated small talk.\n\n\"Yeah, it's a nice day,\" Zephyr said, offering the boy a small smile as they climbed into the carriage. \"Do you guys go to, um, Terrenov, often?\"\n\n\"Well, the students-in-training can go whenever they want,\" Rayden told her. \"Many of them ride their dragons down, you know. They only provide the carriages for us recruits on Sundays, though, I hear. I wonder how the witches travel if they don't have dragons and want to go to Terrenov during the week.\"\n\n\"They probably have their ways.\" Zephyr tilted her head. \"I wonder if they have some kind of teleportation spell. That'd be cool!\"\n\n\"Mmm, we'll have to look into that once we pass the witch trials,\" Rayden decided.\n\n\"Witch trials?\" Zephyr asked him. \"I thought you wanted to be a rider.\"\n\n\"I did, at first.\" Rayden sighed a little. \"But I don't think I can handle the pressure. I only had thirteen merits yesterday, and I don't know how I'll make up the extra points before this Saturday. They're going to expel everyone with fifteen or less this week.\"\n\n\"Fifteen or less?\" Zephyr winced. \"I have a lot to make up, too, then\u2026Though, I don't think I'm cut out for this sort of thing anyway. I'd be much better off as a witch.\"\n\n\"It's a lot of pressure, yeah,\" Nova admitted, settling in her seat and pulling her legs up, as the carriage was still filling and others were passing them to go sit with friends farther into it. Including a few girls from the Caelum group, already snickering over having heard their conversation. One of them was the same girl who'd commented on Zephyr's 'figure' back on the first day, who Nova had learned to avoid during the past week. It was too late to leave the carriage, though, as the driver prodded the horse to start and they began moving along the road at a brisk trot. Oh joy, this was going to be a fun ride.\n\n\"Hey, Teira,\" said the girl in question. She was a Caelum rider recruit named Fayta, and now smirked at her friend as the two sat in the seats across from Nova, Zephyr, and Rayden. \"What's worse than a washout?\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Teira snickered back, clearly already knowing the answer.\n\n\"A witchout,\" Fayta announced, earning chuckles and snickers from the others in the carriage.\n\n\"Very clever,\" Rayden muttered with a blush and a roll of his eyes.\n\n\"Wait, what do you mean, 'witchout?'\" Zephyr frowned. \"Like, if someone switches to being a witch instead of a rider?\"\n\n\"Obviously,\" Fayta scoffed. \"Do you know what witches are good for? Nothing. The only reason anyone studies witchcraft is to make up for the fact they can't forge bonds with dragons.\"\n\n\"Oh, they're good for something,\" Teira spoke up. \"Who else would sweep all those stairs?\"\n\n\"Right! Or clean our carpets,\" Fayta laughed. \"Or cook our food?\"\n\n\"Hey, yeah, or shut you up?\" Nova added, faking a grin as she glared at the two. \"How about you mind your own business? No one asked for you to weigh in with your loser opinions.\"\n\n\"Oooh.\" The girls both giggled a bit, giving Nova a challenging look.\n\n\"Looks like we cut a bit close to home.\" Fayta smirked. \"Don't think we haven't noticed you still doing the witch prep, Lady Nova. What, afraid your blood isn't strong enough for a link?\"\n\n\"How do we even know she's actually Ayo's daughter?\" a third recruit weighed in now, this being an older boy from the Terra group by the name of Lorn, who was sitting in the back of the carriage, one of the last to have climbed in. \"She came from Earth, so she's probably lying.\"\n\n\"I'm not lying,\" Nova told him, gritting her teeth. \"And I don't care if I do become a witch. They're not useless\u2014you just haven't been paying attention.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Gwyn Falla says they\u2014\" Zephyr started.\n\n\"Gwyn Falla is going senile,\" Teira interrupted her. \"We all know it, even if no one wants to say it out loud.\"\n\n\"Gwyn Falla only became a witch herself because she couldn't pass her trials as rider,\" Lorn told Zephyr. \"She's made the best of an undesirable situation, nothing more.\"\n\n\"You can't say that about a council member!\" Rayden gasped to the two, looking scandalized. \"Gwyn Falla is the High Witch!\"\n\n\"Oh, that puts me in mind\u2026\" Fayta turned to Zephyr, biting back her smirk and attempting to look serious. \"Since she's been attentive with you and you feel comfortable enough to mention her by name, could you pass along a message? My laundry's been coming back to me stiff as of late and I'd like her to tell the witches down in the laundry room to ease back with the starch, hmm?\"\n\n\"Alright, that's it,\" Nova said, getting up and turning to the low back of the carriage. She stood on her seat and carefully jumped out onto the road below, ignoring the round of laughter from the carriage behind her.\n\n\"Wha\u2014Nova!\" Zephyr gasped, following suit and climbing over the side of the carriage herself as it kept rolling onward, the girl jumping off a few feet down the road. \"Give me a heads-up next time, jeez!\"\n\n\"Wait for me!\" Rayden called, and Nova raised an eyebrow as the boy also climbed up to jump, and then lost his balance when the driver pulled to a sudden stop so that he came toppling out of the carriage completely. The laughter behind him erupted into a roar, echoed by the groups from other carriages nearby who were now watching the spectacle in amusement as Rayden hurried to his feet, his face red as he brushed dirt off his clothes.\n\nJeez\u2026the kid was just going to get himself bullied even more.\n\n\"Hey!\" The driver turned around in his seat with a glare. \"Stay seated when we're moving!\"\n\n\"We're sorry!\" Zephyr called back with a wince, hurrying over to Rayden as the recruits in the carriage continued to laugh. \"Rayden, are you okay?\"\n\n\"Hmm? Yes, I'm\u2026I'm fine, of course,\" Rayden said tensely, hunching his shoulders and pointedly not looking at them. \"The stop was\u2026unexpected.\"\n\nThe driver shook his head at them with a disapproving frown, muttering as he started the carriage up again and the recruits in it waved and called their mocking goodbyes.\n\n\"Forget them,\" Nova huffed angrily. \"I didn't really want to go to Terre-whatever anyway.\"\n\n\"Terrenov,\" Rayden corrected her absently as more carriages started to pass them by. \"Well, this is a fine to-do! I was looking forward to eating fare from beyond the gallery for once and maybe seeing about a new pair of boots. Perhaps if we walk back in time, we can catch one of the last carriages.\"\n\n\"Need a lift?\" a familiar voice called as another carriage slowed to a halt beside them, Nova looking up to see the four students they'd run into on their first day when they'd been touring the school with Osa.\n\n\"Oh, uh, hi!\" Zephyr blinked, offering a small smile. \"Sure, thanks!\"\n\n\"Of course.\" The boy in the group jumped out over the edge and offered a sweeping sort of bow as he pulled open the swinging door.\n\n\"We saw you jumping out ahead of us down the road,\" one of the girls said. \"Trouble?\"\n\n\"Oh no, no trouble, none at all,\" Rayden said quickly.\n\n\"Some of the recruits in that carriage don't approve of witchcraft, that's all,\" Nova explained as she climbed into the carriage, the four older students shifting around to make room for them. \"They were being jerks. And, don't take this the wrong way, but I don't remember your names.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" the first girl, the one who'd asked if they needed a lift, waved her hand airily. \"My name is Anasia, and these are my friends, Hilla, Briss, and Masa.\"\n\n\"Pleased to make your acquaintance, again.\" Briss, an older-looking student with tan skin and long dark hair pulled into a messy bun, offered Nova her hand to shake.\n\n\"I'd have jumped, too,\" the boy, Masa, announced, climbing back in now that Zephyr and Rayden were boarded, as well, and waving for the driver to continue. \"Drive on.\"\n\n\"You're Nova and Zephyr, if I recall?\" the fourth member of the team, Hilla, checked, pushing her red hair over her shoulder as their carriage started back up again.\n\n\"That's right,\" Nova said. \"And this is Rayden\u2014he's a recruit, too.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you.\" Rayden bowed his head to the others. \"You're second-year students, is that right?\"\n\nAnasia nodded. \"I think I've noticed you before. You're the recruit that nearly impaled himself with his own spear last week?\"\n\n\"Ahem, I\u2026yes.\" Rayden grimaced. \"That was I.\"\n\n\"Mm, well, determination is half the battle,\" Masa told him, looking a little amused. \"You'll learn.\"\n\n\"Yes, keep trying,\" Anasia agreed. \"Masa, shall we tell them what you did during our own trial preparation?\"\n\n\"If it pleases you, my lady, we shall tell them anything,\" Masa said with a smile.\n\nThe way he talked was so odd.\n\n\"Masa fell off his dragon,\" Anasia told them with a friendly smile. \"He almost got booted from the school immediately! They weren't even going to wait for the weekly review, so he's just lucky Dafyd vouched for him. Dafyd was in training as apprentice to the old instructor at the time.\"\n\n\"You fell off your dragon?\" Zephyr repeated with a laugh. \"How?\"\n\n\"Well, you know how there's the saddle, right, and you sit on it?\" Masa smirked. \"The trick to falling off is to find yourself no longer sitting on it, during flight.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Nova laughed. \"Even I haven't fallen off my dragon.\"\n\n\"I still say he wouldn't have fallen off if the dragon he was with hadn't been too young,\" Briss noted. \"Barely two years old, he was. They get younger every year.\"\n\n\"I hear those two younglets you found are going to be available for linking at the trials,\" Hilla noted. \"They'll be what, a month old?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nova frowned. \"I still think they're too young, but Korgad says they'll grow fast enough to be nearly ready by the time trials start.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Hilla sounded thoughtfully.\n\n\"Physically, yes,\" Briss said. \"Dragons age incredibly rapidly during the first few months, and then after that, they stay around the same for the rest of their lives\u2014thousands of years in some cases. Mentally, though, it used to be a dragon had to be at least a year old before trying to link with a rider, and many of them take even longer before it actually happens.\"\n\n\"What changed?\" Zephyr asked. \"Why are the dragons getting younger?\"\n\n\"Well, there are fewer of them nowadays,\" Masa told them. \"This blasted war's been taking a toll on them, you know. Even those who survive an altercation with the enemy can still come out of it injured, some beyond recovery. Many of the dragons are retired now; they help with the trainees sometimes, but they don't try for links. And if there aren't enough dragons to link with, well, being a rider becomes rather pointless.\"\n\nNova remembered the dead on the battlefield she'd seen on her first day back, full of dragons and monsters alike, and felt a bit of a chill go through her at the thought of Rune or Hake lying there among them. She hadn't wanted them to do the trials anyway, but Korgad had insisted they'd be ready, and now she felt even more uncertain about it. She'd have to talk to Korgad about it later when they got back.\n\n\"Don't worry about your younglets, Nova,\" Rayden told her, seeming to take note of her frown. \"I'll be surprised if either of them forms a link anyway; I've heard no one intends to try with them.\"\n\n\"What? Why?\" Zephyr demanded.\n\n\"Well, because they're twins, of course,\" Rayden told her plainly. \"Haven't you heard? Twins aren't as proficient in battle; they're smaller, weaker, and their ability to forge links is compromised by their natural link with each other.\"\n\n\"That's a load of lies,\" Nova said. \"Twins are as good as any other dragon and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.\"\n\n\"Nova,\" Zephyr muttered, blushing and glancing around at the others, who all looked a little surprised and slightly offended.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Nova said at once, gritting her teeth and trying to shove down her irritation.\n\nWhy was she so defensive about this?\n\nWell, maybe it was because she knew what it was like to be an outcast, to have people write her off as not worth it because she came from the wrong life. The twins were orphans like her, and they already had enough to deal with. They didn't need the added weight of being ignored for something as stupid as having been born from the same egg.\n\n\"I didn't mean to offend you or your younglets.\" Rayden cleared his throat, frowning but looking a little guilty. \"I'm sure they're more than capable of fighting and forming links despite their disadvantages, but it is true they'll have to work harder to compensate for those disadvantages. It's common knowledge that twins are lesser; you likely haven't been here long enough to notice the difference.\"\n\n\"I still say there isn't one,\" Nova insisted. \"But\u2026sorry I snapped.\"\n\n\"There, see, we've worked it out,\" Anasia said with a strained sort of chuckle. \"Anyway, is it your first time visiting Terrenov?\"\n\nNova sighed a little, turning away and watching the scenery as Zephyr said that yes, it was, and then she and Rayden began talking to the older students, who offered to show them the best stores and then started discussing weapon types and the keys to finding what worked for you. Nova tuned them out after a while, thinking about Rune and Hake, conflicted between wanting them to forge good links at the trials and prove everyone wrong, and wanting them to skip the trials completely to stay safe. They were still so small. Sure, they were bigger than her now, but they weren't half the size of Korgad, and she couldn't see how they'd make up the difference in just a month. And considering how young Garlet had seemed at twelve years old, and how young Korgad sounded in all those old stories when he'd already been a couple hundred years old at the start, she couldn't imagine her younglets fighting an actual war.\n\nHer younglets.\n\nShe'd gotten too attached and she knew it. She didn't like feeling responsible for someone, either; it's why she'd always tried to avoid getting close to foster siblings in the past.\n\nWell, apart from Zephyr, of course, who'd remained her friend. But Zephyr was different. Sure, Nova always tried to take care of her, but Zephyr took care of Nova, too. They helped each other, so it wasn't like Zephyr was completely dependent on Nova or anything. The twins\u2026they kind of were. They had Korgad, too, but still, they were\u2026they were her younglets.\n\nCurse them for being so sweet.\n\nThe ride to Terrenov took nearly an hour, but the time passed by much more pleasantly than the five minutes they'd spent in the carriage with Fayta and Teira, even with Nova's heavy thoughts, and as they rounded one last bend around the foothills surrounding the mountain, she sat up straighter to get a better view, realizing that with the exception of flying low over a few towns on Korgad's back, she was about to see her first honest-to-goodness fairy-tale town.\n\n\"Oooh,\" Zephyr breathed next to her, sitting up a bit straighter herself and smiling at the sight of the village as the carriage slowed down on the busy cobblestone streets, following the other carriages past several houses and on towards the center of town. The houses they passed were all fascinating and distinctive, the first floors made of gray, rough-looking brick or stonework, with small shuttered windows and thick wooden doors, while those that had second or third floors stretched slightly over the streets, the upper floors framed in crisscrossing dark wooden beams, white plaster of some sort comprising the walls. The roofs were mostly shingled, she noticed, though some of the smaller ones had thatched roofs, which were strange to see in real life. She found herself wondering what they did in rainy seasons\u2014and then she blinked, realizing she had no idea if Ragond had rainy seasons. She'd have to look for a book about Ragond weather in the library later.\n\nThe carriage passed low under a sort of archway made of the wooden beams and plaster connecting two houses across the street from each other, and then it turned a corner, slowing to a stop completely in a line with the other carriages.\n\nThe four older students all stood. \"This is where we get off,\" Masa told them. \"It'll be faster to walk the rest of the way from here.\"\n\n\"Would you like to come with us?\" Hilla offered. \"We're heading straight to the village square.\"\n\n\"That sounds great, yeah!\" Zephyr grinned, looking around excitedly as the group all climbed out of their carriage and started following Anasia and her team down the street.\n\nIt was getting more and more crowded with every step, as the other students had all seemed to have the same idea, mixing with tons of pedestrians as they walked onwards past the line of carriages. Nova felt a little overwhelmed by the crowd and made sure to keep Zephyr and the others in sight as she tried to stay close and avoid being jostled by the crowd, the noise getting louder as they walked down the incredibly narrow street.\n\n\"Watch your step,\" Hilla called to them over her shoulder. \"The main road is full of horses, and horses leave their marks.\"\n\nThe smell hit right as the girl said it, Nova letting out a disgusted groan as she covered her nose. Wow, that was one thing she'd never thought about when picturing the world before cars. Sure, horse-drawn carriages looked pretty, but gosh, this smell.\n\n\"Oh wow,\" Zephyr muttered, grimacing and covering her own nose as she watched the ground more carefully. \"It's worse than a dog park.\"\n\nLuckily, they didn't stay long, Anasia leading them down a side street after a few more minutes of pushing through the crowd. \"This way,\" she called to them. \"It's a shortcut.\"\n\n\"Well, technically, it's a longer route,\" Masa told them as they followed the older students into the even more narrow alleyway. \"But the carriages can't come through here, making it far less crowded; takes less time to navigate.\"\n\n\"We're sure fortunate you came along to guide us,\" Rayden noted with a grateful smile, the noise dying down as they left the crowded road behind and started making their way through town, these streets still somewhat busy, but not nearly as populated as the main road.\n\n\"Yeah, that's part of why we take the carriages,\" Hilla agreed with a smile. \"Most of the linked students either ride their dragons down here or avoid this place on recruiter days entirely. We like the bustle, though.\"\n\n\"The chance to scope out the recruits and find promising ones is a draw,\" Briss noted.\n\n\"Promising?\" Rayden repeated, immediately looking a bit anxious. \"I trust we fit the bill?\"\n\n\"Well, you're certainly interesting recruits,\" Briss laughed. \"I'm not sure yet if you're promising. We'll have to wait and see about that.\"\n\nThis elicited a chuckle from the others, and they continued walking and talking together for a little while longer before they rounded one last corner and found themselves in a busy marketplace crowded with students, villagers, and merchants. There were kiosks everywhere, filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, jewelry, baskets, clothes, and all sorts of other things. The merchants were calling out their wares, the pedestrians were laughing and talking with each other, there were a few more horses making their ways through the street, and there was even a dragon nearby, resting on a rooftop and watching the bustling street with interest, its tail dangling down towards the street.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Nova looked around. The setting itself was surreal enough, but the dragon pushed the whole thing over the edge. She'd been in this world for a whole week already and she still sometimes couldn't get over dragons, especially when she saw one doing something new. Like lounging on a roof.\n\n\"Oh, this all looks amazing!\" Zephyr breathed out, taking in the scene with wide eyes. \"It's a real medieval marketplace!\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, we're heading to the blacksmith,\" Masa told them, waving across the marketplace towards an actual, honest-to-goodness blacksmith. Clanging a large hammer over a freakin' sword on an anvil, like he was in a video game or something. \"Have fun shopping, Nova, Zephyr, Rayden.\"\n\n\"We'll see you back at the castle, if we don't run into you again somewhere in town,\" Anasia offered with a smile.\n\n\"Uh, yeah, thanks!\" Nova smiled back. \"See you guys later!\"\n\nThe older teens moved on and Nova turned back to the market, starting to feel excited. \"Alright,\" she said to Zephyr. \"Where are we going first?\"\n\n\"Would you mind if I walk along with you for a bit?\" Rayden asked them, looking around eagerly himself.\n\n\"Um\u2026\" Nova hesitated, kind of wanting to just have this experience with Zephyr and no one else, but feeling rude about saying no. Especially as this was Zephyr's friend, not hers, so it was really up to her. Nova turned to the other girl, shrugging and feeling awkward now.\n\n\"Ahem, I, uh\u2026sure,\" Zephyr said, looking just as awkward as Nova felt.\n\nRayden blinked, glancing between the two of them and then blushing, letting out an anxious laugh. \"Of course, I do have business to take care of,\" he said hurriedly, shrugging and taking a few steps back. \"Perhaps I'll catch up with you later!\"\n\n\"No, it's fine! You can stay, I didn't\u2014\" Zephyr started with an embarrassed grimace. \"Yeah, you can totally come!\"\n\n\"I couldn't intrude.\" Rayden cleared his throat and then turned, darting into the crowd and disappearing behind it.\n\n\"Well, that was awkward,\" Nova noted, feeling herself blush and clearing her throat.\n\n\"Yeah, no thanks to you,\" Zephyr muttered absently, though sounding a bit teasing behind her embarrassment. \"Jeez\u2026 Anyway, let's\u2026shopping!\"\n\n\"Right, shopping,\" Nova agreed, trying to forget the awkward exchange and turning her focus onto the market instead. \"Okay, we definitely need new clothes, so, like\u2026I don't know, do we need to find a tailor or something? How does this work?\"\n\n\"Here, let me see,\" Zephyr said, starting to lead the way through the crowd. \"Keep an eye out for anywhere that looks like it has fabrics and stuff.\"\n\n\"On it,\" Nova promised, glad she was as tall as she was, at least able to see over the crowd a little better than Zephyr. She kept getting distracted by all the stuff for sale, though, especially with a heavy leather pouch weighing in her pocket. A pouch full of gold coins Osa had given her that morning\u2014telling her it would be enough to get anything she and Zephyr wanted and more.\n\nShe'd felt uncomfortable accepting the gift, but the man had insisted, telling her repeatedly that it wasn't enough to make up for the sixteen years of not knowing her. He'd already asked her over to his house for dinner three times in the past week and she kept turning him down, and she could tell he was starting to feel upset about the distance she was keeping. It was only fair to keep the money, right?\n\nShe felt bad about pushing him away, really, and she wasn't even sure herself why she was doing it, but she just\u2026couldn't bring herself to look at the guy without feeling strange and awkward, and she was so busy anyway with training and with the younglets that she did always have a good excuse, so.\n\nAt least they were getting new clothes.\n\nBy the time Nova and Zephyr got back to Stonehaven, it was late in the evening, and even though they hadn't been doing any fighting, flying, studying, or magic that day, Nova was still really tired. She and Zephyr headed across the courtyard and into the spire, crowding onto the lift along with all the others there, both of them carrying baskets filled with new things that were way more their style than the hand-me-downs Dafyd had given them. Nova had new riding gear, as well, in smooth black leather, while Zephyr was leaning into the 'witch' thing pretty heavily now, having bought herself some full-length, midnight-blue robes and a matching witch hat, though the girl was already claiming she shouldn't have bought it to begin with and would be too embarrassed to wear it, considering how different and outlandish it seemed compared to the normal stuff they'd worn on Earth\u2014even though Nova kept reminding her the other witch recruits and older classmen were wearing it, too.\n\nNova was going to try and convince her to wear it tomorrow anyway, because honestly, it was great that Zephyr had something she really seemed to want to do, and the other girl had seemed a lot happier this past week than she'd ever been, even with how busy they'd been all week. It was nice to see.\n\nThe day had been great overall, and once the two made their way into their room and set their bags down, Zephyr declared she was going to take a long bath before heading to bed even as Nova decided to go up to the caves to check in with Korgad and the younglets.\n\nThe climb took a while, though it was starting to seem like less of a hike now that she took it nearly every day. It wasn't long before she reached the caves, heading in and making her way to the alcove where Korgad lived with the younglets.\n\nBy now, everyone was used to her, and she didn't usually get noticed much when she came down here, but tonight, she became aware as she walked that most of the dragons were staring at her, a few of them whispering to each other.\n\nNow suspicious, Nova got to the alcove and frowned, absently petting the younglets as they rushed over to her, the two having to crouch onto the floor now to let her pet them better, both chattering and jabbering about their day.\n\n\"Yeah, hi guys, good to see you, too,\" Nova told them, smiling at their antics and feeling a rush of fondness before turning to Korgad. \"Did something happen?\" she asked him. \"Why was everyone staring at me out there?\"\n\n\"They found who the twins' egg belonged to,\" Korgad told her bluntly, his eyes narrowed.\n\nNova's heart froze. \"What?\"\n\nThe old dragon nodded. \"The mother has learned where they are, and word is, she's flying in tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No!\" Nova frowned, a new feeling rising up in her as she put her hands protectively on the twins' heads. \"No, it's been a week\u2014she can't show up after a week and take them back!\"\n\n\"Relax, girl, no one said anything about her taking them back.\" Korgad huffed. \"Of course, she might, but it's not a guarantee.\"\n\n\"She can't!\" Nova exclaimed. \"What\u2026where would she take them? Where does she live?! Who even is she?!\"\n\n\"Someone who does not brook disappointment,\" Korgad told her. \"And who doesn't take no for an answer. You've been studying your history, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Nova frowned, gritting her teeth at his way of talking in riddles.\n\n\"Perhaps you might know the dragon mother, then.\" Korgad scoffed a bit, turning away and lying back down, closing his eyes as if this was another casual conversation instead of involving a possibility of losing the twins. \"She appears in many stories; she's more famous than I am.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Nova asked. \"Who is she, Korgad?!\"\n\nKorgad let out a rumbling sort of sigh.\n\n\"Brioni.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Brioni",
                "text": "Nova had never been more anxious to leave a class in her life.\n\nAll day long, she'd been unable to focus, her mind on nothing but the younglets. She had read about Brioni, one of the most famous of all dragons. A formidable fighter, bigger than nearly any dragon that had come before her, who had taken down monsters galore and fought in nearly every important battle in the last six hundred years. And now this dragon was coming here, might already be here, staking a claim to the twins, and Nova was stuck in class, hiking up the mountain, reciting ancient legends, and practicing the steps of helping a dragon on and off with their armor and saddle.\n\nFinally, it was over, and Nova and Zephyr hurried to the gallery to grab something quick to eat, along with an extra treat for the dragons\u2014as they tended to do when they could. Especially now, if it might be one of the last times they could see them.\n\nNova had a surprisingly hard lump in her throat as the two girls hurried up to the dragon caves in silence, skipping the Monday magic class with a thick sort of tension settling over them like early morning fog.\n\nFinally, they reached the cave, heading inside and seeing most of the hundred or so dragons crowding around their alcove. The two girls hurried over, carefully ducking through the horde of dragons until they reached their alcove, where Korgad was waiting outside. He seemed agitated, his tail sweeping side to side while he pawed at the ground, narrowing his eyes as he noticed the girls and nodding for them to approach.\n\nNova and Zephyr obeyed, Nova biting her lip since she could now see into the alcove and make out a huge figure of a dragon\u2014indeed, the biggest one she'd ever seen\u2014lounging in the alcove and taking up nearly the entire space while Hake and Rune were clamoring over each other, chattering away to her.\n\nThey seemed happy.\n\nNova tried to swallow the lump in her throat, knowing it wasn't fair for her to be upset about this. The younglets had the right to know their mother, and she couldn't stop them. But it wasn't fair\u2026Nova had been the one taking care of them. Nova and Korgad and Zephyr. They'd been the ones teaching them and feeding them, watching them grow.\n\nKorgad lowered his head more towards Nova, nudging her back a little with his nose in a comforting sort of way, and Nova let out a breath, unable to help but feel glad the old dragon was there, even in this awful situation.\n\n\"Nova!\" Hake noticed her first, perking up and turning away from Brioni with Rune following suit, both younglets darting to the mouth of the alcove and over to the girls, Hake pushing his head under Nova's hands while Rune did the same with Zephyr. \"Nova, Nova! This is our mother!\"\n\nNova let out a deep breath, making herself smile for the young dragon as she petted his head. \"Yeah, I heard,\" she said, trying to sound happier than she felt. \"Congratulations.\"\n\n\"She's very nice,\" Rune informed them seriously, her eyes wide.\n\n\"So, you are the human child who found my egg,\" the large dragon said, tilting her head a bit towards Nova. Even out here next to Korgad, five or six feet away from the alcove in which Brioni lounged, Nova felt uneasy and tense\u2026and the other dragons crowding around and watching the exchange with bated breath and whispers weren't helping, either. \"I owe you my thanks, then, Daughter of Ayo.\"\n\n\"Er\u2026it's fine.\" Nova cleared her throat, looking the large dragon over and noting that her copper-green scales and amber eyes were the same as those of many of the other dragons, the only noticeable difference being her enormous size. \"My name's Nova, and I\u2026I'm happy I could, um, help.\"\n\n\"Treat!\" Hake gasped, jumping up excitedly and sniffing the air as he pushed at Nova, who almost fell over with his weight. \"You brought me a treat!\"\n\n\"Ack! Don't push, Hake!\" Nova steadied herself against Korgad, having to laugh at the younglet's actions. \"Get down, come on! Yes, I brought you a treat.\" She reached into her pocket, pulling out the bit of steak she'd wrapped from dinner and tearing the wrapping off, then holding it out to Hake, who gobbled it up at once, and pulling another piece out, handing it to Zephyr to feed to Rune.\n\n\"Wait!\" Brioni commanded, leaning her large head forward and sniffing at them, Nova feeling a little startled by the size of this new dragon's head alone. \"I would prefer,\" the dragon said in a slow, drawling sort of tone, \"you not fatten up the girl as you've already done the boy.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova blinked in surprise, a sudden swell of indignation coming over her. \"What are you talking about? It's a little piece of steak\u2014they're done with it in one bite!\"\n\n\"How is the girl to inherit my legacy?\" Brioni asked. \"How is she to learn to hunt if she has gristle fed to her by hand? You may give her piece to the boy; he is too far gone as it is.\"\n\n\"What?!\" Nova repeated, now feeling angry as Hake lowered his head a bit beside her, swooping his tail to the side and looking up at his mother with wide eyes, Rune dropping her own mouth, glancing between Brioni and Hake in shock. \"Too far gone?!\"\n\n\"What does that mean?!\" Zephyr demanded, looking angry herself as she moved slightly more in front of Rune now, the smaller dragon looking between Brioni and Hake in wide-eyed anxiety.\n\n\"Precisely that,\" Brioni told her. \"As twins, there is not enough between them to make two dragons of note and nobility. Only one. In such cases as these, it is necessary to choose which hatchling you wish to carry on your name, and I choose the girl. Rune, as she has been named. She is small for her age, but that can be remedied with good hunting, and I'd rather start with my hatchling too small than too big in the wrong places.\"\n\n\"Such as the head, perhaps,\" Korgad huffed. \"The boy is fine. I've been teaching them to spar each other, and he'll trim up once they get old enough to play against the rest of us.\"\n\n\"He shan't, long as he's being fed his treats,\" Brioni responded haughtily. \"But it is of no matter to me. You may do what you like with him. I have chosen to mother Rune.\"\n\nNova felt her anger change to rage at this cold statement, a wave of shock coming over her\u2026that Brioni would dare to disown him like that, right in front of him, right in front of everyone, and declare that his sister was the only one worth keeping! Did she have any idea what that felt like?! Did she even care? So what if they were twins? So what if Hake was, apparently, a little on the chubbier side? He was only a week old! To have your mother decide you weren't worth keeping, it\u2026it was just\u2026.\n\nIt hurt.\n\nThe younglets were both acting agitated now, Rune whimpering and pawing at the ground, shifting her weight from side to side while Hake ducked his head low, shaking it and groaning audibly as he backed towards Nova. She clenched her fists, sputtering a little because she was unable to form her thoughts into words, but fully intending to yell them at Brioni the second she managed to do so. And then she stopped when she suddenly felt a new pang of hurt and confusion, almost like a delayed sort of echo of emotion, tugging at the back of her mind while Hake tugged at the sleeve of her new tunic.\n\nNova\u2026\n\nNova went cold, turning to Hake in shock and staring down at him, her mouth dropping open. Had\u2026had she just felt Hake's emotions? Was that his voice she'd just heard in her head? Had she and Hake linked?! She let out a slow, deep breath, running her free hand through her hair and swallowing. She had time to think about this later. She could ask Korgad about it then, and what it felt like to link; she could describe what had happened and Korgad would tell her if she was right, but for now, she had more important things to do. Hake was clearly upset, and Rune seemed to be, as well, the little dragon burying her head in Zephyr's cloak.\n\nAnd it was up to Nova to care for them now.\n\nShe gently pulled her sleeve free from Hake's mouth, resting her hand on his head instead and making herself smile at the poor kid as he looked back up at her with his large, bewildered, hurt-filled eyes. \"It's okay,\" she told him quietly, kneeling a little to be closer to his head since he was crouched so low to the ground, despite his being much taller than her now. \"I chose you.\"\n\nA new sense came echoing into her head now, and it was a rush of relief, gratitude, and love in addition to the still-stinging pang of hurt, so that Nova shuddered a bit at the feeling, knowing now for sure that she was picking up on Hake's emotions, without a doubt. Was this a link? How could they possibly have linked? She'd thought the dragons weren't supposed to link until the trials\u2026 but clearly, Hake was still too little to be able to control it, especially when upset about Brioni. Which was fine with Nova, she realized, because she'd decided to become a dragon rider anyway, and she'd rather she be the one to link with Hake than to have someone like Teira or Fayta do it. But it was still troubling, that it had happened this early\u2026wasn't it? Trials weren't for another two months!\n\nKorgad was huffing at Brioni now\u2014he and the other dragons, along with Zephyr, fortunately not seeming to have noticed Nova's reactions. Hopefully, no one would find out about this unexpected link until she'd had more of a chance to come to grips with it. Korgad growled, drawing her notice. \"I'm beginning to see how you could have gone a full week before noticing your egg was gone,\" he accused the other dragon, starting to look even more agitated, huffing out his breaths and sort of rocking a bit on his claws as he bristled. \"Your tales of savagery in the hunt failed to convey your heartlessness in the nest.\"\n\n\"Spare me your poetics, Hyn Dwoan Bah't Lamat Va,\" Brioni growled, getting up onto all fours and bristling in anger herself.\n\nWhoa, wait, what had she said? That sounded like spellcasting, but what did that mean?\n\nKorgad clearly understood it, letting out a bit of a roar and rearing on his hind legs while the other dragons nearby all started pawing the dirt and stamping their claws, huffing in excitement at what seemed to be shaping into a fight.\n\n\"Stop it!\" Nova yelled to Korgad, startled by the roar coming from so close, as she, Zephyr, and the younglets were still standing next to him and were therefore in the line of fire. She grabbed onto one of Hake's small horns, starting to try and pull him away from the alcove, putting several feet of distance between them. \"Zeph, get Rune!\"\n\n\"Come on, Rune!\" Zephyr gasped, already having started to try and lead the smaller dragon away herself, both of the two younglets casting frightened glances up at Korgad and Brioni and letting out startled squeals as they rushed away from the alcove alongside the girls.\n\nBrioni reacted to Korgad's manners in kind, letting out a loud hiss of her own as she slinked out of the alcove, drawing up to her full height and spreading her wings\u2014and, oh gosh, she was huge! The other dragons were all noticeably bigger than Korgad, but this dragon outmatched them all at nearly twice Korgad's size, towering over him like a lion towering over its prey.\n\n\"Korgad!\" Nova yelled, a surge of panic coming over her at the sheer mass of this beast.\n\n\"No!\" Hake squealed, as well, while Rune started bleating frantically, moving up behind Zephyr and shoving her along with the brunt of her horns.\n\nThe other dragons were all roaring now, most of them spreading their wings and jumping up against the walls or flying overhead to get a better look, the energy in the room spiking at the noise and the flurry of movement. Meanwhile, Nova couldn't make herself move anymore, couldn't drag her eyes away from Korgad as he stood his ground, raising his own wings and glaring up at Brioni defiantly, still on his hind legs as if trying to make himself appear bigger than he really was, beating his wings a couple of times to add to the effect and nearly knocking the girls and younglets over with the force of the wind being sent their way.\n\n\"You challenge me?\" Brioni thundered.\n\n\"Korgad, stop!\" Nova screamed, finding her voice and quelling her panic as she pushed past Hake\u2014the younglet having started trying to push her farther back himself\u2014and ran out between Korgad and Brioni. \"Stop it, you'll get hurt!\"\n\n\"Nova!\" Zephyr exclaimed, turning pale white and looking about ready to faint. \"What are you doing?! Get out of there!\"\n\n\"No!\" Nova called back, though, oh gosh, Korgad looked wild right now\u2026wild and furious and monstrous\u2026and she knew if she turned around, Brioni would look even worse. Nova had been warned in dragon training to never ever get between two fighting dragons, that it was practically suicide, but she had to stop Korgad. If he fought against Brioni, he could be killed!\n\nThe scarred old dragon let out another roar over her head, the sound shaking Nova to her core and causing her to go cold, but then he paused, looking down at her and baring his teeth as he let out a few panting, hot breaths, blinking at her and then slowly lowering his wings.\n\n\"Foolish girl,\" he growled. \"Get out of the way.\"\n\n\"No,\" Nova said again, though barely managing to get the word out, breathing heavily herself as her heart started beating again, this time going too fast. \"You have to stop, Korgad,\" she got out. \"Don't challenge her! She's too strong\u2026you h-have to stop!\"\n\n\"Rngh!\" Korgad growled, throwing his head back and pawing at the ground, but then lowering his head back down to Nova's level, looking at her full-on with his large, flashing eyes as he folded his wings back against his back and let out a deep breath.\n\n\"O-okay.\" Nova let out a relieved breath, absently reaching out and putting her hand to his forehead, resting it between his eyes for a moment and then shakily moving back to stand by Hake, who was staring at her with blatant awe, an echo of the emotion flickering in the back of Nova's mind when she got closer. Oh man, this was all moving so fast.\n\n\"Nova,\" Zephyr said breathlessly, still looking pale and shaken as she and Rune hurried over to them, Zephyr grabbing Nova's arm tightly. \"Don't ever do that again! I thought you were going to be killed!\"\n\n\"Yeah, right,\" Nova got out, glancing over her shoulder at Brioni now that she had enough courage to do so, seeing the humungous dragon staring down at her with her head tilted, her own vast wings tucked in again. \"I just\u2026needed him to stop.\"\n\n\"Daughter of Ayo,\" Brioni said, her voice still loud and deep. \"Have you not been warned to avoid standing between clashing dragons?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I've been told that, yes.\" Nova swallowed, still feeling that cold sort of wariness as she addressed the dragon.\n\n\"And you stood between me and my prey anyway?\" Brioni narrowed her eyes.\n\nHer prey? So, she had been in the mode of a hunter\u2026Nova let out a breath, glancing at Korgad and noting, once again, the large scar running down his face, now wondering if he'd gotten it from another dragon. He seemed to have known Brioni, and she definitely knew him. What if he'd gotten it from her? And yet, he'd been challenging her anyway. He was too reckless. Nova gritted her teeth, turning back to Brioni and nodding in response to her question. \"And I'll do it again,\" she said defiantly, clenching her fists and trying to make herself stop trembling, frowning to show she was serious, \"if you try to hurt any of my friends.\"\n\n\"Nova\u2026\" Hake said quietly, pressing his head against her back as a feeling of gratitude and respect echoed in her head along with, once again, love.\n\n\"You are a fool of a child,\" Korgad said quietly, though he was also giving her a new sort of look, seeming thoughtful and bowing his head slightly. \"But that was very brave.\"\n\n\"Brave, indeed,\" Brioni announced, lowering herself to walk on all fours as she passed by them, moving a few steps towards the exit of the main caves and turning her head to look back at Nova over her shoulder. \"The blood of your parents flows through your veins.\"\n\nNova let out a breath, not having expected that and feeling a strange new feeling go through her. It was, she thought, a sense of\u2026pride? Honor? She wasn't sure. It was making her feel oddly somber, like Brioni hadn't merely complimented her as much as she'd challenged her. Made it clear she expected something from her, it seemed.\n\n\"I have made my decision,\" Brioni announced, turning her back on them once more. \"The younglets will stay here, both of them, in the charge of the dragon Korgad and the lady Nova.\"\n\nThey could stay? Oh, thank heavens! Nova let out a breath of relief as Zephyr did the same, the girls instinctively hugging each other after the tense situation and the good news while the younglets both let out delighted squeals, Rune rushing forward to push her head against Zephyr while Hake did the same to Nova, the whole group of them falling over as the other dragons in the caves all let out whinnies of excitement themselves.\n\n\"Ack! Wait, agh, get off!\" Nova laughed, struggling to get back to her feet while the younglets hurriedly backed away, starting to squeal out their apologies and proclaim their happiness at being allowed to stay. \"I know, I know, I'm excited, too!\" she promised them, pressing her hand against Hake's forehead and letting out a deep sigh. She suddenly felt exhausted, rubbing her eyes and looking around at all of the dragons\u2014who were starting to slink away themselves\u2014and noticing that Brioni had continued to leave while they were talking and was halfway out of the caverns already, without saying anything to the younglets. Well\u2026well, who needed her, anyway? They had each other.\n\nShe couldn't help but feel bad for the little ones, though. Especially Hake. To have been rejected like that, right to his face, by his own mother.\n\nA nagging sort of fear twinged at the back of Nova's head, that maybe her own journey wouldn't end much differently. That she'd find her mother, at long last, only to have Seren decide she wasn't worth keeping around.\n\nShe shook her head, trying to push the thought away and swallowing, patting Hake's head one last time before turning to Zephyr. \"I'm exhausted.\"\n\n\"Same,\" Zephyr agreed with a nod, rubbing at her eyes. \"I'm glad everything worked out, though\u2026I was afraid we were going to lose them.\"\n\n\"You won't have to worry about that anymore,\" Korgad said with a deep, rumbling sigh, going back into the alcove and lying down, seeming small inside it now that Nova had seen Brioni lounging there earlier. \"But it's late. Go along to your bedchamber, girls. Get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Yeah, okay,\" Zephyr agreed, starting to move towards the entrance herself.\n\n\"Night, Korgad.\" Nova waved. \"Night, kids.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Nova!\" Rune called as she and Hake crawled into the alcove, as well, lying down next to Korgad. \"Goodnight, Zephyr!\"\n\n\"Goodnight!\" Hake called.\n\nNova smiled, a sense of peace coming over her at the knowledge that they would be there in the morning. She didn't know what she would have done if they'd been taken away.\n\nEspecially now, if she'd forged a true link."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Dangerous Game",
                "text": "Nova and Zephyr were studying in the great library, as they did every morning, but today Nova's mind was far from the books and scrolls she was pretending to read. All she could think about was Hake and everything that had happened the day before. She stared blankly down at the words on the page of her history book, not taking any of them in and unable to focus on anything besides the fact that Hake was having fun right now, and even though she didn't know why, she knew it was happening. Because she could feel it in the back of her mind.\n\nShe wasn't supposed to have linked until the trials. What should she do?\n\nShe should definitely drop out of witch training. But how could she do that without making everyone suspicious, especially Zephyr? Should she tell Zephyr about the link?\n\nOf course, she should tell Zephyr about the link, she told herself. She and Zephyr tried to tell each other everything, and this was way too important to hide.\n\nShe had to tell Korgad, too, to get his advice on whether to tell Dafyd or the Council. The last thing she wanted was for Hake to get into trouble if dragons weren't supposed to link until the trials. She'd have to try and get the chance to talk to Korgad away from the younglets and the other dragons, though. She didn't want anyone knowing about this until she knew for sure what she wanted. Because, if she linked with Hake, she would have to stay here at Stonehaven for the two years of full-time training, and then the extra two years of service to pay off the debt since Hake would need the training, too. And even though she'd agreed to stay for the trials and give this whole thing a shot, she'd still sort of been relying on the option of backing out later on if she wanted to. She liked having an out, a backup plan for if things went wrong. Korgad was her out, as far as she was concerned; he was experienced enough to know where to go and what to do if Stonehaven didn't work out, and he'd be able to teach her enough of the basics to manage even if she didn't have the specialized training the other recruits would get.\n\nBut Hake? Hake had been having trouble saying everyone's names a week ago, and even though dragons apparently grew and matured much faster than humans, he still needed to be taught how to do things like spar and fly and hunt for himself, not to mention how to fight in a war and do link-jumps and whatever else they weren't supposed to be taught until after the trials.\n\nLinking with Hake made things more\u2026permanent, and Nova didn't like that one bit.\n\n\"Nova!\"\n\nZephyr's call broke through Nova's thoughts and she jumped up quickly, her mind immediately on alert as she glanced around the quiet library for any sign of trouble. But as Zephyr hurried over to her, Nova took in her friend's smile and realized that Zephyr wasn't in danger. She was just excited.\n\nIt was a little embarrassing that her first reaction to hearing her name was to think they were being attacked or something. Maybe she was still a bit on edge from the fight that had almost started the day before?\n\n\"Ahem, uh, yeah, Zeph? What is it?\" she asked, trying to sound more casual than she felt as she closed the book she'd been reading and gave Zephyr her full attention.\n\nAlmost her full attention. Because Hake had apparently picked up on her moment of panic and was now worried about her. Urgh\u2026Nova tried to convey, somehow, that she was okay and he didn't need to worry, but she wasn't sure if she was doing it right. This was all so complicated.\n\n\"Come here!\" Zephyr was saying excitedly, not seeming to notice Nova's tension as she took Nova's hand, starting to pull her down the aisle. \"Come look at this\u2014it's seriously amazing!\"\n\nThe other girl led Nova a few aisles away and then stopped, releasing Nova's hand and looking over the shelves for a moment before spotting whatever she was looking for, pulling a book off the shelf, and handing it to Nova. \"Open it,\" Zephyr commanded with an expectant grin.\n\n\"Uh, okay, weirdo,\" Nova chuckled, feeling curious as she took the book and tried to open it.\n\nTried to. Because it wouldn't budge. \"What the\u2014?\" Nova frowned, looking the book over and expecting to see a latch or something, but there was nothing holding it shut. She tried to pry the cover open again, but it was stuck tight. \"Oh, I get it,\" she laughed. \"It's a gag book or a decoration, right? It's a block of wood or something, with a book cover glued on.\"\n\nZephyr shook her head, her grin widening. \"Nope, it's magic. I can't open it either\u2014look!\" She grabbed the book back, grunting a bit as she tried to pry the cover off, and then laughed, putting the book back on the shelf. \"All week long, we've been reading the history books the mages give us,\" she said. \"But I was trying to look through some of these other shelves here to see if they had anything more helpful, and it turns out almost all of these books are magical! They only open for people who are smart enough to handle what's inside!\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova stared. \"That's insane!\"\n\n\"Right?\" Zephyr laughed. \"I couldn't believe it! I was talking to Mage-Lessar Yvana\u2014'Lessar' is what they call apprentice mages\u2014and she said it's the same for spellbooks and earthian recipes and secret records and all sorts of fascinating things! Some books even bite you if you try to open them before you're ready!\"\n\nNova smiled. \"That's really cool, Zeph.\"\n\n\"Yeah, come on, come check this out!\" Zephyr said excitedly, grabbing Nova's hand once more and leading her over to the spiral staircases. \"Yvana says there are some books so old and important that they haven't been opened in centuries! None of the mages here have enough knowledge to handle what's inside, so no one knows what's written in them!\"\n\nZephyr led Nova up to the top floor, running over to the back and stopping at a row of seven podiums, each one containing an ancient-looking, dust-covered, leather-bound book, with the podium in the center raised higher than the others, made of grander wood, and holding the biggest and oldest-looking book.\n\n\"What are these?\" Nova asked, staring at them.\n\n\"These are the, um, the 'lecterns containing the seven tomes of enlightenment,'\" Zephyr said with a chuckle, circling the center stand and looking it over eagerly. \"This one here? It's called 'Merlin's texts.' Merlin's texts! They say he was a real person, and that he wrote this book before Ragond was even created! Yvana says no one has ever been able to read it; it's a complete mystery, and it's the goal of every mage to seek as much knowledge and wisdom as they can so that they might be the first person to open the book and read Merlin's secrets. Isn't that amazing?!\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nova agreed, leaning forward to look at the book herself and feeling a tingling, thrilling sort of urge to try opening it, even though she knew that she wouldn't be able to do it if she couldn't even open the random book on the shelf downstairs. \"Zeph, do you know what this means?\" She straightened back up, looking around at the shelves. \"Maybe this place does have something that'll help me find my mother, and I just have to be able to open the right book.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Zephyr nodded. \"Yvana says some people kept journals here in the library, where they would write about their travels and the things they learned in between their quests. Nova, what if your mother has a journal hidden around here somewhere? She might have written about what was happening when she disappeared\u2026she might even have written down where she was going next!\"\n\nNova felt another thrill go through her, this one bringing along with it a sense of urgency and hope. \"We have to find it,\" she said at once, looking around the aisles and running her hand through her hair. \"Zephyr, you're a genius! We have to find it\u2014this is why Korgad brought us here!\"\n\n\"Well, maybe,\" Zephyr said, putting a hand on Nova's shoulder. \"I asked about Seren, and Yvana said she doesn't know if she kept a journal here or not, but she'll ask around to the other mages and tell me what she finds out. Even if Seren didn't, though, there still might be information here we could find.\" She glanced back over to the seven lecterns, biting back another grin. \"We just have to open the right book.\"\n\n\"Zephyr, this is amazing,\" Nova told her friend, acting on a whim and pulling Zephyr into a quick hug. \"I'm so glad you're here with me! I don't think I'd make it out here on my own.\"\n\n\"Well, sure you would!\" Zephyr laughed, hugging Nova back before pulling away. \"You're strong, Nova, and you're smart\u2026even if you try to hide it 'cause you don't want to be a nerd. You'd be fine without me. I'm the one who needs you, not the other way around.\"\n\n\"Don't talk like that, Zeph, jeez,\" Nova chuckled, shaking her head. \"We need each other, so it's not a matter of who needs who more.\"\n\n\"Oh alright.\" Zephyr gave in with a bit of a blush, still looking happy and pleased with herself at her discovery as she pushed her glasses back up her nose, and then, glancing at one of the windows, she sobered a bit and frowned. \"The sun's getting higher,\" she sighed. \"We'd better head to breakfast.\"\n\n\"I don't want to go to classes now,\" Nova complained as they made their way back towards the stairs. \"I want to stay here and keep looking for information on my mother.\"\n\n\"Hey, I mean, you never know\u2026maybe we'll learn something with Mage-Lessar Alana,\" Zephyr offered, \"that'll be the exact right thing we need to know to open the right book later.\"\n\n\"Pft, I doubt that,\" Nova scoffed. \"Lately, it's all just been 'the Great Mage this' and 'the Council of Five that.' If learning the creation myth of Ragond and when Tila Newan was elected to the Council was all we needed to find my mother, somebody would have done it by now.\"\n\n\"You know, the Great Mage might not be a myth,\" Zephyr noted as they left the library and started crossing the portico back towards the student building. \"Most people think he is, but Yvana says some of the older mages think he was a real person. But yeah, no, memorizing the Council members' election dates is kind of pointless.\"\n\nNova was about to agree but was distracted as she felt a surge of annoyance from Hake in the back of her mind. What had happened now? Why was he annoyed? Was Korgad teasing him about something again?\n\n\"Nova?\" Zephyr blinked, pausing by the door to the student buildings and giving her a careful look. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\" Nova turned to her, realizing she must have been frowning. \"Oh\u2026um\u2014\" She looked around, seeing the usual dozen or so dragons lounging around the portico even though most of the humans seemed to be absent, likely already at breakfast. \"Um, I\u2026have something to tell you,\" she told Zephyr, taking the other girl's hand and leading her away from the door, towards the back of the portico where it connected with the mountain cliffs and was shaded under the bridge high above them that connected the top floor of the library to the third floor of the student building.\n\n\"What happened?\" Zephyr asked at once, looking serious and lowering her voice to a whisper.\n\n\"I\u2026think I might have\u2026forged a link,\" Nova admitted quietly. \"With Hake. Last night.\n\n\"What?!\" Zephyr gasped. \"Nova, you can't be serious!\"\n\n\"No, I am,\" Nova insisted, swallowing as Zephyr's reaction brought home how serious this was. \"I think he did it by accident\u2026it was when Brioni was here yesterday. I don't know what to do about it. I'm afraid I might get him in trouble if I tell someone he linked with me before the trials. I\u2026asked him not to mention it to Korgad or Rune. He didn't like to keep secrets, but I told him it's important.\"\n\n\"You\u2014what do you mean, you asked him?\" Zephyr blinked. \"Did you go back to the caves after I went to bed?\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026no.\" Nova bit her lip. \"I asked him\u2026through telepathy.\"\n\n\"Telepathy?!\" Zephyr seemed to freeze, finally putting her hand to her head as she stared at Nova in shock. \"Oh my gosh! This is a big deal. Does Korgad know?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I think I'm gonna try to tell him, if I ever get a moment alone with him again. It's hard since he's always with the younglets unless he manages to come with me on a training exercise\u2014and then we're always around Dafyd and Lir and the other recruits.\"\n\n\"No, yeah, that makes sense,\" Zephyr agreed. \"Wow\u2026what's it like?\"\n\nWhat was it like? It was like nothing Nova had ever experienced before. This closeness, this\u2026connection, always being aware of his feelings, always knowing he was there\u2026sharing his frustration and annoyance without any idea what had bothered him, picking up on his happiness and playful nature, but never knowing what had set it off. It was like there was another person sharing her head, but at the same time, not really\u2026more like they were\u2026on the phone, all the time? No, that wasn't right, either. \"Like\u2026I can't even describe it,\" Nova told her. \"I just feel what he's feeling, and I'm pretty sure he can feel what I feel, too. It's weird.\"\n\n\"Well, you can't come to witch class with me anymore, that's for sure,\" Zephyr said, her eyes widening. \"If they found out about the link while you were trying to light candles or something, you could be executed!\"\n\n\"Yeah, I'm sorry to ditch you,\" Nova told her. \"I know it's the only class we can take together.\"\n\n\"No, it's okay.\" Zephyr held her hands up in surrender. \"This is more important than having a class together. Gosh\u2026I can't believe you might be linked! And with Hake, too! He's so young.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but if it's true, I'm glad he's linked with me and not anyone else, at least,\" Nova sighed. \"I would have hated it if he'd ended up with some of the other Caelum students.\"\n\n\"Like that Fayta girl,\" Zephyr said, frowning. \"Or her friend, whatever her name is.\"\n\n\"Teira.\" Nova rolled her eyes. \"Yeah, this is for the best. It does complicate things, though. I think, I'm gonna hide it, at least until I've talked to Korgad about it. I don't want to get him in trouble.\"\n\n\"It was a mistake, you said?\" Zephyr asked. \"He linked with you by accident?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nova admitted. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026I just, don't want to risk having it happen to me.\" Zephyr frowned. \"I don't want to be a dragon rider\u2026I'm sticking with the training because, well, I don't want to fail on purpose. But it's really hard, and I don't like flying with those other dragons we've been training with. And, I think I could be really good at spellcasting.\" She smiled a little. \"I was this close to lighting a candle on Friday\u2014I could almost feel the fire coming to me. I want to see that through; it's exciting, and magical\u2026and I don't want to risk accidentally linking with Rune the way you linked with Hake. But I don't want to stop coming to see them entirely, either. They'd get upset, right? They wouldn't even understand why I couldn't come.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\" Nova frowned. \"I mean, as long as you're careful, it's probably fine. You know Rune. I think she'd be able to control herself a bit better than Hake does. Especially as long as there's not another fight like yesterday.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Zephyr agreed. \"Well\u2026okay. You're right, it'll be fine. We can talk to Korgad about it later and see what he says, too. Meanwhile, we'll be careful.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Nova nodded, glancing towards the student building. \"Well\u2026guess we'd better get going, then. Before all the breakfast is gone, huh?\"\n\nZephyr nodded, though she still seemed thoughtful and serious, and the two began to head inside.\n\nNow Nova couldn't shake the feeling, however, that they were playing a dangerous game. She didn't want to separate Zephyr from the younglets, but still\u2026If something did happen, Zephyr could be in danger, and that was the last thing Nova wanted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Even When You're Worlds Apart",
                "text": "Nova couldn't believe how quickly time passed. As she sat astride Korgad's back, grasping the saddle and taking in the quiet evening, with the wind blowing through her hair while Korgad glided along the plains towards Mount Drells, her thoughts kept circling over everything that had already happened over the past nine weeks since Brioni's visit\u2014as well as everything that hadn't happened. She was now certain that she and Hake were fully linked, though maybe they could have avoided it if she'd talked to Korgad right away, but she still hadn't told the older dragon about it. And the longer she put it off, the harder it got to broach the subject.\n\nShe wasn't entirely sure why she hesitated to tell him. It had seemed so important when it had happened, but with how busy she'd been with probacio training and with how much care the younglets had needed, she just hadn't had a moment to talk to Korgad alone at first, and as the days had passed, she'd noticed more and more that Korgad seemed\u2026different. Ever since Brioni had visited, Korgad had been almost bitter. Distant. Even cold. She didn't understand it or know why he'd been acting this way, but it had made her start to dread the oncoming conversation. She just didn't want him to yell at her, and with the way he'd been acting lately, that seemed the most likely result.\n\nSo\u2026she hadn't told him yet. She'd warned Hake to keep it a secret, too, explaining that they weren't supposed to be linked yet and that they had to pretend it hadn't happened. Which had been hard for the young dragon to understand, but he'd trusted her on it and promised not to mention anything about feeling Nova's emotions or\u2014and this had begun to happen recently\u2014hearing her thoughts.\n\nShe couldn't put it off any longer, though, which was why she'd asked Korgad to come flying with her tonight. The younglets were more than big enough to be left alone now\u2014in fact, after ten weeks of growing, they had nearly reached Korgad's size, Hake standing to about Korgad's shoulder while Rune stood to Hake's. They'd begun training to spar with Korgad and the other dragons, too, and he'd taken them out to hunt for their own food these past few weeks.\n\nAt the moment, they were approaching Drells, Korgad soaring low over a lake at the base of the mountain with the moon and stars glimmering in the water as they passed. He landed on the far bank and Nova dismounted, looking out over the horizon to see Stonehaven in the distance, an odd feeling of disconnect coming over her. How did it feel like she'd been there forever? Like it was strange to be even this far away?\n\nThe distance made it easier to see the light, however\u2014the windows of the school glowing brightly, lighting the towers and illuminating the black shadows of dragons flitting around near the portico, otherwise invisible in the dark of night. It still took Nova's breath away sometimes, even though, after ten weeks, she'd gotten much more used to things.\n\n\"I don't think I've ever been out here at night,\" she noted. \"It sure is pretty.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Korgad hummed absently, stretching out his wings and shaking his head a little, not seeming to have really heard her.\n\nHe barely spoke to her these days. Nova sighed, sitting down on the bank and looking out over the lake with a frown. She didn't understand Korgad's problem. Was he upset because of how little time she'd spent with him lately? That wasn't her fault; he was the one who wanted her to become a rider, and the probacio training she was going through to prepare for the trials was incredibly tough, taking up almost all her time.\n\nSo many students had been cut. There were only around eighty left among all three groups combined, everyone else having been expelled from the program. Most of these cut riders had left the school completely, vowing to try again next year, though a few of them had stayed on to keep working as a witch.\n\nZephyr was one of those students, of course.\n\nShe'd been disappointed in herself upon being cut, obviously. Zephyr wasn't the kind of girl to give up on schoolwork of any kind, and she hated failing a class. But\u2026she'd seemed much happier ever since she'd been cut from dragon riding training, as she was now free to spend more time in the library, researching Ragond and devoting her time to witchcraft. Her class schedule, now that she'd fully switched to witchcraft, consisted primarily of reading and note-taking, and sitting in on the classes of full-time students. Apparently, it was against the rules for probacio witches to actually try to perform magic outside of their three days of classes in their preferred branch, but they were given beginner-level spells or recipes to learn in the meantime, and\u2014in the case of aerial magic, at least\u2014a syllabus of runes that, according to Zephyr, built the ancient language in which spells were recited. You could learn the basic chants by ear if you had a teacher, she said, but in order to truly do well, you had to be able to read and understand the language. And by watching the older students practice their own spells, she was able to hear the melody for different elements of spellcasting, such as the notes that went along with specific words, even if the combinations changed spell by spell.\n\nZephyr also had more time to go down and visit the younglets during the day when Nova was going through recruitment training, which seemed to please both the younglets and Zephyr. It still made Nova nervous, but nothing had happened so far, so\u2026it seemed to be fine.\n\nProbacio training was almost over, though. The Council had announced the day of the trials, which would start on Thursday and take place over the course of three days, the final day set for Saturday, the day of the full moon.\n\nNova did not feel ready. She'd barely been managing to keep up with the others\u2014always scraping up just enough merits to keep from being expelled, but only barely. No matter how much progress she made, she was always right on the edge of being cut, as the threshold for making it rose by five merits every week. She wasn't getting dizzy or nearly passing out during physical training anymore, and she now knew the basics of how to use many melee weapons, having done surprisingly well with archery and even managing to shoot a bullseye once. She'd grown used to flying, too, and she knew the ins and outs of dragon safety and riding equipment, so her training was going fine. And with Zephyr's help, she was finally starting to feel like she at least knew what was going on during Alana's history lectures.\n\nBut the threshold for merits this final week was fifty-five. And that was just to make it to the trials. If she had come all this way only to be cut now, well\u2026she didn't know what she would do.\n\n\"What are we going to do if I don't pass the trials?\" Nova asked, the question drawn from her unwillingly by the need to know.\n\n\"Eh?\" Korgad turned his head to her, narrowing his amber eyes. \"Do you think you're going to fail?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026I hope not.\" Nova frowned. \"But worst-case scenario, what would happen?\"\n\n\"There can't be this 'worst-case scenario,'\" Korgad said, straightening up a little and huffing angrily. \"We need access to the library; we can't have you sent away now!\"\n\n\"I know that, Korgad.\" Nova gritted her teeth. \"Which is why I'm trying to prepare for every outcome!\"\n\n\"Are you?\" Korgad huffed. \"Or are you giving up out of a fear of failure?\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova snapped. \"Of course not! I'm not giving up. What are you even talking about? You think I'd quit something this important? What's your problem?\"\n\n\"My problem is that I've got everything riding on you!\" Korgad snapped. \"And now you're suddenly talking like you're going to fail. What is it? What's got you worried? You're a fine enough flier; it can't be that. What of your studies? Have you been studying?\"\n\n\"Of course, I've been studying. Nonstop studying, ever since we came here!\"\n\n\"Have you learned anything important?\" Korgad asked, tilting his head at her. \"Has the library given you any insight on what might have happened to your mother?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nova admitted, crossing her arms. It was making her feel discouraged, too. None of the books were opening for her, and Zephyr's mage friend Yvana had said no one knew of any journal of Seren's, so if she'd kept one, it had been a secret. They were coming up on a bunch of dead ends. \"That's part of why I wanted to talk to you. I've barely been able to find anything aside from fairy tales.\"\n\n\"I told you those were the wrong books,\" Korgad said. \"Are you telling me there aren't any books on your mother besides fables?\"\n\n\"Well, how should I know?\" Nova glared. \"There's over two thousand years of history in that library, and it's not very organized. Not to mention, even if I do think I've finally found a book that'll get me somewhere, half the time it won't open for me because I'm apparently 'not ready for it' or something, so I don't know what you expect me to do!\"\n\n\"There's not a single book in there about Seren that you can open?\" Korgad scoffed. \"Brilliant. Just my luck, we got saddled with an illiterate.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Nova exclaimed, a pang of anger and hurt going through her at the jab. \"I'm not illiterate\u2026and why do you do that?! I'm trying, so hard, and you keep\u2014\" The emotion was suddenly too much, after everything that had happened over the last few days\u2014no, the last few months\u2014and her eyes welled with tears that ran hot down her face as she felt her cheeks burn in embarrassment. She couldn't believe she was crying over a stupid little thing like being made fun of by someone she hadn't known two months ago. \"Forget it,\" she muttered, turning away and waving dismissively at him as she wiped her eyes with her other hand.\n\n\"Wait,\" Korgad said, his tone soft and low now. \"Child, wait, I\u2026I'm sorry.\"\n\nNova stood with her back to him for a minute longer before she turned around, still embarrassed about the tears, but managing to get a grip and stop crying. Still, she stood apart from him in defiance as she wiped the last of the tears away and frowned at Korgad, resolving not to talk until he expanded on that apology. He couldn't talk to her like that and get off easy, no way.\n\nThe large dragon seemed to realize this, narrowing his eyes a little before letting out a long, deep sigh and then lowering his head to her and looking at her intently. \"You talk like her,\" he told her quietly. \"And you make the same faces. In appearance, you look more like your father, but the faces and words, that's what gets to me. I know I can be\u2026blunt.\"\n\n\"Cruel,\" Nova corrected him.\n\n\"Abrasive,\" Korgad compromised. \"But it's my fault, not yours. I know you're not illiterate; you're a very clever child, as far as humans go, and it was\u2026wrong\"\u2014he slitted his eyes in distaste at the word\u2014\"for me to disparage you for something that was my fault more than your own.\"\n\n\"Your fault?\" Nova frowned in confusion. \"How is it your fault books won't open for me?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I haven't told you enough of what you're looking for.\" Korgad shrugged his shoulders dismissively. \"Look, I'm trying to apologize here. The least you can do is not interrupt.\"\n\nNova rolled her eyes, but nodded, waving for him to continue.\n\n\"I know these past few months have been difficult,\" Korgad told her seriously. \"And you had to fight hard to get through them. I recognize that. You are powerful, little one. I'm sorry.\"\n\nNova swallowed, nodding once and wiping at her eyes again to get rid of the last evidence of tears. \"Thank you,\" she said quietly. \"I just\u2026wish you would talk to me.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to talk about,\" Korgad sighed, his eyes closed. \"You're not ready. You still have much to learn before I can tell you these things you want to know.\"\n\nHe made it sound like this was one of the books in the library. Like he had to stay closed off until she learned some specific, unknown lesson to unlock what he knew.\n\n\"So, you admit it,\" Nova sighed, rubbing her forehead and trying to fight back her frustration. \"You're keeping secrets.\"\n\n\"Everyone keeps secrets, child,\" Korgad told her, blinking one eye open to look at her seriously. \"Do not think you're the only one.\"\n\nWhat did that mean? Did he know about the link between her and Hake? Nova swallowed, feeling surprisingly defensive, like a little kid caught doing something they weren't supposed to do\u2026even though she had meant to tell him soon. \"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Eh, I'm sure you don't.\" Korgad sighed, closing his eye again. \"If you have nothing to tell me, I don't know why you dragged me all the way out here for a talk.\"\n\n\"Maybe I just like you,\" Nova said. \"Maybe I like talking to you. Did you ever think of that? Suspicious old lizard.\"\n\nKorgad shook his shoulders, letting out a deep, rhythmic laugh, and Nova couldn't help but laugh a bit at the reaction herself, starting to feel a bit better again. Why was it always like this, though? How come it felt like, every time she wanted to talk to Korgad, she had to fight with him first? It was frustrating, and she didn't like fighting with him.\n\n\"Why did you want to talk to me?\" Korgad asked again after he'd finished laughing, raising his head back up and eyeing her. \"Are you thinking of running?\"\n\nNova bit her lip, sobering at once. She wasn't still thinking of running\u2026she would have been, if it were just her, but it wasn't. She couldn't deny that she didn't fit in here, though. The Caelum recruits were competitive, almost cutthroat, and more likely to trip you than give you a hand. Nova didn't like any of them, and she didn't get to spend a lot of time with the other two groups because of the differences in their class schedules and how little free time they all had.\n\nBut it wasn't just her she had to think about. Zephyr was really happy here. She was doing well with her studies, consistently returning from her classes excitedly chattering about how much progress she'd made and what she'd learned, and on top of that\u2026Zephyr had friends here now. She had a place here, and she was where she wanted to be. Nova couldn't ask her to leave this behind, and she knew Zephyr would never let Nova leave on her own.\n\nOf course, even if she could ask Zephyr to come with her and leave, they still couldn't have done it. The twins might have grown big enough to be left alone for a few hours, but they were still young. Young and excitable, and they both relied so much on the girls and Korgad.\n\nShe couldn't run away now even if she did want to. \"No,\" she told Korgad. \"That's not it. I wanted to ask you\u2026what it's like to have a link.\"\n\nKorgad tilted his head the other way, blinking a little in surprise. \"That's all?\" He scoffed. \"Silly girl, you could have asked this in the caverns. A link is a connection between dragon and rider, a special bond that lets both parties draw strength from the other so that both may reach heights they could not have climbed to alone.\"\n\n\"But what does it feel like?\" Nova pressed. \"What happens to you when you link? What sort of things can you do?\"\n\n\"It feels like a link. I don't know!\" Korgad shrugged his large shoulders. \"What does it feel like to have legs? You're asking foolish questions.\"\n\n\"Korgad\u2026\"\n\nThe dragon let out a sigh, closing his eyes for a moment before turning back to her. \"One such strength you get when you forge a link with your dragon is a telepathic connection,\" he said. \"You will grow in tune with the emotions and thoughts of your partner. With time, and a strong enough connection, you might grow to feel as though you are one with your dragon partner, as if you are not two separate minds, but a single experience, two halves of a whole.\" He turned his head slightly, looking out over the cliffs and across the horizon, the moon rising into the now darkened night sky and shining in his amber eyes. \"You are constantly aware of the other,\" he said softly, now sounding more like he was talking to himself instead of Nova. \"You know where they are, what they're doing, how they feel\u2026even when you're worlds apart, you feel as though they're still with you, as though you could turn around and\u2026\" He cut himself off and turned back to Nova, letting out another deep sigh before standing slowly and spreading his wings. \"Come. It's late, and you have work to do in the morning.\"\n\nThat sounded like what had happened with her and Hake. But hearing it from Korgad made it sound sad, especially with the look he'd given her, and the way he was once again trying to dodge the question.\n\n\"And what, Korgad?\" Nova prodded, not making a move to stand.\n\n\"And they'll be there,\" Korgad finished quietly. \"Watching you.\"\n\n\"Do you still feel that, with my mother?\" Nova asked, standing and swallowing. \"Is that how you know she's alive? You can still feel her through your link?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Korgad admitted. \"And no. With Seren, I feel\u2026an emptiness.\" He shook his head a bit. \"But not a loss. I feel no emotion; I hear no thought. It is as if she is\u2026asleep. But I still feel her soul. She is alive, out there somewhere, waiting for me to find her. I am sure of it.\"\n\nNova shuddered a bit at this description. No emotion, no thoughts, just\u2026waiting. It was chilling to imagine, and even more unsettling to wonder how this could possibly have happened if even Korgad couldn't explain it.\n\n\"We'll find her,\" Nova promised, putting her hand on Korgad's shoulder and running her fingers across the smooth, hard scales. \"I'll do whatever I can to help.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Korgad said, nodding once and letting out another sigh. \"Because, without a rider, a dragon's powers are limited. Yes, we can fight with horn and claw, we can gnash our teeth and fly through walls of stone and mortar, but the true power of a dragon comes from its magic\u2014and it is only through the bond with our riders that we can access these magics and obtain our true strength. That is what link-jumping is, you know. The dragon and rider each draw on the other's strength of soul, share a memory of a place they've both been, and use the power of that memory to travel vast distances at the speed of light. It's impossible for even the most skilled of dragons to do this without at least a blossoming bond, and it's exceedingly difficult to accomplish without a true link.\"\n\n\"What's the difference between a bond and a link?\" Nova asked.\n\n\"A bond can be forged without either party ever intending to become partners,\" Korgad told her. \"It is like\u2014\" He tilted his head as if trying to think of a decent comparison. \"It is like a close friendship. You might pick up on the way the other feels, for example, not because you share their emotions, but because you know them well enough to see it play across their face. You are bonded, you share experiences, and you rely on each other for strength, but you are not linked. A bond must be necessary for a link to take place, but not every bond becomes a link. In fact, many dragons and riders have more than one bond, though it's rarer now than it used to be.\"\n\nWait\u2026you could bond with a dragon without linking? How come no one had told her that? Maybe she wasn't linked with Hake after all, just bonded.\n\n\"How do you know the difference between a bond and a link?\" she asked.\n\n\"The biggest difference,\" Korgad said, \"both in terms of how you'll feel and what you can do, is the telepathic connection. Even the strongest of bonds aren't capable of telepathic thought; only a link can produce a connection that powerful.\"\n\nOh. Then, yes, there was no doubt about it.\n\n\"To what purpose, may I ask, do these questions tend?\" Korgad asked, narrowing his eyes at her.\n\n\"I, um\u2026\" Nova shifted her weight, not sure why this felt so hard to admit. \"I've\u2026linked with Hake.\"\n\n\"What?\" Korgad demanded, blinking his large eyes at her and straightening a little. \"But the trials aren't for a few more days! How could you have fully linked? He should know better!\"\n\n\"It wasn't his fault,\" Nova said quickly. \"He was too young when it happened, and he did it by accident.\"\n\n\"When it happened?\" Korgad repeated. \"And when was that?\"\n\n\"To be honest\u2026\" Nova bit her lip, \"it was when Brioni came to visit.\"\n\n\"What?\" Korgad said again, letting out a breath of surprise. \"Why did you not tell me?!\"\n\n\"It\u2014there wasn't a good opportunity at first,\" Nova defended herself. \"And then\u2026well, you were acting differently, and I haven't really had a good chance until now anyway.\"\n\n\"Different?\" Korgad scoffed. \"How so?\"\n\n\"Just different.\" Nova shrugged. \"Sulky, distant, angry\u2026worse than usual, I should say.\"\n\n\"Hmph.\" Korgad straightened, giving her a look that seemed more teasing than offended if the glint in his eye was any indication. \"You're hardly one to speak of distance; you are the one who's been lying to me these past nine weeks.\"\n\n\"Hey, lying's a strong word,\" Nova protested, chuckling a little before sobering. \"I'm gonna tell everyone at the trials this weekend if you think that's a good idea. I thought Hake might get in trouble with the Council if they found out he linked with a human too early\u2026and I guess I was worried you'd feel like you had to tell them, out of duty or whatever.\"\n\n\"Smart, then.\" Korgad nodded. \"They'll give all students the chance to announce links during the trials; you're right to wait and announce it at that time. This is a great relief, you know. Now I needn't worry about carrying you through the trials as I've needed to carry you through everything else.\"\n\n\"I resent that!\" Nova crossed her arms. \"I've worked hard to get where I am, and it's been without your help ever since the younglets came around, anyway. I'm pretty sure I could have passed the trials on my own, too.\"\n\n\"Ehh?\" Korgad tilted his head at her. \"I seem to recall you asking, mere minutes ago, what my plans were if you should fail.\"\n\n\"That's fair,\" Nova admitted. \"I just like keeping my options open, I guess.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Korgad hummed thoughtfully, tilting his head at her again. \"Perhaps\u2026\"\n\n\"Perhaps what?\"\n\n\"You've inherited much from your mother,\" Korgad told her, frowning into the distance. \"More so than I at first believed. I know you must be\u2026frustrated with how little I've been able to guide you these past few weeks. You say you've had trouble finding the right books in the library?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nova nodded. \"We've tried tons of history books, anything to do with dragon riders, but everything that looks helpful refuses to open for us.\"\n\n\"Dragon riders?\" Korgad tilted his head. \"Hm\u2026this week, I want you to begin your studies with the Link Mage; see what you can learn about him.\"\n\n\"The Link Mage?\" Nova repeated, now feeling a bit confused. \"I've already been studying him, along with everything else. He's the supposed creator of Ragond. Alana says he's a legend, that Ragond has always existed and the portals were discovered two thousand years ago, by a lot of people, and the stories all merged into one legend about a Link Mage until people started believing it.\"\n\n\"That is untrue,\" Korgad said seriously. \"The Link Mage is very real, and it's important you learn which of his stories are true and which are mere legends.\"\n\n\"He's real?\" Nova blinked, surprise coming over her at this revelation. \"How am I supposed to know the difference between reality and legend, though? All the stories sound the same.\"\n\n\"You must try,\" Korgad insisted. \"Don't question this, girl, trust me. Study the Link Mage. It is the key to all understanding of this world.\" He turned his side to her, gesturing to the footholds on his saddle, and raised his wings. \"Now, come; it is time to fly back. You have much work to do in the morning, and it's getting late.\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, hating this curt way he had of ending conversations, but knowing that if she pushed him farther, they'd probably get into another fight. So, she gave in, climbing onto his saddle and holding tight as they jumped off the outcropping and began the flight back to Stonehaven. At least she felt like she'd learned something this time. And, she felt like she'd come to a new place of understanding tonight, like she knew Korgad a little better. That was worth the trip, even if she still didn't know as much as she wanted to.\n\nJust one week more. One last stretch before Saturday came and she would take her trials, and come out of it either as a linked rider\u2026or as the last recruit to wash out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fireworks",
                "text": "The first day of the trials dawned bright and clear, and Nova did not feel ready. She'd barely been able to sleep the night before with various scenarios playing out in her mind as she envisioned the tests, still not entirely sure what they would consist of and imagining all sorts of challenges\u2014and how badly she might fail them. She already had a link, of course, so she wasn't worried about not being able to bond with dragons, but she knew students would be judged on the skills they'd learned, as well. She'd be expected to fly and fight and prove she was not only capable of riding, but ready for the responsibility of it.\n\nOnly around ninety rider recruits had made it this far, and there were only thirty-five or forty witch recruits remaining. Zephyr seemed as anxious as Nova did in preparing for her own witch trials, the two of them going through their morning routine in relative silence. Though, judging from the almost frenzied energy coming from the older students and the other recruits in the gallery, the others were far more confident in their abilities. Either that or they were better at disguising their anxiety as excitement. Nova didn't know how they all managed it. Well, almost all of them managed it, anyway. Rayden and a couple others seemed as bad off as the girls, Rayden barely touching his breakfast.\n\nIt was probably worse for them, Nova thought, as the first day of the trials was devoted to witchcraft. The dragon rider trials would take place over Friday and Saturday, so Nova still had one last day to prepare. But Zephyr had mere hours, as did Rayden, who'd been booted shortly after Zephyr and switched to full-time earthian magic himself. As a result, he spent the morning muttering earthian rules to himself over his porridge and poring over his own syllabus of materials and their magical properties. At least the witchcraft students knew what to expect, Gwyn Falla and Professor Dreyan having announced during the last performance review that the witch trials were going to consist of a general test of their knowledge and then a practical exam where they would be given resources and expected to show what they'd learned.\n\nThe explanation for dragon rider trials had been confusing, though, and Nova still wasn't sure what to expect. The teachers had said they'd be 'jousting,' but hadn't gone into exactly what that meant on a dragon. Nova hoped it wasn't like in the movies where knights jousted on horseback, rushing at each other and stabbing each other with poles as they tried to knock each other off their horses.\n\nNearly everyone they knew had felt the need to stop by and say good luck, too, whether the wishes were genuine or not. Anasia and her team had spent ten minutes offering last-minute advice, while Teira and Fayta had smirkingly paused at their table to deliver the oh-so-creative line, 'Good luck; you're going to need it.' And Dafyd had been traveling around the room speaking to all of the remaining recruits in general, answering questions and offering tips\u2014telling Nova, upon reaching her, to not be worried because 'riding was in her blood.' Which, honestly, just made her feel even more anxious. If all these people kept saying she was destined for this, she'd feel even worse when she failed.\n\nIf! She would feel even worse if she failed.\n\nShe couldn't afford to think about 'when.' She'd definitely be doomed if she expected to fail.\n\nThe trials were going to be held out in the fields below Stonehaven, and apparently they were a big enough deal that an entire festival came with it. The people of Terrenov had been working with the school to set it up in the lower courtyard throughout the week. Nova had caught glimpses of it here and there, but since she'd been busy with her studies, she hadn't actually gone down to the ground level to see it. So, as she stepped off the lift with Zephyr, Rayden, and several other recruits, she felt an eager sort of curiosity despite her nerves. Just like with her first trip to Terrenov, she'd never attended a real medieval festival before, and she couldn't wait to see what it was like.\n\nThe lobby of the spire was more crowded than she'd ever seen it before, mostly with students and a few of the older soldiers, and Nova and Zephyr had to push through the crowd to get to the main door. Once they were outside, they could see several brightly colored tents rising above the heads of the crowd in the shade of the courtyard and hear lively, fairy-tale sounding music being played over the sounds of laughter and lively discussion. There were tons of kids running around in peasant tunics and leather boots, too, screeching in excitement and playing with folded paper dragons attached to small poles by a thread of string, the dragons 'flying' out behind the kids as they ran. The adults milling around the courtyard all seemed happy and excited themselves, eating treats or oohing and ahhing over the kids as they walked around in groups, carrying baskets full of trinkets that Nova assumed were being sold at the various tents. It reminded Nova of being at a fair, despite how different it seemed from the fairs she'd been to back home. Especially the food. No hot dogs, funnel cakes, or caramel apples, as far as she could tell, but the scents of sweet rolls, pies, roasted corn, and smoked meat hit her all at once, and that more than made up for it.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Zephyr breathed, her nerves seeming to dissipate at the sights of what surrounded them. \"This is amazing!\"\n\n\"Would you like to look around?\" Rayden asked, smiling. \"We have time before we have to go to the arena.\"\n\n\"Absolutely!\" Zephyr grinned.\n\n\"Anything to take my mind off the trials,\" Nova agreed at once, having to smile a little herself as they veered off from the other recruits and started making their way through the crowd towards some of the tents nearby. As they got closer, she saw that there were people selling things. The first stand they came to was full of beautiful figurines made of stained glass\u2014most of them dragons, but with a few birds, flowers, or other animals mixed in.\n\nThere were smaller figurines closer to the front, and Zephyr picked up a tiny glass dragon around the size of an egg; it was clearly meant to be a younglet if the large eyes, head, and wings were any indicator, as well as the more greyish, opaque appearance of the body, while the adult dragon figurines were generally stained the coppery green of most dragons.\n\n\"Look!\" Zephyr grinned. \"It looks like Hake!\"\n\n\"It does,\" Nova agreed, looking through the other younglets she could see. \"I don't see any that have spots, though, so no Rune.\"\n\n\"There's Lir,\" Rayden noted, nodding over near the back of the stand to a bigger figurine, this one about the size of a coffee maker. This glass dragon was one of the few stained orange instead of green, and in the unmistakable black leather riding gear that matched Dafyd's leathers, the figurine looking as self-assured and pleased with herself as her real-life counterpart.\n\n\"Oh wow.\" Nova blinked, walking a little farther into the tent and noticing that there were actually quite a few replicas of Lir, which she supposed made sense, given that Lir was so distinctive in coloring and linked with a well-known captain of the military. In fact, as Nova looked around, she saw one figurine even bigger and more detailed than the last one, which showed Lir with her wings outstretched as if about to fly, a little stained-glass Dafyd on her back with his arm held out, his dagger drawn.\n\nThat was kind of weird, actually\u2026but kind of cool, too. She saw a few other figurines with riders, but she didn't know who they were, and she suddenly found herself wondering what it would be like to come into a stand like this someday and see a tiny glass version of herself astride Hake. She tried to shake the idea off, however, because that was silly. She wasn't here for fame or glory\u2014she was here to get strong enough to find her mother.\n\nA little bit of fame on the side wouldn't hurt, though.\n\nThey perused the tent for a few more minutes, Nova eventually buying the little dragon that had reminded Zephyr of Hake, and moved on. They passed a small band of musicians playing a jig while several people nearby danced and clapped along, the song ending in a fit of laughter as one couple on the outskirts of the group was caught by a passing child's dragon streamer and twisted up in the string.\n\nNova already felt better just from the general mood of the festival grounds when they came into view of another tent\u2026and she stopped, surprise coming over her at the sight of rows and rows of jewelry made from the same kind of metal as her necklace\u2014dragonite, Dafyd called it. She stepped inside, picking up a bracelet. The silver, green-flecked metal was burnished and shining dully, and the merchant stepped forward with a smile.\n\n\"Genuine dragonite,\" he told her. \"Straight from the Western mines, it is.\"\n\nNova nodded but put the bracelet down upon noticing a wooden stand with lots of pendants just like hers hanging from it, the metal clinking slightly as they shifted in the breeze. She swallowed, taking one of the necklaces and looking it over. Another dragon was etched onto this one, though in a different pose than the dragon on her pendant, and when she turned it to the other side, there was no name. \"Do you\u2014ahem,\" She cleared her throat, her mouth feeling especially dry. \"Do you come to the trials every year?\"\n\n\"Aye, for the past ten years now, I think\" the merchant acknowledged. \"D'ye know me work?\"\n\nNova reached up, carefully taking her pendant off and holding it out to him. \"Did you make this?\"\n\nThe merchant tilted his head, taking the pendant and looking it over carefully before pulling a spyglass out of his apron pouch and holding it up to his eye. \"Oh, well, that I did, my lady!\" he told her with a proud grin. \"Has my mark on it; I hide 'em small in the tail, y'see. Can't say's I remember when, though. I've got a shop in town, and pendants are me best sellers. I carve whate'er y'want on 'em for only two piece'o gold more.\"\n\n\"You don't remember when?\" Nova repeated, a rush of disappointment coming over her. \"It\u2026it would have been purchased by Seren. Do you remember if Seren ever bought anything here?\"\n\n\"No, my lady, I'm dreadfully sorry,\" the merchant said, now looking a little awkward as he shrugged his shoulders. \"Lots of folk come through here during the trials, and I have that shop in Terrenov. Looks old, too.\" He handed the pendant back to Nova. \"That cord's a bit thready. Want I should get you a new one? Or p'raps a chain?\"\n\n\"No, thanks.\" Nova swallowed, turning to leave the tent. She didn't know what she'd expected the man to say; of course, he wouldn't remember one customer out of the hundreds he'd had over the years. Still, she'd thought, for a moment\u2026No, she was being dumb.\n\n\"You alright?\" Zephyr asked her quietly, following her out of the tent and putting a hand on her shoulder. Rayden lingered nearby looking awkward but sympathetic.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nova nodded, squaring her shoulders. \"Yeah, I'm fine. Really, don't worry about me, Zeph.\" She gave her friend a smile to show she was okay. \"Come on, let's get to the arena.\"\n\n\"Alright, if you're sure,\" Zephyr sighed, following Nova out of the shaded courtyard and towards the arena.\n\nSet up in the fields beyond the courtyard, the arena was huge\u2014around twice the size of a football field\u2014with grand, temporary bleachers set up on one end, capable of seating the whole crowd, while a long line of smaller bleachers ran along the two long edges of the field, where most of the recruits and older students were seated, tons of dragons either lounging behind the student bleachers or flying overhead, a couple even sparring on the field while people slowly filled the guest bleachers and offered a cheer now and again when one dragon got in a particularly good hit.\n\nNova! I see you!\n\nNova had to bite back a small smile at the echo of excitement and happiness she picked up from Hake. She glanced around at the roost of dragons until she spotted Korgad, the younglets excitedly pawing the ground on either side of him.\n\nI'm coming, she thought back, waving and starting across the field to go talk to them, Zephyr following while Rayden headed for the student seats.\n\nThe younglets couldn't really be called 'younglets' anymore. They still weren't fully grown, but with Hake standing at Korgad's shoulder and Rune standing at Hake's, they were much, much bigger than Nova and Zephyr, which didn't seem fair since it hadn't even been three months yet. She checked the pocket of her jacket where she'd put the glass figurine that reminded her of Hake, wishing the younglets could have stayed small for longer.\n\n\"Hey, guys!\" Zephyr greeted them as they reached Korgad and the twins. \"Having fun?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\" Rune nodded her head a bit, looking around the arena and shaking her wings out. \"Isn't it exciting? Oh, I can't wait for the games!\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nova smiled, but glanced at Korgad before turning back to Rune, feeling a little wary again. \"Are you two sure you're ready? You can always wait till next year.\"\n\n\"Don't want to wait,\" Hake told her. \"Want to be a soldier!\"\n\n\"We're ready!\" Rune promised. \"We want to play in the games with you!\"\n\n\"What games, exactly?\" Nova asked Korgad.\n\nKorgad let out a laugh. \"That's what the 'lets have been calling your trials,\" he told her. \"Since you'll be tested primarily on flight and midair maneuvers, you'll naturally be riding dragons while you do so. But it all sounds 'fun,' apparently, so they've been dubbed 'the games.' Isn't that right, 'lets?\"\n\n\"The games are going to be fun!\" Hake announced excitedly. \"I'll be the fastest flier!\"\n\n\"I want to be the fastest flier,\" Rune protested. \"You can be the highest flier.\"\n\n\"Bah, stop this bickering,\" Korgad scolded the twins, though still sounding more amused than anything else. \"It doesn't even matter until tomorrow. Today, it's just the witch trials. That's what you're doing, Zephyr?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Zephyr sighed. \"I'm so nervous.\"\n\n\"Don't be nervous, Zephyr,\" Rune said, lowering her head to their level and gently pressing her forehead against Zephyr's for a moment, Zephyr laughing a little as she reached up and scratched Rune's head. \"You're too clever for that.\"\n\nNova frowned, feeling a growing anxiety at the closeness of the two. Over the past ten weeks, Rune and Zephyr had really seemed to click, and while Nova was glad they both were happy, she couldn't help but feel anxious, considering Zephyr's chosen path. If all went well, the girl would be accepted into full-time witch training today. She didn't need all the suspicion, or the risk, of a close bond with a dragon.\n\n\"Speaking of your trials\"\u2014Korgad nodded over to the bleachers, which were starting to fill more rapidly now\u2014\"you two should take your seats. It's nearly time.\"\n\nRight. Here they went.\n\nThe witchcraft tests were conducted over four categories: first, the staff brought out several long tables on which were placed fifty books, which appeared identical, save for the fact that half were blue and half were green. The hopeful witches were called to the tables and told to open the magical books in front of them, the aerials instructed to try the blue books and the earthians told to try green. Anyone who could open their book was given the book as a prize\u2014the books revealing themselves to be their first-year lesson books\u2014and thus moved on to the next test, while those who couldn't open their books were dismissed from Stonehaven and told to try again next year. That amounted to four crushed recruits in total.\n\nZephyr had passed with her aerial book, and Rayden had passed with his earthian, but they didn't seem any less anxious because of it. In fact, all the witches now seemed tenser than ever as they watched the four rejected students walk out of the arena in front of the pitying looks of the crowd.\n\nThe next test was more like an actual test, with Gwyn Falla and Professor Dreyan taking it in turns to ask the students questions about their chosen school of magic; Gwyn asked for recitation of the rules of spellcasting or the definitions of words and phrases while Dreyan asked questions about earthian recipes and ingredients, such as the scientific names of common plants or the safety procedures of brewing. The students were expected to answer every question correctly, asked around five questions each, and two students were dismissed upon answering one of their questions incorrectly.\n\nThen the aerial recruits were told to stand by while the third test was conducted, this being the final test for earthian recruits. Some of the school staff brought out another table, this one full of all sorts of plants, soils, vials, stones, seeds, and other objects, as well as tools for brewing such as cauldrons and mortars and pestles. Then Rayden, along with the other fourteen earthian recruits, some of whom had been studying magic the whole time while others had only started trying after being cut from dragon rider probacio training, were given one turn of an hourglass to create something using only the ingredients on the table.\n\nNova leaned forward in her seat, watching in fascination as the earthian recruits hurried to the stockpile, perusing the ingredients and gathering what they needed before returning to their tables and quickly beginning to work. She was too far away to see much of what they were doing\u2014and hadn't attended a single earthian class, so she wouldn't have understood it anyway\u2014but she still felt keenly interested in the task as she watched Rayden specifically while the boy worked.\n\nShe had expected it all to be potion-making, but Rayden was actually one of only four students who appeared to be attempting a brew, the others all frantically doing other things with their ingredients; a couple of them looked to be mixing dirt and seeds with some of the mysterious dusts and liquids from the vials and uttering what sounded like spells under their breath as they poured their mixtures over living things like flowers, fruit, or, in one case, a moth in a jar, the objects hardening and freezing into various kinds of metal. Some other students seemed to be growing plants of their own, coaxing them from small pots of dirt with spells and mixtures, the plants rising and growing right before Nova's eyes, and the final few students performed the most fascinating magic of all, gathering piles of ingredients and then carefully arranging them on their desks, lighting circles of candles around them or outlining shapes made of salt or dirt, one student even taking a knife and carving a sort of rune-like shape directly into the wooden table, light starting to surround the objects as they merged and fused right in front of them, turning into something new.\n\nSome students\u2014including Rayden\u2014finished their creations before the hourglass ran out, cleaning their stations and stepping back to wait for the final few minutes to pass. Several others worked in a fevered rush right up until the last second, leaving their stations a mess, but finishing their objects in time. Three students didn't finish their objects at all, defeated as time was called and they stepped back. And one student performing ritualistic magic actually caused quite a scene when, around ten minutes before time was called, his half-formed object exploded, a small fire breaking out while the boy fell back with a scream, clutching at his face. Several staff members rushed forward and loaded him onto a stretcher, carrying him away while others put out the fire and cleared his station for him and other recruits continued to work, all of them starting to look downright sick with anxiety. Nova felt sorry for the boy who'd been carried out, wondering if he'd be okay and unable to help but imagine herself in his situation if some sort of accident were to happen the next day during dragon trials. The beasts were dangerous, after all, and even though she'd grown used to dragon safety by now, there was no telling what might happen in a high-pressure situation.\n\nThe other three who had failed to finish their objects were dismissed while everyone else was congratulated on passing their trials and given a second book, this one a notebook in which they were told to record their experiences in school, and sent back to the bleachers. Eleven earthian students in all returned to their seats, where the older witch students quietly congratulated them\u2014several passing them vials of their own, which Nova imagined was probably some kind of calming potion, as the nerve-wracked recruits all started drinking them at once.\n\nMeanwhile, however, it was on to the final phase of the witch tests, with Zephyr and the other aerial recruits called to the front while the earthian tables were cleared and a new desk was brought out, this one containing other objects such as candles, scrolls, books, and a row of wind chimes hanging in a line. One by one, the aerial students were called to come to the table, where they were given ten minutes to learn any one of the spells found there and perform it. Those who performed a spell, any spell, would be accepted into the school, whereas they'd be dismissed if they couldn't.\n\nNova felt her interest spark, eyeing the piles of books and scrolls and wondering what kinds of magic they might hold, but most of the aerial students seemed to have been scared off by the earthian accident, and Nova's spirits sank as, one by one, they all approached the table, flipped through some of the scrolls on top, and then took a candle and recited the chant they had all been practicing on the very first day of classes, lighting the candle and playing it safe. One or two of them branched out at least a little, one recruit taking a candle and then, instead of lighting it, levitating it, and one student poring over the scrolls for about five minutes before tapping at some of the wind chimes, apparently to find the right notes, before beginning to sing a different chant, making a gust of wind rush through the arena and knock the chimes into each other as they rang out musically. It was kind of cool, but not all that impressive.\n\nUntil Zephyr was called forward. The last of the students to be called up, she seemed to be in the zone, a determined frown on her face as she carried her new lesson book over to the table, setting it down and opening it to a page before she hurriedly began sorting through the scrolls and books on the table in search of something\u2026what, Nova didn't know. Zephyr was the only one of the aerial students who'd brought her lesson book with her, and as the minutes passed, she kept going back and forth between the lesson book and the other scrolls, jotting down a few notes in her lesson book and constantly returning to the chimes to find notes, humming along with them to get the melody. She started to smile and look excited as the crowd and the Council all waited expectantly, seeming to realize they were about to see something special.\n\nAnd they weren't disappointed.\n\nZephyr used every second of her allotted time to learn whatever it was she was trying to learn, gathering five candles from the box and carrying them away from the table to set them out on the floor in a circle, kind of how the earthian ritualists had, and then stood back. She recited the spell to light them, and the audience looked a bit disappointed for a moment\u2026before Zephyr took in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and sang something more.\n\n\"Hela'n ka ruse byrst suin steylae dau'brae yd!\"\n\nThe small tongues of flame on the five candles suddenly burst up into streams of golden light which sparked and shot up into the sky before exploding like fireworks in a dazzling display of crackling sparks, the audience all letting out a collective gasp and an exclamation of awe, and then a hush came over the crowd for a moment as the flames died out. And, finally, they let out a thunderous roar of applause.\n\nZephyr was grinning now, her cheeks flushing from the cheers as she glanced proudly over to Nova in the bleachers, the students around Nova whispering and chattering excitedly, with even the meanest of the Caelum recruits looking stunned and impressed. Nova couldn't help but grin as she clapped and cheered along with the crowd. Trust Zephyr to pull out all the stops, despite how nervous she was. That would show everyone what her friend could do, proving that witches could be just as important as dragon riders.\n\nThe crowd was finally quieting down now, while over in front of the Council box, Gwyn Falla stood, raising her hands to the crowd and waiting for them to calm down before turning back to Zephyr, who was beaming from ear to ear as she waited.\n\n\"Zephyr Anderson,\" Gwyn announced, \"never before have I seen such ingenuity and creativity in one this young.\"\n\n\"Uh, thank you,\" Zephyr said breathlessly, running a hand through her hair as she shifted her weight and blushed more deeply, her eyes shining.\n\n\"Stonehaven is proud to take in students of such imagination and strength of mind,\" Gwyn continued. \"And, as High Witch, I am proud to have the honor of teaching you in your upcoming schoolyears. Moreover, it is my obligation as a citizen of Ragond and my right as a member of the Council of Five to choose from among the recruits an apprentice who will study under me personally. If you would be willing, Zephyr, I intend to grant you a title and name you as my apprentice.\"\n\nWait, what?! That was an option?! Nova cheered again and was echoed by the crowds, the happiness for her friend mounting as Zephyr actually stepped back in shock, putting her hands over her mouth and letting out a laugh, seemingly unable to speak as she nodded numbly.\n\n\"Very well.\" Gwyn smiled back with a nod of her own. \"You may see me in my classroom later tonight to go over your contract and duties.\" She turned to the remaining students and announced, \"That concludes the witchcraft trials for this year. On behalf of myself and Professor Dreyan, I am proud of each and every one of you, and welcome you to Stonehaven as official first-year students!\"\n\nThe crowd all clapped again while Zephyr hurried back over to the bleachers. Nova and Rayden, along with the other witches, all rushed forward to congratulate her.\n\n\"Zephyr, I'm so happy for you!\" Nova cheered at once, Zephyr still laughing happily as she grabbed Nova's hands and pulled her into a quick hug before stepping back. \"You were amazing!\"\n\n\"Very much so!\" Rayden agreed with a grin, putting a hand on Zephyr's shoulder. \"You've certainly showed everyone witches are nothing to laugh at!\"\n\n\"Oh my gosh\u2026I can't believe that just happened!\" Zephyr exclaimed, still looking a bit breathless as she ran her hand through her hair again. \"I made fireworks, Nova! I used magic to make fireworks, and now\u2026now I'm going to be the apprentice of the High Witch! This is amazing!\"\n\n\"You're amazing, Zeph!\" Nova exclaimed, hugging Zephyr again and then stepping back a little so the other witches could congratulate her, as well. She seemed so happy. And she deserved it. Zephyr had always worked hard. To have her brilliance and dedication rewarded like this, in front of everyone, was wonderful.\n\nNow, Nova had to hope her own trials found just such a good ending."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Rider Trials",
                "text": "Nova still wasn't quite sure what to expect as she made her way back to the arena Friday morning for the rider trials. The crowds seemed to have doubled; the stands were packed already even though yet another set of guest bleachers had been set up on the other end of the stadium. Nova was honestly surprised\u2026Anasia had warned that the rider trials were more popular than the witchcraft ones, but Nova hadn't realized the crowd would be this big today. The noise was overpowering merely from people talking, so she couldn't imagine trying to joust in front of such a large crowd.\n\nThe dragons all seemed to be eating it up, though. In addition to the hundred-odd dragons there to seek out riders to link with, there were tons of other dragons present, some of them being injured or retired dragons who almost never left the caves and others visiting from elsewhere in the world. Nova had never seen so many dragons in one place before and lost count of how many there were as they all raced around along the ground, sparring and wrestling in groups of up to ten dragons at once, and swooping and twisting in the air, occasionally diving down and rushing over the crowd to draw out screams and cheers and rounds of applause with each pass. It was as if they were showing off for the crowd.\n\nNova looked around for Korgad and the twins, but it was nearly impossible to find them in the chaos, and she kept getting distracted with how many there were and how active they all seemed to be. She gave up after a while and simply made her way to the student bleachers.\n\nZephyr and the other witches, now that their own trials were over, had been asked to sit in the audience bleachers, meaning Zephyr wasn't with Nova now. She'd wished her luck, given her a huge hug, and promised to cheer louder than anyone\u2014and it was comforting to know that her friend was rooting for her, somewhere in the sea of faceless onlookers. Still, she'd have felt better if they could sit together.\n\nEventually, the Council arrived, and much as had happened yesterday, the dragons all calmed and moved to wait behind the student bleachers as the Council and teachers took their seats in the private box. Only, this time, Dafyd and Commander Traevorlin weren't there. That seemed awfully strange in itself.\n\nBut then the crowd erupted into a burst of thunderous applause as two dragons\u2014one of them being Lir\u2014flew out from the portico high above them and dove towards the arena, circling the crowd and doing stunts before they landed in the arena. Lir and Dafyd wore their matching black and silver riding leathers, and Commander Traevorlin and his dragon wore matching gold and mahogany-red leathers of their own. The two dismounted, pulling off their leather helmets and turning to the crowd to wave as the cheers grew louder. Traevorlin pushed his long hair over his shoulder as he began walking over to the Council box, his dragon taking back off and hopping the bleachers to wait with the other dragons while Dafyd and Lir stayed behind, Dafyd swooping low in a bow to the crowd as they all cheered one last time.\n\nHe was so stuck-up. No wonder he had people making statues of him.\n\nThe crowd quieted about as much as it could while a staff witch in red robes entered the arena, walking over to Dafyd and casting some sort of spell on him. Dafyd then turned to the crowd again as the witch left the arena. \"People of Ragond!\" he called. \"Welcome to Stonehaven!\"\n\nThe crowd all cheered again, Dafyd grinning at the attention and waiting for them to pause before he continued, now turning more to the students. \"I'd like to begin by saying, first and foremost, how proud I am of each and every one of you, simply for having made it this far. The trials are going to take place over the next two days, and although your performance will not be reviewed, as it were, you will be sorely tested. The mark of a rider, the ability to link with a dragon, is intangible and impossible to prove until you are linked\u2014or at least bonded\u2014with a dragon, and dragons are the only ones who can truly sense the potential for such a bond within a human. There is no way to test for the ability, save through bonding and eventually forging a link\u2014which is irreversible\u2014while both parties still draw breath. A dragon cannot link where there is no bond; so, I hope you've been taking the past ten weeks to get to know your potential partners,\" he said, waving his hand to the dragons behind the students. \"And that you've begun to bond already. If you do not forge a link by the end of the trials tomorrow night, but you have felt a strong enough bond that you are selected by a dragon to link with in the future, you will not be dismissed. If, however, you cannot link with a dragon by the time the sun sets tomorrow and no dragon speaks for you regarding a bond, you will be expelled.\"\n\nOh\u2026was that it? Well, that was fine, then. Nova was already planning to reveal her link with Hake tomorrow, so, she'd be fine. It was a little odd that there was no way for the Council to know whether or not she'd formed a link, though.\n\n\"Make no mistake,\" Dafyd continued, \"a link is an incredibly personal and lifelong commitment. Do not enter into it lightly. While it is customary for dragons and riders to link or at least pledge during the trials, it is not a decision to be rushed. The games are one final chance for dragons and riders to mingle with each other, to test the waters. See if you feel a bond and if you are ready to take the next step in your partnership. And, if you are both already sure in your friendship and know from the start that you intend to bond, consider these two days your first chance to show us what kind of a rider-dragon pair you are going to become.\" He flashed another smile towards the crowd. \"They love a good show, after all, don't you, my friends?\"\n\nThe crowd all cheered and clapped again, Dafyd straightening and looking pleased while Nova rolled her eyes. She wasn't sure why she found him annoying, but ugh, that smug look on his face.\n\n\"Now then!\" Dafyd called to the recruits. \"The majority of the next two days will be spent in dragon jousts, so I recommend you go and find a partner! When your name is called, report to the arena with your dragon partner, and do your best! The winning pair of each match is given the chance to declare a link and claim your badges. But don't despair if you lose the match, as you won't be immediately disqualified. You will continue to compete until you resign or the sun sets tomorrow evening\u2014at which point you must declare a pledge, at least, in order to remain with us.\" He put his helmet back on and deftly climbed back into Lir's saddle, turning back to the students. \"The first recruit will be called in five minutes' time,\" he announced, \"and they will be given the right to choose the rider they'll be challenging. And yes, before you ask, you are permitted to challenge a rider who has already been given a badge. You can even challenge me if you think you can best me,\" he offered, grinning. \"I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world.\"\n\nHe lifted off with Lir, gliding to the other side of the arena and dismounting again, going to talk to a few more witches, while Nova and the other recruits wasted no time in getting to their feet and heading over to where the dragons were waiting, most of them rushing to whichever dragon they'd spent the most time with during training.\n\nNova went right to Korgad and the twins, naturally, noting immediately that the twins both had on riding gear\u2014though, where they'd received it, she didn't know.\n\n\"Nova!\" Hake exclaimed when she reached them. \"Pick me first! Pick me first!\"\n\n\"No, me!\" Rune pawed at the ground. \"I want to joust!\"\n\n\"Heh, well, I can't pick you both first,\" Nova laughed, reaching up and scratching the two dragons' heads as they lowered them for her reach. \"Where'd you get the leathers?\"\n\n\"Dafyd lent them to us,\" Hake informed her.\n\n\"It wasn't Dafyd; it was the school of Stonehaven,\" Rune corrected her brother. \"He's just the one who brought them to us and helped us put them on.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Nova blinked, turning to Korgad. \"They lend leathers?\"\n\n\"The younglets are not yet full-grown,\" Korgad told her, straightening a little in his own ancient-looking but sleek, shined brown leathers, which were encrusted with faded gemstones. \"It would be pointless to buy them leathers they're not going to fit into in a week's time, and they need something for the games.\"\n\n\"I want to play the games!\" Hake whined excitedly, crouching close to the floor and flicking his tail out behind him. \"Pick me first, Nova, please!\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" Nova hesitated. She did want to ride on Hake, to see how he worked\u2026how he flew. And she'd always hated saying no to him. But she'd never ridden on either of the younglets before, and she didn't know how to 'duel' in the first place. \"What if I pick Korgad first?\" she suggested. \"Just so he can show me how to duel, and because then it will be more fair since I didn't pick either of you first?\"\n\n\"Awwww,\" both younglets whined, drooping their heads a little but then shaking it off, nodding to her. \"I guess that's alright,\" Rune decided.\n\n\"But I'm next, right?\" Hake checked. \"You'll pick me next?\"\n\n\"Oh, alright,\" Nova laughed. \"I'll pick you next.\" A thought came to her then and she frowned, turning to Korgad. \"Though\u2026are you even allowed to compete?\" she asked. \"If you have a link with my mother, is that going to be a problem?\"\n\n\"I doubt it,\" Korgad huffed. \"Considering the majority of Ragond believes your mother to be dead and thinks I've gone insane from the loss of my rider.\"\n\n\"Wha\u2026\" Nova bit her lip, not liking that thought at all. \"Does\u2026does that happen?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Korgad said matter-of-factly. \"A link broken through death can devastate the remaining partner\u2014though, rest assured, I know insanity and I don't possess it.\"\n\nWell, this was unsettling\u2026it sounded horrible, so how could he talk about something like that flippantly?!\n\nThe twins seemed equally surprised, watching Korgad with wide eyes. The old dragon seemed to pick up on their reactions, though with confusion and incredulity more than anything else.\n\n\"What, does that surprise you?\" Korgad scoffed a little. \"Forget I said anything, all of you. You've got to keep your focus on the trials. No one's going mad today, and, Nova, your mother is still alive. But yes, I will be permitted to joust. Now, go and get a weapon,\" He nodded to a small shed near the back of the bleachers, where several students were heading in and out.\n\n\"I have this,\" Nova said absently, indicating her bow and quiver slung over her shoulder and still feeling a bit taken aback by his remarks, but trying to refocus.\n\n\"A jousting spear, silly girl,\" Korgad told her, leaning down and pushing Nova with his head, nudging her towards the shed. \"And a shield!\"\n\n\"Right, okay, I'm going!\" Nova said.\n\nShe made her way over to the shed and joined the group of students waiting to get their jousting spears and shields. She just hoped she didn't get called\u2014or challenged\u2014first.\n\nApparently, she didn't have much to worry about, however. Most of the recruits seemed to have something to prove, either challenging Dafyd, a previous winner, or some of the older students like Anasia and her team. Those called up didn't challenge other waiting recruits, and after nearly three hours of waiting, Nova started to become frustrated. She'd been waiting since breakfast, after all, with Korgad instructing her in the art of a joust and teaching her to hold her weapon and shield while astride a dragon, though they couldn't get any real practice in until they could actually go do it. She'd watched a few of the other matches and talked to the twins for ages (neither of them having been approached by a single rider, Korgad having scared them off all day), and now they were about to be dismissed for lunch, Dafyd having announced about ten minutes earlier that the matches would stop at noon and start up again at one.\n\nShe was just saying her goodbyes to the disappointed twins when she heard Dafyd calling her name. Wait, she'd been challenged? She blinked, somehow caught unawares for a moment before she was hit by a sudden spike of nerves, gasping and darting back over to Korgad.\n\n\"That's us!\" She grinned, starting to climb onto his saddle. \"We're up! Let's go!\"\n\n\"Good luck, Nova!\" Hake called.\n\n\"I hope you win!\" Rune added.\n\n\"Well, I doubt that,\" Nova scoffed a little. \"But I'll do my best! Be right back, you guys!\"\n\nKorgad spread his wings, leaping up and gliding back down over the student bleachers as he landed in the arena, where Dafyd was waiting near\u2026Fayta. She'd been challenged by Fayta?\n\n\"Oh great, it's you,\" Nova sighed when they got close enough, and then she noticed which dragon Fayta was riding. \"Garlet? What are you doing with her?\"\n\n\"Now, that isn't very nice,\" Fayta chuckled. \"If you want, I can challenge someone else.\"\n\n\"No!\" Nova snapped. \"No, it's fine. Actually, yeah, this is great. I've wanted the chance to fight you from the start.\"\n\n\"What's surprising about my teaming with Lady Fayta?\" Garlet tilted his head, straightening a little. \"She's an excellent rider and a skilled fighter, and our long-term goals coincide quite nicely, I think.\"\n\n\"What?\" Korgad asked Nova. \"This little girl bothers you, Nova?\"\n\n\"You could say that,\" Nova replied. \"She's a bully, and she's been picking on Zephyr and me from the start.\"\n\nKorgad let out a bit of a huffing laugh, nodding. \"Well, let's get to it, then,\" he said, crouching low and then springing into the air at the sound of the trumpet signaling their start. Fayta and Garlet did the same, the two dragons gaining height and flying to opposite sides of the arena before both circled. Nova felt her heart start to race as they faced each other.\n\nKorgad tilted his wings a bit, the wind catching at them as he entered into a glide, but then he slowly turned it into more of a dive, Nova reaching down to where the spear and shield were sheathed into pouches in the saddle. She drew the shield first, quickly sliding it into place as she gripped the saddle between her knees, but jeez, it was hard to stay on without holding onto the saddle while they were flying like this! She was losing time, too\u2014Garlet was getting closer, so she had to hurry. The adrenaline was pumping now as she got the shield into place, reaching back down again to get the spear and struggling to pull it free, barely getting a grip on the staff before Garlet and Fayta were upon them.\n\nKorgad collided with the younger dragon, the two of them grabbing each other with their talons and snarling as they tried to bite at each other, Nova gasping and lurching to the side, nearly falling off the saddle and dropping her spear as she gripped the handhold to stay on, barely having time to register the falling spear as she brought her shield up to block a thrust from Fayta, the girl not seeming to have the same kind of trouble Nova was having\u2014despite the fact that Korgad and Garlet were now twisting in midair with the two of them still on their backs, their wings beating ferociously as they continued to fly while they fought.\n\n\"Where's your fire, now?!\" Fayta crowed, clashing her shield against Nova's and shoving both into Nova's chest hard. Nova let out a pained yelp and felt anger come over her; she gripped her shield again and shoved it right back at Fayta, but realized too late that she'd left herself wide open to an attack from Fayta's spear. She gasped as the girl brought it down, pushing away from her, and then she felt a jolt of terror as she slid right off Korgad's saddle and began to fall to the ground below.\n\nShe couldn't help but let out a scream while, above her, Korgad matched it with a roar, breaking free from his wrestling with Garlet and diving down to swoop beneath her. Nova hit the saddle hard and all the breath left her lungs as she clung to it tightly. Oh gosh, she'd messed that up so badly. Fumbling with her shield, dropping her spear, and falling from her saddle. She'd never live this down.\n\nKorgad hit the ground, shaking her off his saddle and turning to her with a glare. \"What were you doing?!\" he demanded, letting out an angry huff of hot breath as his eyes flashed and he stomped his feet into the ground. \"You could have gotten yourself killed. Weren't you paying attention at all?!\"\n\nNova couldn't even respond, gasping for breath as she shakily pushed herself up from the ground, her heart still racing as the sound of the roaring crowd hit her like a ton of bricks. She'd failed in front of thousands of people.\n\n\"And the match goes to Fayta of the city of Caravon!\" Dafyd announced, Garlet landing nearby and looking a bit guilty while the girl in question jumped down from the saddle with a laugh, marching over to Nova and holding a hand down to her with a smirk.\n\nNova swallowed, feeling her face burn as she smacked Fayta's hand away and got to her feet herself, still breathing pretty heavily. And, owww, her side hurt from where she'd hit the saddle.\n\nFayta chuckled, stepping back as her smirk grew into a smug grin. \"Come now, Lady Nova, there's no need to gnash,\" she said. \"It was just a little tumble.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, you can\u2014what?\" Nova blinked, distracted. \"What do you mean, 'gnash'?\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Fayta laughed. \"Oh, Nova. What are you even doing here? 'Gnash' is slang, I suppose you'd call it. It means you're behaving rather beastly, baring your teeth at me as if you're the dragon. Really, Lady Nova, are you sure you belong here?\"\n\n\"Come now, girls, it was a clean fight,\" Dafyd said upon approaching them with a bit of a sigh. \"Let's leave it on the battlefield, hmm?\" He offered them both a little smile before turning to Fayta. \"As the winner of the match, you have the right to declare a link, if you wish,\" he reminded her.\n\n\"Wait!\" Nova gritted her teeth, looking over to Garlet. \"You can't link with her! You're a good enough dragon, Garlet\u2014why would you throw your lot in with a bully like Fayta?\"\n\n\"A 'good enough' dragon?\" Garlet drew up to his full height, bristling in offense. \"Well, thank you for that, I'm sure!\"\n\n\"It\u2014no, I didn't mean it like that!\" Nova groaned.\n\n\"Don't mind her, Garlet,\" Fayta told the dragon, reaching up and patting his shoulder. \"She's sulking because she lost the match.\"\n\n\"Hmph,\" Garlet sniffed before turning to Dafyd, nodding huffily.\n\n\"To answer your question, Captain, we are going to link; in fact, we've already formed a strong bond and Garlet intends to link with me now in celebration of our victory.\"\n\nWhat? He couldn't do that to her! Yeah, the dragon had been flighty, and maybe sometimes even annoying, but they'd worked together several times lately while Korgad was busy. She'd thought he would be better than this.\n\n\"Congratulations!\" Dafyd was saying, looking pleased with the outcome as he bowed his head to Fayta and Garlet. \"I must say, I thought you two might benefit from each other. You've made a fine choice.\"\n\n\"Mm, thank you, I think we have,\" Fayta said, climbing back up onto Garlet's back and offering Nova one last smirk. \"Farewell, my lady,\" she snickered.\n\nAnd, with that, the two left.\n\n\"Well then.\" Dafyd turned to Nova. \"You're the lead match now; who do you wish to challenge?\"\n\n\"No one!\" Korgad announced angrily. \"We forfeit our right to challenge.\"\n\n\"What?!\" Nova stared at him. \"What do you mean?! I'm not quitting, not after all that work!\"\n\n\"You're not quitting, fool!\" Korgad huffed at her angrily. \"You're clearly not ready for this; fetch your spear and you can try again tonight, on one of the younglets. Bah! Losing to a twelve-year-old! You've disgraced me for the last time!\" Turning in place, Korgad sprang into a flying leap, beating his wings and taking off overhead towards the portico, leaving Nova behind to feel stunned.\n\nShe'd tried her best. If she'd failed, it was his fault for deciding it'd be funnier to keep her in the dark than explain the trials earlier and give her a chance to prepare better!\n\n\"There's no need to fret,\" Dafyd told her, putting a hand on her shoulder. \"Nothing angers a dragon more than bruised pride. He'll return soon, I'm sure of it. In the meantime, why not go and get some lunch? You can try again this afternoon after he cools off.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Nova swallowed, shrugging Dafyd's hand off her shoulder and turning to leave the arena\u2014but catching Osa's eye as she glanced over towards the Council.\n\nAnd with that, she felt even worse. She'd let everyone down.\n\nKorgad came back down from the portico after lunch but refused to joust with her again, and she couldn't help feeling upset about it\u2014and the twins seemed to pick up on the tension themselves, both acting quieter and more subdued. Nova felt bad about it; they'd been so excited and happy earlier. Why did she keep fighting with Korgad in front of them? It just made them anxious.\n\nTheir moods did lift a bit later that afternoon when she was challenged again, jousting on Hake as she'd promised. She was pleased to find he was surprisingly fast, instinctively knowing when to glide, when to roll, and when to beat his wings and race along at high speeds. Though, when it came down to the actual joust, he left too wide a distance between Nova and her opponent, leaving her unable to reach the rider with her spear, and then he overcorrected and barreled past the other dragon entirely, letting the other rider disarm Nova easily.\n\nShe was disappointed to lose again, but he'd seemed to have fun, so she tried not to let it get to her. And later on she faced a different struggle altogether with Rune, who was precise in her movements, reaching the other dragon and darting around them naturally to give Nova a good opening, but she flew so slowly that their opponent seemed able to predict their every move\u2014and once again disarmed Nova with relative ease.\n\nRune seemed incredibly embarrassed and disappointed in herself after the match, and it was all Nova could do to comfort her and tell her it wasn't her fault, that they just needed practice.\n\nBy the time the day ended and Nova got to go up to her room, she was officially discouraged. She'd done terribly, and it had made Korgad angry and the twins upset. She was starting to feel like maybe she wasn't cut out for this after all. If Zephyr hadn't been waiting for her with a hug and a mug of hot chocolate, Nova would seriously have started thinking about quitting.\n\nAnd the second day of jousting didn't go much better.\n\nKorgad agreed to joust with her again, but after three bad matches he declared once more that he was done and flew off to sulk, leaving her with the twins, who were both nervous and lacked self-confidence after the previous day's failures. It set them all up to do badly since the three of them were discouraged and getting increasingly anxious as the sun climbed higher\u2014and then began to sink\u2014and they had yet to get a win.\n\nShe knew she only had to reveal her link with Hake to be accepted, and she still intended to do that, but as more and more of the others won matches, she realized she couldn't bear the thought of getting in on a technicality, being one of the few to have lost every match.\n\nShe had been doing a lot better on Hake, though, she had to admit. It helped that they were so connected. They were able to make decisions at the snap of a finger, without having to call them out to each other, and even without their telepathy, they just\u2026seemed to be in tune. Nova related to Hake in a lot of ways, and they had similar ways of thinking when it came to facing down fighters who were bigger and stronger. On Korgad, she'd been struggling, unable to keep up with his tactics and failing every time. On Rune, she'd done fine but had still struggled to pull in a win\u2014and hadn't come close. On Hake, there had been several times she'd thought she might win, only barely losing each time.\n\nBut 'barely losing' was still losing, and she needed a win.\n\nSo, now, as Dafyd personally jousted against each of the remaining recruits who hadn't won a match yet, and called Nova to come take her turn, she sighed, looking between the twins and then choosing Hake. It was her last chance, and she was up against Dafyd. She had to pull out all the stops.\n\nThe two made their way into the center of the arena, facing down against Dafyd and Lir\u2014the female dragon being nearly twice Hake's size\u2014and getting ready for the match.\n\nNova's heart was already racing as the trumpets sounded and the two dragons began flying up to the opposite ends of the arena. She didn't wait to reach altitude before starting to wrestle with her shield, knowing she needed as much time as possible to get it into place so that she could get her spear ready.\n\nWe need a strategy, she thought to Hake as they climbed ever higher, Nova glancing over her shoulder to see Lir and Dafyd already in place, circling around on the other side of the arena to maintain position as they waited. They were waiting for her, and somehow that made her angrier. She knew the odds were against her, but the two didn't have to go easy on her. We have to win this, Hake. We need to defeat them, somehow.\n\nI am smaller, Hake thought back, a glimmer of excitement and eagerness echoing in Nova's mind. I can turn faster. She is used to fighting head-on, but if we twist out of the way, under wing and over tail, you can unseat the Dafyd boy from behind!\n\nThat was actually a pretty good idea! Nova agreed with him as they circled around, starting to head back towards Dafyd and Lir, and picking up speed as the wind blew through her hair, determination filling her as the other pair began flying to meet them.\n\nSpeed is the key, Nova thought to Hake, realizing that she wouldn't need her spear until after they'd gotten behind Dafyd. She reached up, shoving it into her quill where she could grab it easily, and then leaned forward against the saddle to decrease wind resistance, clutching Hake's saddle tightly with her free hand as the adrenaline got going. This was it, her last chance, so she needed to go all-in. Go, fast as you can; don't give her time to react!\n\nHake started beating his wings faster, gaining a bit more height and speed before tucking his wings in to enter a bit of a dive, their speed increasing as Nova's breath caught in her throat, the wind whipping at her face as she squinted to keep Lir in sight. In a moment's time, Nova recognized that Hake was going to feint to the right. But, suddenly, a vision filled her mind; in the course of one split second, she could see exactly what was about to happen.\n\nHake was going to feint right\u2014but Dafyd was ready for them. Dafyd had seen Hake's speed increase, and he'd noticed the angle at which Nova and Hake leaned when Hake had tucked his wings in. Dafyd was ready for them, and he was going to use his shield to unseat Nova as they ducked under Lir's wings, defeating them before they even had the chance to try their maneuver.\n\nThe vision faded as quickly as it had come and Nova let out a gasp, pulling back on the saddle and drawing her spear at once, not having time to wonder or think about what had happened. The pair were still fast approaching, almost upon them. Left! she thought urgently. Feint left, and then shoot upwards, straight up!\n\nWith no time to respond, Hake simply obeyed, changing course at once and spinning to the left instead of the right and then raising his wings as he arched his back, turning up into a ninety-degree angle as he rose past Lir's wings, Nova letting go of the saddle and stabbing her spear into the thickest part of Lir's saddle, then jumping off Hake and using her spear for balance as she shoved her shield into Dafyd's turned back as hard as she could.\n\nAnd Dafyd fell.\n\nDafyd fell!\n\nThe crowd was screaming and roaring as Lir reached down with her talons, catching Dafyd and swooping down to the ground. Nova grabbed hold of Lir's black saddle to keep from falling herself, feeling a rush of pride and euphoria as the dragons both landed and she slid off Lir's saddle.\n\n\"I did it!\" she laughed, her heart pounding after the excitement of the match. \"No way, oh my gosh, I really did it!\"\n\n\"That\u2026how'd you do that?\" Dafyd asked breathlessly as he got to his feet, staring at her in shock. \"That magic, you\u2014did you open a time-jump?!\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Nova blinked. \"A what?\"\n\n\"Lady Nova Harris!\" Commander Traevorlin called sternly, his voice loud from magic like Dafyd's had been earlier, and Nova could tell by the tone that she was in trouble, tensing at once and looking over to where the council members and teachers were all standing, staring at her with the same sort of stunned look Dafyd had\u2014only, without the smile accompanying it. Wait, what? What was wrong? Why were they all looking at her like that?\n\n\"That is a foul on the match!\" Traevorlin continued. \"Time-jumps are not permitted for your status!\"\n\nWhat?! What\u2026was that the vision she'd had? But she hadn't done that on purpose! She hadn't even known it was an actual vision, more than instinct! Why were they calling it a foul? No one had told her it was a foul\u2014she didn't even know what it was!\n\nTraevorlin frowned. \"The match is forfeit!\"\n\nForfeit\u2026? But did that mean\u2026? No! He couldn't be serious!\n\n\"You have been disqualified.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Into the Storm",
                "text": "This couldn't be happening, she thought to herself.\n\nNova was currently waiting outside the Gold Hall, feeling anxious as she listened to the loud discussion inside. Were they really going to disqualify her? What would she do if she got expelled? Zephyr had a contract as Gwyn's apprentice now, and the twins were still young. She couldn't just leave anymore, much as she might like to. If she got forced out\u2026\n\nBut she didn't even know what she'd done! No one had told her, and it had been complete chaos after the match, with Hake being confused and indignant while Dafyd of all people had immediately called for an appeal to the disqualification, Lir following after him and telling him he was wasting his time while the crowds had all started clamoring over the declaration. And then the Council, along with all the teachers and a few other staff members, had taken to their hall to 'discuss' things while Nova was bidden to wait outside.\n\nShe wished Zephyr were there, and she had no doubt her friend was trying to get there, but Nova could bet the bleachers were hard to navigate since the matches were now over and everyone would be trying to leave. Hopefully, she'd reach her soon. Zephyr was always good at standing up for Nova when she got into trouble.\n\nRight now, it seemed Dafyd was the only one advocating for her, unless Osa took her side, as well. But then again, after she'd lost every match for two days and then finally won one\u2014apparently by foul\u2014there was always the chance the guy would give up on her. Especially since she'd unapologetically continued to ignore his invitations to dinners and events\u2026until the past few weeks, when they'd stopped coming.\n\nHow messed up a person was she? She finally had 'family' for the first time in her memory, and she'd already driven him away.\n\nThe grand door beside her opened, interrupting her thoughts as most of the teachers and staff members exited the room, giving her dirty looks as they passed.\n\n\"Nova.\" Dafyd stepped out as well, offering her a friendly, if not apprehensive, smile. \"You may enter.\"\n\nHe stepped back inside and Nova followed, unsure what to expect and feeling torn between the desire to apologize and beg to be allowed to stay or yell and rage that it wasn't her fault and that, if they didn't want her to do whatever she'd done, they should have told her in the first place so that she'd have known not to do it. She had to get a grip.\n\nInside the hall, the council members were all seated where they'd been last time; the two old men, Lege D'Allos and Alon the Old, were at the center, with Osa and Tila to the left of Lege, and Gwyn sitting next to Alon at his right. Commander Traevorlin was there, as well, standing behind Lege's chair and glaring at Nova while Dafyd moved to stand by Gwyn.\n\n\"Nova Harris, daughter of Ayo and Seren,\" Lege began coldly, \"you are facing disqualification for the act of performing a time-jump during a sanctioned match of the trials. What do you have to say to this?\"\n\n\"What do I have to\u2014I don't even know what that is, let alone how I apparently did it!\" Nova said at once, the angry side of her edging for control. \"Nobody told me it was a foul; nobody even told me it was possible! And\u2026it just happened!\"\n\n\"The move was valid,\" Dafyd spoke up. \"Even if she had done it intentionally, it would've been a good battle tactic and strategy. We shouldn't punish her for something we're going to train her to do in two years!\"\n\nThey were going to train her to do the time-jump in two years? Well, that was cool, but it made it even more ridiculous that they were threatening to disqualify her now!\n\n\"What is a time-jump?\" she asked, crossing her arms. \"How did I do it? And why is it a foul in a match?\"\n\n\"A time-jump is akin to a link-jump,\" Gwyn explained. \"It gives dragons and their riders the ability to glimpse the future\u2014either a few seconds or a few minutes, or occasionally more\u2014and grants them a tactical advantage.\"\n\nNova thought back to the moment when she'd known what Dafyd would do, and how it had felt so natural. How could they punish her for that, when it hadn't even been on purpose? \"And that's bad?\" Nova gritted her teeth. \"You're going to expel me for accidentally using a tactical advantage? How is that fair?\"\n\n\"It was an accident, then?\" Osa checked.\n\n\"Yes!\" Nova nodded, looking away from him to the rest of the Council. \"I didn't mean to do it, and I don't even know how it happened. I wanted to win, and\u2026saw what Dafyd was going to do.\"\n\n\"It was a great play,\" Dafyd insisted. \"She shouldn't be punished for this.\"\n\n\"It's bad form.\" Traevorlin narrowed his eyes. \"And she's a fool if she thinks she can get away with it. What, did you think we wouldn't see the distortion field surrounding you as you performed the jump?\"\n\n\"The distortion field? I don't know what you're talking about! This is the first time I've even heard of a time-jump!\"\n\n\"You've been here ten weeks and you expect us to believe you don't know what a time-jump is?\" Alon scoffed. \"That is unlikely.\"\n\n\"She may be right,\" Dafyd spoke up. \"I did not cover the ability during recruitment training, as they won't be taught it until year two and I didn't think it relevant. Lady Nova has only been here in Ragond for ten weeks. Her lack of foreknowledge regarding the time-jumps is my fault, not hers.\"\n\nGwyn frowned. \"If her opponent and instructor have no objection, I don't know why we're still arguing about it.\" She looked to Nova. \"Have you linked with the dragon you performed the jump with? Or were you merely bonded with him?\"\n\nNova felt a twinge of relief at the question; she was sick of trying to hide it and glad to get the opportunity to admit to the link now. \"Yes,\" she admitted, \"we've been bonded for a while, and I think we linked during the match.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Gwyn acknowledged. \"The dragon Hake is very young, is he not?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nova answered, glad she'd picked up on that. \"He's not even three months old yet, so maybe he just\u2026got excited, and that's how we both made the jump accidentally?\"\n\nThe council members exchanged looks with each other, Alon and Lege looking skeptical while Osa and Gwyn looked satisfied, and Tila merely looked uncertain.\n\n\"Perhaps we ought to put it to a vote among the Council,\" Osa suggested, raising his own hand. \"Those in favor of declaring the move valid and granting Lady Nova the right to study at Stonehaven?\"\n\nGwyn raised her hand, as well.\n\n\"And those in favor of disqualifying her?\" Osa asked, lowering his hand as Lege and Alon raised theirs.\n\n\"Tila?\" Lege asked the fifth member, who had not raised her hand either time. \"You are the tiebreaker.\"\n\nTila looked at him for a moment, seeming tired and mildly irritated, and then turned her gaze to Nova. \"We must take into account her bloodline,\" she said slowly, waving a dismissive hand towards Osa. \"And allow for such\u2026overuses of power, as might come with it.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Lege sighed, though he looked a bit irritated now. \"In that case, the victory is valid, and Lady Nova is hereby granted enrollment into Stonehaven.\"\n\nNova let out a breath of relief and nodded, offering a smile to Dafyd and then to Gwyn and Osa, for defending her\u2014although, now Osa was giving her a look again, and she hadn't meant to make it seem like she wanted to talk right now or anything. Why was it always so awkward to talk to him? \"Ahem, um, thanks,\" she told the Council, turning back more towards Gwyn. \"I won't let you down, I promise.\"\n\n\"We shall see about that,\" Alon told her. \"We might not be disqualifying you, but you've still got a warning. The move was bad form, whether it was done intentionally or not, and it's dangerous to perform any kind of link magic without proper training. Until you have learned caution, I'd advise you to exercise restraint. Two more warnings, and you'll be expelled.\"\n\nNova froze in place, torn over fighting. It wasn't fair for them to still punish her even though they'd agreed she hadn't done anything wrong on purpose. But she knew if she fought it, she'd get in even more trouble\u2026so, she bit back the surge of irritation and nodded to him that she understood.\n\n\"You are dismissed,\" Lege announced.\n\nWell, he didn't have to tell her twice. She turned at once, heading through the door and starting to make her way through the grand foyer with Dafyd following after her.\n\n\"Lady Nova!\" he called, stopping in front of her and offering a small smile. \"I want to congratulate you on your victory. Not many riders have the ability to perform a time-jump, let alone an untrained recruit with an inexperienced dragon. You are very talented.\"\n\n\"Yeah, thanks,\" Nova said, not sure why she felt slightly more frustrated with him talking like this. But he had taken her side in front of the Council, and about rules, which seemed like a big deal for him. \"Thanks for sticking up for me,\" she made herself say. \"I owe you one.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" Dafyd smiled. \"It would have been a shame to see a student with your ability and determination go to waste.\"\n\nWhy was he complimenting her like this? \"Um, yeah\u2026\" Nova gritted her teeth, feeling strangely uncomfortable. \"Real helpful to hear that when I still got a warning for something I didn't even mean to do, that you hadn't even told me was a rule. Anyway, thanks. Uh, I gotta go.\" She pushed past him, deciding to go talk to Zephyr and the others and try to forget how tense and angry she felt.\n\nDafyd didn't try to follow her or keep talking, and it occurred to her that maybe she'd been too defensive. She felt kind of bad now. But she wasn't about to turn around and apologize, so she resolved to forget about it and try to get back to the good feeling she'd had before the foul was called.\n\nAfter all, she'd defeated Dafyd in a joust in front of a roaring, cheering crowd. She'd done it. She hadn't washed out or made a fool of herself\u2014she'd made it through the trials.\n\nSo\u2026now she was fully committed to spending the next two years of her life here. Granted, she'd already accepted that, but she'd still kind of been holding out for an escape plan.\n\nAnd the good feeling was gone again.\n\nIt took a long time to navigate the crowds after leaving the Gold Hall, and although she kept looking for Zephyr, she couldn't find her anywhere. That was one problem with Ragond, the lack of technology like phones. If she could have sent Zephyr a text and asked where she was, this would be easy. But, no, they had to bumble around until they ran into each other.\n\nThe dragons were heading back up to the caves, soaring overhead in the dark of night as the festival died down, merchants packing up their tents and spectators starting to set up tents of their own. Nova got stopped several times by people congratulating her on her victory\u2014and the same happened once she finally got inside, with the other students doing the same. The ride up on the lift was especially awkward, as some of the Bestia students who'd happened to get on with her were fighting back disappointed tears as they offered their congratulations while having failed to win a match or find a pledge themselves.\n\nShe stopped by the room she shared with Zephyr, but her friend wasn't there so she wrote a note telling her how the meeting with the Council had gone, that she wasn't expelled after all, and that she'd gone up to see the twins. Leaving the note on the table, she then made her way to the dragon caves. By now, the sky was fully dark, the only light coming from the moon, and the caves were even darker. She lit a candle as she walked to Korgad's alcove, the excitement of the day starting to catch up with her. She probably wouldn't stay long, she decided. After this, she wanted to get something quick to eat and go to sleep. Her real training wouldn't start until Monday, so she could afford to stay up a bit late tonight, but jeez, she was exhausted.\n\n\"Nova!\" Hake called as she approached their alcove, he and Rune scurrying out to meet her while Korgad leaned his head out to see her without getting up.\n\n\"Hey, guys,\" she greeted the younglets, petting them when they lowered their heads. \"Crazy day, right?\"\n\n\"Did you get spelled?\" Hake asked at once.\n\n\"Expelled,\" Nova corrected absently. \"And no, I didn't. They gave me a warning, though, for accidentally using magic I didn't know existed and breaking a rule no one told me about.\"\n\nKorgad let out a bit of a laugh, standing and stretching his front talons. \"I hope you said the same to them, child,\" he told her.\n\n\"Eh\u2026more or less.\" Nova shrugged, unable to help but smirk a bit. So, he wasn't still mad. Good. \"Alon and Lege don't like me all that much.\"\n\n\"Those fools haven't liked anyone in hundreds of years,\" Korgad pointed out. \"They disliked your mother, too. Anyone brave enough to challenge their bureaucracy.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Nova tilted her head, feeling proud at this news. \"Well, good. They're full of it. Called themselves gods the first time I saw them.\"\n\n\"Bah,\" Korgad scoffed. \"Anyway, you did well today, Nova.\" He tilted his head back at her. \"How did you manage to perform a time-link? These past few days have been Hake's first time with a human rider. He shouldn't be able to do that, and neither should you. You must have an affinity for it.\"\n\n\"Nova!\"\n\nShe turned to the mouth of the cave as Zephyr appeared, offering a grin and carrying a basket. She tossed a couple of treats to the excited younglets as she hurried over to Nova, immediately wrapping her free arm around Nova's shoulders in a hug. \"Oh my gosh, congratulations! I'm so glad you didn't get disqualified\u2014that would have been awful!\"\n\n\"You said it,\" Nova agreed, eyeing the basket as the smell of food wafted from it. \"Did you bring dinner?\"\n\n\"Yep!\" Zephyr opened up the basket and began to plate up some food for Nova. \"I figured you'd probably be hungry and the line is huge, so yeah. I took it to our room first, but this is better, 'cause now we can all eat together!\"\n\n\"Yay!\" Rune jumped a little in excitement.\n\n\"We have already eaten,\" Korgad told Zephyr. \"And what you have could not fill us anyway. We had our hunt after Hake and Nova's victory,\" he reminded the twins.\n\n\"I won a joust with a captain,\" Hake told Zephyr proudly.\n\n\"I know, I saw.\" Zephyr smiled at him as she handed Nova her plate. \"Good job, Hake. You, too, Rune, you both did great today!\"\n\n\"I didn't win a match,\" Rune sighed.\n\n\"Well, you still did a great job,\" Nova told her, starting to eat.\n\n\"I think so, too,\" Zephyr told Rune, sitting down against the wall with her own plate and petting Rune's head as the dragon laid down next to her.\n\nThe school felt busier than ever the next day, as everyone was either preparing to start classes in earnest or packing to leave and saying their last goodbyes. The energy in the dorms and the gallery was incredibly tense, full with a mixture of dread, eagerness, excitement, and, among the groups losing a friend, disappointment and sadness. And without a schedule to separate the three groups, everyone milled around at the same time, causing traffic jams in doorways and on the staircases as well as a huge line at the lift\u2014and seemingly everyone wanted to talk to Nova and Zephyr.\n\nThey had always been a bit of a target for notice here, being the only kids to have come from Earth in twenty years and with Nova being related to Ayo and Seren, but now that Zephyr had shot off her fireworks and Nova had been the only recruit to defeat Dafyd and Lir in the trials, they'd suddenly been upgraded from the weird new kids to the cool new kids, and Nova didn't know which label she hated more.\n\nIt was good that Zephyr wasn't being made fun of as a witchout anymore, but at least when they'd been outcasts, Nova hadn't had to talk to a lot of people. Sure, she got along with Rayden, and whenever Anasia's team was around, it always turned out to be fun, but she much preferred being alone to being in a huge group of people all trying to talk to her at once.\n\nEspecially some of the other Caelum recruits. Teira and Lorn were now acting like they'd been best friends with Nova and Zephyr the whole time, while Fayta sarcastically complimented Nova in ways that made it clear she didn't think Nova deserved any of the attention. Like saying, 'It must be nice to have your luck' and 'I suppose strong blood does make a difference.' And, worst of all, commenting that, 'Having family on the Council must have been relieving; you didn't really have to worry about disqualification at all, did you?'\n\nIt was getting hard to play nice.\n\nWhich was why now, as the afternoon sun stretched over the mountains, Nova and Zephyr had flown out with the younglets for a quick trip to Drells. They just needed a break. And Korgad had refused to come, claiming to be tired, so it was just them.\n\nWhich was fine, though Nova had hoped to persuade Zephyr to ride Korgad since there was no risk of her accidentally linking with him like there was between Zephyr and Rune. She'd at least talked the other girl into riding on Hake with her, Rune flying alongside them alone. It made the smaller dragon feel left out, and Nova hated that, but it was important to keep them both safe, so she hadn't had much of a choice.\n\nIt was good they were all getting this time together, though. The next day, Zephyr would be starting her apprenticeship with Gwyn while Nova began her first year as a full-time student with Hake and Dafyd. There was no telling when they'd all get the chance to hang out together again.\n\nMeanwhile, Nova could tell she was starting to bond a little with Rune, as well, because she was picking up echoes of melancholy and insecurity from the smaller dragon, as well as hints of jealousy over the fact that they were all about to leave her behind while they worked. Nova had already asked Dafyd if Rune could tag along on their training missions even without a rider, and he'd said yes, but it wasn't the same and Nova knew it.\n\nThey'd landed by the lake at the base of the mountain, and Nova and Zephyr were talking and unpacking a picnic while Rune and Hake took turns diving into the lake for fish, when Nova noticed some dark clouds rolling in. At first, she simply tried to keep an eye on them, because a little rain never hurt anyone\u2026but the clouds quickly got too dark to ignore so she asked Zephyr to pack the picnic back up as she walked over to the edge of the lake, waving down the younglets and telling them they were going to head back.\n\nShe didn't think she'd done it fast enough, though. The clouds were moving in way too quickly.\n\nIt started raining after only a few minutes of flight, becoming a downpour almost at once. The dragons both started to feel anxious in the back of Nova's mind, not helping her own nerves much as they struggled to fly against the harsh wind and rain.\n\n\"This is bad!\" Zephyr called out, holding tightly to Nova's waist as they both leaned over Hake's saddle. \"How far to Stonehaven?\"\n\n\"In this wind? Who knows?\" Nova gritted her teeth, squinting to try to see in the rain and to keep an eye on the horizon and on Rune, struggling to stay close beside them. \"It'll be fine, as long as there's no\u2014\"\n\nA deep, rolling thunder began to sound and Nova felt her panic spike as her heart sank. They were going to be caught in a thunderstorm! \"Hake, go ahead and take us down!\" she called at once, gasping a bit and tightening her hold on the reins as lightning flashed a few miles away. \"RUNE!\" she yelled over to the other dragon, who was beating her wings faster and fighting harder against the wind in trying to reach them. \"RUUUUNE, FOLLOW US DOWN! WE'RE LANDING!\"\n\nI don't like the lightning, Nova; it's scary!\n\nI know, Hake, but it'll be okay. Take us down!\n\nIt WON'T be okay\u2014you're just as scared as I am!\n\nStupid link, letting the kid feel her emotions. How was she supposed to be brave for the younglets if they could always call her bluff?\n\n\"Just take us down!\" she called to him more insistently. \"It's gonna be fine\u2014Zephyr, hold on!\"\n\n\"They can't fight this wind!\" Zephyr exclaimed. \"They'll get blown over! I\u2014wait, I know a spell!\"\n\n\"What?!\" Nova called over her shoulder, twisting a little in her seat to look at the other girl more fully. \"Are you sure?!\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Zephyr nodded. \"I've never done it outside the Harmoniums before, but it might help!\"\n\nRune let out a desperate roar as a particularly strong gust of wind pushed her farther away from them, the wind lifting Hake's wings and pushing them even higher up, a loud boom of thunder drowning out the sound of Rune's roar after a few seconds, only to be followed by another flash of lightning, this one noticeably closer. It startled Hake, who roared in fright, stalling in his flight and dropping a few feet.\n\n\"Do it!\" Nova exclaimed.\n\n\"VEYNISA YN AUVUMA IFSPRIETA!\"\n\nAs soon as Zephyr yelled the words, the wind grew even stronger, a burst of it hitting them full-force and knocking Hake into a spiral. Nova shrieked, grabbing hold of the saddle with one hand and Zephyr's arm with the other\u2014but Zephyr was wrenched free with a scream of her own, falling away into the storm."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Accident",
                "text": "\"ZEPHYR!\"\n\nNova felt her heart stop, terror gripping her as she and Hake fell farther away themselves. No, no, no! She grabbed the reins, trying to regain control and bring Hake into a dive, but with another thunderous boom and flash of lightning, Hake yelped loudly, blown ever more off course. Panic raged through Nova now, coming from both herself and the panic of Hake and Rune as she craned her neck to try to see where Zephyr was because this couldn't be happening...she needed to find her, to catch her, right now!\n\nThere was suddenly a flash of white light in her peripheral vision, different than the lightning in the air around them, and Nova whirled around to see that Rune had disappeared. And then another flash of light appeared miles below, and she saw Rune dive from it, catching something that, from this distance, looked human enough for Nova to think\u2014to hope\u2014that it was Zephyr.\n\n\"Down, down\u2026get down there!\" Nova gasped, still unable to breathe as she urged Hake lower, the poor dragon not seeming to have noticed what had happened, as Nova now felt nothing from him but fright and guilt. \"It'll be\u2014shh, just get down there,\" Nova said, trying to shut out her own feelings and Hake's in order to try and pick up the glimmer she could feel through her general bond with Rune. She had to isolate the feeling, to focus on it\u2026.\n\nRelief. Rune felt overwhelming relief.\n\n\"She caught her!\" Nova exclaimed to Hake as they finally started being able to fight their way down closer to the ground, where Rune had landed far below. \"She\u2014she caught her, Hake! She's okay! Zephyr's okay!\"\n\nShe's okay?! Oh, thank the Mage! Thank Mother Earth! I thought\u2014I thought I'd killed her!\n\nWhat? Hake, you\u2014it wasn't your fault! Even if she wasn't okay, it wouldn't be because of you.\n\nHake didn't respond, but now Nova could feel a troubled, anxious sort of remorse from Hake in her mind\u2014one that she didn't like. It wasn't Hake's fault. If anything, it was Nova's, for deciding to fly them all off into a storm in the first place. If anything had happened to Zephyr because of her, she never would have forgiven herself.\n\nThey finally reached the ground, landing in the puddle-soaked plains as close to Rune and Zephyr as they could manage. Nova jumped off immediately, ignoring the water that instantly filled her boots as she sloshed her way over to the other dragon, Hake running past her himself and reaching them first. Rune seemed agitated and upset, shaking heavily as she rocked a little in place, crouched low on the ground and letting out periodic growls\u2026not sounding angry, but scared. And Nova couldn't see Zephyr at all.\n\n\"Where is she?!\" she demanded of Rune at once, putting her hand on Rune's nose to try and calm her. \"Rune, it's okay, look at me, where's Zephyr?!\"\n\n\"Falling!\" Rune gasped. \"She was falling, she was\u2026I caught her, I\u2026I couldn't let her fall!\"\n\n\"So, you did catch her?!\" Nova pressed, a surge of relief going through her as she put both hands on either side of the dragon's head, leaning her forehead against her scales for a moment before the concern took over again. \"Where is she? Rune, show her to me! Is she hurt?\"\n\nRune hesitated, but then slowly stood\u2014still shaking and wavering, but moving aside and opening her talons, in which she'd been tightly clutching Zephyr, the girl shaking even more than Rune had been, and openly crying on the ground.\n\nNova's heart broke. Oh, this was all her fault. She should never have let this happen! She couldn't even imagine how terrifying that had to have been, falling through the sky with nothing to catch on to, wind and rain and thunder drowning out your own cries for help.\n\nShe dropped to her knees next to Zephyr, lifting her friend up a bit and pulling her into a tight hug, fighting back tears as Zephyr started sobbing into her shoulder.\n\n\"I'm s-sorry,\" Nova got out, swallowing hard. \"Zephyr, I'm so, so sorry!\"\n\nZephyr hugged her back tighter, still crying, and then the rain seemed to stop. Nova blinked in surprise and looked up to see that Hake and Rune had laid down next to them, stretching their wings out over the girls' heads to wall them in and shield them from the storm.\n\nGratitude came over Nova then, too, clashing with everything else she was feeling and overwhelming her with the painful reminder that this was her fault, and although she was glad the dragons were there to protect them, she'd still almost gotten her best friend killed, not to mention traumatizing the younglets.\n\nThey waited for who knew how long while the storm raged overhead, until it finally broke and passed by, and the dragons moved, Nova slowly pulling out of the hug with Zephyr. \"You okay?\" she asked her friend.\n\nZephyr just sort of stared ahead for a moment, her eyes wide and haunted looking, as if she hadn't slept for weeks. Her face was sheet-white and her hair lay tangled and soaked from the rain and mud. And then she let out a deep, slow breath, rubbing at her eyes and nodding numbly.\n\n\"Zeph\u2026\" Nova winced. \"Are\u2026are you sure? That was awful. If you're hurt, or\u2026or just not okay, it's okay to say so.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" Zephyr started, her voice catching as she let out another deep breath and shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. \"I'm fine. I'm fine. I just\u2026I don't\u2026wanna fly anymore.\"\n\nNova grimaced, looking around at the plains and seeing they were still miles away from Stonehaven, the towers on the mountainside barely visible from this distance. \"I think you're going to have to,\" she made herself say. \"It's too far to walk, Zeph. I\u2026I'm really sorry.\"\n\n\"I won't drop you again,\" Hake said at once, his tone remorseful and pleading as he lowered his head next to Zephyr. \"I'm sorry, Zephyr, please forgive me! I won't let you fall again!\"\n\n\"It\u2026no, don't worry about it, H-Hake,\" Zephyr said, shuddering again and shaking her head. \"I know you won't, and\u2014and it was\u2026my fault. I m-messed up the spell. Don't feel bad about it. I need a minute. Just\u2014\" She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees and taking in a deep breath. \"Okay\u2026give me a minute, and then we can\u2026f-fly home.\"\n\nNova nodded, swallowing hard and getting to her feet, pushing her own wet hair out of her face. She felt awful.\n\nSo much for their day off together.\n\nBy the time they made it back to Stonehaven, it was nearing sunset. Hake and Rune landed on the portico, both somber and quiet, and Nova and Zephyr dismounted, Zephyr immediately heading towards the buildings as she wrapped her arms around herself once more.\n\n\"Hey, do you want me to get some dinner, bring it to you in the dorms?\" Nova asked her quietly, hurrying to keep up with her. \"I have to get the dragons settled in, and\u2026\" She trailed off, looking around the portico and realizing there was a lot more activity up here than usual, with tons of the adult dragon riders who lived in the military floors above them gathering around in groups, taking orders from some of the generals as their dragons flew down a few at a time so they could mount and take off from the portico. \"What's going on?\"\n\nZephyr blinked around at everyone, but her gaze seemed vacant and distracted. Nova put a hand on her shoulder, biting her lip and steering Zephyr as they kept walking through the ranks towards the dorm building. \"You go get some sleep,\" Nova muttered to Zephyr once they reached the doors. \"I'll see if I can figure out what's going on.\"\n\n\"Don't be out too late,\" Zephyr muttered.\n\n\"I won't, don't worry,\" Nova reassured her, squeezing Zephyr's hand before leaving her behind, turning back to the portico and looking around as she made her way back to Hake and Rune, who'd now been shuffled to the side and were waiting anxiously, watching the others with wide eyes. \"You two hear what's going on?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, but I don't like it,\" Hake huffed quietly, ducking his head a little. \"They're all flying north. Something must be out there.\"\n\n\"It's too quiet,\" Rune noted, crouching low and moving a little behind Hake. \"No one's saying anything.\"\n\nShe was right. Nova bit her lip, watching as another group of soldiers and their dragons dove off the side of the portico, flying north. Most of their forces were leaving, she realized; and aside from the people giving orders, no one was saying anything. She also couldn't see any of the other students out here\u2014not even the second-years, just soldiers. Dafyd was here, though, talking quietly with Traevorlin over near the library, with Lir and the commander's dragon waiting nearby.\n\n\"Go to the caves,\" she told the younglets quietly, patting both their heads before stepping back. \"I'm gonna talk to Dafyd since he must know what's up. I'll come up in a little while. Tell Korgad what happened with the storm, too\u2014I have questions to ask him later.\"\n\nThe younglets nodded, taking back off and flying up to the caves while Nova crossed the portico to talk to Dafyd and Traevorlin right as the commander turned away and mounted his dragon, flying northward himself.\n\n\"Dafyd!\" Nova called as she approached, the man turning to her in surprise, a serious look on his face.\n\n\"Lady Nova,\" he greeted her, bowing his head for a moment with a slight frown. \"What are you doing out here? Students were asked to vacate the portico for the soldiers' embarkment.\"\n\n\"I don't know what's going on,\" Nova told him. \"Zeph and I took the younglets to Drells earlier\u2014we just got back.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Dafyd said, now seeming to notice her muddied appearance. \"I hope you avoided the storm that passed through here?\"\n\n\"Ehh\u2026we got through it,\" Nova sighed, mainly to avoid having to explain everything since she wanted to find out what was happening here. \"What's going on? Where's everyone going? Did something happen?\"\n\n\"Yes, an incursion,\" Dafyd replied. \"A rather vicious one, too, according to the alarm.\" He pulled what appeared to be a small, egg-shaped black stone from his pocket, the thing seeming to be pulsing with light, though\u2026now that she looked closely, Nova couldn't actually see the light; she just\u2026knew it was there, somehow.\n\n\"What's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Hmm? Oh, this is a hawkstone,\" Dafyd told her. \"It's enchanted to relay messages from a matching hawkstone elsewhere in Ragond. I'm the carrier of the Yeason hawkstone\u2014Yeason being a port city along the northern coast\u2014and they sent for reinforcements a little over fifteen minutes ago.\" He held the stone up to his ear for a moment, his frown deepening, and then he sighed again, shaking his head. \"I only hope they reach them in time. It sounds like the Mythoi have sent hundreds.\"\n\n\"Hundreds?\" Nova repeated, watching the dragons take off as the image of that battlefield she'd seen came to her mind once again. Were these dragons and their riders flying to their deaths? She'd never asked how many riders worked as soldiers here before, but it didn't look like there were hundreds here.\n\nAs she watched one dragon flying off, she was distracted from her thoughts by a flash of white light opening up in front of the dragon, the rider and dragon disappearing through it before it closed, just like what had happened with Rune. She remembered going through the same kind of light with Korgad before they'd come here.\n\nThe link-jump.\n\nHow had Rune done that? She hadn't learned how to do that yet, and Zephyr definitely hadn't learned it. Had Rune managed to do it by herself?\n\n\"Well, I hope everything's okay there,\" she told Dafyd, who nodded absently as he listened to his hawkstone again. \"I'll just, um, head inside. You're not leaving, are you?\" She blinked, suddenly imagining Dafyd dead on a battlefield and getting cold again\u2026maybe she was still shaken by what had happened with Zephyr.\n\n\"Oh, no, I'm staying here,\" Dafyd told her, offering a small smile. \"I'll be leading the second-years in taking over the patrols and watch-guard here at Stonehaven while the commander flies out with the military.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Nova said, nodding. \"Er, not 'good' that he has to go fight, or that the older students have to do the guarding, but 'good' that you're not\u2014never mind. I'm leaving.\"\n\nDafyd chuckled, giving her an amused, perplexed sort of look before getting distracted again and turning back to his hawkstone. Nova took the opportunity to leave before she could say anything else super-awkward. What was wrong with her?\n\nDafyd was throwing her off, what with acting all serious now instead of his normal show-offy self. That's all it was.\n\nShe made her way to the caves, her general feeling of unease growing at seeing how empty the dragon caves seemed. They were usually packed this late at night, but nearly half the dragons were gone now.\n\n\"Korgad!\" she called when she reached their alcove, the twins both stepping away, apparently having just caught him up to speed. \"There's been an attack on some city on the coast. Most of the soldiers are being sent out.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know,\" Korgad told her. \"I heard about it when the alarm first came through, while you were apparently flying into a thunderstorm.\"\n\nOh\u2026right.\n\n\"I didn't know it would be a thunderstorm.\" Nova frowned, considering her error. \"I thought it would just be rain and I thought we could beat it back.\"\n\n\"And Zephyr?\" Korgad asked. \"She is alright?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nova sighed, rubbing at her eyes for a moment. Gosh, she was tired. \"She's okay. Rune saved her.\" She turned to Rune. \"Do you know what it is you did to reach her?\"\n\nRune ducked her head, shaking it and looking anxious. \"Am I in trouble?\" she asked quietly.\n\n\"Not with Korgad and me, no\u2026we'll take care of it,\" Nova assured her, turning to Korgad. \"I'm pretty sure she used one of those link-jumps you were talking about. She was above us one minute, and then Zephyr fell. I saw a flash of white light, and then Rune was below, catching Zephyr. I saw another dragon do it upstairs to get to the attack.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Korgad tilted his head at Rune, looking a bit surprised. \"It's extremely difficult to perform a link-jump without a rider. How do you feel?\"\n\n\"Tired,\" Rune admitted. \"Really tired. And hungry.\"\n\n\"Hake, go and fetch some fish for your sister,\" Korgad ordered Hake absently. \"It's no doubt you're tired and hungry, Rune. I'm surprised you made it home without a long rest first. Even over a short distance such as that, it's quite impressive for you to have done that magic riderless, especially without instruction and training. You should be proud of yourself.\"\n\nNova felt an echo of guilt and shame from Hake over the praise as the younglet left the alcove, presumably to fetch the fish as he'd been told. The poor kid was probably still blaming himself for this. Meanwhile, Rune was feeling a bit pleased, from the tiny bit that Nova could tell, though it felt like there was something else there that she couldn't quite place.\n\n\"Thank you,\" the dragon nodded. \"I\u2026I\u2026just couldn't let her fall.\"\n\n\"You'll be learning how to do that yourself in the coming weeks, along with Hake,\" Korgad told Nova. \"Harnessing the innate power of a dragon and using your own magic and memory to help unleash their power to its fullest potential.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Nova nodded, patting Rune's head absently as she headed to the mouth of the cave. \"I'd better go check on Zephyr, and then get some sleep myself.\"\n\n\"Yes, go off to bed, girl,\" Korgad chuckled throatily. \"And bathe first\u2014you're such a spectacle, caked in mud as you are.\"\n\n\"Wow, thanks!\" Nova rolled her eyes with a scoff as she stepped out of the alcove. \"Good night, Rune.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Nova,\" Rune said quietly, still looking exhausted.\n\nNova left the cave, sending Hake a goodnight in her head since he was out fishing, and then she made her way down to the dorm rooms. She stopped by their room, but\u2026Zephyr wasn't there.\n\nStrange. The other girl had seemed exhausted. Nova would have thought she'd gone straight to bed, but apparently not. But then, where would she be? Nova set about her search, trying the witch classroom, the Harmoniums, the gallery, and the common area, but Zephyr didn't seem to be anywhere.\n\nAt least, not anywhere in here. But Nova had another guess. Grabbing the new, red-hooded cape Osa had given her as a reward for her performance in the trials and slinging it on over her shoulders, as a layer of warmth against the dusk fall air, she left their room and stepped back outside onto the portico to hurry over to the library door.\n\nInside, glancing around and not seeing Zephyr immediately, she started to climb up to the top floor as she kept her eyes open for the other girl. It didn't take her long to find her, standing and looking at Merlin's texts with her back to Nova.\n\n\"Zephyr!\" Nova called in a loud whisper, heading over and putting a hand on her shoulder. \"Hey, what are you doing out here? I thought you were going to go to bed.\"\n\nZephyr sniffed loudly, turning to Nova and giving her a scared, anxious sort of look, tears streaming down her face.\n\n\"Zephyr, what's wrong?\" Nova winced a bit at the sight of her friend, looking her over in concern. \"Are you sure you didn't hurt yourself when you fell? Come with me and let's go see if we can find Professor Dreyan. He might have something for you.\"\n\n\"No,\" Zephyr said quietly, sniffing again and wiping at her eyes. \"I\u2026I\u2026oh, Nova, I really messed up.\"\n\n\"With the wind spell?\" Nova asked. \"Zeph, that's okay, it was just an accident\u2014\"\n\n\"Not with the spell, Nova!\" Zephyr exclaimed, her tears starting to come down faster as her eyes flitted around the library like she was a trapped animal.\n\nSomething was truly wrong here. Nova waited, her heartbeat quickening as she felt that aching dread settle back into her stomach, trying to prepare herself for what Zephyr was getting ready to say\u2026 and what Nova knew was coming, that she didn't want to hear.\n\n\"I a-accidentally linked with Rune.\"\n\n\"Zephyr,\" Nova said quietly, her heart sinking at the admission and her breath coming in more quickly. \"Come with me back to our room.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to do,\" Zephyr whimpered, rubbing her forehead. \"This is really bad, Nova, and I don't know what to do!\"\n\n'Really bad' was an understatement. If anyone found out about this, Zephyr could die.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Nova insisted, trying to reassure herself as much as Zephyr. \"Just\u2026you can't talk about it in here. Try to stay calm, and come with me to our room\u2014we can talk about it there.\" This seemed to quiet Zephyr well enough, the girl letting out a groan as she let Nova take her hand and lead her back across the upper bridge to the dorm rooms and then down to their own wing, waiting for Nova to unlock the door before immediately crossing over to lie down on her bed, burying her face in her pillow.\n\n\"How do you know it's a link?\" Nova asked as soon as she'd locked the door and lit the candles.\n\n\"I know,\" Zephyr said, lifting her face a little to be heard without being muffled by the pillow. \"The same way you know you're linked with Hake. She's up here.\" She reached up, tapping at her head. \"Well, not right now so much. She's asleep. But she was here earlier, worrying about me and asking what she's supposed to do. As if I'd have the answer. How am I supposed to know what to do?\"\n\n\"When did it happen?\" Nova had to ask, slowly sitting down on their couch and trying to pretend to be calmer than she felt.\n\n\"When do you think it happened?\" Zephyr sighed, rolling over onto her back and frowning anxiously up at the underside of her canopy bed. \"When I started to fall, she got really scared and it just\u2026clicked. That's how she did the jump thing.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Nova bit her lip. \"But, she did it to save your life, then! They can't punish you for that!\"\n\n\"They almost punished you for using regular magic too early,\" Zephyr pointed out. \"There's no way they'll let me off as a linked witch, even if we say it was an accident. You heard what they said before the trials; links can't be broken, so this is permanent! I'm never going to be able to unlink. I blew it; it's over. What if they separate us?!\" She winced, sniffling and rubbing at her eyes again as the tears started anew. \"What if they t-take Rune away and never let me see her again!?\"\n\n\"I won't let that happen,\" Nova promised at once. \"No way are they taking her away from us. They'd have to kill me first.\"\n\n\"Nova, you know I don't like when you talk like that.\" Zephyr winced. \"It's not funny.\"\n\nOh jeez, yeah, Zephyr had never liked statements or jokes about death. Which Nova could understand, given the girl's history. \"Right, sorry,\" she muttered, running her hand through her hair. \"I mean it, though, I'm not letting you and Rune be separated. That would be cruel, and she needs you around. She's still so young.\"\n\n\"What are we gonna do?\" Zephyr groaned. \"I really messed up. I should never have tried to cast that spell, but I was just trying to help us get back to the school, where it was safe.\"\n\n\"It's okay, Zeph, don't worry about it,\" Nova told her. \"Look, the important thing is to worry about what happens next, right? Not get caught up in whose fault it is that it happened.\"\n\nEven though it was totally Nova's fault.\n\n\"Right,\" Zephyr said, sitting up and pulling her knees to her chest as she took a few deep breaths, no longer crying. \"What happens next?\"\n\nNova nodded, thinking it all over and biting her lip. \"Well\u2026the easiest answer is\u2026you stop being a witch. Explain what happened, that it was an accident, but that you'll switch to being a rider to avoid breaking the law. I mean, this has to have happened before, right? As long as you do it now and don't hide it first, they can't convict you of practicing witchcraft while you were linked.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can do that, Nova,\" Zephyr sighed. \"I'm not good at being a dragon rider! Apparently I have the special power you have to have to make links, but I hate flying, I hated those first link-jumps on Korgad, and I'm not good at the weapons or the saddles or any of it! If I admitted I had a link, especially with Rune, who they already say is a cursed, runted, spotted twin, they'd give up on me completely and expel me forever! I'm a washout, Nova, remember? I barely lasted three weeks before I was cut from the program and moved to witchcraft full-time!\"\n\n\"Well, we have to do something!\" Nova insisted. \"You can't practice witchcraft anymore, Zephyr! If you got caught, you could be executed! Do you really want to risk that?!\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Zephyr exclaimed, suddenly looking desperate and starting to cry again. \"Nova, spellcasting is\u2026Nova, it's the only thing I've ever been good at! No, not 'good'\u2014I'm great at it! I finally found something that makes me happy, and that I can do well! I finally found a place where I feel like I fit in and belong, and now you want me to give it up?!\"\n\nNova paused, a surge of surprise coming over her. She hadn't known Zephyr felt that way. What did she mean, this was the only thing she'd ever been good at? Zephyr was good at a lot of things; she was smart, honest, kind, and thoughtful, and she always knew the right thing to do or say, and she was always willing to help people who needed it. And what did she mean by saying she'd 'finally found' something that made her happy? Was she\u2026had she been unhappy before?\n\nWhat was Nova thinking, though? Of course, Zephyr had been unhappy. Their lives had both sucked before they'd come to Stonehaven, and Nova should know that more than anybody. And she'd been so caught up in her own problems, in her own quest, that she hadn't even realized how unhappy Zephyr had truly been.\n\nNo, Nova couldn't ask Zephyr to give up witchcraft. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't right. There had to be another solution. \"Okay,\" Nova sighed, running her hand through her hair again. \"I won't ask you to give that up; you're right. We'll just\u2026hide it. You heard Dafyd; there's no way for the Council to tell there's a link on their own. As long as we're careful not to raise suspicions, we can keep it a secret. I can talk to Korgad in the morning. If anyone can help us, he can.\" She crossed over to Zephyr's bed, sitting on the edge next to her and putting a hand on her shoulder. \"You're my best friend, Zephyr, and I won't let anything hurt you. Either of you.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Zephyr agreed, letting out a deep breath and leaning into a hug, wrapping an arm around Nova's shoulder. \"Alright, Nova, thank you. You're my best friend, too. I love you.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I love you, too, Zephyr.\" Nova swallowed, remembering how close she'd come to losing her that day. Recalling the sound of Zephyr's scream as she'd tried to catch her, only to have her slip away in the night. She didn't think she'd ever forget that moment, not if she lived to be a thousand years old."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "\"This is Not a Game.\"\n\nEarly the next morning, before the sun had even fully risen, Nova was on her way to the dragon caves. It was time to talk to Korgad.\n\nNova couldn't help but feel a wistful sort of fondness at the sight of Hake and Rune cuddling with each other as they slept, Korgad curled up lazily on the other side of the cave. Since Korgad was small for his age, and the younglets were about his size now but still young, they all three fit in the same alcove, cramped though it was becoming. Nova stopped and watched them for a few minutes. What she wouldn't have given for a camera.\n\nKorgad blinked one of his eyes open, letting out a deep sigh at the sight of her and closing it again as he stretched his front claws. \"Well, look who's up to bother me already,\" he grumbled, turning slightly away and settling back in to sleep. \"Did no one ever tell you not to wake a sleeping dragon?\"\n\n\"You're not asleep,\" Nova told him. \"And I didn't wake you. I was just waiting here.\"\n\n\"Spying,\" Korgad accused her teasingly.\n\n\"Sure. Listen, we need to talk.\" Nova crossed her arms.\n\n\"Talk, talk, you're always talking,\" Korgad sighed again, furrowing his brow as he continued trying to sleep. \"Run along, little girl, and come again past noon.\"\n\n\"I can't!\" Nova frowned. \"I have my first day of real training today. We have to talk now.\"\n\nKorgad let out a huff, finally raising his head and opening his eyes all the way as he turned his head to Nova, frowning a bit. \"What?\" he huffed. \"What is so important that you had to barge in here and disturb my rest?\"\n\nShe probably should lead up to the big thing. Start things slow, and get him awake and alert before springing Rune and Zephyr's link on him.\n\n\"I want to hear about my parents,\" she decided for a start.\n\n\"Bah, not this again!\" Korgad rolled his eyes.\n\n\"Well, I think I have a right to know!\" Nova snapped. \"And I'm sick of you dodging every question, of having to learn everything in books, or being surprised when other people randomly drop some bit of information I don't know\u2014when you know her and could have told me all along!\"\n\n\"Books?\" Korgad repeated, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes at her. \"So, you have been doing your reading. What have you learned?\"\n\n\"Not anything since the last time we talked,\" Nova groused. \"It's only been like four days.\"\n\n\"Useless,\" Korgad muttered, turning away with a scoff.\n\n\"Hey!\" Nova snapped, a rush of anger and hurt coming over her as she glared at the dragon. \"I'm not useless! I've been busy, okay? Do you know how much work I've had to do just to keep up with the training? How am I supposed to find the time to scour six floors of some ancient magic library when I've been having to cram two thousand years of history into my brain because I've lived my whole life on Earth and don't know anything about this place?\"\n\n\"You haven't lived your whole life on Earth, silly girl!\" Korgad snapped. \"You lived here in Ragond until you were seven.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova let out a breath, momentarily distracted by this new piece of information. \"I lived here until I was seven?\" She'd already known she had lived here before, Korgad had told her that ages ago, but she'd sort of assumed she'd gone to Earth when she was a baby. \"Well, news flash, Korgad, I don't remember any of that,\" she said, glaring at him. \"Seriously, I don't have any memories of this place, at all. If I was here until I was seven, how come I don't remember?\"\n\n\"Forget that for now,\" Korgad said, starting to look agitated again and huffing out a breath of hot air. \"What matters is finding your mother.\"\n\n\"Stop dodging my questions!\" Nova exclaimed. \"I'm sick of it! Why can't you just tell me what happened?! What are you hiding from me?\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" Korgad growled. \"Nothing you need to know, that is. By the Mage, you're annoying.\"\n\n\"Wow, thanks.\" Nova rolled her eyes. \"Annoying, useless, silly\u2026I don't know why you're still here if you hate me so much.\"\n\nKorgad paused, blinking down at her and seeming a little surprised. \"What? Hate you? I don't\u2026 Bah!\" He let out another huff, dramatically dropping his head down and closing his eyes. \"Believe what you will. It doesn't matter; nothing matters.\"\n\n\"Korgad,\" Nova groaned, running her hands through her hair and circling him again, crossing her arms and sitting down in front of his large face. \"I don't really think you hate me. I'm just sick of you dodging my questions all the time. What's so wrong with me wanting to know about my parents?\"\n\n\"Nothing\" Korgad admitted, sighing deeply as he stood. \"You're right; I'm sorry. I find it\u2026difficult, to speak of your mother. But I know she would be proud of you.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"She would be,\" Korgad said. \"She always knew you'd become a rider.\"\n\nNova let out a breath, a sudden swell of emotion coming over her, and she swallowed hard, feeling her eyes well with tears despite her best efforts to keep control. She hurriedly wiped them away, but it was too late to hide them completely. \"What\u2026why are you crying?\" Korgad demanded in surprise, drawing his head back a little.\n\n\"It\u2014\" Nova started, having to laugh at the dragon's reaction, choking back her tears and wiping at her eyes again. \"It's nothing. I\u2026I guess I'm just getting emotional. Don't worry about it.\"\n\n\"Ehh? Silly child, crying over praise,\" Korgad muttered, looking a bit agitated as he shook his head. \"I meant to be uplifting, not discouraging.\"\n\n\"No, it was uplifting!\" Nova promised. \"It was, I promise. I just\u2026haven't ever heard that before, that she'd be proud of me.\"\n\nThis didn't seem to make Korgad feel any better, the dragon letting out another sigh before turning back to the twins. \"Go and get your breakfast,\" he told Nova over his shoulder, lowering his head and nudging at Hake and Rune. \"Best hurry, before they awaken, or they'll never let you leave.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Nova said, biting her lip as the twins both stirred in their sleep, nestling closer to each other as Korgad turned to her once again. \"There's another thing I have to tell you.\"\n\nKorgad tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at her tone. \"What?\"\n\n\"It's, um\u2026about Zephyr,\" Nova said, wiping the rest of the tears off her face and grimacing a little as she focused back on the task at hand, glancing at the twins. She lowered her voice a bit, stepping closer to Korgad. \"Yesterday, when Zephyr fell in the storm and Rune caught her\u2026\" She swallowed. \"She says she thinks they forged a link. She knows they forged a link; it\u2026they were talking telepathically, and you said that only comes with true links, right?\"\n\n\"Zephyr forged a link?\" Korgad hissed, his muscles tensing as he furrowed his brow. \"She could be killed!\"\n\n\"It was an accident!\" Nova tried. \"She was falling, and Rune was just trying to save her\u2014they didn't mean to do it!\"\n\n\"The Council is not going to believe or care,\" Korgad huffed. \"She must give up witchcraft at once!\"\n\n\"I won't ask her to do that,\" Nova replied, shaking her head. \"This is the first time I've ever seen her really happy, so I'm not going to try to make her give that up for some stupid law!\"\n\n\"It's a matter of adherence or death, girl. This is no time for childish rebellion!\"\n\n\"So, what, you'd rather she be miserable?\"\n\n\"I'd rather she be alive!\"\n\nHake let out a sleepy groan, the two younglets stirring again, starting to awaken, and Nova felt a twinge of frustration. She tamped down her rising indignation, though, as she didn't want to keep fighting in front of the twins.\n\n\"If she won't give it up, she must leave at once,\" Korgad told Nova, speaking quickly and quietly. \"She and Rune both. I will guide them to the world portal, and they can hide on Earth\u2014\"\n\n\"That's giving up on witchcraft,\" Nova interrupted him, but the twins saw her then, both letting out exclamations of surprise and pleasure as they greeted her.\n\nKorgad waited for the twins to finish their greetings and then focused on Nova again, frowning seriously. \"What is your plan, then?\" he asked.\n\n\"Plan?\" Rune repeated, the two looking between Nova and Korgad.\n\n\"We're talking about your link,\" Nova told her, careful to keep her voice to a whisper as she turned back to Korgad. \"There's no way for the teachers or Council to tell if someone has a link unless the dragons tell them\u2014and none of us are going to tell them. As long as we're careful, there's no reason for anyone to be suspicious. Zephyr can keep practicing witchcraft and we can keep working as riders, and no one will ever be the wiser.\"\n\n\"Stupid children!\" Korgad snapped. \"Why even bother telling me if you're not going to listen to what I say? Do you know what will happen if you're caught?\"\n\n\"Then we won't get caught!\" Nova said back. \"Now, drop it, or you're gonna scare the younglets.!\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Korgad hissed, pawing at the ground in agitation. \"If this is what you all mean to do, I'll protect you as best I can. You must understand, however, this is not a game. If you grow careless or act recklessly, you could all four of you be executed.\"\n\nAll four of them\u2026Nova swallowed, knowing that she had to think about more than just her and Zephyr now. If anything happened to the younglets, she'd never forgive herself.\n\n\"I understand,\" Nova said after a moment, feeling the weight of her decision already. \"We'll be careful, I promise.\"\n\n\"Yes, we'll be careful,\" Rune agreed with a nod. \"I don't want anyone to get in trouble over me; I'm sorry.\"\n\nKorgad hesitated, giving the smaller dragon a look and then sighing, shaking his head. \"It's not your fault, Rune,\" he said. \"You did what had to be done to save your friend. It's a mark of courage. I just\u2026\" He narrowed his eyes. \"I want you all to be safe.\"\n\nHe really did, Nova realized, seeing the look in his eyes. Nova should have been talking to him from the start. She should have trusted he'd understand, and maybe things wouldn't have reached this point if she'd just asked him for help. She guessed maybe she was still used to how things had used to be, when she and Zephyr had been on their own. But things weren't like that anymore, and she had to adjust.\n\nShe wasn't on her own any longer.\n\nA few hours later found Nova walking out onto the portico with the other recruits\u2014no, she corrected herself. With the other first-year students, ready for class. There were around a hundred of them altogether, from all three groups, their dragons lined up on the edge of the platform with their tails hanging over the edge as they waited. Nova immediately spotted the younglets in their hand-me-down leathers, looking eager and excited near the end of the line with Korgad lazily lounging over a mountain crag nearby. Nova wasn't sure if his insistence on watching the lessons was reassuring or embarrassing, but it felt like a mixture of both. She was glad he'd be there if anything went wrong, but it didn't help that Fayta was already snickering to her friends and nodding pointedly at him.\n\n\"Welcome, students!\" Dafyd called as he stepped into view, offering them all a smile. \"Or I should say, hello again. I know you were expecting the commander, but I'm afraid he's been called rather suddenly to the north, and as I've already been working with you all during your probacio training, I've agreed to take his place while he's away.\"\n\nA whisper of unease went through the group, and Nova couldn't blame them. The sky seemed eerily empty now, with all their dragons waiting behind them and the rest off to some fight. She hadn't realized how used to dragons she'd grown until most of them were gone.\n\n\"Now, now, there's no need to worry,\" Dafyd reassured them. \"The commander, along with the rest of our forces, knows how to hold his own in battle, should the need for it arise. In the meantime, we must continue on and ready ourselves for the day on which we'll be called to arms ourselves. Now, one of the most valuable tools in a dragon's arsenal is, of course, a link-jump. The act of using magic to teleport from one place to another instantaneously. That is what we'll be learning today.\"\n\nExcitement stirred through the crowd, everyone looking eagerly over to their dragons, and Nova couldn't help but feel her own interest spike, as well. Finally, they'd be learning link-jumps! She glanced over to the twins with a smile, feeling a surge of excitement from Hake and a glimmer of pride from Rune, who, too obviously, had already done one herself without being taught.\n\n\"Everyone, mount your dragons!\" Dafyd called, smiling at their excitement. \"We're flying out to Mount Drells to perform the exercise, and I'll give further instructions upon arrival. Move out!\"\n\nThe other students all hurried to their dragons, mounting and starting to fly away as Nova crossed the portico towards the twins, who were eagerly jumping around and chattering while Korgad laughed from his perch above them.\n\n\"Nova! Nova, I want to learn to jump!\" Hake said at once, lowering his head to her and pushing it against her hand once she lifted it, prompting her to scratch his scales.\n\n\"I know,\" Nova laughed, wanting to fly out to Drells on Hake, but deciding to fly on Rune instead, hopeful about keeping the spotted younglet from feeling too left out. \"I'm going to ride Rune on the way to get there, though, alright?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Hake sighed, wilting a little before perking up. \"I'll race you there!\" He turned at once, jumping from the portico and shooting off across the sky before they could respond, Korgad letting out another laugh at the younglet's actions.\n\nMounting Rune, and with Korgad following behind, Nova flew out to Drells with the others. Although she'd flown with the Caelum group before, which had started with around thirty recruits and ended with just over twenty, this was the first time she'd ridden with such a large number of dragons, the skies filled as the hundred of them all soared down towards the other mountain. Nova marveled at the difference such numbers made, both in view and in the quality of flight. Rune didn't have to work hard to keep up, near the back of the group where there wasn't much wind resistance. Almost the whole flight was spent gliding, giving Nova the chance to look around at her other classmates.\n\nThe other Caelum recruits were easy to spot, most of them flying near the front by Dafyd in pricy-looking leathers, some of them\u2014like those of Fayta and Garlet\u2014even matching their dragons' saddles. Apparently, they'd taken their example from Dafyd, in his black and silver matching set with Lir. But the other groups' members didn't have the same look, Nova realized. Hake and Rune weren't the only dragons in standardized tan leathers, and many of the riders looked decidedly poor, in coarse, woven tunics and scuffed boots, their leathers mismatched and thin. In flight behavior and style, however, they showed no difference. Some of the most underdressed of the Bestia students were flying as well as Fayta and the others, if not better, their dragons seeming as eager as Nova's.\n\nThe group all reached Drells, circling around the lake and landing alongside the bank while Dafyd and Lir flew overhead, Dafyd calling out instructions.\n\n\"The key to a link-jump is familiarity!\" he called. \"The way it works is that you must have a clear picture in your mind of a certain location. Details, scents, feelings, these things linger in the mind, and when you recall them, you share those images with your dragon through your link. This establishes a connection, a conduit through which magic can flow. Once you've learned to recognize that magic and harness it to serve your purpose, your dragon can unleash it in a burst of tangible energy\u2014much like a portal\u2014and jump.\"\n\nHe and Lir vanished in a burst of white light, reappearing on the other side of the lake while the students all drew in a breath and then began chattering to each other in excitement, waiting for Dafyd to return.\n\nNova, meanwhile, was having a bit of a hard time understanding these 'instructions,' feeling frustrated. They were supposed to visualize a place\u2014fine, she could do that. But how did they 'recognize and harness' the magic? He'd just told them to do it without explaining how.\n\n\"How do I 'harness' magic?\" she asked Korgad. \"What's it supposed to feel like?\"\n\n\"Always with these questions,\" Korgad sighed. \"You feel it, child, there's no 'how.'\"\n\n\"But that doesn't\u2014\" Nova started, but she was interrupted as Dafyd landed near the front of the group again, offering them all a smile.\n\n\"Now then,\" the man said. \"Let's get started.\"\n\nAs Dafyd began organizing everyone into a line to practice jumping over the lake, Nova began trying to 'feel the magic,' reaching for the connection she felt through Hake in the back of her mind. She could feel his eagerness and excitement, as well as the same from Rune, but she didn't know if feeling emotions was the same as tapping into magic. And the other students didn't seem to have her problem understanding this concept; no one was asking any questions or looking confused though they all seemed to have trouble with practical application. Only about half of them were managing to make jumps at all, and nearly all of them came out of it shrieking and flying straight into the lake. Nova noted with pleasure that Fayta was one of the students who couldn't make the jump at all, though she and Garlet both seemed to be determined to do so, straining with concentration and effort as they flew over the lake, no light surrounding them. Maybe that would stop the girl from being smug about everything, though Nova highly doubted it.\n\nFinally, it came time for her turn and she mounted Hake, feeling nervous as they began the flight. Just like with the jousts at the trials, she wanted to make this jump. She didn't want to be among the few who failed, but she still didn't know what magic she was meant to harness\u2014or how.\n\nNova, we have to focus, Hake admonished her. I don't want to fail, either.\n\n\"Right, sorry,\" Nova muttered, frowning in concentration and feeling a new need to succeed\u2014not for herself, but for Hake. The dragon began to pick up speed about halfway across the lake, and Nova let out a breath, trying to focus on the far embankment where she and Zephyr had set up their picnic basket before. Now, to harness the magic.\n\nHow, though?!\n\nHere, Hake said, and then a new feeling came over Nova. It was a tingling, breathless sort of pulsing in her mind, like music through a good pair of headphones, and the color blue came to her mind for some reason, like that of a hot summer sky. She latched onto the feeling, letting out a gasp and allowing it to take over\u2014and then the world disappeared in a flash of white.\n\nIt all came back at once, hitting Nova like a ton of bricks, and her breath caught in her throat, making her choke as a pang went through her head. Ohhhh, wow, that\u2014that was link-jumping?! It hadn't felt that way when Korgad had done it! She hadn't felt much of anything with him; this was a whole different experience. She felt almost as if\u2026as if she hadn't existed, for a moment.\n\nAnd then a surge of cold and wet crashed over her, and she let out a shriek before water filled her lungs, Nova choking on it as she realized they'd hit the lake. She clamped her mouth shut, swimming up and breaking through the surface to cough and gasp for breath as she looked around for Hake, who also broke from the surface nearby, letting out a roar and splashing violently around before shooting out of the water, at which point he grabbed up Nova in his talons and began flying back over to the beach.\n\n\"Good job,\" Dafyd praised them with a laugh as he handed her a towel. \"Very good job, you two. Head on to the back of the line for another turn.\"\n\nThat was it? Just, 'good job, take a towel, go to the back of the line?'\n\nWell, it didn't matter, because her head felt like it was about to split open, and she was cold and wet and her legs were shaking. But, truly, it all felt great! She'd done it\u2026she'd performed a link-jump on her first try!\n\nShe laughed, drying her face off and sponging at her wet clothes as she and Hake moved along, Rune and Korgad joining them after a moment.\n\n\"You did it!\" Rune exclaimed proudly, jumping onto Hake and pushing him to the ground in excitement. \"Yay, yay, you did it!\"\n\n\"Well done,\" Korgad said, letting out a throaty chuckle himself as he tilted his head at Hake. \"How do you feel, boy?\"\n\n\"Nnnngh,\" Hake whined, shaking water out of his wings and pawing at the ground as he walked. \"Didn't like it!\"\n\nKorgad laughed louder. \"Yes, it does take some getting used to.\"\n\n\"How come I didn't feel like that with you?\" Nova asked him, coughing a little again and putting a hand on Korgad's shoulder to steady herself.\n\n\"I didn't draw from your magic,\" Korgad explained. \"I've been at this game for so long, I know how to link-jump without my rider. It's exceedingly difficult still, and exhausting, but possible with enough practice and determination.\" He focused on the twins. \"You two will have to rely on links, though.\"\n\nDid that mean that this was how Zephyr had felt when Rune had link-jumped to catch her, only she hadn't had any idea what was happening? No wonder her friend was so averse to dragon riding now if that was the case.\n\nSuddenly, Nova didn't feel so pleased."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Quiet of the Woods",
                "text": "The students had barely touched down in Stonehaven before Nova was summoned to the Gold Hall, the boy Torin, who had shown them their room, waiting for her on the portico. She had no idea what they wanted now, but her frustration was already climbing high as she and Torin rode the lift down the spire and began the walk to the hall. Why did they have to keep picking on her? Didn't they have more important things to do than follow her every move?\n\nApparently not.\n\nTorin stepped into the hall to announce her, Nova taking a deep breath as she waited outside, trying to stay neutral. There was no guarantee they were going to yell at her\u2026maybe they had something good to say this time.\n\nThe absence of Osa and Gwyn when she entered the room, however, was a bad sign.\n\n\"Lady Nova,\" Lege Alon said at once, glaring at her from behind his long white beard. \"Is it true that you attended your classes accompanied by not one, but three dragons?\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova frowned. \"Is that what this is about? Uh, yeah, I did. But Korgad was just\u2026observing. He wasn't really 'training.'\"\n\n\"Why?\" Lege asked.\n\n\"Because he's Korgad,\" Nova said with a roll of her eyes. \"He does whatever he wants.\"\n\n\"You do realize that, by monopolizing all three dragons, you're preventing others from attempting to bond with the younger twin?\" Lege asked.\n\n\"Who would bond with her?\" Nova frowned. \"Probacio's over, so all the students have dragons already.\"\n\n\"What about next year?\"\n\n\"That'll be next year!\" Nova snapped. \"Are you seriously saying you don't want me to talk to my friend because she might get a rider a year from now?\"\n\nThe two old men exchanged glances while Tila, pale as ever, gave Nova a thoughtful, narrow-eyed look. \"Your friend?\" she asked quietly.\n\n\"Yeah, she's my friend.\" Nova glared. \"And anyway, she's a twin, so everyone's prejudiced against her anyway. No one else even tried to bond with her or Hake during probacio, so I don't see what the problem is!\"\n\n\"And how do you expect to form a team if you have three dragons following along behind you?\" Alon narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Most riders form a team upon completing their probacio training,\" Alon explained. \"But with three dragons to one rider, you have no room for a team.\"\n\n\"Can't the dragons be my team?\"\n\nThe three stared at her for a moment, seeming taken aback by her question.\n\n\"Is it against the rules for them to come with me on missions?\" she asked next, crossing her arms.\n\nThe three exchanged a glance, Lege and Alon frowning now while Tila shook her head.\n\n\"No,\" the woman said.\n\n\"Dafyd said they could come,\" Nova told them. \"And now you say it's not against the rules. Why am I here, again?\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Lege said, looking irritated and waving his hand disdainfully. \"I suppose they may accompany you.\"\n\n\"Oh, they may?\" Nova scoffed, rolling her eyes. \"Thank you, Your Excellency, I'm ever so glad to hear it.\" She swept a low bow before straightening and backing towards the door, jerking her thumb to indicate it. \"May I be dismissed from your presence now?\"\n\n\"You speak in jest, insolent girl,\" Alon glared. \"But do not forget we could expel you still, and you'd not see either of your younglets again.\"\n\nNova stopped, taking in a few deep breaths as anger and a bit of panic rushed over her. Could they do that? Throw her out and keep the twins?!\n\n\"Sorry,\" she made herself say, clenching her fists and feeling her cheeks burn. \"I didn't mean\u2026to offend you.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Alon sniffed, waving her off dismissively. \"You'd do well to remember your manners in the future, child, as I may not be as generous next time.\"\n\n\"Aye, do not think your grandfather's seat immunizes you from consequence,\" Lege agreed. \"Nor the apparent favoritism Gwyn Falla shows your friend.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Nova said.\n\n\"Then you are dismissed,\" Lege told her. \"But your insolence is\u2026appalling. I expect more from a granddaughter of a councilman. Consider this your second warning.\"\n\nOh, come on! They were making things up to punish her for now! Nova didn't let herself say anything else, not trusting her anger, and instead left the hall, waiting for the door to close behind her before letting out an angry growl and running her hands through her hair. They were ridiculous! And Osa and Gwyn being absent only proved that the other three had things rigged against her. At least they'd said she could keep taking Korgad and Rune on missions, though.\n\nNova went straight to her room, skipping out on dinner, and took a long bath, trying to calm down. And it worked, somewhat. The sauna-like quality of the hot tub and the d\u00e9cor did wonders, and by the time she finished and headed back into her room, she finally felt calm enough to realize she was hungry. She grabbed a fresh peach from the fruit bowl (which got refilled daily when they were in class) and lounged on the couch, absently watching the sun set from the picture window, now starting to recognize some of the dragons flying by based on their leathers.\n\nHer life had changed so much.\n\nThe door opened after a while, Zephyr coming in and giving Nova a sympathetic look. \"Hey,\" the other girl greeted her. \"Tough day?\"\n\n\"Ugh, the worst,\" Nova groaned, sitting up. \"The Council is a freaking joke.\"\n\n\"That bad, huh?\" Zephyr sighed, crossing to sit next to Nova and wrapping an arm around Nova's shoulder in a quick hug.\n\n\"They gave me another warning,\" Nova told her. \"For being insolent with them after they called me in to question me for no reason whatsoever.\"\n\nZephyr frowned. \"That's not fair.\"\n\n\"No, it's not!\" Nova agreed. \"I'm just\u2014rgh, I'm so frustrated with all these rules!\"\n\n\"Let's go away for a bit,\" Zephyr suggested, standing back up. \"Like we used to when things got to be too much back home. There's a forest not too far from here. We can fly down on the twins and relax.\"\n\n\"That sounds good,\" Nova admitted. \"But I don't know if it's a good idea to have you riding on Rune where people can see you.\"\n\nZephyr didn't seem deterred, instead offering Nova a grin. \"Come with me,\" she said. \"I've got something to show you.\"\n\nNova followed her friend from the room and down into the Harmoniums, her curiosity growing. \"What are you going to do?\" she asked, looking around the dark and empty caverns as she waited nearby. Zephyr stepped onto the platform, clearing her throat and flashing Nova a grin before beginning to chant.\n\n\"Wysi'ru scor kutyrindus illi'o!\"\n\nAnd then\u2026she vanished.\n\n\"Wha\u2026Zephyr?!\" Nova gasped, looking around. Had she teleported, or was she\u2026invisible?!\n\n\"I'm still here,\" she heard Zephyr's voice, the girl laughing. \"Isn't this amazing? I'm invisible!\"\n\n\"I can't believe it!\" Nova stared. \"I just\u2026wow!\"\n\n\"So, now I can go with you on Rune sometimes!\" Zephyr said, sounding a lot closer than Nova had expected. \"I can turn it off when we get to the woods, and then I'll make myself invisible again when we have to come back.\"\n\n\"Yeah, uh, right,\" Nova said, having to laugh a bit again as she ran a hand through her hair. \"Totally, yeah, let's go!\"\n\nShe turned to leave the Harmoniums and head to the caves but paused because\u2026she had no idea if Zephyr was still here. She couldn't afford to talk to her in public as they walked, though, so she guessed she had to trust she'd be there.\n\nThis was going to take a lot of getting used to.\n\nThe woods on the edge of the mountains were beautiful. Ancient trees stretched high above them with thick trunks and mossy bark, tall enough and far enough apart for the younglets to follow Nova and Zephyr on foot. Branches stretched so far outward that they covered the forest in a canopy, swaying lightly in the breeze with a sea of rustling leaves, glimpses of moonlight flitting in where it found a break among the branches. More light was provided by the flickering candles they'd brought with them, but Nova couldn't hear any of the normal sounds of the woods back in Florida\u2014the katydids, frogs, and cicadas replaced by the sounds of crickets and hooting owls. Nova even heard one or two wolves howling in the distance, a thrill of excitement going through her each time, but she knew that with two dragons growing bigger every day, they'd be safe even if the wolves got close.\n\nThe younglets had apparently been there hunting with Korgad a few times, and so they spent the walk recounting their stories while Nova and Zephyr walked ahead of them, listening and offering comments here and there as they poked around the forest.\n\nNova was feeling much better now. The woods got to her every time, no matter how different the environment. She let out a deep breath, looking up and watching the moonlight dance through the trees as she wandered down the path, tuning the dragons out behind her. This place was so peaceful, so quiet.\n\nWhy had the crickets stopped chirping?\n\nShe frowned, looking around at the woods, but she didn't see anything amiss. \"Shh,\" she hushed the dragons over her shoulder, holding a hand up and blowing out her candle.\n\n\"Nova?\" Zephyr whispered, following suit and blowing her own candle out as the dragons both stopped talking. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nova admitted. \"Something doesn't feel right. Let's head back.\"\n\nShe turned around, Zephyr and the twins letting her pass them and starting to follow behind her again. Hake and Rune both crouched low and looked around with narrowed eyes, ready to pounce if something should attack them. Nova felt Hake's protective instincts flare up in the back of her head, as well as a glimmer of nervous determination from Rune. The forest was completely quiet now, save for the rustling leaves, and she couldn't help but feel the bad feeling in her grow. Something was about to happen, she could feel it.\n\nAn unearthly, high-pitched screech echoed through the woods from who knew where, Nova tensing and dropping her extinguished candle as she grabbed her bow and notched an arrow at once, stretching it out and pointing it around\u2026but nothing came out of the woods. She let out a breath, feeling a bit embarrassed as she registered that the screech had sounded kind of distant, though not as far away as she'd like. Another screech suddenly sounded from behind them\u2014still far enough away that they couldn't see the source, but close enough for Nova to feel a jolt of panic.\n\n\"Come on,\" she breathed, turning to Hake and putting away her weapon for a moment so she could mount. \"Zephyr, get onto Rune; we'll go faster riding.\"\n\nZephyr obeyed, Hake and Rune starting to silently dart through the woods as Nova drew her bow again and got it ready in case they met anything on the road.\n\nAnd then she saw it.\n\nLooking around right as Hake ran past a break in the trees, Nova saw a wide clearing, an expanse lit by moonlight, and it held well over a dozen half-human, half-monstrous creatures all gathered together, weapons drawn. One of them\u2014a harpy\u2014turned right when they passed, meeting Nova's eye with a large, black, bird-like one of her own.\n\nMythoi.\n\nNova's heart pounded as she reached out with her mind, urging Hake to go faster, the images of the battlefield she'd seen all those weeks ago flooding her mind unwillingly. The younglets were too young for this\u2014they barely knew how to fight or control their magic. They couldn't get into a fight with Mythoi! She notched her bow with a shaking hand, starting to have trouble breathing, and turned around in her seat to shoot at the monsters, but\u2026none had followed.\n\nMaybe they thought they didn't have enough numbers?\n\nOf course! They didn't know the twins were younglets; they'd probably just seen two dragon riders and hadn't wanted to cause unnecessary fighting.\n\nShe let out a breath, relief surging through her, but they weren't out of the woods yet.\n\nIf the Mythoi were here, this close to Stonehaven, there could be more. They could be gathering\u2026they could be getting ready for an attack.\n\nShe had to warn Dafyd.\n\nAs soon as they broke from the trees, she gave the order to fly and both dragons shot into the air, beating their wings as they soared to the school. She and Zephyr dismounted as soon as they reached the portico, starting towards the dormitories, but Nova skidded to a stop as she realized\u2026she had no idea where Dafyd lived.\n\n\"How do we sound the alarm?\" Nova demanded, running a hand through her hair. \"What are we supposed to do?! Is there a\u2026a guard or something?\"\n\nRune threw her head back, letting out a loud, long roar, and Nova gasped, not having expected it. She whirled around to see what was wrong before realizing the younglet was trying to attract attention\u2014to sound an alarm.\n\nIt seemed to work, lights starting to flicker on in the windows above them as a man in leathers left a small turret on the far side of the portico, holding up a lantern as he started over towards them.\n\n\"Zephyr!\" Nova gasped, remembering just in time that Zephyr wasn't supposed to be here. \"Quick, turn yourself invisible!\"\n\nZephyr gasped, as well, before hurriedly muttering the chant, vanishing right as the guard got close enough that he would have seen her.\n\n\"What happened?\" the man demanded. \"What are you doing out here this late?\"\n\n\"I was out for a flight,\" Nova said at once, pointing over to the woods. \"In the woods, over there, south of the school, and I saw at least a dozen Mythoi, in a clearing!\"\n\n\"Mythoi?!\" The guard drew back in surprise as the school door opened now, Dafyd and a few others starting to head towards them. \"Lan'doreth!\"\n\nNova paused, distracted by this unfamiliar word, but she shook it off as Dafyd reached them.\n\n\"Mythoi in the southern woods,\" the guard reported.\n\n\"What?!\" Dafyd stared. \"So close?!\"\n\n\"I saw them,\" Nova told him. \"At least a dozen, but they didn't attack us.\"\n\n\"What were they doing?\" Dafyd demanded.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nova admitted. \"I didn't stop to look\u2014we came right back here as soon as we realized something was wrong.\"\n\n\"Smart, very good,\" Dafyd nodded, though frowning, running a hand through his brown curly hair and looking surprisingly uncertain\u2014especially since he wasn't in his leathers, just a plain red tunic and belt. \"Nearly all the others are in the north, too!\"\n\n\"What should we do?\" the guard asked.\n\n\"Gather the rest of the soldiers,\" Dafyd decided after a moment. \"And bring me Anasia and her team. We'll act as scouts, to go and see what we're dealing with\u2026and eradicate the problem if we can. I'll wake our dragons.\"\n\n\"We can do that,\" Hake volunteered. \"We'll get to the caves faster!\"\n\n\"Very well, thank you,\" Dafyd nodded, offering him a small smile. \"But then stay put, understand? You, Korgad, and the rest of the student dragons, get your leathers on and stay with the school. Watch the sky over the southern woods; we'll signal if something happens.\" He turned to where a bunch of the other students were now milling out onto the portico. \"Worry not!\" he called, flashing them a smile that Nova could tell was faked. \"Return to bed\u2014there's merely been a sighting, nothing serious!\"\n\n\"A sighting?\" Lorn, one of the former Terra recruits, repeated with wide eyes. \"Portal or Mythoi?\"\n\n\"Just a handful of Mythoi, Lorn, nothing serious,\" Dafyd said as he passed.\n\n\"Are you going to fight them?\" Fayta demanded, pushing her way through the crowd. Nova nearly froze in surprise at the girl's getup, her normal white leathers and pale blue tunic having been replaced with a bright orange, floor-length silk robe embroidered with white flowers and tied at the waist with a white sash, and her dark red hair piled into a mess of braids on top of her head. She certainly didn't seem smug or intimidating now, that was for sure.\n\n\"We're going to investigate,\" Dafyd corrected her. \"Now, students, if you please, I must be on my way. Clear out the hall, please, let me through!\"\n\nNova stopped following him, stepping away and letting him pass even with the crowd milling around, questions and concerns floating around before they finally died down and Nova made her way back to her room, looking around and hoping Zephyr had made it back okay.\n\n\"I'm here,\" the girl suddenly said from beside her.\n\nAfter the adrenaline from the sighting, Nova's nerves jumped through the roof at the sound and she let out a shriek before she could help herself, jumping away from the voice and then catching herself, bursting into laughter at her reaction.\n\n\"Oh gosh, I'm sorry!\" Zephyr said at once. \"I didn't mean to scare you, I\u2014here, one minute.\"\n\nShe uttered the chant to become visible again and appeared in front of Nova, who couldn't help but burst into laughter again.\n\n\"What?\" Zephyr demanded, chuckling and blushing as she adjusted her glasses. \"I swear, I didn't think you'd react like that!\"\n\n\"No, no, it's fine,\" Nova waved her off, still laughing. \"Oh gosh, can you believe it?! We\u2014we go out into the woods for one night and have to send out the artillery!\"\n\n\"Do you think Dafyd and the others will be okay?\" Zephyr asked, biting her lip.\n\n\"I hope so,\" Nova said, sobering a little and crossing over to the window, looking out even though she couldn't see the woods from here. \"It didn't look like there were very many, at least.\"\n\nAnd the look she'd gotten from that harpy\u2026it hadn't looked anything like the wild eyes of the harpy that had attacked Zephyr on the battlefield. Now that the rush was over, she reflected on that moment, when their eyes had met. Thinking back on it, she realized the expression in those dark, bird-like eyes had been\u2026different.\n\nShe sighed, turning back to Zephyr and opening her mouth to say something more before the dark room suddenly took on a blue tone. Nova turned back to the window, her blood running cold as she saw the familiar blue lightning sparking into view, and a vast expanse of red sky appearing in the night, only about a half-mile away from the mountain.\n\nNo\u2026no, this couldn't be happening! A portal was opening here?! Right after Dafyd and the last of the soldiers had all left for the woods? She turned at once, reaching out to Hake and telling him to send the rest of the dragons out to fight, then running to the door and stopping only as Zephyr grabbed her wrist.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" the girl demanded, her eyes wide.\n\n\"To the portico!\" Nova told her, pulling free and wrenching the door open. \"Get everyone up\u2014Stonehaven's under attack!\"\n\nAnd they were the only ones left to fight."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Hero",
                "text": "By the time Nova reached the portico again, the Mythoi were already landing. She stopped cold at the sight of dozens of the creatures hitting the stone floors, screeching loudly as they drew weapons, all of them looking wild and agitated\u2014especially as the first of the dragons swooped down from above, grabbing at the monsters and tossing them over the edge with a roar.\n\nThe rest of the monsters immediately began running for cover\u2014which meant running straight towards Nova, the library, and the school building behind her. She gasped, drawing her bow and fumbling to get it notched, but then another dragon swooped down, landing between them and starting to knock the Mythoi away with his horns and tail, several other dragons landing and doing the same.\n\nThe door banged open behind her and the other riders began running out, all in a strange mix of leathers and pajamas, weapons drawn and faces pale as they mounted their dragons when they could reach them, others rushing straight into the fight on foot.\n\n\"Nova!\"\n\nNova whirled, relief surging through her at the sight of Korgad swooping low, the twins flying along behind him. Her relief was short-lived, though, as she saw movement in the corner of her eye and turned to see a minotaur charging towards her, horns lowered as his hooves thundered along the stone platform. She couldn't help but shriek, finally managing to loose an arrow only to have it miss the beast, but then the minotaur was knocked back by a snarling Hake, the younglet roaring as he began wrestling with the beast\u2014who was much smaller than Hake, but formidable, roaring right back and trying to beat Hake back.\n\nNova didn't have time to do more than gasp before she was lifted into the air, Korgad grabbing her with his talons and shoving her to the side so that she could grab his saddle. He let go of her the moment she got a good grip on the footholds and she was screaming again, though she'd barely realized it herself, clamping her mouth shut and forcing herself to get a grip as she climbed into the proper position while Korgad circled back around towards the portico.\n\nHer heart raced as she clung to the front of Korgad's saddle, looking over her shoulder to see the portal sparking to a close behind her. She couldn't believe this was happening! At least no more monsters were flooding through, but too many had already made it in and she knew they were outnumbered. What were they supposed to do?!\n\nHake! Was Hake okay?! She closed her eyes, focusing on their connection and picking up on his rage and determination. He was still fighting, then; he wasn't afraid or hurt. She opened her eyes just in time to see Korgad diving towards a pegasus. The winged horse\u2014which she'd once thought majestic\u2014snarled with a desperate, wild sort of neigh as it charged to meet them.\n\nKorgad barreled over it easily, knocking it out of the air and hitting it with his tail, the pegasus screeching in pain as it began to fall.\n\nWhy did it hurt so much to see that? she wondered.\n\nKorgad soared back over to the portico, where more and more students were finding their dragons, the fight quickly seeming to shift in their favor as the Mythoi all began jumping off the edge of the platform, trying to fly away as the dragons chased them down.\n\nBut\u2026they had to stay together and protect the school, didn't they? The Council and all of the witches and school staff were still inside, while the soldiers were all either miles away in the north or scouring the woods on the other side of the mountain. Maybe they were all inexperienced, but that just meant they had to work together to get through the fight. If the students all separated into the night, chasing down smaller monsters, they'd all be open to attack.\n\n\"NO!\" Nova screamed at them. \"NO! LET THEM GO! STAY WITH THE SCHOOL!\"\n\nA few of the students and dragons seemed to hear her, turning back towards the school, and then, suddenly, another portal sparked into life in the sky. But unlike the portals Nova had seen before, this lightning was purple and seemed to be sparking far more chaotically, showing a bright, silvery-white sky behind it. What kind of portal was this?!\n\nA few of the Mythoi near the new portal started screaming, seemingly pulled into it as if they couldn't escape from its gravity.\n\nAnd Garlet was struggling to escape, as well, having been fighting nearby and now beating his wings against the force\u2026but he was losing ground, Fayta looking panicked astride him.\n\n\"Over there!\" Nova pointed to Korgad, the old dragon changing course and folding his wings in, roaring as they shot towards the pair like a bullet.\n\n\"GET BACK!\" Fayta yelled to them, only looking more desperate now as she gripped Garlet's saddle tightly, her hair and the hem of her robe streaming behind her towards the portal as if her hold on Garlet were the only thing keeping her in place. \"STOP\u2014IT'S TOO STRONG!\"\n\n\"SHUT UP!\" Nova bellowed back, only feeling more determined as Korgad lowered his head, hitting the pair from the side with all of the force he could muster and knocking them out of the path of the portal.\n\nFayta shrieked at the impact and Garlet let out a frightened roar, Korgad pushing off of them to stay in the air while the two fell for a moment, Garlet catching himself in the air shortly after so that the two could turn and shakily fly back towards the portico.\n\nNova and Korgad turned back to face the portal, watching as a few more Mythoi fell into it before it sparked out of existence.\n\nThe world went silent for a moment\u2026and then the Mythoi all began screeching and whooping in panic, dispersing at once and darting away from Stonehaven in any direction they could. The dragons let out last roars, the students among them cheering and whooping, and Korgad roared, as well, turning to fly back to the portico.\n\n\"Nova! Nova!\" Rune exclaimed at the second they landed. \"Oh, Nova, I was so worried!\"\n\n\"Did he hit you?!\" Hake demanded, bouncing over to her and all but pushing her off Korgad's saddle with his snout so that Nova barely got her feet under her before landing. \"Did I stop him in time?!\"\n\n\"Y-yes, Hake, it's\u2014yeah, you stopped him,\" Nova panted, pressing her hand to her heart. \"Oh my gosh, I've never been so scared in my life! Is anyone hurt?\"\n\n\"Nova!\" Zephyr yelled, darting past the dragons and running over to Nova to tackle her in a hug. \"Oh my gosh, you're okay!\"\n\n\"I'm okay,\" Nova repeated, hugging Zephyr back as the adrenaline started ebbing away. \"I'm not going anywhere,\" she added in a whisper. \"I promise.\"\n\n\"You did it!\" Rayden was calling then, Zephyr pulling out of the hug with a relieved laugh, but leaving her arm over Nova's shoulder as they turned to face the other students, who were all starting to dismount and surround them. \"If it weren't for you, who knows how many people might have been pulled into that portal!\"\n\n\"Hail to Lady Nova!\" someone else in the crowd called, a resounding round of applause and cheers sounding off from the others.\n\nWhat\u2026they were cheering for her?\n\nShe bit back her grin as best she could, feeling her cheeks heat, but she couldn't help but feel a rush of pride and happiness at the praise. She'd just been trying to keep everyone safe, doing what she had to do because she knew no one else was there to do it.\n\nBut now\u2026she kind of felt like a hero.\n\nNova was still riding the high from her victory the next day, the students all cheering for her again when she and Zephyr entered the gallery for breakfast. Everyone got up and crowded around to talk to her, thank her, tell her how cool she'd been\u2026and then, when the news was announced that class was canceled for the day while the Council discussed the attack and the few who had been injured were treated, everyone stayed in the gallery and asked for Nova's side of the story, rumors having spread that she'd not only been the one to lead the other students in defending the castle against the Mythoi, but also the one who had seen the threat in the woods in the first place. She assured everyone that the story wasn't that interesting, that she'd just happened to be in the right place at the right time, but they all insisted she tell it anyway\u2026so she did. And they had all listened, enraptured, and praised her quick thinking and 'natural leadership,' especially when it came to her saving Fayta and Garlet.\n\nShe was trying really hard not to get a big head about it, but it was hard\u2014especially considering she'd never had people be proud of her like this before.\n\nOf course, her contribution wasn't the only story being told in the gallery. Other rumors were circulating, as well\u2014one being that Dafyd was in trouble with the Council for taking all the graduates and some of the older students off to the woods, leaving the school in the hands of first-years during one of the worst direct attacks on the school in recent years. After he'd gotten back with the rest of the soldiers, having dealt with the band of Mythoi there, he'd been summoned straight to the Gold Hall, where, rumor had it, he was being reprimanded for the first time. Which Nova actually felt pretty bad about, considering she'd been the one who'd told him about the Mythoi in the woods in the first place. Not to mention that Dafyd hated the thought of disappointing the Council and was perhaps the most law-abiding person Nova had ever met.\n\nAnother rumor was being spread, as well, that more portals had been opened all over Ragond the night before\u2014including a couple in nearby Terrenov and several in the large city of Caravon, some of the guards along with a mage having been sent to investigate the reports. This was a big deal, as towns and cities in Ragond apparently had protective charms and wards placed on them to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and portals had never opened in town before, let alone trapped people inside\u2014which was what was happening now, according to rumor.\n\nNova found that rumor particularly interesting. Korgad had said that all of the trouble with portals had started with the war twenty years ago, and her mother had only been missing for nine years. Was it possible that she'd been caught by an unstable portal, just like the people from Terrenov and Caravon?\n\nThough, what Seren could have been doing around a portal without Korgad, Nova didn't know.\n\nHer thoughts\u2014and the latest stories being told around her\u2014were interrupted when Dafyd entered the gallery looking tired and more than a little discouraged, though he offered a small smile to the students as they all quieted down.\n\n\"Hello, students,\" he said. \"I have a few announcements to make. First off\u2026I'd like to say how proud of you I am, each and every one of you.\"\n\nHis gaze lingered on Nova and she straightened, feeling the pride and pleasure return as she couldn't help but smile back, her face heating a bit in a blush. She didn't even care what Dafyd thought of her, and never had, but for some reason it did feel good to hear him say that.\n\n\"You all fought bravely,\" Dafyd continued, looking away from Nova and towards the others once more. \"You did everything right, from what I'm told, and we at Stonehaven are all safe due to your quick thinking and heroic actions. The three students who were injured in the fight have been fully healed and are resting comfortably in the hospital wing.\" He paused, letting out a sigh. \"On to my next announcement\u2026I'm afraid the Council has placed some new restrictions on students in light of the attack. You must all be inside by dusk each night\u2014\"\n\nNova groaned inwardly as a murmur of dissent went through the crowd, everyone else seeming just as frustrated as Nova, but Dafyd raised his hand to try to quiet them, sighing again.\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"Believe me, I tried to contest it, but the Council doesn't want to risk losing anyone else to the portals.\"\n\n\"What about link-jumping?\" Masa asked with a frown. \"Weren't we supposed to accompany you this weekend to teach the first-years to navigate jumps in the dark?\"\n\n\"That has unfortunately been postponed, as well,\" Dafyd told him. \"Councilman Osa is seeking permission from his seatmates to lead the lesson personally, but until the issue is decided, we cannot move forward.\"\n\n\"What about the library?\" one of the witches asked.\n\n\"As long as you use the top floor skywalk to return to the dorms, you may continue to use the library after dusk,\" Dafyd said. \"The library, the spire, the classrooms and gallery, and the dormitory's common area are all still open to you until your normal curfew; it's only going outside after dusk that is barred. In addition, daytime classes are now restricted to school grounds, and will end an hour earlier.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Teira asked.\n\n\"If there's another attack, we cannot afford to have so many of our students away from the school,\" Dafyd explained. \"As many of our classes involve flying to various locations around Ragond in order to familiarize everyone with the landscape and practice link-jumping, it's impractical to continue under the new circumstances.\"\n\nThe others all seemed to think this over, everyone quietly whispering to each other as Nova exchanged a glance with Zephyr.\n\n\"If no one has any other questions, I'll leave you to your meal,\" Dafyd said, apparently not realizing breakfast had ended nearly an hour before. \"I'd like to say again how well you all did during the attack yesterday, and I know you're all going to make fine soldiers in time. Anasia?\" He nodded to the girl, who stood with her teammates, and the four of them followed Dafyd from the room, leaving the rest of the students in silence.\n\nNova frowned down at the table, thinking over all of the new rules in frustration. The Council shouldn't be keeping them away from the fight just because they were young. Or had they forgotten it had been Nova and her classmates who'd fought off the Mythoi attack last night, while the Council had been nowhere to be found?\n\nThe portals were posing a big problem, though. Especially the purple one that had almost swallowed Fayta and Garlet. The other girl hadn't come to breakfast, and Nova couldn't shake the memory of the look of panic on Fayta's face. She was just glad Korgad had gotten to them in time. She might never have liked Fayta\u2014in fact, she might have almost hated her at times\u2014but that didn't mean she wanted the girl gone. That portal had taken Mythoi, too, though.\n\nWait. Why would the Mythoi open a portal that swallowed up their own forces? The creatures hadn't seemed to know it was coming, reacting in as much surprise as the dragon riders. Had it been random?\n\nKorgad had said that world portals were natural phenomena\u2026but he'd said that about the portal to Earth specifically, not these other smaller portals the Mythoi were using. In fact, if she remembered correctly, he'd once told her that those portals were being opened by Mythoi and that they'd found a way to force them open and were using them to invade Ragond.\n\nMaybe the Mythoi didn't have as much control over the portals as they'd thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Forum",
                "text": "Nova followed the other students through the foyer of the Gold Hall into a larger room she hadn't seen before; it was set up much like the main classroom, but without desks, and the marble steps that formed the bleachers were instead lined with ornate wooden benches and arranged to face five grand thrones upon which the Council sat, about to hold a public forum.\n\nThe forum was the talk of the school, and as the girls moved to sit with Rayden and the other witches, Nova could tell it was serious. Where the students were usually loud and excitable, the hall was dead silent, despite the girls being among the last to arrive with the majority of the school already gathered. It had been a few days since the attack against the school, and rumors had been circulating regarding what would be said here\u2014if there were going to be more rules, if the rules were to be lifted, if anyone had heard from the soldiers in the north\u2026\n\nDafyd had tried to tell the students not to worry, that the purpose of the forum was merely to discuss the situation and determine how to protect the citizens of Ragond, but considering how anxious Dafyd himself was looking these days, he hadn't been convincing.\n\nAt least they were finally going to hear from the Council.\n\n\"Silence for His Excellency, Lege D'Allos, Head of the Five,\" an officiant near the thrones called\u2014despite the silence already permeating the room. \"His Excellency, Alon the Old, First Commander\u2026His Excellency, Osa the Bold, High General\u2026Her Excellency, Tila Newan, Elder Rider\u2026and Her Excellency, Gwyn Falla, High Witch.\"\n\nThe officiant stepped away, and Lege began to speak.\n\n\"In recent years, the war has escalated,\" the old man began. \"The creatures of Mythos continue to prove hostile, invading Ragond through unstable portals and slaughtering our civilians in hordes. We have tried to mitigate the damages caused and prevent the Mythoi from continuing these attacks, but our efforts are proving fruitless, the Mythoi unleashing and weaponizing dangerous new portals in order to abduct our soldiers and civilians from within the safety of the cities. After much discussion, the Council has decided to open the floor to questions from the soldiers and soldiers-in-training here at Stonehaven.\"\n\nLege narrowed his eyes at Osa, who frowned back unchallengingly, giving Nova the impression that the old man wasn't too pleased about the public forum. She felt a stirring of pride for her grandfather. Like maybe Osa was on her side and that of the other students.\n\n\"We ask that you respect the decorum of this ancient hall,\" Lege continued, \"and present your questions calmly and without confrontation. If you wish to be called on, raise your hand and we will hear you.\"\n\nSeveral hands went up at once. Lege raised a small golden scepter that Nova hadn't noticed before, pointing it towards Mage Kamaria-Zahra, the woman teaching their history and philosophy classes now that they were full-time students.\n\n\"Reports have come in from all over Ragond,\" the woman announced. \"Over a hundred citizens have gone missing from the new portals, and the people are demanding to know what the Council intends to do to prevent these portals from continuing to open in towns and cities, as well as what is being done to find those who have been taken already.\"\n\n\"The Council intends to search for the missing citizens as soon as it can safely be done,\" Alon the Old replied. \"As we do not yet know how the new portals work or how to open them ourselves, we are unable to risk sending forces in unprepared. As for what we do to protect the citizens, we intend to advise them to stay indoors after dark, in order to\u2014\"\n\n\"The portals are opening inside homes,\" Kamaria-Zahra interrupted him bluntly. \"Some have been stolen from their beds while they sleep; doors and walls mean nothing to magic.\"\n\n\"We shall study the new portals comprehensively,\" Lege told her. \"In fact, I move to call High Witch Falla to organize teams of licensed mages and witches to travel to the locations where portals have opened, to reset the protective wards, investigate the portals, and take witness statements, returning here to compile a report so that we may better understand what we're dealing with\u2014and, at that time, come up with a plan of action to rescue those who have been lost.\"\n\nSomehow, Nova didn't find this reassuring. It seemed to placate Kamaria-Zahra, however. The woman still frowned, but she nodded and took her seat as more hands went up.\n\n\"Captain Falla,\" Lege said, pointing the scepter to Dafyd, who stood with a frown of his own.\n\n\"What news have we heard from the soldiers in the north?\"\n\nThe Council exchanged glances. \"We have not had any messages from the north,\" Lege said, eliciting a murmur of surprise and concern from the crowd. \"However, this does not mean there is cause for alarm. Their hawks could simply have been waylaid; or they might have encountered problems greater than imagined, requiring their immediate attention and preventing them from sending messages forthright.\"\n\n\"So, we're simply leaving them be?\" Captain Jung-Dae demanded. \"Are we not sending scouts to check their status?\"\n\n\"We have no more scouts to send.\" Lege gritted his teeth. \"Unless you would like to volunteer.\"\n\n\"Gladly,\" Jung-Dae said at once. \"I shall go this very hour if permitted.\"\n\nThis seemed to surprise Lege, who blinked for a moment before offering the man a tight-lipped smile. \"Very well,\" he said. \"You may select two second-year students to accompany you if you wish.\"\n\nNova frowned as a few of the older students volunteered, Jung-Dae selecting his candidates and instructing them to meet with him after the forum. She felt like the Council was doing surprisingly little of their own free will, and having to be pushed to decide anything at all\u2026with those decisions ultimately being to allow other people to do their work for them. This was how they ruled their world?\n\nThe matter 'settled,' Lege called on another speaker, this being one of the mages from the library who Zephyr often talked to, though Nova didn't know his name.\n\n\"The mages have been instructed to search the library records for historical occurrences such as these,\" the mage said. \"However, you have been on the Council of Five for well over a thousand years. Have you ever heard of portals opening within cities, or taking people against their will? We have no time frame of history in which to begin our search, Your Excellency, and we'd appreciate the information.\"\n\n\"If such an event has happened in the past, it was not on a wide enough scale to have been brought to our attention,\" Lege replied. \"If I were you, I'd begin my search among the personal reports and records of individual riders, perhaps from over a thousand years ago\u2014anything detailing one-time phenomena, rather than searching for a widespread case.\"\n\nThings went on this way for a while, with many more questions being dismissed or passed off to others, while Nova grew more and more frustrated with the attitudes of Lege and Alon, specifically. They weren't giving the other three a chance to talk, dominating the conversation and making calls without consulting the others while downplaying the concerns being presented and making them out to not be a big deal. And maybe they didn't think it was. They weren't the ones who'd been fighting, and they hadn't lost anyone through the portals. For two who 'were as gods,' they certainly didn't seem to care about the mortals in their care.\n\nThe meeting felt like it was dragging on forever, but right when Nova had given up on getting any real answers, the 'decorum' of the hall was interrupted by a guard who came barreling into the room, bolting down the aisle towards the Council as the crowd turned to him with a collective gasp.\n\n\"A portal!\" the guard yelled to the Council without pause. \"A portal has opened up over the eastern plains! Thousands of Mythoi are invading!\"\n\nNova drew in a breath, feeling a jolt of shock and dread as the others around her all started to clamor and murmur, as well. Thousands!? There was no way they could fight thousands of Mythoi! Even if the soldiers had been there to fight, there were only around three hundred of them licensed, and then maybe two hundred students in both years\u2014and that was if they counted the witches! How were they supposed to fight off thousands of bloodthirsty monsters?!\n\nBut the guard wasn't done speaking, and his next words made Nova's blood run cold.\n\n\"They're trying to force open the world portal!\" he exclaimed. \"They're going to invade Earth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Into the Sea",
                "text": "\"No!\" Zephyr exclaimed beside Nova. \"They can't attack Earth! The people there don't know how to fight!\"\n\n\"Order, ORDER!\" Lege bellowed, exclamations rising up all over the room.\n\n\"We can't fight off thousands of Mythoi!\"\n\n\"All the soldiers are gone\u2014what are we supposed to do?\"\n\n\"They're going to destroy the portal!\"\n\nNova gritted her teeth, a lifetime of memories flashing through her mind at the idea of Earth being attacked by ancient, magical monsters. The portal had opened on a Florida beach, near where she'd grown up! She thought of all of the people still there\u2014people she'd only thought of once or twice these past few months, and who now had no idea what was coming. And what about all the kids there? All of the foster kids she'd shared houses with on and off for the past nine years? What about the little ones she'd had to look out for, who couldn't take care of themselves? What about the older ones who'd taken care of her when she'd been small, who had grown up in the years since and finally had a chance to live for themselves?\n\nWhat about the kids who were going to be orphans tomorrow, if no one came to help?\n\nAnother voice lifted above the crowd, and it was the cold voice of Alon over on his throne. \"We cannot risk a confrontation!\" he called. \"The beasts are leaving us unharmed, so let Earth protect itself!\"\n\nA hot, burning rage filled Nova at this. \"HOW DARE YOU!?\" she screamed, jumping to her feet and clenching her fists as she glared across the hall to the Council. \"This isn't a game! There are real people out there, and you're just going to let them die?!\"\n\nThe crowd quieted, everyone turning to her in surprise as she jumped down from the bleachers, making her way to the aisle below. \"We have to fight!\" she insisted, approaching the Council with anger compelling her forward. \"Earth can't protect itself, not against creatures of magic! They have no defense for that! By the time the military gets there, it'll be too late\u2014people are going to die. Real people! You call yourself a god among men?! Get off your throne and do something!\"\n\n\"Hold your tongue, girl!\" Alon hissed, his eyes flashing in anger. \"Take your seat and learn your place!\"\n\n\"My place?!\" Nova repeated, her fury growing. \"My place is fighting for the people!\"\n\nAlon opened his mouth but was cut off as the crowd erupted into shouts, clapping their hands and jumping to their feet. Lege called for order again as Nova felt a stirring of shock and\u2026support. They were actually listening!\n\nNova turned back to the Council. Alon was now silenced and angry, his face red, Lege and Tila looking around at the crowd with wide eyes while Gwyn Falla smiled, and Osa was outright beaming at Nova in pride. She bit her lip, another surge of emotion going through her. She hadn't meant to cause a scene, she'd just been angry, but now she felt like it was okay, or even good, that she'd said what she had, despite the calls for respect and decorum.\n\n\"Order!\" Lege called one last time, letting out a deep breath as the rest of the noise died down and he turned to Nova with a frown. \"Very well,\" he said. \"All riders prepare to fly. You leave for the world portal at once.\"\n\nOnce again, the room burst into activity, everyone crowding into the aisle as they pushed through the door to the foyer. Nova fought to get back to where the witches were still sitting uncertainly in the bleachers\u2014Zephyr already standing and searching the crowd, calling for Nova.\n\nNova finally broke free, jumping onto the bleachers herself and running over to her friend to clasp her hands. \"I'm sorry,\" she told Zephyr at once, swallowing a sudden lump in her throat as adrenaline pumped through her heart. \"I know I said I wouldn't leave you again, but this is important!\"\n\n\"It's okay,\" Zephyr said breathlessly, her eyes wider and her face paler than Nova had ever seen. \"You're right, we have to protect Earth! Oh, Nova, I'm so proud of you! I wish I could help; I'd go with you if I could!\"\n\n\"I know,\" Nova said, pulling Zephyr into a quick hug. \"I'll be back; I promise!\"\n\n\"You'd better be!\"\n\n\"Here,\" Nova said, reaching up and pulling her necklace off, her hands trembling slightly as she gave it to Zephyr. \"Keep that safe, until I get back.\"\n\nZephyr nodded numbly, biting her lip as she put the necklace round her own neck, then hugging Nova again. \"A'meldyn kustana madhyren,\" she sang under her breath.\n\nNova let out a breath\u2014not having a clue what the chant meant but feeling reassured anyway. She hugged Zephyr tighter before pulling back. \"I've gotta go. Bye, Zephyr, I\u2026I love you.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" Zephyr choked a bit, pulling her glasses off and wiping at her eyes, which were starting to tear up. \"I love you, too.\"\n\nNova didn't want to leave, but she had no choice, so she let the anger drive her, turning and running after the other riders. Every second spent here could mean a death sentence on Earth.\n\nThey had no time to waste.\n\nThe sight that met Nova's eyes when she came out of the link-jump\u2014astride Korgad, who knew where the portal was and could get there without her help, and who'd insisted on carrying her anyway, with Hake and Rune slipping through the portal behind him\u2014was one she would never forget.\n\nThe two portals stretching across the sky were larger than any she'd seen before; the one with red sky behind it was sparking wildly and sending bursts of electricity across Ragond's sky while the other\u2014the one to Earth\u2014was growing larger by the second, the sky around the circle of lightning staining black as if the air itself were being poisoned by it. A throng of monsters flew between the two portals, pouring out of Mythos and shooting across the sky, straight to Earth, screeching wildly and not seeming to pay the dragons and their riders any attention as more began appearing out of their link-jumps, their own eyes widening at the sight.\n\n\"Do not falter!\" Dafyd called, he and Lir flying out in front as they surveyed the scene. \"Anasia! Lead the first-years in driving as many as you can back into Mythos! Second-years, you're with me! We go to Earth to defend the people!\"\n\n\"I'm going, too!\" Nova yelled to him. \"That's my home down there!\"\n\nDafyd nodded to her as he turned and began to fly towards the Earth portal, about half the students following him with Nova and Korgad doing so, as well, the twins in tow.\n\nNova tensed as they approached the throng of Mythoi, with Hake, Rune, and Korgad starting to thrash them out of the sky, shooting towards the portal amidst the high-pitched, inhuman-sounding shrieks and the rapid flurry of bat-like, monstrous wings and swiping claws. Nova kicked at a few of the beasts herself when they got close enough, clutching tightly to Korgad's saddle as they reached the portal, the light enveloping them on their way through.\n\nAnd then\u2026they were on Earth. Nova gasped at the sudden change of air pressure, the familiar scent of the ocean and the sound of crashing waves hitting her as well as the wave of heat from the hot Floridian air. It was summer here now, she realized, an uncanny feeling settling over her\u2014though it was immediately interrupted by the realization that they were in a dive, Korgad letting out a roar as they fell towards the sand just like the last time they'd gone through.\n\nIt really did take a lot of energy, didn't it?\n\n\"STEADY!\" she yelled, both to Korgad and the twins, and to the other riders all falling out of the sky around her with surprised yells of their own. \"AIM FOR THE SEA!\"\n\nKorgad obeyed, turning in midair as they all fell into the water, the warm salt water crashing over Nova and knocking her out of the saddle. She fought to swim back to the surface, breaking through the waves and looking around for the other riders, some of whom had crashed into the sand, while others began swimming towards the beach themselves, spitting out mouthfuls of the water in disgust.\n\n\"What\u2014what kind of water is this?!\" she heard one boy exclaim nearby. \"It's salty!\"\n\n\"Where's Hylora!?\" one girl shrieked, splashing through the waves and looking frantic. \"She's not surfacing!\"\n\nWhat?! Nova gasped, looking around the sea as she realized that no dragons were shooting back out of the water. That didn't make any sense! Why\u2014\n\nThe small, scarred face of a komodo dragon popped out of the waves in front of her.\n\nOh no. Oh no!\n\n\"K-Korgad?!\" Nova stared.\n\nOne of the riders let out a frightened shriek nearby, which was echoed by others as the dragons all began surfacing as lizards, bigger than their humans\u2014but barely\u2014with most of them seeming as startled and panicked as the riders they were now trying to reach, the humans screaming in terror as they fought to get away from their dragons in the water.\n\n\"STOP!\" Nova yelled. \"THEY'RE YOUR DRAGONS!\"\n\n\"What?!\" Dafyd demanded, looking lost as he swam over himself, an excessively orange lizard following him. \"How is this happening?!\"\n\nDafyd didn't know, either?\n\n\"They change on Earth!\" Nova explained.\n\nWhat, they didn't teach their captains about what happened on Earth? Well, it had been twenty years since people had been allowed to use the world portals, she supposed. If Dafyd had only been a captain for a couple of years, it made sense he wouldn't know about dragon transformations, but shouldn't the Council have thought to warn them?\n\n\"We\u2026get to the beach and I'll show you how to change them back!\"\n\n\"Grab my back,\" Korgad commanded her, sliding through the water like an eel and turning his back to Nova\u2014his leathers apparently having changed into a little leather harness. She grabbed it while Hake and Rune swam circles around them, clamoring frantically about their sizes. \"Come!\" Korgad barked to the twins before suddenly shooting off into the waves, swimming much faster than any lizard had a right to with Nova clutching the harness, closing her eyes and clamping her mouth shut as she was pulled along. Her heart began to race harder at the sensation of the water rushing into her face, as if she were drowning, but fortunately the ride didn't last long, Korgad pulling her onto the wet sand as she coughed behind him, gasping in a breath and forcing herself to stand, calling to the other riders there that the lizards were their dragons and to stop screaming.\n\nSeriously, why was everyone screaming?\n\n\"Steady!\" Dafyd called again, choking a bit himself as he and Lir reached the beach nearby, his hair soaking and covering his eyes. He pushed it back, wiping his face on the waterlogged, clinging silk sleeve of his tunic as he turned to her. \"Nova, could you\u2026explain this, please?\"\n\n\"Hold on\u2026\" Nova blinked, wiping the water from her own eyes and looking around. \"Where are the Mythoi?\"\n\nThere was silence for a moment, the question hanging in the air as everyone looked around the empty beaches. There were the hundred riders or so, with their dragons\u2014as lizards\u2014beside them, but she saw no harpies, no pegasi, no minotaurs. Where were they?\n\nThey would have changed, too.\n\n\"They're different!\" Nova gasped, pushing her hand through her hair. \"What\u2014what would they turn into here?\"\n\n\"Look!\" Someone pointed out over the sea, back towards the portal, and Nova turned that way only to gasp at the sight of the monsters who were still pouring out of the portal, but dropping straight into the sea, every single one of them, diving into the water in the distance, far from land, as a huge, monstrous tentacle rose from the waves\u2014followed by another, and then a third.\n\nThey were turning into sea monsters?! How was that fair?! How was it even possible?\n\n\"Nova!\" Dafyd said urgently, his eyes widening. \"We need to turn our dragons back into dragons, now!\"\n\n\"Right!\" Nova tried to calm down as she turned to Korgad and the twins, who\u2014like most of the dragons\u2014were on all fours, their tongues flicking out as they panted tiredly. \"Last time, Korgad told me to put my hand on his head, like this\u2026\" She knelt, pressing her hand against Korgad's scarred face and feeling the tingle of magic through her fingers as the lizard closed his eyes and let out a breath before shifting back into his normal self.\n\n\"Everyone, copy Nova!\" Dafyd commanded, doing the same with Lir while Nova next turned to the twins, putting a hand on each of their heads so they could grow. \"And then mount; we take to the sea, and to battle!\"\n\nNova bit her lip as her three dragons, now fully-sized, continued to pant in exhaustion. They'd gone through a link-jump and a world portal, and now they were going to have to fight on top of that\u2014and hurry, too, if they were going to be able to get back through the portal at the end of it. At least the Mythoi had to be feeling the same strain themselves, and the dragons wouldn't be at too much of a disadvantage. And, as she looked back up at the portal, she realized the Mythoi had stopped getting through, which meant the others were doing their part.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said, climbing back onto Korgad. \"I know we're all tired, but the faster we finish this, the sooner we can rest. Twins, stay close. Circle me during the fight, okay? Hake, you're incredibly fast, and Rune, your agility is unmatched! With all three of us together, they won't stand a chance.\"\n\nThey would be okay, she told herself. They had to be."
            },
            {
                "title": "More Time",
                "text": "It seemed Nova's heart raced faster than the dragons as they flew out to sea towards the humungous monsters, the last of the unchanged monsters falling into the water as the tentacles\u2014now around ten of them\u2014crashed through the waves, sending storms of mist raining through the air. It looked almost like the smaller Mythoi had fused together to form the larger creatures. How they'd done that, and how the riders were supposed to defeat them like this, she didn't know.\n\nDafyd, however, seemed to have a plan.\n\n\"Formulate teams!\" he called to the students. \"Five to a team, and run lines like you've practiced! Circle the bases of the tentacles and cut them down with tooth, knife, and claw!\"\n\n'Run lines?' He hadn't taught the first-years that yet. What did it mean? Nova looked around at the others as the teams immediately began pairing off, five dragons at a time, and fell into a straight line one behind another to soar down to where the tentacles were rising out of the water, cutting at the flesh as they circled them. Each tentacle, she realized up close, was roughly the size of a house.\n\nThe tentacles all began recoiling as a gigantic head lashed out of the water, looking almost like a dragon itself, only with large bird-like eyes and a beak, one single twisting horn raising out of its head like a unicorn as it let out a thunderous, ear-piercing shriek. Nova yelled out in pain, covering her ears and feeling the force of the scream vibrate through her, the dragons and riders nearby all roaring or yelling out in pain as they faltered in flight. The tentacles began thrashing wildly, knocking dragons out of the air as the giant head dove back underwater, disappearing in the foam.\n\nThey had to take it out.\n\n\"DIVE!\" Nova yelled to Korgad, the dragon obeying at once and tucking his wings in, rolling into a dive with the twins right behind them.\n\nTake out its eyes, Nova instructed Hake, who would hopefully pass the message on to Rune.\n\nHe understood, and she took in a deep breath, bracing for the impact of the water as Korgad dove beneath the waves. She closed her eyes on instinct but forced them open again, ignoring the pain of saltwater in her eyes as she looked for the head, seeing it grotesquely attached to a long body of tentacles as it moved around the floor of the ocean, seeming frantic and agitated and letting out another muffled shriek, air bubbles bursting from its beak.\n\nThe dragons all shot towards it, the twins going for its eyes as instructed while Korgad dove straight for the neck, Nova clinging to his saddle and closing her eyes again, resisting the urge to be sick as she felt him tear into the throat. The monster letting out another shriek before it was choked off, gargling the seawater for a moment\u2026before the waters stilled.\n\nAnd then the waters rushed at her again for a moment longer, till she and Korgad broke through the surface and she gasped air in gratefully, keeping her eyes closed against the slowly burning pain. Was it over? Had they won? Was Earth safe?\n\n\"It's going down!\" she heard someone yell. \"It's finished!\"\n\n\"Hurry!\" Dafyd bellowed. \"Back through the portal!\"\n\nThe air was rushing against her again as she coughed, spitting out seawater and feeling a dull, throbbing sort of panic start to build. It was over, but her eyes were burning and she was afraid to open them, stuck in this world of black with no idea how close they were or if they were going to make it.\n\nAnd then the sound of crackling electricity grew overwhelmingly loud, and the pressure changed, driving the water out of her ears as the air switched from salty to sweet. They were back in Ragond! She couldn't take the suspense anymore\u2014opening her eyes and wincing at the pain, blinking rapidly against it as she looked around to see how the fight here was going.\n\nIt was already almost over. The other riders were fighting the last of the Mythoi back into their portal, and although there were a few dragons on the ground\u2014oh, she could only hope they were just exhausted, or even only injured and not worse\u2014as well as hundreds of Mythoi, the majority of monsters seemed to be fleeing, flying back into their own portal as quickly as they could.\n\nThey\u2026they had done it. They'd fought off the attack, protecting Earth in the process.\n\nNova didn't have much time to celebrate, however, as a large expanse of sky suddenly went black about a quarter-mile away, with a new portal\u2014this one flickering with red lightning\u2014opening between the first two. The remaining Mythoi shrieked louder, darting back through their portal while the other riders all began yelling, as well, flying off in all directions to get away. If this one pulled them in like the purple ones did, they were lost.\n\nBut as Korgad turned to leave, Nova looked at the portal over her shoulder, noting a dark blue sky through it, and then\u2026a person.\n\n\"WAIT!\" she called, pulling at Korgad's saddle. \"Wait, go back, someone's in there!\"\n\nKorgad wasted no time in turning again, and as he beat his wings faster, shooting back towards the portal, Nova felt it. A glimmer of panic, longing, and hope, which she shared, but wasn't hers, tugging at the back of her mind as they both strained to reach the opening.\n\nThey were bonded.\n\nKorgad was fast approaching the portal, Nova craning her neck to see into it, needing to see into it. The red lightning began to spark away, the image flickering in and out of existence, and they were so close! Nova could see the person inside it in full now; there was a tall woman standing with her back to the portal, a frayed skirt in faded green blowing to the side as long dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, pushed aside by the wind to reveal the unmistakable sight of deep brown riding leathers. The woman wasn't moving and didn't turn, just standing in place only a few feet behind the portal as Nova felt her drive\u2014as well as Korgad's\u2014surge into desperation.\n\n\"MOTHER!\"\n\nBut then, even as the call was still on her lips, the portal sparked louder than before, cutting out entirely and leaving behind nothing but the small cloud of black, with the other two portals nearby doing the same.\n\nKorgad let out an anguished roar which Nova echoed with a scream of her own. That had been her! It had to have been her! She had been right there, so close they could have reached her, if they'd only had more time!\n\nBut here they were, left separated once more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"Where You Go, I Go\"\n\nSometimes, the world is too loud.\n\nThe noise had lasted for days, starting with the thunderous roars and cheers from the other dragons and riders after the battle for Earth had ended, and continuing on when they'd eventually made their way back to Stonehaven in exhaustion, to be surrounded at once by the witches and school staff trying to treat their injuries, and then lasting even longer the next day when the Council had commended them all for their bravery, awarding them their licenses early\u2014albeit while telling them they still had to attend classes, making the badges little more than empty titles.\n\nAs if licenses were important when her mother had been so close.\n\nThe day after that, the soldiers had returned from the north with half the numbers they'd begun with, the general mood of victory souring into the tense sort of uncertainty from before while Traevorlin and other survivors talked with the Council behind closed doors. The story got out anyway, that the Mythoi had infested the mines and were overrunning towns on the outskirts of Ragond, and many of the soldiers left again the next morning to try to hold defenses while the Council gathered everyone together to announce even more rules.\n\nPortal use was now strictly forbidden, and even link-jumps were only to be used in necessity; witches were barred from practicing any magic at all unless approved by the Council. In addition to all that, training was cut to half its original time as students were being enlisted in the patrol roster. The Council cited magic conservation as a result of a dwindling source due to Mythoi interference, which sounded complicated and unimportant, but Nova hadn't bothered to fight these rules out loud. She knew it would only get her in trouble, and that was the last thing she wanted. But, rules aside, if she ever saw another red portal again, she was going in\u2014no hesitation, no looking back.\n\nShe wasn't going to miss her next chance.\n\nNow, as she and Zephyr climbed the last few feet to the peak of Stonehaven Mountain, the school sprawled out below them while Hake and Rune flew circles overhead and began the descent to land, Nova let out a deep breath, finally able to take in real quiet.\n\nIt was amazing, how so much could change and yet she always found herself in the same place. It was hard to believe it had only been three months since that day in the swamp woods, when she hadn't known about Ragond or dragons or magic, or her father's legacy or her mother's name. It felt like an eternity ago.\n\nAnd yet, it also felt like she'd climbed through her foster parents' window an hour ago.\n\n\"Hey.\"\n\nNova blinked, her thoughts interrupted as she turned to Zephyr, who was smiling at her sympathetically and holding out Nova's necklace, the light catching at the shining dragonite.\n\n\"I kept it safe, like I promised.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Nova said, letting out a sigh of relief and offering a smile back to the other girl as she slipped the cord around her neck. \"She was right there, Zephyr.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"I could have reached her if I'd been fast enough.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" Zephyr sighed, shrugging a shoulder as she sat down on the grass. \"We'll just have to get faster.\"\n\nNova blinked, the sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu growing as she felt a surge of gratitude and fondness come over her. \"We?\" she repeated, the corner of her mouth quirking at the memory of that conversation they'd had a lifetime ago.\n\n\"Of course.\" Zephyr smiled back. \"Where you go, I go. Remember?\"\n\n\"Remember what?\" Hake asked as he made his landing nearby, tilting his head at Zephyr. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"Nowhere, right now,\" Nova sighed. \"With all these rules, we can't even leave this dumb mountain.\"\n\n\"It is pretty, though,\" Zephyr noted, smiling wistfully as she looked out over the horizon.\n\n\"Very pretty,\" Rune agreed, settling on the ground and leaning her head against Zephyr's side, the two younglets now too big to rest their heads on the girls' laps like they used to. \"And lots better than Earth.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nova turned to her in surprise, letting out a slight chuckle as she sat down herself, leaning against Hake. \"You didn't like Earth?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Rune sniffed.\n\n\"Too salty,\" Hake agreed with a huff of his own, nodding decisively. \"Too much water. No mountains. And I don't like being a lizard.\"\n\n\"That's just\u2026oh,\" Nova blinked. Of course, the younglets wouldn't have liked the transformation, especially not having expected it. \"Heh, well, being a lizard aside, you didn't see all of Earth. There are loads of mountains there, just as big as these, and plenty of places where there is no sea and it's not as salty. Not like I've seen anything other than Florida, but\"\u2014she shrugged\u2014\"maybe one day we'll get to go back and explore the rest of it together.\"\n\n\"Maybe, yeah,\" Zephyr agreed. \"Once the war ends and we can use the portal again.\"\n\n\"Don't you like it here, Nova?\" Rune asked, raising her head a little to tilt it at Nova.\n\n\"Sure, I do,\" Nova said. \"I just\u2026\"\n\nShe just what?\n\nShe'd been about to say she wanted to go home eventually, but as she sat here looking across the horizon, her back against Hake's warm scales, with Zephyr and Rune beside her and Korgad resting in the caves below, she was suddenly struck with the realization that this was her home now. She'd connected to this place. She had friends here, a purpose, a life, and\u2026she had family. A real family to take care of, and that took care of her.\n\n\"I just want to show you around someday,\" she finished instead, offering Rune a smile. \"We'll take a vacation there or something when the war's over.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Zephyr agreed, beaming and lying down in the grass. \"That's a good idea. A nice, long vacation to Earth, and then we'll come back home.\"\n\nAnd then they'd come back home.\n\nNova liked the sound of that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Korgad didn't want to leave his cave.\n\nHe knew the girl was worried about him\u2014how could he not know, now that they were bonded, despite his best efforts\u2014but he couldn't bring himself to care. She could worry all she wanted, as could the twins and Zephyr. It wasn't going to change anything. He still wasn't going to leave the cave. Not yet anyway.\n\nHe'd been so close. Mere feet away, after all these years, and she had been right there\u2026\n\nAnd now she was gone again, as unreachable as ever.\n\nWhat had she been doing there, in that desolate world he'd glimpsed through the portal? Why hadn't his voice reached her? Why hadn't she turned around?\n\nAnd, perhaps most of all, why hadn't he flown faster?\n\nHe groaned, trying to close out the twinge of concern he could feel from Nova, and attempting to ignore the painful absence of anything else as he looked listlessly out from the alcove and into the main cave.\n\nThe light was fading from the skylights high above them, and he raised his head, listening as the other dragons of Stonehaven all began to fly by, one by one returning to their alcoves for the night. Sunset was upon them, then. The younglets would be back any minute, likely with the girls on their backs, and they would all talk, and laugh, and tell stories, and cast him their pitying looks as they'd been wont to do these past few nights, trying to draw him out and change his mood with their closeness, their love.\n\nHe didn't need their pity; he didn't deserve their love. All that mattered was finding Seren, having her close to him again at long last and filling this emptiness he felt deep within. And, her assuring him that she'd known he was looking, known that he would never give up on her. That she would never leave him so alone again. That she loved him, that she forgave him\u2026if she ever forgave him.\n\nAfter all, how could she ever forgive the one who'd lost her daughter?"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Dragons of Solunas 1) Dragon of Ash & Stars",
        "author": "H. Leighton Dickson",
        "genres": [
            "high fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Author: H. Leighton Dickson; Tags: dragons, dragon protagonist; Genre: high fantasy",
                "text": "\"It is said that a Dragon breathes Fire. That is a Myth.\n\nA Dragon IS Fire and his Whole Life is the Story of his Burning \u2013\n\nPage by Blistering Page.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "I don't remember much of my time in the shell, but what I do remember is good.\n\nWarm, quiet, calm. The music of my heart, the rhythm of hot blood, the simmering acid in my belly. I believe I dreamed, but of what, I cannot say, for there was nothing in the shell to dream about. But dragons are a fantastical clan. Our minds have no equal; our imaginations no limit.\n\nI also remember the first time my eyes saw light. For the longest time, my world had been filled with my curled self \u2013 legs, wings, belly and tail \u2013 black as what I would later call a starry night. Beyond me however, I would sometimes see a film that was rippled and grey. This, I later learned was the shell. At some point, it became too small, or I became too big but the shell was warm and quiet and calm so I stayed. One day, there was a shimmer of motion beyond the film and for some reason, I felt an urge to discover. I had never had an urge before. It was to be the first of many. I pressed the shimmer with the pick of my beak and the world peeled apart into startling brightness. I fell onto a warm rock, dwarfed by a massive trilling darkness that I later called my mother.\n\nThere were three others I remember on the day of my hatching \u2013 sisters all and green. My mother was there, nudging their flailing shapes, snapping up the shells and the ooze that came with them. They tumbled and chirped over each other and I recall thinking they were pathetic and small. I had no silverstone. I knew nothing of self. I was also small, but I'm certain not nearly so pathetic.\n\nThe Anquar Cliffs served as nest and aerie, high above the Flashing Water. There were many cliffs and therefore, many nests for many dragons. I remember watching a golden drakina and her brood of seven eggs on a ledge below our own. While they hatched, I do remember another urge - that of eating them in the shell but I refrained. My mother would have disapproved. Her bites were painful enough if I merely nipped a sister in jest. Still, the sight of the eggs hatching filled me with curiosity and revulsion, although it was years before I realized that I had looked the same way at the time.\n\nSeven eggs is a lot for a dragon and that day, as the golden mother cooed and nudged the many cracking shells, I watched one hatchling flail out of the sticks and onto the stone. It moved awkwardly, for at birth our wings are wet and sticky and very, very soft, and it tipped and tumbled toward the edge of the cliff. I watched as it teetered on the brink, letting out a pathetic cry before the mother rose from the nest, eggs and hatchlings falling from her like scales. A flock of sea snakes swept in, however \u2013 their grey leathery bodies twisting beneath their tiny wings and one of them snatched the hatchling from the cliff. The drakina swung her great head and roared, liquid flame spraying from her mouth and turning many of the snakes to char. It was the first time I ever saw dragonfire and immediately, the aerie erupted in chaos as dragons and snakes shrieked at each other. The first snake carried the chick higher and higher until another plummeted downward, catching the hatchling in its talons and together, snakes and baby tumbled through the air in a bloody dance. Finally, they released the hatchling and it dropped soundlessly into the water below the cliffs.\n\nI stayed much closer to my mother after that.\n\nMost days were sunny and hot, the skies blue, the waters bluer and I yearned to fly like the others but my wings were not strong enough. They were an unusual hue, like a smoky night, where you can see stars through the clouds, and I quickly learned that, after sunset, I was almost invisible to the others because of my colouring. There were no other dragons of my shade in the aerie, for most dragons are the colour of the elements \u2013 gray, gold, blue and green or a blending of these so that we reflect our surroundings and hide from our prey. I'm not certain, then, how I came to be. My mother was a rock grey with a blue sheen in the sunlight and the drake that held court over our particular cliff was a green, so I suspected early on that I was not his. It didn't matter. Dragons are not given to sentimentality or idle dreams of fidelity. Dragons are interested in food, water, nests and mating with other dragons.\n\nOh yes, and gold, but that's another story.\n\nThe waters around the aerie were full of fish, and while I know the stick people like to tell stories about how dragons eat their herds and raid their villages, for the most part, that is simply untrue. We eat fish and sea snakes, feathernewts and sometimes shaghorns if they are foolish enough to come close. I do prefer a good fat feathernewt, but that could be simply because of an early diet consisting mostly of fish. While nutritious, fish has a certain oily aftertaste that sits in the belly for hours. My mother was a good fisher and each morning, she would return to the nest and open her mouth and we would scramble in to eat. As the only male, I was the strongest and arguably the most hungry, so I would always be first to gorge on predigested silverfins and bloodbass. My sisters would get whatever was left and after several weeks, I became aware of the fact that I had one less sister than I'd had before.\n\nI told myself it was the sea snakes and thought no more of it.\n\nSo for many weeks it was all about the nest and about our mother. Feeding, sleeping, stretching, fighting over fully-formed bits that she brought home in her teeth. Some days she would bring home shards of crystalized arcstone, which I eagerly gobbled up before my sisters could, loving then hating the burn it caused in my belly. On the days that it rained, she would shield us under the cover of her wings. On the days of scorching sun, she would shade us in the same way. She regularly cleaned both us and the nest, and I realized dragon chicks were messy creatures with no regard for themselves or their territory. Still, it was a good life and I was as happy as a young drake could be.\n\nIn the mornings, I would wave my wings in the wind and wait for them to grow as strong as the drakes wheeling through the sky overhead. They preened, those drakes, although there is little thought given to beauty in the dragon world. Pride and strength, speed and skill: those were the marks of a fine dragon. For a drake, hunting ability came a close second after the number of drakinas bred and secured in your own aerie. I'm not even certain the number of hatchlings mattered to a drake. Their mock-battles killed many chicks and maimed even more as they crashed from cliff to cliff. Their tails swept eggs and hatchlings alike into the sea during their raucous sparring.\n\nIn the nights, I would push my head out from under my mother and gaze at the twin moons and the stars above me. I didn't know then that they had names, I didn't know then that they had patterns and that you could fashion entire universes out of the glittering, twinkling lights that lit up the night sky. The night was the same as I, the same colour, the same sparkling dance. Like clouds and ash at dusk. I felt an aching affinity for the night. Even from such an early age I wanted to be a part of it.\n\nThe night sky was my father, I told myself. The night and the stars and the double moons that winked like eyes in their cycles \u2013 waxing and waning, winking and sleeping and wide. The eyes of my father, the star dragon Draco Stellorum, saw all and approved.\n\nAs I mentioned, the imagination of dragons has no limit. We are creatures of dreams and fire.\n\nMy mother was a large drakina and as such, had secured a nest at the top of the highest of Anquar's Cliffs. Most of the drakes stayed out of her way, knowing she could just as likely render them neuter as kill them, and that, for a drake, would be worse than death. Our drake frequently landed near the nest to preen, cleaning his moss-green scales with the tiniest of teeth, combing the seagrass from his spines with the talons on his back legs and showing off his broad wings in the late summer sun. My sisters watched, entranced. Me \u2013 I hated him with every night-black scale on my body and vowed to one day be a better, stronger, more-skilled drake than he.\n\nOne evening, the large brown on the outermost cliff began to bellow, a cry that was quickly taken up by the others. The drakinas returned to their nests, settling down atop their fledglings with unceremonial roughness. My mother was fishing and while we waited for her return, my sisters tucked themselves deep into the sticks. I, however, did not, and scrambled instead to the highest ledge to see what could possibly have alerted the entire aerie, more than sea snakes and blue-footed goswyrms. I watched how the drakes postured, watched where they were looking when suddenly, an arrow of dragons crossed the inlet that led past the Cliffs.\n\nFive very large dragons \u2013 male and female both \u2013 flying like an arrow, led by a great silver drake. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Dragon Flight. It was the first time I'd ever seen a stick.\n\nWhen I say 'stick', I mean the stick people, the only creatures that could catch and tame and ride a dragon. I narrowed my eyes and stretched out my neck, rising up on my hind legs so I could see. At first, I thought they were spines growing out of the shoulders of the dragons but as they passed, I thought they did look rather more like sticks, with their lean torsos and knobby limbs and funny flat faces. Unlike dragons who are strong as stone and fluid as the sea. We are all the elements combined.\n\nIt was then that my mother returned, catching my head in her mighty jaws and dropping me into the nest on top of my sisters. She settled over us and tucked low, as if willing herself to become part of the stony cliff and thus hide us from the Flight.\n\nI marvelled at the thought of sticks riding dragons, however, and turned it over and over in my mind for many days after.\n\nBecause of this, I wanted to fly. You weren't a dragon unless you flew. There were lizards and dillies and monitors all over the cliffs but none of them flew. I suppose the sea snakes, wyrms, feathernewts and overmolls could claim dragon-like status but dragons would vehemently disagree. There are many, many creatures that fly on the earth. None but dragons are dragons. Only dragons breathe flame. Fire is what sets us apart from the others. Dreams and imagination and fire.\n\nBut back to my story.\n\nOne morning, eight weeks after my hatching, I was fanning my wings on the aerie cliff and a great gust of wind caught them, lifting me off the stone and several wingspans over to the nest. My heart thudded in my chest then at the exhilaration. I lumbered over to the edge once more (and I say lumbered, for dragons are most ungainly creatures on land, with our strong back legs and our forelegs knuckled, clawed and winged), spread wide my wings and let the wind take me once again through the air back to the nest. My sisters squawked at me, as mother was out fishing and they assumed her authority as all young drakinas-in-training do. I ignored them, as all young drakes-in-training do. I let the wind carry me over and over across the top of the cliff. It stirred something deep inside of me, so when the next gust of wind came, I unfurled my black wings and sprang into the sky.\n\nAnd I flew.\n\nI flew up and up and up, over the nest and over the aerie so that the green drake noticed me and launched into the air. But I was fast and young and strong and I soared above him, so proud of myself and my male wings, until the wind died. Those wings, once strong enough to handle the skies, became fledging wings once more and I plummeted like a baby into the nest of the gold drakina and her brood. Only now, the drakina was fishing with my mother and there were six fledglings almost as large as I. They hissed and snapped until I scrambled out of the nest and onto the stone.\n\nI looked up to see the sea snakes coming.\n\nAn entire flock of them, twisting and writhing on their tiny wings and I felt an unfamiliar fire in my heart. I summoned it, calling it from deep within. I choked and gagged and finally coughed up a shard of arcstone. I had never blown fire in all of my short life, would likely never do so as a sea snake descended, talons reaching for my black beaked head. I closed my eyes and willed \u2013 arcstone and acid, brought them both forth at the same time and felt the heat congeal in the back of my throat. It felt like my head would split open with the pain so I spat now, forcing it forward with all my fledgling strength (which is to say, not much) and felt the roof of my mouth and the slick of my tongue scorch with the heat.\n\nThe sea snake shrieked and wheeled away as another dropped from the sky towards me. I did the same, summoning the acid and the stone and spitting them both at the awkward creature, this time lighting the tip of his tail on fire. He flapped up and up until the flock surrounded him and they all went down in a writhing mass of grey scales and tiny wings.\n\nMy breath was hot and my chest filled with smoke. I shook my head, retching until the last of the taste was gone and licking my teeth to clear it of ash. Behind me, the nest of six fledglings watched with fascination, their glassy eyes shimmering with wonder and delight. I had done it, I thought to myself. Not only had I been the first fledging in the aerie to fly, but I was the first to call the fire. I was a drake now, not a chick and I shook my head once again, awaiting the day I had a mane of spines to prove it.\n\nAnd so I rose onto my hind legs and trumpeted the dragon song \u2013 a rich, mournful, triumphant cry of victory that, when I look at it in hindsight was likely a pathetic warble, when suddenly, a great shadow fell across the ledge. My mother, large and earth-grey, settled onto the stone before me, her breath reeking of fish. I lifted my face to hers, trumpeted again in defiance. I was a drake. I had flown and produced fire. I needed no mother to protect me and I would take my place in the aerie with all the other males.\n\nShe snapped her jaws down on my head and lifted from the ledge, carrying me like a dead thing to our own nest and my sisters. She dropped me unceremoniously onto the sticks and settled down on top all of us like a massive grey stone. We got no food that night. I suppose I should have felt bad for my sisters but I did no such thing. In fact, I felt very content with myself and as I closed my eyes in sleep, I vowed to my father, Draco Stellorum, that tomorrow I would give in to my newest urge.\n\nI would set my wings to the sea and fly."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE STORM FALL",
                "text": "My mother left the aerie before dawn. It was easy to tell because of the gust of cold that rolled down in her wake and I was waiting for it. I stayed in place for a long time, partly to make sure she was well and truly gone, but also partly because I was afraid. My wings were strong and my fire was sure; it was my heart that was unsteady and beating so fast. But soon, I lifted my head to study the rooks in the first light of morning and I thought I had never seen such a glorious thing.\n\nThe sun splitting the night from the day, the sky from the waters with astounding colours. Reds and oranges, yellows and purples. High above me, the stars. My stars, my father, and I felt a yearning for him like I had never known before. I could see shapes and patterns in him now, envisioned in the height and breadth of my imagination. There was the Dying Wyrm \u2013 a hook of stars that looked like the death throes of a sea snake. Then there was the Fat Fish, which looked exactly like its namesake \u2013 large and round with stars that gleamed like shimmering scales. And of course, there was the magnificent Draco Stellorum \u2013 an exultant dragon with wings that spanned the entire night sky. That was my father \u2013 Draco Stellorum, Dragon of the Night Skies. His Eyes were the twin moons; tonight one wide, one winking. He was smiling at me, calling me, encouraging me to defy my mother and fly.\n\nAs I have said, the imagination of dragons has no equal.\n\nI looked back at my sisters, curled up on each other like twins. I felt pity for them then, although why I did has confounded me to this day. Perhaps I felt superior, young drake that I was. Perhaps I equated them with the mundane life of female dragons, although I was clearly not thinking of my mother if that were the case. Regardless, it was with something akin to fond sadness, so maybe my earlier pronouncement on sentimentality was somewhat wrong.\n\nI kept low and deliberately quiet as I slipped from the nest, made certain not to drag either tail or wings on the stone until I reached the cliff's edge. I gripped it with my wing claws and peered over the side, down at the golden drakina and her chicks far below me. She was stirring and I knew she'd be up in a matter of moments. I would need to be very quiet to avoid her, as well as the flocks of sea snakes that hunted these parts. With a deep breath, I fell forward and stretched out my wings and prayed that yesterday's success had not been premature. Falling into another dragon's nest is never an excellent thing.\n\nI winged down the cliffside, steering away from the nest but plummeting toward the rocky water. With my heart in my throat, I lifted my head and my wings unfurled, catching the wind just before I hit the waves. It was the most exhilarating feeling and I know my words can never do it justice. The lurch of the belly and the release of thought as you become one with the air and the sky and the clouds. The fierce cold of the wind across your eyes, and the glaze of the second eyelid protecting them from burn. I laughed at the sensations - the soaring and the dipping, the whirling and the wheeling. My tail was a rudder, guiding my direction and it followed my thoughts perfectly as I wove in and out of the Anquar Cliffs. It took no time at all to learn when to flap and when to sail, when to tuck and when to reach, the canvas of my wings thin but strong enough to carry my weight. Soon, I passed the Fang of Wyvern, a rocky pinnacle sticking out of the water like a tooth. No dragon nested on the Fang. I don't know why but I knew that if I ever had drakinas, they would nest here simply because no one else had.\n\nAnd then, finally, free over the open water. I glanced back to see the Cliffs, making sure I could remember my way home. They looked like the scales of a great water dragon and I felt the earth force chime within me. It was like a tug or a pull and I knew that I would always be able to find my way home because of it. The earth force is a dragon's best friend, next to wind and fire.\n\nThe sun was higher now, the water a gleaming gold and I dropped to fly just above its choppy surface. I concentrated on the rhythm of my wings, the focus of my breath, the beating of my heart. I could fly like this forever, I told myself. A creature of air and sky and water. The land was a prison, heavy like a stone.\n\nThere was a flashing beneath the waves, and I looked down, delighted to see a school of lemonwhites racing beneath me. I loved the taste of lemonwhites, so flew lower still, stretched out my talons, aiming to snag one but all I caught was water and spray. I flapped faster, dropping my legs into the water and almost flipped wing over beak with the drag of it. I had to think. My people were fishers so there had to be a better way. I angled my wings to take me up, up, up before arcing in the sky as I had seen the drakes do when they'd dance for the drakinas. My wings folded, my tail whipped and I plummeted, entering the water like a pebble. Instantly, all things slowed.\n\nThe thickness of the water was unexpected and when I gasped, water rushed in through my nostrils and mouth, filling my throat and splitting my head. Fish battered all around me and I flapped against their currents. Upside down and underside up, I flailed through the water until finally, my head then my body burst through the waves. I retched again and again until the water was out of my chest and back in the sea where it belonged. Dazed, I looked around and realized with surprise that I was sitting on top of the waves. Wings tucked across my back, tail fanned out behind, legs paddling instinctively beneath me. It was a remarkable sensation, sitting here between the worlds of sky and sea, but I realized that that was a dragon's life. Sky and land and sea and fire. It was probably why we were the masters of all. Except the sticks.\n\nI wondered about that.\n\nIt was strangely peaceful sitting on the water, watching the great expanse of blue all around me. There were light wisps of clouds in the sky, small white wavecaps on the water. The Anquar Cliffs were just a thin line of spikes on the horizon, scales along the spine of that great ocean dragon of my imagination. The earth force beat in my breast, strong and true like my heartbeat, and I rose and fell on the waves as though the waters were breathing. I was the only living thing in the world at this moment and for the first time in my young life, I was content.\n\nTickles on my paddling feet and I looked down to see the school of lemonwhites directly beneath me. I wound my tail around my body so that it splashed just below my beak. A lemonwhite rose to the surface and I could see its many black eyes bob and twist as it watched my tail. I arched my neck and dove, spearing the fish with the spike of my beak. Pride swelled my heart as I held it up for all to see; which is to say, no one for I was alone, but still. Vanity and youth are inseparable companions.\n\nI tried to eat it, but in fact, the fish was impaled on my beak and my jaws could not reach. I tried with my tongue but it was too slippery. I tried with my back foot but I ended up head-down in the water, pathetically thrashing. At this point, I was very grateful that no one was watching. Finally, I caught it with the talon of my wing and was able to slide it from my beak and into my mouth.\n\nNothing can compare to the taste of a lemonwhite that has not been already digested by your mother.\n\nAnd so, I spent the better part of the day fishing from my vantage point of bobbing water drake. I was happy that the fish didn't seem to have a corporate memory. I was able to use the same technique to catch fish after fish, tossing some in the air until I was quite skilled at snatching them as they came down. Most I swallowed whole but some I crunched, enjoying the salt taste run across my tongue and down my throat. Soon, I was full, weighted down on the top of the water and rather sleepy. I tucked my head beneath my wing and dozed, the morning sunshine warm on my back.\n\nI dreamed of stars, of Draco Stellorum battling the Dying Wyrm and eating the Fat Fish as a Dragon Flight soared across the entire night sky. It was a very good dream.\n\nI'm not sure how long I slept but I awoke to a rocking of the water. Big waters, high waves. I looked around. The sky had grown heavy with clouds and in the distance, I could see the flashing that is called Hallow Fire. It is usually accompanied by Hell Down \u2013 a loud crashing roar that follows the Fire. I shook my head and stretched wide my wings but my belly was so full that my wings wouldn't lift. I flapped and flapped but the drag of the water on my legs, tail and belly was too strong. The waves were lifting me higher and sending me lower so that at times I could see neither sky nor the horizon and for the first time in my life, I began to despair.\n\nA sensation made all the worse at the sight of a set of dark scales slicing through the water toward me.\n\nA wave lifted and crested, tossing me briefly out of the water and as a reflex, my legs began to paddle in the air. Once they touched the surface, I found I could run several steps before the water dragged me down again. The scaly creature was almost upon me. It was almost impossible to see because of the darkness of the waves and the darkness of the skies but I could tell that it was large and predatory and approaching me very quickly. I tried to call the fire but a belly full of fish oil prevented it, dousing even my acid with its slimy ooze.\n\nI waited for the next rise and ran along the crest of the wave, beating my wings and cursing my gluttony. The wind was strong, the water stronger, but I urged my legs to be stronger still. I felt a rough surface under my feet and my heart blanched inside of me. The creature lifted me high and tossed me up into the wind, playing with me the way I had played with the lemonwhites. I would end up the same way if I didn't take to the skies soon. A glance beneath me revealed rows and rows of flashing white. They were, believe me, incredible motivation and within a heartbeat, I was skyborn, rising above the huge waves with every beat of my aching wings.\n\nWith mouth gaping wide, the creature rushed the surface, leaping into the air but crashing back down with barely a taste of my tail.\n\nThere was no triumph however. The winds buffeted me like an angry mother and I remembered that while I was a drake, I was still a small drake, no bigger than the sea snakes that had hunted me. The wind howled and Hallow Fire cracked and I felt like a leaf caught in between, tossed as each saw fit. I briefly reconsidered settling onto the water again but the thought of the toothed creature filled me with dread and so I stayed airborne for the bulk of the storm, all the while my wings burning from strain.\n\nAt one point, I tried to fly over the clouds as I imagined the great drakes could do. I flew high, higher, desperately searching for a break in the winds. I needed to see my father, Draco Stellorum. I knew that once he saw me, he would help, but there was nothing but Hell Down, Hallow Fire and the roaring of the wind. The clouds were astounding, however \u2013 bigger than anything I could have imagined and rimmed with gold. For one fleeting moment, I glimpsed yellow and blue and pink but was immediately flung back into the dark that flashed with Hallow Fire and thundered with Hell Down. I searched the angry skies, praying even for a glimpse of a Dragon Flight. I would follow them anywhere but there was nothing, no one, so I tucked my wings, dropping back to the fury above the water.\n\nIt seemed like a lifetime and when it was finally over, any trace of the sun was gone. I had lost the better part of the day to the waves and the clouds, and night fell so quickly that I had no strength to fly anymore. I returned to the water, floating with my head tucked under my wing and prayed that if the creature did come back, it would eat me before I even knew I had been eaten. And so I dozed restlessly, fitfully, all night until the sea quieted and the sun lifted the mantel of night once again.\n\nWhen I awoke, there was no land anywhere.\n\nThere was no land, there were no Cliffs, there was not even the tug of the earth force within me. There was nothing but sea and sky and a sad, lonely little dragon floating on the water. I remember calling to my mother, willing to accept what would likely be a humiliating return to the nest, but there was no answer, only my pathetic wail echoing across the sea. I was hungry but I would not eat. I was thirsty but the salt stung my throat. I floated like this for a full day, watching the sun cross the sky and dip into the sea, calling the night to follow like a love-sick drake. Follow it did, until the next morning, when the sun peeked out to begin the cycle all over again.\n\nI awoke to the sounds of sea snakes, their shrill voices carrying across the water. There was also the sound of waves against a shore and the smell of fish strong on the breeze. I opened my eyes, blinked out the salt sting, and my heart did a flip inside of me at the sight. It looked like a forest of branchless trees, half submerged, half protruding from the water. At the tops of these trees, a roof of flat wood, wet and smooth, that created a canopy along the rocky shore and cast shadows across the top of the water. Nets hung from that canopy, along with baskets and ropes of twine and sea grass. It was different than anything I had ever seen before, but then again my whole world had been the aerie, so it was to be expected.\n\nThe sea snakes circled high above me and I knew they thought me easy prey, which I suppose I was. The fire was back in my belly however, and when one swooped down with talons extended, I welcomed him with a breath of flame. He shrieked and soared upwards when over the sound of the waves, I heard the trilling of dragons. My heart leapt once more so I spread my wings and in two beats was airborne.\n\nFrom the sky, I could see that the wooden canopies were docks of a fishing village and as I rose over them, I caught my second glimpse of stick people.\n\nI wasn't entirely sure what to think. Like dragons, they moved on two legs but unlike dragons, they had no wings, no scales, no beaks or tails. As I flapped along the wood, they ran after me, pointing and shouting in their odd, unmusical language. I couldn't understand how they could ride dragons as they did \u2013 they had no wings or fangs or claws or spines. In fact, they looked quite harmless as they chased me, grabbing nets from the docks as they went. No, with their pushed-in faces and no teeth or talons to speak of, I wasn't impressed at all.\n\nIt would be a sad day before I let one of them ride me.\n\nBesides, I was looking for dragons.\n\nI spied the first sitting on a post, her wings spread wide. She was a gold and a little larger than me, so I swept between the fishing huts, flashing my wings before her. She trilled so I trilled back, urging her to join me in the air when I noticed a hemp rope knotted around her legs. It was puzzling, almost as puzzling as the silver band buckled around her throat. It looked far too tight and I thought she surely must be in distress. The look in her eye said otherwise, so I lit upon the post beside her.\n\nA second trill came from the nearest hut and inside, I could see a young drake also larger than I. He was green and blue and trapped in a cage of wooden spikes. It was far too small for him, forcing him to fold his wings and hunch his spine. He also wore a silver band and I puzzled some more until the young drakina began nibbling the sea grass from my juvenile mane. It was distracting and entirely more pleasant than when my mother or sisters had tried.\n\nA crowd of stick people gathered from behind and while I may have been young and foolish, I was not overly foolish. I sprang from the post and up to the roof of the nearest hut. One of the stick people reached for a sack tied to his waist. He was shorter than the others and thinner, with a mane of curling spikes on the top of his head. He looked young, although I had no point of reference at the time. He held a fish up to the early morning sunlight and I remembered that while I had gorged itself on lemonwhites two days past, it was two days past. I snapped my beak in anticipation, delighted when he flung it into the air over the roof. I launched and caught it easily, downing it with a single gulp.\n\nThe golden drakina cooed at me and I snapped my beak a second time.\n\nHe flung a second fish, this time over the docks and I swept down like the Hallow Fire, snatching it before it hit the wood. The drakina was watching with interest so I tossed it into the air and flew in a circle before catching it in my beak and returning to the roof. I was proud of myself for my very newly acquired skill. I was a fisherdrake now. The Fang of Wyvern would soon be mine.\n\nThe fellow produced another fish, this one larger than all the others and I snapped my beak again. He waggled the fish in his hand and I leaned forward, clutching the roof with the talons of my wings. He waggled and waggled and the gold trilled and fanned her beautiful wings and the fish slipped out of the hand and onto the dock. The stick people fell silent at that.\n\nI looked around. The sea snakes were circling. They wanted the fish but it was mine. The stick had given it to me, not the snakes, not the other stick people. They stood in a circle around the fish, holding a web of hemp amongst them. I didn't wonder why. Clearly, they were afraid of my fire and thought a hemp wall a sufficient method of protection. It isn't in the nature of dragons to be suspicious, although perhaps it is more in our nature to be vain.\n\nI soared into the circle of stick people, snapping the large fish in my jaws and with one mighty stroke, swept upwards into the skies. It was then that I felt the hemp fall across my back, weighing my wings like the water in the storm. I dropped the fish and twisted, expecting the web to fall away but I was hauled down to the wood with a thud. I called the fire but the hemp was wet and it only sizzled with oily smoke. The people wrapped the hemp around and around and I remembered the little golden drakina and her bound legs and I remembered the blue and green drake and his cage of twigs and I knew that I had been a vain and foolish dragon. I struggled and fought but the hemp grew tighter and tighter until I could barely move. I cursed my wild stubborn pride and vainly bit at the hands grabbing and poking at my neck. When a silver band was snapped in place around my own throat, I bowed my head and relented."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE STICK PEOPLE",
                "text": "They are called Stick People because they build their world of sticks.\n\nI learned that the docks were a large fishing market called the Udan Shores on the bridges, barges and waterways of a city called Venitus. Venitus was a water-city, with the sea clawing the edges of the land for miles. Fishing boat, dory and skiff were the ways these sticks got about, and for the most part, they pushed their boats through canals with long poles. Large barges were pulled by dragons, and it was the first time I'd ever seen my people as anything but creatures of sea and sky. It was an affront to my pride and I immediately despised the world of sticks.\n\nIt was also the first time I ever thought of my people as a people. I suppose self-identification finds root in many soils.\n\nI was in a cage, much like the blue and green drake. It was small, so small that I was forced to remain curled and it wasn't long before my spine began to ache. I was a sea dragon, used to tall cliffs and taller skies, so these days spent in a cage were a horror to me. There was no food, though the smell of fish was everywhere, and I found my belly rumbling with the thought of lemonwhites and silverfins and bloodbass. At this point I knew I would eat a sea snake and be grateful for it. That is how low I had sunk.\n\nI never saw the stars in those first days, never saw the moons nor the hot sun nor the water. Only the inside of the hut and the cages of dragons. I thought much of my father, Draco Stellorum. I missed him but I realized with surprise that I missed my mother more.\n\nSeveral times a day, a hard-faced man came with a basket of fish and a long switch. He removed the blue-green dragon from his cage and I could not help but watch the exercises they went through. The hard-faced man handled the drake roughly, checked the silver band and the hemp at the drake's feet. The band restricted our fire somehow, keeping the arcstone from creating the spark that turned our acid to flame. Against our fiery breath, the stick people are helpless.\n\nI watched with narrowed eyes as he slipped a harness over the drake's blue head. Next, he pulled the wings through as though they were made of sticks, like everything else in this world of sticks. He didn't appreciate the glory and the delicacy of dragon wings, for he had nothing glorious or delicate of his own. Unless you counted the golden drakina. She would sit on his shoulder or perch on his wrist, nibble tiny grubs from his hand. He would pet her and coo at her and she would trill back. She was glorious and wicked and wonderful and I found it difficult not to watch her when I had the chance.\n\nRegarding the exercises, I vowed to do the opposite of what was expected of me, so I did. When the hard-faced man put his hand to the blue's beak, the blue lowered his head. When he put his hand to mine, I bit him. I was rewarded with a whack of the switch across my neck. When the hard-faced man offered a spoon of mashed fish, the blue ate, licking it off the spoon with a rough tongue. (I realized then another reason for the silver band \u2013 fisher dragons were not meant to swallow any of the fish they caught, merely hold it in our throats until our sticks demanded.) I did not accept the mash offered, however and rather hissed and lunged and was rewarded with the switch to my beak. Where the blue leapt to the hard-faced man's wrist, I flew at his face, straining with all my talons to paint that hard, leathery skin with ribbons of red. I cannot begin to tell you what he did with the switch after that.\n\nI hated the hard-faced man. I hated this village and my life in the cage of sticks, and I vowed to die here, defiant and free at least in spirit, dreaming of my life at the Anquar Cliffs. One day, the blue drake was gone, and I thought I saw him sitting once on the post next to the golden drakina. I didn't care. It would be a year before they would be of breeding age and I would be dead before then.\n\nMany days later, when my belly had long-since quieted and my head was too weary to lift, another of the stick people entered the hut. It was the same one as that first day \u2013 the young one that had tossed the fish into the air and lured me into this trap. I supposed I should have hated him more than the hard-faced man, but I didn't. I knew it was my own pride that rendered me here. No one was more to blame than I.\n\nHe wore a belted tunic and sandals, with a satchel draped across his shoulder. From it, he naturally pulled a set of sticks. He put those strange sticks to his lips and blew. What came out was music, beautiful sad music like dragons weeping and I found it soothing to my ears. It was good music to die to, I reckoned, and closed my eyes to welcome my end.\n\nThen, he began to talk in a voice that sounded like the roll of waves on the shore. I didn't even open one eye. He could slit my throat and take my hide as a prize, although with its bruises, I doubt it would be a worthy thing.\n\n\"Stormfall.\"\n\nHe repeated that single word, over and over and I grew to understand the shape of it, if not the meaning.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" he said. \"Stormfall. That's what I would call you.\"\n\nI ignored him, wishing in fact that he would slit my throat. At least the silver band would be gone.\n\n\"Serkus calls you Snake, but you fell out of the storm, so Stormfall.\"\n\nAnd then I felt something on my tail, a light something at first and I could smell a sharp tang above the odor of fish. I opened one eye to see him rubbing salve onto the wounds on my tail. I could have moved it if I wanted. I could have slid my tail into the cage and tucked it against my body but I didn't care. It felt good and I felt bad. It made sense to do nothing.\n\n\"You are a fine dragon,\" I heard him say. I didn't understand the words, but I understood the meaning, if only in the crooning tone of his voice. \"A very fine young dragon indeed. I'm sorry I let them catch you but I can't let you go now or Serkus will beat me the way he beats you.\"\n\nHe brought his face close to mine, studied me through the wooden bars. I opened both eyes now and blinked at him. He did look young, I thought, although I knew nothing of stick people. Dark curly hair like seaweed, dark eyes, dark skin like mine. If I had my fire, I think I could have burned it all off with one breath but I didn't care to. At least, that's what I told myself.\n\nThe boy bolted upright as the hard-faced man entered the hut, the blue perched obediently on his arm. He moved his stony eyes from the boy to me, and back again, before sliding the drake into his cage on the floor beside me.\n\n\"You think you are a match for this black snake, soul-boy?\" he snapped in a tone that I understood all too well, despite my lack of verse in stick. \"You want to try to make him a fisher?\"\n\n\"I did well enough with Skybeak,\" the boy answered. \"You said I did.\"\n\n\"Because I was teaching you.\"\n\n\"Then let me try. It's no use killing him.\"\n\nThe hard-faced man nudged my cage with his boot.\n\n\"A dragon not tamed is a dangerous thing,\" he said. \"Best to kill them before they eat your flocks or your village or your family.\"\n\nLies, I thought to myself. All I wanted was fish and sky.\n\n\"Let me try,\" said the boy. \"If I don't have him willing in harness and tether by the wide moons, I will take out his heart with a fishknife.\"\n\n\"By the Open Eyes?\" The man shook his head. \"That's four days.\"\n\n\"I can do it in three.\"\n\nWhen I think back on these things, I realize dragons aren't the only creatures with an abundance of vanity and pride.\n\n\"Three days it is.\" The hard-faced man turned to leave the hut, looked back with a wicked grin. \"If he eats any of the fish or damages the nets, it comes out of your pocket, Rue. Or your soul.\"\n\n\"He won't,\" said the boy.\n\nRue, I told myself. He was called Rue.\n\nIt was, I realized much later, my first introduction to names. It was to be a deep, twisted and profound relationship. But back to my story.\n\n\"You have two seasons left, Rue,\" said the hard-faced man, \"To get both your freedom and your soul. Don't risk it all for a wild dragon. A soul is a valuable thing.\"\n\nHe paused.\n\n\"Worth at least six months of fish.\"\n\nAnd then he laughed.\n\nThe boy called Rue lowered his eyes but I saw his fingers curl.\n\nStill laughing, the hard-faced man left the hut.\n\nWe were alone, the boy, Skybeak and me. From his little cage, the drake trilled and I watched as Rue reached in to rub the blue head, running his hand down to the chin, to the itchy spot between the spines. Skybeak gave a contented sigh, closed his eyes in pleasure.\n\nOddly enough, I didn't hate this blue drake. He was a captive just like me. He had made choices to live and not die and even though he spent his nights in the lair made of sticks, he spent his days serving at the side of the beautiful drakina. He seemed content but I wondered if he had ever flown the open skies. I wondered if he had ever caught his own lemonwhites or burned the tail of a sea snake or had seen the Dragon Flight soaring across the open waters. I could never accept this as my home, could never live off the mashed remains of rotten fish instead of hunting for myself.\n\nRue moved back to my cage, slid a wooden panel down from the top to pin my head and neck to the bottom. I didn't fight it. I didn't care. He fastened it with twine and carefully, opened the latch, reaching his hand in toward my face. I knew I should have bitten him then. My life would have been much different. Instead, I growled (which in dragon sounds much like music) but it did not deter him and before I knew it, his fingers brushed my jaw. I growled again as he traced the long, elegant lines of my beak, from my chin to the bony ridge circling my eye. I blinked slowly as his hand traced down my angular cheek and through the spines to the soft spot of my throat, all the while repeating the same word.\n\nStormfall.\n\nHe applied the sharp-smelling salve as I closed my eyes. I would growl more tomorrow, I told myself. I would burn his face off once I had regained the strength to do so. I had no idea what the next three days would bring, nor how my life would change by the wide moons. For now, I desperately wanted sleep and so I did. But the moons are like the tide \u2013 there is no stopping them once they are on their course to rise."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Rue carried the cage out of the markets to a remote part of the shore, where sand and stone met weeds and waves. Tiny sink-lizards darted along the beach, hunting insects that flittered above the surf. The wind was strong and cold and I found myself wondering how he was going to attempt to do this when the wind was a dragon's ally. Regardless, I didn't care overmuch. Once I could, I would be free.\n\nHe laid the cage down onto the sand and knelt beside it, sliding the wooden panel down across my neck again before opening the latch. I hissed at him, baring my teeth and wishing I had the flame to scorch his skin off. Within two moves, he had affixed a harness to my face, tightening leather straps around my jaws and fastening them behind my head. I had no horns at this point so I was effectively muzzled, prevented from biting, snapping or even spitting a wad of acid. He raised the panel and sat back, tugging on a cord that was attached to the muzzle. I didn't budge. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He would have to drag me out onto the sand to begin his lessons. Which is exactly what he did.\n\nI braced myself against the wood but he was so much stronger, and soon I was beak-first in the sand. My wings sprang out from my back, free for the first time in days. Yesterday I was wishing for death. Today, however, was another day and I leapt into the air, bringing my wings down in frantic strokes as they caught the wind and pushed me higher. Soon, I was far above the boy and the beach and I was free until a yank on the muzzle jerked my head earthward.\n\nI cursed my foolishness. Of course there was a method. He had trained dragons before and I was new to this game. I twisted my neck and tucked my wings, racing down towards him with talons extended but he ducked and flicked my legs with a reed as I swept by. Not harsh, but a reminder that they were stick people for a reason. I growled and flew high, reaching the end of the rope once more. I began to fly in circles, dizzying circles above his head, around and around and around, keeping the tension on the rope and searching for a weakness. But as I looked down, I saw him wrap the rope around his waist. He dropped to sit in the sand, pulled a small package out of the satchel across his chest. Immediately, I smelled salted silverfin and I slowed my circles, my belly waking up to the idea of food once again.\n\nHe sat quietly, this stick boy, chewing the silverfin and ignoring the dragon flying at the end of the rope. He was clever too, I had to give him that. It didn't take long before I swept in and dropped to the sand in front of him, folded my wings across my back. He didn't look at me, just continued to munch on the silverfin until it was all gone down his odd flat hole of a mouth. I suspected they had teeth, the stick people. Not true teeth like dragons. No fangs or tusks of a mature male, that much was true, and I wondered how they could eat anything as chewy as a silverfin. Lemonwhites, however, were a different story. They would fall apart with the slightest pressure.\n\n\"Six months worth of fish,\" he said softly. \"That's all my soul was worth.\"\n\nI narrowed my eyes, watched him eat the silverfins and thread the leather straps.\n\n\"My father sold it to Ruminor when I was born, before he sold me to Serkus. With all this buying and selling, you'd think I was valuable.\"\n\nMy mouth watered watching him.\n\n\"A dragon is worth far more than a soul-boy\u2026\"\n\nI wondered if they were also meant for me, these new leather straps. It didn't matter. I would soon be rid of this muzzle. No bindings could keep me contained. I was a wild drake. I racked the straps with my talons but the leather was strong and I was weak. Chewing, he looked up at me, reached into the pouch for another fish. Held it by the tail and waggled it like he had that first day in the village, causing the scent to waft in my direction. If I could have, I would have snapped my beak but I could barely open my mouth and I felt the juices well up between my teeth. I feared I would drool because of this cursed muzzle and that, for a dragon, is a terrible degradation.\n\nRue tossed the fish to the sand at my feet and I grabbed it in my talons, tried desperately to put the flesh to my mouth but the muzzle prevented it. I thrashed furiously and battered it with my beak but to no avail. I launched into the air, wishing I could just leave this prison of torment or die trying. I flew in dizzying circles once again but this time to the music of the wooden pipes. It was sad and lonely and beautiful, like me. I flew for hours and hours until the sun was high in the sky and I could fly no more and finally, I plummeted to the sand, welcoming the warmth on my belly and tail. If I couldn't have the fish, at least I would take this one pleasure before I died.\n\nAfter a long while, Rue rose to his feet and crossed the space between us. I lifted my head and hissed at him. The muzzle was tight and there was sand on my tongue but I didn't move. I didn't retreat. I merely watched him, knowing that at any moment, I could leap into the air and be out of his reach. If only for a time, though, because I was tethered and he was strong.\n\nHe crouched in front of me, held out the leathers.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" he said. \"This is a body harness. It will free your head and allow you to eat.\"\n\nI hissed again, although perhaps less vehemently.\n\nHe reached out his hand, stroked my neck, ran his hand along my shoulder, still raw from the hard-faced man's lashes. He gently laced the leathers around my wings and under my chest like the blue drake. I let him, knowing that ultimately, without teeth or fire I couldn't win. For some reason, I forgot my talons. I could have shredded his face and throat but I never thought about it. I tell myself I was exhausted but I suspect there was something more in the forgetting.\n\nHe cinched the second harness tight and I growled at him. He stroked my head, the spines that would one day mature into a mane of spikes, untied the muzzle and slid it off my face. I debated biting his nose off but it was then that he held up the fish.\n\nIt was a lemonwhite.\n\nI hated him.\n\nHe pulled out a short fish knife and slid the blade into the fish's mouth, slicing it into long, ribbon-like strips. He held one out to me and I growled again.\n\n\"Eat, Stormfall,\" he said, his voice rolling like the waves on the shore. \"It's small enough for you to swallow, even with the fisher collar. I won't mash it for you. You are a wild dragon and deserve respect.\"\n\nMy belly growled this time and I snapped the slice from his hand, throwing it back into my mouth but it caught the wrong way in my throat. I shook my head and it went aright, sliding down like water. It felt like nothing, and I looked back at him, angry and proud and demanding.\n\nSmiling, he held up another slice."
            },
            {
                "title": "WARSHIPS & CANNONFIRE",
                "text": "It was amazing how fast I could fly when the sky was clear and the waters calm. I learned how to release thought and focus solely on breathing in time to my beating wings. It was a furious rhythm, allowing no room for distraction and I found I could push myself so that even my second eyelid would burn from the wind. But while it was furious, my spirit soared in those times and I skimmed the surface of the waters in search of a target. In those days, my target was fish.\n\nDuring the last weeks of the dry season, I became the best fishing drake in all the village. Rue was a good trainer and I learned how to snatch two silverfins at once from the surface with my talons. I learned that the red flash in the water meant bloodbass and I would soar up high, arcing and diving deep to catch as many as seven in my mouth at the same time. I knew how to spit acid at the sea snakes and how to pull the heads off sink-lizards with claw and beak. I knew the school patterns of lemonwhites and the feeding habits of blue mollies and I knew which fish to avoid because of venom in their spines. I found that out the hard way.\n\nI learned how to drink the waters of the ocean. I far preferred the fresh water that Rue gave me from amphora back in the fishing hut, but I realized that I could, in fact, swallow mouthfuls of ocean when necessary and strain out the salt through tiny slits in my beak. The salt often crystalized, looked like stars glittering along my face.\n\nBest was that I learned to taunt the big scaly things called Black Monitors \u2013 the same creature that had tried to eat me on the night of the storm. I led them a merry chase, my tail dragging atop the ocean waves until they swam into rocks or reefs or sandbars that I had spied from above. They never died but still, I was proud of my new skills and thrived under Rue's patient hand.\n\nI would have been happier if they died, but then again, I was young and proud and male.\n\nBecause of Rue, I learned about life in the village. The Udan Shore was part of Venitus, a larger city of water canals and glass blowing and many, many boats. Everyone in Venitus seemed to hate the hard-faced man, whose name I learned was Master Fisher Brazza Serkus. I refused to acknowledge that he in fact had a name, preferring to think of him as simply the hard-faced man. I was still as proud as ever and wild, even though I wore the silver band.\n\nI learned that Venitus itself was in the nation of Remus and that the stick people of Remus bought and sold everything, including each other. As a child, Rue had been bought by the hard-faced man for peeling the shells off tiny beaked shrimp. He had proved good at his job and worked his way up to his current position of apprentice fisher dragoneer. Once his apprenticeship was complete, he would be free to leave the village and find work elsewhere and then, perhaps a life. He was young but not so young, and I would catch him glancing from time to time at the girls who sold hemp along the docks. They would smile and wave but wouldn't approach. I never thought that it might have been me, perched on his shoulder with my wings wide and teeth bared, although perhaps I suspected, just a little.\n\nI also learned that fishing dragons didn't last long in the village, for within a year they would outgrow any of the skiffs that the stick people used. In fact, the best I could expect from my life here was to breed the golden drakina (whose name I learned was Summerday) and then be sold as a barge dragon along the canals or as a cart dragon to an inland farm. I tried my best not to think of this, believing in my bones that Rue would free me before selling me as a cart dragon, but I didn't know this for fact. While he was kind, Rue was a stick and I was a dragon. Life meant very different things to both of us.\n\nAnd so one evening, I returned to Rue's skiff. He was alone in the little boat, the shoreline barely a slash across the western horizon. I landed on his knee, releasing the fish in my talons and bringing up the others from my crop. The baskets were full after a good day and as I settled onto my perch at the prow, he pulled several strips of silky lemonwhite and fed me by hand. Because of the band, I could never swallow the fish I caught so Rue always fed me strips. I felt very lucky. Skybeak, Summerday and the others were always fed mash. I couldn't imagine eating mash from a bowl. It was an affront to my wild, proud and vainglorious nature.\n\nAnd so we sat one evening, Rue playing the pipes and I warbling along in my beautiful dragon voice, both of us enjoying the sun set over the water. Soon, it was twilight and the sky filled with streaky clouds and stars and my father, Draco Stellorum, and we just sat, the boat rising and falling on the quiet breathing of the water. The village was a long way off and we would frequently go back after dark. I think he was lonely, this stick boy, and a dreamer for he would often gaze for hours at the horizon of empty sky. We would venture further than any other fisher team and I wondered if he had ever thought to escape, to flee his master and begin a life somewhere he had never been. Every night we returned home, however, to the hut and the dragons and the docks and Master Fisher Serkus. Fortunately, the beatings were few now that Rue was growing and I was trained.\n\nAt one point that night, Rue lowered the pipes.\n\n\"There's going to be a war soon,\" he said quietly. \"Serkus said that Lamos is trying to steal our dragons. He said we should not go out too far and to pray that Ruminor will keep us safe when we go.\"\n\nI had heard the name Ruminor before. A god, I presumed, a spirit who ruled the skies and taken the moons as sister-wives. I was learning much from my time with the sticks.\n\n\"I won't pray,\" said Rue. \"It's Ruminor's fault if there's a war. He made the world for his sons but gave dragons to one and not the other. That's a terrible thing to do. We shouldn't have to pay the price if war comes to Remus. Ruminor was a bad father.\"\n\nHe paused, searching his thoughts. He was a quiet boy, not given to many words. This was the only time he talked, when we were alone on the ocean at night. I think the water made him feel safe and the stars made him free.\n\nSometimes, it was so quiet that I could hear his thoughts.\n\n\"Not that I know about fathers,\" he muttered. \"Mine sold me when I was born.\"\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n\"Doesn't matter really. I have shelter, I have work. And I have my own dragon. That's better than a father.\"\n\nHe ran a hand along the crest of my skull, the warm nubs where my horns would grow. He raised his dark head to stare at the sky and sighed.\n\n\"I don't believe the old stories about Ruminor and his sons, anyway. They're just old myths and rules. Don't tell Serkus. He'd have me whipped, even though he doesn't believe them either.\"\n\nI couldn't tell the hard-faced man. I wouldn't even think his name. Names were, and still are, profound things.\n\nHe'd stopped patting me. I pushed my head into his hand so he resumed.\n\n\"I do believe in dragons, though,\" he smiled. \"Dragons are beautiful and proud and strong and clever. Sometimes I wish I had been born a dragon.\"\n\nI loved these nights on the water. I loved his hand on my neck, the sound of his words. Like waves on the ocean. With his music and his love of the sea, I often wondered if Rue was part dragon.\n\n\"I've been learning about dragons. Well, mostly about Selisanae of the Sun. Every morning, she rises from the ocean to chase Ruminor's wives from the sky. She reminds me of Summerday sometimes.\"\n\nSummerday. I could easily believe she was daughter to the sun. Just the mention of her name made me sit a little prouder, arch my neck so my spines stood out.\n\nVanity, thy name is dragon.\n\n\"She was one of the First Dragons, Selisanae was. Serkus calls them the Veternum. Selisanae, Nerisanae, Stellorus and Anquarus.\"\n\nThe last two struck a familiar chord. My father and my home. Odd how the words were so similar. Maybe Rue was part dragon after all.\n\n\"I believe in the Veternum,\" he continued. \"But Ruminor?\"\n\nHe grunted.\n\n\"I don't believe in him because I don't have a soul. If he gave it back, then maybe I'd believe but he doesn't, so it's his own fault.\"\n\nRue often talked about souls. I didn't know what they were but apparently he didn't have one. His father had sold it to that Ruminor before selling him to Serkus. It was complicated and beyond my dragon reason. I knew about fish, however. I snapped my beak. He passed me a slice of lemonwhite.\n\n\"Soul-boys \u2013 that's what they call us.\" He sighed again. \"Soul-boys, because we don't have a soul. Doesn't matter. I don't need it anyway. I have you and you have soul enough for me.\"\n\nI would give Rue a soul if I knew where to find one. All a dragon needed was water, sky, flame and fish.\n\n\"I'll be free soon though and Serkus will make Ruminor release my soul. Only two more seasons. I'll have to pay Serkus for you so I might have to work another season, but I'll do it. I'll take you with me, Stormfall. I promise you that. When I'm free, you will be too. I may not end up with my soul but at least I'll have my dragon.\"\n\nFreedom sounded good. Lemonwhites sounded better.\n\n\"Can you imagine where we could go on our own?\" he asked, passing me another strip. \"To Capua or to the Etreni Salts or maybe even all the way down to Terra Remus. I could buy my own skiff and we could live on the beaches and neither of us would have to work for anyone ever again. I don't need a soul to be happy. I think all I need is a dragon.\"\n\nAll I needed was fish. I snapped my beak again.\n\nHe grinned and fed me another.\n\nWe sat longer, rising and falling on the water and eating lemonwhites. By right, they belonged to the hard-faced man, as did Rue and I and all the fish we caught. In spite of this, I would have happily eaten them all but at one point I realized there was a sound on the water.\n\nI lifted my head, gazed around in the darkness.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" Rue asked. \"What do you hear?\"\n\nHe reached for a lantern, but paused.\n\nThe creak of wood, the splash of oars, the rush of waters, the flap of canvas in the faint breeze.\n\nI spread my wings but he scrabbled forward, wrapping me in his arms and pulling me into his chest. He closed my beak with one hand.\n\n\"Hush,\" he hissed. \"A ship\u2026\"\n\nI blinked, not understanding. I didn't fight him, though. It was Rue and he was my stick. The rush of waters grew louder, became a roar. I darted my eyes across the expanse, looking for a sign. There was black and there was blackness. I could feel the air moving forward, pushed by an unseen force.\n\nThere. I spied it just to the east of us - a flash of rigging in the starlight. It was almost on top of us and I struggled now, flailing against Rue's arms. He released me, hauling back on his oar and turning the prow just as a massive vessel swept across our path. I launched into the starry sky, flapping just above the water and hoping I was invisible because of my night-black scales.\n\nThree vessels with billowing striped canvas sails and ten oars per side, row upon row. The prows were curved inward with large painted eyes that watched me as they surged past. On the decks, men pushed large iron objects and there was an odour that brought back early fledgling memories of arcstone.\n\nOne of the shipsmen shouted, pointed at me as I swept too close. It was a language different from Rue's and I flew higher until I was out of sight. From the sky, I could see Rue's tiny boat bobbing in the wake of the three great vessels so I waited until he was far behind before swooping down to my perch on the skiff.\n\n\"Lamoan warships!\" gasped Rue and he lunged forward, snapping my harness to a pull-ring at the prow. \"We have to warn the village! Maybe we can beat them to the shores! Fly, Stormfall! Fly!\"\n\nHe threw me into the air and I whirled above the skiff, feeling the harness snap taut against my chest. I heard his oars splash and I threw all my strength against the leathers as together, dragon and boy set the small boat racing across the waters toward the village. But two oars are no match for forty, and one small dragon no match for wind-catching sails. They easily out-paced us, leaving us battling their white-capped wake as we struggled to keep up.\n\nIn the distance, I saw a flash like Hallow Fire, followed by a boom like Hell Down and behind me in the skiff, Rue let out a strangled cry. I flapped harder, feeling the strain in my wings and the chafe of the leather against my chest. Another flash, another boom and fire began to glow across the horizon. Posts and beams, docks and huts, we watched the structures of the village catch and blaze. Soon, Rue leaned back on the oars, dragging us until we slowed.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" he whispered, his voice hoarse and cracking. \"Stormfall, come back.\"\n\nI did, grateful for the rest, and I lit on his knee, eyes still fixed to the burning village very far away. He dropped his hand on my head, silent and still. From our vantage, we could see silhouettes of buildings blazing with flame, timbers crackling and splitting, roofs crashing down on the living things within. Most disturbing were the shadowy figures, blazing as they leapt into the water. Plumes of steam rose as the waves sizzled and smoked.\n\nThis was stick fire and I was stunned at how deadly it was. Another flash, another boom, another explosion in the village. And so we sat for a long time, rocking on the waves, our faces made hot by the distant flames, our backs cold from night on the water. As the village burned, we could see men from the ships running from hut to hut, could hear laughter and screaming in equal measure. I thought I heard the shriek of a young dragon and I feared for Skybeak and Summerday. There were other fishing dragons in the village, so I convinced myself it was one of them.\n\nAnother sound now, coming from the night behind us and I sat up, looked to the sky. Rue said nothing. I'm not certain he even noticed. I chirruped loudly and unfurled my wings. Rue looked up and gasped.\n\nWhommpf, whommpf, whoompf, steady and low and strong, a Dragon Flight swept like an arrow across the stars above us, a great silver drake at the tip. I could see the intricate harness, saddle and leathers that kept the riders in place and my heart threatened to burst at the sight of them. They continued on over us and I knew tonight there would be a battle that I would be both honoured and horrified to witness.\n\nAs they arced down over the ships, seven dragons unleashed their fire and the sails erupted in flame. There was chaos on deck as the great iron objects spun, flashing and booming in the night sky. One, a stone-gray drake, went spiralling down and I could see his rider leap from the saddle as they hit the water. The drake bellowed, thrashing as arrows pelted the waves. The rider cried out under the deadly hail before he disappeared beneath the hull of the ship. The last I saw of the dragon was the tip of his tail as he too slipped into the black.\n\nRue had a grip on my own harness but I strained against him, twisting and snapping, until he finally unhooked the rope. Released, I was instantly airborne and beating my wings madly to catch up with the Flight.\n\nAnother flash and boom and I ducked, the heat searing my second lids as a great iron ball tore past me to shatter the wing of a golden drake behind me. He spun as he went down, hitting the waters hard, the spray cooling me as I swept through. His rider did not leap and both were met with a volley of arrows, turning the whitecaps red before they slipped under the seething waves.\n\nAbove us, the dragons circled, spraying fire and as I neared, the heat was worse than even the hottest day on the Anquar Cliffs. The sounds from the battle were deafening\u2013 the booming of black iron, the roar of the fires and the shouting of the sticks. Another blast of cannonfire, another volley of arrows. Five dragons raining death down on the flaming warships, and me, a little night-black dragon in the middle of it all.\n\nI saw the silver drake land on the top deck of the lead vessel, setting everything alight with his breath as he swung his great head. Two sticks spun a cannon, taking aim at him from the deck below. I barked a warning but the battle roared louder so I tucked my wings and dove like a spear.\n\nThe first stick screamed as my talons raked across his face and I wheeled, disappearing with a flick of my tail into the night. Fragile, I marvelled. His skin tore like lemonwhites under my claws. The second stick cranked the iron, so I dropped onto his head, striking at his eye and piercing the pulpy flesh with my dagger-sharp juvenile beak. A string of slime and ooze trailed when I pulled it out and I shook my head, sent it sailing across the deck. The man howled and dropped to his knees but I was gone; a wraith of ash and stars and cool night air.\n\nBefore I knew it, the great silver drake was in the air beside me. His head was larger than my entire body, his one wing-beat to my ten. I knew he saw me, for his wide pupil constricted, but his rider yanked on the rein and he banked hard, circling to rain fire once again across the foremast of the ship. It pitched forward, crashing onto a set of barrels and black powder spilled across the deck. Suddenly, there was a great flash of light and I tumbled through the air, a boom cracking the night like Hell Down. I caught the hot wind and soared upwards, watching as the hull split in two under the flames. Slowly, both halves pitched forward and followed the drakes down to the depths.\n\nThe remaining ships began to pull away from the docks, abandoning any men to the fire, the boiling water and the enemy, but the Dragon Flight was relentless. Their flames scorched the ships over and over until both vessels groaned and shuddered, tipping stern over prow and sliding into the dark water. The Flight then swept the seas, torching any men left bobbing in the waters. It was as bright as midday, but the light was that of the burning docks and the flaming timbers and the golden reflection of it all on the surface of the sea.\n\nI hovered for a long moment, watched the Flight leave the wreckage and wing their way towards the village. In my heart of hearts, I longed to follow but I was too young and far too small. But they had captured my imagination \u2013 dragon and stick flying as one, our fire harnessed without a single silver band to be seen. Perhaps the most powerful, most noble dance in the history of the world and I had shared in its steps, small as they may have been.\n\nWith a flick of my tail, I wheeled in the air and returned to the skiff, lowering myself silently onto the prow.\n\nRue sat, eyes empty, watching the glowing city as we rocked on the waters. I snapped my beak at him, hoping for a reward. He did nothing. I hopped over to perch next to him, snapped again. Nothing. I had done well tonight. I had assisted in a battle. I deserved a reward, praise, a stroke on the head.\n\nNothing.\n\nHis silence was confounding.\n\nFinally, after several hours of sitting in the boat, bobbing up and down on the surface of the water, he reached for the oars to take us home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "There was little left of the docks that morning and our fishing hut had burned to the ground. Bodies lay fallen among charred wood, arms and legs twisted at awkward angles, smoking like coals. These sticks died in contorted positions, and I realized it was the same as with dragons. When we die, our spines constrict and our heads twist over our backs. I couldn't imagine the manner of pain produced by immolation. Some things are too terrible for the imagination of dragons.\n\nI perched on Rue's shoulder as he wandered through the remains. I wasn't certain what he was looking for, but he was my stick. He needed me and I was proud to be needed. When I think back on it, I realize that I was bound to him in ways that had nothing to do with the silver band at my throat.\n\nOther villagers wandered across the docks, some gathering usable items, some looking for loved ones, all wailing in despair. The docks were the only part of the village that I had known, but Venitus was a large center and city people floated by on their dorries and skiffs to glimpse the destruction. They were lucky that the pirates did not get further into the city but then again, they were lucky only because of the Dragon Flight.\n\n\"Boy!\" came a voice and Rue turned to see a man in silver armour crunching through the debris toward us. I recognized him as the rider of the silver drake and I spread my wings at the sight of him. I'm not sure why. Perhaps to make myself look bigger and therefore more impressive. Perhaps as a threat to keep him away from my stick. I don't know. It had been a long night and I was tired.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on us,\" said the man in greeting.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles,\" said Rue, bowing swiftly. \"How may I serve?\"\n\n\"Your dragon, may I see him?\"\n\nRue glanced at me then back at the rider.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Your dragon saved my life last night, and that of my drake, Ironwing.\"\n\nRue glanced at me again before gathering the hemp rope and passing me over to the rider. I hissed angrily but perched on the man's gloved wrist. I was big but he was strong.\n\n\"What have you named him?\"\n\n\"Stormfall, Master Rider.\"\n\n\"Interesting name.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Rider. He blew in on a storm. With his colouring, it seemed to fit.\"\n\nThe rider checked my teeth, examined my spines, the stumps where horns would crown my skull as I aged. I hissed again but it was a vain protest. This man was skilled in the way of dragons.\n\n\"Taken from wild, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Rider,\" said Rue. \"I caught him for my Fishing Master.\"\n\n\"And you trained him yourself?\"\n\n\"I did, Master Rider. He's a very good fishing drake.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" He passed me back and I hopped to Rue's shoulder, home. \"His colouring is advantageous. Gods-damned Lamoans never saw him coming.\"\n\n\"The fish don't see him either,\" said Rue. \"That's why we go at night.\"\n\n\"My name is Cassien Cirrus, First Wing of the Eastern Quarter Dragoneers,\" said the man. \"When he's older, bring him to the Citadel. We could use a night dragon like him.\"\n\n\"A night dragon\u2026\" repeated Rue, tasting the words on his tongue.\n\nThe stick reached into his armour and produced a coin. He placed it in Rue's hand.\n\n\"A pass into the Citadel. Bring it with you when you come.\"\n\nHe turned to leave.\n\n\"But what about me?\" called Rue. \"What will I do without my dragon?\"\n\nThe man shrugged.\n\n\"Perhaps we could use a young dragon like you too.\"\n\nHe flashed his teeth and left us to approach a gathering of city officials down the docks. In the distance I spied a gleam of silver as the great drake cleaned his scales on the sand.\n\nRue studied the coin in his hand before slipping it into his pocket and I folded my wings across my back. I was hungry and too tired for imaginings. I longed for my wooden cage where I would fall asleep under the trills of Summerday.\n\nI wondered if I would dream, and if so, I hoped it would be of the Flight.\n\nSuddenly, the world pitched beneath me and I tumbled forward to the dock, a crack like Hell Down ringing through my ears. Rue staggered and went down as well as the switch of Fishing Master Serkus rained blow after blow upon his head and shoulders. I screeched and sprang from the dock, wings beating against his chest, claws extended. I would rake out his eyes like I had on the ship.\n\nBut I froze when I saw his face. The face that had always been hard as mountain rock was now gone \u2013 fleshy, raw and blackened by flames. With a savage backhand, he whipped the switch across my beak and stars exploded like Lamoan cannons behind my eyes. He swung a net of hemp across me and I dropped back to the charred wood with a thud. Rue cried out and threw himself, fists flailing, onto the man but Serkus struck him to the dock with savage ease. I thrashed against the netting as he kicked me over and over and over. The blows were hotter than the fire on the docks, but soon, even the heat faded and Rue's cries drowned under the pounding of my ears until there was nothing but ash and stars and blackness and silence."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE COROLANUS MARKETS",
                "text": "I was in another cage now, traveling on the back of a cart pulled by noxen \u2013 strong buck-like creatures with low horns and no imagination. They were happy to pull carts. They were happy to eat grass. They were happy to be in harness and happy to be free of it. I easily understood the myth that dragons ate noxen, for if I'd had the chance, I would have killed and eaten them too. I think they would have been happy for their deaths as well.\n\nWe rattled along the road through foothills of yellow grass and red rock. I could see mountains in the distance; great white peaks that were impressive yet so very different from either the Anquar Cliffs or the Udan Shore. This dry land was alien to me and I found my scales flaking in the arid wind. I missed the water that had shaped my early life, but it wasn't the only thing I missed.\n\nNext to me in an identical cage was Summerday. She had survived the attack on the village, for which I was grateful, but she had not trilled, she had not cooed, she had not done any of the things that had previously marked her as a glorious young drakina. I realized quite soon then that she was blind. Something had happened on the night of the attack and rather than slit her throat, the hard-faced man (whom I now called the no-faced man) was going to sell her as a breeder, taking whatever he could get for her. I didn't know if it was the right thing. While a dragon lived, there was always a possibility of life out of the ashes. Once dead, a dragon merely fed the earth and the many creatures that lived on her.\n\nSkybeak was not here, which told me much.\n\nThe worst thing, however, was the fact that I had not seen Rue since that morning on the docks and I prayed that the no-faced man hadn't killed him. I couldn't imagine how he could have, not with Rue almost grown, but sticks lived by very different rules than dragons. They killed dragons easily, but I wondered if killing each other was allowed by the laws of their land or their god.\n\nWithout Rue, I felt torn in two, like a sliver of lemonwhite left to dry on the shore. If he was alive, I knew he'd find me and free me from this terrible cage. We'd live on the ocean and fish forever, he'd promised and I believed him. But if the no-faced man had killed Rue, I hoped he was with his soul somewhere where spirit dragons flew to the song of his pipes.\n\nI would have protected him with my life had I been given the chance. I would have given my life for his.\n\nThere was no fighting this cage. I had tried and I had failed. The bars were rattan and very strong and the little acid I could produce would only sizzle the smooth oiled surface. And so I lay, curled upon myself and cursing the life of a dragon. I should not have left the aerie, I told myself. I should not have been so vain. But vanity is like youth \u2013 it fades in time, to be replaced by ache, stone and ash.\n\nBut then again, I would never have met Rue. I would never have flown alongside a Dragon Flight, battled warships, learned about sticks. I couldn't regret my choices. They had been mine and had been right at the time. Still, I was so very young. What did a young dragon know about life?\n\nAfter several days on a terrible lurching road, I saw the signs of another village, this one larger than the Udan Shore but smaller than Venitus itself. Huts high up in the mountains, farms along the hills, fields of noxen and tallybucks, and more carts that joined us on the road. That night, the no-faced man pulled into an inn as the rains started, taking his noxen into the stables but leaving Summerday and I under a tarp on the back of the cart.\n\nThe no-faced man had left us each with a small wooden boards blobbed with mash. I was very hungry and tried to eat it, but my tongue rebelled and I pushed the board out through the bars to get the scent away from my nose. It was then that I heard the first sound from Summerday \u2013 a snapping of her beak that drew my attention. The no-faced man had missed the mark and her mash board sat just outside the cage, beyond her reach. She could smell it but couldn't see it, and she battered her head repeatedly against the bars of the cage as she tried to reach. I was not a sentimental dragon but the sight of such a glorious drakina reduced to this filled me with an ache of an altogether different sort.\n\nI glanced down at my food. I wasn't going to eat it so I nudged the board with my own beak, edging it towards her cage. I nudged it again and again, until it caught against the base of the bars. She heard it bump and flattened her head, spines lying elegantly against her neck. I had to try harder. I slipped my beak beneath the board, tipping it up and the mash slid down, down the board to blob at the base of her cage. It was gone in a heartbeat and I felt a wave of satisfaction, not so much in the act of helping her but in the act of thwarting the no-faced man.\n\nMy anger burned again and I vowed to kill him even if it meant death for me, which it would. Sticks could kill dragons, but dragons were forbidden to kill sticks. If dragons were a proud people, sticks were prouder still. Perhaps we were similar in that regard.\n\nMaybe I would kill him for Rue too. I would kill him for Rue, for Summerday and for me.\n\nThe rain continued all night and water seeped under the tarp to run through the cart. I didn't mind. I was a fisher dragon and water was my friend. I stretched my neck under the bars and let it roll onto my tongue. I felt bad for Summerday however \u2013 she couldn't catch the water and after many hours of missing the raindrops that fell through her cage, she stopped, lowering her beautiful head onto her claws, defeated. She went thirsty that night and after the meal of rotten fish, it was heartbreaking.\n\nAt first light of morning, the no-faced man climbed back into the cart and we rambled off again. I was grateful he didn't bother to feed us but wished he had removed the tarp. While the rainy season meant cooler weather, it was hot under that heavy cover. My wings and legs were aching from the confinement, and I longed just to be able to stretch and flap and fly. I dozed and my dreams were filled with longing and fire and Rue.\n\nBy noon, the rain had ceased and noise from the streets had intensified. I knew that we were no longer on rural roads and I was elated when the cart jerked to an unceremonious halt. I raised my head when the tarp was thrown off and blinked as the light poured in from above. My cage was yanked from the cart and I could immediately smell dragons.\n\nIt was a market, bustling with sticks and animals and carts and stalls and despair. Brown puddles splashed under foot, wheel and claw. Waterlogged canopies hung from poles and masonry walls were streaked from the night's rain. Still, the sun was strong, making the air heavier than ever. I was glad to be out from under the tarp.\n\nThe no-faced man threw my cage up on a wooden platform between three other young drakes. One, a large red, hissed and flung himself against his bars, but I spat a mouthful of acid at him and he recoiled, showing me his back. The others were grey-greens and I don't think they even noticed me. They lay with their heads on their wings, uncaring and dull and I wondered at the apathy of dragons. It was an entirely foreign concept to me. Then again, I had wished to die those first days on the Udan Shore. Perhaps apathy was not so different from grief. Both crippled like chains.\n\nA moment later and Summerday's cage was wedged between us. Surprisingly, the red drake hissed at her too and I wondered if he were as blind as she.\n\nThe stick people gathered round a sandy circle, shouting and laughing as one-by-one the half-yearling drakes were auctioned off. The red was sold to a fighting pit and I thought that it was a fitting end for the foul-tempered creature. The grey-greens were sold as a pair to a family of arcstone miners. They would spend most of their lives underground now, detecting and grading the stone for the men who mined it. Apparently, arcstone was as vital for sticks as it was for dragons, although what they did with it, I still don't know.\n\nNext, it was Summerday and I craned my neck as the no-faced man pulled her from her crate. She wobbled awkwardly on his wrist and he gave it a shake so that she unfurled her marvellous golden wings. A murmur of approval rose from the crowd and for the first time, I wondered if sticks had an appreciation for finer things.\n\n\"What is her story?\" asked a woman from the back row. \"Can she pull?\"\n\n\"She's a fisher,\" said the no-faced man. \"Best I ever had. But she can pull, given the right harness.\"\n\n\"Why are you selling her, then?\"\n\n\"I ran a fleet on the Udan Shore of Venitus,\" he said. \"Lost everything to pirates in the last raid and needs to pay my debts. See?\"\n\nAnd he gestured to his non-existent face.\n\nAnother murmur. Clearly, news of the raid had made it to this foothill town. I could hear the word \"Lamos\" from the crowd and a rumble like distant thunder of Hell Down. One man spat upon the ground.\n\n\"She's blind, see?\" said the no-faced man. \"Lost her eyesight in the fires so she's no use to me as a fisher. But as I said, given the right harness \u2013 a fixed harness, mind \u2013 she can still pull.\"\n\nThe woman stepped forward, accompanied by a lady in waiting and two men, obviously guards. She was in cream linen, with gold belt and gold laurels in her golden hair. If I had been a stick, I'm sure I would have been impressed. As a dragon however, I knew she would burn as easily as the next.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on us,\" she said and the crowd murmured.\n\n\"Yah, Ruminor,\" said the no-faced man.\n\n\"Your blind drakina,\" said the woman. \"How can she pull?\"\n\n\"She's a fine thing,\" said the no-faced man. \"And so are you. I'm assuming you're not using her to pull a plow, harvester or tiller, are you?\"\n\n\"Certainly not. I'm from Bangarden.\"\n\nThe crowd murmured approvingly. She noticed.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on Bangarden,\" grinned the no-faced man.\n\n\"He does indeed. My husband is a senator and as such, I have a golden pilentus that is always pulled by a golden dragon. I have four, you see, but the golds \u2013 well, they don't come along every day.\"\n\n\"Your headstalls have blinders, yeah? Well, she don't need them. If you have a fixed trap and a good driver, she'll do well by you.\"\n\n\"How is she for handling?\"\n\n\"As I said, best I ever had.\"\n\nShe whispered to one of the men before turning back to the podium.\n\n\"Twenty-four denari and nothing more.\"\n\n\"Twenty-four denari?\" barked the no-faced man. \"She's worth twice that!\"\n\n\"She's blind,\" cooed the woman and I suddenly hated her more than the no-faced man. \"No blind dragon is worth a single coin so be grateful I'm offering what I am. She'll have a year of service in a fine household and I have a golden drake that is around her age. Perhaps we'll get a few clutches out of her before she kisses the axe.\"\n\nI would tear out her eyes before I killed her.\n\n\"Sold,\" grumbled the no-faced man. \"Treat her right. She's a good girl.\"\n\nBut the woman was gone, whirling off into the crowded market with her lady at her heels. One of the men stepped forward to complete the transaction and I felt an unexpected tightening in my chest at the sight of her \u2013 beautiful wicked Summerday, sold to pull a vain stick carriage and likely die before her prime. Life was hard on dragons. So few of us reached maturity and once again, I thought of the Dragon Flight. Large, majestic, mature dragons living with a noble purpose.\n\nAnd, I thought, no silver band around their throats.\n\nJust like that, she was passed over to the woman's guard, a muzzle strapped around her beak and her wings bound in leather. He bundled her under his arm and pushed into the crowd. I lost sight of her in a heartbeat and for some reason, my world was a little darker without her.\n\nI was the last of the half-yearlings and the no-faced man hauled my crate roughly to the podium. Like Summerday, he yanked me out and made me perch on his wrist. I was heavier and I could tell his muscles were straining under the feat, but still, he snapped his wrist and I stretched my wings for balance. There was silence from the crowd.\n\n\"What in Hadys is that colour?\" asked one man, a stick with more rolls on his chin than there was on the shore. \"Black? Since when is there a black dragon?\"\n\n\"He's perfect for night fishing,\" said the no-faced man. \"Or night hunting. The prey don't even see him coming.\"\n\nI remembered the words of the silver rider. A Night Dragon, he had called me.\n\n\"A night dragon?\" echoed a voice and the crowd parted on a small man with long grey hair and skin almost the same shade. He had a cane and was wearing a hat that looked like an upside-down cone. \"Wouldn't that would be dangerous?\"\n\n\"Dangerous? This one ain't dangerous. He's ominous.\"\n\nAnd once again, the no-faced man shook his wrist. I flapped instinctively to keep my balance, cursing him and his theatrics.\n\n\"My name's Gavius and I'm from the Under Weathers,\" said the gray man. \"We've been having troubles with a dragon taking our flocks. How would I know this one wouldn't do the same?\"\n\nThe no-faced man ran a hand along my scales. I snapped but he batted my beak and I relented.\n\n\"Look at his scales,\" he said. \"Why do you think he so scarred up?\"\n\nNo one answered.\n\n\"He was on the docks when the cursed pirates attacked,\" the no-faced man lied. \"He tried to save my dragons but the cannons were too much for him. He risked his life for the others, but all he ever ate was fish.\"\n\nLies, lies, all lies. Except the part about the fish.\n\n\"So I can guarantee you, Master Farmer Gavius, that this dragon will not eat your flock. In fact, he'll protect them. He's the best drake I've ever had.\"\n\nAcid. Flame. Teeth to the throat. Talons to the belly. All the ways I could kill him.\n\n\"I thought you said the gold was your best?\" came a snicker from the crowd.\n\n\"I lied,\" he said. \"That horanah was rich and I wanted her money.\"\n\n\"Yah! You're full of shat, Serkus!\" said another.\n\n\"That's what his wife says!\"\n\nAnd the crowd laughed at him. Almost as good as death, I reckoned but he bared his teeth, held me up all the higher.\n\n\"The First Wing of the Eastern Quarter Dragoneers staked a claim on him,\" he shouted above the crowd. \"And you can get two hundred denari for a Flight Dragon recruit.\"\n\n\"Why don't you train him then?\" came another and the crowd murmured once again.\n\nHe stepped forward and I felt his puckered eye fall upon me.\n\n\"I don't have the heart, see,\" he said quietly. \"The boy who used to fish with him\u2026\"\n\nMy heart thudded in my chest.\n\n\"They were inseparable, see?\"\n\nRue. He was talking about Rue.\n\n\"That boy, he was like a son to me\u2026\"\n\nHis voice cracked. A woman crooned in sympathy.\n\n\"I just, I can't bear to look upon these proud, valiant, Lamoan-fighting black scales\u2026\"\n\nI had no breath, no heartbeat, no thought. What was he saying?\n\n\"So I needs to find him a home, see? A home where he can be treated fairly, with someone as proud and valiant as my poor, lost fishing boy\u2026\"\n\nI didn't know what to think. He was lying. Surely, he was lying about Rue. But I didn't know.\n\nI didn't know.\n\nThere was silence for a long moment, before Gavius nodded and raised his cane.\n\n\"Twenty.\"\n\nA knife smile split the raw face and he shook his wrist so that I flapped one last time.\n\n\"Give me thirty for my poor lost fishing boy.\"\n\n\"Thirty!\" called a large stick from the back.\n\nThe bidding was hot and animated but all I could think of was Rue. He couldn't be dead. The no-faced man was lying. And yet, why wasn't he here? He had said we'd be together. He had promised we'd be free.\n\nHe had been bought and sold in a market just like this as a youngling. I wondered if he had been afraid like Summerday, or apathetic like the grey-greens, or bewildered like me. Not for the first time, I marked our similarities but also our differences, and wondered what it was that enabled people as frail as sticks to rule creatures as magnificent as dragons.\n\n\"Sold!\" shouted the no-faced man. With great pleasure that he slipped the muzzle on over my beak, tugging the laces tight behind my head. One day I would kill him, I thought to myself over the tugging and the straps. I would summon all the fire in my dragon chest and finish the job the pirates had started. Whether Rue was alive or dead, I would be happy to watch him burn.\n\nHe passed me over to the grey man.\n\n\"This collar looks tight,\" said the grey man. \"When does he need a new one?\"\n\n\"Not for a few months,\" the no-faced man lied. \"It's a fisher-bolt, see? Supposed to fit good and snug. Besides, this fella is slippery and can spit acid with even the littlest room.\"\n\n\"Noted,\" said the grey man. \"He have a name?\"\n\nStormfall, Rue had said. You fell out of the storm so Stormfall.\n\n\"Snake.\"\n\nThe grey man shrugged, slid the wing-leathers down over me and once again, I was confined. He strapped me in across his back, so I could see where he had been. As he began to make his way out of the dragon market, I could see the yearlings brought in now \u2013 greys and blues, greens and browns, all of them as beaten down as the noxen that had pulled my cart.\n\nIn the swarming, bobbing mass of people, I did see a flash of gold. I imagined it was Summerday flapping desperately in harness and fixed poles, an elegant golden whip coming down across her back. But it was only a flash and I have a vivid imagination.\n\nI closed my eyes then, and let the stick carry me away from this horrible place to my new home in the Under Weathers. But a part of me was gone, left behind on the Udan Shores, bound up in the fate of a lost boy without a soul."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE UNDER WEATHERS",
                "text": "It was dark and raining when we reached the district called the Under Weathers and as we traveled, I thought we might possibly be headed back to the sea. My ears popped frequently and if I kept my eyes open to the road behind me, I grew dizzy from the low pressure. The air was a welcome change from the Corolanus Markets however, and the rain made everything lush and green. Moss grew up rocks and down tree branches and rivers rushed alongside the road that gradually became a path then a shaghorn trail and then little more than a narrow footpath.\n\nWe saw no one else on that road for the entire day. It was a silent, solitary journey through foothill and forest, but the rain was constant and warm so I was content. Dragons are creatures of water as much as sky, but I did wonder about the stick. His conical hat and hide boots were soggy to the point of shapeless, but he walked without slipping, so I couldn't complain.\n\nThis land of the Under Weathers was very hilly, with low mountains and odd rock formations rising from shallow lakes. There was fog everywhere. At one point, I thought he was going to take us directly into a mountainside but there was a fissure and we slipped right through. It was perfectly black in this cavern and I could hear the hissing of goswyrms overhead. Soon, we were out the other side just as the last of the sun sank behind the foothills. He paused a moment, wiping the rain from his face.\n\n\"Here we are, Snake,\" he said. \"The Oryza Fields of Gavius Grele. Been in my family for generations.\"\n\nAnd he turned his back so I could see ahead for a change. There were fields as far as I could see, some flooded, some dry, and some that stretched up the hillsides of scrub and grass. The mountains surrounded this little valley and I thought it rather pretty and pastoral. Strange smells carried on the rain and I wondered what sort of living this man made from the earth when suddenly, I smelled dragons and my heart leapt in my chest.\n\nIn the distance, there was a thatch-roofed farmhouse, several outbuildings and what looked like a silo several flights high. Lantern-light flickered at the window and stick people gathered in silhouette at the door. They looked very small.\n\nGavius turned and continued down the path toward the farmhouse. They ran to meet us in the rain, those little stick people, splashing through the mud and shouting with voices that were very high in pitch. I instantly thought of fledglings with their sharp, high chirps and realized they were children.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles, avus!\"\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on us all!\"\n\n\"Did you get one, avus?\"\n\n\"Avus, can we see it?\"\n\n\"What colour is it, avus? Did you get a blue one like you said?\"\n\nI was surprised at how small they were. And how many. They reached up to touch my feet, my tail, my belly. I couldn't hiss. I couldn't spit. I was a bound dragon. Indignity was my life now.\n\n\"Open the aviary, Tacita. He is young and needs rest.\"\n\nThe children raced away from us toward the silo \u2013 a tall stone building with curved walls and a metal mesh roof. Suddenly, a warble went up into the night, picked up by another and then another. It was like music to my ears and my breath caught in my throat.\n\nDragonsong.\n\nThe grey stick called Gavius Grele swung me from his back, his old fingers working at the tethers that bound my wings.\n\n\"They are serenading you, Snake,\" he said. \"They are giving you a poor dragon's welcome.\"\n\nAs the door rolled aside, one of the little sticks lit a lantern and placed in front of a surface that reminded me of very quiet water. I later learned that this was called silverstone, and sticks used it to reflect light in miraculous ways. Soon, the entire tower was filled with warm gold. My heart leapt at the sight of three dragons of various ages, each in their own cage. Each cage was easily one sixth of the silo, and soared all the way up to the metal mesh roof. They trumpeted and called and I hadn't heard such a thing since the wars between the sea snakes and the dragons on the Anquar Cliffs.\n\nEverything within me wanted to serenade back but I was wearing a muzzle and the best I could do was a pathetic hum.\n\n\"Neve,\" Gavius said. \"Our Snake is hungry. Fetch him a small meal of grubs and diced kidney. But very small. His collar is a fisher-bolt and I think it's too tight. I'm not sure how we'll fix that. I should have bought one in the village but I wasn't thinking.\"\n\nThe little stick called Neve raced off to do his bidding.\n\nGavius carried me into one of the empty cages, set my talons upon the damp chaff bedding. He released the bindings from my wings and they sprang out as if of their own volition. Next, the muzzle, and once off, I threw back my head and sang as I had never sung before. The three dragons launched into flight, up to the metal mesh roof (which I realized was open to the sky and rain and stars) and then swooped back down again in a display of dragon joy.\n\nMy feet next, and once free of the hemp, I lit from the straw and soared up, up, up to the mesh roof, filling my chest with cold night air and rainwater. In the pen to my left was a grey yearling drake with the beginnings of horns and we battered our beaks along the mesh walls in greeting. In the pen to my right, an old green drake with stunted wings and dwarfed legs and many scars along his scales. Across from the three of us, a red drakina of about three years. She was too large for her pen but that didn't stop her trilling along with us. I would have happily continued to spiral and soar but a strange, mouth-watering scent reached my nostrils. I dropped to the straw to investigate.\n\n\"But he's not blue, avus,\" said one little stick.\n\n\"No, he's better,\" said Gavius. \"He's a night dragon.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" they all said at once.\n\nThey had spooned a pungent mixture of mash and grubs into a wooden trough and slid it through a panel in the pen. I cocked my head at the sight of it. I was a fish eater for the most part, occasionally tasting sea snake, goswyrm, dillies and jakes whenever Rue had a mind to share. Never this strange green-brown medley that smelled like the inside of a dead ghorn.\n\n\"What's his name, avus?\"\n\n\"The man at the auction called him Snake. What do you think about that, Tacita?\"\n\nGavius noticed my hesitation and reached a grey hand in, plucking several tiny oily bits in his fingers. He tossed one in the air towards me, which I caught easily. The children clapped and squealed and I was proud of the fact that Rue had taught me well. I swallowed instantly, unsure of the taste on my tongue, but when he tossed another, I crunched down with my tearing teeth. Dragons are not grass grazers like noxen or leaf nibblers like goswyrms. Dragons are flesh eaters and our teeth are made like little daggers or arrowheads or spears. Crunching was a foreign concept, like slurping mash or pulling carts.\n\n\"Snake is not a good name for him,\" said the little stick called Tacita.\n\n\"Well then, what would be?\"\n\nBut crunch I did and I shook my head at the scattering of tastes through my mouth. It went down fine, however, and I snapped my beak at him, catching and swallowing the third piece before plunging my jaws into the trough with relish.\n\n\"Blacky,\" said Tacita.\n\n\"Smoky,\" said another.\n\n\"Cloudsnake,\" said Neve.\n\n\"Draco Stellorum!\" cried a boy and they all laughed at that.\n\n\"Draco Stellorum,\" repeated Gavius. \"Dragon of the Stars.\"\n\nI would have approved but I was busy.\n\n\"Nightshade,\" said Tacita.\n\n\"Nightshade,\" repeated Neve.\n\n\"Nightshade,\" repeated Gavius. \"Well then, I think our new dragon has a name.\"\n\nI didn't care. My belly was full and I eagerly licked all the green-brown juices and grub legs from the trough. And that night, when I climbed into the hemp nest just above the floor and folded my wings across my back, I hoped that wherever he was, Rue was as happy and well-fed as I was at this moment. And when I dreamed, I dreamed of water and fish and Summerday and my wild and future home on the Fang of Wyvern."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Pulling a cart does not come as naturally to dragons as fishing, but I did learn many things in those first weeks on the oryza fields.\n\nFirst, I learned that there are two kinds of harnesses \u2013 fixed and free. Fixed traps are used for young dragons and when the terrain is even. They involve three light poles that fix the harness to the cart, one pole on either side (attached to the harness under the wings) and one beneath, (attached to the harness under the chest) to keep the dragon flying just above the ground. The underpole can be adjusted to varying angles and while restrictive, it's actually very helpful. Learning the art of steady flying is difficult for young dragons and we need all the help we can get.\n\nFree traps are simple \u2013 dragon harness attached by tethers to the cart. These are good for plows and tilling unstable ground. They require a dragon that knows his angles, for it is very easy to become tangled in the loose set of leathers. Fortunately for me, Gavius started me out with a fixed harness and we got to work immediately in his large acreage of oryza, a type of grain that requires flooding to grow. Planting is done in the spring and is very labour intensive. It doesn't require dragons however, just many little sticks. The plowing of the fields, the mixing of the shat fertilizer and the tilling of the soil, those were jobs for dragons. The threshing of the kernels from the husks \u2013 that was also a job for dragons.\n\nGavius also had a flock of Silky Shearers that he used for wool, milk, cheese and meat. This, along with the oryza, fed his family and ran the business. Dragon shat is acidic, and when mixed with the milk from the shearers, produced a fertilizer that was perfect for the oryza. It was the job of his children and grandchildren to spread in it the water that soaked the fields. Everyone had a job at Gavius' fields. There was not one day of rest.\n\nThe old green drake with dwarfed legs went by the name of Stumptail. He had been on Gavius' farm since he was a yearling, and the work was becoming hard on his joints. He could pull a cart like a nox however, walking on all four limbs with an odd, jerking gait. As I have said before, dragons on land are cumbersome things and I would watch him walk, head bobbing as he pulled the plow. Whether it was a limp or a rhythm, I couldn't tell, but his legs seemed sound, his knuckles strong and his body solid. He had no tail and his horns, spines and talons had been filed down so that there was nothing dragon-like about him. It made me question my fate here on the farm, where a dragon became more like a nox in order to fit. Still, he had few vices and was old, so perhaps life had not done so poorly by him after all.\n\nThe young grey was called Stonecrop. He was being trained to take over from Stumptail and was a happy young drake, filled to the spines with nervous energy. He was always chasing his tail or scratching his shoulders or chewing his feet, and every night he climbed up the mesh walls of his pen, then down again, up and then down. I couldn't imagine life for him on a farm, pulling plows and tilling fields under harness every day. It didn't seem suited to his nervous personality and I wondered if he had started out that way or if life had conspired to make him so. Not all dragons thrive in the service of sticks, I've learned over the years. More are destroyed than are kept and Samus the plowhand threatened us always. Kissing the axe, he called it. The fate of working dragons.\n\nThe red drakina was called Ruby and she was the resident thresher. She had the spines of a mature dragon but with filed horns like the others. She also had a temper that kept the drakes away from her and I realized that was why she was on the far side of the aviary with an empty pen on both sides. It made me wonder about drakinas in general. Other than my mother, sisters and Summerday, I had little experience with them. It seemed like such a bother to attend worrisome, wicked or brooding females when the entire ocean was filled with fish.\n\nThe work was hard. I didn't take well to pulling a tiller at first and must admit it is not in the nature of dragons to pull. It is ours to soar and wheel in the skies, to dance on the clouds and swim in the sun. This type of agrarian flying was hard and disciplined, with short, tempered beating of the wings. No stretching, no soaring; just slow, steady flight. But Gavius and his family treated me kindly, so I was happy and well fed and I grew under their care. After a few weeks, the sores from the harness became callouses as my body moulded itself to the farm.\n\nI had never lived through a rainy season, having not yet been a yearling when I'd arrived and the weeks of constant rain wore my spirits down. The skies were dark in the morning and dark well before the end of work. Some days, the sun never shone at all and I despaired of ever seeing blue sky again. Fortunately, the aviary was well drained so while it was always wet, our nests were sheltered and relatively dry. I found there was nothing I loved better than climbing into my nest after a long, bone-weary day in the fields. Closing my eyes to the singing of the dragons was (and still is) a blissful thing.\n\nThe little stick named Tacita had taken a liking to me. She was the first to bring my mash in the morning, squatting by my pen to watch as I ate. Sometimes she would show me my reflection in the silverstone and together, we admired my beauty and colour. Other times, she brought a slate, reedpaper and charsticks and would sketch for hour after hour. She always showed me her charrings and invariably, they were of me. My profile, my eye, my talons, my beak. Sleeping, eating, pulling. I especially liked the ones of me soaring across the moons, for I hadn't soared since the Udan Shore.\n\nI wondered if she dreamed of elsewhere, like me, like Rue.\n\nBut Tacita wasn't lost and she wasn't a slave. She was free and happy and I often wondered if this could have been Rue's life had he not been sold to Serkus. At night, she would sneak in to the aviary and sit outside my pen, hugging her knees as if they would keep her warm. Sometimes she sang with me, her high thin voice mirroring the memory of his pipes. She had dark hair, just like him, and large dark eyes like the moons of my father, Draco Stellorum. Soon I began to look forward to her night visits and sometimes fell asleep to her singing.\n\n\"I'm glad we didn't get a blue dragon,\" she said one night. \"I like you better. You're like the night sky and the night sky is big and dark and very sad. It's okay to be sad. I was sad when my parents died but avus is good to me. At least we could all stay together.\"\n\nShe fell asleep beside my pen that night. If I could have, I would have stretched my wings to cover her. Still, I exchanged my perch for the straw of the floor and slept with my back to hers, warming her as best I could until morning.\n\nLife could have been worse for me, I realized.\n\nThe silver band had become too tight however and now I could only eat very small meals. It had become difficult to breathe as well, but the low fields were heavy with rich, damp air so what I could breathe was good. Still, it presented a problem, for the band had no way to be loosened without being removed entirely and it seemed Gavius didn't have a second, larger size for me. I wondered how you could have a farm with dragons and no proper equipment for their care. Then again, they were poor and I was growing.\n\nHe left for Corolanus one rainy morning, leaving Samus the plowhand in charge of the farm. I was pulling the tiller through a field that had been left fallow for a year. It was on a high slope and the soil was heavy from the rain, so it was a difficult job even under the best conditions. Behind me, Samus was driving. I didn't like working with Samus. He was lazy and made the dragons do more than our share. However it was not in my nature to complain, so I put my shoulder into the work, flying hard and strong up the hills in the rain. Harder yet was the tilling downside, for that was when you really needed your stick to keep the device from sliding forward and crushing your feet or tail under its heavy iron blade.\n\nI knew now why Stumptail had no tail. Tillers, plows and long, elegant dragonlines simply didn't mix.\n\nWe had lost the sun early and it was almost time to quit for the day. My shoulders were aching from the down-strain of the fixed harness and my wings were burning with exertion. Low and steady, flap and flap. Exhausting, especially with the silver band cutting off my breath and I couldn't fill my chest with air, only rapid shallow gasps. But still I worked, low and steady, flap and flap. I couldn't wait to be done for the night.\n\nThe soil was hard and slick and on the second last run, Samus stumbled. He dropped onto the ground and stayed, muttering under his breath but behind me, the tiller began to slide forward and I realized he had let go of the gripholds. In fixed harness, the poles began to carry me on down the hillside.\n\nI whipped my tail beneath me and dipped my wings back, trying to brace my feet in the wet hillside but the tiller was heavy and I was already light-headed. Samus shouted as I slipped forward and downward in the mud. The metal blade churned hot on my scales and I beat furiously to right myself but my wings beat vainly against mud and pole and grinding blades. Suddenly the poles snapped and the tiller lurched forward, plunging the broken ends into the ground and taking me with them. Pain shot like arrows through my haunches while mud and the silver band cut off all breath in my chest. I was being crushed into the hard, slick soil and for a moment, like me, the world did not breathe.\n\nThere was a shadow as Samus grabbed the long gripholds, hauled down with all his weight but it was not enough. The forward angle was too high, the arc too deadly as they rose slowly, ominously, into the air above me. He would be forced to release them soon, else risk his own death. This slope was so steep that once it fell, we would plunge down the hillside, shattering tiller and dragon alike.\n\nSuddenly I was surrounded by the shrill voices of many little sticks, grabbing at the harness and pushing against the tiller's frame. I saw the flash of a blade as the boy, Niro, leaned in close, his face covered in mud. I felt the jerk as one by one, my harness leathers snapped free and the many little hands grabbed at me from beneath, tugging wings, pulling legs and finally sliding me out from under the crushing weight.\n\nSamus shouted again and the little sticks scrambled out of the way as he released the holds. Immediately, the tiller flipped upside-down, harness leathers whipping, metal blade screeching as it plunged down the hillside, bumping, crashing and finally smashing its way to the bottom.\n\nI stretched my wings, jaws wide, chest burning, desperate for air.\n\n\"Nightshade!\" cried Tacita.\n\nToo tight, too hot. There was no air. \"Samus!\" cried Farida, one of the taller sticks. \"He's choking!\"\n\n\"The band is too tight,\" Tacita wailed. \"He can't breathe!\"\n\nBurning, stabbing, threatening to burst.\n\nFarida turned to Samus.\n\n\"The metal cutters!\"\n\n\"No!\" he shouted. \"An unbanded dragon is death!\"\n\n\"He won't hurt us!\" cried Tacita.\n\n\"Get the axe,\" shouted Samus. \"It's the only way.\"\n\n\"No,\" wailed Neve.\n\nTacita scrambled to her feet and disappeared down the slope.\n\nDespite their little hands, I sank into the mud. No air, no food. The life of a farm dragon was too hard and I welcomed the kiss of the axe if only it would end this agony. My thoughts were spinning and my chest ached as though under water. My head was heavier than the entire world so I laid it down, tasting mud and rainwater and old, dead oryza.\n\nStars popped behind my eyes, bursting like Lamoan cannons. Fire and crash, boom and burst, Rue falling to the docks under the no-faced man's blows.\n\nI didn't feel the tugging of the band. I didn't feel the metal slide beneath my scales but suddenly, my chest filled like a balloonfish and my head almost split in two. Smoke rolled out of my mouth and I heard cheering from all the little sticks. I'm certain they planted many little kisses all over my face, but it was a fleeting thought, and I surrendered to their embrace, weary but breathing.\n\nAnd more importantly, unbanded."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE NIGHT DRAGON",
                "text": "It was the middle of the rainy season when the night dragon came.\n\nI was sleeping in the aviary when I heard the cries of the shearers. They are stupid creatures, like noxen but less happy, and truthfully, any dragon who could eat them would be right to do so. But these were Gavius' shearers and I was loyal to Gavius, and so when I heard the bleating, I raised the alarm. It was too late however, for in the morning seven of the flock had been butchered with only two eaten. That was curious. I couldn't imagine a dragon wasting anything as tender as a shearer.\n\nHe didn't come back the next night, nor the next or the next so life went back to the way it was. Gavius always rose before the sun, along with Tacita, Farida and Samus. Together they fed us, cleaned the aviary and got us into harness for the day's work. Gavius had purchased a new collar in Corolanus \u2013 a tiller-bolt, it was called and it fit me quite well. In those weeks, my appetite flourished and my growth nearly doubled. Now I was as large as a shearer, each wing as long as Gavius was tall. My scales were growing thicker, my spines longer. My skull was itchy too and I knew I was beginning the first buds of horns.\n\nAlmost every day after work, Tacita would show me my reflection in the silverstone and I marvelled at my handsomeness. Self-importance is much more relevant when one has at least an idea of self.\n\nThe red drakina had gone into season and while I was still young and barely aware, it made Stonecrop irritable and restless. At all hours of the night, the grey dragon climbed up and down his mesh walls, cooing to her and singing songs of love. Stumptail snarled and spat little wads of acid at him. Unfortunately, my pen was between theirs and his wads would end up sizzling the chaff on the bottom of my floor. Every morning, Samus grumbled about what a messy dragon I was but I didn't speak stick and had no way to correct him. Besides, he was lazy so I was happy he had work to do, regardless of blame.\n\nOne night, I awoke to the sound of bone on metal. I looked up from my nest to see Ruby clinging to the mesh at the top of the pen, her long spiked tail slapping from side to side. Through the bars, there was another figure silhouetted by the moons and my heart stopped in its chest. I knew it was the night dragon, butcher of shearers and lover of red drakinas, gnawing at the bars with his dagger teeth. I thought for a long moment, knowing that if I raised the alarm I would have an enemy for life in Ruby but that if I didn't, Gavius would lose more shearers. Gavius was good to me and Ruby was miserable at the best of times so the decision was truthfully not a hard one. I am wont to say that I debated just a little for the sake of peace in the aviary.\n\nSo I bugled the alarm and Ruby's head snapped down in my direction. She hissed, her lashing tail threatening to take out some of the stones in the wall as the night dragon lifted from the roof. Stumptail grumbled and Stonecrop yawned but outside in the rain, I could hear the thundering beat of wings and the terrified bleats of shearers. I knew Gavius had lost more of his flock and it was all because of Ruby.\n\nThe next morning she was horrible, snapping and growling even at the sticks and I wondered at the reasons for having a drakina when there were so many useful drakes around for the purchase. Still, I told myself that Ruby was simply a strong, dominant dragon. She probably would have ruled an aerie had she been free and not for the first time, I thought of my mother.\n\nThat night, however, Gavius did not put me away as usual. No, after he fed the others, he led me to the shearer pens carrying a large spear, an axe and an oil lantern for light. It was still raining, but being night it was a cold rain and I can't say that I enjoyed it overmuch. (Neither did the shearers, having a dragon so close.) Gavius led me by the harness into one of the rain shelters. There, he leaned the spear against the wall, placed the axe in the chaff and dimmed the lantern. I curled into the chaff and in a manner that reminded me of my days with Rue, we settled down for the night.\n\nThe sound of rain on a thin metal roof is a pleasant thing. I longed to gaze at the stars but Gavius had a basket filled with sliced moorsnake, a favourite of mine from the swamps. He sat with his back against my flank, feeding me slices of snake and telling me stories of the early days of the farm in a very quiet voice. Truth to tell, I wasn't paying attention. The moorsnake was superb and I was happy to be away from the hissing, snarling drakina. Besides, there was another smell coming from the basket and it had set my heart racing.\n\nArcstone.\n\nA working dragon is never given arcstone. It's against the rules of sticks. With our fire, we are powerful and would never submit to a life of service. So when he slid the bolt from the collar and it dropped to the ground with a thud, I knew then that I was not simply enjoying an evening out under the stars. No, tonight I would be taking on the night dragon.\n\nMuch later I came to wonder if this hadn't been his plan the moment he laid eyes on me in the market. After Serkus' exaggerated tales, it sounded perfect \u2013 a dragon brave enough to fight Lamoan pirates and able to hide in the night. It would have been a good plan, the perfect solution, with one exception. I was just a yearling.\n\nIn fact, I wasn't even sure I could fight Stonecrop and win. No, I take that back. I could win against Stonecrop. But against Stumptail? Against Ruby? And more importantly, against a mature dragon that killed for play?\n\n\"I can guarantee you, Master Farmer Gavius,\" Serkus had said. \"That this dragon will not eat your flock. In fact, he'll protect them.\"\n\nThe liar, the user, the beater of helpless dragons and soul-boys. Gavius went to the market to get a blue dragon and came home with the 'Hero of the Pirate Raids.' Only the 'cannons had been too much.' The no-faced man had spun a story that had hooked this man like a gullible grey fish.\n\nI hated the no-faced man more than ever.\n\nGavius pulled a small piece of the flaky silver rock and held it up to my nostrils.\n\nI had no idea what to do. I wanted the night dragon to find another willing drakina and leave the shearers of the oryza fields for another night. I wanted our farm to go back to the way it was, the routine and the rain, the singing and the sweet sleep after a long day's work.\n\nGavius nudged me, offering the arcstone once again.\n\nI took it and swallowed, embracing the burn that it caused as it went down my gullet and into my crop. It was a terrible sensation, eased only by the exhalation of a breath of fire. No one really knows how we make the fire, not even very old dragons. It has to do with the arcstone and the acid in our bellies \u2013 when they meet, you can either swallow or spit, and once the spit hits the air, it erupts into flame. A dragon can spit acid even without arcstone, but it is nowhere near as impressive.\n\nI ate another piece and then another, felt it stick to my tongue and coat my back teeth. Once swallowed, it is never completely gone. It can live in the crop forever.\n\nThe night was cold and I lay my head down across my wings. Gavius was sleeping. I could tell because of the rhythmic noises he made when he breathed. I could have killed him then, I realized. I could've set him on fire and taken off into the night but I didn't. Gavius and his little sticks had been good to me and I was a dragon of integrity. My pride was all that I had in this odd, stick-run world, and I would guard it with my life.\n\nIt was late when I heard the first bleat. The rain had stopped and I lifted my head from my wings. The shearers were restless, bumping around like confused goswyrms and I knew that I would eat them too if I lived in foothills like this. It was then that I had a fleeting moment of self-doubt. Dragons have no concept of ownership. Territory, yes. Ownership, no. Food was food. You fought for it and if you caught it, you ate. If not, you went hungry. I was never certain how the sticks managed to barter their foodstuffs. It didn't make sense, but then again, I wasn't a stick.\n\nI heard the sound of wings overhead and looked up to see a shape pass across the moons. I also heard the groan and screech of metal and knew that Ruby was once again trying to gnaw her way out of her pen. I chirruped quietly and Gavius opened his eyes. He pushed off my flank, grabbed the axe and staggered to the wall where he had leaned the spear. He looked at me.\n\n\"Are we ready, Nightshade?\"\n\nReady, I thought to myself? How could I possibly be ready?\n\nI rose to my feet and shook the chaff from my scales. My belly was burning with the arcstone and I knew the fire would be strong and yellow-hot tonight. It was a good feeling, for I hadn't blown fire in over a year, not since the marauding sea snakes under the docks of the Udan Shore. Once learned, however, it is a skill no dragon forgets.\n\nMore groan and screech of metal and together we left the shelter, looking to the aviary to see a shadow on the roof. My heart caught in my throat. He was large, perhaps five years old and easily three times my size. There was no way I could harm him, let alone frighten him. There was nothing I could do.\n\n\"Remember the docks,\" said Gavius in a quiet voice and he laid a hand on my neck. \"You fought those Lamoan pirates when you were much younger. You are a brave dragon, Nightshade, and you are the colour of the stars. You are invisible.\"\n\nHe was right. While I was no hero of the pirate raids, I did save the silver dragon and his rider, tear out a throat and some eyes on the ships. All I needed to do was get this night dragon on the ground and Gavius, with his axe and his spear, would do the rest.\n\nI unfurled my wings and leapt into the sky.\n\nHigh, higher, the wind under me, careful not to beat too quickly and make a sound. There was no rain now and I blanched at the thought. We dragons are sensitive to sounds. Sometimes the rain was a friend, creating a constant drone under which I could fly. Other times there was a muffle as it hit my body, interrupted on its way to the ground. I could see the farm and all the fields gleaming silver under the wet moons and I flew higher still until the aviary with its interloper was right below me. Through the bars, I could see Ruby's teeth and claws, glimpses of her dark red beak. The metal was almost chewed through and I realized that they had been at this for months. Dragon teeth are very strong and I was impressed to the point of second thought.\n\nRuby was a captive drakina who wanted her freedom. It was natural, it was understandable and it was a death sentence. She had a band. She would die within weeks without its removal, and as much as I disliked her, I couldn't let her die.\n\nI tucked my wings, summoned the fire and dove like an arrow toward the head of the night dragon.\n\nHe turned his face and I breathed the fire, blinding him first and raking second, feeling the soft round flesh of his eyes slice under my talons. He bellowed and shook his head, scorching the air at my tail but I dipped down when I should have swept up and the flames missed me by a scale. I felt the heat, however, and knew that one mistake on my part and I would end up like a charred, twisting seasnake. I circled back around from beneath, spraying fire across his eyes a second time. His wings beat down and the force of them caught me, slamming me into the wire mesh of the roof. Stars popped behind my eyes at the sudden pain, when Ruby clawed through the mesh, raking long red ribbons along my back. I sprang off, dazed but spiralling into the night sky, praying that I was as invisible as the sticks said.\n\nThe drake, whom I realized was not black but inky blue, launched from the roof as well, spraying fire in my wake and I rolled to avoid being scorched. He was seasoned, could follow me by scent alone so I swept downward to the pens, hoping to lose him in the mix of their strong aroma. Beneath us, the shearers scattered in terror. His wing beats were so strong that they caused the air around me to push out and suck in, battering me by force alone. My head was spinning and I misjudged my altitude, my wingtip catching the roof of the first shelter and stars popped behind my eyes. I spiralled to the ground and the flocks scattered as I hit the ground. Blindly, the drake followed, shattering the shelter into a hundred pieces under his weight. I sprang into the air but was yanked to the ground yet again, wing snagged in a piece of twisted roof metal.\n\nThe indigo dragon rose to his feet, towering over me like a mountain.\n\nIt was then that the aviary shattered upward as Ruby burst forth from the mesh. She clung to the roof for a brief moment, clutching the twisted metal that had once been her prison. The indigo drake swung his head and bellowed and she bellowed back before launching herself skyward. Shouts from the farmhouse as Samus ran out, lantern in hand.\n\nShe arched toward him spiralling in the air, her wings almost dusting the ground. I watched in horror as she snatched him from the doorway, in her talons and flew up, up, up before letting go.\n\nI did not see him hit the ground.\n\nAbove me, the indigo dragon turned back and coiled. I could see his acid breath ignite across his tongue and I shrunk low to the ground, fearing the rush of scorching flame. Suddenly his head jerked back as a spear savagely burst from his throat. Fire spewed from his mouth like blood and he tried to lift from the ground but Gavius was there, hauling him back down to the earth. The drake sprayed fire in all directions, flames catching wood, grass and shearers alike. Gavius released the spear and swung the axe now, striking the inky head once, twice, three times. The dragon roared, part of his beak severed when Gavius slammed the axe down once last time deep into the great blue skull. The drake rocked back on his legs, clawing at the spear protruding from his neck like a harpoon and sprang into the sky, spinning and twisting as he went. It was with horror that I watched him crash backwards onto the roof of the farmhouse. It collapsed inwards under his weight and screams rose like the flames from within.\n\nGavius bolted across the field.\n\nI was still stuck on the wedge of tin that had pierced my wing. My back was torn and bleeding but there was nothing in the world now like the screams. Farida and Niro, Neve and Tacita. Mostly Tacita. The drawings and sketches, the silverstone and the kindness. She had fed me for months, patted me when I was weary, sung with me like a friend. I rolled and thrashed and sprang into the air, dragging my pinned wing as I made for the farmhouse.\n\nA massive weight struck like a fist and once again, I struck the ground. It was Ruby, crushing the breath from my body and trying to break my spindly neck with her jaws. In the moonslight, the silver band gleamed at her throat and I knew that while she was larger, she was vulnerable. I sprayed my fire into her face, increasing the heat from yellow to white until I was dizzy from the effort. Her lids sizzled and puckered under the flame and she released me, shaking her head and backing up into the shattered shearer hut. I rolled to my feet, dragging the tin and blasting fire until her spines were smoking and she sagged back down into the debris with a howl.\n\nA sharp boom cracked the night air as the blazing farmhouse collapsed in on itself. I could see the indigo dragon's legs and tail thrashing above it, watched with a breaking heart Gavius silhouetted in the flames. The house was an inferno, the heat pushing him out at every turn. There were no screams anymore now, only the roar of his burning home and soon even the indigo dragon grew still. The farmer sank to his knees, merely a shadow in the fierce light. He stayed that way for a very long time.\n\nBeside me, Ruby moaned, clawed at her eyes with her wing talons. Finally, Gavius rose, picked up the axe and crossed the field, ending her life with a merciful few strokes.\n\nI sat there by her lifeless body as the farmer stumbled over to the aviary. I could hear the cries of both Stumptail and Stonecrop and prayed that they hadn't kissed the axe too. They were blameless. In fact, as I looked down at Ruby, her lifeblood making rivers in the darkness, I realized that she was blameless too. She was a dragon, meant for better things than threshing and plowing. She had yearned for a life beyond Gavius' oryza fields and the wet pressure of Under Weathers. The indigo drake had been wild and only doing what wild dragons do \u2013 soaring high in the limitless sky, eating what they can catch and mating with other dragons.\n\nIt was the sticks who complicated things and what was worse, tonight, I had helped them.\n\nThunder from the aviary as Stonecrop burst out of the doors, wings wide and he immediately took to the sky. Thankfully, I saw no flash of silver in the moonslight and he spiralled over the farm again and again before becoming no more than another star in the night. Stumptail next, an old dragon who couldn't fly and he lumbered away from the aviary in his odd, lop-sided gait. Despite the rain, flames were travelling swiftly across the winter grass and he leapt into the flooded oryza fields like a water dragon. I watched the moons gleam off his scales until he too disappeared in the darkness.\n\nA whoomph from the aviary and I turned to watch as it began to glow. Soon, flames leapt from the doors and sparks rushed from the open mesh roof. Gavius had set it on fire. I didn't know why, I didn't understand so I waited patiently for him to come out, to lay a hand on my head, to drag the dead drakina to the flames and dispose of her body with honour but he never did. He never came out and the aviary stones sizzled and popped under the heat.\n\nA final boom from the farmhouse as the rains began anew. Papers floated down on the night breeze, edges bright, centers black, and I recognized the charred sketch of a dragon soaring across the moons.\n\nI remembered tasty grub mash and silverstone reflections, soft kisses on my cheek and songs at midnight. I laid my chin down across the sketch and did not move for the rest of the night as the wet fields boiled all around me. Ash rose on the night breeze up to the sky where it looked like floating stars.\n\nAsh and stars and my father, Draco Stellorum. I was very sad and I realize now that I was mourning. I didn't know it then. It was a strange sensation, huge and empty and sharp and heavy. I had never mourned before, not truly. I had never mourned the loss of my aerie or my freedom or Summerday or even Rue but now, wave after wave crashed over me until I thought I would drown in sorrow like the ocean.\n\nAnd so I mourned for all of them now, covered in blood and ashes and wishing life were very different for dragons and the sticks that ruled them.\n\nI barely felt it then, when other sticks came sometime the next morning. They dug through the wreckage and pulled me from the ash. They freed my wing from the wedge of tin, put a band around my throat and threw me into another cart. I never saw Gavius, his children or his fields again, nor any of the dragons that had lived or died there.\n\nTruth be told, I did not miss the dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE DEATH DRAGONS",
                "text": "There was a plague in the town of Bangarden, and therefore great need for funeral dragons. Because of my colouring, I was a perfect choice and the price for me this time was well over fifty denari, although it made little impression on me then. I understood now the apathy of dragons. What little pride was left in my young body was quickly being turned to ash, my fledgling imagination to stone.\n\nThe smell of death was my constant companion in this place on the plains and I learned about the many rules of city life. Working carts like plaustri and carpentri were pulled by noxen, whereas finer carriages like ciseri, bennai and pilenti were pulled by dragons. Those dragons on the right side of the road had their harnesses fixed at steep angles, whereas those on the left side (going in the opposite direction) were fixed level. It made a certain sense, for dragon wings are wide whereas streets are narrow. It was a very common site for drivers to halt mid turn and lower the traps before changing direction but it made the streets even more congested than they already were.\n\nMy new owners were a family of funeral practitioners, run by a patriarch, Allum and his three sons. They ran a fleet of death carts and I had to admit, in this plague town, it was a lucrative business. They drove around the city on Death Days, calling for corpses. Sticks motioned to them from their houses, and they would carry out dead slaves, servants and unloved relatives, tossing them on the back of the carts before moving on. People paid for this service and were told that the bodies were taken for communal burial. I can assure you that they were burned in Allum's furnace, where the ashes were sold to other sticks for use in fertilizer, soap and silver polish.\n\nThat was the way of business in Bangarden.\n\nNow I had been sold as a funeral dragon and as such, didn't pull the death carts like others did. I was reserved for those who paid for a private burial. Then, Allum would take out his best carriage \u2013 an elaborate roofed vehicle made of ebony wood. We went out several times a week to the Banners, neighbourhoods in Bangarden reserved for politicians, businessmen and their families. (I learned much about stick society in Bangarden. Whereas powerful dragons nest up, powerful men nest large.) Once there, we would wait for the rituals of death to end. Then, a party carried out the dead to lay them inside the funeral carriage and we would head off to the burial grounds, followed by a throng of wailing sticks. I was allowed to fly low during these times, for given my size and spectacular colouring, all traffic would stop and allow us to pass. The mourners apparently liked this and I believe Allum was paid well for this service. I had my own pen at night because the other dragons were unhappy and it was feared that they might damage my valuable pelt.\n\nThat, I realized, would not be good for business.\n\nDay after day, I waited for the rattle of the harness that would allow me to be out in the wet winter sun. I never had realized how much I loved the sun until Bangarden. Well, truthfully, until the Under Weathers and the advent of the rainy season but at least there, I could be outside in the air and fly, even if pulling a plow or a tiller. Here, I stayed in my pen until an important stick died, necessitating the services of a funeral dragon. My pen was not open to the sky as in the Under Weathers, but roofed and dark, without even a window to see stars or moons. I slept more often than not and grew deaf to the incessant chatter and squeals of the other dragons.\n\nMy new name was Hallowdown and I must admit I liked it. A combination of Hallow Fire and Hell Down and I thought it fitting for a drake of my colour and stature. I was a year-and-a-halfling now, and growing larger every day. There were four others all under two, which is the perfect size for pulling a cart. I could only imagine what happened to the death dragons over the age of three. I admit that I don't remember seeing any older in my brief time in the markets, nor in my days on the streets.\n\nI sometimes wondered how one would kill a three year-old dragon. By then, our horns are in, our necks are fully maned with spines and the spikes on our throats are strong and hard. A simple slit of a blade would not do it. I did remember relative ease of dispatching Ruby with a few strokes of an axe and it made me sad when I realized how I knew this. I had helped to kill the indigo dragon and in doing so, I had helped to kill Ruby. My obedience and my integrity had cost the lives of two dragons. Although I tried not to think of it, I must admit that there was little else to do but think.\n\nThat line had been crossed so subtly. With all the indignities I had witnessed in my short life, I had found it easy to lose myself in the service of sticks. The moment I'd smelled the firestone, I had made a choice. I could have feigned ignorance. I could have flown away the moment the band had been removed. I'd thought I was better than other dragons, smarter, more respectable and therefore not subjugated by the sticks whose only weapons were mesh and whips and dreaded metal bands.\n\nIt was apathy, I realized, as I lay there listening to the other dragons quarrel and fight. As selfish as they were, the sticks understood how to work together to accomplish a task. Dragons don't think much beyond themselves and their own needs.\n\nI believe I grew quite cynical and esoteric in those days as a funeral dragon. Time and death, it appears, does that to a dragon.\n\nI was also growing hard in my spirit. I had been free for less than one sixth of my life and the memories of the sea and the stars and other noble things condensed into small stones, like lumps of coal that simmer and grow cold. I thought often of Rue and Tacita, Summerday and Ruby. Freedom and loss and beauty and pride; my early world crushed to embers under the formidable iron wheel of life.\n\nI also thought often of the no-faced man, of Gavius and his axe coming down on a defeated Ruby, of dragons bought and sold like fish, dragons in pens and under harness. I only needed to call these things back to mind, and those coals would blaze anew. It was a different kind of fire, one that had no need of arcstone and thrived in spite of the silver band at my throat.\n\nOr maybe, it thrived because of it.\n\n\"Come now, Hallowdown,\" came a familiar voice and I opened my eyes to see a young man entering the dark aviary. \"Who's the finest funeral dragon in all of Bangarden?\"\n\nI rose to my feet and shook the straw and chaff from my scales, reached my wing-talons out before me and stretched long in the spine and tail. The pen wasn't large enough for me to fully extend my wings. In that respect, Gavius's aviary was considerably superior, but I was the only dragon to have a solo pen, so I couldn't complain.\n\nI was happy to see it was Junias the middle son, rather than Kellas or Nonus or even their father, Allum. All were experienced dragoneers but Junias had kind hands, and with the new head-harness I was wearing, that kindness was an important consideration. He entered the pen and I bowed, curling my wings in and lowering my head in respect.\n\nThat, I learned, was what working city dragons did.\n\nThe death dragons began to shriek when he slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out a sliver of dried goswyrm. I took it, shredding it slowly as to savour the taste on my tongue. I had learned that respectful behaviour usually went well for me, all things considered. And since I was a dragon with integrity, I always gave respect until a stick or dragon lost it. Then, I have to admit my pride would reign and those little coals would flare and grow white hot. Character flaw or simply life, I cannot say. Or perhaps, more truthfully, I would not.\n\nJunias checked the silver carter-bolt band at my throat, ran his hand along my neck and scratched the maturing horns. They itched terribly and I released a long rumbling sigh. Back feet were awkward for scratching and more than once, I found myself envying their hands.\n\nHe laughed, lifted the head-harness with the wedge of metal that I now wore in my mouth.\n\nThis, to dragons, is the ultimate indignity. Such glorious, majestic and powerful creatures controlled by a slip of metal between our teeth. It was called a 'bit' and I will admit it made controlling us much easier, for as large and powerful as we are, our heads sit at the end of our very long necks. As such, they are easily turned and where a dragon's head goes, so goes his body. I had been wearing bits for months now since being brought to Allum's aviary, so I opened my mouth and accepted it, bristling at the sharp tang of iron on my tongue and the grate of the curb against the roof of my mouth. With Junias, his kind hands meant less friction and therefore, a much more pleasant drive for me.\n\nI always hated the sound of Kellas or Nonus's sandals on the floor. I would rarely be able to eat on the nights after they drove because my tongue and palate would be bruised for days. If I had hands like the sticks, I would push the metal into their mouths. But if I had hands like the sticks, then I would be a stick and all things would be reversed.\n\nAs you can see, I had much time for thinking.\n\nJunias led me out past the other dragons, their shrieks and hisses bouncing harmlessly off my night-black pelt. I secretly yearned for the days at Gavius' though, when Stonecrop and I would play bite-beak between the mesh, or I would happily watch Stumptail's acid spit-wads streak across the pens. Dragons don't do well in confinement. We were made to fly in open skies. Something the sticks apparently did not understand or appreciate.\n\nMaybe the Dragon Flights understood that. Maybe that's why I thought of them so much.\n\nThe black carriage was waiting in the courtyard, its ebony wood polished to gleaming and its fittings painted a liquid gold leaf. I took my place in the traces, standing quietly as he fastened the harness across my back and under my wings. This carriage also had a wooden brace for my feet and I found it very useful to press against while keeping the momentum forward and low. It also had a T-shaft, a groove beneath the carriage for my tail, eliminating the need to bind or dock it as with other death dragons. All in all, it was a well-designed vehicle, I thought, but when the only other things I knew were plows and tillers, skiffs and dorries, I was no expert.\n\nThe poles next, affixed to both sides of the harness. There was none underneath. I was an experienced cart-dragon now with no need for the fixed brace. I had often wondered if I could carry the thing upwards to the stars given the inclination, but I'd never had the inclination, so I never tried.\n\nLastly, the draw-reins. I hated the draw reins. They ran from the bit through rings on the breastplate and up to the drivers. Draw-reins allowed them to pull our heads down to our chests, making for an attractively arched neck when pulling a carriage. It was uncomfortable to fly with head tucked into my chest and by the end of the day every muscle in my body ached from the unnatural position. I never knew if there was another function for the draw-rein. They never spoke of it, just attached it and drove. Once again, I was thankful for Junias and his kind hands.\n\nHe climbed aboard and rolled a black canvas awning over his head. It was the end of the winter season and that meant a lighter rain from morning to night. As a dragon, I welcomed the water as a friend, an ally, a kindred spirit but after so many months, I longed to see the sun once more. I never saw the moons or my father, Draco Stellorum. In the rainy season, there were far too many clouds.\n\nWith a flick of the rein we were out into the city.\n\nBangarden meant 'Fine Garden.' It was a city built for high-born Remoan politicians and their servants. Streets cobbled with worn stone, palms on every corner, cedars in every fine yard. Travertine homes, limestone walls, marble statues. Here, there was politics and there was the plague and as a result, there was also civil unrest. Both took their toll on men and dragons alike.\n\nThis rainy morning, I saw another funeral carriage pulled by a drake named Towndrell. Towndrell was a grey with a faint pattern of indigo stripes across his back and legs. His tail had been docked just below the rump and to me he looked like a winged nox. He had a large, kind eye however and was as fine-tempered as any dragon I had ever met. I had liked him the moment we'd met, carriage to carriage at a large family funeral. He was respectful and earnest and longed to serve his driver to the best of his ability. His driver, Philius was an angry man \u2013 harsh with the bit and harsher with the whip. I often wondered if the stripes across Towndrell's back were not a coat pattern but rather scars left by a lifetime of angry men. I would believe it had he language to tell me.\n\nI also believe I once saw Summerday. This was a city that prided itself on wealth, position and appearance, and truthfully, nothing could be finer than a golden dragon pulling a golden pilentus. She had the draw-reins pulled tight so her neck arched magnificently, and her spines looked like the rays of Selisanae, Dragon of the Sun. Unlike Towndrell, her tail had been coiled and bound, mirroring the arch of her neck and she flew without blinders under the constant cracking of a golden whip. I called to her but her drivers were hard and if she heard, she had no opportunity to respond. Or perhaps, she cared not to. The no-faced man had hated me, and she had been devoted to her master.\n\nSuch was the life of dragons.\n\nBack to my story.\n\nThis morning, I saw Towndrell in the town square flailing against the braces. His cart's rear wheel was wedged in a rut in the cobbles. The streets were old and well-worn and even in the finer areas of town, there were large gaps between the stones. In the rains they filled with mud and became treacherous sinkholes for wheels. We tried to avoid them but sometimes our drivers did not pay attention. The road rarely obliged even the most diligent of dragons.\n\nI watched as Towndrell struggled to pull the wheel loose, watched the whip come down across his back again and again, making stripes in his leathery coat. Blood from his knees splashed into the puddles and ran between the cobbled stones like a river. In the carriage seat behind me, Junias muttered a curse. He hated poor treatment of dragons but he was a junior driver and usually kept his opinions to himself. Now, there was a crowd of spectators gathering around the carriage, some shouting at the driver, others shouting at the dragon. This was Bangarden. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was to blame.\n\nThe rain came down, the traffic had ground to a halt when Junias surprised me by leaping from the driver's seat, leaving me stranded on my side of the road. Without a word, he tromped through the rain and pushed through the crowd, reaching Towndrell's carriage and leaning his back into the wheel. The driver cursed him and shook his fist, but within moments, a second man appeared and then a third. Together they worked the wheel free from the sucking mud and the crowd cheered as they finally placed it on steady ground.\n\nHe laid a hand on Towndrell's neck.\n\n\"Go easy on him, Philius,\" he called up through the rain. \"He can't get his weight into the trace with the draw-rein so tight.\"\n\n\"Oh forgive me, wise Master Junias!\" snapped the driver. \"But you've forgotten what it is like to work hard. Not all of us have night dragons to impress the senators.\"\n\n\"Treat your dragon well and you'll impress the senators, Philius.\"\n\nJunias turned but Philius brought the whip down behind him with a crack. The crowd shrunk back, waiting and wet.\n\n\"You've forgotten your rank, Junias Allum,\" Philius snarled. \"You are new money and proud show. The Prefect will remember those who have served him long after night dragons lose their fashion.\"\n\nThe crowd parted as a thin-haired man in a fine cloak stepped out from among them, a servant holding a nox-skin parasol over his head.\n\n\"The Prefect is an imbecile,\" said the man. \"He remembers nothing. But the senators; well, the senators are another matter.\"\n\nThe crowd mumbled at his words. A few men laughed.\n\n\"This senator will remember that your dragon was thin and bloody while his,\" the man grinned, waved a ringed hand at me. \"His sleek and fine. That's what this senator will remember, even if the Prefect doesn't.\"\n\n\"Forgive my impatience, Senator Aelianus.\" Philius bowed his head, glowering under his brow. \"But Ruminor does not smile on us all.\"\n\n\"In Bangarden,\" said the senator. \"It is enough for a senator to smile on you.\"\n\n\"A senator who will one day be Primar,\" said Philius.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said the man. \"But today, Ruminor has other things to deal with.\"\n\n\"Like the terrible state of these streets,\" grumbled a man from the crowd.\n\n\"Like Lamos,\" snapped another.\n\n\"Like the plague, idiot,\" growled another.\n\nThe senator raised a gold-ringed hand.\n\n\"Times are hard for Remus,\" he said. \"But the Remoan people are stronger than hard times. We will outlive this plague and rise to crush Lamos under our boot!\"\n\nThe crowd roared and some shouted. Others began to push and quickly, the senator was ushered from streets now grumbling and growling and roaring in the rain.\n\nIn the midst of it all, Junias looked up at Philius.\n\n\"Just care for your dragon,\" he said and pushed his way back through the crowds to climb, soaked and muddy, into the driver's seat. With a tug of the rein, he pulled me back onto the road. I did manage to throw a glance in Towndrell's direction. I'm sure I saw the whip come down one last time across his back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The funeral was long so it was late when I was let into my pen that night. The mash was cold but still I ate. I was a working dragon. Little was left to my choosing anymore and food was the one thing I looked forward to after a long day in the traces.\n\nI crawled into my nest of straw and despite the hissing, hooting of the others, fell into a deep sleep almost immediately. I dreamed of Towndrell \u2013 his kind eye and docked tail. The whip painting patterns across the grey streets \u2013 painting, cracking, stinging, bleeding. Summerday, beautiful and proud, sinking under a pilentus of molten gold. The mud sucking wheels and wings and death dragons and cities and Rue and the Sleeping Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum.\n\nThere was an unusual scent in the aviary.\n\nI opened one eye.\n\nI was a night dragon, accustomed to seeing in the black and I lay quite still, waiting for the glint of movement in the court. There was the sound of dragons moaning in their sleep, the hiss of rain on the roof, the hum of crickards in the courtyard. And there, the crunch of straw as something moved across the floor outside my pen.\n\n\"I'll teach him,\" muttered a voice in the dark. \"Bloody prideful boy talking to me like that, showing me up in front of the senator.\"\n\nAnd suddenly, a torch sprang to life beyond the bars, the face of Towndrell's driver gleaming in the firelight. I raised my head, blinking at the brightness.\n\n\"I'll burn the pretty pelt off you, night dragon,\" he said. \"Then the market will be fair and I can earn back my business without Allum's sons to taunt me.\"\n\nA grumble from one of the death dragons far to my left. A hiss to my right. I narrowed my eyes, snarled. After Ruby and the indigo drake, I dreaded the thought of fire unleashed in such close quarters. Locked inside these pens of mesh and metal, we would sear as easily as fishing docks. We would burn as thoroughly as wood.\n\nPhilius' face flickered as he held the torch up to the bars of my dark pen. He was going to slip it through the bars and drop it onto the dry chaff on my floor. It would catch and burn like wildfire, and in such a small enclosure, I wasn't convinced I'd survive. My heart slowed, my muscles tensed and coiled, ready to spring. I studied it, the angle of the stave, the rise and fall of the flames as they leapt and danced before me. I could almost feel the fire bite the roof my mouth and my throat stung as acid raced up from my belly.\n\nSlowly, as if under water, he slid the torch in through the bars.\n\nHe never saw me coming, never imagined in all his years that a dragon might do what I did then, lunging from my nest like a cannonball and crashing into the bars with a clang. He never in his wildest dreams could have imagined my jaws coming down on his wrist, completely enveloping the torch in his hand.\n\nHe screamed but I could not hear him. He tugged but I could not feel him. The world had shrunk, instantly condensed to the war between my teeth as acid met oil-soaked flame.\n\nFlames, hot and stinging, bit the roof of my mouth, danced over my tongue, savage and raging and caged. My eyes bulged from the pressure, my throat expanded painfully above the silver band until I thought I would burst. It was a furnace of scorching acid and I released it all in a massive fiery blast into Philius' stunned face.\n\nHe staggered backwards, tripping to the sandy floor before scrambling wildly to his feet. He fled into the courtyard like a madman, hair flaming, arms flailing as he went. Tongues of fire leapt to the poles and the oiled leathers lining the walls and the night filled with the shrieking of death dragons. Still, it was the rainy season. Water buckets sat filled outside every door so when Allum and his sons appeared, the fires were out within minutes with a minimum of damage to either poles, walls, roof or dragons.\n\nI'm not certain they ever knew what had happened. They certainly never knew how a spent torch and man's hand ended up on the floor of my pen. I never saw either Philius or Towndrell again. Later that week, I did see a thin grey dragon being loaded on the back of a death cart. I can't be certain but I believe Towndrell was flying with my father, Draco Stellorum, in the wild expanse of the skies, finally free of lash and leather and the dreaded silver band."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE LAST DEAD MAN IN BANGARDEN",
                "text": "According to the legends of sticks, the high god and creator of the universe, Ruminor Deiustus, took two wives \u2013 Luna and Lara, the sister moons of the world. From them, he fathered two Celestine sons \u2013 Remus and Lamos. Remus was the clever one and beautiful and his father had gifted him with Selisanae, the Golden Dragon of the Sun. To his son Lamos, who worked in the underworld forging iron into swords, he gifted nothing but smoke and ash and iron and labour. Soon, the sons battled over Selisanae but Remus was victor, refusing to kill his brother in a regrettable show of mercy. Instead, he exiled Lamos to the harsh and fiery mountains across the Nameless Sea. His descendants have lived there ever since, forging cannons and trying to steal dragons from the prosperous people of Remus. At least, that's how the legend is told in Remus. I imagined it would be much different when told in Lamos, if it was told at all.\n\nI often thought that Selisanae reminded me of Summerday. Given the chance, I'm certain I would have fought for her myself.\n\nThere was strife in the city of Bangarden.\n\nThe plague had worsened and the politicians had called priests from other cities to offer sacrifices, consecrate temples and call for fasting and prayer. Still, people were dying tenfold every day. Bodies piled up on the streets, impeding traffic and filling the wet air with the stench of rotting flesh. I imagine it was hard for the sticks and for the politicians that tended them, but for Allum and his sons, their business was thriving. Almost every day now I was sent out to the Banners and I enjoyed being able to stretch my wings, even if it was in the traces.\n\nOne morning, I heard Junias' sandals on the aviary floor and I looked up. He was unusually quiet as he slipped into my pen, offering me the goswyrm without his customary greeting. He rubbed my horns, scratched my chin and slipped on the bridle before leading me out to harness me in very fine leathers. As he fastened the draw-reins, I wondered at his silence. Like Rue, he wasn't a talkative fellow, but there was something about him that filled me with unease. He led me into the walled courtyard where the funeral carriage waited, along with his father, brothers and to my surprise, his mother Avea.\n\nI had rarely seen Avea. She was a small woman and strong but today, she wrung her hands as if to make them warm. She was wearing a palla cloak of dyed wool and gave me a wide berth as her husband fixed the draw-reins into place.\n\n\"We will be home late,\" he said. \"There will be a large celebration to mourn his death. We don't wish to offend by leaving early.\"\n\n\"Don't offend,\" said Avea. \"It is an honour to have been chosen.\"\n\n\"No one is sad he's dead,\" said Kellus under his breath. He'd polished the last of the ebony wood so that it shone like silverstone.\n\n\"Kellus!\" snapped his mother. \"Don't say it.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" said her son. \"None of us will mourn him. He was a terrible Prefect.\"\n\n\"They're all terrible Prefects,\" said Nonus as he oiled the wheels.\n\nKellus laughed.\n\n\"We do not speak ill of politicians,\" said their father. \"We're being well paid for this, so keep your tongues in your heads, all of you.\"\n\nAvea wrung her hands again.\n\n\"Cara says there are whispers in the streets.\"\n\n\"Bah,\" grunted her husband. \"This is a politician's town. There are always whispers.\"\n\n\"Not like today,\" she continued. \"The senate has doubled the guard.\"\n\n\"And there's a Dragon Flight in the city centre,\" said Junias.\n\nA Dragon Flight! My heart thudded in my chest at the words but I was mindful not to react. A Bangarden dragon was known for his composure and restraint.\n\n\"What's a Dragon Flight going to do?\" said Kellus. \"Light the funeral pyre?\"\n\n\"Kellus!\" snapped his mother again. \"Ruminor forgive you!\"\n\n\"Ruminor thinks it's funny.\"\n\nAnd he blew her a kiss. All but Avea laughed at that.\n\n\"Should I take out a death cart today?\" asked Junias.\n\n\"No,\" said Allum. He and Kellus stepped up to the carriage seat while Nonus climbed into the back. \"Let the dragons sleep. There is only one dead man in Bangarden today and that's the Prefect. The rest of the city can die tomorrow.\"\n\nAnd with that, Allum pulled the draw-reins so that my jaw was pulled down to my chest. My spines stood proudly against the arch of my neck and my back curved unnaturally.\n\n\"Oh, he does look fine, Allum,\" said Avea and to my surprise, she patted my shoulder. \"Ruminor has blessed us with such a fine dragon.\"\n\nFor the very first time, I didn't curse the strain of the draw-rein.\n\nThe whip cracked in the air above me and with a deep breath, I pressed onto the brace, bringing my wings down in one great stroke. A second and then a third, and soon the carriage rolled forward, out and onto the streets of Bangarden."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "It was the end of the rainy season and already the days were brighter. Still, I spent most of the day standing outside in the warm mist, watching the streetwyrms land to scratch for seeds and my belly began rumbling for food. In Allum's aviary, we were only fed at night, a practice I didn't fully understand. The first light of morning seemed the best time to me but then again, I'm not a dragoneer. Perhaps they think they get a better day's work from us when our bellies aren't full, but by midday, it was difficult to think of anything other than your next plate of mash. As unappetizing as that sounds, that was my life and I prided myself to say I did it well, being a dragon of integrity and all.\n\nThe Prefect was the magistrate of the city and from what I understood, he was not so terribly old. His house was very large, gated and at the center of the city. Black drapes hung from every window, black lanterns from every post. There was a mob gathered outside but all stood a respectable distance away from the carriage, a fact for which I was grateful. If I could have, I'd have blown fire in a great circle, forcing them back even farther but naturally, I was banded and the pleasure of fire was denied once again. There were centurions everywhere \u2013 soldiers with swords, spears and large scutan shields standing between the mob and the house. People gave them as much berth as they gave me.\n\nI heard a sound and held my breath as I looked to the sky. A Dragon Flight was wheeling above, flying in high perfect circles over the Prefect's house. I marvelled at their skill as they passed each other, wingtip to wingtip, banking steeply and riding the air with a minimum of beats. They stayed high and I looked around at the crowds, wondering at the meaning of it all.\n\nDragons don't understand much of stick politics. Our world is about speed and skill, strength and longevity, so the older and larger a dragon is, the more power he or she has. And for dragons, power only means more nests and more breeding and more eggs and more cliffs in which to house more nests. If another dragon challenges us or interferes with our plans, we fight. But the fighting leads to swift resolution \u2013 either submission or death and life goes on. We are not a complicated people. So while I didn't understand the mob that had gathered outside the magistrate's house, I could easily feel the tension that simmered like a riptide beneath calm waters. It reminded me of how storms gather all the clouds into one dark place before the first crack of Hallow Fire.\n\nBecause of the draw reins, my head was bound tight, so I cast my eye around the mob as sticks pushed towards the walled gate. I growled at them and they shrank back. When the soldiers hiked their weapons to threaten me, I snarled at them too. I admit to a certain satisfaction when they stepped back as well. Standing at my head, Kellus jerked the rein but I did not growl at him.\n\nI could hear the great doors open behind the gate and I breathed deeply the smell of death. This was not the sickly sweet smell of plague, nor the rancid, musky odor of disease. No, this had a powdery sharpness to it and I wondered if he had been poisoned. Nobody had liked the Prefect, according to Allum's family. The mob shifted and murmured, growing blacker like those stormy clouds as the gates opened now on six men carrying a body wrapped in black. A crowd of mourners followed, wailing and posturing and flowing like a black tide. At the sight of the body, the crowd rippled like the waves on a dark ocean and I knew the Hallow Down was set to strike.\n\nThe lurch as the body was laid into the back of the carriage and I Nonus closed the rear hatch and spring up into the back. Allum climbed onto the driver's seat and Kellus followed. Immediately, the carriage was surrounded by mourners and mob. I saw one man push another, only to be struck with the hilt of a centurion's short sword. The crowd roared and pressed forward but the centurions held them back.\n\nA clay jar shattered at the wheel of the carriage and the soldiers fell upon the thrower. I snapped at another man who staggered too close but the head-harness was tight and Allum yanked on the rein. The crowd swarmed the carriage and the mourners swarmed the crowd. There were sticks everywhere, rushing and fighting and preventing me from moving forward.\n\nI smelled oil and arcstone moments before a second jar shattered onto the carriage's roof. It erupted and once again, my world burst into flame.\n\nFlames raced down the buckboard and I bellowed as tongues of fire licked my tail. Allum sprang down from his seat but the crowds pressed in on him so he couldn't reach my harness. Steel met steel and swords clanged against the ebony of the carriage, chipping splinters of wood from the frame. One of the Dragon Flight swooped down, blasting fire into the air above the crowd. Another Flight dragon snatched a man from the ground, depositing him safely on the other side of the street, only to have him bolt back into the fray. The sticks scattered at the approach of the dragons but did not disperse and I snarled as a pair of them fell into me, their swords striking metal and wood and dragonbone.\n\nAnd so, I have mentioned those coals.\n\nThe carriage was burning; my owners desperate to salvage something of their finest cart, and both mob and guards were absorbed in a sea of hand-to-hand combat. I was in the midst of it all and no one was looking to protect me, a fine and useful dragon. The flames stung my wings and I could smell the smoke of dragon flesh, my dragon flesh and I remembered Ruby and Summerday and Towndrell and suddenly, those coals roared to life inside of me.\n\nI reared high on my back legs, bellowing as my wings snapped open their full width. I beat down, knocking many sticks off their feet and sending even more scrambling out of my path. I shook my head, the reins swinging wildly and Kellus tried to catch them. He looked so small beneath me and I brought my wings down with another powerful stroke, knocking him to his knees. Another stroke and the wind was my captive. Another and another and suddenly, I was above the street, anchored by the flaming cart. Another and another and it began to rise with me, tipping so that the body of the Prefect slid out and into the mud.\n\nThe crowd fell upon it like sea snakes.\n\n\"No, Hallowdown!\" cried Allum and he gestured wildly up to the Dragon Flight. \"He will shatter the carriage! It's the best I have! Stop him!\"\n\nA rider astride a large brown drakina swept down to hover at my head. She bellowed at me but I bellowed right back. I was furious at the fact that I was still attached to a flaming carriage and no one seemed to care, not even this noble Dragon Flight. I brought my wings down again and again until the wheels finally left the ground and the cart was airborne. We rose higher and higher until I could see the walls and the gates and the streets and the flames beneath. Above me and all around was the Flight, seven mature dragons blocking my path, their wings buffeting as flames now raced up the poles, catching the fine oils that were used in the polishes and I felt my sides sear with heat.\n\n\"Do we kill him?\" I heard a rider shout and on the back of a blue drake, another pulled his bow.\n\nBefore I knew it, the brown drakina's rider sprang from her back, soaring like a dragon himself through the space in between. Suddenly, he was on my flank, holding on by the harness and bracing himself on the carriage poles. His weight tipped me to one side and I began to sink like a stone.\n\n\"Rufus!\" cried another rider. \"Are you crazy?\"\n\nI thrashed my head to dislodge him, for the strain in my neck and wings was too great.\n\n\"Fly, night dragon!\" he shouted in my ear. \"Stay airborne for a moment longer!\"\n\nThe smoke was sharp and thick and even this high, it was work simply to breathe. Rufus pulled his sword and brought it down once, twice, three times and the harness that held the right pole snapped free. Immediately, all the weight jerked in the opposite direction and the drag caused my wing to bend unnaturally. We plummeted as the carriage swing wildly beneath.\n\nThe air stung my eyelids and the heat beat like waves on a rocky shore but with remarkable skill, the rider scrambled under my neck and around my chest, swinging his sword to the braces once again. Suddenly, the carriage was gone, down, down, down, shattering into a thousand splintering pieces across the Prefect's gate.\n\nI soared up to the sky, released but off balance as the rider clung to the harness across my chest. I pitched forward, losing altitude so quickly that I thought we too would shatter across the gate but he swung his leg across my neck, settled into the muscular hump and hollow of my shoulders as if home.\n\nA rider.\n\nI had a rider on my back.\n\nIt was heavy and strange but not at all awkward, for his weight seemed to right my balance. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.\n\nHe leaned his weight forward along my spines.\n\n\"And down, night dragon. You can touch the ground now, without fear.\"\n\nDown. Down, he wanted me down. I could feel pressure from his legs across my shoulder, seat bones pushing down my spine. It was a natural extension and I angled upwards, throwing my weight into my haunch and beating my wings downward to lessen the impact. When my feet touched the earth, my body lost all strength and I collapsed onto the street. The mud felt good on my charred belly and I barely noticed it when the brown rider left my back. The sticks were still fighting \u2013 stick against stick, citizen against centurion, and I realized at that moment that I hated them all except the riders and their Dragon Flight.\n\nI never knew what had happened to the body of the Prefect.\n\nI stayed down for a very long time, until the soldiers and the Flight cleared the streets. Kellus returned to take me to the aviary. I never got mash that night, and the next morning, Junias fitted me with a walking harness and led me to the markets, where I was auctioned off yet again, this time to the Pits. I was glad for the exchange, for in the Pits I could fight and be free of sticks and carts and the dreaded silver band when I died."
            },
            {
                "title": "LIFE & DEATH IN THE PITS",
                "text": "It was like nothing I could have expected. In fact, it was like a city unto itself, isolated in the mountains between the cities of Bangarden and Salernum. Known simply as 'The Pits,' it was a sprawling complex of caves and underground tunnels leading to and from the bestiaries that housed well over a hundred animals. Sitting atop it all was 'The Crown,' a large circular arena built of limestone, travertine and marble. I could not help but be impressed when I first laid eyes on it on the long road to the underground.\n\nI was perhaps the smallest dragon there, but not the smallest creature by far. As I was led into the tunnels (flanked on either side by sticks riding cerathorns \u2013 large armoured four-legged beasts with coats like iron and horns like spears), I saw cages and pens of the wildest variety, containing creatures from sink-lizards to the scaly land monitors of the Remoan deserts. There were creatures like jumpbucks but with razor horns, and creatures like leather-backed phogs with tusks and spines. Many of the creatures had rings pierced through their snouts. I wondered if I would receive such a ring and if so, what manner of tools would be used in the piercing. A two-year old dragon's snout is already strong and hard \u2013 piercing such a thing would require strength and no little skill.\n\nAnd rather than the smell of death as in Bangarden, these tunnels smelled of blood; old caked blood that held together the very stones beneath our feet.\n\nThe noise was deafening, even louder than Allum's aviary. These were angry beasts and wild, throwing themselves at the iron mesh in hopes of freedom or a ripping fight and I found it took all of my nerve not to flinch as we walked past. Besides, I could smell trees and grass and fresh air and I prayed that the aviary was as big as Gavius', if not bigger.\n\nIt was called the Dome of Dragons.\n\nA huge circular cave that opened to the skies above, containing a veritable jungle beneath an iron mesh roof. Dragons were penned on three levels surrounding the Dome, like the many spokes of a great wheel. All the cages shared one central mesh wall with it and for that, I was grateful. At least to look on trees and sky; to smell the wind and rain. It would be a good way for any dragon to meet his fate then, with a chest filled with jungle air and a memory of sunshine.\n\nI was led up and around to the top level where they kept the youngest dragons and I was relieved to see none younger than I. I suppose it was self-defeating, but the thought of a juvenile dragon sentenced to a life in the Pits fanned those coals once again. I would have been a very angry, bitter dragon indeed if there were any younger than yearlings here.\n\nThe sticks turned me out into a pen that was lower but wider than Gavius'. The walls were stone, carved directly out of the mountain rock, and the bedding was straw and dirt. I had a new head-harness, one that allowed me to eat and chew and bite. It had a metal ring under the jaw so that I could be clipped to a cable and led with little resistance. As I have mentioned before, our heads are at the end of our very long necks. For creatures so impressive, we are remarkably easy to control.\n\nThe first thing I did was press my face against the mesh wall overlooking the Dome, breathing in the scent of damp soil and old trees. Vines and grasses, flowers and moss, palm trees and cedar and olive pine. For some reason, this soothed me and after the two days of travel, I stretched out by the mesh and studied the roof, wondering if I could, over time, chew my way through the iron as Ruby had done. The thought of chewing anything sounded rather good, and my belly rumbled in the absence of food. Eventually, I dozed and dreamed of sea snakes and lemonwhites and the vast expanse of blue that was the sky.\n\nI couldn't remember the last time I'd dreamed of the night sky. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen the stars, nor the winking, waning or wide moons of my father, Draco Stellorum. I knew enough of the world of dragons to know that he wasn't my sire but some things I clung to with a fierce tenacity. I was a night dragon. He was my identity.\n\nMorning brought horrendous screeches of waking dragons, and sticks with whips came to roll open the bars to my pen. Two of them led me out and down a long stone ramp and I passed many pens with many dragons. All watched me with intense, combative stares and I ignored them all, keeping my own eyes from straying too far to the left or to the right. I was led to a small circular arena, not high enough for flying and fashioned out of the familiar metal mesh. Inside, two sticks waited with a hissing blue drake, holding him against the walls with whips and spears. My handlers led me inside, closing the door behind me, the blue and his two handlers. The drake was released and a live goswyrm was tossed at my feet.\n\nGoswyrms are awkward creatures with leathery necks and spindly legs. Their wings are frequently tattered (for they like to sleep hanging upside down in caves), but their bodies are disproportionately round and plump and they make a fine meal for any dragon. It tried to run but I stomped down with my clawed foot, stooped to catch its head in my jaws. The blood that sprayed across my tongue was hot and sweet.\n\nImmediately, the blue dragon lunged across the pen, snatching the wyrm from my mouth. He began to shred the flesh with his dagger teeth into strips tiny enough for him to swallow and the handlers behind him laughed. I shrank back, puzzled. That goswyrm had been clearly meant for me and I snapped my beak at him in protest. He did nothing, merely continued until the meat was small enough to slip past the band down his throat. I looked past him to his handlers, assuming they would rectify the situation but they circled the inside of the ring, one on either side. One man cracked the whip at me, the prodded me with his spear. I swung back to look at the blue, barked once, twice, three times but he ignored me. I sat back to puzzle some more.\n\nThe smell of blood was thick in my nostrils and my belly rumbled with lack. Suddenly, I knew what they meant for me to do. They wanted me to fight for my food.\n\nThose coals began to burn once more.\n\nI swung my head toward the handlers once again, growling in a sound that rumbled like distant Hell Down. They raised their weapons but they had not reckoned on my many weeks under the hard-faced man. I lunged and they both staggered back into the mesh wall. I pressed them into it, raising my wings and lowering my head in threat. Shouts now as all the other sticks rushed toward the pen, whips and spears in hand and I brought my face so close to the first man, my mouth open wide, dagger teeth gleaming. He covered his face with his hands as if that simple act would stop my jaws. I did not bite, however. I loosed a long, furious roar that emptied the room of all other sound and echoed until it faded away like ripples on a dead sea.\n\nThere was silence now in the arena and I leaned back, let them scramble out of the pen. They slammed and locked the door, leaving me with the half-eaten goswyrm and the blue.\n\nI swung my head his way now. He had frozen in place, the wyrm hanging from his jaws like waterweed. I snapped my beak and he dropped it into the sand. I lunged forward and snatched it up, shaking it to break its bones before I settled down to shred it with my own dagger teeth.\n\nI knew what they wanted me to do. I knew what game they wanted me to play so I would play it like a master dragon. I had anger, I had cunning, I had been wild and they only had whips and spears. This game, I would win or die trying.\n\nAnd this time, the blood on my tongue was all the sweeter."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "In the Pits, no meal came without a price.\n\nA fight, a lesson, a battle, a skirmish. All was intimidation and rage, and while I had the rage in full, the intimidation took a little time in coming. I was young and inexperienced in fighting other dragons. Still, I remembered my talons raking through indigo eyes; remembered the axe plunging into Ruby's head. They were dead because of me and I found that a sickening guilt swept over me whenever I faced a frantic, hungry dragon. But here in the Pits, guilt was a weakness so it quickly hardened into self-loathing which, when fuelled, became fury. It was that fury that gave me the edge in the practice pits. If you succeeded, you were fed. If not, you went hungry. I ate well most nights, whereas others limped to their corners, broken and bleeding and hungry still.\n\nWhat set me apart from the others, however, was the fact that I did not fear the sticks either. I remembered the thrill of the Lamoan pirates, the rush as I spilled their blood on the decks of the ships. I remembered the crunch of Philius' wrist as my jaws came down on the torch, the smell of burning flesh as I sprayed flames into his eyes. That, I reckoned, none of these combatants had ever done. I had a reputation now and it gave me a nerve that the others lacked. I believe the handlers feared me, just a little and that was a very good feeling.\n\nNow, even my dinners had an audience. Sticks would pay for the privilege to watch us fight and kill and eat, and I thought it an odd business to cheer at the defeat of such majestic creatures as dragons. Apparently, they paid more now, as the handlers faced danger and 'certain death' while working with me. I had been fitted with a new collar, one with spikes of steel called a blood-bolt, and in glimpses of silverstone, I can assure you that it looked very menacing around my night-black throat. They also had a new name for me, which once again I must admit was fitting for a dragon of my proud, tragic, terrible nature.\n\nWarblood.\n\nOne evening, I was led up a long underground tunnel and the sound of sticks grew louder with each step. There was a large wooden door bolted from the inside that vibrated with the sound of their chanting. Warblood. Warblood. Warblood. It rekindled my fledgling vanity and when the door was finally swung open, I burst out onto the arena floor, the sticks wildly trying to control me with ropes and whips. It made, I believe, for a most excellent entrance.\n\nI was in the Crown.\n\nIt was the very first time and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the strange light. The sky above was dark, with my stars and the twin moons shining like beacons. Torches burned along the travertine walls. Columns and arches, stairs and benches and most of all, sticks. Rows and rows of their odd, flat faces seated all around me, many levels up like rocks dotting a mountainside, protected by a web of iron mesh that ran up to the very high ceiling. It was dented in many places and I imagined it was from dragons flying too fast and not making the turns. The entire place smelled of blood and sticks and smoke, and when I reared onto my back legs and spread wide my wings, the entire crowd fell silent.\n\nThe only thing I could think of was my colouring. I was a night dragon, the colour of ash and stars and smoke and death. Stealthy and silent, I could steal their flocks in the night. I could murder their children and set fire to their homes. They didn't know that all I wanted was to be free of this silver band and return to the Anquar Cliffs a wildling once more. They didn't know that I would do it or die trying.\n\nI bugled to the night sky, once, twice, three times and the crowds went wild, a roar like the thunder of Hell Down and my heart soared at the sound. My handlers moved forward, using poles to remove the ropes at my head and neck and I lunged at them, causing the crowd to roar more. It was the oddest thing I had ever experienced but I knew that in the Crown, a dragon was expected to perform if he was to live.\n\nI vowed to give them a performance they would not soon forget.\n\nAt the opposite end of the arena, a red drake was ushered in. He was a little larger than me and I immediately recognized him as the ill-tempered drake from the Corolanus Markets. The crowd cheered when he spread wide his wings and roared. I could see the scars from many months of living in the Pits and for the first time in weeks I felt a pang of fear. Life in the Pits was ultimately about killing, a thing that I had never actually done. I was responsible for the death of the indigo dragon, I had aided the execution of Ruby, and while I was guilty of imagining the gruesome deaths of all the sticks I hated, I had never actually taken a life other than a fish. I was all bravado and threat. Now I was being asked to kill and it set my blood racing. Could I do this and if so, how?\n\nThe red drake spied me and he let out a bellow that shook the mesh. I bellowed back, knowing that if we'd had arcstone, the entire Crown would be ablaze.\n\nHis handlers released him and he stalked forward, hissing and whipping his blood red tail. He was hot, so I needed to be cold. I glanced up at the sky and the mesh ceiling. It too was dented and I swiftly judged the number of wingspans to get there. I spread wide my wings once again, allowing myself to feel the length and width and breadth of the Crown. It was a matter of speed and precision \u2013 how soon to reach the sides, how to bank to prevent me from adding another dent in the iron web. He had likely flown in here. I had not. Added to my lack of killing, this would be my downfall.\n\nBut what a fall it would be.\n\nSuddenly, there were only two dragons in all the world. My heart was a war drum, my blood the ice of fear but there were also the coals of fury kindling in my belly. I lowered my head, raised my wings and roared.\n\nHe leapt through the air toward me, body arched like a bow, teeth and talons leading, wings spread far back. I sprang up to meet him and our jaws clashed as we sought a hold on the other. My talons raked his belly, his raked my chest. I felt fire run like ribbons from the wounds.\n\nIn that instant I knew that he was too strong so I launched into the air. As expected, he followed, his wing beats slow and powerful. But mine were swift and efficient for once upon a time I had been a fisher dragon and I knew how to move so that the wind stung my eyes. But there was a ceiling and walls and a floor, not miles and miles of open sky. I would need skill as much as speed.\n\nI began to circle around the widest part of the Crown, faster and faster and faster. He was at my tail, snapping and spitting acid that stung my scales. As we raced, his wing clipped one of the torches and it crashed to the ground, taking bits of limestone with it. At one point I scraped along the iron mesh protecting the sticks. Pain flashed behind my eyes but for their part, the sticks howled with pleasure and I hated them for it.\n\nThe red tried to intercept my circles but I was faster and he struck the mesh again and again in my wake. Faster and faster I flew, angling my flight so that it was ceiling to floor now, ceiling to floor in a dangerous ellipse that could kill either one of us with the slightest miscalculation. I counted the wing strokes that it took to go up before the ceiling, and then the sickening lurch of a spiral, counting the strokes before I hit the ground. He matched my speed, his jaws snapping as he sought my tail and I whipped it like the wind to dizzy him. My stomach flipped as I approached the ceiling, banked so sharply that my talons clanged along the mesh. Downward now and I timed it, my heart threatening to burst as the ground rose up so quickly. Barely a wingspan above the floor, I suddenly reversed, lurching upwards and reaching back with my talons, hoping he would be where I expected him to be. He was and I caught his red face and swung him downwards despite his beating wings.\n\nHe hit with a crunch and tumbled tail over spine, tail over spine, before finally sliding to a stop in a twitching heap in the sand.\n\nThere was silence in the Crown.\n\nI hovered over him, wings beating slowly, blowing bits of sand across the arena floor. His tail whipped back and forth, his legs kicked and thrashed but his head, neck and wings did little more than quiver. In one instant, I had broken his neck and for some reason, I remembered Ruby, flailing in the mud.\n\nRuby, the indigo dragon and now this warrior red.\n\nIt struck me like a poison-tipped spear.\n\nI was a killer of dragons.\n\nThe crowd however erupted in cheering, sent coins flying through the air so they fell like hard rain upon us. The handlers entered the arena, two with long brooms to keep me away, others with spear and axe to finish what I had started. I bellowed but they ignored me, moving toward the thrashing red with their instruments of death. I remembered the night in Allum's pen, when Philius had come to call and those hard, simmering little coals began to rage.\n\nHonour, integrity, respect. Things I thought I possessed, qualities I believed would set me in good stead with these sticks, were merely lies to keep me submissive and working. I understood now how they had used pride as both bait and capture. It was clever really. That's why they were masters and I wore a silver band.\n\nWhen Philius had come to call\u2026\n\nThe memory stirred inside me.\n\nI swung my head, scanning the sea of flat faces, finally seeing the torch and limestone burning on the arena floor. I arrowed towards it and scooped the torch in my jaws, tossing it so I could swallow the flames back as far as the silver band. The crowd roared and I soared over the red dragon, spitting acid flame at both handlers and their pathetic weapons as I went. Spear and axe instantly blazed and the handlers scrambled out of the way as I spat again, this time lighting the brooms with the borrowed fire. My mouth burned and my tongue sizzled and the fire from the torch quickly sputtered and died but I was not going to repeat the night in Gavius' fields. No stick would do this because of me.\n\nThe blame was mine. Likewise, the blood.\n\nThe crowd fell silent as I landed near the drake. His eye rolled up to meet mine and, with wings spread wide, I put a clawed foot on his shoulder. I wished in that moment to have been able to talk the way the sticks talked, to exchange thoughts with such ease and fluidity. Dragons are not blessed with language. We roar, we sing, we bellow, we grumble, but we don't talk. And I wondered if I had finally stumbled on the one true thing that made the sticks more powerful than dragons.\n\nI reached down and sank my teeth into his throat, the one area that has no spines or spikes to protect it, and pressed down. Too hard. Our skins are too hard, so I tore with my clawed foot once, twice, three times until blood sprayed across my scales. I could see the vessels now, red and blue and oozing with life and I bit, severing them as if they were lemonwhites. He shuddered once, then died and I lifted my head, blood dripping from my teeth and jaws.\n\nI spread my wings and bellowed at them now, at the pathetic handlers who thought a broom could stop me. At the pathetic crowds who paid to see us fight and kill each other. At the world of sticks in general and at the injustice of life and power and death and I roared so that the blood sprayed out of my mouth like fire and I hated them with all the fire that was in my belly. I hated myself as well, for my vanity and foolishness and pathetic integrity and in that moment, I vowed to change the laws of dragons and men.\n\nPerhaps it was a good thing that we don't have language, for the crowd went wild \u2013 cheering and leaping and throwing coins like the rain. But they didn't know what I was thinking and they couldn't tell what I had just said, for at the next chance I got, and every chance after that, I would kill a stick for every dragon until the scale was even once more.\n\nI let them lead me to my pen but I did not sleep that night, nor for many other nights after that."
            },
            {
                "title": "DOME OF DRAGONS",
                "text": "After eight months in the Pits, I was still alive. I suppose that meant I was unbeaten. I never liked to think of the blood I had spilled along the way.\n\nIt wasn't because I was stronger. It wasn't because I was more savage. I think it was simply because I was smarter and had a canny recollection of where I had come from and where I was going. I was also angry and I harnessed that anger, made it very small like those coals, using them instead as fuel when I needed them. I killed many dragons because of those coals, when what I really wanted to do was kill the sticks that imprisoned us. In those eight months, I had maimed several men, delimbed one and crippled another but I still hadn't killed. They were careful around me, all the while rewarding my misbehaviour with freedom and food.\n\nWhen I say freedom, I mean the Dome of Dragons. It was mine for several hours a day then, to fly, to swoop, to sleep and to hunt, for they would occasionally release a wild jumpbuck or daggernewt into the Dome so I could keep my skills sharp. Not often, however. They needed to keep us on the edge of starvation, rewarding us with food if we survived a match and killed. A cruel bargain \u2013 death for food. Cruel but effective. We all desired to live.\n\nI don't think they'd ever had a wild dragon in the Pits, only those who had been bred into service to fish or pull carts or whatever else a stick could think of for a dragon to do. I had been born wild. I had fished for my dinner and I remembered back to the time as a fledgling when I had fought off a seasnake and won. Those memories added to the fuel and anger became my core; a hard, sharp white-hot coal of fury and self-loathing and will.\n\nTwice a week I fought to a full Crown, and the theatrics grew more spectacular with each passing battle. There were parades and army drills first to warm up the crowds. Sticks fought each other and I knew that not all were soldiers. I thought of Rue, how he had been bought and sold and wondered if a stick could be sold to fight in the Pits. Regardless, sticks fought sticks then gore bulls and direcats. Then gore bulls fought direcats, and the winners fought dragons and finally dragons fought dragons. Not all would die, but many would and I learned that sticks loved the sight and the smell and the very idea of blood.\n\nInterestingly, dragons never fought sticks. I think the thought of us killing them was something too deep, too visceral, and therefore, too dangerous. Naturally, I thought about it all the time.\n\nMy fights were now the finals of the nights. The sticks would lead in a new challenger and the crowd would cheer, wondering if this would be the one to defeat Warblood, the Night Dragon, Jewel of the Crown. The challenger would be released to fly to the roar of the crowd, but then the handlers would douse the torches one by one, leaving a very few to burn in the arena. Then, I would arrive, swooping from the ceiling in almost perfect cover \u2013 my scales the stars, my wings smoke in the night sky. Just like with the red drake, I would strike the killing blow almost immediately, leaving my opponent with enough life left for a pathetic parlay once the torches were relit. The crowd never knew my strategy \u2013 just the sight of a night dragon filled them with awe, wonder and more than a little fear. It was the easiest job I had ever done and I could have done it forever had it not been for the fact that I hated myself now as much as I hated the sticks.\n\nWe never fought in the Dome. The Dome was a place of respite for dragons and sticks alike, and there were many days when I would watch handlers roam the great arena for hours on end. Oh yes, they would clean, they would prune, they would move rocks and rake sand and plant seeds but they would also sleep and spar and laugh and read. I never understood how men who lived in a world of violence and death, could have normal lives beyond that. As I've said, I thought of Rue often, wondered if he could have been a handler like this. Wondered if these men had been bought and sold into such a life or if it was merely a servitum like tending a plow or tilling a field. Something they did in order to have food and shelter and a modicum of purpose.\n\nLike life in Bangarden, I had much time to think.\n\nI had a new collar \u2013 not studded like the previous, but buckled leather cased in silver. It was called a clap-lock and I preferred it immensely. I also had a nose ring. It had happened quite suddenly when one day a tray of shredded goswyrm hearts appeared through the food hatch of my pen. Goswyrm hearts are particularly sweet and were a common treat for favoured dragons in the Pits. I never thought to question it and devoured it immediately, licking the tray clean with my sticky tongue. But almost at once, a heaviness came over me and I found my legs buckle beneath. I put it down to the contented effects of the wyrm until the door rolled open and a dozen sticks rushed in.\n\nI was used to being handled by them. I was used to them inspecting my teeth or tending my rare wounds but this was different. A heavy mesh was thrown across my back and the sticks held me down, pinning my wings and keeping me on the floor. My response was sluggish and now I believe they must have treated the hearts with a soporific. I could barely lift my head or lash my tail and before I knew it, a needle was thrust through the septum between my nostrils, which is the only tender bit of a dragon's snout. Fire and light popped behind my eyes and I thrashed sideways, knocking several handlers to the floor. With a roar I rose up like a thundercloud but the sticks had done their job and fled, rolling the door closed behind them.\n\nI shook my head and snapped my jaws, blinking as I tried to adjust to this unnatural addition. My nose throbbed with the sting of many thornets, more so when I tried to rub it with my wing claw. A ring, I realized. They had fitted me with a ring like a common pit dragon and the coals of my fury blazed anew.\n\nIf I had seen it reflected in a slice of silverstone however, I think I would confess to the fact that it was made of very fine hammered steel. Some part of me would have approved, if only just a little.\n\nAnother important thing I must confess is the fact that, during my time in the Dome, I had bred a drakina. Several, in fact, given my advantageous colouring and prowess in the Crown. I suppose they were trying to breed for either of those qualities, though I truthfully didn't care. A drake never thinks of eggs or hatchlings, only having more drakinas than any other drake in the territory. They are as important to him as his pride.\n\nA fine drakina had been let into the Dome one day while I was dozing and at first, I thought they meant me to kill her. I had never killed a dragon in the Dome and wasn't sure what to do when an overpowering scent reached my nostrils. It reminded me of Ruby in Gavius' oryza fields and I suddenly understood the indigo dragon and his night visits. The scent was like the taste of lemonwhites \u2013 sweet, smooth and overpowering to all other senses. But I also remembered Summerday's tease and Ruby's temper, so I watched her from the branches of a very tall tree and debated what I should do.\n\nShe was a year-and-a-halfling, fine-boned and charcoal like dark, dark stone. I don't believe she had ever been in the Dome before as she explored first the rocks and trees and bubbling pond before finding the sand and rolling over in it, enjoying the feel as it polished her scales and spines. My heart ached at the sight of a dragon just being a dragon. We are majestic and charismatic creatures, ill suited to a life of service. I wished the sticks could see that.\n\nI unfurled my wings and soared down from the tree, surprised that I hadn't surprised her. She lifted her head from the sand, blinked slowly and rolled again, lashing her tail from side to side. I sat and watched her for a while, wondering if I should bring her a gift. I had killed a young nox earlier on, one that had been unceremoniously shoved into the Dome and I had broken its neck with ease. (Honestly, I do believe he was happy to see me the instant before he died.) And so, I lifted off and returned with a haunch I was saving for later, reckoning it might serve me better in the belly of the drakina than in my own.\n\nShe rose to her feet, shook the sand from her charcoal scales and approached without fear. She put a claw on the haunch and hissed at me, just in case. Language, I marvelled. We didn't speak with words like the sticks, but we communicated. I sat back and watched her as she ate, pondering this lack of language among our people. But before I knew it, she was rubbing her head along my flank, growling and purring in a way that reminded me of Summerday yet again. She was obviously in season and the scents of drakina and nox blood were a heady mix. She snapped at me now and I snapped back, spreading my wings and dipping my head low to the ground. Suddenly, she sprang into the air, rocketing toward the mesh ceiling like a star. I leapt after her and followed, for the first time in a long time flying with someone who wasn't trying to kill me. Soon, we were neck and neck, soaring around the Dome, the envy of all the other dragons who were watching from their pens. She twisted in midair and raked my flank with her claws before wheeling and spiralling downward. I bellowed and followed again until I struck her from above, our wings battering, our tails lashing like whips. We soared upwards now, twisting and spinning in an arc through the domed sky until my jaws clamped down on the back of her neck and suddenly, I knew.\n\nIt was like Hallow Fire, I must admit. The flash of light that illuminates everything and threatens to burn all in its rush and quickly we dropped like stones to the sand. Wings and necks entwined we rolled across the floor, crushing shrubs and saplings under our weight and threatening to take down many of the older trees with our tails. Her scales were the wind, her spines the mountains and if we were not banded, our fire would have scorched the earth. Bellow and breath, claw and couple, the mating of dragons is a deadly thing. Even for us, it threatens to consume us, overturn all our majesty and turn us into creatures of instinct and lust.\n\nThe mating of dragons also takes a long time and it was dark when the handlers came to separate us. Believe me when I tell you, if I had my fire, they would have all been turned to ash.\n\nI never saw the charcoal drakina again, but several weeks later, I was presented with another one, this time the colour of deep waters. You may also believe me when I tell you that this time, I was much more savvy, and shared only a very small piece of the haunch. As I've said, I am a clever dragon and was able to breed and still eat twice that day. A few weeks after that a brown and after that, another grey. If it weren't for the Crown, life would have been good for me.\n\nAnd I could see the sky.\n\nThe stars called to me at night, telling tales of the Fat Fish and the Dying Wyrm and most of all, my father, Draco Stellorum. I learned the patterns of his eyes during that time \u2013 the Wide Eyes, the Sleepy Eyes, the Winking and the Blinking. Since the Dome was open (with only the iron mesh to keep us in), there was nothing to keep the rains out and when they came, it was magical. As I've said before, water is a dragon's friend and even the fiercest of downpours was a delight. During those times, I would close my eyes and remember when I could fly without harness or mesh to limit me. There were times when I could almost hear the tides and I missed the sound of the sea, the rise and fall of the waves, the smell of the salt on the wind. It was very helpful in keeping those coals of fury alive, otherwise I could have grown complacent. As it was, it only served to sharpen my desire for freedom. I would return to the Cliffs or die in the process.\n\nOne afternoon, while dozing in the Dome, I heard a sound and lifted my head to see five shadows cross the mesh roof. My heart thudded in my chest. A Dragon Flight. A Dragon Flight had come to the Pits. It filled my head with all manner of questions. What was a Flight doing here? Was it for fighting and if so, against me? Surely the riders of a Flight would never watch a match where dragons killed dragons for sport. I couldn't possibly fight a Flight dragon \u2013 I wouldn't and I resolved myself to die with honour instead of fight one of them. I'm not sure why I felt that way. I had never met a Flight dragon, not truly. I had saved the great silver drake, but I hadn't met him. However, his rider seemed like a man I could respect and there was much to be said for that.\n\nUnless of course, the honour of the Dragon Flight was all in my mind. Perhaps there was no world in which dragon and rider worked as one, only served and servant. I thought back to Rue and Gavius, to little Tacita and her char sketches in the night. Good sticks, noble sticks, but still I wore a band at my throat.\n\nI glanced at the ceiling mesh. It was almost gnawed through in one corner. Teeth and dragon acid were a potent combination and I silently thanked Ruby for my introduction to the art of the great escape.\n\nHandlers showed up and rolled open my ground-floor door. That was my cue to return to my pen, although I'd often wondered what they would do if I didn't. I never acted on that question and this time, like all other times, I soared down to land on the sand, snapping and growling and they gave me a wide berth as I lumbered in. My thoughts were racing however, and I found myself puzzling over why a Dragon Flight would be in the Pits. There had not been a jumpbuck, nox or daggernewt released in the Dome for me that day. Or the day before, when I paused to think about it.\n\nIn my pen, I laid my head down across my claws, wrestling with my thoughts. I lay for the rest of the day, knowing that tonight I would be called upon to fight and kill and, depending on the challenger, perhaps die. I was nearing three and almost my full size. (Although dragons can grow every year of their life. I have heard of dragons that are bigger than mountains, and dragons that live in the water where sticks make their homes on them like islands.) If I died today, I would never know how big I would have grown had I stayed on the Cliffs of Anquar. So little of my life had been my own choosing.\n\nAnd so I waited for the rising of the stars and the filling of the Crown and the trumpets and the parades and dousing of the torches and the rush of blood in my veins. And for the first time in my life, I dreaded the coming of the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "JEWEL OF THE CROWN",
                "text": "It was dark when they came for me.\n\nI needed four handlers now and I moved slowly, reluctantly, down the tunnels toward the Crown. They tried to make me move faster, tugging at my nose ring, tapping my legs with switches, tapping my tail with brooms. My growl echoed in the tunnels and they stopped. I believed by then I had their respect. At least, that's what I told myself.\n\nWe didn't use the wooden door anymore \u2013 that was for all others and for challengers. The Night Dragon didn't walk in to the Crown. No, I had a special chamber on the sixth level. Originally a cleaner's hallway, it had been reconstructed for me with a long low ceiling, narrow dark walls and a silent drape of linen for a door. But it opened high into the Crown and allowed for an entrance from above, unseen by sticks or dragons, thus preserving the element of surprise for both.\n\nAs I waited at the linen drape, I could hear the crowd roaring again, could smell the blood and excitement of other dragons. The torches were still blazing so it was not my time and I tossed my head, rattling the ring and slapping the ropes. I was angry and eager to get on with the night. Victory or defeat. Life or death. There was no other way in the Crown and I was weary of the game.\n\nMusic of trumpets marking a new match. My heart leapt to my throat but I steeled it, willed it to grow cold, hard, stone.\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on us all tonight,\" the announcer's voice rang through the Crown, echoing as if there were two. \"For the glory of our new governor, Septus Aelianus, Primar of the Eastern Provinces, we are blessed to bring you the match to end all matches!\"\n\nI understood most stick words by now, enough to realize that the Dragon Flight was here because of an important man.\n\n\"Entering the Crown from the north gate,\" echoed the announcer. \"We bring you Bonesnap \u2013 the pride of the city of Belarius!\"\n\nThe arena shook with the roar of a dragon and crowd went wild, drowning his war cry with their cheers. Bonesnap. I tossed my head again. I would finish him like a sinklizard.\n\n\"And from the south gate,\" the announcer continued, \"His twin brother Bloodtooth!\"\n\nTwo?\n\n\"Bonesnap and Bloodtooth, Twin sons of Remus and the Eastern Provinces! Together, the sons of Belarius will challenge the undefeated Night Dragon, our very own Warblood, Jewel of the Crown of Salernum!\"\n\nThe roar of the crowd shook the walls, rattled the wooden planks as my feet.\n\nI growled, a deep rumbling sound in my chest that I know frightened the handlers. I didn't care. I was angry, doubly so. Two dragons. Two dragons against one, all for the sport of sticks. I ducked my head low and narrowed my eyes, summoning the coals, willing the fury. I would kill them both before they knew I was in the arena. I would kill them as I had never killed before and I felt my blood grow hot in my veins.\n\n\"Warblood!\" shouted the crowds. \"Warblood! Warblood! Warblood!\"\n\nAbove the crowds, I could hear the cries of the twin dragons down below, trumpeting and bellowing the challenge. From the changes in pitch, I could tell they were swinging their heads, looking between the east and west entrances and back again. They were wondering how large I was, where I would enter, how I would attack. I grunted, imagining the surprise in their faces when I swept down from the sky in the dark. It would last a heartbeat before I broke their necks, but it would be enough.\n\nAnd one by one, the torches went down in the Crown.\n\nThe crowd hushed and I could hear the twins bugling to each other. They were pathetic, lost and helpless and I pulled my chin to my chest, coiling every muscle in my body. The ropes fell away, the drape was swept aside and I slipped into the Crown like a wraith.\n\nI was night. I was darkness. I knew how to ride the air so that my wings made no sound. I was a spirit, a ghost, a shadow. There were stars and the moons, and the Wide Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, to guide me. I knew from experience where the mesh walls were, where the pillars and columns were that held up the stands. The Crown in darkness had been my home for months now. In fact, the Crown was more a part of me than the Anquar Cliffs and at that moment, I realized that I was no longer a wild dragon but something else entirely.\n\nNot wild. Not a warrior. Neither and both. I could kill all or none. Dreams of nobility but my life bought and paid for in blood. The sticks hadn't done this. Yes, they had captured me and banded me and forced me to work and now kill or starve, but ultimately, it had little to do with the sticks at all. My vanity had brought me here, to this place. I killed their dragons because I could not kill myself.\n\nBelow me, four torches flickered by the four gates and I could see the sons of Belarius, their eyes flashing like beacons on the sea as they swung their heads blindly in the dark. They were green, I realized, and both larger than me but it didn't matter. I had killed bigger. I had killed older. I steeled my will, becoming a creature of death and blood.\n\nI tucked my wings and dropped like a massive stone onto the first twin's head. He crumbled beneath my weight but I did not leave it there. With his face in my talons, I immediately sprang upwards, taking him with me as we disappeared into the blackness. In several powerful strokes, I was at the Prefect's Box where a small candle gave light to the important men. I swung the drake's body into the mesh and with a clang, it dented inward. Inside the Box, the men shrieked and I could see both senators and soldiers shrunk back in fear.\n\nIt was a good feeling.\n\nI sank my teeth into the back of the green dragon's neck just beneath the horns. He squealed, writhing and bending the squares of mesh with his powerful talons but the grip I had was savage and sure. With my feet on his back, I pressed him into the iron and shook my head violently, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until I heard the crack of his neck bones. Squeal became sputter but I did not stop \u2013 back and forth, back and forth \u2013 until his head came free and I felt the blood spray warm across my eyes.\n\nBonesnap, I thought with grim pleasure.\n\nAnd suddenly, a torch crackled to life within the Box.\n\n\"Night Dragon,\" someone whispered.\n\n\"Warblood,\" said another.\n\nI hovered backwards, releasing my grip on the severed head and it thudded quietly into the sand below. The body however continued to flail for several heartbeats, stuck against the mesh by its own talons and spines. Again, like the very first drake I'd killed, the tail lashed and the legs thrashed but the wings merely twitched. The exposed throat pulsed blood into the Box.\n\n\"Marvellous!\" shouted a man as he rose to his feet. His white robes were splattered with red but he began to clap his ringed hands together. \"He is marvellous! I salute him.\"\n\nThe senator from Bangarden.\n\n\"Yes, Primar,\" said another. \"Truly marvellous.\"\n\n\"We salute the Night Dragon!\"\n\n\"Warblood, the magnificent!\"\n\n\"Stormfall?\"\n\nI froze.\n\nSuddenly, a great weight slammed into me from behind, forcing all the air out of my chest as I struck the iron.\n\nIt was the second dragon, twin to the first, and I cursed my vanity. In my lust, I had forgotten him and now, in the light of the Prefect's Box, I was visible and therefore vulnerable. I plummeted downwards, spiralling my wings to catch the air until the darkness swallowed me once again. But he had a grip on my neck and fell with me, his back talons raking my flanks and beating my wings with his own. He was larger than me and I knew that if we hit the ground, any advantage I might have had would be lost.\n\nHis mouth was wide, dagger teeth tearing furiously and I let him, ignoring the blinding pain as his jaws gnashed and chewed because he finally struck the buckled band. As I've said earlier, I was not savage, I was not stronger, I was merely smarter and once I realized the killing lust was upon him, I leaned into him, pushing the band up between his teeth. He bit wildly, not realizing that it was leather and not skin he was gnawing, metal and not bone. I angled my wings and met the ground with my back feet, springing and taking him with me up, up, up to the far side of the dark arena. Above me my father called. Draco Stellorum, Dragon of the Stars, both Eyes Wide, twin moons full and beaming. I was losing blood, Warblood, but I was the Night Dragon and I would live or die because of this night.\n\nWe flew faster and faster toward the iron mesh. I knew the Crown. I knew the walls like my own scales and, pushing my banded neck into his mouth, I wheeled in midair. Backwards, we struck the mesh hard.\n\nSo hard that it dented beneath our combined weight. Behind it, the sticks screamed and bolted from their seats because, at this particular impact, the band around my throat snapped free.\n\nPing, ting, ting. It bounced off the mesh before hitting the sand.\n\nThe silence that fell with it was louder.\n\nA dragon un-banded, loose in the Crown.\n\nI threw back my head and bellowed, bringing up the acid that was always in my belly. The fire came with it, rolling off my tongue and spraying yellow-hot across the face of the green dragon. His eyes burst within his head and ooze ran down his sizzling face. I blew fire through the mesh and the sticks screamed once more. I soared through the Crown, raining fire into the stands and seats and through the arches and exits and doors. The Crown erupted into chaos.\n\nOver the din, I heard the singing of arrows, felt heat rain across my flank as they hit. I saw a torch on the ground, then a second so I circled and swept low, taking out all the torch columns with my wings as I flew. Bam, bam, bam, bam, they fell like saplings in a summer storm until there was nothing but moonslight in the Crown, and firelight on the citizens as they thrashed and howled and burned.\n\nStill, I was trapped. There were only two ways out. I would be free through one or die fighting tonight. I flew high to the ceiling, gripping the iron mesh with my talons, spitting acid on the bars and hearing the familiar sizzle as they weakened and charred. I sprayed fire in a concentrated blast but arrows thudded along my spine and I knew this way would not work for me. I released the mesh and disappeared into the dark shadows, hovering in my night blackness and knowing I had only a few hours until daylight. The only way now was certain death and I hardened my heart for the prospect. Death for dragons was never glorious, no matter how hard we tried.\n\nThere were archers in the stands and others on the floor but I could see light flickering behind the large double doors where the processions came through. The army gate, I remembered. It was used for the parades and drills and I had no idea where it went but surely not to underground tunnels. When the doors swung open, the army marched out carrying spears and arrows and swords and I took a long, deep breath, steeling my will and deadening my heart. I dipped my head, angled my wing and descended like the night.\n\nThe army didn't see me coming until I was upon them, and then I sprayed fire into them, lighting them all like torches but I didn't stop. I flew straight into them, bowling them over as they screamed and fell and crunched beneath me. In a heartbeat, I was through to the other side. It was dark like the tunnels but in the distance, I could see a shimmer of light. Moons, I realized, the Wide Eyes of Draco Stellorum. My father was showing me the way to freedom or to death \u2013 which one I didn't know. Regardless, I half flew, half lumbered through the dark tunnel toward it, my wings unable to fully extend. Arrows thudded into me from all angles but the light was an open arch and I was not stopping.\n\nSwords drawn, centurions rushed from outside, not realizing that I had flame and I burned them with barely a thought. They crumpled to the stone and I felt the crush of them under my feet. Suddenly, I was through the archway into a wide exterior courtyard. Above me, the open sky.\n\nA powerful shock to my shoulder and I staggered, looked down to see a spear protruding from my flesh. A centurion was standing in the archway and I ducked my head and blew, setting him ablaze with one breath. I paused a moment to survey the field \u2013 citizens were flooding out of many exits and soldiers were rushing in from many entrances. But there was no mesh; there was no ceiling. There were only the moons and the stars and the great expanse of night sky and my father. I heard the bugle of distant dragons and remembered the Flight.\n\nI tossed my head and sprang into the air, my wings making huge downstrokes once, twice, three times, ignoring the blinding pain from my shoulder and dragging the long spear with me as I climbed. Finally, I was skyborne, soaring over the Crown and then the Dome and the Pits and then the roads and the foothills and the mountains and the clouds.\n\nI looked back to see five dragons flying like an arrow in my wake."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE CRESCENT MOUNTAINS",
                "text": "From night to morning I flew, determined to stay airborne but feeling light-headed as the events of the battle took their toll.\n\nStormfall.\n\nThe spear in my shoulder was slowing me down, creating drag in the strong air currents above the mountains. Like Rue dragging an oar in the water, I found myself drifting to the side as my good wing beat stronger than my weak. Arrows in my back stung and the blood streaked along my neck from the green dragon's teeth. But I was unbanded and free and could happily die on any one of these great mountains beneath me.\n\nStormfall.\n\nThe Dragon Flight was still following and this puzzled me. They could have easily overtaken me given my injuries but they didn't and I found myself wondering what their aim was.\n\nSomeone had called me Stormfall.\n\nI pushed it from my mind and tucked in my wings, plummeting down to skim the crests of the mountains. They looked white, these mountains, like the caps on ocean waves. I had never seen anything like them in my life. While the peaks were white, the valleys were dark and it was the darkness that I was searching for. Night dragons do not hide well in the light.\n\nI angled my good wing, fighting the pain but letting the drag take me down, down, down into craggy valleys. It was magnificent to have the wind in my eyes once again, even if for such a sorry reason. A part of me just wished to close them and let the ground take me. Death would come mercifully quick and I would be soaring through the stars with my father before I knew it. But I was a proud dragon and if there was a way to outwit these sticks, I reckoned I owed it to myself to at least try.\n\nThere were trees lining these mountains \u2013 bank pines and larches and olive firs growing at steep angles along the slopes. I whipped between them now, knowing this was a dangerous but effective way to become lost in the night. It was very dark, with the clouds passing over the moons, and I risked a glance behind, scanning the skies above for any trace of the Flight. If I couldn't see them, it seemed reasonable that they couldn't see me when suddenly, a streaking branch nicked the tip of the spear and fire exploded behind my eyes. Wildly I spun, crashing into tree after tree until my wingtip struck the slate of the mountain and my belly followed suit, scraping along the stone and moss and bumping off trees and stumps and rocks. I came to rest at a cliff's edge, wedged against a cedar that cracked at my impact but did not fall.\n\nI closed my eyes now. Even if the Flight hadn't seen my undignified landing, they would have heard it and so I was doomed, too weary to hide, too bloody to fight. They would have to kill me for I would not go back to the Pits. The rules had changed and I had changed them. Any dragons I killed would be free dragons, any fight a fair fight and any sticks that got in the way would be a welcome sacrifice.\n\nI didn't hear it when the first dragon landed, nor the second. At some point however, I became dimly aware of voices but I shut them out, determined not to know when the sword fell across my neck. The smell of dragons was strong and I welcomed that smell, let it carry me into the stars. If I am truthful, I do think the last thing I remember was the word Stormfall, and then nothing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "It is a strange place, that place between Death and Dying, and it almost seems like sleep. Long, deep, dreamless sleep that is at once empty and disturbing, a twisting world of blurred space and fragmented memory, of insensate calm and unimaginable terror. I was grateful to leave that place, even if it was to hear the voices of sticks once again.\n\nStormfall. I had been Stormfall once.\n\nI remembered a scrap of the dream \u2013 a stick had removed the spear and taken much of my blood with it. Men had climbed over me in my dream, pulling out barbs like nettles and rubbing pine tar into the wounds. In fact, all I could smell was pine tar. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to see a great silver drake stretched out beside me, fanning his wings in the sun.\n\nHe noticed me, cocked his great head to one side and rumbled a greeting. His wings lay open across the rock, the talon-tips crossed beneath him and he looked very regal, more regal than any dragon I'd ever seen. He was easily twice my size and his hide was scarred from many battles. But still, his scales shone like silverstone and I wondered if I knew him.\n\n\"Stormfall?\" came a voice and I lifted my head to see a stick walking toward me. He was wearing silver armour and a bell of memory began to take chime, calling back a time on the Udan Shore. \"Do you remember me, Stormfall? Cassien Cirrus, First Wing of the Eastern Quarter Dragoneers. You saved my life and that of my dragon.\"\n\nI growled at him, low and deep in my chest. He continued towards me so I bared my teeth, my many rows of daggers that could cut him in half in one snap. The silver dragon growled now. However, he didn't move, didn't change position to threaten or intimidate. The threat was in his tone and I understood it very well, despite our lack of language.\n\n\"I thought it was you,\" said the stick, Cassien Cirrus. \"Not too many dragons with your colouring in this region.\"\n\nHe was beside me now, smelling of leather and pine tar and dragons. He reached out and touched my neck where the spear had been, ran his hand along my flank. I remembered the one of the first days in the fishing hut when Rue ran his hand along my face. It had been the first touch of a stick that had not been accompanied by bruises. Like this.\n\nBut I was not that dragon any more.\n\nI summoned the fire, blew a curl of smoke out my nostril and the great silver dragon rose to his feet. I snapped at him and he snapped back, our teeth echoing through the quiet valley.\n\n\"Enough,\" growled Cirrus and the dragon lowered his head. \"I told you he'd be hard as stone, Ironwing. He wasn't as lucky as you.\"\n\nThe silver drake grumbled and I noticed that he had no band around his throat. Come to think of it, he never had. Of course they were allowed to harness their fire, these Flight Dragons and for the first time in a very long time, my imagination struggled to raise its broken head.\n\n\"The others have gone,\" said Cirrus. \"They've returned to the Citadel so it's just us here. You, me and Ironwing.\"\n\nAnd he held up a piece of charred meat. It looked like a skoat, a small tree lizard known for sharp teeth and tasty flesh and he peeled a strip for me. I clenched my jaws tight, unwilling to play this game. First Rue, then Junias, then all of the handlers in the Pits. The lure of food, traded for a silver band and work. Or in the Pits \u2013 for blood. I was no fool. I would take nothing from this man's hand.\n\nHe smiled at me. I could burn him to ash with the fire of my breath.\n\n\"You're a clever one, aren't you?\" he said. \"But look, Flight Dragons have no band. They can eat what they want, when they want. Ironwing could kill me if he wanted to, couldn't you, Ironwing?\"\n\nThe silver drake grumbled but did not take his shiny eyes off me for an instant.\n\n\"And so, here, I offer you this skoat. It is very tasty and you need the strength.\"\n\nHe stepped forward once again. The skoat looked good, smelled even better.\n\nI pushed myself to my feet. They were shaky but still.\n\nThe silver drake growled again.\n\nStormfall and Rue, Flight Dragons and Riders. Working together for a common purpose. I had been happy once. I had been Stormfall.\n\nI looked around at the sunny mountainside. Trees, rocks, slopes, white cliffs. Above me, clouds and blue. Beneath me, valleys and rivers.\n\nThere was no comparison.\n\nI stretched out my wings and leapt into the sky, soaring out and away from this rocky ledge, the stick and his silver dragon with barely a second thought.\n\nAnd to my relief, they did not follow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Life in the Crescent Mountains was at once different from and similar to my early life at the Anquar Cliffs. Instead of fish, I hunted white ghorns and shaggy noxen and shared with no one. I hunted at night as well, perfecting the arts of soundless flight and killing with a single blow. Instead of a nest on a mountain ledge, I made a lair in a cave I'd found along a cliff face. It smelled of old dragons and I wondered if it was an ancient aerie of some sort. It gave me a sense of belonging, one I hadn't had in some time.\n\nBut above all I was free and felt like I did when I was a fledgling. Wild and proud and strong and vain. I had stood up to the dragon rider and his silver drake and had no master now but the wind. It was a good feeling, much needed after so long a slave. I staked my claim on a large tract of land, spitting acid on every rock and tree that I could find. Although dragon acid burned like fire, it cooled to a sticky wad and was the way dragons marked their territory, so I patrolled my borders every night, spitting acid and checking for signs of sticks or dragons.\n\nI was very far from the sea however, and sometimes I could feel the earth force calling me home. I would go one day, I promised, but when I did, I would have to cross the Pit lands and Bangarden, the Corolanus Markets and then Venitus. Even the thought of living with another band filled me with dread.\n\nDragon Flights were common in this area. Sometimes at dawn or twilight, I would see them travelling in their signature arrowheads across the Crescent Mountains and I watched with interest until they disappeared from view. Of all things in this world, the Dragon Flights confounded me the most \u2013 dragon and stick working together without banding. The dragons were harnessed but I wondered if it was more for the sake of the sticks. They were a fragile people, physically \u2013 easy to kill, easier to wound. It was a puzzling alliance, a complex one, and sometimes I'd allow myself to think about Rue and our days on the sea, or Tacita and our songs in the aviary. Some nights my dreams replayed these memories. More than once I was back in Bangarden, with a burning carriage on my tail and a brown rider on my back.\n\nThere had been a Flight Rider on my back.\n\nStill the thought captivated me. The sensations captivated me \u2013 his legs pressing into my shoulders, his hands gripping the spines on my neck. His weight foreign but not wrong and I found my mind turning it over and over, fighting the leap of my spirit every time that arrowhead crossed the sky.\n\nThis too I tried to chase from my mind. I was a wild dragon now, only needing to remember the taste of cold mash in order to appreciate the shaggy noxen that were happy to feed me day and night with their warm, bloody bodies.\n\nOne morning, as I was flying home with a full belly, I smelled a dragon.\n\nA drakina actually and the scent grew stronger as I neared the aerie. It occurred to me that perhaps my den had history, with dragons returning to nest year after year. It didn't matter now. The den was mine. I had earned it and I would keep it, defending it against any who tried to take it back.\n\nThe sun was breaking the dark skies as I landed on the ledge. Her scent was very strong along with the scent of blood and I wondered if she had brought me a gift. I had never bred a drakina in the wild so I didn't know if that's how it was done. It would certainly go a long way to appeasing me, and I must admit that the thought of a willing drakina waiting for my return was a heady thing. It was with great bravado, then, that I lumbered into the small cavern, only to be greeted by a blast of flame.\n\nI shrank back but only for a moment before meeting with a blast of my own and the cavern was illuminated in furious light. Then silence, save the crackling of the stone and the growling of a displaced female. Dim beams sliced the darkness as the sun struggled to rise and I could see her, coiled upon herself, prepared to fight.\n\nShe was a beauty, a golden drakina that reminded me of Summerday. A dark sheen on her wings told me she was injured and had sought my den for refuge. The memories of drakinas in the Dome threatened to ambush my reason but still, it was my cave, my nest, my home and she was the intruder.\n\nI pushed my head into the cavern and bellowed at her. She bellowed back, wings held wide, tail lashing. Glorious, like Summerday. Grating like Ruby.\n\nI was larger, could easily kill her had I the desire, but I had hunted all night and my belly was full and I wanted nothing more than to sleep in peace. I pushed my way into the cavern, head ducked low, smoke billowing from my jaws. The tips of my wings scraped the rock, raining bits of shale to the stony floor. She hissed but stepped aside as I hopped up onto my bed of sticks. It was already warmed from her body and I turned several times to settle, curling my long tail around me and laying my head on my claws. I snarled at her.\n\nShe hissed again, wings still wide. Looked to the cave's mouth and the rising sun, then back at me. I closed my eyes, not caring. She was no threat to me. I could hear her grumble, could hear her confusion and upset until she grew quiet. After a while, I opened one eye to see she had curled up near the mouth of the cave, her golden back to me, ribs rising and falling with her breath.\n\nShe smelled good.\n\nSatisfied, I closed my eyes again and fell into a deep satisfied sleep.\n\nI woke to find her lying against me, her back to mine and I had to admit the warmth was most pleasant. I could smell dried blood and I wondered briefly what had wounded her. It didn't seem fatal, only limiting but that, for a dragon, could be the same.\n\nWhen I rose to my feet, she awoke, hissing and coiling away from me. I saw how she was holding her wing. Awkward and tender, the leather darkened, the membrane clear. I didn't care. She wasn't my drakina nor was she in season. I'd learned from Ruby and Summerday to keep my distance until she was.\n\nThe cave was cold with evening air and when I yawned, my breath frosted as it left my tongue. I stretched and finally pushed past her as I lumbered toward the cavern opening. She hissed but I ignored her, leaping into the darkening sky and forgetting her in a heartbeat.\n\nI was a creature of the night. I was a master of the stars and I soared high, higher toward my father, Draco Stellorum. Some nights it seemed as though I could almost catch him and I wondered what that might be like, to finally become one with the moons. It was so cold the higher I flew, the air so thin, and it made me wonder how he could live the way he did so high above all other dragons. Did he have a lair in the clouds? Did he chase Selisanae, the Golden Dragon of the Sun, into the sea every night?? Did he have a kingdom or territory or lands that he ruled or was he merely an illusion, a smattering of lights that had somehow become real in my imagination?\n\nAt night, I was free to think of such things and I would fly for the sheer glory of flying, feeling the cold bite my eyes and the frost burn the ring in my nose until the hunger in my belly brought me back to the earth.\n\nI did think of the drakina once or twice that night. I expected to find her gone by morning so I pushed her out of my mind to focus on the hunt.\n\nThat night, I took down two shaghorns \u2013 a buck and a doe in one strike and I ate the buck on the edge of the mountain, enjoying the warmth as the blood ran down my throat. As usual, I ate the organs first, then spent the rest of the night tearing and swallowing whole large slices of flesh. I took my time with the bones. I loved long bones as they cracked beneath my teeth and the marrow spilled out over my tongue. There was nothing like it and I marvelled how any dragon could live on mash. Even fish was a sad substitute for nox, unless it was lemonwhite.\n\nNext, I rolled in the snow to clean the blood from my beak and claws. There is nothing like fresh mountain snow for cleaning dragonskin and I realized I was so very content. The only thing I could possibly need might be already in my den. I snorted, shaking the snow from my mane and I gazed down at the dead doe. It would be a good gift, I thought to myself. If she was still there. If not, it would be breakfast. Either way would end well for me.\n\nI snatched the doe in my talons and took to the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE DRAKINA",
                "text": "Once again, I was greeted by a blast of flame.\n\nDrakinas, I thought. They were a puzzle. What could possibly motivate them?\n\nI bellowed at her as I landed on the ledge and she bellowed back, flame licking at the edges of the cavern's opening. It was an orange flame however, not white or yellow hot and I gauged her protest as feeble and unworthy. I ducked my head and pushed inside, dragging the shaghorn carcass across the stone with my teeth. She watched me with wary eyes, wings wide, tail lashing and I could see fresh blood glistening on her wing leather. She had been cleaning it; a natural instinct, I knew. Best to let it scab over and harden. I'd learned that from life in the Pits.\n\nI settled onto the stone and tore into the shaghorn, bolting down great slabs of flesh with relish. I wasn't hungry but I also wasn't overly sympathetic. This was my den and my kill. She was being allowed to stay only by my good will. Best she learn that early on if she was to become my mate.\n\nI looked up at her, licking the blood from my teeth and she hissed at me. Once again, I saw the frost cloud up from her breath and marvelled at the coldness of these mountain winters. So different from the winters in the Under Weathers when the worst that fell was a temperate rain. I remembered the rain well. It had been as much a part of my working life as the dragons. Stonecrop and Stumptail, Ruby and her indigo drake. Dragons moulded and shaped by actions of men. Towndrell was the same, whipped, beaten and left for dead at the side of a road. I thought of Summerday, beautiful and proud and blind now also because of men.\n\nAnd here, a beautiful wildling, waiting on me for food.\n\nI left her the carcass in an icy puddle of blood.\n\nShe was on it before I reached my nest and I must admit there was some satisfaction as I listened to her tear and crunch. I wondered when she had eaten last, when suddenly she spat a mouthful of flames and the carcass sizzled under the heat. The cave filled with the smells of roasting meat before she tore into it again. Odd, I thought. Wild dragons did not cook their food. It was not something we did, in and of ourselves. At least, I had never seen in during my early days in the Anquar Cliffs. No, we relished the wild taste and stringy flesh, the blood and the tang of raw. This was a learned behaviour and instantly thought of Cassien Cirrus and his roasted stoat. I narrowed my eyes, studied her all the more closely now as I wondered where she had come from and why.\n\nPerhaps she was like me, returned to the wild from some form of servitude.\n\nThere was dried blood on the sticks of my nest so I climbed over them and with my back feet, scratched them off the pile. With one breath I torched them before turning in circles and settling down upon the rest. I laid my head on my claws as the first rays of dawn reached into the cave. My belly was full, my eyes were heavy, and soon I was asleep, flying with my father, Draco Stellorum, in my dreams.\n\nI awoke later that day with the frost settling over my scales but once again, my back was warm. I remained still, watching the rise and fall of her scales as she breathed; the twitch of an eyelid, the curl of a golden claw. She was so much like Summerday and I fell back to sleep, lost in the glorious colour of her.\n\nI awoke later to the feeling of tiny teeth nibbling on my scales.\n\nIt took me a long moment to realize she was grooming me, cleaning bits of blood and dried flesh that the snow had not reached and I stayed completely still as her nibbles traced their way along my neck to my cheek, jaw and finally beak. Her hot breath fell across my face and I opened one eye to see her studying the silver ring in my nose. She nipped it with her tiny front teeth and I snarled a warning. She shrank back, startled.\n\nSlowly, I rose to my feet, shaking the frost off my scales and lumbered over to the shaghorn. I pawed at it, searching for anything left that might be raw or wild but it was truly cooked and crumbled beneath my talons. She snaked in, snagging a roasted haunch and dragged it out from under me. I didn't care. I was a wild dragon now, not a slave anymore to leather or wood or steel or cooking.\n\nAs she ate, I moved to the cavern's edge, perched at the lip and folded my wings across my back. It was twilight, my favourite time of the day, and I searched for the eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum. There, I saw them. Both blinking as if ready for sleep, pale orbs merely crescents hanging in the skies. The stars glittered as they appeared through the falling darkness and I imagined his wings, covering me the way my mother's did when I was young. Odd. I rarely thought of my mother now. As I swept my gaze over the peaks and valleys of the Crescent Mountains, I felt the earth force tug in my chest, calling me home.\n\nI could follow it, I knew. I could let it lead me back over the Crown and the Dome, over Bangarden and Corolanus and Venitus, out past the Udan Shores to the wild cliffs of Anquar and my people \u2013 fishers and free.\n\nI realized that, at some point, the drakina had joined me. She perched on the ledge, wings also folded across her back and I yearned for the language of the sticks. They had words that had the power to change things, while all we could do was trill and bark, warble and bellow. No wonder they considered us beasts. It stirred those coals of anger once again and I lifted my head to the sky and raised my voice in the song of dragons, a song of skies and clouds and waters and stars and solitude and longing. The cold valley beneath me echoed for a moment as the song carried far and away.\n\nUnexpectedly, the drakina also threw back her head and sang, her voice high and musical and rich and moving and I joined, adding my deeper voice and the valley rippled with dragonsong. We sang and sang and sang until the Blinking Eyes moved across the sky and we fell silent to hear the song of the night. Perhaps we didn't need words like the sticks needed words, I wondered. Perhaps our songs were language enough.\n\nMy belly rumbled and so when the night had fallen over us, I leapt into the sky to hunt. I caught and killed a large antlered vemison drake and did not eat it. It wasn't because their hides are so very tough. Rather, I relented my opinion on sharing and carried it back to the den whole.\n\nWhen I arrived at the ledge that morning, she was gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "I have said on many occasions that dragons are not a sentimental people and for the most part, that is true. We don't dwell on the past, we don't dream of the future; we live for the now. For the sunrise and the sunset. For the skies, for the waters, for the hunt and for the next mate. But that morning, finding her gone left me like a stone sinking in the ocean.\n\nBut I realized there were other scents in the air.\n\nI dropped the carcass and breathed deeply, tasting the air with my tongue. There was the drakina but there were others \u2013 two drakes, no three, and another drakina. There was no blood on the wind so there had been no violence. Her flight, I wondered? And if so, why had she left them? How had she come here? I had marked my territory and the thought of three drakes moving in fanned coals of a very different sort.\n\nI wheeled and leapt into the air, not caring as the carcass plummeted from the ledge to the valley far below. I was intrigued and challenged and more than a little angry. It was past sunrise now and I was as exposed as a night dragon could be. Still, I followed their scent for hours. It was midday when I passed the edge of my territory, later still when I reached a ridge and the smells converged like a wall. I landed, discovered a series of acid wads all along the crest. These were the markers of many, many drakes and as I lifted my head to survey the mountains and deep valley below me, I was astounded.\n\nDozens of dragons streaking through the air, soaring and wheeling and circling like fledglings. Drakinas in nests lining the cliffs, trumpeting to wayward chicks, cooing to obedient ones. Young drakes in mock battles, preening for the females, jousting with wing and beak. The scents of old eggs mixed with fresh shat floated up along with that of dragon breath and fire. My heart soared at the sight. It was fascinating and glorious and I all but forgot the golden drakina. I had never seen an aerie save as a chick, and now that I was mature, I saw how utterly majestic it was. With one wing tucked over my back and the other gripping the ledge, I leaned forward to get a better view.\n\nPerhaps three dozen dragons, mostly young, some older, confined to this particular valley. It was wheeling, tumbling chaos, and I swept my eyes over the craggy landscape. It was a large aerie, but not as large as the Anquar Cliffs. White-capped peaks carried on to the horizon and in the distance, sunlight danced across an unnaturally curved surface. I narrowed my eyes, leaned forward even more. It was a dome and next to it, a spire of shimmering, snow-covered gold.\n\nSuddenly, a shadow fell over me and with the thunder of Hell Down, a great drake landed on the ridge, his brown wings held wide in warning. He roared and hot breath sprayed across my face, bringing with it the smells of noxen and skoat and shaghorn. I held my ground and bellowed back, noticing distant dragons circle in for a better view. The brown lowered his head and lashed his tail, the posture of intimidation. I realized that he was almost twice my size, if not more and he would try to kill me in a heartbeat if I dared strike a threat.\n\nBut I was a threat. I was Warblood, Jewel of the Crown. Most drakes postured and preened. I killed.\n\nIt was daylight and I had no advantage other than the fact that I had killed more than my share of drakes as large as he. An even match, I wagered, and I spread my wings, prepared to accept his challenge.\n\nA second drake rose to the ridge however, blue wings beating a backdraft and he bellowed at the sight of me. Almost immediately, they were joined by a snarling red drakina and a bronze drake. The three hovered in perfect synchronicity and I marvelled at their co-operation. Drakes and drakinas working together to protect their aerie and the thought occurred to me that perhaps not all intelligent dragons were slaves to sticks.\n\nIt also occurred to me, then, that perhaps our dragonsongs had summoned them.\n\nA fourth and then a fifth rose up from the ridge, blotting out the sun.\n\nI could win against one, perhaps even against two, but not against all these and not in the daylight. I leapt from the ridge and dipped a wing, wheeling in the air and leaving the aerie for my own lands. While everything in me wanted to, I forced myself not to look back, for it would be humbling to let them win such a simple conquest. However, as I returned to my own lair that evening, I vowed I would investigate further in the coming days. Naturally, at night.\n\nI like to think of myself as a patient dragon but I know that this is not completely true. I do believe I gave it the time between Blinking Eyes and Sleeping, knowing that during the Sleeping Eyes of Draco Stellorum, there would not even be moonslight to give me away. And so one evening during the Sleeping Eyes, I left my lair and flew those many hours, flying by scent and memory alone until my night eyes spied the ridge. I landed silently and gazed down into the valley.\n\nThere was nothing.\n\nNot one drake, not one drakina, not one nest of chicks to be seen. I could smell them sure enough, but the scent was days old and I puzzled at the meaning. Slowly, carefully, I sliced through the valley, landing on one of the nests to find the branches cold. I took a deep breath and chirruped into the night. Nothing. I bugled now, the only sound the dull echo as my call bounced across the rocks. The aerie, which had once been filled with life and dragons, was empty.\n\nIt was then that I heard the music.\n\nMusic like the sighing of stars, notes rising and falling like the ocean waves, plucking my strings like dragonsong from long, long, very long ago.\n\nIt was coming from the dome and spire. In the absence of moonslight and with only stars to guide me, I flew for less than an hour before the dome blocked out even those and I soared toward it, lured by the music of the night. There was a low building at its base and I smelled sticks and leather, but the music was not coming from that building. I swept over it, circling instead the great spire capped with snow and pure gold.\n\nSoft and low, coming from within. Pipes\u2026\n\nIt stirred something deep within me, calling me the way the night called me. Unlike the pipes, the night and I were one. I was a curious dragon and strong from my life in the wild. Besides, I loved the smell of gold. I breathed it in as I circled the dome, ignoring the prickles of warning racing up and down my spine. This was a place of sticks. I should have flown far, far away. But the music called so I stayed.\n\nIn the darkness, I could see holes all along this tower from base to roof. Windows, I thought, or doors open to the night sky. Without mesh, without glass, they were large enough even for very large dragons and the music floated out through them like incense. I spied one such hole near the top and landed, prepared to leap back into the sky in a heartbeat. I peered down.\n\nIt was dark but the smell of dragons was strong and after a moment, I could make out nests built into the walls with stucco and wood. Empty nests made of sticks and straw and chaff. I could also smell men. This was an aviary like Gavius' \u2013 constructed by sticks to house their dragons. I could smell old leather and old blood and gold and another scent that triggered memories from ages past. My heart ached as the music stopped, echoed away like leaves on the wind.\n\nBelow me, a lantern flickered to life.\n\n\"Stormfall\u2026\"\n\nA boy on the stone floor far, far down. He lifted it so the light fell across his face.\n\n\"Stormfall, you've grown\u2026\"\n\nDark face, dark eyes, wild curly hair.\n\nMy heart leapt into my throat and I wheeled in the window and sprang into the night, flying as fast as I could to return to my lair and the lands that I had claimed as my own. I settled into my nest by dawn but did not sleep one wit, for my heart did not slow its race, nor did my mind stop its spinning. I could not, I would not believe what it was telling me.\n\nThat day at dusk, I left my den to return to the golden spire, finding it still empty of dragons.\n\nThere, Rue was waiting for me."
            },
            {
                "title": "RUE",
                "text": "I watched him from the tower top, sleeping in one of the lower nests with a lantern by his side. He stirred after several moments, rubbed his eyes and stared up at me for a long time. Finally, he stepped to the floor, picked up the lantern and walked out the main floor door. I could hear him outside and I swung on my perch, watching the lantern light swing across the rocks. It stopped on a narrow plateau between cliff and trees and I could see him making a fire on the grass. It was not high enough for snow here and I wondered if the rains would come even to the mountains. If so, warmth and dry wood would not be taken for granted for long.\n\nThen again, the sound of the pipes.\n\nLow and trilling like the music of dragonsong and my heart lurched within me. I leapt from my perch and soared through the night sky, sweeping down over his head like a great black wind. I rose up to the mountains but the pipes were so sad and sweet and they called me with a sharper tug than any rope, so I circled and swept over him again. I heard him laugh and call my name, my old name, my first name before I knew that dragons could have names. I wheeled in the air and dropped to the ground several spans away, wings wide and ready to fly at the first sign of others.\n\nIn the light of the fire, I could see him. Lankier, older but still the same.\n\nRue.\n\nAlive, not dead like Serkus had said. Alive and Rue.\n\nMy Rue.\n\nHe turned as he sat, lowered the pipe and smiled.\n\n\"I can't believe how big you are,\" he said. \"Cirrus was right. You're magnificent.\"\n\nI shook my head, snapping my mane of spines.\n\nHe reached into a pocket, pulled out a gold coin, held it up in the firelight.\n\n\"Look,\" he said. \"I still have it, the coin he gave us to enter the Citadel. That was so long ago. We were both so young.\"\n\nI stared at him. My Rue. I didn't know him.\n\nHe looked down, sighed. Slipped it back into his pocket.\n\n\"You used to sit on my shoulder, remember? Even when you were too big to do it, you did. Scared all the girls on the docks. You'd scare them plenty now, you're so big. You'd crush me like a beetle.\"\n\nI snapped my beak at him, like the old days.\n\n\"I don't have any lemonwhites for you,\" he said. \"I'm sorry. I\u2014\"\n\nHis voice caught in his throat and he drew a long, shuddering breath. His eyes were filling with moonshine and oceans.\n\n\"I'm sorry about so many things,\" he said. \"I didn't look for you when Serkus sold you. I was so angry then, so broken and defeated and angry. I left the Shores and never looked back. But I thought about you all the time.\"\n\nI couldn't smell other dragons or sticks or traps. There was only Rue so I took several steps toward the fire. The stones were warm so I lay down, folding my wings across my back.\n\n\"You have a ring,\" he said and he made a face. I think it was a sad one. It didn't matter. It was my ring. I had earned it, along with my scars.\n\n\"Cirrus said you were in the Pits,\" he said. \"That they called you Warblood and that you were undefeated.\"\n\nI turned my head, nibbled an imagined itch on my shoulder. I always liked the sound of his voice. Up and down like ocean waves. Soothing and musical like a dragon.\n\n\"I'm sorry you were in the Pits. I can't imagine you there. You were the best fisher dragon I ever knew.\"\n\nI was hungry. I hadn't eaten last night or the night before, for that matter, and my belly made a rumbling sound. I yawned to disguise it and once again, Rue laughed.\n\n\"I have some dried stoat in the hut,\" he said, nodding towards the spire and the little house at its base. \"It's not much but the riders didn't leave anything and I've had to pretty much fend for myself. I do miss the lemonwhites, though.\"\n\nI looked at him. Blinked slowly. Marvelled that out of all the sticks I had come to hate in my life, he was not one of them. Even though he had been the one to catch me, the first to put a band on my throat. My Rue.\n\n\"I can understand you, you know that?\" he said and he poked at the fire with a long stick. \"Cirrus told me that Dragon Riders are chosen because they understand dragon thought. He found me in Venitus after a rider told him about a dragon at the Prefect's house. There was a riot in the streets and a dragon almost died. He was the colour of night and stars.\"\n\nHe grinned now, a small sideways grin, stirred the fire so that sparks rose up into the darkness.\n\n\"Actually, he said this night dragon lifted a flaming funeral carriage into the air. I said it sounded like something you'd do.\"\n\nI remembered it vividly. It was an impressive thing, but then again, I was an impressive dragon.\n\n\"Cirrus tried to find you but the funeral owner had closed his business and left town. He lost track of you after that but we talked all night. He came to visit a few times afterwards. I was working in a fish shop in Venitus, helping the owners buy and sell Shore fish. We sold to senators who vacationed there with their families. We sold lots of fish.\"\n\nMy belly grumbled at the thought.\n\n\"We never bought from Serkus, though,\" he said. \"I don't know what happened to him. Someone told me he was gone. I hope he's dead.\"\n\nSo did I.\n\n\"See? Cirrus said you can tell the dragons that will make good Flight dragons. You can almost hear their thoughts, active and sharp. You think all the time, Stormfall. Not all dragons do. Maybe that's why we got along so well. I think all the time too. It's not so good when you're a soul-boy. You're always thinking about what you would do if you weren't.\"\n\nI didn't know what to do. I didn't know what he wanted. A part of me wanted to go home, kill a nox and eat well, and then sleep for the rest of the night and then all day as well, just because I could. But another part of me wanted to sit and enjoy his company a while longer, listen to that voice that was like the waves. Perhaps it brought back memories of a simpler time and a younger self, when my imagination was as wide as the sea and my feet firmly planted on the shoulders of a boy.\n\n\"Cirrus thinks you could be a Flight Dragon,\" said Rue. He looked up at me. \"And he thinks I could be a Rider. He said we should be a team. I'd like that. It'd be better than selling fish to fat senators and their wives. That's what soul-boys dream of when they have the time.\"\n\nA rider.\n\nI had dreamed lately of the brown rider, his legs across my shoulders, his hand on my spines. Living and working with sticks for a noble purpose, no band of silver at my throat.\n\nBut I was Warblood the Undefeated Jewel of the Crown, killer of sticks and dragons.\n\nIt was just a dream.\n\nHe looked back at the fire, poked it so that ash floated up to the stars.\n\n\"I dream all the time. That night when the pirates attacked the docks, that was the end and the beginning for me. You helped the Flight, Cirrus said. He said you saved his life and the life of his dragon and that he would do his best to find you and bring us together to the Citadel. You can't imagine what that meant for me, up to my arms in fish guts, to hear that a Dragon Rider wanted to help. But maybe you can. You are that kind of dragon.\"\n\nHe had no idea. My imagination had been slaughtered in the Crown. I was nothing but a spectacular killer, all ash and stars and blood.\n\n\"I didn't get my soul, see? Even when I left my servitude, I never got it back. I still feel the same as I did before I was free. Ruminor hasn't smiled on me at all.\"\n\nI wondered if that was my problem too. My father, Draco Stellorum, was aloof, unreachable, implacable. It was hard to believe in stars when your life was filled with blood.\n\n\"After the riots in Bangarden, I didn't see Cirrus for months,\" Rue went on. \"And then ten days ago, he showed up again. He said you had been seen here, at South Aerie Four and that if I was still interested in a life as a Dragon Rider, that I'd best get up here as soon as I could. I've been waiting for days.\"\n\nHe looked up.\n\n\"But I didn't give up. Not this time. I knew you'd come back. You're faithful and proud and curious. Your mind never stops. I just had to wait. And here you are.\"\n\nI looked past him into the fire, the yellow dancing tongues of flame and the twisting reaching fingers of smoke. Men could tame fire, but it was the dragons that ruled it.\n\nHe sat for a long while, poking the fire with the stick, watching the embers sizzle and burn. This was the most I'd ever heard him talk. Even in those long nights on the little boat, we mostly fished in silence. He had never been one for words.\n\nAfter a while, he sighed.\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said. \"It's just a silly dream. You're wild and I'm poor and neither of us will be any more than what we are. We're alive and that's the best either of us could hope for.\"\n\nAnd he rose to his feet, stood before me as if unafraid. I could kill him with one breath, with one snap of my jaws. He was thin as a reed. Slowly, he reached out his hand, the hand that used to feed me lemonwhites and silverfins and dillies. Trembling, it hovered under my scaly chin and I growled, remembering nets and rings and silver bands.\n\nHe turned his palms up, hands empty and open.\n\nSo I let him approach, bristling at the brush of his fingers on my jaw. He traced the spikes and spines of my mane, the spiralling steel that was my horns.\n\n\"Pebbles,\" he said as he reached up to my scales with both hands now. \"Like smooth, warm pebbles\u2026\"\n\nHe ran his hands back down my face to my beak, to the ring still lying between my nostrils. Odd how both Rue and the golden drakina had marked it. Truth be told, I didn't think of it much anymore. It was part of my history. Dragons don't care much for history.\n\nAnd his hands ran down my neck, pausing at the scars from Bloodtooth, at the healed spear wound, the fireburns along my flank. Prizes of my adulthood, I reckoned. Not many dragons lived beyond the age of three. Not in the service of sticks.\n\nHe released a deep breath and continued, running his hand up to the hump and hollow where my wings met my neck.\n\n\"This is where the rider sits,\" he whispered. \"I can't imagine riding a dragon. I can't imagine flying. It must be terrifying, more terrifying than being in a small boat in a big storm. But then again, you were never afraid of anything.\"\n\nHe was wrong. I was afraid of the silver band.\n\nHe stepped back and back again. kicking dirt onto the fire and causing it to crackle and die.\n\n\"You should go. Go back to your den or your nest or whatever dragons call their homes. I'll go back to my fish shop in Venitus. It's not so bad.\"\n\nHis eyes were shining like oceans once again. Now, they spilled like rivers.\n\n\"You are a fine, fine dragon, Stormfall,\" he said. \"I'm glad I got to know you and I hope you live until you are the size of a mountain.\"\n\nAnd then Rue turned and was gone, disappearing into the night like a shadow. I stayed where I was for a long time, wrestling with the war of memory and yearning, freedom and friendship. I must confess that the night was colder without him.\n\nBut a Flight Dragon?\n\nThere were Flight Dragons at my last match in the Pits to protect the Primar and his company. I hated the Primar and his company. They had orchestrated a battle between dragons for their entertainment. But the Flight had been there only to protect.\n\nThere were Flight Dragons in Bangarden, presiding over the funeral of the old Prefect and the skirmish on the streets. I hated Bangarden. The carts and the mud, the mash and the harnesses. The sticks were merely players, using dragons without thought. I was glad Allum had lost his business and I hoped they all burned in the fire started by the funeral carriage. But Junias had been kind and had stood up to Philius to protect Towndrell from the lash. In the riots, the brown rider had saved my life at the risk of his own. Surely, both were acts of nobility, worthy of a dragon heart.\n\nThere were Flight Dragons at the Battle for the Udan Shores. The only defense against the Lamoan pirates, they had dispatched those ships with impressive skill. I hated the pirates but the Flight had been against them, burning their ships and dying for the village. Their sacrifice was noble, stirring a deep current of pride in my veins.\n\nAnd then there was Rue.\n\nI looked up to the sky where the sun was rising over the horizon. No vast ocean horizon but still, the Crescent Mountains were majestic with their snowy peaks and rocky valleys. The sky was huge, with pink and yellow bands streaking across the clouds. I had seen so many different sunrises, each beautiful in it's own way. Like dragons and maybe, just maybe, like sticks.\n\nMy territory now was big and impressive and all mine, but it was empty. I had no nests except the one I slept in every night. The golden drakina was gone, leaving an ache that bit like a cold wind. My life was rich but meaningless and I wondered what might change if I were a Flight Dragon.\n\nI would have Rue.\n\nI sat for so long and was so still that a feathernewt fluttered by my face. I snapped and it was down my throat, the first meal in three nights. Small, sweet and oddly satisfying.\n\nRue and Tacita, Junias and Cirrus. Kindness was like a feathernewt \u2013 small and sweet and for me, a rare but satisfying thing.\n\nI rose to my feet, feeling the rush of cold air under my warm belly and in two strokes, I was airborne, circling, rising high above the plateau and the spire and the golden dome. I saw Rue leaving the hut and swept down toward him, silent as the night. But it wasn't night, it was dawn and he turned at my shadow as I snatched him from the path. He yelped and thrashed his stick arms and I flapped higher to get above the trees. It was awkward but slowly, he reached up, grabbing my legs and pulling himself up to my belly. My wingstrokes were sure and strong and soon, he was hanging on to my neck, trying to swing his leg around my shoulder and avoid the many spikes. He slipped, his weight swinging back down beneath me, his legs flailing like a dying bowbuck. He knocked the tops of the trees with his feet and I suddenly understood why Flight Dragons wore harnesses.\n\nI rolled in the sky so that my belly was to the sun and Rue was on top. Slowly, very slowly, I rolled back, righting myself and slowly, very slowly, Rue climbed over me. Finally he was up, sliding his weight into the hump and hollow and wrapping his arms around my neck. It was a difficult balance but my shoulders were strong and heavily muscled from a life of pulling carts and I stayed just above the trees so he wouldn't be afraid. Still, we were very high up and the mountain wind was strong.\n\nSoon, we were over the peaks and ridges that were the Crescent Mountains. He was hugging my neck and while the wind was loud, his laugh was louder.\n\nIt was a very pleasant sound.\n\n\"Southwest,\" he shouted over the rush of the wind. \"We have to go to the Citadel and that's southwest! Follow the spires! They're the aviaries of the Flight Dragons!\"\n\nAnd he leaned his weight to one side and I felt myself instinctively bank. A little too deeply for once again, Rue hugged himself tightly to my neck. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if dragons could laugh and if so, what it might sound like.\n\nBut for now, I was committed. We were going to the Citadel. Cirrus had asked, Rue had a coin and I had a choice. I was a free dragon and needed nothing else. I set my face to the rising sun and flew."
            },
            {
                "title": "NET OF DRAGONS",
                "text": "I learned much about sticks in those next few days.\n\nI learned that sticks don't like the dark, so I abandoned my nocturnal routine to suit the boy I was carrying on my back. We flew during the day and slept for long stretches at night. I hunted at dusk and dawn and also learned that sticks don't like their shaghorns raw. Rue tried to make a fire once before realizing that I made them much better. Breakfast and dinner went smoother after that.\n\nI also learned that sticks are not sound sleepers. I would find wonderful ledges high up in the mountains but Rue was not as comfortable with the heights so he slept tucked under my wing like a fledgling. In fact, I think he would have been happiest if I had folded myself on top of him like a drakina. It never occurred to me then that he might have been cold. Dragons have thick hides. Sticks, apparently, do not.\n\nWe followed the spires southwest and the mountains grew higher, mightier. The evidence of dragons was greater too and I wondered why they had left the aeries until I woke up one morning covered in snow.\n\nNow, before my time in the Crescent Mountains, I had never seen snow and it had taken much time to realize that it was not its own thing. It made a comfortable nest when I settled down into it but by morning, the heat of my body would have turned it to water and that, on a cold morning, was not pleasant. So I'd always blow a fiery breath across my ledge first, melting the snow and drying the water and avoiding that problem from the start. Rue was happy with this result as well, for I'd learned that wet sticks were not happy sticks. It was not the same with dragons.\n\nSo that morning, I shook the snow from my head and gazed around at the ledge and the nearby cliffs. They glistened with pink and purple under the dawning sun and I thought it rather pretty. Dragons are not given to sentimentality but beauty is objective as much as subjective, and we are good at such distinctions.\n\nIn those pink and purple skies, I saw a black arrow winging southward and my heart thudded in my chest. We were going to the Citadel, the place where both dragons and riders lived and trained together. Rue thought I could be a Flight Dragon. So did Cirrus. But did I?\n\nRue stirred and I lifted my wing as he pushed out from underneath. He was wearing the skin of a direcat that had tried to eat us one night. It had been a valiant attempt but still, I was a killer of dragons so the battle had ended before it had begun. For his part, Rue was happy for the new coat and for me, I had been happy to finally taste cat.\n\nHe yawned and stretched, running a hand along my scaly neck. It always felt good, his touch, and it brought me back to the days on the Udan Shores when he and I would spend night after night on the big waters. I watched him as he reached down to pick at the remains of a goswyrm I had caught before bedding down. It was frozen and he looked at me, baleful as a pathetic chick. My flames quickly set the flesh steaming once again. He sat down and leaned against my flank, plucking at the sizzling strips and popping them into his mouth. He said nothing, content to chew and gaze out at the pink and purple hues and think.\n\nHe was a thinker, he had said. Always thinking. Just like me.\n\nI noticed his hands as he ate. In a few short days they had gone from bloody and raw to callused and strong, all from gripping my neck. His leggings too were tattered from gripping the iron of my hide. Dragon scales are like plates of metal, I've been told; our spines like daggers of steel. I assume sticks exaggerate almost as much as dragons but still, I was happy not to see blood.\n\nThe wind carried a scent and I looked to the south, finding yet another black arrow streaking through the sky. Rue lowered the wyrm as he watched, entranced. I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking the same.\n\n\"Well?\" he said finally. \"Shall we follow them, Stormfall? Is this what we want?\"\n\nI yawned, making a great effort to appear unimpressed. He knew me too well though and rose to his feet, tossing the last of the wyrm over the side of the mountain. He wiped his hands on the coat and grinned.\n\n\"Alright, you lazy nox,\" he said. \"Let's show them what real flying is like.\"\n\nHe laid a hand on one of my horns and swung his leg across my neck, settling into the hollow at my shoulder. It was perfect for sticks, this hump and hollow \u2013 few spines, smooth scales, shoulder bones mimicking the bend of a knee. As if dragons were meant to be ridden.\n\nI pushed to my feet and stretched my wings wide, testing the air and the winds and my strength. It was a perfect morning for flying. Rue wrapped his arms around my neck as I leaned forward, enjoying the dizzying pull of the earth on my head, the wind cold against my eyes. I went with it now, springing from the cliff's edge and falling straight down. Rue was silent, no scream, no shout, most likely holding his breath. I knew he hated this, the roaring fall and the sudden, sickening swoop upwards. For me, it was always the best part \u2013 that snap of wing leather, that lurch in the belly, the swift rise like the moons over the mountaintops. Flying was freedom. It was joy. It was life.\n\nFor a dragon, the best thing in all the world.\n\nAnd so we flew, my wings beating against the air currents like oars in the water. Rue sat deep in the hollow, holding twin spikes near the base of my neck. His legs followed the angle of my shoulder, feet resting under the curve of my wings. I was young but large and our bodies fit perfectly. Again, as if dragons were made for riding.\n\nWe flew just above the Crescent Mountains and I was careful not to swoop or wheel. Without a harness, Rue's seat was precarious \u2013 I had once banked too sharply and he had flung forward into one of my neck spines. His chin was still purple from the impact and he was lucky not to have lost an eye. We were also very high up in the mountains and it was winter \u2013 the air was so cold at this height that to fly any higher might cause him to freeze. The skin of the direcat kept his body warm but his face and hands were often blue by evening.\n\nI often wondered about how they ruled as easily as they did. Anything could kill a stick, it seemed, even weather. Perhaps they ruled because no one knew this.\n\nSo that day, we kept the Dragon Flight in sight as we flew, they (like we) keeping a low trajectory over the mountains. Soon however a second Flight appeared, at first merely a speck on the horizon and growing larger as our paths converged. The first Flight was growing larger as well. It was strange. We were following at a great distance and I had matched speed so we would neither gain on them, nor lose sight. It seemed they had noticed us and adjusted accordingly and the blood grew hot in my veins when I realized I had been seen.\n\nAs a night dragon, I was perfectly hidden by the stars. Here, in the morning light, I was a beacon and like one, they were drawn to me. I had abandoned my advantage by flying in the daylight and the thought filled me with sudden and inexplicable terror.\n\nNow, fourteen dragons and fourteen riders filled the sky around us and it was all I could do to remain calm. I could feel Rue hands tighten on my neck, his knees grip my shoulders like a vice. This was no fair welcome to the Dragon Flights, ushering us into the camaraderie of the Citadel. No, the riders too focused, the dragons too tense. They were working as a team, drawing in a net that would quickly tighten around us, much like a mesh or a pen.\n\nOr a band.\n\nThe coals sprang alive in my heart as terror gave way to fury. It was the only way I had survived the Pits.\n\nAnd I would not be taken again.\n\nWithout warning, I tucked my wings and plummeted like a stone, slipping through their net of dragons. Rue yelped but held fast as the earth pulled me down. I let it \u2013 down, down, down to the valleys, willing those coals to add speed to my wings. They were at my tail, however \u2013 a great green and a brown and I spiralled in the descent, feeling Rue's weight swing against my shoulders. As the mountains grew nearer, a red drake trumpeted from above but I veered away at the last moment, causing the three dragons to almost collide in mid-air.\n\nA grey swept in front of me now and I could see the rider on his back gesturing at us. I dove again, dropping toward a white peak and arcing away at the last moment. A blue soared above me and released a blast of flame across our path. Fighting, I thought, always fighting and my throat grew tight as I reigned in my own fire. Not a Dragon Flight. I couldn't burn a Dragon Flight but as the blood burned in my veins, I felt Stormfall growing thin and Warblood raging now with every beat of my wings.\n\nUp now, another sharp sweep and I began to climb, up up up like an arrow. The air was so cold but I narrowed my eyes, thinking of nothing now but escape. I would die before they took me. Warblood would kill. Higher and higher, throat biting with frost, the air so thin that my chest ached. The wind so sharp so that even my teeth ached inside my mouth.\n\nAnd suddenly, Rue was gone.\n\nIt was like the coming of the winter rains in the Under Weathers, shocking and instantaneous and I snapped my wings to halt my climb. I arced in the air, whipping my tail and turning my face to the ground far below. I couldn't see him beyond the circling Flights so I tucked my wings and dove.\n\nIt was like diving for Black Monitors, whose young lived deep in the waters. You could see their shapes from high up and a long dive was required to spear them. And so I dove, leaving my heart in the clouds as I sought for and found the dark shape plummeting toward the ground.\n\nFaster, I urged my self, faster and I could see him now, gangly arms and legs and cat coat flapping as he tumbled through the sky. All other dragons were gone, all riders gone too. My world became the boy in the sky and my need to catch him. I was a fisher dragon, now fishing for Rue.\n\nAnd with a snatch of my talons, I caught the coat with one foot. His body flailed and spun out of it but I caught an arm with the other. Awkwardly at first but I swept up and tossed him, catching him at the shoulders in a better hold. We soared around a cliff side, lower now and not as cold. I waited for him to crawl up my legs but he didn't. In fact, he didn't move and as I flew, still desperate to make my escape, my heart lurched in my chest. I spied a ridge and angled toward it, slowing as I approached and beating my wings to hover just above it. I dropped him into the snow and gracefully landed beside him, folding my wings across my back.\n\nThe Dragon Flights circled above us now. I ignored them. My world was laying facedown in the snow, arms splayed wide in a sunken pit of white. There was no blood so I reached down to nudge him. He didn't move. I nudged him again, nipped at his cat coat delicately with my front teeth. Still nothing. I reached with a talon and turned him over, his arms sinking back into the snow as he rolled. Still, he did not move to get up.\n\nDeath had been intruding into my life since the beginning, since the fledgling in the waters or the unnoticed loss of one sister. Then after that, always, like an insect buzzing around my head in the night. Ruby had died horribly and so had Gavius. I had killed sea snakes and noxen and dragons and sticks. But Rue? Everything inside of me turned to ash at the thought.\n\nThe sky grew dark as the great green came down, beating its wings slowly as it lowered toward the ridge. I stepped one foot across my boy and bellowed, head dipped, wings wide. The grey next and then the blue until I was surrounded on this ridge by seven dragons with seven others circling above. I could see the glint of sunlight as the grey rider pulled his bow and all of them followed suit.\n\nI bellowed again, furious and terrified and despairing when I felt a hand on my leg. My heart leapt as Rue pushed himself up and out of the snow. He looked ill, leaned against my chest to keep steady. I hissed at them all.\n\n\"That is the night dragon of the Crown,\" shouted the grey rider. \"He is sentenced to death for the attack on Primar Septus Aelianus.\"\n\nI hissed again but Rue shook his head, gripping my face with his arms. I let him. I was glad of his touch, if nothing else.\n\n\"Stand back and let us carry out our duty,\" shouted the grey rider. \"You will be taken to the Citadel for healing, then you will be free to go.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Rue. \"We are both going to the Citadel.\"\n\n\"The night dragon is a killer of citizens,\" said the rider. \"His head will be taken to the Citadel. Stand back.\"\n\nA bolt thudded at Rue's feet, disappearing into the snow and leaving only a pit.\n\n\"No!\" Rue leaned his back against me now, began to dig in his pocket. \"We were invited!\"\n\nAnd he pulled his hand from his pocket, fingers clutching a tiny object. But they were stiff from the cold and the object dropped into the snow, disappearing like the arrow. He wailed and sank to his knees to look for it.\n\nA second arrow, this time near my lashing tail, and a third into the snow between my feet.\n\nMy mouth and tongue and eyes grew hot as I summoned the fire, felt it billow up my throat. I would not die like a nox.\n\n\"NO!\" shouted Rue and he pushed up from the snow to wrap his arms around my beak. \"No, Stormfall! Hear me! No!\"\n\nI growled deep in my throat but he had locked me with his dark eyes. I could look nowhere else. My tail lashed from side to side however as the heat boiled my blood but stayed.\n\n\"See?\" Rue shouted to the grey rider, turning his head while still gripping my face. \"He's not what you think. You don't know his story! You don't know him! Look!\"\n\nAnd he thrust his arm straight out, blue fingers clutching a tiny object. It flashed like sunlight against my shadow.\n\n\"The coin of the Citadel!\" he said. \"Given to us by Cassien Cirrus of the Eastern Quarter Dragoneers! To us!\"\n\nSeven dragons hovered around us. Seven dragons circled above. Fourteen dragons surrounded me, trapping me with their very bodies. My eyes were fixed now on the grey and his rider, smoke curling from my nostrils as I worked to keep the fire inside. Rue had a hold of my mouth. I couldn't kill anyone without killing him and that was something I would never do.\n\n\"Cirrus is only one man,\" said the rider. \"He does not speak for the Primar.\"\n\n\"But we were invited,\" said Rue and slowly, he released me, turning to face the rider, keeping one hand on my horn. \"To be trained for the Dragon Flights. Yes, he is wild and I am poor, but we've come trusting your integrity and honour. If you kill him now, even on the orders of the Primar, you'll betray that trust. Is that what wild dragons and poor boys can expect from the Citadel?\"\n\nMy Rue, a boy of few words. He chose them like swords.\n\n\"You cannot deny us,\" he said. \"Not now and not yet.\"\n\nFourteen dragons hovering, circling, wings beating a mad wind, lifting the snow and Rue's hair and my smoke.\n\n\"We'll let the Citadel decide,\" said the grey rider. \"Come with us and do not fight or our arrows will find their marks.\"\n\nHe yanked the rein and the drake banked sharply, pulling back to join the rest of the Flight. They circled above us, waiting, casting shadows down on the ridge.\n\nI noticed Rue's hand trembling. His whole body was, in fact, but he released a breath, one he must have been holding for a long time. He turned to look at me.\n\n\"Don't ever do that again,\" he said.\n\nIt was like an arrow to the heart.\n\nHe laid a hand on my neck and swung his leg up into the hollow that used to be home.\n\nWithin two beats, we were airborne, the Dragon Flights positioned around us like a net. This time, I did not protest.\n\nIt was evening before we made the Citadel."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE CITADEL",
                "text": "We were made to wait on a large flat plateau that I later learned was called a landing stone. It was growing dark and Rue leaned into me, his body shivering with the cold. I let him, grateful for his company but my mind still wrestled with his words from earlier. I tried to chase them away with the sights, sounds and smells that were the Citadel.\n\nIt was not quite city, not quite aerie but a curious mixture of both. Stone towers were built into and out of the mountains, with pricks of lantern-light dotting their spires. Holes were carved into cliff faces \u2013 dragon nests, I assumed, and aviaries both wide and tall were staggered throughout the Crescent. Domes rose up from the peaks, their roofs gold and dusted with snow. Arched bridges and aqueducts spanned the valleys and I marvelled at the skill required to construct such things. (Again, perhaps one of the things that separated sticks from dragons. Dragons are not, by and large, builders.) All along the periphery, oil-filled troughs burned, clearly marking the boundary of the Citadel and I could see dragons and riders in silhouette, keeping guard both day and night.\n\nThe sky was filled with dragons and my heart soared at the sight. They were moving in all directions \u2013 some in Flights, some alone, some ascending to the skies, others descending to the towers but all in patterns, carefully orchestrated and controlled. There was no chaos like in the Anquar Cliffs. These dragons flew with purpose and order. I hated to admit that it was because these dragons had riders.\n\nBeside us, a large brown drake and his armoured rider guarded us and I reined in my temper. I could have easily escaped \u2013 leapt into the twilight sky to freedom but Rue's words were still ringing in my ears. While understandable, my fear had turned to fury and I had panicked. In doing so, I had almost killed him. I couldn't blame it all on the Pits. It was my pride once again, threatening to destroy his dream before it had even begun. So, with claws digging into the snowy stone, I stayed. To Rue's credit, he remained standing and did not seek refuge in the warmth beneath my wing.\n\nSometime during the night, a man approached, his boots crunching ahead of him in the snow.\n\n\"Come with me,\" he said. \"They want to meet in Celarus' Landing.\"\n\n\"Both of us?\" asked Rue.\n\n\"You want to be a dragon rider, don't you?\"\n\nRue nodded.\n\n\"How you going to do that without a dragon?\"\n\nWithout further address, the man turned and walked the way he had come, across one of the narrow stone bridges that led into the mountain.\n\nRue looked at me.\n\n\"Please behave, Stormfall,\" he said. \"For both our sakes.\"\n\nI growled but it was half-hearted. Together, we followed the man across the bridge to the mountain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Celarus' Landing was a large circular room with a ceiling easily as high as the Crown. Torches lined the walls and high window arches were open to the darkening sky. These arches were obviously made for dragons and the smell of dragonhide was everywhere. But, unlike the Crown, there was no smell of blood. No offal or death, just dragon, leather, smoke and stick and I was grateful for that. For his part, Rue was grateful to be out of the night, although his shivering did not stop. Such frail creatures, I marvelled. One bite and they'd be finished.\n\nThere were guards armoured and holding spears, standing by the many doors of this Celarus' Landing. Were they protecting those going in, I wondered, or those going out? It seemed a moot point \u2013 Celarus' Landing was the heart of the Citadel. You wouldn't be here if you were an enemy.\n\nNot for the first time, I was glad I didn't understand the politics of sticks.\n\nOther than the guards, we were alone.\n\nDragons are partial to a rare type of beauty. Colours that please the eye and patterns that engage the mind. As I swept my eyes around the room, I found myself admiring the floor in Celarus' Landing. It was a glass and stone mosaic, a pictorial history of dragons and riders throughout the ages. On the walls were dragon skulls, some almost as large my entire body. I marvelled at the thought of a dragon living to such an age and remembered Rue telling me the legends of Anquarus, a dragon the size of an island, living in the sea.\n\nThere was a marble man astride a huge limestone dragon literally carved into the rock and I wondered if this represented Celarus himself. On our way here, Rue had told me the story of Celarus the Swift, lieutenant of Remus and the commander of the first Dragon Flight. His name literally came to represent the one thousand dragons and riders that served the Emperor in peacetime and in war. I remembered the Lamoan pirates, their cannons and swords and I wondered if in Remus, there was ever a time of peace.\n\nI could hear the echo of footsteps and from one of the many doorways, a party of sticks approached. I sat up, ruffling the spines at my neck and lifting my wings from my body. Not in threat \u2013 I was not so foolish anymore \u2013 but as in a statement of presence, demanding respect. It is the way of dragons. These sticks didn't stop or slow their approach but rather fanned out around me, hands on hips to study me like a specimen to be bought or sold. I growled, feeling like I was back in the Corolanus Markets.\n\nA white-headed wrinkly man in long robes stopped in front of Rue, tapped the ground with a twisted cane.\n\n\"Ruminor has smiled on us,\" said the old man.\n\n\"Ruminor has smiled on us all,\" repeated the others. Rue said nothing and silence descended into the room.\n\nAnd so, nothing was said for several long moments. Nothing was done. I relaxed my spines but did slap my tail on the mosaic, just once.\n\nThe wrinkly man laughed.\n\n\"Magnificent,\" he said finally. \"He's big. How old?\"\n\n\"Three years or so, Master Dragoneer.\"\n\n\"And you?\"\n\n\"Sixteen summers, Master Dragoneer.\"\n\n\"Plinius,\" said the man. \"Dragon Master Plinius and I am as old as five of you, boy.\"\n\nRue said nothing. The wrinkly man called Dragon Master Plinius grinned.\n\n\"So,\" he began. \"Cassien Cirrus, eh?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dragon Master,\" said Rue.\n\n\"What is your name, boy?\"\n\n\"Rue, Dragon Master.\"\n\n\"And your family name?\"\n\n\"None, Dragon Master. I don't know my parentage. I was sold as an infant.\"\n\n\"In Corolanus?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dragon Master. In Corolanus.\"\n\n\"We don't get many soul-boys here in the Citadel.\"\n\nRue swallowed, looked at the ground. I told myself he was admiring the glass and stone.\n\n\"And do you have your soul back, Rue Soul-boy?\"\n\n\"No, Dragon Master.\"\n\n\"Ruminor hasn't smiled on you then, has He?\"\n\n\"No, Dragon Master. I suppose not.\"\n\nThe wrinkly man grunted.\n\n\"What makes you think a soul-boy can be a Flight Rider?\"\n\n\"Cirrus, sir,\" said Rue. \"He was impressed with my dragon, and then later, me.\"\n\n\"How did you come to meet our Cirrus, then?\"\n\n\"I worked the waters off the Udan Shore\u2014\"\n\n\"In Venitus?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dragon Master,\" said Rue. \"Stormfall here was my fisher dragon. He helped Master Dragoneer Cirrus when the Lamoan pirates attacked.\"\n\n\"I remember reports of that raid,\" said Plinius. \"And how old are fisher dragons, Rue Soul-boy?\"\n\n\"Young,\" said Rue. \"Up to a year at most. Then they are too big for the skiffs and we have to sell them.\"\n\n\"So how old was your Stormfall when he helped Master Cirrus?\"\n\nRue glanced at me. \"Eight months, perhaps, Dragon Master. We could only guess. He was not hatched in an aviary.\"\n\nThere was a murmur from the men.\n\n\"Taken from wild, then?\" asked the wrinkly man.\n\n\"Yes, Master.\"\n\n\"And yet he lets you ride him. Why is that?\"\n\nRue shrugged.\n\n\"He trusts me. I trust him. We're friends.\"\n\n\"Wild dragon and soul-boy,\" said Plinius, tapping his cane on the mosaic floor. \"Both slaves to one master or another, yes?\"\n\nRue said nothing.\n\n\"Fascinating. Tell me,\" Plinius continued. \"Did Cirrus mention what he wanted you for?\"\n\n\"Master?\"\n\n\"Did he say anything about the war? About Lamos or their dragons?\"\n\nRue frowned at him. \"Lamos doesn't have dragons, Master.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. Yes, of course they don't,\" said the man. \"And why don't they?\"\n\n\"Well,\" and Rue swallowed again. \"The legends\u2026\"\n\n\"The legends? Do you mean the history of the Remoan people, Rue Soul-boy?\"\n\n\"I, I only ever heard it over the fires as a boy\u2026\"\n\n\"You are still a boy,\" said Plinius. \"What have you learned over the fires of the the myths and legends and history of the Remoan people, of the twins Remus and Lamos and the Golden Dragon of Ruminor?\"\n\nRue said nothing, looked back at the floor.\n\n\"Not much, obviously,\" muttered the old man. \"Have you any education at all?\"\n\nRue continued his study of the mosaic.\n\n\"No history? No maths? Can you even read, boy?\"\n\n\"No, Dragon Master,\" said Rue and he looked up now. \"No one teaches soul-boys to read.\"\n\n\"And does that make you angry?\"\n\nRue shook his head.\n\n\"That says a lot about your dragon then,\" said the old man. \"That he would choose a poor boy like you.\"\n\n\"We were both slaves, once,\" said Rue. \"Now, we're free and here.\"\n\nThe old man grunted and now, all eyes fell upon me.\n\n\"Interesting colouring,\" said one man.\n\n\"Cirrus said you can't even see him at night,\" said another.\n\n\"He's wearing a ring,\" came a different voice this time. Lighter than the others and suddenly there was a hand on my flank. I swung my head to growl but it died in my throat. It was a woman and I was surprised. She didn't look like any woman I'd ever seen before. She was as tall as the men and like them, her hair was shorn to the scalp. She looked like a warrior.\n\n\"He's been in the Pits,\" she said, running her palm along my scars. \"Cirrus said his name was Warblood.\"\n\n\"He's killed dragons,\" said another.\n\n\"And citizens,\" said the first. \"That's a problem.\"\n\nThe woman tried to lift my lip, perhaps to check my teeth. Dragon lips are tough as stone. I did not let her and I growled again.\n\nShe laughed now.\n\n\"He's stubborn.\"\n\n\"He's proud,\" said Rue. \"And he's been badly treated at the hands of men.\"\n\n\"A Flight Dragon needs to be handled,\" said the second. \"He needs to respect our leadership and trust our instruction.\"\n\n\"Then we'll handle him,\" said Rue. \"And teach him to trust. He was like that on the docks. He was the best fisher dragon I'd ever trained.\"\n\n\"And how many did you train?\"\n\nRue looked down again.\n\n\"Two,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"So you a free boy now?\" asked the old man and he tapped Rue on the arm with the cane. \"Or are you a runaway?\"\n\n\"Free,\" said Rue. \"After the raid, my master released me from my servitum. I was almost done anyway.\"\n\n\"A Master releases a soul-boy why? From the kindness of his heart?\"\n\nI could see Rue's teeth clench, his jaw work to hold his tongue.\n\n\"No\u2026\"\n\n\"Why then?\"\n\n\"Because I was angry that he sold Stormfall. Because\u2026\"\n\n\"Did you hit him?\" asked the wrinkled man.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nNow his fingers, flexing and releasing.\n\n\"But you wanted to.\"\n\n\"I am as tall as he is and almost as strong,\" said Rue. \"I could have.\"\n\n\"But you didn't.\"\n\n\"He had nothing left. The fishing huts had burned and he'd already sold the dragons. He said it was more trouble to keep me so he sent me away.\"\n\n\"Without your soul?\"\n\n\"Didn't want it anyway,\" said Rue, but there was something in his voice. The wrinkled man could hear it too. \"Not that way, I mean. Not if I had to work for him for another year.\"\n\nThe old man tapped his stick.\n\n\"That's a very bold statement, Rue Soul-boy.\"\n\nNow Rue lifted his eyes. They gleamed like steel.\n\n\"Ruminor gives and Ruminor takes away,\" he said finally. \"If I wait for Him to give me my life, I'll never start living.\"\n\n\"So you do have some iron in your spine, Rue Soul-boy.\" Plinius grinned. It looked like it might split his wrinkled face in half. \"That was two years past?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dragon Master. Two years.\"\n\n\"And what did you do with your freedom, boy?\"\n\n\"I found a job in Venitus, Dragon Master. In a fish shop.\"\n\n\"So why didn't you take him and fish yourself?\"\n\n\"Serkus sold him immediately after the raid.\" He shrugged now. \"I didn't try to find him. I had no money and no connections. Besides, the Corolanus Markets are not known for their records.\"\n\nThe old man snorted.\n\n\"If you were a Flight Rider,\" he said. \"Nothing would have stopped you from finding your dragon. Your poverty has moulded you.\"\n\n\"I know what freedom tastes like,\" said Rue. \"I will never let it grow cold in my mouth.\"\n\nThe others murmured at that. I growled. These new sticks were proud and audacious. Too much like me.\n\n\"Sticks?\" laughed the old man. \"Sticks? Do you hear him, Master Fisher Freed-Soul-boy-with-No-Surname?\"\n\nAnd the cane struck once more. Rue winced and I growled again. I was weary of growling, felt the heat begin to rise in my throat.\n\n\"He's going to burn you, Plinius!\" laughed one of the men.\n\n\"He's going to roast you for breakfast!\"\n\nTruth be told, I wanted to roast them all right then.\n\nRue turned and grabbed my beak and for a brief flashing moment I wanted to roast him too. I lashed my tail instead, causing one of the men to leap lest I take his legs out from under him.\n\n\"He won't burn you,\" shouted Rue. \"But don't insult him.\"\n\n\"What if I insult you?\" asked the old man. \"What if I hit you?\"\n\nHe struck him a third time.\n\nI swung my head and snarled. The walls of Celarus' Landing echoed with the sound.\n\n\"Take care, Plinius,\" said the woman. \"This dragon is angry. I can feel it.\"\n\n\"We can all feel it,\" said the first man. \"He's as subtle as Hell Down.\"\n\nThe old man called Plinius grinned.\n\n\"And what if I hit him?\"\n\n\"Please don't, \" begged Rue. \"Master Serkus hit him so much when he was in training. It was very bad.\"\n\nThe Dragon Master tapped my neck with the stick.\n\n\"What are you thinking, night dragon?\" asked the old man. \"I can hear your anger like Hell Down.\"\n\nI dipped my head, raised my wings, this time threatening true. The party of sticks stepped back.\n\n\"Stormfall, no!\" pleaded Rue but the old man tapped me again, this time on the snout. Rue grabbed my face. \"I said No! Respect, Stormfall. He's baiting you.\"\n\n\"Step away, boy,\" said the man. \"Let's see what this night dragon is made of.\"\n\nHe tapped my face again. And again. And again. Rue tried to put his body between the cane and my scales but the old man simply moved around him. The tapping continued.\n\n\"I feel it,\" said the woman. \"Watch out, Master Plinius. It's coming.\"\n\n\"Oh I do know.\"\n\nAnd he gripped the cane with both hands and brought it down across my head with a crack so that I saw stars.I was a creature of the stars.\n\nI heard Rue's shout echo but it was only an echo, a dream, a vapour.\n\nI was also a creature of ash.\n\nI lunged forward, catching the cane entirely in my mouth, just shy of the man's wrinkled hand. I closed my eyes and willed the fire to rise up over my tongue, creating a furnace of rushing, leaping flame. Celarus' Landing echoed with a roar like Hell Down as smoke rolled from my nostrils. The cane instantly became char in my mouth.\n\nI stepped back and coughed. Ashes floated to the mosaic floor like snow.\n\nThe old man had not moved, still held the hilt of the cane in his hands. He stared at me.\n\nAnd began to laugh.\n\nHe laughed so that the cavernous room echoed once again with sound.\n\n\"Well done, night dragon!\" he said. \"Very well done. You have the fire but you also have restraint. I would have roasted me in a heartbeat if I were you!\"\n\nHe stepped forward now.\n\n\"Do I have your permission to touch you?\"\n\nI swung my head to look at Rue, the men and woman cheered. It was surprising. Rue wasn't my master. I was a free dragon, but still, that was the power of sticks.\n\nI turned back at the old man, narrowed my eyes.\n\n\"You understand our words,\" he said, cupping my spiky chin with both hands. \"That's a good sign. Perhaps you will make a Flight Dragon after all. Hmm, a wild Flight Dragon and a rider without a soul. Surely, Ruminor is laughing now.\"\n\nThe man ran his hands along the scales of my face, up over the ridge of my eyes, placed his palms there and held. I was about to growl again but there was a sound in my mind, a whisper, a voice like wind in the sand pines. I knew it. I followed it. It was relaxing, calming, soothing and I leaned into it with both mind and body, inviting it to wash over me like warm, warm waters.\n\nMy knees buckled and Celarus' Landing echoed one last time as my entire body folded to the floor.\n\nThe old man smiled, stroked my jaws with a touch like summer grass.\n\n\"A pity you dragons can't speak,\" he said gently. \"It would be lovely to hold a conversation with you. Any one of you. You are magnificent creatures. Riders are the luckiest people in all the world.\"\n\nIt was true, and I suddenly found myself approving of this strange, wrinkly, white-headed stick.\n\nHe turned his face to Rue.\n\n\"You will need to choose a surname. Servus, Solus or Liber. Your life, your choice. But you'll need one, for Dragon Riders are not soul-boys with no names. I would choose Solus.\"\n\n\"Yes Dragon Master,\" said Rue. \"Solus.\"\n\n\"Very well, Rue Solus. You and your dragon both will need training,\" he said. \"Make no mistake. Dragoneers are an exclusive guild. You are here now but if you fail in any stage you will not stay. Which, given your unorthodox beginnings, is entirely possible.\"\n\nRue nodded as if he were uncertain. I merely blinked slowly, unimpressed.\n\nThe old man patted my cheek.\n\n\"But I like you,\" he said. \"You don't have fire; you are fire.\"\n\nI let a ribbon of smoke curl from my nostril, making the point, but deep inside my belly, I felt the uneasy glow of embers, the flicker of fire signalling my fate about to change yet again."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE SKYROOM",
                "text": "Rue learned much about dragons in those next few weeks, and as a matter of course, so did I. He learned how to tell the age of dragons by our teeth and that while our spikes and spines feel like iron, they are really fibre like our claws and scales. Our horns, however, are bone and continue to grow as we do. In very old dragons, their horns can reach the tips of their wings and Celarus' Landing was filled with many magnificent, enormous skulls.\n\nHe learned about the acid in our bellies and how it can alternately burn and then heal. He learned about the arcstone that, once swallowed, lives for years in our crops and how the crushed mineral creates a spark when we call the acid across it. And he learned how we need all three working at once to create our fire \u2013 acid, arcstone and air. It was the ultimate weapon in a dragon's arsenal.\n\nHe confided that he thought it easier to think of our fire as magic. To me, it was just the way of dragons, as natural as breathing or hunting or flight.\n\nI saw Rue rarely in those next days and I knew he was undergoing training on his own. They had shaved his curly head and clad him in leather but still, he crawled into my nest every night, bruised and battered and too weary even to play the pipes. He would slip under my wing and together we would sleep until the blast of a horn woke everyone at dawn. Then he would crawl out from under me, run his hand over his shorn head and stumble off. It was a good thing I was not a worrier, else I may not have enjoyed my first weeks as a Flight Dragon. Which, I must confess, I did.\n\nI shared the novice aviary with three other drakes - a moss green by name of SeaTorrent, a brown called Darkling and a red with a love of food named Majentrix. All were young, perhaps half my size, and afraid of me. Understandably so. Flight Dragons were taken in after their first year but before their second, making me the oldest recruit in the Citadel. I wasn't bothered \u2013 my treatment at the hands of the dragoneers was better than I had expected and better than I had ever been given in my short, rather tumultuous life.\n\nIt wasn't difficult to stand for their handling \u2013 the inspection of teeth, the filing of spikes, the rubbing of sweet-smelling oil into my scales. In fact, I don't recall ever enjoying the touch of sticks as much as I enjoyed this and I wondered if the Emperor's Dragons were treated this way. Meals were noxen, delly bucks and shearers, all freshly butchered and I knew that these dragoneers understood our need for the hunt and kill.\n\nI had been fitted for a head harness that they called a bridle. It was similar to the head harnesses of Bangarden, minus the eye-covers and bits. These bridles were merely a means for the rider to indicate direction and speed, as a dragon with free access to his fire could not in all truth be controlled. Free access to fire also rendered the bit (the name for that insulting slip of metal between our teeth) pointless, for one blast would cause the metal to melt and the bridle would fall apart, useless. This new design was much more comfortable but truth be told, I approved of it less for comfort than for the dignity I was allowed to retain.\n\nAnd for dragons, dignity is an important consideration.\n\nSo after several weeks of conditioning, I was brought to the tannery to be fitted for a saddle. This was a type of body harness that fastened across the chest, with straps along the spine and under the tail to prevent it from sliding forward. It also fit snugly over the hump-and-hollow of a dragon's shoulder, allowing a rider to sit comfortably for long periods of time. Although Rue could ride without one, I had seen what my scales had done to his clothing and skin (not to mention his chin.) A well-fitted saddle would be comfortable for both dragon and rider, although the tail strap took some getting used to.\n\nThe tannery was one of the lower complexes in the Citadel valley, and the smell of animal hide was a delight for my nostrils. It had a high dark ceiling with few windows, and dust floated like snowflakes in beams of light cast down to the floor. The walls were filled with rows of saddles, bridles and harnesses and ladders leaned against them leading up to a wooden second level. Some saddles were very large and I marvelled at the thought of the dragons that might fit them.\n\nThere were also silverstones reflecting light along the walls and I stole frequent glances at myself. The leather for both saddle and bridle was night-black and I admired how it gleamed against the starry expanse of my skin.\n\nWhile the tanners tugged and measured, Rue's scent floated in and I let out a call that sounded like the music of stars. The tanners jumped back, startled and they grumbled at me, cursing my name. I didn't care. I called again and again until the wooden doors slid open on Rue's gangly silhouette.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" he answered.\n\nAs he approached, I could see he also had been fitted in a uniform of night black. Dark-dyed linen tunic and leggings, leather breastplate, gloves, greaves and kilt of black leather strips. A heavy cloak to keep him warm in these snowy mountains and a satchel draped from shoulder to hip. No armour however, unlike Cassian Cirrus and his iron drake and I wondered if armour was reserved for War Riders.\n\nI was fine with that. Armour would be heavy and I had no wish to be working harder than needed. I was still a free dragon and this experience with the Flights no more than a trial.\n\nHe moved in closely to inspect the tack, tugging at the buckles and running his hands along the straps.\n\n\"It's good,\" he said quietly. \"The black looks perfect on him.\"\n\n\"He's a vain one, he is,\" grumbled the Master Tanner. \"Always looking at himself in the silverstones.\"\n\nRue grinned.\n\n\"You'd be vain if you had a pelt like his.\"\n\nThe tanner grunted. \"Now, you make sure all the straps are snug but not tight,\" he said. \"Too tight will cause blisters. Too loose will chafe. Both are irritating and you have a bad tempered dragon to begin with.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Tanner,\" said Rue.\n\n\"Also too loose and the saddle might slip,\" said the tanner. \"It would cause you to lose your seat and falling into those spikes at full speed would not be good either. You're skinny. They would go right through you.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Tanner,\" said Rue.\n\n\"And here, these are the rings for the draw reins,\" said the tanner. \"But he wouldn't let us put them on. Most dragons don't like them but yours, well he refused.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Tanner,\" said Rue.\n\n\"Vain and bad tempered. I don't know what Plinius was thinking.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Tanner,\" said Rue.\n\n\"Now ask him,\" said the man, and he backed away. \"Ask him how it feels.\"\n\nRue swallowed and moved close to my head, ran his hands along my face up past my eyes to the hollow beneath the horns. Like the wrinkly man, I heard a sound, a whisper of a voice inside my skull. I didn't like it. I lashed my tail in irritation.\n\n\"Oh he will be a difficult one,\" said the tanner.\n\n\"He's proud,\" said Rue and he leaned against me, his forehead touching mine. My face was now almost as long as his entire body. \"I can't assume that just because it works for other dragons, that it will work for him. Besides\u2026\"\n\nHe reached down to scratch under my chin. I grumbled, but this time there was pleasure in it.\n\n\"We have an understanding. This lasts as long as he wants it.\"\n\n\"And when he doesn't want it?\"\n\n\"I go back to fishing.\"\n\nRue laid a hand on the neck strap, slipped one foot up into a stirrup and swung the other over my shoulder, settling in as if home. The leather squeaked as he adjusted his weight.\n\n\"How does that feel, Stormfall?\"\n\nI grumbled one last time, just for the tanner and lumbered forward, getting used to the feel of the straps along my body. It was snug, as the tanner had said, but made so well that it flexed when I did and held its shape while not annoying mine. The rein fell across my neck and I leaned with it, marvelling at the difference in sensation. Bitted bridles worked by avoidance of pain but this \u2013 this was intuitive.\n\n\"Yes,\" said the tanner as he watched my moving. \"It fits well. A Dragon Flight is only as strong as the leather that binds them.\"\n\n\"That's not what my instructors say,\" said Rue from my back.\n\nThe tanner snorted.\n\n\"Welcome to the Citadel.\" And for the first time all morning, he smiled. \"You are ready. Go, meet up with your Flight.\"\n\n\"Are we ready, Stormfall?\" asked Rue from my back. His weight shift and I could tell he was looking at the doors. I didn't need to see him to know that. I could feel it. Intuitive.\n\nI turned as bright light spilled into the dark room. Within three strides, I was leaping out to the sunshine and into the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Dragon lessons were not held indoors.\n\nIt made sense, naturally. While Rue had some classes inside, dragons do their best work in the open. There were times when we were called into the tannery or the dracorium (a large stone agora for tending injured dragons). There were even times when we would be summoned to Celarus' Landing for presentation or debriefing but for the most part, we dragons worked outside. At stations all along the Crescent Mountains, Flight lessons took place and I could see dragons working in precision within their teams. Sun and clouds were our ceiling, peaks and valleys our walls. They were called skyrooms and were perfect classrooms for both dragon and rider.\n\nAs new recruits, we joined the ranks of the first season dragoneers, skipping some classes, making up others as needed. There were upwards of twenty recruits training in the Citadel but we shared a skyroom with only six others, including my aviary-mates Majentrix, Darkling and SeaTorrent. There was another green, a brown and the instructor's large bronze. Seven was the base number for a flight, with some being smaller and others larger, depending on the commission. Master Quintus was our instructor but I wondered if we might see Cassien Cirrus and Ironwing in our lessons. They were the reason we were here and for some reason, I imagined flying with them once again.\n\n\"A Dragon Flight does not insist on privacy,\" said Quintus. He was a tall lean man in bronze armour. Behind him sat his dragon Claysheen, bronze wings folded across his back. \"You will be sleeping together night after night after long, weary night, in battle and in peace. You are the Emperor's Skyborn. Abandon any thoughts you may have of leg room or wing room or personal space.\"\n\nThe Emperor's Skyborn. I wondered about the Emperor, what sort of stick would inspire such fealty. I remembered Septus Aelianus, first senator of Bangarden who had spoken so powerfully for Towndrell. He'd become Primar of the Eastern Provinces who had set two dragons upon one. I wasn't sure what to make of that, but I was certain that I hadn't burned enough of his men.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" growled Rue from my back. \"Hush.\"\n\n\"Get close now!\" shouted Quintus. \"Move in. Fall in!\"\n\nI looked around at the crew gathered here in the skyroom. We were on a ridge several valleys away from the Citadel, I must admit, it was gratifying to be wingtip to wingtip with dragons who were not trying to kill me.\n\n\"I said, fall in!\"\n\nThe riders of six dragons muttered as they tried to manoeuver their mounts. Wings beat, tails lashed and I hissed as a young blue pressed onto my flank. He hissed back and I snapped.\n\n\"Stormfall!\" barked Rue. \"Restraint. You are a Flight Dragon now.\"\n\n\"He's not a Flight Dragon yet,\" said Quintus in a voice that carried over the wind. \"None of you are. You must learn to control your dragons and they must respond to your commands. If not, there is no place for you \u2013 any of you \u2013 in the Flights.\"\n\nA rein across the neck, slight pressure of the leg against the shoulder; all ways for a rider to communicate with his mount. But none of us were good at that communication. Majentrix bumped into SeaTorrent, getting stirrups caught in the leathers and others tripped over lashing tails. Riders shook fists at each other and dragons snapped and snarled. I snorted, having little patience for any of it. It was not what I expected from the Skyborn.\n\n\"I hear you, night dragon,\" called Quintus. \"And you're quite correct. You are all fledglings when it comes to discipline and training. It takes months for a Dragon Flight to be forged. This is merely to show you the shortcomings of dragons and their riders. But there is another way.\"\n\nI cocked my head. In fact, all of us looked at him, desperate.\n\n\"Catch me.\" He smiled. \"If you can.\"\n\nHe sprang onto the back of his bronze and immediately, they took to the skies. I needed but a nudge from Rue to follow, the rest of the fledgling Flight flapping like sea snakes in our wake.\n\nWe were fast but Claysheen was faster and I instinctively veered up for altitude. If I was going to catch him, I reckoned, it would be the way I caught all dragons \u2013 as a wraith sweeping down from above. But I found myself bound by rein and stirrup as Rue leaned away from my soaring. I could do little but obey and I suddenly realized that the instructor's words had not been literal. I was not actually supposed to catch him.\n\nIt was an important thing to learn.\n\nAt first, we followed like a flock of fledglings, ungainly and disorganized but soon, we fell into a natural pattern, flying behind Claysheen in the shape of an arrow. He broke the wind with his body and we rode it behind him. The wind bit my eyes, stabbed the back of my throat but I have to admit I'd never felt anything like it in my life. Claysheen veered left. We veered left. He angled skyward. We angled skyward. Such speed, such precision, such grace and beauty and shared purpose. In fact, at that moment, there was no other purpose save grace, speed and precision and that, for a dragon, is beauty enough.\n\nSkyborn.\n\nIn this arrowhead formation, we flew to the next skyroom. It was a tall peak with a single wooden post rising from the top.\n\n\"This post is Lamos!\" Quintus shouted as Claysheen banked high above it. \"Tomorrow, we torch it to the ground! A second haunch of delly buck for the dragon and rider with the best score.\"\n\nI banked behind them, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow, Rue and I would retire to the aviary with very full bellies.\n\nAs in many things, I was not wrong and this victory was almost sweeter than blood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "It was a strange thing then, when we lost SeaTorrent. His rider always pushed him too hard, drove him to fly too fast, banked too sharply. One day, they miscalculated and did not pull up from a dive. He survived with only a shattered wing and shoulder. His rider was not so lucky.\n\nIn memorium, we took to calling our flight the Torrent. I thought it was laughable, given our initial ineptitude and the fact that we were named after a clumsy dragon and foolhardy rider but naturally, I had no say. Other than that, the name inspired. For dragons, that is an important consideration.\n\nOne week later, the Torrent was summoned to Celarus' Landing. It was one of the last days of winter and snow floated in through the high dragon arches, settling on the mosaic floor for brief moments before melting under our heat. The Landing smelled good \u2013 clean and cold and filled with leather. Shadows cut through the shafts of light and I looked up to see the silhouettes of two dragons perched in the arches. One was Claysheen \u2013 I knew him immediately but the other was smaller, with a coat that glowed like the late-evening sun. It was tricky to see in the shadows but I could tell that it was a drakina and that she was gold.\n\n\"Replacement for Peppe and SeaTorrrent?\" whispered Vir Belonnias, Majentrix's rider.\n\n\"Probably,\" said Darkling's rider, Claudio Cloelius. The Flight just called him Cloe. \"But we don't need one. We're fine the way we are.\"\n\nStanding beside their riders, the dragons seemed to agree.\n\n\"All Flights are odd numbers,\" said Vir. \"We can't ride with six.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" said Urbano Mass, rider of the brown drake, Bruno.\n\n\"Because that's not the way it's done, you beet head.\"\n\n\"It's because of the war,\" said Vir.\n\n\"What war?\" asked Urbano. \"We're not at war.\"\n\n\"Just about,\" said Vir. \"Blame Lamos.\"\n\n\"We're not going to war,\" said Cloe. \"We're just recruits.\"\n\n\"It's because of Peppe,\" grumbled Manillus, rider of Treeheart the green. \"They blame us for his death.\"\n\n\"They do not,\" said Vir.\n\n\"Are we in trouble?\" asked Urbano.\n\n\"You will be,\" said Cloe. \"If you open your mouth again.\"\n\nThey all snickered, save Rue. He merely smiled and held his tongue, as always.\n\nSoon, the mosaic floor echoed with footsteps and I swung my head as Quintus and Dragon Master Plinius entered the Landing, accompanied a tall young woman. A scent came with her. Drakina. It set my blood racing.\n\nThe trio stopped before us. Plinius studied both dragons and riders for a moment before turning to me with his shiny, pebble-like eyes. He tapped his cane on the floor.\n\n\"Look, night dragon,\" he said. \"I have a new cane. Do you like it?\"\n\nI grunted. A curl of smoke escaped my nostrils.\n\nAs for the Torrent, they stared at the girl as though she were a cerathorn. No older than Rue but taller and strongly built with dark hair that fell in one long braid down her back. She was wearing a golden breastplate, cuirass and greaves. Armour when the Torrent only wore leather. But there was something about her. The scent on her metal was speaking.\n\n\"We won't stand on ceremony,\" he said. \"Quintus, introduce your rider and get on with it.\"\n\n\"Ruminor has smiled on us,\" said Quintus.\n\n\"Ruminor has smiled on us all,\" the riders repeated in unison although I doubted any of them meant it.\n\n\"In the wake of Paulo Peppe and SeaTorrent, we have been granted a new rider.\"\n\nThe riders looked at the floor, scuffed the mosaic with their boots.\n\nQuintus grinned.\n\n\"We have the honour of adding Galla Gaius to our Flight,\" he said. \"She and her drakina, Aryss, have a year of experience with the Vigiles of Vaspar. That's a privilege and an honour for us. Isn't it, Torrent?\"\n\nLooked at the floor, scuffed the mosaic with their boots.\n\n\"Welcome to the Torrent,\" said Rue quietly.\n\nShe beamed at him.\n\n\"Galla Gaius,\" said Quintus. \"This is Rue Solus and Stormfall, his night dragon.\"\n\n\"Good health, Rue Solus,\" said Galla.\n\n\"And to you,\" said Rue. He'd never been one for words.\n\nI breathed in the scent of her. There was something about her I knew, something from a time past.\n\nAs Quintus made introductions, I stretched my neck and breathed on her. She smiled, leaning into my warm breath instead of away, fluent in the way of dragons. I pushed my nose to the leather at her waist, down her legs to her greaves. She laughed.\n\n\"What is he doing?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Rue. \"Stormfall?\"\n\n\"He's remembering something,\" said Plinius. \"Gads, you recruits have the brains of crickards. Help him to remember, girl. You know dragons. Help him.\"\n\nShe held her hands up to my face.\n\nThe other riders gaped as I opened my mouth and took her hands between my jaws, slathering them with my tongue as waves of taste and scent and memory took me back, back beyond the Citadel, beyond the aviaries and the skyrooms to my time in the mountains.\n\nI allowed the colour to form in my mind.\n\nGold like the breastplate, gold like the sunrise and dragonsong.\n\nHer.\n\nI pulled my jaws away, strings of saliva dripping from her hands, and sang.\n\n\"He knows her,\" laughed the woman. \"Aryss was right. He is her Night Dragon!\"\n\nAnother song echoed down from the dragon arch.\n\nI looked up now as one of the silhouettes launched through the high window, wings bringing her down through the clean and the cold.\n\nI knew her, hard like stone and sharp like sticks, warm like fire and pure, pure gold.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" said Plinius. \"He knows.\"\n\nAnd he laid a hand on my neck.\n\nI sang again and the answering song took me back to the mountains.\n\nWearing saddle and armoured bridle, my golden drakina with wing now healed, touched down on the mosaic of Celarus' Landing."
            },
            {
                "title": "ARYSS",
                "text": "For dragons, the world is a world not so much one of sight or sound but one of scents. Some are rocky, others earthy, some are fleshly and others fire. We can smell when the clouds are about to release the rain or when the earth is under so much pressure it is about to split. I suppose it is similar to the way the sticks can sweep their eyes though a sea of other sticks (who all look the same to dragons) and instantly pick out those they know by face alone. In the same way, dragons can sift through a skyful of smells and instantly pick out those they recognize and those they know.\n\nAryss was one such scent.\n\nShe was beautiful, she was strong, she was skilled and she was clever. She was everything I remembered of her and more because she was a Flight Dragon.\n\nIt was early spring \u2013 the mountain air had grown warm while preserving the blanket of snow in the high places. With spring came the mating season, and both Aryss and Galla were excluded from the Torrent's aviary, sharing one instead with those drakinas not released for nesting. Dragons caught in the mating fever are creatures of fire and destruction, not purpose and order. It was a pragmatic solution and we were soldiers in the Emperor's Skyborn. Still, she drilled with us and her skills were remarkable. While I spent most of my days with the Torrent, thoughts of Aryss filled my nights. I knew it was the same for Rue.\n\nHe would sometimes come back late to the nest with Galla's scent on him and it would set my blood racing. I remembered the girls on the docks, who would smile and wave but never come close. Galla was not like those girls. In-between training sessions, the four of us \u2013 black and gold dragons with black and gold riders \u2013 would race through the skies beyond the Citadel, wingtip to wingtip to practice our drills. I learned more of cues and response, reining and balance in those times than all the lessons taught by the masters and instructors combined. Perhaps it was my pride but more likely it was the fact that she was forbidden and for this season, however brief, she was mine.\n\nOver the succeeding days, I learned how sticks ran the Dragon Flights and I had to admit, it was a remarkable feat of organization. Flight dragons were usually the products of other Flight dragons, hatched in assigned aviaries until the Spring Tides, when drakes, drakinas and young returned en masse to the Citadel. I realized then, that the aeries I had encountered during my short time as a wild drake were, in fact, these aviaries. This network was called the Draco Curantora, and it was run by a branch of the dragoneers called Curantors. The Curantors chose the drakinas, they chose the drakes, they chose the nesting sites and they trained the fledglings from the central Draco Curantorum near the Citadel. It was an impressive set up, in use for more years than anyone could remember.\n\nThrough snatches of memory and Plinius' skill, the Curantors were able to piece together Aryss' story. She had been born of a Flight drake and a wild drakina, hatched with two siblings in the very den I had called my own. But there were (and still are) direcats in those mountains and one had managed to climb down the ledges and into the cavern. The cat had killed both siblings before the drakina returned, and she fought and killed it before succumbing to her own wounds. Barely a fledgling, Aryss stayed in the den until the sound of dragonsong drew her out. It was a Flight, calling out the breeding pairs and the new clutches for their return to the Citadel in the Spring Tide.\n\n\"She remembers the sound of their wings was like Hell Down,\" said Galla. \"Somehow, she slipped in and flew with them until they arrived in the Citadel. All the other chicks followed their mothers leaving Aryss lost and alone in the Curantorum. She was raised by my father.\"\n\n\"Umberto Gaius,\" said Vir. \"Quintus served under him, yes? He says he was a great Dragoneer.\"\n\n\"He would have been proud to know I was serving with Master Quintus,\" said Galla.\n\n\"We're all proud to be serving under Quintus,\" said Cloe.\n\nThey nodded at that.\n\nThe sticks were sitting around a small snowy firepit near Aurelias' Peak, running daggers across each other's scalp and wicking the bits off into the snow. Recruits were allowed one of two hairstyles \u2013 a long braid or heads entirely shaved. With the exception of Galla, they all chose the shave. There was a certain quiet peace now as they groomed each other like dragons. The rest of us \u2013 Majentrix, Darkling, Bruno, Treeheart, Aryss and I \u2013 were perched higher up, wings folded across our backs, the sunset warming our scales. I was grooming Aryss, cleaning her spines with my tiny front teeth. Payment for when she had done the same for me.\n\n\"Did anyone see the Legions arrive this morning?\" asked Vir.\n\n\"The First Imperator is here,\" said Cloe. \"Tinitian says they are making the declaration tonight.\"\n\n\"I hope he does,\" said Vir.\n\n\"I hope he doesn't,\" said Urbano.\n\n\"I don't want war,\" Manillus said. \"Not with Lamos.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Rue and they all looked at him.\n\n\"I want them gone,\" he continued. \"They destroyed the village I lived in. Everything burned. Everyone lost. And there was no reason. They didn't take anything. They would have destroyed the whole city if the Flight hadn't showed up.\"\n\nGalla leaned forward.\n\n\"Did you join the Flight just to avenge yourself on Lamos? That's not a very good reason, Rue.\"\n\nRue made a sound. It was like a young drake growling.\n\n\"I had friends,\" he grumbled. \"I had dragons. I had a life.\"\n\n\"You have a dragon now,\" said Galla. \"You have a life.\"\n\nRue looked down into the fire. I saw his jaw working to control his tongue.\n\n\"It's the new Emperor,\" said Cloe. \"He wants war so we go to war.\"\n\n\"He killed his cousin,\" said Manillus. \"That's what the Campari say.\"\n\n\"The Campari don't know anything,\" said Vir. \"They could be tried for treason with such claims.\"\n\n\"Political assassinations happen all the time,\" said Cloe. \"Septus Aelianus had his cousin Maritus poisoned. Everyone knows that.\"\n\nI paused in my grooming. Septus Aelianus. I knew the name. Aryss nudged me so I continued.\n\nUrbano grunted. \"As if being Primar of the Eastern Provinces wasn't enough.\"\n\n\"Not if you want war,\" said Cloe. \"He hates Lamos.\"\n\n\"I hate Lamos too,\" said Urbano. \"But I'm not sure I want war.\"\n\n\"They have dragons now,\" said Cloe. \"Master Willas says dragons were the only thing that gave us superiority but now they have a laying drakina in Nathens.\"\n\n\"A golden drakina,\" said Vir. \"Like the First.\"\n\n\"Where would they get her?\" Galla asked. \"I didn't think there were dragons on Lamoan soil.\"\n\n\"They stole her,\" said Vir. \"That's what they do.\"\n\nCloe spat into the fire. I paused again in my grooming to watch him, curious that their spit did not contain acid. Pointless, I figured. Why have spit that did not burn? And I turned my attentions back to the warm golden scales.\n\n\"Cannons and dragons,\" muttered Rue and he ran a hand across his bare head. \"Why don't we have cannons?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Vir. \"Quintus says it's not our concern because it's not our branch of service.\"\n\n\"It is our concern,\" Rue grumbled. \"Cannons can blow dragons out of the sky. All dragoneers should be concerned about that.\"\n\n\"You're not a dragoneer,\" said Galla and she looked at him, grinning. \"Not yet.\"\n\n\"I'm an optimist,\" he said.\n\n\"You're an idiot,\" said Cloe. \"Your dragon's too old.\"\n\n\"That's not what Cassien Cirrus said,\" said Rue.\n\n\"We don't serve Cassien Cirrus,\" said Vir. \"We serve Quintus and he says your dragon's too old. He's still wild.\"\n\n\"You lie, Vir,\" said Galla. \"Quintus doesn't talk like that and Cirrus said the Night Dragon could win the war for us.\"\n\nThere was silence around the firepit and she looked away quickly. Ashes rose up to greet the rise of the Sleeping Eyes.\n\nRue leaned forward.\n\n\"What do you mean, Galla?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" she said. \"I spoke out of turn.\"\n\n\"When did you speak to Cirrus?\"\n\nShe glanced up sharply.\n\n\"My father trained Ironwing when he was a recruit. They're here, in the Citadel with the First Imperator.\"\n\nRue sat back, brow drawn, frowning. The silence that followed was blanket heavy. Finally, Cloe slapped the fire with his sword.\n\n\"We should do a Shadow raid tonight.\"\n\nThe others groaned.\n\n\"Not on your life,\" said Vir. \"Not while the Imperator and his troops are here.\"\n\n\"The Imperator is nowhere near the aerie,\" said Cloe. \"And if there's going to be war, we might as well get used to flying in the dark.\"\n\n\"We can get coal from the forge,\" said Manillus.\n\n\"There's no guard at Corantus Five,\" said Urbano. \"They're all in for the proclamation.\"\n\nA roosting drakina is a fearsome thing. During a Shadow raid, we would attempt to slip through the aeries in the dead of night without waking a single one. It was not an easy task since dragons are sensitive to scent, and the drakinas woke to the smell of us rather than the sight or sound. Quintus suggested that rubbing coal into our skin helped mask our scent as we flew, blending us in to the scents of stone, slate and dragon-scorched rock. It was extremely effective but caused our skin to dry out after repeated use.\n\n\"Well?\" said Vir. \"Are we just going to sit here until the proclamation? Let's go.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Rue. \"Tonight, I'm going to try something else.\"\n\nGalla glanced at him.\n\n\"Celarus' Landing?\"\n\n\"Stormfall and I can do it.\"\n\nCloe snorted.\n\n\"You'll get killed.\"\n\n\"Only if they're going too fast and miss,\" said Manillus. \"We saw what happened to Peppe and SeaTorrent.\"\n\n\"They won't miss,\" said Vir. He leaned back on his elbow and laughed. \"No, the worst that will happen is that they might get in trouble with Plinius or his centurions.\"\n\n\"If they get caught,\" Urbano added.\n\n\"The Night Dragon won't get caught,\" said Rue. He sent a sideways glance to Galla. \"You said Cirrus is here, in the Citadel?\"\n\n\"I saw him,\" she nodded.\n\n\"Good,\" said Rue. \"We'll show him what the Night Dragon can do.\"\n\n\"After the proclamation,\" she said.\n\nHe said nothing so she nudged him with her thigh.\n\n\"After the proclamation.\"\n\nHe grinned.\n\n\"After.\"\n\nI growled but Aryss trilled so I resumed the cleaning of her scales until the riders rose to their feet, ending one service in exchange for another."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "It was early evening when we returned to the Citadel to find all the Dragon Flights on alert. Fires burned along the Crescent and the war flag \u2013 a red banner with a golden drakina surrounded by aurel leaves \u2013 flapped in the winter wind. We split up, Aryss and Galla arcing for their tower while Rue and I chose to light atop the mountain ridge alongside several of the Campari. The Campari were lone dragoneers who rode without a Flight. For some reason, both Rue and I felt at home with them, perhaps because of our solitary natures. Regardless, as we peered over the edge of the natural amphitheater called Crescent Prime, the sight of over one hundred dragons and even more sticks took our breath away.\n\n\"Is that the Imperator?\" Rue asked one of the Campari, a hardened man with a dragon the colour of stone.\n\n\"That one there,\" said the man. \"The one with the spike-helm.\"\n\nAnd he pointed. It was all we could do to make him out, so far below and surrounded as he was by such a crowd, but when he took to the podium, the amphitheater fell silent. Even the wind held its breath.\n\n\"Hear, O Remus,\" he began and his voice echoed through the mountains. \"And hear ye lands of Lamos, let Justice hear! I am a public messenger of Septus Aelianus, Emperor of the Remoan people. Justly and religiously I stand before the most devoted servants of Remus, ye noble Dragoneers!\"\n\nThe cheer that went up almost deafened me, being a dragon of unusual sensibilities.\n\nIt lasted for a long while, would have lasted longer had not the Imperator raised his gloved hand.\n\n\"It's the proclamation,\" hissed the Camparius. \"They always use the same language.\"\n\n\"Let my words bear credit! Hear, O Remus and you too, Lamos \u2013 Ruminor also, and all the celestial, terrestrial, and infernal gods! Give us ear! I call you to witness that this nation Lamos is unjust, and has acted contrary to right. The state of Lamos has offended against the Remoan People with its cannons and its warships and its soldiers. Now, we have witnessed the ultimate act of aggression \u2013 a brood of dragons for which Lamos has no precedent nor history nor divine right!\"\n\nBooing and hissing rose from the crowd, but the Imperator rose his fist higher.\n\n\"This is an act of war!\"\n\nThe hiss became a roar.\n\nDragons added their voices, bellowing loud and long into the night.\n\n\"It's all myth and legend and shat,\" said the hardened man. \"The High God Ruminor giving Selisanae to his son Remus, not to Lamos.\"\n\n\"That's a bad father,\" said Rue.\n\n\"It's shat.\" The man grinned. \"But that's the High God for you. I only trust in my feet, my stomach and my dragon.\"\n\nFinally, the roar died away.\n\n\"Upon the order of Emperor Septus Aelianus and on behalf of the Remoan People, I have ordered that there shall be war with Lamos. The Senate of Remus has duly voted that war should be made upon the enemy Lamos unless and until they abandon their dragons: I, acting for the Remoan People, declare and make actual war upon the enemy! Which noble Dragoneers stand with me?\"\n\nAnd lastly, one final roar to outdo all others, fairly lifting the snow from the mountaintops. Even Rue was cheering. I didn't share his passion or his hatred for this nation called Lamos, even if they were responsible for the destruction of the Udan Shore. Sticks were sticks. They killed each other as easily as they killed dragons.\n\nI looked for Aryss in the crowded, cheering, bellowing mass but did not find her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "There were no Eyes in the sky to guide me as we flew across the peaks and valleys of the Citadel. I was a Night Dragon and as such, didn't need the Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, to see the Citadel. For me, it was as clear under the stars as it was in the sun.\n\nRue pressed low across my neck, fairly hugging the saddle as we swept silently through the night sky. This was why riders' uniforms matched their dragons. They became indistinguishable on our backs, looking almost a part of our wings and spines. At night, it didn't matter but during the day, the sight of a rider carried a weight of a very different sort.\n\nTorches continued to burn along the Crescent Mountains but for the most part, the Citadel was sleeping. The tower of Celarus' Landing was dark, without even a flicker of light to be seen through the many high dragon arches.\n\nI opened my senses to the voices of the night. Stars sang. Wind whispered. Below us, trees brushed and rocks cracked. Snow wept as it dripped away for the spring and I could hear the distant crackle of fire, the voices of men and the heartbeat of dragons. There were no moons to guide me. No lanterns within or torches without. I remembered how I would descend on unsuspecting dragons in the Crown. Blackness in my wings and death at my claws. Warblood, undefeated Jewel of the Crown, Killer of Dragons and Men. How easily he could come back. I shuddered at the thought.\n\nWith a shift of Rue's leg, I tucked my wings and dropped like an arrow.\n\nI could feel the dragon arches rather than see them and at this speed, if we hit the walls, we were dead. Rue held his breath and tucked deeply into me as I folded my wings over him. Swiftly and silently, we swept in through one of the arches, my tail following my body perfectly as I followed the curve of the walls. My wings opened enough to keep us aloft, all in utter silence. Skilfully, I circled the Landing, my tail not even brushing the many horned skulls along the walls. Once again, I remembered my nights in the blackness of the Crown, sweeping over the throngs of spectators but avoiding the mesh that protected them.\n\nRue leaned, indicating we should leave. It was achievement enough to simply have made it in and then out. I ignored his leaning, however, for there was something on the floor.\n\nNo one in the room at all; not a centurion, not a guard. It was empty and black as the pitch from Allum's ovens but still I could see with my night-dragon eyes the beautiful mosaic of glass and stone, the history of dragon riders throughout the centuries. In the center of this beautiful floor lay Plinius' cane.\n\nRue dug his heel into my shoulder but I leaned away, diving silently downwards, wings back, talons reaching. Down, down and down I went and with barely a scratch of my claws on the stone, the cane was mine. Now, I brought down my wings in a powerful stroke, soaring upwards, seeing clearly the stars through the dragon arches. Within two heartbeats, I was outside and into the night once again.\n\nSo sleek, I thought to myself. So deadly. Poor Plinius would beg for his cane back. I would not roast this one. No, I would keep it until he begged.\n\nAnd so it was with this attitude of self-importance that Rue and I returned to the Torrent aviary, only to find it empty of dragons, save one.\n\nIronwing, the silver drake, was stretched out in my nest, his wing-talons crossed elegantly in front of him.\n\nAnd around a firepit circle at the centre, two men were playing dice. One was in silver armour.\n\nThey both looked up as we peered down from the ledge.\n\n\"Well, come in Rue Solus,\" said Dragon Master Plinius. \"Come in, Night Dragon. And bring my cane with you, if you please.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE SHADOW FLIGHT",
                "text": "\"The Night Dragon and his soul-boy,\" said Plinius as he approached. \"I am impressed, Cirrus. I will gladly refund you your coin.\"\n\nRue slid from my back, but kept one hand on my shoulder. I could feel his knees shaking as he bent down to slide the cane from my talons. He did not pass it over but gripped it tightly, twisting it in his trembling hands.\n\n\"Forgive me, Dragon Master,\" he said. \"I was\u2026I was\u2026\"\n\nHis words failed him and for some reason, so did my victory.\n\n\"You were proud,\" said the wrinkly man. \"A Flight Rider needs to be proud.\"\n\n\"Of himself and his dragon,\" added Cassien Cirrus.\n\nThe rider rose to his feet, slipped the dice into his silver pocket.\n\n\"Do you know what they want of you, Rue Solus?\" asked Plinius. \"What they want of your night dragon?\"\n\n\"No, Dragon Master. But I can guess.\"\n\n\"It won't be easy.\"\n\n\"Our lives have never been easy,\" said Rue. \"He's been a fisher dragon and a farm dragon. He's been a pit dragon and a Flight dragon. There is no dragon in the Empire that can do what you're wanting. None except him.\"\n\n\"The Lamoan drakina will be well guarded,\" said Cirrus. \"It won't be as easy as taking the Dragon Master's cane.\"\n\n\"It was just laying there in plain view,\" said Rue and he held it out.\n\nPlinius took it.\n\n\"The cane,\" he said. \"Was not guarded.\"\n\n\"You knew we would come for it. They won't expect us to come for the drakina like that.\"\n\n\"We knew,\" said Plinius and he leaned forward on his cane. \"Because we were told.\"\n\nRue glanced up sharply.\n\n\"We are a nation at war,\" said the wrinkly man. \"There are espionars everywhere.\"\n\n\"Every man is a soldier,\" said Cirrus. \"As is every woman.\"\n\nThere was only the hiss of the night wind.\n\n\"Galla,\" Rue whispered.\n\n\"Galla is a soldier,\" said Cirrus. \"You need to think like one. You and your dragon both.\"\n\n\"Flight Riders live to serve,\" said Plinius. \"Likewise their dragons. How do you think we got your dragon here in the first place?\"\n\n\"Aryss?\" said Rue.\n\nThe thoughts came together in my mind like storm clouds. Aryss in my mountain den, blood on her wing. Proud, defiant, warm and gold.\n\n\"She's a remarkable drakina,\" said Plinius. \"Very clever, very intelligent. Not many could be trusted to return once they've tasted freedom like that.\"\n\nA sweet, golden lemonwhite for a lonely night dragon.\n\n\"Cirrus knew our night dragon would find himself a lair. She tracked him, baited him and brought him in.\"\n\nBecause of her, I found the first of the Draco Curantora, the tower and after that, Rue.\n\nAnd after Rue, the Citadel.\n\nIt had been a clever plan and I had played my part, to the beat.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Night Dragon,\" said Plinius. \"But we needed you.\"\n\nVanity and pride. Lure them with gold, catch them with ego. Dragons are a predictable people.\n\n\"And me?\" asked Rue and he turned to the silver rider. \"Did you 'need' me too?\"\n\nCirrus sighed, folded his arms across his chest.\n\nRue was quiet for a long moment.\n\n\"We can do this,\" he said finally. \"At least let us try.\"\n\n\"My Flight is leaving for Terra Remus at dawn,\" said Cirrus. \"We've been commissioned by the Imperator to find the Lamoan drakina but she's in Nathens, their capital city. Even if they send one hundred dragons, none will make it through alive because of their cannons. But you can. I know you can. You can end this war before it has even begun. And that's where the problem lies.\"\n\nHe sighed again. The silver drake on my nest grumbled. Almost as one.\n\n\"After the massacre in the Crown, the Emperor put a price on Stormfall's head,\" he went on. \"My Flight isn't convinced that we can get into and out of the capital without paying it, maybe in blood. They don't want you, but they don't know you. They don't know what you can do. They think you're wild and unpredictable, that you'll be more of a problem than a solution.\"\n\nHe stepped forward now, laid a hand on my neck and for once, the silver drake did not growl. My heart swelled with pride.\n\n\"I've seen Stormfall at work,\" he said. \"In the Crown and on the water. Ironwing and I would be dead if it weren't for him.\"\n\nPride, pride, always pride.\n\nI should have learned by now. I should have known.\n\n\"We need you, Night Dragon. Our nation needs you. I believe that is why you were born a Night Dragon, to do what no other dragon can do.\"\n\nHe looked at Rue now, knees still shaking. Still a boy.\n\nCirrus grinned flatly.\n\n\"You have my favour to join us, Rue Solus. But first, you must convince my Flight tonight. There's no guarantee that you won't be killed if you come but come anyway. If you succeed, then we fly to Terra Remus where we meet the Emperor's Legion. There's also no guarantee that you won't be killed and Stormfall's head set up on the marble walls as retribution. There's even less of a guarantee that you will be chosen for this commission and finally, if you are chosen, there is almost no chance of either of you coming back.\"\n\nRue looked at the ground. I could see the muscles in his jaw twitching. So controlled. So restrained. So unlike me.\n\n\"We're leaving at dawn,\" said Cirrus. \"But tonight, we'll be camped at Tarren's Duct. You know where it is?\"\n\nRue nodded.\n\n\"There will be three dragons besides Ironwing. Show them what you can do. Impress them with your skill in the night. Hunt, catch them, terrify them, I don't care what you do but don't kill. They think you are Warblood, Jewel of the Crown. Prove to them that you're not. Prove to them that you can do what we cannot.\"\n\nAnd with a shake of his silver spines, Ironwing left my nest for Cirrus' side. For such a large dragon, he moved with such grace, such elegance, like smoke. The rider slipped his foot in the stirrup and in a heartbeat, was up. The drake spread wide his wings.\n\n\"But this is not Stormfall's fight,\" he called from Ironwing's back. \"This isn't really yours either, Rue. You are both free to decide. Ruminor smiles on whom He chooses and we do what we can with the rest.\"\n\nThe first wing beat almost blew the wrinkly man over. The second had them halfway up the spire, at the third they were out the large dragon arch into the night sky.\n\nPlinius watched him go, before turning to us one last time. His skin looked like parchment.\n\n\"It has been a privilege to know you, Rue Solus,\" he said. \"And a pleasure to meet this wonderful Night Dragon. I hope we will meet again in the afterlife. I will drink to your health and you will drink to mine.\"\n\nHe caressed my cheek as one might stroke a child, his eyes shining like tiny pebbles.\n\n\"I should not have hit you with my cane,\" he said softly. \"I regret that. My new cane isn't nearly as nice.\"\n\nHe threw a glance at Rue.\n\n\"I can't speak for Ruminor. If you succeed, He might just give you your soul back. But then again, He might not\u2026\"\n\nHe picked up his lantern and shuffled out the door, the cane making quiet tapping sounds on the floor. He was swallowed by the darkness in a heartbeat.\n\nRue watched him go, did not move for some time.\n\n\"I need you to remain Stormfall,\" he finally whispered in the firelight. \"No matter what happens, please stay Stormfall.\"\n\nHe didn't know what he was asking.\n\nHe stood until his knees got the better of him and he buckled to the floor beside me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "There were no moons to guide me. No Winking Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum. I didn't need him. Tonight I was the night. Tonight I was the darkness.\n\nImpress them with your skill, Cirrus had said.\n\nI was sad when I left the Torrent aviary, a place where I had learned to enjoy the touch of sticks. I was sadder still when I left the Citadel, the last landing stone streaking below me like a fading memory. Sadness and fear, leaving this place of purpose and nobility behind; war before me, my path stained with blood. My heart was racing, too fast, too strong, to the beat of my wings.\n\nHunt, catch them, terrify them, I don't care what you do but don't kill.\n\nBlackness in my wings and death at my claws.\n\nPlease stay Stormfall.\n\nHe didn't know what he was asking. None of them did.\n\nThey think you are Warblood, Jewel of the Crown.\n\nThis wasn't my fight. This wasn't my war.\n\nWar meant blood.\n\nPlease stay Stormfall.\n\nI ached for Rue as we left his words behind in the aviary.\n\nStroke by stroke, I left Stormfall behind and stroke by stroke, put on the mantle of Warblood, undefeated Jewel of the Crown of Salernum, Killer of Dragons and Men.\n\nProve to them that you're not.\n\nI couldn't kill them.\n\nWarblood would try.\n\nBlackness in my wings and death at my claws.\n\nStormfall would stop him.\n\n\"No thinking,\" Rue hissed over the night wind. \"Riders can hear your thoughts like Hell Down.\"\n\nI tried to quiet my mind. It is hard for a dragon of my intelligence and imagination to be quiet, especially when the blood is hot and the acid scalds the back of your throat.\n\nI was the Night Dragon.\n\nBlackness in my wings and death at my claws.\n\nBonesnap, I thought to myself and I sifted the air for dragons on the wind. \"Hush, Stormfall. Your thoughts.\"\n\nShow them what you can do.\n\nBack to the fire. I could land quietly. I could grab one or none or all. I could sweep between them and scatter the ash up to the night. There were many, many strategies for proving myself and I wanted to know what he wanted of me, for I could do all of it or none.\n\nTruthfully, I would be just as happy to veer north and let the earth force take me home.\n\nI could see them sitting around a fire beneath a towering aqueduct. Sticks were always sitting around fires and I realized that they coveted fire. It was why they subjugated dragons, the bringers of it.\n\n\"Don't kill,\" he whispered. \"Take one, release him into the sky then take another.\"\n\nI recognized Ironwing immediately. I had saved his life. He had spared mine. We were equals and I found a measure of satisfaction in that. But there was another and it struck me like an arrow in the heart.\n\nAryss.\n\nVanity and pride. Lure them with gold, catch them with ego.\n\nLike a spear, I tucked my wings and dove.\n\nFour dragons dozing in the darkness, one raising his gray head to yawn. I caught his face in my talons and beat down my wings, rising us both up, up, up. He was heavy but surprised and swung his back end, his tail lashing and feet raking only air. When he called his fire, I was gone, releasing him and disappearing into the black sky like a wraith. I arced and dove again, but this time they were waiting for me \u2013 the men on their feet, the dragons with wings wide. But it was dark and I was the night and I caught a gold drake by the saddle, rose into the air with him even as he beat against me. I wouldn't hurt him, I told myself, though the blood was hot in my veins. I felt the saddle creak as I flung him overhead and whirled, releasing him to dive again.\n\nAryss next. I caught her by the back of the neck, taking her up, up, up into the starry sky before a blast of fire licked at my tail.\n\nOn my back, Rue stayed low, gripping my neck and allowing me my head. Three dragons in the air now and I dodged between them all. Fire lit up the night but I was a ghost silhouetted against the flames, wheeling and snapping and whipping my tail so that I had touched every dragon save Ironwing and left them living.\n\nPerhaps Stormfall had flown with us still.\n\n\"Release and down,\" cried Rue and I obeyed, dropping to the fire with almost no sound. The dragons rushed to land, forming a circle around me with their wings.\n\nRue sprang from my back as swords and arrows were brought to bear but the great silver drake rose onto his back legs, lighting up the sky with his powerful flames. The riders stepped back as Cassien Cirrus strode into the circle.\n\n\"Peace,\" he barked. \"Flight, stand down.\"\n\n\"That was madness!\" shouted Galla, her sword flashing in the firelight.\n\n\"Insubordination!\" shouted the rider of the steel grey. \"Cirrus, we should kill them both for that!\"\n\n\"Did you hear them?\" Cirrus he spread wide his arms. \"Did any of you hear them at all?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter\u2014\"\n\n\"But it is the only thing that does matter,\" he said. \"None of us heard either sound or thought. They were silent as night.\"\n\nRue said nothing, merely looked at the ground.\n\n\"Three Flight dragons,\" Cirrus continued. \"Taken like fish from the ocean before any of you even knew what was happening. That is what we need for Lamos. That is how we take the drakina.\"\n\nThe first colour of dawn glowed over the mountains. The fire crackled and spat ash into the early morning sky. The dragons snarled but as I stood between them, unmoved and undefeated, I desperately tried not to think of what had awakened in me tonight.\n\n\"The Emperor won't allow it,\" said the rider of the grey. \"He still remembers the Crown.\"\n\n\"We all remember the Crown,\" said another.\n\n\"This dragon has already faced Lamoan cannons,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"So have I,\" said the first.\n\nCirrus sighed.\n\n\"We need him, Rufus. I believe it in my bones.\"\n\nThe riders stood for a long moment before the first slid the short sword into the scabbard at his hip.\n\n\"Ruminor have mercy on you, Cirrus,\" said the one called Rufus. \"The Emperor could have us all flayed.\"\n\n\"He could, but he won't.\"\n\n\"You're so sure of this wild dragon,\" grumbled the rider of the gold drake. \"And a soul-boy? How old is he? Twelve?\"\n\n\"Old enough,\" muttered Rue.\n\n\"Old enough to die,\" said the rider. He aimed his sword at the silver rider. \"This is your measure, Cirrus. We live or we die, because of you. Remember that.\"\n\n\"I won't forget,\" said Cirrus.\n\nBoth riders turned and moved to their dragons. Cirrus waited a moment before nodding swiftly. He kicked snow and dirt over the small fire before approaching to his drake. That left Galla Gaius. She stood like marble, sword gleaming in the dawn's light, long braid swaying in the night breeze.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Rue.\n\nShe turned her back and walked toward her drakina, speaking words of comfort and ease. Aryss perched erect, wings wide, tail lashing in the darkness. I could hear her heartbeat racing like a school of silverfins. I had terrified her. No, Warblood had terrified her. But I was Warblood and Stormfall. Both and perhaps neither.\n\nI hated this. I hated what I had become tonight, what they wanted me to become even still. I didn't know what they would ask of me in the coming days, but I knew that as Stormfall, I wouldn't last.\n\nWarblood, however, would thrive and I wrestled with the fact that I had led so many lives. Stormfall and Snake, Nightshade and Hallowdown, all preparing the way for Warblood the Undefeated, Jewel of the Crown of Salernum. I looked up to the sky. There were no moons but there were stars, scales of my father, Draco Stellorum. Always watching but never doing. Perhaps I hated him most of all.\n\nWe flew out at first light of dawn."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "They were called the Shadow Flight. Not sanctioned, not existing, comprised only of five dragons. There were two silvers \u2013 Ironwing and Jagerstone and conversely two golds \u2013 Aryss and Chryseum. And now me. I wondered if our colours had anything to do with our selection. Surely there was more to it than that but it was curious. As you know by now, I am a curious dragon.\n\nBoth Chryseum and Jagerstone were fine drakes, having reached perhaps eight years but I must admit it was Ironwing who impressed me the most. He was very large, easily ten to fifteen years and compared to my size, I barely came to his shoulder. He watched us with heavy eyes and I could only imagine the life he had seen. It filled me with pride and rage in equal measure \u2013 pride that he had lived so long, and rage at the fact that he lived so long because of a stick.\n\nIt took us three days to reach Terra Remus and as we flew over the land, it changed from high mountains and deep valleys to limen groves and olive firs. Cities and villages, towns and farms \u2013 I saw more of this vain land than I needed, for in every field and on every road, I saw dragons. Cart dragons, carriage dragons, plow dragons and barge. I wondered if they too looked up at us and dreamed of flying.\n\nWe also flew over an amphitheater in the middle of a plain. It looked like a small version of the Crown and those coals, long dormant, began to flicker once more. I suppose anger is a kind of fire. One breath and it kindles anew.\n\nIt was the morning of the third day when I smelled the ocean. My heart leapt into my throat, my wings beat faster and it was all Rue could do to hold me in formation. I wanted to race ahead of the Shadow Flight, soar high into the billowing sea clouds and plunge headlong into the glorious water. I kept my pace but I believe the entire Flight flew a little faster because of me.\n\nOn the third day, the city of Terra Remus grew out of the sea beneath us, with brightly coloured houses hugging its rugged shores. The streets were narrow and steeply sloped, and my heart ached for the dragons forced to pull carts up and down those roads. But it was hard to think of anything but the ocean, the vast expanse of blue stretching as far as I could see. Sea snakes rose and fell on the salt wind, catching heads of fish tossed overboard by the ships that followed the coast. Smelting fires from stone ovens billowed smoke into the sky, fashioning hooks and anchors, spears and rams for the warships. And there were hundreds of war ships, some anchored in the harbour, others docked by the piers, all flying the war flag of Remus.\n\nThe war flag of Remus. Golden drakina surrounded by aurel leaves on a blood red banner. I had known two golden drakinas in my lifetime \u2013 Summerday and Aryss. While Aryss flew at my left wing, these days she was farther from me than Summerday.\n\nAs we closed in on the city center, I was astounded by the sheer number of dragons in the sky and on the ground and on the docks. The city was preparing for war with both ships and Flight Dragons and I had never seen such numbers in all my life. I wasn't sure which made me happier \u2013 the sight of the ocean or the sight of so many dragons.\n\nI tore my eyes away from the glorious blue as the silver drake dipped a wing and I inclined to follow. We spiralled downwards to circle a long rectangular building at the crest of the city's highest hill. Red tiled roof supported by marble columns carved in the shapes of rampant dragons. It was called the Curia Terra Remus, I later learned \u2013 the Senate House of the Eastern Quarter. Dozens of landing stones surrounded the Curia and on each, a waiting dragon. Cirrus motioned for us to land and we took the last five empty stones.\n\nHe leapt from his mount and disappeared up the gardened steps to the building, while a trio of soul-boys moved to work the iron water pump. A trough ran between all the landing stones and very soon, fresh water coursed through like a little river. Flying for three days is thirsty work, and I drank my fill, the little river tending all on the stones. Even Rue knelt to cup it in his hands, splashing some on his face and neck. He missed the ocean too, I knew.\n\nNext came groomers with wooden buckets and scrubbing brushes. They picked at my teeth, sanded my talons, rubbed oil into old wounds and new calluses. It was entirely pleasant, especially with the wind strong on this high ocean hill, and salty and I dozed in the afternoon sun while they worked to polish my scales to gleaming. Dreams of Aryss and shaghorns and life in the Pits made for fitful sleep as Warblood crushed Nightshade under a roof of stones, and Hallowdown collapsed beneath a flaming cart of bones.\n\nI roused to the sound of chains and a familiar tug at my throat.\n\nA band.\n\nI threw my head back, rearing to the sky and wings beating furiously to the second snap of a band around one leg. Rue bolted to his feet as I launched into the air, yanked short by a chain keeping me less than one wingspan above the ground. I roared as an entire Legion surrounded me, throwing a net of linked chain across my wings and dropping me back to the stone in a lashing, writhing mass. Spears and swords rattled before me and I called the fire inside my belly, willing it to leap out of my mouth and burn them all to cinders but the fire stalled \u2013 choked to mere smoke as it tried to leave my tongue.\n\nA band.\n\nA silver band.\n\nI raged and roared, tossing my head and lashing my tail and the groomers toppled like tree trunks in its wake.\n\nKicking and fighting, Rue was dragged off the stone by centurions and higher up, a man in white robes held up a scroll.\n\n\"Warblood, Night Dragon of the Salernum Crown, you are marked for crimes against Septus Aelianus, Emperor of all the Provinces of Remus and Imperator of the Known World. Ruminor have mercy on your night-black soul.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "NIGHT OF DRAGONSONG & FIRE",
                "text": "According to Rue, they argued for my life 'til last light of day and the better part of the night. It didn't matter. Stormfall died under the chains and the band, while Warblood was reborn. I didn't grieve the death so much. I think he had been dying all my life. I remembered a time when I didn't have a name, only a starry-black coat and my pride.\n\nSo I lost the last bit of Stormfall that night as I thrashed \u2013 banded and chained \u2013 on the landing stone of Terra Remus. Warblood was whom they wanted. Warblood was whom they would have. The moment this wretched band was gone I would kill them all and burn this city to the ground. My throat was raw from the trying, my talons splintered, my hind leg torn to the bone but I would not give up. I would never give up. I would die on this cursed stone or be free and never return to the world of sticks.\n\nAll that night I raged and roared, bellowing and spitting acid at any stick who dared try quiet me. At one point, they sent Rue and then Cirrus but my eyes were filled with blood and I refused to end my struggles. I believe a centurion tried to beat me with a mace but he was hauled off and I was left to thrash in chains and links and bands. The saddle was crushed, the bridle in ribbons and the mesh was now so tangled in my scales that every movement was a fire. Blood dripped from my tongue and sprayed across the stone as accompaniment to my roars.\n\nBut I was not alone. Beside me, the Flight Dragons took up my cries, roaring and raging along with me, unappeased by their own riders. Soon, dragons on the hills joined in, then dragons in the valleys. Dragons in the streets, fields and harbours added their voices and before the first Winking Eye appeared above the ocean, every drake and drakina in the city of Terra Remus was crying into the night, drowning out the shouts of men and filling the sky with the anguish of our people. It was a shared plight and if I could have shed tears like Rue, I would have.\n\nIt was powerful and poetic and when I had no more strength in my bones, I fell quiet and listened to their cries. Finally after several hours, the night grew silent and still, as if even my father, Draco Stellorum was holding his breath. I could hear the heartbeat of every dragon on the Curia Hill, feel the fire in every scaly breast. It was life and it was death and it was everything in between. I closed my bloody eyes, took a deep ragged breath and sang.\n\nI sang out the song of my people, the music of the stars and the lament of the waters. The song of our people, ensnared by our pride and enslaved by the vanity of men. Our majesty and grace, our ferocity and joy, I sang it all through a throat raw and bloody and I know I had never sounded so terrible and so beautiful as I did that night.\n\nA high harmony now to my left. Aryss. I knew it because we had sung together that one night in my mountain cave. Two voices now pierced the darkness, eerie and lilting and brutally sad. A deep rumbling chord next. Ironwing. I could have died on that rock then and there when he added his song to ours. Then Chryseum and Jagerstone. The entire Shadow Flight sang their hearts and one by one across the hillside, every dragon joined in.\n\nNo longer raging, no longer roaring; the Dragonsong raced like a mighty wave across the city and the sound threatened to call the moons down from the heavens. Glass shattered in every window, marble cracked in every wall as the sound shook Terra Remus to its very foundations. Every free Flight dragon took to the skies, singing and wailing and beating the air with a roar like Hell Down. I could feel them above me, circling above the Curia Terra Remus in the hundreds, created winds of hurricane force. At some point during the night, my throat failed me and I rested my head on the stone, overcome by the songs of my people.\n\nWe were Skyborn. We didn't have words, but we had language. I knew it now. I would ever doubt again.\n\nThe sun rose that morning with dragonsong still echoing across the waters. I learned later that many dragons kissed the axe that night. The dragons killed no one, however. Sticks killed. Dragons sang. Ours was the music and the power and the right.\n\nFinally, a procession in gleaming white exited the Curia. They carried poles and banners, scrolls and shields. Rue was with them, as was Cirrus and Galla and they stood before me, waiting for the singing to cease. Ironwing barked and the Flights above the Curia fell silent, save for the thunder of their wings. Still, it was a very long time before the dragonsong died away from the city and the ocean. I was certain no one's hearing ever returned to normal after the Night of Dragonsong.\n\nIt took them much longer to remove the mesh of linked chain. I had struggled with such savagery that the metal was embedded in my scales and spines and spikes. I was as raw as I had been after my escape from the Crown but this morning, I felt no pain. Not even when they tore pieces of hide from my flesh to remove the metal, or peeled the ragged leather of both saddle and bridle from my skin. After wearing it for so long, I felt like a newborn hatchling, wet from the shell.\n\nRue moved forward. He was holding a key. It was to the bands but still I growled at him.\n\n\"I hear you, Stormfall,\" he said quietly. \"We all hear you.\"\n\nStormfall was gone.\n\nHis face was puffy and streaked with glistening lines. Tears. They had happened before, usually with great sadness or greater joy. I didn't care. He was a stick to me now, nothing more. I would kill him as I would any of the others.\n\n\"We hear you, Stormfall,\" he repeated and he edged closer. \"The Emperor understands now. He's agreed to lift the sentence on your head. Please let me remove your bands and he will tell you himself.\"\n\nThe morning air cooled my bloodied flesh, the rising sun warmed it. The rising sun was gold. Gold like Aryss and Chryseum. Gold like Summerday the wicked. I missed her now, wished she could have been here for this most remarkable night. I hoped she was dead. Dead like Ruby, dead like Towndrell or Bonesnap or SeaTorrent, no longer victim to the service of men.\n\nDead like Stormfall of the Udan Shore.\n\nRue dropped to his knees, covered his face with his hands.\n\nI should have been moved but I was stone. No, after this day, I was ash.\n\n\"I hear you, Stormfall,\" said Cassien Cirrus and he stepped up beside Rue. \"But you need to hear me. I'm am going to remove your band.\"\n\nMy heart leapt into my throat. There would be fire there soon enough.\n\n\"If you kill me, they will kill Rue. If you fly, they will kill Rue. If you fly and take him with you, they will kill us \u2013 all of the Shadow Flight. So I ask you to lay aside your pride, listen to the Emperor and consider his request before you decide. Will you do this for me? Will you do this for Rue? Will you do this for these magnificent dragons who have wept and sung and bled for you tonight?\"\n\nHis words, echoing like a whisper in my mind. Invasions, always invasions. A dragon was never his own unless he was free or dead.\n\nI growled, a long rumbling sound that shook my chest. Centurions rattled their spears but Cirrus held up his hand, stopping them.\n\nI did not kill him.\n\nAfter a long moment, he reached down to Rue's side, removed the key and approached slowly. He knelt to examine the band. It also was embedded into the scales of my throat, slippery with blood and ooze. After three good twists, it clicked and band fell away, hitting the stone with a clink.\n\nI slid my eyes over to him.\n\nI could turn him to ash with one breath. With one thought, he would be little more than salt at my feet, cinders floating on the wind. He laid a hand on my neck, ran it across my bloodied shoulder. I did not flinch, but neither would I admit how good it felt. I bared my teeth and snarled. He ignored me, knelt to unlock the chain around my rear leg. The flesh peeled away and it stung bitterly as he worked but soon, it too fell to the stone.\n\nHe stepped back and back again, laid a hand on Rue's shoulder, helped pull the boy to his feet. He staggered as he rose, Rue did, and I wondered at that. But I didn't care. I pushed myself to my own feet, the knuckle-claws of my wings bare to the bone and suddenly, there was a hush from the Flight dragons above and beside.\n\nNo more saddle. No band or chain or rider.\n\nI threw myself back onto my hind legs, unfurled my tattered wings and blew fire, hot and white into the morning sky. It felt good; the burning breath as it scorched the back of my throat, the searing flame that rolled between my teeth and off my tongue. I sent my fire as tribute to my father, Draco Stellorum, as he closed his eyes for the night.\n\nAbove and beside and all around, the last of the night lit up like Hallow Fire. Down the hillside and across the city, through the docks and for as far as anyone could see, plumes sprayed the dawn like a hail of arrows as every unbanded dragon in Terra Remus trumpeted with fiery breath.\n\nFinally, I returned to the stone, shook my mane of spikes and turned my weary eyes upon the riders, one in silver, one in black. They had come to take me to their Emperor, the man who had once been senator of Bangarden then Primar of the Eastern Provinces, now Emperor of all Remus. The man that had me kill two dragons for sport; the man that sentenced me to death for trying to escape his prison of savagery and for treating sticks the way they treated us. The way they treated my people.\n\nMy people. The Skyborn.\n\nSo in the name of the Skyborn, I would.\n\nI took a lumbering step and the legions of centurions raised their swords, rattled their spears. I took another and then another, finding my one raw leg unsteady but I moved forward. Rue fell in step on one side, Cirrus on the other and together we exchanged the landing stone for the stair leading to the Curia. I left a trail behind me however, a slick of ooze and blood up the travertine steps.\n\nAryss called as I disappeared beneath the portico.\n\nI did not look back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "The Curia Terra Remus was not a fishing hut. It was not a labyrinth of stone tunnels like the Pits, or mesh domes like the Crown, or hewn rock like Celarus' Landing. This was unlike any place I'd seen and it was as beautiful as it was imposing. They could fit many dragons in here.\n\nMarble columns lined the way, easily ten wingspans high and polished to gleaming. The ceiling was plaster, carved with dragons, aurel leaves and scenes from history. The floors were travertine ice and cool to the touch. They echoed with every footfall, hissed as my tail dragged along behind. I felt very small as I made my way through these vast halls, passing one huge alcove after another toward a line of centurions at the far wall.\n\nThey stood around a large wooden table that was covered with parchments and papers. I smelled ink and wax and iron and I knew that these were generals in the Emperor's army, poring over maps and agonizing over strategies. They turned to stare at me as I lumbered in, and amongst them, a man in white robes trimmed with gold.\n\nI recognized him.\n\nHe turned to face us, said nothing for a long moment. Rue dropped to one knee while Cirrus stood like a statue, eyes fixed on a relief at the far end of the curia.\n\n\"Cassien Cirrus, I should have you flogged,\" said the man, his voice echoing through the marble. \"I told you I did not want this dragon here without a band.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus. \"But he would not come with one.\"\n\n\"He could kill us all with one breath.\"\n\n\"And you could kill him with one centurion.\"\n\n\"I doubt that very much.\"\n\n\"Here, you are equals.\"\n\nThe generals growled now but the thin man raised a brow.\n\nCirrus took a deep breath, eyes still fixed on the end of the hall.\n\n\"You are the Emperor of all Remus,\" he said. \"After last night, the Night of Dragonsong and Fire, perhaps he is the Emperor of all Dragons?\"\n\nEmperor of the Skyborn.\n\nIt took a moment, but a smile spread across the thin man's face. It was like a knife.\n\n\"That is the second act of insubordination, Cirrus. You will not be granted a third.\"\n\n\"Yes, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus. \"Thank you for your patience.\"\n\nThe man stepped forward. Centurions snapped their swords across their chests, generals moved to stand in front but he waved them all away with a bare arm. Fabric swept the floor as he moved toward us, stopping not an arm's length away from my jaws. I noticed the gleam of a golden aurel circlet in his thinning hair.\n\nBut I was the Emperor of the Skyborn.\n\n\"I've met you twice, Night Dragon,\" he said. \"First, back in Bangarden just before you destroyed my cousin's gate. Then in Salernum just before you destroyed the Crown. I am Septus Aelianus, Emperor of Remus, Divine First of the Sons of Ruminor. I have the power of life and death over all the men and dragons in this province.\"\n\nHe inclined his chin.\n\n\"Including you, Warblood of the Crown.\"\n\n\"He is not here as Warblood of the Crown,\" said Cirrus. \"He is here as Stormfall of the Citadel.\"\n\nThe Emperor smiled again.\n\n\"Oh, I don't think so,\" he said. \"Look at him. This is the Warblood I remember. The creature who killed Bonesnap of Belarius so swiftly, so savagely, that he tore the head off his body the way I might tear the wings off a moth.\"\n\nI remembered. It was a good kill.\n\n\"I once called you marvellous,\" he said. \"I would no longer describe you as such.\"\n\nHe was wrong. I had never been more magnificent than now.\n\nClasping hands behind his back, he began to walk a slow circle around me.\n\n\"Do you remember how many men died that day in the Crown, Cirrus?\"\n\n\"Twenty-seven, Imperator Augustus.\"\n\n\"Is that all?\" He raised a brow. \"I thought it was more. It seemed like more.\"\n\n\"Twenty-seven killed, over one hundred scorched.\"\n\nThe man grunted. He was at my tail now. One lash and I would break both his legs.\n\n\"We went to see him, you and I,\" he said. \"I wanted to see if it was the same funeral dragon who impressed all the rich dying in Bangarden, but you? You wanted to see if this Warblood was the same young fishing drake who could disappear into the night sky like the smoke from a fire. It was a bold plan, Cirrus. Bolder even, because you refused to kill him when you were ordered to do so. You could have been executed for that.\"\n\nHe threw a glance over his shoulder.\n\n\"Ruminor smiled on you for your boldness that day. He spared your life. As did I.\"\n\n\"Ruminor smiles on us all,\" said Cirrus.\n\nThe Emperor was at my shoulder now. He paused.\n\n\"But then he was gone,\" said the Emperor. \"Like the Eyes at Dawn. I wonder how that happened? Ruminor was not smiling then, was he?\"\n\nCirrus clenched his jaw but said nothing. The Emperor glanced down at Rue, still bent like a storm willow. He had not once looked up.\n\n\"Is this his rider?\"\n\n\"Yes, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"He looks like a soul-boy.\"\n\n\"Yes, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus. His eyes remained forward. Rue's remained on the ground.\n\n\"Imagine that,\" said the Emperor. \"A soul-boy riding a war dragon. What an inexplicable place our world has become.\"\n\nHe dropped a hand onto to Rue's head, patting him once, twice, three times. It infuriated me. I wanted to snap my jaws around that hand, just like I had Philius', taste the bone crunch under my teeth.\n\nMy heart was as black as my hide.\n\nThe Emperor moved back to the table, laid a ringed hand on one of the maps.\n\n\"According to our espionars,\" he said. \"This is where she is being kept, here, on the fourth hill of Nathens. Are you convinced you can make it there?\"\n\n\"We can make it, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"And how long does it take?\"\n\n\"Five days to cross the Nameless Sea by ship,\" snapped a general in bronze and leather. \"Even a trireme cannot make it faster.\"\n\n\"A dragon can,\" said Cirrus. \"It's three days by dragon.\"\n\n\"You will head out before the fleet,\" said the Emperor. \"If you fail, they will not.\"\n\nCirrus nodded swiftly.\n\n\"And once there, do you think this soul-boy and his bloody dragon can do what we ask of them?\"\n\n\"I do, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"Can you make them?\"\n\n\"They are Skyborn, Imperator Augustus,\" said Cirrus. \"Trained to do the will of the Remoan people.\"\n\nThe Emperor grunted.\n\n\"The will of the Remoan people is to eat, drink and let blood in the games.\"\n\nHe turned back as if to study the maps.\n\n\"I will rescind the death sentence on Warblood, Jewel of the Crown of Salernum if you are successful in Lamos.\"\n\n\"We will be successful in Lamos,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"Of course you will,\" said the man. \"After that show, the bloody dragonsong all day and all night, I have no doubt of that. I've never witnessed such a thing in all my life. Perhaps he is the Emperor of Dragons, now. Hmm, Draco Imperator. What an inexplicable world\u2026\"\n\nTwo of the generals laughed and he glanced over his bare shoulder, smiled.\n\n\"We will see if he is Stormfall of the Flights or Warblood of the Crown,\" he said. \"For in the same way he presented me the head of Bonesnap of Belarius, he will present me with the head of the Lamoan drakina.\"\n\nHis smile a knife once more.\n\n\"He must become a Killer of Dragons once more to prove to me that he is no longer a Killer of Dragons. What a marvellous, brutal, inexplicable world\u2026\"\n\nThe generals surrounded him and with that simple gesture, we were dismissed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Killer of Dragons.\n\nKiller of Dragons.\n\nWarblood, Undefeated Jewel of the Crown of Salernum, Killer of Dragons and Men, tasked with the greatest task of all \u2013 killing the golden drakina of Nathens.\n\nI perched on the high bank above the harbour, the sun warm on my skin even as the ocean breeze was cool. I breathed it in, allowing the smell of salt to take me back to a happier time. I could see fishing skiffs with young dragons in the prows, some heading out, others returning home. They were oblivious, those young dragons. They couldn't imagine the life that was waiting for them, one of carts and wheels and harnesses and whips. If they were lucky, they would die in a hurricane or in the jaws of a Black Monitor, not under the axe of a stick.\n\nRue was sitting next to me, arms wrapped round his knees. He had made no move to tend my wounds but I'm not sure I would have let him. It all made sense now; the special training, the night raids. He had known what they wanted of me for a very long time, I suspected. Cirrus too. That was why he spared me that day on the mountain after my escape from the Crown. I gazed at Ironwing, dozing in the afternoon sun, wing talons crossed beneath his chin. He was large, elegant and majestic. But somehow the silver coat seemed a little duller, the armour a little more tarnished than it ever was before.\n\nNext to him, Aryss, fanning her wings in the breeze. As beautiful as Summerday and just as wicked. She was Galla's dragon, working for the Emperor just as her rider was. I studied her, remembering the time I found her in my den. There had been blood on her wing but I never cared enough to investigate. I was still struggling with the thought that it had all been a ruse.\n\nI had hoped to be her drake.\n\nRue was shaking his head. I could hear whispers of his thoughts but I ignored him, turned my eyes back to the harbour and the boats and the dragons. They were preparing to cross the Nameless Sea with a hundred ships and even more dragons. The ships had red-striped sails but it was the oars that gave them strength and speed. And on the prow of each ship, a dragon tethered to a bronze ram. I remembered how Rue would attach my harness and I would pull the little skiff while he rowed against the tides. This was the same, only bigger.\n\n\"You should go,\" Rue said. He was looking out over the sea as well, likely remembering our time on the water. \"Go north. Venitus is north, so your aerie is north too. Go now before they leave. I'll be fine.\"\n\nTears. Tiny rivers of water glistening on his cheeks like rivers. Sticks didn't know how much like the elements they were, didn't realize they were made of earth and rain. Dragons were made of wind and fire. Maybe we were meant to be together, uniting the elements in universal balance.\n\nThen again, when so many killed and died, maybe not.\n\n\"They won't kill me,\" he lied. \"But if they do, it'll be for the best. Ruminor still hasn't given my soul back so there's no point in living like this. I wonder if there's a place where soul-boys go when they die.\"\n\nThe harbour cliffs were a mosaic of scales. There were more dragons here than in the Corolanus Markets, more than in the Pits, and more even than in the Citadel where they lived and worked by the hundreds. In fact, I never knew there were this many dragons in all the world.\n\nI thought of the golden drakina of Nathens. She likely had no idea she was at the center of a war between nations, between mythical brothers. All she would care about would be her clutch, and I realized that if there was in fact a clutch, then at some point there would have been a drake. Was he still there in Nathens, or was she gravid when she had been stolen?\n\nHad she, in fact, been stolen?\n\nAll stories told by sticks. They lied like they breathed, not even knowing how or why.\n\nI had no band at my throat, no chain at my foot. I had no saddle nor bridle nor even rider. At this very moment, I could leap into the sky and be gone, follow the earth force back to the Anquar Cliffs and the aeries of my people. I could do that, return to my home and fight for the Fang and take mates and live until I died a great island of a drake, leaving only young dragons and old stories in my wake.\n\nBut then, all these would die.\n\nI remembered the cannons \u2013 the flash of the iron and balls of lead that tore dragons apart; that rendered their wings little more than ash and crushed their chests like mountains. These War Dragons knew nothing of Lamoan cannons. They would feed the Monitors and the sea snakes and Draco Oceanus, the great Dragon of the Sea.\n\nAll I ever wanted was my freedom.\n\nIf I didn't go, Rue would die as well. They would kill him. Even if I took him far, far away, he would never be able to return to the world of sticks. He would be alive but he would be alone. As alone as he'd been all his life.\n\nAll he ever wanted was a soul.\n\nCould I give him that?\n\nIf Lamos lost her dragon, Remus would reign supreme.\n\nIf Lamos had cannons and dragons, Remus would be forced to change.\n\nBut all these dragons \u2013 the Skyborn that had roared and sung and breathed fire all night for me, those that I had called my people \u2013 would be dead.\n\nI stole a glance at him, the boy weeping at my side. In point of fact, he was no longer a boy but a man, as much as I was no longer a young drake. I was a dragon with horns and with a mane of spines and a heart that had been turned to stone.\n\nI watched the water roll down his cheeks.\n\nWater could crack stone. Water could shatter it.\n\nAll he ever wanted was his soul.\n\n\"My soul,\" he said quietly. \"And you.\"\n\nI turned my face to his, blew my warm breath across his neck. He reached up a hand to stroke my cheek.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Stormfall,\" he whispered. \"I'm sorry for all of this.\"\n\nAnd he pressed his face into mine, his tears running across my beak and onto my tongue.\n\nSalt. They were salt. Not like rain, but like the sea.\n\nHe was almost a dragon.\n\nWe left the shores of Terra Remus at noon."
            },
            {
                "title": "NAMELESS",
                "text": "It was good to be on the water once more.\n\nThe buffeting winds, the leaping whitecaps, the schools of silverfins and bloodbass and lemonwhites. Oh, the lemonwhites. I dove into them, mouth wide, scooping as I used to in my earliest days only this time, blowing the seawater out through my teeth and swallowing as many as I could at one time. It felt good to be eating them, crunching and chewing or swallowing as I willed. I was a dragon without band, free and fighting for my kind.\n\nIn fact, it was liberating. Rue had no saddle or bridle but clung to me with both arms, almost a part of my spines now for I was no tame dragon. I was no Flight Dragon, nor Pit dragon, nor fisher dragon. I was not Stormfall or Snake, Nightshade nor Hallowdown. I was not even Warblood. I was, like the vast sea we flew over, Nameless.\n\nThe Shadow Flight followed our lead, discarding saddles and bridles for the necessity of bareback. The colour coordination between dragon and rider was important now, and the riders flattened low along our backs. At a distance, it was difficult to see them at all, which was an effective strategy. We were flying into Lamos, where dragons had never been. If seen, the only way we would not raise an alarm would be as wild drakes, drawn to the nation because of the drakina.\n\nAt least, that was the theory.\n\nWe flew the first day low to the water and I showed them how to skim the surface for schools of silverfins. Silverfins loved the warmth and were easy to snag with little effort from above. Bloodbass next and I delighted to soar high only to plunge headlong into the depths at the flash of red, bringing up almost a dozen at one time. Rue quickly learned to leap from my back the moment I hit the water and I know the others watched with shock as I caught him on my back once I surfaced. It was a dance \u2013 dragon, water and stick, in that order. Rue knew it and danced along. We were more one than we had ever been, both freed slaves serving hard masters. Life was our master. Life and fate and destiny and death. But I wasn't Stormfall any more.\n\nPart of finding my new name, I reasoned. I knew nothing and everything. I was going to kill a dragon to save dragons. Nothing made sense anymore, but then again, I suppose it rarely had.\n\nI also taught the Flight how to rest on the surface of the water. They were mountain dragons accustomed to snow and rock and high altitudes. While these had been like those that had saved the Udan Shore, I distinctly remember Ironwing grooming himself afterward on the sand. Water was a stranger to them.\n\nIt came back like I had never left, the tucking of the wings and the forward lean, allowing the waves to hold my weight. Simply by example, I taught them to paddle their feet like the oars of a ship. It felt so good \u2013 the water between my toes, splashing on my chest, running down my arched neck. And my tail, steering like a rudder, made weightless by the ocean force pushing up against it. The salt stung the wounds raw from the Emperor's chains but it healed as well. Oh yes, it healed.\n\nThere was nothing between sea and sky but a vague difference in colour, a line that cut this world in two. Blue as far as I could see \u2013 clouds above, darker dips below. Before and behind, east, west, north and south. Only water and not water and dragons.\n\nAnd at night, I saw stars.\n\nStars over the ocean are unlike any stars over the land. They go on forever, longer and farther and deeper because the waters reflect them in the inky blackness. Even with both Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, Wide Open above, I was a part of it all, almost invisible in the night. The riders talked for a long time then, discussing plans in soft voices as if not daring to break the spell of an ocean night.\n\n\"You sure the maps are good, Cirrus?\" asked Chryseum's rider, a short, wiry man named Markus Platt.\n\n\"Octarius vouched for them,\" said Cirrus. \"The mercator paid with his life to get the maps to him.\"\n\n\"Why?\" said Galla and from my back, I could feel Rue turn to look at her. \"I mean, why would a Lamoan mercator want such information in the hands of their enemy?\"\n\n\"Because he wasn't a Lamoan mercator,\" said Rufus Dane, Jagerstone's rider. \"He was a Remoan espionar.\"\n\n\"The Empire has had espionars in Lamos for years,\" said Cirrus. \"This talk of dragons is not new.\"\n\nThere was a silence as the information settled in.\n\n\"So,\" said Rue. \"The maps will take us not only across the Nameless Sea but into Nathens as well?\"\n\n\"Getting to Nathens will be more than half the battle,\" said Cirrus. \"In two nights, we must pass through the Wall of Moons.\"\n\nDane hissed at that, raised his water skin to his lips.\n\n\"We won't have stars, Cirrus,\" he said.\n\n\"Ships do it,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"And ships have rudders,\" said Platt. \"I'm not about to ride backwards and keep a hand to steady Chryseum's tail, that's for gods-damned sure.\"\n\nThe golden drake snorted. So did Cirrus.\n\n\"They have the earth force,\" he said. \"That should keep us going in the right direction. The real danger will be altitude. It's hard even for dragons to stay level inside the Wall.\"\n\nBoth Dane and Platt grunted at that.\n\n\"Why?\" asked Rue. \"What is the Wall of Moons?\"\n\n\"Do you remember back when you were a fisher boy?\" said Cirrus. \"Of a time when the winds would die and the clouds would come down from the skies and you couldn't see anything or go anywhere because it was all fog?\"\n\n\"For days at a time,\" said Rue, nodding his head. \"We called it Ruminor's Veil.\"\n\n\"Well, Ruminor's Veil is for dead men,\" said Dane. \"It falls across the middle of the Nameless Sea. You can't see anything, you can't hear anything. It's like flying on a blind dragon.\"\n\nI thought of Summerday, beautiful and wicked and blind.\n\n\"You think you're going up,\" said Cirrus. \"But suddenly, you're going down. I've heard of riders hitting the ocean when they thought they were just under the clouds.\"\n\n\"Sometimes it's two-days thick,\" said Platt.\n\n\"That's all we need,\" said Dane. \"Fly for two days and come out of it right on the shores of Atha Lamos.\"\n\n\"And being blown out of the sky by their gods-damned cannons.\"\n\nThe men laughed quietly, experienced soldiers all.\n\nRue sighed, stretched out along my back and I knew he was thinking. Still, he fell asleep quickly with the sea rising and falling like the breath of a great dragon. It was beautiful and I was at home, a creature of sea and sky and stars. The Wide Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, watched over me as I slept.\n\nSelisanae, the Dragon of the Sun, rose to chase my father from the dawn and that morning, we feasted on entirely new types of fish before launching into the vast blue sky. We flew all day, high enough to taste the clouds but low enough to see shapes of large Black Monitors in the water. I had never been out so far without land in sight and it brought back memories of gluttony, of flashing teeth and storms sweeping me far away from home. When night came once again and with it the Wide Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, I was grateful to set down under his sleepy gaze, although I didn't trust that he'd protect me one bit.\n\nWe slept in loose formation, close but not touching, heads tucked over our backs. Rue slept between my wings and my neck, warmed by my body and rocked by the sea. I admit I dozed for the most part until I was roused by a sound breaking the waves.\n\nSwiftly, I raised my head, blinking in the blackness.\n\nI could see nothing. The Eyes were wide apart, casting light in different directions and I felt Rue stir as the cold air replaced my head.\n\n\"Stormfall?\" he asked.\n\nWrong, wrong, something was wrong. Danger was in the water and I barked to alert the others, pushing up from the surface, wings wide, neck arched, scanning the waves for a sign.\n\nThe dragons stirred, Ironwing lifting his majestic head, barely visible in the water's dark sheen.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Cirrus. \"Ships?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Rue and they fell silent, all ears straining to hear something, anything in the darkness. \"Stormfall?\"\n\nA splash to our left as a rolling hump crested then disappeared into the inky depths.\n\n\"Leviathan!\" shouted Markus.\n\n\"Monitor!\" shouted Rue and he grabbed my spines. \"Black Monitor. Get out of the water!\"\n\nFour sets of wings snapped open as the Shadow Flight leapt to the sky. Suddenly, Chryseum screeched, jerked downwards and the water churned as if boiling beside him. They went for the tail, I remembered and I saw his neck slap from side to side in agony. Golden wings beat the water but a massive shape surged beneath, scales glittering in the moonslight, and his body jerked lower. Red sprayed across the waves.\n\nHis rider, Markus Platt, clambered down the heaving spines, sword drawn, hacking savagely at the Monitor's flank. Above him, Ironwing wheeled and dove, plunging into the water like a falling star, talons extended, turning the ocean to steam with his breath. Chryseum screeched again, this time fire billowing from his mouth, illuminating the waves and the spray and the blood. A giant tail slapped the water and disappeared, tugging the thrashing drake deeper and flinging his rider into the waves.\n\nA second Monitor broke the surface now, its many rows of teeth flashing in the moonslight. Platt's scream was cut short and Chryseum's firebreath sizzled as water flooded his mouth. Ironwing leapt back into the night and from high above we watched the golden drake gurgle and lurch before being swallowed by the blood-red waves.\n\nThe four of us hovered above, our wings beating like rip currents across the top of the water. It boiled for some time afterwards but neither dragon nor rider surfaced.\n\n\"Black Monitors hunt at night,\" Rue said quietly. \"Those were big ones to take a grown dragon.\"\n\n\"We fly all night,\" Cirrus snapped. \"The time for sleep is done.\"\n\nAnd he leaned forward, taking Ironwing up into the sky, lit on both sides by the Wide Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum.\n\nHow many dragons had he seen die in his lifetime? Thousands? Tens of thousands? More?\n\nRue nudged me with his heels and I followed Jagerstone and Aryss into the stars. I felt nothing at the loss of Chryseum and his rider. It was the way of things, the alchemy of life and death and life. Monitors killed to live, to eat, just the same as dragons. Sticks had no power over this and were ultimately at the mercy of death, just like us. No, I admit that I felt nothing at the loss of this golden dragon.\n\nBut as my wings took me up, up, up into the shimmering night, I also admit that I was glad it wasn't Aryss who had fed Draco Oceanus that night.\n\nAnd perhaps that surprised me more than anything."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "We lost the Eyes during the night as the Wall of Moons settled in.\n\nWe flew without speaking, our wings beating a steady rhythm across the water, but the dawn never broke. The sky gradually turned from black to grey to white until we could see nothing but cloud and fog. It was impossible to see the ocean. It was impossible to see the sky. It was impossible even to see the horizon that separated the two. All was white and grey and rolling, like smoke from a water-soaked fire.\n\nIt was a very strange sensation because there were, quite simply, no sensations. Soon, my eyes became blind to anything but white, and I found my ears straining to hear any sound over the sweep of wings. Numb and senseless, even the air was an enemy. It was like flying through an endless vat of tiny needles but I was grateful for the irritation \u2013 at least it was something I could feel. I was a Night Dragon, lost in this world of white and grey, this Veil of Ruminor, this Wall of Moons. I desperately wished to settle onto the surface of the water but after the nightmare of black scales, I knew it was still safest in the skies.\n\nSo it was all I could do to keep my eyes fixed on Ironwing's great shape flying in front of me. His silver coat reflected the fog, however, and he slipped into and out of my vision as I struggled to keep up. To my left, I could make out the Hell Down shadow of Jagerstone followed by Aryss' sunny glow, but even those were fleeting vapours as cloud passed in between.\n\nI remembered this type of sea from my days as a fisher. The water beneath the fog wall would be as still as a stone, with not even a breeze to move it. It would settle over the docks for days and not a single skiff or barge would go out.\n\nFor hours we flew, dizzy and disoriented. Dragons have an innate sense of direction \u2013 a tribute to the earth force, Cirrus had said. We can tell if we're level or angled, veering left or veering right, but this? This was like flying without the earth force into a hole and at some point, my mind began to play tricks on me. Ironwing was above me, then below. No, above. Aryss on my left, then on my right, then on my left. I didn't think I was flying differently; certainly Rue made no sudden shifts or leans, but I gradually became aware of the sound of water growing closer. Voices next, not from the Shadow, and I strained to make some sense of our position when suddenly, the sails of a warship appeared before my eyes.\n\nSomeone screamed.\n\nIronwing hit first, cracking the mast like an old tree. I wheeled to avoid the double sails but I struck the top of the second mast with my wing. My talons caught in the rigging and I spun violently around, flinging Rue against my neck at the impact. Jagerstone was on my tail and followed me into the wooden beam, shattering it like cannon fire. I felt Rue's weight disappear and I knew he had been thrown.\n\nAll this in less than a heartbeat.\n\nA sound from nightmares as arrows whipped through the sky. Below me, sticks raced about on the deck of the ship, shouting in a strange tongue as timbers and ropes rained down from the sails. Caught in the rigging, I blasted it with dragonfire and was free within moments. Jagerstone, however, was tangled in the canvas, suspended and thrashing above the deck. Arrows shot up at him and I saw his rider pitch backwards, only to be caught in the rigging himself as arrow after arrow thudded into stone-grey leather. Ironwing was free but I could see through the fog a jagged tear in his wing. Wheeling into the chaos, Aryss blasted archers on the deck while I flew away from it, hoping to spy Rue before the arrows did.\n\nThere! His dark head bobbed in the water near the side of the ship. He saw me, raised his hands through the choppy surface. Arrows hissed, bringing fire of their own as they thudded into my neck, chest and side. I sprayed yellow flame across the deck before tucking my wings and diving. I caught Rue's arms and pulled him from the water as arrows whipped past me, peppering my tail with bites. I sprayed the deck with white fire this time, noticing the large eye painted on the curved prow as I flew past.\n\nLamos.\n\nRue climbed to my back and I circled down. Jagerstone had broken free of the burning rigging but two barbed spears were lodged in his throat and he flailed through the flames, smashing through oars and deck planks and seamen as he went. Finally, he toppled over the side, the splash sending a wall of water up and onto the deck.\n\nBoth Aryss and Ironwing scorched the ship in pass after pass and men leapt from the deck into the water, as if that would protect them from the kiss of dragons. I too swept downwards, setting all bobbing heads alight. Soon, the screaming died away, leaving only the crackling of the flames on canvas and wood and bone. Bits of burning debris floated in the water, and the Wall of Moons swallowed the smoke as if consuming it.\n\nFirst Ironwing, then Aryss, then I settled on to the top of the quiet water, to wait with Jagerstone as he died. The fog was as thick as ever, but we had no fear of Monitors. We had no idea of time any more, no idea of place or war or drakinas, only a slate grey drake retching flame and blood into the ocean in equal measure. Cassien Cirrus moved his dragon closer, carefully crossed over to the grey drake's back. He himself was bleeding from the head and arm, but he ignored it, pulling one bloody spear out Jagerstone's leathery neck. The drake moaned as Cirrus tried to move the second.\n\n\"Rue,\" said Galla.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" said Rue. He yanked a broken arrow from his side. \"Leather.\"\n\n\"You're bleeding.\"\n\n\"So are you.\"\n\nI watched as the silver rider bent, laying a hand over Jagerstone's eye. He was asking permission and for a moment, my black heart was moved. So I raised my voice in dragonsong, my deep pure notes echoing across the still water. Aryss joined me next, then Ironwing, and we serenaded our companion into the care of Draco Mortis. Cirrus rose to his feet, picked up the first spear and crossed over to stand on the shoulders of his silver. With barely a pause, he plunged it like a harpoon deep into the grey dragon's heart.\n\nWithout a sound, Jagerstone's body slipped into the deep.\n\nWe sat on the surface for a long moment, numb and pensive, until a crack shattered the silence. Still burning, the Lamoan warship had split in two, both fore and aft decks raised high in the air and the midships submerged. The aft deck disappeared swiftly, following Jagerstone with a hiss of froth and steam and snapping cables. But the foredeck, with its curved prow and great painted eye, took its time. It bobbed and groaned, rising higher into the air before sliding backward, slowly down, down, down into darkness, the Eye of Lamos watching us as it went.\n\nAll gone in a heartbeat. In a lifetime of fire and water, ash and blood.\n\nAnd with that, the wind picked up, moving the Wall of Moons away from us, little wisps of fog spinning in its wake. It revealed a sky bluer than Skybeak over a sea still running with blood. It seemed odd, irreverent even. We had lost Chryseum and Platt, Jagerstone and Dane in less than a day and we hadn't even reached the Lamoan shore. Sacrifices to Ruminor and his Veil.\n\n\"One more day,\" said Cirrus, examining the tear in his dragon's silver wing. \"We must push through one more day. Tell me now if you cannot.\"\n\n\"We don't have a choice,\" said Galla. \"We can't float on the sea forever. There's blood in the water and those leviathans will feast on our bones tonight.\"\n\n\"I don't want to fly back through that,\" said Rue. \"Ruminor's Veil is for dead men.\"\n\nThere was something in his breathing and I turned my head to look at him. His eye was swollen, his lip split in two and his leather was glistening darker than dark. I knew it wasn't from seawater. My heart of stone that had been broken by Rue's salt tears was turning to ash.\n\nWith bleeding limbs and charred hearts, we took to the skies.\n\nWe were over Atha Lamos by dusk."
            },
            {
                "title": "LAMOS",
                "text": "Atha Lamos was a port city, a ship-building city, a cannon-making city, so we made a point to fly very high above it. Below us, the lights of the city's torches made a complex pattern like the spokes of a carriage wheel. I remember Rue had once said that Lamos was shaped like a hand and Remus like a boot. Lamos, he had said, always reached to grasp the boot of his brother Remus who, being a boot, strove to crush the hand of his brother Lamos. I wondered how a legend of brothers could cause these peoples to go to war. Then again, the war was over dragons. Of all the possible causes, I suppose only dragons would be an acceptable one.\n\nAtha Lamos was also an island, the largest in a chain of islands that flanked the northwestern coast of the nation. It was built around a harbour that, from the air, resembled a perfect circle. It was as if one of the Wide Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum, had kissed the water, leaving an imprint in the ocean floor. Perhaps there had been three moons at one time, three mothers to the twins. Perhaps one had thrown herself into the sea after the battle between brothers, a sacrifice for peace in hopes for her children.\n\nI suppose my imagination was returning and I wondered why. There was no hope left in me, no life and my heart was as inky as my coat. But I had pride still. Perhaps there was enough of that for all of me.\n\nWe flew silently over this ship-building city, grateful for the blanket of stars that cloaked us. I was invisible, Ironwing near so but Aryss was the sun streaking across the sky and I knew we needed to land soon. Fortunately, this set of islands was an archipelago, as craggy as the Citadel and we settled on a peak overlooking the rugged coastline. A small herd of mountain shaghorns had watched our approach with curiosity, never having seen a dragon before, and we each snagged one as we flew past. After three days of fish, I was happy to be eating meat and I let the blood run down my chin with grim pleasure.\n\nThe leftovers we roasted for our sticks. It seemed the only blood they enjoyed was in their sport and so we sat that night with full bellies but raw bodies, numb to everything but the senses of the night. The rush of the mountain wind, the roar of the tides below. The Eyes were wide, the night was warm and while we couldn't risk a fire, Ironwing held one in his open mouth. It was like a great kiln and the flames billowed and danced over his tongue with each breath.\n\nCirrus rolled out the map.\n\nI had never seen a map before and it was intriguing to me. It was drawn on oiled animal skin, so it would keep the ink if wet, and there were sketches of land, water, mountains and beasts. The Nameless Sea separated Remus from Lamos and it looked indeed as if a hand were reaching up to grasp a boot. I could see the circular harbour that was Atha Lamos and all the little islands like blobs of ink. The mapmaker had been careful to draw leviathans and the Wall of Moons in the water, dragons on Remus, cannons on Lamos and a great many ships on both sides of the sea. There were also a great many symbols and I remembered that sticks had a complex language that included the transmutation of words into ink on parchment, paper and skin.\n\nI growled softly. Part of the reason they ruled as they did, I supposed. Dragons could only transmute fire.\n\n\"Here is Nathens,\" said Cirrus, pointing with a grimy finger. \"Two days to fly, and we'll stay to the mountains. Less chance of being seen.\"\n\n\"We could fly at night,\" said Rue. He looked very bad. His eye had swollen shut and his breathing was loud and wet.\n\n\"We might,\" said Cirrus. \"But it's hard to hide on land in the daytime. Easier to be in the sky.\"\n\n\"People don't look up,\" said Galla. \"Not usually.\"\n\n\"They must expect dragons,\" said Rue. \"Now that they have a laying drakina. Her scent will call drakes from everywhere.\"\n\n\"They have a dragon master,\" said Cirrus. \"And according to the espionar, he's Remoan.\"\n\nGalla hissed but Rue nodded.\n\n\"It makes sense,\" said Rue. \"Who in Lamos can tend and rear dragons? They have no experience.\"\n\n\"We will kill the drakina,\" said Galla. \"Then we will kill her master.\"\n\n\"Maybe we free the drakina and kill the master,\" said Rue.\n\nThey both looked at him.\n\n\"Why not?\" he asked and rose to his feet, laid a hand on my neck. \"The orders are to keep Lamos from getting dragons.\"\n\n\"The orders are to kill her,\" said Cirrus.\n\n\"But dragons killing dragons is not the way to end a war,\" Rue insisted. \"It just prolongs it.\"\n\nI looked at him now.\n\nMuch had changed in these past weeks at the Citadel, in the Torrent then the Shadow Flight, at the Curia and in the Nameless Sea. Hope and betrayal, life and sudden death. I had changed but perhaps more importantly, so had Rue.\n\n\"Lamos doesn't deserve dragons,\" he said and he stroked my jaw, cupped my spiny chin. \"But neither does Remus. We treat our dragons very, very badly.\"\n\nI grunted and smoke curled from one nostril.\n\n\"We're soldiers, Rue,\" said Cirrus. \"And we have orders.\"\n\nRue didn't turn to look at him.\n\n\"You've disobeyed orders before.\"\n\n\"We're all that stands in the face of open war,\" Cirrus said. He folded the map, tied it with a leather strip. \"How many of our people would you see die when the life of one dragon will stop it.\"\n\n\"Two dragons so far,\" said Galla. \"Chryseum and Jagerstone. This drakina will make three.\"\n\n\"And two men,\" said Rue.\n\n\"Three,\" said Galla. \"The espionar paid with his life. You said so yourself, Cirrus.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry Rue, but we kill the drakina and then we go home.\"\n\nRue sighed, stroked my face.\n\n\"It never ends with one,\" he said. \"It only begins.\" My heart swelled at his words. Here was the Rue who had been my kindred spirit, my stick, my fellow freed slave and I was happy to have him back. I arched my neck, pushed my long face into his body. He gasped and staggered back.\n\nBoth Cirrus and Galla bolted to their feet.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" said Rue. \"It's nothing.\"\n\n\"Show us,\" commanded Cirrus.\n\nReluctantly, Rue peeled back the layers of leather that protected him, revealing a puncture wound in the middle of his chest. The bruise was the size of his fist, but the wound was puckered, round and oozing.\n\nIt was from me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "I remembered the instant it happened. We had been flying blind and I had struck the warship's mast, spinning violently as the rigging caught my wing. The impact had slammed Rue forward into the spikes of my neck and punctured the leather at his chest. Cirrus was certain that there were several ribs broken, but what worried him most was the sound of Rue's breathing. If a lung had been pierced by either spike or shattered bone, then Rue could not ride, and if Rue could not ride, then the mission, whether deliverance or deathstroke, was lost.\n\nWhile it was still deepest night, Cirrus took Ironwing to find the brine clams that lived on rocky shores and shallow reefs. They had a poisonous jelly inside their shells that could be used to slow the spread of infection and hold back the sensations of pain. He hoped the Wide Eyes would light his path but left us the map in case they didn't.\n\nAryss was agitated for much of the night, grumbling and lashing her golden tail behind her. It was annoying, especially since she was next to me and would frequently lean over and nip my shoulder or neck. I didn't understand, nor did I care to. A heaviness had settled onto my chest and I knew it was because of Rue.\n\nGalla had built a small altar of stones and had not moved from it, rocking back and forth on her knees as she prayed. Rue watched her, propped up on his elbows, resting yet not at rest. At the first light of dawn, the tall woman pulled her sword and lifted it to her neck, slicing her long dark braid clean off. She laid it across the altar.\n\n\"Why did you do that?\" asked Rue. His voice was strong but I could hear a catch in it.\n\n\"I asked Ruminor to accept my sacrifice,\" she said.\n\n\"You sacrificed your hair?\" said Rue.\n\n\"The braid is a token,\" she said. She rose to her feet, touched her forehead with the flat of the blade and slid it into her belt. \"If he spares you, he may have me.\"\n\n\"That's a stupid bargain,\" said Rue. \"I'm not dying.\"\n\nShe moved toward us, knelt before him. Beside me, Aryss began to nibble my mane.\n\n\"It's the only one I can give,\" she said. \"I have only two things of worth \u2013 my dragon and my hair. I will never sacrifice my dragon.\"\n\nAryss' nibbles quickly turned to bites and I growled, lashed my tail this time.\n\n\"Your life is worthy,\" said Rue. \"And you are a skilled dragoneer.\"\n\nShe took his hand in hers, spread her fingers in between his. Golden and dark, like stripes along a dragon's back.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Rue.\"\n\n\"It's my own fault,\" he said. \"I'm not a rider. Not really.\"\n\n\"No, I mean\u2026\" She leaned down, kissed his forehead. \"For Aryss. For me. All I ever had was the Flight, until you.\"\n\n\"Did you ever love me?\"\n\n\"From the moment we first met,\" she said. \"It wasn't strategic.\"\n\n\"I know.\" And he blinked slowly.\n\nAryss trilled in my ear, nipped again. I grumbled but she leaned into me, rubbing her cheek along my neck. Her purrs quickened my blood like a pulse. She was acting as though she was in season and I wondered if it had anything to do with her rider.\n\n\"You're the only one who ever made me feel beautiful,\" said Galla and she straddled him, pulled at the fabric of her leggings.\n\n\"You're the only one who looked at me as anything other than a soul-boy,\" Rue said, helping her.\n\n\"Has your soul come back yet?\"\n\n\"Maybe it never will,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't want to lose you.\"\n\n\"I'm not dead yet.\"\n\n\"Really?\" She grinned sadly. \"Prove it.\"\n\nAnd he reached up with his hand, pulling her face down to meet his.\n\nTheir behavior was curious. I had never seen sticks mating. Had never really let my mind consider the thought but now with Aryss writhing against me, it was all I could do to ignore them. It was almost beat for beat, blood for blood, the passion of dragon and rider. I remembered the old man Plinius and how he reached into my mind like a wave upon the shore and made my legs buckle in response. Sometimes when we were flying, I just knew where Rue wanted me to go, how he wanted me to fly, without a single cue from rein or leg. I hated that sensation, resisted with every scale on my night-black body. Just another of the ways sticks controlled us dragons, with the power of their thoughts. I wanted to observe more but when Aryss arched her back to welcome me, all my observations quickly turned to ash and stars.\n\nSometimes I think too much.\n\nRegardless, while the sticks mated quietly, the dragons did not. I believe we may have altered the rock formations of this particular island, perhaps caused a small landslide that killed a few more shaghorns. There was a distant boom that sounded like cannonfire but we were occupied with the entanglement of tails and limbs. It was the first time I had mated with a drakina that was not banded and I'm convinced that because of our fire, there is one patch on the peak where still nothing will grow.\n\nAs I've said before, the mating of dragons takes much time and it was noon before we flew back up to the peak. We had snagged two other shaghorns and shared them with our riders. Mating for sticks seemed to be as consuming as it was for dragons and they ate their fill on the meat we roasted. Or perhaps, Rue did not eat as much. I stretched out in the warm coastal sun and slept until the air grew cool and the Eyes rose over the waters.\n\nBy nightfall, neither Cirrus nor Ironwing returned and the sticks talked in terse, low whispers. Finally, Rue rose to his fee and approached on unsteady legs.\n\n\"Stormfall,\" he said and he held out the map.\n\nI breathed it in \u2013 the scent of ink and leather and Ironwing. I knew the silver dragon's scent well by now but I opened my mouth, closed my jaws over the map, tasting it, inhaling it again and again, imprinting it in my very scales.\n\n\"But be careful,\" he added. \"Because you must return before morning. No matter what, if you don't find them by first light, you must come back. We must go on, otherwise it's all in vain.\"\n\nIt was all in vain, I thought. Remus, Lamos, Ruminor, sticks, me. We were all vain. I don't know who was worse.\n\nWith a powerful stroke of my wings, was up in the dark sky above the peak. It was comforting to know that Aryss watched me go."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "I followed the route we had taken back along the island chain \u2013 over the waters and craggy peaks and distant villages. It all looked the same, I thought. The same as Remus from the sky and I cursed the sticks' need for nations and boundaries. They were possessive. They lived to possess. Lands, noxen, barns, even other sticks. Dragons possessed nothing but territory and even then, could share as long as there was enough food and drakinas to go around. And with our great wings, we could easily find new territory for aeries and nesting and hunting. The sticks had carts and carriages and ships \u2013 surely they could move as easily as dragons.\n\nI wondered if pride were somehow involved.\n\nAnd so it was with such philosophizing that I followed the scent of the silver dragon until the distant flickering spokes of Atha Lamos came into view. However, I also smelled fresh water and my tongue suddenly reminded me of its existence by sticking to the roof of my mouth.\n\nIt was late, it was dark and I was thirsty so I followed the scent down, sweeping over the clay rooftops as I never had done in Bangarden or Venitus or Terra Remus. This was remarkably similar to those cities however, even to the smells and sounds of a city at night. Soon, I found myself circling above a public fountain in a town square, surrounded by mud-brick homes and lit only by the Wide Moons.\n\nSilently, I landed on the cobbled street, listened to the waters as they splashed and bubbled in the fountain's pool. Ocean water was drinkable for dragons but fresh, ah, the smell of this was sheer bliss. It was both fountain and well, and I lumbered forward, dropping my jaws into it, drinking deeply and enjoying the cool, refreshing streams as they ran down my throat.\n\nA new scent met my nostrils and slowly, I lifted my head. A woman stood mere paces from me, wrapped in tattered linen and holding an amphora in both arms. She had not seen me in the darkness and was clearly terrified at finding a dragon in the city square.\n\nShe was not a Laomoan monster. She was not at all like what I had been led to believe by Rue and the others. In fact, she reminded me of Avea, Allum's wife from Bangarden. I reached out my beak. Her eyes widened, the clay pot trembled in her arms, but she did not scream or run or faint. I breathed in the scent of her clothing, her hair, her skin, reasoned that she was a mother of children from the milk on her robes. Breathed out on her face to gift her the scent of dragons.\n\nThe amphora slipped from her arms, shattering on the stone of the road.\n\nI snorted and gathered myself to launch into the night sky, careful not to flick her with my tail as I went.\n\nI followed the smell of the silver dragon into the city and I felt my heart sink. This was not good. Surely there were brine clams along the shores closer to the Mating Peak and I vaguely remembered the boom of cannonfire almost hidden by the chaos of mating dragons. I soared now over the vast dockyards and the scent of iron filled my nostrils. There was also the salt and the fish and the wood oil and the smoke. Other than the iron, it was the smell of my youth.\n\nOne pier was brightly lit, a beacon of activity in an otherwise quiet night so I angled toward it, hearing the sounds of a crowd echoing across the water. From the deck of a large ship, a treadwheel crane lifted a large net over the dock. Sticks waved torches beneath it, and between the netting a great mass gleamed like silverfins.\n\nMy heart stopped its beating as I winged my way towards the net. It was what I had feared, what I had know, deep in my deepest heart of darkness, for I was a creature of the night and the ash and the stars.\n\nBlackness in my wings and death at my claws.\n\nThe silver in the net wasn't fish.\n\nI swept down over the crowd, raining fire across their murderous heads. They bolted, screaming in all directions and I torched them as they ran, burning the people, the dock and its wooden treadwheel. Up I circled into the night sky, watching the flames races across the oily pier before I bore down once again, this time scorching the ship and all its crew in this pass.\n\nI was the night. I was the nightmare.\n\nI was Nameless, primal dragon of the night and the ash and the stars. I roared in fury as I sprayed both docks and ships with white fire, the purest and hottest of all the fires we can breathe. Cables snapped and canvas raged under the heat. As I flew, I sprayed my white fire along the netted body of Ironwing, the most majestic of dragons, so that he would suffer no more from sticks. I heard the boom of a cannon and in a heartbeat I whirled, the iron ball streaking past my belly. I followed it to its source, sending a blast of white fire into the black mouth of the Lamoan warship before wheeling back into the sky. It burst into flames with one, two, three explosions behind me and I rode the blast of heat and light up high above the dockyards into the coolness of the night.\n\nOther cannons fired now from other ships but I was far out of reach and their iron destruction whipped beneath me to rain down on other far parts of the city. Below me, fires raged along the docks and ships blazed as they rocked on the waters but it was nothing. Nothing compared to what they had done, to how carelessly and thoughtlessly they had slaughtered the most majestic of dragons. As if he were a sea snake. As if he were a wyrm.\n\nAnd in that moment, I hated them all, more than I hated the Remoans. I vowed to Ironwing that I would kill this traitor drakina and her master and all the sticks that dared defend them. I would smash her eggs and devour her fledglings and fly with Aryss to the Fang of Wyvern where I would sing the dragonsong every night and burn every ship that ever dared pass.\n\nThe sun was stretching her fingers of pink into the dawn sky when I returned to the Mating Peak. I was not a stick. I had no words. I had no language but I lowered my head as Rue and Galla rushed toward me and they knew what I knew. And I sang for him, for noble Ironwing, elegant and proud, majestic and regal leader of the Shadow Flight of Remus. Aryss sang too and together we let Lamos know that if they dared court dragons, dragons would come.\n\nAnd we would deliver the fire."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE FOUR HILLS",
                "text": "Those next days, we made our way to the Four Hills of Nathens. We flew all day, all night, all day and all night again, following the mountains as they followed the map. We stayed just below the clouds and while it was very cold at such an altitude, it served to keep our riders awake even at night. One of the moons was waning and it was more difficult for Aryss to see in the dark. She flew just beneath and slightly behind me, our wings beating the same rhythm, catching the same winds. While we saw many towns with many flickering torches, they were for the most part distant and that eased my mind. I had announced the presence of dragons loud and clear to the people of Lamos and in doing so, lost the element of surprise. For a night dragon, it was a bad strategy.\n\nNathens was the capital city of Lamos and I remember Cirrus speaking of how it had originally been built between the Four Hills as a tribute to Fulcanor, the god of forges and fire. Back then, the mountains had breathed fire, frequently spewing flame and molten rock out the top. Lamos, brother of Remus, refused to move his settlement and ultimately sacrificed his daughter, Nathena, to appease his god. Apparently, it was an acceptable sacrifice, for the mountains ceased their eruptions and the liquid flame quietly turned to arcstone. The Four had been quiet for decades, if not longer.\n\nI thought about Galla's sacrifice \u2013 her token and her bargain \u2013 and wondered if my father, Draco Stellorum, was waiting for a similar gift from me. How many dragons would die to appease him? Would I die to secure peace for my people? Should I?\n\nI have said before, dragons are not a sentimental people. Perhaps, it was just me.\n\nAs we approached Nathens, it was easy to see the Four Hills from the glow of the city surrounding them. In fact, it reminded me very much of Terra Remus for there was a large body of water in the distance. I tried to remember the map, if it was a part of the Nameless Sea or new water entirely. What was distracting, however, was the smell of arcstone rising on the wind. It made sense. If the Hills had once coughed fire, then the sticks could easily mine arcstone from the earth for their cannons.\n\nMy heart tightened at the memory \u2013 the warships and the crowds and the high net of silver.\n\nI never knew what happened to Cirrus. This was one time when I cursed the imagination of dragons.\n\nLights from the city stretched on and on and we were quickly losing the cover of night. One of the Hills was very near and looked to be unpeopled and wild. There were four very tall columns on the peak and as we winged closer, I could see that they were statues, one facing each direction and as tall as a dragon from beak to tip of tail. I could feel Rue tense on my back as I swept through the darkness toward them. It was blacker than black under the Winking Eyes of my father, Draco Stellorum \u2013 one miscalculation would mean a broken wing or shattered skull or worse. He held his breath as we bore down.\n\nLike the dragon arches of the Celarus' Landing, I sliced between the columns just as easily as we had that night. Immediately, my wings snapped to stop my forward motion and I was pleased that Rue did not jerk forward at the force. I dropped silently to the warm, dry stone and the drakina circled once more before landing beside me, her golden claws touching the ground moments after mine.\n\nNo one had heard us. Certainly no one had seen. Our position from this first Hill gave us a perfect vantage point \u2013 I could see the city of Nathens spread out like a wheel, lanterns and torches flickering like stars. Just like stars, I thought, as we settled down for our first sleep in two days. I spread my inky wings over dragon and riders as my father, Draco Stellorum, slipped away under the skirts of the dawn.\n\nI wondered where he went, that great starry dragon I called my father. To his lair under the sea? Perhaps he was devoured by the Selisanae, Golden Drakina of the Sun, only to return again each night, reborn or regurgitated. And not for the first time, I thought of my mother.\n\nI closed my eyes, hoping that thoughts of the aerie, the sea snakes and the Fang of Wyvern would carry me off to sleep but a fleeting scent drifted through the night, and after that, I could not sleep because of my racing heart.\n\nIt was the scent of a dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "A wall of dark cloud was moving in from the east and I could smell a storm on the wind.\n\nIt was difficult to wake Rue that evening. His breathing had grown worse and now, as the sun dipped behind us and the sky grew red, Galla knelt beside him, rubbing his shoulders and calling his name. It was not the first time I'd thought he might die. The first time was after the Lamoan pirate attack, when Serkus had beaten him and I'd not seen him for years. The second time was after his fall from the net of dragons, when I'd caught him in midair. They were so fragile, these sticks. A sip of black water could kill them as easily as a whiptail. As I watched Galla try to rouse him, I realized that I didn't want that to happen. He was my stick. I needed him.\n\nMore.\n\nI needed him more than I needed the sky. More than I needed the sea or the stars or my pride. He couldn't die.\n\nShe ground her knuckles into his chest and he opened his eyes with a gasp.\n\nI had seen many dragons die in my short lifetime. Sticks were different. I remembered Gavius and his children; the way they had hugged me and kissed my face after the plow on the hillside. Their loud screams and louder silence as the little house collapsed under the indigo dragon. The smell of death from Bangarden and the wailing of the people as they poured from the walls. The shrieks of the soldiers as they burned in the Crown. So fragile and yet they ruled the world.\n\nThe net of silver moved me to fury but what of noble Cassien Cirrus, First Wing of the Eastern Quarter Dragoneers and leader of the Shadow Flight? Surely he was dead as well. Why didn't I mourn for him? Why were some sticks enemies and others, idols? Did the hard, cruel stone of life shape them as it shaped dragons? Were they as helpless as we?\n\nGalla helped Rue sit up, passed him a skin of fresh water. He gulped it greedily as she put a hand to his forehead. I could feel heat coming from him. He was earth and sea, now he was becoming fire. If ever a stick turned into a dragon, it would be Rue.\n\nI looked over at Aryss. Between the large statues on the peak of the hill, she was watching the city, her gaze intent and fixed. She was magnificent, I realized, the setting sun causing her scales to gleam like molten fire. I thought of Summerday, glorious, wicked and blind. I thought of the drakina and her seven chicks in the Anquar Cliffs. This was the gold that dragons loved, not jewels or trinkets or crowns or treasures. The gold of a fiery soul, pure as anything in the sea or the sky or the stars.\n\nThis drakina I was to kill was gold.\n\nI moved beside Aryss to cast my eyes out over the sparkling city. An angry wind was picking up, bringing scents of arcstone, dragon and Hell Down. I could almost see her, this rogue drakina I was meant to kill, and I lashed my tail, tossed my head so that my mane of spikes slapped against my neck. Rogue dragon, indigo dragon, death dragon. No dragon could ever be understood by sticks. They laid words on us to reduce us to the size of their language. This drakina was either slave or free; trapped against her will, or simply doing what dragons did, sitting a nest and hoping for life. I could free her as easily as kill her although I had vowed to Ironwing her death. The thoughts warred within me but I was used to that.\n\n\"We'll do a sweep first,\" said Galla. She laid out the map, was struggling to hold it down with palm and knee as the wind threatened to lift it from the rock. \"Take a look at that fourth Hill where the drakina is being held.\"\n\n\"How is she being held?\" asked Rue. He was hugging his knees and to me, looked very young. \"In an open pen or roofed building?\"\n\n\"It doesn't say,\" she said.\n\n\"You'd think that if the espionar actually saw her, he'd have drawn it on the map.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2014\"\n\n\"Is she laying or has she laid?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Because if she's laid, then we have eggs to consider. Or even hatchlings.\"\n\n\"I'm not Cirrus. I don't know.\"\n\n\"He should have told us. That's important information.\"\n\n\"He didn't.\"\n\n\"And now he's gone, leaving us with a map that answers no question but where.\"\n\n\"It's enough.\"\n\n\"And if she's not there?\"\n\nGalla said nothing, looked down at the map.\n\n\"If we can free her,\" he said finally. \"We free her.\"\n\n\"If,\" said Galla. \"And if not, Aryss and I will be decoy. The guards will think their dragon escaped and give you a better chance.\"\n\n\"To free her.\"\n\n\"Yes. Fine. Whatever you want.\"\n\nI would kill her. I had made a vow.\n\nRue staggered to his feet when a fit of coughing caused him to double up. Blood splattered on the rock at his feet. He straightened, drew in a deep, shuddering breath. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.\n\nMy chest tightened within me at the sight. He was dying. This boy that had saved my life, shaped me the way waves soften a stone, was dying.\n\n\"Stormfall and I should go alone,\" he said. \"That was always the plan. That's why Cirrus wanted the night dragon.\"\n\n\"You're not well.\"\n\n\"Well enough for this.\"\n\n\"Can you even ride?\"\n\n\"I can ride,\" he said and he laid a hand on my neck. It felt good, almost like the first days. Life had turned me to stone since then. Life had turned me to ash.\n\nHe couldn't die.\n\n\"I'm coming with you,\" she said, folding the map and slipping it back into her golden leather.\n\n\"In case we fail?\"\n\n\"To make sure you don't.\"\n\nThey stared at each other for a long moment, before he reached a hand toward her. She took it, allowing him to pull her to her feet. She reached into a leather pouch, produced three fingers of slime and wiped it across her face. It shimmered like gold in the twilight.\n\nRue grunted, pulled out a pouch of his own. Soon, his face was as black as my wings and I understood their strategy. If possible, we were meant to be seen as wild dragons, not a Remoan raiding party. Lamos might think twice if wild dragons brought a rain of fire and destruction on their lands.\n\nI had already given them a taste of that at Atha Lamos.\n\nI could smell the gathering clouds, the coming storm, the fury of Hallow Fire and the terror of Hell Down. It was like a billowing wall moving from the east and as the sun fled over the mountains, I looked up at the statues that had been our guardians during the day. I hadn't truly seen them earlier but now, on the verge of leaving, it was important to me to study them. To truly see them, mark them in my mind like a memory stone.\n\nThey were statues of men, facing the four directions of the world. The one with face to the south was of a man with arms raised to the sky, holding the sun in his hands. The one with face to the west was the same man, holding a sword in one hand and a severed head in the other. The one with face to the north was the man stomping a dragon under his feet and the man with face to the east was holding a dead child in his arms. Such beauty in tragedy and I wondered if this were a common thread in all of life. Sacrifice and fury, death and revenge. Perhaps this was not a thread, but simply life. Perhaps there was nothing beyond these mortal things.\n\nI snorted as Rue climbed onto my back. I was a Flight Dragon and this was a time of war. I would kill this drakina like a nox and move on.\n\nWith the wind biting at my eyes, I leapt into the sky. The eastern statue watched as I went, dead child of stone in his arms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "The wind was loud but my pulse was louder. Flashes of Hallow Fire split the sky and my wings strained against the clouds. I couldn't get there fast enough. Deathstroke or Deliverance. I didn't care which. Stormfall wasn't flying tonight, nor was Warblood. I was Nameless like the sea and I knew it wasn't only the drakina's fate that would be determined tonight.\n\nThe Second Hill of Nathens was crowned by an extensive complex of buildings. Curia, ramps, walls and agorae. It was clearly habited, with lanterns flickering between marble columns and torches whipping in the stormy wind. They had no emperor, I had heard. Not like Remus. Lamos was ruled by a council of rich and powerful citizens, and I wondered which of them had given the order to secure a dragon. A bold move, clearly inviting war. We gave it a wide berth and continued east.\n\nOn the Third Hill of Nathens, a solitary temple rose out of the mountain, with columns and pillars, arches and gates. Smoke from incense that struck my nose like a wall. Another statue towered over the complex, this one helmed and holding a golden spear. I debated snatching it with my feet as we flew but I restrained myself and we pressed on toward the fourth.\n\nBelow us, the city sprawled in the darkness, shutters closed over windows to keep out the wind and blowing sand. I could smell her now, dragon scent mixed with shearer blood and arcstone. I wondered if it were deliberate, masking her scent the way the Torrent coated their dragons with coal for the night raids. There would be no need to mask her, I reckoned. There were no other dragons in Lamos to hide from.\n\nThe Fourth Hill now. It was the largest and also the hottest and I angled my wing to ride the rising air around it. The scent of arcstone was very strong and I could smell deep molten fire even in the coolness of the night. How the sacrifice of one small child had kept this mountain from blowing was entirely beyond my understanding. Stick gods were even more confounding than their sticks.\n\nThere were no moons, only Hell Down and Hallow Fire. As I swept around the peak, I could see that this complex was in three sections. A long ramp zig-zagged its way up the hillside to enter through a fa\u00e7ade very near the top. It looked like a temple built into the face of the mountain, complete with columns, pillars and arches but I could tell that the bulk of the habitation was within the mountain itself. In some ways, it reminded me of the buildings in the Citadel \u2013 half rock, half construct and I wondered if it were hot inside because of the arcstone. I could certainly believe these mountains had breathed flame.\n\nMaybe long ago these mountains had birthed dragons.\n\nI swept across the middle section now. Marble arches and a large stone circle opened to the night sky. I could see two torches faltering in the wind and in their light, a small gathering of men guarding an entrance that led back into the mountain like a great open mouth. One man was butchering a shearer, while the others stood and watched. I think they were soldiers but none of them were looking for enemies. None of them were expecting dragons. They were barely awake. Still, I was grateful for the angry clouds and buffeting winds and I began to think how I would kill them.\n\nOn the far side of the stone circle, a half ring of steps like a great outdoor amphitheater. It was very similar to the Citadel's Crescent Prime and I wondered if those rich rulers ever watched their dragon fight. If so, I would gladly stop at the Second Hill and kill them on my way home.\n\nDragonscent wafted on the whipping winds and I could smell gold. She was gold. Gold \u2013 rich and beautiful gold and something tugged at corner of my memory. Gold and arcstone, arcstone and gold. But as I've said before, dragons can sift through a skyful of smells and instantly pick out those they recognize and those they know.\n\nThis one, I knew. Somehow, I knew.\n\nRue bent, squeezing with one leg and I obeyed eagerly, wheeling in mid-air, tucking my wings and diving like a spear. I took the man with the butchered shearer first, crushing his head in my talons as I plucked him off the stone. No one heard over the roar of the winds. No one noticed, wrapped as they were against the buffeting of the clouds. Silently, I dropped the man over the side of the Fourth Hill and wheeled again, setting my sights on the next.\n\nI was an arrow \u2013 no, a cannon ball, dropping towards the group of men at reckless speed. I could feel Rue's knees tense as he tucked himself deep into my back. Like Celarus' Landing, like the First Hill of Nathens, I streaked seamlessly through the stone arches, talons extended, just as a flash of Hallow Fire cracked the clouds.\n\nTwo men looked up and I must admit I revelled in their expressions before I landed, crushing them under my weight. I snapped the third in my jaws and flung him over the open side with a toss of my head. Immediately I launched back into the air, taking the last man up with me, my talons piercing his throat as easily as a shaghorn.\n\nSuch fragile creatures. Dragons were far superior.\n\nSoundlessly I released him into the night sky, the eventual thud of his body masked by the wind and Hell Down. I was Nameless of Many Names, the Night Dragon, Killer of Men and Terror of Flocks. I circled, returning to the arches and the wide circular ring of stone. My talons touched down and I dropped, head low, wings wide, waiting for more to rush from the cavern mouth. They didn't and I could hear the faint beat of wings as Aryss landed atop the arch above me.\n\n\"Rue!\" Galla hissed down over the wind. \"What in Hadys are you doing?\"\n\n\"Stay there!\" he hissed back. \"Guard the door!\"\n\n\"This is not the plan\u2014\"\n\n\"Go,\" said Rue.\n\nThere were two torches struggling to hold onto their flame in the whipping winds beside me. I swung my head and closed my teeth over the first, feeling it bite the roof of my mouth before it sizzled and died. Another step and I chomped the second and the landing stone plunged into utter darkness. This was what I needed. I was the Night Dragon. The black was my father, the clouds my cloak. So many years ago, I had fallen from the storm on the shores of Remus. Now, I was falling from the storm on the peaks of Lamos. It was fitting and poetic and altogether perfect for what I would find inside.\n\nA doorway-without-a-door hewn directly into the mountain and I snaked carefully toward it, swinging my head with each step. I could feel Rue press down against my neck, could feel the racing of his heart against my skin. My eyes adjusted to the blackness as I moved into the cavern, seeing the chiselled walls, the bricks and beams added for reinforcement. The ceiling was very high and it carried along the same angles as the arches and the smell of drakina was very strong.\n\nSoon, this cavern became a great keep, a dragonhold of brick and arches and iron and mountain rock. I could smell blood and shat and I slowed as the rustle of chains echoed off the stone. There was no light but I needed none. Several wingspans ahead, I could see a pale nest of straw and sticks, the glint of her tail moving as she turned. More chains now and she lifted her great head, breathing me in with a rumble and snort. On my back, Rue was frozen, more a part of me than ever before, terrified and spellbound in equal measure. Together we watched as the drakina spread her glorious wings across the nest and stretched her head toward me, spines flattening along her neck.\n\nShe trilled.\n\nMy heart thudded in its cage at the sound. She was music. She was beautiful and proud and magnificent and wicked and everything I remembered and more.\n\nRue let out a long, ragged, wondrous breath.\n\n\"Summerday?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "FACELESS",
                "text": "Summerday. It was Summerday.\n\nMy heart soared at the very memories of her. Of a wicked young fledgling perched on a bar, nibbling the weeds from my mane. Of a proud, glorious drakina pulling a pilentus under whip in Bangarden. But here, now, and very much alive, Summerday breathed in my scent. And trilled.\n\nRue slid off my back, paused only to steady his legs at my side.\n\n\"Summerday?\" he repeated.\n\nShe hissed, shrunk back onto her nest, turned her head away from him. The rustle and clink of chains made me furious and I wonder how long she had been imprisoned this way.\n\nShe hissed again as Rue reached forward to ease a stick from the nest. He slid back and held it up to me and with a sharp puff of breath, I lit it. The new torch blazed to reveal a majestic dragonhold with a high arched ceiling and braced stone walls. Many dark doorways led into the mountain itself and I could smell men and iron and arcstone. Along the walls were carcasses of shearers and shaghorns, tallybucks and goswyrms. In one corner, tall urns stored water.\n\nI studied her now, my glorious Summerday. A great wide leather collar bound her throat, keeping her tethered by a long chain to the wall. Beneath it, I could see the requisite silver band, her scales almost grown around it and I wondered how she was even able to eat. There were perhaps four eggs cradled beneath her legs, all speckled like large pebbles. One leg was chained as well and while she could move about the nest area, I noticed claw marks on the stone floor.\n\nLife turned dragons to stone. Stars to ash, gold to coal.\n\nShe hissed again and coiled back on the nest, teeth bared, tail lashing. She was as blind as ever but I wondered if that had made her senses sharper, keener.\n\nAnd then Rue reached into his satchel and did something I hadn't expected. He pulled out the pipes and began to play.\n\nI watched Summerday carefully. Watched her head lower, watched her eyes close. She was back in happier times on the shores of Udan of Venitus, when she fished like the rest of us and was queen of the docks. She grumbled deep in her chest and finally, turned to face to him, reaching out her beak and breathing him in.\n\nSummerday.\n\nHe lowered the pipes, laid a hand on her muzzle, ran it under to scratch her chin. She purred and my heart leapt at the sound.\n\nHis hands deftly moved to the collar and the large buckle there, dropping it to the floor with a thunk. She shook her mane of golden spines, snapped her beak in satisfaction. He lowered the torch to study the chain at her leg when suddenly, her head lilted in the direction of the cave. She trilled.\n\n\"Gods be damned,\" came a voice from a dark doorway. \"The soul-boy and his black snake.\"\n\nMy head snapped up as the no-faced man stepped into the light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "His voice was the echo of nightmares.\n\nI boiled the acid in my belly. I willed the arcstone into my crop. Master Fisher Brazza Serkus. There would be dragonfire tonight or I would die trying.\n\nMaster Fisher Brazza Serkus. I hated Master Fisher Brazza Serkus. Every scale on my night-black hide hated Master Fisher Brazza Serkus.\n\nHe lit a torch on the side of the wall and the dragonhold was bathed in warm, radiant gold.\n\nTwo guards accompanied him, with helms, breastplates, greaves and shields. With a hiss, I dropped my head low and raised my wings, lashing my tail behind me. I revelled in their faces. I filled them with terror.\n\nThey hesitated only a moment before fanning, pointing spears toward me as if that might stop me. Most likely, they had never seen a drake before, certainly never a war dragon and I did not need my vanity to know I was surely an impressive sight. In three strides, they could be dinner. In one breath, they would be char. \"I would never ever, in all of my years, have thought of this,\" Serkus said, stepping into the room. \"That your snake would have survived for so long. I did tell the old man he was a slippery one. I did say.\"\n\nHis face was no longer raw, but puckered and tight. One eye was pure white, while one ear gone altogether. He had no hair on one side of his head.\n\nTonight, I vowed I would finish the job the pirates had started.\n\n\"It was him on the docks the other night, wasn't it? The 'wild dragon' that torched Atha Lamos. He's already a legend in Nathens. But you, soul-boy? A dragon rider? That's comedy. Or is it tragedy? Lamos does love its theatre.\"\n\n\"You?\"\n\nI didn't need to look at Rue. He had frozen in place, eyes fixed on his one-time master.\n\n\"What?\" said Serkus. \"You so surprised?\"\n\n\"Why did you do this?\" Rue gasped. \"You sold your dragons! You sold your ships! You lost everything to the pirates!\"\n\n\"I lost everything because of you!\"\n\n\"Me? What are you saying?\"\n\nSummerday trilled and Serkus moved over to her, took her face into his arms. It was as big as he was.\n\n\"That's my beauty,\" he said. \"You caught that big, black snake again, didn't you? You a fine girl, you are.\"\n\nHe didn't look up at us, continued to stroke her elegant face.\n\n\"They were coming for my dragons, you shathole. I made a deal with them \u2013 ten thousand denari for three young dragons. But you and that damned Flight ruined everything.\"\n\n\"That's not true. Their cannons\u2014\"\n\n\"Greedy,\" he snapped. \"Thought they'd just take what they wanted, cut me out of the deal and pocket the coin. Lamoans are greedy that way. I've learned that by now.\"\n\nHe snorted and gazed down at the drakina.\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" he said. \"I got here, didn't I? She's already had a clutch so if you've come here because of some cursed Flight orders, then you've wasted your time. And likely your life.\"\n\nFour eggs, likely just laid.\n\nAcid. Flame. Teeth to the throat. Talons to the belly. It came back like a tide.\n\n\"Who's going to train them?\"\n\nSerkus shrugged. \"Not all Remoans love Remus.\"\n\n\"Let her go, Serkus,\" said Rue. \"She's served you too well to end up like this.\"\n\n\"She adores me,\" he said and he lifted her chin, gazed into her unseeing eyes. \"Always has. Some dragons are loyal to their masters.\"\n\nAll the ways I could kill him. \"If she adores you,\" seethed Rue. \"Why do you chain her?\"\n\n\"In case she changes her mind. She is just a dragon, after all.\" And I was so very good at it now.\n\n\"Her mistress, that Bangardian horanah, died of the plague. I found her again in Corolanus. No one wanted her. She was blind, already pregnant and ready for the Kiss of the Axe. Picked her up for five denari, took a skiff, crossed the gods-damned sea myself. I became their dragon master and saviour all at once. I live like the bloody emperor.\"\n\nHe looked up at me.\n\n\"But she needs to be bred again, see. I knew she'd attract a drake or two, but Ruminor piss-in-a-pot, the Snake? That's not what I ever imagined.\"\n\nSticks have no imagination. Dragons, however, are unequalled. I had imagined all the ways I would kill him ever since that first day on the docks.\n\n\"Why are you here, boy?\" he asked. \"It's not for Remus, certainly not for dragons. Not for nationalism or pride or duty or any shat like that. So what is it? Ruminor still got your soul?\"\n\nIt was a bitter, long moment as I realized that a part of him was right. The Citadel and the Shadow Flight, the lessons and the dogged quest. Rue was noble and brave and valiant and kind, but he was also much like a dragon. He wanted what he wanted. In the back of his mind, this had been a last attempt to win back his soul.\n\n\"Let her go, Serkus,\" Rue repeated. \"We don't want to kill her. We don't even want to kill you. I don't care about Lamos anymore. I don't even care about Remus. Keep the eggs. Just let Summerday go.\"\n\nThe no-faced man smiled. I didn't know that was possible, given his lack of face.\n\n\"Not today,\" he said.\n\nA scream from outside, shouts of men and the roar of a dragon. I coiled back on my haunches and snarled, feeling flames scald the back of my throat. Summerday snarled too, swung her head in my direction and bared her many dagger teeth. But she was banded and chained. I could kill her in a heartbeat.\n\n\"Rue!\" Galla's voice echoed through the dragonhold. \"Archers! Fly!\"\n\nBrilliant light flashed from the front of the hold and I knew that outside, Aryss was battling Lamoan guards. Inside the hold, the two soldiers hoisted their spears for a throw but I sprayed a blast of my own and they screamed as their armour melted under the heat. Serkus whirled for the doorway but Rue bolted after him, fighting to get a hold and tackling the older man to the ground. Summerday lunged but so did I, snapping my teeth across her neck and dragging her off the nest and away from the men. She bellowed and braced with her feet, scattering the nest and raking the stone with her claws. One of the eggs rolled out after her, instantly cracking as it dropped from stick to stone. Grey claws and yellow slime seeped onto the floor.\n\nEven though she was blind, somehow she knew.\n\nSuddenly, she dropped her shoulder and rolled, using the tension of the leg chain to pull me into her. Suddenly we were a snapping, writhing mess, slicing flanks with our claws and biting flesh with bloody teeth. Pain popped behind my eyes but I had been a Pit dragon. I knew when to use the pain to my advantage, to harness it as if from a vat of coals. She roared at me, her jaws wide, tongue curling so I pushed my face into her open mouth and called my fire.\n\nSummerday was a fisher dragon, then a carriage dragon and finally a breeding dragon. She had worn a band all her life, likely never tasted arcstone, never blown flame or even spat acid. She could never have been prepared for the power as I breathed sizzling, raging dragonfire down her throat.\n\nShe yanked backwards, shaking her head and blinking her unseeing eyes. She didn't know to release it and kept her jaws tightly shut as she backed away, smoke billowing from both nostril and teeth. I could see flame red burning her from within but more than that, I watched her throat expand as the flame met acid.\n\n\"No!\" shouted the no-faced man. Rue had him in a choke hold against the wall. \"Not my Summer, no!\"\n\nShe shook her head again and again, her throat now swollen like a fat sea snake when suddenly, the silver band snapped and dragonfire burst from her mouth in a great torrent, white hot and scorching everything in its path. The straw and sticks of the nest caught easily, engulfing the remaining eggs in flames and the cavern filled with the sickly stench of burning yolk.\n\nGuards appeared at the doorway but I rained fire across the rock. They disappeared.\n\nThe drakina retched and retched again as she tried to suck cool air into her lungs. Finally, she sank to the stone, blinking and bewildered and spent. I lumbered over to her, placed a foot on her neck, talons constricting to the point of blood. I bellowed at her to stay down.\n\n\"Don't kill her,\" the no-faced man moaned. \"Please don't kill her! She's a good girl.\"\n\n\"You're killing her,\" hissed Rue. \"Give me your key so I can free her.\"\n\nMore guards from another door and I roared, spraying fire at them as well. Beneath my foot, Summerday shuddered, retched again before pushing up to her feet. I let her. She shook her head, snapped her jaws and a wisp of flame rolled off her tongue.\n\n\"You'll take her back to Remus,\" said Serkus. \"She'll die there. What do you do with a blind drakina?\"\n\n\"Stormfall will take her far, far away,\" said Rue. \"Back to the land where free dragons fish for themselves under the stars. Give me your key.\"\n\nVoices shouting in a strange language and out of the dark entrance of the hold, I could see a set of guards marching in formation towards us. I swung around, dropped my head and raised my wings in threat. They lifted bows, arrows already nocked.\n\n\"Tsirkos!\" one of the soldiers shouted. \"Tha \u00e9choume skot\u00f3sei aft\u00f3 to dr\u00e1ko?\"\n\n\"You think they're going to let you keep a dragon now?\" hissed Rue. \"After this? She's as dead as we are unless you let me free her.\"\n\nSerkus turned his face, barked an answer in the tongue of Lamos. He tugged a pendant around his neck, passed it to Rue. It was the key. He slipped over to Summerday's side, laid a hand on her thigh and ran it down to the chain that had puckered and torn her flesh. She snapped at his touch but with a twist and a click, the chain fell off onto the floor. Rue stepped back as, for the first time in her life, the golden drakina was free.\n\n\"Tsirkos!\"\n\nSnarling, I swung my head back to the unit. I could melt their golden plates with one breath. Could tear their heads from their bodies; puncture their throats with my dagger teeth. All the ways I could kill them.\n\nBut there was a sound behind me, a gasp and gurgle and I turned. Rue's eyes were wide, brow furrowed as Serkus stepped back, the tip of a small blade glistening in the firelight.\n\n\"Off to Hadys with you, boy,\" he hissed. \"Without a soul, that's where you go.\"\n\nMy roar deafened the wind, louder than Hell Down as I watched Rue stagger and drop to his knees.\n\n\"Sk\u00f3tose ton!\" shouted Serkus. \"Kill them all!\"\n\nArrows whipped across the narrow space, every one of them thudding into my flesh and I roared again, sweeping a rain of flame across the unit. The first row flailed to the stone but the second, another volley of arrows were loosed my way, striking face, neck and chest. My vision blurred as a bolt pierced just below my eye and I tossed my head, calling the fire again but more metal barbs had punctured my throat and the flames sputtered with little effect. This, I realized, was where I would meet my father, Draco Stellorum as the second row of soldiers raised their spears.\n\nSuddenly, a blast of brilliant light from behind turned them into silhouettes and heat struck like a wave. Lumbering in through the mouth of the hold, Aryss sprayed the unit from behind until every last man was writhing on the stone floor, skin flayed, armour melting. I could see her through the smoke and flames, riddled with arrows but golden rider still on her back.\n\n\"Rue!\" Galla cried.\n\nSerkus whirled and bolted for the nearest doorway but a blast of flames cut him off. I swung my head, blinking from the brilliant light and the arrow under my eye. To my shock, I saw Summerday, head low, wings high, tail whipping like a banner, smoke curling from her mouth.\n\n\"Now, my lovely,\" said the no-faced man and he raised his hands to her. \"I'll be back, I promise. See, look what they did to your nest. To your eggs.\"\n\nShe snaked forward, following the sound of his voice and cutting off his escape from the hold.\n\n\"You're my queen, my empress, Selisanae of the Sun.\"\n\nHer trills became hisses and her head swung from side to side as she stalked him, herding him away from the door and toward me. I growled and dropped my head, summoned the fire and held it like a furnace in my jaws.\n\n\"Don't you dare,\" Serkus snapped. \"You are forbidden to kill me! My dragon won't allow it. She will kill you if you hurt me! Summerday! Show him!\"\n\nShe was beautiful and proud and magnificent and wicked and everything I remembered and more, for she was a drakina and for the first time in her life, she was free.\n\n\"I raised you, Summerday! I trained you! I \u2014\"\n\nShe spewed her fire in a sudden burst, setting her master alight like a flailing torch. He screamed and staggered towards me, arms waving over his head. With great pleasure, I added my flame to hers, white hot this time. In a heartbeat, the blackened body of Master Fisher Brazza Serkus teetered and fell, shattering into kindling across the stone floor.\n\nOf all the ways to kill him, this was the best for it was well and truly dragon. \"We go now!\" shouted Galla. \"Rue! Get up now!\"\n\nHe was sitting on his heels, face blackened, arms loose at his side. He looked up slowly, shook his head.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I'm Rue Solus. Soul-less, the soul-boy. It doesn't matter.\"\n\nAs he spoke, blood pooled up on his tongue.\n\n\"You saved the drakina!\" She leapt from her dragon, rushed to his side. \"That's what we came to do. Ruminor will smile on you, I know he will.\"\n\n\"I can't walk,\" he panted.\n\n\"But you can ride.\"\n\nShe slipped her arm under his, lifted him to his feet.\n\nThere was noise at the mouth of the hold. Another unit preparing arrows and spears. I remembered this from the night in the Crown but I couldn't do it with Rue on my back.\n\nTwo drakinas, two riders. They could do it if I made a way.\n\n\"Stormfall, wait!\" cried Galla.\n\nI turned away from them, spread my wings and took first one step, then another, launching myself into the dragonhold and blowing fire as I went. The soldiers shouted as arrows peppered my forehead, bounced off my horns, pierced my wingleather. Just like the night in the Crown, a spear thudded into my shoulder and sent pain stabbing up with each stroke of my wing. I was Warblood, Undefeated of the Crown but I was also Stormfall of the Citadel. I was Snake and Nightshade and Hallowdown and Nameless and free. I was everything I had ever been, every name, every place, every circumstance.\n\nI steeled my head, stayed low to the ground, and they either scattered before me like chaff or were trampled beneath me like straw.\n\nAnd suddenly, I was out into the night, soaring over the dark circle of stones. Above me, the skies flashed and roared. The wind filled my chest, stung my eyes, soothed my rage. I noticed motion on my right. It was Aryss, Galla leaning low across her neck. And on my left, Summerday, flying free for the first time in her life. On her back, my Rue.\n\nMy heart rose with my wings. We had done it. We had saved the drakina of Lamos and I had saved my wicked Summerday. Surely, my father, Draco Stellorum, would be proud of me now.\n\nI should have known better. I should have known.\n\nA flash of Hallow Down and a last volley of arrows whipped past my head. I heard a cry as Galla pitched forward, then back, sliding from her mount to disappear into the black sky below. Aryss arced a wing and followed.\n\nMy heart sank with her but I turned my face to the Nameless Sea and flew."
            },
            {
                "title": "SKYBORN",
                "text": "The storm did not abate all night and I took us beyond the First Hill of Nathens. I didn't trust that Summerday could navigate between the statues without damaging herself or lose Rue in the violent winds. I also resisted torching the Second Hill of Nathens, along with those politicians so eager to enslave dragons in the service of their nation but my appetite for burning stick had been quite sated. I pressed eastward, following the mountains until I spied a flat plateau far below. There were no signs of habitation so I took us down as the first light of dawn stretched her fingers across the sky, pushing the flashing clouds ahead of them. Still, dawn was far away and the winds were very angry.\n\nSummerday could fly surprisingly well without sight and she touched down immediately behind me, almost in my tracks. Rue was slumped over her neck and when he didn't move to dismount, I must admit to a tightening in my chest. I feared he had been impaled on her spikes and spines. I crooned at him. He didn't move. I nudged his hand with my beak. It didn't rise to meet me. To her credit, Summerday lowered to the stone and this action alone caused Rue to slide from her shoulder, leaving a dark slick along her golden scales.\n\nEven when his body thudded to the ground, he didn't move.\n\nI sat back to watch him.\n\nThere was little warmth in his body and the wind was cold. An easy explanation, so I stretched out beside him, ignoring the discomfort as the many, many arrows dug deeper into my hide. A dragon's skin is thick, thicker than a Lamoan arrow is long, and it would take many barbs to do real damage. The one below my eye was problematic and my inner eyelid twitched and spasmed. The barbs in my throat would need to be removed as well, else I'd never throw fire as I needed.\n\nOdd.\n\nThinking about myself made it easier not to think of Rue.\n\nThe paint had streaked off his dark cheeks but stayed under his eyes, across his forehead and in the cracks of his lips. His mouth was partly open so I lowered my beak, breathing the smell of blood on his tongue. The wound on his chest had ceased weeping and I laid my chin on his punctured breastplate, unaccustomed to the new and terrible weight pressing in on my own heart.\n\nEver since that morning in Celarus' Landing, when Plinius had touched my mind with a voice like whispering trees, I had fought Rue's thoughts inside my head. He had only ever been a fisher boy. He was no threat, he could never harm me, yet I had fought to stay separate from him, to stay safe. To stay my own and to keep my mind free from the invasion of the sticks. They had bought and sold my body but I had always been the sole master of my mind. I had been too proud to let him in and now, as he lay here growing cold under my head, I regretted that my pride that had denied him such a little thing.\n\nWe're alive, he had said. That's the best either of us could hope for.\n\nAnd now he was dying. Would it have been so bad?\n\nI nudged my face beneath his unmoving hand so that it rested on the ridge of my eye socket. I closed my lids and remembered.\n\nI remembered life on the docks with Summerday and Skybeak, flying so fast that my eyes burned. Catching so many blood bass that my throat would stretch like a fat senator overtop the silver band. I remembered the skiff on the water, nights under the stars, song of the pipes across the waters. Cannons and fire and Serkus and then Corolanus. The day my life ended was the day it had truly begun.\n\nI remembered Gavius and his little ones. They had been kind to me. Tacita had drawn my portraits. Their screams had grown quiet under the flaming roof.\n\nI remembered Towndrell, the whip of his master, the carcass on the side of the road. The most valiant, most faithful, most honourable dragon I had ever known.\n\nI remembered Ironwing, stretched out in a net, caught like so many silverfins going to market. Elegant, strong and noble. I'm glad I never saw him die. I'm glad I burned him in a proud dragon pyre.\n\nBut most of all, I remembered Rue. Rue with the wild curly hair and big teeth, slicing lemonwhites and teaching me to fly like the wind. I remember the pipes, how music seemed more his language than words and I wondered if that was why I understood him, for dragons are creatures of music and song. Even now, when I think of Rue, I hear his songs and I sing them.\n\nI was older now and I had lived. Rue had been right. It was the best I could have hoped for.\n\nSummerday stretched out on Rue's other side and my heart ached for her too. I never knew her before the Udan Shore. I never knew how she had been brought into service of such a man as Serkus, or how she had survived as a blind dragon in a vain city. Even this night, she had lost her young in the battle and yet, here she was, grieving for a boy she barely knew. She had carried him here, she who had never had a rider on her back. I was honoured to be grieving in her company.\n\nThe storm was fleeing now at the onset of the sun. Selisanae of the Sun, chasing the storm with her beauty and warmth. Life wasn't beautiful or warm, I thought, but then again, I had known two remarkable golden drakinas in my lifetime, so perhaps in some small way, it was.\n\nIt was a very long time, then, before I felt something against my eye ridge. Something weak and feeble, but moving.\n\nRue's hand.\n\nStormfall, he said.\n\nI open my eyes, noticed his, round and glassy like pebbles. My heart thudded in its cage.\n\nStormfall, he said again, but he wasn't speaking. His lips had not moved, the blood caked and blowing off in the wind. I have it.\n\nHis voice in my head.\n\nI crooned, allowed my tongue to trill like Summerday. Truthfully, I could have sung.\n\nMy soul, he said. Ruminor gave it back\u2026\n\nI breathed in his scent, that of blood and leather and oceans. Oceans. Seas. Big water. Rue.\n\nIt was like sunlight through treetops, memories not mine flashing behind my eyes. Faces I didn't know, old women I'd never met, children and bowls of soup and then standing on the blocks at the Corolanus markets. A younger Serkus and the fishing huts and the threading of nets and the removing of shells and the wonder of dragons. The lure of dragons, the delight of dragons, the training of dragons.\n\nAnd then me.\n\nAnd you, Stormfall, he said. Brave dragon. Clever dragon. Loved dragon\u2026\n\nLoved dragon.\n\nLoved dragon?\n\nLove?\n\nLook. Selisanae, he said. She's coming to take me to Ruminor\u2026\n\nI looked and I saw.\n\nSunlight, reaching her long fingers across the horizon, pink and yellow and orange and red. Selisanae, consort of my father, Draco Stellorum, sharing the sky and trading night for day without ceasing. She was coming for us on the beams of the dawn, flashing in and out of sight like a vision, hidden in the brightness the way I was hidden in the stars.\n\nIt was a golden dragon.\n\nSummerday raised her head, trilled. The sunlight answered back as a molten shadow appeared from out of the light.\n\nMy soul\u2026 said Rue. Is free\u2026\n\nAryss the magnificent lowered from the sky, the body of her rider in her claws.\n\nAnd it's singing\u2026\n\nHis hand stopped.\n\nWings beating a strong low rhythm, she laid Galla Gaius on the stone beside Rue, arrows riddled across the gold-clad back. And so we sat for most of the morning \u2013 Aryss, Summerday and I, not willing to leave but not wanting to stay. The drakinas took turns pruning the arrows from my scales. I'm not sure I felt them anymore. Soon, there was a small pile and I set them alight with a puff of my breath. I looked over at my boy and the woman who had been his lover. Whatever Ruminor did with souls, wherever he took them, I hoped that Rue's was somewhere he could sit on the sand and play the pipes all day.\n\nLoved dragon.\n\nHe was my boy. I had loved him.\n\nI set them alight as well. He and his woman and his pipes. Music and honour and love and fire..\n\nAryss the magnificent sang a dragonsong of mourning, and Summerday the wicked joined in. I chose to watch the fire rather than sing, as it crackled and roared, sending ash up into the clouds. In fact, I'm not sure I had a voice. We stayed until nightfall, Aryss, Summerday and I, until the fire was little more than embers and bone, and the sky was filled with ash and stars. Ruminor had not accepted Galla's sacrifice. Her hair lay on an altar two nights west, while two bodies fed my father, Draco Stellorum, with their ash. He was as greedy as Ruminor was cold. Ember and bone, ash and stars. That was the music of life.\n\nAs the sun disappeared under the cloak of darkness, I felt the earth force tug inside me once again. I had no rider, I had no purpose but I had two drakinas who had never been free. Finally, after so many years of delay, detainment and detour, I was going home.\n\nSo I, Draco Stellorum, launched into the night, Selisanae on either side."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "We flew for two days, sleeping on mountain peaks during the days, hunting shaghorns in the valleys at night. Summerday was an amazing hunter. Living in the dark made her other senses sharp and she could 'see' by heat, scent and sound better than most dragons could with their eyes. Aryss was ever vigilant, rarely sleeping, always watching and I wondered if she grieved the loss of her rider as I grieved the loss of mine. I could well imagine.\n\nWe had all lost our sticks, I realized one evening as we left the Mating Peak for the Nameless Sea. While Summerday was grieving the loss of a very bad man, he had been her very bad man. He had treated her as an animal, but she had been his, saved from cruelty in Bangarden and from life in the soulless markets of Corolanus. Above all things, dragons are loyal. Perhaps that is what makes us to amenable to life with sticks. Our characters are larger than their shortfalls.\n\nWater is a great conductor of sound, so when I heard the thunder and boom coming from the west, I knew it was not the storm. The Remoan fleet had made Atha Lamos and cannons were firing long and loud across the waters. Soon, we could smell smoke and iron and burning flesh, and I debated changing our route to avoid the island altogether, as the battle was undoubtedly going on around it. I chose not to, however. There were dragons in the fray, noble dragons who'd been given no choice. Dragons, who had alternately raged and then sang with me on the Night of Dragonsong and Fire.\n\nBecause of that night, I would give them a choice.\n\nIt was evening as the lights of Atha Lamos came into view and we flew through acrid smoke to perch on the highest crag above the city. The sun was sinking over the moon-shaped harbour, painting everything in hues of red and orange. There were ships as far as I could see, all the way to the western horizon \u2013 Lamoan ships and Remoan ships. I could tell them apart by the eyes and the dragons. Flashes of cannonfire alternated with dragonfire and the thunder of both threatened to tear apart the very sky. The air was filled with arcstone and fire and iron and oil and blood.\n\nMy heart leapt in its cage at the sight of hundreds of dragons wheeling and soaring in the skies. It was chaos but it was war, as ship rammed ship and cannons barked death with every iron ball. Ship dragons tangled in rigging, thrashing and flailing and sinking along with their vessels. Flight Dragons swept through the skies, torching docks and homes and ships as they went. Riderless dragons, ragged holes blown through their wings, crashing into those same docks and homes and water, trailing plumes of smoke as they went.\n\nJust like under the indigo dragon, houses echoed with the screams of children.\n\nI remembered the number of ships and dragons assembled for battle in the skies above Terra Remus. Now, there were half. These were the same drakes, the same drakinas, who had struggled with me under the nets of Terra Remus. They had raged with me, then sung with me, then lit the night sky with their fire. The same dragons, warriors all.\n\nDragons fighting. Dragons dying, all for the vanity of men.\n\nI couldn't leave them but I couldn't stop them so from my vantage point, I closed my eyes and lifted my voice in song. Mournful and rich and melodic and sad, my song rang out over the moon-shaped harbour, carrying across docks and water alike. My drakinas joined in, adding their voices, sliding up scales and down octaves as our music carried on into the night. We didn't have words. We didn't have writing or maps or language, but we had music and in that music, we spoke victory and loss, sadness and rage. We sang fire and water, earth and sky. We wrote the history of the Battle of Lamos and told the story of Selisanae of the Sun and wove the tragedy of the lives and deaths of dragons in every land. It was marvellous.\n\nWhen I opened my eyes, dragons filled the skies before me, first a few, then dozens, then more, rising high above the cannons, hovering in place and listening to our song.\n\nRiders, kicking but powerless as Flight Dragons left their aerial attacks in a valiant act of corporate disobedience. Most swept low, allowing riders to leap off into the waters; others, whose riders continued to kick and haul on the rein, rolled mid-flight, disposing of them in altogether unceremonious fashion.\n\nShipsmen rushed to release ship drakes from harness lest their ships be capsized as the dragons took to the air, joining the growing thunder in the sky. Some ships came with them, creaking then cracking at the end of their tethers, splashing into the churning waters far, far below.\n\nDragons without riders swooped high above the city, darkening the twilight like a tattered cloak. Soon, ship fought against only ship, man fought against man alone, as every single dragon above Atha Lamos abandoned the battle to join the thunderous flight. They took up the dragonsong of our people and once again, just like in Terra Remus, it threatened to shatter every window and deafen every stick. The cannons targeted them, firing in an attempt to take them down but they succeeded only in raining destruction on the city of Lamos in the form of iron hail. The sky was black with the thunder of their wings and even the cannons were deafened as every eye in Atha Lamos looked to the stars.\n\nAs the last of the red disappeared beneath the horizon, my father, Draco Stellorum, stretched his wings across the land. Draco Stellorum and his Eyes, the moons of Remus. And Lamos. And now, me.\n\nI rose up on the highest mountain above the city, stretched wide my starry wings. I was the Draco Stellorum, Dragon of Stars. I was also Draco Cinis and Draco Fumari and Draco Mortuis. I was a dragon of smoke and ash and death and all things dark and deadly. But like my father, I had the Eyes, my moons, my own Selisanae of the Sun. Aryss and Summerday, drakinas of fire and strength and pure, fierce, gleaming gold.\n\nYou know how dragons love their gold.\n\nWith that, I launched into the night and called my people to follow.\n\nThey did."
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON OF ASH & STARS",
                "text": "When there are a hundred dragons in the sky, it is Hell Down and Hallow Fire. It is the winds of a hurricane and the roar of the storm. We blot out the sun, we blacken the clouds, we churn the sea like foam. It is a magnificent, terrifying sight.\n\nIn honour of the Torrent, I called them the Thunder.\n\nI followed the earth force northwest. We did not stop to sleep, not once, not even when we passed through the Wall of Moons. As a blind dragon, Summerday's equilibrium was excellent, and she kept the Thunder high and level. I had not forgotten losing Jagerstone to the ship and Chryseum to the ocean. I was flying with a hundred war dragons. I didn't want to lose a single one.\n\nDays later then, we were finally free of the Wall of Moons and approaching the southern shores of Remus. The earth force was calling me north but I couldn't help but track west, just a little. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, we reached Terra Remus on the fourth day after leaving Atha Lamos and as we flew over the city, we called to every dragon down below. Whether Flight or working, whether banded or free, we called and they responded. We created chaos in Terra Remus that day and added to our number perhaps twenty Flight Dragons who abandoned their riders and as many cart dragons who lifted their plinti and carriages to the skies. We torched those carriages and watched them seed the clouds with ash and dust.\n\nThe second reason we flew over Terra Remus was entirely juvenile and vain. But then, you do remember that while I had lived a difficult life, I was still at that point, quite young.\n\nI was then, and am still, vain.\n\nI took my one hundred dragons on a flight across the roofs of the Curia Terra Remus, where I shat as I flew over the clay tiles. Trust me to say that we did not need language in that moment, for the hundred following did exactly the same thing. Part of me wishes I had circled back for a look but I prided myself in knowing that our point had been well and truly made. I also knew that I'd never have a reprieve from the Emperor if I ever fell afoul of the centurions again, so it was a good thing I never did.\n\nDay after day, we flew along the coastline, calling to any working or fisher dragon we saw, snagging cliff bucks from the shores and fat fish from the sea. I knew that when we finally stopped at the Cliffs of Anquar, we would need to free those still in harness, saddle or band. Truth be told, I hadn't given it much thought but the more dragons that left the earth for the skies, the more it became apparent that while they were free of service, they would die very quickly if not freed from the trappings of service. I remembered Bloodtooth cracking my band during our battle in the Crown and I wondered if I could teach such a skill to another, all without the benefit of language. That would be an interesting development for I was not sure I could sing that particular skill.\n\nRegardless, the earth force beat steadily stronger with each stroke of my wings and I pressed the Thunder long and hard without a rest. None of the dragons disappointed. They had no idea where I was leading them, but followed \u2013 no, joined me in the anticipation. Day became night, water became sky and the smell of salt and fish and freedom was life in my chest.\n\nMy father, Draco Stellorum, watched as we flew under the Wide Eyes of the Moons and I remembered how Rue had spoken of the First Dragons. Selisanae, Nerisanae, Stellorus and Anquarus and I had listened with keen interest. Memories of the Cliffs and the nest and my mother and sisters led me with a ferocity that I had thought reserved for the Pits and I let myself wonder what I might do if I found the Fang of Wyvern occupied by another drake. I would leave him, I reckoned. After so long fighting in the service of sticks, I knew that I would never stoop to fight over territory. The world was big. My world was bigger.\n\nAnd all this time, both Aryss and Summerday flew with me, one at my left, the other at my right. My moons, my Eyes. Golden and fierce and mine.\n\nOne night, with the Cliffs so close, I took the Thunder down onto the dark sea. The impact of such a number of great creatures displaced much water and caused such a wave that I knew any Monitors in the area would leave us in peace. Silverfins however, were another story and we ate an entire ocean of them, barely sating our hunger from such a trip. We slept on the waters that night, a hundred of us rising up and down on a warm, welcoming sea. With Summerday's head across my neck, I was almost content. But with home so close, there was a fire in my blood that would not, could not, be doused until I set my eyes on the Cliffs of Anquar.\n\nAnd so I waited for the first light of dawn, held my breath as the sun's rays painted those daggers first purple, then red, then glorious gold and my heart leapt into my throat at the near-forgotten sight. I had only seen them from a distance once in my life, on that dreaded day when I traded the aerie for adventure. They truly looked like the spikes on the back of a great dragon. So many islands rising sharply out of the sea, waters crashing at their base, vegetation sparsely scattered along ridge and crest. Beyond the cliffs, a stretch of land extended beyond the horizon, made golden by the sun. I had never seen it before and I wondered if it was inhabited like Remus or wild like the dragons. Anquarus could easily have made his home here.\n\nAs Selisanae of the Sun made her way out of the ocean, the sea snakes found us, swooping and worrying and raising their cries to the heavens. The memories took me back to my mornings as a fledgling \u2013 sea snakes and sunshine and gleaming over it all, the Fang of Wyvern. I would have laughed had I been able.\n\nIn the distant dawn, I could see silhouettes circling the cliffs and my heart leapt into my throat at the sight. Wild dragons.\n\nThe sea snakes fled as I rose on top of the water, beating my wings and barking to the Thunder. They had slept soundly, but within minutes the sky was dark and the waters churned beneath them. Those distant silhouettes whirled and grew larger as the Wild dragons took notice and rose to meet us. I prayed there would be no violence \u2013 there were enough cliffs for all. But then again, I would never have expected so many to abandon their sticks and follow me home, either. I knew so little about my people. We are unpredictable as we are proud.\n\nThe Fang was between the Thunder and the Wild, so I rode the air up, up, up to its pinnacle with Summerday and Aryss on either side. It was, for the most part straight, striated rock, but moss grew in the ledges and on the peak. I circled first then landed, waiting for the largest drakes and drakinas to meet us. Soon, the sky grew black under wing as both Wild and Thunder circled each other, bellowing in agitation and threat. The air was sharp as a spear.\n\nTwo drakes, a blue and a brown, wheeled above me before dropping to the mossy peak, wings wide, head low. Behind me, Aryss barked and Summerday hissed and I snapped at them both. I had been a working dragon for too long. I had a different plan.\n\nI raised my wings but bent them inward, arched my neck and averted my eyes, gazing at the mossy stone at their feet. A deep, respectful bow, an early gesture of respect. The sticks had enjoyed such things and these dragons, having lived their entire lives in freedom, deserved it.\n\nThe drakes fell silent, unsure of their next move, when first Aryss then Summerday bowed as well. In fact, with over a hundred dragons in the air, there was little sound save the beating of wings and the crash of waves against the Fang. A shadow crossed the sun as a drakina landed between the drakes, larger than either of them and bringing with her a scent from my youth.\n\nI dared look up.\n\nAlmost as large as Ironwing, my mother towered over me, as dark as the Cliffs of Anquar. She lowered her great head, scarred as if from some terrible battle, but I realized that it was just life and that she was old and magnificent and strong. I studied her grey scales, the spines and spikes that had never been filed, the throat that had never been banded. She breathed in my scent, made a rumbling sound deep in her chest and my heart threatened to burst from within. She leaned forward, opening her mouth wide and ever wider, strings of saliva swinging between rows of dagger sharp teeth. I resisted the urge to shrink back and those familiar jaws clamped over my head.\n\nFish oil and arcstone. The fragrance of my youth.\n\nAs long as she didn't regurgitate bloodbass all over my head, I would be fine. Suddenly, she released me and threw back her head, warbling a song into the morning light. I followed suit, singing the dragon song with a joy I had never known and soon, the sky exploded as both Thunder and Wild joined the chorus. It was glorious and we alternated singing with blasts of fire, and the sky flashed light then dark with the smoke of our breath. Dragons wheeled and danced in the sky, dove into the waters, tugged at what little remained of harness and rigging. Young dragons flitted around the outer rim, bold yet equally terrified and full of the vigour of youth.\n\nI had been the same when I was young.\n\nSuddenly, a bellow rippled in from the outer dragons and a boom that shook me to my core. A second and then a third as iron balls whipped through the air past me into my mother. She barked and leapt from the Fang, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood sprayed from her heart as slowly she spiralled down, down and down into the water below.\n\nCannonfire.\n\nI sprang into the sky, furious and wheeling to see a huge fleet of ships moving northward. Lamoan ships. I could tell from the cannons and the great glaring eyes. But Remoan ships as well, with their golden drakina sails, outfitted with Lamoan cannons. It made no sense, but as I coursed toward them, my wings beating faster than my rage, I realized that I had caused it. Me, the Night Dragon of the Crown. I had ravaged the Lamoan docks and freed their golden drakina. I had called the dragons of Remus and they had come. I had shat on the house of the Emperor and united two warring peoples under the banner of fear.\n\nThis was me. All me. Nameless, riderless, limitless, free. Dragons were a threat to both brothers, and they had followed us here to destroy us all.\n\nI barked to the Thunder, I bellowed to the Wild. They followed me and we dove toward them like a hailstorm. Boom and flash of cannonfire. Breath and crash of dragonfire. Almost two hundred dragons bore down on the fleet and soon, the sky was filled with black.\n\nSmoke and fire, the smell of iron and arcstone. This was why they mined the arcstone, to out-breathe dragons and I felt it burn in my throat as I carried the fire to them, eager to torch every one of their pathetic skiffs. The balls whipped like leaden arrows and next to me, a brown drake was struck. I tucked my wings and dove, spraying flame all across the lead vessel. I didn't care that it had a golden drakina sail, that it was Remoan not Lamoan. It was stick and it would burn.\n\nUp into the dragon-dark sky, wheeling and plummeting again, the fire pouring like rain from our mouths. The cannons boomed like many mouths, coughing flame and lead and iron. Dragons were like schools of silverfins. Too many to miss, and one after another, they splashed into the sea. They did not go quietly, however, and their thrashings crippled as many ships as our flame.\n\nI'd lost sight of Summerday and Aryss. I hoped they'd stay well out of the fray but I knew otherwise. Aryss was a Flight Dragon, her skills unrivaled but Summerday? How could a blind drakina who had only known captivity survive such a battle? A ball tore past my head and thoughts of drakinas went with it.\n\nThe ships had reached the Fang of Wyvern. The cliff face was pitted as both dragons and iron balls slammed into it, and I must admit I despaired of ever claiming it as my nesting site. The fact saddened me, then angered me and I bore down once more, raining fire across the eye of a Lamoan warship. Aflame, it carried on to crash into the Fang, shattering and scattering wood and men across the surf.\n\nIt was then that I saw the eye.\n\nLarger than anything painted on the ships, a great yellow eye opened beneath the waters.\n\nAnd it roared.\n\nIt was not the roar of cannonfire. It was not the roar of Hell Down. It was the roar of an earthstorm, of the very Cliffs and the rocks and slowly, just like an earthstorm, the Fang of Wyvern began to move.\n\nThunder and Wild fell away as the sea began to churn and boil, and the cliff rose up beneath me. All along the archipelago, cliffs that had been homes to dragons for hundreds of years shuddered and sank, while the Fang rose higher and higher. The warships pitched on the churning seas, sucking inward as a massive shape pushed out of the ocean, spray and foam roiling like a cauldron. It was the largest dragon I had ever seen and with a flash like Hallow Fire, I realized it was Anquarus of the Sea. The Cliffs were his spines, the Fang one of his horns and his tail carried on as far as the horizon. As he rose, winds surged and sucked all around him and dragons were sent spinning through the air, some crashing into the water, others into the iron scales of his body. When he spread wide his wings, they lifted water and weeds and fish and silt with them, only to rain back down to the waves like a waterfall. With a roar that was like the heart of Hell Down, he turned his great yellow eyes to the ships.\n\nThey shattered under his claws, were sucked into his jaws, crushed between his iron teeth. He flung his great body onto the fleet, sending giant waves crashing on both sides, capsizing the others. He thrashed and gnashed and when he finally blew his ocean-blue flame across the remaining ships, they instantly turned to ash and blew away on the hurricane wind of his breath.\n\nAfter many hours, all that was left was the sound of sea snakes and hissing water.\n\nHe was the size of many mountains, had to be hundreds of years old. He gazed up at us, past us, to the gleaming gold of Selisanae above and with a roar that split the earth in two, he brought his great wings down, forcing both dragons and water out from under them. A second and then a third and I wondered if such a weight could be carried but his wings were as wide as the sea and soon, he thundered into the sky, blackening the clouds and obliterating the sun with his bulk.\n\nIt was noon before he was out of sight and the roar of his passing finally died away into wind and silence.\n\nIt was longer before any dragon was able to breathe, longer still before any of us could move.\n\nA pitiful warble echoed across the water. I looked to see Summerday resting on the surface, wings wide, eyes unseeing. I flew over to settle next to her, nudged her throat with my beak. She exhaled deeply, then again, and I realized that there was no way I could tell her what we'd seen. There was no song, there was no comfort, but there was life and there was freedom, and I nipped her spines to calm her. She hissed at me, but she settled once Aryss lit on the water beside her.\n\nEventually, the Wild swept back over their former home but there was nothing, merely white sand and blue waters made brown with silt. We lost many dragons that day and I must admit that their bodies fed the sea creatures for weeks afterward. Those remaining settled back onto the waves but Anquarus had destroyed the greatest natural aerie I'd ever known. In truth, Anquarus had been the greatest natural aerie I'd ever known.\n\nAll of us, both Thunder and Wild were united in one common plight. We had no home.\n\nI could see the golden strip on the horizon. It was land of some sort. Perhaps there were dragons. Perhaps there were men. Either way, it was a place we needed to go, for neither Thunder nor Wild would last long floating on the waves like debris.\n\nWith a bellow, I spread wide my wings to capture the winds. Aryss and Summerday did likewise and together we rose into the sky with all of the Thunder at our backs. We soared toward the Wild. They were circling over the emptiness where the Cliffs been, and hissed and barked as we streaked past. I ignored them, focusing now on the strip of land in the distance.\n\nGold before me. Gold on either side. The sky above was gold as well, under the gaze of Selisanae of the Sun and you know how dragons love their gold. I was free, a night dragon of ash and stars, fire and smoke and pride.\n\nBut most of all, fire."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Now, I am old.\n\nI am the oldest of all the dragons. I do not breed anymore. I do not hunt nor do I fly, for even moving disturbs the trees and the rocks and the young dragons all around me. I'm rarely hungry, rarely thirsty and I have roots growing under my belly and moss beneath my wings. Perhaps it's trying to make me a part of the earth, much like Anquarus was a part of the sea. It doesn't matter. I won't be here for much longer.\n\nWe called the land Nerisanos, after Nerisanae the First Drakina of the Earth. It was a good name, an ancient name befitting this ancient place. There were no sticks, no cities, no civilization of any sort. There were mountains as high as the Cliffs of Anquar. There was fresh water and forests and plains and beaches. There was fish and shaghorns and coarse shearers and goswyrms. There were few sea snakes and I must admit, I didn't miss them at all.\n\nOur dragons stretched out across this land and soon, there was no distinction between Thunder and Wild. All were Wild because all were free. We bred and nested and built our homes up on the tallest peaks and in the deepest valleys. I bred both Aryss and Summerday and our young were alternately sunny gold or starry black or striped both, and soon, a night dragon was not a rare sight. We sang each night, telling the stories of our lives around fire pits like the sticks used to do. I rarely thought of Rue, but when I did, my song was all the sweeter.\n\nI don't sing anymore either.\n\nI lie across the flat, mesa-topped peak of a mountain for there is no nest or ledge, lair or den big enough to hold me. I sleep during the day, enjoying the warmth of the sun all along my sides. My horns are so long that they touch my back, twisting like roots in the ground. Young dragons fly over me, play in my spines, nest in my scales. My skin is like stone, my eyes like silverstone, my claws like flint. I'm not as large as Anquarus but it doesn't matter. As I said, I won't be here for long.\n\nI'm going to my father, Draco Stellorum. I know now that he is one of the Veternum and his name not Draco Stellorum but Stellorus of the Stars. He is real and I will find him.\n\nI'm not sure when, but one night I will rise. I will shake the moss and the trees and the rocks from my body and when I spread my wings, no one will know that the sky has disappeared, for the stars will be my stars, my scales will be the night. I will crack the mountain when I leap into the air, each beat of my wings will create a hurricane. I will brace my eyes against the cold as I rise higher and higher and I know I will see not just all of Nerisanos, but Remus and Lamos as well. I will see what it is that a map is based on, and I wonder if it will be long and flat or curved and round. I suspect curved, but I am a dragon given to great imaginings.\n\nI imagine flying with my father, Draco Stellorum, through the stars; soaring through the night sky as if it were water and chasing Selisanae of the Sun. I long to sing once again with the moons, the Eyes, my dear golden drakinas Aryss and Summerday who met my father far earlier than I. When I think of them, my entire chest aches and the mesa-topped mountain trembles with the grief.\n\nI am a vain dragon, a proud dragon, and now an old dragon. I have lived with vice and with vigour and while I could go on, I am eager to see where the stars will take me and how high I will fly before the cold turns me to ice.\n\nAnd sometimes I wonder if I might meet Ruminor, the harsh father of sticks and cruel breaker of bargains. I would scorch him with my breath until he is ash and I will blow him on the wings of the wind so he could never steal souls from young boys again. I will set the heavens on fire with the flames of my breath and perhaps the stars will burn for me as I light them. Selisanae would burn, I know this to be true. I wonder if my father, Draco Stellorum, would join me or if he would watch, as he always watches, while I battle a god and win. Perhaps that will appease him. And then again, perhaps not.\n\nAs you can tell, I have much time for thinking.\n\nAnd perhaps when I burn the heavens, I will burn my father too, perhaps I will take his place. Draco Stellorum Cinisi. Dragon of Ash and Stars. Then, the young drakes will gaze up at me and wonder what I think and make songs about the moons, my Eyes Aryss and Summerday. I will not be too proud to hear them.\n\nAnd so until the day that I rise, I stay. My breathing shakes the treetops, my heartbeat moves the tides. I have lived a good life but even now as I gaze up at the stars, I grow restless.\n\nListen for the wind. Turn your ear to the roar of distant Hell Down.\n\nI move."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Fallen Star",
        "author": "L. J. Davies",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "DragonFire"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "The Season of Fire",
                "text": "[ Chasing Shadows ]\n\n\"Still nothing!\" I slammed the old book shut in a cloud of dust. Cursing, I pushed the discarded pages into the ever-growing pile of useless parchment at my side. \"I swear it would be easier chasing my own shadow.\"\n\nEmpires, exploration, and most unnervingly war, all paled into insignificance against what I was looking for. Everything in here only went back a thousand years or so.\n\nSeriously, it seems that no one had the sense to keep a record of anything prior to that!\n\nSomewhat disheartened I flexed my paws, the muscles had grown stiff through lack of use, and with a swipe of my tail I hooked the arrowhead at its tip under the handle on top of a glowmoss jar.\n\nSeven useless books sat at my side \u2013 some of the thousands of tomes in Dardien's archive that lacked the information I sought. What little knowledge I had of the omnipotent beings beyond this world wasn't enough; in fact, the words I'd heard from the spectral mouth of a god were more a curse than a blessing. All I possessed was the recollection of times I'd rather have remained a mystery. The world was bigger than anyone knew, even the people I'd once lived amongst had a dark past, as did the creatures I now called my own.\n\nNine guardians chosen to protect them, more like nine power-hungry fools destin to doom the world.\n\nReading about those ancient figures and their races filled me with a mixture of disgust and pride. I'd been the one to end the last of them, and yet I always felt that something greater was lurking. I hated myself for thinking that way, but I knew the truth wasn't going to stop hurting, no matter how much I tried. The gods had told me so, leaving me to contemplate the unknowable reality that was my existence.\n\nUse what I know? The Ethereal's words came back to me again. That's hard when I know nothing!\n\nIt was getting late and the warm evening air hung over the stone shelves, each towering column of crafted rock a monument of claw-written knowledge. Straining my neck to peer up at them I really had to commend the architecture of the Earth Order.\n\nIt had been almost four seasons since I arrived. Back then I'd had my suspicions about how the stone was so flawlessly moulded into the shapes about Dardien. Indeed, my vague and fleeting theories had proved correct. It was the purpose of the architectural guild of the Earth Order, with their power to manipulate the earth, to construct the structures around the City of Dragons.\n\nMy eyes passed over the shelves, eventually returning to the pile of inadequate books. I'd hardly known anything about literature when I'd arrived. I recognised the collections of parchment sealed within their leather bindings from those that Tarwin read back in the village hall, though the claw-written dragon symbols differed from human text. Despite the fact I'd never learned to read or write, it was surprisingly easy to absorb the new information.\n\nI was good at that \u2013 I'd taught myself to fly, and even breathing fire seemed to have come naturally. It was less like I needed to learn, more like I already knew and all I had to do was remember.\n\nBefore I met my new friends, I would have linked that instinctive ability to my dragon heritage, but the more I learned about myself, the more I felt I didn't belong.\n\nSeriously, I need to stop putting myself down. They appreciate me, I know that!\n\nI grabbed a book and carefully returned it to its shelf. Marred by the marks of those less respectful, all the tome offered in return was a throat-tickling plume of dust. The next three were no less grateful, sending several spiders scurrying as they slid into place.\n\n\"By the fires, doesn't anyone ever clean this place?\" I grumbled, coughing to clear my throat.\n\nWith the lack of information inside them, it wasn't hard to see why they were so unappreciated. Although, given the motives for my research, I couldn't believe that anyone was looking for quite the same information.\n\nNo one has seen what I've seen, no one knows what I know. 'Keep looking forward,' I told myself.\n\nI relied on that thought a lot, it helped keep me focussed when I felt the past catching up to me. Risha had told me it helped her when she'd struggled to move on from her memories, which was unfortunately another story I dreaded to recall.\n\nAnother thing I can't fix. No matter how many books I read.\n\nWith a sigh, I turned to peer down the vast corridor of towering bookshelves, in a city where everyone could fly, things didn't need to be built close to the ground. Beams of sunlight flooded into the main aisle of the archive, through arched openings. An identical row of tightly packed shelves on the opposing side reached up into the domed roof. Around their inner edge ran another level of shelves and arches, supporting more towers of knowledge, giving way to even more layers above.\n\nAll this and I still have nothing.\n\nI tried to clear the thought from my mind. Glancing around the main hall, I was wary of anyone who might be lingering. Because I didn't like being out in the open for too long, I always made sure I emerged from the aisles closest to one of the four exits. This time, I'd made sure it was the south exit, ensuring the shortest flight home.\n\nThe large archway lined with glyphs and carvings was only a few feet away. Another testament to the magnificence of dragon architecture, it glowed like a blissful flame in the day's dying light. The second longest day of the year, to be exact. When I'd arrived here, such beautiful depictions and rich ancestry amazed me, the care and intricacy rivalled only by the designs of extinct races.\n\nBut my knowledge of those vanished lives and the cruel world beyond Dardien, only served to push me further away from dragon society. The city was full of stone murals and inscriptions, but their effect had diminished, or at least that's what I liked to believe.\n\nIt doesn't help that pretty much all of them portray wars and conquest.\n\nSliding the more useful books into an uncomfortable satchel that hung around my neck, I tentatively moved from the cover of the aisle trying to walk like any other citizen. Thankfully, the archive was quiet \u2013 it had to be, since silence was intended to leave those within its space undisturbed; unfortunately, that didn't seem to include me. The stares of all who saw me felt like hot needles piercing my scales. When I first called Dardien my home it was worse, especially being so soon after returning from my incredible journey. It had taken me nearly a month to surface from the pessimistic bog I'd dwelled in at the time. Except for the friends I'd made when I first arrived, I felt like everybody was watching me, like they were expecting me to spring out and attack them.\n\nIt felt like my presence was a great taboo, dragons would scrutinise and study without ever approaching. It was hard to accept at first, but I'd learned to ignore it. I may not be one of them, but if they kept to themselves, I was happy to keep to myself. No one really knew who I was, and thankfully, none of the hundreds of books I had scoured made any mention of the legend surrounding me. Those closer to me knew a faint truth that I conjured up to hide the details. But only Risha and I knew what I was and what really happened.\n\nAs I walked, the unexpected clatter of armour interrupted my thoughts, triggering a subconscious connection, compelling me to look ahead. Two armoured guards flanked either side of the south exit, and from this distance they could easily have been mistaken for statues. The stoic sentinels stood motionless, and I often wondered if they ever moved. It almost made me laugh thinking that the same two dragons had to stand there forever.\n\nMore metallic clattering betrayed the silence when two more guards, escorting a smaller dragoness, appeared behind me. I'd been here long enough to recognise the differences of my kind, even when encased in armour. I could tell that at least one guard was female. As for the dragoness between them, there was no question as to her identity. She wore slick, segmented armour, lined with shimmering silver inscribed with small runes, capped by a dark-blue metal as deep in colour as the ocean's endless abyss.\n\nFrom what I'd learned, the ancient ancestral runes of battle were inscribed on all draconic armour to bring good fortune. Unlike her guards, her helmet was long and sharp, a slim point stretched across her sky-blue snout. It had two glistening silver spikes covering a pair of long black horns, while numerous smaller silver barbs created a shimmering crown. Segmented sections of the blue and silver armour covered her back and tail all the way down to its armoured tip, where it extended into a long blade. Gleaming metallic gauntlets encased all four paws, tipped by shimmering, razor-sharp blades at the toes, as if talons were not enough. Across her chest hung a silver and gold neckband, a great crystal-clear diamond at its centre.\n\nTarwin had once told me that dragons had an insatiable desire for riches. While my friends had warned me about dragon instinct, I knew the rumoured greed to be false. I had no desire for that great gem, although if anything supported such a legend, that jewel was most certainly it. Adding to the idea, were the four sockets flanking the diamond. One housed a fire-red ruby, another a water sapphire, the third an earth emerald and the final one an air opal.\n\nThe gems of each order. I noted.\n\nAs for her identity, she was Princess Zephyra, master of the Air Order and daughter to sovereign Aries, Dardien's current ruler. When I'd first arrived, I had no idea who he was, but in the time since my return I'd learned plenty, or more accurately, overheard plenty.\n\nHe was rarely seen beyond the palace and wasn't believed to be the great leader everyone expected, which was certainly not what the city needed in these troubled times. A sovereign was supposed to be blessed by the creators themselves, to possess mastery of all four elements. When I first heard that I had thought of him as another with no natural element. However, he had no proof of his power, nor did he speak of it.\n\nHe was an air elemental, and to the citizens of Dardien \u2013 until he proved otherwise \u2013 that was all he was. Despite their reservations, no one questioned; afraid of Aries' wrath, they simply dismissed them as nothing more than rumours.\n\nSo long as I'm never on his bad side, I don't care.\n\nThe sound of shifting armour curtailed my thoughts, once again drawing my eyes back to the princess. Unlike most others, neither Zephyra nor her royal guard spared me a glance before they moved swiftly from sight. The sound of their armour shattered the silence long after they had disappeared, not that anyone would challenge her.\n\nWonder if she comes here so late to avoid the attention, like I do? I thought, knowing it was exactly what I did.\n\nThe sunbeams shimmering on the marble floor reminded me of the time. I had to get back, and with the royal distraction gone, I resumed my walk, marking the position of the exit guards with a brief glance. They paid me no heed, their steady breathing the only thing to suggest they were alive.\n\nPassing beyond the archway, fresh air greeted me, its gentle breeze warm and alive with the distant beating of wings. A balcony bustling with dragons of all descriptions lay before me. It was a huge landing area, a great scar in the rock, stretching all the way round the circumference of the archive. Several pillars suspended the stone at the edge of the platform, equidistant and symmetrical, each one creating a perfect arch. I made sure to dodge around every dragon I could as I crept over to the edge.\n\nI wish I could socialize, but they're not my friends. I thought, just as some dragons gave me odd looks.\n\nUpon returning to Dardien, I learned a lot about the dragons I cared about. Risha sometimes studied in the archive with me for her training, mostly about healing, although she was yet to pass her trials. She was the one who'd introduced me to this place, she was confident that if there was something I needed to know, I would find it here. Yet I'd been searching for almost two seasons and I was beginning to lose hope.\n\n'Keep looking forward.'\n\nThe memory of her uttering the phrase always gave me the reassurance I needed. Although I could tell myself what she said a million times, it didn't compare to the real tone of her soft voice.\n\n\"There's still time to find the truth, the books aren't going anywhere,\" I imagined her telling me.\n\nThe fleeting idea of books growing wings and flying away lightened my mood, even though there was supposed to be an enchantment on them, preventing them from leaving the city.\n\nWith the bemusing image lingering in my mind, I felt my claws brush against the edge, a few small stones clattering as they fell. Glancing down at the still-blue water of Dardien's lake, I caught the reflection of the dying sunlight shimmering beautifully. The warm summer breeze tickled the surface, disturbing it enough to make it look like a sheet of golden silk beneath the city.\n\nIf not for the beating of wings, the din of chattering conversation and the gushing of distant waterfalls, I could have stared down at the blissfulness for hours. When I looked into the skies I had to wonder, I had left my life behind for this, and though I saw its worth and more importantly, the worth of those with whom I chose to stay, at the back of my mind I knew all was not right.\n\nKeep looking forward. I repeated, seizing my wandering mind.\n\nGlancing over my shoulder, I ensured the satchel's strap was secure, before coiling the lantern tight in my tail. Before I knew it, a gust of magically written wind swept me into the sky, and I banked in the direction of home.\n\nAs my wings beat, I shook my neck, shifting the restless satchel with a forepaw. The woven band rubbed against my scales with each flap and the jar of glowmoss fidgeted as I fought to keep it steady. Flying with all the extra baggage took a lot of concentration, even down here where flight was easier.\n\nI'd always been suspicious of the city's unnatural air currents, the fact that they seemed to know exactly what to do and where to go was especially unnerving. I'd learned more recently that a group of air elemental dragons, known as Wind Writers, controlled them. To some, it was a career \u2013 a whole faction of the Air Order was devoted to wind writing.\n\nFrom what I'd been told, seven air dragons were required for the task. Using ancestral binding magic, their minds were linked, forming one large consciousness to govern the city skies. Some looked at what needed to be done, while others acted on it, seeing and responding as one, like some great god of the sky. Personally, I'd never liked the idea of having my mind combined with another, not to mention several. Maybe it was because I feared what someone might gain from what I knew, or simply the exposure to someone else's thoughts.\n\nI don't think anyone would want my memories. They're not the greatest.\n\nA bright beam of sunlight crossed my eyes as I banked left, the swift turn forcing me to clutch the shifting satchel while the woven fabric continued to claw at my scales. No matter how useful it was, I hated flying with it, in fact I disliked flying here altogether. I believed that if the Wind Writers were doing all my work for me, my aerial skills would suffer. I never thought of myself as better than anyone else when it came to flight, both Risha and her brother had learned almost as independently as I had. However, I still went to great lengths to ensure that, whenever possible, I flew on natural air currents.\n\nRegular trips to the steam caves, where the Wind Writers had no influence, maintained my edge, as it did my friends'. As the thought passed, the air steadied me into a glide. Beneath me the airspace held many more airways, all filled with winged traffic. Above was the same, dragons flitting amidst the hanging stalactites that made up Dardien.\n\nNot much of a distraction, I sighed, trying not to think of this as another fruitless day of study.\n\nIt almost felt like my conscience was bullying me and my constant recollections were nothing but cruel attacks. I wanted to be certain I'd won, that I was free of my supposed purpose. It was almost four seasons ago that I'd put a stop to the last of the Dark Guardians and subsequently the war the Sphere of Eternity had threatened.\n\nAcrodan's last words still haunted my mind like a curse, however. He'd claimed the gods were cowards, terrified of his master, and that they'd chosen me to vanquish him when they could not. Unable to manifest in physical form, the gods had claimed that the affairs of the mortal world were beyond their reach. As for the imprisoned power that sparked the words of both sides, I had no idea. All I knew was that it was an evil beyond all comprehension.\n\nThe more I reflected, the more frustrated I became. There was no mention of that time, the time before the Sphere, and not one piece of information regarding its discovery. All those books, all that talk of ancestors and legends \u2013 and no one had thought to record it! Not that I could ask anyone why; I doubted anyone would speak to me unless their desire to talk was as great as their need to stare.\n\nPlus, it seemed that many were oblivious to the changing world beyond Dardien. Not even the Council of Elders, who had told me of the Sphere and Acrodan's existence, knew of the events that unfolded to the north, and neither I, nor anyone else who knew, had told them. At the time, my disappearance had gone unnoticed; after all, I'd only been here for a few days. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for the others.\n\nI felt a slight change in the air as I was deposited on the platform outside my nest, the golden glow of the sun having disappeared, leaving me in the cool shadow of the rock. I glanced around at the vast sprawl of nests, my eyes reluctant to turn towards the smooth stone entrance; I'd been away all day, following the same routine I had for several weeks. In that time, I'd seen little of those with whom I shared my new home, I always left before dawn and returned late after dark, only now the prolonged daylight hindered my efforts. I gave my neck another scratch, tossing the strap further down my spines with a flick of my head before creeping inside, hopeful that I might slip in unnoticed.\n\nA warm homeliness filled the air, it was quiet and there was no sign of anyone. The only movement came from the glow of a flickering blue flame, its light dancing over the walls, while it curved itself around a bubbling pot. I tentatively peered over the fire and seizing my chance, I made my way to the central ring, where I could quickly fly up to my nest.\n\n\"Well, look who's finally decided to come home.\"\n\nI froze mid-step, turning to see the smirking muzzle of a blue dragoness. Thankfully, she didn't bear the look of someone who thought ill of what I'd been doing \u2013 as her words might have suggested. But all hope of going unnoticed quickly faded.\n\nIt seems that even those who know me for what I am, are reluctant to release me from their attention. Pausing for a moment, I knew I should appreciate them more, especially Risha.\n\nThey're my friends, not some common observers.\n\n\"You know there was a time when you wouldn't leave here, now you're almost as bad as Boltock,\" she chirped, stepping down to the lower floor.\n\nI moved over to the edge of the shallow bank separating the two levels. She approached the flame, using her tail to lift the lid of the pot, checking its contents.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I answered.\n\nRisha looked up. \"No, no, don't be sorry,\" she admitted, redirecting her attention to the fire, returning the lid to its pot.\n\nHer fluent motion reminded me that I still held a glowing lantern in my own tail and a satchel around my neck. I gently placed the former by my side, while I held on to the satchel.\n\n\"I guess not everyone has to lock themselves in an archive,\" she joked.\n\nMoving closer, I steadied the restless satchel with a forepaw. \"Well, at least someone knows who I am; otherwise, I'd think I was crazy,\" I added with a reassuring smile.\n\nShe was the only other who knew everything. After our return, I had told her about the stars in the ice, the creators and all they had told me. I didn't know if she truly believed me; admittedly, I was at rather a low point when she'd confronted me, and I finally felt I could confess. She had sacrificed a lot for me, and while she would never admit it, I knew my obsession with the truth was damaging our relationship. I knew that I owed it to her to be here and not out searching for answers I'd never find, and with that in mind I slid down beside her.\n\n\"Hey, no one thinks you're crazy, and certainly not any of us,\" she reassured.\n\nThe thought lingered for a moment. She was right about the latter part, although the former was a worry. Lost in thought my head drooped lazily while the fire's warmth caressed my front, and the stone at my back delivered a warm kiss.\n\n\"I still can't find anything,\" I admitted, trying not to sound too disheartened.\n\nWith a sweep of a forepaw I slid the book-laden satchel from my neck. I knew there would be nothing of any importance in them, and yet I'd brought them anyway. Risha's gaze wavered, the disturbance in the tranquil blue pools of her shimmering eyes drawing my attention.\n\n\"I take it you won't be eating again tonight?\" she asked, clear about the rhetorical nature of the question.\n\nNo one else would ask about something like that, as not eating would surely be a shock to most. It was true \u2013 I could go for longer than any dragon without food, and I'd been neglecting meals for over a week now. While I usually ate after such long periods, I hadn't shown any sign of starvation or hunger. She would have been amazed when we'd first met, but now she had seen what I really was, any concern was lost.\n\n\"I assume you won't be coming to the season of fire celebration either?\" she added.\n\nThe celebration had slipped my mind, I had to admit. I used to measure the passing of time by the passing of winters, but the draconic calendar was different. The four seasons I once knew still existed, but they held deeper meaning. The season I once knew as autumn was the season of air, winter was the time of water, spring was earth and summer was fire. Tomorrow was the year's longest day, the height of the season of fire, and the start of the next dragon year.\n\nA great celebration marked the passing, and the other seasonal celebrations paled by comparison. I was no stranger to festivities, but whereas I was once viewed as a creature of legend and somewhat respected for it, here I felt shunned. I tried my utmost to know the way of the dragons through experience rather than reading about their long history. It had been what I always wanted after all, and while it was hard to socialise, it brought me closer to my true friends.\n\nRisha looked at me as the thought ravaged my mind, the smile on her muzzle drawing me back to reality. I knew it would mean a lot if I was there. She was always there for me. But the fact was, I didn't want to go, and I knew she'd never force me, but if nothing else, I owed it to her and somewhat to myself.\n\n\"Yeah... I'll come.\"\n\nSurprised, she paused for a moment, shaking her head.\n\n\"You don't have to,\" she replied, her endless kindness making me feel like I owed her even more.\n\n\"No, no. I need to see more anyway,\" I added, manufacturing a cheerier expression.\n\nThe giddy smile that broke across her snout warmed my sour feelings, at least.\n\nNow I need to prepare myself for tomorrow night. Urgh, I've not been to a party in almost a year.\n\nThe sudden sound of scattering claws by the door, accompanied by a shower of rocky dust generated by the beating of leathery wings, interrupted our conversation. Like a ball of green scales, a dragon hurriedly came skidding to a clumsy halt.\n\n\"Not as easy as I remember,\" Boltock laughed as he gained control of his landing.\n\n\"By the fires, Boltock, you should be more careful with that wing!\" Risha snapped with a mix of anger and concern.\n\nHe paused before looking over the large scar on his wing. The membrane was tattered, discoloured and barely held together. Every time I saw it, I felt a pang of guilt, because no matter how much I'd been assured it wasn't my fault, I still blamed myself. It re-enforced my hate for those who so mercilessly inflicted it, though I took some comfort from the fact that I'd defeated them.\n\n\"It's fine,\" Boltock proudly assured his sister. \"Everyone thinks it's heroic; they all say I was so brave,\" he added in a tone his sister seemingly disliked, while pressing a forepaw to his chest.\n\n\"Not that I'm not brave,\" he quickly corrected.\n\nRisha stared at him, seemingly trying to decide if any response was necessary, unable to contain a slight snigger.\n\n\"What did Ember say then?\" she asked smartly, and her brother was swift to frown.\n\nAfter being here for so long, I had to admit I knew what he was going to say as much as Risha did.\n\n\"She's going with Pyro. Says she still owes it to him.\"\n\nEmber was a Fire Order dragoness, the last of us who knew most of what had transpired during our disappearance. We had all kept it a secret, but unlike us, she had at least one to answer to. Ember was independent, as many dragons were, but she shared her life with Pyro, another Fire Order soldier. Risha and Ember were close friends, while Ember and Pyro's relationship was somewhat frustrating to Boltock.\n\nI'd once asked Risha about it, but surprisingly that conversation was one she consistently avoided. Although she had explained that if a dragon and dragoness were close enough, they called each other 'mates'. When she had tried to explain, I'd regretted asking; it was confusing, and at the time it was the least of my worries. Not to mention it made me feel awkward, especially around her. We were close friends, but certainly nothing like Ember and Pyro.\n\nI'd briefly met Pyro when I first arrived, and after returning from our adventure, I learned he was at least a year older. I hadn't appreciated our ages at the time, especially considering the scale of a dragon lifespan, a few years difference didn't matter. Even so, being a serving member of the Fire Order, Pyro had more than a few questions about where we'd been.\n\nI felt he deserved to know more, although we all knew he'd be angry, especially with Boltock for not inviting him. As for the rest of it, he was as oblivious as everyone else; he knew nothing of where we truly went, nothing of those we encountered, or my vague origins and what I'd done. It felt selfish to deny him, but Ember had said it was best and assured me it was okay. As a soldier he always wanted to be more, to be free of the bounds of lesser ranks, to stand up for what was right and sometimes it got to his head.\n\n\"You know you're the reason he didn't come with us, right?\" Risha declared, shaking me from my thoughts.\n\nBoltock grunted, shaking his head as he moved beside me and sat against the rock. She watched until he finally stopped, at which point she turned her attention to the fire.\n\n\"I assume you won't be going now?\" she asked, glancing back to her brother, who quickly avoided her eyes.\n\n\"Do I have a choice?\"\n\nShe smiled wryly before teasing.\n\n\"Not if you wanna meet some of the order masters.\"\n\nBoltock mouthed something silently before leaning forward, attempting to deflect his sister's humorous attention, he redirected his to me.\n\n\"Look who's back.\"\n\nI sighed, trying to uphold his attempt to change the subject, until he realised, he'd almost instantly failed.\n\n\"She's not been on at you as well, has she? What could she possibly have to worry about you for?\" he added, giving his sister a cheeky glance.\n\nI couldn't help feeling slightly uncomfortable. Although this was the family I'd always wished for, when my closest friends referred to me as something even a little unusual, it still hurt. I stood up, sweeping my satchel around my neck. Boltock looked confused for a moment before turning away apologetically. I knew that beneath his boisterous attitude there was a dragon who really cared.\n\n\"Don't make it too easy for her,\" I told him, offering a smile as I glanced back over my shoulder. He grinned while we both looked at Risha's disapproving glare, and with a flap of my wings, I flew up to the ledge defining the doorway to my nest.\n\n\"I'll see you tomorrow, I'll make sure!\" I called down as I entered.\n\nThe once bare walls of the chamber were hidden behind piles of dusty books and parchment. I was sure that I'd collected half of the archive in here, and yet I still went back every day, clinging to the hope that I'd find something. I shook off the irritating satchel, which hit the floor with a satisfying thud. Slumping into my nest of quilts and dry straw, I pressed my head against the soft surface, opening my eyes over the mountains of grey cloth and a dark horizon broken only by the shadow of huge tomes.\n\n\"He seemed...\" I heard Boltock's voice below, \"\u2026 tired.\"\n\nI could barely hear Risha's mumbled reply through the stone beneath my quilts.\n\n\"Hey, Sis,\" he continued. \"I'm not saying anything, but are you sure you...?\"\n\nHis words were stopped abruptly, by what I could only assume was a silent response from his sister. I decided to stop eavesdropping, it was wrong, especially on my friends. Instead, I gazed up at the towers of useless knowledge, the roughly stacked books resembling the wooden walls of my old home. The last thing I'd been told by the creators was to use what I knew, but the useless bulwarks of paper were monuments to the fact that I knew nothing.\n\nMy eyes drifted until they came to rest on a lone book sat on a small wooden case covered by a parchment inscribed with some scribble about a 'golden sigel'. I pulled my head up and sprawling the rest of my body across the quilts I swept the parchment aside. Grasping the smooth wooden case with my forepaws I stared at the image inset into its lid. The 'Seal of Eternity' portrayed four white dragons sat in a circle around a black sphere, depicting the creator's triumph over their greatest foe.\n\nRisha had bought it for me; apparently it was the least she could do after I'd saved her life. It was only after I'd finally conquered the guilt her sentiment induced that I came to appreciate her gift. It was a welcome reminder that I had someone else who would always be there for me. I lowered my head to take a closer look before carefully opening the lid with my snout.\n\nThe faint glow from a gleaming white gem sitting within a golden eight-point star illuminated the case's inner surface. Four smaller points sat between the main ones, and a coiled dragon-like serpent bridged all of them. The whole shape sat neatly on top of a gold chain, wrapped around the edges of the case like a thin snake. I didn't know whether I hated, loved, or owed my existence to the golden amulet. It undoubtedly gave me limited control of the power I possessed, and yet I refused to wear it. Although I hated those who'd cursed me with that power, it was magnificent, and its presence made me feel more like myself.\n\nA clatter of claws, a whoosh of wings, and a gust of air beyond my nest's entrance was enough for me to slam the case shut and shove it away.\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha's soft voice whispered through the opening. \"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.\"\n\nI quickly pushed the case further against the wall with my tail. \"No, no it's fine,\" I answered hastily.\n\nBrushing off her embarrassment, she smiled and moved over. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nI paused for a moment, trying to think of anything I may have done to give her the impression I wasn't. Hiding the mental conflict, I replied, \"Yeah, I'm fine, it's...\"\n\nLost in the maelstrom of thoughts, my attention drifted. \"It's just\u2026\" My eyes wavered, drawn back to the box. \"I need to know,\" I added shamefully.\n\nTentatively breaking the silence between us, she continued. \"I know it's not my place to ask but... Do you really need to give up so much of who you are to find out what you are?\"\n\nI heard the truth in her words, I always did \u2013 her voice was as gentle and calming as a summer breeze. Yet within the calmness it could be as strong as dragonfire. It was one of my favourite sounds.\n\nEver since I'd known the truth about myself, I feared I would lose myself to it. She was one of the few things I could hold on to, to avoid losing who I was. Despite the truth in her words, the only one prolonging the possibility of that loss was me and my obsession with uncovering more of it. I still remembered the part of me that would fantasise about where I came from and marvel at the unknown.\n\nI glanced at the books, her eyes following mine as they climbed the mountain of old parchment.\n\n\"What happened to the dragon who just wanted a home?\" I asked myself aloud, lowering my eyes until they were level with hers.\n\n\"This... this isn't about, well?\" she asked hesitantly.\n\nI knew what her question meant and without her completing the sentence, I answered and shook my head.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nI missed my old home, but I had no regrets about my decision to leave. That had been mine alone, what I feared now was losing the home I'd found.\n\n\"I want to know it's over,\" I admitted, raising my head. \"I want to know I never have to risk anyone else ever again,\" I added turning my eyes to the small part of Dardien's night sky visible through the window.\n\nShe crept further into the nest, and I marked each step by the tap of her claws, until I knew she stood right behind me.\n\n\"You're the one who saved us, and yeah, it was a risk. But we went willingly, and you fought to ensure that the risk didn't grow,\" she continued, placing a forepaw on my shoulder.\n\nI knew what I'd done to prevent losing those closest to me; I'd done it because it was right, but whenever I thought about it, I could do nothing but wallow in the suffering my failures had caused in the process.\n\nI glanced at her, knowing she would defeat my every word. She knew me too well, she knew exactly what to say, and lifting her paw from my shoulder, she turned to the exit. I manufactured a weak smile, failing to match the warm glow of hers. I appreciated everything she did for me, especially what I suspected she sacrificed. She was truly my closest friend.\n\n\"Blaze, you don't have to be what they say you are,\" she told me, pausing on the ledge.\n\n\"Oh, dragon feathers!\" Boltock's voice rang out from below, accompanied by the sound of falling stones and the sharp hiss of water hitting something hot.\n\nDragons didn't have feathers. I chuckled to myself, meanwhile she spared the lower chamber a glance.\n\n\"No, he's certainly not making things easy,\" she huffed playfully.\n\n\"That's your brother for you,\" I replied, and she rolled her eyes.\n\n\"Oh please, I could kick both your tails if I needed to,\" she declared with a playful confidence.\n\nThat's Risha alright, my soft, loving best friend who's not afraid to kick my tail.\n\n\"See you tomorrow,\" she finished, before spreading her wings and diving from the ledge.\n\nI remained still for a moment, staring at where she had stood, part of me longing for her to be there forever. I turned to my quilts and with a dusty thud, found myself staring at the alien landscape of cloth and straw once again. Maybe she was right, maybe it was all over, and I was worrying about nothing. It had been almost four seasons since I'd seen that cursed thing explode and fall into the abyss. Even the part of me that wanted to believe something was still out there lurking in the darkness was succumbing to the idea I was rid of it. Maybe I could truly have the life I'd always dreamed of.\n\nI dragged the rest of my body lazily onto the quilts, curled my tail to my head, and buried myself beneath a draped wing.\n\nMaybe it is over. I repeated to myself, each thought drawing me closer to my new life and the dark relief of sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Mapper",
                "text": "I stood up, finding myself in a bright forest, sun dazzling my tired eyes as pillars of light broke through the canopy. The summer air was warm and calm, filled with the chatter of birds, the fresh scent of wood, and layers of radiant leaves. Around me was an array of smaller plants, ferns, young trees and groves of shaded bluebells. Weariness subsided as my eyes passed over the tranquillity, until it was broken by the faint sound of a distant voice.\n\nEach tree generously bounced it to the next, I listened intently while the sound increased, drawing closer until the words were almost recognisable. It was calling my name.\n\n\"Blaze... Blaze.\"\n\nIn that moment I realised, I knew it. I knew it better than any other, and without hesitation I dashed forward, sweeping aside shrubs and scattering swarms of insects. The forest tried to slow my pace, but the scratching plants and biting hollies were nothing against my scales. At least until the forest floor disappeared beneath me without warning, sending me tumbling down a dry dirt bank in a cloud of dust. With a thud I crashed to the ground, scattering the dry sediment and pebbles. I fumbled to my paws attempting to recover when I saw her. She stood before me, illuminated by a glowing column of light slicing through the canopy.\n\nShe stood on two legs, taller than my four, two arms hung at her side holding on to a wooden bow. She wore thick leather hunting gear, equipped with an arrow quiver and satchel. She looked at me through a parted fringe, red hair glowing like fire in the sunlight.\n\n\"Tarwin?\" I questioned curiously.\n\nHer expression was perplexed, and I recalled she couldn't understand me. I placed a quivering paw in the dirt and stumbled forward. My attention fought to stay on her, but inevitably slipped away for a moment, and when it returned, she was gone.\n\nAs I stared at the spot where she had stood, reality quickly caught up with me. She'd gone, and with each movement of my head the trees began to spin, like a daze from which there was no escape, until a chaotic whirlwind of indistinguishable colour replaced its beauty. The image accelerated into a spinning darkness, breaking to a halt as quickly as it started. The forest, once awash with colour, was now nothing more than an eerie blackness. My dazed head finally lifted, or at least it felt like it did, in the endless gloom I could hardly tell. Beneath my paws a rough, black stone stretched out in all directions, the vast expanse of the alien landscape broken by towers of the same dark rock until it became one with the horizon. A dark sky awash with crisp stars, dotted with radiant patches of cosmic cloud. The millions of sparkling lights were far from the warming sight I knew; this time, their glow felt hostile and cold.\n\nMost eye-catching of all was a majestic, shimmering sphere bathed in phantom-light like a giant moon in the void, its vast surface an uneven patchwork of blue and green shrouded in wispy white clouds. Simply staring at it made me feel nauseous, like I could fall forever into its vast emptiness. The vertigo forced my eyes back to the rock around me, and before I could fully comprehend the reality there was a sudden shift in the blackness.\n\nA cold chill swept over my already frozen scales, and the gloom shifted again as something moved just beyond my sight like an invisible snake. Another chilling gust of wind blew, this time carrying faint words. I braced myself as the elusive tone danced around me, leaving a serpent of lingering sound until, with a snap, they found their place.\n\n\"You believe you're safe?\"\n\nTheir brief clarity struck me, before shifting once more.\n\n\"Who's there!?\" I shouted, my eyes snapping between spires and darkened ridges.\n\nAnother movement writhed through the darkness, as if a giant worm was sliding effortlessly through the shadows. A bright-red light projected onto my scales as two glowing scars tore across the starry sky. Swiftly expanding, like fire spreading over dry parchment, until they morphed into a pair of sharp, flaming eyes. I backed away, my eyes wide in horror as another flash revealed a fiery jaw, lined with shadowed teeth.\n\n\"You do not rule here, Guardian,\" announced a ghostly voice, each shocking syllable striking fear deep into my soul.\n\nI know those words.\n\n\"Darkness will fall,\" the fiery form assured, the flames within its spectral mouth shifting with each word.\n\nA feeling of dread, rage, and devastation overwhelmed me \u2013 so much hatred bled from its frightening eyes. I'd seen this vision before, an unforgettable, eternal vision lodged deep inside my mind. In those eyes I saw what I'd seen within the darkest depths of the Sphere. I shuddered, yet the rock under my paws seemed to grip me, holding me captive, until a fiery explosion sent the hellish world into oblivion and I snapped back to reality."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Through the translucent skin of my draped wing the faint light of dawn streamed in through the window.\n\nJust another dream. I muttered to myself, shifting my head from under the covers.\n\nDreams were once a curse, but those limited to my sleep couldn't assault me with the same effect as those that became reality.\n\nKeep looking forward. I told myself, trying my best to imagine Risha's voice. Those dreams are getting old anyway.\n\nI took a long, deep breath, stood up, and stretched my aching limbs. The cave was surprisingly cool, and a light breeze blew through the window, chasing loose parchment over the floor. Outside, the sun had begun conquering the night, reclaiming its throne on the day of its longest reign. Glancing up at the mountains of knowledge flanking me, I turned to the discarded satchel and the pointless books peeking from its gaping mouth.\n\nAll this useless information? Maybe Risha is right. I glanced at the case housing my amulet. Maybe it is over.\n\nIn a swift movement I shovelled some of the books into the satchel. If it's over, I don't need them. I don't need to worry anymore.\n\nThe more I realised it, the more I felt like I stood a chance of settling down, really making this place home and my friends my family. With the growing warmth of that thought, I happily stuffed as many volumes as I could into the satchel. I managed five and some tattered scrolls before finally deciding that any more would hinder my flight.\n\nThis is going to take a lot of trips.\n\nI had time; in fact, I had my entire life \u2013 and a dragon's life was long! I could make a quick trip to the archive to return the books, be back before the others woke, and still hold my promise that I'd see them this morning.\n\nYes, that's good! I can spend the morning with Risha, just me and her!\n\nAlthough it was heavier than usual, I pulled the bag around my neck and moved towards my nest's ledge. As expected, it didn't sound like anyone else was awake. Steadying the heavy load, I spread my wings and swooped down. The faint smell of smoke drifted up from the charred remains of the fire, several pots discarded around it.\n\nHow late did those two stay up last night?\n\nI quickly headed to the main balcony, brushing past the waving curtain as I walked out into the cool summer morning. The faint beating of distant wings, a light breeze, and the distant gushing of water broke the silence. The skies were relatively quiet, few dragons flew this early.\n\nThat's going to change this evening for sure. I reasoned, recalling the celebration.\n\nGo to the archive, leave the books, get home before they wake up, spend the day with them and go to the celebration tonight. I said to myself, rapidly forming a mental checklist, spreading my wings and setting off into the early morning sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "After a short flight I swooped on the winding currents and my destination panned into view. From here the archive landing balcony looked like it split the great stalactite, halfway around its middle. Rows of arches supported the open hall, disrupting the irregular weave of platforms, bridges and nests scattered above and below. Carrying the extra weight, I had to beat my wings hard coming into land, and with a clatter of claws against polished stone, I found myself looking into one of the arched doorways.\n\nPut back books, return before they wake up, I reminded myself.\n\nIt was significantly quieter than last night. Satisfied there were fewer prying eyes, I swiftly hurried inside, checked the two guards, and whilst I'd never seen them quite this early, all seemed normal. Then I noticed two more armoured dragons standing at the end of an aisle.\n\nZephyra's personal guards. The memory of the princess flashed briefly through my mind. They're here early, maybe they didn't leave last night?\n\nReturn books, get back before they wake up!\n\nMy mind snapped impatiently, shaking me from my wandering suspicion. Shaking off the blanket of curiosity I quickly moved into the nearest aisle. A cooling shadow consumed the breaking daylight, the long row of towering shelves and old books stretching out before me like a tight gorge. I was alone, except for one silhouetted figure at the far end. Not that I cared too much, I wouldn't be here for long, and with that in mind, I scurried toward the shelf from which I'd taken the books.\n\nIn my haste I managed to drop a couple on the floor, and before I could consider my clumsiness, the tapping of paws distracted me. I glanced up to see a tail whip around the far end of the aisle accompanied by a small cloud of dust where the stranger had stood. I cocked my head before concluding I was simply being avoided again.\n\nKeep looking forward. I remarked inwardly. I shouldn't have to put up with all the aversion for much longer.\n\n\"I haven't seen you here before.\"\n\nThe sound of a female voice almost had me jumping up the walls; it was firm whilst maintaining a soft, regal tone. I wasn't expecting anyone other than my friends to speak to me \u2013 certainly not in public, and certainly not now. I took in a deep breath, calming my sudden nervousness, only for my mind to go blank as I looked at who had addressed me.\n\n\"My apologies, I didn't mean to startle you.\"\n\nHer crystal-clear eyes stared at me through the long, knife-like slits in her dark-blue and silver helmet, striking me speechless.\n\n\"Erm...\" Was the only sound I could force from my mouth, and she giggled slightly.\n\n\"Greetings, I'm Zephyra,\" she introduced herself. A regal bow accompanied her words, and she subtly opened her wings in salutation.\n\nHer identity was all too clear, although up close, she looked slightly taller and a few years older than me. I'd never expected to speak to another dragon, let alone royalty.\n\nSeems the children of important figures have a way of finding me: first Tarwin, now Zephyra?\n\n\"Blaze, my name is Blaze...\" I stammered awkwardly.\n\nShe carefully looked me up and down, and all the while I dreaded she would point out my odd colour and lack of element.\n\n\"Greetings, Blaze,\" she added, this time nodding formally. I tried to do the same, but the subtle motion I came out with was hardly worthy.\n\n\"Erm, you're...?\" my voice trailed off again, my throat feeling like it was stuffed with wool.\n\n\"A princess?\" She proffered. \"I would prefer not to be reminded,\" she added, running a foreclaw over her neck spines.\n\n\"Never mind titles,\" she continued, swiftly diverting the topic. \"I've never seen you here before.\" Her stare caught my eyes before they drifted away.\n\nThis is it; this is when she calls me a freak.\n\n\"In fact, I've never seen a dragon like you before,\" she added, as expected.\n\nNot only that, now I was going to have to think of an answer, a better one than the excuse I normally gave to those who asked me.\n\nWhile my thoughts floundered, she sighed, an exertion that sounded more graceful in her regal tone.\n\n\"Never mind that,\" she shifted topic again, as if wishing to say so much before her listener could be stolen.\n\nShe looked over the shelves, her armour made no noise as she moved.\n\nThat really is some armour she has there. I didn't know why it was so silent, but it did explain how she was able to sneak up on me so easily.\n\nI remained motionless, the only sign that I wasn't a statue was my breathing and fidgeting eyes, continually jumping to the pile of scattered books at my paws and hoping she wouldn't notice them. I didn't want to be rude to the only other dragon to whom I'd ever spoken, especially royalty, and yet deep down, I really wanted to leave.\n\nShe continued to peruse the vast expanse of shelves and dusty old knowledge, her armoured tail swishing silently. Each time the shimmering weapon cut through the air the bladed tip made me feel slightly uncomfortable.\n\n\"Are... you alright?\" I mumbled, surprised that the words escaped my muzzle as I stole my eyes away from her tail.\n\n\"Fine, fine... It's just\u2026 All these books and I can never find what I need,\" she acknowledged.\n\nI certainly know that feeling; this archive needs a major rearrangement or better management.\n\nI paused again, keen to say something more despite the intimidation of her presence.\n\nI've fought monsters, creatures and the foul magic of a dark sorcerer, but this moment scares me more? It felt like my own past was mocking me.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" I asked sheepishly, trying not to look her in the eye. She gave a wry smile, like she'd longed for me to ask.\n\n\"It's nice to hear someone actually speak to me for a change,\" she responded happily while her eyes continued to scour the shelves.\n\n\"Everyone's usually too afraid of my father,\" she noted, as I felt a similar relief to be chatting.\n\n\"I've always wanted to know how to be a great leader, like my great aunt Aria,\" she continued enthusiastically.\n\nThat was another ambition I understood, although I hadn't had a life preparing me for the duty of leadership like she had.\n\n\"Not like my father,\" she added under her breath. \"The less said about his methods, the better.\"\n\nI noted her attitude was like someone else I knew. But before I could consider what Tarwin used to do, Zephyra's eyes turned back to me.\n\nShe scrutinised every detail, and I felt strangely naked \u2013 a rather pointless thought, considering dragons didn't typically wear anything other than jewels and armour. I draped a wing over my body as she shifted to my side. Before she could look over my entire flank, she paused curiously.\n\n\"Are these yours?\" she asked, breaking my bewilderment, and allowing me to see she was holding one of my fallen books.\n\n\"Y... y\u2013yeah,\" I stuttered, reaching forward and clumsily taking hold of the book she'd offered, quickly stuffing it back into my satchel as I fumbled to gather the others.\n\nAnother amused giggle left her mouth as she gingerly raised a forepaw to her muzzle, slipping one final book into my bag with her tail.\n\n\"It's been nice talking to you, Blaze,\" she added, her amused tone accompanied by another subtle bow before she turned away. \"I hope to see you here more often.\"\n\nI attempted to say something, but being locked in a cocoon of bewilderment, I was too confused to reply. It wasn't until her blade disappeared around the end of the aisle that I relaxed.\n\nDid she speak to me? I asked myself. Another dragon, a royal dragoness no less? I felt warm feelings in my chest.\n\nI was happy! She'd spoken to me, and not about my differences; well, not directly anyway.\n\nMaybe the world knows I'm finally ready to live my life?\n\nOnce again, I carefully retrieved the books from my satchel, gently sliding them into their rightful place. All the while my body felt like it was filled with a pleasant, fuzzy sensation.\n\nSpeaking to another dragon isn't so bad, and if I can manage to speak to royalty, I can speak to anyone!\n\nThe rapid scratching of scattering claws interrupted my contemplation, and I turned quickly. Another shadowy figure disappeared, their existence only evident by a brief tail flick and dust left at the far end of the aisle. I felt a strange sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu; I was sure I'd seen the same figure disappear earlier.\n\nReturn books, get back before they wake up!\n\nMy unexpected conversation with the princess had already prolonged my schedule. I knew I'd be hard pressed to get back before at least one of the others woke, and yet, I was fighting a mental conflict between loyalty to my friends, curiosity and suspicion, and the latter was winning, drawing me towards the far end of the aisle.\n\nMy wandering led me into an empty corridor, thinner than the main aisle. To my right lay more shelves, each curving slightly to adhere to the structure's outer circumference.\n\nAnother rush of clawed feet focused my attention, and my eyes snapped to my left to see several more of the shelves stretching out in the same manner as those to my right. A few aisles down, however, the curved corridor abruptly ended, there was a rough stone wall, it looked old and forgotten. A flurry of dust, the clatter of claws, and a glimpse of a tail in a dark, dusty opening cut into the rock convinced me that someone was messing with me.\n\nReturn books, get back before Boltock and Risha... My mind raced, desperately trying to subdue its inquisitive nature. Before they wake up!\n\nDespite attempting to follow my own schedule I found myself peering at the old tunnel. I didn't need any reminder that what might be down there betrayed everything I wanted to forget, but I had to look.\n\nIf there are really some answers, some final answers, I've got to take a peek.\n\nI stepped cautiously from the cover of the shelves, moving through the opening, the air felt stale, like a dry skeleton left and forgotten. Thick dust laced the smooth archway and cobwebs hung from the curved ceiling, leading to a downward stairway. I forbade my mind to remind me that I should leave as I glanced back to make sure I wasn't being followed.\n\nNot that whoever led me here was bothered about that. I thought as I took a tentative step forward.\n\nIf the corridor had ever been clean, it was now a ghostly echo of its former self. A thick carpet of dust lay at my paws, the remnants kicked up by my fleeing predecessor spinning in the air. I took care to ensure my own movements did not do the same, my visibility was poor enough already.\n\nThe light behind me faded, as I rounded a corner in the descending stairs. All the while I could see no sign of the one I'd followed, or anything else for that matter. Nothing but a musty dryness lingered over my senses while shuddering cobwebs brushed over my snout.\n\nShifting several of the dust-ridden strands aside, I caught sight of a faint blue light. Oh, by the skies, not this again.\n\nDespite my apprehension, things were not the same. The whole place felt ancient \u2013 what I could see of the walls looked withered and wrinkled like shrivelled fruit. The stairs levelled into a short tunnel, leading into what looked like a chamber at the far end, its centre lit by a dense cluster of glowmoss clinging to a solitary stalagmite. I glanced back to the gloomy staircase, and for a moment, considered turning back.\n\nJust like last time, did I turn back then? I recalled the cave under the ice and huffed. No, but sometimes I wish I had.\n\nI soon found myself entering the chamber, walking on a thick carpet of dry debris. A swarm of gloom clouded my view as shadows cowered from the moss's faint glow. The roof hung low, allowing enough room for a dragon to stand, but it certainly wasn't a cavernous chamber like the rest of the archive.\n\nStepping through dust so deep it felt like I stood in a sheet of foul snow. I crept towards the base of the lone stalagmite, to where two curved tables were fitted perfectly around the circular stone. Accompanying them was a rusted perch forged to look like fire, and a set of small saucers presenting ancient coals. Two shelves hung beneath, and what looked like the most ancient book I'd ever seen sat alone, its pages yellowed and unevenly sandwiched between its shrivelled covers. Its spine twisted and bent in a way that, if it was alive, would be impossible to bear.\n\nHow long has all this been down here? I wondered, glancing around.\n\nShelves formed from moulded stone flanked me, like those in the archives, though these were withered and worn almost beyond recognition. Books, parchments and several old scrolls lingered, all considerably older than any others I'd seen.\n\nAnd Boltock says I'm a crazy book hoarder?\n\nA crooked staff leaned against one of the walls, appearing to be nothing more than a trimmed tree branch. Straining my eyes, I made out two wooden beams bridging the gap between the walls, supporting the ceiling before retreating into the rock on either side. Taking another cautious step, I reached for the book sitting on the central shelf, the action summoning a plume of dust.\n\nTake it easy, I told myself, wincing as the bombardment of dry debris stung my eyes.\n\nReturn books, be back in time...\n\nI had to silence the mantra in my mind as it countered my thoughts. I know what I told myself, but that's impossible now.\n\nI focused on the fact I'd never been here before, and by the looks of it, neither had anyone else.\n\nThis must be what I've been looking for.\n\n\"You're a strange one, aren't you?\" a chattering voice declared from the gloom.\n\nIt sounded as old as the chamber itself, and spoke with an enthusiasm that betrayed its ancient nature. I jumped quickly trying to steady my nerves and not conjure up another dust storm, but it was too late \u2013 the sudden movement sent the sediment swirling, like a swarm of angry bees. The cloud instantly stung my eyes and tickled my throat as it mocked me. I coughed, turning clumsily to the glowing moss at the chamber's centre, where my blurred vision landed on a very strange sight.\n\nA few rapid blinks provided a clearer image, and I almost jumped again when I found myself staring straight down the snout of a green dragon.\n\nWait, is it me or is he... Taking a closer look, I confirmed, the dragon was upside down.\n\nMy head tipped to the side, as if somehow trying to right the image. Only to find he was indeed completely inverted, hanging from the roof by his tail, which was coiled tightly around one of the wooden beams.\n\nHe was slightly larger than me, with dull-green, rocky scales. He was clearly an earth dragon, and like most earth elementals he bore gravelly spines on his hips, shoulders, and tail. Scarred, leathery wings folded at his side, and his horns were straight and brown, like two stalagmites pointing towards the rear half of his skull, or they would have if he had been the right way up.\n\nHis scales were aged beyond that of any dragon I'd seen before, and from what I knew of the Elders they were at least a thousand years old. Stranger still was what he wore on his head.\n\nAt first sight I thought it was the colouration of his scales, but upon closer inspection it seemed to be a dark-brown, leather cap. Appearing almost as old as its wearer, it was held to his head by a strap and two metal clips running beneath the back of his jaw. His horn-tipped snout protruded through a hole in the front and several metal rings housing curved glass hung over his eyes, distorting the image of his cloudy pupils. Several more lenses sat on either side of the first pair, out of his immediate line of sight. Each seemed to be one size smaller than that which preceded it, ready to fall into place over his eyes, if required.\n\nSo, it's like a magnifying glass cap?\n\n\"A strange one indeed.\"\n\n\"Do you think this was the best idea?\"\n\nIt was hard to work out whether he spoke to himself or to me. I also couldn't figure out why I was the one who was referred to as strange. I had my unique appearance, but he was the one hanging from the ceiling by his tail!\n\n\"Of course he's special, how many white dragons have you seen?\" he asked himself.\n\n\"Well... erm, yes, but he's been here a while,\" he continued, answering his own questions, albeit in a slightly different tone.\n\nMy scepticism grew, morphing into concern, not that he seemed to realise. He spared me a fleeting glance, seemingly using that information in an argument with himself.\n\nAnd I thought I was going crazy?\n\n\"Who are you talking to?\" I asked.\n\nHe snapped his disapproving attention back to me, as if I'd rudely interrupted a proper conversation.\n\n\"We've watched you,\" he replied, tapping his left eyeglass with a long claw, the second of the metal rings sliding into place as he did so. \"You've been coming here for some time. Yes?\" he added, swinging closer to me.\n\nFor a moment he was a paw stretch away, before the wooden beam gave a groan and the force of his swing reversed, pulling him back. \"Oh, oh, and he spoke to the princess, don't you go forgetting that!\" what seemed to be the second of his personalities muttered.\n\n\"Yes, yes. Shut your snout, scatter brain!\" the first snapped.\n\n\"But we have the same brain?\" the second countered.\n\nThe first of the personalities sighed, or maybe it was the second \u2013 I couldn't tell. Either way, I stepped backward, slightly uncomfortable with how close he'd come during his swing, and secondly, because what was puzzling a moment ago was now increasingly creepy. The idea of this strange, tail-hanging dragon watching me wasn't exactly normal, not even for me.\n\nHe's right \u2013 I come here a lot \u2013 but I've never seen him before.\n\n\"As I was saying...\" his first personality stated, pausing for a moment and glancing to his ear, as if waiting for his other half to counter.\n\nWhen no such retort came, he went on. \"Very well, we'll continue. We have observed you around our archive for some time.\"\n\nOur archive? I assumed he was referring to himself.\n\n\"Knowledge of the Dark Guardians' War interests the white dragon?\" the second, slightly creepier, personality questioned, in a tone that suggested a deeper interest.\n\nHe was right to question, there was something deeper; I always sought knowledge of a time before the war.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I asked.\n\nThe hanging dragon stared at me with a puzzled look, as if normality to him was as strange as he was to normality. I sighed, the sudden breath encouraging unwanted dust to lift, before I added.\n\n\"Both of you?\"\n\nHe gave a wry smile, his yellowed teeth flashing as he swung back on his tail.\n\n\"We, dear drake, are the Cartographer,\" he stated, simulating an upside-down bow with his front paws and head.\n\n\"The Cartographer?\"\n\n\"The Mapper, dear drake, the Mapper!\" he grumbled in a patronising tone, tapping his head twice with his forepaws. \"We were once called many things, but alas, as the centuries have passed those names have faded.\"\n\nHe mumbled quietly to himself for a considerable time. Meanwhile, confusion struck me, and I became worried that my desire to learn his identity may have jeopardised any attempts to gain information. Attempting to coax him, or more accurately 'them', back to the subject, I continued.\n\n\"A mapper of what?\" I enquired.\n\nHis magnified eyes snapped back to me, appearing appalled by the intrusion. Though he quickly seemed to forget and smiled broadly.\n\n\"Why, a mapper of knowledge, of course!\" he blurted with a blast of enthusiasm.\n\nIf he's a knowledge mapper, he must know where to find the knowledge I need?\n\n\"So, you know about all the knowledge in the archive?\" I pressed.\n\nHe peered at me cautiously, clearly wary of passing on that information.\n\n\"Of course we do!\" the second of his voices interrupted.\n\nI paused, trying not to think of how weird this was getting as he continued to blabber.\n\n\"We had believed that everyone had forgotten about the war and the ages before, through death, fear or simple rejection of the gods.\"\n\n\"So, you know about the time before the Guardian War?\"\n\nHe froze mid-swing, both personalities content on staying that way. For a tense moment I thought I'd ruined my chances by insulting the crazy dragon in some way.\n\n\"Of course we do, we had many dealings during the Age of the Nine,\" the second voice mumbled, now sounding like it was the more reluctant of the two.\n\n\"That's why you're here, is it not?\" the former added, knocking another magnification lens across his narrowed left eye while resuming his rhythmic swing.\n\nWith my hopes rekindled, and before I could question further, he continued.\n\n\"Although those sour-scales up there don't admit it, they all know the legend. When the shadow returns, one of unnatural blood will be born among the nine great races.\"\n\nI'd heard that before, the griffin king Halfbeak had told me the same tale. To hear the words uttered again on the day I'd decided to let it all go, sent a shiver down my spine.\n\n\"A white dragon,\" he noted, peering at me like treasure. \"A dragon of unnatural blood if we're not mistaken, comes to us seeking knowledge of an age before one of legends?\" He questioned as if to a grand audience.\n\nMy thoughts battled the growing confusion. He'd led me down here, I hadn't come looking for him, and he'd apparently been watching me for some time. He'd also confirmed that he knew at least something about the war. Before I could process my next question, he burst out in enthusiastic laughter.\n\n\"Ha, ha, ha! And they said they didn't need the Cartographer anymore!\" His new tone seemed to be a mixture of both personalities. \"You should watch those leatherwings up there you know?\"\n\nHis jabbering voice suddenly lowered into a sinister grumble.\n\n\"They'll be scared; they know what you are, even if they don't like to talk about it. Once they're forced to admit it, they'll throw you out so they can ignore their worry, like every other of their issues.\" He flicked a claw over the table, casting a small stone aside.\n\n\"Even so, their worries won't ignore them!\" he continued, laughing to himself, before his cackle deteriorated into a spluttering cough. \"I think we'll be leaving this place soon, don't you?\" he asked, and his second personality responded with an eager nod.\n\nNo matter what I did, his words sunk their teeth into my mind like all those I'd heard before. I didn't believe the Cartographer was telling me this to be cruel, he didn't seem to take pleasure in such a thing.\n\nMaybe that's what happened to him? A part of me suggested, recalling his previous rambling. Maybe they cast him out too, forced him to stay cooped up down here until he went mad?\n\nHis absence would explain the disarray of the archive, but as for why they didn't need him, I couldn't say. More importantly, his words supported my fear of losing this home as I did my last.\n\n\"You should be careful of the sovereignty most of all, they aren't like their ancestors,\" his second voice warned.\n\nI gave him a disapproving look at the idea, was that why he was so interested in my conversation with Zephyra? I couldn't block out the tone of inevitability in his words.\n\nI need to be careful of everyone, even my friends? No, they would never do that to me! I cursed, quickly dismissing the idea.\n\n\"He's a snake, that Aries,\" the Cartographer continued, laughing, like it was part of a prolonged joke. \"Whole wings of fire, air and earth order dragons are sent to places of no return, villages and settlements are burned to rubble on our borders and he does nothing.\"\n\nThe kooky dragon gave a disgruntled ruffle of his wings.\n\n\"And what of our last allies to the north, eh? We've never found featherwings to be the most patient, and as for the south? Those forsaken lands have always been cursed.\"\n\nHis words sparked a growing fear that there were things going on in the world that most of those in the city were unaware of. In my search for knowledge, I'd read enough about the last great war to know the devastation another could bring.\n\nBut it didn't start like this: The Sphere caused it, and I've made sure it's gone.\n\nThe Cartographer stopped swaying, turning towards me sharply as he repeated.\n\n\"And so, the white dragon comes to us in search of knowledge regarding an age of legend?\"\n\nA strange air of respect now carried in his words.\n\n\"What do you know?\" I asked, stepping forward while he stared at me from behind his lenses.\n\n\"We are old, very old. Even when the Guardian War ravaged this land, we knew many things. To recall a lifetime of knowledge is merely a dream. What we will say is that the spark of this legend is not what it seems.\"\n\nI felt my heart twitch in response to his cryptic explanation. That's nothing! Can't someone be straight with me for once?\n\nBefore I could snap, there was a creaking shift, leaving him almost on the verge of falling as he uncoiled his tail and lowered himself onto the table, retrieving the old book from the shelves.\n\n\"There are many legends. Many that speak of where the Dark Sun fell, others say more of its corruption, but none can be called completely true,\" the Cartographer muttered as he contorted his body to get his head beneath the shelf.\n\nHis worn wings scratched against the ceiling as he pulled himself up, holding the book in his grubby forepaws. \"We know little of our memories, but legends are a fine way of seeing the past, if one can see them for what they truly are.\"\n\nI hated the cryptic notion of his words, and yet I didn't feel like this was going in the same direction as other conversations regarding my true nature. As for his lost memories, well, he looked old enough to have been alive at the time of the Guardian War.\n\n\"As for that knowledge, it lies here,\" he added, reaching out a forepaw, with the ancient book locked in his long, unmaintained talons.\n\nThe pages were worn, old and covered in dust, the rough, leather binding was ripped in the bottom-left corner. On the cover a smudged font of faded-black ink defined the recognisable shape of an eight-point star and the title, 'The Fallen Star'.\n\n'You'll always be my fallen star.'\n\nThe distant memory of Tarwin's last words ran through my mind, almost as lost to me as she was. Everything I knew about myself had at least some truth to it, or at least I hoped it did.\n\nCould this book answer my questions? Turning to the cartographer, I snatched myself from the trance into which I'd slipped.\n\n\"We've never read this one, not as another could,\" he said. \"Not as one of legend could understand, leastways.\"\n\nHe placed a strong emphasis on the word 'read' while staring deep into my eyes, like I was the legend for which this book had been waiting. He slipped it into my open satchel, and while I watched him do so, all I could think about was what the Ethereal had told me.\n\nHad it been the truth? What had I really done upon destroying the Sphere?\n\n\"Guard it well,\" the Cartographer cautioned, drawing my attention back to the confines of the chamber. \"Knowledge is a mighty weapon, and all weapons are dangerous,\" he advised, coiling his tail around the wooden beam and heaving himself up to the rafters.\n\n\"Yeah, better watch it with that, if they know about it, they will fear it,\" his second personality added, as he restarted his rhythmic swing, wrapping his wings about himself like some sort of giant bat.\n\nI glanced towards the dim light of the exit. I had it, the knowledge of what I was \u2013 the fallen star. I glanced back to the mumbling Cartographer, thinking that no matter how crazy he seemed, his intentions were honourable.\n\nHow long has he waited for this moment?\n\n\"Thanks,\" I acknowledged excitedly.\n\n\"Eyes await you at journey's end,\" he murmured with a gentle rustle of his wings as he nodded. His eyes closed, the lenses distorting the image of his scaly lids as he released a long weary sigh.\n\nI pondered for a moment. It was like the whole universe was playing an orchestrated game with me, the very day I sought to let go, the answers came crawling to me. I hated irony, and coincidence even more. I had to keep looking forward, but at least now I had some hope of the answers I'd been seeking. With that final thought, I began the climb back to the upper archives.\n\nThe fresh air irritated my dust-filled lungs when I eventually crawled out from the dank gloom and began coughing up the filth I'd inhaled.\n\nHow does he live down there?\n\nI assumed he didn't really care. Whatever the case I had an awful feeling that he'd given me the answers now for a reason. I looked at the satchel, imagining what could be in those pages I thought to peek inside.\n\nReturn books, get back before they wake up!\n\nMy mind scolded my impertinence. I knew the latter part of that mantra was probably impossible, but I should at least return the books and then slip back with my gift.\n\nI made my way to the closest aisle, moving through into the main hall, checking for others while I did so. The central aisle was empty, the rows of smaller corridors on either side equally so. The fact it was still early meant that I didn't have to dodge too many watchful eyes as I scampered towards the exit.\n\nThe flight balcony wasn't so quiet, and what the Cartographer had told me gnawed at my mind like a swarm of ravenous insects. It made the subtle glances harder to dismiss. I'd never considered they knew of the legend, only now realising it might have been naive of me to think so. They couldn't know, surely; Risha had no idea when we met, and neither did any of the others, or at least it wasn't obvious. Zephyra showed no sign that would suggest she knew, then again, was that brief encounter enough to base that assumption on?\n\nIt must be the older residents, the ones who've had time to know the legends.\n\nMy restless mind refused to leave it to that one group. It was hard not to perceive everyone's scouring eyes as a potential persecutor, sentencing me to the lonely fate the Cartographer had warned about. The home I'd sacrificed so much for was the one thing I feared to lose the most, only now the greatest threat to it came from my own kind.\n\nIf they feared what my presence supposedly signified, would they simply dismiss me? Cast me out of sight as they did their fear? I wanted to scream, tell them the shadow was vanquished, that I'd stopped Acrodan and his dark master's plan. I shook my head, struggling to believe, in fact, I'd never been able to admit it was true.\n\nKeep looking forward, my mind whimpered, consumed beneath the weight of doubt.\n\nI scurried to the edge of the balcony, fast enough not to leave myself exposed for too long. At the precipice, my eyes darted about the bustling crowd. The idea that they might turn on me like some savage animals was growing into serious paranoia. Even though they were going about their business without sparing me a second glance, I still felt every pair of eyes watching me.\n\nI'm different, I'm not the same. I'm a herald of something darker, a blighted symbol upon the world.\n\nMy mind grappled with an idea it could not tame and I felt myself gasping for breath at the mental image of being cast out. The thought that they might betray me because the gods had cursed me with this purpose made my thoughts burn with anger.\n\nI had to stop, close my eyes, and think. Don't freak out, don't attract any more unwanted attention.\n\n\"No surprise to find you here,\" an instantly recognisable voice drew me from the darkness of my closed eyes.\n\nThe sound of Risha's sweet words were like a blessed lifeline. I looked up, relieved that she was here and ashamed she'd had to come and find me at the same time.\n\nShe... She's what I need right now, she'll keep me safe. I thought as with a whoosh of wings, the familiar dragoness landed beside me.\n\n\"So much for 'I'll see you tomorrow,\" she added, attempting to hide her disappointment.\n\nCatching the breath panic had snatched from me, I lowered my head.\n\n\"I was trying to be back before you woke up. I, I... I got distracted,\" I admitted, attempting to forge a frail smile. \"Sorry.\"\n\nShe wasn't angry, which made me feel worse. I'd promised to do one thing for her, and I'd failed. In truth, I knew she only frowned upon what I was doing, because she wanted me to have the life everyone else had. While she didn't tell me how much she gave up to see that come true, I had my suspicions it was a lot more than I gave her in return.\n\n\"Distracted?\" she questioned sceptically, looking around at the crowd.\n\n\"Well, I'll leave you to your distractions.\"\n\nWhether she'd intended it or not, she made me feel like letting the past go was the best action I could take, despite the answers being quite literally beneath my muzzle.\n\n\"I have to get some things for tonight, it's not like Boltock's going to do it,\" she admitted with a laugh as she turned away. \"See you then?\" she added, glancing back.\n\nThe nagging desire to read the book was overwhelmed by the desire to spend time with my friend. I'd once spent all my time with Tarwin, and now I only gave Risha fleeting moments combined with short sentences that usually ended in 'goodbye'.\n\nWith one eye on the dragon-filled sky and the route to the nest where I could read, and the other on the blue dragoness I was quickly losing the right to call my best friend.\n\n\"Risha?\" I muttered.\n\nShe seemed to know exactly what decision I'd made simply by looking at me.\n\n\"Wait, I'll come with you.\"\n\n\"Well, you're more honest than Boltock,\" she stated with a pleasant laugh as I trotted up beside her.\n\nShe could read me like a book, and whatever Boltock had done to get out of what I could only assume was the same situation, I couldn't begin to imagine. The troublesome green dragon would do anything to avoid the things his sister wanted him to do.\n\nCan't say I'm into them either. But spending time with her, that I loved to do."
            },
            {
                "title": "Forgotten Past",
                "text": "Bright beams of sunlight unleashed their golden radiance on the lake as I banked steadily to the left. Risha flew close beside me, leading the way to what I assumed were the markets, the main centre of trade in the city. It had been some time since I'd flown with her, yet there was still something hypnotic about her movement. She always managed to draw my attention, no matter how much I tried to focus.\n\nDo I gawk like this all the time? What is it with me? My thoughts grumbled. It's not like she flies any different than any other dragon.\n\nMy assumption about our destination was confirmed when the wind-written air led us toward the main cliff face, where another huge scar was cut into its vast surface. The Sovereign's palace sat at its centre, its flat face and sharp corners looking out of place in a city hewn from natural rock \u2013 almost like it wanted to be different. Numerous carved symbols covered its surface, while four monolithic pillars defined the entrance to an immense hall.\n\nFour large, metal braziers, standing on equally grand, stone plinths, flanked each column. A green flame lit up the one to my right, illuminating a great tree woven into a tapestry hanging down its front, representing the symbol of the earth element. The second illuminated a red fire elemental emblem woven into similar material, its flame more potent, with dancing tips of deep-red flickering with orange and fleeting yellow. Grey was next, both in flame and fabric, a raging whirlwind depicting the air element. Finally, a blue flame lit the left-most pillar, representing water. Something I'd always considered contradictory, since the blue banner bore the seal of a breaking wave.\n\nWater and fire? Funny, I still think blue flames look the prettiest.\n\nPositioned between the fire and wind pillars, a set of steps led up to the palace hall, and just below, sat a solitary pedestal bearing an unlit brazier. The flame it lacked was supposed to be a universal mix of all four colours, known fittingly as the fire of unity. I'd never seen it lit, nor had anyone else I knew, but the Sovereign's blood line was supposed to possess all four elements. The royal blood of their dynasty was said to have been blessed by the creators, and yet Sovereign Aries had never seemed to possess the power. I'd never really understood the monarchy or their elemental powers, it had too much to do with heritage and magical jewellery.\n\nAround the unlit brazier, vast stairs led down to a crowded ledge decorated with numerous, equally vast carvings. From there the sprawl of stonework paved the way to the market area. Stone bridges and platforms supported structures made from wood and forged metal, ranging from small shacks offering food, to large, stone-cut forges smelting ores into weapons, armour and a whole manner of other dragon attire. Others were simply selling small trinkets, books and dyes.\n\nDragons scurried about the wound in the great cliff, like flies attracted to exposed flesh. Swooping into the scar before wandering about the market sprawl, buying and selling, in a similar way to the humans I'd once known. With a whoosh of leathery wings and a clatter of claws, I found myself on the market ledge. Risha landed beside me, although I was too preoccupied by the maelstrom of beating wings and the chatter of trade ringing from every corner to notice. The smell of forge-smoke and exotic foods drifted through the air like a ghost overwhelmed by the number of bodies it had to haunt. The same scenario repeated itself for as far as I could see, and it almost felt like the weight of the crowd was suffocating.\n\nMaybe this wasn't the best idea after all.\n\nI couldn't stop thinking about the number of eyes watching me; it was almost unbearable, though I knew most of them were too preoccupied with their dealings to notice me.\n\n\"It'll get busier, everyone will be getting ready for tonight,\" Risha announced before moving off into the crowd.\n\nI had to force myself after her, folding my wings at my side so I could weave through the writhing mass. Before long, we passed into one of the buzzing side streets, store after store flanked us: 'Iron Fang's Forge', 'Parinthien Spices' and 'Fleetwing's Reliquary of Exotic Artefacts' to name a few.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" I asked, pressing my snout close to Risha's ear.\n\n\"I need something to wear for tonight! So does Boltock!\" she called back over the din.\n\nI looked down at the bracelets she wore around her ankles. Except for the armour of guards and soldiers, I hadn't really taken much notice of dragon attire. She wore several gold bracelets and a sapphire-encrusted neckband. In fact, most dragonesses wore jewellery to mark their elements. As for Boltock, well I couldn't work out whether it would be amusing, or scary to see him wear anything.\n\nBefore I could offer any further consideration to the idea, I was swept to one side. In a moment of panic, I quickly looked about, fearing the rabble had separated us. Until I realised she was leading me to a less crowded area between two smaller stalls.\n\n\"Phew,\" she gasped. \"As I was saying, I need some stuff to replace these tatty things.\"\n\nShe shook one of her forelegs and the golden bands jingled. Personally, I didn't think they looked bad. I liked the way she looked, although that may have been down to my complete ignorance of accessories.\n\nThen I noticed she had a small pouch strapped around her ankle, and before I could ask what it was, she was digging into it. The several gold pieces she retrieved were yet another thing with which I'd become more familiar. They were called dragoons, a type of currency not too dissimilar to those used in human trade \u2013 something I'd watched many times. Risha and Boltock both received several dragoons a week from their training, and I'd always felt guilty for not contributing to our living expenses in the same way. Every time I tried to bring it up, Risha always replied: 'Saving the world is more than enough.'\n\nThat said, gold and jewels were far more expendable here than back in my old home. I'd been told it was due to earth elementals and fire order forges, however, sometimes it added to my suspicions about dragon hoarding. Each solid-gold coin was engraved with a dragon seal, which was quite simply the head of the sovereign surrounded by a ring of ancient symbols. Others bore the Seal of Eternity or the Pyre of Goldfire, and some rare coins had much older seals.\n\nDragons are determined to cram their history into everything, though it's never the history I need!\n\n\"If you're still coming tonight, you might as well find something to wear while you're here,\" she suggested, handing me several gold pieces. Reminding me that I hadn't considered this evening's celebrations.\n\nDamn the Cartographer, why did he pick today, of all days?\n\nI promised her I'd go, and taking care not to reveal my mysterious cargo, I slipped the dragoons into my satchel.\n\n\"I'll meet you...\" she began, pausing to peer over the crowd, \"I'll meet you in front of the palace later, okay?\"\n\nFor a moment I couldn't understand why she was leaving when she'd wanted me to come with her.\n\nWithout her this place may as well be the frozen wastelands!\n\nI severed my mind's attempts to villainize my closest friend when I came to realise what she was trying to do. She wanted me to have a normal life, and in such a life, I had to do some things alone.\n\n\"Are you sure you're okay with that?\" she inquired.\n\nI gave a subtle nod, but the sceptical dragoness looked unsure of herself.\n\nShe's right \u2013 I need to do things on my own, and if she thinks I'm ready, who am I to argue?\n\nI nodded, this time forcing a smile. \"I... I'll be fine, I've been through worse, right?\"\n\n\"Sure... I'll see you later then,\" was the last thing she said before disappearing into the crowd.\n\nI remained between the two stalls, my smile fading as I stared at the space she'd occupied.\n\nI've known her for less than four seasons, and yet she knows me almost as well as Tarwin!\n\nTurning my attention to the bustling crowd, I quickly began to wish she was still by my side. I certainly wasn't ready to venture out into the sea of scaled bodies alone, so I chose to move to the back of the stalls instead, into the shadowed rear walkways.\n\nThe gloomy overhang was a dark empty reflection of the crowded market, filled with stale air and more unpleasant smells. There wasn't even any glowmoss to light the way, and the sounds of the busy streets crept through the murky atmosphere like muffled spectres. There were fewer dragons back here, a scattered few that moved promptly by or sat hunched up gibbering about liquid silver.\n\nCast into the dark, away from the rest? I recalled the Cartographer's words. By who's judgment, I'm only back here because I can't stand the crowd?\n\nMy eyes scanned the cliff wall to my right, spying the empty husks of old businesses. Twisted mockeries of their former selves staring enviously at the rears of the thriving businesses that had replaced them. The shadowed walkway led out onto the central ledge before the palace steps, which looked magnificent, a paragon of earth dragon craft.\n\nThat I'm forced to view from the shadows like a rat. I shook my head. No, stop thinking like that!\n\nDespite the city's distracting beauty, it was the scurrying dragons continually passing by that stole my attention. I could feel their restrained glances, their staring eyes, and with the Cartographer's words latched onto my mind like a leech, I could no longer ignore them. My slow walk quickly hastened; I almost wanted to sprint along the walkway and fly away. It was only when I reached the light at the far end of the under-street, that I stopped.\n\nThe sunlit palace steps lay beyond, but it felt like the whole city could be watching me, waiting for the time when I'd step into the light so they could cast me back into obscurity. For every moment I dwelled on it, my hatred of those who had cursed me grew \u2013 and so did my purpose.\n\nHow stupid to think that destroying Acrodan and the Sphere would end this torment.\n\nI'd never been truly accepted anywhere, and I wasn't going out where everyone could see me. I needed to stay out of sight, lest the Cartographer's cursed words find me again.\n\nSo much for getting dressed up like Risha suggested.\n\nMy attention switched to the empty shell of a store to my right. It had clearly been abandoned some time ago, the inside was filthy and strewn with cobwebs. I crept in through the doorway, scattering balls of filth, the only memory of the once prosperous business. Above me, more dusty cobwebs covered a cylindrical shaft like that of our nest. Although this one only had one ledge, a large stone semicircle.\n\nOkay, I'll wait here until Risha comes back. No one needs to see me.\n\nI figured the best place to wait would be up on the ledge, and through the scattering dust, I flew up to find a long, gloomy, debris-ridden corridor. As expected, the ledge offered a comfortable place to settle, and the moment I did my thoughts turned to my satchel.\n\nI needed to know who I was, what I'd done and, more importantly, how to prove to everyone that I wasn't the foreboding legend they all thought. I had to know that I'd already stopped the shadow and that I was no more harmful than any other dragon.\n\nDust escaped the old book's cover the moment I seized it with my snout, tickling my throat and stinging my eyes \u2013 not to mention the awful taste of the impossibly worn leather. Ignoring the irritation, I set the book gently on the floor, fearing it may disintegrate if I opened it without something to support the crumbling pages. Gently brushing the grime aside, I placed a forepaw on the cover, carefully prising open the first page.\n\nA swarm of particles scattered like roaches fleeing flame, while the twisted spine creaked in protest. The inside was as worn as the exterior \u2013 yellowed parchment flaked and crumbled at its edges, and what remained of the paper wasn't far from becoming dirt itself. Scruffy marks and wounds inflicted by poor care and handling covered the scribbled nonsense, and a few loose pages slithered from the folds of their larger companions. All I found on the first page were faded scrawls and rambling notes, so poorly drawn I barely understood them. Carefully brushing the loose parchment aside, it revealed the second page and a blurred title.\n\n'From the words of Gulavan the Seer. A compilation of events leading to this fateful day, so that we may be remembered for the deeds we are about to commit...'\n\nThe words blurred into nothing more than a smudge after that, while the next page revealed a picture. Although it was far from the pristine claw-work it once was, the faded image of a striking dragoness was clear enough. She was tall and regal, wearing exquisite attire. The image was colourless, hardly holding my attention, save for the small paragraph below it:\n\n'To our beloved daughter Aria. When you read this, you will be ready to see your true destiny...'\n\nThe words trailed off again, except for 'We love you.' towards the end.\n\nBest not jump to conclusions. I told myself, recalling the name Aria belonged to the sovereign during the Battle of Dardien.\n\nThe next page provided nothing more than a time-ravaged collage of dull scribbles and faded drawings, as did the next few, boasting the same ghostly writing, blurred notes and scuffs.\n\nMaybe this isn't a book? I wondered. At least not like those I know, this is more like a combination of notes.\n\nAfter several similar pages I found one describing the magic of dragon architecture, scribbled details of mystical dragon armour and a rough drawing of what appeared to be a young earth dragoness.\n\nIs every page mocking me? I inwardly grumbled as I pressed a forepaw to the parchment.\n\nI continued to sweep through, page after page, finding more unreadable nonsense and fragmented knowledge. Eventually I slammed my forepaw down and the book quivered like a frail, old creature.\n\nThis is stupid! I finally find answers and they're too...\n\nAfter a few moments of grumbling, I looked down to see sketches of four warped, elemental sigils bound within what appeared to be crystalline pillars. By process of elimination, the one I assumed represented earth was scribbled out. There was also a fifth, a golden flame with a serpentine dragon coiled within its centre, very similar to one I'd seen in Storm Peak. Claw-scribed paragraphs sat around a crudely drawn sketch of a ridge with a huge mountain in the background, and it took me a moment to figure out which of the brief notes came first.\n\n'From the journal of Archivist Kaida, scholar of the Dardien archive, wing leader of the Goldfire Ridge investigation.\n\nI turned the page, and what was written next looked more like a journal or a diary entry.\n\nKaida, you are my most trusted student. That is why I have recommended you to the council concerning the events that transpired at Goldfire Ridge. If selected, you will be required to make for the Phoenix Mountains with the utmost haste. A group of specially selected specialists will meet you at the base of Red-Fire Mountain to accompany you to the ridge, the site at which the artefact was discovered.\n\nI knew of the Phoenix Mountains, their smouldering summits and fire spewing peaks were often referenced in the books I'd read, though aside from numerous ruined cities, there were few noteworthy locations around them.\n\nDay one, Goldfire Ridge expedition; 30th of Fire's Peak.\n\nTwo more wings arrived this morning, a band of Mordrins and a flock of griffin soldiers from the north. Trust those featherwings to treat this as a military expedition. Although, I can't blame them for being cautious. It seems that whatever landed on the ridge is something new to all of us. Those that saw it are saying it fell from the heavens, they're calling it a Fallen Star. They say it glowed brighter than the fury of Red-Fire itself. Unfortunately, all witnesses are Highkin, and I fear their devotion to the creators will lead to great exacerbation. Gods and demons aside, I'm sure there is a logical explanation for these events.\n\nIf it did fall from the sky then the impact site would suggest a northerly trajectory, meaning any smaller fragments could have landed over Valcador, or as far north as mount Ilivar and the Vrain Sea. As for what it is, very little is known about the Ether and the tales of our golden ancestors' retreat into the stars. That in mind, the thrill of being assigned to this expedition is overwhelming. At first, I was somewhat sceptical about it, but with what we've already found this could be the discovery of the age.\n\nThe academy seems to think differently, the assistance they sent to aid me is quite inadequate. It seems that the council believes this to be another sky rock, they restricted us to students rather than professors. As for the guards they insisted accompany us, they don't seem to favour being led by a dragoness of my stature. I think they'll reconsider, once they get a boulder cast into their smug muzzles, I can be as bold as any order soldier. It feels like Gulavan is the only other taking this as seriously as me; he's getting on a bit these days, but, like I always tell him, I would never have been inspired to enrol if it hadn't been for him.\n\nAs for the expedition itself? Now that the place isn't glowing hot, we'll be leading a group up to the ridge this afternoon, assuming that the fury of Red-Fire is not the cause. The fact that the site has temperatures so high that even we were unable to withstand, is rather daunting, I must admit.\n\nThe first of the scribbled paragraphs finished, but they'd been enough to stir my imagination. From what I could understand, Kaida was an earth dragoness, possibly the one sketched earlier. I'd also worked out that I couldn't be the Fallen Star she referred to, as this account was ancient.\n\nStill, what if there's two? What if there's a whole bunch of fallen stars? Calming my eagerness and growing frustration, I read on.\n\nIt seems that if one wishes to understand these events, one must first know the creators. Most believe, and our legends suggest, that our golden ancestors are responsible for the fallen star. I've studied ancient lore my whole career, but for the purposes of this report, I think it best to remind myself. By ancient accounts there are five creators, although only four are known. Their realm is known as the ether and existing within it is a city of gold that is said to be beyond our comprehension. From there they rule this creation with grace and majesty.\n\nFirst is Bezaleel, the eternal watcher, lord of shadow, oldest of the four and creator of the darkness in which our plane of existence is set adrift. Second is Anora, lady of light, original creator of starlight and the four elements: earth, water, wind and fire. Prannath, the lord of life, is third, creator of all living things as well as the grand caretaker. Finally, Nakir, the master of death, youngest of all, for death cannot exist without its former brethren. He is their messenger, harbinger of a will most unclouded and just.\n\nI withdrew my attention, thoughts becoming tangled as my knowledge contradicted itself. Almost all I thought I knew of the creators seemed to disintegrate. They'd failed to tell me any of this. I knew nothing of their names; in fact, they'd claimed never to have such things. I knew nothing of who they truly were or what they stood for, only that they'd created this realm and fabricated this legend of dragon ancestry.\n\nUrgh, why can't the answers be clear, straight and simple, for skies sake!? I inwardly grumbled while continuing to read.\n\nThe expedition reached the ridge late this afternoon. Progress has been slow due to the flightless representatives of the lesser races and their altitude sickness, leaving me in an awkward situation with the griffin representatives. The featherwings have requested that scouting patrols be dispatched into the crater, but I don't trust them. This alliance has stood for an age, and still they try to steal the discovery we all deserve. Fortunately, the excuse that the site is still too hot is holding up for now, although it will be difficult to prevent them from sticking their beaks into my affairs for much longer. At least the day seems to be on my side; the clear sky and the amazing view of Red-Fire Mountain were a nice bonus. It's certainly beautiful when it's not spewing lava, and who knows? Maybe I'll see a phoenix.\n\nAs for the ridge itself, the impact has desolated the volcanic stone, leaving only a smouldering crater. Temperatures do seem to be cooling, but visual contact with the artefact itself has been hindered by the intense concentration of smoke and steam cast from the nearby lakes. It seems I will have to withhold my enthusiasm for a little longer, we will be nesting on the ridge tonight. It's a minor setback, but a smart scholar always makes good use of their time, since there are many more things I should re-familiarise myself with before proceeding into the crater.\n\nI rubbed a forepaw over one weary eye, turning the page to find more paragraphs. In addition to the words, four pictures caught my attention. The first, about halfway down the page, was a sketch of what looked like a giant pillar, its smooth surface more like cast metal, like that of the Elder Temple's door. As for the second, it was merely another drawing of a dragon.\n\nAnother was that of a dragon helmet, cast with far more intricacy than those worn by the city guards. The final picture, at the base of the page, was a circle, its rim engraved with strange symbols. In its centre was a smaller circle containing more of the mysterious markings bound in squares, orbiting an eight-pointed star.\n\nDay two, Goldfire Ridge expedition: 31st of Fire's Peak.\n\nThe lesser races reached the summit early this morning, and due to the demands of our feathered allies, the expedition into the crater has been brought forward. The arrival of a new griffin general, Grim Talon, has also provided me with cause for concern, as well as the new attentions from the hippogriffs of Mistwind, the eastern earthkin, and kingdoms as far south as Parinthien.\n\nI found myself questioning whether I was right for this expedition. I must admit I've had my suspicions all along, but in truth, I'm not stupid, I know they only sent me here because they thought nothing of this matter. But now I'm in charge of something that could change the alliance altogether. I am thankful for the support of the highkin representative Calathar, representing both his people and Night Queen Koruna in this endeavour. He seems to share both my desire for answers and caution, his efforts are commendable, and I am glad to have him at my side. After all, this is his peoples' land.\n\nI am also thankful for Gulavan's assurance, he assures me I can do this \u2013 I couldn't ask for a better mentor. Even though I was anointed to the duty of leading this expedition, I like to think it's a group effort.\n\nThis is such a drag! I inwardly huffed. Why write so much down? I need answers, not a life story!\n\nAs for what the author spoke of, it was less of a mystery to me now than when I started reading. I'd learned a lot about the nine great races of the world in the past few seasons. Griffins or 'featherwings' were close allies, as were their southern cousins, the Hippogriffs. As for the rest, they were mostly lost or shattered by the Guardian War. The kin races, highkin, nightkin and earthkin, the latter more commonly known as dwarfs, were all gone; two were wiped out when they failed to answer their corrupt guardian's call. As for the third? Well, there was a reason their cousins chose death over corruption. Then there were humans, once known as Mordrins, as was their long-forgotten kingdom.\n\nAt that, a fleeting memory of the human I once knew flashed through my thoughts. Tarwin held a place in my heart, she'd raised and cared for me. She was the best of her race, but not all humans were the same, especially after what they'd done to Risha and Boltock's family.\n\nDay Three, Goldfire Ridge expedition: 1st of Pyre's Twilight.\n\nThe temperature at the base of the crater has now cooled enough for the lesser races to follow us. Although, at one point the desire to leave our feathered allies behind was tempting. As always, I glance over my wings to find someone looking down their beak at me. The new griffin general is certainly no exception. By the stars, I don't care if he thinks less of me because I'm not a soldier or the fact I'm a dragoness, but I'm still not going to allow those toothless hard-snouts to push me and my expedition around! I'm confident I made the right decision, and even though they are pushing for completion, I am happy in the knowledge that I remained composed enough to make that decision under pressure.\n\nWe reached the object itself this afternoon. For one, it's huge, and at first inspection it's unlike any structure I've ever seen. Its walls seem to be made of solid gold, which I know is impossible, as such a metal would surely have melted under the immense heat. As for the exposed part, our architects have assessed the structure and believe the construction to be of ancient dragon design. Personally, I think it resembles the descriptions I've heard from Exilar in the far south, or the structures of Mt Ilivar. My guess is that discovering how it fell from the sky will provide some answers, though I am not very hopeful.\n\nDay Four, Goldfire Ridge investigation: 2nd of Pyre's Twilight.\n\nA doorway into the interior was discovered late last night. It appears that most of the structure has fallen through to the steam caves, meaning that this can only be the tip of the artefact. Whoever sealed the doors has gone to a great deal of effort, which is rather strange, as there seem to be no alternative routes in. I'll admit it was more than a little amusing to see Grim Talon attempt to break it down with force. When he failed, Gulavan had the idea to have one of our soldiers breathe fire on it. Once again, he was right \u2013 the dragonfire triggered an extremely complex mechanism of arcane metal, bolts and cogs, confirming it is indeed of draconic design. The scowl on the featherwing's beak was equally entertaining, I almost couldn't resist asking him who the weak one was at that point.\n\nUpon entering, we found the place in ruins. An impossibly hot white fire still burned the metal, and the scars of the impact hindered our efforts. As for the design, it consisted mainly of the same golden metal, while the floors are formed from polished marble with inlays of arcane technology that far surpasses anything I know. In all honesty, the sight of such a magnificent place is reward enough.\n\nMany artefacts have already been discovered. Among those found on the topmost layer are three larger, intricately detailed sets of dragon armour, their grand proportions and the size of the pedestals on which they were found suggesting they were more of a display piece. Statues make up many of our recent finds too, their positions suggesting they were once animated, pointing to an arcano-magic far beyond anyone's knowledge. We have catalogued most of the items, but those too big to remove, such as the enormous arcano-tec dragon beyond the wall of the structure, are being studied on site. All I can say after all this is, I'm glad I remained in charge of this expedition, because what we've discovered here is amazing.\n\nFurthermore, we have decided to push deeper into the structure. It seems that the impact left a great amount of the object buried as well as shattering a large portion of the upper floors, leaving a deep pit into the caves below. The heat conditions and volcanic nature of Red-Fire Mountain, coupled with the state of the rock and the structure itself, have made this more dangerous than anticipated, especially for those without wings.\n\nDay five, Goldfire Ridge expedition: 3rd of Pyre's Twilight.\n\nRegrettably, two of the Mordrin representatives were reported deceased last night. It seems that their inquisitive nature led them to wander from the camp in the dark. Yet there has been no word from the surviving representatives or my superiors regarding the rather sensitive matter. In addition, there have been no new discoveries, and some among our party are growing impatient. Gulavan has spurred me on, even so, he is also frustrated with endless empty hallways and pits.\n\nDay six, Goldfire Ridge expedition: 4th of Pyre's Twilight.\n\nThis evening, as we were setting up to nest for the night, one of the Mordrin representatives stumbled across a new artefact. It seems their inquisitive wanderings do prove useful after all. The artefact itself is a black sphere, discovered in the largest chamber we've found so far. It's the deepest point we've been able to reach using the caves to bypass the worst of the structural damage. Upon retrieving the artefact there was a strange sense among us all, and while I was sceptical at first, I must admit it felt like this truly was a message from the creators. I really find that hard not to believe now, especially as the structure is reminiscent of the Golden City itself. As for the artefact, the Sigils have taken great interest and are deciphering any clues that may unlock the secrets of what transpired here, in addition to any connection to the creators and their disappearance.\n\nEverything I thought I knew crashed into a whirlwind of lies. It was clear that I wasn't the fallen star, it was the structure containing the Sphere of Eternity! If that was true, then the sphere had fallen from the skies like me and wasn't 'given' to mortals at all. Everything they'd told me back in the ice, everything I thought was true, was all a lie!\n\nIs what I know of myself a lie too? Is what they got me to do \u2013 a lie?\n\nTaking in a deep breath, I turned the page. The next few portrayed images and words confirming the artefact was indeed the Sphere I'd vanquished seasons ago. Even the claw-drawn image of that cursed thing was a stain on reality.\n\nDay ten, Goldfire Ridge investigation: 8th of Pyre's Twilight.\n\nThe Sigils have finally returned from their rituals, and yet they do not speak of what they have found, only that the artefact is to be taken to the reliquary of Ilivar immediately and the matter discussed with the council. For once, Gulavan and I found ourselves agreeing with Grim Talon. They have simply stolen our greatest find without a clear reason! Stars curse those sly birds and their relics, even if this Is a sign of our lords' return.\n\nGulavan and I are to return to Dardien, to take up our case with the council, who I'm sure will send more to continue the study of the other fallen artefacts. Despite my orders I'm not letting this find go, as neither the council nor the Sigils are stealing my credit. They sent me out here thinking it was nothing, but after all my work I'm going to get the recognition I deserve. I discovered something that could change the world!\n\nI stared at the ancient parchment, at one last scrawled piece of faded writing, followed by a small seal of nine hooked talons and red feathers.\n\nUpon the twilight of ages, the skies will break to bring forth the Fallen Star of scornful wrath and eternal hate. Cometh then one of unnatural blood, born to one of the nine great races of our legacy. For when darkness falls, and the most ancient of shadows is reborn, cometh the last great Guardian to whom we are solely sworn, descendant of shadow, light, life and death, their loss will transcendent.\n\nMighty fires of starlight will stand against the darkest dawn, and upon blades of crackling fire, corrupt blood will be drawn. When starry skies of longest night are gazed upon in times of greatest doubt and direst fear, age's twilight grows ever near.\n\nUpon that new dawn, the most magnificent light will bless such skies, as stars clash upon dying age's coming night. When golden spires become awash with Dragonfire, all will know of their last great saviour. So will end the reign of our grand creator.\n\nI slammed the book closed, its spine cracking and rupturing the weak leather. Dust flew from the pages, scattering in the wind as the aged parchment disintegrated under the force of my forepaw.\n\nIt was as if my heart had turned to ice, the chill coursing through my veins with every beat, only to be melted by burning anger. They had lied to me! I'd sought them out, desperate to know who I was, and they had lied!\n\nThat was it: I was going to find out the truth, and I now knew where to find it, where it fell all those centuries ago. I clutched the book tight, pushing it back into my satchel, which was when the harsh realisation caught up with me.\n\nNot again. I mentally whimpered. I can't leave again.\n\nMy anger sustained itself for a fleeting moment before the cool waters of sense flooded into the dry rivers of reason my rage had boiled away.\n\nI can't just leave again. The thought was enough to extinguish my anger, and I peered down at the chamber floor.\n\n'The truth may remain beyond your comprehension.'\n\nIt was one of the few things I'd been told that wasn't a lie.\n\nAm I ever going to know who I am? I needed to finish this, or I'd be incomplete forever.\n\nDeciding to wait downstairs and watch through the window for Risha's return, I spread my wings, scattering dust as I readied myself to jump. I hesitated when I realised that hiding my sorrow from her wasn't going to be easy, but before I could consider that further, something caught my attention. It was the muffled sound of someone shouting, but strangest of all, it seemed to come from behind me.\n\nTurning my head to the shadowy chamber, I felt a faint breeze blow up from its depths. The muffled din crept from the darkness, and each time it sounded, my curiosity grew. Until eventually I found myself following a trail of fluttering webs animated by the weak airflow.\n\nAfter the Cartographer's chamber, it almost felt like Dardien itself was drawing me into its most forgotten reaches, and I soon reached an open chamber, as bare a skeleton as the rest of the place. A weak beam of light broke the shadows through a large hole in the left wall. Curiosity's gripping tendrils closing tighter, I gathered my wandering thoughts and edged over to the small breach.\n\nMore muffled shouting echoed from the hole, gradually growing in strength. Placing my paws up against the shattered stone, I peered through. The slightest touch saw the wall crumble, the stone more like dust than rock, and I moved the crumbling remnants until the breach widened to something I could squeeze through. Caution took the reins of my mind, gripping tight as a gust of air swept into my face. I poked my head into what appeared to be a small crawl space, a second, longer glance, revealed that it was a space in the upper skirting of a larger chamber.\n\nA forest of monolithic columns organised into long rows supported the broad arches of an enormous hall, each flanked by bracers of varying coloured flame. The light from outside shone through, creating neat lakes of gold on the marble floor, the glorious glow only broken by the pillars' looming shadows. The formation continued for four more rows, before a giant wall stopped its progress. At its centre lay a golden door covered in inscriptions and markings, a huge mechanism of bars forged into its arcane surface. The other wall about the chamber's edge crawled with regal carvings and majestic inscriptions, ranging from battles to simple life, depicting dragons, griffins and a whole manner of other creatures.\n\nThat was when I realised this was undoubtedly inside the palace. As for the shouting, it was still distant, primarily because the chamber was so vast, and I was high up. Curiosity pushed me through the opening onto a carpet of cinders. Whatever this space was, involved fire, but thankfully the black soot on which I now trod suggested it hadn't been used in an age.\n\nThrough the small arches separating me from the main chamber, I could see several draconic figures entering from the main opening. Standing in a triangular formation, they cast a long shadow over the regal-blue carpet. Three of them were armoured, and from what I could see of their scales, they were Fire Order: one was red, the other two a bright orange. However, they were not the ones creating the commotion. In the centre of their triangle stood a fourth dragon. Another Fire Order soldier, fidgeting, twitching, and shouting in a peculiar way.\n\nI couldn't make out exactly what he was saying, his voice was broken, as if the soul had been snatched from it. His armour and scales looked like they'd recently seen battle, in fact, he seemed to be crazier than the Cartographer. A pair of shackles around his back paws connected to a chain, tethering him to the ankles of two of his escorts, who held their heads high, their eyes averted.\n\nIs he a prisoner? A traitor? I wondered, knowing that some of the punishments for such crimes could be severe. He'll be lucky if they don't lock him up for good.\n\nThe group crossed the chamber, moving between the braziers of the fire and air elements towards the huge metal door on the opposite wall. I crept quietly along the narrow crawlspace, keeping pace with them until they finally reached the door. A deep groan drowned out the dragon's muttering, as metal ground against metal, vibrations shaking the wall as the solid-gold blocks slid away and the two huge doors were reluctantly forced apart. The group proceeded through to the next chamber while the wall shuddered again as the arcane seal fell back into place behind them.\n\nRaising myself from where I'd been crouching, I could see that the sooty crawl space continued its lap of the chamber, but to my right, the trail led through a small archway into the chamber beyond the door.\n\nCautiously creeping through, I caught up and found the soldiers standing on a polished stone floor, its pattern broken by a set of stairs at the far end. More guards lined the edges, each a motionless, silver statue barely visible in the shadows of flanking arches. At the top of the steps, shimmering gold flowed up from the ground to create a throne. Slim at the base, the metal rose and blossomed like a flower, climbing above the seating plate to form four, petal-like golden towers, within the peaks of which, sat radiant jewels.\n\nThe throne had stood as a symbol of power over the city for many generations, but the imposing dragon lounging upon it had not. A slender, jewel-lined neck held his head high, and hidden beneath the cloak of a silken wing, his body draped lazily across the seat. His paws rested over the gem-encrusted rim, jet-black claws glinting, while his tail coiled around its base like a deadly snake.\n\nAround his front ankles he wore two silver bands, with a similar band at the base of his tail. A magnificent silver crown covered his head, moulded to enhance the appearance of his obsidian-black horns. The front edge led to a slender, silver plate sitting above his cold, grey eyes, before it flowed like quicksilver over his snout, making it look more like a helmet than any crown I'd ever seen. Around his neck he wore a golden band fitted with five gems \u2013 a shimmering diamond flanked by a red ruby, a blue sapphire, a green emerald, and a polished opal, each as spectacular as those that adorned the throne's peaks.\n\nI didn't need reminding about their significance, or that of the one wearing them. There wasn't a dragon in Dardien who didn't know Sovereign Aries. To his left stood a rather glum-looking dragon, his sky-blue scales, tail, and webbed spine confirming he was a water elemental. Opposite, stood an old red dragon, whom I instantly recognised as the Fire Elder.\n\nAlthough I'd only seen them once, I'd never forgot the ones who told me to abandon Tarwin. Though their lack of visibility was to be expected, from what I knew, they only came out from their meditation at the Sovereign's request.\n\nIf he's here, then this must be important. I noted. What have I stumbled into? I went into that store to avoid attention, now I'm in the throne room! Skies curse irony! I inwardly hissed, pressing myself low against the soot as I crept closer.\n\nI no longer cared about the filth; the Cartographer had warned me to watch the sovereign above all others. So, if there was any hint of what was going on in the outside world, I needed to know.\n\nMeanwhile, the group of soldiers and their chained companion approached with the utmost respect. Aries' sharp eyes watched them closely until they stood at the base of the stairs.\n\n\"Your highness,\" the foremost soldier greeted, bowing his head, raising one forepaw, and spreading his wings. His companions followed his example perfectly, all bar the one between them. \"The only survivor of Frostwrath Keep, as requested,\" he added, stepping aside, exposing the crazed soldier.\n\nAries studied the rambling dragon like a jeweller might an unrefined diamond.\n\n\"Surely one could not have begun service with such an addled mind?\" he proposed, his sharp words sounding like they were laced with silk, his tone disguising their sly intent.\n\n\"No, your highness,\" the lead dragon replied, standing tall.\n\n\"So please do enlighten me as to how a soldier of one of the finest orders has been reduced to this,\" he demanded, waving a dismissive forepaw at the crazy dragon.\n\n\"He's been like this since Frostwrath, your highness. We still don't know what happened to him or the whereabouts of the rest of his wing,\" the lead dragon responded quickly, seemingly struggling not to trip over his words.\n\nAries studied him more closely, his glare pinning him like a knife through the wing.\n\nIt's like he enjoys seeing dragons squirm. I noted.\n\nHis neck swivelled with a chime of jewelled chains, redirecting his eyes to the twitching dragon.\n\n\"What, pray tell, became of your station?\" he asked, clearly appalled not to receive the same respect he'd received from the others.\n\nThe crazy dragon's eyes danced in their sockets, with little care for who addressed him.\n\n\"Answer your Sovereign, soldier!\" another of the soldiers snapped, but nothing came from the maddened beast.\n\nAires continued to scrutinise the fidgeting wreck, glancing away as the crazed dragon suddenly blurted.\n\n\"I've seen them!\"\n\nThe Sovereign paused, his spines bristling before replying.\n\n\"What have you seen?\" His voice was slow and deliberate, sinking back to a deceivingly charismatic tone.\n\n\"Winged shadows in the night... soulless creatures, they stole the minds of the others, changed them into the ebon-winged demons!\" the rambling dragon laughed deliriously.\n\nAires' expression seemed to crack like thin ice.\n\n\"My apologies, your highness, he says nothing else,\" the leader explained, but Aries gave him no heed as he stared intently at the mad dragon.\n\n\"Take him away, see if his mind can be salvaged,\" he suddenly ordered, waving the group off with a wing.\n\nThe three soldiers gave another regal bow before making their way to the door.\n\n\"You are to remain here,\" he added, looking to the leader of the group, who glanced anxiously to his companions as they promptly departed.\n\n\"Yes, your highness,\" the soldier replied, his voice almost breaking as he forced himself to bow once more.\n\nWith a subtle head tilt, Aires turned to the blue-scaled dragon at his side.\n\n\"Send word to the order masters. Once tonight's celebrations are concluded I wish for a full report from each.\"\n\nThe blue dragon bowed and quickly scurried off beneath the columns of my vantage point.\n\nWith one graceful stride, and a chiming of jewellery, Aries uncoiled and stepped down from his throne, claws tapping on the polished marble like swords.\n\n\"You are a wing leader of the Fire Order, are you not?\" the words slithered from his muzzle as he stopped before the soldier.\n\n\"Yes, your highness,\" he replied, seemingly struggling to maintain his posture.\n\n\"Please do correct me if I am mistaken, but the soldiers of your order claim to be the finest, do they not?\"\n\n\"Yes, your highness.\"\n\nAries paused, his expression hard and cold.\n\n\"Look at me,\" he hissed, in a tone more intimidating than any raised voice.\n\n\"S\u2013s\u2013sorry, your highness,\" stuttered the soldier, his eyes creeping up to meet his sovereign.\n\n\"Indeed. As I was saying, your order claims to excel above all others, does it not?\"\n\n\"Yes, your highness,\" the increasingly nervous soldier confirmed.\n\n\"Then would you care to explain why one of the finest could be driven to madness by nonsense?\"\n\n\"We do not know, your highness,\" he blurted.\n\nAries slid forward, each intimidating step a frightful reminder of his complete command over every dragon in the city as he pressed.\n\n\"We? Do you mean to tell me there should be more in here to question?\"\n\n\"I... I do not know, your highness!\" the soldier corrected. \"It's my responsibility.\"\n\nAries muzzle curled into a sly smile.\n\n\"There are those that would say that a darkness is growing in the north. Orkin have moved down from their mountain holes and war is on the horizon, and yet we have our finest soldiers driven mad by flying shadows, ebon-wings and demons? It's Ludicrous.\"\n\nEven with the briefest mention, I knew what he was talking about. The orkin were once known as highkin, but they were corrupted by their guardian Hinnoron. After submitting to the Sphere, they became twisted by its dark magic, gruesomely changed into a race of savages driven by an uncontrollable desire to destroy and a thirst for bloodshed.\n\nWe were lucky not to come across any last time, they're all over Valcador apparently.\n\n\"You cannot remain ignorant to this, Aries,\" an older, wiser voice interrupted.\n\nThe Sovereign reluctantly pulled away from his malevolent taunt, turning to the Fire Elder, regarding him with a firm, almost challenging look.\n\n\"Be gone with you,\" Aires instructed the soldier, waving a wing without sparing him another glance.\n\n\"Yes, your highness,\" the visibly relieved dragon replied, bending into a final bow and promptly departing.\n\n\"Our enemies gather in the north; of that I am all too aware. But these shadows of which they speak are nothing but legend,\" Aries replied, a patronising tone gracing his regal voice. \"The orkin menace will fall \u2013 as they have many times,\" he added confidently, resuming his perch on top of his throne.\n\n\"You know of what I speak, and it is far beyond some barbarian rabble,\" the Elder countered.\n\n\"Do not lecture me on the threats of old; they are gone, buried beneath the ice of Ilivar,\" Aries snapped, his silver voice melting away into a molten growl. \"Acrodan and the rest of his traitorous ilk are nothing more than a story to frighten hatchlings, and the dark sun is long since forgotten,\" he continued, his voice flowing back into its deceitful, silken tongue.\n\nThey don't know? Of course, as far as they know the Sphere is still out there and Acrodan is still a threat! The realisation filled me with a warm sensation, melting my fear of rejection. Maybe if I tell them I can have my life back?\n\nThe elderly dragon looked at Dardien's ruler like one would a pouty child.\n\n\"You may blind yourself to the darkness your highness, but it will still be watching you. Why can't you see that? Your soldiers are driven mad by the unexplainable. Even our allies, King Halfbeak and as far south as Mistwind know of the change. All remain loyal to the old alliance, so why do you not call upon it?\"\n\n\"Enough!\" Aries bellowed, extinguishing the Elder's speech with little more than a subtle raising of his voice. \"I will not be compared to that featherwing ilk. We remain hidden because I think it unwise for our strength to be visible to the world. I do not wish to entice challenge.\"\n\nThe elderly dragon's muzzle twisted into a scowl as he shook his head disapprovingly, and Aries' eyes snapped to him with dagger like speed.\n\n\"Do you doubt my ability to rule? Do you doubt that the creators denied my uncle an heir because they did not intend me to be Dardien's ruler?\"\n\n\"Not at all, sire,\" the lie in the Elder's words was hidden almost perfectly.\n\n\"Then remember your place. In time this darkness will show itself and will be cast back into the pit from which it crawled, like all others before it.\"\n\nThe Elder huffed, slouching as he moved towards the door.\n\nAries displeasure was clear the moment he saw him departing without dismissal, and yet he did nothing.\n\n\"I trust all is in order for tonight?\" he asked, his charismatic tone returning as he abruptly shifted topic.\n\n\"Indeed, sire,\" the Elder muttered, glancing back as he reached the door, where he stopped and focused his eyes on the last place I expected.\n\nHe's looking right at me!\n\nI pressed myself hard against the choking soot, muzzle flat against my satchel, while the Elder's eyes remained unmoved. A cold fear washed over me, and I wished I'd listened to my inner voice when it had told me this was a stupid idea.\n\nAny hope of getting a new life will be crushed if I'm caught!\n\n\"Is something amiss?\" Aries asked curiously, drawing the Elder's attention.\n\n\"No, nothing at all, your highness,\" he responded, the rolling of metal locks breaking the conversation as he proceeded beyond the opening door.\n\nThe wall trembled while the slabs of gold crawled back into place, only when they slammed together did I thaw from my cocoon of fear. I tried to determine whether he'd seen me or not, either way, he didn't tell. The Elders were always strange to me, their plots were almost as elaborate as those of the gods.\n\nI took the fright as a sign to leave, and I crept cautiously towards the exit. That was until the sound of chiming jewels halted my retreat. Aries stood up, the clatter of claws signalling his approach as he paced down the throne room and his sharp eyes fixed on the door.\n\nIt's okay, he's just walking, he's not seen...\n\n\"I know you're watching.\"\n\nI froze, my heart skipping a beat. How could he have found me?\n\nMy trembling eyes crept over my shoulder and dirt-stained wings until they fell on Aries staring into the archway.\n\n\"Why do you hide?\" he asked, turning to face the wall I was hiding above. In that moment, my fear was so intense it rivalled the terror I'd felt when facing the dark guardian.\n\n\"Why must you be so miserable at a time of celebration?\" Zephyra's equally regal tone challenged when she emerged from the arches beneath me.\n\n\"I thought the orkin to the west were extinguished?\" Aries swiftly responded, turning back to his throne.\n\n\"They were, we dispatched five wings to burn them back into Shadow Fen, but they grow in number every day. The Phoenix Mountains are already swarming, while more rally in Valcador and Taldran. I fear it will not be long until they press their assault from the east too,\" she challenged.\n\n\"What remains of the highkin kingdom is not of our concern, nor are the western lands,\" her father replied, waving a dismissive foreclaw.\n\n\"So how do you expect to stop them if you will not allow us to vanquish them completely?\" Zephyra countered.\n\n\"The creatures will break on our borders like waves upon cliffs. They will be met with tooth, claw, and dragonfire, and they will fail \u2013 as they have for centuries.\"\n\nZephyra paused, considering her response while her armoured wings fidgeted.\n\n\"And what of the far north?\" she countered. \"Is that not of your concern? If you knew I was watching, don't pretend I didn't hear that conversation.\"\n\nHer father's smugness fell flat, it was clear he knew he'd be hard pressed to deny her anything.\n\n\"Not only that, but you didn't really believe you could keep Frostwrath from me, did you?\" she questioned, marching closer.\n\nAries watched from his throne, his body motionless, and sharp eyes fixed on her as she moved to the base of the stairs.\n\n\"My dearest daughter, it would seem the time you're spending beyond the palace has influenced your mind. I assure you; the north is not of your concern.\"\n\nShe stamped an armoured claw on the steps as if she was about to scream, and yet she held back her emotion with a stern expression.\n\n\"Very well, Father. Shall I meet you at the celebration?\" she was swift to add, letting out a long breath.\n\n\"Indeed. It would seem the city needs to be reminded that times are not as dire as they seem.\"\n\n\"Until later,\" she replied, bowing her head slightly before turning back to the shadows beneath my hiding space.\n\nAries watched from his throne, but his look wasn't that of a loving father; he only cared for hiding his troubled thoughts.\n\n\"Oh, dearest daughter, you need not concern yourself with the report I sent for, I will grant you a personal audience.\"\n\nZephyra stopped mid-stride.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she answered, \"but I will fulfil the same duties as my fellow order masters.\"\n\nHer regal tone was a weak disguise for the disgust she seemed to harbour, and the smart expression hiding her father's feelings faltered.\n\n\"As you wish,\" he stated dismissively.\n\nMy watchful gaze remained fixed on him; his cold eyes clouded with what he was fighting to deny. The heart-stopping fear that I'd been discovered hadn't quite ebbed away, but I caught my breath, slipped gradually back into the second tunnel and down towards the safety of the deserted store."
            },
            {
                "title": "Celebration",
                "text": "\"Where in the creators' name have you been?\" Risha demanded.\n\n\"Looking for stuff,\" I responded sheepishly.\n\nShe looked me up and down, and I knew if anyone could find fault in my lie, it was her.\n\n\"Where have you been looking? You're full of... dirt.\"\n\nI did my best to hide my soot-stained wings, trying to rub what I could off my muzzle with equally grimy forepaws. Dodging her stare, I noticed her glance to the darkened street from which she'd seen me emerge before she added.\n\n\"Blaze, you didn't have to go. I...\"\n\n\"No, I'm fine... I'm fine,\" I interrupted, though it felt like thick cotton stuffed my throat.\n\nShaking her head, she glanced away, her frown almost dragging the truth out of me.\n\nHow can I lie to her, she's all I have?\n\n\"We'll need to clean you up before the celebration. I should be able to find something back at the nest.\"\n\nThe image of her disappointment branded itself onto my mind, but the clattering of her paws caught my attention when she turned towards the cliff. I also noticed she wore a woven pouch like my satchel, only much newer and strapped to her back behind her wings. I'd seen those types of bags before, but I couldn't imagine myself flying with one.\n\n\"Well at least you're not the only one, I couldn't find anything for Boltock either,\" she admitted, seemingly more to herself than anyone else.\n\nThat doesn't sound like it's going to go down well. I thought, the idea of her brother in some ridiculous attire mildly entertaining.\n\n\"We'd better get back, there's only a few hours before the celebrations start,\" she said, spreading her wings and leaping from the ledge.\n\nI shook myself like a wet hound, dislodging a fair amount of grime and drawing a few odd looks before quickly joining her in the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "\"Where have you been?\"\n\nFor the second time in one day I felt a strong sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu as Boltock eagerly questioned the two of us. Risha looked at him as if he should have known, and he stared at her for a moment before his confusion became a cunning smirk.\n\n\"You weren't out on your own I see?\" he muttered smugly, his eyes flitting between his sister and I.\n\n\"Shut your snout, Boltock,\" she replied, walking by him and flicking the grin from his muzzle with a bat of her webbed tail.\n\nUnable to hold back a snigger, he ducked his head behind a wing.\n\n\"What happened to you? Looks like you were dragged through a troll den,\" he remarked, turning his attention to me.\n\n\"Boltock, come here,\" Risha called, the order accompanied by a serious expression that forced him to drop the smug look.\n\n\"Please don't say you got me something stupid,\" he pleaded.\n\n\"No... no, I haven't.\"\n\n\"So, what have you got?\" he inquired, edging closer to her pouch, which now lay at her forepaws.\n\n\"Erm, nothing.\"\n\n\"What? You said you'd get something heroic looking! What am I supposed to wear?\"\n\n\"You can wear your presentation outfit,\" she replied, taking on a very motherly tone as she added. \"I told you, if you wanted something fancy, you needed to come with me.\"\n\n\"What about that silver stuff we bought last year, that should fit?\" he questioned abruptly.\n\nShe said nothing, but simply gave a subtle nod towards me. His eyes followed, as if trying to delay the inevitable revelation.\n\n\"Really?\" he deadpanned.\n\nUnable to block out the idea that I was coming between them, I edged over to intervene. But before I could say anything, Boltock's eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Okay, Sis, I see what you're trying to do.\" his wings ruffled as he smirked. \"I'll wear the training gear, if it makes you happy.\"\n\n\"I'll wear whatever makes it easiest, I don't mind,\" I swiftly added, \"I'm going to put this stuff back and get cleaned up.\"\n\nBoltock continued to grin, as if he understood something I didn't.\n\n\"Yeah, fine,\" Risha chirped in a fluster, drawing another equally odd look from her brother, as well as a wing-shielded snicker.\n\nWithout hesitation and a whoosh of my wings, I flew up to my nest's ledge. The moment I landed, I slipped the dirty satchel from my neck and slumped onto my bed.\n\nSo much for taking things back. I inwardly grumbled, as I peered up at the books. Hey, at least I finally found the right one, even if it is confusing.\n\nFrom the Cartographer's old tome, I knew a few things. For one, I wasn't the fallen star. The significance of the new tale was more worrying, especially if the sphere was never given to mortals. It had literally fallen into their possession. So many more questions needed answering. Plus, I still wanted to know the sphere was truly gone.\n\nI saw it fall and explode. It's gone.\n\nI stood up, peering through the window at the late afternoon sun as its beautiful rays shone like beams of shimmering gold. Before long, my eyes fell away, trailing down to where they would have met my forepaws, had they not been captivated by the small, wooden box, bearing a familiar seal on its polished lid.\n\nCan I ever have a normal life?\n\nIf I left all the knowledge and old books behind, if I told everyone of my secret \u2013 that Acrodan and the sphere were vanquished?\n\nCan I risk putting my faith in it when the truth I'd been told had been riddled with lies.\n\nI knew what I wanted, and I knew I would never abandon Risha, Boltock or any of the others. If I wanted this life, l had to tell the city it was over, show them that the part of me they feared would bring about their destruction was gone. Tonight would be the perfect opportunity, everyone who was able to attend would be at the celebration. If the Cartographer was right and most of them knew the legend, then if I told them it was false, they'd have to believe me.\n\nThat's it, the answer to my problems!\n\nRisha was right \u2013 I had to look forward, and to reveal a truth like mine, I had to look my best.\n\nMy eyes scanned the nest, eventually settling on the bedding material at my paws. It was the best I had right now, and I could clean it later. Picking up the sheets in my muzzle I eagerly started rubbing at my paws. The soot smeared like ink as I dragged the rag over my white scales, but it didn't matter, because when I was free, I could do whatever I wanted. I could clean a million sheets, I could help Risha and Boltock, make my contribution! I could finally be part of the family they deserved!\n\nA whoosh of wings quickly drew my attention towards where Risha landed on the ledge, holding an old, cloth sack. She looked different, the bracelets around her ankles were new, and she boasted bands of silver with tinted blue edges, each symmetrically moulded side depicting waves closing in on each other, before breaking and falling backwards in a perfect mirror. The rims were lined with lapis, and the centres held gems as blue as the ocean's depths. She wore similar bracelets on her tail, a larger one at the base and two smaller ones before the fin at the tip.\n\nLined with more lapis and moulded with the same wave-like design, a gold and silver plate covered her back. Around her neck was a matching collar, a gleaming sapphire in its centre, and finally, I noticed that she held what appeared to be a matching helmet in her forepaw, complete with trailing chains of silver.\n\nShe dropped the bag, and I realised, that compared to her, I must have looked utterly awful. I dropped the rag, a pang of guilt overcoming me as I realised, I wasn't taking this seriously enough.\n\n\"It's a bit old, but it should look fine,\" she suggested, glancing down to the sack, while unable to hold back a slight laugh as her eyes met mine.\n\n\"It should fit you, you're less...\" She flexed a forepaw in the air, searching for words. \"Rotund than Boltock, shall we say.\"\n\nBefore I could respond, she set her helmet aside and approached, dragging the sack towards me with her tail.\n\n\"Did you hide in a furnace? Or was Boltock right about the troll thing?\"\n\nThat long-dormant skirting had certainly felt like a furnace, and the fear of being caught had made it feel even hotter.\n\n\"No, I would have to be smart to hide somewhere that clean,\" I joked.\n\nRisha certainly didn't seem angry with the fact that I'd hidden away from the crowd, more mildly disappointed. She smiled before picking up the rags I'd discarded in her muzzle. The blackened cloth was put to shame by her glistening scales, and she'd certainly put a lot of effort into her appearance.\n\n\"Mift mour ming pease,\" she mumbled through the cloth. I quickly deciphered the muffled words and did as she instructed, lifting my wing while she began scrubbing the soot from my under-scales.\n\nIt was uncomfortable, the scales down there were certainly more sensitive than the rest of my body, and I felt an embarrassing heat creeping into my cheeks. In any other circumstances I would have jumped away, but the moment the initial shock passed, new feelings set in. Just looking at her made me feel slightly different, more so now that she looked so stunning.\n\nIt was a sensation I didn't understand, having only ever felt it around her. It was like something danced in my chest, sparking a warming fire, unlike that of normal dragonfire. It wasn't fuelled by rage or anger, but a gentle flame kindled by her presence. I bowed my head awkwardly as her eyes met mine, the sight of the blackened rag against her gleaming scales making me feel sick with guilt.\n\n\"Mover mide,\" she mumbled against the rag.\n\nHer muffled words were lost to my awkward stupor, and I shook my head with a clueless expression.\n\nShe rolled her eyes.\n\n\"Murmmaroud!\" she instructed in an increasingly amused tone, pushing her head against my hips, forcing me to turn.\n\nI resisted a little as she disappeared beneath me, her tail waving in the air as she reached my belly. I fought the awkward fluttering in my chest, making the uncomfortable feelings almost bearable. At least bearable enough that I could subdue the urge to kick and squirm.\n\n\"Risha, I'm sorry,\" I admitted.\n\nI felt the hard scrubbing against my under-scales ease.\n\n\"Sorry for what?\" she asked, spitting out the rag.\n\n\"For... not being what you deserve and... I know how much you've...\"\n\nShe pressed her wing tip against my muzzle, silencing me while rekindling that dancing flame in my chest as I glimpsed her beautiful eyes.\n\n\"All I know for sure is that I could have had two brothers,\" she began, dropping her wing and moving over to the bag.\n\nShifting to face her I recalled that she was from a clutch of three eggs, from which only she and Boltock had hatched.\n\n\"And as far as I'm concerned, I do,\" she added.\n\nI certainly didn't deserve that, or her. The way she cared for me was too good for anyone who spent most of their time chasing down their stupid past.\n\nAll that talk of the Sovereign being blind to what matters. Am I so different?\n\nShe lowered her head to the sack, quickly retrieving a pair of silver bands lined with a white-opal trim, bearing the same clouded stone in the centre.\n\n\"Are they for me?\" I asked, gently stepping up beside her.\n\n\"Well, we can't have you going to the season of fire celebration without something to wear. And now you're not a soot dragon, with these you'll probably pass for an air dragon,\" she added, positively glowing.\n\n\"I got them for Boltock last season. He thought he might impress a certain someone by wearing another order's gear, but it didn't fit him,\" she laughed. \"Hold out your paw please.\"\n\nWithout question I raised my left foreleg, while she placed the corresponding band around my ankle. With a subtle click the two metal parts joined. It felt strange at first, lying above the joint of my ankle and showed no sign of slipping off.\n\n\"See. It's a perfect fit,\" she declared triumphantly.\n\nI raised my right forepaw, and with a click, she fitted the second bracelet, stepping back to admire her work.\n\n\"You look better already,\" she announced, before reaching back into the sack.\n\nThis time she retrieved a large, silver plate, which I assumed was a back plate like hers. A cloudy-white opal trim marked the edge, while a brown-leather strap dusted with fine silver fastened it on to the wearer.\n\n\"I'm guessing you don't know how to put this on?\" she noted humorously, picking up the plate in her muzzle.\n\nMy eyes followed as she moved to my side. \"Do you mind?\" she asked, trying to maintain some decency as she slipped the metal plate over my back.\n\nWith my approval her head dipped beneath my right flank, her tail taking its place. With a gentle squeeze against my under-scales, she secured the plate to my back and eased it into a comfortable position.\n\nIt felt like a cage over my lungs, the metal lay heavy between my wings. I looked over my back to see the broader end of the plate sitting above my shoulders, getting thinner as it moved between the leathery limbs. I gave them a flap, the strap felt as if it tightened with each wingbeat, but it wasn't too uncomfortable. I was sure I could cope with wearing it for one night.\n\nRisha returned to rooting through the sack, retrieving what I hoped would be the final piece. What she produced was a slender, silver helmet, perfectly shaped to fit over a muzzled head. Though it wasn't clear how my horns would fit, given it was originally intended to be for Boltock, whose horns were very different from mine. Even so, I didn't care too much for my appearance, and if it made Risha feel happy, I'd wear it.\n\n\"May I?\" she asked with a formal bow.\n\nI nodded, lowering my head to let her gently place it on. It was slightly awkward, but I only admitted that to myself.\n\nShe stepped back before biting down on the hanging strap and pulled it hard. The silver-dusted leather tightened against my lower jaw, biting at my scales. The helmet's front edge sat over my eyes, forming a smooth brow that made it difficult to look up and open my mouth. It was all a little tight for my liking, but I could manage for one night.\n\nHow soldiers wear this all the time is beyond me \u2013 maybe it's why they hardly ever move? As I wondered, Risha marvelled at her work, before her eyes fell on the blue-tinted silver helmet at her paws.\n\n\"Would you?\" she asked, glancing back to me and sliding the helmet over with a forepaw.\n\nI felt a strange sense of honour that she'd asked, despite the fact that she'd been closer to me than most could manage without receiving a bite. Her helmet was like mine, moulded to match the rest of her water-themed attire. A single sapphire graced the crown and the forward side of her four horns were covered by gleaming silver. Taking the front in my muzzle, she bowed her head, inviting the helmet as I carefully placed it upon her.\n\n\"Pull the strap like I did, but not too tight,\" she instructed.\n\nI reached beneath her jaw, securing the silver helmet in its rightful place.\n\n\"Not bad,\" she confirmed.\n\n\"Not too tight?\" I asked.\n\n\"I meant you don't look too bad,\" she laughed.\n\n\"Oh, right... Y\u2013You neither,\" I replied with a shy smile.\n\n\"Are you two ready?\"\n\nWe turned our attention to the ledge to see a rather smug-looking Boltock dressed in a steel-grey outfit, his helmet covering his forehead and encasing his cheeks. One hole in the front allowed his muzzle to escape, and two at the rear freed his curved horns. Two more outlined his glistening eyes, while an emerald-encrusted steel band ran around his neck. It was then that I realised I didn't have a neckpiece. Either this armour didn't come with one, or Risha didn't have it. Either way, I was happy to have less of a burden.\n\n\"Yeah, we're ready,\" she answered.\n\nBoltock gave her a smile in return, before dropping back to the nest below. I heard her swoop from the ledge a moment later, and at that moment I felt my attention drift towards the wooden box. Tonight I was going to challenge the truth, take my destiny in my own paws and leave my cursed past behind. The glowing gem in that case was the only proof I had that any of it was real. I didn't know why I felt so attached to it, I hated the thing, and yet it was almost a part of me. Edging over I opened the box, the amulet's warm glow bathing the wooden interior. Sweeping it onto my neck, the fine chain clattered over the helmet, falling once again into place across my chest.\n\nIt's a part of me, even if I'm going to leave all that behind.\n\nI quickly dashed to the ledge and swooped down into the main chamber. The armour was heavy but not as flight-hindering as I'd feared.\n\n\"Come on, Blaze!\" Risha urged from the balcony.\n\nI looked to see her standing beyond the twitching curtain, Boltock dancing eagerly in the air behind her. This was it. I was going to leave it all behind and have a life with my two best friends. For once I was able to focus on all I'd wished for, and I looked forward to the night of celebration for the first time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "The wind-written skies were alive, the air currents flowed with rivers of dragons, all streaming towards the centre-most structure of Dardien. Unlike all other hanging monoliths, it wasn't a colony of stone nests; but one single structure spanning the whole stalactite. Its steep sides were a symmetrical pattern of huge arches, sitting in rings around the rock's circumference, one row above the other. Vast amounts of glowmoss clung to the inner walls of the hollow interior, its blue light escaping through the arches like an alien sun.\n\nAbout halfway between where the structure merged with the roof and the thinner point shrunk to nothing, the hollow inside halted and a vast, circular floor of polished stone stretched from one side to the other. In the centre sat a huge bowl, so large that it dwarfed the mighty braziers of the temple and palace. Within, it held a roaring green flame, representing spring, the season of earth, and at midnight it would be changed to that of the season of fire. At its rim were four platforms spaced out like the points of a star, where earth order soldiers perched along with draped green banners. Below, a raised stage at the base of the bowl, leading to a set of stairs and a higher podium, designated for Dardien's finest, it too was draped in lavish green tapestries.\n\nThe main floor was a multi-coloured carpet of dragons, of every age, size, and element. All had shown up to celebrate the coming of the new year, while many more poured in through the mighty arches. The loud rhythm of thousands of voices and the distant sound of traditional dragon music filled the vibrant atmosphere, and while I gazed in wonder, Risha and Boltock banked out of view. Noticing their change in direction, I followed, feeling no larger than an ant as I swept through one of the monstrous arches.\n\nBy the skies, what I wouldn't give for a peaceful flight through somewhere this grand.\n\nEven with the wind-written currents, the armour hindered my skill, and the sheer amount of beating wings around me made the airway harder to follow. With a clatter of claws, I landed, albeit slightly less elegantly than usual. Down amidst the crowds I felt as overwhelmed as I had in the sky. Wing beats and clattering armour rang out throughout the structure, thumping down on me like invisible hammers. Guards wearing silver plate, dressed with flashes of gold and jet-black obsidian engraved with fiery red stood sentry among the crowd, while other, richer dragon outfits, put most to shame. I'd been to celebrations before but never like this, never among my own kind, and although my old family may have said otherwise, they'd never pulled off anything this grand.\n\nI stuck close to Risha, I may have looked like one of them with my air order armour, but I still found fitting in difficult.\n\n\"Wow, Boltock!\" I heard a pair of excited voices shout beside me.\n\nStill glued to Risha's side, I glanced over to see his scarred wing outstretched, while two smaller dragons hung on his every word.\n\n\"Did you really have to fight monsters to get it?\" one questioned eagerly, both pairs of eyes bright with anticipation.\n\nBoltock hesitated before pressing a forepaw to his chest as he puffed up.\n\n\"Yeah, of course, I had to catch it with my bare claws and wrestle it out of the sky,\" he boasted.\n\n\"When I'm older I'm gonna fight monsters, just like you!\" one of the young dragons declared, jumping on the spot.\n\nI could feel my eyes roll in their sockets like grinding stones. Yet I couldn't help but smile, no matter how guilty I felt about his wound, he still managed to make something positive out of it. His expression changed when he turned in my direction, and the two younger dragons slipped back into the crowd chattering amongst themselves.\n\nIt took me a moment to realise that he wasn't looking at me, but at his sister as she glared his way.\n\n\"What?\" he asked innocently, and her stern look broke into a laugh.\n\n\"The way you're going, all monsters will need to watch out for the next generation,\" she mused, primly fluttering her wings.\n\n\"Yeah well, better to start young. The more you know before your order days, the better,\" he retorted, turning back to the crowd.\n\n\"I'll never understand him,\" she admitted with a sigh.\n\n\"Can't say he's not making the most of it,\" I contended.\n\n\"Yeah, anyway, let's go find something more interesting,\" she replied, leading me on.\n\n\"How many of them do you know?\" I asked as we passed through the crowd.\n\n\"What? Do you think I'm friends with everyone?\" she asked with a raised eye-crest.\n\nAt her expression, I felt a hint of embarrassment, but she was swift to assure, \"Don't worry, there's no competition.\"\n\nThe smile I offered in return was weak, yet still made her giggle.\n\n\"Let's see, there's Flame and Torch, they're two fire dragons I don't think you've met. They should be here too.\" She lifted a forepaw to her snout in thought. \"Jade and Geode, I really must catch up with them, now they're mates!\"\n\n\"Hey, Risha!\" a pair of identical water dragonesses suddenly hollered, cutting my friend off.\n\nI glanced up to see both wore similar attire to hers, while boasting significantly more gems.\n\nSo, they're that kind of dragon? I wondered, aware of Risha tensing beside me.\n\n\"Azura, Alatha, hi,\" she responded with false enthusiasm.\n\n\"Aww, it's nice to see you again, we didn't catch you at graduation,\" they chirped in unison.\n\nRisha rubbed the back of her neck with a forepaw. \"Ha-ha, yeah about that... I wasn't there, I've not graduated yet.\"\n\nThe way the two beamed at her after that confession really unnerved me. How can they act so happy and sincere?\n\n\"How is it going for you two, now that you've been assigned to a wing?\" she inquired somewhat tentatively.\n\nThe pair looked at her, then each other, giggling like hatchlings hoarding all the toys.\n\n\"Oh, it is positively amazing! Hey, and don't worry, I'm sure you'll get through next time,\" the dragoness to the right added, her voice as indistinguishable from the other as her appearance.\n\n\"I sure hope so,\" Risha replied, and before I knew it, she turned away, blocking my view.\n\nI caught a last glimpse of the pair trying to look around at me before she called back, \"Anyway, I really must be going, I'll see you around!\"\n\nAs curious as I was, I didn't fight to look back as they replied.\n\n\"Don't forget to study!\" Their synchronised laughter was drowned out by the crowd as they added. \"Creators know you need to!\"\n\n\"What was that all about?\" I asked, as Risha ignored the comments.\n\n\"It's nothing, don't worry about it.\"\n\nIs it really, what did they mean? I tried to meet Risha's eyes, but she held them away. Is she failing in training or something?\n\nBefore I could satisfy my curiosity with another question, a second, more familiar voice called out from the sea of chatter.\n\n\"Risha, Blaze!\"\n\nMy head pricked up, as did Risha's.\n\n\"Ember!\" my companion cried in clear relief.\n\n\"Hi!\" Ember replied, the sound of her voice summoning Boltock back to us in a flash.\n\nHer instantly recognisable orange scales lay beneath a suit of gleaming red, tinted with gold, a colour as pure as flame and moulded to appear as such, with bracelets over her ankles and tail. A row of segmented plates along her back moved gracefully with every step, and sleek golden chains draped her wings. Unlike our full-head helmets, at the back of hers was a band, set over her horns like a slender tiara. The red-tinted gold curving like a dancing flame as it coiled up her horns.\n\nI diverted my eyes from the reunion and peered out over the buzzing crowd.\n\nWhat did they really mean about Risha... Urgh, why can't I get that out of my head?\n\nLost in thought, the thousands of winged shapes darting about became blurred silhouettes against the blue light.\n\nIf she's suffering and she's not telling me I... My thoughts halted. Isn't that what I'm doing to her?\n\n\"Haven't seen you in a while,\" Ember's voice quizzed, unmistakably directed at me. Jumping in mild surprise, I quickly turned.\n\n\"I've been... occupied,\" I stammered.\n\n\"I can imagine,\" she countered with a subtle smile, and the pair of us shared a laugh.\n\nI bet she can, after all she's one of the few that knows what happened.\n\n\"Yeah, it's been busy,\" Boltock interrupted, moving to my side, wrapping a wing over my back. \"Being a god and all that,\" he added, hugging me like his best buddy as he rubbed his chest with a forepaw and added.\n\n\"It's tough work.\"\n\nOnly Boltock could make such a joke without making me feel like a freak.\n\nThough I know whose attention he's really trying to appeal to. I thought, subtly shrugging off his wing.\n\n\"Good to see you made it,\" another voice interrupted.\n\nEmber's eyes lit as all of us turned to a larger red dragon, adorned in coal-black armour that blended perfectly with his fin and smoky under-scales.\n\n\"Pyro!\" Ember replied affectionately.\n\nThere's no denying that Risha is right when she says those two have a liking for each other.\n\nI heard Boltock grumble under his breath as the fire dragoness approached Pyro, rubbing up to his side like an affectionate kitten. I felt a tinge of awkward embarrassment, especially when the pair tapped their muzzles together.\n\nWhat do they see in each other's eyes that lets them stare for so long? Before I could think on it, Risha appeared at my side.\n\n\"Well, aren't you two getting close!\" she announced to her fiery friends. \"I'd say congratulations are in order.\"\n\n\"Not the kind of affection you'd expect from soldiers, hey?\" Ember replied, with Pyro's wing draped over her back. \"We're already making preparations to put aside the academy's designated partners to be with each other instead.\"\n\nFollowing more grumbling from Boltock, I caught him creeping away. In that awkward moment I felt like joining him, until my name was mentioned.\n\n\"Risha, Blaze,\" Pyro called, bowing his head respectfully. \"Boltock,\" he added, raising slightly.\n\nThe green dragon stopped mid-step, briefly glancing over his shoulder.\n\n\"Hi,\" he replied sheepishly, before scampering off into the crowd.\n\nI was about to follow him, when another dragon appeared beside Pyro \u2013 an air dragon, covered in glass-like silver plate that seemed to glow like flickering lightning.\n\n\"So, this is the dragoness he can't stop talking about?\" the newcomer questioned, peering over Pyro at Ember.\n\n\"And I assume you're this best friend he talks about?\" she cooed, with a glance at her mate.\n\n\"Well, I imagine you've attained that title as of late,\" the wind elemental replied cleverly, looking to his embarrassed 'best friend' with a self-satisfied smile.\n\nPyro seemed to lose a fight against laughter, his stern expression cracking as he chuckled.\n\n\"May I introduce my 'former' best friend, Soaren,\" he announced, gesturing a wing to the newcomer.\n\nThe grey dragon gave a respectful bow, wings parting slightly while placing his left forepaw forward.\n\n\"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Ember.\"\n\nEmber rolled her eyes, hiding her blush behind a wing as she glanced to Risha.\n\n\"There's no need to be so formal, either of you,\" the blue dragoness intervened, glancing at the two soldiers.\n\nI felt another urge to follow Boltock at the realisation I'd yet to introduce myself, but the chance was stolen.\n\n\"But the pleasure is all mine. I'm Risha of the Water Order, and this is Blaze,\" she added, edging closer to my side as the grey dragon's eyes lingered.\n\n\"Pleasure,\" he greeted, his gaze crossing mine before looking back to Pyro.\n\n\"Most of the order are by the inner circle, if you and Ember would care to join us,\" Soaren informed, gesturing towards the central podium.\n\n\"Let's go meet your other friends, shall we?\" Ember giggled, before adding with a wink. \"I'm sure they have many more things to tell me.\"\n\n\"Ember, we're in the academy together...\" Her coy look was enough to halt Pyro's words.\n\n\"Alright,\" he sighed.\n\n\"You two should come,\" Ember called to Risha and I, as she turned to follow Soaren.\n\n\"Yeah, I... I,\" Risha stuttered, her eyes darting around as I fidgeted uneasily.\n\nMaybe I should let her go with them? No need to make a fool out of both of us if I mess up telling everyone that they're safe.\n\n\"It's okay, I'll be fine, you go enjoy yourself while you have the opportunity,\" I insisted. \"I'll go find Boltock or something,\" I added, hiding the fact that if I'd any intention of finding her brother, it was a weak one.\n\nShe glanced toward her friends disappearing into the crowd.\n\n\"I... I...,\" she stuttered, looking at me closely. \"Thank you.\"\n\nShe darted off and as the space she'd occupied was filled by the masses, I felt like I was lost in a storm with no lifeline.\n\nSo much for enjoying an evening with my friends. I inwardly groaned, making my way through the crowd.\n\nI'll wait at the edge. Surely it'll be less busy there. I theorised as I considered exactly how I was going to reveal the truth.\n\nIt's not as though I can simply waltz up to the podium and give a speech.\n\nAs expected, the nearer to the outer walls I got, the more the bustling crowds thinned, not a great deal, but it was better than the intimidating mass towards the centre. At least now dragons were a wing's length away, instead of being at the end of my muzzle.\n\n\"So, you're part of my order now?\"\n\nMy head suddenly perked up, homing in on the strangely familiar voice. Yet again I felt words catch in my throat when I realised Zephyra was looking straight at me.\n\n\"I meant the armour,\" she added, casually pointing to my attire with a forepaw as I stared in bewilderment.\n\n\"Oh... Right... I... I can explain.\"\n\n\"It's Blaze, isn't it?\"\n\nDespite the fact she'd been nothing but courteous to me twice in one day, the urge to avoid a conversation resurfaced.\n\n\"What a lovely jewel,\" she continued, fixing her eyes on my amulet.\n\n\"Erm, yeah.\"\n\nMy eyes darted about in search of another topic, in the end settling for the ringed podium around the base of the great fire.\n\n\"Shouldn't you be up there?\" I asked tentatively, pointing to the upper area with my wing tip, but she didn't spare it a glance.\n\n\"I would if my father had his way but sitting within a wing's reach of him is almost unbearable,\" she explained with a rebellious smile.\n\n\"Still, I should probably get back, he'll be giving a speech soon and, fires forbid, if I'm not there he will get his tail in such a twist,\" she added with a chuckle, taking one last look at my amulet.\n\n\"It's been good to meet you again, Blaze,\" she finished with a bow before moving towards the central podium.\n\nDespite being relieved that she'd gone, I couldn't help but take some comfort in talking to someone else again.\n\nShe doesn't seem out to get me, so maybe not everyone's as bad as the Cartographer claims.\n\nI resumed my walk to the edge, eventually reaching one of the grand arches, where the polished stone gave way to the warm, wind-written sky. I had to admit that, despite my reluctance to be here, the view was amazing. The city had not inspired me like this since I'd first arrived.\n\n\"I see you found the view.\"\n\nMy senses pricked up at the sound of an elderly voice. My recognition was vague, but I knew it, especially as I'd already heard it today.\n\nBy the creators, am I a magnet for unwanted attention? I mentally grumbled to myself.\n\nThe fuzzy recognition of the tone fell into place as I glanced up to see the Fire Elder.\n\n\"It is quite remarkable,\" he continued, standing across the arch from me.\n\nI averted my eyes as swiftly as they'd found him, denying an immediate answer; after all, they were the ones who'd told me to abandon Tarwin and first to curse me with the knowledge of my destiny.\n\n\"You knew, didn't you?\" I asked, my eyes still fixed on the city. \"When I came to you last, you knew about the legend?\"\n\nI stared out over the city, my eyes fixing on every speck of glowing moss amidst the neighbouring stalactites and after an uncomfortably long pause, he replied.\n\n\"Yes, the legend was known to us. But who you were, and your purpose, were nothing but a hope, an idea \u2013 as they remain. Times are changing, long-forgotten things in this city are awakening. Ask yourself: was it the legend that led you to do what you did or your heart?\"\n\nAt that he turned away, moving back into the crowd. I would have called out, asked more, but his words left me stunned. They'd told me I was unique but failed to mention the legend the griffins had finally revealed. I felt paralysed, like a deadly poison was surging through my veins. He was right \u2013 nothing they'd told me had changed my decision; I went after Tarwin because she was my family, not because it was my destiny.\n\nBefore I had more time to consider, the thundering of metallic thumping consumed the air around me, overpowering the crowd as I shook off my thoughts.\n\nI looked toward the base of the central fire at two large rows of soldiers stamping their armour-encased claws in perfect union, while four fire dragons dressed in obsidian-black armour took positions on the brazier platforms. The crowd fell silent, and the beating wings dispersed as the skies emptied and everyone turned their attention to the upper stage.\n\nThe thumping ended as abruptly as it started, the dragons raising their heads in union, creating a walkway between them from which a silver-scaled figure emerged. Nothing but the tap of his sharp claws broke the silence as he moved up to the edge of the podium. I could almost hear the hearts of those around me beating in anticipation. Aries loomed above the crowd, his sharp, grey eyes surveying with arrogant pride as his gem-laden scales gleamed like starlight.\n\n\"Welcome, I welcome you all!\" he bellowed in the same charismatic tone I'd heard before.\n\n\"This is a truly magnificent time, the start of a new season, a new year!\" His eyes narrowed, clearly appalled by the lack of reaction. \"Though, as many of you know these times do not come easy.\"\n\nI felt the phrase 'troubled times' echo through my mind. Yeah, but listening to what he said before, some of that seems like his fault.\n\n\"Traitorous orkin have challenged our might once again, but they are doomed to fail,\" he declared, his eyes focusing on the motionless soldiers flanking him.\n\n\"I propose that this night of celebration is dedicated not only to the turning of a new year, but also to honouring those brave warriors who, by tooth, claw and dragonfire, have kept our great lands safe.\"\n\nHis sly tone betrayed any respect, while the thunderous stomps of the grateful soldiers offered makeshift applause. I felt disgusted by the way he manipulated them with such false honour.\n\n\"Once more the creators are truly with us! For we, the faithful of Dardien, have never lost hope!\"\n\nI turned away. I couldn't believe his conceit, and it seemed I wasn't the only one. It was like the whole world had taken an anxious breath, and despite the thunderous metal clanking, the crowd remained devoid of sound.\n\nThat was when a horrendous screech tore through the masses like an invisible storm, forcing most to their knees. I stumbled, as if the noise had ripped the breath from my lungs. My muzzle pressed to the floor as it started to rumble and the green flame within the great brazier erupted into a ferocious red fire, shaking the bowl's foundations, throwing the four fire dragons into the crowd. The raging inferno ripped one of the brazier platforms from its support, reducing the metal to molten magma in an instant as the rim of the bowl began to glow red-hot.\n\nThose not completely crippled by the soul-rending screech took to the air amidst a fleeing storm of cinders. Alarm cries filled the skies while the firestorm grew into a mountain of flame, the peak searing the moss from the ceiling. The blast knocked Aries to his knees, before those of his guards still able to stand, covered and whisked him away. Guards also took to the air, jumping up from the panicked rabble like silver arrows. I forced myself to my paws, fighting to clear my mind as the ground shuddered, like some beast was taking mighty steps towards me.\n\nMeanwhile, the fiery wind reduced to a swirling shroud of black smoke, morphing and flowing like it was alive, until it formed a black funnel surrounding the bright light of a crimson flame. When the guards attempted to approach, the smoke exploded, catapulting them back with an invisible force, the writhing filth immediately reforming and flowing like water over the fiery core.\n\nTwo vast appendages emerged from its flanks, casting a shroud of choking plumes into the crowd. I shook my head, unable to believe what I was seeing.\n\nThose are wings \u2013 dragon wings \u2013 formed from pure shadow!\n\nThrough the swarm of fleeing dragons, I could see that Aries and his guards had disappeared from the pedestal while the molten metal from the rim of the brazier trickled onto the polished stone. Above, the shadowy wings retracted, curling over the raging smoke storm and covering the furnace within its heart. The same swirling fire flickered and spun while two more glowing points appeared.\n\nThe eyes of what looked like a dragon materialised from the morphing imitation, burning as if the darkness itself was alive. The shadow broke again, parting to form a gnarled muzzle, and a mouth equipped with serrated teeth. While chaos reigned about me, I felt myself anchored to the spot, my eyes scorched by the flame, unable to move, or look away from the monstrous shadow-dragon. When the world fell into an eerie silence, as if reality itself dare not make a sound.\n\nThe panic slowed, heads rose from their stunned positions, terrified flyers disappeared through the arches and the creeping shadow extinguished the glow from the moss.\n\nTwo infernal eyes scoured the scene, projecting a sense of ultimate dread wherever they fell. I felt my legs tense, my heartbeat like a hammer in my chest, generating a fear I hadn't felt in a long time.\n\n\"Lies!\" a grisly voice bellowed from the flaming jaw, spitting crackling fire and embers.\n\nThe rumble coursed through the silent crowd like an invisible wave of terror.\n\n\"Impudent fools, you are hardly worthy of these words,\" the flaming horror declared. \"You know nothing of the powers you insult. You and your ilk are nothing but vile carrion picking at the last scraps of a doomed world. Your existence is nothing more than a gift you do not deserve,\" the monstrous shadow continued.\n\n\"Such a pity that no one lives to remember my name \u2013 so arrogant of you not to know of your true master, and yet you would sow chaos in my presence?\" the creature growled, its eyes narrowing into a scowl as its head rose on a slender shadowy neck.\n\n\"It would seem that you must be reminded of the true order of things.\" Its words were spoken not as a threat, but as a matter of fact. \"I will reclaim what is rightfully mine and curse those who stole it with oblivion!\"\n\nIts baleful eyes sailed over everyone until the flaming sockets finally came to rest on me. \"Then you pathetic wretches will understand what is necessary.\"\n\nI froze under the intense glare, its intimidation reminding me of Acrodan's crushing magic, forcing me to the floor.\n\n\"You will come to see you do not rule here guardian, nor do your traitorous ilk,\" the shadow rumbled, holding its gaze until the storm of darkness curled in on itself, returning to a swirling fire.\n\nWith a deep, bellowing sound the entity surged violently back into the brazier. The whole place shuddered as the base of the great bowl splintered, the platform crumbling and the metal structure melting into a molten soup until the whole floor fell into a cave, a cave that couldn't possibly exist.\n\nConsumed by the unnatural abyss, the brazier disappeared in a sea of flames and showering cinders. Before I could take in the scale of the devastation, several shapes erupted up like dark arrows, leaving a stream of black smoke in their wake. They soared in perfect formation to the peak of the chamber before peeling away and plummeting toward the crowd. Two black wings exploded from the flanks of each, the membranes snapping open with a crack like lightning as they tore into the panicked crowd.\n\nWith claws outstretched, they ripped through bodies like birds plucking fish from a pond, rising, spinning, and twisting in the air with an ear-rendering shriek as they curled back for more diving blows. The air filled with screams, wing beats and screeches as the shadow-creatures repeatedly swooped down, slashing with unnatural agility and speed, leaving a trail of choking smoke in their wake. Those able to do so took to the sky, while flames of all colours erupted from those who fought back. All the while the image of those fiery eyes burned into my mind, corrupting my thoughts like a dark weed.\n\n'You do not rule here, guardian'\n\nI was smashed to the stone as rushing paws flattened my wings, leaving only a forest of dashing legs to fill my sight. Another screech ripped through the air, and one of the shadow-creatures sliced through the armoured body of a guard before me. Striking like black lightning, the soldier's gleaming armour was no defence, as the attack instantly reduced the scales beneath the sleek metal to dust.\n\nThe winged shadows maintained their attack, sinister claws turning flesh and blood to ash. Fighting the burning image in my mind, I staggered clumsily to my paws and plunged myself into the throng. With another horrifying cry, a shadow swept inches from me, sending me tumbling to the floor as the foul smoke seared my lungs and singed my eyes. In the moment I'd had to glimpse at the creature, I could see it was almost invisible beneath the coat of living darkness. Its size was also an illusion \u2013 one moment the restless shroud would be no bigger than me, the next it would be the size of a fully grown dragon. Its only recognisable features were the torn, black tissues of its tattered wings. Draped in choking shadow they lifted the beast back into the sky, the dusty remains of those caught in its grip scattering in its wake.\n\nI staggered once again, fighting to remove the dust from my mouth, and clamping my eyes shut against the image of the impossible monster. All the while, its screech bounced around every wall in my mind like a thunderous chorus.\n\n\"Keep them within the arches, don't let them into the city!\" an authoritative voice boomed.\n\nThe call gave me a new focus, and a small flicker of order sparked to life as the remaining soldiers rallied to the command. Amidst them I could see two dragons, one wearing bright red armour, the other midnight blue. Another horrific shriek forced my head down, and several shadowed creatures swirled round to face the rallied group. Without hesitation their approach hastened beyond any natural speed, shadow rippling like ink suspended in water. I tried to watch but felt the image of those eyes force themselves further into my mind like daggers threatening to cripple me again.\n\nI need something, something to hold on to...\n\nThe others!\n\nBoltock, Risha, where are they?\n\nBattling against the mental corruption, I snapped back. I must find them!\n\n\"Fly steady soldiers!\" another voice shouted, drawing my attention up in time to see one of the creatures caught in a torrent of grey flame.\n\nThe shadow and fire morphed into one, consuming the creature's unholy form, leaving a trail of black dust in its wake. The rest of the creatures avoided the flames with impossible agility, slamming claws-first into the armoured skyline. There was no clatter of metal or screams of death; the steel bodies merely fell lifeless to the ground, their wounds crackling with dark energy as they turned to ash.\n\nTwo of the creatures emerged from the group and swerved around for a second run, while three armoured dragons fought bravely \u2013 meanwhile Zephyra, the master of fire, and two other soldiers engaged in a dog fight with a third creature. Surpassing the dragons' agility, it looked like the monster was merely humouring them. As did the others, seeming to fly with no doubt that they could easily finish any resistance if desired.\n\nThey're toying with their prey. Why, what are these things?\n\nTwo more creatures emerged from the fire pit, and for one of the soldiers it was over almost instantly. The fresh creatures tore him from the sky, leaving the ashes of his lifeless body to plummet into the abyss. Another beast slammed into the Fire Order master, striking him across the chest, disintegrating his bright-red armour in the blink of an eye, the dark wounds spreading like wildfire over his orange scales.\n\nThe second attacker wasn't so precise, and Zephyra made a lightning-quick dive to avoid it. Swiftly correcting its failed manoeuvre, it countered her move, slamming the back of its shrouded form into her armoured chest.\n\nI felt my heart leap into my mouth, but thankfully it seemed only their claws dealt the fatal blow. Thrown into a spin, the Air Order master crashed to the floor a few paw steps before me, rolling clumsily to a stop. Panting heavily and shivering as she turned to face her adversary. The creature executed another perfect manoeuvre, swerving into a strafing run directed right at her. Its claws cut through the crowd like knives, slicing both metal and dragon scale like paper. She stood her ground, the deadly, silver blades on her wing tips and tail ready to skewer the creature.\n\nBracing my paws hard against the stone I Instinctively drew in a deep breath, exhaled violently, and struck the creature with a ball of pure-white light. The shadow and fire morphed, rippling across its body like liquid, before the bolt's ferocious power forced the monster back into oblivion.\n\nI felt my whole-body tremble; I'd not done anything like that in a long time, and gasping for breath, I battled to stay on my paws. Zephyra's eyes met mine, like a window through the chaos. This morning I was a strange new dragon and now I'd saved her life. Before I could react, her eyes widened, and I was thrown into the sky.\n\nA dark shadow consumed my sight, searing my eyes and flooding my lungs with what felt like fire. Before it could completely consume me, a bright shield of light cast itself between us. The shadow curved and coiled as it spread like a sandstorm of black dust, before, without warning, the light shield failed and the twisted image before me became a blur. The only things I recognised within the swirling mass were the archways and the black smoke bleeding away as the thing dropped me.\n\nI instinctively spread my wings to control my fall, the uncontrolled brake almost tearing the membranes to ribbons. If not for the wind-written currents, I doubt I'd have regained control.\n\nMy reprieve was short-lived as a shadowed arrow crashed into my flank, crushing my wing, and throwing me into another spiral. The shimmering barrier erupted from my scales once more, but the dark limbs of the creature burst through like a virus bleeding into the light. A withered set of black claws clutched my front paws, both of us spinning out of control. Its grip felt like death, its claws burned my scales, and the air around it felt devoid of life.\n\nI opened my eyes, squinting through the pungent shadow, and the sight before me was almost indescribable. A creature of pure darkness, two torn and battered wings marred by gashes of bleeding shadow. Its image bled into my mind, filling it with whispers and chilling echoes that rivalled those of its master's cursed eyes. My conscience fought against the madness growing like a parasite in my thoughts, and with every moment I could see the creature it felt like my mind was melting into chaos.\n\nI slammed my eyes shut and with all my strength kicked into its underside. A cold chill met my paws upon contact with its bony hide, but the sudden impact forced it away, sending me tumbling uncontrollably through the air. The creature screeched somewhere behind me, the sound tearing through my thoughts, yet beating my wings harder I caught another current.\n\nI'm not going to end up scorched to dust by those invisible blades!\n\nI'd faced monsters, creatures, and dark wizards, but this was something else, this thing had a darker intent. Locking my eyes on the speeding projectile as it swerved back to strike me, I didn't hesitate to exhale another blast. The light exploded, but the monster's momentum forced it forward, until its bony mass struck me in a plume of shadow. Its clumsy movement propelled a cloud of suffocating smoke into my throat and eyes, the foul shroud burning my insides.\n\nWrapped together we crashed into a stone pillar. My back hit first, armour absorbing some of the impact as pain flared throughout me, bones cracking and scales shattering. A second impact clipped my right wing, but the creature was unaffected. With every collision it merely phased into shadow, harmlessly returning to its original form in an instant. I pressed my rear paws against its underside, and with another tremendous buck, cast it away before finally tumbling to the floor.\n\nBlood splattered over the polished rock as my wing fell to it like a rag. Yet I'd never been so happy to see my own blood flowing, rather than wounds marred by life-stealing dust. Another screech echoed through the gloom of my dazed mind, forcing my eyes up to find a blur of winged darkness, discarded by the sky like a rotted leaf cast from a dying tree, plummet into a brazier-fire.\n\nThe effort of rolling onto my front was enough to make me sick, but with nothing in my stomach to reject I gagged a foul froth of black dust, before gasping desperately for air.\n\nThe brazier I'd landed next to shuddered violently as fire consumed the creature, the shrouded form merging like liquid within the flames. I had no fight left in me, and even with my ability to heal I had no time to react. With a heavy shudder, the brazier crashed to the floor, smothering the monster in a shower of burning coals.\n\nThe vile entity wasn't troubled by the heat. Shadow and flame alike dripped and morphed perfectly around its body. With the shroud boiling away, I caught a glimpse of what lurked beneath \u2013 a horrific monstrosity, standing like a blight on reality. No larger than me, it stood on four skeletal limbs. Sleek, black hide covered its alien appendages, formidable spines graced its back and a pair of equally unnatural wings extended from its bony shoulders. Withered strips hung from the scorched limbs and a spiny, trident-blade tipped tail coiled like a serpent around its serrated claws.\n\nLong spines covered its head, the foremost forming a ridged crown curving over its skull and down its emaciated neck. Its mouth hung below the base of a large set of horns and a sharp, spiny frill lined its edge. Its teeth were like rows of glistening spires, sitting gruesomely within a quivering jaw. Above the rows of fangs, and the most sinister of all, there were no obvious sign of eyes.\n\nThat's impossible, how can they move like that with no eyes?\n\nThe monster gave a painful hiss as flames swarmed over its skin, before disintegrating into shadow, leaving only a crackling plume of black mist in its wake.\n\nMy head fell against the stone, my lungs releasing a bloody cough. My vision grew weaker, darkness consumed me until my body finally failed and I couldn't fight it any longer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dardien's Folly",
                "text": "An ocean of inky blackness swirled in the sky. Its movement almost invisible amidst the gloom of its own existence. An alien landscape of black towers illuminated by gleaming starlight surrounded me, and yet it felt like the whole place was submerged in crushing water.\n\nIs this it? Am I dead, am I cursed to this oblivion?\n\nMy eyes flickered open, freeing me from the endless night. Fire replaced the darkness, the memory of oblivion in those molten eyes, accompanied by a distant tapping through the emptiness. I couldn't look away or block it out, flee or panic, all I saw were flames.\n\n\"You must be reminded of true order,\" hissed a dark voice amidst the tapping. \"You do not rule here!\"\n\nThe fire grew in strength until it formed a raging maelstrom of flame, only inches from my muzzle. All the while I could do nothing but watch it draw closer, until it reformed into the burning glow of two blazing eyes and a fanged snout. The tapping sound became almost deafening, before the grisly tone boomed.\n\n\"You will understand, or you will have oblivion, Guardian!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "With a sudden jolt, reality snapped back into place, sealing away the scorching eyes, replacing them with a dull ceiling of smooth stone. A light-orange glow lapped across the featureless surface like waves on a restless lake, accompanied by the crackling of flames. The distant tapping still echoed in my throbbing mind, and each twitch of my eyelids left a blur in my weary vision.\n\nWhat in the Creators' name happened? I wondered, my muscles aching as I forced them into action.\n\nA cough cracked my dry throat as I raised my head, and my distorted vision came into focus. Looking myself over, I flexed each of my paws; although they were stiff, they felt okay. I did the same with my wings, first left, then right, at which point I noticed the blood-stained bandages covering the tips.\n\nSomeone healed me... but who... what? What happened?\n\nWith my memory spinning and fighting to recall, I winced as I pushed myself up from the bed. Odd twitches in my back and flank suggested something was still at work under my scales, a feeling I'd only sensed once before.\n\nI healed \u2013 like in Storm Peak. I noted, glancing back. But it still feels like I'm only one step away from falling apart.\n\nThat was when I realised I was no longer wearing my helmet, armour \u2013 or my amulet! In a flash, my mind fell to a new terror, frantic at the thought that I may have lost it. I looked about the small room, cursing myself for bringing it to the celebration.\n\nCreators damn me. It could be at the bottom of the lake for all I know!\n\nThe more I floundered, the more my body ached, until I forced myself to slow, pressing a forepaw to my chest.\n\nOkay, think, what happened? I told myself, casting my mind back. Where are the others, where is the amulet?\n\nI remembered the celebration, a swirling flight and fire. I need to find out what happened, make sure the others are safe.\n\nKnowing I'd find no answers here, I staggered towards the small healing-room exit, using the wall for support. It seemed my body wasn't as eager to get up and go, and panting heavily, my head slumped against the exits smooth arch.\n\nCome on, I can fight monsters and a dark wizard! I'm not getting bested by exhaustion!\n\nPeering out, a long corridor lay beyond the chamber, lined with barred cells and lit by a series of burning braziers.\n\nWait, this looks more like a dungeon than the healing chambers?\n\n\"Greetings, my lord,\" announced a voice.\n\nStartled, I jumped to see a blue dragon standing by the door, the same dragon I'd seen at the Sovereign's side. He gave a subtle bow, lowering his head and spreading his wings.\n\n\"Now that my lord is awake, would you care to follow me?\" he asked in a commanding, but charismatic tone.\n\nIt took me a moment to realise what he'd said, and before I knew it, he was marching towards a set of steps at the far end of the hall. For a moment I wasn't confident I had the strength to follow, but fighting against the rebellion of my aching legs, I caught up.\n\n\"Erm... excuse me, where am I? Where are my friends, and where's my outfit?\"\n\nThe corridor took a left turn, opening out into a large chamber, while my escort completely ignored the fact I was there.\n\nSo much for the whole 'my lord' thing.\n\nThe moment I saw the chamber I was being led into fear overcame me. My guide took up a position next to the opening, carefully leaving space for me to pass by his side.\n\n\"That is not for me to say, my lord,\" he finally replied, gesturing with a wave of his wing for me to proceed. \"I'm sure you'll be well informed soon enough.\"\n\nThe shadowed view of several armoured guards standing between rows of pillars, bridged by a polished marble floor, amplified my concerns as I tentatively stepped out.\n\n\"It appears I owe you my gratitude!\" a sharp voice snaked into my ears.\n\nThe blood in my veins ran cold, and my eyes fixed on the brooding serpent laying on top of his golden throne. His slender, jewel-laden neck glistened in the dimly lit chamber, with his head held high he draped lazily across his shimmering seat. His grey eyes glinting like fine gems, judging every part of me as they scoured every detail. Shock robbed me of words, while he seemed confused by my lack of response.\n\n\"As I said, you have my gratitude, for saving the life of my daughter,\" he repeated, and I recalled how she'd almost been slashed by one of the monsters.\n\nA spark of warmth ignited as I came to realise this might not be as bad as I feared. Although I wasn't ready to let my guard down, Aries was a cunning snake. There was only one response I could give, though the idea filled me with disgust.\n\nWith a bow of my head, the words felt like bile rising from my gut. \"Thank you, your highness.\"\n\nAries fell silent, as if pleased but cautious simultaneously.\n\n\"Please, the formality is not necessary,\" he said, waving a forepaw dismissively.\n\nHis silver body uncoiled with a chime of decorative chains as he strode down from his throne, at the same time my suspicion grew. That didn't feel like an answer he would normally choose; he seemed to loathe those who forwent the proper respect.\n\n\"As I am sure you're aware, there are those who believe that the end of an age is upon us, that you seek to vanquish that which has dared rear its foul head?\" he went on, his eyes constantly scanning me from beneath the rim of his crown.\n\nI forced myself not to squirm beneath his deceitful gaze, offering him no reply, even when his monologue paused expectantly.\n\n\"I, however, sense there is more to such an endeavour.\"\n\nHe resumed, halting his approach at the base of the stairs. I remained silent, and after an uncomfortably long silence, he smiled, exposing teeth like serrated diamonds.\n\n\"Make no mistake, I am aware of who you are, as I am of the legends.\"\n\nDeep down I knew I shouldn't be surprised, and yet I was still taken aback by his words.\n\n\"So, do you truly seek that which would grant you the mastery of all?\" he enquired, skulking around me as I'd seen him do to his soldiers.\n\nI steadied my nerves. I wasn't going to let him break me, not like them.\n\n\"No, your highness,\"\n\nHe halted his snaking creep.\n\n\"Interesting, it is good to know the one of unnatural blood was born of dragon-kind. It seems the gods still favour us.\"\n\nI averted my eyes, maintaining my silence while he resumed his prowl.\n\n\"It must be such a burden,\" he growled softly, \"to know your life can never truly be yours.\"\n\nEvery thought in my mind sparked and leapt at that statement like wolves after fresh meat. He turned his back to me, his jewelled tail slipping away like a silver river.\n\nHow can he possibly know that? I inwardly muttered. How does he know how it feels?\n\n\"One can't be written into legend, unaware of its curse. We share a common problem, you and I. For it was misfortune, and not choice, that saw me cursed with duty and responsibility too,\" he cooed, as if reading my mind, before adding. \"But maybe I can help you.\"\n\nHe can help, how? But more importantly, why?\n\n\"How?\" I asked bluntly.\n\n\"From the ancient halls of Taldran many legends speak of the power one such as yourself would possess, and yet I believe this power not fixed,\" he stated, brushing a foreclaw over his golden neck brace and its jewels.\n\nThe gems that are supposed to let him control all four elements. I noted, as he snapped his gaze back to me.\n\n\"Give me the power of unnatural blood and be rid of it,\" he added quickly. \"Then you can be free, a hero of Dardien with a lifestyle to match.\"\n\nI can be free, rid myself of this curse, have a life of my own? Revelling in the idea, I was almost oblivious to the clatter of the guard's armour as more emerged from the pillars.\n\n\"How?\"\n\nAries smiled. \"I have the resources and knowledge of an entire kingdom at my disposal. There are many great powers within this city, few of which are known.\"\n\nIs this really it, can I finally be free from my torment, free to live my own life, to create whatever truth I want?\n\nThe truth!\n\nThe warmth of the unreachable reality was shattered when the truth hit me like a wall of cold water. His deceit flooded into every corner of my mind, consuming the reality that could never be. With my power he could finally be what he pretended he was, and I had no doubt he'd get it by any means \u2013 there was no 'we' in his offer.\n\nI must get out of here, find my friends and make sure they're safe!\n\n\"You have my word, for like you, I have been chosen,\" Aries pressed, a disguised urgency in his tone.\n\n\"No,\" I answered dispassionately, breaking his patience.\n\n\"That is most unfortunate,\" he spat, while two guards quickly moved between us, their wings snapping open to enclose me.\n\n\"Take him away,\" he ordered. \"I will find alternative methods.\"\n\nThe guards responded without question, as the reality I dreaded began to play out.\n\nI've stood against dark masters and now I'm being forced away by nothing more than pathetic soldiers? Have I really fallen so far?\n\nIt was as if there were voices in my mind berating me, even as another part of me added.\n\nBut these are no monsters, they're my own kind.\n\n\"Are they?\" that voice, deep in the caverns of my mind, hissed.\n\nAre they? Or am I a stain on their perfection, the harbinger of the coming darkness, vanguard of the shadow that has revealed itself?\n\nNo! I mentally barked.\n\nThe new voice gave a vile snigger as I reasoned; maybe I'm not their equal, but if I betray them, I'm no better.\n\nI must get away and find the others!\n\n\"Where are they now when you need them? Have they betrayed you too?\" My mind's sinister voice asked.\n\nDoubt began to consume me.\n\nShow them the truth! It hissed like a snake weaving through my thoughts.\n\n\"Enough!\" I shouted, blocking out the manipulating words and snapping open my wings in a blaze of golden light.\n\nA scorching wave of heat hit the two guards, and not even their fireproof scales withstood the force that threw them aside like frail twigs. With their seared armour sizzling, they crawled away, while the stone beneath my paws crackled and boiled like clay as I glared at Aries.\n\nBetray me? This is Dardien's folly, not mine!\n\nI spoke without opening my mouth, realising that the spider's web of deceit within his vile mind was open to me. I could twist those fantasies of power, have him bowing at my paws, boiling alive in my proximity as he cowered before his greatest fear. If he wanted this power, I'd give it to him, and not in the way he desired.\n\n\"So, the creature beneath the whimpering chick reveals itself?\" Aries' arrogance was unwavering. \"Ask yourself this, Guardian. Is this how they would see you?\"\n\nThe burning fury and melting thoughts were silenced for a moment as my mind succumbed to confusion, and with no amulet to support me, my glow faded as I fell into a crater of molten rock.\n\nI'm no better, what have I done? The answer was all too clear \u2013 I've become the monster they expected.\n\n\"Such power will be most useful, and I will not see it wasted on some pathetic whelp,\" Aries snorted.\n\nIs he right, is the fear of the legend the fear of me? Am I the darkness?\n\n\"Take him away!\" Aries ordered once more, heralding the cautious approach of more guards.\n\nThe Cartographer's warning was too late, I was betrayed, and I was a fool to think I had a chance. The shadows of the guards closed in, and I could no longer call them my own. I was a fool to ever give them that title, to think this could be my home. Closing my eyes, I let weakness and loathing take me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "I stared at the prison bars and stone walls for what felt like hours, but they were nothing compared to the bleakness I felt inside. Aries couldn't expect his frail prison to hold me; instead, like a noose around my neck, his words were a tether. He was right, I'd denied the truth since the beginning.\n\nI really am the monster.\n\nA single stone bed, a dancing flame, and a rather cautious guard were all that accompanied me. While inside my mind the distant and rhythmic beating of stones drifted on a sea of faint whispers. No thought diminished the muttering as it persisted to tempt me with horrific ideas.\n\nWhat good is there in any of this?\n\n\"You are relieved, soldier,\" a firm voice commanded from beyond my cell, its regal tone instantly recognisable.\n\nI perked up, the whispers in my mind scampering like timid dogs.\n\n\"My orders are to let no one pass, not even you, your highness,\" the guard replied dutifully.\n\n\"New orders from the Sovereign; you are relieved. Or would you disobey orders from one among the dynasty to which you are sworn?\" she challenged; her words followed by another uneasy pause.\n\n\"Very well, your highness,\" the guard finally acknowledged.\n\nA sense of relief came over me when clattering armour signalled his bow and departure, before my cell's door swung open, and Zephyra materialised in the archway.\n\n\"Come with me, there's no time to waste.\"\n\n\"Why trust her?\" the voice whispered, my eyes narrowing as I considered. I can't trust any of them, but why is she here?\n\nZephyra had an unsettling anxiousness in her eyes, both her paws and wings fidgeted. I pushed myself up seconds before she dashed off.\n\nWhat in the sky's name is she doing? Helping me? What about her father?\n\n\"Come on!\" she exclaimed in a forced whisper as I peered out to see her marching towards the stairs.\n\n\"Why should you trust her after what her father did?\" the voice in my mind growled. Trust her or not, I need to get out of here.\n\nConsciously guiding the reins of my thoughts over my mistrust, I dashed from my cell and quickly caught up with her, while she peered cautiously around a corner.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I demanded quietly.\n\n\"I'll explain later, for now just follow me,\" she replied, quickly darting across the empty throne room towards a second dimly lit corridor.\n\nShould I really follow her or make a run for it? I wondered as she led me into the web of walkways sprawled across Dardien's interior.\n\nBefore I could consider the idea, she turned sharply left, pausing momentarily when the sound of voices drifted up from behind us.\n\n\"This way,\" she demanded, bolting through another corridor. \"The patrol patterns won't send them this way.\"\n\nEventually, the small tunnels opened into a large hall, lit by burning furnaces and the smell of molten metal. Rows of weapons and armour sat between large anvils, piles of gems and old training dummies.\n\nI guess these are the palace forges. I concluded, spying numerous sets of armour on wooden mannequins.\n\nThankfully, there was no one around, and a few more tunnels later, the winding underground web delivered us to a walkway high above the palace. I took a deep breath of fresh air the moment it met my nostrils, but it wasn't the warm homely sky that I knew, it was cold and dry. The city was dark and empty \u2013 either I'd been in that cell for at least a day or it was still the night of the celebration.\n\nGhostly moss-light shone from nests, but no firelight or braziers illuminated the gloom.\n\n\"Get down,\" Zephyra hissed, sweeping back into the cover of the tunnel mouth, gesturing for me to follow.\n\nMoments later, two armoured sentries flew past, their armour clattering lightly with each wingbeat as their sharp eyes scoured the silent cliffside.\n\nThe moment their metallic chime disappeared, the princess cautiously lifted herself up, glancing in all directions before quickly moving on. I wanted to trust her, but the voice in my head 'kindly' reminded me I'd already fallen into that trap once. Nevertheless, I followed.\n\nNo, I must give her a chance. I declared, swiping the sick ideas from my mind as I pressed on. She's not her father.\n\nI remained close to her tail, the pair of us ducking away from more patrols, until the pathway snaked beneath a stone arch where we finally stopped. Giving our surroundings another check, Zephyra immediately instructed me to go through a solitary doorway in the wall with a wave of her wing. I hesitated for a second, before entering to find the chamber was home to a swarm of dusty gloom.\n\n\"You still want to trust her?\" The vile voice questioned.\n\n\"Blaze!\"\n\nAll doubt left me as I was overwhelmed by a sudden embrace.\n\n\"Risha?\" I stuttered, surprise stealing my voice as I fought to remain steady amidst the force of her hug.\n\nShe's here, she's safe! Her presence alone immediately silenced my mind's goading thoughts.\n\nI could barely make out how she looked, but it was clear she still wore her decorative leg and tail bands. Her helmet and back plate appeared to have been lost, and while dust covered her beaten scales, she seemed unharmed.\n\n\"You're okay?\" I asked urgently.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm fine, but what happened? There... there was the fire, those things. They said you were taken to the palace, but...\" her questions poured like a spring river after snowfall.\n\nI didn't know what to say, I didn't know what it was in the fire or what those creatures may have been.\n\nCan I tell her about Aires' betrayal? Can I tell her what I did?\n\n\"Come, we don't have long,\" Zephyra interrupted, as she marched in behind me.\n\nRisha promptly moved to my side while we followed the princess into the next chamber. Then I noticed the others; Boltock, Ember and Pyro, the latter's red scales and softly glowing armour runes immediately giving him away. Another vaguely familiar face stood beside him.\n\nHis friend from the celebration? Soaren, I think.\n\n\"I trust there was no trouble whilst I was absent?\" Zephyra questioned, looking towards the two soldiers.\n\nIt appeared neither had ever expected to be taking orders directly from royalty, leastways while also defying their Sovereign.\n\n\"No, your highness,\" both responded in union, bowing slightly as she walked by.\n\n\"Good, then is everything ready?\" she asked, her question seemingly directed at all of us.\n\nWait, what does she mean?\n\n\"Ready? Ready for what?\" I asked urgently.\n\nAll eyes fell away from me, as if they'd hoped I would never ask while having no doubt I would do so.\n\n\"You must leave for your own safety,\" Zephyra intervened quickly.\n\nHer words hit like a hammer, fuelling my feelings of rejection, and yet it didn't sound like that was what she intended.\n\nShe knows the truth, she knows the legend, is that what she means?\n\n\"Why?\" I asked, more interested in why she'd broken me out and gathered my friends than my reasons for leaving.\n\n\"You are the one from legend, aren't you?\"\n\nI gave no response; she didn't need it; I knew what she meant, and she believed it.\n\n\"My father has gone mad with fear. He would rather have us all die locked up down here than lose his throne. He cares for nothing except for what the legends say of your power and how he can use it.\"\n\nHer muzzle wrinkled into a snarl as she spoke, her emotions clearly conflicting behind her narrowed eyes as she added.\n\n\"Whatever happened last night wasn't some orkin trick or dark magic, those creatures were...\" She paused, shuddering from horns to tail. \"Those creatures were... well, let's just say after staring at one, I'm glad I'm still sane.\"\n\nIt was clear that trying to piece together the memory of them was painful. As for the monster in the fire? I knew it could only be that which I'd failed to stop.\n\n\"Yeah, but you still haven't told us how we leave \u2013 the city is barricaded,\" a rather confident voice interrupted.\n\nAll eyes turned to Boltock, and he deflated a little as he squeaked. \"I mean... It would be good to know.\"\n\n\"There is a passageway up to the plains at the north end of the canyon,\" Zephyra announced. \"It's an old escape route for the royal family.\"\n\nListening to her words I was struck by another reality check from Boltock's statement. What does he mean 'we'?\n\nI pulled myself from Risha's side, looking back at them all. The same three who'd risked everything for me once before, and others seemingly willing to do the same.\n\nI can't let them do it again.\n\n\"No, if I go, I have to go alone,\" I asserted, my eyes fixed on Risha.\n\nI know if anyone is going to argue, it's her.\n\n\"You can't do it alone!\" she responded.\n\nI braced myself to oppose whatever she might say, knowing she was more than capable of proving her point.\n\nI know she's right, but I almost lost her last time. I thought.\n\n\"Could you have done what you did last time alone?\" she pressed, lowering her gleaming-blue eyes to meet mine.\n\n\"No, but I... I won't let anyone risk themselves again,\" I insisted.\n\nPlacing a forepaw beneath my muzzle, she gently lifted my head as she added. \"You were right, this isn't over and I'm sorry I didn't believe you.\"\n\nThe sight of her broken by the realisation that my life still wasn't mine, was unbearable. \"But I told you once before, you never have to face anything alone,\" she continued, the others standing behind with the same look of determination.\n\n\"How can you say no?\" The voice in my mind was strangely supportive as I finally relented with a nod.\n\n\"Very well, we're ready then,\" Zephyra interjected, somewhat impatiently. \"I will lead you to the hidden passageway, but you must follow me closely.\"\n\nHer eyes lingered on Boltock, before she turned to the two soldiers.\n\n\"Watch over them at all costs, both within and beyond our borders,\" she commanded.\n\nI felt a mixture of shock and relief to know that the stoic pair were accompanying us, although it meant more lives lay in my claws.\n\n\"You take your orders from him from now on,\" she added, pointing to me with her wing tip.\n\n\"Yes, your highness!\" was their only response, as they both gave each other puzzled looks the moment her back was turned.\n\nI looked over each of them; friends, soldiers, and royalty all willing to help me \u2013 it was as far from Aries' betrayal as I could get. I could not yet speak for Pyro or Soaren, but I knew the others would follow me to the end and back.\n\nThis time it might be to the end.\n\n\"You carry the fate of our race, the fate of the world,\" Zephyra finished, looking to me and bowing.\n\nI felt a wash of disbelief to see the princess kneel before me as so many did to her. It was almost as if she'd been looking for someone to respect, something to believe in that wasn't her father's lust for power. There was certainly none of her father's corruption in her eyes, nor was there any desire to fill his role.\n\nShe's not like him, she's the real leader this city needs. The sound of wing beats broke the tension.\n\n\"They probably know he's missing by now,\" Soaren warned, glancing to his order master.\n\n\"Agreed, so stay close,\" she repeated as she disappeared through the door.\n\nPyro and Soaren followed swiftly, and I slipped through after them, re-entering the ghostly silence of the city with a cautious glance. Risha was right behind me, and the pair of us quickly moved aside to allow Boltock and Ember through. Zephyra crouched beneath a stone arch, her sharp eyes scanning while Pyro and Soaren peered the opposite way.\n\nHearing the distinct sound of wing beats, she waved us down as another wing of guards flew by, obsidian-black plates shifting noisily with each flap of their leathery wings.\n\n\"When we're airborne you fly and don't look back, any of you,\" she instructed, her eyes lingering on Pyro and Soaren as she added. \"Keep any guards distracted until we reach the edge of the city, then make for the border as fast as you can.\"\n\nThe armoured pair gave wordless nods, and I was sure her orders were pushing them to the very limit of their loyalty.\n\nBetter to be loyal to her than her father. I reasoned inwardly.\n\n\"Right then, let's do this,\" she declared.\n\nSpreading her wings, she sprang from the archway, Pyro and Soaren close behind. Boltock, Ember, and Risha leapt from the ledge next, leaving me no time to dwell on my thoughts.\n\nHere we go again, I hope I can keep them safe.\n\nQuickly following, I soon realised how empty the city was as it sprawled below me. Whatever force maintained the warm atmosphere was gone, as were the wind-written currents. Aries was certainly doing his best to keep the sky closed and I found myself falling back on Risha's advice now more than ever.\n\n'Keep looking forward.'\n\nThe others flew ahead in an arrow formation, Zephyra at the head, using her elemental powers to support our escape. Pyro and Soaren flew close behind her, their eyes scouring the surrounding stalactites with griffin-like precision.\n\nMeanwhile, I contemplated how they'd act on their instructions \u2013 would they hesitate or follow their orders? If we did escape, Aries would surely punish them if we returned and would they be able to keep us safe in the troubled world beyond the city?\n\nCan I even keep us safe?\n\nNot wishing to dwell on the idea, my eyes peeled away to the hanging structures passing by. Most sat in darkness, the odd brazier still burned and the occasional beacon of inextinguishable glowmoss broke the gloom. I caught sight of Boltock occasionally glancing over at Ember flying across the formation from him, and to my left was Risha.\n\nCan I keep them safe?\n\nThe further we flew under the cliff, the more the city dispersed, marking Dardien's border. It was usually no boundary to anything that could fly, we'd often crossed beneath it when heading to the steam caves. Yet tonight it was alive with brazier flames.\n\nThis is it they're going to catch us for sure!\n\nZephyra glanced back at Pyro and Soaren, dismissing them with a nod.\n\nSoaren swirled acrobatically, another air dragon displaying his skill in the sky, while I caught Pyro briefly glance back at Ember. I trusted her not to falter, she was a capable survivor, though my trust of Pyro had never been tested, and I wondered if the only reason he was doing this was for her.\n\nHe cares about her so much. What effect is that going to have when it comes to orders?\n\nAfter a moment of hesitation, he broke off; he wasn't as swift or as agile as his air elemental partner, yet he showed skill in his armour that I could never match.\n\nAs we approached a small stalactite, I could see a few openings lit by a mix of red flame and glowmoss. A thin stone platform protruding from its left side supported a signal pyre, its red light revealing the armoured forms of two sentries. Despite the soldiers, Zephyra made no course correction, and in no more than a few wing beats, we flashed by the watchful pair.\n\nFor a moment I hoped they hadn't noticed us. I really didn't want conflict with my own, certainly not after what I'd done back in the throne room. However, another part of my mind was eagerly awaiting the chance. The sound of grinding stones grew louder, accompanied by tapping. Even though Aries had betrayed me at the first hint of the legend's truth, I tried to shake it off. My race wasn't the mindless creatures I'd once vanquished.\n\n\"Aren't they?\" the scornful voice hissed.\n\n\"Stop! The city boundaries are closed by his highness's orders!\" a fading voice shouted from behind us.\n\nThe clatter of armoured plates followed, and I glanced back to see the two guards launch into the air. At least one of them was an air elemental, who was able to reach us much faster than his companion.\n\n\"Stop, in the name of the great Sovereign!\" he bellowed, swinging past me into Risha's path.\n\nShe responded with an outward spin, but the guard was a skilled flyer, making a swift counter that forced her away from the group.\n\nShe's going to be left behind!\n\nWithout a thought for myself, I dropped out of formation, realizing it had been some time since I'd flown in unwritten skies. I'd maintained my old skills well enough to swerve into the guard's flight path, diverting his attention. Risha banked under me, appearing at my right side. Now he was chasing both of us, and worse still, we were lagging behind.\n\nFolding my wings, I spun in mid-air, the manoeuvre demanding far more agility than I possessed.\n\nCome on, focus on me! The guard wasn't shaken, and I struggled to return to a straight flight path as he surged forwards.\n\n\"Stop now or we will be forced to ground you!\" he warned with a snap of his jaws.\n\nIt seemed like this journey was going to be over before it began, when without warning, a new current swept us back into formation, and with a metallic clatter, the guard was thrown into a frantic spiral. Any doubt about Pyro and Soaren's loyalty was immediately dismissed as the fire dragon rode on a current created by his air elemental companion.\n\n\"Fly straight, we have your back!\" he called as Risha and I raced to catch the others.\n\nNoticing the cliffs closing in either side of us, I peered ahead to see we were rapidly approaching the canyon's northern tip. Seamlessly, the overhang sank away, and the cliff faces merged into a deep, black smear on the grey stone. It wasn't hard to work out that the narrow cavern was our escape route, and Zephyra was leading us towards it at an incredible speed.\n\nI've never flown through such a tight space like this, I hope she knows what she's doing.\n\nThe shadow of another guard appeared above us, leaving me no time to worry about the speed or accuracy of our approach. He swooped low, the strength of his wing beats disturbing the air of our flight path. Boltock and Ember saw him, but neither could move aside without colliding with the rapidly approaching rock faces, forcing them downward. My eyes darted about, searching frantically for any relief from the speed, but between the guard and the rocky meat grinders, there was no time.\n\nSuddenly Zephyra tucked her wings to her side, shot up like an arrow, and curving upside down along the underside of the guard, flared her wings. The leathery membranes went taught with a crack, forcing a ferocious rush of concentrated air against the pursuing dragon. I watched in amazement as he was thrown upwards and sent tumbling towards the lake.\n\nShe really does know what she's doing. I observed when, with another manoeuvre, she swirled into position behind us.\n\nBefore I could fully appreciate what had transpired, another guard exploded from beneath me forcing himself between Risha and I as she narrowly avoided the wall of gnashing rock to her right. The geography on my side gave me even less in the way of options \u2013 either I was forced into him or beneath him. With no time to spare, I opted for the latter, retracting my wings, and rolling under the guard's body.\n\nLike a fool, I'd swerved right to where he'd intended, and as he reached out for me with his foreclaws I crashed across a rocky floor. My instinctive manoeuvre threw me aside to avoid a pillar of rock, unfortunately my pursuer wasn't so lucky.\n\nThe loud sound of shattering armour and splintering bone signalled his collision; the stone meeting its match as it was ripped from its station and sent tumbling across the cave floor. Through the settling plume of dust, I could see his broken body and lifeless eyes staring at me.\n\nWha... What...\n\nThe unwelcome shock sucked the life from my chest, while the voice in my mind mocked.\n\nI killed him, one of my own!\n\nMy vision blurred as a flood of disgust and horror rushed into my mind.\n\n\"You killed him, he could have had a mate and family!\" the horrifying voice groaned woefully. \"You're no better. The monster from legend has claimed its first victim.\"\n\nIts tone settled into a dry rattle while the tapping rocks beat at a deafeningly high volume and I saw the mental image of a scoring tally carved upon a stone slate.\n\nWhat have I done?\n\nThe sound of flapping wings snapped me from my dread when the others entered through the cave's mouth. All bar Zephyra, whose metal-clad claws clutched one of the stalagmites as she landed. Uninjured, I righted myself with a clumsy flap of my wings, leaping up to where she was perched.\n\nShe witnessed everything; she saw what I did!\n\nI knew from the methods she'd been using that she hadn't intended for anyone to get seriously hurt, and yet she made no mention of the fallen soldier.\n\n\"Go!\" she shouted over the rushing wind.\n\n\"What about you?\" I asked, but she paused before answering.\n\n\"Someone needs to talk some sense into my father, I'll stop them from following you for as long as I can!\" she shouted, glancing at me for a moment, before casting her eyes back to the city sky.\n\n\"Come on you two!\" she shouted to Pyro and Soaren, the silhouettes of six guards close behind them.\n\nBefore I knew it, Pyro was swooping by, while Soaren landed on another of the stalactites.\n\nShe's not going to be able to hold them for long, I don't want to leave her to the wrath of her father.\n\n\"What are you doing, soldier?\" she snapped at Soaren.\n\n\"With all due respect, your highness, my loyalty lies with my order and its master,\" he replied sternly.\n\nShe said nothing; in fact, I was sure she wore a smile beneath her helmet. Soaren looked at me with an air of hope.\n\n\"That thing in the fire... If the legends are true.\" He paused, glancing back to the sky before finishing, \"then may the Creators be with you.\"\n\n\"May they be with you all,\" Zephyra added, and before I could open my muzzle to respond, she demanded. \"Go. Now!\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" I offered, taking one last glance back before leaping up to be snatched by the racing air current.\n\nDarkness wrapped around me like a cold blanket, and the only sign that the world existed was the howling wind on the almost invisible rocks. The air snaked through the tunnel, eventually revealing what looked like a serrated set of menacing stone teeth illuminated by the lunar glow. It almost felt like I was fighting to escape the throat of some giant creature.\n\nI'm almost there, almost out. I told myself as the light drew closer.\n\nMy optimism was thrown into disarray when the air current vanished, and in a frantic blur I was thrown into an uncontrollable spin. My eyes locked on the only point of reference, the moonlit glow ahead.\n\nAlmost there, almost there... Keep looking forward.\n\nThe first impact was inevitable. The sharp, rocky surface ripped at my wing, tearing flesh, breaking bones, and almost sheering the whole limb from my body. Adrenalin overwhelmed the pain, and a combination of shock, fear, and a burning desire to get out alive raced through my mind until I came crashing to the ground in a shower of dirt, rough stones and dried grass. My thoughts swam wildly in my throbbing head and my severed wing burned agonisingly in the cold night air.\n\nI tried to get up, dragging my head through the dirt to see the tattered-white sheet laying beneath scattered piles of crimson dust. One of the ribs was bent back, leaving deep-red gashes against lines of white bone. I felt my insides twist as if someone was standing on my guts, and even with my ability to heal, the sight of my disfigured limb knocked me sick.\n\nI'd broken my wing twice in one day, and as I fell back to gaze up to the moonlit sky of the Midnight Planes, my strength began to fail. Tendrils of darkness leaked into my distorted vision, while it felt like a warm sponge was pressed over my skull. Amidst the blurred haze I heard A muffled din and the beating of wings.\n\nI need to get up, I need to move! No matter my thoughts, my body had other ideas, plunging me into darkness once more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "My eyes finally fluttered open, a few blinks confirming they really were open, back in the lifeless world. Stranger still, was that I felt fine \u2013 my vision wasn't blurred, and my ears had stopped ringing. There was no stomach-twisting sickness in my gut or agony in my wing, but it was cold, colder than the icy tombs of Ilivar. I shuddered when the sensation finally caught up with me and I recognised the faint sound of tapping stones.\n\nThe rhythm stopped, and I froze, listening intently. It resumed; only this time it was closer. I tried shouting out, but no words escaped my muzzle. It was as if the air was unable to carry the sound of my voice, and yet the sound of tapping stones increased to an ear-piercing percussion, and two small points of light broke the gloom.\n\nA swirling, inky blackness grew until the outline of a dark, fleshless body formed. The light from the fire in its eyes boiled out across its muzzle, dribbling like molten iron into its exposed chest cavity and forming into a mockery of a beating heart. The vague shape twisted into that of a dragon, and beneath its fiery eyes a fanged mouth parted, releasing a long, slow hiss. A spine-like tail coiled over its ribs, while its forepaws lifted from the ground and it leant against the base of a rocky pillar. It held two sharp rocks, one in each paw, repeatedly knocking them together as if trying to ignite an invisible flame.\n\nI staggered back, but as I moved, I felt myself being torn from my body, until what remained of the lifeless mass of white scales fell to the floor while I stood like a ghost. Shock shoved me to the floor like a hammer, gasping for breath, while the bony creature struck the gloom with one of its stones. A flash of molten light marked the blow as a scorched line was drawn in the darkness.\n\n\"One!\" the sound of a piercing voice hissed, and the world became a cacophony of screeching wails and deafening heartbeats.\n\nI saw the brief image of a wolf-like creature without a head, another pinned under rocks. I closed my eyes, but the images around me passed through my eyelids like ghosts.\n\nI know those creatures, they're some of the first things I...\n\n\"Three!\" the bony dragon's stone struck the air with another molten flash, drawing a third weeping line through the gloom.\n\nIn the same instant, the image of a winged creature impaled by ice scorched my thoughts.\n\n\"Four!\" I saw what was left of the dark guardian Acrodan plunging into the swirling vortex and reduced to dust.\n\n\"Five!\" Brought a fifth vision of the lifeless eyes of the dragon soldier, and the mournful cries of a family that would never be complete again.\n\nThe skeleton finished its final strike on the darkness with a satisfied grin as it snorted a plume of hissing embers.\n\nI wasn't a hero, there was no such thing; I was a murderer and I'd killed them all. I'd stolen their lives, and for what? For the good of others? For right or wrong? What was justice to one, was murder to another. What did it mean to be a god? To have the responsibility to do what was right or what needed to be done?\n\nIt didn't matter, I didn't have that right, I wasn't a god and I certainly wasn't a hero. I was a frightened, little dragon bestowed with the power of a monster, and now I was as cruel and murderous as the rest. Like the gods who left so many to die while they did nothing, I was the same.\n\nThe skeleton shifted again, the tally glowing red hot in the darkness as it hissed. \"You're no better!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Troubled Times",
                "text": "[ New Horizon ]\n\n\"No fire,\" I heard Pyro order as I flickered back to consciousness.\n\nI was pressed against the dirt and it was still dark, the cover of trees reinforcing the gloom. There was a scattering of dust as paws shifted, and my dazed eyes locked on Boltock with two logs in his mouth.\n\n\"Fut ifs cowd,\" he muttered around the wood.\n\nPyro gave him a stern stare and he spat them out, before repeating. \"But it's cold.\"\n\n\"It's the season of fire,\" Pyro deadpanned.\n\n\"Yeah, but...\" Boltock grumbled, glancing around, before sighing.\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\nMarching over to a tree, he slouched down at its base in a huff. \"It's not like we're going to be here long anyway.\"\n\nPyro's judgmental stare lingered on him, before he moved off to what I made out to be the edge of the trees.\n\nIt was hard to determine where we were, but I assumed we were under one of the Midnight Plane's tree clusters.\n\nNo wonder he doesn't want to start a fire, I imagine Dardien patrols are all over the place.\n\nPyro, it seemed, was able to consider most aspects of our situation, which was enough for me to justify letting him lead for now.\n\nWhy should I be giving the orders? I'm not a soldier, I'm not trained.\n\nMy thoughts were abruptly severed when I felt a sting of pain in my side. Startled, I raised my head to see Risha peering down at the water-covered mess of magically healing scars that was my wounded wing.\n\nBy the Creators, it already looks halfway healed! I thought, the sight making my stomach churn as it brought back memories of Boltock's injuries.\n\nHe suffered for weeks with that, and here I am, healed within a night. I found it hard to look in the green dragon's direction. I really am a freak.\n\n\"You should really watch yourself, you know,\" she scorned.\n\n\"You should know you don't need to do that,\" I responded, preferring she didn't waste her time on me.\n\nYet all I received in response was another painful sting.\n\n\"Ouch!\"\n\n\"Oh, don't be such a hatchling,\" she chastised, relaxing her concentration, and letting the water flow back into the dirt.\n\nThen I noticed a small lump of stone in her forepaws. \"You can heal as fast as you like, but not with things like this still inside.\"\n\nShe was right, I had no idea if my accelerated healing would remove the stone or simply trap it within my flesh.\n\nOkay, the healing alone makes me sick, I don't need to think about that too.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I admitted quietly.\n\nShe gave a brief smile and flicked the stone away.\n\n\"I've found some,\" someone else announced from behind her, and Ember appeared with a thin green stem trapped in her muzzle.\n\n\"Gar leaves,\" she added, passing the vegetation to Risha who, with a quick swipe, ran her teeth over the flimsy stem, stripping the leaves.\n\nI felt my head drop to the dirt again, my body's regeneration sapping energy like a bloodthirsty leech. The sound of Ember's paw steps drew my eyes as she walked by peering down at my wing. I knew she'd seen what my body could do before, and yet her eyes were still filled with amazement.\n\n\"Does he really need it?\" she asked, glancing back at Risha.\n\nI had to agree, I'd eaten the same leaves before and the taste was still with me for all the wrong reasons. I wasn't sure the plant helped, back then I had no idea of how I healed, and for all I knew, the medicine did nothing.\n\n\"He's getting it, whether he likes it or not,\" Risha replied, and I reluctantly did as I was told.\n\nAfter some chewing the bitter mush of leaves slithered down my throat to leave a foul, lingering aftertaste. All the while she beamed with a half-proud, half-amused smile.\n\nIs this her way of getting back at me or something?\n\n\"See, much better,\" she declared.\n\n\"How's he doing?\" Pyro interrupted.\n\nEmber moved towards him, brushing close by his flank, before turning to face us.\n\n\"He's fine,\" Risha replied, retrieving some professionalism.\n\n\"Really?\" he challenged, moving round to get a clear view of my wing.\n\nHis eyes grew wide, and almost choking on his next few words, he stammered. \"I\u2013I'll admit, you've surprised me.\"\n\nWhile he pondered, I grew concerned about how much he knew. I never heard the improvised story Ember had told him.\n\nDid she mention anything about how I healed or my unique fire?\n\nI knew she hadn't told him about Acrodan or the sphere, she'd told me it was better he didn't know we'd been in such danger. Though it had been a while since our return, leaving enough time for suspicions to grow.\n\nNow he's seen me go from crippled to flight-ready in a matter of hours. I don't think he learned about that in training.\n\nEither way, I had to wonder.\n\nDid they tell him while I was unconscious? How is he going to feel about the truth being kept from him for so long?\n\nWhile I worried, he didn't linger. Instead he lay down against a tree trunk, and Ember followed, leaning her head on his shoulder as they both gazed out into the moonlit night.\n\nThey look so peaceful with each other. Why ruin it by coming out here with me?\n\nWith that thought, another question crossed my mind and I turned to Risha.\n\n\"Who told you to find me?\"\n\nI'd no doubt she would have come to save me from Aries herself, but she'd had no idea where I'd gone after the celebration.\n\n\"Zephyra didn't tell you?\" she asked, looking at me like some part of an elaborate plan had been broken.\n\nI thought back to escaping from the cell, but I could only recall the princess telling me to hurry.\n\n\"No, she didn't tell me anything.\"\n\nHer unease left me nervous, and she looked like what she was about to tell me was something I'd have been better off not knowing.\n\nUrgh, I know that kind of look all too well.\n\n\"It was Elder Vulkaine.\"\n\nIt was rare that any of the Elders were addressed by their true names, they were mostly referred to as a collective. I knew Vulkaine was the Fire Elder, rather conveniently the one who'd spoken to me before the attack.\n\nI should have guessed they were mixed up in this. I thought, and noticing my confusion, Risha continued.\n\n\"When that thing came from the fire we were near the edge. The order dragons told us to fly away, but I went back to look for you and Boltock. I couldn't find you, and by the time I'd found Boltock those dreadful things were already swirling around the place. There was so much chaos...\"\n\nShe paused, and I was already uneasy with the possibilities forming in my mind. The mere idea that she'd been in such danger wasn't pleasant.\n\nI should have been there; I shouldn't have wandered off.\n\n\"One of those things came at us,\" she resumed, recoiling at the thought. \"I\u2013I saw it coming... I could have burned it, fire seemed to work on the others, but I saw it and... it was impossible... Like it shouldn't have been there, but it was...\" her voice trailed off into jitters as she closed her eyes.\n\nI took a deep breath. So long as she's safe.\n\nShe was right, when I'd looked into the eyes of that thing, it felt like my mind was melting. The true feeling eluded me, but those monsters were so wrong, so very wrong; they shouldn't exist, and yet they did.\n\nI freed my mind of the memory, the mere recollection felt like a nightmare.\n\n\"When I saw it, I was so scared... I\u2013I couldn't fight it, and if it hadn't been for Vulkaine, well...\" She glanced away, one wing brushing against mine.\n\nThe Fire Elder saved her? Knowing that split my opinion regarding them further.\n\nThey'd once told me to abandon Tarwin and now one had saved my best friend? Their words and actions confused me, almost as much as the creators'.\n\nOnly now I know for sure they knew about this legend from the start, and they had lied.\n\nThe idea of their scheming was infuriating. Why didn't they tell me the first time I came to them?\n\nEven if they didn't know exactly who or what I was, they could have at least told me about the legend rather than leave it to some other.\n\n\"He told Zephyra to find you and leave. She also said you saved her life, so she didn't need convincing.\" Risha finished.\n\nI gave a subtle nod. I guess the princess repaid me in full, I'd be nothing if she hadn't brought me to my friends.\n\nEven so, the faint sound of grinding stones deep in my subconscious reminded me of the skeletal figure roaming amidst my thoughts, relishing my irritation. Ignoring him, I resumed my evaluation of the plan that had gotten us this far.\n\n\"I'll admit saving a princess is not a bad way to make friends,\" Risha added with a laugh.\n\n\"Friends with her, maybe. Her father, not so much,\" I responded with a slight smile.\n\n\"Well, Aries has a lot to answer for. Hopefully, he'll be off the throne when we get back,\" she suggested.\n\nWhen we get back? Back from where, I have no idea where we're going this time.\n\n\"I don't suppose any of them told you where we need to go?\" I asked hopefully.\n\nShe paused, and her perplexed expression made my heart sink.\n\n\"Vulkaine said you would know,\" she answered softly.\n\nWhat did I know?\n\nDredging the depths of my mind I tried to recall the smallest detail. I searched through the shattered fragments, through all the dark corners, but all led me to the trauma of the last few days. Amidst it all one memory stood out above all others, 'The Fallen Star'. The Goldfire Ridge investigation and the Phoenix Mountains!\n\nI'd quashed my initial urge to go there, but did the Elders somehow know that? Did they know that the Cartographer had given me the book? It felt like the nature of my entire existence was greater than I'd previously imagined; surely there was more at play. Whatever the case, the brief entry in the book and knowing what lay in those mountains were the only leads I had.\n\n\"The Phoenix Mountains... Goldfire Ridge,\" I declared.\n\nHope intensified my words, but at her obvious concern, my enthusiasm dampened.\n\nWhat is it? What's at Goldfire ridge?\n\n\"Goldfire Ridge?\" a voice rumbled beside us.\n\nPyro appeared a few steps away, a stern look on his face.\n\n\"It hasn't gone by that name for an age, not since the siege of Taldran,\" he began, glancing at Risha, who offered a solemn nod.\n\n\"It was once the capital of the Highkin Empire, destroyed by Hinnoron during the war. Now it's nothing more than a pit where orkin dwell,\" he explained.\n\nThat explains why they're all so afraid of it then.\n\nI'd never seen an orkin, but I'd read about the fierce barbarian race who were once the noble highkin. Most of the north was at constant war with small warbands and tribes. Yet I was no stranger to the rumours that those isolated pockets were coming together.\n\nNow we need to go deep into the heart of their territory. I couldn't think of a response.\n\nI was sure that Goldfire Ridge was where we needed to go, but why would the clues suggest such a perilous place?\n\n\"They can't be any worse than those shadow-things,\" Boltock interrupted, all eyes turning to him.\n\nThere was no doubt he was right, but just because the orkin were not monsters of pure darkness, it didn't make them any less dangerous.\n\n\"Isn't there any way we can get around them? They won't be looking for us in their own lands, and if they are, they'll have their eyes on the sky \u2013 we could walk,\" Risha suggested, and Pyro paused, contemplating a response.\n\n\"Maybe,\" he replied, \"but that place is a crumbling hive of industry and fire, not to mention we number only five! The risk is too great, we may not return home.\"\n\n\"Home?\" Boltock questioned, shrugging off a disapproving look from his sister. \"Can hardly call the city home now, they've chased us out.\"\n\nPyro snorted, his wings fidgeting as he continued. \"Are you sure that's where we need to go?\"\n\nI paused, wanting to tell him there was another option. \"I... Yes, that's the only lead I have.\"\n\n\"Very well, can you fly?\"\n\nI glanced at the fading scars on the white membrane of my wing. It wasn't perfect, a deep red mark still ran down one rib, its edge glowing in a ghostly-white haze. Some of the taught tissue was also partially ripped, but so was one of Pyro's \u2013 and to him that injury was for life.\n\n\"Yes, I think so,\" I responded with a nod.\n\nRisha gave me a disapproving scowl. If it was up to her, I'd be grounded for at least another day. However, the fire dragon didn't hold the same concern and swiftly moved to the edge of the trees.\n\n\"The Phoenix Mountains are at least three days flying time to the north-east. Without Soaren or the princess the journey will be more strenuous.\" He scratched a mark in the dirt as he spoke, drawing a makeshift map.\n\n\"We head east over the planes to Overlord's Fell; if things go well, we'll make nest there tonight.\"\n\nI'd heard of Overlord's fell, it was a range of rocky peaks said to be the spine of an ancient creature, so large and powerful, it dwarfed mountains and could rip great scars in the world.\n\nBut that's another legend.\n\n\"Is that clear?\" Pyro finished, looking over us all as he marked his improvised map.\n\nA series of nods greeted his commands, albeit a rather hesitant one from Boltock.\n\n\"Good, then everyone form up on me.\"\n\nWithout hesitation he turned and marched out onto the planes. Ember was quick to follow, Boltock trudging behind, as did Risha. I rose to my paws, shaking off the dry dirt, before calling Risha's name.\n\nShe stopped and looked back.\n\n\"It's not going to be like last time. I won't let anything happen to any of you, I promise,\" I assured her earnestly.\n\nShe stared at me; her eyes filled with a nagging frustration. I knew she hated the fact that I still blamed myself for what happened to her.\n\n\"Blaze, don't hold yourself to that,\" she implored.\n\nI knew the good old 'don't hold yourself to that', but I was still holding her to what she'd said the last time.\n\n\"Promise me one thing. Make sure you come back. The world's not the only one that needs you,\" she added, placing a forepaw on my shoulder.\n\nWith that she turned away, following the others out onto the plains."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The green sea of the sunlit planes drifted by beneath me, occasionally broken by rough patches of trees and snaking rivers. A steady wind formed silver waves across the lush ocean as large flocks of earth birds stampeded over the grassland. Their once-brown feathers were now a deep red, each one bearing three distinct orange and blue stripes along the length of their back, with some individuals boasting impressive, fire-like crests.\n\nBy the time the rolling hills and grasslands finally gave way to dense forest, the sun had sailed across the cloudless, blue sky. The dense mass of pine trees brought back memories of creatures stalking us through the mist. I did my best to dismiss them, at least this time I knew the eastern forest would soon be broken by the foothills of Overlord's Fell.\n\nPart of me wondered if this was the way I'd flown when I'd first arrived, while vague recollections of rocky hills and lakes flickered through my mind. Another part of me hoped that the change in scenery might make me feel better about what I was doing.\n\nAt the horizon's edge a shimmering line broke the canopy, as if specks of light danced over the tree line. As we continued, the glistening mass grew, finally revealing itself as the sea. I'd not seen it free of ice in such a long time, not since the day I'd left the village with Tarwin. I never really thought much of it, but the sight and the smell reminded me of the life I used to know.\n\nSitting up on the cliffs, taking in the salty air. The memory made me feel warm and fuzzy. Things used to be so simple.\n\nAs we flew, the water drew closer, crawling across the trees like a swarm of glistening insects. The salty smell greeted me as if on cue, whilst the sound of the waves competed with the wind.\n\nIsolated islands filled the bay, resembling the backs of monstrous sea creatures. Their cliffs rose high from the depths while trees clung to the sheer edges for dear life, all fighting for a spot on the safer peaks. Outcrops of tree-laden land crawled out across the water like fuzzy green clouds on a shimmering mass of sleek silk. Overlord's Fell appeared on the opposite edge of the bay, and I tried to picture the cliffs as the back of some legendary titan. If the legends were true, the Overlord was truly beyond comprehension, the sheer peeks stretched for miles, like a great wall of jagged stone.\n\nMaybe some things are too farfetched to be real.\n\nI was trying hard not to think of what might happen, by focusing on what was different this time. Firstly, it wasn't winter, and as far as I knew, there was no one after us. Thankfully, Aries didn't seem desperate enough to send patrols this far out, or Zephyra had been very persuasive. Plus, I knew what I could do to defend us, although without the amulet I was unsure about my control.\n\nFeels like that snake still managed to steal a part of me. I thought, clutching a forepaw at my chest.\n\nFinally, we had Pyro. My opinion of his presence was still mixed, and although he was under orders to follow me, he seemed to be leading us fine on his own. Not that it mattered, I was glad to shield myself from the responsibility, and he was far better suited to the role. The only fracture in my growing trust was that I had no idea what he knew of me, or what I'd done. Although he would undoubtedly question it before long.\n\n\"Hey! Have you ever caught a fish before!?\"\n\nI snapped back from my contemplation at the sound of a voice over the wind. I looked ahead to see Ember looking back at Boltock with a daring smile.\n\n\"Yeah, I can catch fish,\" he countered confidently.\n\nShe swooped in closer while he became unsure of whether this was an opportunity or an equally good way to embarrass himself. She glanced to Risha, who was sniggering to my right \u2013 Boltock wasn't the best when it came to lies, and they both knew it.\n\nAdmittedly, it wasn't hard for me to see it either, but I wasn't saying anything. Meanwhile, Boltock's narrowed eyes snapped to his sister.\n\n\"It's not like you could,\" he goaded, swooping in beside her.\n\n\"Oh really?\" she retorted, flexing a foreclaw.\n\nHe's claimed that someone who can control water can't catch a fish, really?\n\n\"That's... that's, not fair,\" her brother retorted at the same realisation.\n\nI assumed they meant fishing on the wing, as the only other way I knew of was with a rod or nets and we certainly couldn't do that.\n\nCatching a fish from the sky? How hard can it be? I began to wonder, glad for the distraction.\n\n\"I could catch a fish, if I tried,\" Boltock declared again.\n\nI caught Pyro glance back at our noisy conversation, expecting him to order us back into formation, but he smirked and slowly shook his head.\n\nCatching a fish from the sky? I repeated to myself.\n\n\"Can't be that hard,\" I stated, swooping in by Risha's side.\n\nAll three looked at me as if I'd finally sealed the dare, while Risha and Ember exchanged enthusiastic glances.\n\n\"Oh really?\" the fire dragoness asked. \"Well, you two try to catch one before us,\" she challenged while Risha swirled over to her side, leaving me with Boltock.\n\n\"It's still not fair,\" he protested. \"She can just magic them up!\"\n\n\"No elements,\" Risha instructed primly.\n\nWith her brother's confidence reignited, he stretched out his foreclaws, beating his wings faster as he declared.\n\n\"Alright then, get ready for some fish!\"\n\nRisha and Ember began to glide away while I followed Boltock in a steady descent towards the water, pulling up above the restless liquid. The waves almost lapped my muzzle, and the spray coated my wings in a salty sheen.\n\n\"Have you ever done anything like this before!?\" Boltock shouted over the rushing waves.\n\n\"No!\" I called back, my eyes flickering as salty water bombarded my face.\n\n\"Then this is going to be fun,\" he admitted excitedly.\n\nOkay, Blaze, let's do this. How hard can it be?\n\nFrom what I imagined, I was looking for shimmering bodies moving beneath the waves, something I knew from the words of the fishermen back in my old home.\n\nOkay, maybe it's gonna be a little tricky.\n\nThe water was deep and murky, its surface whitened by breaking waves, and cold to the touch. I lowered myself as close as I dared, my wingtips kissing the wave peaks. Within moments I caught a shimmer beneath the abyss and dropped my snout beneath the gushing liquid. My eyes refocused as another shimmer split the murky gloom, a mass of glinting scales darting like sequins in the deep. With a splash Boltock shot up beside me, I assumed he'd caught something. A larger shape appeared in the water, a mass flowing beneath me.\n\nThis is it, they're right there, a whole black and white shoal of them!\n\nWait... Black and white?\n\nThe mysterious body suddenly erupted from the water directly beneath me, expelling a jet of salty liquid into my face. I pulled up, barely missing its towering fin and as I shook the salty brine from my muzzle two of its companions broke the surface either side.\n\nWhat in the creators' name! I inwardly shrieked, but despite the shock, I couldn't help laughing.\n\nI'd seen these before \u2013 they were Orca, supposedly messengers of the great spirits from my old home. One thing I did know is they ate fish, the same fish I'd been after.\n\nWell, what's a little friendly competition when they're three times my size?\n\nThe pod of three broke the water like temporary islands. With a splash, and a flick of their powerful tails, they powered back toward their submerged quarry.\n\n\"Big catch!\" Ember called out as I soared back up to her and Risha, both clutching decent-sized fish in their foreclaws.\n\n\"Yeah, just my luck it would be too big,\" I replied, as Boltock swooped in with a fish in his foreclaws.\n\n\"Okay, but either way you didn't catch one. Two to one, means we win,\" Ember declared with a laugh, playfully swooping off after Pyro before Boltock could argue.\n\n\"Wait, what! That's not fair!\" The green dragon protested.\n\nSmiling in amusement, I caught Risha also enjoying the spectacle.\n\n\"Good try, nearly as big as the one back... well, you know,\" she replied, losing herself in the excitement before realising where her words were leading.\n\nI knew why she avoided the subject, but she had nothing to blame herself for.\n\n\"Yeah, they were,\" I replied, shaking more salty water from my scales.\n\n\"Only you could be so lucky,\" she added.\n\n\"Only I could have such counterproductive luck,\" I joked, excitement replacing my fear for the first time in far too long."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The shimmering waters continued for some time before the waves finally broke on a beach of rough, grey stone. Shattered boulders and rocky pools marked the eastern shoreline, a whole array of seaweed, shells, and drifting debris littering the damp terrain. Vegetation took hold where the shore gave way to a mix of pine-trees and lush woodland of broad-leaved oak and chestnut. Beyond it, Overlord's Fell rose like a wall, the rough spine bathed by the warm sunset.\n\n\"Keep an eye out for a place to nest, a ledge or something will do,\" Pyro ordered as he started to bank south along the ridge.\n\nTo my right, a small stretch of land reached out from the main coastline, turning back on itself to form a shielded cove. Within its cover was what looked like a spider's web of wood, rope and thatch-laden buildings, lit by flickering torchlight. It was a village, the central building belching smoke from its chimney. A fleet of small sailboats bobbed in the inlet's calmer waters, and a large wooden tower overlooked the scene from the cliff top. A burning cauldron of natural fire marked its top, so bright it would be visible far out to sea. It reminded me of the home I used to know, the torches and the smell of smoke mixing with the sea's salty scent.\n\nIt's a human settlement, it must be.\n\nPyro banked away towards the cliffs before we got too close, and I had to wonder why he didn't want to get closer.\n\nIt's probably best to leave things be. I know not all humans are like Tarwin.\n\nAs I banked after the others, I had to remind myself that I'd never be able to lead anyone if I couldn't focus on our current problem. I watched the torch-lit village disappear over a tree-laden ridge, doing my best not to let nostalgia distract me.\n\n\"Down there!\" one of the others shouted, and I looked to see a secluded ledge amidst the trees.\n\nBoltock circled, while others swooped down to join Pyro. The ledge sat at the edge of the cliff, shrouded by trees clinging dearly to the slope, their roots crawling through the rock in search of soft, barely existent soil.\n\nBetter than nothing. I thought, with my paws hitting the earth, scattering the fallen pine-needles.\n\n\"Good work,\" Pyro congratulated Boltock, who didn't really seem to know how to respond. \"Now, get a fire going.\"\n\nThe green dragon was fast to move at those words, dropping his fish and darting off.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Ember asked, dropping her fish.\n\nI looked round to see her words were intended for Pyro, who was moving towards the cliff edge.\n\n\"To keep watch. Aries' patrols could still be out this far.\"\n\nA chill ran down my spine. Maybe Aries is not as afraid to send dragons out here as I thought.\n\nEmber gave her mate a disapproving scowl. \"You really think he'll put that much effort into finding us?\"\n\n\"Either way, this isn't Dardien, there are creatures \u2013 orkin and creators know what else out there,\" he insisted.\n\n\"Fine,\" she huffed, ruffling her wings before turning away, while he resumed his march to the edge.\n\nWow, maybe that whole 'mates' thing is way more complex than I thought?\n\nI caught Risha watching her fiery friend closely. By her expression I knew she was thinking about whether she should say anything but had seemingly decided against it. I thought to ask her about their relationship again, but after her last attempt at explaining it, I dropped the idea.\n\nConfusion about my friends' relationships is the last thing I need right now.\n\nA rustling in the bush heralded Boltock's return, holding a large log in his mouth. He quickly moved over to a central spot, and with a few sweeps of his tail, he brushed aside the dry forest debris. Eagerly positioning the wood and shoving more dried leaves onto the pile he coiled back, and pausing for a minute, he glanced over at Ember. The fiery dragoness was sitting against a tree, her eyes filled with a distant look of solitude.\n\nDid he expect her to interrupt?\n\nSlowly, Boltock sank to the floor, seemingly unsure. I'd only ever seen him behave like this once before, that time he wasn't showing off or seeking attention. The look in his eyes revealed a glimpse of the hero I'd seen in him the night his wing had been mauled.\n\nWithout warning, a ball of blue flame suddenly broke his stare.\n\n\"Hey!\" he moaned, his eyes snapping to his sister as she abruptly lit the fire.\n\n\"You should cook these,\" she suggested, returning with the three fish.\n\n\"Okay, okay,\" he sighed, snatching the fish from her coiled tail, tossing them onto the fire.\n\nWith a concerned scowl, his sister turned away, muttering to herself. \"One day he'll understand she's already taken.\"\n\n\"I'd ask for another explanation but, well...\" I replied. \"Last time it got awkward.\"\n\nRisha giggled, her eyes still locked on her brother cooking the fish and occasionally glancing to where she'd forbid.\n\n\"I imagine you have enough to think about,\" she continued.\n\n\"I still have to figure out which parts of it I should be thinking about,\" I groaned, lowering my head.\n\nShe failed to reply, her eyes locked on her brother.\n\nWhat's she thinking, I don't make her feel awkward, do I?\n\n\"Are you okay?\" I asked, snapping her out of her trance.\n\n\"Yes, yeah I'm fine. I'm just... Well, everyone finds someone when they're ready.\"\n\nI pressed my head against the floor, uncertain of how to respond. This was quickly reaching the point of her last attempt to explain how dragon relationships worked.\n\nMaybe I'm stupid, maybe it's my elusive feelings for her. What if those feelings upset her? How am I supposed to know what they all mean!?\n\nShe seemed to notice my loss for words, and a gentle smile broke across her muzzle.\n\n\"Am I pushing the limit?\" she joked, lowering her head to mine, before turning her eyes back to her brother.\n\n\"My limit is the moment their eyes meet, after that it's all over the place. So much nuzzling and wing-hugging,\" I replied, playing stupid as we shared a laugh.\n\nI was swift to settle down, if I managed to get some sleep now, I could be more awake when everyone else was asleep. I didn't want to trust the safety of us all to Pyro's watch alone.\n\nThe swish of a swift tail flick followed by the thud of cooked fish shattered my growing illusion of unconsciousness, and I caught Risha laughing at her brother.\n\n\"You do know your scales are fireproof, don't you?\"\n\nBoltock gave her a sour look.\n\n\"Very funny,\" he muttered, scooping another fish from the fire with his spiny tail, slipping one into his muzzle, while reserving the other.\n\n\"That one's yours,\" he told his sister, nodding to the dusty fish on the floor with a hint of vengeful humour.\n\nShe rolled her eyes, scooping up the fish, holding it over the fire to incinerate whatever it had collected from the ground. The pair quickly ate their meals, and I had a good idea for whom Boltock was keeping the last one pristine. There would be none for me; of course, I didn't need it. Though it was unlike Risha not to offer me any or at least moan about my lack of eating.\n\nMaybe it's because there's not enough to go round, prioritise those who need it, that's what I would do.\n\nBut something deep inside my mind was stirring another thought, after what the Cartographer warned of my own kind and what I'd seen them do.\n\nI abruptly closed the idea. No! They're my friends and I don't need food.\n\n\"What about him?\" Boltock asked, gingerly glancing at Pyro silhouetted by the sunset.\n\n\"He'll be fine; if he wanted food, he'd have caught some,\" a tired voice surfaced.\n\nEach of us looked back to see Ember carefully pulling the cooked fish from Boltock's coiled tail.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nRisha's eyes jumped between the pair as her brother regarded the fiery dragoness with wordless awe.\n\nHe really likes her. Not even Pyro looks at her that way.\n\nWithin moments, Risha subtly slipped between the two of them, her brother's look turning scornful as he grumbled and turned away. I diverted my eyes. I appreciated their lives and the way they lived, but I'd had enough of how my race acted around each other, especially the vibe around Ember.\n\nIs she like a magnet for attention or something?\n\nWith my idea of an early night's sleep all but gone I stood up, shaking the flora from my under-scales and turning to the only sight other than trees.\n\nA chilly evening breeze met my approach \u2013 even though it was summer, it was still cold. In the corner of my eye I could see Pyro leaning motionless against a rock, while dry vegetation crunched beneath my paws.\n\nLiving under a roof of stone was never good for me, I'd always craved a view of the sky. Right now, it was as red as dragonfire, the clouds posed like mighty creatures above the darkening horizon as the sun sank below the gleaming sea. The stars were beginning to fade into existence, while a full moon sailed over the distant mountains. Another nervous glance revealed that Pyro still didn't seem to notice me.\n\nMaybe he's asleep? So much for keeping watch.\n\nA shimmer in the dwindling twilight caught my eye, then another, and another shooting like fireflies across the brewing night. I'd seen them before; my old family called them shooting stars.\n\nTarwin called me that once, a star that fell from the heavens.\n\nI could almost imagine each one as another like me, yet I'd never wish such a fate on anyone else. There was a darker side to fallen stars. It was just as easy to imagine them all as...\n\n\"A red-set graces the sky.\"\n\nI glanced over my wing towards Pyro. Whether he'd been asleep at all was questionable, but now he was sat up. From beneath his helmet his stoic eyes followed the stars falling across the night sky.\n\n\"Fire will fall tonight,\" he recited philosophically. \"And so it does,\" he added, his eyes following one of the fallen stars until they fell on me.\n\nAt least now I knew what he was talking about, albeit my only problem was that his attention was now focused on me.\n\nThis must be how Boltock feels. I thought nervously.\n\nI could certainly see why he avoided this particular set of eyes. Most dragon eyes were the colour of their scales, apart from mine, which were blue. Pyro's were piercing red, judging and proud, though they seemed to hunger for more.\n\n\"So, the legend is true, the Elder was right?\" His statement made me more cautious than curious.\n\n\"Zephyra was right to follow you against her father then? And I am right to follow her?\" he added, seemingly for his own benefit rather than mine.\n\nWhile he spoke, I subconsciously analysed what he knew of me, knowing that I needed to guard against saying something out of turn.\n\n\"So, if it is true, where did you go?\" he pressed, confirming both my suspicions and fears.\n\n\"Where did you lead them? Where did you lead Ember?\" His tone rose slightly at the mention of her name.\n\nIt wasn't aggressive, although it still made me anxious, and I considered telling him the truth.\n\nIt's not like he's my enemy; in fact, I'd be hard pressed not to call him my friend.\n\nSo why not tell him about Acrodan and the sphere? Everything I did to stop them was pointless anyway.\n\nI peered into his fiery eyes, noticing a change in his expression; his stare didn't look at me, but through me. In fact, he was looking behind me. I immediately turned to where his focus fell, and saw, along the tree-lined ridge of a distant foothill, a flickering red glow dancing like fire. The smell hit me as soon as I saw the illuminated tower of smoke rising like a huge, black tree.\n\nSomething big is on fire. The exact location of the blaze hit me like a hammer \u2013 The village.\n\nPyro shifted beside me, his snout raised to the air as the chilly breeze quickly became thick with the smell of smoke and distant cries of terror.\n\n\"Orkin,\" he declared, sharp eyes fixed on the hillside.\n\nI swallowed, trying to avoid the smoky taste as it clawed down my throat.\n\n\"What do we do?\" I asked.\n\nAfter a long pause, he replied. \"We move and hope they have no knowledge of us.\"\n\nMy eyes remained fixed on the fire as he stood up. Did I expect anything more from him?\n\nI fidgeted anxiously. Last time I would have run without hesitation, but this time I knew what I could do.\n\n\"Be the hero, it is your responsibility.\" The grim voice hissed in my mind.\n\nI can't sit idly by while people die. I have to be better than that.\n\nPyro slipped back into the cover of the trees. He would probably want to move before anyone else noticed what was happening. Undoubtedly, some among us would probably share my feelings.\n\nNo, I can't let them know they could get hurt \u2013 if I want to do something, I must do it alone.\n\nThe more the idea lingered, the more it felt like I was the one who was betraying them more than they ever could me. On the flipside, it could be my old home in flames, my old family.\n\n\"Do what's right, it's your responsibility, isn't it?\"\n\nWithout a word, I spread my wings and leapt from the cliff, gently gliding towards the fire-lit hillside."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Wyrm",
                "text": "A rocky ridge amidst the trees provided a suitable landing spot while the dark fumes disguised my approach.\n\nThe smoke burned my throat and eyes like an invisible flame, and the sea was choked with ash, making the waves grey and foamy. The whole village was alight, the intense flames reflecting from the water, as if the sea was bleeding molten iron. Fumes bellowed from everywhere as wooden huts and bridges lay collapsed, smouldering on the rocky banks or sizzling in the cold waters.\n\nPanicked settlers ran for their lives, screaming as they fled into the forest, while others sat on a boat already far from its moorings. Anyone who had attempted to fight lay slaughtered on the bloodied walkways or had been cast into the sea like driftwood.\n\nThen I heard the creatures who had brought the destruction. They filled the air with a sound like that of wild animals, mixed with the clattering of their fearsome armour and grinding joints. The swift slicing of their blades cut through the smoke and the metallic thunder of their heavy boots marked their position.\n\nI'd seen monstrous creatures before, but none like this. These weren't wild animals \u2013 they stood on two legs, with two arms like those they were butchering. That was where any similarities ended, their tattered skin was pale and drawn tightly over stocky bodies and pointed ears. Some bore long strands of dirty-white hair and peered through cold, dark eyes. Putrid teeth jutted awkwardly from their bloodied mouths, and long claws sprouted from withered fingers. Their gaunt features were scarred and warped by dark, bruise-like patches. Many of those blemishes morphed into jagged stone, like boils and blisters erupting randomly from their flesh, consuming the entire body of some. Twisting together with metal blades, shields and axes, replacing hands and feet with rusty claws or serrated hooks.\n\nHorns and spines broke free like gnarled tree-roots, twisted into armour to form sharp spires of bone and broken metal. Despite their vile forms, the humanoid beasts were intelligent, coordinated and brutally efficient. They knew what they were doing, and they enjoyed it, swarming over the village like ants, turning everything to a bloody pulp or smouldering rubble.\n\nSo, this is the real enemy that's been causing everyone so much trouble? The orkin.\n\nI stalked along the shallow ridge, keeping close to the ash-smothered undergrowth. The burning heat steadily increased, the cool summer night a distant memory. When I came to a steep edge, I peered down to see another rocky bank stretching out in front of me, below that lay one of the village's walkways.\n\nVile orkin marauders bounded across it, their thudding boots rattling the wood. I kept low, peering over as they continued to flow below me, dragging limp bodies. Most appeared to be dead, trailing blood or lacking limbs, while others clung desperately to life.\n\nI should have come down here sooner! Creators curse me, it's too late for most of these people!\n\nThe trail of corpses was suddenly broken when three larger brutes dragged in some live stragglers. One held two girls over his spiked shoulders, both kicking and screaming. Another held a wailing woman, while the third dragged a bloodied and beaten man.\n\nIt was painful to watch, but I knew I couldn't do anything for them, not while there were so many orkin.\n\nWithout control how much of a threat to them am I?\n\nThe flow of creatures steadily decreased as they gathered in the centre of the burning village. Forced to their knees between the jabbering mass, the beaten prisoners were like rags to their captors.\n\nTo think they were once a noble race. I thought, terrified by what the sphere had done to them.\n\nThe air filled with an animalistic chorus of cheering as the orkin called out menacingly, and a sickening disgust filled me as I watched, fuelling my rage until I was ready to lash out.\n\nControl or not, I can't let this happen!\n\nAt that critical moment something silenced me, a distant sound beyond the smoke echoing through the hills. The rabble suddenly fell silent as it sounded again; whatever it was, was drawing closer.\n\nI know that sound, it's a roar, a familiar roar. The moment it cursed my ears I felt anger consume me. It can't be what I think it is!\n\nSwooping through the smoke like a ghost amidst the desolation, its dark scales were illuminated by the flames. It landed on the roof of the central structure, spewing embers under its weight. The thatch buckled as its winged forelimbs folded against the crumbling walls of the structure. Its fearsome head snaked through the flames and smoke with little care for the heat, sinister eyes reflecting the destruction as they set upon the ravenous orkin. Its dribbling jaw parted, letting out a recognisable hiss, its frightening teeth displayed for all to see as the spiny frill on the back of its head rattled. The assembled orkin directed their attention to the wyvern, frozen by fear they squirmed and squealed.\n\nThey're the ones to start all of this, they stole me from my home!\n\nAcrodan's dark servant snaked its head down into the rabble, and each horrifically warped creature staggered back from its fearsome maw. Its movement allowed me to see something else, something I wasn't expecting. Between the wyvern's monstrous wings sat a wood and bone saddle, connected to a crude leather harness wrapped around the beast's bulk. Upon the mounted throne sat an orkin. He was different to the others, he was bigger and more fearsome, dark magic having completely ravaged his body, leaving nothing but a black, stone hide. His shoulders and back were covered in large, upward-facing spines, as was the back of his head.\n\nWhat was impaled on those spines made me sick: skulls were staked like gruesome trophies, and one spine was so long that a whole skeleton hung down. From its appearance I assumed it was human, the jangling limbs held together by rope as they fell over his back like some horrifying chime. Stone consumed his eyes, glowing with a fiery, green hue that pulsed across his entire unnatural body in baleful ribbons. One clawed hand held a hammer, a great brazen block of iron on a metal shaft. The other hung lazily at its side, clutching the reins leading to the wyvern's drooling mouth and a firm metal bit.\n\nThat monster's not a slave to Acrodan at all, it belongs to that orkin.\n\nThe warlord held control over his fearsome mount with little effort, the reigns twitching when the monster's head moved between the lesser runts. Either the creature was loyal to the core or its master had beaten any disobedience out of it. Although I would prefer neither, I hoped it was the former.\n\nI've fought wyverns and know how powerful they are. If he's managed dominance over this one, I don't want to imagine his strength.\n\nThe monstrous brute glared at the fire from his mount, his eyes finally coming to settle on the nervous crowd before him.\n\n\"Goarog!\" He bellowed.\n\nThe mob squirmed, a series of squeals and grunts shrieking from the mass as it seemed not one of them dared answer the summons.\n\nAll the while, their leader glared down at them impatiently.\n\n\"You best be steppin' forward's, you runt!\" he boomed while the wyvern's head rose, rattling its frill.\n\nThe rabble grew quiet as a lone orkin nervously stepped forward. His face was nothing more than bone, dark flesh taking the form of a skull, leading to a spiny frill across its ridge. His right side was mostly free from corruption, while his left hand held a rusted cleaver within putrid claws.\n\n\"Y\u2013Yes, Lord Balgore.\" The smaller, trembling orkin bowed nervously.\n\nWith a subtle gesture of its master, the wyvern coiled its fearsome head down, snaking to the side of the cowering grunt.\n\n\"I's see there ain't, no wyrm here, runt,\" the brute I now knew as Lord Balgore grumbled.\n\n\"We's had minor setbacks, my lord, I... I's assures you's, all's is well,\" he grunted, looking down at his deformed feet while the wyvern's teeth drew closer.\n\nI listened closely, noticing their staggered pronunciation, although with a mouth made of stone, I imagined speech wasn't their greatest quality.\n\n\"I's don't care about's some scraps from 'round here. You's know what I's after, don't you's, runt?\" Balgore bellowed, dismissing Goarog's words with a flick of his claw. \"Did I's not order that wyrm's 'ead on a spike before nightfall?\"\n\n\"Y\u2013Yes, yes, my's lord, but, but...\"\n\nBefore he could finish, the wyvern's slavering jaw shifted in next to him.\n\n\"It's a pity you's failed me, Goarog,\" Balgore rumbled. \"That wyrm is interferin' with mah plans \u2013 and you's knows what 'comes of wyrm's interferin' with mah plans.\"\n\nThe wyvern's fearsome head rose, its teeth ready to strike down on the trembling grunt.\n\n\"Wait!\" Goarog squealed as they closed around him. \"We's gathered lots of scraps for the ice-fires and we's, we's... got prisoners toos! Yes, yes they'll draw out the wyrm!\"\n\nThe wyvern raised its head, taking Goarog with it, while Balgore split the crowd with an intimidating glance, revealing the human prisoners in their midst.\n\n\"The wyrm, it will come for them, I's swear,\" Goarog spluttered from within the wyvern's clenched jaw.\n\nBalgore's eyes snapped back to the runt, seemingly trying to determine if his words were true or a plea of desperation. He snorted, and without any obvious command, the wyvern brought the runt to eye level with him.\n\n\"You's have 'til three dawns to bring me wyrms. Don't fail's me again,\" he commanded.\n\nThe wyvern's grip tightened slightly.\n\n\"O\u2013of... Of, of course not, my lord,\" Goarog gasped, before the wyvern tossed him to the wooden deck.\n\nBalgore pulled on the reins, turning his steed's head to the rest of the horde.\n\n\"That goes for all of you's! Get's back to the city as soon as you's done muckin' 'bout out here!\"\n\nScouring the trembling underlings, his mighty mount spread its wings, turning the smoke and fire into a whirling frenzy as it lifted him into the thick cloud and disappeared into the night.\n\nThe whole village trembled at the beast's departure, but with a sudden jolt of his stone-cursed body, Goarog turned towards the other orkin.\n\n\"Well's you's runts heard! Gets to watching for that wyrm, and gets those meat bags strung up, we's goanna be eatin' meat tonight!\"\n\nThe horde erupted into animalistic chatter as they pulled the humans aside, allowing Goarog to stagger into their midst.\n\n\"Gets them dead 'uns cut up. Keep these stragglers,\" he instructed coldly, pointing to the dead.\n\nThe rabble eagerly did as ordered, dragging some of the bodies away before tearing them apart. I felt my stomach churn.\n\nNo, I have to focus on those I can still save, the ones he's keeping prisoner.\n\nGoarog's lifeless eyes were far from the glowing fire in those of his master, although they were just as baleful and unforgiving. He perused over his terrified captives, sniggering, and snorting as he wheezed for breath.\n\n\"That wyrm's not goanna be able to resist savin' these meat bags,\" he grunted, dragging his cleaver over the wooden platform until he reached the man at the far end. \"This one's no use to us, either. Throw him to the horde,\" he instructed bluntly, pointing to the squabbling mass. \"They's be needin' all the fresh meat they's can eat.\"\n\nI have to do something, I must stop this, but there are too many.\n\nThe harsh reality drilled into my mind, and the memories of the times I'd felt so helpless before surfaced from their darker corners.\n\nIt's like when Acrodan had my friends, I have all the power but I'm not fast enough!\n\n\"No!\" One of the captives screamed, and my head shot up at the sound of a young girl lurching from her captor's grasp, before being dragged back.\n\nI staggered forward, claws dragging in the scorched earth as Goarog turned to her, his cold eyes gleaming in the firelight.\n\nNo, she's like Tarwin used to be!\n\nAn amused smile cracked across his face, breaking into a laugh.\n\n\"Let him go!\" the girl cried.\n\nGoarog's amused smile fell as he lifted his cleaver, pushing it against her neck.\n\nShe froze, and all but her innocent whimpers fell silent.\n\n\"This one's gots some fight left in it,\" he laughed, turning his head to the injured man. \"I's goanna enjoy stickin' it next.\"\n\nBefore the blow fell, the girl screamed, and Goarog was knocked from his warped feet. I rolled uncontrollably to a halt beside him, claws grasping at wood.\n\nDo the right thing, no matter what. I told myself as I stood to face him.\n\nHe jumped up, shaking off my attack like it was an inconvenience, only for his beady eyes to shoot wide when he saw me.\n\n\"Leave them alone!\" I barked, with no knowledge of whether he understood.\n\n\"Is this that wyrm, boss?\" one of his companions asked.\n\n\"Shut up, you's maggot! I's thinkin',\" replied Goarog.\n\n\"Don't looks like any wyrm I's ever seen, boss,\" the runt continued unabated. This time he wasn't even spared a glance before the back of Goarog's bony claws struck his face.\n\nThe disobedient orkin dropped to the deck in a shower of black blood and splintered bone, while the others squealed and squirmed.\n\nGoarog's eyes fixed on me once more.\n\n\"Have we's got ourselves a wyrm?\" he asked, bringing his ugly blade to bear.\n\nI stared at him, my eyes narrowing as I battled to keep my fire in check. Don't lose it, that amulet is nothing, I can control it if I don't lose focus!\n\n\"No, I don't think it's the wyrm,\" he sniggered. \"But Lord Balgore don't know that!\"\n\nBefore I knew it, he swung his cleaver and lurched forward.\n\nSo much for negotiation. I thought, although I probably should have known better.\n\nAnger and lack of time to think had given me no other choice. I didn't care for the orkin, they were vile and evil, but there were prisoners here and...\n\nThe sound of grinding stones broke through my thoughts while Goarog approached, a vengeful smile plastered upon his cruel, stone skull.\n\nThis is it: do what's right, no matter the cost.\n\nI pressed low against the deck, ready to set him alight, when a clatter of claws shattered my concentration, as did what landed before me. At first, I thought it was one of the others, my heart sinking in the belief that they were here. A second glance confirmed it wasn't, in fact, I didn't know what stood before me at all.\n\nIt was without a doubt a dragon, with a crimson-coloured layer of fur-like plumage and feathers covering its body. A frill of crimson feathers with twilight-purple pinions tipped its tail. The same feathers covered the base of its tail, the back of its rear legs, and wings, while a rudimentary armour formed from sticks and leaves covered its back.\n\n\"Good job,\" a sharp feminine voice interrupted.\n\nShrouded beneath a helmet, her hawk-like eyes shimmered in the fire light. Much like the rest of her gear it wasn't metal or even sticks, it was the cleaned skull of a bird. Perfectly fitted over her head, secured by rope made from vines, the empty eye sockets allowed her to see while the long beak protected her muzzle.\n\n\"But please, try not to steal my job,\" she added with strange enthusiasm as two feathered wings like those of a griffin erupted from her side, launching her back into the sky.\n\n\"That's it, the wyrm!\" Goarog shouted, pointing to where the feathered dragoness had stood. \"You's runts deals with this one, the wyrm is mine!\" he ordered, pointing back to me as he darted away.\n\nTwo orkin flanked his retreat, charging at me with their brutal weaponry. I narrowly dodged the first's spiked club, spinning to the side as the rusty iron barbs dug into the wood. While the creature to which the weapon was attached fought to yank itself free, the second swung at me with a curved hatchet held in a spiny claw. The crude blade barely missed my head, its weight unbalancing its wielder, giving me a chance to retaliate.\n\nWith all the strength I could muster, I rammed his leg with my horns, sending him tumbling into the ash-smothered water, where he was quickly consumed by the grey mush. Moments later, I turned to see the first of my attackers free himself.\n\nKeep control, stay composed.\n\nI drew back, ready to blow him away, when the feathered dragoness burst through the smoke, flicking her tail and firing several projectiles from within her feathery plumage. With a sharp whoosh, each struck the creature clean in the neck and he fell to the floor gasping while she disappeared.\n\nOkay, maybe control isn't necessary.\n\n\"Gets me the wyrm! Gets me the wyrm!\" hollered Goarog from somewhere amidst the crowd.\n\nOrkin footsteps thundered over the decking, leaving their battered prisoners unattended. Most disappeared into the smoke in pursuit of their prize, who I now assumed was the feathered dragoness who so effortlessly tormented them.\n\nThe wyrm? Not the best name, I must say.\n\nI seized my chance and darted towards the prisoners. The wounded man lay on the deck while the others fought to free themselves. Without a thought I skidded to a halt before the girl as crude orkin arrows whizzed overhead.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll get...\"\n\nShe looked at me with all the thanks she could express, reminding me of Tarwin as I recalled she couldn't understand me.\n\nDon't lose focus, Blaze.\n\nWithout hesitation I started to cut through her bonds, fibres snapping one by one, springing back as the rope loosened.\n\nAlmost got it...\n\nA heavy pain exploded in the right side of my chest under the force of a sudden kick to my side. I felt my ribs crack and my lungs burn as I staggered to my paws and the screaming girl was yanked from my sight. Goarog held her by the scruff of her fur dress, wheezing as he spat.\n\n\"Likes this one, do's you?\"\n\nSnorting a laugh, he pressed a twisted metal boot hard into my side, and I felt things inside moving that I knew I shouldn't.\n\n\"Well's you's should be likin' this,\" he laughed, removing his boot and tossing the girl aside like a rag.\n\nLanding with a thud she bounced across the decking and came to a rest by my pinned snout, coughing on ash.\n\nDo what's right, no matter what! It's your responsibility!\n\nThe sound of Goarog's cleaver moving as he turned focused my mind. The pain in my chest flared agonisingly at any attempt to move.\n\nNo, not again! I'm not going to sit by and let bad things happen ever again!\n\nBefore I could react, there was a whizz as a sharp projectile bounced harmlessly off his armour.\n\n\"Hur, what was...?\" What followed the shot was far from repelled.\n\n\"Hey, stony, pick on someone your own size!\" The feathered dragoness declared, slamming into his spiny back.\n\n\"Gets off me's, you's wretched wyrm!\" Goarog squealed, while thrashing.\n\nHis attacker wasn't going anywhere, rising on top of his back, preparing for an attack no other race could muster.\n\nSo, she really is a dragoness. I noted as I caught sparks flicker in her throat.\n\nGoarog reached back, frantically fighting to strike her with the rusted blade, when she was unceremoniously ripped from his spines.\n\n\"I's caught it, boss, I's caught the wyrm,\" another orkin boasted dutifully.\n\nIt was the same one Goarog had beaten to the deck only moments previously, beaming at his master as if all he wanted was to please him. Goarog snapped around, sparing him a brief glance before snatching the struggling dragoness from his grip, throwing her to the deck and pinning her beneath his boot.\n\n\"You's been causin' me a lot of troubles, you's have,\" he rumbled, his rage replaced by joy.\n\n\"Likewise, filth,\" she hissed, her eyes narrowing as she spat cinders in his face.\n\n\"I's had enough of you, wyrm!\" he declared, shaking the flickering embers off and raising his cleaver above his head.\n\nDo something, Blaze! Let go! With my insides burning I staggered up.\n\n\"Look, we's got another, boss,\" the second orkin announced, pointing eagerly at me.\n\nGoarog barely glanced my way before the second orkin's face exploded in a shower of rocks and he was launched into the water. In the same instant, beating wings parted the smoke and swept Goarog across the deck.\n\nFinally, a loud thud marked Pyro's arrival as the orkin stood up, his cold eyes widening as much as they could within the confines of his stone skull.\n\nI guess he wasn't expecting this many wyrms.\n\nThe feathered dragoness's puzzled eyes crossed Pyro's before she scampered off into the sky as quickly as she could manage. Meanwhile, more rocks tumbled down over the wooden walkway as I saw Boltock swoop overhead. The platform collapsed under the weight, burying more of the squabbling orkin in the seawater. From across the walkways I saw fire consume more orkin like a hungry creature as Ember forced the flame forward with unnatural swiftness.\n\nNo, they shouldn't be here. They're in danger.\n\n\"This ain't concernin' you's, wyrms,\" Goarog snapped at Pyro, bringing his rusted blade forward.\n\nThe red dragon's sharp eyes narrowed as he stood tall.\n\n\"Leave, filth!\" he ordered, and Goarog glanced to his drowned, burning, or buried comrades.\n\n\"We's goanna's gets you's scaly ones,\" he threatened, backing up until he was at the central hut.\n\nPyro's eyes watched his every move, his claws scratching the wooden deck as he steadfastly followed.\n\n\"We's goin' back to the camp boys!\" Goarog shouted, raising his cleaver to the sky, rallying what was left of his rabble, before disappearing into the smoke.\n\nAlthough I was relieved to see them vanish, the pain in my lungs quickly stole my joy. I was going to have to put up with it for a while, but I'd done what was right. My friends and the prisoners were safe.\n\n\"Yet they had to risk their lives to save you again. Call yourself a hero?\" My mind's dark voice hissed.\n\nThe ash around me fidgeted, followed by the clatter of claws as Risha materialized from the smoke.\n\n\"Blaze, you're... By the fires, I...\" she stuttered, her tone a mix of frustration and relief as she knelt over my broken chest.\n\nWhy is her priority always me? She knows I'll recover.\n\nShe stepped closer, helping me to my paws, all the while giving me a look somewhere between worryingly sympathetic and annoyingly frustrated.\n\n\"Set them free,\" Pyro barked, glancing towards the trembling prisoners as he passed them.\n\nRisha glanced up at him, reluctantly leaving my side. The moment she did, I felt my legs crumble like ruined pillars. Panting heavily, I took an agonising step towards the girl I'd half-freed.\n\nI'll save one, I can save just one.\n\nRisha hurried to the others, slicing their ropes with swift flicks of her claws. Taking another deep breath and fighting the convulsions of my broken lungs, I tried to focus on the half-torn bindings, giving them a final flick to finish what I'd started. The moment the bonds were broken, the girl struggled to her feet, while I inevitably found myself falling.\n\nI did it, I saved one... She's so much like Tarwin, so much like when we were younger... When we were happy.\n\nShe turned to me, unable to express her thanks. Does she know what I am, or are dragons only legends to her too?\n\n\"Get away from me!\" A frantic scream came from behind me, and I managed to turn in time to see Risha scurrying to my side like a timid hatchling.\n\nShe'd released most of the humans, leaving the woman until last. The freed adult now looked at us with as much fear as she did her brutal captors.\n\n\"Get away from them!\" she demanded; her attention focused on the girl I'd saved. \"Get away!\" she screamed again, rising clumsily to her quivering feet, and dragging the girl back.\n\nI felt a shifting pain in my side as Risha pressed against me, forcing me to my paws. It wasn't my broken ribs that caused me such agony, it felt like a cold blade had been thrust into the memory of my lost home.\n\nWe saved them and now they're rejecting us?\n\nThe stones ground over the sound of my mind's vile voice. \"What, did you really think you could simply go back to the way things were?\"\n\n\"Blaze,\" Risha whispered, but I was unable to focus.\n\nAll I could do was watch the woman now bent over the injured man, weeping hopelessly. While another peered off into the reflection of the fire upon the lake, with a stare as empty as my own.\n\nIs this the betrayal the Cartographer warned me about?\n\nCold emptiness turned to boiling rage as my eyes narrowed under my fading vision, and the image of that dark creature \u2013 a flaming smile dawning over its muzzle \u2013 flashed across my mind.\n\nI'm a fool to try saving them, no one so weak deserves the divine aid only I can offer!\n\n\"Blaze!\" I heard Risha's voice again, this time pushing against my side, the pain causing my thoughts to tumble.\n\nI choked, gasping for air, almost drowning from the inside. Risha caught my head, and with a wheeze, I was able to catch a breath.\n\n\"We have to go!\" she said earnestly. \"You need to rest.\"\n\nI winced when I felt her tug at me, placing her wing over my back and pulling me toward the forest. My lungs begged for more air as we staggered over the hardened mud where the wooden deck met the beach, before leading into the cover of the trees.\n\nShe gave a quick glance to my injured flank, setting me down against the base of a tree.\n\n\"By the creators, you...\" Flustered, she pressed a wing over her forehead. \"You'll be fine, you're always fine, right?\"\n\nShe sounded like she was reassuring herself more than me, before she glanced back at the fleeing humans. \"Don't worry about them. They're not...\"\n\nI imagined it was my glare that silenced her, but she was right; they weren't Tarwin or my old family.\n\n\"She has no right to compare them.\" I cut off the destructive suggestions of the voice, wrestling it back into the deepest corners of my mind.\n\nWhat am I thinking? Risha cares for me more than anyone.\n\nAs my dark doubts subsided, I noticed her sapphire eyes fix on me, and through strained tears and searing pain, I managed a weak smile.\n\n\"What in the creators' name were you doing!?\" Pyro demanded as he appeared above us.\n\nRisha's attention switched to his intense eyes. While I was forced to admit the first thing he'd ordered me to do, I'd completely ignored \u2013 and he knew that all too well.\n\n\"He did the right thing, and you would have done the same,\" Risha replied, her eyes meeting his with equal resolve.\n\n\"He almost got himself killed! That was the most idiotic, reckless thing a dragon could possibly do!\"\n\nShe had no counter for that and neither did I. I could argue with the 'killed' part, but only because killing me was a lot harder than he knew.\n\nGetting myself killed isn't the problem. Almost getting my friends killed is.\n\nPyro gave a frustrated grunt as he turned away, grumbling about how I'd be seriously disciplined back in the academy.\n\n\"I trust he will be ready to fly come sunrise?\" he asked, turning back to Risha.\n\nNeither of us could be expected to know, but she nodded regardless.\n\nIf I'm not, what can he really do?\n\n\"Ember, Boltock!\" he shouted.\n\nBoltock scurried forward while Ember swooped in from the burning village, landing beside him. The moment her eyes fell on me they widened with concern, and her muzzle opened as if to speak, when it appeared she thought better of it, and turned to Pyro.\n\n\"We make for the foothills of the Phoenix Mountains at dawn,\" he commanded, adding through clenched teeth. \"With no more diversions.\"\n\nHis commands were clear. Compared to him I was a pathetic leader, and all I'd done tonight was prove I wasn't good at following orders.\n\nMaybe I should apologise?\n\n\"I wouldn't step there, if I were you,\" cooed a warning from above as one of Pyro's paw steps nearly touched the leaf-littered ground.\n\nGingerly raising the limb, he redirected his eyes to the trees.\n\nShe sat comfortably on the branches, her forelimbs crossed, her head, wings and tail draped like an oversized cat. Sharp amber eyes peered through the holes in her helmet, watching him closely or more accurately, his paw placement.\n\n\"I really wouldn't,\" she persisted, raising her head.\n\n\"And who are you?\" he asked.\n\nShe leapt from the branch, catching on to it with her tail, spinning acrobatically to the floor.\n\n\"The name's Neera, but all my friends call me the Wyrm,\" she introduced, shaking dirt from her ruffled feathers.\n\nEveryone's eyes widened when they saw her plumage \u2013 she certainly gave the term 'dragon feathers' more meaning.\n\n\"Your friend, he doesn't seem to be doing so well,\" she noted, blanking Pyro's stern expression and pointing to me with a feathered wingtip.\n\n\"What of it?\" he asked.\n\nShe gave him an equally stern look, as if he should know exactly what she was suggesting.\n\n\"I have a nest in the ruins not far from here, we can take him there. After what you did, I think I owe you.\"\n\nPyro glanced at me, then back to her, his stare lingering.\n\n\"You know Goarog and his mob will be looking for you now, don't you? They've been around here for months, looting scraps for his master, and he'll do anything for him,\" she stated in a mild, lingering tone.\n\n\"Or he'll get his ugly little head bitten off by Balgore's 'pet',\" she added with a frustration that suggested she wanted the honour of doing that herself.\n\nPyro remained suspicious, eventually asking. \"Why should we trust you?\"\n\nShe paused, as if she had a million answers, none fitting the question perfectly.\n\n\"Why shouldn't we? She helped save those villagers,\" Ember interrupted, glancing at Neera, who appeared delighted.\n\n\"Because she's a faldron,\" answered Pyro abruptly.\n\nConfusion fell over all except Pyro and Neera. I had no idea what a 'faldron' was, and right now, I didn't care. Ember glanced up at her mate, her expression demanding an explanation.\n\n\"Elemental thieves, their kind would take our ancestral birth right and manipulate it in the belief that they were like us,\" he continued with a deep bitterness he could have only acquired through years of blind pride.\n\nNeera's eyes narrowed, her long ears flattening against her head.\n\n\"That was millennia ago, and I'm not them, nor is any other faldron north of the cursed lands.\"\n\nBefore either could utter another word, a deep bellowing horn interrupted, and all except Neera's attention pricked up.\n\n\"Very well,\" she said, eventually pricking up her ears, directing them towards the forest. \"You'll have orkin chewing on your wing bones soon enough. They think dragon marrow will let them fly.\"\n\nNo matter what Pyro ordered, I wouldn't let that happen. I was close to instructing the soldier to take her offer when he replied.\n\n\"How far?\"\n\nNeera paused mid-stride.\n\n\"Over the ridge,\" she replied, looking up at the smoke-smothered cliffs.\n\nOver that? With no flight? The world really hates the word 'easy', doesn't it? I inwardly groaned.\n\nPyro paused while she looked at him with the glare of inevitable victory.\n\n\"Lead on,\" he conceded with a sigh.\n\n\"As you wish,\" she replied with a subtle attempt at a regal bow. \"Oh, and I still wouldn't stand there,\" she added, nodding to his forepaw before she turned away.\n\nRegardless, Pyro gave a grunt as he begrudgingly placed his forepaw down. The moment it met the dirt there was a swift snap of branches, a whirl of wind, and a cloud of dry dust as a rope rushed up. Pyro was in the air faster than his wings could take him; with the rope he'd been warned about wrapped around his outstretched forepaw.\n\n\"What did I tell you?\" Neera laughed gleefully as she approached the furious dragon swinging from her trap."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fatal Blows",
                "text": "My insides twisted into impossible shapes as broken bones shifted like rocks inside my chest. My lungs felt like they were flooded with liquid fire and my throat filled with a foul acidic bile. With Risha's support, I battled through the agony, and after what felt like an eternity of excruciating pain trudging up the steep, rocky path, we reached the peak of Overlord's Fell. The orkin horn had sounded several times while the village inferno burned below, choking the air for miles around.\n\nMy vision had already started to clear, and my breathing became less strained. Less could be said for the pain inside, I was certain I couldn't heal properly while moving.\n\nWhat if my insides re-grow all wrong? I didn't want to imagine the shapes into which my movement could warp the final product.\n\nDon't think about it. Get somewhere safe and get some rest. It worked every other time.\n\nThe path snaked over the ridge, passing between two sheer spines before winding downward. With the village flames far behind us, it became so dark I couldn't even see Risha beside me. It felt as if I was walking blindly into a black abyss, and without her support I'm sure I would have fallen over the edge.\n\nThe sudden light of a strangely coloured flame came as a relief as it blazed into existence ahead. It was red, like that of a fire elemental, but its edges were lapped by grey, like that of air, creating a strange combination of the two. The hybrid fire blossomed from a weathered brazier, constructed in a way that closely mimicked the trees of the surrounding forest. The glow also revealed Neera's skull-covered face as she moved to ignite another brazier opposite.\n\n'Elemental thieves... manipulators?'\n\nPutting the sight of her flame and Pyro's words together, it wasn't hard to surmise that Neera's forged element must be that of wind and fire.\n\nSo faldrons can have a mixture of two powers? But what about their feathers, are they fireproof too?\n\nI didn't want to imagine what Pyro thought about her displaying her power so readily, but in my eyes an abnormal element was nothing new.\n\nWhile the concoction of fire bloomed within the old braziers, Neera moved on. The light revealed Ember close behind, while Pyro lingered a considerable distance back.\n\nAs we followed, the loose dirt under-paw gave way to cobblestone, the light from the fires revealing a bumpy road flanked by ruined buildings. The stone structures were made from perfectly forged slabs, pillars, and arched doorways, decorated with fine seams of weathered metal, that looked to be an extension of the woodland thereabouts. Gentle streams of water weaved decoratively around each, their flows directed by shallow channels, through holes and under humped bridges. As Neera lit more braziers, I could see more buildings climbing up the cliff face, forming neat, terrace rows.\n\nI imagined at one time these buildings would have been buzzing with residents, but now the only citizen was the forest. Lush vegetation grew all over the crumbling stone, while long vines snaked down from archways covering darkened doorways. Trees burst from the rock, roots forcing floors and walls apart like soft dirt. Moss, saplings, and a whole manner of shrubs consumed the edges of the pathways and in some places, nature and architecture flowed so seamlessly it was like it was intended to be that way. Smaller, more exotic looking shoots grew from shattered pots, while more thick roots formed bridges that could have once been roads.\n\nThe sprawl stretched all the way up the hillside until it nestled up against the rocky spine of Overlord's Fell. A larger structure sat on a square platform of the uppermost terrace. Its walls were square and open, its interior protected by a row of tree-like pillars, while the back wall appeared to blend seamlessly with the cliff. Water carved its way around it before forming a waterfall and dropping to the forest floor, and to the right a pair of curved bridges spanned a cliff-side gorge, where vines hung like thick curtains from the mossy stone.\n\n\"Keep up,\" Neera called from ahead, as she moved across one of the bridges, igniting another brazier on the opposite side.\n\n\"Easy for her to say,\" I muttered as we traversed the bridge.\n\nRisha laughed, but the curve in the path spurred a pain that quickly robbed me of any humour.\n\n\"Wait,\" Neera commanded, her open wing blocking our path.\n\nI watched her disarm another trap, pretty sure that Pyro would roast her alive before she could cut him down from another.\n\n\"I filled this place with them. Though it's usually only me who needs to avoid them. No nightkin have lived here in a long time,\" she added, shifting to disarm another.\n\nNightkin?\n\nAs far as I knew, the nightkin, brothers of high and earthkin were extinct, wiped out by the Dark Guardians during the war. The dull, battered, and overgrown walls the only reminders of their once great empire. It was a cold memento of the devastation the last war wrought, and a clear warning of what could so easily happen again.\n\nAnd it's still my job to stop it? I can hardly defeat one orkin raiding party!\n\nI tried to chase the image of the world in flames from my mind, though there was nowhere to look that was free of ruins, at least until our feathered guide came to a halt.\n\n\"In here,\" Neera instructed, igniting a flame inside one of the ancient structures.\n\nEmber and Pyro were first to follow through the arch of the tree-lined doorway, with Risha and I close behind. The stone chamber was like a corpse picked clean, not dissimilar to the store I'd hidden in back in Dardien. In the centre a ring of stones sat neatly around fresh firewood. While a makeshift wooden frame held the roasting body of a squirrel over a newly lit flame.\n\nTwo more carcasses hung on the wall, tied to grooves in the smooth stone. Weapons and various attire hung at the rear of the chamber, together with clawed gauntlets made from bleached bone, reinforced with sticks, resembling the metal ones worn by the guards back in Dardien. A particularly formidable looking pair sat between several of the feather-like projectiles Neera had thrown from her tail. Above them, sat a polished skull, similar to the one she already wore. This one appeared to be from a fox or wolf. Beneath the armour sat three stone pots, two of which were closed, the third bursting with sharp, bone-spears.\n\nA stone bed laden with moss and leaves filled the far end of the room, while more closed pots and strange plants hung from the ceiling. Pyro looked on in ignominy, shunning the feathered dragoness as he took up a position by the door. Meanwhile, Boltock entered behind us, taking a seat at the far end of the chamber next to Ember, getting as close to her as she \u2013 and Risha's glare \u2013 would allow.\n\n\"You can use the bed,\" Neera offered.\n\nBefore I could manage a reply, Risha was already guiding me towards it.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she replied on my behalf as I slumped painfully on to the mossy sheet.\n\n\"Think nothing of it. It's not much, but there's some things up there, if you need them,\" Neera replied, pointing to a hanging assortment of dried plants.\n\n\"Thanks, he'll be fine,\" the blue dragoness replied.\n\nThe faldron cocked her head, confusion spreading across her expression, but before she could ask any questions, Risha turned her attention back to me.\n\n\"You will be fine, won't you?\" she whispered.\n\nI had a feeling she was referring to more than my physical injury. I had to remember what I'd done was right, and that it wasn't Tarwin or my old village who'd rejected me.\n\nClearing my throat, I replied, \"Y\u2013Yeah, I'll be fine.\"\n\nHer eyes lingered before she finally sat down against the base of the bed.\n\nEventually, my eyes grew heavy and the firelight became a confusing blur. Voices became a muffled mishmash of sound. The heat from the flame warmed into a comforting blanket against my side as I fought against the exhaustion and the comfort of lucid sleep embraced me.\n\nDespite my slumber, my mind's conflict continued. The more I tried to convince myself that Tarwin would never reject me, the more the dark thoughts supplemented the idea with something else. I'd saved their lives and I should be glad I was able to do that, but did it make up for those I'd killed?\n\n\"It will never be enough. Maybe you deserved to be rejected.\" Whispered the grim voice.\n\nWhat I'd done certainly didn't remove a tally for a life I'd taken. It simply served to remind me that no matter how much I tried, it would never be enough.\n\n\"The orkin will see the fire. How do you know they won't come searching for you up here?\" I heard Pyro ask through my fragile consciousness.\n\nI glanced up to see them all sat around the flames, Boltock and Ember opposite my bed. There was something off about the green dragon, his eyes were fixed on the fire, like it was a magnet for his thoughts. Pyro glared out into the darkness, while Neera sat casually at the back of the chamber, fastening more of the projectiles into her tail feathers. While a shift of blue wings told me Risha still lay at the base of my bed.\n\nIs she still awake? Am I?\n\nThe strange blur of dream and reality ended, leaving me with no idea whether I'd slept or for how long. My wounds felt marginally better, enough to confirm that we'd been here some time at least. Neera gave a final tug on the green twine securing her weapons and looked to Pyro by the door.\n\n\"They used to come up here, but they're not that hard to avoid. After a while they gave up. As for the lights, well, they're not as smart as their ancestors,\" she explained with a sly chuckle.\n\n\"So how does a faldron end up in these lands?\" he asked, almost like her presence was a crime.\n\n\"As I said before, what he should be asking is why you're here,\" Ember corrected in a friendlier tone.\n\nNeera smiled, while Pyro snorted and turned back to his watch. The faldron's expression faded for a moment, her ears flattened, and her fuzzy muzzle drooped.\n\n\"Shadow Fen orkin took my nest in the Red Rock Mountains a long time ago. I've been surviving on my own ever since. I take them out wherever I can, try to be a nuisance,\" she explained, glancing to the array of improvised weapons and armour.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Ember replied, lowering her eyes.\n\nI know how she feels \u2013 I'd asked someone that same question once, and the answer still haunted me.\n\nNeera continued to stare at her crafted tools, before pricking up her ears and jumping to her paws.\n\n\"Don't be, that was a long time ago and I've barely known anything other than this,\" she assured, her enthusiastic tone returning.\n\nIf only I could come to terms with my past so easily.\n\n\"That's only half of the question though, isn't it?\" she continued, glancing at Pyro. \"What are five leatherwings, from Dardien I presume, doing here?\"\n\nPyro's eyes remained locked on the darkness outside.\n\n\"What of it?\" he growled quietly.\n\nNeera grinned.\n\n\"I'm merely returning the favour,\" she countered. \"I answered your questions, so how about you answer mine?\"\n\nThere was another silence, which was eventually broken by Ember.\n\n\"We're going to the Phoenix Mountains.\"\n\nPyro instantly gave her a disapproving scowl, but she glared back with little care, while Neera's expression changed.\n\n\"The Phoenix Mountains? That's Taldran \u2013 why would anyone in their right mind want to go there?\" she asked, laughing like it was a joke.\n\nPyro's expression grew more serious and smoke snorted from his nostrils.\n\n\"I thought I said tell no one!\" he snapped at Ember, moving to stand above the fire.\n\nHis reaction didn't sit well with me. He may have been a closer friend to her than me, but I wouldn't see them fighting.\n\nIf we fall apart here, then there's no hope for any of us.\n\nIt appeared his assertion didn't sit well with Boltock either, as the earth dragon snapped out of his thoughtful stare. Meanwhile, I heard a shuffling below me as Risha stood up, her eyes fixed on the pair.\n\n\"We make for the mountains at dawn, without any more distractions,\" Pyro ordered, before turning back to the door.\n\nEmber shook her head disapprovingly.\n\n\"Distractions? You know he did the right thing.\"\n\nPyro gave her another icy stare, frustration burning in his eyes.\n\n\"He almost got you all killed, including himself!\"\n\nI felt all eyes turn to me, each pair striking harder than the orkin's boot. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was pretend to be asleep.\n\n\"He didn't. He can't let us down, he...\" Ember's voice trailed off.\n\nPyro studied her as if he'd found the flaw in her words he'd been searching for.\n\n\"You wouldn't know,\" she muttered softly, turning the suspicion in my mind into the truth I feared.\n\nHe doesn't know what happened to us, and he certainly doesn't know what I really am.\n\n\"I wouldn't know? Well, I know what I saw tonight, and I see the scars you fail to explain,\" he growled, gesturing to Boltock's wing. \"If that's who you were led by, then there is no truth in the legend,\" he added bitterly and the cold reality of his words rang out in my mind, while my dark voice laughed.\n\nThe truth had finally come out, and the faint words of the Cartographer's warning echoed above the sound of cruel cackling. I closed my eyes tight, trying to seal myself away from the unforgiving world, when the most unexpected voice interrupted.\n\n\"Last I heard; you were sworn to take orders from him,\" Boltock challenged.\n\n\"Stay out of this,\" Pyro warned, with a sharp glare.\n\n\"Stop it, both of you!\" Risha ordered with an assertiveness I seldom heard.\n\nThere was a tense pause. Pyro and Boltock's intense stares were so tightly locked, it felt like I could cut the link between them with my claws. Risha's words seemed to sink into at least one of them and Boltock stepped back.\n\n\"We leave at dawn with no more distractions,\" Pyro repeated sternly.\n\nFor a moment it felt like it was over. The tension relaxed, and although Pyro's words were frowned upon, they were ignored.\n\n\"No,\" Boltock replied, all eyes darting to him as he turned back to Pyro. \"No, you... you can't say that, not after what we've all given up,\" he insisted.\n\nPyro turned, surprise melding into frustrated aggression.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha snapped, but he ignored her.\n\nThis is all my fault, they're mad at each other because I'm an impulsive do-gooder!\n\n\"Boltock?\" Ember's softer tone tried to distract him, but his eyes remained fixed.\n\n\"We're not following you. You didn't do the right thing, you would have left them,\" Boltock rumbled, his voice low and steady.\n\nPyro approached, standing over the fire, glaring down at his smaller companion. Boltock had merely confirmed the belief that was in all of them. Pyro would have left the village to burn, while I could not.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha shouted again, and he finally looked to her, lowering his head and turning away.\n\n\"I'd expected more decency from the dragon she... Well, from Ember's choice,\" he noted under his breath.\n\nPyro's eyes lit up with a rage that quickly became an inferno. I felt my eyes widen as the unthinkable happened. The armoured dragon spread his wings over the fire, reared up, and swung a forepaw forward, his bladed gauntlet slamming into Boltock's back. His scales deflected most of the impact, but the force was still enough to pin him to the floor.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha cried, dashing to her brother's side.\n\nI shot up, dismissing the flaring agony.\n\nEmber's eyes fixed on Pyro's as he staggered back to the doorway, the shock in her expression enough to shatter his anger. Like dry clay, the soldier crumbled under the realisation, his eyes widened when he looked at his raised forepaw like it was a venomous snake.\n\n\"I... I...\" he stammered; his voice broken by panting before he bolted through the door.\n\nWith pain sinking its countless fangs into me, I slumped back to the moss. I'd healed, but not enough. Meanwhile, Boltock was still on the floor with Risha at his side as Ember stared out into the night like she'd seen a ghost.\n\n\"Get off!\" he demanded, and before his sister could react, he shot up, chasing Pyro into the night.\n\nDumbstruck, Risha appeared as lost for words as Ember, but she snapped back to reality much faster, darting after her brother. I gasped as much air as my lungs would allow, staggering from my bed to the doorway, despite a few muffled protests from Neera.\n\nWhat have I done? I don't care about the pain, I must follow them, I have to go! I must do the right thing. No matter...\n\nI took off into the ruins as fast as I could, but what had dulled into a subtle ache quickly flared into burning agony. My rasping lungs begged for more air than my nostrils could provide, and my unsteady heartbeat felt like bellows stoking a fire. I didn't care, I deserved every bit of painful punishment my body could conjure. I had to keep going, I had to find the others and put things right.\n\nIt wasn't long before I slowed to a limp, then a halt, a mossy wall the only thing preventing my legs from failing me completely. I struggled to see anything in the limited light, until the glow of dawn sliced through the night, breaking on the ridge like a great wave.\n\nHow long was I asleep for? It should never have come to this!\n\nWith all the strength I could muster I staggered up the nearest set of overgrown steps to the next terrace, when a sudden thud halted my progress. I gasped for the air that was unexpectedly lost, fighting to see what or who I'd run into. Relief came when I realised it was Risha. She was back on her paws in a flash, helping me to mine as her anxious words spilled out.\n\n\"Have you seen them?\" her eyes frantically darted everywhere. \"By the creators, they're such egotistical idiots!\"\n\n\"No, no, I came looking.\"\n\nThe words stole my breath and left me panting.\n\n\"Come on, this way,\" she commanded, moving quickly down the overgrown street.\n\nTaking in several deep breaths, I forced myself to follow, but the best my aching body would allow was a slow limp. Soon enough, I was overcome by a hacking cough, and I slumped against the wall, pressing a forepaw to my aching chest.\n\nI must keep going, I have to be better. My mind whimpered as my weakened paws tried unsuccessfully to push me on.\n\nRisha glanced back, seemingly torn, she came back to help.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I coughed, stumbling forward with her support.\n\nShe didn't say a word as she glanced around, her eyes settling on a set of overgrown stairs leading up to the next level.\n\n\"They must have gone up there,\" she urged as she rushed over, dragging me with her.\n\nHer pace was too quick for me, and before long I had to slip away from her side and flop against another wall.\n\n\"R\u2013Risha, go... Find them... I... I'll be right behind you.\"\n\nShe looked back, already at the top of the stairs, at which point she nodded and disappeared.\n\nPlease, be safe. I inwardly begged, before the scattering of dusty gravel and falling leaves overhead stole my thoughts. Boltock? Pyro?\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha called out, redirecting my attention to the top of the stairs.\n\nShe panted almost as heavily as I did, when she came skidding back, her expression alight with worry.\n\n\"I found them, this way!\" she gasped, turning left along a ruined street.\n\nI followed as she turned right, disappearing around another corner. Stumbling, I was about to turn, when something else caught my attention or, more appropriately, eluded it. Scattering gravel and dust pattered down from the ruins beside me, and I paused.\n\nSomething's up there.\n\nAnother rustling sound signalled movement through the vegetation, and I looked to see the branches flinch, but nothing more.\n\n\"Boltock, stop!\"\n\nRisha's cries immediately stole my attention, and gorging on as much air as possible, I resumed my stumbling pursuit. Staggering around the corner, I found Risha lingering between her brother and a large stairway leading up to the temple.\n\n\"Stop!\" she snapped. \"Stop!\"\n\nThis time her voice slipped into a plea. As I caught my breath, I glanced down to the ruined street where fleeting shadows interrupted pillars of the dawn's light.\n\nSomething's moving above us.\n\n\"You were the one to make me do it, you and your stupid fantasies!\" Boltock finally spat, and his sister's expression faltered.\n\n\"You gave up so much, your livelihood, your future for this... T\u2013this bigger picture! I thought I could understand, maybe even believe. But you were wrong!\" he cried.\n\nShe took a step back, her expression caught between surrender and a plea for him to stop.\n\n\"You're not always right, Sis! I've known that for a long time, and yet I let you throw everything away,\" he continued, his words peaking with frustration before he finally sighed.\n\n\"All for what, for feelings? No one ever seemed to care about my feelings!\"\n\n\"Where's Pyro?\" she demanded abruptly.\n\nHer brother stared at her without a care, answering in a cold, dead voice as he gestured to the steps with a wing.\n\n\"He headed up there.\"\n\nTall, tree-like columns rose from artificial waterways at each side, supporting a smooth, stone archway before the road flattened.\n\n\"Wait here,\" she instructed, as she snaked by and started up the steps.\n\nBoltock completely disobeyed, immediately following her, and despite the pain, I did the same.\n\nAnother scattering of dust and fleeing birds in the trees drew my eyes away, yet I caught sight of nothing but the wind.\n\nI'm going crazy, it's fever hallucinations. Focus on the others, they're what matter.\n\nAt the top of the stairs lay a vegetation-strewn courtyard. Its outer walls were open, a line of stone pillars draped in moss and vines marking the edge. Opposite, it backed into the cliff face, where two tree-shaped pillars rose on either side of a collapsed archway cut into the rock. A series of branches wrapped over and around the image of a sphere sitting above the entrance, the familiar seal of eternity, the sign that cursed my existence.\n\nPyro sat below it, holding his head low, his back hunched, and his wings draped over his shoulders like a cloak.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" he asked.\n\nRisha calmly took a step closer while the fire dragon shifted to glare at her from beneath his helmet.\n\n\"You don't follow me anymore, you all believe in that stupid legend,\" he snapped, looking at one of his forepaws. \"And who am I to say otherwise? No one ever saw me the same way.\"\n\nShe paused, stepping back with a look of confusion.\n\n\"Is that what this is about?\" she asked.\n\n\"Of course it is!\" he abruptly snapped. \"You're enamoured with it, Risha! So are the rest of you, so much so you'd forget all I taught you in favour of some stranger!\"\n\n\"You know that's not true,\" she replied.\n\n\"Really? Then why did you all disappear for the best part of a season?\" he retorted.\n\nAnother rustling and a snake-like hiss shuddered through the canopy, its source eluding me once more. Ignoring the distraction, I stepped up beside Risha.\n\nI need to make this right, not her.\n\nEvery one of my thoughts insisted that this was all my fault. Pyro glared at me, and I knew he believed that was true too.\n\n\"Go on, keep denying it,\" he sneered.\n\nTaking in a deep breath I replied, \"It's true!\"\n\nShifting within his wings, he peered down with a hint of satisfaction.\n\n\"So, it is your fault!?\"\n\nWhat I'd been dreading was finally put into words, and the impact was more painful than any physical injury.\n\n\"What about Ember? What would she think?\" Risha interjected. \"You know she wouldn't put her faith in something if she didn't believe in it.\"\n\n\"She betrayed me... you all did,\" he finally growled, before jabbing a fore claw at me. \"So go! Follow him, see if he can lead you through Taldran alive!\"\n\nRisha rose to reply, but her words escaped her when a horrifying screech ripped through the air, forcing us all to the ground. Its source erupted from the trees in a spray of leaves and branches.\n\nDiving like an arrow the first shadow-monster crashed into Pyro in a flurry of dark smoke, giving him no time to react before others followed, completely consuming him.\n\n\"Pyro!\" Risha cried, quickly bolting forward.\n\nWithout thinking I held her back, the pain in my chest flaring to impossible levels as I readied a fireball. In the same instant, one of the creatures materialised inches before us, while more poured down from the trees. I opened my muzzle, pain searing as a surge of blinding light escaped and struck the creature point blank, consuming it with a frightful hiss. Upon obliterating the monster, the fireball carried on, exploding into the cliff, shattering what was left of the archway.\n\nThat was when I realised that Pyro had been completely consumed, and amidst the black mist swirling in his place, I saw another molten tally.\n\n\"Six!\" the voice crackled.\n\nI staggered back. For the first time, I witnessed the death of someone close, someone who wasn't always against me.\n\nThe image of his scales turning to dust infected my mind like a plague, the idea of life fading from his eyes blighting my thoughts. Another of the dark forms swooped overhead, casting an intimidating shadow beneath its wings while more followed in its wake. One swooped down to the stone courtyard only inches from the tip of my muzzle, lashing out and narrowly missing Risha as she darted back to her brother.\n\nI heard the cackle of the dark tallyman amidst the cacophony of screams and screeches. The molten monument to the latest life I'd cost faded away as another deafening cry ripped down from above. Almost choking on the charred taste of my last attack, I coiled back.\n\n\"Look out!\" Risha cried, leaping back when another of the creatures targeted her and Boltock.\n\nIt received my fire bolt, instantly bursting into a ball of white light before being sucked into oblivion with a sharp pop.\n\n\"Run!\" I shouted as loud as I could manage, the exertion rattling my smoke-seared throat.\n\nRisha looked to Boltock, then back to me.\n\n\"Go! Run!\" I coughed again, moving back, forcing them on with my wing.\n\n\"You can't run anywhere,\" she exclaimed, tugging me to one side.\n\nThe pained look I gave her confirmed as much, but the fact was, I didn't care about myself. No matter what promises she wanted me to keep, there was no way I was letting Pyro's fate befall them too. She scowled at me, another shriek interrupting before she could protest.\n\nThe creature swooped towards us, and ducking under its talons, we slipped back down the stairs. Another creature appeared behind us, swooping low over the steps as shadows poured from it like a foul deluge. Pressing my underside against the stone I readied myself for the strike, only for a second creature to appear above, both plummeting claws-first towards us. My attention was caught between the two as the bright ball of light erupted from my open jaws, blowing them apart. The lower one struck a stone wall, exploding in a dusty haze, while the second was set ablaze.\n\nI watched fire merge with shadow like liquid as the thing melted. Within the shadowy gloom about its head I could see its eyeless scowl, devoid of pain, disorientation, or fear.\n\nWhat in the creators' name are these things?\n\nForcing Risha and Boltock around the corner, I placed myself between them and the creatures, fighting to keep my eyes on their thought-melting appearances. Before long one of the creatures curved back on itself, releasing a villainous hiss as it perched upon a wall. I backed away, choking and with my insides burning, I could hardly stand, never mind muster up the strength to release another blast. Its eyeless stare studied me, its head cocking curiously to the side, its fanged jaw twitching as it did so. Until, with a flap of its tattered wings, it launched itself into the air.\n\nI turned to face Risha and her brother. \"We need to get back to the others!\"\n\nThere appeared to be no disagreement as frightened birdcalls heralded the presence of more monsters. Peering up, I strove to see how many there were, but it was impossible to tell.\n\nThey all blur together, like they're smaller parts of the same thing!\n\nThose on the ground swarmed in doorways, trees, and arches. The stone seemed to shudder in pain at their touch, and yet they didn't strike. It was as if they were toying with us, eagerly watching, and waiting. I felt a spike of anger at the thought that they were killing for fun.\n\nAll those dragons back in the city, and now Pyro. It's a game for them!\n\nBoltock was first to reach the next set of steps and scamper to the lower terrace. Risha was about to turn after him when another creature burst from the treetops, plunging down for the kill. I slammed my claws into the stone, pushing myself forward and desperately trying to force another shot into existence, but all that came was an exhausted flare of sparks.\n\nRisha's attention snapped to the creature, and for a moment my mind filled with the thought of the unthinkable transpiring before me.\n\nNo, not her! They won't touch her!\n\nA sudden torrent of blue flame hit the creature before any blow struck, flowing across its body like boiling water, sending it crashing into the ruined wall above the stairs. There was an explosion of shadow, dust and crumbling wall as the force shattered the ruin, and I slipped to the floor. Prising my eyes open, I felt the shroud of dust settling on my scales, and to my immense relief, Risha also lifted herself from the rubble.\n\n\"Blaze, Boltock... Boltock!\"\n\nHer words were broken by coughing as she staggered over to the ruined stairway.\n\n\"I'm, okay,\" Boltock coughed from the opposite side of the collapse.\n\nMeanwhile, his sister's eyes darted about frantically, searching for a way over, before she glanced my way.\n\n\"You can fly, leave me,\" I offered.\n\nAnother shriek severed the suggestion when its accompanying shadow swooped down to the street behind us, a plume of smoke trailing in its wake.\n\n\"Risha, there's no time, go!\" I shouted urgently, putting myself between her and the creature as it lingered down the street.\n\nHer eyes lingered on the collapsed rocks, but I couldn't focus on anything other than our adversary's deliberate approach.\n\n\"Boltock, go find the others!\" she shouted over the boulders, and I heard him scurry away while the creature edged closer.\n\nSo, this is a game to them? Well, I'm not planning on playing nice!\n\nI coiled back, forcing my mouth open. The creeping creature noticed the change in my stance and quickly launched into a wing-assisted leap. Its drooling jaw was only inches from my muzzle when it met with a blast of blinding light, so close the explosive force threw me back.\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha cried, helping me to my paws as another symphony of horrifying sounds bellowed from the treetops.\n\n\"Come on,\" she screamed, practically dragging me to her side as I started to crumble as much as the ruins.\n\nSupporting my weight against her body we hobbled down the ruined street. Our retreat stopped when the sound of water became louder and a fine mist filled the air. On the cliff-facing side of the walkway, a waterfall created a natural scar allowing a stream to bleed down a steep tree-lined gorge. As I looked ahead, the reason for our sudden halt quickly became clear \u2013 the road led out onto a severed bridge.\n\nShe's going to have to fly. She should leave me. I thought as Risha frantically searched for an escape.\n\nOne of the creatures landed at the far end of the bridge. Its torn wings folding at its gnarled sides while a torrent of shadow poured from its body. I stepped forward, once again putting myself between it and my friend. Unfazed, it studied us from within its gloomy cowl.\n\nAnother plume of shadow marked the arrival of a second creature, landing beside it. I bared my teeth, and to my surprise, they stopped. Another pair landed on the opposite side of the bridge while a fifth thudded down before us. Shadow poured from them like water, and the longer they remained still, the more it pooled, slowly leaking onto the stonework, choking plants and turning roots to dust.\n\nI stepped back long before the dark pool came near, while another beast landed in a tree, turning the bark to dust. All the while, they did nothing more than scowl and hiss, like a group of angered cats.\n\n\"Sssteal yourssself, Guardian,\" a strange, twisted voice hissed, each word ending with a slithered breath.\n\nIt came from the shadow-creature creeping down the tree trunk, the wooden limbs wilting as its shadowed coat flowed away to reveal its true form.\n\nMy eyes shied away from the sight of its jet-black skin shimmering in the sunlight. It was a hard, bone-like texture, unlike any skin or scale I'd ever seen. It clutched the tree with four withered legs, a formidable set of claws tipping each one, while a long, spine-like tail with a trident-tip snaked around the trunk.\n\nWith another hiss, its head emerged from the withered and torn membranes of its unfurling wings. Peering at me with an eyeless scowl from below a crown of bony horns, a quivering mouth lined with fangs almost too long for its dribbling jaw, slavered drool that hung like glistening beads on transparent strings.\n\nI stepped back, stopping when I heard Risha yelp and almost slip.\n\n\"Sssso disssappointing,\" the creature hissed.\n\n\"What are you talking about? What are you?\" I demanded.\n\nSeemingly amused by my lack of knowledge, a twitching tongue parted its quivering lips.\n\n\"The Guardian knowsss not of the monstersss of itsss passst,\" it hissed to its fellows, and they growled as if insulted.\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" I asked.\n\nIt paused, giving the impression of glaring without eyes while inhaling a gargled, clicking breath, before it rasped.\n\n\"We are the agentsss of the timelesss one.\"\n\n\"Agents? What one?\" I asked, suspecting that whatever had been locked within the sphere was that 'one'.\n\nThe creature turned its head to one side.\n\n\"He who gave usss form, he who would destroy usss and yet hasss once more allowed us into hisss world,\" it grinned maliciously. \"And thisss time it will be oursss,\" it added, with an angry growl.\n\nIts eyeless brow peered at me, and despite the lack of vision, it felt like the cursed fiend could see deep into my soul.\n\n\"Even now, after sssuch a ssshort lifetime? You think you know fear and pain? You think you can sssave them?\" it snapped, deadly saliva flying from its fangs as it lurched forward.\n\n\"The time of the creatorsss isss over, the age of darkness is reborn!\" it hissed, spreading its wings.\n\nI prepared for an assault, expecting it to fly straight at us; Unexpectedly, it didn't take flight, but simply dissolved, before reappearing in front of me in a choking cloud.\n\n\"Thisss isss where you meet your end, Guardian,\" it spat, raising a shadowed foreclaw.\n\nNo, not this time!\n\nWith my last ounce of strength, I unleashed a shot. The bridge exploded in a plume of rubble, before crumbling and sending us all tumbling into the rapids. Dust and rubble cascaded like rain, and a muffled cry sounded out amidst the turmoil as one of the foul wraiths slammed into the waterfall, the liquid instantly melting the shadowy cloak from its body.\n\nNot so fond of elements, are you!\n\nInevitably, my view was stolen by a cold splash as the world became a freezing cauldron of muffled sounds and raging torrents. Frantically kicking, I was tossed about like a leaf caught in a ferocious gale, slamming into the riverbed and several boulders before I could right myself. Forcing all four paws against the rocks, I pushed up, and in an explosion of water, erupted from the river.\n\nHuge up-swells of freezing water dragged me down the gorge as I gasped, and more liquid cascaded over me, forcing me down into another storm of bubbles. My wings slammed into a boulder, the pain forcing my muzzle open, allowing the bubbles to bellow out in a white plume. No sooner had the river dragged me beneath its angry surface, than it effortlessly tossed me back up. I gasped for air, but the raging torrent was far from done, battering my limbs against boulders and fallen logs.\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha cried out, her desperate call muffled and broken by the roar of the rapids.\n\nShe was barely visible in the swirling waters as she was sucked into the narrow gorge along with me. In the same moment, I heard a screech echo from the ruins, glancing up, I saw four dark shapes fly out from the settling dust. Slicing through the air like black arrows, leaving a shadowy trail in their wake before disappearing into the trees.\n\nI must reach Risha before they do!\n\nBefore I knew it, the current dragged me between two boulders, heaving me up, before throwing me over yet another set of rapids. Fighting against pain, fear, exhaustion, and the cold rushing water, I was tossed back to the cool morning air. I caught sight of Risha, but the river had other ideas and another strong current yanked me to the side, dragging me over the rocks like a twig before swallowing me into a swirling cauldron. The force of the water was ferocious, turning the deep plunge pool into a whirling tomb, ripping me from the riverbed before slamming me hard into the rocks.\n\nPropelling myself to the surface, I gulped in all the air I could, singed throat and damaged ribs searing as I filled my lungs. One of the creatures swooped low over the rapids, with claws and teeth brought to bear. I tried to face it, but the river tore me from every paw-hold I could find, dragging me along like a helpless bug.\n\nThis is it. I relented as I glimpsed its claws flashing by inches from my face. So much for destiny.\n\nA swirling mass of water erupted from the river like a hungry animal, gnashing jaws instantly enveloping the creature and greedily dragging it into the swell.\n\nI opened my terrified eyes, fighting against the mounting agony as I forced my claws into the rocks, clinging desperately to their slippery surface.\n\n\"Not one of your best ideas,\" Risha panted to my right \u2013clinging to a boulder opposite my rocky anchor.\n\n\"I... I... It's been a long night,\" I panted.\n\nAnother screech curtailed my sentimentality, bouncing from the steep cliff sides as if neither rock face wished to absorb it. My eyes instantly redirected to its source sweeping low over the rapids.\n\nWe have to get out of the river! I inwardly declared, but the overgrown banks were sheer.\n\nCasting my view downstream, I made out several toppled trunks bridging the gap. My urgent evaluation suggested only one option: one of the logs was close enough to offer a way out, but even from here it was clear the currents between the rocks beneath it were formidable. Getting us both there in one piece would be hard enough but getting up there while battling the current would be almost impossible in my condition.\n\nIt doesn't matter about me. I have to get Risha out.\n\n\"Get to that fallen tree!\" I shouted, glancing over to the log.\n\n\"What about you?\" she called as she saw it.\n\nShe knew the answer and I knew exactly what promise I was breaking \u2013 I assumed it was the only reason she wasn't already on her way. The simple fact was that we held each other's lives so highly it would undoubtedly be one of our downfalls.\n\nOnly I can recover from those downfalls, she can't.\n\nThe water exploded when the drowned shadow-creature burst from the foaming torrent. With its skeletal body completely devoid of shadow, I could see that without their shroud only their mouths dealt their life-stealing blow.\n\nHow else was it able to sit on that branch without it turning to dust while its saliva killed the earth?\n\nSupernatural or not, the power of the river forced the creature forward all the same, smashing it into my rock. Its claws scratched against the stone as its deadly jaws resurfaced, snapping shut inches from my snout.\n\n\"Go!\" I ordered.\n\nWithout a second thought I kicked off the rock, sending a surge of pain down my spine. The river tore me away, throwing me back into the current, Risha followed, as did the creature. I couldn't say any of us were faring well against the current, especially when we were sucked between two boulders and swept over another set of rapids as two more winged horrors swooped overhead.\n\nRisha emerged at my side, panting heavily, and as she shook the water from her head, the creature appeared too, before it was quickly consumed by the raging white pool below the rapids.\n\nMy attention was stolen when another creature swooped in, its wings outstretched and alive with shadow.\n\n\"Duck!\" I shouted.\n\nWatching the dark shadow pass overhead from below the waves, another current dragged me down into the depths of a swirling plunge pool. Amidst the chaos I was soon forced upwards, coughing, gagging and gasping for air I searched frantically for any sign of my companion.\n\nPain suddenly overwhelmed my senses when the river dragged me backwards into a rock. My body falling limp as the water threw me over like a piece of driftwood.\n\nI... I don't know how much more of this I can take.\n\nI could see the log through my blurred vision; ironically, it was next to where the river pinned me, but I was too weak to do anything. It shook unexpectedly, and Risha's blue scales came into focus as she balanced precariously on the unstable platform.\n\n\"Blaze, come on!\" she cried, but I couldn't move, my body was done. \"Come on, they'll coming!\" she demanded, reaching out a forepaw.\n\nSure enough, there was another thud on the log, and the beam shook violently as clutching claws turned it to dust. Another dark shape landed behind her, almost shaking the log free. I heard their heartless hisses above the river's chaos \u2013 their bodies didn't obey the laws of reality, so why should their vile sounds?\n\n\"Control? You can have control over everything!\" The voice in my mind laughed. \"Do not allow these vile demons to take what you desire!\"\n\nFinally, the flailing body of the water-trapped creature slammed into the centre of the log, breaking it apart. In an instant, the river tore the wooden beam free, sweeping all those balanced on top into the rapids. In the same moment, the voice in my head stepped confidently back into the shadows as a primal hatred erupted inside me.\n\nWater exploded with steam, rock buckled and the falling log burst into flames. The first creature was cast into the river, while the tumbling log struck the second, sending the pair flying into the next pool of foaming water. Risha and the body of the third beast were swallowed by the water and what remained of the charred log struck me and burst into flames.\n\nThe force sent me tumbling into the river, washing me over another rapid where I caught a glimpse of one of the creatures impaled on a log jammed between two boulders. The shadow-stripped form gave a horrifying screech before disintegrating into dust, while the rushing waters consumed me in another storm of boiling liquid. The water felt strange, like it dared not hinder my actions. The shadow-creature that burst out from the torrent and dragged me down, seemed less considerate as its gnashing jaws snapped, only just missing my glowing muzzle.\n\nI forced my forepaw into the side of its spiked head, and the moment my claws struck, the creature began to burn. Curling up, I pushed my rear paws up into its bony ribs, while the second of my foreclaws tore across its head, gouging molten gashes where its eyes should have been. The riverbed grazed my paws, and with an instinctive reaction, I pushed myself to the surface, shoving the shadow-creature aside, while it disintegrated in a cloud of dust.\n\nA plume of mist and a thunderous roar boomed out over the pathetic cry of the smaller rapids, and despite my lucid state I realised we were heading towards a waterfall, a very big waterfall.\n\nBefore I could consider escape, another creature erupted before me, catapulting us both backwards. Digging my claws deep into its hide, the bright light of my godly flames melted into its back, forcing it back into the dark pit from which it had spawned. It screamed as I rode its body through the water like a raft, finally smashing it on a rock. Its body broken beneath my paws, the sudden loss of support sent me tumbling and bursting from the river in a shower of boiling water, close to the edge of the waterfall.\n\n\"Blaze!\" a distant voice cried out.\n\nRisha clung to a rock close to the waterfall's edge, and another of the creatures was heading straight for her.\n\nI pushed up with all my might, flared my wings, and slammed into its back, the force throwing us all over the edge. The creature tried to spread its wings, but I forced them shut. While its fearsome teeth snapped, I pulled my head back, drawing in a breath of fire. The ensuing explosion obliterated it and accelerated my descent.\n\nSmashing into the freezing water, I felt my body go limp. The cliff's shadow dulled the world, while the whirling soup of turbulence pulled me deeper into the darkness and finally, unconsciousness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dark Games",
                "text": "Light slipped into a haze of grey, the roar of falling water becoming nothing more than a muffled din. Paws and wings nought but numb stumps, while each breath grew shorter, as did the insane pounding of my heart and the thunder in my head. I was as cold as the water about me, yet my eyes were open, chilling liquid kissing the dull spheres. The dark creature emerged from its hiding place, slithering between my paralysed thoughts, looking proudly over the fires of my rage.\n\n\"Impressive, so much power,\" it hissed.\n\nI'd done something terrible. I was sure Risha was safe, but my punishment was to be left here sinking into oblivion. I closed my eyes, resigning myself to darkness when something touched my forepaw. Too weak to react, I felt the claws grip and pull hard on my limb. Liquid rushed by, until through the darkness of my eyelids, I could see a dull light and in an explosion of spray I instinctively gasped for breath, as did my rescuer.\n\nMy head jolted forward when its weight returned, and my eyes burst open to see I was in a deep plunge pool at the base of the waterfall. Great walls of rock cast shadows over most of the churning lake, while it transitioned to a calm downstream flow brushing by smooth, muddy banks under lush green woodland.\n\n\"Blaze, Blaze!\" Risha panted.\n\nThe more I looked at her, the more I wished I could tell her to forget me and take care of herself.\n\nI don't deserve her help or her friendship.\n\nHauling me over her back, she began to swim. It was the unmistakable shriek of the shadow-creatures that finally dragged me back to alertness.\n\nWe needed to find shelter; my eyes fixed on the curtain of water behind us. I knew from experience that there were often caves behind the cover of waterfalls. I also knew from our recent experiences, that those things would never intentionally enter water.\n\n\"Risha, behind the waterfall,\" I coughed and sputtered.\n\nShe immediately began swimming, while I tried to release her paws of my weight. When the water flow began pushing us away from the falls, her eyes closed, allowing her to focus and her elemental markings began to glow. On her command the water slowed and the current parted around us. She passed beneath the veil of thundering water, liquid hammering our bodies until we found the fall's constant flow had eroded a cave into the base of the cliff.\n\nThe force of the water pushed us further into the cavern, and as Risha's strength finally failed a smooth surface brushed my limp paws where the cave floor rose to form a flat beach. I slipped from her back, the water taking my weight as I steadied myself. She was exhausted, and grabbing her gently, I found enough strength to force us both upright and onto the shoreline, where I finally collapsed, with Risha falling in a similar heap beside me. Water dripped from the ceiling, each drop ringing out like a poorly orchestrated melody, accompanying the crashing waterfall behind us.\n\nI looked at the water gently lapping against Risha's scales, her wing tissues bobbing with the peaceful flow as her chest rose and fell with each shallow breath.\n\nShe didn't have to drag me in here, she should have let me sink to the bottom.\n\nA recognisable shriek stole my attention. It sounded different behind the veil, but still unmistakable.\n\nThe creature's silhouette projected against the falling water. It circled around to the far edge of the pool, eventually landing on a rock close to the waterfall's barrier. The black scythes of its claws scratched against the rock, while its tail snaked around the base and the shadow melted from its bones.\n\nPlacing my wing over Risha I sank down, leaving only my eyes and nostrils visible above the water. Its spiny head rose from beneath its wings, peering around so precisely it betrayed the fact it had no eyes. Even above the waterfall's roar I could hear the slow pace of its breathing. Its dribbling exertions were deep and raspy, each one followed by a hiss or deep clicks. My heart thundered in my chest and my legs shuddered \u2013 I desperately wanted to kill it.\n\nIts eyeless stare turned to the forest, scanning the muddy banks, while it raised one dark foreclaw against its bony chest. Risha's tail twitched, and without thinking I pressed my wing to her back, pushing her down and making a considerable noise myself.\n\nThe creature's scanning movement halted, and its head lifted, turning towards us as its raised foreclaw lowered to the rock. I held my breath while its blind gaze fixed on the waterfall. With its mouth openly displaying the dripping jewels of its murderous poison, it gave another drawn-out hiss, a sound so cold and dead it felt like just hearing it could be fatal.\n\nCome in here, I dare you, I'll blast you to oblivion.\n\nRustling its tattered wings to shake off the fine mist, it took one last look around before leaping from the boulder and disappearing downstream. My whole body filled with a wave of relief as the tension left me, and I released my grip on Risha, only for her to swing round.\n\n\"Are they gone?\"\n\nI wasn't sure; for all I knew there could be more above the cave mouth.\n\n\"I think so,\" I whispered cautiously.\n\n\"What in the creators' name are they?\" she asked incredulously.\n\nOne thing was certain \u2013 they were more frightening than anything I'd ever seen before.\n\nSlaves to the darkness, what hope of stopping it is there when it has monsters like them on its side?\n\nRisha shifted as she tried to stand, her legs immediately slipping out from under her. I knew she would have little care for her condition, she'd be more concerned about the others, especially her brother. Meanwhile, my chest injury was gone, boiled away by my transcendent fire. While my strength was steadily returning, I cautiously pressed all four paws against the rock, slipping before finally managing to stand.\n\nRisha lay in the water, looking anxiously to the world beyond our protective liquid curtain. She knew she was in no fit state to move, she'd seen it in others enough times to know, and yet she still tried.\n\nShe's more like me than she cares to admit.\n\nI carefully knelt to her level, opening my wing above her back.\n\n\"You need to rest; you can't help anyone yet.\"\n\nThe look she gave me confirmed what I was thinking, and gently pushing myself up against her flank, draping her wing over my back and mine over hers, I helped her up. I fought not to slip on the rocks as she leaned her weight into me. A dry band of shore was where we finally came to rest, amidst boulders and loose sand.\n\n'Dry' was a loose term to describe our resting place, the spray and drips from the roof covered everything in at least some moisture. Very little light reached this far into the cave, but I could make out our surroundings as I lay her gently on the stone. I gingerly lowered to the floor beside her, as she turned to face me.\n\n\"Next time you think jumping into a river is a good idea, I'll string you up by your tail.\"\n\nMy mind conjured up an image of the Cartographer hanging from his tail with me beside him, and a weak smile broke across my muzzle.\n\n\"Not my best idea, I have to admit,\" I conceded.\n\nShe gave a subtle smile, raising her head to look at the waterfall.\n\nShe's still thinking about the others, I know it. Moments later she tried to stand again, stumbling on the slippery rocks before I jumped forward to catch her.\n\n\"You can't go anywhere like that,\" I softly suggested.\n\n\"That's rich coming from you,\" she huffed.\n\nSlumping down with a sigh she turned her eyes away and looked herself over. I knew how she must feel, what it was like not knowing what had become of someone close.\n\n\"They'll be okay \u2013 remember when they came to find us on their own?\" I reassured her, moving back to where I'd been lying.\n\n\"That's not it, I shouldn't have been so stupid,\" she muttered, her words disrupted by frustration.\n\nIt wasn't her fault; those creatures were after me. I'd cast us into the river and I'd caused us to fall over the waterfall. I was the reason we were separated from the others and I was the reason Pyro was dead.\n\n\"I shouldn't have told him all that stuff, I didn't need to get so... Blaze, I'm sorry,\" her sudden exclamation only summoned confusion in my mind.\n\nSorry? What does she have to be sorry for?\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" I asked.\n\nShe looked pained, almost guilty, as her eyes fell shamefully to her forepaws.\n\n\"I saw you go to the end of the world and back for Tarwin. You defeated Acrodan just so you could see her again. All the time we were there you were real, all the stuff I heard in the stories, all those tales my parents told me... I saw it, I saw you, and you were real,\" her voice trailed off, and she looked out over the water.\n\n\"I believed it, the first sight of something truly good, not doom, gloom and monotony... I felt like I had something, someone to put my faith in again.\"\n\nA wave of guilt came over me and I thought to tell her that I hadn't set out to do good, I'd simply wanted to save Tarwin. I soon realised that telling her would only topple the pillar of belief onto which she clung.\n\n\"I didn't tell you, because I thought you would have a better chance of leaving it behind if you didn't know, especially when you began looking for the answers; that only made it worse,\" she went on, staring at her forepaws as she drew them through the sand.\n\n\"I tried to set it aside, get by, keep training, working, but eventually I had to tell someone,\" she sighed again, the exertion long and dry. \"And, well... Boltock was never one for subtlety,\" she admitted.\n\nI recalled what she'd told Pyro in the brief seconds of the conversation I'd picked up, the meeting with the unknown pair at the celebration too. Her feelings involving my struggle had been tearing her life apart, and I'd never truly considered myself worthy of such concern.\n\n\"Blaze, I'm sorry,\" she repeated.\n\nI knew she'd only let her life falter because she cared for me \u2013 why else would she be here now and not halfway to the mountains with the others while I perished in a river?\n\n\"You didn't do anything wrong, I should have been there,\" I stammered. \"I should have ended this when I had the chance.\"\n\n\"Blaze. What you did, no one else could have done.\"\n\n\"Is that a lie? You believe that part, don't you?\" The voice in my head hissed, twisting her words. \"Admit it, it feels good, knowing you're the only one with such power.\"\n\n\"You should get some rest,\" I suggested, dismissing the subject. \"After what we've both been through, it's best to rest.\"\n\nShe looked stunned for a moment, her head drooping before she flopped to the floor and closed her eyes. I watched the peaceful tranquillity of her glistening blue scales as she settled, eventually I looking about the cave.\n\nI should have incinerated those monsters the moment I saw them. Then maybe Pyro would still be alive.\n\nLowering my head to the stone, I maintained my watch over the waterfall.\n\nMaybe I should look for the others, those things don't know she's here and she's safe.\n\nNo! I stopped the thought immediately. The last time I snuck away it led to all this mess!\n\n\"How can any of them blame you? They chose to follow, even after you told them not to.\" For a moment it felt like my mind wasn't my own, just like back in the throne room.\n\n\"Why not go out there, why not be the hero alone?\"\n\nI needed to get out, get away from the voice in my head, I had to find the others. Staggering forward, my forepaws splashed clumsily in the shallow water.\n\n\"Don't go,\" I heard the faint whisper behind me, her voice instantly clearing the fog clouding my mind.\n\nI glanced back into her wide, lost, lonely eyes, stealing a glimpse of my reflection in the water, realising I could never leave her. I'd abandoned all I once knew for her, so how could I? Creeping back, I lowered myself to the ground, closer than I'd ever been before as I reassured her.\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere.\"\n\nI used to get close to Tarwin, but I was like a brother to her and her father never allowed me to sleep unwatched. Somehow, this felt different \u2013 my calming heartbeat felt strange.\n\nIs this what I failed to see in Pyro and Ember? What Risha tried to explain? But why would I feel it around her?\n\nShe lowered her head beside mine, our tails coiling over each other. Every moment we were close felt strangely comfortable, all my worries were chased away by a warmness I'd never felt before. I draped my wing gently over her back, our forepaws overlapping. She was like a light in the darkness, a pyre I'd always seen, yet seldom followed and always failed to understand.\n\nIs this why I can never leave her, or her me?\n\nI'd always wanted an explanation, to know the workings of everything around me, but as I closed my eyes, this time, I was perfectly fine without one."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Consciousness became a swirling hybrid of dreams and reality. I felt better than I'd ever felt, and yet deep sleep was still beyond my reach. One wary eye lingered on the curtain tumbling across the cave mouth, and when that one tired, the other swiftly took its place. Occasionally, I'd glance to Risha beneath my wing. Although her rest was uneasy, I was glad she'd at least managed to get some sleep.\n\nIn truth, I had no idea whether I was awake or not, the boundary between the two became so blurred it distorted my view. Sound was muffled and every lucid movement felt like it was passing through an invisible pool of warm liquid.\n\nRisha twitched in her sleep and I finally lifted my head. My eyes scanned the cave from one side to the other until a faint image broke the gloom. A black skeletal form sat perched on a ridge of rock at the far end, two burning-red eyes within the sockets of its dragon-like skull shrouded by hunched wings. The tip of its emaciated tail coiled down about the rock, occasionally flicking and disturbing the water. Its bony forepaws held two sharp stones, slowly grinding them against each other as the flame in its body flickered between ribs and serrated fangs.\n\n\"Go away.\"\n\nThe creature stopped taunting the water's surface and grinding the stones as it looked at me with a hint of surprise.\n\n\"It'sss not wise to ssspeak to what you believe are hallucinationsss, you know?\"\n\n\"What would you know about wise?\" I countered.\n\nHis flaming eyes narrowed, the bones of his skull, morphing like liquid shadow.\n\n\"An interesssting quessstion,\" he replied, stepping down from his rocky perch and striding across the water.\n\nHis claws tapped on the liquid like it was solid, but I didn't so much as twitch when he stopped before me. \"What would you know about it?\" he repeated.\n\nI lowered my view to his bony forepaws, the eyes of his reflection staring at me with as much conviction as his own.\n\n\"You're no better than me. It'sss not long before six becomes ssseven and that becomesss ssseventy, then ssseven thousssand,\" he taunted cruelly.\n\nMy head snapped up and the projection staggered back, as if afraid. He was merely mocking the gesture, and his sly smile soon returned.\n\n\"I mean no offence, I am far from innocent,\" he reasoned, waving a skeletal paw in surrender. \"But who decreesss thossse actions foul? Mortalsss?\" he smiled cunningly. \"What are they to usss?\"\n\nHis question silenced his humour, as he tapped the stones and added. \"They're nothing to usss, a shattering fall, a fatal wound, and they are nothing but a lifeless corpssse. We are greater, we are stronger, we are...\"\n\nThe creature's words trailed off into a grin, his flaming eyes boring into mine. \"You know of what I ssspeak. You know it'ssss true \u2013 and you like it.\"\n\n\"No, no, no!\" Seemingly amused by my pathetic attempts to resist he paused.\n\n\"You're afraid, I can feel it, and yet I wonder if you know what you truly dread.\" Grinning wryly, he turned toward Risha, and the moment his baleful eyes settled, a shiver ran through her.\n\n\"Stop, don't, mother, don't leave,\" she muttered in her restless sleep.\n\n\"Leave them out of this,\" I growled.\n\nThe thing was taken aback by my response, far more surprised than any hallucination should be.\n\n\"We didn't do that,\" he growled.\n\nWhen I opened my wing further to shield her head from his glowing eyes, he merely smirked.\n\n\"I didn't do that, if it pleases you, and yet I gorge myself on the blame you harbour for yourself,\" he added with equally deliberate words.\n\n\"Play your game with me, if you must, but leave her alone,\" I snapped angrily, surprising him again with my choice of words.\n\n\"A game? What do you think I am? This isss no game, a game would suggessst there are two playersss with an equal chance at victory. Maybe that wasss once ssso, but now we both know there isss only one,\" he corrected cryptically.\n\nI fought the confusion, and in doing so, I could almost understand.\n\n\"The darknessss isss coming, and what is anyone in comparissson? What are we?\" he asked, slithering his head close to mine. \"Are we playersss or are we jussst as weak as everyone elssse on the board?\"\n\nI sighed, bowing my head to meet the molten gaze of its reflection.\n\n\"Just leave,\" I whimpered.\n\nUnexpectedly, he backed away across the water.\n\n\"We are not worthy to challenge the new order. Not yet,\" he hissed, his foul voice echoing about the walls until it morphed into a high-pitched purr."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "My eyes snapped open to be greeted by cold, damp darkness, the thundering waterfall and a symphony of drips echoing from the rocks, and yet it felt strangely silent. The air was heavy and moist, every watery bead sparkling like a cowering star. The distorted mosaic's reflection danced on the cave wall where the light poured in. The weather outside looked to be grey; we'd obviously slept for some time. Risha lay beneath my draped wing, having her by my side made me feel better. Her body was much warmer than the unforgiving cave, and her spirit was far stronger than my own.\n\nIf only feelings and beliefs could fix everything, I sighed to myself as I stood up.\n\nPart of me still wanted to search for the others, but I couldn't leave her alone. On one paw, I was sure the creatures had moved on, but on the other, swimming out would be hard without Risha.\n\nNot to mention the last time it seemed to quickly tire her out. It must be hard to command so much water.\n\nOne thing the gloomy crevice around me lacked was my mind's dark hallucination. I found the rock where he'd been projected, only to see a narrow pathway beyond.\n\nHow ironic. I inwardly muttered while I made my way carefully along the natural walkway. I came to stand directly before the water curtain, where a small outcrop led out to the muddy shoreline beyond the cliff. An overhang slowed the raging torrent enough so as not to overwhelm anyone trying to cross from the cave into the pool.\n\nIt's almost like he wanted me to find the easy way out.\n\nIt was an unnerving idea, but I had to keep looking forward.\n\nGet out of here, find the others, those are our priorities. I told myself, turning back to Risha. I hope she's as good at finding her brother as he is at finding her.\n\nRisha still slept, and while my eyes lingered, the mysterious feelings almost persuaded me to lay back down with her.\n\nShe's so peaceful, so radiant...\n\nI forced myself to ignore the impractical idea, wondering what my mind's dark avatar would say about it, or if he was a source for such mysterious notions. We had to move, and as much as I didn't want to disturb her, I found myself returning to her side, gently nudging her with a forepaw.\n\nHer weary eyes finally opened, and I felt another twinge of guilt knowing that I'd summoned her back to the miserable reality of the cave. She awkwardly glanced about before her eyes found my forepaws; for a moment it was like she'd expected me to be right beside her, panic setting in before she realised I'd moved.\n\n\"We should get going,\" I suggested gently.\n\nShe still appeared lost in her dreams, her eyes crossing mine, like I was a different dragon to the one she once knew.\n\n\"Go where?\" she asked, shaking her head free of sleep.\n\n\"To find the others, we need to find them before we head to the Phoenix Mountains,\" I reminded her, with a slightly puzzled tone.\n\nDid she forget about all that?\n\nSure enough, reality flooded back as fast as the thundering water outside, and she seemed to deflate a little.\n\n\"There's a passage to the left side, you don't need to swim again,\" I informed her, glancing to the walkway I'd discovered.\n\nMoving towards the exit I noticed she was staring into space, and pausing mid-stride, my growing confidence turned to worry.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\nFor a moment it felt like my words went unheard, but she soon snapped back from her trance with a shrill breath.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm fine, why wouldn't I be?\" she asked in a peculiarly happy tone.\n\nI tried not to let my confusion show. I knew my feelings for her had changed, but whatever was on her mind was making her behave rather strangely.\n\nHow can she be fine knowing the others are out there alone?\n\n\"Okay, but come on, we must find the others.\" My next reminder seemed to spur her on a little more, and she jumped to her paws.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" she confirmed, scampering over to me.\n\n\"Okay, this way.\"\n\nThe water hammered down, barely missing my muzzle as we came upon the curtain, and I glanced back to see she was right behind me.\n\nGood, no more distractions. I thought, taking a hesitant step through.\n\nThe water was unbelievably cold, and though the overhang in the cliff face reduced the flow, it was still heavy against my scales. I crossed about halfway before stopping, the water beating on my back and wings like an orkin's club. I could see the world beyond was calm and still in the wake of recent rain.\n\nThe coast looks clear, there's no more shadow creatures.\n\nRelieved not to come face to face with one of those monstrosities, I remained under the deluge. Pressing myself against the rock while opening my wing to create a shielded exit.\n\n\"Come on!\" I beckoned, offering the way for Risha. \"I think you've had enough of water for one day.\"\n\nThe now more focused dragoness smiled, practically beaming as she offered curt thanks and slipped under my wing. I waited until she was clear before drawing the numb limb back to my side, and careful not to slip, I quickly moved after her. The rocky ledge led out onto the muddy beach and we soon found ourselves in the shaded forest surrounding the pool.\n\n\"They're smart, they'll have gone into the forest. It must be harder for those things to fly between the trees,\" Risha suggested.\n\nI wish I could believe her, but after seeing them, I doubted that trees would slow them for long.\n\n\"Will you be able to find them?\" I asked, concealing my concerns.\n\n\"Well, Boltock was always the best, but I've had to put up with his smell for...\" her reply trailed off, as if she'd only just appreciated the severity of our situation.\n\nI stopped beside her, drawing my eye to the forest. \"Are you sure you're okay?\"\n\nShe nodded firmly and marched on, periodically sniffing the air. The smell of damp wood in the cool summer day crept through the trees, its freshness hiding the dangers. The phantoms were long gone, and yet recalling their image turned the pleasant scene into a ghostly shadow. Their existence was like a wound on the world, and even when they moved on, their poison scarred wherever they had lingered.\n\n\"This way,\" Risha called, already a few paw steps downriver.\n\nStay focused, keep looking forward. I told myself, firmly slamming the doors on all other thoughts while moving up beside her.\n\nAs we trekked, a strange eeriness welled beneath the canopy, the sound of the river mixed with an uneasy rustle along with the chatter of nervous birds.\n\nHow can bird call sound so, so wrong? It's as if those things leave behind an unnatural disease. I thought, my senses perking at the shrill call of what sounded like a hawk, and I swore I spotted a fiery glimmer in the sky. It feels like I'm going insane.\n\nBefore long, the muddy flora was broken by scattered rock, moss and discarded leaves lying amongst large roots exposed by the river. The roar of another waterfall filled the air, and eventually the river plummeted down into a second rocky gorge. We couldn't navigate the steep, overgrown cliffs on paw, and flying with the idea that those things were still nearby wasn't an inviting option. We stopped on the edge, peering down at the foaming depths, surrounded by cliff sides that were steeper than those upstream.\n\n\"Where now?\" I asked, and she gave an agitated sigh, closing her eyes tightly while mumbling to herself.\n\n\"T\u2013this way,\" she muttered. \"We'll need to go round.\"\n\nI couldn't disagree, following her away from the water, into the forest, my eyes darting uneasily through the labyrinth of trees, bushes and eerie shadows. Before long, a growing barrage of rain began, its heavy clatter hindering any chances of detecting danger early. On the flip side, the canopy kept most of its cold touch away.\n\nThe deluge brought out more forest freshness, and as beautiful as it was, it wasn't enough to suppress the creatures' foul illusion. All the while, deeper, darker thoughts began to blossom, and the crudely sealed door at the back of my mind buckled. The regrets of decisions I'd made, and the fear of responsibility.\n\nWhat are the other's going to say when they see us? What will they think about Pyro, what will Ember think!?\n\nComing to a halt, my forepaws were kissed by the chill of trickling water. Exposed tree roots clung perilously to the muddy slopes as I looked to see Risha standing at the edge of a small stream, her eyes darting about the moist terrain.\n\nIs she lost? Has she lost the scent? Is the smell of the forest blocking it? I didn't want to think about what could be worse.\n\n\"What is it, what's wrong?\" I asked, but she continued to stare blindly upstream before snorting.\n\n\"Urg, what am I trying to prove!?\"\n\nBeginning to fear the worst, I replied, \"What do you mean?\"\n\nShe turned, with her eyes wide and empty she sadly admitted, \"I can't find them.\"\n\nHer revelation took me a moment to process. If it was true, where had she been leading us?\n\n\"Boltock could always find me, but, but I never really learned his scent as well as he did mine. I never thought I'd need to, and he? Well, he always...\" Her voice trailed off as panic started to set in.\n\nMental alarm bells rang, tearing down whatever defence I'd erected against my darker thoughts. If she couldn't find them then I had to focus, I had to find a solution.\n\nThink! Think! I groaned while my concern grew and I peered at her with the same defeated look.\n\nAn explosion of speed and a shower of dirt erupted from my left, impacting hard against my side and knocking me to my knees. Water launched as I fell into the stream, and before I could react my attacker pinned me to the ground with four clawed paws. I coiled back my hind legs, ready to fight, but as I struggled and looked up my view met with a skull. A skull wore by a familiar, feathered face.\n\n\"Neera!\" I exclaimed in bewilderment.\n\nThe faldron's eyes went wide within the sockets of her helmet, her ears raised in shock. I released the tension in my legs, but she remained silent, scanning me in amazement before she finally stepped off.\n\n\"It's... you, but you can't be...\" she stuttered, backing away like she'd seen a ghost.\n\nRighting myself, I shook the water from my scales and wings as she stammered.\n\n\"You! I saw you last night, y\u2013you had at least a broken rib, a punctured lung, and then you ran and... not even a dragon could recover so quickly from that!\"\n\nThe phantom in my mind grinned smugly at her blatant acknowledgment of my superiority.\n\nWhat can I tell her? Other than the fact that I'm harder to kill than anything she could possibly ever know?\n\nI felt as if that would be mocking her, she was a survivor, a hunter. She'd gone to great lengths to avoid such things happening to herself while I ran in, took a beating, and healed perfectly.\n\n\"Are you with the others? Are they okay?\" Risha interrupted, turning to the stunned faldron.\n\nNeera looked like she wanted to run, and the dread of being considered as something to fear stirred my mind's dark entity.\n\n\"Is Boltock alright?\" Risha demanded again, her voice becoming more desperate.\n\nNeera shook her head, finding her voice as she stammered.\n\n\"We made it out, seems those things were after you, but...\" her voice trailed off, and a frown appeared on her fuzzy muzzle.\n\nRisha edged closer.\n\n\"What?\" she demanded, and Neera's ears folded flat.\n\n\"They're fine, but the red one didn't come back.\"\n\nWhat relief I'd gained in the knowledge that Boltock and Ember were okay, waned with the memory of what had happened to Pyro.\n\nSix! My dark conscience cackled, grinding his stones.\n\n\"Where are they?\" Risha asked more forcefully.\n\n\"Not far,\" Neera answered, glancing up to the canopy as the rush of heavy rain began to roar.\n\n\"Then let's go,\" Risha insisted, walking up beside her.\n\nI looked at the pair briefly while the bars over the door in my mind bulged under the weight of what I'd done. I could do what my mind told me, and forget it; after all, Pyro had struck Boltock and ran \u2013 I didn't summon the creatures, I didn't do this, but my conscience wouldn't allow me to accept that.\n\n\"This way, keep an eye out for trouble,\" Neera advised, cautiously moving up the bank with Risha close behind.\n\nI don't care what this is, leave them out of it. I mumbled to the wraith in my mind.\n\n\"If they're not players, then they're pieces on the board,\" he replied.\n\nI held back a wave of anger, snorting smoke as I stomped a forepaw.\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha enquired, her voice snapping me back to find her worried expression focussed on me.\n\nI forced a smile and followed, but each step weighed heavy with guilt."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "\"Sorry about back there, I heard voices, and... Well, can't be too careful out here,\" Neera tried to explain, glancing at me apologetically.\n\nI tried to force a smile: like she said, I shouldn't be alive and with those things out there, well...\n\n\"No hard feelings?\" she asked hopefully.\n\n\"No hard feelings,\" I answered, shaking my head reassuringly.\n\n\"We're sheltered beneath the other side,\" she went on as a large boulder appeared from amidst the trees and she moved around it.\n\nI followed, but Risha didn't move; she just stared into the ground at her forepaws.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I asked, and her wide, and tearful eyes met mine.\n\n\"Blaze, remember it wasn't your fault, you did the right thing.\"\n\nI wanted to believe her, but the denizen in my head burst out laughing. Pyro's death was my fault, and I would bear the blame, no matter whether she or my mind's dark persona told me otherwise. I felt the cold loneliness of my existence creep over me, and I hated what the creators had done more than anything.\n\nShe knows I'm not going to believe her, yet she tells me anyway? I don't deserve her.\n\nThe ground began to slope gently downward, creating a sheltered overhang under the bolder. I saw Boltock first, and Risha rushed towards him long before he showed any sign of knowing she was there. Instinctively wrapping her wings around him, he remained lost in his thoughts, as emotionless as our rocky shelter. Releasing him, she stepped back as I approached, and immediately felt the bleak tension.\n\n\"It's so good to see you, are you okay?\" she asked, fighting back the tears of joy in her shimmering eyes.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" her brother replied raising his head to face her, seeming to fight tears too, while a frail anger quivered in his eyes.\n\nFor a moment, his gaze met hers, then his green spheres shamefully diverted towards Ember's silhouette as if begging his sister to make it right. I gazed at the fiery dragoness, she was lifeless and lost in thought, curled up with her back to the world.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Risha sighed quietly, as her eyes followed mine.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" was all I could think to ask, in a tone riddled with guilt.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she replied hopelessly.\n\nTo hear those words from her was crushing. It felt as if the illusion in my mind was right, that without her optimism, I was lost.\n\n\"You can't stay here,\" Neera interrupted.\n\nWe both turned to see her staring out into the rain, her eyes darting about the trees, her ears raised and twitching in response to every sound. Her forepaws moved, passively drawing in the dirt.\n\n\"Those things won't have gone far,\" she added, glancing back as her ears fell between her horns.\n\n\"There's usually smoke rising to the north-east of here. My guess is it's a village, possibly human. It's about a day's walk in the same direction as Taldran.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Risha replied gratefully.\n\nNeera gave a respectful nod, ears raising once more before stepping out into the rain.\n\n\"She's right,\" Risha whispered at my side.\n\nRegretfully I knew what she was looking for \u2013 I was in charge now, and it was my decision. So, I swallowed hard, fighting my apprehension.\n\n\"I know, get the others,\" I instructed, and she gave an understanding nod as she peeled from my side.\n\nMeanwhile, Neera stood in the rain a few paw steps away from the cover, her feathery coat already darkened by water. Glistening beads gathered and ran from her armour, the taller feathers on her head and tail sagging.\n\n\"What about you?\" I asked, unsure of what to expect.\n\n\"I've always been the loner type, and, well, I have to go back,\" she answered, rubbing one forepaw over the other. \"The orkin aren't going to stop themselves.\"\n\nI didn't reply, I just looked at her.\n\n\"Good luck,\" she added, raising her ears while forcing a smile.\n\n\"You too,\" I offered.\n\nShe replied with a nod, quickly glancing back before turning away and disappearing into the forest with a bounding leap.\n\n'The loner type?' Unfortunately, I knew exactly what she meant.\n\nRain crept down my muzzle, leaving chilling scars as it passed over my scales. My eyes remained locked on the forest a few long moments before I dared turn to the others.\n\nEmber was still coiled up in the far corner of the shelter, while Boltock stared into space, his body drooping like a rag thrown over his four paws. Risha stood beside him, waiting for an answer she seemed to doubt would ever come.\n\n\"Because it's my fault!\" he suddenly snapped, his limp form tensing, raising his head, while his squinting eyelids held back more tears.\n\n\"I thought if I had something to believe in as much as you did, then I... I...\" Boltock's muttering stopped abruptly, his words reduced to a dull mumble.\n\n\"I didn't see what you saw, I didn't see what happened, I was a fool to believe you!\" he continued angrily before his weak shield of aggression collapsed.\n\nRisha froze, staring into his quivering eyes.\n\n\"It was your choice,\" she whispered quietly.\n\n\"When is it ever my choice?\" he sobbed under his breath.\n\nI caught Ember watching the arguing siblings, her ruby-eyes shimmering in a well of tears. Her glare settled on Boltock.\n\n\"I should think so,\" she hissed, in a perilous tone.\n\nHer words quivered as she forced them from her trembling muzzle like a foul-tasting meal. Meanwhile, there was no reply from the siblings.\n\n\"We need to move,\" she finally added, her voice struggling to remain strong as she redirected her attention from Boltock to me.\n\nHer fleeting glance felt like a blade through my heart. She remained silent and marched to the edge of the shelter. It took a while for the sorrowful sight to fade, and while it did, I felt the freezing hand of guilt drag me further into my mind's dark abyss. While the bag of bones in my head laughed.\n\nLeave them out of this...\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha's voice broke me free, and I turned to see her standing at my side. \"We should go, get some distance between us and this place before nightfall.\"\n\nOf course, she was right, she was always right. We didn't stand a chance against our hunters, especially at night. Pulling myself from the pools of my guilt-ridden conscience, I began to focus.\n\n\"Okay,\" I decided, \"we walk north-east until nightfall.\"\n\nTurning to the forest I hesitantly placed a forepaw out into the rain, and for a fleeting moment, I doubted they would follow. I took another step, the cold barrage hitting my scales, scornfully delivering its punishment.\n\n\"North-east, north-east?\" I questioned myself aloud, realising that I'd no sense of direction beneath the trees.\n\nAs the realisation hit me, my confidence began to drain and my head dropped. Then I recalled Neera's strange actions before she'd left \u2013 she looked like she was scratching in the dirt.\n\nIt was hard to make out at first, but the arrow drawn in the dirt undoubtedly pointed our way, north-east. She'd also said there was a village not too far in the same direction. After the encounter at the last one I wasn't too sure about that, and I thought we were better off swinging further to the north.\n\nIt's settled then, that's what we do.\n\nI took another step, followed by another until my walk formed. I had to keep going, stay focused, and not let my mind consume me.\n\nRisha appeared at my side long before I looked to see if they were following. If she was with me then, I assumed, even with their differences, the others were too.\n\n\"What about this village?\" she asked.\n\n\"We'll head further north to avoid it, then find somewhere to nest for the night,\" I elaborated.\n\nShe paused for a moment before replying with nothing more than a simple, \"Okay.\"\n\nI forced myself on for hours, until what light broke through the grey sky faded, and night drew closer. The trees looked petrified in the twilight, as if stunned by the passing of our dark hunters. My mind's eye visualised their physical form, even thinking about them felt wrong, as if the memories themselves created a mental void that couldn't be filled.\n\n\"This should be far enough,\" I announced, waving my wing in Risha's path.\n\nShe glanced at me before looking at the others. I didn't follow her eyes, because as selfish as it was to ignore their pain, I needed to retain a strict 'no reminders' policy. To distract myself, I peered up to the darkening trees and the deep-red sky silhouetted by giant clouds. I was reminded of Pyro's words: 'Fire will fall tonight.' I really hoped his vague Fire Order prediction had referred to the falling stars rather than the blazing village, or something worse.\n\n\"I'll find a place to nest, you make sure the others are okay,\" I instructed Risha, trying to limit the conversation to the two of us.\n\nShe paused for a moment, seeming to disapprove of my suggestion.\n\n\"I won't go far,\" I added reassuringly. \"I promise.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" she sighed.\n\nGet ready for another long night awake by the fire. I moaned to myself, certain that I wasn't getting any sleep knowing those things were out there.\n\nStepping forward, I brushed through a thick layer of thorny brambles into a clearing. The cover between the trunks was probably the best form of shelter I was going to find. I moved over to the tree line, that was when it hit me \u2013 the smell, the image of this place, it all felt strangely familiar.\n\nThat's impossible. I told myself. It\u2026 it's just a forest, I've never been here \u2013 have I?\n\nThe only response my mind gave was an impossible sense that I should know this place, even my mind's dark avatar seemed somewhat confused. My eyes darted from tree to tree, the memory faint but there. I wasn't sure if it was real, I'd seen so many forests, and yet...\n\nA subtle noise sounded out around me, accompanied by a recognisable scent.\n\nThere's some sort of village nearby, I recognise that smell.\n\nA clatter behind me, swiftly followed by several more, drew my attention to a small pebble bouncing down the bark of a tree trunk \u2013 tap, tap, tap, thud.\n\nIt hit the ground, disturbing the mud. My eyes widened as it settled; I know that trick, it's a distraction!\n\nThe unmistakable sound of a drawn bow was followed by the light placement of a foot behind me. It was a sound I knew all too well, only now that arrow was surly pointing at me.\n\n\"A real hunter never gets caught,\" a jokingly judgmental voice announced.\n\nMy legs went as stiff as the petrified trees about me.\n\nI know that voice.\n\nI turned, and panic exploded into an unexpected wave of joy when my eyes settled upon Tarwin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Night of the Dragon",
                "text": "Caught in an almost impossible limbo between fright and overwhelming joy, the sharp arrowhead sat perfectly between my eyes, remaining there for a brief second while our gazes locked before being unhooked.\n\nHow did I fail to recognise her the moment I caught her scent?\n\nI was disappointed that after such a short time away my memory of her was already fading.\n\n'A real hunter never gets caught?' I doubt I'll be living that mistake down any time soon.\n\nTarwin seemed as lost for words as I was, placing her arrow back in its quiver, she crouched to my level. She seemed smaller than I remembered, but other than that she was exactly as I recalled. She wore the same leather hunting gear, albeit slightly worn and modified. A long fur cape covered her back, curling down from her neck to form a cowl over her head. Her bow crafted from the rare wood of a green spire looked identical to the last...\n\nThe last time I saw that was when... No reminders! I told myself.\n\nTarwin flicked her hood back with a shake of her head, strands of red hair falling over her freckled face. I tried to say something; but of course, she couldn't understand me. I heard the dark creature cackle in the back of my mind as if somehow, he knew the answer to that riddle, and found it hilarious.\n\nI slammed a mental door in his smug face.\n\nHe can laugh all he wants; I might even laugh back!\n\nMore than ever, I felt like doing so, because no matter what he did, I'd still found my way back to Tarwin.\n\nDefying the dark image, I pressed myself against her. After casually speaking to my own kind for almost four seasons, I didn't need words to show her how happy I was to see her.\n\n\"It's good to see you too,\" she replied, hugging me back with more than a slight surprise.\n\nFor a moment, I was content to stay there with my wings wrapped around her, reminded of how much I'd missed her. I felt slightly embarrassed by how silly I must have appeared when she released me and stepped back.\n\nCome on this is Tarwin \u2013 she's basically my sister.\n\n\"You've grown,\" she noted.\n\nI looked back to the tip of my tail, moving my eyes steadily up over my spine; she was right, I felt taller, at least compared to her. The other dragons and I were about the same age, so our sizes were relatively similar.\n\nI'm almost as tall as her shoulders! All this after one year?\n\nWith our warm reunion ended she stood up, brushing loose dirt from her knees, before asking, \"What are you doing here, I thought you went back with...?\"\n\n\"Blaze!?\" a second voice interrupted, stealing my attention.\n\nSeeing my focus diverted, Tarwin turned as Risha emerged from the bush. I'd been out of her sight for too long, and the moment her eyes found Tarwin, they widened.\n\n\"Out for an evening stroll, are we?\" Tarwin teased.\n\n\"But, if, if...\" Risha stammered, glancing at me. \"That must mean the village...?\"\n\nMemories of a warm fire, the smell of the sea, nights sat up in the rafters and Tarwin's stories all came flooding back.\n\nThe nostalgic wave came over me with such force that even my mind's dark phantom was overwhelmed.\n\nNot so strong after all, is he? I subconsciously sniggered while it cowered in a darkened corner.\n\nA sudden chill on the wind shook me from my thoughts, and Tarwin looked up into the restless canopy as rain clouds broke the scarlet sky.\n\n\"Best be getting back, things... well, let's just say things aren't the same anymore.\"\n\nFor a moment, I feared what she was talking about, then I realised I already knew: 'Troubled times.' The world outside may have once been kept from her, but I doubted that those secrets had survived long upon her return.\n\n\"I've collected the last of the snares, so I'll be heading back,\" she added, pushing her fur cape aside with her bow to reveal a freshly caught pair of rabbits and a pheasant strapped to her belt.\n\nHa, now she's just showing off \u2013 good to see she hasn't changed.\n\n\"I don't suppose you'll be coming back. Or are you going to be sleeping in the woods again?\" she asked, an inviting smile breaking across her face.\n\nI didn't need to speak to answer that question. I'd crossed a world of danger for her, of course I was going back.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'm sure Father won't mind. It's the last of the spirit celebrations tonight, so I doubt he'll be home,\" she added, looking back at Risha.\n\nThe spirits were human deities, I'd never really paid much attention to them. I knew now that most races had evolved their own interpretations of the creators, especially after the war. Indeed, the fall of the Guardians to the sphere had ultimately destroyed the pristine image. I did, know enough about human culture to recall that during the week of the longest day, there was a celebration every night, each one dedicated to one of the five spirits \u2013 and tonight was the last event.\n\n\"Father can hardly turn you away on the night of the dragon,\" Tarwin laughed, turning to the forest.\n\nThe night of the dragon! I remembered the last time I'd attended such a night, I was the centre of attention, not even Tarwin's Father could ignore me!\n\nI took a giddy step after Tarwin, practically bouncing before a quiet voice stopped me mid-stride.\n\n\"Risha?\"\n\nI turned to see Ember emerge from the bushes, peering at the blue dragoness whose eyes were fixed on Tarwin. In the same moment, my joy suddenly flopped, and sure enough, my mind's dark entity took the chance to regain lost ground.\n\nVisions of Pyro's fate flashed through my thoughts like lightning as Ember's eyes passed over us both.\n\nFires curse you! I snapped to myself. No reminders!\n\nMy unexpected joy had prevented me from considering how she, or any of the others, might feel about going back to the village. They all knew Tarwin, but in our current state they might feel very different to the last time they'd met her.\n\nEmber seemed, as always, to consider things with a practical, militarised mindset as she stiffened and stated.\n\n\"We'll go with her tonight.\"\n\nIt wasn't the suggestion I expected, but it was what I wanted. I gave her an appreciative nod, backed up by a weak smile. Her face remained cold and stern, while Risha stared at me before picking up on her friend's suggestion.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, that's safer, I'll tell Boltock.\"\n\nHe knows Tarwin, but what's he going to think about a whole village? I dreaded to think, especially knowing Boltock's view on humans.\n\nEither way, I trusted his sister's ability to talk him round, and offered her an appreciative thanks.\n\nShe nodded as she turned and made her way back through the bushes. Meanwhile, Ember remained with me, her eyes avoiding mine.\n\nWhat does she really think of me now, does she think I'm cursed like Pyro did?\n\n\"Are you coming?\" Tarwin enquired from the darkening forest.\n\nEmber glanced in her direction, and with that I took to the trail my human friend had taken. A small flame of joy still burning at the fact I was home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"Hunting's not been as good without my lookout, I haven't caught nearly as many monsters,\" Tarwin boasted humorously as I walked by her side.\n\nI laughed with her, glad to see she could still joke about such things. All the while I had to correct my pace to keep up. My longer legs disrupted a rhythm to which I was once used to, it almost felt like she could take two strides for my one.\n\nSo long as I don't end up huge like some of those dragons back in the city. Getting into her home will be impossible if I get that big!\n\nA quick glance back reassured me that the others were following. Risha seemed slightly confused at my funny walk, and I guessed if the trail had been any wider, she'd be at my side too. Ember wasn't too far behind her, while Boltock dawdled at the back. I'd no idea what his sister had said to him, but he was following.\n\nIt's almost like he doesn't care anymore. Does he really blame himself for Pyro?\n\nI heard the dark entity in my head cackle as I peered out at the shadowy silhouettes of the darkening tree trunks, barely visible in the gloom. Meanwhile, a chilling wind encouraged my lust for a warm fire.\n\nBefore long, a new scent caught my attention. The smells of smoke and flame were no strangers, and I could picture the flickering torches with insects teaming around the lure of firelight. I had no doubt the central fire would be lit for the celebrations; after all, what were dragons without fire?\n\nSure enough, with every step the scent grew, until a new light emerged through the trees. The dark shadows of the buildings were visible against the glow of the central flame, and like an earth-bound sun, it challenged the splendour of the rising moon for supremacy of my vision, a vision that wasn't as I remembered.\n\nAn open field of gently waving grass filled the space between the village and the forest, tree stumps poking up like shallow islands from a gentle lake.\n\n\"We needed more space for farmland and the trees for that,\" Tarwin explained, noticing my confusion, pointing over the field with her bow.\n\nA row of horizontal tree trunks lay around an unfinished section of wall, highlighting recent construction. Muddy cart-tracks lined the new defensive structure, and more freshly felled logs sat in a triangular heap beside the breach, as did a wooden hut, which looked like it had been built as swiftly as the fortification. Opposite the hut, a fence formed a square paddock, in which two horses chewed on a pile of hay heaped in one corner.\n\nWhy do they need all of this? Are things really getting that bad out here?\n\nThen I noticed several guards posted along the rim of the spiked barrier, their outlines silhouetted by the light from the flames, metallic armour and spear-tips glinting.\n\nIs this to prevent what happened to that other village?\n\nTarwin moved out into the field, and the moment there was room, Risha appeared at my side.\n\n\"So this is...?\" She paused, considering her words.\n\n\"Where I grew up?\" I finished with a comforting smile.\n\nShe stammered nervously before mirroring my positive expression, then looked back to the others. Ember was taking in the sights, studying the wall, buildings and the fire. Boltock simply gave an upward glance before his head sank back down with a huff.\n\n\"How much of this is for you and only you?\" The voice hissed. \"It's all about you right now.\"\n\nI shook his words from my mind and moved on after Tarwin. The pathway was well walked and judging by the long grass, most of the trees here had probably been cut down while Tarwin was away.\n\nI wonder if this was a shock to her when she came back?\n\n\"Back from hunting this early?\" a guard shouted from the wall as he lit a lantern.\n\n\"Yeah, and you can be sure I've caught something good,\" Tarwin called back as she came to a stop before the breach.\n\nI wasn't sure whether she referred to me or her rabbits, but the guard's attention fell on me.\n\nHe looked startled at first, spear flinching in his grip as he muttered. \"By the spirits.\"\n\n\"They're with me, don't you remember?\" Tarwin interrupted, sweeping in between me and him.\n\nHe looked sceptical, shaking his head.\n\n\"Of course. Oh, and your father's been asking for you,\" he added, motioning back to the village.\n\n\"I'll bet he has,\" she sighed, turning towards the inner sanctuary and the central firelight.\n\nAs expected, we drew more glances from the few people that were about as we entered the village. It was quieter than I remembered. Then again, most of them were probably still bed bound. After all, this was the fifth night of celebrating, and whatever they drank from the kegs in the great hall, well...\n\nWhen we were much younger, Tarwin and I tried some, and nearly managed to set sail with one of the docked boats as a result. In fact, it was surprising that I hadn't accidently wandered all the way up north and found my destiny back then. Acrodan would have certainly been in for a surprise when he found me passed out on the floor of Ilivar.\n\nThe voice in my head sneered at the idea, as I inwardly chuckled. Meanwhile, Tarwin abruptly stopped in front of me, and thankfully Risha held me back before I could walk into her.\n\nUrgh, I'm almost twice as big now, I must remember that!\n\nWe were standing outside the great hall, the largest building in the village, and soon to be the centre of the last celebration.\n\n\"I've got to have a word with Father. Let him know we've more than a pretend dragon to celebrate.\" Tarwin announced, before stepping up the stairs and adding, \"You can come in, if you want, I won't be long.\"\n\nI placed a forepaw forward to follow before I remembered and looked back to Risha \u2013 I wasn't going to go without her.\n\n\"Go, you need to,\" she suggested softly.\n\nAs surprised as I was, I knew I wanted to hear those words and I simply offered a nod of appreciation.\n\nTarwin was already through the doors when I reached them, snaking between the wood before they closed. The moment I was inside, the stench of a week's worth of festivities hit me. The sickly liquid they so greedily consumed pooled amidst the cobblestones, while the wooden tankards it spilt from lay forgotten among toppled stools and discarded scraps. Long, wooden tables stretched down the length of the hall, creating an alleyway of festive carnage, ranging from discarded meat to tossed cutlery. I averted my muzzle from the stench, redirecting my eyes towards the roof. The curved rafters formed the inner frame of the hall, creating a circle of wooden struts, each decorated with shields, swords, axes and the odd mounted animal head.\n\nFlickering torches bathed the dark wood and grey stone with their light, and a long, rectangular fire pit ran lengthways between the two centre-most tables. A large roasting spit spanned its length, and a significant amount of the roasted carcass remained. Its flesh looked succulent, with the occasional charred flake falling into the simmering fire as forks and skewers sat idly by. I assumed they had roasted a hog for each night of the celebration. It was only an occasion like this that would warrant the consumption of a full animal, never mind five!\n\nTarwin's Father was never one for subtlety when it came to this kind of thing. I recalled, thinking back to the time he'd had a whole cow spit roasted.\n\nDaring to lower my muzzle, I saw Tarwin walking through the festive desolation with little care, heading towards her father. The stocky, bearded giant sat on a throne at the far end of the hall, but he wasn't the jolly man I recalled from nights like this. He was talking to someone, a man who I guessed was only a little older than Tarwin. I struggled to recognise him, wondering if he'd come from another village.\n\nThe pair were mid-conversation and when Tarwin stole their attention, an uneasy silence fell as she approached. I stopped, slightly sceptical of the pair. Her father gave a subtle nod, dismissing the second human, his armour and weaponry shifting noisily as he made his way down the aisle towards her. I couldn't help noticing how the two glanced at each other as they passed.\n\nWho is he, looking at her like that? For some reason I felt a spike of jealous frustration.\n\n\"Miss Tarwin,\" he greeted with a crisp nod.\n\n\"Yorik,\" she replied, more dismissively.\n\nHe passed on with little recognition of her tone as she turned to her father. Meanwhile, I stepped aside, allowing him through. From the confused look I received I don't think he recognised me either, choosing instead to divert his attention with a subtle grunt.\n\nFunny, I never thought they trusted strangers from beyond the forest here so much.\n\n\"Ahhhh, there she is!\" Tarwin's Father bellowed, opening his arms in greeting.\n\nHis daughter gave a heavy sigh and stopped at the base of his throne.\n\n\"What did he want?\" she asked moodily, setting the limp bodies of her quarry on the table at her side and narrowly missing a sleeping villager.\n\nHer father turned and slouched, waving the idea away with a broad hand.\n\n\"We were discussing the trade agreement and changes regarding the wall,\" he replied.\n\nSensing the lie in his words as clearly as I did, she sighed. But her father was quick to change the subject.\n\n\"Any good news?\" he asked hopefully.\n\n\"No,\" she replied sourly.\n\nIs there really any good news in the world right now? I thought as the voice in my head growled.\n\nHer father's drunken state seemed to stave off disappointment enough to keep him talking.\n\n\"Oh well, never mind, I've got some good news for you.\"\n\nI could almost feel her tense as she replied, \"Let me guess, that's why Yorik was really here?\"\n\nRaising his hand, he stroked his beard, contemplating her mood like it were somehow a joke. In the same moment, she turned her scowl from him, directing it to the limp game beside her.\n\n\"The beast-men push further south every day, they slaughter our game, other villages, and you don't seem to care,\" she snapped firmly, staring down at the dead carcasses.\n\n\"Tarwin, we've spoken about this. As long as they're out there, then it's not our problem.\"\n\nHer eyes snapped back to him as her sharp tone hissed.\n\n\"No, it will be our problem when they come into our village burning and pillaging!\"\n\n\"Then we'll beat them back into the holes they crawled out of, but until such time we stay put and defend our own,\" he commanded firmly.\n\n\"I'll speak to you properly when you're sober,\" she was swift to finish, turning back and drawing her father's gaze towards me.\n\nAt first, he looked puzzled, but then he smiled. I knew he'd never liked me, but I'd saved his daughter and the last time I saw him he did at least acknowledge me.\n\n\"Well, I see you've found your little dragon for tonight,\" he cheered as she walked away.\n\nI had no idea if he thought I was real or a drunken hallucination, but he seemed childishly overjoyed.\n\n\"Come on, Blaze,\" she sighed, without looking back as her father burst into a drunken song about fishing for sea serpents.\n\nSnaking through the closing door behind her, I tried to clear the smell from my nostrils and take in as much of the crisp, night air as possible. The others were still waiting at the base of the steps. Risha and Ember glanced about, but it seemed neither dared move without me, while Boltock was still lost to his grief. I felt a strange sensation come over me, the lives I never imagined I would meet, were stood here in front of me. When I'd watched Tarwin ride off into the mist I never imagined I would see her again, never mind find myself back home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"You'll be glad to know this old place hasn't changed too much,\" Tarwin joked as she led the four of us up the steps to our old home.\n\nI glanced up at the wooden frame supporting the walls beneath the triangular roof and felt new warmth grip me as my claws tapped on the familiar stone. It had been such a long time since I'd heard that sound, and the sound of every paw-step that followed filled me with more joy.\n\nTarwin was first through the door and standing in the archway she held the heavy wooden thing open. I passed through, leaning against the hinged wood and relieving her of the duty, with a courteous snort. My intelligence may have confused anyone else, but not her. She smiled, rolled her eyes, and muttered about how I was the first gentleman she'd met in weeks as she moved inside.\n\nI remembered it perfectly. Tarwin was always first in, and she would light the fire. I loved the fire, lying in the flames was especially luxurious. The memory played like a mirror of the last day I'd been here, only now there were no wyverns to steal her away.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Risha chirped as she moved by, her interest stolen by my home.\n\nEven Ember's gaze was directed about the interior, while Boltock entered last, his eyes clouded and downcast.\n\nStepping away from the door behind him, the hinged wood rattled as it slammed, just like I remembered. The moment it sealed, the warmth of the new-born fire chased the cold away and the dancing light of the flames defeated the darkness.\n\n\"So, this is where you lived?\" Risha asked, her eyes scanning the high triangular ceiling crossed by wooden struts, to Tarwin's bed suspended at the far end.\n\n\"Yeah, but it's got nothing on where I live now,\" I replied appreciatively.\n\nShe glanced at me with an equally playful smile. This building may once have been my home, but I'd never leave her or any of the others for it.\n\nA clatter in the small storage room at the back of the house was enough to draw our attention. Risha gave a subtle laugh at my swift concern, covering her giggle with a wing.\n\n\"She trained you well.\"\n\nFor a moment I struggled to understand what she meant, before appreciating her observation with a roll of my eyes. I may be living as a dragon now, but I had to admit I'd been a glorified pet when I lived here.\n\nYeah, a very smart one who now has a friend who jokes about it every time I act like one!\n\nShe raised her head and gave a subtle nod in the direction of the storeroom.\n\n\"Fine,\" I sighed, giving in to her friendly torment.\n\nMoving around the fire I peered in, and sure enough, Tarwin was stood at the opposite side, picking up one of the metal forks that I knew was supposed to hang on the walls.\n\n\"Stupid things!\" she cursed, setting the utensil down on a wooden table. \"Every hook and latch in here is getting rusty.\"\n\nI cautiously crept through, hopping down the step separating the stone floor of the main house from the base of the storeroom. She reached beneath her fur cape and pulled out another rabbit, one I noted, she'd not left with her father.\n\nShe certainly hasn't changed one bit. I thought as she set the limp body down on the table, before noticing me.\n\n\"What? You didn't expect me to let him have all of it with the food he's got in there, did you?\"\n\nIt was like she read the words straight from my mind.\n\n\"I'm never letting this place run low on food again,\" she added quietly, setting her bow on a shelf above the table.\n\nSo long as she does not get kidnapped doing so, I'm fine with that.\n\nWith a huff, she sat back on a rickety stool, letting out what I could only describe as a strange mixture of a sigh and a groan while resting her head in her palms, elbows supported by the table.\n\n\"It's not been the same without you, first Mother and, well...\"\n\nIt wasn't hard to imagine her pain; she seemed lost, her feelings blurring into a deep sadness. I knew it was my decision to leave, knowing full well what I was leaving behind. I knew she respected that, she was the only human who ever could, but being here now, I realised how much it had hurt to lose her.\n\nShe was my family; she'd raised and cared for me from an egg. Sitting beside the chair, I thought about how much more I now knew, about all the things that transpired centuries ago, Mordrin, Acrodan and the fall of her ancestors' kingdom. The reality that had been kept from her, and I wondered if she really knew where I'd gone or what had truly happened at Ilivar?\n\n\"I've missed you, Blaze,\" she sighed, placing her hand gently between my horns as she always used to do. \"But as long as you're happy with your own...\" she continued, forcing herself to accept it. \"I'm happy for you.\"\n\nIf only I could tell her, I could say something to make her understand. I didn't know why I'd chosen them over her, all I knew was that it felt right.\n\n\"I would give them all names,\" she continued with a laugh, counting my three friends on her fingers. \"But I imagine you've already got them. So, I'll stick to red, blue and green.\"\n\nI couldn't help but snicker slightly at the notion. She would never know their dragon names, they were special, but nowhere near as special as the one she'd given to me. The name only a seven-year-old girl could give to a legendary creature.\n\n\"Eh, then again, if I could understand you, we wouldn't be the same, would we?\"\n\nOnce more she read those words from my mind like a book. I had to admit, as much as I wished I could talk to her, things would never be the same if I could. The first time I'd spoke and received a response everything changed. I'd spoken to dragons, griffins and the possessed Acrodan, but it wouldn't be the same if I could speak to her, she certainly wouldn't be the Tarwin I knew.\n\n\"Just leave it!\" the sound of a voice from the main room interrupted.\n\nTarwin showed little recognition of words, maybe hearing a grunt or a growl. Edging towards the doorway I could see the others, their shadows silhouetted by the fire on the wall behind the flame. Behind me, Tarwin stood, turning back to the table.\n\n\"You should probably go and make sure they're settled; this must all be pretty strange for them.\"\n\nCreeping out, I found Risha stood behind Boltock, his sorrowful head directed towards Ember, his eyes quivering with tears. The fiery dragoness looked like she was breaking under the strain of her emotions, but her firm demeanour held. I crept further into the room, stopping when I found myself on the opposite side of the fire. Risha was the only one who seemed to notice my presence, glancing at me as the others stammered.\n\n\"Ember, I... I...\" Boltock's voice quivered as if he was freezing, his weak expression faring no better.\n\nHe looked truly sorry, his face begging for the forgiveness that his words were unable to convey. It almost seemed to break Ember. She shivered violently as if trapped in an icy blizzard.\n\n\"He was gone the moment he struck you, but you, you... you ran your muzzle, you...\" The fiery dragonesse's muzzle wrinkled as she sniffed.\n\n\"I accept that you're sorry, but don't ever talk to me again!\" she snapped, shattering Boltock like fragile glass.\n\nRisha glancing at him in sympathy but focused on her fiery friend, as if silently asking for what Boltock couldn't.\n\n\"Risha, leave it,\" Ember growled.\n\nI averted my eyes, disgusted by the fact that this wasn't tearing me apart as much as it should. My mind's dark phantom really was missing its chance to drag me back into the darkness.\n\nMeanwhile, Boltock curled into a tight ball beneath his wing. Risha nudged him gently, not getting a response, she raised a paw to try once more before stopping when she caught me watching. If we were the only two that hadn't broken down, then unless we could do something soon, we'd be next. I made my way round to where she stood.\n\n\"You should get some sleep,\" I suggested, glancing at Ember who stared into the fire. \"Maybe we can sort this out when things have calmed down.\"\n\nRisha nodded before finally settling beside her brother.\n\n\"You should do the same,\" she added quickly, closing her eyes and curling up beneath her wings.\n\nLooking to Tarwin's bed, I really had no idea whether to be happy, sad, glad or frightened.\n\n\"It's not nearly as warm anymore,\" Tarwin's calm voice announced.\n\nI turned to see her leant against the storeroom doorway, bow strung over her shoulder.\n\n\"Then again, what do you expect when someone who can breathe fire kept it warm?\" she added with a smile.\n\nI rolled my eyes. She saw me breathe fire once and now it's as if I could always do it?\n\n\"Listen, I've got to go to Father, it is a celebration after all; do you want to come? It's the night of the dragon,\" she suggested eagerly.\n\nI'd been a part of that celebration for most of my life, and if I didn't know better, I'd say it was the creators' work that brought me here on this night of all nights. I wanted to be with her, to live a part of the life I once knew, but then I'd have to leave the others.\n\n\"Must be good company,\" she noted, her eyes falling where mine now rested, on Risha.\n\nHers too, remained unmoved, before she finally spoke again. \"Well, I shouldn't be long. It's not like I'm going to be drunk like the rest of them; otherwise, they'd never get fed.\"\n\nFinishing her words with a slight laugh she departed, the loud slam of the door shaking me from my stare.\n\nGood, bad, terrified? How am I supposed to feel about this?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The calm night air was cold and crisp against my scales. In the black abyss I could see the orange glow of my breath escaping against the firelight, its heat a minor disturbance in the otherwise freezing sky. The flames' scent mixed with the sound of the distant sea, and if it wasn't for the rowdy sounds of merriment coming from the hall, and the dark shadow of the new wall, it would be a night like every other I could remember.\n\nSo much for the last of their celebrations, I bet they're no less indulged than their first.\n\nIt had to be good, because Tarwin hadn't returned, and I'd half an urge to go searching for her. It was probably her loyalty to her father that was keeping her there. If there were guests from other villages, she would be expected to greet them with him.\n\nShe's probably the only voice of reason around here.\n\nI became concerned at the recollection of the strange man in the hall and the way he'd looked at me, not that it mattered, because for once I could dismiss it. Tarwin would never be like that, if any of them did try anything Tarwin would need to be the one they should be concerned about, not me.\n\nShe'd never let anything happen to me here. I thought contently as my claws scraped wood.\n\nI used to sit in this hatch for hours on end. The smoke from the fire had once been my only competitor, but now the walls fought to condemn my growing size.\n\nGive it another year and I won't fit up here!\n\nThankfully, the star-laden view I was so fond of remained unchanged. A sea of specks sparkling like jewels, washed by dancing beams of coloured light. Beyond them, the depth of the sky was so immense it felt like I could fly forever upwards. Nothing could make me forget the scene; it was imprinted like an impossibly detailed portrait on the fabric of my mind. Tonight, there was one difference amidst the stars, however, just like days ago bright lights darted down.\n\nMaybe Pyro's prediction was right. Maybe the red sky heralds the shooting streaks' arrival?\n\nA whoosh of wings and the sound of claws on wood was enough to steal my thoughts. I glanced back to see Risha perched on one of the beams, with a curious look on her face.\n\n\"I was never supposed to fly in here,\" I admonished gently.\n\nShe smiled.\n\n\"I imagine that wasn't Tarwin's rule?\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. She has the right reply for everything.\n\nBefore I could respond she invited herself to the ledge with a gentle beat of her wings. It was a tight squeeze, but I gave her as much room as I could.\n\n\"The one thing Dardien's never had,\" she commented, gazing upon the stars. \"A view like this.\"\n\n\"I used to sit up here all the time,\" I admitted.\n\n\"Wondering if dragons could fly to the stars, I presume?\" she asked expectantly.\n\nI bowed my head, slightly embarrassed. My eyes lowered to the village and the cliff beyond the darkness, thankful that the wall hadn't blocked out everything. The workings in my mind sparked to life, spurred and directed by a deep, elusive motive.\n\n\"Want a better view?\" I asked, falling forward and spreading my wings before she could say a word.\n\nThe cool night air caught me like an invisible blanket, and I glided out from the open hatch. Beating my wings hard, turning my glide into a hover.\n\n\"Come on!\" I called eagerly, and she laughed as she fell from the hatch to join me.\n\nThe freezing air bit my wing tips, yet I felt strangely warm, an exhilaration greatly increased as the land fell away and the torch-lit shapes of boats by the pier came into view.\n\nThe docks gave way to the inky blackness of the sea, its churning peaks kissed by the glow from the village fires. I felt confident with Risha at my side, I'd rarely flown over the open sea, and never at night. Her magnificent, moonlit scales shimmered with the motion of her near silent wing beats as her sapphire eyes gleamed like blue stars. Coiling my wings, I spun into a twirl, darting upward before curling back towards her. She gave an amused laugh, narrowed her eyes, beat her wings hard, and propelled herself up. As she reached the top of her climb they snapped to her side. Her momentum stopped immediately, she tilted, and fell from the sky.\n\nI slowed myself into a hover, watching with both caution and awe as she fell like a blue arrow, almost indistinguishable from the falling stars. I could see her smiling victoriously as she plummeted, turning her dive into a rapid spin. The instinct to stop her surged as she fell toward the water, but I knew how skilled she was, and before she hit the writhing surface, her wings opened with a striking clap. The sudden force turned the water's surface into a shower of droplets and salty spray as my worry turned into a proud \u2013 and relieved \u2013 laugh.\n\n\"Beat that!\" she challenged triumphantly, curving into my flight path.\n\nMy eyes narrowed as I mirrored her. 'Beat that?' I can beat that!\n\nMy eyes scoured the gushing waters and then the cliff face as an idea came to me. I'd only pulled it off once before; it had terrified me, not to mention Tarwin. Now I was alight with a burning confidence and Risha seemed to notice my flame like an insect to torchlight.\n\n\"Impress me,\" she challenged.\n\nChallenge accepted, I worked my wings on the wind, carrying me up until I pulled them to my sides. For a moment, the world fell silent, all I could hear was my breathing and rapid heartbeat before things turned into a whirling blur and I fell towards the water. The cold touch of the salty air rushed by, stinging my scales. I closed my eyes, forcing myself into a streamlined arrow, until with an almighty splash, the world became a freezing storm of muffled sound. I felt myself speed into the depths, and even through closed eyes I could detect the cold soup growing darker. Forcing the reluctant, leathery membranes of my wings to unfurl against the water's resistance, I stretched down with my paws until my claws touched the seaweed-laden seabed. Upon contact I coiled up, pushed hard, and forced my wings and tail to propel me towards the surface.\n\nDespite my confidence, the last time I'd done something like this a villager had to fish me out of the water.\n\nBut last time I wasn't what I am today!\n\nI beat my wings as wide and as hard as I could, the water tearing past the leathery tissue with more fury than the rapids. A dim light blossomed beyond my closed eyelids, until all at once, the world exploded around me and I erupted from the sea in a watery spray, bursting into the sky like a comet. I took my first deep breath, opening my eyes the moment the cold air struck me, finally twirling back into a steady flight.\n\n\"I did it!\" I cheered to myself, swaying victoriously in the air. \"Ha-ha, I did it!\"\n\n\"Okay, I'm impressed,\" Risha called, swooping in beside me, her face alight with an amazement I never wanted her to lose.\n\n\"Now you'll never be able to turn down a bath,\" she added jokingly.\n\nSettling into a calm flight, we banked back towards the village. If I recalled correctly there was a field at the top of the cliff where the sheep were left to graze. Tarwin had often had to stop me from chasing them when I was younger, but she wasn't here now. I had to remind them I was back, and swooping low across the flock, I did just that. With a chatter of bleats and a symphony of stampeding hooves they scattered like wispy clouds in the wind.\n\nRisha swooped in beside me, a look of excitement beaming across her face. I could almost imagine this as my life, sharing it with the best friend I could ever wish for. My heart raced and a warm feeling filled my veins, blocking out the night's chill. I felt like shouting with excitement, flying up and declaring to all the world that I was happy for once.\n\nSwooping down, I set my claws into the grass, flattening the sharp stalks. I settled down in the field with the tree line not too far behind. Risha landed at my side, smiling wildly.\n\n\"Told you there was a better view,\" I finally declared, through my joyous exertions.\n\nHer eyes settled on the sea of stars covering the dark ocean, watching the falling streaks of silver beautifully reflected by the water. While droplets dripped from her shimmering sapphire scales, I took the opportunity to shake the water from my body, before moving closer.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" she professed as her wings settled like gleaming sheets of silken diamond.\n\n\"Yeah, it's not the only thing.\" I found myself surprised by the words escaping my muzzle as I looked at her.\n\nHer muzzle was parted by possibly the happiest, and at the same time, most stunned, expression I'd ever seen. She leaned onto me, brushing her neck against mine.\n\n\"Whatever happened to getting some sleep?\" she asked, and I felt my body go rigid.\n\nI didn't have an answer and I didn't think she expected one. This was something new, something I'd never considered, and yet it felt more natural than flight or breathing fire.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" she whispered quietly, but for the first time ever, I wasn't looking to the stars to see that beauty.\n\n\"How sssentimental,\" a voice hissed from the darkness.\n\nI spun round, with Risha not far behind, and sure enough one of the shadow-creatures we'd escaped was sitting on a withering tree branch. A stream of deadly fluid dripped from its jaw while its blade-tipped tail whipped about like a venomous snake ready to strike. A pair of tattered wings covered its hunched body as its head snaked forward, its eyeless scowl piercing my senses like no ocular gaze ever could.\n\n\"It'sss mossst amusssing,\" the creature hissed mockingly, \"to think that you believe, you of all othersss, will ssstop usss.\"\n\nI jumped to my paws, locking my eyes on the exposed creature. It seemed amused, letting out a triumphant snarl while cautiously panning its head from side to side, exposing rows of long fangs in its open jaw.\n\n\"What? Who are you?\" I demanded, my eyes screaming as if I was staring at the sun.\n\nIts caution turned to what appeared to be shock. Its movements ceasing as its mouth closed, the last hiss reduced to a slow, clicking gargle. Sitting motionless for a moment, whatever thought process was going on in its mind, it hadn't planned for my question and didn't like it.\n\n\"Your arrogance towardsss the truth is nothing but an insssult to your creatorssss.\"\n\nI stepped forward, forcing my eyes to focus, no matter how much they wanted to pull away.\n\n\"What do you know about me?\"\n\nThis has gone beyond Acrodan's plot to unleash the sphere's power. I've always felt there was more, something beyond what the creators told me or intended.\n\n\"Our massster once cursssed usss to oblivion, he wasss a fool and you are foolsss to oppossse usss,\"\n\nIts tone grew deeper with every hiss-heightened syllable, its mouth twitching, almost struggling to express its words.\n\n\"Sssuch weakness, we are ssstrong, and you, all of you, are nothing but a ssspeck on our realm,\" it hissed, leaning forward from its branch.\n\n\"Get back!\" I snapped, forcing myself between it and Risha.\n\nThe creature recoiled, revealing there was still some doubt in its mind. Then it rose tall on the withering branch, one clawed forelimb raising and grasping the air before curling into a bony fist.\n\n\"The Guardian wissshesss for a fight? You truly are a fool.\"\n\nLeaping from its branch it fell towards us. Without hesitation I opened my muzzle ready to torch it, but before I had the chance, it swooped up, and through some impossible manipulation of reality, disappeared into the darkness. In that moment of relief, a new sound rang out over the water, one I didn't recognise until my eyes found its source and I felt my heart stop. Light from the flames bathed the swarm of creatures while shadows grew over their bodies.\n\nThey're not after us, they're after the village!"
            },
            {
                "title": "On Wings of Shadow",
                "text": "The forms of several more creatures burst from the trees, their smoke-covered bodies bathed in firelight, they plummeted towards the village like dark mirrors of the fallen stars. Without a second thought, I spread my wings and leapt into the air.\n\n\"Blaze, wait!\"\n\nRisha's words were drowned out as my heart raced, my wings beat furiously, and my eyes scoured the flame-lit tree line. A dark form rose from the glow, its body bathed in flames as it dove to the ground with a fiery flash. Another pair repeated the incredible manoeuvre, the fires growing with each of their blazing sacrifices.\n\nThey're setting themselves on fire and killing themselves! I could not comprehend their twisted strategy any more than I could stand to look at them.\n\nNo, there's got to be more to it than that!\n\nI heard the alarm bell sound, only to be cut off by a loud crash as muffled warning calls sounded over the ring of drawn steel and crackling flames.\n\nI beat my wings harder, forcing myself towards the chaos as another beast performed its blazing sacrifice. As one disintegrated, another materialised, maybe even the same one. Without warning, one of the flaming balls of shadow struck me, its jaws snapping above my neck as its claws dug into my hide.\n\nThat's it, those claws are a death sentence.\n\nIt thrashed and squirmed as we became a swirling furnace of flames plummeting towards the ground. I forced myself around, almost tearing my wings on its spines, and with a firm kick, I managed to shove it away.\n\nI felt its spikes scrape the hard scales along my back, and I struck the wooden walkway along the wall's inner rim. The world spun, the only sound amidst the muffled din of battle that of my racing heart. I bounced to the ground, panting for breath I rolled onto my front, only to be faced with another of the creatures as it dribbled down like liquid darkness before me.\n\n\"Flee, foolsss,\" it hissed, its tone slightly higher than the one I'd previously heard.\n\nThrough my dazed eyes I could see its teeth bearing down, as its rasping breath touched my snout, it stopped, its confident grimace fading when it was unable to move its right claw.\n\n\"What isss thisss?\"\n\nIce grew up its foreleg like fire up a frozen tree trunk.\n\n\"Get away from him!\" Risha growled, stealing its attention long enough for a spear of ice to hit it between its non-existent eyes.\n\nFor a moment it looked like it had worked, the creature's mouth widened and shivered, until its fangs closed into an angry scowl. The ice firmly lodged in what would have been its brain disintegrated, the hole it made healing instantly as if it were nothing more than an inconvenience.\n\nTugging at its immobilised limb, shadowy claws phased through the restricting ice as it homed in on my friend. A ball of blue fire consumed its body, turning its arrogant recovery into a frantic attempt to escape, while Risha leapt down beside me and it boiled into charred black embers.\n\nHow am I still alive, that thing should have killed me?\n\n\"What were you thinking?\" she demanded.\n\n\"The others! We have to find the others!\" I replied, urgently staggering back to my paws.\n\nAll I could do now was get everyone to safety, wherever that may be. That was a task made all the more difficult by what was unfolding about me. The village was ablaze and individual battles raged around the flames. Those guards who had not been plucked from the walls inconvenienced the creatures with spears, as they toyed with their targets like cats with mice.\n\nDoorways lay open beneath flaming rooftops laden with dark smoke, while the spawn of filth crept inside every house. A screech pierced my ears when the gates to the far field burst open and a flock of panicked sheep flooded out. Beyond them the horses bolted, a pair jumping the fence with ease and escaping into the forest.\n\nWhat... What am I supposed to do?\n\n\"Blaze!\"\n\nRisha's cry came too late and shadows swept me from my paws. Claws gripped my shoulders and harsh smoke burned my throat. I beat my attacker's wing with my tail, fighting to knock it from the sky. It hissed and snarled, its teeth flashing when, with a final slap of my tail, I forced us apart. The sudden shift sent it swirling through a thatched rooftop, its body buckling as it slammed into a rafter, before tumbling onto the hot coals of a dying fire. Glowing embers sprayed out like molten rain, the creature hissing as its body warped back together, righting itself in a cloak of flame as I swooped through the hole and landed on a rafter.\n\n\"Blaze!?\"\n\nIt was Ember's voice that made me realise what house the creature had crashed into.\n\n\"Blaze!\" her panicked tone cried out again when the creature launched itself up at me in a flurry of cinders.\n\nIts reckless decision only resulted in a torching from two fiery torrents as both Ember and I unleashed blasts of dragonfire, the combined conflagrations turning the monster to dust.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Boltock cried, waking up with a jump.\n\nHis first indication of something unusual happening was me gagging on the shadow I'd inhaled, as Ember panted heavily at my side.\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha's worried voice sounded from the hole in the roof before she swooped down. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nI pressed a forepaw to my chest as I wheezed, but Ember was the first to respond.\n\n\"What's going on? Why in the creators' name were you two out there?\"\n\n\"I... we...\" Risha hesitated, words falling into a stammer before I interrupted.\n\n\"You have to leave now.\"\n\nEmber glanced between us with a disapproving scowl as Risha asked.\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\nBaring my teeth I turned to the door.\n\n\"I have to find Tarwin. Leave, I'll find you in the forest.\"\n\n\"Blaze, wait!\" she cried, but I shook my head.\n\n\"No! Go! Go now!\"\n\nGiving her no more time to protest, I lowered my horns and rammed the door open, charging into the village battlefield. I skidded to a halt amidst the fighting forms of winged horrors and men, their dusty remains swept away on the wind while roaring fires silhouetted the carnage. Before I could gag, cry, or scream, the world became a swirling ball of light, dark flames, and shadow coiling around me when one of the creatures swept over the central fire and slammed into my flank. In a spray of dirt my claws dug into the damp earth, grinding me to a halt.\n\nHissing angrily, the abomination rushed at me, holding its fanged mouth wide. If I hadn't known better, I could have sworn it was the one I'd just vanquished. With my teeth bared and nostrils flared, I lowered myself ready to lunge. It could bite and scratch all it wanted, but I wasn't easy prey, and it wasn't the only one with god-like powers.\n\nThe whoosh of metal and a heavy thud shattered the image of the charging creature, its spiny form forced to the ground as its barbed head was cut clean-off. The long, steel blade sat wedged in the dirt where the creature's body disintegrated, and I looked up to see its attacker, instantly recognising him as the man who'd been talking to Tarwin's Father in the hall.\n\nYorik. I recalled the name, but he looked at me like the filth he'd slain.\n\n\"You!\" he growled, dragging the blade from the dirt.\n\nWhat does he mean?\n\nFor a moment, a surge of fear struck me, before shock and finally dread set in.\n\nHe thinks I did this I... My thoughts collapsed. These things are only here because of me, I led them here!\n\nBefore I could fully consider the idea, the smoky sky behind him wavered beneath a pair of dark wings, and he gave an angry cry as I coiled back. The bolt of white-hot flame surged by him like an airborne inferno, sending the creature back into oblivion before its claws could strike him. He staggered as the force of the shot exploded. Panting heavily, I managed to snake around his legs before he clumsily struck out, his sword lodging in the dirt where I'd been standing.\n\nWhat did he just do?\n\nI was sure if it wasn't for the creature, his steel blade would have struck me.\n\nI shook my head. This isn't the time for questions, I must find Tarwin. She... She'd never let anyone here hurt me!\n\nBlocking out the destruction around me, I bolted towards the hall. Smoke filled my lungs and fire my sight as more blazing creatures dove into the village like seabirds after a shoal of defenceless fish.\n\nMy home... everything... on fire. I narrowed my eyes and fortified my thoughts. No, get to Tarwin, make sure she's safe!\n\nRapidly approaching the hall, I lowered my horns and burst through the doors. The stench of smoke followed like an angry river in my wake, while the light of roaring flames illuminated a perfect square on the alcohol-saturated floor. I ground to a halt at the end of the tables, baring my teeth and snorting like an angry boar. My motivation to fight wavered as I looked at a group of cowering villagers, mostly women and children, backed into the far corner beyond the throne. A few armed men stood around the hall, and at first, I feared they'd strike me.\n\nNo, Tarwin will never let them, what happened outside must have been some misunderstanding.\n\nAs I paused and subdued my anger, I noticed their anxious eyes looked to the inferno beyond the open doorway.\n\nWhat's there to misunderstand? I caused this, like I cause everything to go wrong.\n\nTarwin's Father stood before his throne, his mighty war axe in hand. My eyes finally fell upon Tarwin, protecting a panicked group in the corner. With her bow drawn, she seemed to be the only level-headed one here, neither drunk nor scared to death. I scampered towards her before a gust of wind and a loud slam signalled the doors opening behind me.\n\n\"Blaze!\"\n\nTarwin's cry drew everyone's attention, including her father's, towards me as I was thrown into one of the long tables. With a blood-curdling scream one of the creatures burst into the hall, its wing beats carrying the choking shroud of death. With a forceful flap it knocked the two closest guards aside, its dark shroud covering them like cursed water as its claws touched down on the stone floor. Reality took a nervous breath in its presence, the gargled hiss of its slithering breath and the sound of its bony body grinding in my ears. Scurrying to the opposite side of the table, I peered across its width at the others.\n\nTarwin's Father was the first to act, gripping his axe across his chest with two broad arms, staring down his dark opponent. The creature took a deceptively slow step forward, scraping its claws against the stone as it gave a gargled hiss.\n\nWait, is it me or does that sound like laughter?\n\nAnother splintering crash drew my attention to the roof above Tarwin when another creature burst through. It landed in front of her, folding its wings as it lifted itself up onto its hind legs. Almost paralysed by shock she fumbled for her bow. It was almost as if the world had fallen into slow motion, like something, somewhere, wanted the moment to last.\n\nI felt completely helpless, she was too far away, the creature's impossible reflexes too fast.\n\nNo, not like this, not her!\n\nBefore I knew it, the monster was unexpectedly thrown aside by the heavy sweep of her father's axe. The metal blade carved across its body, but the nature of the weapon saw it took time to swing back, alerting the creature to a second blow long before it struck. Although it was only a fleeting moment, the monster transitioned into shadow and the axe merely brushed through, ringing out against the stone as the creature re-emerged.\n\nThe burly man drew back as the creature leapt onto the table, its claws turning plates, mugs, half-consumed food and drink to dust. Meanwhile, the monster behind me slithered down the steps, seemingly unaware of my presence.\n\nOh no, you're not sneaking around while I'm here!\n\nIts head snapped back as I jumped onto the table, releasing a torrent of flame as it lunged at me. I ducked as its burning body flew overhead, smashing into the floor before bursting into a cloud of fine black particles.\n\nMeanwhile, the second creature was thrown down the middle of the hall by a blow from the axe.\n\n\"Come on!\" he bellowed, thumping his armoured chest with a clenched fist.\n\nThe creature released a shriek, exploding forward in a violent eruption of shadow. In a split second, the broad blade came down and split its skull with tremendous force, falling to the stone with a clatter when its body dissolved back into whatever darkness had summoned it.\n\nHe did it, he killed one! I noted, as Tarwin's Father staggered to retrieve his blade.\n\nJumping down from the table, I turned towards his daughter as a wry smile cracked her face.\n\nI expect she didn't see that coming all those times she called him an old fool.\n\nThat was when I saw the shimmer in the darkness behind him, something was moving, waving, curling, as if the shadows themselves were afraid. Crippling pain consumed the stocky man as he lurched forward, and his chest exploded. Any specks of gore were instantly reduced to dust as the trident-blade skewered him like one of the pigs upon which he'd feasted.\n\nThe last glimmers of consciousness faded from his eyes as he was effortlessly lifted towards the rafters where a head of thorns emerged from the drapes of folded wings. A long, slow hiss seeped from the perched creature's fanged jaw as the man skewered upon its spiny tail was brought before its eyeless skull.\n\n\"Mortalssss, such a frail, pathetic existence,\" it hissed.\n\nI could almost feel its words scratch at my mind like sharp spikes.\n\n\"Seven!\" a familiar voice laughed.\n\n\"No!\" Tarwin screamed, drawing her arm back and releasing an arrow.\n\nThe projectile screamed through the air, piercing the side of the creature's head. It showed little care, the arrow disintegrating and the wound disappearing as it bled back into the void. Before releasing an ear-piercing shriek, uncoiling its tail like a cracking whip, tossing the body of Tarwin's Father aside like a rag, it spread its wings and leapt from the rafters.\n\nLurching to her left, Tarwin ripped a torch from its fastenings, swinging the flame round as the shadowed form swooped in. The flaming club smashed into the side of its head in a shower of embers, setting it alight and forcing it to swerve. The ball of flame and shadow spun about the rafters, smashing through several support beams before crashing into one of the monstrous kegs. The flammable within liquid exploded as soon as it met the flames, the blaze igniting the neighbouring kegs creating a wall of fire that quickly set the whole hall alight.\n\nPanic gripped the frightened villagers as they made a dash for the door. Tarwin waved them on, but her eyes remained fixed on what remained of her father's body amidst the flames. She didn't even look at me as I tried to make my way over.\n\nI have to get them out, they can't survive in this heat.\n\nAnother fiery eruption burst from the gurgling flames and fire swarmed along the support beams while the roof gave a painful groan. A falling beam shattered the table to my left, throwing me to the floor as smoke started to choke the air.\n\nAll the while my mind's dark entity cackled, excited by my friend's mortal danger. I coughed and panted, staggering back to my paws while toxic fumes singed my throat and sapped the moisture from my eyes.\n\nI must help her!\n\nThe next time I looked through the flame, she was by her father's throne looking down over his remains.\n\n\"Tarwin... You...!\" I gasped, cursing whatever stupid curse had left me unable to call out to her.\n\nAs my words failed, I jumped up, scattering cutlery beneath my paws. The roof groaned again, buckling as another section collapsed behind me. Another shudder, and more blazing wood came down to my left, leaving only one path to Tarwin.\n\nI must get to her before this whole place crashes down!\n\nWhen another explosion lashed out, I scampered forward as fast as I could. Before me a skeletal form rose from the swirling firestorm, its long, bony appendages stretched out, dripping viscous black liquid flames, and flayed, black flesh, like a grisly hand with long, sharp fingers. While its eyeless skull peered through the inferno.\n\n\"Foolish girl,\" the incinerated creature wheezed as it turned towards Tarwin.\n\nBut... the fire... it should be dead!\n\nShe froze on the spot, and her face said it all.\n\nWait, she heard it, she understood it!\n\nAfter longing to speak to her for so long, the fact that the first inhuman voice she'd heard was this monster, infuriated me. It could do whatever it wanted, even decide whether it lived or died, a creature that obeyed no rules. It didn't care about what it did, or for the flames in which it stood.\n\nDid fire really vanquish the others? Or did it merely send them running? Does anything ever truly kill one of these monstrosities?\n\nRage flared deep inside me.\n\n\"Are we any better?\" the dark tone whispered. \"We do not die, how many more rules do we break?\"\n\nI have to be better. I subconsciously replied.\n\nErupting from the fire, the creature's molten wings opened wide. Springing up to intercept, my claws dug deep, tearing wounds of glowing light through the raw-black bones as both of us fell into the lake of boiling fire. Its bony form smashed into the stone beneath the flames. Pinning it down with all four paws I dug my claws in.\n\n\"You think you can come here and attack my home, hurt my friends!\" I could not help but scream, fire foaming around my teeth as I snarled.\n\n\"I'll show you!\"\n\nMy searing daggers burned into its carcass as its claws scratched back in a futile effort to break free. Coiling my neck, I opened my muzzle to release a torrent of blinding flame. The skeletal entity flailed wildly, swiping its dark limbs against the river of white fire, until one of its desperate swipes struck me on the side of the head and it repeatedly hit me until I was finally thrown off.\n\nI staggered as more charred rubble crashed down around me. The flames fidgeted as the creature rose to its claws, wrapping its tail behind itself and folding its fleshless wings to its side. Dark liquid trickled down its brow, exposing its razor-sharp fangs, its scorched flesh draped like loose rags, while it stared at me.\n\n\"You will all die,\" it hissed, launching itself forward.\n\nDeadly claws swept across my face only inches from my eyes, followed by teeth and the soulless expression of its face. I spun like a bucking horse, my hind paws striking its muzzle.\n\nYou're not the only ones with unnatural strength. I inwardly hissed as two burning paw marks were scorched into its splintering bone.\n\nI spun around to slash at it, my body screaming with the strain while the monster showed no sign of tiring. It simply lifted to its haunches and coiled its tail, springing like a serpent from the flames. With its jaw open wide, it released a long, slow cry from deep inside its throat. The horrific, seemingly endless sound almost disabled me, ringing in my ears and permeating my thoughts. Slumping back against the flaming remains of an overturned table, I gasped, coiling back and opening my mouth. One final ball of blinding light escaped me, whipping the surrounding flames into a frenzy before surging into the monster's maw and blowing it into a cloud of dust.\n\nDrawing in another breath I staggered, panting, wheezing, and coughing while I took a cautious step forward. The sea of flames and swirling smoke obscured my vision as more fire consumed the roof.\n\nThis place isn't going to last much longer, I have to get Tarwin!\n\nCrawling through the ruins more scorched rubble fell around me, until I finally saw her sitting near her father's throne, leaning against the wooden chair, gasping for air.\n\n\"Blaze?\" she whimpered, barely conscious.\n\nGrabbing her sleeve in my muzzle, I pulled her back. Pieces of flaming debris struck the stone before us, smoke, flames, and embers filled the air like a deadly swarm. The building released another groan as the last of the wooden supports gave way in a burst of dancing light and splinters. The rafters quickly followed its destructive descent into the sea of flames.\n\nTarwin fell limp, the smoke inhalation stealing the last of her consciousness. Dragging her to the back of the hall, and with a final blast, I created a hole through which we could escape. Smoke, the creatures' screeches, and the foul stench of death filled the air as the building gave a final groan, the force of the explosion bursting out through the breach, sending us both tumbling to the dirt.\n\nFire consumed almost every part of my vision and smoke blotted out the night's beauty with its choking shroud. Illuminated by the flames, Tarwin lay at my paws, defeated, beaten, and smothered in ash, but alive and still breathing. Her gloveless hands were slightly burnt, and her reddish hair was singed, her clothes caked in soot.\n\nTarwin... what have I done? I thought. I'm sorry.\n\n\"Tarwin!\" a recognisable voice sounded from somewhere amidst the chaos. \"Tarwin!\"\n\nYorik led several men, battered, bruised and coated in ash. I froze, a cold dread creeping over me as cries and screams sounded out over the thudding of the villagers' heavy boots. Things became muffled as Yorik screamed at me, drawing his sword. I staggered back, the noisy betrayal bolstered by the dark creature in my mind, telling me to show them my true power, to not let such pitiful fools threaten me.\n\n\"No! I'm better than that!\" I shouted aloud as I turned and ran as fast as my legs would carry me, over the wall, across the fields, and into the forest's darkness.\n\nBefore long, the sound of battle gave way to silence, the light of the fire dulled and fell into the night and I carried on running through the trees, over bushes, fallen logs, across rock-strewn ditches and mossy streams. My lungs whooshed like beating wings, each scorched inhalation burning my throat. My legs strained in agony, but I didn't stop, I couldn't stop.\n\nWhat have I done? How far have I gone? The questions manifested as my dark avatar ran beside me, laughing while his molten eyes peered into mine.\n\nAll I knew had gone up in flames \u2013 my family was shattered, and I knew nothing of my friends. I'd left them all to the inferno and the wrath of the darkness's spawn.\n\n\"How ironic,\" the creature bounding at my side hissed.\n\n\"Shut up!\"\n\n\"The world doesssn't care about you.\"\n\nI opened my muzzle to yell in protest, but he was right \u2013 the world doesn't care, so why should I?\n\nMy own kind betrayed me, my family was lost, and my friends were broken by the loss of one who would strike them.\n\nWhy should I care? Why should I save them? Why should I fulfil the creators' wishes?\n\nThey'd left the world to die when it needed them most, when a blessing they'd sent turned out to be pure evil.\n\nWhy do I care? My eyes slammed shut, blocking out everything that rushed by.\n\nMy defences had been breached and I was no longer able to bottle up the hate, the rage, the guilt or sorrow. The only sign that the world around me existed were the jolts of my stride and the thud of my rapid paws on the cold, damp earth. Until my paws were abruptly swept from under me and I slammed to the dirt muzzle first.\n\nMy rear legs kicked upwards, while my eyes remained sealed. I didn't want to see the world, to see the fire through the trees, to smell the smoke or hear the distant screams. Yet amid my oblivion I sensed none of it. The night air was cold and dark, the sounds of buzzing insects and swaying grass beckoning me to open my eyes.\n\nI can't look, I don't deserve to, I should lie here in the dirt until I rot.\n\nI'd allowed everything I ever cared about, everything I loved, to fall, and when I thought about it, I couldn't bring myself to care.\n\n\"Why so harsssh on yourssself?\" the grisly voice hissed, and my eyes shot open as I lashed out in the mud.\n\n\"Go away, leave me alone!\"\n\nTo my surprise the foul animation of bones disintegrated, leaving me alone in the open field. Grass swayed in the moonlight while the shimmer of the stars was crossed by a gentle cloud of smoke. I glanced back to see the faint orange glow of distant fire barely visible through the trees.\n\nThat was when something else caught my eye. The grass was broken by an old log, discarded and rotting. Water lilies bloomed proudly in a pond beside it, swarming with birds, frogs and dragonflies.\n\nT\u2013this is our field, where Tarwin and I always came. The last time I'd stood here was the day this whole mess began.\n\nGrass scratched at my sides, my scales defending against its futile attack. I tried not to look at the moonlit sea of waving vegetation, tried not to remember the last time my paws had touched this soft dirt, or to think about the sounds and smells carried on the dry wind. I walked forward, as if programmed by the hundreds of times I'd done so before, like it was a normal day and my destiny had never come to haunt me.\n\nI was stood by the remains of the fallen log and the pool before I knew it. The lilies left small gaps for the wind to chase ripples across the water, small banks sparkling in the radiant moonlight. The sound of insects and water-bound life chattered within the rustling reeds as I peered into the tranquil pool. As if sensing my presence, the surface settled, and the chatter died. The water formed a perfect mirror, allowing me to see a white dragon, with scales marred by soot and dirt, but this wasn't the reflection I expected.\n\nWhat stared back now was a dark and twisted phantom of my former self. It was cold, corrupted, and evil, broken and crippled by a world of which I'd once no knowledge of. I was no longer the content pet or the friend of those who I'd once believed never existed, and I was not the saviour tasked with the world's salvation.\n\nNo, the dark, red eyed, bony creature staring back was me.\n\n\"Did you missss me?\"\n\n\"No!\" I screamed, swiping at the water, shattering the foul image in a flurry of glistening beads.\n\nI staggered forward, my forepaw disturbing the surface once more.\n\nThat isn't me. I'm not a monster, I'm not!\n\n\"Blaze?\"\n\nRisha's soft voice came from behind me, so faint it was almost lost on the gentle breeze. My head shot up and I turned. I wasn't afraid to look her in the eyes. She had to know what I was, she had to see that I wasn't the idol she'd looked up to. I didn't say a word, nor did I attempt to hide my torment. Unfazed, she stepped forward, her eyes locked on mine as she asked.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I can't save them,\" I admitted, turning away sharply.\n\nMy tail sent the water into another rush and my sudden movement robbed her of her reply. The barriers of my mind collapsed, from the deepest, darkest, furthest reaches of the abyss as all the hatred, fear, sorrow and guilt burst out.\n\n\"I have nothing \u2013 no family, no home!\" I shouted, choking before I could finish.\n\nRisha staggered back against the decayed log.\n\n\"That's not true,\" she tried to assure me, her eyes struggling to meet with my emotion-strained spheres.\n\nHer concern for my wellbeing shone like a beacon of hope, and yet, I only saw her fighting not to see what I'd become.\n\n\"What about them?\" she asked, firmly pointing her wing to the firelight through the trees. \"What about what you've done, all you have saved?\"\n\n\"I didn't save anyone! I failed!\" I hissed, snarling.\n\nBackpedalling, her tail coiled as smoke slithered from my nostrils.\n\n\"I can't save anyone,\" I pressed, falling into a sad whimper.\n\nHer mouth opened to reply.\n\n\"No, don't!\" I continued, jabbing a wing tip at her. \"There's nothing you can say that will change what I am.\"\n\nThe words tore a hole in my chest and my head drooped as I dragged myself to the water's edge.\n\n\"So that's it? You're going to abandon everything you've done?\" she asked, her words partially stolen by a tearful sniff. \"That's not failing anyone other than yourself.\"\n\nHer emotions broke as she turned and began to walk away. I closed my eyes tighter, forcing more tears down my muzzle as the sound of her paw steps faded into the rustle of the wind and the chatter of pond creatures resumed.\n\nTears rolled down my snout, falling into the water as the wind settled and the world fell silent. The image in the tranquil mirror returned, and a white dragon stared back at me.\n\n\"It's such a ssshame,\" my dark conscience hissed, his twisted reflection appearing next to mine. \"Sssso isss thisss really it?\" he asked cryptically.\n\nA final tear rolled down my muzzle.\n\n\"You'd like that, wouldn't you?\"\n\nHe paused thoughtfully, scratching the end of his muzzle with a bony claw, and narrowing his flaming eyes.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAs confusion flooded my thoughts, he gave a sly smile.\n\n\"If you refusssse to play...\"\n\nMy eyes narrowed. He'd already said there was only one player in this game, and without me, he'd play it with others, my friends. Risha was right, she was always right.\n\nIf I don't, who else would stop my reflection?\n\nMy head shot up and I looked across the sea of waving grass, shimmering as the wind kissed its surface.\n\n\"You were never lossst,\" my shadowy reflection sneered.\n\n\"No, I wasn't! But you are!\" I shouted, and with a swift kick I bolted back into the forest after Risha.\n\nI have to do this, because if I don't, what will be left? A world of darkness swarming with those things? I could never let that happen.\n\nThe calm swaying of the field ceased, and the forest's shadow embraced me. Beyond the trees I could see the glow of the village fire.\n\nI could go back, but for what? I just hope Tarwin is safe.\n\nI knew that if I left there was a good chance those creatures would follow me away from what was left of my home.\n\nI must find Risha, she can't have gone far.\n\nThe faint moonlight barely lit the forest as the trees ceased their swaying. Once again, the eerie curse of the shadow-creatures hung like a swarm of flies over a corpse.\n\nA rustle in the undergrowth broke the silence, and I spun, hoping to see Risha, only to find dense foliage.\n\nWhere is she? She can't have left.\n\nCreeping towards the noise I half-expected her to jump out with some witty comment. That thought turned to caution when there were no further sounds.\n\n\"Risha?\" I called out.\n\nThere was no response, as I made out a light through the leaves.\n\nSurely the others haven't started a fire so close to the village. I took another cautious step, my muzzle pushing the vegetation aside.\n\nA searing pain exploded in the back of my head and along my spine. My vision distorted as my legs buckled and I collapsed towards the glow, my limbs going limp as warm trails of blood ran from the back of my neck.\n\nI... I can't feel anything.\n\nThe world became a swirling concoction of spinning trees, and blurred firelight, the dancing glow of its flames illuminating what looked like several large cubes of dark steel. Two large human-like figures stood over them, both larger than a man and darker in colour, with rugged outlines that appeared to be made from pale flesh and stone. Another struggled with something, a serpent-like shape writhing in his grasp, tail and claws beating against metal and spewing fire as the brute forced something over its muzzle. There was a loud clamp as the struggling form was shoved into one of the cubes.\n\n\"That's the last of 'em, boss,\" a grisly voice announced as it walked past me.\n\nThrough the blur of my vision, I glanced at its feet while another shape peered down over me, its half stone face, combined with scarred, pale flesh and eyes like black pebbles.\n\n\"We's know, we's heard ya' already. We's supposed to be's bein' quiet,\" another of the pair grunted.\n\nThe second creature growled, slumping back over to one of the steel cubes as they rattled and shook.\n\n\"Quiet, the pairs of ya', an' shuts them wyrms up too,\" the third of the trio demanded, pointing a clawed hand to the cubes.\n\nI recognised the voice.\n\nNo, no, no, not them, not now!\n\n\"Where's the wyrm?\" growled a commanding tone.\n\nIt's Goarog!\n\n\"Not here, boss,\" the orkin by the metal cubes replied, banging the top of the agitated box.\n\nThey're not cubes, they're cages!\n\nI tried to scream and move, but it felt like my mind had been cut from my body, all I could do was lie there helpless. Goarog's face contorted as he gave a dissatisfied grunt, each of the lesser beasts squirming in response.\n\n\"Get this one a cage, we's can still skin it,\" he growled, pointing to me with his cleaver.\n\nI had to move, do something, but I couldn't; it was as if my head wasn't part of my body and I was a rag on the floor.\n\nI repeatedly tried to stand, but my mind was cast into a storm the moment I tried to shift an inch. My insides churned like a gushing river, forcing a bloody foam into my throat.\n\n\"Are we's not going back for them meat bags, boss?\" the orkin beside Goarog asked, eagerly brandishing a blade.\n\n\"Let the shadow-demons have 'em,\" he grunted.\n\n\"An' unless we's being quiet, those things will be chewing on our hides next,\" he added, turning towards the group.\n\n\"Now get's this wyrm in a cage so's we can gets back to the mountains.\"\n\nBefore they could scoop me up, a sound from the undergrowth marked the arrival of a fifth orkin.\n\n\"Found's another one, boss,\" the newcomer snorted, showing off his catch.\n\n\"Get off me, you filthy monsters!\" Risha shouted, kicking, and snapping while the orkin's deformed talons held her by the neck.\n\nHer claws scratched against the stone hide and her tail coiled like a snake as she squirmed helplessly.\n\n\"Let go!\" she demanded repeatedly, until she saw me.\n\nI tried to force my vision to focus, to make myself stand. If there was ever a time I needed to heal in a flash, it was now, but the nature of my injury allowed none of it.\n\n\"Blaze!\" I heard her cry through the muffled thunder in my ringing ears.\n\n\"Gets that one in a cage, an' gets this one on the troll,\" Goarog demanded impatiently, pointing to me again.\n\n\"No!\" I heard Risha scream as a bright blue flame erupted from her muzzle.\n\nLike a child holding a candle the startled orkin threw her from its grip.\n\n\"Fire... I's don't like fire,\" he squealed.\n\nI tried to lurch forward a little more. I can do this, I can recover \u2013 I have to!\n\nGoarog drew his crude weapon.\n\n\"What's is you's doing, fool?\" he shouted, cursing the failed captor while the others watched and Risha rushed over to me.\n\n\"Get away!\" she growled, baring her teeth in a fearsome display as she stood over me.\n\nThe orkin were silent for a moment before they began laughing.\n\n\"Gets me that wyrm,\" Goarog demanded, lunging forward without hesitation.\n\nShe met his lunge with fire. The monstrous orkin turned his shoulder, his stone hide breaking the flames before he swung blindly, clumsily striking her side with his blade's flat edge. The width of the crude weapon, combined with the force of his blow, knocked the wind from her, throwing her into a sprawling heap. His lunge carried him forward, heavy foot landing close to my prone snout.\n\nHe gave a ferocious grunt as he swatted the blue flames from his shoulder with no sign of burning, then looked to Risha lying on the ground and gave a loud, animalistic roar. He lunged again, bringing his blade down to strike her. With all the strength, focus, and feeling I could muster I lashed out, not enough to fight, nor to stand, but to grab his leg in my foreclaws. The force of his lunge turned on him as he fell forward with a wet thud, his cleaver lodging in the dirt at his side.\n\nRisha staggered to my side when another orkin grabbed her neck and wings before she could retaliate. With my strength drained, all I could do was watch as Goarog pulled his cleaver from the dirt and staggered to his feet to stare at me.\n\n\"Resist me, will you's, wyrm?\"\n\nThe ribs of my folded wing and chest shattered under the force of his boot against my side.\n\nI was rolled onto my back as his jet-black, soulless eyes peered down without mercy or pity, uttering a series of grunted laughter.\n\n\"No wyrm resists me!\" he bellowed, and lifting his cleaver high in a warped claw, he struck down.\n\n\"No!\" Risha cried as a pain greater than anything I'd ever experienced exploded through my chest.\n\nI felt my scales prize apart, my muscles tear and my ribs splinter. My heart twitched around the gruesome blade, my lungs spewed a frothy fountain of crimson and the metal shifted deep inside my chest. Goarog knelt, leaving his weapon like a rusty spire erupting from my body.\n\n\"All's wyrm scales are softer on the underside, but the hard 'uns on top, helps keep the blade inside,\" he snorted, laughing as he turned the cleaver.\n\nI had no strength to whimper, let alone respond to Risha's cries.\n\n\"I know's you's can understand me, wyrm!\" he snapped, bringing his bony jaw close to my dying eyes, the stench of his breath kissing my muzzle. \"And you's know I's the last thing you saw before you's die,\" he added with a slow, maniacal laugh.\n\nRising to his feet, he yanked the bloodstained blade out with a simple flick of his wrist.\n\nMy ruptured scales spewed blood and with an effortless flick he forced his blade into the dirt, gripped my neck in the clawed blades of his fingers and dragged me from the ground. Like a bloodied rag I was held up before the fire, blood dripping from my tattered wings and limp tail. The world was fading, but all I focused on was Risha. Maybe because I was unworthy of her, because I'd failed her, or because before I was done there was nothing more I'd rather see.\n\nYet the last thing I'd said to her was that she was wrong.\n\n\"We's goanna haves our victory!\" Goarog proclaimed triumphantly, waving me about like a flag of domination.\n\nThe other orkin cheered with little care for the attention they might attract. While Risha stared in disbelief as a metal mask was forced over her face and she was brutally shoved into one of the cages.\n\n\"We's goanna have our victory,\" Goarog hissed, bringing my dying eyes to his. \"All wyrms will fall.\"\n\nMy last breath caught in my blood-choked throat as he tossed me into the forest like a discarded rag and I thudded to the ground. The pain was gone, the warm feeling of my life was gone. The light in my eyes extinguished, the world was consumed by darkness, and finally death..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Darkness Reborn",
                "text": "[ Reflections ]\n\nBeyond consciousness, dreams, and nightmares, there was nothing \u2013 no feeling, no sense, no thought, just emptiness. I stared into the darkness behind closed eyes, until the distinctive rattle of bones, followed by a wheezing breath, caught my attention.\n\n\"It didn't take you long to come crawling back,\" the skeletal form hissed.\n\nI looked up, the strange new environment slowing my movements. If it wasn't for his glowing eyes and molten heart, he'd have been invisible. He looked frail, as if he was dying and I was glad in the knowledge that if we were truly one, then at least I could watch him perish with me.\n\n\"I would not concern yourself with thoughts like that,\" he declared knowingly.\n\n\"If you knew the truth you would know not to,\" he added, pointing a bony foreclaw towards me.\n\nA cold black expanse of rock and spires formed around us, beneath the endless night and a radiant moon.\n\nIs it true, am I dead? I rolled onto my front, raised to my paws, and looked myself over.\n\nI don't look or feel injured. I thought, pressing a forepaw to where the blade had pierced my heart. Then again, if this is some form of afterlife, what does it matter?\n\n\"We're dead, your game is over!\" I shouted.\n\nThe dark entity cocked his head, contemplating his reply with an ember-spitting huff.\n\n\"You are so content with hopelessness,\" he chastised, grasping at the fleeting embers to extinguish them.\n\n\"But you're right, we're one in the same, and neither of us has any hope of doing what is required without the world trying to steal it from us.\"\n\nHe swatted more embers aside, uncoiling like a snake before reaching to snuff out the last one. Then he paused.\n\n\"We're both dead, but death does not concern us, does it?\"\n\nMy eyes met the glowing spheres of flame within the bony sockets of his skull.\n\n\"It's a shame you didn't have the will to save them. You just laid down and died,\" he goaded.\n\n\"What would your creators think of that?\"\n\nI lashed out, swiping the smug expression from his bony muzzle. The viscose reality slowed my strike, my paw merely passing through a disintegrating cloud.\n\n\"So, there is some fight left in you? Indeed, we are one in the same, if only you knew the truth of that,\" his disembodied voice echoed.\n\nThe air shifted again as he reformed before me. Only now he looked healthier, at least as healthy as a skeletal-dragon-hallucination could look.\n\nWhat does he mean, 'if only I knew the truth of that?' How can my own mind keep secrets from me?\n\nHe saw behind all the doors I sealed; he knew all the things I dare not think of. He himself, had crawled from the depths of one such idea, and if what the shadow creature had said in the field was true, then I had no idea who I really was. Acrodan had spoken to me in the same way, and yet I still believed the brief words of the creators, accepting the fate I hated above all, rather than considering that there may be more to it.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" I demanded.\n\n\"You're a fool,\" he responded, stepping closer.\n\nI marked each step with a fleeting look, but in the end, there was nothing more he could do, we were dead.\n\n\"You're a fool, incapable of seeing the truth.\"\n\nSo, the truth really is locked away deep in my mind?\n\n\"Show me,\" I snapped.\n\nFor a moment he seemed surprised, until his bony muzzle curled into a smouldering grin.\n\n\"As you wish.\"\n\nHe gave a regal bow, spread his tattered wings, and vanished. Seconds dragged into minutes...\n\nWhat am I thinking? Of course, there's nothing. Well, at least I don't have to deal with him anymore \u2013 all I have now is...\n\nAn explosion of light broke my thoughts, when something new sparked amidst the emptiness, expanding rapidly, rushing forward until it formed a glowing, golden tunnel. Shifting and blossoming like a flurry of gleaming gems, the sparks formed sheets of light, swarming like fireflies into a new reality. It gradually took the shape of a chamber, held up by four pillars, towering arches, and sheer, gem-studded walls.\n\nThe image was like the time I'd been taken to the stars, only this time there was no wonder or amazement \u2013 I didn't feel like I wanted to be here. As the illusion began to settle, it formed a domed golden roof, decorated by a magical projection of the night sky.\n\nThe ghostly illusion was put to shame as I gazed across the vast room, to a balcony that opened out to a sky filled by a thousand stars. They sparkled amidst luminescent red and blue clouds, while great, golden towers rose in the foreground. Even greater than Dardien's upside down spires, each one boasted glimmering peaks, sheer sides, and monstrous draconic statues.\n\nIt was a glorious blessing for my eyes, at least until the city was darkened. Scarlet fire, more ferocious than any mortal flame, bellowed from the depths of the majestic fortifications while purple smoke trailed into the starry sky. Vast swarms of shadow-creatures, like those that had hunted me, flew in writhing columns as if to form the tentacles of one great creature. Glinting specks of gold appeared amidst them, like comets, chasing down the swarms and setting them ablaze with torrents of pure-white flame.\n\nI staggered in amazement as a marble floor materialised beneath my paws.\n\nIt feels so real, but it can't be.\n\nThe illusion completed itself as the floor seamlessly met the golden walls, crawling out into the centre where four more pillars rose in perfect symmetry. Arched doorways materialised around the edges, leading to endless corridors. Detail after detail blossomed from the swarm of restless gold until, above the central columns, a swirling ball of light gradually clustered into a faint crystalline sphere, light pulsing like a living heart. Hovering in the air just before it was something else, something I recognised the moment it materialised \u2013 a golden, eight-point star illuminated by a glowing white gem at its centre, a coiled dragon serpent lining the rim.\n\nIt's my amulet! But I found it in the ice, how is this possible?\n\nFinally, golden plates began to form on the inside of each central pillar. They were difficult to see at first, but as they melded into existence, I could clearly make out three pieces of golden armour, each one a masterpiece worthy of the stars themselves. Their undersides glowed with a magical blue hue, strange features levitated between the horn shafts and around the claws. Glowing-white gems and engraved patterns flowed like water over the brazen metal, but what set the suits aside, was their size, dwarfing an adult dragon.\n\nJust like Kaida described in her expedition?\n\nI'd never been here, and yet something deep in my mind was telling me I knew this place.\n\nIt's the Golden City, it must be, but how? Is it even real!?\n\n\"No, no, this isn't real,\" I cried, pressing both forepaws over my eyes.\n\nWhat did I ask for, I didn't want to see this!?\n\n\"Shocked?\" the bony hallucination hissed, appearing beside me.\n\n\"Stop it, I don't want to know any more about their stupid mistakes,\" I retorted.\n\nIgnoring my plea, he sat smiling, like there was hidden irony in my statement.\n\n\"If you want to save them all,\" he spat, \"you need to know the truth!\"\n\nHe turned and watched the final part of the vision materialise, not an object of the chamber, but a huge dragon as large and majestic as the city around him. His hide was unlike anything I'd ever seen, gleaming scales roaring with white-hot flame that oozed from beneath his golden armour.\n\nIt's like those levitating around us. I noted as the huge dragon shifted.\n\nAs he did, the levitated sections of his magical attire flowed seamlessly over his molten body without the slightest contact. It was only when he turned toward me that I was bathed in his full glory. Purple gems floated before his chest plate, and separate rings of levitating gold encased his flaming horns. The flames on his neck formed a burning mane, their writhing peaks becoming a deathly-black mist as they petered out.\n\nI paled like a timid hatchling when, from beneath his gem-studded helmet, a pair of glowing eyes as infinite as the night sky, peered straight through me.\n\nIs this what it's like to look at a god? Surely this is not how I look when I lose control?\n\nIt didn't take me long to realise that the dragon was not looking at me. Instead, he set his sight on a pair of large, golden doors behind me. As he did so, the intricate slabs opened, far more smoothly than those back in Dardien, each sections parting, slipping neatly into the walls on either side. Claws tapping upon polished marble announced the entrance of another dragon. This one was normal size, dressed in similar golden armour magically suspended above his white scales.\n\nWhite scales? That's impossible \u2013 I would have gasped or staggered if my body had allowed.\n\n\"Keep watching,\" the illusion insisted.\n\nMy eyes fixed on the white dragon as he came sliding to a halt before the giant, flaming beast.\n\n\"My Lord Nakir, Vulpomancers have breached the lower sanctum, the central gardens and aviary are overrun.\"\n\nNakir? I recognised his name from the journal, he was one of the creators, the one responsible for death, if I recalled correctly.\n\nNakir turned, his own claws tapping like blades on stone.\n\n\"Well done, soldier, I trust the necessary preparations have been made?\"\n\nI wanted to scream, shout out, do anything that would change this. Tell them what I knew became of the Golden City and the Ethereals.\n\n\"Yes, my lord, although our forces here have been significantly weakened, the Hierarchs have diverted much of our enemy's attention to the battlements.\"\n\nNakir nodded, glancing up to the door, as if there was something only he could see.\n\n\"Go now,\" he said, \"do what you can.\"\n\nThe smaller dragon bowed, turned, and moved to leave, when without warning, the breath was sucked from his lungs. His flesh withered in an instant and with a faint whooshing sound he imploded, leaving his armour to clatter to the floor.\n\nI recoiled slightly \u2013 Did Nakir murder him or did he allow him to die?\n\n\"So, this is where you stand?\" a deep, rasping voice boomed as it had days ago at the celebration.\n\nThe chamber grew cold under a cloak of black smoke pouring in from the doorway, before swirling into a raging inferno of boiling red flame to form another giant dragon. Black armour covered him from head to tail, rising neatly into sharp bones, like those of the shadow-creatures. Similarly, choking shadow poured from him to form an abyssal lake around his dark talons.\n\n\"We withstood millennia of war with the Infernals and yet this fells you?\" the shadow-monster rumbled, his voice dripping with disappointment.\n\nNakir stood firm, looking his counterpart in the eyes before replying.\n\n\"You brought this upon us. The Outsider's chaos has been vanquished, there is no need for this to continue.\"\n\n\"Do not speak to me of its name. You may continue to hide the true motive of your betrayal beneath frail excuses, but you cannot prevent what is required,\" the dark dragon admonished, taking a step closer.\n\n\"Yet it appears you have sacrificed more than I in this war,\" he continued, glancing round at the armour displayed around the crystal sphere. \"I wonder. Are you here now because you feared what would become of you if you followed them? Do you fear you will lose the prize you truly seek?\"\n\n\"We did what we had to,\" Nakir replied.\n\n\"Your pain, your emotion, they make you weak, and yet you would seek to steal what is mine in the belief that you have the strength to rule?\" the dark dragon taunted as he slowly prowled around Nakir.\n\n\"I entrusted all of you for millennia, but I never intended for you to have such purpose. I should have seen at the fall of Tileria the error of my judgment.\"\n\nNakir shifted to meet the eyes of his counterpart, seemingly unable to give an adequate response. All the while, the dark dragon gave a cunning smile.\n\n\"You are still unable to prove me wrong.\" A rumble like laughter bellowed deep in his molten throat. \"You were the ones whose actions began this war. The Infernal Blade, Enishra, the Darkness itself! They're all monuments to your incompetence!\" he added like a disappointed father.\n\n\"Your mind is addled by madness! The heart of Anaris lies shattered, the realms in ruin, and yet you still allow this corruption to flourish unbound!\" Nakir countered.\n\nI had no idea what half the things they were talking about were; in fact, I didn't want to know there was an entire universe worth of sorrow and woe.\n\n\"Do not speak to me of the heart, you know nothing of it! Nor will I see this corruption fester any longer,\" the dark dragon warned with a scowl.\n\n\"If you are to stand between me and the security of the realms, I will have no choice but to destroy you,\" he threatened.\n\nNakir's eyes narrowed, and for the first time he showed an ounce of emotion as anger boiled in his eyes.\n\n\"You say that, and yet you allow droves of vulpomancers to desecrate the ether. You allow the essence of chaos to breach our reality. All for what, the belief that they will restore order?\"\n\n\"All necessary sacrifices. For if all creation must be torn down for order to be achieved, then so be it,\" rumbled the dark dragon.\n\n\"So be it, indeed.\" Without warning Nakir raised his bladed wing, slicing across his opponent's face.\n\nAn explosion filled the air, throwing the dark form across the marble floor.\n\n\"By our power transcendent, you will fail!\" a booming choir of voices emanated from Nakir's muzzle as he spoke.\n\nWith a deep intake of breath, he rose, the air crackling in his throat like the fire of a furnace.\n\n\"You would sacrifice so much to allow the chaos that was, to persist?\" the dark dragon hissed as he rose to his paws. \"You truly are impure!\"\n\n\"No, you are impure and have allowed darkness to poison your mind until...\" The multitude of voices in Nakir's tone broke.\n\nWhat is it? Is that sadness. Grief? I had to wonder as the ethereal paused. How can a god feel sorrow?\n\n\"You are no longer my creator,\" he finally growled, his eyes fixed on his darker counterpart.\n\nAll the while the shadow-dragon scowled, until in a flurry of cinders he finally declared.\n\n\"Very well, my children, you have made your choice and you will fail!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Gasping desperately, air filled my dry lungs, my heart began to race, and warm blood flooded through my veins. Feelings struck out to my claws and the tips of my wings before my mind flashed back to consciousness, racing thoughts spinning like they were caught in rapids. After the initial surge, my body fell limp, my limbs became jelly as I gulped in air like a fish out of water.\n\nI... I'm alive...\n\nThe moment I was able, I directed my eyes to where the blade had pierced my body, only to find an irritating restriction bound my midriff. My chest was tightly wrapped with improvised bandages, darkened by dried crimson and woven vegetation. There was a similar dressing around my left wing, where beneath layers of leaves, the leathery tissue felt taught and hot.\n\nMy racing heart slowed as my body began to relax, each breath of air and every heartbeat ones I was sure I shouldn't be taking.\n\nWhat did I see? The creators and the Golden City? No, I saw the city ablaze, I saw a war. I saw things I wasn't meant to see.\n\nThat bony fiend knew I'd never wanted to know, and yet I felt he'd wanted to show me for as long as I could remember.\n\nWhere is he now?\n\nI was surprised he wasn't here giving me some cryptic lecture on the mysteries I'd witnessed. To tell me who the dark dragon who had interrupted the season of fire celebration, and battled Nakir, really was.\n\nWhat is he? A creator? One of those shadow-creatures? He'd called them his children.\n\nMy mind went blank.\n\nWhat does it matter anymore, I was beaten by some orkin, how can I stand up to that!?\n\nSomehow, I was alive, and my bony tormentor had left me with the information I needed to continue his game.\n\nThe darkest part of me is the only part that really accepts what's going on, what does that make me? Am I a monster, or is Risha right?\n\nWith that thought, my priorities swiftly shifted.\n\nRisha! The others!\n\nMy head shot up. Something I found to be a serious mistake as my vision began to swim. Taking another long, slow breath, I paused. I could see I was in a shallow cave, the dull sunlight outside visible through trees as a light pattering of rain danced upon their dense leaves.\n\nThis isn't where I died, unless the orkin bandaged me up and took me with them.\n\nI tried to move, but my weak efforts were met with a deep pain in my chest, and I was forced to flop back.\n\n\"I wouldn't be so quick to be on my paws again, if I were you.\"\n\nLifting my head the best I could, my eyes met with someone I would never have expected.\n\n\"Neera?\" the breath of my first words grated, like razors in my rejuvenated throat.\n\nThe blurred form of the faldron approached from the cave entrance, shaking the rain from her wings.\n\nThis can't be right it must be some sort of hallucination.\n\nShe stopped at my side, and there was no denying it really was her. She looked like she had seen a ghost, and for all I knew, I could be one. There was no reason to assume my new lease of life was a miracle. Not compared to what my body had previously recovered from, but death was death, the end of everything, and it seemed I even avoided that.\n\n\"I guess you've never died before?\" she asked, cocking her head, trying to prove to herself that I wasn't a hallucination.\n\nI... How many dragons can say they have? I thought, though my throat was too stuffy to force out the words.\n\n\"I do admit I don't know anyone else who's lived to talk about it,\" she confessed.\n\n\"Why did you come back?\" I finally wheezed.\n\nSilhouetted against the light at the cave mouth, she glanced back, her body tense and ears flattened, as if this response was something she had been thinking about for a while.\n\n\"Because if I didn't, I'd ask myself why not,\" she answered.\n\nNow I was confused. That wasn't really the answer I was expecting.\n\n\"You should be dead \u2013 you should have been dead back when I met you, but here you are,\" she went on, her tone turning to concern.\n\n\"But I spend all my time trying to save others from the orkin, so what would I be if I didn't save you and your friends?\" She plucked a pebble from the floor, rotating it in her forepaw as she added. \"I wouldn't be the 'Wyrm' if I let the orkin have their way.\"\n\nHer final words played out unnoticed in my mind, while the words that flowed from my muzzle felt like they were killing me all over again.\n\n\"Where are the others?\"\n\nHer doubtful expression set off internal alarms that I'd never wanted to hear, no matter how dead I should be.\n\n\"The village cleared out to the north-west. As for your leatherwing friends, Goarog took them,\" she admitted.\n\nYes, and he killed me! I thought bitterly.\n\nThe orkin grunt had swiftly risen to the top of the list of things I didn't like.\n\n\"Where did he take them?\"\n\nThe delay in her response was almost unbearable.\n\n\"Taldran, the remnants of the highkin capital.\"\n\nThat's where I'm going, and by the creators, I'm going to find the Golden City, get the truth, and get them back if it kills me again and again!\n\n\"That place is the forefront of everything they have south of Valcador, a belching ruin of smoke and steel, war engines, wild men and goblins. There are creatures there, that...\" Neera stopped, a shiver silencing her words before she could finish.\n\n\"Getting in won't be easy, that's for sure,\" she admitted, sensing my newfound determination before I'd spoken.\n\nI'm getting in there, even if it means levelling the whole city!\n\n\"How do you know they're safe?\" I asked, and she tossed the pebble out into the rain.\n\n\"Balgore wants dragons, and the orkin take many slave-creatures for their armies, arenas, foundries and such. They seized Valadran a few years ago just because they hate leatherwings.\"\n\n'Slaves?' As horrible as it was to imagine, it also meant they were almost certainly alive.\n\nGoarog needed to bring his master a prize, or Balgore would have killed him.\n\nHe wasn't so stupid that he would allow three good dragons to go to waste, yet the image of my friends caged and muzzled was horrifying.\n\n\"Pity those monsters won't get to keep them for long,\" I snapped under my breath.\n\nI bore a hatred one could seemingly only gain after being killed by their enemy, and the fact that I couldn't die sealed the orkins' fate. I was going to slaughter any who got in my way, save my friends, and restore order.\n\nI'll get to Goarog and claw his head off the first chance I get! With my fury burning, I tried to force myself up.\n\n\"You're still in no state to go anywhere,\" Neera chastised, rushing over as searing pain and overwhelming fatigue forced me back down.\n\nBy the creators, she's like Risha, though maybe a little blunter in her methods.\n\nEither way, she was right. I couldn't even move, let alone fly to Taldran in this state.\n\n\"Don't worry, it will take them a couple of days to get across the lake, and then there's the slopes of Red-Fire Mountain. They have a two-day head start, but once you can fly the trip is only a day,\" Neera reassured, hesitantly pressing a paw to my bandaged wing.\n\nShe's so on edge, is she scared of something too?\n\n\"They won't hurt them, I promise. I've watched orkin all my life, trust me, I know,\" she went on, rising back to her paws. \"If they were in immediate danger I would have gone after them and left you...\"\n\nShe stopped, her feathered wings fidgeting as she averted her eyes.\n\n\"For dead,\" I finished grimly.\n\nPart of me wished she had, but that was the same part that wished this was over. The darker side of my mind had made sure I would never give in, and ironically, he'd saved me from taking the easiest, most selfish option.\n\nI have to do what's right; I must keep looking forward.\n\nThe cost of my transgressions could never be my friends' lives, not while I was alive \u2013 and as far as I knew, that was now indefinite.\n\n\"Get some rest, that wound closed about a day after I found you, at that rate I'd say you'll be fine by late tomorrow,\" she suggested, moving back towards the cave's mouth.\n\nI gave a weak nod before laying my head on the floor, watching as she sat before the edge of the stone roof, gazing out into the overcast world beyond. In my head the dark creature muttered something; he knew what he'd done, his game was still very much in motion and now I was as much a player as the darkness.\n\nWhether he intended it or not, I was going to win this or be destroyed trying. He hadn't only brought me back; he'd shown me a frail image of the truth. Neera had refused to believe I was gone too, and for that alone, I owed her everything.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I muttered softly, before closing my eyes, but all she did was nod."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "A loud rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning burst across the sky, interrupting my restless sleep yet again. As much as I may be healing, it still felt like my insides were tearing themselves apart. Over the dull restlessness of the storm I could hear bones cracking back into position, accompanied by the electrical lances of pain, and thumping aches.\n\nThe price of immortality. I assumed, yet that wasn't what robbed me of a peaceful sleep.\n\nIf I can't die, then what? What if I live for a million seasons? I'll outlive them all!\n\nI'd never asked for any of this, but at least it gave me the chance to put things right. As for the truth, the dark memories lurking in the back of my mind stalked like hungry predators, ready to devour my sanity. I raised my head, the burning pain racing through me with each twitch of my recovering muscles.\n\nIgnoring it, I looked over my freshly reformed wing, to the coat of dry vegetation covering my chest.\n\n\"You were right,\" I whimpered softly.\n\nThe dark form didn't hesitate, swirling into existence on a rock at my side, its bones covered by a pulsating, reforming layer of shadowy scales. A sly smile wrapped around his sharp fangs, fleeting embers escaping as he wheezed.\n\nI can't fight it any longer; he, I... whatever we are, he's been right all along.\n\nThis game had only one outcome, and we both knew the players. The darkness was more powerful than I had ever expected, my vision had shown me that. However, I was immortal, making victory inevitable, even if it took me an eternity.\n\n\"To finally hear the words from your mouth. I never thought the day would come to pass,\" the shadowy illusion declared. \"One day you will accept everything, after all, you do have forever.\"\n\nMy eyes met his molten scowl as his head leaned towards me on a long, bony neck.\n\n\"You can think what you want,\" I answered bluntly. \"I don't care anymore.\"\n\nHe contemplated my words, but instead of his dry, rasping voice, the chiming of bones signalled his skulking movements. He slithered down from his rock, materialising before me like living shadow. Lifting my head to look at him wasn't worth the effort or pain, yet I fixed upon his disapproving, judgemental eyes.\n\nIt's almost as if this is not the victory he wants.\n\n\"You don't get that luxury,\" he snapped angrily, waving a shadowy forepaw over my wounded form.\n\n\"You know what you are. Your regret and misery feed my every action. What you desire drives me. The path of thoughts leading to what you want most is that upon which I walk.\"\n\nHe scowled, his blazing teeth grinding with frustration, as if he was a tutor whose lesson had gone unheard.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nMy clueless response increased his frustration.\n\n\"Why do you think I showed you that vision?\" he demanded, fiery eyes flaring.\n\nMore confusion pooled in my expression and he growled.\n\n\"You needed that truth, to know they lied!\"\n\n\"I don't care about them anymore either,\" I replied.\n\n\"Oh, but you do. You saw what became of them, I showed you,\" he cursed, fire boiling from his features as lightning split the sky outside.\n\nI turned away. He's an illusion, shouting is not going to do him much good.\n\nAs I turned his anger dwindled, that sly, knowing look reforming upon his face. In the same moment, his bony tail curled around, and the bladed formation that tipped the spiny whip brushed against my neck.\n\n\"We both know that won't do either of us any good,\" I challenged, turning his grin into a blank stare.\n\n\"No... Death is not your enemy as it is all others. Your concern should be for what would truly destroy you, what would destroy us all.\"\n\nI had to consider that. What can really destroy me if not death? Pain, anger, the loss of those I care about?\n\n\"The truth is the only thing keeping us together,\" he snarled, coiling his neck back.\n\n\"Then I will find the truth, and be rid of you,\" I countered.\n\n\"I hope you do, because only then can you truly save them,\" he snapped.\n\nI snorted as he curled back in a slither of smoke and reappeared on top of his stone perch.\n\n\"Though which truth you choose to believe will decide that,\" he added conceitedly, vanishing in a whisper of smoke."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "A flash of lightning drew me from the blurred line between reality and illusion.\n\nHow long have I been unconscious? How long have my friends been slaves to those monsters? Is Neera right, are they safe?\n\nFirmly reminded of what had happened, I raised my head from the floor. My breathing felt clearer, as did my sight, and the bone-crunching pain was nothing more than an inconvenient cramp. I looked back over my chest to see the bandage had been removed and my pale under-scales were clean. All that remained of the fatal wound was a dull scar, emanating a faint, golden hue.\n\nThe strange cast of chewed vegetation around my wings was also gone, as was the injury. I closed my eyes, trying dearly not to dwell on it.\n\nDon't think about how wrong it feels, I don't need to be sick right now.\n\nAnother flash of lightning lanced through the sky, drawing my attention to the cave's mouth as its thunderous follower cracked like a distant drum. I stood up, all four paws wavering slightly as they pressed against the floor. The weakness was gone and taking a step I knew I shouldn't, my legs felt strong.\n\nStepping around a fire of orange and grey flame, I reached the opening, undeservingly breathing in the fresh, moist air. The cave sat on a ridge, and a small platform of natural rock stretched out before me. Rain lashed the wind-kissed tree line, broken only by the occasional rocky spire or hole in the endless canopy. In the distance, mountains rose like a wall of rock from the sea of green, clouds covering the higher peaks and directly beneath them the forest was broken by a huge lake.\n\nThe Phoenix Mountains? I observed, recalling the legends of fire birds to the north from my time growing up. What Tarwin wouldn't have given to go there with me.\n\nWith a sudden gust of wind and the beat of feathered wings, Neera swooped in and landed.\n\n\"Good to see you're up,\" she chirped, although from her tone, I guess she had never expected to utter those words.\n\n\"You talk a lot in your sleep, you know?\" she added, beating her wings to snuff out the fire.\n\n\"Pretty sure I never used to,\" I admitted.\n\nShe looked at me somewhat sympathetically before smiling.\n\n\"When you're on your own you get used to seeing and hearing things that others miss,\" she stated, moving back to the rear of the cave where the remainder of her bone-crafted gear lay.\n\nSlipping into the plant-formed harness, and with a tug of her muzzle, she tightened it to her back. Her clawed gauntlets and tail projectiles were next, until finally, she slipped her freshly polished skull-helmet into place over her head.\n\n\"There aren't any orkin between here and the foothills. After that, we can safely assume there'll be more than a few,\" she began to inform me while she tested her gear's fit.\n\n\"It's a day's flight from here to the shores of the bubbling lake. Taldran lies above, beyond the steam fields,\" she went on, directing her eyes to the cloud-covered mountains.\n\nI nodded as she finished; those days already feel like an eternity, I need to save them.\n\n\"How do we get in?\" I questioned.\n\nShe paused for a moment, and I feared I wasn't going to like what she suggested.\n\n\"The old stone bridge into the city is their way in, but there's another way across the steam fields, a route they certainly won't use,\" she explained thoughtfully.\n\n\"The steam fields?\" I asked, repeating her words while formulating a connection with the steam caves beneath Dardien.\n\nThe dragons back home always said the steam was something to do with the rocks and heat, contradicting what I'd originally guessed was some Fire Order trick.\n\n\"They're hot water lakes and fountains surrounding Taldran, something to do with Red-Fire Mountain. The path's safe, for you at least,\" she replied, ruffling her feathers subtly.\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\n\"Well, they haven't got me yet, and I'm not about to let some hot steam have the honour,\" she proudly assured, puffing up her chest.\n\n\"They keep the captives to the north-east of the ruins, near the doors to the temple. At least that is, providing they haven't taken them to Valcador's foundries, but that would take them longer.\"\n\nThe more she talked about it, the more I recalled what I'd read had happened there millennia ago. Goldfire Ridge, the site of the fallen star, where the Sphere was found. It made me nauseous knowing I was going to the place where it all began, but this time I was going to end it all.\n\nThat temple is where I'll get my answers, one way or another, I'll make sure of it.\n\n\"When can we leave?\" I asked, anxiously moving towards the opening.\n\nShe peered at me disapprovingly.\n\n\"You haven't eaten anything yet.\"\n\n\"I don't need to,\" I replied bluntly.\n\nShe's seen me come back to life; surely she can believe that?\n\n\"Okay, in that case we can leave now. We'll fly low to avoid the worst of the storm. Stay close and follow me.\"\n\nI gave her a firm nod, immediately following as she leapt from the cliff and out over the sea of trees."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "The angry sky let out a series of monstrous booms as lightning crackled across the heavy clouds like blazing whips. The storm wasn't getting any better and there was no way either of us could stay up here for long. After only a few hours of flight, rain had already chilled my wings to the freshly reformed bone, and the dull throbbing in my chest began to feel more than a little uncomfortable. The shores of the 'bubbling lake', as Neera had called it, were close, the band of rain-swept water had been creeping forward for hours and now sat just over the next row of trees, as did something else.\n\nAt first it was almost invisible through my rain-marred vision, a plume of smoke pouring from above the trees.\n\nI think I've seen enough smoke to last a lifetime.\n\nIt didn't take long for its source to become clear. The trees broke on the rocky shore of the lake, its vast waters stretching out before us revealing the charred remains of another pillaged settlement. Neera circled the ruins, and all I could do was stare at what remained of something else I'd failed to save. The orkin were monsters, nothing more, I wanted to kill every one of them, and given the chance, I would take pleasure in doing it.\n\nWould that make me no better than them? I shook off the idea.\n\nNo, whatever happened here must stop \u2013 the killing, the destruction, it has to stop, and I'll do whatever it takes.\n\n\"Down there, look for food and shelter!\" Neera instructed, smoke swirling aside as our wing beats struck the fetid air.\n\nThrough the foul smell and choking breaths, I could see the wooden skeletons, glistening wet and littered with the residue of battle. Human dead lay about like autumn leaves left to rot, bodies mutilated and broken, with far fewer dead orkin lying amongst them.\n\nDon't think about it, don't think about home, don't think about Tarwin. She'll be safe, she knows how to take care of herself.\n\nWith her feathers soaked and body armour glistening with beads of water, Neera was first to land. She appeared as appalled as me, but I guessed, for her, it was more than that. This was a failure to live up to everything for which she stood. She'd fought against the orkin tyranny for as long as they dared leave their mountain caves, and she'd failed to do that here.\n\n\"You can't save everyone,\" I admitted, landing beside her.\n\nI could hear the darkness in my mind agreeing with the utmost haste, every confession making him stronger. Raising her rain-soaked head, Neera let out a long sigh. Her eyes trembled within the sockets of the skull, but through the tears, came the conviction of a survivor.\n\n\"Salvage anything useful and look for shelter,\" she commanded, taking a tentative step forward.\n\nI nodded, making my way to what appeared to be the remains of the central platform, the piles of bodies making it difficult to find anything. Flies brave enough to face the heavy rain darted about, and the stench of death hung in the air like a curse. I didn't dare look at the blackened skin or crimson streams that trickled in the rainwater, or every face frozen unnamed and forgotten.\n\n'Look for shelter, salvage...' I couldn't, and I doubted Neera was truly doing the same as I stopped at a pile of corpses blocking my way.\n\nI couldn't look anywhere but into their twisted remains, and in an outburst of anger I raked my claws against the charred wood, scattering carrion.\n\nWhat could I have done? I growled inwardly, striking the charred wood once more as I blindly stepped towards a burnt hut.\n\n\"Blaze, stand still,\" Neera suddenly hissed in a forced whisper.\n\nI glanced over to see her as motionless as the corpses, her eyes wide and frightened.\n\n\"To your right,\" she mouthed, cautiously glancing to where she'd directed.\n\nI turned to see more corpses littered with feasting crows, and then to something else. A huge furry mass sat behind the pile, its body heaving with each tug of its monstrous head. Until, its large ears pricked up, and I tensed when its fanged jaw rose from its bloody feast.\n\nA Ghaul! I noted instantly, recalling the creatures that had once chased me across North Rim. Fortunately, it's only one.\n\nIt froze the moment our eyes met, the only movement coming from the red dribble running from its parted fangs and the flare of its panting nostrils.\n\nHow dare it come here and disgrace the dead by feasting on them! I found myself inwardly growling.\n\n\"Insolent coward!\" The voice in my head reinforced as I placed a paw forward.\n\nThe Ghaul countered my move, lowering its head, growling, and stepping back from its feast.\n\n\"Blaze, what are you doing?\"\n\nI didn't spare Neera a glance. Something needed to pay for this mess. I'd rip this monster limb from limb before I ever failed anyone again. With my teeth bared and eyes narrowed, I snorted smoke and the beast scampered off like a frightened pup, bounding over the dead and into the forest.\n\nIt's lucky I have other things to worry about right now.\n\nNeera cautiously made her way to my side, her eyes still lingering on the trees.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she asked, aghast.\n\nI took in a deep breath and turned my gaze over the steaming expanse of water, towards the distant wall of rock and trees.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nShe didn't respond. All I heard was the gentle song of the rain, the distant rumble of thunder and her bone covered claws tapping on charred wood as she moved away.\n\n\"This one's empty, come inside when you're ready,\" she proposed, entering the ruined house.\n\n\"I think you do know,\" the dark voice hissed as I slumped in the rain. \"I think you do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "The back of the house in which we resided had completely collapsed. Neera had scavenged some things, mostly orkin armour, and was hard at work doing whatever it was she did with them. Somewhere in the distance another loud rumbling sounded out, but I couldn't make out if it was thunder or drums.\n\nIt could be either this close to Taldran, but there were no flashes of light accompanying the din, nor did the black clouds reveal their elusive beauty. Neera hadn't said anything since I'd moved into the shelter, though her occasional glances at least let me hope she cared.\n\n\"Why so ignorant?\" a familiar tone hissed, drawing my attention to my reflection.\n\nRed eyes indicated the dark form's presence, his skull growing over the image of my face like a weed.\n\n\"You need to pull yourself together,\" he added, crawling from the water, and curling up on the charred wood beside me. \"Unless you're starting to like our little chats?\"\n\nMy eyes shifted reluctantly.\n\n\"What do you want, I'm doing what you asked, aren't I?\"\n\nHis amused expression dropped, and he sank down.\n\n\"What I ask? So, you only go to save those you care for under the assumption I've asked it of you?\"\n\nThe urge to explode with anger crossed my mind, but I had neither the will nor the care \u2013 he can taunt me all he wants, he's not real.\n\n\"So, what do you want?\" I asked. \"You obviously don't care about what I want.\"\n\nThere was a momentary pause before he replied.\n\n\"I wouldn't be so sure. You want to save them all, rid yourself of this eternal curse, to know the truth,\" he mused, dangling that last part of his sentence before me like a lure.\n\n\"You have seen fear, sadness and guilt,\" he proclaimed, climbing down from his perch. \"Your feelings are strange to you? You wish to do what is right but have no knowledge of what that is. Darkness and death, they make you feel sad, guilty, and afraid. They crush you more than any mortal weapon ever could, despite your immortality,\" his tone grew stronger as he directed a bony wing to the scar on my chest.\n\n\"I could count a tally for all these lives about you and you'd feel nothing more than those feelings,\" he added, moving the wing to pan across the ruined village.\n\nHe slowly prowled around me, taunting me with each deliberate movement.\n\n\"You are nothing more than a cauldron of doubts, you're afraid to do what is right, because you know that you need to become the monster to do so.\"\n\nI tried to open my muzzle in protest, but he was right, and yet there was something he was avoiding. I could see everybody about me, whether it be dragon, orkin or human. I felt exactly how he described, and yet not as I once did. Now all I wanted to do was punish those who wronged what I believed was right.\n\nI've gone from guilty to angry, what does that say about me now?\n\nI redirected my attention to the black waters of the rain-swept lake. Meanwhile, he frowned, flames coiling up from his bony muzzle.\n\n\"If only you knew what it was like to become a monster, to do what must be done,\" he began, as if he understood that pain more than anything.\n\n\"Our responsibilities always demand sacrifice. We are, both of us, monuments to that inevitable fact,\" he hissed, then paused, coiling around me.\n\n\"Only the weak feel remorse and pain. But with every dismissal of them you grow stronger, you accept your responsibility. These feelings are a part of you, yet they do not define you.\"\n\nHis fiery eyes appeared in front of me, pressing closer.\n\n\"Anger is strong, but unpredictable, sorrow is a weak trap. You cannot allow those feelings to control you.\" He dismissed the seemingly trivial ideas with a flick of his wing.\n\n\"If you are to save them, you must believe, above all else, that your responsibilities place you above them. If a million must die to save a billion, so be it, you must do what's necessary.\"\n\nI stared into the blazing spheres within the dark sockets of his skull.\n\n\"It's not you that defines me either,\" I countered coldly.\n\nHis confident expression fell, frustration and disappointment evident in his glare. Obviously, I'd yet to understand what he was trying to tell me, and frankly I'd be happy never knowing.\n\n\"Erm, who are you talking to?\" Neera asked puzzlingly.\n\nMy eyes widened, and I snapped back, shaking my head free of the hallucination to see her peering over a wrecked table, her eyes wide with concern.\n\nIs that what I instil now? Maybe he wants them to fear me? I shook my head. No, he doesn't define me.\n\nI stood up, shaking the freezing coat of water from my scales and turned towards her. Managing a frail smile, a look of relief immediately washed over her face and she sunk back down behind the overturned table.\n\nI followed, moving around to where the morphed glow of the faldron's hybrid flame illuminated the burnt ruin. What was left of the thatched roof sheltered us from the rain as the broken walls warded off the wind.\n\n\"Loneliness isn't an ideal life choice,\" Neera advised while she tugged at a spiked piece of orkin gear at her forepaws.\n\nShe'd been weaving the plates into something new all evening. Neither of us had been able to bring ourselves to take anything from the former residents; however, the orkin were afforded no such respect. Using plants she had retrieved from the shoreline; she'd broken down and re-tied her made-up exoskeleton. I sat myself opposite, lowering my head to the wood as the warm glow of the fire chased the chill from my scales.\n\n\"It's not that, I\u2026\" I started, but I couldn't tell her the truth, especially as the one I thought I knew was a lie.\n\nShe abruptly stopped her tinkering and peered across the fire at me.\n\n\"I'm not going to pretend to know what you're thinking about. I mean if I'd died and...\" her voice trailed off as she cautiously glanced my way.\n\nMy lack of offence seemed to be enough to strengthen her confidence.\n\n\"Well, let's say I'd be glad I still had a chance to do what was right by my friends.\"\n\nI felt my blank expression turn to a subtle smile.\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nShe glanced up, her fluffy muzzle parting as she mirrored my expression.\n\n\"I just hope I haven't missed that chance,\" I finished.\n\n\"Don't worry, we'll get them back,\" she assured, her ears perking.\n\nI offered another smile as she stood, brushing the orkin wears from her paws with a gentle sweep.\n\n\"You should get some rest, there was still a hole in your chest no more than a day ago,\" she suggested.\n\nMy smile dropped a little at her mention of my fatal injuries, but this time her look remained positive as she strode out into the rain.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll keep watch tonight,\" she called back, taking a position by the door and dragging a fur pelt over her back.\n\n\"Not that we need it, every monster south of Valcador is afraid of you,\" she added, with a slightly smug look.\n\n\"You can taste their fear. They're weak and afraid,\" the dark monster mused, sliding about my mind like a serpent.\n\nHe could say what he liked, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. For now, I was happy to imagine his frustrated growl as I repeated the thought over and over to myself.\n\nI'm not going to turn into him, that's the only responsibility I have right now."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "The charred remains of the fire sizzled in the damp morning air as the smell of smoke mixed with the fresh scent of the steamy lake. The sounds of morning birds mixed with that of squabbling carrion as I raised my head, looking around the damp interior of the burned lodge. The first thing I noted was that I couldn't see Neera.\n\nShe must still be on watch, or out hunting for food?\n\nShaking the stiffness from my muscles, I made my way over to the water's edge. The rain had ceased, and a faint mist hung over the lake, a dull red glow projected into the shroud by the rising sun hiding somewhere behind the clouds. Looking down into the waving liquid my eyes met with my distorted reflection.\n\n\"I'm the one who's doing this, not you,\" I told the flickering image, staring down at it and waiting for a response.\n\nIt simply stared back, silently.\n\nWhat am I doing, talking to my reflection like a fool? I asked myself, raising my head from the water. I really am going mad.\n\nNone of it's real. He's just my mind playing tricks.\n\nI slumped down, my forepaws hanging over the edge of the platform.\n\nHe? Who am I calling 'he'? He. It, whatever it is, isn't real! My tail backed up against an overturned table.\n\nI need to stop thinking like this! I sighed, glancing down at my dirty paws, plagued with soot and grime.\n\n\"What am I doing?\" I asked myself aloud, but my mind gave no answer.\n\nI'm beginning to think I really do enjoy his company.\n\nA loud thud snapped me from my daze as Neera peered cautiously around the table. Any worries about her daunted expression quickly passed when I saw what she was wearing. It wasn't her usual skull and bone armour. Instead, she had spiny plates fastened to her like the armour of dragons back home, giving her a more orkin-like appearance.\n\n\"Good to see you're awake; here, put these on,\" she instructed, pushing a set of the modified gear towards me.\n\nThis must be what she was working on last night.\n\n\"What's it for?\" I asked, jabbing a paw at the hard, insect-like carapace.\n\nI had a vague idea what the resourceful faldron had in mind, and I certainly didn't want her to feel intimidated by my questions \u2013 that's my dark mind's way, and creators be sure I'm not letting him have any say.\n\n\"Well, we can't just go marching in there. It's a disguise, they should think we're slave-beasts or something,\" she elaborated, looking over herself, wiggling her shoulders and hips, before grunting.\n\n\"I'll admit they're not the most comfortable, but it's better than an axe in your neck.\"\n\nDespite my ability to heal, the thought of an axe in my neck wasn't a good one. Avoiding detection was certainly the better option.\n\n\"Okay, that makes sense,\" I acknowledged as I started to slip the modified gear on.\n\nFor the most part, it fit neatly, covering my torso before catching on my wings. The segmented neck piece settled into place, and I had to admit, even with thick scales, the scratching was more than a little unpleasant, never mind the smell. A moment later, I kicked the rear section between my wing ribs, where it finally settled above my hind legs. Last to go on was the tail cover. Like the plates covering the back of my neck it was crudely segmented with sharp, bony edges.\n\nAs resourceful as Neera was, I doubted she could make the gear of such a monstrous creature comfortable.\n\n\"I take it you don't wear armour that often?\" she asked jokingly, noticing my struggle.\n\nI stopped fighting the bony mass and glanced at her.\n\nBe positive and polite, because after what she's seen of you, she has a right to be afraid.\n\nI lowered my head, before replying sheepishly. \"What gave it away?\"\n\nShe smiled and moved to my side.\n\n\"Oh, you know, you leatherwings and your diamond-hard scales,\" she added sarcastically, while pushing the plates I couldn't reach into position with a swift flick of her wing.\n\n\"I wish they were that strong,\" I added, recalling all the times I'd been scarred and slashed.\n\n\"Well, we can't all be invincible,\" she added with a subtle laugh before pulling the improvised rope securing the rear plate to my back.\n\nI winced at the sudden shock against my scar, and she muttered an apology before moving onto my tail. Rather embarrassed, I looked away as she fastened the second set of straps.\n\nI've lived almost independently for my entire life, and twice this season I've had to be dressed like a child!\n\nWith another tug, she tightened the final plates to my tail.\n\n\"You can handle that one, can't you?\" she asked as she pointed to the modified chest plate.\n\nGreat! My friends are either scared of me or bold enough to poke fun.\n\nReaching down I tightened the plates to my neck and the remaining exoskeleton to my torso. Meanwhile, she stepped back, slipping her forepaws into what appeared to be a pair of bladed gauntlets made from the same dark hide as the rest of the armour.\n\n\"Here, these should save your claws,\" she offered, holding two of the gauntlets for me.\n\nI looked at the exoskeleton blades besides my sleek talons.\n\nThese are the same claws that boiled through dragon scale, shattered skulls! I don't need pitiful... No!\n\nI wasn't thinking about things that way, I wasn't giving the dark entity something to lecture me on the next time I wanted to sleep. Flicking them onto my forepaws, I shifted each claw into its respective socket. It was like stepping into a muddy puddle, the inside seemed to squelch.\n\nI'm not wearing these again unless I absolutely must. The thought ran through my mind when I placed my paw into the second gauntlet.\n\nThe whole set was clumsy and far from elegant, not to mention the claws dug in when I walked. It was heavier than expected too, and I imagined it would be especially restrictive if I had to fly while wearing it. However, if it kept us safe and helped save the others, I couldn't argue.\n\nNeera looked over herself once more, double-checking everything. I really hoped the orkin were as stupid as I'd seen, the dark chitin and bones on her body were believable, but the disguise certainly wouldn't fool me.\n\n\"One more thing,\" she added, reaching back with her muzzle.\n\nI peered round, struggling against the plates as she produced two tatty masses of dark bone hanging from improvised rope.\n\nI'm going to have to wear a helmet again, aren't I? I inwardly groaned.\n\nShe didn't hesitate to place the spiny mass over my head and muzzle, pulling its strap tight before attaching her own.\n\n\"It smells like something died in here,\" I grumbled, my voice muffled by the plate.\n\nShe winced slightly.\n\n\"Erm... yeah, probably best not to think about that,\" she replied, pulling her spiny helmet's strap tight with a forepaw.\n\nNeither of us were recognisable, and I doubted my dark side would look kindly on the spiny monster that peered back from the water's reflection.\n\nMy eyes lifted to look on the far shore and the steep mountainsides reaching above the reddened clouds, the improvised plates grinding as I peered through the slim sockets.\n\nI've no idea how she wears something like this all the time, although hers is a better fit. I thought as the armour-clad faldron appeared at my side.\n\n\"Take off's going to be a little rough,\" she advised, spreading her feathered wings while giving her fur and feathers a vigorous shake.\n\nI copied, and instantly regretted it as the grimy plates slid over my scales like slugs.\n\nThis isn't going to be a pleasant flight.\n\nShe launched herself over the water and up toward the clouds. I pressed one forepaw to the ground and sprang up after her. The added weight fought to pull me into the depths, but with a furious beat of my wings I steadily rose into the mist.\n\n\"Not my greatest take off,\" I mumbled to myself against the backdrop of jangling bones, as she glanced back.\n\n\"Better than most, you're stronger than you look,\" she called as we soared higher.\n\nIt was difficult to keep up with her as we climbed. I seldom flew so high; in fact, I felt like I was pushing the boundaries of my experience long before the mountain tops came into view. Nevertheless, I pressed ahead, swiftly catching my feathered companion, ready to put an end to the orkin for good."
            },
            {
                "title": "Taldran",
                "text": "The cold air began to freeze the plates to my scales as the red lure of the sun grew brighter. Before long, it finally burst out in a ray of light, shattering the cloudy shroud.\n\nWe emerged to find an endless expanse of silky white spread across the sky before us, its wispy surface bathed in a golden glow by the morning radiance. Neera surfaced before me, sending ripples through the perfect stillness with her graceful wing beats.\n\nShe flies like a master in this stuff, how does she do it? I wondered enviously.\n\nSnowy mountain peaks loomed like an island afloat in the sky. One summit stood out, shattered and broken, while the smaller peaks almost seem to revere its majesty.\n\nThat must be Red Fire mountain. I concluded.\n\nIt took some time, but we finally set down on a rocky ridge partly covered in snow and devoid of all but the hardiest vegetation. A chilling wind blew against the barren rock, forcing faint wisps of cloud to break upon the desolate spires. A flat layer of slate separated under my paws, layer upon layer stacked and slipping down the mountain's side.\n\nNeera was the first to move, swiftly clambering over the loose layers to the peak of the ridge. As I followed, I noticed the wind carried a strange call, like that of a kite or a buzzard, yet radiating with a strength others lacked.\n\nWhy do I feel like I've heard that call before?\n\nIt was enough to draw my attention to the sky, where I saw an eagle-like bird with golden feathers. The majestic avian gleamed in the sun's light as it soared gracefully overhead, two longer tail feathers flickering in the wind like plumes of fire. Swooping low, it released another echoing call, like no peak could claim it as their own.\n\n\"That's why they call them the Phoenix Mountains,\" Neera commented, observing the bird as it glided towards the ridge.\n\nA Phoenix? Once I'd assumed they were only a legend like myself, my heart was warmed by the sight as the beautiful creature passed by and vanished behind the ridge.\n\n\"Lucky though, I don't think anyone worthwhile has seen one in a decade,\" Neera added.\n\nThe regal portrait the mountains presented was instantly spoiled when my eyes moved down from the snowy peaks towards the opposite ridge. Like the back of a mighty creature, the rock rose to meet the smoking ruins of Taldran.\n\nMonstrous metal spikes and wooden ramparts defiled the former highkin structure, clinging tenuously to the noble stonework. The rocky remains bled down the mountain slopes from huge gashes in the once proud defence, the likes of which had been crudely rebuilt with black steel and gnarled wood. Distant pyres burned from the tallest of the once great towers, trails of smoke scarring the golden sky.\n\nBelow the teetering spires, sat formidable looking siege weaponry. Huge frames of smoke-blackened wood supported large, hollow barrels leading back into molten cores. Meanwhile, the orkin manning the great machines appeared as no more than tiny ants defending their nest. I'd never seen such ferocious looking machines, half of them looked like they could blast dragons right out of the sky.\n\nFrom the depths of the fallen city beyond the crumbling wall, the rumble of drums and the rabble of orkin voices echoed. Striving to see through the thick smoke of a hundred fires, I made out some of the city's inner structures, pressed against the steep mountain within the crater in which they sat.\n\nThe largest among them was a towering monument built into the cliff side at the rear of the city, a large door flanked by towering golden spires. Its soot-tarnished surface was blackened and scarred by layers of other less regal cladding grafted onto it. A crude, wooden web of scaffold covered the rest, obscured by ash and draped in more anarchic machinery.\n\nIf I had to guess I'd say that's the old temple. I noted, disgusted by what had become of the once grand monument.\n\nSpanning the valley below our vantage point was a defiled stone bridge, its paved surface transformed into a muddy pathway passing below us before snaking down the mountainside to the west. In the gaping chasm below, a wispy layer of pungent-smelling mist rose from a bleached field of bubbling water. Straining my eyes, I made out the large fountains of hot liquid spewing below the shroud, snapping up like a pit of vipers.\n\n\"Taldran,\" Neera growled resentfully. \"I can't imagine its former owners would be too impressed. That's if they weren't the ones who ruined it.\"\n\n\"So how do we get in?\" I asked, but before she could respond a thundering horn heralded the coming of a thousand twisted, metal boots.\n\nA stream of orkin flowed along the muddy road leading into the smouldering city. Among the aggressive rabble came a whole manner of beasts restrained by thick chains. One in particular was dragged violently by several orkin \u2013 a four-legged behemoth with three fearsome heads; one I recognised as a ram's, while the remaining pair were nothing but scaly mixtures of sickly green scales, crimson hide, and mangy fur. Putrid flesh festered where its skin was broken, dragon-like wings sprouted from its arched back, and sharp claws tipped its four paws.\n\nWhat in the creators' name? I wondered; my muzzle agape as I noticed what appeared to be another head on the end of its snake-like tail.\n\nThe abomination was far from the only monster. Three colossal brutes towered above the flow, walking on their hind legs and worn knuckles. A rough green fur covered most of their thick hide, rugged and soaked wet. Rather like the orkin, their exposed spines rose to form rocky spires along their hunched backs, draped in chains, furs, and the bones of their victims. All parts of the hulking creatures devoid of fur looked to be made of stone, as did their long snouts, which bore a jagged, rock-toothed beak topped by a row of three eyes on either side.\n\nGreat, I've seen horrors with no eyes and now brutes with six! I groaned to myself.\n\nReinforced ropes, chains, and metal supports had been hammered into the creatures' backs, securing crudely built structures, carrying more armed orkin. One hauled a war machine, like those sitting on the towers, many orkin tending the fiery war engine while others brandished their rusty weapons like slave masters. Cages like those I'd seen in the woods hung from chains, and instinctively I looked for signs of my friends. All that met my eyes, was more unrecognisable creatures, most of which shook their restraints violently.\n\nThe image struck at my confidence \u2013 What if the others are dead or being driven mad by the orkins' punishment? I want to jump down there and kill them all! If I let myself go, if I take my dark hallucination's advice, I can do it. It's my responsibility to protect my friends.\n\nNo! We need to sneak in there, it's the best way to ensure their safety. Then we can try and get into the temple.\n\n\"By my tail feathers, they've got trolls and chimera,\" Neera cursed as she pressed herself low to the ridge.\n\nI gave her a concerned look. If her plan was jeopardised, I'd have no choice but to do this my hallucination's way, I wouldn't be able to stop myself.\n\n\"I've never seen so many of them,\" she continued. \"Valcador must be crawling with them if they can spare this many.\"\n\nHer flustering caused her plumage and ears to bristle. I could sense an aura of doubt and hesitation about her, and I didn't like it.\n\nI really hope she knows what she's doing.\n\nI looked back to the convoy to see that the tide was thinning. The main bulk of the army trudged across the bridge towards the city gates, a horn bellowed and the mass of mangled stone, wood, and metal, began to grind open.\n\n\"They're gathering an army like never before, no one is going to be able to stand up to this if it gets any bigger,\" Neera uttered.\n\n\"Hey?\" I stole the faldron's words as she began to mumble. \"How do we get inside?\"\n\nShe paused, collecting her thoughts before glancing to the emptying road, then to the steaming valley beyond. Every moment she deliberated; my anxiousness swelled.\n\nMy friends are in those foul cages. I have to get them out!\n\nI could feel the dark puppet master in my mind pulling the strings of my conflicting emotions. His way or mine, he was searching for a weakness, but I was determined to resist. I opened my muzzle ready to question again, when Neera's eyes finally snapped back to me.\n\n\"We swoop down into the steam fields and use the cover. Stay close to me, and try not to attract any attention,\" she instructed firmly.\n\nFrustration cooling a little, I gave her a firm nod. She returned the gesture before extending her wings and dropping over the ridge, into the shroud of thick steam. I paused for a moment, glancing at the smoking ruins.\n\nHow many are in there? Hundreds? Thousands? How many will die if this plan fails? How many can that dark fiend tally up in triumph?\n\nI shook the thoughts from my mind \u2013 that isn't going to happen, I'm not his puppet.\n\nIt took a moment to steady myself in the heavy armour as I took off and swooped into the warm shroud of foul-smelling mist. The choking stream burned my nostrils as it flooded my lungs, turning the sun's vibrant rays into a sickly-yellow fog. Most of the ground consisted of strange, bleached rock dotted with yellow scars and bubbling pools of steaming water, while hardy vegetation clung to life around the charred husks of dead trees. In some of the deeper wounds, sloppy mud gargled, creating more discoloured fumes. Jets of boiling liquid spewed geysers from simmering pits, molten fissures and pale spires.\n\n\"Watch your step and stay close,\" Neera warned, glancing back from where she was barely visible.\n\nFollowing her steps, I was quick to act on her instructions; quickly discovering one mistake would have me drowning in a vat of thick, bubbling filth as I slipped.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she asked, peering over her shoulder.\n\n\"Yeah, just a loose piece,\" I replied, dismissing the experience.\n\nShe nodded, before glancing back ahead. Following her gaze, it took me a moment to identify that she was staring at a shallow slope marking the opposite bank of the bubbling pit. Through the shroud, the shapes of charred bones became visible, most were mutilated, but I managed to identify several as humanoid. Another was a quadruped about the size of an adult dragon or griffin, and many more were larger still.\n\nThe orkin cut them up and cast them into this foul-smelling pit to rot?\n\nI lowered my head in disgust, my blood starting to boil. From beneath the sockets of her makeshift armour, Neera's quivering eyes panned over the gruesome wasteland. Closing tightly for a moment when I saw the distinct glimmer of tears.\n\nShe really does hate them. I noted, and with a fierce grunt, she drew herself up and marched off into the sickly fog.\n\n\"Neera, wait!\" I cried, toxic fumes besieging my throat the moment I dared to open my mouth.\n\nMy muffled words were met with nothing but the hiss of steam, the feathered dragoness was nowhere to be seen. As geysers erupted before me I staggered around them, dark shapes emerging from the gloom, cocooned in a weeping, yellow crust, desperately reaching up to escape the putrid air. More horrifying effigies of mutilation covered the deadly landscape, from bony totems draped over withered branches, to horned skulls perched atop bleached boulders.\n\nMy paws beat heavily on the desolated ground with little care for the death pits sprawling around me. I coughed and wheezed as I went, spitting acidic foam from my singed throat. The scattered dead grew into corpse mounds, as whole skeletons, and bloated bodies littered the mist.\n\nWhy in the creators' name did we come down into this cursed place?\n\nAt last I caught up with Neera, her still form like a phantom in the veil. She had her helmet flicked up, her stunned eyes were wide and quivering, while her ears folded against her neck. I stopped beside her before daring to follow her gaze. Another bubbling pool lay before us, corpses littered its gnarled rim while more were strung up from dead trees like trophies.\n\n\"I could tally every one of them,\" the voice mocked from the back of my mind as my eyes levelled with Neera's.\n\nAt first, I thought I was looking at the body of a griffin. It was a similar size to an adult and bore the tattered remnants of feathers. What remained of the dark plumage fluttered in the wind, the neck picked clean of flesh and bones encrusted with yellow grime. The remains of its right wing and skull lay submerged in the pool, that was when I realised, I was looking at the corpse of a faldron.\n\nNeera's expression said it all, her rage boiled, her hatred for the orkin seething in her eyes. I pushed my impatience aside while she stared across the bubbling pit as if her gaze alone could scour Taldran from the mountain side.\n\n\"Such determination from one so helpless, it's almost adorable,\" the dark entity in my mind purred with laughter.\n\nI was about to think of a witty retort when a roar suddenly ripped through the mist, instantly snatching my attention.\n\nI know that call!\n\nThe mist was blown into a frenzy by the thunderous beating of wings. My eyes darted to a petrified tree before me, and with a few rushed steps, I ducked beneath it. Coughing on the foul air, I glanced back to Neera, her dark feathers nothing more than a smudged blur upon the sickly canvas.\n\n\"Neera!\" I called.\n\nShe was unresponsive, until another roar snapped her from her trance. She glanced my way, darting over in a flash as the wyvern's wing beats grew heavier. With its head held high above the choking cloud, a sharp pair of sinister yellow eyes scoured the bleached ground as it swooped by.\n\n\"Balgore,\" Neera hissed resentfully as I spied the fearsome warlord on the monster's back disappearing into the ruined city.\n\n\"It must be something big if he's here,\" she added, as the mist flooded back in.\n\nGood, I can cut off the head of the snake while I'm here.\n\n\"What now?\" I asked, assuming that Balgore's presence would put pressure on her plan.\n\nShe gave a confident, vengeful smirk, flicking her exoskeleton helmet back into position.\n\n\"Now we go get your friends back.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "After spending longer than I'd ever wanted in such a hellish place, we eventually found ourselves pressed against the cliff face below the outermost wall of Taldran. My scales felt like they were on fire, my eyes seared, and my nostrils burned. Peering up at the wall, I did my best not to think about the ghastly decorations swinging in the wind. A makeshift wooden scaffold had been erected where the natural rock face met with the wall's foundations.\n\n\"Wait for them to pass,\" Neera whispered, as two patrolling orkin approached.\n\nI sunk low, holding my breath against the foul stench as the sound of their warped metal feet beat across the weathered timber. For every moment they were above us it felt like my heart would burst from my chest. I wanted to hide, to follow the plan, but I also wanted revenge.\n\n\"Anger?\" the dark form in my head purred.\n\nAngry? I'm furious! I want to tear them apart. All of them!\n\nOne of the creatures paused, its silhouette a dark blotch in the mist. I began to tremble, my legs like the taut string of a bow ready to spring forward.\n\nI can't cower here while this continues \u2013 they deserve nothing more than brutal destruction.\n\nNo! I barked at my thoughts.\n\nI'm not like that, I'm not the gods' executioner. No matter what I've done, I won't be the same, I have to be better.\n\nHeavy footsteps shook the wooden frame when one of the orkin approached the platform's edge, its gaze sailing across the sickly mist. One of his eyes was black, while the other had turned to dark green embers within the stone thrusting from his skull.\n\nI glanced at Neera, and a tense silence fell over us as the orkin leaned back, raising his deformed head to sniff the air.\n\n\"Does you's smell that?\" he asked. My heart began to race.\n\n\"Smells what?\" the second one grunted.\n\nMy heart was ready to burst from my chest as the two creatures peered down. I coiled back, ready to strike with the fire welling in my chest. I knew what I had to do, and they wouldn't get any pity or mercy. Before I could act there was a shimmer in the mist as two bladed shapes launched like bolts of lightning. Both orkin staggered, the mist settled as quickly as it had been disturbed, and the disfigured pair gave gargled groans. With a heavy thud, they both landed before me, bony feathers firmly lodged in their necks.\n\n\"Are you coming?\" Neera called as she leapt up.\n\n\"You're getting a taste of your duty,\" the dark form hissed as I stared at the orkin.\n\nShut up, I cursed to myself.\n\n\"Blaze!?\" I took a deep breath, looking up to my companion.\n\n\"I'm coming.\" With a firm flap of my wings, I dragged the weight of my disguise up to the wooden platform.\n\nThe dense warmth of the gaseous mix ebbed away, and a wall of welcome cold struck my buzzing scales as I gasped greedily on the fresher air. The wood was tainted yellow and sagged like damp parchment under our weight. I glanced to my companion; her plumage darkened by moisture hung heavily beneath her armour. She didn't let it bother her one bit; her eyes were alight with bitter fury as she marched on.\n\nFor a moment, it was like I was looking in a mirror. This was her dark side dragging her into the foul pit of feelings that lurked below her conscience. Her actions were measured, but no less merciless than what my rage would have had me do.\n\nMaybe there is somewhere to draw the line between mercy and necessity? Maybe I can do what's right and still distance myself from the monsters I slay?\n\nAs we made our way up the wooden walkway, my attention turned to the wall. The once great white-stone structure had fallen long ago, leaving a mountain of ash-stained boulders. More wooden walkways spanned what remained, and above them, stood towering spires topped with siege cannons.\n\nNeera paused at the breached base, coiling her tail to her front paws she prised the feathers apart to reveal the six-or-so blades she still had lodged there.\n\n\"I imagine not all of them are going to be so poorly armoured,\" she grumbled, checking her weapons before releasing her tail back to its rightful position. \"We'll need to pick our fights carefully.\"\n\nI nodded, peering at the mound of rubble as we started to clamber up. The mountain's shadow darkened the whole city, while a wall of steam blocked whatever sunlight was able to reach us from the south. It was only when we reached the peak of the wall that any warmth broke through.\n\nGoldfire Ridge! Now I know why it got that name. I thought, as the sun parted the smoke.\n\nIt was a name given to this place long before it became the festering pit it was now, and the sight of the mountain tops glowing in the light of the summer sun was hardly a warming one.\n\nNeera's natural agility ensured she reached the summit ahead of me, following closely I lowered myself to the soot-smothered marble beside her. A road of smooth stone, aged and battered, ran down the centre of the city, disappearing into what remained of the archway holding the temple's grand doors. The two huge slabs of dulled and charred gold hung ajar, their huge hinges twisted and warped. Pits gouged into the earth beneath them, with orkin manning roughly constructed cranes that seemed to be excavating any scraps of the golden material they could find.\n\nThey want the gold, why? I wondered, peering at where they'd cut into the temple walls.\n\nThe once magnificent face had been damaged and worn, ancient murals lost forever beneath a coat of deep scars and rusty iron plates. More wooden walkways draped in heavy chains and harnesses surrounded them, while the dilapidated spires stood twisted and bent. Every part of the walkways crawled with orkin and a whole manner of smaller, frailer creatures.\n\nA pair of shabby, wooden towers constructed above deep, glowing pits, sat at each side of the doors. Long chains connected to cumbersome wheels held aloft by the frames descended deep into the earth, while remnants of the once elegant highkin structures lay scattered about them. Further forward, twisting bridges spanned the central road, and large pillars topped with braziers, burned from the tallest towers.\n\nOn the stone spires that were not home to wild flames or booming drums, sat more of the savage siege weapons, their barrels pointing skyward. Even the innards of the once great structures were not spared desecration, most had been smashed, converted into pens for the orkin's most vile creatures.\n\nChimera, as Neera had called them, wrestled over scraps of meat, while several hulking, chained trolls were occasionally prodded by a bold orkin with a long pole. Below them, smaller beasts snapped and squabbled as crows picked over more of the orkins bloody mutilations.\n\nWhat wasn't a festering pit of gore or a pen for their horrors, had been demolished and remoulded into rows of burning foundries, belching black smoke from fires used to forge sickening weaponry. Armour and blades were piled high at the base of the monstrous siege cannons, while the grim furnaces were fed with wood and coal like hungry monsters.\n\nBelow the breach in the wall closest to us, a pair of vast stands surrounded a bone-covered arena, filled with thousands of rowdy orkin. As for what held their attention, I couldn't tell, but I knew from the metal net and circling carrion, it involved death. On the far side of the arena was an opening filled with more cages and pens. Eventually my gaze fell to where the base of the rocky pile met the back of the stands.\n\nI know what those cages are, they're using what they catch to fight in the arena!\n\nA cruel combination of dread and anger filled my mind.\n\nI need to get down there and find the others before it's too late.\n\n\"They're organised and well-armed,\" Neera noted, unable to hide the dread in her tone. \"They've never been like this.\"\n\n\"Where will they be keeping the others?\" I asked.\n\nShe paused, looking down to the rear of the arena. \"My guess is they'll have them in there, ready for the arena \u2013 leatherwings are quite the prize.\"\n\nNausea washed over me as she confirmed my fears. She'd told me they'd be slaves, which was horrible enough, but to think they would have to fight for orkin amusement...\n\n\"You know what you could do,\" the voice hissed.\n\nI shook his suggestion away but gave Neera a disapproving scowl. From the anguish in her eyes, I could sense disappointment, as she most likely hadn't known the orkin would do this. They were gathering their numbers and strengthening their positions, doing things differently.\n\nShe's terrified of it, it's obvious. They're not the enemy she knows anymore.\n\nNeera glanced away without saying a word, her eyes directed toward the rear wall of the arena.\n\n\"We'll have to make it round to the far side,\" she suggested, glancing to the gap between the line of cages and pens leading out to the arena floor.\n\nScouring the mass of captives and their prisons, my focus drifted to where the back of the wooden frame met the base of shattered rubble.\n\n\"Wait,\" I gasped, pressing a forepaw to her tail before she could slip away.\n\n\"It'll take us too long to go all the way around. You said they'd think we were slaves, right? So why not sneak through?\"\n\nShe recognised my urgency as she considered the idea.\n\n\"Through the arena?\" she replied like I was crazy. \"There are too many of them! We can't take them head on!\"\n\n\"No, but if my friends are in there, I'm going in after them,\" I insisted.\n\n\"Then we're going to need more than some bony old plates,\" she informed, ruffling her armour.\n\nI gave the arena another look over. Given the shabbiness of their craftsmanship, it didn't seem too hard to sneak in \u2013 the mass of wood and metal was full of holes covered by simple pelts.\n\nThat's not going to be the hard part though, is it? I thought as I considered, getting out will be our problem.\n\nThe others wouldn't have a disguise, and worse still, the arena floor lay between us and the temple, which meant that the quickest way out was across the killing field.\n\nI'd be saving my friends to lead them into a death trap.\n\n\"It's only a trap if you don't do what you know you can,\" the voice in my head sneered.\n\nI narrowed my eyes, snorting smoke. \"Leave it to me, I can deal with the orkin.\" Neera gave me that crazy look again.\n\n\"All of them alone? No offence, but the last time you...\" I glanced her way, and she trailed off as I assured.\n\n\"That's not going to happen this time.\"\n\nShe clearly didn't know what to think, though the fact I was still alive seemed to be worth something as she nodded.\n\n\"Well, we still need a way in,\" she declared.\n\nMy eyes scoured the arena walls, carefully absorbing every detail. One area was exposed and more easily accessible from the base of the rock pile.\n\n\"Down there,\" I noted, motioning to the opening.\n\nShe mirrored my action before the pair of us snaked down. Soot-choked stones buckled and shifted beneath our weight, as I begged the creators that our disguises would be enough to see us through. Thankfully, Neera seemed to have been right about the orkins' stupidity, from a distance we were indistinguishable from the armoured dogs and wolves I'd glimpsed patrolling the ruins.\n\n\"Why worry, they discover you, and they die, it's simple really,\" the dark voice stated as we reached the arena.\n\nIt seemed the orkin had constructed it over what remained of a cathedral, supported by a mesh of imperfect wood and metal bored deep into the rock.\n\n\"Neera, climb up,\" I said, my tail directing her attention upward.\n\nShe hesitated, before scampering over the ridges of my armour, onto my back and disappeared inside.\n\n\"It's clear,\" she reported.\n\nHeaving my heavy armour, and myself up, I slipped through, landing on wood with a clatter from my encased claws. We found ourselves in a cage, evident by the barred door at the far end. Beyond, lay a dimly lit corridor, and directly opposite, another chamber led out onto a balcony populated by a horde of rowdy orkin. Hide and fur rugs hung over the opening and a dull torchlight lit the gloom. Smoke and the smell of death lingered in the air while the sounds of rattling chains combined with howls from below.\n\nBy the creators if they so much as lay a claw on any of my friends...\n\nI heard my mind's dark avatar cackle in glee as Neera crept over to the edge of the open cell, her sharp eyes peeled, while her restless ears twitched like the wings of an insect.\n\n\"Empty,\" she muttered, as I cautiously crept up beside her.\n\n\"There's got to be more cells,\" she suggested, peering round to where the corridor dropped down a set of stairs.\n\n\"It seems you's gone an' redeemed yourself, Goarog,\" a deep voice suddenly growled.\n\nInstinctively, I pulled Neera back, and without thinking I forced us both into the corner of the cell. She tensed, her feathers bristling like she was about to kill me, while I managed to silently mouth a weak apology. Heavy footsteps heralded the appearance of a brutish orkin as he strode into the corridor outside the cell. It didn't take long for her to recognise the voice as I caught sight of Goarog and his hulking master.\n\nMy anger boiled \u2013 they'd burned villages, taken my friends, and left me for dead!\n\nIt was hard not to turn both to ash there and then. Holding back, I was able to take some satisfaction from the fact that the orkin who had killed me was nothing more than a snivelling coward before his overlord.\n\n\"Thank you's, m\u2013my lord,\" Goarog squealed.\n\n\"You's may have slithered ya' way out of this one, runt, but I still want that wyrm's head on a spike, or you's be lucky if you's don't become dinner for a chimera,\" Balgore growled.\n\nAll the while, I could see the pride radiating from my companion at the mention of her proclaimed title.\n\n\"Yes, yes, my lord, I's will gets what you's desires,\" he squealed, before a loud animalistic growl parted Balgore's jaw.\n\n\"I's hope's so, maggot. Ar' new age is comin' an' I'd hate for you's to miss it.\"\n\nThe larger of the pair shifted and demanded. \"What's is the report from the north?\"\n\n\"All's is well, my lord. Lord Maragoth has the ice fire foundries burning, and more tribes gather from Shadow Fen,\" Goarog finished with a firm grunt.\n\n\"Good, I's didn't expect that stinking brother of mine to do anything useful, but it seems he is better at it than you's, if what you's tells me is correct...\" Balgore challenged, his voice crackling with an ominous tone.\n\n\"Yes, my lord. But the shadow-daemons... they don't distinguish. They slaughter us as they do the weak, they...\"\n\nGoarog's excuse trailed off in an animalistic whine. Balgore shifted, giving an ignorant snort.\n\n\"Of course, the great master would see nothin' in a worm like you's. Now, gets outside with the rest of the runts, and pray these new combatants are worthy of my time.\"\n\nThere was no objection from the cowardly underling, his footsteps disappearing after the heavy slam of his lord's fist on a table.\n\nI released a tense breath, peering out to see both had moved out of sight.\n\n\"Nice to hear they still want my head, I was afraid they'd forgotten,\" Neera joked, creeping into the corridor.\n\nMy mind lingered on what the pair had said, particularly on the fact that the majority of the orkin army wasn't here.\n\nI can't kill them if they're not here! I thought in frustration, yet my mind's dark avatar merely assured me the time would come.\n\nI followed Neera along the corridor to where it descended into a dungeon emanating a cacophony of howls.\n\n\"This way,\" she prompted with a wave of a wing, jumping down the stairs.\n\nThe sound of thousands of heavy feet stamping down on the stands blended with the roars of imprisoned creatures. As we reached the bottom, we found the wooden wall to our right held several large cells. Each one filled with smaller cages that held nothing more than gnawing rodents and bones.\n\nOn our left, larger openings led out to the arena floor, lined with more cells. Behind one set of bars was a furious mixture of foul beasts in a single body, hissing, spitting and thrashing angrily. The multi-headed chimera eyed us both for a moment, before returning to its frenzied spin, its snake-like tail gurgling putrid liquid while two other heads spewed torrents of flame.\n\n\"Shut up in there's, you's oversized manticore!\" an orkin guard growled, thrashing a barbed whip towards its cell.\n\nI spun around to face him, only to find him wrestling with a smaller version of the monster in the cage behind me, and although it was no bigger than a dog, the adolescent chimera was no less aggressive. Beyond the wrestling pair lay another set of cells, and my eyes widened in relief, and then horror, as I saw what was inside.\n\n\"Listen up, you's runts, the boss 'as something to say!\" an orkin voice boomed from outside.\n\nThe roaring crowd fell silent, as I launched myself at the whip-wielding orkin. Most of his uncorrupted back was covered by a cloth draped over his shoulder spines, but my exoskeleton-encased claws took care of both with little effort and forced him to drop the young chimera.\n\n\"Listen, you's maggots!\" Balgore's voice boomed out over the now silent horde. \"How's long has we's been livin' in these holes? How's longs has our Lord Hinnoron's vision been denied!?\"\n\nThe question went unanswered, but the same could not be said for me as I sank my claws deep into the back of the orkin slave master. The corrupted humanoid thrashed, swinging his weaponised forelimb at me. I swerved across his shoulder, narrowly missing the rusted mix of flesh, skeleton, and blade. Then came the sharp crack of the whip clattering on my armour as his other arm reached over to grab me.\n\n\"Far too long has we's been beaten by the weak ones! Far too longs have we's let our lord's will be undone! The blessing given to's us by the power of the Great Master has beens wasted on you's cowering wretches!\"\n\nThe uneasy silence amidst the rabble of the arena stands remained unbroken as the whip struck my armour over and over.\n\n\"Hold still!\" Neera called.\n\nI glanced up to see the sharp bone feathers slice across my opponent's neck, while a second pair struck the small chimera's forelimbs.\n\n\"Well, we's ain't goanna waste that blessing no more!\" Balgore decreed, as a torrent of black blood from the slave master's neck darkened my scales.\n\nJumping away, I staggered off him as he toppled into a twitching heap, and finally fell limp on the sand beside the wailing chimera.\n\n\"The hour of our Great Master has come, as promised! His prison is no longers locked, his demons fill the skies, and so we's rise to answers his call!\"\n\nMy eyes opened wide as a rattling sound behind me, ended with a rickety thud. I looked to see a wooden gate had fallen into place over our way back into the corridor, locking us in the dungeon. I didn't care, all my thoughts abruptly stopped as my eyes fell on the open cell opposite, and the lone cage inside. It was neither empty nor filled with discarded bones, and a flood of relief mixed with guilt overcame me when I saw her.\n\n\"Risha!\" Her name left my muzzle before I knew it.\n\nRelief turned to anger when I saw her beaten scales smothered beneath foul gladiator armour, her silver bracelets long since stolen. All the while, her eyes filled with disbelief inside the cold sockets of her metal mask. Unlike the exoskeletal helmet I wore, hers was a foul metal case, glowing with strange runes, clamped and sealed firmly over her muzzle. A metal grill covered her eyes and nostrils, and a large padlock sealed the steel tomb to a chain.\n\nShe mumbled something, but her faint murmur was lost in a roar of orkin applause.\n\n\"The ice fires of Valcador are burning, the shamans of Shadow Fen heed the call, and we's goanna use 'em all. We's goanna march on this world as our lord once did. We's gonna rise as the Great Master's servants and he's goanna bring about ours new age!\" Balgore's booming speech continued.\n\n\"Step back!\" I instructed.\n\nRisha pressed herself against the back of the cage as I breathed a jet of fire and boiled her chain into glowing sludge. As soon as she was free, she leapt at me, almost knocking me over. Despite all the hatred, all the guilt, the moment I felt her embrace, it all dissolved away.\n\nSwiftly shaking one of the gauntlets from my forepaws, I grasped the second chain, then the padlock. I had to concentrate; I wasn't sure if what I was attempting to do would work without the control my amulet gave me. Sure enough, my tight grip began to glow, I had enough hatred boiling inside me to destroy this whole place, but our reunion gave me all the control I needed. I gripped tighter until the metal melted away. It dribbled to the floor, and I fell into a slight daze when, with a metallic click and a thud, her mask fell off.\n\n\"Blaze, I thought you were dead!\" she cried, tears streaming from her eyes.\n\nI was left speechless while my haziness cleared, and our wings wrapped around each other's.\n\nShe saw me die \u2013 what can I tell her? That I came back, simply awoke from the eternal sleep that had stolen the rest of her family?\n\n\"He was,\" Neera chimed in, retrieving her blade from the orkin's neck before cautiously eyeing the squirming chimera.\n\nRisha didn't even glance in the faldron's direction, she held me tighter, nuzzling beneath my head as tears rolled from her eyes. Out of it all, only one thing came to mind.\n\n\"Nothing to hold me to yet,\" I whispered, wrapping my wing tightly over her back.\n\nShe looked up at me, her sapphire eyes wide and gleaming as she declared. \"That's not a bridge I'm ever going to cross.\"\n\n\"Demons are descending from the north, the place where the meats bag scum stole away our great master. It's from there that he's returnin'!\" Balgore rallied another chorus of thunderous cheers from the crowd outside.\n\n\"Where are the others?\" Neera questioned urgently.\n\n\"They dragged me over here,\" replied Risha. \"I was supposed to be the next one in this\u2026 spectacle. The others are still over there,\" she explained, pointing across the blood-stained arena with her wing.\n\n\"The brethren of Hinnoron will's be drawing togethers, all the clans and all the tribes. We's will march on this world as we's did under our lord's brazen banner. We's will scour the mountains of featherwings, burn the soft skin meat bags, and dig out the city of wyrms! The brazen horde of Hinnoron is reformed. You's all serves Balgore now, maggots!\"\n\nThe thunderous applause was the loudest combination of noises I'd ever heard, and my relief faded as Neera gave a frustrated grunt, pacing forward.\n\n\"We can't get to them, not through that many, there's thousands!\" she stated, staring out on to the arena floor.\n\nShe's right, but I chose this way, and if I fail to stop them here, then they'll destroy everything.\n\n\"I need to stop them,\" I declared. Risha froze in my grip.\n\n\"No, no, you can't,\" she demanded. \"You can't go out there, that's crazy!\"\n\nI pulled away, and her words trailed off as I peered over the arena floor.\n\n\"Wait here,\" I instructed, but she refused to let me move.\n\n\"No, I'm not losing you again,\" she insisted, her expression the same as it had been the first night I'd tried to leave her.\n\nShe stepped forward, her eyes like piercing daggers, and I realised she didn't need to tell me 'no' again. She looked to my once-shattered wing, then down to the armour covering the scar on my chest.\n\n\"T\u2013They'll kill you!\" she snapped, her words wavering with emotion.\n\n\"I'd like to see them try!\" Neera interrupted.\n\nRisha looked between us, bewilderment covering her face.\n\nIf only she'd seen what Neera saw. I thought, as I sighed. They can't kill me, but they can kill my friends... That's why I must be the one in the line of fire.\n\nThe rattle of wood and the screech of metal snatched all our attentions when more dungeon bars rose.\n\nOr the world could have other plans. I thought, glaring into the face of the fully-grown and ruthlessly tormented chimera."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Centurion",
                "text": "\"Get across the arena, now!\" I hissed as Neera edged to my side.\n\nThe multi-headed creature gave a loud hiss, multiple pairs of hungry eyes designating targets for the equally numerous sets of fangs. The mouth of the feline head snarled, its bared teeth dripping with foaming liquid beneath flared nostrils. The goat head sat beside it, and the scaly third head snorted flame.\n\n\"That bile is really flammable,\" Neera nervously pointed out, positioning herself behind our fireproof bodies and nodding to the gurgling liquid.\n\nThe monster's attention panned away, and it moved towards its smaller companion.\n\n\"I'll distract it, you get over there and find the others,\" I ordered, backing away as the creature lowered two of its heads.\n\nBeyond the confines of the chamber I could hear the mixed responses of the crowd \u2013 the cheers, morphing into growls at the delayed entertainment. The postponement was short-lived, as the monstrous creature lashed out. The teeth of two heads, and the fangs of its snake-like tail, ripping the smaller chimera to ribbons.\n\nIs everything here only interested in killing?\n\nStepping to the left, I distracted the third head away from the others as I called.\n\n\"Hey, ugly!\"\n\nThe second pair twisted after the third, one vomiting foul liquid in a series of bubbling coughs while sparks flashed behind the fangs of the other. Before the uppermost head could ignite the flammable bile, I breathed my own, sparking the spewing liquid into an inferno.\n\n\"Go, run for the cages!\" I shouted as the flames wrapped around the thrashing beast.\n\nWith little care for the changed combatants, the savage crowd roared to life when the three of us bolted out onto the arena floor. To the right of our entrance a tower supported a balcony above the crowds, breaking the skyline of the arena. Balgore and his lesser grunt Goarog watched the spectacle while the warlord's wyvern sat on a bone perch to his left. Above us, a net of chains covered the arena's upper rim, patrolled by armed orkin.\n\nEven if I melt through the net, there's no way we can avoid that many arrows. I noted as I saw more beyond the outer walls. We'll have to walk all the way to the temple.\n\nI wasn't given long to speculate, as a chorus of animalistic cheers wasn't enough to quench the chimera's ferocity. It lunged at me in an explosion of splintering wood and flames, unable to avoid its crushing jaws my frail armour crunched as its teeth sheered through and struck my scales. A concoction of vile-smelling fumes and spewing liquid flooded over me as I kicked out, trying to break free. The flaming monstrosity reared up in response, launching me through the air with a flick of its neck. Spreading my wings a moment too late, I slammed into the ground with a thud.\n\nSomewhat dazed I staggered to my paws as the creature spun wildly before striking out with its serpent-tail. The potent fangs lanced across my muzzle like a cracking whip, shattering the exoskeleton and knocking me to the floor. Finding my back pressed into the sand, I rolled onto my front, only to be pinned down by one of its forepaws. I resisted its weight, forcing all my paws into the ground, the acrid reek of its breath stung my nostrils and flammable drool poured over me.\n\nBreathing fire while covered in this stuff can't be the best idea? I thought, only to conclude. But neither was blowing up that bridge.\n\nI opened my muzzle, fighting to draw breath as the slender, serpentine head of the tail appeared beside me. With a sharp hiss, its fanged jaw flared, and I was in no position to do anything other than struggle as it struck toward me.\n\nIn an unexpected flash, a lance of ice sliced the scaly extremity clean off, and it flopped to the floor in a twitching heap. In the same instant, the abomination's pained whine became a shriek as it reared up, and a pair of bone-feathers skewered the rightmost head's eyes.\n\n\"Get away!\" Risha growled, angrily beating her wings, and rearing up with sapphire fire dancing between her teeth.\n\nStaggering to my paws, I looked back in startled confusion.\n\n\"I'm not letting you out of my sight again!\" she hollered above the orkins' din.\n\n\"Keep its attention, I'll get behind it!\" Neera called, darting masterfully into the air.\n\nRisha braced herself against the floor at my side, her wings tight at her flanks, elemental marks glowing.\n\n\"I'm trained, you know?\" she stated, her firm expression broken slightly by a stern smile. \"And I don't need the order's stupid exams to deal with this thing.\"\n\nAbove the clanking of metal, the booming of drums, and the roaring crowd, the painful screams of our now partially blinded adversary cried out. The reptilian head spat at Neera, sending a dry cough of flames towards her. With a beat of my wings I bolted forward, aiming for the lower of the heads, plunging my teeth and claws deep into the mangy flesh on its neck. Foul-tasting ichors mixed with the noxious fumes flooded my mouth, and what remained of my helmet crumbled under the strain.\n\nSo much for the disguise, most of the city is cheering for us now!\n\nThe roaring creature bolted, throwing me over its head to within reach of its gnashing jaw. A surge of pain burst through the armour around the tip of my tail as its teeth sank through to my scales. I didn't dare look at the bloody mess, instead I clawed my way onto its head and forced my talons deeper into its skull. Noxious bile spewed from its mouth, its bones cracked, and blood boiled. The second of Neera's makeshift gauntlets disintegrated in the flames of my white-hot claws in an all-too-familiar fashion, and yet I felt neither sympathy nor guilt for stealing another life.\n\nI'm doing what's right, this thing's a monster. It's my responsibility to make sure it can't hurt anyone else.\n\n\"Risha! Light it!\" I cried as I shoved the creature's head down into its own concoction of flammable bile.\n\nHer eyes widened as she hesitated. \"What about you!?\"\n\nThe creature lurched up, almost throwing me into the air.\n\n\"Risha, do it!\" I urged, glancing into its wild eyes for a moment before the world erupted in blue flames.\n\nWhat was left of my armour gave a crack as the explosive force threw me through the air and I landed with a thud, closely followed by a shower of foul-smelling gore. My head spun, my muscles burned, my tail was in tatters, and what remained of the chimera slumped in the sand.\n\nSpews fire... But not so fireproof... I inwardly gasped, as my head slumped against the sand.\n\nMy armour had split, sagging off like broken pottery as my wings flopped loosely at my side.\n\n\"Blaze! Blaze! By the fires, your tail!\" Risha called, urgently appearing at my side. \"I'm sorry I...\"\n\nShaking off the battered parts of her armour, she frantically wrapped me in another desperate embrace until I was brought face to face with her disapproving scowl.\n\n\"Don't you ever make me do anything like that again!\" she demanded, squeezing me tighter.\n\n\"Well, I'll assume I'm safe if you're the one managing the explosions,\" I offered dryly, and she snorted a hiss of blue flame in my face.\n\n\"Hey, you two, look sharp \u2013 this isn't over,\" Neera reminded us as she landed to our right.\n\nBesides some minor tail feather singes, she looked fine. Not to mention, her armour was holding up far better than mine. Her eyes were not fixed on us, she was focused on the balcony above the roaring crowd.\n\n\"A victor! Gets some's mores out there's, I's wants to sees more fightin'!\" Balgore growled, silencing the roaring crowd with a bang of his mighty hammer. \"I's wants to sees more fightin', and that means get more fightin' on! Boss's orders, and I's goanna be the biggest of all the bosses!\"\n\n\"Not if I can help it!\" I shouted as I staggered forward.\n\nI'm ending this today, even if I have to slay every orkin here to get Balgore's head on a spike.\n\n\"I know you can understand me,\" I pressed.\n\n\"Huh?\" the warlord snorted, staring down at me like I was no more than an ant talking back to his boot.\n\nMeanwhile, the eyes of his lesser companion weren't quite so devoid of concern. Goarog's rocky skull cracked and shifted as they widened.\n\n\"That's... that's impossible, I's stuck that one good,\" he whimpered, as if robbed of a prize.\n\n\"If you's as stuck it, then how's it here?\" Balgore questioned.\n\nI placed a paw forward and coiled back.\n\n\"Get to the cages and find the others, I'll keep him busy,\" I instructed.\n\n\"Blaze, I told you...\"\n\n\"I'm going to put an end to this,\" I declared, before Risha could protest further.\n\nIt didn't stop her concern, but she reluctantly released me as Neera added.\n\n\"Keep him away from the cages, I'll find a way through.\"\n\n\"Even's if it was dead, which it ain't, why was it not here on my wall?\" Balgore growled, pointing a claw at me, then the stuttering grunt.\n\nGoarog whined, backing away until his spines brushed the wall. For every moment they argued the crowd was silent and I collected myself. Taking in a deep breath I closed my eyes, allowing all the rage and hatred to fill my mind.\n\nHe'd killed me and stolen my friends!\n\n\"Anger?\" the dark tone of my mind teased.\n\nNo, this is my responsibility. My concentration wavered.\n\nI will punish them for everything they've done, not because some voice in my head wants me to reduce all who condemn me to dust, but because it's necessary.\n\n\"No matter, runt, I's gonna shows you how a real warlord does things. I's gonna have that wyrm's head for my...\"\n\nThe wooden platform exploded in a ball of fire as my shot landed with an explosive boom. Reverberating from every surface and sinking deep into the earth with a resonating hum, as if the city itself welcomed the impending liberation.\n\nI braced myself as fire leapt across my scales, shattering what was left of Neera's armour. With another burst of white flame, the arena's framework ignited, scattering tree-sized fragments across the crowd. The orkin closest to the blaze scattered like insects, Goarog was catapulted to the side and the wyvern's bleached perch collapsed into the stands. A plume of dust and fire consumed Balgore as he fell from the crumbling platform, and with a thundering crash, an avalanche of smouldering rubble crashed on top of him.\n\n\"Such power, it feels good, doesn't it?\" The voice hissed.\n\nThe restless crowd fell silent as the echo of the explosions dispersed amongst the peaks. I prowled towards the settling dust, each step of my burning paws turning the sand into boiling pits of molten glass.\n\nThis ends today. All of them die!\n\nWithout hesitation, I coiled back, and set the remains of the smouldering stands ablaze with breath after breath. Orkin scattered like roaches as the fire began to ravage the wooden structure. But I was far from done. Rearing up, I beat my wings, releasing a wave of boiling air, dispersing all that was left of the explosion's dust cloud.\n\nShock didn't worry me when I saw Balgore shrug off the rubble when he emerged unfazed from the wave of heat. Grasping his hammer, he let out a fearsome roar, beating a stone-ravaged arm across his chest. Another loud roar robbed my attention, the unmistakable sound of the wyvern.\n\nOh, how I will enjoy melting one of those into dust!\n\nIts serpentine neck and unfurled wings blocked out the light from the burning platform as it rose into the air. Within seconds it was heading straight at me, its beating wings creating a sandstorm in its wake. Effortlessly dodging to the right, its jaws impacted the molten dirt I'd left behind, and I couldn't help but smile as my nemesis burnt itself on the searing sand.\n\n\"No!\" Balgore shouted, his spiked hammer crashing down on his mount's head with a bone-crushing blow as he shoved it aside.\n\n\"This one's mine!\" he rumbled, running at me without hesitation.\n\nHe was like a mountain, wielding a hammer that was twice the size of my skull. If I hadn't been in control of my fear, I might have broken down at the sight of the wall of warped steel, flesh and stone.\n\n\"What is fear but a weak mortal concept?\" my avatar hissed wickedly.\n\nI coiled back, firing another ball of burning light into the sand at his twisted feet. The ground erupted as the projectile exploded and a cloud of hot sand and fire consumed the warlord. The shot rang out, the sound carrying deep into the mountain. Another unusual silence momentarily fell over the arena, until something rang back. It was so faint I barely noticed. Raising myself up, I stepped back from the lingering cloud, thankful that the warlord was nowhere to be seen \u2013 did it work, is he...?\n\nHis hulking body burst through the swirling mist, his hammer striking my side before I could avoid it. I landed in a steaming heap of superheated sand, yet there was no pain, in fact all he'd succeeded in doing was to encourage my mind's dark entity to stoke my fires. I caught sight of Risha and Neera behind me, but before I could get to my paws, the sharp spines of Balgore's hammer struck me again.\n\n\"Is that all you's got, wyrm?\"\n\nWhite flame spewed from my nostrils as I swatted the weapon away with a foreclaw. Lifting to my paws in a shroud of steam, Balgore grew wary, but also unsatisfied by my unspoken answer. He held what was left of his hammer across his chest, the end he'd struck me with glowing bright orange and hissing like freshly forged steel.\n\n\"I's gonna guts you's, flame demon!\" he boomed, charging towards me.\n\nFocusing all my fury and hate, I closed my eyes and coiled back, ready to strike, but his hammer came too early. The spiked weapon plunged down with bone-shattering force, but the blow never came. The metal hissed and cracked, melting into a hot sludge long before it could strike my molten scales. Opening my eyes to the sensation of slag pouring over me, I glanced down to see it reform as a dark blob at my paws.\n\nBalgore's eyes widened when he looked over what remained of his once great hammer with utter disbelief.\n\nNow he's getting the message! He, and his whole cursed race are going to die!\n\nThe faint sound of a distant hum from deep inside the mountain filled the silence. This time it was more distinctive, radiating up to the high mountain peaks like an elusive symphony.\n\n\"What's this trickery?\" Balgore demanded, furiously shaking what was left of his hammer.\n\nI didn't respond, while the dark creature in my mind guided my thoughts: \"No mercy!\"\n\nI opened my muzzle, flames as hot as the sun bubbling in the back of my throat.\n\nNo mercy for monsters! My own thoughts repeated.\n\nA deeper, longer rumble reverberated around the arena; this time too loud to ignore. It surged through the city like a great wave, immediately followed by a deep tremor.\n\nReleasing a wayward fireball, Balgore fell to the sand in another explosion. The force also sent me staggering, while the whole mountain shifted beneath my paws.\n\nThis isn't me, I'm strong, but I can't move the earth itself!\n\nI searched for my opponent and what remained of the scattering crowd froze and fell silent. Balgore rose to his feet and another deep, earth-churning groan resonated, this time accompanied by the ring of grinding metal. Something shifted beneath me, something mechanical and yet alive, beating at the earth, clawing its way under the city.\n\nThe howling of orkin slave creatures grew into a panicked frenzy as fire spread further over the arena. An unnerving chill ran down my spine as my blazing form started to dissipate. I caught sight of the others standing by one of the cages, and given the glowing-hot bars, I assumed they were trying to melt their way through.\n\nWhat are they waiting for, why have they stopped?\n\nThe city shook again, loose ruins tumbling while the orkin horde began to squeal more than ever as large sections of the arena collapsed. All the while, the deep, mechanical growl grew louder, and I began shaking more violently with the increasing shudder. My gaze, as well as many others was directed toward the temple as the earth before the defiled golden doors erupted into a huge fountain of dirt and stone.\n\nA snake-like mass of gleaming metal whipped violently into the air. What looked like an enormous, armoured worm with a fiery-white light glowing beneath segmented golden plates writhed up from the pit, tossing orkin aside like ants before sinking back down.\n\n\"What's is this!?\" Balgore demanded.\n\nI had no idea; but the fact that the orkin didn't know about it, worried me more.\n\nThis is their city; they've been here for hundreds of years and they don't know what this is?\n\nAnother metallic growl reverberated from the pit, and another shape erupted high into the sky, blocking out the sun before crashing down.\n\nIs that a giant golden claw? I thought in stunned disbelief.\n\nThe metal talons slammed into the ground with an almighty crunch, showing little care for the structures or the orkin crushed beneath. The plates that bound its glowing interior buckled, shifting and shimmering as geysers of steam shot out from intricate joints. The sound repeated itself when another claw emerged, grabbing the top of a stone column, the force almost bringing the whole pillar down.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is that? I thought in horror while the limbs shifted, hauling something up from deep within the pit. I bolted as fast as my legs would allow to the cage on which Risha and Neera worked.\n\n\"Can you get through?\" I panted, looking at the glowing bars.\n\nNeera shook her head free of her focus, noted my newly healed body with a snort, then swiftly added.\n\n\"I'm working on it! These things are designed to hold all sorts of animals, including fire-breathing ones!\"\n\nThe metallic grinding accelerated, accompanied by a constant rumble. Waves of panicked orkin rushed out of the arena like a river, even Balgore turned to his dazed wyvern, leaping into its saddle. Neera coiled back, releasing a torrent of hybrid fire over the bars, while more fire from Risha finally melted them.\n\n\"Come on!\" she called, avoiding the red-hot metal as she snaked through.\n\n\"Blaze, come on!\" Risha shouted yanking me to the far end of the cage where we found another set of bars.\n\nThe destruction was clearly visible \u2013 beyond the bars a huge gash had been ripped through the earth in front of the temple doors, dragging a good portion of the orkins' crude structures down with it.\n\n\"No! Stupid things, we need to get through!\" Risha growled, launching herself at the bars.\n\nShe said they had the others over by the temple. I peered out through the cage in stunned terror. No, not like this!\n\n\"You can't save everyone,\" my mind hissed callously.\n\n\"Risha! We'll get them out, I promise,\" I declared, gripping her by the shoulders.\n\nAll the while, Neera stood wide-eyed, staring at a machine lifting itself from the crumbling pit. The mechanical limbs dragged it from the depths, its colossal bulk blocked out the sky, while piles of debris cascaded down its shifting plates. The ancient, metallic workings shifted until a great, segmented wing stretched out, pistons hissing while a mysterious, white light glowed like a furnace inside. There was one last groan as the wing folded, and the metal goliath heaved itself to full height, its long, slender neck coiling up to reveal a regally decorated head, glowing white eyes and ember-spewing nostrils.\n\n\"It's a dragon!\" Neera shouted, muzzle agape as the monster of pure gold shuddered to a halt.\n\nDebris poured from its body as it dwarfed the arena. Along its segmented neck, metal plates separated, hissed and clattered as they parted slightly to relieve the heat inside. Steam hissed from its joints, while its head, held high above the highest city spire, scanned the horde before it.\n\nI paid little attention to the wyvern and Balgore taking off behind us as the animated machine's eyes blazed with white flames.\n\nIt's like the monster from the celebration, but... Different.\n\nI didn't have time to consider who could have constructed such a thing, because it now looked straight at me, or was it into me, what was inside me or what it knew me to be? I didn't know.\n\nIt's like it knows me.\n\nSilence fell over the mountains, even the orkin turned to stare. The strangely beautiful armour shifted and light surged from its chest, up into its neck, past the upper plates venting a celestial heat, slowly creeping, segment by segment.\n\nMy eyes widened when I realised what was about to happen.\n\nIt's a giant mechanical dragon, and that is\u2026 Dragon's breath...\n\nI leapt forward, dragging Neera back from the bars, forcing her behind Risha and I. With three metallic clanks, a hiss of steam, and a whirring of smaller mechanisms, the machine's jaw opened, releasing a hurricane of white-hot flame. I closed my eyes while the fire consumed the street, turning it into a river of flames that washed away the chattering hordes of orkin, tore what remained of the arena stand from its foundations, and boiled our cage.\n\nFireproof or not, I felt the heat lap at my scales as the sheer force rocked our cell like a ship caught in a storm. Thankfully, the crude orkin metal offered enough protection, but the same couldn't be said for the burning wood, charred stone, and the smell of burnt monsters.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Neera panted, her feather-tips sizzling as she peered at both of us.\n\nShe could have died if I'd have been a second slower... I dismissed the possibility of what could have been and simply offered a nod.\n\nThe far side of the cage was now nothing more than a glowing hole.\n\n\"That fire... It's...\" began Risha, looking right at me as she shrugged off what was left of her singed armour. I knew what she was going to say \u2013 no fire's that hot, save for mine.\n\n\"Come on, we've got to get past it,\" I ordered, moving to the newly melted opening.\n\n\"Stay behind us,\" Risha instructed to the not-so-fireproof Faldron.\n\nNeera wasn't going to argue and nodded as the two followed me.\n\nPeering down over the scorched ground, I saw the remains of a thousand incinerated orkin. Those more stone than flesh, had withstood most of the flames and came crawling from the heaps of blackened bones as a smell viler than the chimera's breath hung in the parched air. Pyres and lingering smoke created a veil over the machine while more metallic movement echoed from the pit, followed by a heavy thud when the claw clutching the pillar crashed to the ground.\n\nRubble and boulders littered the street before me, and it was hard to tell what had recently fallen and what had been this way for centuries.\n\nMaybe I won't be the one to level this place after all.\n\nTesting the heat of the smouldering stones for Neera, I leapt down and fixed my eyes on the orkin structures near the pit.\n\n\"That's it down there,\" Risha directed, as more orkin crawled from the rubble like rats.\n\n\"Whats are you's doing maggots!? Gets in there an' fight!\" Balgore's voice bellowed from somewhere above the devastation.\n\nPeering over my shoulder I saw his wyvern perched on the city wall, beyond the smouldering ruins of the arena. Even so far away he made his voice heard, however, the sound also attracted the machine's attention. Its expressionless eyes locked on the warlord's position and it emitted a low groan as its metal jaw hissed again. The golden segments in its throat spaced, venting the heat of the pulsating light channelling up its neck until, with a jolt, it launched another projectile.\n\nIt was unnervingly like the fire bolts I was able to conjure and ripped through the air with the intensity of the sun. The wyvern beat its wings, attempting to escape, but the projectile's explosive force shattered the wall under it, covering it in a shower of stone and debris, knocking Balgore into the volcanic mist over the far side. As soon as he was gone, the machine's eyes drifted to the orkin hordes, and its mouth opened once more.\n\nClink, clink, boom!\n\nA new, equally deafening sound shattered the air, echoing through the mountains before the machine could let loose its flame. I bolted to the cover of a boulder as the head of the metal creature exploded in a shroud of shrapnel. Several of the orkin cannons had turned to face the new foe, and with a whirring of crude metal, the giant-dragon was struck again.\n\nIts head rose from the smoke completely unscathed, turning to the first cannon.\n\n\"Fire!\"\n\nThis time I heard the order before the cannon's molten ball was released. The shot glanced the side of the machine's armoured frame, and my eyes widened in horror when I realised where the deflected shot would land.\n\n\"Look out!\" Without thinking, I jumped to my paws, bounding across more rubble as Risha yanked Neera away from the exploding shot.\n\nIt struck a tower above us, the whole thing coming down in a thundering cloud of dust.\n\n\"We need to get out of the open, we're like sitting-griffins out here!\" Neera declared, her feathers ruffling. \"We should use the back alleys for cover!\"\n\nThe ringing in my ears muffled the boom of another cannon and the orkin battle cries, as I looked to Risha.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\nShe coughed, rising to her paws, but managed a nod while shaking the dust from her scales.\n\n\"S\u2013she's right, we need to get to the temple...\" she suggested.\n\nA mechanical whir echoed through the settling dust, allowing me to see the faint glow of flames. Before any of us could react, there was a stone-crunching crash, the force shattering the floor, sending the dust cloud into another frenzy. The claw of the machine came to rest in the rubble beside us \u2013 a little closer and we'd have been flattened!\n\nPeering up, I saw the shifting golden plates amidst the gloom. Up-close, I could see the metal was engraved with a mass of intricate carvings, like those on the Elder Temple's door. It was obvious that the plates were only the exterior shell. Thousands of metal components shifted like living muscle covered by white light within the machine's core, all combining to mimic a living creature.\n\nSeveral large plates forming its lower chest vented a wave of intense heat, exposing the raging furnace at its heart. The surge of hot air hit me like a wall, and a shower of white embers followed as it unleashed another shot. The bolt of light lit the gloom, followed by another violent response from the orkin canons.\n\nThey can fire all they want; it doesn't seem to care. I thought in twisted triumph as I saw the blazing ruins of a canon cascading down.\n\nAs I watched, the claw pulled up and the glowing chest glided forward as it took another lumbering step. The whole thing was like the shadow-creatures, it shouldn't exist, but it did, and yet it felt different, like it belonged somewhere else as opposed to not belonging at all.\n\n\"Okay, now's our chance,\" Neera suggested, hopping down into the narrow Taldran streets the moment the claw was gone.\n\nShifting to follow, I caught Risha's stare lingering on the mighty golden doors of the crumbling temple.\n\nShe thought she'd lost me and now her brother? I reassuringly nudged her side.\n\n\"Come on, we'll find them,\" I assured.\n\nHer eyes wavered before shifting to me, not even the violent tremors shook her free.\n\nShe really does trust me, even though I haven't a clue. I had no idea how to feel, but I was determined to live up to that trust.\n\nI stepped forward, stretching out my wing to her side. She trusts me more than I trust myself, is that what matters?\n\nWe both jumped into the streets after Neera whilst another boom rang out over the machine's thunderous movements. The rumble spurred us all on, hugging the walls of the tightly packed ruins until we found a side street leading towards the temple.\n\nI hate tight spaces. I thought, reminded of the ice below Ilivar as we shoved past orkin barricades and camps.\n\nFinally, Neera scampered to the end of the street, which was crossed by another, leaving us with a choice: left or right. We turned towards the temple, but it was nothing more than another tight space, and a graveyard of smouldering ruins.\n\n\"By my tail feathers, it's like a maze down here!\" Neera grumbled as she peered out into a courtyard filled with the demolished foundations of highkin architecture, the remains of orkin scrap, and incinerated creatures.\n\n\"How are they smart enough to navigate this place?\" she added with a puzzled look.\n\n\"We're still heading the right way, it's just a little further,\" I told her, spying the spires of the temple over the shattered roof tops.\n\nShe nodded, swiftly proceeding through an opening, but the moment she was clear, she was struck on her left side. Her armour absorbed most of the blow inflicted by the hulking fist of the half-scorched orkin. Snorting, he pulled a toothed blade from his back, and held it against Neera's neck as she struggled to recover.\n\n\"What doess we's 'ave 'ere?\"\n\nHis sneering lips bubbled foul black goo as he spoke, and without thought, I lunged at him, fire hissing through my teeth. Switching his attention towards me, he swung his spiked fist into my head, throwing me to the floor. The foul taste of a backfire seared my throat as I gagged on soot and clutched my chest. Meanwhile, the orkin shifted, swinging to bring his blade down on me. I saw flashes of Goarog in the wood's seconds before my attacker's chest suddenly exploded. Black gore and corrupted stone followed the frozen spear exiting his abdomen as he expelled a gargled dying breath, hitting the ground with a thud.\n\n\"A dead orkin, that's what you have there,\" Risha growled as she leapt on top of him and helped me to my paws.\n\nUninjured, Neera recovered her dignity before pressing on, muttering. \"Let's pretend that one didn't get the jump on me.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I offered my companion.\n\n\"You're not dying again,\" Risha declared. \"Not if I can help it.\"\n\n\"Tell that to the thing that did this,\" Neera called.\n\nWe both looked to see her at the far side of the courtyard. Clambering over, I found myself peering at the distinctive imprint the machine's claw had left in the ground.\n\n\"What is that thing?\" Risha questioned, as its distant rumbles echoed through the streets like a ghost.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I admitted, shaking my head \u2013 this is something else entirely, like the shadow-creatures... Like me.\n\n\"Whatever it is, I hope it wipes this place off the mountainside, then burns the whole of Valcador to boot,\" Neera professed bitterly.\n\nThe thunder of cannon fire behind us wasn't too far from granting the faldron her wish as I hopped down into the giant impression.\n\n\"Well, it's got their attention, so let's get into the temple before they catch us again,\" I encouraged.\n\nRisha leapt to my side without question.\n\n\"Remind me again why you wanted to come here in the first place?\" Neera asked, nervously scanning the destruction about her.\n\nFor a moment I was lost for words. I'd no clear idea what the Elders had intended me to find. All I knew was that it was my only lead to finding the creators and fixing this mess.\n\n\"For the same reason you came back to save me,\" I replied.\n\nShe paused for a moment, smiled, and hopped down.\n\n\"In that case, lead on.\"\n\nThe moment I knew she was with us, I clambered over the rubble and through several more cramped streets while the battle raged on at the far end of the city.\n\n\"This was where they held us!\" Risha declared as we finally reached the edge of the pit from which the mechanical creature had crawled.\n\n\"No, no, by the creators, I don't see it!\" she added in a panic.\n\nLaced with fallen debris the pit sloped down beneath the temple into what appeared to be a natural cavern. Huge paw prints were still visible, as were the gashes that monstrous, metal claws had left in the earth. Any curiosity was forgotten, as I studied the slope to find most of it was formed from huge pieces of stone sitting amidst crushed metal forges and collapsed huts.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Neera asked, only to swiftly correct herself when faced with Risha's solemn stare. \"I... I... They can't be down there, I'm sure they're okay.\"\n\nShe didn't get another response as Risha hopped down to scour the rubble. I was quick to follow, overturning stones and wooden beams while the sounds of cannon fire and metal feet still thundered overhead.\n\nNeera has to be right, they have to be okay!\n\n\"There!\" Risha cried, sliding down the rubble towards the half-crushed remains of a larger orkin structure sitting almost vertical on the slope.\n\nI bolted after her into the shadow of the newly formed chasm, and from the sound of her paws, I guessed Neera was right behind. The sudden appearance of an orkin emerging from the doorway stopped me in my tracks. He was dazed and shaken, Risha was far enough away to stop before she ran into him, while I coiled back, ready to send him into oblivion.\n\n\"Do it! Remember what 'they' did. It is your responsibility to keep them safe,\" the dark tone of my breaking conscience hissed as the orkin staggered, shaking his head before looking up at us.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" he growled.\n\nThe orkin gave a fierce grunt, revealing the metal blade of his warped left arm.\n\n\"They don't deserve mercy, they have broken the natural order!\" my mind roared, and seeing the orkin poised to attack Risha, my vision boiled red.\n\nThe shot hit his chest, sending him back into the wall, where his shredded corpse ricocheted and bounced down into the chasm. The explosion rang out with a strange, echoing hum. It was like the arena, but stronger, and seemed to emit from deep within the bowels of the pit.\n\n\"Good! See how they are nothing in the face of your true power,\" my mind's dark avatar purred, slipping away into my thoughts.\n\nIgnoring his gratification, I leapt down after Risha as she continued to the doorway.\n\n\"Boltock! Ember!\" she called, moving through a corridor lined with buckled cells.\n\nMost held panicked creatures, thrashing and gnawing at their bent prison bars, trying to escape, while others lay dead, crushed under the rock.\n\n\"Ember, Boltock!\" Risha called again, searching the far end of the hut, where the rear section had been sheered away.\n\nThe ground tilted into the chasm and my heart almost stopped at the sound of a loud metal clang. The thought that it may be the machine gripped me, but when it repeated, I realised it was close and nowhere near as grand. It repeated until my eyes found its source, half-buried in the rubble was another cage. Risha immediately leapt forward, dashing to the metal box. From her relieved expression, I quickly guessed that the captive was alive.\n\n\"Get back!\" she instructed, rearing up and releasing a torrent of flames over the bars.\n\nAs she worked, I glanced back towards Neera, her eyes scouring the dusty devastation from beneath her battered helmet.\n\n\"Good riddance\" she declared, spitting onto a dead orkin with a satisfied grunt.\n\n\"I think you were right about them,\" I confirmed, nodding to Risha.\n\n\"I told you, I know the orkin, even if they're starting to change.\"\n\nThe click of an opened lock, and the clang of a falling metal mask onto the wooden floor sounded the moment I saw Boltock emerge from the cage, only to be wrapped in his sister's wings.\n\n\"You're okay. I, I... where's Ember?\" she asked anxiously, pulling back.\n\n\"I don't know, her cage was right next to mine,\" he announced, nervously backing away from his sister and glancing down into the pit.\n\nShe nodded and quickly disappeared over a shattered, stone wall with Boltock close behind. I staggered after them, hoping I'd misheard the conversation as I fought to keep my balance.\n\nI spoke too soon, Neera may be right, but that doesn't mean they won't have been crushed!\n\nI froze when I saw the pair of them searching a pile of rubble below a sheer drop next to two boulders.\n\nNeera stopped beside me, her ears pricked up high.\n\nThen I noticed it too \u2013 something's different, it's almost silent, too quiet. Has the battle stopped? Has the machine fallen, or has it wiped all of them out?\n\n\"Boltock! Help me with these, quickly!\" Risha cried.\n\nThe new commotion stole my attention, and Neera and I quickly jumped down. Boltock and Risha were pulling the stone away, revealing a metal box buried beneath the remains.\n\n\"Risha, let me move the stone!\" Boltock demanded.\n\nRealising the sense in his command, she stepped back, allowing him to move the rocks with his elemental power. In a flash, he focused, raising them into the air and flinging them into the pit.\n\n\"You help them get her out, I'll check for orkin,\" Neera suggested, jumping down and moving deeper into the pit.\n\nShe's on edge. I noted. And that silence is making my spine prickle. We can't stay here.\n\nWith Boltock busy releasing Ember's cage, I scampered over to a relatively flat surface that had once been the roof of a building, where I sat beside Risha and asked.\n\n\"Are you alright?\"\n\nShe seemed almost startled by my sudden presence but nodded her head slightly.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm fine.\"\n\nI wasn't convinced and wondered if this was how she felt when I was sitting bruised and battered pretending it didn't hurt.\n\n\"There, I've got it!\" Boltock declared triumphantly, interrupting my thoughts as he lifted the cage free within an arm of rock trapped by his magic.\n\nIn that moment of relief, I felt a shudder in the earth, a muffled sound, and a commotion at my side followed by a sharp scream. I turned to see Risha's shoulder and front-left leg covered in blood. A deep wound covered her right wing and before I could react, a stone hand slammed into my snout, forcing me to the ground. Risha staggered too, and my eyes snapped open to see a pair of warped metal boots drop down between us.\n\n\"I's don'ts cares if you's ain't dead, you's demon scum, I's gonna kills you's good an' proper this time,\" Goarog spat, swinging his weapon round ready to strike again.\n\nNo, not this time, I'll rip his heart out before he gets another chance!\n\nAdrenaline rushed through my veins, and a beat of my wings gave me enough height to hit him square in the chest with my horns, knocking him to the floor. I stood over my bleeding friend lowering my head, baring my teeth, protecting her with my wings.\n\nGoarog staggered up and began walking around us, laughing to himself.\n\n\"Risha!\" Boltock cried.\n\nI glanced over to see him standing by the half-open cage, with his eyes wide.\n\n\"Stay there, help Ember!\" I shouted, sincerely hoping he trusted me enough to listen. \"He won't touch her again.\"\n\nGoarog stopped in front of me with his back to the smoke-scarred sky, grunting a laugh.\n\n\"Is that so's, wyrm?\" He flexed his rusted blade. \"I's gonna guts you's, then her, then all of yous!\" he cursed, black blood splattering from his mouth.\n\nI coiled back, ready to strike; he isn't getting any mercy. I don't need my corrupt conscience to tell me that.\n\nThe rubble at the lip of the cave shifted and Goarog smiled manically, his vile stone face cracking like a dry riverbed. As I prepared to fire the world grew dark and a metallic groan echoed through the cavern.\n\n\"I's...\" Goarog's words trailed off as he glanced up and his expression dropped.\n\nA tremendous gush of air kicked up a cloud of choking dust and rock as the ground in front of me disappeared, pressing me to Risha's back as my eyes closed tight. The sound of hissing steam and the groan of shifting metal, together with a metallic hum and a glowing light, filled the air. I opened my eyes to see a giant, golden claw where Goarog had stood only moments earlier.\n\nIt remained still for a moment, dust settling on its gleaming surface until it gave a loud shunt, the advanced workings whirring back to life while it heaved itself back, dragging rubble as it retreated out of the pit. I stayed perfectly still, only moving my eyes to follow the retreating claw disappearing over the edge of the cavern, while the creature's mighty head loomed into view on top of its plated neck.\n\nIt's looking straight at us again.\n\nWith a loud clunk it stopped, its glowing eyes scouring the detail. For a moment it was unresponsive, its shadow blocking out most of the light while more debris settled around me. I was stuck between terror and my desire to allow no further harm to come to anyone.\n\nWith another clank the plated neck separated, revealing white-hot flame. Its mouth opened and the back of its throat whirred. I had no time to act as the spinning apparatus roared to life, ducking my head and spreading my wings to protect Risha the best I could. Although we were fireproof, I never realised how much I'd taken that for granted as the world exploded in a storm of white-hot flame, the intensity testing my scales to their limit.\n\nI can do this... It's... Just fire! I closed my eyes tight as the flames beat down on the hissing rock, searing them into molten slag.\n\nWhen it eventually stopped, I took in a great gulp of superheated air, almost burning my lungs. The glowing rocks sizzled like hot coals, and the once buried hut was no more than a bonfire. Beyond the dispersing smoke I could still see two glowing eyes.\n\n\"We need to go now!\" I heard a voice shout out as I staggered.\n\nIt was Ember, she was barely any better than Risha. Her battered scales, stolen jewels, and slight limp fuelled my anger. Thankfully, she was free of a cage that was now nothing more than a pile of molten gloop. Boltock emerged from behind a large rock beside her, but she didn't spare him a glance. Nor did I, as I quickly looked over Risha. She was breathing but losing consciousness due to the steady flow of blood running from her wound. Unsure of what to do, the sound of shifting metal rushed my decision. I moved around her, lowered myself, and spread out a wing while gently grabbing her neck in my mouth and pulling her limp body onto my back.\n\nHer legs draped at my side and her head fell across my neck, while blood ran across my shoulder. There was another loud shunt when the shimmering mass glided through the smoke, scattering the dust like a flock of frightened birds. I rose to my paws, followed the others, carrying Risha with me towards the lower part of the cavern. The sound of violent destruction behind us made it clear that the earth wouldn't hold the metal creature out for long.\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha's weak voice instantly stopped me.\n\nAt least she's speaking, she's conscious, she's alive.\n\n\"Risha!\" Boltock responded before I could.\n\nDespite his own injuries he appeared at my side, far from the depressing cocoon in which he'd hidden for days. Ember limped up beside him, far more focused on assessing what she was presented with.\n\n\"We need to stop the bleeding,\" she coughed, coiling her tail up to the side of her head as flames sparked at its tip.\n\nI swallowed hard, knowing full well what she intended.\n\n\"This is going to hurt,\" she informed Risha sympathetically, who gave a faint whimper.\n\nMaybe it would be better if she's unconscious? I coiled my tail around, hovering the thin base of the freshly regenerated tip before her muzzle.\n\n\"Bite down on this, it will help,\" I offered.\n\nI'd seen it done enough times back home with Tarwin, only never with my own tail. She hardly had the strength, but Risha took it in her jaw, closing her eyes tight.\n\n\"Ready?\"\n\nLowering her tail to Risha's shoulder, Ember's flame met the bleeding wound, and I felt her teeth sink in. Closing my eyes tight, I consoled myself in the knowledge that what I was feeling was nothing compared to what she was going through. In the blackness of my closed eyes, the dim light of Ember's flame flared, then faded, as did Risha's grip on my tail. Before her head fell limp over my shoulder and she slipped into unconsciousness.\n\n\"She won't last long without proper healing,\" Ember acknowledged, her voice trembling.\n\n\"She's the only one who knows anything about proper healing!\" Boltock exclaimed, pointing a forepaw at his sister while looking at Ember.\n\nEmber gave him a solemn glance in response.\n\n\"No. No, no she won't... Ember don't...\" Boltock struggled to get his words out. \"Don't look at me like that!\"\n\n\"She needs help, I've given us time,\" was the best the fiery dragoness could offer.\n\nTime, space and creation?\n\nWe are here, where the fallen star crashed. I noted as I glanced up at the cave roof.\n\nI'll take her to them, and they will save her, they'll tell me the truth, tell everyone what really happened. I'll make them!\n\nLaying her across my back we traversed around the boulders until we came face to face with a monstrous cavern. It was like a subterranean world, reminding me of how awestruck I'd been when I first gazed upon the immense scale of Dardien.\n\nIt's so large, they could have built the entire city of Taldran down here!\n\nWe stood on an outer ridge, formed from a flat stone road running around the chamber's circumference. Cracks in the ceiling allowed beams of sunlight and trickling waterfalls to pour to the cave floor, where bubbling pools of water sat below a city of orkin scaffold and crude industry. Most of it had been turned to ruin by what I assumed was the machine's awakening, while orkin bodies bobbed in simmering pools. A large stone staircase ran up towards a door built into the natural rock face, the original entrance to the temple I presumed.\n\nAt the point where the stairs met the outer ring, a bridge stretched across the steaming pits, as did several others, all leading toward the centre like the equidistant spokes of a grand wheel. Each one was lined with symmetrical rows of marble pillars, bearing the distinct design of highkin architecture. Scattered among them were more orkin structures, most of which had fallen into the bubbling pits.\n\nBeyond the abandoned scaffold, the ancient pathways led to a monolithic structure, something that didn't belong amongst the simplistic stone work. It was similar in scale to one of Dardien's stalactites, though most of it was hidden away by the roof and floor, making it appear more like a great pillar. As I'd read, it was made from solid gold, its weathered surface lined with a network of complex architecture like that of the mighty dragon stalactites.\n\nIt almost looks like what I saw in my vision of the Golden City.\n\nLike the journal entries suggested, the mass of the object seemed to have fallen through the earth like a spear. The roof of the cavern was cracked and bent inwards, and the floor dipped into a shallow crater. I could only assume that much of the damage its impact had caused had faded over the thousands of years it had laid here. What surprised me most were the lights \u2013 like another scene from Dardien, its vast surface glowed, not with flame or torch light, but with orb-like stars. Upon closer inspection they appeared to be hovering crystals of varying sizes suspended in a synchronised orbit around the structure, all perfectly clean and fresh.\n\nHow did the orkin not take these? I wondered as one drifted by.\n\nAs we walked closer, something else became apparent amidst the noise of the hissing steam and bubbling water. The cavern was alive with a gentle hum, almost singing, a long, deep reverberation as if the whole place was calling out to something.\n\nIt's like the noise that machine made. I noted. But this place was dead in the journal, why's it so alive now?\n\nAt the end of the road was a large door, surrounded by a tall archway like that of the temple outside, it too was made from gold and in far better condition.\n\nFar grander a place to meet gods than in the ice. I couldn't help but think.\n\nAnother sound echoed through the immense chamber this time accompanied by a birdcall. I glanced up to one of the faintly lit holes to see the flickering feathered image of a phoenix. The majestic bird descended into the chasm, gliding effortlessly, before disappearing into the archway between two of the golden pillars.\n\n\"What happened?\" I heard Neera's voice, long before I saw her. \"I took care of a few orkin, is she okay?\"\n\nThe faldron appeared on top of a toppled pillar to my left, her eyes filled with concern as they fell on Risha.\n\n\"We need to get inside that thing,\" I told her, nodding to the central formation.\n\n\"I don't know what's in there, there could be thousands of orkin or another of those metal things!\" she warned, before repeating. \"What happened?\"\n\nHer questions and concerns were lost as I felt anger flood my mind.\n\nIf there are any orkin left on this mountain, I'll wipe them from it.\n\nAs for another metal creature? I'd take it down if it meant keeping my friends safe.\n\n\"Bold ambitions, you really are starting to come into your own,\" the dark voice cooed.\n\n\"She's going to be fine. We need to get inside,\" I responded, forcing truth into my words.\n\nShe will be... though I had no idea what I would do if she wasn't.\n\nNeera looked to Boltock, then Ember limping behind. Her questions ceased when her feathers ruffled disapprovingly, yet she fell in line behind me.\n\nThe golden archway dwarfed us; even the highkin temple doors on the surface were nothing by comparison.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Neera asked, gazing upwards as we passed under a monolithic archway.\n\n\"The fallen star,\" my tormenting voice stated, as the stone road gave way to polished marble.\n\nIn truth, there was only one answer I could really give.\n\n\"Home,\" I sighed, with little appreciation of what the word really meant.\n\nNone of them seem to understand; none of them really knew where I'd originated.\n\nI'm still a freak, a pretend dragon... The creators' puppet.\n\nAnother chamber with towering walls greeted us, an inner sanctum bathed in pure gold. Its less-weathered surface was lit by more of the crystal lights orbiting high within its domed ceiling, like a billion fireflies in a shimmering night, illuminating a vast expanse of ancient symbols and carvings.\n\nFlames burned in the cold air, their smoke trailing off into the closed space above. Four monolithic archways were spaced out like the equidistant points of a compass, while above the centre was a cylindrical shaft, encased in orkin scaffold, chains and thick ropes.\n\nI assume that leads into the upper sections of the structure. I wondered, lost in wonder and awe, almost able to imagine being those who first found this place.\n\nDirectly below it, moulded into the floor at the centre of the chamber was a detailed dial bearing a star in the exact shape of my amulet. Through the dust, soot, and plant growth I made out neat glyphs of spheres, stars and dragon skulls.\n\nPausing at the edge of the ring, I glanced back at Risha's unconscious body. She was still breathing, but her heavy inhaling and lack of movement were unnerving. I shook my head \u2013 I'm not going to lose anyone else, especially her.\n\nPicking myself up, I moved down a set of shallow steps spanning the circumference of the central dial. Aside from the crackling of flames in the cool air, it was eerily quiet. There was no sign of the creators, the crystal pillar, or the light they'd spoken through the last time we'd met.\n\nThere must be more than this! I inwardly grumbled, as the call of a phoenix broke the stillness, and I looked up to see it circling directly above.\n\nI glanced to all four entrances to see they all led out into the cave.\n\nNo, there has to be more to it than this!\n\nA cold dread washed over me as the others stood within the central circle on either side of me. I felt all hope fading, my efforts to hold on were like trying to catch the wind. Markings way beyond my understanding were etched into circular bands at my paws, and I edged to the smaller depiction of an eight-point star marking the very centre.\n\n\"What now?\" Boltock's panic forced out his rushed words.\n\nI heard Neera give a frustrated grumble, while Ember replied, \"There's nothing here.\"\n\nHer voice broke with brutal honesty.\n\n\"No, no, we came all this way!\" Boltock cried.\n\n\"There has to be something, there has to be,\" I declared firmly, scanning every surface, the walls, the ceiling and the crystal lights, but there was nothing.\n\nThere can't be nothing!\n\nI closed my eyes, desperately trying to recall everything I'd read about this place: sealed doors, the Sphere of Eternity. A door they couldn't get through.\n\nMy eyes snapped open.\n\n\"Boltock, there's nothing but an empty room,\" Ember replied, her voice quivering as she lowered her head.\n\nI felt my mind slipping, but I couldn't accept that, I couldn't give up. We'd come all this way, escaped Dardien, the shadow-creatures, and Taldran!\n\n\"There has to be something!\" I shouted, fear turning to anger.\n\n\"No, no, no,\" I cursed, scratching at the golden carvings under me. \"There has to be!\"\n\nDespite a momentary increase in the faint humming, I staggered with a final whimper as my last flicker of hope disappeared.\n\nI stared at the shaft above and then down at my paws \u2013 It's a shaft, but it goes up, so is this really the bottom?\n\nI looked down to my forepaws placed firmly on the smaller central circle. Pausing for a moment before connecting the memories.\n\nWhat did Kaida say about dragonfire? I took a deep breath. My dragonfire is like no other.\n\nI released a small plume of white flame upon the plate, and there was another momentary increase in the faint humming followed by a flash of light bursting across the metal at my forepaws. Then it was gone.\n\nI looked up, hoping beyond all hope that there was something, a light, a ghost-dragon and Ethereal to save Risha. But there was nothing.\n\nNo...\n\nSuddenly the whole central circle on which we stood jolted. I glanced at the others, all staring at me, their eyes widened in shock as the engraved plate shuddered, and without warning, the whole floor fell out from under us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ancestors of Gold",
                "text": "The sensation of falling overcame everything as the smooth, cylindrical shaft rushed by a wall of gold and the occasional flash of blue glowing rings. Nausea struck me, but thankfully, the speed of the platform gradually reduced to a gentle glide.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is this?\n\nQuestions flooded my mind as I looked up to the shrinking shaft above, the sight causing my head to spin with vertigo.\n\nHow deep does this go?\n\nI discovered how vast the place was when the surrounding cylinder was sucked away, and we entered a new chamber. The plate gently levitated down in a controlled freefall, and despite my desperate desire to find help, I was overwhelmed by awe. The new chamber was even grander than those above and it appeared like no one had set foot inside for millennia. The fine architecture and detailed markings were clean and crisp, almost like they had been forged moments ago, shimmering magnificently in the radiant glow of suspended crystals.\n\nSeveral levitating bands of gold guided our platform on its final descent, and it came to a steady halt, seamlessly merging with a new floor. Catching my stunned breath, I instantly knew I wasn't the only one to be shocked. The others stepped cautiously from the platform; their forepaws pressed to their temples to steady their nausea. I could still feel Risha's fading breath on my shoulder as my claws tapped the polished marble floor. It was jet black, so clean it mirrored the chamber and me almost perfectly.\n\nThis looks exactly like the structure from my vision! I noted as my reflection stared back. I can't think of that now, I need to help Risha!\n\nThe soft humming sound still surrounded us, and like the chamber above, four huge corridors led off in equidistant directions. The one directly ahead was lit by a bright, blue glow, dwarfing that of the crystals. The source seemed to be a large blue sphere, continually crossed by a slender shadow. It was the closest thing to the crystal pillar I'd seen, which immediately made it my intended direction.\n\nAs we walked, my eyes wandered. Above, the light from the crystals flowed like a tranquil river into the corridors before blooming out where they widened. The walls glistened in their majestic glow, as did the marble floor. Golden pillars supported the magnificent ceilings, coming together to form sets of symmetrical archways. Smooth, circular cavities carved into the walls between them housed great draconic statues, bathed in faint, blue light.\n\nThey were unnervingly like the giant mechanical dragon, golden plates covering smaller internal workings while a flickering core danced like candlelight. Their heads were lowered, the left forelegs grasping spears tipped with huge silver blades transitioning from purple to blue in the ethereal light. If I hadn't seen the dragon outside, I'd have assumed they were statues. However, their appearance made it clear they were similar in design and function, albeit smaller, and thankfully inactive.\n\nWho in the creators' name built this? How do they work?\n\nMy eyes returned to the chamber as it opened out into another large, domed area, where the river of levitating crystals fanned out like a blossoming flower. In the centre were five golden pillars, forming a ring around a wide, squat pedestal.\n\nIts top reflected the light of a large sphere looming like the sun in a summer's sky. Two golden rings orbited the blue star, each gliding gracefully over its surface, sometimes seamlessly overlapping. I felt a cold dread cover me at the unnerving stillness \u2013 this must be it, there's no time for anything else.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\nThe echo of my voice was the only response as I shouted into the vast halls.\n\nCome on if you could find me under the ice you can find me here! I inwardly cursed.\n\nThe gentle hum was merciless, it was the only thing to meet my ears until the sound of buzzing insect wings broke the monotonous drone. I listened closely, attempting to prove to myself that it was real.\n\nPlease don't, this is not the time for my mind to play tricks.\n\nNo matter, the sound was there, it was real, and it was moving. At least until it settled before me. My head shot up to find two golden mechanisms hovering in front of me on oscillating wings of light. A strange form of metalwork constructed about an illuminated, shifting core, similar in shape to an insect. Several segmented legs hung below their golden exoskeletons, neatly tucked up beneath their bodies.\n\nTheir insectoid nature betrayed the fact they were almost as large as me, and each one had a head formed from shifting plates, twitching antenna, and a lone, glowing eye at the centre. The head was split into two segments, each one jittering as they swayed rhythmically from side to side.\n\n\"Can you help?\" I calmly asked, taking a step forward.\n\nThere was no response, and only then did I realise how stupid I must look. I have no idea what or who they are, they're certainly not the creators.\n\n\"How wonderful,\" a voice unlike any I'd ever heard expressed excitedly.\n\n\"The Guardian is here at last! With three descendants, oh how marvellous,\" it spoke in a strangely cheerful tone while what appeared to be its source darted about above us.\n\nI looked up to see a bright white light similar to the levitating crystals descend from the ceiling. Its hovering movements emitted the same low-pitched buzz as the two mechanical drones, even though its wings were formed from segmented metal, not light. In fact, as it settled between its companions, it was clearly very different.\n\nIts structure was more avian than insect, namely a white light bound by a golden skeleton that mimicked the shape of an exotic hawk. Individual segments shifted like feathers, similar to the blades Neera flung from her tail, while two glowing-white eyes sat above a hooked beak. The feathers of its arcane wings buzzed like a hummingbird, while the machine levitated down. Any movement seemed to coincide with its voice, as if it was expressing its emotion.\n\n\"Greetings, I am Arcane Personnel Overseer, One, One, Zero. Designated 'Apollo' by my former masters. I am the assigned overseer of this Arcanum,\" the golden hawk announced, as if it had rehearsed the introduction a million times. \"Long has this Arcanum been severed from the Ether. For quite a substantial time I have awaited one who may reactivate it, and as predicted, you have returned.\"\n\nHe was far happier than any arcane moulding of gold and magical light should be.\n\n\"We need your help; you have to help!\" I implored, moving Risha's limp body into view.\n\nApollo tilted his head, before adding in an unnervingly cheerful tone. \"I see this descendant appears to have sustained significant injury.\"\n\nGliding effortlessly around, his sharp eyes scoured her limp body, as if he could see what we couldn't. Then he stopped, rotating his head like an owl to face me.\n\n\"Can you help her?\" I pressed, urgency breaking my voice.\n\nThe cold eyes of the magical machine stared at me, and I really hoped for his sake that he didn't say 'no'.\n\nI'll make them help her if it kills me again and again. After all they've done to me, they don't have a choice!\n\n\"Indeed, though it appears major restoration talismans will be necessary. Fortunately, the sanctum is fitted with sufficient arcane enchantments,\" he chirped, peering down at me as if I should know what he was talking about.\n\n\"So you can help?\" Boltock asked as he edged closer.\n\nThe desperate look in his eyes surpassed my own, and Apollo gracefully spun around to greet him.\n\n\"Indeed, descendant. I will have the caretakers see to it immediately,\" he replied, swivelling back to face the two hovering machines.\n\nAs if some invisible message had passed between them, the metallic insects drifted over me with a hum of their luminous wings.\n\n\"Please be delicate, the Guardian has requested care,\" Apollo insisted as a beam of light flashed from a set of crystals suspended within their unfolding limbs.\n\nIt lanced down before softly striking her scales, where it blossomed into a haze that wrapped around her limp body. As the magical field grew, I felt her weight lift from my back, and for a moment it was unsettling.\n\nCan I trust them, what are they going to do to her?\n\nI'd let my desperation blind me to the fact that this certainly wasn't the creator I knew.\n\nWhat option do I have, I have to trust them? There's no time for anything else.\n\nRisha was slowly levitated from my back, a sparkling haze supporting her body as the two caretakers gently carried her towards one of the side exits.\n\nBoltock already followed close behind, while Ember offered me a nod and limped after them.\n\n\"Home, huh?\" Neera questioned, peering up at the immense golden monument.\n\n\"Something like that,\" I offered.\n\n\"Guardian?\" Apollo's charismatic tone challenged as I started to follow, and I glanced up to see his sharp eyes fixed on me. \"Are you not to accompany me?\"\n\nMy concern for Risha was so strong it clouded my desire to find the truth. Any thoughts of meeting the creators had almost died away.\n\n\"Accompany you?\"\n\nHe bobbed silently in the air, and despite his limited expression, I could tell he was confused.\n\n\"My orders stipulate that if the Guardian returns my grand masters are to be informed immediately.\"\n\nHis masters? Surely he means the creators?\n\nI glanced to Risha as she was carried through one of the arches, with Boltock and Ember close behind.\n\nThey're safe, Risha is safe \u2013 I believe that \u2013 but is the world?\n\nI outwardly sighed.\n\nI need to know, I need to confront the creators again, and this time I'll make them tell the full story.\n\nI looked to Neera, who'd also delayed following the others.\n\n\"Go with them, I shouldn't be long,\" I suggested, waving a forepaw in their direction.\n\nShe looked at me sympathetically.\n\n\"They'll be safe, I'll make sure,\" she assured as she left.\n\n\"Splendid, are we to continue?\" Apollo asked, displaying what I could only interpret was a happy expression.\n\n\"Yes, lead the way,\" I mumbled, as I turned towards him.\n\nHow can I have come so far, and now I'm here, all I want to do is be by her side rather than find the answers?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "\"I am glad to inform you that the Arcanum's isolation counter-measure enchantments have been restored to full function. Given a stasis period of approximately one thousand and six years, it is encouraging to see that a single ethereal energy burst restored full working order in only four point zero-five minutes,\" Apollo rambled on as he hovered before a grand, golden door, tapping on it with a pair of talons until it slid open.\n\nEven with his charismatic tone, his words were empty. As for what he'd said, I had no idea \u2013 I don't even know what he is.\n\nWith that in mind, I asked. \"Apollo, what are you?\"\n\nHe peered down on me, his mockery of an expression turning into a somewhat proud aura as his metallic feathers puffed outward.\n\n\"I am an arcane construct, designated Arcane Personal Overseer One, One, Zero, re-designated 'Apollo' by my former masters. I was designated and enchanted to oversee all drakaran constructs within this Arcanum; my original design was as a personalised assistant construct,\" he elaborated.\n\n'Drakaran constructs?' I assumed he meant the animated statues I'd seen, including himself, and the bug-like drones.\n\n\"Explains the monster outside,\" I grumbled under my breath.\n\n\"Indeed. Upon impact I thought that centurion unit destroyed. I am glad to see its independent reactivation is still fully functional, but I fear that without continuous power to its internal talisman, it will not function for a prolonged period,\" the golden hawk replied, hearing my subtle muttering perfectly.\n\n'Centurion unit'? I inwardly frowned.\n\n\"That thing nearly killed us!\" I snapped, anger boiling at the thought of Risha's injury despite the fact she hadn't been harmed by the machine.\n\n\"Impossible, the probability of death in an ethereal being of your magnitude is zero percent. The last order for all major war constructs was to defend this Arcanum until the binding was complete, I assume such orders are still in effect,\" he explained, once again, like I should know.\n\nAt least that confirms my experience of death. I noted, trying not to think about immortality.\n\n\"What do you mean drakaran constructs?\" I enquired.\n\nApollo appeared almost shocked at my lack of knowledge, lighting up at his opportunity to explain.\n\n\"Why, the drakaran are my creators. The first-born of our grand masters as are they their celestial servants. It was my creators' duty to carry out the grand masters' will and bring all within creation under the rule of our benevolent creators.\"\n\nNow I was confused; but he looked remarkably pleased with himself for a machine.\n\nI wish I never asked. I moaned to myself, stopping as we stepped out through another archway.\n\nMy attention was swiftly drawn to a large semi-circular platform protruding from a great expanse of wall stretching out behind us. The chamber was so immense, that ahead of us the whole world fell away into a yawning space. Awe overwhelmed me as I came to a stunned halt.\n\nIt's like someone intends to fit the whole of Dardien into this one monstrous enclosure!\n\nThe vaulted ceiling resembled a clear night sky, darkened by shadow and filled with swarms of floating crystals. Neat rivers of light ran across the artificial sky, reaching out from the edges before converging in the centre where they formed a grand sphere of light.\n\nWhat looked like great columns of gold orbited it, and I had to shake my head to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. It was no illusion though. Golden columns the size of Dardanian stalactites floated around the blue star, adorned with a similar expanse of magnificent architecture. Blue light bathed their vast flanks while swarms of crystals and huge shoals of the bug-like constructs flowed around as if suspended in water.\n\nAnd I thought my vertigo in that shaft was bad?\n\nMy eyes followed one of the light-rivers to where it met the wall directly above an archway, revealing more walkways and pillars, some the size of roads. The edge of our marble platform was marked by a golden railing, its continuous line only broken where it rose to form an opening with a hollow centre, creating a drop off into the blue mist below.\n\nPossibly for taking off.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I stuttered, unable to imagine how such a thing could have ever fallen from the sky.\n\nIf only Kaida had dug through, she'd have discovered all of this! Apollo landed on the rim of the platform, peering over the abyss.\n\n\"The aviary chamber, a great portion of this Arcanum was severed during the binding. I had to take precautions to ensure the impact did not severely damage the planetary surface,\" he explained, confusing me entirely as he added.\n\n\"I assure you I have done my utmost to keep it in pristine working condition over the past millennia.\"\n\nSurely this is the creators' doing, a fragment of the Golden City itself.\n\n\"So, your masters, they're the creators, right?\" I asked incredulously.\n\nHe gave a long pause, eventually hovering back to me as the pair of us settled on a golden ring in the marble floor.\n\nAnother of the falling floor plates, I assumed, trying not to think about the upcoming sensation.\n\n\"In the mortal tongue, yes. I exist purely to serve the Ethereals, as did my creators,\" he replied as the plate gave a shudder and gently fell away.\n\nI closed my eyes the second the movement started, quickly opening them when I realised it was falling more calmly than the first. Apollo hovered at a constant height beside me, and there was another whoosh as we passed through a guidance ring, swiftly followed by another until their passing became rhythmic.\n\nThe descent revealed the breath-taking scale of the chamber. A huge ring ran around the base circumference, revealing yet more cityscape. More bridges spanned the gap from the outer reaches, each one leading towards a great cluster of structures at the centre. Below them, the lower-most section glowed like a vibrant rainbow.\n\nIt's like they've managed to capture every colour imaginable down there!\n\nIt wasn't until we descended lower that I discovered trees covered the entire lower section. An alien forest contained within a glowing, magic barrier. Strange shapes cast down long, drooping branches, others were like living rock or giant mushrooms. There were flowers the size of houses and tall plants wrapped in vines, yet the most unique thing of all, was their glow. Red flowers burned like flames, green glowed like sunlight through lush leaves, and blue light radiated like the reflection of waves on the seabed.\n\nThe alien canopy contained more of the floating constructs, each darting about like bees in a wild meadow. Levitating platforms sailed like golden ships above them, each holding a virtual skyline on their backs and deploying larger levitating constructs.\n\n\"Magnificent, isn't it? This Arcanum was designated to the study of mortal flora and fauna, but unfortunately events saw the higher levels repurposed,\" Apollo chimed as I stared, awestruck.\n\n\"I am glad to see they've had no effect on the suspended vegetation, and caretaking systems have reactivated marvellously, water levels are good, and the coolant talisman functionality is twenty percent greater than estimated.\"\n\nHis explanation was like hearing Tarwin and her father babble about politics I had no hope of understanding, at least until he finally concluded.\n\n\"Though, it is unfortunate that power levels cannot sustain full functionality for long.\"\n\n\"H\u2013how.... How does someone build something like this?\" I stammered.\n\n\"My creators were masters of ethereal and arcane engineering. A great number of their constructs are as their bodies were millennia ago, designed in the image of our grand masters. The source of all dragon ancestry can be traced back to this point,\" he boasted, his golden plumage puffing up again as his wings buzzed furiously.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the defeat of the Darkness did not save my masters, and with them the last of the ancient drakaran perished. The descendants that Lady Goldfire established on this world are all that remains of their legacy,\" he explained further.\n\n'The Darkness', the enemy I knew nothing of, but he also spoke of other things \u2013 Goldfire? Descendants? I've heard similar things before, in my vision of the creators!\n\n\"I know this may come as a surprise, but I really have no idea what any of that is?\" I admitted, and unlike pretty much everyone else, he beamed at the opportunity to lecture me.\n\n\"The fall of our masters transpired soon after Lady Seraphine Goldfire founded the descendants upon this world, after it was liberated from the tyranny of the Infernal Blade. Little did she know that her sacrifice would ensure my masters established a legacy. For soon, the Darkness was unleashed.\"\n\nSeraphine, Infernal Blade? Maybe I should ask him to go one point at a time? I wondered, but it was too late to stop the torrent of information.\n\n\"Ultimately, it was the shattering of the heart of Anaris and the Darkness's vanquish that sealed their fate. The final events that led to the binding and isolation of this Arcanum came a few cycles after, during the great betrayal,\" he explained as the platform came to a steady halt at another balcony.\n\n\"What?\" For a moment I was able to voice my confusion.\n\nBut for the first time he didn't seem to acknowledge; instead, he hovered towards another archway set into the lower wall. Quickly following, I was once again greeted by a chamber of golden walls, black marble floor, and domed heights filled with swarms of glowing blue crystals.\n\nAdmittedly, this chamber was smaller, and a series of archways created smooth, cylindrical hollows in the wall. At their bases sat circular pedestals supporting glowing white crystals, magically projecting light up into strange images. They depicted spheres orbited by smaller orbs, while others bore disk-like rings about their equators. The surface textures of each set them apart, with some looking like swirling balls of vibrantly coloured cloud. While others resembled lumps of dull rock, and more were coated in a shimmering blue sheen, broken by patches of green and brown. The display stretched across each side of the chamber, disturbed only by the entrance through which we'd walked and another arch opposite.\n\nThe floor transformed into a wide set of descending steps leading down onto a ring around the circumference of the chamber. Beyond that, it fell away into a misty pit, while a bridge stretched out to a circular dish levitating above the abyss.\n\nA large, squat golden table sat upon it, no taller than me, it glowed with a ghostly-blue hue. More magical light projections hovered over it, depicting a vast network of much smaller spheres orbiting around several larger ones, as well as great belts of dust.\n\n\"These projections display other worlds within this realm. Their reactivation is a good sign that communications have been able to locate and identify all worlds within four hundred and seventy parsecs. I am confident that all communication lines will soon be operational.\"\n\nApollo's words were lost as he buzzed by.\n\nI merely nodded, with little recognition as I steadily made my way towards the centre, awestruck by the cosmological marvels spinning around me. Meanwhile, my guide paused, turning to face me as he hovered patiently. I glanced down to the central plate to see it was, in fact, a bowl of shallow liquid, like a tranquil lake. I stopped at its edge as one of the orbiting spheres and its smaller satellite passed gently through the air above my head.\n\nOf all the impossible things I've witnessed, this place is quickly rising to the top.\n\nI placed a paw on the rim of the pool, and as it had done long ago, an image of the stars appeared.\n\nDragons can't fly to the stars; they can bring the stars down to them!\n\nThat was until, suddenly and without warning, it all vanished. Taken by surprise I staggered back, fearful that my actions may have caused a catastrophe.\n\nDid I just turn off a whole world or something?\n\n\"Excellent, communications are fully operational,\" Apollo announced excitedly.\n\nSwallowing my apprehension, I glanced over to see him perched on one of four crystal pillars around the pool. He gave the rock a few neat taps with his talons, and a moment later, they flickered back into life. I suddenly felt a great presence enter the room as a bold, new light was born in place of the constellations.\n\n\"My masters,\" Apollo declared, bowing his head and spreading his wings.\n\n\"Well done, construct, you have fulfilled your duty admirably,\" the light rumbled, flickering with every word.\n\n\"Of course, my lord,\" he replied.\n\nAll the questions they'd left unanswered, the life they'd cursed with a purpose of legend and the lies, flooded back as I looked up into the bright orb and declared with a claw-stomp.\n\n\"You lied to me!\"\n\nI saw no change in the suspended ball, although I could feel its aura.\n\nThey can't hide from me this time; I know too much already.\n\nI stepped forward, this time I wasn't afraid, I wouldn't be so naive or polite. The calming glow dimmed, contemplating its response before it declared.\n\n\"You were bestowed all the knowledge you required to fulfil your task.\"\n\nI shook my head as its words mentally projected themselves into my mind and my rage poured out.\n\n\"No! You lied, you only told me what you wanted me to know. You knew I'd believe it; you knew I'd believe anything!\"\n\nIn the corner of my eye, I noticed Apollo's metallic feathers ruffle in surprise. Meanwhile, the swirling entity adopted a new tone to emphasise its response.\n\n\"We told you what you wished to hear, any more of the truth would have destroyed you.\"\n\nHardly. Everything they told me has already torn me apart, what's the harm in a little more?\n\n\"So why lie? Which of you is it? You lied to me about your names too, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Our names are long forgotten, but I see you have found those that mortals would bestow upon us,\" the light replied cautiously.\n\n\"So, answer me, who are you? What is this place?\"\n\nThe light paused.\n\n\"We exist together, my brothers, sister and I. We were bound long ago. The place in which you stand is a shard of the Golden City, crafted by the ancient drakaran.\"\n\nI contemplated the idea of a race created to serve.\n\n\"You mean your slaves?\"\n\n\"There are several errors in your hypothesis, Guardian. My makers were not slaves, they served our masters willingly.\"\n\nApollo's wings buzzed suddenly as he intervened on his masters' behalf.\n\n\"Such arrogance, it's nothing but disrespect,\" the darkness in my head hissed, shattering more of my mind's barriers.\n\n\"The Darkness, what is it? If I was the only one who could open the sphere, why send me there? Where were you? You didn't help, you let everyone die, you left everyone!\"\n\n\"Enough!\" The Ethereal's voice, combined with a wave of crackling energy, lit up the chamber, almost knocking Apollo from the air.\n\nI braced myself as a slight sense of intimidation dulled my anger.\n\nThey're not breaking me, not this time.\n\n\"You wish to know the truth, then so be it. The fault lies with no one else, we bear the blame,\" the ethereal finished in a calming tone.\n\n\"To be precise, my lord, records of events show that the fault wasn't truly anyone's. With such powers mounted against us, defeat was inevitable,\" Apollo claimed.\n\n\"No, construct, the Darkness is our error and ours alone.\"\n\nI took a deep breath, releasing some of my tension as I pressed again.\n\n\"The Darkness. What is it?\"\n\nApollo lifted, eager to explain.\n\n\"Construct, activate the projection talisman,\" the Ethereal interrupted.\n\nThe mechanical avian responded without hesitation, buzzing over to the crystal pillars.\n\n\"Visual enchantment active, my lord.\"\n\nA smaller crystal rose from the pool while the fireball faded, coiling around the rock and morphing into a solid shape. First a body, then legs, wings and a head, stepped up from the pool as the last trails of glowing dust settled, burying the crystal somewhere within.\n\nA dragon stood before me, different from the ghost-like spectre I'd once spoken to. It appeared tangible, taking on a form I recognised. Roaring white flame tipped with smoky black, glowed beneath shifting magical armour, levitating comfortably about his flaming scales. I'd seen the same dragon in the vision my mind's dark entity had shown me and was at a loss for words as he bowed his head.\n\n\"I bid you greetings, I am lord Nakir, creator of death and last to speak for my brethren.\"\n\nHis tone was cold and direct, I had to remind myself that the creators were not my enemy, no matter how mysterious they might appear to be.\n\nHe's the master of death, but death is just another part of life. I assured myself as he peered down at me, before moving off.\n\n\"Please follow, I will explain,\" he calmly requested.\n\nWith a tentative step I moved forward, and the two of us made our way across a bridge on the opposite side of the pool, with Apollo close behind.\n\n\"The corrupted power we refer to is a being known as Mordrakk.\"\n\nMordrakk, the dragon in the fire? The name of my enemy rang through my mind like the chime of bells.\n\nNakir looked on as we made our way up a set of opposing steps, regret radiating from him like heat from a summer's sun.\n\n\"Mordrakk was once the wisest amongst us, he was the forefather, master of all that exists,\" He continued.\n\nI halted mid-stride.\n\n\"What? The Darkness, was one of you!?\"\n\nThere was a long pause, as if the answer I was seeking was better left forgotten. He glanced back, cold eyes seemingly staring through countless millennia in those fleeting moments.\n\n\"Mordrakk was the best of us, our creator, the lord of reality. For that, we owe him our existence,\" he said, bowing his head. \"He wasn't always as he is now, that is true. And yet, there are things even gods cannot resist.\"\n\nHe adopted a sterner tone; clearly this tale wasn't something to be told lightly, even for the creators.\n\nMy next few steps were taken with caution, as was my choice of words.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked as we proceeded through another archway.\n\nMore light projections lined the walls and the corridor fell away into a pit of blue mist on either side. A long marble bridge ran directly ahead, into another, much smaller chamber. There the marble morphed into a spherical plate covered by a ghostly glow. At its centre, another golden dish held a sparkling crystal pool and another projection talisman.\n\nNakir strode towards it without pause, glancing over the shimmering displays at either side of us as I kept pace.\n\n\"Long ago, a powerful entity was discovered within a dark corner of reality. Its origin remains unknown even to us. But it came to be known by many names \u2013 the Shade, the Outsider,\" he uttered the titles as if they caused pain.\n\n\"Most notoriously it was known simply as the Darkness, a horrific cosmic entity so callous and vast it could turn the stars to shadow,\" he explained further.\n\nThe halls seemed to shudder around him at the mere mention of the names, projected spheres flickering like dying flames at his passing.\n\n\"To look into the Darkness was to look upon the endlessness of non-existence, an entity unbound by natural law with the power to consume all.\"\n\n\"What happened, to the Darkness, I mean?\" I asked.\n\nHe paused, and I recognised his hesitance to continue as an improvised way of distinguishing between what he wanted me to know and the full truth.\n\nI'm still not about to let that slip away again. I thought, opening my mouth to press further, only for him to elaborate.\n\n\"The creature laid siege to the Ether, a feat never thought possible, and yet it still came. That was when Mordrakk faced and destroyed the Darkness, shattering its form at the cost of the heart,\" he continued to explain as we reached the marble platform at the corridor's end.\n\n'The heart?' Apollo, and my vision had mentioned similar things. I'm beginning to think my dark consciousness showed me that vision for more than motivation.\n\n\"What's this heart?\" I enquired as Nakir walked around the golden formation in the centre.\n\n\"The heart of Anaris, a dimensional tesseract pre-dating the masters themselves. The heart once resided within the centre of the Golden City until it was shattered by the Darkness and all of its shards were...\" Apollo started to answer.\n\nNakir waved off his abrupt interruption with a wing, silencing him before resuming his own story.\n\n\"The heart of Anaris was an artefact from long before our creation. Mordrakk was the only one to know of its true origin.\" The god's eyes met his reflection in the pool.\n\n\"An infinite dimension, the realms within the heart were originally a paradise. It was once my duty to ensure the souls of those who passed made the journey to those realms, and it was those souls the Darkness sought to consume,\" he added, his eyes burning with resentment.\n\n\"It was at the heart that the Darkness met its end, and the remaining shards were used, among other things, to imprison what remained of the Darkness's power.\" He paused again, dipping a claw into the pool.\n\n\"We thought it over once those shards were hidden away, but to rid this world of the Darkness was no simple task. Evil resides within the souls of all, and it takes only an entity born of such evil to take that power to a level we cannot comprehend. For those who live after looking into the eye of chaos itself, do not go unscathed, not even gods.\"\n\nHe looked up, his glowing eyes meeting mine for a moment.\n\n\"It was there within the eye of the Darkness that Mordrakk saw the impurity of his creation, and in him the Darkness found a new way to seek its victory.\"\n\nI paled under the Ethereal's endless stare. Something so twisted and vile that even gods were vulnerable.\n\n\"Driven by madness, Mordrakk sought to purge the universe of the very thing that now dwelled within his mind. In his eyes he was ensuring such a dire situation would never arise again, to save all with perfect order. Reality soon became nothing but a plaything, expendable, replaceable. He became the very thing he'd once vanquished.\"\n\nI had no idea what to make of it all. His words made me feel insignificant, but I'd been right all along \u2013 this was much bigger than me, gods, dimensions, even the whole of creation.\n\n\"In his rage Mordrakk ignored our plea for peace and many worlds were lost, more so than during the Infernal Wars. A new war spread throughout creation as our Drakaran fought the one we once called 'Father'.\"\n\nI shuddered from wing tip to wing tip.\n\n\"In the final days of the conflict, Mordrakk forged an army from the essence of the very entity he sought to destroy. Tiny fractions of the Darkness, known as vulpomancers, creatures forged into twisted visions of his former creations, were driven to fight by his indomitable will.\"\n\nSounds an awful lot like the shadow-creatures that were hunting us. I noted.\n\nI knew how this was going to end. The dark illusion in my head had been right, there was only one player in this game.\n\nSo, who am I to stop him? I failed once, and that time I was faced with nothing more than a crazy wizard.\n\nMy head dropped, and my eyes directed towards the pool.\n\n\"Why me?\" I demanded.\n\n\"Because you have defeated Mordrakk once before.\"\n\nI almost collapsed as his words hit me like a wall.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nMy voice was somewhere between a fierce growl and a pathetic whimper. Both sides of my mind had been right, the truth hurt, not because I knew it, but because I could never escape it.\n\nNakir seemed unable to hide his shame, though he'd warned me about hearing this information.\n\n\"In the last days of Mordrakk's betrayal we faced a threat matched only by the Darkness's first invasion. Mordrakk lay siege to the Golden City with numbers beyond reckoning. The last of the drakaran were wiped out that day, forcing my companions and I to make the ultimate sacrifice.\"\n\nThat has to be the day I saw in my vision.\n\n\"When Mordrakk created us, he bestowed upon each of us an aspect of himself. Individually none of us could truly defeat him, so we were forced to forge our power into one. The last shards of the heart were brought forward. Into the first, we poured our physical power and souls, adding to the strength of those already locked inside. Mordrakk was to be sealed into the second shard, into what came to be known in mortal tongue as the 'Sphere of Eternity.' So, upon that final day, within the besieged walls of the city, the binding of our power was committed, we forged and moulded our individual aspects into an entity with the combined power to strike down Mordrakk...\"\n\n\"That entity, was you.\"\n\nI froze.\n\nIt was like life itself had been sucked from me, leaving what remained to bleed out with every shallow breath. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had the truth, I'd never escape it, and yet I still didn't believe it.\n\nTarwin found me in the woods, not in the Golden City!\n\n\"How did I...?\"\n\nNakir peered at me, seemingly judging whether to tell me more.\n\n\"Tell me!\" I demanded.\n\n\"When Mordrakk breached the Arcanum spire you were only seconds old. With our power bound to you, you were able to drive him into his prison. It all could have ended that day, but the force of the battle shattered the Ether. A hole was torn in time and this Arcanum fell into the void, as did Mordrakk's prison and you.\"\n\n\"And, where were you?\" I pressed with a snarl.\n\nThe illusion looked up with a hint of shame.\n\n\"Ever since that day, we have remained bound to each other and utterly powerless, all we have been able to do is watch and wait. We knew not when or where you would emerge, for the Ether does not abide by the laws of time. It was almost two thousand years before this Arcanum and Mordrakk's prison fell to this world.\"\n\nA ball of light exploded from the pool between us, the sudden flash forming a spherical shape. I was faced with a large, blue orb, its surface broken by islands of green, with a smaller spherical rock orbiting close by. As the detail formed, glowing blue arrows pointed to several location across its surface, ranging from the top, bottom, and a few scattered outliers.\n\n\"Accuracy of cartography; ninety percent. I will update,\" Apollo declared cheerfully, hovering over to another crystal pillar.\n\n\"That will not be necessary,\" Nakir instructed.\n\nSeemingly perplexed, Apollo gave a hovering bow and backed away. Wide eyed, I stared up at the magnificent orb.\n\n\"Your world is known as Enishra, meaning 'legacy' in the ancient Drakaran tongue. It is the world on which Lady Seraphine Goldfire sacrificed all to establish her mortal descendants,\" Nakir continued, peering up to the orb.\n\nMy world? We live on this? The image made my already messed up mind spin.\n\n\"When we first discovered that the races of this world, including Seraphine's lost descendants, were oppressed by the last of the Infernal Blade's powerful overlords. Our drakaran, along with the first mortal dragons, saw it liberated and made efforts to ensure another age of tyranny would not occur,\" he stated proudly.\n\n\"So where were you when this world needed you again, when I needed you?\" I challenged.\n\n\"The brief tear in the Ether caused by Mordrakk's emergence allowed us to send a short message of warning to those who found his prison. Even with that message they were not ready, and so for another thousand years we could only watch, powerless to help as they forgot us, and the sphere slowly turned them against each other.\"\n\nThen I came along, if the Ether does not obey time, who knows how long I was in there?\n\n\"Upon the twilight of ages, the skies will break to bring forth the Fallen Star of scornful wrath and eternal hate. Cometh then one of unnatural blood, born to one of the nine great races of our legacy. For when darkness falls, and the most ancient of shadows is reborn, cometh the last great Guardian to whom we are solely sworn, descendant of shadow, light, life and death, their loss will transcendent.\n\nMighty fires of starlight will stand against the darkest dawn, and upon blades of crackling fire, corrupt blood will be drawn. When starry skies of longest night are gazed upon in times of greatest doubt and direst fear, age's twilight grows ever near.\n\nUpon that new dawn, the most magnificent light will bless such skies, as stars clash upon dying age's coming night. When golden spires become awash with Dragonfire, all will know of their last great saviour. So will end the reign of our grand creator.\"\n\nHe worded the legend of my existence as perfectly as I'd seen in the Cartographer's accursed book. But it was all beyond my comprehension. I was staring at my world, there was so much of it, and above all else, I knew I couldn't save it.\n\n\"Give one a message and it will be lost to archives and scrolls, bestow one a legend and it will last forever in tales and songs. We knew not where or when you would emerge to battle Mordrakk, but after a thousand years of bloodshed, you finally came.\"\n\nNakir went on as a mark on the spherical map appeared to show where I'd landed.\n\n\"The loss of your soul shard allowed the Ether to affect you in many ways. Allowing you to take the form of a natural child, the draconic image of the drakaran souls bound to you.\"\n\n\"But I'm not a dragon, am I?\" I whimpered.\n\n\"The power of a shard of Anaris, of a billion drakaran souls and the power of my siblings and I, all reside within you. Its power makes you greater than any mortal. For them you are an undying light from which hope can shine.\"\n\nI turned away, looking back along the corridor.\n\n\"I'm not the same, I did not defeat Mordrakk. I, I\u2026\"\n\nAll the fight left me, and I lowered my head.\n\n\"Your destiny is your own, and while events did not proceed as expected, we created you to save them.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not like you!\" I declared as I spun back to face him.\n\nI'm not like them, I'm nothing more than a weapon they forged in desperation. I never had any hope at a normal life!\n\n\"Then would you allow such corrupted tyranny to dominate all? Each of the spheres you see around you is a world that will fall beneath the shadow of Mordrakk's cruelty.\"\n\nNakir gestured to the numerous levitating maps around us.\n\n\"Would you allow them and the world you call 'home' to fall into darkness?\" he asked.\n\nI glanced at the other worlds, so many different places, and all of them could be gone even as I admitted.\n\n\"I can't do it.\"\n\nNakir paused, peering down at me thoughtfully.\n\n\"For one who claims to be worthless, you have achieved more than any other. When the Dark Guardian stole your family, you did not hesitate to stop him. When we, a force beyond your understanding, asked the impossible of you, you fought your fear and struck down evil,\" he reasoned.\n\n\"For one who claims they can't save mortals, you have fought hard to save a given few, given your life when you knew nothing of the power that sustains you. Even now you stand here stained by the blood of those you fight to protect,\" he noted, gesturing to Risha's blood stain on my back, then down to my fading scar.\n\nI hadn't done any of that in the way he implied. I'd gone after Acrodan to save Tarwin, I'd stopped him to save my friends. I'd died because of my own stupidity, I'd saved Risha because...\n\nBecause she means everything to me.\n\n\"You should ask yourself; did you fight because of what you were told or because of your heart?\"\n\nThat's exactly what Vulkaine said at the celebration.\n\n\"You care for the descendants in a way we never could, so would you allow them to fall to Mordrakk's tyranny? After coming so far?\"\n\nThe dark image of my own insanity had been right all along. In the end, it all came down to whether I was willing to accept my responsibility.\n\nCan I really deny who I am, or can I accept that I'm the only one who can stop this?\n\n\"Mordrakk's power gathers in the north, the area in which he was released. For now, he cannot reach full strength, to do so he must re-enter the Ether and feed on the power that sustains us within our realm. Once he has that he will attempt to tear open the universe,\" the Ethereal explained as he turned and made his way back around the projection.\n\nThere's no fighting that, not without risking everything.\n\n\"And how could he get back into the Ether?\" I stuttered.\n\n\"He will require the power of a pure shard. There are few within his reach and he would not dare unleash more of the Darkness's power from the few scattered about the realm. The Sphere was destroyed when he broke free, therefore leaving only one.\"\n\nNakir looked at me expectantly as my expression fell into confusion.\n\n\"The icon you called upon is not only a part of you, but the only way to physically open a gateway into our realm.\"\n\nMy amulet! The one that Aries took! Nakir smiled, seeming to read my realisation.\n\n\"I don't have it,\" I admitted sheepishly.\n\nHis smile faded.\n\n\"Then whoever does, is threatened by a power very few understand.\"\n\nSo, the Darkness will turn its sight to Dardien? The entire city is at risk!\n\n\"What have they done for you?\" a familiar voice hissed.\n\nHe's right, they've done nothing but shun, betray and lock me away?\n\nNot all of them, I reminded myself.\n\n\"I must go back... I'll get it and take it somewhere he'll never find it, I'll...\" I muttered to myself, only to realise how stupid the idea was.\n\n\"To do so would only allow him more time to recuperate. No, if we are to strike, we must do so now, while he is still weak,\" Nakir advised thoughtfully.\n\n\"Strike him, how?\" I asked.\n\nHe offered a look that almost resembled sympathy.\n\n\"That shard contains who you are, and without it you risk becoming nothing more than raw power, and yet now that may be all that is required.\"\n\nI tried not to think about that feeling put into words. I was more disturbed by the fact that I'd allowed it to happen more than once.\n\nNo, I need to do this, no-one else can, and even if that power is beyond my ability to control if it's directed at Mordrakk it could work.\n\nI looked down at my forepaws as I took a trembling breath.\n\nI don't want to exist as nothing more than an epicentre for collateral damage but otherwise, they'll all die: the world, Dardien, my family, my friends.\n\n\"I need to see them. I need to make sure my friends are safe,\" I demanded.\n\n\"Construct, take him to the descendants and prepare the gateway,\" Nakir instructed.\n\nApollo manoeuvred in the air, giving a bow.\n\n\"Certainly, my lord.\"\n\nWith that, he hovered hastily to my side.\n\n\"Please follow me, the healing sanctum is this way.\"\n\nI glanced at Nakir. I hated them for it, but I now knew the truth. His head lifted from the crystal pool, his godly eyes peering over me.\n\n\"Remember, Guardian, you alone hold the fate of us all.\"\n\nI didn't respond. I had the truth, but I didn't forgive them. I held the fate of those for whom I cared, not the gods."
            },
            {
                "title": "Elusive Legacy",
                "text": "I staggered as the levitating floor slid to a halt, and after traversing the chamber in which we'd met, Apollo and I made our way in the same direction the others had been taken. Eventually we came upon another of the platforms, albeit slightly smaller and built into the side archway of a corridor. Stepping onto it, Apollo gave me the best puzzled look he could muster as we ascended.\n\n\"Is everything alright, Guardian?\" His ability to express concern was unnerving, but what could I tell him?\n\nThat I'm okay? That would be the biggest lie since the creators told me killing Acrodan would fix everything.\n\nSo, I simply nodded and mumbled an inaudible response.\n\n\"Splendid, shall we continue?\" he replied, seemingly less able to see through my lies.\n\nAs the platform slid to a halt, I shook off the disorientation the ascent induced to see yet another vaulted chamber. Unlike the others, it had three pathways instead of four and the walls were broken by archways similar in depth to those holding the light projections. Within each was a smaller doorway.\n\nThe first normal-sized things I've seen in this place.\n\nA strange, translucent sheet, almost like a window of shimmering water, covered each. I counted six in total, two of which were uncovered. In the chamber's centre, a ring of pillars surrounded a plantation of the same magical flora I'd seen in the aviary chamber. Smaller variants of the insect-like constructs buzzed about like bees hovering through the archways or a small hole in the centre of the ceiling.\n\n\"Please follow me, I ensured that your companions were directed here to the healing sanctum,\" Apollo cheerfully suggested, leading me to one of the open chambers.\n\nPeering through, I saw Ember and Neera sleeping, the latter of which still wore her battered armour. One of the insect-constructs hovered above them like a silent sentinel, and while I was far from completely trusting, it was good to know Apollo had taken my request seriously.\n\nThe moment I knew they were safe, I turned back to the second of the open chambers. Glowing crystals decorated its outermost wall, and a hovering, oval plate looming above a glowing blue pedestal appeared to be some kind of bed. Above that another crystal levitated with several smaller lights and golden rings orbiting it.\n\nA flickering light projected from two talismans at either end of the bed, forming a sheet of glowing dust like I'd seen in the Ethereal's projection. The dust varied in colour from red to green and blue, while the particles formed what looked like a miniature mountain range.\n\nThe creators can say I came from the stars all they want. I'll still never understand how any of this arcane stuff works.\n\nDespite all of that, what stole my attention, was Risha lying peacefully on the levitating plate beneath the magical display. She was unconscious but breathing steadily. The scales around her wound had knitted back together and radiated with a subtle glow like mine did after healing. It was also a great relief to see Boltock sat at her side, his head leaning on the edge of the floating plate like a loyal hound.\n\n\"As you requested, this descendant's health has been fully restored. Though for now she must rest, it may also be some time before consciousness is regained.\" Apollo informed primly.\n\nI'd no idea how they'd done it, and any thought to ask was lost in relief.\n\n\"Thanks, I don't suppose you could help the others?\" I asked as he perched beside me.\n\nHe gave a subtle bow, golden feathers chiming as he opened his wings.\n\n\"Of course, Guardian,\" he responded happily.\n\n\"I never wanted to drag them this far and, well... They can't heal like I can,\" I sighed.\n\nHe offered a somewhat sympathetic look, seemingly concerned by how I looked at Risha as he glanced her way.\n\n\"To allow more than one to enter through the gateway, especially so soon after exposure to restoration magic, would carry a great risk,\" he explained solemnly, his charismatic tone dipping for the first time.\n\nHow is his voice and face so real? I had to wonder as he looked back at me.\n\n\"You really do care for them, don't you?\"\n\nI'd no idea if he could read minds like his masters, but the look I gave told him everything.\n\n\"Please do forgive me, despite major modifications, my core enchantments still limit my emotional and social interaction routines.\"\n\nI sensed a sorrow in his otherwise constantly cheerful tone, before he folded a wing over his chest, bowed, and finished.\n\n\"Please do take all the time you need.\"\n\nHis wings buzzed as he departed, meanwhile, I approached Boltock. The earth dragon was halfway between consciousness and sleep. I could imagine his capture had stolen his energy, not to mention the cruel things the orkin may have done to him. I tried not to think about that as I paused beside him, and his weary eyes fluttered open.\n\n\"Hey,\" he mumbled softly.\n\n\"Hey,\" I responded, my eyes passing over his sister as her healing bed gave off a low hum. \"Is she okay?\"\n\n\"I think so, what Dardien would not give for magic like this,\" he responded, rubbing a forepaw over the bed as a yawn escaped his muzzle.\n\n\"You should get some sleep, I'll watch her,\" I suggested.\n\nHe rubbed his tired eyes and sighed.\n\n\"The others are sleeping in the next chamber,\" I added, nodding towards the door.\n\nNodding, he nuzzled his sister's healed shoulder, and the light around her restored wounds shimmered.\n\n\"Just like you,\" he observed, forcing a smile.\n\n'Just like me'. The image of the fatal scar on my chest glowing white-hot flashed through my mind while he turned away and slowly dragged himself out of the doorway.\n\n\"Blaze...\"\n\n\"Thanks for coming back, and... You know, I'm sorry.\"\n\nI bowed my head, slightly ashamed that anyone would take the blame for my mistakes.\n\n\"None of this was your fault, Pyro was wrong,\" I replied, hiding my shame behind a firm tone.\n\nHe seemed to take that as a hint of forgiveness, and finally disappeared.\n\nWas he wrong? I had to wonder. No, it was my fault, I was the one who tried to play the hero.\n\nI turned away, looking up to the crystal array nestled in the golden architecture above.\n\nIt's your responsibility to save them. The words echoed through my thoughts as I glanced back at Risha's restored scales.\n\nWill she be as ashamed of this miracle as I am? I rested a forepaw on my fading chest scar. She has no reason to feel that way, she deserves it far more than I do.\n\nResting my head on the table's smooth surface, its suspended weight shifted slightly. I still had them, I still had her. I wished I could believe I deserved it, especially with what I was about to do.\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha's frail voice asked.\n\nShe managed to lift herself, to see me. I wanted to speak, but couldn't find the words, so I forced a weak smile. Her eyes lingered for a second before falling to her healed shoulder.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nWhat do I tell her, that some freaky magic restored her like it does me?\n\n\"They fixed you,\"\n\nShe peered around the chamber, to the glowing array of crystals, to the walls, and finally back to me.\n\n\"They?\" she asked, rubbing her eyes.\n\n\"It's a long story,\" I responded dismissively.\n\nFlexing her legs and wings, she groaned, and I found myself lurching to assist her the moment she tried to sit up. She had always told me not to push myself too hard, and right now she looked closer to falling asleep than being able to walk.\n\n\"How do you feel?\" I asked, fighting back my concern while resting a forepaw on her shoulder.\n\nShe slid back to the bed, glancing at her restored wound and wiggling the leg below it.\n\n\"Wait, I... that's...\" She was staggered at her own words.\n\n\"Impossible?\" My smile became genuine. \"I thought you said nothing was impossible?\"\n\nShe looked at me, a smile parting her muzzle as she asked knowingly.\n\n\"Did you find what you were looking for?\"\n\nI'd certainly found something, but right now I didn't care. I had my friend back, and for this moment I was going to be what I'd failed to be back in Dardien. I'd prove that I was more than a weapon, I'd be who I wished to be my whole life.\n\n\"I... I definitely found something,\" I responded with a nod.\n\nShe rubbed her face, paws flopping at her side as she tried to stand again, only to slump back down.\n\n\"I'm not getting up, am I?\"\n\nDespite my smile, I shook my head.\n\n\"No, there's a lot more to everything, including getting off that bed,\" I told her, before reciting what I could recall of Nakir's tale.\n\nI told her everything, about Mordrakk, the drakaran and the truth behind the sphere. Until eventually her half-lidded eyes glanced around, taking in more of the chamber's detail.\n\nMy eyes followed, without a thought for the place from which this star had fallen, or what had transpired to bring it here.\n\nIt's still beautiful beyond imagination. I should show her.\n\n\"From the Golden City?\" she asked, awestruck.\n\n\"Trust me, if they'd told me a few seasons ago I'd have said they were crazy,\" I sighed.\n\nI shook my head to see her staring at me, staring like never before.\n\nWhat does that look mean, why can't I figure it out?\n\nSlightly embarrassed, I averted my eyes.\n\n\"You should get some sleep. I know you think you don't need to, but...\" she giggled, playfully prodding the tip of my muzzle with a forepaw.\n\n\"You're one to give orders,\" I countered, with a laugh.\n\nShe scowled, giving me a look like those I was blessed with every time I battered myself to a rag. The realisation sent a shiver through me at the thought that life would always put something in the way of what I wanted.\n\nAll I could think of now was that I wanted her to see the beauty of this place before destiny tore us apart. I wanted to be with her, and nothing more. Leaning against the bed, its weight shifted once more.\n\n\"Are you going to stay and watch over me, hero?\" she teased, resting her head close to mine.\n\n\"I thought you had Boltock for that?\"\n\n\"Where is he, and the others?\" she replied, opening one eye.\n\n\"They're next door, they're safe, don't worry,\" I confirmed.\n\n\"You should go and see if they're okay. I know Boltock was here, and he won't be taking this well.\"\n\nRespecting her request, I got up to leave, but as I did, my insides began to ache with the knowledge of my destiny.\n\n\"I'll be back soon,\" I replied, softly nudging one of her forepaws. A smile crossed her sleepy muzzle as I turned and passed through the doorway.\n\nIn the near-silent halls the buzzing constructs went about their work. Several walkways weaved their way through the central plantation, while grass and smaller luminescent flowers lined the lower openings. I took a step forward, scattering several of the hovering machines as I wandered into the grove. I tried to recall exactly what Apollo had told me about them, but when that recollection failed, I simply brushed my paws against the magical grass, leaving a trail of luminescent paw-prints.\n\nThe narrow pathway opened into a small grotto, a magnificent display of red flowers, purple mushrooms, and glowing-blue leaves obscuring the chamber's ceiling. Flickering green branches hung down like threads, tended by shimmering specks of light, reflected from the dancing caretakers. The grass here grew to about knee height, clustering around a pool of crystal-clear water. To the left lay a rock formation coated in blue moss, similar to that of Dardien, directing a trickling stream into the pool while a siphon drew the liquid away through a small, rocky hole opposite.\n\nI moved to the water's edge, sweeping aside the reeds and peered into the tranquil waters. I was met by more vegetation \u2013 marvellous flowers like water lilies bobbed about while trails of green weed danced in the gentle flow of the waterfall. I focused on my reflection staring back, the expression it wore, while not ecstatic, was the best it had been in what seemed like an eternity.\n\n\"Such sentiment.\"\n\nI tore my eyes from the water to see the flame-filled eyes of my minds dark illusion staring at me from across the pool.\n\n\"It's admirable and yet you owe it all to me,\" the hallucination purred as he stalked along the opposite bank.\n\n\"I don't owe you anything.\"\n\n\"Don't you?\" he spluttered, red-hot flame spitting from his muzzle. \"You'd be nothing if it wasn't for me, and still you fail to see it,\" he hissed, angrily swatting strands of grass aside with a sweep of a foreclaw.\n\n\"No! I know the truth. I don't need you to tell me anything, you're nothing but an illusion.\"\n\nHe stopped.\n\n\"All you knew for so long was an illusion of the truth. If you believe those golden fools and what they say now, you're blinder than I thought.\"\n\nHis response pricked my anger \u2013 he's trying to reignite my desire to fight.\n\nA fiery snigger accompanied a sweep of his talons across the crystal-clear surface, slicing through his reflection as he questioned.\n\n\"Have you ever considered that they don't know the full truth themselves?\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" I demanded.\n\n\"It is such an intriguing question, isn't it?\" he countered, his muzzle fixed with a sinister grin. \"You may know what was intended for you, but do you know who you truly are?\"\n\n\"What's that supposed mean?\" I replied, with a snort. \"I asked who you were, not me.\"\n\nFor a moment he looked surprised, his sly smile fading.\n\n\"You'll never see it, will you?\" he responded cryptically.\n\nI felt my defence falter as his stare shifted to an odd sympathy. He knew I had to leave them if I wanted to save them. All to fulfil what he claimed was my 'responsibility'.\n\n\"See, you're nothing without me. I make you something, I am you, I am your order, I...\"\n\nHe stopped as his claws struck the grass and drew back.\n\n\"It's pitiful, really. It was never my intention for it to come to this.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, your intention?\" I snapped. \"You aren't even real!\"\n\nHis expression contorted as he angrily swiped at the pool.\n\n\"My intentions are to save them, as are yours!\"\n\nI felt compelled to reply. That makes no sense, he sounds like Mordrakk!\n\nMy thought came to an abrupt halt. Saving them from themselves is exactly what Mordrakk wants?\n\n\"If that is so, what would you have me do?\" I asked.\n\n\"Fulfil your destiny.\"\n\nHis last words carried like a ghostly echo as he slipped back into a dark mist.\n\nI stared at my reflection, then my scar. He's right and I'm tired of admitting it, tired of fighting him. I know what I must do.\n\nTurning from the water, I looked towards Risha's chamber. This is it, I've no idea if I'm ever going to see her or any of them again.\n\nI didn't know how to feel, and without allowing myself the chance to look back I quickly moved down the corridor from which I'd entered. Despite the majestic glow and the busy constructs, the hall felt lonely. My body ached with a pain worse than any physical discomfort; a pain I didn't think I could heal.\n\nWhat's wrong with me? This is all for their own good, for Risha's own good!\n\n\"A\u2013Apollo!\" my voice croaked as it echoed down the hall.\n\n\"Apollo, I'm ready!\" I repeated and sure enough, the low-pitched hum caught my attention.\n\nHis golden talons tapped on the metal as he landed and peered at me with an expression of curiosity.\n\n\"Do forgive my observations. While you seem healthy, I am detecting a considerable amount of emotional...\"\n\nI shook my head, severing his words before he could finish.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" I insisted, \"show me where I need to go.\"\n\nHis curious look once again turned to one that resembled sympathy.\n\n\"Do forgive me. If you are sure, please follow me.\"\n\n\"I have re-established gateway operations, the location has been plotted, and activation awaits my command. Unfortunately, the power required for passing will greatly reduce that of this Arcanum, and I fear without resupply it will shortly be unable to function independently.\"\n\nHe led me back towards the platform, while each step I took felt like I was trudging through a deep bog. He babbled on as we made our way up to another chamber, and when the levitating plate slid to a halt, I saw a radiant blue field covering arched hollows cut into the walls. Inside, I could vaguely see what looked like silhouettes of dragon armour, each staring out from their prison like silent soldiers primed for battle. Several rows continued up the wall, stopping where the roof began to curve. More of the smaller constructs buzzed about, disabling the glowing fields as they routinely checked on the magnificent attire suspended within.\n\n\"This chamber's upper levels sustained significant damage, rendering most of these units intended masters inoperable,\" Apollo stated, drawing my attention.\n\nHis words were weak against the deep aching of my conscience, and no matter how much I knew I needed to do this, I could not bring myself to listen.\n\nI want to be back with the others. At Risha's bed side.\n\n\"Guardian, you are concerned for them, are you not? I would recommend...\"\n\nMy look cut him off once again, and he stared at me for a moment before I finally uttered the words, \"I'm not putting them in any more danger.\"\n\nI could almost feel myself deflate as I was forced to admit what I'd failed to accept for so long. Apollo hovered backwards, moving round to face me.\n\n\"A worthy cause, but if emotions can dictate your judgment, you may not be functioning at full efficiency. I sense you care for the descendant female deeply, maybe now is not the optimal time to act.\"\n\nI was confused and ashamed all at once.\n\nHe's right but I don't understand why I feel that way!\n\nRisha deserved so much more from me, she'd done so from the moment we'd met. She'd made me promise to never leave her again. She'd held me to that promise, and yet...\n\n\"Apollo, I'll decide what's best, now show me what I need to do.\"\n\nHe hesitated. How does he know more about my emotions than I do?\n\n\"Yes, of course, my apologies. Please do wait here and I will retrieve your apparel.\"\n\nMy eyes followed as he darted about, eventually coming to rest beside one of the sealed archways. His talons tapped the wall at its side, and the barrier disintegrated with a flash.\n\n\"Many units have been preserved here. Each a marvellous feat of engineering, I must say. Drakaran armour is bound to the spirit of its intended master, and yours has been waiting for a very long time.\"\n\nAt his words, shards of metal leapt forth, converging into a suspended suit of golden armour. The more it manifested, the stranger it became. Most notable of all, was the fact that it had no straps or bindings. Each segment levitated independently but came together as one to form an almost perfect shape.\n\nSeveral plates covered the head, more covered the edge of each wing. Levitating bands sat where the horns were intended to be, as well as a sharp, diamond-shaped blade suspended perfectly at the tip of the tail. Claws of gold replaced their natural counterparts, while clear crystal glazed the eyes. Most significant of all was the shallow, empty socket in the shape of an eight-point star imprinted on the chest plate.\n\n\"This set was crafted to bind with you. It will only respond to your synaptic command.\"\n\nI looked up as Apollo hovered back down, the confusion on my face seemed to unease him.\n\n\"Synaptic what?\"\n\nHis thoughtful expression turned to what I assumed was a smile before he kindly reworded his response.\n\n\"The suit is magical, fused to you as is customary for drakaran units. It will only respond to your thoughts. I do apologise that I am unable to define it more clearly or provide adequate training.\"\n\nMagical armour made solely for me? Do I need this? Or will it be another reminder of what I was always intended to be?\n\nI reached out, touching the segments as the image of me wearing what hovered before me entered my mind.\n\nShould I really give into this any more than I already have?\n\nUpon contact, the armour shattered, and a swarm of golden pieces rushed towards me, reforming over my body in a perfect reflection of their former position. I staggered back, looking over myself, instinctively trying to shake the plates from my scales like they were biting insects. To my surprise, and without drawing to my body, they followed my movements perfectly, as if they were a seamless second set of scales. As I became accustomed to them, I noticed the undersides of the plates glowed with a faint, magical hue. I moved my wings to see the membranes were still exposed, as were the inner ribs, while the outer arm of each was encased in its own protection.\n\nI don't even look like a dragon anymore! I thought, imagining myself as another of the faceless defence drones dotting the Arcanum.\n\n\"What is wrong, Guardian? Drakaran armour is magical, designed to respond to synaptic command, not physical force,\" Apollo repeated as I flexed each of my serrated claws.\n\nIt sounded ridiculous, but after all I'd been through, I could believe anything. The helmet was the worst part, and although it shifted with the slightest facial expression, I wanted to get it off.\n\nWhat does he mean? I think to make it do stuff?\n\nAs quickly as the thought crossed my mind the armour obeyed. The segments withdrew, flowing seamlessly over those about my neck, exposing my head.\n\nApollo's proud face greeted me, his luminous eyes beaming.\n\n\"Good, I see the function is clearer now, Guardian.\"\n\nThe suit wasn't cumbersome or heavy, it didn't weigh anything, and for once I was smiling, I was impressed. I raised a gauntlet, turning it slowly as the metallic surface shimmered.\n\n\"The gauntlets are equipped with standard blades as well as magical enhancements, as are your wing and tail blades. Visual perception may also be changed at the master's discretion,\" Apollo noted the armour's arcane perks like he'd prepared a checklist.\n\nMagical enhancements? I pondered on the thought for a moment, focusing my attention on the gauntlet.\n\nIt instantly obeyed, and with a flash, the tips of the golden claws lit up with a blazing-white flame. I glanced at my wings, and the edges lit up with the same flame, similar in formation to the metal blades on Dardien armour.\n\n\"Excellent, it seems your base instincts will be adequate for use. Your armour is also designed to withstand extreme temperatures as well as vent excess heat,\" Apollo went on excitedly, only for his gaze to disapprovingly fall on the empty socket in my chest plate.\n\n\"It is unfortunate you no longer possess the shard,\" he observed. \"It would have elevated you to maximum...\"\n\nHe suddenly stopped; speechlessness was something I didn't even think he had the capacity for.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nHe remained stationary for a moment, as if reminiscing.\n\n\"The shard contains drakaran souls. It is their souls that make you who you are... The souls of some I once knew.\"\n\nI glanced away, recalling the last thought to cross my mind the night I decided to wear it: It had felt like a part of me ever since I found it in the ice.\n\nIf Apollo was right, it was more a part of me than I could have ever imagined.\n\nI never imagined it literally contained the souls of others.\n\nI had no idea whether to be sorry or step up and do what was right by those long dead drakaran. My thoughts directed the shards of my helmet to close over my muzzle, and the glowing blue of its underside lit my vision.\n\nI'll do what's right by all of them before this is over.\n\n\"Oh my,\" a surprised voice interrupted, and I looked up to see Apollo staring past me.\n\nI quickly turned.\n\n\"Risha?\"\n\nI was thankful for the armour covering my face as my expression sank from shock to shame. She was trembling, holding the forepaw of her wounded shoulder against her chest.\n\nWhat in the creators' name does she think? I must look like an utter stranger, a monster like this!\n\n\"W\u2013What are you doing here?\" I stammered.\n\nFor a moment I hoped Apollo would provide her a completely logical explanation, but when he failed to do so I stepped forward. Fighting back the guilt and pain welling up inside, and praying my helmet was enough to cover my pitiful expression, I uttered the words I'd been dreading.\n\n\"Risha, I have to leave.\"\n\nConfusion instantly gripped her.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nBefore she could continue, I spoke up.\n\n\"There's something I must do.\"\n\nHer pained expression struck like a dagger to my heart.\n\n\"What do you mean? We're here, we reached Goldfire Ridge. This is where we need to be. You said we needed to be here!\" she protested frantically.\n\nI bowed my head.\n\n\"No, there's, I... I.\" Words stuck like splinters in my throat.\n\nShe stepped forward, my trembling claws tapping on the marble as she gently lowered her wounded limb.\n\n\"If there's more, I'm not leaving you,\" she demanded. \"We can face it together.\"\n\nMy eyes closed tight as her tentative paw-steps ceased, as did her words.\n\n\"No, I need you to stay here, where it's safe.\"\n\n\"And how do you know that? How do you know you can do what you need to? Blaze, you don't...\" Her words faded, but my head shot up and I looked her in the eye.\n\nShe moved back, melting under my stern glare.\n\nMy shameful mind couldn't bear it, every part of me hated what I had to do. She couldn't come with me, not this time, I couldn't risk her life or any of my friends again. I had to continue alone.\n\nShe means too much for me to risk losing her again.\n\n\"No, this time I must do things alone. I'm not risking any of you again,\" I declared steadfastly.\n\n\"I'm not letting you do anything alone,\" she countered, her eyes narrowing.\n\n\"Why?\" I snapped, rising tall.\n\nIn a flash, her stern expression fell away as if that was a question she'd never expected to have to answer.\n\n\"Why do you always follow me? You nearly lost your brother, your friends, your life because of me. So why follow me? I'm not an idol, Risha, I'm not what you think I am!\"\n\nShe stepped back further, like she'd seen a monster \u2013 that dark entity that only desired power and domination, the one that urged me on, to do what was necessary rather than what was right.\n\nI... I can't do this anymore.\n\nBowing my head, I fought the rage and hatred inside as I looked down at my reflection, a white dragon clad in magnificent gold. Risha's weak paw steps tapped on the marble as she took a tentative step towards me and her reflection appeared next to mine.\n\n\"Because I love you.\"\n\nMy whole world spun as my confused mind came to an abrupt halt.\n\nLove? She loves me.\n\nI had no concept of love, I was merely a weapon, a being with no purpose other than to destroy.\n\nYet she loves me?\n\nMy armour fell away from my scales as my thoughts cleared, even the dark manifestation fell utterly silent.\n\nIs this the elusive feeling that's evaded me for so long?\n\nIt was something more powerful than armies, the will of kings, or the wrath of gods.\n\nIs it what the creators failed to factor, why they lost?\n\nShe bowed her head while my puzzled eyes looked on. I hadn't had a dragon upbringing, I didn't know what love was, and yet I'd felt it for so long.\n\nI love her and... That's why I must leave.\n\nFighting the heart-rendering pain in my chest, I summoned my armour back into place over my scales.\n\n\"Apollo, let's go.\"\n\nThe hovering construct looked at me like I was making a mistake but led on regardless.\n\n\"Of course. This way.\"\n\nHe hesitantly hovered towards the central plate, and following, I didn't look back, I couldn't bear to look her in the eye.\n\n\"Wait!\"\n\nApollo was the one to stop, and when he failed to activate the platform I was forced to look back.\n\nTears lined Risha's eyes. The sight tore me apart and yet, as she approached, I couldn't keep my eyes off her.\n\nShe deserves so much more than my attention, why should I lead her on?\n\n\"Please don't...\" she choked, closing her eyes and glancing away.\n\n\"Don't leave without saying goodbye.\"\n\nLove forced me to mirror her expression, the plates of my helmet sliding away. She lowered her head, pressing it against my chest plate while wrapping a wing over my back. As strange as it felt, I accepted love for the first time, and it tore me apart."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The clatter of our unified paw steps was lost to the immense scale of the aviary chamber as Apollo led us inside. The semi-circular platform stretched out in front of us, the radiant blue sun shining magnificently far beyond. As much as Risha clung to my side, she could not fight wonder as she gazed in awe at the immense towers orbiting the sun.\n\n\"Is this...?\" she asked in wonder, her eyes completely captivated.\n\n\"A piece of the Golden City?\" Apollo moved to face her. \"Marvellous, isn't it? My masters originally intended for this...\"\n\n\"Your masters?\" she questioned.\n\n\"Why, the drakaran, of course,\" he answered.\n\nHer curious look drew her further from her sorrowful expression, Apollo noticing her curiosity long before she was able to voice it.\n\n\"The drakaran are your ancient ancestors. Your kind are the mortal descendants of star dragons founded by Lady Seraphine Goldfire during the first age of this world.\"\n\n\"Don't ask him too much,\" I muttered with a smile. \"He'll talk for a thousand years.\"\n\nApollo's eyes darted between us before he finally turned and hovered to what I'd assumed was the platform's take off point previously. Only now the inner rim of the ring glowed with a pulsating blue light as bolts of lightning arced between each illuminated side.\n\n\"The gateway is set to the coordinates of Mordrakk's power source, exactly two-thousand, two-hundred and sixty-three point-two miles to the north-west of our current location,\" Apollo stated, his talons tampering with the 'gateway' as he called it.\n\nSo, it's going to end where it began \u2013 Ilivar, or what remains of it.\n\nThe place I should have stopped this before it all commenced.\n\nI shook my head free of the regret and what could have been, stepping up to the glowing gateway.\n\n\"This will take me straight there?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not directly. This gateway is designed for inter-realm travel. Transportation through the Ether is required for this trip.\"\n\nThe idea of travelling through the untamed Ether again was unnerving, especially considering the last time it had changed me from a god to an egg, not to mention cast me forward a few thousand years. However, the idea of flying or walking all that way was equally unattractive I guess I must trust he knows what he's doing.\n\n\"So, this is it?\" Risha's voice broke my concentration.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I replied as I looked back.\n\nShe smiled, almost able to hide the fact she hated every moment of what was taking place.\n\n\"No,\" she stammered, looking at the blue sun, seemingly to help stem her tears.\n\n\"I should have told you how I felt,\" she admitted.\n\nAlmost on instinct, I took a step forward and wrapped her in my wings.\n\n\"Ever since we met and that night you tried to leave, I...\" her words trailed off, but our eyes came closer.\n\n\"Coordinates plotted. Strange, I expected at least partial shade interference,\" Apollo announced behind us. \"Levels indicate that Mordrakk's power is growing. I would recommend caution. There is a high probability that vulpomancers have already corrupted most of the surrounding area.\"\n\nTaking little note of his babbling, I released Risha with a hesitant breath.\n\n\"Apollo, I need you to guarantee me their safety,\" I demanded, nodding to the sapphire dragoness.\n\nFor a moment he stared at me.\n\n\"Indeed, if that is your command, I will see it completed. Though, unfortunately this Arcanum will soon lose power and I will be unable to protect them here,\" he replied hastily.\n\nFor a moment I pondered on how strange it felt to put my trust in a machine created by a long-dead race of star dragons.\n\nDo I trust him? Not completely, but I trusted Risha.\n\n\"You need to find somewhere safe. Don't go back to Dardien,\" I insisted, knowing if I was unable to stop Mordrakk his only target will be the amulet.\n\n\"Do you really think the sovereign would let us back in?\" she chuckled.\n\n\"Get away from the mountains too,\" I added, sure that the orkin would not abandon Taldran for long.\n\nShe nodded as I backed up to the gateway, unable to avoid looking into her eyes.\n\n\"The world isn't the only one who needs you, you know,\" she admitted through gathering tears.\n\n\"It needs me now,\" I declared, \"But, you're the only one I need.\"\n\nShe leapt up, wrapping her wings around me, pressing her head against mine until our eyes met.\n\n\"Promise me you'll come back.\"\n\nI swallowed hard, I'd broken too many promises to her, and I didn't intend to break another.\n\n\"I'm coming back, I promise.\"\n\nShe hesitated before releasing me, backing up slightly as the void within the gateway-ring swirled into a storm of radiant energy.\n\n\"I'll hold you to that,\" she responded.\n\nI smiled, fighting my own emotions. I'm coming back \u2013 for better or worse, I'm not leaving them for good.\n\n\"Keep them safe,\" I repeated to Apollo.\n\n\"Indeed, Guardian,\" he replied, hovering at Risha's side. \"And good luck.\"\n\nAt that, I took a faltering step into oblivion. Light encircled me, spinning like a storm, casting me into the void. Within seconds the world was gone, and I was falling away from everything. My Friends, my family, and my love."
            },
            {
                "title": "Responsibility",
                "text": "A tunnel of warped energy flashed before my eyes, tossing me about like a leaf in a furious gale, until darkness rushed up to shatter my fall and a hard bump marked my landing. My mind spun as a blurred set of memories realigned to reform what was my consciousness, only one thought was sure \u2013 I'm not going through another gateway again for as long as I live!\n\nThe flash of light accompanying my sudden arrival illuminated the icy surface and swirling clouds about me before returning to darkness. In the gloom nothing but the howling wind, and freezing blizzard beat across my scales.\n\nMy eyes flickered open and I found my muzzle pressed against hard ice. Lifting myself from the frozen surface, I couldn't see anything in the darkness surrounding me, no evidence of where I'd come from, nor swarms of monsters ready to set upon me. All I could see was a gloomy shape ahead of me.\n\nIlivar's entrance, Apollo delivered me right to the front door.\n\nI shivered at the thought of what I knew to be within the ruins of the fortress. Catching my breath against the bitter cold, I took a bold step forward, followed swiftly by another.\n\nMy eyes scanned the icy sprawl, and I noted the vast network of frozen pillars making up the outer layers. Unexpectedly, most were intact which caused me to think about the last time I'd been here.\n\nI had stood on this very spot and told my friends they didn't have to follow me.\n\nLooking back, I knew I couldn't have been more wrong, but with a grunt, I shook my head and dismissed the memory.\n\nThere's no point dwelling on what could have been.\n\nWith that thought firmly in mind, I kept going, until the roar of the wind reduced to a cacophony of howls and wailing spectres, occasionally broken by the clattering of falling ice. The more I listened, the more it sounded like there was something stalking me.\n\nI'm definitely not alone.\n\nThrough the shifting sockets of my helmet, my eyes scanned the ice bridges, pillars and archways, catching glimpses of what looked like living shadow.\n\nThe shadow-creatures, vulpomancers, they must be here.\n\nThe sudden sound of scraping claws sent me bolting into a maze of reflections as a barely lit pathway drew me deeper into the sprawl.\n\nWhat am I doing? They didn't send me here to run away!\n\nSwallowing my fear, I calmed myself and pressed on. The sudden appearance of my reflection surprised me and I spun to the image of myself locked in a frozen pillar.\n\n\"Ah, now we will see you for who you really are,\" the illusion hissed as my armoured reflection morphed into his twisted, fiery image.\n\nNo, I need to focus on what's real, not him! I averted my eyes, and he raised a shadowy claw to his muzzle.\n\n\"You're alone, alone in the dark,\" he reminded me.\n\nI placed a paw down to move on, but as I did, he started to cackle.\n\nI don't have time for this anymore. He's the last thing I need. He isn't even...\n\n\"Oh, I can assure you I am quite real,\" he rumbled, fading from the ice and leaving only my armoured reflection.\n\n\"We have been together for some time now.\" His cackling voice slowly warped into a terrifying howl, bellowing through the gloom.\n\nThe whole of Ilivar shuddered under his growl, disturbed banks of snow fluttered, and the ice groaned as something shifted beyond my sight. A serpent, monstrous in size, yet invisible, it skulked in the shadows waiting to strike. Even when it felt like it was directly above me my eyes darted up to see nothing.\n\nWhat is this? How can something so large be so hard to see? I looked in every direction while his laughter echoed through the ice chasms.\n\n\"I know your fear, I can taste it. Such purpose, such undying loyalty, it's admirable.\" His voice swelled to that I'd heard at the celebration, speaking with an unnervingly respectful tone.\n\n\"Where are you, Mordrakk!?\" I demanded, wings flaring as the arcane weapons along them flashed to life.\n\n\"You know nothing of that name! Nor of the one it belongs to!\" he snapped.\n\nThe bellow tore through me like a hurricane and I slipped as the whole of Ilivar shuddered. I soon stepped up and steadily resumed my walk.\n\n\"But I know you, I've known you for such a long time and yet you still think you can oppose me?\"\n\nHis words drilled their way into my thoughts.\n\n\"Where are you? Show yourself!\" I ordered.\n\n\"I'm everywhere, I'm everything. Do you not know? Do the tales and legends not tell of my glory?\" There was an uneasy pause, and everything fell silent.\n\n\"No, of course not! You believe the false tails of my traitorous children!\" he growled. \"I saved them, I stole the heart of that which I loved most, I stood against the Infernal Blade, I cast the Darkness into oblivion. All for them!\"\n\nThe more I thought about it, the more he almost made sense. He'd created them, cared for them, managed things and made the hard choices when no one else would.\n\nWhat, no! My mind screamed. He's trying to manipulate me, don't listen!\n\nWithout a thought I coiled back, releasing a bolt of fire. The glowing projectile illuminated the icy sprawl before exploding in a shower of frozen shards. As the sound echoed through the labyrinth, Mordrakk merely laughed.\n\n\"I thought the games were over? I thought you knew who I was, and what needed to be done,\" he continued.\n\nI started to run, and the frozen doorway of the inner fortress came into view.\n\nGood to know all the details I remember are still intact.\n\n\"I know why you're here. My traitorous children sent you to do their blasphemous work while they cower in my realm,\" he growled, finding no trouble in keeping pace with me. \"My sons and daughter, how pitiful. They will soon learn what becomes of those who betray me!\"\n\nI skidded to a halt at the doorway.\n\n\"The only one who betrayed you is yourself!\" I shouted as I readied another fireball.\n\nThe vast slithering sounds all silenced.\n\n\"Really?\" The whole place started to shake as he laughed. \"What concocted lie did they tell you? What did they offer you to sway you to their deceit?\"\n\nIs this a joke? I wondered, but the idea that Nakir could have lied to me was not so farfetched. No, not again. I have to do this!\n\n\"Was it freedom? They're hardly in a position to offer that.\" His laughter cut off abruptly as he hissed. \"You would follow them so blindly when their cause does not best my own? They only seek my power for themselves, they are greedy and selfish. You of all should know what you are to them? They never intended for you to live, they above all others have betrayed you, they have from the very beginning.\"\n\nHis words bore deeper, like daggers into my thoughts.\n\nI shouldn't listen, but what if he's right \u2013 what if they're all squabbling over the same power, what if none of them are right?\n\n\"Do you not think that when their use for you expires, they will not hesitate to retake their power?\"\n\nI paused, staring out into the darkness. They wouldn't, would they?\n\nWhy not? They're like him. After all they've done, is it too hard to believe they'll kill me and take back what's theirs?\n\n\"Your life is worthless to them,\" Mordrakk proposed.\n\nNo, it can't be true; he's the villain, the evil who's killed and tortured so many!\n\nEverything I stood for crumbled with one thought, cracking as much as the icy structure around me.\n\n\"Call yourself Guardian? You're merely an instrument in their flawed plan, as worthless as the rest of this corrupted creation!\" His voice slithered closer.\n\nI stamped an armoured forepaw.\n\n\"No, you're wrong!\" I argued, swiftly following the words with another glowing fire ball.\n\nI heard him shift, and fired again, leaving little time to act as the projectiles struck the icy columns. The world shook and the already weakened structure began to crumble. The thunderous noise consumed his voice. I turned and ran, dodging falling rubble while the world was rapidly consumed by a wall of falling ice only inches behind my tail. Like a gnashing maw it surged closer, and spreading my wings, I leapt towards the doorway, landing clumsily on the slippery surface as the thunderous avalanche sent a rush of shattered ice over me.\n\nThat was too close!\n\nShaking frost from my back, I stood up to see the way behind me had completely collapsed.\n\nSo much for getting out the way I came in.\n\nMy mind raced, looking ahead a mist-shrouded corridor greeted me as eerie silence fell over the freezing darkness.\n\nI can't really believe any of that stuff, can I?\n\nMordrakk was cunning, but why would he try to manipulate me with words rather than destroy me with his proclaimed power?\n\nUnless, as Nakir's said, he's still relatively weak.\n\nI pressed on regardless, the memories of these halls echoing through my thoughts. From what I could remember this path would lead me back to the main hall, where Acrodan had started this nightmare.\n\n\"A valiant effort,\" Mordrakk's omnipotent voice growled, his deep, grisly tone carrying through the halls like a haunting spectre.\n\nHe almost sounded amused at my hasty attempt to avoid, or even destroy him. It also confirmed that my pitiful efforts had done neither.\n\n\"You know...?\" he continued. \"A part of me almost wishes to see you strike me down, if only to see those traitorous fools undone.\"\n\nI kept doing my utmost to ignore him as I passed by several intersecting corridors, many of which had collapsed or were torn asunder by huge fissures.\n\n\"Would they ignore the order my rightful reign would bring, if only to see the perseverance of their false ideas? Freedom is nothing more than an impossible reality, if one bestows freedom upon creation, it will tear itself apart. Mortals are too petty to coexist, they cannot resist greed, pride and anger,\" he hissed the words as if they tasted vile.\n\n\"It is the same carelessness that gave the Darkness its strength and gave it a place in the heart of every mortal soul.\"\n\nThe ice shuddered once more while I tried to focus on pressing forward.\n\nBut he's right \u2013 these are troubled times.\n\nI'd seen that the world would tear itself apart, the orkin, wyverns and Acrodan were all prime examples.\n\nBut they're all nothing more than instruments of his destruction. I countered as the idea conflicted with others.\n\nEven so, there were examples free from Mordrakk's control. Risha and Boltock had seen humans kill dragons, and back in the city I'd seen what Aries was willing to do to keep his power.\n\n'There's only one real player in this game.'\n\nAll of them, no matter their agenda or ambitions, to us they were pawns. Pieces that, if left unchecked, would inevitably destroy the board.\n\nI had no idea if that had been his plan all along, written into the fabric of creation or simply a delusion of his corruption. But it was hard to dispute. If forced to unify, if all freedom was taken away, then the world would be forced to coexist under one idea.\n\nShouldn't that have been the creators' responsibility all along, to do what was necessary, no matter what?\n\n\"Yes, you know of what I speak,\" he growled. \"You see the chaos of a world that is allowed to be free. War, destruction and death \u2013 such things ravaged us once. Back then I failed to see the impurity of the life I gave. But as I peered into the eyes of chaos, as I saw pure discord and oblivion, I discovered what must be done.\"\n\nIlivar trembled as his slithering motions returned.\n\n\"That was you, you caused that, you caused everything!\" I shouted into the empty gloom.\n\nImmediately recognising the scenery around me, I looked ahead to see a junction in the corridor.\n\nIt's a little battered but it's like I remember it!\n\n\"Their lies cloud your vision,\" he pressed. \"They were never brave enough to admit the truth. The Darkness wasn't of my design, its power was unrivalled by all but my own! They only cared for the lives of their lesser beings, their precious drakaran. So much so that they would betray me!\"\n\nI focused on ignoring his toxic words as I came upon the junction, hopped over a large split in the floor and turned left.\n\nYet I had to wonder. To save the whole of creation from such chaos, would it have to be remade? If all those who'd shunned or betrayed me could be destroyed and remade exactly how I wanted, would their former selves matter at all? If reality could be resumed so perfectly, was there really value in life?\n\nNo, if I change the lives of others, mould them to what I wish, I'm no better than the creators when they made me!\n\n\"You can't say that, everyone deserves to live their lives freely!\" I challenged.\n\nLooking ahead, I recalled the hall I stood in collapsing. It led to where I'd failed to stop Acrodan, but the blockage had been cleared, allowing me to see where the wall had collapsed, exposing the chamber to the outside world. The raging storm about the citadel, subdued into a barrier of freezing mist.\n\n\"Life is nothing but a gift from me!\" Mordrakk bellowed, \"Made so mortals appreciate the might of their makers. It's expendable, replicable \u2013 would you not sacrifice a world for the good of all if you had the power to remake it? Would you spare those who would destroy others because something as pitiful as morals clouded your responsibility? Would you not purge creation of darkness, to make it a better place? If not, who are you to tell me otherwise?\"\n\nHis words festered in my mind as I made my way over the pile of rubble beneath the collapsed balcony. Shattered walls stood like dark sentries in the mist, their remains like skeletal bones stretching up on either side. Meanwhile, silence fell once more as if the lingering fog was a fortress against which the wind feared to blow.\n\nPeering out into the opaque shroud, I recalled the last time I'd stood here, facing the greatest threat this world had known.\n\nBut all Acrodan did; was prove Mordrakk's point.\n\nI knew the evil among them, but not the truth \u2013 Mordrakk's intentions were justified, yet cruel, conceived with a corrupt mind.\n\nBut who's truly corrupt, him or his children? The thought that I'd been created to oppose him was intimidating, and yet the idea that it may have been done out of spite rather than responsibility was devastating.\n\nI placed a forepaw on the ruined steps, and glancing around I saw what remained of Acrodan's staff, discarded amidst the snow.\n\n\"He was a weakling, like the rest of them, even with my power they were nothing. Yet they served their purpose well enough,\" Mordrakk commented.\n\nMoving to the top of the stairs, the gloom revealed another shape, namely a pillar of ice, taller than me and hovering on the edge of the abyss.\n\nThat's new, I don't remember it from last time.\n\n\"If they were so weak,\" I asked, \"how did they defeat you?\"\n\n\"Mortals are arrogant,\" he sneered. \"Ever since this world was liberated from the Infernals it's merely had an illusion of freedom. I simply needed to restore order until such a time that I may be free,\" he explained.\n\nHis words were like a curse, and his disregard for the war he'd caused was infuriating. He alone had created the horror and monsters of the Guardian War \u2013 yet he couldn't care less.\n\nI swung round, angrily striking the hovering pillar with my tail blade. A sudden flash of light lit the chamber and a deep hum boomed through the mist. Moments later, an invisible wave charged around the gloom, blowing it away and revealing a sea of stars beyond the dancing aurora. Falling stars streaked across the image, each appearing as a blood-red slice through the night sky.\n\n'Fire will fall this night', Pyro's words eerily echoed in my mind.\n\nThe darkened depths of the pit broke the barren, icy waste sitting beneath them. Only, it looked much larger than I recalled. Above its inky blackness, huge pillars of ice hovered where Ilivar's crater edge and ice towers had once stood, the ground beneath them consumed by darkness. Each tower rotated in the cold air, their bases crackling with a strange red light.\n\nThe sight that made dread surge through my veins most of all, was the swarm of hissing vulpomancers lining the shattered walls. Like voracious insects, they crawled across its surface, the ice screaming at the touch of their claws while shadow dripped from their tattered wings.\n\nThere's so many... I... Can I really take them all on?\n\nSomething shifted behind me \u2013 a faint whisper building in strength until it rivalled the swirling firestorm from the celebration. Living smoke crept from every corner, crevice and hole, crawling across the ruined surface and about its dark servants, spinning itself into the shape of a body. Monstrous talons poisoned the ice as they materialised, while above, vast wings cast a dark shadow as they flared like storm clouds upon the horizon. A heart of burning flame roared in the centre of its chest, while a long neck, topped by a horned head, supported two flaming nostrils and a pair of glowing, hateful eyes.\n\nIt was the same monster that had exploded from Dardien's seasonal fire, the image that had tortured me for so long.\n\nMordrakk.\n\n\"Arrogance, that is their weapon against all who would stand against them. My children believed they could protect their pets from me by procrastinating, delaying, imprisoning,\" he boomed, his voice growing stronger as flames spat from his mouth.\n\n\"But it's their arrogance that betrays them,\" he continued. \"For to believe they and their weak ideals could purge this corrupt reality, to save it from the Darkness, is folly!\"\n\nHis head snaked about, leaving a trail of shadow until his flaming eyes set on me.\n\n\"Do you not see their lies? They label me their enemy only to justify their transgressions. For I am the fallen star, fallen from the gleaming pedestal upon which they would hold me so highly!\"\n\nI took a step back, paling under the burning malice of his gaze as he added. \"But you... you are different, you are something more.\"\n\nMy paws brushed against the cliff top as the storm of shadow and fire crawled over the ice, the frozen surface releasing a painful crack under the weight of what should be weightless.\n\n\"You are something much more. A monument to my traitorous children. An insult to my power, and yet you would be nothing without me.\"\n\nWithout him? I'm far better than him, than any of them!\n\nTo believe that was the only hope I had left, the only virtue on which to cling. He'd been the one in my mind, he'd been the one to force me on, to force every failure, every imperfection. He'd told me of my responsibility.\n\nAll those lives, a universal genocide, all of it could be destroyed in an instant. To be remade without their previous imperfections.\n\nI stared at my paws as shadow and snow lapped over them.\n\nWould their death matter if they were alive again in the same instant? Should the universe be sacrificed to free it of corruption?\n\nI demanded my mind stop fighting any idea that I might agree \u2013 that I could have the life I wanted, the life of which I'd dreamt if only I listened to him.\n\n\"I can sense the storm of confusion in your mind, as always, it controls you,\" Mordrakk hissed, with a sinister grin.\n\n\"You don't know anything about me!\" I snapped, but his flaming expression did not falter.\n\n\"Then allow me to enlighten you with your true purpose, that which my children have failed to see,\" he taunted, lowering his head. \"For I made you what you really are.\"\n\n\"You're wrong, you're...\" I stammered.\n\nHe recoiled in a cloud of shadowy flame.\n\n\"Am I? If so, tell me who made this world? The young, the old and the wise. Who made the water you drink, the food you eat, was that not I? I am creation, I am eternity!\" he hollered with the fury of a cosmic storm.\n\n\"Yet it is you who must decide, for that is why I gave you this life. My children believe it an accident that you live, but no, it is by a fraction of my power that you live to fulfil your responsibility, to save them!\"\n\nI could do it, unmake everything, save them, as I always should have done. I held the fate of creation in my claws. It was my responsibility to do what was right for all I knew: home, Dardien, dragons, orkin, Tarwin and the others.\n\nFor a moment, I held it all, and it felt good. Unlimited power, I had everything!\n\n\"No!\" I cried, shaking my head.\n\nHis eyes narrowed, embers spewing from between his fangs as he growled.\n\n\"We are gods! It is our birth right to rule all creation. It is our responsibility to ensure its survival, no matter the cost,\" he thundered, peering down at me like I was a pouty child.\n\n\"Mortals live and die, they are nothing but a blessing of my power. They are weak and deserve nothing from us, and yet they would divert you from what needs to be done!\" he accused, pulling back to full height and grasping the ruined walls either side of him.\n\nVulpomancers clawed their way around his talons, but with my rear paws at the cliff edge I had no choice but to step forward, my eyes switching between the prowling creatures. All the while Mordrakk considered me with a sly pity.\n\n\"If you cannot see the truth, I will show you. Those of my children's precious drakaran made mortal upon this world are weak, corrupted by chaos, fear and greed,\" he continued.\n\n\"You're wrong,\" I countered under my breath.\n\n\"Am I?\"\n\nHis eyes stared toward the cliff edge behind me, and I resisted the urge to turn until curiosity got the better of me. A dragon silhouetted by moonlight stood on the precipice. His blackened scales were scarred, and discolouration spread from the dry wounds, polluting a faded red surface. His wings were torn and one of his horns was broken. He wore jet-black armour engraved with glowing runes, and under a spiked helmet two eyes of purple flame burned brightly.\n\nI staggered back. That's impossible!\n\n\"Pyro?\"\n\n\"That is no longer my name,\" his harsh, twisted voice announced.\n\nI glanced back to see Mordrakk had vanished while his minions looked on like ravenous spectators.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I asked, edging back.\n\nHis face turned to anger and stepping forward his metal-clad claws scraped across the ice with a shriek no less horrific than the monsters about us.\n\n\"Getting what should be mine,\" he snapped, purple flames burning in the back of his throat. \"Taking back what you stole!\" he added, taking another step forward.\n\nI stood my ground, caution overcoming confusion as my mind crept back to the vague image of the last night I'd seen him alive.\n\n\"I didn't take anything from you,\" I replied, marking his slow walk as he began to circle me.\n\n\"Don't play stupid, you stole everything! Ever since you turned up you began stealing respect, friendship, power. They followed you over me when it was always my right to lead!\"\n\nHe paused and lowered his head like a cougar ready to pounce. \"You think I don't know where you took them?\"\n\n\"That's... I didn't steal them from you.\"\n\nI couldn't think up a response he wouldn't be able to twist. He smiled, a grim flame flickering through his sharp teeth.\n\n\"You can't deny it, can you? You're nothing but a wyrm, Blaze!\" He raked a claw across the ice.\n\n\"What is it you want \u2013 power, respect? I trained my whole life, and what did that arrogant snake Aries give me? Nothing more than a suit of armour!\"\n\nWhat's wrong with him? He's betraying everyone, including himself! Is he so weak-minded that he can't see Mordrakk's clearly manipulating him?\n\n\"I never wanted any of it,\" I growled back.\n\n\"Indeed,\" he laughed, as if he'd won the first small victory. \"But the Great Master has promised me everything you stole \u2013 power and respect over a new breed of ebon wings.\"\n\nHe spread his black wings proudly. \"I can remake the world the way I want it to be, with those I desire at my side.\"\n\nTo see him fall to such madness was painful. Maybe if he wasn't so blind, so weak!\n\n\"He's lying, he isn't going to share any of his power!\" I attempted to reason.\n\n\"The gods we worshipped were truly fools; they had to be, to make you in the belief you could save them,\" he countered.\n\n\"Mordrakk is evil, his mind has been twisted by something no one understands!\" I pleaded, while his inability to listen only started to infuriate me.\n\n\"Is he? Or is it your foolish gods who truly fell to the Darkness's chaos?\" he laughed, scraping an armoured claw against the ice. \"Not that it really matters, I think it's time we ended this little chat.\"\n\nI fought against my growing anger, lowering myself for the inevitable as he spread his wings.\n\nI can't fight him, he's my friend, albeit not like the others, but I knew him.\n\nI looked down at my claws, imagining the burning weapons they could become. The horrifying memories of what I could do when I lost control.\n\nPyro gave an angry growl before his armoured spines collided into my side, catapulting me towards the cliff face. The blackened metal of his helmet clattered against the gold of my own, his reinforced horns pressing the magical segments against my scales. I came to a grinding halt in the snow while he controlled his momentum, slowly moving towards me.\n\n\"Fight back, you coward!\" he goaded, \"You're too frightened to do what's best for everyone, aren't you? How did you ever think you could be their leader?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to fight you,\" I reasoned.\n\nAppalled, he grunted, striking his gauntlet across my helmet, and down my snout. My armour absorbed most of the blow, while the force sent me sprawling to the floor.\n\n\"Fight back, coward!\" he demanded again, smashing his claws against the top of my head.\n\nMy helmet clattered as my head fell to the floor. I still offered no response, and he gave another angry grunt, grabbing one of my exposed wing membranes in his mouth and ripping the soft tissue away with a fearsome twist of his teeth. The pain surged through me as the flesh tore away and a warm flow of crimson followed.\n\nSpitting out the bloody remains, he gave another hiss. \"You're pathetic!\"\n\nI fought against the pain and anger beating like drums in my mind, both begging me to retaliate. Meanwhile, his dark armour shifted as he moved his head down to my neck and clamped his teeth around the magical segments. I was ripped from the floor and with a mere flick of his neck, he threw me like a rag into the hovering ice pillar at the cliff's edge.\n\n\"Where is the immortal champion that imprisoned my master? You can smite the lord of all creation and not fight here?\" he chastised as I slid to the floor in a painful heap.\n\n\"Your time among mortals has made you weak! You care for them when you are nothing to them!\"\n\nLooking up, I saw him stop. It was like he realised something new, and his flaming eyes narrowed as a malicious grin parted his muzzle.\n\n\"Maybe I could return to them when I'm done here.\" He waved a foreclaw dismissively. \"That pathetic whelp always chasing my mate's tail and his good for nothing sister!\"\n\nHis threat finally broke me, and the fiery force I'd restrained broke free, exploding in a hiss of steam as the ice around me melted and my armour effortlessly vented the flames.\n\nHe flew forward, horns impacting my chest, while I seized his shoulder, throwing us both over the cliff edge. I opened my wings to steady myself, landing on a snowy ledge. He coiled in the air, swirling to face me before diving and effortlessly swerving to avoid the bolt of flame I sent his way.\n\n\"You're nothing!\" he spat, crashing into me and beating his claws against my armour.\n\nSlashing out with one of my gauntlets, I left a glowing white gash across his chest. He leapt back, glancing at the wound I'd so effortlessly inflicted, before lunging at me once more. Beating my wings furiously, I propelled myself up and over him, striking with the blade at the tip of my tail, slicing another glowing swathe through his armour.\n\nHis claw met my side as I landed, and the force of the strike sent me sprawling. In the same moment, he flew at me again, his muzzle spewing crimson flames. Bracing myself, I coiled back, unleashing another flaming projectile. He swerved, but not before the shot exploded to his right. Raising my wing-mounted blades, I cut two more gashes into his tattered wings as the blast sent him crashing to the ice beside me. He responded with reflexes far superior to those I'd seen before, jumping back toward the cliff edge, forcing his horns against my left flank and throwing me to the floor with a clattering hiss.\n\n\"You think you could take everything from me? My friends, my mate, my power!\" his rage exploded, he dashed towards me.\n\nI lowered myself as his armoured claws clattered against my shoulder plates. My molten-hot paws clutched the rapidly melting ice before the force flipped me into the air. Meanwhile, his claws glowed red against the heat of my ethereal form, as he swooped over and tore me into the sky.\n\n\"I will take what you stole!\" he screamed, dropping me back upon the main platform before descending with a clatter.\n\nI rolled to the side, but he kicked me onto my back, opening his mouth to bite my throat. Lifting my left claw, I swung for his head. Without a word I gripped his helmet tight, and no match for my power, the metal melted like butter as my claws boiled through to his scales.\n\nHe screamed, his flesh searing like bubbling magma as my claws cut through his eye. My rage burned like a furnace, forcing me to lunge at him again, sinking my teeth into his right foreleg, incinerating his armour and scales.\n\nHe screamed more, but I was far from finished. My hind paws kicked into his underside, throwing him from my grip while severing his right leg in a loud rupture of flesh and bone as I held it in my mouth.\n\nHe skidded across the floor, and without hesitation or mercy, I rose, spitting out his severed limb as it disintegrated into charred ashes. He lay broken on the ice, shivering with pain, grasping at the stump that had once been his foreleg. The left side of his face was a disfigured molten mass of scales and warped metal, his eye lost within the charred mix. I rose above him, coiling back, and opening my mouth.\n\n\"See, they are weak, their existence is nothing more than a blessing from us.\" The dark voice coiled sinisterly around me.\n\nI felt the fire at the back of my throat as my eyes stared mercilessly at the shivering, disfigured dragon I once called a friend.\n\n\"What are you waiting for? End him and claim your rightful place!\" the eager voice added with a sinister laugh, and I saw the image of a bony dragon raising his paw to a glowing tally.\n\n\"Eight...\"\n\nI stopped. My eyes wide as I held back, and my mouth slowly closed. The voice gave a grunt of frustration as I fell panting to my knees, staring at my bloodied, disfigured friend sprawled helplessly at my paws.\n\nNo, I can't have, surely not. What have I done?\n\nI staggered back, gasping, before falling to the ice. The dark creatures surrounding me hissed uneasily when Mordrakk's shadowed form spun back into existence. He glanced down at Pyro like he was nothing.\n\n\"What are you waiting for? Restore order, send him to his rightful place!\" he demanded.\n\nOnce I'd have been unable to believe the lack of concern in his voice, but now I knew better. I knew the gods didn't care for anything other than themselves.\n\nIs this order or subjugation? Is it for the good of all or merely the will of the Darkness that now thrives within him? I thought as vulpomancers dragged Pyro away.\n\nHis eternal endeavour for power had stolen the minds of many, including his own. I'd seen it, I'd felt it. If this was the order he'd bring, it could not be allowed to happen. If the greatest act of kindness to the universe was to allow it to die, then it was corrupt from the start. They would be reborn, to be subdued by the rule of a power-mad creator \u2013 I will not allow that to happen.\n\nForcing myself to stand I stared into his burning eyes.\n\n\"No more! You're wrong about them, about everything. I'm not like you, I won't let you do this,\" I declared.\n\nHe rose to full height, and before I could react, flames leapt from his muzzle. I felt myself being torn from the ground, an invisible force catapulting me toward the cliff, slamming me into the floating pillar with a bone-shattering crunch. Mordrakk snorted flames as his dark talons sliced effortlessly through my armour, boring deep into my side, while he pinned me against the pillar with nothing more than a stare.\n\n\"You would dare to defy me? I am your creator! You would be nothing but a casket of soulless dust without me!\"\n\nSpreading his wings, he descended towards me.\n\n\"I am your master, the greatest of all masters!\" he roared.\n\n\"My wings will cast a shadow over this pitiful world! My claws will cut swathes through reality itself. My fire will scour corruption from the universe and you...\" His gaze narrowed.\n\n\"You are fools to defy me!\"\n\nFlames licked at my scales; his shadowed jaw held inches from mine. I tried with all my remaining strength to break free, but it was hopeless \u2013 the force that held me wasn't physical, nor was the deep wound his claws had inflicted as it hurt more than any pain I'd ever felt.\n\n\"Did you really expect me to have fallen that day? No, you are my legacy, I gave you this life so that you may fulfil my work and, if not? Well, it is easier to corrupt the pitiful soul I gave you than the billion my children stuffed into that shard!\"\n\nHe glanced down to the empty socket in my magical armour, and grinned.\n\n\"I see that you lack your better half anyway. No matter, your raw energy will suffice for now.\"\n\nNo, he's nothing without that amulet!\n\nI couldn't open my muzzle, but I laughed silently, mocking the fact that his goal was still beyond his reach, that he wasn't all-powerful. I knew he knew what I was thinking, and he could do nothing to stop me.\n\n\"Now you will see this world turn against itself,\" he hissed, snaking back, coiling up against the opposite wall and flexing a dark talon.\n\nA sudden surge of pain raced across my body, like the ice was drawing me in, until the magical grip released its hold and I dropped to the floor. The cracks and fractures in the floating pillar glowed like a fire burned inside. Meanwhile, clouds gathered, and lightning flickered in the swirling midst like the pillar was somehow a conduit. With a horrifying scream a beam of red light shot from its peak, streaming up into the centre of a gathering storm, flashing brightly before exploding into a shower of darkness.\n\n\"Now you will see the error of your ways. I will restore order to my creation and bring peace; all that you know will die,\" Mordrakk roared.\n\n\"I will be reborn, and if that is seen as darkness, then so be it, for I am Darkness, Darkness reborn,\" he bellowed into the angry sky and all of creation trembled at his words.\n\nI fought through the pain of each breath to stand, but it was as if there was no air to take in.\n\n\"It is our responsibility,\" he told me as he glanced down. \"We can't escape it.\"\n\nI placed a quivering paw forward, raising my head up to look him in the eyes.\n\n\"Responsibility? My only responsibility is to save them!\" I shouted with all my strength.\n\nPower flooded through my veins, igniting a primal fire far beyond my desire or ability to control. I beat my wings, ascending into the air before the pillar. A radiant heat instantly melted the ice around me, a hurricane of steam fanning out on a cosmic wind that disintegrated the vulpomancers into ash. Mordrakk snarled, and I felt several more attempts to pin me shatter against my burning scales.\n\nWith a furious grunt, he coiled back, opening his mouth to reveal the burning fire in his throat from where he unleashed a torrent of flame. The fire blossomed across the surface of a new sphere surrounding me, as my eyes continued to meet his.\n\n\"If this is your choice, it will only bring them all to their end! The impurity in your heart will break you, emotions will be your undoing!\"\n\nI had no care for his words as I poured all my fear, hatred, and fury into growing hotter, until it felt like my heat rivalled the sun itself.\n\nMordrakk sneered, as if he knew exactly what my undoing would be.\n\n\"I know you; I know the one you can't live without, and her soul will be mine!\" he roared as he lunged forward, breaking through my shield.\n\nSomething inside me snapped \u2013 a boundary that should never have failed, fractured. Unbridled power escaped me, and within moments, he recoiled, his eyes disappearing behind his wings before he swirled out of existence. The few remaining vulpomancers scattered like frightened birds before disintegrating to dust, along with their fellows.\n\nAll the while my intense light grew brighter, pushing back the shadow and destroying the ice around me like crumbling clay. With explosive force the fiery ice pillar shattered as did the ground beneath me and all that was left of Ilivar.\n\nMy focus slowly burned away with everything else. He'd gone and yet those infernal eyes burned amidst the chaos, imprinted like a mental scar on my mind. I faltered, then fell, slowly cascading down within a blurred torrent of melting ice, water and snow.\n\nDarkness crept into my vision, my mind and my soul. Every thought, every sense, was consumed by blackness so deep it left me completely empty. I hit the floor, my armour and wounded body clattering on the surface, the force of impact snapping me like a twig as I blacked out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Almost as suddenly as darkness had overcome me, I opened my eyes to find myself in what looked like a drakaran structure. Four pillars sat before me, a glowing storm at their centre. Two figures stood poised to fight before the light and I suddenly realised it was the scene I'd witnessed in death.\n\nMordrakk launched himself at Nakir, his shadowy muzzle biting down on the Ethereal's armoured neck, crushing the shifting plates. Nakir kicked up his bladed tail, swivelling round and striking Mordrakk in the eye, and with a hiss of pain, the dark form backed off.\n\n\"Join me or surrender, my son, you cannot defeat me. I am eternity!\" Mordrakk bellowed, but Nakir stepped back, glancing at the growing storm within the pillars behind him.\n\n\"No, I will not allow this madness to continue,\" the creator of death challenged.\n\nMordrakk released a fiery roar as he lunged again. Nakir rose, slicing a wing blade across his muzzle, sending him sprawling across the floor.\n\n\"You are my children, I cared for you without question! You have endangered everyone with your stupidity. Never again will I entrust power to such weak-minded fools!\"\n\nNakir struck with his tail blade, slicing Mordrakk's right leg.\n\n\"You are no creator of mine, you've allowed the Outsider to corrupt your mind, you...\"\n\nBefore he could finish, Mordrakk leapt up, forcing his sharp fore-talons up beneath his opponent's armoured plate and into his heart. Nakir gasped, the last of his fire flickering in his eyes as Mordrakk's cold, merciless gaze stared into them.\n\n\"I bear no sympathy, my son. This is what must be done,\" he finished, yanking his claws free.\n\n\"As is this, Father,\" Nakir muttered as he kicked back, disintegrating as he fell into the swirling storm within the pillars.\n\nMordrakk staggered back, when, in a blinding flash, a bolt of fire lanced out, striking him in the chest, tearing a shard of his shadowed hide back into the flames. He fell to the marble, the whole room starting to shudder as a dragon materialised from within the glowing flames. Like an angel it unfurled its wings, the distinct shape of an eight-point star melded to its blazing chest.\n\n\"What have you done, you fools?\" Mordrakk hissed, coiling back and unleashing a torrent of flame.\n\nThe fire broke on a shield of white light, and with a simple flick of its wings, the opposing energy sent a bolt of lightning into Mordrakk, followed by more until a rain of fire burned the fallen god away.\n\n\"If this is your sacrifice, then so be it!\" he growled as the glowing entity coiled up into a tight ball, suddenly unfolding with an explosive force.\n\nI was almost torn from my body by the explosion. Only blackness remained as I found myself in the cold, dead landscape of shimmering rock below a sea of stars. I peered into the endless emptiness at a mighty sphere in the sky.\n\nYet now I saw it as it once was, like the projections I had seen in the Arcanum. It was a world ravaged by a dark shroud pouring across its surface, flashing with bursts of red, glowing flame. On the horizon, below the cataclysm, a blue form broke the emptiness, and I froze.\n\n\"Risha?\"\n\n\"You left us,\" she uttered, and a sudden wave of dread surged through me.\n\n\"You said you would return, but you left us to the world of shadow,\" she added disconsolately.\n\nI opened my muzzle to respond, but words failed me. My eyes stared hopelessly at the one I loved, until her image fell away like shattered glass, replaced by my mind's dark illusion.\n\nNot him... He's not...\n\nI collapsed as he approached, then felt his cold claws stroke my head in mocking comfort.\n\n\"I warned you that the truth would hurt,\" he declared. \"We are the same, we have always been one. Beyond the knowledge of my children, I have hidden my salvation in their greatest hope.\"\n\nI fought not to cry out as his dark claws caressed my scales.\n\n\"No... I'm...\"\n\nSorrow stole my words as Mordrakk placed his paw over my muzzle.\n\n\"You may run from me, but you can never escape your true responsibility.\"\n\nI tried to fight him, to push him away, but my strength failed me. I was nothing more than a puppet on his strings as his muzzle opened to speak once more.\n\n\"We are Darkness, Darkness reborn.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Dreamer 3) Dragon Thunder",
        "author": "J. S. Burke",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "DRAGON THUNDER",
                "text": "The stunted trees cast long, twisted shadows in the evening light. Drakor crouched low at the edge of the field, tasting the wind, tracking his invisible prey. Dew sparkled on tall, feathery grasses as they swayed, marking the path of an unseen creature.\n\nThe white dragon dug his claws into the ground. His muscles tensed, ready to spring. Suddenly, his head snapped up.\n\nDrakor stared into the east, into the growing darkness. He leapt into the sky, pumping his wings hard, climbing straight up. Soon the air was so cold that his breath froze. His eyes burned, straining to see past the horizon. But his home was too far away, and now it was gone.\n\nDrakor folded his long, white wings and dove straight down, hurtling through the sky like a star-stone. He snapped his wings wide just in time, raising a thick cloud of dust as he landed. His diamond-shaped scales gleamed like white opal, with a hint of hidden colors and a glittering edge. He was young and still growing, only fourteen feet long from head to tail. But his gray eyes seemed older than his youthful size.\n\nHe was the leader of ice dragons.\n\nA white dragon landed beside Drakor and bowed respectfully. \"The magnetic lines glowed like the sun, just for an instant. That flash nearly blinded my inner eye! Was that the end?\"\n\nDrakor nodded to Jardor, his second-in-command. \"Check the magnetic field. Only something major could change it so much.\" His tail drooped to the ground. \"In my vision, our Volcano erupted like never before. A burning tower punched a hole through the clouds, reaching for the stars. Then our island home was gone. It seems like forever since I saw this in my mind, and I have feared it ever since.\"\n\nJardor shuddered. \"I trusted your vision, but still I hoped you were wrong. It isss hard to accept that our home isss gone.\" He stared to the east. \"Maybe our Volcano will reach the stars and warm our ancestors beside their star-fires.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail uneasily. \"Maybe. It gave much energy to this world. Sea and sky will use the energy. Giant waves will smash into the shore, but we should be far enough inland. Then the storm will strike. Warn everyone to take shelter. I do not want the dragonlets blown away.\"\n\nJardor left to sound the signal drum.\n\nDrakor gazed into the west, where cheerful layers of pink and violet colored the horizon. Night-blooming flowers began to open, adding new scents to the cooling air; the powerful aromas nearly overwhelmed his senses.\n\nHis eyes were drawn back to the dark eastern sky, and he shuddered. His home was gone forever, and it felt as if the sun had been ripped from the sky. Drakor turned away from the darkness and flew to the meeting circle, to warn the clan of the coming storm.\n\nTwo hours later, a primal scream sounded from across the sea. Black clouds rolled in with electric energy so strong Drakor thought his scales would glow. The stars and moon disappeared, swallowed up by the roiling darkness.\n\nThen the storm struck, fierce beyond anything in their legends.\n\nThe wind howled as it ripped off branches and tore trees from the ground. Lightning flashed through the darkness and thunder boomed across the sky. This was Dragon Thunder, the voice of the First Dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "BRRRROOOOMMMMM! Scree shuddered as rumbling, thunderous roars tore through her body like the barbs of sting rays. The small octopus gazed east, toward the explosions.\n\nTwo volcanoes had erupted, theirs and another to the northeast. Disturbing changes near their undersea home foretold an eruption, warning them to flee.\n\nThe second volcano was a lonely island, the ancestral home of ice dragons. Her friend Drakor had foreseen this eruption, and the stars in his vision showed when it would happen. Scree had learned that their volcanoes were connected, so everyone was in danger.\n\nShe stretched each of her eight weary, anxious arms. Beneath her skiff, powerful death waves were already tearing across the sea. And a ferocious storm was coming.\n\nScree smoothed her skin and removed the gray tinge of worry. Now she was her normal, reddish-brown color, appearing calm and confident. She raised three signal flags on her mast: Tie everything down! Shorten the skiff-wing! Release the bamboo fins!\n\nThe other skiff-flyers swiftly complied.\n\nScree nodded approval. She was leading a fleet of pod-mates into the west, fleeing the destruction of their undersea village. Most items were already tied down. It was standard procedure to shorten the skiff-wing, so it wouldn't be ripped to shreds by fierce storm winds. The bamboo fins were new, her latest invention. Would this help them survive the coming storm?\n\nAll too soon, the evening sky changed to an eerie, rusty black. Scree flexed her arms, feeling the cool, damp air. Waves grew taller, washing across the deck and clawing up the mast. The towering peaks became liquid mountains, hiding the other skiffs.\n\nScree curled her arms nervously. The travelers were still days away from their new home, and the skiffs were dangerously overloaded with last-minute passengers. Could the small skiffs survive this storm?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Hail pounded Drakor's village. Huge hailstones bounced across the rocky ground like a horde of crystal crickets. The ice glowed like a thousand eyes in the flashes of lightning. Then rain fell in cold, drenching sheets.\n\nLightning slashed across the dark clouds. Thunder crackled and boomed. The storm raged through the night while dragons hunkered down in their unfinished dens.\n\nDrakor crouched miserably on the cold, wet floor. His den had a narrow entrance and a circular stone wall that was nearly his height. This blocked the wind, but the incomplete roof did nothing to stop the deluge. He huddled beneath his rough blanket, woven from strips of hemp. But this leaked, too. Relentless, freezing rain slithered through the uneven weave.\n\nIf only there had been time to finish his roof! But he used that time to help finish the homes where dragonlets lived with their dams.\n\nAn endless crackle of lightning lit his bedraggled den, showing a trough of seawater. Long, slender branches lay soaking in the salty water, to soften and preserve them. A pile of descaled fish skins had been rubbed with grease to make them cloudy-clear. Soon, he would bend the branches into a tall, arched frame and cover it with the skins.\n\nA proper roof gave shelter, but it was also a cloudy window to the sky. He would watch glowing sunsets and swirling auroras through this ceiling. Ice dragons needed the sky as a fish needs water.\n\nDrakor shook water out of his eyes as he gazed up into the flashing darkness. He sighed and curled up tight, trying to sleep through the thunderous shaking and icy torrents of rain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Drakor woke at dawn to a deathly silence. That ferocious storm had finally died. He tossed off his sodden blanket, shook out the sparkling storm ice, and chewed chunks of smoked redfish. Then he ate clawfulls of walnuts mixed with dried cranberries, his new favorite combination. These tart red berries were an unexpected treasure, discovered in a nearby bog.\n\nDrakor left his den and filled his lungs with the cool spring air. He instinctively looked east. Would their Volcano truly join the after-world? Would it warm past dragons beside their star-fires in the sky? Would his dam feel this warmth? A comforting lullaby played in his mind, a rare memory from the brief time before she left him.\n\nDrakor strode through the village, checking each den, asking questions. He breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone had survived that ferocious storm.\n\nThe young leader gazed to the west, where morning mist rose from between the hills like dragon's breath. Drakor stretched his wings, feeling the freedom of the wind and the pull of the unknown. He forced his wings back into stiff folds. Soon, he promised his inner dragon. But his feet kept walking, closer and closer to those hills.\n\nJardor, his second-in-command, landed beside him. \"This world isss bigger than I could have imagined. The fishing isss great! But our new Volcano does not speak or warm the ground. I miss the rumbling on our island home. I even miss that awful smell.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. Their island was home for countless generations of ice dragons. It had biting winds, black Volcano grit, and the eternal stench of rotten eggs. They were often hungry. How could he miss it so much? \"Nothing could ever replace our home, but this place isss a good match.\" His ears twitched at the whine of mosquitoes. \"And it definitely has the same annoying insects.\"\n\nTheir new village lay between two lakes. Light glinted off the huge lake to the south, which was home to tasty red fish half as long as Drakor. The close lake, to the north, was small and shallow. This should freeze well for their winter games. Northwest of the village, a glacier ground across the land, groaning and dropping boulders.\n\nJardor gazed to the east with a wistful expression. \"Some dragons say that our island home isss still there.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"That isss just wishful thinking and lies spread by Mardor. Clan legends give the warning signs. The shift in the magnetic field and that terrible storm show that our old home isss gone.\"\n\nHe stretched his cramped wings. \"Some dragons ignore all the signs. They need to see to believe. But seeing the empty place of our lost island would bring them no joy.\"\n\nDrakor fell silent, flicking his tail up and down, up and down. He was sure his good friend Arak had a unique, secret gift. That golden dragon could do more than just share thoughts while in trance-mind. He must be able to see what was really there when he mind-traveled. And he would find empty sea where their island had lived.\n\nDrakor sighed. He owed everything to Arak: his life, his wings, even his victory and the survival of his clan. So he would never ask his friend about his secret.\n\nA dragon's claws clicked sharply on the stones.\n\nDrakor's head whipped around as he was startled from his thoughts.\n\nJardor looked him in the eye. \"The leader should check on the storage pit.\"\n\nDrakor nodded and followed him to the middle of their new village. This was the best place to protect their crucial supplies. Before the storm, he had covered the pit with fish skins to keep out the rain. Now, two dragons worked on opposite sides, straining against ropes as they hauled up buckets of dirt.\n\nDrakor stepped to the edge and peered down, to where dragon-lords dug deeper into the shadows. \"This isss deep enough. Pave the floor with river stones.\"\n\nA huge dragon grumbled loudly, \"We left our storage pit with all of our wonderful food.\" He balanced a heavy bucket of dirt on each massive shoulder and stomped past Drakor, ignoring the young leader.\n\nDrakor ground his teeth. He should demand respect, but what if the dragon did not back down? This dragon had been Mardor's second-in-command. What if this dragon challenged him to a leadership fight . . . and he lost?\n\nJardor stared after the dragon. \"He remembers food we never had. We were practically starving on our island.\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. \"His memory isss quite flexible, but his mind isss not. He changes the past to suit him, but he cannot imagine me as the new leader.\"\n\nHe turned his head and found Mardor staring at him. That giant could not imagine any world where he was not the leader. And he wanted his power back."
            },
            {
                "title": "DEATH WAVE",
                "text": "Drakor took a deep breath, tasting the cool breeze, noting scents of smoke and fish. Then a group of dragon-dams walked by, grumbling just loud enough to be overheard. \"Starting the same work here that we just finished on our island.\"\n\nJardor raised an eye ridge. \"What work?\"\n\nDrakor nodded toward the meadow. \"Digging more tubers. We need more of everything: cranberries from the bog, dried grapes, acorns, walnuts, and pine nuts. Herbs for tea and roots for that Sassafras drink. And, if we find that bee hive, we can store honey in gemstone jars.\"\n\nFive young dragons touched down in a perfect ring around him, smiling at their precision landing. One opened her lumpy sack, releasing a pleasant, earthy aroma. \"We hunted in the foothills. These are the best mushrooms I ever tasted!\"\n\nDrakor grinned. These dragons were his size, his age-mates, and they often found the best new foods for their evening gatherings. It helped to hear dragons speak of what they liked here. Then his ears twitched at a new noise.\n\nThree small dragonlets began jumping up and down on sacks, laughing hysterically. One poured a sack of crushed pinecones onto the blanket. Then all three raked with their claws, hunting through the debris. They tossed pine nuts into a bucket, counting points for hitting the center or pinging off the inside wall.\n\nDrakor smiled. \"Clever youngsters. They make a game of getting nuts from those old, broken cones. Pine nuts will be as valued as gemstones when everyone isss tired of fish.\"\n\nHe looked up as the ground shook, rumbling like a Volcano.\n\nA giant dragon stomped by with a huge fish slung over one shoulder. He turned and stared at the leader while flexing his sharp claws.\n\nDrakor noted the claws; it looked as if the dragon was mentally shredding him into tiny pieces. He locked eyes with Mardor until the larger dragon lowered his gaze. The giant turned and stalked away from the new leader.\n\nDrakor shivered. He was too young, too small, and yet he beat Mardor in the challenge fight. Then he took the clan away from a home they loved and a doom they never saw. Now he was an upstart leader in a new land facing unknown dangers.\n\nJardor looked from Mardor to Drakor. \"He really hates you.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Mardor would not listen to reason, so I challenged him.\"\n\nJardor clapped him on the shoulder. \"And you won. Every dragon survived the long flight here, except for one old dragon-lord. He refused to travel on Arak's skiff.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep, slow breath, noting all the unknown scents. They were still strangers in a new land. \"I became leader so the clan could escape the death of our home. But the clan never saw our Volcano explode.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"Many believe our island isss still there. They think we left a perfectly good home and endured a brutal move for no reason. To survive here, I need the support of all the dragons, and especially Mardor. The clan must work together.\"\n\nHe studied the growing storm clouds. \"Legend says that this coming winter will be long and harsh. Can we store enough food to survive, with enough kinds to stay healthy? Can we learn the ways of our New World before winter closes in?\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. The dwire were another problem. These large predators could camouflage nearly as well as his octopus friend Scree.\n\nHow could they defend against invisible killers?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Scree woke at dawn as the water lightened around her. She curled and uncurled each of her eight intelligent arms, stretching. Then she tasted the sea with her sensitive suckers. A cool current flowed past her cave, bringing new flavors of life and death, and she stored this information in her main brain.\n\nBright orange fish darted through the reef like frantic butterflies, while moonstone jellyfish pulsed slowly above. Scree smiled. These ocean clouds held needles of death, but no lightning storms. She felt the gritty sand outside her cave, sensed movement below the surface, and pounced. She made a quick snack of the cherry clam.\n\nHer new home was hidden beneath furry branches of coral trees. The volcano near her old home had awakened, rumbling and shaking, bleeding toxic new flavors into the sea. So the entire pod fled across the sea in a fleet of small skiffs, leaving their village and almost everything else behind.\n\nThey left just in time.\n\nAn explosion shattered the sky. Then the storm struck. Monstrous waves attacked the skiffs with curling white claws, grabbing the sides. A normal skiff would have been dragged under.\n\nBut Scree was ready.\n\nAt her signal, bamboo rafts rolled out from the sides of each skiff. These huge fins spread across the water and merged with the waves. The skiffs no longer fought the sea. They became the sea.\n\nScree had surfed the waves, jetted through coral forests, even rode a few sharks. But nothing felt quite like this, with a terror and excitement beyond any experience. It was the best ride ever!\n\nScree eyed the bare rock walls of her new cave. There were no glowing tapestries. The shelves weren't up, and the ceiling had holes. She peered outside. The sand was not yet paved with colorful shells and pebbles. Worse, there was no medicinal garden.\n\nScree pulsed a sigh, then straightened her arms. It was time to get to work. She planted clumps of long, feathery, red seaweed that swayed with the currents, adding color and movement to her Healer garden. She fastened two long shelves along the wall. Then she pulsed to the roof of her cave and fitted rocks into the largest holes.\n\nScree pulled on the clear glass bars across the entrance, testing. They held. This was a barrier to curious reef residents, a protective screen she could see through and squeeze through. The bars were lightning casts, a gift from her dragon friend Arak. He rode the storm, making lightning strikes on the beach, which melted a path of glass through the sand.\n\nScree left her cave and pulsed through the reef. She passed a cluster of lively flowers eating a dead fish. These lemon yellow anemones were rooted to the stone, catching and killing with their poisonous petals. When food became scarce, the flowers could glide away to a better place.\n\nScree twirled her anxious arms, thinking. Had she chosen a good place for the pod to move?\n\nThe coral forest cast a dark web of shadows across the sand, like the orb of a monstrous spider. Scree held still, feeling the sounds, flavors, and motions of the sea, checking for danger. A new taste seeped into the sea. She glided toward the unexpected flavor, moving like a shadow.\n\nSuddenly, right beside her, a coral rock shape-shifted into an octopus. She signed to her mate, weaving words with two of her flexible arms. \"Orm! Your camouflage was perfect.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"This crab thought so, too. It got too close, and now we have dinner.\" He held the stone crab by its huge claws while pushing down and in. Both claws dropped off the crab, like dead leaves from a winter tree. The crab scuttled away.\n\nOrm dropped the claws into his pouch. \"The crab will grow new ones. What made you think of adding bamboo fins to our skiffs?\"\n\nScree turned happy-green. \"Remember when Arak's bamboo raft carried an injured dragon to the skiff? It flexed with the waves. That sparked an idea. I designed bamboo fins to flex with storm waves, to help the skiffs. The dragons finished making them just in time.\"\n\nOrm changed his skin color to match her green. \"Clever. We're lucky, too. That storm carried us here faster than expected. It's so good to be back on shifting sand, instead of those roiling waves! But I feel a disturbing flavor. Is it from a sleepy volcano? Or something worse?\"\n\nScree nodded. \"I feel/taste this, too. I wish Drakor could dream up the answer.\" She looked northwest. \"He must have his claws full, trying to lead those ice dragons. Especially Mardor.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Drakor landed on the hilltop, where the wind blew strongest. He leaned into the wind, feeling the freedom. A flare of energy glowed in his mind, drawing his eyes to the ground. Small, glassy-green stones lay scattered among the dull gray rocks. Zircon! Green was a rare color for this gemstone. Why did it look like a stormy sea, feel like melted sand, and have such intense inner energy?\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. These acorn-sized gems could be used as secret guard stones, dropped into the storage pits as they were filled. After the pits were sealed, he would feel if anything inside was moved. There might be tunneling creatures who could steal from below or, worse, even a rogue dragon. To survive, the clan needed everything they could store, and more.\n\nDrakor searched the ground, gathering every green stone he could find. An hour later he found no more of the green zircon rocks, just a few blue. He stored the sparkling, sky-blue zircon in another pouch.\n\nDrakor flew back and landed beside Jardor. His nostrils flared at the powerful aromas.\n\nJardor wrinkled his nose. \"We caught enough fish to fill both smoke boxes. I wish I liked smoked fish.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"I hated it too, at first. Now the smoky flavors seem dragonny.\" He took two heavy, golden crystals from his pouch and tossed them to Jardor. \"I found more strike-stones! These are for you. This isss a safer way to start a fire than with lightning strikes.\"\n\nJardor dropped the bright stones into his pouch. \"Thanks! New World fires are great, but why must we make so much smoked fish? Dried fish taste better. Even pickled fish taste better!\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. \"Smoked fish will last better than dried fish, and there are not enough jars for pickled fish. The clan cannot afford to lose any of our stored food. The world will change because our Volcano exploded.\"\n\nJardor snapped his tail in dismay. \"We lost our home. What could be worse?\"\n\nDrakor gazed east, toward the unseen sea. \"We do not often share our most ancient legends. Many say these things never happened. Some call them the Lost Legends, made up by a dragon who lost his mind. But my sire taught me all the legends, and he believes these are true.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail up and down. His eyes glazed over, as if in a trance. \"A Volcano exploded and destroyed a long-ago home of ice dragons. Everyone died except for the dragons who were away, fishing. Sunsets were fiery red and orange, like a bleeding Volcano. Winter was so cold that the sea waves were thick and frosty, moving like slush snow. That winter was long, lasting many seasons, until there was no food left. Most of the dragons died.\"\n\nJardor shuddered. \"Yes, that isss worse.\"\n\nDrakor caught the glint of silver on a dragon's wingtips. \"Jardor, that dragon-lady isss with egg! Where should she nest?\"\n\nJardor frowned. \"Somewhere safe and warm?\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously. \"That isss a problem. Safe isss easier than warm. But now we should check the forest.\"\n\nDrakor landed at the edge and his eyes grew wide. The ground was littered with branches, leaves, flowers, and vines torn off by the wind. Beams of light shone through new holes in the forest, where uprooted giants had crashed down.\n\nJardor poked at pale flower tassels and big maroon blossoms. \"This means no fall harvest of nuts, golden Paw-Paws, or grapes.\"\n\nDrakor's wings drooped as he stared at the forest of destruction. \"No mulberries or black cherries, and Arak said those are the best. Our harvest was stolen by the storm. Weather isss more dangerous than Mardor.\"\n\nHe straightened his wings. \"Fish may survive in the deep lake, but dragons need more than fish. I hope we can harvest the sea for clams and seaweed.\"\n\nDrakor looked southeast, toward the distant sea. Scree had moved there with her pod. The last he heard, she was skiff-flying through that fierce storm. How was she?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Coral shadows stretched longer and darker as Scree flowed across the reef, checking with all her senses. The sea still tasted odd, and now it was vibrating to a dangerous beat. Why?\n\nA frilly, purple-and-rose sea slug danced in the water. Yellow spikes ran down its back, each tipped with a tiny blue eye. Quithra! Where would it go to spawn? She needed the eggs to make a numbing salve for aching arms, which was popular with older octopi.\n\nSuddenly, a sea current brushed her skin. Scree spun around with her arms out, stiff, ready to fight or jet away. Then her body went limp with relief. She signed to her mate, \"Would you like to hunt?\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Where?\"\n\nScree pointed toward the undersea canyon, where a sheer wall dropped into eternal darkness. \"We haven't hunted there.\"\n\nOrm shook his head. \"That's where the sharks hunt.\"\n\nScree grinned. \"We could catch another ride.\" She concentrated on the millions of cells in her red-brown skin, changing the color of each cell. In an instant, a vivid picture appeared: an octopus rode a shark through the blue-green sea.\n\nOrm rolled his eyes. \"You may enjoy shark rides, but I had enough excitement on the trip here. We're still learning the ways of our new reef. Let's hunt closer to home.\"\n\nMoonbeams filtered down through the sea, adding a silvery light. Turquoise anemones waved their glowing petals. She pointed to small, white eggs that gleamed in the dark water, like stars in the night sky. \"Those must be from reef fish, the ones that stay here. Are the migrating fish doing as well?\"\n\nScree and Orm pulsed through coral branches, following a trail of subtle sounds and flavors. She peered into a crevice. Something glimmered in the shadows and she froze. An iridescent lobster! It caught all the light, shining like precious white opal.\n\nScree signed, \"That's too rare to eat. Let's keep hunting.\" She pointed. \"Orm, look!\" Cold water flowed across her sensitive skin as she squirted down.\n\nOrm gazed at the brown sand dollars with a dreamy expression. \"They're like that stack of chocolate cookies Zarina made. Dragons and octopi. Who could have guessed we'd get along so well?\"\n\nScree grinned. \"Arak would say you have a sweet tooth.\"\n\nOrm changed his skin cell colors and covered his body with a simple design. Sharp, white tooth triangles stood out against the dragon-gold. \"I do like sweets. I'm glad you met him.\"\n\nScree curled an arm beneath her head. \"I'd never seen a dragon. Arak had beautiful golden scales, but he was all sharp claws and teeth. When he crashed onto that ice, I wanted to flee back into the sea.\"\n\nOrm laughed. \"You? Choose safety?\"\n\nScree nodded. \"He was bigger than a shark! But he was torn and bleeding. I just couldn't let him die, all alone on the floating ice.\"\n\nOrm reached over and twined arms with his mate. \"I know. You're a Healer. Golden dragons can be scary, but ice dragons are as fierce as giant squid!\"\n\nScree tilted her head in a dragonly way, considering. \"Yes, they are. I rather like that.\"\n\nOrm laughed. \"Of course you do.\n\nScree looked north. \"Remember the first time we met Drakor? Now he's the leader of ice dragons. That job must be harder than tackling a horde of giant squid!\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"Neither job appeals to me.\"\n\nScree made pictures of seaweed growing up her body. \"A long winter will be worse on land than in the sea. We could grow extra food for the dragons. They may need it.\"\n\nOrm held still, in his thinking pose. \"I'll see what we can manage. Let's hunt, and I'll fix a tasty meal with dragon spices!\"\n\nSuddenly, the ocean shuddered. Waves tore through the water, tumbling rocks and ancient coral. Scree was grabbed by the sea, twisted and wrenched, battered and bruised. This was a death wave. Where did it come from?\n\nShe tried to peer through the turbulent water. Then a dark cloud of mud covered her like a shroud. Her body went limp, and the light went out of her eyes.\n\nShe was buried alive."
            },
            {
                "title": "SEAQUAKE",
                "text": "At star-rise, Drakor lay tensely coiled in his den. Strange scents crept in from the nearby forest. Suddenly, his silvery, fish-skin pouch turned green with reflected light. He rolled over and gazed up through the partial roof. A sea-green aurora twisted and twirled across the sky.\n\nDrakor gave a deep sigh. This wandering light was much like his thoughts. He sat up and stretched, working the knots out of his muscles. What should he do about Mardor and his angry supporters?\n\nDrakor restlessly drew in the dirt floor, sketching a circle of fire-breathing dragons. This design matched an ornament made by a friend. Golden dragons grew fanciful snowflakes in the winter clouds, put them on pine sap, and zapped to create lacy amber ornaments.\n\nHe stared at the drawing, reliving his fierce fight with Mardor. Then he looked up at the star-studded sky. His dam lived with the star-fires. What would she think of him now? What advice would she have?\n\nDrakor pulled a wood flute from his pouch and fingered the holes. He played a simple tune, quietly, matching the tempo to the dancing aurora. Music flowed through his mind, relaxing him as nothing else could.\n\nDrakor checked the position of the stars. It was time. He tucked the flute back into his pouch and pulled out an ice-clear ball, his quartz trance-stone. Arak had promised to mind-call from across the sea.\n\nDrakor stilled his mind and stared into the center of his clear quartz globe, sinking deeper into trance. The globe seemed to shimmer, glowing from within. Then he was looking down on his limp body. His trance-mind traveled east, toward the shore, drawn to a matching shimmer. As the trance-mind shimmers overlapped, he heard Arak's voice deep within his mind, as if in a cave. The voice was a flat monotone.\n\n<Drakor. How was the flight>\n\n<Arak. We flew longer than I hoped to, but we made it here. All but one. How were the big waves>\n\n<Even worse than expected>\n\n<How are the octopi>\n\n<I have not heard. Scree must be busy>\n\n<When will you bring our ice dragons to the New World>\n\n<We leave in three days. Remember the rainbow cave we found. We will stay there>\n\nDrakor's trance-mind traveled back to his empty body. He opened his eyes, put the globe back in its pouch, and lay down. The leaves of his bed crackled in a normal, comforting way. His body demanded sleep, but new questions sparked in his mind.\n\nHow much had survived the towering tsunamis and fierce storm? Would the entire clan of golden dragons move here? And, would they have food to trade?\n\nThe ribbons of light twisted faster now, like dragons surfing a dangerous storm. This aurora was as tangled as his thoughts before he fought Mardor. And as hard as it was to win that terrible challenge fight, leading the clan was harder.\n\nMardor had ruled with steel claws. Dragons gave him instant obedience. But Drakor was the youngest, smallest leader ever. Some ignored his orders, while a few openly questioned his commands. Soon, a dragon would challenge him.\n\nCould he win again?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Scree jerked back to consciousness. She was buried alive in thick mud. Her body screamed for oxygen, but everywhere felt the same, with no up or down. Which way to the sea? She held still, feeling for any sound in the muffling mud. She felt a faint vibration from the churning sea, but it seemed to come from below! She was all turned around.\n\nScree pulled arm over arm through the muck, dragging her body toward the distant feel/sound of the angry sea. She must escape before this homing beacon stopped moving.\n\nFinally, her head pushed through into the water. But she still couldn't breathe. Spots danced before her eyes. The world spun darker.\n\nAs her main brain faded away, her eight intelligent arms rallied. They reached up together, squishing mud out of her breathing-gills. Her body drew in a weak pulse of gritty oxygen-water. Then another. Her main brain awoke.\n\nScree's arms grew stronger. She climbed out of the muck and stared through the cloudy, whirling sea. Where was Orm? The tip of an arm poked up from the thick, gray sludge. He was drowning in mud!\n\n\"ORM!\"\n\nScree dug down, grabbed the limp arm, and pulled. A pale, deathly gray octopus emerged from the muck. She wrapped four arms around his head, gently squishing the thick mud out of the tubes to his gills. At last, he could breathe. But nothing happened. He had no pulse!\n\nShe squeezed the hearts on either side, beneath his gills. Then she squeezed the third heart, sending renewed blood to his oxygen-starved body.\n\nOrm remained as limp as a jellyfish washed ashore.\n\nShe squeezed all three hearts in the proper rhythm, again and again, pumping blood for her mate.\n\nHe was still as death.\n\nScree sent a micro-zap of energy deep into each heart, just as she squeezed them.\n\nHis hearts began to beat! Scree's skin pulsed with an odd mix of happy-green and worry colors. Everything was working, but his body didn't even twitch! When would Orm wake up? The minutes dragged on, each with a day's worth of torment. Then, slowly, the normal red-brown color crept back into his gray skin.\n\nThe spark of life returned to his eyes, and his limp arms whispered, \"Scree.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"I told you not to do this to me again.\"\n\nHe smiled faintly. \"What? Don't almost die, or don't find my way back?\"\n\nScree twined two arms with her mate and gazed deep into his eyes. \"Don't leave me.\"\n\nOrm reached up feebly and twined a third arm. \"Never. That odd vibration was a seaquake warning?\"\n\nScree nodded. \"The water's still sloshing around.\"\n\nOrm grimaced. \"Almost dying makes an octopus hungry, but my pouch was torn away.\" He struggled upright, carefully arranging his shaky arms for support.\n\nScree reached into her pouch, plucked out four thin-shelled clams, and gave them all to her mate.\n\nOrm hesitated. \"That's your emergency food. Aren't you hungry, too?\"\n\nScree shook her head. \"This is an emergency. You nearly died, and you need all this energy to recover. I'll hunt when the sea calms down.\"\n\nThe water grew clearer as the sea stopped churning. Sand, mud, and dead things sank to the seafloor. But the sounds and tastes of the sea still felt odd, all jumbled together.\n\nScree helped Orm crawl to a huge barrel sponge. It was firmly attached to a rare, solid patch of rock and still standing. \"Rest in here. This should be a safe place if there are any more death waves. I'll be right back.\"\n\nOrm climbed slowly up the side of the sponge, slid down into the curved center, and camouflaged. He turned shiny brown and added shallow holes in his skin, becoming part of the ancient animal.\n\nScree nodded approval and crawled away, feeling as gray as the sea. She waved her arms through the water, tasting, and followed a death trail to a cream-and-tan calico crab. It was squashed by rocks that must have fallen in the seaquake.\n\nScree made quick work of this meal, and her color improved as she fed. Then she glided along the sand, feeling the flavors of the sea.\n\nA mantis shrimp lay pinned beneath a rock, leaking clear blue blood. It was about half her length, shaped like a lobster, and painted with all the brilliant reef colors. The long, narrow body had segments of green and teal with an edge of midnight blue. There were eight ruby legs and two powerful, orange claws. The huge, iridescent eyes sparkled like rainbow opals.\n\nScree slipped forward to end its pain and make a meal. The colorful creature was trapped, nearly dead, but still she approached warily. This ferocious predator had few enemies despite its small size. The striking claws were deadly. Mantis had the fastest punch in the sea!\n\nThe mantis stared fearlessly into her eyes and flashed a rapid pattern of light.\n\nScree blinked. She could barely count the flashes. It was so fast! And there were odd gaps in the message. Was there light she couldn't see?\n\nUsing its free claw, the mantis sketched a triangle in the sand. The Healer triangle.\n\nScree pulsed white with shock and then surprise-pink. A shrimp asking for help? How did it even know how? Scree studied her prey. Her former prey. She glanced again. It was male. She moved the rock off the mantis and began healing her unusual patient.\n\nHe sketched a picture in the sand of a male mantis tending the eggs.\n\nScree nodded. Mantis shrimp mated for life and took turns guarding the eggs. This must be his season to tend their nest while his mate hunted.\n\nThen he drew a squashed mantis.\n\nScree pulsed gray with sorrow. His mate must be dead. She again felt that terrible emptiness from finding Orm buried in the muck, limp and gray, when he nearly died.\n\nShe pointed to herself. \"Scree.\" She pointed to him and signed, \"What's your name?\"\n\nThe mantis struck his sturdy claw against the rock, moving so fast she couldn't see! That was an odd experience. An octopus could shape-shift in the blink of an eye, but he moved even faster.\n\n\"Strike.\" The mantis flashed another light pattern, again with gaps.\n\nShe stared. He must be using light beyond her sight.\n\nHe looked right at her and his eye stalks twitched.\n\nScree could almost read his mind: she was a soft, shell-less creature who could barely see and was too dim-witted to understand. She stiffened at his arrogance and then quivered with laughter. He was a shrimp by nature and size, but accustomed to power and abilities beyond most creatures. And that could be useful."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Scree jetted back to Orm. She shuddered at his ghostly color and immediately emptied her sack. \"Eat. You'll feel better.\"\n\nOrm devoured the clams. \"Thanks. What took so long?\"\n\n\"I was helping a wounded shrimp.\"\n\n\"Treating? Not eating?\"\n\nShe laughed as they pulsed home together. \"I offered to feed Strike so he can tend his eggs. He's clever, and he can see light that we can't.\"\n\nOrm stared. \"I know that look. What are you planning?\"\n\n\"Fish and turtles line up at cleaning stations to be rid of parasites. Octopus apprentices help me treat problems beyond parasites, in my Healing Station. What if different beings work together to heal, sharing our unique abilities?\"\n\nOrm stopped pulsing. \"Like dragons and octopi?\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Dragons and turtles see magnetic lines, but we can't. What can a mantis see? Maybe Strike could help me with those strange new tumors that are cropping up.\" She turned happy-green as they reached their caves. Only a few stones had fallen. But her cheerful green quickly faded to gray. Some of the oldest coral trees had shattered.\n\nOrm sighed. \"Many generations of octopi will hatch and pass on, becoming one with the sea, before this coral regrows to its former size.\"\n\nScree curled her arms in distress. \"And that disturbing sea flavor has grown stronger. What does it mean?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "GHOST SKY",
                "text": "Drakor sighed in relief as he fastened the last translucent fish-skin panel onto his roof. No dragons died in the storm, they caught plenty of fish, and his den was finally finished. Everything was going well. He curled up on his nice, dry bed. The crisp leaves crackled pleasantly beneath him, releasing earthy aromas as he dropped into an easy sleep.\n\nDrakor woke to a rose and violet sunrise glowing through his ceiling. He left his den, grinning as this cheerful dawn became a clear blue sky.\n\nThen a dark shadow crept across the ground.\n\nDrakor stared up at the cloudless sky. His eyes grew wide when the bright morning sky turned a dull, dusky gray. The sun became a pale ghost, as if trapped behind a dark, unseen cloud. Robbed of light, the world had dark, muddy colors. A chill spread through the air.\n\nDragons flicked their tails nervously as they worked, whispering about strange omens in this strange land. Why did they have to move? And why did they move here?\n\nDrakor moved from group to group, reminding them of their ancient legends. These were the changes to expect after an eruption destroyed their island. But many did not believe their island was gone.\n\nThe perpetual twilight weighed them down, and discontent grew with each unnatural day.\n\nDrakor was burdened by the odd gray sky and constant grumbling. Night after night, he barely slept. He woke slowly on the fourth day, craving sleep. He squinted at the sunrise that shone through his ceiling. Light! After three days of eerie twilight, this was a welcome change. He opened both eyes. Then he stared.\n\nThe ceiling glowed in curious shades of green.\n\nDrakor bolted from his den. Green skies warned of fierce storms with monstrous hail, or deadly tornadoes. He scanned the sky, searching in every direction. Where were the dangerous thunderclouds?\n\nDragons crowded together, eyes wide, staring. The sky was green, with no clouds! Then a glowing green ball rose up into the sky.\n\nA youngster squeaked, \"The sun isss green!\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail, as surprised as the others. Green skies were not even mentioned in the legends.\n\nA dragon-lord shouted, \"This isss a warning!\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together, thinking. The clan was unsettled by the move, but this was worse, something completely unexpected. Still, the green sky must be caused by their Volcano. He stood taller, moved to the center of the crowd, and raised his wings high.\n\nFor once, the dragons fell silent, waiting for him to speak. But what could he say?\n\nDrakor gazed at the sky, which nearly matched the grass . . . \"Green isss the color of spring, the time to celebrate new hatchings. Our Volcano sends us green skies to celebrate our new beginnings here, as he travels to join the stars.\"\n\nA dragon muttered, \"Maybe our Volcano isss sending us a warning to leave this place.\"\n\nMardor muscled his way to Drakor and stretched even taller, standing well above the crowd. \"This isss our island calling us home.\"\n\nDrakor gritted his teeth and ignored Mardor, as if this claim was not worth a reply. If only he could prove that their island was gone! He glanced east, recalling their last meal before they left their island. \"Tonight we will feast to celebrate our new home and this sign of approval from our Volcano.\"\n\nA dragon began thumping her tail. Friends joined in, cheerfully pounding the ground, drowning out the protests.\n\nDrakor assigned dragons to help with the feast. Then the crowd trickled away.\n\nThe sun and sky remained green the entire day. Dragons spent most of the day staring at the sky, so the only thing they finished was their feast.\n\nThat evening, a vivid green sunset wrapped the world in this unexpected color. Drakor stood still, watching. Then he snapped his tail. Even the moon and stars were green! It was unbelievably beautiful and equally disturbing, like living inside a mythical globe. If this strange sky was from a dying Volcano, what would their after-home be like?\n\nDrakor was stiff with worry. He tried to identify each green in this odd, intangible world and then match it with the real world. There were gemstone shades of intense emerald, pale peridot, cloudy jade, sparkling green opal, and more. He found the greens of iridescent beetles, mushrooms, ferns, and tree leaves. Maybe this alien green world was not so different from theirs. His wings began to relax. But the next day, the sky glowed in shades of green he had never seen!\n\nDrakor walked by a surly group of ice dragons. These were Mardor's followers, the biggest dragons in the clan, and they all wanted him to fail.\n\nMardor snapped his long tail. \"This isss not spring green. It isss green like the mold on old dead things.\"\n\nMardor's former second-in-command growled, \"It isss green like the mist from a poisonous mushroom.\"\n\nDrakor stared them down but, if they were not challenging his leadership, he would have laughed. It was clever. Mardor was more than a fierce mountain of muscle, and this made him even more dangerous.\n\nFor three days and nights they lived in a glowing green world. Then, on the fourth day, their normal yellow sun returned. These unnerving greens disappeared, and the cloudless afternoon sky was blue.\n\nDrakor breathed a deep sigh of relief.\n\nSunrise and sunset glowed brighter than ever, but only in fiery reds and orange. There were no purples, pinks, or greens. When the sun rose and set, flaming colors filled the sky, as if the entire world was a Volcano burning."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Afternoon light slanted through the sea as Scree headed for the canyon, and beyond. She pulsed just above the coral, automatically searching for Healer supplies. Her main brain focused through thousands of tiny eyes in her skin, gathering a wider picture of the reef.\n\nShe swooped down to collect slime from the mustard-yellow fronds of a soft coral. This goo helped fight infections.\n\nScree tasted the currents as she traveled, checking with the sensitive suckers in her arms. Both of the eastern volcanoes leaked chemicals before they exploded. Death waves had raced across the sea, carrying rotting carcasses, floating rocks, and odd chemicals. And the latest wave, the one that nearly killed Orm, carried new problems.\n\nThe reef was changing. There weren't as many migrating fish. Turtles were growing tumors. And what was happening in the abyss, in the home of the giant squid? They had attacked the pod twice in their old village. She negotiated a treaty but, if fish died off, these hungry giants could attack again.\n\nScree stopped at the edge of the reef, where pink algae made a bright, wrinkled crust on the rocks. She peered into the abyss. The living reef continued down the canyon wall, with feathery red worms, blue anemone flowers, and knobby purple sponges. She pushed off into the cold, strong current. It was like flying in a wild winter storm!\n\nScree twirled down into the twilight zone. Corals and seaweed disappeared with the fading light, replaced by sponges, anemones, and ancient life. She felt very few fish songs and caught no glimmer of scales. Where were the fish? Had they died? Moved away? Or were they just hiding?\n\nScree gazed down into the deep abyss, where odd glowing creatures lit the eternal darkness like stars. She wore a ring of glowing anemones around her mantle and carried food to attract glowfish. This living light would help her explore. She took a long pulse of oxygen-water. It was time to dive deep.\n\nA huge shadow slid across the sea like a dark cloud.\n\nScree looked up and stared. This shark was as big as a giant squid!\n\nThe monster angled down and swam right at her.\n\nIt was too late to camouflage.\n\nScree held her arms out, stiff and steady, waiting calmly to defend while the eye-skin behind her head searched frantically for a crevice to hide. Squirting ink would be a last-minute distraction, a cloud to hide behind while she jetted away.\n\nThe shark tilted sideways, and her anxious arms went limp with relief. There were white dots across its broad back. This was a whale shark, a gentle giant.\n\nThe shark stopped right beside Scree. What did it want? Then her sensitive arms curled away at the terrible feel/taste of rotted flesh. A long rope was wrapped tightly around the base of its huge tail fin.\n\nScree flushed gray with worry. She grabbed the sharpest blade in her Healer bag, a red-and-blue knife. This was made from a ruby-and-sapphire gemstone; only diamond was harder. Drakor had carved this gift in thanks, after she helped put his shattered wing back together.\n\nScree slid her knife under the rope and sawed upward. Half fell away, but the remaining rope was stuck in the cut. The shark flinched but held still while she tugged the rope out of the wound. Then she pushed iodine-rich seaweed into the deep cut, to kill infection.\n\nScree took a closer look at the rope, which was woven from an unknown plant. Golden dragons made braided ropes from strips of fish skin. Ice dragons wove ropes from hemp. So who made this rope? The sunset dragons? And where was the shark when he got tangled up in the rope?\n\nScree patted the shark's rough, sandpaper skin and pulsed away. The giant fish turned and nudged her gently, wriggling his body. She turned surprise-pink at the invitation. Scree settled on the shark's back and fastened her suckers to its scales. He swam off, faster and faster. This was more fun than riding a wave to shore! Then the shark circled back, returning her to the place where they met.\n\nScree slipped off. She gazed into his eye, and understanding passed between them. It could be helpful to have such a large friend, and whale sharks had long memories.\n\nEvening shadows stretched longer, telling the time. Partway home she met Orm, curling his arms with concern.\n\n\"It's late. Where were you?\"\n\nScree turned happy-green. \"Riding a shark. You're right, that cliff at the edge of darkness is the perfect place to find them! Orm, I need your help. You can identify chemicals just by tasting the sea, better than anyone else.\"\n\nScree looked toward the mysterious edge. \"We need to visit the abyss. You can check chemicals while I check fish songs. Then we'll know what's happening here, what types of fish remain, and how many. If there aren't enough fish after those eruptions, giant squid may start hunting us again.\"\n\nOrm stretched his arms while his skin pulsed with shadowy-gray images.\n\nScree watched this blurry skin-movie. What was he thinking?\n\nThen he rolled his eyes. \"You think the promise of a shark ride will make me want to help?\"\n\nScree twined two arms with her mate. \"No. You'll come for the chemistry.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Ours? Or the sea?\"\n\nShe twined a third arm and pulled him closer. \"Both.\" Then she flexed her arms nervously. \"We must find the source of the problem. Everything is connected, so this could harm octopi and dragons.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "SPARKLING MENACE",
                "text": "Drakor stretched his long, leathery wings, soaking up the sun. The first storage pit was now stocked with food and a few of his secret guard stones. This cloudless sky promised a perfect day for digging the next pit.\n\nSuddenly, the sky turned gray. Thin, silvery lines danced before his inner eye, like sparkling spider webs. Ice energy! Drakor whistled a warning and raced to his den. He shivered as the temperature dropped faster than a falling star-stone. Then hail rained down, thick and furious.\n\nDrakor nearly stepped on a mantis in his den. The insect spread its glossy wings in a threat display, gleaming like ice. This fierce hunter was no longer than his claw, a sparkling menace as dangerous to insects as this glittering storm was to dragons.\n\nAn hour later, the hailstorm simply stopped. The sky turned bright blue, as if it had never held a cloud.\n\nDragons crawled out of their shelters. A few were bleeding and the rest must be bruised. They crowded together, flexing wings and snapping tails, staring. Ice balls sparkled across the ground like a cold, pebbly beach.\n\nOne dragon poked the ground. \"This ice must be three feet thick!\"\n\nAnother stared at the sky. \"What a freaky storm! It came with no warning.\"\n\nDrakor walked to the center of the crowd, treading carefully on the slippery, sparkling crystals. The last thing he needed was to fall flat on his face in front of the clan! He raised his wings and waited. For once, he was glad that they took so long to settle down. He needed that time to think. This unpredictable weather was a menace that nobody could fight. What could he say to calm their fears?\n\nAn old dragon-lord with silvered scales raised his wing. \"In all my years, I have never seen so much ice! Why isss the weather so strange here?\"\n\nDrakor spread his arms wide, palms down, in a calming gesture. \"Our Volcano exploded. Legends tell us that weather changes everywhere when this happens. The sky will calm down in a few years.\"\n\n\"Years?\"\n\nDrakor shared a confident smile. \"Yes. Our Volcano isss sending us new memories as it leaves for the stars. We will see the world as we never have before, and have interesting stories to tell future hatchlings! Today isss a holiday. Clear the ice out from around your dens before it melts. Then we will feast.\"\n\nAs the crowd dispersed, Mardor growled loudly, \"This strange ice isss another warning to leave this strange land, while we still can.\"\n\nDrakor kept walking, unwilling to confront his nemesis. He had enough problems to deal with already. But Mardor's smoldering eyes followed him, with enough fire to melt all the ice that had fallen.\n\nJardor tilted his head toward the giant. \"Mardor isss like an angry Volcano.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"He hates me. His friends look forward to my defeat. Older dragons have more years of good memories on our island, before we were hungry, so this change isss harder for them. And they want a proper, older leader.\"\n\nJardor shook his head. \"You are a better leader than they realize, better than you realize. You turned a weird green sky into a celebration. Then you made a freaky ice storm seem interesting, not scary.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"It isss a challenge to find the right words. I never had to think so hard, before I won.\"\n\nJardor laughed. \"Yes, you did. You won with your mind, not your size.\"\n\nDragons busily filled buckets with ice and dumped them near the stream. Drakor scanned their ice-covered village as he dug. Why would their hot Volcano send ice? And how could a warm sky dump so much ice, so fast? He shook his head and kept digging.\n\nThe hailstones soon melted together into slick, pebbly ice. Youngsters gathered on the icy field to play Slam, hitting a flat skipping stone with their tails. But their play was more like a rough game of tag as they gleefully slammed into each other whenever they could.\n\nDrakor asked the dams to take turns keeping an eye on the youngsters, to make sure they stayed close to the village. The dwire were probably watching."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Scree caught a glimpse of bright blue in the coral forest. This was a deadly blue-ringed octopus. It had the most potent poison in the sea!\n\nShe made several journeys across the sea, leading their fleet of skiffs, moving the pod to safety. As she left on the last trip, dangerous new volcanic gases bled into the sea. Finally, the small, blue-ringed octopi clambered aboard the pod skiffs. They squeezed into every crevice. Sharks and turtles swam right beside the small skiffs, ignoring each other, fleeing from the growling volcano.\n\nShe scanned their new reef. Hidden within this crystal forest, the blue-ringed octopi lived in their simple homes: a jumble of rocks, a coral cavity, or an empty shell. They had spread throughout Scree's village, making this a safer place for her pod.\n\nScree waved to her tiny, toxic neighbors. The blue-ringed octopus allies traded their powerful venom for Orm's blue-green abalone pearls, which Scree traded for dragon products. She smiled. Her unexpected friendship with one dragon had grown to include the entire clan of golden dragons.\n\nScree patted her precious Healer bag. This was made from indestructible cloth-of-gold, woven from the thin, wiry roots of pen shells. The bright fabric was covered with tiny, dull brown shells sewn on for camouflage. Four compartments held a treasure-trove of supplies, including this deadly venom and a sharp surgeon's knife of glittering black garnet. As a Healer, she often explored the border between life and death: knives and poison could heal or kill.\n\nShe squeezed her suckers, feeling the wax balls that were filled with venom. Poisonous pearls. She had challenged a horde of giant squid in the dark abyss, alone, to protect the pod. Arak helped her survive by creating these toxic balls. Now, every pod member carried a poison ball hidden in a sucker.\n\nThis poisonous protection was changing octopus culture more than anything else.\n\nNaturally timid octopi were becoming fearless. Hiding in plain sight was their traditional defense, but now this camouflage was mainly used for hunting or games.\n\nScree flowed over to Orm's cave. She found her mate just outside, juggling three large pearls: pink, lilac, and black. She reached into her pouch and tossed him two more shimmering balls. \"The pearl farms are doing well?\"\n\nOrm smoothly added her peach pearls to his juggling routine, braiding five paths through the sea. He spoke with two more arms, \"All the farms are doing great. Soon we'll have enough pearls to trade.\" He caught each lustrous ball as it sank through the sea, adding them to his lumpy bag.\n\nScree applauded, turning her arms dragon-gold and adding scales to signal the highest praise.\n\nOrm gave a proper bow, bending just below the mantle. He gazed west, toward the distant shore, and his arms became stiff. \"I'm not ready for a clan-and-pod gathering. Pearls move much faster in air, and I haven't practiced sky juggling for many moons.\"\n\nScree twined arms with her mate, feeling his worry. He was often chosen to share the First Octopus legend, with its traditional pearl dance. \"Let's visit the raft. You can practice with pearls while I check on the skiffs.\"\n\nOrm's stiff arms relaxed into normal curves. \"That's an excellent idea.\"\n\nScree looked toward the distant farms. \"Orm, will we have food to share?\"\n\n\"With golden dragons?\"\n\n\"And ice dragons. If Drakor has a restless, hungry clan of ice dragons, then the golden dragons will be in danger. Everything is connected.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Good point. The crops are growing well here, so we should have extra.\"\n\nScree pointed to a web of light dancing on the sand. The glowing pattern was made by waves at the surface, where the peaks caught the sun. This formed bright lines of condensed light that shone down through the water. \"Sky and sea connect in interesting ways . . .\"\n\nOrm finished, \"Like dragons and octopi.\" He copied the dancing light onto his skin. Then he replaced this light pattern with two simple, interlocking shapes: dragon and octopus. They fit together perfectly in an abstract, repeating design that covered his body. He played with the colors, turning a pattern of gold dragons with happy-green octopi into silvery-white dragons with challenge-blue octopi. The design colors flashed back and forth on his body.\n\nScree stared. \"You're the ultimate artist! I can't wait for the next dragon-and-octopus festival. Feasting, storytelling, rainbow fires, and trade! We left so much behind.\"\n\nOrm shook his head. \"We saved what matters most: the entire pod and our blue-ringed octopus friends. We'll trade for what we need, especially spearheads and dragon spices.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"We need spearheads, but I think spices are a want.\"\n\n\"No. Tasty meals are a need.\"\n\nStur, the pod leader, dropped down through the sea and landed neatly beside them. He twined arms respectfully with both pod members. \"Orm, at the New Moon Festival, could you tell the story of our battle with the giant squid?\"\n\nOrm bowed. \"I'll be ready.\"\n\nA smile flitted across Scree's face as she studied her former fosterling. He had grown into a strong pod leader. \"Stur, I spoke with Arak in trance-mind. Our volcano became an island, and it's still growing. It must have destroyed our village.\"\n\nStur nodded. \"You were right, our volcano was the bigger problem, but we still had to survive the squid attack before we could move. When you visited the abyss, did you find any signs of the giant squid? And what have you learned about the fish?\"\n\nScree flushed pink with surprise. How did he know? But Stur was clever. Maybe he could read this in the currents. If only she could use the currents to spy on giant squid. Her arms stiffened. The migrating fish were scarce. Was something happening to them as they rode the currents?\n\nScree looked south. \"I found signs of giant squid. I don't know what's happening to the fish. They could be dying from volcano chemicals or a different problem but, if squid are hungry, they may hunt us again. The pod should plan a defense and practice throwing spears.\"\n\nStur nodded. \"I agree. And I'd like you to lead this defense. Again.\"\n\nScree barely stopped a scream of angry red. Her arms tensed with worry and her main brain shouted, NO! The mystery could be the greater danger! She calmed her many minds.\n\nStur gave a half-smile as her arms relaxed.\n\nScree stretched taller. \"I'll prepare the defense if I'm in charge of prisoners. I will not kill.\"\n\nStur bowed. \"I know, and I accept your terms.\"\n\nScree held up an arm. \"And I'll train Scrim to take my place. I can't just wait around here.\"\n\nHis arms stiffened. \"We need you.\"\n\n\"Scrim will do just as well. We must understand the other mysteries.\"\n\nStur nodded, but he walked away on stiff, frustrated arms.\n\nScree sketched a diagram in the sand. \"Orm, there aren't enough of the migrating fish here. They catch a ride on the currents to breed and feed. What if the adults and hatchlings aren't completing the circle to return home?\"\n\nShe shuddered as a cold finger of the sea ran across her mantle, as if in warning."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Drakor flicked his tail as the sun rose, painting the sky with bright topaz and ruby streaks. Dawn always had the same fiery colors of Volcano flames. When would the other sky colors return?\n\nMorning mist rose like smoke from the stream. Drakor avoided the slick, mossy boulders as he jumped into the frigid water, claws out. He caught his breakfast and ate it raw. It was odd how much he missed the cooked, spiced meals from the short time he lived with the golden dragons.\n\nDrakor walked back to the village, checking first on the new dragon-dam. She was building her nest between her den and a neighbor's den, safely in from the edge of the village. He nodded approval. On their island, nests were built near the hot springs, far from their village. But the New World had more dangers, so nesting within the village was the best choice.\n\nHer elegant nest was built from fist-sized stones of dark granite, but there were only a few gemstones fitted into the crevices. Dragon nests usually had so many gems that they glowed like a fiery Volcano. There was a thick layer of dried red grass, which would cushion her egg. But this grass was a poor substitute for the glassy, golden-red Volcano threads used for nests in their old home. Drakor felt another jolt of mourning for their lost island.\n\nThe dragon-dam flicked her tail nervously as she bowed to Drakor. \"Soon I will lay my egg, but there are no hot springs here. How should I warm my nest?\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. How indeed? Their new Volcano was silent, with no life-giving warmth. On their island, generations of dragons had nested on the warm ground of the hot springs. Was this why Mardor objected to a new home without this? But if the clan had stayed on the island, they would all be dead.\n\n\"Ask Merika. She might have ideas.\" Drakor gave the dam three small, brilliant gemstones: ruby, topaz, and sapphire. \"I brought these from our old home. Use them for your nest, for tradition.\"\n\nShe bowed her thanks, but her tail flicked up and down with worry.\n\nDrakor left, flicking his own tail uneasily. Maybe his second-in-command would have a solution.\n\nJardor shrugged his wings. \"I know nothing about nesting, but we could make Volcano gems. Adding bright stones to her nest might cheer her up.\"\n\nDrakor growled, \"I think she isss more worried about the health of her egg than the look of her nest.\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"Yes, but I do not know what else to do.\"\n\nDrakor's wings stretched upward as he gazed into the west. \"Neither do I, and today isss a good day to fly. We can search for dwire and sunset dragons.\" He leapt up into the wind, tasting the freedom of the sky, and escape.\n\nThey flew northwest, skimming just above the trees. Drakor scanned back and forth, searching for dwire or the legendary sunset dragons, but all he saw was the endless forest.\n\nThe sun was high overhead when Drakor reached the lonely cone. Trees had been swallowed up by Volcano blood that later cooled into stone. Rock trunks and stumps stood dark and silent in the ghostly remains of a dead forest. Saplings and scruffy bushes grew in the ashes.\n\nDrakor inhaled the comforting smells of old ash mixed with scents of young growth. It felt like home, but this Volcano had returned to deep sleep. The ground did not tremble. There were no sharp, annoying sulfur smells, but also no warm springs to help a nesting dragon. Could a dragon's egg hatch in this New World? Any problems would be another reason to challenge him as leader.\n\nDrakor stretched the worry out of his body. He channeled the sky, sending lightning swords into the volcanic ash below. Jardor threw his swords, too, in a friendly competition for the most strikes. Then they swooped down together to collect the newly made stones.\n\nEach lightning strike melted the ground, fusing ash into a glassy, emerald green stone. Drakor grinned as he juggled five gems, tossing them high into the sky. Then he caught and stored them.\n\nThey flew to the other side of the volcano and threw more lightning swords. This ash melted into ruby-red or sapphire-blue stones.\n\nDrakor hefted a glassy gem twice the size of a dragon's eye. Sunlight passed straight through, making a bright ruby stain on the pale ash. These were perfect gems of fire.\n\nThe dragons sat down on cold rock logs with their tails hanging down behind. Volcano blood had hardened around these fallen trees to create excellent dragon seats. They snacked on orange tubers and smoked fish from their chest pouches. Then Drakor spread his wings wide, soaking up the pale afternoon sun.\n\nJardor peered through an emerald-green gem. \"These are of the Volcano, perfect for an ice dragon's nest.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"And, we have more than the dragon-dam needs. I hope we can use the rest of these gems for trade.\"\n\nJardor put the gems in his pouch. \"What isss trade?\"\n\n\"We would exchange stuff with the golden dragons, so we each get something we want.\"\n\nJardor shrugged his wings. \"Maybe we could just work harder.\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. \"More types of food would help us survive the long winter. If we could trade for chocolate, ice dragons would be more cheerful. But trade isss more than just a way to get something we want. Trading helps you become friends. Golden dragons and octopi trade with and help each other. Now both groups are stronger.\"\n\nJardor frowned. \"How can an octopus help a dragon?\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"You have not met Scree, or Orm. I will tell you a story on our way home.\" He stretched his wings, and the slanting afternoon light produced a monstrous shadow-dragon. If only he could grow as fast as his shadow, into a huge dragon who looked like a proper leader."
            },
            {
                "title": "TRANCE-STONE",
                "text": "Morning fog drifted away as Drakor strode to the dragon's nest, juggling five Volcano stones. These looked just like their traditional nest gems, but real rubies, emeralds, and sapphires were hard to find here. He presented these gemstones to the dragon-dam.\n\nShe tucked the gems among the plain stones, giving her nest the proper look of a fiery Volcano. But she continued to flick her tail nervously.\n\nDrakor shuddered as a shaft of light ran across her wing. The tips had turned a darker shade of silvery-white. Soon the dam would have an egg to warm, and he still had no idea how to help. How could he call himself a leader? His tail drooped to the ground as he trudged away.\n\nDrakor caught a young dragon-lady studying him, with an odd gleam in her eyes. He quickly turned away. He was much too busy for a mate of his own! Some day he might give nest stones to a dragon-lady, but not for many years.\n\nDrakor tucked the rest of his Volcano gems under a long slab of clear quartz. The gems sparkled up from below, like stones in a wild stream. This unique shelf held a few stone plates and mugs for the evening communal meal.\n\nDrakor flew off to gather more of the branches that were torn off by the storm. He carried armloads to the smokehouse and stacked them in separate piles, since each type of wood made a different flavor of smoked fish. When winter dragged on, and all they had left was fish, any variety would be welcome. Satisfied, he left to join the dragons working on another storage pit.\n\nA dank, earthy aroma rose from the deep hole. Drakor inhaled deeply and laughed. Why did he still miss the sharp, stinky odors of their old home? Dragons were often hungry, scrounging for food, yet he missed that harsh, beautiful island.\n\nScraping noises came from the pit. Then a rope at the surface jerked twice. Drakor hauled the bucket up, hand over hand, claws back to protect the rope. He emptied the rocky dirt into another bucket, and a dragon carried it away. Finally, Drakor called down the hole. \"It isss deep enough. Climb up the claw-holds.\"\n\nJardor climbed out of the pit while Drakor pointed to two dragons. \"Please pave the floor with those large, flat river stones.\" As they left, he motioned to a group of dragon-dams. \"Please bring the tubers and smoked fish.\"\n\nJardor dusted his hands off and grinned. \"We now have two storage pits!\"\n\nDrakor clouted his friend on the back. \"Excellent. We just need a few more.\"\n\nA dragon-lord growled, \"More? Two isss more than enough.\"\n\nAnother grumbled, \"He wants to keep us too busy to miss our true home.\"\n\nDrakor flexed his claws with frustration but kept his voice calm. \"Our Volcano erupted. The island isss gone. According to our legends, this winter will be longer, so we must store more food.\"\n\nHe turned back to Jardor. \"Walk with me.\"\n\nThe sun was now low in the sky, adding the typical flames of sunset. Drakor stopped when they reached the edge of the village. \"Jardor, I must leave. Could you manage the clan and keep us on schedule for digging?\"\n\nHis second-in-command simply nodded. \"How long will you be gone?\"\n\nDrakor cocked his head to the side. \"You did not ask where.\"\n\nJardor grinned. \"No. But why?\"\n\n\"Much has changed. I need a quiet space to think.\"\n\nJardor met his eyes. \"Isss it so hard to be leader?\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"I grow tired of the watching eyes. I am used to more freedom.\"\n\nJardor pointed to a cluster of branches floating on the lake. \"You take the right sticks and I'll take the left. First dragon to strike five, wins.\"\n\nThey each channeled the sky, throwing lightning swords. Branches burst into flames and pine smoke drifted ashore.\n\nDrakor was faster.\n\nJardor thumped his friend on the back. \"You won this game, just like you always do. You are still the same dragon. Go and do what you need to do. The clan will still be here when you return.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Mind-call if you need me.\" He flew due west until he was above the hills. Then he flew straight up through the thick clouds, wrapped in cold, gray mist. He turned north, hidden from prying eyes by the solid white carpet below. These clouds flowed across the sky like a river, parted around a lone mountain peak, and joined together again downstream.\n\nEvery landmark was hidden by the clouds, so he used an inner map. All dragons could close their eyes and see the magnetic field that flowed around the world. Drakor had trained his mind to watch within while his eyes were open, a skill needed for lightning sword games. He flew with open eyes while following the magnetic lines that glowed silvery-gray in his mind.\n\nThe sun set just as Drakor reached the ice cave, his secret retreat in the glacier. Moonlight glowed through the frozen walls and sparkled along cracks, like stars. This cave was a silent haven of glassy blues and whites, like a frozen sky. He breathed fire into a snow-filled hollow in the rock floor. Steam rose as he melted a pool of water and heated it to boiling.\n\nDrakor took a sparkling mug from his pouch. With one claw, he lightly touched each of the gems that formed a rainbow circle around the clear crystal. The center diamond matched his clear quartz globe, his trance-stone. This blue-and-white ceramic mug was a precious gift from Arak's clan.\n\nDrakor fixed a calming tea with dried mint and chamomile. He sipped slowly, relaxing into the memories of his time with the golden dragons. When a dragon learned to communicate in trance-mind, the clan celebrated with a tea ceremony. Soon, he would teach ice dragons to enter the trance-mind and mind-talk. With practice, they could share thoughts across long distances. Then he would add a new tradition: a special mug to celebrate set with a gem that matched their trance-stone.\n\nIt was time to call Arak. Drakor took the trance-stone from his pouch, calmed his mind, and focused into the clear quartz globe. He entered the trance-mind and mind-traveled south.\n\n<Arak. I must visit>\n\n<When>\n\n<I can be there in two more dawns. Can we meet at that field north of the cave>\n\n<Yes. Why there>\n\n<I wish I had time to visit with the clan, but I must return quickly>\n\nDrakor's trance-mind returned to his limp body. He stored the precious globe, stretched out on a thick bed of leaves, and dropped into a deep, trouble-free sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The light of a nearly full moon washed through the sea. Scree felt the changing symphony of the sea, as reef residents prepared for the high tide. She carried another meal to Strike, who stood guard over a mass of pinkish-orange eggs, flexing his tail to move water across them.\n\nThe mantis clicked his thanks. Then he spoke with gestures and light. \"Scree, why did you help me? The first time?\"\n\nScree focused on the light. Each color had a different meaning, and so did the flashing patterns. Her main brain must have grown from trying so hard to count the rapid light flashes!\n\nShe sketched a triangle in the sand. \"You drew this sign.\"\n\nHis eyestalks twitched. \"I saw you make that shape once, using your arms. What does it mean?\"\n\nScree shook with silent laughter. \"You didn't even know? That's the Healer sign. The triangle has a broad base of knowledge and the tipping point where healing happens. When you drew that sign, you called out the Healer in me.\"\n\nStrike shimmered with new patterns. He must be laughing with light.\n\nThe next evening, a full moon rose above the sea. Silvery light filtered down through coral branches, making watery shadows across the reef. Scree turned a cheerful green. The mantis eggs were hatching! She held perfectly still as tiny orange larvae kicked out of their shells.\n\nAn hour later, the last hatchling floated up toward the surface to ride the currents.\n\nStrike hung his head.\n\nScree signed, \"What's wrong? Almost all of your eggs hatched.\"\n\nHe stared into the distance. \"I mated for life. My mate is dead, so these were my last hatchlings. There's no one to share my burrow.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Strike, you would be a remarkable Healer. You see light I can only imagine. I feel/taste sickness, but you could actually see the sick cells inside a patient. With your help, I could target a micro-zap to the exact spot. You could make a burrow under my cave and help in my clinic.\"\n\nStrike shook his jewel-colored head. \"No. I'm a fighter.\"\n\nScree stood taller. \"Then fight for others.\" Her arms jerked as border chimes sounded an alarm through the sea, and her body. She flushed gray with worry. It took something big to trigger those alarms! Scree checked the currents, tasting no new deaths in the sea. Her arms relaxed, and she pulsed to the center of their village.\n\nStur, the pod leader, turned gold to catch everyone's attention. \"Travel in your groups of four to your assigned area. Search the border and stay camouflaged.\"\n\nThree hours later, Stur called off the search.\n\nScree stared south, toward the abyss. \"Orm, we still don't know what triggered that alarm. A harmless whale shark? Or a hungry giant squid?\"\n\nOrm grimaced. \"A scout planning another attack?\"\n\nScree sighed. \"When will the warning system be finished?\" She helped the pod plant kelp all around their village. As the seaweed trees grew taller, the octopi attached another set of shells or metal rods. These sets clanked together to sound an alarm.\n\nEach alarm made a unique vibration, to quickly identify the place where the warning was triggered. This would help the pod prepare a swift, strong defense.\n\nOrm pointed up. \"The kelp trees are growing fast. They've nearly reached the surface!\"\n\nScree made skin pictures of leafy kelp that raced up her body. \"Good. The giants are interesting friends, but we'll need this warning if any challenge us. At least we understand this squid danger. I'm more concerned with what we don't understand. What does this odd feel/taste mean? And what's happening with the fish? Are they dying here, or leaving and dying somewhere else?\"\n\nScree waved a greeting to Krees and Tor, her former fosterlings. The youngsters turned happy-green and waved back. How had they grown so much? They were nearly her size! Where did the time go?\n\nScree pulsed back home, changing colors with her memories. She chose her fosterlings from the tiny new juveniles that arrived. She trained them in the ways of the pod and to be Healers. Scrim, another fosterling, was preparing to lead the defense against an attack. Just in case.\n\nShe stiffened at an unexpected, sharp clicking.\n\nStrike poked his head out from beneath her cave. \"I decided to make a new burrow here.\"\n\nScree signed, \"How do you like it?\"\n\nStrike flashed a light pattern. \"Adequate. Some may think I have an octopus guard but, truly, you now have a mantis guard.\" Then he shimmered with patterns she could barely see. The light faded away as it moved beyond her range of sight.\n\nScree smiled. Once again, Strike was laughing with light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Drakor opened his eyes and stared. Golden sunrise glowed through the ice walls, as if the entire cave was carved from flame quartz! He ate a quick breakfast and launched into the sky, heading south, flying ever higher until he found the wind-stream. This current was bitterly cold, but much faster.\n\nHis nerves were frayed from dragon-weeks of dealing with the clan, and especially Mardor. He relaxed into a rhythmic flight, letting the solitude renew him.\n\nDrakor landed on the pebble beach at sunset. Sky colors played across the waves in shades of fire, like gemstones: topaz, carnelian, ruby. Then stars shone in the darkness. He lay on the pebbles, away from the forest, soothed by the rhythmic surf. He slept well, knowing that the stones would squeak a warning if anything large approached, like dwire.\n\nDrakor awoke before dawn. He soared high as the rising sun glowed up through the clouds below. Cherry red fire filled the spaces between purple-gray puffs, as if the world was burning. The clouds caught fire, glowing bright orange, then turning gold. He gazed at the color-changing carpet. This was the magic of flying.\n\nAs he drew near the field, Drakor felt a strong magnetic pull. His inner eye saw a bright, silvery-gray spot. Arak must have brought the lodestones! He dropped below the clouds, searching, and caught a glint of gold.\n\nDrakor arrowed down, back-winged, and landed. \"Arak! It isss so good to see you!\"\n\nThe golden dragon grinned and held up a steaming mug. \"You must be half-frozen.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes glowed as he reached down for the mug. \"Thanks. It isss cold in the wind-stream.\" He took a long drink. \"Spiced red root tea! I have missed this.\" He finished the tea and sighed. \"Dragon spices. Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, honey, a pinch of pepper, and Dorali's special herbs.\" He bowed low to his friend. \"Thank you. For everything.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"You had the hardest part, fighting Mardor. Dorali made this tea special for you. She wants to know how your wing held up on the long flight here.\" He eyed the white dragon up and down, then nodded. \"You look well. You've grown! And you made good time flying here.\"\n\nDrakor grinned, displaying his long, sharp teeth. \"I am well, I needed to grow, and I am learning the sky currents of our new home. This place has layers of wind that move in different directions.\" He cocked his head to one side. \"I did not think you would move here so soon.\"\n\nArak sighed. \"Two great waves struck our home. They tore down our trees, stole the beach, and scoured the ocean floor. Coral chunks that weighed more than Mardor fell on the shore. Even worse, the waves covered our cave. Saltwater flowed in through hidden holes and ruined part of our stored food. Then the storm struck, taking the rest of the tree flowers. There won't be a fall harvest.\"\n\nArak flexed his wings distractedly. \"Thick rafts of floating gray stones washed up along the shore. Dragonlets bounced across this wiggly playground-on-the-sea, laughing. But I felt as gray as the stones. This raft was made from the bones of your home, and that eruption sent tsunamis that clawed ours down, too. The gray snowfall of ash made it hard to breathe. So, we had few reasons to stay.\"\n\nDrakor solemnly bowed his head. \"My home was doomed to die, but I hoped yours would be spared.\" He looked to the east. \"Even here, far from our old home, dead fish and strange skeletons are washing up on the shore. Scree isss right, everything isss connected.\"\n\nArak stretched his wings wide and folded them straighter, as if shaking off the loss. \"The copper was safe, and part of our food survived the waves. Taron and I are taking turns making the long trips, moving dragons and supplies to the New World. Sometimes I wish we could all just fly here, like ice dragons, but it's too far.\"\n\nDrakor shivered. \"That was a difficult flight, even for us. It was brutally long, bitterly cold, and we lost a dragon. How are your ice dragon guests?\"\n\nArak bowed his head. \"I'm sorry for the loss. But, any dragon who stayed would have died. Our guests are doing well. The dragon-dam is nervous, her dragonlet is loved by all, and your sire is an amazing storyteller! We'll be sad to see him leave.\"\n\nDrakor whipped around and dropped to a fighting crouch as a branch bent and sprang back. There was only sound, with nothing to see. He turned back to Arak, and his wings slowly relaxed. \"I thought that was a dwire, but the branch did not bend enough, and the sounds were too small.\"\n\nArak's eyes grew wide. \"You're ready for a fight! Those are just tree lizards. They camouflage, too. They're useful in our new cave, eating bugs that would eat our stored food. Have you met the dwire?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but they are near our village. I wish we could see them.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"That would be useful. You've flown a long way to visit. How can we help?\"\n\nDrakor stood taller, automatically assuming a leaderly stance. \"According to legend, winter isss long and harsh after a Volcano explodes. We brought little food with us on our long flight here. Our lake has fish, and we gathered old nuts, but that storm has destroyed much of our future harvest. We need more plant foods. Would your clan be able to trade?\"\n\nArak nodded slowly. \"This will be a harsh winter for all of us, but we'll trade what we can when we bring the ice dragons home. Scree might be able to help, too. You have your claws full. I don't want dragons to have an excuse to challenge your rule.\"\n\nDrakor growled, \"Mardor will need no excuse. He will make one.\"\n\nArak nodded again. \"Be careful. What would you trade?\"\n\n\"The lake fish are huge! Their skins are perfect for skiff-wings, and we have smoked fish.\" Drakor took three bright stones from his pouch: red, blue, and green. Each was larger than his eye. \"We make gems from Volcano ashes.\"\n\nArak hefted the clear stones and used his metal knife in a scratch test. \"These look just like ruby, sapphire, and emerald. They test softer, so they'd be easier to carve.\" He put them in his chest pouch. \"We can always use more fish and fish-skins. I'll see what food we can spare.\"\n\nArak stretched his wings. \"We've mostly been fixing up our new cave, but a group of dragons flew south and harvested sacks of cocoa pods. Those odd trees are inland, surrounded by hills, so they escaped the worst of the storm damage. It seems that their fruit grows all year long! Zarina should be able to make extra chocolate to trade.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"That would be great!\"\n\nArak took a small bag from his pouch. \"This is Dorali's special tea, to drink if you must fight. She's working with Orm to make something even better.\"\n\nDrakor placed the bag carefully into his chest pouch. \"Thank them for me. I may need this.\"\n\nThen Arak handed him a clear quartz jar with bluish-green powder and a cork stopper. \"These are the copper salts you asked for. It's great, being so close to our copper mine! If you need more, we have plenty to spare. Why do you want it?\"\n\nDrakor gave him a mysterious smile. \"Thank you. When you visit, you will see.\"\n\nArak lifted up a lumpy sack. \"I thought you'd miss these.\"\n\nDrakor hugged the sack close, as if it held a precious dragon egg. The sack was heavier than it looked, and his inner eye nearly screamed at the blinding-bright silvery-gray. \"Our lodestones! Thank you for bringing them. Our flight here was long, and extra weight meant death.\" These stones were an important part of ice dragon heritage, used for their Winter games. After losing so much, they meant even more. He carefully secured the sack inside his backpack.\n\nArak grinned. \"I thought you might like to have some now. I'll bring the rest when we return the guests.\" He tugged a sack out from beneath a bush. \"Here's food from Zarina to fuel your flight back.\" He eyed Drakor's broad chest. \"You've grown more than I expected. I'm glad I listened to my mate and added more food.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep breath, inhaling the aromas. His eyes held a dreamy expression. \"Cinnamon-honey roasted almonds and smoked fish with pepper! I have missed your spices. Give Zarina my thanks. I wish I could stay and visit, but the clan isss restless.\"\n\nArak handed him one last bag. \"This weighs little and will help calm your clan.\"\n\nDrakor filled his lungs with the irresistible scent. \"Chocolate!\" He bowed low. \"Thank you. Chocolate isss precious, but friendship isss the most precious gift.\"\n\nDrakor launched into the sky, climbing fast. Far below, Arak zigged his claws in a jagged lightning path, wishing him a safe journey home.\n\nThe world below disappeared as Drakor flew up beyond the clouds. He could fly forever, far beyond his troubles, if he was not the leader. But no leader quit; he was beaten and replaced. And how could he stop being leader without risking his friends? Drakor stretched his wings and settled into an easy rhythm. He needed a plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON CLAWS",
                "text": "Drakor shivered as he stared to the west. Thick, ferocious clouds poured over the hills like an unstoppable tide, drowning each peak. Then the leading edge curled over like dragon claws and captured the last hill. Their village would be next.\n\nJardor snapped his tail. \"I never saw such clouds! It looks like an avalanche of snow.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"This isss an interesting world. Spring isss too cold and the clouds act like dragons. I never know what to expect, so we need to be ready. You are my second-in-command. I want a third and fourth in-command.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. \"It isss hard to explain. I beat Mardor. One dragon. Now I can tell every dragon what to do. Isss that fair?\"\n\nJardor grinned. \"Mardor isss no normal dragon. What are you thinking?\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"True, Mardor isss not an average dragon. I was thinking about the golden dragons. They do not fight to become leader. They choose the leader that most of them think will do the best job. Then they share ideas and talk about problems. I want more in-commands to help and to share ideas. It isss a start.\"\n\nJardor nodded slowly. \"Fighting isss our way, but there could be a better way. It isss something to think about. Cranart could make a good third-in-command. He isss older and good with lightning swords, but he does not seem to mind that you win those games. For the fourth, you could choose an older dragon-dam. They may have different ideas.\"\n\nDrakor clouted him on the back. \"You are the best second-in-command ever!\"\n\nJardor turned and looked him in the eye. \"You also need spies.\"\n\n\"Spies?\"\n\n\"Mardor used spies when he was leader. He still does. You need all the help you can get.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"True. But I do not want to become Mardor.\"\n\nJardor laughed. \"That isss not possible. He isss the biggest dragon ever!\"\n\nDrakor flexed his claws. \"Mardor isss training to fight. I think he will challenge me.\"\n\nJardor snapped his tail. \"That isss against the rules. You beat him.\"\n\n\"I think the rules have changed. We have a new home, new leader, and new ways. Everything changed too fast. The older dragons are upset. They want something that feels safe, strong, and familiar. That isss Mardor. I have seen him talking to these dragons, and they stop talking when I get close. He isss trying to turn the clan against me.\"\n\nDrakor gazed into the distance, flicking his tail up and down. \"Mardor was the clan leader my whole life. I wanted him to lead the clan to safety. Instead, I became the leader. I do not know if I can win another fight.\"\n\nJardor rustled his wings nervously. \"What will you do?\"\n\nDrakor gave a lopsided smile. \"I will try. I am practicing to fight, in secret. And I have something better than spies: friends. Now I need to call a meeting.\"\n\nThey flew to the circle, and Drakor landed in the center. Jardor struck the huge drum once. The beat rumbled through the morning sky, summoning the dragons. Soon the rings were full.\n\nDrakor raised his wings high. The dragons gradually grew quiet, while Mardor grinned at the slow response. Drakor's hands automatically curled into fists. He forced them open. \"The golden dragons will bring our clan members home soon. Then we will trade our Volcano gems and fish for their food and chocolate.\n\nWings fluttered and dragons whispered, \"Chocolate.\"\n\nA young dragon-lord raised his wing. \"What isss trade?\"\n\n\"Ice dragons and golden dragons will agree on how much we will give each other for one big fish, or a clawfull of gems, or chocolate.\"\n\nA dragon-lady raised a wing, and he nodded to her. \"I can carve gemstone bowls to trade for chocolate.\"\n\nMardor raised a wing part way up and growled, \"Why should we trade? We are much bigger. We can easily take what we want.\"\n\nDrakor stared him down. \"They are dragons. They would fight back, and even ice dragons can be hurt.\" He glanced to the south. \"Attacking the golden dragons would be like cutting down the tree to get all the nuts. The tree would make no more nuts. Golden dragons would spend their time fighting, not gathering food or making chocolate. Then there isss nothing to gain.\"\n\nDrakor looked from one dragon to the next, meeting their eyes. \"Trade isss better than fighting. We catch many fish and make gems from worthless ashes. We can trade to get food and chocolate from golden dragons. With trade, there isss no loss.\"\n\nA dragon-lord asked, \"When will we trade?\"\n\n\"The golden dragons will arrive in a moon to bring the ice dragons home. Then we will trade.\"\n\nMardor raised his wing and began speaking without permission. \"Why do yellow dragons help ice dragons? Do they need us to get fish for them? Fish too big for them to catch?\"\n\nDrakor's hands began to clench in anger. He took a deep, calming breath and uncurled them. \"Golden dragons are smaller, but they are also clever and strong. Size isss not everything. They do not need our help. They carried our newest dragonlet away from the Volcano, so she could be safe from the explosion. They want us to survive because we are all dragons.\"\n\nMardor sneered, \"You say our home isss gone, that we survive because of you. But nobody has seen our home to know if it isss really gone. Isss this just a sun dream?\"\n\nDragons looked from Drakor to Mardor, flicking their tails nervously.\n\nDrakor stretched taller, puffed out his chest, and held his wings in crisp folds, trying to look like the leader they wanted. Like Mardor. \"You heard the explosion from across the sea, when our Volcano left to join the stars. You feel/see the change in the magnetic field. You felt the power of that storm. Sunsets are brighter than ever, like fire. Our island isss gone. One day we may be able to see the empty place that was our home. But we have a new home here. Do you remember how hungry we were? Now we catch fish every day.\"\n\nDrakor looked to the east, toward the sea. \"An ocean giant once said that home isss where you are. Wherever we go, we have the freedom of the sky. Here we have food, too.\"\n\nA few tails flicked up and down, up and down. The rhythm was catching. Young dragons and some older ones began snapping their tails up and down like a wind-blown field. A group of dragon-dams joined in, adding to this signal of approval.\n\nDrakor scanned the crowd and smiled. \"I need volunteers to make items for us to trade.\"\n\nWings rose around the circles.\n\nHe assigned dragons to make Volcano gems and to carve bowls. Then he ended the meeting, while Mardor glared at him through slitted eyes. Drakor turned away from the giant, relaxing his tense muscles knot after knot. He desperately needed solitude, but found his feet walking toward Merika's den. He caught up with his friend partway to her home.\n\nShe turned and gave him a warm smile. \"Come see the new plants!\" They walked together to her den.\n\nMerika pointed to a planter just inside the entrance, where small green shoots breached the soil. Her eyes glowed. \"The ice-flower plant just sprouted! When this long winter ends, I can plant young bushes near the forest. In a few seasons, we can make our traditional drink with the berries to properly celebrate the Summer Solstice.\"\n\nDrakor stared at the tiny plants. This was a piece of home, a memory made real. These were true ice dragon plants, with snow-white flower petals that turned as clear as ice when it rained. The small berries were blue, the color of the sky, of freedom. \"That isss great news! I did not know you brought seeds.\"\n\nMerika watered the plants carefully. She pointed. The edge of her den was lined with rough stone planters, all with seedlings, with different shapes and shades of green. \"I brought many types of seeds. That isss the treasure I chose from our home.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"You are wise.\"\n\nMerika looked to the east. \"Our island home isss truly gone?\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nMerika squared her wings. \"Then we will make a better home here. Thank you again for the strike-stones.\" She placed a copper pot over the small stone pit and lit a fire with sparks from the golden stones. When the water boiled, she made two mugs of herbal tea. Spicy steam filled the den. \"I think you need this. That was a difficult meeting.\"\n\nThey drank together in a comfortable silence.\n\nDrakor relaxed on the stone bench, surrounded by the reassuring scents of homeland plants. But after he left, his thoughts returned to Mardor, and his hands became fists. This was not over. Soon, Mardor or another dragon would challenge him to be leader. And then . . . Worries grew in his mind like the shadows that thickened around him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Scree sampled the sea with her arms, feeling the delightful flavors. \"Spices! And chocolate!\"\n\nOrm grinned. \"It's the New Moon Festival.\"\n\nThree strong beats on a giant clam shell announced the feast.\n\nScree turned happy-green as these vibrations washed through her body. \"It's our first proper celebration in the New World.\" She jetted to the feasting table with Orm and joined the line, where octopi flashed cheerful colors.\n\nScree eyed the unfinished table. This was a rough jumble of round, dead coral rocks. In time, there would be hundreds of rocks carefully fitted together, making an elegant table to keep the feast above the sandy grit. But the food was already perfect.\n\nOrm pointed. \"Desert!\"\n\nBright orange scallops were clustered together at the far end of the table. These hinged shell pairs held precious balls of chocolate that were coated with nut oils, to protect them from the sea.\n\nScree laughed. \"First, the main dishes.\" She made a ring of scallops around the edge of her coral plate, filling the middle with a colorful seaweed salad. Then she arranged crab claws into a fancy star with eight points.\n\nOrm glanced at her plate. \"That's a flavorful star.\"\n\nScree grinned. \"Your jellyfish design is exquisite. How did you get that glow? It's a nice touch.\"\n\nHe held up a crystal jar that glowed blue. \"I made a tasty fungus sauce.\"\n\nShe turned both eyes to the glowing jar. \"I love cold fire.\"\n\nScree filled her mug with red-root tea, pushed the top on, and settled onto the sand with friends. She studied the plate that Scrim held. Her apprentice had drawn a realistic squid with seaweed and small brown cockle shells. \"That's a perfect design.\"\n\nScree watched her friend discreetly. Three of his arms had been torn off by a giant squid in their recent battle. Two of his missing arms had begun to regenerate, but the third had been ripped off into the mantle and would never re-grow.\n\nScrim would always have an awkward gap, so he might never move as fast as other octopi. But he was a deep thinker, clever and creative. And of all her apprentices, he was the one best suited to take her place as leader of the pod defense.\n\nScree savored the flavors of her edible art while pod-mates discussed their new homes and the best places to hunt. No one mentioned the recent seaquake, or giant squid, or the missing fish.\n\nScree signed to Orm, \"They talk as if we left all our problems behind with this move. If only that were true.\"\n\nA drummer began beating the giant clam shells. Dragon chimes joined the drumming, played with metal bars that hung free in the water. The music rippled pleasantly through Scree's body, adding a unique feel/sound to the natural symphony of the sea.\n\nScree's arms danced in the water, matching the irresistible beat that pulsed through the sea. Octopi moved onto the sandy dance floor, twirling and spinning with reckless abandon. Then Orm pulled her onto the dance floor, and she spun up into the sea.\n\nPast and future fell away, lost in the whirling dance. Scree flashed a rainbow of understanding. Her pod-mates had just survived a battle, a move, and a seaquake. Now they were simply living in the moment, glad to be alive.\n\nBeside the dance floor, youngsters played a game of Mimic. The leader changed her shape and colors to become a rare blue lobster. The players copied this in a heartbeat. Suddenly, eight blue lobsters sat on the sand.\n\nA new beat rang through the sea, and everyone headed for the storyteller circle. This was well lit by glowfish. These fish were living lights, attracted to bowls with shredded clams.\n\nStur, the pod leader, moved to the center of the circle, and every arm fell silent. Pictures appeared on his mantle while two arms wove words through the water. \"This is the legend of the First Octopus. Long ago, our mother, the Moon, ruled the seas. But she was lonely. So she gathered rich mud from the bottom of the sea and made a head. Then she added two arms for each of the four moon phases . . .\"\n\nWhen he finished, Scree joined the applause. She changed her arm color to bright dragon-gold with emerald spirals. Octopi changed their colors to every rainbow shade. The story circle became a fantasy garden of colorful octopus arms.\n\nNext, Orm pulsed to the center. Octopi lowered their speaking arms respectfully and sat in stillness. All eyes were focused on the master storyteller.\n\n\"This is the story of our battle with three giant squid.\" He spoke with eloquent gestures while a movie played across his body-screen. He made the fight vivid, terrifying, and real. When the last remaining squid smashed its monstrous arm down on Scree, everyone jumped.\n\nScree could still feel that tremendous blow, but she had survived. Others were less fortunate.\n\nOrm finished the story and bowed.\n\nThe crowd went wild, waving golden arms with dragon scales. This was the highest praise.\n\nThen Scrim told the story of their courageous move across the sea. He shared images of the fearsome storm waves in the last crossing, and cheerful green octopi pulsing down to their new home.\n\nAgain, the audience applauded. Scree made bright lightning twirl up her storm-colored arms. The fierce battle and daring move were their stories, and they would all be part of these legends.\n\nScree caught the leader's eye and nodded. He had chosen stories to remind the pod of the dangers and their inner courage.\n\nShe looked to the west. The golden dragons would soon complete their move to the New World. Then they'd celebrate with a clan-and-pod festival at the shore, trading goods and sharing legends. Storytellers used gestures from dragons and octopi. When a dragon changed his mind, he spoke of changing his colors, like an octopus. And to show acceptance of change, an octopus stretched out two arms like the open wings of a dragon.\n\nScree twirled her arms restlessly. Drakor was having a hard time as leader. Would the difficult dragons stretch their wings wider and accept the changes? Or would a dragon challenge him? Could Drakor win another fight?"
            },
            {
                "title": "LIGHTNING ROD",
                "text": "Drakor took a deep breath, savoring the rain-washed air. After the shower, the cloudless sky was a deeper blue. Red and yellow mushrooms had popped up all over the meadow. It was so rainy that these were the new flowers!\n\nDrakor followed his nose to the smokehouse, where dragons were busy filleting five huge fish. \"Good work.\" He flew to the village and landed near a cluster of young dragon-lords. They bowed and then stretched their wings wide, a sign borrowed from Arak.\n\nDrakor smiled. Open wings were the new symbol for accepting ideas, change, and his leadership. He felt their eyes follow him as he continued walking.\n\nDrakor walked by a cluster of old dragon-lords talking with Mardor. They fell silent and narrowed their eyes before barely nodding their heads. Mardor's eyes showed pure hatred. Drakor stretched taller and held his gaze until the former leader lowered his eyes.\n\nDrakor turned away, feeling the angry eyes that burned into his back. He flicked his tail. For years, nobody noticed him. Now, eyes followed him everywhere. He was a lightning rod for eyes.\n\nMore disconcerting were the interested eyes of unmated dragon-ladies. They arched their necks and preened when he looked their way. But not his good friend Merika. Drakor shook his head. He was an upstart young leader in a new land trying to cope with angry dragons. He had no time for a mate!\n\nDrakor turned at the quiet footsteps and smiled. Merika. She was so wonderfully predictable, a dragon he could depend on.\n\nMerika handed him a large, steaming mug. \"You need this.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" He took a sip and smiled. \"It isss tasty, but different. What did you use?\"\n\n\"Chamomile to relax, berries for flavor and sweetness. Your wings are stiff, so your muscles must be tense.\"\n\nDrakor gazed into her eyes. Calm eyes, a lovely, smoky gray. \"How did you learn this?\"\n\nMerika flicked her tail. \"Dorali taught me, when the golden dragons visited our island.\" She pointed to his chest pouch. \"I have often wondered, what are those odd lumps?\"\n\nDrakor opened his pouch, releasing the aromas of smoked fish and pine nuts. His shiny, silver water flask reflected the blue sky. Small quartz vials held metal powders.\n\nMerika pointed to his large, silver-gray rock. \"That isss a nice Titanium crystal! You have food, water, and ground metals: titanium for black lightning, cobalt for blue. We all carry this, but what isss in that lump?\"\n\nDrakor unwrapped a clear, fist-sized, eight-sided crystal.\n\nMerika's eyes grew wide. \"That diamond isss huge! And it must be heavy. Why do you always carry it?\"\n\nDrakor stared into the sparkling depths, remembering the scent of his dam. She had a pleasant, piney smell from the pine needles that she heaped onto his small sleeping pallet. She hummed a dragon's lullaby, but he always stayed awake to hear the whole tune. Instead, he fell asleep to her rhythmic breathing.\n\nThis crystal seemed to hold her spirit, like the diamond that brought the First Dragon to life. \"My dam gave this to me before she died, when I was barely from the shell. This isss all I have from her. I wish I could have known her longer, before she left to join the stars.\"\n\nMerika put gentle claws on his arm. \"I am sorry she left so soon.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings in the ice dragon way. \"It isss life.\" He tilted his head back, noted the growing clouds, and added, \"I watch the stars at night to see her.\"\n\nMerika met his eyes. \"She watches you and isss proud.\" They stood silently, side by side, gazing into the sky. Then she asked, \"What do you keep in the bottom?\"\n\nDrakor reached into a deep inner pocket. He pulled out a clear quartz ball and then his carved wood flute. Last was a ceramic mug, made from blue and white clay. There was a circle of rainbow gemstones on one side, surrounding a clear diamond. \"These are gifts from golden dragons.\"\n\nMerika snapped her tail. \"These are well made.\" She reached a claw toward the mug. \"That isss beautiful.\"\n\n\"Zarina made this for me when I first visited the land of the golden dragons. They welcomed me, healed my shattered wing, and asked for nothing in return.\"\n\nMerika turned her head to the south. \"Golden dragons see the world through different eyes. I will leave with them when their skiff brings our ice dragons home. I want to be a Healer. Think what I could have done for your sire when he was injured, so much more than just sharing my food with him.\"\n\nDrakor's heart skipped a beat. Leave? Merika was the steady part of his life, a quiet listener, the calm center in his stormy world. \"Merika, the food you shared was scarce and precious. Few were willing to help. You are helpful here. Why must you leave?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Dorali helped fix your wing when it was shattered. I need to know this magic, and more. I will train with Dorali and any other Healers who will let me.\"\n\nDrakor took a step back. She was serious. Merika was leaving?\n\nShe held her hands out, claws back, and he met them as he always had. Their hands fitted together perfectly. \"Drakor, we have been friends since the egg. I will always be your friend. I need to be a Healer. This isss my chance.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep breath, inhaling the odd scents from this unnatural weather. He slowly stretched his wings, trying to work out the painful stiffness. His whirling mind was another problem. \"I think I need another mug of that calming tea. Could we walk?\"\n\nThey headed for the meadow, followed by watching eyes. Wet grasses squelched beneath their feet. Drakor noted with interest that his stride automatically changed to match hers. Everything matched. Something clicked in his mind. \"When will you return?\"\n\n\"When I know enough to truly help. I will visit when I can.\" Merika searched his eyes. \"I see the looks that unmated dragon-ladies give to you, the leader. Their scales shine like never before. Many are strong and lovely. Soon you will choose one of them for a mate.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"No. They only want me because I am the leader. That isss not what I want. Have you chosen another dragon?\"\n\nThe buzzing of insects filled a silence that stretched longer and longer. Finally, Merika shook her head and whispered, \"No.\"\n\nDrakor smiled for the first time. \"Then I will wait.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Scree flowed into Orm's cave and froze. Her eyes tracked a jellyfish that pulsed bright in the darkness. Its ice-clear body shone with inner light, like a captive aurora, glowing in rose and teal. Light gleamed along the tentacles.\n\nIn the blink of an eye, Scree became a shimmering, pink-and-blue jellyfish. She hung in the water while her tentacle-arms swayed with the gentle current.\n\nOrm nodded approval. \"You used your cell mirrors to catch the light. You almost glow!\"\n\nScree changed back to her octopus shape, spiraled down, and draped her arms comfortably over a rock seat. The water held a delicious feel/taste of fresh scallops with crushed mint leaves and garlic. This sea-and-land combination made the best meal!\n\nOne wall was covered with a living tapestry, an elegant design that glowed through the water in seven vibrant colors. She remembered when Orm first bred the small, clear, jelly-like tunicates to glow in colors. He created patterns by holding the base of each creature against the wall until it attached. Now he also bred glowing anemones. These animal-flowers added texture to his artwork.\n\nOrm held an anemone against his skin. As soon as it attached, he added another glowing ornament. \"Our sea flowers bloom all year long, so they're better than land flowers.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Anemones make the best gardens, colorful by day and glowing at night.\" She held an anemone against her skin, and the sea flower fastened on tight. Then she added another. Soon, her mantle had a necklace of anemones that glowed in red, orange, or blue.\n\nScree flexed her body, and the anemones stayed on. She dropped a pinch of crab meat into the center of each sea flower. \"This should keep them in place, since only a hungry flower wanders off. These are perfect night lights.\"\n\nScree pulsed to the edge of the cliff with Orm. \"Are you ready to explore? Remember, life speaks with light in the dark abyss.\"\n\nOrm nodded. They each grabbed a rock and plummeted down into a dark, cold world.\n\nRed colors vanished first, then orange and yellow, like a melting rainbow. Soon, only blue, violet, and light beyond sight reached this eerie twilight world. A small octopus squirted luminous ink as it fled. Then a school of fish swept past with bright blue belly lights.\n\nScree held still, sorting the symphony that pulsed through her body. \"Sound travels even faster in the abyss, so this is an efficient survey. The crabs and shrimp sound like they're doing well here. I feel the songs of young fish, but fewer adults and hatchlings. The missing notes are from some of the migrating fish.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"And none of the chemicals that I taste should be killing fish.\"\n\nScree pointed down. \"Let's check deeper.\" She dropped through darkness until she touched down on thick, squishy mud. Bristle worms and starfish of all kinds crawled across the vast mud floor. Her living lights showed only a few rocks, and these rare, solid anchors were completely covered with life.\n\nScree felt the rotting flavors of food that drifted down from far above. A feather star waved its frilly arms, grasping at this slow snowfall of death.\n\nOrm held an arm out to feel/taste the stinky snow. He shook it off. \"I'm glad we have better food. Scree, I sense nothing new here. Let's head back.\"\n\nShe formed a circle with two arms and then ripped the tips apart. \"If the fish aren't dying here, they must be leaving and not returning. Where is the circle broken? We need to follow the currents to understand this problem. Everything is connected, so everyone could be hurt. Even the dragons.\"\n\nOrm twirled his arms, not answering. Finally, he signed, \"I assume you wish to follow in a skiff?\"\n\nScree smiled. \"Of course.\"\n\nA three-foot fish with glowing green spots swam out of the murky distance.\n\nScree pointed. \"Look! A glowing shark!\"\n\nOrm's eyes were huge. \"That's a beautiful neon glow. But it's still a shark, and there's nowhere to hide.\"\n\nScree twined arms with her mate. \"A skiff journey would be safer.\"\n\nOrm made skiffs appear on his skin and then drenched them in towering waves. \"Except for the storms.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"But, thanks to our dragon friends, we now have proper skiff fins to surf the storms.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Drakor stood at the top of the hill, filling his lungs, tasting the cool wind after a shower. His claws clicked on the bare expanse of rock. This had a comfortable feel of home; it was once Volcano blood. The black rock held pieces of bright blue sky reflected in water-filled hollows. This matched the turquoise lake of their lost island.\n\nDrakor shivered at the memory, and his eyes were drawn to the east like iron to a lodestone. The loss of their home was a raw wound for the ice dragons, and he alone knew that it was gone. Many still doubted their need to leave, to move to this strange land.\n\nSomething glittered in the scruffy bush, drawing him closer. Drops of morning dew clung to an invisible web, catching the light and sending it back even brighter. These sparkling strands triggered a memory. Arak had challenged him to make a plan to defeat Mardor and leave their doomed island. The spider weaves a sticky trap for insects and makes safe strands to escape. It has a plan to survive. You need a plan.\n\nDrakor sighed. He fought Mardor to move their clan to safety. That solved one problem. Now he was the leader, trapped in a new web of problems. He blew gently on the web, and the spider scampered to safety, avoiding the dangerous strands. What plan could possibly avoid all the sticky new problems he faced? They seemed to grow faster than evening shadows. And what should he do about Mardor?\n\nJardor landed beside him and folded his wings neatly. \"This isss your new favorite place.\"\n\nDrakor turned his gaze to their village, which was a long glide away. \"It isss quiet here.\"\n\nJardor raised one eye ridge. \"There are decisions you must make as leader. Let me know how I can help.\" He followed Drakor's gaze to the cluster of older dragons. \"I know why Mardor isss angry, but what about the others?\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"We had to leave before our home was destroyed. I had to lead the dragons here, quickly, while they were still too shocked to question the word of their new leader.\"\n\nHe looked Jardor in the eye. \"I forced them to leave. But they never saw our island explode, so they do not see me as the dragon who saved their lives. I am the dragon who took them away from a home they knew and a leader they understood.\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"Maybe it would help if these dragons could see that our old home isss gone.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. They forget how hungry we were on our island, but complain of every problem here. Then they blame me, the leader with all the power. But I do not control the weather or the world. It isss only an illusion of power.\"\n\nJardor cocked his head to the side. \"You think a lot more. We used to play games and explore. We had fun.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings and winced. \"Part of me wants to give up being leader. It isss hard to stand tall with my wings folded stiff, all the time, to look like the leader they expect. How did Mardor stand it?\"\n\nJardor laughed. \"He wanted to be leader.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"He still wants it. And we still need to solve the problem of the dwire. These big hunting lizards can change colors to hide perfectly. Sometimes, when I am walking beyond our village, I think I see one. Only for a moment. I hear rustling branches or a crunch on the rocky ground, but I find no trace. When winter comes, the snow will show their tracks. Warn all the dragons of the dwire danger, one more time. Especially the younger ones, since they are more likely to listen.\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"We will find a way to deal with dwire. But there isss another problem. The dragons are restless. Everything isss new. We need game practices to give them something we know.\"\n\nDrakor thumped him on the back. \"You think more, too. Plan two half-days of fun. We can teach Lightning Swords on the pebble beach. Since the lake isss not frozen, we can use the meadow for Slam. Dragons can practice tail strikes using a ball, instead of the disc.\"\n\nJardor bowed and left.\n\nDrakor flew down to the field below, at the edge of the forest. This flat field had solid rock just a claw length beneath the dirt, so trees could not grow. It would be perfect for Slam practice! Small, toothy lizards cropped the grasses at night and hid by day. He called them smidgers, after the lizards of their island. But these lizards could camouflage, like the still unseen dwire, so they were hard to catch.\n\nDrakor peered into the forest. Twigs bent as invisible lizards leapt within trees, rapidly changing colors as they moved. Then something fell to the ground. He saw the odd sparkle of an oily, black eye. As the lizard died, the perfectly camouflaged body became visible, turning a splotchy brown.\n\nDrakor grabbed the lizard, took a small bite, and spat it out. His mouth went numb. The bitter taste and numbing effect probably meant it was poisonous. Were dwire also poisonous? How many were in a pack, and when would they attack?\n\nDrakor flew back to the village through a bright blue sky. He snapped his tail in surprise as cold drops spattered against his wings and slid down his scales. With frequent rain, new mushrooms popped up daily. Some tested toxic, but the edible mushrooms were dried and stored.\n\nDrakor landed near Jardor. \"That sun shower was short.\"\n\nJardor shrugged his wings. \"It was long enough to clean the air.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously. \"Will snow fall as often as this rain? We built our new dens with taller, steeper roofs to shed the snow. Are they steep enough? Or will snow pile up until the roofs collapse under the weight?\"\n\nJardor took a long look at his friend. \"You are doing everything you can. Worrying will not change what happens, but we could change the Slam field.\"\n\nDrakor raised one eye ridge. \"When did you get so wise? And yes, that field isss still too rocky.\"\n\nHe assigned dragonlets to clear the field of the biggest rocks, under the protective watch of two dragon-dams.\n\nAs the sun sank lower, Drakor flew to the foothills. He collected roundish, fist-sized stones to carve into balls for the Slam game practices. Gathering stones also gave him a chance to explore, poking among rocks and hunting for secret caves.\n\nThe sky suddenly darkened, and ice-cold rain pelted the ground. Then, as fast as they came, the clouds disappeared. Evening sunlight turned the entire rain-drenched sky into a parade of rainbow colors, all with a reddish tinge. Each new, vivid color melted into the next. Blue-violet flowed into red-violet, then rose. Next was tangerine, which turned golden.\n\nDrakor stood rooted to the ground as the sky colors changed. Indigo blue became purple, then black, and bright stars appeared. Orm, his artistic octopus friend, would love this! He straightened his wings. Scree said that what would be, would be, and then she would fix it. Well, there was beauty in this New World, and they would solve the new problems."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Drakor woke at dawn as orange light filled his den. He checked the magnetic lines for weather warnings and smiled. This was a perfect day for practice games. He signaled Jardor to sound the drum.\n\nSoon, the Field-Slam practice began. Ten rough rocks served as goal-stones, while piles of roundish rocks served as game-stones. But their true game-stone was a sparkling blue disc that slid across ice.\n\nCranart pointed. \"Form ten lines. Take turns hitting a game-stone ball with tail strikes, and aim for the goal-stone.\"\n\nDragons quickly formed ten lines, laughing and exercising their long tails.\n\nDrakor looked east. This field was another plus for their new home. There were no good places to play field-Slam on their island, where scruffy clumps of grass grew among the rocks and boulders. \"Cranart, we should think about real summer games, not just practices. We could carve perfectly round balls and try different ball sizes. We could even make up new games!\"\n\nCranart's eyes glowed. \"Summer games!\"\n\nDrakor grinned and pushed off, climbing into the sky with a heavy sack that glowed bright in his mind. This held their precious magnetic lodestones. He landed near a group of dragons and gave stones to each pair. \"I need these back after your practice.\"\n\nThe dragons bowed and left, flying toward the distant white line of the glacier. Drakor followed them with his eyes. Soon, thunder crackled and boomed as they practiced sculpting ice with lightning.\n\nNext, Drakor found Jardor on the pebble beach, by the lake. The damp rocks squeaked beneath his feet, protesting the weight of a dragon. He eyed the enormous pile of branches and driftwood. It was enough for a bonfire! \"At least that terrible storm was good for something. There isss more than enough wood for target practice.\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"Plenty. We made a game of gathering wood.\" He lowered his voice. \"But some of these dragonlets have never even made a lightning sword!\"\n\nDrakor studied the bouncy youngsters. \"I can teach the beginners while you help the ones who can throw swords. I taught golden dragons to make lightning swords and play the sword game. Teaching ice dragons should be easier.\"\n\nJardor raised one eye ridge. \"And what did you learn from the golden dragons?\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"You will be surprised.\" He raised his wings for silence. \"Every ice dragon should know how to make and use lightning swords. There isss one very important rule: NEVER use a lightning sword to attack a dragon. Swords are only for games and defense. You may defend yourself or your clan from an attack by something like a dwire. These dangerous hunters live in the forest and are hard to see, because they change colors to camouflage.\"\n\nThe dragonlets rustled their small wings, turning their heads from side to side, peering into shadows.\n\nDrakor raised his wings again. \"The dwire could be anywhere. But we are ice dragons! Now, to learn how to make lightning swords, come with me. If you already know, Jardor will help you improve.\"\n\nOne dragon-dam stayed with each practice group, as extra protection for the youngsters.\n\nFive dragonlets surrounded Drakor, jumping up and down, flexing their small wings and flicking their tails. These youngsters had more energy than a lightning storm! He tossed ten pieces of wood onto the beach. \"First, watch carefully. Then I will teach you.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his claws out and a glowing pearl appeared. This grew quickly, twisting taller. In the blink of an eye, he held a bright sword. Within moments, he grew and threw ten lightning swords. Each one hit the target. Orange flames sprouted like odd flowers on the beach. Smoke drifted with the wind, carrying scents of different woods.\n\nDragonlets stared at the flames with huge eyes.\n\n\"An ice dragon should be able to hit any target. First, stand still and close your eyes. Feel the magnetic lines around us. Look for ones that wriggle.\"\n\nFive dragons closed their eyes, bouncing in place with the boundless energy of the very young. Apparently, \"still\" was not an option.\n\n\"Now, open your eyes. Point to the wriggling line. That isss a magnetic wrinkle.\"\n\nA young dragon squinted into the sky, struggling to keep both eyes open while he searched with inner sight. He pointed. \"There!\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"Well done. Now, find ten more magnetic wrinkles. Then we will work on energy pearls.\"\n\nShadows shifted as the sun moved across a cloudless sky. \"Time for a break!\"\n\nThey plopped down and devoured their snacks. Then every set of eyes fastened on Drakor. He assigned a target for each dragonlet. \"Find a magnetic wrinkle near your target. Now, feel the energy in the sky. Pull this into your open hand.\"\n\nMinutes later, each dragon held a glowing pearl, an energy ball that hovered just above their claws.\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Pull in more sky energy. Grow your lightning ball.\"\n\nSoon each dragonlet held blinding light that twisted wildly, reaching for the sky. Their eyes glowed with excitement that nearly matched the energy they held.\n\n\"Find a magnetic wrinkle near your target. Wait for the wrinkle to move over the target. Then throw the lightning. It will be drawn to the wrinkle.\"\n\nFour swords hit the rocky beach, missing the wood. The fifth sword caught the edge of a log, which smoked.\n\nJardor stopped by near the end of practice, as their small wings began to droop.\n\nDrakor whistled a halt. \"Well done. Meet here tomorrow, same time.\"\n\nJardor pointed toward the burnt wood. \"They learn fast.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"They are made of energy, so it isss easy to control energy. We need every set of claws ready to defend. I found large paw prints near our village, and they were not made by dragons.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "MIND QUEST",
                "text": "The sea reflected the flaming reds and orange of sunset. Waves clawed up the sides of the skiff, slipped through the railing, and washed across the deck. Arak adjusted the tiller and tied it off, taking a short break from steering. He kept his long wings furled as cold, salty wind knifed into him.\n\nArak shared a joyous grin with his long-time crewmates. He wiped cold sea spray off his golden scales and shouted above the wind, \"We're making good time!\" The skiff was their floating home. This time it carried four golden dragons, two small octopi, and three ice dragons.\n\nTaron walked carefully on the slippery wood, with his golden wings folded tight against his back. His grin was as fierce as the sky. \"This is perfect!\"\n\nDorali flicked her golden tail up and down, in a perfect rhythm. \"There's nothing else like it. I could stay here forever.\"\n\nSlanting rays sparkled off Karoon's golden scales. He wrapped a line around the cleat and made neat coils with the remaining rope. \"It is perfect. I feel completely of this world, like I'm living inside both sea and sky.\"\n\nThe other dragons turned as one to stare with wide eyes.\n\nArak clapped Karoon on the back. \"Now you understand.\"\n\nDorali grinned. \"That's exactly how it feels.\" She put her hands out, claws back, in the ice dragon way.\n\nKaroon smoothly met her hands, claws back. He gazed into her eyes as if they were the only two dragons in the world.\n\nArak smiled. Dorali stood tall and proud, no longer trying to hide her scars from the world. Karoon had grown from a bully into a solid dragon, and Dorali's persistent suitor. Would she accept him as her mate?\n\nScree rested in a water-filled tub that was bolted to the deck. She colored her head and mantle to match the evening sky, while her arms became rolling sunset waves. \"Sky and sea connect beautifully . . .\"\n\nArak finished, \". . . like dragons and octopi.\" He stared out at the waves, which rippled up and down as far as the eye could see. \"This surface is forever in motion, as if the sea itself is alive.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"The sea is alive. Often peaceful, sometimes dangerous, always lovely.\"\n\nSuddenly, the air felt lighter. This was a severe weather warning! Arak closed his eyes and concentrated on the magnetic lines. They sparkled like a field of fireflies on a warm summer evening. Fierce storms were brewing, but where? \"Taron, take over while I check the hold.\" He secretly signed, \"I need to check to the north.\"\n\nTaron looked him in the eye as he secretly signed, \"Don't travel too far. Nobody knows what would happen if you abandon your body for too long.\"\n\nArak clapped his friend on the shoulder. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\nAs a dragonlet, Arak had quested for hours in trance, his body limp. He even forgot to eat! When he mind-traveled, he saw what was really there; the adventure drew him on and on. No one knew why Arak stayed in trance, lost to the world, so he was bullied as a worthless \"Dreamer\". But Taron stuck by him, and now his friend was one of the very few who knew about this secret gift.\n\nAs Arak turned to leave, Taron reminded him, \"Return soon.\"\n\nArak nodded. His friend understood the dangerous lure of this gift, even though Arak was the only dragon who could actually explore while in trance. He flung open the hatch and dropped down to the floor, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.\n\nSunset glowed down through a crystal cone set in the deck. This caught the sky and sent it below, filled the hold with fiery light. The walls glowed with aqua light from Orm's fungi, as if the sea had flowed in through the hull.\n\nGolden dragons were all moving to the New World, so their only skiff was packed full for each voyage. Dragons took turns crammed into a dark hold. Now, the crystal cone and glowing walls added welcome light. But this trip was different. They were traveling north along the coast to return their three ice dragon guests. With so few travelers, Arak could have privacy while he mind-traveled.\n\nHe made a quick check for leaks, feeling the walls for dampness while looking for warped boards or dark water stains. Arak sighed with relief. No leaks. Then he closed the overhead door, sat down, and gazed into his aquamarine trance-stone. His body went limp as his trance-mind rose up.\n\nThe skiff fell away and he sped north, questing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "When Arak's mind returned to his body, he woke to a darker hold. He stashed his globe and quickly climbed out. The fiery skies had changed as the sun slipped away. Evening waves reflecting a later sunset, gleaming like precious copper.\n\nArak quietly told Taron, \"There's a powerful storm not far to the north. We must head for shore now. We're not too far from that cove you found.\"\n\nTaron nodded, turning the tiller. \"Weather's unpredictable at sea, and even more since those volcanoes erupted.\"\n\nStars appeared just as they reached the cove. Then storm clouds raced across the sky, hiding these lights.\n\nTaron eyed the thick, dark clouds and thumped his tail with satisfaction. \"We made it here just in time.\"\n\nArak looked over the side of the skiff, where flashes from glowing sea life lit the waves. \"The sky's dark, but the sea sparkles. Let's anchor for the night and set crab traps.\"\n\nScree signed, \"I need to stretch my arms in the sea. Orm and I can hunt and make another fish survey.\" She clambered out of her tub and slipped across the cold, wet deck, dragging a mesh bag.\n\nScree flattened her body, slid under the railing, and formed her head into a point. She dove straight down, parting the sea without a splash.\n\nOrm followed close behind. He fell overboard in his usual way, sending up a small wave.\n\nArak flicked his tail nervously as his friends disappeared below the waves. They were armed and clever, but new territories had new dangers. He'd feel much better when Scree and Orm were safely back on board."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Scree turned white with shock as she hit the water. \"It's colder here than last year.\"\n\nOrm turned black and covered his body with lacy white snowflakes. \"Definitely.\" Then they twirled down together.\n\nScree adjusted the mirrors in her skin cells to catch the dwindling light. She pointed up toward the surface. \"You always make waves.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Just like you.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"How?\"\n\n\"I change the sea, if only for a moment. Your waves change the pod and the clan.\"\n\nScree pointed to the anemones around her mantle. \"You change the pod with your farms and inventions.\" Her necklace of living flowers glowed in violet and rose, while Orm's anemones glowed in bright teal and orange. Did this light help Orm enjoy his visits to the dangerous depths?\n\nScree had often explored the abyss, alone, bringing food to attract glowing fish and see by their light. Now she could bring her own light to better join this unique world.\n\nDarkness closed in around her as they sank deeper into the sea, and the flowers seemed to glow brighter. Scree grinned. This could start a new fashion! Anemones were as beautiful as the abalone armbands the octopus dancers wore. Imagine dancing in the dark at a New Moon Festival while glowing with sea life.\n\nAs they drew near the seafloor, Scree's eyes bulged and she pointed. \"Look!\"\n\nA ghostly arm reached down through the frigid water. The sea icicle stretched longer and longer until a twisted claw touched bottom. Then a frosty line raced along the dark seafloor. Starfish and sea urchins scattered frantically, but the ice ran faster. Sparkling fur sped across the floor and caught them. Many died in this crystal path of death.\n\nScree hovered above the icy ground. \"Tarm spoke of this. These crystals are far colder than normal ice.\"\n\nOrm stared. \"Tarm, the giant squid? He's right. We need a safer place to land.\"\n\nThey pulsed south, keeping one eye pointed toward the dangerous brinicle.\n\nScree swiveled her other eye in all directions, hunting. \"I feel the clicking of crabs, but there aren't many fish talking. Where are they?\"\n\n\"Scree, even in this cold I can check chemicals, and the ones here aren't dangerous to fish.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"We'll need to follow the fish route to find the place where they disappear. Then we can learn what's happening.\"\n\nHours later, Scree and Orm pulsed back to the skiff. They tied their catch bags to ropes that hung down the stern, into the sea. Then Scree pulled a cord that rang the bell, announcing their return. They could climb up the octopus ladder that was fastened to the side, but riding up was much faster.\n\nArak lowered buckets and pulled them up, one at a time. He sighed with relief when they were both safely aboard. \"Welcome back!\" Then he glanced over the stern. \"What did you find?\"\n\n\"Pink sea cucumbers and red crabs. And it's colder than ever. Deadly frost hunts along the seafloor.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Dawn painted both sea and sky in glowing shades of amber. Arak held the tiller and skiff-flew north, plunging across leftover storm waves. His eyes were drawn to the flaming colors of another spectacular sunrise. \"It's brighter than ever!\"\n\nDorali nodded. \"Ever since the odd green skies disappeared, all we see are reds and orange. This change must be from the volcanoes, but I miss the purple and rose colors.\"\n\nA white dragonlet walked over to Dorali, automatically lifting her feet to anticipate the rising deck.\n\nDorali nodded approvingly. \"You still have your sea legs.\"\n\nJordana smiled shyly. \"I skiff-flew before I could run. I love the sea.\" The youngster trembled and looked down at the deck. \"I hope I can visit, when my wings grow longer and I can fly . . . Will you remember me?\"\n\nDorali wrapped her wings around Jordana. \"No one will ever forget you. What's really bothering you?\"\n\nJordana flicked her tail nervously and whispered, \"I have always lived with golden dragons. I do not know ice dragons. Will I act right? Will they like me?\"\n\nDorali sighed. \"I do understand. It's hard to feel different. You learned our ways easily, so you'll learn the ways of ice dragons. But it's alright if a part of you is always a bit different. A field with only one kind of flower would be boring.\"\n\nA smile lit her face like lightning within clouds. \"Flower?\" She giggled. \"I am not a flower.\"\n\nDorali touched foreheads with the youngster. \"You're unique, and I'll miss you more than you know.\"\n\nJordana straightened her small wings. \"As soon as I can fly, I will find a way to visit.\"\n\nThe skiff jerked suddenly, caught by an unexpected wave. Jordana's dam grabbed the railing in a death grip and stared to the west, flicking her long white tail uneasily. There was nothing to see but starlit water.\n\nArak moved closer to the dam. \"Don't worry. We're skiff-flying along the coast, close enough to find shelter if we need to outrun a storm. We'll get you safely home in another day or two.\"\n\nThe dragon-dam turned to face Arak but kept a tight grip on the railing. \"I have never seen our new home.\"\n\nHe pointed northwest. \"Your village is near an old volcano, and there's a lake with huge fish. I think you'll like it.\"\n\nScree pulled up higher in her tub and peered at the waves. \"It's the season for squid journeys, so we could meet these giants again.\"\n\nOrm shuddered as he glanced overboard from his tub. \"I'd prefer a trip without that particular pleasure.\"\n\nTaron flicked his tail nervously. \"So would I.\"\n\nDorali set a tray down on a low table, and every nose turned toward the scented steam.\n\n\"Hot chocolate!\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Grab a mug. This wind speeds our journey, but it steals the warmth.\" She gave small cups to Scree and Orm before taking her own mug.\n\nJust then, two long, reddish brown snakes rose up from the sea and slithered over the railing. The skiff shook as if caught in a sudden storm.\n\nDragons grabbed for anything solid as the skiff tilted back and forth. Hot chocolate spilled onto the deck, adding a sweet scent to the smells of polished wood and seawater.\n\nA huge yellow eye glowed up through the water. Then another. Two giant squid surfaced, each longer than the skiff.\n\nArak held tight to the rigging as the skiff pitched wildly. Why did their monstrous friends need to be so dangerously playful? Fortunately, the hold was heavily weighted with rocks. This ballast and the deep keel gave the dragon skiff great stability, to keep it from flipping over.\n\nThe ice dragons seemed to turn a whiter shade of snow, and their eyes were huge.\n\nArak signed to Scree, \"Our dragon guests have never seen anything bigger than their own kind.\"\n\nScree rolled her eyes. \"How could they? Nothing on land is bigger than an ice dragon!\" She climbed up a ramp arm over arm, using her suction cups, and hung three arms over the side. Scree made a series of red and yellow spots on her skin, her version of squid lights. \"Veera and Tarm. How good to see you. How do you find us?\"\n\nThree of Scree's arms made spots as she spoke with the squid, while two more arms translated the spot-words for dragons and Orm.\n\nVeera grinned while yellow and red lights flashed along her speaking arms. \"Your floating island is easy to find. The sea is full of eyes.\" The squid's long mantle flushed with subtle colors.\n\nScree focused one eye on Veera's intended light message. Her other eye tracked the squid's posture and mantle colors. Veera was laughing!\n\nScree made more message spots. \"The sea is full of squid eyes?\"\n\nVeera's arms sparkled with lights. \"Squid are everywhere. The sea is our home. An ancient shark sends you a message.\"\n\n\"You didn't eat it?\"\n\nVeera shook her head. \"Squid don't eat this shark. It's too interesting and wise, like you.\"\n\n\"I'm interesting and wise?\"\n\n\"You're interesting. I'm not sure about wise.\" Veera's mantle flushed with colors.\n\nScree matched these colors on her own body, joining the squid's laughter.\n\nVeera's entire body turned shock-white for a split second. \"You understood! Perhaps you are wise, too.\"\n\nScree shrugged her octopus shoulders in a dragonly way. \"Wisdom is difficult to judge. What did the shark say?\"\n\n\"The seafloor is shaking in the east, so another island is ready to hatch. This shark has studied the night sky for many generations of squid. A huge star-stone is coming. It may hit the sea or start fires on land. Warn your sky-swimmer friends.\"\n\nScree twirled her arms nervously. How could they prepare for such things? \"Please thank him for the warning. What have you learned?\"\n\nVeera flashed her lights to answer. \"Sunsets are brighter, like a swarm of red krill. The world is colder. Some fish died when the volcanoes exploded. But something new is killing the fish, and we don't know what. Tell us when you find it. Also, squid are hunting beyond the abyss. We reminded them of the treaty, but be wary.\"\n\nScree straightened her arms. \"Warn them to be wary. If squid attack, we'll capture them and make them glow.\"\n\nTarm rippled with laugh colors. \"That's a fate worse than death. The ice is growing again, instead of breaking apart. I miss riding the thunder waves, when ice mountains fall into the sea.\"\n\nVeera gave a ferocious grin, a fearsome sight. \"It's time for us to hunt.\" She flashed red and yellow lights in the traditional squid greeting-farewell.\n\nScree answered with bright red and yellow spots, \"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\"\n\nArak waved farewell as the squid disappeared. \"Scree, I'm glad you're aboard to talk with them.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Giant squid are interesting. They glow brightly through life. But we should make more language skins in case they visit when I'm not aboard.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"Yes. But, somehow, they always seem to know when you are here.\"\n\nZardan, Drakor's sire, was staring down into the sea. \"I wish I could see deeper.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"I do, too. An entire world is hidden beneath these waves. It's the realm of octopi and giant squid.\"\n\nThe next day, dawn burned with golden flames. Arak gazed at the fiery sea, awash with reflected sky colors. \"I love how the sea captures the sky. Taron, we should reach the ice dragon shore in a day or two, but we need more fresh water now.\"\n\nTaron pointed northwest. \"We can anchor in that cove with the stream.\"\n\nArak stretched and folded his wings. \"There are clams in the sea and wild carrots in the meadow. Let's gather food for the welcome feast.\"\n\nAn hour later, they anchored near the shore. This cove had towering, black rock islands and impressive tides. Arak set three storm anchors to keep the skiff from crashing against the rocks. He signed to Scree and Orm, \"Could you hunt on the reef?\"\n\nScree grabbed her mesh bag. \"I could use the exercise. Orm, we can do another fish survey.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"The tide's still flowing out and should turn back in a couple hours. Perfect.\"\n\nThey slipped overboard together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Scree relaxed into the pull of the bitterly cold current, and was swiftly carried offshore. When the current lost its strength, she pulsed to the rocky reef with Orm.\n\nThis place was eerily quiet, with no sounds to paint a picture of the reef's residents. Scree poked between rocks and checked for movement beneath the sand. She spied the beady black eyes of a stone crab, hidden beneath the ledge. She curled her arms, ready to strike.\n\nThe eye-skin behind her head caught a streak of blue.\n\nAs Scree whipped around, a wave of water rushed over her. Suddenly, she was in the jaws of a shark! Her intelligent arms sprang into action, pushing into the shark's gills on both sides of its head.\n\nThe shark shook its head violently from side to side, trying to shake her arms loose. It couldn't breathe. Scree pushed her arms deeper into the gills, denying it new oxygen-water.\n\nDesperate to breathe, the shark released her.\n\nScree jerked her arms out of the gills. She shot ink directly into the shark's face, confusing its sense of smell. Then, hidden by this dark cloud, she jetted away.\n\nScree squeezed her boneless body partway under a rock. Her skin instantly crumpled to match, turning gray with crusty pink patches of algae. In the blink of an eye she disappeared in plain sight. She held as still as the rock she resembled, as still as death.\n\nThe shark shook its head, trying to clear out the ink. Then it prodded the reef with its pointed nose, peering beneath rocks, searching. Scree stopped sucking water in through her siphon as she held her breath.\n\nThe shark was a sleek cylinder, perfectly built for speed. It swam in tight circles around the hidden prey, searching. But all it caught was the light that gleamed on its bright, silvery sides. Finally, the shark tore away, thrashing its tail angrily.\n\nA nearby rock morphed into an octopus. Orm smoothed his skin and squirted over. \"Scree, that was too close.\"\n\nThe Scree-rock took a deep breath, changed back, and twined arms with her mate. \"Yes. And too fast. There was no time for a ride. That was a young mako shark, the fastest of them all! They can leap a dragon's length out of the sea.\"\n\nOrm rolled his eyes. \"Really? You want to ride another shark? Riding the waves would be safer, and looks like just as much fun.\"\n\nScree's eyes grew brighter. \"Orm! You just said surfing was fun!\"\n\nOrm grinned. \"Not precisely. Just as much fun.\"\n\nScree turned toward the distant shore. Waves crashed, slipped back, and crashed again, with this eternal song. \"When we left our home, we also left the land of the golden dragons. You said that if our flying friends moved here too, we'd fly the waves together to celebrate.\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"True.\"\n\nScree stroked his arm gently. \"This is the perfect place. We'll start with small waves. Then we can shoot through the tunnels!\"\n\nOrm gave a half smile. \"Yay.\"\n\nScree covered her skin with cresting waves in shades of happy-green. \"After we hunt, we can tie our bags to the skiff and still have time to surf the sea.\"\n\nOrm turned both eyes toward the distant, crashing shore. \"What will be, will be. First, we hunt.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"And do a quick fish survey. Then we can hunt up another shark to ride.\"\n\nOrm rolled his eyes.\n\nScree laughed. \"We'll see Drakor soon. I wonder how he's doing.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "PLAYING WITH FIRE",
                "text": "Drakor soared high on the currents, circling, searching the sea below. Afternoon rays slanted across the waves, adding a golden glow. He shivered as wispy clouds streamed across his wings, washing them in cold, wet air. When would they arrive?\n\nDrakor tasted the salty air, recalling his journeys across sea and sky. He smiled with the memories and added two words to his favorite undersea greeting: \"May you surf the currents of the sea and sky forever.\"\n\nA small, silvery-white fin appeared on the horizon.\n\nDrakor snapped his tail as it grew into a huge, triangle skiff-wing, flying across the waves toward the shore. The skiff slowed as it entered the cove, a protected circle of sea that was nearly surrounded by the rocky shore. A narrow, wooden dock reached out from the land, waiting.\n\nDrakor dove straight down and landed beside Jardor. \"The dragons are here! Sound the drum!\"\n\nBOOOM! BOOOM! BOOOM! The dragon-sized drum thundered three times, rumbling through Drakor's body. White wings filled the sky like early snow as ice dragons flocked to the shore. The triple beat announced the arrival of guests and, soon, a welcome feast. No dragon ignored this signal!\n\nRemnants of their crude shelters dotted the rocky beach. These had been hastily made from anything they could scavenge. The largest boulders remained, but death waves stole the rest. These remnants marked the spot where the clan landed after that long, terrible flight.\n\nDrakor shuddered at the memory. His wings felt like burning ice, growing heavier with each stroke. But the burden of leading the clan into the unknown was heavier still.\n\nHe had shocked the dragons by defeating Mardor, their long-time leader. Then he led the disbelieving clan away from their doomed island, while his wounds still bled from the challenge fight. He followed the stars and magnetic lines, monitoring their position and storms. They flew high in the wind-stream, miles above the ground, safely above most storms. Flying with the wind shortened their time, but it was bitterly cold, well below freezing.\n\nDrakor chose the fastest route, but their flight to the New World was still dangerously long, even for ice dragons. And there was no place to stop and rest.\n\nDrakor flew point, trying to prove his worth; a series of \"V\" formations spread out behind him. Breaking the sky-trail was tiring work, but this made an easier path for those who followed. Despite the bitter cold, his muscles burned with the strain. When his wing strokes faltered, Jardor moved up beside him to take his place. Drakor nodded and slipped back, grateful for the reprieve.\n\nThe dragons flew nonstop, hour after hour. Dragon-lords took turns carrying the heavy, flightless dragonlets in slings. They worked in groups of four, trading off in the sky as they flew.\n\nThe ice dragons left their island home just before dawn. They snacked while flying and stretched their arms back again, streamlined to fly faster. The dragons flew all that day and through the night. The sun rose again, and still they flew! In all their legends, dragons had never flown so far without stopping.\n\nDrakor was exhausted and half-frozen, flying as if dead. The sea below was a flat, gray-green circle, and they were always in the center. This never-changing view numbed his mind while frost numbed his body.\n\nThen the beach appeared. This solid surface was more glorious than a feast! They could finally land.\n\nDrakor snapped out of his reverie when the skiff reached the dock. The shore had a salty-dead smell, the eternal scent of the sea, which triggered memories of skiff-flying with friends.\n\nArak, his golden dragon friend, tossed sausage-shaped cushions over the side. This protected both skiff and dock as he managed a soft landing. He leapt onto the pier and fastened ropes around pillars, securing the skiff. He called to the crew, assigning watch duty.\n\nJordana walked down the narrow plank from skiff to dock, bouncing cheerfully as it bent beneath her, eyes bright with interest. The dam followed close behind, sighing with relief when she stepped onto solid land. Then she stumbled.\n\nDorali caught her arm. \"Your legs are still walking with the sea, moving with the waves. Take small steps. You'll soon have your land legs.\"\n\nDrakor stared at a dragon flying from the skiff to the shore. His crippled sire was flying!\n\nZardan landed gracefully beside him. He touched foreheads in the respectful manner of golden dragons. \"It isss good to be back.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes glistened with emotion as a tragic memory met overwhelming happiness. He owed so much to the golden dragons, and to Scree. Years ago, Zardan was buried in an avalanche. Drakor was just a small dragonlet, but he kept digging until he freed his sire from the snow and rocks.\n\nBut Zardan was crippled, and the clan considered him a useless burden. Unable to fly, he would have died with their island when the Volcano erupted. Instead, Drakor's friends saved and healed his sire. Zardan once again had the freedom of the skies!\n\nMerika greeted Zardan. Then she met Drakor's eyes. \"This isss why I must leave, to learn the healing magic.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I know.\" He gazed at the skiff that brought his sire and clan members. Soon, this skiff would leave with the one friend he needed most. His tail drooped to the ground.\n\nArak landed and bowed respectfully to the leader. When Drakor bowed back, dragons rustled their wings in irritation. Some whispered loudly that the leader of ice dragons, the biggest dragons of all, should never bow to anyone!\n\nArak raised one eye ridge.\n\nDrakor signed silently, \"They do not fully appreciate what you have done for us, and I am not quite the leader they expect.\"\n\nA short glide away, a cluster of huge dragon-lords stood wing-to-wing, watching. These were the oldest ice dragons, nearly twice Arak's size and all scarred from fights. Mardor was the biggest of them all. He stood tall and proud with wings stiffly folded, as if he was carved from ice.\n\nArak nodded pleasantly to the group. The dragons ignored him except for Mardor, who narrowed his eyes and glared back. Arak said quietly, \"He really hates me.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail. \"Yes. He knows you helped me survive. But he hates me more. I took away what he loves most, his power. His anger isss like a Volcano, ready to explode.\"\n\nArak shuddered. \"Do you ever wish Mardor had not survived the flight here?\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"I am the leader and he isss a member of the clan. I do not want him hurt, but I do not think he feels the same about me.\" He studied the hulking figure. \"He isss the biggest dragon ever, and he isss looking for a way to challenge me. I do not know if I can win another fight.\"\n\nArak cocked his head sideways. \"But you do have a plan?\"\n\nDrakor's eyes brightened and he gave a deep, booming laugh. \"Yes. You and Scree taught me that much.\" He nodded toward the skiff, feeling a strong magnetic pull. \"You brought the rest of our lodestones?\"\n\nArak grinned and clapped him on the back, in the rough, ice dragon way. \"Yes. You need them for a proper Winter Festival.\" Arak pulled a clear quartz jar from his sack, filled with blue-green powder. \"This gift is from Arafine, from one leader to another. It's more of the crushed copper rock from our mine.\"\n\nArak took a second jar from his sack. Six-sided, metallic gray crystals showed through the clear sides. \"This is from me. I struck a rare vein of selenium crystals. They burn true blue, like a clear winter sky. Use this for a special fire.\"\n\nDrakor cradled both jars. \"These are perfect! Blue isss the color of freedom.\" He handed Arak a box carved from fragrant wood. \"I too have been playing with fire, and not just about fights.\"\n\nArak stared at the lid. \"The whorl in this wood grain looks like a flying dragon! Dorali's right. Your art always includes something natural.\" He slid the lid off and peered inside. \"What's this?\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"Iron filings, from a star-stone in the ice sheet. These will add golden sparks to your fire, the color of your scales.\"\n\nArak's eyes grew wide. \"Thank you! I've never found a star-stone. If you find any more, they'd make great trade items.\"\n\nDrakor looked toward the distant glacier. \"These star-stones are pure iron, and dark, so the sun heats the stones. They melt the ice, sink into it, and are hidden below the surface. We hunt for them with magnetic sight.\"\n\nDorali joined them. She gave Drakor a small bag and signed, \"If you must fight, chew three of these candies first. Orm helped. He says it's more efficient than the tea you drank before your last fight.\"\n\nDrakor opened the bag and his eyes lit up. Chocolate! Then his nose wrinkled at the unexpectedly sharp scent. He gave a lopsided grin. \"Chocolate candy with bitter herbs. Only Orm could think of this. Thank him for me.\"\n\nDorali shook her head. \"You can thank him yourself. Scree and Orm are aboard.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes glowed. \"I can visit after the feast. I have missed all of you!\" He raised his wings high and waited, making sure he had everyone's attention. Then he bowed to the golden dragons. \"This feast celebrates the return of our ice dragons. Thank you for bringing them safely home. Now, fill the feasting table!\"\n\nDrakor grinned as dragons hurried to comply. This was the one command he could give and expect instant obedience, like a proper leader.\n\nThe rough table was on a high ridge within sight of shore. It was hastily assembled from large stones fitted between boulders. But the plates, bowls, and platters were newly carved from stone or wood.\n\nIce dragons brought out their traditional foods first. There were platters piled high with fish and huge bowls of colorful lichen salads topped with creamy pine nuts. Next were New World treats: nuts mixed with wild green apples and bright red cranberries. Golden mushrooms were sliced thin and paired with small lake clams.\n\nHuge wooden buckets sat on the stony ground by the far end of the table. Most held cold stream water, but five had spiced, honey-sweetened, Sassafras root drink. This was their favorite New World beverage.\n\nGolden dragons placed their contributions on the table. Three platters were piled high with snow crabs, caught during their last stop. A bowl with golden-brown mushrooms was decorated with sprigs of rosemary and mint. Five platters held scraped wild carrots in their many colors: magenta, yellow, white, and the more common deep purple. These carrots were arranged in colorful patterns. One platter had a sunburst design, one had a fanciful snowflake pattern, and three had colorful patterns of jagged lightning.\n\nDrakor flicked his tail happily. He had missed the artistic feasting of golden dragons.\n\nArak added serving plates with food from Scree and Orm. These had clams, crab claws, and seaweed in the tastiest colors: gold, red, and purple.\n\nTempting aromas filled the air. Many of Drakor's age-mates opened their wings wide, making an arched display. This signaled an acceptance of change, of their new home, and of Drakor as leader.\n\nArak nodded toward the stretched wings.\n\nDrakor smiled sadly. \"The younger dragons accept me and our new home, but they remember only the hungry years on our island. For them, this food isss reason enough to move. But my sire taught me our legends and shared stories from his youth. I know what the older dragons miss so much. They miss the good memories and the hope for a better future, in the home of our ancestors. And now that hope isss gone.\"\n\nDrakor turned to the waiting crowd and raised his wings high. \"Today, we feast on food from land and sea! Golden dragons also brought chocolates, one for each of us, as a guest gift.\" He ceremoniously added this bowl to the center of the table and nodded to his second-in-command.\n\nJardor struck the drum three times.\n\nDragons filed past the feasting table, commenting on the variety of food and artistic displays. Then they lined up at the head of the table on each side, grinning, snapping their tails.\n\nAs the leader, Drakor went first. His in-commands were next, and the guests. Then the rest of the dragons filed past the food, carefully selecting their proper portion from the bowls and platters. After years of hunger, this habit was deeply ingrained.\n\nWhen the plates were empty and stacked, Drakor raised his wings. \"It isss time to trade.\"\n\nSilent circles formed, with the tallest dragons standing in the back while those in the closest rings sat on the ground. Drakor, Arak, and Dorali were in the center, surrounded by an audience that was as still as ice, watching.\n\nArak and Dorali spread their items across the stony ground. There were large sacks with starchy tubers, colorful carrots, or salty red seaweed. Next were five small jars of golden honey, a bowl filled with gleaming pearls, and chocolate.\n\nDrakor smiled. \"That isss even more food than I had hoped for.\" He pointed to the pearls. \"And Orm has been busy.\"\n\nA young dragon whispered loudly, \"Honey and chocolate!\"\n\nIce dragons placed items opposite the golden dragon items. First were three emerald-green armbands that sparkled brighter than diamonds. These were carved from a rare mass of solid garnet, and they matched the green rim on Dorali's golden scales.\n\nArak eyed the arm bands. \"It's the exact shade of our green lightning.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"We use blue, you use green. If an ice dragon-lady accepts blue lightning from a dragon-lord, they are mated for life.\"\n\nIce dragons added three piles of Volcano stones that sparkled in the afternoon light: emerald-green, ruby-red, and sapphire-blue. Some of these gems were larger than a dragon's fist! Next were five agate bowls that were cleverly carved, using the natural rainbow swirls to suggest dragons. These bowls were polished as smooth as melting ice. Smoked fish fillets were piled high. These were wrapped in hemp, and a magnet for dragon noses. Then came small gemstone jars, carved thin to be light.\n\nArak's eyes glowed as the fish skins were stacked high. \"They're huge, perfect for skiff-wings. I'd like to trade first for all three of the green arm bands. Taron and I have traveled nonstop, moving our clan to the New World. These bands will help our mates remember us.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"And the third arm band?\"\n\nArak glanced toward the skiff. \"I have a friend who will want this.\"\n\nDrakor's smile grew into a broad grin. \"I think I know this dragon. For one jar of honey, you can have all three. What do you want for that chocolate?\"\n\n\"Half of the smoked fish and all the fish skins.\"\n\nArak and Drakor made the exchange.\n\nIce dragons watched with eager eyes while whispering, \"Chocolate!\"\n\nDorali held each of the agate bowls up to the sun, one at a time. Light glowed through them in cheerful colors, like earth rainbows. \"These are beautiful. Our clan should see your art. What do you want for them?\"\n\nDragons grinned at the compliment while Drakor named the barter price.\n\nThey traded the small gemstone jars for pearls. \"Scree will want these for the Healers.\"\n\nTrading continued, like a game, until all the items had swapped sides.\n\nArak bowed formally. \"The items we traded for will be carried home and shared.\" He looked from the impressive pile on his side to the much smaller pile on Drakor's side. He secretly signed, \"You had many more items, yet the exchange was even. You worked that out perfectly.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"Your items are rare and precious. This has been an excellent exchange.\" He silently signed, \"In truth, I owe you more than I could ever give. And so does the clan.\" He tilted his head toward Mardor's dark scowl. \"Though some dragons would not agree.\"\n\nThe air grew cooler as the sun sank low in the sky. Drakor assigned dragons to carry Arak's items to the dock. By the time everything was loaded onto the skiff, a golden-orange sunset glowed along the western horizon.\n\nDrakor raised his wings high. \"It isss time to light the festival fire. Our new home isss rich in firewood. We light this fire to celebrate the safe arrival of our clan members. We also celebrate trade between ice dragons and golden dragons.\"\n\nThe clan was silent, staring at the logs that were piled high within a circle of rocks.\n\nDrakor hid a satisfied smile. Their old island home had biting winds, with only a few stunted trees. There was little wood to burn. But this was a forested land, and fires were a new treat.\n\nDrakor channeled the sky, sending a thin lightning sword into the wood pile. Tongues of flame blossomed and spread. Soon a warm fire blazed in yellows and orange, with bright red sparks. Then he tossed on branches from wild apple and birch trees, adding delicious aromas to the fire. Scented smoke and cheerful crackling filled the air. This was another new experience for the clan.\n\nAs the sun disappeared, the fire blazed brighter. Dragons leaned in, flaring their nostrils to catch the smoky, dragonny scents. Their eyes reflected the flames, glowing golden-gray.\n\nStars gleamed in the darkness. Golden curtains of light rippled and danced to an unheard song. Then glowing green ribbons swirled exuberantly across the night, like the flight paths of mating dragons. Drakor flicked his tail in surprise. Where did that thought come from?\n\nHe gave a secret signal to Jardor, and all his in-commands left. Minutes later they returned. Each carried a basket filled with old, weathered pinecones. The cones had a normal, piney smell but an odd, blue-green sheen.\n\nArak eyed the baskets. \"Is this what I think it is?\"\n\nDrakor signed, \"I soaked these cones in copper salts.\" He stretched his wings slowly, moving as if he was simply stiff, and grinned. Stretched wings were the new sign for change.\n\nArak signed back, \"Scree says that change must start somewhere. This should be interesting.\"\n\nA dragon-dam pointed to the baskets. \"That isss a lot of pinecones. What are they for?\"\n\nDrakor held a cone high. \"Dragons play lightning sword games. Now we can also play fire games. These pinecones make colored fire, for a choosing game.\"\n\nDragons snapped their tails in excitement.\n\n\"A new game!\"\n\n\"How do we play?\"\n\nDrakor began juggling three pinecones, a skill learned from his golden friend, Karoon. He smoothly added a fourth cone to his juggling routine. Dragon eyes gleamed as they followed the flying cones. \"These pinecones burn with blue flame. I will give you a choice, and each of you will have one pinecone to show your choice. If you choose 'No', keep your cone. If most of you keep your cone, the fire will stay orange. That means 'No', and that isss what we will all do.\"\n\nHe stopped juggling, catching each cone as it fell. \"If you choose 'Yes', toss your cone into the fire. If most of you toss your cone into the fire, the color will change to blue. This means most of you choose 'Yes', and that isss what we will all do.\"\n\nEach dragon took one cone from a basket. Mardor glowered as he took his cone. Drakor nodded to himself. His nemesis was more than just a great fighter; he understood the seeds of change within this game. To a dragon like Mardor, this would be the most dangerous game.\n\nWhen everyone held a cone, Drakor raised his wings for silence. \"It isss late. We could stop for the night, or stay longer and share legends. If you think we should not stay, choose 'No' and keep your cone. If you think we should stay and share legends, choose 'Yes' and toss your pinecone into the fire. If enough choose 'Yes', the fire will turn bright blue.\"\n\nMardor looked from dragon to dragon, shaking his head 'no' while shredding his pinecone. Some stared back at him with wide eyes while others scrunched their eye ridges, whispering, \"Why?\" His followers also wore puzzled expressions. But his strongest supporters nodded agreement and, when Mardor threw his shredded cone onto the ground, his cronies followed suit.\n\nThe rest of the dragons looked from their odd, greenish cones to the cheerful orange fire. Then a stream of pinecones flew through the air, landing neatly in the fire. Tendrils of blue flame sprouted and grew together, making a beautiful blue fire, the first the clan had ever seen.\n\nThis fire glowed like the blue lightning that ice dragons made to choose a mate. It was the color of the sky, of freedom. But this fire meant a new kind of freedom, to choose as a group, beyond the decision of the leader.\n\nDrakor felt the warm glow of success all the way down to the tip of his tail. Just as he hoped, the lure of blue fire and starlit storytelling was too much to resist. Dragons wanted to play this new game, so Mardor had failed.\n\nThe seeds of change were planted. How would this change the clan?"
            },
            {
                "title": "LEGENDS",
                "text": "Drakor could not quite hide his grin as he raised his wings exuberantly high. \"You chose blue flames, for storytelling. Arak, would you share a legend?\"\n\nArak walked to the fire and stretched tall. \"The First Golden Dragon was born of Storm. He was made from the four elements of life: Fire, Water, Air, and Land.\" He spoke like a storm, loud and fierce, and his words rumbled through the darkness.\n\nDragons leaned forward, eyes glowing in the firelight.\n\n\"Storm covered our world, shaking it with terrible thunder. Storm was lonely, so he sent a red bolt of lightning through the rain-drenched sky. It burned the golden sand, melting a crater.\"\n\nArak poured golden sand onto the ground, gleaming in the firelight. He held a long branch of red coral, carved like jagged lightning, and swiftly struck the sand. At the same moment he tossed a handful of powder into the fire.\n\nBOOM!!!\n\nThe ice dragons reared back.\n\nArak grinned. This explosive powder was a mix of sulfur, charcoal, and dried lizard poop.\n\n\"A golden dragon-lord leapt out of the crater. Each golden scale had a thin ruby edge that matched the red lightning. The dragon was created from air, rain-water, land, and lightning-fire. He flew as fast as the wind and danced with lightning to honor the Storm.\"\n\nArak wove one hand through the sky as if it was a flying dragon, swooping and spiraling. The dragon-shadows danced across the ground.\n\n\"But the dragon-lord was lonely.\" Arak let his wings droop while his tail sank to the ground. \"So the Storm made a rare shaft of green lightning, the color of new spring leaves.\" He grabbed a jagged rod from his pouch, carved from rare, emerald-green jade. He threw this green lightning into the sand while again using the explosive powder to make thunder.\n\n\"A dragon-lady flew up from the crater. Each of her golden scales had an emerald rim, the color of green lightning. The dragons flew up together into the clouds and danced with the Storm.\"\n\nArak wove two hands in front of the fire, making large, winged shadows move across the ground. The shadow-dragons twirled up into darkness and disappeared.\n\n\"We are born of Storm. A dragon-lord chooses a mate in the Storm dances. He uses red metal powder, like the rim of his scale, to turn a lightning bolt green, like the rim of a dragon-lady scale. Then he tosses this green lightning to a dragon-lady. If she tosses it back, they're mated for life.\"\n\nTaron stepped forward and gave him a large ceramic bowl. The hardened clay had swirls of blue and green, like the sea. Blue-green abalone pearls formed a pattern of cresting waves near the rim.\n\nDrakor held the bowl high, turning so all could see. \"A dragon-dam makes a nest bowl for her egg, following clan tradition. The egg must hatch in a nest that combines land, water, fire and air. The First Dragon was born of these four elements. Now all dragons are born within them. The nest bowl is made of clay, softened by water, and hardened by fire and air. Gemstones are added for special meaning. This ancient magic nurtures the dragonlet.\"\n\nDragon-ladies leaned forward for a closer look at the nest, murmuring approval.\n\nArak bowed. The audience snapped and thumped their tails in thunderous applause.\n\nDrakor added his applause. When the noise finally died down, he raised his wings high. \"Thank you, Arak! Now I will share the legend of the First Ice Dragon.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. This legend was even older than the dragon-sized trees hidden deep in the forest. \"The Volcano rose high above the ice. Lightning crackled through his hot, dark clouds and he ROARED!\" Drakor threw his head back and roared, louder than thunder.\n\n\"White lightning struck the glacier again and again, carving the ancient ice into a solid white body.\" Drakor gathered energy on his claws and threw small lightning swords into the ground near his feet.\n\n\"Dragon scales covered the body like shattered ice on a frozen stream. A jagged ridge ran down the back. The Volcano melted long, smooth wings that flowed out from the ice body. He threw two bolts of black lightning and cut dark eyes into the head. His sculpture was complete, and lifeless.\"\n\nDrakor crouched low and spread his wings wide across the ground, holding as still as an ice sculpture.\n\n\"Then the Volcano gathered white diamonds, made from blood-red fire deep inside his heart. These icy crystals held his fiery spirit. He ground them into sparkling dust and sprinkled this over his sculpture. Diamond dust settled into the rim of each white scale.\"\n\nDrakor held up his massive, eight-sided diamond. This crystal gleamed with inner light, as if it was alive. Then he snapped his wings wide, springing to life with a gale of wind.\n\nDragons leaned into the wind from his wings.\n\n\"The dragon's scales sparkled and her dark eyes glowed with life. She drew in her first frozen breath, sprang into the sky, and flew high above the Volcano. Then she dove back through the dark clouds, flying faster than the wind. The First Dragon was made from the Volcano and ice, as fierce as burning lava and as wild as a winter storm.\"\n\nDrakor bowed. The audience applauded with enthusiastic tail thumps. This was a story they all knew by heart but never tired of hearing.\n\nMardor raised his wing and then waited quietly for Drakor to call on him. \"I, too, have a story to share.\"\n\nDrakor studied the giant. He was never this polite. What was Mardor planning now? Warily, he nodded assent.\n\nMardor strode confidently to the center.\n\nDrakor gritted his teeth when the clan was instantly silent for their former leader.\n\n\"This isss a legend we must never forget, of our three gem-colored lakes: ruby, moonstone-white, and turquoise.\" Mardor held up a large, polished stone as he mentioned each lake gem.\n\nDrakor noted that the stones were of low quality, but the colors matched their old lakes perfectly. These gems had not been found in the New World, so they must be from their island. Mardor must have carried the heavy rocks on his long flight here. But were these legend-stones his personal treasure, or just part of his plan to win back power?\n\nMardor held his stones in the firelight, where they shone like sunlit lakes. Then he slipped them back into his sack.\n\n\"Long ago, the world grew colder. Ice Dragons left the Volcano. After many generations, our past was nearly forgotten.\"\n\nMardor held still, wings drooping and head bowed.\n\n\"Then the clan grew ill. One brave dragon left, flying north, seeking a way back to the Volcano who made them. Surely he would know how to heal them! The dragon-lord followed an ancient rumor. He searched for the secret path of three stones, each the size of three dragons.\"\n\nMardor snaked his head this way and that, as if searching.\n\n\"The dragon-lord found each worn stone. They barely showed above the waves, but were a much-needed place to rest. On the fourth day, he reached our beautiful Volcano Island and landed near three clear lakes.\"\n\nMardor put three polished quartz stones on the ground, matching the clear lakes.\n\n\"A deep voice sounded inside the dragon's head. 'Welcome home. Your journey was long, and your clan suffers. I will create healing waters.' Then the Volcano breathed his smoky breath across the lakes. The first lake turned ruby red, like Volcano blood, like ice dragon blood.\"\n\nMardor held his ruby gem high, and it winked in the firelight.\n\n\"The Volcano said, 'We share the same red blood. You have flown far and are exhausted. Drink of this lake.' The dragon-lord drank with a thirst beyond thirsts, and energy returned to his body.\"\n\n\"The second lake turned icy white, like our scales, but the water was warm like a dragon.\"\n\nMardor held up his shimmering moonstone.\n\n\"The Volcano spoke again. 'You are worried. Drink of this icy warmth. Ice dragons are made of fire and ice. You need both.' The dragon drank again and a deep calm filled his mind.\"\n\nMardor held up his turquoise stone.\n\n\"The third lake turned sky-blue. The Volcano said, 'I gave you wings, for the freedom of the sky. Drink and be healed of spirit.' The dragon drank the blue water and was filled with hope. He flew through the Volcano's smoky breath, spiraling with joy.\"\n\nMardor put his three colored gemstones on the ground, in the order of their lakes.\n\n\"Then the Volcano gave the dragon-lord one last gift. 'Gather the blue berries from the ice-flower plants. Carry them to your clan. Each dragon must eat three berries to heal. Then they may return here, to their true home.'\"\n\nMardor stretched his arms to the east, as if reaching for his perfect home.\n\n\"The dragon-lord bowed and left. Three moons later, his clan followed the stones back to the Volcano, where they lived for generations in health and safety.\"\n\nMardor stood tall. \"We must never forget our Volcano, our precious lakes, or our lovely home.\" He finished with an elegant bow.\n\nTails began thumping, and Drakor joined the applause. This was a well told story. Dragons were gazing to the east, eyes bright with memories, tails drooping. Drakor also missed their island, but he knew it was gone. Mardor had found another way to sow discontent. Did he miss their island as much as he missed his power?\n\nDrakor raised his wings high. \"Arak, thank you for bringing our dragons home. Tomorrow at sunrise, we feast! Then we will all return to our homes, and may the winds be with you.\"\n\nHe motioned to Arak and Dorali. \"There isss something you must see, tonight, before you leave. Follow me.\"\n\nThey glided inland to a small meadow, where tiny yellow stars flashed.\n\nArak smiled at the sparkling display. Then his eyes grew wide. These fireflies were turning their lights on and off at exactly the same time, flashing together. \"How do they manage to all flash at the same time?\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"I think this clan of fireflies could be a living aurora, connected by light, speaking with light.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"That makes as much sense as anything else. I need to get back to the skiff.\"\n\nDrakor turned his head toward the sea, feeling an instinctive pull. \"I'll race you.\" He leapt into the sky, glided to the skiff, and landed neatly on deck. Moments later, Arak and Dorali landed beside him, laughing.\n\nAs soon as Drakor's claws touched the damp wood, his worries slipped away like the tide. Rolling waves and scents of the sea triggered happy memories, back to a time before the strain of being a new leader in a new land. Here were true friends who wanted him to succeed.\n\nDrakor greeted his octopus friends by twining claw-to-arm. He spoke with fluid gestures, grinning with relief: he could still speak proper Octopus. That worried him while he taught this silent language to Merika. Had he used the signs correctly? But she wanted to learn Healing arts from Scree, and he wanted to spend time with his friend before she left.\n\nOrm signed, \"Did you get the chocolates?\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"They look very efficient. Thank you!\" He gave his friend a bag. \"For the marvelous meals you make.\"\n\nOrm felt the lumpy bulbs. \"Garlic! The flavor feels exquisite.\"\n\nDrakor gave three small, clear quartz bottles to Scree. Each had a gemstone stopper: ruby red, sapphire blue, or emerald green. \"To hold your healing potions.\"\n\nScree turned colors, matching each stopper. \"These are perfect!\"\n\nTaron grinned from where he stood near the mast, coiling a line. \"It's good to have you back on board!\"\n\n\"It isss great to be back!\"\n\nKaroon studied his friend. \"You're even taller!\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"I have grown.\" He opened his wings and stretched, with a reach as wide as the skiff.\n\nKaroon thumped him on his back. \"Your wings are enormous! Arak says you might end up fighting Mardor again. You've both grown so he's still bigger. I can help.\"\n\nDrakor automatically adjusted his stance as a sea swell rocked the skiff. He swiveled both ears toward Karoon. \"How?\"\n\n\"I was a dragonlet when my sire left for the star-fires. My dam lost interest in everything, even me, so I got into trouble. I got good at fighting and figured out ways to beat bigger dragons. Mardor will be ready for this fight, and I have some new ideas. I'll show you tonight.\"\n\nScree signed, \"Remember, your plan matters more than your size.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail in surprise and signed, \"How did you know what we are talking about?\"\n\nScree quivered with octopus laughter. \"Dragons sometimes forget to sign while they're talking, so I learned to read dragon jaws. And it was a good guess, since you two always talk about fighting.\"\n\nScree tilted her head sideways, in a dragonly way, using a curled arm to support the weight. \"You beat Mardor once. If you fight again, you can win again.\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"I wish I was that sure I could win.\"\n\nThe skiff jerked against the restraining lines, as if eager to head back to sea. Water sloshed high in the tub, and Scree fastened another arm over the rim. \"I led a battle against three enormous squid that attacked our pod. They were many times our size, yet we won.\"\n\nHer skin cells changed colors faster than lightning as the fight played out across her body screen. Giant squid bashed their powerful arms into the sand. A battered octopus was flung far across the reef. Drakor's eyes were glued to the terrifying images. He had imagined this fight, but the grim reality was far worse.\n\n\"The next battle was inside me, so this fight was harder. I was furious. They killed my friends, a senseless loss. I wanted to give in to hatred, but I stopped myself. We marked the squid and released them, as planned.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"You let them go. That isss hard for an ice dragon to understand.\"\n\nScree smiled. \"Squid are proud, like dragons. They hated that we let them go more than if we killed them.\"\n\nScree looked him in the eye. \"Mardor has deep anger. This could flow into the fight, and into you. Drakor, what will you do when you win? Where will your anger go? What we do changes us and the world around us, like a wave. Anger and hate are dangerous waves that build on each other. They can damage you and the world around you.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"I do not know if I will win, how I will feel, or what I will do.\"\n\nScree twined arm-to-claw with her friend. She signed with two more arms, \"You're a good leader. You can find a way to win both fights.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Dawn bloomed in cheerful colors that did not reflect Drakor's mood. After the feast, he went aboard the skiff and bid farewell to each of the travelers.\n\nLast of all, Merika flew aboard. Her polished scales caught the sunrise colors, sparkling with a golden sheen. A shiver ran down his spine. Merika looked like she belonged with the golden dragons, following her dream. Would she even want to return?\n\nDrakor bid farewell to Merika and flew ashore. He stood on the rocky beach, holding his hands up, claws back. Merika matched them from her place by the rail. The skiff grew smaller and smaller as the wind carried it away. Then all he saw was the sea.\n\nDrakor folded his wings tight, resisting an urge to fly high and watch longer. He had a clan to manage. But a part of him left with Merika, and his snowy scales felt gray.\n\nHe turned away. \"Jardor, could you take over here? I need to check on the dam again.\" Her egg seemed a bit small. Would the hatchling be healthy?"
            },
            {
                "title": "RISING STORM",
                "text": "The rising wind blew cold and fierce. Dark clouds covered the dawn horizon. Then Drakor spied a lone white cloud. No, it moved too fast. He sharpened his gaze and his heart beat faster. A dragon was flying in from the south. Merika! He leapt into the sky and flew to meet her, landing lightly at the edge of the field.\n\nMerika hit the ground hard, staggering as she found her footing. She wore her regular chest pouch and there was a new, bulky bag fastened between her wings.\n\nDrakor flicked his tail in surprise as she stumbled. That backpack must be heavy! He sucked in his breath as her scales caught the light, sparkling like frost on new snow. Then he held out his hands, claws tilted back. \"I missed you.\"\n\nMerika met his hands, claws back. \"I am just visiting.\"\n\nDrakor nodded casually, hiding his disappointment. \"Of course. The welcoming ceremony should start soon.\"\n\nA smile lit her face. \"Thanks for the trance-mind message. I hoped I would be on time. I flew morning 'til sunset for four days and camped on the beaches at night. Some of them glow!\"\n\nDrakor smiled back. \"Trance-mind isss useful, especially over long distances.\" So far, only four ice dragons knew how to speak mind-to-mind. He had trained Jardor and Merika, and his sire learned from Arak. But if Mardor learned, he could plot in even greater secrecy.\n\nMerika took a sweet-scented bag from her chest pouch. \"Arak sent this for the welcome feast.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"Chocolate!\"\n\nAn old dragon-lady landed beside him and bowed low. \"It isss time to form the circles.\"\n\nMerika flexed her wings excitedly. \"The new dragonlet!\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. This would be the first ice dragon to hatch in the New World. He called out to Jardor, \"The hatching isss now! Give the signal!\"\n\nBOOM! BOOM! Two thundering beats of the drum informed the clan. The sky filled with white wings like a winter storm, beating toward the nest.\n\nDrakor joined the flurry of dragons.\n\nThree fierce dragon-ladies made a triangle around the nest, guarding the egg. Volcano gems were tucked into spaces between the dark rocks: topaz-gold, sapphire-blue, and ruby-red. These gems caught the light, flickering like flames.\n\nThe dragon-dam stood with crisply folded wings, eyes glowing as she gazed down at her nest. Her egg was a precious jewel, smaller than normal but perfect. Thick, diamond-shaped scales swirled from top to bottom in a pine cone pattern. The dark bronze shell shimmered with iridescent, red-gold streaks, like a fire opal.\n\nThe dragons formed circles around the nest. Dragon-ladies made the inner rings, standing closer to the nest. Dragon-lords were in the outer circles. They all raised their claws to the sky and stood silent, waiting.\n\nThe egg rocked back and forth while the dragon-dam crooned encouragement. Pecking noises filled the waiting silence. Finally, the tip of a small nose showed through a tiny crack in the shell.\n\nThat was the signal.\n\nSparks crackled up from dragon claws as they called splinters of lightning. They added metals for color, matching the Volcano nest gems. Electric rings of red, yellow, and blue light surrounded the nest like an earthbound aurora.\n\nThe dragon-inside pecked at its shell, but the crack did not grow. The pecking sounded weaker and weaker. Then it stopped.\n\nA desperate silence filled the air, as brittle minutes ticked by.\n\nThen Merika stopped her lightning display. She stepped up to the egg, reached her claws into the tiny crack, and gently pulled the shell apart. A small, damp dragon-lord fell out and lay limp on the nest grass, panting.\n\nThe circles of light stopped. Dragons stared.\n\nA dragon-lord muttered, \"He isss weak. We need strong dragons for a strong clan.\"\n\nMardor snapped his tail with a loud crack. \"He isss a worthless runt. He should have died in the egg.\"\n\nAnother growled, \"She helped him hatch! That isss not our way.\"\n\nThe new dam hung her head, and her wings drooped. \"I am old to be with egg. My mate isss the only dragon who died flying here. Our new home has no hot sands to warm the nest, so I covered my egg with rotting plants. This warmed my dragonlet-within. And he hatched.\"\n\nShe gently stroked the ridge scales of her dragonlet and gazed into his clear gray eyes. \"He isss my first dragonlet, my only dragonlet.\" Her voice dropped to a whisper. \"But he isss weak. I should let him die.\"\n\nMerika shook her head. \"NO. He isss just small. Feed him fish eggs for extra energy. He could grow to be the biggest of us all!\"\n\nMardor scowled. \"The weak should die. It isss our way.\"\n\nMerika threw Drakor a pleading look.\n\nDrakor assumed his most leader-like pose and raised his wings for silence. \"We welcome our newest clan member! Dragons are born of the Volcano.\" He looked from one dragon to the next, meeting their eyes with a confidant stare, forcing them to accept his decision. But inside, he felt as if he had wandered into thick mud that sucked him down.\n\nThis was the first dragonlet to hatch in the New World, and it was weak. This would be called Drakor's Failure, a vindication for every dragon who protested their move here. By clan law the dragonlet should die, yet he had just welcomed him into the clan. Mardor must be thrilled.\n\nA dragon muttered, \"Will all the new dragons be weak?\"\n\nShadows spread across the ground as the dark clouds grew. Drakor glanced at Mardor, who was already talking with the malcontents. His gut churned with worry. More than one storm was brewing.\n\nDrakor raised his wings again. \"Now we will fill the feasting table. Merika brought chocolate for the feast!\" That got their attention as nothing else could. He headed for the table, bringing the restless crowd with him. Soon they were safely away from the new dragonlet, and Merika.\n\nDrakor glanced back. Merika had helped the dragonlet despite their customs, despite the angry dragons. She had also helped with Drakor's crippled sire. He clicked his claws together. Why should the weak or sick be left to die? These dragons might heal and, if not, they still had much to offer. Strong was not everything.\n\nTempting aromas filled the sky as dragons brought food for the celebration. The new feasting table was beside their village. It was a long rectangle, about half as tall as an adult dragon, carved from a rare outcrop of solid garnet. The table was as important as the food that often hid its colorful surface. It was a symbol, a solid sign that this place was their new home.\n\nThe rock had all the garnet colors. Much of the table had blends of yellow, orange, and red garnet, like a flaming sunrise. Green patches sparkled brighter than emeralds, while a rare section had blue and purple garnet. Streaks of pink seemed to swirl in the light, like an aurora.\n\nMost of the rock had been sanded smooth until it gleamed. Clusters of garnet crystals stuck out above the flat surface, like earthy red flowers growing from the table. This natural, untouched element was an important part of their art.\n\nDragons filled the table with long platters of fish. Dragon-sized bowls held festive salads made from sliced roots with nuts, seeds, mushrooms, and bright red berries. Other bowls had a colorful mix of lichens: golden-orange, silvery-gray, green, and bright crimson.\n\nDrakor looked north, toward the rocky region. This was prime lichen territory, a perpetual source of this tough food. It should survive even the most brutal winter. Most lichens were safe to eat, nutritious, and tasted awful.\n\nDrakor signaled his second-in-command to strike the drum.\n\nBOOOM! BOOOM! BOOOM! Three beats rumbled through the air, announcing the feast.\n\nDragons swiftly lined up at the head of the table, on both sides, rustling their wings with excitement. As leader, Drakor went first, followed by his second-in-command. He clicked his claws on the polished rock and smiled. He chose their new village location partly for this garnet mass, to make a gemstone table that nearly matched the one on their island. This would connect their old and new homes each time the clan gathered to eat.\n\nJardor spoke up. \"The table isss perfect, and the food isss even better.\"\n\nDrakor gave a half smile. \"At least something isss as it should be.\"\n\nJardor thumped him on the back. \"And we survived. That isss also good.\"\n\nDrakor's smile grew. \"Yes it isss.\" He added lichen salad to his plate, along with a helping of memories. For more than a year their island Volcano rumbled and stank, warning them to leave. Ocean fish heeded this warning and left. Ice dragons stayed but, without these fish, meals were lean. They scrounged for food, scraping lichens from rocks and branches. The clan remained on that island despite the warnings and their hunger, until he forced them to leave.\n\nDrakor chose a thick slice of smoked fish, noting the pleasant woodsy aroma. He added nuts, seeds, and shredded roots to his lichen salad, hoping to improve the flavor. Then he sat with his three in-commands, who carefully talked about anything but the weak dragonlet.\n\nDrakor chewed his lichen salad. The nuts and seeds barely improved the flavor. He drained an entire mug of tea, trying to wash away the lichen flavors of rotted wood and crumbling rock. Could spices from golden dragons improve the taste?\n\nMardor sat with the oldest, biggest dragons, talking loudly. \"That new hatchling cannot even walk to the feast! Why did Drakor accept him into the clan? Does he want weak dragons? Clan members who can never challenge him? What kind of leader isss he?\"\n\nDrakor ground his teeth. He glanced back toward the nest. Merika and two dragon-dams remained with the new dragonlet, who was too weak for the traditional walk to the feast. They must all be hungry.\n\nJardor said, loudly, \"The feasting table isss full.\"\n\nCranart added, \"This fish isss delicious!\"\n\nDrakor nodded to his friends. \"Thank you. Mardor isss right about one thing. The dragonlet cannot attend this feast, so his protectors will miss this meal. Jardor, could you take over here?\"\n\nDrakor slid the rest of his meal into his chest pouch; maybe he could slip away later and explore. Then he began filling three plates with food. While he was growing up, he saved part of every meal for his crippled sire. It became second nature to feed another dragon. Now he balanced three plates on his arms and walked slowly toward the nest.\n\nDrakor paused not far from the nest, entranced by the peaceful scene. Dragons were sharing their precious journey food with each other and the dragonlet. They shredded the fish into tiny pieces and encouraged him to eat. Most hatchlings were ravenous, greedy, and self-focused. This hatchling ate as if he was too tired to feed, but understood their concerns and wanted to ease their worries.\n\nDrakor gave his first true smile since the difficult hatching. This hatchling would be an interesting addition to the clan.\n\nAs he watched, the clouds above grew thicker, racing across the sky. Lightning sparkled and thunder rumbled. A flare of light caught Merika, and she seemed to glow a brighter shade of white.\n\nDrakor's heart stopped. He stumbled and nearly dropped the plates.\n\nThe dragons turned as one, claws out, ready to fight anything to protect the hatchling.\n\nDrakor cleared his throat. \"I brought you food from the feast.\" But, of course, that must be obvious.\n\nMerika grabbed two of the plates before they could fall. She gave them to the dragon-dams, who accepted the food with wide eyes and quiet murmurs of thanks. One whispered, \"No leader does this.\"\n\nDrakor flinched. No leader had ever done this, and certainly not Mardor. It was an unheard of courtesy. He simply did not fit the leader role.\n\nMerika took the third plate with a proper, formal bow and slid this food into her chest pouch.\n\nDrakor eyed the empty plate. \"You are not hungry? You flew far today.\"\n\nStill not speaking, she shook her head no.\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously. \"Then, could we walk?\"\n\nShe hesitated before nodding. They walked together in silence, to the open grassy field. Then she squared her wings and looked him in the eye. \"What I did with the egg does not follow our rules, but I had to do it.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Of course you did! If you could not rescue a hatchling, then you would not be a Healer.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"I thought you wanted to lecture me, to set me right.\"\n\n\"You are right. You are perfect. Will you fly with me?\"\n\nUnderstanding dawned in her eyes. She hesitated. \"Are you sure? Mardor isss stirring up trouble. Another dragon-lady would be a better choice for you, as leader. What I just did will not help you.\"\n\nDrakor looked back toward the feast. \"Mardor will stir up trouble no matter what I do. This new dragonlet will be a good addition to the clan.\" He held his hands up, claws back, and she met them. Their hands fitted perfectly, just as they always had. \"You are my choice, if I am yours.\"\n\nMerika smiled and leapt off the ground.\n\nDrakor followed and they spiraled up into the sky together, with perfectly matching wing strokes. His worries dropped away with the ground. Soon they were hidden within cold, gray clouds charged with energy. Lightning sparkled all around them. Ozone filled the air with its bright, bracing scent.\n\nLight and shadow flitted across Merika. She caught a small lightning bolt and tossed it. He twirled the bolt on copper claws, making a bright circle. This was a skill learned from his games with golden dragons. He released it safely to the clouds and caught a new bolt.\n\nThey tossed lightning back and forth while Merika added spins and twirls. She must have practiced in the clouds with Dorali. She had learned more than Healing during her visit south!\n\nDrakor felt that his scales must glow with the energy of this game. But it was no game. He took a bottle of cobalt powder from his pouch. This would make bright blue lightning, the sky color that meant freedom, the most precious gift. If Merika accepted this bolt and returned it to him, they were mated for life. They would share freedom together.\n\nDrakor took a deep breath. He pulled the cork from the bottle. Then he caught a new lightning bolt and poured in the powder."
            },
            {
                "title": "THIN ICE",
                "text": "White lightning changed to the color of a bright blue sky. Drakor twirled the bolt while thoughts swirled through his mind. Merika was comfortable in her own scales, content with her life. When she left, he missed her calm wisdom and humor. But did she miss him? And, did she want a mate?\n\nHe took a deep breath and tossed the lightning.\n\nMerika caught the blue bolt neatly and twirled it on her claws, as if considering.\n\nDrakor's heart thudded painfully in his chest. Why was she waiting?\n\nThen she tossed the bolt back.\n\nDrakor's heart beat again with a normal rhythm. He caught the blue lightning, twirled it once, and set it free. They were mated.\n\nDrakor and Merika flew up into the wind-stream, high above the sea of clouds. Clean, cold air rushed past, pelting them with grains of ice. They flew northwest with perfectly matching wing strokes, heading for the Volcano. Ice dragons were forged from fire and ice and so, by tradition, newly mated dragons flew through ice to fire.\n\nAs the sun set, evening colors shone up from below, washing through the clouds. The dragons flew above a misty, glowing carpet of rose and violet. Then sharp, bright stars lit the darkness. Drakor and Merika spiraled about each other, weaving a sparkling path through the night sky. They landed on a weathered plateau beside the mountain.\n\nThis Volcano was silent, with no vivid fires. The bright, living blood had hardened to rock, but the Volcano's gifts remained. Rare diamonds were made in its fiery depths, long ago. Now they would make new gems from the ashes.\n\nThe wind picked up, driving the clouds away. Drakor and Merika feasted beneath curtains of colored light that hung in the sky, rippling in an unknown breeze. They walked wing-to-wing across the wind-swept land, admiring its harsh beauty while gathering a few rare diamonds. Clear, eight-sided crystals had weathered out of the dark rock, sparkling in white, yellow, pink, and pale blue.\n\nDrakor arranged the gems in a pattern that captured the flickering essence of northern lights.\n\nMerika stepped closer and gazed down at the design. \"That isss beautiful.\"\n\nDrakor looked up at the sky with a sad smile. \"Diamonds shine like stars and auroras, like the after-home of dragons. They always reminded me of my dam. The diamond she gave me was used in my hatching nest.\" He stood straighter and scooped up the crystals with his claws. Then he poured them into Merika's cupped hands. \"Now, diamonds will remind me of you.\"\n\nMerika carefully stowed the pale diamonds in her pouch. She reached a moon-white wing across Drakor's back and snuggled closer. \"One day, these will decorate our dragonlet's nest. We would also need gems with bright Volcano colors.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"The storm isss rising. Feel the energy? We could make those gems now.\"\n\nMerika tilted her head. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe leapt off the ground and climbed up into the air. They channeled the sky, striking the ground with lightning, melting hard gray ashes into clear gemstones.\n\nDrakor gathered these new gems and presented them to his mate: ruby red, topaz gold, sapphire blue. \"These stones have proper Volcano colors. They are of the Volcano.\"\n\nMerika accepted his gift with the ritual words, \"Dragons are hatched from the Volcano.\" She added them to her pouch and looked to the east. \"Traditions are important. They keep memories alive. But this Volcano isss far from our home, and it isss late.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"We will spend the night in my ice cave.\" He launched into the sky, and she followed. Soon they rested together on a bed of dry leaves within sparkling, ice-blue walls.\n\nMerika ran a claw along the cold, gleaming wall. \"This isss the most beautiful den I have ever seen. But what will Jardor think when you do not return tonight?\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"Jardor will know why and take charge.\" He packed snow into their mugs and changed this to boiling water with a thin stream of dragon-fire. Then he gave both mugs to his mate. \"Tea isss your specialty.\"\n\nMerika filled two tea balls. \"Red root, cinnamon bark, nutmeg seeds, and ginger root.\" She added her own special blend of herbs and put a tea ball in each mug. Fragrant steam filled the air as she added a pinch of pepper and a dollop of honey.\n\nDrakor took a sip, then a long drink. \"It isss perfect.\"\n\nMerika grinned. \"Dorali said you loved spiced red root tea. She gave me tea and spices from the south. I found local herbs that nearly match. Most spice plants need southern warmth, but I can grow ginger in my den. It isss useful for stomach problems.\" She sighed contentedly. \"I have learned much from the Healers, but I still have much to learn.\"\n\nDrakor gazed south, toward the land of the golden dragons, flicking his tail. \"How long before you leave again?\"\n\nShe followed his gaze. \"I will help the new dragonlet for a five-day and then fly south.\"\n\nDrakor wrapped a long, snowy wing around Merika and pulled her closer. \"Then, we should enjoy this time.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Evening shadows stretched long as Drakor and Merika landed beside their village.\n\nJardor greeted them with a knowing smile. \"It isss good to have you back.\"\n\nMerika asked, \"How isss the new dragonlet?\"\n\nJardor's tail drooped. \"Not well.\"\n\nMerika sped to his den with Drakor close behind.\n\nThe dam bowed respectfully to Drakor and greeted Merika with an enthusiastic thump of her tail. \"Thank you for coming! He will not eat.\"\n\nThe tiny dragonlet studied Merika with big, gray eyes as she crouched down beside him. She checked his eyes, pulse, and temperature. \"He seems fine. What have you tried?\"\n\nThe dam rattled off ten different foods.\n\nMerika sighed. \"One of those should have worked. We should try fish liver.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"That isss like chocolate to most dragons.\" He left to catch a fish.\n\nMerika chopped the fresh liver into small pieces, noting the healthy maroon color and potent aroma. The dragonlet tried a tiny bite of the fatty feast. Then he turned his head away, rocking from side to side, moaning softly.\n\nHis dam's tail slumped to the ground. \"Why does he not eat?\"\n\nMerika sighed. \"This could be a problem with the food, his stomach, or both. We will figure it out.\" She fixed peppermint-ginger tea with honey. \"This should soothe his belly.\"\n\nSpicy-sweet steam filled the den as the youngster slowly sipped the tea. Soon he stopped rocking, closed his eyes, and snored.\n\nWhile he slept, Merika cooked wild rice with finely diced apples and herbs. \"This should be easy on his stomach.\"\n\nWhen the dragonlet woke, he ate only one spoonful of the stewed rice. He sipped the tea and slept again.\n\nFollowing tradition, dragon-dams took turns visiting the hatchling and bringing tasty dishes for all. The den was drenched with tantalizing aromas from clan favorites, like the best feasting table ever. Each day, Merika tried new herbs and foods with her patient. He cried less but still just nibbled and slept. She sighed with frustration.\n\nA visitor pointed to Merika's bag, which was leaning against the den wall. \"What do you keep in there?\" The silvery fish leather shimmered with rainbows, refracting light from the domed ceiling.\n\nMerika opened her Healer bag and displayed the items in each compartment: herbs, vials of ground metal, bone needles, two types of thread, hemp bandages, poison for anesthesia, and sharp garnet knives in green, red, or orange.\n\nThe visitor stared. \"Could I learn?\"\n\nMerika nodded. \"Our clan needs more Healers.\"\n\nTen students attended her classes: dragon-dams, the youngster Jordana, and, to everyone's surprise, Drakor and Jardor.\n\nThe days grew swiftly colder. Summer was unnaturally short and, in less than a moon, autumn arrived. Wind rustled through the crisp, dry grasses. The storm-damaged trees were nearly bare, but any remaining leaves turned cheerful reds and gold. Then, within a dragon-week, the leaves were gone.\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously as the days grew colder. He was not quite ready to teach the clan to breathe fire. He must solve the problem of Mardor and his surly followers before arming them with new weapons.\n\nEach evening, Drakor walked with his mate across the field to the edge of the forest. The cold, gravelly ground crunched beneath his feet. The bare trees made lacy skeletons against a flame sky, like black coral in a sunset sea. Merika hunted for herbs while Drakor stood guard, searching for unnatural shadows. This was something that dwire could not hide . . . and their tracks in snow.\n\nShe dug up another golden root and added it to her bag. \"Thanks for coming along, but the dwire still have not attacked. Maybe there isss no threat.\"\n\nDrakor returned a half smile. \"That would be comforting, if true. And maybe Mardor has no plans to fight me.\"\n\nMerika snapped her tail. \"But he lost! He cannot challenge again.\"\n\nDrakor gave a mirthless laugh. \"I do not think that would stop Mardor.\" He glanced back toward the village. \"Will the dragonlet grow up like a normal dragon?\"\n\nMerika sighed. \"Yes, if he starts eating like a normal dragon. I wish I knew exactly what to do. I spoke with Dorali and Zarina in trance-mind, and even they have run out of ideas.\"\n\nA dragon-week later, morning frost sparkled across the ground--and the dragonlet finally began to eat! And eat. He devoured everything in sight.\n\nHis dam's eyes glowed.\n\nDrakor sighed in relief. \"This isss great! But why now?\"\n\nMerika studied her small patient. \"I think he was just too small when he hatched. He still had some growing to do before he could eat like other dragonlets, but the tea and special foods helped him along.\"\n\nThe dragon-dam bowed low to Merika. \"It isss more than that. You saved my dragonlet twice, first from the shell, and then to live and grow like every other dragon. I owe you a debt I can never repay.\"\n\nMerika gazed fondly at the sleeping youngster. \"He isss precious. I helped because I could, so there isss no debt. Now I can leave and study with Healers.\"\n\nThe dam said firmly, \"You already are a Healer.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"Yes she isss.\" He walked with Merika to her den and helped pack her journey food, secretly tucking in a precious bag of chocolate from his own stash.\n\nMerika fastened her chest pouch. She slung the pack with her Healer bag over her back, between her wings, and tightened the straps. \"You and the other trainees can look after the clan.\" As she turned to leave, a gust of cold wind whipped into her den.\n\nDrakor stepped outside and studied the darkening sky. He furled his wings against the rising wind. \"Wait for a better day.\"\n\nMerika gazed at the swift clouds and her wings drooped. She nodded agreement. \"But I must leave soon. Winter storms will be much worse.\"\n\nTwo days later, Drakor peered into Merika's den. \"Ready?\"\n\nHer eyes glowed gold, reflecting the flaming sunrise. \"Yes. Finally!\"\n\nA dragon-lady landed beside them in a cloud of dust. \"My dam broke her leg. It isss bad.\"\n\nMerika grabbed her Healer bag. She tossed in an extra roll of hemp bandages, handed two long, wooden supports to Drakor, and followed.\n\nThe elderly dragon lay sprawled across boulders at the base of a tall cliff, beside a thin waterfall. A broken bone stuck out through the torn, bleeding scales of one leg.\n\nDrakor stared up the cliff. The smooth, water-sprayed rocks were covered with emerald-green moss. She must have slipped, but why did she fall so hard? And why was she up so early? The claws of one hand clutched a glowing mushroom, while earthy aromas escaped from bags beside her.\n\nMerika poured tea and herbs into a mug. \"This will help with the pain. What happened?\"\n\n\"I was gathering, and slipped on the wet rocks. My wing caught in a bush, so I could not catch the wind to break my fall. Instead, I broke my leg.\" She laughed, but her eyes showed her pain.\n\nMerika looked up at the treacherous cliff. \"Why gather here?\"\n\n\"It isss the perfect place: damp, with bushes, and the light isss right. I wanted to gather the glowing mushrooms, the type that stop bleeding, and it isss easier to find them in the dark. This isss also a great place for lichens. We should remember our old ways.\"\n\nMerika smiled. \"You should teach us, after you heal.\" Drakor pulled on the dam's leg while Merika guided the bones together. Then she wrapped the leg with a wooden support on either side. \"This will hold it in place until we get you back home.\"\n\nSix dragons arrived with a litter to carry the patient back to her den. The patient's daughter walked alongside, carrying the sacks, with her eyes glued to her dam.\n\nMerika flicked her tail nervously as she secretly signed to Drakor. \"The broken bone tore through her scales. This isss a dangerous wound; she could lose her leg to infection.\" Her wings drooped. \"I want to leave, but I should stay.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. His inner jolt of joy was muffled by Merika's sadness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "A five-day later, Drakor set down a bucket of glittering shards. \"I hope this helps.\"\n\nMerika gave him a weary smile. \"Thanks. Even with the herbs, oils, and micro-zaps, her leg isss still swollen to twice its normal size. It isss time to ice it again.\" She broke the shards into smaller pieces and filled two long bags. \"The ice isss getting thicker.\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. \"Yes, and there isss still much to finish before winter arrives.\"\n\nAnother dragon-week later, the morning sky changed. It was not shadow gray, eerie green, or flaming orange--it was completely white. This was a color all ice dragons understood: Snow.\n\nWhite powder swirled around Drakor. The ground froze beneath his feet, and the snow began to stick.\n\nMerika stared at the sky, and her tail drooped to the ground. \"Winter came early. The patient's leg isss starting to heal, but I waited too long to leave.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"You stayed for your patient, and you are learning new treatments every time you consult other Healers in trance-mind.\"\n\n\"But I cannot learn the micro-zap patterns in trance, and that isss the magical healing energy.\"\n\nDrakor wrapped his long wings around her in a comforting embrace. \"Then we must find a way for you to return.\"\n\nThe snow fell faster now, sliding down his scales and gathering in drifts. All the smells were scrubbed from the sky, robbing him of the world of scents as well as sight. Drakor gazed in the direction of the dark forest. When this snowfall ended, he should be able to see the tracks of the invisible dwire."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Drakor opened one eye and peered up, checking the time. Sunrise streaks of red and peach glowed through his translucent ceiling. He took a long drink from the water-filled bucket, which was in a hole in the floor. Then he left.\n\nThe ground was white, and thick frost covered the branches like spring flowers. Winter was here to stay. But for how long? The stone walls were taller and thicker in these new dens. Would these changes be enough to keep the dragons warm during a long, harsh winter?\n\nDrakor's breath made small clouds in the frozen air as he walked to the stream. Worn rocks near the edge were now covered with sparkling, spiky ice crystals. He broke through the solid surface and refilled his water bucket. The ice was definitely thicker, and soon this stream would freeze solid.\n\nDrakor gazed south toward the silvery-blue shimmer. Collecting water in that lake was their next option. But that would be nearly impossible in a blizzard. And, eventually, dragons would need to smash through ice to reach the water.\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. Arak taught him to breathe fire. He could teach this skill to the clan, to melt ice. That would solve their water problem, but then he might face a group of fire-breathing malcontents led by Mardor. He was already skating on thin ice.\n\nDrakor stared into the water-filled bucket, flicking his tail. Dorali, a golden dragon, taught him to use his inner energy to make the tiny lightning of micro-zaps. This was the magic of cloud sculptors and Healers. These tiny pulses of electricity could grow a dainty, fanciful snowflake or heal a shattered bone.\n\nEach frequency had a different use and made a different ripple pattern in water. He just needed to discover a new micro-zap, a heat-zap, to melt snow into water. Heat-zaps would be safer than fire-breathing.\n\nDrakor laughed. Just discover a new micro-zap. Then he straightened his wings. Well, why not? He would experiment at night.\n\nDrakor swiveled his ears toward a crackling, crunching, tinkling sound. He leapt into the sky and flew south to the huge lake. Wind blew across the lake's frozen skin, breaking the ice into thin, clear pieces. These crystal shards piled up on the shore. Pushed by the wind, an unstoppable army of shattered glass marched inland.\n\nJardor landed beside him and stared at the marching ice. \"I have never seen ice do this!\"\n\nDrakor clouted him on the back. \"It isss good that we did not build near this lake. Nothing could stand in its path.\"\n\nThat night, Drakor experimented with micro-zaps, seeking a heat-zap. He zapped into a snow-filled bowl, using the energy pattern that weakened rock seams.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nHe tried two more zap patterns, to heal bruises and mend broken bones.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe added energy to increase the frequency. Surely one of his micro-zap patterns would work! But the snow remained a frozen, crystalline mass.\n\nThe next evening, Drakor tried a zap for sore muscles. He snapped his tail with excitement as the snow softened beneath his claws. He increased the frequency. The snow turned slushy and swiftly melted. His smile nearly split his face. Success!\n\nDrakor put his claws into a bowl of water and zapped. Then he checked by candlelight, memorizing the unique ripple pattern of his new heat-zap. Now dragons could melt snow into water without fires or lightning swords. This would be a safer, easier skill.\n\nDrakor threw festive sparks from his claws in silent celebration.\n\nThe following day, he summoned his in-commands and Merika. \"This will be a long, snowy winter, so I found a new way to turn snow into water.\" He melted snow in a bowl, using just his claws.\n\nThe dragons stared. \"How?\"\n\n\"We channel sky energy to make lightning swords. We can channel our inner energy to make a heat-zap.\" He pointed to five bowls of water. \"First, learn the pattern. Then teach the clan.\"\n\nThree days later, morning light filtered through dense clouds. Dragons everywhere were melting snow with their claws. Some melted pictures in the ice, just for fun. Drakor grinned. Another problem solved!\n\nSnow began to fall, covering jagged rocks with soft white curves. Then the wind changed, blowing faster and dangerously cold, like a frozen wind-stream. Drakor shivered as he tried to peer through the furious snowstorm.\n\nSuddenly, the air crackled with energy. His inner eye caught a bright lightning strike, but he saw nothing through the thick white curtain. A soft boom filled the sky, muffled by the snowfall.\n\nThunder-snow? This was new, not even mentioned in their legends!\n\nDrakor could barely feel the ground beneath his feet, and the tingling numbness warned of frostbite. He struggled home through the blizzard, finding his way with his inner eye: he followed a lodestone marker that glowed silvery-gray in his mind.\n\nWhen these powerful snowstorms cloaked their world, even a dragon could get lost; they might freeze to death. So he created lodestone guides. Now, each den had a unique magnetic marker to guide the dragons safely home.\n\nDrakor breathed a sigh of relief as he entered his den. Had all the dragons found their way back through this storm? His magnetic guides should solve that problem, but there was always one more problem.\n\nCould he give the clan a reasonable explanation for the sudden, disturbing storm? Or would this new display of weird weather be another excuse to challenge him?"
            },
            {
                "title": "LIGHTNING SWORDS",
                "text": "Two days later, Drakor stepped out into a silent white world. He walked alone through the slow white rain, nearly hidden within a snowfall that swallowed up sight, sound, and scent. Suddenly, a voice spoke up right behind him.\n\nDrakor spun around, claws out.\n\nJardor jumped back and held his hands out, claws back, grinning. \"Sorry.\"\n\nDrakor thumped his friend on the back. \"Are you really? What isss the problem?\"\n\nJardor said, \"The dragons are restless. We need something fun.\"\n\nDrakor stretched his stiff wings. \"It isss almost time for our Winter Festival. We will make new memories with our old traditions! Then the New World will feel more like home.\"\n\nJardor's eyes lit up. \"That pebble beach isss perfect for lightning sword games, and we can play Slam on our small lake.\"\n\nDrakor clouted Jardor on his back. \"Tell the clan to prepare for the games. The lightning sculptors need to fetch the ice boulders. You and the other in-command dragons can take turns with the signal drum. That way, you can each join a game.\" His wings drooped. All but the leader could play.\n\nDrakor straightened his wings. \"Arak brought the rest of the lodestones, and I have chocolate for the feast. Look what I just found.\" He held up a heavy blue stone.\n\nJardor's eyes widened. \"That isss a good omen.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I hope so.\" Sodalite was a rare blue stone with white veins, greatly treasured by dragons. It matched the winter sky and their frozen lake, with its blue-gray ice and network of white cracks.\n\nThe domed roofs shed snow, but furry frost covered every den. This made small white hills that disappeared into the wintry world. Drakor paused to admire the peaceful scene, where everything meshed. He needed such unity for the clan. Then he sighed and brushed the frost off his roof.\n\nThat evening, Drakor placed the blue stone beneath his clear quartz shelf. He lay on his bed of leaves, watching stars through the roof, listening to the song of the lake. The ice crackled as it grew thicker, day by day. This eerie music was louder at night, when the temperature dropped faster. Drakor could tell how cold it was just by listening.\n\nHow cold would it get during this long winter?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Afternoon rays gilded the sea as Scree docked their small skiff at the raft. Orm tied it off, giving an extra tug to check the knots. They tossed all the bags onto the raft and then covered the skiff with a tarp.\n\nScree grabbed three bags. \"I hope this keeps the skiff dry. That was a useful survey. The same types of migrating fish are disappearing from that reef, too. These fish must be leaving to breed or feed, but they're not coming back.\"\n\nOrm grabbed the remaining bags. \"I agree. It's not the chemicals here that are hurting these fish. Scree, it's good to be home. Our pod will love these treats: abalone, mussels, and that rare pink seaweed.\" He splashed into the sea.\n\nScree dove in beside him. She twined one arm with her mate and matched his spiraling descent. \"Orm, we need to follow the currents farther to find the problem with the fish.\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"We also need to keep track of what's happening here. The threat from giant squid is real, and closer to home.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Scrim can keep watch here, and mind-call with any questions.\" She felt the flavors that seeped from their bags, sending a silent call to the pod. Soon, everyone would know they were back.\n\nA blue-and-orange sea slug flew slowly by, flapping its clear, fleshy wings.\n\nOrm stared beyond this creature, to the dark abyss. \"Scrim is clever. But you're the legend that the giant squid respect.\"\n\nScree flushed red. \"I'm an octopus, not a legend. What we don't know can hurt us, and we know nothing about the fish problem. They're an important part of the reef, like notes in a song. If these notes disappear, the symphony of the reef could fall apart.\"\n\nOrm twined another arm with his mate. \"Alright. After the clan-and-pod festival, we'll follow the currents. But we need to plan carefully. If something is killing so many fish, this could be our most dangerous trip yet.\"\n\nScree's skin pulsed with happy colors. \"Thank you.\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"I'm not sure I deserve thanks for helping you into danger.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "A five-day later, Drakor awoke as topaz and gold glowed through his domed ceiling. He poked his head out of the den. The skies were clear. It had stopped snowing! This was perfect festival weather. He left to find his second-in-command.\n\n\"Jardor, please announce the games.\"\n\nThree strong drumbeats rumbled through the air. Dragons snapped their tails with excitement as they prepared for the games.\n\nCranart and Tenira glided over to join Drakor and Jardor. Choosing more than one official helper had raised many eye ridges, but things ran more smoothly. And why should the leader decide everything?\n\nDrakor squinted into the rising sun as dragons skimmed overhead. They were all sizes, young to old, tearing joyfully across the sky. They landed in the middle of the small, frozen lake and immediately began clearing snow off the ice. They worked from the center to the shore, using powerful tail sweeps.\n\nDrakor lifted a heavy sack from his pouch and gave it to Cranart, his third-in-command. \"We could not have survived that long flight while carrying this extra weight. So, Arak brought our lodestones to the New World on his dragon-skiff. Use them to mark the ice for Slam.\"\n\nCranart rustled his wings anxiously. \"And the game-stone?\"\n\nDrakor smiled as he lifted a lump from his pouch and unwrapped this. The top of the ancient, sparkling disc was covered with glittering blue sapphires. The gems were the color of the sky, of freedom. This powerful lodestone burned silver-bright in his mind. \"I brought it from our island, since only the leader carries the game-stone. Soon we will play our first game of Slam in our new home!\"\n\nCranart's eyes glowed. He bowed and left for the frozen lake, flying ever faster, as if the memories in these magnetic stones lightened his load.\n\nDrakor gazed north, where huge ice boulders as big as Mardor stood on a field of snow. These ice blocks had been cut from the ancient glacier, floated down the river, and dragged ashore. A team of dragons pulled each block onto a platform of rolling pine logs.\n\nAs an ice block was rolled inland, a log from the back was moved to the front. Rolling logs traveled beneath each block to the field. Now, the field was ready for the contest for best lightning sculpture.\n\nDrakor handed a sack to Tenira, his fourth-in-command. \"This isss for the Lightning Sculptures. Make sure each pair of sculptors gets their share.\"\n\nShe peered into the sack and snapped her tail. \"All of the lodestones and black diamonds are here! I thought these were left behind.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"We brought everything we really need. Take turns helping with the games so you can enter them, too.\"\n\nAfter she left, Drakor drummed his claws on his scales. Would these traditional games be enough to unite the dragons? Or was the clan too divided?\n\nDrakor's ears swiveled toward a whistling sound. The young dragon-lady continued her simple tune as she strolled by him. This dragon lullaby held soothing memories of his dam crooning to him.\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. Music had an energy that reached into the mind, more powerful than a magnetic storm. He often played his wooden flute, quietly, alone. This was a farewell gift from Karoon, a golden dragon. Could music help bring the clan back together?\n\nDrakor flew to the beach and signaled the drummer. A long, rumbling drum beat rang across the snow. Dragons landed in clusters and spread out, seeking the best spectator spots.\n\nDrakor raised his wings high. \"It isss time for the Lightning Sword games. The drum will beat ten times. The winner isss the dragon who hits the most targets before the last drum beat.\"\n\nPieces of wood were dropped randomly across the rocky beach. Then the first contestant stepped forward. He was young, barely able to fly, flexing his claws nervously. Then he stretched taller, held out his hands, and nodded.\n\nBOOM . . . . . BOOM . . . . . BOOM . . . . . Ten slow drum beats counted the time to strike targets with lightning. A gray haze and the scent of smoke blew across the field, but only three wood pieces burst into flames by the tenth beat.\n\nDrakor nodded to the youngster with a reassuring smile. \"You did well.\"\n\nA dragonlet darted forward, slipping on the snow-covered pebbles. She grabbed the burnt remains, tossed them onto the frozen stream, and placed new branches on the beach.\n\nThe next contestant stepped forward, and drumbeats counted the time. When all the young dragons had competed, Drakor announced the winner. Then older contestants lined up, flexing their sharp copper claws eagerly, eyes bright with excitement.\n\nDrakor flicked his claws out. A bright pearl appeared, glowing as he tossed it back and forth between hands. He could pull in more sky energy and let it grow, twisting into a bright lightning sword. He glanced at each target and found a magnetic wrinkle close enough to call lightning; he could strike every target. This was his game. His wings rustled eagerly, ready to fly toward the game.\n\nDrakor sighed and released the bright pearl. He forced his errant wings back into stiff folds and watched with longing as each contestant played. He drummed his claws on his scales. Why did Mardor even want to be leader? Where was the joy in it? But power meant everything to that dragon, and he wanted it back. Mardor was a difficult leader on their isolated island. Here he might do anything, even attack the golden dragons. So he owed it to his friends to remain in charge for as long as he could.\n\nDrakor announced the winners. The dragons left for the frozen lake, walking slowly so the dragonlets could keep up. Nobody wanted to miss the games of Slam! This brutal contest was their favorite.\n\nTeams of two were roughly matched by size, with young, middle, or older dragons. There were pairs of dragon-lords, dragon-ladies, and mated dragons.\n\nCleared of snow, the frozen lake gleamed in the sunlight. Black lodestones marked the border of the Slam field, and were easily seen against the clear aqua ice. Drakor closed his eyes, testing the magnetic pull of the stones. He could feel/see each silvery shape. Players would know the borders of this game without looking. A plain blue stone marked each of the two goals.\n\nDrakor ceremoniously placed the glittering blue game-stone in the center of the Slam field. Then he glided to a rise just beyond the lake. Dragons lined up along the icy shore, tails snapping, eyes glued to the game-stone.\n\nDrakor raised his wings. \"Each game of Slam will last for half a notch on the sun dial. Use only your tail to move the game-stone. Do not use wings or claws. No flying. No carrying. A point isss scored when a goal-stone is knocked out by the game-stone. The game begins at the beat of the drum.\"\n\nTwo teams of young dragon-lords took their places on the ice. Attackers walked to the center, facing the sparkling blue game-stone. A Defender stood in front of the plain blue goal-stone at each end.\n\nThe drum beat once.\n\nTwo dragons slammed into each other with a jarring thud, holding their wings safely back. They fought for the game-stone with whip-like strikes of their tails. One dragon curled his tail around the sparkling blue stone and slung it toward the opposite goal-stone.\n\nBoth dragons tore across the frozen lake, barely gripping this slippery surface. Sparkling shards of ice sprayed from their copper claws. They struck shoulder to shoulder, again and again, trying to catch the game-stone. The blue disc sped away and was claimed by another.\n\nDrakor grinned. Slam was a good name. Tensions dissolved like salt in the sea as they played this rough, traditional game. The Defender stopped the game-stone, wrapped his tail around it, and slung it back. The disc twirled across the ice with a wicked spin. An Attacker caught the sparkling blue stone with his tail. Dragons crashed together as the piece of solid sky flew back and forth.\n\nFinally, a loud crack split the air. The game-stone struck a goal-stone and knocked it out of the goal.\n\nJardor called, \"Point!\"\n\nThe players were battered, bruised, and grinning ferociously as they returned to their starting positions. Finally, the drum beat ended the game. Drakor announced the winning team while spectators thumped their tails.\n\nMore games were played with teams of the younger dragon-lords. The final winners were surrounded by exuberant friends pummeling their backs. \"You won!\"\n\nThe next games had teams of mated pairs. The game-stone flew across the ice while players gave impressive body slams. Dragon-lords had stronger tail strikes, but dragon-ladies had keen eyes and better control of the game stone.\n\nThe score was tied when the time drum sounded, so an extra time-part began, continuing the game. A dragon-lady slung in the winning goal with a perfect tail shot. The winning team flew triumphant spirals up into the air.\n\nNext were Slam games with dragon-lady teams, then with the older dragon-lords.\n\nNo one was surprised when Mardor and his former in-command won, but Drakor was impressed by the violence of the final game. It seemed as if Mardor was pouring all of his anger into the contest. Would this drain away his frustrations? Or was the game just another practice for a fight?\n\nThe sun sank lower. Snow glowed gold in the slanting rays as Jardor beat the drum once more. Drakor announced, \"The Slam games are now over. It isss time for the lightning sculptures!\"\n\nThe clan hurried to the last contest.\n\nTen huge blocks of ice sat on the snow, glowing, waiting for the sculptors. A dragon pair flew to each block. They carefully placed pieces of magnetic lodestone into their ice block. These would call lightning, like magnetic wrinkles. It took great skill to place the stones in exactly the right place, imagining the sculpture within the boulder, knowing how and where to shatter the ice. Sculptors would use lightning swords of different sizes to carve their vision.\n\nDrakor raised his wings for silence. \"Dragons were created by the Volcano, from sky-fire and ice. These sculptures celebrate our story. At the first drum beat, sculptors will channel lightning. There will be ten slow beats. Stop at the last beat.\"\n\nThe ice sculptors raised their arms high, claws out.\n\nDrakor signaled the drummer.\n\nA loud drumbeat hung in the frozen air. Then the sky sizzled and thunder boomed. Bolt after bolt of lightning struck each boulder, knocking off pieces of ice. The strong odor of burnt air mixed with scents of ancient ice.\n\nWithin minutes, rough dragon shapes filled the field.\n\nThen the dragon-ladies deflected lightning with their claws, making bright splinters that ran down the ice, melting perfect wings. Next, they used splinters of lightning to melt the surface of the dragon's body. This liquid skin quickly re-froze with the crackled appearance of dragon scales. Black diamonds appeared like magic from their pouches, with the clear darkness of a night sky. They poked a large diamond into each slushy eye socket, which quickly froze to hold the sparkling gray Ice dragon eyes.\n\nDragons channeled the power of the sky as if they were true spirits of the Volcano. When the steam cleared, ten ice sculptures rested on the snow. Each was a perfect, larger-than-life dragon. One held a large fish in its teeth. Another had wings stretched wide in flight. A third dragon sculpture stood tall with sharp claws and snarling jaws, in a classic fighting stance.\n\nDrakor shivered, recalling his terrible fight with Mardor. He checked each sculpture, noting the details and realism. These were true ice dragons, born of fire and ice, created in moments of magic.\n\nFinally, Drakor declared a winner. The sculptors leapt into the sky together, twirling ever higher, sending lightning swords into the patchy clouds above. They spun a bright cocoon against the evening sky.\n\nDragons headed home, laughing as they hurried to the feast.\n\nDrakor stood as still as the frozen statues. That victory display was new, and his mind sparked with ideas. Ice dragons made only three lightning colors: white for games, black for warning, and blue for a mating proposal. If they used more colors, that glowing display could become sky art. And, if they added sparks, it would look even better. Green trees could turn to gold and then icy white, changing colors like the seasons. Lightning Pictures could become a new game!\n\nDrakor's claws tingled with excitement. No, that was the cold. He blinked, noting the empty field. The sky had darkened into night, with starlight gleaming on the icy crust.\n\nDrakor stretched his cramped wings and sped through the sky to join the feast."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Drakor woke early, in the darkness before dawn. He chewed a chunk of leftover fish and left his den, walking on a sea of blue-shadowed snow. The light of a million stars sparkled across the crystal crust.\n\nAromas from their dragon-sized meal still hung in the air. Dragons loved a feast, and chocolate made everyone smile. Even Mardor!\n\nDrakor strolled to the meadow with a spring in his step, snapping his tail cheerfully. The winter games were a success. The weak dragonlet was gobbling food like a proper dragon. Dragons no longer muttered, \"Let him die.\" Everything was working out.\n\nHe glanced back at his trail in the snow and grinned. dwire would also leave tracks, making them easy to spot. That was one less worry.\n\nThen he spied part of a paw print. It was not his, and it was fresh!\n\nDrakor froze. His eyes slid back and forth, seeking. But any trail had been brushed out. How clever! The dwire had used its tail to remove the snow prints and hide its tracks.\n\nA cold beyond snow seeped into his body. There could be dwire right beside him, and he would not know! He scrutinized every hill and shadow, every lump of snow. There! That shape did not quite follow the normal curve of the land.\n\nDrakor lunged forward and the snow leapt aside. Two more lumps slid closer. Then all three charged in to attack. There was no time to reach the safety of the sky.\n\nDrakor gave the piercing warning whistle. He sucked in a lung full of air and bellowed, \"DANGER!\"\n\nDrakor threw a lightning sword at the closest Dwire. It screamed, arched its back, and lay still. He struck another as it leapt straight at him. He channeled the sky faster than ever before. The third closed in and fastened its jaws on his leg. He twisted around and slashed its throat with one swipe of his claws.\n\nMore dwire appeared as if by magic. A whole pack raced toward him.\n\nThe dead beast still clung to his leg. He wrenched its jaws open, wincing at the pain, and flung the carcass away. He quickly felled two more dwire with lightning swords.\n\nThen the pack closed in."
            },
            {
                "title": "CHANGING COLORS",
                "text": "The sky filled with wings. Bolt after bolt of lightning flew down from the hovering dragons. Snarling dwire screamed as they were struck by burning swords. Odors of sizzling sky and burnt meat filled the field.\n\nThe angry attackers leapt into the sky, trying to catch the winged fighters. Three more dwire attacked Drakor, the only dragon on the ground. He struck back with glowing swords that flew from both hands. The invaders lost their camouflage as they died, changing to a mottled gray-brown. They were about a third of Drakor's size, with sharp teeth, diamond-shaped scales, and no wings.\n\nCamouflaged dwire fled back into the forest, leaving a clear trail in the snow. They wasted no time hiding their tracks. Then no dwire moved . . . at least, none that could be seen.\n\nIce dragons landed in a perfect circle around Drakor, standing wing to wing, waiting for instructions. He staggered to his feet and straightened his wings, ignoring the pain. He scanned the ring of dragons, noting who came when he called, and who did not.\n\nMost were about his size, his age-mates, or a couple of years older. These were the dragons he played Slam with, the ones who challenged each other with spontaneous games of lightning sword. They accepted him as the leader in that game and now as leader of the clan.\n\nThere were three older dragon-dams. The rest of the dams were probably guarding the youngsters. But only two of the biggest, oldest dragon-lords answered his call. Drakor clenched his fists. Mardor and his followers had blatantly ignored his command.\n\nDrakor relaxed his claws and stretched taller. He swiftly chose ten dragons who excelled at lightning swords, naming them as he pointed. \"Cranart, take these dragons to hunt down the dwire that fled. Stay together and follow their tracks. Be careful.\"\n\nHe pointed to five more dragons. \"Help Jardor drag the dwire carcasses beyond the field. We do not want to attract scavengers. The rest of you, follow Tenira and check out the village. Work in pairs.\"\n\nEveryone left but Merika, and her eyes burned as she studied his wounds. \"Sit down before you fall down.\"\n\nDrakor folded to the ground. He gazed at the golden-orange streaks that glowed in the dawn sky. This contrasted oddly with the carnage below, where red patches stained the snow and gray carcasses lay in untidy clumps.\n\nMerika pulled out a shiny silver flask. It turned orange, reflecting sunrise colors that were so bright, the metal seemed to be on fire! She warmed the flask with a heat-zap. \"For energy. You need this.\"\n\nDrakor sipped a sweet, spicy drink that warmed him all the way down. \"Delicious tea. This has the perfect blend of cinnamon, honey, and herbs.\"\n\nMerika gave a half-smile. \"Energy should taste good.\" She unfastened the Healer bag from between her wings. Then she scooped up snow, washed the red ribbons off his cuts, and rubbed in a stinky yellow salve. \"This has goldenseal, lavender, and yellow tansy to fight infection. These cuts are shallow, but a dwire's bite could be as poisonous as a snake's. Now, your leg.\"\n\nMerika reached into her bag. She pulled out a sharp bone needle threaded with thin gut string. \"This tear needs a few stitches. Hold still.\"\n\nDrakor stifled a twitch as she poured stinging powder into the cut. Ice dragons did not show pain.\n\nMerika held the edges together with one hand, carefully matching the scales. She sewed up the tear with her other, using five small stitches. \"Scree does this so easily! It must be nice to have eight arms.\" She bound up his leg with hemp strips, testing to be sure the bandage was neither too tight nor too loose before tying knots.\n\nDrakor held still, watching her closely. \"Scree would be proud of you.\"\n\nMerika beamed. \"That isss the nicest thing you could say. And you threw lightning with both hands! That isss new.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I have been practicing. We may all need this skill. The dwire planned this attack well, on a misty night just before sunrise.\"\n\nShe counted five drops from a vial and added them to the mug. \"We are lucky you were here to give the warning. Drink this. It protects from some poisons. The wounds should heal clean, but be careful. I will check them tomorrow.\"\n\nDrakor swallowed the bitter drink. \"Thanks.\" He struggled to his feet. Then he pushed off with his good leg, beat up into the sky, and glided to the village. Merika followed. He made a rough landing, favoring his injured leg as he sank into the cushion of snow.\n\nZardan waved them over. \"One got through. I killed it, but a dragonlet isss badly hurt.\" He gazed at Drakor's bandaged leg and raised one eye ridge but asked no questions.\n\nMerika gasped. \"Where, Zardan?\"\n\nHe led them to the dragon's den, where a dam crooned anxiously to her youngster. There was room for only three dragons. Merika stepped inside. Drakor stretched his long neck through the entrance. His nostrils flared at the salty scent of blood.\n\nThe wounded dragonlet was swallowing screams, digging her claws into the ground, struggling to not show pain. One wing was perfect. The other was crumpled like a dead butterfly. Broken bones showed through the snow packed around her wing. Snow covered her chest, already stained red and pink like a terrifying sunset.\n\nDrakor's heart thudded painfully, and his eyes blazed with anger. If she lived, would she ever be able to fly? Would she die, or wish she had?\n\nHis right wing twitched as he recalled that day, when the rumbling Volcano shook him off. That was the day that changed everything.\n\nDrakor's wing was shattered. He tumbled down the mountain, rolled onto thin ice, and was carried out to sea. He should have died. Then he met the odd crew on a strange, floating home. Arak, Dorali, and Scree had helped. Now he needed them again.\n\nMerika spoke to the dam in a low, soothing voice. \"I can help.\"\n\nThe dam tore her gaze away from her wounded dragonlet. She scanned Merika's eyes as if searching for hope. Then she moved aside, making room for the Healer.\n\nMerika knelt beside the youngster and stirred powders into a cup of water. \"This tastes bitter, but it will help you.\" She signed to Drakor, Call Dorali and Scree. We need them.\n\nHe nodded. I know.\n\nDrakor flew to his den to enter the trance-mind. He soon returned and signed, Dorali will come. Arak will bring Scree.\n\nDrakor wrinkled his nose. Narrow wall slits were open in summer for air flow. The slits were closed for winter, making a snug home that trapped body heat. It also trapped the stench of bloody, fish-skin bandages and stinky herbs.\n\nThe dragon's chest was now clean and slathered with mustard-yellow salve. Several cuts had fish-skin bandages and three needed stitches, but one slice was so deep he could almost see her beating heart. This cut held golden honey, to protect the wound while it slowly healed from within.\n\nMerika took out a fat roll of hemp bandage and eyed the wound.\n\nDrakor saw the problem. \"I can lift her while you wrap.\"\n\nThe dam scrunched back against the wall as he crawled in, barely fitting. Drakor gently lifted the dragonlet off her pallet while Merika wrapped bandages around her chest, adding pieces of iodine-rich seaweed to kill infection.\n\nMerika motioned to the dam. \"Could you collect more branches for her resting pallet?\"\n\nThe dam nodded and slipped out of the den.\n\nDrakor murmured, \"It isss harder to see someone hurt than to be hurt.\"\n\nMerika nodded. \"She needs to help, so I gave her something to do.\" The dragonlet's breathing was slow and uneven as she dropped into a deep, herb-induced sleep.\n\nMerika carefully brushed the snow off the wing. She finished just as the dam returned, with her arms piled high with branches. The dam trembled at the sight of her dragonlet's mangled wing. Merika gave her a large, carved rock bowl. \"Could you fill this with clean snow from the top of the mountain?\"\n\nThe dam rustled her wings nervously before flying away.\n\nDrakor asked, \"Why so far?\"\n\nMerika took out her needle. \"It would be hard for her to watch this.\" She looked up at the cloudy, domed ceiling. \"There isss just enough light for this work.\" She makes small, even stitches. \"I used the thinnest gut thread. It should dissolve, which isss easier on the patient. If I need candles, I could light them by breathing fire.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"We learned that from the golden dragons, but it isss too early to share this skill with the clan. Ice dragons are dangerous enough to each other without breathing fire. We can use strike-stones to light the candles.\"\n\nMerika flicked her tail. \"Wise decision.\" She stitched up another tear and dripped honey into a deeper cut. \"Why did the dwire attack now?\"\n\nDrakor looked toward the feasting table, where scraps remained in the snow. \"I think they were drawn by the feast.\"\n\nMerika nodded. \"Follow me.\" She crouched down and left through the entrance. Then she drew a wing in the snow. \"I need a frame, the lightest, strongest one you can make, to hold her wing still until the other Healers arrive. I can start the healing, but I need their help.\"\n\nDrakor touched foreheads with his mate. \"You know more than you realize.\" He measured the drawing against his arm. Then he pushed off with his good leg only, pulling hard with his wings as he beat up into the sky.\n\nDrakor returned just as Merika finished her last stitch. The frame was carved from a strange, pale wood. \"This isss basswood, the lightest wood from around here. And it has no strange odor to disturb your patient.\"\n\nMerika reached for the frame. \"That was fast.\" She sniffed the frame and then hefted it, testing. \"Light and odorless. Perfect! Why did you have this wood?\"\n\nDrakor looked toward the forest. \"When my wing was mangled, Scree and Dorali used a frame to help heal it. Taron taught me about trees, and now I collect wood. There were plenty of trees and branches lying around after that storm, so I built a simple den in the forest to properly store and dry different types of wood.\"\n\nMerika nodded. \"That was lucky. Why different types?\"\n\n\"I want to make flutes and, some day, a dragon-skiff. I want to travel. Giant squid have a saying that isss both greeting and farewell: 'May you surf the tangled currents of the sea, forever.' The sea could carry us anywhere, if we had a skiff.\"\n\nShe stared. \"You never mentioned this.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"Life has been busy. I add big branches to that den when I find them.\"\n\nMerika ran a claw along the sturdy frame, feeling the rim and wing struts. \"This isss well made. You make a good Healer.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"You say the nicest things.\"\n\nTogether they stretched the dragonlet's battered wing to fit the frame, gently, making sure the broken bones met properly. Drakor held the wing against the brace while Merika wrapped it in place using soft strips. She placed her claws on the dragonlet and ran them lightly across the chest, back and forth. Then she started on the wing. \"This energy speeds healing.\"\n\nDrakor stared. \"I remember this pattern.\" He put the claws of both hands on his wound and began zapping. He could barely feel it. How fast did it work?\n\nHe learned the skill mere months ago, but it seemed like years. This was a simpler time, before he challenged Mardor in a fight to be leader. Now, he was healing a new wound while preparing to face an old enemy.\n\nThat jogged another memory from Dorali, telling him that the pulse could distract a dragon like unexpected storm energy. Micro-zaps did not break their fight rules, but it would feel like cheating. He used no zaps when he fought Mardor the first time and became leader. Only his fight strategy had been new and unexpected.\n\nDrakor touched Merika's shoulder. \"I will be back. You need to stay with your patient.\"\n\nJordana poked her head in, adding a breeze as she flexed her wings nervously. \"If you need a helper, I can stay. I learned a few Healer skills from Dorali.\"\n\nMerika smiled at the youngster. \"I could use your help.\" She caught Drakor's eye as he turned to leave. \"Your wing muscles are tense again. Drink some tea and relax. Be careful with that injury.\"\n\nHe nodded. As he left, Merika welcomed Jordana into the den.\n\nDrakor walked away slowly, thinking. He ate a clawfull of nuts for energy. Then he stretched his arms and wings, loosening the muscles. Crisp, cold air numbed his wounds, which helped, but he would still need Orm's bitter candy.\n\nDrakor popped three chocolates into his mouth and grimaced. How could chocolate taste bad? He pushed off with his good leg and flew to the field, where his second-in-command was finishing up. Dwire carcasses were neatly stacked just inside the forest.\n\n\"Jardor, please call my third-and fourth-in-command.\"\n\nTwo long whistles split the air.\n\nCranart and Tenira soared over and landed.\n\nCranart said, \"We killed three more dwire. The rest of them erased their tracks as they ran into the forest. Then they camouflaged and disappeared.\"\n\nDrakor eyed the silent forest. \"You did well. Call off your team. We will find another way to deal with them.\"\n\nTenira folded her wings crisply. \"We killed two dwire in the village, and your sire killed the third one that sneaked through earlier. How isss the dragonlet?\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Thank you. Merika isss still with the dragonlet. We splinted her broken wing, and two more Healers will arrive soon. Now there isss another matter I must deal with. Come with me.\"\n\nThey flew together to the meeting circle.\n\nDrakor landed in the center. The icy crust crunched as it broke beneath his claws, and he sank into the snow.\n\nJardor landed on a rise just outside the circle, beside the huge drum. BOOOMMMM! The drumbeat thundered across the ice and through the sky. Dragons swiftly gathered, forming loose circles around the center.\n\nDrakor took a deep, calming breath. Then another. He raised his wings high, and the dragons fell silent. \"I gave the danger whistle and called a warning when the dwire attacked. That isss a call to defend our clan. Many answered. Some did not.\" He met the eyes of each insubordinate dragon, ending with Mardor. \"Where were you?\"\n\nMardor eyed Drakor's leg bandage, and the mustard-yellow smears across the cuts. He stared back insolently at the leader. \"You are such a clever fighter, so good with lightning swords. We thought you could handle all the dwire. Surely you were just warning us to protect the juveniles?\"\n\nDrakor stared into his eyes. \"That would have helped. Where were you? You know the clan laws.\"\n\nMardor raised an eye ridge. \"Laws? You have no problem changing our laws. We never needed that signal in our real home. The dwire are a danger because you brought us here!\" His neck twisted as he turned his head in a circle, meeting the eyes of each dragon as if he was still their leader. \"We left a good home. You led us from safety into danger. The dragonlet that was attacked may never fly. She may die or wish she had. It isss your fault. The clan deserves a stronger leader.\"\n\nDrakor stretched taller and looked from dragon to dragon, reminding them who was their true leader while gauging loyalty by their eyes. Many could not meet his gaze.\n\nThe clan was divided. Mardor had spread his lies, convincing all he could that their old home was still there, that Drakor was unbalanced and power hungry. Mardor was fighting with hidden claws.\n\nDrakor sighed. He was the leader. He had saved the clan, found them a new home, and fought off the dwire. Now he had muddy smears across his battle wounds while Mardor gleamed like new snow. Mardor looked like the leader the clan expected, huge and powerful, so it was easy to believe his lies.\n\nDrakor straightened his wings into crisp folds. He spoke clearly, using all the storyteller tricks learned from his sire. \"Our Volcano changed. It rumbled every day, and the ground swelled. The fish left. The legends warned us to leave. This isss the wisdom of our ancestors. Our Volcano exploded and sent a powerful storm across the sea to say farewell. The magnetic field shifted. Sunsets are like flames. These signs tell us what happened. You know our old home isss gone. We escaped just in time.\"\n\nDrakor pointed to the ground. \"We can know without seeing. Close your eyes. Feel the cold, wet snow beneath your feet. We know it isss snow without looking. We know our home isss gone without seeing the empty sea.\"\n\nHis voice grew stronger. \"We were nearly starving. Now we can fill the feasting table. We will deal with the danger. We are dragons!\"\n\nDragons thumped their tails, beating the snow flat with this sign of approval.\n\nMardor scowled. He raised his wings and began speaking without permission. \"You offer more words but no proof that our home isss gone. You brought us to a dangerous land. A dragonlet was torn apart in the center of our village! The clan needs a strong, experienced leader to be safe here.\"\n\nTails stopped thumping. The watching eyes darted back and forth between their past and present leaders. Drakor met their eyes and his tail slumped to the ground. The clan was split in their loyalty, choosing sides like an octopus changing colors. Mardor was the long-time leader they feared but understood, enforcing a strict, orderly society. Drakor was the leader they barely knew who brought unexpected change and danger.\n\nHe felt as if a whirlpool was sucking him under. They escaped the Volcano. They could deal with the dwire. But the clan was not prepared for the greater danger: starvation.\n\nAccording to legend, this winter would last through spring and beyond, maybe a year or more. There would be no fall harvest. They could still catch fish in the lake and hunt along the seashore. But the fish could leave. Sea life would move into deeper water, away from the frozen shore. Dragons needed to stockpile more food now, while they still could. The clan must unite behind him to survive the long winter.\n\nMardor scanned the crowd and gave a smug, triumphant grin. \"I Challenge You.\" His words sliced like a sharp claw.\n\nDragons gasped as order fled away.\n\n\"Mardor lost! He cannot challenge again!\"\n\n\"This isss not our way!\"\n\nMardor snapped his wings wide. \"This isss your sign for change. We left our home. We smoke fish instead of drying it. A weak dragon was helped from the shell. Much has changed.\"\n\nA dragon-dam hissed, \"Helping the hatchling was the right thing to do. We should not waste a precious egg. The new dragon isss now strong.\"\n\nAn old dragon-lord snapped his tail. \"We need a strong leader.\"\n\nA young dragon shouted, \"We have a strong leader!\"\n\nMore dragons joined the blizzard of opinions.\n\nThoughts flitted through Drakor's mind. They all mourned the loss of their homeland. But, many believed Mardor's lie that the island was still there. If he refused this fight, others would soon challenge him, since they thought his first win was an accident. But if he fought now, and won, his victory would not be a fluke. Everyone would accept him as leader.\n\nCould he defeat this hulking dragon a second time? If he lost, the golden dragons would face a dangerous enemy. And ice dragons would starve during the long winter.\n\nDrakor nodded slowly. \"I accept your challenge.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "RIP TIDE",
                "text": "Scree's arms woke with a jolt. Two arms sprang back like snakes, ready to attack with their toxic tips. Another arm swiftly wrapped around the shaft of a spear. Then her main brain awoke, noting the pearly gray water of early dawn. Her eyes swiveled about, searching for the danger.\n\nOrm was watching through the clear glass bars of her cave, and he was safely on the outside. \"You're the most dangerous Healer I've ever met! I poked to wake you from your bad dream. I was worried.\"\n\nScree popped up and flowed over to the bars. \"What was I dreaming?\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"Your dreaming-skin was blurry, not like the crisp pictures you choose to make. There were two waterfalls, one above the other. Two white dragons fought at the top. The bigger dragon won. He slipped down to the second waterfall and fought a golden dragon. Both dragons tumbled over the edge and crashed down into the mist. Then your skin turned dark, your arms curled up tight, and you were as still as death.\"\n\nScree flicked the tip of one arm up and down, up and down, like the tail of a worried dragon. \"This was like being caught in a dangerous rip tide. I hope it was just a dream. Mardor could challenge Drakor and, if he wins, attack the golden dragons.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Arak knew there was a risk when he helped Drakor save the ice dragons, but it was the right thing to do. You must have dreamed this because you're worried.\"\n\nScree squished thin, squeezed between the bars, and twined arms with her mate. \"I'll check the sea for messages and then visit the new Healing Station.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"How's that working out?\"\n\n\"Excellent. Fish and turtles line up to have parasites removed by specialists. Then octopus Healers take turns helping. With Strike's unique skills, we're doing a lot more.\"\n\nOrm smiled. \"That sounds efficient. The abalone and oyster farms are doing great! We have plenty of pearls for trade and extra food for our dragon friends. Stop by my cave at sunset, and I'll fix us a scallop-and-seaweed salad. I just finished my design on the back wall. This tapestry glows in eight colors!\"\n\nScree turned happy-green. \"I can't wait! I'll help feed your artwork. Arak mind-called. More than half of the golden dragons have now moved to the New World. In a few more months they'll all be here! Then we'll celebrate with a clan-and-pod festival.\"\n\nOrm covered his skin with pictures of feasting food. \"I can hardly wait!\"\n\nScree made a skiff picture on her mantle. \"And then we'll follow the route of the disappearing fish.\"\n\nOrm grimaced. \"I hope it's not also the route of the disappearing octopi.\" He flowed away, carrying a large, lumpy sack.\n\nScree gazed after her mate. That sack must have the pearl seeds. Orm put the shell balls into live oysters and abalone. The animals covered these plain balls with many shimmering layers, turning them into lustrous pearls.\n\nOrm fed special diets to the oysters, to grow different pearl colors: pink, peach, lilac, creamy-white, or black. Best of all were the abalone pearls. These blue-green pearls flashed with orange fire, like rare opals. Blue-ringed octopi found them irresistible, and happily traded their venom for pearls.\n\nScree ate a few clams and added their shells to her garden. Then she pulsed through the sea, feeling the currents, sensing. She waved an arm at the mottled brown grouper. He turned white, asking a question, and she signed back, \"Not tonight.\" They often hunted together, when twilight shadows changed the reef. Then it became a different world. Life glowed, corals fought viciously for space, and strange new creatures emerged.\n\nScree dropped down to a sandy patch and held still, feeling the symphony of sound as it pulsed through her body. Reef fish spoke to each other with grunts as they hunted together. Crackle-pop noises came from glossy gray shrimp. The sharp snap of claws was surprisingly loud for such a small predator. This sound came from her new assistant, Strike, the mantis shrimp.\n\nScree glanced toward the Healing Station. She and Strike had combined talents to heal Tara, her long-time turtle friend. Scree removed the pulpy pink tumor from the flipper. Strike used his remarkable eyesight to find the cancer cells hidden beneath the tumor, and she burned them away with a targeted micro-zap.\n\nScree gazed east. The ice dragon island had disappeared, while the octopus volcano had now grown into a mountain. Both volcanoes gave strange chemicals to the sea, adding a smoky-oily flavor, and tumors were no longer rare.\n\nThe reef trapped distant sounds, so Scree twirled up to the rose-colored waves above. She pulsed in place, feeling the full ocean orchestra. Long, rolling beats came from a drum fish in the reef below. The patter of rain came from above. Waves crashed on a distant beach, and sand squeaked in the rolling surf. Then she felt an unnatural clang of two metal bars striking together.\n\nScree counted three strikes, pause, two strikes, pause, and then the signal repeated. Dragons were calling. Someone was hurt! She shuddered. What if her fight dream was really foresight?\n\nScree turned both eyes toward the unseen shore. She could light the signal fire on the raft above or talk with bar strikes, but this was crude communication. She needed to know what to bring.\n\nScree sank down into a tangled clump of leafy brown seaweed and camouflaged to match. She set her clever arm-brains on automatic, to remain as seaweed, waving above her hidden head. Then she plucked a shimmering pearl from one sucker, focused her main brain into the center, and entered the trance-mind. Her eyes glazed over, and her head fell back limp.\n\nScree's trance-mind flew to shore and overlapped with the waiting shimmer. Arak made mind-pictures with their sign language, which was beyond the skill of most dragons. Scree excelled at mind-pictures after years of making images on her body, concentrating to change the color of every cell in her skin.\n\n<Scree. We need your help>\n\n<Arak. What happened>\n\n<An ice dragonlet has a mangled wing. Merika has done all she can. Will you come>\n\n<Yes. Meet me at the raft>\n\nScree's body jerked awake as her mind returned. She peered through the curtain of leafy brown strands that swayed with the current. Then she relaxed her seaweed arms back into their normal octopus shape and pulsed home.\n\nA mangled wing was bad, but this was not the terrible fight she feared. It would be great to see her friend Merika again. And Drakor! Yes, he tried to eat her when they first met, but once they resolved that problem, he made an interesting friend.\n\nRed, green, and golden-brown strands swayed with the currents outside her cave. This elegant seaweed garden had grown, and soon it would hide the entrance to her home. Scree squeezed between the bars of her cave. She checked the spears that leaned against the inner wall. The sharp, poisonous tips were safely sunk into the smooth sand floor. These spears helped octopi defeat the attacking giant squid. But would that battle stay won?\n\nThe walls of her entrance chamber were now covered by Orm's living art, with a swirling mosaic that glowed in red, green, blue, and gold. Scree tossed a shrimp to the glowing jellyfish that lit a side room, which was used for patients. She flowed deeper into her cave and entered the largest chamber.\n\nShe looked up at the night sky. Orm had created this with glowing tunicate stars. Three glowing jellyfish pulsed near the ceiling, waving long arms that moved like an aurora. Scree checked her Healer supplies in this living light.\n\nLong shelves wrapped around the room, with gemstone jars and seashell boxes that added all the colors of the reef. There were knives, needles, thread, supplements, seaweed medicine, land herbs, poisons, salves, sponges, and bandages. Three giant clam shells held live maggots to eat off dead skin, leeches to safely drain blood, and barnacles to repair a turtle's shell.\n\nScree ran her arms along the shelves, plucking up items for her Healer bag. The dragonlet was in bad shape, so she might need a bit of everything. She added a jar with thin sewing needles carved from black coral. Next was a spool of strong, thin, golden thread. It was nearly indestructible, spun from the roots of the pen shell. The roll of fine gut thread would be useful for making deep stitches that could later dissolve.\n\nBright pairs of purple, yellow, or red scallops made excellent hinged containers. These held seaweed, herbs, and supplements. Silvery shell boxes had dragon spices, used for meals and medicine: cinnamon bark, peppercorns, ginger root, and more. She added a red coral box with sharp, hollow needles from the fin spines of a dead lion-fish. The living fish could inject poison through these spines.\n\nScree chose an orange garnet bottle with a tight stopper. This held blue-ringed octopus venom, a deadly nerve poison from their small cousins. A tiny dose could sedate a patient, but too much would kill. She added a sleeping potion from murex snails, the type with the spiky shells.\n\nScree felt the unique, triangular sides of an amethyst jar with foxglove extract. This land-plant poison helped with hearts, so she added it to her bag. A wiggly cylinder jar was carved from a thick branch of precious white coral. This glossy container held slime, harvested from soft coral fronds that swayed with the sea. It was useful for fighting infection.\n\nScree added dead sponges, live leeches, and a surgeon's knife of sparkling green garnet. Next, a coral jar with salve made from the bitter eggs of a colorful sea slug. She paused at the rolls of kelp leaves, feeling the leathery seaweed to taste its freshness. But Merika, her ice dragon friend, would have plenty of bandages. Last, she chose lightweight journey food.\n\nWith her Healer bag stuffed full, Scree left her cave. She placed the clear glass bars back into their holes across the entrance.\n\nScree gazed west, feeling the pull of Orm's cave, and flushed gray. She would miss their evening together. His glowing undersea tapestries were a wonder, matched only by his company. She used stones to leave a quick message for her mate: a Healer triangle with an arrow pointing north. They would talk later in trance-mind.\n\nScree reached the huge rock anchors and pulsed up to the platform above. She climbed arm over arm onto the raft and glided across the smooth, damp logs. Then she examined the four small skiffs that were tied off, checking the knots. The rest of the pod skiffs were safely anchored in a cove along the shore.\n\nScree gazed up at the swift clouds, shivering as winter wind brushed across her skin. She often risked this dangerous journey to the surface just to admire the stars. Today she would fly with dragons, soaring above a sea of color-changing clouds. And tonight she would fly closer to those mysterious crystal stars.\n\nA bright dot appeared on the horizon. This became three golden dragons. Soon, two males and a greatly scarred female circled above her raft: Arak, Karoon, and Dorali. Two dragons stayed aloft while Arak landed beside her on the raft.\n\nArak greeted Scree, touching foreheads in a dragon-to-dragon gesture.\n\nScree smiled, remembering the first time they met, when he crashed at sea. Now they shared a friendship as deep as dragon nest-mates.\n\nArak signed, \"The dragonlet's badly wounded. Her wing's mangled, and dwire bites may be poisonous. Merika's still an apprentice Healer, and she's worried.\"\n\nScree looked north, toward the unseen patient. \"Merika knows more than she realizes.\"\n\nArak gave Scree a small sack. \"Yes, she does. Zarina sent this. You'll need the energy, since it's even colder up high.\"\n\nScree peered inside and her eyes lit up. \"Chocolate!\" She popped a piece in her mouth and tucked the rest into her Healer bag. \"Zarina's excellent cooking is exceeded only by her Healer skills. Thank her for me.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"Now you sound like Orm.\" He unrolled a hooded cape.\n\nScree smiled. \"He loves Zarina's treats.\" She studied the cape. She always wore a flying suit when traveling by dragon. The inner lining was woven from a soft, spongy plant to hold water and keep her skin damp. The outside had two layers of fish skins that enclosed blankets. The skins shed wind and rain, while the dry blankets within held warmth.\n\nBut this suit looked quite different.\n\nScree pointed to the rigid dome. \"You've made changes.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"I added eight thin, wood ribs to support your head, like the sea. This should make it easier for you to breathe and pump blood.\"\n\nScree beamed. \"I'll finally know what it's like to have bones. And you changed the eye holes.\"\n\nArak clicked a copper claw against the clear, rectangular box in the hood. \"I carved this from quartz crystal, to replace the open eye holes. Now your eyes will be properly protected while you study the stars.\"\n\nScree chuckled. He knew her so well.\n\nArak held up the cloak. \"The inner blankets are thicker, for warmth. I added two slits for your arms so you can talk. The hood has side slits to add air to the water, for better breathing.\"\n\nScree eyed the new harness with its abundant straps. A cord wrapped around the base of Arak's right ear and ran to the harness. \"That's new, too.\"\n\n\"This harness should keep you safe, even if it's a bumpy ride. Pull the line to my ear to get my attention. We'll fly along the coast so we can stop when you need a break in the sea.\"\n\nScree gazed steadily at her friend. \"You've thought of everything.\"\n\nArak pointed north. \"I hope so. This will be a much longer flight, so you need better protection. I made new octopus flying suits during our voyage across the sea.\" He dipped the cape into the sea and slipped it over Scree.\n\nScree squeezed her head up into the damp dome and looked out through the quartz box. \"The eye box is perfect! It's crystal clear.\" She tied the cape just below her head. Then she climbed up Arak's golden scales, settled between his wings, and fastened the new safety straps.\n\nScree tied two ropes around her Healer bag and tested the knots. She fastened her suckers tight and signaled. The raft rocked wildly as Arak pushed off. Waves sloshed across the logs, gleaming bright in the morning light.\n\nThen three golden dragons and one small octopus flew north to help a young, wounded ice dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE CHALLENGE RING",
                "text": "Morning light glowed across the icy crust on the snow. White fog rose from the jaws of dragons as they stared, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. Then they backed away from Drakor and Mardor, clearing a larger space for the fight.\n\nDragon-lords marched in a line around the circle. Their feet struck the ground in perfect time, as if a drum was beating, or a heart. They stopped and turned to the center, spread their wings wide, and stood wingtip-to-wingtip. This living wall marked the edge of the challenge ring.\n\nDrakor studied the fight arena with focused calm as he entered the first stage of trance-mind. Bitter herbs in the chocolate numbed his pain from the dwire's bite. He stretched, loosening his muscles for the fight. Dorali had said, \"Size means nothing. You are as strong as your mind.\" But size did help.\n\nAnother ring of dragons formed close behind them, standing wingtip-to-wingtip in the exact center between two dragon-lords. Then dragon-ladies marched and made another circle. Dragon-dams formed the last ring, with the youngest members safely behind this final line of defense from the fighters.\n\nThe watching dragons stood perfectly still, as if carved from ice, with the electric calm before the storm.\n\nDrakor and Mardor faced each other in the center of the ring, eyes glowing in the early light. They each took two long steps back.\n\nDrakor's second-in-command stood on a rise just outside the dragon circles. He raised his wings high, and there was complete silence. \"Fighting begins at the beat of the drum. Lightning strikes are forbidden. The victor will lead the clan.\" He bowed low to Drakor in a show of support, but there was a worry crease between his eye ridges.\n\nDrakor crouched on the balls of his feet and dug his claws into the snow. His ears swiveled back to face the drum as he locked eyes with Mardor.\n\nBROOOMMMM! The starting drumbeat rumbled across the frozen field.\n\nDrakor and Mardor sprang forward with teeth bared, claws out, eyes battle-bright.\n\nMardor snapped his long, powerful tail around Drakor's knees, like a whip.\n\nDrakor leapt high to escape the living noose. His claws sliced across Mardor's tail as he whirled away, stopping well within the border of silent dragons.\n\nMardor crouched in the center of the ring as if he owned the fight. He ignored his cuts, with his eyes fixed on Drakor.\n\nThe leader feinted left, lunged right, and lashed out with the ten curved swords of his hands.\n\nMardor stood firm. Claws clashed together and sparks flew. The giant raked across Drakor's wounded leg with the razor-sharp claws of one foot.\n\nDrakor glanced down at scarlet slashes that dripped onto red snow. His wounds must be deep, but he felt nothing.\n\nDrakor began to spin, moving his feet in a perfect rhythm. He watched Mardor's eyes to anticipate blows. Soon he spun like a whirling tornado, moving in a circle around the challenger, darting in and out to attack. This was how Drakor fought and beat Mardor in the first challenge. He read Mardor's smile: this time, the giant was ready.\n\nThe challenger stayed in the center, turning to face the upstart leader.\n\nDrakor whirled faster, moving his claws up and down in a blur to form a shield. He spun in and lashed out. Their copper claws met again and again, striking bright sparks.\n\nMardor wore an annoying, confident smile as he lashed out with claws and tail.\n\nDrakor evaded the claws and sprang over the slashing tail, maintaining his balance. He shifted toward the east, still spinning, moving in a smaller circle around Mardor.\n\nThe challenger moved with him, pivoting to meet his claws, claiming the center of Drakor's circle.\n\nDrakor leapt up and struck sideways with both feet, using the force of his entire body. He raked his claws across Mardor's thigh and landed back on the snow, still spinning.\n\nMardor growled at this surprise move as he struck back. He missed.\n\nDrakor and Mardor fought in the middle of a crowd, but they faced each other in a private world. Their first fight had never ended, and now their claws were finally out.\n\nDrakor moved farther east, spinning closer and closer to his foe.\n\nMardor struck lightning-fast with his longer arm. He broke through Drakor's defense, aiming a fierce blow to cripple the leader.\n\nThe crowd gasped. Fighters were expected to wound their opponent, but not kill, and crippling a dragon was even worse.\n\nDrakor punched down hard on Mardor's wrist, stopping most of the force, but five new cuts bled down his thigh. His scales were sticky and his breathing was rough.\n\nMardor's smile grew into a wide, feral grin.\n\nDrakor's nostrils flared at the scent of his own blood. He was covered in cuts, shivering as red warmth ran out of his icy-white body. He felt no fear, just a focused calm from entering the first stage of trance-mind. And he felt no pain, thanks to the bitter herb.\n\nDrakor wobbled as he spun. He fought in a place beyond fear and pain, but he was utterly exhausted from two fights. The fight would end soon, in victory or defeat. If he fell, Mardor would slice him to ribbons. This would be the most painful defeat the clan had ever known, and everything he had worked for would be lost.\n\nDrakor reached deep inside, seeking his inner lightning. He had to win now, before he fell, to protect the golden dragons. He owed them. And his clan needed him, too.\n\nDrakor stumbled and fell to one knee.\n\nMardor moved in for the kill.\n\nDrakor rolled sideways and sliced Mardor's belly with razor-sharp claws, lightning fast. He kept rolling, jumped up, and dropped into a fighter's crouch.\n\nMardor's eyes blazed as he snaked forward.\n\nDrakor flipped high above his opponent, sailing through the sky, as if he had just begun to fight. He raked Mardor on the neck as he spun overhead, using both hands, claws out, slashing an \"X\". This was the traditional mark of a defeated dragon.\n\nDrakor had not marked Mardor when he beat him the first time, winning the challenge fight on their island. He hoped to lead without this custom. But the giant had never acknowledged his own defeat or accepted Drakor as the new leader. Marking him now was a move intended to rattle this cool, composed, deadly foe.\n\nIt worked.\n\nMardor roared in anger.\n\nDrakor leapt back, to the east, ready for a mad, careless attack.\n\nBut instead, enraged beyond reason, Mardor threw a lightning sword straight at Drakor's heart.\n\nDrakor deflected the bolt, sending it into the sky, seeking the safest path to protect the crowd.\n\nDragons gasped in disbelief. Mardor had just broken their oldest rule!\n\nDrakor stared. This was a fight to the death with no rules and everyone at risk. He must end it now, before someone was killed.\n\nBeating Mardor was difficult. Killing him would be easy.\n\nDrakor instinctively gathered sky energy. He had the lightning sword skills to get through Mardor's defenses. He could throw a sword into Mardor's heart and stop him now. The clan would be safe. He would be safe. No one would blame him, and his biggest problem would be solved. But how would it feel, to kill a dragon? How would it change him to kill one of his own?\n\nDrakor deflected another lightning sword, sending it beyond the rings of dragons. He must act now. But he just could not send that fatal sword. He let his energy pearl bleed away into the sky as he charged his challenger.\n\nDrakor leapt into the air, striking Mardor square in the chest with both feet.\n\nMardor staggered back, off balance. His left leg dropped down into a snow-covered hole.\n\nDrakor leapt sideways and struck Mardor in the belly, slicing with his claws as he spun away.\n\nThe giant toppled back and hit the ground hard, with his leg still in the hole. There was a sharp, crunching sound. Mardor winced but made no noise, even though his leg must have broken.\n\nDrakor grabbed Mardor by the throat, forcing his own angry claws back. He needed to win, not kill.\n\n\"YIELD.\"\n\nMardor pressed an arm tight against his own bleeding belly. His eyes blazed, angry and defiant but no longer insane. He twisted and kicked out with his good leg, hard, one last time.\n\nDrakor felt a thump but no pain as he stared into Mardor's eyes. His foe grinned and passed out.\n\nDrakor struggled to his feet. He raised his wings high in victory, still in battle heat and feeling no pain. Even Mardor's followers could not question this win. \"I AM YOUR LEADER!\"\n\nDrakor turned slowly in a circle.\n\nThe crowd bowed as one, but their eyes bulged and their mouths hung open. Every dragon was staring at his chest.\n\nDrakor glanced down. His scales were sunset red. Blood spurted from the long, gaping slashes, and his bones showed through. This was a mortal wound.\n\nDrakor whispered, \"He got me.\" Then he collapsed onto the scarlet snow as his mind drifted away."
            },
            {
                "title": "SPIRIT DRAGON",
                "text": "Merika screamed, \"NO!\" She tore through the rings of dragons and fell to her knees beside Drakor. Blood ran from the long, deep cuts that sliced across his chest and belly. Was he even breathing?\n\nThe clan stared at the fallen dragons, eyes wide, flicking their tails nervously. Being torn between two leaders was terrible. This was worse. One was dead or dying, the other defeated and disgraced.\n\nMerika trembled as thin white fog rose from Drakor's jaws. Was his spirit dragon leaving? Then his chest moved, just barely.\n\nMerika grabbed clumps of dried peat moss from her Healer's bag and pushed this into the worst wounds. She laid her forearm along the moss and applied pressure. \"Moss will absorb blood, stop the bleeding, and prevent infections,\" she said, reciting a lesson. Then she wrapped long strips of hemp around the moss-covered wounds and tied them snugly.\n\nMerika scooped snow from a rare clean patch, filled fish-skin bags, and pressed them onto the bandages. \"Cold helps stop the bleeding.\" Reciting the lessons was oddly comforting, as if other Healers shared her burden.\n\nWhispers flew around the rings. \"Who will lead?\"\n\nJardor joined Merika in the center and tilted his head in silent question.\n\nShe stared at her fallen mate and whispered, \"He isss more dead than alive. I will do all I can. Arak, Scree, and two others are already on their way here to help the wounded dragonlet. They might heal Drakor . . .\" Her voice caught in her throat, \". . . if he lives that long. He needs to be taken to his den.\"\n\nJardor glanced at Mardor. The giant lay where he fell, silent and still, with one leg bent at an odd angle.\n\nJardor pointed to two dragons. \"Bring both toboggans, quickly.\"\n\nMinutes later, five dragons lifted Drakor onto a long, wooden toboggan. Jardor said, \"Pull him into his den, gently.\"\n\nMerika gazed at her fallen mate. \"Tenira and Cranart, please keep pressure on his wounds. Cover him with blankets when you reach his den.\"\n\nTwo dragons pulled Drakor across the snow along the smoothest path. Cranart and Tenira walked by his side, pressing against his bandaged wounds.\n\nMerika tore her eyes away from Drakor and turned to the fallen giant. She knelt down beside Mardor and cleaned his cuts with snow, then used the stinging, mustard-yellow salve. He remained as still as ice, with vacant eyes, as if he felt nothing at all. She made a wide, hasty bandage around the worst wound, wrapped his leg straighter, and called Jardor. \"Please take Mardor to his den. I will set his leg later.\"\n\nJardor eyed the giant. \"I hope this toboggan can carry him.\" He summoned three large, sturdy dragons. \"Pull Mardor into his den and then remain outside. He must not leave.\"\n\nMerika said to Mardor, \"Do not try to stand. I will check on you soon.\"\n\nThe giant slid his body sideways, up onto the toboggan, but his feet and long tail hung off the end. The guards strained against the ropes, grunting as they pulled the immense load. Mardor's clawed feet left a red trail in the snow.\n\nMerika shivered. This trail had the blood of two dragons.\n\nThe clan stared after Mardor, snapping their tails.\n\n\"Mardor broke the law. He must die!\"\n\n\"Kill him!\"\n\nJardor raised his wings for silence. \"I am second-in-command. I am the leader until Drakor isss well. We will wait for his decision on Mardor. Now there isss work to do.\"\n\nMerika bowed to Jardor, launched into the sky, and flew like the wind to her mate. Drakor lay inside his cave, as still as death. She quickly checked the patient. His pupils were huge, his scales were cool, and his pulse was racing. \"He isss in shock. I need more blankets to keep him warm.\"\n\nMerika whispered, \"Do not die.\" She sent the gentlest micro-zap into Drakor's heart, to encourage it to keep beating.\n\nTwo dragons arrived within minutes, bearing tall stacks of blankets. Merika tucked layers of blankets around Drakor. \"Raise the legs higher than the heart,\" she murmured, again reciting lessons. She folded two more blankets and placed them beneath his legs.\n\nMerika cleaned his many cuts with snow and slathered mustard-yellow salve across them. She sewed up three deeper cuts using small, even stitches while carefully matching the scales on either side. Then she filled the deepest cuts with honey, to let his body heal them from the inside out.\n\nMerika took a long, deep breath. It was time to check the terrible slashes across Drakor's chest and belly. She untied the bandage and sighed. She had stopped the bleeding from these death slices, but now his scales had an unhealthy, gray-blue tinge.\n\nHow did you balance the opposite needs of the body? When was a bandage tight enough to control bleeding, yet loose enough to allow the circulation his body needed? She gently cleaned the cuts and nervously adjusted the bandages. Was this right?\n\nMerika turned to her helper. \"Watch him carefully. Drakor must not move. I will be back soon.\" Tail dragging, she left for Mardor's den. She flexed her claws in frustration, wanting to shred something. Why did they need to fight today?\n\nMardor sat on his bed of leaves, staring at the ground. He barely looked up as Merika entered. His face held a lost look, and his wings drooped in defeat.\n\nMerika's anger faded away. Scree's words came to mind: What will be, will be. And then I'll fix it. Well, there was plenty to fix. When would the Healers arrive?\n\nMerika cleaned Mardor's wounds with clawfulls of snow. \"The cold will reduce swelling.\" She slathered on the mustard-yellow salve, wrapped deeper cuts with bandages, and eyed the long belly slash. \"This needs stitches.\"\n\nMerika threaded a sharp bone needle with thin fish gut. \"Hold still while I sew up your wound.\" Mardor sat as if carved from ice while she worked.\n\nWith the help of a guard she set Mardor's broken leg, pulling until the bone snapped back into place. He barely winced. She placed a flat stick on either side, wrapped the leg tightly with hemp bandages, and made strong knots.\n\nMerika took deep, slow breaths while the image of a micro-zap pattern formed in her mind. She zapped through the bandages. This complicated energy pattern would help the bones heal faster. She crushed a clawfull of herbs, adding a pleasant, earthy aroma to the den, and mixed them into his mug of water. \"Drink. This has nettles and boneset herb, to help heal your bones and scales.\"\n\nMardor did not move, so she put the mug into his clawed hands. \"Drink.\"\n\nHe drank the potion automatically, without a shred of notice.\n\nMerika collected the empty mug. \"Mardor, DO NOT put any weight on this leg. A dragon will bring you crutches to help you move. I will check on you tomorrow.\"\n\nHe did not reply.\n\nMerika crouched down to catch his eye. \"Do you understand?\"\n\nMardor nodded once and then continued to stare into space, as if lost in his own private nightmare.\n\nThe sun sank behind the purple mountain as Merika trudged back toward Drakor's den. The sky turned a vivid blend of ruby, gold, and topaz fire. She stopped and stared. How could such beauty exist beside these terrible wounds?\n\nMerika entered the den and paused, overwhelmed by the stench. She replaced a blood-soaked bandage while Drakor lay still, barely breathing, dead to the world. Would he ever wake?\n\nMerika checked the wooden tub. It was still empty. She called Jardor and pointed, \"This must be filled with seawater before Scree arrives. Could dragons fly to the shore and bring back buckets of the sea?\"\n\nSuddenly, she swayed and nearly fell.\n\nJardor grabbed Merika's arm to steady her. He studied her eyes. \"I will assign dragons to prepare for our guests. You need to eat. You have been working since the dwire attacked at dawn.\" He motioned to the other dragon. \"Feed her and make sure she rests.\" Then he left."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Merika awoke at dawn, disoriented. She had crashed into sleep while lying on a few extra blankets. She sat up and turned to her mate. Drakor was completely still, lost to the world. She checked his pulse and put an ear to his chest. Weak pulse, rapid heartbeat, shallow breathing. He was still in shock.\n\nMerika flicked her tail nervously and murmured, \"If he does not wake soon. . .\" She could not finish that thought. She gazed south, willing the visitors to fly faster. Scree and Dorali had healed Drakor once before. Could he survive until they arrived?\n\nDuring the night, Zardan had taken the place of the helper. He stared down at his son and shivered with a cold beyond winter. \"My mate sang him the same lullaby each night. Maybe it will reach him.\" He began to croon softly.\n\nIf Drakor heard, he gave no sign.\n\nMerika flinched at the stench as she removed old, blood-soaked bandages. She rubbed lavender oil across his wounds and placed a gray leech on a dangerously swollen lump. It quickly attached, gently thinning and sucking out the old, dark blood to let new blood circulate. She wrapped clean bandages around her mate and tied the ends.\n\nMerika chewed a handful of nuts for energy while rummaging through her Healer bag. She chose three small bottles and massaged the oils into his chest. \"Hawthorn, ginger, and rosemary. This will reduce swelling and strengthen the heartbeat.\" Saying it out loud seemed to make it real.\n\nMerika inhaled the spicy-earthy combination of oils and noted a salty smell. She checked the tub. It was full of seawater! She must have slept deep to hear nothing, while dragons filled the tub. \"Now, what was that other heart oil? The dangerous flower?\" She found the odd, triangular, amethyst jar. \"Foxglove!\"\n\nMerika poured five drops on Drakor's chest. She rubbed them in and gently zapped a heart healing pattern. Nothing changed. \"At least you are still alive,\" she whispered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "On the morning of the third day, three bright stars appeared on the horizon. Arak, Dorali, and Karoon glowed gold in the early light. They landed beside a waiting dragon.\n\nJardor stood in the snow, holding a tray with three large, steaming mugs and one small cup. He gave a wide, toothy smile as they approached. \"You must be cold. Thank you for coming! Did Merika give you the latest news?\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Yes.\" He gulped his tea, noting the spices and honey. It was red root tea, the traditional drink of golden dragons. Jardor's thoughtfulness warmed him as much as the tea. \"Thank you. We'd like to see Drakor now.\"\n\nJardor bowed low. \"Follow me.\"\n\nThey all jogged to Drakor's den, which was near the edge of the village. Ice dragons turned to stare with wide eyes.\n\nWhen they reached the den, Karoon spread a wing possessively over Dorali.\n\nShe curved her neck around to peer into his eyes and then glanced down at his wing. \"Why?\"\n\nKaroon flicked his tail nervously. \"I thought you'd just be helping a dragonlet. Now you'll be spending time with Drakor, too.\"\n\nDorali smiled. \"Drakor's a good friend and a well-made dragon. But he has Merika. And I have you.\"\n\nA huge grin spread across Karoon's face. \"Yes you do.\"\n\nLight gleamed off Dorali's sparkly green arm band. Arak grinned. Karoon had given that to her. Was she finally ready to accept him as mate?\n\nA young dragon-lord stood at the den entrance, flicking his short tail nervously. He stood straighter as they appeared and gave the visitors a proper bow, bending at the waist with his back straight. \"It isss my turn to carry messages. Are you here to help?\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Yes. Here are two more Healers: Scree and Dorali.\"\n\nRelief showed in the youngster's eyes. \"Thank you for coming so far to help our leader.\n\nArak crouched low and crawled through the narrow entrance tunnel, still carrying Scree between his wings. As his head cleared the tunnel, he stopped cold. Merika had shared her shocking news in trance-mind. But the reality was far worse.\n\nDrakor looked like a corpse.\n\nFlickering candles added light and shadows to the disturbing scene within. Drakor lay as still as death, swathed in blankets, with dull scales and a sunken-in face. Merika's wings hung limp. She sat beside her mate, gently stroking her hands down his neck, along the veins beneath his scales. She must be trying to send blood back to his heart.\n\nArak's tail slumped to the ground. Merika must be living in a nightmare. He and his friends left home before the challenge fight, before two more dragons were wounded. Had they brought the supplies they needed for Drakor? Could Scree heal his dying friend?"
            },
            {
                "title": "HIDDEN CLAWS",
                "text": "Arak's nostrils flared as he entered the den. There was fresh sand on the floor and a minty scent in the air, but the smell of dragon blood lingered.\n\nMerika's eyes lit up. \"Arak! Scree!\" She pointed to the wood basin beside Drakor. \"Jardor filled it with water from the sea, and I have kept it warm with heat-zaps.\"\n\nScree slipped out of the thick cape, climbed off Arak's back, and slid into the welcoming warmth. She slowly curled and uncurled each of her arms. Her pale gray skin regained its normal red-brown color as she rested in her element, taking deep pulses of oxygen-water. \"That was an interesting sky journey. Winter clouds are even colder than the deep abyss. I was half-frozen.\"\n\nArak quietly signed to Scree, \"Please heal our friend.\" He turned to Merika. \"I'll wait outside so there's room for Dorali.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Scree slipped two arms out of the tub, tasting the damp air in Drakor's den. Scents of old blood, potions, and salves were nearly masked by the potent aroma of crushed peppermint leaves. Despite her obvious exhaustion, Merika had remembered the importance of scent. Her ice dragon friend was already a true Healer.\n\nScree signed, \"I'm ready.\"\n\nMerika pulled back the blankets that covered the patient's chest.\n\nScree moved three arms over Drakor, sensing. Her skin flushed dark gray with worry. How was he still alive? He was cold despite the many blankets that were still tucked around his sides and over his legs and arms. Dragons needed regular meals. It was nearly impossible to feed an unconscious patient, so he must have eaten nothing for three days. His body salts tasted off. But worst of all, Drakor's heart fluttered erratically, and his pulse was so weak she could barely feel it.\n\nScree turned topaz brown with resolve. She was a Healer. Her arms sparkled with ideas as her main brain considered the options.\n\nScree reached into her Healer bag, grabbed the amethyst jar with the triangle sides, and pulled out the stopper. Her arms curled away at the sharp feel/taste. This medicine came from a deadly purple flower, and too much could kill.\n\nMerika nodded. \"Foxglove. I used that, but just a little. I was afraid to use too much.\"\n\nScree mixed ten drops of Foxglove extract into a spoonful of nut oil. \"You did well. You kept him alive. Now his heart needs a stronger beat before I reset the rhythm. Drip this under his tongue, slowly, near the back.\"\n\nScree placed her arms above Drakor's heart while Merika treated the patient. Her sensitive suckers checked his chemicals, temperature, and pulse. She smiled as his pulse improved.\n\nScree fastened one arm directly above each of his four heart chambers. Then she zapped once into each chamber, in a rapid sequence.\n\nNothing changed.\n\nScree sent stronger pulses of electric energy into Drakor, again in the proper sequence for a dragon's beating heart. And then again.\n\nSuddenly, Drakor coughed. His eyelids fluttered like the wings of a dying moth. A crack opened up, as if he was peering in from beyond. Then he opened his eyes for the first time since the fight.\n\nMerika snapped her tail. \"Drakor!\"\n\nDorali cheered while Scree turned bright emerald shades of happy-green.\n\nDrakor gazed at his mate and tried to sit up. \"Meh-ri-kah,\" he croaked.\n\nShe put both hands on his chest, gently. \"Do NOT move. Your wounds are too deep. You must lie still.\"\n\nShe turned to Scree and bowed low. \"You saved him. That was an amazing treatment only an octopus could manage. Sometimes I think I would trade my wings for eight marvelous octopus arms.\"\n\nScree grinned. \"And I might trade my arms for dragon wings, to fly through auroras and up to the stars.\"\n\nMerika bowed again. \"Scree, I will fly you wherever you wish to go, whenever you want to go.\" She turned to Drakor, and her stormy gray eyes flashed with anger. \"WHY??? Why did you need to fight NOW? I already had one horribly wounded dragon to heal! Then I had three! I worked every day, all day, on wounded dragons. I did nothing else until Scree and Dorali arrived.\"\n\nDrakor watched warily from his bed.\n\nMerika snapped her tail angrily. \"When I heard the drum, I left the dragonlet with her dam and Jordana. There you were, locked in a terrible fight with Mardor. It looked like a fight to the death, and it nearly was. You already had a leg wound! I did not become a Healer just to keep fixing you up!\"\n\nDrakor attempted a smile and croaked out, \"But it isss a nice benefit from having you for my mate.\"\n\nMerika glared back and he cringed. If eyes could throw lightning swords, he would be dead.\n\n\"I warned you to be careful. You could at least have waited. Why did you accept Mardor's challenge?\"\n\nDrakor reached out one hand, hesitantly, claws back.\n\nMerika stared silently, ignoring his appeal. Then she sat down beside him and met his hand, claws back. \"I thought you would die, and you nearly did. I need to know why.\"\n\nDrakor tried to nod, and winced with pain. \"Merika, the clan was divided. Many did not accept me as leader. And many ignored my call to defend the clan.\"\n\nHe took a few deep, slow breaths. \"Half the dragons believed Mardor's lies. When he challenged me, I had a choice. I could fight Mardor now, when I had a plan, or wait to be challenged by other dragons. If I beat him, I would be accepted as leader. Few would want to challenge a dragon who could beat Mardor twice! I need the support of the entire clan for us to survive this winter, and the dwire. There isss much work to do.\"\n\nMerika sighed. \"At least you had a plan. But plans seldom work as expected.\"\n\nDrakor started a laugh that became a dry, choking cough.\n\nShe held a flask to his mouth. \"Water. Take small sips.\"\n\nHe drank the entire flask, slowly. \"Thanks. I cannot remember ever being so thirsty! Yes, plans are not perfect. But dragon-lords may be less eager to challenge me after this terrible fight. I want to change how we choose our leaders. Our way isss a waste of dragons. Golden dragons have a sensible way.\"\n\nMerika bent down and gently touched foreheads with her mate. \"At least we can agree on that.\" She took another flask from her bag. \"Drink this broth. I added the salts you need and some pain medicine. It isss not good to hurt so much.\"\n\nJardor poked his head in through the entrance and entered the den, smiling. \"Drakor, it isss so good to see you awake! Merika and Dorali, the dragonlet's dam wants to see you. She isss worried about that wounded wing.\"\n\nDrakor tried to straighten his body, to look more like a leader. As he moved his leg, it began to bleed through the bandages. \"Huh. That dwire bite isss deeper than I thought.\"\n\nMerika glared. \"I warned you to lie still. You were hurt that badly and still you had to fight?\" Reaching into her Healer bag, she tossed Jardor a roll of bandages and a jar of salve.\n\nHe caught them neatly.\n\n\"Jardor, you know how to use this. Please change his bandage and keep him still. Drakor, drink the broth.\" Merika spun on her heel and left the den."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Jardor flicked his tail while he changed the bandage. \"She isss quite angry.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Merika isss a Healer. Because I fought, she had three dragons to heal instead of one.\"\n\nJardor tied off the bandage. He turned to Scree and spoke slowly. \"I heard you can read dragon jaws. Thank you again for coming so far to help.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"You read that conversation?\"\n\nScree nodded and signed, \"Merika has good reasons to be angry. She had too many patients with almost no help. You, her mate, were nearly dead. And, have you noticed her wing tips? They're silvery.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes were huge. \"No wonder she isss so mad. Merika isss with egg!\"\n\nScree grinned. \"Yes. And she's tired of patching you up. This is not a job I seek, either, but I worked too hard on your mangled wing to lose you now.\"\n\nScree curled an arm beneath her head, in a dragon's thinking pose. \"Hearts are as fascinating as bones. An octopus has one main heart and two small hearts. Fish have one heart with two chambers. But a dragon has one heart with four chambers, all together! It was an interesting challenge to reset a dragon's heart.\"\n\nDrakor reached out a hand, slowly, and Scree twined arm-to-claw. \"I owe you my life, once again. Thank you.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"I saved your wing the last time, not your life.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"Flying isss life. Scree, you were right. The inner battle was hard.\"\n\nShe signed, \"And you won. You let go of your anger.\"\n\nJardor raised one eye ridge. \"Drakor, when you fought, you kept moving to the east. You knew where that hole was under the snow?\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I memorized the fight circle before it snowed. I knew that hole could be useful. Scree, when you fought three giant squid, you made a hidden hole. It helped you survive that fierce blow. I fought Mardor the same way I did the first time, to throw him off guard, so I could lead him to the hidden hole.\"\n\nJardor shook his head. \"Drakor, it was risky. Why did you agree to fight?\"\n\nDrakor stared out the entrance, where a light snowfall swirled through the afternoon sky. \"Mardor knew I was hurt, and still he wanted to fight me. He was healthy, rested, and huge. How could he possibly lose? Mardor wanted to beat me so completely that nobody could question that he was the leader.\"\n\nDrakor flicked the tip of his tail, which was the only part of him that did not hurt. \"I could have refused. Or I could have agreed to fight him after my leg healed. But we were already fighting. Mardor challenged my leadership every day; he fought with hidden claws. I had to prove to his followers that I am the clan leader, and fights are all they understand. The snow hid the hole, and I knew where it was.\"\n\nDrakor started coughing.\n\nJardor offered his flask, and Drakor took a few sips. \"Thanks. The whole world was changed by our Volcano. We have a new home. We will face dwire and starving times and problems that I cannot imagine. We need a united clan to survive.\"\n\nJardor shook his head. \"It was still risky. He could have missed that hole. And you nearly died.\"\n\nDrakor smiled. \"True. Plans seldom work out as we hope, especially with fights. But this was my best chance, when the snow was perfect and Mardor was so confident of winning. Size matters, but a good plan isss stronger.\"\n\nJardor cocked his head sideways. \"You sound more sure of yourself.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"I defeated Mardor twice. Everyone knows that I am the leader. But we need leaders who can plan, not just beat up another dragon.\"\n\nJardor bowed. \"You are a good leader.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I am. And I plan to remain the leader. Much has changed, and the clan needs something constant. But, some day, I want to have a new leader for the clan. Then I will be free to explore.\"\n\n\"No ice dragon just stops being leader! Who would be next?\"\n\n\"You, I hope.\"\n\nJardor snapped his tail with a loud crack. \"NO. I do not want to fight you.\"\n\nDrakor looked him in the eye. \"I do not want any more challenge fights. I want a new way to choose the leader. We will use the choosing game to decide almost everything I can think of. Ice dragons love making blue fires! Soon, they will want to have a choice. Then, when the time isss right, the clan members will choose their new leader.\"\n\n\"Did you plan all this, before you fought?\"\n\nDrakor started to shrug his wings and winced. \"I never liked challenge fights, but I never considered another way until I met the golden dragons. I challenged Mardor on our island because I knew we had to move. I had to win that fight. I fought here, the second time, to finish the first fight. I did not plan to be nearly killed. Jardor, you would be a good leader. You understand what needs to be done and have the patience to deal with the clan every day.\"\n\nJardor looked toward the fight circle. \"I will think on this. What will you do with Mardor?\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"I do not know. I am just one dragon. But change can start with just one dragon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Drakor stared at Merika's wings. \"When were you going to tell me?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe nodded toward her silvery wingtips. \"That.\"\n\nMerika smiled. \"Oh. That. The color began to change the day the dwire attacked. Then you were beyond hearing, and I was beyond busy.\"\n\nDrakor ignored the dig about his fight and simply grinned. \"Our own dragonlet! Our egg will hatch in summer . . .\" He stared out at the snow. \"But there will be no spring or summer, only winter.\"\n\nMerika nodded. \"I know. I miss our hot springs. It isss a challenge to nest here, even in summer. It would be nearly impossible in winter. Dorali invited me to nest in their cave.\"\n\n\"You can study with the Healers.\"\n\nMerika looked south. \"Yes. A golden dragon fills her nest bowl with sand. She warms the bowl with dragon-fire, which safely warms the sand and the egg within. But breathing fire on a ceramic bowl does not feel right for an ice dragon.\"\n\n\"What will you do, instead?\"\n\n\"Make a traditional ice dragon nest using rocks and gems. Our egg will be in sand, like a golden dragon's nest, but I will warm the sand with your new heat-zap. This should feel like the hot springs of our old home.\"\n\nDrakor gazed at his mate. \"That sounds perfect.\" He clicked his claws together. \"We need a place for dragons to nest here during this long winter. The clan should build a special den, just for nesting. This would be a safer place even after winter ends and spring finally returns.\"\n\nMerika's eyes lit up. \"Yes!\" She brushed off a patch of the dirt floor beside Drakor, making it smoother. Then, using a sharp claw, she began to draw. \"The nesting den must be big enough to hold four large dragons. It should be in the safest place, here, in the middle of the village. We must be able to fold the roof, to take it off for the hatching ceremony. The den walls would be thicker, with many layers of rock to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer. They would also be shorter so we can all watch as the egg hatches.\"\n\nShe drew more marks in the floor. \"Narrow slits to open during the summer heat and cover in winter. Baskets of river sand will be kept here, with holes for water buckets along this wall.\"\n\nDrakor ran his eyes over the drawing and nodded. \"You thought of everything. When the den isss ready, ice dragons will nest in our village. Then we can properly welcome our new dragonlets.\"\n\nMerika smiled. \"This will be a good home. Now you must eat.\" She turned away and peered into her Healer bag. \"Where isss that sea salt? Ah, there.\" She poured some into the bowl she held. \"This has some of the minerals you need to grow more blood.\"\n\nWhen she looked away, Drakor stretched his body stealthily, slowly, as slow as a stalking dragon. Then his body spasmed and he gasped, wincing with pain.\n\nMerika whipped her head around. \"I warned you to lie still! Your wounds are deeper than you think. If not for Scree . . .\" She shuddered, nearly dropping the black onyx bowl that she held. Salty, scented steam rose from within. \"You are much too thin. Eat all of this, but slowly. This isss a thicker broth, almost a stew.\"\n\nLying still was a new form of torture, but he noted the loose, scaly skin on his body. Drakor studied his reflection in one of the flat, polished sides of Merika's five-sided bowl. He looked like a corpse, and it was not a good look. With all his wounds, he even smelled like something dead.\n\nDrakor tried a spoonful of broth. \"Dragon spices!\" He finished eating and looked hopefully at the empty bowl.\n\nMerika shook her head. \"Not yet. Eating too much, too soon, would hurt you.\"\n\nDrakor sighed and picked at his blankets. \"I broke Mardor's leg. Isss he healing well? Will he be able to push off and fly?\"\n\nMerika snorted. \"Mardor will recover and have a weather-bone to predict change. The weather isss always snow, so that isss not a very useful talent.\"\n\n\"And the dragonlet? Will she be able to fly?\"\n\nMerika gazed in the direction of that den. \"I hope so. That wing frame we made isss working even better than I hoped. Her bones are mending. Dorali isss encouraging scales to grow across wounds. She isss painfully aware of her own scars, and pleased that these are harder to see on a white dragon.\"\n\nMerika gave Drakor a big, steaming mug. \"This isss herb tea with honey. Drink all of it.\"\n\n\"My favorite! My throat feels as dry as a mud-cracked stream bed in summer.\" He finished the tea. The den faded away as he spun down into darkness. His last thought was that she must have added something extra to make him sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Drakor's nose awoke to a new scent. He opened his eyes. Merika was gone.\n\nArak offered him a steaming bowl. \"Have some broth. Merika's worn out, so I offered to watch over you while you both slept.\"\n\nDrakor said, \"Thank you. She needs rest more than I do. I wish I could have won as I planned, without these wounds.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"It would be nice if plans cooperated. I'm glad we were already on our way.\"\n\nArak smiled. \"We have a good team here. Scree has unique skills. Dorali and Merika take turns micro-zapping injuries. Jardor gets the food supplies, and then Karoon and I fix meals. We all help change bandages. Jordana helps, too.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail. \"Jordana isss learning our ways, but she still misses the golden dragons.\" He gave a sad smile. \"We have three wounded, den-bound ice dragons. Before I fought, there was only one. Because of me, we need all of you.\"\n\nArak gave Drakor's shoulder a careful, reassuring pat. \"This fight was going to happen. I'm glad we could help.\"\n\nDrakor's lump of guilt began to thaw like ice in spring. \"Thank you. How was your trip here?\"\n\n\"Interesting. We stopped for lunch and spent each night on a beach, so Scree could rest in the surf, and we could warm up by a fire. It's safer by the sea, easier to defend if dwire attack. My favorite is still that pebble beach with the glowing waves.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes lit up. \"That isss one of my favorite places. I will never forget our sea journeys. The skiff became home. Someday . . .\"\n\nArak cocked his head sideways. \"You wish to travel again? You'll always be welcome aboard the dragon-skiff.\"\n\nZardan crawled in through the narrow entrance, bringing tantalizing aromas that filled the den. He placed a heavy tray on the low table. There were plates of food and a bowl. He handed the bowl to Drakor. \"You look better already! Dorali made fish broth with herbs and salts.\"\n\nZardan turned to Arak and bowed low. \"Thank you again for coming here. These are the new food favorites: smoked redfish, cranberries, toasted nuts, and dried mushrooms.\"\n\nArak's stomach rumbled as he eyed the food. The strange, tan mushrooms were hollow, with a honeycomb pattern of ridges and pits. He began eating and thumped his tail. \"This is superb!\"\n\nZardan put a plate on the stool next to Scree. This was carved from solid red jasper, polished smooth, with a tall rim to hold the feast within. Ruffled gray oysters, brown clams, and shiny black mussels were arranged in an attractive starburst pattern.\n\nHe bowed low. \"Thank you for saving my son.\"\n\nScree turned happy-green. \"You're welcome. You found my favorite foods! Thanks. With the sea so cold, these must be hard to get.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"The icy shore makes it a challenge to hunt, and there isss less to find, but you deserve a proper feast.\"\n\nNight closed in, with auroras dancing in the sky.\n\nDrakor pointed outside. \"That sky fire moves faster than smidgers on a warm day. There are colors I have never seen! They remind me of Orm's glowing sea creatures.\"\n\nArak gazed at the sky. \"When we play games with colored lightning, the clouds glow with rainbow fires. But this is the best light show ever!\"\n\nZardan's eyes glowed. \"These are even better than the auroras at our old home. Now I have new legends to share.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"These new sky colors are a gift from our Volcano, to welcome us to our new home.\"\n\nZardan gazed at his son. \"I thought I would lose you. That fight will become a clan legend.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"I hope the most memorable part of the story isss that this was the last challenge fight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "A five-day passed.\n\nBright auroras glowed green through the ceiling, adding their light to the flickering candles in Drakor's den. Notes from a flute duet flowed like another layer of warmth.\n\nIce dragons gathered near the entrance, tapping their claws in the snow, matching the rhythm. Scree held a hollow silver ball between two arms, feeling the vibration patterns.\n\nMerika and Dorali finished the tune and bowed.\n\nDragons snapped their tails in applause when the tune ended. Scree showed her delight with a rainbow that swirled down each arm. Then her skin became a night sky, with emerald auroras that spread across the stars until she was completely happy-green.\n\nDrakor stared. \"Scree, you change colors faster than lightning. How do you think so fast?\"\n\nScree shrugged her octopus-shoulders. \"It helps to have nine brains.\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"I can only imagine.\" He turned to the dragon-ladies. \"That was magnificent. Could you play at the feast?\"\n\nDorali pointed her flute at Drakor. \"You should play, too. And Arak. Merika, there's room for all of us to practice in the visitor's den.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"Mardor thought that den was a waste of time. Who would visit? But now you're all here, healing three dragons. Thank you again.\"\n\nJardor poked his head in. \"Merika and Dorali, the dragonlet needs you again.\" After they left, he entered the den. Jardor studied his friend and leader, then nodded as if satisfied by the progress. \"We caught, cleaned, and smoked five more hands of fish. And we tried Scree's suggestions for dwire warnings.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes brightened. \"What?\"\n\nScree signed, \"The dwire camouflage so you can't see them, but sound and smell are also important. We knew that giant squid would attack our pod, so we hung shells on seaweed trees. The shell noise gave us warning. Then we broke stinky, rotten eggs to hide the scent of our octopus fighters.\"\n\nJardor took a box out of his sack. \"I designed noisy, smelly, warning traps.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"What did you use?\"\n\nJardor opened the box. \"This thin wood box squashes easily. The dry sticks inside break and make noise. For smell, I added that strange mushroom with orange arms, the one you call stinky squid. Nothing too awful in case a dragon steps on a box.\"\n\nJardor looked toward the field. \"When it was dark, we hid the boxes under the snow, near the forest. When a box isss stepped on, the noise and smell should warn the guards.\"\n\nDrakor said, \"Guards?\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"I added guards. It isss what you would have done, if you could have.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"Yes, but you were clever enough to not be unconscious.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "DANGEROUS WAVES",
                "text": "Another five-day passed, and Drakor's bruises now showed purple beneath his scales. He glanced at his mate, who had turned away. Then he slowly stretched, reaching his claws toward a long, puckered scar.\n\nMerika spun back. \"Do NOT scratch.\"\n\n\"Everything itches.\"\n\n\"Be glad you are alive to feel the itch. Try walking again.\" She held his elbow firmly, keeping him steady as he sat up and slowly stood.\n\nJardor appeared at the entrance. He looked Drakor up and down, studying the lighter bandages that no longer bled through. \"You can walk?\"\n\nDrakor nodded.\n\n\"Good. It isss time.\"\n\nMerika shook her head no. \"He nearly died. He needs more time to heal.\"\n\nDrakor took a step toward the entrance. \"Jardor isss right.\"\n\nMerika walked by his side, holding his elbow. He twisted out of her grip and gently placed both hands on her shoulders, claws back. \"Merika, I need to do this alone.\"\n\nHe looked Jardor in the eye. \"Thank you for all you have done for me and the clan. Call the meeting, and I will come. But there isss something I must do first.\" Then he left the den, alone.\n\nDrakor limped away. He winced as he put weight on his left leg, which was still swollen from the dwire's toxic bite. Everything hurt. Finally, he reached Mardor's home.\n\nDrakor stretched taller, feeling each stitch and puckered scar. He nodded to the two dragon guards. \"Please move back.\" Then he entered the dragon's den, alone.\n\nMardor sat at the far back, beyond sight of curious dragons strolling by. His scales were polished, and the wounds seemed mostly healed. He narrowed his eyes at the unwelcome visitor and growled, \"Why are you here?\"\n\nDrakor studied Mardor's home in silence. This den was huge, but so was Mardor. It was spartan, nearly empty. There was no glittering hoard of gems, no cache of tasty food, just his chest pouch and a simple bed of leaves. Most dragons had more, even dragonlets! Why did he want so much control, but so little stuff? Was power his only love?\n\nDrakor cocked his head sideways. \"Why did you want to be leader? It isss not that much fun.\"\n\nMardor's eye ridges rose up in surprise. \"You do not want the power? That isss more precious than chocolate.\"\n\nDrakor gazed back toward the meeting circle. \"Isss having power truly worth all the fights?\"\n\nMardor shrugged his wings. \"To me, it isss everything. I cannot imagine a different life. And now I will die.\" There was no anger or hate, as if the fight had washed this away like clean snow.\n\nDrakor sighed. By clan law, he should either kill Mardor or banish him forever. But he was the leader, and this was his decision. \"Mardor, I will not kill you, and I will not allow the clan to kill you. But you broke our oldest rule. You will be outcast for three moons. When the moon isss full for the third time, you may return.\"\n\nMardor snapped his tail in surprise. \"Why?\"\n\nDrakor looked him in the eye. \"Dragons should not kill dragons. There are too few of us already.\"\n\nMardor bowed his head. Then he eyed Drakor's bandages. \"Letting me live isss more than I would have done for you.\"\n\nDrakor gave a wry grin. \"I know. You wanted me dead. You have wanted this since we fought the first time.\"\n\nMardor stared. \"You knew. And you did not want me dead? You could have killed me with a lightning sword in the fight. You have the skill.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"We are different dragons. But you have been a huge thorn between my scales.\" He shared a lopsided grin. \"As I once was for you.\"\n\nMardor gave a rusty smile. Then he stared past Drakor, into the scraggly forest beyond. \"I thought I would die. I did not think past my fate. I am disgraced. I can leave, but I do not see how I can return.\"\n\nDrakor sank down to the ground beside Mardor. He took two precious pieces of chocolate out of his pouch and gave one to his former foe.\n\nMardor's eyes grew wide, but he accepted the treat. They ate together in silence.\n\nThen Drakor said, \"My sire did not want to live when he could not fly. Dying can seem easier than living. But life brings change. You lost two challenge fights. You will not be leader again. But there isss more in life than being the clan leader. You are a strong dragon and a strong fighter. We could use your help if the dwire attack again. You are part of the clan.\"\n\nMardor's lip curled back. \"YOUR clan.\"\n\n\"No. OUR clan. The clan isss for all of us, not one dragon. Now we must go to the Meeting Circle. The clan isss waiting. I did not want you to walk alone.\"\n\nDrakor and Mardor walked together, followed by the two guards. Their breath froze in small clouds. New snow muffled their steps and covered the bloody field, as if that terrible fight had never happened. But it had.\n\nDrakor walked to the center of the ring, followed by Mardor. The giant stood tall with stiffly folded wings, but he seemed to have shrunk. Mardor was just a normal dragon facing something beyond his worst nightmares. This must take more courage than anything else he had ever done.\n\nDrakor nodded to Jardor, and he struck the drum once. Thunder rumbled through the air. Drakor raised his wings high, wincing as this pulled on his many stitches. \"I won the challenge fight in our old home. I won again in our new home. I Am The Leader.\"\n\nThe entire clan bowed low in unison. They were quieter now and calmer, too. Every dragon seemed to accept Drakor's rule, relieved that the constant conflict was over at last. There was one clear leader.\n\nA dragon-lord raised his wing politely, and Drakor nodded for him to speak. \"Mardor used lightning as a weapon in the challenge fight. He should die!\"\n\nAnother raised his wing. \"He broke our oldest rule. He deserves death!\"\n\nA low chant of \"Death. Death. Death.\" rose from clusters of dragons. They were like sharks with blood in the water, circling for the kill.\n\nMardor remained a silent white statue, but his gray eyes flicked around the circles, seeking old cronies. They met his gaze and looked away.\n\nDrakor recalled Scree's warning: Anger and hate are dangerous waves that build on each other. He raised his wings for silence, determined to stop this now. \"NO. He should not die. Mardor made a mistake. Who has not made a mistake?\"\n\nWings rustled as the crowd grew quiet.\n\nDrakor stood taller. \"I am the leader. We need everyone. That dragonlet was helped from his shell because we have no dragons to waste.\"\n\nDrakor turned to face his former foe. \"Mardor, you broke clan law when you used a lightning sword against another dragon. Therefore, you will be outcast for three moons. You will leave at dawn. When the moon isss full for the third time you may return, to be welcomed back.\"\n\nDrakor turned in a circle, catching every eye. \"Mardor has been, and will be, a valued member of our clan.\"\n\nThe giant looked at him in surprise and then bowed low, finally accepting Drakor as the leader."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "The following dawn, Drakor rose early. His breath froze in small white clouds as he walked to Mardor's den, carrying a large, lumpy sack. \"Here. This has salve for your wounds and dried fish. It isss a start, and you are a good hunter. I will walk with you into the forest.\"\n\nMardor accepted the sack with a silent bow. He donned his chest pouch and pulled the blanket off his bed of leaves.\n\nDrakor eyed the blanket, which was rough and plain, woven from uneven strips of hemp. In fact, it was ugly. Mardor did not seem to care about any possessions, only power. Now he was disgraced, powerless, and alone. Would he return, or disappear like the morning mist?\n\nThey walked together in silence, heading north, until they were hidden by the frost-covered bushes and stunted trees. There, on the ground, two dark branches made a \"V\" against the snow.\n\nDrakor pointed northwest. \"There isss a small cave at the base of the hill, hidden behind a bush. I found it when I was exploring. This isss my private cave, but you need it now. It isss too cold to be without shelter. This trail of sticks leads to the cave. Toss the sticks away as you find them, so no one can follow.\"\n\nMardor studied Drakor as if truly seeing him for the first time, as a fellow dragon. \"Thank you. This isss more than I deserve.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head no. \"A small octopus once taught me that everyone deserves consideration. I was hungry, so I tried to kill her. She stopped me cold, knocked me out, and then healed my broken wing. She gave me back the sky! I asked her why, and she said, 'I could have killed you. But a live friend isss worth more than a dead enemy.'\"\n\n\"That isss Scree? She stopped you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And now you are friends.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nMardor dropped his blanket and sack in the snow. He put out his hands, claws back.\n\nDrakor smiled and met his hands, claws back. \"I will see you in three moons. Then you can help me lead the defense against the dwire.\"\n\nMardor smiled back. \"Yes.\" He picked up the sack and blanket, then headed for the secret cave with a new spring in his step."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Glittering flecks of ice spun in the air, glowing like crystal fireflies. This whirling cloud was just above the snow, sparkling like an earthbound aurora. Drakor watched the whirlwind until it fell apart. More weird weather, but this was beautiful and harmless.\n\nHe inhaled slowly, noting the scents of fish, clams, mushrooms, cranberries, lichens, nuts, and chocolate! Bright gemstone jars held root-beer, a New World favorite made with sassafras tree roots. This would be a meal to remember, a proper farewell feast for their visitors.\n\nDrakor looked toward the shore with a sad smile. It was even colder now, and Arak was not willing to risk Scree on a return flight through the frozen clouds. Instead, the dragon-skiff had arrived to bring the visitors home, and Merika. They would all leave at dawn.\n\nBROOOM! BROOOM! BROOOM! The drum thundered three times, rumbling through the air.\n\nDragons dropped everything and headed for the feasting table. Youngsters began snapping their tails and others joined in, united by the catchy rhythm. This spread through the clan like a northern wind, and the cheerful sound rang across the snow.\n\nA dragon-lady scooped up a clawfull of snow, warmed it with a zap from her claws, and threw the slush ball at her suitor. It slid comically off his face. Soon the snow was flying like a winter storm.\n\nJardor clouted Drakor on the back, gently. \"This isss fun. I cannot imagine such foolishness with Mardor as leader.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"The clan isss pleased that the conflict isss finally settled. Now we have just one leader.\"\n\nJardor shook his head. \"That isss only part of it. You are a different sort of leader. No one wants to challenge you.\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"Isss that because they like me as leader, or because they have lost interest in being sliced up? If any dragon challenged me now, he could win the fight. But I hope there will never be another challenge fight.\"\n\nJardor raised an eye ridge. \"This isss one of our oldest customs. Do you really think you can change it?\"\n\nDrakor looked down at his abundant stitches and scars. Sometimes they itched so fiercely he wanted to shred his scales with scratching. \"Yes. And we must. Arak says that everything worth doing starts with a dream.\"\n\nJardor nodded. \"Ending the challenge fights isss a worthy dream.\"\n\nDrakor gazed at the table. \"And this isss a worthy feast. We should fill extra plates for the visitors on the skiff.\"\n\nJardor pointed to a large tub in the meeting circle. \"I finished this just in time. Now Scree and Orm can both join the fun.\"\n\nDrakor walked over and touched the water. \"Good. It isss warm. Orm brought food to help us through the winter.\"\n\nJardor's eyes grew wide. \"Remember when I asked 'How can an octopus help a dragon'? I never imagined a tiny, boneless creature could be so helpful.\"\n\nDrakor laughed. \"Size isss not everything.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Scree relaxed in her tub on the skiff. \"The dragons built a special basin just for us, so we can enjoy the celebration.\"\n\nOrm looked toward the distant gathering. \"Terrific. Now I can finally sit in the middle of a horde of ice dragons. Another dream come true.\"\n\nScree twined arms with her mate, carefully. \"Drakor is the leader, and he's made it clear that we're honored guests.\"\n\nOrm shrugged. \"But will they all listen? Remember the first time you met him? He attacked, and you knocked him out. Six of my arms have toxic tips, just in case.\"\n\nJust then, Drakor landed right beside them. He held out a colorful stone blade. \"Scree, I carved this surgeon's knife from a new Volcano rock.\"\n\nThe round handle flattened into a thin blade. Bands of color flowed across the stone like waves washing onto the shore: maroon, amethyst, red-violet, golden tan, and blue-gray. This was an Earth rainbow with the feel of the sea.\n\nScree felt the edge, and her eyes glowed. \"Thank you. It's beautiful! The edge is knapped so thin it's as clear as ice. This is the sharpest knife I've ever felt!\" She placed the blade between two long shells and slipped this into her Healer bag.\n\nDrakor beamed. \"Then it isss perfect for the sharpest Healer I have ever known.\"\n\nScree and Orm squished into their flying suits, climbed onto Drakor's back, and settled between his wings. He flew them to the gathering, and they slid off into the large, sea-filled basin.\n\nScree gazed at the crowd of dragons with interest while Orm, with equal interest, rechecked the toxic tips in his arms. Scree grabbed one of his safe arms. \"Orm, look!\"\n\nThe sunset glowed with raging reds and fiery golds. Glittering ice covered the sea of snow, reflecting these colors, surrounding the festival with a vivid display of fire. Then the sun disappeared. Red and green auroras sparkled against the darkness, transforming the night sky into precious black opal.\n\nAs Orm gazed at the sky, his stiff arms began to relax. \"I must find a way to create undersea auroras.\"\n\nDrakor signed, \"And I must see the glowing tapestries in your den.\" He nodded to Jardor, and the signal drum thundered.\n\nThe entire crowd became silent.\n\nDrakor raised his wings high. \"We feasted on the gifts of our New World to honor those who flew so far to help us: Arak, Dorali, Karoon, and Scree.\" He bowed to each as he spoke. \"Now, Dorali will share the unique art of golden dragons.\"\n\nDorali walked to the center and held up an amber snowflake. It glowed in the firelight, like a frost-covered spider web reflecting the dawn.\n\nIce dragons leaned forward with wide eyes, snapping their tails in appreciation.\n\nDorali smiled. \"This is an ornament for our winter solstice tree. Dragon-ladies grow fancy snowflakes in the winter clouds, using trace metals and micro-zaps. We place the snowflake on liquid pine sap, zap to turn it to amber, and cut out the design.\"\n\nShe held up more amber flakes. One had a design of leaping fish, another had dragons.\n\nA dragon-lady raised her wing. \"Could we learn this art?\"\n\nDorali grinned. \"Yes.\"\n\nDrakor raised his wings, and everyone fell silent. \"Thank you, Dorali. We could plan a united dragon festival with games and cloud art. Now we will hear the music of flutes.\"\n\nFour golden dragons moved to the center of the meeting circle. Drakor pulled out his flute and joined them.\n\nAt a signal, Arak, Taron, and Drakor played the flute melody. Karoon added a sparkling clash of cymbals, their new metal instrument. Then Dorali joined in with a flute harmony that soared and dove like a playful dragon. Bright notes spilled across the moonlit snow.\n\nThe audience stood perfectly still, ears tilted forward, entranced.\n\nDrakor relaxed into the music as he played. Everything was working out. Then he noticed odd shadows at the edge of the forest that did not match the trees. Dwire!\n\nHe caught Jardor's attention and pointed an elbow toward the shadows. His second-in-command took a closer look and nodded, adding their sign for dwire. Drakor continued playing the flute while Jardor quietly spoke to dragons.\n\nThe following dawn, Drakor stood on the skiff, wishing the guests farewell. Extra guards had watched through the night, and the dwire had not attacked. As the skiff rocked beneath him, he felt the pull of the sea, like a tide drawing him back.\n\nLast of all, Drakor bid farewell to Merika. \"I will mind-call.\"\n\nMerika met his hands. \"I will be waiting.\"\n\nDrakor flew ashore and watched until the skiff disappeared beyond the tantalizing horizon. He resisted the urge to fly high and watch longer. At least their egg would be in the warmer, well-protected cave of golden dragons. He sighed and turned away. There was work to do.\n\nIce dragons flew back to their village, carrying the plates and remaining food.\n\nAs the sun set, Drakor flew high above the fields, searching for dwire. He found monstrous dark shadows that rippled across the snow, ten times larger than the dragons who made them. Ice dragons were nearly invisible on snow but, as the sun sank, their shadows grew enormous in the slanting light.\n\nHe imagined monstrous dwire shadows and shuddered. Were these hunters gathered just inside the forest, hiding their shadows, watching and waiting?"
            },
            {
                "title": "FRACTURED ICE",
                "text": "An eerie wind moaned outside. Drakor sat on the floor of his den, carving a bowl from the new Volcano gem: black ice. He smoothed off the last rough edge and held it up to the candle light. The glassy bowl was clear darkness, like a solid night sky. Black ice was the perfect name.\n\nDrakor set the bowl down and fixed a mug of tea. He inhaled the spicy steam and swallowed it down, warming himself from within.\n\nMerika had mind-called. Their egg was a large, healthy size. She was learning the Healer micro-zaps. And the last of the golden dragons would soon arrive, completing their move to the New World. Then they would have a clan-and-pod festival with dragons and octopi.\n\nDrakor clicked his claws together. After the festival, Scree and Orm would leave to follow the route of the disappearing fish. He hoped Arak could use his secret gift to keep an eye on them as they skiff-flew.\n\nDrakor looked toward their ice-covered lake. It seemed that these fish were also leaving, swimming down the river to the sea. Would they return? If not, the ice dragons had a new, serious problem. If Scree learned what was happening, the clan would need to help fix it. She was right: everything was connected.\n\nDrakor moved to the entrance, pushed the blanket aside, and poked his head out. He took a deep, frozen breath. As he exhaled, sparkling frost grew on his scales. When would this winter end?\n\nThick clouds covered the moon and stars, making the night even darker than the bowl he carved. Drakor stepped outside, crunching through the icy crust. He stared into the darkness, toward his secret cave in the forest, flicking his tail nervously. This was the third full moon since Mardor left. He should be back.\n\nMardor had served his time in exile. This was the lightest sentence Drakor could give, a careful balance between consequences and concern for a dragon. With a sheltering cave and a lake for fishing, he should have survived. Had the dwire found him? Even the most ferocious dragon could die in an ambush, unable to reach the safety of the sky or the help of the clan. Was he hurt? Or worse?\n\nWhere was Mardor?\n\nDrakor stared into the night, trying to pierce the darkness. If that dragon did not return soon, he and Jardor would search . . .\n\nA powerful roar shook the sky.\n\nThat was a dragon! Drakor was in the air before he knew it, gathering energy with his claws. He whistled a piercing warning to the clan as he flew.\n\nThe wind grew, tearing at the sky. Moonlight bled through a tattered patch of clouds. At the edge of the field, a huge dragon spun on the snow, claws flying, battling an invisible whirlwind.\n\nDrakor hovered in the sky just above the dragon, working his wings to hold still. He threw lightning swords with both hands, striking the nearly invisible attackers, creating a perfect ring of death around Mardor.\n\nDwire shrieked in rage and pain. As the dwire died, their chameleon hides became visible, a mottled gray-brown. But even in death, they clung to the dragon like leeches in a swamp. As the dragon was pulled down, more dwire leapt for his throat.\n\nDrakor killed the last clinging dwire just as Mardor collapsed on the battlefield.\n\nMore dragons appeared in the sky, throwing lightning swords. The invisible dwire were betrayed by their faint shadows. There were many tens of dwire!\n\nDrakor landed beside the massive, shredded dragon that lay bleeding in the snow. Mardor's perfect, sparkling white scales were now sliced, shredded, and scarlet.\n\nMardor whispered, \"You came when I called.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Of course. You are part of the clan.\"\n\nMardor stared at the dead attackers. Some dwire still clung to his hide, with their jaws clenched in death. There were rings of burnt dwire all around him, yet no burn had touched the dragon in the middle. This was the work of a lightning artist. \"You always were better with lightning swords.\" His eyes rolled up in his head, and his body went limp.\n\nDrakor called to his in-commands. \"Cranart, check the village for dwire. Tenira, get a toboggan, four helpers, and blankets. Take Mardor to his den as fast as you can and keep him warm.\"\n\nDrakor scanned the snow. The field was littered with death, but still there were fresh tracks leading from the battle into the forest. How many dwire were there? He pried open the jaws of dead dwire and removed them from Mardor's body. Chunks of flesh had been ripped out, and blood ran freely.\n\nDrakor burned with anger. He flung the dead dwire as far away as he could, calming down as he cleared a path for the toboggan. If not for Mardor's warning . . . He gathered clean snow and began washing the wounds of the scarlet giant.\n\nFive dragons arrived and stared at the bloody giant. They carefully slid Mardor onto the toboggan and tied his limp wings to his body, but his feet and tail trailed beyond. The dragons covered him with blankets, grabbed the toboggan ropes, and pulled, picking up speed as they moved across the snow.\n\nDrakor turned to Jardor. \"The dwire planned this attack well. They need to hide their shadows, yet they chose a night with a full moon, a time we would least expect. They waited for thick clouds, for the darkest night with a moon. They even avoided our sound traps . . . they must have watched us place them!\"\n\nJardor snapped his tail. \"We need a new plan.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Yes. Please take over here while I help Mardor.\"\n\nJardor nodded toward the bloody trail in the snow. \"Isss there hope?\"\n\nDrakor gazed up at a star that escaped from the clouds. \"The stars will decide, but Mardor isss the toughest dragon I know.\"\n\nJardor shook his head. \"No. Mardor isss the second toughest dragon. You are tougher. Go do what you can.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes widened in surprise. Then he nodded to Jardor and leapt into the sky. He flew to his den and grabbed his Healer bag. He tossed journey food into his pouch and slung it over one shoulder. He flung his blanket over the other shoulder, picked up another bag, and sprinted for Mardor's den.\n\nDrakor reviewed Healer lessons from his skiff journeys with Scree and Dorali, and from Merika's classes. He knew the basics and more, but would this be enough? And his Healer bag felt rather thin, barely adequate. What would he give for Merika's well-stocked bag?\n\nDrakor reached Mardor's den just as the unconscious giant arrived on the toboggan. He helped push this into the den. Then he dropped his own stuff by the wall. \"Tenira, could you stay?\" He pointed to another dragon. \"Ask Jordana to come, and walk with her. Dwire could still be lurking in the shadows. Then I need one of you to wait outside this den, to help. Take turns waiting here or helping Jardor.\"\n\nDrakor and Tenira stood on opposite sides of Mardor, working as fast as they could. Blood continued to drip onto the floor and seep into the dirt. An aroma of death filled the air, mixed with earthy scents of herbs and moss.\n\nTenira cleaned a deep cut and pushed in peat moss. \"He isss so big, and there are so many wounds! How can we stop all the bleeding in time?\"\n\nDrakor wrapped another bandage. \"Cold snow and peat moss will help slow the bleeding until we can treat all of his wounds. But how much blood can he lose, and still live?\"\n\nTenira paused, took out her water flask, and drank it down. \"Why did you ask for Jordana? She isss so young she cannot even fly.\"\n\nDrakor tied a knot in the bandage. \"She has as much Healer experience as I do and, being so young, isss small enough to squeeze into the den with us.\"\n\nTenira nodded toward Drakor's pile of stuff. \"And the blanket?\"\n\nDrakor tied another bandage knot. \"Mardor needs someone to stay with him.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"You would be best for that.\"\n\nDrakor placed his claws over each wound and zapped as he worked, using up his own inner energy to help Mardor live. This was the fastest way to stop bleeding and speed healing. But there were so many wounds! Soon his hands trembled and his scales felt gray.\n\nTenira looked over at Drakor and snapped her tail with a loud crack. \"You must save some of your own energy.\" She tossed him a pouch of walnuts, and he barely caught it. \"Take a break. Eat this and drink some water.\"\n\nDrakor fumbled to open the pouch. He studied the floor as he ate, quietly fuming. After all he had accomplished, he felt like a dragonlet being reprimanded.\n\nTenira must have noticed. \"I apologize. I should have said that differently, but you looked so drained that it scared me. You are still healing from a near-fatal wound. Merika needs you, and so does the clan.\"\n\nDrakor squared his wings, trying to look energetic. \"You were right. I need to pace myself. We still have wounds to clean and bandage. Sometimes I feel . . .\" He paused. \"I am the smallest leader the clan ever had. Mardor isss huge. He always looked like the perfect leader, perfectly groomed and in control.\"\n\nTenira bowed. \"Nobody questions your size. Maybe your common sense . . .\" She laughed. \"What sane dragon would want to fight Mardor twice? And you were right about our Volcano.\"\n\nHis eyes grew wide. \"You knew?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I knew the legends and the signs, but where would we go? Then you found a place. When Mardor would not listen, you beat him. Twice! He isss not perfect, and he lost control in that last challenge fight.\"\n\n\"Yes, he did, and paid a price. I hope that price does not include his life.\"\n\nTenira studied their patient. \"Mardor's warning was timely. He redeemed himself. And even you, the leader, are doing all you can to save him.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"Mardor needs help, and he isss a member of our clan.\"\n\n\"You understand what matters. That isss why you are the leader we need.\"\n\nJordana entered the den, flicking her tail nervously. The youngster bowed to Drakor. Then she stared at Mardor. His terrible wounds looked even worse in the flickering candlelight. She set her apprentice Healer bag down and, without a word, began working on his bleeding, shredded legs.\n\nDrakor nodded to Jordana as she dripped honey into a deeper wound. \"Thank you for coming. We need the help of another Healer.\"\n\nJordana smiled shyly and kept working.\n\nTenira stitched up a section of scaly skin that hung loose, partly ripped away. \"I wish Merika was here. She makes better stitches.\"\n\nDrakor held a long cut together as he stitched. \"We could really use her help. It isss hard to match the scales together and make small, even stitches. Mardor has lost so much blood! And how much poison isss in all of these bites? How well does this new salve protect against it? How will we get enough medicine into Mardor, when he isss not even conscious?\"\n\nTenira looked up. \"Spoken like a Healer.\"\n\nDrakor gave a half smile. \"I finally understand why Merika was so mad when she had three dragons to heal.\"\n\nTenira ran her eyes over the huge patient. \"Treating Mardor isss like working on three dragons. We need to turn him over, to reach his other wounds.\"\n\nAnother dragon helped turn him.\n\nDrakor, Tenira, and Jordana continued working. Hours later, their wings hung limp. They were stained with all the shades of blood: bright scarlet, dull burgundy, and a blackish maroon.\n\nDrakor called a halt. \"Thank you. We stopped most of the blood loss, and can work on the healing tomorrow.\"\n\nJordana bowed. \"Thank you for letting me help.\"\n\nDrakor smiled at the youngster. \"You are a Healer, and we needed your help.\"\n\nTenira bowed. \"I will walk Jordana home and send another of Merika's students to help, at dawn.\" Then they both left.\n\nMardor lay in deathly stillness, barely breathing. Beneath the blankets, he was covered with bandages, mustard-yellow salve, and stitches. The dirt floor around him was muddy-red, soaked with blood, and the stench was overwhelming. Drakor noticed the silence with a fleeting smile. This was an unexpected benefit of the eternal winter: there were no annoying, buzzing flies drawn to the gory feast.\n\nDrakor recalled his recent challenge fight with Mardor, when his own blood was flowing away. Creeping cold had spread through his body before he collapsed into darkness. Mardor must have this same bone-deep cold, since there was not enough blood left to warm him.\n\nDrakor placed the claws of both hands over Mardor's massive, battered chest and zapped healing energy into the heart. The beat grew a little stronger. Then he piled more blankets around his former foe.\n\nDrakor shivered. It was bitterly cold outside and not much better in the den. He washed his hands in a bucket of melted snow, opened his other bag, and took out the bowls filled with quartz crystals. He placed the bowls in a circle around Mardor and touched the crystals with his heat-zap.\n\nFlecks of red glowed inside the hot, clear quartz. These crystals seemed to shimmer as they heated the air, covering the dragon with velvety warmth.\n\nCrystal fire was Drakor's newest discovery, another way to help the clan survive this bitter winter. It was a safe, easy way to warm the den, like adding a stack of weightless blankets. Quartz crystals were everywhere, and they could even be spotted in the ground beneath the snow. Their subtle electric energy drew the inner eye.\n\nDrakor was too weary to polish his scales, but he remembered Tenira's warning and ate a quick snack. He found a fairly clean patch of floor near the back wall, rolled up in his blanket, and immediately dropped into an exhausted sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Drakor opened one eye to a ceiling that glowed orange. The bloody stench told him where he was. Sleep tugged at his eyelids, but he forced himself up to check on the patient.\n\nMardor was barely breathing. Then he saw the floor by the light of dawn: it was soaked with blood. Had the giant lost too much blood?\n\nDrakor grabbed his bag. Where was the sea salt? Merika had added a few items before she left, but his Healer bag was still rather thin. He mixed a blood-building potion with water, salt, molasses for blood iron, honey for energy, and willow bark extract for swelling and pain. Then he warmed this with a heat-zap.\n\nA dragon-dam entered the den, one of Merika's students. She bowed respectfully to Drakor, but her eyes grew wide. Was she surprised by his unpolished appearance? Or because he was here, helping, unlike a normal leader?\n\n\"Thank you for coming. Could you drip this under his tongue, near the back? Drip slowly, one drop at a time, and stop if he coughs.\"\n\nJardor poked his head into the den. \"Drakor, we need your decisions.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. He crawled outside and stared. His blood-stained scales looked even worse in the light. He wrinkled his nose. The den had an overpowering stench, drowning other odors. But now he knew that he, too, smelled terrible.\n\nDrakor grabbed two generous clawfulls of snow and scrubbed his scales until they gleamed. This crystalline cold woke him up completely.\n\nJardor handed him a steaming mug of tea. \"You need this.\" He tilted his head toward the den. \"With so many stitches, Mardor looks like fractured ice. Will he live?\"\n\nDrakor finished the tea. \"That isss still up to the stars, and Mardor.\"\n\nJardor smiled. \"And to you. I saw you give Mardor a bag when he left the clan, and there was a trail of sticks in the snow. To a shelter? You gave him a better chance to survive as an outcast. Now you are helping him survive this attack.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"He isss a member of our clan. We need him.\"\n\n\"True. I did not think there could be so many dwire left, after that first attack! What happens now?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON DREAMER",
                "text": "Another day passed, and the patient was still unconscious. The dragon-ladies went home for the night, leaving Drakor alone with the wounded giant. Most of the blood-soaked floor had been replaced with new sand, but the odors lingered.\n\nDrakor took shallow breaths, trying to ignore the stench. He carefully wiped off a row of stitches, checking to be sure there was no infection under the dried blood.\n\nSuddenly, the giant opened his eyes and spread his claws, ready to attack.\n\nDrakor backed away. \"Mardor. The dwire are gone. You are in your den.\"\n\nMardor turned his wild eyes toward the voice. Then he whispered, \"Dray--kor.\"\n\nDrakor's ears twitched; Mardor's voice was impossibly weak. He gave him a water flask. \"Drink slowly.\"\n\nMardor drained it. \"I do not remember ever being this thirsty.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I know exactly how that feels.\" He smiled. \"When I said you could help lead the defense against the dwire, I did not mean you should fight the whole pack by yourself.\"\n\nMardor gave a rueful smile. \"That was not my plan.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I was coming back, walking just inside the forest. Clouds covered the night sky, so I saw no shadows. I heard a crunch. Then the moon escaped from the clouds. There were many tens of hunting shadows sliding across the snow. The dwire spotted me before I was safely up in the sky. I shouted a warning as they pulled me down.\"\n\n\"Your warning saved dragons.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Mardor looked down at his bandaged body. \"I was furious when you marked me. Now, the dwire have marked me so completely that my neck scars no longer matter. You were right, there isss more to life than being the leader. I had three moons to find a new way to live.\"\n\nDrakor cocked his head sideways. \"And?\"\n\n\"I explored.\" Mardor reached for his shredded chest pouch, grinning as he pulled out a red opal scale.\n\nDrakor stared. \"Sunset dragons! Finally! Where?\"\n\n\"Southwest. The ground was torn up and smelled of blood. There were tracks of many dwire but just one dragon, and it was even smaller than you.\" He ran his eyes across his huge, torn, bandaged body. \"Dwire are fierce fighters. How could one small dragon win?\"\n\nDrakor looked Mardor in the eye. \"Size isss not everything.\" He clicked his claws together. \"According to our legends, sunset dragons are dream-walkers. They can mind-walk with other dragons. Maybe they can also hear dwire minds?\"\n\nMardor stretched slowly, stifling a groan. \"A warning would help. If they can sense minds, they know we are here and avoid us. Can sunset dragons stun a mind when they mind-walk?\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"Mind-stun? If so, these are deadly dreamers. The sunset dragons may not want to meet us, and they could be dangerous. But I have dreamed of meeting them.\"\n\nMardor shook with laughter and winced at the pain. \"Have you no fear?\"\n\nDrakor looked down at his scars. \"Clearly not enough.\"\n\nMardor eyed Drakor's abundant scars and grinned. \"That isss true. Wait 'til I am well and I will help you search.\"\n\nDrakor gazed southwest and his smile grew. \"Then we will finally meet these mysterious sunset dragons.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragons of Mother Stone 2) Faith in Flames",
        "author": "Melissa McShane",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "About dragons",
                "text": "Dragons have six fingers on each hand, and the number twelve has semi-religious meaning to them. They measure the passage of time in twelvedays as well as seasons and years, and frequently count by dozens as well as more conventional base ten numbers (thanks to having ten toes on their feet).\n\nDragons measure time of day by the position of the sun: dawn, morning, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, late afternoon, dusk/sunset. Time of night is measured by relation to midnight: dusk/sunset, evening, late evening, midnight, the dreaming hours, pre-dawn, dawn.\n\nDragons take approximately thirty years to reach adolescence and are considered adults at age fifty-five, though it can take another ten to fifteen years for a dragon to achieve her full adult size.\n\nDragon time and distance measurements are inexact and based on the average dragon body. The basic unit of time is the heartbeat, or beat. A dragon's resting heart rate is about twenty-five beats per minute, so a single beat is the equivalent of two and a half seconds, a hundred beats is a little over four minutes, and a thousand beats is almost forty-two minutes.\n\nAn adult dragon is approximately the same length and height (not including wingspan) as a double-decker bus, but slimmer. Their basic unit of distance is the dragonlength, which is somewhere between twenty-five and thirty feet long (counting from tip of the nose to tip of the tail). For smaller distances, they use the handspan, which is approximately twelve inches long. For long distances, they are more likely to measure by the length of time it takes to fly somewhere rather than how far it is in dragonlengths. A dragon standing erect is sixteen to twenty feet tall.\n\nAdult dragons weigh between 4000-5000 pounds. An active dragon will eat, on average, 250-300 pounds of meat per day, plus a quantity of stone equaling another 8-10 pounds (sometimes less depending on the \"richness\" of the stone). Dragons generally eat twice a day, though in lean times a dragon will gorge herself on available food and then not eat again for several days.\n\nAn adult dragon can fly up to 120 miles per hour."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The oncoming storm that blackened the western skies smelled of lightning and cut grass and fresh warm water, a lake's worth of it. The rainy season in the lowlands had proved to be more uncomfortable than the hot, drier spring had been. Lamprophyre had thought rain would keep the temperature low, but all it had done was saturate the air the sun heated to an unbearable level so it clung to her scales and wings like a caul. On the worst days, the ones where clouds didn't dim the sun and any movement felt like swimming in soup, she napped fitfully in her hall and dreamed of crisp, cold mountain air, of sleeping on chilled stone in a cave warmed by her body heat, and woke to the unpleasant reality of Gonjiri in summer.\n\nRokshan never seemed disturbed by the weather, but humans were acclimated to the lowlands in a way no dragon could ever be. He wore long-sleeved linen shirts regardless of how hot it was, which made Lamprophyre's heart ache for him because she knew his clothing choice had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with the burn scars she still had never seen. It wasn't something she could task him with, not even on days like today when there was no one else around and he was perched comfortably in the notch behind her shoulders. Once again, she promised herself she'd find a time to discuss the forbidden subject, and once again she knew she was lying to herself.\n\nLamprophyre eyed the clouds and calculated how long it would take for the storm to arrive. More than a thousand beats, which was more than long enough for her purposes. The wind blowing those clouds in her direction buffeted her, prompting her to put her back to the wind so she didn't have to close the nictitating membranes over her eyes. She wanted to see this through to the end, even though it had been Rokshan's idea and she wasn't totally sure it was a good one.\n\n\"I'm not sure this was a good idea,\" Rokshan shouted. \"The soldiers are all distracted.\" He shifted his weight so he was leaning over her left shoulder, putting more of her body between himself and the wind. Below them, the great granite wall of Tanajital loomed dully, its usual sparkle dimmed by the overcast. Soldiers thronged its wooden wall-walk, all of them intent not on potential enemies approaching from the north, but on the colorful specks speeding along the southern wall, on the far side of the city. Lamprophyre decided not to say she'd told him this might happen.\n\n\"Too late now,\" she said instead. The specks were moving fast enough around the curve of the wall that already they were visible as colored blotches, red and midnight blue and tarnished silver and, ugh, grass-green. In another beat or so, they were recognizable as dragons.\n\nDespite herself, Lamprophyre's heart raced with excitement. Rokshan had been right about one thing for sure: there was nothing in the world to beat the sight of a magnificent, powerful creature in motion. She wasn't racing because she feared her rider losing his seat, and also because the dragon ambassador losing might look bad, but watching was almost as good. Now, if only Porphyry would pull ahead\u2026\n\nThe dragons were headed directly for her. Lamprophyre resisted the urge to fly backward, out of their path. Dragons never collided with each other intentionally, and moving would just make her look stupid. Rokshan clutched her ruff more securely, but gave no other sign that he felt nervous in the face of four dragons barreling down upon them. Closer, closer\u2026Porphyry was right on Coquina's flank\u2014\n\n\u2014and the dragons swept past, four streaks of color that separated to fly in all directions as they shed momentum. Lamprophyre ground her back teeth together. She'd promised not to compare herself to Coquina anymore, not after the illuminating conversation she'd had with her mother Hyaloclast about Coquina's true merits or lack thereof, but old reactions died hard, and seeing Coquina fly past head and neck in front of Porphyry irritated her. She put on a pleasant smile and flew to where her clutchmates had gathered in the lee of the city wall, their eyes dilated and their breathing heavy from their exertions.\n\n\"Coquina wins again,\" she said. \"That's three out of five.\"\n\n\"I'm just lucky,\" Coquina said with a laugh and a flutter of her wings that pretended to humility. Lamprophyre resisted the urge to grind her teeth again. Coquina was pretty and fast, both of which qualities Coquina had Mother Stone to thank for rather than her own perseverance in developing them, though Coquina persisted in acting as if possessing them made her superior.\n\n\"I don't know why we bother,\" Orthoclase said, flapping his wings in a leisurely fashion at odds with his breathless voice. \"Only Chrysoprase can beat her every time, and she thinks it's beneath her dignity to race younglings.\"\n\n\"As if Chrysoprase weren't only twenty-seven years older than us,\" Flint said. He stretched, showing off his shapely, muscular torso, a move that on anyone else would have indicated vanity. \"She thinks being a mother means she has to protect her dignity.\"\n\n\"What does a dragon mother do to raise her child?\" Rokshan asked. \"I thought dragons didn't care as much about parentage as they do about their clutch or their respect for Hyaloclast.\"\n\n\"That's when we're adults,\" Porphyry said. His scales, red as ripening cherries, were darker in the light from the oncoming storm and became even darker as he did a slow loop in midair. \"Dragons can't fly until they're fifteen, so they need to be watched before that so they don't venture into places they can't get out of, or might fall off of.\"\n\n\"And they need feeding,\" Flint added, \"particularly the males, who can't cook their own food. So mothers and fathers take care of their physical needs, and they also tell stories so the dragonets learn their history.\"\n\n\"Chrysoprase is overprotective,\" Coquina said. \"Pyrope is eighteen, but her mother still keeps her close to the nest. It's ridiculous.\"\n\n\"There's nothing ridiculous about caring about your child's safety,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And Pyrope is accident-prone. Remember when she climbed up to that ledge looking for garnet and got stuck? It was almost two thousand beats before anyone figured out where she'd gone.\"\n\n\"That was when she was ten, Lamprophyre,\" Coquina said. \"And Chrysoprase has been overprotective ever since. I know if I had a child, I wouldn't want it to grow up frightened and stunted.\" She cast a quick glance at Flint, who was looking back at the city wall and missed her coquettish look. Lamprophyre, who hadn't missed it at all, wondered once more if Flint knew Coquina was pursuing him. He was too smart to be ignorant of her flirtation, but he'd never once acknowledged it, and Lamprophyre couldn't tell if maybe he really was ignorant, after all.\n\n\"We should go,\" Rokshan said. He pointed up. \"The soldiers are still staring. They're supposed to be alert to threats, not watching dragons. Sorry. I didn't realize, when I suggested racing, that it would draw their attention so thoroughly.\"\n\n\"But it proves you were right, Rokshan,\" Orthoclase said, \"about humans being interested in dragon races. I didn't hear a single frightened thought the whole time we were up there. Though I wasn't really listening. Too busy eating Coquina's dust.\"\n\nCoquina laughed again. This time, it was a more brittle sound, and to her surprise Lamprophyre felt sorry for her clutchmate. She was almost certain Coquina had only set her sights on Flint because he was gorgeous, but if she felt genuine affection for him, how terrible if he really didn't care for her. Lamprophyre almost listened to Coquina's thoughts, but eavesdropping was bad manners, and she didn't want to fall into old habits of being obsessed with Coquina.\n\nThey flew lazily back to the warehouse district, not needing to race the storm, though Lamprophyre suspected she and Rokshan would get a little wet returning to the embassy after seeing the others to guest quarters. Humans thronged the streets below, heading for shelter. None of them looked up or pointed in amazement; none of them gave the dragons more than a passing thought. That was another thing Rokshan had been right about. Nine twelvedays before, when they'd arranged to rent these warehouses as temporary homes for dragons visiting Tanajital, he'd said, \"Humans don't stay amazed at the extraordinary long. Soon enough, extraordinary becomes normal, and then normal becomes taken for granted. You'll see.\" Based on the thoughts she overheard from below, dragons\u2014at least these dragons\u2014were definitely taken for granted.\n\nThe streets surrounding the warehouses were wide enough for dragons to land on, and once humans had become accustomed to their draconic neighbors, they'd stopped using those streets entirely. Lamprophyre never feared stepping on humans here. Even so, today she hovered rather than landing, saying, \"Are any of you going home this evening?\"\n\n\"I have business with a stone supplier,\" Orthoclase said. \"He has some stone I've never tasted. You'll all love it once I've worked out what else to pair it with.\"\n\nHis clutchmates laughed. \"We eat better than anyone in the flight thanks to you,\" Porphyry said. \"I'm staying the night. Don't feel like flying as late as that storm will require.\" Flint nodded agreement. Coquina just shrugged and walked into her warehouse.\n\n\"All right, then I'll see you in the morning,\" Lamprophyre said, flapping hard to propel herself skyward. She felt Rokshan wave at her clutchmates, and then the two of them were high over Tanajital and headed for the embassy.\n\nFat drops of rain had begun to fall when she descended to the courtyard in front of the embassy and hurried inside before crouching to let Rokshan climb down. She turned so she could watch the rain fall and settled herself comfortably on her stomach. \"It's still pretty,\" she said, \"even though I'm ready for the rainy season to be over.\"\n\n\"We have another couple of months before that happens,\" Rokshan said. He settled himself in the cross-legged position that always made Lamprophyre's hips ache just looking at it. \"That's five twelvedays.\"\n\n\"I'm getting used to human time measurements, too,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Though I still have to count it out in my head. Maybe someday it will be more natural.\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"Odd,\" he said. \"I smell cooking. Isn't it a little early for Depik to make supper?\"\n\n\"It's not supper, it's soup,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's for the beggars.\"\n\nRokshan's eyebrows rose in an expression of disbelief. \"Soup for beggars? Why is Depik making soup for beggars?\"\n\n\"He wanted to help our neighborhood,\" Lamprophyre explained. \"Because he needed help for so long, and now he's in a position to help others. I don't always use all the meat from a cow or a pig, and he asked if I minded him using the scraps and the bones to feed the hungry. Though it's not always just the hungry. Anamika and Varnak sometimes get permission from their parents to eat here. But mostly it's beggars.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan began, then fell silent. She recognized the expression he got when she came up with a question that had a complicated, human answer. \"Lamprophyre,\" he went on, \"you're an ambassador. I'm not sure you should be feeding beggars out of the embassy. No human ambassador would do such a thing.\"\n\n\"I'm not human,\" she pointed out, \"and I don't see why not. Maybe Tanajital is welcoming of dragons now, but it can't hurt to build goodwill, just in case. And Depik was so excited about his idea, I didn't want to turn him down. He's had fewer bad days in the last month, and while I don't think his illness is cured, this certainly seems to have made a difference.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head slowly. \"I can't argue with your logic. It's just an unusual idea most humans wouldn't have\u2014but you're not human, yes, I'm aware.\" He chuckled. \"I don't know why I'm objecting. This plan of Depik's will probably end up having unexpected and positive side effects, just like everything you do.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you can see sense.\" She settled herself more comfortably on the floor and closed her eyes. The rain rattled the roof tiles and occasionally blew through the window holes near the ceiling, spattering her hindquarters in a not-unpleasant way. Beside her, Rokshan leaned against her side, tucking himself into the crease of her shoulder. It was so restful, sitting and napping with a friend.\n\nShe'd almost drifted off to sleep when she heard Rokshan say, \"There's someone I want you to meet. A friend of mine. A, um, female friend.\"\n\nShe blinked and shifted a little, not enough to dislodge Rokshan. \"A female friend? Or do you mean more than a friend?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure yet.\" Rokshan laughed, a little self-consciously. \"Nevrita's attractive, she's intelligent and funny, so I'm not sure what she sees in me\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't be derogatory of yourself. That makes you look weak and stupid, and you're neither of those things.\"\n\nThis time, his laugh was amused and unforced. \"Sorry. I meant that as a joke, but\u2014anyway. I met her at a concert hosted by Lady Tanura, where it turned out we both like the same composers, and then she was a guest at the reception for the new Rezmish ambassador, so we talked some more, and I've seen her several times since then. She's interesting, and I like her, and I think it might be more than just liking.\"\n\n\"I was at that reception, and I don't remember meeting anyone named Nevrita.\"\n\n\"You didn't. Remember, you left early? She arrived after that.\"\n\nAn unexpected pang of jealousy stabbed through Lamprophyre. \"And you're just now telling me about her?\"\n\n\"Why are you upset? I wasn't sure this was anything more than casual acquaintance, and I didn't see the point of doing something so dramatic as introducing her to my best friend until I knew she was someone I wanted you to meet.\"\n\n\"Best friend\" comforted Lamprophyre and made her feel stupid about her reaction. \"You're right. I'm sorry. I'd like to meet her, if she's as interesting as you make her sound.\"\n\n\"She is. She's never met a dragon before, and she seemed excited when I suggested I introduce you. Maybe in a few days?\"\n\n\"I look forward to it.\" She closed her eyes again and felt Rokshan relax into her side. So. Rokshan hadn't had any romantic relationships since she'd met him last spring, and after he'd been burned badly by a Fanishkorite spy wielding a fire-blasting artifact, she'd wondered if he felt uncomfortable getting close to a female human. He'd said something along those lines that day, but they hadn't discussed it since. If he liked this Nevrita, and Nevrita liked him, Lamprophyre was happy for him. And she wasn't going to let a stupid irrational jealousy affect how she treated the female. It wasn't as if Rokshan would stop being her friend just because he started a new and different relationship.\n\nShe let the pounding of the rain lull her to sleep, and woke to find the noise had ceased and the air was cool and fresh. It was the only thing about lowland weather she enjoyed, the pause after the storm before the sun could once again heat the air hotter than dragon's breath. They didn't have anything like it in the mountains.\n\nBeside her, Rokshan stretched and got to his feet. \"That soup smells amazing,\" he said. \"I'm almost tempted to become a beggar.\"\n\n\"You can have some without being a beggar,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Though aren't you supposed to attend a banquet at the palace tonight?\"\n\nRokshan groaned. \"It's Khadar's birthday. I wish I could gracefully break my leg or something to get out of it. He's always so insufferable, as if birthdays were invented solely to benefit him.\"\n\n\"I'm too big to fit into the banquet hall,\" Lamprophyre said, not concealing her relief.\n\n\"I wish I could ask Nevrita to accompany me, but singling her out like that would have my parents all over me, wanting to know when we're getting married. So I'll have to suffer alone.\" Rokshan stretched, making his joints pop in a way Lamprophyre hated. Humans were so fragile, she always expected him to snap his bones or pop his arms from their sockets. \"Have a nice meal, and I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nLamprophyre followed him out into the courtyard and watched until he disappeared up the street. The earth of the courtyard, hard-packed from generations of human feet, always had its top layer stirred up by heavy rains, and the mud clung unpleasantly to Lamprophyre's feet and tail when she incautiously let it sweep the ground. She tried wiping off the dirt, but it just clung to her hand instead. Irritated, she scooped water from the brim-full rain barrel and washed her hand, then entered the dining pavilion and settled herself in her accustomed place near the kitchen.\n\nDepik came around the corner and bowed. \"If you're ready, supper's near done,\" he said. \"And the soup is ready.\"\n\n\"It really is a lot of work, making the soup and then washing all those bowls,\" Lamprophyre said, remembering Rokshan's dubiousness. \"Are you sure this is a good idea?\"\n\n\"My lady,\" Depik said with a frown, \"you've never been hungry, truly hungry. I have. I remember how it feels. I'd wash a thousand bowls if it meant sending these people away full.\"\n\n\"I understand, a little,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling abashed. \"And I agree that it's satisfying to help.\" She stood until she towered over the kitchen wall, which was taller than Depik but still only half as tall as she was at full height. \"Let me handle the soup cauldron, and you can carry the bowls and spoons.\"\n\nThe cauldron wasn't very big, not nearly the size of the one Depik used to cook soup for her, and she lifted it easily and set it down near the entrance to the pavilion, opposite the rain barrel. Depik set down a stack of wooden bowls as the first of the evening's beggars approached. She and Depik had been providing soup for almost a twelveday, but those who came for a meal were still timid, even the ones Lamprophyre recognized as repeat visitors. She watched as they filled their bowls and retreated into the courtyard to eat. Some of them brought their own bowls, but even they stayed to eat, watching Lamprophyre as if they expected her to do something interesting.\n\nDepik rolled out the trolley containing the evening's half a cow, expertly butchered and cooked to perfection, and Lamprophyre tore happily into the meat and idly listened to the thoughts of her \"guests.\" The ones she saw regularly interested her, like the woman with two children in tow\u2014all right, that was less interesting and more heartbreaking. The woman's thoughts were always focused on her children, but Lamprophyre wished she knew her story, why she had no mate\u2014or maybe she did, and he wasn't capable of helping to provide for his family. It wasn't something Lamprophyre felt comfortable asking.\n\nThere was the young man with only one leg; Lamprophyre tried not to stare, but that wasn't something that ever happened to dragons and she almost couldn't help herself. There was the old man whose wispy white hair flew in all directions like one of those flowers that broke apart into a thousand fluffy seeds. His thoughts were chaotic, unintelligible except for the occasional snatch of coherent language, can't find my way or it speaks like thunder, and his constant smile and vacant eyes reminded her of the dragon Gabbro, who'd needed help to find his way to Mother Stone when his madness took him completely.\n\nAnd there was the odd woman who didn't look like a beggar at all. Her clothes were finely stitched and dyed a rich purple and blue, and she wore a faceted garnet the width of Lamprophyre's thumb in a setting of gold wire wrapped around her upper left arm. That alone told Lamprophyre she was wealthy, or had wealthy friends. Her thoughts were always amused, as if she were laughing at the people around her, and Lamprophyre couldn't decide if she disliked the woman or not.\n\nDepik came to supervise serving the soup, and Lamprophyre ate and watched the humans. Dragons took care of each other, and this was a way in which humans did the same, but she knew it wasn't a universal trait. For every human they fed that night, a dozen or more elsewhere in Tanajital or in the other cities of Gonjiri would go hungry. She understood why Rokshan was so skeptical of Depik's efforts; when she thought about how many humans were in need, she knew it was impossible to help them all. And yet not helping when she was capable felt wrong. She could only do her best, and hope it made a difference to some.\n\nShe finished her meal before the last of the soup was served, so she sat and watched the beggars in silence until they'd all departed, the wealthy woman with a nod and a smile for Lamprophyre as if she knew what Lamprophyre thought of her. Then Lamprophyre lifted the cauldron into the kitchen to be washed, waved good night to Depik, and entered the embassy. Rokshan was probably still at supper, listening to Khadar talk about how wonderful he was. Much as she enjoyed being with Rokshan, she didn't envy him his supper companion tonight. Khadar, the Fifth Ecclesiast and a powerful religious figure, didn't like her any more than she liked him, and since he always found a way to steer conversations around to how she was a heretic for not believing in his religion, she was just as happy to have been excluded from the birthday celebration.\n\nShe settled in to sleep, watching the lazy evening sunlight slant across the courtyard and illuminate the end of the street that terminated there. Maybe she should make an effort to get to know the people they fed, now that they had regulars. She fell asleep imagining a conversation with the old man, whose thoughts floated as madly as his hair, and who told her a secret she couldn't remember come the morning."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "\"I'm sure this is all a terrible misunderstanding,\" Lamprophyre said, as patiently as she could manage. The day was hot and promised to become hotter, so she was already irritable even before this little man had intruded upon her day. That dealing with humans like him was part of her duties as ambassador didn't make her less cranky.\n\nShe shifted her weight, wishing she could sit up and stretch, but aware that such a move might seem like intimidation. \"If your cart was trampled, it was surely by accident,\" she continued. \"And if Bromargyrite were here, he would be very embarrassed and apologetic.\" No need to reveal that Bromargyrite's clumsiness was nearly legendary among the flight.\n\n\"That doesn't give me back my cart,\" the little man said. He was shorter even than most human females and had thin black strands of hair arranged across his bald scalp. The hairs fascinated Lamprophyre. They never moved no matter how agitatedly he twitched. \"Nor my goods. The contents of that cart represented hours of labor. Keg stands don't build themselves.\"\n\n\"Keg stands?\"\n\nThe man flapped his hands distractedly. \"Keg stands. For holding kegs of beer or ale. Very important to tavern owners and innkeepers. Now I'm out hundreds of rupyas and my business will suffer.\"\n\nLamprophyre began to feel she was drowning in words. This little man was one of those whose thoughts echoed his speech so closely it gave Lamprophyre a headache listening in, but even without the deluge of thought, his words were like tiny missiles plinking off her hide. \"Of course we'll reimburse you for your losses,\" she said. Reimburse was a word she'd learned from her teacher Dharan and, thanks to Bromargyrite's frequent visits to Tanajital, had used far too often in the last several twelvedays. Months. \"But surely keg stands don't represent your entire business? Because I can't imagine them being disposable. One sale would be good for years, yes?\"\n\nThe little man gazed at her, his mouth open. \"Well, I\u2026naturally I make other wooden objects, but my competitors will move in on this part of my business! I demand recompense for that loss, too.\"\n\nPurposeful movement in the street drew Lamprophyre's attention. To her relief, it was Rokshan, trotting toward the embassy heedless of the heat. \"Rokshan can help us work those details out,\" she said. \"I'm afraid I'm still not familiar with the relative value of human coin. Rokshan, this man has made a claim on the embassy. Will you determine a fair compensation\u2014\" another word from Dharan\u2014 \"for his losses?\"\n\n\"What? Oh. Yes.\" Rokshan came to a halt beside the man. He wasn't much taller than the average human male, but he still towered over the little man. \"Where are your damaged goods?\"\n\nThe little man stilled. \"Well, I disposed of them already, naturally.\"\n\n\"I don't know how I can assess their value if I can't see them. Or did you think you'd be allowed to set a price? What goods were they?\"\n\n\"Keg stands,\" Lamprophyre said. \"For holding kegs of beer or ale.\"\n\n\"Keg stands?\" Rokshan glanced quickly from Lamprophyre to the little man. \"Those aren't worth much.\"\n\n\"But there was the cart, too,\" the man said, rallying.\n\n\"Which I notice you also didn't bring,\" Rokshan said. \"What evidence do you have that there ever was a cart containing keg stands?\"\n\nThe little man froze again. Now Lamprophyre stood, towering over both humans. \"You weren't trying to cheat me, were you?\" she said in her deepest voice, and listened closely. The little man's thoughts, previously a chattering torrent of words, had become incoherent and guilty, though guilty about what, she couldn't tell.\n\n\"I'll give you one chance to tell the truth,\" she intoned, lowering her head to be level with the little man's. \"After that, Rokshan is going to boot you in your posterior and send you on your way.\" She caught the sound of drifting amusement from Rokshan before she focused once more on the little man.\n\nThe man swallowed. \"The dragon did step on my cart,\" he said in a weak voice, \"but it was because it had crashed into a house and the axles were broken. But it did have a few keg stands in the back. I didn't lie.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Lamprophyre said. \"A dragon would definitely consider your original tale a lie. Rokshan?\"\n\n\"Humans, too,\" Rokshan said. \"What made you think you could cheat the ambassador?\"\n\nThe little man said nothing. His guilty thoughts had become fearful. Lamprophyre's irritation mingled with sadness. Some people still feared she might hurt them, even though she had never hurt any human who wasn't trying to kill her.\n\n\"If your cart was damaged before Bromargyrite stepped on it, I shouldn't pay you anything,\" she said, \"and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to cheat me and make Bromargyrite feel bad. However, I'm sure your cart would have been repairable before it was smashed by a dragon, so we'll pay for that damage. But if you thought you could get more out of me by lying, you are very much mistaken. I think you have lied to more people than me in pursuit of coin, and I think you deserve for your business to suffer. Now, take your money, buy a new cart, and try honesty for a change.\"\n\nThe little man stared at her. Rokshan fished a small handful of silver out of his pouch, the one containing Lamprophyre's money, and pressed it into the man's hands. \"I suggest you leave,\" he said, \"before I remember that Lamprophyre wanted me to kick you in the ass to get you going.\"\n\nThe little man twitched, startled, then ran for the street. Rokshan watched him go. \"You should have caught his deception yourself,\" he said.\n\n\"His thoughts made my head echo. I wasn't listening to them,\" Lamprophyre protested.\n\n\"It worked out in the end, so I suppose it doesn't matter.\" Rokshan entered the embassy and flapped the hem of his shirt to cool himself. Lamprophyre thought about suggesting he remove the long-sleeved garment, but that would have prompted one of those direct, challenging looks Lamprophyre found so uncomfortable.\n\nShe followed him inside and settled on the floor. \"Did they let you into the Hall of Visions this time?\" she asked.\n\nRokshan grimaced. \"No, and I think someone may have interfered to prevent it,\" he said. \"The first time, it was closed to the public. The second time, I didn't have the proper paperwork. This time, the excuse was flimsy\u2014something about how I needed to prove I had good reason to be there. But the ecclesiast who told me that looked shifty, like she was lying. I wish you'd been there to confirm that.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't fit.\"\n\n\"I know. It still would have been nice to be able to task her with her falsehoods.\" He sighed. \"Three guesses as to who's interfering, and the first two don't count.\"\n\n\"Khadar. But why would he care?\"\n\nRokshan leaned against her side. \"He's not stupid, for all he's venal and obnoxious. He knows if I'm interested in a prophecy or prophecies registered in the Hall of Visions, you're likely interested too. And you're a heretic as far as he's concerned. That's enough for him to want to keep us from learning whatever it is there is to learn. He doesn't even have to know what we're interested in.\"\n\nLamprophyre blew out an impatient cloud of smoke that drifted away through the window holes near the ceiling. \"We barely know what we're interested in. 'The skies will burn' is such an oblique phrase, and if it's embedded in other prophecies, we might not be able to find more than just the two we know about. Assuming there's more to find.\"\n\n\"If not for what Hyaloclast said about those words being passed down from dragon queen to dragon queen, I would have put its appearance down to coincidence,\" Rokshan said. \"At any rate, we're at an impasse for now. We may need to pay someone to do the digging for us. Someone not known to have a connection with us.\"\n\nLamprophyre made a face. \"I can't think of anyone like that. Dharan would be perfect if he weren't our friend.\"\n\n\"He might still be perfect. He's good at charming women, and that ecclesiast struck me as the type who's readily charmed.\"\n\n\"I don't know what makes humans attractive to each other, so I'll take your word for it. Is Dharan handsome?\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"He's handsome, yes, but he's also charming\u2014not two things that have to go together. All his male friends wish he'd get married already and take himself off the market.\"\n\n\"What about you? Are you handsome?\"\n\n\"Modesty prevents me answering that question, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nAll his amusement had vanished, and there was a dark undertone to his words Lamprophyre didn't like. She persisted anyway. \"Your face isn't scarred much, and\u2014\"\n\n\"The scars aren't the issue.\" Now he sounded angry.\n\n\"It certainly sounds like they are. You won't take off your shirt even to go swimming.\"\n\n\"Because I don't like being stared at.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't stare at you. And we never swim where humans are.\"\n\n\"Could we not talk about this, please? It's not something you'll understand. Let's think about how to get into the Hall of Visions.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" She couldn't help feeling he was never going to overcome his self-consciousness about his appearance if he wouldn't talk about what had happened to him. At the same time, she was uncomfortably sure that pushing him was the wrong way to go about it. It just made her so unhappy to see him afraid of his own body\u2014but her happiness wasn't the issue here, was it? \"All right,\" she said. \"Who can we find to do the work? Someone who's intelligent enough to dig through the records and spot what we need?\"\n\n\"If little Anamika were older\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, she would be perfect! But she's only eleven. Maybe her father? No, he's too devout. He'd be uncomfortable searching through prophecies for anything but divine insight.\"\n\n\"There's always Manishi.\" Rokshan scowled. \"No one would believe she was doing it for anyone but herself. And she'd intimidate those ecclesiasts so much they wouldn't dare deny her access.\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled even more deeply. \"She'd want to know why we wanted the information, and she'd want to be paid. Probably a lot. And while no one would make the connection to us, she'd certainly stand out in the Hall of Visions, given that she's as close to being a heathen as Dharan.\" Rokshan's sister Manishi, an adept skilled at working magic into stone, had helped them in the past\u2014always for a price.\n\n\"We'll figure something out,\" Rokshan said. \"Now, how about a story? It's too hot to do anything but sit in a shady spot and read or nap, and it's too early for a nap.\"\n\n\"I disagree. I can nap at any time.\"\n\n\"Well, you shouldn't. Civilized people nap after a midday meal, not before. And wasn't Porphyry coming this afternoon for reading lessons?\"\n\n\"All the more reason to nap when I can. But I'd rather you read to me.\"\n\nRokshan got to his feet with a grunt and walked to where books lay piled on a cloth next to the slates Lamprophyre, and now Porphyry, practiced writing on. Dharan had insisted on the cloth to protect the books from the hard-packed earth floor, and since most of the books were his, Lamprophyre agreed. \"What do you want to hear?\" Rokshan asked. He knelt beside the stacks of books and ran his finger down the spines. \"More of the history of Tanajital?\"\n\n\"It's too hot for anything serious. What about more of the constellation stories?\"\n\n\"That one's big enough for you to read it to yourself.\"\n\n\"I know, but you have a nice voice and I like listening, too.\"\n\n\"Flattery, flattery,\" Rokshan said. He extracted a very large book from the pile and returned to sit against Lamprophyre's flank. \"Let's see. Ah, this is a good story, the Healer.\" He turned the book around so Lamprophyre could see the brilliantly colored illustration facing the first page of text. It depicted a human male lying on a pallet, reaching his hand toward another human male whose body was surrounded by a golden glow. Lamprophyre sniffed the page; real gilding.\n\n\"It's a good picture,\" she said. \"Is that supposed to be Jiwanyil? The one surrounded by gold?\"\n\n\"Right. Now, listen.\" He turned the book back toward himself and read:\n\n\"'Mandar was born to poor weavers who lived in Umrit, and had he been ordinary, he would have lived out his life in obscurity. But as a child, Mandar was blessed by Jiwanyil with the gift of healing others. His touch could heal a wound or cure illness, even of those close to death. Mandar's abilities made him famous, and as his fame spread, he was thronged by men and women wanting his healing touch.'\"\n\n\"That seems like a terrible way to live,\" Lamprophyre said. \"All those people clamoring for attention. It's not as if he owed them anything. Or did he?\"\n\n\"The story doesn't say,\" Rokshan said. \"But\u2014just listen. 'Mandar gave his gift freely, without charge and without regard to the status of the supplicant.' That makes sense, if he felt it was something Jiwanyil expected of him.\"\n\n\"I think he should have charged them money. That would have cut down on the number of people bothering him.\"\n\n\"Dharan gave you that idea, didn't he?\" Rokshan shook his head in mock sorrow. \"That's true, but I'm not sure I could do that if I were Mandar.\"\n\n\"You're generous of spirit. Just like a dragon.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I'd like to think humans are capable of generosity, too. Let me continue. This is the important part, what comes next.\"\n\n\"'Over time, Mandar found himself growing weaker with every healing, as if vital force ebbed out of him to flow into the person he healed. Concerned, he sought the guidance of a reverend. 'I fear using my gift,' he said, 'and I fear the consequences of denying it. What should I do?'\n\n\"'The reverend went away for three days and prayed for Jiwanyil's guidance. When she returned, she told Mandar that Jiwanyil had given him the healing power to bring Jiwanyil's light into dark places. 'You must have faith,' she told him, 'and follow Jiwanyil's path.'\n\n\"'But it may kill me,' Mandar said.\n\n\"'The reverend repeated, 'You must have faith.'\n\n\"'So Mandar went back among the people and continued to heal them. With every healing, he grew weaker. He gradually lost his strength until he was incapable of walking, then of standing, and finally all he could do was lie on his bed. And yet he continued to heal those who asked for his gift.'\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"That's so unfair,\" she said. \"Why would Jiwanyil want him to die for the sake of healing others? He shouldn't have to sacrifice himself.\"\n\n\"Are you saying there aren't things you'd be willing to sacrifice yourself for?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"Well, yes, but this is different! Mandar doesn't even know these people, and yet he's going to die for their sakes! I don't understand your religion at all.\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"The story's not over yet. 'There came a day when Mandar knew he only had one healing touch left in him, and it would mean his death.\"\n\n\"I don't like this story, Rokshan.\"\n\n\"This is important if you want to understand humanity. 'As he lay on his bed, a blind man groped his way toward Mandar and stopped a short distance from him. 'Come closer, and let me heal you,' Mandar said.\n\n\"'The blind man did not move. He said, 'Why would you give your life to heal me?'\n\n\"'Mandar said, 'Because Jiwanyil told me to have faith, and I trust God's word.'\n\n\"The blind man put his hand on Mandar's wrist. Mandar felt power rush through him, strengthening him. Suddenly it was Jiwanyil standing before him. 'Rise,' the God said, and Mandar rose from his bed as if he had never been ill. 'You had faith in me when the path seemed unclear, and you will be blessed above all men for my sake.'\n\n\"Then Jiwanyil disappeared, and Mandar felt the God's love surge through him. From that day on, Mandar traveled the world, healing those he met and telling the story of Jiwanyil's grace. When Mandar died, Jiwanyil set him in the sky as the constellation The Healer, reminding all that faith in God is always repaid, no matter how confusing God's commandment seems.\"\n\nLamprophyre thought about the story for a few beats. \"I'm not sure I agree with that,\" she said. \"I don't think I could do something that hurt me and didn't make sense. Mandar didn't know he wasn't going to die.\"\n\n\"You don't have people you trust with your life?\" Rokshan countered. \"Suppose Hyaloclast told you to\u2026to fly up the slopes of Mother Stone. Would you do it?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014but that's different. Hyaloclast wouldn't tell me to do something that foolish.\"\n\n\"Unless Hyaloclast understood something you didn't. Truthfully, Lamprophyre\u2014you trust Hyaloclast never to lead you astray, right? Jiwanyil is the same. His instructions to us through his ecclesiasts are meant to bring us happiness. That's why Mandar obeyed even though he didn't understand the reason.\"\n\nLamprophyre shifted uncomfortably. \"Our religion isn't like that. Mother Stone doesn't tell us how to behave. We simply try to follow her example. She is eternal and unchanging, so we are honest and consistent in our dealings with each other. She accepts us into her heart, so we are generous and forgiving of others' faults. She knows us, which lets her be perfectly just and perfectly merciful, so we are as just and merciful as our limited understanding allows.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Rokshan. \"That makes you not so different from humans, at least so far as our obedience to Jiwanyil's laws goes.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"From what I've seen of humans, though, that obedience isn't essential to being human. You've said humans can choose to obey Jiwanyil's laws, or not.\"\n\n\"That's right. And the fact that we can disobey makes our obedience more meaningful.\"\n\nThat didn't make sense to Lamprophyre, so she said, \"Well, we consider all those behaviors as essential to being dragons. They're part of our identity. So, for example, when we're at odds with each other, we meet with the flight and talk about what's bothering us. And the flight helps the two who are fighting come to terms so they can be one with the flight again.\"\n\nRokshan tilted his head back. \"What about you and Coquina? You never did that with her.\"\n\nLamprophyre flushed a delicate purple. \"I was afraid of looking stupid in front of the flight, or maybe just in front of Hyaloclast. Jealousy is considered foolishness, among dragons, because we're supposed to celebrate our differences, and I was sure challenging Coquina would make me seem like a child. So I pretended it wasn't real and that Coquina and I were still getting along.\"\n\n\"But she still bothers you.\"\n\n\"Not as much as before. I've learned the truth of what our parents teach us\u2014that we should honor and respect each other for the strengths we bring the flight. I have strengths I didn't realize back when I was jealous of Coquina. So any lingering bad feeling is just that\u2014lingering from the way I used to be.\"\n\n\"That's very mature thinking,\" Rokshan said with a smile. \"I'm afraid I'm not that well-adjusted, or I'd get along with Khadar.\"\n\nLamprophyre made a face. \"I'm glad Khadar isn't a dragon, because I don't know if I could ever not be at odds with him. Though if he were a dragon, he wouldn't be an ecclesiast and wouldn't be so obnoxious.\"\n\n\"This is true.\" Rokshan sat up. \"There's Dharan. He's early.\"\n\nLamprophyre extended her neck so she could see down the street. Dharan strode along confidently, with a couple of books in one arm and a crumpled piece of paper in his other hand. She stared at him, wishing she knew which of his features made him so handsome to humans. Or maybe it was how all of them were arranged. Dragons saw beauty in a symmetrical form, in well-shaped eye ridges and a smoothly muscled torso that curved to a narrow midsection, and in colors that complemented each other. Coquina's beauty, for example\u2014Lamprophyre made herself think about Coquina rationally\u2014was as much in how her rose-colored wing membranes suited her grass-green scales, like a flower, as in her symmetry. Humans all had more or less the same coloring, and if they were symmetrical, it was in a way Lamprophyre didn't yet understand. Maybe Dharan could tell her if Rokshan was handsome.\n\n\"Did you see this?\" Dharan demanded when he was close enough for speech. He brandished the crumpled paper at them. Rokshan looked up at him, but didn't rise, so Lamprophyre had to stay lying down or knock her friend over.\n\nShe held out a hand for the paper. \"Is it something bad?\"\n\n\"Stupid and annoying, yes,\" Dharan said, handing the paper over. \"It's certainly offensive to me.\"\n\nLamprophyre peered at the tiny writing. She had a lens for magnifying letters too small for her to easily perceive, but it was across the room and Rokshan was still reclining against her side. \"It says something about the gods? That they demand devotion? That doesn't seem unusual.\"\n\n\"Greater devotion,\" Dharan said. \"As in, the ecclesiasts have written this proclamation to call Gonjiri to repentance. But that's just the beginning.\" He accepted the paper back from Lamprophyre and read: \"Katayan, the Lonely God, is disappointed in his followers, who refuse to acknowledge him as their Lord. He calls on dragons everywhere to forsake their heretic religion and give their devotion to the True and Living God of the Dragons.\"\n\n\"Heretic religion?\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"They've said as much before,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Not like this,\" Dharan said. \"Not so publicly.\" He handed the paper absently to Rokshan, his attention all on Lamprophyre. \"I think we've just seen the first moves in a religious war.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"Religious war?\" Lamprophyre said. \"But why would they do that? Gonjiri doesn't want any kind of war with dragons.\"\n\n\"Gonjiri doesn't,\" Dharan said. \"But the ecclesiasts have different priorities. And topmost on that list is maintaining power. Dragons openly challenging the official doctrine are a threat to that power.\"\n\n\"That's an overly cynical way of looking at it,\" Rokshan said. He'd been reading the paper, and now he stood, dusting off his posterior. \"Ecclesiasts have the ability to hear the mind of Jiwanyil. If God speaks to them, isn't it reasonable that they'd believe in the tenets of their faith as revealed by God? And that they'd want others to believe as well?\"\n\n\"I'm willing to give most ecclesiasts the benefit of the doubt because of that,\" Dharan said. \"But that language\u2014\" He flicked the paper with his finger\u2014 \"is inflammatory and irresponsible. If they really were concerned about the state of dragons' souls, they wouldn't start by demanding they change their beliefs. Or claim to know the mind of Katayan.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Rokshan said. \"Whatever their motivations, this is a problem.\"\n\n\"How is it a problem?\" Lamprophyre said. \"I mean, yes, I see that there will be conflict, because the flight isn't going to bow to the ecclesiasts' demands, but I don't know what the ecclesiasts can do about it except make more demands we will also ignore.\"\n\n\"They can turn the people against you,\" Rokshan said. \"Most humans in Tanajital believe in Jiwanyil and respect the reverends and ecclesiasts. And Katayan is sort of a romantic figure. So the people might be upset that you're not following the will of Jiwanyil the way they do.\"\n\n\"Why is Katayan a romantic figure?\"\n\n\"He's called the Lonely God,\" Dharan said, \"because it was believed all the dragons were dead and he didn't have any worshippers. Legends say he wanders the world, appearing to humans who have experienced a loss. The death of a loved one, for example, or a change in fortune. We're taught to respect Katayan and honor his grief.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" That did sound sad, and Lamprophyre could see how humans might find the concept appealing. Any dragon would feel the same. \"That's a nice story, but dragons worship Mother Stone, and we have plenty of evidence that our faith is real.\"\n\n\"That's not something most humans will understand,\" Rokshan said. \"They hold to their faith as strongly as you do to yours. And that faith has sustained humans for over a thousand years. Up until now, very few of them knew anything about dragon religion, but this proclamation will change that.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, I don't know what dragons can do about this,\" Dharan said. \"Challenging the ecclesiasts will only give them more opportunities to spread their nonsense.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Rokshan said. \"Ignore it, and maybe it will go away.\"\n\n\"Do you think so?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"Because I'm not sure Khadar, for example, will let this go at one piece of paper.\"\n\nRokshan and Dharan looked at each other. Rokshan shrugged. \"Then we see what comes next, and maybe that will give us some idea of how to proceed.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't like that answer. Challenging the High Ecclesiasts, starting with Khadar and working her way up to the Archprelate, felt like a better move. But as satisfying as that would be, it would also be aggressive, and that would only raise public sentiment against her. \"All right,\" she said, \"but at some point, if they don't back down, there will be a fight.\"\n\n\"I'm looking forward to that day,\" Dharan said with a grin.\n\n\"You would,\" Rokshan said, but without malice. \"Let's move the slates outside before Porphyry gets here. And then I'm going to see if I can hunt down someone who can do that research for us, Lamprophyre.\"\n\n\"What research?\" Dharan asked. \"I like researching things. What do you need researched?\"\n\n\"See?\" Lamprophyre said. \"He's even eager about it. I think we should use him.\"\n\n\"And now I'm not so eager,\" Dharan said. \"You make it sound like you want a Dharan-shaped weapon.\"\n\n\"We almost do,\" Rokshan said. \"Lamprophyre and I need some information about certain prophecies from the Hall of Visions, but Khadar keeps interfering. So we have to get someone else to go instead.\"\n\nDharan made a face. \"The Hall of Visions. I thought you were after something interesting.\"\n\n\"It is interesting,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Khadar was possessed of a prophecy a few months ago, back when Hyaloclast came to meet with the king, that said 'the skies will burn.' And Hyaloclast told us that phrase has been passed on from dragon queen to dragon queen since the Great Cataclysm. And it's appeared in other prophecies. We want to know which prophecies.\"\n\n\"Not only that, but we'd like to find out the details,\" Rokshan added. \"Who was possessed of them, what questions were they in response to\u2014anything that might indicate what that phrase might mean.\"\n\n\"I take it back,\" Dharan said. \"That's very interesting. So why don't you want me to do it? Because I'm an unbeliever?\"\n\n\"We were actually thinking you might be known to be our associate,\" Rokshan said, \"and you'd just get the same runaround we did.\"\n\n\"But Rokshan says you're good at charming women, so I think you should try,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDharan burst out laughing. \"He does, does he?\"\n\n\"You know you are,\" Rokshan said. \"Remember Karana and the peaches?\"\n\n\"I do, mainly because no one who knows that story will ever let me forget.\" Dharan made a face Lamprophyre had never seen before, his eyes half-lidded and his lips pursed. \"'Mmm, just one bite\u2026'\"\n\nIt was Rokshan's turn to laugh. \"And she still liked you after everything fell apart. You're definitely charming.\"\n\n\"So will you do it?\" Lamprophyre asked, hoping to bring the conversation back to the important part and stop the two friends from reminiscing. \"Because putting one over on Khadar would help me forget about the stupid proclamation.\"\n\n\"I can at least try,\" Dharan said. \"But it will be a few days before I have time. I have lectures tomorrow and the day after.\"\n\n\"It's already waited a few months. It can wait a couple of days,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre picked up the large rectangular slates, so unnaturally smooth, and set them in the courtyard, propped against the embassy walls. \"I'll try not to be impatient,\" she said. \"If you brought me new books, that will help.\"\n\n\"An illustrated codex of animals,\" Dharan said, \"and a beginner's text on magic theory. It was hard to come by, too. Most adepts learn from other adepts rather than from books. This one was written by a non-adept who compiled knowledge from scholar-adepts. It's intended for people who don't intend to practice magic, so they can understand the principles of the artifacts they use.\"\n\n\"That sounds interesting.\" The human use of stone to channel magical energy fascinated Lamprophyre. To her, stone was mostly important as food, and the possibilities human adepts had seen in even such ordinary stones as feldspar and quartz intrigued her. \"Though if there's a book that lists the different stones and what kind of magic they produce, that would be even better.\"\n\n\"I've looked, but there doesn't seem to be anything like that,\" Dharan said. \"My instinct is that adepts don't want other adepts knowing about their discoveries, so they can monopolize their production, at least for a while. Why they don't like writing down the discoveries everyone knows about, I don't know, but secrecy seems paramount.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's something a non-adept could compile, like this book.\"\n\n\"Could be. It wouldn't be hard to make a start.\" Dharan handed the third book to Rokshan. \"A history of the rulers of Gonjiri. Dry, I'm afraid, but it's organized in chapters by ruler, and some of them were interesting characters. I leave it to you to decide which ones.\"\n\nRokshan grimaced. \"I feel as if I'm one of your students. Am I to write an essay?\"\n\n\"Think of it as penance for all the reading you didn't do at the academy. Or as a privilege to instruct the first dragon student of Gonjirian history.\" Dharan clapped Rokshan on the shoulder. \"So, tell me who the lady I saw you with at the paraveti two nights ago was. A new friend?\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"Her name is Nevrita, and we have a shared interest in the paraveti tangal. And she wasn't with me. We just happened to meet there.\" He wasn't meeting Dharan's eyes.\n\n\"I see,\" Dharan said. He sounded a little too casual. \"I'm sorry I couldn't join you, but I had a rather importunate young lady with me and I didn't want her imposing on my friends. Besides, when I saw you, the two of you were having a very animated discussion, and I didn't like to intrude. She's an aficionado, you say?\"\n\n\"We were arguing\u2014not really arguing, discussing\u2014the lead performer's interpretation of the role,\" Rokshan said. He seemed a little less stiff now, Lamprophyre thought, and she watched him in fascination. She was better at interpreting human body language now, or maybe it was just knowing Rokshan so well, and his demeanor struck her as either embarrassed or self-conscious. He must like this Nevrita more than he'd suggested to her the other day. \"Nevrita's very knowledgeable about tangal recitation.\"\n\n\"So are you,\" Dharan said. \"It's good to know you've made a friend who can match you in that.\" He turned to Lamprophyre. \"It's too bad you're too big to fit in the paraveti, because the paraveti tangal and the paraveti huspeth are two of humanity's greatest artistic achievements. And Rokshan is an expert on the tangal, and could give you a thorough grounding in the art.\"\n\n\"Dharan exaggerates,\" Rokshan assured her. \"There are many interpreters more experienced than I.\"\n\n\"All of them professionals,\" Dharan said. \"Don't be so modest.\"\n\n\"Yes, don't be so modest, Rokshan, you should be proud of your accomplishments.\" Lamprophyre leaned down to prop her head on her hands, putting her just below his eye level. \"What's paraveti tangal? I don't know those words.\"\n\n\"Paraveti was a poet who lived about four hundred years ago, and Tangal was one of her students. The artistic form is named for both of them. It's a form of poetry recitation, but done on the spot,\" Rokshan said, \"so it's composition as well. Though composing poetry in advance is also acceptable. Listeners know spontaneous composition is harder, so we tend to respect it more.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine it. New dragon poetry takes years to compose,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan nodded. \"It's a certain type of poetry, too. Performers take on roles, famous figures from history or living people or even mythological people, and create poems reflecting those people's personalities or passions, or their understanding of historical events or religion. It's a way of shaping our understanding of humanity, of seeing history and faith through a specific perspective and thus improving our own perceptions of events or beliefs.\"\n\n\"That's fascinating. Are you sure there's no way I can see it? You know I love poetry.\"\n\n\"I\u2014actually, maybe,\" Rokshan said. \"I know several of the paraveti tangal performers, and I might be able to arrange something. It would have to be in the coliseum, and I'm not sure how well sound travels there, but they could tell me if it's possible.\"\n\n\"I'd love that!\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. Give me a day or so, and I'll know if it's possible. It might still be impractical, so don't get too excited.\"\n\n\"Too late.\" Lamprophyre smiled. \"And maybe Nevrita could come. If she's so knowledgeable, she could help explain the performance.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Rokshan said. He didn't look at all self-conscious now. \"I'll talk to Pranesh tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I hope that invitation includes me,\" Dharan said. \"I'm curious about what kind of performance a tangal reciter will put on for a dragon.\"\n\n\"Anything will do,\" Lamprophyre said. She was thinking, though, not of the human artistic performance, but of Nevrita. Once again she suppressed a twinge of jealousy. Rokshan could still be her friend if he had a romantic relationship. And she wanted him to be happy. Maybe Nevrita was the answer to that.\n\n\"No, P and H together make the F sound,\" Lamprophyre said. She tapped the slate where she'd written PORPHYRY in big letters. \"And for some reason the two Y letters have different sounds in your name, 'ih' and 'ee'. Human spelling is so odd. I don't know why it can't be spelled P-O-R-F-I-R-E-E.\"\n\n\"That would make more sense,\" Porphyry said. \"I know I have trouble remembering all the sounds made by putting two letters together. So much easier to memorize the words.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you still have to be able to sound out unfamiliar words so you know what you're memorizing.\" Lamprophyre turned to her own slate and wrote her name. Her handwriting had improved dramatically with practice. Below that, she wrote some of the other names she knew: ROKSHAN and ANCHALA, Rokshan's sister, and DHARAN and ANAMIKA.\n\n\"Psst! Lamprophyre!\"\n\nLamprophyre turned and peered into the dimness of the embassy. As if writing her name had conjured her up, Anamika stood near the back door, jigging from one foot to the other in nervousness. \"Anamika? Why did you come through the back door? I'm afraid I can't play right now. Lessons.\"\n\n\"I didn't come to play,\" Anamika said. She walked forward a few paces to where Lamprophyre could see her clearly, but Porphyry couldn't. Nor, Lamprophyre realized, could anyone else outside the embassy. \"I'm not supposed to be here.\"\n\n\"You know I don't like you disobeying your parents\u2014\"\n\n\"This is important,\" Anamika whispered. \"I'm not supposed to be here ever again.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lamprophyre entered the embassy and crouched down to put herself on Anamika's eye level. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Mam and papa say you don't believe in God and you've turned your back on Katayan.\" Anamika's restless jigging was starting to unsettle Lamprophyre. \"They say we're not to play with you because you're wicked.\"\n\n\"I am not!\" Lamprophyre controlled her next outburst. \"I believe in a different religion, Anamika. It's not wrong for me not to believe in yours.\"\n\n\"But why don't you believe in Jiwanyil and Katayan?\" Anamika cried out. \"You have to believe in them or devils take your soul.\"\n\n\"They\u2014Anamika, dragons worship Mother Stone. We have stone in our blood and bones, and when we die, we return to her. We've never heard of Katayan. That's something\u2014\" Lamprophyre closed her lips over the words something humans made up. Anamika was eleven, far too young by either human or dragon standards to be analytical about her religious faith and far too young for Lamprophyre to feel comfortable teaching her things at odds with her parents' teachings. \"So your parents are afraid I'll corrupt you and Varnak?\"\n\nAnamika nodded.\n\n\"I promise I wouldn't do that, but I don't want your parents upset with you. They're just trying to protect you. So you and Varnak should stay away until your parents change their minds. I'll talk to them\u2014maybe that will help.\"\n\nThat seemed unlikely, but it cleared the frown from Anamika's face. \"Do you think you could talk to my parents soon? Varnak and I want to go swimming with you.\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can do. Now, get on back home before they guess where you've gone.\"\n\nShe stared at the back door, hanging slightly ajar from Anamika's exit, after the girl had gone, and wished she knew human curse words. The situation was too stupid for ordinary swearing. She'd almost forgotten that proclamation because nothing had seemed to come of it. It looked like she was wrong.\n\nShe stomped back out into the courtyard, prompting Porphyry to say, \"Something wrong?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nothing important.\" She hoped that was true. If she was wrong about that, as well, life for dragons in Tanajital was about to become extremely unpleasant."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Lamprophyre coasted low over the river south of Tanajital, well beyond where the boats crossed from one bank to the other. The air coming off the river was marginally cooler, but still damp, and Lamprophyre dipped even lower and trailed her hands and feet in the water. Even at that slow speed, she sent up waves that sprayed her torso and belly and made her wish she could dive in\u2014but that would soak her wing membranes and make flying extremely difficult. Dragons were creatures of air and fire, not water and earth. Even so, soaking in the river would be so comfortable on a day like this one, with the sun a white disc in the sky that broiled everything it touched.\n\n\"You're sure you don't want to go swimming?\" she asked Rokshan. He'd been unusually quiet since they'd left Tanajital, but maybe it wasn't so unusual, given how the heat sapped her will to talk.\n\n\"I'm sure,\" Rokshan said. \"Maybe tomorrow. I wish we didn't have to fly through the heat of the day.\"\n\n\"The alternative was staying in Umrit until evening, and they don't have accommodations for dragons. I wish we hadn't had to go there at all. They were all so afraid. Rokshan, is there ever going to be a time when humans don't fear me?\"\n\n\"It's coming, Lamprophyre, I promise.\" Rokshan patted the side of her neck. \"Most of the big cities are used to dragons now. It's just little towns like Umrit, and it's sort of Bromargyrite and Orthoclase's fault for racing so close to it.\"\n\n\"That's all it was. Racing. They didn't even enter Umrit.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. That was more critical than I meant. I'm just saying we have to decide how dragons will approach these little towns, and it's clear now that sending out handbills in advance makes a difference because the townsfolk are prepared.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed and banked to follow the curve of Tanajital's wall. \"I wish you weren't right, but I know you are. I didn't realize how proud I am until I had to abase myself in front of that tiny little magistrate and apologize for my friends scaring his stupid fellow citizens.\"\n\n\"I was impressed at how civil you were. He was obnoxious about the whole thing. You're a far better diplomat than I am.\"\n\n\"Well, I feel more confident when you're with me, so thank you for coming along.\"\n\n\"My pleasure. Now, I'm going to eat something, and then I think a nap is in order.\"\n\nLamprophyre, descending toward the embassy courtyard, saw a familiar figure just inside the entrance, leaning against the wall so his face and body were half in shadow. \"Dharan's here. Do you think he made it into the Hall of Visions?\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" Rokshan said, \"because I really want a meal and a nap.\"\n\nLamprophyre alit in the center of the courtyard and crouched for Rokshan to climb down. \"You can wait inside where it's cooler, you know,\" she said.\n\n\"I know, but I like watching the people in your neighborhood.\" Dharan stood upright and stretched. \"You're not going to believe what I learned at the Hall of Visions.\"\n\n\"Does it involve cold roast chicken and a large plate of saffron rice?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"You're a slave to your stomach, you know that?\" Dharan gestured for Lamprophyre to precede him into the embassy. \"We'll eat after I tell you my story. I promise it's worth waiting dinner for.\"\n\nRokshan sighed and settled himself on the floor next to Lamprophyre. \"If it isn't, you're buying.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Dharan sat cross-legged facing Lamprophyre, who settled onto the cool earth floor with a grunt of satisfaction. If she stayed in the lowlands long enough, she might end up so acclimated to the hot weather she'd find her mountain home too cold. Stones, but that would be awful!\n\n\"So I did some research before I went,\" Dharan said, \"research as to who would be on duty at the Hall of Visions at which times. I may not actually be able to charm the birds from the trees, but I'll admit I've had success swaying ladies to my point of view. This morning, the ecclesiast supervising visitors was a young woman who was already inclined to be helpful, at least as far as assisting other visitors went. It's fortunate for the ecclesiasts I had no sinister motives, because she went out of her way to steer me in the right direction. I believe if I'd asked she might have shown me to the Archprelate's own chambers.\"\n\n\"I knew you were the right choice!\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"We should have sent him to Umrit instead of us,\" muttered Rokshan.\n\n\"Are you finished, or do you want to natter on some more?\" Dharan asked. Lamprophyre sat up and assumed her best attentive pose. Rokshan shrugged. \"That was just the beginning. In fact, her helpfulness almost worked against me, because she kept coming back to ask if I needed anything. It was distracting. But I managed to learn a few things regardless.\" He removed a folded sheet of paper from within his sleeveless shirt and passed it to Rokshan.\n\nLamprophyre peered at it over his shoulder. \"I can't read it,\" she said. \"Your handwriting is usually better than that.\"\n\n\"It's intentionally bad because I didn't want my so-helpful ecclesiast friend doing what you're trying to do now.\" Dharan flapped the hem of his shirt to cool himself. \"The first thing I learned is that the Hall of Visions has the worst cataloguing system I've ever seen. I don't know how ordinary people manage to find anything. No index, no cross-referencing. It's as if they don't want people reading the prophecies, and I'd believe that if not for the ecclesiasts helping other visitors.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, Lamprophyre, that I shamelessly eavesdropped on other people's conversations. The ecclesiasts do want people to be able to look up prophecies. They just want to control what people find. They have a system that's not obvious to laypersons, and using that system, the ecclesiasts can find just about any prophecy.\"\n\n\"But since you're a genius, you deduced the system from what you overheard,\" Rokshan said, rolling his eyes.\n\n\"Why, thank you, Rokshan, I was about to use those exact words,\" Dharan said with a grin. \"It's a non-obvious system, but fairly simple once you know the rules. I've created far more complex organizational methods myself. So in between dodging the assistance of my besotted young ecclesiast, I located a number of prophecies containing the phrase you gave me.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled herself more comfortably, since Dharan had the look of someone about to tell a good story. \"And?\"\n\n\"And nothing,\" Dharan said. \"That is, I couldn't see any commonalities between the prophecies except that the phrase 'the skies will burn' seems tossed in at random in almost all of them. The two non-random exceptions being the most recent prophecy, the one Khadar was possessed of, and a prophecy delivered seven years ago that refers to preparing for a great disaster. But I wrote summaries of each prophecy on that paper.\" He dropped the hem of his shirt and rested his hands loosely on his knees.\n\nRokshan was scanning the page with his eyes narrowed in thought. \"What about the commentaries?\"\n\n\"Also not helpful. Most of the relevant prophecies are unfulfilled, or partially fulfilled. Oh, and that was the other thing: I didn't see any ecclesiast's name represented more than once. That is, it seems any ecclesiast possessed of a prophecy containing those words only received one of them.\"\n\n\"That's unfortunate,\" Rokshan said. \"If there were an ecclesiast who kept receiving those words, we might be able to confront him or her.\"\n\n\"What are commentaries?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"Commentaries on the prophecies?\"\n\n\"Sort of,\" Rokshan said. \"Ecclesiasts keep track of the prophecies they're possessed of and make notes on the written records of how and when they're fulfilled. And other ecclesiasts study the prophecies looking for correlations between them, and they write those down on the records, too. If the prophecies we're interested in were fulfilled, even in part, how they were fulfilled might give us hints to what 'the skies will burn' might mean.\" He folded the paper and handed it to Lamprophyre. \"I'll make a fair copy later, so we can both read it instead of trying to decipher Dharan's chicken scratches.\"\n\n\"I love your expression of gratitude,\" Dharan said.\n\n\"He's kidding. We're both grateful to you,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Seriously, we are,\" Rokshan said. \"Do you think you found all the relevant records?\"\n\n\"All the ones it's possible to find with a superficial search. I'm sure there are more, but locating them might draw the kind of attention you want to avoid. But I'm willing to try again sometime if you feel it's necessary.\"\n\n\"That really is more than we asked,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDharan shrugged. \"I'm curious now. And I don't like leaving a scholarly puzzle unsolved. Do you have any guesses about what you're looking for? What the phrase means?\"\n\n\"Just that from what the dragon queen said, it might be tied to a future catastrophe.\" Rokshan stood and stretched. \"Not necessarily as fatal as the last one, but if it is, wouldn't it make sense that Jiwanyil would warn us?\"\n\n\"Better for us if Jiwanyil prevented it,\" Dharan said. \"And I know what you're going to say. If God hovered over us all the time, humans would be stunted and never learn anything for themselves.\"\n\nIt was so like what Hyaloclast had once told her Lamprophyre blurted out, \"But that's true, isn't it? Mother Stone never interferes in dragon lives because we would otherwise never do anything without her telling us to. We'd be children forever.\"\n\nDharan shrugged again. \"Then what's the point of a god who only watches, if he or she is all-powerful?\"\n\n\"This is too heavy a discussion to have on an empty stomach,\" Rokshan said, \"but I think a god who creates rational creatures with free will expects them to act without his direction, and that kind of creation demands that a god be all-powerful. It doesn't dictate how else he uses that power. You may be a genius, but you don't use that genius directed by the preferences and demands of others. Now, food, Dharan, and then Lamprophyre and I will study what you've brought us.\"\n\nLamprophyre carefully unfolded the paper without tearing it. She could barely make out that there were words on the page and not, as Rokshan had joked, chicken scratches. Having taken such pains to improve her handwriting's legibility, it struck her as funny that anyone might deliberately make their handwriting worse. \"Don't take too long,\" she said.\n\nWhen the men were gone, Lamprophyre placed the paper between two books so it wouldn't get damaged or lost and settled in to read one of the books Dharan had brought the day before. The book she chose was a history of the Great Cataclysm, what humans referred to as the catastrophe, and it was extremely boring. How anyone could make a time that had probably been terrifying and full of danger boring was beyond her. She'd been skimming through the pages, though, trying to learn the basic facts without falling asleep on her magnifying lens.\n\nWhat especially interested her was the human account of what had happened to the dragons. She'd heard the stories from Rokshan, about how the mountains had risen up and swallowed all dragons, but this book went into more detail. According to the writer, the dragons had tried to destroy human civilization, but the catastrophe, in which the earth had moved and cities had been sunken below ground or shattered by mountains rising in their place, had stopped their advance. That was where the legends of the mountains swallowing the dragons came from.\n\nLamprophyre swiveled the lens away and rested her chin on her folded arms. It was impossible. She'd lived in the mountains all her life, and there was no evidence anywhere that the mountains had been uprooted even as recently as a thousand years ago. But Dharan had taught her that these old stories, and even the modern explanations for the old stories, weren't necessarily false just because no one had proof they'd happened. \"Kernels of truth,\" he'd said, and then had to explain what kernels were.\n\nSo what was the truth here? Something had happened to the dragons to make humans believe they were all destroyed. Her own people's history wasn't much more detailed than the human legends. Dragons told stories of how the humans had turned their backs on them, and the dragons had retreated to the mountains in response. But that didn't fit with how human legends said dragons had attacked them. Lamprophyre couldn't imagine that ever happening. Humans were too soft and fragile to be a threat to dragons, and dragons wouldn't attack anything that wasn't a threat. It was all too confusing.\n\nShe read a few more pages before her eyelids became heavy. This was all wrong. Reading should be fun, not sleep-inducing. Even so, a nap felt like a good idea. She slept, and dreamed of dragons raining fire and acid down on human cities until Mother Stone reached out her arms and gathered them to her, crushing them under her weight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Lamprophyre chewed a mouthful of roast pig and listened to Rokshan eating soup. He was usually a tidy eater, but either the soup was too hot, or he didn't feel a need to use his best human manners in front of her. She tore off another mouthful. She didn't use utensils when she ate the way humans did, so her manners from a human perspective were fairly messy. It wasn't important when they were in her dining pavilion, but it did make her feel self-conscious about eating in public places.\n\n\"Some of these people come often,\" she told Rokshan, speaking in a low voice even though none of the beggars were close enough to hear. \"The man with only one leg, for one, and the woman with two children also.\"\n\n\"I wonder about that woman,\" Rokshan said, and slurped another mouthful of soup. \"What she does with her children during the day. You don't often see beggars with children, and I'm not sure why not. There must be many parents in Tanajital who have to beg for their survival, and it's not as if there are places that will watch their children while they're out on the streets. Or maybe those beggars have relatives they're supporting as well, and they tend the children during the day.\"\n\n\"She's afraid of me hurting her children, or I'd ask her,\" Lamprophyre said. She only occasionally listened to the thoughts of the people who came for soup in the evening, because there were enough of them that their thoughts were a chaotic, echoing tangle, but she'd heard enough to know how her \"regulars\" felt about her. Lamprophyre felt only a dull ache at knowing some of them still feared her. Maybe that was how things would always be.\n\n\"The old madman comes sometimes, too,\" she said to distract herself. \"The one with the flying white hair.\"\n\nRokshan studied the man, who stood off to one side and drank from his bowl rather than use a spoon. \"Why is he a madman?\"\n\n\"His thoughts are shattered like broken glass. I tried listening, but they didn't make any sense. All I know is that he goes between agitation and serenity in an instant, and I can't tell what he's agitated about. Sometimes he's afraid in flashes, and sometimes he clutches his head like it pains\u2014there, like that.\"\n\nThe old man had dropped his half-full bowl on the packed earth, spilling soup everywhere. He put both hands over his ears and twisted his head back and forth as if his hands were turning it, and a high, shrill keening escaped his lips. No one else in the courtyard paid any attention to him.\n\nRokshan stood and walked to the old man's side. He picked up the bowl and brushed particles of dirt from it. \"Let me get you some more,\" he said, as if the old man could hear him even though it was clear the man was past hearing anything. Rokshan refilled the bowl and returned to the old man's side. The man had sunk to his knees and was breathing great sobbing breaths as if he'd been in terrible pain. Rokshan waited for him to lower his hands, then gave the old man the bowl. The old man resumed drinking soup as if nothing had happened. He ignored Rokshan completely.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Lamprophyre said when Rokshan returned to her side. \"I wish I could help him. I'm so big I'm afraid I'd accidentally crush him.\"\n\n\"That's not a life I'd wish on anyone,\" Rokshan said. There was still soup in his bowl, but he seemed not to notice. \"Who knows what he was when he was young? And now he's old and mad and dependent on strangers.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened briefly before she had to block out all the other thoughts. \"He's calm enough now. I don't think he remembers those episodes.\" She sat up. \"Oh, and there's the strange rich woman. I ought to tell her to leave the soup for people who really need it, but for all I know she does need it. And we have plenty.\"\n\nRokshan looked where she was pointing. \"Oh,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh?\" He'd sounded uncomfortable, as if he recognized the woman. \"Do you know her?\"\n\n\"Not her personally.\"\n\n\"Who is she? I've been curious for a twelveday, but I have the feeling she'd laugh at me if I talked to her.\"\n\n\"She's no one, really. Or, well, she probably doesn't need a free meal, so I wonder what she's doing here.\"\n\nLamprophyre blew out a cloud of impatient smoke. \"That's what I thought. How can she be no one and also be wealthy?\"\n\n\"I don't know how wealthy she is.\" Rokshan shifted so his face was in profile to Lamprophyre. \"She's a Sister of the Red. A, um, prostitute.\"\n\n\"I don't know what that means.\"\n\nRokshan sighed. \"I suppose it was too much to hope Dharan had explained it. Prostitutes have sex with men for money. It's considered shameful for both the women and the men who, um, patronize them.\"\n\nLamprophyre mouthed the words sex with men for money, trying them out to see if they made any more sense on her lips. \"I still don't understand. You mean, more than one man? How can they be pair-bonded so often? Or\u2014the men don't die afterward, do they?\"\n\n\"Of course not!\"\n\n\"Then how do they manage it?\" A horrified thought struck her. \"You don't mean they have sex without being pair-bonded?\"\n\n\"Um, yes. The prostitutes aren't married to the men they have sex with. The men give them money in exchange for sex. Do dragons not\u2014well, all right, obviously you don't have money so you can't pay for sex, but it sounds like you only have sex with the one you're pair-bonded to.\"\n\n\"Of course we do! We're not animals!\" Heads turned at the sound of her shrill exclamation, and she hunched her shoulders as if that would divert their attention.\n\nRokshan cleared his throat. \"Lamprophyre,\" he said patiently, \"humans aren't animals either, but we\u2014Jiwanyil teaches us that we should keep sexual relations within marriage, but humans can choose whether or not to obey that rule.\"\n\nLamprophyre stared at him. He still wasn't looking at her. \"Sexual intimacy is powerful for dragons,\" she said.\n\n\"Powerful for humans, too.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I mean that we share thoughts with the one we're pair-bonded with. Far more intimately than just hearing them. If we did that with someone we're not pair-bonded with, especially if we went on to do it with someone else\u2026\" She shuddered. \"Imagine knowing the innermost thoughts and secrets of someone who wasn't going to spend their life with you. It makes me embarrassed just thinking about it.\"\n\n\"But how do you know when you've found your true mate? Couldn't you make a mistake, and be pair-bonded with the wrong person, and later realize your destiny lay elsewhere?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"Dragons spend years getting to know each other before deciding on a mate. It's why so many dragons mate within their clutch.\" Another horrible thought struck her, this one embarrassing. \"Oh. Have you had sex? I know you're not pair-bonded. Married.\"\n\n\"I have.\"\n\nThe words struck her to the heart. She'd been so critical of human customs without realizing she was directly criticizing him. \"I'm sorry. Humans do things so differently\u2014I didn't think I might have been insulting you. I apologize.\"\n\n\"It's all right. I wasn't insulted. Much.\" He smiled, the corner of his mouth turning up though he still wasn't looking her way. \"It's true, we believe in sex only between married people, but our desires are strong enough most of us are weak that way. Sometimes couples have sex and get married later. Sometimes men don't have partners and they patronize prostitutes. The reverends and ecclesiasts preach against it, but it's like I said\u2014we humans have the choice to obey Jiwanyil's law or not.\"\n\n\"The ecclesiasts must really not like prostitutes, then. How could you tell that's what she is? Her clothing?\" The woman had left already, or Lamprophyre would have stared at her more intently than usual.\n\n\"Her armband. Women who don't want to conceive children wear garnet artifacts to prevent conception. Prostitutes wear theirs openly, so people know they're available for sex, and that they won't present a customer with an unwanted child later.\"\n\nShe didn't understand why anyone might not want children, but that sounded like an even more complicated conversation. Something for another time. \"But wouldn't that make them obvious to the ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"It does, but there's no law against prostitution, so all the ecclesiasts can do is chastise them and insist God-fearing folk shun them. Sort of like what they've done to dragons.\"\n\nLamprophyre's dislike of the woman evaporated in the knowledge of this shared experience. \"So, when you had sex, was it with a prostitute?\"\n\nRokshan burst out laughing, causing the few beggars still in the courtyard to look his way. \"No, Lamprophyre, I did not pay a prostitute,\" he finally said, \"and you should know it's insulting to suggest to a man that the only way he can get sex is to pay for it.\"\n\nLamprophyre blushed. \"So who was it with?\"\n\n\"That, I'm not going to discuss with you. It's ungentlemanly. I'll just say that in recent years I've come to see the wisdom in Jiwanyil's laws, and I've decided not to have sex again until I'm married.\"\n\nThat relieved Lamprophyre's mind, though she didn't know why. Possibly because it made him seem more dragon-like. \"If it makes you happy, I'm glad of it,\" she said, refraining from asking him more detailed questions like What changed your mind? or How does sex feel for humans? which she was sure he wouldn't answer.\n\nShe settled in more comfortably and helped herself to the last swallow of Rokshan's soup. Humans were so strange. Once more she reflected on the males in her clutch. They were all friends, and they all had different things in common with her, but she didn't feel an urge to single one of them out as a potential mate. Maybe she needed to look at the clutch born just three years before hers, or the one five years younger\u2014though the younger clutch members were only just fifty-five and not ready for pair-bonding at all.\n\nShe sighed. Or maybe she needed to stop worrying about it. She was young enough not to be expected to choose a mate any time soon. But with five males and two females in her clutch, she was always conscious of her friends watching her and Coquina, wondering which way they'd go. So long as none of her clutchmates was harboring a secret passion for her, she was comfortable letting things go on as they had.\n\nEven so, as she watched the last beggars deposit bowls in the box near the soup cauldron, she couldn't help wishing one of her clutchmates had captured her heart. How wonderful, to have someone to share such intimacy with! Someday, she thought, and crossed the courtyard to the embassy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The following evening, the courtyard was more than usually full of beggars. Depik had told Lamprophyre, when they'd begun this practice, that there were holy days in which people were more generous in their giving than usual, and on those days they should expect to see fewer people coming for soup. He hadn't said if there was anything special about the days when they saw more people. Lamprophyre watched the crowd from the dining pavilion, searching out her regulars. She didn't see the old man or the prostitute, but there was the mother, gripping her children's hands as if she feared being separated from them. A reasonable fear, given how crowded the courtyard was.\n\nShe saw the young man with one leg, hobbling down the wide street that led only to her courtyard. He was usually earlier than this. Lamprophyre tossed a large steak into her mouth and chewed blissfully. It was too bad it was impractical to feed all her beggars steak, because steak was delicious and Depik was very good at cooking it.\n\nThe young man was halfway across the courtyard now. Three other men, all of them short but burly, with large arms bumpy with muscles, were crossing the courtyard toward him, bowls of soup in their hands. They had their backs to Lamprophyre, so she couldn't see if what happened next was accidental, but the three burly men made no attempt to get out of the way of the young man, and one of them kicked the wooden device Rokshan had called a crutch, knocking the young man down. Lamprophyre rose to her feet. The three men laughed and kept going as the young man fumbled with his crutch, his brown skin darker with humiliation.\n\n\"Hey!\" Lamprophyre shouted. \"You three!\"\n\nThe three men took a few more steps before turning around hesitantly, as if they weren't sure she was addressing them. \"Yes, you,\" Lamprophyre said, stepping away from the dining pavilion and then stopping to avoid crushing anyone. It probably wasn't an issue, because everyone in the courtyard had backed away from her when she emerged. \"Help him up.\"\n\nThe men exchanged glances. \"What?\" said the one in the middle. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Oh, spare me,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You know who and you know what. How dare you come here and take my food and think you're somehow entitled to treat other people like dirt? I don't think you're even beggars. You're far too well fed.\"\n\nThe burly man on the left took a step backward. \"Don't you dare,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You put those bowls down and get out of here. And I don't want to see you again. Dragons have very good memories, and I assure you I won't forget your faces. And if I'm wrong, and you are in need of a meal because you're poor, you should remember that you lost your chance here because you were selfish and cruel to someone even worse off than you. Get out.\"\n\nSlowly, the men placed their bowls on the ground and backed away, not turning around until they'd reached the street. Then they ran.\n\nLamprophyre blew out a cloud of smoke. That had felt good. Then she caught sight of the young man, who'd managed to get his crutch under him and stand up. She was better at reading expressions than she had been when she first came to Tanajital, and his flushed face and refusal to meet anyone's eyes, the way he hunched in on himself, told her clearly he felt humiliated. Guilt surged over her. She hadn't even considered the young man's pride, or that he might not want to be rescued.\n\n\"I'm sorry about that,\" she told him. \"What's your name?\"\n\nHis eyes widened. Clearly he'd never expected a dragon to speak to him. \"Sumaan,\" he said in a voice almost too low for Lamprophyre to hear.\n\n\"Sumaan, my name is Lamprophyre, and I welcome you to my home,\" Lamprophyre said, falling back on words she'd heard Anamika's father using with guests. \"I wish I could limit my hospitality to those who really need a good meal, but I'd rather not question people to have them prove their need. Please have something to eat, and the rest of you\u2014\" She raised her voice. \"If you're here because you heard there was free food, there is. But I hope those of you who can afford to feed yourselves won't take the place of someone who can't.\"\n\nShe walked back into the dining pavilion and gulped down more steak. To her surprise, people were leaving without eating. She hadn't actually thought anyone would care about her appeal to their consciences. Something humans and dragons had in common was a love of getting something for free, though in dragons' case that meant being given something with no obligation to respond in kind. She and Depik had been lucky not to encounter this problem, this arrival of those not in desperate need, until now.\n\nShe finished eating and surveyed the courtyard again. There were still a lot of beggars, though she still didn't see the prostitute or the old man. Sumaan stood leaning against the embassy wall, his crutch propped beside him. It was growing near to sunset, and Lamprophyre needed to leave, but she didn't dare take off from the courtyard full of fragile humans who she might trample or knock over with her wings.\n\nShe left by the back way, past Depik cleaning up in the kitchen, and stood behind the embassy, looking up at its steeply slanted blue roof nearly as vibrant as she was. It had a narrow beam running the length of it, giving the roof the appearance of a book laid face down with its spine pointed up, something Dharan had yelled at her for doing once. Lamprophyre crouched, folded her wings back, and leaped for the roof, grabbing hold of the eaves and hauling herself up to the beam. Probably it wasn't that narrow for a human, but for her, balancing required her to spread her wings wide and extend her arms. She wobbled once, got her balance, and leaped into the sky before she lost her grip on the roof beam.\n\nFlapping awkwardly and hoping no one who mattered had seen her graceless ascent, she winged her way south and east, toward the coliseum. The towers of Tanajital cast long shadows pointing her way, some of them oddly shaped by the bulbous gilded tops that looked like turnips dipped in gold. To the west, the Green River was already fully in shadow, and lights had begun to come on in the little boats making one last quick dash from one shore to the other before darkness made sailing dangerous. The sun, halfway below the horizon already, looked like a blob of molten glass, dark yellow shading to orange where it touched the land. Lamprophyre admired it for a few beats before turning her back on it.\n\nThe coliseum was a large structure of red sandstone, with tall arches circling its outer wall. The arches fascinated Lamprophyre, the more so because neither Rokshan nor Dharan knew how they stayed up. Dharan had said only that it had to do with engineering, not his field of expertise, and Rokshan had said, \"I was told the stones of the arches fit so closely together they might have gotten away with using no mortar. That terrified me as a child, the thought that those stones might come tumbling down and crush me if someone kicked them. It's not possible, of course, but children imagine the strangest things.\"\n\nNow Lamprophyre cruised down in a wide spiral around the coliseum and observed the passersby thronging the streets surrounding the coliseum. The streets radiated out from it like spokes on a cart wheel, with a single street wide enough for two dragons to sit side by side\u2014she and Flint had checked\u2014completely surrounding the coliseum, and a similar street circling that one about two dragonlengths away. When she had first come to Tanajital, she'd stayed in the coliseum until the embassy was ready, and those circular streets had been empty because the citizens all feared her. Now, even though she was circling low and Flint and Orthoclase were already in the coliseum, those streets were as full as ever with humans heading home to their suppers or out for an evening's entertainment. Just like she was.\n\nShe landed lightly at the back of the coliseum, near the wooden box where the royal family sat to observe races or performances. Large openings framed with wood allowed her to see inside the box easily. It was bare as far as decorations went, the walls unpainted and lacking the woven hangings she'd seen looking through windows at the homes of the well-to-do. Some chairs with fat yellow cushions on their seats were lined up in two rows facing the coliseum floor. If you were human, those chairs would be an extremely comfortable way to watch the races held here weekly.\n\nA round platform about two handspans high had been erected in the center of the coliseum, with unlit torches flanking it. A couple of plain wooden stools like Lamprophyre had seen outside buildings near the embassy, the buildings where humans went to buy meals, were arranged in a loose grouping around its circumference.\n\nFlint and Orthoclase had settled nearby, comfortably settled on their haunches with their tails wrapped around their hindquarters. \"Isn't anyone else coming?\" she asked.\n\n\"Bromargyrite will be here any time now,\" Flint said. He shuffled over to make room for Lamprophyre next to him. \"Dolomite and Porphyry flew home for a few days, and you know Coquina has no interest in poetry.\"\n\nLamprophyre privately thought that however little interest Coquina had in poetry, she certainly had a great deal of interest in Flint, but she would never embarrass him by referring to Coquina's pursuit of him. \"I wonder if it will ever be anyone but our clutch coming to Gonjiri,\" she said. \"I don't know if they're not interested, or they don't feel welcome.\"\n\n\"Most of them don't think humans have much to offer us,\" Orthoclase said. \"That will change over time.\"\n\n\"And once they realize\u2014oh, it's Bromargyrite,\" Flint said, looking up at a descending figure that glowed orange and yellow in the last light of the sun. \"Everyone duck and cover.\"\n\n\"Funny,\" Bromargyrite said, but he landed more carefully than Lamprophyre had and stood well away from the wooden box. \"This human city seems made of intentionally fragile things. I swear I never mean to step on anything, but it's like things appear just where I mean to step.\"\n\n\"You're not too far off,\" Orthoclase said. \"Obviously Tanajital wasn't built for dragons, but it's almost as if some human builder wanted to make us uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"And yet humans themselves can be very friendly,\" Flint said. \"As I was about to say, once the rest of the flight realizes how interesting humans are, they'll spend more time in the lowlands. I've gotten to know a human male, a builder of stone houses, and he's taught me a lot about why humans build the way they do. I've even helped with some of his construction. We flew south yesterday\u2014\"\n\n\"Flew?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I'll admit it was uncomfortable at first, having a human perched back there,\" Flint said, reaching around absently to rub the base of his neck, \"but I liked having someone to talk to on that long flight. And Lokun wasn't afraid at all. I think we might become friends.\"\n\n\"I suppose if Lamprophyre could manage it,\" Orthoclase said. \"I'm not sure I could be that close to a human, but it's also true I've made acquaintances among the stone merchants. So maybe I'm wrong about that.\"\n\nTorchlight flared at the far end of the coliseum, and Lamprophyre's attention was drawn by three humans in short, sleeveless robes, circling the walls and lighting the torches that hung at intervals there, then crossing to the center and lighting the torches on the platform. The sun was nothing more than a yellow glow in the western sky, and the torches were a welcome illumination. They cast their dancing shadows on the ruddy earth that floored the coliseum, lighting the space well enough that Lamprophyre could have read by their light.\n\nShe heard voices approaching from the east, murmuring too low for her to identify the speakers, so she listened for their thoughts and found Rokshan, Dharan, and Rokshan's sister Anchala. To her surprise, one of the remaining thinkers was Rokshan's mother, Queen Satiya. She didn't recognize the fifth person and guessed it must be Nevrita. Excitement made her pulse quicken. The fifth person wasn't thinking anything coherent, which meant she was listening to someone else speak. Lamprophyre hoped the speaker was Rokshan. Her earlier stupid jealousy of someone who might theoretically take Rokshan's time away from her vanished in her eagerness to meet this woman Rokshan was interested in.\n\nShe was also aware of a few other presences who didn't speak and whose thoughts were preoccupied with an awareness of their surroundings that to Lamprophyre sounded like a light, lilting hum punctuated with the occasional shadow or keep back. The group of speakers' voices became muffled, echoing like water dripping into a pool deep within a lightless cave. Soon enough, though, she heard them clearly, their voices coming from somewhere at her eye level. Someone laughed.\n\nThen a door at the back of the wooden box opened, and a couple of guards walked through. Lamprophyre realized immediately they had been the preoccupied thinkers. They checked the box thoroughly, then stood to either side of the door and stood as still as trees. All the dragons were watching now, Bromargyrite a little farther from the wooden box than the others.\n\nRokshan walked through the door and gestured for someone to follow him. That someone turned out to be the queen, who came forward to the front of the box. \"Lamprophyre,\" she said in her sweet, soft voice. \"How good to see you. And these must be your\u2026clutchmates, is it?\"\n\n\"That's right, your majesty,\" Lamprophyre said. \"These are Orthoclase, Flint, and Bromargyrite.\"\n\nThe three male dragons bowed. Bromargyrite's bow wasn't at all clumsy. He must have practiced. \"We appreciate the welcome Tanajital has given us,\" Flint said.\n\n\"I hope to continue to welcome dragons to our country,\" Satiya said. \"It's unfortunate you've had to stop racing around the city wall. I wish I could have seen it.\"\n\n\"We're trying to find a solution, your majesty,\" Orthoclase said. \"Dragon racing is something humans have shown an interest in, and we think it would build dragon-human relations if it could be a commonplace.\"\n\n\"When you figure it out, let me know,\" Satiya said. She seated herself in the front row of chairs and straightened her robe, not the colorful one she wore for official functions, but something soft green and flowing.\n\nAnchala took a seat next to her mother with a nod for the dragons, all of whom she'd met before. Dharan sat beside her without a hint of reservation, something that amused Lamprophyre. She knew very well that Anchala had set her sights on Dharan in a way that made Coquina's flirtation with Flint look like mild interest. Since Dharan had no intention of marrying any time soon, and even less interest in Anchala, Lamprophyre thought it remarkable that he could sit so calmly beside his pursuer. Dharan must like paraveti tangal more than she realized.\n\nShe turned to look at the last woman emerging from the corridors behind the royal box. She was tall for a human female, almost as tall as Rokshan, and rather than arranging her hair high on her head as Anchala had done, or in loops and coils the way Satiya's hair was, she had pulled it back from her face and secured it at the back of her neck with a golden clasp\u2014real gold, Lamprophyre smelled. Her skin was a lighter brown than most Gonjirians Lamprophyre had seen, almost as light as the queen's, and her loose robe with the deep neck concealed her figure enough that Lamprophyre could barely see the bumps on her chest that meant she was female.\n\n\"Lamprophyre, I want you to meet Nevrita,\" Rokshan said, beckoning the female forward. \"Nevrita, this is my friend Lamprophyre.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure to meet you,\" Nevrita said. Her voice was deep and flowing like water over stone. \"Rokshan speaks of you constantly.\" Too constantly, she thought. It's enormous.\n\nThe spiteful thoughts startled Lamprophyre. \"It's nice to meet you finally,\" she said. \"Rokshan says you know a great deal about this performance tonight. I'd appreciate your insights.\" Nevrita must be as uncomfortable as Lamprophyre, to think so negatively about someone she'd only just met.\n\n\"Of course. Though Rokshan is more experienced than I.\" Separate them, how?\n\nLamprophyre's mouth nearly fell open in shock. She heard Rokshan laugh and say something about his experience, but her mind made no sense of the words. Separate her and Rokshan? Why the Stones would Nevrita want to do that? Then she had to choke back a laugh. Of course. Nevrita liked Rokshan, and she had the same fears Lamprophyre had\u2014that Rokshan wouldn't be able to make room for more than one close relationship. Lamprophyre relaxed. Nevrita would realize she wasn't a threat to Nevrita's relationship with Rokshan, and they would eventually become friends.\n\n\"\u2026so I asked them to perform some of the most famous roles,\" Rokshan was saying. \"I think it's best if you dragons experience the tangal without any explanation at first, so we'll hear a few performances. Then we'll explain some of the subtleties. Then the last ones, Nevrita and I will explain as they go. All right?\"\n\n\"I feel as if we're making history,\" Flint said, making his clutchmates chuckle, all except Lamprophyre. She'd caught the tail end of Nevrita's thought: boring, don't know why I agreed. She examined the woman closely. Nevrita was laughing at something Rokshan had said, and her hand rested lightly on his forearm in a caressing, intimate gesture. Lamprophyre eyed it warily. Why the woman's demeanor was so at odds with her thoughts, she didn't know, but she had a very bad feeling that it couldn't be explained away as Nevrita's jealousy.\n\nHumans, two male and one female, had taken seats on the stools on the platform when Lamprophyre turned around. They wore strange clothing, black trousers with wide legs, tunics with sleeves equally wide, and gauzy black cloths tied around their heads to cover their hair completely. She almost asked Rokshan what the clothing meant, but remembered Nevrita was sitting next to him and changed her mind. Nevrita might be superficially pleasant, but Lamprophyre was reluctant to draw the woman's attention to herself in any way.\n\nShe settled in to listen to the performance, telling herself to block out the intruding thoughts that made it impossible to appreciate the poetry. But her seat below the royal box put her directly in front of Nevrita, and her awareness of the woman was like an itch between her shoulder blades, impossible to reach. Her knowledge that she would ask Rokshan to scratch a real itch of that kind drove that awareness to new heights of discomfort. She would shut out Nevrita's thoughts for a hundred beats or so, until she couldn't bear not knowing what Nevrita was thinking any longer, and then, with a furtive feeling of guilt, she eavesdropped for another hundred beats before blocking her again like flinching from a blow. Sometimes the thoughts were good ones, like wish we were alone, but even the good thoughts were followed by ones that tarnished them: never going to make him mine if we're always surrounded by people. And some of them were terrible: stupid dragons, never appreciate art or blue dragon's a fool to think he'll choose her over me.\n\nBy the end of the first round of performances, Lamprophyre's head ached and her body felt as if she'd been poisoned, weak and sick and with acid flowing through her veins instead of blood. She turned to look at Nevrita, who was smiling as pleasantly as if she was genuinely enjoying herself. As she watched, Rokshan put his hand on Nevrita's elbow, guiding her forward, and Lamprophyre felt she might actually be ill. She swallowed, put on a cheerful smile, and tucked her misery away where she could indulge it later.\n\n\"What did you think, Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I think maybe you need to have human experience and knowledge to truly appreciate it,\" she managed, which was true; she'd enjoyed the poetry, what she'd heard of it, but with the consciousness that there were rivers of meaning flowing deep beneath the surface.\n\n\"Let's hope that's not true,\" Rokshan said. \"I chose these roles because they require very little knowledge of history to appreciate. The subtlety lies in understanding that the events narrated in the poems are shaped by the experience of the character doing the recitation. Did you notice that all three of them described the same event?\"\n\n\"I didn't, actually,\" Orthoclase said. \"But now that you say so, I can see how the first and the last, at least, were about two sides to the same situation.\"\n\n\"The middle one isn't as obvious,\" Dharan said, \"because the speaker, Mindai, was a servant who worked in the great estate that was overrun. She saw things the general and the ruler didn't.\"\n\n\"I understand now,\" Lamprophyre said, then shut her mouth, unable to continue because she'd heard Nevrita think much handsomer than Rokshan, too bad he's not the prince. Her heart ached with her secret knowledge.\n\nNevrita was holding forth on some stupid detail of the performance, and Rokshan was listening to her with a little smile on his lips like he was very pleased not just with what she said, but with his closeness to her as well. Lamprophyre once more wanted to be sick. This wasn't something she could conceal from Rokshan. He had to be told what Nevrita was really like. But if Rokshan liked Nevrita, and he clearly did, he would be so upset to learn the truth. She could imagine how he would feel to learn that Nevrita only wanted him because he was royalty, that any prince would do.\n\nHeartsickness gave way to anger. How dare this woman hurt her friend? How dare she pretend to care about him for the sake of\u2014what? Becoming a princess? Gaining wealth? It didn't matter what Nevrita's actual motives were; she was a grasping opportunist, and Lamprophyre wished she dared denounce her right here and send her screaming out of the coliseum, pursued by dragons.\n\nThe rest of the performance passed Lamprophyre in a blur. By finally and resolutely blocking all thoughts, she managed to pay enough attention to the final recitation and Rokshan and Nevrita's commentary to make intelligent responses to the questions Rokshan posed. When the last recitation was over, and the discussion had died down, Lamprophyre said, \"I should be going. I had an early morning, and I'm almost falling asleep now.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Rokshan said. He sounded so concerned Lamprophyre for the first time ever wished she were a human, to break down in a sobbing fit. She'd seen humans weep for sadness or frustration, and it seemed to bring them comfort. But dragons couldn't cry, so she smiled, said goodbye to Nevrita without listening to hear whatever spiteful thoughts she might be entertaining, and flew straight to the embassy without looking around at Tanajital by night, normally a sight that pleased her.\n\nDepik had left the lanterns by the doorway burning, and Lamprophyre extinguished them, careful not to break the delicate glass. Then she settled down on the nice earth floor of her embassy, curled her tail around her flank, rested her head on her folded arms, and closed her eyes tight to invite sleep to come quickly. But her mind persisted in running through Nevrita's horrible thoughts, over and over again until Lamprophyre wished she were mentally deaf like the dragon Massicot, unable to hear thoughts. But then Rokshan would have no way of knowing what Nevrita was really like. Without that knowledge, he might even marry her, and what a nightmare that would be.\n\nLamprophyre sighed, blowing out a cloud of smoke, then intentionally breathed out more of it until the ceiling of the embassy was comfortably foggy. As horrible as her knowledge was, she could endure it if it meant helping Rokshan. She clung to that thought until she eventually fell asleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Lamprophyre woke with a headache and a horrible taste in her mouth that wasn't cleared by the deliciously greasy sheep Depik prepared for her. After breakfast, she retreated into the embassy. She knew the building was called a hall, but today it suited her to think of it as a cave, comforting and dark and isolated from humans.\n\nNow that she'd slept, she found herself more horrified by Nevrita than she had been the night before. No dragon would ever behave that way. Of course, that was because dragons were from birth accustomed to their surface thoughts being perceived by others, and they learned to make their thoughts match their demeanors. But it was also because the idea of entrapping someone into a pair-bond as Nevrita clearly intended to do to Rokshan was so alien as to be incomprehensible. Any dragon who managed to fool another about her affection for him would have the deception revealed the first time they were sexually intimate. Lamprophyre's thoughts the previous night about wishing to be human vanished. She wouldn't be human if it were a choice between that and a grisly death.\n\nShe picked over her books, but didn't feel like reading any of them. She was in the process of copying out dragon poetry, but that required Dharan to write everything down, since there were few papers big enough for her to write on. She settled down to lie full-length on the floor and flexed her wings. Maybe she should go flying. That always cleared her head. If she were careful, she could avoid her clutchmates and go for a nice solitary flight.\n\nShe heard footsteps and suppressed a groan. Rokshan. How to tell him the terrible news? She had a feeling there was no good way to do that.\n\n\"Are you still feeling poorly? You looked a little wan last night,\" Rokshan said. He dropped to the ground beside her head and crossed his legs under him. \"It went really well, don't you think? Nevrita couldn't stop talking about how much she liked you. I hope you liked her. I never realized how much I enjoyed talking about paraveti tangal until I met someone who shares my appreciation for the art. And Mother seemed to like her too, though Mother is so reserved it's hard to tell.\" He rested his elbows on his knees and propped his chin on his hands in the pose Lamprophyre thought of as Contemplative Monkey. \"I was wondering, do you think you might be willing to fly with Nevrita? I know it's a very personal thing, but I want the two of you to be friends.\"\n\nIt was too much. \"Rokshan, I have to tell you something,\" she said, \"and you're not going to like it.\"\n\nRokshan's smile vanished. \"You didn't like Nevrita.\"\n\n\"It's not that.\" She knew her expression was unconvincing.\n\n\"Lamprophyre, she's a good person, and I know if you give her a chance, you'll like her. This is important to me, can't you see that?\" Rokshan scooted closer. \"You know this doesn't affect our friendship, if I have a close relationship with someone else.\"\n\nLamprophyre couldn't keep in a laugh. It sounded shrill and false, as if she'd only ever heard about laughter from other people. \"You know, until last night that was my biggest worry,\" she said. \"I'll admit I was a little jealous of Nevrita before I met her. But now\u2026 Rokshan, you know I care about you, right? And I would never do anything to hurt you without a reason?\"\n\nRokshan's face looked like a wooden mask. \"And you think you have a reason?\" he said, sounding formal and distant and making her heart hurt worse.\n\nLamprophyre swallowed. \"I listened to her thoughts. Nevrita's thoughts. I'm glad I did and I wish I hadn't at the same time. Rokshan, she's not who she seems to be. She's cruel and sarcastic and\u2014\"\n\n\"You listened to her thoughts? How dare you intrude on her privacy!\"\n\n\"I do it all the time and you never complain!\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. \"Rokshan, she doesn't like me at all. She sees me as an impediment to your relationship with her and was thinking about how hard it would be to separate us. She thinks dragons are stupid because we don't understand your art. And she was bored at even being there. She wondered why she'd agreed to it.\"\n\nRokshan was so still he might have been carved of brown agate. Lamprophyre wished he would do something, say something, even if it was yelling at her. \"That's not the worst,\" she went on, feeling her voice shake. \"She thought how Dharan is handsomer than you, and how she wished\u2026wished he was a prince. Rokshan, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. But I couldn't not tell you.\"\n\nRokshan blinked. He worked his jaw a couple of times. Then he stood. \"Forgive me for not thanking you,\" he said. His voice was as cold as any winter cavern, and as quiet as if he were on the other side of the courtyard instead of standing next to her.\n\n\"At least\u2026at least you're not pair-bonded. Married,\" Lamprophyre said, and instantly regretted her stupid words when he turned the bleakest, darkest look she'd ever seen on her.\n\n\"You couldn't have kept this to yourself,\" he continued in that still, cold, dead voice. \"Were you that jealous? Jealous enough to want to rip my heart out?\"\n\n\"What? Rokshan, no!\"\n\n\"I might have guessed your ability would end up causing me misery. I'd rather have gone on ignorant. So maybe I can thank you, after all.\" Rokshan turned his head to look out at the distant street, already working toward a noontime heat. \"Thank you, Lamprophyre, for ruining my life. Thank you for intruding where you weren't wanted. And thank you so much for not keeping your enormous mouth shut.\" He'd started walking before the last words fell from his lips, treading across the courtyard with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched as if she'd thrown a punch at him instead of her terrible words.\n\nLamprophyre watched him until he was swallowed up by the crowds thronging the street. Her head ached more than before, and the tension through her shoulders burned. She laid her head down and covered herself with her wings. She knew Rokshan well enough to know when he was speaking out of pain, and she knew he didn't mean any of what he'd said to her. His words still felt like icy spears aimed at her heart, miraculously capable of piercing dragon hide and freezing her solid.\n\nShe lay like that for several hundred beats until she heard approaching footsteps. Not Rokshan, whose tread she would know anywhere. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Maybe whoever it was would be afraid of disturbing a dragon at her rest. Everyone knew dragons were dangerous. They just didn't know they were only a danger to their best friends.\n\n\"Lamprophyre?\" Dharan said. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\nShe sighed and raised her head. Dharan wouldn't be balked by something so simple as sleep, and he was one of only three humans in Tanajital who knew she could hear thoughts. \"Something terrible,\" she said. \"I listened to Nevrita's thoughts.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Dharan said. \"Then you know she was only interested in Rokshan for his title.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"You knew?\" she exclaimed. \"Why didn't you tell him?\"\n\n\"I only met her last night. I came on purpose to meet her. Or did you think Anchala had grown on me?\" Dharan settled himself on the ground next to her. \"I wasn't sure that's what was going on. I absolutely wasn't going to suggest the possibility to Rokshan unless I was sure. But I can only think of one way in which Nevrita's thoughts could be considered terrible.\"\n\n\"He hates me. I told him what I heard, and he said\u2014oh, it doesn't matter. He was hurt, and he lashed out. But I don't think he'll ever forgive me for being the one to tell him.\"\n\n\"He will. But he needs time to get past feeling like a fool. That's not an easy feeling.\" Dharan sighed. \"Damn Nevrita. I wish women would stop thinking Rokshan is an easy target, just because he's a prince.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Why would that make him a target?\"\n\nDharan sighed again. \"Most nobles marry for political consideration. Love doesn't come into the picture. So there's a certain kind of woman\u2014man, too, to hear Anchala tell it\u2014who believes a prince is a prize to be won instead of a human being with needs and desires like everyone else. They figure love is irrelevant if it means they can be a princess. And Rokshan\u2014\" He shook his head. \"Rokshan may be the best man I've ever known. He's generous, smart, compassionate, and skilled at making other people into the best versions of themselves. But he's also wary of any woman who expresses an interest in him. That he let Nevrita get close\u2014I don't know what he was thinking. This is going to wound him deeply.\"\n\n\"Is he not handsome? Because Nevrita thought you were more handsome than he.\"\n\nDharan scowled. \"You didn't tell him that, did you?\"\n\nLamprophyre flinched.\n\n\"You did. Well, nothing we can do about that now. Yes, he's handsome, though I'm sure whatever scars he bears have convinced him that's not true. But it doesn't matter. Between this and the last time, I'd be surprised if he's willing to take a chance on love ever again.\"\n\n\"There was a last time? Another Nevrita?\"\n\n\"Worse.\" Dharan let out a short, curt laugh that had no humor in it. \"Never bring this up with him, understand? We don't talk about it. Ever.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling a little frightened at his vehemence.\n\n\"About five years ago, Rokshan was involved with a woman who told him she was carrying his child. He intended to marry her, but I was suspicious. The whole situation was too easy. So I investigated, and discovered that the child had been fathered by another man, someone she still had a relationship with. She wanted a royal pedigree for the brat.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt sick again. Knowing that humans could have sex without being married was hard enough to comprehend. That anyone would do something so monstrous as lie about the father of her child made her head spin. \"But he's a prince. Could she get away with that?\"\n\n\"She was destined for execution as soon as the baby was born. Rokshan intervened and sent her into exile without his father knowing. And then he left Tanajital for three months. I have no idea where he went. When he came back, he asked to join the Army and was his old self\u2014so long as nobody brought up that fiasco.\"\n\n\"He said he wasn't going to have sex again until he was married,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Yes. I can hardly blame him. Wait\u2014he told you that?\"\n\n\"He was explaining about prostitutes and how it's bad to accuse a man of having sex with one.\"\n\nDharan cleared his throat. \"You ask the most interesting questions, Lamprophyre. Anyway. This thing with Nevrita will devastate him. He'll need friends when he finally overcomes his instinct to flee.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart ached more fiercely. \"He doesn't want to be my friend.\"\n\n\"He's upset because you revealed the truth. He won't stay angry with you, if only because he's too smart not to realize who actually deserves his anger. In fact, I imagine right now he's looking for a reason to end the relationship without revealing that a dragon read Nevrita's mind. I know, it's not reading.\"\n\n\"He can't just stop speaking to her?\"\n\n\"He introduced her to his mother last night. He's going to need a plausible excuse for why he would do that and then break things off.\" Dharan rose. \"I'll go look for him. Maybe I can help with that. And, Lamprophyre?\" Dharan put a hand on her shoulder. \"Thank you. I know this seems like disaster now, but you saved him a lifetime of misery. Remember that.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched Dharan cross the courtyard as she had Rokshan and was struck by the difference in their gaits, one dejected and angry, the other confident. It made her suddenly furious with Nevrita, that the woman could so callously use Rokshan, treat him as a prize. She rushed from the embassy and took to the skies. She would find Nevrita and scare her senseless, teach her why it was a mistake to hurt the people Lamprophyre loved.\n\nAlmost immediately, she remembered she had no idea where Nevrita lived or where she might go during the day. But flying soothed her, and she decided to follow the river downstream a ways, letting her mind wander far from her troubles. She felt a pang at not having Rokshan perched behind her shoulders, but it faded as she swept across the sky, high enough that the air was cool and the sun's warmth was comforting rather than a brutal weapon.\n\nWhen it was nearly noon, she turned around and flew back toward Tanajital, this time swooping low enough to startle a herd of deer. She almost snatched one up, just for fun, but she wasn't hungry and it would be a waste of good meat.\n\nAs she approached the city, she saw orange and red and midnight blue forms making slow loops and occasionally hovering on its far side. Hopefully her clutchmates wouldn't want to converse or race or anything else social, because she still felt a little downcast. But Bromargyrite, Porphyry, and Flint ignored her, and she returned to her embassy without encountering anyone.\n\nShe entered the coolness of the hall and stopped with her tail and hindquarters still outside. \"Hello,\" she said to Rokshan, and couldn't think of anything else to say.\n\nRokshan was sitting next to the slate, flipping the pages of a book in a way that said he wasn't seeing them. \"I'm sorry to intrude,\" he said.\n\n\"You're never an intrusion.\"\n\nRokshan shut the book and tilted his head back, closing his eyes. \"I'm sorry,\" he said, his voice as quiet as it had been that morning. \"I didn't mean any of that\u2014but that's not the point, is it? I was hurt, and I wanted to hurt you so I wouldn't feel alone in my pain. I'm sorry I did that to you.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Lamprophyre came fully into the embassy and sat. \"I don't blame you.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I blame myself enough for both of us.\" He ran his fingers through his hair and opened his eyes. \"I just felt so stupid. I swore I'd never get caught like that again, but Nevrita\u2014she was perfect. And maybe that should have been the clue. Nobody's that perfect unless they're trying to be.\"\n\n\"She was very good. If I hadn't listened to her thoughts\u2014I'm sorry I did that.\"\n\n\"I'm not. Forget my self-righteous outburst earlier. If you hadn't found out what she truly is, I might have\u2026\" His voice trailed off. \"I seem to recall that you offered to do exactly that months ago\u2014listen to the thoughts of any young woman I might be interested in. I should have remembered that sooner, brought her to meet you after the second time we met, and everything would have been simple.\"\n\n\"Dharan said you have to come up with a good, public reason for not seeing her anymore.\"\n\n\"Was Dharan here?\" Rokshan laughed the same short, curt laugh Dharan had. \"He's probably afraid I'll disappear again. Yes, I've made enough of the 'relationship' with Nevrita that I have to get out of it gracefully and publicly. Much as I wish I could just stop seeing her.\"\n\n\"I'll help if you need me.\"\n\nThis time, his laugh was unforced. \"You're still my friend?\"\n\n\"Of course. You'll have to do worse than say horrible things to me to drive me away.\"\n\n\"God's breath, Lamprophyre, I hope we never find out what it would take to drive you away.\" He got heavily to his feet. \"I'll figure something out, or Dharan will. Don't worry about it.\"\n\n\"Do you want to go flying? Or have you eaten yet?\"\n\n\"I'm not hungry. And flying would be a release. Thanks.\"\n\nBromargyrite, Porphyry, and Flint were gone when Lamprophyre and Rokshan rose above the towers of Tanajital. Feeling relieved because she still didn't feel like conversation with anyone, even Rokshan, she flew south and then circled the great city wall around to the north. The fields below were lush with greenery that made her wish she knew the names of the plants, though none of them were edible by dragons. The afternoon rains were on their way, and Lamprophyre cast an expert eye on the clouds; the storm would arrive by midafternoon. She and Rokshan had time for a leisurely flight.\n\nWhen she reached the northernmost edge of the city, she was surprised to see her clutchmates sitting on the ground that lay between the wall and the first of the fields. Bromargyrite was lying flat on his stomach with his head tucked low near his shoulder. Porphyry and Flint sat upright, and the sound of a conversation drifted to Lamprophyre's ears. More disturbing were their thoughts, which were all three sullen and angry. Flint looked up when Lamprophyre flew past overhead, but didn't wave. Concerned, Lamprophyre circled back around and landed a dragonlength from the three.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked. She crouched to let Rokshan climb down. \"You're all disturbed by something.\"\n\n\"We've been discussing what to do,\" Flint said. Porphyry grunted and let out a sharp, acid-scented stream of air from both nostrils. The smell dissipated quickly in the breeze that blew intermittently from the direction of the river. Bromargyrite had his eyes closed and appeared to be asleep, but Lamprophyre could hear how angry he was. For Bromargyrite, the most easygoing dragon in the flight, to become that angry, something must be very wrong. She didn't want to eavesdrop past the general drifting surface emotions dragons didn't care about concealing, but she'd never been so tempted to do so before.\n\n\"Do about what?\" she asked.\n\nFlint glanced at Bromargyrite as if waiting for him to speak. Bromargyrite put an arm over his face. \"The ecclesiasts,\" he said. \"Stones take them. Two of them accosted me while I was in my warehouse.\"\n\n\"Accosted you?\"\n\n\"Challenged him verbally,\" Flint said, anger touching his words. \"Called him a heretic and a godless animal, among other things. Insisted that he worship this stupid Katayan person\u2014sorry, Rokshan, I mean no offense.\"\n\n\"I understand you,\" Rokshan said. \"Did they threaten violence?\"\n\n\"Against a dragon?\" Flint laughed. \"They're stupid, but they're not that stupid.\"\n\n\"I think they were trying to goad me into attacking them,\" Bromargyrite said, his voice muffled by his arm. \"I nearly did. They were drawing all sorts of attention, though, and I knew it would go worse for me if I gave in to my instincts. So once I recovered from the surprise of the attack, I flew away.\" He moved his arm so he could look at Lamprophyre. \"Why would anyone do that? I know the ecclesiasts are upset that we don't worship their god, but this felt like they cared more about hurting me than convincing me they were right. I don't understand it.\"\n\n\"I think I do,\" Rokshan said. \"They want to drive you all out of Tanajital. Out of Gonjiri, if they can manage it.\"\n\n\"How is attacking Bromargyrite going to accomplish that?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nRokshan paced the ground between Lamprophyre and Flint. \"You dragons have proved you're not violent,\" he said, \"and the ecclesiasts know your response to being attacked is to remove yourselves from the situation. Like Bromargyrite did. They probably also know the odds of converting you to the worship of Katayan are vanishingly small. But you're still a threat to their power. So they're going to keep attacking until you're so uncomfortable you leave the city.\" He stopped pacing and looked up at Lamprophyre with his hands on his hips. \"No more dragons, no more challenge to their authority, no more dealing with people doubting their teachings.\"\n\n\"But we don't want to leave,\" Porphyry said. \"Humans are interesting, the ones that aren't calling us names, anyway. And I'm still learning to read.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to leave, either, and I'm sure my father feels the same,\" Rokshan said. \"Your presence here supports the alliance he needs to keep Fanishkor from attacking. But he has very little power over the ecclesiasts. If all they do is call names and insult you, well, there's no law against that. But there has to be something we can do to counter them.\"\n\n\"Something,\" Flint said irritably. \"It had better be something effective, because I don't know how forbearing I can be if this goes on much longer.\"\n\n\"We can't attack humans, even the ecclesiasts,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I know.\" Flint sighed, and more acid-tinged air drifted toward Lamprophyre. \"But we can fight back. Actively challenge their authority. We can show them we aren't helpless targets.\"\n\n\"That would just make things worse,\" Rokshan said. \"They'd feel even more justified in trying to get rid of you. But being humble and courteous won't work either, not if the ecclesiasts are determined to anger you.\" He rubbed a hand over his face. \"I'm sorry. It's been a bad day and I'm not thinking clearly.\"\n\n\"Bad day?\" Flint asked.\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"It's not important. What matters is deciding what to do next. For now, you need to stay away from the ecclesiasts. I can have a detachment of soldiers guard the streets surrounding the warehouses who will turn everyone away, including the ecclesiasts, and that will contain the problem for now. Let me and Lamprophyre work on a more long-term solution. I think diplomacy is the key.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't feel like being diplomatic with anyone who called her friend an animal, but she nodded agreement. \"Maybe we can figure out something else the ecclesiasts want,\" she said. \"Some compromise. Much as I feel we shouldn't have to.\"\n\n\"Can you three wait outside the city until sunset?\" Rokshan asked. \"That will give me time to post guards. I'm sorry to have to ask that of you.\"\n\n\"We'll go for a swim,\" Bromargyrite said. \"I want to wash away the nasty feeling those ecclesiasts gave me. I hate being angry.\"\n\n\"Those ecclesiasts were lucky in their choice of targets,\" Flint said. \"Any of the rest of us might have lashed out. The Gentle Giant is more temperate.\"\n\nBromargyrite's orange scales darkened to red as he blushed. Lamprophyre hadn't heard anyone call him that in over twenty years, but his size\u2014he was as big as Lamprophyre, very big for a male\u2014and his placid temperament had earned him the nickname when he was very young. Probably his clumsiness was related to his size. She smiled fondly at him. \"You'd never hurt anyone, however provoked you were.\"\n\n\"Let's hope that stays true,\" Bromargyrite said gruffly, but he smiled, too.\n\nThe three males flew off south and west toward the river while Lamprophyre and Rokshan returned to the embassy. \"I think I could eat,\" Rokshan said as he dismounted in the courtyard. \"And then we can discuss the problem further.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She headed for the cool darkness of the hall, then stopped, startled, because someone was already within. \"Coquina?\" she said. She couldn't think of any way to ask what the dragon was doing there without making it an accusation. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nCoquina emerged from the hall, and Lamprophyre's surprise turned to alarm. She'd never seen Coquina look so distraught. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated almost to circles, her breathing was heavy, and she moved restlessly, as if she weren't in control of her limbs. \"Lamprophyre,\" she said, \"I'm afraid I've killed someone.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "\"Stones,\" Lamprophyre swore, and took Coquina by the shoulders and hustled her back inside the embassy. The hall was big enough to comfortably fit no more than two dragons, but right now Lamprophyre felt crowded, as if Coquina were twice her size and had her wings spread wide instead of folded forlornly along her sides. \"What happened? Who was it? A human, yes?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Coquina said. \"I mean, yes, humans, but I don't know if they're dead\u2014\"\n\n\"They? More than one? Coquina, what happened?\"\n\n\"Take a breath, both of you,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre hadn't noticed him follow her inside. \"Coquina, tell us from the beginning.\"\n\nCoquina nodded. \"It was about a thousand beats ago. I was at the coliseum.\" Her voice was so subdued it was hard to believe this was the same brash dragon who'd made Lamprophyre's life a misery for years. \"There's a game some humans and I invented, where they throw things in the air and I burn them before they touch the ground. People come to watch. But today, three of those ecclesiasts in their carrying cages\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre groaned and closed her eyes. Rokshan said a few of the human swear words he refused to teach her the meaning of. \"They harassed you,\" he said in a flat, angry voice.\n\n\"How did you know?\" Coquina asked. \"Yes. They came right onto the floor in the middle of the game. That's so dangerous, and I nearly set the royal box on fire by accident. I swear it was an accident. They startled me. And then they started shouting things about me. Horrible, stupid insults. But they were so stupid I just laughed.\" She laughed now, a brittle, almost hysterical sound. \"That made them so angry. And my friends\u2014the players\u2014they were laughing too, and they yelled insults back at the ecclesiasts. Then the ecclesiasts told the humans who carry them to attack my friends. And it wasn't funny anymore.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath and made a visible effort to control her trembling. A shadow passed over her face, and Lamprophyre glanced up, but saw only the storm clouds gathering in preparation for the afternoon rains.\n\n\"Those human males who carry the cages are much bigger than my friends, and have those strange bulging muscles,\" Coquina continued. \"And most of my friends are females and not very strong. Fast, but not strong.\" She breathed in deeply again, this time blowing out a puff of smoke. \"I couldn't let them hurt my friends. So I got between the two groups and spread my wings so I'd look bigger and hopefully scarier. But I moved too fast, and I knocked over one of my friends, and when I turned to help her up, I swung my tail and hit two of the large males. I really didn't mean to, I swear, Lamprophyre. But they fell, and they didn't get up. Then the ecclesiasts were shouting again, and my friends were pressing me closely, and the next time I moved, it was one of my friends I hit.\"\n\nCoquina's trembling had all but stopped, but her eyes were still dilated and her gaze darted everywhere but at Lamprophyre. \"I tried to help her up, and the ecclesiasts' servants started hitting me. It didn't hurt, obviously, but between that and the shouting and the fact that I couldn't turn anywhere without hurting a human, I panicked. I backed away carefully, and once I was free of everyone except the males hitting me, I flew away. And then I came here.\" Another puff of smoke jetted from her nostrils. \"I don't know what to do. If I killed them\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's worry about one thing at a time,\" Rokshan said. \"You did the right thing in coming here. This embassy is legally dragon territory, and you can claim asylum if you need to.\"\n\nCoquina looked at Lamprophyre in puzzlement. \"He means Gonjirian soldiers can't take you away to prison, or\u2014yes, I know, there's no way they can confine a dragon, but that's the idea. That you're safe from retaliation here.\"\n\nCoquina nodded. \"But I'm worried about Melika,\" she said. \"The female I knocked over. If I killed her, I don't know if I can live with that.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre and I will find out what happened to all of them,\" Rokshan said. \"And we'll bring word.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Coquina\u2014or, rather, it will be all right,\" Lamprophyre said. Consoling Coquina struck her as the most ludicrous thing she had done all day\u2014weren't they enemies? She looked into Coquina's fear-stricken face and remembered the day, years and years ago, when Coquina had brushed past her rather than greeting her and had gone on to ignore her invitations to play, sighing dramatically and saying she'd outgrown childish things. If they were enemies, it was past time they put that enmity behind them. \"The ecclesiasts are trying to force dragons out of Tanajital. They attacked Bromargyrite today, too. This is entirely their fault.\"\n\n\"Morally, maybe,\" Coquina said. \"I'm not sure human law would agree. I'm the one who did the damage.\"\n\n\"You let us deal with that.\" Lamprophyre gripped her shoulder briefly. \"We'll be back soon. Stay here, don't let anyone see you, and try to calm down. If Dharan shows up, tell him what happened and ask him to wait for us to return. He might have a solution none of us have thought of.\"\n\nCoquina nodded and settled herself on the floor of the hall. Lamprophyre followed Rokshan into the courtyard and crouched for him to climb up. \"Where do we go first?\" she said.\n\n\"Over a thousand beats. That's nearly an hour ago,\" Rokshan said. \"Let's try the coliseum anyway. There might still be people there who saw what happened and know where the victims were taken.\"\n\nThe coliseum was empty when they arrived. Rokshan swore again. \"That makes it harder,\" he said. \"We might have to go to the Archprelate's palace and demand to see the ecclesiasts responsible. I doubt very much they were acting on their own initiative.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Lamprophyre said, listening to the ebb and flow of human thoughts. \"I mean it might not be that hard.\" She descended on the western side of the coliseum to land on the street outside, very slowly to give the humans time to move out of her way. The last thing they needed was more human injuries.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" she said to the crowd, which had gone very still. \"There was an accident here about an hour ago involving some ecclesiasts and the big grass-green dragon. Can anyone tell me what happened?\"\n\nNo one moved. No one spoke. \"Please,\" Lamprophyre said. She could still hear their drifting thoughts, and many of them were about Coquina's accident. \"This is important. My friend Coquina is very worried that she hurt humans, and we need to know what happened here.\"\n\n\"She should've been more careful, big brute like that,\" someone called out from the center of the crowd. People immediately moved to give the speaker space, as if they were afraid of being too near her. Calling Coquina a brute was a bad choice of words that might justifiably provoke her fellow dragon, though of course Lamprophyre wasn't going to take offense and retaliate.\n\n\"I understand she was pressed closely on all sides,\" Lamprophyre replied politely. \"Aren't humans sometimes injured by accident in large crowds like this? I promise Coquina was trying to be careful, and this was a terrible accident. Did you see what started the conflict?\"\n\nThe woman glared at Lamprophyre, but said nothing. Lamprophyre, listening to the woman's thoughts, said, \"So you didn't see it. Wasn't there anyone here who did?\"\n\n\"I did,\" a man said. Once more the crowd shifted so he stood alone. He was tall for a human and built like the swaying willows that grew by the riverbank. \"I go to all the dragon games. Never seen an ecclesiast take an interest until today, and then three of them show up.\"\n\nRelief flooded through Lamprophyre. \"Three? In litters?\"\n\n\"Yes, but with the drapes tied back. They came right onto the floor in the middle of the game, which is damn dangerous if you ask me. All that fire flying around. But they came in shouting for the game to stop, which made the audience angry.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Rokshan asked.\n\nLamprophyre thought the answer was obvious, but to her surprise the man ducked his head furtively. \"We wager on the game,\" he said, \"begging your pardon, your highness.\"\n\n\"I'll pretend I didn't hear that,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre hadn't thought there was anything wrong with wagering, given how humans seemed compelled to wager on almost anything, but clearly there was something shameful or possibly illegal about it. \"So the game was interrupted. I take it the players all stopped what they were doing?\"\n\nThe willowy man nodded. \"The ecclesiasts verbally attacked Coquina right away,\" he said. \"Told her she ought to worship Katayan, and then yelled insults and demands when she refused. Look. It's not my place to say, but I think Katayan is pleased that there are dragons in the world again, and I don't know why dragons don't worship him. But you can't force anyone to believe a certain way, and Jiwanyil knows if you did, that belief wouldn't be worth anything.\"\n\n\"That's very wise,\" Rokshan said, nodding. \"So the ecclesiasts were yelling and insulting Coquina?\"\n\n\"She laughed at them,\" the man said with a smile. \"Probably not the best idea, since nobody likes being laughed at, but it got the other players laughing, and then the audience was laughing too because the ecclesiasts actually got out of their litters and were shaking their fists and acting like a bad performance of Falat.\"\n\n\"A paraveti tangal role,\" Rokshan murmured to Lamprophyre. \"And that angered the ecclesiasts more.\"\n\n\"Right.\" The smile fell away from the man's face. \"I'm not right sure what happened next. The ecclesiasts ordered their bearers to arrest the players\u2014I don't think ecclesiasts have that power\u2014\"\n\n\"They don't. Go on.\"\n\n\"Anyway, the bearers attacked, Coquina got in the middle of the fight to protect the players, and next I knew there were bodies on the ground and the watchers in the lowest tier were climbing over the wall to join the fight. Coquina flew away somewhere in the middle of that, but the fight kept going until the city guard broke it up. They arrested the bearers and anyone else they could prove had been in the fight, and the bodies were taken away. Don't know where.\"\n\n\"Were they still alive?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nThe man shrugged. \"Don't know. I think so. They were more careful with them than if they'd been corpses.\"\n\nThat relieved Lamprophyre's mind. \"What happened to the ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"They left on foot.\" The man laughed. \"Guess I shouldn't be amused by that, but I've never seen an ecclesiast walk anywhere. It made them seem more like ordinary people, and that's\u2026I don't know. Almost like seeing Jiwanyil himself treading the streets.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Rokshan said. \"Thank you, sirrah. We hope to have this misunderstanding cleared up shortly, and for the games to resume so you can, of course, not wager on them.\" He kept a perfectly straight face as he said this, but the man chuckled and nodded as if Rokshan had said something else. \"Anyone who witnessed the events is invited to come to the dragon embassy to have your story recorded. We and Coquina appreciate your testimony and your assistance in seeing justice done.\"\n\nHe climbed back up to his seat, and Lamprophyre, having checked carefully for humans pressing too near, leaped into the sky. \"Where now? The Archprelate's palace, to find those ecclesiasts?\" she asked when they were high enough not to be overheard.\n\n\"They'll be protected there, almost as well as Coquina will be at the embassy,\" Rokshan replied. \"The next step is to find where they took the injured and learn if any of them survived. There are centers for healing throughout the city, and I'm guessing our three victims were taken to the nearest one.\"\n\n\"Good idea. Where is it?\"\n\n\"A few streets over from the coliseum. But you can't accompany me there. The streets are too narrow.\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled. Stupid human city with no regard for the needs of large creatures. \"So what do I do?\"\n\n\"Go to the central guard post and find out who was responsible for arresting the brawlers. We'll need their testimony as well.\"\n\n\"I don't understand why we're asking all these people to tell the story. Don't we just need Coquina and the ecclesiasts, and maybe Coquina's human companions?\"\n\n\"Because those ecclesiasts will try to spin the story their way, and we need as many witnesses as possible to counter them. An ecclesiast's testimony carries more weight than it should, since people assume as Jiwanyil's voices, they're honest and infallible.\"\n\n\"You mean they might lie.\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" Rokshan leaned forward along her right side. \"Why, don't dragons have problems with two dragons giving different versions of the same event?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. Below, Tanajital was a dull brown under the storm clouds that blocked most of the sun's rays, and she cast no shadow on the buildings. \"Dragons don't lie. Hearing thoughts means lying is pointless. If two dragons understand a situation differently, they work together to understand why. Gaining that understanding is considered a gift, and it brings the dragons closer. We only know about lying from stories of humans.\"\n\n\"That's disheartening, that lying is something we might be known for, but not unjustified.\" Rokshan pointed. \"The center of healing is down there. If you let me off near the park, I can walk the rest of the way. You know where the guard headquarters is?\"\n\n\"On the west side, in that big open plaza, yes.\"\n\nShe descended to land outside the park that circled the palace. From above, it looked like a green moat dividing the palace from the rest of Tanajital. At ground level, it smelled richly of leaves and thick emerald grass, and trees grew thickly enough that most of the palace was invisible. All that showed were its golden roofs, angled or domed and giving off whiffs of tangy metal. It was still a few thousand beats before suppertime, but the smell roused Lamprophyre's hunger.\n\nRokshan hopped down without waiting for her to crouch. \"We'll meet back at the embassy before supper, all right? Remember, you want the witnesses of the guards who broke up the fight.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nRokshan saluted her with a wave and ran off northward. Lamprophyre beat the air with her wings until she was just above the trees, then headed west."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "She had never visited the guard headquarters, but its enormous stone construction, mountain-like in its peaked shape, was an obvious landmark from the air. Rokshan hadn't known why it was so big, or if it had been something other than guard headquarters once as Lamprophyre suspected. Her familiarity with the buildings and towers of Tanajital told her that most structures that size and height belonged either to wealthy individuals or to the government or royal family. She was still fuzzy on the difference between the last two.\n\nThe guard headquarters was shaped like a pyramid of stone, but perfectly regular, as if someone had cut square sections out of a mountain, each smaller than the last, and stacked them atop each other. The topmost level was a little more than two dragonlengths in each direction and made a perfect landing platform, but Lamprophyre had a feeling the city guard would take offense at her intruding on their territory. So instead, she landed on the plaza\u2014Dharan's word\u2014in front of the guard post.\n\nThe plaza was a great sweep of stone wide enough for all of Lamprophyre's clutch to sit close together, if they weren't concerned about trampling the plants that grew in stone boxes at regular intervals across it. It, too, was evidence to Lamprophyre that the headquarters hadn't always belonged to the guard, because it didn't strike her as necessary to their work. The plaza looked more like a place where street performers would gather, and that turned out to be true.\n\nToday, the musicians who performed with a variety of musical instruments Lamprophyre had no names for scattered as she descended, though at nearly midafternoon, the hottest part of the day even when a storm loomed, most humans were indoors. She felt sorry for the musicians and wondered if they made so little money from their efforts that they couldn't afford to go inside. Maybe some of them visited the embassy in the evenings for free food.\n\nShe looked around carefully to make sure there were no humans in her way, then crossed the plaza to the guard headquarters. To her surprise, there was no one guarding the doors, which were too small for her to enter. Though maybe it wasn't so surprising, because who would attack a building full of armed men?\n\nShe knocked politely on the doors and sat back. Nothing happened. She was about to knock again, more loudly this time, when the doors flew open and a dozen men wearing the sky-blue tunics and short tan pants of the city guard emerged at a run. They all held short, fat sticks above their heads in preparation to attack. When they saw her, they stumbled to a halt, some of them running into their companions and staggering from the impact. Wide-eyed, they spread out slowly, never taking their eyes from Lamprophyre. Their thoughts were a muddle of confusion and fear, and from a few of them Lamprophyre gathered her gentle knocking hadn't been so gentle, and they'd thought she was a battering ram. The image amused her, or would have if she hadn't still felt so tense.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" she said in her least thunderous voice. \"I seem to have startled you. I'm not attacking, I promise. I'm here to ask some questions about the, um, incident at the coliseum earlier today.\"\n\nNone of them lowered their sticks, but their thoughts became less fearful and more confused\u2014all but one man, who was thinking should have expected this, don't know what to say to a dragon. Lamprophyre focused on him. Unlike the others, he wore a bronze circle of metal too small for Lamprophyre to see in any detail attached to the left side of his blue tunic. \"Are you the leader?\" she asked. \"I'm sorry, I don't know much about the city guard except that you are a kind of soldier and that you report to one of General Sajan's commanders. And that you keep the peace.\"\n\nThe man stepped forward, finally lowering his stick. \"If you're here for revenge, you're in violation of Tanajital's laws,\" he said in a harsh voice that concealed fear. \"And you should tell the green dragon to give itself up for judgment, because it's in violation too.\"\n\n\"Her name is Coquina,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and she wasn't at fault. She has sanctuary in the dragon embassy while we sort this out.\"\n\n\"Protecting a criminal makes you guilty as well,\" the man said. \"We have laws, and you dragons have to follow them while you live here. Don't think you can get away with killing people.\"\n\nLamprophyre sucked in a breath. \"They're dead?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"Not sure. They were alive when they were taken to the healing center. But one of them was in a bad way.\"\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes and sent up a quick prayer to Mother Stone for patience. \"I'm not here for revenge, and we're not interested in breaking laws with impunity,\" she said. \"I just want to talk to the guards who broke up the riot. We need their testimony to prove that the ecclesiasts were as much at fault as Coquina and her friends, or more so. Though if the guards arrived after the fight started, they don't know what caused it.\"\n\n\"Not our business,\" the man said. \"We're responsible for keeping the peace.\" A tendril of doubt and the words knew something was up threaded through his thoughts.\n\n\"I know, and all I'm asking is for your men to tell the truth,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Those ecclesiasts baited Coquina, and when she tried to protect her friends from the men the ecclesiasts ordered to attack them, she accidentally hurt people.\"\n\n\"That wasn't part of the report.\"\n\n\"As I said, I'm sure your men didn't witness that. But they did arrest some of the bearers as well as the game players and probably the watchers who got involved in the fight. So they know the ecclesiasts had something to do with it.\"\n\n\"Those bearers were defending themselves!\" another man said. The guard captain, as Lamprophyre assumed he was, glared at the speaker. The man ignored his captain. \"That dragon is dangerous!\"\n\nLamprophyre felt sick. She hadn't considered that the guards might have misunderstood the situation. She could tell the man wasn't lying to protect the bearers, but if he was a religious man who believed the lies the ecclesiasts were spreading, his testimony would damn Coquina rather than exonerate her.\n\n\"Did you see Coquina\u2014the dragon\u2014attack anyone?\" she asked as calmly as she could manage.\n\nThe man swallowed hard, his fear at having Lamprophyre's attention making his thoughts incoherent. \"She was gone when we got there,\" he said.\n\n\"Then you didn't see what she did, and you shouldn't make accusations about something you didn't see,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Dragons believe in being honest, and that means not claiming witness of events they weren't present for. Are humans different?\"\n\n\"No, they are not,\" the guard captain growled, directing another glare at the man. \"And guards are meant to be impartial in their enforcement of the law. Turn the dragon over to us, and we'll see that she receives justice.\"\n\n\"Sirrah, you can't confine a dragon.\"\n\n\"If it's\u2014she's\u2014innocent, she won't try to escape.\"\n\n\"Even so, she has asked for sanctuary and I've granted it. I promise she won't leave Tanajital until this is straightened out. Will you accept my word?\"\n\nThe guard captain's scowl became truly ferocious. \"You don't trust us?\"\n\n\"Have you arrested the ecclesiasts who incited the riot?\" Lamprophyre asked, inspired.\n\n\"Arrest ecclesiasts? Are you mad?\" the guard captain exclaimed.\n\n\"Then you can't arrest Coquina either,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If you're so concerned about fairness and impartiality.\"\n\nThe guard captain let out a deep breath. \"Damn,\" he said, so quietly she almost couldn't hear him. The wind had picked up and was doing its best to carry their words away from the oncoming storm. \"All right,\" he finally said. \"She doesn't leave Tanajital.\" Doesn't matter, not like we can execute a dragon for murder.\n\n\"I promise she'll stay here,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Will you send the guards who controlled the riot to the dragon embassy to have their witnesses recorded?\" She privately hoped he wouldn't send the outspoken man, but even his word counted. Maybe not for the right side, but it counted.\n\n\"I will,\" the guard captain said. \"I don't like disorder in my city. Are there going to be more incidents like this one?\"\n\n\"That's up to the ecclesiasts,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling unspeakably grateful that Bromargyrite was as easygoing as he was. \"Dragons haven't incited any riots and will continue to be inoffensive and interested in coexisting peacefully with humans. You have my word on that.\"\n\nThe guard captain was thinking hard about ecclesiasts, and Lamprophyre heard so many of them in the streets these days, any more problems and I might have to kill my career arresting an ecclesiast. She hadn't realized there were more ecclesiasts about than usual, but then most of the streets of Tanajital were too narrow for her to walk, and she hadn't thought to watch for their litters as she flew overhead.\n\n\"I'm returning to the embassy now, and I'll watch for your men's arrival. Please tell them not to be afraid. We won't hurt them, and we won't be angry no matter what their witness is.\" Lamprophyre spread her wings. The copper membranes caught the wan light dimly, turning almost brown. She waited for the guards to retreat before flapping hard to lift herself into the sky, feeling as if she were fighting the leaden, wet air of the storm. With a few last beats of her wings, she glided toward the embassy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "With the guard captain's thoughts in mind, Lamprophyre flew slowly, examining the narrow streets for the conspicuous colored rectangles of the ecclesiasts' litters. She knew most of them had yellow curtains, and that the High Ecclesiasts like Khadar each had their own color. Almost immediately, she saw a yellow one, moving rather quickly in the direction of the Archprelate's palace. She suspected it was racing the storm. These afternoon storms poured rain down hard and fast enough that flying was impossible, and she imagined the downpour would saturate the curtains and get the ecclesiast inside very wet. It was a cheering thought.\n\nShe saw no other litters, but the streets were almost empty of ordinary traffic, so if there were more ecclesiasts about than normal, she would have to try searching for them another time. Making another slow, wide turn, she descended to the embassy courtyard and furled her wings just as the first heavy drops fell.\n\nShe hurried inside and nearly bumped into Coquina, who was drawing pictures on one of Lamprophyre's slates. \"Oh! Sorry.\"\n\n\"No, I was in the way.\" Coquina dropped the chalk and shifted to the back of the embassy. \"Did you find out about Melika?\"\n\n\"We think she was taken to a place where they have adepts who heal people. It's too narrow for a dragon to fit, so Rokshan will inquire. I guess he's not back yet.\"\n\n\"No, and Dharan hasn't come either. I've just been sitting here wishing I could wind back time and make different choices.\" Coquina settled low on the ground, looking so dejected Lamprophyre's heart went out to her.\n\n\"We've spoken to people who witnessed the event, and they're going to speak\u2014maybe not in your defense, precisely, but they'll tell the truth, and that should be enough.\"\n\n\"Enough for what?\" Coquina let out a puff of smoke. \"I don't know anything about how humans deal with criminals. And don't they think ecclesiasts are above the law?\"\n\nLamprophyre remembered the guard captain's shock when she'd suggested he arrest the ecclesiasts who'd started the riot. \"I'm sure King Ekanath doesn't think so, and we can take this to him if we have to.\"\n\nOutside, the rain hammered down on the courtyard and struck the roof with a hissing, rattling sound as if someone were pouring gravel over the steeply slanted roof tiles. Lamprophyre half-turned away from Coquina to watch the water sheeting down from the sky. \"But the ecclesiasts were at fault, and we'll prove that,\" she added, speaking loudly to be heard over the clatter.\n\nCoquina said nothing. Lamprophyre settled her head on her arms and breathed in the smell of water mixing with the hard earth of the courtyard. It reminded her of the river near her mountain home that swelled its banks in spring and carried with the rapid, icy flow a rush of sediment that gave the water a loamy, rich scent. It was impossible to drink, of course, coating the tongue with a fur of soil particles, but it smelled delicious, like living stone.\n\n\"Why did we stop being friends?\" Coquina said.\n\nLamprophyre jerked upright in surprise. Coquina was tracing circles on the packed earth of the floor and wasn't looking at her. \"What do you mean?\" she asked, stupidly.\n\n\"We were such good friends as dragonets, and then everything changed. But now I can't remember what happened. Only that we've been at odds for years.\"\n\n\"Because you treated me like an inferior, and mocked me, and never let me forget it when you beat me at something,\" Lamprophyre replied, hot anger replacing her stunned amazement.\n\n\"That, I remember,\" Coquina said, still not looking up. \"But you stopped wanting to do things with me. You didn't want to give up childish games, and all I wanted was for us to start acting like adults. Together. We were the only females in the clutch, Lamprophyre, it's not like I had anyone else my age to share things with. And you weren't interested. I felt so betrayed, and I didn't know how to talk it out. So I pretended it didn't matter because I felt stupid about letting your behavior get to me.\"\n\nLamprophyre realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it with a snap. \"That might make sense for a first reaction,\" she heard herself say, \"but it doesn't excuse all the years after that.\"\n\nCoquina shrugged, a strange gesture from someone lying nearly prone. \"It felt like once I'd started down that path, I didn't know how to stop. And you were smarter than me, and better at poetry recitation, and I was sure Hyaloclast wanted you for her successor and then you really would be superior, because you'd be my queen\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"Hyaloclast has never shown any interest in making me her heir. I was thinking it would be Chrysoprase.\"\n\n\"You're smarter than Chrysoprase, too.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but I'm sure intelligence isn't the most important quality in a queen.\"\n\nCoquina shrugged again. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I didn't behave very well. We should have done the honorable thing and talked it out with the flight, and I don't know that my youth is any excuse.\"\n\n\"I wasn't honorable either,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I was ashamed of being so jealous of you\u2014\"\n\n\"Jealous of me? Why?\"\n\n\"Please. You're beautiful, you win all the races, you're witty. I always felt so stupid around you.\"\n\nCoquina got heavily to her feet. \"That's hilarious. I was jealous of you. I don't think you realize how admired you are for your memory. Nobody in the flight knows as much poetry as you do, except maybe old Scoria, and you're far better at recitation than she is.\"\n\nLamprophyre blushed. \"I didn't know anyone thought that way.\"\n\n\"It's true.\" Coquina laughed, a weary, bitter sound. \"I can't believe I had to nearly kill someone to become humble enough to ask your forgiveness.\"\n\nGuilt flooded through Lamprophyre, chilling her hot, embarrassed blood. \"Hyaloclast chastised me for being jealous of you,\" she said, \"but even that wasn't enough for me to humble myself, either. I'm sorry, Coquina. I should have remembered that early friendship and tried to get it back.\"\n\n\"So should I,\" Coquina said. \"Can we? Be friends again, I mean?\"\n\n\"We are,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And it's not so bad. We only have twenty-seven years of lost time to make up for.\"\n\nCoquina laughed. \"No time at all.\"\n\nShe settled herself beside Lamprophyre, and the two of them watched the rain in silence. Pale sunlight slanted through an unexpected gap in the clouds, lighting a spot on the courtyard that shifted gradually as the clouds moved. It looked like a yellow leaf, floating along the surface of the courtyard as if it were a deep pool and not an expanse of earth whose top layer was being churned into mud. The falling raindrops plinked into the mud and were soaked up, making Lamprophyre imagine the courtyard was desperate for moisture and wished to be a green field of human crops instead of a sterile landing ground for dragons.\n\nAfter a few hundred beats, the rain changed from being a waterfall downpour to a steady sprinkle and then passed entirely, heading westward toward distant Fanishkor. Lamprophyre propped herself on her elbows. \"I wonder how long it will take those humans to come here,\" she said. \"We really do need Dharan and Rokshan. Someone will have to write down their witnesses, or something. I don't know how it works.\"\n\n\"I just want to know that Melika's all right, and that the other players don't hate me,\" Coquina said. \"I never imagined I would be friends with humans, but it's not that remarkable, is it? They're rational creatures just like we are.\"\n\nLamprophyre thought of the guard who'd been so adamant about the ecclesiasts being victims and wondered about the \"rational\" part of that statement. \"Rokshan is my best friend,\" she said. \"I certainly didn't expect that. Though sometimes I wish he was a dragon. He'd be a good one.\" She'd occasionally imagined them flying together, side by side, and it was a satisfying daydream.\n\n\"I almost wish I were human,\" Coquina said, \"or at least human-sized. It would be fun to be able to play with my human friends on their terms.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. \"I wouldn't be human if you paid me,\" she said, using one of Dharan's favorite phrases, and then realized she'd spoken like a human and blushed.\n\nCoquina shifted her weight. \"There's Rokshan,\" she said, \"and it looks like he found Dharan.\" She got to her feet and exited the embassy. She didn't seem to care about the thin mud clinging to her feet and the underside of her tail. Lamprophyre followed her, more reluctantly.\n\nRokshan and Dharan were both damp, as if they'd left shelter before the rain had fully stopped. \"Nobody died,\" Rokshan called out from across the courtyard. Coquina stopped where she was, her shoulders slumping in relief. \"There were five people injured, three by Coquina and two by the fighting, which is damn near miraculous.\"\n\n\"It sounds bad,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"You've never seen a riot,\" Dharan said. \"People get hurt who aren't even throwing punches. Probably more of the participants were injured, just not badly enough to require healing attention.\"\n\n\"So Melika is all right?\" Coquina asked.\n\n\"She was fully healed right after I arrived. I paid for the healing with embassy money, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"That's acceptable,\" said Lamprophyre. \"What about the ecclesiasts' bearers?\"\n\n\"Also healed, though I didn't offer to pay for them. There were a couple of ecclesiasts there speaking with the adepts, and I saw the bearers walk out with them, so their healing was complete as well.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"I'm not,\" Rokshan said. \"Oh, all right, I'm glad for your sake, Coquina, but they deserved a beating. Being willing to attack others, some of them women smaller and weaker than they\u2014that's reprehensible. But it doesn't matter. Since no one died, this situation has become much less complex.\"\n\n\"And we may be in a position to go after the ecclesiasts,\" Dharan said. \"I found Rokshan returning here just before the storm hit, and we discussed things while we were hiding from it. If we can get enough witnesses to swear to the ecclesiasts' behavior, I'm sure we can accuse them of inciting riot, and that is a crime. One they won't be able to hide from behind ecclesiastical privilege.\"\n\n\"But will we find enough witnesses?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"It's a big city, and I get the feeling most people don't like coming to the attention of the law, even indirectly.\"\n\n\"We have all of the men and women who play that game with Coquina,\" Rokshan said. \"I told Melika to bring them here. And there's the man we spoke with outside the coliseum. If he comes here, we can ask him about others he knows who were present, and invite them to speak up as well. Ten or twelve witnesses to match the twelve bearers\u2014\"\n\n\"Which is also a point in our favor,\" Dharan said. \"Twelve strong men were ordered to attack a group half their size and not as strongly built. That suggests the ecclesiasts had this outcome in mind from the start.\"\n\n\"This might work,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Because aside from clearing Coquina of any legal charges, we want to keep the ecclesiasts from continuing to attack dragons. If they know they can be arrested for breaking the law, they'll be less likely to do so.\"\n\n\"Leaving them to try something they can't be caught at,\" Coquina said.\n\nThe others stared at her. \"It's obvious,\" she said. \"The ecclesiasts won't stop until they get rid of dragons in Tanajital. If it's a matter of religion, they'll be devoted to that cause. We can't stop being alert for whatever they try next.\"\n\nHer words brought Lamprophyre down to earth. \"She's right,\" she said. \"They'll try something we can't defend against.\"\n\n\"Let's worry about that later,\" Rokshan said. \"We still need to resolve Coquina's problem. And I haven't yet arranged for soldiers to guard the warehouses.\"\n\n\"Why soldiers, and not the city guard?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"The city guard are soldiers whose first responsibility is to keeping the peace in Tanajital,\" Rokshan explained, \"but keeping the peace means non-lethal force. It's why they carry truncheons rather than swords. The soldiers of the Army are intended to fight non-Gonjirians, but they are also deployed in times of extreme domestic crisis. Setting them to defend dragons sends a different message than if I asked for a detachment of guards. It says Gonjiri sees a threat to dragons as a threat to the country. Also, they won't be intimidated by the ecclesiasts unless the Archprelate himself shows up demanding to be let through. And that's not going to happen.\"\n\n\"Why can't we talk to the Archprelate? He has to be the one who gave the ecclesiasts their orders.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre, nobody talks to the Archprelate. He lives in seclusion so he's untainted by the ways of the world and capable of receiving the purest revelations.\"\n\n\"Or because he's being manipulated by the High Ecclesiasts,\" Dharan murmured. Rokshan glowered at him. \"All right,\" Dharan continued, \"I don't actually believe that. I do believe it's a mistake for the person entrusted with the spiritual well-being of a nation to be so isolated he doesn't know what the people need.\"\n\n\"Jiwanyil knows what the people need. Are you saying the Archprelate doesn't speak with Jiwanyil? All his prophecies are on record,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I don't want to get into a religious debate, Rokshan. What matters is that you're right about this problem not being able to be resolved by someone talking to the Archprelate. We'll just have to be careful.\"\n\nRokshan nodded, though Lamprophyre could tell he wanted to go on arguing about his faith. \"Then I'll go speak to Sajan and arrange for troops to block off the dragons' territory. Dharan, will you wait here and take down any witnesses from people who arrive? Lamprophyre, if you'll fly with me, that will speed things up. I don't want your clutchmates forced to spend the night outside the city.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. Coquina said, \"I suppose I have to wait, still. It's all right, I don't mind, I just wish there were more I could do.\"\n\n\"Time enough for that when the ecclesiasts invent a new plan,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre crouched, muddying an elbow, and Rokshan climbed up. His sandals left streaks of mud down her side. A bath was in order just as soon as everything dried out enough that she wouldn't get muddy again immediately. In this weather, that wouldn't take long. She took off with a powerful push of her hind legs, flapped hard to gain altitude, and headed for the Army buildings on the far side of the palace. It felt good to take action. It would feel better to stop those ecclesiasts for good.\n\nCool night air brushed Lamprophyre's face, and the hum of the wind blowing past the window openings near the embassy's ceiling was as soothing as a lullaby. Beside her, Coquina breathed softly enough that if not for her body's heat, Lamprophyre might have imagined her gone back to her own warehouse.\n\nIt had been a busy afternoon. She and Rokshan had returned from arranging for soldiers to block the entrances to the dragons' warehouses to find the courtyard full of humans. Some of them were Coquina's friends, and they'd been chattering animatedly beside the dining pavilion, surrounding Coquina like bees courting a rose. Others were men and women who'd been in the coliseum, more than Lamprophyre had anticipated. Their thoughts were all indignant, but not at Coquina; they were upset that the game had been interrupted and angry with the high-handedness of the ecclesiasts.\n\n\"I respect them because they speak with Jiwanyil,\" one of those women had said, \"but some of them seem to think that means they're better than the rest of us. We're all Jiwanyil's creations, aren't we? I'm more comfortable with the reverend who lives four doors down from my family. He's generous and he cares about seeing that the children get a good religious education.\"\n\n\"The ecclesiasts are frightened of dragons,\" Lamprophyre had replied, \"and frightened people do stupid things. At least, dragons are that way.\"\n\n\"Humans too,\" the woman had said. Craning her neck to look Lamprophyre in the eye, she'd added, \"And why don't you worship Katayan the way any right-thinking creature would?\"\n\nShe hadn't sounded accusatory despite her choice of words, just curious, and Lamprophyre, feeling uncomfortable, had told her, \"Dragons are raised to believe in Mother Stone. I had never heard of Katayan before coming here.\"\n\n\"Which is a blessing. Now that you know about him, you can worship properly.\"\n\n\"We do worship properly,\" Lamprophyre had said, hotly, \"and why is it you're so convinced you're right? Dragons are older than humankind, so shouldn't that mean we know the truth?\"\n\nThe woman had stiffened and turned away without saying anything else. Lamprophyre had feared she'd made a mistake\u2014but she wasn't going to deny her faith just to keep humans happy, and it was past time they learned that.\n\nAt suppertime, Lamprophyre and Coquina had eaten and watched the beggars come for a meal. Coquina had looked sad when the old man arrived. \"His mind is broken,\" she'd said. \"It's like a mass of shattered stone, some of it with sharp edges. How terrible for him. Suppose he was someone brilliant once?\"\n\n\"I think it's tragic no matter who he used to be, but I take your meaning,\" Lamprophyre had said. She'd chosen not to explain the Sister of the Red prostitute, feeling too bone-weary from the excitement of the day to deal with Coquina's probable shock when she learned about humans and sex. It seemed as if her fight with Rokshan was years in the past.\n\nJust before sunset, a runner dressed in royal livery, yellow and green, had come rushing into the courtyard looking for Rokshan. The child had a folded paper in an oiled packet he gave to Rokshan. Rokshan had read the paper's contents silently. \"Coquina is to present herself to the king on the training grounds tomorrow at ten o'clock. That's midmorning,\" he clarified. \"With any witnesses to provide her side of the story.\"\n\n\"Does that mean the rest of us can't come?\" Lamprophyre had asked.\n\n\"No, you're to attend as Coquina's guarantor, I suppose you could call it,\" Rokshan had said. \"The one who stands surety for her appearance and for her harmlessness. I'll be there to put all the statements together and to argue with whoever the ecclesiasts send. Please, Jiwanyil, let it not be Khadar, though that might be good as he's not very bright and I could talk circles around him. Forgive me, Jiwanyil, but let me change my last plea.\"\n\nDharan laughed. \"And I'm coming along as legal consultant,\" he'd said, \"as I know slightly more about the details of the law than Rokshan, and might see possibilities he doesn't.\"\n\n\"I'm relieved,\" Coquina had said. \"I didn't want to face the king alone.\"\n\n\"No fear of that,\" Rokshan had said, \"though between us, I believe he's on our side.\"\n\nNow Lamprophyre looked through the doorway across the dark courtyard and considered that. The king ought to be impartial, shouldn't he? And yet Rokshan had said more than once things that suggested the king wasn't fond of ecclesiasts. That didn't make any sense, given that Ekanath had more than once requested a prophecy from those ecclesiasts, and would he have done that if he were opposed to them? It was confusing, and Lamprophyre hated being confused.\n\nShe settled down and closed her eyes. Tomorrow this would all be resolved, one way or another. They had witnesses, they had truth on their side, and that would be more than enough.\n\nShe hoped."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The training grounds were a wide stretch of bare earth behind and to the right of the palace, hemmed in on its far side by the parkland circling the palace. Low buildings with dark red roofs nestled into the trees, creating a contrast with the bright and dark greens of the leaves that was almost dragon-like in its brilliance. In fact, the colors reminded Lamprophyre strongly of Chrysoprase, whose dark green scales and maroon wing membranes were unique not only in the current flight, but in the memories of the oldest dragons. Rokshan had told Lamprophyre that some of the buildings were for housing soldiers, and some were for the officers, but they all looked the same to her: low to the ground, lined with window holes, with roofs bright enough that Lamprophyre might have used them as a beacon to land at night. Boring.\n\nThe platform erected on the training grounds, on the other hand, roused Lamprophyre's curiosity. It was wood, and not very sturdy from her point of view; she would almost certainly crush it if she tried to stand on it. But it was sturdy enough to support the king's seat and a handful of other chairs, so it wasn't something to be put up and taken down in only a hundred beats. Temporary and not temporary at the same time. That struck her as typically human. She wondered who was responsible for building it and taking it down, and whether it came in pieces that could be stacked together. Maybe Rokshan knew.\n\nShe looked down at him, thinking to ask the question, but he was deep in conversation with Dharan and she didn't feel like interrupting just for idle curiosity. The training ground was as dry as if the previous day's storm had never happened, and the sun shone in a clear sky, edging its way toward midmorning. The heat, already unpleasant, weighed on her head and shoulders and made her wish for a canopy like the one shielding the king's seat. She needed something she could carry with her. That wasn't so unlikely, was it?\n\nOn her other side, Coquina sat on her haunches, talking quietly with one of her human friends. The rest of them milled around her, restless as dragonets ready for their first flight. Lamprophyre wondered which of them was Melika. None of them acted like they'd been injured, though Lamprophyre supposed a good healer would take care of that. The only healing Lamprophyre knew anything about was Rokshan's, after he'd been burned, and that had been interrupted because the two of them had had to stop a war.\n\nShe glanced around. So far, the only people who'd arrived were Coquina's defenders, including three men who'd witnessed the fight at the coliseum. It made her nervous that maybe Rokshan had mistook the time, that they'd been supposed to arrive at some other of the many human hours that all had numbers assigned to them.\n\nBut\u2014no, there was movement at the corner of the palace where the road curved around from the park. A handful of\u2014she didn't actually know what they were, except she didn't think they were ecclesiasts and they didn't dress like reverends\u2014anyway, five or six of the people dressed in ecclesiastical yellow with the strange upside-down bowl-shaped haircuts preceded two litters. Fluttering yellow drapes caught the scant breeze, but didn't move enough to reveal the ecclesiasts inside. Two litters, not three. That might be significant, though Lamprophyre didn't know how. Right now she felt she was grasping at anything that might give Coquina an advantage.\n\nThe people walking ahead of the litters carried musical instruments, pipes and drums and a piece of metal hanging from a cord, but they weren't playing any of them except the piece of metal, which the person holding it tapped with a slim brass rod every fourth step. The procession, and the tiny ting sounds, put Lamprophyre's back up. She knew very little about human customs, but her instincts told her this behavior was the ecclesiasts' way of establishing dominance.\n\n\"What does that mean?\" she said, nudging Rokshan.\n\nRokshan regained his balance and looked over his shoulder. \"God's breath,\" he swore. \"I don't know what to make of that.\"\n\n\"Does it mean something? I feel like it means something.\"\n\n\"It means,\" Rokshan said, tilting his head to look up at her, \"the ecclesiasts intend to make this a sacred affair. They want to claim that Coquina's actions were intended as a blow at them in their religious capacity and not as defending herself and others from an attack. Which could be a problem for us, if Father decides he doesn't want to offend the ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"Or he'll be angry at their blatant attempt at manipulation and tell them off,\" Dharan said. \"Let's not be pessimistic. It could go either way.\"\n\n\"You said the king might be on our side. Is that because he dislikes the ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"I would never say that,\" Rokshan said, but his face was expressionless in a way that suggested he meant the opposite of what he'd said. Since the ecclesiasts' procession had nearly reached them, and they might be able to overhear Rokshan, Lamprophyre guessed he didn't want to give their enemies any reason to protest unfair treatment if the king's judgment went against them.\n\nThe ecclesiasts' bearers set their burdens down about a dragonlength away from Dharan and the same distance from the platform as Lamprophyre and the others were. The attendants put their musical instruments away in their belts, which were simple cords of twisted red silk, and tied back the yellow curtains with more red cords. From Lamprophyre's perspective, the men inside the litters were almost invisible; she was enough taller that she could see only the knee of the nearest ecclesiast and the hand he rested on it. She decided not to crouch so she could see inside, because that would look like she cared, or possibly like she was nervous.\n\nCoquina appeared to have drawn the same conclusion Lamprophyre had, because she ignored the litters entirely. \"Why only two, I wonder?\" she said in a low voice for Lamprophyre's ears alone.\n\n\"That's what I was thinking. If there were three ecclesiasts at the coliseum, shouldn't all three have come to this?\"\n\nCoquina shrugged. It was a gesture they'd all picked up from humans, versatile and communicative. \"I'm so nervous I don't dare move, because I'd either trample someone or start shaking.\"\n\n\"It's all right. It's not as if they can hurt us. If King Ekanath does decide you were at fault, he'll probably just send you home.\"\n\n\"Which will hurt our presence here and make all dragons look weak. And I don't want to go home, certainly not under these conditions.\"\n\nLamprophyre cast her a startled glance. Coquina might or might not be less intelligent than Lamprophyre, but she was smart enough to see to the heart of the problem: ecclesiasts driving one dragon away would open the door to casting out others.\n\nA pause settled over the training grounds, a moment in which no one spoke or moved restlessly. The only sound was that of the breeze rustling the distant leaves, something Lamprophyre suspected only she and Coquina could hear. She knew her hearing and sight were superior to a human's, but not how much more acute, and now she tilted her head and listened to the rushing sound, a hissing like scales rubbing over stone. If only the breeze would become a wind, and stir the heavy air so Lamprophyre didn't feel quite so much like falling asleep! As it was, only responsibility and nervousness kept her from giving in to her impulse to return to the embassy and nap.\n\nBehind her, a loud noise somewhere between a squawk and a moan shattered the stillness. Lamprophyre jumped and half-turned to see what strange creature had such a call. Two men in the green and yellow that marked them as royal servants strode forward at a measured pace, pausing between each step. Curved horns with large, round mouths hung by long cords around their shoulders to bounce at their hips. As Lamprophyre watched, one man raised his horn to his lips without unslinging it, and that same peculiar sound rang out.\n\nBehind the men with the horns came four women, shorter than the horn-blowers and with their long hair gathered up in horse's tails at the back of their heads. They made four points of a square, or two short columns lined up behind each of the horn-blowers. Each carried a book nearly too big for her, bound in leather with gilding on the page edges and locked shut with a strap and a clasp. The leather smelled old, the gilding smelled as fresh as if it had just been applied, and Lamprophyre wished she knew what it all meant, because this was clearly a ceremony that said King Ekanath was taking this very seriously.\n\nThe king's litter, borne by four muscular men unclad from the waist up, followed the four women. The white curtains were tied back, and Lamprophyre caught a glimpse of the king, sitting in that uncomfortable-looking legs-folded pose, before he approached too near for her to see beneath the litter's roof. He didn't look happy, but he didn't look angry, either. Lamprophyre hoped his expression wasn't one of the many she still couldn't interpret, and that he was on their side, after all.\n\nThe group of men and women dressed richly in court attire, white shirts and short trousers under heavy silk robes in a variety of colors, that followed the king weren't as orderly as the procession in front. Lamprophyre risked listening to their thoughts\u2014there were already enough humans present to make eavesdropping impractical, much as she wanted to know what the ecclesiasts had in mind\u2014and gathered that most of them were extremely curious about what the king would decide, though a few were already thinking about their midday meal. As it wasn't even midmorning yet, she thought those few were, as Dharan sometimes said, slaves to their stomach. If they were here to help the king pass judgment, they ought to have the decency to focus their attention on Coquina's fate and not on roast chicken.\n\nThe bearers set the king's litter on the ground at the base of the steps leading to the top of the platform, and one of them assisted the king to his feet. Ekanath climbed the stairs and took his seat in the golden chair, covered with the canopy that cast such a lovely shade. A few of the crowd following the litter ascended as well and sat in the chairs to either side. As soon as all of them were seated, the women holding the oversized books carried them up the steps, where Ekanath's followers each accepted one. They set the books on their laps, front side up, but didn't open them.\n\nThe horn-blowers took up positions at either side of the base of the steps. Both blew an even longer, louder note that sounded like the cry of a strangled goose. Lamprophyre swallowed an inappropriate laugh. She welcomed her mirth even if she couldn't indulge in it, because the ceremony was impressive and alien and very, very human and she felt so out of place she was grateful for anything normal like a laugh.\n\nWhen the last echo of the dying goose cry had vanished, the king leaned forward slightly and said, \"Ladies and gentlemen, the books of the law.\"\n\nAs if guided by invisible hands, the four people holding books in their laps unlatched the straps and opened the books simultaneously. None of them spoke, but Lamprophyre observed they had all opened to different points in their books, and she hoped that meant this was more symbolism and not that they'd already made a decision, whoever they were.\n\n\"What is the charge?\" Ekanath said. His words carried through the still air, which impressed Lamprophyre. She hadn't realized humans knew the trick of projecting their voices far using the power of their diaphragm muscles.\n\nOne of the horn-blowers spoke. His voice was nearly as loud as Ekanath's. \"The ecclesiasts claim a challenge to their religious authority in the person of the dragon Coquina, accused of attacking their servants in an unprovoked manner.\"\n\nCoquina shifted restlessly, but said nothing. Rokshan had told everyone not to react, no matter what the ecclesiasts claimed. Lamprophyre was glad of the warning, because she otherwise might have shouted denials and angry retorts.\n\n\"And what is the counter-charge?\" Ekanath said. He still looked and sounded as if none of this mattered to him.\n\n\"The dragon Coquina claims ecclesiasts taunted her and ordered their servants to commit violence against innocent humans. In the process of defending herself and those innocents, she accidentally injured three humans. She counters that the ecclesiasts are ultimately responsible for the injuries and other damages sustained,\" said the other horn-blower.\n\n\"Very well,\" Ekanath said. \"Witnesses for the accusers?\"\n\nOne of the bowl-haircut attendants stepped forward. \"Ecclesiasts Nendan and Sarthak have submitted the ecclesiasts' statements and stand ready to answer questions.\"\n\n\"I have received and read their statements,\" Ekanath said. \"Witnesses for the defender?\"\n\nRokshan took a few steps forward. \"Your majesty has the statements of six witnesses who were present in the coliseum for the riot,\" he said, \"and we have nine others present here today who are ready to answer questions.\"\n\nIt was all so calm and civilized Lamprophyre wanted to scream. Surely the king, if he'd read all those witnesses, knew the truth?\n\nBut the king still looked perfectly placid. \"Ecclesiast Nendan,\" he said, turning slightly in his chair to more directly address the ecclesiast's litter. \"Repeat your claim to these auditors.\" He gestured at the man seated nearest him, who still held his book resting open on his lap as if prepared to read from it at any moment.\n\n\"Your majesty,\" the unseen ecclesiast said, \"we\u2014\"\n\n\"Please stand before your king,\" Ekanath said in a pleasant voice.\n\n\"I\u2014yes, your majesty,\" Nendan said. He clambered out of his litter, not very gracefully, and had to grab hold of the roof pole to keep his balance. \"We had heard tell of an\u2026event\u2026occurring at the coliseum, featuring that dragon.\" He gestured at Coquina without looking at her. \"We saw an opportunity to invite her to renounce her godless ways and pay devotion to the Living God of the Dragons, Katayan. She rejected our words and cast insults and vicious laughter at us, inciting the crowd to do the same. Your majesty knows a challenge to an ecclesiast is a challenge to Jiwanyil himself. We attempted to reason with her, but she dealt two of our men a blow, knocking both unconscious, then in her rage turned on other humans.\"\n\nCoquina made a sound deep in her throat that might have been the beginnings of a snarl. \"But\u2014\" one of Coquina's female friends began, and was hushed by a glare from Rokshan.\n\n\"So you claim innocence in all of this,\" Ekanath said.\n\n\"We do, your majesty. In Jiwanyil's name.\"\n\nEven though she was blocking the thoughts of everyone present, Rokshan was near enough and familiar enough to Lamprophyre that she could feel a pulse of satisfaction run through him at those words. She was certain she understood it. Claiming to tell the truth in the name of their God when they were lying would certainly work against them.\n\n\"And why are there only two of you?\" Ekanath said in that same mild tone.\n\n\"We judged this situation simple enough to resolve that it did not need the presence of three ecclesiasts,\" Nendan said. He sounded like someone confiding in a friend some obvious truth that they both understood without saying.\n\nEkanath nodded. \"Prince Rokshan,\" he said, turning to Rokshan. \"Have you anything to say in Coquina's defense?\"\n\n\"The ecclesiasts' actions were not innocent or benign,\" Rokshan said, \"and I have witnesses to prove it. While they may have intended only to invite Coquina to follow their teachings\u2014which, by the way, I doubt\u2014\"\n\n\"We are not here to read the minds of the ecclesiasts,\" Ekanath said. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"As I say, they may simply have wanted to convert a dragon, but they did so using harsh and insulting words designed to goad Coquina into anger. And they ordered their men to attack innocents, thus inciting riot.\"\n\n\"We dispute this claim utterly,\" Nendan shouted.\n\n\"Ecclesiast Nendan, do not interrupt,\" Ekanath said. \"And the dragon's attack on the ecclesiasts' men?\"\n\n\"Was an accident,\" Rokshan said. \"Coquina moved to interpose herself between the attackers and her friends, and she struck those men without intending to.\"\n\nEkanath eyed Coquina, who returned his regard fearlessly. If she was shaking, it wasn't evident. \"I can see how that would be possible,\" he said.\n\n\"Your majesty,\" Nendan said, in the tones of someone who'd been bottling up his rage for several beats, \"you cannot think to credit this creature's account over that of representatives of Jiwanyil! We have sworn to our statement in Jiwanyil's name, and that gives us an impeccable witness that trumps all others.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" Ekanath said. \"There is legal precedent for what you say.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt numb. He was going to take their word\u2014their lying word\u2014for truth even though their witnesses were weak compared to Coquina's. Beside her, Coquina shifted, and Lamprophyre felt her take her hand and squeeze it tightly.\n\n\"I have only one more question for you, Ecclesiast Nendan,\" Ekanath said. \"Do you take me for a fool?\"\n\nAnother hush fell over the training grounds. Nendan's mouth fell open. \"I,\" he said, then licked his lips nervously. \"Of course not, your majesty. I don't know what you mean.\"\n\n\"Then you swear that you were at the coliseum during the event in question?\" Ekanath leaned slightly forward again, and this time his words were sharpened steel.\n\n\"I,\" Nendan said again, his gaze flicking in all directions as if seeking help and finding none. \"I am a representative of the ecclesiasts\u2014\"\n\n\"Who was not present for the attack,\" Ekanath said. \"I believe\u2014Vanga, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe I asked for the presence of the ecclesiasts who were part of the attack.\"\n\n\"You are not wrong, your majesty,\" the first horn blower said. \"You summoned the three ecclesiasts who were in the coliseum, who are Golzar, Saral, and Barindra.\"\n\n\"But you\u2014\" Nendak sounded utterly astonished. \"How did you know\u2014\"\n\n\"I may only be king,\" Ekanath said, \"but I am very concerned about law and order in my city. I made sure to know the names of those I intended to question. Why, I ask again, did the Archprelate choose to mock my justice by hiding those three ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"The Archprelate didn't\u2014that is, we thought\u2014Sarthak and I are experienced with speaking the law\u2014\"\n\n\"But I am interested in hearing eyewitness testimonies.\" Ekanath sat back. \"You spoke as though you personally were present. You thought to usurp my authority by manipulating the process of justice.\"\n\nNow Nendak sounded terrified. \"Your majesty, I swear\u2014\"\n\n\"By Jiwanyil?\" Rokshan said placidly. The four book-bearers on the platform chuckled.\n\nNendak pulled himself together with a visible effort. \"We misunderstood the situation,\" he said. \"We believed wrongly that we should show our respect for the law by presenting our claim through those with legal experience. We apologize for our mistake.\" He bowed deeply.\n\n\"I expect the Archprelate\u2014I beg your pardon, the High Ecclesiasts\u2014to learn from this mistake.\" Ekanath turned back to Rokshan. \"I wish to question your witnesses.\"\n\n\"Of course, your majesty.\" Rokshan stepped back to stand beside Lamprophyre again.\n\nEkanath fixed one of the men with his gaze. \"Who attacked first?\" he said.\n\nThe man showed no sign of nervousness at addressing his king. \"The ecclesiasts' bearers did, your majesty, under order from their masters.\"\n\nEkanath turned to the next man in line. \"How many humans did the dragon Coquina attack?\"\n\n\"None, your majesty. She knocked over two of the bearers by accident, and she stepped on Melika when she tried to back away from the bearers,\" the man said.\n\n\"Is one of you Melika?\" the king asked.\n\nThe woman Coquina had been talking to stepped forward. \"I am, your majesty.\"\n\n\"You seem very well for someone who's been stepped on by a dragon.\"\n\nMelika smiled at his humor. \"Coquina paid for my healing, your majesty. It was a terrible mistake. She would never hurt any of us intentionally.\"\n\n\"I see. You,\" the king said, pointing at another woman. \"Did you participate in the riot?\"\n\nThe woman stilled. \"Your majesty, I didn't think those bearers ought to be allowed to get away with attacking people, just because they work for the ecclesiasts,\" she said, somewhat nervously.\n\n\"Your majesty, I protest,\" Nendan said. The king waved him to silence.\n\n\"So you believe the violence was justified,\" Ekanath continued.\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes briefly and hoped the woman would have the sense to shut up.\n\n\"No, your majesty,\" the woman said, \"but I don't believe anyone should be asked to lie down and take a beating. They attacked us, we fought back.\"\n\n\"Ecclesiast Nendan? Anything to add?\" Ekanath said to the ecclesiast.\n\n\"Your majesty, these people have been coached in their responses,\" Nendan said. \"I believe the dragon ambassador paid them to speak in her friend's defense.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"That is a bold accusation,\" Ekanath said. \"Ambassador, what do you say?\"\n\n\"I say that people are always quick to accuse others of their own worst failings,\" Lamprophyre retorted. \"The ecclesiasts are angry because dragons don't worship the way they want them to, and they have attacked more than one dragon with words and threats. Now they've attacked a dragon physically and gotten humans hurt. That's taking their anger too far. Dragons respect human religion, but we have our own faith, and we're not going to sacrifice it just to keep the ecclesiasts from attacking us. I don't need to pay people to entice them to speak the truth, and I think, your majesty, that you should consider what it means that these witnesses were very eager to speak out against the excesses of the ecclesiasts.\"\n\nNendan was sputtering with rage. \"Well spoken, ambassador,\" Ekanath said. \"Ecclesiast Nendan, Ecclesiast Sarthak. I have great respect for those who hear the voice of Jiwanyil, and my respect and that of my predecessors is enshrined in law. But I have no respect for those who seek to trade on those legal protections to the point of disregarding both my instructions and the law itself.\"\n\nEkanath stood, prompting the four others to stand as well, though they didn't close their books. Ekanath said, \"I judge that the dragon Coquina is innocent of the charge of willfully attacking humans, as well as the charge of inciting riot. The High Ecclesiasts, as guarantors of the ecclesiasts as a whole, are ordered to repay Coquina the money spent on healing this young woman, as well as a fine of two hundred rupyas in restitution for having harassed a guest of the royal house.\"\n\nNendan had gone perfectly silent. His fists were clenched by his sides, and he was breathing heavily, but he said nothing.\n\n\"In addition,\" Ekanath said, \"I order the High Ecclesiasts to pay a fine of five hundred rupyas to the Crown, for attempting to usurp the king's authority and for taking advantage of the law's very generous provisions with regard to ecclesiastical authority.\" He smiled. It was not a nice smile. \"Please relay my best wishes to your superiors, and my hopes that they will continue to serve Gonjiri in the way Jiwanyil expects.\" He walked down the steps and climbed into his litter. Behind him, the four men and women closed their books and strapped them shut. Lamprophyre reminded herself to ask Rokshan what the books were for, but later.\n\nShe stood patiently while the king's litter receded into the distance. It hadn't yet disappeared beyond the palace before Nendan, swearing viciously under his breath, climbed into his own litter and signaled the bearers. The two ecclesiasts retreated rapidly, this time without their musical accompaniment. The bowl-cut attendants almost had to run to keep up.\n\nWhen they were gone, Rokshan sagged against Lamprophyre's side. \"That outcome was not nearly so much a given as it seems,\" he told her. \"We were lucky the ecclesiasts were so arrogant they assumed they had everything going their way.\"\n\nNearby, Coquina's friends cheered and hugged her. Lamprophyre caught Coquina's eye and smiled. Coquina's answering smile was wobbly, but it was still a smile."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Lamprophyre and Rokshan flew with Coquina back to the dragons' warehouses. Lamprophyre felt superstitiously that if she let Coquina out of her sight, the ecclesiasts would descend again. But aside from seeing three yellow-topped litters following various streets on the flight from the training grounds, nothing happened. Coquina settled into her warehouse and said, \"I'm going to sleep. I feel as if I haven't rested properly since all of this happened.\"\n\n\"We should race later today,\" Orthoclase said. He and the other males of the clutch had been waiting impatiently for news, and now they stuck their heads out of their warehouses like so many inquisitive badgers. \"Then see if we can't bring food to the clearing north of the city so we can all eat together properly.\"\n\n\"I like this idea, if you can get Depik to cook enough for all of us,\" Bromargyrite said, licking his lips in anticipation.\n\n\"I'll see what I can do,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Meet at the river mid-afternoon?\"\n\n\"A swim and a race, and then another swim,\" Flint said. \"There are benefits to lowland living. The water is always warm.\"\n\nLamprophyre waved goodbye to her clutch and flew back to the embassy, where she let Rokshan off with a sigh. Dharan came out of the embassy and leaned against the door frame, watching the two of them. \"I can't believe the ecclesiasts didn't even obey the king's instructions,\" Lamprophyre told Rokshan.\n\n\"I can,\" Dharan said. \"I realize this means nothing because I'm a heathen, but ecclesiasts are full of their own privilege and don't care anything for their religious responsibilities.\"\n\n\"That's not true of all ecclesiasts,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"All right, it's only true of some, but what does that say about religion if Jiwanyil is willing to deliver prophecies even to those who aren't good examples of his servants?\"\n\n\"We don't know that that's true, Dharan. For all we know, those corrupt ecclesiasts are never possessed of a prophecy.\"\n\n\"It would be interesting to look into,\" Dharan mused. \"Something you could show the High Ecclesiasts, maybe get them to chastise the worst offenders.\"\n\n\"Unless the High Ecclesiasts are like that, too,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What about Khadar?\"\n\n\"Now you've corrupted her,\" Rokshan said, glaring at Dharan.\n\nDharan held up his hands in a \"don't hit me\" gesture. \"You have to admit Khadar is not the best example of a worthy ecclesiast,\" he said.\n\n\"I know.\" Rokshan sighed. \"And yet he was possessed of a prophecy. I don't understand the divine mind, and sometimes I question whether anyone does.\"\n\n\"You said the Archprelate receives the purest revelation,\" Lamprophyre said. She ducked into her hall and rooted around her stone supplies for a hunk of feldspar, which she bit into with pleasure. Eating at midday, or nearly midday, felt so decadent.\n\n\"I did, and I believe that,\" Rokshan said. \"So if he hasn't chastised those ecclesiasts, I have to conclude even their behavior is part of a divine plan.\"\n\n\"That's a level of faith I will never understand,\" Dharan said, \"but it heartens me to know there are still honorable believers in the world.\"\n\nRokshan clapped Dharan on the shoulder. \"I'll convince you yet.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I'm thinking I might convert to the dragon faith.\"\n\n\"That would be so strange,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'm not sure you could make it all the way to Mother Stone when it's your time to die. You're already so fragile.\"\n\n\"I'd depend on you to help me,\" Dharan said with a smile. \"I'm off to lectures now, but tell Porphyry I'll be here tomorrow by nine\u2014by morning\u2014for another reading lesson. And to take down another poem. We almost have enough to publish a book.\"\n\n\"I look forward to it,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nWhen Dharan was gone, Rokshan said, \"I wish we knew what the ecclesiasts will try next. Coquina's right, they won't stop because of one defeat. However definitive a defeat it was.\"\n\n\"Do you think we should take extra precautions?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"We could continue to post guards, maybe make sure nobody goes anywhere alone\u2014Stones, I can't believe I'm suggesting that. We shouldn't have to behave like victims!\"\n\n\"I think we'll maintain a military presence by the warehouses for a while, just in case.\" Rokshan paced the courtyard, his head lowered in thought. \"We can't do that here because people have to be able to reach you, but it's not as important because that street is already a bottleneck. But other than that, I think dragons should behave as if they have every right to be here. Which they do.\"\n\n\"So we need to know how the ecclesiasts will attack next.\"\n\nRokshan sighed. \"I hate fighting a defensive war, but we have no idea how the ecclesiasts will strike next. We'll just have to stay alert and ready to fight back the instant they strike.\"\n\n\"Staying alert all the time sounds exhausting.\"\n\n\"It is, but we don't have much choice.\" Rokshan stretched. \"I'm off now. I'll be back this afternoon, if I'm invited for swimming.\"\n\n\"Of course you are,\" Lamprophyre said. She hesitated, then added, \"It will be secluded, and nobody approaches us dragons when we're all together.\"\n\n\"Don't start on that again, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nHis voice was a warning, but the tension of appearing before the king and her fear of Coquina being punished found sudden expression in anger. \"Why not?\" she exclaimed. \"Rokshan, why are you hiding your body? I don't understand why you're so self-conscious about looking different than you used to. You know we won't\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" Rokshan snarled. \"I don't like being stared at\u2014\"\n\n\"None of us would do that.\"\n\n\"And it's my body, not yours\u2014\"\n\n\"True, but it makes me sad that you're so ashamed of yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm not ashamed!\" Rokshan half-turned so his face was in shadow and spat out a blistering curse. \"I don't expect you to understand. Dragons don't scar. Nothing hurts that impenetrable hide of yours.\"\n\n\"Other dragons can,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nHe turned back to face her. \"But dragons don't fight each other.\"\n\n\"No, but there are sometimes accidents. Dragon claws and teeth are stronger than dragon hide. Those accidents leave scars.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Nevertheless. I don't like being reminded of my, well, weakness, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Weakness? Because you were burned?\"\n\nHe shrugged again. \"Fragility, maybe? I'm not as strong as I thought I was.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, that makes no kind of sense. As if suffering burns was the same as letting someone hit you without fighting back. You almost died from those burns, but you survived. I would think you would see those scars as a reminder of that. Of how strong you are.\"\n\nRokshan let out a long, deep breath, his head thrown back so he was facing the sun. Then he walked into the embassy without a word. Lamprophyre followed him. He walked all the way to the back door so he was only dimly lit by the sunlight coming through the window holes near the ceiling. Then, still in silence, he pulled his loose linen shirt off over his head and dropped it on the floor. He gave Lamprophyre a challenging look, daring her to see what he'd kept hidden.\n\nLamprophyre came closer and lowered her head to look at her friend. She remembered what he'd looked like before the fire, his smooth brown skin the color of chestnuts, the defined muscles that weren't so ridiculous-looking as those of the king's bearers. Now she swallowed to keep from saying something compassionate he would take as a terrible insult.\n\nStreaky marks not as dark as the rest of him, ridged and irregular, radiated out from a spot at the middle of his chest. They ran thick ropy tendrils of scars down into the waistband of his trousers, and up over his shoulders, and spidered like bony fingers up the side of his face. Lamprophyre had seen that much of the scars, those marks on his formerly smooth cheek, but seeing them connected to the rest of the terrible ridges and streaks made her feel she'd only thought she knew what they looked like.\n\nRokshan turned around slowly, holding his arms slightly away from his body. More scarring, not as heavy as on his chest, made stripes across his back and circled his arms. The scars didn't seem to pain him, but she looked at one thick patch over his left biceps and tried to imagine how it would feel to have fabric constantly rubbing against it. She almost reached out to touch the ridges, to see if they felt rough or smooth, but realized in time what a terrible mistake that would be.\n\n\"My left thigh is a mass of scars,\" Rokshan said. He sounded as if they were discussing the weather. \"I don't know why it's so much worse than the right one. I suppose I should be grateful it's not that bad everywhere.\"\n\nLamprophyre's throat ached with sorrow, and the muscles of her shoulders were in knots. She swallowed again, and said, \"It's my fault. I'm so sorry.\"\n\nRokshan turned around. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I didn't put out the fire fast enough. You might have been fine if I'd been faster. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You're\u2014\" Rokshan bent and retrieved his shirt, but didn't put it on. \"I showed you so you'd stop nagging me, not so you could blame yourself. I don't blame you at all.\"\n\n\"You should. No wonder you didn't want to show me. I had no idea the damage I'd done.\"\n\nRokshan chuckled, normally a sound that cheered her. Now it just made her more miserable. \"I've been really stupid,\" he said. \"Vain and selfish and stupid. I don't know what I was thinking.\" He ran a hand lightly over his chest. \"Lamprophyre, you saved my life. You were in pain I can't even comprehend and you still only thought of saving me. And I repaid you by resenting\u2014not you, I never resented you\u2014but the loss of my old appearance. You're right. Nobody who matters will look at me differently.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"Certainly not dragons. We don't have any idea of human beauty. Yours is just a different kind of body.\"\n\n\"You're still blaming yourself. I can tell.\"\n\nShe shook her head, then nodded. \"It will pass. Mostly I'm grateful I didn't let Harshod go. If I'd seen this before encountering him, I'm sure I could have killed him without a single reservation.\"\n\n\"He's dead. We're not. Let's make that cause for celebration.\" Rokshan shook out his shirt and put it on. \"I really do have to go. I'm arranging for an excuse to stop singling out Nevrita.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nThis time, his laugh was hearty and free of any negative emotion. \"You really are my best friend,\" he said. \"Don't think I don't know you wanted to tear into Nevrita, metaphorically speaking, for using me.\"\n\n\"I would have, but I don't know where she lives.\"\n\n\"It's all right. I'll take care of it.\" Rokshan gripped her forearm briefly. \"Thank you for not letting me continue to wallow in self-pity. Now\u2014stop blaming yourself. Take a nap or something. I'll be back in a few hours.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled on the floor when he was gone and closed her eyes. It was hard not to see Rokshan's scarred body when she did. She resolutely tried to think of other things, feeling that dwelling on his scars was the opposite of what she'd promised him. Swimming this afternoon, that would be fun. Maybe tomorrow she and Rokshan could go over what Dharan had learned in the Hall of Visions. That would be less fun, but at least she would feel she was accomplishing something.\n\nA shadow passed over her face, and she blinked at the young woman\u2014maybe an older child, she was so short\u2014who stood there, balanced on the balls of her feet like she wanted to flee. \"Yes?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThe child jerked, startled, and took a step backward. Her thoughts were full of nervousness but not fear, and Lamprophyre heard trample me without noticing. Well, that was better than outright terror.\n\n\"Did you need something?\" she went on. \"A question, or something dragons can do for you? Or did a dragon cause you injury? I promise we don't intend to hurt humans, but we are very large and sometimes it happens by accident. If it was Bromargyrite, he's really sorry.\"\n\nThe girl shook her head. \"It's a message,\" she said in nearly a whisper. \"From Princess Manishi. She asks that you come to her workshop imm\u2014as soon as you're able.\"\n\nLamprophyre concealed a smile at the girl's amendment of Manishi's message. \"I don't suppose she said why she wants to see me?\"\n\n\"No, my lady ambassador.\"\n\nSo at least the girl had been coached in the correct form of address, almost certainly not by Manishi. \"Will you return to her highness and tell her I'll be there shortly?\" Lamprophyre could outfly this messenger, but she felt it was good for Manishi not to develop the expectation that Lamprophyre would drop everything at her command.\n\nThe girl nodded and was gone before Lamprophyre could get to her feet. Lamprophyre stretched and picked up a book from the piles. Give it a thousand beats or so, and she'd see what Manishi wanted. She had some reservations about going unaccompanied by Rokshan, because he was more suspicious than she and better at keeping Manishi from cheating them. Manishi's strange quality that blurred her thoughts and made them impossible to hear meant Lamprophyre couldn't use her secret edge. But Lamprophyre had had several encounters with Manishi over the last dozen twelvedays, and she felt less worried about dealing with her than she originally had.\n\nLamprophyre opened her book and settled in to read. Whatever Manishi wanted, it would almost certainly be interesting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Though Manishi lived in the palace with the rest of the royal family, she spent most of her time in the slums of Tanajital. Slums, Lamprophyre had learned, were old or run-down neighborhoods where very poor people lived. Rokshan had said there was much crime in the slums, which confused Lamprophyre; poor people didn't have anything worth stealing, and she didn't know why people were more likely to attack each other just because of where they lived. It wasn't something that concerned her personally, but it did make her wonder what power Manishi had that she wasn't afraid of walking those streets alone.\n\nManishi's workshop was a wooden building weathered silver with age and a dozen years' exposure to the storms of Gonjiri summers. It slumped as if worn down by life, with even its roof sagging and what was left of its paint peeling in thin strips where it had been partly protected by the eaves. The workshop was nearly as big as a warehouse, but it was built differently from the ones the dragons had rented as temporary caves. Its roof wasn't quite as high, it had no windows, and its double doors opened outward rather than inward. One of those doors hung crookedly on leather hinges, inviting thieves, but when Manishi opened the door to Lamprophyre, shoving hard to get it to move, she showed no sign that she was concerned about people breaking in.\n\n\"You took your time coming,\" Manishi groused. She was dressed, as always, in knee-length trousers and a sleeveless shirt, both of which were made of coarsely woven ivory cloth, and her hair was piled messily atop her head.\n\nLamprophyre opened the other door and managed to squeeze through the opening, ducking her head and furling her wings close to her body. \"I do have other responsibilities,\" she said, \"and you didn't say it was urgent.\"\n\nManishi shrugged. Her irritation had vanished as quickly as if it had been manufactured rather than genuine. \"Close the doors, and have a seat,\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre tugged the doors shut and made herself as comfortable as possible in the cramped workshop, wrapping her tail around her hindquarters and keeping her wings furled. Lanterns glowed on the walls, two flanking the door and four more spaced throughout the workshop. Their warm light wasn't enough to fill the large space with more than a twilight glow, but Lamprophyre's vision was better than a human's, and she had no trouble seeing the cabinets filled with drawers of all sizes and the obsidian slab hanging in one corner. This was the only adept's workshop she'd ever seen, and she'd occasionally wondered if they all looked the same, or if Manishi's single-mindedness with regard to magic manifested itself in this orderly environment.\n\nManishi dragged a low stool out from under the work table shoved against one wall and sat. For a few beats, they examined each other, princess and dragon. Lamprophyre was by now burning with curiosity about what Manishi wanted, but she wasn't so stupid as to speak first and give up her advantage. Someday she really needed to learn Manishi's secret for turning her thoughts into an indecipherable hum.\n\n\"You've been selling kyanite to others,\" Manishi abruptly said. \"We had an arrangement.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lamprophyre hadn't anticipated anything like that. \"I don't recall any such arrangement.\"\n\n\"It was implicit. You provide me kyanite privately, so no one else knows I have it, and you don't tell any other adept you can get it.\"\n\nLamprophyre was certain she'd never agreed to those terms, but she knew Manishi well enough to be aware the woman constructed her own reality and clung to it. \"It doesn't matter. I haven't sold kyanite to anyone else. No one's asked for it, for one, and I'm not so desperate for coin as to need to sell my own private stock. Kyanite is delicious.\"\n\n\"Eating it. What a waste.\" Manishi frowned. \"Then why is it at least three other adepts have stopped looking for it at the market?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. Maybe they don't want it anymore. What's it for, anyway?\"\n\nManishi's gaze flicked speculatively at Lamprophyre. \"It wouldn't mean anything to you,\" she said. \"An experiment.\"\n\nManishi was right; Lamprophyre wouldn't appreciate the details. From asking other adepts, she knew kyanite had mind-focusing powers, but so did sapphire, and sapphire was more potent than kyanite. She'd originally suspected Manishi wanted the kyanite because it was cheaper than sapphire, but some careful inquiries had turned up the surprising fact that kyanite was among the more expensive stones humans traded for. Lamprophyre doubted Manishi wanted the stone for anything so mundane as improving mental focus and clarity.\n\n\"So how do you know these other adepts have stopped looking?\" she asked. \"Since I don't imagine they came out and told you.\"\n\n\"I have my ways,\" Manishi said with a smile. \"I want you to find out which of your dragon friends are selling kyanite, and make them stop.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"I want you,\" Manishi said in the slow, deliberate tones of one speaking to an unusually dim child, \"to make them stop.\"\n\n\"I can't do that. What my friends do is their own business.\"\n\n\"True, but you can\u2026encourage\u2026them to change their business. Tell them you have more need of kyanite than they. I don't care. Just get them to stop.\"\n\nLamprophyre let out a deep breath and suppressed the urge to shout. \"In the first place,\" she said, \"I'm not going to lie to my friends.\" She almost told Manishi why lying to a dragon was impossible, but revealing that secret to this woman struck her as a very bad idea. \"In the second place, don't you think that would make them suspicious? And that they'd pass that suspicion on to whoever's buying the kyanite from them? If you're so concerned about secrecy, you ought to think before doing something that will draw attention to yourself.\"\n\nManishi frowned. \"Good point.\" She stood and paced the small area between the door and Lamprophyre. \"Very good point. I suppose I'll just have to increase my supplies of kyanite. There's a chance my rivals will notice the depletion of the supply, but I'll have to risk it.\"\n\nIrritated, Lamprophyre said, \"You say that as if I'm a tap you can turn on and have kyanite come flowing out. Suppose I don't feel like going after more for you?\"\n\n\"I'll pay you well.\"\n\n\"I don't need money.\" This was not strictly true. With the addition of six more dragons to Tanajital, Lamprophyre's needs for the embassy, for entertaining as well as paying reparations for accidents, had increased substantially. But she didn't like Manishi's attitude.\n\n\"Everyone needs money.\" Manishi turned to face Lamprophyre. \"Very well. If you're not interested, I suppose I'll have to tell Father what that dark blue dragon has been up to.\"\n\nPuzzled, Lamprophyre said, \"Flint? What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"He's made several long flights out of Tanajital since he arrived. Him and a human rider. Some of them have been over the Fanishkorite border.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Is that a problem?\" Lamprophyre's uneasiness grew.\n\n\"Of course it is. We're almost at war with Fanishkor\u2014even a dragon ought to know that. Fanishkor is very interested in any information that will give them an edge over Gonjiri. With all that flying, scouting overhead, I'm sure the blue dragon and his rider have a very good sense of where our military presence is. Do you suppose Father will believe he didn't sell information to Fanishkor the last time he landed there?\"\n\nLamprophyre's chest ached with tension. \"That's ridiculous. Flint has no interest in giving Fanishkor information. Fanishkor attacked dragons and tried to bring us into a war with Gonjiri. Flint would have no reason to help them even if we weren't allied with Gonjiri.\"\n\nManishi shrugged. \"I suppose we can put it to Father. Who do you think he'll believe?\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre shut her mouth. The idea of Flint as a spy was ludicrous. It didn't make sense even if she assumed he'd done what Manishi suggested, but had been an innocent dupe of his human rider. And yet\u2026 \"You have no evidence,\" she said.\n\n\"I have plenty of evidence,\" Manishi said. \"I observed that dragon landing in Fanishkor and meeting with humans, and I made a record.\" She crossed the room to her enormous slab of polished obsidian, which rested in a frame that could be rotated vertically or horizontally. At the moment, it was upright and reflected the room dimly, an imperfect mirror that made Lamprophyre look like a fuzzy-edged blue blob.\n\nManishi took a thin wand of rose quartz the length of her forearm from a sheath connected to the mirror's frame and ran its tip across the surface of the obsidian, from upper right to lower left. It made a faint scratching sound, but left no mark on the shining, flawless stone.\n\nLight flickered from deep within the obsidian like a torch coming to life, warm and glowing. It spread and grew lighter until the entire surface glowed pale yellow with a radiance that made Lamprophyre close her nictitating lids briefly. Manishi held the wand to her lips and whispered something across its tip, then held it to the mirrored, glowing surface.\n\nColor bled outward from the tip of the wand, blues and greens and browns spreading like ink dropped into a puddle of water. Unlike ink, the colors stayed discrete; if anything, they became more coherent the farther they flowed across the mirror. After only a few beats, Lamprophyre realized she was seeing a picture of a hilltop, gentle and low, unlike the foothills near her rocky home. Greenish-yellow grass burned by the summer sun covered the hilltop. Five darker shapes, one very large, filled the view. Lamprophyre blinked and squinted to bring them into focus; the image wavered as if Lamprophyre had ducked her head underwater without closing her nictitating membranes.\n\nThen the image became clear, and Lamprophyre gasped at the sight of Flint and four humans gathered together on the hilltop. For a beat, nothing moved, and then the image jerked into motion, looking for all the world as if Lamprophyre were looking through a window at the real Flint. She couldn't hear anything, but the figures' lips were moving, and Flint lowered his head to listen to one of the humans. Another of the humans handed something small and square to the speaker; Lamprophyre couldn't make it out, but the speaker reached into it and thumbed through its contents, convincing Lamprophyre that it was paper.\n\nThen the human who'd handed the paper over climbed onto Flint's shoulders, and Flint took off, soaring out of the picture. Manishi touched the wand's tip to the mirror, and the image shivered, then dissolved into a swirling mass of color which flowed in reverse back into the wand.\n\nLamprophyre stared at the obsidian mirror until all the light drained from it. \"How did you do that?\" she demanded. \"Why did you do that? Have you been spying on all of us?\"\n\n\"I have my methods,\" Manishi said. \"And it hardly matters why, not when the evidence is so strong.\"\n\nThe blank face of the obsidian mirror reflected Lamprophyre poorly, but her aghast expression was clear, if only to her. \"It doesn't mean anything,\" she finally said, cursing how weak her voice sounded.\n\n\"I'm sure Father will agree. Let's ask him.\" Manishi regarded her with a pleasant smile. Lamprophyre wished she dared smack that smile off the adept's face.\n\nShe considered her options. She was certain Flint hadn't done anything wrong and almost as certain that he hadn't even done anything wrong unintentionally. But proving that would be difficult. Manishi's father, King Ekanath, might want his dragon alliance, but he was unlikely to give anyone, dragon or not, the benefit of the doubt when it came to apparent espionage. Lamprophyre felt confident that eventually, she'd be able to convince Ekanath of Flint's innocence. It was \"eventually\" that worried her. So much turmoil would ensue between now and that eventual time, and who knew what kind of other, permanent repercussions there might be?\n\n\"Fine,\" she said. \"I'll bring you more kyanite. But you'll pay the standard rate. I don't believe Flint is guilty.\"\n\n\"Of course. I'm no blackmailer,\" Manishi said, her smile broadening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Lamprophyre arranged with her blackmailer the details of providing Manishi with the stone she wanted and flew off toward the warehouses. Fury had taken over irritation. What the Stones had Flint been thinking? She was going to tear him apart.\n\nWhen she arrived at the warehouses, only Flint, Dolomite, and Coquina were there. \"Where are the others?\" she asked. She still felt wary of letting any of her friends wander Tanajital freely when there were still ecclesiasts around. Then she felt angry again, for a different reason. Dragons shouldn't have to alter their behavior out of fear of the ecclesiasts.\n\n\"Porphyry and Bromargyrite left to buy cows for Depik to cook,\" Dolomite said. His dark green scales looked nearly black in the dimness of his warehouse, so he was virtually invisible except for the silver-shot blue of his wing membranes, the exact color of a summer sky over the mountains laced with impossible lightning. \"Orthoclase had to see someone about an exchange of stone.\"\n\n\"Exchange of stone? Was he selling kyanite?\"\n\nDolomite and Flint exchanged wary glances. She realized she'd sounded a little too shrill and intense.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Dolomite said. \"Why?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"It's not important. Flint, why have you been flying to Fanishkor?\"\n\nFlint now looked alarmed. \"Lamprophyre, are you angry about something?\"\n\n\"Just answer the question.\"\n\n\"Lokun likes flying, and he has friends all over the world, not just in Gonjiri.\" Flint's gaze on Lamprophyre was steady and not at all guilty. \"He's introduced me to many of them.\"\n\n\"And he gave the ones in Fanishkor information? Confidential information?\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart felt leaden. \"Tell me the truth, Flint. Have you and Lokun been spying for Fanishkor?\"\n\nFlint's eyes widened. \"Of course not! Why would you even think that? Fanishkor's government is our enemy.\"\n\n\"And yet Lokun handed a Fanishkorite documents containing secret information he gained from what he saw when you flew all over Gonjiri.\" Her words tasted sour, as if she were male and bubbling over with acid from her second stomach instead of fire.\n\n\"He did not! Lamprophyre, who told you these lies?\" Flint was breathing heavily now, and the scent of acid wafted from his lips.\n\nLamprophyre settled back on her haunches, feeling as weary as if she'd flown to Mother Stone and back without stopping. \"I saw you,\" she said. \"Princess Manishi has some way of observing people at a distance and preserving that observation so others can see it. I watched you and Lokun hand over a packet of papers to Fanishkorites. I know you've flown over the land enough to make detailed records of where Gonjiri's military is deployed. Flint, please. Tell me I'm wrong.\"\n\nFlint settled back as well, his mouth a tight, angry line, his wings furled close about him as if for protection. \"We gave papers to those Fanishkorites, yes,\" he said, \"but they were plans for a house Lokun designed for his friend. Lokun is famous as a designer of human buildings, not just as a mason. Fanishkor may be our enemy, but a lot of its people just want to live in peace. I can't believe you'd take the word of some human over mine.\"\n\nHis surface thoughts were hurt, and angry, and Lamprophyre felt guilt tangle with her ebbing fury. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"But you don't understand how damning those images were. If Manishi wants to, she can take them to her father and claim what I just accused you of, and Ekanath would almost certainly believe her.\"\n\n\"But we'd tell him otherwise,\" Dolomite said. \"It's just a misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"The king is still worried about war,\" Coquina said, drawing every dragon's attention. \"He's not going to take chances. If he finds out about this, it won't matter if we tell him the truth. He'd send Flint home and probably do awful things to Lokun to get him to reveal his supposed contacts in Fanishkor.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't let that happen,\" Flint said, spreading his wings to make himself look bigger.\n\n\"But I don't understand why Manishi would care,\" Dolomite said. \"I've only met her once, but she struck me as completely uninterested in politics.\"\n\n\"She cares,\" Lamprophyre said wearily, \"because she can use those images to make me do what she wants.\"\n\n\"So what does she want?\" Coquina asked. \"It must be something awful if she has to force you to do it.\"\n\n\"It's not awful\u2014at least, I don't think it is. Manishi is experimenting with kyanite and she needs a large supply of it. Without telling any other human she wants it or has it. I've brought her some in the past, but you can imagine I don't like selling it when we could eat it instead.\"\n\nDolomite smiled reflectively, apparently reminiscing on past meals. Flint said, \"So she threatened you so you'd supply her with kyanite. Is that why you wanted to know if Orthoclase was selling it?\"\n\n\"Yes. She suspects some of her rivals have private suppliers, because they aren't looking for it in the market anymore, and of course she assumed one of us was that.\"\n\n\"It's not me,\" Dolomite said. \"I've been working on a way to allow dragons to race, and no one's even approached me asking me to provide them with stone.\"\n\n\"I spend all my time in Tanajital in the coliseum,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"You already know what I've been doing,\" Flint said. His voice was calm, but his thoughts were still angry. Lamprophyre's fury became directed at Manishi. How dare she make her doubt a clutchmate?\n\n\"Flint, I'm sorry I accused you,\" she said. \"I didn't believe you'd done anything wrong, but I was angry at being blackmailed and I was angry you'd done something so careless as dealing with Fanishkorites. But of course there's nothing wrong with having friends, even if those friends are citizens of the wrong country. Please forgive me not trusting you.\"\n\n\"I accept your apology,\" Flint said. \"And I think we should be grateful for one thing to come out of this misunderstanding, which is that we now know Manishi is capable of spying on us and ruthless enough to use that against us. Is there anything we can do about that, do you think?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Though it did seem she kept the images inside a wand, like ink in a bottle, only when she poured them out, they made pictures instead of a pool of ink. I suppose, if we stole the wand\u2014\"\n\n\"Careful,\" Coquina said. \"What if she's watching us now?\"\n\n\"It's just images, not sound. If it had sound, I'd have heard what Lokun was actually saying and the king would know it was an innocent transaction.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"And we can't steal the wand, because Manishi has protections on her workshop that are powerful enough to blow even the palace apart, or so she told me once. Even a dragon might take damage from that.\"\n\nThey all fell silent, their thoughts somber and melancholy. Eventually Flint roused himself to say, \"There's nothing we can do about it, save provide Manishi with the kyanite she wants. And see if Orthoclase has been selling it to others. I know he has any number of deals going with human merchants, but last I heard, he was buying varieties of granite from all over Gonjiri, not dealing in crystals. But he has to fund those purchases somehow, and it's probably by selling stone from the home gleaning fields.\"\n\nA large shadow swept over them, temporarily blocking out the sun. Orthoclase landed neatly on the street beyond and turned around, tucking his tail close to his body and furling his wings. \"Who's selling stone?\" he asked. \"I know all the major buyers now, and what they're looking for. I have to say, collecting coin is far more satisfying than I ever imagined back when old Scoria told us stories of humans and their obsession with it.\"\n\n\"What have you been selling?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nOrthoclase's elegant eye ridges flared. \"A lot of different stones. Why? Am I in trouble? Because you're all looking at me like I'm the last cow in the herd.\"\n\n\"We have a problem,\" Lamprophyre said, and quickly explained Manishi's blackmail.\n\nOrthoclase's expressive eyes grew cold and hard as she spoke. When she finished, he said, \"And there's nothing we can do about it.\"\n\n\"We'll think of something,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Right now I think we should find out who's been selling kyanite. I take it it's not you, Orthoclase.\"\n\n\"Definitely not. Kyanite is one of my favorite foods, and there's never enough of it. A human would have to offer me a pile of vahas to get me to part with it.\" Orthoclase stood and tried to pace, but came up against Coquina in just two steps and had to subside. \"But is that really a good idea? It sounds like Manishi fears any investigation will lead back to her, and she might decide to tell her father her story as revenge if she thinks we're responsible for revealing her interest.\"\n\n\"We know humans get kyanite from places other than our mountains,\" Coquina said, \"because they knew what it was before Lamprophyre brought it to Tanajital, right? So if there are other adepts who are experimenting with it, and they've suddenly stopped, they're getting it from secret sources. And wouldn't a human do better bringing something that valuable to market and letting humans compete to pay her the most for it? Like in the story about the pearl?\"\n\n\"That suggests those other sources are illicit,\" Flint agreed. \"And it makes me wonder if humans aren't going to our mountains secretly and mining things for themselves.\"\n\nLamprophyre's breath caught in her throat. \"They couldn't. Could they? Wouldn't someone have noticed?\"\n\n\"There are a lot of mountains, and our flight only occupies some of them.\" Flint stood and stretched his wings, barely missing Dolomite's head. \"Now that humans know dragons are allies, and not inclined to attack humans, there might be some daring enough to sneak into the mountains for stone. Some of those stones aren't available in the lowlands, even from merchants from other countries, and some of them are closer and more plentiful than in other places. I know Lokun said something about our garnet being cheaper than the stone from Sachetan.\"\n\n\"Which might make Sachetan angry,\" Coquina pointed out. \"Not that that's relevant now, but it might mean Sachetan is looking to undercut us.\" She laughed. \"I'm talking like a human merchant. I blame Melika. Her family sells artifacts, and she knows all about how stone sales work.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"She does? Would she be willing to explain it to us?\"\n\n\"You think Melika might be able to find out who's supplying kyanite?\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"She'd be discreet, and she wouldn't want the information getting back to Manishi,\" Coquina said. \"I can ask her.\"\n\n\"There is one other thing,\" Dolomite said. \"Don't we want to know why Manishi and all those adepts want kyanite? If they're experimenting with it, that means they intend it to do something. To be an artifact. And if Manishi is so underhanded as to blackmail us, I don't trust her to only create artifacts that are harmless.\"\n\n\"I have a book on magic,\" Lamprophyre said, \"something general for beginners. It will provide a foundation for me to understand more complicated magic. And there's a scholar-adept at the academy named Sabarna who's helped me in the past. I think I can ask her questions. Though\u2026\"\n\n\"Though, what?\" Flint asked.\n\n\"She wasn't forthcoming about the uses of kyanite either. And I couldn't understand her thoughts the same way we can't understand Manishi's. Maybe I don't want to involve her, after all.\"\n\n\"I think it's past time we figured out why those two humans' thoughts are impossible to hear,\" Flint said. He laughed. \"Seems like we just gave ourselves assignments the way Dharan does Porphyry.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"Find the suppliers of kyanite. Figure out what the adepts are trying to do with it. Discover Manishi and Sabarna's secret ability. Oh, yes, and make a trip home to collect kyanite for our blackmailer.\" She sighed. \"You're right, that sounds like a lot of work.\"\n\n\"I think it's exciting,\" Coquina said. \"Solving a mystery. It's like the stories about the human female Veena from before the Great Cataclysm, how she would find things that were stolen or learn who attacked someone. It must be so challenging, not being able to tell what someone's thinking or whether they're lying. Of course, if she could do that, there wouldn't have been stories.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Flint said. \"I never knew you liked those stories, too.\"\n\nCoquina shot a glance at Lamprophyre. \"I suppose I didn't want anyone thinking I was childish for liking children's tales.\"\n\n\"Nobody thinks that,\" Flint said. \"Let's all go race. I feel the need to shake the dust of this human city off my feet.\"\n\n\"I'll wait at the embassy for Rokshan, and we'll join you by the river at the usual place.\" Lamprophyre stood and stretched. \"Maybe next time you could bring Lokun. If he's such a good friend, we'd all like to meet him.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Flint said.\n\nLamprophyre watched her friends fly off southward, then headed back to the embassy. She felt much less confident than she'd let on, though she was sure those feelings were buried deep enough no one had heard them. Manishi was clever, and Lamprophyre was sure her amity toward dragons would last only until they turned on her, or made themselves useless to her. They would have to be very careful not to give Manishi any reason to tell the king what she knew.\n\nAnd yet as she alit neatly on the courtyard and entered the embassy, she couldn't help feeling her clutch was on the right track. If they were going to counter Manishi, they needed information, preferably information that would allow them to blackmail the adept in return. It might be their only hope of stopping her. Lamprophyre lay on the cool earth of the hall's floor and sighed. Dragons blackmailing humans. The thought made her feel itchy and guilty. She had no desire to be human, but it seemed humanity had overtaken her, at least in this one way."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Lamprophyre lay in the clearing to the north of Tanajital and tore a mouthful of cow free from its carcass. While Depik had been willing to cook for all seven of the dragons plus Rokshan, his kitchen wasn't large enough to handle three cows without the first one getting cold while the second cooked. So in the end, Flint, Coquina, and Bromargyrite had each carried a butchered cow to the clearing, and Lamprophyre and Coquina had roasted the meat for everyone.\n\n\"This feels so homey,\" Flint said around a large bite of tender meat. \"Like when we were thirty and finally old enough to go off on our own. That one night we spent in the lowlands west of home\u2014remember?\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Coquina said. \"We were so excited about catching our own meals we killed too many boars and had to haul the extras back to the flight the next morning. That was a long and tedious journey.\"\n\n\"But it was the best meal I'd ever had,\" Dolomite said, smiling lazily as if the memory was as fresh as yesterday.\n\n\"I remember a time,\" Rokshan said from his position leaning against Lamprophyre, \"when Dharan and Baleran and I traveled south to Sunital on our own, without our families. We were barely sixteen and we thought we were the lords of creation, adults doing adult things.\"\n\n\"That sounds like you thought wrong,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Some thief took Baleran's money. Slit the bottom of the pouch and lifted the coins neatly as you please. With only two-thirds of our resources left, we couldn't afford three separate rooms at an inn, so we crammed into a tiny garret with only two beds. Dharan snores like a woodcutter with a rusty saw, and Baleran talks in his sleep, so you can imagine how restful the night wasn't.\" Rokshan laughed. \"And in the morning, the innkeeper insisted we'd burned a hole in the bedclothes and extorted an extra five rupyas from us. We hurried back to Tanajital as fast as our feet would carry us and vowed never to take our lives for granted again.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Dolomite said. \"If you're a prince, how were you able to travel so simply and privately? Shouldn't you have had bodyguards, or attendants, or something?\"\n\n\"I didn't exactly have permission.\" Rokshan sat up and reached for a second leg of turkey, which Depik had cooked. \"Though as the youngest son of the king, I'm not as closely watched as, say, Tekentriya is as heir. And I think, looking back on that escapade, my teachers might have been deliberately less observant, to give me a chance to get away from the scrutiny.\"\n\n\"That could have gone badly for them, if you'd been hurt,\" Coquina pointed out.\n\n\"It could. But really, there was no danger. I'm not\u2014well, wasn't then\u2014very recognizable as Prince Rokshan. You'd be surprised at how easily Anchala and I can get away with moving through a crowd without drawing attention. Or\u2014I can't really anymore.\" He gestured at the scars on his cheek. \"People know about what happened to me, and there aren't so many scarred men in Tanajital that I can pass unremarked.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded, keeping her expression neutral. That Rokshan could allude to his disfigurement so casually told her he really had started to come to terms with it. He'd also taken off his shirt and trousers to go swimming, keeping only the short pants he wore to protect his male parts, and behaved as if nothing were wrong. Lamprophyre had had a tense moment when Dolomite, guileless and bad at knowing what not to say, had asked \"Do they hurt?\" with a gesture at Rokshan's thigh (which was, in fact, more severely scarred than the rest of him). But Rokshan had simply said, \"No,\" and when Lamprophyre broke her own rule about not listening to her friend's thoughts, she'd heard only a peaceful reflection on how strange burn scars did feel.\n\n\"I can imagine there are benefits to that as well as drawbacks,\" Flint said. \"Being recognized, I mean.\"\n\n\"Well, I spend a great deal of time with Lamprophyre, and she's definitely recognizable,\" Rokshan said, \"so it doesn't take much intelligence to guess who the man flying with her is.\" He looked up at Lamprophyre. \"I was wondering the other day,\" he continued, \"whether there are any duplicates among dragons. Of colors, I mean.\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" Coquina said. \"Porphyry and Nephrite come closest, but Nephrite is a much darker red than Porphyry. For us, at least, there's a huge range of colors even among ones you humans might simply call red. So if there were another dragon with blue scales and copper membranes, her color wouldn't be the exact shade of Lamprophyre, and we could easily tell them apart.\"\n\n\"But it doesn't happen often,\" Orthoclase said. \"And we certainly don't have identical dragons the way humans have sometimes. I was so startled when I saw a human female the other day with two children who looked exactly the same. I thought the child had some kind of magic that moved it instantly from one place to another.\"\n\n\"Twins,\" Rokshan said. \"Yes, sometimes human women give birth to more than one child at once, and sometimes those children are identical.\"\n\n\"That must be so uncomfortable,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Having more than one baby inside you. Women already look enormous when they are ready to give birth to just one child.\"\n\nBromargyrite stirred his enormous self, but said nothing. Lamprophyre could hear enough of his thoughts to know he'd been about to ask something about human childbirth, or the sex that led to childbirth, but had changed his mind when he remembered it was Rokshan he'd meant to ask. For someone who'd actually had sex, Rokshan was remarkably easy to embarrass with mention of it.\n\nShe wondered if he'd be more frank with the dragons if she and Coquina weren't present, since he'd told her more than once that among Gonjirians, it was considered crude to discuss sexual matters with members of the opposite sex. Lamprophyre, who wasn't yet on the verge of being pair-bonded, hadn't had the discussion with Hyaloclast about the practicalities of dragon sex, so it wasn't as if she had anything to compare the human kind to.\n\n\"Female dragons become large, too, just before expelling an egg,\" Orthoclase said. \"Not as large as female humans, proportionately.\"\n\n\"It's not something I'm looking forward to,\" Coquina said. She didn't glance at Flint the way she normally did when discussing anything even remotely related to pair-bonding, which surprised Lamprophyre. Maybe Coquina wasn't interested in him, after all. Or maybe she'd finally realized she had a better chance of winning his heart if she wasn't so obvious in her pursuit. Either way, Lamprophyre hoped for Coquina's happiness, and was pleased to find no bitterness in the thought.\n\nBromargyrite got heavily to his feet\u2014he'd eaten more than the rest of them\u2014and stretched so his arms were flung wide, his back was arched, and his wings were spread to their fullest. \"I'm ready for some stone,\" he declared. \"What did you bring, Orthoclase?\"\n\nOrthoclase grinned and opened the heavy leather sack at his side, bigger than a human torso and smelling deliciously of a dozen delicate stone flavors. \"Granite,\" he said. \"But not just any granite,\" he went on quickly as Flint and Coquina groaned. \"I've been experimenting with the different kinds of granite available throughout Gonjiri, and the subtleties are really remarkable.\"\n\n\"I was ready for marble,\" Flint complained. \"I know you have some in there.\"\n\n\"That's the other thing,\" Orthoclase said, ignoring his plaintive tone. \"I've worked on some delicious pairings to take advantage of the granite subtleties.\" He dug about in his sack and removed a couple of fist-sized stones, one white and veined with gray, one rough and nearly black. \"Granite from near the Sachetan border, combined with some marble waste I got from a sculptor here in Tanajital.\"\n\nFlint accepted both stones and cracked each in half. He bit into one of the marble chunks, then took a bite out of the granite. His eye ridges rose. \"That is good,\" he said, his words muffled.\n\nOrthoclase handed around more paired stones. Lamprophyre chewed hers, pink granite that looked like the walls of Tanajital and a slab of silvery mica, with pleasure. \"I've wished I could take a bite out of the city wall from the day I arrived,\" she murmured. The mica fractured pleasantly in her mouth, crunchy and light. She swallowed and added, \"I'm surprised the adepts don't use granite in their magic. There's so much of it, and there are as many kinds are there are of feldspar and quartz and agate, which I know they do use.\"\n\n\"Adepts are strange,\" Bromargyrite said. \"I got to talking with one about a twelveday ago and he had the oddest questions.\"\n\n\"Questions? Like what?\" Lamprophyre sat up, scattering stone crumbs.\n\n\"Oh, like do dragons work magic from eating stone. Do we need stone to fuel our second stomachs. What stones do dragons prefer to eat. The sort of question that reflects more about the asker than anything else. He was clearly convinced we gain some benefit from eating the kinds of stone that an adept would use for magic.\"\n\n\"But he didn't ask about kyanite?\"\n\nBromargyrite shook his head. \"Didn't ask about any stone in specific.\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Rokshan. She had told everyone about Manishi's blackmail while they were swimming, and none of the others had been approached about kyanite. \"I feel we keep accruing more questions,\" Rokshan said, \"and don't have answers for the questions we had before. I wish adepts weren't so secretive. We don't dare ask the questions we most want to know the answers to.\"\n\n\"We'll harvest Manishi's kyanite tomorrow,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and Coquina, you'll ask Melika about it?\"\n\n\"She's been asking if we could go flying, and that would be a good, private way to discuss it.\" Coquina blushed, tinting her grass-green scales light brown. \"It just feels so intimate, letting a human that close. I consider Melika a friend, but I wasn't sure I wanted to single her out from the others. Or maybe I'm wrong, and it will feel perfectly natural.\"\n\n\"It's strange at first, like having a fly perched just out of swatting range,\" Flint said, \"but you wouldn't believe how nice it is to have someone to talk to while you're flying.\"\n\n\"And it's fun to see how much Rokshan enjoys it,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Do I?\" Rokshan asked with a smile.\n\n\"You shout when I do something daring, like you're half scared and half exhilarated.\"\n\n\"That's true. But not every human feels that way. Dharan wouldn't want to fly with a dragon unless it was a choice between that and a horrible death.\" Rokshan set his turkey leg aside and wiped his hands on the grass.\n\nLamprophyre took another bite of mica. \"They don't use mica, either,\" she said, returning to the previous line of conversation. \"But quartz\u2026\"\n\nPorphyry, who'd been silently lying nearby with his eyes closed, stirred and asked, \"What about quartz?\"\n\n\"I thought you were asleep!\"\n\n\"Just digesting.\" Porphyry sat up and took a chunk of streaky lavender quartz from Orthoclase. \"I've noticed a lot of adepts carry quartz artifacts, but never by themselves. That is, if they only have one artifact, it won't be quartz, but if they have two or more, at least one of them is likely to be.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you'd paid that close attention to adepts,\" Flint said.\n\nPorphyry shrugged. \"They interest me. And I've read some of that book Dharan brought you, the one about magic for beginning adepts. The fact that humans place such value on different stones that to us are just food is fascinating, don't you think? It's made me wonder how they figured it out in the first place. They certainly didn't learn it from dragons.\"\n\n\"When I compared Manishi and the scholar-adept Sabarna, back when I first came to Tanajital, I noticed they both had artifacts in common. Chlorite, and quartz.\" Lamprophyre settled down more comfortably. \"And they both have incomprehensible thoughts. I wonder if one or both of those stones is responsible?\"\n\n\"Maybe that's something we can find out,\" Bromargyrite said. \"Though we'd have to be careful not to give our secret away.\"\n\n\"I'd like to look into it,\" Porphyry said. \"I can be discreet. I wish I'd thought to make note of the artifacts the other adepts were carrying, the ones whose thoughts are unintelligible, I mean.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Orthoclase said. \"I've encountered a few adepts in the course of buying stone, and some of them are like Manishi. Who, if we could hear her thoughts, would be less of a threat.\"\n\n\"It sounds like we have direction,\" Flint said. \"Coquina will talk to Melika, Porphyry and Orthoclase will investigate the adepts, and Lamprophyre and Rokshan will harvest kyanite. I think I might come along on that trip. While you're getting the stone, I'll talk to the flight and see if they've noticed anything strange in the gleaning fields. If humans are secretly stealing our stone, they might have left signs.\"\n\n\"I'll visit with that adept again,\" Bromargyrite said. \"He said he was interested in learning about dragonkind. I'm sure I can get some answers out of him without him knowing that's what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"This is exciting!\" Dolomite said. \"What should I do?\"\n\nLamprophyre exchanged glances with Rokshan. Dolomite was no younger than she was\u2014older by a couple of days, even\u2014but his eagerness and guilelessness made him seem as if he belonged to a younger flight. He would be so hurt if she told him there was nothing for him.\n\nAn idea occurred to her. \"Actually, there's something I was meaning to do before Manishi interfered,\" she said. \"The guard captain thought something about there being more ecclesiasts in the streets than usual. I had planned to fly over the city and see if that was true, but would you be interested in doing that instead? I don't want it to wait for me to get back, and the kyanite is going to take all day.\"\n\n\"Why do we care?\" Dolomite asked, though with curiosity rather than the sullen resistance that would have said he saw her offering as makework. \"It's not as if they can hurt us anymore.\"\n\n\"Maybe not the way they tried with Coquina and Bromargyrite, but we're sure they haven't given up on driving us out.\" Lamprophyre stepped closer. \"I think it's very important that we know as much about their movements as we can find out. If the guard captain thought their increased presence was potentially a problem, that tells me the ecclesiasts are a danger to more than just us.\"\n\nDolomite nodded. \"All right. I can mark down what I learn on one of your slates. I may not know how to read yet, but I've seen how humans tally things and it's not much different from our counting.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Dolomite.\" Lamprophyre stood and stretched. \"I think I'll turn in early, so we can make an early start tomorrow. Rokshan, can I take you to the palace?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nRokshan climbed swiftly to his usual seat, and Lamprophyre waited for everyone to collect the picked-clean carcasses and Rokshan's turkey bones before leaping into the sky and heading for the palace. \"How early is an early start?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"Around dawn? I want to have plenty of time to search for kyanite.\"\n\n\"I'll be there.\" Rokshan shifted in a way that suggested he was looking behind them. \"It's still remarkable to see so many dragons in the sky all at once.\"\n\n\"Even more remarkable when it's the whole flight.\" Lamprophyre felt an unexpected pang of homesickness. A ridiculous pang, given that her clutch was almost always here, and she liked Tanajital, and she was free to return home whenever she wanted, but still a pang. It was just as well they were making that trip tomorrow. She would have to make time to visit with the flight. How awful, if she only ever returned home because of Manishi's demands.\n\nShe scowled. Maybe she shouldn't have given in to the blackmail. The king wasn't irrational, and he wanted the dragon alliance; he was unlikely to expel them on so flimsy a piece of evidence as Manishi's magic mirror. But she would have been making that decision on behalf of other people, and that wasn't fair. No, they were better off letting Manishi think she'd won, and secretly working to neutralize her power over them. And if Manishi thought she was cleverer than seven dragons, she was going to be profoundly surprised."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "It was barely midmorning when Lamprophyre swept over the foothills below her mountain home. The summer sun had burned the short grasses golden, and she knew from experience that they were also stiff and dry and prickly-ticklish even against the thick, rough skin of her feet and hands. Her shadow kept pace with her, lumpy and distorted by the curves of the hills and by Rokshan's silhouette. Farther away, Flint followed, his shadow appearing to race hers.\n\nShe flew on, past the foothills into the beginnings of the rocky peaks, furred with the remains of scruffy short plants and prickly with stunted pines that were all that could grow on that ground. The smell of the stone, dry and dusty in this season, cheered her. It was the smell of home.\n\nShe rose higher into the mountains until the air was cool and fresh and she had left even those few plants behind. Rokshan leaned forward so she could hear him over the sound of the rushing wind. \"We're going straight to the gleaning field, yes?\"\n\n\"Yes, and it should be warm enough for you, this time of day.\" Lamprophyre banked and wheeled right, waving at Flint, who kept on going. \"Though we'll stop at the caves on our way back to Tanajital. If Flint discovers that humans have been secretly mining our mountains, we may need to do something about that immediately.\"\n\n\"Is it bad that I hope it is humans mining the mountains for kyanite? That would be an easy solution, not to mention Manishi can hardly gripe about dragons cracking down on theft regardless of what stone they're stealing.\"\n\n\"I was thinking something like that. All the other possibilities are more complicated.\" Lamprophyre scanned the peaks below. Even for her draconic eyesight, the small exposed patch of kyanite was hard to spot. \"I want\u2014oh, there it is.\" She furled her wings and dove so Rokshan would give that shout of terrified excitement that made her laugh.\n\nShe pulled smoothly out of her dive and hovered above the blue bands streaking the gray surface of the mountain. A rockfall sometime earlier that year had exposed the kyanite, and Lamprophyre and other members of the flight had been carefully chipping away stone to expose it further. The sweet, rich scent wafted to her nostrils, and she inhaled deeply, letting the smell fill her with satisfaction.\n\nThere was a ledge about half a dragonlength deep below the gleaning field, and she landed there and carefully let Rokshan down. \"I'm afraid this is going to be boring,\" she said. \"Stay on the far end of the ledge so the rocks don't hit you. They'll be small, but it's still no fun being pelted with gravel.\"\n\nRokshan nodded and walked to where the ledge tapered to no more than a handspan wide. He withdrew a sack from where several were tucked into his belt and shook it out, then sat with his legs dangling over the ledge. If the height\u2014it was another three dragonlengths down to the next flat spot\u2014bothered him, he gave no sign. \"This is an amazing view,\" he said.\n\nWith her feet, Lamprophyre grabbed the lip of the rock beneath the gleaning field, carved out for the use of dragons cutting away the stone, and swiveled to look out over the rocky heights. \"I suppose,\" she said. It looked the same as always, stark rocky slopes descending to the softly rolling foothills and then the vast plains stretching out into misty yellow-gray dimness. Tanajital was too far away to be seen even from this height, but she imagined she could perceive it, straddling the banks of the Green River that lay west of where they were.\n\n\"I suppose,\" Rokshan scoffed. \"How jaded do you have to be not to be amazed by this vista?\"\n\n\"Jaded? More like I've seen this view every day for the last sixty years. That's just experience.\" She swiveled back to face the kyanite. When she and Rokshan had first found it, the dusty blue crystals had been visible only one or two handspans' worth. Now, after several twelvedays of careful excavation, the sweep of kyanite stretched nearly a dragonlength across the sheer surface of the mountain. Sheer except where dragons had removed crystals, of course, and in those places the mountain was pitted and rough like a worm-eaten tree. It was not an image Lamprophyre would have had before living among humans.\n\nShe took hold of a protruding knob designed to steady someone cutting the crystal and extended the strong, powerful claws of her left hand. As she carefully cut along the long side of one of the exposed kyanite crystals, she said, \"I meant to ask how it went, freeing yourself of Nevrita, but I wasn't sure it was something you wanted to talk about. So you don't have to say if you don't want.\"\n\n\"My plan is in motion. I'd rather not discuss the details.\" Rokshan leaned back against the rough face of the mountain so the stone plucked at his black hair. \"I still feel like such a fool for being caught like that.\"\n\n\"I understand. When it's something you've done before, and you think you've learned from your mistakes, but it turns out otherwise\u2014you're not the only one who's done that, you know.\"\n\n\"Really? What have you done that you swore you wouldn't do again?\"\n\nLamprophyre paused in her cutting. \"Oh, Coquina was always good at goading me into pitting myself against her. Racing, specifically. I've never beaten her in a race, and after every loss I always swore I wouldn't try again, but then I'd tell myself it must have been a fluke and challenge her, or accept her challenge, and of course I'd lose again.\"\n\n\"But you're friends now.\"\n\n\"I think so. We have a lot of years of anger to get past, and I still have flashes of jealousy of her, so I don't know that our relationship is totally repaired. But we finally both want to be friends, and that's the beginning of fixing things.\" Lamprophyre carefully thumped the stone above the crystal to free it, then handed it down to Rokshan to put in his sack. \"That was faster than I anticipated. Maybe we'll be back at the embassy in time for supper.\"\n\n\"That would be nice.\" Rokshan sat down again. Lamprophyre shifted her position and spread her wings to keep her balance. The smell of kyanite made her stomachs rumble, and she resisted taking even a small bite. She knew very well how it worked: one small bite led to another, and another, until you were logy and over-full from eating a whole crystal of the rich stuff.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said, and the too-casual sound of his voice made her stop her cutting again. \"Are you, um, interested in any of your clutchmates?\"\n\n\"What? You mean, as a mate?\"\n\n\"Never mind. I shouldn't have asked.\"\n\nLamprophyre realized how shocked she'd sounded. \"No, it's all right, you just startled me. What makes you ask?\"\n\n\"I was curious. Now that I've gotten to know them, and I understand you're likely to choose one of the males as your mate, I can't help trying to see them as a dragon would. But I have no more understanding of dragon beauty than you have of human, except what you've said about Flint being very attractive.\" Rokshan chuckled. \"I still say you have the nicest coloring, but Flint comes close.\"\n\nLamprophyre smiled. \"Thank you. Flint's colors are attractive, yes, but he's also handsome because his shape is nice, and his muscles are defined without being obvious, and his eye ridges are very expressive. Though Orthoclase's eyes are actually prettier than Flint's. Orthoclase can even do that trick with his eye ridges that some of you humans do with your eyebrows, waggling them independently. He learned from watching Dharan.\"\n\n\"I see. So you're attracted to Flint?\"\n\nLamprophyre handed Rokshan another crystal. \"I'm not. I'm not attracted to any of them, which is hard because I'm so close to all of them. But there's still time for that to change. Or I'll find a mate in the next older clutch. I'm not worried.\"\n\nRokshan looked her in the eye, making her hesitate rather than returning to her task. \"Aren't you?\" he said, in a tone of voice inviting her to say more.\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"All right, I'm a little worried,\" she said. \"Hyaloclast and Aegirine were pair-bonded when they were my age. Aegirine told me when I was little that he'd never so much as looked at another female, that he'd loved Hyaloclast from the time he was old enough to understand what love was. I don't know how Hyaloclast felt about him, because she and I don't talk about personal things, but I think she loved him enough that she hasn't pair-bonded again even though he died many years ago. So if my parents had such an immediate and lasting connection, I feel there's something wrong with me that I haven't.\"\n\n\"If they were human, I'd say what your parents had is pretty rare,\" Rokshan said. \"My parents had a political marriage, and Mother said it was a miracle they fell in love. She said my father believed she only married him to be queen, and she believed he'd chosen her because he needed a mother for his three children. According to her, it took them more than a few years to realize they were wrong about each other. But now they're very close, for all Father seems hard and unyielding and Mother is diffident.\"\n\n\"But it's not quite the same for dragons. It's like, oh, I don't know. I'm always afraid the males of my clutch are waiting for me to choose one of them, and that it changes how they see me. It's a burden that I'm not interested in any of them. And what if I never find anyone I'm attracted to? We have so many stories about the beauties of the pair-bond. I want to experience them for myself.\"\n\n\"You still have plenty of time,\" Rokshan said. \"Though I understand why you'd feel their regard was a burden. They're all good people and worthy of you, except maybe Dolomite, and that's not his fault.\"\n\n\"Yes, he's just too innocent for me to think of him seriously as a potential mate.\" Lamprophyre resumed cutting, licked her claws for a taste of the sweet crystal, and added, \"I do sometimes think about each of them as if they were my mate, testing the idea, you know? And if I had to pick one\u2014if love weren't an issue\u2014I don't know who I'd choose, because they're all interesting in different ways. It's probably different for humans, but with dragons, a mate will know if you're not completely honest, and that includes how you feel about him. I couldn't do that to any of my friends, choosing them just to have chosen someone.\"\n\n\"Yes, humans are better at being deceptive,\" Rokshan said drily.\n\n\"Sorry, I forgot. It's too bad humans aren't more like dragons that way.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" Rokshan said. \"Humans are made for deceit. Not in an awful way, just that our society is built around little white lies and we're used to that. So if we were suddenly incapable of lying without it being found out, I think our civilization might collapse.\"\n\n\"That makes sense.\" Lamprophyre sniffed the next crystal, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes in pleasure. \"Oh, that is good. It's unfortunate you can't smell this, though really it's just as well because you'd want to eat it if you could smell it, and that would be a disaster.\"\n\nRokshan took it from her and set it gently in his sack. \"What does it smell like? Or is that an unanswerable question?\"\n\n\"Maybe not. It smells a little like that brown stuff they had at the Rezmish ambassador's reception. The stuff that melted immediately when I touched it.\"\n\n\"Like chocolate?\" Rokshan grinned. \"If that's true, it's no wonder you dragons are crazy for it. Chocolate's only been readily available here in the last seventeen years, I think. At least, I can remember being a child and tasting it for the first time when the ambassador from Sachetan gave some to my father as a sample of what they wanted to start trading. I think it's much more valuable than garnet, but then I have no need for a contraceptive or a virility enhancer.\"\n\n\"You said that Sister of the Red wore her garnet artifact openly, so people would know she can't have children. Now you say it enhances someone's sex abilities. How can the same stone do two opposite things? And don't say it's not polite to discuss it with a female, because you brought it up.\"\n\nRokshan groaned. \"I did, didn't I? Well, there's not much to tell. All I know is that garnet has an inherent quality that affects reproduction. So I imagine cut one way, it can make someone more fertile, and cut a different way, it can inhibit fertility.\"\n\n\"I don't understand why someone would want not to have children. That's not a dragon thing at all.\"\n\n\"Well, it's mostly women who use those, because the burden of childbearing falls most heavily on them. They endure nine months of increasing discomfort, then the agony of childbirth\u2014\"\n\n\"Childbirth hurts humans? I suppose that makes sense, but expelling an egg is supposed to be a pleasurable sensation.\"\n\n\"The woman has to push the baby out of her body through a very small passage, and no, Lamprophyre, I am not going to elaborate on that for you. Anyway, yes, childbirth is painful. And then there's years of taking care of the baby until it's old enough to be left with someone not the mother. Human women produce milk for their babies, and although there are other foods you can feed an infant, that milk is still the most nutritious substance it can get. Which is all a very long way of saying that a woman who has a demanding job, or doesn't have a husband to help support their family, might not want to be tied down to a baby.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Surprisingly, she did. She cut one more crystal free and said, \"I think that's enough. And we should only give Manishi half of what we gleaned. I don't want her thinking we have access to an unlimited supply, because she might become more demanding.\"\n\n\"Very smart. And half of this is more than we've provided her before in any case.\" Rokshan got to his feet. \"Shall we look for more stones? It's not even noon yet, and we can always use the money.\"\n\n\"Orthoclase said there was a lot of extra turquoise when he was here last. Turquoise is fairly valuable.\" The ledge wasn't big enough for her to fit and give Rokshan a leg up, so she hovered just beside it and extended her arm. Rokshan clambered easily up and settled himself in the notch. Lamprophyre took another long sniff of the kyanite before wheeling away and descending to the lower heights.\n\nThere was enough turquoise she didn't need to cut any free from the mountain. She and Rokshan tossed chunks of it into a different sack so they wouldn't break the long kyanite crystals. When they'd taken as many as Lamprophyre judged the flight could spare, she said, \"I wonder who harvested this much. Leucite, maybe. He loves turquoise.\" She made a face. \"I've never understood the appeal, because it tastes bitter, but there are a few dragons who are crazy for it.\"\n\n\"What I don't understand,\" Rokshan said, \"is how there are so many valuable stones in these mountains. South of here, the mines only produce one or maybe two types of stone, and that's all there is in that area. Yet up here, it's like you scratch the surface and there's a different precious or semi-precious stone.\"\n\n\"I never thought about it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I didn't realize the southern mines were so limited.\" She weighed a lump of turquoise in one hand and let it fall. \"But Mother Stone is different, and so maybe her children are, too.\"\n\n\"I thought dragons were her children. You mean the mountains around Nirinatan\u2014Mother Stone?\"\n\n\"Yes, but they're different kinds of children. We believe that when a dragon dies, her bones enrich the mountain, and so the lower peaks are like the essence of dragons who came before. Except the mountains are far too big to be nothing but dragon bones. So they're really only metaphorically her children, unlike dragons, whose spirits come from Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"That's fascinating,\" Rokshan said. \"I wonder why human legends don't say anything about that. It's not like humans and dragons didn't live together centuries ago. And yet we have stories of Katayan instead.\"\n\nLamprophyre shrugged. \"Who knows what else we've lost over the centuries? Dragons have no memories of human religion at all.\" She crouched. \"Let's see if there's any jade. I was thinking we could sell directly to the adepts who supply stone to the healing centers.\"\n\nRokshan clambered up. \"Manishi won't be happy.\"\n\n\"I never promised to deal exclusively with her, whatever she says. And she doesn't use jade, anyway.\"\n\n\"True.\" Rokshan swiveled in his seat. \"There's Flint. Maybe he learned something.\"\n\nLamprophyre pushed off with her powerful legs and rose to meet Flint. His unexpectedly rapid flight brought him even with her before she could ascend very high. \"You look like you're in a hurry,\" she said. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"Nephrite and Heliodor said they saw humans on the lower slopes a few days ago,\" Flint gasped. \"They\u2014the humans\u2014moved like they were trying to go unobserved. So Nephrite concealed himself long enough to watch them, and then Heliodor swooped low overhead to see what they'd do. They scattered, but Nephrite saw they had pack animals laden heavily with lumpy sacks. And a bunch of tools Nephrite described as 'sticks with metal teeth.' I wish memories were visual, because I could have seen what he meant, but I'm sure they were mining tools.\"\n\n\"So we were right,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm surprised it was that easy.\"\n\n\"It's not easy at all,\" Flint said. \"The humans left three or four days ago, and they might be anywhere now. There's no way for us to catch them and prove they were stealing stone.\"\n\n\"Except that Rokshan is an excellent tracker,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I'm honored at your faith in me,\" Rokshan replied, \"but it's rained here at least twice in the last four days, and that rain will have obliterated any trace of those thieves.\"\n\nLamprophyre grimaced. \"I guess it doesn't matter, then. Though we know\u2014you did tell the flight to watch for more thieves, yes?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Flint drew in a deep breath and expelled acid-scented air. \"But that will matter only for the territory around the caves. They didn't seem concerned about watching the length of the mountains, and why would they? There's only so much territory we can defend.\"\n\n\"Then we'll have to track the thieves at the other end,\" Rokshan said. \"In Tanajital, or in the other large cities. And that's only the Gonjirians. There's no way to know if Fanishkor is sending miners to the mountains abutting on their country.\"\n\nHe sounded frustrated, and Lamprophyre said, \"But we're not worried about stone theft in general, are we? Just people mining kyanite illicitly and selling it in secret. Though I am angry about the thefts. I almost had Hyaloclast convinced that we could allow humans to mine in our territory. Now she'll be angry and forbid it, and we'll miss out on all the artifacts we could have traded for.\"\n\n\"You're right, though.\" Rokshan leaned forward so she and Flint could hear him more clearly. \"As infuriating as the idea of theft is, we're really only concerned about the influx of kyanite. Was there any of it in the area Heliodor and Nephrite saw the thieves?\"\n\n\"No,\" Flint said, brightening. \"Nor in any of the adjacent areas.\"\n\n\"So they aren't the ones we're after.\" Rokshan absently patted Lamprophyre's shoulder. \"We can go home and see what the others learned.\"\n\n\"First, I want to say hello to the flight,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I want to catch up on all the gossip.\"\n\n\"I didn't know dragons gossiped,\" Rokshan said as Lamprophyre turned and flew westward. \"What with hearing each other's thoughts.\"\n\n\"We only hear surface thoughts. Listening in on purpose is bad manners. So there's still talk, and people's art creations, and new pair-bond announcements. And seeing how the dragonets fare.\" Lamprophyre felt a proprietary interest in the dragonet Opal, whom she and Rokshan had rescued from human bandits before her hatching. But whenever she was close to Opal, the dragonet burst into alarmed chatter about anything that flitted across her mind, and Lamprophyre had to settle for reports from Bromargyrite, who was Opal's brother.\n\nThey stayed and talked with the flight until midafternoon, at which point Lamprophyre and Flint headed back to Tanajital. The journey home was a silent one. Lamprophyre felt she'd talked herself out in her conversations with her friends, and talking to another dragon while flying was difficult, as you had to shout to be heard over the distance dragons necessarily had to be separated by so they wouldn't collide. Rokshan, too, was quiet, but he was probably thinking about the next step in finding out where the mysterious kyanite was coming from.\n\nAt nearly sunset, they separated at the city wall, Flint heading for the warehouses, Rokshan and Lamprophyre flying to the embassy. Before splitting off, Flint had said simply, \"Come to the warehouses after you eat, and we'll discuss with the others.\"\n\nLamprophyre had nodded, feeling too hungry and weary from the long flight to speak.\n\nThe courtyard was full of beggars eating soup, so Lamprophyre landed atop the embassy roof and scrambled awkwardly down behind the embassy. She crouched so Rokshan could climb off and said, \"Do you want soup, or are you going to the palace for supper?\"\n\n\"Soup. I want to hear what everyone learned.\" Rokshan stretched and yawned. \"Besides, the soup smells incredible.\"\n\nLamprophyre crept past the kitchen into the dining pavilion and settled herself on the dusty flagstones. The woman with two children was supervising washing their faces at the water barrel. The old man with the wispy white hair sat cross-legged beside the embassy's front door, drinking soup as was his custom. He seemed untroubled by whatever pained his head tonight. Lamprophyre didn't see the one-legged man, Sumaan, but the Sister of the Red had her bowl in one hand held close to her lips and was eating tidily, her attention on her meal.\n\nRokshan returned to her side with his bowl and spoon just as Depik wheeled out the trolley with a beautifully sectioned and roasted pig on it. The smell was incredible. Lamprophyre tore into the meat and nodded thanks at Depik, her mouth too full to speak. Hot meat juices dripped down her chin, but she was too hungry to care about what she looked like.\n\nRokshan paused in his eating. \"That's a reverend,\" he said, pointing with his spoon at a portly man wearing ordinary trousers and a sleeveless shirt. The only thing that set him apart from the beggars, aside from his confident bearing, was a length of fabric the color of buttercups draped over one shoulder and secured in a knot at the opposite hip. The fabric was thick and wide and fell in a long drape from that knot to brush the ground. The reverend held it gathered in one hand and let it sway as if he were using it to sweep the street.\n\n\"Surely reverends aren't beggars?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Not to my knowledge.\"\n\nRokshan set his bowl aside and got to his feet. He hadn't taken more than a couple of steps toward the reverend when the man released his grip on the fabric and raised both hands high above his head. \"O beloved of Jiwanyil,\" he shouted. His voice wasn't deep and had a slightly nasal quality to it, but it filled the courtyard nonetheless. \"Our God is all-knowing and all-merciful. He wants all his children to return to him. But his understanding has a limit. Jiwanyil has declared what the children of Katayan must do to return to their God's embrace, and he sorrows at their recalcitrance.\"\n\n\"Now, wait just a minute,\" Lamprophyre said, rising.\n\nThe reverend ignored her. \"Katayan weeps for his children, and Jiwanyil weeps with him. Jiwanyil fears the disobedience of the children of Katayan will corrupt his children. He has warned many times, but to no avail. Therefore, he has instructed his ecclesiasts and the reverends who are their right arm to take stronger measures.\"\n\nRokshan had halted. Lamprophyre, watching him, was caught by the odd look on his face, as if he anticipated a blow.\n\n\"As the voice of the ecclesiasts,\" the reverend continued, \"I instruct the worthy children of Jiwanyil to have no dealings with the children of Katayan. Anyone found violating this instruction will be considered an unworthy follower. And the destiny of unworthy followers is to be cut off from Jiwanyil's blessings.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Rokshan let out a hiss that made him sound almost draconic. \"You,\" he said, striding forward to face the reverend, \"what exactly are you saying?\"\n\nRokshan towered over the portly reverend, but the man looked at him without a trace of fear. \"Jiwanyil's instructions are clear,\" he said. \"Have no dealings with dragons, and you will partake of Jiwanyil's grace. Continue to consort with them, and be denied his blessings.\"\n\n\"You can't be serious.\"\n\nThe reverend turned his gaze on the men and women filling the courtyard. All of them stood frozen, some with full spoons half-raised to their lips, others gripping their bowls in taut-knuckled hands. \"When Jiwanyil's warnings go unheeded, God must speak more loudly,\" he said. \"He pleads with you to return to the true faith. You have been warned.\" He turned his back on Rokshan and walked out of the courtyard, his yellow drape once more sweeping the street into puffs of dust rising wherever he trod.\n\nLamprophyre hurried to Rokshan's side. \"What does it mean, be denied Jiwanyil's blessings?\" she said in a low voice. \"Rokshan. Talk to me.\"\n\nRokshan shuddered as if a chill had touched his spine, impossible to imagine in this sultry weather. All around them, beggars came back to life, gathering together into small murmuring groups. Some of them cast wary glances at Lamprophyre.\n\n\"It means,\" Rokshan said in the same low voice, \"not being allowed to worship in congregations. Denied the rites of marriage or burial. Shut out from religious ceremonies and celebrations. It means excommunication.\"\n\nShe had never heard the word before, but it sounded like a death knell. \"Can they do that?\"\n\n\"Of course they can do that, Lamprophyre. The ecclesiasts are told what behavior is in harmony with Jiwanyil, and they proclaim that to the people.\"\n\nHe sounded so angry Lamprophyre recoiled. \"But you don't believe that, do you? That spending time with me angers your God?\"\n\nRokshan wasn't looking at her. He had his gaze fixed on the courtyard. People were setting down their bowls and walking toward the street, their heads lowered as if they felt shamed. Lamprophyre watched the woman drag her two children away. The younger one was screaming and fighting her, and the older child cried something about being hungry still that made Lamprophyre feel sick.\n\n\"Rokshan, you have to stop them,\" she said. \"They need this food. Tell them it's a mistake. That Jiwanyil doesn't mean them to go hungry just because it's a dragon providing the food.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"They won't believe that.\" He bent to put his own bowl on the ground. \"I don't know. Lamprophyre, I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Sorry? Sorry for what?\"\n\nBy this time, only a handful of people were left in the courtyard. One was the Sister of the Red. The old man still sat by the embassy door, slurping soup as if he hadn't understood the reverend's warning.\n\n\"Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling desperate, \"look at me. Look at me!\"\n\nHe turned, and the look on his face was so empty, so hollow, it made her feel even sicker. \"I have to go,\" he said, and turned away.\n\n\"Rokshan, wait!\"\n\nHe paused without turning around. Desperate words whirled through her mind, but she couldn't think of anything that might convince him to stay.\n\n\"You know this is wrong,\" she finally said. \"No God who loves his children would demand such a sacrifice.\"\n\nWithout looking back, Rokshan said, \"God sees farther than we do. He gives us instruction because it will benefit us, even if we don't know why. That's the kind of love Jiwanyil has for us.\" He walked away across the courtyard and vanished down the street.\n\nLamprophyre let out a terrible, anguished cry and leaped into the air, heedless of the people remaining in the courtyard. From above, she could see Rokshan making progress down the streets, headed toward the palace. She thought about descending on him, catching him up and carrying him away as she had the day she'd met him. If she could get him alone, she could convince him the reverend was wrong. She could remind him that their friendship mattered more than the foolishness of the ecclesiasts. But the crowds pressed him too closely, and he never looked up even though he could surely hear her beating the air above him. With another cry, she wheeled around and arrowed toward the warehouses.\n\nMost of her clutch was there, though Porphyry and Bromargyrite were absent. Lamprophyre stumbled to a halt in the street and cried out, \"The ecclesiasts have struck again!\"\n\n\"Did they hurt you?\" Orthoclase asked. \"You look terrified.\"\n\n\"No, it's Rokshan\u2014they didn't\u2014oh, I don't know what I'm saying, it's all so terrible and muddled.\" Lamprophyre drew in a breath and tried to calm herself. \"A reverend came to the embassy and told everyone if they associate with dragons, they can't receive religious blessings anymore.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Why would they do that?\" Dolomite asked.\n\n\"Because it's an excellent threat,\" Flint said. \"Humans won't want to lose their connection to Jiwanyil, certainly not over dragons. Imagine if someone told you you couldn't return to Mother Stone when you die.\"\n\nDolomite shuddered. \"So the humans won't want to deal with us anymore.\"\n\n\"But that can't include the friends we've made,\" Flint said. \"They have to know better.\"\n\nLamprophyre's throat ached with misery. \"Rokshan walked away from me. He just left. I don't understand. This has to be a ruse by the ecclesiasts. I don't believe Jiwanyil wanted it at all.\"\n\n\"The people won't care,\" Coquina said. She looked as stunned as Lamprophyre felt. \"They believe the ecclesiasts speak for their God. Dealing with us was fine so long as it was just a matter of what dragons believe being wrong. Humans might even have thought they were doing God's will in associating with us and maybe bringing us to the truth. Now\u2026\" She let out a hot burst of smoke. \"And there's nothing we can do about it. I don't know much about human law, but I'm sure it doesn't govern ecclesiasts doing purely ecclesiastical things.\"\n\nFlint gripped Lamprophyre's shoulder, steadying her. \"It will be all right,\" he said. \"Rokshan is too good a friend to let this come between you.\"\n\n\"He also has tremendous faith in Jiwanyil,\" Lamprophyre said miserably. \"I know he's said he's comfortable with not knowing the entire truth\u2014that if dragons worship Mother Stone, there's probably a reason humans believe in Katayan\u2014but I doubt that extends to believing the ecclesiasts are lying to everyone in Gonjiri just to drive dragons away.\"\n\n\"But that's what we think, right?\" Dolomite said. \"We know we're not evil.\"\n\n\"No, but maybe the human God is threatened by us, and he really does want us gone,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Orthoclase said. \"I've given the religious situation a lot of thought, and it occurred to me that if the human God Jiwanyil really exists, he would know the truth about dragon religion, that Mother Stone is real and Katayan is made up. Or maybe Katayan is a corruption of what humans used to know about Mother Stone.\" He shook his head impatiently. \"The important thing is, if Jiwanyil is real and really does want dragons gone, he wouldn't dress it up in terms of an imaginary God demanding we worship him. He'd just tell us to get out of Gonjiri.\"\n\n\"So it really is the ecclesiasts trying to get rid of us,\" Flint said. \"But why?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Those ecclesiasts are lying, and worse, they're using people's honest faith to compel them to do what the ecclesiasts want. I refuse to let them manipulate me and I am absolutely not leaving Tanajital, not when I'm still needed here. I'll just have to prove what they're doing.\"\n\nThe four other dragons stared at her. \"Prove, how?\" Flint asked.\n\n\"I don't know. It makes me sick to think that usually I have Rokshan to help me come up with plans.\" She swallowed, trying to ease the ache in her throat. \"Not everyone in Tanajital is devout. We'll still be able to interact with some humans. And then I'll think of something.\"\n\nCoquina laughed, startling the others. \"Sorry,\" she said. \"I was just thinking how Manishi is one of those humans, and I was actually relieved by the thought.\"\n\nOrthoclase chuckled. \"She definitely won't care about being cut off. Neither will Dharan.\"\n\nThis thought comforted Lamprophyre, though not by much. \"I want to talk about what we learned today,\" she said. \"I don't want to think about this until morning. I'm going to have trouble sleeping as it is.\"\n\n\"I told these three what we learned about stone theft,\" Flint said. \"Porphyry is still out investigating. We think. He's been gone since morning.\"\n\n\"Bromargyrite left after noon to talk to that adept he knows,\" Orthoclase said. \"I spent the afternoon at the market, sniffing for stone. I'm afraid I didn't learn much, aside from how common certain stones are. Nobody was actively using magic, so I couldn't compare the effects to the stones and work out what they're for.\"\n\n\"I talked to Melika this morning,\" Coquina said. \"She's going to look into the kyanite situation for us and let me know if she finds out who's selling it. At the very least, she thought she could discover who's buying it.\" Coquina's lovely face hardened. \"Assuming she's willing to speak to me again after this.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. It seemed everything led back to the ecclesiasts' terrible pronouncement.\n\n\"I don't know if I learned anything helpful,\" Dolomite said. \"I flew over the city several times, watching for ecclesiasts, and I saw a lot of them. But the pattern they made didn't mean anything.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"Pattern?\"\n\n\"Well, patterns,\" Dolomite said. \"I drew them on the slate. I hope you don't mind that I borrowed one of yours, Lamprophyre.\" He ducked inside his warehouse and returned holding one of the giant slates Lamprophyre and Porphyry practiced their handwriting on. It was covered with a roughly circular design filled with an intricate, multicolored pattern. A wrist-thick line cut off the left side of the circle, and Lamprophyre, looking at the design in puzzlement, felt the image click into focus. It was an aerial map of Tanajital, rendered beautifully in Dolomite's distinctive artistic style.\n\n\"Where did all the colors come from?\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Oh, humans make chalk in dozens of colors,\" Dolomite said eagerly. \"I bought some so I could draw on the inside of my warehouse. They're amazing, aren't they? But today I used the colors to show the path of each ecclesiast I saw.\" He traced a blue line without touching it, his finger hovering just above. \"This one followed this path. She was moving really slowly, so even though I was watching half a dozen of them, it was easy to keep track of her. The pattern looks like a six-pointed star, see? And she traveled the path four times before returning here. This is the Archprelate's palace.\" This time he did tap the slate, smearing the fat chalk circle slightly.\n\nFlint stepped closer to examine the blue line. \"It does look like a star.\"\n\n\"All the ecclesiasts I saw made patterns,\" Dolomite said, \"and they all traveled over those paths four times before returning. Like wearing a groove in the streets or something.\"\n\n\"And they covered the entire city in their patterns,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Did you only draw the streets the ecclesiasts followed, Dolomite?\"\n\n\"No, the white lines are the large streets they didn't use.\" Dolomite tilted his head curiously. \"There aren't very many of them. I was so interested in the patterns I didn't realize.\"\n\n\"It's interesting, but what does it mean?\" Coquina said. \"Do those patterns matter?\"\n\n\"We don't know enough about human religion to answer that question,\" Flint said.\n\nThe sound of flapping wings made them all look up. \"Sorry that took so long,\" Porphyry said. \"That's beautiful work, Dolomite. What is it?\"\n\n\"A map of Tanajital, and the progress of the ecclesiasts Dolomite saw,\" Flint said. \"What does it look like to you?\"\n\nPorphyry narrowed his eyes. \"Like colored patterns. But in truth, if that represents several paths, it looks like someone searching for something.\"\n\nLamprophyre gasped. \"You're right! They're covering the whole city in a tight pattern the way they would if they were hunting.\"\n\n\"But then why make patterns?\" Coquina said. \"They could achieve the search pattern more efficiently if they weren't constrained by those smaller patterns. See, this one is really small, and it's entirely within this other one.\"\n\n\"Coincidence,\" Lamprophyre snapped. Of course Coquina had to step on Lamprophyre's discovery. She never could bear to see Lamprophyre succeed.\n\n\"It's too regular to be coincidence,\" Coquina said irritably. \"If you'd let go of your need to be right all the time\u2014\"\n\n\"Only when I'm actually right!\"\n\n\"So you're going to insist on your interpretation even though\u2014\"\n\n\"Both of you, stop right now,\" Orthoclase said, spreading his wings with a snap that cut across their argument. \"You're upset because you have human friends who might desert you because of the ecclesiasts' decree. Don't let that affect what we're doing. Or your friendship.\"\n\nLamprophyre closed her mouth. Across from her, Coquina dipped her head low so Lamprophyre couldn't see her face. Hot, embarrassed blood turned Lamprophyre's scales lavender.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she told Coquina. \"Orthoclase is right. And I guess I'm not as comfortable around you as I claimed. Forgive my harsh words.\"\n\n\"No, it's my fault,\" Coquina said. \"I'm the one who turned our disagreement into a personal attack. I'm sorry.\"\n\nSilence fell for a few beats, until Lamprophyre managed to look at Coquina and found the other dragon gazing back at her, somewhat dejectedly. \"If Rokshan doesn't come back, I don't know what I'll do,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nCoquina nodded. \"I was supposed to go flying with Melika tomorrow morning for the first time.\"\n\n\"So let's figure out how to stop the ecclesiasts,\" Flint said. \"I think it's obvious that the ecclesiasts were looking for something today, and it's equally obvious that they used these unusual patterns for some reason as part of that search. Dolomite, will you watch again tomorrow and see if the patterns are the same?\"\n\n\"Of course. This is so exciting!\" Dolomite said, fairly bobbing in his excitement.\n\n\"Then, Porphyry, what did you learn today?\" Flint asked.\n\nLamprophyre and Coquina exchanged wry glances. For a male, Flint was certainly bossy\u2014though if he were female, they'd consider him assertive. But he was smart, and saw to the heart of things quickly, so what did it matter that he wasn't female? Lamprophyre decided she was just as happy to let him coordinate their efforts.\n\n\"I flew to the academy and talked to the students,\" Porphyry said. \"And I observed them and their teachers. I'm certain it's chlorite that makes certain humans' thoughts incomprehensible.\"\n\n\"So why quartz, too?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"That one, I just asked someone about,\" Porphyry said with a grin. \"Turns out quartz amplifies the effect of whatever stone you pair with it. Which is why you never see it as the only artifact someone has. There would be no point because there's nothing for it to work on.\"\n\nAgain, the flapping of giant wings made them all duck and then shift to make room for Bromargyrite. \"You won't believe what I learned,\" he said without waiting for anyone to greet him. \"Chlorite blurs human thoughts.\"\n\n\"Not to diminish your findings, but Porphyry figured that out,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"But did Porphyry also figure out that it's related to the kyanite?\" Bromargyrite said smugly.\n\nThe clutchmates burst out talking all at once. \"All right, quiet down and I'll tell you what I learned from that adept,\" Bromargyrite said. \"This time, I couldn't hear his thoughts. I did a quick sniff and realized he'd added a chlorite pendant to his array of artifacts, so I guessed that was responsible. That also told me he had no idea dragons can hear thoughts, or he'd have been wearing it the last time.\"\n\n\"At least we've managed to keep that secret,\" Orthoclase muttered.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Bromargyrite said with a warning look at Orthoclase for the interruption, \"I steered the conversation around to specific stones. Got him to take off the chlorite so I could 'see it more clearly,' and then distracted him so he never remembered to put it back on and I could eavesdrop. I pretended dragons got benefits from eating certain stones and asked to compare those effects to what human artifacts do. And he gushed out information like a rushing river.\"\n\n\"I hope you were cautious,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I did not mention kyanite, so stop glaring at me, Lamprophyre, but I didn't have to because he thought about it. We were talking about sapphire, and how it improves mental focus, and he thought 'if I only had some kyanite, I could prove the communication theory.' So I pushed a little harder, asked him about chalcedony because of that communication stone you have, Lamprophyre. And he thought, 'chalcedony is well enough, but someday I'll read others' minds.'\"\n\nEveryone fell silent. \"Don't you see?\" Bromargyrite said. \"Those adepts looking for kyanite are trying to develop an artifact that will let them hear thoughts!\"\n\n\"That's kind of a stretch,\" Flint said.\n\n\"Not so much of a stretch, if you put all the pieces together,\" Coquina said. \"We know sapphire and kyanite have similar mental effects. That adept wanted kyanite for a 'communication theory.' A mental communication isn't that far a leap from listening to thoughts.\"\n\n\"Ohhh,\" Lamprophyre said, realization striking. \"We wondered why some adepts would have incomprehensible thoughts when they don't know dragons can hear them. Obviously, if they are trying to develop a thought-hearing artifact, they know others are too. What if they invented a way to block that artifact before it was even created?\"\n\n\"That makes a lot of sense,\" Coquina said. \"But now I'm concerned about what happens when they succeed with the kyanite. There's no reason to believe that artifact will work only on humans. And I really don't want someone like Manishi hearing what I'm thinking.\"\n\nOnce again, silence fell. Finally, Flint spoke. \"There isn't anything we can do about it, save getting some of those chlorite artifacts for ourselves. And even that's impossible because it would give away that we know the secret. But at least now we know what we're facing.\"\n\n\"I haven't given Manishi the kyanite yet,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If we're willing to face the potential catastrophe, I can refuse to hand it over.\"\n\n\"I don't think we should risk angering the king, not now that the ecclesiasts have struck another blow,\" Flint said. \"I don't mind for myself, but Lokun could be in trouble.\"\n\n\"And really, what's the worst that could happen?\" Porphyry asked. \"We know what Manishi is after, and we can keep an eye on her. If she develops the kyanite artifact, we'll be aware of it and we can counter her. Not giving her the kyanite just means someone else will develop it first, someone we don't know to ward against.\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled. \"I hate giving her an advantage in anything. Rokshan\u2014\" She stopped as the terrible heartache descended on her again.\n\nOrthoclase put a hand on her shoulder. \"It will be all right,\" he said. \"This will pass. The ecclesiasts are lying, and we'll prove it.\"\n\nShe nodded and put her hand over his. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe sun had almost set, and lanterns were coming on in the neighborhoods surrounding the warehouses. The dimness didn't impair the dragons' vision much, but Lamprophyre said, \"I'm going to sleep. We can talk more in the morning. Maybe things will sort themselves out overnight.\"\n\nThe others murmured what she hoped was agreement and feared was the same discouragement she felt. She waved goodbye and flew off to the embassy.\n\nIn her heart, she imagined Rokshan waiting for her inside, ready to explain that it was all a mistake. But the embassy was empty, and the courtyard was dark because no one had lit the lanterns. That was usually something Depik did\u2014but he'd have left, too, wouldn't he? The ache in Lamprophyre's throat redoubled. She crept slowly into her hall and settled herself to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "She woke to the smell of roasting cow and lay quietly for a dozen beats, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. Then the memory of the previous night struck her. Confused, she left the embassy and stepped into the dining pavilion. \"Depik?\"\n\n\"One moment, my lady,\" Depik called out, and shortly he appeared, trundling the cow on its trolley. \"Sorry about that. I'm afraid I got a bit of a late start.\"\n\n\"But, didn't you hear?\"\n\n\"Hear what?\"\n\nLamprophyre almost didn't tell him. It felt so good to speak to a human who didn't hate her, she didn't want to give that up. But it wasn't honorable to keep this secret. \"The ecclesiasts have said anyone who associates with dragons is denied Jiwanyil's blessings.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" Depik said the words as if dismissing everything she'd just said. \"I'm not giving up the best job I've ever had for the sake of religious trappings. Now, would you prefer sheep or cow for your supper?\"\n\nLamprophyre gaped. \"Religious trappings? But you won't be able to worship!\"\n\nDepik gave her a serious look. \"Worship is what you make of it,\" he said. \"I've kept Jiwanyil's teachings for years even though I rarely go to services. I'm willing to take a chance on that satisfying God.\" He turned and entered the kitchen.\n\nLamprophyre stared after him for a few beats. Then she absently tore off a large bite of cow, her eyes never leaving the kitchen door. She expected people like Dharan and Manishi, people who didn't really believe in God or his teachings, to reject the ecclesiasts' demands. But Depik was faithful, or as faithful as someone could be who disobeyed what he had to believe was God's command. Lamprophyre tried to imagine denying Mother Stone and came up blank. It would mean not being a dragon anymore. Obviously it wasn't the same for humans, but if they truly believed the ecclesiasts heard the word of Jiwanyil, how could they justify refusing to obey their commands?\n\nShe ate slowly, wishing the food could dispel the horrible ache that lingered in her throat and had moved behind her eyes. Rokshan would come back. He had to. She clung to that thought until common sense prevailed. Of course he wouldn't. She didn't know what humans believed about what happened to their souls when they died, but being denied Jiwanyil's blessings almost certainly meant their souls would be cut off from their God. That wasn't something anyone faithful would want to risk. And that alone would keep him away.\n\nShe found herself unable to finish her meal and pushed it aside without summoning Depik to remove the rest. Wearily, feeling a million years old, she trudged back to the embassy and sorted through her piles of stone. Her eye fell on the sack containing the kyanite crystals, and another pang of sadness pulsed through her. She opened the sack, removed a long, rod-like crystal, and bit off the end. The sweet flavor made her gag, but she choked it down where it would no doubt sit in her stomach, lumpy and indigestible. She tossed the rest of the crystal back and lay down beside the stone stores, breathing in their mingled odors.\n\nShe heard footsteps approaching and looked up to see Dharan running across the courtyard. \"I heard,\" he said, panting, as he drew up even with the doorway but did not enter. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nLamprophyre shifted to be able to look at him more directly. \"He left,\" she said. \"I don't know where he went.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen him since two days ago. I would have thought\u2014but no, he wouldn't talk to me because he knows what I'd say.\"\n\n\"What would you say?\"\n\n\"That he's a fool,\" Dharan said. \"This is clearly a ploy by the ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"I agree, but, Dharan\u2014\"\n\n\"No 'buts,' Lamprophyre.\" Dharan sounded furious. \"You know the ecclesiasts want dragons gone. They've hit on the perfect way to accomplish that. I never knew they were this corrupt.\"\n\n\"Yes, but what if they're not?\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. Orthoclase's words of the previous day had faded to nothing in memory. \"Ecclesiasts do receive prophecies\u2014we've seen that. There's no reason to think this isn't one more prophecy except that we don't want it to be!\"\n\n\"I may or may not believe in God, but I do believe in logic. And a principle of logic is that you shouldn't ignore the obvious answer in favor of a more convoluted one. You dragons threaten the ecclesiasts' power. They need you gone. And they just happen to be possessed of a prophecy that gives them what they want?\" Dharan started pacing the doorway, turning rapidly on his heel every time he came up against the frame. \"It's ridiculous. It can't possibly be true.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"It doesn't matter. There's nothing we can do about it. Besides, we have other things\u2014I mean, we dragons do\u2014to investigate.\"\n\n\"More important than convincing Rokshan to pull his head out of his ass?\"\n\n\"We can't force him to believe our way, Dharan. It has to be his decision.\" She sighed again. \"Come inside. I don't want to talk about this where people can hear.\"\n\nDharan glanced around the courtyard. \"Nobody is here. And that's not likely to change so long as the ecclesiasts' edict is in place.\"\n\nThat made Lamprophyre's heart feel like cracking in two. \"Even so, I don't want to risk it.\"\n\nDharan walked past her and sat next to the second slate. It still had Porphyry's handwriting scrawled across the upper half, unrelated words he'd found visually appealing. \"So what do you dragons have going on?\"\n\nLamprophyre settled herself so her hindquarters blocked the doorway and most of the light. The dimness comforted her. \"We found out a few things. One is that the ecclesiasts are searching Tanajital for something, and they're traveling in mysterious patterns we don't understand. The other is that some adepts are trying to invent an artifact that will let them hear thoughts. Manishi is one of them.\"\n\nDharan's mouth fell slightly open. He said, \"Even one of those things would be astounding. Are you sure about the mind-reading? I know, it's not reading. Or maybe it is, if it's adepts inventing the thing.\"\n\n\"We're reasonably sure. It fits all the evidence.\" Lamprophyre fumbled around until she found the kyanite bag. \"This crystal is what they're experimenting with. I'm supposed to give some to Manishi.\"\n\n\"You can't do that,\" Dharan said. \"Manishi is smart and ruthless. If anyone could invent a mind-reading artifact, it's she. And Manishi capable of hearing people's thoughts doesn't bear thinking about.\"\n\n\"I have to. She's threatened to hurt Flint if I do.\"\n\nDharan laughed. \"How in God's name does she expect to hurt a dragon?\"\n\nLamprophyre explained everything. \"And we can't risk the king getting angry with us now, even if I'm sure we can prove Flint's innocence eventually,\" she concluded. \"We're already in such a precarious position. And there's Flint's human friend Lokun to think of, too.\"\n\n\"But giving in to a blackmailer is dangerous. Manishi will go on holding that over your heads forever, and her demands will grow more terrible.\"\n\n\"It won't be forever. We'll figure out a way to stop her. At worst, we'll find a time to tell the king ourselves what Flint and Lokun did. That has to be better than him finding out some other way.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Dharan shook his head. \"It doesn't sit well with me to give in to blackmail.\"\n\n\"Me either, but we don't have a choice right now.\"\n\n\"You always have a choice, Lamprophyre. You just don't have a good choice right now.\" Dharan leaned back with his head tilted against the wall in a pose that reminded Lamprophyre so much of Rokshan it made her want to fly away from him. She closed her eyes and willed herself calm. Nothing she could do.\n\n\"Tell me more about the other thing,\" Dharan said. \"How do you know the ecclesiasts are searching? What for?\"\n\n\"We don't know. Dolomite was watching them yesterday and he saw the patterns.\" Lamprophyre stood and stretched. \"We should go to the warehouses so you can see. Maybe a human will understand better than a dragon.\"\n\nAt the warehouses, when Dharan finally appeared\u2014he had flatly refused to fly with Lamprophyre, which had secretly relieved her mind, because she didn't want to fly with anyone but Rokshan\u2014he examined Dolomite's slate with interest. \"It's definitely a search pattern,\" he said. \"I'm not sure about these smaller patterns, except that they seem to outline certain districts within the city. And they're avoiding some places entirely. The streets surrounding the dragon embassy, for one.\" He traced the white lines surrounding the spot Dolomite had marked, smearing the chalk slightly.\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Orthoclase said. \"If they're so keen on dragons being evil, they wouldn't want to contaminate themselves.\"\n\n\"They're also avoiding the slums,\" Dharan continued, \"and that makes sense too, if you consider what a high opinion of themselves ecclesiasts have. It's not as if anyone in the slums will attack an ecclesiast, so it's not a matter of personal safety, but that's what they have reverends for, to take Jiwanyil's light into dark places they'd rather not venture.\"\n\n\"So the embassy, the slums, and\u2026what's this?\" Bromargyrite asked, pointing.\n\nDharan tilted his head and squinted. \"The academy,\" he said. \"But that might just be because there aren't any large streets within the academy's boundaries, just footpaths. The ecclesiasts certainly circle it. You said they trace their paths four times?\"\n\n\"That's what Dolomite observed,\" Orthoclase said. \"He's out watching the ecclesiasts again. I think he enjoys the challenge.\"\n\n\"So they might not follow the same paths today,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And who knows how long they've been doing this?\"\n\n\"The question is, what are they looking for?\" Dharan said. \"I don't know how to answer that.\"\n\n\"We could just ask,\" Flint said.\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"I doubt they'd be willing to talk to a dragon. Or a known heathen,\" she added, gesturing at Dharan.\n\n\"So we watch them, and see what we can learn,\" Flint said.\n\nA shadow passed overhead, and the dragons looked up. Lamprophyre caught sight of Coquina's face, set and hard, before the dragon landed, took a few trotting steps to slow herself, and ducked inside her warehouse without saying a word. Lamprophyre looked at the others. \"Coquina tried to talk to Melika this morning,\" Flint said in a low voice.\n\nLamprophyre took a few cautious steps, being careful to make noise so Coquina wouldn't think she was sneaking up on her, and paused just outside Coquina's warehouse. Coquina was a dark shadow inside the windowless building. \"Um, did something happen?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nA puff of hot smoke emerged from the doorway. \"She wouldn't see me,\" Coquina said. \"Her mother told me I wasn't welcome and slammed the door in my face. So I don't know if that was Melika's decision, or her mother's, or\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Lamprophyre said, the ache beginning in her throat again. \"I'm sure Melika is still your friend, even if this decree means she has to stay away.\"\n\nCoquina burst out of the warehouse. \"She's a stupid human, and she believes the lies her false god is telling her,\" she shouted. \"I don't know why I ever thought we could be friends.\"\n\nLamprophyre faced her down, unmoved by her outburst. \"I know it hurts,\" she said. \"If we can find a way to change the ecclesiasts' minds\u2026\" Even to her, that sounded facile and improbable. She blew out a smoke cloud of her own. \"Let's worry about the things we have power over. Rokshan and I were going to meet with Manishi around late afternoon to deliver the kyanite. Am I still doing that?\"\n\n\"We're not in a position to defy her yet,\" Flint said. \"Can you put her off for a few days?\"\n\n\"I think so. She might not know I've already harvested it. I can tell her I won't have it until three days from now. Any later than that and she might get suspicious, or angry, and go to the king.\" Lamprophyre looked up to where Dolomite swept past, a dark green speck against the cloudless summer sky. \"I wonder what he sees up there?\"\n\nThe others followed her gaze. \"It's hard to remember he's our age,\" Coquina said. \"And then he comes up with something brilliant like seeing those patterns.\"\n\n\"Once he's drawn today's paths, we'll have something to compare yesterday to,\" Dharan said, \"and that might be revelatory.\"\n\n\"But what does it matter?\" Coquina burst out. \"So the ecclesiasts are looking for something. It's not as if we can do anything with that.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Flint said. \"But if they've lost something, they don't want anyone to know about it, or they'd have made another of those obnoxious announcements. Suppose we figure out what it is and find it first? That gives us a weapon to use against them.\"\n\nThat hadn't occurred to Lamprophyre at all. \"That would be fantastic,\" she breathed. \"But it's going to take time. And we still have to figure out how to keep Manishi from going to the king with what looks like evidence of treason.\"\n\n\"It gives us something to do,\" Orthoclase said with a shrug.\n\nCoquina spread her wings with a sharp crack. \"I'm joining Dolomite. If we can bring down these ecclesiasts, I say we should.\" She leaped into the sky with a great swirling of wind and dust.\n\n\"I'll talk to Manishi,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and the rest of you get to work thinking how we can outmaneuver her.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" Dharan warned. \"She's suspicious and paranoid. You can't give her any hint that you intend to deceive her. Even pretending to be downcast and submissive might tip her off.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best.\"\n\nLamprophyre was halfway back to the embassy before remembering she likely couldn't get a human to take the message to Manishi that she wanted to see her. Muttering curses under her breath, she changed direction and headed for the slums. Dragons didn't lie, but they knew about pretending\u2014putting on a show the other person knew was false, but accepted in the spirit of the game\u2014and she was sure she could trick Manishi. But pretending wouldn't be necessary. Lamprophyre was angry and hurt and bewildered, all of which she could display to the adept without giving anything away.\n\nShe descended slowly, giving the humans time to clear the streets. The slums were never as crowded as the richer parts of Tanajital, as if the residents were ashamed of where they lived and didn't want anyone to see them. Men and women slunk off down narrow alleys leading from the street in front of Manishi's warehouse, their thoughts a muddled tangle of surprise and fear and even resentment, which puzzled Lamprophyre. After some consideration, she decided the humans might not like being invaded by a creature the ecclesiasts had declared outcast. Suppose the reverends and the ecclesiasts considered them tainted by proximity to her, even if they didn't speak or interact in any way? Anger flared within Lamprophyre. It was all so unfair she wanted to scream.\n\nManishi's workshop was as quiet and still as it ever was, giving no sign that anyone was within. Lamprophyre hesitated before knocking on the door. Suppose the workshop's protections were sensitive to any outside force? She didn't think she was in danger, but the surrounding buildings and the people hiding from her within them might be. She thought about this for a moment, then knocked gently on the wood. The protections couldn't be that sensitive, because for all this neighborhood wasn't busy, there were enough people that casual contact with the buildings was possible. Manishi didn't want her workshop blown up for no reason.\n\nThe door swayed a little under her knocking, though she hadn't used much force. Lamprophyre heard no one moving around inside. She waited a few beats, then knocked again, more forcefully. \"Manishi?\" she said. \"I need to talk to you.\"\n\nStill nothing. Lamprophyre looked around. She couldn't sit in the street, waiting who knew how long for Manishi to return. She had no way of leaving a message, nothing to write with, and Manishi might get angry if Lamprophyre scrawled all over her door and walls. And she couldn't leave a message with one of the humans, even if there had been any about. But she didn't like the idea of returning here repeatedly until she found Manishi. Lamprophyre let out an impatient puff of smoke from both nostrils. She was close to leaving this city, and Stones take the alliance between her people and Gonjiri.\n\n\"You looking for the adept?\"\n\nStartled, Lamprophyre looked over her shoulder. A human child, male or female, Lamprophyre couldn't tell, stood hesitantly in the shadow of the nearest alley. The child's eyes were wide, its face filthy, and it wore a ragged shirt that fell all the way to its knees that Lamprophyre thought was actually an adult's tunic. The child wiped a hand across its nose and repeated, \"You want the adept?\"\n\n\"I, well, yes,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You shouldn't speak to me.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Another swipe across the nose. \"I heard as dragons don't eat people. So I ain't scared of you.\"\n\n\"Because you'll be in trouble with the ecclesiasts.\"\n\nThe child shrugged, one shoulder rising higher than the other. \"Don't never see the ecclesiasts in here. Ain't scared of them, neither.\"\n\nLamprophyre turned to face the child more directly. \"Your parents will be angry with you, though.\"\n\nThe same odd shrug twitched through the child. \"No parents. Just me and Kavari.\"\n\nRokshan\u2014she closed her eyes briefly as she thought of him\u2014had told her many of the children who came alone for soup were orphans, a word Lamprophyre had never heard before. He'd also said that children whose parents died and who had no other family were usually in the direst of straits among Tanajital's beggars. \"Who is Kavari?\"\n\n\"Little sister. We live just down there. Do you breathe fire?\"\n\n\"Sometimes, but never to hurt people,\" Lamprophyre assured the child. Its thoughts were clear and untroubled by fear, but there was an edge of hunger to them Lamprophyre recognized, and it broke her heart. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Rassika,\" the child said. That sounded like a girl's name, though Lamprophyre hated to jump to conclusions with humans and their strange prickliness about having their sex misidentified.\n\n\"Rassika,\" Lamprophyre said, \"are you hungry? You and your sister?\"\n\nRassika's eyes widened. \"We do fine on our own,\" she said. \"Ain't no one taking her away.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to do that. My friend Depik makes soup every night for anyone who needs it. I was wondering if you and Kavari might want some.\"\n\nNow the girl's eyes narrowed suspiciously. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because Depik and I like helping. Because we have lots of food, and Depik used to be a beggar and he knows how it feels to be truly hungry. I would be pleased for you and your sister to visit me.\"\n\n\"But you want something out of us,\" Rassika said, suspicion still tingeing her voice and her thoughts.\n\n\"No, I\u2014\" Lamprophyre paused. She didn't know how old this child was, but she knew plenty of adult humans whose pride wouldn't let them accept help without giving something in return. \"Actually, yes,\" she corrected herself. \"I need to tell Manishi\u2014the adept who works here\u2014something important, but I don't think I should wait around here for her to return. If you give her a message, I'll give you and Kavari a good meal tonight. Is that fair?\"\n\nRassika regarded her in silence for a moment. \"Fair,\" she said. \"What message?\"\n\nGood question. \"Tell her the delivery will be in three days,\" she said. This was actually an excellent solution; Lamprophyre wouldn't have to encounter Manishi, or lie to her, and Manishi would have no option but to wait the three days, lacking anyone to argue with.\n\n\"Delivery in three days,\" Rassika said. \"Delivery of what?\"\n\n\"It's private.\"\n\nRassika nodded as if privacy was something she understood and held dear. \"Where do we go for food?\"\n\nLamprophyre considered her mental map of Tanajital and translated it into something a landbound creature could use. \"The old customs house, north of here,\" she said, and gave a handful of directions Rassika took in without looking or sounding confused. \"You can come any night you want. And we can talk again, if you want. I like talking to humans.\"\n\nNow Rassika did look puzzled. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because humans are interesting, and I'm here in Tanajital to explain about how dragons live and their customs so humans and dragons will understand each other.\" Something that could not happen so long as the ecclesiasts' edict was in force. This made her angry again, so she took a deep breath and said, \"Can I meet your sister?\"\n\nRassika shook her head. \"Tonight,\" she said, and slipped away deeper into the alley.\n\nLamprophyre listened to her thoughts\u2014dragon big, maybe not eat but it would crush Kavari, don't know if I trust it\u2014until Rassika was too distant to be more than a thread in the tangle of humanity surrounding her. Then she flew for the embassy. Depik needed to know they were still serving soup that night, even if no one came.\n\nShe landed in the courtyard and stretched out her wings and back. Even if Rassika didn't deliver the message, she could justify not going back as a response to the ecclesiasts' demands. Yes, make Manishi come to her. Manishi might be blackmailing her, but Dharan was right that giving in readily would just make Manishi step up her \"requests.\"\n\nShe took a few steps toward the embassy, but stopped when something moved within, something no more than a shadow in the dim interior. \"Can I help you?\" she asked, squinting into the darkness.\n\nThe shadow moved forward to stand in the doorway. It was Rokshan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "\"Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre breathed, and fell silent. Rokshan stood stiffly, like someone unsure of his welcome and ready to flee if necessary. His silence was the sort that swallowed words, his own and those of everyone around him. It didn't matter, because Lamprophyre couldn't think of anything to say.\n\nThey stared at each other for a dozen beats, not moving, not speaking. Finally, Lamprophyre managed, \"We should go inside. It's too hot out here.\"\n\nRokshan nodded and retreated into the shadows. Lamprophyre followed him, furling her wings closely so she wouldn't accidentally knock him down. She settled on the floor and lowered herself until her head was level with his. What to say? Everything in her heart felt like an accusation. You left. You cared about your religion more than about me. You wouldn't even say goodbye.\n\nShe waited for Rokshan to sit as he always did, with his legs crossed in that painful position, but he stood, still looking uncertain, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back and his head bowed. More silence stretched out between them like a river, with both of them on opposite banks and no way of crossing or even meeting halfway. The silence wore on Lamprophyre, but she knew it was a mistake for her to be the first to speak, and override whatever had brought Rokshan back.\n\nFinally, without looking up, Rokshan said, \"I had to go, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nLamprophyre drew in a breath. \"But you knew it was wrong, didn't you? Jiwanyil couldn't possibly want what the ecclesiasts said!\"\n\n\"It's not faith if you only obey the instructions you like,\" Rokshan said. \"Or the ones you already intended to follow. I believe the ecclesiasts speak the word of God. I couldn't not\u2014God's breath, Lamprophyre, don't you understand?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I do understand. But something is very wrong with that pronouncement. Dharan said\u2014\"\n\nRokshan's head came up. \"Dharan,\" he said through gritted teeth, \"has no idea what it means to live a faithful life.\"\n\n\"It's not that. He said it's an unlikely coincidence that the ecclesiasts want dragons to stop threatening their power, and then they receive a prophecy that gives them what they want. Don't you think that's strange?\"\n\n\"Unless they were right all along.\"\n\n\"Stop it!\" Lamprophyre shouted. \"Why did you even come back if you were just going to repeat what you already said? You believe I'm evil? Then get out of here, and never come back!\"\n\n\"You're not evil,\" Rokshan said. \"But don't you see the position I'm in? Either I believe the ecclesiasts and lose my best friend, or I question the ecclesiasts and lose everything I've believed my whole life. And\u2014God help me, Lamprophyre, but I think the ecclesiasts are wrong. I think\u2026I think they're lying.\"\n\nThe words sounded as if they were wrung out of him. Lamprophyre's anger vanished, replaced by a terrible sorrow. She rested her hand gently on his small shoulder\u2014he was so fragile, she could break him without even realizing\u2014and said, \"You shouldn't have to make that choice. Stones take those ecclesiasts for what they've done.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"I don't know where that leaves me. Heretic, maybe. But I've thought about this, and I spoke to Khadar\u2014\"\n\nShe'd almost forgotten he had a close relationship with one of the High Ecclesiasts who were responsible for the edict. \"What did Khadar say?\"\n\n\"It's what he didn't say that convinced me. He was nervous. Khadar is never nervous. He was born arrogant, and he's convinced that everything he does is right. But he wouldn't meet my eyes, and he didn't take the opportunity to lecture me on how my evil ways consorting with dragons had finally caught up to me. He just said prophecy is prophecy and Jiwanyil's word is infallible. And then he made an excuse and left. It was so unlike him it made me wonder\u2026\"\n\n\"Wonder what?\"\n\nHe finally lifted his head to look at her. \"Wonder what game the High Ecclesiasts are playing at. I would have sworn that despite their love of power, they have enough respect for God and the responsibility of their positions not to abuse the trust we all have in them. And I believe the Archprelate really is Jiwanyil's voice to all of Gonjiri, and that he would rein them in if that became necessary. But this\u2014Lamprophyre, how is it possible? And if the High Ecclesiasts have lied to us, how long has that been going on?\"\n\n\"But the ecclesiasts are possessed of true prophecies. We've seen it. So they can't possibly be lying about everything.\"\n\nRokshan's mouth thinned into a hard, straight line. \"Just lying about one thing is enough.\"\n\nLamprophyre lowered her hand. \"All right,\" she said. \"The ecclesiasts are pretending Jiwanyil told them dragons should be shunned. That doesn't mean Jiwanyil doesn't exist, or that he doesn't reveal prophecies to worthy ecclesiasts. It just means your religion is in the hands of people who don't believe in it. You shouldn't doubt what you know is true.\"\n\n\"What makes you say they don't believe?\"\n\nLamprophyre struggled to put into words ideas that had only just come to her. \"If they believed,\" she said slowly, \"they wouldn't fake prophecies to get what they want. They would leave it to Jiwanyil to decide how humans should relate to dragons. They would have faith that even though they thought dragons were a problem, Jiwanyil sees more than they do and would guide them to the right outcome.\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"You're wiser than every ecclesiast in Tanajital,\" he said. \"Even so, it still doesn't make sense. Either they haven't been possessed of any prophecies on the subject, or they have, and they're lying about what Jiwanyil told them. That's another thing I would have sworn was impossible.\"\n\n\"There isn't anything we can do about it, though, is there? Short of pinning Khadar down and beating his secrets out of him, which, by the way, I would love an excuse to do.\"\n\nRokshan's smile turned into a laugh, and Lamprophyre felt giddy with joy to hear it. \"I don't know,\" he said, \"but if they're lying, I believe Jiwanyil will eventually intervene. Somehow.\"\n\n\"You really do have tremendous faith,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If I found out\u2014I don't know. If I found out dragons don't return to Mother Stone when they die, I think it would shake my faith to its core.\"\n\n\"I never knew whether I really believed until that reverend delivered that decree.\" Rokshan lowered himself to the floor. \"I don't know that I recommend having your faith tested that way.\"\n\n\"I'm just glad you're back,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And I have so much to tell you.\"\n\nRokshan examined the pattern Dolomite had drawn the day before. \"It's strange,\" he said. \"They're obviously looking for something, but these search patterns, they're a complete waste of time and energy.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Flint asked.\n\nRokshan tapped the six-pointed star. \"This path requires the ecclesiast to stop halfway down a street and retrace his steps before moving to the next street. Someone else examines the rest of the street, as part of another small pattern. It's a terribly inefficient way to search for anything.\" He laid a finger to his lips and then made a face as he tasted the bitter chalk dust.\n\n\"So they're doing something else as well,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Yes\u2026\" Rokshan drew the word out on a long hiss. \"Yes, something else, but what?\"\n\nThe sound of wings drew everyone's attention. Coquina and Dolomite landed in the street near the slate. They both looked exhausted. \"We should be taking turns,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"The patterns aren't apparent unless you watch for a long time,\" Dolomite said. Wearily, he reached for the second slate, transported to the warehouses by Lamprophyre, and gestured to someone to hand him his chalks as if he were too tired for more speech.\n\nThe others watched as he swiftly sketched the view of Tanajital from above, a rough circle with its left side cut off by the fat line of the Green River, and drew in the major streets. Then he picked up a pale red chalk piece and roughed out a trapezoidal shape as if he were sketching someone's portrait. \"Nine patterns, not seven like yesterday,\" he said, \"and they were different patterns this time.\"\n\n\"Why do you orient the map that way?\" Rokshan asked. \"With north at the top?\"\n\n\"Because north points to Mother Stone,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Your maps are different?\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"We have west at the top, looking toward where Jiwanyil entered the world.\"\n\nIt took Dolomite about a hundred beats to finish drawing all the patterns, but when he'd dropped the last piece of chalk, Flint lifted the slate and set it to lean against a warehouse next to the first. \"Is there any correlation between the colors?\" he asked.\n\nDolomite brightened. \"Oh! That would be good, if I knew which ecclesiasts went where and drew which patterns!\" Then he looked dejected. \"Except they all look the same from above.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Flint said. \"This is amazing.\"\n\n\"I flew lower than Dolomite,\" Coquina said, \"getting a better look at the individual ecclesiasts. Scared the Stones right out of some of them, too.\" She grinned nastily. \"All the groups were identical. Three musicians, four bearers, two reverends, and the ecclesiast in his or her litter. Every one of them had the curtains tied back. And none of them were High Ecclesiasts. I couldn't get close enough to see if the ecclesiasts were paying close attention to any place in particular, and I couldn't pick their thoughts out of the general noise. But since most of the time ecclesiasts travel with the curtains hiding them, I think it's safe to assume they are definitely looking for something.\"\n\n\"What about the attendants? Did they appear to be searching?\" Orthoclase asked.\n\nCoquina looked thoughtful. \"That's a good question,\" she said. \"I'd have to say I don't think so. The musicians always have that glazed stare, like they're seeing something nobody else can, and the bearers are the same. The reverends might have been, but\u2014no, they couldn't, because they were reading aloud from big books they carried. Taking turns reading, I mean.\"\n\n\"That sounds like the ecclesiasts are taking care to conceal their interest,\" Rokshan said. He was staring at the slates, examining first one and then the other. \"Traveling in the same pomp they always do so no one will think anything about this journey is different.\"\n\n\"That's seriously paranoid,\" Bromargyrite said. \"Nobody in Tanajital is likely to question anything an ecclesiast does, right? So I don't see why they'd worry about behaving strangely.\"\n\nRokshan took a quick step back and tilted his head sharply to the right. \"God's breath, I have it,\" he said. \"Somebody rotate these slates one turn to the right. Put west at the top like a human map.\"\n\nThe dragons all looked at him in confusion. \"Quick, or I'll lose it again,\" Rokshan demanded. Lamprophyre picked up one slate and Bromargyrite took the other. They swiftly turned the slates until the west side of the city was at the top, making the city look like a blob clinging to the branch that was the thick line of the Green River.\n\nRokshan took a piece of white chalk and quickly drew small versions of the patterns, now rotated to the right, along the top of the slate, above the river. \"They're not searching the west bank, which means they know whatever they're looking for can't cross the river,\" he said, \"and they're not searching properly because they can't. Not if they want their search to succeed.\" He finished drawing the seventh pattern and moved on to the second slate.\n\n\"I'm confused,\" Lamprophyre said. The patterns he'd drawn looked almost like letters, some of them. \"How can their search succeed if they're not efficient?\"\n\nRokshan drew the last pattern with a flourish and stepped back. \"Those are all symbols relating to the High Ecclesiasts and their responsibilities. Each of the High Ecclesiasts represents one of the gods\u2014Nirinatan, Katayan, and so forth\u2014and each has symbols pertaining to his or her god. In certain ceremonies, they use these symbols to invoke the gods. They're prayers.\" He gestured at the slate. \"The ecclesiasts are using the city to power their prayers.\"\n\nThe others fell silent. Finally, Lamprophyre said, \"And no one would notice except a dragon, who wouldn't know the significance. Honestly, I still don't know the significance. Is it dangerous to do something like that?\"\n\n\"I feel very uncomfortable being in the center of some other religion's prayers,\" Porphyry said.\n\n\"It's not dangerous,\" Rokshan said, \"and it doesn't affect the people in the city. I've seen it done\u2014well, not seen, it's too big for a human to see\u2014at any rate, I know of it being done twice before in my lifetime. One was when the previous Archprelate was dying, and the prayers were to speed him on his journey back to Jiwanyil. The other was when my father was very sick, and everyone joined together to plead with God for his recovery. Oh, and I know they did it when my father's first wife was killed in an accident. That time, it was for mourning. But in every case, they made an announcement so the people could participate in their own small way.\"\n\n\"And they haven't said anything this time.\"\n\nRokshan glanced at Lamprophyre. \"No. Though I don't think we needed any more evidence that the ecclesiasts are up to something shady.\"\n\n\"But it does tell us they are very concerned about finding whatever they've lost,\" Flint said.\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"This is progress,\" she said, \"so why do I feel we haven't gained any ground? We still have no idea what the ecclesiasts are looking for.\"\n\n\"Or who,\" Coquina said. \"It could be a person.\"\n\n\"True, and that complicates things,\" Rokshan said. \"Do you have any idea how many thousands of people live in Tanajital? And a person can hide in ways an object can't. If I were an ecclesiast, I'd recognize what, specifically, these prayers are for, but I can't read the symbols, just recognize them.\"\n\n\"I can't think of a way to locate whatever or whoever it is,\" Flint said. \"Maybe this is a problem for tomorrow. Sleep on it, and see what occurs to us.\"\n\n\"I have to return to the embassy,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If anyone shows up for supper, I want to reassure them that they're doing the right thing.\" She also hoped Rassika and her sister would arrive, and not just because she wanted to know if Rassika had delivered her message."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "The courtyard was virtually empty when she arrived, empty enough that she had no trouble landing. Rokshan hopped down and said, \"I'm starving. I forgot about breakfast.\"\n\n\"Have some soup.\" Lamprophyre settled herself in the dining pavilion and examined the few beggars who'd dared the ecclesiasts' wrath. There was the Sister of the Red\u2014well, she was already outcast, no doubt. She didn't see one-legged Sumaan, but the old man was there, holding his bowl in both hands and swaying to music only he could hear. A few others, all strangers, ate swiftly and didn't meet her eyes. That hurt, but she reminded herself that she cared more that these people be fed than that they liked her.\n\nFurtive movement at the mouth of the street caught her attention, and she stepped forward out of the dining pavilion, startling two of the strangers into fumbling their bowls and sending splashes of soup to soak the ground. Lamprophyre ignored them. \"Hello, Rassika,\" she said. \"Is this Kavari? Welcome to my embassy.\"\n\nRassika clutched the arm of a much smaller child, one who looked up at Lamprophyre in stunned amazement. She moved as if trying to escape her sister's grasp, but Rassika held on more tightly. \"I told the adept what you said,\" she told Lamprophyre. \"She ain't happy.\"\n\n\"With you, or with me?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"With you. She di'nt care about me 'cept that I stay out of her place.\" Rassika wiped her arm across her nose. \"You got food?\"\n\n\"Come with me, and we'll see about that,\" Rokshan said, startling Lamprophyre because she hadn't heard him approach. Rassika dragged Kavari with her, making the child stumble along because her round brown eyes were fixed on Lamprophyre's wings. Lamprophyre suppressed a laugh. She hadn't felt much like laughing in the last day.\n\nShe turned from watching the children follow Rokshan and was arrested by the sight of more people entering the courtyard. It was the woman with two children. She held their hands as tightly as Rassika had gripped Kavari, and she halted about a dragonlength from Lamprophyre and stood watching her as warily as she might a dangerous predator. Lamprophyre reminded herself that to this woman, she might actually be a dangerous predator, and settled back on her haunches rather than approaching.\n\n\"I'm glad you came back,\" she said politely. \"I know it's hard, feeding two children, and I'm glad for any help I can provide.\"\n\nThe woman's eyes looked haunted. \"We're outcast now,\" she said in a hoarse voice, \"but I\u2014we need this food. Need it more than Jiwanyil's blessings.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at the children, a boy and a girl. Their clothing was dirty, but their faces were clean, though Lamprophyre could see traces of tears on the boy's face. All three of them looked unnaturally gaunt for humans, and Lamprophyre had the sudden horrible suspicion that this meal was all these people got, all day long.\n\n\"Come in and eat,\" she said, \"and tell me about yourselves.\"\n\nThe woman's name was Bhakriya, and her children were Preyanka and Abhit, and they had come from Kolmira looking for work. At first, Bhakriya was reluctant to speak\u2014or maybe she was just busy eating\u2014but gradually she relaxed enough to let her children stray from her side. She and Lamprophyre and Rokshan watched the two approach Rassika, whose grip on Kavari hadn't weakened and who ate her soup by tipping the bowl one-handed to her mouth. \"Whose children are those?\" Bhakriya said.\n\n\"No one's. They're orphans,\" Lamprophyre replied. \"I asked Rassika to help me today in exchange for food. No, it's not like that,\" she went on hastily as Bhakriya's eyes widened in alarm, \"the food is free, without obligation on anyone. But Rassika is very proud and she didn't want a handout.\"\n\n\"Even so, I should have thought of that,\" Bhakriya said. \"What can I do to repay you?\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Rokshan, caught off guard by the question. \"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"You could help Depik wash up,\" Rokshan said. \"There's not many dishes tonight, but usually it's a big chore. I'm sure he'd appreciate the assistance.\"\n\n\"I'll do that,\" Bhakriya declared. She set her bowl beside her and rested her arms on her drawn-up knees. \"God's breath,\" she said. \"I'd forgotten there are those who have it worse off than I.\" She was looking at the four children, who now sat in a circle talking. \"Time was my children would be off running in a place like this. Now they haven't the strength for it. And those other two\u2014not even a parent to watch out for them. No wonder she's clinging so tightly to the little one. The child can't be more than three, and her sister's not full grown yet.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked away in embarrassment from the tears welling up in Bhakriya's eyes. \"Can I ask about your children's father?\" she said, hoping it wasn't a forbidden subject. Rokshan shifted, but said nothing, so it was probably all right.\n\nBhakriya wiped tears from her eyes. \"Gone, if Jiwanyil loves us,\" she said, her voice hard and cold. \"He used to hurt me and was working his way up to hurting the children when we fled Kolmira. I hope he never finds us.\" She laughed bitterly. \"Though I suppose Jiwanyil doesn't love us anymore if we're consorting with you, so maybe our luck's run out.\"\n\nLamprophyre stared at Bhakriya, her mouth hanging open in surprise. \"I don't understand,\" she said. \"He hurt you? Aren't you his mate?\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said quietly, \"humans don't\u2014sometimes they do terrible things to each other\u2014\"\n\n\"I know that. But to his own mate?\"\n\nTears once more filled Bhakriya's eyes, and she lowered her head to her knees. Lamprophyre heard her thoughts, full of pain and sorrow and, to her astonishment, shame.\n\n\"Why are you embarrassed?\" Lamprophyre asked, not caring that it revealed her secret ability. \"Your mate has a duty to protect you and your family\u2014at least, that's how it works for dragons. If it's all right for a human to hurt his mate\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not,\" Rokshan said. \"Let it go, Lamprophyre. I'll explain later.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't want to let it go, but she trusted Rokshan. \"I'm sorry I made you cry,\" she said to Bhakriya. \"There are so many things I don't understand about humans.\" Inspiration struck. \"You know, I'm sure Depik would appreciate having more frequent help in the kitchen, cleaning up. Why don't you come back in the morning? There's always leftover food, and you could wash dishes in exchange for that.\"\n\nBhakriya looked terribly torn. \"I don't want you making work for me, out of pity,\" she said.\n\n\"It's not pity. I want to help. And you don't have work, do you?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not regular work. We have to keep moving so my husband doesn't find us.\"\n\n\"So you can work for me, and I'll watch your children while you do, and we both benefit.\" Lamprophyre leaned closer. \"I'm very good at hide and seek,\" she confided.\n\nBhakriya looked Lamprophyre up and down, clearly contemplating her size, and just as clearly deciding not to ask questions. \"All right,\" she said. \"In the morning. And I'll wash up tonight, too.\"\n\n\"Wonderful! Here, let me introduce you to Depik. He really will be happy for help washing all the bowls.\"\n\nDepik came out of the kitchen when Lamprophyre called his name. \"Depik, this is Bhakriya,\" Lamprophyre said, prodding the woman forward. \"She's going to help clean the dishes and the kitchen every morning and night. Bhakriya, this is Depik.\"\n\nDepik extended his hand to Bhakriya. \"Welcome,\" he said. \"I could use the help. My lady is a messy eater.\" He grinned up at Lamprophyre to show it was a joke.\n\n\"You haven't seen messy yet,\" Rokshan said. \"Bhakriya, we'll keep an eye on the children if you want to set to work now.\"\n\nBhakriya nodded and followed Depik into the kitchen. \"Well, that's interesting,\" Rokshan said in a low voice.\n\n\"What is?\"\n\nRokshan cast a glance back at the kitchen. \"Nothing. Maybe. Ask me again next week.\"\n\nSometimes he mystified her. \"All right.\"\n\nShe sat watching the four children as dusk settled on the courtyard. At some point, Depik came out to light the lanterns, and their glow cast odd shadows over the children's faces that made all four of them look even gaunter. Maybe she should offer Bhakriya the use of one of the servants' houses behind the embassy. No, better wait until she was sure this unusual arrangement would work out.\n\n\"You're unexpected,\" a voice said from beside her. Lamprophyre turned to see the Sister of the Red watching her, that peculiar smile on her lips.\n\n\"Am I?\" Lamprophyre said. \"How is that?\"\n\nThe Sister of the Red drifted forward, kicking up her filmy skirts with each step. Lamprophyre observed that her sandals and her toenails were the same shade of bright gold. \"You're no human,\" the woman continued, \"but that doesn't stop you treating humans the way you would your own kind.\"\n\nHer words were innocuous, but her tone irritated Lamprophyre. \"You don't know anything about dragons, so I'm not sure how you think I treat them.\"\n\nThe woman's smile broadened. \"Humans reserve their sympathy for those closest to them,\" she said. \"Family, lovers, friends. Anything else is Other. I'm sure dragons are the same. Most dragons.\" She drew a shallow line in the dirt with the toe of her sandal. \"I'm intrigued by a creature who cares enough about people not of her species to go out of her way to protect them. What good will that woman and her brats ever do you? Or that old man whose brains flew away with the wind?\"\n\n\"Why should they have to do me good?\" Lamprophyre said, feeling seriously nettled now. \"I have resources and I choose to spend them on helping others. And I find humans interesting. Even awful humans like you.\"\n\nThe Sister of the Red laughed. It was, surprisingly, not a nasty sound. \"I admit I'm not a nice person,\" she said. \"I've been looking out for my own interests since I was fourteen. So I don't think the way you do. But that's why you interest me. We're so different I can't help wondering what the world looks like from your perspective. And not just because your perspective is fifteen feet high.\" She laughed again. \"Maybe if I visit here often enough, I'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Lamprophyre said as the woman turned to leave. \"You don't need food. Why come here?\"\n\nThe woman paused. Over her shoulder, she said, \"Food's not the only thing you supply, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched her go, stunned into silence. What else did she supply? Companionship, maybe; she'd seen some of her regulars make friends with the other beggars. Safety, certainly. Bhakriya's horrible mate would have trouble hurting her here, under a dragon's watchful eye. But she couldn't imagine anything she had that the Sister of the Red would want, unless it was the perspective the woman had mentioned.\n\nShe shook her head and entered the embassy, where Rokshan sat watching the children. As she passed the old man, he smiled vacantly at her, and she returned the smile even though he probably wasn't really aware of her. People came for food and they stayed for the company. Maybe she was doing more for Tanajital than she thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Lamprophyre woke early the next morning to the smell of roasted cow and the sounds of rapidly pattering feet. She opened one eye to see a small figure dart past the doorway, followed by a slightly larger one. So Bhakriya was here. Lamprophyre closed her eye and stretched, flexing her wings. She didn't have to get up immediately. Besides, after the turmoil and stress of the past two days, she felt entitled to sleep in.\n\nThoughts intruded on her peaceful morning, not terrible ones, but ones focused on her: big as a house and could squish us and smells like fire. Lamprophyre sighed, and realized she'd breathed out smoke when the thoughts became agitated. \"It's all right, it's just smoke,\" she said, opening her eyes. Bhakriya's children regarded her from the doorway, their thoughts uncertain but curious. Lamprophyre couldn't remember their names.\n\n\"Do you want to come in?\" she asked.\n\nThe girl shook her head vigorously and grabbed the smaller child, the boy, by the shoulder to keep him from advancing. \"Mama said not to disturb you,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm awake, so it's no disturbance,\" Lamprophyre said. \"My name is Lamprophyre. I'm sorry, but I don't remember yours.\"\n\nThe little boy wrenched free of his sister's grasp and walked to within touching distance of Lamprophyre. \"I'm Abhit,\" he said. \"I like blue. You're very blue.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Lamprophyre agreed. \"Did you eat breakfast? Because it smells like mine is almost ready, and you can have some of it if you like.\"\n\n\"Depik made porridge for all of us,\" the girl said. She took a few tentative steps forward. \"I'm Preyanka.\"\n\n\"It's nice to meet you both,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Now, I don't want to step on you, so if you'd move to the side, please?\"\n\nPreyanka took Abhit by the hand and towed him rapidly to where Lamprophyre's books lay piled on their cloth. Abhit's eyes widened. \"You have books!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"I do. If you want, you can look at them. Just be very careful, because they're expensive and some of them aren't mine.\"\n\nPreyanka nodded. \"We had a whole room of them in our house in Kolmira,\" she said, then shut her mouth and ducked her head as if she'd said something she shouldn't. Lamprophyre guessed she didn't want to talk about the home they'd left behind, particularly if her father was as awful a person as Lamprophyre imagined.\n\n\"Well, enjoy yourselves,\" Lamprophyre said, as if she hadn't noticed Preyanka's confusion, and strolled to the dining pavilion, where Depik had just wheeled out the trolley. Steak. Depik must be feeling very well today.\n\nBhakriya emerged from the kitchen with a wooden bowl in her hands and a scrap of cloth she was drying it with. \"Thank you again, my lady,\" she said. \"It wasn't necessary to provide us with special food. Scraps are fine.\"\n\n\"That was Depik's idea, not mine, and I leave those decisions to him,\" Lamprophyre said around a mouthful of steak. \"Besides, I don't think porridge is expensive, if that's what you're worried about, and all of that aside, I want the people who work for me to be well-fed so they won't want to be hired away.\"\n\n\"I've had trouble finding employment that will support all three of us. This work is a blessing.\" Bhakriya tucked the cloth into her waistband, but stood there holding the bowl instead of returning to the kitchen. \"I hope you understand how very grateful I am. How grateful we all are.\"\n\nHer words made Lamprophyre uncomfortable. \"Well, I'm grateful for your help, because Depik is sick sometimes and can't always keep up.\"\n\nBhakriya looked concerned. \"Sick? What kind of illness?\"\n\n\"It's not contagious, if that's what worries you. He has trouble getting out of bed some days, and sometimes that lasts for a while. But he's a hard worker.\"\n\n\"My lady is generous,\" Depik said, coming up behind Bhakriya. \"I was destitute for years before she took a chance on me. I'm better than I used to be, but I have days where it's not so good.\"\n\n\"Then I'll help on those days,\" Bhakriya declared. \"I don't have much experience cooking, but I'm sure there's something I can do.\"\n\nDepik glanced at Lamprophyre. \"If my lady doesn't mind.\"\n\n\"You can't be worse a cook than I am,\" Lamprophyre said. She didn't like the expression on Depik's face; it was unfamiliar, but his thoughts were tinged with unhappiness that made no sense. He'd been cheerful about having Bhakriya help, he'd gone out of his way to provide her and her children with breakfast; could it be that Bhakriya helping on his bad days was a reminder of his weakness? Lamprophyre knew human males in particular could be embarrassed at being made to look weak or inferior in front of human females. But Depik was sensible, so that seemed an unlikely explanation. She determined to pay attention to his thoughts, and task him with it if his unhappiness persisted.\n\nShe devoured her steaks a little too rapidly\u2014she preferred her food hot, and the small pieces of meat cooled off quickly\u2014and washed her claws and face. She heard voices coming from within the embassy, and went inside the hall to discover Preyanka reading to Abhit from the book of constellation stories. \"Go on,\" she said when Preyanka paused to look at her, and settled down where she could listen. Preyanka had a nice, clear voice, and Lamprophyre enjoyed hearing the story.\n\nPreyanka was almost finished when Bhakriya entered, standing in the doorway with her hands clasped before her. She didn't say anything until the story was over, and then she clapped her hands and said, \"It's time to go, children.\"\n\n\"I like this place. Why can't we stay here?\" Abhit complained.\n\n\"Because my lady has better things to do with her time than supervise children,\" Bhakriya said.\n\n\"I won't be here most of the day, or I'd invite the children to stay,\" Lamprophyre said. \"So you can do your other jobs without worrying about them.\"\n\nBhakriya looked up at Lamprophyre and blinked rapidly to clear away tears. \"I don't understand why you are so generous,\" she said. \"Thank you. We'll be back this evening. Early, so I can help with supper.\"\n\n\"I look forward to seeing you then,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nShe settled comfortably on the floor and flipped the pages of the largest book without reading it, thinking about what the Sister of the Red had said last night. She hadn't done anything for Bhakriya that she wouldn't do for a dragon of the flight, but Bhakriya was human, so maybe Lamprophyre's generosity was unusual. It was just that humans interested her, that was all, and their needs were so different from hers it was fun to see how she could help.\n\nShe saw Rokshan approaching from the street and walked to meet him in the courtyard. \"I saw Bhakriya and her children,\" he said. \"Did everything go well?\"\n\n\"I think so. Depik made porridge. I'll have to make sure he doesn't run through his own supplies too quickly.\"\n\n\"Depik made porridge, did he?\"\n\nRokshan's tone of voice was heavy with meaning, as if porridge were somehow significant. \"Should he not have?\"\n\n\"What? Oh. No, of course not. In fact, I was betting on it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nRokshan glanced past her at the dining pavilion. Lamprophyre looked, but no one was there. \"Maybe nothing,\" he said. \"Don't worry about it.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, I hate secrets unless I'm the one keeping them.\"\n\n\"It's not a secret, just something I'm not sure about, and I don't want to discuss it until I am. Understand?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, yes.\" Lamprophyre breathed out two puffs of smoke, impatient as much with herself as with him. \"Are you ready to fly? I want to see where the ecclesiasts go.\"\n\nRokshan clambered up. \"I thought Dolomite was doing that.\"\n\n\"He tracks the patterns. I just want a sense for how many ecclesiasts are involved. There were seven, then nine, and suppose that number keeps increasing?\" She pushed off with her powerful legs and beat the air to gain altitude.\n\n\"Like I said, I don't know enough about the symbols to be able to tell what kind of prayers they are,\" Rokshan said. \"But if they're searching as well as praying, they might send out more searchers if they aren't immediately successful.\"\n\n\"That makes sense.\"\n\nShe rose high above Tanajital and made a slow right-handed circle, following the wall of the city and altering her course to fly above the river rather than crossing it to the west bank. Below, Dolomite flew lazily in the opposite direction, making a great spiral that would cover most of the city. It was fortunate for everyone that he loved flying, because Lamprophyre couldn't imagine a more tedious job.\n\nFrom her height, humans were visible only as movement through the hair-fine streets, and not even the ecclesiasts' litters were distinguishable. She sank lower and still lower, descending below Dolomite to where she was only a few dragonlengths above the streets. Now she could see the ecclesiasts, traveling through the streets surrounded by what looked like bubbles of air separating them from the masses. She focused on one and swooped lower until she could hear the music the ecclesiasts' attendants were playing. \"Can you hear that?\" she asked Rokshan.\n\n\"Not over the noise of the crowd.\"\n\nShe hummed a snatch of the tune. \"Does it mean anything?\"\n\n\"Nothing unusual. It's an auditory warning that an ecclesiast is coming. Standard practice.\"\n\nLamprophyre rose about half a dragonlength and beat her wings lazily, but even at her slowest she was faster than the ecclesiast's litter, and soon outpaced it. She continued in her flight path until she'd spanned the entire city and was back where she'd started. The bearers didn't react as if they were worried about her. \"I counted,\" she said. \"Twelve ecclesiasts in the streets. The guard captain believed there were more of them around than usual, but I don't know how many is usual.\"\n\n\"Neither do I, but twelve seems excessive,\" Rokshan said. \"So others have noticed it, too. At least, they've noticed the increased numbers. I think you're right that it would take a dragon to see the patterns.\"\n\n\"I wonder,\" Lamprophyre said. She'd been watching the street the ecclesiast had chosen. It widened out three dragonlengths ahead into a street big enough to fit her, if she didn't mind displacing the people.\n\n\"Wonder what?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"Wonder what they'd do if I confronted them.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that's a good idea, Lamprophyre. You might start a fight.\"\n\n\"How? It's not as if they can hurt me. And I have some very reasonable questions.\"\n\nRokshan was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, \"Is it bad that I want to see this?\"\n\nLamprophyre grinned. \"Of course not. You humans are so bloodthirsty, I'd be concerned if you didn't want to see it.\"\n\n\"We're not bloodthirsty. We just like watching a good fight.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure where the distinction is, but I'll let you have it.\"\n\nShe flew a tight circle over the litter. None of the ecclesiast's attendants looked up at all. Lamprophyre remembered what Coquina had said about the musicians' and the bearers' glassy stares. Maybe they didn't even know she was there. Well, that wouldn't last long.\n\nWhen the litter was barely a dragonlength from the wider street, Lamprophyre descended slowly, calling out, \"Make room! Please, give me space! I don't want to hurt anyone!\" as Rokshan yelled similar warnings. Men and women scattered, though they didn't go far. Lamprophyre found herself in an empty spot on the sun-heated white bricks of the street, circled by more empty space, enough that there might have been room for another dragon so long as he was male and not Bromargyrite. People surrounded that space in a ring, watching tensely, their thoughts full of fear and curiosity and (from those near enough to see the approaching ecclesiast) worry about whether standing and watching a dragon could constitute consorting with her.\n\nThe ecclesiast's procession hove into view, musicians, bearers, litter, and reverends, exactly as Coquina had described. Lamprophyre rose to her full height, which gave her a good view of the humans' heads and the top of the litter, and said, \"I'd like a word with you, your Holiness.\" She didn't like to give him any kind of respect, considering how the ecclesiasts had treated her species, but it was always better to start with politeness because it gave you more options for descending into rudeness.\n\nThe bearers didn't put down the litter. The reverends walking behind it closed their books, which were big enough to require two hands to hold them. One of the reverends, a woman whose dark hair was tinged with red, said, \"Dragons are outcast, and no ecclesiast will speak with one. Step aside.\" Her thoughts were as stolid as her voice, with no fear of Lamprophyre.\n\nLamprophyre didn't move. \"But no ecclesiast will fear Jiwanyil's wrath simply for speaking to me, because they're more holy than the average person and not vulnerable to whatever taint you think I have. I just have a few questions, and then I'll be on my way.\"\n\nThe other reverend said, \"Dragons are outcast, and no ecclesiast will speak with one. Step aside.\"\n\n\"What are you afraid of?\" Rokshan asked. \"Surely you're not going to miss an opportunity to convince a dragon to follow the true path in worshipping Katayan?\" He appeared to address the ecclesiast, who was invisible from Lamprophyre's perspective.\n\nThe first reverend said, \"Dragons are outcast, and\u2014\"\n\n\"I will answer no questions except those pertaining to true doctrine,\" the ecclesiast said, interrupting the reverend, who fell immediately silent. The ecclesiast's voice was the high-pitched one of a woman, and was perfectly calm in a way that in anyone else Lamprophyre would have found soothing. But this was her enemy, and Lamprophyre tamped down her irritation. Politeness, until rudeness was necessary.\n\n\"Why does Jiwanyil hate dragons?\" she asked.\n\n\"Jiwanyil does not hate dragons.\" The ecclesiast's voice was even smoother. \"Jiwanyil hates no living creature. He wants all to live in harmony with God and worship their creator according to the laws of their creation.\" Her thoughts were as placid as the reverends' and as fearless.\n\n\"But dragons don't believe in your religion. Why should we change to suit you?\"\n\nThe ecclesiast's thoughts didn't waver. \"Dragons have lost the true faith in the years of their isolation. It is not your fault that you have forgotten Katayan. The fault is in those who, having had the truth revealed, fail to return to Katayan's worship.\"\n\n\"That only sounds reasonable,\" Rokshan said. \"Dragons are older than humans. Why shouldn't their religion be the true one?\"\n\nThe ecclesiast's thoughts became unfocused with anger, and Lamprophyre caught a flash of thoughts: apostate, heretic, he is in a position to sway many, must stop him. \"You are in violation of Jiwanyil's teachings, Prince Rokshan,\" the ecclesiast said, her voice taut with the same anger. \"You were warned of the consequences, and you are now outcast, denied Jiwanyil's blessings. If you want to be restored to full fellowship with Jiwanyil's light, walk away from this creature now.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to do that,\" Rokshan declared, his voice carrying to the watching crowd. \"I don't believe those teachings came from Jiwanyil. I think you're lying.\"\n\nLamprophyre jerked, trying to twist around so she could see her friend who had apparently just lost his mind. He had been the one who didn't want to start a fight! \"Rokshan? What\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you think so, Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan said, putting heavy emphasis on \"think.\" Lamprophyre listened. The ecclesiast's thoughts were nearly incoherent with rage, but fragments of thought emerged: how dare he and deserves what he gets and wish we could drive the creatures out faster. To her surprise, nothing in the ecclesiast's thoughts suggested that she knew the decree was false. So not all the ecclesiasts were in on the plot. Maybe it was just the High Ecclesiasts, after all, and she needed to track down Khadar.\n\n\"What are you searching for?\" she asked, hoping to take advantage of the woman's fury to goad her into revealing something.\n\n\"You dare address me after speaking blasphemy?\" the ecclesiast shouted, thinking holy, must find. It was all Lamprophyre could hear before the crowd's agitation grew too great. Their confused, frightened thoughts overwhelmed her to the point that she had to block everything out, but it didn't take a dragon's mental hearing to know Rokshan's words had stirred them to the point of incipient riot.\n\n\"We have to get out of here,\" she said, and took off without another word. Looking back, she saw the wind of her passage had knocked two of the musicians over, and the bearers seemed to be struggling to keep the litter upright, but no one seemed hurt. That relieved her mind.\n\n\"What were you thinking?\" she demanded. \"Challenging an ecclesiast in public? Did you want to start a riot?\"\n\n\"I was thinking,\" Rokshan said placidly, \"that it might be a good idea to plant the idea that the ecclesiasts are lying.\"\n\n\"Won't that just cause civil unrest? We don't want people to disbelieve their entire religion.\"\n\n\"No, but if enough people challenge the ecclesiasts, the Archprelate will have to intervene.\" Rokshan shifted his position and leaned forward so he could speak directly into her ear. \"Wherever this false teaching came from, the Archprelate can put a stop to it.\"\n\n\"Unless\u2014\" Lamprophyre shut her mouth on the Archprelate is corrupt.\n\nRokshan knew what she meant without her speaking. \"I don't believe that,\" he said. \"The Archprelate has guided Gonjiri for twenty years, and his wisdom has blessed our country. If he was possessed of a prophecy that said dragons should be shunned, he wouldn't try to justify it by saying it was Katayan's will, because he has always been very clear that he speaks only for Jiwanyil. So I think it's someone else. One or more of the High Ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"Which means we really should go after Khadar.\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll seek him out this afternoon. Did you learn anything from that ecclesiast's thoughts?\"\n\n\"That she doesn't know the decree is a lie, which implies that you're right about the High Ecclesiasts. Oh, and that they're searching for something holy.\"\n\n\"That's not much help, is it?\"\n\nLamprophyre blew out a puff of impatient smoke. \"No. It doesn't even tell us whether they're looking for a thing or a person.\"\n\n\"It's more likely they're looking for a thing, because a holy person would be in the Archprelate's palace. I can't imagine an ecclesiast running off.\" Rokshan blew out his breath. \"But I don't know what a holy thing might be. As far as I know, things are only holy when they're in use.\"\n\n\"I don't understand what that means.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, if a thing contains the power of God, like a prayer wheel, it only does when someone directs that power into it. Things don't store up holiness the way an artifact stores magic. Unless I'm wrong about that.\"\n\n\"So we're no better off than we were before.\"\n\n\"We confirmed they're searching for something. That's good.\"\n\nLamprophyre alit outside the warehouses and let Rokshan down. \"I hope you're right about stirring people up. I don't want to be responsible for a riot.\"\n\n\"You started a riot?\" Orthoclase said, poking his head out of his warehouse. \"On purpose?\"\n\nLamprophyre explained about the encounter with the ecclesiast. By the end of her story, Porphyry and Flint were listening, too. \"That actually makes sense,\" Flint said when she finished. \"If the ecclesiasts are teaching something that isn't true, people should know about it. It might even confirm what they feel deep down about that teaching.\"\n\n\"You think humans can tell the difference between a true teaching and a lie?\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"Why not? Dragons can,\" Flint responded.\n\n\"I like to think Jiwanyil's light touches all of us,\" Rokshan said, \"and that light illuminates the truth of his prophecies. But I was also thinking that this might get people searching the Hall of Visions for the record of the prophecy that supposedly says dragons are outcast. If it's not a true prophecy, it might appear different from others. And that will encourage more people to question the false decree.\"\n\nThe beating of giant wings and an enormous shadow drew everyone's attention upward to Coquina, descending rapidly. She landed hard and crouched on hands and feet, breathing heavily as if she'd been racing. \"I'm fine,\" she said when Orthoclase tried to support her. \"Just didn't shed momentum fast enough. I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Why were you in such a hurry?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nCoquina turned to face her. Her chest was still heaving, and her wings trembled from exertion. \"Melika's been hurt,\" she said. \"Her mother wouldn't tell me more than that. It's my fault.\"\n\n\"How could it be your fault?\" Lamprophyre said. \"You haven't seen her for days.\"\n\nCoquina laughed, a shrill, almost hysterical sound. \"They found her in the slums, badly beaten. There's only one reason she'd be anywhere near there. She was investigating the kyanite. For us.\" She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. \"She was hurt because she was helping us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"But she's alive?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nCoquina nodded. \"I don't know more than that she was taken to her home and treated by a physicker. I offered to pay for them to take her to a healing center, but her mother slammed the door on me after telling me not to come back.\" Her hands and wings trembled with agitation. \"I don't even know if it's something she might die of.\"\n\n\"Try to calm down, Coquina,\" Flint said. \"There's nothing we can do for Melika now.\"\n\n\"Except find the humans who hurt her and destroy them,\" Coquina snarled.\n\n\"We can't kill humans even if they deserve it,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling uncomfortably guilty at saying it. After all, she'd been indirectly responsible for a human's death and she didn't even regret it. \"They have to go to trial.\"\n\n\"And if human justice finds them innocent? That's unacceptable.\" Coquina stood to her full height and flexed her wings.\n\n\"We don't know that, and we can't act before we do,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Besides, how are we to find the guilty humans? The city is teeming with people, and Melika's attackers could be anywhere.\"\n\n\"We go to the slums and we question humans until we find someone who saw the attack. Maybe they even know the attackers.\" Coquina's eyes were narrowed in anger, and her voice shook.\n\n\"That's a good plan,\" Orthoclase said. \"And it gives us a reason to pursue the kyanite smugglers, or whoever they are. They have to have some connection to the adepts. If Melika was close enough to the truth that they beat her to stop her investigating\u2014\"\n\nCoquina growled, deep in her throat, and didn't even look embarrassed at her atavistic reaction. Orthoclase glanced her way, then continued, \"If we can find her attackers, it probably won't be much of a reach to find the adepts who are buying kyanite, or the people selling it. Whatever it is Melika found.\"\n\n\"The problem is the slums have mostly narrow streets,\" Flint said. \"It's going to be difficult to fit into some of those spaces.\"\n\n\"I can handle that,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll arrange for an investigation. A private one, so the slum dwellers aren't frightened by uniforms. They'll learn the truth and report back to me.\"\n\n\"A private investigation?\" Lamprophyre had thought he would send in soldiers under his authority as a military commander. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"My sister Tekentriya despises me, but she is rabid on the subject of violence against women,\" Rokshan said. \"It won't take much to convince her to send out a few of her agents to look into the attack.\"\n\nThat left Lamprophyre feeling wary. Tekentriya was heir to the throne and supervisor of a network of confidential agents, and she not only despised Rokshan, she feared Lamprophyre. \"She would have to be very rabid to overlook the fact that it's you asking,\" she said.\n\n\"Trust me, she is,\" Rokshan said. \"Coquina, do you know where in the slums Melika was attacked?\"\n\n\"I don't know where it is, but Melika's mother said she was attacked in South Narrows, like that was a landmark,\" Coquina said.\n\nRokshan nodded. \"I'll go now to get that investigation moving. Then I'll see if I can find Khadar.\" He ran off northward and was soon lost to sight.\n\n\"Why does he want to find Khadar?\" Flint asked, making a disgusted face.\n\n\"We, um, talked to an ecclesiast, and her thoughts indicated that she didn't know the decree is a lie. So we think it's the High Ecclesiasts responsible.\" Lamprophyre settled back on her haunches and sighed. \"Coquina, I'm so sorry. If those idiots hadn't spread that false prophecy, we could arrange for Melika to get proper treatment.\"\n\n\"It's infuriating,\" Coquina said, but she sounded less angry than before. \"I hope a physicker is good enough. If she dies because she was helping us\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's not worry about that,\" Flint said. \"Until we know more about the attackers, all we can do is continue to watch the ecclesiasts and hope they give something away.\"\n\nCoquina spread her wings again. \"I'll see what I can learn,\" she said, and leaped into the sky.\n\nThe others watched her fly away in silence. Finally, Porphyry said, \"I'm going to the market to see what kind of artifacts are for sale.\"\n\n\"We don't need artifacts. Do we?\" Orthoclase said.\n\nPorphyry shook his head. \"I don't intend to buy. I want to confirm that no one sells chlorite artifacts. I doubt they do, since they're related to the race to create the first mind-reading artifact, but if I'm wrong, we might want to question anyone who is.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nPorphyry grinned. \"I always am.\"\n\nWhen he was gone, Lamprophyre and Flint looked at each other. Lamprophyre wondered if Flint felt as discouraged as she did. \"I'm going to fly,\" she said. \"If Manishi is as upset with me as I think, there's a chance she'll try to track me down. So I'm not going to settle anywhere very long.\"\n\n\"I had an idea about her,\" Flint said, \"but I don't want to talk about it until I'm sure. Good flying, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and took to the skies.\n\nIt was late afternoon before she returned to the warehouses, tired from her wanderings and ready for a meal. But she didn't want to return to the embassy until she knew what the others had learned. She swept low over the city, breathing in the smells of dust and cooking fat and the sour smell of thousands of human bodies all packed together. It was strange how individual humans smelled nothing like the sour odor. Rokshan, for example, smelled like the pines that grew on the hills below the mountain peaks, and Manishi smelled of a dozen different stones plus a whiff of something Lamprophyre couldn't identify that she thought of as the smell of magic. So unusual.\n\nHumans looked up and pointed as she passed overhead, but there were too many of them for her to make out coherent thoughts. She didn't need to; she could guess they were thinking about how her presence in Tanajital was a potential contamination. That made her angry and determined to prove the ecclesiasts wrong. Strange as the scents of humans were, what was even stranger was how fond she had become of the human city and the people who lived in it. It would never be home, but it was more welcoming than she'd imagined possible when she'd first arrived.\n\nEveryone was there when she arrived, all but Dolomite settled in their warehouses. Rokshan had also returned and was drawing symbols on a sheet of paper secured to a board. Lamprophyre had seen one like that used by Dharan as well, something he called a blank book that was bound on one end like a regular book, but with pages that weren't written on and only one cover. Rokshan's fingers were gray from the charcoal stick he held, as if he'd been writing for a while. Lamprophyre bent to peer at the tiny writing.\n\n\"I don't know if there's anything I can learn from this,\" Rokshan told her. \"But the more information we have, the more likely that is.\"\n\nDolomite finished his sketch, drawn on the back of the first slate, and sat back as if exhausted. \"Twelve patterns,\" he said, \"and three of them are repeated from the last two days. And they're covering more ground, though they still haven't ventured into the slums, the embassy, or the academy.\"\n\nLamprophyre examined the new sketch. \"You're going to run out of chalk colors if they continue increasing their numbers.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't think so. There really are a lot of chalk colors. Humans are so inventive.\" Dolomite idly drew a dragon in flight, tiny but so detailed it might have flown off the slate and winged around his head.\n\n\"Did Tekentriya's people find the attackers?\" Lamprophyre asked Rokshan.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Not yet. It may take a few days, and then I'll have to coerce the information out of someone. Tekentriya made it clear that even though she appreciated my bringing the problem to her, it wasn't my business anymore. And of course I couldn't tell her why it mattered that I learn the results of her investigation.\"\n\n\"But they did start investigating.\"\n\n\"Yes. Like I said, violence against women is something Tekentriya takes very seriously.\"\n\n\"That's so strange,\" Coquina said. \"I mean that that's something common enough that it's a special category of violence.\"\n\n\"Humans use violence to get their way sometimes,\" Rokshan said. \"Some men see women as an easy target because women are generally smaller and weaker than men. Tekentriya would like the law to recognize this tendency and provide special protections for women because of it.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to imagine being shoved around by Coquina and failing,\" Flint said with a smile.\n\nCoquina arched her neck to look at him. He was half a dozen handspans smaller than she, and his wingspan was narrower. \"So much easier to keep you in line by outflying you.\"\n\nFlint's smile broadened. \"I didn't realize that's what you've been doing all these years, keeping us in line.\"\n\nCoquina smiled back. \"Five males and two females in our clutch. You males have us seriously outnumbered. We have to keep you in line, right, Lamprophyre?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" Lamprophyre said with a straight face. \"Teach you who's boss.\"\n\n\"You're not bossy,\" Dolomite exclaimed. \"You're assertive.\"\n\nLamprophyre and Coquina exchanged glances. Dolomite really was guileless and innocent. \"That's a nice way of saying 'bossy,'\" Lamprophyre said, \"but I'm glad you don't feel intimidated by us, because we don't want to control you males. It's so much more fun when we work together.\"\n\n\"Like now,\" Orthoclase said. \"I never realized how close we all are until we were aliens in a human city.\"\n\n\"I hadn't considered that, but it's true,\" Lamprophyre said. \"All of us trying to solve this puzzle, and defeat the ecclesiasts, and thwart Manishi\u2014Flint, did you work out what you were thinking about her?\"\n\n\"I don't know her well enough to guess what approach will be best,\" Flint said, \"but we have a few options. One is to steal that crystal wand she has the images stored in. That would be ideal, but requires us to get inside her workshop, and that's unlikely. We could threaten her with violence, but from what you've said, she doesn't think like ordinary people and might not care.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Rokshan said. He was twiddling the charcoal stick between his fingers, blackening them further. \"Besides, she knows dragons won't hurt humans.\"\n\n\"The third option is to find something we can blackmail her with. But that has two problems. We'd have to investigate her, and that's not something we're equipped to do, and if she doesn't care about a threat of violence, she might not care about blackmail.\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Orthoclase said. \"Though it would be a satisfying option.\"\n\nFlint nodded. \"So we come to the option I'm leaning toward, which is that I go preemptively to the king and tell him what Lokun and I did.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"That isn't a good idea,\" she said. \"Suppose King Ekanath decides you're a threat and has you banished? Or, worse, what if it gets him thinking in terms of what dragons might do, and gets rid of all of us so we can't spy on him?\"\n\n\"That's not what he'd think,\" Rokshan said. \"If Flint tells him the truth, and it gives Father ideas, those ideas will almost certainly be that he can enlist dragons to spy on Fanishkor. He'll want to turn you over to Tekentriya for use in her spy corps.\"\n\nHorrified, Lamprophyre said, \"But we don't want to do that! We're not Gonjirians, and I don't think the terms of the human-dragon alliance allow us to act so directly as human auxiliaries.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean he won't put pressure on you. It could be uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"Uncomfortable enough that Manishi blackmailing us is a reasonable alternative?\" Flint asked. \"We should consider it. Manishi having a hold on us is dangerous. Personally, I'd rather the king tries to make us his spies than that Manishi forces us to work for her. We can turn the king down.\"\n\n\"We have a few days before Manishi becomes a problem. We'll think about other possibilities until then.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"It's almost suppertime. Is there anything else we need to discuss?\"\n\n\"I'm too tired to think straight,\" Dolomite said. \"Bromargyrite, were you going to bring us a cow or three?\"\n\nBromargyrite stood and stretched. \"Porphyry, help me out,\" he said. \"Lamprophyre, we'll see you in the morning?\"\n\nLamprophyre felt a little guilty that she was going to have a perfectly cooked meal while her friends would eat what Coquina roasted. Though Coquina was a more meticulous cook than Lamprophyre, so it wasn't as if they'd eat poorly. \"In the morning,\" she said, and when Rokshan had climbed up, she flew away to the embassy, taking a higher path so she could see the city the way Dolomite had drawn it. She saw no ecclesiasts' litters, nothing but the usual streams of people heading for home and their own suppers.\n\nThe courtyard was as sparsely populated as it had been the previous night, but there were still people there, which relieved Lamprophyre's mind. Most of them were strangers, and those men and women stayed well away from Lamprophyre, but the Sister of the Red was there, smiling her enigmatic smile as she observed the courtyard. Her smile grew more amused when she met Lamprophyre's gaze. Lamprophyre watched her for a few beats before looking away. She didn't want the women thinking she'd won some battle.\n\nShe said to Bhakriya, who stood at the cauldron ladling soup into bowls, \"I wish Rassika and Kavari would come back. I think Rassika needs a safe place where she doesn't have to worry so much about her sister wandering away.\"\n\n\"She did come back,\" Bhakriya said. \"She said she had a message for you, and I told her to wait in the embassy hall. That's all right, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Lamprophyre's mood brightened. \"Did she eat?\"\n\nBhakriya shook her head. \"She said she should speak with you before that. She really is very independent. I don't think she wants to rely on anyone but herself.\"\n\n\"I suppose that makes sense.\" Dragons relied on their clutch, on the whole flight, without worrying about the kind of reciprocity that seemed to define Rassika's life. Lamprophyre crossed the courtyard without difficulty and ducked her head inside.\n\nRassika was curled up on the cloth the books lay on, limp and boneless with exhaustion. In the dim light, her face looked rounder, less tense, and her resemblance to Kavari was stronger. Kavari sat next to her sister, looking at the illustrations of the constellations book and occasionally touching the bright colors. She looked up at Lamprophyre, and her eyes grew wide.\n\n\"Hello, Kavari,\" Lamprophyre whispered.\n\nKavari stood, pushing the book aside. She took a few tentative steps toward Lamprophyre, then a few more. Lamprophyre held out her hand, which was big enough to fit completely around Kavari's head, though she didn't know why she would do that. Kavari reached out, slowly, and closed her hand on Lamprophyre's finger, as far as it would go. The touch was barely palpable, the child's hand cooler than Lamprophyre's, but it made Lamprophyre's breath catch in her throat as if she'd been handed something precious.\n\nRassika stirred. Her hand closed slowly on nothing. Then she sat up, all her tension returning in the space of a beat. \"Kavari!\" she shouted, her voice filled with such fear Lamprophyre's heart ached for her.\n\n\"She's right here,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She's safe.\"\n\nRassika scrambled awkwardly to her feet. \"Shouldn't've slept,\" she said. Her breathing was ragged with what was left of her fright. \"Anything could've happened. Shouldn't have slept.\"\n\n\"You were so tired, I'm not surprised you slept.\" Lamprophyre wished she could adequately reassure this proud, frightened girl. But she knew in her bones that Rassika wouldn't forgive herself for not protecting Kavari, even if it hadn't been necessary. \"And Kavari is smart. She knew not to go anywhere. See, she was looking at the pictures. You've taught her well.\"\n\nRassika took Kavari's hand and held onto it so tightly Kavari cried out and tried to pull away. \"Can't let her go,\" Rassika said, ignoring her sister's cries. \"Dada said, don't let go. She's all I have left.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I\u2014\" There really wasn't anything Lamprophyre could say, much as she wished she could make the girl's life easier. \"Did you have news for me?\"\n\nRassika nodded. \"Heard the adept woman talking. Don't know to who. But she said as you dragons ain't done what you said, and she had to teach you a lesson.\"\n\nLamprophyre's blood froze. \"Stones,\" she breathed. \"Rassika, when was this?\"\n\n\"Don't know hours. It was just before I come here.\"\n\nLamprophyre stepped back out of the hall. \"Rokshan?\"\n\n\"Over here,\" Rokshan said. He was crouched beside the old man, holding the man's soup bowl while he keened a thin, weak cry of pain and gripped his head in his hands.\n\nLamprophyre waited for the old man to stop making noise and impatiently gestured to Rokshan to join her. \"Manishi is going to 'teach us a lesson' for not bringing her the kyanite,\" she said. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"I'll go back to the palace immediately and see if I can forestall her,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll tell her we'll bring the kyanite in the morning. There's no time for anything else.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"It will have to be Flint's plan,\" Rokshan insisted. \"If he tells Father the truth, it won't matter what Manishi says. You'll just have to stand firm against any plans he wants you for.\" He turned and ran from the courtyard before Lamprophyre could offer to fly him to the palace. Well, it was better, if he was going to confront Manishi, that Lamprophyre not be present to make Manishi wonder why they hadn't brought the kyanite with them.\n\nRassika was looking at her speculatively. \"You ain't scared of the adept, not someone as big as you, right?\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"Big doesn't always mean powerful. I can't hurt a human without causing a lot of trouble, which means humans who want me to do something for them can sometimes force me to do things I don't want to. Thank you for bringing me that news. I owe you.\"\n\nHer words made Rassika's eyes widen as if Lamprophyre had said something more startling. But all she said was, \"You said we could have soup if I told you things.\"\n\n\"You can have soup any time you want, whether or not you give me information.\"\n\nRassika nodded and dragged Kavari past Lamprophyre to where Bhakriya stood at the soup cauldron. Preyanka stood next to her mother, holding the bowls to be filled. Lamprophyre wished she knew how to tell human ages. She only knew that humans with white hair and wrinkled faces were older than those with black hair and smooth faces, and she knew a child's height indicated years, but dragons lived so much longer than humans Lamprophyre wasn't good at judging the relative maturity of two adult humans. Rokshan had told her that in human years, she would be about eighteen. It was interesting information, but not helpful.\n\nEven so, if heights were anything to go by, Preyanka was older than Rassika, Rassika was older than Abhit, and Kavari was younger than all of them. Lamprophyre was fairly certain Kavari was old enough to speak\u2014there was another difference; dragonets came out of the egg able to speak, but human babies took a year or more to say their first words\u2014but she'd never heard a word out of the child. Maybe she was as frightened as Rassika in her own way.\n\nPreyanka handed the bowl of soup to Rassika with a smile the younger girl didn't return. That didn't seem to bother Preyanka, who watched Rassika and Kavari walk away as if curious. It was too bad Rassika was so isolated, because Preyanka might be a good friend. Lamprophyre had observed Bhakriya's daughter closely over the twelveday the little family had been coming for soup, and she was impressed at how kindly she treated her brother and how respectful she was of her mother.\n\nPreyanka picked up another bowl and held it for Bhakriya to ladle soup into it. The man standing before her took hold of it, then came up short when Preyanka didn't let go. \"I've got it, girlie, thanks much,\" the man said. He tugged on the bowl, making soup slosh up the sides and trickle down over the lip. Preyanka stared past him, her lips moving as if she were chewing something.\n\nBhakriya flung the ladle down with a splash and snatched the bowl out of Preyanka's hands. \"I beg your pardon,\" she said to the man, \"she hasn't been feeling well,\" and steered Preyanka through the dining pavilion and past the kitchen to the rear of the embassy. Lamprophyre, curious and a little concerned, followed.\n\nBhakriya glanced back and saw Lamprophyre. A look of terror just like the one Rassika had had at thinking Kavari was missing flitted across her face. \"It's not\u2014please don't\u2014\" she said.\n\n\"Is Preyanka all right?\"\n\n\"It's nothing\u2014\"\n\nPreyanka closed her eyes and swayed as if she were about to faint. When she opened her eyes, they were the green of new leaves, pupils, irises, whites and all. \"Find the lost,\" a voice that was not hers said. Lamprophyre couldn't tell if it was male or female; it reverberated as if echoing off invisible walls. \"That which is spoken by the old stone is true and false, and the hearers wander like lambs. Faith is not enough.\" Preyanka drew a deep breath. \"The skies will burn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"What,\" Lamprophyre began. Preyanka, an ecclesiast?\n\nPreyanka licked her cracked, dry lips to moisten them. Bhakriya held her by the shoulders, either supporting or restraining her, Lamprophyre couldn't tell. Preyanka's head sagged, and a trickle of blood ran from her nose. Then she jerked sharply, nearly tearing free of her mother's grasp. She flung her head back, sending blood flying to spatter Bhakriya's cheek, and then her whole body went into spasms, her arms flopping and her head twitching as if some invisible force were shaking her. Bhakriya cried out and held Preyanka close enough that she, too, jerked and spasmed. It looked as if the two were dancing some horrible, unnatural dance. Lamprophyre hovered nearby, afraid to touch them and possibly hurt them by accident.\n\nAfter what felt like a thousand beats, Preyanka's convulsions slowed, and when she opened her eyes, they were her normal brown, though she didn't appear to see anything. Bhakriya still clutched her tightly, tears trickling down her cheeks. She, too, stared into the distance as if looking at something invisible to Lamprophyre.\n\n\"Bhakriya,\" Lamprophyre said, \"what can I do? Bhakriya, talk to me.\"\n\nThen Depik was there, gently easing Preyanka free of her mother's blind grip. \"This way,\" he said, carrying the girl around the rear of the embassy to the rows of little houses meant for servants. Depik nudged open the door to his house and entered it. Lamprophyre leaned down and peered through the window. Depik had laid Preyanka on his bed and now stood looking down at her. His back was to Lamprophyre, so she couldn't see his expression.\n\nBhakriya followed Depik, her hands clenched together tightly in front of her. \"Don't say a word,\" she told him. Her voice was fierce with anger and fear. \"Not a word, or I'll\u2014\"\n\n\"Or you'll what?\" Depik said.\n\nBhakriya flinched and took a step backward. \"Nothing,\" she said, sounding as bleak as Lamprophyre had ever heard. \"I'm helpless. Please, don't tell. I beg you.\"\n\nDepik turned to look at Bhakriya. \"I won't betray you,\" he said, \"and neither will my lady. But I don't understand why you're afraid. This is nothing to be ashamed of.\"\n\nPreyanka twitched, drawing Lamprophyre's attention. \"Mama?\" she said weakly. \"Did it happen again?\"\n\nBhakriya dropped to her knees beside the bed. \"Yes, sweetness, but there's nothing to worry about. Just rest.\"\n\n\"But he'll find us now.\" Preyanka sounded near tears.\n\n\"He won't, I swear. It's all right. Rest now.\"\n\n\"Where am I?\" Her tearful voice sounded frightened.\n\n\"It's my home,\" Depik said. \"It's all right. Try to sleep, if you can.\" He gestured to Bhakriya. \"We're going outside, but I promise your mother won't go far.\"\n\nBhakriya squeezed Preyanka's hand, then followed Depik out to where Lamprophyre waited. \"Now you know our secret,\" she said. \"You can't tell anyone. Please. It's her life at stake.\"\n\n\"I'm confused,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Isn't Preyanka too young to be an ecclesiast? And why are you begging in the streets when she could be living in the Archprelate's palace?\"\n\n\"She's young, yes, but that just makes her remarkable.\" Bhakriya's voice shook. \"My lady, the ecclesiasts\u2014oh, it's a long story.\"\n\n\"Neither of us have anywhere to go,\" Depik said. \"Talk. It might do you good.\"\n\nBhakriya nodded. \"My lady,\" she said, \"nobody knows who an ecclesiast is until he or she is possessed of a prophecy. So it's always a surprise. Usually ecclesiasts are young adults when it happens, but sometimes they're in their teens or even younger. The young ones, the ecclesiasts are always excited about because their prophecies are considered purer.\" She made a noise of disdain. \"I think it's nonsense, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that young ecclesiasts are taken from their families and brought to the Archprelate's palace. The families are well compensated for the loss, but the children still go.\"\n\n\"They wanted to take Preyanka away,\" Lamprophyre said, understanding dawning.\n\nBhakriya nodded again. \"My husband\u2014he was thrilled. We're not poor people, but he loves money more than anything else, and he was eager to increase his fortune by way of selling his only daughter.\" She laughed bitterly. \"I didn't care about the money. I don't want that life for Preyanka, to be praised and worshipped for the next sixty or seventy years. But I would have endured it if we could have stayed near her. Ecclesiasts can see their families if they want. And my husband refused to leave Kolmira. So I took the children and fled.\"\n\n\"To Tanajital,\" Depik said flatly. \"The very place the ecclesiasts would have taken her.\"\n\n\"It was the only place in Gonjiri big enough for us to be lost in,\" Bhakriya said. \"I was afraid to go to Fanishkor, what with them being on the verge of war with Gonjiri and maybe interested in taking out their anger on a displaced woman with two young children, and Sachetan is too far. So I decided to take my chances.\"\n\nA terrible idea was taking shape in Lamprophyre's mind. \"Would your mate\u2014your husband\u2014have told the ecclesiasts about Preyanka?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Bhakriya said. \"He'd already sent word when we left.\"\n\n\"Is it possible he guessed where you went?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Bhakriya's brow furrowed. \"I suppose he might. We left over a month ago, so if he searched Kolmira first, he might have worked out by now that we're not there.\" Her voice choked on a sob. \"I should have sent her away, protected her from her father's fists, but I couldn't bear to lose my little girl.\"\n\n\"Nobody blames you,\" Depik said. \"You were in an awful position, you and the littles, but you're safe now. My lady won't let anyone near you.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Lamprophyre said, but her mind was working furiously. Holy, must find. Who was it who'd said there was no chance the ecclesiasts were searching Tanajital for one of their own? It didn't matter. If Bhakriya was right about the ecclesiasts valuing a very young person for her purer prophecies, no wonder they were sweeping the city. The High Ecclesiasts must be going out of their minds at having lost Preyanka.\n\n\"No, wait,\" she added swiftly. \"I can only do so much. If your husband comes here, or if the ecclesiasts find Preyanka, I can't commit violence against them even if they deserve it. We have to find a way to keep anyone from learning where she is.\"\n\n\"We can move on,\" Bhakriya said, sounding uncertain.\n\n\"You won't have better protection anywhere else,\" Depik said. \"I'm sure o' that. And my lady may not be able to hurt them, but I've no reservations about it.\"\n\n\"Depik, you can't fight them. The guard will take you into custody,\" Bhakriya said.\n\nDepik shrugged. \"If it spares you time to get away, might be worth it.\"\n\n\"Nobody's fighting anyone,\" Lamprophyre said. How she wished Rokshan hadn't left! Stones take Manishi and her stupid greed and selfishness. \"Bhakriya, the ecclesiasts are searching the city for Preyanka. It's just good fortune they haven't seen her yet. It's also good fortune they don't ever come this way. You'll have to stay here until we can figure out what to do.\"\n\n\"I can't do that.\" Bhakriya's voice sounded tearful again. \"I shouldn't involve you in my troubles.\"\n\n\"Why, because the ecclesiasts will condemn me? Too late to worry about that.\" Lamprophyre laughed. \"What's happening to you isn't fair, and I don't like unfairness. Rokshan and I will work out how to solve your problem, and until then you'll go on working for me. There are plenty of these little houses for you to use.\"\n\nDepik put a hand on Bhakriya's shoulder. \"It will be all right,\" he said.\n\nSlowly, Bhakriya raised her hand and rested it over Depik's. \"I believe it will,\" she said.\n\n\"All right. Let's finish serving food and clean up, and then tomorrow we'll discuss your problem with my clutch\u2014the other dragons\u2014and find a solution.\" Lamprophyre didn't want to tell Bhakriya she was relieved to learn what the ecclesiasts were looking for, in case Bhakriya took it the wrong way. But she felt more cheerful than she had since the day that reverend had brought his terrible decree to the embassy.\n\nWhile Bhakriya and Depik returned to serving soup, Lamprophyre helped Preyanka and Abhit choose a house to sleep in. Preyanka had recovered completely from her prophecy, though the way she refused to meet Lamprophyre's eyes and her tumbled thoughts told Lamprophyre the girl still felt awkward and embarrassed and hoped the dragon wouldn't push her to talk about it. Lamprophyre stayed tactfully silent.\n\nRassika, towing Kavari behind her, followed the other two children, not saying anything. Lamprophyre caught a glimpse of her face and felt incredibly torn. Rassika's longing for even so impermanent a home as the embassy was obvious, but Lamprophyre knew there was no way Rassika would accept charity, even if Lamprophyre couched it in terms of keeping Kavari safe. She wished Rokshan were here, because he might see a solution\u2014and just like that, the answer came to her.\n\nWhile Preyanka and Abhit were settling themselves in their chosen house\u2014the houses weren't really very small, but each had only one bed, so they couldn't share with their mother\u2014Lamprophyre drew Rassika aside and said in a low voice, \"Rokshan needs to know what happened, and I don't want to wait until morning. Do you suppose you could run to the palace for me and ask him to come? I'll watch Kavari until you return.\"\n\nRassika's gaze darted to her sister, then back to Lamprophyre. \"I guess I could,\" she said, warily.\n\n\"Thank you. And it will be late when you return, so I was thinking, maybe you could sleep here for the night? I worry about you and Kavari traveling the slums in darkness.\"\n\n\"I been doing that for years,\" Rassika said, but in the tone of someone who wanted to be convinced.\n\n\"Yes, but surely this is easier? And Depik makes porridge in the morning, so you could have a meal\u2014and of course I'd pay you for running the errand,\" Lamprophyre pressed on relentlessly.\n\nRassika looked at Kavari again. Kavari's eyes were fixed on Lamprophyre's wings. \"All right,\" Rassika finally said. \"You watch her right, yes?\"\n\n\"I promise.\"\n\nRassika released Kavari and bolted. Kavari never stopped staring at Lamprophyre. \"We'll wait for Rassika in the embassy hall,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Butterfly,\" Kavari said, reaching out a tiny hand toward Lamprophyre's wings. Her thoughts were wordless, but filled with wonder.\n\nCharmed, Lamprophyre picked Kavari up and lifted her to where she could touch the copper membranes. She could barely feel Kavari's fingers brushing against the sensitive spots. She'd wondered, from things Rokshan had said, whether humans' sense of touch was more refined than dragons', and now she felt that had to be true.\n\nCarrying Kavari, she walked through the courtyard and settled herself just inside the embassy so she could watch the stragglers coming for food with the last rays of sunlight. Depik and Bhakriya were talking in low voices near the soup cauldron, and Lamprophyre idly listened to their thoughts. Bhakriya was exhausted, but hopeful, and Depik\u2014oh. That must be what Rokshan had thought might or might not be something.\n\nLamprophyre looked at Depik more closely. If he had affection for Bhakriya\u2026actually Lamprophyre didn't know what that meant, in human terms. It sounded as if Bhakriya was still pair-bonded to her husband, and dragons, at least, couldn't have more than one mate at a time. Though maybe it didn't matter, since Bhakriya's thoughts about Depik weren't along those lines. Lamprophyre examined the two of them more closely. She found herself wishing Bhakriya returned Depik's regard, because how beautifully simple a solution to have the two of them pair-bonded! Depik would never hurt anyone, and he was kind and loyal, a perfect mate for Bhakriya. If her husband were gone, of course.\n\nThe Sister of the Red finished her soup and nodded at Lamprophyre as if they were equals before leaving. Lamprophyre still wasn't sure how she felt about the woman. Others drifted away until the only humans still there were Depik, Bhakriya, and the children\u2014oh, and the old man, who seemed to have fallen asleep sitting up. Lamprophyre left him alone. It felt as if she were sheltering half of Tanajital tonight. She glanced at Kavari, who was looking at the constellations book again, settled herself across the doorway so Kavari couldn't get out without her knowing, and closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to listen to the voice of the city as it hummed along into night.\n\nShe didn't open her eyes when Kavari climbed over her and settled in the nest made by her folded arms, but soon Kavari fell still and quiet, and when Lamprophyre peeked, she saw the child was curled up asleep. She was no bigger than a hatchling dragonet, and Lamprophyre had a sudden vision of herself with her own child, sometime in the future. She still had no idea who she would choose for a mate, but the idea of being pair-bonded, of tending a child, was less uncomfortable now.\n\nShe closed her eyes again and listened. There was Depik, clattering away in the kitchen, and Bhakriya swishing dishes through water. At the limits of her hearing, Preyanka and Abhit were breathing quietly in sleep. Past that, the murmur of thousands of people going about their nighttime business soothed her spirits. One of those people might be Bhakriya's husband, but Lamprophyre found it impossible to worry about that, what with the calm of the warm, humid air and the dim purple twilight. Something for the morning, when she could discuss it with the clutch.\n\nShe roused from her doze at the sound of running footsteps, one light, the other heavier. Blinking, she looked up to see Rokshan coming toward her, trailed by Rassika. Conscious of Kavari's sleeping weight in her arms, she didn't move more than to raise her head. \"Did you find Manishi?\" she asked.\n\n\"She wasn't at the palace,\" Rokshan said. \"Father hadn't seen her. Whatever she has in mind, it's not telling Father about Flint.\"\n\n\"That's a relief. Sort of. I guess it was easier when we knew what she planned.\" Lamprophyre carefully slid her arms from beneath Kavari until the child rested in her hands. She gave her to Rassika, who staggered slightly. Maybe the girl wasn't as rested from her sleep as Lamprophyre had thought. \"Bring Kavari, Rassika, and I'll show you where you can sleep.\"\n\nRassika stared at the little house, clean but furnished only with a bed, an oil lamp, and a small chest, as if it represented the height of luxury. \"We can sleep here?\" she asked, her voice tinged with awe.\n\n\"Yes, and have a meal in the morning. And\u2014\" It was an impulsive, rash thought, but the girl's plight and the memory of cradling Kavari spoke to Lamprophyre. \"If you don't mind, you might run more errands for me. There are so many places in this city I don't fit, and I imagine you know it well.\"\n\n\"Sure I do.\" Rassika didn't take her eyes off the bed. \"I'm fast, too, faster'n most my age.\"\n\n\"That is exactly what I need.\" She resolved to think of errands for Rassika to run. \"Now, sleep, and we'll talk more in the morning.\"\n\nShe walked in silence back into the embassy and closed the back doors as quietly as she could manage. Then she leaned against them, making them creak, and rubbed her hands over her face, pressing the ridges above her eyes to relieve the tension at the back of her skull. \"I've never been so tired.\"\n\n\"Don't sleep yet,\" Rokshan said. \"I need to tell you what I learned.\"\n\n\"I thought you said Manishi wasn't at the palace.\" Thinking about what Manishi might be doing right then made her head hurt more.\n\n\"Not Manishi. Khadar,\" Rokshan said. He sat cross-legged next to her and stretched out his back with a series of pops that made Lamprophyre shudder. \"I searched for him earlier today. Usually he's either at the palace or at some pleasure house, doing un-ecclesiastical things. But he wasn't in any of his usual haunts. I think he's gone to ground in the Archprelate's palace.\"\n\n\"Where we can't get at him.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"It doesn't matter. I found out what the ecclesiasts are searching for.\"\n\nRokshan's head jerked up. \"You what?\"\n\nLamprophyre lowered her voice, though there was no one around to hear. \"Preyanka is an ecclesiast. She was possessed of a prophecy right in front of me. Bhakriya fled with her to keep the ecclesiasts from finding her and taking her away.\"\n\n\"But\u2014Lamprophyre, we have to take her to the Archprelate's palace. She has a destiny she can't avoid.\"\n\nLamprophyre recoiled. \"You can't possibly be on their side. Not after what they've done.\"\n\n\"What they've done is separate from the duties of an ecclesiast. Preyanka is going to go on being possessed of prophecies for the rest of her life. That's Jiwanyil's voice speaking to humanity through her. It's not fair to anyone to deny the world the word of God.\" Rokshan closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. \"No wonder the ecclesiasts have been out in force, though it doesn't explain why they didn't make an announcement and enlist the city's help.\"\n\nHis placid certainty angered Lamprophyre. \"They were going to take her away from Bhakriya,\" she said, feeling a growl build within her. \"She would never see her daughter again. That's not fair.\"\n\n\"That's not true. It's not like the ecclesiasts are thieves. Bhakriya could see Preyanka whenever she wanted.\"\n\n\"Not if Bhakriya is living in Kolmira with that awful husband of hers. He only cares about the money the ecclesiasts would pay for Preyanka. And you know if they find Preyanka, it will be easier for Bhakriya's husband to track her down. I refuse to let that happen.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't sound like that.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Like I'm the unreasonable one.\"\n\nRokshan rubbed his face the way Lamprophyre had rubbed hers. \"All right, you're not unreasonable. But you also don't understand everything about this situation. You've seen how a prophecy takes the one possessed of it. Receiving prophecy is hard on a human body, and the ecclesiasts have things, medicines, that ease that burden. If Preyanka doesn't receive that treatment, one of her prophecies could injure her, maybe even kill her. Does Bhakriya know that?\"\n\nLamprophyre involuntarily glanced over her shoulder as if she could see through the walls to where Bhakriya slept. \"I don't think so.\"\n\nRokshan sighed again. \"There has to be some way to keep Preyanka safe without alerting her father. I don't know why Bhakriya hasn't taken steps to annul her marriage. Any ecclesiast who knows the truth would see to it. Though if her husband is powerful enough, he might continue trying to hurt her regardless of whether or not they're still married.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't the law protect her?\"\n\nRokshan looked away. \"It should. But it's complicated. The law wants to see families stay intact, and sometimes that means overlooking or ignoring good reasons for a marriage to end. It's not right, Lamprophyre, I know, but humans can't hear people's thoughts. They have to go on what they see. Even ecclesiasts. Bhakriya's husband\u2014like I said, if he's rich and powerful, he might be able to conceal what he's done to her and escape punishment.\"\n\nOutrage choked Lamprophyre's reply. \"That is so unfair,\" she said. \"I\u2014\" She managed not to say I'm glad I'm not human. The failings of human society weren't Rokshan's fault.\n\n\"Bhakriya is in a much better position now,\" Rokshan said. \"With the two of us behind her, she's protected from her husband simply snatching her away. I'll spend the night here, and speak with her in the morning about a divorce\u2014that means legally ending her marriage. She might not have pursued that option out of fear her husband will try to keep the children from her.\"\n\n\"We can stop that, too, right?\"\n\n\"If you're willing to spend some money, yes.\" Rokshan's face was grim. \"I'm embarrassed to say this, but the whole thing would be easier if Bhakriya had some fresh bruises.\"\n\n\"That's disgusting.\"\n\n\"Like I said, humans can't hear thoughts to know if someone's evil. Even if Bhakriya is granted a divorce, a judge bribed sufficiently might rule that Abhit has to go back to his father. But we won't let that happen.\" Rokshan put his small hand over Lamprophyre's. \"I hope Bhakriya trusts us. Finding a permanent solution for her means she'll have to face her husband eventually. And let Preyanka go.\"\n\nHis somber tone of voice told her he was warning her that she had to trust him. She hated his words. Expose Bhakriya to the man who'd hurt her, force her to give Preyanka up to the ecclesiasts\u2014nothing about this was good. But he was right that hiding Bhakriya and her children was a very impermanent solution. And the draconic solution\u2014making Bhakriya's husband flee in terror from dragons who would tear him to pieces if he hurt her again\u2014was impossible in a human world.\n\n\"I think I liked it better,\" she said, \"when all we had to worry about was Manishi's blackmail.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Lamprophyre banked left and made a long, sweeping turn that brought her once more over the street leading to the embassy. According to Dolomite's maps, the ecclesiasts never came closer than two dragonlengths from the courtyard, but Lamprophyre didn't want to risk not knowing that had changed, not now that they knew the ecclesiasts' intent. She saw a yellow-shrouded litter a good distance away, and one about ten dragonlengths away on a direct line to the embassy and headed their way. She followed it until it turned east and was clearly heading for the palace. For now, they were still safe.\n\nOn her return, she found the courtyard empty, hot and humid even at not quite midmorning. Voices came from the sheltered dining pavilion, and when she ducked into its shade, she found Bhakriya and Rokshan facing one another, speaking in loud voices. Depik stood nearby, watching in silence, but his thoughts were all about Bhakriya and his worry for her.\n\n\"I won't do it,\" Bhakriya said. She looked at Lamprophyre. \"Thank you for your generosity, my lady,\" she said, her voice tight and angry, \"but we have to leave now.\"\n\n\"You can't leave! The ecclesiasts are still out there, looking for Preyanka,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"His highness wants to turn her over to them,\" Bhakriya said, without a hint of respect or awe over Rokshan's title. \"If we run now, we can escape them. We'll go to Sunital, or somewhere\u2014\"\n\n\"Preyanka can't keep her gift secret forever,\" Rokshan said, sounding much calmer than Bhakriya, \"and if you don't take her to the ecclesiasts, it could kill her. If you go now, with me\u2014\"\n\n\"We're both outcast, remember, your highness? They won't do you any favors. They'll take Preyanka and tell Jagen where we are. I'd rather die on the road than go back to him.\"\n\n\"We won't let that happen.\" Rokshan glanced at Lamprophyre. \"Whatever the ecclesiasts say about religious matters, we're not outcast from the law's protections. We can help you receive a divorce, and protect you from your husband. You can't keep running forever.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Bhakriya said. Tears welled up in her eyes. \"You don't understand. It took everything I had to run away, every scrap of courage. You don't know what it's like to live with someone who thinks nothing of a slap or a punch to make us fall in line. I can't go back to that. If I didn't have the children to think of, I might have\u2026\" She shook her head. Behind her, Depik's hand closed slowly into a fist. \"I want to be truly free, but I can't risk it. You know the law isn't always fair. I can't prove what Jagen is, and he has wealth and power\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't bear this,\" Lamprophyre told Rokshan. \"What can we do?\" Bhakriya's thoughts were filled with the black despair she had only ever heard from Depik when he was deep in the grip of his illness.\n\nRokshan looked from Lamprophyre to Bhakriya. \"You're right that I don't understand,\" he said, \"but I know something about being trapped by a life you can't escape. However frightened you are, your suffering will go on unless you do something to change it. Do you want to go on living in fear, always running, never knowing if this is the day someone catches up to you? Or do you want to take the next courageous step, and reach for a future you can bear to live with?\"\n\nBhakriya stared at him. \"It's not just me,\" she said.\n\n\"I know. It's terrible for children to be mixed up in this. But I promise you\u2014\" Rokshan took her hand and squeezed it. \"Lamprophyre and I will stand with you. You won't lose Preyanka, because the ecclesiasts will treat her with respect in every way, including finding a place for you and Abhit to live where you can see her often. You're not the first family to be in this position. And as for your husband\u2026damn it, I shouldn't say this, but if the law doesn't support you, Lamprophyre will make sure no one ever sees him again.\"\n\nBhakriya's eyes widened. \"My lady, you would\u2026\" Her thoughts finished the sentence she couldn't bring herself to say.\n\n\"I would,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But I have faith in Rokshan. We'll try the law first. And we will protect you until it's all resolved.\"\n\nTo her surprise, Bhakriya turned to Depik. \"What do I do?\"\n\nHe blinked. \"Why ask me?\"\n\n\"Because you've been helped by them, and you know what they're capable of. Am I mad not to run?\"\n\nDepik came forward. \"I trust my lady. She gave me a chance when no one else would. If she says she'll support you, that's not nothing. And I\u2026\" He swallowed. \"If it were up to me, I'd want you to stay.\"\n\nBhakriya's thoughts changed from agitated to confused. She ducked her head slightly. Depik's face became impassive. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it. Lamprophyre felt awkward about having witnessed his moment of vulnerability. She cleared her throat, drawing everyone's attention and breaking the strained silence. \"Will you trust us?\" she asked. \"Because I'd worry so much if you left.\"\n\nBhakriya let out a deep breath. \"I will, Jiwanyil help me,\" she said. \"He may not love me and mine, but I say you've done more for us than any ecclesiast.\"\n\n\"The ecclesiasts,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Rokshan, what does it mean if an ecclesiast is outcast?\"\n\n\"You mean, because Preyanka has consorted with dragons, and been possessed of a prophecy under those circumstances?\" A wicked smile touched Rokshan's lips. \"That's an interesting question. I look forward to asking it.\"\n\n\"Is that what we do first? Tell the ecclesiasts about Preyanka?\"\n\n\"The first thing is to rid Bhakriya of Jagen. Whatever money they pay for Preyanka\u2014to compensate the family for the loss of her labor\u2014\"\n\n\"Preyanka doesn't have to work,\" Bhakriya said.\n\n\"Legally, a child is recognized as a resource a family may or may not use,\" Rokshan said, \"and that money is due regardless. You'll need it to help support you and Abhit, since you don't have your husband's support anymore. If you're divorced before the ecclesiasts take Preyanka in, and your children are legally yours, that will make the financial side of this less complicated.\"\n\nBhakriya nodded. \"I'm afraid I don't know anything about divorce. I was always too frightened to ask questions, because if Jagen knew\u2014anyway.\"\n\n\"I'll handle the first inquiries,\" Rokshan said. \"For now, you need to stay concealed, you and the children. Lamprophyre, you and your clutch will need to find out what Manishi is up to. If it means Flint has to tell Father his story, that will have to happen immediately.\"\n\nTo Lamprophyre's surprise, Bhakriya laughed and immediately muffled it with her hand. \"I'm sorry,\" she said, \"it's just that a dragon and a prince are intervening on my behalf. I never would have dreamed it. Thank you, my lady, your highness.\"\n\n\"We're happy to help,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Depik, you'll watch them while we're gone, yes? And I'll tell Rassika she's to find me if anything happens, like if the ecclesiasts come this way.\"\n\nDepik nodded. His face was still impassive, but Lamprophyre could hear his thoughts, and Bhakriya was preeminent in them. She found herself hoping Bhakriya could see what a good man he was.\n\nShe found Rassika eating porridge in the kitchen with the other children. Rassika took in Lamprophyre's request with a solemn expression. \"So you see it's important that you're fast,\" Lamprophyre concluded. \"That will be so important if anything happens here.\"\n\n\"I'm fast,\" Rassika said with a nod. \"But Kavari\u2014\"\n\n\"Bhakriya will care for her,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling confident in her promise. \"She's a mother, so she knows how to take care of children, right? You don't have anything to worry about.\"\n\nRassika looked at Kavari, who was feeding herself rather messily. \"You don't need me for true, do you?\" she asked.\n\n\"If you mean, am I making up jobs for you out of charity, then sort of, in the sense that I could hire anyone to run errands for me. But I want to help you because you're brave and I think that's deserving of respect. And, well, look at me.\" Lamprophyre stepped back, away from the overhanging roof of the dining pavilion, and spread her wings wide. \"This city was made for humans, not dragons, and there are so many places I can't go. I trust you to go where I can't, Rassika. That matters to me. So I'm willing to pay you and provide you shelter in exchange for your labor. And that's not charity.\"\n\nShe folded her wings and sat down again. Rassika examined her closely. Then she set her empty bowl aside and stood. \"Ain't had no one care what happens to us for years,\" she said. \"I'll run for you if it's what you want.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Do you know where the dragons live? The ones not me?\"\n\nRassika nodded. She looked poised to dart off immediately despite Lamprophyre's instructions.\n\n\"That's where I'll be. Come for me if Depik or Bhakriya tell you.\" Lamprophyre backed away into the courtyard and found Rokshan waiting. She crouched to let him up. \"Where should I take you?\"\n\n\"The central guard post. The judiciary is next to it. I'll start those proceedings and then join you at the warehouses.\" He gripped her ruff hard as she launched herself into the sky. \"Would you really kill Bhakriya's husband?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I don't want him to escape justice, but I'm not comfortable being the instrument of justice myself. Among dragons, that's what the queen does. It feels presumptuous.\" But she couldn't help remembering Bhakriya's black despair at the thought of returning to where her husband could hurt her or her children. What was worse: sending three people she cared about into danger, or ending the life of a horrible criminal? It disturbed her that she didn't have a ready answer for that question.\n\nThey flew the rest of the way to the monstrosity of the guard post in silence. Though the plaza was thronged with people, they all moved aside to give Lamprophyre space to land. Silence filled the plaza as she crouched and Rokshan hopped down, silence dense enough that the noises of the city were a more distant hum than usual. A rush of wings filled the air as a flock of gray and white birds swooped past and settled on the stones less than a dragonlength away. They were too ignorant or too stupid to realize they were in danger, even if it was only theoretical danger because they smelled verminous and didn't tempt Lamprophyre's hunger at all.\n\n\"This shouldn't take long. I'll return soon,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre didn't wait around to see where he went, though she was mildly curious about what the judiciary building looked like. She wanted to get away from all the silent humans and their wary, watchful eyes that said she was a threat. Stones take those ecclesiasts who'd ruined all the hard work she and her clutchmates had done to stop humans from being afraid of dragons.\n\nHot, muggy air enveloped her as she flew toward the warehouses. Bhakriya and her children were safe for now, which meant it was time to worry about the other threat. Lamprophyre couldn't begin to guess what Manishi might try next, except that it would be something manipulative. Maybe she should just give the adept the kyanite. So what if she created a mind-reading artifact? She was only one person\u2014all right, a ruthless, self-centered, amoral person who wouldn't think twice about using that ability to ferret out secrets and use them for further blackmail. No, they couldn't give Manishi what she demanded. Lamprophyre refused to dwell on the other problem: that there were possibly dozens of other adepts, in Tanajital and beyond, all set on being the first to listen to thoughts. Nothing the dragons could do about them.\n\nBy the time she reached the warehouses, she was hot and tired as if she'd flown much farther than not even halfway across the city. The day was shaping up to be the hottest this year. Mentally cursing the weather, the lowlands, and the humans who'd thought settling here was a good idea, she landed and then stood for a beat or two, breathing heavily. She needed to make time for a swim later.\n\nShe heard voices coming from Flint's warehouse and wearily walked in that direction. \"\u2026won't do it,\" an unfamiliar voice said. It was high-pitched enough not to have come from a dragon, but she didn't recognize it as belonging to any of the humans she knew.\n\n\"We're out of choices,\" Flint said. \"If we take action, we cut her off at the knees, so to speak.\"\n\n\"You may be confident of your chances, but I'm nobody,\" the stranger said. \"I'll end up in prison no matter what.\"\n\nLamprophyre poked her head through the open doorway. \"Flint?\"\n\nFlint glanced up. He looked as if he'd been having this argument long enough to become frustrated. \"Lamprophyre,\" he said. \"This is my friend Lokun. He had an unexpected visitor last night. Tell her, Lokun.\"\n\nLokun was short by human standards and stocky, but his eyes gleamed with intelligence as well as anger. \"You trust this dragon?\"\n\n\"She's my clutchmate, Lokun. I trust her with my life.\" Flint sounded superficially calm, but Lamprophyre knew him well enough to tell when he was ready to start shouting.\n\n\"Was your unexpected visitor a woman?\" she asked. \"With messy hair, dressed like a laborer but with speech like a noble?\"\n\nLokun's brow furrowed. \"How did you know?\"\n\nLamprophyre exchanged glances with Flint. \"How did she threaten you?\" she asked Lokun.\n\nHe stared up at her as if expecting her to come out with more information. \"She told me she'd seen me and Flint selling secrets to Fanishkor. I thought she was mad at first, but then she told me details of that visit with Parhit no one could have known unless they were there. So I called her a liar, and she asked who I thought the king would believe, a nobody like me or a powerful adept.\"\n\n\"Odd,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She didn't tell you her name or true identity?\"\n\nLokun shook his head. \"She just said to tell my dragon friends to do as they'd promised or it would go ill for me. Now Flint tells me she's the Princess Manishi and she wants you to deliver a crystal she offered to buy. Flint, just give her the damn crystal and be done with it!\"\n\n\"I told you she will use it to hurt people,\" Flint said. \"We can't be party to that.\"\n\n\"You don't know that's what she'll do.\" Lokun turned to face Flint. \"Right now, the king doesn't know anything about the princess's lies. If we go to him, tell him we didn't sell information to the enemy, it will get him thinking about the possibility that we might have. He might even think we're trying to deceive him, pretending honesty and openness to gain his trust and get him to overlook what seems like treachery. He can't hurt you, but he can stick me in a dungeon and torture me to get me to tell secrets I don't have!\"\n\n\"I won't let that happen,\" Flint said. He flexed his wings as best he could in the confines of the warehouse. \"I'd take you to hide somewhere.\"\n\n\"Hiding is short-term thinking. My whole life is in Tanajital. I can't up and move somewhere else, take a false name and start a new life!\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And it's not fair, even if it were practical.\"\n\nFlint blew out an acid-scented breath of hot air. \"But the alternative is giving Manishi a hold over us forever. She's not going to be satisfied with one delivery of kyanite. She's going to go on demanding things of us, and suppose someday those things are criminal? I know you're scared\u2014\"\n\n\"Damn right I'm scared.\" Lokun didn't sound scared. He sounded furious.\n\n\"But you know this is the only answer.\" Flint crouched to put himself on a level with Lokun's face. \"You don't have to come along. I can refuse to reveal who my human companion was. But the king will trust us more if we're both there, completely honest with him. And if he does threaten to hurt you, I'll stop him.\"\n\n\"Flint\u2014\" Lamprophyre began.\n\n\"I know we're not supposed to harm humans, but if it's a choice between that and letting them harm an innocent, I know where I stand,\" Flint said.\n\nIt was so much like what Lamprophyre had been thinking about what she would do to keep Bhakriya and her children safe it shut her mouth on more objections. \"All right,\" she said. \"And I'll come with you.\"\n\n\"Come with you where?\" Dolomite asked, startling Lamprophyre with his silent approach. \"Is it swimming? Today should be a day for swimming. I feel like the air is trying to drown me.\"\n\n\"We're talking about going to the king to preempt Manishi's threat,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I think it should just be me and Flint, though. It's my duty as ambassador, and we don't want to make the king feel like he's on the defensive.\"\n\n\"I wonder why Manishi doesn't come here to challenge us,\" Dolomite said, with the air of someone contemplating an idle question he didn't much care about answering. \"Do you think she's afraid of all of us together?\"\n\n\"I think she doesn't want to give up her advantage,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She feels stronger when she's in her own place.\" She wished they dared threaten to destroy the adept's workshop, but Manishi would just laugh at that.\n\n\"So do we have an agreement? Or will you stay behind?\" Flint asked Lokun.\n\nLokun's jaw was set tight. \"You're manipulating me.\"\n\nFlint jerked as if the man had punched him between the eyes, not that a human could do much damage even there. \"I'm just being logical. Please, Lokun, don't give in to fear.\"\n\nIn the silence that fell, Lamprophyre could hear the dull hum of the city, punctuated by the occasional shout of a street vendor. Lokun looked as if he'd been turned to stone. \"Fine,\" he finally said. \"Fine. I'll do it. But I think you're wrong, and this is all going to be a disaster.\"\n\n\"It won't. I won't let it,\" Flint said.\n\n\"I'll request an audience with the king,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I hope it won't take long.\" She couldn't send Rassika, in her overlarge adult's tattered shirt and dirty face, for this. She would have to go herself. \"In fact, I'll do it now. Rokshan is coming here when he finishes his business\u2014would you ask him to wait for me?\"\n\nShe caught a glimpse of Flint's thoughts\u2014maybe Rokshan can talk sense into him\u2014as Flint said, \"We'll all wait.\"\n\n\"Let's get this over with quickly,\" Lokun said. He sounded calmer now, but his thoughts were still agitated, and Lamprophyre felt a pang of sadness for both Flint and Lokun. Manishi had a lot to answer for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "She flew as fast as she dared to the palace, so fast she stumbled when she alit in front of its great double doors. At this hour, they stood open, and men and women passing through in both directions shrieked and fled when she made her precipitous appearance. A couple of soldiers in uniform, dark blue shirts and knee-length tan trousers, stood to either side of the door, holding their halberds in an awkward semi-defensive position, as if they wanted to ward against a potential attack but didn't know how they could hurt a dragon. More humans, braver than the rest, hovered near the doorway, staring at her.\n\n\"I'm sorry I startled you,\" Lamprophyre said politely. She addressed the soldier on the left, whose thoughts were more wary than frightened. \"I need to get a message to King Ekanath immediately. It's urgent diplomatic business. Could you send someone to ask him if the dragons can meet with him privately, at his earliest convenience?\"\n\nThe soldier nodded slowly, his eyes never straying from her face. He snapped his fingers twice, then once more in what sounded like a signal. A boy about Preyanka's height came forward from the crowd at the door. He, too, wore the dark blue and tan clothing, though in his case it looked less like a uniform than the soldiers'. Lamprophyre repeated her request, and the boy nodded and shoved through the crowd to disappear into the palace.\n\nLamprophyre took a few steps backward and settled herself to wait. \"It's all right, I'll just sit here until he returns.\"\n\nThe soldiers slowly returned to their ready and alert position, halberds gripped in one hand with the butt grounded beside their feet. The rest of the humans continued to stare, but one or two detached themselves from the crowd and descended the stairs, staying well away from Lamprophyre as they continued on to wherever they'd been going. Eventually only a few people remained, and their thoughts were curious rather than afraid. Lamprophyre thought about inviting them to ask her questions, but she was still on edge from the argument with Lokun and deeply unsure, now that she was here, that they were doing the right thing.\n\nShe blocked out the distracting thoughts of the humans and listened to the city's hum, more distant now that she was in the palace grounds and away from most of the traffic. It occurred to her that the ecclesiasts hadn't avoided this place in their search, even though it was as closed to regular traffic as the academy. So they weren't intimidated by the king. They must feel secure in their power.\n\nMore people came to the doors and stopped short at the sight of her. Whispered conversations too distant for her to hear clearly carried with them thoughts she could hear all too easily; the newcomers wanted to know why the dragon was there. She ducked her head to hide a smile as the watching humans speculated about why she might want to speak to the king. Obviously they couldn't know the truth, but their guesses were amusing: she wanted a trade agreement, she intended to declare war on Gonjiri, she wanted the king to give her part of the palace to live in. Humans had strange ideas about what dragons wanted.\n\nEventually, she heard running footsteps, much more rapid than those of the other humans, and the boy emerged, once more pushing past the people clogging the doorway. He trotted down the steps and halted only a few handspans from her. His thoughts were free of fear, being mostly taken up with awe that he'd spoken to the king and was about to speak to a dragon. \"My lady ambassador,\" he said with a bow, \"the king requests your presence this afternoon at three o'clock in the great hall.\"\n\n\"Please tell the king I and my companion Flint will be there at that time,\" Lamprophyre said. She had no idea when three o'clock was, but Rokshan ought to come with her anyway, as her diplomatic liaison. She bowed to the boy, sending up a flutter of startled thoughts from everyone watching, and backed away so she could fly off without knocking the boy over.\n\nWhen she returned to the warehouses, Rokshan had arrived and was talking quietly with Lokun. Lamprophyre broke her own rule about not listening to Rokshan's thoughts just long enough to establish that he felt calm despite Lokun's evident agitation. \"He'll see us at three o'clock,\" she said, interrupting their conversation.\n\nFlint, seated within his warehouse, nodded without saying anything. He was upset, Lamprophyre could tell, his surface thoughts preoccupied with Lokun's anger and fear. Lamprophyre wished there was something she could do. She didn't know how close Flint and Lokun were, and maybe their friendship wasn't as established as hers and Rokshan's was, but she feared this attack of Manishi's had dealt it a blow it might not recover from.\n\n\"I assume you want me along,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Of course. Though I don't know that either of us should do more than introduce Flint and Lokun. And I don't think we should bring Manishi into it.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Lokun said. \"Since the bitch is responsible.\"\n\n\"She is my sister,\" Rokshan said mildly. \"And I think mentioning her will make you both seem weak. It implies that you would have kept the secret if Manishi hadn't intervened, rather than realizing the implications and choosing to speak in the name of patriotism and honesty.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Flint said. \"What does three o'clock mean?\"\n\n\"Between midafternoon and late afternoon,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll warn you when it's time to go.\"\n\nFlint roused himself and stepped out of the warehouse. \"I'm going for a flight,\" he said. \"Lokun, will you join me?\"\n\nLokun looked up at him. \"Not right now,\" he said. \"I need to think some things through.\"\n\nA flash of pain crossed Flint's handsome face. Then his expression hardened. \"I'll be back after noon,\" he said, and leaped into the sky.\n\n\"That was cruel,\" Lamprophyre said without thinking.\n\nLokun was watching Flint fly away and didn't look at her. \"I thought we were friends,\" he said. \"He's asking too much of our friendship.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Lamprophyre said, shamelessly eavesdropping on Lokun's thoughts. \"I think you feel responsible for leaving Flint open to blackmail. It was your request that took you both into Fanishkor. Lokun, you're both innocent of anything but wishing ordinary people didn't have to suffer because of their governments' enmity. It's Manishi who's to blame.\"\n\n\"And yet I'll take most of the punishment if the king decides to be an idiot,\" Lokun said.\n\n\"He is my father,\" Rokshan said in that same mild, slightly amused tone. \"And he's not cruel or stupid. I really do think if you're honest and open with him, he'll respect that.\"\n\n\"Just\u2014please don't blame Flint for this situation,\" Lamprophyre continued. \"I would hate to see you lose your friendship over someone else's evil behavior.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Lokun sighed. \"I shouldn't have turned him down just now, but I need some time alone. Look, I'll be back around two, and maybe he and I can talk then. I'm sorry.\" He trudged away down the street, his head hanging low as if his toes were the most interesting thing around him.\n\nBeside her, Rokshan let out a deep sigh. \"Manishi needs to be taught a lesson,\" he said.\n\n\"I was thinking something like that myself,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She can't go on thinking we're helpless. And she deserves a thrashing for hurting Flint and Lokun.\"\n\n\"Removing the possibility of blackmail will go a long way toward doing that. And when that's done, we can discuss her future relationship with dragons.\"\n\n\"You can't mean we should continue trading with her?\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"Of course not. But I want her to clearly understand that she ruined her excellent trading position because she was greedy and paranoid.\"\n\nLamprophyre relaxed. \"I agree.\"\n\n\"Where is everyone?\" Rokshan said. \"It's remarkably quiet.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Dolomite went flying, either to the river or to watch the ecclesiasts. I suppose we should still do that, even though we know what they're looking for now.\" Lamprophyre peered into a few more warehouses. \"Everyone else is gone, too. I bet they left before Flint and Lokun started arguing, maybe to give them some privacy. Coquina might have gone to see if she could convince Melika's mother to accept her help in getting Melika healing treatment.\"\n\n\"It might be too late,\" Rokshan said. \"No, I don't mean she's dead,\" he added hurriedly as Lamprophyre gasped in horror. \"I mean that magical healing is more effective if it happens soon after the injury is received. The healers who worked on me the second time, after we stopped the war, told me if the body's natural healing mechanisms are engaged, they fight with the unnatural effects of jade or moonstone. It's been long enough that healing might not help Melika.\"\n\n\"Coquina will be furious if that's true,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"With good reason. The ecclesiasts have a lot to answer for.\"\n\nLamprophyre stepped inside Flint's empty warehouse and settled into the slightly cooler dimness. \"What happened at the judiciary building?\"\n\nRokshan sat beside her and leaned against her flank. \"I asked for information on divorce.\" He chuckled. \"Made a lot of people very confused until they understood I wanted the information for someone not myself. I'm sure some of them still think I'm trying to get rid of a secret bride.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"And is it simple? Please say it's simple.\"\n\n\"It's unfortunately not simple. We have to have the original decree of marriage, which bears the name of the reverend or judge who performed the ceremony. Bhakriya has to come before a different judge, accompanied by the one who married her and Jagen, and declare her reasons for wanting a divorce. Then Jagen can either counter or agree to the dissolution.\"\n\n\"But that means he can prevent her from being free! Because I'm sure he won't admit to beating her.\"\n\n\"It's a safeguard so no one can get rid of a spouse just because they feel that person is a burden on them. Men sometimes try that when they want to get rid of their wives to marry younger women. The good news is that if Bhakriya can show evidence, like the testimony of other people that Jagen beat her, Jagen's consent is no longer necessary.\"\n\nLamprophyre sagged. \"The bad news being that anyone like that is in Kolmira, and out of our reach.\"\n\n\"Let me worry about that. You keep an eye on Bhakriya and be alert to anyone who might try to drag her back to Jagen. We need to keep her safe until she can appear before a judge. The one thing we have in our favor right now is that Bhakriya and Jagen were married here in Tanajital. I had the records clerk check, just in case. So we should be able to find the reverend who married them.\"\n\n\"Someone who won't like that you're both apostates.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"This is a legal matter as well as a religious one. The reverend won't be able to refuse to do her duty even if she thinks Bhakriya is a contaminating influence.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"I feel a little better now, though really nothing's changed. We still have only a small chance of freeing Bhakriya from her husband, we have to turn Preyanka over to the ecclesiasts, Manishi is still a threat, and the king might not see things our way.\"\n\n\"You're so pessimistic sometimes.\" Rokshan tilted his head back and closed his eyes.\n\nJust after midafternoon, Flint returned. Coquina had come back a few thousand beats earlier, frustrated at her failed attempt to get Melika's mother to see reason. \"I offered her a pile of rupyas and she turned me down,\" she'd growled. \"I'd be impressed at her commitment to her religion if she wasn't obeying a false decree.\"\n\nPorphyry and Bromargyrite had returned just after Coquina. They'd been searching for Manishi and they, too, had to admit failure. \"She wasn't at her workshop, and no one in the neighborhood admitted to seeing her recently,\" Porphyry had said. \"We think she might have left the city. She goes off on buying trips all the time.\"\n\nLamprophyre had felt unexpected relief at the idea. She didn't relish having to face the woman, even though she and her clutchmates were clearly in the right. Manishi was so erratic and unpredictable, she felt like more of a threat than she probably was.\n\nNow Flint landed neatly outside his warehouse and ducked inside without saying a word. Lamprophyre thought Let's leave him alone and hoped the others were paying attention.\n\n\"I think we should go for a swim after this meeting with the king,\" she said. \"We deserve a nice rest.\"\n\n\"And another supper together,\" Bromargyrite said. \"I miss that.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Porphyry said. \"Coquina?\"\n\nCoquina shrugged. \"I'm not going to be good company.\"\n\nFlint poked his head out of his warehouse. \"Neither am I.\"\n\n\"We don't care if you're angry so long as it's not with us,\" Porphyry said. \"Let's sit around and grouse about things. That's always satisfying.\"\n\nCoquina gave a reluctant half-smile. \"True,\" she said. \"Humans call it 'bitching.' I like that word.\"\n\n\"Then we'll bitch together,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Does anyone know where Orthoclase went?\"\n\n\"Picking up more stone, I hope,\" Bromargyrite said. \"He knows this marble sculptor who gives him her waste stone for free. He says she likes not having to deal with it.\"\n\n\"I could use some marble right now,\" Flint muttered. Lamprophyre glanced at the others. All of them clearly had decided not to draw attention to their clutchmate's bad mood.\n\n\"Let's hope he brings some\u2014oh. Hello, Lokun,\" Lamprophyre said to the man approaching down the street.\n\nFlint stirred and sat up, but said nothing. Lokun came to a halt before the dragon. \"I'd like to talk,\" he said. \"Privately.\"\n\n\"We don't have a lot of time,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"This won't take long.\" Lokun's thoughts were direct and clear, not muddled with anger as they'd been earlier, but Lamprophyre couldn't tell if he had decided to say something that would destroy his friendship with Flint.\n\nFlint stretched. \"We'll meet you outside the palace in a thousand beats. Will that be soon enough?\"\n\nRokshan nodded.\n\nFlint crouched to give Lokun a leg up, then flew away in a nearly vertical ascent. Lamprophyre watched them go, shielding her eyes from the sun's glare with her nictitating membranes. \"I hope,\" she said, then fell silent.\n\n\"Me, too,\" Coquina said. Lamprophyre caught a snatch of Coquina's thoughts and was struck by the unexpected depth of feeling Coquina had when she looked at Flint. Maybe there was possibility there, after all.\n\nRokshan cleared his throat. \"I hope they resolve their problems,\" he said, \"because they'll be more convincing if it's clear they are in accord.\"\n\nLamprophyre blew out a big puff of smoke. \"I'm tired of being afraid and worried. Rokshan, let's fly for a bit before we have to meet the king. I need to relax and pretend there's nothing more wrong with the world than pig for supper instead of cow.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"Tragedy indeed.\"\n\nThey flew across the city, waving to Dolomite in his endless spiral\u2014he would definitely need a rest after this\u2014and downriver a few hundred dragonlengths. The smell of cool running water relaxed Lamprophyre, and she imagined swimming in it, soaking her scales and her wings and not even caring about the uncomfortable feeling wet membranes gave her. It also made her wonder what winter was like in the lowlands. Surely not as cold as it got in the mountains, but was Tanajital ever not humid? She almost asked Rokshan, but decided it was more fun to speculate.\n\nEventually, Rokshan told her, \"It's time,\" and they headed to the palace. When they arrived outside the great doors, Flint and Lokun were already there. Lamprophyre risked listening to Lokun's thoughts, but heard only agitation and if this doesn't work and concluded his relationship with Flint wasn't topmost in his worries right now.\n\nRokshan hopped down and strode toward the doors. \"There's room enough for all of us, but you dragons will need to keep your wings furled,\" he said over his shoulder. Lamprophyre followed him inside.\n\nThe hall beyond the doors was as cavernous as she remembered, though those memories were tainted with the fear she'd felt for Rokshan the first time she'd entered. Her non-retractable toe claws clicked over the floor, made of hard, flat, perfectly square stones that weren't really stones. They smelled almost like pumice, dusty and dry, and she was sure eating them would be as unsatisfactory.\n\nBehind her, Flint ducked to avoid the metal web that gleamed with fire and failed to light the hall fully. It was pretty, but odd, and Lamprophyre didn't know why the king didn't have proper lanterns with nice clear glass to light his hall. Probably it was a human royalty thing.\n\nShe came to a stop in the center of the hall, and her mouth fell open. The king stood at the top of the dragon-wide staircase on the right side of the hall. His expression was forbidding, and his thoughts were angry, filled with horrible words like betrayal and lies and death.\n\nBeside him, wearing a smile that made Lamprophyre think of a predator, stood Manishi."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "\"You dare show your faces here,\" King Ekanath said. His thoughts were angrier than his tone of voice, which confused Lamprophyre. It made no sense for him to conceal his anger, if Manishi had told him everything\u2014which, by the look of her, she almost certainly had.\n\n\"Flint and Lokun came to explain,\" Rokshan began.\n\nEkanath cut him off with a curt gesture. \"If they think anything they have to say will exonerate them of espionage, they are sorely mistaken. I've seen what they did.\"\n\n\"You've seen what Manishi showed you,\" Lamprophyre protested. \"An exchange that could have been anything.\"\n\n\"So you knew what these two had done and you didn't come forward immediately?\" Ekanath said. He took two steps so he stood at the edge of the platform at the top of the steps. \"That makes you complicit.\"\n\n\"Your majesty,\" Rokshan said, and his use of formal address rather than calling the king Father told Lamprophyre they were deep within the realm of diplomacy, \"perhaps we should take a step back. We assert that Flint and Lokun are innocent of espionage. You are committed to the rule of law, which says no one can be convicted without a fair trial.\"\n\n\"You want to drag this through the courts?\"\n\n\"You are the ultimate judge and the voice of the law,\" Rokshan went on, unperturbed by the interruption. \"I ask only that we be allowed to defend our actions before you.\"\n\nEkanath gazed down at his son. \"The evidence against these two is strong.\"\n\n\"And circumstantial,\" Rokshan shot back. \"I would like to know what Manishi told you.\"\n\nEkanath glanced back at Manishi, whose smile had vanished. Now she looked sad and a little uncertain. Lamprophyre wished she dared attack the woman. She settled on her haunches and glared at Manishi, though as Manishi was looking at Rokshan, it was a wasted glare.\n\n\"I didn't want to believe such foul behavior of an ally of the kingdom,\" Manishi said, her voice low and confiding. \"But after considering the possible consequences of those two's actions, I realized I had to do my duty and speak up.\"\n\n\"So you showed him what you showed me? Flint\u2014the dark blue dragon\u2014and that man, meeting with a stranger and handing over papers?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nEkanath's eyebrows raised. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"I admit I showed the evidence to Lamprophyre first,\" Manishi said smoothly. \"I hoped she would convince the criminals to turn themselves in. But when she did nothing, I was forced to act.\"\n\n\"That's not true, your majesty,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Manishi used that evidence to blackmail me.\"\n\n\"Lies,\" Manishi said, sounding perfectly calm.\n\nEkanath's gaze traveled from Manishi to Lamprophyre. \"Blackmail you, how?\" he asked.\n\n\"She wanted me to provide her with stone I didn't want to give. It was supposed to be a secret from the other adepts that she had it.\"\n\n\"I don't need blackmail to get what I want. I have enough money to pay for things legally,\" Manishi said.\n\n\"This is irrelevant,\" Ekanath said. \"Regardless of motive, the facts remain that those two\u2014\" he pointed at Flint and Lokun\u2014\"sold state secrets to Fanishkor.\"\n\n\"We didn't,\" Flint said, stepping forward. \"I don't know what Manishi showed you to convince you otherwise, but the one time we traveled to Fanishkor, it was to meet a friend of Lokun's.\"\n\n\"I designed a house for him, your majesty,\" Lokun said. \"I'm well-known as an architect, and I've designed houses and public buildings for many people, including some in other countries.\" He glanced up at Flint. \"This whole mistake is my fault. I didn't want to take the overland route to Fanishkor, especially since the border crossing is difficult, and I thought it wouldn't be wrong if all we did was meet my friend for five minutes to hand over the designs.\"\n\n\"It's my fault, because I knew it would look bad, but I wanted to help Lokun,\" Flint said. \"I admit we made mistakes, but I deny we did anything to betray Gonjiri. I don't know if you remember, your majesty, but Fanishkor used dragons to very nearly start a war, and we were all furious at being made their tools. There is no way I would do anything to help that country.\" He was breathing heavily, filling the air with the sharp stench of acid.\n\n\"Your majesty,\" Lamprophyre said as the king opened his mouth to speak, \"if you saw the same thing Manishi showed me, you know it was a visual record only. There's no record of what the two groups said to each other.\"\n\n\"Which means nothing,\" Manishi said. \"They were in Fanishkor speaking to Fanishkorites. They handed over documents. A dragon can spy out military secrets easily.\"\n\n\"It means,\" Lamprophyre said as if Manishi hadn't spoken, though anger made her voice shake, \"it comes down to Flint and Lokun's word against Manishi's. The word of two people who were present versus the word of one person who was not. Your majesty, did you ask Manishi why she happened to have that visual record?\"\n\nEkanath's eyes narrowed. He turned to Manishi, who still looked calm. \"Well?\" he said. \"Did you have some reason to suspect these two?\"\n\n\"I,\" Manishi said, \"of course I knew they fly all over Gonjiri, and it occurred to me that they must be spying\u2014\"\n\n\"Rokshan and I fly all over Gonjiri. Are you going to accuse us of spying next?\" Lamprophyre said. \"Your majesty, doesn't it make more sense that Manishi, wanting a hold on us dragons, went looking for something she could use to blackmail us?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Ekanath said. \"Manishi has no need to stoop to blackmail.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Rokshan said, startling Lamprophyre into silence when she would have shouted something inappropriate, \"Manishi wanted kyanite from Lamprophyre. Do you know why? I think you might.\"\n\nLamprophyre caught the emphasis on think and listened closely to Ekanath's thoughts. Clear as a ringing bell, she heard kyanite, what is kyanite and no idea what Manishi does ever. Rokshan caught her eye, and she gave a minute shake of her head.\n\n\"I don't see how that's relevant,\" Ekanath was saying.\n\n\"It's relevant,\" Rokshan said, \"because she wants to develop an artifact that will let her read minds.\"\n\nLamprophyre gasped. She heard the horror in Flint's thoughts and the confusion in Lokun's, but Rokshan remained as placid as if he'd just commented on the weather. Maybe he was placid because he'd lost his mind. Revealing that secret, and to the king, of all people\u2014yes, Rokshan had gone mad without her noticing the descent.\n\n\"She what?\" Ekanath said. He, too, sounded puzzled. Clearly he didn't realize his youngest son was insane. \"An artifact? That can't be possible.\"\n\n\"Of course it isn't,\" Manishi said, glaring at Rokshan from behind her father's back.\n\n\"The dragons discovered a secret cabal of adepts who are engaged in a race to be the first to develop that artifact,\" Rokshan said. \"The dragons realized kyanite was key to the discovery and, knowing what a dangerous weapon that would be, refused to provide the crystal to Manishi. That's why she blackmailed Lamprophyre. I take it she didn't tell you? Because I'm sure Tekentriya's spies would love something like that, as would the military, and someone as\u2026loyal\u2026as Manishi ought to have created that artifact to serve her country.\"\n\n\"You liar,\" Manishi snarled.\n\n\"Can you prove this assertion?\" Ekanath asked Rokshan.\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"I can prove Manishi wanted kyanite from the dragons, and I can show you the evidence that kyanite is key to developing the mind-reading artifact. Whether Manishi was acting out of self-interest or out of patriotic duty, only Manishi knows that.\"\n\nEkanath turned to Manishi. \"Well?\"\n\nManishi's face had smoothed into her original sad but determined expression. \"I wanted it to be a surprise,\" she said. \"I don't like having people breathing down my neck while I'm working, and I haven't proved the theory yet. I can't believe Rokshan could do something so terrible as ruin my efforts.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre began.\n\nRokshan overrode her with, \"I don't think this project is benefited by secrecy. You don't like working with others, but surely if you collaborate with, say, some of the adepts attached to the military, you'll have quicker success? I know you want to beat your rivals to the discovery.\"\n\nManishi's face twisted briefly with malice. Glancing at Ekanath, she said, \"I suppose that's true.\"\n\n\"I'm astonished,\" Ekanath said. \"I had no idea such a thing was possible. If you knew about it, why didn't you bring it to my attention sooner?\" he said to Lamprophyre.\n\n\"We only discovered it a few days ago,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and we were working out what to do with the information when Manishi attempted to blackmail me. I'm sorry if we didn't act fast enough.\" It stunned her how easy it was to lie to someone who couldn't hear her thoughts. Well, it was only partly a lie, and maybe that helped.\n\nEkanath looked at each of them in turn, dragon and human, reserving his longest gaze for Manishi. \"You are correct that Manishi's evidence hinges on knowing what passed between Flint and Lokun and their Fanishkorite friends,\" he finally said. \"In the absence of any more evidence, I choose to believe the dragon's account of what happened is true, if only because dragons do not, to my knowledge, lie.\"\n\nLamprophyre kept from flinching with guilt.\n\n\"My judgment is that this was an innocent, if foolish, transaction, and I instruct all dragons living in Gonjiri not to fly into Fanishkorite territory in future. I realize I cannot control where you fly, and I can only make it a request, but you should consider it a binding part of our treaty\u2014a gesture of goodwill on the part of dragons, just as my leniency in this instance reflects goodwill on the part of humans.\"\n\n\"Thank you, your majesty,\" Rokshan said with a bow.\n\n\"Oh, get up,\" Ekanath said irritably. \"No more 'your majesty,' Rokshan, unless you want me to believe you're making fun. Manishi, I'll ask General Sajan to choose his best adepts to work with you. I expect you to proceed as quickly as possible, if it's true there are others interested in making this discovery first.\"\n\nManishi's smile was bitter. \"Certainly. But I will need kyanite,\" she added, shooting a poisonous glare at Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre's heart sank. All that work, and she'd still have to hand over the stone to their enemy.\n\n\"Oh, and Manishi can show you how to protect against having your thoughts read,\" Rokshan said cheerfully. \"Ask her to explain what chlorite does.\"\n\nThat wiped the poisonous look off Manishi's face. Stunned, she said, \"How did you\u2014\"\n\n\"Dragons are thorough when they want to learn a thing,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"This is extraordinary,\" Ekanath said. \"I want full reports every day. I know you don't like being monitored, Manishi, but the needs of the kingdom outweigh your preferences.\" He made a gesture Lamprophyre interpreted as indicating the \"court\" was over and walked away through the little door at the top of the stairs.\n\nManishi's left hand, the one wearing the quartz and chlorite ring, was clenched into a fist as if that would somehow hide it from notice. \"You dare,\" she snarled. \"Everything was fine until you had to defy me.\"\n\n\"No, everything was fine until you got greedy. Greedier,\" Rokshan said. \"You should have been more obliging and less quick to attempt blackmail.\"\n\n\"You're a fool,\" Manishi said. \"Why do you think I didn't take this to the military? The secret will come out in days, and so much for my edge.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Rokshan tilted his head back to look at her more closely. \"Mind-reading isn't a secret anyone should have. It's not safe. Better a thousand adepts develop it than one or two. If everyone knows it's possible, everyone can potentially defend against it. You've lost, Manishi.\"\n\nTo Lamprophyre's surprise, Manishi shrugged. \"I suppose. But I still get what I wanted. You can deliver the kyanite to my workshop this evening. And I'll have another order for you at that time.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"You really believe we'll still deal with you after what you tried?\"\n\n\"Please. You've won this round. That doesn't mean we stop playing the game.\"\n\n\"Yes, actually, it does.\" Lamprophyre walked to the base of the stairs and leaned forward. If she stood at her full height, she was almost eye to eye with Manishi. \"I'll sell you the kyanite because you're working for the government now. But I'm done being your errand runner. After this, no dragon will sell to you, ever again. You're stuck with rock sniffers and merchants now.\"\n\nManishi raised one eyebrow. \"I'm your most reliable client. You think you can afford to alienate me?\"\n\n\"Alienate\u2014? Manishi, you're mad. You alienated us when you tried to blackmail me. We'll be just fine. You, on the other hand, are going to have to compete with your fellow adepts for resources.\" Lamprophyre turned away. \"I predict you're in for a miserable year. And that's just the beginning.\"\n\nShe ducked past Flint and left the palace, taking a few steps away from the door to leave room for her clutchmate to exit. Breathing in the warm, wet air that smelled of inedible green things and not dust and pumice and acid, she said, \"Rokshan, the next time you decide to run mad, would you warn me first? Why the Stones did you tell the king about the kyanite?\"\n\n\"For exactly the reason I gave. So long as the mind-reading artifact is a secret, it gives a tremendous advantage to anyone who develops it. If everyone knows about it, particularly if they know there's a defense against it, it's useless.\" Rokshan stretched, making his back pop. \"I admit there's a risk in turning it over to the military to develop, but it's less of a risk than letting Manishi continue to work on it in secret. I'm sorry you have to give her the kyanite.\"\n\n\"That's all right. It's not like it's really going to her, if she's working with General Sajan's adepts.\" Lamprophyre crouched to give Rokshan a leg up. \"Shall we go back to the warehouses and tell everyone the good news?\"\n\n\"We're going for a flight down river for a few hundred beats,\" Flint said. Lokun was already perched in the notch behind his shoulders. \"We never did finish our talk. I'll be back soon.\"\n\n\"All right\u2014wait, what's Porphyry doing here?\" Lamprophyre beat the air and flew to meet her clutchmate, who was flying awkwardly in their direction. When she neared the bright red dragon, she discovered his awkwardness was because he had a passenger. To her amazement, the passenger was Rassika, her eyes wild with terror and her small hands gripping Porphyry's ruff so tightly the color bled away from his scales.\n\n\"We need to land,\" Porphyry shouted; he was still far enough away that the sound of wings beating drowned out some of his words. Lamprophyre followed him down to the soft grass of the parkland surrounding the palace, where he knelt and twisted gently to get Rassika as close to the ground as possible. Rassika rolled off and crouched on her hands and knees, breathing heavily.\n\nHer heart thumping against her ribs, Lamprophyre crouched beside the girl and said, \"Rassika, what happened?\"\n\n\"He came,\" Rassika panted. \"Bad man came and took them all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"Stones,\" Lamprophyre breathed. \"When? How long ago?\"\n\n\"She reached the warehouses about three hundred beats ago,\" Porphyry said, \"shouting things about people being taken and asking for you, Lamprophyre. I flew as fast as I dared\u2014Stones, but she's small. I could barely feel her. Left me terrified she'd fall and I wouldn't notice.\"\n\n\"I run as fast as I could,\" Rassika gasped. She pushed herself to her feet. \"The bad man had a mort o' others with him. He went after Bhakriya, Depik attacked him, and that's all I saw because I run to where you said.\" Tears streaked her thin cheeks. \"I left Kavari. I don't know where she is. Bad man said, take 'em all, but I couldn't stop for her because you said go fast\u2014\"\n\nRokshan picked up the girl and held her close. \"Kavari will be fine,\" he said. \"They won't hurt a baby. But we need to go quickly. Rassika, I'll hold you and we'll fly with Lamprophyre, all right? You don't need to be afraid. I won't drop you.\"\n\nRassika, her face buried in his shoulder, nodded vigorously. Lamprophyre crouched to take on her double burden. \"Porphyry, go back to the warehouses and warn everyone we may have to face down the ecclesiasts. Ask Bromargyrite and Coquina to come to the embassy. And go quickly.\"\n\nPorphyry nodded and took to the skies. Lamprophyre took off as gently as she dared, though her heart was pounding more rapidly than when she'd faced down Manishi and she wanted to speed through the air to find out what had happened. If Depik had attacked\u2026he was strong, she thought, but one human male couldn't stand up to a handful of them. She flew faster. Depik hurt, the others taken. How could they find four humans in a city full of them?\n\nThe courtyard teemed with people when Lamprophyre arrived, forcing her to alight on the roof of the embassy. \"Everybody out!\" she shouted in her deepest, most sonorous voice. Startled, the crowd shifted and pressed to the edges of the courtyard, though very few people fled. A few still huddled around an unmoving form near the dining pavilion. Lamprophyre's breath caught.\n\nShe leaped down from the roof and leaned over to let her passengers off, then hurried to Depik's side. Blood trickled from his nose and from a long cut on his cheek that was the center of a spreading bruise, and more bruises splotched his forehead and chin. His eyes were closed, but a second glance showed her his chest was rising and falling, too slowly, but at least he was still alive. \"What happened?\" she demanded. \"Depik, what happened?\"\n\n\"Don't disturb him. He's badly injured,\" a woman kneeling next to Depik said.\n\n\"I can see that,\" Lamprophyre said irritably. \"There were four other people here, most of them children. Does anyone know where they went?\"\n\nRassika shoved past the people surrounding Depik and grabbed his shoulder. \"Where's Kavari?\" she shouted. Tears once again flowed down her cheeks, but she didn't spare a hand to wipe them away.\n\nDepik stirred. His eyes fluttered open briefly, then closed tight against the bright sunlight. \"Fought,\" he whispered. \"Give them time to run. I don't know what happened after.\"\n\n\"I only saw the ending,\" the kneeling woman said. \"There were a lot of men beating on this fellow, and one of them fighting with a woman. I didn't see children.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre!\" Rokshan shouted. Lamprophyre looked in his direction. He stood in the embassy doorway, his hand on\u2014Lamprophyre gasped and hurried to where Abhit stood, clutching Kavari. He was shaking and his eyes were wide with fear. Then Rassika was there, grabbing Kavari from Abhit's arms and clutching the child to her heart. Kavari burst into tears. With all the people present, Lamprophyre couldn't pick out Kavari's thoughts, but she judged the child was crying out of fear and confusion and not injury.\n\n\"Preyanka and I were playing with Kavari in the embassy,\" Abhit said. His voice was as shaky as the rest of him. \"I heard Depik shout that we should run. Preyanka went to the door, and she started screaming, so I grabbed the baby and ran out the back. We hid under the bed\u2014was that right? I don't\u2014\" He burst out sobbing. \"Where's Mama? Did he take her? He's going to hurt her again!\"\n\n\"We'll find her, Abhit, don't cry,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nShe turned back to the watching crowd. \"Did anyone see where those men went? They would have been dragging a woman and a girl not yet full grown. Please, this is important.\" A possibility occurred to her. Maybe it was a bad idea, but the faces surrounding her showed no inclination to help a dragon. \"The girl is an ecclesiast,\" she shouted, and a loud murmur sounded among the watchers. \"That man kidnapped her to take her away from her mother. I know the ecclesiasts aren't friends to dragons right now, but nobody should treat an ecclesiast that way, least of all a young girl who can't defend herself. Now, please, didn't anyone see anything?\"\n\nA tall, gangly woman stepped forward. \"I saw,\" she said. \"They came down the street and spread out in front of the embassy. That man stepped up to defend the others, and they all ran, but while some of the men were beating on that fellow, others caught hold of the woman and slapped her around until she stopped fighting. They dragged the girl out of that tall open place, but they didn't hurt her. Then when they were finished with the beating, they dragged the woman and girl off down the street.\"\n\nLamprophyre chose not to yell at the woman for keeping this to herself for so long. \"Did you see which way they went?\"\n\nThe woman pointed right. Westward. Lamprophyre's heart sank. There was a lot of city in that direction. But it was all she had.\n\nThe sound of wings beating the air drew her attention upward to where Coquina and Bromargyrite filled the sky. Lamprophyre drew back to give Coquina room to land, while Bromargyrite, clearly unwilling to hurt the humans still thronging the courtyard, settled on the roof ridge. \"Did that woman's mate steal her away?\" Coquina asked. \"Porphyry didn't have many details.\"\n\n\"He took Bhakriya and her daughter. Rokshan and I are going after them. I need you two to watch this place in case someone comes looking for Abhit\u2014that's Bhakriya's son.\" Lamprophyre didn't know how much of a problem this might be, but with Depik looking the way he did, she didn't want to take chances.\n\nShe turned back to Depik, who was moving feebly as if he wanted to rise. \"Lie still,\" she told him, pressing him gently to the ground. \"I'll give you five vahas if you'll arrange for a healer to tend him,\" she said to the kneeling woman. \"You can keep whatever the healer doesn't take. And if it's not enough, find me and I'll make it right.\"\n\n\"Five vahas,\" the woman breathed. \"I don't need paying to help someone.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" Lamprophyre said. Rokshan dug in his belt pouch, the one containing the embassy funds, and handed over five square gold coins. \"I'm asking a lot of you, because I also need someone to help watch these children while I track down their mother.\" Rassika, Abhit, and Kavari still looked terrified, and Lamprophyre didn't think it was a good idea to leave them supervised only by two dragons they didn't know. This close, if she focused on the one mind nearest her, she was able to pick out her thoughts from the seething mass filling the courtyard, and the woman's thoughts were full of compassion for Depik and the children. \"I think you can be trusted.\"\n\n\"The ecclesiasts\u2014\" the woman faltered, then firmed up her chin and said, \"I'll do it.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Rokshan, let's go.\"\n\nWith Rokshan securely settled behind her shoulders, she climbed to the embassy roof and leaped from there into the sky. Almost immediately, the despair she'd been holding at bay threatened to overwhelm her. The streets were as full as they always were, there was no sign of Bhakriya or Preyanka, and it had been more than five hundred beats since Jagen and his men had attacked the embassy. \"They could be anywhere,\" she said.\n\n\"Could be, but in reality there's only one place they are,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Can you track them?\"\n\n\"Not in the city. We can ask around, but let's use our heads first.\" Rokshan leaned well out so he could see the streets. \"Jagen's not from around here, so he'd have to hire rooms to stay in while he searched for Bhakriya and the children. He's wealthy, so they will be nice rooms in a nice inn. But he also knows hurting his family is wrong, so he'll want to keep that a secret, and the only way to do that is to hire a house instead of taking rooms at an inn. By the same logic as before, it will be a nice house. And he'll have gone back to it by the most direct route.\"\n\n\"That all makes sense, but how does it help?\"\n\nRokshan shifted to look over her other side. \"We need just one more piece of information, which is that taxes on personal property are assessed according to how elaborate a house you own.\"\n\n\"Now I'm confused.\"\n\n\"Turn right at the next corner. Can you go any slower?\"\n\n\"Maybe, but at some point I'll go so slow I'll fall out of the sky. Why do we care about taxes?\"\n\n\"We care,\" Rokshan said, \"because people who own property they rent out make that property as bland and uninteresting as possible, to minimize the taxes they pay. They can't disguise its size, but they can paint it a boring color with no decorations, and not plant a roof garden, things like that.\" He pointed, and Lamprophyre saw the edge of his hand and looked where he indicated. \"They look like that.\"\n\n\"But we don't know if that's the right one. I saw three other houses of that type when we were flying.\"\n\n\"It narrows down our search considerably, though, and we can start by asking questions of the people in the vicinity. And I've been keeping count. This is the farthest they could have gotten in the half hour since the attack, and we haven't seen them on the streets, so we know they went to ground somewhere in this quarter-mile area.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, you're brilliant,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I know. It's a curse,\" Rokshan replied.\n\nThe neighborhood they now flew over had wide streets and large houses separated from each other by narrow alleys, signs that it was a wealthy neighborhood. Lamprophyre only cared about the wide streets that allowed her to walk without her tail smacking the walls. The streets smelled cleaner, too, freer of the refuse and human waste stench that plagued other parts of Tanajital. If she hadn't been so agitated, it would have been a pleasant walk.\n\nPeople ran when she and Rokshan approached, not because they feared her, but because they feared the ecclesiasts, as Lamprophyre discovered when she stopped to listen to their thoughts. Frustrated, she said, \"Those ecclesiasts have a lot to answer for.\"\n\n\"We have Abhit, and men like Jagen don't give up their heirs easily,\" Rokshan said. \"Particularly since Preyanka, as an ecclesiast, can't inherit more than basic personal property. Jagen can't leave Tanajital until he retrieves Abhit, and at worst, we can lay a trap for him.\"\n\n\"But there's no reason to think he won't hurt Bhakriya to punish her for running away,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We can't leave her with him.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm trying not to think about it.\"\n\nLamprophyre growled deep in her throat. \"This is ridiculous,\" she said, and swiftly pounced on a portly man hurrying past. He squeaked, a high-pitched noise at odds with his physique. \"We're looking for someone,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We won't leave until we find him. So if you're worried about dragons contaminating your home, well, help us find him and we'll go. It's that simple.\"\n\n\"Who?\" the man asked in a shaky voice.\n\n\"That house,\" Lamprophyre said, pointing at the nearest house that matched Rokshan's deduction. \"Who lives there? Is he home now?\"\n\nThe man shook his head. \"Vacant,\" he whispered. \"Been vacant two weeks now.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened to his thoughts and heard no echo of lies. She released her captive and turned away. \"Next neighborhood,\" she said.\n\nThe next neighborhood had two houses that might be Jagen's hideout. Lamprophyre didn't bother with the niceties this time; she grabbed a young woman and the man strolling hand in hand with her and said, \"Tell me what I want to know and I'll be out of your hair. That is the expression, isn't it, Rokshan?\" she asked her friend.\n\nRokshan rubbed his mouth as if concealing a smile. \"That is correct, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook the pair gently. \"Those houses. That one across the street, and the one five places down. Those are for rent?\"\n\nThe two looked at each other as if they thought she might intend to rent one. \"Yes?\" the man said. \"Please don't eat me.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't eat people, Rabhan,\" his female companion said. Her thoughts were completely free of fear, even fear of the ecclesiasts. \"What of it?\"\n\n\"Who's living in them now?\"\n\nThe woman jerked her chin, as her arms were pinned at her side by Lamprophyre's hand. \"Close one, it's a family, parents and three children. Farther one is a man with a lot of servants.\"\n\n\"That farther one,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Did you see him return?\"\n\n\"Saw him leave,\" the woman said. \"Left about an hour ago, him and six of his men. I didn't like the look of them. Not our kind of people at all, not for this neighborhood. They looked the sort of men who enjoy causing pain, if you take my meaning.\"\n\n\"So he hasn't come back yet?\"\n\nThe woman shrugged, quite a feat in her position. \"We were busy until five minutes ago, with no time for looking out windows to spy on our neighbors.\" Her thoughts made it clear it was the kind of busy that required both humans to be naked. Lamprophyre quickly blocked the woman's thoughts despite her curiosity about human sexuality, feeling it was the wrong time to pry about that subject. Someday she really needed to find a human who didn't get as embarrassed as Rokshan did to explain how sex worked for humans.\n\nShe released them both. \"Thank you for your cooperation,\" she said. \"Rokshan, I think we should check that house.\"\n\n\"Did he do something wrong?\" the woman asked.\n\n\"We don't know,\" Rokshan said, \"or, rather, we're not sure he's the man we're looking for.\"\n\n\"I hope he is, your highness,\" the man said, his fear subsiding. \"Because then you might get rid of him. He really isn't our sort at all.\"\n\n\"What is\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you again,\" Rokshan said, overriding Lamprophyre's query. Instead of mounting, he walked away down the street. Lamprophyre caught up with him in a few long strides.\n\n\"What does he mean, our sort?\" she asked.\n\n\"He's just a snob, that's all,\" Rokshan said. \"Interested in keeping his neighborhood pure and free from people who aren't as wealthy as he is. I despise that kind of person, but it doesn't matter now.\" He came to a halt in front of the house the two had indicated. To Lamprophyre, it looked the same as all the other houses along the street, though without the curves and lines and dots painted on its neighbors. Its roof was tiled the same blue as the embassy, with a rain gutter angled toward the rear of the house. Lamprophyre hadn't seen any rain barrels on this street and guessed rich people might consider them an eyesore.\n\nSmall windows cut into the brown brick of the fa\u00e7ade indicated the house's height represented at least two stories inside as opposed to a single tall room. That also meant Lamprophyre wouldn't fit inside. Irritated at this hint that she would not be able to smash through the door and drag Jagen into the street, she said, \"So what are we supposed to do now? We don't know if this is the right house.\"\n\n\"I have a feeling it is,\" Rokshan said. He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head back to regard the roof. Lamprophyre followed his gaze. The roof ridge was wide enough Rokshan could easily stand on it, and the roof itself was more gently sloped than the embassy. It overhung the house by only a little bit, not enough to provide decent shade at this hour of the afternoon.\n\nRokshan lowered his head. \"Can you perch on the roof ridge?\"\n\n\"If it's sturdy enough. It doesn't look any weaker than the embassy.\"\n\n\"Fly up there and listen to my thoughts. If I shout for you, verbally or mentally, take the house apart.\"\n\nLamprophyre blinked. \"But this isn't Jagen's house! Should we really destroy someone else's property?\"\n\n\"We'll make Jagen pay for the damage. At worst, well, it means a few more mining trips for us. But if Bhakriya is in there, she could be in serious danger, and I think it's a risk worth taking.\"\n\nLamprophyre had temporarily forgotten about Bhakriya. \"You're right. Are you just going to knock on that door?\"\n\n\"I am.\" Rokshan wiped his palms on his trousers. \"If it's not Jagen, we move on. If it is\u2026\"\n\nLamprophyre flexed her right hand and let her claws extend. \"Take the house apart.\"\n\nShe flew up to the roof ridge and settled on it cautiously, not putting her full weight down until she was sure the ridge would support her. It occurred to her that with all those windows, someone might have seen her and Rokshan, since they hadn't bothered to conceal themselves. Well, it wasn't as if this plan depended on secrecy. Rokshan would introduce himself by name, if they didn't recognize him outright. She shifted her weight, heard the beam creak, and froze.\n\nRokshan was knocking on the door thinking hope they aren't stupid enough to attack a prince. That possibility hadn't occurred to Lamprophyre, and it made her more tense than she already was. It didn't disturb Rokshan, who'd started whistling an unfamiliar tune as calmly as if he were visiting an old friend.\n\nBeats passed. No one came to the door. Maybe they were wrong, and no one was home. Rokshan thought could be wrong and where to next as if he could hear her thoughts and not the other way around. She heard him knock again, more forcefully. The street was filling up with people staring at the roof\u2014Stones, she hadn't concealed herself. Dragon concealment didn't last long, but it would have been long enough if she'd remembered to do it before landing on the roof. Now it was too late, and the street had started to look like a carnival town, and she and Rokshan were running out of options.\n\nShe heard music, and looked to see a different kind of movement at the far left end of the street, people being nudged by their whispering neighbors to turn and look up the street. She squinted into the bright afternoon light and saw a litter approaching, surrounded by the musicians and reverends of an ecclesiast's entourage. Its red curtains, bright as Porphyry, fluttered in the light breeze; unlike most of the ecclesiasts' litters she'd seen recently, the curtains were not tied back, and the litter's occupant was obscured. It must be hot behind those curtains, not that Lamprophyre cared about the comfort of ecclesiasts.\n\nThen the strangeness hit her. Red curtains, not yellow. This was no ordinary ecclesiast. This was one of the High Ecclesiasts. And there was only one reason a High Ecclesiast might be on this street at this time, unless the world was more ruled by coincidence than Lamprophyre was willing to allow.\n\n\"Rokshan!\" she shouted, just as she heard him think finally. The sound of the door opening came to her ears, and Rokshan said, \"I'm looking for Jagen, is he\u2014\"\n\nThen everything happened at once. Rokshan thought Lamprophyre, now! She heard him cry out in pain, heard fists striking human flesh. A woman screamed nearby. Lamprophyre leaped down from the roof, roaring a wordless challenge, and smashed the door as it began to close with Rokshan inside. And a powerful voice from behind Lamprophyre cried out, \"Stand down, godless creature, or face Jiwanyil's wrath!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Lamprophyre ignored the voice and struck another blow to the door. It shattered under her fist. Lamprophyre reached inside and grabbed a fistful of cloth and the arm inside it and pulled. A screaming man flew through the doorway and hit the ground in a boneless heap. Snarling, Lamprophyre stuck her head and one arm inside and searched for Rokshan. He was fighting two other men, punching and kicking in a controlled but violent manner that suggested he knew what he was doing. Lamprophyre decided to intervene anyway.\n\nShe stretched her arm to the limit imposed by the door frame and grabbed one of Rokshan's assailants by the leg. She dragged him away from Rokshan and pinned him against the wall. \"Jagen,\" she said. \"Are you Jagen? Answer quickly.\"\n\n\"No!\" the man screamed, shoving ineffectually at her hand with his one free one. The other was pinned to his side. Not-quite-fresh bruises on his chin and cheeks, dark purple, suggested Depik had gotten in some solid blows before he was overcome. \"Let me go!\"\n\nLamprophyre hooked her fingers into the back of his waistband and hoisted him into the air. She blew a hot cloud of smoke into his face, making him choke, then dragged him through the doorway and deposited him next to his unconscious friend.\n\nA blow to her hindquarters startled her into turning away from the house. \"How dare you ignore the Third Ecclesiast?\" a reverend said. He held his giant book like a weapon and raised it as if to strike her again. Lamprophyre lowered her head and growled at him. He flinched, but didn't back away. His courage would have impressed her if she weren't so worried for Rokshan, alone and facing Stones knew how many more of Jagen's men.\n\n\"The Third Ecclesiast can wait,\" she said. But when she turned around again, Rokshan stood in the doorway. His hair and clothes were in disarray, but he looked unhurt. He had a heavyset man by the back of his shirt and shoved the man ahead of him out the door. To Lamprophyre's relief, Bhakriya followed.\n\nThe relief was short-lived. As soon as Bhakriya emerged fully into the light, Lamprophyre snarled again. The woman had been severely beaten, with one of her eyes swollen shut and her jaw puffy, and bruises covered both her arms. Furious, Lamprophyre dove for Rokshan's captive, who had to be Jagen, but Rokshan interposed his body between her and the heavyset man.\n\n\"Don't,\" he warned Lamprophyre. \"I know it looks bad\u2014\"\n\n\"Bad? It looks like a nightmare!\"\n\n\"Trust me, Lamprophyre, it will be all right.\" Rokshan glanced past her and swore. \"Maybe not. The last thing we needed was the Third Ecclesiast wading in with both her giant feet.\"\n\nThe reverend threatening Lamprophyre had backed away gracefully, again not at all as if he were afraid, though Lamprophyre could hear his thoughts and he was not certain how this would end. \"You are in violation of the laws of God and man,\" he said, making the watching crowd shift nervously. \"Someone send for the guard to take these two into custody for destruction of property. And stand aside. We are here for the ecclesiast Preyanka.\"\n\nBhakriya gasped. \"No. You can't have her.\"\n\n\"Bhakriya\u2014\" Rokshan said.\n\nShe shook her head and glanced over her shoulder. Lamprophyre could just see someone standing inside the house, someone whose agitated thoughts were those of Preyanka.\n\nRokshan shoved Jagen in Lamprophyre's direction. She caught him by the shoulders and squeezed just hard enough to make the man gasp in pain. Rokshan turned to face Bhakriya. \"You have to have faith,\" he said in a voice low enough that only Bhakriya and Lamprophyre could hear. \"This is the right decision. It's Preyanka's life at stake.\"\n\n\"An ecclesiast's destiny is clear,\" the reverend said. Lamprophyre had begun to hate the smug smoothness of his voice. \"She belongs to Jiwanyil and to the people. Do not attempt to thwart Jiwanyil's will.\"\n\n\"I won't allow it!\" Bhakriya screamed.\n\n\"You don't have that power, woman,\" Jagen shouted. \"I'm her father and the decision is mine by law.\"\n\nLamprophyre held Jagen more tightly and leaned down so her hot breath that smelled of fire blew over him. \"I can make you disappear so thoroughly your own parents will forget your name,\" she whispered. \"You had better stop talking about what's yours before I forget I'm civilized.\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" a new voice said. The red curtains parted, and a woman stepped out of the litter. She was small even for a human female, with dark hair cut short to frame her face, which had delicate, well-shaped features and lines creasing her forehead and the corners of her eyes and mouth. The red silk robe she wore over black shirt and trousers bore stitched designs of animals, all of them predators. Golden tiger faces adorned the front of her robe, over the lumps on her chest.\n\nAs she walked toward Lamprophyre, the reverend and his companion knelt and bowed, and then like a spreading wave everyone in the street did the same until Lamprophyre, Rokshan, Bhakriya, Preyanka, and Jagen were the only ones still standing before the Third Ecclesiast.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast's thoughts were placid, neither angry nor afraid nor curious. She seemed utterly unimpressed by Lamprophyre, as if meeting dragons was an everyday occurrence for her. \"This seems an unnaturally dramatic way for me to greet a new ecclesiast,\" she said. \"Preyanka. Please come forward.\"\n\n\"I won't let you take her from me,\" Bhakriya said, stepping in front of Preyanka, who hadn't moved.\n\n\"No one will take her from her parents,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"We're not monsters. But Preyanka's gift must not be ignored or denied. She needs training and treatment to be able to use that gift to its fullest without suffering injury.\" She held out a hand to Preyanka. \"I'd like to see you, child. I promise I won't take you anywhere you don't choose to go.\"\n\nPreyanka hesitated a few beats longer. Then she walked past her mother, prompting her to let out a small cry and begin weeping. She stood before the Third Ecclesiast, who was no taller than she was. \"You'll stop me having these attacks?\" she said.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast shook her head. \"Those attacks, as you call them, are the gift of Jiwanyil, and may not be denied. But we can ease the toll they take on you.\"\n\n\"I don't want to leave Mama.\"\n\n\"You will see her as often as you like, but for your safety you must live in the Archprelate's palace for the next five years, until you are capable of enduring the prophecies that possess you.\" The Third Ecclesiast looked past her at Rokshan, still standing between Bhakriya and the street, and at Lamprophyre, still holding Jagen in place. \"But your mother and father must stop consorting with outcasts and dragons. Jiwanyil's decree must not be disregarded.\"\n\n\"It's a false decree!\" Lamprophyre exclaimed, just as Jagen said, \"These two attacked me, unprovoked!\" and Bhakriya said, \"They saved me and my children, which is more than Jiwanyil ever did for us!\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast appeared unmoved by the outbursts. When silence fell again, she said, \"Prince Rokshan. You, of all people, should know better than to ignore a prophecy. Your faith has always been remarkable. And you choose to throw it away for a heretic creature?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to argue with you, Ayusha,\" Rokshan said. \"Preyanka was possessed of a prophecy while she was under Lamprophyre's protection. Jiwanyil can't be that angry with humanity if he's willing to speak to her under those circumstances.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast's delicate eyebrows raised, deepening the wrinkles on her forehead. \"That's a subject for another time,\" she said. \"At the moment, I want to know\u2014\"\n\nA disturbance at the edge of the crowd drew Lamprophyre's attention. Five men in the sky blue tunics of the city guard approached, short sticks in hand, their thoughts a mixture of fear and apprehension and awe. They moved through the kneeling people carefully until they reached the open area surrounding the litter and the house. \"Who is responsible for this destruction?\" the first guard asked. His voice was gruff, as if he were trying to sound assertive, but there was no power behind it.\n\n\"I broke the door down,\" Lamprophyre said. \"This man's servants were attacking Rokshan, and I was defending him.\"\n\nThe guards exchanged glances. All of them were suddenly thinking variations on can't take a dragon into custody and that's Prince Rokshan, how can we arrest a prince? Lamprophyre pressed on with, \"This man beat his mate\u2014look, you can see how badly she's hurt\u2014and you should take him into custody before he tries to hurt Preyanka as well.\"\n\nThe guard straightened. \"Sirrah, did you attack this woman?\" he asked. By his thoughts, he felt himself on firmer ground.\n\nJagen tried to stand up straight, but Lamprophyre's hands on his shoulders weighed him down too heavily. \"She fell,\" he said. \"Ask her. She's very clumsy.\"\n\nBhakriya's shoulders heaved with her heavy breathing. \"I did not fall,\" she said, her voice low and furious. \"Jagen beat me to punish me for running away from an abusive marriage. I refuse to be ashamed any longer. I intend to divorce him and see him in prison for what he's done.\"\n\nJagen's astonishment cheered Lamprophyre. She leaned on him a little more heavily and enjoyed the whimper of pain he made.\n\n\"Did anyone else see the attack?\" the guard asked.\n\n\"Her word isn't good enough for you?\" Lamprophyre snarled.\n\nThe guard took an involuntary step back. \"More witnesses are always better,\" he said, his voice shaking.\n\n\"I think you'll find these men,\" Rokshan said, pointing at Lamprophyre's victims, \"saw what Jagen did. I'm sure they'll want to testify so they aren't charged along with him.\"\n\nThe conscious man glanced at Rokshan, then at Lamprophyre, and nodded vigorously.\n\n\"Then we'll take them all into custody,\" the guard said, \"and, your highness, you and the dragon will\u2014it's procedure that you come with us.\"\n\n\"We'll be happy to bear witness against Jagen as well,\" Rokshan said cheerfully. Lamprophyre could tell that wasn't what the guard had in mind, but he didn't want to fight royalty.\n\n\"What a pleasant solution,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. Lamprophyre had almost forgotten she was there. \"Preyanka, please join me, and\u2014I beg your pardon, but what's your name?\"\n\n\"It's Bhakriya, your Holiness,\" Bhakriya said. She stood stiffly, and Lamprophyre heard the sadness in her thoughts.\n\n\"Bhakriya, when your marital difficulties are resolved, come to the Archprelate's palace and ask to see Preyanka. You'll be admitted at any time.\" The Third Ecclesiast looked at Jagen. \"I believe your compensation has already been paid. I hope that doesn't make things difficult for you.\"\n\n\"I don't care about the money, your Holiness. I just want Preyanka to be well.\"\n\n\"She will be.\" The Third Ecclesiast turned to Lamprophyre as Lamprophyre passed off Jagen to one of the guards. \"So. You believe Jiwanyil's word is false. Take care, dragon. I was the one possessed of that prophecy. Challenge it, and you challenge me.\"\n\nLamprophyre gazed back at her fearlessly. \"I don't know any more about your religion than you know about mine. But I think it's very suspicious that you received a prophecy that coincidentally tells you to do exactly what you already wanted to do.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said quietly, \"this isn't the time.\"\n\n\"Isn't it, Rokshan? When would be the time? Your Holiness, that decree has hurt so many people. Just a thousand beats ago I spoke to a woman who almost refused to help an injured man because she feared being outcast. How is that right? How can a just and loving God force that kind of moral decision on anyone?\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast returned Lamprophyre's gaze. \"I will not explain my faith to a creature who deliberately stands outside God's grace,\" she said. \"A prophecy is a prophecy, and we humans know that obeying prophecy, following the will of Jiwanyil, brings us lasting happiness. I don't expect you to understand.\" She turned her back on Lamprophyre and walked to the litter, holding out a hand for Preyanka to join her.\n\n\"At least you can call off your search now,\" Lamprophyre said. \"That ought to make everyone happy.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast stopped. Her placid thoughts turned confused. \"Excuse me?\" she said, turning around.\n\n\"Your search for Preyanka. Or did you think people loved seeing all those ecclesiasts in the streets?\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast's thoughts became sharp and wary all at once. Lamprophyre heard her think can't possibly know almost a disaster must find, and then the woman said, \"You're mistaken. We weren't searching for Preyanka. The ecclesiasts are here to bring order and peace in these troubled times and to counsel people who have been contaminated by inadvertent contact with your kind.\"\n\n\"That's enough, Ayusha, we get the point,\" Rokshan said. \"Give my regards to Khadar.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast turned around without acknowledging Rokshan. She helped Preyanka climb into the litter, then climbed in herself, and her little procession moved off down the street as kneeling people stood and bowed her past.\n\nBhakriya's face was wet with tears, but her thoughts were calmer now. \"I feel so lost,\" she said. \"Is Abhit safe? And Depik\u2014\" The tears flowed faster. \"I wasn't fast enough. He fought to give us a chance to get away, but I was too slow. Is he\u2014?\"\n\n\"He's receiving treatment and will be fine,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"We should get a healer for you, too,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nBhakriya shook her head. \"I need these marks to speak on my behalf. Jagen can't be allowed to get away with his evil behavior anymore. Will you go with me to the judiciary? I want to see justice done.\"\n\n\"We'll stand by you,\" Rokshan said. \"But we should go now. That poor guard shouldn't get in trouble just because he didn't know how to take a dragon and a prince into custody.\"\n\nJustice, it turned out, moved slowly. Lamprophyre had hoped, with Bhakriya as injured as she was, that a judge would take one look at her and declare her marriage to Jagen over. But instead, Lamprophyre had to tell the story of what she and Rokshan had done to several different people, and she never saw Jagen at all. Rokshan told her he was in the custody cells, which was where people waiting for trial were kept. Then he had to explain about trials, which took a while.\n\nAfter that, a fussy little woman wearing a black gown that hung only to the middle of her shins came in to the courtyard where Lamprophyre waited, the judiciary not being built to hold dragons, and tried to get Lamprophyre to admit to destroying the entire house Jagen had rented. She had a list of damages she wanted Lamprophyre to confess to causing. Finally, Lamprophyre became annoyed enough to say, \"You know full well I didn't do anything but smash the door, and I've offered to pay for that. If you persist in trying to cheat me, I'll tell the judge that this isn't the first time you've tried this and see what she does. Now, get out of here, and live an honest life from now on.\" The woman ran.\n\nIt was nearly sunset when Rokshan entered the courtyard and said, \"We're free to go.\"\n\n\"Thank the Stones,\" Lamprophyre breathed. \"Is that all? They don't want us back?\"\n\n\"We'll need to come back with Bhakriya in a few days, but that's for her divorce. And we'll bring Dharan along, in case there's any problems with custody. That means we have to make sure they don't say Abhit has to return to his father,\" Rokshan explained when she looked blank.\n\n\"They wouldn't do that, would they?\"\n\n\"The courts don't award custody to an abusive parent, and we've already proved Jagen is that, but no sense taking chances.\" Rokshan hauled himself up. \"Bhakriya already left. I told her we\u2014you\u2014would give her a ride, but she said she needed to be alone for a bit.\"\n\n\"I understand. She was thinking such a jumble of thoughts, and worries about Preyanka, it's not surprising she wanted some time to herself.\" Lamprophyre leaped into the sky and flew almost straight up until the air became cool and the light of the setting sun shone clear and unimpeded along the western horizon.\n\n\"I never get tired of this view,\" Rokshan said. \"Tanajital an anthill below us, the ground stretching out as far as we can see. If we flew higher, we might see the ocean.\"\n\n\"If we flew higher, you'd start to freeze.\" Lamprophyre turned to face north. Her distant mountain home was a charcoal blur on that horizon, but she imagined she could see Mother Stone, her peaks dusted with white year-round. \"I'd start to freeze. It's not the way I want to go, freezing solid and dropping out of the sky like a stone.\"\n\n\"So when dragons near death, they fly up the slopes of Mother Stone and do what?\"\n\nLamprophyre craned her neck so she could see his right leg. \"Nobody knows. The tradition is that Mother Stone opens, and the dragon flies inside to a realm where there's no more death or pain, just flying endlessly with all the dragons who have ever lived. But even if it's just that the dragon finds a place to land, high on the slopes, and freezes peacefully to death, that's an acceptable answer. Either way, we're part of Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"And the High Ecclesiasts want to turn you to the complicated worship of Katayan. How frustrating.\"\n\nLamprophyre started a slow, shallow spiral that would bring her back to Tanajital eventually. \"Is it complicated? How so?\"\n\n\"I suppose in absolute terms it's not complicated. Just by comparison to what you believe. There are rituals, and holy days, and codes of behavior\u2026huh.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It just occurred to me that dragons are never possessed of a prophecy. At least, I assume not.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. The air was growing warmer, but wasn't yet uncomfortable, and she spread her wings wider to take advantage of the air currents. \"If they are, it doesn't look anything like when humans are. So I'm going to say, definitely not.\"\n\n\"Well, wouldn't it make sense that if Jiwanyil speaks to humans, Katayan would speak to dragons?\" Rokshan leaned forward and then sat back quickly before he could put more than a slight pressure on the sensitive spot at the back of her head. \"Sorry. I suppose what I mean is, it's more proof that Katayan as we know him isn't real.\"\n\n\"I wish we'd realized that when the Third Ecclesiast was near. Her eyes might have popped right out of their sockets. Is that the right expression?\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"Why are you suddenly so obsessed with human idiom?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I guess because it's versatile and clever.\"\n\n\"Well, Ayusha is hard to rattle. She's been a High Ecclesiast for longer than any of the others and her faith is rock solid. Though knowing that she's responsible for that false decree, I don't know what to think.\"\n\n\"I did rattle her, though,\" Lamprophyre mused. \"When I asked about them calling off their search?\"\n\nRokshan straightened. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Wasn't it obvious? I asked if she intended to stop searching now that they'd found Preyanka, and she was startled and said something about how they hadn't been searching for her. But she was thinking how it was impossible I knew about the search, and they still had to find whatever or whoever it was.\" Lamprophyre considered her words. \"I suppose you couldn't have known her thoughts, but I thought her surprise was clear.\"\n\n\"I remember she said they weren't searching, and I didn't know what to make of that,\" Rokshan said. \"Because I'm certain of what we deduced from Dolomite's observations. But if it wasn't Preyanka they were looking for, what is it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but if the Third Ecclesiast lied about it, it might be time for a more direct approach.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Lamprophyre smelled soup just before the embassy came into view, and the aroma heartened her. It meant Depik was well. She remembered what he'd looked like when they left and wished she hadn't agreed to let Jagen go without a well-deserved beating.\n\n\"You're tense. Is something wrong?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"Just regretting giving up my own form of justice.\" She slowed her speed until she could alight neatly on the roof ridge. The courtyard, while still not as full as it used to be, was still busier than it had been the night before. Bromargyrite's arms and head extended from the doorway of the embassy, and he was watching Abhit read to Rassika and Kavari. Coquina was barely visible in the depths of the dining pavilion. A few humans were serving themselves from the soup cauldron, casting wary glances at the dragons, but the mood was remarkably placid considering what had happened just a couple of thousand beats before.\n\nLamprophyre climbed down from the roof carefully beside the dining pavilion and let Rokshan hop down. Coquina glanced over at her, then returned her attention to the cow she was eating. \"Depik said he could cook two as easily as one,\" she said, \"so I feel no guilt at eating your supper.\"\n\nDepik looked up from the trolley, where lay a perfectly butchered and cooked half-eaten cow. He didn't look as if he'd ever been injured. \"My lady!\" he exclaimed. He looked past her, then out the front of the pavilion. \"Where's Bhakriya?\"\n\n\"She wanted to walk back from the judiciary building alone,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Everything will be all right, except Preyanka had to go to the ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"That was necessary, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. \"Can I have some soup? I'm starving.\"\n\nDepik was holding his knife like a weapon. \"But they took her. I couldn't stop them.\" He looked away. \"He hurt her, didn't he?\"\n\n\"He did. She's a survivor, Depik. She denounced Jagen and he's in the holding cells pending trial. In a few days she'll stand before a judge and receive a divorce.\" Rokshan gripped Depik's shoulder and made the man look at him. \"You need to honor that.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't know what that meant, but Depik seemed to. \"I do,\" he said. \"I will.\"\n\n\"And if you two were pair-bonded, that would be wonderful,\" Lamprophyre said impulsively.\n\nDepik smiled and shook his head. \"Too soon, my lady,\" he said. \"I'm not interested in burdening her more, and I'm not as reliable as I'd like yet. She knows what I'd do for her and hers, and that's enough.\"\n\n\"And no suggesting it to Bhakriya, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. \"Let things happen as they will.\"\n\nDisappointed, Lamprophyre said, \"I know, but you humans are so short-lived, you shouldn't waste any of the years you have.\"\n\nBoth men laughed. \"I'll bring out your food in a bit, my lady, it just needs to finish cooking,\" Depik said.\n\n\"And I'll watch over the soup pot until Bhakriya gets here,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I take it no one attacked?\" Lamprophyre asked Coquina.\n\n\"It's been this quiet for a thousand beats.\" Coquina tore off another mouthful. \"The healers came to help Depik, and once he was well, the other humans lost interest. Bromargyrite played with the children for a while, and I took a couple of short flights to observe anyone who might try an attack. Everything's fine.\"\n\nLamprophyre stepped into the courtyard and surveyed the people waiting there. For a change, none of them were afraid of her, though the strangers never got too close. Rassika, supervising Kavari from the entrance to the embassy, nodded at her in a gesture far older than her years. The nod drew Abhit's attention, and he dropped his book, leaped to his feet, and sped toward Lamprophyre. \"Where's Mama?\" he demanded.\n\n\"She'll be here soon\u2014actually, she's here now,\" Lamprophyre said, gesturing toward the street. Bhakriya's bruises looked worse than before, but she moved easily, and Lamprophyre reflected on how fortunate it was that Jagen hadn't broken any of her bones. Abhit ran to embrace his mother, who bent to hug him tightly. With as many people as were in the courtyard, Lamprophyre couldn't hear either of their thoughts, but that wasn't necessary. Bhakriya's smile said everything she was thinking.\n\n\"But he hit you, Mama, I should have stopped him!\" Abhit was saying as the two returned to the courtyard.\n\n\"You did the right thing,\" Bhakriya said. \"And it truly doesn't hurt much.\"\n\nThe smell of roasted cow became stronger, and Lamprophyre turned toward where Depik had rolled the trolley into the dining pavilion. \"Suppertime, my lady,\" he said. He saw Bhakriya and stood perfectly still. His thoughts were both close enough and clear enough that they cut through the background noise despite how they ran together in his rage: should have killed how dare she looks and a sweeping red haze of fury that dizzied Lamprophyre so much she had to block everything.\n\nLamprophyre heard Bhakriya approaching, and she stepped back to allow her to pass. Bhakriya stood before Depik, whose expression was impassive and whose only movement was a convulsive clenching of his fist. \"You tried to stop them,\" she said. \"Thanks to you, Abhit got away. I'm so sorry I wasted your sacrifice.\"\n\n\"It was nothing.\" Depik's hand twitched as if he wanted to touch the side of her jaw, which was still puffy. \"I wish I'd done more. God's breath, Bhakriya, what kind of man could do this?\"\n\nBhakriya rather self-consciously touched her swollen eye. \"An evil man, and one I'm well rid of,\" she said. \"And I'd welcome another thousand bruises if they were evidence of his evil. I chose not to be healed so I'd have an even better chance with a judge. Don't pity me.\"\n\n\"I would never,\" Depik said. \"You're braver than me.\"\n\nBhakriya laughed. \"We both took a beating today,\" she said. \"I'm not sure we should compete for which of us was braver. I'm so glad you were healed.\" She hesitated for half a beat, then put her arms around Depik. Startled, Depik returned her gesture, his eyes wide and fixed on Lamprophyre. She risked listening in briefly and was cheered at what she heard: Depik astonished but pleased, and Bhakriya filled with contentment. That was the next best thing to love, at least to Lamprophyre's mind. She looked away and pretended not to notice.\n\nAfter a few beats, the two humans released each other, and Depik cleared his throat. \"Dishes,\" he said. \"Unless you want to serve?\"\n\n\"I know I look terrible, and I'd rather not be stared at,\" Bhakriya said, and touched her swollen eye gingerly again. \"Besides, I'd welcome something so normal as washing up.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled herself beside the trolley and tore into her cow. Depik had used a different seasoning this time, and she liked the change. The dining pavilion was crowded with both her and Coquina in it, but it was nice to share that closeness with a friend. \"Did Bromargyrite eat?\" she asked.\n\n\"He said he'd wait until I finished. Stones, but this is delicious.\" Coquina let out a cheerful belch she didn't bother to control or conceal.\n\nRokshan returned with his bowl of soup and settled next to Lamprophyre. \"I'm having trouble relaxing,\" he said. \"So much has happened, it's hard to think Bhakriya's troubles are over. Mostly over. The ones involving the possibility of someone finding her family and taking them away.\"\n\n\"But we have a different problem now, which is we still don't know what the ecclesiasts are looking for and they're still committed to calling dragons evil,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nCoquina shifted her weight and burped again. \"We don't? I thought the ecclesiasts wanted Preyanka.\"\n\nLamprophyre explained what she'd learned from the Third Ecclesiast's thoughts. \"I wish I'd heard more,\" she concluded. \"I'm certain the Third Ecclesiast knows what they're searching for. Or who.\"\n\n\"If we could find Khadar, that might be as helpful,\" Rokshan said. \"I wish I knew why he's hiding in the Archprelate's palace. It's not as if he knows his thoughts are vulnerable to being overheard.\"\n\n\"And the Third Ecclesiast was agitated enough by my questions I'm sure it will benefit us to beat them to finding whatever it is.\" Lamprophyre chewed slowly, thinking hard. \"Maybe we need to approach another of the ecclesiasts in the street. Though\u2026no, that would be pointless. There are so many other people surrounding them I can't hear their thoughts over the noise of the crowd.\"\n\n\"How are you not exhausted, Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan asked. \"I'm too weary to make plans. Let's just enjoy a good night's sleep, and figure out the next step in the morning.\"\n\nNow that he mentioned it, Lamprophyre did feel rather tired. \"I suppose I feel it's become a race. The Third Ecclesiast isn't stupid, is she?\"\n\n\"She's extremely intelligent. Far smarter than Khadar.\"\n\n\"So she knows we know they're searching for something, even though they kept that search secret. And if she's intelligent, she'll want to step up their search in case our knowledge means we're looking for whatever it is, too. Which we are.\"\n\n\"Even so, Rokshan's right that there's nothing we can do about it tonight,\" Coquina said. She stretched and picked up the remains of the cow carcass. \"I'm taking this to Bromargyrite, and then I'm heading for my warehouse, unless you still need me?\"\n\n\"I think the danger is over. Thank you for helping.\"\n\nCoquina shrugged. \"I find I'm more attached to these humans than I first expected when I came to Tanajital.\" Her expression stilled. \"Though maybe that was a mistake, since it got Melika hurt.\"\n\n\"Humans aren't forced to serve dragons,\" Rokshan said. \"Melika chose to help because you're her friend, and that's what friends do for each other. Don't diminish her choice by blaming yourself for what happened.\"\n\nCoquina's expression became thoughtful. \"That makes sense,\" she said. \"Good night, and I'll see you both in the morning.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched her walk over to the embassy and sighed. \"I never thought we'd be friends again. Never thought I wanted to be friends again. Life is so strange sometimes.\" She watched as the old man stood, leaving his empty bowl on the ground as he always did, and walked away down the street, his bent body looking frail and yet determined on the unswerving path he took.\n\nRokshan drained the last drops of soup and leaned against her flank. \"I should go before I fall asleep here.\" Despite his words, he made no move to rise.\n\n\"You could sleep in one of the servants' houses,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I like that plan.\"\n\n\"It means you have to get up, Rokshan.\"\n\nGroaning, Rokshan pushed himself to his feet. He moved rather stiffly, and Lamprophyre, suddenly remembering, said, \"You're hurt! Why didn't you say anything?\"\n\n\"I'm not hurt badly. Just stiff.\" Rokshan stretched until his joints popped. Lamprophyre shuddered, and he grinned at her. \"Sometimes I do that just to see the look on your face.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Lamprophyre shifted so her face was close to his. \"Well, sometimes I ask questions I know will embarrass you. Like, why was Depik thinking about how warm his body got when Bhakriya\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't ask,\" Rokshan said, blushing. \"I give up. You win.\"\n\n\"Dragons always win,\" Lamprophyre said smugly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Lamprophyre rose late the next morning. She still felt tired, as if nothing about her sleep had been restful even though she had had some very pleasant dreams about flying with Rokshan through the mountain heights. In the dream, the air had been warm, not hot and sticky like the lowlands or bitter cold like the real heights, and they had flown until Rokshan had leaped from her shoulders and flown away under his own power. At the time, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world, but now Lamprophyre reflected on it and wondered why she hadn't imagined Rokshan with wings.\n\nEveryone seemed dull that morning. Depik wasn't there when Lamprophyre entered the dining pavilion; only Bhakriya and Rassika were in the kitchen, which smelled of porridge and not delicious broiled cow. \"I tried to rouse Depik, my lady, but he groaned and wouldn't look at me,\" Bhakriya said.\n\n\"He's just ill. It will pass by afternoon,\" Lamprophyre said, trying to sound patient, though she was actually a little resentful of having to cook her own meal on a day like this when she didn't want to exert herself to do anything.\n\nGradually, the rest of her\u2026what could she call it, this strange collection of humans she'd acquired? Not a family, because she had a family and the humans were, except for Rokshan, too humble in their speaking to her to be considered true equals. Household? She'd heard Anamika's mother refer to her family that way\u2014not just the people, but their property and responsibilities. That sounded right. Her household.\n\nThat reminded her that she hadn't seen Anamika, or any of the neighborhood children who usually visited her, since the ecclesiasts' decree had driven everyone away. She'd tried to talk to Anamika's father and been shooed off, politely but firmly. That ought to be reassuring, that at least they didn't hate her, but the memory just made her angrier at the ecclesiasts.\n\nAt any rate, her household gradually arose and gathered in the kitchen for breakfast. Rokshan appeared last, moving more stiffly than he had the night before, his eyes bleary and his hair in disarray. \"You look awful,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And I think you lied to me about how badly hurt you were.\"\n\n\"It wasn't a lie,\" Rokshan said, \"and it wasn't so bad until my muscles stiffened up. I just need food and a chance to move around. There's really only a few bruises.\" He smiled. \"I'm sure the men Depik and I thrashed can't say the same.\"\n\n\"You're sure Depik will be all right?\" Bhakriya asked. Though the swelling in her eye and jaw had gone down, her bruises were even more startlingly vivid than before.\n\n\"This happens sometimes,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Less than it used to, but he's still always embarrassed about it. So don't draw attention to it when he finally gets up.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Bhakriya's thoughts said she didn't actually understand, but Lamprophyre knew enough about humans to recognize when they meant they accepted something even though they didn't understand it.\n\nShe flew the short distance to the butcher's where Depik usually bought her meat and paid for a cow, which she then roasted in the courtyard because the dining pavilion was full of humans. Kavari watched her in childish awe, her thoughts full of fiery butterflies, and the child's peaceful thoughts soothed Lamprophyre's irritation. She ate, set the carcass aside for Depik to dispose of when he recovered, and washed her face and hands at the rain barrel.\n\n\"I feel better,\" she told Rokshan as he climbed up to the notch behind her shoulders.\n\n\"I wish I did,\" Rokshan said with a grunt. \"Don't worry, it will pass.\"\n\nThe flight to the warehouses seemed to take longer than usual, and not just because Lamprophyre flew slowly. She watched a couple of yellow litters pass below them and thought once more about accosting them. \"Pointless,\" she muttered.\n\n\"What was that?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I was just saying it would be pointless to try to get an ecclesiast to talk.\"\n\n\"We need a new approach,\" Rokshan said. \"And\u2026huh. It occurs to me I haven't seen Dharan in several days. I hope he's all right.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't he be all right?\"\n\n\"He's more or less an unbeliever. Some people might think that makes him fair game, if the ecclesiasts are stirring everyone up to think in terms of being worthy of Jiwanyil's love.\"\n\nThat worried Lamprophyre. \"Should we look for him?\"\n\n\"I think maybe we should,\" Rokshan said. \"Let's talk to the others first, maybe make a plan, and then\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre peered ahead at the warehouses. \"Actually, it looks like he found us.\"\n\nDharan was, in fact, at the warehouses when they arrived, talking to Porphyry. Porphyry's excited thoughts were audible from several dragonlengths away. \"Lamprophyre, the book of poetry,\" he said before she'd fully touched earth. \"Dharan says it's going to be printed!\"\n\n\"But who would do that, if we're outcast?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Not everyone believes the ecclesiasts are right,\" Dharan said. \"Among them is a printer I know. She's agreed to print the book and have it bound. We just have to decide how to distribute it.\"\n\n\"That's remarkable,\" Rokshan said. \"Is that what you've been doing all this time?\"\n\n\"That, and researching your prophecy.\" Dharan's smile fell away. \"It's been difficult, and not in the fun way. I think the Hall of Visions is close to banning me.\"\n\nPuzzled, Lamprophyre said, \"Did you do too many heathenish things? Because I can imagine they wouldn't like that.\"\n\n\"No, it's that they've started to deduce what I'm after, and I get the feeling they don't want anyone looking into that prophecy.\" Dharan turned to Rokshan. \"Will it disturb you if I say that my printer friend is not the only person questioning the ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"Not the way you probably think,\" Rokshan said. \"We think the ecclesiasts lied about that decree coming from Jiwanyil. I'd like to believe people can feel the truth of God's prophecies, so it makes sense that some people would feel the inherent wrongness of a false one.\"\n\nDharan's eyes were wide. \"God's breath,\" he said. \"I never thought I'd hear you say anything like that. What brought you to that conclusion?\"\n\n\"A lot of little things, plus Khadar being uncharacteristically uncertain on the subject. We want to find a way to prove that prophecy false, or to force the High Ecclesiasts to recant.\"\n\nDharan was utterly silent. Lamprophyre didn't need to break her rule about not listening to her close friends' thoughts to know what he was thinking, because his face was utterly astonished. \"I don't think I can call myself a heathen ever again, now that I know what it really looks like,\" he finally said. \"How can I help?\"\n\n\"First, I want to know what you learned in the Hall of Visions,\" Rokshan said. \"It worries me that the ecclesiasts might want to prevent people knowing of a prophecy.\"\n\n\"And we've heard a prophecy about that subject that won't be in the Hall of Visions,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I forgot to tell you because everything was so chaotic, Rokshan, but Preyanka was possessed of a prophecy that ended with 'the skies will burn.'\"\n\n\"Do you remember the rest of it?\"\n\n\"I'm a dragon, Rokshan, of course I remember.\" Lamprophyre sat back and cleared her throat. \"'Find the lost. That which is spoken by the old stone is true and false, and the hearers wander like lambs. Faith is not enough. The skies will burn.'\"\n\nFlint and Coquina poked their heads out of their warehouses as she spoke, probably because the cadence of her voice was the one she used when reciting poetry. They came to join the little group outside Porphyry's warehouse, listening closely. When Lamprophyre finished, Flint said, \"Was that a prophecy? Are they all so oblique?\"\n\n\"It's less oblique than some, at least to me,\" Rokshan said. \"The ecclesiasts are looking for something or someone who's lost. And then there's 'faith is not enough.' We've already decided that unquestioning faith about the ecclesiasts' decree isn't enough for a real believer.\"\n\n\"Wandering like lambs\u2014how do lambs wander?\" Coquina asked.\n\n\"I don't know. It's outside my experience. Dharan?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I'm a city boy, too, so I have no idea,\" Dharan said. \"But infant creatures in general follow whoever looks like an authority figure. A parent, or a spiritual leader. So it might mean people wandering without clear direction.\"\n\n\"Which is sort of what's happening now,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Some people following the ecclesiasts, some not knowing who to listen to.\"\n\n\"It's 'old stone' that makes me curious,\" Flint said. \"If this were a prophecy for dragons, it might mean an old dragon. An old dragon giving advice. Remember when Gabbro was in the first stage of his decline? He would talk about things that never happened and refused to believe us when we repeated what he'd said. That's like an old stone speaking true and false.\"\n\n\"But it's a human prophecy. What could an old stone that speaks mean to humans?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"It could mean someone well-respected, someone with experience,\" Dharan said.\n\nRokshan opened his mouth, then closed it again rapidly. \"No,\" he said. \"It\u2014suppose it means the Archprelate?\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan was shaking his head. \"But the prophecy says the old stone speaks true and false. The Archprelate is without question the human closest to Jiwanyil, and his prophecies have always been true ones.\"\n\n\"There's the current decree, though,\" Dharan said.\n\n\"Ayusha claimed responsibility for that one. If anyone's lying, she is.\" Rokshan squeezed his eyes tight shut and let out a deep breath. \"I can't believe I just suggested the Third Ecclesiast lied about a prophecy. Regardless, I refuse to believe the Archprelate is anything but faithful to God.\"\n\n\"Well, what if the 'old stone' isn't a person?\" Porphyry said. \"What if it's your religion? You already know some of the ecclesiasts are faithful, and their prophecies are true, and you know that at least one prophecy is false\u2014that could be the old stone speaking true and false.\"\n\n\"I actually like that interpretation,\" Dharan said. \"For what my opinion's worth.\"\n\n\"It does make sense,\" Rokshan said. \"So, as far as we can tell, Preyanka was possessed of a prophecy that instructs the hearers to find what is lost. It contains a warning that some authority is speaking both truth and falsehood, and probably that's causing the people to wander without clear direction. It says that faith is not enough. And that the skies will burn.\"\n\nEveryone was silent for several beats. Finally, Lamprophyre said, \"None of that seems related to the final sentence. Unless it means that we have to resolve the puzzle or the result is the skies will burn.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Dharan said. \"Every time that phrase occurs in a prophecy, it's the final sentence.\"\n\n\"Is that significant?\" Rokshan asked.\n\nDharan shrugged. \"I don't know. But it's always the final sentence. It's possible each of those prophecies is like this one\u2014a puzzle to solve. And the reason 'the skies will burn' makes no sense in most of them is that it's a promise, maybe. Or a result. Something the prophecy either points toward, or is intended to thwart.\" He patted his chest a few times. \"Damn. I left my blank book at home. It has all the prophecies I copied down. I should add Preyanka's prophecy to the list, and look at all of them in this new light.\"\n\n\"Not to be critical, but is this important right now?\" Coquina asked. \"It doesn't have any direct bearing on the problem at hand. We need to find a way to thwart the ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"No, you're right,\" Dharan said, \"but it is something concrete I can deal with.\"\n\nA few dragonlengths away, Dolomite emerged from his warehouse. \"What time is it? Midmorning?\" He groaned. \"I hate oversleeping. It makes me feel like I weigh as much as a mountain, all day long.\" He stretched, spreading his wings wide. \"Did I tell you what I saw yesterday? I can't remember.\"\n\n\"We haven't seen you since yesterday morning,\" Flint said.\n\n\"Oh, right.\" Dolomite ambled toward them. \"The ecclesiasts are doubling up on their patterns. There are two ecclesiasts walking each one.\"\n\n\"That's odd,\" Flint said.\n\n\"Not if they were afraid one set of eyes wasn't enough,\" Coquina said. \"Dolomite, you really need to take a break from watching the ecclesiasts. You're going to exhaust yourself.\"\n\n\"That's probably why I slept so late,\" Dolomite agreed. \"But I do like flying, and it's fun to watch the ecclesiasts and know they know I'm up there and they can't do anything about it.\"\n\n\"That may be the nastiest thing I've ever heard you say, Dolomite,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDolomite laughed. \"I don't like them. They're rude and they've frightened people. And they leave papers cluttering up the streets.\"\n\n\"Them and every would-be tangal performer and civic improver in Tanajital,\" Rokshan said sourly. \"It's such a waste of paper, all those handbills.\"\n\n\"I thought the ecclesiasts put their handbills on the sides of buildings, not threw them around the streets,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDolomite shrugged. \"I don't know whether it's usual, but they were throwing out papers by the handful yesterday evening. It was just before I came back for the night, when they were all headed for the Archprelate's palace. Wait a moment.\" He walked back to his warehouse and returned with a large, by human standards, sheet of paper held between two claws. Rokshan took it from him and scanned its contents. Lamprophyre could only tell that it had JIWANYIL'S BELOVED! printed across the top in big, bold letters and smaller printing in two columns below that, filling the page.\n\n\"Interesting,\" Rokshan said. \"The ecclesiasts have declared this coming Jiwanyisan\u2014that's two days from now\u2014a day of holiness and peaceful gathering. They're going to hold a special meeting of prayer and contemplation in the coliseum that evening. The intent is to pray for the souls of the outcasts in the city, human and dragon.\"\n\nCoquina snorted, sending up a puff of smoke. \"How generous of them.\"\n\n\"Oh, but this is perfect,\" Rokshan said, handing the paper to Dharan to read. \"All those High Ecclesiasts and the Archprelate in one place, all of them potentially thinking about what they're searching for\u2026it's ideal.\"\n\n\"I thought you said the Archprelate lives in seclusion,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Lives in, yes, but he always leads these special ceremonies.\" Rokshan looked as satisfied as if he had arranged for the day of prayer himself. \"It's the perfect time to discover what we need to know.\"\n\n\"That assumes we'll be welcome, as outcasts,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"We don't have to attend.\" Rokshan gripped her shoulder. \"Trust me, I've attended many of these before. We just have to fly close enough to the ecclesiasts.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Lamprophyre said, brightening. \"And if the ecclesiasts don't think the right thoughts, we can get Khadar alone and worm it out of him.\"\n\n\"You sound like that would be your preferred outcome,\" Coquina said with a smile.\n\n\"It almost is. Khadar annoys me.\"\n\n\"He annoys everyone,\" Rokshan said. \"And I think we have a plan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Two days later, Lamprophyre circled high above the coliseum and watched it fill with humans. At that distance, the humans weren't distinguishable as individuals, but instead resembled flowing, bubbling black oil, streaming through the largest streets. When the oil reached the wide thoroughfare surrounding the coliseum, its movement slowed as thousands of people all tried to enter at once through the tiny doorways leading to the stands.\n\n\"My parents aren't here yet,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"How can you possibly tell from up here?\"\n\n\"When a member of the royal family is in attendance, they fly the banner of our family. It's green and yellow and hideous, but it's also instantly recognizable. I'm betting on them not making a spectacle of their entrance, given that this is a religious ceremony.\"\n\nLamprophyre flew in a slightly wider circle that passed the palace. \"I think that's the king's litter down there.\"\n\nShe felt Rokshan shift to look over her shoulder. \"It is. Let's see if the High Ecclesiasts have arrived.\"\n\nSomeone had erected a platform like the one the king used halfway between the royal box and the center of the coliseum floor. This left a great open space, fully half of the coliseum grounds, as empty as if the High Ecclesiasts wanted dragons to attend. Well, maybe they did want that. Lamprophyre didn't care.\n\nShe swooped lower, down to where individual humans were visible like bustling black and brown ants. She couldn't tell if any of them were looking up, and their thoughts were a seething mass of curiosity and fear and anxiety, but she felt certain that even the ones who knew she and her clutchmates were there didn't want to look at them, in case that violated the ecclesiasts' decree. Stupid ecclesiasts.\n\nShe looked off toward the palace. The litter\u2014two litters now, so probably the king and queen\u2014drove an open path right down the middle of the widest street leading to the coliseum. Ants stopped to bow as the litters passed by, backing away to the sides of the street and then following slowly in the litters' wake.\n\nLamprophyre saw the banner Rokshan had described, waving limply in the heavy, still air Lamprophyre wished meant a nice storm was coming. Though it was probably just as well there was no storm due until evening, because what the dragons didn't need was an interruption that might mean the High Ecclesiasts would cancel their prayer ceremony. She didn't think green and yellow were ugly; they reminded her of the dragon Sapphire, who'd taught her so many poems and stories before he rejoined Mother Stone.\n\nShe flew another couple of circles while she waited for the litters to reach the coliseum and for the king and queen to ascend to the stairs. But finally the green and yellow banner flew atop the royal box, and Lamprophyre dove for the open space of the coliseum grounds.\n\nShe'd flown high enough not to be able to hear the noise of the crowds, but as she descended, she heard a dull murmur, much quieter than she'd expected. It reminded her of the sound the city made late at night, when almost everyone was abed and the city's voice rumbled, low and peaceful. \"Why is it so quiet?\" she asked Rokshan.\n\n\"It's a day of peaceful, prayerful contemplation,\" Rokshan reminded her. \"Everyone is trying to maintain a spirit of holiness by not chattering to their neighbors or shouting to get someone's attention.\"\n\n\"It's nice. I hate to admit that.\"\n\nRokshan put a hand flat on her shoulder. \"Remember that almost everyone here believes they're in harmony with Jiwanyil, and has good intentions in wanting dragons to embrace Katayan. That's what makes me angry, that they've all been lied to and are turning their spiritual energies toward a false prophecy.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"We'll change that. I know we will.\"\n\nAs she descended, the noise diminished further until Lamprophyre could hear the quiet, united breathing of thousands of humans, all staring at her. She looked out across the sea of brown faces, all of them too distant for her to easily make out expressions. Their thoughts were still too chaotic to understand, but the crowd lacked the restless movement that would indicate anger or an incipient riot. She'd been afraid of being shouted at or assaulted\u2014not frightened of those things, neither of which could hurt her, but afraid that the humans' anger and fear of dragons and what they represented might make it impossible for her to learn what she'd come here to learn.\n\nThe platform looked a lot more permanent and a lot more gaudy than the king's. Five colored banners hung along its front, green, red, black, white, and blue, each of them bearing an embroidered picture. Lamprophyre recognized the willow tree on the green banner; it reminded her of Khadar's robe. And there was a tiger's face stitched on the red banner that looked just like the ones on the Third Ecclesiast's robe. It was easy to guess that each banner represented one of the High Ecclesiasts, or maybe the god each of the High Ecclesiasts spoke for. Though that didn't tell Lamprophyre where the Archprelate's banner was, or what it might look like.\n\nStairs at the back led up to the top of the platform. Lined up down its center were five chairs, all of them gilded with real gold whose scent made Lamprophyre wish she'd eaten more at breakfast. Five chairs. That made no sense. There should be six. \"Rokshan,\" she murmured, not wanting to disturb the silence, \"why\u2014\"\n\nTrumpets blared to the right and left. The sudden noise startled Lamprophyre into an upward jerk she straightened out of immediately, not wanting to look like she was afraid. A litter shrouded in green silk entered through a door beneath the royal box. Lamprophyre heard a sigh as of thousands of voices breathing out in unison. The litter circled the coliseum floor once, and then its bearers headed for the platform and the stairs at its rear.\n\nThe litter made a neat turn next to the stairs so its long side faced them, and the bearers set down their burden. Khadar stepped out. He tilted his head to look at Lamprophyre circling above, shielding his eyes from the late afternoon sunlight. Lamprophyre tried to listen to his thoughts, but couldn't pick them out from the background noise. If that would be the case for all the High Ecclesiasts, this plan might fail before it had even started.\n\nLamprophyre chose to ignore her pessimistic thought. Watching Khadar closely, she perched on one of the red stone arches and furled her wings. Rokshan gripped her ruff more tightly as her position tilted him backward sharply, but he felt secure to her. She would see if Khadar would denounce her, or get back into his litter and leave, cancelling the ceremony.\n\nKhadar continued to watch her. Lamprophyre listened to the crowd's thoughts briefly before the cacophony deafened her; they were wary and angry, and fragments of words like dare and monster and get rid floated through them like bits of sharp ice in a wintry stream. But they remained mostly silent. She thought they, too, were waiting to see what Khadar did.\n\nAfter a dozen beats, Khadar's gaze fell away. He lifted his robe a few inches and began ascending the stairs, taking slow, measured steps. When he reached the top, he walked to the left end of the row of chairs and stood before the last one with his hands clasped behind his back. Lamprophyre once more tried to hear his thoughts and once more failed to hear anything but noise.\n\nAs soon as Khadar had stopped moving, the bearers carried the litter away, and another litter, this one with fluttering sapphire-blue curtains, emerged from the same door Khadar's had. It, too, made a circle around the coliseum before stopping at the foot of the stairs. A woman with very dark brown skin wearing a bright blue robe matching the curtains stepped out. She didn't pay any attention to Lamprophyre, just climbed to the platform and took up a position in front of the rightmost chair. Her black hair was cropped close to her head the way the Third Ecclesiast's had been, but Lamprophyre was too far away to make out the details of her features, or determine whether she was old or young.\n\nShe had been staring at the woman, so she'd missed the entrance of the Third Ecclesiast's litter and her ascent of the stairs. The woman strode more confidently than either of the other two, and stopped in front of the chair next to Khadar's with a brisk turn that made her red robe swirl out around her. She was a lot shorter than Khadar, but her presence was so powerful it made her seem to tower over him. Khadar shifted slightly, bowing his head toward her, and Lamprophyre thought he might have been speaking to her. If he was, she didn't respond in any way, and finally Khadar straightened again and stared out over the crowds.\n\nThe next litter was draped in white, and the man who climbed out of it was enormous by human standards, very fat and, as Lamprophyre discovered when he stood next to the blue-clad woman, very tall. His white robe and the banner hanging in front of his chair were embroidered with a dragon's head, sketched out roughly the way Dolomite might begin a portrait. It was only the suggestion of a dragon, but its lines contained so much pent-up power Lamprophyre felt moved by it. Katayan might not be real, but humans definitely respected him.\n\nFinally, a black-draped litter that looked like a moving ink blot circled the coliseum, and a black-clad man stepped out to climb the stairs and take the central position. Unlike the other four, whose robes were embroidered with recognizable pictures, the black robe and its matching banner bore a complex sigil in copper and gold embroidery. If this one represented Jiwanyil, God of humans, maybe nobody wanted to see representations of human figures as his symbol. Or maybe they'd tried, and the pictures looked stupid.\n\nLamprophyre regarded the last man closely. His skin was a lighter, more coppery brown than the other four, and he wore his black hair long for a human male, swept back from his face and clasped at the nape of his neck in a way that reminded Lamprophyre unpleasantly of Nevrita. He regarded the crowd for a moment, turning his head for his gaze to sweep the stands as far as possible without turning around. There might be some symbolism in the way the High Ecclesiasts had their backs to the royal box, but Lamprophyre felt tense and on edge and didn't want to ask irrelevant questions of Rokshan, not when she was still curious about the missing sixth seat.\n\nAs one, the High Ecclesiasts took their seats, and another sigh rose up from the watching crowd. Lamprophyre saw the central figure\u2014the First Ecclesiast, perhaps?\u2014tilt his head toward the Third Ecclesiast, who didn't look at him. For several beats, the entire coliseum was as still as if it were empty. A breeze brushed Lamprophyre's furled wings, bringing temporary relief from the heat. She didn't want to speak, and break the heavy, oppressive silence.\n\nFinally, the First Ecclesiast nodded. He rose from his seat and walked to the front of the platform. \"This gathering is a place of holiness and peaceful worship,\" he said. His voice carried throughout the coliseum, as loud and clear as if he and Lamprophyre were in a small room together. Lamprophyre caught the glint of a stone hanging around his neck, distant enough she couldn't smell it. Another glance showed that all the High Ecclesiasts wore similar stones. Voice amplifying artifacts. How useful.\n\n\"It is also intended for Jiwanyil's faithful, and not for those who reject his word,\" the First Ecclesiast was saying. \"But Jiwanyil's forgiveness extends to all who reject their evil ways and embrace his light. We invite all such to attend.\" He looked directly at Lamprophyre. \"Join us, if you are here in peace and honor.\"\n\n\"Stones. What do we do?\" Lamprophyre asked Rokshan.\n\n\"Go down there, of course.\"\n\n\"But we aren't here in peace and honor!\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said with some amusement, \"neither are they, really.\"\n\nLamprophyre blushed. She'd forgotten why they were there. The First Ecclesiast had sounded so very reasonable. She opened her wings and stepped off the arch to glide neatly to the big open space. Getting closer to the High Ecclesiasts was good. Close enough, it wouldn't matter what the crowd was thinking. \"Stay there,\" she told Rokshan. \"If this goes bad, we'll want to be able to leave in a hurry.\"\n\n\"O ye who are faithful, pray with me,\" the First Ecclesiast said. He held his arms out wide above his head so he looked like the letter Y. \"May Jiwanyil's grace overflow upon us. His light shines in dark places, bringing us to his presence. Let us be one.\"\n\nThe crowd responded as one, possibly repeating his last four words; with all of them speaking, the words weren't more than a jumbled din that would have been a roar if the people hadn't spoken so quietly. Lamprophyre, caught off guard, said nothing. Then she remembered she didn't really want to take part in this ceremony.\n\nThe First Ecclesiast was looking at her with a disappointed expression. \"Let us remember God's blessing of creation,\" he said, addressing the crowd though he was still staring at her. \"From the Immanence arose the Five Gods.\"\n\nOn the word \"arose\" the other High Ecclesiasts stood and walked to the front of the platform. Khadar raised his hands as the First Ecclesiast had. \"The Immanence gathered, and life arose,\" he said, his voice sounding unnaturally nasal through the effect of his voice-amplifying artifact. \"Thus came Meyari, God of the Living World.\"\n\n\"Meyari,\" the crowd echoed. This time, Lamprophyre could make out the word.\n\nThe blue-clad woman at the opposite end raised her arms. \"Life needed a foundation, and the mountains arose,\" she said. Her voice was high-pitched and pleasant, like birdsong. \"Thus came Nirinatan, God of the Living Stone.\"\n\n\"Nirinatan,\" the crowd repeated.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast raised her arms. It didn't make her look any larger. \"The mountains cried out for children, and animals arose,\" she said in a resonant voice Lamprophyre could almost believe could fill the coliseum unaided. \"Thus came Vrelok, God of the Living Creatures.\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced around as the crowd said, \"Vrelok.\" Many of the humans had their eyes closed. Some were swaying as if to music only they could hear. This part of the ceremony struck her as a formality, something to invoke the gods. If it were a dragon ceremony, it would be over already. She would have been bored if she weren't so anxious about the possibility of learning the truth about the ecclesiasts' search. If only they would move on!\n\nThe large man in white said, \"The creatures of the world needed to be kept in check. Thus came Katayan, God of the Living Fire.\"\n\nThat was different. The sound of the name \"Katayan\" echoed off the walls. Why humans had landed on a characteristic of only female dragons to identify their made-up male dragon god, she didn't know, though fire was definitely more dramatic visually than acid.\n\nThe First Ecclesiast, who hadn't lowered his hands the whole time, said, \"The dragons needed someone who could control their baser desires. Thus came Jiwanyil, God of the Living Man.\"\n\nLamprophyre shifted, feeling uncomfortable and irritated all at once. Baser desires? If she hadn't already believed that at least some of the human religion was false, that would certainly prove it.\n\nThe High Ecclesiasts lowered their arms, and all of them but the Third Ecclesiast returned to their seats. The Third Ecclesiast took a few steps until she was opposite Lamprophyre. \"You don't like hearing the truth,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't like being told I'm inferior to any species as a whole,\" Lamprophyre retorted. \"And I certainly don't believe I have any baser desires for humans to control. That doesn't make any sense.\" She sounded much louder than she was used to, and guessed she was close enough to the Third Ecclesiast's artifact for it to amplify her voice, too.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast tilted her head to one side. \"You challenge our faith on this holy day?\"\n\nLamprophyre felt the conversation slipping away from her. \"I don't mean to. I just want to know what you intend. Your decree has hurt so many people. I don't know why you wanted that.\"\n\n\"We will not argue with the faithless, especially not on this day. Participate in silence, or show the respect you claim you have and leave.\"\n\nLamprophyre stood, prompting a murmur from the crowd. \"Yet you don't respect us,\" she said, and listened for the Third Ecclesiast's thoughts. She heard mostly the massed din of the watching worshippers, but over that, closer words: respect nothing why listen they must be stopped.\n\n\"We respect those who repent of their mistaken ways to serve their true God,\" the Third Ecclesiast was saying. Lamprophyre barely heard her audible words because she was listening hard to their thoughts. She'd begun to hear other mental voices as the rest of the High Ecclesiasts leaned forward to pay attention to this conversation. Don't know, one thought, and another thought bring to truth.\n\nShe focused briefly on Khadar and heard, to her surprise, uncertainty and fear. Why those emotions? They weren't shared by his fellows. Can't believe, find the lost, not what I thought came to her mind.\n\n\"Can I ask a question? Not a rude question,\" she said, cutting off the Third Ecclesiast without hearing her words at all. \"Why isn't the Archprelate here to lead this ceremony?\"\n\n\"The Archprelate chooses to remain in isolation that his prayers on behalf of the people of Gonjiri will remain pure,\" the Third Ecclesiast said.\n\nKhadar's thoughts became more agitated. Find the lost.\n\nLamprophyre almost let out a cry of surprise. Swallowing her own agitation, she said, \"I'm afraid I don't understand how that's possible. Surely he should go among the people, to know their needs?\"\n\n\"Jiwanyil tells him everything he needs to know,\" the Third Ecclesiast snapped. \"Do not blaspheme.\"\n\n\"It's a fair question, Ayusha,\" Rokshan said. \"Lamprophyre means no disrespect.\"\n\n\"I think you should leave,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"You have disrupted the peace and holiness of this meeting.\"\n\n\"I think we should, too,\" Lamprophyre said quickly. Her guess filled her with excitement and fear, and she wanted to discuss it with Rokshan as soon as possible. \"I'm sorry we disturbed you.\" It was only a tiny lie. She needed to be careful not to fall into the habit.\n\nShe backed away so she wouldn't knock anyone off the platform with the wind from her wings, and took to the sky. Her mind whirled. If she was right\u2014but it had to be impossible. And why would Khadar, of all people, be the only one feeling uncertain and worried?\n\n\"I think that tiger woman is the real leader,\" she said. \"The Third Ecclesiast.\"\n\n\"I told you she's got more experience than the others,\" Rokshan said. \"But the First Ecclesiast has never been so overtly deferential to her before. He looked very uncertain of what to do about us.\" He leaned forward so she could hear him more clearly. \"And Khadar was afraid of something, but I couldn't tell what.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought, too.\" It had to be the right answer, but it still didn't make sense. \"He definitely knows who they're looking for. And I\u2014but it's impossible.\"\n\n\"What is?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"Let's land and discuss it. I'm tired of shouting.\"\n\nThe embassy courtyard hadn't yet filled up with people looking for a free meal. The aroma of soup had begun to fill the air, along with the scent of fresh raw meat. Lamprophyre gave the soup pot an idle stir and inhaled the delicious smell that wafted from it.\n\n\"So, talk,\" Rokshan said, sitting cross-legged beside Lamprophyre. \"What's so impossible?\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Depik, who'd retreated into the kitchen and wasn't paying them any attention. \"When I asked where the Archprelate was, Khadar's thoughts became very worried, and he thought, 'Find the lost.' I know it sounds impossible, but\u2026\" She let out a deep breath. \"I think it's the Archprelate they're looking for.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "\"That is impossible,\" Rokshan said. \"In the first place, why would the Archprelate leave his palace, and in the second place, how could he get lost in Tanajital? Or, rather, why would he get lost, because even if he left, it's not like he can't find his way back.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Rokshan, I just know what I heard.\" Lamprophyre scooted to where she could look him in the eye. \"It would explain why there are so many ecclesiasts in the streets, because the Archprelate is more important to them than anyone else in the city. Would the Archprelate have a reason to become lost? I mean lost as far as the other ecclesiasts are concerned. Like, if he's hiding.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense either. Why would the Archprelate hide?\"\n\n\"Maybe he wants to get to know the people better,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and he knows the High Ecclesiasts would be upset about that. Maybe he had a prophecy that told him to leave the Archprelate's palace. Maybe his life was threatened.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"No one would dream of hurting the Archprelate.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Lamprophyre shot back. \"You know at least one High Ecclesiast is corrupt. What if she's corrupt enough to want to take his position? How is the Archprelate chosen, anyway? One of the High Ecclesiasts?\"\n\n\"No, it's simpler than that.\" Rokshan stood and began pacing the stone floor of the pavilion. \"The ecclesiasts come together after the death of the last Archprelate, and Jiwanyil's light shines on the one who's intended to become the new Archprelate.\"\n\n\"Actual light?\"\n\n\"Actual light.\" Rokshan stopped pacing and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one hand. \"Anyway, even if Ayusha were that corrupt, killing the Archprelate\u2014I can't believe I just said those words\u2014wouldn't guarantee her the position.\"\n\n\"Killing the Archprelate?\" Depik exclaimed as he came out of the kitchen with a stack of bowls and a handful of spoons. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"It's a long story,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Is the soup ready? I'll carry it out.\"\n\nShe set the cauldron outside the pavilion and returned to her place. \"I don't know if it matters why,\" she said, \"but I'm very certain it's the right answer.\"\n\n\"I have to say I agree with you, impossible as it seems,\" Rokshan said. He helped himself to a bowl of soup and returned to his seat.\n\nLamprophyre inhaled the smell of cooking cow and wished it would cook faster. \"So, what do we do? We can't find the Archprelate any better than the ecclesiasts. Worse, because we don't know what he looks like. Unless you've seen him.\"\n\n\"I know he's very old, but that's it,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"And Tanajital may be small by dragon standards, but there are thousands of humans living here, and there are plenty of places we can't fit into. I don't know that we're any better off than we were a thousand beats ago.\" Lamprophyre shifted her weight and propped her elbows on the floor, resting her chin in her hands.\n\n\"We're better off because we know what we're looking for,\" Rokshan said, \"even if we don't know where the Archprelate is.\"\n\n\"But we know where he isn't,\" Lamprophyre said, \"thanks to Dolomite's exhaustive work. If he were in any of those streets, they'd have found him by now, especially now they've got multiple ecclesiasts searching each pattern. The only places they don't go are the academy, the slums, and here\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped as a memory caught her up, something she hadn't thought about at the time. \"They don't come here, ever,\" she murmured. Rising, she stepped to the front of the pavilion and surveyed the courtyard. Beggars with soup bowls stood or sat, eating placidly despite her sudden appearance. There still weren't many of them by comparison to before the decree. She ignored the Sister of the Red, who pretended not to notice her in turn, and crossed the courtyard to the embassy, where the white-haired old man sat with his bowl.\n\nShe crouched low and searched her memory for something Khadar had told her, back when she'd first arrived in Tanajital. \"Excuse me,\" she said to the old man, \"Most Holy One?\"\n\nThe old man stared vacantly at her, his eyes unfocused as if he didn't see her. His fractured thoughts were even less coherent than usual, a roiling soup of fragments of syllables and placidity. Lamprophyre sat on her haunches. It had been so obvious. Maybe that's why it was wrong, because life was never that perfect.\n\n\"Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan said from behind her. \"You didn't think he\u2026 Lamprophyre, the Archprelate isn't a decrepit madman!\"\n\n\"It made so much sense,\" Lamprophyre said. \"The ecclesiasts are looking for the Archprelate, and why couldn't that be because the Archprelate is helpless? What if that's why no one ever sees him?\"\n\n\"That's blasphemy,\" Rokshan said, his voice cold. \"There's no way Jiwanyil would allow his representative on earth to fall into such a state. It would mean Gonjiri couldn't receive God's word. Maybe you're right that the Archprelate is what the ecclesiasts are searching for, but it has to be because the Archprelate wants to be hidden.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling chastened. \"I'm sorry. I didn't mean any insult.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Rokshan clapped her on the shoulder, as high as he could reach. \"Look. Let's eat, and we can think about what to do next.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She rose to her feet, but didn't move right away, instead looking down at the old man. His gaze was now fixed on a point in the distance, the way it did before he had one of his keening episodes. Lamprophyre gently took the bowl from his hands so he wouldn't drop it just half a beat before he grabbed the sides of his head and let out a thin, pained whine. Rocking in place, he closed his eyes and whimpered. It was such a helpless sound Lamprophyre's heart went out to him.\n\nOn impulse, she picked him up and carried him to the pavilion, where she set him down near the kitchen. The old man curled into a ball, holding his head and breathing in short, weeping gasps. Lamprophyre put her large hand beneath the old man's head, cushioning it from the hard stone. After a few beats, his restless motion stilled, and he lay quietly on the floor, his hands still cradling his head and his breathing still erratic. With his eyes still closed, he looked as if he'd fallen into a shallow, dreaming sleep.\n\n\"I wonder if we should take him to a healer,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I don't know if they can do anything for a broken mind, though. And maybe it's been going on too long for them to help. But it might be worth the attempt.\"\n\n\"I'd say something about how you can't save everyone,\" Rokshan said, \"but I know that won't stop you trying.\"\n\n\"I don't like watching people suffer.\" Lamprophyre gently withdrew her hand, hoping not to disturb the old man if he really was sleeping. But it wasn't gentle enough. He stirred and sat up, blinking. For the first time since she'd seen him, he focused on her, taking in her height and the spread of her wings as if they meant something to him. He moistened his dry lips with his tongue, which flicked in and out like a lizard's. Lamprophyre held very still. She didn't know what she was waiting for, but it felt like the world had stopped moving and was waiting, too, for what would happen next.\n\nThe old man closed his eyes and shuddered once, like a deer shaking off a fly. His breathing slowed into regularity. He shuddered once more, and opened his eyes.\n\nThey blazed with a vivid green light.\n\nLamprophyre gasped and stepped back, her eyes never leaving the old man's. Beside her, Rokshan let out a hiss of surprise. She stretched out her hand, feeling for his shoulder to steady herself. It was a mad impulse, because she was far more likely to knock him down, but in her amazement she felt the need for physical contact to remind her the world hadn't gone crazy.\n\nThe old man's eyes seemed to focus on her, though without pupil or iris it was impossible to be sure. There was just so much intent in his countenance she felt the weight of his gaze regardless. He licked his lips once more, working his mouth as if it had been a twelveday since he'd spoken. \"The voice speaks from darkness,\" a strange voice neither male nor female said. \"The faithful wander, lost despite familiar paths. Seek the chosen and destroy the link. Restore the lost.\" He took a deep breath and let it out in a long, thin stream. \"Man and dragon, listen and obey.\"\n\nLamprophyre's mouth fell open in astonishment. The old man closed his eyes and shuddered once more, then sagged as if exhausted. When he opened his eyes, they were their normal dark brown.\n\n\"God's breath,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre glanced his way, because he'd sounded like he might pass out. But he was staring at the old man, as stunned as she felt. \"What am I saying?\" he continued. \"Literally God's breath. I don't understand. He's clearly senile, and yet he was possessed of a prophecy\u2014one more comprehensible than any I've heard before.\"\n\n\"And it didn't hurt him the way it did Preyanka,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What does it mean? Rokshan, it's your faith. What do we do now?\"\n\nRokshan squatted next to the old man and tilted his head gently so he could look into the Archprelate's eyes. The Archprelate gazed back at him with his familiar vacant smile. Rokshan shook his head. \"Clearly his mental state doesn't prevent him receiving Jiwanyil's word. But I can see why the ecclesiasts wouldn't want this getting out. People might question why Jiwanyil hasn't replaced him.\"\n\n\"Well, why hasn't Jiwanyil replaced him?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"I apologize if this is rude, Rokshan, but it feels almost like keeping a corpse moving, having him in this condition but still having prophecies.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I've never heard of a living Archprelate replaced. They always hold the position until they die.\" Rokshan rocked back on his heels, suddenly looking ill. \"God's breath,\" he said. \"They couldn't\u2014but what if the High Ecclesiasts have prevented him being replaced because they want control?\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If he's alive, he's the Archprelate, and we just saw him have a prophecy, so he's still in charge, right?\"\n\n\"Unless the High Ecclesiasts are pretending to deliver instructions in his name,\" Rokshan said. \"Instructions that benefit them. Like wanting all the dragons out of Tanajital.\" He shook his head. \"No,\" he said, \"no, Ayusha claimed responsibility for the prophecy making dragons outcast. And there haven't been any prophecies from the Archprelate for weeks. Whatever's going on, it's not that the High Ecclesiasts are using this frail old man to deceive the people.\"\n\n\"Except they are doing something,\" Lamprophyre said. \"A voice speaking from darkness, a chosen someone who should be destroyed, leading the people astray\u2026there's corruption somewhere, and I'm sure it's among the High Ecclesiasts. And Jiwanyil wants us to do something about it. Human and dragon working together.\"\n\n\"Well, we can't return him to the Archprelate's palace,\" Rokshan said. \"He must have left for a reason, and it's almost certainly that he was in danger.\"\n\n\"Or that he was looking for help,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What was that about 'man and dragon obey'? That prophecy was aimed at us as surely as if he'd spoken our names.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have to be us. It could mean it's for humans and dragons generally,\" Rokshan said, but he sounded as uncertain as she felt. That gaze, so intent and so piercing. The Archprelate had seen her somehow through those green eyes, and had addressed his prophecy to her. The thought made her extremely uncomfortable. She didn't want to be the focus of another religion's prophecy.\n\n\"All right,\" she said, seeing Rokshan's gaze turn on her, \"he meant us. So what are we supposed to do?\"\n\n\"Let's look at the prophecy one phrase at a time,\" Rokshan said. \"The most obvious one is that the faithful wander. The ecclesiasts, maybe just the High Ecclesiasts, are giving them false guidance.\"\n\n\"So even though they're following as they always do\u2014down familiar paths\u2014they're lost,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We already guessed this.\"\n\n\"But combined with 'seek the chosen', that suggests there's one person in particular doing it,\" Rokshan went on. \"But I don't know what 'the link' might be.\"\n\n\"I think a voice speaking from darkness is important,\" Lamprophyre said. \"That sounds like someone giving bad or evil instructions, and maybe that's why the faithful wander. Destroy the link between the chosen and something else?\"\n\nRokshan blew out his breath impatiently. \"We could go on guessing all day,\" he said. \"It's time we gained more information.\"\n\n\"How are we going to do that?\" Lamprophyre asked. She felt weary at the thought of following the ecclesiasts again, or talking to people who didn't want to reveal what they knew.\n\nRokshan smiled. \"By doing what you've longed to do ever since this started.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "\"Suppose someone comes while we're gone?\" Lamprophyre said as she winged her way toward the coliseum. \"This would be the worst possible time for the ecclesiasts to decide to bring Jiwanyil's light to the heathen dragon ambassador.\"\n\n\"They're all at the prayer ceremony,\" Rokshan pointed out, \"and if Rassika is fast, Coquina will be at the embassy before we return. And we can't afford to wait for her. The ceremony could already be over.\"\n\n\"That's logical, but I still worry.\" Lamprophyre flew faster. Rokshan was right; it was unlikely the Archprelate would be snatched at exactly this time just because they'd finally found him.\n\nThe prayer ceremony was still going strong when Lamprophyre and Rokshan returned to the coliseum. \"I can't perch on the arches to wait,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"We need a tower we can watch from,\" Rokshan replied. \"Maybe that one over there?\"\n\nThe tower Rokshan indicated had a pointed cone for a top, highly impractical as far as Lamprophyre was concerned, and was gilded so brightly that on a clear day it might blind anyone passing near it. It was too steeply inclined for her to land on it, but near its top a stone balcony circled it, doubling the tower's diameter with how wide and deep it was. Lamprophyre descended slowly, flapping hard to keep from overshooting the mark, and landed with one foot on the balcony and the other on the rail. It was an awkward position, but Rokshan had been right: it gave her a perfect view of the coliseum, including the back half of the platform.\n\nFrom that distance, she could hear the gentle noise of human speech in a rhythm that suggested they were chanting. \"Do you know what they're saying?\" she asked Rokshan.\n\n\"I think it's a prayer of praise to Jiwanyil,\" Rokshan replied. He hadn't climbed down from her shoulders, and now he leaned forward as if that would bring the sounds better into resolution. \"It could also be the hymn to Katayan, but that would be louder, so maybe not.\"\n\n\"You humans have so many religious rituals. It's fascinating.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't?\"\n\n\"No. Our invocations are very short and amount to reminding those present of Mother Stone's love.\" She wondered for the first time if that meant something about dragon religion, that dragons didn't spend a lot of time on worship. If it meant anything, it was probably that dragons felt a kinship to Mother Stone that didn't require much pageantry, the way nobody composed hymns of praise to their feet for carrying them across the land.\n\nRokshan shifted his weight again. \"It's stopped.\" Sure enough, the rhythmic hum had ceased, and the air was once more still and tranquil. Lamprophyre peered into the distance. It looked like the people atop the platform were moving.\n\n\"Time to go,\" Rokshan said. \"We'll wait until they've all five left the coliseum, and then\u2026\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She let go of the rail and dropped, snapping her wings open before she fell too far, and flew in the direction of the coliseum. This time, she flew high enough that no one below could take offense or feel she was intruding. She didn't care about not offending anyone, but their plan depended upon a certain amount of surprise, and she needed to look like a dragon idling across the sky.\n\nFar below, splotches of color that were the High Ecclesiasts' litters left the coliseum, spaced very far apart. Exactly as Rokshan had predicted. One, two, three, four, and dive. For once, Rokshan didn't shout with excitement as she plummeted toward the ground, suggesting he was as tense with nervous excitement as she was. After all, if this went wrong, they might have the entire city after them.\n\nShe landed heavily in the street and dropped to one knee to keep her balance. It wasn't a very wide street, and people scattered when she landed, her wings spread wide to take up even more space. Amid screams and the rush of running feet, she said in her deepest voice, \"I want a word with you, ecclesiast.\"\n\nKhadar's green-draped litter had come to a halt half a dragonlength away. The bearers looked as if they wanted to back up, but the fleeing pedestrians had taken shelter behind the litter, and there was nowhere to go. For once, there were no reverends or musicians in Khadar's entourage, making his litter look small and naked by comparison. The green curtains fluttered, but Khadar didn't emerge. Lamprophyre tried to listen to his thoughts, but heard only the fearful and anxious thoughts of the bystanders. Whatever Khadar was thinking, it was more of the same.\n\nRokshan hopped down and took a few steps toward the litter. \"We just want to talk, Khadar,\" he said in a voice that carried over the hum of the crowd. \"You know Lamprophyre won't hurt a human. You're in no danger.\"\n\nStill nothing from the litter. Rokshan took another step forward. \"It won't\u2014\"\n\nThe curtains parted, and Khadar climbed out of the litter. His dark hair was sweaty around the hairline and the nape of his neck, and his green robe was rumpled, with a crease across one of the willow tree embroideries. \"If you think there's nothing worse we can do than cast you out,\" he said, \"you're mistaken.\"\n\n\"Find the lost,\" Rokshan said. \"We know what it means. How did you manage to lose him?\"\n\nKhadar didn't move, but he swallowed hard once. \"You're bluffing.\" Lamprophyre heard a flash of focused thought, can't know, that had to have come from him.\n\nShe leaned down so her head was level with Khadar's. \"White hair like dandelion fluff,\" she said. \"Dark brown eyes. Walks a little hunched over\u2014\"\n\nTerror struck her so hard it felt like a weapon. She gasped and flinched before regaining her composure. Khadar looked like his best friend had just struck him. \"How did you,\" he said, blinked, and wiped sweat from his forehead. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Safe,\" Rokshan said. \"Now tell me why he needs protection, him of all people.\"\n\nKhadar glanced quickly to either side. People lined the street, watching this interaction with curiosity and fear, though Lamprophyre judged it was fear for themselves rather than fear for Khadar. That struck her as odd, but she didn't have time to pursue it, because Khadar had stepped closer, close enough for Lamprophyre to touch.\n\n\"We can't discuss this in public,\" he said in a low voice even Lamprophyre's draconic hearing had to strain to understand. \"Come to the Archprelate's palace.\"\n\n\"Not a chance,\" Rokshan said. \"The danger is there, whatever it is. We talk here and we take our chances. Though I'm sure you're capable of concealing your meaning from these bystanders.\"\n\nKhadar flinched. \"You think so little of me?\"\n\n\"I think you're complicit,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and you'd better start talking if you want to redeem yourself. When all of this comes out, which side do you want to be on?\" She didn't have any idea what she was talking about, knew only that her words were prompting Khadar to think indecisive thoughts and, she hoped, were pushing him toward revealing everything.\n\nKhadar once more glanced from side to side. \"He disappeared three weeks ago,\" he said. \"We keep a close eye on him because, well, you know why. But one morning he was just gone. We started searching, but it was as if every white-haired old man in Tanajital had just vanished. How did you find him?\"\n\n\"You don't search thoroughly enough,\" Lamprophyre said, then hoped she hadn't given away the secret of the Archprelate's location.\n\nKhadar drew himself up. \"I insist you take me to him.\"\n\nDespite his defiant posture, his thoughts were frightened, filled with phrases like must get him back and if anyone finds out. Lamprophyre stood taller and loomed over him. \"You don't get to insist,\" she said. \"Keep talking. Why is he still the Archprelate?\"\n\n\"Because he is still possessed of prophecies,\" Khadar said. \"And he is still Most Holy One and deserving of reverence. God does not desert his creations just because their minds are broken.\"\n\n\"That's the most honest thing I've ever heard you say,\" Rokshan said. \"But you aren't being completely forthcoming. Why did you run away from me when we last spoke? About the decree naming dragons outcast?\"\n\nKhadar looked away. \"Because I didn't want to argue with you over a prophecy.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Lamprophyre said, not caring how she was risking revealing her secret. \"Tell us about that prophecy. It's false, isn't it?\"\n\nKhadar's mouth fell open. \"Blasphemer,\" he said in a hoarse voice.\n\n\"That's rich, coming from you,\" Rokshan said. \"You supported that prophecy even though you knew the truth. Why did Ayusha lie, Khadar?\"\n\nLamprophyre held her breath, listening to Khadar mentally wrestle with himself. She would have known the moment he gave in even if she hadn't heard his thoughts, because his whole body sagged. \"I don't know if she's lying,\" he said. \"We just haven't seen her possessed of a prophecy in the last three weeks, and yet she tells us things she claims are prophecy and attacks us verbally if we challenge her. It was her idea not to let anyone know the Ar\u2014he was missing, because we can't afford for anyone to find out his condition. But I thought\u2026\" He drew in a deep breath. \"I thought it mattered more that we find him, even if it means having to answer some hard questions.\"\n\nLamprophyre would have sworn Khadar was a lying hypocrite who didn't believe in his own religion, and she'd never expected to hear his thoughts ring with truth. By his expression, Rokshan felt the same. \"Then you don't think he's in danger,\" he said, watching Khadar closely.\n\nKhadar shook his head. \"I think we need him,\" he said, lifting his head so he could meet Rokshan's eyes. His own eyes glittered with unshed tears. \"I don't think we can stop Ayusha without him. I don't like the way she's been going. I don't like dragons, but she's afraid of what they might do. She thinks they'll destroy our faith. I don't think that's possible, but she has control now, and I know she's planning to reveal some new decree soon. She has to be stopped, and the Archprelate is the only one who can do it.\"\n\n\"But he's\u2014not himself,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed, realizing in time that they still had an audience. \"He can't stop anyone.\"\n\nKhadar turned his gaze on her. \"That's how I used to think,\" he said. \"That religion was all about temporal power and doing things to benefit myself with my influence over worldly matters. When I was actually possessed of a prophecy\u2026\" He shook his head. \"I can't explain it well. I realized all those things I'd thought were nonsense, faith and prophecy and even God, were more powerful than anything I could do of my own abilities. Now I know faith is about acting on belief, doing God's will even when you can't see how it could possibly work out for the best.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" Rokshan said. \"You've never been anything but selfish and immature, and now you expect us to believe you've had a major change of heart that just happens to coincide with what we want to hear?\"\n\n\"I don't care what you believe, Rokshan,\" Khadar said, sounding more like himself. \"I know what I believe. If you won't bring him back, I'll send people for him. If you found him, I can guess where he is, and you can only defend him for so long. But it would be better if you brought him yourselves.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nKhadar turned away. \"Because even faith can use some help,\" he said. \"And Jiwanyil teaches that only a fool fails to make use of the gifts God gives him.\" He walked back to his litter and paused with his hand on the frame. \"Now, let me pass.\"\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan stared at each other in bewilderment. Rokshan recovered first and climbed into the notch behind Lamprophyre's shoulders. \"But\u2014\" she began.\n\n\"Later,\" Rokshan said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nLamprophyre pushed off with her powerful legs and beat her wings until she was once more high above Tanajital. She flew for a few dozen beats, not conscious of a direction until she realized she'd crossed the wall and was heading north toward Mother Stone. Maybe she'd unconsciously sought out a familiar source of comfort and stability, something she could hold onto when the world came unraveled as it was now. \"What do we do?\" she asked, hearing an unexpected note of pleading in her voice.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Rokshan replied. \"I think Khadar is wrong, because the Archprelate clearly is in no condition to help himself, let alone rein in a powerful ecclesiast who has the support of every other religious person in Tanajital. But if Ayusha plans to take more action against dragons, we have to stop her. Not just for us, but for the sake of the city. That prophecy demanded as much.\"\n\nLamprophyre wheeled and headed back south. \"Let's at least see what we can do for the Archprelate. We have to protect him. Khadar might follow through on his threat to come after him sooner rather than later.\"\n\n\"And then we'll consider what to do about Ayusha.\" Rokshan leaned forward so he was lying along her neck, his forehead pressed against her scales. \"Damn Khadar for his cowardice. He and the other High Ecclesiasts would stand a far better chance of denouncing her than we do.\"\n\n\"I thought it was pretty brave of him to admit to what he knew.\"\n\n\"Admitting it to us is a lot easier than proclaiming it to the city. He'd like us to do the dirty work.\" Rokshan sighed. \"Though it is true that was more than I ever believed I'd hear from him.\"\n\nLamprophyre swooped down toward the embassy. \"How did he ever become an ecclesiast if he never was possessed of a prophecy until a dozen twelvedays ago?\"\n\n\"I didn't witness the first one, the one that declared his status. I always thought he'd pretended to one and was accepted for political reasons, or because Father gave money to the ecclesiasts to accept him. But now that I've seen a prophecy, I realize faking one is impossible. So he must have been possessed of one and then no others for years, for him to be so overwhelmed by the one we saw together.\" Rokshan sat up straight as she descended into the courtyard. \"I don't know how they choose the High Ecclesiasts. That might have been political. But it doesn't matter, does it? If Ayusha is corrupt, Khadar's inadequacies seem minor by comparison.\"\n\nHe hopped down and headed for the dining pavilion. Lamprophyre followed, ducking into its shelter. She stopped only a few steps in. The pavilion was empty."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Lamprophyre and Rokshan stared at each other in growing horror. \"Where\u2014?\" Lamprophyre began. She rapidly walked to the kitchen and looked over the wall. Depik was in the final stages of preparing that evening's cow. He was alone. \"Depik, where is the old man?\"\n\nDepik looked up. \"Who, my lady?\"\n\n\"The old man I brought in here. Where did he go?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I didn't notice anyone in the pavilion. Maybe Bhakriya saw him?\"\n\nRokshan had already run to where Bhakriya stood next to the soup cauldron, ladling out rich beefy broth. \"I remember seeing him walk past me,\" she told him. \"I noticed because normally the people who eat here don't venture into the pavilion. But I didn't watch him after he left the courtyard for the street. Is it important?\"\n\n\"I'll go on foot,\" Rokshan said to Lamprophyre. \"You take to the skies. How long ago was this?\" he demanded.\n\nBhakriya looked worried. \"I don't know. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour? I'm sorry, if you'd said you wanted him watched\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not your fault, it's ours,\" Lamprophyre said. She could kick herself for assuming the Archprelate wouldn't leave so long as there was food. \"If he comes back, steer him into the pavilion and make him stay there, all right?\" Without another word, she took two running steps into the courtyard and launched herself skyward.\n\nCries of surprise and fear followed her, but she left them behind almost immediately, banking to follow the street where it curved west toward the river. The streets were as crowded as they always were at this time, a surging tide of humanity sweeping toward home and supper. Lamprophyre flew as slowly as she dared, scanning the crowds for a smudge of white hair standing out against all the black-haired people. The warm scent of human bodies all crammed together, slightly sour and tinged with the sweeter odor of the river, made her empty stomachs feel sick\u2014or maybe that was the knowledge that the ultimate spiritual leader of the country was wandering alone and unprotected through the city, and she felt partly at fault.\n\nShe couldn't remember how many days he'd been coming to the embassy for food. He'd been on his own all that time, and no one had hurt him. Maybe God was watching out for him, in which case she didn't need to worry. Jiwanyil might not be her God, but she was certain he had the power to protect his most beloved servant. It still felt like failure. And it felt like defeat, as well, because she had the suspicion that the Archprelate might be the key to defeating the Third Ecclesiast, even if she had no idea how to do that.\n\nIn the distance, she saw a blotch of green and rose that resolved into Coquina. Lamprophyre flew to meet her clutchmate. \"Thank you for coming,\" she said.\n\n\"Rassika wasn't very clear on what you wanted. You need me to watch the embassy?\" Coquina said.\n\n\"I did, but\u2014\" Lamprophyre suddenly didn't feel equal to explaining everything to Coquina. \"It's nothing. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.\"\n\nCoquina looked skeptical, but she nodded. \"All right. Get some rest. You look tired.\"\n\nLamprophyre was sure she looked more than tired. She felt exhausted, stricken by all the revelations, all the secrets coming to light. But she still had a duty.\n\nShe coursed over all the streets the Archprelate might have conceivably taken, remembering Rokshan's point about counting the beats since he'd disappeared and calculating how far he could have gotten in that time. Traffic had thinned, and lamplighters had begun lighting lanterns along the streets, before she had to give up the search as a lost cause. Dejected, she flew back to the embassy and crouched in the middle of the courtyard, feeling weary enough that even the smell of hot cooked cow couldn't tempt her from her position.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said from behind her. She turned to see him approaching from the street, unaccompanied. Her heart sank further. Rokshan looked her over as if expecting to see the Archprelate appear from beneath her wing. \"It's all right,\" he continued. \"He'll come back tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Lamprophyre said. \"He doesn't always show up.\"\n\n\"Let's just stay optimistic, all right?\" Rokshan clapped her on the shoulder. \"I'm hungry. Let's eat, and maybe we can work out a plan.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She settled into the pavilion, but discovered she'd lost her appetite. Rather than hurt Depik's feelings, she carved off a piece of meat with her claws and nibbled it. It was delicious as always, but it sat like rock in her stomach, not the nice digestible kind of rock, but a heavy, leaden lump even her robust digestive system couldn't manage.\n\nShe tore off another bite and chewed slowly, savoring the juices. \"If we confront the Third Ecclesiast directly with our knowledge,\" she said around her mouthful, \"maybe she'll break down and admit to lying.\"\n\nRokshan had his knife out and was cutting off morsels of cow for himself rather than eating soup. \"I doubt it,\" he said. \"Ayusha is tough. She's been in power for years and she's withstood any number of challenges to her authority. Us accusing her with no proof won't so much as rattle her.\"\n\n\"What challenges to her authority? I thought humans respected their religious leaders.\"\n\n\"They do. It's other ecclesiasts who make those challenges. Mostly they're challenges to interpretation of prophecy. Ayusha's understanding of prophecy has always been on the edge of what's reasonable. Like, well, you and I interpreted the Archprelate's prophecy a few hours ago, right? Ayusha would have looked for meaning that wasn't so literal. She might have said 'voice in darkness' meant\u2026I don't know, I'm not her. Maybe that it was a blind person speaking.\"\n\n\"Isn't it more likely the true meaning is the obvious one?\"\n\n\"Sometimes. But Ayusha is right often enough that she's well-respected for her interpretations. And she's good at defending those interpretations.\"\n\n\"You must know her well to use her given name instead of her title.\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"All the High Ecclesiasts are in and out of the palace, all the time. I grew up hearing my father refer to them by their names, and it was natural for me and my siblings to do the same. It means I'm not as overawed by them as I otherwise would be.\"\n\nLamprophyre's attention was drawn by a flurry of movement at the mouth of the street. She sat up to look past Bhakriya, who had gone very still. People entering the courtyard moved very quickly to either side to allow a line of muscular men, dressed in knee-length trousers with their chests bare, to march past them. The men ignored the scuttling people and came to a halt in the center of the courtyard, taking up watchful positions with their legs in a wide stance and their bulging-muscled arms folded over their chests.\n\nBehind them, borne by four more men like the others, came a red-draped litter. Lamprophyre got to her feet and walked slowly to the edge of the dining pavilion, following Rokshan. She felt superstitiously as if their conversation had summoned the Third Ecclesiast, and for a moment wondered if the woman had the ability to hear her thoughts. Then she shook off her ridiculous thoughts. It couldn't mean anything good, the Third Ecclesiast being here, and Lamprophyre needed not to be distracted by irrational fancies.\n\nShe hadn't been this close to the Third Ecclesiast's litter before, and was struck by how good it smelled, a tangy-sweet odor like a blend of pyrite and kyanite. It blended with the smell of the soup and the cow meat to overcome the ranker, sweaty odor of the muscular men. Lamprophyre looked at them more closely. Six men, plus the four bearers. She remembered what had happened to Coquina's friends in the coliseum, and took another step forward so she fully emerged from the dining pavilion and could loom over the Third Ecclesiast's companions. If the woman intended to start a fight, she would find that not so easy a prospect.\n\nRokshan had stepped to the side to give Lamprophyre room and gestured to Bhakriya to go to the kitchen. Bhakriya gave one wary look at the litter, dropped the ladle into the pot, and retreated. It relieved Lamprophyre's mind to have Depik and Bhakriya safe, but it also worried her that she didn't know where the children were. In the embassy, hopefully, and with luck they'd think to stay there. The rest of the people\u2014Lamprophyre didn't know how she could protect all of them, but she'd think of something.\n\nNo one moved. The earlier breeze had died down, and the air was heavy and tense with the oncoming storm. The lanterns ringing the courtyard, and the ones hanging from the embassy buildings, seemed to be working harder than usual to push back the oncoming dark. Gray clouds bulging with rain moved ponderously slow across the sky. If the rain came, it might send the Third Ecclesiast running. That was probably too much to hope for.\n\nThe litter's curtains fluttered. The Third Ecclesiast emerged, putting one small foot delicately on the ground as if testing the waters of an unfamiliar pool. Satisfied, her other foot joined the first, and she brushed the curtains aside and stood before them, one hand resting lightly on the litter's frame. She said nothing, merely regarded Lamprophyre with the expression of someone who'd seen an unfamiliar insect and was working out whether or not to squash it. Lamprophyre stared back at her, wishing she could speak thoughts to a mind as easily as hear them. The Third Ecclesiast's thoughts were placid, though what Lamprophyre heard made no sense: almost done and nothing left and perfect solution should have thought before.\n\n\"Dragon,\" the Third Ecclesiast finally said. \"You have gone too far.\"\n\nStartled, Lamprophyre said, \"What? I don't understand. I haven't done anything to you.\"\n\n\"To me, no.\" The Third Ecclesiast stepped away from her litter and approached Lamprophyre, passing between her muscular men as if they were so many pillars and not people. \"To Gonjiri, most certainly. Or did you think we would not find out?\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Rokshan, who looked as bewildered as she felt. \"I\u2014find out what?\"\n\n\"Your crime,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. She stopped half a dragonlength from Lamprophyre and looked up at her fearlessly. \"You abducted the Archprelate. Return him, or face our wrath.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "\"What?\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"You're out of your mind, Ayusha,\" Rokshan said.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast didn't move, but her thoughts became triumphant. \"Witnesses place you at the Archprelate's palace at midnight several days ago,\" she said. \"Did you think you could force him to stop prophesying of your wickedness?\"\n\n\"I didn't kidnap the Archprelate!\" Lamprophyre shouted. A flash of light and a crack of thunder shattered the stillness as she said kidnap, as if the sky were emphasizing her words. \"You know very well I didn't!\"\n\n\"Rokshan, how could you lend yourself to this?\" the Third Ecclesiast said, ignoring Lamprophyre. \"I expect no better from a beast, but you? You should have known better.\"\n\n\"Ayusha,\" Rokshan said, then appeared to be struck mute, groping for something to say to answer this unexpected and bizarre challenge.\n\n\"I am here to demand his return,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"And to take you both into custody for kidnapping.\"\n\n\"You can't prove\u2014\" Lamprophyre realized that sentence made her sound guilty and changed her words to, \"You lost the Archprelate and you want to blame it on us. Why are you so desperate to get rid of dragons? Are we such a threat to you?\"\n\n\"I have been possessed of many prophecies, and my instructions are clear.\" The Third Ecclesiast hadn't moved and seemed not at all afraid of Lamprophyre's looming presence. \"Jiwanyil has spoken, and it is my honor to obey.\"\n\n\"Ayusha,\" Rokshan said again, \"you have to stop. We know the truth. The Archprelate ran away from the palace and you've been searching for him ever since. We didn't kidnap him, and you know it. And we won't help restore him to you.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast took another couple of steps to put herself next to Rokshan. \"Whose story is Tanajital more likely to believe?\" she said in a low voice, pitched to carry no farther than Rokshan's and Lamprophyre's ears. \"I am giving you this chance to hand him over. Refuse, and the city learns of your crime. They will tear this place apart and will do their best to kill you both.\"\n\n\"They can try,\" Lamprophyre said, just as Rokshan said, \"You'd start a riot just to get your way?\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast shrugged. \"Give him to me now, and we'll never have to find out.\"\n\n\"What makes you think he's here?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Don't play that game with me, Rokshan,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"I realized the searchers had deliberately avoided this place in their investigations, and after the questions you asked today, I deduced where he had to be.\"\n\nSo it was a guess, and a very lucky one. Rokshan and Lamprophyre looked at each other. Rokshan had the expression she rarely saw, the one where his eyebrows came together in the middle like he was thinking hard, and she listened to his thoughts and heard He's not here, and there's no point concealing that. She nodded once.\n\nRokshan turned to the Third Ecclesiast. \"He's not here,\" he said. \"He left before we returned.\"\n\n\"I think you're lying,\" the Third Ecclesiast said.\n\n\"Liars always assume they're being lied to,\" Rokshan shot back. \"It's true. He comes for soup and then he leaves again. We don't know where he goes during the day.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast regarded him narrowly. \"He comes here every evening?\"\n\n\"Most evenings,\" Lamprophyre said, feeling like a traitor for helping the Third Ecclesiast in any way.\n\n\"You had better hope that means tomorrow night,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"I will return then.\"\n\nRokshan suddenly grabbed Lamprophyre's wrist. \"What, you won't leave your men here to watch us?\" he said. His voice sounded tense, and his brows looked like thunder. Lamprophyre, baffled, again listened to his thoughts and heard only the word LOOK repeated over and over.\n\nShe looked past the Third Ecclesiast and saw the Archprelate standing at the end of the street, just inside the courtyard.\n\nShe swiftly turned her gaze back on the Third Ecclesiast and cast about for anything she might say to keep the woman's attention on her, all the time willing the old man to turn and run, to vanish into the crowds before the Third Ecclesiast saw him. \"Yes, aren't you afraid we'll make him disappear again if we aren't closely observed?\" she said.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast didn't notice their agitation; her thoughts were again triumphant with her victory. \"What, and put him beyond your protection? I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Being free in Tanajital has to be better than whatever you have planned for him,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nA frown touched the Third Ecclesiast's lips and then fell away as quickly. \"Planned for him? I want him restored to his position, to guide Gonjiri.\"\n\n\"Except he's not sane,\" Rokshan said. The Archprelate hadn't moved from his position, his familiar vacant smile driving Lamprophyre mad with frustration. \"And now we know the truth. What's to stop us telling everyone?\"\n\n\"You won't tell anyone,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. \"You know what that would do to the worship of Jiwanyil if people believed the Archprelate was incompetent. Which, of course, he's not. Sane or no, he still is possessed of prophecies, and you really are a heretic if you deny that.\"\n\n\"If that's the case, then he must have seen something to make him run,\" Rokshan said. \"A danger posed to him by other ecclesiasts. Which means if we hand him over to you, we could be complicit in his death. I'd rather face whatever you have in mind for me than be party to that.\"\n\n\"Still defiant? We'll see if you still feel the same when the mob attacks. Even your dragon friend can't save you from that.\" The Third Ecclesiast began to turn away. Lamprophyre grabbed her shoulder and let her go immediately when the woman turned on her with an unexpected snarl.\n\n\"You're counting on me being unwilling to defend Rokshan from other humans regardless of the situation,\" she said. \"I don't want to hurt humans, but I won't let him suffer for your evil.\"\n\n\"You say evil, I say obedience to Jiwanyil's word.\" The Third Ecclesiast took a step closer. \"If you'd only been willing to obey yourself, this could all have been avoided.\"\n\nThe Archprelate blinked and licked his lips as if suddenly aware there was food available. He began walking toward them with his slightly hunched gait, ignoring the muscular men filling the courtyard. Lamprophyre realized if he continued on his straight line to the soup cauldron, he would pass right beside the Third Ecclesiast. She took a step to the other side, hoping the woman would turn with her, putting her back to the cauldron. \"If you hadn't been so demanding and offensive, none of this would have happened either,\" she said.\n\n\"I am God's chosen, and I obey his words,\" the Third Ecclesiast said. Her attention was fully on Lamprophyre and she didn't notice the Archprelate had nearly reached them. \"I don't expect you to understand.\"\n\nLamprophyre held her breath as the Archprelate, only paces from the Third Ecclesiast, picked up a bowl and stepped over to the soup cauldron. But he didn't serve himself. He waited there with his bowl outstretched just the way all of them did for Bhakriya or Preyanka or Depik to fill it.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast's eyes narrowed. \"What are you\u2014\" she began.\n\n\"Chosen?\" Rokshan said, slowly.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast ignored him and turned around. Lamprophyre heard the sharp surprise of her thoughts as she recognized the Archprelate. Rokshan swore in a low voice. The Third Ecclesiast reached for the Archprelate's arm, saying, \"Jiwanyil be praised.\"\n\nThe Archprelate stepped back before she could touch him, and the bowl fell from his hands. The staccato crackling of his broken thoughts surged loud enough that Lamprophyre couldn't help hearing, fragments of words like not her and time past later and speaks like thunder. On that last thought, thunder boomed as if the storm, too, could hear thoughts and agreed with the Archprelate.\n\nRokshan pushed past the Third Ecclesiast and put himself protectively between the Archprelate and her. \"Don't touch him,\" he warned. \"I'm already a heretic and I'll have no trouble defending him from you and your men.\"\n\n\"Try defending against all of Tanajital,\" the Third Ecclesiast murmured. In a louder voice, she said, \"This man is ill and needs healing. I have seen it in prophecy. These two heretics stand in the way of prophecy. O faithful of Jiwanyil, do not allow them to prevail!\"\n\nRokshan cursed again. Lamprophyre got behind the Archprelate and crouched low, spreading her wings to protect him, though no one had moved yet. \"Take him away, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll deal with this.\"\n\n\"Are you insane?\" Lamprophyre said. \"And where would I take him?\"\n\n\"People of Tanajital, to me!\" the Third Ecclesiast shouted.\n\nThe Archprelate suddenly staggered and fell against Lamprophyre's leg. She put a hand out to steady him and felt a shudder run through him. \"Everybody listen!\" she screamed over the rising wind and the murmurs of the crowd. \"Listen to this!\" She hoped she was right and that the Archprelate was about to be possessed of a prophecy, and hoped even more it would be something that would turn the tide in their favor.\n\nThe Archprelate stood unassisted and took a step away from her. He blinked his eyes, once, twice, and when he opened them a final time, they blazed with leaf-green light. \"O faithful of Jiwanyil,\" he began.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him into silence. Rokshan moved to intervene, and she shoved him aside. \"It's not true, it's a lie,\" she shouted. \"I am the one who receives true prophecy. I am the chosen of God!\" She let go of the Archprelate and clutched herself, wrapping her arms around her stomach as if it pained her. Rokshan once more put himself between her and the Archprelate, then stood still, his hands half-raised as if he wanted to take hold of her but was afraid to.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast shuddered much as the Archprelate had. Then she stood upright with her hands at her sides and tilted her head back the way a bird might before bursting into song. With her eyes closed, she said, \"Listen to her, dragon. She tells the truth.\"\n\nLamprophyre shivered. The voice was not the Third Ecclesiast's. It was low and throaty, like deep water running over stone, like thunder rolling over the mountaintops, and it sent a chill up her spine. It sounded nothing like what Lamprophyre had come to think of as the Voice of Jiwanyil, the strange voice neither male nor female she'd now heard from three different people possessed of prophecies. And yet it had a similar quality, resonant and certain and impossible to forget.\n\n\"She is my chosen,\" the voice said. \"You should have listened when you were commanded. Now the city will burn, and it will take you and yours with it.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked down at the Archprelate, whose eyes were still vivid green. He was listening to this with great interest, for the first time appearing to be conscious of his surroundings. \"Dragons worship Mother Stone, not Katayan,\" she said. \"And I don't think\u2014\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast laughed. It was a horrible, mocking sound that made Lamprophyre cringe inside. \"Mother Stone? You dragons have no idea what waits for you there. Your God is dead, and you have nowhere to turn but to me. Leave this city or be destroyed.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart was beating so hard it hurt her ribs. \"You're lying,\" she whispered, wishing she could summon a louder voice.\n\nAnother laugh, louder and more menacing than before, issued from the Third Ecclesiast's lips. \"Am I? I have more power than you have ever dreamed. You know nothing, fallen child of a fallen race. I am your doom.\"\n\nRokshan grabbed the Third Ecclesiast's shoulder and swung her around to face him. She didn't resist. \"Who are you?\" he demanded.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast opened her eyes. Instead of bright green light, they were filled with a dark smoke that roiled within their depths like the heavy clouds lowering above. Blood tricked from their corners. \"I am Jiwanyil, foolish boy,\" she said.\n\n\"You absolutely are not,\" Rokshan said. \"I would bet my eternal soul on it.\"\n\n\"Your eternal soul is already lost for consorting with this creature. Step back\u2014\"\n\nA hand reached past Rokshan to grip the Third Ecclesiast by the wrist. \"Listen and obey,\" the Archprelate said a clear voice that rang through Lamprophyre like a bell. \"The old stone speaks lies through the chosen. There is no more time for the faithful to wander. Give the tiger her desire and let it scour her clean.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast tried to wrench free, but the Archprelate's grip only tightened. \"What are you doing?\" she demanded in her own voice. Then, in that cold, horrible voice, she said, \"The old man speaks lies. He is senile and knows nothing. God's grace has passed from him.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Rokshan said. \"Whoever or whatever you are, we know you're not God.\"\n\nLamprophyre was thinking hard. The muscular men hadn't moved. The people surrounding the courtyard were shifting uncomfortably, as if they weren't sure what voice to listen to. Hearing their thoughts, Lamprophyre knew she and Rokshan only had a few beats before they attacked, uncertain of anything but that the Third Ecclesiast was their spiritual leader and knowing the Archprelate only as the senile old man who had fits. Give the tiger her desire. The Third Ecclesiast was the tiger. What was her desire?\n\n\"Jiwanyil!\" she shouted, startling everyone. Another crack of thunder split the sky, followed almost immediately by a spike of white lightning. \"Ayusha believes she is the Archprelate. Give her her heart's desire!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "The Third Ecclesiast jerked onto her toes as if someone had grabbed her hair and pulled straight up. Deep within the murk of her eyes, glints of green light shone, dimming and fading and then brightening again until the smoke burned away. \"I am your God!\" the dark voice said, sounding less resonant and farther away. \"You will worship\u2014\"\n\nThe voice cut off sharply. The Third Ecclesiast's body arched like a bow, and a hiss of pain emerged from her clenched teeth. Rokshan stepped back. The Archprelate took the opportunity to move into the space where he had been, taking the Third Ecclesiast's other wrist and holding her as if tethering her to the ground. Though he said nothing, his eyes were still the same vivid green as hers now were.\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast threw her head back and opened her mouth. \"That which comes cannot be stopped,\" she said, and this time her voice was the ringing music of the real Jiwanyil. \"Fear nothing except the enemy you do not know. God and man, dragon and God, no one is to say where truth lies, or where lies are truth. Ward against the voice in darkness. The skies will burn.\"\n\nLamprophyre realized she was holding her breath and let it out slowly. Rokshan, beside her, stood as still and tense as if he were the one possessed of a prophecy. The Archprelate continued to hold the Third Ecclesiast's wrists, his head tilted to look at her; Lamprophyre hadn't understood how short he was until she saw him next to the Third Ecclesiast, who was a tiny woman and only barely shorter than he. She reached out to free the Third Ecclesiast from his grip, and he twitched the woman out of Lamprophyre's reach. \"Don't,\" he said in a normal if very elderly voice. \"It's not over.\"\n\nThe Third Ecclesiast jerked and fell to her knees. Then she was thrashing madly, held upright only by the Archprelate's hands. Blood trickled from her nose and the corners of her eyes, foam bubbled from her lips, and her head moved so rapidly Lamprophyre could hear her joints popping. Through it all, the Archprelate held firm, anchoring the woman so she couldn't fall and hit her head against the hard earth of the courtyard.\n\nEventually, the Third Ecclesiast's seizure passed, and she hung limp in the Archprelate's grasp. He gently lowered her to the ground and stood over her, looking down as intently as if he understood who she was and what had happened to her. Lamprophyre bent to arrange her in a more comfortable position, and froze. \"No,\" she said, leaning closer to rest her cheek near the woman's mouth, which lay slack in death. \"I don't understand. Why\u2014\"\n\n\"The thing that possessed her altered her brain,\" the Archprelate said, \"made it incompatible with true prophecy. I don't know why Jiwanyil didn't act sooner, but there is much I do not understand about divinity.\"\n\nLamprophyre stared at him. \"You\u2026aren't you\u2014\"\n\n\"Mad?\" The Archprelate turned to look up at her. \"I am, or will be again.\" He held out a hand to let a few raindrops spatter his palm. \"What terrible timing the heavens have.\"\n\nLamprophyre became aware of the murmuring crowds beginning to press forward. She couldn't tell from their agitated thoughts what they believed had just happened, but even if all they thought was that two ecclesiasts had been possessed of prophecies at the same time, and that one of them had been overtaken by it, that was enough to overwhelm the embassy. \"Please stand back,\" she said, walking toward the center of the courtyard. \"Rokshan, would you\u2014\"\n\n\"Already thought of it,\" Rokshan said. He had the Third Ecclesiast's body in his arms and was moving through the muscular men toward the litter. All of them had turned to watch him. They weren't as stolid as Lamprophyre had thought. Lamprophyre walked around the courtyard, saying things she barely remembered speaking, her whole mind focused on the Archprelate, who stood by the soup cauldron with no apparent concern for the rain now falling on him.\n\n\"Go home\u2014the Third Ecclesiast needs rest\u2014the ecclesiasts will explain everything tomorrow\u2014really, just go home,\" she said, and with those words and some well-timed flaps of her enormous wings, she got the courtyard cleared of everything but the litter and the Third Ecclesiast's entourage. The bearers and the other men had gathered together in a huddle, alternating glances at the litter whose silken draperies were spattered dark red with rain with glances at Rokshan and Lamprophyre. One of the men moved as if to lift the curtain, and another slapped the first man's hand away.\n\n\"We can't send them back,\" she told Rokshan when she returned to his side. \"A litter shows up with a dead Third Ecclesiast, and who knows what they'll think?\"\n\n\"She can wait,\" Rokshan said. \"I have questions.\"\n\nThey turned to face the Archprelate, who smiled sadly at them and turned to enter the pavilion. Following him, Lamprophyre settled on the stone floor and tucked her tail around herself. Outside, the rain continued to patter lightly, and she glanced over her shoulder at the bearers in their huddle, who seemed not to notice or care about the weather. Well, they hadn't noticed the Third Ecclesiast was dead, because they were unlikely to remain so calm if they had. Maybe that sort of unobservant behavior was something the ecclesiasts looked for in bearers. The rain wasn't falling heavily, and Lamprophyre found she didn't much care if the men got wet.\n\n\"I don't believe I have much time,\" the Archprelate said, drawing her attention. \"But I remember how kind you were, and I saw your faith, and I think that's deserving of answers.\"\n\n\"You weren't pretending to be mad, were you?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Unfortunately, no. When I knew a great danger was coming, I pleaded with Jiwanyil to spare my life until it had passed, so I would not leave my people unprotected from it. In his grace, he chose to grant my request, but he apparently believed I would be capable of acting even if my mind was gone.\" The Archprelate closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. \"I can feel the fog coming on again, so I need you to listen and not interrupt.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre began. Rokshan shushed her.\n\n\"Months ago, I had a terrible dream,\" the Archprelate said. \"A voice spoke to me, claiming to be Jiwanyil. It said my worthiness allowed it to speak to me directly, with no need for the obscurity of prophecy. It told me many flattering things and assured me I was destined for greatness. When I woke, I realized it was no dream.\n\n\"My mind was already going by then, and I believed the 'dream' to be just another manifestation of madness. But a second, similar dream convinced me it was an entity speaking to me, and\u2014well, I have been an ecclesiast most of my life, and I know Jiwanyil's voice. This was not Jiwanyil. When it spoke to me again, I fought back. It told me if I resisted, it would raise up another Archprelate in my place. Fearing for my life and in the grip of delirium, I fled the Archprelate's palace.\n\n\"Since then, I have roamed the city in a fog, only coming briefly to myself on some occasions when I was possessed of a prophecy. I do not know what led me to this place\u2014probably it was just hunger. But this evening, the first prophecy I spoke left me aware that here was where I needed to be. And I returned. You know the rest.\"\n\n\"So Ayusha was the entity's second target,\" Rokshan said. \"Do you think she would have killed you?\"\n\n\"Almost certainly,\" the Archprelate said. He swayed and sank to his knees in one sudden movement, but waved Rokshan off when he moved closer to help. \"No, I'm well, or at least as well as I can be. Ayusha has always been determined and ambitious. I don't know if the entity put the idea of becoming Archprelate into her head, or if it was something she aspired to despite the impossibility of controlling Jiwanyil's choice, but I suppose it hardly matters now.\" He put a hand to his head. \"Questions, now, while I can still answer.\"\n\n\"You said you saw our faith. What faith?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nThe Archprelate tilted his head to regard her closely. \"You called upon a God not your own to break the entity's hold on Ayusha. Why?\"\n\nTaken aback, Lamprophyre said, \"I don't know. It was the prophecy that told me what needed to happen. I'm sorry if that was presumptuous.\"\n\n\"Not presumptuous. You spoke as one with the certainty of faith, and God responded. I honor that.\"\n\n\"But I don't worship Jiwanyil.\"\n\n\"I've found, in my long life, that Gods care more that their instructions are heeded than that people mouth platitudes in their direction,\" the Archprelate said wryly. \"Don't worry. Jiwanyil knows your heart, and I'm sure your Mother Stone does too.\"\n\nLamprophyre still felt uncomfortable with the idea of her faith being enlisted in the cause of a religion not her own, and cast about for a change of subject. \"Why are you sane now?\"\n\nThe Archprelate nodded slowly, as if he knew what she'd done. \"As I said, I have moments of clarity, and I think the power of that last prophecy left me clear for longer than usual.\" He grimaced. \"Or possibly Jiwanyil wants you to know the truth, since no one else does. It will be up to you to decide who to share it with. Though I believe you could do worse than confide in Khadar. The boy is more faithful than he realizes, though I wish he would abjure whorehouses. It's so undignified.\"\n\n\"So, what was that entity?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"That, I don't know. Something very old and very evil. Something that intends to bring about our destruction if it can. There are prophecies referring to the skies burning that I believe have something to do with it.\"\n\n\"We know some of those prophecies,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We know they speak of a calamity like the Great Cataclysm so many hundreds of years ago.\"\n\nThe Archprelate looked at her without comprehension for a moment, then shook his head as if clearing away fog. \"Calamity. Yes. We are almost certainly facing something as terrible.\" He pressed a hand to his head, and fear flickered in his eyes. \"What else? Oh. I believe the entity wanted dragons out of Gonjiri because dragons and humans working together, fighting together, spells disaster for its plans. Don't let anyone drive you out, dragon\u2026God's breath, I can't remember your name. I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You'll correct the prophecy.\"\n\nHe looked up at her, his face stricken. \"I can't,\" he said. \"My memories\u2026I feel them dissolving. I'm going\u2014I can't stop it.\"\n\n\"What do we do?\" Lamprophyre said. \"Can't we\u2014Rokshan, Jiwanyil can't want this!\"\n\nRokshan knelt beside the Archprelate, looking as torn as she felt. \"I don't know, Lamprophyre. But\u2014\"\n\nThe Archprelate grabbed Lamprophyre's arm, groping as if he were blind. \"Everything's fading,\" he cried out, sounding terrified. \"My mind\u2014dear God help me, I can't bear losing myself again!\"\n\nImpulsively, Lamprophyre put her arm around the Archprelate and held him close. \"Don't be afraid,\" she said. \"We'll remember for you. You'll be safe, I promise.\"\n\nThe Archprelate closed his eyes and nodded, shuddering and then growing calm. His breathing steadied. \"I'm ready,\" he said, and bowed his head.\n\nLamprophyre didn't move. Rokshan knelt beside them both, his eyes fixed on the Archprelate. She heard movement from the kitchen as Depik and Bhakriya emerged, hand in hand, but with their attention on Lamprophyre in a way that suggested they didn't realize they were touching. \"Most Holy One?\" Lamprophyre whispered.\n\nThe Archprelate looked up at her and smiled. His vacant gaze struck her to the heart.\n\n\"Is that\u2014?\" Depik asked, his voice low and uncertain.\n\n\"It is,\" Rokshan said, \"but I think you had both better forget what you saw. If Jiwanyil loves him, he will take this old man back to him soon.\" He rose and extended a hand to help the Archprelate to his feet. \"I'll go back with Ayusha,\" he said. \"Do you think you can fly with him? I know it's uncomfortable to fly with anyone but me.\"\n\nLamprophyre regarded the old man, who looked about him as if he'd never seen the dining pavilion before. \"It will be an honor,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "The news that the Archprelate had died in his sleep spread throughout Tanajital five days later, carried by reverends in wide yellow drapes whose paths took them through every part of the city, including the slums and the dragon embassy. Lamprophyre took to the skies when she heard the news, feeling an ache in her heart that only flying could soothe. She watched the ecclesiasts' litters travel the streets and wondered what prayers their progress defined.\n\nTentatively, feeling vaguely heretical, she spoke to Jiwanyil in her heart the way she was accustomed to address Mother Stone on the rare occasions she felt justified in praying: He served you until the end, in ways he never thought would be expected of him. I don't know anything about what you do with the souls of your followers, but I hope you give him rest.\n\nNothing happened. She wasn't sure what she'd expected, whether a voice in her head or a feeling in her bones, but Jiwanyil remained silent. Relieved, because being touched by a foreign God was not something she wanted to have happen, she headed back to the embassy.\n\nThe courtyard was silent when she landed, without the laughter and pattering footsteps of children that had rung through it when the reverend had delivered his announcement. Lamprophyre ducked inside the hall and found Abhit there, looking at books. \"Where did Anamika and Varnak go?\" she asked.\n\nAbhit closed the book on his finger to mark his place. \"Their papa called them home because of the Archprelate's death,\" he said. \"Mama said I was to be quiet out of respect.\"\n\nLamprophyre only partly understood that. Dragons honored death by participating in the things the deceased had loved in life, and were only quiet during a dragon's flight to Mother Stone, but she could respect human traditions. And it wasn't as if she'd known the Archprelate as he truly was except for those few last minutes before his madness claimed him again. Still, remembering the sharp, intelligent look in his brown eyes, his clear voice, she wished she could have flown with him while he had the wits to appreciate it.\n\nThat flight returning him to the Archprelate's palace had been terrifying, with the rain dampening her wings and her not sure he'd remember to hold on, and she'd nearly started a riot by landing on their very doorstep. But Khadar had taken things in hand, immediately helping the Archprelate down as if he'd been waiting for her arrival. She never thought she'd be grateful to Khadar for anything. She doubted his change of heart was complete enough to make him permanently less of an arrogant ass, but for now, at least, she could behave as if she believed it.\n\nShe hadn't seen Rokshan since he'd left to escort the Third Ecclesiast's body to the Archprelate's palace. On her flight there with the Archprelate, she'd considered waiting at the palace until he arrived, but the agitation of all the ecclesiasts at her arrival made her decide that was a bad idea. He'd sent word the next morning, hard on the heels of the official announcement of the Third Ecclesiast's death, that he would be occupied with royal duties for the next few days; it seemed a High Ecclesiast's passing was a state matter as well as a religious one. Lamprophyre tried not to feel impatient.\n\nShe settled on the stone and rested her head on her arms. \"Why don't you read to me,\" she suggested. \"If you don't mind. Dharan says practice is important, with reading.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Abhit said.\n\nShe'd already heard the book he'd chosen twice, so she let the words wash over her without paying them much attention. It was the sound of his high, childish voice that soothed her, a sound like birds chirping. For one so young, Abhit was remarkably good at reading. She idly made a mental note to ask Dharan to find more books for him.\n\nAbhit finished the book and set it aside. \"I'm bored,\" he said. \"I know we're to be respectful of the Archprelate, but I don't think he cares anymore if we play games.\"\n\nLamprophyre privately agreed with him, but she felt she'd done enough to corrupt the youth of Tanajital recently and had no desire to be at odds with Bhakriya with respect to his religious education. \"I think you're meant to reflect on\u2026actually, I don't know what you believe happens after death.\"\n\n\"If you believe in the Gods, they take your soul to live with them when you die,\" Abhit said. \"The reverend back home said you have to show you believe by following Jiwanyil's laws and commands. Or Katayan's, I guess. If you don't believe, then devils take your soul instead and tear it into pieces.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. \"Good thing the ecclesiasts declared dragons not outcast anymore, because I wouldn't want that happening to my friends just for being my friends.\" That had happened three days ago, and with the Third Ecclesiast's death and the announcement of the Archprelate's illness, it had felt like an afterthought even though to Lamprophyre it had been more important than anything else.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Abhit said. \"Were the ecclesiasts wrong in saying dragons were outcast for not worshipping Katayan?\"\n\n\"They said not.\" It had been a masterpiece of human mendacity, really. The new decree had praised Tanajital for obeying the first one and had declared that it had been a test of faith. And with that, the old decree had been nullified, without a hint that the ecclesiasts had been wrong. All those formerly cut off were restored in Jiwanyil's sight. Lamprophyre hadn't even heard whispers that dragons should worship Katayan. All the thoughts she heard from people who came for food indicated relief that tensions had evaporated; no one harbored any secret doubts about the legitimacy of either decree.\n\n\"I guess Jiwanyil wanted to see if people still had faith in him when dragons' religion is counter to yours in some ways,\" she continued. \"Personally, I think if you've seen someone possessed of a prophecy, it's hard not to believe.\" As she said this, though, she thought of the Third Ecclesiast, who had believed a false voice claiming to be God. Suppose the voice everyone believed to be Jiwanyil was really just another creature like the false, evil one? Even if that voice was good, that didn't make it a God. Lamprophyre sighed. She wasn't fond of pondering religious matters, especially those of a religion not her own. She knew what she'd seen, and absent other evidence, she felt sure the voice she'd heard all those times was that of the actual Jiwanyil. He wasn't her God, but she could respect him.\n\n\"I have faith,\" Abhit said. \"But you're right, some of that is because I've seen Preyanka be possessed of a prophecy. Do you suppose Jiwanyil likes it better when people believe even though they've never seen that?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" It was an interesting question, though another one she didn't have the knowledge to pursue.\n\nAbhit put the book back in its pile and said, \"I'm going to ask Mama if we can see Preyanka today. I wonder if she'll be busy preparing for the ceremony for choosing a new Archprelate. Wouldn't it be funny if Jiwanyil chose her?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought it would be horrible to make a thirteen-year-old girl the religious leader of a nation. \"Funny,\" she agreed.\n\nShe let the muggy warmth of the day soak into her bones and was falling asleep when the sound of running footsteps came to her ears. Rokshan was back.\n\nShe stepped halfway out of the hall to watch his approach. His pace slowed as he entered the courtyard, empty at this time of day. \"I thought, with this announcement of the Archprelate's death, you'd be caught up in more ritual,\" she said.\n\n\"Not until tonight,\" Rokshan said. \"Ayusha's death being so sudden and so violent meant the ecclesiasts enlisted our family in praying for her soul, in part because my father is king and in part because we knew her so well.\"\n\nLamprophyre grimaced. \"I'm not sure I could have participated wholeheartedly, given all the evil things she did.\"\n\n\"All the more reason to pray to Jiwanyil for his grace in forgiving her sins.\" Rokshan walked into the embassy and sat against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing a little more heavily than usual. \"I don't know what to think.\"\n\n\"Abhit says if you don't believe, devils rend your soul. What about people who believe, but do evil things?\"\n\nRokshan opened his eyes. \"Jiwanyil gives you the reward you deserve, based on his knowledge of your innermost heart. Sometimes that reward is torment until your heart changes. Some ecclesiasts like to speculate on how long that takes, and what happens after, and whether there's even any truth to the idea that we continue to grow and learn and change after death. I've always been more concerned about living an honorable life so it's not an issue.\"\n\n\"Don't be offended, but I like my religion better. So much less complicated.\"\n\n\"That's true.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled down near Rokshan. \"When is the choosing ceremony?\"\n\n\"For the new Archprelate? Tonight after sunset. They could do it any time, but it's tradition to do it after dark so the light of Jiwanyil is more dramatic.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they don't let outsiders watch.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"No, just royal outsiders. But they'll make the announcement immediately after it happens. The whole city waits for that.\"\n\nLamprophyre pictured everyone in Tanajital standing on their doorsteps or the flat roofs of their houses, watching the skies for a beam of light. \"Well, if you're here for the day, I'll send for Dharan. He had some thoughts about the 'skies will burn' prophecy I told him I wanted to discuss when you were available.\" She turned and opened the back door. \"Rassika?\"\n\nAfter a few beats, the child appeared. Lamprophyre still didn't know how old Rassika was, but she looked more mature now that she was clean and wore clothes that fit. \"Will you take a message to Dharan?\" she said. \"Tell him Rokshan is here, and find out when he can visit.\"\n\nRassika nodded. \"I'll run fast,\" she said, and darted away through the front doorway.\n\n\"You convinced her,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"It took some talking, but it helped that she wanted to be convinced.\" Lamprophyre looked at the street into which Rassika had vanished. \"She runs errands, and Dharan is teaching her to read so she can be even more efficient\u2014\"\n\n\"Not because you want to help her?\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled. \"Of course it's because I want to help her. But she won't take charity. Anyway, I pay Bhakriya to watch Kavari during the day, though I think Bhakriya would do it for free because she loves children, and I pay Rassika to be my messenger, and everything is perfect. Though wouldn't it be wonderful if Bhakriya took Rassika and Kavari as her own children, and married Depik? Then they would be a real family.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I hope you haven't told any of them this plan.\"\n\n\"I have self-control, Rokshan. Besides, you told me humans prefer to work things out for themselves. So I give them a home so they're close together and can see how wonderful it is to have each other.\"\n\n\"That is the most generous thing I've ever heard,\" Rokshan said. He'd stopped laughing and was regarding Lamprophyre with a curiously intent expression that made her feel uncomfortable. \"This is what makes you happy, isn't it?\" he continued. \"Giving people what they need.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But I don't know that I ever did that with dragons. It's just that you humans are so fragile and short-lived, it feels like it means more when I can help you.\"\n\n\"That's an interesting perspective.\" Rokshan stretched out his legs, then folded them cross-legged beneath him. \"The new Third Ecclesiast, by the way, is a man named Nitesh. I don't know him at all, but Khadar says he's famous among the ecclesiasts for his common sense in adjudicating religious disputes. Khadar sounded like he respects the man, for whatever that's worth.\"\n\n\"I'm still getting used to the idea that Khadar's opinion isn't completely self-serving. Do you think he'll go back to being selfish and self-centered?\"\n\nRokshan ran his fingers over the smooth leather surface of the nearest book. \"Oh, I think he's still that. But he's had experiences that have shaken him, and I really believe he's developed faith. What that means for the future, I don't know. I sincerely hope Jiwanyil doesn't pick him for the new Archprelate. I don't know that his new faith is strong enough to keep him from seeing that choice as proving how very special and superior to others he is.\"\n\n\"But you said it's entirely Jiwanyil's choice.\"\n\n\"It is. And, as I recall you pointing out, if I believe that, then I have to have faith that whoever Jiwanyil chooses is the right person for the job. Even if it's Khadar.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. \"I still hope it's not. I don't think your entire country should have to suffer while Khadar learns to be a good, unselfish person.\"\n\n\"I hope it's not, too.\"\n\nRassika ran through the doorway. Unlike Rokshan, she wasn't breathing heavily at all. \"Dharan says he can come after noon,\" she said. \"He also give me this to read.\" She waved a slim book at them. \"Can I go read it, my lady, or do you need something else?\"\n\n\"No, go and read, and I'll call you if I do,\" Lamprophyre said. She settled back down when Rassika was gone and said, \"Isn't that nice? She really does love reading.\"\n\n\"It makes me wonder who she'll turn out to be,\" Rokshan said. \"You saved her life, Lamprophyre. Children alone in the slums don't generally live to grow up.\"\n\n\"Well, that's two children who will,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDharan appeared closer to midafternoon than noon, carrying a stack of books atop which lay his blank book. \"Sorry,\" he said. \"I started buying books and forgot to stop.\"\n\n\"Are those for me?\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. \"What do I owe you?\"\n\n\"Some of them are for you and your growing household, and some of them are mine. I'll settle up with Rokshan later.\" Dharan carefully deposited the stack on the protective sheet and wiped sweat off his forehead. \"I hope there's a storm soon, because we could use the cooler weather.\"\n\nLamprophyre poked her head out the door and surveyed the sky, inhaling the moist air deeply. \"Tomorrow before dawn,\" she declared. \"Isn't that good, though? Because of the ceremony tonight?\"\n\n\"Choosing the new Archprelate,\" Rokshan told Dharan, whose confused look vanished.\n\n\"As I understand it, the ceremony proceeds regardless of weather,\" Dharan said. \"It might even be a bonus, having it in a rainstorm, because that makes it even more obvious what Jiwanyil's light is.\"\n\n\"I thought you were a heathen,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I had a very thorough religious education, Lamprophyre, and just because I'm not sure I believe it anymore doesn't mean I've forgotten it.\"\n\n\"But if Jiwanyil's light is so potent, even you have to admit it's real.\" Lamprophyre felt like she'd made a telling point, then wondered why she cared. It wasn't her religion.\n\n\"I've never seen it,\" Dharan said. \"I'm sure there could be other explanations for it.\"\n\n\"I have,\" Rokshan said. \"I thought it was obviously Jiwanyil's light. But if you want actual proof before you believe, I won't argue with you. I won't even be insulted that you won't take my word for it.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Dharan said with a grin. \"Now, let me tell you what I've learned about our favorite prophecies.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled back on her haunches and furled her wings close to her side. \"We told you what the Archprelate said, that he believed those prophecies were related to the evil entity that spoke to the Third Ecclesiast.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that gave me a direction for my research.\" Dharan picked up his blank book and leafed through the pages. \"If 'the skies will burn' is a metaphor for an oncoming catastrophe, and the prophecies warn of that catastrophe or tell how to avert it, then it's an easy jump to assume that whatever this entity is, it wants the catastrophe to happen. Which means there should be references in some of these prophecies that will tell us more about the entity itself.\"\n\nHe picked up a piece of chalk and turned in a slow circle, looking around. \"Where are the slates?\"\n\n\"Still at the warehouses. We keep forgetting to bring them back,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Well, never mind. I can write on the wall.\" Dharan chose a different, storm-gray piece of chalk and turned to the wall. \"There are ten references to a 'voice from darkness' in the collected prophecies. Two of them reference 'the old stone.' One mentions, in a general way, fearing the ally and welcoming the stranger. And Ayusha's prophecy said to 'fear no one except the enemy you do not know.'\" He wrote all of that swiftly on the white wall of the embassy, large enough for Lamprophyre to read easily. \"That all speaks to an unknown enemy, one that stays hidden, but one that on the surface appears to be good or supportive.\"\n\n\"Which is what Ayusha proved,\" Rokshan said. \"What about 'old stone'?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" Dharan tapped the chalk against his lips. \"Stone usually suggests strength and stability, a sure foundation. So in this case, it might well mean something you expect to be a support, but isn't. But all of that taken together definitely imply some non-human, non-dragon, single entity. It's not Fanishkor, for one.\"\n\n\"Which is a relief and a disappointment, because if it were Fanishkor, we'd know how to fight,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I don't like what the Third Ecclesiast said about this not being able to be stopped,\" Lamprophyre said. \"That feels as if nothing we learn or do matters.\"\n\n\"Maybe it can't be stopped,\" Dharan said, \"but if were impossible to overcome, there wouldn't be prophecies about it.\" He flipped pages. \"This one says 'two become as one,' and this one\u2014\" He turned a few more pages. \"This one is really long and flowery, but I'm pretty sure it refers to dragons and humans together. Doing what, it doesn't say. But definitely acting as one.\"\n\n\"So we're already doing something to defend against the entity by teaching humans and dragons to live in harmony,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nDharan nodded. \"Also, Ayusha's prophecy said to ward against the voice in darkness, which implies that such a warding is possible.\"\n\n\"I told Khadar that,\" Rokshan said. \"Actually, I told him everything that happened in the courtyard. He didn't know what warding against such a voice might be, but he said the ecclesiasts would pray for a prophecy on the subject. And in the meantime, they're warning everyone not to be fooled by false voices.\"\n\n\"There are other hints to what the catastrophe will look like, or signs that it's coming,\" Dharan continued. \"References to waking, either the world waking, which would mean spring, or something else waking, probably meaning the entity gaining power. Some prophecies talk about storms coming, which, if it's literal, might mean the rainy season, but I'm inclined to think it means the enemy's attack will be something we see coming from well off, or with time to prepare. But there are a few that make no sense. Yet.\"\n\n\"You sound like you're about to go into battle,\" Lamprophyre said, amused.\n\n\"I've never let an intellectual puzzle beat me, and this one is no exception.\" Dharan closed his blank book. \"The more we learn, the easier these prophecies will be to understand.\"\n\n\"Convinced now that they're true prophecies?\" Rokshan said with an arch smile. \"Or is this really just an intellectual puzzle?\"\n\nDharan shrugged. \"Let's just say I'm willing to grant you the possibility they're real. We just disagree on the source. Besides\u2014\" His expression suddenly became very somber. \"The consequences of not believing something like this that turns out to be true are greater than I'm willing to risk. If that means I have to revisit my stance on God, so be it.\"\n\nRokshan rose and clapped Dharan on the shoulder. \"You know it doesn't matter to me whether you believe or not, right?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Dharan said, \"and that, more than anything, leads me to believe you're right.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Sunset came with no lessening of the punishing heat and humidity. Rokshan and Dharan left well before the evening meal, Dharan to a lecture, Rokshan to join his family for the Archprelate's ceremony. Lamprophyre dozed until the smells of good food cooking roused her. The courtyard still wasn't as full as it had been before the ecclesiasts' first, disastrous pronouncement, but there was still a line at the soup cauldron where Bhakriya stood. To Lamprophyre's surprise, Rassika had joined her and was handing bowls to beggars. Probably she was just looking for more ways to earn her keep, but how wonderful if she'd done it because she wanted to help!\n\nLamprophyre made her way past the line to the pavilion, where Depik had brought out the trolley\u2014sheep this time, not something she loved for always, but a nice change from cow. He'd also served plates to Abhit and Kavari, and Abhit was supervising Kavari's meal. Just like a brother would. Lamprophyre stopped herself daydreaming along those lines and tore into the first sheep. The greasy meat satisfied her. Food now, and\u2026no, flying with her clutch afterward wasn't a good idea, not on this night. If they passed too close to the Archprelate's palace while the ceremony was happening, and the ecclesiasts thought they were interfering\u2014it was better not to take any chances on misunderstandings. They could fly another time.\n\nShe chewed, swiped her mouth with the large cloth Depik provided\u2014he liked to joke about how messy an eater she was, but it was true as well\u2014and took another bite. Delicious.\n\nKavari finished her meal and carried her plate carefully into the kitchen. Lamprophyre listened to Depik's amused thoughts at how grown-up the baby was becoming. He would have no trouble thinking of the children as his own, if it ever came to that. Lamprophyre scowled and stopped listening. She was a busybody, she thought the word was, and it didn't matter that she only wanted her friends to be happy, it was still interfering.\n\nAfter finishing her meal, she crossed the courtyard to the embassy and settled in the doorway, watching the humans and idly listening to their thoughts. Another few nights, with more and more people coming for food, and the noise would be too great to hear any one person's thoughts. She saw one-legged Sumaan talking to an old woman whose thoughts flitted here and there like butterflies, not mad, but in the beginnings of a decline, and her heart ached. She should be glad of the Archprelate being free, finally, of his senility. If his religious tradition was true, he was happy now, safe with Jiwanyil and not lost to himself anymore. But she missed seeing him in her courtyard.\n\nShe glanced at the Sister of the Red, who crossed the courtyard toward her, holding her bowl of soup. The woman stopped near Lamprophyre and saluted her with the bowl. \"Thank you for your generosity in feeding us all,\" she said. \"I don't know if I said that before.\"\n\n\"It's no trouble, and you're welcome,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThe Sister of the Red raised the bowl to her very red lips, but didn't eat. \"I'm sorry I missed the drama the other night. How exciting, to see the Archprelate. Is it true he was mad?\"\n\nThe ecclesiasts had already told Lamprophyre what to say if anyone asked this question, and Lamprophyre, feeling loyalty to the old man if not to his compatriots, had decided to obey their wishes. \"He was Jiwanyil's voice to the people, and perfectly coherent.\" That was even true.\n\nThe woman nodded slowly as if Lamprophyre had said something very wise. \"And the decree has been rescinded. I suppose I'm grateful not to be excommunicated anymore\u2014no, I tell a lie, I'm still not welcome among the good worshippers of Jiwanyil.\" She shrugged one shoulder, making the garnet on her arm flash in the low light. \"It doesn't bother me, and I'm glad it didn't bother you.\"\n\n\"It's not my religion.\" Lamprophyre wondered what the point of this conversation was. She listened to the woman's thoughts and caught one that startled her so much she didn't hear the woman's next spoken words. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"I said, it seems dragons are more generous with each other's faults than humans are.\" The Sister of the Red took a delicate bite of soup. \"I doubt a dragon would shun another dragon over a difference of religious opinion.\"\n\n\"We wouldn't, but it's not the same.\" Should she bring it up? Challenge the woman? \"What's it like, doing what you do?\" she asked.\n\nThe Sister of the Red smiled. \"Interesting. I've always enjoyed sex, and I enjoy power, and this life lets me have some of both. You might be surprised at how some men can be manipulated through sex without their even knowing it. Though I know nothing of dragon sexuality, so perhaps it's not a surprise.\"\n\n\"I don't understand human sex. Rokshan won't talk about it. He says it's coarse to discuss it with someone of the opposite sex.\"\n\n\"I see.\" The Sister of the Red took another dainty bite of soup. \"Well, I'd be happy to explain anything you like, if you're interested.\"\n\n\"I am, actually. Not tonight, but some time when there aren't so many people I might have to pay attention to. But that wasn't what I meant.\" Lamprophyre took a deep breath. \"Were you spying on me from the start, or did Tekentriya take advantage of a coincidence?\"\n\nThe spoon, halfway to the Sister of the Red's lips, halted. She lowered bowl and spoon and gazed intently at Lamprophyre. Then she laughed. \"How long have you known?\" she said.\n\n\"Long enough,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Did Tekentriya think I was so dangerous? Or was it just curiosity?\"\n\nThe Sister of the Red shook her head slowly, still chuckling. \"The Princess Tekentriya is suspicious and clever, and I admire her for it. She sees in dragons a new power in Tanajital, and she wants to understand that power, control it if she can. I told her that was impossible, but I don't think she believed me. Control is something she holds dear, and the possibility of being at the whim of something she can't control, well, you see how that might frustrate her.\"\n\n\"What did you tell her?\"\n\n\"I'm a professional, Lamprophyre. I don't share my secrets with my marks, however much I might like them. But you needn't worry. I told her only what any observer might see\u2014what she would see if she had the time to come here and watch.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't know what to say. The revelation made her feel completely out of her depth. \"And that satisfied her?\" she managed.\n\n\"For now. I think if dragons were to take a more active role in Gonjirian politics, she would increase her scrutiny. Fortunate for everyone you don't intend that, yes?\" Her red lips curved in a secretive smile.\n\n\"I don't\u2014\" Lamprophyre exhaled slowly, turning her head so her hot breath didn't touch the woman. \"You'll stop now?\"\n\n\"Why, because you know my secret?\" The Sister of the Red leaned forward slightly. \"Tekentriya will send someone else if I tell her I've been found out. Someone you won't know to suspect. I think we'll both be happier if I continue to make my reports\u2014I'll go on eating here, and you'll know to put on a good face whenever I'm around.\"\n\nFinding Tekentriya's next spy would be simple, now Lamprophyre knew such a thing was possible, but the idea of having to search every human who entered the embassy wearied her. And she liked the Sister of the Red, despite her continuing wariness of the woman. \"I agree,\" she said. \"But it would be a bad idea to try to deceive me again.\"\n\nThe Sister of the Red laughed. \"I'll remember that.\" She turned away to face southwestward, setting her bowl on the ground. \"It's getting dark. I wonder if it's dark enough for the ceremony?\"\n\nLamprophyre followed her gaze, imagining a line extending all the way from the embassy to the Archprelate's palace. She didn't know where they held the ceremony. She'd only seen the narrow strip of white bricks\u2014narrow by her standards\u2014that ran in front of the Archprelate's palace when she'd arrived there days ago with the Archprelate perched behind her shoulders. That had been barely big enough to fit her, and certainly couldn't hold a host of ecclesiasts. But she'd seen an enormous field like the training grounds spread out behind the Archprelate's palace, and now she imagined it covered in bright green grass trampled flat by the feet of hundreds of ecclesiasts.\n\nIt occurred to her to wonder if there were ecclesiasts elsewhere in Gonjiri, if they felt left out because they couldn't attend the ceremony. Suppose one of them were the next Archprelate, and couldn't be named for that reason? But if that were a problem, surely the High Ecclesiasts would do something about it. It was fun to imagine those ecclesiasts drawn to Tanajital without knowing why, arriving just in time to participate in the ceremony, and then having that light fall upon them, declaring them Archprelate.\n\n\"How does it work?\" she asked. \"Is the light visible to outsiders, like a lantern shining through a gap in a wall?\"\n\nThe Sister of the Red nodded. \"Almost. The skies glow when the light appears. We won't see Jiwanyil's light, just its reflection.\"\n\nLamprophyre eyed the clouds, which had begun gathering shortly before sunset in preparation for the coming storm. They were still thin and gray, heavy enough only to dim the light of sunset and too high to reflect the lights of Tanajital, if there had been any; the city was remarkably dark tonight. Towers rising between the embassy and the Archprelate's palace were thin gray fingers reaching for the clouds, their gilded tops shining dully as they caught the last rays of light.\n\nShe and the Sister of the Red watched in silence as darkness fell. Depik didn't come to light the lanterns, but Lamprophyre didn't worry. It felt right that Tanajital should lie in darkness on this night, waiting to see what light Jiwanyil would send.\n\nThe courtyard was still. Lamprophyre heard Bhakriya putting the children to bed, though only Abhit and Kavari; Rassika had joined Lamprophyre at some point, standing next to her in silence and looking southwestward as well. The beggars had all either left or were sitting quietly here and there throughout the courtyard. Lamprophyre breathed shallowly, not wanting to disturb the stillness with even the smallest noise.\n\nThen Rassika grabbed her hand. In the distance, faint light glowed, reflecting off the clouds as if someone had lit a lantern and was now trimming it to glow ever brighter. The light increased until the clouds were as white as if lit by the sun. A sigh ran through the courtyard, from the beggars to Depik and Bhakriya to Rassika and even to the Sister of the Red. Lamprophyre watched in awe as the light shifted with the movement of the clouds. It didn't look like anything special, if you didn't count how no lantern available to human or dragon could make a light that large. And yet it gave off an indefinable peace with its light, a sense of wonder even Lamprophyre could feel.\n\nThe light lasted for no more than ten beats, but no one moved in all that time. Then the light faded as steadily as it had appeared, and Tanajital was in darkness again\u2014for half a beat. Lights, ordinary small lanterns, sparked into life throughout the city, marking the streets and the towers and the distant city wall. Lamprophyre made way for Depik to light the embassy lanterns. Rassika released her hand and walked away silently into the embassy, heading for the back door and her bed. Lamprophyre gave the distant clouds one last look, then nodded to the Sister of the Red and turned away. She pretended she didn't see the silvery marks of tears on the woman's face.\n\nShe settled in for the night, tail curled around her, wings covering her, head pillowed on her arms. Tomorrow she would learn who the new Archprelate was. It wouldn't be Preyanka. It might be Khadar, though she echoed Rokshan's hope that Jiwanyil wouldn't be so cruel\u2014to Khadar, if not to Gonjiri. Probably it would be someone she'd never heard of. Someone who until a few beats ago had been nothing but an ordinary ecclesiast and was now responsible for an entire country's spiritual well-being. How had she or he felt when that light appeared? Lamprophyre couldn't imagine it.\n\nLamprophyre, someone whispered.\n\nLamprophyre sat up and looked around, dread rising within her. That had been no earthly voice, much as she wanted to believe some stranger had crept into the embassy to speak to her.\n\nLamprophyre, the voice said, you have been chosen.\n\n\"Stones,\" Lamprophyre cursed in a whisper. Ward against the voice in darkness, the prophecy had said, but how?\n\nListen to me well, the voice said. I will\u2014\n\n\"No,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You're not welcome. I will not listen.\"\n\nThe voice chuckled. You have no choice but to hear me.\n\nDesperate, Lamprophyre did the only thing she could think of to block unwanted thoughts, something all dragons were taught to do as part of learning mental listening etiquette: she recited the first poem that came to mind. \"Oh, the dragonet/Has never yet/Been taught to fly or warble;/But the dragon who/Flies straight and true/Will sing of slate and marble!\"\n\nShe couldn't hear the voice anymore, but she had a feeling it was just biding its time. She went into the second verse, madly running through her options. She knew more poetry than anyone, and she could outlast the voice. But what if that was false? Suppose the voice had greater endurance, and could afford to wait for Lamprophyre to become exhausted? She needed a different plan.\n\nMother Stone, she pleaded silently, protect me.\n\nThe voice leaped on her moment of inattention. Mother Stone cannot save you, it said. Listen to me. I will give you everything you ever desired.\n\n\"I already have that,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. The voice had given the Third Ecclesiast her every desire, and\u2014but no. It hadn't. There had been one thing the voice couldn't give her, and Lamprophyre had known what that was.\n\n\"Jiwanyil!\" she shouted. \"This is your prophecy. Stop this creature, now!\"\n\nGreen light blazed around her, surrounding her so she could see nothing beyond it. The voice shrieked, a high, shrill sound that pierced Lamprophyre's heart and made her ears ache. Then it was gone, and the light was gone, and Lamprophyre came to herself to find she was lying flat on her face in the embassy, breathing in the scent of the hard-packed, dead earth that was its floor.\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes and took a few beats to appreciate the way her heart sent blood speeding through her body, how her lungs drew in and expelled air, how her mind was her own and not touched by the voice of some evil entity. Then she pushed herself upright and looked around. The embassy was dark and quiet and empty of anyone but herself. The voice, when she probed the corners of her mind, was gone.\n\nShe began shaking and curled in on herself to control it. That thing had spoken to her from Stones knew where, it had known her name, and nothing she could do could make it leave. It had taken divine intervention by a god not even her own to send it screaming away. Lamprophyre felt certain that intervention had been permanent. The voice wouldn't touch her again.\n\nShe felt sick. She'd called on Mother Stone and received no response. Was that because subconsciously, she hadn't expected to? Mother Stone had never spoken to her or to any dragon in Lamprophyre's whole life, and Lamprophyre knew no stories of that ever happening. It wasn't something Mother Stone did; she was a guardian and a refuge, but took no active role in her children's lives. It didn't mean Mother Stone wasn't real.\n\nUnless it did.\n\nLamprophyre violently shook her head to dispel the awful thought. Mother Stone loved her, she was sure of it. And it was just that she'd seen Jiwanyil take action in exactly those circumstances that she'd thought to call on him. Knowing he was real wasn't the same as believing in him, in the sense of worshipping or giving him her allegiance. It wasn't a betrayal of her own faith that she'd called on Jiwanyil.\n\nShe made herself think of more practical matters. If this voice was going to keep trying to overwhelm people, they needed a more reliable defense than calling on Jiwanyil or reciting poetry. A better ward. That wasn't something she\u2014\n\nIt came to her in an instant. The chlorite artifacts. Those made it impossible to hear thoughts; what if that extended to preventing someone from putting thoughts into your head? She was almost out the door before she remembered it was too late for any adepts to be reasonably burst in on, and she didn't know many adepts at any rate. Going to Manishi was out of the question. Lamprophyre settled back down and calmed herself. Time enough to do this in the morning.\n\nWhich left only the question of the entity itself. It had felt very old, and very clever, and very sure of itself. But that was all she knew. She didn't know what kind of creature it was, whether it was human or dragon\u2014please, Mother Stone, not dragon\u2014or something so alien they didn't have a name for it. She didn't even know if it had a body. Maybe she should have spoken with it long enough to learn what it wanted. No, that was a bad idea, because suppose a longer communication would have given it power over her?\n\nIf you can hear me, she thought, and I hope you can't, but if you can hear me\u2014I will stop you.\n\nNothing replied. She closed her eyes and made herself relax by mentally reciting the longest and most boring poem she knew. At first, the idea of sleep seemed ridiculous, but as time passed, she found herself struggling to remember the lines, and gratefully drifted off.\n\nThe last thing she remembered, in a haze so profound she thought she'd imagined it, was a voice saying, I am coming. And the skies will burn.\n\nSneak Peek: Ember in Shadow\n\nLamprophyre perched atop the highest tower in the city of Tanajital and surveyed the landscape below. The last rays of the sun tinted the stone and plaster of the buildings orange, warming the city despite the coolness in the air. Winter was coming, creeping over the lowlands so slowly Lamprophyre hadn't realized the weather was changing until it already had.\n\nShe gazed past the city wall, built of pinkish granite blocks even a dragon would have trouble lifting. The fields that had been golden with crops last spring and then turned verdant green with the rains of summer were dry and bare now, waiting for humans to lay in new crops. To the west, the Green River ran slow and shallow, its name even less appropriate than usual as winter drew near.\n\nShe'd rather be home in the mountains for winter, her favorite time of year. Snow covered the bare crags, softening their lines and giving the dragons something to roll around in. When storms raged, the flight took shelter in the many caves dotting the peaks, some of them natural, some hollowed out by dragons over centuries. The females heated stones with their fire and made the caves cozy and comfortable, and the dragons entertained each other with poetry recitation or drawing on the walls. Sometimes the oldest dragons told stories of what they remembered, taking the flight's imagination back in time almost to the Great Cataclysm. Lamprophyre always remembered her father Aegirine at this time, how he'd buried her laughing in snowdrifts when she was small and flung snowballs at her when she grew too large to be buried. She looked forward to winter every year.\n\nThis year, she wasn't so sure. She hadn't seen any of the signs of winter she was accustomed to, just changes that might have meant anything. First, the constant rains of summer had lessened and then disappeared, drying the air slightly. Then the sun had gradually shifted its position southward, and the brutal heat had diminished with it. Now, only three twelvedays from the shortest day of the year, the sun no longer beat down with such punishing heat, and the nights actually verged on chilly.\n\nEven so, chilly wasn't the same as cold, and there was no way snow would fall on Tanajital. Lamprophyre looked at all the landmarks she was now so familiar with. The palace with its dozen gilded roofs, tawny in the light of the setting sun, surrounded by rich green parkland of trees and grass. The stone mountain of the city guard headquarters, a symmetrical pyramid of square segments that might have been cut from the granite by dragon claws, and the great plaza in front of it. The Archprelate's palace, low and squat except for the spire piercing its center, reaching for heaven. And, just north of where she clung, the dragon embassy, with its blue roof and matching painted decorations. She was too distant to smell supper cooking, but she imagined it anyway.\n\nShe let go of the tower and fell about a dragonlength before snapping her wings open to soar over the streets and houses of the human capital. Flying was wonderful no matter where she did it, but it was especially fun to listen to the amazed thoughts of the humans below, just within range of her mental hearing. It had been months\u2014she prided herself on finally understanding human measurements of days and time\u2014since dragons had come to Tanajital, and almost all the humans were used to them by now. Lamprophyre rarely heard fear from them anymore.\n\nShe coasted along above the wide street that ended at the embassy, which had once been a customs house for human trade, and landed neatly on the roof ridge beam to look down into the courtyard. There were more humans than usual, beggars come for a free meal, but Lamprophyre never knew what made the difference. So long as they had enough soup, it didn't matter.\n\nShe climbed down the rear of the embassy and entered the dining pavilion near the kitchen. Depik looked up when she loomed over him. \"Five minutes, my lady,\" he said.\n\n\"It smells done now,\" Lamprophyre said, drawing in a big whiff of hot cooked cow, her favorite meal.\n\n\"It has to finish cooking outside the oven, you know I've told you that, my lady,\" Depik said with a smile.\n\nLamprophyre scowled, but half-heartedly. Depik's genius needed to be obeyed. \"I know. I just hoped for once it would magically cook faster.\"\n\n\"I'm sure magic can't do better than me.\" Depik chuckled. \"I'll bring it to you soon.\"\n\nLamprophyre proceeded to the main area of the dining pavilion and sat heavily in her accustomed place. Outside, Bhakriya was ladling soup into bowls, aided by young Rassika. \"Good evening, my lady,\" Bhakriya said over her shoulder. \"It's been a lovely day.\"\n\n\"If I were home, I'd be playing in the snow,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's so different here.\"\n\n\"What's snow?\" Rassika asked.\n\n\"It's what happens when rain freezes. It's light and very cold, like frozen feathers.\"\n\nRassika's puzzlement deepened. \"What's freezes?\"\n\n\"I\u2026it's hard to explain. It never gets cold enough in Tanajital for anything to freeze.\"\n\nRassika shrugged and picked up another wooden bowl. She'd changed so thoroughly since she and her baby sister Kavari had come to live with Lamprophyre it was hard to reconcile the clean, alert, helpful young woman with the dirty, frightened girl she'd once been.\n\nLamprophyre took a look around the courtyard. She didn't see any of her regulars, most of whom stood out in one way or another. Like Sumaan, the one-legged young man who'd been coming less often recently. Lamprophyre wasn't sure whether to worry about him or not. Maybe it meant he'd found work and didn't need a free meal so often. Darsha, the Sister of the Red prostitute who spied on Lamprophyre for Crown Princess Tekentriya, wasn't here either. But Lamprophyre didn't worry about her at all. Darsha was clever and capable and was almost certainly busy with a client.\n\nThe idea of paying someone to have sex with you was still utterly foreign to Lamprophyre, and not just because dragons didn't use coin. She tried not to judge humans by dragon behavior. It seemed wrong and unfair to expect humans to do everything the way dragons did. But sex for dragons was tied so closely to mental communication, to the intimacy of knowing another's thoughts, Lamprophyre had trouble not being judgmental. She reminded herself again that her best friend Rokshan had had sex without being married and it didn't make him a bad person.\n\nThe thought of Rokshan made her wonder where he was. He'd left last night saying only that today was reserved for family matters, but she'd thought he meant the daylight hours and that he'd join her for supper as he usually did. Lamprophyre sat up straighter as the creak of trolley wheels signaled Depik's approach with her cow. It wasn't as if she wouldn't see him tomorrow. She'd just gotten used to eating with him in the evenings.\n\nShe tore into her cow with more alacrity than usual. Hot juices ran down her chin, and she licked up what she could manage and mopped the rest with a clean cloth Depik provided. He was more concerned about her dining manners than she was, saying frequently that ambassadors needed to set a good example. Lamprophyre had grumbled about her manners being perfectly acceptable among dragons, but she'd understood his point. So she used the cloth and pretended she was a dainty human eating soup in the palace dining hall.\n\nShe'd never actually seen the palace dining hall. It was deep within the palace, which wasn't built to accommodate dragons. But Rokshan had described it, filled with candles so it was lit bright as day regardless of the hour, the tables set in a U with the king and his family sitting at the base of the U and the guests spread out along the two long sides. The open space between was for entertainment, dancers or musicians or performing animals. Lamprophyre never wished she could be human\u2014the very thought made her scales tingle with disgust\u2014but she did wish she could see the entertainments.\n\n\"Rokshan didn't send word he wasn't coming, did he?\" she asked between mouthfuls.\n\n\"No, and we haven't seen him, my lady,\" Bhakriya said.\n\nLamprophyre grumbled to herself. Rokshan was a prince and the youngest of five royal children. His family had many duties associated with ruling Gonjiri. He might be her diplomatic liaison, but that didn't mean he could ignore all his other responsibilities. Even so, she looked forward to seeing him every day and it made her irritable when she didn't.\n\nShe tore off a somewhat larger mouthful of cow and chewed vigorously. \"I suppose this ceremony has him preoccupied,\" she said when her mouth was mostly empty. \"This pair-bonding thing\u2026what did you call it?\"\n\n\"The royal wedding,\" Bhakriya said. She released the ladle with a small splash and turned to face Lamprophyre. \"It's so romantic. Princess Anchala and her betrothed from Sachetan\u2026it's like a storybook romance, the way he swept her off her feet.\"\n\nRassika scowled. \"I think it's silly. All that mush.\"\n\n\"You'll think differently when you're older, sweetheart,\" Bhakriya said fondly. Rassika scowled more deeply. \"Falling in love is the most wonderful thing in the world.\"\n\nLamprophyre heard Depik's thoughts sharpen and realized he was listening carefully to this. She considered half a dozen leading questions before deciding there was no good way to approach what she wanted to know, which was whether Bhakriya's feelings for Depik were as deep as his for her. \"For dragons too,\" she said instead. \"My parents loved each other very much. I hope I fall in love like that someday.\"\n\n\"Aren't you in love with Porphyry?\" Rassika asked. \"He's here all the time.\"\n\n\"No, Porphyry and I are just good friends and clutchmates,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I don't feel that way about any of the clutch.\" She listened to Bhakriya's thoughts, but heard nothing that might indicate she was thinking of Depik when she thought of love. Disappointed, she added, \"But there are lots of dragons near my age. I'm sure someday one will be right for me.\"\n\n\"You just have to be patient,\" Bhakriya said. \"I\u2026it's not important. But love is sweeter when it comes slowly.\"\n\nAsking Bhakriya to elaborate was probably a bad idea, given that her former husband had beaten her and tormented her, so whatever love they'd originally felt for each other hadn't lasted. Lamprophyre blocked out Depik's painfully clear thoughts and wondered, as she often did, whether it wasn't cruel to let him live in such close proximity to Bhakriya, if he loved her and she didn't feel the same. But it wasn't as if she could kick either of them out.\n\n\"I'll remember that,\" she said, and took a last bite of cow. \"Rassika, would you fetch me a slab of mica? The courtyard is too full for me to safely cross.\"\n\nRassika nodded and darted away. Lamprophyre cracked a bone and sucked out the delicious marrow. Rokshan's absence aside, this was a beautiful evening.\n\nShe accepted the mica from Rassika and chewed the brittle, easily fractured mineral happily. It crunched like tiny bird bones in her teeth, but without the tickling sensation of feathers. Depik took the remains of the carcass away without comment and without looking at Bhakriya. Lamprophyre felt so bad for him. She'd been so sure Bhakriya would see Depik's wonderful qualities and fall in love with him. But now it seemed Bhakriya wasn't interested in falling in love with anyone. Lamprophyre wished she could pummel Bhakriya's former husband for hurting her so badly, emotionally as well as physically.\n\nMovement at the mouth of the street caught her attention, and she sat up straight. \"Rokshan!\"\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" Rokshan said as he approached. \"Lots of ceremonies today, all of them centered on the families meeting. It's important everyone receive attention according to their status, which means negotiations and politeness and I thought I might actually die of boredom.\"\n\n\"I thought your family outranked Lord Torannum's. Doesn't that make it easy?\"\n\nRokshan lowered himself to sit beside her, his legs crossed under him. \"You would think so, yes? But a woman who isn't heir to a title takes her husband's rank, and there's always dispute over when exactly that transfer of rank takes place. And Torannum, Jiwanyil bless him, has a very status-conscious mother and a father who defers to his wife in everything. So Lady Risha makes every ceremony longer with her 'are you sure that's how it should be' and her 'of course I don't know how you do it in Gonjiri, but in Sachetan\u2026' and the way she clears her throat.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled back, amused, and took another bite of mica. \"I didn't think there was more than one way to clear one's throat.\"\n\nRokshan rolled his eyes. \"God's breath, Lamprophyre, the woman has turned throat-clearing into an art form.\" He stiffened his spine and put two fingers delicately over his mouth, and said, \"A-hem,\" blurring the syllables so the word was barely intelligible. Lamprophyre laughed and wiped crumbs of mica from her lips.\n\n\"But Torannum is nice?\" she asked.\n\n\"Very nice. He dotes on Anchala, but not in a servile way, and I think I like him best of all my brothers-in-law.\"\n\n\"I thought there was only one. Tekentriya's husband what's-his-name.\"\n\n\"Zekran, and you're not the only one who forgets about him. He's not a bad sort, just kind of a nonentity.\"\n\n\"I can easily understand how Tekentriya would overshadow anyone she's married to.\" Tekentriya, Crown Princess, was smart, powerful, domineering, and suspicious. It had been a surprise to learn she was pair-bonded at all, let alone that she had three children.\n\n\"Anyway, yes, he's the only living one. Manishi's husband Vorshan died of an illness years ago, and I disliked him intensely, if I can be allowed to speak ill of the dead\u2014\"\n\n\"You know that's not a dragon custom. Speak away.\"\n\n\"He was a braggart, and he and Manishi fought constantly, making everyone around them uncomfortable. They, of course, loved the fighting and didn't care what anyone else thought. I didn't wish Vorshan ill, naturally, but it was such a relief to have an end to the fighting.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I'm glad Torannum is a good man. I like Anchala.\"\n\nRokshan leaned against her flank. \"And Dharan escapes his doom. Though just between us, I think Anchala was only interested in Dharan because he was a challenge. Torannum is a much better match for her.\"\n\n\"Will the\u2026what did you call it? Will the wedding party come to the races tomorrow?\"\n\n\"That's the plan, yes. Lady Risha demonstrated the first genuine emotion I've seen from her when my father told her about it. It seems she's fascinated by dragons. You might want to stay away from her, because she's the sort of person who would ask for a ride and not understand a refusal.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. She swept the mica crumbs into a pile and pinched them into her mouth. \"Thanks for the warning. What about Khadar? Will he deign to grace us with his presence?\"\n\nRokshan tilted his head back. \"He and the other High Ecclesiasts are performing purification rituals with the Archprelate, readying the training grounds to be a suitable location for a royal wedding. Though he did say the Archprelate was sorry to miss the races. She's fond of dragons, too.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. Shevaan, the new Archprelate, was only in her mid-thirties and much more active than her predecessor, who'd been very old when Lamprophyre had known him. Lamprophyre had met the new Archprelate a few days after the woman's appointment, if you could call being touched by Jiwanyil's light an appointment, and hadn't known what to expect. But the new Archprelate had a winning smile and a friendly, open demeanor, and had said, \"Gonjiri is blessed indeed to receive such wonderful creatures. I hope you will feel welcome here.\" Lamprophyre, still smarting over several twelvedays' worth of insults and casual cruelties by ecclesiasts who'd felt themselves justified on religious grounds, smiled and bowed and said nothing. It wasn't this Archprelate's fault the former Third Ecclesiast had been corrupted by an evil entity into lying about prophecy, and Lamprophyre felt she could be generous.\n\n\"And Khadar's change of heart has lasted longer than I expected,\" Rokshan went on. \"He and I had a civil conversation this morning, and he never took a single opportunity to lecture me on the evils of consorting with dragons.\"\n\n\"I thought all that was over.\"\n\n\"Over as far as official doctrine goes. There are still plenty of ecclesiasts who believe dragons should worship Katayan. And the truth is, that makes sense from a certain perspective. The Lonely God Katayan has dragons to worship him for the first time in nearly a millennium, so I can see how some humans might think the fact that dragons don't would be a problem.\"\n\n\"Just so they don't nag me, or threaten my friends again, they can think whatever they want.\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"Are you racing tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Maybe once or twice. I'm out of practice. And no one's figured out a racing harness yet.\" Lamprophyre settled herself more comfortably, putting out a hand to keep from knocking Rokshan over. \"Though none of us are sure we're comfortable with the idea. It's not as if we need riders when we race.\"\n\n\"I admit my interest is purely selfish. I like the idea of racing with you. I just don't want to worry about being knocked off.\" Rokshan yawned. \"But I understand it might be undignified.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"We're all too young to worry about our dignity. Except Chrysoprase, who is awfully stodgy for someone only twenty-seven years older than my clutch.\"\n\n\"I didn't know she was here. Will she race, too?\"\n\n\"She and Massicot came down this morning to help build the obstacle course. It's going to be so much fun! Even if Chrysoprase is likely to win all the speed challenges.\"\n\nRokshan yawned again. \"I should get back. I didn't realize how sleepy I was.\"\n\n\"You could sleep here,\" Lamprophyre pointed out.\n\n\"No, the ceremonies start at dawn. Much as I'd prefer to stay.\" He got heavily to his feet. \"Give me a ride?\"\n\n\"You must be tired if you're that lazy.\"\n\nRokshan made a perfunctory rude gesture in Lamprophyre's direction. \"If you were in my place, you'd realize how exhausting all this social activity is.\"\n\nLamprophyre moved slowly into the courtyard, giving the remaining beggars time to get out of her way, and crouched to give Rokshan a leg up. It was almost full dark, and Depik had lit the lanterns illuminating the courtyard, but despite the dimness there were still plenty of men and women loitering. Lamprophyre flapped her wings a few times, hoping the humans would take the hint, then leaped into the sky, prompting a cry of exultation from Rokshan.\n\nIt had been a surprise to discover how much more she liked flying when she had a companion. It wasn't as if she were suddenly a more competent flyer, and as she'd said, dragons didn't need human direction to stay on course. But having someone to talk to was invigorating, and Rokshan loved flying so much it felt as if she'd discovered it all over again.\n\nShe dipped low over the palace, made a wide circle around the parkland as she descended, and alit neatly in front of the great front doors, closed now but still guarded by soldiers with halberds. Rokshan hopped down and said, \"I'll see you tomorrow, all right? And let the others know Torannum and his family would like to meet them. I'll see if I can't impress upon Lady Risha the impropriety of asking to ride a dragon.\"\n\n\"We'll be all right,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nShe watched until the great doors shut behind Rokshan before taking to the skies once more. With the light of the half-moon silvering the towers and rooftops, night flying wasn't very dangerous, not the way it was in the big open spaces between here and the mountains, but it still wasn't something Lamprophyre felt comfortable doing. And not because she felt unsafe; she had promised Hyaloclast, the dragon queen, that she wouldn't do it anymore, and keeping that promise felt important. Lamprophyre was sure that feeling didn't arise from her desire to please her mother, but instead came from a sense that the thrill of risking herself was\u2026childish, perhaps?\n\nIn any case, she hurried back to the embassy and settled herself in the hall. The courtyard had cleared during her short flight, and no one moved throughout the embassy grounds. Lamprophyre closed her eyes and listened to the thoughts of her household. Depik and Bhakriya were in the kitchen, washing up. Rassika was behind the embassy where the servants' houses lay, putting Bhakriya's son Abhit and Rassika's sister Kavari to bed. They were just like a little family, and if only Bhakriya\u2026but it was wrong to lay all of Lamprophyre's wishes on Bhakriya. If she didn't love Depik, that's all there was to it. And they'd all still care for each other regardless.\n\nLamprophyre sighed and lay down with her head pillowed on her arms. Time for her to stop wishing for the world to run her way and to accept the way it was.\n\nShe listened to the quiet sounds of washing and the idle thoughts of Bhakriya and Depik, both of whom weren't thinking anything more personal than how weary they were, but in a good way, the kind of weariness that comes from honest exertion and accomplishment. The courtyard dimmed further as the lights in the dining pavilion went out, and further still when Depik extinguished the lanterns flanking the embassy doorway. Then the night was still, with nothing but the distant hum of the living city to disturb the quiet.\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes and made one last mental check of her human friends. Ever since the night, months ago, she'd been poisoned by someone who'd sneaked into the embassy grounds and tainted her food, she'd had worries about something like that happening again. Only her fears weren't for herself, but for the others in her household. So every night, she listened to their thoughts to assure herself they were well. The children were asleep. Depik was thinking of Bhakriya. Bhakriya was thinking of her daughter Preyanka, a young ecclesiast living in the Archprelate's palace while she learned to control her prophetic powers. Everything was fine. She let herself relax until she gradually drifted off to sleep.\n\nShe woke abruptly, disturbed by a sound she couldn't remember, something that in her dream had been two hands clapping once. Pitchy darkness surrounded her, far darker than night ever was, and she blinked as if that might clear her vision. In her confusion, she could tell only that she was surrounded by people\u2014humans, they had to be humans because so many dragons wouldn't fit\u2014whose wordless thoughts were sharp and intent on moving silently. \"What\u2014\" she began.\n\nSomething grabbed her and twisted, making her scream in agony. All her bones grated against each other, muscles tore, and she tried to draw breath for another scream and found her lungs unresponsive. A high, keening whistle filled her ears, a shrill sound that felt like a needle drilling through her ears into her skull.\n\nShe felt as if she were falling, but the sensation went on and on without pause. Disoriented, she flung out her arms, desperate for balance. Her hands smacked the hard earth floor of the embassy. It felt strange, the surface grainier and rougher than before, and the smell of the dirt was distant, like the memory of a smell.\n\nThe hands wrung her again, and she smelled blood, faint as the smell of earth. She became aware that she was crouched on her hands and knees, and the floor still felt strange, as if she were suddenly aware of every particle on the clean-swept surface digging into her scales. The humans' thoughts intensified, and she heard stop her screaming and wake the others just as giant hands, far larger than any dragon's, took hold of her again. Someone shoved a large wad of cloth into her mouth, and when she reached up to remove it, those giant hands grabbed her wrists and hauled her to her feet.\n\nShe felt weak, so weak her legs wouldn't support her, and as off-balance as if her wings were frozen numb and unresponsive. She tried to break free of the giant, but then something struck her hard across the side of her head, and she saw sparks. My eyes work fine, she thought crazily, and then something smooth and cold touched the center of her forehead, and despite everything, she fell helplessly into sleep."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Jane Austen's Dragons 3) Netherfield",
        "author": "Maria Grace",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "regency",
            "dragons",
            "romance",
            "female protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Nippy March air scoured Elizabeth's face as the mews' uneven paving stones assaulted her feet in her dash to Darcy's carriage. She pulled her green cloak tighter around her shoulders, her fairy dragon, April, safely nestled amongst her hood's folds. The sun's first rosy rays barely peeked over the horizon, not yet having their warming influence on the day.\n\nSaying her goodbyes to Georgiana and Pemberley in the cellar dragon lair below Darcy's London townhouse had been the right decision. Forcing everyone to endure the morning nipping at ears and noses, fighting tears and melancholy, would have not made their parting any easier. Poor dears. Who was more distraught: Georgiana, for the loss of the sister she had just claimed, or Pemberley, now bereft of both her Keepers?\n\nThe two would be in good hands with Barwines Chudleigh, Lady Astrid, and the rest of the Blue Order officers taking them under their\u2014sometimes literal \u2014wings. There should be comfort in that. But still\u2014to be asked to walk away after only just becoming acquainted with them and the new sense of family they brought, even for the critical work the Order demanded! Beastly unfair. Even so, Georgiana and Pemberley maintained brave faces and did not cry; she would do the same\u2014at least while in their company.\n\nThe driver handed her into the plush carriage and shut the door. The entire coach smelled of him\u2014his shaving oil, his soap, his own particular scent. Him. She blinked the burning from her eyes. Beastly unfair.\n\nWarm bricks smoothed the edge off the chill, and a toasty lap rug lifted her to the heights of indulgence. Not that it was a far stretch to get there in Darcy's well-appointed coach. Thick squabs with supple leather covers, a table of sorts that pulled down from the sidewall, gleaming hardware\u2014not so long ago she would never have imagined traveling in such luxury.\n\nThis would be her lot as Mrs. Darcy. How easy it would be to become accustomed to excellent equipage and a refined home filled with minor dragons, not to mention another Dragon Keeper determined to do right by his Dragon Mates. Truly, what more could she dream of?\n\nPerhaps not to feel guilty for her good fortune.\n\nStill though, one issue haunted her. Would Mr. Darcy be as determined and devoted toward his wife as to the dragons? Papa certainly was not. But then again, none would suggest that a fair comparison.\n\n\"You are fretting again,\" April whispered, snuggling closer into her neck. Fluffy blue feather-scales tickled Elizabeth's ear.\n\n\"Are you cold? You can come under the lap rug if you like.\"\n\n\"You are warm enough for me. There are times\u2014occasionally\u2014that it must be nice to be a warm-blood.\" April tucked the tip of her beaky nose under her tail.\n\nElizabeth laughed and stroked April's head. \"I suppose you are right.\"\n\n\"But you should not fret. All is as it should be now.\"\n\n\"You have a most peculiar notion of how things should be. You do realize we are in search of a rogue dragon. My youngest sister has gone off with a man trying to make himself a Deaf Speaker. And my other sister is currently betrothed to a tentatively-approved Deaf Speaker, a man generally loathed by man and dragon alike. None of that seems exactly desirable to me.\" Elizabeth threw her head back into the squabs. Described like that, their situation had all the hallmarks of a Gothic tale in the making.\n\nApril nipped her ear softly. \"You forget you are betrothed to an excellent Keeper, away from that horrid, jealous Longbourn, and Keeper to an infant vikontes who will someday be a tremendous influence in the Dragon Conclave. I am entirely content.\"\n\n\"You have very decided opinions, my Friend.\"\n\n\"And you ignore too many correct opinions.\" April snorted, tickling the side of Elizabeth's jaw.\n\nShe made it all sound simple, but then dragons tended to overlook what was inconvenient to their particular agenda. Unfortunately, April's insistence did not change the difficult realities, no matter how much either of them wanted it. Elizabeth wrapped one arm tightly around her waist.\n\nThe carriage turned into the mews behind the Gardiners' house. They stopped at the back door near a laden luggage cart, Uncle Gardiner's horse tied to its side. Was it insurance he would have transport in case Papa became angry with him again?\n\nShe winced. Uncle should not have to think that way about Papa. But truly, was it surprising he did?\n\nRustle and Cait landed on the carriage roof. The driver greeted them in muffled tones. According to Darcy, the driver heard dragons but had no Dragon Friend. It seemed odd that one who heard dragons might not want to live with one, but apparently not everyone found draconic company appealing.\n\nBefore Elizabeth could leave the coach's warmth, Uncle helped Mary and Heather slide in beside her. Heather climbed inside Mary's generous furry muff, tucked her tail over her nose, and snored a musical fairy dragon snore\u2014adorable, like most things concerning fairy dragons.\n\n\"Do you think Longbourn will have already told Papa the news?\" Mary glanced over her shoulder as though looking for one of them.\n\n\"Since the majority is not in his favor, I somehow doubt it. I expect the duty will fall to you and Uncle Gardiner.\"\n\n\"I wish you would talk to him.\" Mary plucked at a tuft of silky brown muff fur.\n\nReally, that is what worried her? Elizabeth grimaced and clenched her teeth. Sharp words and sarcasm would not improve matters. \"I hardly think that possible, considering I am now a stranger to Longbourn estate.\"\n\nMary clapped her hands to her cheeks. \"Oh, Elizabeth, I am sorry! I cannot believe I forgot\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose it is a good thing I have not lest Longbourn become enraged over the trespass.\"\n\n\"You need not sound so angry with me. I meant no offense.\"\n\n\"Considering you gained what you most wanted whilst I have lost just as much and perhaps a great deal more, is it too much to ask that you would remember my situation? If for no other reason, as Longbourn's Keeper, it behooves you to pay attention to those things that affect your dragon.\" So much for avoiding sharp words.\n\n\"You need not sound so bitter. It is not as though you are without home or dragon. Are you not betrothed to a man of consequence both in the Blue Order and in London society?\" Mary turned her face aside.\n\nWas it possible Mary was jealous? She got everything she desired, and yet she still resented Elizabeth?\n\n\"You sought Mr. Collins. I had never considered Mr. Darcy until we stood in the Dragon Conclave, and I had little choice. That may not mean much to you, but it is material to me.\" Elizabeth knotted her fist under her cloak, relishing the cut of her fingernails against her palm.\n\nHeather stirred and opened one eye. \"You are not being very kind.\"\n\nGracious! Heather had never criticized Mary before.\n\n\"She is right.\" April poked her head out of Elizabeth's hood. \"Who are you to criticize if you are less perfect than her?\"\n\n\"That is all we need to hear on the matter.\" Elizabeth covered April with her palm.\n\nMr. Collins clambered in, Uncle Gardiner close behind, the coach rocking and swaying with their shifting weight.\n\nUncle pulled the door shut and rapped on the roof. The carriage lurched as the horses set into motion. \"With such an early start, we may well be at Longbourn before the family makes it down to breakfast.\"\n\n\"Remember, Papa is apt to be cranky before he has had his first willow bark tea and coffee.\" Elizabeth avoided looking at Mary.\n\n\"Then I shall not offer any news of importance until he is well dosed with his morning libations.\" Uncle winked. Though he smiled and seemed cheerful, something about the way he carried his shoulders\u2014but why would he not be tense, all things considered?\n\nElizabeth turned to Collins. \"How did you find your audience with Lady Astrid?\"\n\nHe still wore a wide-eyed look that might be permanent; at least the pallor had finally left his countenance, though. Probably a good thing. Watching him faint dead away yet again would not improve their journey.\n\nThe edge of his mouth pulled back in an expression faintly resembling a sneer. So much for any hope of a pleasing conversation. \"I must say, there is a great deal to accustom oneself to. So much intrigue and so many secrets within this Order of yours. A great deal of subterfuge is being practiced at all levels of society.\"\n\nAlready casting judgments and aspersions about the Blue Order? Surely the man was intent upon getting himself eaten by judicial decree. \"I suppose that is one way to look at matters. But I would argue it is in the best interest of both species that it continues. Prior to the Pendragon Treaty, we all tottered at the brink of destruction. When most of those who cannot hear are not able to accept the presence of dragons, much less live peaceably with them, what else can be done?\"\n\nCollins braced his feet on the floor boards and pressed into the squabs. \"I suppose that is the case. Certainly the need for secrecy has been impressed upon me\u2014and the dire consequences of violating it.\"\n\nUncle reprimanded him with a glance.\n\n\"Do not get the wrong idea. As I said, I understand the need for it all.\" He harrumphed softly and tucked his chin to his chest. \"Though, the standards are not equally imposed.\"\n\nThe hairs on the back of Elizabeth's neck prickled.\n\nApril crept out of Elizabeth's hood and perched on her forearm, prickly toes piercing her sleeve. \"The dumb one's implications are dangerous.\"\n\nMary glowered at April.\n\n\"He is deaf, dear, not dumb,\" Elizabeth whispered.\n\n\"No, he is dumb.\" April sent Collins an ear-nipping look.\n\n\"What is it saying? I do not like it growling at me.\" Collins nudged Mary with his heel.\n\n\"'She', not 'it,' and I would counsel you to remember basic etiquette whilst dealing with dragons. You might not be able to properly hear their voices, but they can perfectly comprehend yours. They take offence easily and are often not apt to forgive.\" Elizabeth restrained the urge to step on Collins' foot.\n\n\"Of course, forgive me. What is she saying?\" Oh, if he were not careful, April would peck that condescending smile right off!\n\n\"She does not like what you imply, sir. Nor do I.\"\n\n\"I am not surprised,\" he muttered to his waistcoat.\n\nApril's toes tightened on Elizabeth's arm. Any tighter, and they might draw blood.\n\n\"What am I to make of that remark?\"\n\n\"Simply that I am confused about how the Blue Order applies its regulations.\" His chest puffed a bit\u2014just like a dragon vying for dominance. He probably would not appreciate the comparison.\n\nSo self-satisfied and self-important \u2026 horrid man! \"It would behoove you to speak plainly, sir.\"\n\nApril growled, hackles rising. On the other hand, perhaps the best thing he could do was to stop speaking altogether.\n\n\"If secrecy is so valued, why have you not been reprimanded for allowing those outside the Order to hear those stories you were telling the Gardiner children? That seems a breach of all the secrecy directives, does it not?\" He carefully kept his face turned away from Uncle Gardiner.\n\nElizabeth's jaw dropped. April chittered so fast not even she could make it out. Heather peeked out from Mary's muff and joined in much more softly.\n\n\"Mr. Collins!\" Uncle stomped. \"You are hardly in any place to offer criticism when your own understanding is so meager.\"\n\n\"How can I perfect my information without asking questions?\"\n\n\"There is a difference, sir, between a question and an accusation,\" Uncle hissed like an angry cockatrice.\n\n\"Elizabeth cannot possibly be at fault\u2014in anything?\" Bitterness fairly dripped from Mary's words. \"She has always been such a favorite\u2014\"\n\nUncle slapped the squab beside him. \"You will cease this line of conversation and stop commenting on what you clearly do not comprehend. The unmitigated gall\u2014you have been tolerated\u2014not accepted mind you, but tolerated\u2014by the Order for less than forty-eight hours, and already you see fit to condemn? And you Mary\u2014you may have been Junior Keeper to Longbourn, but you were as happy as your father to drop everything upon your sister's shoulders and leave her to bear the brunt of Longbourn's care\u2014and his tempers\u2014on her own. You claimed it was Longbourn's preferences, but it was as much your own laziness as anything else.\"\n\nElizabeth winced. Perhaps she could take Uncle's horse the rest of the way.\n\nMary's face colored, and she stared at her hands. \"I fulfilled everything Papa asked of me.\"\n\n\"This amounted to nearly nothing. Examples of the kind of effort you should have put forth abounded. Despite your father's lackadaisical Dragon Keeping, he still provided you an excellent role model of devotion to the Order and Dragonkind, or did you even notice the time he spent in study and research?\"\n\n\"He never tried to teach me\u2014\"\n\n\"Were you a willing pupil? Did you attempt to truly apply yourself, or did you make yourself difficult to instruct?\"\n\nElizabeth pressed into the side of the carriage. No wonder the Gardiner boys were careful not to anger their father.\n\n\"I know enough\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014to do what? To be accepted by the Order? Yes, you know that much. But what could you possibly accomplish on your own? Could you meet a cockatrix on her own terms and come out the dominant female? Or introduce two cockatrice and keep them from killing one another? Can you soothe an amphithere's grief without her saying a word as to what troubled her or gain the loyalty much less the cooperation of a tatzelwurm? Would you risk your very life to save a wild-hatched firedrake on the slim chance it might imprint? Would you have known to call for a tatzelwurm to tend the wounds you received in the process? You may be a full-fledged Keeper now, Mary, but you are not Elizabeth's equal in ways you cannot begin to understand.\"\n\n\"So, that is all that matters\u2014dragons and nothing else? What of the people who Keep them and those who must live unknowingly around them? Do they count for nothing?\" Mary's voice turned sharp and thin as it did when she was near tears.\n\n\"What are you saying?\" The words barely escaped Elizabeth's tight throat.\n\n\"It seems the Blue Order gives little thought to people, particularly those who are, through no fault of their own, caught up in the dragon world. Has anyone ever considered how Mama's life has been manipulated by dragons and how little choice she has in the matter?\"\n\nElizabeth pinched her temples. \"She would not be mistress of an estate apart from Longbourn. The Bennets are only landed because the current Longbourn's brood mother chose them as Keepers to the estate. We are who we are because of the dragons.\"\n\n\"Not all estates have dragons. Consider Netherfield Park \u2026\" Mary clapped her hands to her face. \"Heavens, what is going to happen to Jane and Bingley? If there is indeed a rogue dragon there, but neither can hear it \u2026\" She fell back into the sidewall.\n\n\"I am going to Netherfield to see nothing untoward happens to them.\"\n\n\"What will you do?\"\n\nElizabeth shrugged. \"The same thing I usually do\u2014think like a dragon and act accordingly.\"\n\n\"What exactly does that look like?\"\n\n\"I never know until I am in the middle of it. It depends on so many things, starting with the dragon's species, age, the relationships with Keepers or Friends, other dragons or even animals in the vicinity, hunger, dominance, is there hoarding involved, has the dragon's territory been violated in any way\u2026\" Elizabeth raised open hands.\n\nMary's jaw dropped.\n\n\"Now you see.\" Uncle crossed his arms over his chest and sat back, self-satisfied.\n\nHow should one feel about what he had just done? On the one hand, his vocal support was gratifying, especially when Papa had never offered as much. On the other, how much would Mary\u2014and Mr. Collins\u2014resent Uncle's set down? Mary had shown a surprising amount of bitterness just now.\n\nWas it really resentment, though, or the voice of the tremendous pressure of the last few days? After all, worrying that the man one wanted to marry might be eaten by a dragon in a judicial action would be rather anxiety-provoking.\n\nElizabeth giggled.\n\n\"What is so funny?\" Mary's eyes bulged.\n\nElizabeth shook her head. \"A rather draconic joke, I am afraid. Not one most warm-bloods would find amusing.\"\n\nWas it telling that her own sense of humor had become positively cold-blooded? And if so, what did it mean?\n\nMary rolled her eyes and turned aside to the side glass where the outskirts of Meryton appeared on the horizon.\n\nIt seemed only a few moments later the carriage stopped at the border of Longbourn estate.\n\n\"Elizabeth cannot cross into Longbourn's territory.\" Uncle opened the door and jumped out. \"You and Collins may walk to the house from here or ride the luggage cart if you wish. I will accompany Elizabeth to Netherfield and take my horse back to Longbourn.\"\n\nCollins' brows wrinkled, definitely less than pleased, but he wisely chose not to remark as he ducked out of the coach.\n\nMary paused, staring at the carriage floor. \"I \u2026 I \u2026\"\n\nElizabeth touched her arm. \"It is a difficult time for us all. None of us is currently at our best.\"\n\n\"No, I suppose we are not. I hope \u2026\"\n\n\"So do I.\" Now was not the time for draconic bluntness. Diplomacy had its uses.\n\nUncle handed Mary down and made room for her on the luggage cart. He tied his horse to the back of the carriage and climbed inside with Elizabeth, signaling the driver to continue. \"I hope their pettiness has not upset you.\"\n\n\"I have long suspected those sentiments in Mary, so I am not surprised. I hardly count anything Mr. Collins says as significant. Even before he was aware of dragons, he rarely said anything sensible. Why would I expect that to be any different now?\"\n\nUncle snickered. \"Mary appears able to manage him well enough. Perhaps, between her and your father, they will be able to shape him into something the Order will accept.\"\n\n\"He seems anxious to please\u2014so I think it likely, especially since he is not clever enough to form designs upon the dragons. By all appearances, he only is concerned with the condition and convenience of his own skin.\"\n\n\"At least that assists us in motivating him.\" Uncle dragged his fist across his mouth. \"In all seriousness, though, have you a plan once you arrive at Netherfield?\"\n\n\"No, I have nothing specifically in mind, but a great many options. It all depends on the dragon and his\u2014or her\u2014temperament. I imagine this one is cunning, being able to steer clear of Longbourn to avoid a territorial war. Similarly, it cannot be a dominant dragon, or it would have tried to fight Longbourn for his territory. So, I do not expect it to be aggressive toward me\u2014it is unlikely it would chance upsetting Longbourn by harming me. On the whole, lindwurms are not very active dragons.\"\n\n\"And you are certain this is a lindwurm?\"\n\n\"Few species have the dexterity to write, and fewer are able to paint. Lindwurms are often capable of both. Lady Astrid sent me off with several tomes on the species to study, so I shall spend some of my time doing that whilst I explore the nooks and crannies of Netherfield\u2014and the cellars.\"\n\n\"Do you not fear there may be more poisoned rooms?\"\n\nApril popped her head up. \"One of the wyverns at Barwines Chudleigh's salon taught me how to smell for it. I will watch over her.\"\n\n\"You see, I will be well protected.\" She patted April.\n\nPray Uncle would not remark upon the wisdom of counting upon a fairy dragon for anything, much less protection.\n\nUncle harrumphed. \"I will send Rustle to you daily. Keep me abreast of everything. And if there is information you need from your father\u2014\"\n\n\"I shall not hesitate to seek help obtaining it. I promise. However, I do not expect that sort of problem. He will not permit his resentment to threaten his devotion to the Order or dragonkind.\"\n\nUncle did not look convinced."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Nicholls met them at Netherfield's front door. Tucked under a frilly white cap, her totally white hair made it difficult to detect where her hair ended and the cap began. She was young for her hair to have lost all the color but wore it as a badge of authority that none in her domain dared question. Of average height and build, she might be easily overlooked except for the efficient way she carried herself encouraged everyone to get out of her way and allow her to carry on with her business unquestioned.\n\nShe ushered Elizabeth and Uncle Gardiner inside, clearly uncomfortable. Did Mr. and Mrs. Bingley expect them? They had not sent word. How long would they be staying? Would Miss Elizabeth be returning to Longbourn? Were they there because of Miss Lydia's sudden departure?\n\nOne could hardly fault her many questions, but they needed to be addressed quickly before she formed opinions too strong to be persuaded out of. Still in the vestibule, Elizabeth, Uncle Gardiner, and April offered the official explanation, carefully crafted by the Blue Order.\n\nLydia had been called away to attend a sick relation. Elizabeth had been sent in her place to assist in preparing the house for its new mistress. Rooms must be cleaned and inventoried by Elizabeth herself with the staff to assist as she required.\n\nNicholls hesitated to accept that part of the story. Who could blame her? No one who knew Jane would believe she could be so exacting a mistress. Dragon persuasions could only go so far with most people.\n\nFinally April\u2014ingenious little soul that she was\u2014suggested it would be a gift for Jane to return to a home already arranged to her preferences. Moreover, Elizabeth was a most considerate and loving sister to attempt giving a gift on such a grand scale. Uncle Gardiner added his support to the notion, and their subterfuge was complete.\n\nThank heavens! But perhaps Mary did have a point about dragons imposing unfairly upon those who had no say in dragon affairs.\n\nUncle Gardner took his leave, and Nicholls showed Elizabeth to her chambers\u2014a lovely large room in the family wing. Her previous stay at Netherfield had been as a guest of questionable welcome, so she had not been in this part of the house, except fleetingly, in search of maps that might have led them to Pemberley's egg. Today she could stop and take in her surroundings.\n\nMorning sunlight streamed through a pair of tall windows, flanked by damask drapes in golds and blues, flooding all the nooks and corners with light. Subdued dragon imagery filled the spacious chamber and the attached dressing room, the kind that could easily be overlooked by the dragon-deaf, but stood out to anyone acquainted with the Blue Order. The feathers on the paper hangings in both rooms were not peacock, but amphithere. The paintings, landscapes like those hanging in the drawing room, contained tantalizing hints of draconic influence. Mahogany dragon claws clutched balls on the furniture's feet, resting on a burgundy carpet bearing subtle, swirling dragon silhouettes.\n\nOne piece might have been a coincidence, perhaps even two, but no one acquired so much dragon-inspired decoration without doing so intentionally.\n\nMoreover, this d\u00e9cor was not the work of a single generation. At one time Netherfield must have been a dragon estate. But what happened to its dragon? There had to be some record of it somewhere. Why did Papa not know? Or did he know and simply never saw reason to mention it? Why would he keep it to himself, though?\n\nAlone in the roomy chambers, the weight of the last se'nnight descended upon her, slowly forcing her to the floor. A rogue dragon might well be slithering in the cellar below her, one with the potential to destroy the fragile fabric of dragon society. If the country fell into dragon war, everyone had so very much to lose. She wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her forehead on them. It all fell to her to find a way to resolve the matter without bloodshed\u2014warm or cold. How was she to accomplish that?\n\nApril nestled against her cheek and trilled softly, the song soothing the edge of her angst. \"Darcy should be here with you. He would not have permitted them to speak to you so.\"\n\n\"Darcy is doing what he must. And Mary \u2026 she just does not know any better.\" But April was right\u2014it would have been nice to have Darcy there with them. Very nice. He might not know what to do better than she, but he would make her feel like she had a chance at figuring it out.\n\n\"She should, and she will. I will have a talk with Heather. She cannot permit her Friend to act so inappropriately.\"\n\nElizabeth swallowed back a giggle. \"Do you really think Heather capable of such a thing?\"\n\nApril tossed her head in the fairy dragon equivalent of an eye roll. \"You listen to me.\"\n\n\"I suppose you have a point.\" Elizabeth pushed up from the floor. The weight was still there, making it difficult to move, but what choice was there? \"But we should set all that aside for now and find some place to begin.\"\n\nApril flittered to the bed post. \"We should ask the Netherfield dragons what they know.\"\n\n\"Netherfield dragons?\" There were local dragons whom she did not know?\n\n\"The local fairy dragons are too twitterpated to be of any real use. But there are several minor wyrms\u2014wild ones\u2014who live in the woods near the folly, and there is a shy puck living near the garden. If there has been a major dragon about, they are likely to know.\"\n\n\"So near the house? Does not that seem rather close for a wild dragon?\"\n\n\"She is not wild. She was Friend to a tenant who lived on the estate some time ago\u2014perhaps in your grandfather's day. After her death, she chose to stay but did not find another Friend. She is very timid.\" April landed on the windowsill and pointed toward the garden with her wing.\n\n\"Do you know if there is anything the puck particularly likes?\"\n\n\"You mean does she have a hoard? Yes, pucks always have a hoard. Her Friend was a seamstress. She loves yarns and threads of all sorts. The wild fairy dragons often try to steal from her to make their nests. She is not fond of my kind.\"\n\n\"Well, who could blame her? There is hardly a greater offense to such a dragon than to steal from their stash. Might she like some of the pretty cherry-colored twist I have in my work bag?\" Elizabeth rummaged through her work bag and held up the twist. April chirruped. \"Then lead me to our shy friend, and we will see what she has to say.\"\n\nNicholls might be a meticulous housekeeper, but the kitchen garden was nothing short of a disgrace. Rabbits\u2014a great many of them, it seemed\u2014had the run of it. April led her to the edge of the woods near the garden. Several rabbits bounded out of the underbrush and into a hole concealed by a tall spiky holly bush.\n\n\"Here.\" April hovered over the holly.\n\n\"Are you certain? Did you not see those rabbits?\"\n\nApril snorted. \"She is a peculiar dragon.\"\n\nThat was not saying very much. Most dragons had distinct peculiarities. \"In what way?\"\n\n\"She is a puck; they are all a bit odd.\" April landed carefully on the uppermost holly branch, daintily avoiding the prickles.\n\n\"If you mean they hoard valueless things, I have come prepared.\"\n\n\"That is not the only way in which she is odd.\" April pulled a prickly leaf from between her long toes. \"It is the rabbits. She likes rabbits.\"\n\n\"Likes rabbits? Like Pemberley and her dogs?\"\n\n\"At least the dogs live in her dragon lair.\"\n\nElizabeth crouched and peered into the hole. \"You mean the puck lives in the warren with the rabbits? Pucks are house dragons\u2014unless she has been mistreated, why would she\u2014\"\n\n\"She is peculiar, just as I said. She protects her rabbits from foxes and the like. Considering the state of the garden, the warren seems to be doing very well under her care.\"\n\nElizabeth headed back to the house.\n\nApril flew after her. \"Are you giving up already? That is not like you. What is wrong?\"\n\n\"I am not giving up, only realizing we must take a different approach. I scared the rabbits back into their holes, so it is unlikely she will come out and talk to me, at least not today. So I must smooth the way for a proper introduction.\" She shoved the kitchen door open. \"Help me convince the cook to provide me with some vegetables.\"\n\nApril cheeped her skepticism but assisted in persuading the cook it was the most natural thing in the world to offer Elizabeth carrot tops, broccoli trimmings, cauliflower leaves, and a few apple slices\u2014and not question why.\n\nElizabeth brought the kitchen castoffs to the holly bush and arranged them prettily on an old, slightly battered tin plate. She added the cherry-colored twist at the front edge of the offerings and pushed it close to the rabbit hole.\n\n\"Now we wait.\" She stood and dusted off her hands. \"Do you think you can persuade Cook to regularly prepare such a plate?\"\n\n\"The woman is quite a gudgeon. It will not be a problem, especially since she has little taste for vegetables herself. Do not ask her to part with anything sweet though. That would have her balking very quickly.\"\n\n\"I will keep that in mind.\" It was not surprising the puck would not be personable and ready to talk, but it still was a bit disappointing. Where were creatures with Lydia's personality when she really needed them?\n\nThe folly of that thought became evident a few minutes later when April introduced her to the wild wyrms living in the deeply shaded woods, near a broken-down folly. Though the weather-worn look might be considered fashionable, in this case it appeared more a matter of neglect than intent. The roof had caved in, and the trim around the doorway dangled from a single nail. A strong storm might bring the entire structure down. At least the nearby mossy stone bench remained solid enough for her to sit on while talking with the pair of forest wyrms that appeared out of the leafy floor litter at April's first call.\n\nAnd talk they did! Heavens above, did those wyrms chatter.\n\nUnusually friendly for wild dragons, they curled up their long scaly bodies at her feet. Dark and dappled, they blended into the dead leaves and loam.\n\nThe dominant one, a male, dared rub his furry leonine face against her ankles, almost like a cat. Such an audacious move, trying to mark her as his own territory. April dove at him, pecking at his head until he kept a respectful distance. The smaller female proved less apt to claim territory but far more vocal.\n\nIn furry-purry voices they talked over one another, offering their observations on any and everything above ground. They spoke so fast, it was hard to make out most of what they said.\n\nMost Dragon Mates thought fairy dragons were brainless dolts\u2014those people had never tried to talk to wild wyrms. But when Elizabeth asked about the night of the Netherfield Ball, they became very, very quiet, staring at her with wide almost frightened eyes.\n\n\"Have you heard any dragon voices that are new to the territory?\" She leaned down close to hear them.\n\nThe smaller one turned on her tail and disappeared.\n\nThe male rose up like a cobra ready to strike, his mane extended like a hood, and hissed. He wove back and forth, hypnotic in his rhythm. \"Not a safe question. Do not ask again. You do not want to know such things. You do not want to know.\"\n\nElizabeth allowed her eyes to glaze over, and she nodded blankly\u2014exactly as the wyrm would have expected. No point in allowing him to realize she was immune to his efforts, at least not now.\n\nHe shoved his head under her hand. \"Scratch ears.\"\n\nApril chittered overhead whilst Elizabeth scratched behind his ears.\n\n\"Come back and bring us chicken feet.\" He slithered away.\n\nApril flew after him, scolding.\n\nElizabeth leaned back and chewed her lip. For having told her nothing, the wyrms had implied a great deal.\n\n\"The nerve of that creature, expecting you to bring them treats after they have been so utterly presumptuous and unhelpful.\" April landed on her shoulder, feather-scales puffed.\n\nShe scratched under April's chin. \"He overstepped himself, but we have only just met. It is hardly surprising he should be testing the waters.\"\n\n\"You have lived here all your life. He well knows your reputation. Why else would they be demanding chicken feet?\"\n\n\"It was hardly a demand, dearling. I have not taken offense, and neither should you. If you think about it, it was rather considerate of them to have told me how to motivate their assistance in the future.\"\n\n\"You are far too forgiving of their rudeness.\"\n\n\"They confirmed the presence of a lindwurm here.\"\n\n\"They said nothing of the sort.\"\n\n\"Considering the male was driven to persuade me away from my questions, I take that as an indication of a lindwurm's presence. They are bullying fellows toward smaller wyrms.\"\n\nApril harrumphed. \"It seems odd to celebrate the discovery of what we already knew.\"\n\n\"We also know this lindwurm desires secrecy\u2014so he must not be especially aggressive. Moreover, knowing it can read and write, I expect we are dealing with a scholarly dragon, not one interested in dominating a territory. So we should be able to reason with it.\"\n\nApril hovered in front of Elizabeth's nose. \"You liked all those arguments with Chudleigh's friends at her salon?\"\n\n\"They did get a mite heated to be sure, but I still find it preferable to discuss issues rather than worry about being eaten in a fit of pique.\"\n\n\"I suppose there is that.\"\n\nUpon their return to the house, Nicholls met Elizabeth with household books in hand and invited her to the housekeeper's office. Neat and snug, it resembled Hill's office at Longbourn with shelves of linens and china lining one wall and stores of the more expensive food stuffs along another. Near the windows, a utilitarian table doubled as Nicholls' writing desk. Plain, white walls made the space bright and emphasized the lack of decorations\u2014and dragons\u2014in the room. Unlike Darcy House whose staff was largely, if not exclusively Dragon Friends, it seemed the Netherfield servants were not.\n\nNicholls opened her books and set to work, efficient and businesslike as the best housekeepers were. With Elizabeth in residence, meals must be considered. The regular laundry day was approaching; would the new Mrs. Bingley desire that schedule be kept, or would she rather the task wait until she returned? Would Miss Elizabeth prefer the maids cleaned the rooms as she inventoried them, or should they proceed on their own?\n\nThe meeting required several hours and far more quick thinking than Elizabeth preferred. Running a household was her last priority, but since it was the guise she used for being here, somehow she had to find the wherewithal to pretend it was her only purpose. Exactly the sort of subterfuge Mr. Collins found distasteful.\n\n\"What do you wish done with Miss Lydia's things, Miss?\" Nicholls shut her book\u2014did that mean she was finally finished?\u2014and looked at Elizabeth expectantly. \"She left quite a bit in her chamber. I am surprised she did not take it all with her. Perhaps she was expecting to be back soon? Do you think she will want it sent along to her?\"\n\n\"I am not sure. Perhaps it would be best to let me pack it up. I should be able to sort out what to do with it.\"\n\n\"I will take you to her room.\"\n\nLydia had been ensconced in the guest wing, near a servants' passage. Not a high-status room, but according to Nicholls, it was what she wanted. And of course, Lydia nearly always got what she wanted. But why would she deviate so far from her usual demand for the best?\n\nWith a quick curtsey, Nicholls trundled off. April launched from Elizabeth's shoulder and buzzed about the narrow chamber.\n\nThough relatively small, two windows brought sunshine into the bedroom, making it cheery and bright. Clearly it had been decorated with young female guests in mind. Gauzy blue drapes fluttered in the slight breeze that slipped through the edges of the windows. Dainty floral paper hangings matched the bed curtains and coverlet. Fairy dragons that looked a great deal like little birds hovered over the flowers on the paper hanging. Yet another landscape hung over the little bed. Subtle carvings of wyrms coiled around the legs of the oak dressing table. Even here, dragons influenced the d\u00e9cor.\n\nSo much Lydia had left behind! That was not like her; she preferred to bring far more than she needed on any trip. Even if they were walking to town, she somehow contrived to bring an extra-large reticule with who-knew-what inside.\n\nTwo trunks remained in the room. The closet was full of gowns\u2014why did she think she would need a ball gown and an evening dress to manage the house whilst Jane was away? Several morning dresses and day dresses were there as well. It seemed she might have only taken one of each with her? How strange.\n\nElizabeth opened the smaller of the two trunks. One stocking and one glove lay crumpled within. Careless girl! No doubt she would miss those. What chance their mates were tossed in the press near the closet? She tugged open the sticky drawers.\n\nOf course, with no one to watch over her, Lydia had not bothered to fold her body linen; it was shoved in the drawers. It would serve Lydia right if Elizabeth tossed it carelessly into the trunk, but no, she had been taught far too well. Mama would be lecturing in her head for weeks if she did such a thing.\n\nApril cheeped a little laugh as Elizabeth roughly folded the linen and packed the trunk. Not as neat as Mama would have liked, but enough that she need not feel guilty about it. So very much left behind. What was Lydia doing without all her clothes?\n\nNone of this made sense.\n\nWhat was that? Elizabeth withdrew a slim mustard-yellow book from between two petticoats. Did Lydia actually keep a commonplace book? She sat on the edge of the bed in a sliver of sunbeam and flipped it open. A journal? Who would have believed Lydia had the patience to record her thoughts in a journal?\n\nOnce again Mary's voice rang in her ears. She had no right to read Lydia's private meditations. One more compromise of human courtesy in favor of dragonkind! But no, this was about more than the dragons; it was also about Lydia's safety and protecting the family reputation. Those reasons demanded she read the journal.\n\nShe tucked the nagging guilt into a relatively harmless corner of her mind and turned the page. Typical Lydiaesque ramblings, pages and pages of it. Much like her conversation\u2014effusions of fancy which said very little. She skipped several pages.\n\nWait, what was that? Suddenly everything was different. Lydia's enthusiastic scrawl was replaced by an odd, cryptic mix of numbers, letters and symbols. A cipher? Why would Lydia be using a cipher in her journal?\n\nShe turned back a few pages until she found the place where the writing had changed and read the entries just prior.\n\nA new game Wickham was teaching her: to play like British spies. In that way they could write letters to one another, and no one would know to accuse them of impropriety. Heavens, what subterfuge! What utter disrespect toward her parents, toward society in general!\n\nThis was the sort of thing Mr. Collins should be concerned about, not judging the efforts of the Blue Order!\n\nHad Mr. Darcy not already disabused her compassion toward Mr. Wickham, these entries would surely have accomplished it. She forced her eyes back to the page. Apparently, learning the code was difficult for Lydia. Wickham became impatient with her mistakes. What better way than to practice in her journal? And so the gibberish began.\n\nShe scanned the remaining pages, but no helpful key to the encryption existed. Perhaps it was elsewhere \u2026 the shelves and drawers, between the mattresses, under the bed, even the undersides of all the furniture and drawers. Nothing.\n\nWhy? Why did the key have to be the one single thing the feather-pate would choose to bring with her? Elizabeth shut the trunks with a bit more force than necessary.\n\nAt least she would have a puzzle to keep her occupied when she could not sleep\u2014which seemed highly likely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Darcy pushed the sticky window open, its panes grimy and smudged. Another night spent in a roadside inn. At least this one was tolerable. Yesterday, they had billeted in an abandoned barn when Fitzwilliam deemed the inn unsafe. Given Fitzwilliam's tolerance for uncivilized conditions, that pronouncement was one not to be ignored.\n\nTonight's room was little more than a closet, like the other inns, but a modicum cleaner. A bed shoved into one corner of the room bore linens that did not appear too stained. The two upholstered chairs and something that barely qualified as a table occupied most of the space near the fireplace. Barely enough space to walk between them, but it was an improvement over several of the places they had stayed.\n\nWalker should arrive soon. Hopefully he would bring better news than had come out of Brighton. For one as prone to talk as Wickham was, it was suspicious that none\u2014human nor dragon\u2014had any inkling of his intentions or his whereabouts. He always boasted of his plans and how he would never get caught. Always. How was this the only time he managed to keep his mouth shut? A man did not change his stripes any more than a dragon changed his scales. What was afoot?\n\nWalker swooped in, bypassing the window sill altogether and alighting on the back of Fitzwilliam's chair. He turned his back toward Darcy, a signal to release the satchel straps. Darcy quickly removed the bag and scratched between Walker's wings as Elizabeth had taught him.\n\nWalker shot him an appreciative I-am-glad-you-finally-learned look.\n\nFitzwilliam poured a small glass of brandy and placed it near a plate of cold meat on the table. \"When you are ready.\"\n\nWalker flapped to the table and swallowed the topmost piece of meat whole. Not an attractive sight, watching the large lump slide down his gullet.\n\n\"You can stop to chew. We will not have to leave this place in haste. It is not like the last inn we tried to stop at.\" Fitzwilliam slapped Darcy's back.\n\nWalker glared, more for show than anything else, but chewed the next slice.\n\n\"What has you so anxious?\" Darcy poured two more glasses.\n\nWalker gulped his brandy without spilling a drop\u2014quite an accomplishment for a creature with a sharp curved beak. \"The minor dragons of the countryside have gotten word of a wandering rogue dragon, not governed by the Blue Order.\"\n\n\"How? From where?\"\n\n\"Who knows? It could have come direct from the Conclave\u2014such news would be difficult to keep quiet. Even if the major dragons said nothing, all it would take is a single talkative fairy dragon or a wyrm of some sort.\" Walker tossed a small slice of meat into the air, catching and swallowing it in a single movement. \"The general unrest grows as word spreads, despite the Court's assurances that the rogue was clearly limited to Hertfordshire. The major dragons I have encountered are reassuring their Keeps that the Blue Order still maintains the peace among dragonkind. But the disquiet among the minor dragons still unsettles them. If the major dragons lose faith that all the other large dragons will honor the peace established by the articles of the Pendragon Accords, I fear it may not be long before a botched greeting or an unexpected visitor sets off aggression that could escalate quickly.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell and damnation!\" Fitzwilliam slapped the arm of his chair. \"Sir Patrick, the Minister of International Dragon Relations, has been working with Vice Chancellor Torrington for the better part of a year to coordinate the visit from a representative of the Eastern Dragon Federation. They worked out the details of the travel three months ago. The envoy is traveling the underground tunnels, meeting our agents at designated checkpoints. So far all is well, but if there is anything certain about dealing with international politics\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014and dragons\u2014 it is that nothing is simple.\" Darcy dragged his hand down his face. \"Dare I ask\u2014how do you know this?\"\n\n\"Father thought with my army experience I might be of use to Sir Patrick. I think he is trying to groom me for the office eventually.\" Fitzwilliam's expression suggested there was a great deal remaining unsaid.\n\nDarcy blew out a breath through puffed cheeks. \"A lovely, simple plan with so many possible wrong turns.\"\n\n\"In the literal sense.\" Fitzwilliam clutched his temples. \"I will write to Sir Patrick tonight.\"\n\n\"I will take it to him directly.\" Walker paced along the edge of the table. \"Only because these are unusual days, mind you. Do not get in the habit of thinking of me as some messenger bird.\"\n\n\"You saw Cait at Longbourn?\" Darcy sat near Walker.\n\n\"Yes, and she is as well as can be expected. I am sure Lady Elizabeth has said something to that effect in her letter. But the strain of dealing with that fool Collins is wearing on Cait's temper. Longbourn is not helping either, cranky lizard. He tried to stop me from entering his territory.\"\n\nDarcy winced. \"Did you inflict too much damage?\"\n\n\"There was no blood shed, but you will find a few of his head scales in the satchel. Keep them in case you need to remind him of your dominance.\"\n\n\"You took his head scales?\"\n\nWalker snorted something that sounded much like a snicker. \"He was too angry to be in good form. Cait assisted me. She was delighted to take out her vexations on such an appropriate target.\"\n\nDarcy covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. \"Everything is dominance with dragons.\"\n\n\"We are not unlike men in that. You simply choose to demonstrate it in a warm-blooded way. We are much quicker the point.\" Walker smirked, no doubt still enjoying his supremacy over Longbourn. \"Enough talk. I need to eat. Pour me more brandy and read your letters.\"\n\nFitzwilliam saluted and refilled Walker's cup. Darcy sorted the messages and handed Fitzwilliam several, taking his own to a stained, overstuffed chair in the darkest corner of the room. It stank of the last sweat-soaked person who had sat there, but it was the closest thing to privacy to be had tonight.\n\nBest deal with Lord Matlock's letter first.\n\nLovely. Now, in addition to seeking out Wickham, the Chancellor of the Order expected him and Fitzwilliam to visit all the Dragon Estates along the way and quell rumors of rogue dragons attacking the countryside whilst quietly gathering news of any discontent regarding the recent Dragon Conclave. What were they? Blue Order spies? He pinched his temples hard. At least Matlock had not demanded they deviate from their planned journey to do his bidding. That was something.\n\nBut why was he worried over the response to the Dragon Conclave? Was it Pemberley that caused him concern or Collins? Perhaps it was the test of the new marriage articles that resulted in two essentially ordered betrothals? Or something else entirely?\n\nGah! Now was not the time to speculate on the state of the Dragon State. Focus on the task at hand and deal with the rest as it came.\n\nHe cracked open the blue sealing wax on Elizabeth's thick letter. The penmanship was firm and feminine, strong, but evocative of feeling. Just like her.\n\nMy dear sir,\n\nNo doubt you are aware that we have made it safely to Hertfordshire. Uncle Gardiner, Mary and Mr. Collins are welcome guests at Longbourn house, but I am not. I have taken up residence at Netherfield. Longbourn himself is displeased that I am in the area at all and continues to refuse to allow me in his territory, as is his right. My mother and Kitty have been successfully persuaded that it is right and proper that I take over at Netherfield for Lydia who is now visiting an ill relation.\n\nI never realized how convenient it might be to have a wealth of relatives in ill-health.\n\nHe chuckled. She probably quirked a brow with a wry little smile as she wrote that.\n\nI was able to attend holy services on Sunday to hear Mary and Mr. Collins' banns read. No objections were raised, thankfully, but after that, things became rather interesting.\n\nApparently, Lord Matlock wrote to my father with instructions that our banns be read both at my family's parish and at the Kympton parish near Pemberley. So, whether we were ready for it or not, our betrothal is now part of the public record. It took me entirely by surprise as my father had not deigned to warn me. April and Rustle are pleased with the turn of events though. I hope you are not too disquieted by them.\n\nNaturally, my mother was delighted at the announcement, though somewhat vexed that she only learned the news with the rest of the parish. She has taken every effort to enjoy her success as she has called upon her friends this week. Whether that means you will become her favorite son, I cannot say. She is very fond of Bingley, and Collins has the advantage of allowing her to live out her days at Longbourn. Still though, Netherfield is merely leased whilst Pemberley has been in your family for generations, and that is decidedly in your favor.\n\nSurely that provoked another arched eyebrow as she wrote it. Would that he could see it for himself.\n\nHe dragged his hand down his face. Their betrothal\u2014and he was not even there to hear it for himself, to sit beside her and see her blush as their names were called, to see Mrs. Bennet congratulated on the spectacular match made by her daughter when it was in fact he who had made the better match. It would be difficult to forgive Matlock for his interference.\n\nBut then again, it was a subtle way of announcing to any who had not attended the Conclave that all was well with Pemberley\u2014both the dragon and the estate. Probably a necessary precaution considering the current climate.\n\nAt least Elizabeth gave no indication she was put out by it all. Would she tell him, though, if she were? Probably. She did possess draconic directness in spades. Not that he would dare complain about it. It was one of her most remarkable, and even endearing, traits.\n\nCait visits me regularly as much I think to get away from the chaos that is my ancestral home as for me to monitor her progress. Her gravidity is obvious now, and flying great distances is demanding for her, so the fact that she comes to see me speaks volumes.\n\nIn addition to my other tasks, I have acquired, with my uncle's help, a book from Papa's library on eggs and egg laying, penned some one hundred years ago. It was tucked away on one of the upper shelves in a dark, cobwebby corner that Papa rarely consults. While old, it is the only thing I have, so I shall study it carefully. Do not tell Walker, but I also have arranged to talk to a nearby poulterer and a falconer to see what I might glean from them. I know he and Cait might be offended. I am aware they are not birds, but I am just searching for anything that might allow me to assist her most effectively when the time comes. There are, after all, no dragon midwives available.\n\nHe guffawed\u2014a dragon midwife! Had anyone ever considered such a profession for a species that laid eggs? But somehow it seemed only natural that she would. No wonder Walker wanted Cait to remain near her.\n\nHopefully, I will have better success in that endeavor than I have had with the reasons I am here in the first place. The Netherfield dragon has kept steadfastly hidden from me although I have heard rustling in the cellars which I am certain is dragon-based. The local forest wyrms avoid all discussion of the creature, but they do not appear in fear of their lives which suggests the dragon is not unduly aggressive and has an ample supply of food. I am not sure what he is eating, though, which is no small source of concern.\n\nThe Netherfield puck still remains shy and unwilling to talk to me despite the regular offerings I leave for her and her friends. While these sorts of meetings often require time and patience, I fear I may run short of both.\n\nLydia left a great deal behind at Netherfield, which I find puzzling. But the greatest puzzle is her journal in which she has begun to write using a cipher provided by Mr. Wickham. I am having little luck deciphering it, but I have included a faithful copy of several pages in the hopes that you or perhaps F will have better success with it. I do not know that it will offer useful information, but for now it is the best that I have available.\n\nHe pulled out the copied pages. It would be too much to ask for them to be immediately decipherable\u2014nothing could be so easy. But she was right; Fitzwilliam might be able to make sense of them. At the very least, it would be something to do before they ran mad with all their failures.\n\nI hope your trust in me has not been misplaced as I have accomplished very little. I warn you, April has scolded several times about how she thinks you should be here\u2014with us\u2014instead of on the road so far away. When you make your way back to us, I fear your ears may be at risk, so you may want to consider investing in a hat with solid earflaps before you arrive.\n\nWhile I have assured her of the legitimacy of your travels, at times I think she is right. Your company would be very welcome.\n\nEver yours, E\n\nShe would welcome his company! He glanced over his shoulder. He was probably grinning like a fool, and neither of his companions would fail to notice and remark on it. No, it was not a declaration of deepest love, but it was certainly a positive sentiment, one he would appreciate and relish for what it was.\n\n\"So what news have you? Is it too much to expect your betrothed has already subdued the rogue dragon and is bringing him into the Blue Order?\" Fitzwilliam wandered over and leaned against the arm of Darcy's chair.\n\nWalker snorted from the other side of the room. \"I would have told you directly had that been the case.\"\n\n\"So then, what has your fair one to say?\"\n\nDarcy refolded her letter. \"As expected, our rogue is a shy creature and not yet ready to communicate openly. But there are signs that he is not looking for a territory battle, nor is he in danger of resorting to starvation hunting.\"\n\n\"Good news to be certain. I expect my father will be impatient for more than that, but it is a start.\"\n\n\"And she sends work for you to keep you out of trouble.\" He handed Fitzwilliam the cryptic pages. \"She found her sister's journal. Recently Lydia began writing in a cipher that was given to her by Wickham. Probably to send her covert messages under the family's noses. In any case, Elizabeth cannot make anything of it but thinks you might. There might be nothing there\u2014\"\n\nFitzwilliam snatched up the pages and brought them to the closest candle. \"But it is certainly worth investigating.\" He rubbed his hands briskly, his expression shifting to a subtle relish. Even more than Darcy, Fitzwilliam hated, loathed, despised being idle, moreover he had been complaining bitterly of exactly that for several days.\n\n\"So, oh great officer of the King's army, what say you? Is all abundantly clear and easily revealed?\"\n\nFitzwilliam's upper lip curled back. \"It is similar to several ciphers that we used on the continent, but not exactly the same. I should be able to sort this out, given a little time. I cannot imagine Wickham would suggest something complicated to that Bennet sister.\"\n\n\"She is a silly bit of fluff, to be sure, but do not underestimate her intelligence.\" Walker muttered through a large mouthful.\n\n\"Indeed?\" They both stared at the cockatrice.\n\n\"Just because she did not demonstrate it to you does not mean she is unintelligent. Silliness and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. Remember, her family actively encouraged her ridiculous behavior. An intelligent girl could easily work that to her benefit\u2014and I think she did.\"\n\nDarcy scrubbed his face with his palms. \"The last thing we need is a clever woman working with Wickham. He is bad enough on his own. With a crafty partner, I shudder to think what he might be able to accomplish.\"\n\nFitzwilliam turned from the ciphers and grunted under his breath. \"This is not your fault, Darcy. A rogue dragon in Hertfordshire has nothing to do with you or what happened to Pemberley.\"\n\n\"I grant you that much, however\u2014\"\n\nFitzwilliam rolled his eyes and shook his head.\n\n\"Do not look at me that way! You know it is true. Had I been more diligent in dealing with Wickham's treachery in the first place\u2014\"\n\n\"How many times do we have to go over this? It is not your fault. You packed him into the militia just as my father told you, without hesitation. What more could you have done?\"\n\n\"I should have realized sooner what he was about.\"\n\n\"That would have meant you would have had to stand against your father who found Wickham entirely agreeable. Honestly, Darcy, neither you nor I have the fortitude to stand up to our fathers\u2014both formidable men not prone to brooking opposition. Had you insisted your father give up Wickham, you might well have found yourself on very thin terms with him\u2014banished to London, away from Georgiana. You might well have been unable to protect her from eloping with Wickham. Where would we be then? Torment yourself all you like. You will get no support from me in that endeavor. I am convinced that no man could have prevented the egg from being stolen, and no others but you and Miss Elizabeth could have managed to rescue an already-hatched drakling from the unthinkable.\" Fitzwilliam harrumphed and turned his shoulder toward Darcy, focusing on the coded pages.\n\nDarcy leaned back in his chair and stifled a sigh. No point in giving Fitzwilliam more to critique. It was not that Fitzwilliam's arguments were utterly baseless. He had made several excellent points, especially about the likelihood that Wickham's elopement plans would have succeeded. But still \u2026\n\nLittle would make Fitzwilliam understand. Perhaps if he had a dragon to whom he was connected. Then he might\u2014the connection changed the way the world looked in subtle but real ways.\n\nPerhaps he might befriend one of Cait's clutch\u2014if the timing could be worked out. If only he might be a Keeper though\u2014he would make an excellent Keeper, far better than his brother who was already destined for the position.\n\nAlthough Darcy suspected Cownt Matlock preferred Fitzwilliam to his brother, that alone was not grounds to overthrow inheritance laws. There were many men\u2014and women\u2014who would make better Keepers than those who held the role\u2014the image of Anne de Bourgh flashed in his mind\u2014and would never have the opportunity. Perhaps England would be better off finding a way to intentionally assign Keepers to their Dragon, but not without disturbing the entire order of society. Inheriting their Keepers was a compromise the dragons made for the sake of peace.\n\nAnd none of this brought them any closer to finding Wickham and Lydia, or the rogue dragon, or reuniting him with Elizabeth. That could not happen any too soon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Elizabeth pushed up from the narrow cellar steps. Sitting hunched on cramped stairs that offered no padding encouraged the damp cold to sink into her joints, leaving her bones aching like an old woman's. How many hours had she stared at the boxes and barrels and trunks piled along the dark, dank walls, hoping the stubborn dragon would reveal himself? Far too many.\n\nWithout April's help in persuading Nicholls otherwise, the housekeeper would be thinking Elizabeth well on her way to becoming daft by now.\n\nPerhaps she was. Stubborn old lizard.\n\nShe stretched her back and shoulders and trudged upstairs. Sleep. It was dark and late and sleep was the only thing left to do for now.\n\nAt least her room was warm and the featherbeds were soft. She slipped under the blankets and dreamt of dragons.\n\n\"Wake up, but be still,\" a sweet voice whispered in her ear. Elizabeth stopped herself just in time and leaned into April just a little bit.\n\n\"Open your eyes, but do not move otherwise. On the dressing table, near the window.\"\n\nElizabeth's heart raced, but she held her breath, trying to remain as still as possible. Slowly, carefully, she peeked her eyelids open, turning only her eyes toward the window.\n\nSilhouetted in the moonlight, a beagle-sized dragon stood on the dressing table between the mirror and water jug. Clearly female, the four-legged, long-tailed dragon sported a frilled hood, half-extended, ready to help her appear larger if startled. She turned her head this way and that, examining, considering the situation.\n\nApril rested her chin on Elizabeth's cheek, trilling softly. \"You are welcome. Pray come in.\" Sometimes her song had the same effect on dragons that it did on people.\n\nThe puck's hood relaxed a mite.\n\n\"We have some dried meat you might share with us if you come closer.\" April flitted to a closed box on the bedside table between the bed and the dressing table. She lifted the lid with her long toes.\n\nThe puck raised her snout and took a deep breath. Her long tongue flashed out and licked her lips.\n\n\"I would like to share with you.\" Elizabeth pressed into the featherbed and turned her head just slightly toward the shy dragon, the bed linens rustling softly.\n\nThe puck jumped back, her hood flaring to full spread. Moonlight shone through the thin membrane, giving the impression of a large lace veil.\n\n\"You are quite lovely like that.\" Elizabeth whispered, rolling to her shoulder, but keeping her head on the pillow.\n\n\"Share with us.\" April plucked up a sliver of dried meat and tossed it to the dressing table.\n\nThe puck gobbled it up with a flick of her long tongue and smacked her lips.\n\n\"There is more if you come closer.\"\n\nShe crept to the edge of the dressing table, and April threw her another sliver.\n\n\"More?\" What a soft, silky voice the puck had.\n\nApril hopped a piece of meat to Elizabeth's hand, and she tossed it, trying not to move too much or too suddenly. The treat bounced against the dressing table stool\u2014the intended target\u2014and hit the floor.\n\nThe puck chased it down and swallowed it whole.\n\nElizabeth threw another piece, closer to the bed and rose on her elbow.\n\nIn a single movement, the puck scooped up the tidbit and scrambled onto the bedside table. Nearly eye-to-eye with Elizabeth, she jumped back hissing slightly, hood flaring again.\n\nApril hopped to the table and handed a shard of meat directly to the puck. \"I am April, Friend to Elizabeth. She has been leaving the plate for your furry friends and the silk twists for you. She is safe.\"\n\n\"I am not blind. I know.\" The puck gobbled down another sliver of meat.\n\n\"Would you tell us your name?\" Elizabeth asked, April trilling softly in the background.\n\nMoonlight shimmered off the puck's bright eyes. She sat and scratched a wing nub with her hind foot. \"I am Talia.\"\n\n\"I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Talia.\" Elizabeth nodded, not enough to concede dominance, but sufficient to make clear she was no threat. \"I understand you were once Friend to a seamstress who lived nearby.\"\n\n\"I was. She died.\"\n\nApril offered another shaving of meat, but Talia was slower to take it.\n\n\"And she had no kin to take you in?\"\n\n\"Her daughters could not hear, and they did not like the furry hoppers she kept, either.\"\n\n\"So you took over their care\u2014for your Friend?\"\n\nTalia bobbed her head, her hood relaxing.\n\n\"That is a very noble thing for you to do, worthy of a great Friend.\"\n\n\"I like them. They are warm and quiet and soft.\"\n\n\"Indeed they are. And their noses are very cute when they twitch. Do their whiskers tickle as much as they look like they do?\" Elizabeth sat up very slowly.\n\n\"Not so very much once one becomes used to them.\"\n\n\"You protect them, I imagine? There are many enemies about, dogs, foxes, stoats \u2026\"\n\nTalia shuddered. \"Yes. Too many creatures find them satisfying to eat.\"\n\n\"Do you need to protect them from other dragons as well?\"\n\nTalia leaned back and hissed. \"You want to know if the blue one wants to eat them?\"\n\n\"Blue one? Is he a large dragon?\" A blue lindwurm\u2014those were rare in England, usually from the continent. But that made little sense.\n\n\"Too large to be bothered with my furry hoppers.\" Talia glanced toward the meat box.\n\n\"That is good to hear. Has he been about for a long time?\"\n\n\"He does not like you very much.\"\n\nApril withdrew more meat and set it near Talia.\n\n\"I had no idea. I have never met him. How can he already dislike me?\" Elizabeth moderated her tone carefully. It would not do to have the puck think her angry.\n\n\"Every dragon in the county knows you have made Longbourn very irritated.\"\n\n\"Longbourn has been very disagreeable?\"\n\nTalia swallowed the meat with a little shiver. \"Horrid. He has been taking his temper out on us all.\"\n\n\"I am very sorry to hear that. It is wrong of him to behave so.\"\n\n\"It is wrong of you to upset him. Anyone with sense would know that.\"\n\n\"Sometimes dragons are wrong.\"\n\nTalia snorted, poking her nose into the box and pulled out a large piece of meat.\n\n\"Is the blue one afraid of Longbourn?\"\n\n\"Don't know.\" Talia muttered through a mouthful. \"The blue one does not like to fight, though. He has a special way to keep peace with an angry neighbor.\"\n\n\"When you see the blue one again, would you give him a message from me?\"\n\nTalia skittered back, hood flaring a little. \"I will not tell him anything that will make him angry with me.\"\n\n\"I would never ask you to do such a thing. I just hope you would tell him that I am not as terrible as Longbourn makes me out to be. I would very much like to have a conversation with him.\"\n\n\"I might.\"\n\n\"If I continue to put out plates for your furry hoppers and perhaps a little colorful twist for your hoard, might it be more likely?\"\n\nTalia turned her back but cocked her head as though in thought. \"Worsted wool.\"\n\n\"You want wool?\"\n\n\"To line my nest. It helps keep my hoppers warm.\"\n\n\"Then I shall endeavor to acquire you a whole ball of worsted wool.\"\n\n\"I might talk to him.\"\n\nApril laid another piece of meat at Talia's feet. She gulped it down and scurried away into the darkness.\n\n\"That was interesting.\" Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her knees and laid her chin on them.\n\nThey were dealing with a large blue lindwurm, possibly from the continent, who did not like to fight and was cowed by Longbourn's temper, but was creative enough to find some way to placate him. Much of that was good news. She sighed\u2014full-out dragon war was a little less likely, but she still needed to talk to the lindwurm. Perhaps little Talia would help. It would certainly be worth a trip into town later this morning for worsted wool.\n\nThe next day after breakfast, she placed a plate heaped with vegetable trimmings, a ball of green worsted wool, and a bobbin of blue thread under the holly bush. Hopefully Talia would appreciate the offerings and would not become greedy at her good fortune. It was difficult to tell with pucks, but she seemed to be a largely retiring and agreeable sort, so that boded well.\n\nThe garden and warm sunshine were a pleasant change of scenery. Far too many hours had been spent combing through dark, dusty rooms, servants' passages, and sitting in the cellar. Not that those had been entirely unprofitable endeavors. She now had a wealth of paintings to study, some very modern-looking, a large scroll in rather messy dragon script to decipher, and a deeper appreciation for the draconic lineage of Netherfield itself.\n\nA book hidden away on the upper shelf in one of the small libraries had proven quite interesting. Apparently, the estate had been named in some of the original Pendragon documents that drew up the territory boundaries for the original English dragon population. A rather powerful drake had been the first Netherfield. He had served as the county's leading dragon. But all traces and records of him disappeared about two hundred years ago. What had happened, and why had his duties never been transferred to another dragon but left to fall by the wayside? Perhaps one of Papa's forefathers had recorded something in the Longbourn records about it. But it was not terribly likely, for only Papa and his father had been meticulous record keepers.\n\nShe would need to talk to Papa, but he seemed indifferent to her presence. None of her family had paid her much notice. Mama and Kitty were easy enough to forgive, subject as they would be to Longbourn's persuasions, but Mary and Papa were another matter.\n\nNo, now was not the time to become maudlin. No point would be served by that.\n\n\"Miss Bennet!\"\n\nElizabeth looked over her shoulder.\n\nOne of the scullery maids scurried toward her. \"Nicholls said you would want this directly.\" She handed Elizabeth a thick folded letter, barely stopping as she rushed to her next task. Nicholls did not believe in allowing the girls free time to get into mischief.\n\nWas that her style of management or a suggestion from the lindwurm so as to reduce the likelihood of discovery? Likely as not, it was a combination of both. Embracing draconic suggestions happened far more readily when it was in line with one's own inclinations.\n\nMary's precise and regular handwriting graced the neatly-folded missive. She closed her eyes and exhaled heavily. Was it wrong to feel a bit of dread? Mary's unpleasantness was totally understandable, but it was exhausting. Staring at it was not going to make it any easier\u2014may as well face the dragon quickly.\n\nThe wedding is Monday, March 23 at 9 o'clock. Pray come.\n\nWalker asked that I send this along to you. He is with Cait right now but will see you before he returns to Darcy.\n\nM.\n\nShe was invited to the wedding. That was more than she had expected. But did Mary actually want her there, or was it a matter of preventing questions as to why her sister, who was so close by, would not be at the wedding? Perhaps being at the wedding would make it easier to explain why she was not at the wedding breakfast. Oh, that definitely was uncharitable and not a worthy thought at all.\n\nEven if the frustrations\u2014and all told, the loneliness\u2014were eating away at her, it did not behoove her to indulge in that kind of thinking. Besides, folded within Mary's note was a thick letter from Darcy. She smiled in spite of herself, a little of the lonesomeness fading.\n\nShe hurried to the maze\u2014ironically where she had overheard Miss Bingley and Darcy talking all those months ago\u2014and found a stone bench in a sunbeam under a white wood arch. She curled up on the bench and leaned against the now bare lattice, the warmth of the bench sinking into her joints\u2014or was that the warmth of knowing the letter was from him?\n\nHe had written in ink this time. Hopefully that meant his accommodations were better and he was less hurried this time.\n\nMy dear Elizabeth,\n\nSince you inquired directly in your last letter, I am pleased to say, we are warm, fed and dry, and reasonably comfortable this time. I cannot pretend to be displeased that this segment of our journey has taken us past establishments that F deems safe enough for us to stay in. Although I loathe saying it, I am glad you are not with us presently. None of these places are fit for you. It gives me peace of mind to know you are safely at Netherfield. Somehow the thought of a rogue dragon there seems less dangerous than the ruffians we must rub shoulders with here. I realize that must sound a bit odd, all told, but I feel certain that you would agree.\n\nHe was right. She pressed the letter to her chest. Had anyone else ever understood her so well?\n\nI regret I have nothing in the way of good news to report from our efforts. Wickham and Miss Lydia seem to have disappeared without a trace. Neither man nor dragon has encountered them. It is unusual for Wickham to be so discreet in his movements. If nothing else, his typical failure to pay his debts usually makes him easy to trace.\n\nF is beginning to suspect that they did not make their way to Gretna Green after all. But we shall continue our efforts in this part of the country for a little longer to be absolutely certain.\n\nLord Matlock is making sure he gets the most out of our labors by having us visit the dragon estates along the way to keep a watch on the increasing concerns over the rogue dragon. Despite all pains to let people know that it is definitely contained in Hertfordshire (and pray tell me that I am correct in that assumption!), the very notion causes so much unrest that I am not sure we are believed.\n\nHad Papa any idea how dangerous the situation had become? Perhaps if he did, he would be more forthcoming with assistance. At the very least, Uncle Gardiner needed to be made aware of these changes.\n\nF has made a little progress in translating the pages you sent. He says the cipher appears to be based on one used in the army. I have included his partial translations as well as what he has deduced so far in terms of breaking the cipher. I am afraid that what he has gathered from your sister's journal is mostly concerning ribbons and hats and of little application to the current situation. Still, I am hopeful that you will be able to put what I have enclosed to good use.\n\nHave you been able to make contact with the Netherfield dragon yet? I had a thought in that regard. It may be a very bad one, but I trust in your graciousness not to laugh at me for it. There is evidence that the dragon is able to read and write. Have you considered perhaps leaving a written message for him rather than simply hoping he will grant you an audience? As I write this, it does sound ridiculous and perhaps it is, but I thought it worth sharing the notion with you.\n\nHe went on to discuss the sorts of things that people wrote of in regular letters. News of shared acquaintances and loved ones, in this case, dragons and Keepers. Georgiana and Pemberley were doing well. Though Pemberley missed them, the letters they had sent her were keeping her spirits up. She was making progress under the Blue Order tutelage in London, and now able to hold a pencil which was the first step in being able to write. In fact, the little drakling had insisted on making her mark on Georgiana's last letter. Perhaps it was not so normal to have a dragon signing a letter. But Dragon Keepers were hardly typical. Still though, the conversation was welcome \u2026 and warm and rather witty. He expressed himself very well on paper, even if he did not do so in person.\n\nShe set the letter aside and turned her face to the sun, eyes closed.\n\nHis idea about leaving a written message for the lindwurm was unconventional, but it was a good one. Since she had made no other headway, there was little to lose by trying it. The cellar floor was covered in soft dirt in which she could scratch a bit of dragon script that no one would recognize as a message. Much safer than chancing that a piece of paper might be picked up. Yes, she would try that tonight.\n\nShe ought to write to Darcy immediately and let him know. It would probably make him smile. His letter sounded so tense and yet so concerned for her. It would be good to send him some pleasing news, especially since there was so little to be had."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Monday morning proved to be a cool, refined sort of morning that did not call attention to itself for what it was, exactly what one wanted for a wedding day. Elizabeth executed her toilette with particular care, not that anyone would especially notice, but it made her feel better. One's sister did not get married every day. She had missed Jane's wedding, so she needed to enjoy Mary's\u2014what little of it she could participate in\u2014twice as much to make up for the loss.\n\nShe pulled her green cloak around her shoulders, and April settled into the hood. The little church was not so far away as to necessitate calling the carriage. If she used it, Mama would doubtless make a fuss over the fine coach and what a very fine thing it was that Elizabeth would be Mrs. Darcy. While it was expected that Mama should exult in her daughter's success in the marriage mart as it were, it was not fair to distract from Mary's day.\n\nShe steeled herself during her brisk walk, the chill fading as she warmed from the exercise. It returned, though, when she saw the church in the distance, the family coach nearby.\n\nPerhaps this was a bad idea. If she turned back now, none would be the wiser.\n\nBut no, Mary had invited her, and she needed to be there. With an especially deep breath, she made her way toward the chapel door.\n\n\"Elizabeth!\" Kitty, in her second-best green lawn gown, greeted her and took her hands. \"You look so very well. I am sorry you have missed all the excitement at the house. I know you have been ever so busy at Netherfield making things ready for Jane, but still it would have been nice to see you just once.\"\n\n\"Indeed she is right,\" Mama cut in. \"Missing Jane's wedding was indeed a sadness, but you do not need to make up for it by slighting Mary as well.\"\n\n\"She has more than made up for it by getting Mr. Darcy. He will be by far the richest and best connected of your sons. And the handsomest,\" April twittered softly.\n\nElizabeth cast a warning glance at her shoulder. It was not wise to push a persuasion too far.\n\nMama looked a little startled and stared at Elizabeth as though remembering something she had forgotten. Her expression softened and a very pleased, even self-satisfied air crept over her. \"But then, I am sure you are quite caught up in your own wedding planning. Do not forget you have a mother and sister quite willing to help you with that. Just think, you are to be Mrs. Darcy! What a fine, important lady you will be\u2014the wedding clothes you will need!\"\n\n\"I have planned nothing yet, Mama. Mr. Darcy is away on business right now, and we will not plan the wedding until after that is complete.\"\n\n\"We have hardly had time to order Mary's, you know. Just two weeks to prepare. I imagine we shall go to London yet to your uncle's warehouses, not that she will need as much as you to be sure. A vicar's wife can hardly compare to what\u2014\"\n\nThe vicar emerged from the door and beckoned them inside. Mama harrumphed softly and rearranged the collar of her pelisse. Kitty hurried to take her place near the front of the church with Uncle Gardiner who was serving as groomsman.\n\nThe little chapel looked exactly as it usually did. Plain white walls, with matching windows on each side, it smelled of age and damp and dust. Worn, dark wooden pews in two columns flanked the walls like soldiers waiting to march. The simple hexagonal pulpit would hold the vicar several steps up above the congregants. A completely unremarkable church.\n\nSomehow that was disappointing, even heartbreakingly so. Should not a place look remarkable on a day as life-changing as a wedding? Mary had said she, Kitty and Lydia had adorned the church with flowers when Jane wed Bingley. Did Mary not want them, or was she being overlooked once again?\n\nPapa grunted at her as he walked past her toward the back of the church, not even making eye contact. Was that his own preference or Longbourn's? Did the difference even matter?\n\nShe sat near Mama.\n\nMary approached the front of the church on Papa's arm, and the wedding proceeded exactly as the Book of Common Prayer set out that it should, completely ordinary and proper. Exactly as Mr. Collins\u2014and probably Mary\u2014would have it.\n\nWhat would her wedding with Mr. Darcy be like? Surely Pemberley would have to be present\u2014for the wedding breakfast at least if not the ceremony itself. The little dear would never accept being absent for the event that insured she would have her two Keepers permanently.\n\nElizabeth pressed her lips hard\u2014it was difficult to say what was more entertaining, the idea of the drakling throwing a tantrum in order to be allowed to attend the wedding, or figuring out how to bring a major dragon into the church. There was a chapel in the underground offices of the Blue Order\u2014perhaps it would do for the wedding. What would Mr. Darcy say to such a notion?\n\nShe tried to imagine him being disagreeable about it, but the image would not coalesce. It was simply impossible to see him so. He would not be the one to deny the baby something she so dearly desired\u2014and honestly, he probably would not deny Elizabeth, either\u2014even if it meant he had to procure a special license, the services of a Blue Order bishop, and they would be married in Pemberley's dragon lair. She pressed her hand to her chest. Yes, he really was the sort of man who would do that for her. Absolutely nothing like the dragon-deaf dolt who stood beside Mary.\n\nApril cuddled her cheek as though she could sense Elizabeth's thoughts and approved most heartily.\n\nThe vicar declared Mary and Collins man and wife, and they disappeared into the vestry to sign the marriage lines. Papa hovered near the chapel door, glancing alternately at the vestry door and at Mama as she trundled out toward the coach. This might be the only opportunity Elizabeth had to ask him about Netherfield. She slipped out of the pew and hurried to him.\n\nHe grunted at her. Lovely.\n\n\"Pray, have you any records on the history of Netherfield? I am quite certain it was a dragon estate at one time. Is it possible that there might be yet another dragon lurking about with a claim to the territory?\" She stood beside him, not quite looking at him.\n\nHis expressions shifted subtly, from something like disapproval to budding interest. Of course, dragon lore would draw him out when nothing else could.\n\n\"There was no major dragon in residence during my grandfather's lifetime, but the last resident owner was a Dragon Friend. I have several centuries of county records among my library holdings, though. I will examine them immediately and send you word of what I find.\"\n\n\"If that is too much trouble, you could have Uncle bring the books to me, and I can search them.\"\n\n\"They are part of the estate, and Longbourn will not approve of them being placed in your care.\"\n\nShe held her breath to hold back her sigh. He was willing to help her; that should be enough, even though it was not.\n\nMr. and Mrs. Collins emerged from the vestry, her arm in his. He looked satisfied\u2014with himself and with the proceedings. Heather perched in Mary's bonnet, a fluffy pink ornament that accented the pale pink of her best gown. Mary's cheeks glowed, by all appearances genuinely happy.\n\nHow ironic. After all her bitter complaining, did she realize that she was marrying the man she had hoped for because of draconic interference and that her wedding would likely never have happened without it? Now was probably not an appropriate time to mention it.\n\nMr. Collins slipped away to speak to Papa.\n\n\"Heather and I are glad you have come,\" Mary said softly.\n\n\"I hope you shall be very happy together and your marriage is all you have hoped for.\"\n\n\"I expect it will be. Even more, now that he is becoming aware of the true nature of the estate he will inherit.\" Mary glanced over her shoulder toward Collins.\n\n\"Has Longbourn officially acknowledged him yet?\"\n\n\"No. Papa wants to bring him to the lair for a formal introduction soon. With Cait's help, I am sure it will not be long. I have every hope that once that chore has been accomplished, things will settle down and be much easier for us all.\" Mary's eyes lost a little of their smile.\n\n\"Longbourn has been cross and cranky with you?\" Elizabeth touched Mary's elbow. \"Is there something I can do to help? I know a few things that tend to soothe his moods.\"\n\n\"Let us not talk of such things on my wedding day.\" Mary looked away as though Elizabeth had suddenly sprouted a large wart on her nose.\n\n\"You are invited to Netherfield should you ever wish to speak of it.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the invitation.\" She may as well have said she would never darken Netherfield's door.\n\nApril leaned very close and whispered, \"She is not like herself\u2014perhaps her resentment has been suggested.\"\n\nWas that possible? But by whom? Would Longbourn attempt such a persuasion? He had tried to persuade Elizabeth to marry Collins. If he would stoop to that, then he was certainly not beyond this. But why? Given that persuading a Keeper was forbidden in the first place, it seemed odd at best that Longbourn should go to the trouble of doing so just to get back at Elizabeth. No, that made no sense.\n\nMr. Collins collected Mary without so much as a word to Elizabeth, and the wedding party took their leave of the church, leaving Elizabeth to walk back to Netherfield, alone.\n\nA swath of Netherfield's woods bordered Longbourn's. It would be as close to Mary's wedding breakfast as she would be able to go. Though it made precious little sense, she turned down along the wooded path.\n\n\"Darcy should be here,\" April chittered and flapped. \"I am going to tell Walker that he must remedy this situation immediately.\"\n\nThe woods' shadows welcomed them along the cool path between the trees. Branches arched up overhead to form a skeletal canopy\u2014it would be full and green soon, but now it was only a promise of what was to come. The forest floor likewise remained dry and crunchy, waiting for the full advent of spring to soften it with rains and new growth.\n\n\"You are unhappy.\" April hovered near Elizabeth's face.\n\n\"He has work to do. Besides, I do not need Mr. Darcy to be happy.\" Perhaps not, but it would not hurt.\n\n\"Yes, you do. You should be happy. Longbourn is a bully and just plain mean. A disgrace to his kind. The Blue Order really ought to bring him under better regulation.\" April landed on Elizabeth's shoulder.\n\n\"I know you have very decided opinions, but perhaps, just perhaps, it is not good to share them so near to his territory. He does have an awful propensity\u2014\"\n\nA roar just softer than dragon thunder rattled branches overhead and crashing footsteps approached.\n\n\"\u2014to appear when one voices such things.\" Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to draw in long deep breaths. But her heart still fluttered and her belly pinched, especially when the first whiff of dragon musk mixed with the distinct odor of wyvern wafted on the breeze.\n\n\"I do not want you in my territory.\" Huge stomping footfalls punctuated the declaration.\n\n\"Good day to you too, Longbourn.\" She flashed a false smile and curtsied.\n\n\"Get out of my woods.\" He leaned down toward her face, extending his tail for balance.\n\n\"I am on Netherfield territory not yours.\"\n\n\"These are my woods.\" He edged closer, breath hot and putrid on her face.\n\nMary really needed to take better care of his teeth or he would soon be in need of a tooth key himself.\n\n\"Do not attempt to poach territory that is not yours. You know that is against the Accords\u2014even if there is no dragon assigned to the land.\" She folded her arms across her chest and pulled her shoulders back. How would he respond if she spread her cloak and flapped to make herself large? Probably not well, but it was a thought.\n\n\"I do not want you here.\"\n\nApril buzzed toward him and pecked between his eyes, not that he could feel it much through his thick hide.\n\n\"I am very sorry for you then. I hate to suspend any pleasure of yours. But I am entirely within my right to be here, and I will enjoy my walk since you are determined to keep me from my family's celebration.\"\n\n\"You should not have been at the wedding. I told them both I did not want you there. They went against my wishes.\"\n\n\"I am sorry you are so selfish and small-minded that you should wish to keep me from my own sister's wedding. But since it occurred outside of your territory, you have no control in the matter. They were within their rights to allow me to be present. You should be satisfied that you have prevented me from attending the wedding breakfast. I am feeling that deeply. Is that not enough for you?\"\n\nHe huffed acrid breath in her face. \"This is not my fault. It is your choice.\"\n\n\"How exactly is this my fault?\"\n\n\"You abandoned your place as Keeper.\" He thumped the tip of his tail. A large branch snapped and sent a shower of debris against Elizabeth's skirt.\n\n\"Because you tried to persuade me. Now you are trying to use persuasion to make Mary cross with me.\"\n\n\"She has enough to be cross about; she does not need my help.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"She has to manage Collins, who is an idiot, and Cait who is the very picture of a shrew, not to mention your feather-pated mother, and she has been neglecting me. Of course, she is short-tempered. No persuasion is needed to accomplish that.\" He wrinkled his nose, sending April flying backwards.\n\n\"So you have then considered it?\"\n\n\"I am not persuading her or anyone else! Why can you not accept that?\"\n\nShe glared at him through narrowed eyes. \"Why did you threaten me and leave me in fear for my life?\"\n\n\"That again? Why must you take that so personally? You made me angry\u2014\"\n\n\"And that makes it all acceptable? You lost your temper. That is not my fault. The very least you could do is apologize for what you did and for what you tried to do.\"\n\nHe rose to full height, towering over her. \"I am a dragon. I do not need to apologize for anything. You need to come to your senses and stop accusing me\u2014\"\n\n\"There is no point to continuing this conversation. Bring me proof that you did not attempt persuasion, and I will immediately recant and apologize.\"\n\nLongbourn's eyes brightened, eye ridges lifting high. \"And you will return to your position as my Keeper?\"\n\n\"You know I cannot. The Blue Order has already ruled that Mary is Keeper here now. I cannot overturn that.\"\n\n\"You would rather be Keeper to that clumsy baby than me.\" Longbourn growled deep enough to shake the nearby branches.\n\n\"I have been assigned as Pemberley's Keeper by decree of the Order. That is beyond my power to alter. But I will most willingly apologize\u2014\"\n\n\"What good is an apology then, if it changes nothing?\"\n\n\"Why must you be so stubborn? We could at least enjoy the time I have here. I would be pleased to visit you and do all the things\u2014\"\n\n\"Then you would turn around and leave me. No, that is not acceptable.\" He stomped, raining dry leaves over them.\n\n\"I do not want to be at odds with you.\"\n\nHe stared at her with huge, sad eyes\u2014not angry, but sad\u2014and turned away, slinking off into the forest, pouting.\n\nShe leaned against a large tree and covered her eyes with her arm. When did it all go so arsy-versy?\n\n\"He is selfish and jealous and far too accustomed to having his own way.\" April worked her way back into Elizabeth's hood.\n\n\"Large dragons generally have their way for good reason, you know. Few can stop them.\"\n\n\"You did, though.\"\n\n\"I wonder if that was a good idea.\"\n\nApril cuddled the side of Elizabeth's jaw. \"Only because he is making you feel guilty right now. You cannot look at Pemberley's face and tell me it is not right for you to be her Keeper. A firedrake as powerful as she will be must be set upon the right path very early. It will probably take both you and Darcy to make certain that happens.\"\n\nShe scratched April's chin. \"You make a very compelling point, my Friend.\" A point her head understood, but her heart struggled to embrace. \"I am getting chilled. Let us return to Netherfield.\"\n\nJust after dinner, which Elizabeth took in her room whilst she studied one of the tomes on lindwurms, Cait pecked at the window, obviously offended that it had not been left open for her. Elizabeth threw it open and helped her manage her tail feathers, arranging them all safely as she landed on the top edge of the dressing table's mirror. A message satchel was strapped to her back, nearly obscured by the lush feathers of her nearly-black ruff.\n\n\"I am glad to see you, but I did not expect Papa to send you with messages.\" She pointed to the satchel. Cait turned to make it easier to reach.\n\n\"He meant to send Rustle, but after all those people calling today, I simply had to get out! Oh, it was dreadful.\" Cait shook out her feathers in a well-practiced, elegant movement.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"That shallow pate Collins! I may yet tear his eyes out. No one would find fault with me for doing so.\" Silhouetted against the waning sunlight, Cait was still in fine form, though her belly showed obvious\u2014to Elizabeth\u2014signs of her condition.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"One of the guests caught sight of me and instead of allowing Heather to persuade her away from bothering me, Collins decided he should show off the fancy bird that was now staying at Longbourn\u2014as if I were some credit to him! The unmitigated gall of the man! If it were up to me, the court should have ordered him eaten so none of us would have to deal with him. I still think they should and would happily testify so.\"\n\nElizabeth extended a hand to offer a scratch which Cait accepted. \"I am sure it is all made so much worse because you are not far from laying your clutch.\"\n\n\"They have no idea what it is like\u2014and your sister is little help. She has no sympathy for what I suffer. Your father offers sympathy but little more. It cannot be too soon that the Order finds another to take my place. If Collins shows me off as a fancy piece of livestock again, I swear, I shall bite off his little finger. I am no parrot and certainly no chicken!\"\n\nElizabeth smoothed her ruff. \"I quite understand; it is insulting. I will write to my father and inform him he needs to teach Collins better.\"\n\nCait tossed her head. \"He is not the only one in need of reform. Why are you accusing Longbourn of persuading Mary?\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting Mary could work up so much resentment on her own? She seems to have grown far worse since she has come to Longbourn, despite the fact she should be satisfied with all the outcomes. Mary has been known to be a bit contrary at times, I grant you, but this is entirely out of character.\"\n\n\"I am saying it is not Longbourn.\"\n\nElizabeth pinched the bridge of her nose. \"You believe him when he claims that? I do not.\"\n\n\"You are clearly as stupid as the rest of your family.\" Cait tossed her spectacular ruff and spread her tail as though her beauty was reason enough to trust anything she said.\n\nBest let that insult go unrecognized. \"Do you have an idea who is persuading Mary then?\"\n\n\"You are seeking a rogue dragon, are you not?\"\n\n\"He is trying to persuade Mary? I suppose you would have me believe he was also the voice I heard at Longbourn trying to get me to accept Collins.\"\n\nOh, the look Cait cast her way!\n\n\"That is utterly ridiculous. Why would he do such a thing? How would he get into the Longbourn cellars in the first place? You know Longbourn would not tolerate another major dragon in his territory, much less in the house! He barely tolerates you as it is.\"\n\n\"Jealous, crusty lizard.\" She snorted and picked at her wing. \"I cannot speak as to why. Why does a major dragon do anything? They have their own reasons. Would he not have won Longbourn's appreciation if he had succeeded? Nonetheless, you should look past the end of your own nose and consider what ought to have been one of your first thoughts.\"\n\nElizabeth rolled her eyes. \"I will give the notion due consideration.\"\n\n\"You had best do that before it is too late, and you miss an opportunity you need.\" Cait shook out her wings. \"I need a dust bath.\"\n\n\"April has found a pleasant spot in the rose garden. She can show you if you like.\"\n\nApril cheeped and flew off with Cait close behind. She had been taking a lot of dust baths recently. Fairy dragons did that when preparing to join\u2014or attempt to join\u2014a harem.\n\nHow long would it be before April left? Best not dwell on that now.\n\nElizabeth fell heavily into the overstuffed chair near the fire. Could Cait possibly be right? The Netherfield dragon trying to persuade Longbourn's Keepers? No, that hardly made sense at all. It was simply not possible.\n\nBut it might be a point of conversation, one arousing enough to draw the lindwurm out to speak with her. Since nothing else had worked yet, it was worth the effort.\n\nShe pulled her shawl around her shoulders and took up the fireplace poker. The cellar was dark and cold, but the dirt was soft enough for her to write with the poker:\n\nWhy are you persuading Mary to be cross?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Darcy sank back into the large, soft and very clean chair near the fireplace in a room easily twice the size of any he had seen for at least a fortnight. Bright white linens\u2014he had actually checked after the rigors of recent days\u2014covered the tall bed surrounded by bed curtains not tattered and torn. Both a closet and a chest of drawers accepted his luggage\u2014all free from any sign of vermin or dust. The very definition of luxury.\n\nMr. Thomas Powlett's invitation to stay at Birchcaster Heath, though he claimed the accommodations to be modest, was far more welcome than he knew. This was the first time in weeks that Darcy had a room to himself. In the quiet, his thoughts finally turned settled and well-ordered, almost like the pain of a lingering headache receding.\n\nHis meeting with the drake, Birchcaster, had been quite satisfying. It seemed he shared the easy-going temperament of his Keeper and welcomed the Blue Order assurances that there was no need for alarm. Far better than the reception they received at the last estate whose resident wyrm, Overport, was not averse to calling them liars and threatening to run them off his land himself. Matlock would soon receive a letter suggesting the need for some Order oversight on that estate.\n\nJust how many more estates of that ilk dotted the English countryside? What did that mean for the actual state of the Blue Order and their influence over the Dragon State? He raked his hands through his hair, pulling slightly. He had never wanted to become involved in the administration of dragon affairs. Father had managed to keep clear of the duty, arguing on more than one occasion with Uncle Matlock on the matter. He had kept himself to Pemberley and been done with it all. But with the death of Old Pemberley and the birth of little Pemberley, everything changed.\n\nHow melodramatic that sounded, but she would be the first firedrake to be raised in the modern era. Instructing her and shaping her understanding would be crucial for the future of England and the Blue Order.\n\nThank heavens Miss Elizabeth would be at his side through it all. It was tempting to think that Pemberley somehow recognized that her situation would need more than he alone could offer. But that was imbuing a baby dragon with sage wisdom, and even he realized that was crediting her with a bit too much. Still though, it was fortunate.\n\nWalker pecked the French door that opened onto the balcony, and it swung open. He hopped in and closed it behind him. \"I had nearly forgotten how pleasant it was to come into lodgings designed to accommodate my kind.\" He flapped his wings slightly.\n\n\"It does feel a bit like the return to civilization, does it not?\" Darcy laughed and reached for the buckles on the satchel. \"I wonder that you will be able to fly anywhere without this in place once we are done with this affair. I have become so used to seeing you with it. You look quite naked without.\"\n\nWalker snapped his beak in a warning that was not entirely playful. \"Nakedness is a warm-blooded convention that I would thank you to keep to yourself.\"\n\n\"How did you find Cait this visit?\"\n\n\"Big, broody, and balky. She hates nearly everyone and everything right now.\" Walker picked something invisible from between his toes.\n\n\"Rather like she was the last time she clutched?\"\n\nWalker hopped to a small tabletop. \"Precisely, so I am not overly concerned. I suppose it is an advantage that I am only able to make short visits, so she rather welcomes my arrival. She does detest Collins though. The Order needs to provide another translator soon, or she may peck his eyes out.\"\n\n\"He is such a dullard?\" Darcy rubbed his forehead hard.\n\n\"Worse. He is a dullard with opinions. It seems he has decided it is his right as a warm-blood\u2014which by the way, he thinks makes him the superior partner in the relationship\u2014to have opinions on all matters related to dragons and the Blue Order. Opinions which he unfortunately thinks are correct. He borders on quite unteachable.\"\n\n\"Bennet will have his work cut out for him, molding Collins into an appropriate candidate for membership into the Order. Perhaps Collins has forgotten what it will mean for him if he continues to be so opinionated. Do you think it would be helpful if I wrote to remind him of his very precarious position?\"\n\n\"I know Cait would be grateful for it.\"\n\nDarcy leaned forward on his elbow. \"Grateful enough that she might permit Fitzwilliam to try to befriend one of her clutch?\"\n\n\"If he listens to you, she might befriend you herself.\"\n\n\"Thank you for that honor, but no.\" Darcy guffawed. Cait in his household? But then again, Elizabeth had already asserted dominance over her \u2026 No, it was a very bad idea.\n\n\"Good. There is a reason cockatrice only live together for brief periods.\" Walker scanned the room, probably looking for a plate.\n\n\"The kitchen sent up a bowl for you just an hour ago. There, on the dressing table.\"\n\nWalker found it and tore into the raw meat. Darcy turned to his letter.\n\nMy dear Mr. Darcy,\n\nThank you for sending along Georgiana's latest letter. It is delightful to see how much of a change her time with Lady Astrid is making. It is difficult to believe she was once so reticent about dragons.\n\nHave you considered that Barnwines Chudleigh's continuing favor might well put her in a way of meeting an eligible Keeper? No, I do not think Chudleigh is inclined to bother with matchmaking directly, but she is a very social creature. With all her salons and parties, I am certain many introductions are being made. So you may wish to steel yourself for the possibility of yet another wedding in the near future.\n\nAfter having just attended Mary's, I realized that there might be special circumstances surrounding our own. You might think me silly to suppose it, but it seems likely that there may be dragons among those who wish to attend our wedding breakfast. I have no idea how one plans a wedding breakfast to include dragons\u2014the very idea boggles the mind, but then again, so much of what is going on right now does as well. Perhaps if we both give the matter some thought, we might come up with something that will suit all parties.\n\nHe reread the paragraph twice, chuckling each time. Dragons at a wedding breakfast\u2014the very thought! But she was right; it was entirely possible. At the very least it would not hurt to be prepared for such an event. What was more, she was thinking about their wedding, and in\u2014what must be for her\u2014positive terms.\n\nBless it all, if his betrothed wanted dragons at her wedding breakfast, then by Jove there would be dragons. It would no doubt be the most talked about wedding the Blue Order would ever know\u2014not at all what he would desire, but for her, it would be worth it.\n\nApril has taken to spending time with Cait. She\u2014April, not Cait\u2014 has been short-tempered, and my ears bear witness to the degree of her irritation. The broodiness will only grow worse until she finds a proper mate. Fairy dragons are native to the Longbourn woods, so I doubt she will have difficulty finding a harem to join. She is\u2014well, you quite know her personality\u2014she will have no trouble in exerting dominance over the other females. I expect she will have a clutch of her own before summer.\n\nI am glad for her, but\u2014and I have spoken of this to no one\u2014I am concerned that she may decide to lay her clutch in the wild and remain with them to protect the eggs. She has more sense than the average fairy dragon and will be diligent in seeing them hatch safely. I do not know if she will decide to return to me after that, though. She has never been my prisoner, but I have also never considered what would happen should she decide to leave. It has never been a possibility before.\n\nI do not wish to sound maudlin or melancholy, but without the company of my family, Netherfield has been lonely. So much so, I would swear to you I heard giggling in the hall last night, much like my sisters', but there was no one there. Not even the maids. I wonder that I may be going daft.\n\nI pray this does not sound overly sentimental, but how much longer do you think your journey will take? I find myself impatient for your arrival at Netherfield.\n\nHe traced the last several words as though it would bring her closer. She missed his company, wanted him there with her. If that was not tantamount to a declaration of love, what was?\n\nLongbourn will not be pleased to have a second broody female nearby. As I understand, he and Cait have already had words on multiple occasions. I encountered him just after Mary's wedding. He is little changed since we last saw him\u2014except perhaps he is more agitated over Collins.\n\nI am convinced that Cait will need assistance in laying her clutch. The advice from the poulterer and the falconer has been much more helpful than I imagined, and between them and the book from Papa, I believe I have assembled a sound strategy to assist her. Perhaps the Order might name me the first dragon midwife.\n\nIf anyone could aspire to such a title, it would be Elizabeth. He dropped his chin to his chest, chuckling at the image of her hurrying out from Pemberley in the middle of the night to attend a dragon laying.\n\nI have learned a little more about the paintings that bear so many draconic evidences. Talia, the puck who lives in the garden (By the way, when you come, could you perhaps bring with you a variety of threads and yarn, the more colorful the better. And wool! She is a great lover of a warm nest.) has proven a great wealth of knowledge (assisted by her fondness for dried meat.) She has been a resident at Netherfield for many years now and says the Netherfield dragon is a relatively recent arrival. Likewise, the paintings are fairly new.\n\nApparently, every few months a new painting arrives on the doorstep, wrapped in brown paper, with instructions to Nicholls to see it appropriately hung in the house. In exchange for her rabbit warren remaining undisturbed (I will explain that when you arrive,) Talia encourages Nicholls to think the paintings souvenirs of Mr. Bascombe's travels to the continent and beyond.\n\nNeedless to say, it seems reasonable to assume that they are the work of our rogue dragon and having them hang in the house suits his vanity. I have been studying the paintings at length, and many seem to repeat the theme of escape and sanctuary with many dragon types represented. What I do not know is if these themes are to be taken literally or metaphorically, or perhaps our painter lacks imagination and cannot think of anything else to render on canvas.\n\nI took your suggestion and scratched a message to the Netherfield Dragon in the soft cellar dirt, asking him why he was persuading Mary to be disagreeable.\n\nHe wrote back to me: Because I do not like you.\n\nI am not sure which surprised me more, that he responded at all, or that he claims not to like me without having even met me. Needless to say, I asked him why, and I currently await his response.\n\nIn my idle moments I have been continuing to work at deciphering Lydia's journal. Without Fitzwilliam's expertise and experience, I have enjoyed less success than he. But I did come across a phrase that is potentially concerning. I have included both the encrypted characters and my attempt at translating them. I do not know what to make of it, but it does seem significant.\n\nPray let me know your thoughts and when you might make your way to Netherfield. And me.\n\nYours, EB\n\nDarcy's hands trembled just a bit, for so many very good reasons, but those had to wait. He forced himself to turn the page over and stare at the passages from Lydia's journal. The sheet full of coded characters made no sense, but below one phrase Elizabeth wrote: introduce him to my secret friend.\n\nHis hands turned cold as he read the words twice, thrice. Secret friend. He bolted next door to Fitzwilliam's room and barged in.\n\n\"What the devil has gotten into you, Darcy?\" Fitzwilliam jumped from his chair, knocking an empty glass to the floor.\n\n\"Word from Elizabeth.\" He held out the missive.\n\n\"She has deciphered\u2014\"\n\n\"Not very much, but see for yourself.\" He turned the letter to the coded passage.\n\nFitzwilliam scanned the page, his finger tracing as he went. \"Introduce \u2026 special not secret, special friend? Get me my portfolio.\"\n\nDarcy fetched the portfolio from the closet. Fitzwilliam had already spread the paper out on the table in direct sunlight. He pulled notes and a pencil from his portfolio and spent the next half an hour scribbling across the ciphered characters.\n\n\"Bloody hell, that girl's head is filled with fluff and nonsense.\"\n\n\"Be careful\u2014\"\n\n\"Not Elizabeth you idiot, her sister. I can only make out enough to be certain that I am not certain of anything. She refers to a special friend, but who that might be is anyone's guess, much less whom she wishes to introduce to him. I have deciphered that it is a him at least. And that he is tall and handsome.\"\n\n\"She wishes to introduce someone to Wickham?\"\n\n\"Or it is possible she means that she wishes to introduce Wickham to someone. I do not know. Lord, I wish I did, but I do not.\" He scribbled something out further down the page and wrote something else in its place. \"This strongly suggests that she wished to make the introduction near Netherfield, and the date is not long before she disappeared. It is quite possible she never actually left Hertfordshire.\"\n\nDarcy's eyes bulged, and his jaw gaped. \"What? She is well-known in the area. How could she possibly remain hidden there?\"\n\n\"Humor this old army spy for a moment.\" Fitzwilliam raised an open hand.\n\n\"Spy?\"\n\nFitzwilliam flashed a lean smile and nodded once. Darcy gulped. What else did he not know about his cousin?\n\n\"You told me the terrain around Hertfordshire was largely karst, no?\"\n\nDarcy slapped his forehead hard. \"Caverns. So many damnable caverns!\"\n\n\"Quite so. You searched a great number of them looking for Pemberley, as I recall. Some of them, if your descriptions were accurate, would be large enough to house a couple. If properly stocked, they could remain there for quite some time. Wickham could easily acquire supplies in the next village over and never show his face in Meryton.\"\n\n\"We have been on a goose chase whilst Wickham and Lydia have been at arm's length from Elizabeth all this time?\" Darcy clenched his fists until they trembled.\n\n\"Considering we have found no trace of them on the road, and as Wickham has never been good at covering his tracks, it seems highly likely to me.\"\n\n\"That could explain the giggling in the hall and why he said he did not like her.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Elizabeth made contact with the dragon\u2014they have left notes for one another, and his last said that he did not like her very well.\"\n\n\"There is no telling what Wickham could have told him! The dragon could think her very dangerous, indeed.\" Tight lines became visible along Fitzwilliam's eyes.\n\n\"We leave for Hertfordshire at dawn then. I will send Walker immediately to warn her of our concerns.\"\n\nDear God, let the warning not be too late! With the current state of dragon affairs, if any blood was shed, war might well be inevitable."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Elizabeth sat on the bottom step of the dark cellar stairs, her face in her hands. The air smelt of cold damp rock, similar to a dragon lair\u2014perhaps that was why the lindwurm came here. Perhaps not, but it was as good a reason as any. Would that he had never come here at all.\n\nShe peeked up, but the wispy script in the dusty floor did not change: Because you are arrogant, selfish and insensitive to others. Dragons were known to be direct, and apparently this one was no different.\n\nTalia scurried out of a small hole in the far wall. She circled the marks and stared at the words. \"What is that? It makes you unhappy.\"\n\n\"Netherfield does not like me.\"\n\nTalia's wing nubs twitched, a dragon shrug, and she approached the stairs. \"My Friend's daughters did not like me. It happens.\" She edged closer for a scratch between her shoulders.\n\nElizabeth obliged. Talia leaned into her, contented guttural sounds rumbling in her throat.\n\nAt least the little dragon approved of her.\n\nElizabeth turned aside and blinked rapidly. Perhaps Talia was right. It did happen. But not to Elizabeth, at least not where dragons were concerned. Certainly some had been less personable than others; that was only to be expected. But outright dislike? That she had never experienced before.\n\nMoreover, it made no sense. Why would he have taken a dislike to her when she had no interaction with him, ever? She wrapped her arms around her waist, rocking slightly. Talia pressed against her leg, wrapping her tail around Elizabeth's ankle.\n\nHow was she to respond to such an accusation? She stood and scratched out the offending words with her foot, leaving the ground smooth and clean. Best not scribble something in haste. He could wait for a well-thought-out response. If it caused him a little discomfort\u2014and to perhaps rethink his own reply\u2014then so much the better.\n\nTalia scampered off, and Elizabeth dragged herself up the stairs. As she closed the cellar behind her, the longcase clock in the parlor chimed eleven.\n\nIt was time to meet with Papa. Finally. He had refused to see her at Netherfield\u2014he did not dare offend Longbourn by crossing him so directly. She shaded her face with her hand and rolled her eyes. He had, though, agreed they might happen upon each other at the crossroad between the Netherfield and Longbourn estates. It was outside Longbourn's territory, but not within the boundaries of Netherfield Park. Stubborn, vexing, contrary man!\n\nAt least he had consented to meet with her; that was the material thing and what she needed to remember.\n\nShe went to her rooms for her bonnet and shawl. Her cloak hung in the closet\u2014it was odd not to reach for it. But April had been away three days now. What need was there to wear it? April did not need a place to conceal herself, and Elizabeth was not going to meet any major dragons today\u2014at least not a literal one.\n\nShe tied the bonnet under her chin, tight enough that it would stay in place should April suddenly land on it. But that was not likely to happen. April was probably with a fairy dragon harem right now, showing the male who could fly the highest and had the sweetest song, two contests she had to win if she was to gain enough of the local cock's attention to be able to mate.\n\nShe yanked a handkerchief from the drawer, muttering as she dabbed her eyes. Yes, April was just a little fairy dragon\u2014an incredibly annoying and snippy one at that. But\u2014Elizabeth swallowed hard\u2014it was difficult to be without her constant companion of eleven years now.\n\nWhat would she do without her faithful Friend?\n\nShe tucked the handkerchief up her sleeve as she made her way down the grand stairs, her drab skirts whispering across the marble. Best not think about that now. Meeting with Papa would be difficult enough. Melancholy thoughts would not make it better.\n\nThe late morning sun peeked through low clouds, hinting that, just perhaps, it might not rain on the empty fields this afternoon. Green shoots should be appearing soon. A light breeze carried a touch of warmth upon it, enough that it might not make Papa's joints ache quite so much. Spring was always a most welcome season.\n\nNot far off, Papa leaned heavily against the fingerpost that stood askew at the cross road. Rustle perched at the top of the post, leaning a little drunkenly with it. It would be laughable, except that cockatrice did not appreciate being laughed at. Even lesser members of the species, like Rustle, had their pride.\n\nNo doubt the walk from Longbourn had left Papa in serious pain. That would not help his mood. But this was his suggestion. Had she her druthers, they would have met in a place comfortable for him, at the very least, one near a bench where he could sit.\n\n\"Good day, Papa.\"\n\nHe grunted something noncommittal.\n\n\"Was the walk very difficult for you?\"\n\n\"Gardiner drove me here in the coach. Rustle will call him back when he is required.\" He did not meet her eyes. \"Where is April?\"\n\n\"She has joined a harem, I think. Pray let Longbourn know; perhaps even suggest he try to be tolerant of them this mating season.\"\n\n\"Why do you not tell him yourself? It seems you have no compunction about approaching him.\" He shifted his weight to one foot and crossed his arms over his chest.\n\nSo that was what was bothering him.\n\n\"I did not approach him. He came to me, outside of his territory, as I returned from Mary's wedding. If anyone was out of line, it was he and not me.\" She squared her shoulders and stood a little straighter. When had she become nearly as tall as Papa?\n\n\"He is the estate dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"Who left his estate. He does not rule beyond his boundaries.\"\n\nHis gnarled hands flew open. \"If you would simply stop being so stubborn\u2014\"\n\nAs if she were the stubborn one! \"The Order has named Mary Keeper, and she is married to Collins now. That is not going to change.\"\n\nHe stomped, just a little. It must have hurt. \"And you will be married to Darcy without so much as my awareness, much less consent.\"\n\n\"Had you been at the Conclave, you could have given it.\"\n\n\"So now you would criticize how I manage Order affairs? Not to mention you assume my approval\u2014\"\n\nShe clenched her fists and stepped back. \"I came to talk about Cait.\"\n\n\"You have worked out what to do about her egg binding? Tell me and I shall see that it is done.\" He reached toward his pocket\u2014was he planning to try and write notes\u2014or have her write them?\n\n\"It is not something I can tell you precisely.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" A particular low note entered his voice, one that usually presaged a bout of temper.\n\n\"I am still sorting out all the information and working out how what the poulterer told me might be accomplished for her.\" She turned aside and braced herself.\n\n\"Poulterer? She is a dragon, not a chicken!\"\n\n\"I am entirely aware of that.\"\n\n\"You cannot apply what one would do with a chicken\u2014\"\n\nShe sucked in a deep breath and counted to nine. \"It is useful information, especially when considered in conjunction with the information in the rather ancient, and I might add, incomplete tome you sent me.\"\n\nHe stomped over to face her directly. \"She will be so comforted and pleased to know you think her no different than a chicken.\"\n\n\"Those are your words and attitudes, not mine. I would thank you to keep them to yourself!\"\n\n\"Because you will hear no contradiction.\"\n\nShe leaned in close to his face, voice barely above a whisper. \"Because this is not the first time I have done such a thing! How do you think I came to a solution for Bedlow's teething or worked out how to manage scale mites in the nest? No dragon lore contained that information. I worked it out by looking to other sources.\"\n\n\"Had I known that earlier, I would have put a stop to it.\" His face turned florid.\n\nWhere did he think her information had come from? From some volume she had access to but he did not?\n\n\"And cheated how many dragons out of the comfort they have found? Have you forgotten how much relief Bedford found when I worked with the blacksmith to devise a tooth key to remove his rotten tooth? Had he continued suffering, he might well have done himself or someone around him a serious injury!\"\n\n\"Might, might, might! It is all speculation.\" He threw his hands into the air. \"You have no idea what would have happened. The tooth might very well have righted itself or fallen out on its own. You do not know. For all we know, you might have interfered with the natural way of things as you did with April's hatching.\"\n\nHer fists knotted of their own accord, her arms quivering. \"Are you suggesting we would be better off had she not hatched at all?\"\n\n\"I am merely saying you have a propensity to insert yourself into dragon matters without thinking it through thoroughly. What appears to be helpful might actually be harmful. If every clutch of fairy dragons were rescued, England would be up to their noses in the worthless little flitter-bobs.\"\n\n\"So you consider my Friend worthless?\"\n\n\"Her species is\u2014\"\n\n\"Is small and helpless and cute\u2014not at all what one might consider a dragon to be. Thus, she is worthless. I am glad to know your feelings on the matter.\" Disagreeable, short-sighted man! So assured he was right and the only one who could be. If she looked at his face any longer\u2014she turned her back.\n\n\"Tell me how to take care of Cait. I cannot stand here much longer.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, no?\" That got his attention.\n\n\"If I tell you, you are likely to dismiss a great deal of what I say and try to manage this on your own. Half-knowledge could easily kill her as well as ruin her eggs. I will not provide you with anything that might encourage that.\"\n\n\"So you refuse to help her? That will delight the Order.\"\n\n\"That is not what I said, and you know it. What is more, Rustle has heard the entire conversation.\" She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. \"See that Uncle Gardiner knows what has been said and understands that Papa has no knowledge as to how to help Cait.\"\n\nRustle nodded and launched from the fingerpost.\n\n\"Lizzy! How dare you!\"\n\n\"You leave me little choice. I will not risk her on your prejudices and ill-informed efforts.\"\n\n\"And you have suddenly become an expert in laying dragons?\"\n\n\"I have certainly studied far more than you on the matter.\"\n\n\"Impudent girl! I am ashamed of you!! Your time at the Order is making you arrogant. You cannot compare your knowledge to mine.\"\n\nShe walked several steps away, skirt catching in the tall dry grasses on the roadside, each breath dragging, tearing at her throat. \"What you know is different to what I know and not what is essential to help Cait right now. Histories will not help her. Rustle will come for me the moment Cait thinks she might begin laying.\"\n\n\"You know Longbourn will not allow you in the house,\" he called from behind her.\n\n\"It is your responsibility to see that he does. Whatever it takes, you must do it, or the life of the translator the Blue Order assigned to your house is on your hands. I would not want to explain to the Order\u2014or to Lady Catherine\u2014that something has gone wrong because I was denied access to her.\"\n\n\"That is going too far. You will not\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Papa, you have no right to make such demands on me. Have you forgotten? I am\u2014in a large part by your choice\u2014no longer part of your household. Longbourn banished me, and you have made no effort to intervene. I no longer answer to anyone from Longbourn, including you.\"\n\n\"Disrespectful, arrogant\u2014\" He stormed toward her.\n\nShe turned to face him and stepped backwards, matching him step for step. \"You chose this, not I. Now you must live with it. I will go now, but first I should warn you, there is indeed another major dragon nearby. Longbourn needs to be warned, and my sisters and mother watched closely. The entire dragon state is in an uproar, and the slightest incident could spell disaster.\"\n\nHis entire countenance changed, pallor creeping across his face. \"Do not interfere in matters you do not understand.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Do not interfere.\"\n\n\"Do you know something about the rogue dragon?\" It really was not a question. The answer was evident in his every look.\n\n\"Do not interfere, Lizzy.\"\n\n\"I am operating under direct instructions from the Order. You must tell me what you know.\"\n\n\"Rogue dragons are dangerous, too dangerous for a woman to deal with. You must not interfere.\" He turned his back and shuffled toward the road to Longbourn. No doubt Uncle Gardiner would meet him with the coach soon.\n\nWhat point was there in following? He was such an obstinate man. No amount of pleading would persuade him. So, so stubborn.\n\nShe wrapped her arms around her waist and shambled toward Netherfield, her hands numb, her belly roiling, her shoulders aching. Not only had he thrown her away in favor of Longbourn, he thought her efforts to help dragons no more than foolish experimenting, not worthy of respect, despite the results she had achieved.\n\nShe was no more than a foolish little girl in his eyes and would never be more than that. She tripped over a fallen branch and landed hard on her knees. Twittering fairy dragons zipped overhead\u2014it must be a local harem. Was that April there in the lead, flying higher than any of them? The color was right, and the way she dipped and wove looked just like April diving through the halls of the Blue Order. It must be her\u2014but she did not stop.\n\nElizabeth sobbed into her hands. Perhaps Papa was right. She had no business trying to do such work. Maybe it was too much for just a woman to handle, and she should leave it to the trained officers and scholars to manage. What was the Order thinking, sending her on such an errand? What would they do if she failed?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Darcy steadied his horse and shaded his eyes, watching Walker cut through the grey-blue sky, just below the clouds, occasionally passing through a sunbeam that glinted off his vaguely metallic feather-scales. It would not likely rain this afternoon, but the sky definitely would not allow them to forget that it was apt to happen in the near future. As if anyone in all of England ever forgot that was a distinct possibility!\n\nWalker squawked and dove. Odd for him to be hunting now. It was not as though he had any reason to be hungry\u2014and that had not been a terror-inducing predatory shriek, the kind that paralyzed prey. What was he about? Walker landed\u2014what was that beside him? Or rather, who?\n\nWalker nudged the huddled woman until she permitted his head under her arm. She threw her arms around the cockatrice, sobbing. The only person whom Walker would permit such intimacies was Elizabeth.\n\nDarcy jumped off his horse and ran the final few steps, falling to his knees in the field's tall grass beside them. \"Elizabeth?\"\n\nShe turned to stare at him, face tear-streaked, eyes swollen.\n\nHe wrapped her in his arms and pulled her close, cradling her head into his shoulder. \"Whatever it is, you are not alone.\"\n\nShe sobbed harder, clutching at his jacket, rocking with the force of her cries.\n\nHad he said precisely the wrong thing? It would not be the first time. But it would be nice to understand his error so he did not repeat it. Perhaps he should not say anything. That seemed best, so he pulled her closer and held her tightly until the tears subsided.\n\n\"I did not know to expect you. I thought it would be another two days before you came,\" she whispered into his coat.\n\n\"The weather and the roads were very favorable. I hope I have not disappointed.\"\n\nShe giggled, then laughed a little hysterically. \"No, not at all. I am glad you are come.\"\n\n\"I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear that.\" He pressed his forehead to hers. \"Will you tell me what has you here in the middle of the fields?\"\n\n\"I am just being a silly woman.\" She lifted her face and blinked at the sky. Had she ever looked so much a damsel in distress as she did now?\n\n\"There are few who would dare say that of you. I can only guess you have been in the company of one of them recently? Since I do not smell dragon, I imagine you just encountered one of the warm-blooded variety.\"\n\nShe snickered and sniffled at the same time, hiccoughing.\n\nHe handed her a handkerchief. \"I can hardly imagine Collins driving you to such a state. So that only leaves one candidate. What did your father have to say?\"\n\nShe dabbed her eyes and scrubbed her cheeks with the handkerchief. \"He is incredibly stubborn and condescending toward what he does not understand.\"\n\nFoolish old goat!\n\n\"Do you wish to tell me about it here, or shall we talk as we walk back to Netherfield?\"\n\nShe met his gaze with an odd little quirked-brown one of her own. \"Do not think I have mistaken it that either way, you expect I shall be telling you about it.\"\n\nHe brushed a stray tear from her cheek with his thumb. If only he could do something more to soothe them away. \"If you do not wish to talk about it, I will not force the issue. But since we are partners in this matter, it seems like a reasonable course of action.\"\n\n\"Partners.\" She leaned her head against his shoulder. \"I like the notion of being partners. Yours is a rather uncommon attitude, I do confess.\"\n\nWalker squawked conversationally, as though it were the commonest thing in the world for him to be privy to, much less participate in, such a t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate.\n\n\"Chalk it up to having a Friend cockatrice who has always insisted that we were equals. It does cause one to think in rather unique ways.\"\n\nShe glanced back at Walker. \"I knew there was a reason why I admired him so.\"\n\nHer eyes suggested she was teasing. Pray it was so, lest he find himself jealous of a cockatrice.\n\nWalker bobbed his head and hop-flapped toward them.\n\n\"As much as I value your company, you should go see Cait. She eschews flying more than necessary right now. If you catch her a fresh meal, I know she would receive you with great favor, but avoid the Netherfield rabbits.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Walker turned his head nearly sideways and gawked at her.\n\nHad he any idea of how undignified that expression was?\n\n\"The local puck considers them part of her hoard.\"\n\nWalker chirruped, nodding. That one did not interfere with another dragon's hoard was simply a matter of courtesy\u2014and keeping the peace. He threw himself into the sky and glided toward Longbourn.\n\n\"A puck who hoards rabbits? I have never heard of such a thing. I thought they preferred shiny, glittery bits and bobs.\" Good thing Quincy was far easier to please, or none at Rosings would have any peace from him.\n\n\"This one likes fibers as well, especially warm ones. I think that is one of the things she likes about the rabbits, but that is only speculation. I will introduce you. She is a sweet creature, quite unlike the bundle of mischief that is Quincy.\" No one else in his acquaintance ever used the word \"sweet\" to describe a dragon\u2014it would sound disingenuous if they did. But from Elizabeth it was perfectly sincere.\n\nHe stood and offered her a hand up. She took it, brushing the dirt off her skirt as she rose. He tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. Perhaps that was too bold, but she was his betrothed\u2014and she would let him know clearly if his attentions were unwanted.\n\nShe smiled up at him\u2014that special smile of hers that warmed his heart and stirred his spirit.\n\n\"April is still away?\"\n\nShe pointed to a few distant specks in the sky and nodded, swallowing hard.\n\nHe laid his hand over hers as they walked toward the house. \"When my father died, Walker was not certain that he wanted to stay with me. I had grown up with him, but he was grieving my father's loss as much as I. Walker left for nearly two months\u2014I still do not know where he went or what he did during those months. Old Pemberley was failing and disliked company, so I could not turn to him. Even with all the other dragons on the estate, it was a very lonely, difficult time.\"\n\nHer eyes squeezed shut, and she squeaked as tears flowed down her cheeks.\n\nOh, not again! He stopped and pulled back. \"Pray, forgive me. I should not have burdened you.\"\n\n\"No, no, it is not that, not at all.\" She shook her head violently and clutched his hand. \"You understand what it means for her to leave me. No one else does.\" She crumpled and wept into her hands.\n\nWhat else was there to do but to wrap arms around her and hold her tight until she regained control? \"I suppose when your best friend is a dragon, there are not many who can relate. I wonder if that was why April was so adamant that I should come back soon\u2014she realized what was in the offing.\"\n\n\"You are the only person I have ever known willing to credit my fairy dragon Friend with so much forethought and wisdom.\" She held his handkerchief to her face.\n\nThey walked on, her head leaning against his shoulder. While it was deeply regrettable that April had left, was it wrong to be pleased she had given him these moments with Elizabeth in his arms?\n\n\"Our banns have been properly read now.\" He held his breath. Pray this did not upset her, too.\n\n\"I expect the whole of Meryton will be glad to see you here. There has been speculation\u2014\"\n\n\"That I might not return for you?\"\n\nShe tried to shrug away the suggestion with a labored smile that looked more miserable than merry. \"You know how people are, and I am \u2026 well, considered something of an oddity.\"\n\nDarcy threw back his head and laughed. \"My dearest Elizabeth, if you are odd, then I can hardly imagine how I am regarded.\"\n\nShe looked up at him, brow arched, the edges of her lips curling up just a mite. \"I suppose you are correct. It does make us an excellent match, then, does it not?\"\n\n\"Really? Is that what you think?\" He stared straight into her eyes. Dear God, she meant it! \"There are some things that need to be said that cannot wait. Is there a place we can sit?\"\n\nShe led him into a bit of woods and a broken-down folly. \"Will this do?\"\n\nDappled shade enveloped them with the sense of a place not quite, but almost entirely forgotten. He sat near the middle of the bench, forcing her to sit near him. Perhaps a bit inelegant, but it did achieve the desired effect.\n\nHe rubbed his hands together before his chest. \"I realize that I often do not make a good first impression, and in our case, that impression was a lasting one. I am glad you no longer count my separating you from Pemberley as a blemish on my account.\"\n\nShe blushed and dodged his gaze. \"I will always regret having thought that of you. It was impulsive and unfair of me.\"\n\nIt was far easier not to look at her as he spoke. \"I admit it was not a difficult conclusion to draw. Had I been more open, more like Bingley or my cousin Fitzwilliam, perhaps it would have been easier for you to believe more rightly of my character, or at least approach me to discuss the matter.\"\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, he watched her worry her hands and pick at her apron.\n\n\"I do hope though, as we have worked together for Pemberley's well-being, that you have seen a more positive side of me. I may not be the most agreeable of men, or one who speaks easily and clearly, but you cannot doubt my sincerity in matters concerning my dragon's welfare\u2014and yours.\"\n\nShe rubbed her hands along her shoulders, though she did not seem cold. \"Indeed I have seen that, perhaps most clearly in the way so many dragons respect and admire you. That speaks volumes for you.\"\n\nHe took one of her hands in his. \"I admired you for quite some time before that day in the Dragon Conclave. I had hoped you would have realized it, perhaps understood the regard I had for you. You are so perceptive to the dragons; I thought surely I could not be more difficult to understand than they.\"\n\n\"And you would be very, very wrong.\" She peeked up at him, the corners of her eyes betraying a hint of amusement.\n\n\"So it would seem. I am sorry for that. Especially if it has given you pause to doubt the nature of our betrothal.\"\n\n\"You must agree that it is most unusual, considering the Order just passed new legislation limiting the powers of dragons to decide human marriage, then on its heels they all but order our own betrothal. And Mary and Mr. Collins' as well. Do not forget them.\" She rolled her eyes. Was that just for Collins or the entire situation?\n\n\"I would rather forget him, thank you very much. But their circumstance does not alter the fact that we are to be married.\" Dare he look into her eyes right now? Would her amusement continue, or would he find a core truth that he would rather not know?\n\n\"I grant you, our betrothal was\u2014is\u2014rather peculiar.\"\n\n\"And entirely untoward\u2014without so much as even a declaration of friendship from me, to be pushed into accepting an offer of marriage.\" He threw his hands up.\n\nShe looked away.\n\nPerhaps she did not want to hear more, but if he did not speak now, there might not be another chance. \"I was a fool not to listen to Walker. He implored me\u2014on more than one occasion\u2014to tell you explicitly how I felt about you. I deferred, certain that you would not be interested or that it was neither the time nor place for it. Better moments would present themselves. As usual, Walker was right.\"\n\n\"I imagine he is aware of that.\"\n\n\"Yes. And he has not hesitated to let me know in no uncertain terms. He does revel in reminding me of what an idiot I can be.\" He glanced over his shoulder. It would be like Walker to appear behind him just in time to hear such an admission.\n\n\"They enjoy their shows of dominance, do they not?\"\n\n\"I suppose that is an advantage to having a fairy dragon as a companion.\"\n\n\"Ha! Is that what you think? Have you noticed the scars on my ears?\" She covered both ears with her hands.\n\n\"April is the only fairy dragon of my acquaintance to be so bold.\"\n\n\"I suppose you are right. Ladies generally prefer a milder disposition like Heather's. April refused that sort of companion right from the start. She was quite ready to attempt to fend for herself rather than settle for a Friend who did not match her temperament. She thinks very highly of you, though.\"\n\nHe took both her hands and held them close to his chest. \"I think very highly of you. I wish I had told you of my ardent admiration well before we stood before the Conclave and agreed to marry. I know you only accepted because of our Friends' assurances and certainty in the match. I wish you could have accepted me on my merits alone.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You really think I would accept a man without the approval of my dragon friends?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt\u2014you would not. Still, one does not substitute for the other. I would very much like for you to accept me for myself alone.\" It was probably far too familiar a gesture, but he stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. So silky and soft.\n\nShe smiled, and her eyes glistened. \"Would it tell you anything to know that you are the only man April has ever approved of for me?\"\n\n\"I would still like to know I have your approval as well.\"\n\n\"I believe my chances of happiness, upon entering the marriage state, are at least as good with you as with any other Dragon Keeper, so you will do.\" There was that playful quirk of her eyebrow again.\n\n\"I will accept that, though I admit I was hoping for a bit more.\" Hopefully he did not look as crestfallen as he felt.\n\nShe gasped. \"Forgive me! I am apt to resort to levity when I know not what else to say. My feelings are in such turmoil, I hardly know how to express myself. Does it say what you need to know that the days here have been increasingly lonely, and when I have considered what company I would most desire, I have come to the conclusion it is yours?\"\n\n\"Even above your dragons'? That is indeed a compliment.\"\n\n\"It makes me understand\u2014a little\u2014April's desire to be with her own kind.\" Her lip quivered as she spoke.\n\nHeaven's above, had she any idea of what that expression\u2014what those words\u2014did to him! No man could be expected to endure such without responding.\n\nHer lips were warm and soft against his as she yielded in his arms, her arms twining around his shoulders. Could she feel his heart ready to beat out of his chest as he pulled her close? So right, so very right. This was where she belonged, where she had always belonged, where she must remain.\n\nHer breath came in short pants, ragged and hot on his cheek. Dragons' Blood! If he did not find some control soon \u2026\n\n\"Chicken feet? Chicken feet!\"\n\nThey jumped apart.\n\nTwo forest wyrms looked up at them expectantly, a bit of drool sliding down the male's leonine fang.\n\nElizabeth scratched their ears through their manes, still gasping for breath. She probably had no idea of what a picture she was presenting for him as she leaned down to reach them. \"I am afraid not; we were not planning to come here today.\"\n\nTheir chins sank to the ground. Manipulative little creatures for sure. Still, the friendship of any local dragon was worth maintaining. Darcy reached into his pocket and removed a large snuffbox enameled with the crest of the Order in gold over blue. He opened the box and held it out to Elizabeth.\n\nHer nose wrinkled. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"It is rather pungent, is it not? Those are the beetles Gardiner imports that made him a Friend of the Order.\"\n\nThe wyrms rose up almost as high as Darcy's knees, sniffing and tasting the air with forked tongues.\n\n\"Would these do for you?\" He placed a dried beetle in front of each wyrm.\n\nThe wyrms sniffed the beetles all around, licked them several times then snatched them up. A little green goo dotted their lips as they crunched down on their prizes. They squealed in delight. No wonder the dragons had named Gardiner a special Friend of the Order.\n\n\"More?\" The male asked, a beetle leg and antennae hanging from the edge of his mouth.\n\nDarcy reached into the snuff box again, but Elizabeth stayed his hand.\n\n\"You may have more, but you must promise to bring us news of the great blue one. Tell him we wish to meet him.\"\n\nThe pair skirted back, undecided. Darcy retrieved a second beetle for each and held them up in their sight.\n\nThe female quivered and darted forward, eyes on the crunchy prize. \"I will tell him.\"\n\nDarcy set her treat on the ground before her. One did not risk one's fingers to an unfamiliar dragon, no matter how harmless it might seem.\n\nThe male grumbled and hissed. \"He comes to the cellar every night waiting for your message. He is not happy you have not written back.\"\n\nElizabeth nodded, and Darcy delivered the prize.\n\n\"You may tell him that he was very rude. I do not wish to be, so I am carefully considering my reply.\"\n\nWhether or not the wyrm heard or cared through his beetle-fueled delight was difficult to tell.\n\n\"Bring us more information like that and there are beetles and chickens' feet for you.\" Darcy snapped the snuff box closed. The smaller female wyrm wound herself around his ankles with a sound that was not quite a purr, not quite a growl, but it was friendly whatever it was, then disappeared into the forest loam. The male quickly followed.\n\nDarcy shoved the snuff box back into his pocket. \"Does this sort of thing often happen to you? Dragons just showing up out of nowhere ready to answer your questions and throwing themselves at your feet.\"\n\n\"Regularly. For as long as I can remember.\" She chuckled. \"It occurred far more often after April befriended me. My poor father\u2014I think I nearly drove him to distraction\u2014he never knew what sort of dragon I would come across next. Did I ever tell you how I became friendly with a basilisk?\"\n\n\"They are renowned for their dislike of company. It does not surprise me that you would manage to charm one, though. I suppose these wyrms, and perhaps your basilisk friend as well, will be expecting an invitation to the wedding breakfast.\"\n\nHow her eyes sparkled \"Then it must be held at Pemberley. Who but a dragon-hearing cook could be persuaded to put beetles, chickens' feet, and dried cod on the menu?\"\n\nHe laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. \"Do not forget the bones for Pemberley and her dogs.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course, they must be invited as well. Oh, what an event it will be!\" She dabbed her eyes on the edge of her sleeve.\n\n\"It cannot come soon enough for me.\" He pressed his forehead to hers.\n\n\"Or for me.\"\n\nThat was the answer he longed for and required another kiss.\n\nSeveral more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "They both retired early that night. Nicholls returned him to the chambers he used whilst he had stayed there with Bingley. How different the spacious chambers looked now than when he had first come. Every surface evidenced draconic themes.\n\nCarved scales emblazoned the molding near the ceiling. Dragon claws and balls finished all the chairs. Paintings that were probably done by the rogue lindwurm littered the walls while four full lindwurms were carved into the bed posts.\n\nDragons were everywhere. Had he ever really looked at them the first time he had been here? Subtle and tasteful, most\u2014the paintings were the notable exceptions\u2014were the sort of pieces that might find their way into rooms at Pemberley if the Darcys had felt the need to be reminded of dragons at every turn.\n\nIt still puzzled him. What motivated one to put dragons on every surface? Was it not just easier to welcome them into the house to take their place as part of the resident staff and family? But then, perhaps his perspective was the odd one. Even the Bennet house, as he understood, hosted only one companion dragon until very recently. At least Elizabeth agreed with his view. For now that was all that mattered.\n\nHe fell asleep nearly as soon as he pulled the counterpane over his shoulders.\n\nThe next morning, he rose early as he always did. Elizabeth was an early riser as well. Would it be too much to hope for that she might be waiting for him, or if not that, soon to look for him in the morning room?\n\nApparently it was not.\n\nShe sat at the large round table, nearest the bay window jutting out into sunshine. Opposite her, a mahogany sideboard\u2014with dragon-claw-and-ball feet\u2014held a breakfast spread. Apparently Elizabeth shared his preference to eat early, too. The kippers, though, he would leave for Walker. Their scent was a mite off-putting.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Darcy.\" She rose and curtsied. A jumble of books lay open in front of her, and no less than half a dozen paintings leaned against the wall behind. The morning room was beginning to resemble Bennet's study\u2014but perhaps that was not an appropriate thing to say.\n\n\"It seems you have already been up for quite some time. I feel quite the lay-abed.\" He sat beside her. How comfortable and easy that was now.\n\n\"You may lay aside such judgements of yourself. I have only just arrived here. Nicholls humors me, permitting me to leave my morning work here so I may pick up each day where I have left off.\"\n\n\"I can only imagine the persuasion that requires. I have met few housekeepers who can tolerate this level of \u2026 ah \u2026\"\n\n\"Disorder? Chaos?\"\n\n\"\u2026 as you say \u2026 they are usually very particular about the public rooms of the house.\"\n\n\"Hill certainly is. It has taken ever so long to convince her to stay out of Papa's study. I have had the sole cleaning of it for many years. I expect that it has not been dusted in months now. I imagine I shall soon have to call upon Rumblkins to help me strengthen Nicholls' persuasion.\" A bit of a shadow crossed her face. She raised her cup toward him. \"The coffee is very good, very bracing for the day.\"\n\n\"Have you already planned a full schedule? A course of study, art appreciation and perhaps riding for a bit of exercise to round out the day?\"\n\n\"If you wish to think of it that way, yes. I am indeed a demanding task-mistress.\" Her right eye twitched in a bit of a wink.\n\nWas every morning with her to be so entirely engaging? If this was a foretaste of what his marriage would be, none could be more fortunate. He refilled her cup and poured one for himself.\n\nShe added a bit of cream and sugar and sipped it thoughtfully. \"I did not think to ask yesterday, but where is Fitzwilliam? Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"He stopped in London to meet with his father, among others. Apparently, the Eastern Dragon envoy failed to cross a planned checkpoint. There is concern.\"\n\nShe gasped and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. \"Pray tell me, the envoy was not supposed to come near Hertfordshire.\"\n\n\"No, not at all. The planned route was to approach London directly from the south. I know of no way to reach Hertfordshire except to go through London. There are sentries posted at all the tunnel intersections along the way, watching for the emissary.\"\n\n\"Of whom we know nothing, of course, not even a name?\"\n\n\"We do know the representative is an Eastern dragon.\"\n\nShe slapped her forehead and dragged her hand down her face. \"You are aware there are multiple varieties of Eastern dragon and that the number of toes they have is related to their ranking in society which profoundly influences how they should be greeted.\"\n\nDarcy clutched his forehead. \"No, I had no idea. Hopefully though, the Order does and will provide adequate information. The important issue is that we do not need to worry about that, at least not for now. We can rest assured that business shall not mix with our own.\"\n\nElizabeth rolled her eyes. \"Except insofar as the entire country's dragon population is becoming twitchy and hypersensitive and\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not mean to dismiss your concerns, but our task at hand, when resolved, will be the biggest help in rectifying all those issues. So, it seems wise for us to focus on that and leave diplomacy to those, like Fitzwilliam, who have a taste for it.\"\n\n\"As much as I would like to, I cannot fault your logic. We certainly have enough problems of our own here.\" She leaned back, massaging her temples. \"I checked Lydia's room this morning and the trunks had been opened and rummage through.\"\n\nDarcy nearly dropped his coffee cup.\n\n\"I wish I had made an inventory of what precisely was in the trunks. I cannot make out if anything was taken from them or not. Talia is big enough that she could have gotten the trunks open had she wanted to\u2014I did not have them locked. With her penchant for threads, there are any number of things she could have found appealing.\"\n\n\"So it could be anything from signs of your sister's presence to evidence of dragon-hoarding.\"\n\n\"Essentially. Though, if one did not trust the staff, it could be a sign of theft by one of the maids as well. But I rather doubt that.\"\n\n\"You suspect your sister is about?\" He placed his cup carefully on its saucer.\n\n\"I have spent hours in the woods and found absolutely nothing pointing to them. Rustle has done the same from the air, and there seems to be no sign. I do not know what to think.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we ought to recruit the forest wyrms' assistance? I brought an ample supply of beetles, and your uncle will certainly acquire more if necessary.\"\n\nHer shoulders twitched a bit. \"Beetles would garner an unusual level of cooperation from our friendly wyrms. They do not appear to have a great deal of sense, but as they seem to think with their stomachs, we ought to play that to our advantage. We might also ask Talia directly about the trunks\u2014a little later in the morning when the sun has warmed the ground. She usually does not come out until then.\"\n\n\"Having dealt with pucks for some time, I came prepared with a stock of wool and silk, and a few buttons thrown in for good measure just in case.\"\n\nElizabeth laughed, exactly as he hoped she might, and pushed a pair of large open books across the table toward him. \"I have several chapters on lindwurms for you to read. Naturally they are old and contradictory. This one declares they are rather stupid creatures, intent on eating as much horsemeat as they can get away with, apt to digging pits to trap their favorite prey.\"\n\n\"And no horses have gone missing recently in Hertfordshire, I imagine.\"\n\n\"Exactly. This one, suggests they are wily, secretive souls, not prone to communicate with people and apt to be dangerously aggressive toward other major dragons, attacking them during their sleep, in the safety of their own caverns.\"\n\n\"Do you believe that?\" He balanced his chin on his fist.\n\n\"Not even remotely.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me these books are worthless?\" Darcy rifled through a few yellowed pages.\n\n\"I wish I could, but there are shreds of truth in each.\" She slid a sheet of paper out from under the largest book. \"I have tried to list out what each says and sort between truth, falsehood, and what is possible, based on the lindwurms I have personally met and the observations Papa recorded. He may be frustrating on many fronts, but I do trust the accuracy of his reports.\"\n\nDarcy squinted at the sheet\u2014many, many lines of tiny handwriting. She was nothing if not thorough.\n\n\"I would like your opinions on what I have noted. But first, you should see these.\" She pushed her chair back and reached for the paintings.\n\nHe helped her lay them out on the morning room table, entirely covering its surface. Different sizes, different frames, but all with an almost eerie similarity.\n\n\"These have come from all parts of the house. The one on the upper left is from the room Lydia stayed in. The bottom row are all from the large drawing room. I am not sure there is a great deal of thought given to where they are hung, mostly where there is room on a wall to place them. But if you look closely, I think they represent a progression that might be significant.\"\n\nThe one from Lydia's room was certainly the most primitive, both in style and composition. \"The painter's skill grows\u2014to a limited degree\u2014with each painting, and the symbolism becomes somewhat more refined. But each one seems to repeat.\" He pointed to similar elements in each painting.\n\n\"Yes, that is what I saw, too. Look closely at this on the bottom, hidden in the rocks on the path. I think this is dragon script.\" She rang her finger along the edge of a painting.\n\n\"By Jove! You are right. The word is 'sanctuary' or perhaps 'haven'?\"\n\n\"That is how I translate it as well. The word before though, is 'it brings' or perhaps road, path, or way? I am not sure.\"\n\n\"And this?\" Darcy pointed to more scratching hidden in the clouds at the upper left corner.\n\n\"I had not seen those.\" She pulled a quizzing glass from the middle of another book and peered closely into the clouds. \"Does that say 'giver?'\"\n\n\"That might be one way to read it, but if these are characters as well, not just random spots, it could also read 'wise one' or 'deliverer.'\"\n\nShe fell back into her seat and threw her head back. \"What good is it to include such hidden meaning if one cannot even tell if the characters are there?\"\n\n\"Have you been examining these\u2014\"\n\n\"For nearly a month now, and they are making me daft. Each time I think I am getting close to sorting it all out, I find\u2014like you just pointed out\u2014something more I overlooked. I have never felt more stupid than I do staring at these.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you are crediting the painter with far more than he deserves.\" Darcy tapped his lips with his fist.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"To my eye, it seems that this painter has had no formal training at all\u2014completely self-taught. Georgiana tried to talk me out of hiring a painting master to teach her. Told me she could teach herself from a book she had found in the circulating library. I allowed her to try and her efforts came out looking very much like this. You can see the distorted perspectives and the failure of pleasing composition in all of these. In fact, I have to wonder if the same book Georgiana used might have been used here as well.\"\n\n\"Forgive me if I am a mite muzzy this morning, but I fail to understand the implications.\"\n\n\"I see a bored creature with little occupation. Unlike a proper estate dragon, he has no business, except to remain undetected. I know lindwurms do not have a reputation for intelligence.\" He pointed to a line on Elizabeth's list, \"But if he has nothing to do but stay hidden, and he has a lively mind, this seems the sort of thing an intelligent creature would do to entertain himself and while away some tiresome hours.\"\n\n\"I suppose he could have gotten Talia to bring him books from the Netherfield libraries until he found something interesting.\" She chewed her thumbnail. \"Shall we go outside and meet Talia? She may be able to shed some light on the matter. Besides\u2014it is hard to believe I am saying this\u2014but I would very much like to get away from books and studying for a little while.\"\n\nShe escorted him out to the garden, the sunshine a welcome friend. Just how many rabbits did the puck keep in her hoard to do such damage to the kitchen garden\u2014and how was Bingley to manage when he and Jane returned to take residence?\n\nNo doubt the puck would find a way to persuade him to believe it was perfectly fine this way. But it really would be so much better for someone who heard dragons to take the estate. They could make an agreement with the puck to restrain her hoard to this garden plot and plant another that she would restrict the rabbits from. All very neat and simple. The situation as it stood, though, had the potential for some very unpleasant outcomes.\n\nElizabeth pointed to a tall holly bush at the edge of the garden and sat down on a sunny patch of ground that looked like it had specifically been cleared for the purpose. He sat beside her, trying not to grin. There was something rather exciting about the opportunity to meet a new dragon that made him feel like a child again.\n\nShe placed a tin plate of vegetable trimmings in front of her and tapped it several times. \"Good morning ,Talia. I have brought a friend to meet you.\"\n\nAfter several minutes, a long, red nose peeked out from a burrow under the prickly holly leaves, sniffing the air. It pressed further until one shining black eye appeared, surveying the surroundings.\n\nEven though dragons were predators, only a few were actually at the apex of the predatory ladder. Knowing that one was prey definitely affected smaller dragons' personalities. They dare not proceed with the arrogance of their large cousins.\n\nFinally, she poked her head out sufficiently to flare her hood to its full extent and hiss. Posturing and nothing else\u2014it was after all important to clearly demonstrate how big and fierce one was when meeting new associates. Darcy tried not to laugh\u2014it would be considered rude, but the predictability of the minor dragons was amusing.\n\n\"Talia, this is Mr. Darcy, my friend\u2014and April's friend and Rustle's friend\u2014I would like him to be your friend as well.\"\n\nTalia cocked her head and blinked at Elizabeth, hood relaxing halfway. Was it that Elizabeth had honored her by presenting Darcy to her, instead of presenting Talia to the larger creature? Or was it the offer of friendship\u2014which usually implied the presentation of a gift that caught her attention. Did Elizabeth even know herself? He probably should ask later.\n\n\"I would be honored to be part of your acquaintance.\" Darcy slowly, very slowly reached into his pocket and presented a sliver of dried meat, laying it on the ground half the distance between him and the puck.\n\nShe crept forward, one eye on Darcy, the other on the meat. Elizabeth nodded her encouragement. Talia jumped forward and back, grabbing the offering in a single flick of her long tongue. She gobbled it down and licked her face and lips. Just how long was her tongue?\n\n\"Good.\" Talia inched toward Elizabeth until she leaned on Elizabeth's knee. Any closer and she would be sitting in Elizabeth's lap like a pug or a very funny-looking cat.\n\nApparently, this was an understood sign that she wanted a scratch. Elizabeth obliged until the creature all but purred with pleasure.\n\n\"Darcy has a gift for you, if you will be his friend.\" Elizabeth pointed to Darcy's pocket.\n\nHe withdrew a ball of the softest, fluffiest wool he could find.\n\nTalia's eyes grew large, and a tiny dot of drool appeared at the edges of her mouth. \"Wool?\"\n\n\"Yes. It is very warm and soft wool. I would very much like to give it to a friend.\" He extended the wool toward Talia.\n\nShe sniffed at it, her eyes crossing in greedy pleasure. Quincy could be that way about buttons. For a hoarding dragon, their hoard was a direct route to their heart.\n\nTalia sat back on her haunches and scratched behind her frill, eyes never leaving the wool. \"He is your friend?\" She tapped Elizabeth's knee with her tail.\n\n\"Yes, he is. A very fine and loyal friend.\"\n\nDarcy pressed his lips hard\u2014now was not the time to grin like a boy. But certainly one could be excused when one's betrothed complimented him so.\n\n\"He will not hurt my hoppers?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\" Darcy shook his head slowly. \"I told my Friend cockatrice, Walker, he was not to bother the Netherfield rabbits.\"\n\nTalia's tongue flickered in and out, and she glanced skyward. \"Saw him hunting yesterday. He stayed away. That is good. You can be my friend.\" She sat and reached for him with both front paws.\n\n\"I am honored.\" Darcy placed the ball of wool in her paws.\n\nShe accepted the gift with open-mouthed glee, rolling over on her back and turning the ball of wool over and over with all four feet, pressing her face into the fibers, sniffing, and even licking it.\n\nElizabeth shuddered a bit\u2014she was trying as hard as he not to laugh at the pure visceral delight. After several minutes the euphoria subsided, and Talia disappeared into the burrow.\n\nElizabeth tapped the plate, and the puck reappeared. \"I have a question for you. Tell me the truth, I shall not be put out with you whatever you should say.\"\n\nTalia's hood rose a mite as she rose to tip-toes.\n\n\"My sister's trunks, in the room upstairs, were you in them?\"\n\n\"Not me. Nothing I want.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? She has pretty shawls and stockings.\" With that tone of voice, Elizabeth managed to make them sound tempting even to him.\n\n\"Too much trouble to unravel.\"\n\n\"Have you any idea who would go in my sister's trunks?\"\n\n\"Warm-bloods? Wyrms like long things, perhaps them.\"\n\nWild wyrms in the house? That would be rather odd. But what was not odd about the current situation?\n\n\"Might the blue one want them?\"\n\nTalia's hood fully flared, and she hopped back, tail lashing. \"No. No. No. He cannot go in the house.\" She paced before the rabbit hole, teeth bared.\n\nDarcy reached into his pocket for his snuff box and flicked it open as he pulled it out.\n\nTalia's hood slicked back, and she stood on her back legs sniffing and licking the air, drool pooling at the edge of her mouth.\n\n\"Thank you for your assistance. You have been very helpful.\" He offered a beetle.\n\nTalia savored it nearly as much as she had the blue wool. She was nothing if not appreciative.\n\nOnce she finished her treat she scuttled up to Darcy and stared into his face, one dainty paw resting on his knee. \"I do not understand the blue one. He says he does not like you, does not trust you. He is wrong. You are friend.\"\n\nDarcy slowly reached to scratch between her wing nubs. She arched her back to accept.\n\n\"Do you know why the blue one says that?\" Elizabeth's voice was barely a whisper.\n\nTalia sat up and shook, rather like a dog, starting at her nose and ending at the very tip of her tail. \"Stupid.\" She pushed the tin plate into the burrow and disappeared into the darkness.\n\nDarcy helped Elizabeth to her feet.\n\nShe dusted her skirt. \"I am perplexed. First he does not like me, now he does not like you? How can he possibly know you?\"\n\n\"I did stay at Netherfield for some time. Perhaps I did something to offend him then?\"\n\n\"There is no point in speculating. I have owed him a response, and I am going to offer it to him now.\" She marched toward the house.\n\nHe hurried after her. There were moments one could see why Bennet might find her vexing. \"Do you think it wise to ask so provoking a question?\"\n\n\"No, probably not, but it is precisely what a dragon would do. That seems to be the best option we have. At the very least, it will continue the conversation and might even provoke him into granting us an audience.\"\n\nThat look on her face! There was no stopping her, so he bit his tongue and followed. She was probably right, even if he had misgivings. Was this what life would be like with her?\n\nChallenging for certain, but that was not a bad thing. It was probably very, very good.\n\nHalfway to the house, an odd sound, part song, part screech echoed from high overhead. Elizabeth stopped as though frozen by a cockatrice's scream, staring skyward. Colorful specks dove and darted through the clouds.\n\n\"A mating flight,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Come, I see a bench near the cutting garden. We can watch from here.\" He took her elbow and led her, her eyes never leaving the flight.\n\n\"April is there, up high, higher than the rest. You see there\u2014the two rose colored ones cannot match her. The purple one\u2014that is the male. You can see he is a little bigger and a bit faster, too.\" She pointed.\n\n\"I have never seen such a flight before. Have you?\" He slipped his arm around her shoulders\u2014how could he resist?\n\n\"Occasionally. Fairy dragons have lived in the Longbourn woods for generations. Several springs I have been privileged to catch a mating flight as it happened. April would often watch with me and explain what I was seeing. One year Papa was with us. He had never appreciated April so much as he did that day. When we got home, he had me write notes on what we had observed. Later he used those notes to write a monograph on fairy dragons. He was very disappointed when the Order did not see fit to publish that paper. Fairy dragons were not considered important enough to be worth publishing about.\"\n\n\"Does he still have the monograph?\"\n\n\"I believe the original is still in his library.\"\n\n\"Do you think he would be willing to allow me to read it? If Georgiana is to befriend a fairy dragon, I should like to know as much as I can about them.\"\n\n\"I think that would please him.\" She pressed her head to his shoulder. \"Watch now as the leading female circles above the male\u2014no! Pray no!\" She jumped to her feet.\n\n\"What is wrong?\"\n\n\"Those shadows? Do you not recognize the profile?\"\n\nHe squinted into the bright sky. \"Falcons?\"\n\n\"They prey upon mating flights. The fairy dragons are too preoccupied to notice the danger.\" She pressed her fist to her mouth. \"I have seen so many \u2026 many \u2026\" Her voice trailed off.\n\n\"Wait, look!\" A pair of dark spots raced toward the mating flight, his thundering heart matching their pace. \"Walker!\"\n\nOne spot became a blur, swooping down on the marauding falcon. A brief scream and the bird was impaled on Walker's talons. He dove to the ground, quarry secured. Rustle replaced Walker, flying sentinel, watching over April.\n\n\"Rustle, too?\" Elizabeth murmured through her fingers, tears pooling in her eyes. \"They are without a doubt the finest of creatures. Cockatrice often prey upon these flights.\"\n\n\"He would not permit harm to come to his Lairda April.\"\n\n\"Sometimes I think the dragons will never cease to surprise me. Just when I think I know what to expect, they do something like this that totally changes my understanding of them. I am not sure even Lady Astrid will believe this.\"\n\n\"It would not surprise me if Cait had her part as well, perhaps in helping to watch for the event itself. For creatures that are by their nature solitary, those three have become a very effective little flock. A flock that seems to include fairy dragons as well.\"\n\n\"Who would have ever thought? I will have to write this down. It is too important to risk forgetting.\"\n\nA triumphant squawk filled the sky.\n\n\"The male has caught her now,\" Elizabeth leaned into his shoulder. \"April shall have her clutch.\"\n\nWhat she did not say, but her eyes spoke for her, was that she wished April might allow her to be part of that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Three days later, Elizabeth and Darcy stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, dank cellar, staring at the scratches on the floor. Deep slither tracks framed the words, marking the creature's girth\u2014roughly what Darcy could circle with his arms. If accepted dragon lore was to be believed, then it was probably fifteen to eighteen feet in length. But that was only a guess.\n\n\"Am I reading this correctly?\" Darcy pointed at the wispy dragon script highlighted by the dancing candlelight. \"The man is not to be trusted. He carried a Dragon Slayer.\"\n\n\"That is how I read it as well.\" Elizabeth crouched down and stared at it again, but the fresh perspective did not alter the meaning.\n\nThey returned to the light and relative warmth of the house. The chill humidity of the cellar was not conducive to clear thought. Still in a bit of a fog, they meandered to the breakfast room. Who could have predicted the lindwurm's response?\n\nDarcy poured two cups of hot coffee, and they sat down in the restorative sunshine pouring through the large windows, away from the piles of unfinished work, books and paintings littering the table.\n\n\"How could he possibly know you carried the Dragon Slayer?\" She wrapped both hands around the coffee cup, thawing her icy fingertips.\n\n\"Longbourn realized it before the hatching night.\" Darcy frowned into his cup.\n\n\"You think Longbourn would have told him?\"\n\n\"No, but I wonder how Longbourn knew.\"\n\n\"I suppose one of the local minor dragons saw it and told him. They are supposed to report alarming news to him. What could cause greater alarm amongst them than that?\"\n\nDarcy dragged the back of his hand against his mouth. \"I do not like the notion that my every move is spied upon by unseen dragons.\"\n\n\"It is an excellent incentive for one to remain on one's best behavior, though.\" She snickered and sipped her coffee.\n\n\"That is one thing we must see to\u2014Pemberley must keep a proper census of the wild dragons on her land and maintain good oversight of them.\"\n\n\"I completely agree, and since we can teach it to her so young, we have an excellent chance that it will become second nature to her, unlike Longbourn, who cannot seem to be bothered with such mundane tasks. Generally, he thinks very little of the small dragons on his land. They are a bother to him.\" Keeping a very young dragon might indeed have some distinct advantages.\n\n\"The minor dragons are no different to a man's tenants if you think about it.\"\n\n\"That is a very good way to understand it. Not that I think it would make sense to Longbourn. Crusty old thing is entirely set in his ways. That aside, though, how else could the lindwurm know about the Dragon Slayer?\" She looked toward the ceiling and chewed her lower lip.\n\n\"The only other possibility is that he must have seen it for himself.\"\n\n\"Where did you keep it?\"\n\n\"In the barn, buried in a bale of hay.\"\n\n\"He could not have seen it in the barn. The horses would have alerted everyone to its presence.\"\n\n\"The only time I removed the blade was when we left the ball to find Pemberley in the forest.\"\n\n\"He had to be in the forest, then, with Pemberley and Longbourn.\" Elizabeth rose and paced the length of the sunbeams on the carpet and back again, pressing her temples hard.\n\n\"There was a great deal of dragon thunder that night. Do you suppose it might have been Longbourn and the lindwurm challenging one another?\"\n\n\"Is it possible the lindwurm stole the egg from Longbourn? That might be what they were fighting over, and she hatched in the midst of the process.\"\n\n\"My horse was especially unsettled as we rode through the woods. I thought it was merely the noise and the storm, but the scent of the lindwurm might have caused it to bolt. The dragon could have easily detected the sword then. Quite easily.\" Darcy rubbed his chin with his fist. \"With no other context to understand why I carried such a blade, the creature could have rightly deemed me a dragon hunter.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he thinks you have returned to complete the task.\" Elizabeth perched on the edge of her chair. \"That does put all this in a very different light. Very different.\"\n\n\"If the lindwurm thinks I am a threat, would it be best for me to leave?\"\n\nShe set her cup aside and laid her hand on his. \"There has been plenty of opportunity for him to have acted upon a perceived threat, and he has not. If you think about it, he could have demanded you go, threatened\u2014\"\n\nThe windows rattled as a huge black shadow descended, pecking at the glass.\n\nElizabeth jumped, almost tripping over Darcy.\n\nHe flung the window open. \"Walker!\"\n\nWalker swooped in and landed on the back of Elizabeth's chair, back-winging for balance. \"Come, you must come now.\"\n\n\"Cait?\"\n\nWalker squawked ear-splitting, terror-inducing, tones.\n\nA shiver coursed down Elizabeth's spine. \"Tell me exactly what is going on.\"\n\n\"Your father has a nesting box for her in the study, but she has been pacing in and out and will not settle into it. She waddles like a duck, hunched over her belly which your father says is very hard\u2014not as it should be. She has not eaten yesterday or today and has hardly drunk. Her feathers are dull and drooping\u2014\"\n\n\"That is not good, not at all. I will leave as soon as I gather my things. In the meantime, tell her she must drink water, as much as she possibly can, and tell my father to have Hill prepare warm water and bring the hipbath into the study.\"\n\nWalker blinked several times as though forcing his thoughts into a semblance of order. \"Drink water, warm water, hipbath.\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly.\"\n\nWalker launched toward the window, nearly clipping Elizabeth with the edge of his wing. Poor creature\u2014only extreme distress could explain such clumsiness.\n\n\"I will ready the curricle.\" Darcy disappeared before she could comment.\n\nLater she must thank him for that. She ran to her chambers for her carpetbag and threw in her commonplace book containing her extensive notes on egg binding. From there she made her way to the still room for a bottle of witch hazel, a tin of pure lard, and a jar of lemon juice and egg shells she had prepared after talking with the poulterer.\n\nDarcy met her at the kitchen door in Bingley's curricle. The weather was ideal for the sporty vehicle that took much less time to ready than the coach. More importantly, it was designed for speed. In the hands of a skilled driver, nothing could get her to Longbourn more quickly.\n\nDarcy proved a very skilled driver. Did he race curricles for sport back in Derbyshire? If not, perhaps he should.\n\nThey arrived at Longbourn house far more quickly than she would have imagined possible, and never once did she fear the curricle was in danger of overturning. It might have been good fun had their errand not been so urgent.\n\nThe Bennet's coach, driven by Uncle Gardiner, pulled behind the curricle as Darcy was handing her down from the seat.\n\n\"Lizzy, dear! Whatever are you doing here? I had no idea you were coming! You have brought Mr. Darcy, too! You are most welcome, sir.\" Mama trundled up to her.\n\n\"There is a matter we must consult with Papa upon. It came up rather unexpectedly; otherwise, we would have given you notice.\" Pray Mama was not in the mood for protracted conversation!\n\n\"You are certainly welcome, but your timing is most awkward. I fear Kitty and I were just on our way out. You see, we are to call upon my sister Phillips. She has invited us to tea \u2026\"\n\nElizabeth looked over her shoulder. Rustle perched nearby, softly persuading Mama of the urgency of her departure. Persuasion might not be his strongest suit, but he was definitely sufficient to the task.\n\n\"Pray do not concern yourself, madam. Your hospitality is well-known, and I would not dream of you disappointing your most gracious sister.\" Darcy bowed slightly from his shoulders. It would not hurt to add his persuasion to Rustle's.\n\n\"You are most kind, sir, most kind. Perhaps I should go back in and ask Hill\u2014\"\n\n\"There is no need, Mama. I will see Mr. Darcy is made most comfortable.\" Elizabeth pressed Mama's shoulder to turn her in the right direction.\n\n\"You are such a dear girl. Very well. Kitty! Kitty! Hurry along now. We must not disappoint your aunt.\" Mama kicked up a small cloud of dust shuffling to the coach.\n\nKitty met her there, and Uncle helped them both inside.\n\n\"This certainly makes things much easier,\" Darcy muttered beside her.\n\n\"I certainly will not complain for it.\" Elizabeth patted her bag and turned toward the house.\n\nMary met them at the door, pale and wringing her hands. \"I am so glad you are come, Lizzy. She is in great distress, like a woman in travail. Can help her?\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" Elizabeth pushed past.\n\nCollins paced the corridor outside, crossing in front of the study door, making it very difficult to enter. He mumbled something under his breath\u2014probably something very stupid, and cringed as an unearthly shriek started from within the study and permeated the entire house. Maybe he was not entirely dragon-deaf after all\u2014but one might have to be dead to not react to that sound.\n\nDefinitely best that Mama and Kitty were well away.\n\nAnother scream. Elizabeth's skin prickled, the hair on her neck stood up, and she shivered. Yes, Cait was indeed in distress. She dodged around Collins and scurried into the crowded study.\n\nAt least Papa had moved the piles of books against the walls, leaving an opening around the nesting box space, near the center of the room. While the effort to tidy was welcome, it did force everything together into the small island in the middle of the room almost too tight for her to work.\n\nCait, belly distended, hopped from the edge of the nesting box near the hearth, to the low windowsill, to the short footstool and back again. She waddled like Lady Lucas days before her youngest son was born. Papa stood just out of the way, brows tightly knit, eyes locked on the disheveled cockatrix.\n\nWalker perched on the family dragon perch near the nesting box, acknowledging Elizabeth and Darcy with a nod. \"She is here. You will not die. I promise you. Let her help.\"\n\nCait looked up at him and screeched again, wings extended back as though diving.\n\nElizabeth covered her ears, the sound as heart-rending as it was terrifying.\n\n\"Help.\" Cait waddled two steps toward her.\n\nElizabeth rushed to her. Cait wrapped her wings around Elizabeth and collapsed with her head on Elizabeth's shoulder. She smelt oily and dirty which Cait never would have permitted under normal circumstances.\n\n\"So much pain. More than the last time,\" she whispered in Elizabeth's ear.\n\n\"Let me carry you to the nesting box. I will examine you and determine what to do next.\" Gracious, Cait was heavier than she looked! Elizabeth staggered a bit but managed to ease Cait into the nesting box and arranged her in the hay. \"Papa, see the hip bath is prepared in case we need it.\"\n\n\"How warm should the water be?\"\n\n\"Let Walker determine it. Make it as hot as you can comfortably tolerate\u2014it should make you very relaxed and sleepy.\"\n\nWalker bobbed his head.\n\nElizabeth stroked Cait's ruff smooth. \"Mary, open my bag and give me the tin.\"\n\nMary jumped to obey.\n\n\"Now Cait, I must feel for the egg and check for swelling. I fear it may not be very pleasant, but I shall be as gentle as I can. Can you control yourself?\" Elizabeth popped open the top of the tin.\n\n\"No,\" Cait threw her head back in a deep grimace.\n\n\"Then I must wrap your talons so that you do not injure me. I cannot help you if you lacerate my hands. Have I your permission?\"\n\n\"Do it.\"\n\nShe caught Mary's eyes. \"I need feed sacks and bandages, quickly.\"\n\nMary dashed away. Did she really need to wait to be told?\n\n\"While we wait for her, may I feel your belly?\"\n\nCait nodded, and Elizabeth ran her fingers over the matted feather-scales of Cait's abdomen. A single large bulge. Very large. Heavens, just how large was a normal cockatrice egg? Why had no one thought to include that piece of information in any of the dragon lore? It would have been very useful to know.\n\nMary returned; Darcy and Papa helped her wrap Cait's talons whilst Walker perched nearby, carefully out of striking distance, whispering what must have been soothing things in dragon tongue.\n\n\"Now I will check for the egg.\" Elizabeth coated her fingers with pure white lard and carefully probed for the egg. \"Yes, I feel it. Perhaps all it needs is a bit of lard to slide free. Let me see what I can do.\"\n\nCait squawked, and Darcy barely caught her as she reflexively pecked toward Elizabeth's arm.\n\n\"Pray do not bite me! I am sorry it is uncomfortable.\" Elizabeth pulled away. \"But no, this is not going to work.\"\n\n\"I shall die!\" Cait thrashed her wings, driving Darcy and Papa back.\n\n\"No, we must merely take another direction. Trust me. This will work. I have it on very good advice. Mary, soak a pad of bandages in witch hazel. I will put that on your swollen tissues to reduce the swelling and make room for the egg to pass. Darcy, pour a small glass from the jar in my bag\u2014shake it first.\"\n\nThey handed her what she had asked for.\n\n\"Now, while we wait for the swelling to reduce, you must drink this.\"\n\n\"It smells like a hen house.\" Cait pulled her head away and nearly knocked it out of Elizabeth's hand.\n\n\"It is an extract of egg shells\u2014a medicine that will make it easier for you to push the egg out.\" Elizabeth held the cup up.\n\nCait dipped her beak in it. \"It tastes foul. I will not.\"\n\nWalker hopped from his perch and stood beak-to beak-with her. \"You will do what Lady Elizabeth says, and you will do it without arguing.\" He plucked a single old tattered feather from her ruff and held it out to her.\n\nShe hissed at Walker and returned to the cup, guzzling down the viscous white liquid in a single gulp.\n\n\"Very good, that was very good.\" Elizabeth scratched under Cait's ruff. Under normal circumstances, it was far too intimate a gesture for the proud cockatrix to tolerate, but for now, it seemed to relax her just enough that she laid her head on Elizabeth's shoulder, breathing hard in her ear.\n\n\"The bath is ready.\" Papa called from across the room.\n\nWalker perched on the edge of the copper tub, dangling one wing in the water. \"The temperature is right.\"\n\n\"Pray help me carry her.\" Elizabeth turned from Darcy back to Cait. \"I need you to soak in the water for a quarter of an hour. Then we shall dry you off and return you to your nest near the fire. The egg should pass in a quarter hour after that, half at the most.\"\n\n\"You are not just telling me because it is what I want to hear?\" Cait snapped over Darcy's shoulder as they placed her in the warm bath.\n\nElizabeth massaged her tight abdomen in the hot water as a thunderous roar shook the house, rattling the windows.\n\n\"Longbourn is in the cellar!\" Papa shuffled toward the door.\n\nDarcy intercepted him. \"I shall deal with him. You are needed here with Cait.\"\n\nPapa tried to argue, but Darcy disappeared down the hall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Enough was enough! Longbourn might be estate dragon, but there were limits to that privilege that he needed to understand. At the very least, he was not going to continue to bully Elizabeth and jeopardize Cait and her egg.\n\nDarcy followed the roaring and found the cellar door. Interesting how the kitchen staff was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that had been Rustle's doing, or perhaps Rumblkins was proving himself useful. Either way, it was welcome. He paused a moment to light a candle, then plunged into the cellar's darkness.\n\nHis eyes were slow to adjust, but as Darcy made it to the base of the stairs, he could make out Longbourn pacing the length of the cellar, bowing slightly so as not to knock his head on the beams. Clearly the space had not been dug with a dragon in mind\u2014or perhaps it was for a smaller wyvern, a female perhaps? Yes, this would fit a female nicely. Perhaps the original Longbourn had been female.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Longbourn snarled.\n\n\"You will keep your voice down and stop making such a distraction.\" Darcy kept his voice level and firm as Elizabeth did when directing Longbourn.\n\n\"I have not given you permission to be in my territory. I banished her. She is violating my sovereignty. The Blue Order declared I have the right to decide who might be here and who cannot.\" He stomped for emphasis.\n\nDust rained down from the beams above them.\n\n\"Be assured, we will both leave as soon as the situation permits us to do so.\"\n\n\"There is nothing important keeping you here.\"\n\n\"Cait is in distress trying to lay her egg. Elizabeth is helping her. We must stay until Cait is safe.\" Darcy bit his tongue. Patience was the key here. Patience\u2014hopefully not more than he could muster.\n\n\"That is no business of mine. I did not invite Cait here. I do not want her.\"\n\n\"She is here on behalf of the Blue Order so that Collins can become accustomed to dragons.\"\n\nLongbourn grumbled deep in his throat, scratching the packed earth of the cellar floor. \"I do not want him, either. I do not like him. I would just as soon see him eaten.\"\n\n\"That would distress your Keeper, Mary.\"\n\n\"I have never wanted her.\"\n\n\"I know you want Elizabeth, but you cannot have her.\"\n\n\"And that is your fault.\" Longbourn breathed venom-laced puffs in his direction.\n\n\"No, it is yours, and you well know it.\" Darcy retreated up two stairs.\n\nLongbourn extended his wings and roared again. \"I accept no blame.\"\n\nDarcy backed up several more stairs until he was eye-to-eye with Longbourn.\n\n\"Do not think you can win dominance here, little man. You are nothing to me.\"\n\n\"I have already won, you crusty old lizard.\"\n\n\"You have won nothing! I am the apex dragon here.\"\n\n\"No, you are not.\" Darcy reached into his pocket and withdrew a leather envelope.\n\nLongbourn sniffed and snorted at the envelope, nearly butting it out of Darcy's hand.\n\nOpening it, Darcy revealed half a dozen silvery-green scales.\n\nLongbourn roared again.\n\nA heavy body slammed into Darcy from behind. He clutched the bannister for balance. \"Collins?\"\n\n\"What is in your hand that has made him so angry?\" Collins trembled, pointing at the head scales in Darcy's palm.\n\nCould the man possibly have worse timing? \"Get out of here.\"\n\n\"How dare you order me about! This is not your house. It is mine.\" Collins tried to stand straight and puff out his chest. Fool\u2014trying to play the master here but unable to muster more presence than an uncertain adolescent.\n\n\"Not yet, and if this dragon has his way, it will never be.\"\n\nLongbourn stomped closer, turning his foul breath on Collins.\n\n\"What is it \u2026 he \u2026 saying?\"\n\n\"This is between you and I, Darcy. Collins has no business here.\" Longbourn pushed Collins with his nose. \"Leave.\"\n\n\"He wants you to leave.\" Darcy's lip curled a mite.\n\n\"I have a right to know what is going on.\" Did the man really have to whine?\n\n\"And I have a right to eat trespassers.\" Longbourn snorted spittle that landed on Collins' black jacket.\n\n\"Longbourn says you look like a good snack.\"\n\nLongbourn thumped his tail hard on the floor. \"That is not what I said! If you are going to translate, then be accurate.\"\n\n\"I am not your assigned translator. I can say whatever I like. The Order does not require my accuracy.\"\n\n\"Tell Collins I do not want him here.\"\n\n\"No.\" Darcy turned his back on Collins. \"He will be master of this house soon enough. You must become accustomed to him.\"\n\n\"I do not want him.\" Longbourn breathed, hot and pungent, into Darcy's face. \"Make him go.\"\n\n\"No. Have you forgotten?\" Darcy waved the scales under Longbourn's nose. \"I am the dominant dragon.\"\n\nLongbourn screamed and stomped like a little boy throwing a tantrum.\n\n\"You, a dragon?\" Collins stared and blinked hard. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"You need to ask Cait. She will explain. It is a principle all Keepers must understand.\" Darcy tucked the scales back into the envelope.\n\nLongbourn huffed in Collins' face.\n\n\"What is the magic in that envelope making him submit? I must have it.\" Collins grabbed for the scales.\n\nDarcy snatched the envelope back and tucked it in his coat pocket. \"There is no magic. Walker and Cait took his head scales in a dispute, marking their dominance over him. As my Friend, Walker gave them to me, establishing me as dominant over Longbourn. I doubt you shall ever demonstrate dominance over much at all, Mr. Collins. I would suggest you aim instead for competence.\"\n\n\"I am a gentleman. I am not accustomed to submitting\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course, you are, you pandering dolt. I have watched you kowtow to my aunt.\"\n\n\"She is above my station.\"\n\n\"And so is Longbourn.\"\n\n\"He is a \u2026 a creature. He does not have rank.\"\n\nLongbourn swung his head toward Collins and bared his fangs. \"Pendragon declared that we do. A King of your kind accepted our rank, so you must as well.\"\n\n\"You have not read the histories, yet?\" Darcy dragged his hand down is face.\n\n\"Histories? Those are fairy stories for children.\" Collins dropped his voice to near a whisper. \"Just tell me how you have conquered it.\"\n\n\"Not conquered. We have established the order by which we shall live. The key is respect, Mr. Collins. That is where it begins. Does it not, Laird Longbourn? I respect you, and you respect me. Dominance only tells us who has precedence.\"\n\n\"I do not respect a Collins.\"\n\n\"And I do not expect Collins respects you, either.\" Darcy raised an eyebrow to Collins. \"But perhaps you both might learn something. Cait is in an excellent way of teaching you both if you will be teachable.\"\n\nThey both grumbled and muttered but did not outright deny the possibility. That was a start."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The warm water soothed Cait's tension. Her head drooped on Elizabeth's shoulder, and she snored softly. Definitely an improvement over shrieking.\n\nMary hid a giggle behind her hand, not a happy sound so much as a tension-relieving one.\n\n\"Should she be doing that Lizzy? I would think it a bad sign,\" Papa murmured, wrapping his arms over his chest in that authoritative, condescending way he had. \"She does not look well at all.\"\n\n\"As I understand it, the relaxation is good for her. It will make it easier for the egg to pass, especially when the solution she drank begins to work.\"\n\nPapa wrinkled up his mouth but said nothing more.\n\n\"I am certain it is a very good thing that she is restful. Laying should not be so very difficult,\" Walker said with a sideways glare.\n\nIt was nice someone in the room had confidence in her. Hopefully it was not misplaced.\n\n\"The water has cooled. I fear she will take a chill. Mary, towels please.\" Elizabeth extended her hand.\n\nMary scurried off.\n\nElizabeth bit her tongue. Was it too much for her to have seen the hip bath and thought ahead to bring towels when she had gone for the bandages? Obviously the answer was yes, but it was frustrating nonetheless.\n\nMary returned breathless, a sloppy pile of towels ready to fall out of her arms.\n\n\"I will lift her from the bath. Dry her off, and I will take her to the nest.\"\n\n\"But I do not want to hurt her.\" Mary scooted back several steps.\n\n\"She is no different than a travailing woman. You will not hurt her, but getting a chill might undo all that we have accomplished.\"\n\n\"Do as she asks, Mary,\" Papa muttered, not looking at either of them.\n\nHe had been happy enough for her advice and intervention when he did not know from whence her wisdom had come, but now he knew \u2026 Stubborn old lizard\u2014just as bad as Longbourn.\n\nElizabeth's arms ached while Mary meticulously dried Cait's lower body, feet, and magnificent tail feathers. After far longer than it should have taken, Elizabeth lugged Cait back to the nesting box and settled her into the clean hay.\n\n\"Walker, come talk to her again as I check on the egg. Mary, keep watch and make sure she does not peck at me whilst I do.\"\n\n\"I cannot do that!\" Mary's hands flew up, shaking impotently in the air.\n\n\"Is it better that I risk losing my hand to a stray reflex? I need you to step up.\"\n\n\"No! I cannot.\"\n\nPapa shouldered her aside. \"I will do it.\"\n\nAs long as she had help, it did not matter from whom it came. She applied more lard to her fingers. \"Yes, yes that is better. Some of the swelling has subsided, and the egg has definitely moved. You are making progress, Cait, you are doing very well.\"\n\nCait's eyes opened halfway. \"I am?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, it is very close. Perhaps a wee push, just a little one? Can you muster that?\"\n\n\"I do not know. I am so tired.\" Her head lolled back into the nest.\n\n\"Here, I will rub your belly as you push so you do not have to try very hard. Just a little\u2014yes, like that. I feel it! A little more and the egg \u2026 you have done it Cait! The egg is laid!\" Elizabeth grabbed a towel and took the egg from the nest.\n\nShe hurried to the window and held it in a sunbeam. No traces of blood on the shell. Excellent! The shell was sound, lightly green with flecks of gold, firm but not brittle. But so very large! No wonder Cait struggled so.\n\nPapa extended his gnarled hands. It was tempting to be spiteful, but it would serve no greater purpose. She handed him the egg.\n\nHe took it reverently. \"I have never seen one newly-laid. They become rounder and glossy as the days pass.\"\n\nWalker hopped to him and examined the egg, nudging it with his beak. \"It is even larger than the last one. Her last clutch was only one egg. I do not expect another this time, either. It will hatch sooner than most.\"\n\n\"How soon? As I understand, cockatrice eggs take a month full to incubate.\" Papa tapped the still soft shell with his fingernail.\n\n\"Cait's usually hatch in a fortnight, especially the large ones. Our first clutch was of average size and hatched in the usual time. But as the eggs have gotten larger, they spend less and less time in the nest.\"\n\n\"Do you wish assistance in finding a potential Friend?\" Papa asked softly, a little hopeful. There would be some prestige in matching a newly-hatched cockatrice, especially one connected to Walker and Cait, with a Friend.\n\n\"No.\" Cait lifted her head and peered at Papa. \"It is already decided. Elizabeth is my first choice\u2014\"\n\n\"Elizabeth?\" Papa staggered back, pressing the egg to his chest. \"The egg is clearly male. What would Elizabeth do with a cockatrice? They are not a woman's companion.\"\n\nElizabeth winced.\n\n\"We are companions to whomever we choose.\" Cait snapped her beak. \"Perhaps I should insist \u2026\"\n\n\"No, I will not share Pemberley with another of our kind, particularly another male.\" Walker did not exactly growl, but it was close enough.\n\nThat was a reason worth respecting. Not that Elizabeth really wanted another baby dragon to be responsible for when Pemberley's infancy and youth might last nearly all of Elizabeth's life.\n\n\"Then Colonel Fitzwilliam. He will do well for our chick.\" A little of Cait's usual spirit returned to her voice.\n\n\"He is in London right now, but Darcy will inform him. I am sure he will be here directly.\"\n\nNo doubt they had already decided this well ahead of time. What purpose did they have in this little charade in front of Papa?\n\n\"We shall have a room prepared for him.\" Papa masked his disappointment well, but it was still clear in the stoop of his shoulders.\n\n\"Will Longbourn have him?\" Mary looked over her shoulder as though he might appear in the study at any moment.\n\n\"Longbourn has no choice. Cait is here by request of the Blue Order. He cannot interfere with anything regarding her.\" Elizabeth placed the egg back into the nest under Cait's feathers. Dragons did not sit on their eggs like birds, but bird-types often spent time sitting on the eggs as a protective, maternal gesture, declaring to other dragons that this was protected territory, not an invitation for a snack.\n\n\"Is that not perhaps a stretch of the Blue Order's rights?\" Mary asked. \"Should we tempt Longbourn's temper that way? Perhaps it would be best for you to take Cait with you to Netherfield now that her life is in no danger.\"\n\n\"Cait is here for your benefit, Mary, translating for your husband. Without her, he has no way to hear the dragons, small or large. The Order knew she was due to lay her clutch, so taking care of her and the egg was part of the requirements placed on Longbourn.\"\n\n\"Mr. Collins will be fine without her. She can go to Netherfield. It is just a matter of a fortnight, is it not?\"\n\n\"You really do not understand, do you?\" Elizabeth sat on the floor beside the nesting box and hung her head. \"He requires her presence as a part of his sentence.\"\n\n\"Elizabeth is right.\" Papa stood beside Mary, his voice soft and grave.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\nElizabeth braced her elbows and pressed her forehead on her palms. \"When Collins stumbled into Rosings' lair in Kent, the crime\u2014\"\n\n\"What crime? That is not a crime!\" Mary threw her hands up. \"Why is everyone so intent\u2014\"\n\n\"It is among the Order. And that offense carries with it a capital sentence.\" Papa's words hung in the air.\n\n\"That was commuted.\" Did Mary realize what scolding tone she used? Best leave the explanations to Papa.\n\n\"Not exactly. He is on probation. He has a year to be inducted into the Order\u2014or not.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, 'or not?'\" The color drained from Mary's face.\n\nHow could she not understand? She had heard the pronouncements just as Elizabeth had.\n\n\"If he is not deemed worthy, or at the very least not a hazard to dragonkind, then the Order will not allow any threat to dragonkind to remain.\" How did Papa manage to pronounce such news with so little feeling?\n\n\"Who is to determine what makes him a threat?\" Mary fell into the nearest chair.\n\nCait chirruped. \"My testimony will be a part of that consideration. At the moment, I think very little of him and his high-and-mighty opinions. Your plan to send me away reeks of one who wants to get rid of supervision and go her own way. It is not in either of your favor.\"\n\n\"This is ridiculous.\"\n\n\"Your opinion does not matter.\" Elizabeth knotted her fingers together. \"When one deals with dragons, there is a high price for the relationship. I am sorry the connection is one you do not like and perhaps do not even value right now. I am sorry it has been thrust upon you so unwillingly. But perhaps you can keep in mind, it did permit you to catch the man you wanted, and that probably should count for something.\"\n\nMary's jaw dropped. \"Are you suggesting\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I suggest nothing. I merely recommend that you should carefully consider all aspects of your situation before you form opinions too quickly.\" Elizabeth rose and shook out her skirts. \"Keep Cait warm and bring her a large meal and plenty of water. I shall check on her soon.\" She stalked out, not really sure where she was going.\n\nStubborn, stubborn, stubborn, the entire lot of them: Papa, Mary, Collins, Longbourn. Could they not see what was at stake and what disaster they were risking by their obstinacy? One of them had to bend a knee soon, or something tragic was going to happen. But how to make them see?\n\nElizabeth touched her shoulder. If only April were here. She was as obstinate as the rest to be sure, but she was willing to see reason. Only recently she had admitted there were advantages to being warm-blooded. No dragon ever wanted to admit such a thing. Perhaps if she were here to show them a way\u2014but April was not here to help her. She was alone.\n\nPerhaps that meant she needed to do something about the situation herself.\n\nElizabeth fell into a hall chair, arms wrapped tightly around her waist. The wooden frame creaked, and the back thumped against the chair rail. Even the furniture was complaining about her.\n\nAll told, she was as stubborn as the rest. Mary had scolded her for it. Papa had outright berated her for it. Cait had reproached her thoroughly for the same when Elizabeth insisted Longbourn was the only possible dragon who could be persuading Mary\u2014or who could have tried to persuade her about Collins.\n\nWhile it was by no means certain, Cait did have a point. Longbourn was not the only possible culprit. Why Longbourn would have allowed such a dragon into his territory and into the cellars was difficult to conceive, but it was\u2014just barely\u2014possible.\n\nJust enough to make it reasonable to offer him an apology.\n\nAfter all, it would be what Elizabeth would want if accused of such an egregious wrong.\n\nMaybe it would serve as an example to the rest of the family that it was time to become more tractable. Even if it did not, at least it held the promise of making Longbourn easier to deal with. If, of course, it did not make things worse altogether which seemed equally likely.\n\nShe pushed herself up from the creaky chair and headed toward the cellar.\n\n\"And I do not expect Collins respects you, either.\" Darcy's strong voice greeted her at the top of the cellar stairs. \"But perhaps you both might learn something. Cait is in an excellent way of teaching you both if you will be teachable.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she picked her way down the narrow steps to Darcy's side. \"Cait is a very good teacher and has taught me some important things as well.\"\n\n\"Is the crisis past?\" Darcy reached for her hand and held it tightly.\n\nShe had been wrong; she was not at all alone. \"Cait and the egg are safe and well.\"\n\nLongbourn stepped closer to the stairs and leaned toward her face. \"Then you can leave.\"\n\n\"I need to teach Mary how to take proper care of your teeth. Or perhaps, Mr. Collins, you might be amenable\u2014\"\n\n\"I will not have the dumb one touching me!\" Longbourn's tail pounded the cellar floor.\n\n\"I \u2026 I do not think it \u2026 he likes that idea.\" Collins pressed himself against the far banister.\n\n\"He is only being stubborn. Very, very stubborn.\"\n\nLongbourn glared and drew a deep breath.\n\nElizabeth lifted her open hands. \"We all have been very stubborn. We will get no further solving any of the problems facing us by being so.\"\n\n\"What are you demanding of me now?\" Longbourn leaned in toward her, eyes narrow.\n\nHer heart pounded painfully against her ribs. She sucked in a deep breath; maybe that would quell it. \"Nothing. I do not ask anything of you, except perhaps to listen.\"\n\n\"Why should I listen to you?\" Longbourn folded his wings along his back, rather like a child crossing his arms and pouting. But he was no longer stomping and snarling. That was a good sign.\n\n\"I come to offer an apology.\"\n\n\"Apologize to a creature?\" Collins snorted and stomped. \"How can you think of such a thing? It is unseemly.\"\n\nElizabeth whirled on him. \"Not when I have been wrong.\"\n\nLongbourn snapped a warning in Collins' direction. Collins jumped back two stairs. Longbourn sat back a little, his tail making long, slow arcs along the cellar floor. Darcy edged a little closer, pressing his shoulder to hers.\n\n\"I am listening.\" Longbourn settled on his haunches.\n\n\"We,\" Elizabeth glanced back at Darcy. He met her gaze, eyes dark and warm and strong beside her, \"we believe that there is another major dragon, a rogue, nearby. So there is another who could have tried to convince me to accept Mr. Collins.\"\n\n\"A dragon tried to persuade you to accept my offer?\" Collins' jaw dropped. It would have been enormously funny at any other time.\n\n\"Indeed one did,\" she hissed.\n\n\"And you still refused me?\" Now was not the time for this conversation.\n\n\"It violates a fundamental law of the Blue Order, as well as simple common sense, for a dragon to try and persuade a hearer, especially his Keeper.\" Usually that tone of voice ended conversations.\n\n\"You were so dead set against me even that could not have moved you?\"\n\n\"Have I not made it entirely clear to you, sir, that nothing in heaven or on earth would have moved me to accept you? Longbourn scooped me up like prey, wrapped me in his wings and breathed venom on me, and still I refused to accept you. Does that not make it clear enough?\" She probably should not have, but she stomped. It was rather satisfying, though. No wonder Longbourn was so fond of it.\n\n\"It tried to kill you?\" Collins turned very pale. \"I knew they were not to be trusted.\"\n\n\"I can see why you detested him,\" Longbourn muttered.\n\n\"Would you really have wanted me tied to such a man?\" Elizabeth glowered briefly at Collins.\n\n\"Mary seems to like him well enough.\" Longbourn's brow ridge wrinkled.\n\n\"Mary is very different to me; she has other priorities.\"\n\nCollins harrumphed.\n\n\"I am not certain I am one of them.\" Longbourn dragged his claws in the dirt.\n\n\"That has to change. I will do everything I can to instruct both of them in better Dragon Keeping. If you will permit me.\"\n\n\"You said you had an apology to make.\"\n\n\"I do.\" She pulled her shoulders back and looked Longbourn straight in the eyes. \"I am deeply sorry that I accused you of trying to use draconic persuasion upon me when trying to convince me to marry Mr. Collins.\"\n\n\"You do not believe I did that?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 I do not think so. I still have many questions without sensible answers, but no, I do not think you did. I am sorry I accused you of doing so. You have been my friend for a very long time, and friends do not behave so toward one another, even when they are very bad-tempered and do not get their way. Will you forgive me my error?\"\n\n\"Will you tell your father and your sister that you were wrong? And the Blue Order as well? You accused me of heinous behavior before the entire Conclave. It was humiliating.\"\n\nElizabeth sighed heavily. \"I had not realized how difficult that must have been. You are entirely correct. I will submit a formal apology to be presented at the next Conclave so that it is as public as my accusation.\"\n\n\"And you do not believe I would do such a thing to you?\" He leaned his head in very close.\n\n\"Look me in the eye and tell me\u2014would you even consider such a thing?\" She touched his cheek.\n\n\"I like having my way, but there are limits to how far I would go for that.\"\n\n\"I believe you.\"\n\nThe tip of his tail thumped softly. \"Scratch my ears.\" He shoved his head toward her, nearly knocking Collins off the stairs.\n\n\"I cannot believe you apologized to that creature when you should apologize to me.\" Collins nose wrinkled as he snorted.\n\nElizabeth reached for Longbourn's itchiest spots. \"I understand how I wronged Longbourn, sir, but how exactly did I wrong you?\"\n\n\"As I see it, she spared you a very unhappy marriage,\" Darcy grumbled, not looking at Collins.\n\n\"And I led you to a wife who not only wanted to marry you, but somehow seems to think well of you. I ask you again, how have I wronged you?\"\n\nCollins muttered something that did not deserve attention.\n\n\"Now, it is time for your first proper lesson in Dragon Keeping. They are always itchy and like nothing better than a proper scratch. See here, behind his ear\u2014with your permission, Longbourn\u2014\" he grunted not quite affirmatively, but he did not growl, and that was good enough. \"Like this.\"\n\nDarcy elbowed Collins hard, and he capitulated, none too happily, until Longbourn began to respond to his clumsy ministrations. An oddly satisfied look crept across Collins' face. The man would never make a truly good Dragon Keeper, but he might do well enough for the Order to make him a Deaf Speaker and live out his life tending to Longbourn. That would be sufficient."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Darcy stepped back and scratched his head. Who would have imagined Elizabeth's simple apology could make such a difference? Once she assuaged Longbourn's bruised ego, he proved far less disagreeable\u2014which was certainly not the same as being agreeable. The contrast to his previous manner, though, made him seem utterly pleasant. With Elizabeth's approval, Darcy brought Mary and Bennet into the cellar conversation, and their stubbornness softened as well.\n\nThe disgruntled wyvern reluctantly agreed that Elizabeth was no longer banished from Longbourn estate and she might come and go freely from the house and grounds. That alone was a huge breakthrough but not without cost. She had to promise to instruct Mary and Collins in Longbourn's preferences\u2014something neither appeared very interested in learning. Though Bennet still seemed quite put out with Elizabeth, he did agree to speak with her and permit her the use of his library. Small steps, but enough to make the entire affair feel like a victory.\n\nThey returned to Netherfield late that night, too spent for words. Elizabeth leaned heavily on his shoulder as he guided the curricle along the moonlit road. Without the morning's urgency, the ride proved peaceful, even soothing, her quiet warmth as welcome as any conversation.\n\nWith his last few coherent thoughts, Darcy penned a quick letter to Fitzwilliam, telling him of Cait's invitation to befriend her chick. No doubt, that would bring him to Netherfield in short order. He gave the missive to Walker and collapsed into bed.\n\nDarcy slept well into the next afternoon. As he made his way down the grand stairs, Nicholls met him with news. Miss Bennet was under the weather with a sick headache and might not go below stairs all day. He turned around and trudged back up the stairs. Truth was, he felt rather off himself. If she was not going to be about, there was little reason for him to be.\n\nHis muscles ached, and his chest felt vaguely raw, as though a chest cold were coming on. Rather like he had felt whilst recovering from their exposure to the venom in the mapmaker's rooms.\n\nVenom exposure?\n\nHe pulled a hall chair near and fell into it. The wooden joints creaked in protest. He scrubbed his face with his hands, knotting his fingers into his hair.\n\nThere had been traces of venom in Longbourn's breath yesterday, particularly when he became angry. Could that have been enough to cause a reaction? Perhaps they were more sensitive since they had been previously exposed. He drummed his fingers on the back of his head. According to Gardiner, Longbourn also breathed on Elizabeth when he lost his temper and caused her to lose consciousness. Would that render her even more affected by the poison?\n\nHe would have to talk to her about it when\u2014no, it could not wait. He half-ran downstairs to order Nicholls to prepare hot water, then back to Elizabeth's room.\n\n\"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!\" He pounded at the door, leaning heavily on the doorframe, panting to catch his breath.\n\n\"I heard you. You need not break the door down!\" Her voice was thin and sharp through the offending slab of oak. A moment later, she pulled the door open and peeked out.\n\nDark circles lined her eyes over very pale cheeks. Her eyes were swollen and red, and it looked as though she clung to the door handle for support. \"What do you need, sir?\"\n\n\"I think I know what is wrong with both of us.\"\n\n\"You are unwell, too?\" Irritation melted into concern as she reached for his arm.\n\n\"We were both in Longbourn's presence for an extended time and in an enclosed space. I think there was venom in the air.\"\n\nHer brow creased the way it often did when she was thinking. \"He might have been displeased, but he would not have intentionally\u2014\"\n\n\"Not intentionally, to be sure. But when he becomes agitated, there is often a drop or two of ochre on his fangs. When he huffs, he sprays it into the air.\"\n\n\"I suppose it is possible.\" She chewed her knuckle.\n\n\"Remember how you felt after we were exposed to the maps?\"\n\nShe blinked hard at him. \"It seemed just a headache and perhaps a cold, but now that you mention it \u2026 perhaps.\"\n\n\"I have ordered hot water for bathing.\"\n\n\"It seems quite sensible.\" She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as though trying to shake loose a thought. \"Now that Papa is permitting me back into Longbourn house, perhaps I should search his libraries for some sort of antidote to the venom. As we are a wyvern estate, it seems some ancestor should have identified something.\"\n\n\"Did he not already look, though?\" It would probably have been better not to permit the exasperation to show in his voice.\n\n\"He did, but I have discovered he has a bias against particular sources. Prior Keepers kept their own logs and notes, but he considers them unreliable forms of information compared to the canon of dragon lore. I may be able to find something he has overlooked.\"\n\nA searing jolt coursed through his skull. He clutched his temples. \"If we are likely to spend more time with Longbourn, I think it a very good idea.\"\n\n\"I hear the maids coming. You should return to your chambers.\" She glanced over his shoulder and gently pushed her door closed.\n\nShe was right, of course, but he hated to lose her company. He staggered to his quarters, the headache growing steadily worse. He barely made it to his room before his knees melted underneath him, and he fell into a chair. This definitely felt like dragon venom.\n\nA team of servants trundled in with a copper tub and hot water in pails and kettles and pots. They labored for a full quarter of an hour to set up the tub in front of the fireplace and fill it. Walker winged his way into the room just as he shooed the maids out. Darcy shed his clothes and sank into the hot water.\n\n\"You look like carrion some dog dragged to the side of the road.\" Walker perched at the foot of the tub, staring at Darcy.\n\n\"I feel worse.\" Darcy splashed water on his face.\n\n\"Why the bath? Have you been back to the map room?\"\n\n\"No, although we need to. We think it was Longbourn yesterday, venom in the air.\"\n\n\"You should tell Fitzwilliam when he arrives. I saw him on the road. He will be here soon. He carried a rather large portfolio\u2014I would imagine the Order dispatched him here.\"\n\n\"Or he is impatient to visit with Cait and her egg.\"\n\n\"It will not hatch that soon.\" Walker snorted, dipping the tip of his wing into the bathwater. \"That is nearly as hot as the one Cait used at Longbourn.\"\n\n\"Do you wish to use the bathwater when I am finished?\"\n\n\"Lady Elizabeth may have coaxed Cait into a water bath, but I far prefer dust.\" Walker splashed a bit of water toward Darcy's face just for emphasis.\n\n\"How is she today?\"\n\n\"Greatly improved. A bit sore and tired but nearly back to herself. We both owe Lady Elizabeth a great debt. Cait would not have survived without her help.\"\n\n\"I am sure she would be keen for news of Cait. Perhaps you should go to her.\"\n\nWalker smirked. \"You want me to bring you news of how she fares.\"\n\n\"I would value your opinions. I fear she underestimates risks to her own well-being.\" Darcy dragged a small towel over his face.\n\nWalker chirruped and flew out, apparently as concerned about Elizabeth as Darcy.\n\nHe leaned back in the bath, ducking until the water reached his ear lobes. So, Fitzwilliam was on his way with news from the Order. If the portfolio was large, it could not possibly be good news. Best finish up and dress before Fitzwilliam barged in.\n\nTwo hours later, Nicholls\u2014looking a bit perplexed\u2014showed Fitzwilliam into the small parlor lit by the fireplace and a handful of candles. How snug the room seemed with only a small portion lit.\n\nWalker suggested to Nicholls that Fitzwilliam was a very good friend of Bingley, and Bingley would want Netherfield's hospitality extended toward Fitzwilliam even as it had been toward Darcy. Walker managed to get her to accept the persuasion, but it was clear April was much more adept at the task than any cockatrice would ever be\u2014they were unsubtle creatures at best.\n\nHopefully, April would yet return to Elizabeth. She was a very useful creature to have around. Though he might not admit it aloud, at least not yet, her company was entertaining, even a little endearing. He missed having her about.\n\nHe and Fitzwilliam settled into the small parlor to talk. Nicholls brought word that Elizabeth, though improved, would not be coming down for dinner. Darcy requested dinner trays be brought to the parlor. They made small talk until the trays were brought.\n\n\"I am surprised to see you. I sent word only yesterday evening.\" Darcy arranged his dinner tray in front of him. Not a fine meal, to be sure, but far better than anything they had at the public inns. \"I know you are anxious for the egg to hatch, but this does seem a bit enthusiastic.\"\n\n\"If it were only that, I would have taken a wee bit more time. Unfortunately, nothing can be quite that simple.\" Fitzwilliam hooked a small footstool with his toes and pulled it close enough to prop his feet. \"I am a little surprised Elizabeth is not here with us.\"\n\nDarcy explained his suspicions about the venom exposure. \"Even so, I still think it worth the progress we made. While Longbourn will never be tractable, Elizabeth's apology did much to smooth the way. I expect his cooperation on at least the most critical matters.\"\n\n\"Welcome news, indeed. I doubt mine will be, though. Perhaps, for the moment, it is best that we talk without Elizabeth.\" Fitzwilliam tapped steepled fingers before his face.\n\n\"I do not like the sound of that.\"\n\n\"Matters have become more complicated than expected. Things could turn rather ugly.\"\n\n\"From you, that is a very worrisome word. What are you suggesting?\"\n\n\"To sum up the pile of Order documents you will no doubt read later, reports of unrest continue to pour into the Order offices. While the more powerful major dragons do not feel particularly threatened by the possibility of a rogue, particularly one as weak as a lindwurm, the lesser major dragons are calling for assurances that action will be taken.\"\n\n\"Action has been taken. That is why we are here.\" Darcy pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead.\n\n\"The Order fears it may not be enough to quell the lesser-landed dragons.\" Fitzwilliam balanced one foot on top of the other. \"Unfortunately, that is not the whole of it. The emissary from the Eastern Dragon Federation is indeed missing. Gone without a trace.\"\n\n\"How is that possible? I thought you said the emissary was traveling via dragon tunnel\u2014?\"\n\n\"She\u2014we have found out that much about the emissary\u2014was and had successfully passed through several of the checkpoints, but she failed to appear at one and has not been seen since. Several wyrms, large and small, were sent to scour the tunnels, and they turned up very disturbing news.\"\n\n\"Evidence the emissary has been harmed?\" Darcy clutched the arm of his chair.\n\n\"No, thankfully. That would be an entirely different level of disaster. The wyrms discovered branches and tunnels that were not on our maps. The entrances had been obscured, blocked in such a way that one who did not know they were there would not notice them. When the wyrms uncovered them, the scope of the tunnels was staggering\u2014absolutely staggering. We have teams going through them now, but the task will take months at best, perhaps longer.\"\n\nDarcy's jaw dropped. \"That many?\"\n\n\"The emissary could literally be anywhere in England right now, absolutely anywhere.\"\n\n\"At some point, she will grow hungry and have to come out to find food.\"\n\n\"With all the unrest about a rogue dragon, even though the Order has sent word that an Eastern Dragon has been invited to England and is expected\u2014\"\n\nDarcy stood and paced along the fireplace. \"Any dragon lower than a major drake\u2014and even some of them, come to think of it\u2014is likely to defend its territory first and heed the Order only after they feel safe.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Fitzwilliam's expression was grim.\n\n\"Dragon's blood and fire! If the emissary is killed\u2014\"\n\n\"We risk a domestic dragon war whilst trying to stave off a war from the Eastern Federation. Consequently, the Blue Order officers\u2014human and dragon\u2014have decided the only reasonable option is to end the threat of the rogue dragon immediately.\"\n\n\"Is that not what Elizabeth and I have been trying to do?\"\n\n\"There is no more time. An immediate resolution is required.\" Something about the look on Fitzwilliam's face \u2026\n\n\"No, they cannot possibly require that of you.\"\n\n\"Now that you are Keeper to Pemberley, you cannot possibly carry out the task.\" Fitzwilliam's foot dropped to the floor with a resounding thud.\n\n\"We have been exchanging messages with the rogue. It knows I once carried the Dragon Slayer. He is already wary.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell! I am not surprised, though. I knew there had to be something more complicated going on since the creature was not already winding around Elizabeth's ankles, begging to be scratched.\"\n\n\"She does make getting along with dragons look simple and easy.\" Hopefully, Fitzwilliam could not hear the twinge of jealousy in his voice.\n\n\"I am honestly surprised she does not already have an office with the Order. It seems as though they should have worked out a way to benefit from her acumen by now.\"\n\n\"I am sure Bennet and Longbourn are at the heart of that, keeping her close to home for their own ease. If she became an officer, then she would be spending a great deal of time in London and away from Longbourn.\"\n\n\"Something neither of them would much appreciate.\" Fitzwilliam leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. \"I am not sure she should know I have the Dragon Slayer.\"\n\n\"I do not relish keeping secrets from her.\"\n\n\"I am afraid of what she may do if she finds out.\"\n\n\"You are exaggerating. Elizabeth is not inclined to throw herself into that sort of danger.\"\n\nWas Fitzwilliam coughing or laughing? Maybe both. \"You recall what she did when Pemberley hatched? You think it unlikely she would do such a thing again? Do not try to tell me you would forbid her. You and I both know that is impossible. Recall how she took on Cait when you brought her to Rosings.\"\n\n\"I still have nightmares about Cait clawing her eyes out for that.\" Darcy threw his arm over his eyes.\n\n\"Need I say more?\"\n\n\"What about Wickham and Lydia? Is there no concern that if you hunt the lindwurm they might become collateral damage?\"\n\n\"I would not say there is no concern, but let us be honest. Wickham is of no account to anyone. His death would not be difficult to cover with an appropriate tale if anyone even noticed. And Miss Lydia,\" Fitzwilliam blew a sharp breath through the edge of his lips. \"I am sorry, but it was her father's responsibility to curb her behavior. His failure has led to this situation, so any harm to her would be upon his head. He should have been paying attention to the signs that she could hear and acted. The Order is not very sympathetic.\"\n\n\"She is to be my sister. I cannot take such a cavalier attitude.\" Darcy jumped out of his chair and paced.\n\n\"I assure you, I will do everything in my power to protect her. I do not wish to bring grief to Elizabeth, but certainly she can see that there is a great deal more at stake right now than just her sister.\"\n\n\"If it were Georgiana at risk, you would say the same?\" Darcy dared not meet Fitzwilliam's gaze.\n\n\"You know how highly I regard her. But not even she is worth setting the world into dragon war and destroying everything Pendragon and all the generations since have worked so hard to achieve.\"\n\nDamn it all! It was difficult to argue that point.\n\n\"With what the Order demands of me now, I wonder if I am truly fit to befriend any dragon, much less one of Walker's line. If I am successful in my mission, I will be an anathema to all dragonkind.\"\n\n\"Cait specifically named you as Friend for her chick. That is not an honor one turns down lightly.\"\n\nFitzwilliam raked his hand through his hair. \"I take no pleasure in any of this, to be sure. There is an excellent chance I will not survive, even if I am successful. Father did not say as much, but he did bring Mother to London and ensured I saw her before I left.\"\n\n\"There must be another way.\" Darcy paced a little faster. \"I am certain Longbourn must be aware of the lindwurm and at least tolerating it which means they communicate somehow. And the maps! If we can get into the mapmaker's rooms, we might be able to learn something more. Between the two, we may find some way to negotiate with the creature and prevent bloodshed.\"\n\n\"The map room is poisoned, is it not?\"\n\n\"Elizabeth believes an unexplored avenue in her father's library may provide useful information toward countering the venom. Being in the library might well occasion us to speak to Longbourn himself. Perhaps he might even have some knowledge of Lydia. I am certain we will find another way. There must be one.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your faith, Darcy, but it is a luxury I cannot afford. I will go to Longbourn with you and learn as much as I can there. But I do not expect to find anything that will dissuade me from my mission.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "After a full day of rest and two more thorough baths, Elizabeth ventured from her rooms. Her skin was near raw in places from scrubbing, and her fingers might never stop resembling prunes. But her lungs no longer burned and the lingering ache in her joints had faded.\n\nHow would Longbourn react when she told him how sick his bout of temper had left her? Probably despondent and recalcitrant, or stomping off in another fit of temper. He was always one for extremes.\n\nThe morning sun hung high in the sky\u2014so much for her preferred early start. The feather bed beckoned her back into its indulgent embrace. Only the threat of a rogue dragon was strong enough to shatter the siren song. She shrugged into a morning gown, pinned up her hair, and headed downstairs.\n\nMen's voices, Darcy's and Fitzwilliam's, filtered from the morning room. Was it silly to miss having Darcy to herself in the mornings? Yes, and probably selfish, too. Much bigger considerations took precedence now.\n\nDarcy scrambled to the doorway to escort her to her chair, carefully tucking it in under the table for her.\n\nFitzwilliam sat opposite the window, face lined with weary concerns that sleep had not erased. What could have happened in London? \"It is a pleasure to see you out and about today, Miss Bennet.\"\n\n\"It is a pleasure to be out and about, I assure you.\"\n\n\"Would you care for something to eat? Tea or coffee, perhaps?\" Darcy smiled carved dimples into his cheeks when he spoke, making it hard to refuse.\n\nHe set a heavily-laden plate\u2014enough to feed herself and two small dragons at least, and a cup of steaming coffee before her. She sipped her cup\u2014oh, that was very strong!\u2014and nibbled from her plate for a few moments lest she be thought too direct in her conversation. Probably no need to worry given the company, but the long-instilled habit was difficult to alter. \"Dare I ask what news you have from the Order?\"\n\nFitzwilliam glanced at Darcy. Something about the expression seemed vaguely conspiratorial.\n\n\"Things have naturally become more complicated\u2014as they are wont to do when dragons are involved.\" Fitzwilliam described the loss of the Eastern Dragon emissary somewhere in the vast tunnel system underneath England. \"It is imperative we gain control over this rogue dragon situation as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"No doubt.\" Her mind whirled with possibilities. None of them good. \"Since we are making little headway in our conversation with the lindwurm, perhaps it is time to seek Longbourn's assistance.\"\n\nDarcy's brow furrowed with the worried-worn look he often wore.\n\n\"I may be of some use with that.\" Fitzwilliam reached over several piles to liberate a small stack tied with a blue ribbon. \"Lady Astrid sent some material for you.\"\n\n\"Let us bring it to Longbourn house, then. Papa and I may study it whilst you help us scour the journals of past Keepers for further information.\"\n\nFitzwilliam groaned like a reluctant schoolboy. \"I understand it is our best option. Whether or not we manage to find some miracle cure in those cryptic pages, I need to speak to Longbourn himself. Will you help me secure his cooperation? I hope he may be familiar with some of the tunnels in Hertfordshire and perhaps assist us in locating the lost emissary\u2014\"\n\n\"Or\u2014I imagine\u2014at the very least you hope to extract his promise not to harm the envoy?\"\n\n\"That is the least I\u2014and the Blue Order\u2014require.\"\n\nAnd the least Longbourn could rightfully offer. Pray let his stubbornness be softened today. \"I will do my best to convince him to see you, and barring that, I will extract the desired promise from him.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, Miss Bennet, but how does one convince an obstinate dragon?\" Fitzwilliam tapped his palms together.\n\n\"Name a major dragon who is not obstinate. It is in their very nature. One does not become the apex predator by giving way easily, no? To criticize a dragon for being stubborn is like criticizing a horse for having four legs. But inflexibility does not equate to stupidity.\"\n\nFitzwilliam snorted under his breath.\n\n\"Even a pigheaded dragon like Longbourn can see how he has everything to lose and nothing to gain in a full dragon war. The lesser major dragons suffer most in those circumstances.\"\n\n\"You are a difficult woman to argue with, Miss Bennet.\" Fitzwilliam lifted his cup toward her. \"She will not give you an easy run of it, will she, Darcy?\"\n\nDarcy raised his coffee cup and winked.\n\nSeveral hours later, Darcy and Fitzwilliam took turns on the library ladder in Papa's study, one to find books and the other to add them to the abundant stacks of books for perusal. Normally, the books on the floor comprised that part of his collection that did not fit on his shelves. But today, the group also included all volumes that might have material on lindwurms, dragon tunnels, wyvern poison, or young cockatrices\u2014maybe twice as many piles as usual. With four people, a cockatrice nest and the egg, the room had progressed from cluttered to positively smothering.\n\nElizabeth and Papa sat side-by-side in two wing chairs pulled very close to the fireplace and nesting box. He studied Lady Astrid's monographs while Elizabeth scanned a journal from a Longbourn Keeper, three generations past.\n\n\"I am beginning to wonder, Lizzy, if I do not need to make it to London a bit more often.\" Papa looked up from the monograph and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. \"Sending your mother and Kitty there with Gardiner yesterday was a matter of convenience, but perhaps we should do it more often, and I should accompany them.\"\n\nElizabeth nearly dropped the journal. \"Excuse me?\" She had leafed through the monograph on their way to Longbourn and found it absorbing, but not normally the sort of thing Papa would spend a great deal of time with.\n\n\"Yes, I know, you never thought I would say such a thing, but this,\" he tapped the monograph, \"is making me wonder. This is absolutely fascinating work, fascinating. I wonder how much I am missing by not frequenting the Order Library. It is different to what they used to publish. It might even be worthwhile to resubmit that fairy dragon monograph.\"\n\n\"It certainly might. I know Lady Astrid would welcome you. She is a very gracious and entirely charming soul. Though she could easily make anyone feel quite dragon-dumb, she is so kind and thoughtful, that I hardly feel as stupid as she must think I am.\" Elizabeth turned aside. The words had just tumbled from her lips, uncensored. She should have thought them through much more carefully.\n\n\"I hardly think she considers you so, Lizzy. Gardiner has told me your commonplace book has created quite a stir among the scribes and even the Lord Physician.\" His tone did not convey approval.\n\nHer cheeks grew hot as she felt Darcy's and Fitzwilliam's eyes on her. \"They are only my scribblings about my observations and experiences from the Blue Order business I attended with you.\"\n\n\"You were apt to write everything down. Always scribbling in that book of yours. I know your mother insisted on you girls keeping those books, but none of your sisters ever seemed to take it as seriously as you did. I wonder, sometimes, if you were full young to have been dragged from one side of the country to the other when you should have been in the schoolroom with your sisters.\"\n\n\"As I remember it, you brought me on your business trips because you could no longer hold a pen to write.\" She clenched her fist, heart pounding painfully. \"Not on some sort of capricious whim.\"\n\nPapa polished his glasses with the end of his cravat. \"Perhaps I should have hired a secretary to do that work instead. The Blue Order would likely have paid for it once I was installed as historian. You were exposed to too much, to too many dragons and their Keepers, far too young.\"\n\nShe shut the journal forcefully and stood, blood roaring in her ears. \"I am sorry you feel that way.\" She dropped the book on the chair and strode out.\n\nDarcy caught her eye on the way to the door, but thankfully he seemed to notice she was in no mind to be questioned and let her pass.\n\n\"Lizzy! There is work to be done!\" Papa's voice was filled with an all-too-familiar exasperation that came out whenever she expressed an opinion he did not like. It had become so much more frequent in recent years.\n\n\"I need air and to walk and think about all that I have read. That is part of the way I work, and I shall not be denied.\" She slammed the door behind her.\n\nHow kind of him to question the most treasured memories of her childhood, the events that shaped her into who and what she was today. Did she embarrass him, or was it that her presence sometimes led to surprises like April's Friendship? He never did like surprises. Or was it simply because she was a woman, and he did not approve of the elevated position the Blue Order offered them? Or maybe modern Dragon Keeping threatened him and his precious dragon lore.\n\nShe wrapped her arms tight around her waist. That kind of thinking could be the downfall of them all.\n\nAt least Darcy did not seem so hidebound. He read her notes and acted upon them without critiquing or questioning their wisdom because they came from a young woman. He had insisted she come to Rosings to help with Pemberley. Once there, he abided no interference with her ministrations to the drakling. His letters spoke of the trust he place in her.\n\nWhat would it be like living with a man who valued and relied upon her understanding? The more time she spent with Papa, the more pleasing the idea became.\n\n\"Oh, Lizzy!\" Mary nearly ran into her. \"I thought you were in the study with Papa.\"\n\nElizabeth stopped short and jumped back several steps. \"I was, but I need to walk and gather my thoughts.\"\n\n\"Longbourn is in the cellar\u2014he thought he heard your voice. Would you\u2014he would very much like to talk with you.\" Mary wrung her hands in her apron.\n\nOne more stubborn, disagreeable male to deal with? Elizabeth dragged her hand over her face. Now was certainly not the time.\n\n\"He is worried about you. Somehow he has gotten the notion that you have not been well. He really is very concerned.\" Mary bit her lip and cringed a little.\n\nWhat little dragon spy would have brought him that information? At least he was concerned, not demanding something from her. It would have been nice if Mary expressed as much concern. \"Pray tell him that I would be pleased to meet with him in his lair.\"\n\n\"But why go so far? He is in the cellar under our feet.\" Mary glanced over her shoulder toward the cellar door.\n\n\"He is correct. I have been unwell. We believe bad air in the cellar is in part to blame. If he is truly concerned for my health, then he will agree to meet me in his lair.\"\n\nMary clapped her hands over her mouth. \"I had no idea. Do you think it is unsafe\u2014\"\n\n\"For you, no I do not think so. For Darcy and me, though, yes. We were both exposed to powerful wyvern venom at Netherfield. It seems the least exposure is apt to affect us now. Pray do not explain that to Longbourn, lest there be any more misunderstandings. I will break it to him myself when I see him.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course.\" Mary looked a little relieved. \"I am certain he will understand, Lizzy. You should know, your apology meant a great deal to him. Things are so different. He tries hard to be more agreeable now that you no longer accuse him of something he did not do. He did not even complain when I scratched his scales the wrong way, or when I did not warm the oil for his hide properly.\"\n\nLongbourn was not the only one whose attitude had seemed to change. Was it possible Mary was no longer subject to persuasions from a strange dragon and those effects were fading? Not the sort of thing one could ask, though.\n\n\"I am glad about those changes, and I will endeavor to remember.\" She swallowed hard against a little shudder. There were other memories not so easily displaced.\n\nDarkness as the wings enfolded around her. Hot, acrid, burning breath, searing her lungs and great clawed feet closed around her. She reached for the wall for support. Pray Mary never understood such things.\n\nMary grabbed her arm. \"Are you well?\"\n\n\"I will be fine. I \u2026 I just need some fresh air. Pray, tell Longbourn I will see him soon.\" She pushed past Mary and half-ran out of the kitchen door.\n\nGulping in the cool afternoon air, Elizabeth turned her face into the welcoming sunshine. Focus on Longbourn's attitude today\u2014that was what mattered. Nothing could change what had happened, but the future could be different. According to Mary, today he was good-natured and even repentant\u2014the sort of dragon she had always thought him to be. If he met her in the lair, that would indeed show his good faith. He would never be a gentle lapdog or a sweet-natured dear like little Heather, but as long as he was trying, that was good enough.\n\nThe hard ground near the house gave way to the softer earth near the garden. The perfume of newly-turned soil and tiny green things just poking out of the earth greeted her. Those should be comforting. If only her thudding heart and aching lungs might agree, and the vague burning on her face and neck subside. That would indeed bolster her faith in him. Perhaps after she saw him \u2026\n\n\"Mrrow.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" She nearly stumbled over the long half-furry, half-scaled body that wove around her feet near the garden gate. \"Rumblkins!\"\n\n\"You upset? I saw you from the kitchen. You ought not be alone.\" His voice was always purry-soft, so soothing to listen to.\n\nShe crouched beside him and scratched his tufty cat-ears. \"You are a very sweet creature. Perhaps you may be right; it would be best for me to have company.\"\n\nAfter April's near constant presence for over a decade, being without a Dragon Friend nearby felt so wrong, like going out without a proper petticoat\u2014something important was missing. Rumblkins was no fairy dragon, but he was sweet and dear and fluffy. She sniffled and dragged her sleeve across her eyes.\n\nPurring in his funny draconic sort of way, he reared up on his long serpentine tail. Bumping the top of his head under her chin, he licked the side of her jaw with his rough, forked tongue. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To see Longbourn.\"\n\n\"Take the long way about.\" Rumblkins wove around her and bumped under her chin again.\n\n\"Why? He will be waiting for me.\"\n\n\"I saw something interesting in the woods at the edge of Netherfield Park.\" He pointed with his paw.\n\n\"That is quite out of the way. I am not sure it is a good idea.\"\n\n\"It is a very good idea.\" He licked his thumb-toe and purred.\n\n\"Tell me what you saw.\"\n\n\"You must see it yourself.\"\n\nShe sighed and took Rumblkins' fuzzy face in her hands, peering into his dark eyes. There was always a vaguely daft expression there. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but always just a touch addlepated. Were they all that way? She needed to study a few more tatzelwurms to be sure. But among the wildness, there was also a trace of concern and sincerity, perhaps even a little urgency.\n\n\"All right, I will come, but we should hurry.\"\n\nRumblkins sprang off toward Netherfield Park.\n\nOne really should be careful when telling a tatzelwurm to hurry. They were surprisingly fast, even nimble creatures. Though unladylike, she had to run to keep up with him, nearly tripping as she hopped over the stiles. He slowed just as she was ready to call for him to stop and let her catch her breath.\n\nRising up high on his tail, he pointed his thumbed paw at a clump of trees. \"There, I saw it there, just yesterday. It is long and white and smells like Hill's laundry.\"\n\nHill's laundry? Prickles rose on the back of her neck and shoulders. Was it possible? She sprinted to the trees and scanned the ground. There, half-buried in a pile of leaves, a long white streak. She sprinted and snatched it out of the pile, falling to her knees as she did.\n\nA glove! A lady's glove. She turned the length inside out. Talons, claws, teeth and scales! There it was, a little 'L' in blue thread, hidden in the long seam. This was Lydia's glove! From the look of it, it had not been out here very long, either.\n\nBut how did it get here?\n\n\"Was I right? You needed to see?\" Rumblkins bumped her elbow.\n\n\"Yes, and I shall find you a nice dried cod when we return to Longbourn.\"\n\nIf his purrs got any louder, they might well be heard all the way to Longbourn. She scratched his face, ears, and under his chin until he flopped on his back in exhaustion.\n\n\"Did you see who dropped it?\"\n\n\"No, found it while looking for rats.\"\n\nShe rose and tucked the glove in her apron pocket. \"Perhaps Longbourn will know something about this. We should go to him now.\"\n\nThe last bit of the trek up the hill left her winded and pausing to lean against the old, arching hardwoods. Rumblkins' errand had added nearly two miles to her walk, so it was only natural she should be tired, but perhaps she was not quite as fully recovered as she had thought. Rumblkins hopped ahead into the darkness at the side of the hill. Best she wait outside the lair. Rumblings and thumpings followed.\n\nShe forced herself closer instead of running away as any sensible creature might do. The only way to manage her fear was to face it head-on. Then it would subside, or at least that is what Uther Pendragon said about dealing with dragons: the first rational fear subsided when one dealt with them frequently enough.\n\nElizabeth brushed a few leaves from her skirt.\n\nLongbourn poked his head out of the lair and fixed his eyes on her. \"You came.\"\n\n\"Of course, I did. I told you I would be here.\" Affecting a light, casual tone was far more difficult than it should have been.\n\n\"Why did you not come to the cellar? I was making it easy for you. You have been sick.\"\n\n\"Where did you get that information?\"\n\nHe screwed his lips up in a funny, thinking sort of expression. \"The puck with the furry hoppers.\"\n\n\"You mean Talia?\"\n\n\"There is no estate dragon there. Sometimes the little ones come to me.\" He turned his face aside but stepped toward her.\n\nHe could hide his guilt no better than Samuel Gardiner. \"You had her spying on me.\"\n\n\"Not spying. She wanted Rustle and Cait to stay away from her hoppers.\"\n\n\"So she gave you information about me in exchange.\" It really was rather clever on Talia's part.\n\n\"It was not spying.\" He nudged a large rock toward her. \"Sit, you are not well.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I do feel a bit peaked.\" Gracious! How welcome it was to sit!\n\n\"Why did you walk all this way if you are not well?\"\n\n\"I do not think it is safe for me\u2014or for Darcy\u2014to see you in the cellar any longer.\"\n\nHe pulled back and rose to full height. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe stood and lifted her hands. \"You must not get angry with me.\"\n\n\"But I do not like what you are saying. That makes me angry.\"\n\n\"I can see that, but that is the problem.\" Her vision blurred, and her nose burned.\n\nThere it was, a drop of venom, hanging from his left fang. She rubbed her sleeve across her face.\n\n\"What problem?\" The tip of his tail thumped the ground.\n\n\"When you become angry, your fangs drip venom. I am very sensitive to it now. I can feel it\u2014my eyes, my chest burn, it becomes difficult to take a breath. My skin is hot and prickly. In the close space of the cellar, it made the air bad and made me and Darcy very ill.\"\n\nA growl formed in the back of his throat. \"I have not tried to poison you.\"\n\n\"I am not accusing you. Nor is Mr. Darcy. But see, even now, there is poison on your fangs.\"\n\nLongbourn touched a wingtip to his mouth and examined the ochre drop. \"It is only a little.\"\n\n\"I know that. But it is enough. I am sure Talia can offer you further details of what happened while I was at Netherfield.\"\n\nHis shoulders hunched, and his face scrunched into a pout. Apparently he had already heard.\n\nShe returned to her makeshift seat. \"I am just glad I am still able to sit with you here. But if you become angry, I will have to leave, lest the vapors in the air make me ill again.\"\n\n\"I do not want you ill.\"\n\n\"Then control your temper. I see no other way.\" She shrugged and blotted watery eyes with her apron.\n\nHe sat down hard near her rock and stared at her. \"I do not like this.\"\n\n\"Nor do I. But I am willing to try. Are you?\"\n\nHis long tail swept across the ground, clearing a semicircular path behind him as he lowered his head toward her. \"I will try.\"\n\nShe scratched his ears. His foot drummed appreciatively as she hit just the right spot. He arched his back and directed her to half a dozen more spots that desperately needed to be scratched.\n\nFinally, he sighed and flopped down at her feet, ecstatically exhausted by the indulgence. Clearly, Mary needed some pointers in how to scratch a dragon properly. Perhaps a full monograph needed to be written on the matter. Papa would be scandalized at the thought.\n\n\"Now you are sated, I hope you will be willing to talk of some more serious matters with me.\"\n\nHe leaned his head against her legs.\n\nShe steeled herself for the contact. The ill-ease was still there. Pendragon did not say how long it would remain. Perhaps that was so as not to discourage those willing to try.\n\n\"Fitzwilliam came with news from the Blue Order. An emissary, sent from the Eastern Dragons, makes her way to London to open diplomatic relations with the dragons from the Far East.\"\n\n\"Why do I care what they do in London?\"\n\n\"The emissary has become lost. The dragon tunnels have not been mapped as accurately as we had thought.\"\n\nHis ears stood up.\n\n\"It is possible she could appear in Hertfordshire, lost, confused and hungry.\"\n\n\"I will not\u2014\"\n\n\"That is exactly what I am asking of you. Tolerance. Pray be reasonable and think what could come of your actions. You do not need to have her stay here, simply promise me that you will not attack her for encroaching on your territory. Tolerate her if she has to eat and alert us to her presence. Fitzwilliam will see her to London immediately, and she will never trespass again. The Order will be very grateful for your assistance.\"\n\n\"Grateful enough to\u2014\" He nudged her gently.\n\n\"No, you know Mary is your Keeper now and Collins is her husband. There is no changing that. But it is never a bad thing to have the Order's appreciation.\"\n\nHe snorted hard enough to blow up a little cloud of dust at her feet.\n\n\"Have I your promise?\"\n\nHe muttered and grumbled and scratched the ground with a wingtip. \"Will I have mutton if I do?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. I will arrange for you to have half a dozen sheep if you find the emissary and unite us with her.\"\n\n\"Six fat ones?\"\n\n\"The fattest ones I can find.\"\n\n\"I will keep watch for her.\" He tried to sound uninterested, but the promise of mutton was invariably a cause to celebrate.\n\n\"What do you know of the rogue dragon? He has been in the Netherfield cellars\u2014we have exchanged a few written words there. I am certain you must know him.\"\n\nLongbourn inched away and rumbled something noncommittal.\n\n\"Why have you not fought him for being in your territory? I am sure he has trespassed at some time. He must have been near to try and persuade me to marry Collins. He might have been persuading Mary's ill-temper, too. Why do you think he would do such a thing?\" She bit her lip to avoid adding 'And why do you tolerate it.'\n\nHalf his tail thumped behind them. \"Bored.\"\n\n\"The lindwurm is bored?\"\n\n\"And stupid.\"\n\n\"In what way?\"\n\n\"He stole the egg.\"\n\nShe nearly fell off her seat. \"Pray excuse me? Did you say he stole the egg?\" She held her breath. Much as she had a thousand questions fighting to be asked, now was not the time to risk pushing too hard. She would be patient even if it meant her heart would beat out of her chest.\n\n\"After the Deaf One brought it to Meryton, he stole it. He wanted to give me the egg instead of salt.\"\n\n\"Salt? You like salt? Papa never told me.\" She clutched the edge of her stone seat. One more revelation of this caliber, and she would indeed fall off.\n\n\"He says the estate cannot afford it. I must stock my hoard another way.\"\n\n\"I did not know wyverns were hoarding dragons.\"\n\n\"Some of us are, not all, but some.\" Longbourn grumbled under his breath.\n\nNo wonder Longbourn was constantly grumpy. A hoard-hungry dragon was nearly as dangerous as one who lacked food. Gracious, if this was true, then Longbourn's forbearance was extreme.\n\n\"He calls himself Netherfield.\"\n\n\"Netherfield gives you salt? Why?\"\n\n\"So I will ignore him. I have my hoard; he lives in peace.\"\n\n\"You agreed to take the egg to be rid of Darcy?\"\n\nHe snorted and covered one eye with his wingtip. \"Stupid creature did not tell me it was ready to hatch. He was to give it to me while you were at Netherfield, but it hatched in the woods. He decided to eat the drakling to make the whole affair go away. I had to stop him.\"\n\nShe slid to the ground and looked him in the eye. \"You were in the woods protecting little Pemberley from the lindwurm?\"\n\n\"Netherfield was no real danger. He was not actually hungry, only trying to protect himself. Stupid, addlebrained thing to do. He hates conflict and hoped to avoid it by eating her.\"\n\n\"You saved her!\" She threw her arms around his head and wept into his scaly hide. \"I had no idea. I am sorry I did not think you so noble. No wonder you have been so put out. I have horribly underestimated you.\"\n\nHe stretched out one wing around her shoulders in a tentative embrace.\n\n\"I will tell Darcy and Pemberley what you have done. They deserve to know.\" While none of that excused the fits of temper he had shown, at least it made more sense now. Mary, Cait, they had been right. She had wronged him terribly\u2014what a prideful fool she had been.\n\n\"I still do not like them.\"\n\n\"I am not asking you to like them. But I would like them to think better of you.\"\n\nHe grumbled and snorted, but she could feel the corners of his mouth turn up just a bit.\n\n\"Do you know where Netherfield is? Why did he choose that name?\"\n\n\"He is French. He knows nothing. He thinks by taking the name he claims the land. Says the estate was given to him or some such nonsense. What can he know of such things? They have no Accords on the continent.\"\n\nElizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to breathe. Perhaps this really was more information than she could assimilate at once. \"Do you know where we can find him?\"\n\n\"He is supposed to stay on Netherfield Park. We meet once in every moon cycle when he has salt for me. He puts out a bit of salt for me to smell, and I meet him at the stream that borders the two territories. But sometimes he leaves it in the cellar at Longbourn. He is foolish and capricious.\"\n\nThose were no doubt the times he was amusing himself by persuading Bennets. Clearly he was bored and seeking entertainment. Was he stupid though? No, bribing Longbourn with his hoard showed a certain level of devious\u2014or mischievous, it was difficult to tell\u2014intelligence. \"Pray you will tell me when that next happens? It is critical we meet him and invite him to the Order so all may be peaceful and proper once again.\" Perhaps that was overstating things just a bit. Life with dragons was almost never peaceful and proper. \"Does Papa know about any of this?\"\n\n\"He suspects, but Netherfield does not want to be known. Dragons in France are killed. Men are not to be trusted.\"\n\nWho could blame him for feeling that way? \"Have you told him we are different?\"\n\n\"He does not believe it.\"\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut and clutched her forehead. Of course not. Who would, knowing Darcy had carried a Dragon Slayer?\n\n\"Has Lydia tried to talk to him?\"\n\n\"Lydia?\"\n\n\"I thought she might be starting to hear. Have you seen her?\"\n\n\"She has never talked to me. Scratch my back now?\"\n\nShe leaned over his shoulder full length and scratched between his wings until he all but purred. The dear creature would have a sheep tonight as well. With a way to meet with Netherfield and an ally to communicate with him, perhaps now they stood a solid chance of bringing this whole affair to a happy conclusion."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Walker swooped into the study, nearly overturning the dragon perch as he struggled to land. Darcy leapt off the library ladder and ran toward him, jumping a stack of books as he went. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The rogue dragon?\" Fitzwilliam tossed a large volume on the desk and met them at the perch.\n\n\"Elizabeth!\" Walker squawked and flapped. \"She went to Longbourn's lair to talk to him and is collapsed on the ground, insensible.\"\n\n\"What has the brute done?\" Darcy barely held back from punching the nearest chair.\n\n\"Nothing\u2014and Rumblkins confirms.\" Walker settled his wings across his back but sidled from one edge of the perch to the other. \"The tatzelwurm says their discussion was entirely amicable.\"\n\nDarcy bounced his fist off his chin. \"Perhaps she thought being in open air would be safer than the cellars.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Bennet set his book aside and struggled to stand, face wrenched in painful knots.\n\n\"It seems she is\u2014we are\u2014highly sensitive to wyvern venom now. Talking with him in the cellar after Cait's crisis left us both unwell. Just being in his presence, even in the open air, might have been enough to sicken her.\"\n\n\"Why was I not told?\" Bennet hobbled two steps toward them and grabbed a chair for support.\n\n'Because you would have been no help at all' was definitely not the correct way to answer that question.\n\n\"Tell Longbourn we are on our way.\" Fitzwilliam jerked his head toward the door.\n\n\"Bring her here. I will have Hill ready her room.\"\n\n\"No, we will take her to Netherfield. We do not need Collins meddling in this affair.\"\n\n\"I can manage Collins. Even now he is off with Cait, going over the rudiments of dragon introductions. He will not be a problem. You know there is poison there\u2014\" Bennet gesticulated a little wildly.\n\nHow had Darcy failed to notice how gnarled his hands were? Could he even hold a pen any longer or manage a fork to eat?\n\n\"It is confined to the map rooms. She has been at Netherfield for some time now with no issues. The venom in the cellar here could easily contaminate the rest of the house. If you want to help her, we need a preparation of the anti-venom tincture your distant relation wrote about in that journal.\" Darcy pointed to the maroon cloth-bound volume, balanced askew against the leg of a small table.\n\n\"We have no idea if it was even effective. Just a few scrawled notes between butcher's orders and seed purchases! You would trust her life to that?\"\n\nDarcy stomped across the room and snatched up the journal. \"Did Elizabeth not say it aligned with Lady Astrid's monographs and several other obscure references?\"\n\n\"That is not the same thing as knowing\u2014she is forever leaping to conclusions and jumping headlong into things!\" Bennet tossed his head and pressed his arms to his belly.\n\n\"She is nearly always correct,\" Fitzwilliam muttered to the floor.\n\n\"She is simply lucky. I will not encourage that\u2014\"\n\n\"I will prepare it.\"\n\nAll eyes snapped to the doorway. When had the door opened? Had she been listening all this time?\n\nMary leaned against the doorframe, a little pale. \"She went to see Longbourn because I told her he wanted to talk to her. You are right. She avoided the cellar but thought being out of doors would be safe. I pushed her to go \u2026\"\n\nEnough dithering and discussion. \"We will bring her to Netherfield. Come when you have the tincture prepared.\" Darcy pushed past her, Fitzwilliam in his wake.\n\nWalker flew ahead as they wound their way through the woods to Longbourn's lair.\n\nDarcy gritted his teeth and forced his fingers out of fists. Remember, the dragon did not intend her harm. The disagreeable wyvern had been such a problem that it was difficult not to consider him the villain. But that would serve nothing. They broke into the clearing before the lair, Elizabeth a puddle of muslin on the rocky ground.\n\n\"She was scratching between my wings and collapsed!\" Longbourn whimpered, prostrate and nudging her with his nose.\n\nDarcy dropped down beside her. She gasped in tortured pants, her face pale, eyes fluttering.\n\n\"Not his fault,\" she muttered. \"On his skin.\"\n\n\"Get her away from here,\" Fitzwilliam ordered.\n\n\"No! First wash the poison away!\" Walker flapped his wings in Longbourn's face.\n\nHe popped up and sat on his haunches, nosing Fitzwilliam. \"I have water. Come.\" They loped into the cavern.\n\nDarcy propped her up in his lap. She seemed to breathe a little easier.\n\n\"I tried to help, but she has no wounds to lick.\" Rumblkins pressed in close beside him, resting his paws on her leg and trying to force his head under her hand.\n\nHe stroked the tatzelwurm's fluffy head. \"I am sure you did. You are a faithful friend.\"\n\nFitzwilliam staggered back toward them, a large bucket sloshing in his hands. \"There is a spring in the lair.\"\n\nDarcy pulled out a handkerchief, soaked it, and scrubbed her face.\n\n\"Get her apron off! If the poison was on his skin, it is surely covered in it.\" Fitzwilliam pulled at the ties and cast it aside.\n\nAlthough it seemed like hours, it was probably only a few minutes later. Color seeped back into her face. She scratched under Rumblkins' chin and sat up on her own.\n\n\"I will fetch a horse to bring her to the house.\" Fitzwilliam ran off.\n\nThe man could not bear to sit still. He was exactly the sort of friend one wanted in a crisis.\n\n\"I did not breathe venom!\" Longbourn called from the mouth of his cavern.\n\nElizabeth lifted her head as though it was suddenly very heavy and caught the wyvern's gaze. \"No one is blaming you. It seems there is enough venom on your skin to affect me.\"\n\n\"You cannot be near me now?\" Longbourn's eyes bulged, a note of panic in his voice.\n\n\"I \u2026 I do not know.\"\n\nLongbourn turned in a circle, tail thumping as he went. \"What if I bathe? Will that be enough?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 when I am stronger, we can try.\"\n\n\"No, you do not need to risk yourself,\" Darcy whispered close to her ear.\n\n\"You will not stop me.\" She glared venom of her own, and he pulled away. \"But you may come with me.\"\n\n\"We need to get you back to Netherfield for a proper hot bath. Mary is preparing the anti-venom tincture from the receipt you found. Perhaps that will help you.\"\n\n\"Make sure she brings Heather. We will need her help with Nicholls.\"\n\n\"We will manage all that, but first we need to get you back. Fitzwilliam returns. Can you sit in a saddle?\" He helped her to her feet, but she sagged against his chest for support.\n\n\"Or die trying,\" she murmured.\n\n\"That is hardly funny.\"\n\n\"You think I was joking?\" Only the pleasing little quirk of her brow, which declared her in better health than she looked, kept him from scolding her.\n\nThough weak and shaky and requiring several attempts, she was indeed able to mount and remain in the saddle well enough for Fitzwilliam to lead the horse back to Netherfield while Darcy struggled to assure Longbourn she would be well. Stubborn creature only settled down when Walker promised to bring frequent word of Elizabeth's condition. Frustrating, but endearing in an odd sort of way.\n\nEven with several hot baths, Elizabeth did not venture from her rooms for four days. Four long, excruciating days during which Darcy could hardly think or function. He pretended to study the books she had laid out for him and the paintings in the house, but nothing stayed in his mind for longer than a few minutes, except worry. Nicholls became so tired of his constant inquiries after Elizabeth that she took to avoiding him. Maddening though it was, he could scarcely blame her. But really, what else was there for a man to do?\n\nOn the fifth day, Mary arrived with the tincture, Heather riding on her bonnet which appeared specially trimmed to accommodate the fluffy pink fairy dragon. Darcy took her to Elizabeth's rooms himself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Voices in the hall approached. Elizabeth pushed herself up from the soft chair by the window where she had been pretending to read. There was no time to waste, but neither her mind nor her eyes seemed to be able to focus for more than a few moments at a time. Why was it taking so long to recover? Worse still, what might happen the next time?\n\nDarcy's sharp knock resonated from the door. How many conversations, some rather insensible, had they had through that door in recent days? He had even dispatched Walker several times a day to reassure Longbourn of her recovery. Could any man have been more solicitous of her under the circumstances?\n\nThe door creaked open. \"Oh, Lizzy! We have all been so worried about you!\" Mary rushed toward her with open arms.\n\nElizabeth clutched at the bed post to brace for the contact.\n\nHow much her attitude had changed! Was it just sisterly concern, the fact Elizabeth had apologized to Longbourn, or had Netherfield stopped persuading her? Something about the strength of her hold and the high notes in her voice suggested it was a bit of all three.\n\n\"I am much improved, thank you, though I seem to be lacking some of my usual energy.\" Elizabeth fell heavily on the edge of the bed, struggling to hide her lack of breath.\n\n\"I am hopeful this will help.\" Mary pulled a small brown bottle out of her reticule and handed it to Elizabeth. \"I tried to follow the receipt in the journal, but there was a mistake in it. That is why it took me so long to finish. The receipt recommended white wine as a base, but it simply would not come together. Finally, I tried sweet oil, and it seems to have worked, but I cannot be sure. The directions say it should be added to hot water to create a steam. I am a bit unclear whether you are to breathe it, or the text seems to suggest perhaps bathing in it? The handwriting was so unclear and the ink so smudged, I could not tell.\" The words tumbled out in a single breath as though if she did not say them all at once, the opportunity to say them at all might well disappear.\n\nLydia had taught her that habit.\n\nElizabeth uncorked the bottle and wafted the scent toward herself. Pungent was the most pleasant word to describe the concoction. She extended her arm, holding it as far away as she could, blinking hard, but a bit of the tightness in her lungs eased. \"Let me first try breathing it. There is already hot water on the hob. I will fetch a towel, and we can make a bit of a tent.\"\n\nMary brought the washbasin and a small table near the bed and added boiling water and the oil to the basin. Elizabeth leaned over it, head and shoulders covered with the towel to tent in the vapors. She breathed deeply, but choked on the stultifying antidote.\n\n\"I am sorry it smells so. I thought I might try adding dried lavender or roses to make it more bearable, but I did not dare for fear it would somehow change the properties.\" From below the edge of the towel, she could make out Mary wringing her apron.\n\nThe sharp fumes burned her eyes until they watered profusely. The steam tore at her throat, but in a cleansing sort of way. \"I think that was wise. It is not so bad, really, when one gets used to it. More importantly, I think it is helping.\"\n\n\"Longbourn will be very relieved.\" Mary sat heavily beside her. \"I swear he would have been here himself without Walker's constant reports.\"\n\n\"He is quite dear. How put out is Papa?\" Elizabeth peeked out from the towel.\n\nMary sighed. \"It is hard to tell. He mutters a great deal about things I cannot quite make out. I did not tell him about experimenting with the tincture lest he forbid me from bringing it at all.\"\n\nElizabeth laid the towel over the basin and pressed the back of her hands to her cheeks. \"The skin on my face and neck feels much better. I am certain I scrubbed them nearly raw after all the hot baths I have taken, but something feels different now, rather like a prickly scarf has been removed.\"\n\nMary drew close and examined her carefully, holding Elizabeth's hands near her face. \"See where your hands are still rough and raw, but your face is not?\"\n\n\"Gracious, yes!\" Elizabeth tented the towel over her hands and held them over the basin. \"Add a bit more hot water, if you please.\"\n\nHalf an hour later, they examined her hands again, the difference unmistakable. The red, dragon-scaly patches had faded, and her fingertips no longer felt like sandpaper.\n\n\"You were definitely right to use the sweet oil. This has worked very well. Do you remember well enough what you did that you might write it in my book before you leave?\"\n\n\"You think it that significant?\" Mary's jaw dropped as though she had been offered some great honor.\n\n\"Absolutely. Bathing helped, but it was nothing to this. What is more, I think we might be able to make the map room safe with this. It will be difficult, but perhaps with some sort of mask anointed with this mixture\u2014\"\n\nMary grabbed her arm, a little more tightly than necessary. \"You are not thinking of trying to do that yourself, are you?\"\n\nA cry choked her throat, but she hid it in a laugh. \"No, I dare not, but Fitzwilliam might be willing to try. If he built a fire in the room's fireplace, suspended a great pot of water and this oil over it, and let the steam permeate the room\u2014maybe we need to pull the maps and such near the fire, too\u2014but I think it might render them safe. We desperately need those maps right now.\"\n\n\"Do you think there is enough to accomplish the task?\" Mary held up the bottle in the sunlight. There was not very much left.\n\n\"How long would it take you to make more?\"\n\n\"Now that I have worked it out? Two, three days at the most.\"\n\n\"Pray then, write me the receipt, then go and make more, perhaps twice, no three times as much, if you can.\" Elizabeth rubbed her temples hard. Hopefully the headache would not come on full force this time.\n\n\"What shall I tell Papa?\"\n\n\"Nothing until you have told Longbourn of the results. I am sure he will be pleased. You might suggest to him the wisdom in making more. I am certain he will agree, and if Longbourn desires it, Papa can hardly argue.\"\n\n\"Papa is quite adamant that Longbourn must be appeased.\" Mary stroked her chin and chewed her cheek, contemplating. \"I will bring it as soon as it is ready.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Darcy held his breath as Elizabeth made her slow, deliberate trek down the grand stairs. Though she wore only a simple shawl and gown, she was easily one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen. Running up the stairs to meet her would have been bad form and might have implied he did not think her strong enough to make it on her own. So, he slowly strode up, meeting her halfway\u2014hopefully it appeared that way at least. But Fitzwilliam's snickers did not offer a great deal of hope for that.\n\nShe smiled at him and took his arm when he reached her. That was enough to endure any of Fitzwilliam's mocking. She leaned on him a little more heavily than she usually did, but the color had returned to her face and the sparkle to her eye. Though he would probably never stop worrying about her, at least for now, the anxiety could return to a manageable level.\n\nWith servants hovering about, dinnertime conversation was limited to the weather and everyone's health, and even that was constrained to matters that did not involve poisoning by dragons. How odd the life of Dragon Keepers was to think those were normal topics. There were definite advantages to insisting all the upper and senior servants were members of the Blue Order.\n\nAt last they withdrew to the parlor and could close the door behind them. Was privacy a palpable quality? It certainly felt like it.\n\nShe barely sat down near the fire before the details of her astonishing conversation with Longbourn gushed forth.\n\nDarcy leaned forward, elbows on his knees, trying not to let his jaw hang open too much. \"You mean to tell me we owe Pemberley's life directly to Longbourn's interventions?\"\n\n\"It appears so.\" She bit her upper lip, eyebrows lifting like a shrug. \"His story explains a great deal of what happened that night\u2014I have no reason to disbelieve it.\"\n\nFitzwilliam squeezed his fist, popping his knuckles loudly. \"Forgive me, but I am more concerned that this lindwurm\u2014\"\n\n\"Netherfield.\" Something about the way she said the name suggested she had already developed sympathy for the creature.\n\n\"Whatever he wants to call himself. I am concerned that this creature would prove such a danger to another major dragon, even if she was only newly-hatched. Clearly he does not have peaceable intentions.\" Fitzwilliam shot Darcy a knowing look.\n\nPray Elizabeth did not notice it.\n\nShe squared her shoulders and rested her hands lightly in her lap. \"I beg to disagree. If he is trying to claim the Netherfield territory, her presence would be a trespass. With no idea of whom she was, her rank, or anything else about her\u2014\"\n\n\"She is a firedrake! All dragons know the rank of a firedrake!\" Fitzwilliam waved his right hand for emphasis, not that he really needed to; his volume alone made his feelings quite clear.\n\n\"English dragons do. But can you identify the rank of an Eastern Dragon on sight alone?\"\n\nFitzwilliam stammered.\n\n\"I thought not. I will give you a hint. It is in the number of their toes. You might want to remember that when we find the envoy.\"\n\n\"What has that to do with any of this?\"\n\n\"Can you not see? The lindwurm's failure to properly act upon her rank does not necessarily mean he was prepared to engage in an act of war any more than your failure to identify an Eastern Dragon's rank would. Mind you, I am not justifying it, but it is the way that dragons seem to think.\"\n\nDarcy narrowed his eyes toward Fitzwilliam. \"In any case, I will arrange for Pemberley to send Longbourn a gift of salt to demonstrate our gratitude.\"\n\n\"That would do a great deal in raising his esteem of you both.\"\n\nFitzwilliam leaned back in his chair, exasperation clear in his posture. \"I am astonished at your father's behavior on so many counts.\"\n\n\"Not providing for a dragon's hoard seems unconscionable.\" And dangerous\u2014but best not add that just now.\n\nElizabeth harrumphed as her lips wrinkled into a thoughtful frown. \"Strict interpretation of the Accords does permit it in the case of impoverishment or for excessively expensive hoards. But one can hardly call Papa impoverished. Mama has placed many demands on him, to be sure. She expected a certain style of life upon marrying him and placing limits on that has been difficult. But still, it would have behooved Papa to make greater efforts to fulfil Longbourn's hoard-hunger.\"\n\n\"It does explain Longbourn's temperament. Hoard-starvation does make them \u2026 ah \u2026 cranky.\" Darcy said the word carefully lest she consider it an insult to her dragon.\n\n\"It would certainly give him reason to believe he was entitled to demand me as his Keeper.\"\n\n\"I am astonished you would excuse his behavior so easily.\" Fitzwilliam folded his arms over his chest as his command tone crept into his voice.\n\n\"I am not excusing him.\" Elizabeth huffed and rolled her eyes, looking a bit like a dragon herself. \"Why are you so insistent upon confusing understanding with approval? They are hardly one and the same. Longbourn was childish, petulant, and throwing tantrums. I do not approve of any of those behaviors and have the intention of teaching Pemberley otherwise.\"\n\nFitzwilliam snickered. \"You will teach a firedrake?\"\n\nDarcy winced. If Fitzwilliam did not desist, he was going to discover another draconic temper very soon.\n\nShe planted her foot firmly. \"I most certainly will. Babies can be instructed and so shall she be. Already she has very fine tutors in Lady Astrid and Barnwines Chudleigh and her associates.\"\n\nFitzwilliam laughed into his hands, so hard he might stop breathing. \"You sound like a mother of the ton ensuring her daughter has all the correct accomplishments and connections for her eventual come out.\"\n\nFitzwilliam was an idiot.\n\nElizabeth slowly stood. Darcy leaned back\u2014hopefully she would not notice him there. \"So good of you to notice. That is precisely what I am trying to do since neither of you seem to understand the critical importance of the process.\" She took two long steps toward Fitzwilliam and towered over his seated form. \"Pemberley will live five hundred years! Five hundred. What kind of influence will she have in that time? With her rank, it will be tremendous. At least five, maybe as many as ten generations at Pemberley will be her Keepers. What more worthwhile effort is there than shaping the kind of dragon they will Keep?\" Her fists trembled at her sides.\n\nFitzwilliam raised his hands, a small gesture of surrender. \"Forgive me. With so few dragons of her rank hatched, it is not something one thinks about regularly.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not, but it behooves one to do so. That means understanding how dragons think\u2014which is not at all the way men think\u2014and adapting ourselves to it. That is the advantage we have over dragons: we are nimble and able to adapt and adjust in ways they cannot. Their opinions are formed early in their lives, and they do not change. It rests on men to exercise forbearance and creativity to finds ways to make it all work. That is what brought about the Pendragon Treaty in the first place.\"\n\n\"You have an excellent point.\" Darcy sneaked a glance at Fitzwilliam.\n\nFitzwilliam slapped his fist into his palm. \"Understanding alone does not excuse dangerous behavior. There have to be consequences\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course, but they should be tempered with comprehension. One cannot punish a hoarding dragon because they crave their hoard any more than one can punish a hungry man for craving food. Neither will ever change. But one can teach them to acquire their hoard in acceptable ways, or in some cases, even accept a different item to hoard, like Talia with her rabbits. When her Friend died, she did not take to stealing as many pucks do. She found an acceptable substitute. If she can, then others can as well. Understanding their drives and what is possible for them must shape the consequences we invoke. That is the only way we will be able to live in cooperation with dragonkind.\"\n\nIt was not difficult to imagine her standing before the officers of the Blue Order making the same sort of speech.\n\nShe and Fitzwilliam glowered at each other until it seemed they would suck all the air from the room.\n\nFitzwilliam drew breath to speak again, but Darcy cut in, \"So it appears that the tincture Mary prepared was as effective as we hoped?\"\n\nShe did not turn her attention to him, but her posture and expression changed to something grateful. She returned to her seat in a flowing, elegant motion that relinquished none of her power. \"The initial receipt was not correct, and she had to make adjustments, but yes, she was able to settle upon a formulation that did work. I believe we can also use it to decontaminate the map room and the maps as well.\"\n\nFitzwilliam's entire countenance transformed from combative to fully attentive. \"Tell me more.\"\n\nShe quickly explained what she and her sister had devised.\n\n\"A mask of some sort soaked in the stuff might work.\" Fitzwilliam rubbed his chin. \"Instead of steaming the contaminated chamber, what do you think of setting up the room next door to be filled with the steam? We could bring the maps there to expose them to the steam, perhaps even wipe them down with rags damped with the mixture?\"\n\n\"Will that not damage the ink?\"\n\n\"We could test it on a letter or a painting first.\"\n\n\"If it does not damage them, then it seems a reasonable plan.\" Elizabeth glanced at Darcy. \"Should it not be done by someone not already sensitized to the venom? It appears the risk to both of us is very great.\"\n\n\"She is right, Darcy. Let me do this. At least I will feel somehow useful in this affair.\" Fitzwilliam stared into the fireplace, rubbing his knuckles over his lips. He had probably not intended to be so open around Elizabeth. But then, it was difficult not to be.\n\n\"It is difficult to feel like the only one not associated with a dragon, I imagine.\" Elizabeth's voice was soft and gentle. \"Mary often felt that way before Heather's hatching.\"\n\nFitzwilliam grunted, but did not\u2014or perhaps could not\u2014reply.\n\n\"Cait's egg will hatch soon. She named you as her Friend of choice for the chick. I am certain that he will find you acceptable and\u2014many things change once one becomes a Dragon Friend.\"\n\nFitzwilliam sighed. \"I am not sure it is such a good idea. I am not the sort\u2014\"\n\n\"That will be the dragon's decision, not yours. Just because you are present at the hatching does not mean that the baby will choose you as his Friend. It does help if he takes his first meal from your hand, but it does not guarantee anything. Some will choose not to take a Friend without any rhyme nor reason. April nearly did that after her hatching. She did not like any of the possible Friends presented to her.\"\n\nFitzwilliam cocked his head nearly sideways and lifted an eyebrow. He was not often surprised. \"You were not among the choices?\"\n\n\"No, I was merely there to assist my father. But she found me sympathetic when I understood she hated blood sausage as much as I. I suggested a dish of honey instead. At that point, she decided I would do for her, and my father would just have to live with it\u2014and he was not particularly happy with that.\"\n\nFitzwilliam snickered. \"It is not difficult to picture her saying just that whilst diving for his ears.\"\n\n\"You must be there for the hatching\u2014you would not want to risk insulting Cait and Walker by shunning the event. If he is as perverse a creature as his mother, he could very well choose Papa or Mary as his Friend, just to make their lives even more challenging.\"\n\nDarcy chuckled. \"I do not see your father as the type a cockatrice would favor.\"\n\n\"Nor do I, but dragons see the world differently to us. They are never entirely predictable. You will forgive me, though. I am exhausted.\" She rose and headed toward the door. \"I will see you in the morning.\"\n\nThe door clicked shut behind her.\n\nFitzwilliam made for the cabinet where Bingley kept his brandy and poured two glasses. \"I cannot believe Bennet's Dragon Keeping! He deprives the creature of its hoard so his wife can indulge in fripperies! Worse yet, how could he be aware of the rogue and not say anything to the Order?\"\n\nDarcy sipped the brandy. Fruity with oak notes and a bit of spice. Not quite to his taste, but good enough. \"I can only imagine he wanted the notoriety of making first contact and even negotiating peace with the creature.\"\n\nFitzwilliam dragged a footstool near his chair and sat heavily. \"That is one possibility. Another is that he is very much like his daughter and has too much sympathy toward the creature. He may be willing to take some very stupid risks to try to negotiate with it.\"\n\n\"The creature sounds\u2014well, almost like a pacifist, if you think about it. He has never shown any proclivity toward fighting for his territory, only for bribing Longbourn for it.\" Darcy swirled the brandy in his glass.\n\nFitzwilliam propped his feet up and leaned back. \"That does not make him a pacifist, only lazy. As long as bribing is easy, any sensible creature would do it. But consider where is he getting the salt? Think on it. Unless he has some secret place to mine it, then he must be stealing it, and that mostly likely means smugglers.\"\n\n\"We already found evidence of smuggling whilst searching for the egg.\"\n\nFitzwilliam took a deep swallow. \"Precisely. Such men will not take losses of their merchandise kindly. Nothing calamitous may have happened yet, but this is a disaster in the making. Sooner or later, the smugglers and the dragon will encounter one another and the result will not be pretty. Blood will be shed, and there will be death. No matter whose blood and whose death, it will escalate and eventually result in war. There can be no other outcome.\"\n\nDarcy leaned forward on his elbows. \"But if we should make contact\u2014\"\n\n\"You have\u2014did you forget the scribbling on the cellar floor? It has made no difference. The creature has plenty of evidence that Elizabeth is no danger and even a great ally, but still nothing. I am sorry. The Blue Order's ambassador has failed. It is now time for their warrior to manage the situation.\"\n\n\"How are you going to find the creature?\"\n\n\"As soon as the potion is ready, we will neutralize the poison on the maps. Hopefully that will give us means to locate the lindwurm's lair. If not, I shall start searching the tunnels myself.\"\n\n\"Do not be foolish, Fitz. You cannot kill a lindwurm by yourself, in its own terrain.\"\n\n\"You would be surprised what can be accomplished when necessary.\" Something about the look in Fitzwilliam's eye pushed Darcy back a mite.\n\n\"You have not \u2026\"\n\n\"No, not I, but in France, once we found ourselves imperiled by one allied to Napoleon. We had a man\u2014one of the Order\u2014who took it upon himself to deliver us from the danger.\"\n\n\"Did he survive?\"\n\n\"Long enough to allow us to make a record of his tactics. I have been studying them. They are replicable here.\"\n\n\"With the same outcome?\"\n\nFitzwilliam downed the remainder of his glass in a single large gulp. \"If that should be the way, it is not entirely a bad thing. With a death on each side\u2014Blue Order and dragon\u2014the score is even, and war can more easily be averted.\"\n\n\"So you are to sacrifice yourself?\"\n\n\"Those are not my orders, and no one has expressed a desire for that to be the endgame. But if it is to be so, then it is pleasing to know my demise might serve the cause.\"\n\n\"How can you be so callous about your own mortality?\"\n\n\"It is a soldier's way. It is a way one survives.\" Fitzwilliam shrugged. \"Elizabeth cannot know any of this. She is far too sympathetic to the dragons to see the situation as it actually is.\"\n\n\"If the dragon is slain, you think she will not find out how?\"\n\n\"No doubt, she will. If I survive the encounter, I recognize I will be dead to her ever after. I regret that, but it cannot be helped.\"\n\n\"I am still not convinced a diplomatic solution cannot be obtained.\"\n\n\"I once shared that optimism only to see half the negotiation team eaten by a major drake on a French field.\"\n\nDarcy suppressed a shudder with another mouthful of brandy. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The entire event is classified. I should not have even mentioned it to you. If word were to get out about it, the Order fears that it would undermine trust in the Pendragon Treaty\u2014not all truly understand it only applies here, not on the continent. What I can say is that without the Treaty to restrict their behavior, French dragons are far and away more dangerous than you can understand. They are apt to turn on one the moment it is in their interest to do so. This rogue truly has the potential to destroy the entire fabric of English society as we know it.\"\n\n\"Dragon's blood! I had no idea they could be so wholly different to our dragons.\"\n\n\"Elizabeth may understand English dragons\u2014and I have no doubt that she does, perhaps better than any other person, living or dead. On that matter, I completely yield to her expertise. But she has no experience, no means, by which to understand what we are facing. It falls upon you to protect her from herself right now.\"\n\nTwo days later, Darcy followed Fitzwilliam as they traipsed through the hall containing the mapmaker's study, trying to identify rooms that might suit for decontaminating the maps. An especially low ceiling in the room across the corridor made it stand out as a particular favorite. But before a decision could be made, Fitzwilliam insisted on testing its usefulness by filling it with fragrant lavender steam, harmless but noticeable enough that they would be able to tell whether the draughts in the room would carry it away too quickly.\n\nWalker had the staff believing that particular wing of Netherfield was haunted and not in want of any cleaning or attention, so they stayed away from the otherwise too interesting flurry of activity. It took surprisingly little persuasion to convince even Nicholls to avoid the area entirely. Perhaps, Darcy and Elizabeth were not the only ones to feel the faint affects from traces of wyvern poison in the hallway air.\n\nWhen Darcy complained of a headache, Fitzwilliam dismissed him to find Elizabeth and take a walk outside before the effects became too pronounced. He rarely took on such a commanding tone\u2014was that the persona he adopted for His Majesty's army, or was that the person he had always been, but somehow Darcy had never seen?\n\nElizabeth had resigned herself to studying lindwurm texts while they worked and warmly welcomed the notion of a walk when he found her in the morning room.\n\nA steady breeze blew through the sunshine, each gust taking with it a little of the malaise weighing on his shoulders. Elizabeth's posture suggested she experienced the same. Yes, a walk had been a very good idea.\n\nTalia peeked out of the rabbit hole to greet them, happy that Elizabeth had returned to offering a daily plate of vegetable trimmings. What an amusing little creature she was, wholly different to Quincy in so many ways and yet so like him in others. Perhaps it might be good to invite a puck to live at Pemberley. Pemberley would benefit from the acquaintance.\n\nTalia rubbed up against Darcy's leg with a pleasant 'good morning' and offered to introduce her current favorite hopper. Elizabeth immediately accepted, laughing that she had never been introduced to a rabbit before. How easy she was among dragons of all shapes and sizes\u2014English dragons. Even after all of Longbourn's transgressions, she was so ready to forgive him, make exceptions for his uniquely draconic motivations. Fitzwilliam had a point: her greatest strength could, in the current situation, also prove her greatest weakness.\n\nAfter meeting Talia's hopper, they continued into the woods. Like most dragon woods, tall hardwoods arched up overhead, providing a dense canopy\u2014or at least it would be dense later in the spring when all the leaves had filled out. For now, it was only dense enough to cast a dappled shade not a deep one. Rich, spongy loam hushed their steps, lending a soft stillness to the region. Some might consider it romantical, but it was the sort of ground that would muffle the sounds of slithering, too. Not the sort of thing that most lovers thought about while ambling with their beloved.\n\nPerhaps not the sort of place they needed to be right now.\n\nElizabeth stopped at the broken-down folly and sat on the bench\u2014in the middle as he had done not so very long ago. It was pleasing, very pleasing to think she wanted to be near him.\n\n\"I am worried about Fitzwilliam.\" She leaned her head softly against his shoulder. \"He has not seemed like himself since he arrived.\"\n\n\"He is often like that after visiting with his father.\" Why did Elizabeth have to be nearly as observant with people as she was with dragons?\n\n\"Lord Matlock is rather intimidating, I grant you. I would certainly rather not meet with him. But still, Fitzwilliam seems\u2014disconnected, perhaps?\"\n\nDarcy shrugged. Pray she did not ask him a direct question he dared not answer.\n\nShe turned her face upward, toward a pale blue sky, currently devoid of flying creatures. \"With April \u2026 away \u2026 I think I understand him a bit better than I have before. He is surrounded by Dragon Mates on all sides, both in his family and among the Order. He hears but has no Friend of his own. Think about how many individuals highly placed in the Order are in that situation\u2014practically none. It must be incredibly isolating and lonely. I am sure it makes him question his own suitability. No wonder he was so ambivalent about befriending Cait's egg.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" That much was entirely true. Pray he could continue to avoid any falsehood with her.\n\n\"I am certain of it. He will be better after the hatching. I have often seen that chicks, particularly those of the same sex, take after their parents. Walker is fond of you. Fitzwilliam shares many of your qualities. Walker's chick should find him agreeable.\"\n\n\"You make this all sound so very simple.\"\n\n\"It really is not that diffi\u2014\"\n\nTwo familiar forest wyrms poked their shaggy heads out of the deadfall near their feet, their yellow eyes wide and agitated.\n\nElizabeth fell to her knees near the wyrms. \"What is wrong? Has someone threatened you? Come close. You are safe with us.\"\n\n\"No, no! It is not safe here, not anymore!\" The little female wove in circles around them, looking to and fro for something fearsome.\n\nThe male rose very high on his tail and looked Elizabeth in the eye. \"We are all in the gravest of peril!\"\n\n\"We must flee! The blue one \u2026 he says we must all be on guard for our lives!\"\n\nDarcy sprang to his feet, casting about. \"Where is he? Has the lindwurm threatened you?\"\n\n\"No, no!\" The female hid behind Elizabeth's skirts.\n\n\"Not him. He is our friend now! He has promised protection.\"\n\nElizabeth carefully placed a hand to either side of the male's face, encouraging him to focus solely on her. \"Protection from what? Is there a new dragon in the vicinity? Has a strange dragon\u2014perhaps of a kind you have never seen before\u2014appeared in the territory?\"\n\nBy Jove! The last thing they needed was the Eastern Dragon envoy suddenly arriving among them.\n\n\"No, not a dragon!\" The male hissed, tongue flicking as he wove back and forth, rather like an Indian cobra. His mane, matted with leaves and forest debris, stood out, resembling a snake's hood.\n\nElizabeth leaned down and whispered with the barest of musical lilts, \"What then?\"\n\nThat had a calming effect on the wyrms.\n\n\"The danger is not a dragon.\" The female pressed into Elizabeth's skirt.\n\n\"Then what? Answer and you may have a beetle.\" She glanced at Darcy's coat pocket.\n\nHe withdrew the tin and held it in their sight. The object helped them focus.\n\n\"Now, tell us. What is the danger?\" Elizabeth stroked the female's head.\n\nThe wyrm leaned into Elizabeth's hand, uttering contented sounds that were difficult to name. \"A man. A man with a sword.\"\n\nNo! No! No! Stupid, stupid creatures! Why did they meddle in what they did not understand?\n\n\"What kind of sword?\" Her words came in a breathy staccato.\n\n\"A Dragon Slayer!\" A shudder coursed down the length of the male wyrm. \"There is a Dragon Slayer. In the barn. We have seen it in the barn. There is no mistaking such a blade.\"\n\n\"There is a Dragon Slayer in the Netherfield barn.\" She stood and stared directly into Darcy's eyes, color draining from her face.\n\nThe male hissed and bared his fangs. Darcy edged back. \"It is not in my possession. I do not carry such a weapon.\"\n\n\"The newcomer. It is his.\" The female quivered.\n\nElizabeth took the tin from Darcy's hand and placed a beetle on the ground for each wyrm. Somehow they seemed to set aside their agitation long enough to relish their duly-earned treat. But it came back on them as soon as they finished.\n\nShe folded her arms over her chest, her voice full of authority. \"I promise you, on Longbourn's honor, no harm shall come to you because of that sword. It will not taste dragon blood, not so long as I am here.\"\n\nThe wyrms wound around her ankles, rubbing their cheeks against her petticoats. \"You are friend.\"\n\nShe crouched to pet them both. \"Indeed I am. You can trust me.\"\n\nThey circled her one more time, then disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.\n\nElizabeth stood, slowly, deliberately, catching his gaze as she stood. It was the same gaze Rosings used when she was not pleased. Pemberley would probably learn it from one of them as well. \"Have you neglected to tell me something?\"\n\n\"It was not oversight.\" He held her stare with a resolve of his own that seemed to set her back just a bit.\n\n\"Then it was deliberate deception.\" Icy venom dripped from her words.\n\n\"I have never lied to you, and I will never lie to you.\"\n\nHer brows furrowed, shading her eyes. \"Perhaps you and I differ on what constitutes deception. Deliberate omission of crucial information is something I consider deception.\"\n\n\"There has been nothing that occasioned bringing it up.\"\n\n\"Do not hide behind that sort of excuse.\" She stepped closer, slow and intentional, until her toes nearly touched his. \"My father has played this sort of game with my mother all my life. Be assured, I have no desire to continue it in my own home.\"\n\n\"Fitzwilliam\u2014\"\n\n\"Clearly he is under instructions from the Blue Order\u2014there is nowhere else to have obtained such a weapon. He asked you not to tell me.\"\n\nThat knowing look she wore! How could he make her understand?\n\n\"In fact, he did. What do you expect me to do? We are all required to abide by the Blue Order's commands.\" Darcy slipped back half a step.\n\n\"I am quite certain the Order did not explicitly state I was to be kept ignorant of its plans. Or are you suggesting it did?\"\n\nHe stammered something far less informative than he hoped.\n\n\"I thought not.\" She tossed her head, not unlike the way she had in her first meeting with Cait. \"I expect you to treat me like a rational creature and trust me as you claim you do.\"\n\n\"I do trust you. Do not pretend to know my mind for me.\" He rose up on his toes. Perhaps this was why dragons had the need to feel bigger when confronted.\n\n\"Apparently not enough.\"\n\n\"Do be reasonable! You are able to see things from dragon perspectives easily enough. Can you please try to do it for men as well?\" He raked hair back out of his face. \"You do recall what you did the last time the Order sent the sword into Hertfordshire.\"\n\n\"Just how do you remember those events?\"\n\n\"You rushed out in the middle of the night to confront not one, but three dragons. One of whom was trying to eat another\u2014\"\n\n\"A wild-hatched firedrakling that no one was sure could be successfully imprinted. But she was!\" Elizabeth bared her teeth, snarling the words.\n\n\"You endangered yourself\u2014\"\n\n\"For the sake of dragonkind! For your dragon!\" Her fists shook at her sides \"How easy it is for you to forget. I had very sound, experienced-based reasons for what I did.\"\n\n\"You had no experience with a firedrake.\"\n\n\"Now you sound like my father. Need I remind you of the outcome? Pemberley was saved, and you were delivered from a fate you dreaded like death itself. You were not complaining then.\"\n\nBut he was also not profoundly in love with her then, either. Was she not aware of that? \"Yes, I realize that, too. But the outcome does not always justify the means.\"\n\n\"You would rather I had stayed behind at the ball and allowed you to carry out the will of the Blue Order without considering better alternatives?\"\n\n\"Do you not think that perhaps you set a dangerous precedent, deciding which of the Blue Order mandates you will follow and which you will not?\"\n\nShe winced and jumped a step back. No, she did not appreciate that challenge. \"And mindless obedience to hidebound curmudgeons who willingly refuse a complete understanding of a situation is better?\"\n\n\"You assume anyone that does not agree with you is refusing to see the entirety of the situation.\" Darcy threw up his hands and paced along the front edge of the folly.\n\n\"And you refuse to believe there can be an answer that lies outside the canon of dragon lore.\"\n\n\"That is entirely untrue, and you know it. It is you who fail to acknowledge the true nature of the situation.\"\n\n\"What are you so certain I have overlooked?\"\n\nDarcy drew a deep breath, carefully moderating his tone. Perhaps she might listen this time. \"French dragons are not governed by the Accords. Expecting them to behave as English dragons is not reasonable, no matter how much you wish it otherwise. Fitzwilliam has had dealings with them\u2014of a variety we can hardly conceive of here. Believing this does not make me hidebound and narrow-minded.\"\n\nShe huffed and pumped her fists again. \"The fact remains. You did not\u2014would not\u2014trust me with Fitzwilliam's true purpose.\"\n\n\"You have already resolved there can be a diplomatic result and will accept no other alternative. You did not exactly present yourself as open to hear other possibilities.\"\n\n\"You seem to see Fitzwilliam's way as a foregone conclusion. When did you give up on me?\" The pained note in her voice ripped at his soul.\n\n\"It is an alternative that must be considered.\"\n\n\"And without me, it is a foregone conclusion. Can you not see that? Truly, will Fitzwilliam consider anything else? Forgive me, but who else will negotiate with Netherfield? You are hardly likely to strike up a casual conversation with him.\"\n\n\"You think so little of me as a Dragon Keeper? I thought I had earned your respect.\"\n\n\"By your own admission, you do not excel in those arts that allow you to make friends easily.\" Elizabeth stood very straight, her voice dropping to near a whisper. \"Do not expect my help in luring him into a trap.\"\n\n\"I would never ask that of you.\"\n\n\"But Fitzwilliam might have. Keeping the knowledge of his purpose from me could readily have been part of trying to use me against my will.\"\n\n\"He is not the sort of man\u2014\"\n\n\"One who would encourage you to lie to me, to distrust me, is exactly the sort who would do such a thing.\"\n\nA cockatrice screeched above them. Walker dove between them and landed on the bench. \"The egg! Bennet says the time is very near. You must come.\"\n\n\"Pray inform Fitzwilliam. I will ready the curricle.\" Darcy reached his hand toward her. \"Come with me, please.\"\n\nElizabeth stared at him. \"No.\"\n\n\"But Cait\u2014\"\n\n\"Cait's welfare is not in jeopardy now. My father has attended more hatchings than any living Order member. His help will be far more useful than mine.\"\n\n\"Cait will want you there.\"\n\n\"I am weary of being pulled this way and that because some being more powerful than myself wants me to do so. I need time to gather my thoughts and clear my head. It seems I have a great deal of thinking to do. Things are not at all what I thought they were.\" She turned her back on him.\n\n\"Elizabeth, it is not as you think.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think it is exactly that. Excuse me.\"\n\nHe reached for her elbow, but she pulled it away and turned down the path that led back to the garden. Her shoulders hunched as she pulled her shawl tight across them. Never had she looked less like herself than she did now.\n\nHe took one step toward her, but no. There was no purpose to that now. She was certainly in no mind for conversation. Perhaps he would send Walker to her after the hatching. If she was going to listen to anyone right now, it would definitely be a dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Fitzwilliam clung to the side of the curricle, wild-eyed and breathless. Probably with good reason. Bits of gravel and dust flew up behind them as Darcy took a corner a bit too sharply. He had never seen Darcy drive with such reckless abandon. No one had.\n\n\"I was given to think that we had time to arrive there a little more safely,\" Fitzwilliam shouted over the pounding hooves. \"Where is Elizabeth?\"\n\nDarcy snapped the reins, urging the horses still faster. \"She will not attend.\"\n\n\"She found out?\"\n\n\"You might recommend to the army that wyrms make excellent spies, able to ferret out secrets and convey them to the very person to whom that information will be most relevant.\"\n\n\"Damnable creatures. All mouth and stomach and little brains.\" Fitzwilliam clutched his hat. \"Do you want me to talk to her?\"\n\n\"If you befriend the chick, you will be occupied for several days at least sating his hatching-hunger. It is possible she might be ready to talk by then. But she may never speak to you\u2014or me\u2014again.\"\n\n\"I am sorry\u2014I did not mean for this to come between you and your betrothed.\"\n\nIf she still was that at this point. He had promised he would find a way out for her if she desired it. Now that the banns had been read, it would be incredibly difficult, maybe impossible. But he would not hold her to a marriage she detested. \"The time for talk will come, but for now, we must deal with the urgent matter of a hatching egg.\" Darcy stopped the carriage at the front door of Longbourn House.\n\nMary met them at the front door and hurried them to Bennet's cluttered, claustrophobic excuse for an office. There had to be some better way to store books than on the floor.\n\nBennet and Collins stood near the nesting box\u2014what the devil was Collins doing there? No doubt the man would make a cake of things\u2014maybe even teach the chick to despise men the moment he hatched. What was Bennet thinking?\n\nWalker and Cait shared the dragon perch which had been moved to one side of the nesting box. They crooned sounds that were probably encouragements in dragon tongue. They looked like doting parents, so domestic. Not that the tableaux would last long. It was a shame Elizabeth was not here to see. She would probably be able to infer a great deal from just the looks the two shared between them\u2014no, now was not the time to dwell upon that.\n\n\"Good, you are come.\" Bennet waved them in, not rising from his seat near the nesting box. \"Where is Elizabeth?\"\n\n\"She declined to come, fearing that the chick might like her best of the party.\" Fitzwilliam chuckled, tossing an easy salute toward Walker and Cait.\n\nHow easily such disguise poured from his lips. Was that something he had learned as an army spy?\n\nWalker and Cait exchanged creased-brow looks and turned to Darcy. He twitched his head, the traces of a frown at the corner of his lips. Both raised their wings a bit and snapped their beaks. How quickly they fathomed that something was seriously wrong.\n\n\"Colonel Fitzwilliam, you need to be here, next to the box.\" Bennet pointed to a nearby footstool, an air of impatience in his voice.\n\nFitzwilliam wove his way through the room and perched on the footstool. It was just the right height to place him waist high to the nesting box. Though it probably should not bother him, Darcy did not like the way it put Fitzwilliam below Collins, allowing Collins to peer down at him.\n\n\"Have you read the material I sent you on hatching?\" Bennet sounded like a tutor Aunt Catherine had hired for them when they had stayed with her one summer\u2014cranky and demanding.\n\n\"Thrice. And I have taken notes.\"\n\n\"Excellent. But I would expect no less from an officer of His Majesty.\" Bennet pointed to Fitzwilliam's cravat. \"You have a flannel under there for the chick?\"\n\nFitzwilliam fumbled at his neck, finally giving up and tearing the knot out of his starched cravat. He produced a faded flannel cloth that had been tucked under the stock supporting his cravat. \"Here.\"\n\n\"Keep it in hand to clean the hatchling. Giving him your scent will help him recognize you. Mary, you have the chicken?\" He waved at the doorway.\n\nMary pushed in with a plucked whole bird on a wooden platter. Bennet pushed a small table near the dragon perch. Walker and Cait set upon the chicken, shredding it in moments. Good thing there had been no feathers, or the room would be awash in them, floating about as the pair cast them aside. Not an attractive sight by any stretch, but fascinating. Sometimes it was easy to forget how formidable even small dragons could be. Pity the creature that fell under their beaks and talons.\n\n\"Look!\" Collins pointed at the nesting box.\n\nThe mottled grey-green egg wobbled. The shell stretched and wiggled a bit like a tall jelly. The needle-sharp tip of a beak poked through.\n\nDarcy held his breath as it disappeared inside the egg. He counted silently. At ten it had not reappeared. The mantle clock ticked loud minutes, and the egg stopped moving all together. That was a very bad sign. If the chick was not strong enough to break through the shell, it would not survive outside the egg. The kindest thing was to allow it to pass in peace within the confines of the shell.\n\n\"Will not someone do something? Should it not be breaking out by now?\" Collins reached for the egg.\n\n\"No, you must not interfere!\" Bennet slapped his hand back faster than Darcy thought him able to move.\n\nThe egg rocked hard, as though startled by the sounds. It rolled end-over-end toward Collins' edge of the box. Somehow Collins caught it as it tumbled out. He held it up, mouth agape, face pale, and hands trembling.\n\n\"Just put it back in the box.\" Bennet pointed frantically, probably afraid Collins might drop it.\n\nThe egg cracked down the middle and fell away in two large pieces. A matted, bedraggled chick stood in his palm. He turned jet black eyes on Collins and squawked, \"Hungry!\"\n\nCollins stared at it with such a peculiar look. \"What is it saying?\"\n\n\"Hungry!\"\n\nCollins ran a finger gently over the chick's wet, matted head. \"I do not understand.\"\n\n\"Hungry!\" The chick screeched, pawing at Collins' palm. Hopefully his talons were still soft or Collins' hand might be shredded.\n\nSuch a plaintive, desolate sound. A lump rose in Darcy's throat. Beside him, Mary began to weep. Did the voice of a young cockatrice induce sorrow the way an adult's induced terror?\n\nBloody hell! That would be the sort of thing Elizabeth would want to know. Damn it all, she should be here!\n\nCollins' eyes filled with tears. \"I would like to help, but I do not understand.\"\n\nFitzwilliam edged around the box and nudged Collins with his shoulder. He carefully took the chick into his hands. \"The chick is hungry.\"\n\nMary crowded in and pressed the tray of meat toward Fitzwilliam. With his free, hand he grabbed a handful of slivers and offered one to the chick.\n\nThe baby gobbled it down, flapping its wet wings to shower Fitzwilliam and Collins with egg slime.\n\n\"May I clean you?\" Fitzwilliam applied the soft flannel to the baby's face.\n\nThe chick leaned into his ministrations, crooning.\n\nCollins slipped from the room.\n\nBennet murmured soft encouragements to the chick and Fitzwilliam as he fed it a larger piece. They were in good hands. Best see what Collins was about.\n\nCollins leaned heavily against the wall just outside the study door, face in his hands.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Darcy asked softly.\n\nCollins gulped several ragged breaths. \"The way it looked at me.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The creature\u2014the baby. Its eyes. As though it\u2014he\u2014knew exactly what he wanted, needed and how to communicate it. As if I should have understood.\" He clasped his hands and extended them toward Darcy. \"I would have helped had I understood. The grief! They feel! The creatures, the dragons, they feel, as we do. I never realized. They are not just clever animals.\"\n\nDarcy suppressed the urge to slap his forehead. The bigger issue was that the man was finally grasping the nature of dragons, not that it had taken him this long to accomplish it. Darcy bit his tongue and set aside the first three things he thought to say. \"You are absolutely correct.\"\n\n\"How easily the colonel managed, cared for the creature, just because he could understand what the chick was saying. It was truly communicating, speaking to him.\"\n\n\"You will find it far easier to deal with Longbourn now that you understand.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, you may be quite right.\" Collins blotted his eyes with his sleeve. \"That is one too, no?\" He pointed behind Darcy.\n\nDarcy looked over his shoulder. Rumblkins spring-hopped toward them.\n\n\"Yes, he is. His kind is called a tatzelwurm. There are more of them who live in the barns at Longbourn. They do not usually live in homes.\" Or with Friends who could not actually hear dragons, but now was definitely not the time to try and explain that sort of thing.\n\n\"I believe I may owe it\u2014him\u2014an apology.\"\n\nDarcy crouched and extended a hand toward Rumblkins. \"Are you willing to hear Mr. Collins? He has something to say to you.\"\n\n\"Why should I listen to him?\" Rumblkins turned half his body away from them.\n\n\"Mr. Collins, it would behoove you to present a good will offering, a bit of dried cod from the kitchen perhaps\u2014\"\n\n\"Or a dish of cream.\" Rumblkins turned toward them and licked his lips.\n\n\"Better yet, a dish of cream would be very welcome.\"\n\n\"Yes \u2026 yes \u2026 of course. Lady Catherine is always more amenable after a few compliments. Why would not a \u2026 a dragon be so as well.\" Collins trundled down the hall toward the kitchen.\n\nDarcy dragged his hand down his face. But then again, dealing with Aunt Catherine was not so different from dealing with a dragon. Perhaps she was a good model to use.\n\nHow Elizabeth would laugh to hear that, but she probably would agree. How would he explain the transformation that had just come over Collins? Would she even believe him?\n\nRumblkins laid a paw on Darcy's knee. \"She said this was important. I do not know why she left this behind.\" With his other paw, he laid a long, dirty glove on Darcy's knee.\n\n\"She left this somewhere?\"\n\n\"No, we found it. In the woods. She thought it was important, but left it at the lair in her apron.\"\n\nHe held the glove up by one finger. It did not seem the right shape to be Elizabeth's. \"Whose is this?\"\n\n\"A sister's. I do not remember which.\"\n\nDarcy's heart thudded hard against his ribs. \"I will ask Mary, surely she will know. Thank you very much.\" He scratched under Rumblkins' chin.\n\nCollins shuffled up with a saucer of cream. He crouched next to Darcy. \"What should I do?\"\n\n\"Put the saucer down and talk while he takes the cream.\" Darcy rose. \"Pray listen to him with kindness, Rumblkins. What Dragon Mates know easily is difficult for others to learn.\"\n\n\"Mrrow.\" Rumblkins glanced from the cream, to Collins, and back to the cream. Apparently his stomach won the conversation. He pressed his nose into the cream.\n\n\"Ah, yes, well then,\" Collins straightened his jacket and drew a breath long enough to fuel a very long speech, just as he would have done addressing Lady Catherine. Good thing there was plenty of cream.\n\nDarcy excused himself and returned to the study.\n\nMary leaned against her father's cluttered desk, watching as Fitzwilliam fed the ravenous chick. \"The chick's name is Earl.\"\n\nDarcy snickered into his hand. \"I am not sure if Uncle Matlock will be pleased or not having a chick so named for him.\"\n\n\"You think that is the colonel's intent?\"\n\n\"I think it well within the bounds of his sense of humor.\"\n\nEarl had fluffed out as his feather-scales dried. His head, wings, and torso were covered with mottled green-gold down. His serpentine lower half bore soft-looking dark grey scales, wrapped firmly around Fitzwilliam's wrist. Though his beak and talons had a soft, translucent sheen, they had dried enough to be useful in shredding his meal.\n\n\"Earl is rather cute, all told.\" Mary mumbled. \"In the way all babies are cute, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Cockatrice are not cute\u2014or at least I would not risk telling one that. You would go much farther calling him impressive.\" Darcy glanced at Walker. Did he just wink at them?\n\n\"I will remember that.\" Mary's eyes twinkled a little like Elizabeth's.\n\n\"Rumblkins just brought me this. It was found in the woods. He seemed to think it very important. Would you happen to know to whom it belongs?\" He handed the glove to Mary.\n\nShe turned it inside out. \"Great heavens! It is Lydia's!\"\n\n\"You must meet Darcy, my young Friend.\" Fitzwilliam cradled Earl in the crook of one arm and waved Darcy over with the other. Cait leaned down from the perch to offer Earl another gobbet of meat. He would have to stop eating soon, his belly was distended and his eyelids were drooping.\n\nBennet moved aside so Darcy could stand beside Fitzwilliam.\n\nHuge baby eyes turned on him. \"Darcy?\"\n\n\"Yes, Earl, I am Darcy. Walker is my Friend.\" Darcy stroked Earl's fluffy head. Perhaps Mary was right. He was cute after all.\n\nWalker squawked approval from the opposite side of the room.\n\nDarcy offered a sliver of meat. Earl swallowed it slowly, his head lolling into Fitzwilliam's chest as he did.\n\n\"I was not sure we would ever get enough food into him.\" Fitzwilliam stared at Earl with something between wonder and pride. \"I never knew a creature so small could stuff himself that much.\"\n\n\"I believe your mother used to say that about you.\" Darcy chuckled, twitching his brows just a bit. \"I imagine your father will have something to say about his name, though.\"\n\n\"I merely offered it. Earl chose to accept it.\" Fitzwilliam winked.\n\n\"Tell your father that.\" He held the glove toward Fitzwilliam. \"You need to see this. Mary says it is Miss Lydia's. Rumblkins found it in the woods.\"\n\n\"So, she is here?\"\n\n\"It is the first real evidence to suggest that she is.\"\n\nFitzwilliam glanced around for a chair and sat. \"Is it torn? Are there signs of violence?\"\n\n\"It does not seem so.\"\n\n\"Perhaps she is still alive. We must begin searching immediately.\"\n\n\"Would it not be wiser to see the maps decontaminated first? I expect the time it would take would be more than amply made up for in the time saved searching.\"\n\nFitzwilliam glanced down at Earl who snored softly against his chest. \"I suppose you are right. I must go back to Netherfield, though.\"\n\n\"It would be better for the chick to remain here.\" Had Bennet been listening the whole time? Probably. Despite his other physical limitations, his preternatural hearing was still as sharp as ever it was.\n\n\"Come to Netherfield with us. You can watch over him there whilst we fulfil the Order's business.\" Fitzwilliam made that an order, not a suggestion.\n\nBennet scowled and opened his mouth\u2014for protest no doubt.\n\n\"There are many book collections there. You can help us identify the volumes that are of particular value.\" Darcy nudged Fitzwilliam. Sometimes bribery was more effective than demands.\n\nFitzwilliam nodded with just his eyes. \"When we have decontaminated the maps, your assistance in deciphering them will be invaluable.\"\n\n\"I think he is right, Papa.\" Mary and Mr. Collins came up behind Bennet.\n\n\"But Longbourn\u2014\"\n\n\"He will be fine, I am sure.\" Mary laid a hand on Bennet's shoulder.\n\n\"With Cait's help, we will be able to manage.\" Collins' tone was so changed. Who would have thought those words had come from him.\n\n\"They can send for help if there is any problem. I will drive you back myself if necessary.\" It must be difficult to put himself in the service of such a man. The things the Blue Order could require!\n\n\"Very well, but only until the chick is past his hatching hunger.\" Was Bennet pouting now?\n\n\"Walker, pray would you find Elizabeth and inform her of our plans? I do not think this a good time to surprise her.\" That, of course, was an understatement of draconic proportions.\n\n[ Walker muttered something about not being a messenger bird, but for his Lady Elizabeth, he would oblige, and flew off ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Elizabeth pulled her shawl tighter over her shoulders as she turned off the garden path. Talia would insist on introducing more hoppers, and her current mood hardly rendered her obliging. The folly was a far better destination. The forest wyrms were unlikely to appear, and she could have quiet for her own thoughts.\n\nHow could she have been so misled? Darcy said he trusted her, yet he would keep such information from her? That was precisely how Papa treated Mama. Of course, he justified it because Mama could not hear dragons, and the Blue Order required secrecy.\n\nHad the Blue Order instructed Fitzwilliam thus? Did they hope he might use her against Netherfield? It would not be entirely unlike them to do so. How dare they try to manage her like the dragon-deaf! Perhaps Mary's concerns over the Order's behavior were very sensible after all.\n\nHow like the military they were, always quick to turn to the sword for an answer. But it was foolish and short-sighted. How much better if all could be made to see reason. To resolve this without bloodshed\u2014why did they have so little faith it could be done?\n\nWhy did Darcy have so little faith in her? And this was the man she was going to marry? How would that ever work? What point in hoping for a marriage of the mind and soul when he would not turn to her with the truth at such a time as this? No, this would be no more than a typical marriage for advantage and connection.\n\nAt least there would be little Pemberley to love. Perhaps that would be enough.\n\nElizabeth paused at the folly, her feet too heavy to move. The path continued deeper into the woods behind the structure. Why had she never noticed it before? Perhaps it might lead somewhere useful, and if it did not, that was just as well, too. She needed to spend time away from everyone\u2014man and dragon\u2014lest she lose control and say something very untoward.\n\nThe subtle path proved challenging to follow as it wound into the deep woods and into a rocky terrain studded with rounded hills. How long had it been here and what sort of creature made it? It lacked the typical marks left by larger game. In places the track looked more like scaly slithers than anything else.\n\nThis was the sort of landscape wyrms loved\u2014so many holes for them to hide in and explore. Not just wyrms, other smaller dragons liked it, too. The unique karst landscape meant Hertfordshire hosted an unusually large population of wild dragons compared to the rest of England. Perhaps, there were some who lived here who might help her. Though it was difficult to meet wild dragons, it was possible if one was patient and could manage a proper introduction.\n\nShe scanned a small clearing near the hillside for dragon signs. Those could be slither trails among the rocks, and that shiny bit looked like a lost scale. The skeleton of\u2014well something small and previously furry\u2014lay near a few bushes. Multiple wild dragons might well live here.\n\nA scraggly tree offered shade to a boulder near the center of the outcropping. She sat there, still and silent. Surely the dragons would smell her. But if she remained non-threatening, their curiosity usually won over their caution, and they would come to investigate. It merely required sufficient patience.\n\nHer shadow grew steadily longer, and her bones ached from the hard stone perch. Maybe just a little longer, but not much. She needed to leave herself enough time to get back to the house before sunset.\n\nThere, wait! Slithering, the unique sounds of scales over rocks just behind her, approaching with caution. Excellent. All she had to do was be quiet and still and\u2014\n\nA wyrm shadow appeared! Exactly what she\u2014wait. Why was it growing so very large? Chills coursed down her neck and shoulders. How could a rock wyrm cast such a long\u2014rock wyrms did not have arms!\n\nShe turned very, very slowly.\n\nThe creature was blue. The bluest dragon she had ever seen. Bluer than the blue pa snake she had met at the Order offices. He was the blue of a peacock feather, his back a little darker, his belly a touch lighter.\n\nHe rose up on his tail until he stood eight, maybe ten feet tall. It was difficult to tell for certain while she was seated. A long, squared face sported both a wild blue mane\u2014more hairy than feathery, and a long white whisker mustache at the end of his nose similar to Longbourn's. Fangs, stained and not at all cared for, poked out just below his nose\u2014not bared to be a threat just yet.\n\nHis huge round eyes glittered bright yellow in the sunshine, well-formed for seeing in near-total darkness. Two long, powerful arms defined where his neck ended and shoulders began, ending in paws that looked more like hands. Four lithe toes, with one opposing the other three like a thumb, bore daunting talons, useful for digging and for dispatching prey. No wonder horses were terrified at the mere scent of a lindwurm. They would stand no chance against one.\n\n\"You call yourself Netherfield, I expect.\" She rose on jellied knees. At least she kept her voice level and strong. That was something\n\n\"You are trespassing on my territory.\" The gruff, gravelly tone sounded more like a child's affectation than his real speaking voice. Trying to be intimidating, no doubt.\n\n\"This is not your territory.\"\n\n\"I have taken its name. No other dragon claims it. The minor dragons give way to me. It is mine.\" He spoke the last three words with particular force, a little spittle flying with each.\n\n\"That may be how it works in France. But here, there are rules about what territory a dragon claims. You have not followed them.\"\n\n\"I will have this place.\" He slithered closer to tower over her\u2014a particular tendency among males and dragons trying to prove themselves right.\n\n\"It is not impossible\u2014if you work with the Blue Order. Since the proper claimant to this Keep has not been heard from in quite some time\u2014\"\n\n\"He gave me this land.\"\n\nIs that what \"giver\" in the painting referred to? \"Then you may present your claim\u2014\"\n\n\"I hold the land. It is mine. If anyone challenges me, I will hold it, with blood if I must.\" His lips pulled back to reveal formidable fangs.\n\nGood sense demanded she run, or at least back away. But that was also the surest way to trigger a predator's instincts. \"That is not an option. Your attitude places you in grave danger.\"\n\n\"I know about the Dragon Slayer. You have a Dragon Hunter under your control. You are a grave danger to me.\" He leaned down and blew hot breath in her face. She trembled. This was too much like Longbourn \u2026\n\n\"He is by no means under my control. I cannot fathom where you got such a notion. You are a rational, reasonable creature and this entire matter can be solved by\u2014\"\n\nHe swiped at her. Before she could draw breath to scream, she dangled from his paws over the rocky ground. \"I will solve it by removing you.\"\n\nStruggling would do no good, but the reflex was too strong to stop. How ridiculous she must appear kicking and twisting in his grasp. \"Harming me will not profit you. If you kill me, you will die. If Longbourn does not kill you, the Dragon Hunter and his kin will stop at nothing to do so.\"\n\n\"I do not need to kill you, yet. There are other means to try first.\" He pressed her to his chest so tightly she could hardly breathe and slithered toward the hills. He ducked to enter a large cave. What little she could see turned into darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "At sunset, a fast-moving storm released its fury upon Darcy in the open curricle just as they pulled up to Netherfield. Surely Elizabeth would greet them with a warm fire and the promise of a hot meal to be served soon. In his mind's eye, Darcy could see her forgiving smile. No doubt there would be a long discussion to follow, in private of course. But all would soon be well. She would be his Elizabeth once again.\n\nNicholls met them at the door, not Elizabeth. Apparently, she was not returned. This was not the sort of weather anyone should be out in, especially not a gentlewoman without even a spencer to protect her from the chill. But Elizabeth had many dragon friends. Surely one of them would be able to offer her shelter from the torrent.\n\nAn hour later, Darcy paced along the parlor windows, staring at the pounding drops that ran down the windows. A few made their way inside to puddle on the window sill. Did Elizabeth have such protection against the tempest?\n\n\"You may as well stop pacing, Darcy.\" Bennet did not even look up from his book as he sat near the fire with several candlesticks behind him for extra light. The table beside him held half a dozen more volumes.\n\nHow pleasant that he was entirely content with the current situation. Darcy, however, was not.\n\n\"You may as well sit. Pacing is not going to bring her back any sooner.\" Fitzwilliam nursed a glass of brandy near the fire while Earl slept in the crook of his arm. But the way he rolled the glass between his palms\u2014he was no calmer than Darcy.\n\n\"No, it will not.\" Bennet grumbled as he resettled himself in the wingchair like a cold drake trying to get comfortable. \"What is more, you ought to get accustomed to this sort of behavior. She has been doing these things all her life. I doubt you will have any more luck bringing her under regulation than I have.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Darcy faced him, leaning against the window frame. Best keep a little distance.\n\n\"Where dragons are concerned, she has been uncontrollable since she first heard them.\" Bennet slapped his book shut and tossed it on the table.\n\n\"That is a very strong description.\" Fitzwilliam wrenched around in his chair to look at both of them, a hint of amusement dancing in his eyes.\n\n\"For good reason! One afternoon when she was five years old, she sneaked out of the nursery and overheard Rustle and Gardiner discussing a Blue Order matter of importing dragon goods. That evening after dinner, her mother could not find her to put her to bed. Gardiner and I found her sitting on the floor of my study with Rustle, discussing what treats dragons preferred as though it were the most normal natural thing. What kind of child\u2014what kind of girl child\u2014sees a cockatrice for what it is and strikes up a conversation instead of running for cover?\"\n\nGracious, what would his daughters be like! Perhaps they needed to employ a nursery maid with a Dragon Friend. Elizabeth would probably see nothing amiss to have a minor drake rocking a cradle whilst a fairy dragon sang the baby to sleep. What kind of a household would they have?\n\nFitzwilliam snickered into his hand, probably thinking the same thing.\n\n\"You think it funny?\" Bennet slapped the arm of his chair. \"Try raising a child who has no compunction about introducing herself to every local dragon, wild or imprinted. It was one thing when it was limited to fairy dragons and varieties of wyrms. But no, she managed to find a basilisk to acquaint herself with!\"\n\n\"A basilisk?\" Darcy feigned surprise for Bennet's sake.\n\n\"The creature had a reputation for ill-temper among the Conclave on the rare occasions he showed up. He generally refused to speak to the Keeper's daughters, and barely interacted with the Keeper himself. But Lizzy?\" Bennet slapped his forehead. \"The creature tried to scare her off. Instead of having the sense to retreat, she curtsied, introduced herself, and had the foulest tempered dragon in the county telling her stories of the Keep that even the Keeper had never heard!\"\n\nWhich Bennet was probably all too happy to write down and add to the existing dragon lore. Would Bennet think differently of the matter if she had been his son and heir engaging in such boldness? Darcy dragged his heel across the carpet.\n\n\"On that same trip, she managed to befriend, against my express wishes, the most irritating, ill-mannered excuse for a flutter-tuft fairy dragon and brought her into my house to disrupt the delicate balance that must be kept with non-hearing members of the household!\" Bennet panted for breath.\n\n\"You can hardly blame her for that. Dragons choose their Friends as they will.\" Fitzwilliam glanced down at Earl.\n\nHad he ever looked at another creature with so much tenderness? Collins was not the only man affected by Earl's entrance into the world.\n\n\"Perhaps so, but she has no respect for propriety, for order, for etiquette. Even her initial introduction to Longbourn was on her own terms, reckless and improper.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that is what has made him so fond of her.\" Fitzwilliam winked at Darcy.\n\n\"I have never seen a dragon so insistent upon a Keeper before.\" Darcy tapped a finger against his lips. \"Perhaps that is why\u2014dragon's blood, it is about the salt!\"\n\nBennet leaned into his chair, brow drawing into deep, defensive furrows. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Now I understand, and it is despicable.\" Darcy crossed the distance to the fireplace in four long, purposeful strides. \"What kind of Dragon Keeper are you?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about, Darce?\" Fitzwilliam covered Earl with his free arm.\n\n\"Instead of providing Longbourn salt to hoard, you convinced him to take Elizabeth instead. That is why you had been so bloody insistent upon her marrying Collins and not seeking her own choice. You could not risk her leaving the estate. Elizabeth became his hoard as much as Talia is hoarding those rabbits in the garden!\" Darcy clenched his fists.\n\n\"Just wait until Pemberley discovers her own penchant for hoarding\u2014firedrakes are known for it. Then you will not be so quick to judge. Or perhaps your income is vast enough that you may provide whatever she demands. Mine, however, is not.\"\n\n\"It is your responsibility to provide for your dragon's hoard.\"\n\n\"Insofar as I can afford, sir. That is clear in the Accords. Insofar as I can afford. When one has a wife and daughters who do not hear, one cannot explain that the money, which might have provided them with the style of life they believe themselves entitled to, must be diverted to satisfy a hoarding dragon.\"\n\n\"So you frittered away your income on ribbons and bonnets while your dragon went without?\"\n\n\"Not entirely without. He received a portion every year.\"\n\nDarcy took another step, looking down upon Bennet. \"And Elizabeth? You traded your daughter like some fairytale princess to be sacrificed to a dragon!\"\n\n\"You have no right to pass judgement on what you do not understand. You, who have never found your income lagging behind your needs, are in no place to condemn me for what I had to do.\"\n\n\"Modernizing your farming and improving your livestock never came to mind, I imagine. Or were they too much effort for you?\"\n\n\"I will not discuss this matter further\u2014\"\n\nWhen had it started hailing? Sharp pecking sounded as though it would shatter the glass in the center window.\n\nFitzwilliam jogged to the window and threw it open. Walker tumbled in, wet and cold. Darcy scooped up a pile of towels near the fire, placed there in hopes of just such an arrival.\n\nWhile Darcy dried Walker, Fitzwilliam prepared a glass of hot water and brandy. \"Here, that should warm your bones.\" He placed the glass on the floor near the window.\n\nWalker picked up the glass with his beak and drained it in a single swallow. \"Much better. I could use another glass, though.\" He hopped to the fire and spread his wings. \"Damned hard to fly when one gets waterlogged.\"\n\n\"I was surprised you stayed out in this weather so long.\" Darcy dried Walker's wings.\n\nWalker turned over his shoulder and looked directly into Darcy's eyes. \"I could not find her.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you could not find her? She is probably in some cave or even in Longbourn's lair, vexing girl.\" Bennet stared into his lap, muttering.\n\nWalker turned very slowly and leveled a predatory gaze at him. \"Do you think me so lax that I would not have checked all those places already?\"\n\n\"There are dozens of them on the two estates\u2014the hills are full of caves and crevasses that could shelter someone from the weather.\"\n\n\"Yes, there are. I have enlisted the assistance of no less than half a dozen local wyrms and Talia to search them all.\" Walker spoke slowly, distinctly as one did to a very young child.\n\n\"Because wyrms are such reliable sources of information and so likely to do what they promise.\" Bennet rolled his eyes.\n\nWalker folded his still dripping wings to his back and hopped to the arm of Bennet's chair. \"They will do it for Lady Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"Lady Elizabeth? She is now 'Lady Elizabeth' to you? What grand act has she done to deserve that moniker?\"\n\n\"Yes, she is, and you would be wise not to question it. Other men might take pride in having a daughter so well regarded by dragonkind.\"\n\n\"Would she be so well regarded if dragonkind realized that she was hardly a prodigy? The disobedient girl has been making things up as she went, consulting farriers, poulterers, and nursery maids for her wisdom.\"\n\nWalker growled, low and threatening. The hair on the back of Darcy's neck prickled. Earl stirred, squawking softly in his sleep. Did Bennet not recognize the danger he courted?\n\n\"I would thank you to take that up with her, not with me. I have warned her on numerous occasions that she was treading dangerous ground, but she has ignored me. Now her secret is out, perhaps you will help bring some sense\u2014\"\n\nWalker lunged and snapped at the air in front of Bennet's face.\n\nBennet jumped back, knocking his chair down behind him.\n\nWalker extended his wings and he landed on the floor before Bennet. It was never a good thing when Walker made himself big. \"Do you think Cait or I care where her information came from? It saved Cait's life\u2014or do you not seem to grasp that she was at risk of being torn apart from the inside? Would you wish that fate upon anyone?\"\n\n\"You are exaggerating. The egg could have been broken\u2014\"\n\n\"To kill our chick? Yes, that is an excellent option. What matter where her insight comes from when she is right?\"\n\n\"And what about when she is wrong?\" Bennet recovered his composure and staggered forward. \"So far she has been lucky with her potions for scale mites and talon rot, but one day her unconventional methods will fail, and a dragon will be hurt or die. What then? Will you still honor her or will dragonkind turn on her for her upstart caprice in applying insights learned from lesser creatures to dragons?\"\n\n\"You think so little of us?\"\n\n\"Dragons have a reputation for temper for good reason.\"\n\n\"Perhaps because of the constant disrespect we face from you warm-bloods.\"\n\nBennet and Walker stared perilously at one another. Did he not realize Walker could kill him with a single stroke of his talons? Perhaps that was where Elizabeth's nerve came from.\n\nFitzwilliam cleared his throat. Conspicuous, but not ineffective. \"You said no trace has been found?\"\n\nWalker turned to him and bobbed his head. \"None. The only hint came from a rock wyrm who said that he saw her following a path recently created by the blue one.\"\n\n\"The lindwurm?\" A cold knot settled in the pit of Darcy's stomach.\n\nFitzwilliam clapped his hand to his mouth and spoke through his fingers. \"That sounds as if he laid a trap for her!\"\n\n\"The rain has washed away the path, but as soon as the weather clears, the wyrm has promised to show me where it led, but it is difficult to predict how far that will get us. Any tracks the lindwurm might have left will be gone by now.\"\n\n\"They move very quickly and through terrain most major dragons cannot.\" Fitzwilliam chewed his knuckle.\n\n\"You believe it has Elizabeth?\" Darcy swallowed hard.\n\n\"Considering the French dragons I have known, if it had meant to hurt her, it would have done so and left us evidence to prove its power. Given that it knows about the Dragon Slayer, I would assume it wants to use her to negotiate its own escape.\"\n\n\"Dragon Slayer?\" Bennet grabbed for the edge of the upturned chair.\n\n\"Demand answers from the Order, not me.\"\n\n\"But Earl\u2014\"\n\n\"I have promised Fitzwilliam I shall see to his care and find an appropriate Friend if it becomes necessary.\" A promise Darcy hoped he never need fulfill.\n\n\"How could you present yourself as his Friend knowing\u2014\"\n\n\"Because I insisted.\" Walker snapped close to Bennet's knee. \"Enough of this talk. None of it is useful in finding Lady Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"In this weather, what else is there to do? It is not as if anyone can go out in the pitch dark and rain.\" Bennet struggled to right his chair.\n\n\"The map room.\" Fitzwilliam slapped his knee. Earl opened one eye to offer a reproving look.\n\n\"We should begin immediately.\" It was not as though he would get any sleep tonight anyway. \"We should have sufficient antidote with what Mary gave me before we left Longbourn.\"\n\n\"This is a foolhardy effort. No one has ever counteracted\u2014\"\n\n\"How exactly would you know? Have you read every tome of dragon lore in existence? Are you certain it would have been written down if it had been attempted?\" Fitzwilliam stroked the top of Earl's head.\n\nWhat an education that young cockatrice was getting. At this rate, he would likely be even more cynical than his father!\n\n\"We are not asking you to put yourself at risk or even for your approval. Only help us read the maps when they are decontaminated. It seems the least you can do to help your daughter.\" Such a man he would have as father-in-law.\n\n\"Leave Earl here with me, you cannot risk exposing him to the poison.\" Bennet reached toward Fitzwilliam.\n\n\"I am not sure I can risk leaving him with you and your hidebound notions. But it seems I have no choice.\" Fitzwilliam muttered as he rose and carefully transferred the sleeping chick to Bennet's arms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Pressed hard against the lindwurm's cool body in the lightless gloom, time and distance lost all meaning. Only the scraping slithers of his scales against the walls of the rock tunnels gave her senses an anchor.\n\nAll the creature had to do was leave her in this darkness, set her down and abandon her, and all would be lost. A creature who would snatch her up and take her captive was certainly the sort capable of deserting her. Exactly the sort of creature\u2014warm-or cold-blooded\u2014with whom she had no experience. The sort of creature Darcy and Fitzwilliam expected the lindwurm to be.\n\nWhat was that? Her eyes must be playing tricks. How could there be a glimmer of light in this pervasive, stony blackness? But no, it was there, growing larger. She fought for a better view, but Netherfield only held her more tightly. Was he humming to himself?\n\nSurely, that was not possible. Dragons were not musically inclined. It was a sort of self-satisfied sound, not so much aggressive as simply irritating, but definitely melodic and vaguely familiar. Had Mary been practicing that melody recently? Yes, she definitely had. Was he dangerous or just vexing? Probably both.\n\nThe light grew and flickered, a familiar yellow-orange. A fire? Why would there be a fire in his cavern? He needed neither the light nor the heat \u2026\n\n\"Go with her.\" Netherfield set her down none too gently and pushed her toward the fire. She stumbled, blinking in the constricted ring of light that barely reached the walls of what seemed only a wide spot in a tunnel.\n\nOdd, this was hardly a proper lair. Dragons liked to be comfortable. These walls were rough, likely to scrape his hide, and the floor too uneven for easy rest. This space had the hallmarks of a temporary shelter, well away from his actual lair.\n\nAt the far edge of the firelight, a heap of pale fabric shuddered.\n\n\"Lydia?\"\n\n\"Lizzy?\" A dirty face peeked up.\n\nElizabeth swept her into her arms and glared over her shoulder. \"What you have done here is completely untoward. Why would you hold an innocent girl hostage?\"\n\nNetherfield reared back, his expression shifting from satisfied to perplexed. But not aggressive, at least not yet.\n\n\"You can talk to him?\" Lydia scrabbled back as if seeing yet another monster in the room.\n\n\"Of course, I can. No different to you.\" Patience. Now was an appropriate time for patience. After all, Lydia knew nothing of dragons nor the Blue Order. What a shocking manner to learn of them, even worse than Collins' first encounter. \"Is he the first such creature you have spoken to?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\" Lydia leaned in close to whisper. \"You will certainly think me daft, but did you know Mrs. Hill's cat speaks, too?\"\n\n\"Of course, he does. He is a minor dragon. All dragons speak.\"\n\n\"Our housekeeper's cat is a dragon? He did look rather odd when he asked me for a dish of cream. How long have you heard these beasts?\"\n\n\"As long as I can remember. Mary can hear them, too.\"\n\n\"Ahem.\" Netherfield coughed and crossed his forearms over his chest. \"I believe you asked me a question. Do be good enough to permit me to answer.\"\n\n\"We will come back to this, Lydia. I have a very great deal to tell you.\" Elizabeth curtsied toward Netherfield. \"Forgive my rudeness. Do go on.\"\n\n\"Thank you. The girl is not innocent. I am holding her for my own protection.\"\n\n\"Lydia, what have you done?\"\n\n\"Why do you accuse me?\" Lydia wrapped her arms around her waist and huddled down. \"Truly, I have done nothing, not to deserve this.\"\n\n\"If you did not threaten Netherfield, then who did?\"\n\n\"The deaf one.\" Netherfield bobbed back and forth as though preparing to strike at prey.\n\n\"Wickham did not take you to elope?\"\n\n\"No. When he came from Brighton, he was certain there was a monster living at Netherfield. He said Colonel Forster gave him leave to try and find it.\"\n\n\"That is why you were practicing ciphers! Wickham dared not write to you about such things plainly! Is that why you came to Netherfield in the first place?\"\n\n\"Well, no, not exactly.\" Lydia scuffed her heel along the sandy floor. \"Mama is so bossy! Suddenly, the idea came to me: how much fun it would be to have an entire house under my own command. So I went to Netherfield. Not long after, though, I started hearing voices from the cellar.\"\n\n\"You persuaded her to come to Netherfield! You brought her into all this! How dare you?\" Elizabeth stomped\u2014granted probably not the most politic response at the moment, but who could blame her?\n\nNetherfield's shoulders hunched like a scolded little boy. \"I was lonely. Longbourn did not want her there, so it seemed she would not be missed.\"\n\n\"So you used her for your own entertainment? That is despicable. Utterly despicable\u2014and illegal.\"\n\nLydia grabbed for her arm. \"You should not say such things, Lizzy!\"\n\n\"No, you should not.\" Netherfield hissed, recovering his draconic bearing.\n\n\"Did he entice you to come down into the cellar and talk?\"\n\nLydia refused to meet Elizabeth's gaze. \"He seemed friendly and lonesome at the time.\"\n\n\"So you invited Wickham to come meet your friend?\"\n\n\"I did not say my friend was a \u2026 monster! I was lonely, too and thought to make him a wee bit jealous. What is so terrible about that?\"\n\nHis long nose wrinkled into many folds. \"She and the deaf one came of their own accord. I did not invite them.\" He rustled his coils, a little defensive, a little uneasy.\n\n\"They trespassed upon your lair without invitation.\" Elizabeth covered her eyes with her hand. Dragon's blood!\n\n\"I had been told there were rules against such things. Dragons were not to be imposed upon in their lairs.\" His lip and nostril curled back.\n\n\"That is one of the Keeper's responsibilities. But this estate has no Keeper at present.\" Lydia should have known better, should have been taught better!\n\n\"The deaf one wanted to be Keeper of this territory and use the tunnels running under it. He offered a business proposition. But men do not do business with dragons, not even here.\" Netherfield wove from side to side. \"He wanted to use me to his own advantage, to make me a slave.\"\n\n\"We know he is quite dragon-deaf. How could he use you if he could not even talk to you?\"\n\nLydia crumpled into a heap on the floor. How very courageous and useful of her.\n\n\"She translated for him.\"\n\nElizabeth's breath caught in her throat. Lydia had committed high treason and had no idea of it. If only Papa had paid more attention to her, he would have recognized the signs and intervened before she came fully into her hearing. Hopefully, the Blue Order would be lenient given the circumstances. If they were able to reach them at all.\n\n\"When he resorted to threats to gain my cooperation, I had little choice but to detain them here. Why else would I take a babbling addlepate with no sense and fewer connections?\"\n\nLydia shrieked. \"That horrible creature killed my Wickham! He will kill both of us, too!\"\n\n\"You killed Wickham?\" A cold chill snaked down Elizabeth's spine. Those yellow-gold eyes belonged to a killer. She had never looked into a killer's eyes before.\n\nHe turned his face aside. \"I did what I had to do. I will do it again if I have to.\"\n\n\"We are both of Longbourn's Keep. If you harm us, it will be a declaration of war against him.\"\n\n\"Longbourn? You mean there is another monster like this one? On our estate? In our cellars?\" Lydia keened, rocking, arms tight around her knees.\n\n\"I will explain it all to you. I promise. But not now.\"\n\n\"You betrayed Longbourn. He will be glad to see you punished.\" Netherfield turned up his nose and tossed his head, a little like Lydia was apt to.\n\n\"We have made up since I realized you attempted those persuasions upon me, not him.\"\n\nNetherfield snatched her up and dangled her over the fire. The brute! \"Do not tempt me.\"\n\nIt was difficult to maintain one's grace and composure hanging like a ragdoll. \"I am the only leverage you have over the Dragon Slayer. He has experience with your kind. Do you really want to force a confrontation?\"\n\nNetherfield cast her aside, just hard enough to send her stumbling into Lydia, but not enough to slam her into the wall which he could easily have done. \"No more talk.\"\n\nElizabeth huddled near Lydia while Netherfield arranged his coils to effectively block both ends of the tunnel.\n\nIn a very few minutes, Lydia sagged heavily against her with the deep breaths of sleep. Netherfield snored softly as dragons were wont to do. With a lindwurm's keen hearing and the encompassing darkness beyond the little fire, there was no point in trying to effect an escape. She leaned back against the cold, damp stone.\n\nWhat kind of creature was this lindwurm? Unlike any dragon she had ever known: cold, cruel, hard. Ancient dragon lore, written before the Pendragon Accords, chronicled such things. Modern dragons were not like this.\n\nWas it as Fitzwilliam said? Dragons of the continent, without the protections and restrictions of the Accords, lacked the civility of British dragons. Could he and the Order be right, that the sword was the only recourse when dealing with a calculated killer? A killer! Netherfield had killed Wickham. She clasped her knees to her chest and hooked her chin over them, making herself very small.\n\nIt was not hard to justify the dragon's actions, considering what Wickham had threatened Netherfield with. But a British dragon would have brought it to the courts. As a self-made deaf-speaker who had violated multiple Blue Order laws, Wickham would have been condemned, but it would have been a proper judicial action, not\u2014she swallowed hard\u2014a murder.\n\nFitzwilliam was right. There was probably no other solution. And heavens above\u2014Darcy was right, too. How bloody stubborn she was\u2014as stubborn as any dragon\u2014and now she was trapped in a strange dragon's lair to show for it.\n\nAt least she had found Lydia. That was something. As long as they both still breathed, there was hope, if only a very little bit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Darcy paced the length of his chambers for\u2014well, he had lost count by this point. Fitzwilliam had begun their decontamination efforts, soaking the maps in the antidote-laden steam. But it would take time for the cure to do its work. So they waited.\n\nFitzwilliam had bathed thoroughly and fed Earl his next meal. The chick had refused to take it from Bennet's hand which was saying a great deal considering the power of hatching-hunger. Earl did not appear to like Bennet very much. Who could blame him?\n\nWhat was more, feeding Earl seemed to do Fitzwilliam good. In just the short time he and his Friend had been together, Fitzwilliam was a changed man. It was difficult to put into words what it was, but it was there: the expression in his eyes; the way he carried himself; even the tone he used to address Walker. All had altered since Earl's hatching. If only Fitzwilliam could have the freedom to relax and relish the relationship\u2014bloody timing of it all!\n\nImpotent rays of dawn struggled to penetrate the heavy clouds and driving rain pelting the window pane. Blast it all\u2014they would be hard-pressed to be able to get out at all today if this continued.\n\nWait, what was that? The tapping was too regular to be raindrops. A bedraggled blue spot clung to the windowsill and pecked at the glass.\n\nHe ran to the window and shoved it open. April fell in, tangling in the curtain. His hands shook so hard that sorting her out from the heavy fabric and fringe proved complicated.\n\n\"Is it true? Is it true?\" She squawked, flapping her wings, splashing rainwater on his face and chest. \"I heard\u2014we all did\u2014that Elizabeth is missing!\" Who knew that a fairy dragon could scream like an angry woman?\n\nDarcy shut the window and carried her to the washstand for a towel. \"Who told you such a thing?\" He dabbed her dripping face.\n\n\"The wyrms\u2014they all seem to know. By tomorrow every dragon in the county will know! So it is true?\"\n\n\"I fear so.\"\n\nShe dove for his right ear. \"How could you let that happen to her? You were supposed to protect her.\"\n\nHe dodged and covered his ear. \"She was angry with me and went off into the woods. We have not seen her since.\"\n\n\"Fitzwilliam has the Dragon Slayer? That is true as well?\" She hovered drunkenly in front of his face.\n\n\"By command of the Order.\"\n\nShe attacked his left ear. Her ire was so well-deserved that it was difficult to shoo her away. Finally, she stopped and perched on the washstand, panting for breath.\n\nHe picked her up and cradled her in the crook of his arm. \"We will find her. I promise you. We are cleansing the maps even now. They will aid us in finding her soon. We will recover her.\"\n\n\"You must! You must.\" She burrowed between his elbow and chest. \"I will lay my eggs soon. She must be here with me. She must vet my chicks' Friends and see to it that nothing goes wrong. I ... cannot do this without her!\"\n\nCould fairy dragons cry? It certainly seemed so.\n\nDarcy stroked the back of her head, still damp and matted. \"I need her at least as much as you do. We will not rest until she is home.\"\n\nApril stared up at him, tiny and miserable. \"Is your promise enough?\"\n\n\"It will be, my little friend, it will be.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Several hours later, fists pounded at Darcy's door. The door flew open, slamming against the wall behind.\n\n\"The maps are in the morning room along with a fresh pot of coffee.\" Fitzwilliam staggered in, Earl nestled in the crook of his arm. Except for the cockatrice chick, he had the look of a man ejected from a pub after too much cheap gin.\n\n\"Hatching hunger or wyvern poison?\" Darcy scrubbed his eyes with his fists. When had he dozed off?\n\nApril launched from Darcy's shoulder and hovered near Fitzwilliam's chest. \"I do not smell poison, but the baby's belly is full.\"\n\nEarl stretched his long neck toward her, blinked, and cheeped. \"Who?\"\n\nHis baby voice was high, even a little sweet, nothing like the sonorous tones Walker produced. But at the rate he was growing, it would not take very long for that to change. Was it possible he had grown noticeably since he hatched\u2014yesterday? Was it only yesterday?\n\nFitzwilliam offered his other hand as a perch for April and held her close to Earl. \"April, may I present Earl, offspring of Cait and Walker. Earl, she is Elizabeth's Friend.\"\n\n\"Who Elizabet?\"\n\nApril shrieked and zipped away to bury herself under the collar of Darcy's rumpled coat. What was it Elizabeth did to comfort a distraught fairy dragon?\n\n\"Someone you will meet very soon. Walker and Cait consider her a good friend as well.\" Fitzwilliam scratched under Earl's chin.\n\nApril twittered\u2014what did one call that sound?\u2014and shuddered under the point of Darcy's lapel.\n\n\"Have we honey or jam in the morning room?\" Darcy asked.\n\n\"I want tea,\" April chittered. \"Chamomile.\"\n\n\"I will notify Nicholls.\" Fitzwilliam bowed from his shoulders and closed the door behind him.\n\nDarcy pushed up to his feet. A fresh shirt would be nice, but that would involve dislodging April who was already quite upset enough. Best just get on with things. Clean clothes could be had later.\n\nDarcy's throat knotted as he entered the morning room. The place was simply not right without Elizabeth's bright smile to greet him. Instead, Bennet occupied the seat near the windows that Elizabeth usually used. Little good it did him. Heavy, dark clouds, and pounding rain obscured any useful sunlight as he fixated on a pile of maps littering the table. An abundance of candles had been brought in, filling the room with a vague scent of tallow.\n\n\"Here is your tea.\" Fitzwilliam tapped a teacup on the table near the chair where Walker perched.\n\n\"Fairy dragons do not drink tea,\" Bennet muttered, barely lifting his eyes from his maps.\n\n\"Lairda April may have anything she desires,\" Walker snapped back, wings half-raised.\n\nIt was early to be so irate. Just how long had he been sitting here with Bennet?\n\nApril peeked out from Darcy's collar and launched herself at Walker with an off-key squawk. She landed just next to him. He covered her with his wing as he leaned down and whispered something to her in dragon tongue. Darcy took the chair beside Walker.\n\nBennet gaped. Good, he needed to see the influence his \"difficult\" daughter had in bringing species who were often predator and prey into such deep friendship.\n\nWalker nudged April toward the teacup. She dipped her delicate beak in, but shook her head hard, slinging drops of tea across the table. \"Needs sweet.\"\n\nFitzwilliam glanced at the dainty honey server but threw it aside and poured most of the honey pot into the tea. The gratitude in April's eyes said everything. She plunged her face into the cup and drank noisily.\n\nWhen had the little thing last eaten?\n\nEarl chirruped on Fitzwilliam's arm and was rewarded by a kipper from a nearby dish. When had he started looking so incredibly paternal?\n\n\"Blast and botheration!\" Fitzwilliam muttered a little more softly than he might otherwise have, probably out of deference to Earl's sensitive hearing, and struck the pile of maps in front of him.\n\n\"Dare I ask?\" Darcy poured himself a cup of coffee. Strong, black, and bitter\u2014hopefully, it would clear away some of the fog in his head.\n\n\"Are you surprised that the maps are not giving up their secrets easily?\" Fitzwilliam squeezed his temples.\n\n\"Considering they were labeled with a warning symbol clearly declaring them poisoned\u2014\" Bennet mumbled, eyes down.\n\n\"Just how ancient a rune was it? Are there more than two men alive who can decipher such a thing?\" Darcy gulped a mouthful of barely-not-too-hot coffee.\n\n\"If you and Elizabeth had not rushed headlong into searching the house but had consulted me on the matter, we would not be\u2014\"\n\nDarcy slapped the table. April and Earl jumped and squawked. \"No, sir. You sent Elizabeth to Netherfield to search for maps in the first place. You have grown adept at passing blame to others when it should lie with you. Considering you were the one in the region with reason to suspect a rogue dragon, and you did absolutely nothing to alert the Order\u2014\"\n\nBennet rose, but it seemed to make little difference as he remained hunched over the table. \"It would behoove you to be careful with your accusations.\"\n\n\"And it would behoove you\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough from both of you!\" Fitzwilliam pounded the table with his fist while Walker screeched for emphasis. \"None of this is getting us closer to answers. There is plenty of time to fight later.\"\n\n\"If you cannot conduct yourselves usefully,\" Walker glared at Darcy, \"then excuse yourself so those of us ready to work can continue without distraction.\"\n\nBennet sank back into his chair, grumbling under his breath. \"What is wrong with those maps?\"\n\nFitzwilliam snatched up several and stalked to Bennet. \"Look for yourself, and tell me what you make of them.\"\n\nDarcy peered over Bennet's shoulder as he turned the maps this way and that. \"There is no legend, no marks at all, unless those faint bits are dragon script.\" Darcy traced the lines with his fingertip.\n\n\"I need to examine it more closely. The most ancient versions of dragon script can be difficult to identify.\" Bennet adjusted his glasses. \"I believe these two are renderings of the immediate area of Netherfield and Longbourn. I recognize a few of the landmarks, but I cannot be certain.\"\n\n\"So, what you are not saying is these are utterly useless to us.\" Darcy scrubbed his face with his palms.\n\n\"No, I am not ready to say that, yet. I think I can cross-reference these to a set of maps in my library made by a long-ago owner of Netherfield.\"\n\n\"I shall drive you to Longbourn immediately.\" Darcy offered Bennet his walking stick.\n\n\"I cannot.\"\n\n\"What do you mean you cannot?\" Darcy rapped the walking stick on the floor.\n\n\"The weather, it is too wet and slick. I cannot walk in this. The last time I tried, I fell. The surgeon cautioned me that if it happened again, it might well be fatal.\"\n\n\"Can you direct me to this useful volume?\" Darcy enunciated slowly and carefully. Sarcasm would not serve his current purpose.\n\n\"It is usually kept on the third shelf from the top near the window-side of my study. The maps are bound in green leather with gold lettering, about as thick as your thumb. It is possible that it has been moved, but I have no other book fitting that description.\"\n\n\"I will go immediately.\" Darcy bowed and headed toward the door, biting back snide words about the condition of Bennet's study.\n\n\"Leave Lairda April here with us.\" Walker pointed to the snoring pile of blue fluff on the table beside the teacup. \"We will take care of her.\"\n\nDarcy nodded and jogged from the morning room, calling for the carriage.\n\nMrs. Hill showed him in and took his dripping greatcoat. Mr. Collins trundled into the vestibule moments later.\n\n\"Mr. Darcy, you are most welcome this forenoon, most welcome indeed.\" He bowed, stiff and very proper.\n\nCait squawked as she swooped toward them. \"What he means to say is that we are all in an uproar and in need of someone who can manage it.\" She landed on the edge of the open hall door. \"Is it true?\"\n\n\"The cat\u2014that is to say Rumblkins\u2014came in bearing news that something had happened to Cousin Elizabeth.\" Collins wrung his hands.\n\n\"She is missing.\"\n\n\"Then it is as they said, she is in the clutches of yet another \u2026 dragon?\" Collins' voice dropped to a whisper as his face turned as white as the vestibule's woodwork.\n\n\"Nothing is certain right now. I have come to fetch a set of maps to guide our search.\"\n\nA thunderous roar rattled the windows and door. Someone was in an ill-humor indeed.\n\n\"You must speak to Longbourn while you are here. Pray sir, it is quite essential.\" Collins laced his fingers before his chest, nearly begging.\n\nCait looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen. \"Mary is in the cellar with him right now, but it does not sound like she has been successful. He might take it in his mind to confront\u2014\"\n\n\"Netherfield, the dragon calls himself Netherfield.\"\n\n\"Whomever\u2014Longbourn seems determined to bare teeth against him.\" Cait flapped violently enough to swing the heavy door.\n\nTwo major dragons in battle was hardly something one kept from the neighbors, one of the few things that could make this situation worse than it already was. Darcy pushed rainwater from his face with his palm. \"Go to the study and look for a green leather-bound volume of maps whilst I deal with Longbourn.\"\n\n\"Excellent, most excellent. Perhaps I have seen it \u2026\" Collins lumbered off.\n\nAt least Collins was useful now, a marked change from before the hatching. Something to be thankful for considering the current short supply of good tidings.\n\n\"April returned last night and has met Earl. If Walker has his way, they are well on the way to being friends.\"\n\n\"I knew he would be in good hands with Fitzwilliam.\" Cait preened her ruff. \"And, yes, I have also heard what is being said about Fitzwilliam\u2014keeping secrets with wyrms about is nigh impossible.\"\n\n\"You are not concerned?\"\n\n\"Of course, I am; I am no fool. But Walker has faith in your line, and that is enough for me.\" She flew off toward the study.\n\nCait made it sound so simple. All things considered, he should enjoy the fact that one difficult dragon was cooperating with him. With any luck, another might as well. With a very great deal of luck.\n\nHe pushed open the cellar door. Cool, dank air rushed at him. Considering the way his eyes burned and face stung, Longbourn was not bearing the news well at all.\n\nTwo candles in a wall sconce at the end of the stairs cast wan flickers on a very angry wyvern.\n\n\"Mr. Darcy! You are most welcome!\" Mary met him just a few steps down, handkerchief held to her face. She handed it to him. \"You need this more than I. Pray talk to him. Perhaps he will listen to you.\" She dashed past him, out of the cellar.\n\nHer retreat was disappointing, but hardly unexpected. Few could stand up against a dragon's temper. He pressed the handkerchief to his nose and mouth. A familiar scent filled his nostrils\u2014antivenom. The pressure in his chest eased.\n\n\"Is it true?\" Longbourn roared and smacked the floor with his tail, raising a faint cloud of dust. If the creature were not careful, he could seriously damage the structure of the house itself. \"Netherfield has taken her?\"\n\n\"All we know is that she is missing. It is possible she merely took cover from the rain in the hills. We cannot jump to conclusions.\"\n\n\"I will look for her myself. I am not afraid of what I will find in the tunnels like the wyrms are.\"\n\n\"Pray do not.\" Darcy descended several steps.\n\n\"Do you think I cannot rescue her?\" Longbourn bugled a challenge.\n\n\"I am sure you are capable, but it could drive Netherfield to drastic, even tragic action.\"\n\n\"If he harms her, I will kill him.\"\n\n\"That would be your right, but consider, there is no winner in a major dragon battle. Not only the dragons suffer, but also their Keepers and their Keeps. We must avoid that at all costs.\" Darcy lifted open hands.\n\n\"But if he has hurt her\u2014\"\n\n\"If he has harmed her, I will help you slay the beast, both Fitzwilliam and I will\u2014damn the consequences. But we have no sign she has been harmed. Muster the little dragons of your Keep to scour the tunnels for any sign of her. When we know where she is, then we can mount a carefully considered rescue. It is Elizabeth's best hope. Will you do it for her?\" Darcy held his breath. Everything about his suggestion was against dragon nature. They were neither cooperative nor patient.\n\nLongbourn grumbled and stomped about. \"It is the kind of thing she would recommend. I will do as you ask, but if she is harmed\u2014\"\n\n\"Let us not consider that for the moment. It will not help.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Hours, or what seemed like hours, passed, surrounded by consuming dark and sharp chill air. Lydia clung to a tattered blanket, snoring and muttering in her sleep. Elizabeth huddled closer to the waning fire. The cold from the stone beneath her had long since penetrated her bones. She might never be warm again. Still the fire was welcome, a tiny hope in an otherwise very black place.\n\nHow had the lindwurm started a fire, much less kept one going? And why did he do so? He certainly did not require it.\n\n\"Are you in need of food?\" Netherfield opened one eye. It had been yellow in the sunlight, but in the firelight it was more amber, with flecks of green and gold.\n\nHer stomach roiled at the thought, but refusing hospitality was hardly a good way to establish rapport, an advantage she desperately needed. \"I suppose a little.\"\n\nNetherfield curled around himself\u2014how did wyrms manage that?\u2014and picked up a small trunk from the far side of the lair. He unwound and placed it near her. \"Feed yourself.\"\n\nShe opened the dingy, tattered trunk, staring inside until she could make out the contents. Some jars of\u2014well, it was impossible to tell\u2014a few apples, carrots, a hunk of cheese, and several loaves of bread. She tore off a bit of bread and a corner of the cheese. They smelt fresh enough. She nibbled at the bread. Hard and dry, but not moldy. \"Forgive me if I sound ungrateful, but where have these come from?\"\n\n\"The forest wyrms bring me what I need.\" Netherfield rested his chin on his forepaws.\n\nWas it possible that they were the same ones she knew?\n\n\"In exchange for your protection?\"\n\n\"For my patience!\" he snarled, but something about it felt half-hearted. \"They require my tolerance as does everything in my domain.\"\n\n\"Have you really kept my sister here a month?\"\n\n\"She has no sense of time.\"\n\n\"I thought not. She has never been very good at such things. My father considers her quite silly.\"\n\nNetherfield huffed through his nose, rustling his whiskers. \"He is quite right.\"\n\nHe considered her of little use, but he had not harmed her. How easily he could have disposed of Lydia when he had killed Wickham. Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her knees and balanced her chin on them, making herself as small and harmless as possible. \"Lydia says you murdered Wickham, but I am not so sure.\"\n\n\"He is dead.\"\n\n\"You do not sound like a killer to me.\"\n\n\"I will defend myself.\"\n\n\"He tried to escape?\"\n\nNetherfield turned his face aside.\n\n\"Did he become lost in the tunnels? Or perhaps he fell afoul of some underground hazard? Perhaps in a naturally-formed room off the tunnels?\"\n\n\"Sometimes the floors in those rooms are very thin, but a warm-blood cannot tell, especially one dragon -deaf. They cannot hear the rock crying out beneath them.\" Was that a touch of sadness in the lindwurm's voice?\n\nSomething about the way Netherfield's mane fell limp over his neck and the tip of his tail did not move, it all felt so sad, maybe remorseful, too. Had he been a familiar dragon, she would have reached out to comfort him.\n\nFitzwilliam would argue she saw sorrow because it was what she wanted to believe of the creature. But no, certainly it was there, was it not? \"You came from France. That is a long way for a dragon to travel beyond his territory. Are continental dragons not as territorial as British dragons?\"\n\n\"I expect that we are. But not all territory is worth having. You underestimate what Pendragon has done for you\u2014men and dragon.\"\n\n\"Men forced you from your territory?\"\n\n\"I do not submit to men!\" He growled. \"I simply did not relish what it would take to hold my land. Some took pleasure in the fight. Others were committed to ideals that I could hardly believe possible. One came from England, proclaiming that a reformation, an enlightenment as it were, could be obtained between man and dragonkind.\"\n\nEnglish dragons in France? \"But you were not convinced?\"\n\n\"Hardly. What did they know of the suffering that could be wrought by men? There is none alive in England from those days before Pendragon. What would they know of the true affliction men\u2014and other dragons\u2014might bring?\"\n\n\"So you left rather than fight?\" Was it possible this dragon was a pacifist?\n\n\"What good is there to fighting? What does it solve? Until all parties might listen to reason, I had nothing to add to the situation.\"\n\n\"How did you choose to come to Hertfordshire? This is just a small, unimportant territory.\"\n\n\"What better place? The English ideologue told me of it, said I should see it myself and know what he proposed was not some utopia but an actual working society.\"\n\nWas that the \"Giver\" noted in one of the paintings?\n\n\"He was wrong, though. Men are hardly different here to what they are in France. Not to be trusted. This is why I have you.\" Netherfield turned toward her and flicked his forked tongue very close to her face, not in the friendly sort of way that Rumblkins was in wont of doing. No, this was vaguely threatening. But was it real or just for show? \"I know Longbourn values you. I know the men at both estates value you. So, I value you. As long as you bring me what I want.\"\n\n\"And what is that?\"\n\n\"My territory.\" He hissed foul breath in her face and turned his back.\n\n\"I am cold.\"\n\nHe threw a heavy mass of dark wool at her.\n\nA man's coat, Wickham's no doubt. The back was torn open\u2014by claws or fangs? It was difficult to tell\u2014and it sported blood stains near the tears. Had Netherfield torn this from Wickham's back during an attack, or had he tried to catch Wickham as he fell through a cave floor? Now did not seem the time to ask. She pulled the torn garment around her shoulders and shuffled a little nearer the fire. What was this creature about, and what did he really want? Perhaps more importantly, what was he willing to do to get it?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Late in the evening, the clouds broke and weak rays of sunset filtered through. With any luck, no more storms would move in tomorrow. But perhaps that would be hoping for too much.\n\nDarcy climbed into the carriage, the mustard yellow book of maps on his lap. He, Mary, and Collins had spent hours searching the study and eventually the entire house, looking for a green volume. They turned up thin green volumes of farm records, an interesting treatise on the influence of field wyrms on crop production, and a genealogy of Dragon Mates in Hertfordshire from the early sixteen hundreds, but absolutely no maps.\n\nFinally, Mary suggested that Bennet might not see colors very well and the volume might not actually be green. Why had she failed to mention that sooner? They widened their search to all thin leather-bound volumes and finally came across the one he now held.\n\nHe leafed through pages as the carriage swayed through puddles in the road. Page after page of maps with proper titles and compass directions carefully penned on each. Surely this had to be the volume Bennet wanted. No other book in the house fit the description even remotely.\n\nHe trudged inside, guided by voices into the still-occupied morning room. Had they not moved since he left?\n\n\"What took you so long?\" Bennet rapped the table with his knuckles. \"Bring it here. Bring it here.\"\n\n\"It would have helped had you told me the correct thing to look for. This book is hardly green.\" Darcy slid the book across the table at Bennet. No, it was not polite, but it was better than throwing it at him.\n\n\"What are you talking about? It is indeed green.\" Bennet slapped the cover and dragged it closer.\n\n\"There is nothing green about that cover.\" Fitzwilliam snorted and rolled his eyes.\n\n\"It is the color of ground mustard seed.\" Darcy clutched his forehead.\n\n\"No, it is not.\" Walker pecked at the book cover.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Darcy leaned hard on the table.\n\n\"Bennet is correct. The book is green.\" Walker bobbed his head.\n\nApril flitted closer and landed near the book, tapping with her long beaky snout. \"It is not the color of grass to be sure. But neither is it the color of mustard. It is closer to the color of the stalks that bear flowers which are bad to eat and the beetles that make one sick.\"\n\nBennet removed his glasses and stared at the book. \"You are certain this is distinctly yellow to you, Darcy?\"\n\n\"I would bet Pemberley upon it.\"\n\n\"And you, Fitzwilliam?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"And I would swear by the same certainty that the volume is decidedly green as my wife's garden\u2014\"\n\n\"Where she grows those awful flowers!\" April hopped on the book.\n\n\"It would seem, gentlemen, we have stumbled upon an interesting finding. Apparently, not only can some men hear dragons, it seems that some can see like them as well, and it is different to other men.\"\n\nFitzwilliam gasped and pressed the side of his index finger to his mouth. Darcy glanced his way, but he shook his head.\n\n\"An interesting avenue to explore, but for another time, I fear.\" Fitzwilliam reached across the table to flip open the book. \"Are these the maps you were hoping for?\"\n\nBennet replaced his glasses and peered at the open pages. \"Yes, quite so.\" He pulled the book closer. \"Bring me that stack of maps \u2026 no, not that one, the smaller one \u2026 yes, there.\"\n\nFitzwilliam retrieved a pile from the sideboard and set it near Bennet. \"Come to the kitchen with me, Darcy. I am sure you could use a bite to eat.\"\n\nFitzwilliam grabbed a candle and headed away from the kitchen. He ducked into the small drawing room and pulled the door shut.\n\n\"I imagine this has something to do with what Bennet just noted?\" Darcy perched on the arm of the nearest chair.\n\n\"I met a dragon hunter in France. He told me the secret to sneaking up on a wyrm-type dragon was in wearing blue. I thought him superstitious or daft. He had spent so much time stalking dragons in caves and tunnels that his mind must surely have been affected. But now, I wonder. Is it possible that lindwurms tend to be blue because the color is difficult for them to tell apart from the rocks, particularly underground?\"\n\n\"I would never have thought of that, but it might be a means by which smaller ones protect themselves from the larger, especially in territories where there is no other regulation to protect them.\"\n\n\"Go attend Bennet and his maps. I am going to search the house for some coverlet or curtain, something in the proper shade of blue. There are enough rooms here; surely there must be something. When we go after the beast, I want every possible advantage on our side.\" Fitzwilliam darted out. His heavy footfalls disappeared into the dark halls.\n\nWhen they went after the beast. Darcy pressed his fist against the knot in his belly. What would happen to Elizabeth then? Was she still alive? The creature might well intend to use her to bargain for his own safety. That could mean it was a creature of reason and might be negotiated with. Even so, could it be trusted to hold up its part of a negotiation?\n\nNo, probably not. If it had lived with no rules to guide it, why would it be trustworthy now? Their best hope lay in Fitzwilliam's plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "\"Where did you get his coat?\" Lydia shook her.\n\nThe warmth of Wickham's coat had lulled Elizabeth to sleep\u2014probably not for very long. She hardly felt rested when she awoke\u2014only stiff and sore and hungry. \"I was cold last night. Netherfield gave it to me.\" She stretched aching arms.\n\n\"I have been cold, and he never gave it to me.\" Lydia pulled at the arm of the coat.\n\n\"The wyrms brought you that blanket.\" Netherfield lifted his head and hissed softly. \"I thought it would only upset you. She has been whining about the deaf one since\u2014\"\n\n\"You killed him,\" Lydia snapped.\n\n\"Since Wickham ran off into the darkness is probably more to the point.\" Elizabeth pulled the coat out of Lydia's hands.\n\n\"There is blood on his coat! Right there, on the back! It killed my Wickham.\" Lydia stood and stomped, wane firelight shadowing her pouting face.\n\n\"Hush, Lydia, no more accusations. It is not helpful. Are you not hungry?\"\n\n\"Yes. I am starving. I have been for weeks now!\"\n\nElizabeth dragged her hand down her face. \"May we?\" She turned toward Netherfield as much to address him as to avoid seeing Lydia's pandering for sympathy.\n\nNetherfield shoved the trunk closer, and Elizabeth opened it.\n\nLydia grabbed an apple and crunched into it. Elizabeth took a smaller one and slipped it into the pocket of Wickham's coat. What was that already in the pocket? A knife? Yes, that could be helpful. Certainly not large enough to defend against a dragon, probably not even long enough to penetrate its hide, but a knife was always useful.\n\nWait. There was something else, too. A metal box with a sliding lid. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers over it again. Darcy carried one much like it\u2014was it possible? A fire starting kit? Darcy always carried one. Was it possible that Wickham had also?\n\n\"Have a piece of cheese as well, Lydia. You must keep up your strength.\" As she spoke, she slid the lid back. Yes, this was very similar to Darcy's kit.\n\n\"I do not like that sort of cheese. I will have a bit of bread though.\" Lydia snatched up a small roll. \"Tell those creatures to bring more like these. These are at least edible.\"\n\n\"Have you even thanked Netherfield for what he provided?\"\n\n\"One does not thank their jailor.\" Lydia tossed her head and turned her back on both of them.\n\n\"If one is smart, one does. I appreciate what you have done for our comfort.\" Elizabeth rose and curtsied.\n\n\"You are welcome. I shall have a blanket brought for you as well, if you wish,\" he said softly.\n\n\"You are most gracious.\" She sat back down and nibbled bits of bread and cheese. They were stale, but it was best to keep one's strength up.\n\n\"I will go out and survey my territory now.\" Netherfield rose up half way and scattered the fire with his tail. Darkness rushed in with the force of a flood. \"You will have no need of this whilst I am gone. I warn you, do not try to follow the tunnel walls. There are pits and thin floors and crevasses that will take you without a trace.\"\n\nScales slithered against the rock, growing softer and farther away. Elizabeth held her breath, listening, until she could hear them no more.\n\nDarkness unlike any above ground swallowed them. Complete and utter darkness. One could not see a hand in front of her face. One's eyes did not adjust to the unchanging blackness. Thick, heavy, and cold, it enveloped them, held them securely as chains, fraying their good sense and beckoning the edges of terror.\n\n\"He will be gone for hours. He always is. But he will return. It will feel like he has been gone forever, but he will return.\" Lydia's voice moved as she spoke. She probably sat down.\n\n\"Are you sure he will be gone for that long?\"\n\n\"He has been every time. There was one day when he came back very late, but I cannot think of a single time that he returned early.\"\n\n\"Has any other creature ever visited you here? The wyrms he spoke of?\"\n\n\"What is a wyrm?\"\n\n\"A small dragon, long like a snake, but with more of a lion's head.\"\n\n\"Eww, I have never seen such a thing, nor do I want to. No, I have seen nothing of the kind here.\"\n\n\"Good, good.\" Elizabeth reached forward, brushing her hands across the sandy ground.\n\n\"What are you doing, Lizzy? You cannot be thinking of making your way down these tunnels? In the dark? You will die \u2026\"\n\n\"Ah, here!\" Bits of half-burnt wood and a larger branch! She dragged them closer. \"I plan on doing exactly that, but not in the dark.\"\n\n\"What kind of magic have you to bring light into this place?\"\n\n\"Fire.\" She fumbled with the fire starting kit. Slowly, she must move very slowly, for if she dropped anything, it might never be found again. There, the charcloth, the flint, the fire steel.\n\n\"Trust me. He has thoroughly extinguished the fire. There is no way\u2014where did you get that spark?\" Lydia's astonished face appeared in the brief light.\n\nIt took far longer than it should, but Elizabeth managed to get a small fire started. Somehow, the small circle of light pushed back the abiding darkness. Perhaps she really could effect an escape. \"I thought I saw a pile of wood near the far wall. Help me find some green wood. Birch wood, too. I saw some in the fire last night. If there is bark left, I can make torches with it.\" At least one could in theory. Not that she had ever actually done so, but she had read about it in a tale tucked away in an old journal about what to do if trapped in a dragon lair. It had seemed just a fancy story at the time, but perhaps not. At the very least, it was worth trying."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Darcy and Fitzwilliam slept in shifts in the morning room chairs as evening turned to night and eventually into dawn. Bennet, though, required no such respite. He did not even seem to notice the passage of time, churning through page after page of books and maps. The man's capacity to take in information seemed inexhaustible.\n\nThe mantle clock chimed nine times. Nicholls trundled in with a tray of coffee, tea, a plate of kippers, and a rather large pot of honey. April's work, no doubt. But Nicholls came in whistling a happy little tune and left without any further inquiries of what might be required later, so who was to complain if the fairy dragon wanted sweets?\n\nFitzwilliam tossed a few kippers to Earl and Walker and handed Darcy a mug of coffee. Hot and bitter\u2014exactly what he needed to drive away the remaining sluggish thoughts.\n\nBennet tapped the table. \"I think I have something.\"\n\nThey crowded around the window side of the table where Bennet had shoved four maps together and placed one of the bound maps above them.\n\n\"What are we looking at?\" Darcy peered over Bennet's stooped shoulders.\n\n\"Here is the key.\" Bennet pointed to a feature on the bound map that seemed entirely unremarkable and much like everything else on that page. \"Here is Longbourn house and the lair.\" He pointed to the far corner of the map. \"And this is the border of the two properties. I am certain this hill is the one you can see from the spot where the main road turns into the lane heading toward Netherfield Manor.\"\n\nFitzwilliam spilled a drop of coffee on one of the unmarked maps.\n\n\"Do be more careful! Stains will not facilitate reading these maps.\" Bennet elbowed him back. \"What you have just managed to drip your beverage on is what I believe to be the same spot on the Netherfield maps.\"\n\nDarcy's eyes flickered between the two documents. The stream, the larger hill with a smaller one beside it, yes. It required a little imagination, but there was good reason to believe Bennet correct.\n\nFitzwilliam set his coffee cup on the windowsill behind him and leaned over the maps. \"So then, these others represent the lay of Netherfield's lands? I cannot discern much of what is written here.\" Fitzwilliam hovered his finger over some scribbles. \"The mapmaker does not use standard symbology.\"\n\n\"A great deal of this is derived from ancient dragon script. This\u2014\" Bennet pointed at an odd squiggle, \"is the sign for water. The direction of flow and the depth is reflected in the angle of the mark and the intensity of its color. These marks are indications that the features are actually underground. Again the darker the color, the deeper it is.\"\n\n\"That is why so much of the map is so faint! I had thought it just bad ink!\" Fitzwilliam slapped his forehead.\n\nBennet harrumphed. \"Hardly. These are actually very sophisticated renderings, far more so than they look. Most of your assumptions about them are probably wrong.\"\n\nDragon's blood! The man looked so smug. Was it not enough that he was right? Did he also have to be so self-satisfied, so condescending?\n\n\"It seems then these are the cluster of hills that mark the west side of the park?\" Darcy drew his finger along the far side of one page.\n\n\"I believe so.\"\n\n\"But this stream\u2014I have never seen it. We should have crossed it when we rode in.\" Fitzwilliam stroked his chin with his fist.\n\n\"I am not familiar with it, either. But these maps are quite old. I think it is possible that the waterway is underground now, or perhaps it was then, too, and he failed to include the proper marking. The depth of color suggests it is very deep, so perhaps that should be indication enough that the water runs underground.\"\n\n\"But you do not know for certain?\" Darcy caught Bennet's gaze and held it firmly.\n\n\"No, I cannot be sure.\"\n\n\"Of what else are you not certain?\"\n\nBennet grumbled and huffed but eventually pointed out three other significant features that did not appear in the current landscape.\n\nDarcy flexed and released his hands. Better that than strangling Bennet. \"So in short, what you are saying is that you are not actually certain we are looking at a map of Netherfield Park at all.\"\n\nBennet waved his hands as though that might make a difference. \"I am quite certain that we are.\"\n\n\"Except for the fact it lacks two streams, one outcropping, and a rather large crevasse which should be rather obvious to anyone riding the land, of course, this map is Netherfield.\" Fitzwilliam sneered, shaking his head.\n\n\"I have no need of your sarcasm, young man. I have given you my explanations.\"\n\n\"Your speculations at best.\"\n\n\"Nonetheless, these three\u2014\"\n\n\"Rather four.\" Darcy pointed at another spot on the map.\n\n\"Make that five, no six.\" Fitzwilliam indicated two more places.\n\n\"\u2014are the most obvious places to search for the lindwurm. I maintain these three are the places that would most appeal to such a creature.\"\n\n\"Assuming we have read the maps correctly.\" Darcy rolled his eyes at Fitzwilliam.\n\n\"And that such places even exist in the first place.\" Fitzwilliam matched his expression.\n\n\"Which, all things considered, we have blessed little assurance of.\"\n\nFitzwilliam retrieved his coffee cup and drained it in a single gulp. \"Which is all to suggest that we are no farther along now than we were last evening.\"\n\nBennet threw up his hands and turned to face them. \"You make it sound as if I wish these maps to be unclear. I want to see Elizabeth returned as much as you do.\"\n\n\"Useless warm-bloods!\" April hovered over the maps, a drop of honey quivering on the tip of her beak. \"What are you accomplishing in all this arguing? Can not one of you actually do something?\"\n\nAll three men began talking over each other, trying to explain the nature of the situation to her in the simplest possible terms.\n\nApril landed on the table and sang until their eyelids drooped and they fell silent. \"Much better. Since you cannot settle on anything useful to do, I will take matters into my own talons.\"\n\n\"What exactly do you think you will do?\" Was Bennet trying to get his ears bloodied?\n\n\"By now every minor dragon on both estates is aware Elizabeth is missing. One of them will know something. I will find it out.\"\n\n\"How exactly will you force them to tell you? I imagine the lindwurm will want his secrets kept.\" Bennet truly underestimated the power and resourcefulness of a determined fairy dragon.\n\nShe turned to Walker. \"It is not something a warm-blood understands. But when one is asked a question by one's predator, one tends to answer.\"\n\nBennet snorted. \"So you intend to talk to flowers and insects? I am sure they will be very helpful.\"\n\nWalker landed on the table beside her, knocking the maps to the floor with his broad wings. \"I shall be able to convince some of our smaller denizens to answer readily enough.\"\n\nApril bobbed her head as though this had been her plan all along. Perhaps it was. She took off. Darcy opened the nearest window just ahead of her. Walker swooped out behind her.\n\n\"I do not like the notion of simply sitting around, waiting on what the local wyrms might be saying,\" Fitzwilliam muttered.\n\n\"I have no intention of doing that. There is no reason why we should not start checking the locations we have identified, uncertain though they may be.\" Darcy turned on his heel and strode from the room. Bennet would probably be offended that he did not take leave, but, considering the things Darcy wanted to say, it was probably for the best."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "It was impossible to tell how long it had taken her to craft them, but eight shabby-looking torches lay before her, illuminated by a ninth, done in miniature to test the process. The light waxed and waned but mostly waned, threatening to succumb to the demanding darkness. Her petticoat was in shreds, used to bind the beech bark and green wood together, but what matter if it got them out of the cave?\n\n\"You cannot seriously mean to do this.\" Lydia folded her arms and stared at Elizabeth with a derision she could have only learnt from Papa.\n\n\"I most certainly am not going to sit here waiting for something to happen.\"\n\n\"You know a way out of these tunnels that we can traverse before these ugly torches of yours run out?\"\n\n\"No, I never told you I did.\" Elizabeth stood and gathered the torches. \"I am counting on encountering someone in these tunnels who can get us out before that happens.\"\n\n\"Because, of course, these tunnels are as busy as the roads around Longbourn, and meeting someone in here is quite likely.\" Lydia stepped closer as though trying to block her way.\n\n\"The area is frequented by wyrms. There are also fairy dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"Whom I have apparently been living with for quite some time without ever realizing it. Moreover, to my untutored eye it appears they fly, not slither about underground.\" Oh, the look of indignation she wore! The deep shadows only made it more poignant. What bothered Lydia more? That she did not know what they were, or that they had been kept secret from her?\n\n\"There is at least one puck in the area, and a small basilisk\u2014\"\n\n\"You know none of that means anything to me. It might as well be an elephant and an ostrich. Even if it did, what assurances have you that they will conveniently appear just when you need them? No, thank you. I shall stay here.\" She dropped, tailor-style, to the floor.\n\n\"I cannot force you to come with me, but I am leaving now.\"\n\n\"You really believe we can escape before it comes after us?\" Lydia's expression softened.\n\n\"I prefer to take my chances in the tunnels than wait helpless in the dark.\"\n\nLydia shuddered and clutched her shoulders. \"I hate the dark. I never want to be in the dark again.\"\n\n\"Then come with me.\" Elizabeth handed Lydia half the torches and waved her toward the far side of the lair.\n\nWith luck, the eight torches would provide about two hours of light. It should be enough. No wyrm would use a blind chamber. They always had at least two paths out, often more. If they could just follow Netherfield's tracks, those should lead them out in short order. Of course, the operative word was \"should.\"\n\nOnce they escaped, Darcy would probably lecture her about how truly perilous this venture was. He would be right to do so. But if this dragon was as dangerous as Fitzwilliam and the Blue Order thought, was her plan worse than staying with him? What if the worst happened and the torches ran out before they found their way out? Death from dehydration would be unpleasant, but not instant. There was still hope they might be found.\n\nEspecially if they had food with them! Little wyrms had a keen sense of smell and demanding bellies. Perhaps it was ridiculous, but could it hurt to improve their chances?\n\n\"Lydia, take that cheese and tie it up in your apron.\"\n\n\"But it is nasty. Why should we bring that? The bread is much tastier.\"\n\n\"Not for you, for the rock wyrms.\" Elizabeth filled the pockets of Wickham's coat with more cheese, apples, and a jar of pickles. Those would prove particularly pungent upon opening.\n\n\"Should we not be worried about feeding ourselves instead?\"\n\nElizabeth slowly turned and stared at Lydia, allowing her face to shape into an expression Longbourn had long since perfected.\n\nLydia gasped and shoved more into her apron, tied it up, and slung it over her shoulder. \"I am ready.\"\n\nElizabeth counted steps. Some measure of distance might prove helpful, somehow. If nothing else, it was a welcome activity for her racing mind. About two hundred steps away from Netherfield's lair, a small room opened up to their right. Lydia lunged for it, but Elizabeth grabbed her by the back of her dress. She stuck her torch in the entrance. A gaping hole in the floor swallowed the light.\n\n\"This must be where Wickham was lost.\" Elizabeth's voice echoed off the walls.\n\n\"The beast pushed him,\" Lydia whimpered.\n\n\"I suppose we cannot be certain, but that is not the story he told me. You do understand, Wickham criminally threatened Netherfield. He would have been prosecuted in court for it.\"\n\n\"How? A court caring for that creature, that brute \u2026\"\n\nElizabeth raked stray hairs from her face. What would the Blue Order do with Lydia? There were rumors that the Order kept homes in remote parts of Scotland and Ireland for those who heard but would not join the Order. They seemed more like fairy tales to keep naughty children in order than actual places, but perhaps, like dragons, those too existed.\n\nThose worries were for another time, though. After they were away from this place."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Several hours later, Fitzwilliam emerged from the barn leading two horses. A comically too-large greatcoat he had found discarded in one of the family rooms, hung over his shoulders. Hardly the expected image of a dragon hunter, to be sure. With full sun today, the garment would prove hot and cumbersome. Still, it was the shade of dark blue Fitzwilliam felt certain would be difficult for the lindwurm to see. No doubt, he had secreted the Dragon Slayer underneath.\n\nEarl was sleeping in Bennet's care at present\u2014besides eating, sleeping was all the chick did. If they were lucky, they would return with Elizabeth before his next feeding, and he would be none the wiser. If they were very, very lucky.\n\nMore likely, they would not be\u2014luck rarely ran in Darcy's favor. There was no telling what that could mean. He suppressed a shudder as his guts clenched. The scenarios ranged from merely bad to completely tragic\u2014and the tragic well outnumbered the bad.\n\n\"Start with the western sites?\" Fitzwilliam handed him the reins of a smart chestnut gelding.\n\n\"That is the direction I last saw Elizabeth heading.\" Darcy swung up into the saddle and patted his coat pocket.\n\nThe maps were still there\u2014of course, they were; it was silly to worry they had somehow disappeared. But Bennet had objected so strenuously to letting them out of his possession that he checked his pocket by reflex alone. Hopefully they would be of some use even without Bennet to interpret them.\n\nThey pushed the horses hard though it felt a little pointless to rush after all the time that had already passed with the storms and efforts to decontaminate the maps. Would extra minutes, even hours, matter at this point?\n\nStill, they hurried.\n\n\"I think that is the rise on Bennet's map.\" Fitzwilliam pointed to two hillsides in the distance.\n\n\"If I recall correctly, the tunnels are supposed to run along that ridge and breach the surface in three places\u2014at the ends and between those hills.\"\n\nDense trees shrouded the base of the rise. How were they to find the entrances amidst those trees\u2014if they were even still there after all the years since the maps were rendered?\n\nDarcy unfastened his watch fob and raised it to his lips. Hopefully, Walker was close enough to be able to hear it.\n\nFitzwilliam covered his ears and whipped around to gawk at Darcy. \"That is bloody well the most awful sound I have ever heard! What the hell was that?\"\n\n\"Wait until you hear Earl's first full-bodied shriek. I assure you it will be far more dreadful. There is nothing to rend one's soul like a cockatrice's scream. When Earl is a bit older, I will see you have one of these. The whistle is useful for keeping in touch when he learns to hunt on his own.\"\n\nFor a moment Fitzwilliam looked like he was about to argue, but he closed his mouth and turned aside. They scanned the horizon. Walker should not be difficult to spot on such a clear day.\n\n\"What is that?\" Fitzwilliam pointed.\n\nAn oddly-shaped shadow winged toward them. The wings resembled a cockatrice, but long, awkward legs dangled limply underneath.\n\nFitzwilliam slipped one hand under his greatcoat.\n\nThe shadow overtook them, the air above torn by a nerve-rending screech.\n\n\"We have word! We have word!\" a tiny voice cried. April buzzed into Darcy's field of vision.\n\nWalker dropped two wild-eyed rock wyrms at the horse's feet. Reminiscent of their forest cousins, they were more scaly than shaggy, mottled white, black and blue-grey with horny nubs on their heads for burrowing. Their fangs were longer and black eyes larger than those of forest wyrms.\n\nThey dismounted and approached the cowering wyrms.\n\n\"What news have you?\" Fitzwilliam crouched near them.\n\nThe wyrms reared up on their tails and wove as though trying to make out where the voice came from.\n\nFitzwilliam slipped the greatcoat off his right shoulder, still keeping the sword hidden beneath the other side. \"Is that better?\"\n\nThe larger wyrm nodded. \"Where did you come from?\"\n\n\"Tell them your news.\" Walker poked the nearest wyrm with his wingtip.\n\n\"Is Elizabeth all right?\" Darcy dropped to his knees, clenching his fists so he did not grab the creature and shake answers from it.\n\n\"Both females are well. The blue one sent us to get them food and blankets.\"\n\n\"Both? There are two?\" Darcy asked.\n\n\"Is there a man as well?\"\n\n\"Was.\" The smaller wyrm edged back as she answered.\n\n\"Did he escape?\" The effort to moderate his tone lined Fitzwilliam's face.\n\n\"No one has seen him.\" The larger wyrm twitched and hunched into striking position.\n\n\"Did the blue one harm him?\" Darcy's whisper seemed to calm the wyrms.\n\n\"Not know. Blue one did not say.\"\n\nFitzwilliam flashed his eyebrows at Darcy. He was right. At this point, Wickham was of little import as long as Elizabeth\u2014and her sister\u2014were safe. \"Where have you been taking the supplies?\"\n\nThe wyrms talked over one another until it dissolved into gibberish. Walker squawked for silence.\n\nDarcy produced his tin of beetles and gave each wyrm a treat. They gobbled the beetles without hesitation and descended into ecstatic writhing. As they righted themselves, they cast pleading glances his way.\n\n\"I have another for each of you if you will take us there.\"\n\n\"Come! Come!\" They bobbed and wove about in circles as they waited for the men to remount the uneasy horses.\n\nFollowing the wyrms, Fitzwilliam turned to Darcy with a raised eyebrow. \"Whatever those are, Darce, it looks like I need to acquire some myself.\"\n\n\"Gardiner imports them. I will see you have some. Earl might even like them himself.\"\n\n\"Pray he does not drool all over himself like those wyrms.\"\n\n\"Cockatrice are known for their dignity. Do not fear.\" Darcy pointed toward Walker with his chin. The cockatrice followed the wyrms like a schoolmaster herding his students.\n\nThe wyrms led them north, toward the stream that bordered the two estates, not far from Longbourn's lair. Even with Longbourn's promise to not engage Netherfield, being so close to the wyvern's territory could not be a good thing.\n\nThe horses balked as they approached the hillside. Probably a good sign given horses were terrified of lindwurms. They dismounted and tied off the horses.\n\nFitzwilliam removed a pair of iron lanterns from his saddlebag, lit them, and handed one to Darcy. Neither cast a great deal of light, but in the overwhelming dark underground, they would be enough.\n\n\"In there.\" The wyrms stopped at a fairly large opening in the hillside, sufficient for a lindwurm. \"It goes straight to the blue one.\"\n\n\"Lead us.\" Fitzwilliam stepped inside the entrance.\n\n\"No, no, no. The blue one must not know we brought you.\" Both wyrms rose up on their tails, weaving around one another.\n\n\"Then you shall have no beetles until we find him.\" Darcy tapped his pocket.\n\nThe wyrms looked at each other, twitching and bobbing and swaying. \"We wait here.\" The larger one said as they coiled up, entwined, on a sun-warmed rock near the opening.\n\nDarcy made his way inside. A few steps into the tunnel, darkness enfolded them, a cold, dank blanket, heavy on their shoulders. Only the two flickering lanterns could push it back and then only barely.\n\nFitzwilliam led the way, one hand holding the lantern high, the other on the pommel of his sword. On the tunnel floor, they could just make out the scrapings made by the belly scales of a large wyrm. The size alone strongly suggested it was the one calling itself Netherfield.\n\nThe tunnel walls widened and narrowed, the ceiling lowered and lifted, ebbing and flowing like the course of a stream, never too tight for them to pass easily.\n\nOdd. Was that the scent of wood smoke? This far underground?\n\n\"Look!\" Fitzwilliam whispered and pointed ahead.\n\nThe remains of a fire were scattered across the tunnel floor. To the left, a small trunk leaned against the rocky wall. Nearby, a tattered blanket lay in a heap. What did a cold-blooded creature need a blanket for?\n\nDarcy ran to the far wall and threw open the trunk, heart pounding. \"Jars of preserves and pickles? Apples, crumbs of bread and cheese?\"\n\n\"Look at these footprints.\" Fitzwilliam crouched near the remains of the fire. \"Ladies' shoes.\"\n\nHe was right! But where was she? How could she have disappeared? He struggled to breathe. \"She is not here.\"\n\nFitzwilliam laid a hand on his shoulder. \"I see no signs of a struggle. No bloodshed. Moreover, it is clear she was here. We are close to finding her. Let me see your maps.\" They spread them on the dusty ground. Fitzwilliam tapped a spot. \"This is the place the wyrms led us. See here? The spot between the hills we just passed through.\"\n\nDarcy squinted in the flickering light. \"So, then this is the passage we took, and here is where we are now.\"\n\n\"It seems the passage continues fairly straight through\u2014yes, this is good! Look, the tunnel only splits off once and both of those lead up to entrances. So, there is little chance they could have got lost! Come, we will find them!\" Fitzwilliam folded the maps and beckoned him deeper into the darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "\"Lizzy, Lizzy!\" Lydia grabbed at Elizabeth's arm. \"Pray stop! We cannot go on like this. We are hopelessly lost!\"\n\n\"We have no choice.\" Elizabeth pulled her arm away and trudged on. The cold and the dark were fraying her nerves, too, but they had to be close to an exit. They just had to be.\n\n\"We have been walking ever so long now, and we are down to your last torch. We must go back. It should be obvious to even you that there is no way out.\"\n\nJust as it should have been obvious to Lydia that with only one torch left, there was no way they could get back to Netherfield's chamber. Their only hope was to press on.\n\n\"Lizzy, I said stop!\" Lydia grabbed at her dress, and Elizabeth fell hard, dropping the torch. It bounced several times, hit the floor, sputtered, and went out.\n\n\"Light it! Pray light it!\" Lydia shrieked.\n\n\"I cannot see it any better than you can. How am I to do it?\"\n\n\"You found wood to light a fire in the dark.\" Lydia clutched at Elizabeth's hand.\n\n\"It is not as easy as you suppose. I hardly had time to see where the torch landed.\"\n\n\"You blame me for this? You were the one who dropped it.\"\n\n\"Not now, pray hush, and let me think.\" Elizabeth felt for the tunnel wall.\n\n\"Hush? Hush? Why should I hush? This is not a time for silence.\" Lydia stomped. \"If anything, it is a time to cry out for help. How can anyone find us if we are silent? Help! Pray, someone help us! We are here!\"\n\nElizabeth rubbed her temples. \"Hush! I cannot think with you shouting!\"\n\n\"Your thinking is what has got us lost in the darkness! It seems up to me to get us out. Help! Find us please! We are here, against the wall in the dark!\"\n\nStupid, stupid girl! Elizabeth pushed stray hair out of her face. With any luck, she would be able to find the torch. Not that it would be easy, but it should be possible. If she could light it, they would have a few more minutes to try to find their way out. Not many, but it would be something. But perhaps, she should wait to even try until Lydia had thoroughly exhausted herself.\n\n\"Help! Help!\"\n\nYes, she would definitely wait\u2014and try to think amidst the noise. Was there some way to call to some of the local rock wyrms? If she could find one, a little cheese would buy its help. Perhaps if she just laid out the food?\n\nShe pressed her temples. The darkness made it hard to think, weighing heavier and heavier across her shoulders. The stark reality of their peril danced just behind her. To dwell on that was to surrender to it, though, and she was just not ready to do that. Not yet.\n\n\"Lizzy, look!\" Lydia shook her shoulder.\n\nSurely, she must be seeing things. Elizabeth rubbed her eyes with her fists, but the yellow-green blob of light, faint but growing, remained.\n\n\"Here we are!\" Lydia shook her harder. \"See, see, I was right! We are saved! Because of me! you see I was right!\"\n\nElizabeth held her breath. That color was cold, unnatural, not the color of fire. It was unlike any color she had ever seen, more like a willow-the-wisp of legend. Every fable declared they existed only to lead travelers astray. She clutched the wall behind her, knees softening into jelly. Since most dragon legends held a measure of truth, this one probably did too, and that could only mean\u2014\n\n\"Pray come here! I am sure you are looking for us! Get us out of this awful place!\" Lydia stood, sleeves rustling as though she waved her hands.\n\nThe light grew larger and brighter, bobbing, maybe as high as Elizabeth's head. She pressed harder against the wall. The tiny knife in her pocket would offer little protection, and she could not run. Is this how the virgins sacrificed to the dragons of old felt? She pressed her fist to her mouth. Screaming was undignified.\n\nA face appeared.\n\nLydia screamed and fell against Elizabeth who caught her barely in time to keep her from striking her head against the stone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "\"Look, I see light ahead!\" Fitzwilliam pushed through the narrowing tunnel, Darcy on his heels.\n\nSunlight blinded them, stopping them just a step beyond the small exit. Blessed warmth penetrated the layer of cold that had followed him from the tunnels. Fresh, sweet air filled his lungs\u2014he never had liked the stale smell of stone.\n\nDarcy closed his eyes and listened: a slight breeze, birdsong, soft slithering and chattering\u2014probably the rock wyrms approaching, in search of their promised treat. But no female voices, no rustle of skirts against underbrush, not a single sound he wanted to hear.\n\nShe should have been here, waiting for him, assuring him she was well and everything was going to be all right. He reached behind him for support.\n\n\"Darce, look!\" Fitzwilliam elbowed his knee.\n\nDarcy blinked until his eyes finally adjusted.\n\nFitzwilliam crouched several yards from him, pointing at marks in the sand. \"These tracks\u2014I am sure they are lindwurm.\"\n\nDarcy peered over his shoulder. The marks were subtle, subtle enough for any but the most experienced tracker to miss. When, how had Fitzwilliam become so skilled?\n\n\"Beetle?\" The two rock wyrms hurdled over a large rock and landed at his feet.\n\n\"We did not find her.\" Fitzwilliam folded his arms over his chest and glared at the now cowering creatures.\n\n\"She was there! She was!\" The small one cried, hiding in the large one's shadow.\n\n\"We saw signs that she had been there.\" Darcy tucked his hand in his coat pocket.\n\n\"You see! We did not lie! She was there.\"\n\n\"Do you know where she is now?\" Darcy removed his hand from his pocket.\n\nThe wyrms slumped. \"Have not seen or heard. The blue one passed but only scolded us to bring more food.\"\n\n\"You saw the blue one? When? Where?\" Fitzwilliam whipped his head back and forth, scanning the woods.\n\n\"After you entered the tunnel. The shadows moved from there to there.\" The larger rock wyrm pointed with his tail, but the effect was meaningless. \"He went this way. He patrols his territory every day. He would have gone there next, then there and there.\" The wyrm pointed in many directions, but finally stopped facing east.\n\nListening to wyrms was almost as irritating as trying to converse with fairy dragons. Perhaps a little more so.\n\n\"He always takes the same path?\" Fitzwilliam stared at them as he did freshly recruited soldiers.\n\n\"He becomes angry if anything interferes with his ways.\"\n\n\"Good, good, then we know where to go. Come.\" Fitzwilliam beckoned.\n\n\"Wait.\" Darcy crouched and produced beetles for each wyrm. \"I have kept my promise to you even though we have not yet found her. If you see any signs of her or find her, you are to let us know immediately, and there will be more beetles.\"\n\nAfter their post-beetle ecstasy, the wyrms readily agreed. Of course, they would. Anything to sate their perpetually-empty bellies.\n\n\"Those are right handy little tidbits,\" Fitzwilliam muttered as he tromped east.\n\n\"No accounting for taste, I assure you; they smell dreadful. But it is difficult to think of anything else quite so efficacious in gaining the wyrms' cooperation.\"\n\n\"There, look. The trail\u2014a fresh one\u2014the wyrms spoke of. I hardly dared believe they would be sensible, but it seems they are.\"\n\nDragon thunder shook the trees.\n\n\"Dragon's blood and fangs!\" Darcy punched at the air. \"I told him not to confront Netherfield.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell! It is possible Longbourn caught Elizabeth's scent and is pursuing Netherfield to rescue her. Or \u2026\"\n\nDarcy held up an open hand. No need to go there.\n\n\"We might be able to use this to our advantage.\" Fitzwilliam trotted off into the deep woods, following the dragon thunder.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Deadfall crunched beneath them as they ran, dodging stones and fallen branches.\n\n\"While the creature is distracted, I may be able to sneak up on it.\"\n\n\"You cannot harm it until we have Elizabeth back. If only he knows where she is \u2026 we must rescue her.\" Darcy clenched his fist.\n\n\"Trust me, I will do everything I can to recover her. But I also have orders to neutralize the rogue dragon's threat.\"\n\nDarcy bit his tongue. What was there left to say? Nothing would dissuade Fitzwilliam from carrying out his orders\u2014and perhaps nothing should.\n\nClearly, though, he had never been in love. Some things were important enough to bring even the Blue Order's demands into question. But that was not an argument he could win now\u2026 or perhaps ever.\n\nThe dragon thunder increased, booming in a different voice now. Another dragon! No! The two had already met! Once they confronted each other, little save a more dominant dragon, could intervene\u2014and neither he nor Fitzwilliam qualified as such.\n\n\"Look, there!\" Fitzwilliam pointed through the trees to a place where the forest gave way to a rocky clearing backed by several low hills.\n\nLongbourn loped toward the clearing from the western edge, the ground trembling with each step. The lindwurm rose on his tail, challenging the wyvern's bellow with his own thunder.\n\nSo that was what a lindwurm looked like in the flesh. A dark grey-blue, darker than the rock wyrms, with a wild mane, fully fluffed to increase his size. Fangs bared, they must have been the length of Darcy's hand, stained and streaked with neglect. Short forearms waved near his head, toes flexed to show his talons to greatest effect.\n\nLongbourn stopped well out of Netherfield's striking distance, wings fully extended and flapping. He threw back his head and screeched like a hunting cockatrice, his size lending volume and power to his voice that no cockatrice would ever have.\n\nThe sound should have driven every other living thing away from their confrontation. At least those living creatures with sense enough to flee fighting dragons. Unlike he and Fitzwilliam, who were compelled to run toward it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "A face appeared beneath the bobbing yellow-green glow, one unlike any Elizabeth had ever seen. A long, very square muzzle ended in a huge, fanged mouth. Ridges along the nose led to close-set eyes reflecting an orangey glow. Bushy eyebrows swept back and met a hairy fringe along the bottom jaw, becoming a mane\u2014more equine than leonine\u2014full and bushy, extending down a very long neck. The side manes met at the back and merged into a pointed spinal ridge that disappeared into the darkness. Very long whiskers dangled from the edges of the nostrils into a very distinct mustache. It might have hopped off one of Lady Catherine's prized chinoiserie cabinets at Rosings Park. Elizabeth gulped and glanced at the front feet. Four toes!\n\n\"You are the emissary?\" Elizabeth pulled her shawl up over her head and dropped to a knee before the high-ranking Eastern dragon.\n\n\"You are Blue Order?\" Her accent was odd, each word slow and deliberate; blue sounded more like \"brue\" and the \"r\"s of order all but disappeared, but her meaning was clear enough.\n\n\"I am, Emissary.\" Elizabeth rose, head still bowed. \"We were told you had become lost on your journey. Pray, permit me to introduce myself. I am Miss Elizabeth Bennet.\" She curtsied.\n\n\"Erizabet?\" The dragon cocked her head. The odd glowing ball turned with her.\n\nHow peculiar. It seemed to be attached to the top of her head. She carried her own light with her? How astonishingly clever. No wonder she was willing to come all this way via the tunnels!\n\n\"I am called Shin-dee-a.\" The dragon dipped her head.\n\n\"May I address you that way?\"\n\n\"Of course. Why else would I tell you what I called?\" Shin-dee-a chuckled, a deep-bellied, sonorous, but most of all, friendly sound. \"What wrong with her?\" She pointed a long foreleg toward Lydia.\n\n\"I fear it is a very long story, but in short, she was not expecting to see you.\"\n\n\"Then why she call for help?\"\n\n\"I promise, I will explain soon, but first, would you assist us in getting to the surface?\"\n\n\"I get you out. Come.\" She poked Lydia. \"Up, up, time to go.\"\n\nLydia sat up and started to scream, but Elizabeth clapped her hand over her mouth. \"Be still. Lady Shin-dee-a has come to help us.\"\n\n\"Lady?\"\n\n\"It is complicated. Come.\" Elizabeth grabbed Lydia's elbow and dragged her to Shin-dee-a's side. They walked beside her in the odd glow of her \u2026 what did one call that? A bobble?\n\nPerhaps a hundred yards later a sliver of light appeared in the distance. They had been so close to the end. If only Lydia had not\u2014\n\n\"I hope it not problem. I hunted here this morning.\"\n\n\"We are honored to have you hunt on our lands. I will introduce you to the local Laird. He will offer you hospitality until the Blue Order comes for you. They have been beside themselves that you have been lost.\"\n\n\"Most gracious, Miss Erizabet. My thanks.\" Shin-dee-a bobbed her head.\n\n\"We are saved, Lizzy!\" Lydia ran ahead into the blinding sun.\n\n\"Pray forgive my sister.\"\n\n\"Is complicated?\" Shin-dee-a snickered.\n\n\"I am afraid so.\"\n\nElizabeth and Shin-dee-a paused, squinting at one another as their eyes adjusted. In the sunlight, Shin-dee-a was the color of pure red jade, like a carving in Lady Catherine's favorite drawing room, down to the streaks of cream and black in her hide. \"Pray forgive my staring, but you are astonishingly beautiful, Lady.\"\n\n\"You never seen one of my kind, have you?\" She tossed her head back, and the glowing bobble flew up and over her head, becoming lost in the depths of her red-and-cream-streaked mane.\n\n\"I have not had the privilege\u2014\"\n\nDragon thunder roared. Dragon's fire! It was close by!\n\n\"Is that a storm coming, Lizzy? Where are the clouds?\" Lydia carefully avoided looking at Shin-dee-a.\n\n\"No storm. Those angry dragons.\" Shin-dee-a's brow creased.\n\nHeavens, what an introduction to British dragons this was becoming! \"Yes, they are. Pray forgive me. I must deal with this!\"\n\n\"I was told dragons lived peacefully here.\"\n\n\"Yes, Lady, they do, but this current situation is\u2014\"\n\n\"Complex?\" Shin-dee-a's bushy eyebrow lifted.\n\n\"Quite so.\"\n\n\"Is nothing here simple?\"\n\n\"It is a very unusual circumstance right now.\" Elizabeth took Lydia's hand. \"Pray, stay right here whilst I deal with this matter.\"\n\nLydia snatched her hand away. \"I will do no such thing! I need to return to the house and tell Papa what has been going on.\"\n\n\"I assure you, he is entirely, abundantly, and clearly aware of all of this and a great deal more.\"\n\n\"Papa knows about the creatures, too?\" Lydia's incredulous expression would have been laughable at another time\u2014probably any other time. She slumped against the hillside like a melting jelly.\n\nShin-dee-a snorted.\n\n\"I hate to ask this of you, Lady, but my sister cannot be left unchaperoned right now. Pray might you stay here and keep watch over her?\" Another crash of dragon thunder left them all cringing. \"I really must manage this situation.\"\n\n\"Is she as ignorant as she seems? I will keep watch on her and wait for you. Go do what you must. Return soon.\" Shin-dee-a laid down and rested her chin upon her forepaws, patience carved into her features.\n\nHopefully, Lydia would be so intimidated by her chaperone that she would not attempt to go off on her own. Now that she knew about dragons, she could not be left alone. Leaving her in the care of anyone not a member of the Order was technically a breach of law, but the two dragons screaming in the distance were an even-greater problem and one capable of inflicting far greater harm than Lydia, for the moment at least.\n\nElizabeth curtsied and ran toward the dragon thunder."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Fitzwilliam signaled Darcy to the left whilst he ran up the rise to the right. Darcy broke into the clearing, not far from the two dragons.\n\n\"You have gone too far.\" Longbourn lunged and snapped at Netherfield. \"I have tolerated you and your trespasses, but taking her is too much.\"\n\nNetherfield dodged back, arching his lithe body into impossible shapes. \"I have tolerated enough from you. Your ceaseless tempers and whining demands. You told me I would not be bothered, that this place was safe. You lied to me! I demand reparation.\"\n\n\"I promised you nothing. I owe you nothing. I want you gone!\" Longbourn flapped his wings and rose just enough so his feet cleared the ground.\n\n\"This territory is mine. I will have it!\" Netherfield struck like a snake, but Longbourn back-winged just out of range.\n\nA pale blur tore out of the underbrush and stopped between the dragons, waving a shawl over her head like Talia's hood. \"Both of you! Cease this instant!\"\n\nWhat? No! Darcy pelted toward the dragons, skidding to a stop just beside her. \"Merciful heavens! You are safe!\" He grabbed Elizabeth's shoulders and pulled her toward him.\n\nShe bore no outward sign of injury though her pallor suggested cold and hunger. She pressed her cheek to his. \"There is so much to tell you\u2014\"\n\n\"Elizabeth!\" Longbourn snorted and landed beside her in a ground-shaking thud. \"What has he done to you?\" He lowered his head to peer at her eye-to-eye.\n\nNetherfield dropped to Elizabeth's height, belly on the ground. \"Nothing! I did not harm her! Tell him!\"\n\nElizabeth touched Longbourn's snout. \"I am well.\"\n\nLongbourn stomped. Several rocks shook loose and rolled down the slope toward them. \"You stole her away\u2014you stole what is mine!\"\n\nShe paused as if considering how to respond. \"I am here now, returned\u2014so nothing was stolen.\"\n\n\"He took you unwillingly. That is insult enough.\"\n\n\"I have a right to protect myself! If you had not come\u2014\" Netherfield nosed Darcy, driving him back several steps. \"All would have been well. Everything was right until you came, and the egg and all its troubles followed.\"\n\nLongbourn lunged at Netherfield, knocking him away from Darcy. Netherfield lashed his tail and swept Longbourn's feet out from under him. He landed on his back, wings spread. Netherfield rose up on his tail and loomed over Longbourn, fangs bared.\n\nJust how long were that creature's fangs?\n\nDarcy grabbed Elizabeth's hand and pulled her aside. \"We must get away from them. They are beyond listening.\"\n\nShe hesitated a moment but allowed him to pull her partway up the hill behind the shelter of several large rocks.\n\nLongbourn lashed his tail across Netherfield's chest. He fell back just long enough for Longbourn to regain his feet. The two circled, growling and hissing, spittle and venom flying. Longbourn leapt at Netherfield, driving him toward the outcropping where Fitzwilliam hid beneath the blue greatcoat. Was it a coincidence, or did Longbourn know Fitzwilliam was there? Just a little closer and Fitzwilliam would be able\u2014\n\n\"Ki\u2014yah!\"\n\nDarcy covered his ears against the piercing scream as a red blur plummeted from the hillside above, gliding down to land neatly between Longbourn and Netherfield.\n\nThey both scrabbled back, gaping at the intruder.\n\nLong and sleek, like a wyrm, but it was not a wyrm. It landed on four legs, then rose up on the hind two, taller than the other dragons. Webbing extended between the front and back legs\u2014that must have allowed her to glide down with such precise control\u2014extending her body enough to shield the two combatants' views from one another. Her head was like nothing he had ever seen before\u2014except in Aunt Catherine's collections. Dragon's blood!\n\nDarcy clutched Elizabeth's arm. \"The envoy? You brought her here?\"\n\nHe probably did not ask that well, considering the look in her eye. \"I did not bring her. She found us in the tunnels. I asked her to keep watch over Lydia whilst I dealt with this matter.\"\n\n\"Lydia is here, too? And Wickham?\"\n\n\"Dead.\"\n\nThe words clumped together and settled as a cold, hard knot in Darcy's stomach. Of all the ways he thought Wickham might have met his demise, dragons had never been one.\n\nThe envoy dropped her forelegs, and the webbing folded. She puffed her body half again as large as she had been, towering over Netherfield and Longbourn. \"Both stand down. I command.\" Her voice boomed, echoing off the rocky hillsides, piercing his skull, penetrating as few voices ever had.\n\nLongbourn bared his teeth and snarled, unfurling his wings. He expanded his chest and hovered several feet above the ground. \"You are in my territory!\"\n\nThe envoy bared her own formidable fangs and snapped a little too near Longbourn's throat for comfort. \"You challenge?\" She spoke slowly, confident and deadly.\n\nNetherfield dropped flat on the ground, paws on top of his head.\n\nLongbourn retreated gradually, folding his wings as he went. Three steps back, he lowered his head partway\u2014above Netherfield's, but below hers.\n\n\"You\u2014\" the envoy pointed directly at Fitzwilliam. Her tone changed, not quite as threatening, but without a doubt in charge of the situation. \"Come out. Speak for yourself.\"\n\nFitzwilliam stepped forward and threw off the coat, sun glinting from the hilt of the Dragon Slayer.\n\nElizabeth sucked in a ragged breath, fist to her lips, and edged back.\n\nFitzwilliam was a fearsome, handsome man, resembling nothing so much as a fairy tale prince confronting a dread beast \u2026 beasts. Definitely not the image to present to the envoy on her first encounter with the Blue Order.\n\nNetherfield gasped and reared up to face Fitzwilliam eye-to-eye. \"Here to finish the job now?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Fitzwilliam drew the weighty sword. Sunlight glinted from the polished blade, the reflective qualities part of the weapon's intended properties. Forged from a unique blue steel, it could be honed to an edge far sharper than any other metal known and held its edge even against dragon hide and bone. Only a handful of men knew of its existence, much less how to forge such a weapon.\n\n\"You have already marked me in Calais,\" Netherfield turned his scarred neck into the sun. \"Or have you already forgotten?\"\n\nA jagged line, puckered and covered in drawn white flesh, ran from the bottom edge of Netherfield's jaw down to his shoulder.\n\n\"That was not me.\" Fitzwilliam planted his feet and raised the sword.\n\n\"Was it not enough I left that place, that I have been no greater threat to man here than I was in France? Are you so bent upon my destruction nothing will satisfy you but my blood?\" Netherfield swung a taloned forepaw.\n\nTo the dragon-deaf, it would have seemed a fearsome attack. But in truth, it was more a half-hearted show.\n\nFitzwilliam parried the blow, cleanly slicing off a talon. He could have taken the entire paw. The talon bounced along the rocky ground with a vaguely metallic clank. \"I dealt with no dragons in Calais.\"\n\nNetherfield wove and struck the air to either side of Fitzwilliam. \"You did not slay my mate there in the caverns of our ancestral home? I would know that sword anywhere.\"\n\nFitzwilliam held his ground. \"Many have carried this sword. This is the first time it has been placed in my hands.\"\n\nNetherfield snapped, far closer this time. Fitzwilliam repelled his attack, sword to fang. He feinted to the left, but the dragon anticipated and drove him back. Fitzwilliam swung and sliced off the tips of Netherfield's mustache-whiskers. Netherfield skittered back, nearly tangling in his own coils.\n\n\"And now it has been sent after me again. What has your Order against me?\"\n\n\"You have killed\u2014\"\n\n\"Only in self-defense\u2014or has your precious Order stripped that right from us, too?\" Netherfield hissed and dove toward Fitzwilliam.\n\nHe dodged behind a rock. Netherfield's fang took a fearsome gash out of the soft limestone.\n\n\"A school of women and little girls attacked you? You call digging under the foundations of the building and causing it to collapse on the children self-defense?\"\n\n\"Smugglers did that and blamed it upon dragonkind!\" Netherfield shook his tooth free of the stone.\n\n\"An inquiry\u2014\"\n\n\"A French inquiry! Men there do not recognize dragons. We were declared guilty and hunted down as soon as the claim was given voice.\"\n\n\"What of the captives you have taken here?\" Fitzwilliam lowered the sword but only slightly.\n\n\"He killed Wickham!\" Lydia shouted from the hilltop. \"He is a murderer!\"\n\n\"Do not speak what you do not know, Lydia,\" Elizabeth shouted through cupped hands. \"Wickham threatened him in his lair so Netherfield detained them there to keep Wickham from bringing the regiment upon him. Wickham tried to escape and fell to his death through a thin cave floor. I saw the place myself.\"\n\n\"What does it matter? I have done everything that could have been expected of me, everything a dragon might do to escape the war, came to territory expressly given me to so that I might live in peace. But I am done.\" He lurched forward and dropped his head in front of Fitzwilliam's feet. \"Be done with it. Just make it a quick work.\"\n\nFitzwilliam stepped back, lowering the sword further. \"You said this territory was given to you? By whom?\"\n\n\"What does it matter?\"\n\n\"It matters a very great deal. There are provisions in the Pendragon treaty by which a dragon may surrender his territory to another without bloodshed. Tell me precisely who it was who gave you this territory and how it was accomplished. It is possible you may have a rightful claim on these lands. If you do, the Order is bound to honor it.\"\n\n\"You are playing with me. Do you find honor in prolonging my death?\" Was it possible for a dragon to sound melodramatic?\n\n\"I find honor in obeying the letter and the spirit of the law as it has been given us. You have not shed blood\u2014\" Fitzwilliam sheathed his sword and hunkered down beside Netherfield, voice turning very soft.\n\n\"Forgive, Erizabet.\" The envoy bowed her head and shoulders toward them. \"Sometime a larger dragon must settle matters.\"\n\n\"Dragon diplomacy at its finest.\" Darcy bowed to the envoy.\n\nElizabeth turned to him, her expression very difficult to read. \"May I introduce \u2026 my betrothed and partner in Keeping Pemberley. This is Fitzwilliam Darcy.\"\n\n\"Shin-dee-a of Eastern Dragon Federation.\" She bobbed her head.\n\n\"The honor is mine \u2026 Lady.\" He glanced at Elizabeth, and she half-shrugged, half-nodded, obviously as unsure of the title as he. \"I fear this might not be the best introduction to the Blue Order and who we are.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" She waved a forepaw. \"All most interesting. How better to understand you than in conflict time?\" Shin-dee-a twitched her tufted ears, mostly hidden by her mane. Her lips rose at the corners as though enjoying some secret joke.\n\n\"Gracious!\" Elizabeth gasped and covered her mouth. \"Look.\"\n\nFitzwilliam sat, tailor-style, beside Netherfield's head, one hand on his shaggy mane. Netherfield spoke softly while Fitzwilliam listened, nodding. He looked up and beckoned Darcy over.\n\nDarcy took Elizabeth's hand\u2014she accepted his hand and held it! His throat tightened till he almost could not breathe\u2014and they rushed to Fitzwilliam.\n\n\"I have heard his story and am convinced he has a legitimate case to bring to the Order. Apparently after the last Keeper died, the old Netherfield emigrated to France in hopes of fostering a dragon enlightenment of sorts. He relinquished his Keep to this lindwurm who took the name in keeping with British tradition. Of course, the old dragon never informed him of the proper manner to claim the territory, leading to the current misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"Misunderstanding? Did I hear you correctly?\" Darcy blinked hard and stared at Fitzwilliam. Was this the same man who had just days ago refused to entertain the idea of a diplomatic solution?\n\n\"Yes, you did. Darcy, and I do realize I am never going to hear the end of it. But I am a big enough man to admit, Miss Elizabeth, you were correct\u2014\"\n\nShe dragged her sleeve over her eyes. \"I am relieved, for all of us, but I am hardly inclined to declare this a personal victory. Pray allow me a few moments to speak with Longbourn. Then, I think it is time for all of us to return home and send a great deal of news to the Order.\" She squeezed Darcy's hand and waved Longbourn closer.\n\nOne eye on Shin-dee-a, Longbourn approached, head held low.\n\n\"May I present Laird Longbourn, Lady Shin-dee-a?\" Elizabeth gestured at the two dragons. \"Lydia and I had become \u2026 lost \u2026 in the tunnels, and she rescued us. We owe her a great deal.\" She said the words slowly, deliberately, staring directly at Longbourn. \"Laird Longbourn has agreed to act as your host whilst you are with us. Pray stay with him in his lair and hunt on his land. We will send a messenger to the Blue Order directly. An escort will be sent to ensure you make it to the Blue Order offices without further inconvenience.\"\n\nLongbourn's face wrinkled as though he were thinking hard. \"You may stay with me. Come.\"\n\nThat was probably as friendly as major dragons were ever going to be about sharing their territory with another. Shin-dee-a followed him off into the woods.\n\n\"Pray Fitzwilliam,\" Elizabeth called over her shoulder. \"My sister requires a chaperone\u2014at all times now. Would you take her to the house with you?\"\n\n\"I shall care for her as though she were my own.\" Fitzwilliam saluted, but his eyes were entirely serious. \"Miss Lydia, you will come to the house with us.\"\n\n\"With that creature? I will not\u2014\"\n\n\"I said you will come.\"\n\nLydia jumped back several steps. Most people did the first time they heard Fitzwilliam's command tone. She shrank and ducked her head. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Very nice,\" Netherfield murmured, doubtless meant to be heard by Fitzwilliam alone. \"I should like you to teach me that.\"\n\n\"I will consider it.\" He escorted Lydia and Netherfield away.\n\nDarcy reached for his watch fob. Walker should be alerted. He could not be far off.\n\nElizabeth stayed his hand. \"We should talk without an audience.\" She nodded toward the woods."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "The rocky hillside echoed too much, not to mention Netherfield had taken her from there. Neither was conducive to the words that needed to be spoken. Elizabeth needed someplace quiet and secure.\n\nDarcy took her hand, his grip warm and strong. Hopefully, that was a good sign, but maybe he was being a gentleman, assisting a lady in need. They walked several minutes into the woods where the hardwoods cast deep shadows and grew too close together for large dragons to pass.\n\n\"I have never seen the Dragon Slayer wielded before.\"\n\nHe edged the slightest bit closer, his shoulder almost brushing hers. \"It is not an easy weapon to use. A man must be trained by an expert to have any hope of success with it.\"\n\n\"The training is tailored to the dragon in question?\" Granted, this was not at all the subject she had hoped to discuss, but at least they were talking.\n\n\"Of course. Each one is very different in their strengths and weaknesses. In my case\u2014dealing with a hatchling\u2014the training I had was minimal. But sufficient to be the stuff of nightmares. I am grateful we did not have to see a dragon's demise today.\"\n\n\"I am as well.\" She walked several more steps, drawing a deep breath. \"Though, I better understand why it might have been seen as necessary.\"\n\n\"You have no idea how I\u2014we\u2014suffered, knowing you were missing, not even knowing for certain he had taken you.\" His words were halting, even labored.\n\n\"I was foolish to go out as I did. Not for the walk after we argued, that was essential, but following the trail Netherfield laid for me, that was foolish.\"\n\n\"He laid a trap for you?\"\n\n\"I simply walked into it, believing\u2014oh!\" She stopped and slid her hand from his. \"It seems I am capable of being every bit as stubborn as I have accused you of being. I have been so intractable you did not even think you could talk to me about what was truly important. I regret that more than anything else.\"\n\nHe caught her hand again. \"I did not make things any easier. Fitzwilliam insisted you not be told\u2014ordered it, more or less. But that does not mean I was compelled to obey.\"\n\n\"I see how persuasive his orders can be, though.\" She giggled. \"Apparently, he was right. I hate to confess it, but there it is. He thought I would be headstrong and insist on doing things my own way. I have done just that. I am certain my father would have told you the same thing.\"\n\n\"Your father's opinion is of little concern to me.\"\n\n\"He has always said that I was incorrigible and would one day get myself into a very great deal of trouble because of my refusal to follow protocols and structure. And indeed I have. I walked into a trap and was kidnapped by a rogue dragon.\"\n\n\"I admit that was a bit troublesome.\" The corners of his lips drew up in the hint of a wry smile.\n\n\"Just a bit? You are far too kind. I was foolish and impulsive, exactly as Papa described.\" She straightened her shoulders and steeled herself. \"I completely understand if that is not what you wish for in a wife. I cannot possibly be the sort of influence you desire for Georgiana. I am unlikely to be a credit to you in society\u2014certainly not the ton and perhaps not among the Blue Order, either. My opinions are far too decided. What is more, I lack the self-control to restrain my own tongue. I know what we promised to the Order: we are both to act as Keepers for Pemberley, but there are certainly ways to make it work other than forcing you into a marriage with me.\"\n\n\"It is kind of you to have both overlooked my complicity in this circumstance \u2014I should have brought you into our confidence and committed to developing a more suitable plan\u2014and that you have taken it upon yourself to determine not only how I feel but how I should act.\"\n\n\"I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.\"\n\n\"Good. Then perhaps that will force you to actually listen to me.\" He crossed his arms and stared\u2014 no, glared at her.\n\n\"I only mean to make things less difficult for you. I know you are an honorable man. You will hold to your word even if you have changed your mind.\"\n\n\"Which, of course, you know so well, you are able to discern it without my speaking a word.\"\n\n\"Any reasonable man would\u2014\"\n\n\"I am not a reasonable man!\"\n\nShe took half a step back.\n\n\"I do not know where you ever got the notion that I am a reasonable man, but I am not. I have never been, nor do I ever expect to be. I can give you quite a number of people to apply to for confirmation on that point, starting with Fitzwilliam.\"\n\n\"Whatever do you mean?\"\n\n\"I am a man who hears dragons; that alone is enough to set me apart from the normal, sensible sort. I also happen to like their company more than I like most people. That certainly is not sensible.\" He took both her hands in his and drew her a step closer. \"And I am deeply and earnestly in love with a woman who finds dragons literally throwing themselves at her feet, yet her father is the laziest Dragon Keeper and most decided curmudgeon in all of England. That, I assure you, is not sensible at all. And yet, here we are.\"\n\n\"What did you say?\"\n\n\"My dearest, loveliest Elizabeth.\" He led her to sit near a large tree. \"What will it take to make you believe the very qualities that make your father most annoyed are those I most admire in you? I do not want a woman who cannot think for herself, who relies upon me for every scrap of information, and to form her every opinion. Yes, I would like you to do me the honor of talking with me and sharing your thoughts with me, but I relish your ability to leap from one specialty to another, drawing connections and conclusions others would never see.\"\n\n\"And the fact I go brashly charging along after my own ideas regardless of what others think?\"\n\n\"You are confident in what you know. Sometimes that might be a bit overwhelming, but now, I think you will also be more respectful of what you do not know and take that into consideration as well.\"\n\n\"You see, I am not\u2014\" She pulled away and braced herself to stand.\n\n\"Stop it right now!\" He grasped her upper arms. \"You made a mistake, and yes, it could have cost us everything. It was a serious one. I do not forget that now, nor will I ever forget it.\"\n\nHer eyes burned, and she stared at the ground.\n\n\"You are not accustomed to making mistakes where dragons are concerned, are you? I would wager you probably have never really made one before?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"Then I am glad you have made one and a very serious one at that.\"\n\n\"So that I may be properly humbled into my place.\"\n\n\"So that you might be more cautious and willing to accept a partner with a different perspective on these draconic adventures of yours.\"\n\nShe looked up and stared into dark eyes that could not possibly have been more sincere.\n\n\"I do not want you to change. I have never wanted that. I know our life together is going to be challenging. Little Pemberley alone will more than ensure that. No one has raised a firedrakling in centuries. You will be writing the book on the matter in a very literal sense. How could I not want to be part of that?\"\n\n\"But I am so very, very difficult.\"\n\n\"Is not anything worth having apt to be difficult?\" He looked over her shoulder and nodded.\n\nWalker landed beside Darcy, and a chittering ball of blue fluff zipped past.\n\n\"You best listen to what he is saying!\" April scolded, hovering in front of her face. \"The man has been beside himself since you were taken.\"\n\n\"He has been only slightly more distraught than she.\" Walker nodded toward April.\n\nElizabeth extended her hand. April perched lightly on it. \"You have come back?\"\n\n\"It seems I cannot leave you alone!\" April pecked her hand, but it was a half-hearted effort at best. \"Where is my cloak?\"\n\n\"Back at the house. There was no point to wearing it without you. I will put it on as soon as we get there.\" She stroked April's soft head. \"I am glad you have come home.\"\n\n\"Then you know how Darcy feels. Declare him your mate, and be done with it. Truly, it is not a bad thing.\" She hopped to Elizabeth's shoulder and cuddled into her neck.\n\nA tear dripped down her cheek and another. How she had missed her constant companion. Was this truly how Darcy had felt, too?\n\nHe met her gaze without hesitation.\n\nMerciful heavens! It was!\n\n\"I wish I could make your father see you as I do. But he is set in his ways and will probably never change. I am sorry that is the way of things. I only hope someday you might see yourself as I do, and it will be enough.\" He traced the crest of her cheek with his fingertips.\n\nShe leaned into his hand as his other arm slipped around her waist. April hopped off her shoulder and clung to the tree trunk nearby, singing sweetly.\n\nHis lips found hers in a kiss that lingered as his fingertips caressed her throat.\n\n\"Pray, are you convinced now that I still intend for you to become Mrs. Darcy?\"\n\n\"You have almost persuaded me, sir, but not quite yet.\"\n\n\"Fear not. I am a persistent man and am not easily dissuaded.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Darcy suggested a leisurely route back to Netherfield. No doubt, a great deal would need to be accomplished, and their moments alone might be few and far between in the coming days. It seemed wise to relish them now whilst they could. Happily, Elizabeth agreed.\n\nAfter a dinner, which \"tense\" was the very kindest word to describe, the Netherfield party retreated to various corners. Cait had accepted the temporary keeping of Miss Lydia with, perhaps, a little too much relish. Miss Lydia, with Cait closely following, stalked off to her chambers, clearly annoyed and possibly even disgusted not only with the talk of dragons around the dinner table, but that their presence was welcomed there. If one took her seriously, her storming and shouting was troubling and could be viewed as a great danger to the Order. But those who knew her best seemed unconcerned, so, at least for now, Darcy would hold his peace.\n\nMary and Collins joined Bennet and Fitzwilliam in the cellar for a brief introduction to Netherfield. Fitzwilliam suggested Netherfield wished to apologize for his untoward behavior. Was it a show to gain favor with the Order or was it sincere? Fitzwilliam seemed to believe the latter, which for now, was good enough.\n\nDarcy and Elizabeth, who had the care of the sleeping Earl, made their way to the small parlor they favored. Lit only by the fireplace, it beckoned them inside like an old friend. He pulled the fainting couch near the fire\u2014very near\u2014and offered Elizabeth a blanket. Though she had not complained, it was clear she relished the opportunity to be near warmth and light. He shuddered just a little. To be trapped in total darkness\u2014that was truly cruel of Netherfield and would be difficult for Darcy to forgive him for.\n\nShe bade him sit at the head of the fainting couch with a favorite book. She curled up beside him, Earl pressed against her chest and April against her neck, tucked the blanket around her legs, and closed her eyes. He wrapped his arm over her shoulder and held her close. Yes, it was not only highly improper, it was also a touch too warm, and a bit of an awkward angle for his shoulder, but nothing could have compelled him to move. Finally, the world seemed the way it should be.\n\nLoud footfalls in the corridor made him jump. He must have dozed off\u2014according to the mantle clock nearly an hour had passed. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and sat up a little straighter but not enough to disturb Elizabeth.\n\nFitzwilliam strode in, his steps halfway between stomping and storming.\n\nBennet followed him at some distance. \"Astonishing, truly astonishing, the stories he has to tell. Lizzy. Lizzy!\"\n\n\"Hush! Do not wake her.\" Darcy craned his neck around to glower at Bennet.\n\n\"Do give the woman some rest. She has, after all, been at the center of ,not one, but two diplomatic coups today.\" Fitzwilliam pulled a wingchair close to the fire and fell into it.\n\n\"These stories need to be recorded before they are forgotten.\" Bennet leaned on his walking stick as though waiting for someone to offer him a chair.\n\nFitzwilliam ignored the silent request. \"Given the relish with which Netherfield told them, I doubt he will be reluctant to repeat them.\"\n\n\"But if the Order decides against\u2014\" Bennet shuffled toward a chair at the edge of the firelight.\n\n\"What exactly do you think the Order is going to do? No council member, dragon or human, wanted to see his demise. They reluctantly accepted the notion only when it appeared there was no alternative. Given the preliminary word Walker has already brought, there is a great deal of relief that the last resort was not necessary, after all.\"\n\n\"You did an excellent job of brokering an understanding.\" Bennet tapped his walking stick on the carpet.\n\n\"The effort began well before I was dispatched. Without Elizabeth and Darcy, I doubt we would have ever come to this point.\"\n\nBennet grumbled something about obstinate and headstrong under his breath.\n\n\"I have been asked to provide a complete report on the matter.\" Fitzwilliam glanced at Elizabeth who still appeared to sleep. \"I intend to let them know the entirety of the role she played, including her assistance to Cait and encouragement to me to befriend Earl.\" He looked a little longingly at the chick sleeping in her arms but knew better than to risk disturbing either of them.\n\n\"What has the chick to do with any of this?\" Bennet waved toward Earl.\n\n\"Have you not noticed the change in Collins' attitude toward dragons since he attended the hatching? Moreover, I find I see the world differently having Earl declare me his Friend. It makes me wonder if dragons are not the only ones to imprint at a hatching.\"\n\n\"Stuff and nonsense. That is not part of dragon lore. You are simply being sentimental. Probably another of my daughter's influences.\"\n\nFitzwilliam rolled his eyes. \"I am going to suggest Elizabeth write a monograph on the topic. I know many would be greatly interested in it.\"\n\n\"You are just trying to vex me now. I know you are all agog over her way with dragons, but how close to disaster did we all come? In no small part because of her refusal to obey proper protocol. Is no one going to take seriously the risks she took and the danger she placed us all in? Someone must rein her in before it is too late.\"\n\n\"I find it immensely interesting that you would reprimand her for failing protocol when you yourself have been so very lax.\" Fitzwilliam leveled that gaze on Bennet, the one he had developed to put spoilt young officers in their place.\n\nBennet sat forward in his chair, sputtering. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Need I list everything I will put in my report to the Order? Very well, I will start with your failure to provide your dragon with his appropriate hoard as well as your failure to apply to the Order for relief when you found yourself unable to do so. Was that pride sir? Or will you claim that you did not expect the Order would come to your assistance?\" Fitzwilliam leaned back in his chair\u2014a casual posture that was anything but.\n\n\"I did not violate\u2014\"\n\n\"Not the letter of the Accords, to be sure. However, one might argue you did exactly that when you suspected the presence of a rogue dragon and did not immediately report it. Shall I speculate the reason, or will you care to tell me?\"\n\n\"I do not have to answer to the likes of you. Remember, you are talking to an officer of the Order!\" Though Bennet tried to don a cloak of indignancy, it slipped off his shoulders quickly. Even he did not really believe his own protests.\n\n\"I am certain there will be a full inquiry made over the situation, and your presence in London will be required.\"\n\n\"How dare you spread slander against me!\"\n\n\"There is no slander in the truth. I will only report the truth as I know it and allow them to determine what is to be done with it. Have I spoken anything so far that is not fact?\"\n\nBennet muttered into his chest. \"I had no proof there was a rogue dragon in the area.\"\n\n\"I did not say you did. I said that you suspected. Did you suspect or not? Longbourn\u2014\"\n\n\"He knew of Netherfield! What of him?\" Bennet pointed roughly in the direction of Longbourn's lair.\n\n\"So now you would blame your dragon for failing your responsibilities? That is deplorable, sir.\" Fitzwilliam tsk-tsked under his breath. Now he was just taunting Bennet. It was not attractive even if the man had it coming. \"I think it quite likely Longbourn will be absolved of any responsibility in the matter, especially considering Netherfield was sating the hoarding-hunger you so neatly ignored.\"\n\n\"You have never kept a dragon. Truly, what do you understand? Leave these matters to those who know of what they speak.\" Bennet shambled from the room.\n\nThe door shut rather more loudly than etiquette declared it should. Elizabeth stirred against Darcy's chest. \"Would you like to take Earl? He is rather a substantial young thing.\" She lifted him off her chest and drew a deep breath.\n\nFitzwilliam hurried over and settled him in the crook of his arm. Earl opened one eye, cheeped, and nestled into his favorite place.\n\nElizabeth cuddled back against Darcy as he pressed his arm against her waist. \"I confess it is pleasant to be able to breathe unencumbered again. He is a very dear, though heavy, creature. I am honored you would trust him to my care.\"\n\n\"Netherfield took right to him; it was rather remarkable to see them greet one another. Earl curled up and slept right on his snout for a few minutes until it became difficult for Netherfield to talk without disturbing him. Quite the scene, I am sure you can imagine.\" Fitzwilliam scratched under Earl's chin.\n\n\"I can indeed. I am sure Papa will want me for his scribe tomorrow.\" She rubbed her eyes with thumb and forefinger.\n\n\"I would not put too much on those plans. I expect Walker will arrive first thing with a summons calling us all to London immediately.\"\n\n\"I am relieved they took Netherfield's application for admission into the Order with such aplomb. Do you think they will give Netherfield this land?\"\n\n\"No, I doubt it. With what has occurred between Netherfield and Longbourn, and without a proper Keeper to manage his acceptance into the Order, this would be a very poor choice of territory. That being said, I know there are places befitting a lindwurm that could be assigned him. Most of them are north of London and well away from Longbourn.\"\n\n\"I suppose that would be for the best. But Papa will mourn the loss of his acquaintance.\" She stared at her hands and chewed her lip. Her shoulders tensed against Darcy. \"Do you really need to report\u2014\"\n\n\"Would that I did not have to. Truly, I regret this duty, not because I have any fondness for him but because I know that it cannot but hurt you. But whether he chooses to recognize it or not, he contributed significantly to this unfortunate affair by his own failure to follow the protocols and rules he is so fond of quoting at you.\" Fitzwilliam's lips wrinkled\u2014there was a great deal more to his opinion that he was keeping to himself. Probably a wise choice.\n\n\"I hate that you are right, but when you lay it out like that, I can hardly argue. I am worried for him, though. What might the Order do? If they remove him from his post, I can hardly imagine the effect it will have on him.\"\n\n\"He has been negligent, to be sure, but there has been no bloodshed, so I would be surprised to see harsh judgements.\"\n\nElizabeth stared at her hands. \"It is just ironic he is under scrutiny for the very things he has judged me for.\"\n\n\"Once we get back to London, I expect your presence at the offices will be in high demand. Walker already mentioned Sir Edward and Lady Astrid want to speak with you regarding all that has transpired. He is particularly interested in your interventions for Cait, and she, well, you know Lady Astrid. She is interested in everything. But that is for the morning. For now, my young charge and I are tired. I had best get some sleep before he is hungry again.\" Fitzwilliam chuckled as he rose, cradling the young cockatrice.\n\nDarcy and Elizabeth watched him leave.\n\n\"You will stay at Darcy House when we return to London, will you not? Georgiana will be at the house\u2014\"\n\n\"As will Pemberley! I do not imagine she would tolerate me staying elsewhere.\"\n\n\"I was not thinking of her just now.\" He held her a little tighter. \"You look troubled. What is on your mind?\"\n\nShe sighed and looked up at the ceiling. \"Things have changed. I have changed. You bear much of the blame for that. I am not who I was before we met. It is difficult to say exactly how, but I am different, and I simply do not belong here anymore.\"\n\n\"Here, as in Hertfordshire?\"\n\n\"Yes. I used to have patience: with Longbourn and his temper; with my father and his peculiarities; and with Mary and her reluctance to step up and take responsibilities. Even with my mother and Kitty and their rather silly ways. It all used to seem so normal to me. But now, I find them all so very frustrating. Would it be horrible to say I have on occasion fantasized about knocking their silly little heads together in hopes some sense would shake loose?\"\n\nHe stifled a chuckle. She might not appreciate it.\n\n\"All of that is to say, I could not live here again, not with any sort of contentment. You and your dragon, sir, have ruined me for lesser things, and I fear I cannot go back.\" She looked up at him with a sort of serious playfulness that he could easily become accustomed to. But beneath the playfulness, there was something a little uncertain, even insecure. \"I find it difficult to see myself as anything besides your wife.\"\n\n\"We have that in common. But if you ever have doubt, I expect there is a rather large collection of dragons who will testify to the same to reassure you.\"\n\n\"Are you teasing me, Mr. Darcy?\"\n\n\"Absolutely and without reservation. Have you a problem with that?\"\n\n\"Only that you are not kissing me.\"\n\n\"Permit me to remedy that immediately.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The next morning, Elizabeth and Darcy scurried to return the morning room to something more usable for their party. They remove paintings from the morning room table and stacked books high on a small corner table, sufficiently out of the way to be ignored for now. After papers and maps were tucked into a drawer in the sideboard, everyone could be accommodated, at last.\n\nPapa sat near the book table, his eye on several volumes for further study. It would probably not be difficult to convince Bingley to allow him to borrow them, especially with a little persuasion from Heather who was very good at that sort of thing.\n\nLydia sat at the far side of the table, pouting, but serving herself generously. Making up for her privations under Netherfield, no doubt. Cait perched on the sideboard behind her, dedicated to not letting Lydia out of her sight. That was worrisome. If Cait was so diligent, she must consider Lydia's running away a serious threat. The sooner they could get Lydia to London and into the hands of the Blue Order, the better.\n\nCollins sat next to Fitzwilliam and Earl, offering the chick bits of kipper and ham from his own plate. Was this a normal reaction for the dragon-deaf who had witnessed a hatching? Were there any recordings of it in dragon lore?\n\nMrs. Hill had demonstrated it was possible for the dragon-deaf to befriend a dragon after a fashion\u2014had that ever happened before? Surely it must have. All it would take was a clever and persuasive dragon and a sympathetic person. Might it be possible for Jane to befriend Talia in the same way? They both had such gentle personalities; they would be good for one another. It should not be too difficult to persuade Jane that Talia was a rabbit.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Mary whispered in her ear.\n\n\"Forgive me, just a little lost in thought.\" Elizabeth took a bit of jam for her toast and passed the pot to Mary.\n\n\"Little wonder, it has been an astonishing few days, has it not?\"\n\nWalker swooped in through the open window and landed on the back of Darcy's chair, a large satchel strapped to his back. \"The Order requires your immediate presence in London, preferably by the end of the day. All of you.\"\n\n\"We cannot possibly leave in such short order. We have not even made arrangements for a place to stay.\" Papa did not bother to turn around and look at Walker.\n\n\"The Gardiners await your arrival. The Order asks\u2014\" the way Walker spoke the word made clear it was not a request, \"that Miss Lydia be chaperoned at Darcy House and that the Collinses might assist in the effort.\"\n\nFitzwilliam chewed his lower lip. \"They are being rather particular, are they not?\"\n\n\"You are requested to accompany Longbourn, Netherfield, and Shin-dee-a through the tunnels to ensure a safe arrival at the Blue Order offices. Earl may accompany you.\"\n\n\"How generous of them.\" Fitzwilliam pushed back from the table and swallowed the last of his coffee. \"I have my marching orders and will get on with it immediately. Will you bring my trunk for me, Darcy?\"\n\n\"What am I, some sort of prisoner? Have I no say in the matter? What if I do not want to go to London?\" Lydia crossed her arms and settled into her chair as if she had no intention of ever moving.\n\n\"I thought you were always in want of a trip to London.\" Elizabeth looked at Papa.\n\n\"Perhaps, but not now.\"\n\n\"You will accompany us to London.\" Bennet stared at the slice of toast he buttered.\n\n\"I do not know who these Blue Order people are, but they do not control me. I shall not go to London.\" Lydia's face wrinkled into a defiant snort that had often settled matters at Longbourn.\n\nFitzwilliam slowly approached her, man and dragon making way for him as he passed. \"My dear girl, you are not just a prisoner, but you are a criminal of the worst order according to our laws\u2014laws which became yours the moment you first heard a dragon speak. You have no choice in coming to London. Your only choice is whether you shall go in a coach with your family or you shall be dragged there via the underground tunnels in a dragon's arms. Decide now.\"\n\nLydia shuddered, a show of half-drama, half-dread. \"I never want to be underground again. It is horrid and unnatural.\"\n\n\"Then see to it you give your sister and Darcy no trouble, or you will be taken directly to the Order offices to stay in an underground chamber until your hearing.\"\n\n\"Hearing?\" She lost the color in her face. \"You cannot be serious.\"\n\n\"Do not test him or the Order,\" Elizabeth hissed in a whisper. \"He does not exaggerate.\"\n\nLydia clutched at the tablecloth, voice squeaking. \"What will they do to me?\"\n\n\"I do not know, but your attitude will determine a very great deal. Good day.\" Fitzwilliam bowed from his shoulders and turned on his heel.\n\nCollins leaned across the table toward Lydia. \"They are not unreasonable, Miss Lydia. But they are very serious about their rules.\"\n\n\"You, too? You are part of this madness?\" The horror on her face was almost laughable.\n\nA very odd look came over Collins' face. \"Not in the way your sisters and father are. But yes, after a fashion. Perhaps, it would be wise for us to return to Longbourn to pack.\"\n\n\"Shall I pack for you, Papa?\" Mary set her napkin aside and stood.\n\n\"There are books I need to pack myself.\" Papa leaned hard on his walking stick, struggling to stand.\n\n\"I shall come, too!\" Lydia jumped up and dashed toward the door.\n\nElizabeth beat her to the doorway, blocking her exit. \"No, you have a trunk already packed upstairs. If there is anything else you need, Mary can bring it.\"\n\n\"There are several things I simply must have\u2014\" Lydia rushed to Mary's side.\n\nCait cocked her head. \"Do not worry. I shall keep watch over her. You deserve a few moments of peace before it all begins.\"\n\n\"Mary?\" Elizabeth caught her sister's and Collins' gaze.\n\n\"We will keep her in order.\" Mary held Lydia's arm tightly.\n\nElizabeth stepped aside and they left, Cait flapping after them.\n\nDarcy refilled Elizabeth's cup. \"I do not envy Cait's task.\"\n\nElizabeth returned to her seat and scrubbed her face with her palms. \"Perhaps Collins will make an impression on her.\"\n\n\"One might hope\u2014not expect mind you, but hope.\"\n\n\"Do you think I will be deemed disagreeable if I insist that Lydia, Mary, and Collins ride in Papa's coach to London? Even if they will stay with us at Darcy House, I would very much like to greet Pemberley and Georgiana without them.\"\n\n\"I am entirely in favor of the idea, though, I confess my reasons are not nearly so noble.\"\n\nHer eyes twinkled just a bit. \"Who said all of mine were?\"\n\nBy the time their carriage pulled into the mews behind Darcy House, the sun had begun its dip behind London's tallest buildings. Georgiana, Pemberley, and Slate and Amber, the house staff drakes, tumbled from the cellar steps to meet them even before they rolled to a stop.\n\nDarcy handed her out of the carriage and into a two-way embrace: Georgiana on one side and Pemberley on the other, winding her neck around Elizabeth's waist almost until she could not breathe.\n\n\"Walker did not tell us very much, only that the whole matter had come to a good conclusion, and you would be back today.\" Georgiana turned to Darcy and took his hands.\n\n\"We will tell you what we can, but the important new is that everyone is whole and hearty, and the rogue is seeking the protection of the Order.\" Tension slipped from his shoulders, and a special warmth filled his eyes.\n\n\"Is it true that Fitzwilliam befriended Cait's chick?\"\n\n\"Indeed he has\u2014a lovely young fellow, to be sure. You will meet him soon, no doubt.\"\n\n\"He is a quite a changed man for it, too.\" Elizabeth scratched behind Pemberley's ears. \"Not in essentials, to be certain, in that he will always be the same. But you should see the way he looks at little Earl. It is something to behold.\"\n\n\"How wonderful!\"\n\nApril peeked out from Elizabeth's hood and shook her feathers fluffy. \"My clutch will come soon. You shall be a Friend to one of them?\"\n\nGeorgiana's eyes filled with tears that coursed unchecked down her cheeks.\n\n\"Another fairy dragon? I like them! They tickle my nose and sing pretty!\" Pemberley spread her wings with a happy little flap.\n\nAnother dragon in the household? Just what they needed\u2014\n\n\"I think it a wonderful thing.\" Darcy slipped his arm around her shoulder and scratched under Pemberley's chin with the other hand. \"A household cannot have too many dragons.\"\n\nElizabeth bit her upper lip and squeezed her eyes shut, but it did not really help. Tears trailed down her cheeks. He was right. A home could not have too many dragons, and a home built by a man who said that was precisely the place she belonged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Three days later, Elizabeth sat in the antechamber, waiting to be called into the office of the Minister of the Blue Order Court: Nicholas Shillingham, Baron Dunbrook. Two days ago, when they had first waited here to give testimony to Lord Dunbrook, the room had seemed far more intimidating. Large enough to accommodate a dragon of Longbourn's size, the ceiling stared down at them with frescos depicting the establishment of the Pendragon Accords. Built into the surrounding walls, mahogany benches backed with high mahogany backs could hold a large cadre. Mirrored wall sconces above the benches poured light on wall frescos illustrating the formation of the first Blue Order court and the first Ministers of the Court who held office. Surrounded by giants of Blue Order history, it was easy to feel very, very small.\n\nIt was the kind of place Papa would normally find fascinating. He had been fascinated by it, two days ago. But not today.\n\nLord Dunbrook's summons and the ensuing inquest had surprised Papa. He had justified all he had done as sensible and correct. When Lord Dunbrook began to question everything, he became visibly rattled and even contentious. So much so that Lord Dunbrook sent her and Papa out while he continued questioning Darcy, Lydia, Fitzwilliam, Mary and even Longbourn himself.\n\nDunbrook was the sternest-looking drake she had ever seen: deep stony grey, his face appeared chiseled into a permanent scowl with a voice to match. Lord Dunbrook made a perfect match to him. Tall and broad, wearing a traditional judge's wig, his shoulders barely fit through the door, but probably that was more about the way he carried himself than his actual size. Had he learnt that from his dragon?\n\nThey both boomed out questions that sounded like gunfire, and no matter the answer given, their expressions insisted it must be wrong. Their manner did not change whether dealing with victim, suspect, or witness. Moreover, they did not limit themselves to a polite number of discreet questions. Nothing seemed off-limits, including a few things Elizabeth would just as soon not hear. Perhaps that was why it was said Lord Dunbrook's wife lived separately from him. He must be quite the joy at home.\n\nWhen they had been dismissed from questioning, Elizabeth returned to Darcy House and immediately went to bed, not rising until afternoon the next day. Uncle Gardiner said Papa did not leave his room until today when it was time receive Lord Dunbrook's decision.\n\nPapa shambled toward her, leaning heavily on his cane. He stopped half a step from her and stared at her with such an expression. \"I told you. I would have made sure you would have been happy with Collins. I promised you that.\" He sounded so hurt, even betrayed.\n\nThe little girl within withered and fought back tears. \"He is better off with Mary.\"\n\n\"I had no intention of condemning you to a miserable marriage.\" He leaned over her until she felt smaller still.\n\nShe stood and increased the distance between them. \"How would you have accomplished that?\"\n\n\"I would have made sure of it.\"\n\n\"I will be happy in my marriage with Darcy. Is that not sufficient?\"\n\nHe grumbled, trudged back to the other side of the room, and resumed pacing. Apparently not.\n\nHuge wooden doors, carved with the crest of the Blue Order's judicial branch, swung open, slowly, grudgingly. Fitzwilliam appeared and beckoned them inside. He looked satisfied enough, but it was difficult to discern what that might mean.\n\nA blue-uniformed bailiff showed them where to stand: Elizabeth beside Darcy and Fitzwilliam, all to the right, facing Lord Dunbrook's imposing desk; Papa beside Lydia on the left, Mary and Collins slightly behind them.\n\nLongbourn lingered slightly behind the desk, near the tunnel that had admitted him, shifting his weight from one foot to another. He only did that when he was uncomfortable. Given the way the drake Dunbrook stood beside him, a wary eye fixed on the wyvern, it was easy to guess why.\n\nLord Dunbrook banged a gavel on his desk. Elizabeth and Mary jumped. \"Testimony has been given regarding the complaints against Historian Bennet, and judgement shall be rendered.\"\n\nDarcy slipped his hand into hers and squeezed tightly. Dear, dear man.\n\n\"Historian Bennet, you have been derelict in your duties as a Keeper, both in caring for your dragon and in the larger responsibilities of keeping watch over the safety of the dragon state. Longbourn's needs have been neglected. You have compromised Blue Order security by failing to report the possibility of a rogue dragon and neglecting to train your dragon-hearing daughter appropriately. As of this moment, you are relieved as Dragon Keeper at Longbourn.\"\n\nLongbourn grumbled and muttered, rocking side-to-side a little harder, but the look on his face suggested he agreed with Lord Dunbrook. Papa bowed his head and swayed over his cane. Mary gasped and leaned hard into Collins' shoulder.\n\nElizabeth clung to Darcy's hand, struggling to conceal a sigh of relief. Though harsh, the judgement could have been far worse\u2014not that Papa or the Collinses would recognize that, at least not right now.\n\n\"Mrs. Collins, you and your husband will be assigned a Blue Order steward. He will instruct Mr. Collins in the proper administration of estate matters. Mrs. Collins, you will immediately take on all dragon-keeping duties under the supervision of your steward who will ensure the needs of Laird Longbourn are properly met. Your steward's Dragon Friend, another cockatrix, will assume the translation duties Cait currently fulfills.\"\n\nCollins ran his finger along the inside of his cravat and cleared his throat. \"How long will the steward be with us?\"\n\n\"For your entire tenure as Keeper, if necessary. Bailiff, take them to meet their steward.\" Lord Dunbrook waved the bailiff into action and turned toward Longbourn. \"You are to make regular reports to the Order regarding the state of your Keep. For the first two years, a messenger from the Order will be sent monthly to collect your report and to ensure you fulfill all your Keep duties, including wild dragon censuses and attending all Conclave meetings.\"\n\nLongbourn pawed the floor and huffed.\n\n\"I will take that as agreement,\" Dunbrook said. \"You may be dismissed, for now, but do not fail to attend the Conclave.\"\n\nLongbourn snorted and disappeared down the tunnel, his heavy footsteps echoing behind him. Clearly, he did not like being held accountable for his own duties. Still though, he seemed to take the news well enough to suggest he would cooperate, especially if it meant he would get his salt.\n\n\"You, young woman,\" Lord Dunbrook turned to Lydia who stood, quiet and pale, beside Papa. What had Dunbrook said to her to elicit such good behavior? No doubt it was frightening\u2014and probably true. \"You have proved yourself ignorant, even willfully so, and a danger to dragonkind. Moreover, you are not trustworthy, making it impossible to leave you alone for even an instant. You will be committed to a Blue Order girl's school in the north of England until you reach majority at age twenty-one. If at that point you are still deemed a danger, you will be condemned as a career criminal and assigned to a managed home in Scotland for the rest of your natural life.\"\n\nLydia glanced at Elizabeth as if to confirm Lord Dunbrook's power over her. When Elizabeth nodded, she covered her mouth and whimpered.\n\n\"If however, you prove yourself tractable to the teachings of the Order, at the discretion of the school masters, at the age of eighteen you may be permitted to come out to the Order and be introduced to suitable young men in good standing with the Order and married accordingly.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes!\" Lydia clapped and bounced on her toes.\n\n\"But only if you prove yourself learned, changed, and trustworthy.\"\n\nLydia shrank back.\n\n\"Until you are deemed no longer a danger, a guardian drake will be assigned to be with you at all times. You are remanded to the custody of your sister Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy until such time as you are transported to school.\"\n\nLord Dunbrook waved toward the tunnel, and a blue-green minor drake skittered in. She was leggy and lean\u2014probably a very fast runner\u2014standing about three feet tall on all four feet and probably as tall as Lydia if she rose on her hind feet. Her nose was long and sharp. If she had glasses balanced there, she would have looked very much like a governess. Something about the way she carried herself suggested she was well-prepared for the task.\n\n\"This is Auntie. She will take you to the parlor where you may wait. You would do well to consider her your governess for the time being.\"\n\nLydia's jaw dropped. \"I am too old for a governess.\"\n\nAuntie circled her, sniffing as she looked Lydia up and down. \"Perhaps too old, but not too wise. If you have any desire to prove you can live without a chaperone, then you had best start now. Do you play the pianoforte?\"\n\nLydia edged back. \"I have had a few lessons.\"\n\n\"Then we shall make good use of the time. The parlor has a pianoforte. You shall show me what you know.\"\n\n\"You play?\"\n\n\"She is quite the proficient,\" Lord Dunbrook murmured, his eyes twinkling as Auntie opened the door. \"When she is at the Order, she is much in demand for concerts.\"\n\n\"Stop gawking at me, girl, and move on. Clearly, there is a great deal of work to be done to polish you properly.\" Auntie poked Lydia's back until she headed toward the door.\n\n\"A dragon governess?\" Fitzwilliam whispered in Elizabeth's ear.\n\n\"Perhaps Auntie might be available when our children are of an age to need one.\" Elizabeth winked up at Darcy who sniggered under his breath.\n\nLord Dunbrook turned back to Papa. The hard lines of his face softened a bit. \"You have served the Order as an officer faithfully for many years, and your service has not been forgotten. Since you will no longer have Keepers' duties, the Order invites you to dedicate yourself to full-time service as Historian. You may have the use of an Order townhouse and its staff, along with a stipend of three hundred pounds a year if you choose to do so. Further, you may select a secretary, human or dragon, from amongst candidates Lady Astrid will provide.\"\n\n\"My wife and remaining daughter?\"\n\n\"They may live in town with you under the watch of the house staff.\"\n\n\"She may be pleased at the prospect.\" Papa murmured more to himself than anyone else.\n\n\"Think on it. You may have two days to make your decision. You are dismissed.\"\n\nPapa trundled off, his steps a little lighter than they had been.\n\n\"That was generous of you, sir. Thank you.\" Elizabeth curtsied to Lord Dunbrook.\n\n\"While he has not been a good Keeper, that is not the only way to serve the Order. His other skills are valuable. It would be foolish to cast them aside.\" Lord Dunbrook rubbed his palms briskly. \"As for you three, somehow you made a coup out of what should have been a diplomatic disaster. Envoy Shin-dee-a was very impressed with how you handled what she called 'an extreme test of the Order's character.' You managed to turn what might have been a violent confrontation into a peaceful settlement, powerfully demonstrating the Order's commitment to its principles. Consequently, talks have begun to establish a formal relationship with the Eastern Dragon Federation. Well done, very well done.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\" Fitzwilliam bowed.\n\n\"What is to become of Netherfield?\" The words just slipped out before she could catch them.\n\nDarcy flinched. He was probably right. That question was no doubt out of order. Poor man would need to become accustomed to such bold statements tumbling from her lips for there was little hope of stopping them.\n\n\"I cannot say at this time. He has applied for conditional admission into the Order and requested the Netherfield territory. I will make recommendations after the hearings are complete, but the Conclave must render their vote on the matter. Lady Astrid will help you prepare your statements for those hearings. She awaits you now.\" Lord Dunbrook nodded a dismissal.\n\nWalker and April greeted them just outside the antechamber.\n\n\"Earl is well in Lady Astrid's care, but he is growing hungry and insists only you can feed him properly.\" Walker smirked just a bit.\n\n\"That is his way of saying no one else is willing to feed him enough to sate his hunger. Mother used to say the same of me and my brothers when we came home on school holidays. Swore that we must not be fed at all whilst we were in school. I will visit the kitchen and join you shortly.\" Fitzwilliam jogged off down the corridor.\n\n\"I had thought Earl's hunger would abate by now. April's and Heather's hatching hunger only lasted three days.\" Elizabeth stroked April's head. How pleasant to be able to do that again.\n\n\"A cockatrice chick is much larger and thus more hungry.\" Walker looked a little proud. \"In a se'nnight or so, it should fade.\"\n\n\"I think Fitzwilliam will appreciate the respite.\" Darcy chuckled.\n\n\"It will not last very long.\" April poked Elizabeth's ear with her beak.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Elizabeth craned her neck, trying to look April in the eye.\n\n\"Whilst we are here, you should see about procuring a proper nesting box. I will be laying soon. I do not fancy the sort of rough kit your father assembled for his study. A box, properly finished so it is not rough under my feet and has no sharp corners for you to knock your knees upon, with plenty of soft hay, not the coarse, prickly kind, but the smooth, sweet-smelling variety.\"\n\n\"So soon?\" Darcy raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"It is not soon at all, but exactly the right time.\" April puffed a bit, looking very proud.\n\n\"Then you shall have whatever you require.\" He bowed deeply.\n\nElizabeth cocked her head with mock severity. \"You shall spoil her, you know. Then where will we all be?\"\n\nApril flitted to his shoulder and cuddled his cheek. \"Whatever do you mean? I have always been sweet and charming and ever more shall be so.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Three days later, Elizabeth hurried in from the mews to what she had dubbed the ladies' parlor, and shut the door behind her. On the ground floor, the parlor windows looked out on the mews. She could watch Pemberley playing outside with Slate and Amber or simply enjoy the already blooming garden. On gloomy days, the pale blue walls and ivory ceiling seemed to bring sunshine inside. Paintings on every wall provided blossoms even when the garden did not. It was the sort of room she would have designed herself had she the opportunity.\n\nApril flew from her shoulder to the nesting box near the hearth to rearrange the hay again. Silly dear was never quite satisfied.\n\n\"Gracious, Lizzy! You look like you are running from a rogue dragon yourself!\" Aunt Gardiner looked up from the fainting couch near the window where she and Phoenix sat cuddling Earl. The young red fairy dragon had taken an immediate liking to Earl and was preening his head feathers whilst Aunt Gardiner read to them both from A Young Dragon's Primer to the Pendragon Accords. Actually, it was an excellent source for both young dragons and young people. No doubt, she read it to the children in lieu of bedtime stories these days. The little dears could not get enough of dragons, it seemed. Unlike Lydia.\n\nElizabeth sighed and fell into an overstuffed chair near Aunt Gardiner. \"More like a rogue sister, but yes, the effect is rather the same.\"\n\n\"Dare I ask?\"\n\n\"Now that you are a full member of the Order yourself, you may ask anything you like, and I am free to answer.\" Elizabeth smiled broadly. If there was anything to be pleased of at the moment, it was that she could fully share everything she loved most with the woman closest to her.\n\n\"Do tell, then.\"\n\n\"I suppose the most important thing is Colonel Fitzwilliam's defense of Netherfield is going well, as things go for dragons, of course.\"\n\n\"Humor me, my dear. Only being recently introduced to them myself, I cannot quite discern what you mean by that.\" Aunt Gardiner scratched under Phoenix's chin, then Earl's.\n\n\"All in all, large dragons tend to be more competitive than cooperative. So, when asked to compromise, they become rather cranky. It is understandable considering that when one is an apex predator, one assumes one will have one's way in all things. When required to set aside that right, they become grumpy even when they recognize it is in their best interests. So, if one can learn to look past the cross dispositions and the occasional snarling and snapping, discussions go more smoothly.\" Elizabeth blew a stray curl from her forehead. \"But it is rather exhausting.\"\n\n\"You make it sound so very droll and ordinary, rather like dealing with a room full of small children whom one does not need to regard very seriously, instead of creatures who could cause the downfall of the kingdom.\" Aunt glanced down at Earl, one eyebrow raised.\n\nGracious, she had a way of putting things! \"It all makes a great deal of sense if one can just think like a dragon.\"\n\nAunt snickered hard enough to make Earl open one eye with a rather reproving look. \"That is perhaps your greatest asset, my dear. Few of us seem to be able to manage the knack.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but it does little good when dealing with my sisters.\"\n\n\"What happened? I thought Mary was finally coming around.\"\n\n\"She is, I suppose, both she and Collins. I am grateful\u2014a bit astonished, to be sure\u2014but grateful.\" Elizabeth rubbed her temples. \"In anticipation of the Conclave, which they must attend as Longbourn's Keepers, I have been trying to teach them proper etiquette for greetings and introductions. Collins, it seems, has a faulty memory at best and cannot manage to keep straight\u2014well, much of anything at all. Mary tries to correct him but is constantly confusing the rank order of the larger minor dragons. They both understand the issue of size, but the role of horns and venom and frills seem to escape them.\"\n\n\"The way you throw up your hands makes it seem as though it is all very obvious. But those details are not nearly as clear as you might think.\"\n\n\"If one just considers which dragon has the greater advantage in claiming territory, it is very obvious.\"\n\n\"Again, to one who thinks like a dragon, I am sure it is. But you must have some mercy on those of us who do not\u2014yet.\"\n\nElizabeth threw her head back and stared at the plasterwork vine-and-fairy-dragon pattern circling the ceiling. \"I know you are right, and if it were just Mary and Collins, I would probably be far more patient, but Lydia? I am beginning to sound like my mother, complaining about my nerves!\"\n\n\"Fanny, by the way, is quite pleased to know Lydia will be off to finishing school where she might receive proper introductions and marry well.\"\n\n\"'Might' being the operative concept. It will all depend on her tractability which I completely doubt at the moment.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Who knew Aunt's eyes could open so wide.\n\n\"At the hearing today, the matter of Wickham and his demise came up. How she carried on! Not even Auntie could bring her under regulation. I thought, for a moment, the dear drake was actually going to bite her. Not that I would blame Auntie if she did! The scene Lydia caused! It nearly derailed the entire proceeding which would have meant presenting the matter in detail to the full Conclave instead of the special council. Lydia does not understand the crimes she has committed and that the council is offering her great leniency because of her ignorance. The Conclave would likely hold her accountable and \u2026\" Elizabeth shuddered. \"Truly, I just want to shake her.\" Energy coursed through her limbs, itching and twitching until she had to spring to her feet and pace.\n\n\"So, what happened in the special council hearing?\"\n\n\"Lydia explained how she and Wickham had been living in a hermitage they had found on the Netherfield property\u2014we can discuss all the problems with that at another time, for those are things dragons hardly consider an issue\u2014and had been looking for Netherfield's lair. Needless to say, that did not sit well with Cownt Matlock or any of the rest of the Council even though they had already decided not to prosecute Lydia.\" Elizabeth flung her arms wide and waved her hands. \"Then she began carrying on over how Netherfield had killed Wickham\u2014you know how she can be. She worked her way into full hysteria and took much of the Council with her. Auntie finally dosed her with laudanum and dragged her off, leaving it to me to calm not one, but six major dragons and convince them all not to be done with Netherfield simply because it would be more convenient than sitting through the special council.\"\n\n\"Surely, they would not have done such a rash thing!\"\n\n\"I like to think so, but matters did become quite heated. To be entirely honest, it was frightening when the council dragons began arguing with their Keepers. Once Lydia left though, reason began to return. They listened to Netherfield's testimony about Wickham and what I had to say about it, as well. I think the final sticking point is removed now. I expect they will recommend he be accepted into the Order. They even have a territory\u2014well away from the coast and known smuggling tunnels\u2014in mind for him. A small one, but it will be sufficient.\"\n\n\"And a Keeper?\"\n\n\"They have not said, but it should not be difficult to find one. Netherfield is a rather docile creature, a pacifist if you will. As long as the Keeper is literate and well-read, I think he will be a content and compliant member of the Order.\" Elizabeth fell into the nearest chair.\n\n\"I am sure Lydia will settle down a bit once she becomes used to everything around her. Perhaps I will have a talk with her, with your permission, of course. Only just coming into this myself, I think there is some sympathy I can offer her that might be helpful to assuage her feelings of ill-use.\"\n\n\"I am sure Auntie will be grateful for any assistance you can offer. She has a reputation as an excellent governess for unmanageable daughters, but at times, it looked at though she may have met her match in Lydia.\" Elizabeth tapped her fist against her lips. \"How is Mama?\"\n\n\"You must come over for tea as soon as there is a spare moment. She is quite happy. You are to be married, most advantageously to Mr. Darcy. Mary is married to Mr. Collins. Jane, of course, has Mr. Bingley. Lydia is to be sent to school, and now she and Kitty will live in London, something she has always dreamed of. Despite your father's uncertainty, I am convinced it will be a good thing for them all. We will introduce both your mother and Kitty into society here and keep watch over them. Your mother will be kept agreeably occupied while your father can spend his days at the Order offices devoting himself to his duties as Historian. In many ways, I wish this had happened much sooner.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it is all for the best. So much has changed in so very short a time. Is it wrong to say how very much I have enjoyed certain aspects of it?\"\n\n\"You mean Mr. Darcy?\"\n\nHer cheeks burned. \"I can hardly imagine a better man or Dragon Keeper. But there is more than that.\" She rose and stood near the window, tracing the edge of the mullions with her fingertip. \"I do not know how to explain. The past few months we have been so deep in dragon matters. I have never felt more at home, more useful. It is like I have found where I belong. But now that matters have finally resolved, things will return to the \u2026 mundane.\"\n\n\"Raising Pemberley is going to be mundane?\"\n\n\"Hardly. She will be as much a handful as Lydia, though in some ways much easier to deal with. But I know I shall miss being about the business of the Order, involved in something larger than myself. I know I am to be mistress of a great estate, and that should be sufficient for me, managing my own home and family, but \u2026 what kind of woman am I that I am not certain it will be, that I may want something more?\"\n\nPhoenix twittered and buzzed toward them. \"Come, come! See what April has done!\"\n\nApril cheeped from the nesting box.\n\nElizabeth hurried to the hearth. \"My gracious, and with no word of this to us! You have been very busy this morning.\"\n\nThree glistening eggs lay in the middle of the nesting box. Two were half the size of a chicken's egg, vaguely blue, mottled and streaked. The third was much smaller by comparison, it probably would not hatch, but that was not unusual for a first clutch.\n\n\"How beautiful they are!\" Elizabeth knelt beside them.\n\n\"I will sing to them. You will talk to them as you did to me whilst I was in my egg.\" April rolled the eggs in the hay, arranging them to her satisfaction.\n\n\"You remember that?\"\n\n\"Your voice was the first sound I clearly recognized. Being shell-bound was very dull. You talked a very great deal, but it was entertaining.\" April hopped to her shoulder. \"That is how I knew to listen to you once I had hatched.\"\n\n\"That and the honey I offered you.\"\n\n\"I well knew your good sense by then.\"\n\nPhoenix hopped into the nest and extended a wing over each egg. \"They will be my Friends, too. I like them very much already.\"\n\n\"As well you should, my Friend.\" Aunt tickled under his chin, and he twittered happily. \"They will do well to have so fine a protector as you.\"\n\nPhoenix looked very proud of himself, with an expression a little like Mr. Darcy. How her betrothed would laugh to be told he resembled a fairy dragon, but Phoenix would think it rather a compliment to be told he took after Darcy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Several mornings later, dawn finally made its way across the sky and Elizabeth no longer needed to pretend to sleep. Who could expect anyone to sleep soundly on the eve of such a momentous occasion? Unless something untoward happened, Netherfield would be accepted by the Conclave, the first foreign major dragon to be admitted in recorded memory. At least, that is what should happen.\n\nDragons could be unpredictable, though. Even when things went as desired, it often did not happen in the expected manner. Unexpected was not necessarily bad, or so she had tried to convince Papa. Now was the time to back up those bold words with her actions.\n\nDuring her last visit, Aunt Gardiner had brought over the blue silk gown, now altered to fit Elizabeth as though it were made for her. The color was perfect: a serious but not somber shade of blue, happy enough to make her smile. The fabric caught the light just so\u2014subtle but striking. It was probably a little vain to enjoy a gown so much, but Aunt Gardiner was right: there was something about being properly dressed that made a day such as today easier to face. Elizabeth dismissed the maid and made a final twirl in front of the mirror. All that could be accomplished in one's dressing room had been done. She squared her shoulders and strode into the corridor.\n\nBest check on Pemberley and make sure she was ready for Rosings to escort her\u2014\n\n\"You look very well this morning, Lizzy.\" Lydia cut her off as though she had been lurking in wait, arms folded and lips pursed. \"I do not wish to go to the dragon meeting.\"\n\n\"Pray forgive me, Miss Bennet.\" Auntie scurried up behind her. \"She is quite adept at slipping out.\"\n\nElizabeth clapped her hand to her forehead. \"Are you using the servants' corridors again?\"\n\nLydia tossed her head.\n\nAuntie snorted and snapped. Gracious, she had impressive teeth!\n\nElizabeth sidestepped Lydia and addressed Auntie. \"I will have the servants' doors near Lydia's chambers nailed shut for the remainder of your stay. Slate and Amber will keep watch over those corridors.\" Turning to Lydia, she pulled her shoulders back in her most draconic posture. \"I have no patience for your tricks and neither does my household. If you cross Auntie one more time, I will take you back to the Order offices and have you locked in a cell until such time as you are taken to school.\"\n\n\"You would not do such a thing.\" Lydia stomped. \"I cannot believe what has come over you, Lizzy. You are not even mistress of this house, yet! Aunt Gardiner was so understanding; she said you would be, too. Why must I attend the meeting today? With all the dragons of the kingdom? It sounds quite awful.\"\n\n\"The Conclave is the heart of dragon government, a key element of the Blue Order.\" Elizabeth rubbed her temples with her thumb and fingers. \"In the upper gallery, there are observation rooms with windows that look down over the Conclave floor. Aunt and Uncle Gardiner will take you there. You will not have to be close to the dragons, but you must go.\"\n\nLydia pouted and pressed her back against the wall. \"I do not want to go. I do not like these scaly creatures. I do not like their society.\"\n\n\"I am sure the feeling is mutual.\" Elizabeth sneaked a glance at Auntie who tried not to snicker. \"But unless you want to die a spinster confined to the north of England with little money and no society, I suggest you reform your opinions. This will be a good way to begin.\" Elizabeth stomped away and down the stairs.\n\nApril met her halfway down, landing on her shoulder. \"You do not look very pleased. Is it the stupid one again?\"\n\nElizabeth sniffed and rolled her eyes.\n\n\"You should spend time with my eggs instead. Georgiana is reading them stories from Tales of English Dragons. They are very entertaining.\"\n\n\"I am glad my recommendation meets your approval.\" She cuddled April against her cheek.\n\nApril sang a few notes, and a little bit of her tension eased. \"They are waiting for you in the parlor. Go to him. He always makes you feel better.\"\n\nShe was right, perceptive little creature.\n\nDarcy met her at the parlor door. Gracious, he cut a fine figure in his best suit. It was not as though she had never noticed before, but today he was particularly dapper. Was it wrong to smile in approval?\n\nWell, if it was, then so be it. He smiled back and anything that put that expression on his face could hardly be bad.\n\nIn the room behind him, Fitzwilliam laughed with Georgiana, probably at something Earl had just said or done. The sweet little creature was in his favorite spot, the crook of Fitzwilliam's arm, chittering and warbling his draconic version of baby talk. It was difficult to decide which was dearer, the chick or Fitzwilliam's response.\n\n\"The carriage will be ready in just a few minutes. Will you join us?\" Darcy offered his arm and laid his hand over hers. \"Rosings just came to fetch Pemberley for the Conclave.\"\n\n\"As crusty as she can be, I am a little surprised to find her being such an attentive brood mother.\"\n\nFitzwilliam snickered. \"Do not think too much of her. There are ulterior motives involved. She is tired of ill-mannered \"younger\" dragons misbehaving during official proceedings and has it in her craw that if Pemberley demonstrates proper behavior, then others will be apt to follow her lead.\"\n\nGeorgiana giggled. \"It sounds like something Aunt Catherine would say.\"\n\nDarcy's shoulders twitched as they usually did with any mention of his aunt. \"It is a shame we cannot do the same for junior keepers.\"\n\n\"Mary and Collins have been assigned a steward to assist them. Perhaps the same might be done for Anne.\" Elizabeth offered a half-wink that restored Darcy's smile.\n\n\"It is an excellent notion, but unless it becomes policy for the Order as a whole, I fear the de Bourgh ladies would never accept it.\" Fitzwilliam winked back at her.\n\n\"I will take your good humor as an excellent sign for the proceedings this morning.\" Elizabeth sat near Fitzwilliam and Georgiana, Darcy next to her.\n\n\"I am choosing to look at things that way. When Cownt Matlock settles a matter, most dragons are apt to defer.\"\n\n\"With good reason. One does not argue with a huge ancient firedrake without a very good reason\u2014\"\n\n\"And a small army of dragons in reserve.\" Fitzwilliam guffawed. \"I am convinced it is the right decision. Moreover, Netherfield brings unique value to the Order. He is a wealth of information, able to quote the lineage of nearly every major French dragon line and all of the ranking ones. I am sure the Order has no such Records.\"\n\n\"Forgive my ignorance, but what use is that information?\" Georgiana glanced between Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth as though she could not quite decide who was more likely to answer.\n\nElizabeth extended her hand toward Fitzwilliam.\n\nHe nodded, a twinkle in his eye. \"Dragons can be quite clannish and if lines of relation can be drawn, those connections may be the foundation of new treaties. The right connections could ultimately help bring the protections the Pendragon Accords offer English dragons to the continent.\"\n\nDarcy snorted into his fist. \"You sound like you are becoming a diplomat.\"\n\n\"There are worse businesses to be about.\" Fitzwilliam shrugged.\n\n\"That is not what you used to say. I recall you once called them\u2014\"\n\n\"I am well aware of what I once said, but things change, Darce, things change.\" Something about his expression, his tone, seemed wistful, even a touch melancholy.\n\nWhat could Fitzwilliam be repining when his mission had been such a grand success? The housekeeper peeked in to announce the carriage. Those questions would have to wait.\n\nDarcy handed her out of the carriage in front of the Blue Order offices. Would she ever grow accustomed to the fact such a place resided behind such a mundane fa\u00e7ade? Probably not. Darcy offered his arm and escorted her to the blue-painted front doors that swung open at Fitzwilliam's knock. Blue-liveried footmen recognized them immediately. They had been spending a great deal of time at the offices recently, so it should not be surprising but somehow, it still was. Darcy and Fitzwilliam might take it for granted they would be recognized when they went to great places, but a girl from a small country town did not even if her father was Historian of the Order.\n\nThe footman directed them to wait near a cluster of hall chairs for a robed and hooded Bondsman to escort them to the court room at the deepest level of the Order offices. Odd how the heavy, even cumbersome and quite antiquated official robes lent the Bondsmen an air of authority. The deep hoods, obscuring their faces, did the same. Perhaps revealing the burly but pimple-faced youths who served in that role would undermine their control. She bit her lower lip so as not to giggle. Who could expect Lords and major dragons to submit to mere youths? Such scandalous thoughts as was capable of!\n\nHow many steps was it down to the Order's gathering floor? At least one hundred and fifty, maybe as many as two hundred steps, not including the landings where not a few took advantage of small chairs to catch their breath. One day she would remember to count.\n\nThey paused upon reaching the court floor. The Bondsman scurried off to ready their places. Though the room had changed little since her first Dragon Conclave, today it felt far less threatening. The round room, as large as four substantial ball rooms together and as tall as a five-story house, still echoed, cool, dank, and dark as a pair of cockatrice flew around the perimeter lighting the wall lamps, first those at the floor level then slowly moving their way up the three balcony levels. With all the torches and mirrors, it would soon have as much light as a typical ballroom though its population would be anything but typical.\n\nTen tunnels opened into the room from all directions. There was room for two more, but that space, considered the front of the round room, sported the raised platforms with three rows of chairs: the gallery where the Order officials would sit when the Conclave assembled. To the left rose the judge's bench for the Minister of the Blue Court, Lord Dunbrook, and to the right, the desk for the Chancellor of the Order, the Earl of Matlock, who would preside over the Conclave.\n\nBetween the two tunnels to the right of the Chancellor's desk, a smaller gallery with five rows of chairs stood on a platform about a foot-and-a-half high. When they had last attended, a gated witness box had stood in this place. The Bondsman ushered them to sit in the front row, Georgiana between Darcy and Fitzwilliam. Earl snored in the crook of Fitzwilliam's arm as Georgiana cooed over him.\n\nDarcy glanced at Georgiana, an odd, warm look in his eye. He had never expected to see her at such an event, much less to see her happy and excited to be there. Now that she was, he somehow seemed content, even complete, as Elizabeth had never really seen him before. He leaned into Elizabeth's shoulder. Perhaps her presence with him was part of that completion as well. She would like to think it was.\n\nKeepers and dragons trickled in, a little like beans pouring into a basin, so few at first it hardly seemed possible it would fill, then suddenly there was hardly any room left. In the balcony galleries above, Dragon Keepers took their places by rank. She made out Mary and Collins almost directly opposite them on the highest level. On the floor above that, shadows moved behind a large window. That must be where the Gardiners sat with Lydia. Ironic, how Lydia was given a privilege open to few non-Keeping members of the Order, yet she probably despised it.\n\nLiveried attendants escorted major dragons of every shape to their places on the floor, carefully arranging them to keep tensions to a minimum. What a puzzle it must be sorting out how to preserve rank order while ensuring individuals remained separated from those whose proximity would spark violent reflexes. Just the thought of working out the correct height for the platforms for the rearmost dragons so they could see the proceedings yet not have their heads above the larger dragons in front of them made her head ache.\n\nTeams of Bondsmen with large curtains strung between tall poles stood ready to separate dragons if it appeared any were becoming too tense with one another. Another job she did not envy.\n\n\"Look there!\" Fitzwilliam pointed to the tunnel nearest the judge's bench.\n\nFour Bondsmen escorted Netherfield to a gated and locked box next to the judge's bench. Had he wanted, Netherfield could certainly have broken free, but with so many large dragons so close, it was very unlikely he could make an escape. If he even tried, the Conclave would not be merciful. He seemed content to settle into the box and watch the spectacle, catching Fitzwilliam's eye, nodding as he did.\n\nA hush settled over the room, the kind of heavy, unnatural sound that set one's nerves on edge. The sort of sound a forest made\u2014or rather did not make\u2014when a large dragon was walking past. Bondsmen with gold-embroidered Blue Order crests on their chests and feathered turbans in place of hoods appeared from the near tunnel, more of an honor guard than an escort, three on each side of Shin-dee-a. Her bright red hide shone in the candlelight, probably oiled just for the occasion. She smelt of exotic spices, warm like ginger and cinnamon, but not nearly so commonplace. The Bondsman settled her near their gallery.\n\n\"You look warm and well-fed.\" Elizabeth rose and curtsied deep, pulling the edges of her cloak over her head.\n\nApril peeked out from the folds of Elizabeth's hood, wings over her head, bowing.\n\nShin-dee-a chuckled deeply. \"Pleasing to see you, Erizabet. I very well treated, thank you. Barwines Chudleigh most gracious, even sharing me her cavern. Her salons most interesting \u2026 Lairda April, surprised to see you here.\"\n\n\"I come as Earl's nursemaid.\" April pointed at him with her wing.\n\nShin-dee-a laughed heartily. \"Can you sing large dragons to sleep, too? Most handy skill at such a gathering.\"\n\nApril chuckled and twittered softly. Shin-dee-a's eyelids drooped. Whether it was real or feigned was difficult to tell, given the envoy's gentle sense of humor.\n\nFitzwilliam choked on his laughter. \"I have had the same thought. Look! Pemberley arrives.\" He pointed to the tunnel opposite the Officers' Gallery at the center of the back wall, the most prestigious entrance for Conclave attendants \u2026 and the most noticeable.\n\nRosings paraded in, regal and assured as only an ancient firedrake could manage. She extended one wing over Pemberley as they walked, both sheltering her from too much attention and making clear her presence was no accident or oversight. For her part, Pemberley did a remarkable job of maintaining her composure, except for a brief moment when she peeked under Rosings' wing and grinned, waving at Elizabeth, but surely that was too adorable to bring much censure.\n\n\"Your family dragon arrives.\" Shin-dee-a pointed at Longbourn who took his place among the lower ranked dragons. That was one of the differences between English and Eastern dragons. Instead of Keeps, Eastern dragons were attached to particular families.\n\nA gong sounded, cutting through the room's roar, and another eerie hush fell. Baron Dunbrook, the Minister of the Court, gold ormolu scepter held high, led in the parade of Blue Order officials, robed in blue, gold, and ivory. Papa hobbled in at the end of the line, leaning heavily on his walking stick.\n\nWhen was the last time she had seen him in his official robes? If only Mama could see him, looking so official and important\u2014how proud she would be. Or would she be embarrassed that he was at the end of the line? It was difficult to say.\n\nThe officers took their places in the gallery.\n\nLord Matlock, blue robes resplendent with heavy gold trim, mounted the steps to his desk. His somber expression fitted the gravity of his office, but it was far and away lighter than it had been when he had called her into his office to discuss the matter of Netherfield.\n\nOnce she and Darcy married, she would be connected to him. How strange it would be to consider someone so far above her as family. Then again, Lady Catherine would be her family as well, so perhaps one would make up for the other.\n\nLord Dunbrook raised up his firedrake-topped staff and rapped it on the large brass plate in the floor just behind the judge's bench. Sonorous tones resounded off the stone floor and walls, reverberating deep in Elizabeth's bones\u2014the kind of sound it was difficult to tell whether one felt or heard. She struggled not to clap her hands over her ears to block some of the noise, not that it would have helped much. The dragons with the most acute hearing snapped and snorted and stomped. The Bondsmen watched, ready to jump in to prevent aggressions until the sound faded away. Perhaps it was time to craft a new gong that would be less objectionable to all? Papa would probably have a fit to hear her suggest such a thing.\n\nAs the room came to order, Lord Dunbrook opened the Conclave by reading a summary of the Pendragon Treaty and Accords, as much an act of ceremony as a reminder to agitated dragons of the behavior required of them. Sitting at the judge's bench, he rang a high-pitched, desk-top chime three times. \"The Dragon Conclave of England is now in session.\"\n\nA brief roar of assent, then silence.\n\nLord Matlock rose. \"We are privileged to welcome a most honored visitor into our midst: Shin-dee-a, envoy of the Eastern Dragon Federation.\"\n\nCownt Matlock slowly rose to his full height, his head above every other on the court floor and strutted toward Shin-dee-a. His blue-green hide shone in the candlelight, oiled and polished for the occasion, orange eyes glittering bright. Ears pricked, wings held just slightly above his shoulders, tip of his tail flicking lightly, he was relaxed and pleased, completely in his element.\n\nHe stopped about six feet from Shin-dee-a. She stood on her back feet, extending her forearms to spread her gliding wings, and puffed her body, making herself as large as possible. Each movement was slow and deliberate, a formal greeting, not an act of aggression. Cownt Matlock extended his wings and raised his head a moment to tower over her, then lowered his head to match her height.\n\nIt was not a standard greeting, to be sure. According to dragon lore, this sort of meeting had never occurred before. But it contained all the necessary symbolism for the Conclave to understand the honor and deference given and received by both parties.\n\n\"Envoy, you are welcome among us. Enjoy our hospitality. Learn who we are, and allow us to come to know the Eastern Dragons.\"\n\nShin-dee-a trumpeted an odd trill in a pentatonic Eastern scale, but the overall sound was melodic and welcoming. \"I accept your invitation and bring greetings from the Eastern Dragon Federation. Is our hope this be first of many meetings and start of warm friendship among our kinds.\"\n\nCownt Matlock bugled back a friendly sound, but the final tone was a warning note to the British dragons. He expected exemplary behavior from the dragons of the Conclave and would tolerate nothing less.\n\nFrom her place on the floor, Barwines Chudleigh rose, wings extended, and bellowed her welcome. Others followed her example until the room shook with the cacophony. The sound died down, and Chudleigh turned to face the Conclave. \"A salon will be held after Conclave for you to meet the envoy. Inform the Bondsmen if you wish to attend.\"\n\nCownt Matlock voiced a sound of approval, nodding to Chudleigh and Shin-dee-a as he returned to his place.\n\nBaron Chudleigh, Secretary of the Order, stood just in front of Lord Matlock's desk. He unfurled his scroll. \"The French dragon, known in England as Netherfield, presents himself for membership to the Blue Order.\"\n\nThe expected murmur rippled through the room.\n\n\"Who sponsors this request?\" Lord Matlock's voice boomed. How long had it taken him to perfect that draconic resonance?\n\n\"I sponsor him.\" Longbourn's voice echoed from the rearmost ranks.\n\nElizabeth whipped around to see Longbourn. He stood tall but shifted from one foot to the other as he scanned the Conclave. How had Fitzwilliam managed to garner Longbourn's cooperation?\n\nSalt. It had to be salt. Now that his hoard was known, Longbourn's cooperation would likely be guaranteed for some time to come.\n\n\"And I,\" Fitzwilliam stood, straightening his jacket and pulling his shoulders back. Though certainly not a dragon's voice, his carried, low and confident, across the cavernous room.\n\nNow that was unexpected. But if the man sent as executioner now sponsored Netherfield, how could the Conclave object?\n\n\"Although his immigration into England was not conducted according to strict legal channels, Netherfield did receive permission from the previous holder of Netherfield Keep to reside in that territory. During his time in the territory, he largely obeyed the spirit of the Pendragon Accords and proved himself a reliable dragon citizen.\"\n\nDarcy rose and cleared his throat. \"With the singular exception of engaging in persuasions among the dragon hearers at Longbourn and Netherfield.\"\n\nElizabeth drew breath to speak, but a quick look from Darcy begged her trust. She pressed her fingers to her lips.\n\n\"How plead you, Netherfield?\" Lord Matlock asked.\n\n\"Guilty, but ignorant, sir.\" Netherfield hung his head and clasped his forepaws before him, as contrite as little Samuel Gardiner caught in a transgression. \"No such restriction on persuasion exists in France. I had no idea it was considered a criminal offense.\"\n\n\"Upon learning of the injunctions, he has obeyed them scrupulously.\" Fitzwilliam glanced back at Netherfield.\n\n\"I have, most attentively. I do not wish to be the source of any controversy or conflict.\" Netherfield hung his head.\n\n\"His ability to get along with Longbourn in the neighboring estate attests to this fact.\" Fitzwilliam gestured toward Longbourn.\n\nLord Matlock waved Lord Dunbrook forward. \"The court has thoroughly examined the case and Netherfield himself. What is your recommendation?\"\n\nLord Dunbrook approached Netherfield, somber as befitting the situation. \"The court submits the opinion that Netherfield be provisionally accepted into the Blue Order and assigned a territory in the north, surrounded by reliable Keeps ready to assist his assimilation into English dragon life.\"\n\nOf course, such a statement could not go unchallenged, but that was to be expected whenever there was opportunity to display a show of dominance. For the next three quarters of an hour, the lower dragons challenged Netherfield's worthiness while Matlock, Chudleigh, and Dunbrook stood their ground in favor of his acceptance. Eventually Cownt Matlock called for a vote. A few dissented simply because they could, but the resolution passed, and Netherfield was called from the witness box.\n\nUnder the direction of several Bondsmen, he approached Cownt and Lord Matlock, head very low, whiskers scraping the ground.\n\n\"By the consensus of the voting members of the Order, we recognize you as a provisional member and assign you the Keep, to be known going forward as Netherford. Your name is now 'Netherford' to always remind you of where you belong and for what you will be responsible.\" Lord Matlock declared.\n\n\"Do you accept these responsibilities and agree to abide by the Pendragon Treaty and Accords for the rest of your life?\" Asked with such a growl, how could anyone refuse?\n\n\"I do.\" Netherford murmured into the floor.\n\nCownt Matlock tapped the back of Netherford's neck with a claw, loosening several scales which would be kept by the Order, a sort of signature attesting to the contract just formed.\n\n\"There is one further matter to be settled: that of a Keeper.\" Lord Matlock scanned the audience in the gallery. \"Several volunteers have stepped forward to offer themselves for the service.\"\n\nOf course, they had. How many younger sons would be able to resist the opportunity to become established in an estate as a full Dragon Keeper, with little or no expense to himself? All cynicism aside, it was a wonderful opportunity for any young man. Unfortunately, too few younger sons\u2014or daughters\u2014had been trained up to be proper Keepers, especially for a dragon like Netherfield\u2014rather, Netherford\u2014who would need an extraordinary amount of direction for at least a decade.\n\n\"At the request of Netherford, we name Richard Fitzwilliam as Keeper to Netherford.\"\n\nFitzwilliam's jaw dropped, and his forehead creased deeply, almost as though he expected at any moment to be told it was merely a joke his older brothers were playing on him. Darcy clapped his shoulder and nodded vigorously. Had Darcy been consulted on the matter? Considering the way Darcy usually responded to surprises, probably so.\n\n\"Step forward, son.\" Lord Matlock smiled a very genuine smile.\n\nNetherford turned toward Fitzwilliam and looked him in the eyes. \"Will you be Keeper to my estate and help me to establish myself as a proper member of the Order?\"\n\nFitzwilliam rose, his knees trembling, but Elizabeth was probably the only one who noticed. He passed Earl to Darcy and stepped forward, slowly, deliberately, to Netherford's side. \"I had no expectation.\"\n\n\"That is part of the reason I asked for you. You have no motives for me to question. Besides, we have a great deal in common. You were in France, too.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Fitzwilliam bowed his head. \"I am honored to accept the appointment, and all that it requires.\"\n\nMatlock gestured for Fitzwilliam to kneel beside Netherford and place his hand on Netherford's head. Matlock laid one hand on Fitzwilliam's head and the other on Netherford's. \"Your lives will be linked for all time. Fitzwilliam, your progeny will serve as Keepers. Netherford, you will hold the territory on their behalf, and your offspring will hold it for them after you. This relationship is not just for now, but for all the future generations. With that in mind, I name you Dragon and Keeper. Let the Records show this new bond.\"\n\nApplause began in the galleries and drifted down to the floor. Dragons bugled, and the room dissolved into chaotic effusions.\n\nElizabeth chanced a quick glance at Darcy. His eyes glistened, and he bit his lip though his smile still crept through.\n\nThe celebratory din died away, and Fitzwilliam took a step back.\n\n\"Stay where you are, Fitzwilliam. Mr. Darcy, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, approach the Chancellor.\" What did Lord Matlock have in mind?\n\nNo one had apprised them of any charges being brought against them. They had no opportunity to prepare a defense. That was not according to the established protocols. She swallowed hard. Darcy passed Earl to Georgiana and offered his arm, the creases along his eyes revealing as much bewilderment as she felt. She took it gladly.\n\nAs they approached Lord Matlock, Cownt Matlock arranged himself beside his Keeper. Both of them? What could they possibly have done to require them to face both Matlocks?\n\nLord Matlock clasped his hands behind his back and glanced from them to the dragons in the audience and up to the balcony galleries behind them. \"Over the past several months, the dragon state has faced perils unseen for centuries, and you three have managed to be in the thick of it all.\"\n\nOver Matlock's shoulder, Papa glowered directly at her. Elizabeth gulped.\n\n\"An egg stolen from its Keep, a drakling wild-hatched, then sick to near death, deaf-speakers brought into the knowledge of dragons, a rogue dragon, and a lost foreign envoy\u2014\"\n\n\"It was not their fault that I became misdirected.\" Shin-dee-a called. \"In fact, they were quite\u2014\"\n\nCownt Matlock growled a soft warning.\n\n\"It is not lost on the officers of the Order the role you have played in these events.\"\n\nBreathe. She must remember to breathe. Swooning here and now would be anathema to the dragons\u2014to show such weakness before them. She might never regain their respect after such a display. No matter what Matlock declared, she could endure it in order not to lose her standing among the dragons. Cold air ached in her chest as she forced it in and out.\n\n\"It is time that it be officially recognized and dealt with according to the ancient traditions of the Order.\" Lord Matlock waved at someone behind his dragon.\n\nLord Chudleigh appeared, carrying a small stool upholstered in blue velvet with the seal of the Order embroidered in gold thread. Lord Dunbrook followed behind, bearing a substantial sheathed sword. Enamel work along the sheath depicted the Pendragon crest.\n\nThe Pendragon sword? Elizabeth's knee threatened to buckle.\n\nLord Chudleigh placed the stool on the floor before Lord Matlock as he unsheathed the sword and held it upright before him for the Conclave to see.\n\nThe blade itself had been worn with time, no longer sharp as it once was. Bits of rust stained the blade, but the hilt and pommel were brightly polished, inlaid with blue gems matching Lord Dunbrook's staff. It could be none other than the Pendragon blade.\n\n\"The Pendragon Order recognizes your meritorious service to the Order. Richard Fitzwilliam, step forward and kneel.\"\n\nFitzwilliam obeyed.\n\n\"By the power conferred to me by Uther Pendragon through the Blue Order, I make you Knight Bachelor of the Pendragon Order.\" He tapped Fitzwilliam's shoulders with the sword.\n\nCownt Matlock extended his wings to cover Fitzwilliam and Lord Matlock.\n\nThe dragons remained oddly silent as if waiting for Cownt Matlock to reveal them once again.\n\nCownt Matlock folded his wings and Fitzwilliam stood, eyes wide and face a little pale. The corner of Lord Matlock's lips turned up though, enough to crease the corners of his eyes, as broad a smile as he would ever offer in such company. \"Fitzwilliam Darcy, step forward and kneel.\"\n\nFitzwilliam winked at Darcy as they passed one another. Darcy appeared to ignore it as he knelt before Lord Matlock, but the barest twitch of an eyebrow betrayed him.\n\n\"By the power conferred to me by Uther Pendragon through the Blue Order, I make you Knight Bachelor of the Pendragon Order.\" He tapped Darcy's shoulders with the sword.\n\nCownt Matlock received Darcy, and he stepped back to Elizabeth's side.\n\n\"Miss Elizabeth Bennet,\" Lord Matlock gestured to the stool.\n\nHad she heard that correctly? He had called her name? Darcy nudged her, and she stepped forward, lightheaded and unsteady. Kneeling on the soft stool was a welcome relief from standing.\n\n\"What does a kingdom do with a woman such as yourself?\" Lord Matlock asked. \"You present us quite a conundrum, Miss Bennet.\"\n\n\"Perhaps to you, but not to us.\" Cownt Matlock bumped Lord Matlock aside with his shoulder. \"He may have his piece in a moment, but we will have our say first.\" He beckoned with his wing. Barwines Chudleigh slithered from her place to settle beside Cownt Matlock. Barwin Dunbrook flanked his other side.\n\n\"Over the last ssseveral monthsss, your contributionsss to not just dragon lore, but to dragon medicine, dragon relationsss \u2026 nearly all things pertinent to usss has become obviousss.\" Chudleigh wove slightly as she spoke.\n\n\"Your services are needed by the Order.\" Cownt Matlock pulled his head up high and puffed his body. He was about to say something very significant. \"By decree of the dragons of the Council, we create a new officer of the Blue Order and appoint you to serve in that role: Dragon Sage. As such, you will be responsible, with the Chief Scribe, for reforming the education of all Dragon Mates, both Keepers and Friends, and for consulting with the same in all matters of draconic difficulties.\"\n\nElizabeth stared slack-jawed. \"Sage? There is no Dragon Sage.\"\n\n\"There will be once you accept your possst.\" Chudleigh's tongue flicked Elizabeth's cheek, a soft nudge reminding her of where she was.\n\nElizabeth glanced back at Darcy. He stood stiff and straight, but his eyes said everything she needed to hear. \"I accept.\"\n\n\"Of course, you do.\" Cownt Matlock murmured, dismissing Chudleigh and Dunbrook with a flick of his wings.\n\n\"May I continue now?\" Lord Matlock sounded stern, but his posture seemed more amused.\n\n\"If you must.\" Cownt Matlock shuffled aside.\n\n\"As I said, you present us quite a conundrum, Miss Bennet. You flout convention at every turn, and yet, as our dragons have already recognized, you seem to have an unfailing ability to think like a dragon and understand the real needs of a situation, proving yourself time and again. By the power conferred to me by Uther Pendragon through the Blue Order, I make you Dame Commander of the Pendragon Order.\" He tapped her shoulders with the sword.\n\nCownt Matlock enveloped them with his wings. \"We have been observing you for a long time. These accolades are long overdue. You should have been dedicated to Order service years ago.\"\n\nCownt Matlock folded his wings back, but it was several moments before she found sufficient strength to step back between Darcy and Fitzwilliam. The room erupted in an ecstatic roar. In the gallery behind Lord Matlock, Papa shook his head, clearly befuddled by what had just transpired. But his face was soft, not so much displeased as bewildered.\n\nOn Lord Matlock's instruction, they faced the Conclave. \"Sir Richard, Sir Fitzwilliam, and Lady Elizabeth.\"\n\nPemberley waddled from her place beside Rosings directly to Cownt Matlock, and the room stilled. \"This mean she my Keeper now?\"\n\nElizabeth rushed to her side and wrapped her arm over Pemberley's shoulders. \"Not yet dearling, but very soon.\"\n\n\"No! I waited! I patient. I learn letters. I learn pencil. I learn gliding. I promised learn, I learn. Now I want Keeper!\" She lifted her front foot but stopped just before she stomped. The little dear had more self-control than Lydia. She looked up balefully at Matlock. \"Please, may I has my Keeper now?\"\n\nWhispers rippled back and forth across the room, drifting down from the balconies above. The human voices Elizabeth could pick out seemed rather scandalized. The dragons repeated the question amongst themselves as though it carried great weight and merit. Human ceremony, especially regarding betrothal and marriage, made little sense to them.\n\n\"I will consider your request.\" Lord Matlock strode to the Officer's gallery and conferred with several officers. He returned with the Blue Order Bishop at his heels and waved Darcy to join them. \"The first question is, can it be done?\"\n\nThe bishop wrung his hands. \"Have the banns been read?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It is still forenoon.\" He chewed his lower lip. \"The ceremony can be conducted in the Order chapel behind us. Under the circumstances, I think it can be accommodated.\"\n\n\"The bigger question\u2014how do you feel about it, Elizabeth?\" Darcy crouched beside Pemberley, \"I understand what you want, but you must remember that yours is not the only opinion of import in the case.\"\n\n\"I want her.\" Pemberley wound her neck around Elizabeth's waist. \"I very patient like I promised.\"\n\n\"Yes, you have been. Barwines Chudleigh has told me you have worked very hard in all your studies. I am very proud of you, my dear.\" Elizabeth scratched under her chin.\n\n\"Tea has already been ordered for my sssalon after the Conclave. We could make a sssort of wedding breakfast for you of that, to celebrate after the fashion of your kind,\" Barwines Chudleigh whispered, her tongue tickling Elizabeth's ear.\n\n\"It is, of course, your choice, but after the anxiety of the recent months, I think it would be a very good thing for the Order's morale to see their heroes wed in the presence of the Conclave.\" Lord Matlock clearly held a strong opinion, but he was trying hard to appear mild and open to their preferences\u2014not succeeding well, but trying.\n\nElizabeth giggled. \"A sort of happily-ever-after to end a dragon fairy-story?\"\n\n\"Rather like that,\" Matlock winked just barely, looking remarkably like Fitzwilliam.\n\n\"I suppose everyone we would wish to invite is already here. And we had talked about how to accommodate dragon guests for the wedding breakfast.\" Elizabeth shrugged at Darcy.\n\nHe took her hand. \"I would just as soon not wait another day to make you my wife.\"\n\n\"Might our families attend us in the chapel?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Lord Matlock summoned a Bondsman and issued a flurry of instructions. \"The request of young Pemberley has been granted. You are all invited to attend the Darcys' wedding breakfast following the Conclave, hosted by Barwines Chudleigh.\"\n\nElizabeth clutched her forehead. Perhaps this ending was becoming a little too farfetched for even a fairy-story.\n\nIn very short order, Elizabeth stood at the back of the Blue Order chapel with Papa. Except for the absence of windows, it resembled every other chapel she had ever known. Workmanship was probably the biggest difference, with all the mahogany woodwork carefully carved in even, geometric patterns, polished and cleaned. What was not covered in wood bore bright white paint. Neither dust nor cobwebs marred any surface\u2014they would have been quite noticeable with so many candles lighting the interior.\n\nThe two families quietly talked among themselves, at least insofar as Lady Catherine was capable of speaking softly with Lord and Lady Matlock. Clearly, she did not approve of anything that was happening. A wedding with dragons?\n\nLady Matlock did not approve of her disapproval. Collins tried to wade into the situation, only to set Lady Catherine off further, earning both a scolding from Cait.\n\nNear the front of the chapel, Walker extended his wings, trying to block Pemberley's and Earl's view of the bickering. How little Pemberley had pleaded to attend the ceremony that would make Elizabeth her Keeper though she really had no understanding of what was actually happening. The bishop tried to refuse, but even he could not resist her baleful looks and soulful pleading.\n\nFitzwilliam laughed as he made small talk with Georgiana and Pemberley and played with Earl, pointedly ignoring Lady Catherine's unpleasantness. She seemed determined to have someone attend to her and rose, puffed and bustling like an angry dragon, and headed toward Fitzwilliam. April launched from Elizabeth's shoulder and hovered near Lady Catherine, singing softly. She stopped and then returned to Lady Matlock, yawning.\n\n\"Your mother will regret missing your wedding,\" Papa muttered, not meeting her gaze. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and tapped his walking stick on the wood floor.\n\n\"April will persuade her that she attended a ceremony and a breakfast hosted by Lady Matlock that was everything she could have wanted for her daughter.\" It was very kind of Lady Matlock to offer the ruse to mollify Mama, for it would mean she had to admit Mama and Kitty into her acquaintance.\n\nPapa harrumphed under his breath. \"I am sure that will placate her, especially if your Aunt Gardiner reinforces it.\"\n\nElizabeth half-turned her back on him. It was far more pleasant to watch Mr. Darcy talking with the bishop. Darcy's smile was handsome and contagious, much better to dwell upon right now. \"It would be entirely appropriate for you to say something kind just before you place my hand in Mr. Darcy's.\"\n\n\"I always wanted you to stay at Longbourn with me\u2014as much as Longbourn did.\" Papa shuffled a step toward her.\n\n\"Even though I did little beyond confound and frustrate you at every turn?\"\n\nThere it was, that annoyed grumbly sound he always made when she vexed him. \"Must you always make things sound so very bad? I confess, your ways are difficult for me to accept or even understand. I know I have been vocal about that. But what you would expect of a historian who treasures the traditions of our Order?\"\n\nShe shrugged. It was a better alternative than telling him such excuses were hardly becoming.\n\n\"I am proud of you. The dragons esteem you in a way unheard of in all the annals. You have a rare gift with them. Perhaps I should have recognized that more.\"\n\nIt was not actually an apology, but it was more than he had ever said. That should mean something, but it was difficult to tell if it really did. Something to think upon later.\n\nThe bishop called the little group to order and signaled Papa to escort her to Mr. Darcy.\n\nPapa might be reluctant to express his esteem, but the party who waited for her was not. Fitzwilliam, Georgiana, Pemberley, Walker, even little Earl watched her approach with such anticipation. Pemberley flapped, just a little, as if it might hurry them along. Georgiana tried to soothe her, stroking her head, but it only made her flap harder.\n\nPapa relinquished her to Darcy and sat with the Gardiners and Collinses.\n\nThe bishop opened the Book of Common Prayer and read, \"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in Holy Matrimony \u2026\"\n\nPemberley waddled closer and closer until she pressed her head against Elizabeth's waist.\n\nThe bishop did well, only raising an eyebrow at her, but not missing a beat in his reading. Only a man who had spent many years in the presence of dragons could manage such a feat. He placed her hand in Darcy's and enjoined him to speak.\n\n\"I, Fitzwilliam Darcy take thee Elizabeth Bennet to my wedded Wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.\"\n\nShe responded in kind.\n\nThe bishop looked at him expectantly. \"The ring?\"\n\nThe poor man went absolutely white."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Walker swooped toward them and Darcy extended his arm for him to land, more from reflex than conscious thought. He was hardly capable of that at the moment. How could he have possibly forgotten a ring? Would the bishop declare them wed without one? Would Elizabeth ever forgive him such a blunder? Where could he possibly\u2014\n\nWalker nudged his hand with his head. How could he possibly look so smug at a time like this? He dropped a small object from his beak. \"I went back to the house and found this. It was your mother's. I hope it will do.\"\n\nBlood roared in Darcy's ears as he gulped in a ragged breath. How could he thank Walker enough for this?\n\nWithout looking at it, he slipped the ring on her finger. It was a wee bit big, but that was easy enough to sort out later. \"With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.\"\n\nElizabeth's lips formed a perfect \"o\" and her eyes glittered, staring at the ring. The wide gold band was familiar: a pair of firedrakes together clasping a domed blue stone in raised filigree. Mother had worn it on special occasions, a gift from Father's mother upon Darcy's birth. Had Walker any idea how excellent his choice was?\n\n\"I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. I present to you Sir Fitzwilliam and Lady Elizabeth Darcy.\"\n\nThe next several hours passed in a blur of greetings, introductions, and congratulations that began at the Barwines Chudleigh's wedding breakfast but seemed to spill out and span every level of the Blue Order offices. Knights of the Blue Order were not made every day, Dame Commanders even less often, and the creation of a new office entirely? Unheard of! Everyone, human and dragon, seemed compelled to offer their good wishes and even to begin plying Elizabeth with questions.\n\nPoor woman was nearly overwhelmed by everyone, requiring both of her knights to step in and extricate her from seekers. Was that why Matlock had made them? It was unlikely the only reason, but it was amusing to consider.\n\nBy the time they escaped their well-wishers, no time remained to return to Darcy House. They rode directly to Cheapside where the Collinses and the Gardiners had put together a small wedding breakfast. With Cait and the cadre of fairy dragons to persuade Mrs. Bennet and Kitty of the elegant wedding breakfast they had just attended at Matlock House, Mrs. Bennet soon praised Aunt Matlock's generosity and hospitality in welcoming Elizabeth into their family. Surely attending the actual events could not have made Mrs. Bennet any happier.\n\nMore importantly, the warmth in Elizabeth's eyes suggested she was genuinely happy for a small intimate gathering to celebrate with those closest to her. As long as they were now married, who was he to complain?\n\nAt last, they returned to Darcy House, retreating to their favorite parlor for warm cider, roasted apples, and toast. Perhaps it was a plain sort of thing to do, but after a day such as this had been, something ordinary felt very welcome.\n\nThey sat close on the fainting couch, staring into the fire, draining the last of the cider. Surrounded by the smells of the fire, apples, and her subtle perfume, a lazy comfort spread through his limbs. He put out most of the candles, leaving the room small and intimate around them, cozy and inviting. Exactly right.\n\nHe slipped his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. \"This was certainly not the day I expected.\"\n\n\"Are you disappointed?\" She cuddled into his side.\n\n\"Hardly. Merely a little surprised. When one deals with dragons, one does not expect for things to go exactly as one might dream.\" He pressed his cheek to the top of her head.\n\n\"They do usually make things complicated.\"\n\n\"I expect that is a word we shall revisit often.\"\n\n\"There is one thing I have found very helpful when things seem complicated.\"\n\n\"What is that, Mrs. Darcy?\"\n\n\"Often things seem much clearer if one tries to think like a dragon.\"\n\n\"Indeed, is that so?\" He nuzzled the side of her neck, growling slightly. \"Are you perhaps recommending now would be such a time?\"\n\n\"It is a good place to begin.\" She winked at him.\n\nAnd it was.\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nThree weeks later, Elizabeth and April ushered a crowd into Darcy House's largest drawing room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the walls to accommodate the gathering. As twitterpated as April was over the hatching, it was easier to move into a larger room than to try and to convince her to restrict the attendees.\n\nPapa, with Drew, his new secretary\u2014whom Mama thought a rather large dog\u2014insisted on being there. Lady Astrid had expressed interest in publishing his fairy dragon monograph at last, so he wanted to refresh the section on hatching with new observations. April did not object, and the reasoning was sound, so it was hard to deny them.\n\nWalker, Slate, and Amber had to be there as they were part of the household. The hatchling who would hopefully befriend Georgiana would need to accustom herself to them as soon as possible. Though Earl and Fitzwilliam would not be living with them, they would be regularly in their company, so an early acquaintance made sense there, too.\n\nWas it really necessary to have Auntie\u2014and Lydia\u2014there, though? It was not as if they were going to be with them for very long, nor were they likely to see each other with any regularity, but April thought it appropriate.\n\nWith Georgiana, Lady Astrid, and Bylock, they now had seven people, five drakes and two cockatrice in the room. Good thing minor drakes were rather companionable sorts.\n\nWalker was not fond of so much company and kept to himself near the windows. His excuse was to ensure they were guarded against predators that might disturb the hatching. No one dared insult his dignity by suggesting the closed windows were sufficient to the task.\n\nPapa sat near the fire, directing Fitzwilliam in shaving slivers of blood and treacle pudding into a pan of broth simmering on the hob. Lady Astrid and Georgiana helped the drakes rub soft flannels over themselves to give the hatchlings their scent, then rubbed the same cloths over their throats and hands. Papa said it made it more likely for the hatchlings to stay and choose a Friend. Naturally, the hatchlings would ultimately do as they pleased, as all dragons did, but anything that might make the process easier was welcome.\n\n\"Historian Bennet says you should give these your scent and Walker's as well, then give them to Fitzwilliam and Earl.\" Georgiana brought them a pile of flannels.\n\nHer cheeks were flushed prettily, and she could hardly subdue her smile. It was difficult to believe she had ever been the dragon-fearing child Darcy had once described. His eyes shone as he took the cloths. If pride could be palpable, his was.\n\nThe only one in the room who did not seem to share in the warm feelings was Lydia who hunched on a hard stool near the far side of the fireplace. She did not do well when she was not the center of attention. Auntie insisted she attend to gain a better understanding of the bond between dragon and Friend. Lydia had brought a book\u2014a lavishly illustrated bestiary that took up her entire lap. She stared resolutely at its pages, not answering any inquiry directed toward her until everyone simply ignored her. Ah well, it was probably the best anyone could ask for, given the circumstances.\n\n\"The eggs, they are moving!\" Lady Astrid cried and hurried to the nesting box.\n\nGeorgiana took her place along the adjacent side. Elizabeth positioned herself between them while the drakes stood in a ring just beyond.\n\nPapa and Fitzwilliam prepared saucers of broth and sausage and brought them near the box.\n\nTwo of the three eggs in the center of the box wobbled and rocked. The tiny third one lay on its side, resolutely still. Elizabeth moved it to the far corner, out of the way.\n\nBoth mottled eggs cracked near the top, exposing the inner membrane. Georgiana clasped her hands tightly before her. She had been warned to let the hatchlings escape their shells on their own. Lady Astrid leaned over the box, hands clutched behind her back. Perhaps she was as excited as Georgiana.\n\nA sharp beak poked through the egg nearest Lady Astrid. April paced beside it, trilling encouraging sounds. The chick seemed to respond, forcing its head through the shell, a rather surprised look on its tiny face as it blinked in the room's muted light. She quickly pulled her wings from the shell and flapped herself free of it, sending egg slime flying in every direction. Lady Astrid offered her hand to the hatchling for a perch and reached for a flannel.\n\n\"You are the absolute perfect image of a fairy dragon, just like the illustrations in my books.\" Astrid cooed as she dried the deep blue chick. It fluffed into a perfect fairy dragon dandelion.\n\nThe chick turned her head this way and that, cheeping prettily. \"Hungry?\" She said it so politely, so sweetly.\n\n\"Of course.\" Lady Astrid offered her a saucer of broth.\n\nWhat a truly ladylike little thing. Nothing like the greedy guzzles most chicks usually indulged in after hatching.\n\n\"May I call you Verona, for you are the true image of what I imagined a fairy dragon to be.\" Lady Astrid had a rather vivid imagination if this was what she imagined after having known April.\n\nThe chick lifted her head and seemed to consider the notion carefully. \"Verona. Yes.\" She returned to her meal as Lady Astrid stroked her back.\n\n\"Lizzy! Lizzy! I think something is wrong!\" Georgiana pointed to the other egg.\n\nA silvery white beak, followed by an egg-slime covered head, very pale, silvery, almost white, burst forth. With a little squawk, the chick threw off the egg and hopped and flapped, screeching until most of the goo was gone. \"No wet!\" it cried.\n\n\"Clean her off.\" Elizabeth spoke into her hand. Hopefully it would hide the giggle. The chick certainly had strong preferences already.\n\n\"Come here. I will make you warm and dry, little one.\" Georgiana knelt beside the box, making her nearly eye to eye with the chick.\n\nThe chick spread her wings and offered them to Georgiana who already seemed expert in drying and fluffing. \"Better!\" She cheeped and hopped into Georgiana's hand, such a happy, peaceful little thing cuddling her palm.\n\n\"Have you ever seen a white fairy dragon?\" Georgiana asked, stroking the chick's head.\n\n\"No, I did not realize they could be white. She is quite extraordinary. Go ahead and offer her some broth.\"\n\nA large book hit the floor.\n\n\"Ouch! Stop that!\" Lydia snatched her hand away from her lap.\n\nElizabeth rushed to Lydia. The tiniest fairy dragon Elizabeth had ever seen stood on Lydia's knee, pecking her hand and dripping goo on Lydia's gown.\n\n\"Hungry! Hungry now!\"\n\nFitzwilliam pressed a saucer into Lydia's hand.\n\nThe black and red chick tipped her beak into the broth and spat it at Lydia's face. \"No! Hungry!\"\n\n\"Honey, hand me the honey!\" Elizabeth reached over Lydia's head as Darcy passed her the honey pot. \"Here, this will please you.\" She placed the open pot on Lydia's lap.\n\nThe chick thrust her head in the pot, guzzling loudly.\n\n\"She is just like you.\" Elizabeth looked at April.\n\nApril flitted to Lydia's knees and examined the chick. \"She is very tiny.\"\n\nThe chick pulled her head out of the honey, beak dripping, and pecked at April. \"Mine. Hungry.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are hungry, but you are not alone and must be ready to share.\" April chided as she preened the chick.\n\n\"Lydia, dry her off.\" Elizabeth handed her a flannel.\n\nClumsy and a touch annoyed, Lydia scrubbed away the slime. \"You are actually a pretty little thing, but I thought only two of the eggs were to hatch.\"\n\n\"You were wrong.\" The chick pecked at Lydia's hand, drawing a tiny dot of blood.\n\n\"Ouch! Do not do that!\" Lydia snatched her hand away.\n\n\"You should not say very stupid things.\"\n\n\"Well, they did not seem stupid to me.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps you should think about them a bit more before you say them. More sweet.\"\n\nLydia shoved the pot toward the chick.\n\n\"Do not argue!\" a tiny voice cried. The white chick nestling in Georgiana's elbow shook her head furiously.\n\n\"You are like me and prefer peace.\" Georgiana stroked the chick's head. \"If you are agreeable, I shall call you Pax.\"\n\nA happy cheep confirmed her name.\n\nPapa shambled up to Lydia and peered over her shoulder. \"She is so tiny. I am not sure how she broke through the egg.\"\n\nFitzwilliam crouched down and picked up pieces of shell. \"It looks like it fell from the nest and cracked.\"\n\nPapa dragged his gnarled hand down his face. Pray he did not make a stupid remark about dragons who should not have hatched. The little one might peck his eyes out.\n\nThe chick pulled back from the honey and jumped on Lydia's hand. Lydia held her up to eye level and stared at her. They seemed to share a conversation in blinks, facial twitches, and the occasional chirp.\n\n\"You are too small to fly off on your own.\" Fitzwilliam knelt beside Lydia.\n\n\"I could if I wanted to.\" The chick pecked toward Fitzwilliam and flapped her tiny wings for good measure.\n\n\"Of course, she could. She is as good as any of those bigger ones, better because I am sure she is far more determined.\" Lydia nodded at the chick and glowered at Fitzwilliam.\n\n\"I am not so sure.\"\n\nThe chick hopped toward him, hopping mad as it were. \"You should not say such things about me.\"\n\n\"No, you should not.\" Lydia drew the chick into her chest and stroked between her wings. \"Calm down, Cosette\u2014\"\n\n\"What did you call me?\"\n\n\"In French it means 'little thing.' You are a little one. But that is no insult, for the littles can be quite surprising.\" Did Papa catch the glance Lydia threw his way?\n\n\"Cosette? It will do.\" She nodded and warbled, quite loudly for her size.\n\n\"Your voice certainly is not small.\" Fitzwilliam rose. \"What will you do?\"\n\nCosette scanned the room then looked up into Lydia's face. \"You have more sweet?\"\n\n\"As much as you wish.\" Lydia smiled with the same wide-eyed sort of gaze at Cosette as Collins had been wearing since Earl's hatching.\n\n\"Then I will stay. With you.\" Cosette backed up against Lydia's chest, wings spread, challenging.\n\n\"No, no, no. Not another!\" Papa slapped his forehead.\n\nAuntie peeked over Lydia's shoulder and licked the top of Cosette's head. Cosette shook her head and pecked at Auntie's tongue. \"She is my charge, and it is my say, not yours, Historian.\"\n\nLydia pulled Cosette close to her chest and guarded her with the other arm. \"I do not care what either of you say. If she wants to stay with me, then she shall.\"\n\n\"I suppose it is good I agree with you.\" Auntie glowered at Papa.\n\n\"It seems to have happened again,\" Fitzwilliam whispered to Darcy. \"First Collins, now her.\"\n\n\"I would not have believed it of either of them, but perhaps it is possible people imprint as much as dragons.\" Darcy's eyebrows rose.\n\n\"It is certainly an interesting theory\u2014one I am sure Papa will not like. But it will make for an interesting conversation with the Lord Physician.\"\n\n\"She seems very like her brood mother. Rather a scold, I think.\" Fitzwilliam pursed his lips, hiding his characteristic grin.\n\n\"Georgiana would be terrified of Cosette.\" Darcy turned toward Georgiana who was deep in admiration of her peaceable Friend.\n\n\"Which is why Cosette managed to find the one person in the room who would not be.\" Elizabeth tittered. \"It is going to be an interesting Friendship for certain. One can only imagine what those two are going to get themselves into.\"\n\n\"Considering who they are related to, one shudders to think.\" Darcy laid his hand on her shoulder and shook his head.\n\nAll told, he was probably right."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Destiny of Dragons 3) Fate of Three",
        "author": "J. F.R. Coates",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "Almost a month had passed since Ellian had allowed humans to take up residence in my territory. In that time they had been busy constructing enough wooden shelters for them all to live in. As I soared over the small village they had created, I begrudgingly allowed a moment of awe towards the progress they had made. The humans had come to us with nothing after they had voluntarily banished themselves from their own species, opposing the war that had broken out between humanity and dragonkind. Now, where once was open grassland, stood wooden shelters neatly arranged in small groups. They used these for shelter, ignoring my generous offer of the caves.\n\nMost of the humans were gathered near a cluster of smooth black panels assembled not far from the small houses. I had never seen anything like them before, and nor had I been able to understand James McArthur's explanation for them: something about stealing the energy from the sun. It had not made sense to me. I scanned the ground, trying to find the leader of the human exiles. We had sent some of his number out to spy on George Symons's army and were expecting them to return any time now. I wanted to hear everything they had to say. News had reached us of the devastation of Nixa, and it filled me with dread that their next target appeared to be Laxtal. We were sure that the three minor clans that lay between the clan of magic and my homeland would not interest the marching humans.\n\nThere had to be some weakness to exploit without having to risk everything by attempting to kill their leaders. If there was one, we were yet to find it, and James was out of ideas. Every possible vulnerability the human forces presented had already been closed to us. He seemed as lost as I was, though I would never admit such a weakness to the human. They must never know that I already felt resigned to defeat.\n\nTwo other humans were with James when I at last found him, as was Cinson, the Xigax dragon who had been a part of my small clan of exiles for almost two years. The other humans I recognised as Sophie Carter and Amanda Jones, who had also been officers of a similar rank to James before their desertion. As the three most senior humans in their army, they had taken on the responsibility of ruling the small breakaway force, of organising them into something self-sufficient.\n\nThe shorter of the two women, Sophie, signalled me to land as I flew overhead. I did not trim my wings to descend straight away, not wanting to give the humans the impression that they could control or summon me at their will. I would land in my own time. Circling around as though scouting the surrounding area, I bided my time before slowly descending to the waiting humans.\n\nI announced my presence with a growl, staring down Cinson before turning the ire of my gaze towards the humans. Like all their kind, none of the three humans met my eye for even a moment, yet they did not seem concerned with constantly submitting to my authority. I got the impression they were not even aware they did.\n\n\"We were about to send someone out to look for you. We've been trying to find you all morning,\" James said as I landed. The human was looking to the trees a few dozen feet behind me.\n\n\"You have news?\" I asked, glaring at him for having the temerity to think I could be summoned at his call. If he noticed my stare he made no attempt to respond to the challenge and meet my eye. Whereas before I would have revelled in the small victory, now it just felt hollow. Forcing the human to look away meant nothing when he never looked me in the eye to begin with.\n\n\"The army has stopped marching south and has turned to the east,\" James said, as though no mental battle had just taken place.\n\nI growled, surprised by the news, but at the same time elated. Perhaps Laxtal was not their next target, though of course I allowed myself a moment of fear and sympathy towards Axaatl. Ddraig Aranat's clan would need to be alert to the approaching danger.\n\n\"I want to speak to David,\" I asked, referring to the man who had been placed in charge of the small group of human spies. I needed to know everything that the humans had learnt. \"Take me to him.\"\n\nJames blinked a couple of times. \"He's not back yet.\"\n\n\"Well take me to whoever brought you the message,\" I growled, annoyed at the human's lack of initiative. Anyone who had helped pass on this information would be worth my time, unlike this ignorant and idiotic human.\n\n\"None of them are back yet,\" James said, spreading out his hands.\n\nI snapped my jaw shut and glared at the human again. This time he did meet my eyes \u2013 just for a moment \u2013 before looking away. His skin had reddened. I growled again before turning my attention on his companion, Sophie. \"Are you going to talk sense? How do you know the humans are going east if none of the spies have returned?\"\n\nSophie smirked as she pulled a small, black device out of her pocket and held it out for me to see. Around the edge of the dull surface was a border of shimmering light. It appeared to contain every colour imaginable, all intermingled with each other yet, at the same time, distinctly separate. It made my eyes sore just to look at it.\n\n\"These allow us to communicate with anyone else who carries one, no matter where else on Farenar they are,\" the human woman explained, brushing her hand against the edge of the thin, stone-like block. She leaned down towards me and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. \"They say that these were first made by Jalen.\"\n\n\"They?\"\n\n\"They do, yes.\"\n\nI scoffed and turned away from the human. She was no better than James, but at least she had given me some sort of answer that the so-called leader of the humans had been unable to provide. Not that her explanation made any sort of sense anyway. How could those little black stones communicate with someone who wasn't there? I sneered again and put it down to some sort of Human-Nixan magic.\n\n\"So, when are they coming back?\" I asked, not expecting a satisfactory answer from the humans. Two had been most unhelpful, and the third hadn't even spoken to me yet. This other woman, Amanda, had steadfastly refused to even glance in my direction; she maintained a look of nervous fear frozen on to her face. To my surprise, I did get an answer to my question, and it was the Xigax dragon who responded.\n\n\"Tomorrow morning,\" Cinson said with a respectful bow of his head. Finally a simple answer that made sense without any need to answer an additional question I had not asked. Of course it came from a drake. \"I spoke to Tsulus through the... thing. It was so strange, hearing his voice but not picking up his scent. It is an unusual magic, Mulner.\"\n\nCinson had turned his back on the humans, ignoring them as though they weren't there, or were of no importance to him. Following his example, I turned away from the humans and started to walk towards the small forest, gesturing with a wing for Cinson to follow.\n\n\"We'll just wait here then, shall we?\" I heard James say to our retreating backs. I responded with a snarl, not bothering to dignify his irritated tone with a spoken answer. I wished for an intelligent conversation, and that ruled out the three moronic examples of humankind. If they truly did have information for me, then it could wait until I'd learned what I could from Cinson.\n\n\"Any word on Ellian?\" the Xigax dragon asked softly as we entered the shade beneath the trees.\n\n\"Not since she left Kern. She should be back in Laxtal by now, but surely she would have sent word,\" I replied. I couldn't help but fear for my sister. Ever since I heard she had been taken prisoner by the vile traitor Tsona, I had been worried for her safety. She was a strong dragoness, and I knew she could fend for herself, but no drake flared their wings against Clan Xital without consequence. Something had delayed her flight home, and once already Cinson had persuaded me not to fly out and look for her. I didn't know if I could resist a second time.\n\n\"She'll be alright,\" Cinson said.\n\n\"I wish I shared your faith.\" I looked up through the canopy of leaves above our heads. The sky above was clear with a strong southerly wind creating quite some noise amongst the trees. Perfect weather for flying from the southern clans. If Ellian was on these winds she would travel easy and fast.\n\n\"She's strong, Mulner. Stronger than perhaps you realise.\"\n\n\"I know what she's capable of,\" I snapped, coming quick to anger at Cinson's insinuations. She had been out of my life for so long, but that did not mean I was unaware of her feats. Astar's death had shaken the clan, and if rumours of Carlee's demise were true, then that elevated Ellian to being one of the most important drakes in Laxtal. She made a better leader than our ddraig, though I would never vocalise such thoughts to any drake, even my sister. A ddraig's rule should be absolute and without question. Especially from a nomad such as myself.\n\n\"I didn't mean \u2013 ugh. I think the human is calling you again. Shall I go see to him?\" Cinson said, swinging his head around as the sounds of human shouts drifted through the forest.\n\nI wondered what the confounded creatures wanted this time. If it was another painfully trivial matter then I would have to find some better way to avoid them. I would give them this one last chance to be either interesting or useful, and I led Cinson back out of the small forest. The humans sounded excited, but as they spoke over each other I couldn't make out what they were saying.\n\nJames was holding a strange device to his face. He had called them binoculars last time I'd seen them, and he said they allowed him to see things from much further away. I followed his gaze up into the clear azure expanse. My heart almost leapt out through my throat at what I saw. Drakes. Three of them, so far away I couldn't identify them, but I didn't need to. I knew. It was Ellian.\n\nIgnoring the humans and Cinson, I spread my wings and powered up to meet them. I had no idea why my sister had come back here, rather than going straight for Laxtal, but I didn't care. I just needed to know she was safe and well.\n\nAs I approached, they deviated from their heading to converge on mine. They had seen me.\n\nEllian was flying in the middle of her two companions. On her left flew a dragon I recognised \u2013 the Nixan Airil had been a near constant companion to my sister when they had last been here. The other dragon I did not recognise. He was an old grey-scaled dragon whose wings looked like they were starting to suffer.\n\nI called out Ellian's name, and the wind carried her response back instantly. It felt like only a moment before we embraced mid-flight. I took her weight in my wings as I held her tight.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come back,\" I told her, but that didn't matter now. She had come back, just after a circuitous route. I silenced her attempted apologies as I released her, allowing her to glide down to the ground with her own wings.\n\nWe ignored the humans' calls to land by them, instead returning to the small cave overlooking the river and taking to the ground there. The stranger went straight for the water and took a long drink, before spreading his wings and lying in the grass. He seemed exhausted, but in the brief moment I caught his eyes I saw the curiosity and exuberance of a drake in his youth. But most of all I saw incredible power. I had no idea who this dragon was. There were very few drakes I would submit to, but I couldn't help but avert my eyes from this stranger.\n\n\"Greetings, Mulner of the nomadic clans,\" the stranger said, nodding his head just slightly. \"I have heard a lot about you from your sister. She tells me some remarkable things about what you are doing here. I have not seen humans and drakes living together for such a long time.\"\n\n\"I will admit they're proving difficult to get along with, but Ellian asked me to try,\" I replied, glaring at my sister. She only laughed. \"You'll have to forgive me though. I do not believe I know who you are.\"\n\n\"My apologies Mulner. Of course, I am yet to introduce myself. I'm becoming quite forgetful in my old age. I am Ddraig Boruc of Vatrea,\" he said.\n\n\"Forgetful?\" Airil asked in shock. The Nixan had wasted no time in placing his wing around my sister. I frowned. I would need to keep a watchful eye on those two. After the way Vinzent had treated my sister, I was not prepared to let another drake get close to her if he was unworthy of my sister's affection. \"Ddraig Boruc, you know more than us all combined.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc chuckled. \"But I have also lived considerably longer, young Airil.\" The old dragon looked up to the sky as though something had caught his attention. I followed his eyes but could see nothing. The only clouds that broke the perfect sky were a long way to the south. The ddraig had noticed my gaze. \"You won't see what I'm looking at, Mulner. I look at currents of magic as they flow, much like a river through the air.\"\n\n\"And you still won't tell me how you can see that,\" Airil grumbled. This sounded like something the Nixan had been going on about for a while. The Vatrean ddraig remained silent as Airil continued. \"Only Nixans can sense magic, but I've never heard of anyone being able to actually see it. It's completely unheard of.\"\n\n\"Unheard of doesn't make it impossible. I have told you already. I'm not Nixan. I'm something much older and more powerful than that. I am also the last,\" Ddraig Boruc said with sorrow, still looking up to the sky. His voice dropped down to a whisper, so quiet that I wasn't sure if it was for our ears. \"It's definitely changed. Something of great power has been found to the east, or is it someone?\"\n\nHis eyes shone with the magic he saw, glowing beacons of golden light. Then he blinked and the light was gone, as though it had never been. Slowly he moved his head down to look at the perplexed Nixan. I could tell already that this was a dragon of many secrets.\n\n\"Soon we will have to fly to Laxtal, but you needed to see your brother, Ellian. And I wanted to meet these humans you live with Mulner. I feel they would be most fascinating company,\" the ddraig said.\n\n\"I think you'll find you're wrong, Ddraig Boruc. They're obtuse and irritating and know nothing of our ways,\" I muttered darkly. No drake should look forward to meeting humans.\n\nThe ddraig just laughed, a dry chuckle that shook his body from snout to tail tip. \"They haven't always been that way,\" he said after a few moments. \"And maybe one day they'll understand us better once again. But they won't do that if we don't give them a chance. That's what I'm here to do.\"\n\nI bowed my head, seeing some sense in the ddraig's words, even if I still believed they didn't apply to these particular humans. Having had a few weeks to get to know them, I had come to the conclusion they were all as idiotic as each other. Even so, we had to start somewhere, and if these humans could help us defeat the ones who threatened our territories, then we would still be grateful towards them. I just hoped they wouldn't act like they were our betters. I would hate to have to submit towards a human.\n\n\"I'm sure you'll find plenty of opportunity to meet them then. In fact, here they come now,\" I said. The humans had just come into view, on the far side of the river. For creatures without wings, there weren't many places to cross the river without getting wet, but human ingenuity had temporarily startled me a few days back when they had constructed a bridge from fallen trees. It was simple and rudimentary, but they had told me they'd already started work on constructing a more permanent one. That had shocked me out of my state of awe. I had thought the shelters had just been to house themselves before they moved on again. Now they were making permanent marks on the land. Land I claimed as my own.\n\nI glared at the three humans as they carefully crossed their narrow bridge, hoping that one of them might slip and tumble into the water. They were surer-footed than they looked, as once again they denied me the amusement of them getting wet.\n\nDdraig Boruc slowly rose to his paws to meet the three humans, while I took Ellian and Airil away, eager to put some distance between myself and the humans again. We took refuge in the small cave, where we were joined by a couple of other drakes. Our numbers had swollen in the past few weeks, mainly from drakes who were fleeing the clans controlled by Ddraig Tsona, or those that were under threat from the advancing human army. With them came small snippets of information that had allowed us to build a better understanding of what was going on throughout the clans. Two survivors from the devastation of Nixa and the ambush on Kxisila had even reached us. Both Nixans were out hunting, but Airil was glad to know at least two of his clan had survived.\n\nWith a little prompt, Ellian began to recount the tale of her adventures since leaving me behind, what felt like so long ago now. With some digressions from Airil, who had been by her side almost constantly since her rescue from Xital, I was able to add to my knowledge of what was happening in the draconic territories. It did not make for pleasant listening. Though most western clans were united against the human invasion, Xital had sided with the humans, and were forming their own army to fight those who opposed them.\n\nSoon every drake would be needed in Laxtal.\n\n\"Why did you come back?\" I asked my sister. Surely she would be most needed with Ddraig Anzig.\n\n\"I made a promise that I would come back here. What haeraig would I be if I couldn't even keep my word to my brother?\" she said, leaving the side of the Nixan dragon for the first time to place her head on my shoulder. Her paw rested on the jewel around her neck that marked her as haeraig of Laxtal. \"Besides, Ddraig Boruc has been really eager to meet the humans here ever since he knew they were here. He seems to feel they're vital. We'll only stay for a day or two, to give the ddraig a chance to recover, but we will be needed in Laxtal again.\"\n\nI pulled away from Ellian, looking out into the light that streamed into the small cave. I could just about hear the loud voices of James and his two companions as they talked with Ddraig Boruc.\n\n\"Will you come back with me?\"\n\nI couldn't meet Ellian's hopeful gaze. I paced back to the cave mouth. \"My place is here, Ellian. I made a choice never to return to Laxtal. Too many drakes depend on me here for me to abandon them. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Ellian said, following me and sitting by my side, though I could tell she disagreed with my opinion. Airil hung back awkwardly.\n\nMy domain was starting to change as human influence spread. The forest was a little smaller now, a cluster of dying stumps marking where the humans had cut trees to make their homes and bridge. Only the river remained untouched by the humans, flowing as it always had done from the mountains in the west. This was my place in the world. Laxtal would not need my help in their struggle.\n\nThough I had my doubts, in Ddraig Anzig they had a capable leader, even if he was no match for the legendary figure his father had been. At least my sister would fly by his side to correct his mistakes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "\"Why do you mock me so?\" Ddraig Krateos stared down at his paws. His voice was dull. Listless.\n\n\"You would do better than say such lies here, Ddraig Anzig,\" Haeraig Zeena hissed, showing the anger I had expected her father to display.\n\nI knew that the secrets I had learnt would not be able to remain hidden, and the two Nixans had a right to know first. I was almost paralysed with fear, but I had gone too far already to back down. Haeraig Zeena had escorted her father to my chambers, where I had informed him I had found two of his lost children. At least two of the three eggs he had abandoned had survived, and now I knew who they were.\n\n\"I do not lie, Ddraig Krateos. Not about this,\" I said in a small voice. I could barely summon the words to my mouth, and it was only the mental support I felt from Mushussu that allowed me to continue. I didn't know how she was still linked to me, given the secrets I had unveiled. I was not the son of Astar. I could not be ddraig of this clan. \"You have a daughter and a son. The third I am not sure about.\"\n\n\"And they are here?\" Ddraig Krateos asked, lifting his head, looking at me for the first time since entering my chambers. His daughter scoffed, not so quick to believe my words as the ddraig. I assumed that the ddraig trusted my words, or he was desperate for it to be true, that he had more than just the one daughter left following the devastation of his clan.\n\n\"Your second daughter is Maznar. We found her in Trevena, under the control of the human George. She was with us in Nixa, but we didn't stay long enough for her to see you then,\" I said hesitantly, trying to put off what I still had to say for as long as possible. I felt tears spring to my eyes, forbidden tears that no Laxtal drake should ever experience. But I was not Laxtal.\n\nDdraig Krateos took half a step forward. \"And my son?\"\n\nMy throat was constricted so tight I was unable to produce any sound. I just could not vocalise the words I needed to say. Reluctantly I reached out with my mind, using the magic that had started this whole, hateful process. Magic that had systematically destroyed everything I had ever believed to be certain and true.\n\nI touched minds with Ddraig Krateos. \"The other is me.\"\n\nThe tears now flowed freely down my face, running in rivulets through the narrow cracks between my scales. I bowed my head in a futile attempt to keep the ddraig from seeing them.\n\nThe full force of Ddraig Krateos's gaze fell on the back of my neck. \"My son?\" I heard him say. I felt a touch on my chin, and with one gentle claw, the Nixan ddraig lifted my head to look me in the eyes. His claw gently moved up the side of my face. \"Tears? Only a Nixan drake can cry. You are not a Laxtal dragon.\"\n\nI shook my head, trying to pull away from Ddraig Krateos, but his hold on me was too strong. \"I cried once when I was young, but my father\u2026 Astar. He was furious with me. Told me never to do it again.\" I had not known it was a Nixan trait. I had been told it wasn't draconic, and that no haeraig should show his emotions so plainly. If anyone from my clan could see me now, openly weeping in front of the Nixan ddraig, then I would be ruined. I was a disgrace to my clan. Now I knew Astar had been trying to hide the truth of who I was.\n\n\"How is this possible?\" Ddraig Krateos asked.\n\nOnce more I could only shake my head. I had no answers for the Nixan, only further questions. In her small alcove above my head, Mushussu remained silent and offered no solutions to my concerns. She had remained silent for our exchange, though her powers were limited with the presence of Haeraig Zeena.\n\n\"So what happens now?\" Haeraig Zeena asked into the sudden silence that had swept over us all. I knew what she meant. How could I be ddraig of Laxtal and Ddraig Krateos's son at the same time? My clan hadn't accepted Xital rule \u2013 they certainly wouldn't accept a Nixan leader.\n\nMy mind was completely devoid of ideas, and it seemed Ddraig Krateos was suffering similarly, as neither of us could answer the haeraig's question. It was an impossible situation, most unlike anything I had ever heard of. Without the clan's haeraig present, I risked plunging Laxtal into anarchy and chaos at a time when the clan needed to be strong and united.\n\n\"We should wait until your haeraig \u2013\" Haeraig Zeena began, before she was interrupted by a sudden assault of magic.\n\nAlong with the two Nixans, I was almost knocked from my paws, as the strength of the magical energy momentarily robbed me of my sight. Bursts of colour were all I could see, and rainbow swirls were imprinted on my eyes even once my vision returned. Ddraig Krateos was blinking rapidly as he also tried to clear his sight. Whatever had caused the burst of magic, some internal sense was telling me it had come from somewhere below the lair, in the underground caves and the subterranean river. The caves where no drake dared to tread.\n\nI looked across at Ddraig Krateos, meeting his eyes for just a moment before he glanced away. \"What was that?\" I asked. That burst of magic had been more powerful than any other I had known, but for the dying wrench of Nixa. This had felt different. Nixan's destruction had been painful. It had been death. This felt more like rebirth, like new life.\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't know. I have never felt such a thing before,\" Ddraig Krateos admitted. He looked across at his daughter, who still clutched the Axinstone in her paws. The artefact was not the cause of the magic. This was something else, something much more powerful.\n\nI asked the two Nixans to meet me in the central chambers, and the two were quick to obey my request. If we were to learn what had caused the pulse of magic, it wouldn't be by being cooped up in my chambers. It would also allow me to get a little more room, away from the dragon who I would somehow have to get used to calling 'father'. It was too much for my muddled mind to handle right now. I still found it hard to accept that I couldn't turn to Carlee for guidance, but she had been killed by humans as we fled Xital after freeing Ellian from their clutches.\n\n\"You have me now,\" Mushussu reminded me from her perch.\n\nI looked up at the guardian dragoness. Her silvered body shone in the firelight, but nothing was reflected in her scales. Her mind was linked with mine, and I was sure that she was aware of the disappointment I felt that she was no match to my old mentor. Carlee had known that I was not Astar's son, and no doubt who my real father was. She certainly would have known I was a Nixan. She had kept that secret from me her whole life. She had looked me in the eye and told me Astar was proud of his son, knowing full well that Astar had no son. I tried to feel anger at her deception, if only to feel some emotion at all, but nothing came. I felt no emotion but fear.\n\nDrying my eyes off on one of the many thick rugs I had inherited as the Laxtal ddraig, I steeled myself to meet my clan. They didn't yet know my true heritage, so I should have no need to fear them. For the sake of dragonkind, I had to keep the clan strong until Ellian returned. She would become the ddraig in my stead, but I could not allow a period of confusion to reign while she remained absent in the southern clans.\n\nMy arrival was anticipated in the central chambers. The moment I emerged into the cavernous space two drakes hailed me from the floor, near the raised dais in the centre. Isikian and Saya had called me down, from the middle of a small group of drakes that included the Nixan ddraig and haeraig, as well as Yalle and Marin.\n\nBarely had my paws touched the ground before Saya was growling at me. \"You should not have trusted the seer with anything, Ddraig. He has taken two Nixans down to the river, into the lost caves.\"\n\n\"The river?\" I repeated, blinking stupidly at her accusations. What had Azlak done down there to create the burst of intense magic?\n\n\"He took Kaz and Inilta with him, Ddraig,\" Isikian said apologetically, keeping his head low.\n\nI turned to Marin. \"Did Azlak mention anything about this before?\"\n\nThe seer's father snarled in disgust. \"Nothing. Why would he tell me anything when he has those Nixans for company?\" Yalle and Saya added low growls to Marin's words, with the three Nixans remaining silent.\n\nI ignored the three Laxtal drakes, instead moving my gaze across to Isikian, asking him the same question I had asked Marin. He at least was able to give me a better answer.\n\n\"Kaz mentioned something about feeling an immense power down there. Whatever it was, I think they may have just woken it. I felt a magic unlike I had ever felt before, much greater than the Axinstone,\" Isikian said. He didn't look at my eyes, but I could see he was curious. He already knew I had felt the magic of the Axinstone, now he wanted to know if I had felt the pulse of magic that had emanated from below the lair. Slowly I nodded my head once, confirming his unspoken question.\n\n\"Should we send someone down after them?\" Haeraig Zeena asked, drawing a disrespectful growl from Saya. The Nixan didn't even seem to hear Saya, she certainly showed no reaction to the insolence shown by the Laxtal dragoness. Instead the Nixan just moved her eyes from her father towards me, continuing her thought as though there had been no interruption at all. \"If something has been found, then we should try to secure it as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"This is Laxtal. Anything found down there is ours,\" Marin hissed to the haeraig, before I silenced him with a growl and a stern glare.\n\nHaeraig Zeena ignored him. The Axinstone in her paws thrummed with power. An image was placed into my mind of a woman with tattoos of golden light. Startled, I looked around at the Nixans, but none seemed to notice anything.\n\n\"I think they desired to be left alone, haeraig,\" Isikian was saying in response to Haeraig Zeena's question. I had been standing there with my mouth agape while others had been thinking about the problem at wing. I felt like a fool.\n\n\"Give them an hour. Azlak wouldn't have led them into danger,\" I said eventually, putting faith in the seer's ability. Marin momentarily flared his wings in distress, but I doubted it was concern for his son that was the reason for his reaction. Something had occurred which had come between father and son. The two had never had an easy relationship, but Azlak's role in reclaiming the Axinstone had appeared to restore his standing in the eyes of his father.\n\nI wanted to get some time to escape the company of other drakes for a while, but I knew I would never be able to get such a luxury. I couldn't sneak away into the shadows as there would always be someone seeking me out. Until Ellian could take her rightful place as ddraig, I would have no respite from the clan.\n\nDiscussion moved away from what was happening beneath the lair and towards what had been concerning the clan for some time now: the human army gradually moving through our territory. I said little, and the same was true for Ddraig Krateos. We both had too much on our mind to contribute much, and Haeraig Zeena led the arguments against Saya, Marin, and Yalle. The Laxtal drakes were advocating utilising the army we had gathered from our neighbouring clans and taking on the humans directly, before they had the opportunity to attack the lair. The Nixan wasn't convinced, believing the humans' strength to be too great to take on at present. I had to agree with her, but I couldn't see how we could move the odds into our favour. We had already exhausted the supply of drakes from the surrounding clans, with only a few hundred more expected from Clan Xara in the coming days. We were almost at our full strength, and if that wasn't enough, then what hope did we have?\n\nI only intervened when Saya started raising her voice towards Haeraig Zeena, flaring her wings in an obvious sign of aggression. I put myself between the two dragonesses, staring down Saya until she backed away.\n\n\"We will not engage the humans yet,\" I growled, making sure both Marin and Yalle heard me too. The Nixans were guests in our lair, and I did not like them being treated with such disrespect. It was sowing discord when we needed unity.\n\n\"Then you are as weak as they are,\" Saya said dismissively.\n\n\"I am not weak!\" I roared at the dragoness, using every breath of air in my lungs to project my voice far louder than a drake of my size would normally accomplish. I flexed my claws, prepared to fight if that's what I needed to do. \"Do you challenge me?\"\n\nAt first, it appeared I had no need to worry, for Saya submitted herself completely, pressing down to the ground. \"My apologies, Ddraig. I spoke without thought,\" she said quietly. Despite her words, she still had all her teeth bared in an act of aggression. I would have to deal with her later.\n\nMovement down towards the lower chambers caught my attention, and with a flash of golden scales Azlak emerged out from the depths of the lair and into the central chamber. He quickly sought me out, Saya reluctantly giving him room to land. The seer was frantic with energy, and his wings remained slightly unfurled even as he bowed his head towards Ddraig Krateos and me.\n\n\"I'm sorry to interrupt, Ddraig Anzig, but you must follow me. Down in the lower chambers is\u2026 we found someone, you'll just have to come see,\" the seer said, tripping over his words in his haste to spit them all out.\n\n\"What did you find?\" Ddraig Krateos asked, cutting in before I could say anything. The Nixan ddraig had finally found his tongue again.\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't think I could explain her. Please, you'll just have to come meet her. She can win this war for us,\" the seer replied, twitching his wings again and bouncing on his paws.\n\nMy curiosity was piqued, and I could tell the same was true for Ddraig Krateos. I almost didn't want the Nixan to come, for every time I looked at his bronze scales I was reminded of the secrets that had spilled out. He was my father, and I didn't want to remember that every time I turned my head. I knew that I would be unable to dissuade him though. Whatever it was that Azlak had found, Ddraig Krateos would join me in discovering the secrets that had been hidden beneath the lair.\n\nForbidding Yalle, Marin, and Saya to follow, I took to wing behind Azlak. As I expected, Ddraig Krateos and his daughter \u2013 my sister \u2013 joined us in flight. The seer led us through the twisting passages below the central chamber, taking us to some of the deepest and darkest parts of the lair. Down here, torches were rarely maintained, and only one in three was lit until eventually there were none left at all. I had rarely ventured down to this part of the lair, and would not be able to confidently return back up to the surface from this point. Rumours of spirits that haunted the darkest chambers near the river kept all but the bravest drakes away. Maybe those rumours weren't far from the truth, given what Azlak had found.\n\nAfter a couple of minutes of stumbling through the total darkness, Inilta met us in a sudden burst of magical flame. Lights flickered in a small cavern, but my eyes were drawn to a narrow crack in the wall, through which I could hear the bubbling of the underground river.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig. She's just through here,\" Inilta said in hushed tones, guiding me through to the cave with one outstretched wing. Azlak also held back, waiting for me to go through first, with Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena on my tail.\n\nWhat my eyes fell upon was not what I was expecting. A human was sat on the ground, leaning against the wall with a slightly pained expression on her face. Her clothing was strange, even for a human. It appeared to be made from silk, but I couldn't describe the colour, as it seemed to change every time I moved my eyes. In her hand was a small knife with an obsidian blade. Golden ribbons of light adorned her skin, but if there was any pattern to them it was lost to my gaze. Kaz was by her side, with his paw resting on the human's leg. His eyes appeared glazed, as though he was unaware of everything around him. Slowly the human's head rolled around to look directly at me, her amber eyes searing right through me.\n\n\"You are the dragon leader?\" she asked. Her voice was musical and light, partially masking the pain I could see etched on her face. So lost was I in her voice that I almost forgot she had asked a question.\n\n\"I am ddraig of Laxtal, yes,\" I replied at last. My voice sounded hoarse and scratchy in comparison to the human's.\n\n\"And I of Nixa,\" Ddraig Krateos added.\n\nThe human regarded us through narrowed eyes. \"And you speak for all dragons?\"\n\n\"We speak for our clans,\" I replied.\n\nThe human lifted herself up slightly, straightening up her back against the wall. \"I will speak only to the leader of dragons.\"\n\nI glanced across at Ddraig Krateos, trying to judge his reaction. There was none. His face remained completely impassive, and his wings didn't so much as flutter. \"We are as close as you will get to one leader of dragonkind. We have no one true leader anymore,\" the Nixan said, a hint of his old authority returning to his voice.\n\n\"Very well,\" the human said, before descending into a fit of hacking coughs. \"I hate this part,\" she muttered once she had recovered. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself, running her hands through her long, blond hair. I could feel magic radiating from her, but right now she appeared weak and vulnerable, and not at all the saviour Azlak had indicated her to be.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I asked, taking a step forward and trying to stare the human in the eye. She returned the stare, its intensity forcing me to avert mine.\n\n\"I am Esperance,\" she said in a tone that demanded respect and recognition. She looked around the small chamber with wide eyes, before snorting in disgust when the only reaction she got was blank stares, her golden tattoos fading to almost nothing. \"I see dragons have forgotten everything about the world around them.\"\n\nStill no one dared speak. Esperance sighed, holding her head in her hands. \"Do you still have the rune, Kaz?\"\n\nFrom the human's side, the healer suddenly jerked to awareness, coming out from his stupor at the sound of his name. For the first time I noticed something wrapped in his tail, and I stole a furtive glance to Haeraig Zeena to confirm that she did indeed still carry the Axinstone. How was it that Kaz held an exact copy of the Nixan artefact? His tail unfurled slightly, revealing the emblem burnt into its surface, and I could see that it was not the Axinstone. Instead of a dragon's head, the visage of a large cat glared out from the shard of stone.\n\n\"I still have it,\" the Nixan healer said faintly. Azlak had moved forward to stand by Kaz's side, a worried wing hovering over the Nixan's body.\n\n\"Good,\" Esperance said, resting her head back to the wall and brushing Kaz's paw away from her leg. \"You must keep it safe and hidden until I call for you again. No one but those in this cave must know of the rune's presence here.\"\n\n\"Are you not staying to help us?\" I asked. For a moment, my wings fluttered in distress, before pulling my emotions back under control. By my side, Ddraig Krateos had barely reacted, and I did not want to disappoint a fellow ddraig. That I had learnt he was my father had no bearing on my desire to impress him.\n\nEsperance scoffed as she slowly rose to her feet. She took a couple of unsteady steps with her hand against the wall, but she was noticeably gaining strength. \"Help you? Why would I want to involve myself in the petty machinations of a weak draconic race? I have far more interesting things with which to occupy myself. I will return to Ehran.\"\n\n\"Ehran? I know that name,\" I exclaimed, searching my memories for where I had last heard that name. Then I had it. In the expansive cave we sheltered in after crossing the mountains, with the terrifying Nightwings-like statue. Azlak had read that name off a stone slab, and Carlee had expressed her annoyance that she had never heard of the place before. \"There was a message that said we will always find a powerful ally in Ehran. The dragons of the Sxinix would be able to call on Ehran as an ally. The western dragon clans have every right to claim the Sxinix as their own, and we call on that promise to gain Ehran support now.\"\n\nEsperance's eyes widened in shock and the ribbons of light on her skin glowed brighter. \"That promise was made a long time ago, in another age to a dragon who is long dead,\" she said.\n\n\"Will you honour it?\" I demanded.\n\n\"I will not,\" Esperance said, and I felt hope drain out of me. We didn't have enough allies to call upon. The strange human was not yet finished, and she looked right in my eyes. \"But I know one who will. Allow me time to recover my strength, and I shall summon an army to aid you. Does that cover the debt, little dragon?\"\n\nI bowed my head in acknowledgement. If the human delivered on her promise, then any assistance would be most welcome. I just hoped that she wouldn't need long to recover, and that wherever this army was, it could reach Laxtal before it was too late. Time was not on our side.\n\n\"Leave me now,\" the human said, waving her hand dismissively. \"Kaz and Azlak may stay, but too many dragons are crowding me and I don't like it. You shall have your army, ddraigs of Laxtal and Nixa, I can give you my word.\"\n\nOnce more I bowed my head, acknowledging the sworn help to be bestowed upon to us by the mysterious human. Ddraig Krateos however, was less accepting at being dismissed so quickly.\n\n\"How many drakes can you promise?\" he asked, taking a few steps towards Esperance.\n\nEsperance was not annoyed by the ddraig's question, rather, she was amused. As she chuckled her tattoos shone brightly, nearly bright enough to shield my eyes with a wing. \"Drakes? I can provide something much better than drakes.\" She grinned wolfishly, but she elaborated no further, falling into silence and waving her hand in a dismissive gesture.\n\nDdraig Krateos growled and stalked out with his daughter. Inilta left with them as he was also clearly unwanted by the human. I lingered for just a few moments longer, watching the human from the arch leading out to the passages. Kaz had carefully placed the rune on the ground, well away from Esperance's reach, and had reared up onto his hind paws to lean against her chest. The orange light of his magic radiated out from his paws and into the human, though what he was healing was beyond me. Esperance appeared whole, but something was clearly ailing her.\n\nThen the human caught sight of me, and her golden eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Go.\" She gripped my mind tight, her voice resonating through my head until I could hear nothing else. I could do nothing other than obey her command, and of their own volition my paws carried me out of the small chamber. I was powerless to resist her force of will, and the harder I struggled the tighter her mind held mine. I could no longer see, golden light obscuring my vision. I blindly put one paw in front of the other, forced to keep walking. \"You will obey me next time, little dragon, or I shall reconsider my promise.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I won't disobey again. Please, can you release me?\" I pleaded. In the brief moment my magic reached out to her I glimpsed how immense her true being was. Her physical body may have been that of a human, but spiritually she was something so much greater.\n\n\"Do not let it happen again, little dragon. You are nothing to me.\"\n\nWith that I felt the contact between us sever. I blinked a few times to clear my eyes of the lingering golden light, and immediately wished for my blindness to return. I shied back from the sight that greeted me.\n\nBlack scales. Menacing red eyes, and teeth that gleamed white. Maznar looked more like Nightwings.\n\n\"Is that any way to greet your sister?\" she taunted, a malicious grin spreading across her face.\n\n\"Keep quiet when you say that,\" I snarled, furtively looking around to make sure no one could have overheard her. It would only take one drake to know that Maznar was my sister for the secret to spill out, and the spectre didn't seem overly concerned about keeping it hidden. I simply had to keep up the pretence until Ellian returned.\n\n\"Why? Are you scared of who you are? Do you not like being a Nixan?\"\n\n\"I said silence!\" I roared, surprising Maznar by slashing her across the snout. I stood still, panting as I tried to reign my anger in again.\n\nThe spectre slowly raised a paw to her snout. It came away bloodied and her eyes widened. \"That's the second time you've drawn my blood, Anzig.\" She didn't sound affronted, if anything she sounded pleased, and not for one moment did the mad grin on her face fade. The spectre started to circle around me, but I resisted her games and stayed completely still, eyes only for the empty torch sconce directly in front of me. She was no threat to me, and I wanted her to know that.\n\nI hissed in pain as twice she trod on my tail in her circuit around me. She prowled back into my line of sight and pushed her snout against mine, forcing me to look into her wild red eyes. If I took a step back, she took one forward, keeping us in constant contact.\n\n\"Do you know what happens to those who make me bleed?\" she asked. Her hot breath was rank. She must have hunted recently.\n\n\"I am ddraig of this clan. There is nothing you can say to me that will make me fear you,\" I replied, keeping my voice even against her threats. I could not allow her to feel I was being intimidated.\n\nMaznar snickered. \"The imposter Nixan? Ddraig of this clan? I don't think so my dear brother. It can't be long before you're thrown out on your heels.\"\n\nI growled and tried to push Maznar away, but she stood firm. \"We rescued you from the humans. Remember that,\" I snarled. I had trusted the spectre when none but Azlak had done so. I did not want to regret that decision.\n\n\"Yes, you did. Only after you tried to kill me.\"\n\n\"You tried to kill me first,\" I spluttered, unable to comprehend how the spectre could hold that against me. I had only wounded her as I had tried to stay alive, not out of any malice or ill will towards her. \"I know you only did that because the humans were in your head, but I was fighting to survive. We freed you of that.\"\n\nFinally Maznar pulled away from me, giving me some room to move again. \"That's where you're wrong, brother. You freed me of nothing.\"\n\nI allowed my fear to show, taking a step back and fluttering my wings in distress. \"The humans still control you?\" I asked, my voice quavering in terror. The darkness that surrounded the dragoness seemed to grow steadily blacker, until the only thing I could see was Nightwings's demonic red eyes.\n\n\"They never controlled me to begin with.\"\n\nI was powerless to resist as Maznar lunged for me. In one quick movement I was on my back, her claws at my throat. \"I do not take kindly to those who injure me, brother. Last time you were healed. This time I will make sure that's not possible.\"\n\nI screamed as her teeth seized my outstretched wing. Muscle and sinew were stretched to breaking point. Frantically, I tried to push her away, but my claws could find no purchase against her scales.\n\nTendons snapped and the thin wing membranes were shredded as her claws tore freely at whatever they found. I cried for help, but this far down in the lair there was no one to hear my screams.\n\nWith a loud pop, my wing dislocated, but the spectre was not finished.\n\nMaznar pulled harder, her paw pressing into my throat and silencing my screams. My vision started to fade again, but this time no magic was affecting me.\n\nFlesh tore and bone splintered.\n\nThe spectre suddenly fell back, freeing my throat. I had not the breath to scream.\n\nHer eyes gloated. My wing in her mouth.\n\nDarkness took me, but even that couldn't spare me from her demonic gaze."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I didn't know how long we had spent with Esperance. The hours had passed by quickly, and this far underground I had no way of determining the passing of the sun. It felt like such an arbitrary concept, the passage of time. This incredible being \u2013 somehow both human and distinctly not \u2013 was all I needed to worry about. I had no other concern but for her well-being. Since we had found her in the caves below Laxtal, she had been slowly recovering. She had refused to say why she had been down there, or how long she had been lying there with a dagger in her heart, claiming that we were not important enough to know such things. Deep down I knew I should have been offended, but I just could not bring myself to feel that. Just to hear the musical lilt of her voice was an honour.\n\n\"Tell me, is Erik Brightwell still the Prime Minister of Kernow?\" Esperance asked. It must have been almost an hour since she had last spoken. I had thought the human was asleep, and I had been lying with Kaz, our tails entwined. At the sound of her voice we both leapt to our paws, but Kaz had no answer for her.\n\n\"The name is familiar to me, Esperance,\" I answered, trying to place where I had heard the name before. It had come from a human, I was sure. Then I had it, on a beach somewhere in Kernow, before we had reached the human city of Trevena. I had spoken to two humans, and they had told me why human armies were invading our lands. \"Brightwell is their pry-minster.\"\n\n\"Then I have not been gone long.\" The ribbons of light that enveloped her skin shone a little brighter. She held the gaze of Kaz for as long as my mate could endure, at which time she turned her focus to me. I was only able to last a few seconds before I had to look at my paws. Her eyes were so beautiful, yet so strong. \"And did you see a varisen down there? Or evidence of one moving through recently?\"\n\nI glanced aside to Kaz, but his eyes were narrowed in confusion. \"I am not familiar with what that might be,\" I said apologetically.\n\nEsperance clicked her tongue. An image of a brown-furred creature came into my mind. It stood upright like a human, but had fur and a tail like a wildcat. I had never seen such a creature before.\n\nThe golden-tattooed human seemed to know my answer before I had even opened my mouth. She ran her hand over her forehead. \"I need you both to do something for me.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course, anything,\" Kaz replied. I echoed his words. Anything this human asked of me I would do, without question.\n\nEsperance rummaged through her pockets for a moment, her hand emerging with two small squares of a hard, black material. They looked like angular pebbles, with a small coloured border. \"Hold out your paw,\" the human said. I obeyed without question.\n\nFirmly, Esperance placed one of the small squares against my paw, before doing the same with Kaz. For a moment it did nothing, but then in a sudden burst of heat and light, the little pebble disappeared. I yelped in shock, looking over the floor, thinking I had simply dropped it.\n\n\"It's not there,\" Esperance said with a chuckle.\n\n\"Then where did it go?\" Kaz asked, similarly searching for the one that had been placed on his paw.\n\n\"It is a part of you now. They're an old magic, used on Ehran for centuries now. About fifty years ago Alvana started using them too, and with some of the latest technology we've been able to make these devices that are suspended just beneath skin or scales. We call them slates,\" Esperance explained. I nodded my head, pretending that I understood any of what had been said.\n\n\"Alvana?\" Kaz asked.\n\nEsperance sighed and covered her face. \"I don't understand how you can know so little about Farenar. I swear every reference I make to something beyond your clan simply goes straight over your head. It's infuriating.\"\n\n\"Farenar doesn't care about us. Why should we care about it?\" I asked. If the world truly was as large as Esperance claimed, then why was it none of it came to us? Drakes belonged within their clan's territory. There was little reason to fly further afield than that.\n\n\"Once I return to Ehran, Farenar will start caring about dragons again. You will need to be ready to welcome them back. If I am to send an army, then the affairs of dragons will once again become the affairs of all.\"\n\n\"And will you be coming back with your army?\" Kaz asked, a hint of a whimper in his voice.\n\n\"I will not. That's why I gave you the slate. It will allow me to communicate with you whenever I need. Just press your paw if you feel it vibrate, and you'll be able to speak with me, no matter where we are. You'll also be able to contact me if the need is urgent. Press your paw and think hard of me, and if I can, I'll answer you. You can use them to talk to each other, too,\" Esperance said.\n\nI tried to suppress the sense of loss for her imminent departure. At least she had given us a great gift in the slates. Though the distance between us could be great, it was comforting to know that Esperance would only ever be a press of the paw away. She had only been in my life for scant hours, but already she felt closer than anyone had ever been to me. Only Ddraig Anzig and Kaz were her rivals there.\n\n\"You are both to be my representatives. You will be my eyes, ears, and voice amongst the dragons. A long time ago dragons ruled this world. If that day is to come again I want to be there to see it. And you will make it happen, Azlak and Kaz,\" Esperance said, placing her hands first on my head, and then on to Kaz's. The pressure of her touch did not leave. The weight of her expectations was heavy on my wings.\n\n\"We shall do our best,\" I replied.\n\nEsperance tilted her head slightly, as though listening to a distant noise we couldn't hear. \"I can ask no more of you, though I expect nothing less. Two dragons and the fate of dragonkind\u2026\" she said, before falling silent and half-closing her eyes. For a moment I was concerned that she was in pain, but the tattoos of light on her skin shone brighter than ever. \"Two\u2026 or three? There is a third, I feel. But I have not the time to find her now. I'd like you to take me to the surface. It's a long way to Ehran, and if your ddraig wants his army soon, I'll need to hurry.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't you see the ddraig again before leaving?\" I asked timidly, hating to be seen as dictating what Esperance should do. I had no control over her, and there was no reason for her to listen to my advice. I also longed to ask her who she thought this third drake would be, but I knew I'd never get an answer from her.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Esperance said with a shake of her head. \"I don't much like your ddraig. I've met a lot like him before. He's false.\"\n\nI was conflicted. This was my ddraig she was talking about, and Anzig had been so good to me in recent times. I didn't like hearing such criticism of him, but such was the loyalty I now felt towards Esperance, I was unable to speak up to her.\n\nThere was a lot to think about as we slowly led Esperance up through the lower passages of the lair. The few drakes we came across fled in fear the moment they saw Esperance. None listened to my calls that she wasn't here to harm anyone, but memories of humans in the lair when Xital had taken control of the lair still ran fresh in their minds.\n\nWe met no resistance though until we finally reached the main chamber. Word must have spread about Esperance's presence, as there were several drakes already waiting to meet us. Amongst them was my father, and the look of fury on his face almost made me quail in terror, but then I remembered who was by my side. Esperance wouldn't let me come to harm.\n\n\"What is this madness?\" Yalle hissed, stepping forward from the throng of drakes. \"Why is there a human in our lair?\"\n\n\"I am no mere human, dragon,\" Esperance replied haughtily. A few wings were shuffled uncomfortably as she spoke. Some had already been entranced by the music of her voice, and were starting to back away from the lead group. Even Saya had averted her eyes, taking a step back and shielding her eyes. By her side was Vinzent, and the dragonet took his mother's place beside Yalle.\n\nThe albino dragon was not impressed by Esperance's reply. \"I don't care what you say you are. You look like a human and that's enough for me. I want you gone from this place immediately. As for you, Azlak, we have things to discuss.\"\n\n\"Should that not be Ddraig Anzig's decision to make?\" I growled. What right did Yalle have to issue orders on behalf of the ddraig?\n\n\"He isn't here,\" the albino growled.\n\n\"Which is what we need to discuss,\" my father added with malicious glee. \"He hasn't been seen since you took him down into the lower chambers yesterday. We'll only ask you once. What has your human done with the ddraig?\"\n\nI felt a cold chill that permeated down to my bones. They accused me of harming the ddraig? \"We have done nothing to him. He left us with Ddraig Krateos,\" I said, but my words fell on deaf ears. I doubted they even cared the ddraig was missing. It was just a convenient excuse to blame me for something new. They seemed to be ignoring the more pressing threat to the clan. \"Get some drakes together and search for the ddraig. If he's not been seen up here, then he's still in the passages somewhere.\"\n\n\"Why should we listen to you?\" my father snarled.\n\n\"Do you want to plunge this clan into chaos if the ddraig isn't found? Who will lead the clan in his absence? And what impression would we leave on Ddraig Krateos if we can't even look after our own ddraig?\" I retorted, watching his face steadily become more ominous. His rage was building, but in the presence of Esperance he unable to bring about the courage to attack.\n\nEsperance had finally had enough. \"Cease this bickering. I know I'm not welcome here, even if my army will become your allies.\"\n\n\"Your army? Who said we wanted your army, human?\" my father snapped, turning his ire on to the human.\n\n\"Father, she's trying to help us,\" I said, trying to diffuse the situation before Esperance retracted her offer of assistance. The clan could have no complaints if she did, such was the reaction she was receiving from Yalle and Marin.\n\n\"You are not my son!\" Marin shrieked, and for a moment all was silent. There was nothing in the chamber but for Marin and his words.\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Astar found your egg in the wild, abandoned. He knew your mother was barren, so he gifted the egg to us. You were never my son, and I should have told you long ago rather than keep up this ridiculous pretence. I disown you Azlak. You were never mine to begin with.\"\n\nThe words were cruel. I should have been devastated, but as I looked up to Esperance I felt none of that. I felt only cold scorn towards Marin. He had never been a supportive father, so I felt no loss.\n\n\"Let us past,\" I growled, ignoring Marin and glaring at Yalle. \"Esperance will leave us, though she deserves a much better response than this. You shall go and find Ddraig Anzig, and we can start to fix the rot that has taken root in this clan.\"\n\n\"Who said you could give \u2013\" Yalle started to say, but I interrupted him.\n\n\"Find the ddraig. You should have no other priority,\" I snarled, pushing past the albino. He offered no further resistance, allowing me to stalk through the crowd of drakes. Kaz followed on my tail, with Esperance just behind him. Every time I glanced back she was glaring at a different drake, and without exception they all turned away within a moment. None could withstand the ferocity of her eyes.\n\nIt was an awkward climb out of the central chamber for Esperance, but despite her recent injuries she managed it with relative ease. Kaz and I only needed to wait for a couple of minutes for her to reach us, barely a sweat on her brow. We met no further resistance as we passed through the upper areas of the lair, though there were plenty of curious eyes looking out through the shadows.\n\nAnother climb faced Esperance in the gorge outside the lair, which she also managed with ease. She hauled herself up almost as fast as we could fly, an inhuman strength and agility aiding her climb. A couple of drakes had followed us out, and they were joined by a few curious others who had already been out hunting.\n\n\"Which way is south?\" Esperance asked once she reached the top. She looked up at the sky and slowly spun around as she tried to get her bearings. I pointed her in the right direction, and she placed her hand on my head again. \"Tell your ddraig his army will be here in a week. Sooner if I can manage it. If anything changes, let me know through the slate.\n\n\"And to both of you, and the other who was there, thank you for helping me. I don't know how long I'd have been down there without your help. Until the next time, little dragons.\"\n\nI barely had the chance to utter a farewell before she was gone, bounding away to the south with a pace I would never have thought possible. She moved so much faster than any other human and had vanished from view within barely a minute. I gently rubbed my paw, not hard enough to activate the slate, but enough to know it was there, just below my scales. I glanced across at Kaz. Esperance had given us both huge tasks. The fate of three drakes would decide the future of dragonkind, and we didn't even know the identity of one. There was a lot of work to do. It was time to begin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"I don't know if I should tell you this secret or not, but it may help explain why your ddraig is missing,\" Ddraig Krateos said. It had been two hours since I had first realised Ddraig Anzig was lost, and there had still been no word of him. The Nixan ddraig had summoned me up to his chambers, and I was sat in front of the fire with him, Haeraig Zeena and Kaz lying nearby.\n\n\"Anything that could help us find him, Ddraig Krateos. This discussion will not leave these chambers,\" I assured the Nixan. I was completely tense, the fear of what was about to be revealed accentuating the loss of Esperance.\n\nDdraig Krateos took a deep breath. \"Anzig is my son.\" He held up a paw to curtail my shocked cry of protest. \"I only discovered that this morning. Three of my eggs were lost in the wild. One was Anzig. The second was the dragoness Maznar. And the third we don't know about, but\u2026\"\n\nHis eyes met mine as realisation reached us both in the same instant. \"They would be a drake with magic but not from Nixa,\" I said slowly. \"My egg was found in the wilderness. I'm your son.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos choked back a sob as Haeraig Zeena hurried to her paws. \"How is this possible?\" the Nixan ddraig said. He rested his head against his daughter's. \"I lose four sons, but find two more and a daughter just days later.\"\n\nI didn't know what to say. Marin had rejected me just a matter of hours ago, and already I had found my true father? I was the son of the Nixan ddraig. It was just too much for my mind to process, the sudden position of relative power I found myself in. I was older than Ddraig Anzig by a couple of days, which placed me at a higher rank than him amongst Nixan hierarchy. In Laxtal, we were nothing. I had fallen nowhere, I already was nothing, but for Ddraig Anzig the loss of status would be immense. It was no wonder he had kept this knowledge hidden to all. I wondered how long he had known.\n\n\"Will our clan accept them?\" Haeraig Zeena quietly asked her father.\n\n\"Our numbers are too few to pick and choose, Zeena. Any Nixan, no matter how or where they were raised, will be a welcome addition to our clan,\" the ddraig said. I couldn't help but smile, comparing the ddraig's words to those Yalle and Marin had spouted out. They wanted just Laxtal drakes within Laxtal, and none other. They had opposed me when I had allowed the Xital outcast Selane to stay in our lair, and they had disagreed with me on everything regarding the Nixans. Ddraig Krateos seemed a much more accepting drake.\n\n\"Once all of this is over, Ddraig Krateos, father, I think I should like to join you and your clan,\" I said firmly. I was in no doubt, there was nothing holding me to Laxtal but for Ddraig Anzig, and I doubted he would remain in Laxtal either, once his true parentage came to light. Even my mate was Nixan.\n\n\"Of course, my son, we would be glad to have you,\" Ddraig Krateos replied. He held open a welcoming wing, and I stepped into his embrace. He rumbled in a loud purr. \"I could never have imagined my lost eggs would survive. I will always be in Laxtal's debt for the services they have done for me.\"\n\nI kept silent on how reluctantly Laxtal would accept that debt. They would want nothing to do with the two Nixans that had been unwittingly raised here. I wondered if Ddraig Anzig had already realised that, and had quietly slipped away before his clan had turned on him, but I had to discount that. I had seen no sign of that when we had last spoken, and nor had he been seen in the central chambers. He couldn't have gotten out without being seen at all. No, he was still down there. With this new knowledge, more than ever it felt like my responsibility to find him. After all, he was my brother.\n\nA little reluctantly, I excused myself from Ddraig Krateos's company, taking Kaz with me back down to the lower passages. About half a dozen drakes had gone down earlier, but that was the extent of the search group Yalle had organised. I wondered if the albino had had enough of Ddraig Anzig's rule of the clan, and was trying to position himself as the next ddraig. With Anzig missing and Haeraig Ellian absent, he had a good opportunity. That was beyond my concern though. All I cared about was finding my brother, and I felt an excited tingle when I thought of him as that. I had a family that cared about me at last.\n\nI had Seen nothing of Ddraig Anzig's plight, and that concerned me. I didn't know if it meant nothing important had happened, or if there was no future left for him. I tried hard not to think about the latter. I couldn't lose my brother so soon after discovering him.\n\nIt felt like we were all alone as we searched for the ddraig. I could hear no evidence of the other drakes who were meant to be looking for him. Did the treachery against the ddraig run deeper than just Yalle?\n\nAt Kaz's suggestion we separated so we could cover more ground. Though I was reluctant to leave his side and delve into the darkness alone, I saw the logic in his decision. I hurried on down, keeping every sense alert for any sign of the ddraig, while I desperately sought something from my magic to indicate there was still a potential future with him present. I found nothing. There was nothing to indicate that Anzig would have any say over the future.\n\nI couldn't help it. Long suppressed tears started to form in my eyes. It had been such a long time since I had cried that the wetness against my scales felt strange. Hope was surely fading. Whatever had happened to Ddraig Anzig would remain a mystery. Had it been a plot by Yalle to seize power? Had Anzig anticipated being rejected by his clan for being Nixan and snuck quietly away?\n\nI slipped and almost fell on a patch of damp beneath my paws. For one absurd instant I thought it was my tears, but as I lifted up my paw I was able to tell what it was. A shine of crimson was on my golden scales. Blood.\n\nI shrieked for Kaz as I ran ahead. Somewhere behind me I could hear my mate as he hastened to reach me, but panic and fear gave haste to my paws. I could see it now, a trail of blood on the stone ground. It was no small amount either. Whatever drake had been down here had been hurt badly. I almost wished it wasn't the ddraig I had found.\n\nThe trail of blood led me down some of the darker passages in the lair, and from the way it smeared here and there I wondered if the cause had been dragged against their will. In some places I could see pawprints in the blood, heading back the way I came. Surely that was proof? Someone had dragged an injured drake down here and then fled the scene.\n\nUp ahead was a patch of almost complete darkness as five torches had been thrown to the ground and extinguished. In the gloom I could just make out a misshapen shadow. I slowed down and tilted my head in confusion. It looked like a drake, but there was something not quite right. The shape of the body was wrong. It was completely still.\n\nI spun around to see Kaz catch up with me. He carried a lit torch in his mouth, throwing light on the bloodstained ground. As he placed the torch back in a sconce, I turned back to the silhouette on the floor, now bathed in light. It took me but a moment to realise what was amiss.\n\n\"Where are his wings?\" I howled. \"Kaz? Where are his wings?\"\n\nI could hardly believe what I was seeing. I felt faint. This could not be happening.\n\nDdraig Anzig was still alive; I could see the faintest of movements in his chest as he breathed, but his wings\u2026 his wings had been torn from their sockets, leaving nothing behind but bloodied stumps.\n\nKaz quickly rushed forward and placed his paw on Anzig's back, eliciting a pitiful whimper of pain from the ddraig.\n\n\"Can you heal him?\"\n\nI knew immediately from the haunted look in Kaz's eyes that he could not. \"I can stop the blood, but I can't heal what isn't there. His wings are\u2026\" Kaz choked up and swallowed the words he had been trying to say. \"I'll heal him the best I can, but\u2026 Azlak he won't fly again.\"\n\nI bowed my head as orange light started to envelope the ddraig. A drake without wings was useless and helpless. The sky was everything to a drake. It would almost be a mercy to just let him die. Only the thought of telling Ddraig Krateos that another of his sons had died made me allow Kaz to continue his healing. It would be bad enough trying to explain this.\n\n\"It's\u2026 it's done,\" Kaz said shakily. I didn't want to look. I didn't know if I could bear seeing my ddraig, my brother, in such a way. \"He's weak, but he should come through. I've kept his heart beating still. It had almost stopped. He'd lost a lot of blood. Well, we saw it all over the ground.\"\n\nI didn't know if Kaz spoke simply to cope. It was certainly more than I was able to do, still staring down at the ground and refusing to lift my eyes. My mate hadn't finished either. \"If only my brother was here. We'd be able to get him up to his chambers easily. We shouldn't leave him down here, but I don't know what else we can do.\"\n\nSteeling my resolve, I slowly looked up. First, I saw Kaz's pleading eyes, desperate for direction on what to do. Then my eyes moved on to Anzig's shivering body. Blood still soaked his green scales, but Kaz had sealed off the wounds where his wings once had been. All that was left was small stumps of flesh, useless and pathetic. I reached out to him, my paw shaking as I gently brushed the side of my brother's snout. He twitched slightly, but otherwise gave no indication he was aware of my touch.\n\n\"Who could have done this?\" Kaz whispered, placing his paw on top of mine. I leant against him, and he supported my weight. I had suspected Yalle, especially if the albino had interests in becoming ddraig, but surely even he was not capable of such a terrible act? Until the ddraig woke and was able to tell us who had done this to him, there were very few drakes we could trust.\n\nI asked Kaz to fetch Ddraig Krateos and his daughter. With their magic, we would be able to carry Anzig up to the comfort and safety of his chambers. Of course, we would have to take him through the central chambers to get him there, in plain view of the entire clan. Everyone would know of his injuries and the helplessness that came with it. As I lay beside the ddraig, a protective wing over his vulnerable body, I tried to find some way to prevent his embarrassment to the clan, but could think of nothing. Laxtal would not follow a wingless leader.\n\nIt was not long before Ddraig Krateos arrived, running through the narrow passages as though a human army was on his tail. I stood as soon as I heard him, spreading my wings to shield Anzig from view. Haeraig Zeena, Isikian, and Kaz followed not far behind the distressed ddraig.\n\n\"What happened to him? Please, let me through,\" Ddraig Krateos asked, trying to push past me, but I held firm and kept him away from Anzig.\n\n\"Please, wait. He's badly hurt, Ddraig,\" I replied, trying to stop the Nixan, but he kept on trying to force his way through. Stubbornly I held my ground, placing my body between him and his son. \"Father, stop.\"\n\nAt those words Ddraig Krateos finally ceased his attempts to get around me. Behind him I could see Isikian mouth the word 'father' in shock. I would deal with that later.\n\n\"What happened?\" Ddraig Krateos repeated, his voice hollow and empty.\n\nI explained to the ddraig everything I knew about what had occurred, but the gaps in my knowledge were immense. I couldn't tell the ddraig what he really wanted to know, and that was who had attacked his son and left him a helpless cripple. When I finally lowered my wings Ddraig Krateos howled his grief, while Isikian and Haeraig Zeena both averted their eyes.\n\nA low, savage snarl emanated from the back of Ddraig Krateos's throat. In alarm, I stepped out of his way before realising the reaction was not for me. \"I swear I will destroy whoever did this to you, my son,\" he said, holding Anzig's head in his paws. There was the slightest murmur of response from Anzig, but otherwise he remained still and quiet.\n\nI placed my paw on Ddraig Krateos's tail. \"We should take him up to his chambers, where he can rest properly,\" I said, hoping not to feel the wrath of the Nixan.\n\nThe ddraig's shoulders slumped as he nodded. \"Of course, that will be best. Isikian, can you fetch Eule. I think her magic will be needed.\"\n\nIsikian bowed his head and hurried off to do his ddraig's bidding. I asked what Eule's magic was, as I couldn't recall being introduced to such a Nixan, but I got no response from Ddraig Krateos.\n\nWith a flash of amber light, the prone body of Anzig started to lift into the air. I looked into Ddraig Krateos's eyes, which shone with the same light that enveloped his son. He appeared to be holding back tears, the strain of the constantly battling emotions taking their toll on the Nixan ddraig.\n\nSlowly we made our way back up to the main part of the lair. Ddraig Krateos led the way with Haeraig Zeena, Anzig's motionless body between them as they carried him with their magic. I lingered behind with Kaz. He held me close with his wing as we walked, with me resting my head against his shoulder. No one spoke. There was nothing left to say.\n\nAs we approached the central chamber, I was sent ahead to keep any wandering drakes while we waited for Isikian to return with Eule. If Ddraig Krateos knew a way to keep Anzig from being seen, then we didn't want anyone to catch a glimpse of him now. Though I was around a few corners from the main part of the lair, I could hear a lot of activity ahead of me. There didn't seem to be much concern for the missing ddraig, as the general mood appeared to be quite positive. I shook my head. Had Anzig's rule of the clan been poisoned to such a degree that no one even cared about his fate?\n\nI didn't have to wait long for Isikian to return, a copper-scaled Nixan dragoness hurrying by his side. I allowed Eule to pass, but Isikian remained by my side. Several times he tried to speak, but every time the words died before he could spit them out. I knew what he was trying to say, and I helped him out by answering the unspoken question.\n\n\"I am Ddraig Krateos's son,\" I said, dragging my paws against the ground. \"Anzig is my brother, and Maznar our sister.\" I held up a paw to keep Isikian quiet for a moment longer. \"I only learned this today. It's going to take a lot of getting used to.\"\n\n\"I did tell you I thought you were Nixan,\" Isikian said, giving me a friendly shove on the shoulder. I tried to smile, but I just couldn't find the emotion I needed for that. The healer put his paw on mine. \"We're all worried about Anzig. There isn't a Nixan here who won't be outraged at what happened, and we will help Laxtal find the attacker.\"\n\n\"But what if the attacker is Laxtal? This wasn't just an attack on any drake. This is the ddraig of the clan. It could only have been done by someone seeking to replace him,\" I whispered. I half-expected someone to overhear me and leap from the shadows, accusing me of spreading such lies against the senior drakes of the clan, but none came.\n\n\"No drake would want to earn power that way. Such a vile act would not be treated with respect,\" Isikian said.\n\nI sighed. What he said was logical, but I still couldn't help but feel Yalle or Saya was behind this. The healer looked like he had more to say, but he closed his mouth again as Ddraig Krateos and the others caught up with us. Anzig was still suspended in the magic of the ddraig and his daughter, but even as I watched Eule put her paw on my brother's body. There was a flash of white light and the two of them vanished.\n\n\"She's a teleporter too?\" I asked in shock. I had thought Airil was the only survivor with that magic.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" an unfamiliar female's voice answered. I frantically looked around, trying to find the source, but Haeraig Zeena was the only dragoness present, and she hadn't spoken. \"I haven't moved from where you last saw me.\"\n\nMy eyes focussed on the space between Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena. I wasn't sure if I was imagining the slight shimmering I saw, like light reflecting off the surface of water. \"You're invisible?\"\n\n\"Yes. But we're not going to fool anybody if you keep talking to me,\" the empty patch of air retorted. I offered a quick apology before leading the group out into the central chambers. Apart from a few curious drakes nearby, no one even seemed to notice us. It was as though Eule had turned us all invisible.\n\nYalle and Marin were up on the raised dais in the middle of the chamber with Saya and Vinzent. The four drakes were quietly discussing something, but from this far away I had no hope of overhearing them. I knew soon I would have to let them know we had found Ddraig Anzig, but I didn't have the heart for that confrontation yet. I would have some heated words for the albino and the dragon I had once called father, but that could wait until Anzig was safely in his chambers. If they were oblivious enough to not see us crossing the central chamber then they didn't deserve to know what their ddraig's fate was. That was if they didn't already know. They could already be plotting how to convince Laxtal to follow their rule.\n\nWe soon took to wing to ascend to the small cluster of passageways behind the great fire. We rose through the air slowly, for the benefit of the three drakes helping to carry Ddraig Anzig. It would be taking a lot of concentration from Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena to keep Anzig in the air, not even accounting for Eule remaining in contact with him. I just hoped Anzig wouldn't return to consciousness as we flew.\n\nFinally, we made it up to Ddraig Anzig's chambers. Eule removed her grip from Anzig's tail as Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena released him from their magic on his pile of rugs and blankets. I went forward and moved him into a more comfortable position, but that was about all I could do for him just now. He had never been a large dragon, less than an inch taller than me, but now he looked tiny without his wings; so thin and frail.\n\nI had to blink a few times as I was sure something silver kept flashing past my eyes. No one else seemed to notice, so I dismissed it and moved it to the back of my mind. Isikian had immediately moved to light the fire and get some warmth into the chamber. Ddraig Krateos lay down beside his son and closed his eyes, though I could tell he was not about to fall asleep. His snout occasionally twitched in a silent snarl.\n\nEule had made a quiet exit, but no one else was willing to leave. We would all remain until Ddraig Anzig awoke. Partly we were curious. We wanted to know who had dared attack the ddraig, but we were also protective. No one wanted Anzig to come to any further harm, and we would fight tooth and claw to keep him from danger.\n\nWe spoke little, with only the occasional word passing between us. It must have been close to evening and therefore the best time to hunt, but no one even suggested leaving. We would stay as long as we needed to.\n\nHours passed by. I could feel the cold chill of the night's air creeping into the chamber, not quite annulled by the fire. The lair had fallen quiet as most of the drakes had returned to their chambers to sleep away the cold night. I doubted any of them cared about what was happening in here. Certainly no one had come to find me and ask about the ddraig. They didn't even know if he had been found yet.\n\nAnzig stirred. Slowly he opened his eyes and balefully stared around the chamber. Not once did he move his head to look at his back, though his eyes flicked in that direction a couple of times. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse.\n\n\"You should have let me die.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "For three days we had rested, and to me it felt like three days too long. I respected Mulner for wanting to stay here, but it was not my place. I needed to get back to Laxtal, where I could make a more telling contribution to the war. Ddraig Boruc had fully recovered from the flight north, and would be joining us upon our return to Laxtal. We needed only to fly for half the distance, as Airil was confident he could carry us the remainder with his magic. I was thrilled; it had been too long since I had last experienced those few moments of incredible wonder.\n\nMulner tried to make me promise to return to him as soon as possible, but this time I was unable to make any such assurance. As haeraig of Laxtal I knew I would be called upon for greater duties for the clan and would be unlikely to have the chance to escape until the war was won or lost. If he wanted to see me, he would have to come to Laxtal.\n\nI had taken advantage of his company while I could, spending almost every waking moment with him, Airil usually accompanying us when he wasn't shadowing Ddraig Boruc amongst the humans. I had been fascinated by what the humans had accomplished in such a small amount of time, much to my brother's chagrin. He had attempted to convince me how much they were ruining his territory, but I had just marvelled at how they could create so much from the landscape.\n\nJames McArthur had been pleased to see me again. The human leader had given me a short tour of everything his group of fifty had achieved in my absence. Though I understood little of their technology, it had done nothing to diminish the awe their endeavours inspired. He also promised their support should Laxtal come under direct threat. Whether our clan could accept such aid was yet to be determined.\n\nAn urgency fuelled Ddraig Boruc's wings, as he led us eastwards away from Mulner's little clan. He hadn't told us why he felt such haste was necessary, but he pushed himself hard to reach Laxtal as quickly as possible. At times, I struggled to keep up. I was at a loss to understand how the ancient dragon could maintain such a gruelling pace.\n\nIt was only a few hours of flying before Airil called us down to land. We had just entered Laxtal territory, and I could see a couple of unlit beacons below. Either the beacon keepers hadn't seen us yet, or my command to garrison all the beacons had gone unheeded. I couldn't imagine Anzig would knowingly neglect such a crucial part of our defences. Even if we were expecting the human army to attack from the west or north, it would be foolish to neglect the southern boundaries.\n\nI led my two companions down to the closest beacon, wanting answers as to why my instructions had not been followed, before returning to the central lair. Situated atop a low hill, the beacon \u2013 a large stone structure that had been carved out from the hill's bedrock many years ago \u2013 there was perched a bundle of firewood on a blackened patch of stone. I landed by the firewood and furled my wings. I listened, but there was no sound to be heard. No drake came forth to apologise for their inattention.\n\n\"Do you smell that?\" Ddraig Boruc asked as he landed by my side, the backdraft from his wings kicking up a vortex of small twigs and dead leaves from the firewood.\n\nI nodded. It smelt of death. Abruptly I both knew and simultaneously feared what we would find here.\n\nAiril descended into the small hollow that served as shelter for the beacon's keeper. His blue tail had barely disappeared into the shadow before he called out. \"She's in here. It looks like she put up a fight.\"\n\nThe Nixan came straight back out, spreading his wings to prevent me from going past him.\n\n\"Human?\" Ddraig Boruc asked. The Vatrean hung back, inspecting the stone in several places around the beacon, occasionally pausing to claw out a patch of weed or moss and holding it close to his eyes to identify it.\n\n\"No. Drake. She was savaged by claws,\" Airil said, holding his head low.\n\nDdraig Boruc paused his search for a moment, before sighing and shaking his head. \"Dark times will fall when dragon kills dragon in cold blood. When the rune of the gods is found once more, when the wingless amongst us flies the highest and the eagles of war descend in peace. When dragonkind seems doomed to fall, that is when the night is darkest and the glorious dawn returns once more,\" the ancient ddraig chanted.\n\n\"What was that?\" I asked Ddraig Boruc.\n\nHe shook his head with a wry smile. \"Just something someone very wise told me long ago. This just reminded me of that, and maybe, just maybe, it might give us some hope.\"\n\n\"A Nixan seer told you that?\" Airil asked, finally stepping away from the entrance to the small cave.\n\n\"No, it was no drake. He was a werewolf who lived very long ago. There is more magic in the world than just your clan, young Airil. Much greater magic, too,\" Ddraig Boruc said, shaking an admonishing paw at the Nixan. It was something the Vatrean had mentioned several times before, but Airil was finding it hard to believe that magic existed beyond Nixa. Even after stories had been told of humans being able to use magic, they were considered flukes and freaks, and only the clan of magic had rightful access to the mystical art.\n\nI had other concerns on my mind. If the beacon keeper had been killed by another drake, it could be an attempt by another clan to learn the secrets of the beacon flames. Only Laxtal knew how to create the intricate colours in the fire that could differentiate between threat and friend, drake or human. The beacon fires were a coded network across the clan, and only Laxtal knew their secrets. That was also the terms of the alliance I had promised to Ddraig Aranat of Axaatl. His clan would learn the secret too. I had to know if the beacons had been compromised.\n\nBefore Airil could stop me, I barged my way past him and into the shadows of the little burrow. Momentarily, my eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, before a grisly scene unfolded before me. Blood splattered the walls, the crimson stains still slightly damp. In the middle of the floor lay the dragoness who had been keeping the beacon. Airil had chosen his word well: savaged. Her killer had not been content with a simple bite to the throat. Her mangled body was testament to both the fight she had put up, and the ferocity of her foe. Her scaled hide had been rent in dozens of places, her wings beaten and torn. I didn't want to keep staring, but I could only look away when Airil placed his paw on my tail.\n\nAverting my eyes from the savaged corpse, I scanned the rest of the room. There, in the far corner, was the cache of chemicals and powders the keepers used to manipulate the flames. Taking care not to stand on the blood-soaked dirt floor, I leapt across the chamber. It was completely untouched. Everything was all still here. Possession of the beacon's secrets was not the cause of this attack.\n\nWith precision, I eased out a particular black stone which threatened to crumble apart in my claws. Ignoring Airil's questions, I walked back outside with an awkward three-legged gait. Knowledge of this attack had to be spread, and the other keepers needed to know of the danger they could be in. One keeper had been attacked and brutally slain. I could only assume that others would be a target too.\n\nAt my request, Ddraig Boruc used the human-made firelighter that was always kept just beside the firewood to create a roaring blaze. If the other keepers were still alive, they would soon react and light their own fires, and the message would spread across the clan. I crumbled the small black stone in my paw and threw the powder into the fire. Black flames erupted with a tinge of purple, sending a warning that murder and treachery had been carried out in our territory.\n\nI looked towards the horizon in anticipation. The warning would be useless if the other keepers were dead.\n\n\"Look, there,\" Airil said, pointing with a wingtip to the north. Another beacon had been lit, and a moment later it also burnt with the black and purple flames. Then a second was lit, and a third, further away. The keepers were alive and our clan would be warned.\n\n\"We shouldn't linger,\" Airil said, his eyes spellbound by the mystical flickering of the fire. \"Whoever attacked the dragoness here may not be far away. They could easily come back for us.\"\n\n\"We can't just leave her though. She deserves a dignified rest at least,\" I said. It would not be right to leave the dragoness's body for the wild animals to further destroy. It would disrespect her memory. She was not carrion for the wildcats. Somewhere, not too far away, would be a small outlying lair where this dragoness had lived. She would have friends and family there. Soon they would mourn their fallen companion.\n\nI touched the azure gem at my neck, the symbol of Laxtal's leadership. It represented the power, responsibility, and duty I owed all members of the clan. The least I could do for this dragoness and her family was to provide her with a noble and fitting eternal rest.\n\n\"Do your clan burn their dead?\" Ddraig Boruc asked, looking towards the southern horizon.\n\n\"Only if there is no other option,\" I replied. We preferred to bury those who had passed on. There was an expansive burial ground to the south of the central lair, where the ground was soft. Thousands of Laxtal drakes lay there amongst the forests and rivers there, at peace in the tranquil surrounds of nature.\n\n\"There is no other option,\" Ddraig Boruc said, pointing with a quivering wing to a dark patch in the sky. I almost dismissed it as a cloud, but then I realised it moved against the wind. It turned slightly, and I saw it for what it really was. Anzig's stories of the monster he had encountered over the mountains came to mind.\n\n\"Nightwings,\" I whispered in horror. How could she be here? Anzig had said she had fallen into the ocean.\n\n\"It can't be,\" Airil said, also looking up to the great spectre. \"Nightwings had black scales. This one is green. It can't be her.\" The Nixan had seen what I had not. This was not Nightwings.\n\n\"Then the humans have created another demon,\" I said tersely. The monster was circling around one of the other lit beacons like a carrion bird. Swiftly it descended and disappeared from view. I closed my eyes, fearing the life of one of the other beacon keepers. Had we given them enough warning to escape?\n\n\"If you wish to cremate your clanmate, now is the time. Whatever that is, it doesn't seem like it's here to negotiate,\" Ddraig Boruc warned. He spoke wisely, galvanising Airil and me into action. There would be no time for ceremony, but we would do what we could for the dragoness.\n\nWith the ddraig keeping watch in case the demon should approach, I hurried down into the little burrow with Airil following just behind. The brutal scene no longer shocked us. There were more important things to concern ourselves with.\n\n\"Do you think that creature did this?\" I asked Airil as we struggled to lift the dragoness's body onto my back, trying to ignore the oozing blood seeping onto my scales, staining them red.\n\n\"Too big, isn't it?\" Airil replied with a shrug, before taking the dragoness's forelegs over his shoulder. It was awkward, but together we were able to half-carry, half-drag the lifeless body up to beneath the open skies once more.\n\nWe gently placed the body next to the fire, which had started to spit orange and yellow once more. A deep concussive thrum filled the air, followed by an urgent warning from Ddraig Boruc.\n\nI didn't even need to look up. The creature was coming.\n\nFrantically I pulled down on the pile of firewood, trying to pull some down to cover the dragoness's body. If I could just get the flesh to light\u2026\n\n\"Leave her, Ellian,\" Ddraig Boruc whispered frantically, edging closer to Airil.\n\n\"I can't. This needs to be done,\" I cried, trying to block out the steadily growing volume of the monstrous dragon's wingbeats. All I needed to do was pull the flames down to cover the dragoness's body, and it was my duty to her that she was not left alone until been done. I tore at the burning foliage at the bottom of the pile, ignoring the heat searing my scales as I tried to unbalance the towering inferno of flame.\n\nTwigs and logs snapped and crackled as I dislodged enough to send the whole bonfire come crashing down. I leapt away with a squawk, taking to wing briefly to avoid the falling flaming debris. Grounded, I hurried over to Airil and Ddraig Boruc, but as I did so I caught sight of the monster, close enough now that I could see its ferocious yellow eyes. The beast roared, a deafening sound that assaulted my ears and blurred my vision.\n\nAiril held out his paw for me to take, holding a firm grip on the ddraig's paw on his other side, ready to take us away from here. The dragoness's body was alight. She had her pyre. My duty here was done, and I reached forward for my mate and for a brief moment we touched.\n\nThe ground shook as the creature landed, and in the shockwave I fell back and away from Airil.\n\nAiril's pupils dilated, but it was already too late. A loud crack and my mate was gone.\n\nI was alone in the company of a monster. My eyes darted from side-to-side, looking for some sanctuary. The small keeper's burrow had offered little shelter to the dragoness, but it was all I had for safety. I dived towards it just as the monstrous dragon lifted its head up over the edge of the stone slab. His head alone was larger than my body, and a crown of horns adorned the top of its skull. He was a Xital dragon, many times larger than even the biggest Axaatl drakes.\n\nI fled into the small chamber, cowering in the far corner as the monster hauled itself up on to the beacon. Giant claws crumbled the rock as it moved around with purpose. A deep rumbling reached my ears, and it took me a moment to realise it was laughter. The creature was laughing at me.\n\n\"Another little drake to chase?\" the creature said. The small amount of light that illuminated the chamber was cut off as the oversized drake crouched down in front of the entryway. In the complete darkness I could see nothing, and I tried not to move and make a sound, but I knew it was pointless. The creature couldn't reach me here, but nor did I have any chance of escape while it sat and blocked off the only exit.\n\n\"I'll give you the same choice I gave the others, little drake. Either I kill you, or I take you back to Xital and subject you to their magic,\" the creature said.\n\nI couldn't help myself. \"Xital has no magic,\" I squeaked, before remembering that I was trying to remain silent. This wasn't like what Airil believed. Nixans weren't the only users of magic in Farenar, but they certainly were the only drakes who possessed the ability. No Xital had ever used magic.\n\nThe monster snickered. \"With human help we can. I am the result of such magic, and the future of dragonkind. You would be wise to accompany me, little drake. It is humans who will lead us to the future, not your pitiful Laxtal leaders,\" he sneered. I thought I could see a little bit of movement in the darkness, and the slightest flash of its yellow eyes. \"Come, little drake. Let us speak in a civil manner. I am Garus of Xital. I wish to know your name.\"\n\nI was not going to give this creature my name, fearing that somehow it would provide some power over me. I was haeraig of my clan. If I were to fall into the claws of Xital once again then I would be powerful leverage for them. I must not let this dragon know who he had trapped beneath him.\n\n\"Nothing?\" the dragon purred, pulling his head back to allow a little light into the chamber. All I could see was Garus's terrifying visage as he leered down at me. I concealed the gem at my neck, hoping he didn't see the symbol of Laxtal's power. \"Then you shall meet the same fate as the others.\"\n\nThe dragon took in a deep breath, just as a deafening crack resounded from just by my right ear. A flash of blue and I felt a touch at my side.\n\nThe monstrous dragon exhaled, and a stream of flame roared from his gaping mouth.\n\nI shrieked as darkness took me. Red flames licked the corners of my eyes, as shafts of coloured light danced in front of me. Shapeless, formless they spun and swirled, dazzling me as the echoes of an enraged roar vibrated through my body. All the while a pressure on my paw kept me safe.\n\nThe light almost blinded me, and I gulped in air to my seared lungs. Fresh air. Grass was beneath my paws. Before I even had time to react, Airil was holding me tight, his wings wrapped almost completely around me. I returned his embrace, still trying to slow my racing heart. My brain and senses finally caught up with reality. I was safe.\n\n\"It breathed fire?\" I asked in shock, more to myself than Airil, barely believing the evidence of my own eyes and the singes to my body. Legends told of drakes being able to spit fire long ago, but it was no more than that. A vague story almost lost to the depths of time.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" Airil was saying in a shaky voice. I wasn't sure he had even been aware of the attack. He was exhausted, and his tight grip on me started to slacken. I pulled back a little from my mate and looked into his eyes, holding his head with my wings, preventing him from looking away.\n\n\"You came back for me, that's all that matters,\" I said. He had not meant to leave me behind, and I had come out of it alive. We had also learnt something new. Humans and Xital drakes had created at least one of these Nightwings-like monsters. After fending off a few more apologies from my mate, I attempted to take stock of where we were. We hadn't quite made it all the way back to the main lair of Laxtal, but were instead about an hour's flight to the south. Ddraig Boruc was a few feet away, his wings spread out as he lay in the sun, gaining some warmth whilst he could.\n\nWith a sheepish Airil on my tail, I approached the ancient ddraig and recounted everything Garus had said. Every drake allied to our clan needed to be made aware of this event, and the Vatrean ddraig may be able to delve deep into his incredible memory to find a similar occurrence. I did not expect him to leap up to his paws, wings still trailing on the ground as his eyes widened in shock. It was by far the most active I had ever seen him.\n\n\"Repeat everything you just told me,\" the ddraig said quickly, urgently.\n\nOnce more I repeated Garus's words, paying close attention to the ddraig's reaction. I hadn't realised his eyes could widen further, but they did.\n\n\"Why him? Why now?\" he hissed, his eyes going dark as he pondered this new information. He offered no elaboration. He whispered to a person not present. \"Dirus, help me understand.\"\n\n\"Has this happened before?\" Airil asked. My mate's wing was still held protectively over my body. I doubted he would let me out of his sight for some time to come. I gently leant into him, welcoming the touch of his scales against mine.\n\n\"It has not,\" the ddraig replied, his words slow and thoughtful. \"We should hurry to Laxtal. The portents that this event holds could have wide-ranging effects beyond even I could realise. Everything I thought I knew about this human George has just changed. I don't know how he has done this, but\u2026 I'm sorry, I just don't have the words for this right now.\n\n\"If Ddraig Krateos has survived the ambush on Nixa, then I feel he is the only one I can discuss such matters with. Of all drakes, he knows the most about the Axinstone. Maybe together we can work this out, but we must hurry.\"\n\nI tried not to be too fearful by Ddraig Boruc's words, but if this was something he had no knowledge over then I couldn't help but feel a little intimidated by the magic that had created Garus. I had experienced a little of what the humans and Xital drakes had been planning during my time in captivity there, but this monster had been kept completely hidden from me.\n\nDdraig Boruc was silent as we took to wing once more, for what was hopefully the last time before returning to Laxtal. Nothing I could say to the Vatrean was able to coax him from his silence; he was clearly in deep thought about what had happened at the beacon, and what it meant for the future of dragonkind.\n\nI hoped answers would be provided once we returned home, and not further questions. The time had surely come to turn this war around."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "Even in my dreams there was no escape.\n\nI relived that moment over and over. I could feel her teeth tearing into my wings, again and again and again. I couldn't bear it. Shrieking in agony I tried to escape, but I was stuck. Trapped beneath my sister, unable to do anything but endure my wings being torn away once more. Every time she spat them to the side, they were there on my back again, ready to be removed once more.\n\n\"Why are you doing this to me?\" I cried out, not expecting any answer. But one came. She moved, and standing over me were two copies of Maznar. One kept attacking my wings, but the other stared down at me sadly. I tried to lunge up to her, but I couldn't move.\n\n\"Oh my brother, just look at you.\" She shook her head slowly.\n\n\"You did this to me,\" I snarled, putting as much venom into my voice as I could through the pain.\n\nAgain she shook her head. \"No, my brother. I want you to remember it this way.\"\n\nBefore I had chance to reply, she was gone. Fading into the darkness. The drake pinning me down snapped at my wings again. I shrieked in pain. His emerald scales gleamed in the dark. He was meant to be a healer. I didn't understand, but every tear of his teeth was perfectly placed to cause the most pain.\n\nI whimpered into the uncaring darkness as Isikian tore my wings from my body again and again.\n\nI held my head in my paws, trying to erase from my memory the events of the last day. I simply wanted to undo everything that had happened, to forget all I had learnt, and to heal the damage that had been done to me. It had not taken me long to grow weary of the constant sympathy I had received from Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena, or the silent pity from Azlak. Thankfully they had left me alone at last, leaving me with just my thoughts and Mushussu for company. The guardian dragoness I could do little about, but at least she had kept silent for the time being.\n\nI no longer knew what to do. If I ran the risk of my clan turning on me before, surely now my rule would be overthrown the moment my injuries became known. Against my better judgement I glanced behind at my back, which looked bare and small without my wings shielding it. A shadow of the agonising pain knifed through me. My memories were vague and shadowy, but I knew who had done this. Isikian had extracted his payment. He had once saved my life from a fatal injury. Now he had crippled me. I would never be whole again.\n\nThough Ddraig Krateos had pressed me for answers, I had not yet told anyone who had taken my wings, knowing no one would believe me. I didn't dare sleep, fearing to plummet back down into my terrible dreams. I didn't want to relive it again. I couldn't endure that pain, but wakefulness was hardly any better.\n\n\"This is not the end,\" Mushussu said, finally breaking her silence. I heard her metallic paws crossing the stone floor, but I didn't raise my eyes to look at her, instead focussing down on my own paws. \"Look at me Anzig.\"\n\nI felt like I had no choice in the matter. Without even intending to, I obeyed the guardian and stared into her blank silver eyes. \"What do you first notice about me, Anzig?\" she asked, a sharp ring to her voice that I didn't like.\n\n\"That you're not flesh. You're something made of magic.\"\n\n\"No, not that. My body. What do you first see about my body,\" the guardian snapped.\n\nI sighed and looked over the guardian's silvered body. There were several things that came to mind about her distinctive form, but as my eyes roamed her back I realised what she had been trying to point out. \"You don't have wings,\" I said. Whereas I was sure that revelation was meant to uplift me, it just depressed me further. She was an artefact of magic, not of flesh and blood. She was not hampered by her lack of wings, which I most certainly was.\n\n\"Astar raised you to overcome every adversity. He would not want you to give up so easily,\" she said, obviously realising her previous attempt had not worked and changing her direction.\n\nI scoffed. \"I don't think he had this in mind,\" I retorted. This was beyond anything a drake could expect to happen to them. I had been crippled into something that was less than a dragon. There was nothing any drake could do to prepare for this. Once more I looked at my back and the tiny stumps that were all that remained of my wings. One of them gave a feeble twitch, but that was all a drake's most prized possession had been reduced to.\n\n\"You should accept your disadvantage and use it to turn into an advantage. Yes, you're bound to the ground, but that doesn't mean any drake should assume you're toothless. If you get challenged, learn how to adapt your style to fight without wings,\" Mushussu said, poking a single claw into my sternum.\n\nI growled and turned away. Her words meant nothing to the vitriol I knew I would receive from the clan. The guardian had no influence to sway their opinions of me, and even if I managed to defeat one winged drake, another would take their place.\n\nMushussu retreated to her alcove on the far wall. \"If I can't convince you, maybe your brother will,\" she said, snapping her jaw together with a loud click.\n\nI looked over to the veil that covered the entry to my chambers, before snapping back to Mushussu. \"Brother?\" I yelped. How many more drakes would come forward, claiming to be my family?\n\nMushussu had fallen silent with just a knowing smirk without any indication she had heard my question. I didn't have long to wait before a felt the presence of another dragon's mind close by. I was shocked to recognise the touch of the seer, Azlak. I glared at the guardian. What jest was she playing on me now?\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig? May I enter?\" There was no mistaking the uncertain voice that drifted through the veil. It was most definitely the seer. Could he really be my brother, the third lost egg of Ddraig Krateos?\n\nThough I had no real desire for any drake to see me in such a weakened state, Azlak was one of the few I could tolerate, and I reluctantly gave him permission to enter. \"If you come to offer pity, you can turn around now,\" I growled as the seer pushed aside the veil. I had no need for the pathetic sympathy I had been offered so far. No one could possibly understand what I was going through.\n\n\"I'm not here for that, Ddraig,\" Azlak said, keeping his eyes anywhere but towards me. He was scared to look at me. \"I think there's something you needed to know, but I don't know where to begin.\" I could hear his thoughts racing as he tried to compose himself, trying to organise the words to reveal that he was also a son of Ddraig Krateos.\n\n\"You're my brother,\" I said quickly, cutting across Azlak's annoying internal babbling.\n\nThe seer's eyes widened. \"How could he already know?\"\n\n\"Only my body is crippled. Not my mind. Nor my magic for that matter,\" I spat. I neglected to mention that it had been Mushussu who had told us of our relationship. I doubted the limitations of the guardian's magic would have allowed me to reveal her presence.\n\nAzlak appeared rattled. I couldn't understand why. He already knew about my magic, so he shouldn't be so surprised that I was able to work out something such as this. Unless something else was bothering him. Once again I tried to press my mind against his, but his thoughts were in such a mess I was unable to glean anything.\n\n\"Slow down, would you?\" I growled, before realising I had made the request aloud. Azlak's mind registered his confusion at my demand, though he did well to hide it outwardly.\n\n\"I'm sorry, ddraig. I just came to tell you Ddraig Krateos\u2026 our father, he had to fight off Saya. She accused him of trying to take over the clan, like Ddraig Tsona did,\" the seer explained quickly, his words spilling out almost before he could think them. I pulled my mind out of his. It was clear what he thought. Without my leadership, the clan was starting to fracture. At least four drakes were showing intentions of claiming the rank of ddraig. \"We need you, Ddraig Anzig,\" the seer said, vocalising the conclusion to that thought.\n\n\"The clan doesn't want me,\" I replied, turning away from the seer.\n\n\"You don't know that,\" Azlak said, stomping his paw down hard. A sudden steel had come into his voice and he fearlessly approached me. \"Rally the clan around you. Demand that justice be brought upon your attacker. Win them to your side.\"\n\n\"Since when have you been able to tell me what to do?\" I asked bitterly, trying my hardest not to see the logic in the seer's words.\n\n\"Since I became your older brother,\" he answered softly.\n\nI growled and tried to turn from the seer, but he was refusing to leave me alone. He continued to pester me about having to show my leadership to the clan, that I was the same undiminished dragon I had always been. I scathingly retorted that I was no such thing, that obviously I was not the same dragon I used to be. The seer ignored my protests, even attempting to physically coax me towards the passageways that led towards the rest of the lair.\n\n\"Alright, I'll go,\" I snarled angrily, finally giving in to the seer's demands. There was though, something else that bothered me, and I hated drawing attention to a significant weakness. \"There's just one problem. There's a fifty-foot drop to the central chamber. I can't get down there.\"\n\nAzlak paused, clearly having not thought of such a thing. Why would he? No drake ever considered how the layout of their lair would appear to transform so dramatically should they lose the use of their wings. It was an unthinkable situation for a drake, and never before had I thought so much about the sheer cliff walls, especially those around the central chambers and the gorge at the entrance to the lair. I was trapped in here, relying on other drakes to carry me in and out of Laxtal.\n\n\"I'll get Ddraig Krateos. He carried you up here, he'll be able to get you back down,\" the seer said.\n\n\"You don't understand. I don't want to rely on anyone,\" I snapped. I longed to curl up from the shame, but of course I was no longer even given the luxury of using my wings as a hiding place.\n\n\"For now, we'll compromise, but we'll find something to suit you, Ddraig,\" Azlak said, before bowing his head and disappearing behind the veil, in search of the Nixan ddraig. I resigned myself to standing in front of the rest of the clan.\n\nI only had a few minutes to compose myself before Azlak returned with Ddraig Krateos on his tail. The Nixan had a few words of sympathy for me, to which I responded by growling and trying to escape from his clutching paws. I had no need for his pity. I didn't want his help, but I found myself with no choice.\n\nGathering together every scrap of courage I could muster, I led Azlak and my father out of my chambers, keeping a few paces ahead of them through the narrow, twisting passages that led towards the loud noises of the central chamber. Maybe Azlak had been right. I could hear many voices raised in anger at each other, and above them all roared Saya.\n\nI hastened on, coming to a halt at the top of the sheer cliff, a fifty-foot plunge into thin air before me. Never had such a height terrified me so much. My head swam, and I took a couple of hesitant steps back away from the ledge.\n\n\"Are you ready, my son?\" Ddraig Krateos said, coming up by my side. I growled at him, unhappy that he had spoken aloud of our true relationship where other drakes could possibly hear us. I still needed to control the clan until Ellian returned. It seemed like no one had heard the Nixan speak.\n\nI filled my lungs and roared at the clan. \"Laxtal!\"\n\nMy voice echoed through the massive chamber, and shocked silence greeted my words. All eyes were on me now. Then whispers started to spread. Some were shocked. Some were scornful. None pitying.\n\nI felt my paws lift off the ground and I tried my hardest not to flail and panic. I put my trust in Ddraig Krateos as his magic slowly carried me down to the far distant ground. My slow descent was nothing like flying, but it was as close as I would ever feel again.\n\nDdraig Krateos guided me towards the central dais, where Saya had gathered a group of her supporters. They didn't flee the dais, but they all retreated a few steps. I gently touched down and started to prowl towards them.\n\n\"Which of you would dare to call themselves ddraig?\" I growled. I felt so small in comparison to the group of drakes attempting to stare me down. Without my wings I couldn't enhance my size. I would not be intimidated by their spans.\n\nWith a nudge from his mother, the silver-scaled dragon Vinzent stepped forward. \"I would,\" he declared. So it had come to this. The dragon who had once desired Ellian as his mate dared to challenge me in front of the clan. I narrowed my eyes as I felt out for the power of the Axinstone. If I could not hope to win in a physical confrontation, I would use whatever tricks necessary to defeat any challenger. If that meant using my hated magic, then so be it. It was about time it benefitted me.\n\nVinzent started to circle me, and I was not blind to the fact he slowly unfurled his wings, taunting me with their very presence. \"I'm sorry for this, Anzig,\" he said, no evidence of his contrition visible in his posture. A trick to lure me into submission. I was offended he even thought that would work.\n\n\"What are you waiting for,\" I hissed, trying to goad the young dragon into attack, turning on the spot to keep facing my foe. I could already feel his mind. He had mixed feelings. He respected me too much to attack, but he didn't want to disappoint his mother by backing away. This had been her idea, she had forced him into a confrontation he did not want. A puppet dancing to the strings Saya held. Now I would hold the strings.\n\nI already kept a firm grip on Vinzent's mind, waiting for the right moment for my mental strike. The young dragon wasn't yet aware of my presence in his mind, and nor did I expect him to be. He would be completely unprepared for what was about to happen. I had been testing my abilities before Maznar's attack, and I was confident in my plan.\n\nWith my magic in Vinzent's mind, I predicted exactly when he was about to attack, and I deftly stepped aside from his lightning lunge. I gave him a firm kick in the ribs for good measure. My claws raked his side, drawing blood.\n\nI could feel Vinzent's seething realisation at the ignominy of suffering the first injury. Twice more he tried to lay claws on my scales, but both times I avoided his attack, and parried with a lunge of my own. Much to his disbelief, Vinzent was soon bleeding from the initial wound to his side, as well as a slash on his right hindleg and another on his snout. He had yet to lay a single claw on me.\n\nThen Vinzent looked into my eyes and recoiled. I blinked and looked into my own face. My eyes were as white as Azlak's when he Saw the future. Pushing Vinzent's mind aside, I forced the silver dragon's forelegs to drop. \"I surrender,\" I said with his mouth, before retreating from his mind.\n\nI looked down on Vinzent, whose eyes spoke his confusion of what had just happened. He had surrendered to his wingless ddraig in front of the whole clan, and he wasn't sure how it had happened. For the time being he was submissive. He didn't understand his decision, but he had no choice but to obey it.\n\nOthers were not so easily cowed. Saya shoved her son to the side to take his place. Her eyes were narrowed in unshielded hatred. \"You will not rule this clan, lizard,\" she hissed. She spread her bronze wings to their full extent. The gentle scaling on her wingarms glittered in the firelight, and I was sure her delicate movements were meant to accentuate every gleaming flash.\n\n\"Is that so?\" This time I wasted no time in seizing Saya's mind.\n\nI furled her wings against her back and kept up a pretence that she was in control of her actions by pacing around me. It wasn't easy, directing two bodies at once, but it only took a few seconds to achieve it, getting Saya to circle around me, whilst I slowly pivoted on the spot to keep us staring at each other.\n\n\"I should have done this the moment you chased Tsona away,\" the dragoness snarled. I had allowed her continued use of her voice, but now I blocked her access even to this. I had full control over her every action, her every thought. Through her eyes I could see Vinzent retreat back to Yalle and Marin as they watched our struggle for power. They looked scared. They had seen how easily I had subdued Vinzent.\n\nI pondered what I could do to Saya. I had access to everything there was about her, I could sort through her memories and learn anything I liked should I choose to do so. This must be how Maznar felt when she sifted through a drake's dreams. Through the dragoness's eyes I watched as a mad grin spread across my face. It was time to humiliate the dragoness completely.\n\nSearching through Saya's mind, I found the area I needed. I released my grip on her and focussed all magic on her subconscious impulses and preventing the inflation of her lungs.\n\nSaya's face twisted in a silent snarl as she continued to circle around me. I calmly stared back, waiting for her to realise something was wrong. It happened as she tried to speak, the deep breath never coming, her mouth making all the movements but no air passing through her throat to provide the sounds. Her paw went to her neck as she retched, trying to get some air to her lungs. Her eyes dilated as she started to panic, her wings thrashing. No one dared approach the dragoness. Not even Vinzent, wild horror in his eyes, stepped forward to help his mother.\n\nI grabbed hold of Saya's chin and pressed my head against hers. Her eyes were already starting to darken as her mind began to slip.\n\n\"Do you surrender?\" I demanded.\n\nThe dragoness struggled to nod against the strength of my hold on her. I glared into her eyes, leaving her in no doubt that she was mine.\n\nI released her, physically and mentally, and she collapsed to the ground. She took in frenzied gulps of air as Vinzent finally rushed forward to help her, dropping to the ground against her head. He gently cradled his mother's head in his paws as she choked and wheezed on every breath.\n\n\"Do I have another challenger?\" I snarled, searching for any new rivals, seeking out any who dared threaten my rule. There were none. In every face I saw one emotion. Terror. No one dared to even look at me, averting their eyes completely and taking a few steps back in deference. I was wingless, but the clan wouldn't dare to oppose me now. Perhaps I wouldn't need Ellian to take over after all. I almost hoped Isikian was present, so that I might assert my dominance over him, but the Nixan healer was nowhere to be seen.\n\nOnly one dragon met my eyes as I stared around the chamber. Only one was not terrified.\n\nI snarled as I considered the disappointed eyes of my father. His opinion didn't matter to me. How I controlled my clan was not his concern.\n\nLaxtal was mine."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I was glad to see the back of the ddraig. In the days since his demonstration over Saya and Vinzent, he had been quick to anger, sharing violent rows with anyone who disagreed with him. As far as I could tell, he hadn't been using his magic to influence any of his fights, but it was almost impossible to tell. I didn't know what he had done to Saya, but I didn't have the courage to ask him.\n\nDdraig Anzig had dismissed me from his chambers after harshly condemning my attempts of discovering a way to defeat the human army. Apparently, my efforts in gaining Esperance as a powerful ally had fallen short. A toxic feeling had consumed the lair, and I longed to escape, if only for a short time. Taking Kaz with me, I sought a little peace with just my mate for company.\n\nWe flew to the south, away from the flocks of drakes being trained by Axaatl dragons. Everywhere I looked were unfamiliar drakes from so many different clans. Laxtal had never been busier, but it was no longer a welcoming place. Discontent was simmering beneath the surface, both with the human army that was roaming unchecked through our northern territories, and with the influx of foreign drakes. Few Laxtal drakes were happy with being forced to share the lair and hunting grounds with so many of our neighbouring clans. The sooner we could strike out at the humans and chase them away from our land the better. I dreaded to think what it would be like when Esperance's army arrived.\n\nI glanced down at my paw, tempting to squeeze it just for the chance to talk to Esperance once more, but I resisted. I doubted she would appreciate being disturbed just because I had some doubts over the ddraig's leadership. Esperance had already confessed she didn't like Anzig. I didn't want to hear those words again, though right now I had to admit she had a point. He was not the brother I had longed for.\n\nKaz flew a little closer, brushing his wingtip against mine. At least with him around I knew happiness wasn't far away. The grief I felt towards Anzig's descent was nothing compared to the uplift I got whenever I looked into Kaz's eyes. In his paw he carried Esperance's rune, keeping true to his promise never to let it out of his sight.\n\nWe landed about twenty minutes away from the lair, not far from one of the inner beacons that helped protect our territory. On several occasions, Kaz had asked me if we were able to go to one of the beacons, but each time I had refused. He may be my mate, but that was still a secret known only to Laxtal drakes. I ignored the little voice in my head that told me I wasn't a Laxtal drake, and nor had I ever been.\n\nI was no longer sure I would stay in Laxtal after this was all over. What was keeping me here? Only my duty to help Laxtal defeat the humans, and nothing more. One day I would fly far away from here and explore the world. With Kaz by my side there was nothing I couldn't do.\n\nA mountain loomed high, towering above the surrounding peaks. Far below were meadows of green and red, dotted with small human villages. Near the summit of the great mountain was a small flat shelf that backed on to a sheer cliff that climbed all the way to the distant peak. The little shelf offered a perfect view of the country below, and a human-like woman with glowing silver tattoos was sat there, eyes as grey as slate took in everything. By her side lay a small dragon, scales of gold shining bright.\n\nThe dragon stretched up to whisper something to the four-armed woman as he pointed with a wingtip towards a line of blue; the distant ocean. A wisp of smoke was starting to rise from a city on the water's edge.\n\nI had never Seen that place in any of my visions before, nor had I been there physically. It wasn't part of the Sxinix Mountains, but instinctively I knew where it was. Mount Ehran. Esperance's home in the far distant south. I longed to fly there now.\n\nThe smell of burning brought my mind back to reality. I blinked a few times and followed the trail of smoke that had started to drift across the sky. It came from the beacon, just visible through the trees.\n\n\"Purple and black flames?\" I queried aloud, trying to work out what that indicated. I had never seen such colours before, but I knew Kaz would be no help in trying to decipher it, even if he had been paying attention to the flames. He had eyes for something else, and he peered through the smoke haze towards three specks against the clear sky.\n\nMy mate cried out in joy. \"Airil!\"\n\nIt took me a moment longer, but he was right. Airil had returned with Haeraig Ellian, though I didn't recognise the third drake that flew with them. We quickly flew up to meet them, and Airil and Kaz danced through the air together as I took to wing between Haeraig Ellian and the stranger. I could tell he was an old dragon, his grey scales starting to fade in places, but in his eyes, still seemed to be a young, inquisitive dragonet.\n\n\"We need to see Ddraig Anzig right away,\" the haeraig said, treating me with considerably more respect than I had ever heard in her voice towards me before.\n\n\"I wouldn't advise that right now, Haeraig. There are things you should know first. May we land, and I can tell you everything that has happened since you've been away,\" I said, holding my head low as I spoke to my haeraig.\n\n\"Of course,\" Haeraig Ellian said, her voice quivering with fear. She turned to her companion, the stranger I didn't know. \"Are you alright waiting a little longer, Ddraig Boruc?\"\n\nThe old dragon nodded his head slowly. \"The magic I sensed has passed. Whatever it was is no longer here,\" he said sadly.\n\n\"Magic?\" Kaz called out, slowing down and returning to us as we started to descend. It was almost impossible to tell him apart from Airil. \"That would have been Esperance, but how could you know she was here? You're not Nixan.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc almost fell from the sky. \"Esperance? Here?\" he squawked. He flapped his wings, barely able to stay aloft in his distress.\n\n\"She left a few days ago. Do you know her?\" Kaz asked the older dragon, who looked towards my mate with sorrow in his eyes.\n\n\"From a long time ago, yes. I would very much like to hear this story when you get the chance,\" Ddraig Boruc said, before falling into a contemplative silence.\n\nDdraig Boruc said nothing further as we landed, and I started to explain what had happened in Laxtal since the haeraig had left, what felt like so long ago now. Though I said nothing of the ddraig's true parentage, there was still more than enough to shock the haeraig into hiding her face behind her paw. I didn't explain the manner in which the ddraig had defeated his challengers, but I didn't need to. It was clear Anzig was bitter about the loss of his wings, and rightfully so, but he was in danger of taking his anger and frustration out on those who didn't deserve it. I could only hope that having Haeraig Ellian around would help calm him down again.\n\nAll the while I was speaking, Airil and Kaz were talking to Ddraig Boruc. My mate was explaining how we had come to find Esperance in the caves below the lair, and what she had promised us in return for helping her. The ddraig listened without speaking, a wistful look on his face. Kaz had relinquished the rune for the moment, allowing the older dragon to run it through his paws.\n\nDespite my warnings about Ddraig Anzig, the haeraig was still eager to report to him as soon as possible. She left with Airil, but Ddraig Boruc stayed behind, eager to hear more about Esperance. When we told him about the slates Esperance had given us, he gasped in shock. \"She chose you as her envoys? I hope you both realise how great an honour that is.\"\n\nI had a feeling there was a lot Ddraig Boruc wasn't telling us about Esperance, but I didn't feel comfortable questioning him on the matter. His presence felt far greater than the span of his wings. Instead it was the ddraig who asked how many survivors there had been in Nixa. Neither of us had been there during the devastation of the clan of magic, but both of us had felt a personal loss. Kaz of course had lost so many of his friends and family when the humans had broken through the clan's magical defences. I had lost Nataik, the Xigax dragoness who had become as close to a friend as I had known on our journey across the mountains and into Kernow.\n\nThe old dragon was pleased to learn that Ddraig Krateos had survived, and he asked if we could arrange a meeting with the Nixan. I stuttered in my response, unsure that I would be able to promise such a thing. Ddraig Boruc was insistent though, and eventually I was persuaded to go and seek out the Nixan ddraig.\n\nI left my mate and the old ddraig behind as I flew off in search of the Nixans. Truth be told, I had no idea where to even begin looking, as I hadn't even seen Ddraig Krateos or his daughter since the previous morning, when the two had gone out hunting with a couple of other survivors from their clan. I wanted to avoid going into the lair if I could, not wishing to get involved with the toxic atmosphere that was pervading the clan.\n\nA large group of Axaatl drakes were resting near the gorge at the top of the lair. As always, I couldn't help but feel a little intimidated by their sheer size. Scattered amongst their number were drakes from Lilisxi and Kern. Other clans it seemed were fine with mingling with others. It was only the senior drakes in our clan that were taking an aggressive approach to any outsiders.\n\nThere was little activity below. Most of the drakes were spread out on the grass with their wings outstretched, catching as much of the afternoon sun as they could. I doubted there would be any real movement from them until the air started to chill in the evening. I couldn't see a single Nixan amongst them, so I flew on to the hunting grounds to the north.\n\nCompared to the famed Nixan hunting grounds, the Laxtal ones were sparse, but we always had sufficient to feed the clan. Large herds of deer prowled the plains that separated Laxtal from the small clans on our northern borders, as did packs of wildcats and other predatory creatures. Here and there I could see drakes circling the sky with a few hunting eagles stalking the distant deer. The herbivores seemed oblivious to the fact they were being stalked, but then they seemed oblivious to everything but where the grass was greenest. They lived simple lives.\n\nI was about to give up and turn around when I caught the briefest flash of bronze scales. He appeared to be alone, flying back towards the lair. I hurried up to meet him, not wanting to lose him again amongst the chaotic movements of the hunting drakes.\n\nA few eagles squawked as I flew close to them, and for a moment I thought one of them was about to strike out at me, before it wisely reconsidered. Even as one of the smallest drakes, an eagle would not pose much of a threat towards me. Its talons and sharp beak, so effective on deer and cats, were not strong enough to puncture our scales.\n\nThe ddraig was surprised to hear at the request from Ddraig Boruc. The Nixan told me he hadn't spoken to the Vatrean ddraig in years, when he had been a young haeraig. He hadn't even realised Ddraig Boruc was still alive.\n\nAs we flew back to the lair I used the slate in my paw for the first time. I squeezed hard on the small lump in my paw, thinking hard of Kaz as I did so. I felt the little pebble beneath my scales start to vibrate, a curious sensation that made my foreleg twitch uncomfortably. Ddraig Krateos watched on with interest from beside my wing.\n\nA phantom image was projected into the air in front of me. To begin with it was just a mess of colours with no discernible pattern to be found, but slowly it resolved into the shape of Kaz's head, bobbing up and down slightly as he flew. Ddraig Krateos's sharp intake of breath spoke of his shock.\n\n\"I have Ddraig Krateos. I can meet you and Ddraig Boruc outside the lair,\" I said uncertainly, unsure if Kaz would even be able to hear me, or if I was speaking to nothing more than a ghostly projection. I was delighted to see my mate nod in response.\n\n\"We'll be there soon,\" he replied, his voice slightly distorted but still understandable. I squeezed my paw again and the image faded to nothing.\n\n\"What was that?\" Ddraig Krateos asked, his eyes wide with wonder. This was something even he had never seen before. Slightly embarrassed by his attention, I recounted everything Esperance had told us about the slates. By the time I had finished, we were landing by the gorge, a little distance away from where the Axaatl drakes were sprawled out. My father took hold of my paw, pressing down on the slate. There was no response at all to his touch.\n\n\"There is magic greater than ours in this world,\" he whispered in awe. Few Nixans were willing to admit that, and before meeting Esperance I had thought the same. The world as drakes saw it was changing, becoming bigger and far more powerful than we could ever have realised.\n\nMy father asked me a few questions about Esperance while we waited. I could answer only a few, as Esperance was still a great mystery even to me. I knew next to nothing about her, but she had given me a great honour in choosing Kaz and me to be her envoys amongst dragonkind. Then Ddraig Krateos uttered words I never thought I'd hear.\n\n\"If only I'd have known you were my son earlier. You are a fine dragon, Azlak, and I am proud you are part of my family,\" he said, stunning me into silence. Marin had never shown such sincere praise before, only a reluctant acceptance that I was not totally useless after guiding Ddraig Anzig back with the Axinstone. I didn't know how to respond to my father's words, and I mumbled an awkward thank you. It was enough for Ddraig Krateos, and he held his wing around me.\n\nWe only needed to wait a few minutes for Kaz to arrive with Ddraig Boruc. The two ddraigs greeted each other warmly, before the Vatrean went straight to the point he wished to make. He told us about what he had seen on the borders of Laxtal, of the monster they had encountered there. I was the only one present who had witnessed Nightwings, and the prospect of another such creature was utterly terrifying.\n\n\"You said you met such a creature in Kernow?\" Ddraig Krateos said, turning to me.\n\n\"We did,\" I said, shivering slightly in fear. \"She was Nightwings, created by George as a weapon to defend his island from drakes. She is\u2026 or was, at least, Maznar.\"\n\n\"Maznar? My daughter?\" Ddraig Krateos yelped, his wings fluttering as he leapt into the air.\n\n\"Yes. Her egg was gifted to the humans by Ddraig Tsona. She had lived her whole life in captivity before we freed her,\" I said.\n\nDdraig Boruc frowned. \"Can we be sure she's free of their magic?\"\n\n\"I believe so. She certainly tells us she is, and I believe she can be trusted,\" I said, tucking my wings in tight against my body as I sat down.\n\nDdraig Krateos started to prowl back and forth, his wings unfurled slightly, dragging across the ground as he walked. \"We should get someone to go through her mind, so we can be certain. Once your brother is more approachable we should ask him,\" he said, meeting my eyes for a moment.\n\n\"That shouldn't be our main concern right now,\" Ddraig Boruc interrupted. The old dragon looked at the three of us in turn. Only my father could hold his eyes. \"I do not believe the humans could have created Nightwings without the Axinstone, but if Azlak is right, and there was only one when he stole back the rune, then how have they created this new one, Garus?\n\n\"It doesn't make sense. Only the Axinstone has the power to do that to a dragon, and nothing else. No mage or wizard has that strength on Farenar. Not even Esperance.\" Ddraig Boruc tapped his claws on the ground. \"They have been trying for so long.\"\n\n\"What exactly are you suggesting, Boruc?\" Ddraig Krateos asked, pausing in his pacing to sink his claws into the soft earth.\n\nDdraig Boruc didn't answer for a moment, flicking his teeth with his tongue as he thought. \"Either the humans can tap in to the Axinstone's power without having direct access to it, or what was stolen back is not the real stone. Or there is a traitor who has handed the Axinstone back to the humans, substituting a fake to avoid suspicion.\"\n\n\"Impossible, all of them. I know it's the Axinstone. I can feel its power from here,\" Ddraig Krateos countered with a vigorous shake of his head.\n\n\"Can you know for certain? I don't mean to question you, Ddraig Krateos, but even the greatest of us can be fooled by a skilled deception. This would not be the first time I have seen such a trick,\" the Vatrean ddraig said. \"If you would consent, I would like to check for myself.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos growled, but agreed that the older dragon could at least check, if only to confirm that the Vatrean was wrong. The Nixan flew off to return to the lair so he could find his daughter, who still carried the Axinstone.\n\nWhile we waited, Ddraig Boruc inspected the rune Kaz carried once more. As someone familiar with Esperance, Kaz had judged the Vatrean worthy to know of the rune's existence. Ddraig Boruc took the rune into his paws and closely peered at every ridge and indent on the shard of stone. After a few brief moments he looked up again, declaring it to be a genuine rune. Like Esperance had done, he impressed on us the need to never allow the rune out of our sight, for it held an importance that neither of us could ever hope to understand.\n\nA gold dragon, bleeding from a wound in his chest, limped out of the mouth of a dark cave. In his forepaw he held a shard of stone, the golden outline of an otter on its surface.\n\nI got the impression the ddraig was about to start explaining something else before the sound of approaching wings alerted us to the return of my father. I made a vow to ask Ddraig Boruc about that vision when I could. The small fragment of rock looked similar to the one Kaz carried. Were they somehow related?\n\nDdraig Krateos placed the Axinstone down on the ground as he landed, keeping a protective paw shielding it from anyone coming in to touch it. Surely it had to be the real thing. I could feel the heat radiating out from it, invigorating me like the morning sun on cold scales.\n\nDdraig Boruc approached his Nixan counterpart. \"May I?\" he asked, reaching out with a paw towards the Axinstone.\n\n\"You are not Nixan. I don't advise touching it,\" Ddraig Krateos said, pulling the stone away from Boruc's reach.\n\nThe Vatrean laughed, a slow dry chuckle. \"I have held things of much greater power in my paws, young ddraig. I do not fear the Axinstone. I am something far greater than any Nixan.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos growled, but pulled his paw away from the Axinstone, giving the older dragon access to it. Everyone tensed as Boruc placed his paw on the stone, but nothing happened but for a small crackle of magic energy.\n\nLike he had done moments before with Kaz's rune, Ddraig Boruc turned the Axinstone over and over again in his paws, holding it close to his eye as he inspected it. Every time his claws moved against the stone surface, a shower of golden sparks ignited from its surface. The magical discharges alone should have been evidence enough that it was genuine, but the Vatrean was not yet convinced.\n\n\"It is a remarkable replica, but a fake nonetheless,\" he said. He held either end of the stone in each paw and barked, \"Tsagot!\"\n\nThe Axinstone snapped in two.\n\n\"What have you done?\" Ddraig Krateos hissed, his paw raised to strike the Vatrean. His eyes were dark with rage.\n\n\"If that were the real thing, I could not have done damage to it,\" Ddraig Boruc said coolly, staring the Nixan down and freezing his would-be attacker with nothing more than a glance. The Vatrean threw one half of the broken stone to me, and I struggled to catch it in time. \"What do you see in there, Azlak?\"\n\nI looked down at the broken Axinstone. It was not what I expected, a solid stone, but was instead a blood red ruby with a stony exterior. I tilted my head in confusion as I explained this to my mate and the two ddraigs. Now that it was broken I could feel the magic within even stronger than ever.\n\nKaz reached for the second piece of the stone, running his claw over the ruby within. \"There is power there,\" he said, turning accusatory eyes towards Ddraig Boruc.\n\n\"Of that there is no doubt. But this is not draconic magic. It is human in origin. I do not know for what purpose this has been planted here, but I do not think it was for the good of dragonkind. The real Axinstone is still out there, probably in the hands of George Symons.\n\n\"I don't know how long you have had this fake. It could well be that you never possessed the real stone, but you must prepare yourself with the knowledge that a traitor may be amongst our midst. It would be wise to keep this revelation a secret, but you would do well to dispose of this false Axinstone as soon as possible. I don't trust it, and I fear the human magic within could be used to harm us.\"\n\nSlowly Ddraig Krateos lowered his paw. \"And how do you propose we do that? What's left of my clan looks to this as a symbol of unity and of hope. They're going to notice if it just disappears,\" he snapped.\n\n\"We use this instead,\" Ddraig Boruc said, picking up Kaz's rune from where it lay on the grass. He ran his paw over the surface, and the outline of the leopard's head blurred and reformed into that of a dragon. \"It is only an illusion, but it should convince pretty much everyone.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos shook his head. \"It may look the same, but we'll notice the difference. It won't feel like the Axinstone, it doesn't have the same magic.\"\n\n\"You didn't notice you possessed the fake, even when you held it in your paws,\" Ddraig Boruc pointed out, eliciting an angry snarl from my father, but nothing more. \"It is the only option. We just don't know what this magic is capable of.\"\n\n\"If you're wrong\u2026\" Ddraig Krateos warned, giving Ddraig Boruc a withering gaze, but the Vatrean was more than his equal.\n\n\"I'm not wrong. I know more about these runes than you,\" was the calm reply. I couldn't help but marvel at this old dragon, ddraig of a small clan from the distant east. He treated every drake as his equal, no matter their rank or clan and always seemed to be without fear.\n\n\"Then destroy it if you must,\" Ddraig Krateos said with a growl. \"Our efforts should turn to finding the Axinstone once more. If what you say about these enhanced drakes is true, then we can't allow humans to continue using our magic against us. It must be under our control.\"\n\n\"But how will we find it? We have no idea where it is,\" I said, drawing the attention of the two ddraigs. While Ddraig Krateos seemed a little disheartened by this point, Ddraig Boruc just chuckled.\n\n\"Where George Symons is, the Axinstone will not be far away. If we find him, we'll find the Axinstone. It may take another act of theft, but I can take a small group of trusted drakes out to reclaim it,\" Ddraig Boruc said, before turning to face me and Kaz. \"I will need one of you to accompany me, so we can keep in contact with the clan through those slates.\"\n\nI looked over at my mate and saw a brief flash of fear in his eyes. \"I'll go,\" I volunteered, despite the same fear in my gut, and knowing that I could well miss the arrival of Esperance's army. \"I already know of George and the humans. I'll fly out with you Ddraig Boruc.\"\n\n\"We may have need of a healer,\" Ddraig Boruc suggested, looking towards Kaz, his eyes narrowed in thought.\n\n\"Then with your permission, Ddraig Krateos, we would take Isikian too, if he is willing,\" I suggested. I hadn't seen much of the healer who had accompanied me over the mountains. Of course, he could view this as even more a suicide mission than the last and refuse to come, but as our ddraig gave me permission to ask him, I was hopeful I would be able to persuade the healer. I didn't want to leave Kaz behind, but I understood the logic in Ddraig Boruc bringing only one of us. These slates had been a great gift from Esperance, and we needed to use them for the good of all dragonkind.\n\nWhile the two ddraigs flew off to make arrangements for our departure, I spent time alone with Kaz, taking full advantage of the few hours we still had left together. Though I would not be leaving until morning, I still needed to hunt and rest so I could be ready to fly without the need to bask in the sun for too long.\n\nAs I lay with Kaz beneath some trees, I couldn't help but wonder whether I had made the right decision. Ddraig Boruc had seemed so sure that we needed to find George and steal the real Axinstone, but how could we hope to do that and survive? It didn't sound like Ddraig Boruc wanted to take many drakes at all, just three of us in fact. It had been challenge enough with eight. At least this time though, we wouldn't be crossing the mountains. We already knew George was in draconic lands.\n\nAfter an hour to ourselves we both hunted, working together to take down a deer with relative ease. Apart from their flailing hooves, we generally had little to fear from the gentle herbivores. Even the occasional antlered male didn't concern us too greatly.\n\nOnce we had fed our fill, we left the rest of the carcass for the wildcats and scavenging birds to consume. It wouldn't be long now before the deer started to migrate south as winter descended. Already the nights were starting to chill. I was not looking forward to sleeping away from the lair, possibly with little or no shelter at all.\n\nMy chambers were quite far down in the lair, not too far away from the crack that led to the underground river. I had planned to try and claim somewhere better and warmer as I acted as ddraig in Anzig's absence, but I had never seen the opportunity. Now it seemed pointless. I doubted I would be calling Laxtal home for much longer anyway.\n\nThough the air was cold, I had been able to scavenge a single human-woven rug for my own. But for a few other small trinkets scattered around the tiny chamber, it was all I owned. Though the night air was cold, as I curled up in the rug with Kaz's wing unfurled over my body I knew I had all the warmth I could ever want. We muttered a few words to each other, but it wasn't long before we both fell into slumber.\n\nOur sleep was disturbed by a small vibration in my paw. Lazily I pressed the slate, and with tired eyes I watched as the visage of Esperance appeared in front of me. I was too exhausted to do anything but smile and murmur a greeting.\n\n\"Your army is coming. Two days at the most,\" she said, appearing to be fending something or someone away. \"And, to both of you, thank you again. I believe I have chosen you well in aiding me.\"\n\nBefore I even had chance to respond, Esperance had gone \u2013 her image and voice lost to the darkness once more. I closed my eyes once more and dreamed of strange, four-legged birds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "Ddraig Boruc had left almost as soon as he had arrived, taking only Azlak and the Nixan Isikian with him. I had been disappointed to see the Vatrean leave, especially on a task I deemed futile. We already had scouts tracking the movements of the human army, yet Ddraig Boruc had been insistent. I couldn't help but feel he had been hiding something, especially as Azlak was unable to meet my eyes even more than normal as he left.\n\nSince then, I had spent most of my time trying to suppress my cousin's anger. I had been horrified when I had first seen Anzig, deprived of his wings by an unknown attacker. He had furiously rebuffed my sympathetic apologies, and ever since, I hadn't even mentioned his injuries, fearful of another outburst. He had already wounded Yalle in the day since Ddraig Boruc had left, clawing the flank of the albino following a disagreement about sleeping arrangements for some of the Axaatl drakes. He had been apoplectic when he realised Isikian had flown with Ddraig Boruc, but hadn't told me why the healer's absence mattered so much. He had simply descended into sullen mutterings in his chamber, talking to a voice I couldn't hear.\n\nWith the help of Ddraig Krateos, who had shown considerable concern towards Anzig, we managed to steer the Laxtal ddraig outside, where he was able to lie in relative peace, absorbing the light of the afternoon sun. Without his wings he didn't warm up anywhere near as quickly as the rest of us, and often complained about feeling sluggish and slow. He had been unable to hunt either. In his occasional attempts, his prey had easily eluded him. Drakes were simply not meant to hunt on the ground. We needed our wings to survive, and it was agonising seeing him struggle so.\n\nYet, despite Anzig's obvious weaknesses, no one dared challenge him. Everyone remained silent and fearful in his presence, and no one was courageous enough to explain why. I heard whispers of Saya's challenge, but could not believe them to be true. They said Anzig controlled powerful magic, and had been corrupted by the Axinstone. Lies, all of them. I knew my cousin better than any other drake, and he was not the dragon the clan feared him to be.\n\nReturning from another failed hunting attempt with Airil, a dragon flew up to me, babbling something about the beacons being lit. An army was approaching from the south, but the signal flames had been unclear if it had been identified. At first I feared humans. Was there a second human army roaming unchecked? Then I remembered the promise Azlak had made, that the human Esperance was sending help from the far south. We would have more allies, and as I looked around at the wide mixture of drakes already present, I felt a surging flare of hope. If Esperance had delivered on her promise, then we could turn this war around.\n\nAnzig was reluctant to stay out, preferring instead to return to his chambers and out of the eyes of his clan, but I refused to allow it. Without the help of Ddraig Krateos or Haeraig Zeena, he was physically incapable of entering the lair, and the two Nixans had already joined the throng of expectant drakes awaiting the arrival of the new army.\n\nHaeraig Zeena sought me out directly. Her neck craned into the sky, searching for some glimpse of what approached.\n\n\"What do you think she sent?\" the haeraig asked.\n\nI shrugged. I had not met this human. It didn't sound like she was from across the mountains, and it did not seem a human army was forthcoming. Certainly no one was looking to the ground. The signal fires had been clear about one thing. The approaching force was not draconic, yet it came from the sky.\n\nExcited squawks erupted from some drakes further up the hill, above the gorge that sliced through it. I hurried up to them, leaping over the gorge in one, wing-assisted bound. Haeraig Zeena and Ddraig Krateos followed me, but Anzig was stuck on the far side, glaring at us with betrayed eyes.\n\nI quickly saw what the commotion was about, a dark patch moving against the sky. It was heading right for us.\n\n\"Clear ground!\" I bellowed. Drakes of all clans obeyed my command, whether Laxtal, Axaatl, Nixan, or from any of the other minor clans who now called our lair home. Almost a thousand drakes had gathered on the lower slopes of the gorge to witness the arrival of Esperance's army, and slowly they started to shuffle out to clear a patch of grass large enough to hold a further five hundred.\n\nAnzig was belatedly carried over the gorge by Ddraig Krateos's magic, as the half-dozen other drakes on the top of the hill leapt the other way, leaving just the four of us standing alone. We were the leaders of this clan, and we would meet whoever commanded this approaching army united.\n\nWhispers started to spread through the gathered drakes. Whispers of a strange creature. Questions ran through the clan. Had anyone ever seen anything like that before? They looked like birds, but their body structure was closer to that of a dragon, only four times the size. They had wings and feathers, like an eagle or a similar bird of prey, but that was where the resemblance ended. Their feathered forelegs ended in wicked talons, and their hindquarters were furred like a wildcat.\n\nThe first of these strange creatures landed in the middle of the rapidly expanding clearing vacated by the gathered drakes. Some drakes openly fled, while others continued to back away. With a quick count I estimated over one thousand of these creatures. Those who found no space to land circled a little longer before coming to ground beyond the steep slopes that led down to the wide-open flatlands.\n\nOne creature stepped forward from the rest. He had a purple sash around his neck, hanging beneath one of his forelegs. Deep brown and burnished gold feathers and fur adorned his body. His cold blue avian eyes met mine, and his sharp beak clacked as he trotted forward, clearing the gorge without even having to open his wings.\n\n\"I come seeking the dragons Azlak and Kaz,\" the creature said, his voice surprisingly smooth for having to get the words through a beak.\n\nAnzig fearlessly stepped forward. \"I am Ddraig Anzig of Laxtal.\"\n\n\"Then you are not the dragon I seek. Bring Azlak or Kaz. I speak to no other,\" the creature said, interrupting an indignant Anzig before he was even able to complete his introduction.\n\nFor a moment, I thought Anzig was about to protest further, and I eyed the creature's ferocious talons with a wary eye. I had no doubt they could slice through a drake's scales with ease.\n\nThankfully Anzig backed down. \"Find Kaz and bring him here,\" he barked out to the few drakes who still lingered. Only about two hundred Axaatl drakes remained, with few from Laxtal in attendance. Anzig need not have worried, for just a few moments later the Nixan he sought flew up from within the gorge, landing just in front of me to face the creature.\n\n\"Oh, you're gryphons,\" he said, eyes wide as he lowered his head. He didn't seem at all shocked by the creatures. \"I am Kaz, envoy of Esperance. I welcome you to Laxtal.\"\n\nThe gryphon lowered his head in response. \"I honour you with my name, Prince Kyrus, heir to the Crown of Golden Feathers and envoy of Esperance. I am at your service.\"\n\nOn his back lay a grey-scaled drake, curled up in a tight ball amongst the gryphon's feathers. The movement of his mount caused the drake to start awake, raising his head and trying to scramble up to his paws on the uneven surface. There was something odd about the way he moved, but I couldn't quite place what it was.\n\n\"We there already?\" the drake muttered sleepily. \"Damn it Kyrus, you said you'd wake me.\"\n\nThe gryphon snorted in what I could only assume to be amusement. His eyes had lightened momentarily. \"This is Alaron. Envoy of Esperance and commander of her armies. Poor thing needs his beauty sleep, not that it helps much, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"Oh shut it, you overgrown bird,\" the dragon said sleepily. \"Pleasure to meet you, I'm sure.\" He shook his head as he half jumped, half fell off the gryphon's back, who almost immediately turned to start preening the feathers that had been pressed down by the dragon's weight.\n\nMy shocked intake of breath was shared by the other four drakes who stood with me, but only Anzig had the confidence to hesitantly step forward.\n\n\"Your legs? What happened to them?\" he whispered.\n\nThe strange dragon used his wings to walk forward, for where his forelegs should be, there was nothing. I looked into Anzig's eyes, and I saw the same horror he had reviled when we had looked upon him.\n\nAlaron did not walk like a cripple, but with confidence and poise that suggested the injury was an old one. \"I'm a wyvern, you fool. This is what I'm meant to look like. Don't know how you're meant to fly with those extra legs weighing you down,\" he said, before yawning widely. He rubbed his eyes with a wingtip and blinked a few times, then looked at Anzig for the first time. \"Of course, you aren't flying anywhere,\" he added in a quiet voice.\n\nAnzig growled, but surprisingly didn't say anything to retort the wyvern's words. \"I am Ddraig Anzig of Laxtal,\" he said instead, repeating his interrupted introduction from before. \"We are glad to have you here.\" His words lacked sincerity.\n\nThe wyvern was slightly taller than Anzig, even without his forelegs to prop himself up with. Now that he was a little closer I could see that his wings were different to ours, located further around on his shoulders, more on his side than his back. The bones that supported them seemed stronger, though I supposed they had to be, given he used them to walk. He also had a small set of claws about halfway down the leading edge of the wings, which I imagined functioned as his paws. He was such a curious creature, even more so than the gryphon behind him, simply because he was so close to a drake, yet so wildly different at the same time.\n\nFor a short while, Anzig and Alaron discussed how the gryphon army was going to settle in Laxtal. There was precious little room left in the lair, certainly not enough to fit so many large creatures. The wyvern said that gryphons were well used to sleeping beneath the stars, something they preferred even. Of course, that still left the issues of food. Already we were straining the resources of the clan to feed everyone. Gryphons I was sure would need a lot to eat; Laxtal would not be able to provide for them for long.\n\nDdraig Krateos had clearly thought of the same thing. We had strength in numbers now. It was time to act. \"Haeraig Ellian, did you say there were humans allied to our cause? If they're serious about living this side of the mountains, then they should answer our call if we need them. Would you be willing to send a messenger out to them?\"\n\nAnzig stared wide-eyed at Ddraig Krateos. He should have been the one to make that suggestion.\n\n\"I'll find someone, Ddraig,\" I said, bowing my head and taking a few steps away towards the gorge. Most Laxtals had already retreated underground, and would likely stay there until the gryphons had moved on.\n\nI reluctantly left to find someone to carry the ddraig's message. Those creatures who had descended upon our lair were fascinating, and I wanted to learn as much about them as I could. I knew I would seek out their company again when I could. For now, I worried only about what Ddraig Krateos wanted James and his group of humans to know. I couldn't help but wonder if Mulner would join the humans if they came. This could be one of the greatest moments in draconic history. Would my brother really want to miss that? If I were to be honest with myself, he probably would. He cared not for the comings and goings of greatness, instead preferring to live a simple existence as a nomad. I couldn't help but feel some envy towards that.\n\nIt didn't take me long to find someone to fly to Mulner's lair in the west, as there were several drakes in the upper chambers generally reserved for messenger duties. The dragoness who was to carry my message fluttered her wings in fear at the prospect of flying to seek out a human, but offered no vocal protests. She had little choice in the matter. I was her haeraig after all.\n\nOnce I returned to the surface, the gryphon who had introduced himself as Kyrus bowed his feathered forelegs towards me. \"You are haeraig?\" he asked, the word forming strangely from his beak.\n\n\"I am, yes. Haeraig Ellian of Laxtal,\" I replied, bowing my head towards the gryphon. I tried not to feel intimidated by him, but the top of my head barely even came to his knees. Even the Axaatl drakes looked small in comparison to the gryphons.\n\nKyrus chirruped in delight, his earlier coldness seeming to vanish into the afternoon sun. Perhaps it had never been there to begin with, and it was only the shock of seeing such a bizarre creature that had placed the emotions in my mind. He asked me to accompany him on a short walk, as there were a few things he wished to discuss with me. I glanced briefly at Anzig and Ddraig Krateos, both still talking with Alaron. I doubted they would even miss me if I left, so I assented to the gryphon's request.\n\nWe passed through the field of gryphons, towards the small forest to the north. Though a path was cleared for Kyrus, I had to be careful to avoid their talons and claws. There was not as many colours amongst the gryphons as there was in drakes. Most were golden or brown in some variety. Feathers came in all patterns, and every last one of them seemed perfectly groomed. Those few that were a little dishevelled were busy preening and maintaining their feathers with barely an eye for anything else.\n\nAs we walked, Kyrus told me a little about where he came from, a land to the south and east of the draconic territories. He spoke of roaring oceans and towering cliffs, of stony beaches and an abundance of fish to hunt. His mother currently wore the Crown of Golden Feathers, and had ruled over the gryphons for almost forty years. It would be another forty at least before Kyrus expected to wear the crown upon his feathered head. Any drake would be proud of a forty year rule. Eighty years was completely unheard of \u2013 few drakes even managed to live to see their eightieth year.\n\nThough Kyrus talked at length of his homeland, I figured that was not the reason for our sojourn from the others. We had started to skirt the edge of the hunting grounds, where the herds of deer sniffed in alarm at the scent of this new, unknown predator.\n\n\"Esperance warned me not to trust your ddraig,\" Kyrus said, finally getting to his motive. \"She thought he carried too many secrets, and tried too hard to be the leader he wasn't. False, I believe she called him.\" The gryphon's beak clacked his disapproval.\n\nI didn't understand, and I told the gryphon so. I had not seen this mysterious human, but I wondered why she could think she knew so much about my cousin. Words drifted back to me from the depths of my memory. Hadn't Astar once doubted Anzig as a leader? I shuffled my wings as I thought, my loyalty towards my ddraig and cousin tested by Astar's doubts, and now those of the gryphon.\n\n\"It would be unwise to allow the wingless one to lead your armies in to battle. This is not the time to risk any weakness,\" Kyrus advised. His talons and paws crunched heavily on the sticks and leaves that littered the forest floor. In contrast I made almost no noise at all, my much lighter pawsteps able to avoid the dry leaves. With the colder days of winter fast approaching, they were falling with abandon from the trees. Soon nothing would remain, save bare branches creaking in the wind.\n\n\"I'm not the one to take that away from him,\" I answered after a while. I had to crane my neck to even attempt to meet the gryphon's eye, but not once did he glance down to me. His focus was solely above us, at the crisp gold and reds of the foliage still clinging to the trees.\n\n\"Are you not his haeraig? Surely leadership should fall to you if your ddraig is incapacitated in any way?\"\n\nHe was correct. Should Anzig prove a poor leader, then it was my responsibility to remove him from power, lest another drake from within the clan step up and challenge him. I knew it was my responsibility, but I didn't know if I could have the heart for it. He had suffered so much recently, and I didn't want to be the cause of more pain. He had lost father, mentor, and now his wings. Could I take his clan from him too?\n\n\"I understand I may have given you some difficult things to think about, Haeraig Ellian, but you mustn't let family loyalty blind you now,\" Kyrus said, coming to a stop as he looked down at me. A crest of small feathers rose against his neck. \"We are here to help you, but not to fight your wars for you. I have followed Alaron here because he is a strong leader, though he is no gryphon. If your ddraig proves to be weak, he will soon lose our respect, and we will return home.\n\n\"I say this not as a threat to you Ellian, nor as an attempt to spur you to act on that you do not wish to, but you must know the potential consequences if you fail to act. I have seen many battles. I know the difference between a competent leader and one who is not.\"\n\nWhile I understood the reasoning behind Kyrus's advice, I knew I would have to think long and hard before I made any decisions. Did I really think I could be a better ddraig than Anzig? I would have to be certain, if I decided to challenge him. The clan, and even all dragonkind, could not afford a period of instability. That would be much worse than a weak ddraig.\n\n\"I apologise, Haeraig Ellian, if it seems like I am meddling in affairs which are not mine, but I only seek to strengthen your cause in ways I see fit. You do not need to heed my advice, but only recommend you learn from my experience,\" Kyrus said, starting to move once more. I bounded to keep up with the large strides of the gryphon.\n\nOnce more Kyrus talked of his homeland as we began to return to the lair. His roost was located at one of the most western points on the continent across the ocean \u2013 a tall spire of glittering rock that shone in the morning sunlight, rising high above the roaring ocean. Fifty thousand gryphons lived there, and at the summit stood the Aerie, home of Queen Hera. The gryphon's silky words conjured an image of a place of pure beauty, and I longed one day to witness it. Perhaps Airil could take me there, before realising should I become ddraig, I wouldn't have so many opportunities to leave the clan.\n\nI spent a little time describing our lair to Kyrus, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't match his beautiful painting of words. There was no doubt in my mind that Laxtal was one of the most beautiful places I had seen, especially now autumn had its grip on the trees, but there was nothing striking about it. We had nothing as awe-inspiring as a gleaming tower of rock that could mark our territory, leaving strangers in no doubt where they were. I almost felt embarrassed, but the gryphon was polite enough as he listened.\n\nMost of the gryphons had gathered together in small groups. There was much conversation between them in a musical, chirruping language I couldn't decipher. It was like a dawn chorus, with birdsong filling the air.\n\nUp on the hill, on the other side of the gorge, Ddraig Krateos was still with Anzig and Alaron, though Haeraig Zeena was no longer present. Few drakes remained, most having vacated in fear the moment the gryphons had landed. Those few that lingered were the brave and fearless. I recognised just three Laxtals amongst them \u2013 Saya and her son, Vinzent, as well as Keita, the daughter of the albino Yalle. None of them interfered in the conversations on the far side of the gorge, but they were listening with interest.\n\nAlaron was learning all he could about the human army, asking Anzig and Ddraig Krateos questions about their strengths and movements. Thanks to the information my brother had gathered, we were able to provide a decent representation of the human army, and what we believed their intentions to be. The wyvern didn't seem too impressed though.\n\n\"Why have they been given free access to your territory? Why haven't they been harassed at all? You have many thousands of drakes here, just sitting idle,\" Alaron asked, as I took my place by Anzig's side. Kyrus returned to standing just behind the wyvern.\n\nDdraig Krateos rumbled an apology. \"That had been our task, before the humans destroyed our lair,\" he said, quickly ducking his head.\n\n\"There should have been someone replacing your duties then, once your clan was no longer able. Ddraig Anzig, why had none been arranged? You have the numbers,\" the wyvern said, pointing an accusing wing at my cousin, who had nothing to say for himself. Had he really done nothing to act as the aggressor towards the humans? What had he been waiting for? I said nothing of Ddraig Boruc and his mysterious quest he had taken with Azlak and Isikian. That would only have raised some questions I would be unable to answer.\n\n\"And Haeraig Ellian, why don't you come and tell me all about dragon you ran into the other day?\" Alaron asked, turning to me. For the first time I looked into his eyes. They were yellow like a wildcat's, fierce and intense. I met them without looking away.\n\n\"Of course,\" I replied, before delving into the tale once more. By my side, Anzig seemed to diminish as I told of the enhanced dragon. Had he been so deeply scarred by his encounter with Nightwings that he was unable to even hear of another such terror? I suddenly feared how he would react if another such monster were unleashed on him. I kept such emotions from my expression as I spoke. It would not do Anzig's confidence any good if I started openly doubting him, even if I did start to believe Kyrus's warnings were correct.\n\nThe gryphon caught my eye and nodded slightly. Either something was visible on my face or in my wings, or Kyrus had also seen the same signs in Anzig and reached the same conclusion. My cousin was weak.\n\nSoon I would have to challenge him for control of the clan.\n\nFor the sake of dragonkind, I had no choice but to win."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "I almost refused to believe the messenger when she relayed what had happened in Laxtal; massive feathered creatures had landed and declared allegiance to our cause, and now Laxtal required the presence of their allied humans. Though the messenger had only arrived an hour ago, James McArthur was already preparing to depart. I thought I would have been glad to see them go. Now that they were leaving, I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy the silence they would leave behind.\n\nCinson stood by my side as I looked down on the small village they had created. In the shadow of the rocky outcrop in which we lived, the humans had created an impressive sight. The Xigax dragon's tail was restless, twitching back and forth. Something was on his mind, but as of yet he had not breached our silence.\n\nNight was starting to fall though, and the humans would not be leaving today. They planned to march on at first light, likely before the first drakes emerged from the cave to bask in the morning sun.\n\n\"You should join them,\" Cinson said at last, spitting out the words that had been trapped on his tongue for some time now. \"We should all join them. They'll need all the help they can get.\"\n\nI stared at the Xigax dragon. \"I vowed never to return. I will not go back,\" I said adamantly. It had been quite some time since Cinson had asked me that question, and I had thought that argument was already resolved.\n\n\"Even at the expense of dragonkind?\" Cinson said quietly, keeping his eyes firmly on the activity below.\n\nI growled and spread my wings, contemplating flying off before changing my mind at the last moment. This was not something I could choose to do. Laxtal was not a place of good memories for me. I had watched both my parents die there. To me it was a place of sickness and death. It was not a home for me, and but for my sister there was no one there I cared for. But Cinson was right. They needed all the help they could get, for they were one of our last hopes in defeating the humans that threatened our existence. If Ddraig Tsona and George Symons had their way, drakes would be little more than slaves at the beck and call of humanity, forced to move from our traditional homes as the human country of Kernow expanded beyond the mountains that had long been the border between us.\n\n\"I will not do it,\" I snarled. I had been doing enough to help from here. Why would Laxtal need me to return?\n\nStill not looking towards me, Cinson shook his head. \"Then expect to be left alone. I will be flying out tomorrow, and I expect almost everyone will be joining me. Don't let your pride rule you, Mulner,\" the Xigax dragon said. He didn't give me a chance to answer, spreading his wings and leaping off the bluff, soaring down to the river below. A few drakes met him down there, drakes I had thought were loyal to me no matter what. A few of them looked up at me and shook their heads. They were leaving me.\n\nThat night, I lay alone. No one tried to convince me to leave with them, they all must already have known I wouldn't change my mind.\n\nI used the silence of the night to think about what I really wanted. Did I want to simply be a dragon on the edge of the action, never really involved in the most important events of our time? I snorted to myself, drawing the sleepy gaze of a few of the nearby drakes. Of course I did. I had never had any intention of living a life filled with adventure. If Cinson was wanting to take my drakes away from me and lead them to their likely deaths, then he was welcome to it.\n\nIt was a cold night, and though the fire burned brightly, I could still feel the chill night air blowing in through the cave mouth. I wasn't sure if it was entirely my imagination or not, but I thought I could hear wings beating on the wind, wings of a creature much bigger than any drake. My last waking thought before dropping into restless sleep was that it was probably my mind playing with the idea of the feathered creatures who had landed in Laxtal. There simply wasn't anything big enough to make such a noise."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "True to their word, the humans had already gone by the time I emerged into the morning sunlight. A few drakes were already awake, Cinson included, their wings spread out over the grass as they tried to warm up. A few acknowledged my presence, but to most I was a ghost drifting by. The petty fools. I had done nothing wrong, and yet they treated me like a pariah, like I had committed some great evil.\n\nI said nothing to them, and them to me, as the hours passed by and they started to prepare to leave. Not a single other drake was going to remain behind \u2013 all of my little clan were abandoning me here. I was a ddraig without drakes.\n\nBy the time midday had passed, I was alone. Just before he had taken to wing, Cinson looked like he was about to approach me, but I glared him away. I knew he was going to try one last time to make me join them, but I was not to be dissuaded. I would remain here, alone if I had to. There could be no shame in that.\n\nI took some time to hunt, stalking and killing a rabbit with ease. The docile little things never even knew I was coming before I killed them with a quick bite to the neck. One moment they had been happily chewing at the grass, the next they were my meal. The rabbit was me, I decided. In an instant, I had lost my clan and everything I had lived for over these last few years. This was meant to be a refuge for the lost and the clanless, and yet they had seemed to jump at the chance to fly to Laxtal. Did this war really mean that much for them?\n\nLosing my appetite for the remainder of my meal, I left it for the scavengers. I could already see a few wildcats lurking nearby, hoping for any scraps. As I spread my wings, they fought amongst each other to get the best of the rabbit. I left them to it. I had no cares for the comings and goings of the cats.\n\nMy little domain felt empty now, and I soared over it a few times, hoping to find some sign that just one drake had remained behind. I'd even take a human. Any sign that at least someone was still loyal to me, but after the fourth pass over the hill I gave up, dejectedly sinking down to lie by the river.\n\nThe leaves were really starting to fall from the trees now. The river was almost choked with copper leaves, slowly drifting on the current to the far distant sea. How many would eventually reach that far-distant destination? What sights would they see? They would surely travel further than I could ever hope, stuck here through my own stubbornness.\n\nI gripped the soft earth in my claws and howled to the empty sky. I was not expecting it to answer back. A deep, earth-shaking roar returned my cry, a terrifying noise that sent me fleeing straight to my cave. Nothing I had ever heard of could make that sound, and I did not wish to linger and meet whatever had created it.\n\nI reached the cave just in time. A deep, percussive thrum heralded the wingbeats of a vast creature, and from the safety of underground I was able to see a shadow pass overhead. Rock cracked as the creature landed on top of the hill, right where I had been standing with Cinson the previous day. Just a few feet of stone separated me from the creature now, but I didn't believe it knew I was here.\n\n\"I was sure I heard\u2026 There are scents here, but they're a few hours old at least,\" a loud draconic voice said. It was unmistakeably a dragon, but as he moved above me his weight on the rock was far greater than any drake should possess.\n\n\"You're better than that,\" a second voice said, this one human. The dragon growled in response, a deep, gravelly noise that reverberated through rock and bone. \"Come on, they're waiting for us. We fly north!\"\n\nThe human yelled out to unseen companions, but they answered. Three other monstrous drakes roared out, and their wingbeats shook the trees so hard they shed even the hardiest of amber leaves. I crept as close to the cave mouth as I dared to watch the drakes fly away. Each carried at least one human on their back, and all were impossibly large. I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing. Their wingspans must have been well over fifty feet, an utterly unheard of size for any drake.\n\nI wasn't able to see if the drakes were Xital, but it was clear they were working with the humans. Was it human magic that made them so large? Ellian had to be warned.\n\nI didn't even hesitate.\n\nI flew east.\n\nThere were no sounds of pursuit, so it seemed the monstrous drakes hadn't known of my presence. I had been fortunate, but I could not count on such luck again. I pushed myself hard, wanting to create as much distance as I could between myself and my old lair.\n\nI saw no sign of Cinson and his group of drakes as I flew, but as night started to fall I didn't even think about pausing. They would have stopped to rest for the night, but what I had seen didn't allow me to sleep. If Xital was creating an army of monstrous drakes then Laxtal needed to know about it.\n\nAs the stars came out I wondered why I didn't fly at night more often. The skies were almost completely empty, though I could hear a lot of movement below me in the shadows. I could hardly see beyond the end of my own snout, but I fixed on to a single star in front of me to keep flying straight. Without being able to see any of the landmarks along the route, they sky was all I had to navigate. The light of the moon and stars glinted off the occasional river and lake, but nothing else reached my eyes of the land below. I could have been flying over nothing but shadow. At least I wouldn't be able to see any of the familiar but long-avoided landscape below to remind me of where I was going.\n\nI started to tire quickly as the cold sapped away my strength. My wings became stiff, and I laboured with each beat. There were still many of hours of flight left, and it was only through force of will that I was able to keep going.\n\nThe shadows seemed to reach out towards me. I had never felt so cold before, and it was hard to tell if I was even still moving. Other sounds started to reach my ears, more unsettling ones. Somewhere in the distance a drake roared, and that was followed by high pitched shrieking and chittering. It sounded like bats, and they were coming closer.\n\nThough I should have no fear of bats, the chill pervaded my heart, giving me fresh impetus to keep flying, and to hurry. My efforts were useless though. My wings were too cold to do little more than glide, and I was slowly sinking down towards the shadows. They would be no protection from the hunting bats. The shadows were their domain. If they were seeking me, then they would find me with ease.\n\nThe sound of dry leaves rustling in the leaves warned me of how low I had sunk, and a few weary beats of my wings stopped me from falling beneath the canopy. The light of the moon was blocked out, and I cast a tired glance up. Bats covered the sky, each as large as a drake. Whatever their destination may be, I had no more strength to continue.\n\nLeaves and slender branches whipped at my underside as I brushed against the canopy of trees. Another beat of my wings lifted me clear before the forest abruptly ended. I fell into the darkness below, coming to a sudden halt against the ground.\n\nNot too far away a fire flickered. A tall, pale man looked in my direction but didn't move. He melted into the shadows as the cold finally defeated me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "I woke to the sun on my back and a bird chirping nearby. It took me a few minutes to even realise where I was, and why I was lying in the middle of an unfamiliar field. The remains of a small campfire still smouldered not too far away. Slowly the events of the previous day started to filter back through my mind. The sky was clear now, with no drakes or bats to be seen. I hoped those creatures hadn't been going towards Laxtal. From what little I had seen of them, it had looked like a formidable army.\n\nThough I tried to stand up and keep moving, my legs and wings simply wouldn't respond. The cold had sapped all my energy, and all I could do was crawl forward a few pathetic steps before collapsing to the ground again. I managed to reach the abandoned campfire, where I had seen that pale figure in the night. I didn't know how it had failed to see me, but I was glad of it. The charred firewood still gave off some heat, so I lay down with my wings spread out beside it. Anything that would help put some warmth into my aching body.\n\nAs I started to wake up, I became aware of a stinging in my neck. I pressed my paw against the pain, and it came away with a couple of spots of blood. I dismissed it as nothing to worry about. A branch must have struck me as I descended through the trees. With my paw, I felt two small holes that had pushed in between my scales, with a couple of sharp ridges where the scales had been dislodged slightly. It would heal.\n\nI tried to get my bearings, working out where I had blindly flown to in the darkness. From the ground, I could see no defining feature \u2013 no hill to break the flat plains that spread out for miles in all directions. Behind me was the forest I had just avoided flying in to, but those were dotted all through the western territories, so it didn't help me work out where I was. I would need to get into the air and hope I could see something then.\n\nSome dark thought kept eluding my mind. I was sure I was forgetting something important, but as I ran everything through my mind I could find nothing. Cinson left. The monstrous drakes. The bats. Everything was there, but I was sure something still eluded my mind's grasp.\n\nIt took an hour before I felt strong enough to fly again. I still felt an icy chill in my blood, but it didn't restrict my wings anymore. Spiralling straight up so I could hunt for landmarks, I tried to shake the fear in my heart that I was already too late. If the bats had been heading for Laxtal then the clan would likely have been caught unawares. Slaughter would have been the only outcome.\n\nFinally I caught sight of a rock formation I recognised to the north of me, an outcrop I knew to be not far to the south of the lair. I felt relieved. Not only had I flown most of the way to the lair in the night, but the bats would surely have safely passed the lair.\n\nI pushed on, flying north as fast as I could manage. Below I could see many of the beacons that were scattered across Laxtal's territory. They all remained unlit, though there were signs many had recently been alight. The bats may not have taken the central lair, but I feared something had happened to the beacon keepers. It would have to be something to worry about later. Now I needed to steel myself for my first glimpse of the central lair in many years. Just once had I been back since I had banished myself, and then I had only reached the gorge. This time I would have to go further.\n\nMy wings shook as a steep hill rose out from the flatlands. The hill was dissected almost in two by a steep-walled gorge that had been blocked off at one end by an ancient rock fall that had probably redirected the river that used to flow there. North of the gorge, the land remained at a higher elevation, keeping the old riverbed out of reach for anything without wings. I had returned.\n\nThere were a few drakes on the upper slopes of the hills, above the deep gorge. There was no sign of the creatures that had been said to come to Laxtal, nor of Cinson and the other drakes who had left me. None of the present drakes paid any attention to me as I flew past, trying to remember where the entrance to the lair was. After a few minutes I found it, landing just outside on the springy bracken. I could see the flickering flames of the torches inside.\n\nThe first step was the hardest, but after that the others came easier. Long forgotten memories rose to the surface, the agony of losing my parents to illness and injury, but also the joy of so many years spent playing with my friends when I had been a young dragonet. I slowly padded down through the narrow passages, ignoring all the ones I knew to lead to nowhere. It wasn't long before I found myself looking down on the central chamber. Kept alight by uncountable numbers of torches, as well as the few small cracks near the ceiling, the chamber was shrouded in many shadows in the corners. To my eyes it looked like drakes filled every one.\n\nIn the very centre of the chamber was a raised dais, surrounded by a ring of small stalactites. Ellian was there, with a few other drakes. Two of them I recognised as Nixan, but the other two were strangers. As I flew down to meet them I realised they were both crippled. One was without wings, and the other without forelegs. What had happened here to create such injuries?\n\nIt was only once I got close enough to land that I realised the wingless dragon was the ddraig. I couldn't help but stare at the useless stumps that adorned his back.\n\nMy claws clicked on the stone as I landed, and only then did the ddraig turn and notice my stare. He narrowed his eyes in anger. \"What?\" he snapped. I didn't have the courage to ask how he had gained such injuries, but nor did I have the force of will to look away.\n\nAt the sound of his voice, Ellian turned around, and her eyes widened in shock. She shrieked my name and bounded over to me, embracing me in her wings. \"You're back. I can't believe it, you actually came back,\" she said, holding me tight. She held her paw over the wound on my neck, her eyes growing wide in concern. \"Did something bite you?\"\n\n\"It was nothing. I flew into a tree, that's all,\" I said, fighting to free myself of her grip. Eventually I was able to fight free from my sister. Ddraig Anzig glared at the ground by my paws, a fury in his eyes the like of which I had never seen before. I recognised the two Nixans now. They were Ddraig Krateos and Haeraig Zeena, and I bowed my head to acknowledge them.\n\nI turned to the grey-scaled stranger, noting how he used his wings to stand. \"Don't even say it,\" he said, before I even had the chance to ask the obvious question. \"I'm a wyvern, not a dragon. And I hope I don't have to explain that to every new dragon I meet. This is how I'm meant to be.\"\n\nI nodded without saying a word. I didn't know who this creature was or why he was here, but already I knew I didn't want to start an argument with him. Even lacking two of his legs he looked like a fight I couldn't win. His chest and leg muscles were immense, and the small claws on the leading edge of his wing were sharper than any I had seen before.\n\nThe wyvern huffed and turned again to face the ddraig. \"As I was saying, we need to find some strategy to counter this enlarged dragon. It alone can kill hundreds of drakes.\"\n\n\"You know about them?\" I asked, unable to help myself from interrupting. If they already knew about these drakes, then there was little point in me coming here after all. The only news I had now was of the bats.\n\n\"Them?\" the wyvern asked, tilting his head back towards me. \"We only know of one.\"\n\n\"I saw five yesterday morning. That's why I came here,\" I whispered to the wyvern's clawed wings. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Ddraig Anzig and a shocked murmur from Ddraig Krateos aimed at his daughter.\n\nSuddenly I was the focus of all the attention from the four drakes and wyvern. \"Tell us everything,\" Ddraig Krateos asked.\n\nI took a deep breath and recounted everything that had happened to me over the last day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I had never known what it was like to look down on so many humans all gathered together, and now I was given the opportunity, I wished that I had never done so. It was the first time I had been able to truly appreciate the magnitude of the task dragonkind faced if they were to earn their survival.\n\nWe had come to the northern borders of Nixa, not far from where the minor clan of Turaxa met Reneza's territory. The terrain was rugged and harsh, with a multitude of small hills and valleys punctuating the horizon. There was very little out here that could be of interest to the humans, nothing but a few minor lairs that were home to a hundred drakes at most. Some of the local drakes who had lingered despite the human threat told us the army had not moved at all for several days now. It seemed they were waiting for something, but the drakes weren't sure what.\n\nThe human camps were spread out over a great distance, stretching almost as far as I could see in either direction from my vantage point on a small bluff. A couple of thin trees obscured me from any potential prying eyes, but it wasn't long before my confidence failed and I returned to Isikian and Ddraig Boruc. We had found shelter in a small cave frequented by nomads and other travellers. It was little more than a tiny, three chambered cave, but it suited our needs perfectly. My two companions looked up expectantly as I returned.\n\n\"Still no sign of him,\" I said, shaking my head. We had been here for almost a full day now, but had yet to sight our target. George had been absent, but the camp was large enough that he could be anywhere within. Occasionally I felt the power of the Axinstone pulse out from the camp, so we knew we had come to the right place at least. We certainly weren't going to give up so easily. We would try again in an hour.\n\nWith great effort, I resisted lying near Isikian, instead curling up on my own a short distance away. The Nixan had been one of my closest friends since flying across the mountains together, but I sorely missed the company of Kaz. Absently I toyed with the slate embedded within my paw, but I did not succumb to the temptation. We had both promised each other we would only use them when the need was great. Though we were sure Esperance would not give us anything harmful, we had no way of knowing if their magic could have any adverse effects.\n\nOnce more we discussed a strategy on what to do once we actually found George. With just the three of us we knew we would be unable to take it by force. It would be another act of thievery, likely during the night. I shivered at the prospect of having to go out and fly in the darkness. I had done it just twice before; once with Inilta's magic to help warm me. This time we would be without that luxury.\n\nAfter a while, Isikian went out to try his luck spotting George, leaving me alone with the ddraig, who had been quiet and lost in pensive thought for most of the day. When he did speak, he was vague and unclear, always referring to events and places I had never heard of. Sometimes I got the impression the old dragon did not even realise I was there, and he was simply vocalising his thoughts to better sort through them. The name 'Tsoren' was repeated frequently.\n\nA dark cave loomed all around. \"The power of one or all,\" the old, grey-scaled dragon said. Two other dragons listened to his words, one was gold, and the other blue. Seven runes of stone were laid out in a circle between them. The older dragon held an eighth in his tail. \"You have the power to join or destroy. The choice can be yours alone.\"\n\n\"I never asked for this,\" the gold dragon whispered, holding his head low.\n\n\"Every one of the Eight had this same choice to make,\" the old dragon replied.\n\n\"But they chose this path,\" the gold replied, nudging one of the runes with his paw.\n\n\"Not all of them.\"\n\n\"And what did they choose?\"\n\n\"That much should be obvious, at least.\"\n\nThe gold dragon sighed and turned to the blue by his side. \"I don't want to lose you though. If I do this\u2026 If I do this I won't be the same.\"\n\nThe blue gently rubbed heads with his companion, a pained smile on his face. \"Didn't Esperance tell us she had to give up her love to finish her quest? If she could make that decision, then so can you. Besides, I can find them all again after.\"\n\n\"Are\u2026 are you sure?\" the gold dragon said.\n\n\"Do it,\" the blue said, taking a step back. He made sure he didn't once lose eye contact with his companion.\n\n\"Very well. Pass me the Axinstone.\" The gold held out his paw to receive the eighth and final rune. Magic seemed to take physical form as drops of blue light dripped from the radiating stones. The three dragons disappeared as the liquid light grew ever more intense.\n\n\"The power of all or one?\" I whispered, snapping back to the present as the magic of the future still blinded my eyes.\n\n\"What did you say?\" Ddraig Boruc said, his reverie broken at last.\n\nStartled, I repeated what I had said, and started to explain what I had just Seen. Once I had finished, the old dragon slowly walked over to me and placed his paw on my head. I could feel magic beneath his scales.\n\n\"Then maybe you will be the one to break our exile at long last. You are dragonkind's greatest hope now, Azlak,\" the ddraig said, taking his paw away once more.\n\n\"But why? Why me?\" I asked, recoiling away from the ddraig. I simply could not believe his words, even if they echoed those Esperance had said to Kaz and me. 'Find the third drake', she had told us. Ddraig Boruc had already denied that he was the dragon we sought, claiming he was a drake from another era and not one for the future.\n\nFor my whole life I had been the Laxtal omega, the least important member of the clan. Knowing that I was actually a Nixan had not changed that. No drake could go from that position to holding the hopes of our entire species on their wings.\n\n\"Esperance has chosen you. She has seen something in you that no one else has. You have an obligation now to her, and to all of us,\" Ddraig Boruc said. I still didn't know what he was talking about, but I was sure he wasn't about to explain now. I was sure it had something to do with the eight runes I had Seen in my vision, but what they were or did was quite beyond me. The leopard rune I had found beneath Laxtal had been completely bereft of power or magic, yet it had been there with the others in the vision, and it had felt powerful.\n\nI was saved from having to ponder the mysterious events of the future by Isikian's return. The Nixan was frantic, and he kept his wings extended even as the tips knocked and scraped against the cave entrance.\n\n\"I've found him.\" It was all the Nixan needed to say. Moments later the three of us returned to the sky, using the few clouds as cover against watching human eyes. One thing we had learned from our observations was that humans rarely looked up. They didn't expect any drakes to attack them from the skies, and that gave us a distinct advantage. Even if one happened to catch a glimpse of us, from this height we would look like hunting birds.\n\nIsikian led us towards a cluster of large tents almost right in the middle of the expansive camp. From this high it was hard to make out individual humans, but the Nixan was confident this was where George was. I paid careful attention to how far we had flown from our little hideout, so that when the time came to fly in at night, I would be able to return here without having to rely on my eyes. Once the sun sank below the horizon we would have just the humans' campfires to guide us.\n\nWe did not risk flying any lower to discover if George carried the Axinstone with him. We simply had to trust that the human would not want to let the precious rune out of his sight. As we turned around and started to fly back towards our cave, I noticed a small patch of utter darkness amongst the tents. It looked like something had sucked away all the light, for I could see nothing within the void, not even light from nearby fires.\n\nI pointed this out to Ddraig Boruc, hoping he would know what it was. He sucked in his breath and started to fly that little bit faster. \"Kernow has allied with a necuart,\" the old dragon said in a strained whisper that the wind threatened to blow away. Though I wanted to ask him what that was, his face returned to a pensive look, and I knew I wouldn't get another word out of him for some time to come. I had to wonder how much the ddraig lived in the past, lost in his own memories, oblivious to the present. Once I had lived like that, a slave to the future before I had managed some control over my magic. It was a dangerous place to live.\n\nIsikian took the opportunity to quietly slink off and hunt before evening fell. There was precious little wild game in this part of Laxtal, especially with the devastation the humans had caused. Some rabbits at least must have remained, as we saw fresh evidence of their presence. They wouldn't provide much meat, but they would provide enough to sustain us through the night.\n\nThe Nixan wasn't gone long before he returned with three rabbits. Isikian and I both devoured ours hungrily, but Ddraig Boruc was slower with his eating as he continued to mumble and mutter his thoughts.\n\n\"If ever you see what looks like a tall, pale human, you are to fly away as fast as you can,\" the Vatrean eventually said, looking down at the dead rabbit at his paws and starting, as though he hadn't even realised it was there. He tentatively pawed at the soft flesh of the rabbit. \"Do you understand me? These creatures will not hesitate to destroy you, if you're lucky. If you let yourself get caught by them then nothing will be able to save you.\"\n\nIsikian paused in his eating, blood dripping from the scales on his chin. \"What are these things then?\"\n\n\"They are necuart; creatures of darkness and cold. They rarely emerge from the shadows of their barrow-cities in the Twilight Fields, for which the rest of Farenar is grateful. They are powerful foes, and at least one of them is here,\" the ddraig explained. He ripped off a chunk of rabbit meat and slowly chewed, pondering over his next words. \"Where there are necuart, there are grave bats. We will need to be very careful indeed tonight.\"\n\nIn between mouthfuls of rabbit, Ddraig Boruc told us more about the necuart and the grave bats, carnivorous creatures with a wingspan slightly larger than a drake. Usually they plagued the southern human countries. The ddraig couldn't recall a time they had ventured this far north. Certainly not since the cataclysm at least, he mused. His words didn't fill me with confidence. The grave bats and necuart were only active at night, so avoiding them would be problematic. Our impossible task had suddenly become that much harder.\n\nNervously we waited for night to fall. From beyond the hills came the sounds of humans shouting and calling. It sounded like a celebration was underway; some festivities lasting long into the evening.\n\nWe struggled to stay awake as the air cooled. To try and stave off my tiredness I stood guard just outside the cave. A strong wind blew from the north, bringing with it every last scent of the humans' camp. Cooked flesh was by far the strongest smell. I had never understood the human need to sear everything they ate with flame, as there was nothing quite like the taste and texture of freshly-killed meat, nor the warmth of their blood.\n\nIt looked like the night would be a clear one, and I wasn't sure if that was good or not. Some clouds would have provided us some cover as we flew over the camp, but the moon was shining brightly, giving us more light to see by. It was a difficult compromise, and I could not make up my mind on which I would have preferred, no matter how long I thought about it.\n\nThen the first grave bat flew overhead, and I shrunk down as low as I could against the ground, not daring to make a sound. It was every bit as terrifying as Ddraig Boruc had said. The bat's furred body was a little larger than a drake's, and its leathery wings were at least eleven feet wide. Even from this distance I could see its sharp teeth and claws. I had no doubt that it would be a formidable enemy, a fighter every bit as tough as even the strongest Axaatl drake. If it had seen me, it showed no interest in me at all.\n\nThree more bats flew overhead before I was joined by Isikian in my vigil. Ddraig Boruc came out soon after, and together we waited for the noises from the camp to die down enough to risk flying over. That didn't come until long after the last of the sunlight had disappeared below the horizon. But for the light of the moon, I wouldn't have been able to see anything.\n\nFinally, the time came for us to take to wing. We flew silently and low to best avoid the marauding grave bats. There were a few human guards on the camp's perimeter, but it wasn't difficult to bypass them as again none of them even seemed to pay any attention to the sky. Whether it was incompetence, overconfidence, or both, I wasn't sure, but I couldn't believe they weren't expecting any attacks from above. Their only enemies here would be drakes.\n\nThere were enough campfires still lit that could see where we were going, though the smoke made my eyes water as we flew overhead. Only a couple of humans still wandered around, all of whom appeared to be patrolling guards. They were all armed with the new guns we had been warned about, deadly weapons that would kill us from incredible distances. Our scales couldn't protect us from such devices.\n\nIn the middle of the camp was the location of their largest tents. They offered little in the way of shelter in comparison to the sturdy structures that the humans built their cities with, but they seemed a lot more spacious than the cramped tents barely large enough for a drake to spread their wings in. I had no doubt that we would find George in one of these, and we came down to land behind the largest tent of them all. It was three times the height of a human at its tallest point, and looked wide enough for ten drakes to stand side-by-side, wings outstretched.\n\nThe stench of humans was everywhere. It pervaded every surface, obliterating any hope I had of picking up any other scent. Relying on my hearing and sight, I stood guard while Isikian and Ddraig Boruc searched for a way to enter the tent. They scratched around the bottom of the canvas walls, hoping to be able to get in beneath, but there was a fabric floor in the way. It would have been easy to tear through, but if possible, we wanted to get in and out without being detected.\n\nGradually we edged around the tent until we found the main entrance, pulling aside a piece of the canvas that allowed us to slip inside. It wasn't completely dark, but there was very little light to see by as we slowly crept forward, taking care not to bump into anything. Through the gloom I could just make out a large table that dominated the middle of the tent, with a number of storage cases located around the edges. There didn't appear to be anyone in here, and nor could I feel the radiating magic of the Axinstone.\n\nDdraig Boruc leapt up on to the table and started searching through some of the papers that had been left there. I joined him, leaving Isikian to stand guard by the entrance. I could hardly make out anything written on the paper through the darkness, but the ddraig didn't seem to be so hindered. I heard him muttering to himself as he read some of the documents, but didn't seem to find anything important, as he didn't linger on anything for long.\n\nAs my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to make out more of what was in front of me. There were a few maps around, some showing places I didn't recognise, but others of the draconic territories. None were as detailed or complex as the map I had been given by a couple of humans in Kernow. It had been a wonderful gift, helping us reach George's castle just off the coast of Trevena. It had been in Nataik's possession when we had left Nixa, so was most likely lost to us now.\n\nOn most of the maps were a series of markings I struggled to decipher. The red circles and arrows were easy enough to see, but there were a lot of annotations on the sides written in black markings that I was unable to properly read in the darkness. As the ddraig poured over them, I trusted he was able to glean any important information from them.\n\nWhatever the Vatrean learnt, he kept to himself as he silently gestured with a twitch of his wing for us to move on. We quickly stalked across to the next tent, keeping alert for any nearby sound. Nothing was approaching us, and once more we quickly found our way inside. Though once again I failed to feel any pulse of magic from the Axinstone, this tent looked more like what we were after.\n\nMy memory of the laboratory where we had initially claimed the Axinstone was understandably hazy, given the immense battle we had fought with Human-Nixans and Nightwings, but this tent reminded me of that place. There were several strange machines that all seemed to be connected to each other with a complicated web of wires. What was used to power these machines this far into our territory, I had no idea.\n\nAgain, Ddraig Boruc was eager to look around, running his paw over many of the machines as he passed by. Unlike with the maps, the mass of metal was all meaningless junk to me. I had no idea what anything in here did, but once more Ddraig Boruc's actions were all confident and assured. I trusted him to know what he was doing.\n\nThe ddraig summoned me over with a gesture of his wing. Without a word, he pointed to a small glass box that looked vaguely familiar. It took me a moment to place it, before realising it looked almost identical to the device that had held the Axinstone in George's laboratory in Trevena. I was quickly able to open it up. Though it was empty, I could feel the residue of magic inside the container. The Axinstone had been here. We weren't far away.\n\nNow that I had detected a sense of the Axinstone's magic, it didn't take long for Isikian and me to find the minute trail it had left in the air. I couldn't be sure how long ago it had been taken away, but it was a couple of hours old at least.\n\nCautiously we made our way through the camp, the magical residue leading us far away from the central tents. Three times we almost ran into a patrolling guard, but each time we heard them coming and could shrink into the shadows before we were spotted. The cold was starting to sap our strength, but our reflexes were still alert enough to any danger. Beyond keeping all my senses alert for approaching humans, I didn't pay any real attention to where I was going, not until I felt a paw on my tail. Only then did I look up and see what lay just ahead.\n\nA wall of darkness faced us, a blackness so intense that I could see nothing through it, as though a physical barrier existed there. Light from the campfires flickered on the grass until, like a physical boundary, light was replaced by dark. Slowly I crept forward, reaching out with a paw to touch the darkness. Nothing resisted my movement. My paw vanished into the darkness.\n\nThe air was so cold here, and it chilled me to the bone. I shivered and pulled my wings a little closer to my body, trying to conserve as much heat as I could. This had to be some form of magic. The temperature had dropped too quickly to be natural.\n\nDdraig Boruc came up to my side as I pulled my paw back into the flickering fire light. \"Necuart are close by,\" the ddraig whispered softly, confirming my suspicions. The pale men must be guarding the Axinstone, for the magical trail led right into the heart of the darkness.\n\nI did not hesitate. Had I done so I, wouldn't have been able to maintain the courage I needed to walk on into the pitch darkness. My eyes were useless. I could see absolutely nothing, not even the end of my snout. I blindly blundered on, hoping I didn't walk into anything or anyone. A sharp pinch on my tail told me one of the other dragons had taken it in their mouth so we didn't separate.\n\nIt almost felt like I wasn't moving at all. The unseen grass beneath my paws felt the same with every step. The air was getting colder too. I was sure that if I could see it, my breath would be frosting into a cloud of vapour. No sounds reached my ears, but I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, something was watching us through the impenetrable darkness.\n\nA crimson glow burned my eyes. With it came a wave of such intense power that I staggered forward, tearing my tail from the grip of the dragon behind me. A second burst of magic radiated out, but this time I was prepared for it. Suspended in the middle of the darkness was the Axinstone, shining like a beacon in the void.\n\n\"Three little dragons, stumbling through the night. Are they going to die? I think they might,\" sung a cold voice from beyond the gloom. The voice was light and musical, but I could easily detect the icy malice behind the words. I was in no doubt whatsoever that this was the voice of a necuart. I forced myself to ignore him, trying to block him out as he continued to sing threats towards us.\n\nI took another step forward and suddenly the darkness was lifted. There was a ring of light surrounding the Axinstone, held aloft on an ornate pedestal of silver and gold. I could see no sign of the singing necuart. Behind me, Isikian and Ddraig Boruc emerged blinking into the crimson glow.\n\nIsikian made a move for the Axinstone, but the ddraig flung his wing in front of the Nixan, holding him back. \"Wait. This isn't as easy as it looks,\" the old dragon said. Under his direction, the three of us spread out around the circle of light. I could feel the power of the Axinstone's magic on my scales, but I wasn't about to disobey Ddraig Boruc's warnings and leap forward now.\n\n\"What now then?\" Isikian hissed from the far side of the pedestal. He pawed at the grass, eager to move forward. The singing had stopped. It felt like we were all alone, a small sphere of light amongst the never-ending darkness. I tried to keep my eyes on the Axinstone in an attempt to ignore the terrifying darkness. The cold air was starting to get to me now, my wings drooping slightly from my side. I didn't know how much longer my endurance could last.\n\nA pocket of darkness separated from the rest, forming into a vaguely human shape that towered over us. Pale skin and red eyes shone from the darkness. The necuart grinned wolfishly, long fangs extending below his lower lip. He stood between Ddraig Boruc and Isikian. Though the Nixan backed away, the Vatrean dragon held his ground.\n\n\"So, my little dragons, after the Axinstone are you?\" the necuart said, extending his pale hands outwards.\n\n\"What do you care?\" I retorted, doing my utmost not to quail in fear. His eyes met mine. There was a cold fury there, but also a calm, measured curiosity.\n\nThe necuart chuckled, a sound like steel scraped across rock. \"I care, dragon, because George asked me to guard it for him. It would not look good on me if it were to disappear without good reason.\"\n\n\"And you serve the human George?\" I asked, finding courage to speak where I thought there was none. Behind the necuart, I could see Ddraig Boruc's frantic movements, gesturing with his wing for my silence.\n\n\"Serve? No dragon, I do not serve him. He offered me terms that were beneficial to me. That is all. I have no allegiance to the human but for one of mutual benefit,\" the necuart said, folding his arms across his chest.\n\n\"And\u2026 and what terms can we offer you to let us take it?\" I stuttered, ignoring Ddraig Boruc's continued attempts to silence me. The old dragon was urging me to turn and flee. Isikian had already gone, vanishing back into the darkness.\n\nThe necuart laughed again. \"You seek to bargain with me, dragon? You wish to negotiate terms for the Axinstone?\"\n\nI nodded quickly. \"Yes, yes. Anything you ask for, I shall provide,\" I said, bowing my head and spreading my wings in a sign of submission.\n\nThe necuart took a couple of steps forward, taking him level the pedestal. He extended his hand out towards me. \"Anything?\" he crooned. \"Even your blood, dragon? If I asked for your blood and your service, would you give it to me?\"\n\n\"If that is what you ask, then that is what I offer.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc leapt into the air behind the necuart, but pale figure was more aware of his surroundings than he seemed. He spun around and struck Ddraig Boruc mid-flight, sending the old dragon sprawling. The creature leered at me, the ddraig ignored once more, a hungry gleam in his eyes as he pressed his finger against my face. I shivered at the ice-cold touch of the necuart's touch against my scales.\n\n\"No. That is not enough. There is nothing a dragon can offer me that I desire,\" the necuart said, gripping my jaw and lifting me into the air. I dangled uselessly, my legs unable to find purchase on ground or necuart, and my mouth was effectively sealed shut by the creature's powerful grip. He hissed in my ear, his long fangs touching the scales on my neck. \"You aren't even worthy of my time.\"\n\nI was flung away, bouncing across the ground a few times before coming to a rest by the wall of darkness. Dazed, I tried to get back up to my paws. At the second attempt I made it up, shuffling my wings to make sure they hadn't been injured in my fall. The necuart regarded me coldly for a few moments, before turning to face my companions.\n\nThey had already gone. The necuart hissed in annoyance, but that turned into a howl of dismay as I used his distraction to lunge for the Axinstone, plucking it from its pedestal. Power surged through my paws as I evaded the necuart's grabbing hands. I flicked out at him with my tail, catching him across the jaw as I passed, giving me just a moment to escape.\n\nBlindly I flew through the darkness, desperate to get away from the necuart. I didn't know what he was capable of, or when I would be safe of him. I had no idea where I was going, or where Isikian and Ddraig Boruc had gone. All I cared about now was escaping the ire of the necuart, to find my companions and keep the Axinstone from falling back into the hands of the pale one.\n\nShrieks filled the darkness. Screams that were not human or draconic. The grave bats were coming, and as I emerged out of the darkness and into the camp once more I saw them, filling the sky. There were hundreds of them, and I quickly trimmed my wings to glide towards the closest tents. The sounds of human activity were louder now. The whole encampment was starting to wake up as the bats and necuart set off the alarms.\n\nFree from the unnatural darkness, my body started to warm up slightly, though I could still feel a cold chill in my tail. I glanced back. The necuart melted out of the darkness, easily keeping pace with me without any exertion. He gave chase as I twisted my body through the narrow gaps between the tents. The guidewires that supported the tents threatened to throw me to the ground every time the edges of my wings caught them, but somehow, I remained in the air.\n\n\"You will not get away with the Axinstone, dragon,\" the necuart said as he bounded after me, his feet barely touching the ground as he travelled. He was not far behind, almost close enough to reach out and grab my tail. Above my head the grave bats continued to swarm, slowly descending. I was running out of options.\n\nGiving up on my wings, I dropped to the ground and ran, holding the Axinstone in my mouth. My jaw quivered with the raw magic emanating from the stone, but I wasn't about to let it go. I used my smaller size wherever I could, darting under tables and chairs, kicking as much as I could behind me in an attempt to stall the necuart. Nothing worked. No matter what I did, he remained just behind my tail.\n\nI turned another corner, only to face down four waiting humans. The necuart behind me snickered. He had seen what I already knew. There was nowhere left for me to go. The creature was behind me, the humans in front. Grave bats covered the sky.\n\nI lowered my head and spread my wings, submitting to the humans as I placed the Axinstone at their feet. The necuart loomed behind me, covering me in his shadow. I tried not to think about his hungry red eyes.\n\nOne of the humans stepped forward. His eyes were as cold as the necuart's. Though I had never seen him before, I knew exactly who this was. \"George Symons,\" I said with a growl. This was the human responsible for the invasion on draconic territories, and I was completely at his mercy.\n\nThe human ignored me for the moment, addressing the necuart instead. \"Have you broken our agreement?\"\n\n\"His companions got away, but foolishly left the rune for this one,\" the necuart said bitterly. I didn't dare glance back at him, fearful of what I might see there. The sight in front of me was bad enough. George had raised an eyebrow in thought, tapping his cheek with a finger.\n\n\"You're lucky this time. Your failure did not lead to the rune's loss. Go and find the others,\" George said, snapping his fingers at some humans by his side and spinning on his heel. \"Bring the dragon and the rune.\"\n\nA human seized me in their hands.\n\nI was a prisoner of George Symons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "\"We know the humans aren't moving anywhere, so they're waiting for something. We don't want to linger long enough for whatever that is to arrive. We have tarried and dithered for a week already. That is a week for them to gain further numbers,\" Alaron said. The wyvern was having a hard time convincing Anzig, who was the only one refusing to allow the drakes under his control to fly from the lair. Representatives of all the minor clans had submitted to Alaron's command. Hyantl, commander of the Axaatl forces had also agreed to the wyvern's proposed course of action, as had Ddraig Krateos for Nixa. James McArthur had pledged his support from the humans who had arrived a couple of days previously. Only Anzig remained, but he refused to leave the safety of our lair.\n\nWe had gathered on the hill above the gorge so Kyrus and James could join us. The inner passages of the lair had proven too small for the gryphons to navigate, and we doubted the clan would be happy with the presence of another human within the caves. There had been resistance enough to their arrival. Yalle and Vinzent had been the most vocal in their protests, but as of yet a physical confrontation had been avoided.\n\n\"We know this land. We should wait for them to come to us,\" Anzig countered, attempting to stare down Alaron.\n\n\"Then we wait for them to grow stronger!\" Alaron exploded, slamming both wings against the ground in his frustration. His claws tore up the earth. \"They wait because they wish to destroy you. If we attack early, we catch them at their weakest.\"\n\nAnzig arched his back and he faced the wyvern. \"I will not risk the lives of my clan on such a hopeless attack,\" he said. He was on the verge of attacking Alaron before I stepped between them. Ddraig Krateos too moved forward to place himself before the Laxtal ddraig.\n\n\"You speak without thinking, Anzig. We waited for our human allies to get here, but that it when we should have flown,\" Ddraig Krateos said sternly. The Nixan pushed past me to stand directly in front of Anzig. \"You risk more lives by staying here. The wyvern speaks the truth. We cannot allow the humans to gather their full strength, or your lair will fall just like ours.\"\n\nI hung back from the Nixan, inching back towards Alaron and Kyrus. I feared Anzig's continued refusal to act would lead me to a decision I didn't want to make. I knew what we had to do to have any hope of survival, and my cousin was firmly taking the exact opposite of that. We simply had to fly out.\n\nDdraig Krateos and Anzig started to argue, and once more I was afraid my cousin would attack. Muscles in his back twitched, likely a futile attempt to spread his absent wings. Then the Nixan quietly said something I could not make out, but it was enough for Anzig to fall completely silent.\n\n\"Because you never did,\" Anzig growled in response to Ddraig Krateos's unheard statement. He barged past the Nixan to glare at Alaron. \"Very well. You can fly out if you must. Go and fight.\" He turned to me, fury in his eyes. He bowed his head. \"You are ddraig of Laxtal now, if that's what you wanted. I'll try not to let the lair fall into ruin before you return.\"\n\nToo late, I realised the true reason behind Anzig's reluctance to allow the Laxtal drakes to fly out. He would not be able to join us. I didn't dare say anything, not wanting to draw attention to Anzig's physical weakness. He couldn't fly, so there was no way he could keep up with our army as we flew to confront the humans. He must have seen this as an attempt to wrest him from power. I watched Anzig walk away and bowed my head in shame. I should have seen that.\n\nSlowly I began to realise exactly what had just happened. Anzig was ddraig of Laxtal no longer, handing that power over to me. Once before I had been ddraig, before I had been deposed by Tsona. Now that power was mine once more, and I sincerely wished it was not. Anzig was my cousin, and I was loyal to him, but I had to accept now that he was a weak leader for a time like this.\n\nThe grey wyvern regarded me with a critical eye. \"So, Ddraig Ellian. What is it going to be? Will Laxtal join us?\"\n\nI looked up at Kyrus. The gryphon had warned me I would need to become ddraig if I wanted to do what was best for my clan. That had now happened, but I don't think either of us could have expected Anzig to voluntarily step down. Now I had to be the leader both the gryphons and the wyvern could respect.\n\n\"We will fly,\" I said.\n\nAlaron wasted no time in making arrangements. \"James, I want you to take your men and leave straight away. You'll have to travel by foot so it'll take a lot longer for you to get there. Leave behind one of your communicators so we can keep track of your location. Kyrus has experience using them, so give it to him.\n\n\"Ddraig Krateos, I want a full report on what each of your drakes can do. I want to know how many healers you have, how many have offensive magic, whatever. Anything they can do, I want to know it.\n\n\"And Hyantl. Make sure every drake is ready and able to fight. We're not going to have any opportunity to rest, so they need to be prepared. Brute force won't be enough to win this battle, but it could go a long way. That's going to be your responsibility. Any questions?\"\n\nThere were none for the wyvern. As one we all deferred to his judgement, and Ddraig Krateos, James, and Hyantl all left to prepare those under their command. I knew that soon I would need to do the same for Laxtal, and would have to announce myself as ddraig. There would likely be protests. No one from the clan had actually witnessed the exchange of power, and I doubted Anzig would consent to being publicly humiliated by announcing it to them. I could only hope they would take the word of Kyrus or Alaron that the exchange had occurred.\n\nI knew challenges would come. Yalle and Marin had not been too supportive of my rule previously, and as for Vinzent\u2026 the dragonet still turned me cold whenever I thought of him. I had trusted him as a potential mate, and he had spurned that with his harsh words of rejection. He had called me weak. Now I could prove him wrong.\n\n\"Are you ready for this, Ddraig Ellian?\" Alaron asked me.\n\n\"I have no choice. I have to be ready,\" I replied.\n\nThe wyvern nodded once. \"A good answer, ddraig. Get your clan prepared. We will leave at first light the day after the next.\" He did not wait for an answer, before shuffling away to find space to launch into the air. Though he appeared a little awkward and clumsy on the ground, once his immensely powerful hind legs launched him into the air he was perfectly graceful. In his element, he could easily outfly and out-manoeuvre any drake that dared challenge him. Even the gryphons struggled to match Alaron.\n\nKyrus stood by my side as we looked out over the flatlands. My territory. But for how long? Would these two days be my last chance to look down upon Laxtal? Anzig had been right in one respect, we were risking the lives of many drakes. Our clan would be decimated, but it was our only hope.\n\n\"I do wonder if your cousin realised that I carried Alaron on my back when we flew here,\" the gryphon mused, clicking his beak in a manner I had come to recognise as laughter. \"He uses his injury to justify every flaw in his character. I wasn't going to tell him that, of course. He was the weakness in your clan. I didn't want to carry him, but it is curious to note that he never even once asked.\"\n\n\"I think it would have hurt his pride to request such a thing from you,\" I said quietly.\n\nKyrus chirruped loudly in mirth. \"Pride? He is a wingless dragon. He should have precious little of that left.\"\n\n\"He is still my cousin,\" I replied, pawing the soft grass. I did not want to hear such insults towards him, even if I acknowledged his removal from power had been necessary.\n\nKyrus bowed his feathered forelegs and spread his wings. \"You're right, I apologise. I just say what any gryphon would feel in a similar situation.\"\n\nI growled, but accepted the gryphon's apology. Shouts from below pierced the relative silence as Hyantl ordered a few hundred drakes through more manoeuvres. There had been some early protests from a few Laxtal drakes about taking orders from an Axaatl dragon, but those had quickly been quelled after some physical confrontations with both the Axaatl commander and Anzig. Ever since losing his wings, he had not lost a fight. I had only witnessed a few of them, and I had watched on with confusion. Anzig had never held an imposing physical presence, preferring to avoid conflict where possible.\n\nIt wasn't that he had suddenly become a much better fighter, but it seemed that everyone he fought had lost their desire to attack. Anzig had done something to terrify the clan into submission that affected the mind of every last drake. I doubted I would be able to demand the same terrified respect, but I hoped I wouldn't need to.\n\nKyrus soon flew off to make arrangements with the other gryphons. I knew my duties were with my clan, but I left to seek out my brother. He would want to know what had just occurred. Mulner had been largely keeping to himself since arriving in Laxtal. He had worn himself out completely in his flight here, attempting to fly throughout the night in his urgency to deliver his message, but he had yet to recover his strength, which I was alarmed by. I found him at the far end of the gorge, at the narrowest, deepest part as it weaved its way towards the distant mountains, hidden in the deep shadows. The wound on his neck was yet to heal. He insisted he had flown into a tree, though he could not specifically remember such an act. I was not convinced. It looked more like a bite wound to me, but this he had vociferously denied.\n\nI wasted no time in telling him everything that had happened, that I was now ddraig of Laxtal once more. He was surprised, but he smiled as he held me close, holding his wing around me.\n\n\"I'm so proud of you, little sister,\" he said. His voice was hoarse and quiet, little more than a pained whisper.\n\n\"You feel cold. Why aren't you in the sun?\" I asked, pulling out of his embrace and placing my paw on his forehead. His scales felt like ice, as though he hadn't been in the sun all day.\n\n\"It hurts my eyes. I can't see in the light,\" he whispered, stepping away from my touch. His yellow eyes seemed paler than usual, a whiteness to them I had never seen before. \"Ellian, I think I'm getting sick. I think the night air disagreed with me.\"\n\n\"Let me find Kaz for you. Wait here and I'll bring the healer,\" I said. I waited only for my brother's affirmative response before bounding into the sky. I would not sit idle and watch Mulner fall into illness. In Kaz, we had access to a healer of far greater skill than any our clan possessed. If he was unable to determine why my brother was so cold and blinded by the light, then no dragon could.\n\nI found the Nixan healer in the central chamber with Haeraig Zeena, along with a few other Nixans. Brushing aside questions from some Laxtal drakes, I interrupted Kaz and begged him to come to the surface with me. My mate's twin asked his haeraig permission to leave, not spreading his wings until she nodded her head.\n\nAs we flew back up through the lair I explained why he was required. Kaz said nothing in response, his eyes dark in thought.\n\nMulner was lying in the shadows when we returned to him. He barely even responded as Kaz landed by his side, the healer taking care not to land on his outstretched wings. Only the smallest patches of light landed on my brother's extended membranes, certainly not enough to warm his body.\n\nI hung back as Kaz got to work, not wanting to get in the way of the Nixan as he moved around my brother's body. To my eyes it looked like he was doing little more than placing his paw against random points against Mulner's head, chest, and wings, but I convinced myself to put faith in the healer's abilities. Kaz paid particular attention to the wound on Mulner's neck, which was still leaking a small amount of blood. The wounds were two days old. They should have closed by now.\n\nFor ten minutes Kaz worked; small crackles of orange light emanating from his paws as they moved over Mulner's scales. My brother twitched and whimpered pitifully, but otherwise didn't seem to be aware of his surroundings. There appeared to be no change. Not even the bite wound on his neck showed any signs of healing, and when Kaz took a couple of steps back with his eyes narrowed in confusion, I knew the news wasn't good.\n\n\"I do not understand. There's a different magic in his blood that's causing this, but it's nothing Nixan. It's something I've never seen before,\" the healer said. He rested his paw against his snout as he thought.\n\nI hung my head. Becoming ddraig should have been a joyous moment in my life, but instead it was bringing me nothing but heartache and pain. Not only was I sick with worry about the state of Anzig's mind, but now my brother was afflicted with an illness not even a Nixan healer could identify. They were two of the closest dragons in my life, along with Airil. I didn't want to lose any of them.\n\n\"Unless\u2026\" Kaz pondered, breaking into my dark thoughts before stopping again.\n\n\"Unless?\" I pressed. If there was anything that could help Mulner, I would take it.\n\n\"The Laxtal healers use herbs as medicine, is that right? We have always known the limitations to our magic, so sometimes we are forced to use natural medicine too. There is one plant in particular that seems to suppress magic. If your healers have any hutynnu flowers, then it may help stop the magic,\" Kaz explained, spreading his wings.\n\n\"I don't know what that is,\" I replied. I had never heard of hutynnu flowers before. The brief spark of hope was in danger of being snuffed out already.\n\n\"I'll find some for you,\" Kaz said, taking to the air, weaving his way down through the gorge. He was soon out of sight, and I was left alone with my brother once more. I lay on the springy heather by his side, listening to his gentle breathing. High overhead I watched the comings and goings of drakes of many different clans. There were drakes from every western clan here and, but for a few Laxtal protests, everyone worked together. Historic disputes between clans had been put aside for the time being, and every day our numbers swelled as ddraigs released more and more of their numbers. It felt like we would soon have every western drake in Laxtal.\n\nA few drakes had even reached us from the eastern clans. Not everyone agreed with Ddraig Tsona and his draconic allies. About fifty had come from the tiny Clan Fentra alone, on the far borders of Xital. An emissary had also come from Xigax, pledging support to our cause, but regretting they had been unable to send any drakes. They were busy fending off the draconic armies Xital had mustered. This war didn't just affect Laxtal and Nixa. Anyone who opposed Ddraig Tsona was now feeling his wrath. And I stood beside Ddraig Krateos as one of the leaders of our defence. As Ddraig of Laxtal I needed to be out there preparing our forces to fly out, but I simply couldn't leave my brother alone. Nothing else mattered, not until Kaz returned with the hutynnu flowers. Only then would I be able to worry about such concerns.\n\nUntil then I would wait, the shadows hiding me from the drakes that flew overhead. If anyone was looking for me, I heard nothing of it.\n\nWhen Kaz finally returned, he was carrying a bunch of small, red flowers in one paw. They looked freshly picked, the green stalks still covered in a little mud. In the other paw, he held a round slab of grey stone. As soon as he landed, he ground up the flowers against the stone with his paw, until all that remained was a fine powder.\n\nGently, Kaz eased open Mulner's mouth, before slowly sprinkling the powder on my brother's tongue. The healer was forced to hold Mulner's snout closed as he attempted to spit the powder back out again.\n\n\"You have to swallow it,\" Kaz said, keeping a firm grip on Mulner as he started to thrash in an attempt to throw the healer off. Eventually he succumbed to the Nixan's wishes, and with a disgusted expression on his face he swallowed the powder. Only then did Kaz release him, and Mulner wasted no time in sticking his tongue out, his paw wiping away any leftover residue.\n\n\"That was disgusting,\" he growled, glaring at the Nixan.\n\nKaz shrugged his wings as he brushed his paws clean. \"It should stop the magic harming you. Give it a few minutes and you should be able to return to the light and give you a chance to warm up again.\"\n\n\"Still doesn't change the fact it was disgusting,\" Mulner muttered. He furled his wings and slowly rose to his paws. He was unsteady, but that would be more due to the cold than any lingering magical effects.\n\n\"Are you able to look after him, Kaz?\" I asked the Nixan, ignoring Mulner's hurt glare at my insinuations that he needed someone to mind him. Already it seemed my brother was starting to improve. Kaz's hutynnu flowers had been working just as he had expected. Now I needed to turn my attention to the larger matters that plagued the clan.\n\nAfter Kaz assured me he would keep Mulner safe, I spread my wings and kicked off into the air. I already knew where I would be going \u2013 back to the central chamber to announce Anzig's resignation of his duties, and that I was now ddraig in his stead. I would be pressed to announce a haeraig too, but there were precious few I could trust with that sort of power. Once he had recovered, I would speak to Mulner about it. If he intended to remain in Laxtal, then I would need no other alternative.\n\nThe central chamber was packed to capacity, as it had been for almost every hour of every day since the influx of drakes from other clans. As had been their habit of late, Yalle, Marin, and Vinzent were near the centre of the cavern, not far from Haeraig Zeena and a group of surviving Nixans.\n\nYalle looked up as I landed on the raised dais, and the albino bounded up after me, Marin and Vinzent following just behind. \"Have you seen the ddraig?\" the albino growled.\n\n\"You're looking at her,\" I replied coolly, meeting his eyes and waiting for him to lower his challenging glare. \"Anzig has stood down as ddraig, leaving control of the clan to me.\"\n\nMarin and Vinzent both ducked their heads in respectful acknowledgment my new rank deserved. For a moment, I didn't think Yalle would respond, before he slowly bent his knees.\n\n\"Very well, Ddraig. Perhaps you will care to explain the rumours that we are to be vacating the lair on a foolish mission north,\" Yalle said tersely, completely lacking the respect required when addressing the ddraig of the clan.\n\n\"They are not just rumours, Yalle. Every drake capable of flying and fighting will join us as we seek to eradicate this human threat once and for all. Alaron believes that we will never have a better time to strike as the humans will only continue to gather in strength. This could well be our only hope,\" I replied, keeping my voice level as I fought to suppress my annoyance at his rudeness.\n\nI revelled as Yalle's pink eyes widened in fear, an effect matched by Marin. I doubted the two had been attending the lessons the Axaatl drakes had been putting on since their arrival. Conversely, Vinzent had dug his claws into the dust that lay on the cave floor.\n\n\"It is suicide. The wyvern does not know what he is proposing,\" Yalle hissed, but I brushed aside his concerns with a flare of my wings.\n\n\"It is our last hope,\" I repeated, before looking away from the albino. He no longer concerned me, and I felt safe in turning my back. Unlike what those from my clan had given me, Haeraig Zeena wasted no time in bowing her head and offering her congratulations on becoming the clan's ddraig. She asked no questions about the circumstances in which I had taken over from Anzig, for which I was glad. I had no desire to embarrass my cousin further.\n\nI shared a few quick words with the haeraig, asking if her father had already come down to pass on Alaron's plans. The Nixan ddraig had, which was probably how Yalle had learnt of the intentions to fly out.\n\n\"Vinzent,\" I barked, addressing the silver dragon for the first time since he had broken my heart. He cautiously approached me, keeping his head low the entire time. Of the three drakes who had been making attempts to gather power within the clan, Vinzent was the only one I remotely trusted. That didn't fill me with confidence.\n\n\"I need you to ensure every able-bodied drake in the lair \u2013 Laxtal and otherwise \u2013 are warned that they need to be ready to fly at first light the day after next. No one is excused,\" I said, a stern glare in the direction of Yalle and Marin. I would have to pay particular attention to those two to make sure they joined us.\n\nVinzent bowed his head again, no sign of the old affections that had been present in our every interaction. There was no emotion in his voice at all. \"Of course, Ddraig.\"\n\nI watched him walk away, starting to spread the message through the clan, with many heads turning in my direction as the word slowly rippled outwards. Soon every drake present would know that our time was almost up. For better or worse, we would meet the humans that threatened our territory and fight them for control of this land.\n\nThough evening was some time away, I felt the need to retreat again for a short while. I hadn't yet had the chance to let my mind settle and think things over for a while. I instructed Yalle to send Airil up to my chambers when he was next seen, before flying up to the chambers behind the firepit.\n\nI paused at the chambers that had only briefly been where I had sheltered. Now I was free to continue on and call the ddraig's chambers mine. I hesitated on the threshold. Anzig may still have a few possessions of his own there, and without the assistance of a Nixan he wouldn't have had the opportunity to come here to clear them out. Even so, I succumbed to the temptation and pushed past the thin veil that divided chamber from passage.\n\nA flash of silver burst in front of my eyes.\n\n\"Now this is interesting,\" an unfamiliar, metallic voice said, making me leap into the air in fright, a strangled squawk escaping my throat. \"You didn't even need to sleep here, and yet my mind can touch yours.\"\n\nFrantically, I looked around for the source of the voice, but I was completely alone. No one else was here with me, and the passages behind me were empty too. I caught movement in the corner of my eye, and slowly my gaze was drawn up to the alcove above the fire, where the silver statue had always sat.\n\nThe statue moved. Its silver head turned so it could look at me with blank, featureless eyes. I was too scared to even move as it uncurled its body, leaping down from the alcove in one fluid movement. Its body shone amber in the firelight, but reflected nothing of its surroundings.\n\n\"I must say, Ddraig Ellian, I was not expecting to feel your mind so soon,\" the statue said, pacing around me with her long, serpentine body. Only my head moved as I tracked her progress around the chamber. She was certainly a dragoness, I was sure of that, but no statue of solid metal should be able to move as she did. I had to wonder what magic was at work.\n\nThe dragoness grinned, revealing many small, needle-like teeth. \"You are more willing to accept I am real than Anzig ever was. He never really believed what his senses were telling him, no matter how much I tried to convince him.\"\n\n\"Anzig can speak to you?\" I asked, forcing myself to move once more. I tentatively reached out with a paw, hesitating just before I touched the statue's silver scales. Already I could feel a powerful warmth emanating from her metallic body.\n\n\"Only when he was ddraig. His mind is already fading fast from mine,\" the dragoness said with a sad shake of her head. She edged closer to me, pressing her body against my outstretched paw. She felt like metal, not of scales and flesh.\n\n\"What are you?\" I asked her, drawing my paw away from the strange feel of her body.\n\n\"I am Mushussu, Guardian Dragon of Laxtal,\" she replied proudly. She then went on to explain that the guardians were ancient artefacts that had once been used to protect all of dragonkind from harm. As the magic of dragons had withered and faded, so too had the guardians. Now they were linked only to the ddraigs of the forty-two clans, and the protection they could offer was vastly inhibited. Not until dragonkind had been restored could the true potential of the guardians be unleashed once more. Just what had taken away her power, Mushussu either couldn't remember, or she was unwilling to say.\n\nBy the time Mushussu had finished her story, I was lying down amongst the pile of furs and rugs that had once belonged to Astar. The scent of Anzig was so strong here, it was hard to believe that this place was now mine. My mind was still buzzing with the fact that the guardian even existed, but there were already so many questions that I wanted to ask her.\n\n\"I do not know where he's going,\" the guardian said. I blinked in confusion, unsure what she had been responding to. She shook her head and frowned. \"He didn't tell you he planned on leaving? I thought he\u2026 aah, no. He never did, did he?\"\n\n\"Leave? Why would Anzig leave?\" I asked in horror, leaping up to my paws. My tail thrashed, distressed that I had not realised my cousin would be leaving the clan completely. I had thought he would still stay around. This was home for him. Surely there wasn't anywhere else for him to go?\n\nThe guardian hissed. \"He has had mixed feelings ever since Astar died. The last few days have simply been too much for him. The attack by his sister came dangerously close to breaking his mind.\"\n\n\"Sister? He doesn't have a sister.\"\n\nMushussu blinked a few times. \"He never told you that either,\" she said dully. She turned away from me and unleashed a low stream of words I did not understand. She sounded furious, and her tirade ended in a shrieked crescendo. Her wingless shoulders slumped. \"I apologise, Ddraig Ellian. I am not usually so lax with your predecessor's secrets. The sudden change of power has left me confused and unprepared, though that should not be an excuse. Now that I have begun, I suppose I should reveal Astar and Anzig's greatest secret. Please, you must understand that they kept this knowledge hidden for a reason, and though it will no longer have the impact it once would have held, it is up to Anzig to reveal the truth.\"\n\nI sat back down and listened numbly as Mushussu told me about Anzig's true parentage. He was not the son of Astar, but of Ddraig Krateos. I could hardly believe it. The ddraig of our clan had been a Nixan, after all the protests over a Xital ddraig in Tsona. Of course, I understood the need for continued secrecy; there would be drakes after Anzig's scales for deceiving them, even if he had now fled the clan. What was more, Azlak and Maznar were his siblings.\n\n\"I need to see him,\" I said once Mushussu had finished telling me about Anzig's great secret.\n\n\"He\u2026 he has already gone,\" the guardian said, closing her eyes and bowing her head. \"I can only just reach his mind still. He left with\u2026 he left with his sister? I'm sure it's Maznar he's left with. And there's another. A Nixan. Airil, I think his name is.\"\n\n\"Airil?\" I yelped. Why would my mate have left with Anzig? It simply didn't make any sense. There was no way Airil would have left the lair without even telling me where he was going.\n\n\"I am sure it is him,\" Mushussu said, placing a conciliatory paw on my shoulder. I was tempted to shrug off her unfamiliar touch, but instead I found myself leaning in to rest my head against hers.\n\nWe stayed like that for a few moments. I had tried to come here to ease my mind, but I had only had more worries piled on top of the existing issues. Was this what it was like to be the ddraig of the clan? If that were so, then I would not shirk away from my responsibilities. It would take more than just a few setbacks to defeat me. I was sure Airil would return when he could. He was likely only doing Anzig a favour, taking him somewhere his wingless body couldn't carry him. I would not worry myself with anything I had no control over.\n\nI trusted Airil. He would not do to me what Vinzent had done."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "The light still burned my eyes, the heat making my scales itch. I mentioned none of this to Kaz, not wanting the healer to worry. The Nixan had been sure the vile tasting flowers would cure my ailment, but they had done little to ease the pain. I endured the suffering, resisting the urge to retreat to the shadows once more. The warmth was doing little to energise me, failing even to chase away the chill that permeated my blood.\n\nOnce Kaz believed I was beginning to recover, he left me alone to attend to his duties. There weren't any other drakes nearby, though there were some gryphons preening in the shadows of some oak trees. They lay amongst the golden leaves on the ground, cleaning and perfecting the set of their feathers. I moved over to join them, not out of any desire for company, but for the need to share the shade they lay in.\n\nThere were a few chirruped welcomes, but by and large the strange feathered and furred creatures ignored my presence. Any curiosity I felt towards the gryphons had been dulled by the magic that ravaged my body. I was aware I was probably being foolish in not telling Kaz the full extent of my condition, but I couldn't face the constant hassling and harrying from the healer, nor from my sister. She would have her own concerns to attend to, now that she was ddraig once more.\n\nOut of habit alone, I spread my wings across the leaf-strewn grass. There was no sunlight to absorb in the shadows of the trees, but once they were unfurled I didn't bother exerting the energy required to fold them against my sides again.\n\n\"I thought dragons liked lying in the sun,\" one of the gryphons commented, looking up from her preening for a moment. I sent her a withering glance. Her burnished bronze feathers seemed to shine, even when no direct light struck them. I couldn't help but stare at her, even though it made me lose much of the aggression I had been trying to muster.\n\nThe gryphon, seemingly aware of my rapt attention, shook her head from side to side, causing her feathers rustle and shimmer. I noticed she didn't have a crest of feathers around her neck like some of the others had. It must have been a male trait amongst the gryphons, a difference between the genders that drakes did not share to such an extent.\n\n\"Enjoying what you see, are you dragon?\" the gryphon asked, rising to her paws and slowly ambling over towards me. I tried not to be intimidated by her great height, far larger than any drake could ever hope to grow. Even the Axaatl drakes were dwarfed by the gryphons. My mouth hung open, but I was unable to project any words. The gryphon chirruped in amusement. \"You can admit to it you know. It won't be any shame on you. We are quite magnificent.\"\n\n\"I've seen better,\" I replied, finding my voice at last. In truth, I could not recall seeing anything looking so pristine and perfect. She didn't have a single feather out of place, and on her hind legs her fur was perfectly groomed. There was no sign of the coarseness I frequently saw in the fur of wildcats.\n\nThe gryphon chuckled. \"Then I should wish to see this bastion of immense beauty, for it must be great indeed to outshine a gryphon.\"\n\n\"Then you do not look around you enough, for every drake far surpasses a gryphon for beauty. The shine of scales is far greater than the dull lustre of feathers or fur,\" I replied, watching her carefully as she lay down just in front of me. Her head was still slightly higher from the ground than mine had I been when standing.\n\nThe gryphon's eyes sparkled in mirth as she brushed a feather down with her beak. \"You amuse me, dragon. As if any drake could match a gryphon for beauty.\" Once more she laughed, a musical chirrup that drew the momentary attention of some of the other gryphons. \"I honour you with my name, Jesara.\"\n\n\"And I am Mulner. It is a pleasure to meet you, Jesara,\" I replied, surprising myself with my sincerity. It was the first time I had had an intelligent conversation with something that wasn't a drake. Humans had proved a dull alternative, full of frustrating asides and a general lack of intelligence. This gryphon, though arrogant, seemed capable of a decent conversation and I was glad of her company.\n\nJesara inclined her head, crossing her feathered legs in front of her body. \"If you'll forgive me for commenting, Mulner, but you have a shadow behind your eyes. Have you been touched by magic recently?\"\n\nI covered my eyes with my paw. Neither Ellian nor Kaz had noticed that, so was it something that just the gryphon could see? It could be no coincidence though, and there was little point in denying it.\n\n\"I don't know what caused it. Not even a Nixan was able to determine it,\" I said quietly, still hidden behind my paw.\n\nShe surprised me with a gentle touch against my scales. The gryphon's taloned paw was large enough to engulf my head, but she softly brushed my paw away so she could look into my eyes again. Though her touch was light, I didn't resist her at all, nor did I stop her as she ran a claw along the side of my snout.\n\n\"I think I understand what it is. A dark creature has influence over you, but I know something that should be able to remove it,\" the gryphon said, her claw under my chin lifted my head up.\n\n\"I have had hutynnal flowers,\" I said, shuddering as I recalled the vile taste once more.\n\nJesara shook her head, her neck feathers ruffling up. \"This is no flower. If you're able to fly, I can take you to our apothecary. She should have something to help,\" she said brightly.\n\nI groaned and rolled onto my back, tucking my wings against my side. I did not feel like I had the energy to take flight, but the gryphon had other ideas entirely. I squawked as she picked me up in her talons, hugging me close to her chest as she beat her powerful wings and lifting into the air. Whereas before her touch had been gentle, now it was firm. One taloned paw wrapped around my neck, while her other forepaw held my tail tight, preventing any movement at all.\n\nUnlike drakes, who preferred to sleep underground, the gryphons had shown no aversion to resting beneath the stars, only desiring shelter during the occasional downpour of rain. They had a large gathering just to the east of the clan, at the bottom of the steep hill that led to the gorge. Around two hundred were lying around in the sun, with a further fifty taking shelter beneath some trees. Jesara fluttered down on the edge of the trees.\n\nOne gryphon called out as Jesara landed, crying out in their strange, musical language. His eyes were fixed on me. I tensed as Jesara released me, sending me sprawling across the ground. I looked up in fear at the hundreds of gryphons that surrounded me now. Their avian beaks looked particularly sharp, a predatory gleam in their eyes. Had I been wrong to trust them?\n\nJesara chirped back to the stranger, standing over me protectively. The two seemed to be having some sort of debate, but I was unable to comprehend their words. After a few moments the other gryphon took to wing and flew off, while Jesara took a step back and looked down at me. I couldn't help but feel the two had been fighting over their prey, in much the same way two wildcats vocally scrapped for the best pickings.\n\n\"Ely is going to find the apothecary. Trust me on this, she'll be better able to cure you than any Nixan healer,\" the gryphon said. It seemed I had been wrong, they hadn't been arguing which one got to devour me first. In my relief, I didn't answer. As she stepped back, the sun had shone down on my face, sending needles of pain through my eyes. I squinted them shut and crawled forward towards the shadows of the trees, not stopping until I felt the cool shade on my scales.\n\nIt was not long before two gryphons descended from the bright sky to land nearby. One of them I recognised as Ely, who immediately slunk off to the sun-drenched plains, but his blue-feathered companion was a stranger I had not seen before. The cobalt colouring on her feathers was uneven in places. Some patches were faded, and I could see flecks of bronze in spots. It took me a moment to realise what I was seeing; the gryphon had stained her feathers blue.\n\nThe feathers around the stranger's neck rose as she noticed my curious gaze. \"It is not yet complete. I am finding it hard to find the correct berries to complete the dye,\" she said, nervously tapping the grass with her talons.\n\n\"I am sure it will look quite beautiful once it is done,\" I replied. I was quickly learning that flattery was the best way to get a gryphon to do what I wanted.\n\nAs I expected, the gryphon was placated by my compliment, and she bowed her head in response. To be fair, the iridescent blue feathers on the front half of her body made her stand out from the others, a welcome change from the prevalent browns, coppers, and bronzes. She actually did look quite pretty.\n\n\"I honour you with my name, Seris. Ely said you needed healing, but failed to provide information beyond that, but he did pique my interest in you. I've never treated a dragon before, and I feel as though I shall enjoy the experience,\" the azure-feathered gryphon said. I didn't know if it was just an aspect of their avian faces, but the glint in her eye looked quite sinister. Had I had the strength, I would have attempted to fly away, but as it was I could do no more than lie there, prone on the dry grass.\n\nJesara seemed to know more about my condition than I did, and she explained my symptoms to the apothecary in a language I could follow. There was one word though that I did not understand, and it was repeated a few times by both gryphons. They were concerned I had been exposed to a necuart, whatever that was. When Seris inspected the wound on my neck she squawked in shock. That was all the evidence she needed to confirm her theory, and the apothecary quickly flew off to acquire her medicines.\n\n\"It is as bad as I feared,\" Jesara said as we waited for Seris to return. She cleared a small area of broken sticks and leaves before settling down, her eyes constantly watching me. \"When a necuart bites, it doesn't inject venom, but magic. While there is no cure to a bite, we do have things that will slow and suppress the effects of their magic, if we have caught it early enough. When were you bitten?\"\n\n\"I don't know. At least two days ago, I think,\" I said, holding my head in my paws, trying to ignore the ache in my legs. I had no recollection of obtaining the wound on my neck. I had barely noticed the wounds until Ellian had pointed it out, so I could have gotten it any time before then. Surely though I would remember being bitten. The fact that there was no cure to this terrified me. I didn't want to live the rest of my life unable to bask in the sun.\n\n\"Amnesia is common with necuart bites,\" Jesara said, keeping her voice level as her eyes scanned the sky. \"Can you recall a pale man at all?\"\n\nA pale man. Like a half-forgotten dream, I recalled the pale figure I had seen in the distance, the night I had attempted to fly to Laxtal in the dark. I repeated that to the gryphon, and she nodded her head.\n\n\"That was a necuart. If it was only a few days ago, then we still have a chance of suppressing this,\" she said, smoothing out some of her feathers as she spoke.\n\nI glanced up to the sky, trying to spot Seris's azure feathers, but could see no sign of her. There were so many drakes in the sky now, of all different clans. They flew in a v-formation, with an Axaatl dragon at the point. It was a formation for war. A few gryphons flanked the drakes, whether watching or assisting I could not tell at this distance.\n\nPerhaps wisely, Jesara didn't try and press me for any further information about how I was feeling. I was doing my best to ignore the prickling feeling that plagued my scales, and the stabbing pain in my eyes. Even the shadows were becoming too bright for me now. I didn't think it would be much longer before I was forced to return to the caves below me. Only in the total darkness of the underground did I believe I would be comfortable. That was no place for a drake.\n\nWhen Seris returned she carried a large animal hide bag in her forepaws. She gently placed this on the ground before properly landing. Out of it she pulled several strange devices, most made from glass or metal, but some of stone. I couldn't even begin to guess at the function of any of them, but the gryphon handled them with familiarity, placing them down in what looked like a set order and pattern. Next out came a variety of herbs and plants. One held most of Seris's attention; a small white bulb with a pungent smell. She set aside three of the strange bulbs, as well as several sprigs of rose and hawthorn branches.\n\nI watched Seris intently, using her movements as a distraction from my aches and pains. By my side, Jesara resumed her grooming, seeming to pay little attention as the apothecary worked.\n\nSeris started to explain what everything was, stumbling over some of the names as she searched for the term in a language I would understand. The white bulb was garlic, she told me, and had been used to ward off necuart for centuries. Rose and hawthorn were also used to lessen the impact of the magic.\n\nJust like Kaz had done with the hutynnu, Seris ground up the rose and hawthorn in a stone dish, using a few of her metal devices to cut and mash the branches. She then sliced up the garlic and placed it in an odd container, which after a couple of minutes squeezed some clear juice out. This was added to the mixture of ground plant matter. This was all mixed in with a liquid derived from fermented grapes, until eventually a thick paste was produced.\n\n\"I'm\u2026 I'm not going to have to eat that, am I?\" I asked in revulsion. This looked much worse than the hutynnu flowers.\n\n\"I'm afraid so,\" Seris said, wiping the excess paste off her talons and onto the grass.\n\nShe pushed the stone dish a little closer towards me, and I wearily forced my legs into action, dragging myself up to my paws. I took a couple of unsteady steps forward until I was stood right by the dish. I wrinkled my nose at the smell. This was not going to be pleasant.\n\nI tried to eat the paste as quickly as I could. For the most part if was soft and easy to swallow, but occasionally my teeth crunched down on a small bit of rose or hawthorn. The taste was bitter, but surprisingly not as bad as I had feared. I wasn't about to lick the dish clean, but I was able to consume most of it before I felt like retching.\n\nSeris placed her talons on the back of my head as I stood still, breathing heavily. I tried not to bring it all back up again. \"Breathe deeply, dragon. The feeling will pass,\" she said softly, before whispering some arcane words in her native tongue.\n\n\"Will that be enough?\" I panted, in between swallowing down a mouthful of bile.\n\n\"It's too soon to tell,\" the apothecary said, gently moving her forepaw down my back. My scales tingled with her touch, a welcome respite from the needles that had started to fade already. \"You may need another dose if the necuart was particularly powerful, but I'm hopeful you should start feeling the effects already.\"\n\n\"I think I am,\" I gasped, a shiver running down my spine. Whether that came from the gryphon's touch or the effects of the medicine, I wasn't sure. Either way, it was proving more effective than Kaz's earlier attempts.\n\nThe gryphon apothecary chirped in pleasure as she started to put away her unused devices and ingredients, breaking the contact between us. \"You'll never be fully cured, but if you eat a branch of rose every month it should hold the magic at bay,\" she warned. \"Ideally, I would want to keep you close by for a few months at least, so I can keep a close watch on you, but that would mean you would have to come back to the Aerie if we defeat the humans.\"\n\n\"Where is that?\" I asked. I had thought myself knowledgeable on the lay of the land around the draconic territories, but I had never heard of the Aerie before. Then again, I hadn't even known gryphons had existed until a few days ago.\n\n\"A long way from here,\" Jesara said, breaking free from her preening to answer. She pulled me back and held me under her forelegs, keeping me sheltered from the sun. Between the two gryphons I learned of their homeland on the far distant coast across the ocean. Humans controlled most of the lands south to the Bridging Islands, which linked the two continents. Many different countries filled the landscape. To a gryphon flying overhead there was very little difference between them, but on the ground, there were many cultures and ideals and even languages. Most nations welcomed gryphons as friends and allies, but in some they hunted and killed gryphons as mere beasts.\n\nOf course, these human nations were nothing in comparison to the gryphons, according to Seris. Nowhere matched the natural beauty of the gryphon territories, which of course reflected those that dwelt there. From the windswept coast and towering cliffs, to the pristine woodlands bursting with life, there was nowhere that could compare. It was a land so perfect even the gods walked there, Jesara claimed. And that was of course without even mentioning the Aerie itself, the glimmering spire of rock that was the centre of gryphon civilisation. It was from there that the noble Queen Hera ruled, the invincible edifice that symbolised gryphon beauty and strength.\n\nI contributed little to their talk, only nodding and saying a couple of words of affirmation when they paused. I couldn't fully trust their words about the beauty of their homeland without seeing it with my own eyes, but Seris seemed quite convinced that I would need to travel with them. I let their words wash over me as I sunk into my own thoughts. Thanks to the apothecary's medicine, I wouldn't need to avoid the sunlight, but how else would the necuart magic change me? I was convinced this wasn't all over yet, and there would be further consequences of my stupid attempt to fly through the darkness. If I had shown a little more patience that night, this would never have happened. And had it all been worth it? My news had barely been worthwhile. The existence of the monstrous dragons had already been known. The only thing I had been able to provide was their number was greater than they had initially realised.\n\nThe two gryphons no longer seemed to be talking to me. Instead they were having a debate amongst themselves over which part of their homeland was the most wondrous. Seris believed it was the Aerie, and that no one could believe otherwise. Not only did it possess physical beauty, but it also held a spiritual wonder and importance that placed it far above anywhere else.\n\nJesara disagreed. She believed it was the Caves of a Thousand Stars. She appreciated the Aerie, what gryphon didn't? But that was also the obvious choice, and she thought that more of the territory should be looked at with the wonder it deserved. Every gryphon that stepped inside the caves were taken aback by the sheer beauty that met their eyes. The outer chambers sparkled with gems of every colour, creating a permanent rainbow of dazzling light and colour. Deeper in, the stone walls had become polished and shiny by ancient forces, creating natural mirrors. In the glittering light, a gryphon could see themselves reflected in perfection, a creature of utter magnificence that shone with the light of the gods.\n\nSeris respectfully conceded that Jesara had a point, but the apothecary refused to alter her opinion. The gryphon territories were like a perfect golden crown, but the Aerie was the glorious gemstone that attracted and delighted the eye. The Caves of a Thousand Stars, though a wonder in their own right, were only there to complement and enhance the Aerie.\n\nOnce they had settled their debate, or at least agreed to disagree on the matter, Seris checked on me again. She stared intently into my eyes, and I did my best not to look away when she did so. She also checked the bite wound on my neck, which had stopped hurting at last.\n\n\"I think it's worked,\" she chirped.\n\nJesara lifted her legs, allowing me to crawl out from beneath her. I certainly felt stronger now, and as I spread my wings I felt no aches or pains. I was still unsteady on my paws, but I hadn't basked in the sun for several days now, nor had I hunted. It was little wonder I was weak and the gryphons understood this.\n\n\"Go rest in the sun for a while, Mulner,\" Jesara said as she stood up. She shook off the dirt and sticks that had stuck to her feathers, brushing the more determined pieces away with her beak and talons. \"Seris can watch over you while I hunt for us.\"\n\nThough once again I disliked the notion that I needed to be watched over, I appreciated the gryphon's offer to hunt. I didn't feel strong or alert enough to hunt even a witless rabbit.\n\nThe backdraft from Jesara's wings as she took off almost bundled me over, but somehow I remained on my paws and staggered out into the sunlight. I winced as the light struck my scales, expecting to feel the prickling burn on my back, but it never came. Collapsing on the warm grass, I spread my wings and closed my eyes in bliss, the evening sun's light warming my wing membranes in a moment.\n\nLying protectively by my side, the apothecary renewed her efforts in preening her feathers. Beneath her blue feathers I could see her naturally coloured bronze ones. She seemed a little embarrassed by them again, as I could just make out a pink flush on her cheeks.\n\n\"You wouldn't happen to know of any mulberries or blueberries that grow near here, would you?\" she asked, pausing her grooming for just a moment. I shook my head, and she clicked her beak in dismay. \"I didn't count on there being so little familiar plant life here. I had hoped to replenish my stock, but I have yet to find anything that I need. I shall have to learn the local produce before leaving, I think. There could be something here that is more effective than at home.\"\n\n\"But significantly less beautiful of course,\" I said wryly. I had not intended the gryphon to take my words seriously, but she chirruped happily and agreed with me. I couldn't feel annoyed with her though. It was because of her efforts that I was already feeling so much better, as well as I had been feeling in days. She had done what Kaz had not, and I was grateful for that.\n\nWhen Jesara returned I had something else to be thankful for. She carried a whole deer in her forepaws, which she deposited on the ground in front of me before landing and licking her paws clean of blood. The smell of fresh meat was as energising as the sun's light, and I needed no invitation to tear into the warm flesh.\n\nOnce I had eaten my fill of the choice meat, I fell back to the grass with a contented sigh. Jesara dragged away the half-eaten carcass, flinging it deeper into the woods for the wildcats to consume.\n\nI looked around at the hundreds of gryphons who shared this part of the plains to lie in. Barely an hour ago I had been terrified by their mere presence, but now I felt comforted. They were free of the hatred that seemed to be consuming Laxtal at the moment, and in many ways, they seemed to be the far superior species compared to drakes. Of course, I wouldn't actually tell them that. They probably already believed it, and they didn't need me admitting it to fuel their vanity. I couldn't even dislike them for that. At least they provided an intelligent conversation. I could only hope they didn't look down on me the way I did on humans.\n\nAs the sun made its slow passage down towards the horizon, I lay in silence with the gryphons. I daydreamed about what I would do if I survived the upcoming battle. I was tempted to fly with Seris and Jesara to the Aerie, and not just because the apothecary wanted to keep track of the necuart magic in my body. I wanted to see this beauty with my own eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Our number was too great to fit in the central chambers now, so Ellian had summoned the clan outside. She stood above the gorge with Kyrus by her side. Her purple scales shone in the morning sunlight. The rest of the clan watched her from the lower slopes. There had been some murmurings of distrust towards the gryphon's presence alongside the ddraig, but none had been raised directly to my sister. High above soared Alaron, the wyvern impatiently waiting for us to take to wing.\n\nThe gryphon had offered up some device to enhance Ellian's voice, and they were trying to set this up whilst the horde of drakes and gryphons waited in restless anticipation. The sun had only just breached the horizon, but there wasn't a single drake attempting to bask in the morning light. Everyone was alert as the fires had been kept hot and bright overnight in preparation for this. A final feast of salted meats had been enjoyed in an attempt to calm nerves, but I doubted I was the only one who hadn't slept.\n\n\"Drakes of Laxtal, allies and friends,\" Ellian's voice called out, far louder than she would ever be able to project naturally. Neither wind nor distance would be able to drown her out, thanks to the strange technology Kyrus had placed before her mouth. \"For too long we have sat and waited for the humans to come to us. Nixa suffered for it, though we are glad some survived to warn us of their errors of judgement. We will not make those same mistakes. We will fly out and meet this threat as we have always done, with tooth and claw.\n\n\"I know many of you will be afraid. I would be lying to you if I said we are certain to win. These humans will try and kill us all, down to the last drake, but we will not give in. Down to the last drake, we will not stop fighting. That is the Laxtal way. That is the draconic way. Allies of Laxtal, we fly to war. We fly to the deaths of our enemies, or to our own destruction. There can be no turning back now. One way or another, this war ends now. Are you with me?\"\n\nA deafening roar greeted Ellian's words, the likes of which I had not heard since Astar had just become ddraig, not long before my father had been claimed by illness. This was a passionate roar, one that spoke of the clan's desire to rid their land of this human threat. It was not free of the wavering fear though, and to me that was needed. My sister was right. We had no guarantee of success, and even if we were to defeat the Kernow army, it was likely many of our number would die. It could even be after our decimation that Xital's forces could descend upon our weakened clan and easily pick off the remainder of our number. We were about to embark on a futile gesture of resistance, simply because there was no other alternative beyond waiting patiently for our deaths. Even Ellian's biggest dissenters in Yalle and Marin had finally come around to her viewpoint. I could just about see the albino at the edge of the gorge, his wings spread as he roared with passion.\n\nThere was nothing left to say, and Ellian spread her wings to the continued, resonating roars.\n\nMy sister, the ddraig, was the first to take to the skies. Behind her flew a thousand gryphons and nearly nine thousand drakes. It was the largest army Laxtal had ever mustered.\n\nI doubted it would be enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "My cage gently swung in the breeze.\n\nI had not been bound in any way, but my cracked and chipped claws were testament to how strong my prison was. For hours I had tried to escape to no avail. I hadn't even marked the metal bars that confined me.\n\nHumans taunted me as they passed. They called me names, promising me they would kill my friends and family. I soon took to hiding behind my wings, trying my hardest to ignore their evil words. Given that I had been placed in the centre of the camp, in the middle of a large open square between the tents, this was not an easy task.\n\nWhat hurt me more than the humans though, was the occasional drake I saw amongst them. Mostly they were from Xital, but I recognised a few Etrea and Arasa drakes too. The drakes ignored me completely, hurrying by without even looking up at me. I spat insults at their retreating backs, the traitors to our species.\n\nHours passed and turned into days, and I could feel the Axinstone close by, its magic teasing me with dreams of freedom, but not once did I See any way to escape. Perhaps there wasn't one. If I Saw nothing of the future, did that mean there was none for me to experience?\n\nOne thing I could not comprehend was the lack of military presence this deep into the encampment. Hardly any humans who passed by were armed at all. Then there were the strange sounds. Ferocious buzzing and whining were often paired with wood splintering. Hammering of wood and stone greeted my ears from all directions, but rarely the clash of steel or the firing of guns I had expected as the humans readied themselves for war. I didn't understand it, despite the amount of time I had to do nothing but sit and think.\n\nAs another evening started to fall I saw a sight I had no wish to see. Like a ghost from the past, Maznar strutted forward from beyond the far row of tents.\n\n\"Oh, brother, have you been a naughty dragon, to get locked up like that?\" the spectre said. She showed all her teeth as she grinned, her red eyes gleaming in mirth.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I hissed. I slammed my shoulder against the bars of my cage in one desperate attempt to escape, but the metal was too strong. If she was here then it could mean only one thing. She had betrayed us just like Xital had done. We had been wrong to trust Nightwings.\n\nMaznar put her paw against her chest. \"Why, I'm helping my other brother, of course,\" she said. \"I wronged him, and now I have come to fix that.\"\n\nI froze in horror as I caught sight of two more dragons emerging from the shadows. Anzig and Airil were here too. My mate's twin stumbled as he walked, his eyes vague and uncertain.\n\n\"You said we'd go straight to him,\" Anzig growled, not even acknowledging my presence as he waited by Maznar's side. With his paw, he impatiently scuffed at the muddy ground, Airil repeating the exact same gesture.\n\n\"Of course, brother. I wouldn't have you wait for another moment. I just thought it amusing to see the all-knowing seer captured like this,\" Maznar replied with a flick of her wings. She bounded on, heading right for one of the largest tents. Anzig and Airil followed behind her without even another word towards me.\n\n\"Anzig, please, listen to me. Airil!\" I called out, rattling the bars of my cage, but to no avail. Neither responded. My brother didn't even care about me. Whatever it was the spectre had promised, nothing else mattered to him. I would have hoped nothing bad would come from it, but if they were going to see George I couldn't imagine anything good was about to befall them. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to summon every scrap of my magic for some desperate way to See an escape. A glimpse of the future.\n\nFire. Fire and ash and smoke that rose high enough to blot out the sun, casting all in a choking shadow. The ground was scorched, stripped bare of plants. Bodies smouldered where they had fallen, still and silent.\n\nA horrific, mechanical groaning echoed over the crackle of flames. Amongst the tattered ruins of a canvas city was a towering, charcoal black structure. Belching out smoke and flames, the machine was an amalgamation of technology and magic, pulsing with raw power. An unstoppable weapon that fuelled on the lives it snuffed out.\n\nAnd yet, amongst all the death spewed out by the monstrous machine, three drakes staggered forwards, walking ever closer to it. One gold. One blue. One purple. Their tails entwined around a blazing stone of crimson fire. Three drakes. Three fates.\n\nA vision I did not wish to witness. There had been the third drake Esperance had spoken of, but they had appeared hazy and unfocussed to my vision. I did not know who they were, and nor did I know what the strange machine had been, but surely the city of canvas was the one I was trapped in. Just what was it the humans had here?\n\nMy isolation didn't last for much longer. A group of four humans emerged from the tent that contained all the scientific equipment and moved towards me with some purpose. At the same time, I felt a huge wave of magic from behind them. They were experimenting with the Axinstone again, and I didn't like the timing of the humans coming for me.\n\nThey unlocked my cage, and before I could lash out at the closest human he pushed my head down with a leather-clad hand. The glove was resistant to tooth and claw, leaving me powerless to resist the iron grip of the four as a band was slipped over my snout. They laughed amongst themselves as they carried me back to the tent, with crazy ramblings about how dragonkind was resisting the great gift humanity was bestowing upon them.\n\nI tried to argue with them, demand how they believed they were helping us, but I couldn't speak through the elastic around my snout. All I could do was growl furiously, but that only made them laugh harder.\n\nThere were about a dozen humans in the tent. I couldn't see any drakes, but George was present, standing by the machine that held the Axinstone. By his side was a strange human, oddly short by their standards, but I couldn't immediately tell what else was so unusual about him. As far as humans went, he seemed quite normal, but something nagged the back of my mind. George turned on his heel as I was placed on a cold table, each of my limbs tied down tight and secured against the underside of the table so I couldn't even twitch.\n\n\"So dragon, are you ready to witness what I am doing here?\" the human asked. He patted me on the head, a condescending gesture I could do nothing to prevent. I growled again, and once more laughter filled my ears. George's laugh was cold and cruel. \"You should be honoured. You are about to witness the absolute peak of human advancement. In time, more of your kind will come here without the need to be muzzled, but alas, you have proven to be\u2026 difficult.\"\n\nUnless it were the thralls of Tsona and his traitorous allies, I saw no reason any drake should willingly approach George. No one else would be so foolish. Robbed of my voice, I was unable to speak my mind to the human. Not once did he look me in the eye, so even my furious glare was wasted on him. I knew I was utterly powerless, but I also vowed that if afforded the slightest opportunity, I would use it to create as much havoc amongst the humans as I could.\n\nGeorge turned his back on me momentarily, but a quick test of my bonds confirmed that any escape was impossible. The sound of machines powering up filled me with a cold dread; an emanating dull hum set my ears on edge. I thrashed against my bonds once more, in a desperate, futile attempt to escape whatever torture they had prepared for me.\n\n\"Try to relax, dragon. It will make everything so much easier if you do,\" George sneered as he turned back around to face me. In his hand, he held a large syringe, a long but slender needle extended towards me. A single drip of a clear liquid dripped from the end.\n\nI eyed the needle warily, trying to growl out my protests, but I was unable to get any comprehensible noise past my gag. The needle touched my scales at the base of my wing, and I thrashed my body as much as my bonds would allow.\n\nGeorge recoiled, before slapping me with the back of his free hand, ceasing my thrashing immediately. Though the blow hurt, the human winced and shook his hand. My scales were hard enough to injure him too. The victory was small though, and the human brandished the needle once more.\n\n\"If you keep on thrashing around like that this will snap. I can't imagine the pain that will bring to you,\" George growled. My eyes widened as I shook my head. I had no desire to have the thin piece of metal break beneath my scales.\n\nThis time as the human approached I remained as still as I could, closing my eyes as his shadow loomed over me. I flinched slightly when the needle pressed against the soft flesh beneath my wing, and couldn't help but scream into my gag as the human pushed down. For a moment, I thought I could feel the fluid spread out through my body, the foreign substance cooling and numbing my wing and side. Sensation started to return a few seconds later, but I kept my eyes firmly shut as I breathed heavily through my nose.\n\nMy bonds were loosened slightly, still not enough to escape, but I was able to shift my legs slightly to find a more comfortable position. I slowly opened my eyes, momentarily blinded by a bright light being shone right at me. There were three humans just in front of me. One was George. By his right shoulder was the strange human, with a third just behind him.\n\nI squeezed my forepaws tight and almost froze. I could feel the small ridge under the scales in my right paw. I had forgotten all about the small slate pebble that Esperance had given me. It would be pointless pressing down and trying to contact her or Kaz now. I was beyond any help. Slowly my paws uncurled again, opening out to face upwards.\n\nThe strange human pushed forward, shoving George to the side before grabbing hold of my right paw. He sliced its bond with a quick burst of magic. His hand gently rubbed the raised scales on my paw, outlining the mark of the pebble beneath my flesh.\n\n\"Not this dragon,\" the human said abruptly. His wide eyes narrowed as he looked up at George. \"You use this dragon, and I withdraw my support.\"\n\n\"We had a deal, Anthony,\" George said, reaching out to touch the shorter human's shoulder, but Anthony recoiled and pulled away.\n\n\"What have I told you about touching me,\" Anthony growled, letting go of my paw as he did so. I had not been touched by humans often, but this human had felt different. As though there was a coat of fur on his skin that I could not see.\n\nGeorge also took a step back and folded his arms across his chest. \"We had a deal,\" he repeated.\n\n\"And that deal is off if you use this dragon,\" Anthony replied. His eyes sparked gold for a moment. \"This one has been marked by Esperance. If you make an enemy of this dragon, you make an enemy of her. And I will always side with Esperance.\"\n\n\"Now listen here \u2013\" George started to say, before he was interrupted by a call on the other side of the tent, from one of the attendants by the rows of machines.\n\n\"We're getting some strange sensor readings here.\"\n\n\"What?\" George snapped, turning and rushing towards the person who had interrupted him. The other human moved across with him, leaving Anthony alone with me. I stared up into his gold-flecked eyes, and I was finally able to realise what I had been finding so disconcerting about him. His form flickered and shimmered, like he was nothing but a reflection on water.\n\nThe strange human leaned against the table to lower his head to my level. \"I don't know what their magic is going to do to you,\" he whispered, a surreptitious glance over to where George was pouring over the machines, discussing what information they were giving him with the other humans. \"With Esperance's magic in your body, it will not react how they intend. The results could be\u2026 interesting. I wish I could stay to see it, but I have no desire to interfere with Esperance's chosen ones.\"\n\nWith that the human turned to leave, silently slipping out of the tent. No one paid any attention to his departure, with everyone else concentrating on the machines. With my now-freed paw, I tugged at the bonds restricting my other limbs, but my claws were unable to tear through the sturdy material. It was a few more minutes before anyone turned back to me, by which time I was feeling an unsettling sensation spreading out from my stomach. It was a burning sensation, more intense even than the magic of the Axinstone. A feeling of bile in my throat made me want to gag, but with my snout still bound shut I could do nothing but grunt. Something must have attracted the attention of the humans, as out of the corner of my eye I saw them approach me again.\n\n\"It's starting,\" one of them said. It might have been George. I wasn't sure. \"Take him outside.\"\n\nHands roughly grabbed me as my bonds were loosened. I made no attempt to shake free. My limbs felt numb and listless, though in my chest a great energy was burning. I was barely aware of being placed on the grass outside, before the humans retreated back out of my limited field of vision. I was unbound, completely free to fly, but my wings failed to respond. All I could do was squirm slightly as the heat within grew.\n\nMy scales itched as the grass shifted beneath me. A scream tore itself loose from my throat. A scream I had heard before, from within a tin mine upon a rocky headland. It felt like liquid fire had replaced blood within my veins. I arched my back, snout pointing to the sun as the fading echoes of my shriek bounced around my mind. The bright light that pierced my eyes was nothing to the pain erupting from every scale.\n\nReaching out with one forepaw, my claws dug into the earth, gouging out deep ruts in the soil as I struggled to rise to all fours. It took a few attempts, but I finally stood, panting from the exertion. Slowly I opened my eyes to look at the humans who surrounded me in a loose circle. There were more of them now than had been inside the tent. They were all waiting. I wasn't sure I wanted to know what for. Then I saw them. The traitors. Maznar and Anzig. The dragoness I had rescued, and the dragon I had once called ddraig. They stood in the shadows of humans. My brother and sister. The family I had longed so hard for. Now they gloated at me. Airil was stood beside them. A vacant expression on his face.\n\nI snarled at my brother, spreading my wings wide and showing off what he could not. His fear fuelled the magic within me.\n\nMy shoulders snapped and lurched forward, almost throwing me back to the ground before I caught my balance again at the last moment. Bones cracked and flesh shifted, my claws digging deeper into the ground as my paws expanded. Scales burned with golden light as flesh bubbled beneath. My tail felt heavy behind me, and as I thrashed it around I heard something smash. Only vaguely was I aware of the ever-growing distance between my eyes and the ground.\n\nMy shadow twisted on the ground. A deep roar escaped my throat as my wingspan stretched until I could feel tent canvas brushing my wingtips. Humans and traitorous drakes alike shrunk until they were nothing but pitiful creatures before me. Even the tallest human was shorter than my knee. I snarled again at them all, but they were not afraid of me. None of them stepped back in fear, or cowered in terror. Only my pathetic, wingless brother showed any signs of panic as he scampered back behind the ring of humans.\n\nA growl rumbled from the back of my throat, a deep noise that vibrated through my paws and into the earth below. Still the humans weren't intimidated, not even as I flexed my wings, showing them the full potential of my span. The burning that permeated my flesh and scales no longer felt painful. Instead I recognised it for what it was. Pure magic. Sheer power.\n\nOne human separated himself from the rest to approach me. I snarled as he came forward, his hand extended out towards my snout. In his hand was a small shard of rock, emblazoned with a burning dragon's head.\n\nThe Axinstone called out to me. An insidious voice whispered in my mind. \"Obey. Obey. You will obey my every command.\" It spoke the human's mind. The voice was countered by a fierce buzzing in my paw. I shook my head to clear my mind.\n\n\"Why?\" I growled, my voice as deep as gravel. Why should I obey this pitiful human? I could swat him aside in an instant, should I wish. As it was, I revelled in the first moment of panic I saw in the human's eyes.\n\n\"You will obey, dragon. You are mine now,\" he said, his small voice frantic. He held the Axinstone out further, so that its heat started to burn at my snout.\n\n\"No,\" I snarled. There was nothing this human could do to me. I could feel his magic in my mind, but every time he sought control my right forepaw vibrated and I pushed him out. He was powerless against the magic he had given me.\n\n\"Why isn't it working?\" the human cried out to his companions, but there was no answer from them. I covered the ground between us in half a step, pressing my snout against his chest. Terror was evident in his eyes as he gasped out in desperation. \"Nightwings. Get Nightwings.\"\n\nThe name triggered a memory. A monstrous dragoness in the night. Memories flooded back in an instant, and with it, awareness of what I had become.\n\nI roared in George's face, sending him cowering into the dirt as I beat my powerful wings. The Axinstone escaped his grasp, and instinctively I snatched up the tiny shard in one paw before kicking off hard. I eased into the air despite my now-massive bulk. My scales felt hot as I soared over the mass of tents that made up the human encampment. Desperate voices in my mind begged me to return, but I felt no compulsion to listen.\n\nAs I flew away with the Axinstone the pleading whispers in my mind grew fainter, and with them, any threat of control. The humans were losing their grip on the shard's powers, and any hope of holding sway over my mind.\n\nI would not be their monster. I was not Nightwings."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "I didn't know how far I flew, but I was long out of sight of the encampment before I came to rest, sheltering in the lee of a small hill. The sun was soon to set, casting an amber glow across the land. A small stream flowed by. Tentatively I approached the stream's many pools, fearful of what it would reveal.\n\nMy shimmering reflection stared back up at me from the uneven surface. My scales were not the complete black of Nightwings. They were still golden. My face still normal and just how I remembered it. Only I towered far taller than any drake that had ever been. I was four times the height of a human at least, and proportionally even longer than I had been before. I looked back to the tip of my tail. It must have been at least forty feet away.\n\nWas this what the humans were doing with the Axinstone? Were they creating monsters from drakes, but something had gone wrong with me? I remembered the voice in my mind. It had tried to control me, as they had controlled Nightwings, but something had prevented it. I lifted my forepaw up, tensing the powerful tendons in amazement. I could feel such immense power in every muscle beneath my scales \u2013 it both scared and thrilled me. And there, beneath my palm, was the slate Esperance had given me. Was that what had saved me from human control?\n\nI unfurled my other paw, where the Axinstone had been embedded against my scales. The shard was no bigger than a single claw now, but if anything, I had become more aware of its intense, radiating power. Perhaps now the humans could no longer create monsters such as Nightwings, and\u2026 I hesitated with my thoughts\u2026 and now myself. I looked towards the setting sun, tempted to fly to it, to keep on flying west until I left draconic lands. In my new form I had no place amongst my kin. I was nothing but a monster, and did not deserve to remain in this land.\n\nMy wings slumped to my side, and I rested my head against the ground. I had done what we had set out to do \u2013 I had taken the Axinstone from George's hand, but at what cost? Somehow, I had to return the tiny shard to Boruc and Isikian so they could return it to Ddraig Krateos, but I couldn't let them see me like this. They would flee the moment they saw me, believing me to be the same evil Nightwings had been. And continued to be, I reflected silently. My sister had willingly returned to George's side, and now with Anzig alongside her. Airil had joined them, but I could not believe my mate's brother had gone willingly. But then, I would not have believed Anzig would betray his species like Tsona had done, but the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming.\n\nI feared for the state of Laxtal. If the ddraig had abandoned the clan, then what state would be left behind? Even with the Axinstone back in draconic paws, we would need to be at full strength to defeat the human threat. We could succeed if we were divided.\n\nI growled my frustration to the darkening sky. Come the morning I would start the search for Boruc and Isikian, if they had even stayed, so I could return the Axinstone to them. There would be no way I could hide my size from my companions. I could only hope they would not flee on sight of me.\n\nAs I curled up on the open ground, a new concern seeped into my mind. An unsettling sensation in my stomach warned me of my growing hunger. I looked down at my massive body. A rabbit or even pheasant or two wasn't going to be enough. I vaguely recalled flying over a herd of deer not too far away. I picked up their sent, before wearily spreading my wings in preparation to take to the air once more.\n\nWith the Axinstone secure in my clenched paw I began my hunt."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "I was surprised at how little opposition I was received at my order to fly north. Not only was the clan showing acceptance towards me as ddraig, but they also appeared to trust my decisions without question. Not to say I was greeted with total support, but all the opposition had come from the expected areas; the drakes who had been high in favour when Astar had been ddraig. Yalle and Marin had reluctantly joined the massive army, forced to join us or else face the humiliation of being declared incapable of fighting. Even they would not risk being tarnished so.\n\nWe had flown hard all day before finding a place to rest for the night. Our only shelter was beneath the canopy of a forest, with nothing to protect us from the wind and cold. I had curled up with Kyrus, the gryphon's fur and feathers providing some warmth. My wings ached from the long journey so far, and there was yet another full day of hard flying to follow.\n\nMost of my evening had been spent with Alaron and the few draconic leaders we had present as we tried to work out exactly what our plan would be, once upon the camping human army. We didn't expect to be able to catch them unawares, as we were sure they would detect our presence well in advance of reaching their location. However, we hoped that if we moved fast enough, we wouldn't give them much time to respond to our assault.\n\nI had hoped for a quiet night, resting between Kyrus's feathered forelegs, but Mushussu had been occupying most of my thoughts. The guardian had been warning me of her diminishing power, initially explaining that once I slept outside the lair she would no longer be able to reach me. She was using all her remaining time therefore to offer advice on how to proceed and how to keep myself safe. Without a clear line of succession from me, she was fearful she may never touch the mind of another drake.\n\nFinally, she withdrew from my mind, claiming the continued contact was exhausting her, depleting her limited magic too severely. One last time she wished me luck and warned me to keep safe, and then quiet suddenly, my mind was my own once more. I sleepily gazed into the nearby flickering fire, but before I had the chance to relax fully, shrieks and snarls distracted me, emanating from not too far distant. With a weary groan, I rose to my paws, knowing that I would need to investigate the confrontation, and to diffuse the situation if needed.\n\nKyrus didn't move as I shook some stray twigs off my wings, the gryphon's head tucked under his wing as he slept. A few other drakes had woken at the sounds of fighting, though none seemed as eager to move through the trees and find the cause.\n\nShouts started to echo more loudly throughout the trees, and it only took a moment to recognise the voices. I knew I shouldn't have been surprised to hear Marin and Vinzent causing a ruckus, but I had hoped it wouldn't come during the first night of travel. By the sound of it, they were unhappy taking orders from a drake who wasn't their ddraig. I hurried on, not wanting the situation to escalate.\n\nWere it not for the many small fires carefully lit in pits of dirt, I would never have negotiated my way through the dark forest. As it was, I had to be incredibly careful not to walk face-first into any trees. The darkness was oppressive, and the cold air did nothing to clear the sluggishness from my mind.\n\nVinzent and Marin were both stood next to one of the firepits, wings flared as they stared down at the dark form in front of them. Though it was hard to see in the gloom, the silhouette was distinctive enough to recognise the shape of Alaron. The wyvern showed no sign of backing down from the two dragons as I stepped forward into the firelight, the shouted accusations dying on the tongues of Vinzent and Marin as they saw me.\n\n\"What is this all about?\" I hissed towards the two dragons, whose bravado diminished in my presence. They slowly folded their wings against their backs, turning their eyes from me.\n\nNeither dragon seemed willing to answer me, so I turned instead to the wyvern, ducking my head in respect.\n\n\"Some of your clan have no concept of respect, Ddraig Ellian,\" the wyvern growled. His tail thrashed in his anger, powerful wings flexing against his sides. \"They need to learn who their superiors are.\"\n\n\"You are not my superior. You are not my ddraig,\" Marin snapped, flaring his wings again and stepping forward, Vinzent at his tail. Their subservience had melted into the night at the sound of Alaron's accusations.\n\n\"I am not your ddraig, that is true, but whilst you are a part of my army, you will listen to and obey my every command,\" Alaron hissed. I positioned myself between the wyvern and the drakes, making sure they couldn't easily get at each other.\n\nMarin was not impressed by Alaron's response. \"I do not take orders from anyone outside my clan. You have no right to control me.\"\n\nThis time I intervened, advancing on Marin, making the older dragon back away. \"He has every right to control you. He is your commander, and you will obey him because I have ordered you to. That should be enough,\" I snarled, staring Marin down before I turned my gaze to Vinzent. The dragon refused to look away for far longer than was polite.\n\n\"I do not listen to cripples,\" the silver dragon said, moving his eyes from me and on to the wyvern.\n\nSilence fell and I turned cold. Alaron pushed me out of the way so he could stare down Vinzent, snouts barely an inch apart. \"What did you call me?\"\n\nMarin's confidence fled him, and he made a hasty retreat from the wyvern, but Vinzent held firm. Grey wyvern and silver dragon stood nose to nose, neither refusing to stand down. I knew that if I did not intervene, the situation would only escalate. I had to lay down my authority or I would risk losing the confidence of Marin and Yalle, and those like-minded.\n\n\"You will submit and apologise to Alaron,\" I growled at the dragon, but he shook his head, parting his lips and revealing his teeth in disdain. An open display of insubordination that was enhanced as he slowly but deliberately spread his wings.\n\n\"I will do no such thing. I will not sit idle and watch as drakes are lead to their deaths by a weak cripple,\" Vinzent said in a low growl, every word carefully chosen as he continued to stare down Alaron, who bristled in rage. I wanted to cover my face with my wing.\n\n\"Weak? Cripple? You should show some respect, unless you're willing to back your words with tooth and claw,\" the wyvern responded, thrusting a clawed wingtip into Vinzent's chest.\n\n\"Vinzent, don't,\" I protested weakly, but I was completely ignored. Even Marin watched on in fear, barely able to keep his eyes on the feuding pair. There was a small audience growing in the darkness now, both gryphon and drake watching on with curiosity as Vinzent foolishly accepted Alaron's challenge. It was not often two drakes fought to resolve a dispute. There was a morbid intrigue at the possibility of blood being spilled.\n\nVinzent made the first move, attempting to strike the wyvern's wing, but Alaron easily evaded the strike, darting to his right with a fluid movement that belied his usual lack of grace on the ground. The wyvern's tail lashed out, striking the dragonet on the nose with a loud crack.\n\nWith a pained yelp, Vinzent leapt backwards, out of range of Alaron's tail. A few drops of blood dripped from the tip of his snout. The confidence that had been in his eyes seemed to drain away as he warily circled the wyvern.\n\nWhen Alaron's assault came, it was brutal and swift. I couldn't keep track of his movements, his wings, tail, and legs all being used to strike and block with alarming pace. His teeth sunk into Vinzent's shoulder, who howled in pain and humiliation. His wings were already torn and bleeding as he struggled to free himself from the wyvern's jaws.\n\nVinzent eventually found his mark, raking his hindclaws down the side of Alaron's leg. The wyvern hissed as he threw Vinzent away. The dragon landed awkwardly and rolled over onto his back, and for a moment I thought he may have broken his wings and was already defeated. Alaron must have thought so too, as he paused to stand and gloat over his foe.\n\n\"Are we done yet?\" the wyvern snarled, spitting out some of Vinzent's blood.\n\nStriking out with his tail, Vinzent grabbed hold of Alaron's standing leg and tugged him to the ground. The wyvern fell with a surprised squawk as the dragon scrambled to his paws. In a flash, Vinzent was on top of his opponent, trying to reach the wyvern's throat with his teeth, but always held just out of reach by the grey's wings.\n\nNot for one moment did Alaron look concerned. His strong wingarms held Vinzent away as he took a moment to position his legs against the dragon's chest. With a powerful lunge, Alaron tore down Vinzent's flanks, his claws slashing twin wounds down the dragonet's sides. Silver scales shed over the dirt, stained red by dragon blood.\n\nOnce more Vinzent screamed in agony, rolling away from Alaron, but this time the wyvern was not about to let him go. He pinned down the dragon with his clawed wing, pressing down hard on his throat.\n\n\"Will you submit?\" Alaron growled. The fight was over. Vinzent hadn't stood a chance against the wyvern.\n\n\"I will not,\" Vinzent said through gritted teeth, fighting through the clear pain.\n\nAlaron snarled, pressing his snout against the dragonet's. \"You wish to keep on fighting?\"\n\n\"I will not submit to a cripple,\" Vinzent retorted, weakly pushing against the wyvern's chest.\n\nAlaron looked to me. He asked for permission. My body cold, I nodded my head. There could be no mercy for this.\n\n\"So be it,\" Alaron said, releasing his grip on Vinzent. The dragon looked surprised, raising his head slightly, only to be struck hard by the wyvern's wing. A loud crack rang through the air. Vinzent fell back to the ground, his head at an odd angle to his body.\n\nCalmly, Alaron moved away from the motionless body of his adversary. Blood dripped from the wound on his leg, but most of the crimson that stained his scales came from Vinzent. The dragon who could once have been my mate. I tried to feel some shock or horror that I had just watched him die, but all I could conjure was a sense of relief. I would not miss his awkward machinations to win himself more power.\n\n\"Anyone else questioning my authority?\" the wyvern snarled, glaring in particular towards Marin. The dragon quickly lowered his head and backed away. Any resistance he had towards Alaron's command had been convincingly eradicated.\n\nWith an odd feeling of detachment, I watched as a gryphon came forward to carry away the lifeless body. I did not look away until his silver form disappeared into the gloom.\n\n\"I am sorry you had to bear witness, Ddraig Ellian,\" Alaron said, breaking me from my reverie. He limped over to me, carefully avoiding putting pressure on his injured leg.\n\n\"You should see a healer about that,\" I said distantly. Shock at the events I had just witnessed, coupled with the increasingly cool temperature, my thoughts were becoming increasingly sluggish.\n\nAlaron looked back at his leg, flexing it tentatively as he leaned on his wings, before gently placing it back on the ground. \"I suppose you're right. But you should rest while you can, Ddraig Ellian. I can deal with any further dissenters if necessary.\"\n\nI nodded. Despite the action and drama that had played out before my eyes, sleep was proving to be a compelling option. I would have a better opportunity to think matters through when exhaustion didn't fog my mind.\n\nDespite his injuries, Alaron escorted me to my claimed spot of the forest. Kyrus was still lying in the exact same position I had left him in, with his head tucked beneath his wing. I doubted he had even realised I had left.\n\nAfter bidding good night to the wyvern, I curled up again in Kyrus's waiting forelegs. My last thought was of Airil, hoping that wherever my mate was, he was safe. Then sleep took me, and I rested at last."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "News of Vinzent's dissent and resulting death had spread noticeably by the time I woke. Kyrus roused me with a loud chirrup just as the morning sun breached the horizon, and soon the dawn chorus of gryphons started to rouse even the deepest sleepers. The gryphon prince flew off to start the morning hunt, leaving me to find a patch of sunlight. I didn't know if it was just a result of sleeping away from the shelter of the lair, but I certainly noticed the cooler air of the approaching winter as I tried to find a warm spot to bask in. I knew I would not have long to warm up before Alaron called us up into the air again.\n\n\"Is it true what they're saying, Ddraig?\"\n\nThe intrusion startled me, but when I looked up I saw only a sombre Yalle. The albino bowed his head, for once absent of his usual scorn. He asked for permission to lie down alongside me, which I granted. For a few moments we stayed in silence, looking out through the forest at the many drakes and gryphons all waking up together. It was remarkable, seeing so many drakes from different clans able to put aside their differences and sleep together. There were tensions, certainly, but thankfully there hadn't been any further outbreaks of fighting I had been made aware of.\n\n\"Did the wyvern really kill Vinzent?\"\n\nThere was no anger in the albino's voice, only sorrow. It did not sound as though he blamed the wyvern for the dragonet's death. I didn't feel the need to hide anything from him. I explained the night's events, leaving out no detail. It was for my benefit too, sorting out my own thoughts on the situation.\n\n\"It must be so hard on you\" Yalle said eventually, placing a consolatory wing around my body. I tensed, but for now made no attempt to shrug off the albino's touch, just tilting my head in confusion. \"So sad indeed, losing your mate and brother in one night.\"\n\nNow I did push Yalle away, spinning around and snarling at him. \"Vinzent was not my mate. He never was, and I never had any\u2026 wait, brother? What's happened to Mulner?\"\n\nYalle took a couple of steps back, his head bowed right to the ground. \"My apologies, Ddraig. I thought you would have been informed by now.\"\n\n\"Of what?\" I snapped. A shiver of fear ran down my spine, fearing the worst for my brother. Had he too been involved in a fight last night and lost? I couldn't lose my brother so soon after finding him again.\n\n\"He deserted, Ddraig. He and two gryphons. They fled just after sundown.\"\n\nA bittersweet relief swept through me. \"So, he's still alive?\"\n\n\"As far as I know, Ddraig,\" Yalle replied, bowing lower and spreading his wings over the ground. My mind raced. My worst fears had been allayed, but I was still deeply troubled. Though Mulner was still alive, I knew he was not the type of dragon to abandon his duty without a good cause. There had to be a reason behind his sudden departure, but I didn't understand why he had mentioned nothing to me.\n\n\"Did anyone see them fly off? Or talk to them just before? There had to be a witness, right?\" I asked Yalle, who simply nodded in response. \"Then I want you to bring them to me. And find Kyrus too, if you can. He should know about this as well.\"\n\nWith a little reluctance, Yalle flew off to do my bidding. I hoped to be able to get some answers from the drake the albino returned with.\n\nWhile I waited, a few drakes nervously approached and offered their sympathy for Vinzent's death. Each time I aggressively denied the suggestion that I had been at all close to the dragon before he died. I was shocked at how the clan's perception was so inaccurate. I had not held any close feelings towards the dragon ever since our banishment from Laxtal under Tsona, and I thought I had been obvious about it. I had also not made any attempt to hide my affections for Airil, but apparently this had been ignored by the clan. After snarling for the sixth time that Vinzent had not been my mate, Yalle finally returned with a drake and gryphon following in his wing draught.\n\nThe grey dragon who flew with Kyrus was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't immediately recognise him. He was Nixan, that much was clear. His short horns were so much like Anzig's, a feature I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed before. The signs had all been there, but I shook my head. This was not the time to think of him.\n\n\"I heard there have been deserters, Ddraig,\" Kyrus said, almost before his front talons had touched the ground. His beak clicked in what I took to be annoyance. \"Do we need to fear them going to the humans and warning them of our plans?\"\n\n\"My brother was amongst them, Kyrus. An insult to him is an insult to me,\" I snapped at the gryphon.\n\nHe ducked his head in apology. \"Please forgive me, Ddraig. I meant no disrespect to you or your kin. I was not aware your brother was involved.\"\n\nI accepted the gryphon's apology, before turning back to Yalle. \"I want you to request Alaron's presence here too. He should know the situation,\" I demanded of the albino.\n\n\"I'm not your messenger,\" Yalle replied sullenly.\n\n\"But I am your ddraig. Do not forget your place,\" I warned the albino, flaring my wings at him. He shrank in on himself, accepting the rebuke. He spread his wings and took to the air, quickly returning towards the trees. I glared after him until his pale wings disappeared amongst the foliage. His continued insubordination towards me would not be forgotten. After all of this was over, if there was anything left of Laxtal left to rule, I would need to do something about Yalle and Marin. Saya I hoped would no longer be a threat, now that her son was dead.\n\nWith Yalle out of sight, I returned my attention to Kyrus and the dragon in his shadow. Then the Nixan stepped forward, and I immediately remembered where I knew him from.\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian, my name is Inilta. I flew with your cousin to recover the Axinstone,\" he said, bowing his head. I waited for him to continue. \"Your brother asked for my advice last night. He was after information on magic and on our old lair, though he did not say why. There's nothing left in Nixa but ghosts, but I think that was where he intended to fly.\"\n\nKyrus clicked his beak. \"And the two gryphons who flew with him, did they honour you with their names?\"\n\nInilta ducked his head towards the gryphon. \"They did. Seris and Jesara were their names.\"\n\nKyrus paused to smooth down a feather on his neck, his eyes half-closed as he worked. \"Your brother will be safe, Ddraig Ellian,\" he said, pausing in his grooming for a moment. \"Seris is my cousin, and Jesara one of her closest friends. They would not have flown on some foolish errand. Your brother will come to no harm, I can assure you of this.\"\n\nThough I was not completely calmed by Kyrus's assurance, I had no choice to believe what he was saying. I couldn't fly off and chase Mulner down; I had too many duties here to leave. I looked to the northern sky. If the Nixan had been correct, then my brother was somewhere that way, on his way to the ruined lair where the clan of magic had once dwelt. What had attracted Mulner and the two gryphons? I sighed. It was a question I doubted would be answered, not until my brother returned.\n\nWingbeats soon heralded the arrival of Alaron. While Kyrus continued his grooming, I informed the wyvern of the departure of my brother and the two gryphons. He accepted my assertion that Mulner would not fly towards the humans, and that our flight should still be unnoticed by our enemy.\n\nThere was nothing else for us to discuss, and we were soon preparing to take to wing again. If our pace was as good as we hoped, this day would take us close to the last known position of the human army. We intended to meet up with James McArthur and his small band in the evening and take up camp with them. Then, when sun rose the next morning, we would begin the assault on the invaders. Despite the morning sunshine warming my wings, I shivered. I may only live to see one more sunrise.\n\nAt Alaron's call, I took to wing. Several thousand gryphons and drakes followed.\n\nOur final charge was soon to begin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "\"For the last time, would you please tell me why we're flying off on this foolish mission?\"\n\nOnce again, my question was ignored. Ever since leaving the army behind just after sunset, I had been deprived of any information from the two gryphons. It was beginning to feel like I was behind held captive until no longer of any use. Neither Jesara nor Seris were willing to impart what information they had learnt from the Nixan, instead choosing to speak amongst themselves in their own, avian language. The only time they spoke in a language I could understand it was to warn me not to turn back.\n\nIt was a struggle to keep up with the gryphons. Their greater wingspan allowed them to cut through the air with ease, and I had to push hard just to keep in their slipstream. I had tired quickly, and it hadn't been long before I had given the gryphons no choice but to land and rest for the remainder of the night. Once morning had come though, it was straight back into the air. I hadn't even been afforded the luxury of basking in the sun. I had forced my cold and aching wings to support my weight, but somehow I had stayed aloft.\n\nAnd still I didn't know why we had to fly to Nixa. There would be nothing there but ruins and corpses, and even if we did find something, it would surely be too late to make any significant contribution to the war. I was not looking forward to reaching our destination, but my pleas to turn around were ignored every time. In the end, all I could do was put my head down and follow the two feathered and furred creatures. They would not let me turn back.\n\nFinally, as the day was starting to draw to a close, when my sister would be approaching the human army to the east, we started to descend to the ground. I had rarely flown through Nixa, but I recognised enough to know we weren't far away from the former lair of the clan of magic. We settled at the bottom of a wide, sheer-walled valley that separated two hills. Where the ground wasn't rocky it was covered in thick, springy heather. It would be a cold, but comfortable place to rest for the night.\n\n\"I think it's time we gave you an explanation, dragon,\" Seris said once we had landed. Her dyed blue feathers glinted in the fading sunlight as she clawed at the heather, kneading it in much the same way a wildcat would. Jesara remained standing as she looked out to the setting sun.\n\n\"It had better be a good one,\" I hissed. I had left my sister behind, my clan and my friends, what few of those I had. If I ever saw them again, they would want to know why I had abandoned them so suddenly. If I couldn't justify my absence from the clan's decisive few days, then I may as well never show my face in Laxtal again. I would be an outcast once more.\n\n\"Do you remember what Inilta told us?\" Seris asked as she lay down in the indentation she had made in the heather. I resisted the urge to lie down too. I knew that if I did so, I wouldn't rise until sunrise, but I still wanted my questions answered.\n\n\"Something about a gryphonstone?\" I replied wearily. From what Inilta had been saying, it wasn't something that warranted immediate investigation, but Seris and Jesara had been abrupt in their decision to leave after learning of the Nixan artefact.\n\nThe apothecary nodded, her steely eyes staring into mine. I couldn't hold her gaze for long. After just a few seconds I was forced to turn away. As Seris remained in thoughtful silence, I moved over to join Jesara in staring up to the darkening sky. Perhaps the bronze-feathered gryphon would be more willing to answer my questions.\n\n\"You don't understand, do you?\" Jesara asked before I had the chance to speak. She hadn't looked down, her focus still on the sky.\n\n\"I don't,\" I said. I didn't want to admit my confusion, but if I were to understand then certain sacrifices were necessary. \"How can this gryphonstone be so important to you?\"\n\n\"It's not.\"\n\nSeris's terse reply stole the breath from my lungs. I swung my neck around to glare at the apothecary, but she coolly returned the stare. She ruffled her wings as she shifted around in the heather, getting more comfortable. \"It's probably just some tablet that's been looked after for generations. I doubt it has any true magic about it.\"\n\n\"Then, why?\" I whispered, bowing my head. It looked like I would be an outcast after all, sent on a wild hunt for a useless piece of stone. The birds were barely any better than the humans.\n\n\"It wasn't important, but you are. It was imperative we got you away from the others,\" Jesara added. She rested her talons against my back, gently stroking between my wings.\n\nI shivered at her touch, but something still wasn't making sense. Why was it so important I left Ellian and the others behind? This time I did not admit my confusion, but was sure an explanation was forthcoming anyway.\n\n\"I saw your eyes flash red for just a moment when you were talking to your sister. We had to get you away from her. Far away,\" Jesara explained. Instinctively I held my paw up to my snout, one claw resting against my closed eyelid, but naturally I could feel nothing different.\n\n\"Are you sure it wasn't just the fire?\" I asked, my voice weak with fear, knowing that the gryphon wouldn't make such a mistake. I had never heard of anything like that happening before. My heart went cold as I thought of the necuart that had bitten me. This had to be related.\n\nJesara slowly nodded, as though she knew exactly what thoughts were racing through my mind. \"It seems we were a little premature in discounting any influence from the necuart. It must be more powerful than we realised. There is still a chance that it could control you, and through you, learn of our movements and betray us to George. We couldn't risk that happening. You had to be removed from anywhere that could provide your necuart with information.\"\n\n\"I would never\u2026\" I protested, but Seris interrupted me from where she lay.\n\n\"Willingly, no. But the thrall of a necuart has no willpower to resist their master. If it had of asked you, you would have killed your sister without any hesitation,\" the apothecary warned. My body felt like it had been dipped in ice. I couldn't allow that to happen. Perhaps the gryphons were right in bringing me out here, if I could be such a danger to my sister.\n\n\"Is there any way to stop that happening?\" I whispered, holding my head low and staring at the pink heather flowers. I could never allow myself to see another drake again. My life would be one of loneliness unless I could find a way to rid myself of the necuart's influence.\n\n\"There is just one. The necuart who did this to you must die, but that it not possible for you. Come on, I'll explain on the way,\" Jesara said, beckoning for me to follow her on paw. A shadow fell over me as Seris loomed behind my tail.\n\n\"On the way? To where?\"\n\nSeris laughed, a musical sound like the morning bird calls. \"You've forgotten already why we came out here? We're going to Nixa to find the gryphonstone.\" She nudged me with her taloned forepaw, pushing me to start walking.\n\n\"But you said it wasn't important?\" I protested. The nights were getting colder. I had no desire to do anything but to sleep through it and wait for the morning sun. I certainly did not want to explore the open grave of untold thousands of drakes. I was not one to believe in ghosts or spirits of the dead, but with every step I took towards the Nixan lair, a sense of dread rose up in my chest.\n\n\"Compared to making you safe, no, it's not important,\" Jesara explained. She walked on my right flank, while Seris took a place to my left. There would be no chance that I could get away from them, should I desire to turn back or stop. \"But by all accounts, the lair itself contained huge amounts of magic. While we're here, it would be foolish not to investigate it, just in case we find something that could help our friends. Even a gryphon needs help, from time to time.\"\n\nSeris chirruped in laughter again. \"You, maybe. A perfect gryphon would never ask for help, but if some were offered, then perhaps they would take it,\" she said. I thought I could detect a little fear beneath her words. Was she scared for what might be found in Nixa, or of the vicious battle we now seemed likely to miss?\n\nThe rest of the walk was largely silent, with just a few chirps and squawks passing between the two gryphons in their own language. I noticed they kept looking over their shoulders, but every time I caught a glimpse of the dark sky between their wings I saw nothing. The moon was almost full, but it was still not enough to see clearly by. It soon took all of my focus not to trip over any rough patches of grass and bracken. Placing one paw in front of the other was increasingly difficult when I could barely see the ground in front of me. The two gryphons seemed to have it much easier, the only sounds they made were the gentle ruffle of their feathers and the soft rustle of the grass beneath their assured steps.\n\nAs we started to climb the side of a hill, I became aware of another noise reaching my ears. Wingbeats. Something was following us. Judging from Jesara's sudden hiss, she had heard it too. I was immediately reminded of the giant bats that had flown across the night sky just before I had been bitten by the necuart.\n\nThough I searched the sky, I could see nothing. The gryphons, with their far superior eyes, were quickly able to find what I could not. \"It's a lone dragon,\" Seris whispered. I could hear her wings spread as she crouched, ready to spring to flight if needed. \"It seems to have come from Laxtal too, judging by its direction.\"\n\n\"It's definitely alone. If it comes to a fight, we will win easily,\" Jesara added, before whistling loudly to call the stranger down.\n\nThe gryphons' feathers bristled as the wingbeats grew louder. Whoever it was, they had heard Jesara's cry. Finally, a dark shadow moved across my vision as a slender green dragon flew just overhead, coming crashing down to the springy ground a few feet away.\n\n\"Cinson? What are you doing here?\" I cried, slinking beneath Seris's legs to get to my friend.\n\n\"You know this dragon?\" the apothecary asked over a low moan from the Xigax dragon.\n\n\"He's been one of my closest companions for a couple of years now,\" I replied, gently lifting Cinson's head off the ground. He didn't appear to be hurt, just tired and cold. Behind me, the two gryphons shifted around and talked amongst themselves, but I paid them no further attention. For the moment, I just had to worry about making sure Cinson was alright.\n\nThe Xigax dragon's eyes fluttered as he groaned again, slowly heaving himself off his chest and back to his paws. \"I'm glad I found you. I thought I'd gotten lost,\" he said, resting his head against my shoulder as he tried to find his balance.\n\n\"What are you even doing here?\"\n\nCinson shrugged and backed away. \"I saw you fly off. I needed to make sure you were safe, and that you weren't being held captive.\" One of the gryphons clacked their beak in annoyance at that, but didn't interrupt.\n\n\"I'm safe. It was everyone else who wasn't,\" I sighed. I wondered if I should send Cinson away, but the thought of having draconic company was too tempting. At least if I was in danger of being controlled by the necuart, the two gryphons would easily be able to overpower me and prevent me from causing harm.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nI looked away, ashamed. I had barely even spoken with Cinson since he had flown off without me. For one of the few drakes I could call a friend, I had been distant with him ever since I returned to Laxtal. Some of it was because of my recovery from the bite, but it was still inexcusable. I owed him better.\n\nSensing the gryphons' impatience, I decided to tell Cinson everything that had happened as we walked. Though the Xigax dragon was exhausted, he kept pace with reasonable ease. He didn't ask any questions as I explained the reason for my flight, instead just padding by my side in silence. Only once I had finished my story did he speak.\n\n\"You know, there is a legend in Xigax of a creature like you described. They are men of darkness and cold, and live in the frozen wastes of the distant south. I always thought they were a scary story told to hatchlings, but maybe it's true.\" Cinson paused, looking up at the two silhouetted gryphons. \"Just like the skycats were just a legend, but now we're walking with two. Maybe all our legends and stories are true after all.\"\n\n\"What's next? A firebird to shoot across the sky?\" I asked with a laugh. A divine creature said to bring luck and fortune to any who saw one. How we could use one of those about now, but of all our stories, that was the least likely.\n\n\"We have stories of firebirds too,\" Jesara said, her voice distant as she stared up to the sky once more, as though searching for the mythical creature. \"But I have never seen such a thing. Their feathers are rumoured to be almost as fine as a gryphon's.\"\n\n\"A legend, nothing more than that,\" Seris said firmly, before she bounded to the top of the hill we were climbing. A soft glow was coming from somewhere beyond the crest of the hill, slightly illuminating the gryphon's dyed cobalt feathers. She crowed out in triumph. \"This though, this is real magic. Come and see.\"\n\nJesara leapt forward without any hesitation, but Cinson and I were more cautious. We were about to look down upon the death site of an entire clan. I wasn't sure I wanted to see what the intervening time had done to all the bodies that remained. More so I didn't lose face in front of Cinson, I crested the hill and looked down at what remained of Nixa.\n\nFour other low hills formed a rough ring around the Nixan lair, but where there had once been a gentle slope in the interior, there was now a jagged chasm spewing forth what appeared to be pure light. For the most part, it was a gentle glow, but here and there were sparks of almost blinding intensity. It seemed to dissipate into the night sky almost as soon as it left the ground.\n\n\"Magic,\" breathed Seris. \"What did I tell you? There was something worth coming to find here.\"\n\n\"Raw, uncontrollable magic though,\" Jesara said, stepping up to the side of her fellow gryphon. \"There isn't much we can do with this lightshow. There might though, be something we can use inside.\"\n\n\"Inside?\" I yelped, fear releasing my tongue before I could still it. Once more I had revealed a weakness to the gryphons. I glanced across at Cinson, but was somewhat reassured to see that he was making no effort to hide his terror either.\n\n\"What's the matter, dragon? Scared of a little light?\" Seris taunted over her shoulder. The apothecary was already on her way down to the edge of the chasm, not even waiting to see if anyone was joining her.\n\n\"It's not just light though, is it? I'm not Nixan. I don't know what that would do to me,\" I said quietly, averting my eyes from the two gryphons. All my life I had been warned about the dangers of magic, that it wasn't to be trusted, and that only a Nixan could wield it. I wasn't about to walk into a chasm unleashing what was probably powerful magic. No matter what hit I would take to my pride.\n\nI felt a claw twist in my heart when Cinson took a few uncertain steps forward, before bounding to catch up to the two gryphons. The Xigax dragon dared what I could not, and the three of them approached the lip of the chasm together. They were all bathed in the magic light, their scales and feathers luminescent. Then they were gone. One step forward and the magic engulfed them. Not a trace of them remained, and still my paws would not carry me forward or back. I could neither follow nor flee.\n\n\"Cinson?\" I cried out, desperate for some response, but just silence greeted me. My wings were flared uselessly by my sides, a futile gesture as my hindlegs refused to kick off to push me into the air.\n\n\"Weak.\"\n\nI leapt into the air, the sudden voice providing my limbs the impetus to move. I frantically looked around, but I was completely alone. No living thing was illuminated by the magic pouring out from the old lair. Nothing living, and nothing dead either. For the first time, I noticed how bare the ground was. What had happened to all the bodies that should be here? I suddenly realised I didn't want to be alone out here. If something had come to remove the dead Nixans, I didn't want to be around to see it come back.\n\nCrying out Cinson's name once more, I ran forward to the light, not stopping until I felt its warmth all around me.\n\nThe ground fell away beneath my paws, and sudden darkness consumed me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Shadows swirled as I padded through the darkness. There was no discernible source of light that I could find, but somehow, I could still see. The soft, grey light simply was. No sound reached my ears, not even my own pawsteps, which fell on a surface I could neither see nor feel. All I knew was that something held me up with my wings furled, and I saw no reason to question further.\n\nI didn't know how long I walked for, mind blank and no destination to aim for. I simply walked, because it was better than standing and doing nothing.\n\n\"Weak dragon.\"\n\nOne paw in front of the other. Again, and again. No need to stop. No need to think.\n\n\"Submit. Submit to my will.\"\n\nWings fluttered. A gentle breeze growing into a harsh wind. Shadows and smoke gusted into my face, forcing me to hide behind a wing. The air was bitterly cold.\n\n\"Weak, pathetic creature. It's only a matter of time before your mind is mine.\"\n\nMy steps faltered.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Resistance is useless, pathetic creature. You can't escape.\"\n\nI was suddenly blinded as what little light there was vanished, leaving me in total darkness. The wind remained however, and I kept my wing shielding my head. I felt myself getting pushed back, whatever formless ground I stood on offering little grip to hold my position.\n\n\"Give in. Why bother fighting?\"\n\nMy hindpaws struggled to find something to push against, trying to slow my gradual slide backwards. I would not give in to the creature that was holding me here, the necuart that threatened to control me. For the safety of everyone I cared about, I could not let him win.\n\n\"SUBMIT!\"\n\nSomething hard pushed against my tail. That was all I needed. I tensed my hindpaws against whatever protrusion had appeared there and pushed with all my might.\n\n\"I said\u2026\"\n\nThe wind faltered and died.\n\nThere was silence, and I emerged blinking into the light, my wings outstretched as I fluttered to the ground.\n\n\"Glad you could join us,\" Jesara said wryly, staring down at me with amusement in her eyes.\n\nThe gryphon was standing with Seris and Cinson. They were all looking at me, but I could recognise no confusion or fear in them. They had not witnessed what I had. The darkness and that awful, cold voice had been in my mind only. Had it even been real, or had I imagined the whole thing? I shuddered. It had felt real.\n\nFor the first time I took in our surroundings. We were inside Nixa, that much was obvious. The small antechamber was constructed of white rock, all of which glimmered and shone with magic that poured towards the surface above our heads. The roof had been torn away in the explosion that had decimated the clan, but the dark sky was hidden by the intense gleam of the magic.\n\nBut for the destroyed roof, there was only one exit to the antechamber. A narrow tunnel led out to what I assumed to be the main chambers. Following Jesara's lead, that was where we headed. The two gryphons were only able to make it through by crouching down almost so they were shuffling through on their knees, wings tucked as tight to their bodies as they could manage. I heard them complaining to each other in their avian language, and the moment they were through to the other side they started grooming their displaced feathers, making sure everything was perfect once more.\n\nThat allowed us a few minutes to stare in awe at the sight that greeted us. Though it was empty and lifeless, the sheer size of the Nixan lair took my breath away. The shattered ceiling was close, but it was the floor that was almost terrifying. I could barely even see it; it was so far away. It looked far enough that I could dive in freefall for a couple of minutes and still not hit the ground.\n\nOnce again, there was no trace of any bodies, with only the faintest lingering smell of death on the otherwise stale air. The whole place felt sterile. Even with the ruptured ceiling, no scents descended from outside. I heard no sounds, no drip of water or chirp of bird. But for the four of us, nothing moved in Nixa. And somewhere not too far away, my sister could be settling down for her last night alive. If nothing else, I had to make this worthwhile. There had to be some reason for me abandoning Ellian to her fate.\n\nSo we could better find this artefact the gryphons sought, we decided to split up in order to cover the expansive lair. I headed straight down to the distant floor with Cinson, while the two gryphons started exploring the upper echelons. I didn't know what I was looking for, though Jesara assured me I would recognise it once I saw it.\n\nAs expected, it was a long way down to the floor. I could see reminders of the devastation that had befallen the clan everywhere. Where fire had not scorched the rock, it was scarred by debris that had fallen from above. Massive chunks of rock had been torn from the walls, revealing the small chambers where drakes had once lived.\n\nWe landed amongst the rubble that littered the floor. Some chunks of stone were larger than my body. I couldn't begin to imagine how many drakes had been crushed when these massive chunks of rock had been blasted from the ceiling and walls. It would be a long time before the lair was suitable for life again.\n\n\"Which way, do you think?\" Cinson asked, his quiet voice deafening in the silence of the lair. I was aware of his every movement, my senses picking up every minute scratch of his claws against the rock floor or rustle of his scales as he idly swished his tail.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I replied. Whereas Cinson deafened my senses, my own voice was quiet and distant to my ears. I gestured my head in an almost random direction for the Xigax dragon to explore. I didn't trust myself to be near him, and I quickly started to move away from him. There was a shadow on my mind again, and I didn't want to be close enough to harm him in case I lost control.\n\nThankfully, Cinson didn't attempt to argue with me, and he darted off towards the part of the lair I had suggested, slinking through the rubble with sinuous ease. I turned away and headed off in the opposite direction, not once looking back.\n\n\"Not again,\" I growled under my breath. The shadows receded slightly.\n\nI rounded a corner and the debris thinned out a little, though the floor was ruptured by a deep fissure that reached from wall to wall. It looked like an audience chamber, with a raised podium looking out over the cracked floor. There was one thing that immediately caught my eye. Amidst all the chaos and destruction, there was one piece of order looking distinctly out of place. A statue of a silver dragon stood proudly atop the podium. It looked oddly familiar, but I couldn't recall where I could have seen it before. I took a couple of leaps to land by the statue's side, nosing against it as I tried to work out how it could have escaped the destruction around it. There was no way it could have survived unscathed, but here it stood. I wondered if it had been left here by whoever, or whatever, had cleared the lair of the dead.\n\nThe statue was warm to the touch, but as I gently prodded it I felt no movement or life. I didn't know why I had expected otherwise. This was the clan of magic no longer. I didn't expect anything magical to happen within these walls. The silver figure was slightly smaller than me, and unusually serpentine. Not even drakes like Cinson were built like this.\n\nIn sudden, inexplicable anger, I knocked the statue over, wincing as I struck the firm metal. I stared as it seemed to take an eternity to fall, eventually striking the stone ground and sending shockwaves reverberating through the massive chamber. I couldn't move as the blank eyes lit up with a cold blue flame.\n\n\"Foolish, little weak dragon,\" a voice hissed, seemingly emanating from the silver statue yet, at the same time, from nowhere. Slowly, impossibly, the statue began to right itself. Limbs of solid silver bent and shifted before my disbelieving eyes. Only once the thing was looking me in the eyes was I able to take a step back. Tendrils of shadow started to emerge from the shimmering surface of the dragon.\n\n\"This can't be real,\" I said, shaking my head as I tried to back away, but something was preventing my retreat. I was stuck, unable to move.\n\nThe chilling voice snickered as the statue advanced. With every step it made the darkness surrounding it was enhanced, until I could see nothing of the surrounding cave. It was just me and the statue.\n\n\"Are you ready to submit?\"\n\nI arched my back and hissed, lifting one forepaw off the ground, ready to strike if the statue came any closer. It completely ignored my terrified attempts at aggression, and it swatted my paw aside with ease. I tried to retaliate, striking at it with my other, weaker forepaw, but the statue didn't even react as my claws raked down its shoulder.\n\n\"You will be mine, dragon. There is no way to escape it.\"\n\n\"I will not give in,\" I snarled, once more lashing out to no effect. The statue didn't so much as recoil as my claws struck it repeatedly. I took a step to one side, and though the statue didn't move the shadows that surrounded it reached out and enveloped me. I could see nothing but shapeless forms moving through the darkness, and no matter how many times I spun around and lashed out, my claws only tore through the air.\n\nThe shadows taunted me, calling me weak and pathetic. Neither tooth nor claw had any effect on them as they swirled around me. Small fragments of shadow solidified into ghostly echoes of drakes with burning red eyes. Three of them advanced on me, and I couldn't help but think the end was coming. I could do nothing to fend them off. I closed my eyes. They were still visible.\n\nA shadow touched my tail.\n\nI reacted on instinct, spinning around and lunging, feeling flesh against my teeth at last. I opened my eyes to shadows, but hot blood filled my mouth. The shadows could bleed like any drake. I tore into my foe, not giving them a chance to fight back before I subdued them. This was my chance to defeat the shadows, my one opportunity to free myself of their influence.\n\nThe shadows though, only snickered. The cold laughter sought to paralyse me, to fill me with dread at what I had just done. I loosened my jaws. There was a soft thump as my foe fell to the ground.\n\nThen the shadows fled from my eyes.\n\nI knew straight away I would never forget the betrayed agony in Cinson's eyes, nor the ragged attempts to draw in breath. His blood already stained the stone floor, a great pool spreading out and washing against my paws. There was little left of his throat, a gaping wound I had created. I could not save him. I had killed him.\n\n\"I\u2026 I'm sorry,\" I whispered as the light in my friend's eyes faded. His gasping breath failed. My friend, my faithful companion since my exile, was gone.\n\nHe was dead by my own teeth.\n\nGrief threatened to overwhelm me, but before I could let it, I made a decision. I knew my mind could easily break. I could have snapped and given in to the shadows, but instead I felt stronger than ever against them. My mind hardened. The demons in my head would suffer for this. They would be the next to die."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I could not sleep. The longer the night went on the more restless I became until I had no choice but to rise from my attempted slumber. I could feel the chill of the early-winter night, but it had no effect on me whatsoever. I felt like I could fly as far as I wanted and not have to worry about the cold sapping my strength. That thought alone gave me the sense of incredible freedom, but as I looked down at the distant ground, I had to wonder at the cost of it all.\n\nTaking care with each step, I slowly paced back and forth, trying to work out where I could go now. Unless I could find a way to rid myself of the humans' magic, I knew I would never be able to fit in amongst other drakes ever again. A life of exile was not an attractive proposition.\n\nAt the back of my mind, the presence of magic was a constant reminder of the Axinstone, safely nestled beneath a nearby bush. I never strayed far from it, though I doubted anything would have the courage to approach. It wouldn't do to have risked so much, only to lose the Axinstone due to a moment of negligence.\n\nMy senses were so much stronger now, especially my eyesight in the darkness. Before I had barely been able to see beyond past my own snout once the sun had gone down, but now I could pick out so much detail in everything. I could make out individual leaves on the trees on the far side of the nearby stream. The gentle flutter of an owl's wings reverberated in my ears, as well as every chirp and screech from the insects and rodents scurrying through the undergrowth. It was overwhelming. The cold, dead nights were suddenly alive.\n\nI squeezed my eyes shut and tried to block out the multitude of sounds around me, but to no avail. There was just too much. An intense heat built up in my throat, and I lifted my head up to the sky and roared. No sound escaped though, and instead a strong burning sensation escaped my snout. I opened my eyes in time to see the last licks of flame dissipate into the air.\n\n\"Fire?\" I whispered, stunned by what I had just done. According to legend, there were once drakes who could breathe fire, but none had existed for centuries. I had thought it to be just myth, a fabrication passed down through the generations. The stories had told of drakes capable of incredible deeds, acts that no living drake could hope to emulate. Perhaps until now.\n\nJust what was it the humans were doing to us?\n\nA crack of thunder tore through the night, but the sky was clear of clouds. In panic, I dove to the ground and curled around the bush where I had hidden the Axinstone. A drake's wingbeats followed soon after, tired and unsteady. They approached from the south, slowly getting closer.\n\nFrantically, I looked around, but there was nowhere for me to go without being seen. I was too massive to simply hide. Though I knew no other drake could possibly harm me, but for Nightwings, I was still terrified of the reaction I was about to receive.\n\nA small blue dragon came into view. His flight was uneven and several times I thought he was about to fall but somehow he kept going. For a brief moment, I thought it was my mate, before remembering the loud peal of thunder. It had to be Airil.\n\nI stayed as still as I could, hoping that with his lesser eyesight, Airil would just fly straight passed me without noticing. There was to be no such luck though, as his strength gave out. He plummeted from the air and slid along the ground, coming to rest just a few feet away from where I lay. He made one futile attempt to drag himself up to his paws before flopping motionless to the ground.\n\nFor a few more minutes I remained frozen, barely daring to move in case I wake Airil, or worse, accidentally hit him. Just one of my paws was almost as large as his body. I dreaded to think what sort of damage I could inflict. With great care so I didn't make much noise, I edged a little closer to my mate's twin, aware of every movement I made. Gently I wrapped my foreleg around his prone body, before covering him completely in my wing. The magical heat from my body would be enough to warm him until the sun rose.\n\nUntil then I would just lie still, one eye on the Axinstone and the other on the sky. Morning would bring a whole host of problems, but if I was able to explain myself to Airil then at least he could return the Axinstone back to Ddraig Krateos. That would be one less thing to worry about.\n\nThroughout the rest of the night, nothing of interest flew by. I thought I could hear one of the grave bats fly by, it was so quiet and far away that I was not concerned. Apart from a lone owl, nothing came close until the sky started to lighten with the approaching dawn. I was still no closer to working out what I was to do with myself; the restless night had not afforded me answers.\n\nMovement against my leg warned me that Airil was starting to rouse, and I carefully furled my wing to allow the first of the morning light to strike him. I could only hope he would react kindly to my new appearance, as there was little I could do to prevent him leaving. He could be gone in just a thought.\n\nI couldn't look at Airil as he slowly started to wake up, scared of seeing the inevitable fear in his eyes once he opened them. The small weight against my leg was my only assurance that he was still with me. Absently I toyed with the ridge in my paw, desperate to talk to Kaz or Esperance, but I was terrified of the reaction I'd get from my mate if he saw me like this, and I doubted Esperance would be able to help me. She was far away, further south than any drake had gone for generations uncounted.\n\n\"So it wasn't a dream?\"\n\nThe small voice by my side was surprisingly calm, not laced with fear as I had anticipated, but still I couldn't look down at Airil. I was ashamed. Tainted by human magic. He should be scared of me.\n\n\"Not a dream, no,\" I replied sadly, staring down at the grass.\n\n\"I was there. I could see it all, but I couldn't\u2026 I don't understand. How could Anzig do that to me? It should be impossible,\" Airil said, panic rising in his voice. I could feel him stand, his weight pushing off my leg, only to hear him collapse back to the ground again. I chanced him a glance; too weary to remain standing, he had fallen in a heap, his wings spread out to take in as much sunlight as he could manage.\n\nI figured there was nothing for it but to reveal the secrets that I had learnt. Nixa deserved an explanation. \"Anzig is my brother, and Maznar our sister. Ddraig Krateos is our father. We're all Nixans,\" I said soberly, swinging my head away before Airil thought to look up. I didn't want to see his reaction to that revelation. It was hard enough trying to come to terms with it myself. At least he had not yet fled in fear. That was something for which I could be grateful.\n\nA brief spell of silence fell between us. I didn't push Airil to keep talking, content instead with the little bit of quiet. I could feel him moving around by my side. He felt so weak and vulnerable against my scales. Perhaps if Airil's reaction was anything to go by, I wouldn't need to be so worried about what other drakes might think. Even so, I would need to find some way of reversing the changes the humans had put upon me. Practically, I just could not stay like this. I would never be able to fit in one of the lairs. Wherever I ended up, Laxtal or Nixa, would be too small to accommodate me in this form.\n\n\"If I know my brother, Kaz is going to rather enjoy this,\" Airil said, placing a paw on my hindleg. I fought the impulse to kick out at the contact.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked, looking down at the Nixan. I didn't like the wide, mischievous grin on his face. I slowly rose to my paws, awkwardly shuffling away from Airil. He bounded up to his paws as well, much more energetic now that he'd had a chance to warm up. He had to run to keep up with my slow walk, darting between my legs much to my annoyance. I had to be so careful where I was placing my paws, constantly looking down as I wasn't comfortable with my co-ordination in this body.\n\n\"You know. More of you. I think he'll like that,\" Airil said, leaping ahead of me and heading down towards the stream. I chose not to answer him, but followed him anyway towards the water to take a drink. The silence hung between us again. I closed my eyes as I tried to work out what we needed to do now. I reached out with my mind to access the future and\u2026\n\nAnd nothing.\n\n\"I can't See,\" I cried out, leaping backwards and arching my back, wrapping my tail around my legs. My breath came in short gasps as I tried to push out with my mind again, desperate to see something of the future, but I was faced with nothing. Despair washed over me. For the first time since I was a young dragonet, I was blind to what the future held. Unwanted tears formed in my eyes.\n\nI wasn't aware of Airil's presence until I felt his claws on my shoulder. He placed his paw on my neck as I struggled to calm myself, but the panic only grew. Of all the things that could happen, this was one of the worst. There were times when I had hated my magic and what it had done to my life, but never had I wanted it gone. It was too much a part of me, and without it I felt a part of my identity had been destroyed.\n\nMy wings flared, though what I planned to do or where to go didn't occur to me. I didn't know what to do, and only Airil's sharp claws stopped me from taking flight.\n\n\"Azlak, listen to me,\" he repeatedly said, digging in with his claws between my scales as best he could. I managed to control my breathing and close my wings again, lowering my head to the ground as the Nixan's words broke through at last.\n\n\"I don't want to be without my magic,\" I whimpered, displaying weakness I knew would seem absurd in this powerful form. I pawed at the ground, trying not to think about the void within me where my magic should lie. My claws gouged out deep tracks in the grass. Small pools of water from the stream quickly filled them.\n\nThere was only one dragon I was sure would be able to help me work out why my magic was gone, but I didn't want to face Ddraig Boruc in this situation. At the same time, I was pretty sure I didn't have any choice. Without any advice from the experienced dragon I feared I would be stuck like this, destined to live alone for the rest of my life. Either that or return to the humans and beg them to reverse their magic. I would have to be desperate indeed to willingly fly back towards George.\n\nI looked back at Airil, comforted by the concern I could see as he raised his paw up to my neck. His acceptance of how I now was made the decision I had to make that little bit easier. I would have to go and find Ddraig Boruc again, if he had lingered around after being chased away by the necuart.\n\nThere would be no way Airil would ever be able to keep up with my flight, so after he retrieved the Axinstone from its hiding place, he leapt up onto my back. He took refuge between my wings, digging his claws between a couple of scales for grip. It was uncomfortable, slightly restricting the movement of my wings, but it was the only place he could go without tiring himself out with his magic. Once he was securely in position, I beat my wings a few times to make sure he wasn't about to fall off, before kicking off hard.\n\nFlying was so different now, a wholly new experience that I enjoyed despite myself. The speeds I could reach were phenomenal. I could never have imagined such a pace to be possible as the landscape passed by in a blur. I could just about hear Airil shrieking from my back, whether in fear or thrill I couldn't be sure. Perhaps even a little of both. Though I had no idea where to start the search, I covered what would once have been an hour of flying in little over ten minutes. I saw or heard no sign of the human army or their allies through the day, for which I was thankful. It seemed they were not spending any of their resources to search for me.\n\nMore through luck than anything else, I managed to find the small cave we had sheltered in before my capture. The scent of my former companions was cold, but I sent Airil in anyway, just in case they had left me behind some token to indicate where they were headed. I waited outside with an eye on the horizon, wary of the relative proximity of the humans. I could hear their movement when the wind was still, on the very edge of my hearing.\n\nThe Nixan was only inside for a couple of minutes before he emerged again, a small slab of stone in his paw. Markings were engraved on the stone, but they written in a language I couldn't read. Thankfully Airil had already been able to determine what they said.\n\n\"I think Ddraig Boruc knew I'd be with you. This is written in draconic, and there are but a few drakes who can read it now,\" Airil said hesitantly, running his claw over the engraved markings. \"It says they stayed a few nights, hoping to rescue you. After feeling the Axinstone being used, they flew south, to join up with the army he hopes is flying from Laxtal. He hopes you are safe, and that you escaped with the Axinstone.\"\n\n\"How could he have known?\" I asked, turning my head to look south. Perhaps it was my imagination, but now that I knew which way they had gone, their scent seemed stronger that way. With nothing else to do this close to the human army, we were soon on our way again. Once Airil was secure on my back, I spread my wings and launched into the sky once more.\n\nWhether by fate or fortune I picked up a stronger scent of Ddraig Boruc and Isikian after less than an hour of flying south. There were other smells close by too, unfamiliar ones I had no experience of. It put me in the mind of a wildcat, but I was sure it was something completely different. Almost obscured by the strange scents was one all too familiar. Drakes. Hundreds upon thousands of them. Laxtal's army was close. Kaz would be amongst them. Dual emotions of fear and longing stabbed through my heart.\n\nWe weren't far from Nixa when I finally caught sight of the two dragons ahead. I knew I couldn't get close to them, not without them attempting to flee. I sent Airil on ahead, before spiralling down to the banks of the river that marked the northern boundary of Nixa, where their territory gave way to Clan Reneza. With a loud crack like thunder, Airil was gone, taking the Axinstone with him. I was alone once more. There was nothing now to stop Airil meeting up with Ddraig Boruc and Isikian and flying on to the Laxtal army, leaving me here in my isolation.\n\nI rested on a rocky promontory that pushed out into the river, my wings draped out more in habit than anything else. I no longer needed to draw in the sun's heat for energy, my body could do that by itself. I had expected to feel the need to eat more often, but I didn't even need to do that. I could not tell what sustained me now.\n\nLooking down at my reflection in the river, I rolled my head back and forth. It was amazing how similar I looked to the reflection I recognised. Only my eyes were different. They were still gold as they had always been, but they were now infused with magic; flecks of amber and white sparking beneath the surface. They were fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Like the fire I had breathed the previous night.\n\nThe sun was starting to sink low to the Sxinix Mountains and I was beginning to feel sure I had been abandoned. It would have taken Airil an instant to return, but I hadn't seen a single drake fly overhead. Only the occasional bird had flown by, hunting for their prey and oblivious to the conflict that was sure to come. I almost longed for their innocence, to be free of the worries and concerns that plagued my mind.\n\nFinally, just as I was starting to lose hope, I heard the gentle flutter of a drake's wings. I turned my head to see Ddraig Boruc land nearby, with Isikian close on his tail. While there was fear in Isikian's eyes \u2013 like me he had witnessed the full fury of Nightwings \u2013 Ddraig Boruc showed no terror at all. I could only see fascination and wonder there.\n\n\"Now this is a sight I never thought I would see again,\" he whispered, reaching out with one paw as though he meant to touch my snout.\n\n\"Again? You've seen others like me?\"\n\n\"Apart from that ruffian that tried to kill Ellian and me, not for a very, very long time,\" Ddraig Boruc said, pulling his paw back and staring at it.\n\nIsikian shuffled his wings. \"And\u2026 they have no control over you?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"None. They tried, but without the Axinstone they have no chance. Something stopped their magic, I'm not sure what,\" I said, before pausing. I looked down at my paw where Esperance's slate was hidden.\n\nDdraig Boruc noticed the focus of my gaze. \"With something that powerful in your possession, I'm not surprised even the Axinstone failed to break that magic.\"\n\nI nodded. If that was so, I was even more thankful to Esperance. She had saved me from servitude under human control. Isikian looked only slightly reassured by that, his wings still partially unfurled. I wanted to do something to comfort him, but I was scared that if I made any movement towards him he would panic and flee.\n\n\"Are you able to fix it?\" I asked, trying not to let my voice descend into desperate pleading.\n\nDdraig Boruc was silent, his wings wrapped tight around his body as he looked to the ground. I barely dared to move as I waited for his answer, and Isikian did much the same. The Nixan's eyes were wide as he stared at me.\n\nWhen Ddraig Boruc looked up again, his eyes were bright. \"I think so. I know how the human magic works, so I should be able to remove it. Once it is done though, I will not be able to reverse it.\"\n\nI closed my eyes. There was nothing I wanted more than to return to normal and to feel the comforting touch of my magic, but one thing held me back. By stealing the Axinstone back from them, humans had lost access to Nightwings and their other creations. I was the last one left. \"I could be of use, couldn't I?\"\n\n\"I won't force you into any decision, but yes. I can imagine you could be of great use,\" Ddraig Boruc said slowly. He looked up to me and met my eyes, holding them without any challenge. I was still forced to look away.\n\nI growled softly. \"Then, until this is all over, I shall stay like this.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc placed his paw on mine, his small weight barely noticeable. \"You are doing a brave thing Azlak. If only my son were as brave as you, this\u2026\" Ddraig Boruc sighed and said no more, turning away and hunching his shoulders as he sat by the river. I shared a brief, inquisitive glance with Isikian, but we both knew not to interrupt Ddraig Boruc's silence. For the ddraig of such a minor clan, he was a dragon with so many secrets, but we respected him enough not to press him to reveal what he knew.\n\nIsikian moved a few steps closer, his wings fluttering as they threatened to unfurl completely. \"Airil has gone straight back to Ddraig Krateos to return the Axinstone. And to warn them\u2026\"\n\n\"To warn them of me,\" I said, completing Isikian's sentence for him. The Nixan nodded, turning his face from me in embarrassment. \"I am not a monster.\"\n\nI didn't know who I was trying to convince."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "Our horde of drakes and gryphons flew without rest through the day. As a ddraig, I flew towards the front of the army, keeping wing just behind Ddraig Krateos and Alaron. The wyvern was a powerful flyer, showing no sign of weakness as he soared from thermal to thermal. Only Kyrus had made any real attempt to communicate with me during the flight, but I had remained quiet and largely chose not to answer the gryphon's questions. My mind was still trying to catch up on the events of the previous night. I still couldn't believe that Vinzent had been killed, and my brother had fled.\n\nI had seen Saya briefly before we flew out. Though I knew the dragoness had seen me, she refused to look in my direction. Many times she had challenged me or Anzig through her son. With him gone she had lost so much of her power within Laxtal. For now she had been defeated, but I was sure that if we all survived this war, she would find some other scheme to wrest more power from the ddraig.\n\nMore than anything I wanted Airil by my wing, but he hadn't been seen since Anzig had abandoned the clan. Maznar had seemingly gone with them, as she hadn't been seen by anyone for quite some time. The strange black dragoness worried me. I knew I wasn't the only one who didn't trust her.\n\nEvery time I looked back at the force that had been gathered, I couldn't help but feel a swell of pride. Most of the drakes were here because of my efforts. I had been the one to fly through the clans, recruiting numbers for our desperate cause. Thousands had answered, and still more trickled in all the time. Nomads continued to join us, more coming almost every hour. And high above the drakes flew the gryphons, keeping a close watch on any possible human movements within the area.\n\nNot until late afternoon was there anything to distract from the monotony of one wingbeat after another. Starting out as just a speck on the horizon, something started to fly towards us. A few gryphons squawked to each other as they tried to determine if it was friend or foe approaching. After a few sharp orders from both Alaron and Kyrus, it was decided to let them come, as they flew alone and without any support. It would take just a moment to destroy them if they turned aggressive.\n\nI quickly recognised the slender form of a Xigax dragoness. Her sinuous body almost seemed to swim through the air rather than fly. She warily approached us, her eyes wide as she searched through the first few ranks.\n\n\"Ddraig Astar?\" she called out hesitantly.\n\nUpon hearing that name I moved to the front to fly alongside Alaron. \"Astar is dead. I am Ddraig Ellian of Laxtal. Fly with us,\" I said, inviting the Xigax dragoness to my side. She introduced herself as Zuris, one of the commanders of Ddraig Nunahra's armies. She asked if we could land and speak properly, as the news she had was too important to say on the wing.\n\nWith Alaron's permission, I began the call to land. There were many thankful cries at the unexpected relief, and gradually our horde descended upon what was once southern Nixa. Given how close it was to sunset, a decision was quickly made to settle for the rest of the day, and a hunting party was sent out to the famed hunting grounds of Nixa. If it was to be our last night of freedom, then at least we would eat well for it.\n\nThere wasn't much in the way of shelter around; we were on the borders of the Nixan plains and a long way from any large forests. There were a few caves in the low hills, but certainly not enough to shelter our immense numbers. Most would have to sleep under the stars once more, but we were still far enough away from where the humans camped to risk warming fires.\n\nWhile we waited for the hunters to return, I sent a messenger out to find James McArthur and our allied humans. They had to be close by, and it would be useful having them around, in case they had discovered anything on their slow journey on paw.\n\nWith a tired sigh, I joined the other leaders in one of the small caves to hear what Zuris had to say. Kyrus settled down to preen his feathers back into perfection, with Alaron sitting by his side. The wyvern's eyes were alert while we waited for a fire to be lit. Ddraig Krateos was quick to join us, though for once he was not accompanied by his daughter. I was also surprised to see Ddraig Metrus of Eltee, who I was not aware had joined us. She ruled a minor clan between the borders of Nixa and Laxtal, whose lands we had passed over in the morning. She must have joined us then.\n\nZuris stayed close to my side as we waited. She could not keep her eyes on Kyrus for long, but if she was afraid of the gryphon she hid it well. I could also tell she had noticed Alaron's unique anatomy, but thankfully she had not commented on that. I doubted the wyvern had much patience for someone implying he was a cripple, not after his display against Vinzent.\n\n\"So what have we all gathered here for?\" Alaron asked, staring down the Xigax dragoness who quickly looked away.\n\n\"Xigax was attacked by a force of drakes, led by Ddraig Tsona,\" Zuris said, slowing raising her head again, shuffling her wings against her back. \"I think Xital underestimated our strength, as we routed them after just a couple of days. We believe a few of the survivors, including Ddraig Tsona, fled to join up with the human army on the northern border of Nixa.\"\n\nKyrus paused his preening and chirruped. \"How many survivors?\"\n\n\"No more than five hundred,\" Zuris replied, staring with wide eyes at the gryphon, who had returned his attention back to his feathers. \"About five hundred more were too injured to fly. They were captured and are being held in Xigax. Haeraig Ilibela was being interrogated by Haeraig Cheiala when I left.\"\n\nAlaron stepped forward, ducking his head in a rare sign of respect. \"And can we expect any assistance in clearing the humans from your lands?\"\n\n\"That is why Ddraig Nunahra sent me, to offer you a temporary alliance,\" Zuris replied, showing all her teeth as she smiled. \"She wanted to deal with the prisoners before taking to wing with our army, minus a small guard to remain behind. She expected to be two days behind me with five thousand Xigax warriors. We will see these humans gone.\"\n\n\"Five thousand?\" Ddraig Metrus whispered to me in awe. I had to agree with her. A force that strong would destroy almost any draconic clan that stood in Xigax's way. I could only hope that the humans would find them just as unstoppable.\n\n\"This could change things drastically,\" I said, keeping the eye of Alaron and then Ddraig Krateos for a few moments. \"You will not find a better clan of fighters than Clan Xigax. If they have annulled the threat of Clan Xital, then perhaps this isn't an unwinnable war. I do not know if we can risk delaying the attack, but if we can hold our ground for two days then the arrival of Ddraig Nunahra could decimate the humans.\"\n\nAlaron lowered his head in thought. \"You are right. Delaying the attack would only risk losing the chance to ambush the humans, or give them the opportunity to strike at us unprepared. We cannot delay. But I hope your faith in Xigax is justified.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos growled. \"An army of Nixans would be their equal. If the humans hadn't have resorted to such dirty tactics against us, we would have torn them from the sky.\"\n\nI chose not to say anything. I knew Ddraig Krateos would still be hurting at the loss of most of his clan, but the truth was he had allowed the humans access to his clan all too easily. If the might of Nixa had been what he boasted, then the humans should never have been given that chance. Wisely, no one else spoke up against Ddraig Krateos either.\n\n\"We would be grateful for your numbers. You may find a place to rest and feed your fill when the hunters return,\" Alaron said, bowing his head once more towards Zuris.\n\nThe Xigax dragoness thanked everyone present, hesitating slightly when she came to the gryphon, before making her retreat. When she slipped outside our discussion quickly turned to how we could best utilise the Xigax force. I argued that Ddraig Nunahra would unlikely take any orders from any other drake, or even from Alaron. She was smart enough that she would use her drakes in whatever way would best suit the cause, and it would be foolish to try and deter her from that goal.\n\nAlaron reluctantly conceded to my point, but the wyvern still wanted to go through several possible strategies on how to effectively counter the humans' superior technologies. Their guns could easily pierce a drake's scales from a great distance and, lacking Nixan support, we would be vulnerable to the Human-Nixans too. Alaron warned us of what we already knew. Many drakes would die. That was unavoidable.\n\nI closed my eyes as I nodded and accepted the wyvern's warnings. I had to be willing to sacrifice hundreds of drakes who looked up to me as their leader. I had to be sure I could live with that responsibility, that shame.\n\nWe were all relieved when we got the call that the hunters had returned, giving us a chance to forget our worries for a little while. The hunters had killed an impressive array of creatures, from small birds to massive deer almost as large as a gryphon. Once again there was more than enough food to go around, and once their fill had been consumed, drakes and gryphons alike started to settle down and take in the last of the evening sun.\n\nI was looking forward to the same when a loud crack pierced the calm air. It was a sound I could not fail to recognise.\n\n\"Airil!\" I cried, instantly leaping into the air, searching desperately for the source of the noise. It didn't take me long to find him, a speck of blue against the orange sky. Once I had seen him, nothing or no one would get between us, and just seconds later we were embracing mid-flight.\n\n\"I missed you so much,\" I said, resting my head on his shoulder as his wings took most of our weight. Slowly we started drifting towards the ground, to an empty patch of grass near one of the many fires that had sprung up.\n\n\"I'm so sorry. I had no choice,\" Airil said, releasing me for just a moment as we landed, before holding me tight once more. I noticed he carried something in his paw, but that didn't matter for now. We curled up by the fireside together, his wing enveloping me as he hesitantly started to explain where he had been. He told me how Anzig had taken control of his mind, forced him to take my cousin and Maznar to the humans.\n\nAnzig was mad, Airil told me. Driven insane by the loss of his wings, he had turned to what he perceived his only hope of regaining his flight. Maznar had promised him the humans would be able to help, and he had gone straight to George in the hope the human's magic could restore his wings. Whatever human had planned for Anzig had weakened the mad drake's hold on Airil's mind, and he had been able to escape. He didn't know what they had done to Anzig, but he wasn't going to stay amongst them any longer than he needed to.\n\nI closed my eyes, trying not to let the horror of Airil's news overwhelm me. I had known Anzig was suffering from the loss of his wings, but I could never have realised it had come to this. But that wasn't the extent of Airil's news. The humans had captured Azlak as well, and had performed experimental magic on him.\n\n\"Remember that massive dragon at the beacon?\" Airil asked. I nodded silently. I would never forget. \"They turned him into one of those, but,\" he said, suppressing my whimper of fear with a gentle touch of his paw, \"he resisted their magic. They didn't get to his mind. He's completely free of their control, and he stole back the Axinstone as he escaped.\"\n\nFor the first time Airil opened his paw, revealing the blazing shard of rock. \"I should take this back to Ddraig Krateos, but I wanted to feel you against me first. I don't want to leave your side ever again,\" he said.\n\nI tried to process what Airil was telling me about Azlak. He was one of those ferocious monsters now, but completely out of human control? I was sure my eyes lit up slightly at that news.\n\n\"He's coming here? Azlak? I asked, completely ignoring the precious stone Airil held in his paw. That was not relevant to me.\n\n\"He should be here tonight. Ddraig Boruc thought it would be prudent if I came ahead to warn that he was an ally, and not to be feared,\" Airil said with the hint of a smirk. \"He is quite\u2026 intimidating when you first see him.\"\n\nI could imagine and I shuddered at the thought. My only other experience with these monstrous human creations had been utterly terrifying. It would be hard to dispel the notion that Azlak would not be an enemy, something to be feared.\n\nAiril sighed and rose to his paws. \"I should take this to Ddraig Krateos. Will you wait for me here or come with me?\"\n\nThough I was weary from my flight, I was not about to let Airil go from my sight so soon and I told him so much. He smiled as we spread our wings and took to the air together.\n\nI marvelled at the display of force that was spread out below us. Hundreds of small fires had been lit, around each were gathered large swathes of drakes, each trying to get the best spot closest to the heat. There wasn't much mingling of the clans that I could see, especially from the Laxtal drakes. There was a clear divide between those from my clan and our neighbours, something I was a little upset to see. After sheltering so many drakes in our lair, I had hoped that this fear would have been diminished somewhat. The minor clans seemed quite content with each other's close presence, so why couldn't we be the same? Even the towering Axaatl drakes lay amongst those from Lilisxi and Eltee.\n\nBeyond the horde of drakes lay the gryphons. I wasn't sure if I would ever be fully used to the presence of the feathered and furred creatures, but having them nearby gave me a feeling of confidence I knew I wouldn't have otherwise felt. They needed no fire to keep warm, and from the look of it most of them were preening their feathers or already sleeping. I tried to find Kyrus amongst them, but the heir to the Crown of Golden Feathers was nowhere to be seen. But then all the gryphons looked quite similar to me, with most sharing similar gold and brown feathering, so he could easily have been down there with his kin.\n\nDdraig Krateos was with what was left of his clan, less than a hundred drakes remaining of what was once the most powerful clan amongst dragonkind. Even Xital had feared their strength, but now there was hardly anything left, reduced to just clanless refugees desperately fighting for a home. Even if we somehow won this war, would they have anywhere to go? Would they be able to rebuild their lair in Nixa?\n\nI was glad to see Alaron had remained with Ddraig Krateos, the wyvern and Nixan in deep conversation when we landed. They stopped talking before I was able to overhear what they were discussing. Without any hesitation, Airil placed the Axinstone on the ground in front of his ddraig, bowing his head as he backed away.\n\nDdraig Krateos reached out in shock for the Axinstone. He moved slowly, holding the precious shard of rock in one paw as though he barely believed his eyes. His mouth moved, but no sound reached my ears.\n\nLikewise, Alaron stared at the Axinstone with wide eyes. It took him several attempts to speak, with just a couple of splutters escaping his mouth at first. \"This? This is the artefact that was lost?\" the wyvern whispered. He turned to glare at Airil. \"Does Esperance know about this?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 You would have to ask my brother, I don't know,\" Airil stuttered. He failed to meet the eyes of the wyvern, but he was spared further interrogation from Alaron by a joyous call. Kaz had heard his brother's voice and had come bounding across from the sprawled Nixan drakes.\n\nNot even giving the brothers time for a reunion, Alaron urgently asked Kaz the same question. \"I don't think we ever discussed the Axinstone with Esperance. It was never relevant to her.\"\n\n\"Never relevant? Dragon, this is the most relevant discovery in hundreds of years,\" Alaron hissed. The wyvern started pacing back and forth, at one point reaching out with a wing to touch the Axinstone, but being rebuffed by a growling Ddraig Krateos, who took the stone further away from the wyvern's reach. \"We had no idea Bri'An's Rune was being kept in these parts.\"\n\n\"You have it confused for something else,\" Ddraig Krateos growled. \"The Axinstone has been in Nixan possession for hundreds of years, up until the humans stole it. It is not this rune you claim it to be.\"\n\nAlaron puffed out his chest. \"I am not mistaken on this. I would never confuse the rune for something lesser,\" he said. He looked up to the sky as he continued to stalk back and forth. \"The sightings of these larger dragons have got me thinking. I would love the chance to study one up close.\"\n\n\"You might have your chance,\" I said, moving forward half a step, just about resisting the urge to quail back once the wyvern's fierce eyes were fixed on me. I quickly explained everything Airil had told me about Azlak, turning to my mate and pleading for help when I stumbled and faltered. Thankfully he was able to provide much more information than I could, and he even held Alaron's eye for a few seconds longer than I could manage.\n\nThe wyvern's eyes grew steadily wider as he learnt of Azlak. His pacing had ceased as he stared with absolute attention at Airil. Even Ddraig Krateos was unable to tear himself away from what my mate was saying. But then, Azlak was his son, wasn't he? Of course the ddraig would want to know what had happened to the seer.\n\n\"Come fetch me when he's here, will you?\" Alaron asked.\n\nA nervous grin spread across Airil's snout. \"You don't think you'll see him first?\"\n\nFor a moment I thought Alaron might cuff Airil with one of his powerful wings, before simply batting him gently on the shoulder. \"Yes, of course, dragon. Come find me anyway. I plan on distracting myself for a while.\"\n\nBefore anyone could question him further, Alaron launched himself into the air, beating hard with his wings as he quickly ascended. I watched him bank away and disappear in the direction where the gryphons had settled down to rest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Though we tried to warn as many as we could, there was still significant amount of panic when Azlak first flew overhead. I couldn't say I blamed them at all, as I was barely able to contain my fear and I had been warned about his presence. Mercifully few took to wing; those that did were quickly brought back to the ground by the calmer gryphons. Most simply cowered to the ground, shielding their heads with their wings.\n\nAzlak settled down a little distance away from everyone else, and once I had sent someone out to fetch Alaron, I reluctantly took to the air. With Kaz and Airil flanking me, I was the first to approach the golden monstrosity of a dragon.\n\n\"Azlak?\" I called out as I got closer.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian?\" Azlak rumbled, bowing his great head towards me. I noticed every movement he made was slow and careful. He looked like he was trying hard to be aware of where he put his paws and tail. \"No, it'll be Ddraig Ellian now, won't it? My brother betrayed us all.\"\n\n\"Tell me everything you know, Azlak,\" I said, nervously settling down with Airil.\n\nAs Azlak started to talk, Kaz slowly approached his mate. The seer looked scared for a moment, before Kaz lay down amongst his massive forelegs. Azlak let out a contented purr before he started to explain all that had befallen him. Not long after, Ddraig Boruc returned, flying from the same direction Azlak had arrived. The elderly ddraig kept his silence as he listened to Azlak's tale, and we were soon joined by Ddraig Krateos and Alaron. At first I thought the Nixan carried the Axinstone, but then I saw I was mistaken. It was a similar rune, one that Alaron gazed at with absolute awe.\n\n\"What I don't understand,\" the wyvern said once Azlak was finished. \"Is how this human has access to such lost magic. Not since the cataclysm has this sort of power been seen. Bri'An's rune alone couldn't have done it, surely?\"\n\n\"I can't explain it. I don't think any mortal can,\" Ddraig Boruc replied. The Vatrean had shown no fear or shock towards the wyvern. If anything, he seemed almost familiar with Alaron.\n\n\"I don't think anyone cares about how,\" Ddraig Krateos growled. \"All we need to do is work out how we can stop him.\"\n\nAzlak slowly glanced at each of the gathered ddraigs and the wyvern. \"He has many allies. Drakes flock to his cause, though I can't imagine why. Humans we know about, but other creatures too.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc stepped forward. \"It is the necuart we must fear the most. Of all George's allies, it is they who will be the most deadly. So far we have only seen the one, and we must hope that is all the human has been able to sway. Even so, the numbers of grave bats this necuart can control is immense. The bats alone outnumber both gryphon and drake.\"\n\n\"We do not fear bats,\" Ddraig Krateos snarled.\n\nAlaron sent the Nixan a withering glare. \"You should.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos scoffed and turned away. He muttered something under his breath, but offered no rebuke to the wyvern. My brother had warned me about these bats. I was inclined to side with the wyvern, for they sounded like terrifying creatures indeed.\n\nOur impromptu council was once again interrupted. A small commotion had broken out not far away. A number of drakes had suddenly taken to the air again, screeching and squawking as a dozen gryphons tried to get them back to the ground. It didn't take long before I noticed the reason for the disturbance. Surrounded by a phalanx of Axaatl drakes were two humans. One was James McArthur, and the other a woman I only vaguely recognised.\n\nJames waved in greeting as he approached. \"It is good to see you again, Ellian,\" he called out. He then looked up at Azlak and put his hands on his hips. Ddraig Krateos and Alaron continued their discussion about the grave bats, but my focus remained on the humans.\n\nAzlak squirmed under the gaze of the human, unable to meet his gaze for long. \"Do I remind you of her?\" the seer whispered, his voice so soft despite his great size.\n\nJames nodded, glancing across at his partner. \"You do. Sophie here worked with Nightwings more than I did, but I was her handler for a month or so a while back. She was a wilful creature even back then, before George first used his magic on her.\"\n\n\"How is it done?\" I asked before I could stop myself, curious to know how a drake could become such a beast, but also terrified to know the answer.\n\n\"George kept that a complete secret,\" the woman said, bending down onto one knee to speak with me. \"I think only two or three others know how he's managed to do it. There's very few he trusts with any of his secrets, let alone this one.\"\n\n\"Sophie's right. All we know is that without the Axinstone, George won't have the power needed to sustain the restoration,\" James added. He stayed up on his feet, even when he talked directly to me. I had to crane my neck up just to meet his eye, which he never returned anyway. His eyes were always flicking away to look at something new.\n\nFor a moment I thought Ddraig Boruc had something to add, as he flared his wings and pawed at the ground, but he held his silence. I was sure he had more information than he was letting us know, but I respected his silence for now. All the same, I planned on questioning him later on what he knew. Every scrap of information we could gather would be crucial.\n\nWith Azlak's permission, Sophie and James started to inspect the seer in greater detail, lifting a paw and checking his scales and musculature. The human woman even clambered up onto Azlak's back, making the seer wince as she stepped over his wings. The two were clearly familiar with a drake of Azlak's size, and I watched on with curiosity with Alaron, Airil and Kaz by my side, the wyvern ignoring Ddraig Krateos's continued complaints for the moment. I didn't know what the humans were looking for, if anything, but they inspected every inch of the seer's body, much to his embarrassment.\n\nThe sun was starting to brush against the Sxinix Mountains in the west when the humans jumped down from Azlak's neck. If they had learnt anything from their observations they didn't share them with us. Instead they just patted Azlak's leg and, with a wave of farewell and a promise to return in the morning, then disappeared into the growing dusk.\n\nAlaron and Ddraig Krateos retired shortly after. It still sounded like they were arguing over the strength of the enemy, and what we could expect to face the next day. I didn't know why Ddraig Krateos seemed so eager to debate the wyvern, when it was clear that Alaron knew far more about the world than the Nixan. Their voices could be heard long after their tails faded into the darkness.\n\nAfter sharing a few quiet words with Azlak, Ddraig Boruc took to the air and left us too. Wanting to give Azlak and Kaz a little privacy, I put my wing over Airil and guided him back towards the camp. As we walked, a few drakes came out to meet us. Most whispered words of support and of hope, but few asked the questions I didn't want to face just yet. They asked what our chances were, if any of us would survive the coming days. I tried to respond with optimism, but in my heart I knew that many of these drakes would not live. Even in victory we would lose so many. My head sunk. How could I lie to so many and tell them that everything was going to be alright when I knew what was waiting for us?\n\nJust when my resolve was starting to weaken, Airil's wing reached out and touched mine. So long as I had him by my side, I knew I could be capable of anything. Every lie I told hurt me deeply, but I knew that each one was necessary. That was the life of a ddraig, I was beginning to learn; when to tell the truth and when to lie to protect my clan from the knowledge that would destroy them.\n\nBut sometimes, I knew I still needed to preserve a little time for my own selfish needs. I glanced across at Airil, a smile on my snout as a desire grew within me. If this was to be my last night, then I wanted to live it without regret at what could have been. No matter how much of it I had left, I wanted to pledge the remainder of my life to the Nixan at my side.\n\nIn his eyes I could see that same desire, and he reached his paw out to touch mine.\n\nThe crackle of Airil's magic filled the air until I was aware of nothing else. It was time to go somewhere private, where no prying eyes could interfere.\n\nThe rest of the night belonged to us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "I felt sick.\n\nThe demon inside my mind was getting stronger, I was sure.\n\nWe had burned Cinson's body, cremating him as per the tradition of our clans. Jesara had lit the flames with a small flint lighter, similar to ones the humans used. The fire had burnt bright, searing my eyes and imprinting the vision in my mind forever. My only true friend, dead by my teeth. There could be no redemption for me now, but still I refused to give in to the darkness that threatened to overwhelm me.\n\nIt would be so easy to give in, but I had to hold on. For the sake of the gryphons by my side, but most importantly, for the sake of my sister. I would be a threat to her for as long as the necuart prowled these lands. Until he was gone, I could not succumb to his darkness. I could only hope my mind was strong enough to resist. Already I had failed. I could not afford to do so again.\n\nNight had fallen, and the two gryphons had curled up by the fire we had built near the glowing chasm that fell into Nixa. The cold didn't bother me and the firelight burned my eyes, so I sat some distance away, staring up at the distant stars. I looked for the patterns we had been taught since almost the day we hatched. There were some who claimed that in the stars we could read all the stories of the past, but there would be none that told a story like mine. No drake had fallen to darkness like I had.\n\nThe insidious whispers in my mind had quietened down for now, but I knew they would return. Once they did I knew I would be a threat to anyone around me, and I could not risk that happening again. I had no choice. I slipped away into the darkness without a sound, trying my hardest not to look back. Jesara and Seris would be better off without me to endanger them.\n\nIt was the second time I had flown in the darkness, and this time I flew without fear of the cold. Now I embraced it. It gave me strength. The light of the stars was enough to navigate with, guiding me east. There was only one thing left for me to do. Only one way I could break this curse. I had to kill the necuart who had done this to me, and there was only one place I was going to find it. I knew infiltrating the human army should have filled me with terror, but all I felt was cold calm. I would either succeed or die. There was nothing else to it. Succeed or perish. And if, in doing so, I could help my sister by weakening her enemy, then all the better.\n\nI lost track of time as I flew. Feeling no weariness, I was surprised when the eastern sky started to brighten with the coming dawn. Like a dirty smudge on the horizon I could see my target. The city of canvas spread over many miles. The human army had awoken, but of Ellian and her allies I could see no sign. Looking behind me, it appeared that the two gryphons had not given chase either. I was completely alone.\n\nI dropped to the ground, intending to take the rest of the way on paw. The humans would have a harder time detecting me if I avoided the air. A host of drakes would be spotted with ease, but they would not be on the lookout for a lone dragon, and that gave me the advantage I needed. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. No plan, no hope of survival. Just to go in and kill the necuart who had cursed me.\n\nThe stench of humans was unmistakable as I approached the mass of tents, taking some shelter in a small forest that encroached upon the borders of their camp. Never before had I seen so many humans in the one place. I dreaded to think what their permanent cities were like, edifices of steel and stone, reaching up to the clouds but forever remaining bound to the earth. Humans had such a weird fascination with the sky, cursed never to experience the joys of flight. The skies were ours, but the reach of humanity was getting longer and bolder. Soon they would be able to pluck us from the air without leaving the ground.\n\nShouted voices overwhelmed each other as humans started to organise. I couldn't hear anything distinct, so I couldn't be sure if they had seen Ellian and her army. Occasionally I could see a human between tents, still so small at this distance. None of them were searching in my direction, so I continued unhindered through the dense undergrowth of the forest.\n\nThere weren't many birds or wildcats in the forest as there should have been. It seemed the humans' mere presence had scared most of them away. I could have used a snack before delving into the camp. There had to be something I could steal from the humans' supplies, even if it did mean having to endure the horrifically seared cooked meat the humans preferred. A growling belly would soon become the least of my worries.\n\nA nearby bang startled me, my wings flaring and hindlegs tensing, though flight was impossible amongst all these trees. The sound hadn't come from the camp, but from deeper into the forest. Whether human or other I couldn't be sure, but I kept a wary eye in that direction as I continued on.\n\nA shadow on my mind warned me of the presence of the necuart. Like a migratory bird knew where to fly for winter, I could tell exactly where amongst the masses of humans this cold creature was. The necuart's own magic that coursed through my veins would help assist his own death. I couldn't help but smile, baring my teeth to the uncaring foliage.\n\nFollowing the magnetic pull in my mind, I trekked to the northernmost point of the forest. I could hear a river nearby, no doubt providing the humans with all the water and fish they could need while they waited.\n\nThe river was a boundary between the forest and the camp, much to my annoyance. The cold water separated me from the canvas city, with no clear way to cross without taking to wing. I was sure the humans had to have something they used; the idiot James McArthur and his small group had built a bridge within a week. This army had been sitting idle ever since they destroyed Nixa. They should have had plenty of time to construct whatever they needed, especially if they knew they weren't planning on going anywhere for this long.\n\nAs far as I could see in either direction, tents lined up right to the far riverbank. On the outer edge, the tents were all quite small, but I had chanced a glimpse at some of the larger constructs in the middle of the camp. Guards were stationed at regular intervals along the bank. I would not be able to get past them with ease, so I slipped back into the shadows of the trees. I would need to find another way across.\n\nI decided to investigate the source of the loud noise from before, hoping it would give me an opportunity to cause a distraction amongst the guards. I crept onwards, keeping my wings tight against my sides to prevent them snagging on an overhanging branch. The floor was littered with dry leaves, a beautiful array of reds and oranges, down to the dull browns that had fallen earlier. They crunched beneath my paws, making silent movement impossible. Soon winter would be hitting with full force. It would be interesting to see how the humans would prepare against that.\n\nThe trees grew more closely together the further from the edge I walked. Light was scarce. What few green leaves still clung to the branches still provided enough coverage to almost completely block out the sunlight. But that was not all that was up there. A gentle chittering drew my attention to the shadows that seemed to be moving. Bats. Hundreds of them. I knew they had heard me, but for now they didn't seem at all interested in descending to the forest floor. They clung to the branches close to the canopy, barging each other out of the way for space to settle. Not once did any of them fall, their massive claws gripped the branches tight. I could see from here how muscular their legs were, much more so than any drakes were. Even an Axaatl drake would be weak in comparison.\n\nI crept on, doing my best to minimise the sound I made on the dry leaves. The last thing I wanted was to arouse the wrath of an entire colony of grave bats. Thankfully they let me pass, with just a few angry shrieks to bother me. Perhaps they could sense the necuart's curse within me.\n\nTwo more loud bangs alarmed me, a lot nearer now than before. It didn't sound like the construction that had been plaguing my small lair ever since James McArthur had moved in. If anything, it sounded almost like fighting. Had my sister come so soon?\n\nWhat I saw was unlike anything I had ever seen, and given the recent emergence of the gryphons, I was starting to wonder what else might be out there we didn't know about. Three drakes were in a small clearing, all Xitals judging from the crown of horns on their heads, but it what they faced that confused me. Resembling humans only in body structure but half the size, the eight creatures were covered in rust-red fur with black and white markings around the face. Their long, fluffy tails arched right up over their heads. Their limbs were short, adding to their squat appearance. Each of them carried some sort of weapon in six-fingered hands. Half held swords, while the others carried what appeared to be slings.\n\nThree large metallic structures had been knocked over. I couldn't be sure what they were, but they all leaked some foul smelling liquid from several small holes.\n\nOne of the drakes noticed me.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" she snapped, half turning her head so one eye was kept on the strange creatures. \"We can't hold off eight ailur. Get help. There might be more of them.\"\n\nI didn't hesitate, spinning around and scurrying back through the forest. I darted straight through the bat colony. Once more they did little more than screech at me as I passed through. I fought hard to hide the wide grin as I burst back out into sunlight. The Xitals had given me the perfect opportunity.\n\nI leapt across the river in one bound, using my wings to glide across to the far bank. Two of the guards saw me immediately, yelling and drawing their weapons at me.\n\n\"Ailur!\" I shouted, trying to draw a sense of panic. \"In the forest. They ambushed us. Hurry!\"\n\nThe guards didn't hesitate. Another dozen appeared seemingly from nowhere. I had to blink and stare, as they appeared to run across the surface of the river, barely making a splash. Then I saw, almost laughing. There was a bridge there, hidden just below the surface. I was almost impressed.\n\nNone of the guards looked back to see if I was joining them, so without a sound I slipped between the closest two tents. No one would confront me now. To the humans I was just another drake; I doubted they would be able to tell me apart from the Xitals. If I came across any drakes, I simply had to claim I had abandoned my clan, preferring to ally myself with the indomitable human forces.\n\nProgress was slow as I crept on. Though I was confident I would be safe no matter what, I still made the decision not to risk being seen if I could help it. There was a lot of activity around, but it seemed most of the humans were still attempting to wake up. Few wore any armour or even carried any weapons, and many of them carried small cups of some steaming liquid. By staying in the shadows, I was able to observe a lot, but learnt nothing from their behaviour. They truly were a curious species. Everything put me in the mind of James McArthur and what his humans had been building. It didn't feel like an army encampment.\n\nAs I paused to wait for some humans to pass, I thought I heard a noise from just behind me. I glanced back, but could see nothing there. A sense of unease was persistent though, a tingle at the base of my tail that I couldn't shake off. The feeling lingered, even as I scurried forward once more, following the magnetic pull in my head.\n\nI was not prepared for the weight on my tail, or the arms around my belly.\n\nI was thrown into a nearby tent before I even had the chance to react. With difficulty I kept my mouth closed, suppressing the shriek of fear that would have given me away. I rolled onto my back, trying to find purchase on the surprisingly soft floor. Before I could right myself, a strong hand held me down.\n\nI found myself looking into a pair of wide amber eyes surrounded by a mask of black fur. An ailur.\n\n\"You. Dragon. What you doing?\" The creature's voice was sharp and rapid. \"You ruin plan.\"\n\nAnother three ailur stood behind my interrogator. All three had aimed their slings at me. They may have been fighting the Xitals, but I couldn't be sure if they were friend or foe.\n\n\"I am here to slay a necuart,\" I said slowly, staring into the eyes of the ailur who held me. Not once did she look away, her large eyes fixed on mine. So she wasn't like a human, who couldn't stay looking at once thing for a few seconds. The challenge lingered until I was forced to blink.\n\n\"You lie. Tell truth,\" the ailur said. She lay one stubby black claw against my exposed throat. I wasn't willing to chance that my scales were tough enough to protect me.\n\n\"I am telling the truth. You saw my eyes. Tell me you can see the curse of that demon there,\" I snarled, trying to push the ailur off, but she was too strong. She had positioned herself well, out of reach of my claws and just too far away for my teeth.\n\nQuicker than I could react, the ailur reached out and grabbed my snout, holding it tight. She roughly pulled my head to the side, exposing the healed bite wounds on my neck. Her nose twitched. \"Dragon tells truth. Still don't trust. Why dragon ruin plans?\"\n\n\"I did no such thing. I didn't even know you were here,\" I protested. I tried to flare my wings, but the ailur had too strong a grip to make room.\n\n\"Tchh. Dragon bring guards. Not ready. Blood on dragon's claws.\" The ailur pressed her claws harder against my throat.\n\n\"I didn't know. I swear. I didn't know you were here,\" I spluttered, unable to move away from the furious creature.\n\n\"Then dragon help fix. Dragon come. Dragon Selu's now.\" The ailur snapped her fingers at one of her companions and pointed at me. \"Bring.\"\n\nThe ailur released me, and before another one could lay their hands on me I bounded up to my paws. \"Help fix what?\" I demanded, placing myself between the ailur and the canvas flap leading outside. \"What are you even doing here?\"\n\n\"Dragon silent. Or dragon muzzled,\" the ailur snarled. I noticed she had a roll of tape in her hand. I quickly snapped my mouth shut. I didn't want to give her the opportunity to use it.\n\nWe all emerged back into the sunlight. The four ailur completely surrounded me, staying too close to my sides to spread my wings to take flight. I wouldn't be able to go anywhere before they stopped me. They had trapped me without bonds. I couldn't help but feel begrudging respect for their skill, but had to wonder where they had learnt it. Drakes had not come across a race like the ailur before, to my knowledge, but they knew how to capture one.\n\nThe ailur moved in absolute silence, their padded feet not making any noise against the grass and mud. I struggled to match their pace, but every time I moved a little too slow the ailur on my tail gave me a firm hit to hurry up.\n\nWhen we paused for a moment, it allowed me to come up to the side of the lead ailur. \"You said your name was Selu?\" I asked her, keeping my voice low.\n\nThe ailur waved the roll of tape at me. \"Dragon silent,\" she hissed. Her nose twitched. \"Yes. Am Selu. No questions now. No words.\"\n\nKeeping a wary eye on the tape, I fell once more into silence as Selu led on. She seemed pretty confident about where we were going, expertly avoiding human eyes with such proficiency I had to wonder if something more was keeping us hidden. We were moving right towards the centre of the camp, not far away from where I was sure the necuart was residing. I doubted the monster would be active at this time; Jesara and Seris had been quite adamant in saying the necuart were only comfortable during the night.\n\nMore than once I was sure a human was about to look at us as they walked by, but each time their eyes just seemed to slip past. Some sort of magic had to be at work, but none of the ailur seemed to be doing anything to obscure us from sight.\n\nJust as I was beginning to wonder anew what the ailur's plan was, Selu thrust out her paw, calling us to a halt. In front of us was the largest tent I had seen so far, a towering spire of metal reaching high above. There was a hive of human activity around it. Surely this couldn't be our target? Even if the ailur had been using magic to get us this far, I doubted it would be sufficient to get us past ten guards, in addition to the dozens of humans almost constantly passing by. As we watched, five humans went into the tent, one barking orders at his four companions.\n\nThe ailur knew what to do. The three behind me slipped off into the shadows, vanishing far quicker than was natural. I blinked several times, but there was no trace of the ailur at all. There was some sort of magic protecting them. I shot a quizzical glance at Selu, but she just stared back at me with her wide amber eyes. She held a finger to her lips before gesturing down with her palm. Hesitantly, I crouched down, waiting for her next signal. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but with so many humans around I couldn't speak. I may be hidden from their sight, but I was sure they would be able to hear me still.\n\nIf a signal came, I must have completely missed it, as Selu suddenly hissed it me, waving me forward. I could see no discernible difference in human activity in front of me, but the ailur was aggressive in her gesticulation. I was to advance.\n\nI took my first steps out into the open, expecting a human to cry out and see me, but it never came. With a quiet hiss, a thick cloud of choking smoke filled my vision, obscuring absolutely everything from view. I could hear humans panicking, some coming perilously close to colliding with me as they blindly searched for the cause of the smoke.\n\nSelu guided me through the smoke, her paw on my wing. She appeared only as a dark shadow in the gloom. I wasn't sure how she was able to find her way, but she led us through the acrid smoke and into the massive tent, where the air was still clear.\n\nWhat met my eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen before, even amongst James McArthur's small colony. The metallic tower was grounded in the middle of the tent, supported by thick wires that were heavily reinforced where they were embedded deep into the ground. Thick beams of wood supported the great weight of the canvas like the skeleton of a great beast the humans were slowly constructing. More support wires were embedded into the wood. Strange machines of human technology were built around the tower, bright screens displaying bizarre symbols powered in some manner I didn't understand. A vast stack of rippled metal sheets were piled up to one side. Behind that was a dull, obsidian machine that was constantly vibrating. I couldn't even begin to comprehend what I was seeing.\n\nThere weren't many humans still inside, just the three that I could see. Before they even noticed us, Selu had taken them out with her sling. They crumpled to the ground without a sound.\n\n\"Quick now. Little time,\" Selu whispered, dragging me forward by my wing. Her hand had two thumbs, and both pinched into my vulnerable membranes. I gasped in pain, but aware that humans were just outside, I managed to keep my protests quiet. I hurried along after her loping gait as quickly as I could manage towards the centre of the tent.\n\n\"What are we even doing here?\" I yelped, a sharp jolt of pain spearing through my wing as the ailur pulled me along.\n\n\"Dragon help Selu. Dragon pull down aerial,\" Selu snarled, extending her arm up.\n\n\"Aerial? What's that?\" I asked, before following where she was pointing. \"You have to be joking.\" She was pointing at the tower.\n\n\"Selu no joke. Dragon pull support, and,\" the ailur said, before miming the tower crashing to the ground. She grinned. \"Lucky Selu find dragon.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"I still don't know what you expect me to do. I don't know what this thing is.\"\n\nThe ailur held out a small black cylinder she had taken from her pack. \"Dragon take and cut wires. Careful though. Very hot. Dragon wouldn't want to burn scales.\"\n\nTentatively I reached out and took the small device. It felt like a strip of charcoal and nothing more. Following Selu's guidance, I shifted my grip and squeezed one end. A burst of searing heat roared from the tip, blackening the grass beneath me. I almost dropped it in shock.\n\n\"Careful dragon. Firestick dangerous. Now go. Selu protect dragon from here,\" Selu said, slapping me on the shoulder and pointing up to where the support wires connected to the tower.\n\nWondering what I had gotten myself in to, I unfurled my wings and kicked off, circling around the tent until I reached the small support platform near the roof. Here was where the wires were all connected in a thick ring, providing the tower the support it needed to stay standing. A small slither of light shone on me. The top of the tower still looked so far away; I could only just make out the cluster of wires and protrusions at its tip.\n\nSelu had been joined by the other three ailur, all four of them prowling through the tent. I could see from my vantage that there were no more humans present, but without my viewpoint they probably didn't know that. I didn't feel confident shouting down to them. I could hear humans just outside, still trying to clear the smoke. I didn't know how much longer I had.\n\nHolding the firestick in both forepaws, I squeezed hard on it, grimacing as the intense heat blasted my scales. The closest wire was almost as thick as my body. I didn't know how this was going to work. I flicked my wings before pressing down on the wire with the firestick, and to my surprise it sliced through with such ease I almost toppled off the platform.\n\nWith a loud twang, the wire ruptured and plummeted, the broken end whipping around wildly until it snaked to the ground. The tower lurched and creaked ever so slightly. I was sure humans had to have heard that, but they would be the ailurs' concern.\n\nThe next few wires were all connected to the skeletal framework of wood that ran around the interior of the tent. These were a lot thinner than the ones that reached all the way to the ground. It was only when I cut the wires away that I recognised the wooden beams for what they were. James McArthur and his humans had built the same sort of things. They were constructing permanent buildings. The sea of tents wasn't a resting army. It was a colony. If there were more of these skeleton frames being constructed then they were creating a new city. This was where they were building their new homes. I felt like tearing down the whole framework, but I had a different task for now.\n\nThree wires hung from the framework before I moved on to the next thick wire. As it fell, the broken end collided with the canvas, tearing a giant gash down the fabric. I hurried on. If the humans didn't know we were here before, then they would now.\n\nI had three more wires down before I heard the first human shout. Half the support was gone, and the tower started to wobble in the breeze. I just needed a few minutes longer.\n\nThe ailur were already starting to fire off their slings, a seemingly never-ending barrage of pellets emerging from the small pouches at their waists. No human made it more than a couple of paces inside before they were struck down. Most were still clearing their eyes of the lingering smoke, never even seeing their attackers before falling.\n\nThe tower was starting to groan ominously as it swayed against taut wires, straining from the massive weight tugging at them. A few more cuts with the firestick and gravity did the rest. With a loud wrench, the remaining support wires pulled themselves free of the wooden skeleton, splintering wood and raining debris down on the ailur.\n\nWithout anything left to hold it up, the tower began to topple, bringing the whole tent down with it. I leapt from my perch, diving down quickly so I wasn't caught up in the falling canvas roof. I heard howls of dismay from the humans, as well as gunshots fired seemingly at random into the chaos. One ailur shrieked in pain, but at least three humans were hit in the crossfire too.\n\nI landed right behind the four ailur, just as the tower crashed against the ground, smashing apart the stack of rippled metal. Everyone, human and ailur, were thrown to the ground by the sheer impact. There were a few moments of silence before the maelstrom of canvas and wood fell all around us. We were lucky not to be hit by any of the debris as we quickly started moving.\n\nWhatever the ailurs' exit strategy was, they were already putting it into effect, Selu slapping something against her arm as she ran. I kept close, knowing they were my only hope of escaping with my life. If the humans caught me, I was as good as dead. So much for sneaking in and killing the necuart without being detected.\n\nOnce again we ran without detection, despite the masses of humans that were running in the opposite direction. The destruction of their aerial tower had attracted attention from all parts of the camp, it seemed. Even a few traitorous Xital drakes were amongst those approaching the destruction.\n\nWe managed to find a small, isolated tent for temporary shelter. A multitude of aromas struck my nose. I recognised some of the scents from James McArthur's colony, the variety of food they cooked like bread and cured meats. None of it interested me, but one of the ailur started to raid the various containers. Another of the ailur was injured in the arm, and while he received treatment from his companion, Selu took me to the side.\n\n\"Dragon did good,\" she said, a wide maniacal grin on her furry face as she took the firestick from my paws. \"Might need dragon all the time.\"\n\nSelu accepted an apple from her companion, but when she offered me the same I refused, wrinkling my snout up at the green fruit. I didn't know how humans could stand such vile things, but Selu munched through it with her amber eyes lit up in pleasure.\n\n\"Why are you even here?\" I asked. It was a question that had been nagging at my mind for a while. When the gryphons had come, there had been no mention of any ailur for allies.\n\nSelu blinked. \"To destroy aerial.\"\n\n\"But who sent you?\"\n\nSelu gnashed her teeth and grinned. \"Human have many enemies. My master have many allies. Chronicler control like great web. Dragon doesn't even know is caught on it. One string tugs,\" Selu paused as she flicked my leg. \"And the rest will answer. Selu friend of dragon. Nothing else important.\"\n\nI snorted, but Selu didn't appear ready to elaborate on her motives. I could only hope that she was being truthful, and that she fought for the same allies.\n\n\"Can I count on you to help with my task?\" I asked instead, realising I was going to get no more out of her.\n\nSelu held up her hands. \"No, dragon. Selu will not fight necuart. Dragon's task is for dragon alone. Selu must report to master. Warn master of terrible weapon humans possess.\"\n\n\"I helped you though. Why would you not offer the same in return?\"\n\n\"No. Dragon almost ruined plan. Dragon redeem by helping. Selu owe dragon nothing,\" the ailur snarled. She clenched her fist, and for a moment I was sure she was about to hit me. Then she tugged on something on her glove, and to my horror she faded from sight until nothing but a shimmer remained.\n\nI spun around, but the other ailur had already disappeared as well. I was alone once more. Unleashing a snarl, I knocked aside some of the food the ailur had dropped. They had left me in the middle of an army of humans on high alert after we had destroyed their aerial. Selu had not made my mission any easier, but as I closed my eyes and tried to re-find the magnetic pull to the necuart, I was pleased to realise it was not too far away.\n\nIf I could avoid detection, then perhaps I would still be able to fulfil my goal. The chaos that had spread amongst the humans could be used to my advantage.\n\nThe darkness in my mind grew ever blacker. The time for distractions was over. Either the necuart was going to die, or I would. It was time to meet my fate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "Dawn had come. A chorus of birdsong broke the silence, but woke few. I knew I hadn't been the only one to find sleep elusive. I had been invited to sit with the ddraigs and haeraigs as the sun rose, taking care not to throw them into shadow. They would all need to warm up as quickly as possible. With the luxury of the magic in my veins, I didn't need to worry about such a thing. It was something I would almost miss, once Ddraig Boruc restored me.\n\nKyrus was the most alert of those present, though almost all of his attention was focussed on his feathers, preening them back into position if they had been displaced during his rest. By his side lay Alaron, his wing-arms spread out in front of him. He was muttering something to himself, too quietly for me to hear.\n\nI was sure everyone wanted a lot longer to rest, but it wasn't long before Alaron rose to his paws, calling for the others to rouse themselves. Ddraig Ellian was the quickest to rise. Her eyes were kept firmly to the north, where our fate lay. Either the humans would be chased from our land, or we would die in the attempt.\n\nAlaron didn't keep us long, detailing our plans once more. Then he sent the ddraigs away to gather their forces. There would be just one short flight before we reached the humans. Advance scouts had already gone ahead to find a suitable place to launch our attack from. By the time we arrived, we would know everything there was to know about the local terrain and the status of the human forces. From there, I would likely be the first to engage, a shock force to inflict as much damage as possible.\n\nWithin half an hour we were all in the air once more, a thunder of wings filling the morning air. I took the lead, Alaron and Kyrus following in my wake, giving them a much easier flight. I remembered back to the first time I had taken lead in a flight, back when I was leading Anzig over the mountains. Then I had been utterly terrified at the sheer prospect of flying before anyone; now I lead an entire army and the only panic I felt was the prospect of facing a legion of humans. I couldn't explain where my confidence had come from; discovering my true identity had certainly been a part of that, but it had begun much earlier than that. Now I found myself to be the son of a ddraig, of Nixa no less, I guessed a little more confidence was only natural.\n\nThe scouts met with us about halfway. Though they gave me a wide berth, they quickly relayed all they knew to the wyvern and gryphon just behind me. I listened in to what they had to say, taking in every detail I could. The drakes didn't really understand most of what they had seen in the human camp, but they were able to provide a lot of information about the lay of the land. There was a large river and plenty of hills that would provide us with cover, as well as a place to shelter and rest. We would need it too, for without it they would be able to pick us off from range.\n\nI was on the constant lookout for any aerial threats as we neared the human camp, but the sky was completely clear. There was no sign of any grave bats or enhanced drakes. The drakes, I could understand. The humans had lost the Axinstone once more, so they no longer had the power needed to fuel the intense transformations \u2013 restorations, as James McArthur insisted on calling them. Despite the growing sunlight I still feared some patrolling bats, but the sky remained clear.\n\nWe landed just out of sight of the human camp, splitting the army off into different groups. Each ddraig, even those from the minor clans, would have a force to control, all answerable to Alaron. Kyrus would naturally lead the gryphons. I would be my own army, taking orders only from the wyvern as I went wherever I would be needed.\n\nWe were faced with a short wait for James McArthur and our allied humans to catch up with us, so Alaron took the ddraigs and myself up to the brow of the nearest hill to look out over our enemy.\n\nThe camp spread out almost from horizon to horizon, a sea of canvas that stank with the reek of humanity. Here and there though, were structures I had not seen in my panicked escape. Most notable was the massive spire of metal that rose up from the very centre of the camp, but there were all sorts of wooden frames located around the outskirts of the camp. Despite the early hour, I could just about make out some humans climbing these frames, swarming them like bees around a flowering plant.\n\nI pointed out what I could see to the others, aware that my senses were somewhat sharper than I had known before my transformation. They may not be able to see what I could see.\n\n\"This is no mere army,\" Alaron hissed as he squinted, trying to get the vest view he could. \"They're workers. This is a city they're building.\"\n\n\"A city? In our territory?\" Ddraig Krateos growled. The Nixan crouched over the Axinstone. He had not once let it out of his sight, not even trusting his daughter to look after it. He flexed his claws, gouging through the soft earth with ease. \"This land belongs to Nixa. They have no right to settle here.\"\n\n\"They defeated your clan in battle,\" Kyrus pointed out, the gryphon standing over Alaron. \"Does that not give them the right?\"\n\nDdraig Krateos growled, giving no answer to the gryphon. I turned my focus back to the camp, trying to work out where most of the humans were keeping their numbers, and what was being used to construct their new city.\n\nIt was difficult to see, but there seemed to be a lot of activity around the base of the tall tower. Even as I watched the spire seemed to rock.\n\n\"Something's happening over there,\" I said, interrupting another squabble that had erupted between Ddraig Krateos and Kyrus. Even as we watched, the tower seemed to crumple, before collapsing to the earth with a resounding crash that I could easily hear. A shockwave of dust and debris plumed into the air.\n\nWe all watched in stunned silence, none of us sure exactly what it was we had just witnessed.\n\n\"That\u2026 couldn't be Xigax, could it?\" Ddraig Ellian whispered.\n\n\"Surely not,\" Ddraig Metrus replied, stepping forward to stand with Ddraig Ellian. The Elteean dragoness stayed low next to her superior, her belly kept low to the grass. \"Ddraig Nunahra isn't expected today. Not until tomorrow or the day after, surely?\"\n\nDdraig Ellian shook her head. \"But what other allies do we have?\" she asked, waving her paw at the developing carnage in the human camp. She looked up at Kyrus. \"This was no accident.\"\n\n\"Esperance sent only us. This had nothing to do with her,\" the gryphon replied. His wings fluttered nervously against his back.\n\n\"So there's someone else helping us?\" Ddraig Ellian said.\n\n\"I don't think we can rely on that,\" Alaron cautioned. \"The enemy of our enemy doesn't necessarily mean they're our ally.\"\n\n\"But anything that weakens them puts us another wingbeat closer to victory,\" Ddraig Krateos said with a growl. He was about to say something more, before Ddraig Boruc raised his paw. Despite being from a much lesser clan than the Nixan, everyone fell silent and waited for the ancient dragon to speak.\n\n\"That was some sort of radio tower that fell. Without it, George may have no way of communicating with his allies in Kernow, or of sending information back,\" the old ddraig said. He paused to think. \"My family and clan have had long relations with those on our eastern borders. It could well be we have received assistance from Aegia, from the werewolves who live there. There are even a few ailur colonies coming north again. They may have been recruited.\"\n\n\"Will they join us in battle?\" Alaron asked, arching his neck up.\n\nDdraig Boruc shook his head and closed his eyes. \"No. They are not warriors. The ailur will not fight unless they must, and this is not Aegia's war to fight. They would not risk open war with Kernow.\"\n\n\"So be it,\" Alaron said. He looked across to Ddraig Krateos. \"Will the humans be able to access the Axinstone from across the battlefield?\"\n\nThe Nixan ddraig put his paw over the precious stone, as though a human was reaching out to grab it there and then. \"No,\" he growled. \"I tested it with one of McArthur's humans. If just one drake was magically connected to the Axinstone, they were not able to reach its power. Only we will be able to use it.\"\n\n\"Good. We can't risk their wizards being at full strength. They're dangerous enough as it is,\" Alaron said.\n\n\"What about that other rune?\" Ddraig Ellian asked, stepping forward and glancing up to me. \"The one Azlak and Kaz found beneath Laxtal?\"\n\nAlaron shook his head. \"No, only Bri'An's rune has the power needed to fuel the change. The leopard rune is powerless by itself,\" the wyvern explained, before turning his focus back on the rest of the small group. \"We attack while there's still some confusion. Azlak, you will go first. Ddraig Metrus, you will be next. To all of you, may the wind rise beneath your wings. Listen to my orders, and we might just yet survive this day.\"\n\n\"I'm ready,\" I rumbled, trying to suppress the terror that was welling up in my chest.\n\n\"Go and make your final preparations and return here. This hill gives a good vantage of the whole battlefield. We shall command from here,\" Alaron said, turning and bowing his head to each of us, which was repeated back to him. As one, they all took to wing and left me alone. I looked out across the plains. Where there was now a few sparse trees and undulating grasslands would soon be a battlefield of terror and bloodshed. The river that bordered the human camp would run red with the fallen.\n\nI wasn't ready for this.\n\nThe last few minutes went by far too quickly. Before I even knew it, Alaron had returned. Kyrus followed just behind him. At the bottom of the hill the gryphons had started to line up in ranks, a few of the higher in command walking through and inspecting everything from feathers to claws.\n\nBehind the gryphons was Ddraig Ellian, leading her large army of Laxtal and Axaatl drakes. It was the full force Laxtal could muster. Though I no longer truly felt a part of that clan, I still feared the damage that could be done to the drakes I had grown up with.\n\nThe other clans lined up beside the Laxtals, with Ddraig Metrus leading her drakes alongside the gryphons. Clan Eltee would fly just behind me, forming the first line of assault on the human forces. Not one of the drakes showed any sign of fear, every single member of the minor clan holding their heads high with pride.\n\n\"On your command, Azlak,\" Alaron said, forgoing any attempt to give a speech to his army. Everything that needed to be said had been said. All that was left was death.\n\nI spread my wings and behind me several hundred drakes did the same. Launching myself into the air, I unleashed a powerful roar that reverberated through the air. Magic coursed through me as I beat my immense wings, closing the distance to the humans in just a few short moments. I swooped low over the tents a few times, searching for possible targets and giving the Elteeans a chance to catch up once more, as I had left them far behind already.\n\nThe humans panicked as they tried to organise, just a few lone shots fired up at me, the bullets ricocheting uselessly from my scales. From the corner of my eye I could see the Elteeans approaching; I knew it was imperative I kept them out of the direct line of fire, or else they would be picked from the sky with ease.\n\nInhaling deeply, I could feel magic swell in my throat, a fierce burning sensation that kept on building until I could no longer contain it. A ferocious spout of flame burst from my jaws, igniting a row of tents and sparking a few small explosions as the canvas and the contents it protected was superheated.\n\nTwice more I passed over this small section of the camp, unleashing the flame of legend upon the defenceless humans. The Elteeans descended down in my wake, tearing into the unprepared foe with tooth and claw before rising back out of reach. Before the humans could even arm themselves with their guns they were out of sight, falling on another group of victims. They moved with much greater agility than I was able to manage, but even the shots that struck my more vulnerable wings failed to do any damage.\n\nFrom towards the centre of the camp I could hear sounds of barked orders. The humans were starting to organise. I gave a bellowed roar, ordering the Elteeans to begin their retreat.\n\nAs I did so, another distant roar reverberated back. This was no echo, and the sound was all too familiar. Nightwings had come. The spectre from the past had been restored to her full glory; evidently the humans had still had enough magic left for one last transformation. Behind her flew an army of drakes, rising from the far end of the camp.\n\nBehind us, Alaron reacted, sending forth Kryus's flock of gryphons. I led the Elteeans out of range of the humans' guns before turning around and waiting, halfway between the human camp and draconic forces.\n\nI roared out a challenge towards Nightwings, flying above the ranks of Elteean drakes.\n\nMy sister answered the call.\n\nThe battle had begun."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "Our fate had come. Drake fought drake. Gryphons and humans prepared themselves to die in our wars. The army of George and Tsona faced us at last.\n\nBy my side, Kyrus shrieked out orders to his gryphons, sounding like a hunting eagle diving on its prey. Half of Kyrus's gryphons had remained behind, shuffling their wings and clacking their beaks in anticipation. Alaron barked out commands to Ddraig Metrus, trying to control the movements of her clan before the swarm of drakes descended upon them.\n\nThe first impact was devastating, hundreds of drakes falling from the sky in the first moments of combat, wings shredded and throats torn. A couple of gryphons also fell, but from my vantage most of the losses came from Clan Eltee. I winced as I watched the bodies fall.\n\n\"We must send more out there,\" I cried to Alaron.\n\n\"No. Hold. They must not know our full strength, not yet,\" the wyvern replied, his eyes not once moving from the battle in front.\n\n\"They're dying out there,\" I protested, clawing the soft earth.\n\n\"This is war,\" Alaron replied in a harsh tone. \"There is going to be death. Stay put Ddraig Ellian. Your time will come soon.\"\n\nI bowed my head, forcing my wings to remain tight against my back. My paws were restless, but if I kept them on the ground I wouldn't be tempted to leap into the fray and disobey Alaron's orders.\n\nHigh above the fight, Azlak circled with the great dragoness I could only assume was Nightwings. The two snarled at each other, few words being exchanged as they descended into mindless hatred. The two were brother and sister, I had to remind myself, fighting on opposite sides. I wondered where the third sibling was, the dragon I had grown up believing was my cousin. Where was Anzig in all of this?\n\nFrom out of the sea of tents came row upon row of battle-ready humans. Some carried swords and crossbows, but most appeared to be equipped with the new guns that had emerged recently. Swords and bolts didn't bother a drake, but the guns were a thing to be feared and respected.\n\nAlaron had seen this movement too. \"Ddraig Ellian, send out the Axaatl dragons to counter the humans,\" he barked out. I turned around and repeated the order to Hyantl, the commander of Axaatl's army. The large dragon bowed his head before growling to his drakes.\n\nThe Axaatls loped forward, preferring to go around the hill than over it. With them ran a few specially selected Nixan drakes, looking pitifully weak and small next to their larger brethren. Airil was not amongst them. Alaron had other plans for my mate.\n\nWhile Alaron turned his attention back to how the fight was progressing in the air, my focus was solely on the Axaatls. They started sprinting halfway across the plain, dodging falling drake and gryphon as the human army mobilised. I could just about hear the calls from the human commanders as they prepared their first volley of gunfire.\n\nI winced as a series of explosions rippled out from the human front line. The Nixans did their job though, diverting or blocking the bullets with their magic. By my count, only three Axaatls fell before they smashed into the humans, tearing and slashing with tooth and claw.\n\nStronger and tougher than the humans, it wasn't long before the Axaatls started to even out the casualties in the air, so much so the Xitals started to disengage and drop down to help their human allies. The wounded Elteeans took advantage of the reduced numbers to make a retreat, and Alaron gave me permission to send some of the Lilisxi drakes to replenish their numbers. I growled when I saw Ddraig Bakucic amongst their number. I had not even known he had joined us, and was both envious that he got to engage with our enemy, but also furious he was risking his life so early on. Were he to fall, his clan would be devastated.\n\nI was sure this was not the full might the humans had to offer. Only about five hundred opposed the Axaatls, but we were sure many thousands more were safely holed up inside the camp. But the first victory was ours, as after barely twenty minutes there were no humans left alive on the battlefield. Led by Hyantl, the Axaatls took to the air to kill or chase away the remaining Xitals. That was over quickly, the Xitals shrieking as the fled back to the humans.\n\nOf Nightwings and Azlak there was no sign. I had lost track of them in the chaos, though I could occasionally hear a muffled roar. They must have soared high above even the clouds.\n\nDdraig Metrus could barely look up as the survivors returned to receive attention from the few Nixan healers we had access to. Her clan had been hit hardest; already half their number lay dead.\n\nOnly those with serious wounds were treated by the healers. Those with mere scratches would be forced to endure the pain until the battle was over. Even strengthened by the Axinstone, the healers would be terribly overworked by the sheer numbers. About fifty gryphons were able to assist with healing, but few were as effective as the Nixans.\n\n\"That went surprisingly well,\" Ddraig Krateos growled. He looked down at the healers as they started to spread through the landed drakes and gryphons.\n\nAlaron bared all his teeth in a wide grin. \"It is far from over. It has only just begun.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "I growled under my breath at being abandoned by the ailur. Since disappearing without a trace I had neither seen nor heard from them. It was almost as though they had never even been here to begin with. They could have at least provided me with some of their technology to keep me hidden, but the more I walked the more I realised that I didn't seem to be having any issues with that. The humans were so distracted by something else that I was able to pass by without any problem. Even those that I knew had seen me did not stop me. I was just another drake to them. Pathetic humans didn't even know an enemy when they saw one.\n\nA deafening roar filled the sky, soon answered by a second. A few moments later a dark shadow crossed the sky. I glanced up in time to see the great spectre pass overhead, and it was all I could do to keep calm and not flee. I had seen such a creature before, but not so close. The demon they called Nightwings was every bit as terrifying as I had been told.\n\nSudden urgency filled the camp, humans all running in one direction, some dressing themselves on the move. That could only mean one thing. War had come. Ellian was here, and I still had a necuart to kill before he wreaked havoc on the battlefield.\n\nFor now I had to ignore what was going on behind me, try to forget the peril my sister was in. If the necuart still lived by sunset, then I knew my sister would perish. He could not be allowed to survive this day, and I was the only one who could stop him. His dark magic could not defeat me, my mind still intact despite all he had inflicted upon me.\n\nWhen I finally found the wall of darkness, I almost forgot all of that and fled. Sheer terror emanated out from the swirling gloom, a shadow that needed no source. The darkness was so absolute I doubted any light would ever be able to penetrate it. I trembled, digging my claws into the soft soil, my courage threatening to abandon me completely.\n\nThat was where I had to go though, and slowly I edged forward until my nose touched the shadows. Sudden cold permeated my whole body, sapping almost all the strength in me. The voice in my head, silent ever since leaving Nixa, was awoken. A cold laughter filled my mind, drowning out all other sounds.\n\n\"Little dragon has come to me?\" the necuart chuckled. I couldn't be sure if the voice was real or inside my head. I decided that it didn't really matter. I had to ignore it as best I could. \"How wonderful. I could use you, and you brought yourself all the way here.\"\n\nI didn't answer. I tried not to think at all, knowing that any weakness would be pounced upon. I focussed on one paw stepping in front of the other. In the absence of light my vision was completely blinded, not even a shadow moved in front of me. I couldn't even be sure I was moving at all, and not just pacing on the spot.\n\n\"Are you here to submit your will to me?\"\n\nAgain I chose not to speak. Not to think. One paw pressed to the ground, wet away from the sun's light and warmth. Something brushed against me. Fur and leathery skin pushed against my scales. Chittering laughter bombarded my ears.\n\n\"My bats like you. You will be a good ally to them.\"\n\nI growled as the bats moved away again. I could still hear them, their breathing booming in the total silence. Eyes gleamed red. Time seemed to pass inconsistently. A breath felt like a lifetime, yet an hour could have passed by in mere seconds.\n\n\"I have come to find you, yes,\" I whispered to the darkness. My heart was constricted in my throat as terror threatened to overwhelm me. \"Would you reveal yourself to me?\"\n\nThe necuart laughed again as a cold wind blew against me. It bit into me, cutting through my scales and chilling my bones. I closed my eyes, for all the difference it did to my vision, and flung my wing in front of my face. That barely helped at all as I was submerged in icy dread. I could hardly breathe, and I knew then that the necuart was standing in front of me.\n\nI stopped my blind pacing.\n\n\"I thought you were a little bigger last time. No matter. Soon you will answer only to me,\" the necuart said, his voice spearing icicles through my wing, which I tentatively withdrew from my face.\n\nI looked up to see the cold figure from my nightmares. He could almost be mistaken from a human, but his skin was as white as fresh snow, and his thin, almost skeletal form was too delicate for any human. Then there were his eyes. They were as red as blood, and radiated a sense of malice that made me shiver more than the cold did.\n\n\"Are you ready to submit?\" the necuart said, looking down at me with a wolfish grin. Two small fangs jutted out from beneath his top lip.\n\nI gasped as the wound in my neck ached, but chose to keep my silence. Any words I could say he'd twist and throw back at me, using them to burrow his way into my mind. I could not allow him that opportunity.\n\nThe necuart snickered. \"Still resisting? You think your mind is so strong, to keep me out, but let me tell you this, dragon.\" The necuart reached out with his hand, gently touching my scales with one finger. I almost hissed as the side of my neck went numb to his touch. \"You all fall in the end. There is no escaping your fate. Struggle all you will, it will make no difference in the end. Just give in and make it easy.\"\n\n\"I am stronger than you think,\" I whispered, knowing that at any moment the creature could attack, and then it would all be over. If the necuart didn't kill me, there was a ring of grave bats all around us. Three more swooped around overhead. I would not escape this alive, I knew that now.\n\n\"Then you will be a powerful ally. But you are foolish to think you can resist me,\" the necuart said, withdrawing his finger. An angry buzz of sensation returned, like I was being jabbed with hundreds of small needles all at once.\n\nVisions streamed past my eyes. Darkness and shadows were all I saw, twisting and forming grotesque creatures. I didn't know whether they were meant to intimidate me, but I couldn't feel any terror. I felt nothing, merely blinking each phantom away. Neither of us moved, the necuart glaring down at me with his hand outstretched. There was anger in his red eyes, flashing before me between each of his phantasms. I could feel the shadows battering at my mind, but the horror of killing Cinson created a wall they could not penetrate.\n\nI growled, keeping my eyes affixed on the necuart, waiting for the moment he attacked, but still he stalled. Still he didn't attack, resorting to his shadow tricks. I didn't know what he was waiting for. Surely he wasn't still hoping to turn me as his ally? I wondered if I should make the first strike, to surprise him before he had the chance to react.\n\nBefore he had a chance to recognise my intentions, I tensed my hindlegs and pounced for him, catching him unawares as my claws raked down his side. The necuart hissed as I leapt away, quickly spinning around as I landed so I continued to face him. Two deep gouges of red ran down his face, but I had missed what I had been aiming for; his cold, dark eyes.\n\n\"Fool of a dragon. I offered you power untold, and that's how you answer me?\" he growled, the darkness looming ever greater beyond his shoulders. I could feel his voice in my head again, urging me to obey, but there was desperation there now. He no longer wanted me to obey; he needed it. He feared me, and that gave me a small seed of confidence, that somehow I would be able to find a way to defeat the creature.\n\nDigging my claws into the soft earth, I tried to glare at the necuart in a way I hoped would be threatening. \"You offered no such thing. I would have been your slave and nothing more. You offered me nothing,\" I spat, feeling victory in how the necuart narrowed his eyes coldly. I was annoying him; that much was clear.\n\nHe moved so quickly, I barely had time to react. The necuart leapt for me, hands outstretched and grappled with me, pinning me down to the ground. I was just about able to roll onto my back, lashing out at his chest with my hindpaws. The creature howled in pain as my claws found their target, tearing into his vulnerable flesh.\n\nThe necuart backed away, and I was glad to see he was holding his chest in pain, his dark clothes stained with crimson. \"You should not be able to do this. Why can I not control you?\" the creature snarled, his already pale face turning whiter as his panic grew.\n\nAll around us the grave bats fluttered and shrieked, a few of them swooping down to us, but none interfered just yet. What they were waiting for I couldn't tell, but they seemed reluctant to attack.\n\nThe necuart returned to his stalking, keeping his distance from me. He was wary now, treating me as a threat. Whatever control he had possessed over me was gone, just a small whisper at the back of my mind that I was able to ignore. That had been one of the few weapons he had that could harm me, and the creature knew that. Without that, the necuart was as weak as an unarmed human. I braced my hindlegs against the ground.\n\n\"Now, listen,\" the necuart said, raising his bloodstained hands. He had been reduced to pleading, but I was in no mood for mercy. I pounced.\n\nThe grave bats shrieked and swarmed as I leapt past the necuart's timid defence, my teeth clamping around his weak throat. I expected to feel claws tearing into my back, but still the bats didn't attack. They just watched as the necuart flailed, trying to get a grip on my back to throw me clear, but my scales were too smooth, his hands too weak.\n\nBlood poured into my mouth, the taste of it making me growl and squeeze tighter. Flesh and muscle tore beneath my teeth, the necuart's movements growing ever weaker until, with a final desperate attempt to grapple my wings, he fell still. I tore his throat away, a last gasp of air gurgling out with a spray of blood.\n\nI panted, the voice constantly running at the back of my head ceasing. The silence of my mind was overwhelming, but it didn't last for long. A cacophony of voices poured into my skull, a high pitched chittering that never ceased. I shrieked and looked up to the darkening sky, now visible once more as the necuart's unnatural darkness had dispersed.\n\nI had lost track of time. Many hours had passed, as night was almost about to fall. Over the voices in my head, I could hear humans nearby, shouting and yelling, adding to the maelstrom of noise that swirled around me. Gunshots rung out and the screams of human and drake in pain competed with each other.\n\nOne of the grave bats landed just in front of me. We looked at each other eye-to eye, the bat shuffling awkwardly on his wings as he slowly approached. He chittered at me, and my eyes widened as I heard his voice separate from the cacophony.\n\n\"Master,\" the bat said. \"Master.\"\n\n\"Master. Master. Master!\"\n\nThe bats were chanting. Just one word bombarding my mind. Master. I was master. They were mine. Perfect. A cold smile spread across my snout. My tongue lapped at the blood that clung to my scales.\n\nMy eyes were drawn east, where the battle would be raging between dragon and human. My bats were eager for blood. Soon they would drink their fill.\n\nI spread my wings and slipped away into the night. An army of bats followed behind me. There would be death beneath the light of the moon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "We were evenly matched. Brother and sister. Our private battle took us high above everyone else. Up into the clouds we twisted and turned, trying to rake each other with claws or scorch scales with fire. Neither of us could hit the other, just a couple of glancing blows that caused no injury. She had said nothing to me yet, no taunts or insults, just savage snarls and roars of anger.\n\nI was sure she was holding back on me, pulling out of her dives at the last moment, unwilling to properly make contact with me. Only once we were above the clouds and out of sight of the battle armies below did she speak, and her words were not what I expected.\n\n\"Do you think they can still see us?\" she asked, her expression softening as she pulled out of another attack, leaving me to parry at empty air. She hovered, wings beating slowly to keep her steady, while I circled around her, expecting a trap. She kept one eye on me at all times, but otherwise didn't move but for her beating wings. \"You are my brother. I do not wish to harm you.\"\n\nI growled, making sure to show off the numerous small wounds she had already inflicted upon me.\n\n\"To keep up the pretence,\" Nightwings said, answering my unspoken question as she stared down at the swirling white clouds below us. \"Do you trust me, Azlak?\"\n\n\"I would never trust you again,\" I spat, glaring at my sister. I would not let her out of my sight, wary of any sudden movements. She would not lull me into a false sense of security and then attack. Yet the lunge I expected never came, in fact she turned away and slowly started to fly from the battlefield below the clouds, heading away to the north.\n\n\"Will you follow, at least?\" she asked, looking over her shoulder.\n\nI hesitated. I knew I couldn't trust her, but I couldn't see why she would need to pull me away from the others just so she could try to kill me somewhere else. If she wanted to attack, then she could do so right away. A tiny seed of doubt formed in my mind. Perhaps she was being genuine, and she didn't want to hurt me at all. Reluctantly, I started to follow her.\n\nWe had travelled many miles before Nightwings led me back beneath the clouds, several hours of non-stop flight for most drakes. No words had been shared between us, leaving me alone to my uncertain thoughts. At first I wondered where she had taken me, but I soon recognised the great river in the distance that marked the northern boundary of Nixa. Everything was quiet and peaceful, with just the wind blowing through the long grass and the occasional chirp of an alarmed bird to disturb the quiet.\n\nOnce we landed I expected Nightwings to start talking, but she kept her silence. She lay in the grass, head held low and tail wrapped around her legs. I stayed on my paws, alert and ready, constantly expecting an ambush. Even though I could smell no humans or other drakes in the area, I still knew I should be prepared.\n\n\"I guess I owe you an explanation,\" Nightwings said slowly. She pawed at the soft earth beneath her.\n\n\"You owe much more than just that, but an explanation will do for a start,\" I growled. I thrashed my tail behind me, smashing aside a small bush in the process. I winced as a few spiny branches slipped in between my scales, shaking them free and trying to ignore the smug smirk on my sister's face.\n\n\"You know some of the story, how George is spearheading a campaign to expand Kernow's borders. There's not much to the south, but this side of the mountains? To Kernow, this is empty land, with the dying remains of a once proud species scattered through it. To them, dragons are worthless, and are certainly not a threat, but there used to be respect there. I fear I changed that,\" Nightwings said, turning away and clawing at the grass.\n\n\"How do you mean?\" I asked, a little tension slipping from my shoulders as I started to settle down in front of her. My senses were still alert for any danger, but so long as I stayed out of striking range of my sister I knew I'd be safe enough.\n\n\"It was the Axinstone,\" Nightwings said slowly as the tip of her tail twitched. \"George didn't know about it until just a few years ago, and even then it was only when I picked up on it in a Nixan dream. I explained it to him, and he was more excited than I had ever seen him. He kept on yelling about how it was the lost one of eight, but he never explained that to me.\"\n\n\"One of eight? That sounds familiar,\" I said, frowning as I tried to think of where I had heard something like that before, but I simply couldn't place it. I shook my head. It wasn't important for now. Instead I needed to know just what Maznar had done to spark this war.\n\n\"I was sent to steal the Axinstone. I'd already suspected I was a Nixan and would be able to break through the defences the clan had to protect itself from outsiders,\" Nightwings said, closing her eyes and sighing. \"It was all too easy. I even spoke with my\u2026 our father when I was there, but he never suspected a thing. I took the Axinstone and fled at night. No one ever knew it was me.\n\n\"When I took the stone back to Trevena, George was ecstatic. He was able to tap into the magic of it and do some incredible things, the greatest of course being this,\" she said, flaring her wings. Though I tensed, she made no further movements. \"He said he was returning me to our former glory, and that I should be thankful. At first I was, but then, after a while I began to wonder what sort of monster he'd turned me into. Until he started experimenting on other dragons, there has never been any other dragon like me.\"\n\nI wanted to reach out to her, to place my paw on hers, but I resisted the urge. \"How did you resist their control? It was only because of Esperance's magic that I was able to hold them back myself.\"\n\nNightwings shook her head. \"They never had any need to control me like that. I always knew it was obey them or die. They had me under their thumb from the moment I hatched. Believe me Azlak, I never wanted to do anything to hurt dragons, but I would have been killed had I not obeyed them.\"\n\nBreathing out heavily, I looked up at the largely overcast sky, trying to work out what to do. There was a large part of me that wanted to believe everything Nightwings had said. I wanted her to simply be Maznar, to be my sister and the family I had craved for so long. But she was not my only sibling.\n\n\"What happened with Anzig? I saw you lead him straight to George,\" I asked, still not looking down at her. I could hear her shift slightly, just a gentle movement.\n\n\"He pleaded with me. I think he'd been driven mad with his injury, and being overthrown as ddraig was what finally snapped in his mind. He saw George as his only means for healing, as none of the Nixans could give him back his wings. He thought the humans might be able to do what the dragons could not, and give him back the sky.\"\n\n\"No one ever worked out who attacked him. Did he ever tell you?\" I asked with a sigh. Despite all of the resources of Laxtal and Nixa, no one had been able to identify Anzig's attacker.\n\nNightwings paused. \"He accused Isikian, but I'm not convinced,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think even he was too sure. The pain was too traumatic for him to remember.\"\n\n\"I just wish I'd been able to See it before it happened, I could have saved him,\" I said, trying to suppress that guilt. Though control over my magic was much better than it had been, it still wasn't perfect. I doubted I'd ever be able to predict every eventuality.\n\n\"You can't use your magic in this form, can you?\" Nightwings asked suddenly.\n\n\"No, why?\" I asked sharply, glaring down at her.\n\nNightwings blinked. \"No reason. Just curiosity. No other Nixan had been changed, so I wasn't sure if you'd react differently to me. I'm still able to access dreams even when I'm like this, but it took me a few months to be able to recover that magic. I'd imagine you'd be the same.\"\n\nI scrunched up my snout. \"I don't intend on spending a few months like this. No matter what George might think, this is not how a drake should be, and I will find a way to fix it.\"\n\nNightwings shrugged. \"There are ways to do it, but nothing you or I would be able to do. It takes a very specific kind of magic,\" she said slowly, looking at something beyond my shoulder. I turned my head to see what had attracted her attention, but there was nothing there. Just a couple of birds in the distance, two eagles out hunting.\n\n\"So where do we go from here? We need to defeat George, but will the humans try to control you if you come back?\" I asked, uneasy about being away from the battle for so long. I knew we couldn't just sit around and talk, as much as I wanted to understand more about what George had done.\n\n\"No, one of us has to defeat the other,\" Nightwings said, rising to her paws. I quickly followed her, taking a cautious step back. I didn't like the growl that had slipped into her voice.\n\n\"So I claim to have defeated you, there's no one around to witness it. I go back and help defeat George, the you're free to do whatever you like,\" I said urgently, taking a few more steps back, my hindpaws crunching over the bush I had destroyed with my tail not long ago, a few spines digging into my paw.\n\n\"I'm afraid it's not going to be as simple as that,\" Nightwings said with a sad shake of her head.\n\nI was about to question her when three near simultaneous cracks of thunder tore through the quiet. As the sudden scent of human wafted against my nose, I wasted no time to think about the betrayal, kicking off hard and spreading my wings and letting the innate magic in my body lift me into the air. Quickly beating my wings I tried to put as much distance as I could between myself and the humans. My sister made no attempt to follow, and for a moment I thought I'd be able to get away.\n\nOne of the humans yelled just as I felt a spear of stabbing pain lance through my back and wings. I shrieked out in pain, my wings locked in place as I started to drift back down to the ground. Then I felt a strange pull against my body, like a paw had reached inside and was trying to tug out my heart. With no control over my body I crashed back into the ground, sliding and coming to an undignified sprawl of limbs.\n\nThree humans started to close in on me from all angles, not daring to come close but holding their hands out at me. They shimmered slightly as ropes of light leapt out from their hands to dig into my flesh. Once again I cried out as that tugging sensation intensified. Though I was able to move again, it was all I could do to dig my claws into the ground and arch my head back in agony.\n\nBeyond it all, over my own screams of pain, I could hear the cracking voice of Nightwings. \"I am sorry, brother. But this is how it must be.\"\n\nI could feel the magic coursing through my veins slowly diminish, the awesome power that had fuelled me fading to nothing, leaving me feel cold and weak. The ground moved beneath my paws, with claws digging deep gouges in the loose soil as they were dragged closer together. Bone and tendon popped and snapped into new positions, my loud roars of pain getting quieter as my form shrunk down. The humans around me loomed larger, but still they came no closer, keeping their distance as I pressed my head into the ground. Gasping and shivering, I could feel unwanted tears forming in the corners of my eyes, before eventually the agony started to subside. When I opened my eyes again I was much closer to the ground.\n\nThe moment I felt like I could trust my wings again I leapt back into the air, easily avoiding the lazy attempts by the humans to stop me, but this time I could hear the concussive thrum of Nightwings as she swooped into the air. In such an open space, I knew there was little I could do to outrun her, but I knew I'd never give up without a fight.\n\nMy wings felt so weak, claws and teeth so pathetic and small, the ground passing me by with such painful slowness, and it was just a few seconds before I felt Nightwings's shadow passing overhead. I quickly darted to the side, looking up and shrieking at the sight of her open maw descending down towards me. I was only just able to roll out of the way, her wake almost dragging me down to the ground as she passed.\n\nWithout even looking to see how she avoided crashing, I hurried on desperately flying south and beating my wings as fast as I could do generate some speed, but everything was so much slower without the magic pumping through my body. Now it was just blood and heat left to power me, and they weren't enough. I knew I'd be able to outpace any human, and I soon flew out of sight of the three who had changed me back, but I got the feeling my sister was simply toying with me. She hadn't made any more lunges for me, but was instead soaring high above me, tracking me with ease. Beyond her I could see that sunset was starting to approach. The lingering magic in my body would only warm me for so long when darkness fell.\n\nAnother loud crack reached my ears, a small shockwave making my wings tremble for a moment. Nightwings used that moment to dive again, letting out an ear-splitting roar that almost drowned out a familiar voice scream out my name. Once again I rolled to the side before flaring my wings, quickly changing direction before Nightwings could react. She shot past just in front of me, flames licking out from her mouth in her anger.\n\nTwo dragons were approaching in the distance, a glimmer of blue scales making my heart leap, before realising with a little disappointment that it was not my mate, but his twin. With my weakened vision I couldn't quite make out who was lingering just behind, before catching a flash of sunlight on faded grey. It was the old Vatrean ddraig.\n\nI heard Ddraig Boruc cry out, and below me Nightwings shrieked in anger and pain. Fearing she still pursued, I didn't look back until I reached Airil, who had been hovering and waiting for me. Wondering why he wasn't trying to flee, I chanced a glance back, only to see Nightwings writhing on the ground. In the far distance the three humans were trying to catch up, but I saw a thin stream of magic that was pouring out from the massive dragoness's body, my eyes following it to the outstretched paw of Ddraig Boruc.\n\n\"How?\" I whispered, but Airil's paw tugged against mine.\n\n\"No time for that,\" the Nixan said, beating his wings backwards and trying to pull me through the air. Though it seemed Ddraig Boruc had neutralised Nightwings for the moment, there could still be more humans in the area. I turned and started to flee with my mate's brother, back towards where the Vatrean was hovering, eyes narrowed in concentration.\n\nBehind us, Nightwings began to diminish much like I had just done. She clawed at the ground as though trying to stretch herself back out, but with a high-pitched wail she was soon little larger than me, and still the humans had yet to reach her.\n\nWith a sharp gesture from Ddraig Boruc, the ribbon of magic that connected him with Nightwings was severed. He held out a paw to the Nixan. \"Now, Airil,\" he said, his voice rumbling with power.\n\nI felt Airil's paw touch my side, and suddenly everything went black."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "The skirmishes continued throughout the day, the humans never able to fully defeat our forces, but neither were we able to break their morale. Though we continued to endure significant losses, Alaron didn't let up at all. Clan Eltee was utterly decimated by the time night started to fall, with just a handful remaining. Metrus had fallen in the early evening, with her daughter Kiarla taking the title of ddraig over the pitiful remnants of her clan.\n\nAxaatl had fared much better, as had the gryphons and Clan Lilisxi, but to my frustration no Laxtal drakes had yet joined the fray. I had been forced to stand and watch the deaths of so many drakes all willing to give their lives in protection of their clan and family. Until I had been given the same opportunity to fight, they were all superior drakes to me.\n\nHowever, as darkness started to fall a new problem began to present itself. The drakes were starting to tire, even the Laxtals who hadn't been involved in combat were drooping as the temperature fell. It wouldn't be long before we would be forced to find shelter, and there wouldn't be enough gryphons to hold the humans back throughout the whole night. The humans, perhaps knowing this, had sent forward another battalion out into the field of death, marching forward unhindered now towards us.\n\nAlaron was in deep discussion with Kyrus, asking the gryphon leader how long he thought his forces could hold out. The gryphon was pessimistic, confident they wouldn't see out the night without the backing from their draconic allies. As they argued and tried to work out the best course of action, I stared out over the battlefield, keeping wary eyes on the humans as they crossed, though for the moment they looked more concerned with recovering the bodies of the dead than actually approaching and engaging.\n\nHearing movement behind me, I glanced back, expecting Ddraig Krateos, but it was not the Nixan leader. I wasn't too surprised to see Keita approaching with her mate. I had sent her out earlier in the day to try and find Airil, as no one had seen him or Ddraig Boruc for most of the day. I could tell from her expression that she had been unable to locate my mate.\n\n\"No sign of them, Ddraig. Not even Kaz knows where they went,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"My father is still searching though. He'll find out where they went eventually.\"\n\nFirst Mulner had gone off unannounced, and now Airil? I knew they hadn't abandoned me, but I couldn't help but feel saddened that neither of them had thought to let me know of their departure first. I wasn't too confident in Yalle's ability to find them, no matter what trust Keita put to her father.\n\n\"Last time anyone saw them was just after Azlak flew off with Nightwings,\" Okazuni added with a shudder. I imagined they thought they'd seen the last of that monstrous dragoness, and it wasn't hard for me to understand why they had been so terrified of her. She could crush a drake beneath her paws with absolute ease.\n\n\"We'll find him, Ddraig Ellian,\" Keita said, dropping her head. I sighed, wishing I could share her confidence. My brother had yet to return to me either.\n\nI noticed Okazuni tense as he looked over my shoulder. Quickly glancing back it only took me a moment to notice what had caught his eye. Yelling out to Alaron and Kyrus to grab their attention, I pointed a wingtip at the growing cloud of darkness against the black sky. There was one thing we had yet to consider, as their threat had been negligible during the day. A swarm of grave bats was filling the sky.\n\nKyrus yelled out orders to the gryphons, but few were prepared to deal with such a threat. Alaron tried to rouse the nearby drakes, but the wyvern was only successful in dragging a handful up to their paws, by which time the moon had been blotted out completely by the bats. I couldn't help but think that this would be the end of our resistance. There were untold thousands of them. Even were all the drakes able to fight, it would be a terrible struggle to overthrow such numbers. Even so, I would not close my eyes. I flared my wings, feeling Keita and Okazuni do the same. We would fight until our bodies refused to function, until the cold and our wounds forced us into our final sleep.\n\nThere was a shape up there that didn't belong to a bat. I peered up into the gloom, shocked to find it belonged to a drake. I hadn't thought even the Xitals would have dared fly amongst the grave bats; Alaron and Kyrus had both warned us that grave bats refused to listen to any that weren't necuart, and would kill anything else that approached.\n\nAlaron had managed to gather together a force of about five hundred gryphons and a dozen willing and active drakes, but the grave bats had started to soar above us, not making any attempts to dive down. The wyvern believed it too risky to attempt to fly up there to meet them, so for a few moments we waited around, before I noticed the drake had started to descend. It took me several seconds to recognise him.\n\n\"Mulner!\" I shrieked, immediately taking to wing, ignoring the cries of warning from Keita and Alaron. There was no one who would take the wind from my wings when it came to my brother. It was only once I got close to him that I slowed down, even backing away from him a little. There was something different about him, chilling and cold that didn't go away even when he smiled at me.\n\n\"You're safe from him now, Ellian. He can't harm you through me,\" he said quietly, his wings making no noise as he slowly spiralled down towards the ground, towards Alaron and Kyrus. The gryphon and wyvern stepped back as my brother finally touched down. Too nervous to speak to him, I took to the ground a couple of feet away, pressing my wings tight against my back and sharing a nervous glance with Keita, who quickly turned to the side.\n\n\"Is Ddraig Boruc here?\" Mulner asked, swinging his head around the small group, searching for the elderly dragon.\n\nI was about to shake my head when, incredibly, Ddraig Boruc stepped out from the gloom behind Alaron, who let out an undignified yelp of shock as the Vatrean walked past him. He was not alone either, with a restored Azlak pacing beside him, eyes milky white. Behind them both, to my relief, was Airil. My mate came around to wrap his wing around me as Ddraig Boruc started to inspect my brother.\n\n\"Something has happened to you, young one,\" Ddraig Boruc said, holding his paw against Mulner's shoulder, who remained completely still as the Vatrean prodded at him with a claw.\n\n\"I killed him. I killed the necuart who did this to me,\" Mulner said, baring his neck to the Vatrean, showing the two bite marks that were still red against his scales.\n\nDdraig Boruc leapt back like he'd been burnt. \"That's not possible,\" he hissed.\n\n\"The creature thought so too, right up until the moment I tore out his throat,\" Mulner replied with a growl, tensing his claws against the dirt.\n\nThe Vatrean ddraig shook his head. I had never seen him quite so agitated. \"No, you don't understand. This isn't something that is rare, or shouldn't happen but can. This is strictly impossible. It can't be done. Never in history has a thrall even injured their master unintentionally, let alone killed them. The magic that binds the two forbids it.\"\n\n\"You don't believe me? Look above you,\" Mulner growled. We all looked up to the flock of grave bats that swooped around, none of them ever coming close to us, like they were being held back by something. Or someone. \"I control them. They call me master now. The necuart is dead.\"\n\n\"That is\u2026 that is unprecedented. Only one other has ever been able to control the grave bats beyond the necuart. I was never sure how he did it, but he wasn't a thrall either. I\u2026 I don't think I've ever been as stunned as I am right now,\" Ddraig Boruc said with another shake of his head, pawing at the ground.\n\n\"I don't care what you think, Boruc, but what I'm telling you is true,\" Mulner snarled. He went to turn away before he paused, tilting his head as the cacophony of noise from the bats increased. It was as though he was listening to them, but I couldn't hear anything discernible in their shrieks.\n\nMy brother slowly turned back around to face Ddraig Boruc, mouth agape. \"They know of you,\" he said, twitching his head up to the bats. He looked genuinely perturbed by whatever information he was getting from the screeching, chittering creatures that swooped and wheeled through the night air. The same could be said of Ddraig Boruc, who took a couple of steps back.\n\n\"They should not be able to remember, it has been too long,\" the Vatrean whispered, clawing at the ground. He spread his wings. \"Come with me, if you would. I'd like to hear all of this in private.\" He looked around at those gathered around, bowing his head in apology before kicking off into the air, showing no fear for the grave bats above his head. Mulner touched wings with me before he followed Ddraig Boruc into the darkness, the screeching bats following their new master away.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Kyrus asked, clicking his beak and peering around the small gathered group. I shook my head. Something my brother had said had alarmed Ddraig Boruc severely. I had never seen the old ddraig so disturbed before, but I certainly wasn't able to explain it. Neither the gryphon nor wyvern were able to understand it either, but all of us were sure that it had something to do with the bats that patrolled overhead.\n\nKyrus and Alaron soon moved away to continue on a private conversation. Azlak used the opportunity to quickly approach me. It was strange seeing the seer back at his normal size, like I had forgotten just how small he had always been. Of course, he had been our greatest defence against the terror that had been Nightwings, and though it was good seeing Azlak free of the humans' magic, we had been robbed of our much needed protection. I expressed this fear to Azlak, but to my surprise he just smiled.\n\n\"She is no longer the same threat to us. I don't know how he did it, but Ddraig Boruc was able to remove the magic that had been maintaining her form, much like the humans did to me. Unless the humans recover the Axinstone, Maznar can never be Nightwings again,\" the seer explained, bowing his head to me.\n\n\"But what of Anzig?\" Keita asked, stepping forward with Okazuni. \"We've heard nothing of him since he left.\"\n\nI sighed, glancing around at Azlak and Keita. We were probably the three closest drakes to the former ddraig, and yet none of us knew what had truly been going through the head of my cousin. Or who I had always believed to be my cousin.\n\n\"I don't think he's coming back,\" Azlak said sadly, looking down at his paws. \"Losing his wings was a terrible blow, but I think his mind had already broken by then.\" Keita didn't appear to notice the small glance Azlak gave her, but I did. I had to agree with Azlak's unspoken reasoning. Whether she knew it or not, Keita's denial of Anzig by taking Okazuni as her mate had shattered Anzig's heart, and from then on his mind had begun to unravel.\n\nKeita held her eyes low to the ground. \"I loved him once. I owe it to him to find him, and bring him home safely,\" she said, resting her head against her mate's shoulder.\n\n\"You will get that chance,\" Azlak said, turning his pale eyes towards her. \"I have not Seen the outcome, but I think you will face him down, and you will try to reason with him. Just don't go seeking him out. He will come to you.\"\n\n\"You are a good dragon, Azlak,\" Keita said, breaking away from Okazuni and placing a paw upon the seer's shoulder. \"I have wronged you greatly in the past, but I can see now that you care very much for your clan and your friends. I am glad to have flown with you.\"\n\n\"And I with you,\" Azlak whispered back, furiously blinking his eyes, but I could see that they watered. He was trying his utmost not to cry in front of us. If there had been any doubt in my mind that he was Nixan, then that doubt was gone now. I stepped forward to spare him a little embarrassment.\n\n\"We should all get some rest,\" I said, looking around at the small group, taking hold of Airil's tail in mine. Keita and Azlak remained huddled close to each other, and they both nodded in agreement. Azlak especially looked weary from a long day, and it seemed the pains of his transformation was troubling him. The seer's wings were drooping as he turned away, Keita lingering for a few moments longer before hurrying after him with Okazuni.\n\nI rested my head against Airil's shoulder, feeling his comforting wing against my back. The cold was starting to make me weary. Making my way back up the hill, I stood with Airil and stared out at the human city, listening to the quiet sounds of activity from across the blood-soaked plain. Still Kyrus and Alaron continued to have their own discussion, but they fell into silence as I approached them.\n\n\"I go to sleep. I trust you'll wake me should I be needed during the night,\" I said, bowing my head to the gryphon and wyvern. Though Alaron barely nodded his head in return, Kyrus ducked his head respectfully towards me with a gentle chirrup.\n\n\"We don't expect any attack until dawn, not with your brother's bats patrolling,\" the gryphon said with a click of his beak. His eyes glanced up towards the stars, where the skittering cries of the bats could be heard as they swooped. \"He has provided us with some hope.\"\n\n\"Rest well, Ddraig Ellian,\" Alaron added, staring out towards the humans. \"This was just a prelude to the coming storm. Tomorrow the real war begins.\"\n\nI would be ready."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "For the first time since the gryphons had come, dawn was silent. No birdsong greeting the morning sun. The quiet was unnerving, but I didn't want to break it as Airil's eyes slowly opened. Slowly I rose to my paws, legs aching from the exertions in the cold the previous night. Glancing up, I could see the sky was clear and blue, with no sign of the bats that had been patrolling the darkness. Likewise there was no sight of my brother, but I vowed to find him amongst the horde of drakes that were slowly waking up.\n\nSlowly the silence was filled by muttering and groaning drakes, but I shared a silent glance with Airil and started to walk. We didn't need to speak. We both knew where we had to go.\n\nWe picked our way through the sprawled drakes, few even looking up at us as we passed, let alone moving out of our way. I had to take extra precaution not to tread on any outstretched wings, Airil following on my tail as we slowly climbed uphill.\n\nThe eastern slopes of the hill were mostly covered in shade, meaning fewer drakes to avoid, but still our progress was slow. I didn't have the strength yet to take to wing, and my legs were heavy and unresponsive. My wings drooped from my sides by the time we finally crested the hill to look out upon the plains between us and the human city. The bodies of the fallen had been cleared throughout the night, the remains of a bonfire still smoking away to the north. I bowed my head and closed my eyes as Airil settled down beside me. The worst was yet to come, I knew that.\n\nA click and soft chirrup betrayed the presence of a gryphon. I opened my eyes and looked up to see Kyrus slump down nearby. For once he didn't start preening, letting the few feathers sitting out of place remain so.\n\n\"A sombre morning today. We should mourn the dead, but our enemy will not give us such an opportunity. Already they will be preparing their defences,\" the gryphon said with a slow, sad shake of his head.\n\n\"Is that why you don't sing?\" I asked him, voice timid against the continued quietness of the morning.\n\nKyrus bowed his head. \"Fifty gryphons lost yesterday. I don't want to think about how many dragons perished. Too many to count, and today we do it all again. There is no joy in the morning, and that is why we don't sing.\"\n\n\"Then sing of the sorrow. Sing to mourn,\" Airil said. My mate stared down at the gryphon's talons.\n\n\"A song of sorrow?\" Kyrus shuffled his wings and arched his head back. \"We sing for joy, so there are few indeed of those. But I do know one such song, about a gryphon who longed to see home just one more time before he died. This far from the Aerie, maybe it is right to sing it.\"\n\nFor a few moments Kyrus remained silent, before he trilled out a few long, haunting notes. Twice more he repeated the same notes. On the third call over two dozen gryphons had joined in as they descended into a chilling melody of long, sad cries. I held Airil close as the sound buried itself into me. I knew then that for as long as I lived, I would never be able to forget the terrifying beauty of that song.\n\nBy the time the last few notes faded into silence, every drake and gryphon had awoken. We were far from alert, but already some organisation was starting to filter through our ranks. Clans came back together, the few ddraigs and haeraigs creating order amongst the sleepy masses. Like the song, the mood was sorrowful, but I recognised a hardness beneath it. Everyone knew what was expected of them. Everyone knew that they were to risk scale and wing to defeat the humans. No single life was important if it meant we came out victorious. And that meant mine too. If I were to be a ddraig worth following, then that meant I would fight.\n\nWith a flutter of wings, Alaron landed just in front of me. I was still taken aback at how graceful he could move without any front legs, his wings partially folded as his side as he pushed his weight down on the small claws halfway along their length.\n\nThe wyvern growled softly as he looked out towards the encampment on the far side of the plains. \"Yesterday we held back our full strength. Today we shall do no so such thing and hope the humans under-estimated us. Our only aim is to survive the day. If we still live by the time Clan Xigax arrives, then we still have hope.\"\n\n\"Then all must fight?\" I asked, taking a nervous step forward. This was what I had been waiting for, the chance to prove myself a true leader by fighting with those I commanded. I would have it no other way, but I couldn't suppress the terror that welled up within me. Not even Airil's calming touch could quell that.\n\n\"No one can be held back,\" Alaron said with a nod. His clawed wings dug into the ground a little before he slowly spun around to glance at Kyrus and me. \"I would have liked Azlak again to lead the charge, but we shall have to make do with what we have.\"\n\n\"Every drake will fight to the last beat of their wings,\" I vowed, raising my head up.\n\n\"And every gryphon,\" Kyrus added. He had finally started to groom himself again, tucking his wayward feathers back into place with a disapproving cluck.\n\nAlaron nodded, before turning to Airil. \"Can you summon the ddraigs? I would like to speak to them all before we're forced into action.\"\n\nMy mate quickly bounded away to carry out the wyvern's orders. While we waited we sat in silence, just the occasional clicks of Kyrus's beak to disrupt the quietness between us. I kept watch on the humans. They were too far away for me to see clearly, but I could see movement amongst the tents. We had roused before them, but I was sure it wouldn't be long before they were fully prepared for a long day of war. Without the bats to terrorise them and keep them trapped within their encampment, they would soon cross the plains if we did nothing to stop them.\n\nAnd thinking of the bats, I had to wonder where Mulner had gone. I had seen nor heard any sign of my brother at all, nor of the grave bats under his command. I hesitantly approached Kyrus and asked the gryphon if he had seen Mulner. He stared down at me with one cold eye, pausing in his grooming for a few moments. He swung his head towards the nearby forest that grew on the southern edge of the plains.\n\n\"I didn't see him myself, but I was told the grave bats went to roost amongst the trees. I would assume your brother was amongst them,\" the gryphon said, before returning to his feathers.\n\nI had to wonder if we would see Mulner again during the battle. He was no coward, I knew that of my brother, but I recognised that he would use any opportunity he could to avoid taking part in our conflict. He would roost with his bats, emerging only at night to protect what remained of dragonkind. I didn't blame him. At least one drake would survive.\n\nOne by one, the various clan leaders started to arrive. Ddraig Krateos was the first, soaring up the hill and settling on the other side of Kyrus. He barely even acknowledged me as he landed, and stared resolutely away from Alaron as well. Ddraig Bakucic followed shortly after the Nixan, and he bowed his head and grinned when he saw me.\n\n\"Why have you come?\" I asked him. I had expected him to stay behind rather than risk himself in such a foolish venture. We had already lost one ddraig, I didn't want to lose another. \"You should have stayed with your clan.\"\n\nBakucic's wings fluttered. \"And miss out on all the glory of battle? No, Ellian. I couldn't have stayed back in Lilisxi. I couldn't have stayed away any more than you could. It wouldn't have felt right.\"\n\n\"Is it worth dying for?\" I asked with head bowed low, not able to meet Bakucic's eyes, despite my superior rank.\n\nI felt his claw on my chin. \"Of course it is. I'm not one to sit back and wait for the humans to come to me. I would rather die than see my trees burn around me. Today I shall fight, and I will die if I must.\" He lifted my head up, meeting my gaze for a few seconds before glancing away. \"We may not survive, no. But I would shame my clan were we not to come and fight.\"\n\n\"Bakucic is right. We will fight to the last beat of our wings.\"\n\nI turned to see Haeraig Kiarla approach. She ducked her head towards me as she drew near. The Elteean dragoness looked weary, her paws dragging along the ground, wings not fully held up along her back. I knew she grieved as well. She had lost her mother the previous day, and would be taking on her title of ddraig should she survive. Should she have a clan to rule over. Eltee had suffered the worst of our losses, and would likely take on even more once the battle resumed.\n\nI wasn't afforded the opportunity to respond, as Alaron called us all together. He wanted us prepared before the humans were. The last thing we wanted was to be caught out by them while we were still unorganised and confused.\n\n\"We'll attack them with three flanks,\" the wyvern said as every ddraig gathered around him, staying wary of Kyrus's talons as he groomed. \"Ellian, you will lead one flank with Lilisxi and the humans. I will take the centre with Axaatl and the gryphons. The rest shall follow Ddraig Krateos on the second flank. Each flank will have an aerial and a ground force. Ellian and Krateos, I shall leave it to you to decide who will take command of those in your respective flanks.\"\n\nI glanced around at my fellow ddraigs, nodding as the wyvern started going into the details of our strategy. We would attack from three sides. The plan was to trap the humans between tooth and claw, not giving them any chance to organise themselves. We would be relentless, throwing our full strength in and not stopping until we had nothing left. There would be no second chances for us. Today this was would end, one way or another.\n\nWe soon went our separate ways, Ddraig Bakucic following me as I headed back towards my clan so I could start moving them towards our flank. We didn't have long, so I gathered together a few drakes to start spreading the message to prepare to fly. Keita and Okazuni were willing to offer their wings, and I was able to convince a weary Yalle to assist his daughter.\n\nI had been pleased that I had not had to deal with any more petty machinations from the former conspirators in Laxtal, though it was upsetting that it had required Vinzent's death to shatter their resolve. At the same time I knew that their focus would be solely on trying to survive the next few days. I had no doubt that if there was a clan to return to, I would have to face their plots once more, especially as I was yet to name a haeraig. That would have to be a concern for another day.\n\nLaxtal would be taking the flank closest to the trees Mulner had led his bats, I realised as I looked over the plains. I hoped to be able to see him before the chaos of battle overwhelmed us. Before long we were all ready to fly out, keeping low to the ground and descending into the thick forest. Behind me I had several thousand drakes, just over a third of our force.\n\nBats screeched overhead as they rested amongst the branches. None of them made any movements to attack us, though no drake rose too close to them. They didn't share my trust that the bats wouldn't descend, and I could hear a few cautious mutterings behind me.\n\nI called a halt about half way towards the humans' encampment. We were close enough now to hear them, shouts and calls for order drifting through the trees. We didn't have long. James McArthur and his small band of humans weren't far behind us. He came forward to meet me, and I took him and a couple of drakes out towards the edge of the trees to better scout out our position.\n\nAs well as Ddraig Bakucic, I was joined by Yalle, Marin, and Keita, with Okazuni shadowing behind his mate. The only Nyrian present, Okazuni had chosen to join his mate rather than go under the command of Ddraig Krateos on the far flank. Airil had not been so fortunate, getting swept up with the other surviving Nixans. I tried to suppress my fears for him, knowing that he would be able to escape in a moment should he find himself in any danger. I had not yet seen any sign of Ddraig Boruc, so I assumed he had joined the Nixans.\n\nFrom our vantage point, I could see no sign of Ddraig Krateos, nor of Alaron and Kyrus. The line of hills to the east blocked all vision of the gryphons, though I could just about hear the chirping voice of their leader. The open plains were torn up from the previous day, deep gouges where drakes and gryphons alike had fallen from the sky, where humans had fled beneath the barrage from the air.\n\n\"We shall attack hard and fast. As soon as Alaron and Kyrus engage, we shall fly for them. I shall lead from the air. Ddraig Bakucic, take your clan with James on paw,\" I said, not looking back at the drakes and human who stood just behind me. I didn't want to see the fear on their faces, nor let them know just how terrified I really was. It was all I could do to simply keep the emotion from my voice.\n\nRustling in the trees above me caught my attention. I glanced up, a little shocked to see Mulner stalking along a thick bough. He looked down at me and grinned, before leaping from the tree and spreading his wings to gracefully glide to the ground. His paws crunched down upon the crisp leaves that coated the forest floor.\n\n\"The bats rest. They refuse to fly beneath the sun, but if we get some clouds then perhaps I can convince them to fight once more,\" he said, resting his wing over my body. He had eyes only for me, not once looking from my face yet never truly meeting my gaze.\n\n\"They have already done us a great service, by keeping the humans away during the night,\" I said, bowing my head. I could hear my other companions not far behind, perhaps wisely keeping their distance for now and letting me share a moment with my brother. The soft voices of Bakucic and James soon became indistinct whispers.\n\n\"Promise me you'll be safe, Ellian. Can you do that for me?\" Mulner whispered, his voice cracking like I had never known it to do before. \"I would hate to\u2026 Everything I've done, it's to keep you safe. To protect you as best I can. But out there, I can only do so much. While the sun shines I'm powerless to help.\"\n\nI rested my paw on top of my brother's. I was sure we both knew that there could be no guarantees for my safety, or of any of the drakes behind us. My brother trembled and rested his head against mine. He felt so cold.\n\n\"I can try,\" I whispered, entwining my tail with his. \"Just promise me the same. Promise me you'll stay safe too.\"\n\nI didn't believe his weak smile. \"Safe? I'm always safe, Ellian. You'll see. We'll both survive this.\"\n\nI chose to ignore the lie."
            },
            {
                "title": "Mulner",
                "text": "I hated myself. How could I look Ellian in the eye and tell her I'd stay safe when I knew I was dying. The magic burned inside me. I could feel the agonising cold burn course through my veins, tearing me apart from the inside. As I watched her talk to James McArthur and the other drakes, I longed to tell her the truth, but I didn't want to add to her many burdens. Best I find a way to die with honour than give her false hope that I had defeated the curse I had so foolishly inflicted upon myself.\n\nThe bats called to me. Constantly, their whispers threatened to drive me to madness, urging me to roost with them and sleep the day away, but I knew I couldn't give in to that temptation. The moment I closed my eyes to rest would be when I would be defeated. Best to stay awake. Best to give Ellian all I could to keep her safe.\n\n\"Master. Come.\"\n\nI shook my head and growled. The bats were not perturbed. They were relentless. They had not been satiated by their night flight, forced to patrol and keep watch whilst the drakes slept. They longed for blood, but refused to go out into the sunlight to fight the enemies I gave them. I could hear a few longing cries at the prey that lingered below their trees, but I firmly refused to allow that. I would not see the bats feast upon any drake but for those that fought alongside George and Tsona.\n\nAnother call broke out from my bats, a fierce chittering that rippled through the forest. I closed my eyes and held my head in my paws, desperate to rid myself of their voices. In my distraction, I almost missed the movement coming from the camp. It was only Ellian's quiet call that alerted me to the human army that was starting to march. I quickly leapt up into the trees, claws scrabbling for purchase on wood as I climbed up to the best vantage point amongst the leaves, doing my best to ignore the cold chill seeping through my limbs.\n\nI did not know how many humans came forth from the city of tents, but they must have numbered eight thousand at least. Rank upon rank emerged, most on foot but some perched atop their machines of metal that roared out into the plains. All seemed to carry a gun at their hip, and a strange shield slung over their back. The sky was filled by the remnants of Xital's draconic army, and once more I nudged a thought towards my bats to fly forth, but they sleepily ignored me.\n\nSilence greeted them. The humans were left to advance unchecked across the plains. I looked down to Ellian, but she stood with quivering wings, quite content to surrender the ground to our foes. She was waiting for something, and it wasn't until Alaron crested the hills to the east that I understood what. Haloed by the rising sun, the wyvern stood atop the hill with a line of gryphons either side of him.\n\nA call went out from the humans to halt their advance, and for a few moments the two forces stared each other down. Then a ripple ran through the gryphons, and as one they all launched into the air. A matching cry came from below, a rousing snarl from Ellian as she kicked off, leaping out from between the trees, a horde of drakes at her back. Half took to wing, the remaining half sprinting on paw and trying to keep pace with the fifty humans than ran in their midst.\n\nI lingered back in the shadows, waiting for the commotion to pass, until I was the last drake remaining. I looked back towards my bats, listening to their call to retreat back and roost, but I shook my head. That would be the cowardly option. I was no coward. My wings flared and I soared out into the light. Sunlight felt like claws on my back. Formation was forgotten; a horde of dragons swooped towards their foes.\n\nVolleys of gunfire tore through the air. Hundreds of drakes fell, but from my distance I couldn't see who had been hit. I thought I saw someone right from the front spiral down with a crash. I could only hope it wasn't Ellian. Then I saw her, lilac wings spread wide as she careened into the Xital drakes without a care for her own safety. She fought savagely, tooth and claw piercing scale, paying no heed to the blows she received.\n\nMoments later, I heard the bugling call of Ddraig Krateos as his flank descended on the humans. I tried to avoid what I could, tail lashing out and fending off a few drakes as I attempted to find my sister amongst the chaos.\n\nFor a few minutes it seemed like we were defeating our enemy faster than they could kill us. Gunfire had ceased. Even those humans not distracted by the drakes on the ground had stopped shooting for fear of hitting the Xitals amongst the melee. Then the gryphons and Axaatls reached the frontlines, their superior weight crumpling the leading edge of the human army, but their numbers were immense. They soon started to push back.\n\nAlaron was a maelstrom of fury, his apparent awkwardness nowhere to be seen as he lashed out with wing and tail. His grey scales were stained red already. By his side was Kyrus, feathers still perfect even as he gripped a shrieking human in his powerful talons. The human fell silent and the gryphon moved on to his next prey.\n\nI felt claws against my back. Spinning quickly, I threw the drake clear. A bronze Xital dragoness snarled at me. She already had blood on her claws, but I could see her wings trembled with the effort of keeping herself aloft. Whether weakened by injury or sickened by the conflict, I couldn't be sure, but nor could I succumb to a moment of pity. I struck hard and fast, teeth latching around her throat before she had chance to resist.\n\nHot blood poured onto my tongue, the dragoness choking through my grip. I growled and squeezed harder, ignoring her claws weakly battering against my chest. Then she fell still, and I flung her down to the distant ground, her limp body striking the head of an unsuspecting human. I could feel blood dripping from my mouth as I snarled, furiously seeking someone else who dared challenge me. For a few moments I felt restored. Blood warmed me, but the longer I remained still the stronger the chill pervaded my body. I had to keep moving. Keep fighting. Keep killing.\n\nIt was tough to tell ally from foe in the chaos of battle. Not every drake I fought was Xital with the distinctive crest of horns atop their head. Many eastern clans had been swayed by the ruling clan's guile, especially by the words of the treacherous Ddraig Tsona. If there was anything I could do before the magic within my body consumed me, it would be to see that pitiful excuse for a dragon dead.\n\nI lost count how many times claws raked down my back. I felt no pain despite the blood that dripped between my scales. Nothing could be as agonising as the magic freezing my blood. A terrible fury descended upon me, desperate to do as much damage as I could before my strength faltered. Of Ellian I saw no sign. As far as I knew, she could already be dead, but that would not stop me. If I could not keep her safe, then I would avenge her instead.\n\nA definite shift was taking place in the fight. Slowly the drakes started to drift closer towards the ground, guided down by the Xital drakes who kept gradually sinking towards their allies. Though I noticed it, I was powerless to resist the general movement, more roars doing nothing to get anyone to ignore the diving drakes and keep away from the flashing blades and piercing guns the humans carried.\n\nOn the ground, the humans had fortified their positions, using the tall shields they carried to interlock into a strong wall. Small holes between each shield allowed them to shoot through, and they were seemingly tough enough to withstand even a gryphon's talons. They were vulnerable only from the air, but with the efforts of the Xital drakes, fewer were attacking the humans from above.\n\nWith a snarl, I took to paw a little distance away from the fight to gather my breath. The ground was thick with the wounded and dead, and I tried my hardest to block my nose from the scent of the deceased.\n\n\"You fight well.\"\n\nI turned to the voice, narrowing my eyes towards the small Nyrian dragon who fluttered down next to me. He had been a companion of Anzig, I knew that much. Okazuni. I couldn't recall ever having spoken to him before. I grunted in response, keeping my eyes on drake above and human on the ground. A flash of blue feathers caught my attention. I flicked my wings as I saw Seris fighting off a couple of Xitals, her cobalt colouring as perfect as ever. As always, Jesara was by her side. So they had returned after I had abandoned them in Nixa. As much as I wanted to see them and fight by their side, I thought it would be unwise to approach them. Instead I turned back to Okazuni.\n\n\"Have you seen my sister?\"\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian? She was with the wyvern last I saw her, somewhere over there,\" the Nyrian said, pointing with his wing towards the city of tents. I still couldn't see her, but the fighting was fierce there, with the sound of gunshots clearly audible. Gryphon, drake, and human all fought there, not far from the river that flowed by the forest.\n\nShuffling my wings against my back, I started to prowl forward, keeping a wary eye above me. Okazuni leapt forward to walk by my side, though he didn't offer any explanation to his presence. I was thankful of that, but also of his company. I knew he would watch my back. The two of us together wouldn't be caught unawares.\n\nI tried not to look at the bodies that we passed, not wanting to risk recognising any of them. Okazuni had given me hope that my sister still lived, but those who had been a part of my small clan I had beyond Laxtal's borders were still precious to me. Every one of them I cared for, and I didn't want to see them dead in a war that should never have concerned them. Should never have concerned me. Not for the first time I wondered if I would be facing death if I had just stayed back and waited it all out. For a moment I bowed my head and closed my eyes, trusting Okazuni to be our eyes. I would not see another dawn. It would have been nice\u2026\n\nI shut down those thoughts. Better to make use of what little time I had left. I broke into a loping run, avoiding human and drake. Somehow I knew that I would find both of my targets in the same place. I would save Ellian and I would kill Tsona. And a storm was brewing in the distant west, massive clouds towering towards the sky above the mountains. Perhaps my bats would get to fight before night fell as well.\n\nI found the enemy first, near the banks of the river. Ddraig Tsona was no coward. He was fighting with as much ferocity as any other drake, his golden scales stained with the blood of his victims. He retreated only to soar into the air and roar out orders to his drakes, marshalling his forces and directing them into the weakest points he faced, clearing the path for the humans to open fire with their guns. I tracked him for a few minutes, keeping low to the ground and watching his movements. With a savage grin on my face, I realised that he was slowly approaching as the flow of fighting pushed him towards the river.\n\nCrouching low on the banks, I waited. Okazuni was gone, lost again in the chaos but that didn't matter. I didn't want to get him involved anyway. This was between me and the Xital ddraig. Revenge for how he had treated my sister.\n\nTensing my hindpaws against the ground, I waited until he was within range. Silent as the bats I controlled, I pounced and knocked the Xital ddraig clean out the air, rolling and cuffing him with a paw before he had chance to react. I expected to feel the weight of other drakes land on my back, but to my surprise I found there was honour still even in the midst of war. Combat was one on one, and if a drake challenged another, it was expected that no one else intervened. Ddraig Tsona was my fight, and none would interfere.\n\nI wasn't able to inflict a killing blow, or even able to wound the Xital before his hindpaws smashed into my belly, throwing me off the prone dragon. I squawked and regained my balance, but Tsona was already on his paws and circling around me.\n\n\"You challenge me?\" he spat, standing tall with pride. Even though there wasn't much difference in height between us, he still managed to look down on me, yet never truly met my eyes. \"Who even are you to dare challenge the greatest dragon alive?\"\n\n\"I am Mulner of Laxtal,\" I hissed, using the clan I had not acknowledged for years before I even realised what I had said. \"Ddraig Ellian is my sister, and I challenge you for her honour.\"\n\nTsona blinked. \"Mulner, is it? Well, I shall take great pleasure in defeating you. And then I shall find your sister and kill her too for what she has done to me. Maybe then Laxtal shall bow to me as they rightly should,\" he said, sneering down at me. I kept moving, not letting him approach, always keeping him directly in front of me.\n\n\"I killed your necuart. You will not find me so easy a victim,\" I said, revelling in the moment of panic I saw cross his eyes. He suppressed it well, but I could tell from the flicker in his expression that he suddenly feared me.\n\n\"You killed\u2026 Ugh, pathetic. I always knew George was wrong to ally himself with such a sad excuse for a necuart,\" Tsona growled, dragging his claws through the dirt. I could see his hindquarters tense, ready to spring at a moment's notice.\n\nI was ready for him, dropping to the ground and letting him soar right over the top of me. I lashed up with my tail, slapping him across the chest as he passed, but otherwise neither of us did any harm to the other. He landed and spun around quickly, barely giving me chance to regain my paws before he leapt again. This time he bit down hard on my tail, gripping it between his teeth. I cried with pain, lashing my tail to free it from his grip, but I could feel his teeth digging in between scales.\n\nTugging my tail, I lashed out at Tsona's face, grazing his cheek with my claws before striking his horns. He hissed in pain and released my bloodied tail, and for a few moments we both warily circled each other once more. My full focus was on him. Nothing else mattered.\n\n\"You can't win,\" Tsona growled, his eye twitching. I had come close to catching it with my claws, a thin red line passing within an inch of it.\n\n\"You scared of me, Tsona?\" I taunted him, a small smirk on my face. I had rattled him, I knew that much. This would not be the easy fight he had expected.\n\nHe didn't answer me, instead feinting a lunge towards my right before twisting and lashing out for my left. I easily leapt to the side, avoiding his claws but not his tail which struck my snout. I winced and snarled, shaking my head as I failed to grab it in my teeth. He was faster than he looked.\n\nI didn't give Tsona chance to prepare his next attack, lunging for him, snapping at his limbs with my teeth as I tried to get a grip on him. He fought back hard, slamming into my chest with his shoulder in an attempt to fend me off. I struggled to sink my teeth into the Xital, his scales sliding beneath me. But neither were his teeth or claws able to penetrate my scales, the two of us locked together, wrestling in a show of strength that found us equally matched. We both knew that whoever was thrown to the ground first would pay with their life and so we were both determined not to make that so.\n\nMy hindpaws dug into the ground as I resisted Tsona, pushing against his chest and trying to grab his neck in my mouth. I shrieked in pain as I felt his claws loosen a few scales on my shoulder, gritting my teeth and pushing back against the Xital.\n\nWe disengaged and circled each other again, both panting and limping slightly from a few cuts to our legs. I noticed he glanced out to a few of the nearby drakes, none of whom seemed ready to intervene. I doubted they would, not until I was about to strike the killing blow on their ddraig. I would have to make it quick if I wanted to succeed. Though I had not expected to defeat the necuart and live, this time I knew I had no hope of survival beyond this fight. I would kill Tsona with my last breath; I didn't need any seer to tell me that.\n\n\"Ready to give in yet?\" I snarled, keeping my head held high. I wanted Tsona to think I was confident still. Then he did something I didn't expect. The Xital scoffed and turned his back on me.\n\n\"You aren't even worth my time,\" he said, flaring his wings and tensing his hind legs to kick off.\n\n\"Coward, stay and fight,\" I snarled, stomping the ground and digging up a clump of dirt in my claws. Tsona paused and turned his head to face me. He smirked, but showed no sign of returning to our fight.\n\nI heard the gunshot before the flaring of pain in my chest. It took me a few moments to even realise what had happened, by which time my legs trembled with the exertion of keeping me standing. Glancing down, I saw with detached disinterest how I had been shot, a ragged bullet hole puncturing my right shoulder. Already my right paw tingled and felt numb. Better than the stabbing cold, I thought. I didn't even care that an honourless human had interrupted our fight. I just cared that I wouldn't be able to pursue the Xital dragon.\n\n\"You're dead, Mulner of Laxtal. It will only take a word,\" Tsona said, gloating over me. I hadn't even noticed him turn around again, but there he was, standing in front of me, wings spread to tower over me. \"One word though, and you can live. Surrender to me and I'll see that you survive this day.\"\n\nHe thought I was harmless. In his hubris he thought I was already quelled and meek, surrendering and willing to give in. I doubted he even considered that I knew there could be no survival for me. Perhaps he thought I was about to keel over anyway, as he kept on approaching until his nose almost touched me.\n\n\"Your sister was just as easy to defeat,\" he said, brushing his teeth against my neck. \"She may have shot me and left me to die, but I still lived. You can survive this too. Just give up this foolish fight and accept I have won.\"\n\nStill I remained still, waiting for my opportunity even as I could feel my lifeblood draining from the wound in my shoulder. I felt cold, as though the magic in my veins was slowly freezing me. It was claiming me.\n\nThe Xital hissed as I remained silent. His teeth were bared. \"You are dead, Mulner,\" he repeated.\n\nTsona arched his head back to look up into the air. I didn't know whether someone called him, or if he was distracted by someone flying by, but I took the opportunity given to me. I lunged forward, ignoring the fierce protest my wounded shoulder gave. Tooth tore through scale, puncturing Tsona's throat and robbing him of his breath.\n\nHe struggled to free himself, but my grip was too strong. I longed to slowly squeeze the life from him, to hear him choke. To hear his attempted pleas, but I knew I didn't have time for that. The other Xitals would be on me in a moment. Instead I twisted, tasting hot blood in my mouth. Claw and wing battered against me, and I could feel more scales falling away beneath the desperate assault, but before he could dislodge me I ripped upwards.\n\nDdraig Tsona staggered back, unsteady on his paws as he stared at me with wide eyes. His chest heaved, a futile attempt to draw in breath as I spat out the remains of his throat. I struggled to flare my wings wide, to show off my full size. I was almost sure I heard my wings snap as they unfurled. My body was broken.\n\n\"I was already dead,\" I whispered, waiting until Ddraig Tsona slumped to the ground before looking up to the sky one last time. I closed my eyes, giving myself up to the magic at last. I surrendered fully to its freezing bite. It tore through me, every scale turning to ice until I was sure that any movement would cause me to shatter.\n\nI had killed Tsona.\n\nPerhaps Ellian was a little bit safer now.\n\nI was done."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "War was where futures died. I couldn't recall how many possibilities I had Seen emerge and fade almost as soon as I had sensed them. I had done what little I could, calling out to Ddraig Krateos with advice on how best to counter each threat before they emerged. It never felt enough. All around me drakes were dying. Selfishly, I turned my magic towards those I cared most about, seeking to protect my father and Ddraig Ellian from harm. Kaz never left my side, protecting me from the present while I was distracted by the future.\n\nFor all that I saw, one vision troubled me the most. It was unclear just what I was Seeing, but wings of metal flashed past several times, bringing death and destruction wherever they went. I growled and shook my head, trying to focus my magic on them, but nothing ever made sense. I Saw bursts of seemingly random images. Anzig showed up a few times, but I couldn't understand what I was Seeing. He was important, that much was for sure, but his decisions seemed to help both drake and human, but I couldn't find the catalyst that would cause him to fall to one side or the other.\n\nKeeping close to Ddraig Krateos kept me closer to the battle than I would have liked, but I knew I had no other choice. If I were to make any difference, I needed to stay close to my father's side. His booming voice was a constant, guiding the magic of the few Nixan's left alive, as well as the drakes from the other clans left under his command. He was obeyed without question, and I latched my magic onto his fate most of all. I knew it would be his decisions that would have one of the greatest influences on the outcome of this day.\n\nBut no matter what I did, I could not find a way to keep him alive. Before sundown, my father would be dead.\n\nI could have cried, but I knew my duty. I could not let my emotions get in the way of what needed to be done. The longer my father lived, the greater an inspiration he could be to those around him, so it was all I could do to keep him breathing until the weight of fate forced me to accept the inevitable.\n\nHe would die to his daughter's claws. I had Seen it several times. Though I had never got a clear view of Nightwings, I had heard my father's dying words too many times to count.\n\n\"Azlak! Do we help the gryphons or Laxtal?\" Haeraig Zeena cried out, standing beside her father with wings outstretched. The two had cleared an area around them, both prepared to spring back into the action.\n\nQuickly, I scanned ahead, noticing a group of a dozen gryphons pinned back by gunfire, a commandeered shell of human shields their only protection. Not far beyond was the Laxtal force, grounded by the pestering of Xital drakes and in danger of being overwhelmed. I didn't need the magic to decide. I had seen Nightwings amongst the Xital drakes. My father could not be allowed anywhere near her.\n\n\"Help the gryphons, quickly,\" I replied, hoping that my decision wouldn't kill too many Laxtals. Almost immediately, Ddraig Krateos bounded across with Haeraig Zeena and nearly a hundred other drakes, diving upon the humans before they had chance to react. I closed my eyes and turned my head from all the death and destruction they inflicted at my words. It was almost too much for me to bear.\n\nOnce more gunfire echoed throughout the plain, and for one terrifying moment I thought I saw my father fall. But there he was, leaping up and sweeping aside four humans with a single wave of his paw, eyes ablaze with fury and magic. His power was immense, and with the Axinstone in his paws and Haeraig Zeena by his side he was almost unstoppable. And yet unless I did something to stop it, he would be killed by his other daughter this day.\n\nKaz remained close to my side, protecting me from harm and warning me of the dangers of the present while I was lost in the future. I couldn't say how many times he saved my life, nudging me away from the worst of the fight, even protecting me with tooth and claw. It would have been safer for me had I remained with Alaron on the hill of course, but there I wouldn't have been able to communicate with my father and help shape the course of the battle. How I longed for Anzig. With him I could have stayed in safety, and through my brother's magic been able to reach anyone. But he had still not been seen since I had attempted to speak to him in the human encampment. He loomed over my visions still, the shadow of his lost wings casting darkness on every choice.\n\nEvery choice I made hopefully led me towards a future where I could save my father, but the end of all my visions still saw him dying at the claws of his daughter. As Kaz kept me safe, I began to get more concerned. I had never known something to be so inevitable before, and that terrified me. There had to be a way.\n\nBefore long I found myself back close by my father, the Nixan ddraig's scales splattered in crimson. He'd lost a few scales in combat, with a few claw marks down his flank. Despite these, he showed no sign of pain, not even limping as he strode amongst the last surviving members of his clan. By his side as always was Haeraig Zeena, the dragoness also showing the signs of battle, her left wing held away from her side with the delicate membranes slightly torn.\n\n\"Azlak, where to next?\" the haeraig called out, her eyes kept on the sky, wary of any possible threats from above. Our father was focused on the ground, flanked by his guard of drakes and gryphons.\n\nI shook my head and closed my eyes. It was almost too much to keep track of. Trying to sort through the threads of time was making my head hurt; finding the right path was almost impossible. I Saw so many different futures, all hinging off so small a choice. I directed Ddraig Krateos out towards the forest, where my visions told me a fierce counter attack from the humans was about to commence. Something critical was happening there, but my focus on my father had blinded me to those events until now, when it was too late to See. Every future was mine to See, but the present was limited to my own two eyes.\n\nWith Kaz by my side, I followed after them, letting the gryphons carve a path through the fighting drakes. I tried to close my eyes and ears to the death and suffering all around. Trying not to think about how many I had been responsible for, I trimmed my wings and kept Kaz's cobalt scales in sight.\n\nWhat met us near the forest stunned me. With a load screech, the gryphons descended to defend a lone drake surrounded by Xitals. I was sure I recognised the besieged drake, but I couldn't get a proper glimpse of him as I descended after Ddraig Krateos and Kaz. The gryphons made short work of the Xitals, routing them after just a few short, bloody seconds. Something had crippled their morale, and once the battlefield and cleared a little it was easy to see why. Two bodies had remained behind. The drake we had attempted to rescue, and another golden scaled drake.\n\nDdraig Krateos bowed his head as he approached the golden drake, who lay motionless on the ground, blood still leaking from a terrible wound in his throat. \"So, here ends Ddraig Tsona,\" my father muttered, reaching out with a paw and easing the fallen dragon's eyes closed. I failed to feel any great sadness or loss over his death, only that I had failed to See or witness it.\n\nThen my eyes turned to the other drake who lay dead on the ground. This time I couldn't help but let out a gasp of shock and dismay, for I knew who it was. Mulner lay there, and judging from the blood around his snout, he had died killing Ddraig Tsona. The Nixans mostly focussed on the fallen ddraig, leaving me alone with Mulner. I rested my paw on his head, feeling the coldness of his body. It felt as though he had been dead for quite some time, but I was sure I had seen him standing just moments earlier.\n\nA shadow stood over me. \"Ddraig Ellian will blame me for this,\" I said, expecting Kaz to be behind me. I was a little surprised to hear the gentle rustling of feathers and the click of a beak. I glanced back to see a gryphon, her feathers dyed blue.\n\n\"We came too late,\" she said, bowing her head and placing one taloned paw on Mulner's body. \"I would honour you with my name, dragon, but there is no honour to be found in finding out I have failed a friend. I am Seris, apothecary and healer. Failed healer, for I could not save Mulner.\"\n\n\"I am Azlak, seer of Nixa,\" I replied, bowing my head and keeping my eyes away from hers. I hadn't even thought about it, identifying myself as a Nixan. It had come quite naturally, and I felt no sense of betrayal towards the clan that had raised me. The clan that had shunned me. The gryphon's gaze was fierce and almost completely unblinking as she stared down at me.\n\n\"A seer? That is a mighty ability, Azlak of Nixa. You can do much good with that, but I have seen seers go mad trying to change that which cannot be changed,\" she said, sending a shiver down my spine. I was sure she could not know about the visions that plagued my mind about my father. \"I trust you will know what you can and can not do, that sometimes you must put aside your own personal needs and wants. Especially in times like these.\"\n\nI bowed my head and closed my eyes. I held Mulner's paw in my own for a few moments, before releasing it and turning it away. Maybe if I had have focussed more on everyone else and not my father, I would have been able to save Ddraig Ellian's brother. I would never know what futures had died with Mulner, what possibilities his life could have created.\n\n\"I can try,\" I said, tucking my tail in between my hind legs. I felt tears forming in my eyes as I tried to look towards my father, knowing that if I did as the gryphon said, I would be sacrificing my father to die. The father I had longed for my entire life, the proud dragon Marin had never been.\n\n\"You think he would have cared for you?\"\n\nThe thought drifted through my mind, unbidden and unwanted. It took me a few seconds to then realise that the thought hadn't been my own. As soon as I was aware of that my whole body tensed, eyes wide as I stared down into the churned up mud. My brother was in my mind.\n\n\"Come back to us, please,\" I whispered, unaware I had spoken aloud until I heard Seris's curious chirrup. The tip of my tail twitched as I slowly looked up, the touch of Anzig's mind on my own fading. I attempted a smile. \"Sorry, I thought I heard something. We should be prepared. Humans will be here in a few minutes. I believe George will be amongst them.\"\n\n\"George will be here? He will not be pleased to learn of Tsona's death,\" Haeraig Zeena said as she started to approach us. Though she appeared a little intimidated by the gryphon, her head was still held straight, her tail almost motionless behind her.\n\nI wasn't sure it would be quite so simple, and as Haeraig Zeena and Seris started to talk, I slowly backed away. I couldn't bear being so near to Mulner's body anymore, the sight of it acting like a beacon of my failures. Moving back towards the hills and away from the human encampment, I sought to get a few moments of peace where I didn't need to watch my back every moment. Kaz followed behind me. I was glad of his company, but even gladder that he didn't attempt to speak to me just yet. I could only hope that he didn't see the tears that threatened to fall from my eyes.\n\n\"What can I do, Kaz? What can one drake do to save any life in a fight like this?\" I asked eventually. I stopped and turned around, far enough away from my father that I could barely see him anymore. The only drakes nearby were those too injured to fight, hoping to limp back to the safety of the hills before the humans broke through. The battle had turned into a display of attrition. Both armies lined up against each other in one long, thin line across the plains. All of our carefully arranged tactics seemed to have been forgotten. Scattered shields and guns lay discarded by the humans amongst the bodies of the dead. It was a grim scene, and already above us I could see the carrion birds starting to circle. They would be feeding well for the days to come.\n\nIf Kaz responded to my question, I never heard it as I felt the touch of Anzig on my mind again. I could feel him testing his magic on me, determining just how much control he had over me. My paws moved without my will as he forced me to take a couple of steps back towards the ongoing combat.\n\n\"It is remarkable, being able to See the future, isn't it? I didn't realise I'd be able to access your magic like this.\" Anzig's thoughts were clear in my mind as his magic kept me slowly walking forward. Dimly I was aware of Kaz by my side, questioning what I was doing, but I was unable to answer him at all. I tried to struggle against my brother, but his magic had too strong a hold on my mind. I couldn't even question what he was doing, or why. But I knew that he would be able to hear my thoughts anyway.\n\n\"I do this because it's right. I have been shown the truth, Azlak. Perhaps if you had been told what I have learnt, you will understand. They're trying to save us.\"\n\nI tried to shake my head but failed. I knew enough about what the humans were doing I had experienced it too, the pain of their magic coursing through my veins and twisting my shape into something monstrous. They weren't trying to save us. They wanted us dead or beneath their rule.\n\n\"That's where you're wrong, little brother. I'm sorry that I have to do this. I hope you'll come to forgive me, in time. After all you've done to save him. Say a prayer to your gods, Azlak. They're all that can save you now.\"\n\nBefore I was able to react, I felt Anzig's presence leave my mind. I was free to move again, and I immediately started to run, no time to even attempt to launch myself into the air and build up flight speed. Behind me, Kaz sprinted, seeming to understand my urgency despite not possibly knowing what was about to happen. I wasn't even sure of it myself, but I feared that Anzig threatened my\u2026 our father.\n\nI barged past a gryphon in time to see Ddraig Krateos flare his wings ready for takeoff. He clung onto the Axinstone tightly beneath his chest as it had been for the entire battle. By his side was Haeraig Zeena, but there was no sign of Anzig or Maznar. I dared believe that maybe Anzig's threat wasn't against Ddraig Krateos after all.\n\nHaeraig Zeena tugged on her father's tail, distracting him as he tried to kick off into the air. He hovered for a moment, before landing and spinning around with some irritation. As he turned, my sister lunged forward, placing her paw on the Axinstone. Before anyone could react, I felt a fierce mental blast, pushing drake and gryphon away.\n\nFather and daughter grappled, both trying to pull the shard of glowing stone away from the other. Haeraig Zeena snarled, claws lashing out as she battered against her father physically, whilst mentally pushing everyone else away. I couldn't move any closer, an invisible barrier of magic keeping both gryphon and drake away.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" a voice cried out beside me. I thought it might have been Kaz but I could be sure. My mind was drowned out in terror. This was the moment my father would fall. And it had been the wrong daughter. Powerless to help, I struggled against Haeraig Zeena's magic, desperate to break through. But she had the power of the Axinstone to call upon. Her defences were absolute.\n\nDdraig Krateos used neither claw nor tooth in his defence, seemingly unwilling to harm his daughter. His caution contrasted with the savage determination of Haeraig Zeena, who had drawn blood from her father already.\n\nI wailed with anguish as the Axinstone slipped free from Ddraig Krateos's grip. Her magic now unfettered, another blast of Haeraig Zeena's magic erupted out. I was flung backwards, rolling through the mud as she forced everyone away. Gryphons squawked and drakes snarled, but none was able to resist.\n\nThrown against a gryphon who then collapsed on top of me, I struggled to free myself. Feather and fur pressed down on me, and I could feel the heavy weight pulling on my wings. When I was able to get free I quickly leapt up to my paws. Haeraig Zeena had her father's throat in her jaws, squeezing and choking the life from him. Now his claws were out, scratching down his daughter's neck and shoulders, but it was too late. Her magic held him in place.\n\nI sprinted forward, ignoring the pain in my wings. I didn't know what I could do, but I pounced for them, intending to knock Haeraig Zeena away but once more I was thrown into the mud by her magic. Another drake was thrown on top of me, and as I scrambled to my paws I recognised the familiar blue of Kaz's scales. Like me he strained to reach his ddraig, to save and heal him. Before we were able to even attempt to move towards them again, Haeraig Zeena flung Ddraig Krateos to the ground.\n\nHe did not rise.\n\nFor just a moment, Haeraig Zeena's eyes locked with mine. Within them I recognised my brother. Anzig grinned at me from my sister's face. With the Axinstone in her paws, she prepared to kick off and launch into the air, but a gryphon struck her from behind, sending her sprawling into the mud. The precious shard fell from her grasp, landing next to her father's outstretched paw. When she looked up again, my brother was gone, leaving my sister to realise just what she had done. She stared down at her blood-stained claws and wailed, not noticing the gryphons that were descending on her in retribution.\n\n\"No, stop! It wasn't her!\" I yelled in horror, but my words were ignored by the gryphons. All but one. Seris flared her wings and screeched out a loud command, calling off the gryphons from their impending attack. They landed around Haeraig Zeena, one of them pinning her down beneath one paw, but my sister made no attempt to get away.\n\nKaz pushed his way past me, hurrying up to the fallen ddraig. I followed just behind. I couldn't stop my body from trembling, stunned at what I had just witnessed. As Kaz reached out and placed his paw on Ddraig Krateos, I already knew it was too late. My mate's magic sprung out from his paw, bathing my father in a gentle light and the wounds on his wing and throat started to close up, but no movement returned to the Nixan's chest.\n\nI could barely watch as Seris placed her paw on Kaz's shoulder, lightly pulling him away from my father's body. He was dead. My magic had failed to prevent the inevitable. I tried to keep accusatory eyes away from Haeraig Zeena. It was hard to convince myself that it had not been her doing. The truth was harder to accept. Through her, Anzig had killed Ddraig Krateos. A cowardly act that I would never have believed my brother capable of.\n\nFeeling numb, I slowly approached Haeraig Zeena and rested my head on her shoulder, ignoring the gryphon pinning her down. I could feel her tense beneath me, her body stiff as she tried to maintain her composure. Then she broke down, sobs racking through her body.\n\n\"I didn't mean to\u2026 I didn't\u2026 He was too strong...\" she gasped, her head falling down onto my shoulder.\n\nI was about to start consoling her, to join her in her grief, when a shriek went out amongst the gryphons. The pressure on Haeraig Zeena's back was relieved as the gryphons all took to the air. Gunshot reverberated across the plains. I gasped and turned around in shock. The humans had come anew, the hundred or so humans I had originally Seen. The time for grieving was not now.\n\n\"I will find him, Haeraig. Sister. I'll find him and I'll make sure he pays for what he's done,\" I growled, surprising even myself with the force of anger I suddenly felt. I knew Anzig had been hurt badly by the loss of his wings, but he had descended too far into madness if he believed the humans were doing something good for drakes. And killing our father in such a cowardly manner meant that the Anzig I once knew was no more.\n\nHaeraig Zeena then surprised me with the savagery of her response. \"Go. Find him. Bring him to justice,\" she snarled, pulling her head back. Her eyes blazed with fury, and I couldn't hold her glare for more than a few seconds. When she looked away again, it was to gaze towards her father. Her ferocious eyes softened slightly as she approached him. Gryphon and drake stepped aside for her as she plucked the Axinstone up from where she had dropped it. The stone flared brightly in her grip. She nosed upwards. \"Fly now. We'll deal with the humans. They will regret messing with Nixa.\"\n\nI closed my eyes and nodded. I didn't need my magic to know what was going to happen next. I didn't know where to start looking for Anzig, but I was sure I was going to find him.\n\nAnd once I did, I knew I would have to kill him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "We fought fiercely. Many drakes had given their lives for the cause. Our numbers were vastly depleted, and yet the onslaught of humanity never seemed to end. We had taken catastrophic losses, but so had Clan Xital and their draconic allies. The danger from the air had almost been annulled, but still the threat of humanity's steel and gunfire remained. As evening started to fall, it didn't appear to be on the verge of fading.\n\nI couldn't recall how many times I had come within moments of death. Whether it was some Nixan enchantment or pure luck, I could never be sure, but every time I faced claw or sword I was able to escape with no more than a small slice to my scales. I bled for our cause from wounds on my shoulders and legs, but I had not suffered any of the horrific injuries I had witnessed, of drakes, gryphons, and humans alike staggering back away from the fight, desperate to receive the attention of healers.\n\nDusk deepened as the sun sunk down towards the large clouds that had gradually been building throughout the day. It was to be a long, dark night. Whether it would bring any respite to the fighting I couldn't be sure. If the humans pressed their advantage then we would be destroyed. If my brother couldn't call on the bats again for protection, then there would be nothing stopping the remaining humans from slaughtering us when we lacked the energy to fight back.\n\nI had seen nothing of Mulner since the morning. I could only hope that he was still alive as I had not had any opportunity to go and find him. All of my focus had been on staying alive, and preserving the life of as many drakes as I could. I was exhausted and longed for the rest that was denied to me.\n\nAs the sun sunk below the clouds the air started to cool. Our endurance was reaching breaking point when I noticed a drake flying out from the hills behind us. As they flew directly for me, I retreated a little, giving myself an escape from the humans. All around me other drakes pressed forward into the gap, snarling as they leapt forward with claws extended.\n\nMy wings ached as I held them against my back, longing to spread them out and catch the last few rays of sunlight before they disappeared behind the darkening clouds. I wasn't even able to keep my legs from shaking as the newcomer greeted me, the dragoness bowing her head as she landed.\n\n\"Alaron calls a retreat. Fall back to the forest and defend the riverbank if necessary,\" she said quickly, before holding a paw up to prevent me responding despite my superior rank. \"I must find Ddraig Krateos. We haven't had any contact with him or Haeraig Zeena for several hours now. Call the retreat, Ddraig. I'll fly the word down to the other flank.\"\n\n\"Fly safe,\" I said, bowing my head in a sign of respect towards the dragoness. Once she spread her wings again I turned and roared out a command to retreat. The order was eagerly obeyed. A thunderous beating of wings from drake and gryphon alike heralded a quick retreat. Some were shot down immediately, but most were able to quickly escape the range of the deadly guns. Like a ripple across a lake, the order spread down the line of battle until our entire force was hurrying back to the forest as quickly as our weary wings could manage.\n\nTo my surprise, there wasn't much of a pursuit, leaving us free to seek the refuge of the trees. While most others kept to wing as they flew through the trees, I took to the leafy ground immediately, not trusting my failing vision in the darkness. I was not the only one to land. Joining me amongst the dead leaves was Keita, who sported a painful looking wound to her snout, a red line breaking her scales and almost reaching her right, already blinded, eye.\n\nAbove us, the bats chattered away in their high pitched voices, crying out to each other. I scanned through the darkened branches, trying to find any trace of my brother, but all I could see was the ferocious bats, their red eyes glaring down at me with ill-concealed hunger. One crawled along a branch, suspended upside down as its powerful wings and sharp claws supported its weight. When it reached the trunk it slowly started to edge downwards, never once taking its eyes from me.\n\nI tried not to back away, but by my side Keita showed no such concern as the dragoness took a couple of steps from the approaching bat. As I glared at it, I spread my wings to enhance my size, a trick that usually intimidated most creatures that threatened a drake. The bat seemed quite unconcerned, not even slowing down its descent.\n\n\"I am no threat to you. Your master is my brother, Mulner,\" I warned the bat. It chittered in a trill voice, sounding too much like laughter for my liking. And still it advanced.\n\n\"We shouldn't be here,\" Keita said from behind my tail. I could hear the fear in her voice as it quavered. She was on the verge of turning tail and fleeing. But in the forest there were bats all around us. No matter where she went, there would be a horde of grave bats directly over her head. I began to wonder if Alaron had made a mistake in directing us all beneath the trees.\n\nThe bat crawled from the tree and landed amongst the dead leaves on the ground. For the first time I could truly appreciate just how big these bats were. It stood a few inches shorter than me, but its wingspan was larger. Its claws were curved and wicked, looking easily strong enough to penetrate through my scales. Looking at it, it was not hard to see why this was such a feared predator. Without my brother around to control them, I was no longer convinced these beasts were our allies.\n\nMy hindpaw slowly reached back as I took a half step away from the bat. Wings fluttered overhead, and for a moment both the bat and I were distracted as we looked up. I had initially expected to see Keita flying away, but then I recognised the faded brown scales of Ddraig Boruc approaching. I had not seen him all day, but I was not too surprised that he would have been avoiding the worst of the fighting. I doubted he was capable of keeping up with the more energetic younger drakes.\n\nThe older dragon showed no fear as he swooped down to land between the bat and me. With a sharp cry of, \"Tchaak!\" the ddraig chased after the grave bat. To my surprise it squawked and retreated back to the tree, chittering indignantly at the aggressive display from the dragon.\n\nTucking my wings against my back, I quickly glanced back at Keita before taking a couple of steps towards Ddraig Boruc. \"I thought you said no drake can control grave bats?\" I asked, impressed by his apparent control over the creature.\n\nDdraig Boruc chuckled and shook his head, all the while keeping one wary eye on the danger above. \"Control? No, I have no control over them. But I do know how to persuade them about some things, if they're in the mood to listen. Whatever it was your brother did to these ones has left them surprisingly placid, but I don't know how much longer that will last,\" he said, before pausing to inspect something between the leaves beneath his paws.\n\nUnsure if he had anything further to add, I waited for a few moments for him to continue, but whatever had captured his attention had done so totally. I edged closer to the Vatrean ddraig, my tail flicking against the leaves as I moved.\n\n\"They won't attack us in the night, will they?\" I asked him. I could hear Ketia following me, remaining just behind my tail.\n\nDdraig Boruc blinked and shook his head slightly, coming out of his momentary reverie. \"Huh, what? No, they won't attack. They'll be too busy feeding. They won't need to chase down live prey when there's a feast of carrion waiting for them on the plains,\" he replied. He spoke dispassionately, as though he wasn't referring to the thousands of drakes, gryphons, and humans who had died fighting. I dreaded to think how many amongst them all I had once known.\n\nAs though they had been waiting for Ddraig Boruc's words, a cacophony of wingbeats drowned out every other sound as the swarm of bats leapt from the trees. We were sprayed in a shower of leaves and twigs knocked loose by the bats' flight. There were so many of them, I could only look up in awe as they flew past.\n\nSuch was the noise of their wings, I didn't even notice the arrival of another drake until after the bats had all passed by. Okazuni must have slunk close on paw as I doubted the bats would have allowed anything to approach by wing. The diminutive dragon pressed close to his mate, the two of them watching the bats with the same wide eyes I was sure I had.\n\nOnce the last of the bats had flown by, Okazuni cautiously approached me. He didn't once raise his eyes higher than my paws. \"I flew with your brother today, Ddraig Ellian,\" he said in a small voice.\n\nIt felt like my body had been filled with ice. I suddenly dreaded Okazuni's next words, but at the same time needed to know. If he had news about my brother's fate, then I had to hear it. \"Where is he?\" I asked, unable to bring my voice above a whisper.\n\n\"He was ferocious, like he didn't care about whether he survived or not. I lost track of him for a while, but when I found him again he was fighting Ddraig Tsona,\" Okazuni said, daring to raise his eyes for just a moment. Then he squeaked in fear and ducked his head again, eyes fixated on a leaf as he pawed at the ground. \"Ddraig Tsona is dead. Your brother killed him. But then\u2026 Mulner he just seemed to fail. He'd been wounded, but not seriously enough, but he\u2026 Ddraig, he just died.\"\n\n\"No,\" I whispered, shaking my head. I didn't want to believe it. The Nyrian must have been mistaken. It could not have been my brother he had seen.\n\nDdraig Boruc placed his paw on mine. \"You must understand, Ddraig Ellian. Your brother knew he was going to die. He could not survive the magic that flowed through his body. He was dead from the moment he killed the necuart. How he managed to survive this long is something I will never know,\" he said, extending a wing out to rest it over my back. I leant in close to him, trying to suppress the howl of anguish I wished to unleash.\n\nIt had been so long. My brother had left us so long ago, and now he was back in my life I had hoped to make up for lost time. I had wanted to get to know him again, to have some family of my own again. That had been taken away from me. I was alone. Vinzent had betrayed me before his stupidity led to his death. Anzig had abandoned me, but given his true parentage he was never even truly family to me anyway. The only drake I had left now was Airil, my dearest mate. I longed for him, just to feel comforted in the embrace of his wings.\n\nI pushed away from Ddraig Boruc and tucked my tail between my hind legs. \"He killed Ddraig Tsona?\"\n\nOkazuni nodded as he retreated a couple of steps back towards Keita. \"He did, Ddraig Ellian. He fought bravely before taking Ddraig Tsona by the throat.\"\n\nI slowly exhaled before glancing back at Ddraig Boruc. \"We should pass on this information to Alaron. He would like to know that one of our enemy's leaders has been killed. What remains of Clan Xital may be less willing to fight come the morning,\" I said, trying to put my grief behind me for the moment. There were still things that needed to be done, and I had to assume the role of Laxtal's ddraig. It wouldn't do for me to show my anguish now.\n\nWith great effort, I thanked Okazuni for bringing me his information before dismissing him and Keita. With Ddraig Boruc by my side, I delved deeper into the forest. All around us were the many drakes and gryphons who had fought. Most were injured in some way, but very few of them would see a healer at all. We simply didn't have enough with the ability to help everyone. Only those with the most critical injuries would be healed. I tried to slip by unnoticed, leaving the injured to lick their bleeding cuts and attempt to lie down without getting too much mud and grime into their open wounds.\n\nDdraig Boruc knew where Alaron had landed, and the Vatrean led me further into the forest where the trees were dense and thick. Almost no light found its way in through the trees, though the way was lit by some glowing Nixan orbs. In the shadows beyond the light shapes seemed to move, but every time I tried to focus on them I could make out nothing from the deep gloom.\n\nAlaron was not alone when we came across the wyvern. He was in the middle of a heated debate with Kyrus over the continued sense of simply trying to wear out the human forces in a war of attrition. We may have had the superior numbers, but Kyrus estimated our losses to be much greater than had been inflicted on the human and Xital armies. Their debate ended as soon as Kyrus noticed us, the gryphon prince ruffling his wings and chirruping at the wyvern to silence him.\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian, I'm glad to see you looking relatively unharmed,\" Alaron said, lowering his head for a second. He completely ignored Ddraig Boruc by my side, but the Vatrean didn't seem too concerned by the slight.\n\nThough the wyvern had largely overseen everything from afar so he could best direct the forces at his disposal, he hadn't been completely unharmed. One of his wingfingers appeared to be broken, and he avoided putting too much weight on his right wing as he walked. He'd also taken a claw to his neck, with a ragged line of broken and bloodstained scales from the side of his neck down to his shoulder.\n\nKyrus appeared to be unscathed, though he limped slightly with an apparent injury in his left hindleg. No blood blemished his feathers, but I could see a few red stains he had not yet managed to clean away from his claws. His beak clicked as he slowly paced, taking care to step over the fallen branches and detritus on the ground.\n\n\"Still no word on Ddraig Krateos?\" the gryphon asked, staring out into the darkness. I wondered what he saw, his eyes much better suited to seeing without sunlight than mine were.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Alaron said wearily. \"All we can do is wait.\"\n\nIf we were going to wait, I wanted to get comfortable enough to do so. Finding that the Nixan orbs gave off a little heat, I eased myself down next to one of them, unfurling one wing to rest above it. It wasn't much, but it was enough to help soothe some of the aching that plagued my body. Ddraig Boruc followed my lead, but neither Kyrus nor Alaron seemed concerned by the gradually increasing chill, though the wyvern did ease himself down to the ground, his injured wing spread out wide.\n\nIt wasn't long before someone new approached. Shuffling pawsteps crunching over dead leaves first gave them away, before a dark shadow started to melt from the darkness beyond the orbs. A second shadow followed right behind.\n\nKyrus squawked in surprise as Haeraig Zeena entered the orblight with Azlak by her side. Both looked dreadful, their wings drooping low from exhaustion. Their bodies were covered in a myriad of small cuts and wounds, and the tip of the haeraig's tail looked like it had been sliced off by a human blade. Even now it oozed a little blood as she held it up.\n\n\"Haeraig Zeena, it's good to see you,\" Alaron said, not getting up from where he lay to greet the Nixan.\n\nAs Haeraig Zeena let out a distressed whimper, Azlak stepped forward and shook his head. \"No. Ddraig Zeena. Our father is dead, killed by our brother,\" he said, before his eyes met mine. \"Killed by Anzig.\"\n\nStartled, I lifted my head up, though my weary body prevented me from standing up. \"Anzig? You've seen him?\" I asked, both overjoyed at the sighting of him, yet stunned that he had been able to do something as vile as killing Ddraig Krateos. The leader of the Nixans, defeated by a crippled dragon. It just didn't make sense to me.\n\nAgain Azlak shook his head. \"He used his magic. He acted through another. I tried to find him, I've searched all day, but wherever he is, he's hiding. He may have exhausted himself, so we'll need to be on our guard to keep him out of our minds tomorrow,\" he said. As he spoke, he kept on glancing down to Ddraig Zeena's paws, where I noticed she held the Axinstone.\n\n\"Have you tried using that?\" I asked, pointing towards the fiery shard of stone. \"Can you not find the future where you will come across him?\n\n\"I would See every future if I did that,\" Azlak said, his voice quavering in fear. \"I would See and feel every drake dying hundreds and thousands of times over. Seeing a death just once is a terrible enough experience. To live it over and over again would be horrifying. I do not wish to use the Axinstone unless I absolutely must.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the other remaining ddraigs joined us. I was happy to see Ddraig Bakucic still alive. Ddraig Kiarla had also survived her first full day as the ruler of the last living members of Clan Eltee. I had heard only a dozen drakes remained from that clan. Hyantl of Axaatl had also joined us as a representative of his clan; the massive drake clearing a space amongst the leaves to lie down by himself away from the glowing orbs.\n\nI couldn't help but notice Azlak and Ddraig Zeena kept trying to meet my eyes, as though nervous about something. I tried to avoid their gaze, not being in the mood to talk to them, but eventually Ddraig Zeena approached me as we waited for Alaron to start talking.\n\n\"We saw your brother\u2026\" she said, before I cut her off with a wave of my paw.\n\n\"I know what happened. I don't wish to discuss it right now,\" I said, resisting the urge to fold my wings over my body and cover my face with them. Then I remembered the Nixan had lost her father, and four brothers not too long ago. She would be suffering just as much as me.\n\nDdraig Zeena didn't have any chance to respond, nor I to apologise for my harsh-seeming words. Alaron had hauled himself back up to his paws and wings and was looking around at the gathered drakes.\n\n\"Tomorrow is when we win this war. The humans are vulnerable and they know this. They knew they had to wipe us out today, and yet here we are. The threat of the bats will keep them away for the night. Tomorrow we strike again, and we will strike hard,\" the wyvern said. Whereas normally he was prone to pacing back and forth as he spoke, this time he remained standing in one place, hindered by his injured wing.\n\n\"If you haven't noticed, we're pretty vulnerable too,\" Ddraig Zeena said. She was right. Most of us present were injured already, and there were few left amongst our forces who had not been hurt at all. Over half our number had been killed, with almost a quarter on top of that unable to fight until they were healed.\n\nAlaron smirked. \"Had you forgotten Ddraig Nunahra? Five thousand Xigax drakes get closer every minute the sun is up. Another messenger reached us just before dusk. They could not reach us before dusk with the energy to fight, but they are less than a two hour's flight from us. That's all we need to survive tomorrow. Two hours before they will sweep in from the north, killing any human that gets in their way. Do you think you can do that, Ddraig Zeena?\"\n\nThe Nixan bowed her head. The arrival of the Xigax drakes had eluded my mind as well. A flare of hope dared surge up in my chest.\n\nThe wyvern nodded, before sweeping his eyes around the group again. \"I wish to keep George and Ddraig Tsona alive if we can. I have questions I'd like to ask them both,\" he said, before being interrupted once more, this time from Azlak as the seer stepped forward.\n\n\"Ddraig Tsona is dead. I watched him die at the jaws of Ddraig Ellian's brother,\" he said, his voice and strength wavering under the ferocity of Alaron's glare.\n\nAlaron's eyes briefly flicked in my direction before his focus returned to Azlak. \"Dead? I did not expect him to put himself in a position of risk,\" he said quietly. The wyvern winced as he attempted to pace, pressing down on his injured wing and forcing him to stop again. \"Xital's haeraig was held captive by Xigax. They're leaderless now. We can use this to our advantage.\"\n\n\"How? They will still be cowed into submission by the humans,\" Hyantl said, speaking up with a growl.\n\n\"By giving them gryphons to fight. Something large and unfamiliar will send them into panic, and without their ddraig to oversee them, they'll flee,\" the wyvern replied, swinging his head around to Kyrus, who nodded and chirped his approval.\n\n\"We would take great pleasure in it,\" Kyrus said as he stretched his taloned forelegs out in front of him. In the dim light cast by the orbs, he looked particularly savage.\n\n\"So is that it then?\" I asked, drawing Alaron's fierce eyes back on me, as well as the attention of everyone else. \"We sacrifice more lives while we wait for Ddraig Nunahra to come to our rescue?\"\n\n\"Unless you have anything better to suggest, then yes. That is our plan,\" Alaron responded harshly and simply.\n\nI sighed and turned away from the wyvern. He was right. I didn't have anything else to propose. Just because I didn't feel comfortable sending more drakes to their deaths didn't mean I had an alternative solution. We had no other option. We never had.\n\n\"Are we sure the bats will protect us tonight?\" Ddraig Bakucic asked, stepping forward and speaking for the first time. He was looking up towards the trees, whose leaves swayed gently in the wind out beyond the shadows that pressed in close. I couldn't hear any wingbeats nearby, but in the distance I could just about hear the piercing screeching of the grave bats.\n\nAlaron had no answer to that, and nor did Kyrus. They both looked at each other without words. If it had been my brother who had been controlling them, then now with him dead the creatures would listen to no one. Finally, Ddraig Boruc stepped forward.\n\n\"They have no master. No one here can control them, but it is likely they will obey the last orders of their previous master, that being Mulner,\" the Vatrean explained. He joined Ddraig Bakucic in looking up into the darkness, but I was sure he was able to see much more than the Lilisxi ddraig. His eyes tracked something unseen amongst the darkness. \"I do not pretend to have perfect knowledge of the bats' language, but what little I do understand suggests that they are content with the carrion on the plains.\"\n\n\"And they will stop any humans attacking us in the night?\" Alaron asked.\n\nDdraig Boruc didn't answer immediately, once again distracted by something no one else seemed to see. \"They will attack anything that approaches,\" he said eventually. He blinked a few times as he looked down at Alaron again. \"So yes, they will keep the humans away from us. I would expect them to leave just before dawn, probably to fly south to the Twilight Fields.\"\n\n\"Then we have no choice but to end it tomorrow, or the humans will butcher us in the night when we have no protection. If we can't win with Ddraig Nunahra's support then we have but two options. Surrender or flee,\" Alaron said, gazing around at each of us and holding our eyes for a moment. Alaron was never the one to look away first.\n\nThe wyvern then dismissed us all but for Kyrus, bidding us all to get a good night of rest while we could. He informed us he had arranged a healer to come and find us all, to see that we were fully prepared to lead from the front again. I left with Ddraig Boruc and Azlak, the seer informing me that Airil was waiting for me with his twin brother. He led the way, carefully making his way through the trees and testing every step. I could barely even see his golden scales as he walked just a couple of paces ahead of me. Several times I glanced back to make sure Ddraig Boruc was following, but he seemed to be untroubled by the darkness.\n\nI tried to block my ears to the sounds of discomfort all around. Drakes whimpered and hissed as they tried to get comfortable, some crying out in agony as they waited for the overworked healers to reach them. So much suffering already and we expected them to go and fight again. I didn't know how I could do it, but like Alaron had said, what choice did we really have?\n\nKaz and Airil weren't alone when we finally reached them. I was pleased to see James McArthur with them, wrapped up inside a sheet of warm fabrics and holding a metallic stick emanating light. In his other hand was a black device with a rainbow of colours around the edge. The human appeared weary yet unharmed.\n\nMy attention lingered on James for barely a moment, as Airil quickly leapt up for me. We embraced, my wings wrapping around him before we settled down together. By our side, Azlak lay down with his head resting on Kaz's chest. I soon learned that the healer had already worn himself out trying to heal the wounded as they had returned. It had taken Airil's intervention to drag him away, teleporting the exhausted healer to safety, where he had simply collapsed where he was.\n\nFrom James, I discovered that the small group of humans loyal to us hadn't been directly engaged for most of the afternoon. Instead they had been contacting former allies amongst George's army using their communication devices. They had been able to recruit almost a hundred more humans to our cause, a gentle trickle of defectors abandoning their superiors and joining James's band in exile. Compared to the thousands that still opposed us it was such a pitiful number, but for every human that sided with us represented one fewer to fight. We were all grateful for James's efforts.\n\nTrue to his word, Alaron eventually sent around a healer to us, providing relief from our wounds. Kaz had tried to stand up to assist the dragoness as she came around, but the Nixan simply smiled and placed her paw on Kaz's head. He instantly fell asleep at her touch, his long tail draped over Azlak's body.\n\nThough I initially refused the healing, preferring for the dragoness to conserve her strength for those who truly needed it, she insisted. I was too weary to evade her, so when her paw found mine I could feel the warmth of her magic seeping through my body. Scales were renewed as the damaged flesh righted itself, all the little aches and pains I hadn't even been consciously aware of fading to nothing. My body felt rejuvenated, though my mind was exhausted.\n\n\"With your forgiveness, Ddraig,\" the Nixan healer said, bowing her head and keeping her eyes low. \"I use the strength of those who can afford to give it up to complete the healing. That way we can see to more of those in need.\"\n\nI nodded and gave the dragoness's paw a gentle squeeze before she pulled away. \"Thank you. Your efforts are most appreciated,\" I said softly, before she retreated back into the darkness to provide her services where they were next needed. After having my energy drained, I didn't know how much longer I would be able to remain awake. My eyelids drooped as my head fell back into Airil's body. His legs and tail wrapped around my body, holding me close.\n\nThough danger lay less than a mile away and we were protected by a horde of bats who could just as easily turn on us, I found that I could not resist sleep. My dreams were troubled. A black spectre with red eyes haunted them, but she never forced me awake. I slept through the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "I was woken up to darkness. I couldn't see the stars beneath the trees, but dawn had certainly not arrived. Airil's chest rose and fell beneath my head as he continued to sleep. The unnerving red eyes from my dream continued to gleam from the darkness like a ghostly imprint leftover from my mind's eye. But that wasn't what had woken me up. It took a few moments for my cold body to recognise the hand resting against my side.\n\nBlinking to clear my eyes of the afterimages of my dream, I could just about make out the outline of James's shadow in the darkness as he crouched over me. Only the light of his little communications device allowed me to see him at all.\n\n\"Huh? What's the matter?\" I asked, fighting off the urge to simply fall asleep again.\n\n\"Alaron summoned us. The bats have flown south,\" James said quietly, making sure I was staying awake before moving on to rouse Ddraig Boruc. The human carried a cup of hot, steaming liquid in his hand.\n\nI dragged myself up to my paws, weak and unsteady as I tried to remain upright. Airil twitched his tail and curled it lightly around my leg as he slept. I was tempted to rejoin him, but reluctantly I shook my paw to free it before taking a few stumbling steps forward.\n\nInstead of delving deeper into the forest, James led us out towards the outskirts. With the trees less dense, some starlight started to shine down through the leaves, but it was still barely enough to see by.\n\nSleeping drakes were sprawled out everywhere. There seemed to be no particular order amongst it either, drakes from different clans lay sprawled across each other without concern. Nixans lay with Lilisxi drakes, Laxtals with Axaatls. In their exhaustion and pain, none had worried about the boundaries that separated our clans.\n\nDawn was just breaking as we slowly climbed up one of the surrounding hills. The wyvern was waiting for us at the summit, standing tall with no signs of the discomfort he had been in the previous night. His focus was not on the potential human city on the far side of the plains, but to the skies of the east, above the pink glow of the rising sun.\n\n\"If she doesn't come today\u2026\" the wyvern muttered, before slowly turning around to face us. I wasn't sure if we were meant to hear his words of doubt, but he showed no discomfort in knowing that we had overheard him. I bowed my head to him, and the wyvern repeated the gesture. \"I trust you slept well, Ddraig Ellian and James McArthur.\"\n\n\"It was too short, but restful enough,\" I replied, looking up to the human beside me who nodded his assent. For once I was envious of his warm clothing, usually finding the strips of cloth and fabric pointless, but in the cool winds blowing down from the north they would have provided some warmth. I barely had the strength to even hold my wings up tight against my back. The first few rays of sunlight on my scales would be most welcome.\n\nAlaron scratched at the ground with his claws as we waited for the others to arrive. Prince Kyrus was the next, the gryphon already looking perfectly preened as though he hadn't even settled down to sleep. I wondered how long he had already been awake, just to get his feathers in place. Ddraig Zeena approached with Inilta by her side, a film of flames licking at her scales. When the Nixan ddraig settled down, Inilta approached the middle of the circle and placed his forepaws together on the ground. When he removed them, a spring of fire roared up, instantly hotter than any other natural fire I had known.\n\nLike moths to the fire, Ddraig Bakucic and Ddraig Kiarla were next to arrive, both muttering quiet words of greeting before spreading their wings in front of the magical fire. We were all waiting on Ddraig Boruc, but Alaron wasn't willing to wait any longer.\n\n\"I have sent a messenger out to Ddraig Nunahra, instructing her to sweep in from the north. If she has remained undetected by our enemy then I am hopeful she can decimate their last resistance,\" he explained, looking around at the small gathered group of ddraigs and leaders. His eyes settled on me for a moment before moving away.\n\nA paw settled on my tail for a moment, and I turned back to see Ddraig Boruc behind me. I moved to the side, brushing into Kyrus's softly furred hindlegs as I did so, to allow the Vatrean to join in the circle and rest in the firelight. He looked exhausted and seemed to be suffering from the cold more than anyone else.\n\nIn my distraction, I almost lost what the wyvern was saying. I listened again in time to hear Alaron discussing in more detail just what our plans for the day would be. While Kyrus would lead a charge directly against the broken Xital clan and the other surviving drakes, Alaron would take command of most of the drakes to directly combat the humans. I, meanwhile, would be given a task of greater importance.\n\nI would take James McArthur and his group of defected humans and lead them into the heart of the canvas city that had been built on the river. I was to seek out George and force his surrender using whatever means necessary. My assault was to be timed to strike just before Ddraig Nunahra and her Xigax army was to descend upon the battlefield.\n\nJames sat down next to me and placed his hand on my back. His skin was warm to the touch. \"I doubt he'll be risking himself directly,\" the human said. \"I know exactly where he'll be.\"\n\n\"Then it is settled,\" Alaron said, as always holding our gaze for a few seconds. He even glared into the eyes of the human, but seemed to find James's lack of focus an annoyance. \"We shall strike in one hour. Sooner if the humans look in danger of attacking first. Use that time to warm up and energise yourselves. This is the day of our destiny.\"\n\nI took a deep breath. The fate of dragonkind rested on us now. Win or lose, our lives would never be the same again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I was roused too early in the morning with the sun barely making it over the horizon. I had spent the night in Kaz's wings, enjoying what I feared could be the last night I would get to spend with him. I know I had dreamed a lot that night, but frustratingly they remained elusive. Only flashes on meaningless images remained.\n\nIn my paw I could feel the indentation left there by Esperance's slate. The longing to contact her was starting to grow, desperate to hear her words. She would know whether or not we were able to win. But she would also be just as likely to chastise me for bothering her with such trivial things. I knew that while she would probably care about us, we were also beings lesser than her. If we died, she would find someone new.\n\nResisting the urge to squeeze down on my paw, I slowly rose up off the ground, rousing Kaz as I did so. We would want to be energetic and warm as soon as we could, so we wasted no time in heading out from the forest. Despite the number of drakes gradually rousing themselves, the forest was quiet without the chatter of the bats roosting above us.\n\nWe were far from the only ones who found some sunlight on the crest of one of the many hills, wings spread out over the grass to take in some of the morning heat. Kaz lay down by my side, but it wasn't for a few minutes before I recognised who I had settled down next to.\n\nKeita glanced across at me, but where she would have once recoiled or demanded I leave, instead she just gave me a tired smile. \"What have you Seen for today?\" she asked me.\n\nI shook my head. \"Not much. It's too intense for me to properly make out any one future. Too much is changing all the time,\" I said. I hadn't even tried to use my magic since waking up, too afraid of what I might See.\n\nOnce she would have berated me for my unreliable magic, but now she just nodded and sighed. \"Shame. It would have been good to know at least,\" Keita said before she yawned widely. On her other side was Okazuni, and before long we were joined by Inilta, who wandered down from the top of the hill where I could see the ddraigs were gathered around Alaron. The Nixan greeted his brother, the two of them descending the hill together before standing with us.\n\nKeita. Okazuni. Inilta. Isikian. I closed my eyes as memories threatened to bring tears to my eyes. My travelling companions over the mountains. I was not the only one to be thinking of such things.\n\n\"We're missing three,\" Keita said in a small voice.\n\nOkazuni put his wing around his mate. \"We will honour their memory today, make sure their deaths weren't in vain,\" the Nyrian said, pressing his head to Keita's side.\n\n\"No,\" I said, shaking my head, drawing a couple of sharp intakes of breath from my companions. \"We lost two. Carlee and Nataik deserve to be honoured, but not Anzig. He does not deserve such a thing.\"\n\n\"He was misled,\" Isikian said quietly. The emerald-scaled healer took his place on the ground beside Kaz, stretching out his wings and half-closing his eyes. \"Even he deserves a chance at redemption.\"\n\n\"He killed our ddraig. His own father,\" I snapped, not wanting to hear anything that cast my brother in a positive light. By my reckoning, he had lost all hope for being welcomed back by his cowardly attack on Ddraig Krateos, acting through our sister to strike the killing blow. He hadn't even had the honour to fight the Nixan directly.\n\n\"We can still get through to him, I'm sure of it,\" Keita said, leaning back into Okazuni. I wondered if she was aware of how those sorts of actions had contributed to Anzig's decline, that her courtship of the Nyrian had been one of the breaking points in my brother's mind. I sighed. She had to know. She had as much as told me, but that she had not regretted her actions. Anzig had failed to declare his intentions towards her and had suffered the penalty for that. It should be no slight on Keita's wings that she had chosen her own happiness.\n\nI remained silent. I was starting to recall fragments of my dreams, little pieces of the many possible futures that were constantly changing. It was hard to tell which actions would lead to which futures, but one thing I was sure kept on appearing was Anzig. His sneering visage had become imprinted on my mind, as did the shadow of the wings he no longer possessed. There was something I was missing that prevented those visions from making sense, but one thing I was reasonably certain about; I was going to meet my brother again today. We would have no choice but to fight. I had an oath to Ddraig Zeena to uphold.\n\nHow had it come to this? Anzig would die by my claw, or I would die to his. He was meant to be the brother I had longed for my entire life, the companion to suffer through our shared magic. But I had lost all of that. I was not Laxtal, so the burden of being alone with magic was no longer mine to bear. But still, I longed for what could and should have been between us.\n\n\"I wonder what they're talking about.\"\n\nIsikian's words distracted me from my internal musing. He was looking up towards the crest of the hill, where the gathered ddraigs and the other leaders were deep in conversation. I could hear none of their words, but it appeared the wyvern was doing most of the talking.\n\n\"Probably discussing just how they're going to send us to die,\" Okazuni muttered darkly. He was clawing at the ground, not looking up at anyone. Keita muttered something in his ear, something that I couldn't hear. It could have been some assurance that they weren't going to die, but I knew eyes would start to turn to me for that guarantee. It was one I could not provide. I despised not knowing the future, especially to determine the fate of those drakes who had become close to me. I felt like I owed the likes of Isikian and Keita the assurance that they would survive this day.\n\nI didn't even realise I had gotten to my paws before I found myself walking away from the group, making my way downhill. Kaz followed after me, though he respected my need for silence. His company was most appreciated though, and I reached out with a wingtip to brush against his side.\n\nWe kept on walking until we were out of sight of the others. The sun was a little brighter on the northern slopes of the hill, but we weren't out here to bask. There was little room for it anyway, as hundreds of drakes had flocked out to find the warmth after waking up in the cool darkness beneath the trees. It wouldn't be long before we would all be called into action by Alaron and the ddraigs, so they wanted to be ready. Talk was scarce. A few looked up at us as we passed them by, but none actually met our gaze.\n\n\"I can't See a way to save everyone,\" I said once we were out of earshot from the resting drakes. I didn't look across to Kaz, not wanting him to see the pain in my eyes. He stopped and placed a paw on my dragging tail.\n\n\"You can't save everyone, Azlak. And nor can I. There were so many last night that I couldn't get to in time, or where I was too weak to do anything but ease their passing,\" my mate said, his voice dull and quiet. I turned around to face him, and for the first time that morning I truly saw him. His wings were tucked right up into his side, making him appear small and timid. There was genuine grief in his eyes, grief for those who had died. I had been mourning those I hadn't even lost yet, and it made me feel so foolish.\n\n\"Oh Kaz, I'm so sorry. I didn't even think\u2026\" I started to say, but Kaz held up his paw to quieten me.\n\n\"It's alright, I understand. You're never fully in the present, are you?\" he said, placing his paw on my shoulder. I rested my head against his and closed my eyes. If only I could just See a future for the two of us, I would feel much more comforted, but again the chaos of the coming events hid everything from me. If I could get my paw on the Axinstone, then maybe I would acquire the clarity I needed, but I knew Ddraig Zeena wouldn't be letting the precious stone from her sight, and the possibility of all futures at once scared me.\n\nI lifted my paw up from the ground and stared down at the small ridge beneath my scales, once more tempted to give the slate a squeeze. Kaz moved his paw from my shoulder to close over mine.\n\n\"She won't come. She has sent us her help. Everything else must be up to us now,\" he said, confirming the thoughts that had been running through my mind. We would get no help from Esperance. We had to earn that, and we had done nothing for her yet. This was something we would have to do alone. \"We must be brave and stand together.\"\n\n\"I don't feel brave,\" I replied. Despite my words of weakness, I kept my head raised up. I wasn't ashamed to admit my failings to my mate.\n\n\"Then we pretend. You never know, that third drake Esperance spoke of may come to help us,\" Kaz said as he placed his paw beneath my chin.\n\nI shook my head and smiled. We had seen nothing to indicate just who that third drake was, upon whose wings also rested the fate of dragonkind, and now Kaz expected them to just step forward and reveal themselves. As much as I willed for it to be true, deep down I knew that we were alone. It must be on us.\n\nOur fate was coming."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "We were to attack the canvas city with Ddraig Ellian. There weren't many of us that descended into the trees behind the Laxtal ddraig; barely two dozen drakes and about fifty humans. Keita had been chosen to join us, probably because her poor eyesight would have made her a target elsewhere. Naturally, Okazuni had refused to leave his mate's side, though I had noticed Airil hadn't been allowed to join with his mate. The Nixan had been told to assist the injured in getting to safety quickly. Neither Ddraig Ellian nor Kaz had been enamoured with being separated from him, but Alaron had been insistent.\n\nI was wary around the humans' paws, especially those who had only recently defected to our cause, abandoning those we were now preparing to assault. I didn't think anyone but James McArthur was truly certain of their allegiance.\n\nWaiting was one of the worst things to do, especially knowing that already the battle was raging beyond the trees. Our orders were to remain hidden though, at least until Ddraig Nunahra swept in with the Xigax army from the north. Then we would strike, risking our lives to neutralise the threat of George Symons. Without him to lead the humans, we hoped their armies would be forced into surrender. But there was something else, I was sure. I couldn't place it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss, something my magic had warned me of.\n\nUp in the trees were a few spotters, scanning the skies for the first sign of the Xigax force, but there hadn't been anything yet. Nor had there been any indication that my brother had emerged at long last.\n\nAnzig grinned down at me. \"He gave me back my wings. I owe him everything. And you, my brother, what have you done for me?\"\n\nSteel was embedded in scales. A web of metal moved as if by magic, thin sheets of taut, translucent material stretched between them.\n\nBeyond all of that, the spectre of Nightwings lingered. Her eyes gleamed, reflecting the inferno in front of her.\n\nMy claws gouged through the dirt as I struggled to return back to the present. It had been my first coherent vision in almost two days. Was my magic getting stronger, or was it so certain a vision that nothing could change that meeting. Two questions came to my mind. What role did Maznar play in my scrap with Anzig, and what had George done to restore my brother's wings?\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Kaz asked, placing his paw on mine.\n\nMy head twitched from side to side as I slowly opened my eyes to the present. We were still waiting.\n\n\"I am, yeah,\" I said quietly, not wanting to trouble my mate with the details of my vision just yet. I knew he could tell I was hiding something from him, but he didn't press me for more information.\n\nA few leaves floated down to the ground followed by a few branches. Foliage bounced off scales as eyes turned upwards. One of the lookouts was struggling to descend gracefully, the branches too close together to spread her wings.\n\nRestless and nervous murmurs broke out amongst the gathered drakes and humans as the lookout landed next to Ddraig Ellian's side and exchanged a few, quiet words. We all knew what was being said, even if none of us could hear the exact words. Ddraig Nunahra had come at last. Our time for battle was upon us.\n\n\"We go on paw. Quickly now,\" Ddraig Ellian said, spreading one wing and gesturing to us all. Though some quietly complained that we weren't taking to wing, I understood the ddraig's reasoning. If we flew, we'd quickly leave the humans behind, and they would be providing us with protection once we closed in on the canvas city.\n\nA few eyes were drawn towards the plains as we ran for the tents. Even from this distance, I could easily make out the sight of wheeling gryphons and dragons, looking almost like they were dancing through the air. The undulating ground hid the humans from my eyes, but I could hear their shouts and cries. And there, in the sky above, was a horde of Xigax drakes, circling around out of range of the humans' weapons. Their number appeared to be as great as what was promised. We could only hope it would be enough.\n\nLike everyone else, I had to put them out of my mind and ignore them. We had our own task to focus on. The loud crack of gunfire forced me to concentrate on where I was going. We had been spotted by a few straggling humans. They had all been shot by our human guards, but someone would have heard the gunfire. Stealth was no longer a possibility for us.\n\nA quick glance back confirmed we had lost one of our number already. Whether dead or merely injured I wasn't sure. Though it clearly pained some of the humans to do so, no one stopped for him. If he was still alive, he'd have to fend for himself until he got back to safety. If dead, well there was nothing we could do anyway.\n\nI stumbled a few times as we ran, trying to keep up with the impressive pace set by both the humans and other drakes. Okazuni, only slightly larger than me, had slipped back to my side towards the back of the group. Our diminutive size didn't matter so much in the air, but on the ground our strides were so much smaller than everyone else's, that we were in danger of being left behind.\n\nSomeone seemed to know where we were going. Perhaps we were taking directions from one of the recently defected humans, but I never witnessed anyone explicitly pointing out which direction to take. But then, maybe we didn't need directions, as always we seemed to be heading deeper into the canvas city, towards a cluster of larger tents that towered up over everything else around them. Maybe that was where our fate would be decided.\n\nWe were held up a few times, giving myself and Okazuni the chance to catch back up again. The crack of gunfire and whine of bullets was never a pleasant sound, but it was better than being caught out here on our own.\n\nDiving behind one of the tents for cover, I huddled with Okazuni in a desperate attempt to seek protection from the latest round of gunfire. There wasn't much the thin canvas sheets could do to stop bullets tearing through, but at least the humans couldn't aim for us directly. It was small comfort.\n\nJames McArthur and his group of humans weren't hiding in the cover from the tents, instead kicking up any piece of furniture or sturdy structure to crouch behind. I had caught a glimpse of those they were firing on; a group of about thirty heavily armoured humans. They were surely guards of some sort. We had to be getting close, if George had wanted to hold so many humans back from the front lines. It also meant we were outnumbered, and one at a time, our humans were being picked off and killed.\n\nI closed my eyes and grimaced. There had to be something we could do, but I knew that if we left the shelter of the tents, their guns would rip through our scales with ease. I was sure they had been designed specifically to kill us, as never before had there been a weapon so adept at slaying drakes.\n\nDdraig Ellian seemed to be thinking the same thing, as she was busy whispering some instructions to a few drakes around her. She then gestured to the rest of us, ordering us to follow her. Taking care not to make a noise, we all slowly crept away from the battle, taking a longer route around the sea of tents. I glanced back at James McArthur as we left. If he had seen us leaving, he didn't show it.\n\nThe human crouched down over a badly wounded drake, who was curled in on themself, grasping one foreleg close to their chest. James's hand came down on the drake's chest. \"A healer is coming, don't worry,\" the human said quietly.\n\nMaybe he would survive at least. I hoped he did. But I had to put him out of my mind, and not let myself get distracted by those possible futures. My magic was returning now that I had cleared myself from the chaos of battle. If I could be of any help to the ddraig, then I needed to be focused on our future and nothing else.\n\nFlashes of Anzig's eyes kept going through my mind. I was sure my brother was watching us, but as of yet I hadn't seen him try to control anyone. Perhaps he had worn himself out with his mental struggle with Ddraig Zeena when he had slain our father. I was glad. I didn't know how well we'd be able to fight him off if he struck our minds again.\n\nI could still hear the terrible sounds of gunfire behind us, punctuated by the occasional cry of pain. Sometimes those yells were cut off suddenly and terribly. It took so much to keep my eyes open and looking ahead, resisting the urge to curl up and let the grief overcome me. I didn't know those humans. It wasn't even really their fight, but they were laying down their lives for us to succeed. If nothing else, I would do my utmost to ensure their deaths were not worthless.\n\nOnce Ddraig Ellian had led us far enough away from the fight, we changed our course again to aim towards the centre of the camp and the largest of the tents. Of these, the biggest towered over them all, a massive canvas structure with a wide, circular hole in the middle. One side looked like it had been patched up and repaired from a giant tear. I wondered if that one had housed the great spire we had seen felled a few days before.\n\nIf there were still any doubts that here was where our fate was decided, the moment we stepped from the shadows and into the clearing around the largest tent, our enemy stepped out to face us. George Symons stood at the entrance to the central tent, one hand on his hip and the other held aloft to the sky. He clicked his fingers a couple of times.\n\n\"Nightwings,\" he barked out.\n\nI looked across to Okazuni. The Nyrian's eyes perfectly matched my own growing terror. We thought the great spectre had been banished, that my sister had been denied her monstrous form for as long as a Nixan drake held onto the Axinstone.\n\nThere was no sign of Nightwings just yet, but out from the tent stepped a few more heavily armed humans, each carrying a small pistol that thrummed with magical energy. Including George, there were eight of them stood there. Waiting. A few drakes stepped back, closer to the relative safety of the tents, but the humans seemed content with where we were.\n\nWingbeats approached, but it was not the powerful concussive blasts of the terrifying monster that approached. There was a second noise that joined it, an oddly mechanical drone that rose and fell in pitch in time with the wingbeats. It was a sound I had never heard before, nor was it even remotely familiar.\n\nKeeping one wary eye on the humans should they decide to attack, I scanned the sky to find the approaching drake. I almost couldn't see her as she was flying right in front of the sun, but I could almost immediately recognise the silhouette as my sister. I was glad to see Maznar had not taken on our worst fears and recovered her monstrous form. But she wasn't alone. A second drake flew beside her with an awkward flight, having some difficulty in maintaining a stable altitude. I didn't recognise them because I refused to believe who it was. There was no possible way it could be him.\n\nDdraig Ellian took a step forward, moving away from the rest of us. Her eyes were fixed on the pair of approaching dragons. \"Anzig?\" she asked in a strangled whisper.\n\nMy eyes weren't lying to me. My brother had returned to us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "I didn't want to believe it, but seeing Anzig flying with Maznar at his side confirmed to me what my mind had been trying to tell me ever since he had fled. Anzig had fallen and was no longer the dragon I had grown up with. One thing was uncertain though. I had last seen Anzig wingless and crippled, shamed by his inability to take flight. Just how was it that he was able to fly by Maznar's side?\n\nIt wasn't until he got close that I was able to see what had happened. Where his wings once were was now a gleaming structure of thin metal joined together by sheets of some dark material. They were a mockery of his wings, artificial and human crafted. They should have been impossible. The air had never been the domain of humans. Yet despite that, they had been able to craft Anzig the wings he had so cruelly lost. Had he been offered those wings in exchange for his loyalty? I couldn't believe him to be so petty and quick to forget all his clan had done for him.\n\nIf there was any lingering hope that Anzig might simply fly for us, then it was totally destroyed as he spiralled down with Maznar, the two treacherous drakes landing either side of George. The human Anzig had once worked so hard to steal from. The dragoness who had nearly killed him at the human's fortress was now his ally. I pawed the ground, squeezing a lump of dirt into a tightly packed ball.\n\nAs Anzig landed, his metallic wings folded against his back neatly. They were structured just like normal wings, though they made several hissing and clicking noises with each movement. The silver and grey conflicted greatly with his dark green scales. If anything, he looked more crippled now than he had been with nothing on his back at all.\n\nA standoff had occurred. We all knew that the humans were more powerfully armed, that they would be able to kill us all before we could lay claw on them. Their guns were too powerful for our scales to resist. They surely knew that, and were waiting for us to make the first move. They had no need to attack us. We were of no threat whatsoever. I had to resist closing my eyes and turning away as the knowledge that we had failed filled my mind. Failed without even getting close to succeeding. I could only hope Alaron would never know how pitiful an attempt I had led.\n\nAnzig stepped forward. Several of the drakes around me bristled and growled. Azlak, Okazuni, and Keita all responded to the former ddraig's movements by stepping forward themselves. I flared my wings, warning them not to advance any further.\n\n\"It doesn't have to be this way, Ellian,\" Anzig said. I had longed to hear his voice for so long, missing him ever since the moment I had wrested control of the clan from him. There was no anger or hostility in his eyes, but he met my gaze without flinching still. It was a long time before he turned away.\n\n\"Doesn't have to be what way, Anzig?\" Azlak demanded, pushing past my outstretching wing, his lips curled up in a snarl.\n\nAnzig's gaze snapped across to the seer. \"We don't have to fight. We understood it wrong all this time. They only fight us because we fought back. They're trying to help us, can't you See that?\"\n\nAzlak shook his head, but before he could speak Keita had stepped in front of him. \"Help us? Anzig, they killed your mother and your father. They started this, and if we don't stop them then they won't hesitate to kill us all as well. They're tricking you,\" she pleaded, but her words were completely ignored. Showing his utter disregard for the dragoness who could have been his mate, Anzig turned his back on Keita.\n\nHe muttered a few words to Maznar, who grinned widely, a malicious gleam to her piercing red eyes. I couldn't hear whatever was said between them, but the humans reacted to them. George raised a single finger in the air, and as one all the guards around him lifted their weapons, targeting us directly. From behind them a couple of a dozen Xital drakes stepped out from the tents. They all bowed in deference to Maznar and Anzig.\n\nI knew that if I had to die, then I would not die in fear and submission. I held my head high and took a step forward, pushing past Azlak and Keita, who were both stood frozen, the seer's eyes white with the future.\n\nSeven guns activated with a dull whine, the firearms charged with the magical energy that powered them. They were a terrible union between magic and technology. Only one was aimed at me, but I knew that would be enough. Just one shot. I wondered if it would be painless. I took another step forward to meet my fate with eyes wide open.\n\n\"Down!\" Azlak yelled. I didn't think. I threw myself to the ground. The scorching heat of the bullet burned my scales as it passed harmlessly over my shoulders, the wind rippling my wings.\n\nBefore I could think about the reason behind extending my life for an extra few seconds, I heard gunfire again, but this time it came from away to the right. A quick glance confirmed my suspicions. James had broken through. Sophie Carter, the woman who had served as James's second in command, was by his side. They were joined by six other humans. Though they all sported wounds of some description, they all advanced on George and his guards, leaping for the nearest cover.\n\nThis was our chance, and I quickly sprung up to my paws and charged. George was my target, but before I could reach him I was tackled from the side, rolling me over onto my back.\n\nKicking out at the drake who grappled with me, I caught glimpse of a flash of ebony scales and red eyes narrowed in anger. Maznar.\n\nI tried to kick her off me, but before I could do so a second drake landed on top of me, and I felt a cuff across the face from hard steel. Anzig was scrabbling at me, his metallic wings raining blows down on my face while my claws were occupied with Maznar. A flash of gold hit the former ddraig, and for a moment brother fought with brother as Azlak faced him off, leaving me alone with their sister.\n\n\"I've already taken down one Laxtal ddraig. It would be my pleasure to do the same to you,\" Maznar growled. She tried to get her forelegs past mine to tear at my belly. Desperately I tried to keep her away, knowing that if I weakened she would tear through my scales easily.\n\nFinally I was able to get a good strike on her belly with my hindpaws. I was free, and I wasted no time in jumping back to my paws. Maznar was not hurt, but she kept a wary distance as we started to circle each other. Around me I was vaguely aware of other fights taking place, but I couldn't focus on any of them. Maznar deserved my whole attention.\n\n\"What are you talking about? Anzig passed leadership over to me because\u2026 wait\u2026 you? It was you?\" I demanded, my voice dropping down to an accusing hiss. She had been the one who had taken Anzig's wings, had crippled him so badly he had fled the clan. She didn't need to tell me she had done it. I could tell just from her smirk alone. \"Does he know?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she replied haughtily, before making a lunge for my flank. I was only just able to dive out of the way, my tail cracking against her snout.\n\nShe snarled in pain and anger as I spun around to face her again. Waiting for her to make the first move, I kept my eyes solely on her, watching every movement she made as we paced around in a circle.\n\nAgain and again we lunged and grappled for each other, but neither of us was able to gain the advantage. On the ground we were too evenly matched, and it was with frustration that Maznar unfurled her wings first. She kicked off hard, gaining a little height on me before I was able to follow her up. She was fast, not giving me any chance to catch up before she had gained enough height.\n\nWith a new vantage I was able to give half an eye to the surrounding fight. Directly below us was a fierce battle between human and drake. There weren't many combatants on each side, but the drakes fought with near-mindless ferocity. I could just about make out James, far below. He was trying to guide and orchestrate the humans still with him to push forward to a better position.\n\nAway in the distance I could just about see the main battle. Ddraig Nunahra had led her clan down into the fray. It looked like Xigax had made a telling difference, with the human defenders appearing ragged, with a large number already starting to break and retreat back towards the canvas city. That made our fight more crucial. We had to capture or defeat George before those fleeing made it back to us, for then we would end up overrun. Several gryphons were chasing down the running humans, but not all would be intercepted.\n\nI turned my focus back to Maznar as she wheeled around in the air, claws extended. It was easy to evade her, banking to one side and slapping my tail into her face. She squawked in indignation as she tried to correct her flight so she didn't overshoot too far. It gave me plenty of time to lift up above her, my wings flared wide to catch as much of the rising thermals as I could.\n\nMaznar was fast and agile in the air, but I thought I held the edge over her. Every time she lunged I was able to evade, her claws never once touching my scales. She was using more energy too, diving and pulling up with her wings to circle around again. I barely had to beat my wings to stay in position, waiting for the other dragoness to wear herself out first.\n\nToo late I saw what she was doing, turning me around slowly with each failed dive. Then she lined up directly in front of the sun. Squinting, I could barely see her until she was almost right on top of me. Dipping one wing, I tried to roll away from her. This time I was too slow, as a burning pain erupted down my side as her claws sliced through my scales.\n\nMaznar hissed in pleasure as she drew first blood. While it hurt, the wound wasn't too severe. It didn't hinder my wings from beating, but I feigned a greater injury, stuttering my wingbeats and sacrificing a little height to draw Maznar in closer.\n\nShe didn't disappoint me, gliding in close to gloat. \"Crippled so soon? And here I was hoping for a bit of fight. You're a pathetic ddraig for a pathetic clan. You don't deserve to live. You don't deserve their help,\" she snarled as she started to spiral around me. I kept a wary eye on her claws and teeth, but otherwise I let her approach, pretending to struggle to maintain my altitude.\n\nI waited until the last moment. She was within reaching distance when I beat my wings hard, surprising her by looping up to crash down on her back. I pinned her wings to her sides as she struggled beneath me, before trimming my own to drop us into a fast descent. Maznar tried to snap and bite at me, but I kept my legs and neck out of her reach, the strength of my forelegs stronger than her wings.\n\nCarlee had taught me the trick when I was young, and over the years of her tutelage I had perfected the moment of when to let go and spread my wings. It never failed to terrify me though, watching the ground approaching at such an incredible speed.\n\nMaznar shrieked as we plummeted, cursing me with a mixture of human and draconic threats, but nothing she said was going to make me release her too soon. Judging the moment just right, I unfurled my wings and pushed down hard on Maznar's back.\n\nThe wind tore at my wings, pulling at my shoulders and making me cry out in pain as my descent was brought to a sudden stop. Maznar had no such opportunity. I had to wince as she struck the ground hard. I heard at least one of her legs break from the impact. My wings strained to make my landing smoother, but I still landed with more force than I anticipated, sending shocks of pain up through my hind legs.\n\n\"That was a dirty trick,\" Maznar whispered as I approached her, her voice shaking in pain. She lay on her back, her wings crooked beneath her and her legs splayed wide. Her right foreleg was definitely broken.\n\n\"You would have done the same.\"\n\nDespite the obvious agony, Maznar's face twisted into a smile, her red eyes blazing with their usual intensity. \"Of course. Are you doing to kill me now?\"\n\nI placed my paw gently over her throat. It would be so easy to do, and she would have no way of resisting. \"Do you think you deserve it?\"\n\nShe snorted, but whatever her answer was going to be, it was lost as a roar of anger distracted me. I looked up just in time to see Anzig charging for me, Azlak trying to keep on his tail. I had just a moment to brace myself before he crashed into me. A spur on his metallic wings punctured into my chest as we rolled, my wings tucked tight to my back to prevent any damage to them.\n\nI kicked into Anzig, pushing him over and ending our roll with me pinning him down to the ground. \"Stop this madness, Anzig!\" I pleaded with him, as he struggled to free himself from beneath my weight, but I had the advantage of size and strength. \"Ziggy, please!\"\n\n\"She's my sister,\" he growled. I could feel his claws against my belly, but he wasn't able to get any purchase. The physical pain was nothing to the mental agony his words put me through.\n\n\"I thought I was like a sister to you, the only family you could trust\" I said quietly. He froze, and for a moment I thought that maybe he would see the errors in his ways. Then he spat in my face.\n\n\"But the moment I lost my wings \u2013 the moment you thought you could seize power for yourself, you kicked me aside. Some family you were,\" he snarled. I stared down at him as his saliva dripped from my snout. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was truly gone. The dragon I had once known completely corrupted by Maznar and George. If that was so, then there was nothing I could do for him anymore. I cuffed him hard across the face, revelling in his surprised whimper of pain.\n\nI would have hit him again, but Azlak called out to me. \"Ddraig Ellian, Ddraig Zeena comes!\"\n\nLooking up to the sky, I could see that the Nixan ddraig was diving down to meet us, a half dozen gryphons flying with her. The Axinstone was clasped tight in her paws.\n\n\"The humans are routing. They flee for the hills,\" one of the gryphons called out, before squawking as a volley of bullets was aimed for them. One gryphon fell, but the others were all able to land safely and charge the remaining humans.\n\nAnzig's eyes narrowed and turned white.\n\nGeorge took a few shots at one of the charging gryphons, killing it with a direct shot between the eyes. He then grabbed a couple of his companions and pushed them into the towering tent beside them. \"Prepare the Hellfire,\" he ordered them.\n\nFrom where she lay, Maznar screamed in terror. \"No, you promised you wouldn't!\" she yelled, trying to stand up despite her injuries. Whether or not George heard her, he paid no attention to her cries.\n\nMy distraction allowed Anzig to push me off him. I expected him to attack, but instead he just ran straight for the tent after George, leaping over his sister as he did so. He paused only as Maznar called out to him.\n\n\"Anzig, stop him. He doesn't know what he's doing,\" she yelled, flicking Azlak aside with her tail as he tried to stop her standing up.\n\nAnzig shook his head. \"I'm helping him finish this,\" he said, and then he was gone inside.\n\nThe remaining Xitals that had survived lashed out at those they faced, before fleeing after George. No one dared to follow the drakes inside the canvas, fearful of a trap. Instead they all started to limp back towards me, surrounding the stricken Maznar in a circle. I stood over her, placing a paw back over her throat.\n\n\"What is Hellfire?\" I asked. Her panicked squirms slowed and ceased. She looked me in the eyes for a moment before she glanced away again, towards Ddraig Zeena who had landed and was stood by my shoulder.\n\n\"It's a weapon\u2026 a terrible weapon that George promised he would never use. Only a necuart can control it, that's why we had one with us. But he was killed, so the Hellfire was made useless,\" she said quickly, closing her eyes and looking down, whimpering in pain as she moved her broken leg. \"It's designed to kill and destroy everything around it, but George can't control it. If he tries, he'll die. We all die. Every human, drake, and bird.\"\n\nI glared into Maznar's eyes, knowing how many times she had tricked us all before. The fear I saw there seemed genuine. I didn't believe any drake could fake such utter terror. Her pupils were dilated and her mouth was hanging open. Her tail was twitching so fast it was almost vibrating. No, she was being truthful about this. Reluctantly, I decided to trust her and I lifted my paw from her throat.\n\n\"How do we stop this?\" I asked, addressing Maznar but also swinging my head around to look at Azlak. The seer shook his head and frowned, but I couldn't be sure if he was indicating his disapproval for trusting his sister, or whether he simply hadn't seen any way to stop the Hellfire.\n\n\"I don't think you can.\" Maznar paused and stared fearfully at the tent as a deep thrumming noise started to rumble out from within. It shook the earth, making a few humans stumble and almost fall. The injured dragoness struggled to roll over onto her belly, crying out in pain as her broken leg struck the ground. \"Call a retreat,\" she whimpered, her voice barely above a cracked whisper.\n\nAzlak stepped up to my side. He glanced at my face before bowing his head. He showed no such respect to Maznar though, as he snarled down at her with unconcealed anger. \"Is this another of your tricks?\"\n\n\"No!\" Maznar yelped, shaking her head vigorously. She trembled as she stood up carefully on three paws, keeping her injured leg tucked up against her belly. \"I swear to you. I swear my life to Dirus and all the gods, this is not a trick. We're all in grave danger, and we must fly. Everything within five miles of that thing will be obliterated. Nothing can survive the Hellfire. Please, I beg you. Fly before it's too late.\"\n\nMy tail curled up as I pondered trusting the treacherous dragoness. Azlak kept his head bowed low, unable or unwilling to contribute. Then I looked back to Ddraig Zeena, and she nodded her head once.\n\n\"Alright. We'll trust you,\" I said. I could hear Azlak draw in a hissed breath, but he said nothing to argue with me. \"If you can still fly, get yourself to safety. Ddraig Zeena and Azlak, you too. I'll pass the call to retreat. Make sure the message gets to Alaron as well.\"\n\nDdraig Zeena helped Maznar up into the air, but Azlak stayed on the ground with me. I narrowed my eyes at him, but still he didn't unfurl his wings. Then I noticed his eyes were white.\n\n\"I don't think we have enough time,\" he whispered quietly. I wasn't sure those words were meant for me, so I chose not to respond to them. But they put haste beneath my paws as I bounced away to James and his band of humans, who looked almost ready to attempt an assault on the tent.\n\n\"Unless you know how to stop the Hellfire, I'd suggest running,\" I warned them as I approached. A few looked nervous, eyeing towards the tent and the ominous noises from within. I could hear a few shouts, both human and draconic. Some were of pain, others panic. Whatever was happening in there, I didn't want to know. Every instinct was telling me to flee.\n\n\"There is a way. If George can't control it, it will remain active until it literally explodes,\" Sophie said, keeping her gun fixed on the flapping sheet of canvas that covered the entrance. Hot air was starting to blow out. \"Unless we remove the power crystals from it. There's a small hatch near the base that houses the crystals. If you remove those, the Hellfire has nothing to draw power from. Of course, you can't get close enough to it once the machine is on, so we have just one chance\u2026\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" I asked, eyes wide and wings partially unfurled as I readied myself for launch. A quick glance around confirmed that the other lingering drakes hadn't waited for my order. They were following after Ddraig Zeena already.\n\n\"No, but it's the only chance we'll get,\" James replied, before gesturing for his group to open fire. Bullets ripped into the canvas, and a few more cried of pain echoed from within.\n\nBefore giving the defenders a chance to recover, James led the charge into the tent. With one glance up at the sky, I decided to follow after them. Three humans were already dead, killed in the blind crossfire. I couldn't see Anzig or the other drakes, but I knew they had to be somewhere. And then there was the Hellfire. It looked little more than a tall, black structure of obsidian stone, about twice the height of a human. A series of spikes ran around the circular top, all connected by crackling red lightning. Flames licked at the base as the magical energy scorched away the grass it sat on. Shadow and smoke swirled around it as a column of crimson magic started to rise from the spikes.\n\nSophie directed my gaze to a small, white indentation near the base of the obsidian spire. \"There, do you see it? That's the crystal housing unit,\" she said. It was right there, ready to be deactivated, but before anyone could react, a blast of hot air pushed out from the Hellfire as it started to rise up from the ground. A loud, grating growl followed as a bright glow started to emanate out from the obsidian.\n\nJames swore and held his arm up before frantically gesturing back. \"It's powered up, we're too late. Run, as fast as you can!\"\n\nI didn't wait for James to finish speaking, sprinting outside and kicking off hard, powering my wings to gain some height. Azlak hovered in the air not too far away, and once he saw me ascending he spun around and started to rise up as well. I chanced one quick glance back down just as an arc of red light spiralled out from the sides of the canvas, ripping the entire structure to shreds and setting some of the nearby tents ablaze. Any human and drake still close to it fled before they could be caught up in the devastating display of power.\n\nAs the canvas fell away, torn apart by the fearsome energy being emitted, the Hellfire was gradually revealed. I yelled for Azlak to fly, a needless command as the seer was already straining his wings to escape as quickly as he could. Far ahead of us I could see Ddraig Zeena and Maznar flying together, and beyond them the few drakes who had been with us had almost reached the surviving portion of our army. I was sure they had to have seen the terrible awe of the Hellfire, but to my horror I noticed they were flying towards us, not away.\n\n\"No, turn around, turn around,\" I muttered beneath my breath, willing them all to start retreating and flying as fast as they could in the other direction. I did not want to witness what would happen should the arcing beams of magical energy strike anyone.\n\nBy the look of it, most of the Xigax drakes had survived, as had half of the gryphons. It was hard to tell just how many drakes had lived through the ordeal, but it looked like a number fewer than five thousand that was still airborne. Far below, I could see some more drakes limping on paw, as well as the remaining humans running from the burning remains of their encampment.\n\nThe deep rumbling was getting louder as the lightning charged up around the Hellfire, sounding like rocks grinding over each other, but there was a new sound adding to the terrifying cacophony. A keening wailing was growing into a piercing shriek. Without stopping my desperate flight, I glanced back to see what the machine was doing. My eyes widened as I noticed it glowing with a fierce red light that suddenly exploded out in a shockwave of magic.\n\nThe air crackled as a circle of red light expanded out from the Hellfire, incinerating the tents it passed through before eventually fading. Nothing was left but ash, cinders, and scorched earth, the obsidian stone left standing in isolation. Once more the glow started to return as beams of light started to pierce out almost at random. One passed close to me, and I could feel the intense heat burn my scales.\n\nAnother shockwave launched from the Hellfire, but this one didn't remain on the ground. Instead it arced up into the air, and I had to loop over it to avoid being struck. The air burned around it, the thermals it produced pushing up at my wings and making me quickly ascend ever higher. I yelled out a warning to Azlak, but he didn't even need to look back before he started to dive below it.\n\nThe wave of energy faded before it reached Ddraig Zeena and Maznar, but I could tell the two dragonesses were struggling to maintain a level flight. I hurried to chase after them, worried that Maznar's injuries were slowing them both down.\n\nI caught up with them just as they reached the army, led by Alaron and Kyrus. I urgently warned the wyvern and gryphon to start the retreat. For the moment we were out of range of the Hellfire, but if Maznar was right, then that range would only start increasing as its power grew and the human that piloted it started to lose control. It had started moving too, ponderously hovering in our direction. I didn't know how quickly it could move, but it wouldn't be long before it would be back in range of us.\n\n\"We have to shut it down. We're too close, we won't get the injured away in time,\" Alaron said, glancing back and down behind the hill where several hundred drakes were huddled. A few healers wandered amongst them, but most were lying down, too injured to move. They only had a few minutes before they would be vulnerable to the Hellfire, powerless to defend themselves.\n\nI bit my lip and twitched my tail. I could tell there was some truth in Alaron's words, but I wondered how many more would die if we attempted to assault the Hellfire. Apart from taking the power crystals, I wasn't even sure it could be stopped through a show of force alone. There was only the power crystals. Nothing else would work, and I knew it had to be me to volunteer. I wouldn't send anyone else down there to take on the hellish device.\n\n\"I know how to stop it, but I can't get close enough,\" I said reluctantly. I didn't want to get any closer to the Hellfire, but at the same time I knew that if no one was able to stop it, then we were risking the fate of every drake and gryphon nearby.\n\nAlaron was about to protest, but he was silenced by an interruption from Azlak, the seer hovering just behind my shoulder. \"I'll go with you, Ddraig. Kaz too. Together we might be able to do it. We would just require one thing.\" The seer turned to Ddraig Zeena, eying the shard of stone clutched protectively in her paws. \"We need the Axinstone.\"\n\nI expected Ddraig Zeena to protest, such had been her protection of the Axinstone ever since it had been reclaimed from the humans. Only her father had held it since. Instead she surprised me by holding the precious shard out for Azlak to take. It crackled and sparked with magical energy as it changed paws.\n\nWe didn't have much time, but Kyrus found a moment to place a clawed paw on my shoulder. \"Be safe, Ddraig Ellian. And good luck. May your feathers shine bright.\"\n\n\"May the wind rise beneath your wings,\" I responded, bowing my head in response to the gryphon. Then I turned my back on them all and trimmed my wings, starting to descend to the ground and the out of control Hellfire. Azlak and Kaz followed behind me. I could only hope the seer would be able to See a way for us to succeed, for I couldn't see how we could survive this.\n\nUnder Azlak's guidance, we touched down just on the edge of the charred earth already caused by the Hellfire. I kept a wary eye on the machine, on the lookout for any more of the charged magic launching towards us, but most seemed to be arcing well above us, aiming for, but falling short of, the drakes still clustered above us. There were so many of them, it was taking an age to organise them all to start fleeing, or maybe it was simply because I was willing them to leave quicker, any movement they did make seemed painfully slow.\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian, I hope this doesn't hurt you, but wrap your tail around ours,\" Azlak said, nosing my flank and guiding me to look down at his tail, which was already entwined with Kaz's. The Axinstone was gripped firmly between them.\n\nI blinked a couple of times before my eyes widened, realising what Azlak's idea must be. I nodded and wrapped my tail around theirs, pausing for a moment before resting my tail against the Axinstone.\n\nMy body burned as magic coursed through me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "The magic of the Axinstone surged through me. With it held securely in our tails we slowly walked forward onto the charred grass beneath our paws. I had been worried for Ddraig Ellian when she had touched the Axinstone. She didn't seem to be suffering, but she was taking a lot of heavy breaths.\n\nI braced myself for the pain I knew we were about to endure. I had shared a couple of brief words with Kaz and the ddraig, warning them what we were about to face. Kaz's magic was going to be crucial, the Axinstone needed to repair the damage the Hellfire was going to inflict on us. My magic would foresee the worst of the Hellfire's fury, allowing us to avoid being struck head-on and killed before Kaz could save us. I wasn't yet sure what purpose Ddraig Ellian had, but in my first few visions of what was to come I had Seen her with us. She had a part to play still. I wondered if she was the third drake Esperance had spoken of. Was her fate one of those that would decide the ultimate fate of dragonkind.\n\nAlmost without realising what I was doing, I squeezed my left paw around the slate buried beneath my scales. I felt it buzz as I took a few more steps forward, before Esperance's ghostly visage appeared before us. Her golden tattoos shone brightly. I couldn't see much of her surroundings, but she appeared to be sat in front of a sheer cliff face, as I could only see rock behind her. Shadows moved, and the soft murmur of voices suggested that she wasn't alone.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"In case we die, I wanted to say sorry for failing your trust,\" I replied, bowing my head to her. By my side, Kaz also ducked his head low, while Ddraig Ellian just stared at the floating image of the mystical human with eyes wide.\n\nEsperance shifted her position, sitting up slightly and leaning forward. \"If you die? What are you doing?\" she asked, her brow furrowed in confusion. Her hands reached out towards us, as though she could touch us through the illusion of her magic.\n\n\"Walking towards a Hellfire. We're the only ones who can stop it,\" I said, lifting my eyes up to look into hers. There was no challenge there, just an admiration of her golden eyes.\n\n\"You're doing what?\" she demanded, a sudden urgency to her voice. Through the illusion I could hear a few cries of alarm as she stood up. \"You will do no such thing, I forbid it!\"\n\nKaz chuckled and shook his head. \"It's too late for that, Esperance,\" he said. With Ddraig Ellian stood between us, I couldn't rest my head on his shoulder like I wanted.\n\n\"I'm on my way.\" Esperance's terse reply ended the conversation, the flickering sight of her face fading away. All I could see now was the obsidian tower of the Hellfire.\n\nI knew that if Esperance were truly on her way, then she would have no way of getting here in time. Nothing could save us now but ourselves. If we failed, we would die, and with us most of the survivors of the draconic race.\n\nClosing my eyes, I tightened my tail around the Axinstone, letting the magic from the shard of blazing rock infuse into my body. Threads of the future unravelled in front of me. Hundreds upon thousands of possibilities all centred on our actions of the next few minutes. Without the Axinstone I would have no hope of processing every future, every possibility, but each made sense to me now.\n\n\"Follow my every command,\" I warned the others. My heart beat quickly as I considered the prospect that I was ordering a ddraig, but I knew that it must be done. I alone could See the consequences of our actions, and already I could See many different ways that we would die. I knew this would strain my magic to the absolute limit.\n\nSlowly we walked towards the Hellfire, Kaz and I flanked Ddraig Ellian with our tails entwined around the Axinstone. The ground was hot beneath our paws, the air difficult to breath. There was so much magic, I could feel it scratching at my scales, an annoying irritation that threatened to distract me from my visions of the future.\n\nPresent and future intermingled. Three drakes forced themselves forwards, the burning magic increasing around them as they approached the Hellfire. Spikes and protrusions spun around on the obsidian spire, controlled movements that directed a sizzling arc of energy towards them.\n\n\"Down!\" I cried, and just in time the three of us hurled ourselves to the charred earth. With an awful wail, the Hellfire's lightning speared through the air above our heads, scorching and burning away our scales. The agony was severe, until Kaz was able to summon the power of the Axinstone through him, his magic starting to soothe the pain and heal our wounds.\n\nI could give no consideration to what was happening outside of the three of us. As much as I wanted to look back and see that the others were starting to escape, I knew I could not afford myself such a distraction. I also knew a lot of them would die. The power of the Hellfire was growing and the fiery blasts of magic were not just being directed as us. I could almost hear the pained screams, or were they the echoes of the visions I forced myself not to See?\n\nSlowly the magical pressure built up around us, a constant burning sensation that blistered my scales as quickly as Kaz was able to heal them. The pain only got worse, never once diminishing. I could hear Ddraig Ellian whimper, and I glanced to the side to make sure that she was keeping pace. Her snout was bloodied despite Kaz's best efforts, the scales around her mouth peeling away.\n\nIt was only going to get worse. We had only covered half the distance to the Hellfire, and the magical pain inflicted on our bodies would increase the closer we got. I could See many different ways for us to fail \u2013 one wrong step and we'd be obliterated by a gust of powerful magic. One pain-induced stumble could be the difference between life and death. We had to keep moving.\n\nThe lightning was getting brighter now, darkening everything else around us until all was dark but for the magic of the Hellfire. The obsidian stone was engulfed by shadow until it was little more than the crackling outline of the red lightning. The ground burned with flame, both real and magical.\n\nHer paws closed around the crystals and the purest agony tore through her body. She was flung back, her wings pulled open before she landed and rolled, clutching her foreleg to her belly. She screamed in pain, her throat torn raw\u2026\n\nEvery scale was ripped from my agonised body, only to be rebuilt by Kaz's desperate magic. Each pawstep was laced with unending pain as the scorched earth blistered into my vulnerable flesh. It was hard to focus, and even fuelled by the Axinstone, every next second was one in which we died, over and over again, each filled with more pain than the last. Yet still we moved. Still we breathed.\n\nThe future changed.\n\n\"Right!\" I yelled, and the three of us dived to the side. Kaz yelped in pain as the edge of the arcing beam of light glanced his side. I couldn't see how badly he was hurt, but he resolutely stumbled on, gritting his teeth as he focused on his magic once more.\n\nDdraig Ellian was the next to stumble and cry out in pain. I hadn't even Seen anything to strike her, and for a horrifying moment I felt her tail loosen in my grip. If Kaz lost contact with her, then his magic wouldn't reach the ddraig. In the whirling maelstrom of magic we walked through, she would be dead in an instant.\n\nOne paw in front of the other.\n\nOne step at a time.\n\nThe three drakes leapt into the air, spreading their wings in an attempt to fly, to reach the Hellfire quicker. It took only a couple of seconds for their wings to get torn to shreds, the fragile fingers of bone smashed to tiny fragments. They fell to the broken ground, writhing in agony as their tails separated\u2026\n\nWe couldn't fly. On paw was the only way.\n\nI tried to ignore the pain, but it felt like every scale from my body was being torn off. Over and over again. There was no respite, but to stop was to die.\n\nThe Hellfire never seemed to get any closer. The maelstrom of light and magic grew more intense around the obsidian stone, dazzling my eyes and threatening to blind me completely. I was sure I could only still see because of Kaz's constant flow of healing magic. A deep, growling roar emanated from the monstrous weapon, a savage snarl that that sounded almost like a pack of angry wolves.\n\n\"Slower here,\" I said, warned by another flashing vision of danger.\n\n\"No, push on, please,\" Ddraig Ellian whimpered, trying to pull us ahead.\n\nI pulled the ddraig back harshly by her tail, just in time as the burned earth in front of our paws erupted as the Hellfire's magic struck it. For a few moments I was struck blind, unable to see anything but crimson. Whether after images of the magic, or blood in front of my eyes, I simply couldn't be sure. Maybe it was both.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" I growled as my vision returned, the words slicing out of my throat. We were close now, just a few feet away from the towering spire. I craned my neck, trying to find the small section the ddraig had pointed out before. It was there, about a foot up from the base.\n\nAt my guidance, we took slow steps backwards as the Hellfire ponderously moved forward. This close the sound of the crackling lightning was diminished, instead replaced by the low hum of whatever power held it up off the ground. Beneath the obsidian, the air rippled and pulsed, charged with powerful magic and heat.\n\nI didn't dare unfurl my wings as I raised up onto my hindlegs, reaching for the small indentation. My paws fell short, barely able to even reach the Hellfire at all. With flight denied to me, I was simply too short. I growled and bit my lip, glancing across to Kaz. My mate was only a few inches taller and longer \u2013 he wouldn't be able to reach either. I knew what was going to happen. I didn't want it to happen, but we had no choice.\n\n\"It's up to me then,\" Ddraig Ellian said, her voice strained with pain.\n\nI swallowed and nodded my head. I couldn't bring myself to mention what she was about to experience. Ddraig Ellian must have picked up on my discomfort, as she paused for just a moment before rising up onto her hindlegs. Unlike me, she was able to reach the indentation.\n\nAs though aware what was going on, the Hellfire let out a savage snarl before blinding me with another ferocious blast of blood-red light. I staggered back, almost losing grip on Kaz's tail as I did so. By the time I recovered, I heard a loud clunk and the dazzling display of light abruptly ended.\n\nBoth Ddraig Ellian and Kaz screamed in pain, before the dragoness was flung back by an explosive shockwave from the Hellfire. Her tail was ripped from ours, knocking loose the Axinstone, sending the shard of stone to the blistered and blackened soil. The loss of magic chilled me, leaving me numb in shock.\n\nThe Hellfire creaked and groaned as it tipped to one side. It fell slowly, striking the ground with one corner before toppling over. It crashed down and sent a massive plume of smoke and dust into the air. My wing covered my face to protect my eyes as I strained my ears for the sound of any life within the stricken weapon.\n\nMetal screeched and something slammed. A human groaned, and as the dust began to clear I made out a shape moving against the obsidian. Somehow, George still lived. I had not foreseen that.\n\n\"Kaz, get ready,\" I called out to my mate. I got no response from him. Chancing a glance back, I noticed him sprawled out on the ground, his chest heaving for breath. Even with the magic of the Axinstone to sustain him, he had drained the last of his reserves in trying to keep us alive. I clenched my paws against the ground. My wounds were gone. His last act had been to heal me anew.\n\nGeorge crawled out from the Hellfire. He was bruised and battered, his skin an ugly shade of grey I knew no human should ever possess. His face was blistered, his limbs trembling as he attempted to stand, before staggering and falling back over again. He looked up at me with cold, dead eyes and tried to crawl away.\n\nSlowly I followed the crawling human, just in case this display of weakness was an elaborate trick, but the closer I got, the more I was sure that he was actually dying. He finally collapsed, rolling over onto his back to look up at the clearing sky.\n\nTo my surprise, the human actually laughed as I approached, a dry, weary chuckle of defeat. In his hand was a gun, which he held weakly, limbs trembling, before he tossed it to the side. I watched it bounce off the charred ground, spinning away to come to a rest near Ddraig Ellian.\n\n\"I didn't mean to do that, dragon. His mind was too strong, his magic too powerful,\" the human wheezed. He closed his eyes and rested a hand on his brow. \"I thought I was strong enough, but I guess I wasn't. I gave him wings, but I could not control him. Maybe\u2026 just maybe, I could have done it with the Dragon's Head, but you ended that dream, didn't you?\"\n\nThis was the man who had terrorised drakes, driving the humans against us and raiding our lands without mercy. And as he lay dying, he was trying to make conversation with me? I didn't know what to say, so I just stood by his side in silence, glancing across to the ddraig. Kaz had dragged himself towards her, laying his paw on her forehead.\n\n\"Tsona never told you what I wanted, did he?\" the human then said, his breaths starting to get shallow and weak. Above us some drakes were starting to circle, but I felt no sense of danger from them so I was sure they were allies.\n\n\"We knew enough. You wanted our land for your cities. We weren't going to let you,\" I replied, clenching one paw into a fist before slowly releasing it again.\n\nGeorge shook his head and closed his eyes, exhaling heavily. \"If only\u2026\" he said, before falling quiet. His chest stilled, and as I watched, the greatest enemy to dragonkind died. I placed a paw on his face, feeling it go still. He was dead. It was \u2013\n\nSteel wings on scales. Green and gold fought, crimson staining the black earth.\n\nI ducked at the last moment, hearing the whistling of the wind over Anzig's artificial wings. He snarled as he overshot, just about bracing his legs to land a few feet away. He immediately whirled around to face me, his lips drawn up in a snarl.\n\n\"I had it all under control, you fool. Bring him back. Heal him,\" my brother growled, swinging his head towards Kaz.\n\nI quickly jumped to stand between Anzig and my mate. \"He can't. The human is dead. No one can bring someone back from death, not even a healer,\" I said, urging my brother to see sense, but he cuffed me across the nose before I could even react.\n\n\"Because he's weak,\" Anzig spat in disgust, striking me across the nose again. I couldn't bring myself to move at all, my limbs frozen in place despite the pain I felt from his claws, the blood dripping from my snout. \"He couldn't heal me, he can't heal George. He's worthless, but through me, perhaps he can be of some use.\"\n\nMy tongue was robbed from me, but it wasn't until Anzig sneered at me and turned away that I recognised the touch of his magic. He had broken into my mind so easily, his influence so undetectable that I hadn't even recognised that he was controlling me. As he turned away I felt his magic fading from my mind. To my horror Kaz started to stand, his eyes appearing distant as his legs shook from supporting his weight.\n\n\"Leave him alone, Anzig. He can't do what you want,\" I said, approaching my brother cautiously. I went to place my paw on his tail, but he quickly spun around and batted it away.\n\nI could see Kaz falter as Anzig's concentration was broken. He was unable to control Kaz and keep me away from him at the same time. I just had to keep Anzig distracted for long enough, to give Kaz enough time to escape, if he had the energy to do so.\n\nAs I grappled with Anzig, I pleaded for Kaz to fly, but my brother still seemed to have some sort of grip on his mind, as he seemed unable to spread his wings or step back. His eyes were wide with panic, teeth gritted as though trying to will his body into action.\n\nAnzig's reactions didn't seem too hindered, as I could do little but lay the occasional claw on his scales, never able to injure him enough to break his concentration completely. We circled each other, trying to find an opening. Every time I passed him, Kaz never seemed to have moved at all, locked in position by the warring between his own instincts, and the control Anzig was exerting upon him. By my mate's side was Ddraig Ellian, lying completely still.\n\n\"Give him back to me,\" Anzig growled as he lunged for me. I dodged his claws, but his wing flashed out faster and stronger than I expected. I yelped as the metal slashed across my jaw, the impact strong enough to knock me from my paws. I tasted blood in my mouth, my tongue already feeling swollen from where my teeth had bitten into it.\n\nSpitting out a mouthful of blood, I rose to my paws and turned to Anzig, who was still staring down at me with a sneer. I suddenly lost the urge to fight him, my body relaxing as I lay down again. A small part of me knew that it was Anzig's magic that was causing this, but I was utterly powerless to resist it. Every movement I made was controlled by him. He directed my head down to his paws. He held the Axinstone.\n\nHe then guided my eyes around to look on Kaz, who had already been forced over to the human, his paw resting on the still cheek. My voice denied to me, I mentally pleaded with Anzig to release him, that it was all hopeless, but I heard his voice ringing through my mind.\n\nYou will see.\n\nLeaving me frozen in place, my body resisting the efforts of my mind, Anzig sauntered over to Kaz. He placed the paw that held the Axinstone onto my mate's tail, infusing them both with the incredible magic the shard of stone gave them.\n\nWatch a miracle happen, brother. When I bring him back from the dead, you'll have no choice but to accept that we have won. Even the gods will tremble before us. But I don't think you'll see any of that. Surely your visions told you as much at least? Sorry, Azlak. You're too dangerous to keep alive.\n\nMy lungs stopped drawing in breath. Cruelly, Anzig released his control over the rest of my body, leaving me to claw at my own throat as I struggled to force some air down into my lungs. Nothing worked. Even without his direct focus, Anzig's control over my body was absolute. I had wasted too much time. My chest was burning as I realised I needed to drag myself over to my brother, to wrest control of the Axinstone from him. He was hunched over Kaz, who was noticeably swaying and faltering despite the vast reserves of magic flowing through him. The human was still dead. Soon I would be.\n\nMy legs failed and faltered, pitching me down to the ground. I couldn't even speak. My lungs were empty of air. My head felt light and my vision was starting to spin. I was too weak to reach him.\n\nI knew then that I was going to die. My vision was starting to fade, my senses growing weak. Except for touch. Everything felt aflame, each piece of blackened earth like a needle between my scales. My eyes closed. How had I failed to foresee this?\n\nA shot deafened my diminished senses and suddenly air poured into my lungs. My chest heaved. Each breath was absolute agony, but somehow I was still alive. Gasping. Wheezing. But alive.\n\nMy eyes flickered open to see Ddraig Ellian still holding the gun she had fired in an awkward manner, using her two hindpaws to balance the gun and a forepaw to fire the trigger. She moved only to pant. Her eyes were wide open. Slowly I moved my head to see what she was staring at.\n\nAnzig was lying across George's body as Kaz recoiled away. My brother was bleeding from a wound in his chest where he had been shot by Ddraig Ellian. Now it was his turn to struggle for breath.\n\nToo weak to even stand up, I watched as my brother died.\n\nNothing could stop the tears from flowing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "My body was in agony. Ever since I had stepped within the radius of the Hellfire's horrific magic, I had been burning. Touching the monstrous edifice of obsidian had amplified the agony, and it had yet to die down at all. My paws felt like they were blistered and cracked, my scales peeling and flaking away from my body. I couldn't even scream anymore, my throat torn raw and bloody.\n\nAnd then I had killed Anzig.\n\nI knew I had had no choice, but the horror of that action had been the last thing my mind had been able to cope with. I had no recollection of anything after that. Unconsciousness had been a welcome respite from my pain, but from my perspective it was all too short. When I awoke, the pain was barely reduced at all.\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian, are you awake?\"\n\nI squinted open my eyes. I wasn't able to focus my vision at all, but I caught a glimpse of grey scales. It took a long time for my slow mind to recognise the voice as that of Alaron.\n\n\"I am. But I'd rather not be,\" I whispered, each syllable tearing open my throat. I could taste nothing but blood. Slowly I stretched out my legs, trying to ignore the blistering pain that went through me. Something felt amiss as I moved. I had hoped it had been nothing more than a horrific nightmare that had latched on to the horrors I had survived, but as I looked down I knew what I was about to see.\n\nMy right forepaw had been incinerated and torn from my leg as I had pulled the crystals free from the Hellfire. Kaz's magic had not been able to heal it, but he had closed off the wound. My leg simply ended in a savage looking scar just below the joint. I was crippled. Just like Anzig had been.\n\n\"Ddraig Ellian?\"\n\nI had forgotten Alaron was there. The wyvern was sat in front of me, his wings wrapped around his body. He had taken a few wounds himself, but nothing as severe as mine. The worst he had suffered was a deep gash on his neck that was still staining his grey scales crimson.\n\n\"Are you alright?\"\n\nI shook my head. My body felt like it was slowly burning, but it was the absence of feeling from my right forepaw that disturbed me the most. It wasn't even like a numbness. It was a nothingness, and that was all I'd ever feel from there again. I told the wyvern that, admitting my weakness to him in a way I wouldn't trust another drake. He listened to my long list of complaints in silence, keeping still until I finished.\n\n\"I don't know what we can do to help, but Ddraig Boruc wanted to look you over when you were awake. He seems to know things no one else does, so perhaps there's something in that old head of his that can help you,\" the wyvern said as he stood up. He placed one wing on my head, before he braced himself against the ground.\n\n\"Wait,\" I said hoarsely, stopping him from taking flight just yet. For the first time I looked around us. I had been moved back behind the hill where we had taken refuge during the recent nights. There weren't many drakes or gryphons around, though I could hear more amongst the nearby trees. A small patch of burned and slightly smoking grass indicated where there had been a small, warming fire. The air smelt fresh like morning. \"What happened?\"\n\nAlaron's face was grim. \"We won, but barely. They fought bravely, even as the Hellfire was killing at random. Human and drake and gryphon fell to that monster until eventually they surrendered. We haven't counted how many survived, but we lost most of our number. Thousands fell. I haven't seen so much death in many a year. The Hellfire was\u2026 well I just hope that was the last one, dragged out from some museum somewhere. We understand that Anzig used his magic to control George into using the weapon,\" The wyvern shook his head and sighed. \"The important part is that we won. You saved the lives of the survivors. I would have given my wings if I knew it would save half the lives you saved.\"\n\nHe surprised me by bowing his head to me before flying off, leaving me alone. I curled up, keeping my injured leg tucked up beneath my body so it wouldn't be seen by anyone passing by. A whiplash crack of air told me I wasn't left by myself for very long.\n\nMy mate nosed against my side before lying down next to me. He didn't say anything and nor did I. I didn't even move, but I could tell he knew I was awake. We didn't even need to speak to each other. His mere presence was enough to comfort me until I eventually uncurled and extended out my truncated leg for him to see. I expected him to wince or recoil, but instead he merely held his right forepaw against it. The one he was missing a toe from.\n\n\"You know you didn't have to go and out-do me on that,\" he said, a pained smile on his face. His eyes were wet with tears as he looked down at me.\n\nI couldn't help it. I laughed. Despite all my worries and my pain, I laughed. Not even the spasms that went through my chest caused me to regret it. I leaned into my mate's side. \"You're an amazing dragon, Airil. I love you so very much.\"\n\nAiril rested his head on my shoulder, his wing spread over my body. \"You're quite the amazing dragoness too. The saviour of the draconic race, some drakes are calling you.\" I scoffed at the thought, but Airil just grinned. \"And three paws or four, you're perfect for me.\"\n\nLying against Airil's chest, I asked him for more details than I had gotten from Alaron. He told me how drake and gryphon had harried humans from the air, trying to avoid the bolts of magic that burst out from the Hellfire. I had witnessed little of the full power of the monstrous device, having been so close to it the whole time. Airil had seen the destruction it caused. Drakes and gryphons had fallen from the sky, some still shrieking but others killed the moment the powerful magic had struck them. Even on the ground, humans had perished in the same manner. The Hellfire hadn't discriminated between friend or foe. If it hadn't been shut down, there would have been no survivors, of that I was now certain.\n\nThough the Hellfire had crippled the human forces, when I had eventually managed to shut it down with Azlak and Kaz, they had still rallied and made one last, desperate defence. Once again, fighting had been fierce, but it wasn't long before one by one the humans started to throw down their weapons. About three hundred of them surrendered, with a few hundred more estimated to have already fled. Our numbers were little more than that. Ddraig Zeena and Ddraig Nunahra were overseeing the imprisonment of the surviving humans.\n\nOnce the battle had been finally won, most of the surviving drakes and gryphons had tended to the dead, with the few surviving healers seeing to the wounded. Human, gryphon, and drake alike had all burned on a massive bonfire that had lit up the night. I was glad I had not seen it.\n\nBy the time Airil had finished, we had been joined by Ddraig Boruc and Alaron. I was pleased to see the older ddraig had survived completely unscathed, with no trace of injury on his aging body.\n\n\"You did a brave thing, Ddraig Ellian,\" the Vatrean ddraig said, bowing so low that his head almost touched the ground. \"There are few drakes indeed who would willingly walk towards an active Hellfire. I can not claim that bravery for myself.\"\n\n\"I only did what I felt I must,\" I replied. I nudged against Airil as I pushed myself up to a sitting position. I found it a little awkward only having the one paw to use, and I had to suppress a whimper of pain from the simple movement.\n\nDdraig Boruc nodded. His eyes were bright with curiosity as they danced over my body. With a couple of twitching steps like an excited hatchling, he approached me and placed a paw on my shoulder. \"Let's have a look at you then and see what's troubling you.\"\n\nThe old dragon held his paw on my chest and closed his eyes, muttering a few unknown words beneath his breath. He remained like this for a while, and I struggled not to move away. I was unsure just what he was trying to achieve, but he seemed to learn something at least. When he pulled back his eyes were wide.\n\n\"I think it's magic. Pure magic from the Axinstone. Somehow it's infused into your body and is changing it,\" he whispered in awe.\n\n\"Changing me? How?\" I asked. I couldn't help but glance back to look over my body, but I could see nothing different. Apart from my paw I was completely unchanged.\n\n\"Open your mouth for me,\" he said, looking in when I followed his instruction. \"Move your tongue from side to side. Can you feel those?\"\n\nI did as he asked, feeling two strange bumps in my mouth, just to either side of my tongue on the bottom of my mouth. I knew for certain I had never felt those there. Before I was able to ask what they were, Ddraig Boruc answered for me.\n\n\"Fire glands. That heat you can feel inside you? That's fire, Ellian. It's magic.\" Ddraig Boruc had to take a moment to compose himself as he twitched with excitement, his wings partially unfurled. \"Magic is returning to dragonkind at last.\"\n\n\"Fire glands? You mean I can\u2026?\"\n\n\"Breathe fire? Yes, I think you can. Best not to practice here though. Wait until you've gotten your strength back for that,\" Ddraig Boruc said. His words sent my mind into a frenzy as I tried to work out the implications of what he had told me. Azlak had been able to breathe fire when he had been affected by the humans' magic, as had the other enlarged drakes, but beyond those who had been altered by the Axinstone, breathing fire was just a myth.\n\nThere were many questions in my mind, but I was only able to breathe out one word. \"How?\"\n\nDdraig Boruc pawed at the ground. \"That I don't know. I can only assume it was a combination of different magics that triggered this change,\" he said as his eyes unfocused, a slight smile on his face. He muttered something in the old draconic language before patting me on the shoulder again.\n\nAlaron didn't give me any longer to ponder the changes that had been made to my body. \"We should address the survivors. I imagine there's still a bit of confusion amongst them as to what happens now.\"\n\nI averted my eyes from the wyvern as fear welled up within me. \"They'll see me like this though, weak and injured.\"\n\nA paw gripped around my tail as Airil spoke. \"They'll see you as someone who fought through any injury to save them.\"\n\n\"Your mate is right,\" Alaron agreed. \"And you're far from the only one still bearing their wounds from yesterday. It will do them good to see their ddraig has suffered with them. Walk, don't fly, and meet us at the summit of the hill. This is something you need to get used to.\"\n\n\"But how can I walk?\" I asked, trying not to look down at the stump of my right foreleg. Even though it had been instantly healed by magic, my purple scales gave way to smooth white scarflesh that still twinged with pain if I moved the leg.\n\n\"We'll be here to support you,\" Airil said as he nosed into my side.\n\nReluctantly I gave in to his suggestion and carefully lifted myself to my paws. Standing wasn't too bad, balancing on three paws with my tail extended. The first step though, almost sent me right back to the ground again, losing my balance as I tried to place my missing forepaw down to hold my weight.\n\nWithout Airil by my side, I would have fallen several more times. Even so, he refused my pleas to use his magic. He merely repeated Alaron's words that I needed to learn how to move properly without my paw. I couldn't just rely on him or my wings. I had to be comfortable on the ground too.\n\nReluctantly I agreed with his logic, but my progress was very slow. With my injured leg held up against my body, I half-hopped forward with each step, struggling to keep my weight balanced far enough back whenever I moved my foreleg forward. Thankfully, my mate wasn't opposed to providing all the physical support I needed, giving me a shoulder to lean on and help me to adjust my steps.\n\nBy the time I reached the summit my three legs burned with the exertion. My head was held low, and I simply ignored all of those gathered to collapse to the ground. I felt a paw on my back, and after a few moments a little energy started to pulse into me, radiating down from the paw and through my body. The aches in my legs started to fade.\n\n\"Thank you, that feels better,\" I muttered, taking a few moments to enjoy the sensation of not having any pain to worry about before I attempted to stand again.\n\n\"You're welcome, Ddraig,\" a voice said. I tilted my head before looking up. I had expected Kaz, but was instead met by emerald scales, not sapphire. Isikian, one of Anzig's companions. I was surprised to see him here. Looking past the healer though, I saw that all of Anzig's other companions had joined us. Keita and Okazuni were huddled together with Isikian's brother, Inilta. Beside them was Azlak and his mate. I was even more surprised to see that they were guarding Maznar with Ddraig Zeena keeping a watchful eye over them. Haeraig Ilibela was another drake I didn't expect to see. I had been under the impression she had been captured and imprisoned by Clan Xigax. I could only assume she had been dragged here to answer for the crimes of Clan Xital. Her white scales were dirty and stained with a little blood, while her green eyes stared down to the ground without once looking up.\n\nEveryone else present was who I expected to be there. The various surviving ddraigs had come, as had Kyrus and of course Alaron. The wyvern gestured with one wing towards me that I could remain lying down as he started to speak.\n\n\"War is over. Esperance's debt has been paid,\" he said, looking around at the group of ddraigs. Behind him, Kyrus paused from his preening to chirrup in agreement. \"It is not for us to decide how dragonkind progresses from here, but we shall assist as the voice of Esperance to advise you.\"\n\nDdraig Nunahra was a slender dragoness typical of those from Clan Xigax. Her crimson red scales gleamed as she stepped forward. I had always thought the drakes from Xigax had their legs too far apart on their elongated bodies, but if anything they turned this to their advantage in battle as their unique body structure gave them much more flexibility than any other drake.\n\n\"Xital must never be allowed to rule again after what they have done to dragonkind,\" she snarled, her long neck twisting so that she could glare at Haeraig Ilibela, who cowered from the Xigax dragoness. \"They have proven they can no longer be trusted to act as our leader.\"\n\nDdraig Kiarla was the next to speak. \"And what of those clans who have lost everything?\" she asked in a small voice. \"My clan numbers twenty drakes now, plus a few hatchlings and their carers still sheltering in out lair. Clan Eltee is finished.\" Ddraig Bakucic confirmed that his clan was just as decimated.\n\nA few suggestions were thrown forward by some of the ddraigs as the different drakes jostled and tried to get the best deal for their own clans. Some, like Ddraig Kiarla remained largely silent as there was nothing to gain for her anyway. Other clans were likely in the same situation, given the massive losses we had suffered. Most of the minor clans were reduced to almost nothing, even those who hadn't sent their full forces.\n\nAs they had promised, Alaron and Kyrus did not contribute to the discussion at all, keeping slightly behind the drakes and watching on as they argued. No one even bothered to ask them for their opinion.\n\nWith difficulty I hauled myself up to my paws and hopped forwards. Silence fell as eyes were bowed towards me. I inhaled sharply. Everyone, even Ddraig Nunahra had lowered their head. I had not realised how truthful Alaron's words had been. They truly respected me for my deeds.\n\n\"Clans have divided us and kept us apart. Have these few days not shown us that when we fight as one, with one cause, we are stronger?\" I said quietly, knowing that every last one of them was holding on to my every word. I turned my gaze to the wyvern and gryphon. \"Prince Kyrus. Alaron. Do your species divide themselves as we have done? Squabbling amongst ourselves and hindering our very chances of survival?\"\n\n\"We are several nations that do not always get along, much like the humans in that regard,\" Kyrus said as his cold eyes swept around the group of drakes. \"But I certainly do not know of any species that split themselves off so drastically, and in such small groups, as dragons. It truly is an unusual way of living.\"\n\n\"And scrapping over the same piece of territory too,\" Alaron added. \"It distracts from what is truly important for dragonkind. You ddraigs spend so long trying to out-do each other that you end up clipping your own wings just so long as your rival is hobbled more.\"\n\nI nodded and glanced around at the other ddraigs and drakes. \"I propose that we dissolve the clans.\" I had to snarl to silence a few of the immediate protests. \"We dissolve the clans and we truly unite as a species. We've been too busy looking in at ourselves that we've forgotten there's a bigger world out there. We've been trying to fly against the wind. It's time for that to stop.\"\n\n\"What you're proposing\u2026 it would never be accepted,\" Ddraig Bakucic said. A few murmurs of agreement rippled through the other drakes. \"I fear some ddraigs would never want to release the power they hold in their paws.\" Though his eyes never strayed from beneath my forepaw, I could tell who he was implying. It was certainly true that a number of clans held more power than others, especially amongst the ruling clans. With the ddraigs and haeraig of four of those clans present, it was a dangerous thing for Ddraig Bakucic to say.\n\nOf the ruling clans, Nixa had been the one to suffer the most, and it was Ddraig Zeena who stepped forward next. \"I think this idea has some merit, but there are still many things that need to be discussed. Dragonkind still needs a leader, a figurehead to look up to and follow. Clan Xital was that before, but if we dissolve the clans, then who shall step up in their place?\"\n\n\"Having a single ruler is what got us into this trouble to begin with,\" Ddraig Boruc rumbled. I was surprised at how little he was getting himself involved, but like the gryphon and wyvern, he was standing back from everyone else. His knowledge and experience from his long life would have been useful indeed.\n\nDebate started to counter back and forth as we considered the advantages and disadvantages of such a system. Most were concerned with how the balance of power would be distributed, if one drake alone would wield too much control again. Tsona had been allowed to gather power unchecked and unquestioned, even by his own clan as he had welcomed in human traitors. Such a situation could not be permitted again.\n\n\"Then we form a council to keep our chosen leader in check,\" I eventually suggested.\n\n\"Is that not what the ruling clans were meant to be?\" Ddraig Bakucic said accusingly. I flared my wings briefly.\n\n\"In theory, yes. But Clan Xital simply wielded too much power that they could ignore whatever the ruling clans suggested. If we start anew, with the ruling ddraig unable to act without the council's support, then we eliminate the chance of another Tsona,\" I said, noticing a few nods replacing the snarls and mutters of discontent.\n\n\"And who would be on this council?\" Ddraig Kiarla asked. She swirled her tailtip across the ground behind her, twisting up small blades of grass.\n\n\"Let them decide,\" I said, gesturing with a wing down the hill, to where I noticed from the corner of my eye a number of drakes and gryphons were gathering. \"Give the council a year at a time, but if we don't think they're doing the best for dragonkind, a new drake comes in to replace them.\"\n\n\"And the council would elect a leader from amongst them?\" Ddraig Zeena said, her head tilted slightly to one side. \"I think that could actually work. There would be some resistance, of course. But in time, everyone should come to accept that sharing the rule will be beneficial for all.\"\n\nI bowed my head to Ddraig Zeena, thankful for her support. I had thought that she would have been most vocal against such an idea, and perhaps before Nixa had lost their home, she would have been firmly against it. Now it was a chance to restore some balance of power back towards Nixa, even if the clan as itself wouldn't exist anymore.\n\n\"Then are we all agreed?\" Alaron said, the wyvern coming forward to speak for the first time since I had directly addressed him. He looked around the group, who all nodded and confirmed their agreement to him. I felt a tingle flare through my body that wasn't magic. It was excitement. And the thrill of knowing that my suggestion had probably altered the future of dragonkind. Was this how Anzig had felt, all that time ago? I had watched him from my vantage point at the entry to the grand chamber in Xital as he had made his passionate plea for assistance to fight off the humans. He had been so proud then. How had it all ended in me being forced to kill him?\n\nThe wyvern had finished getting everyone's assent, even allowing Haeraig Ilibela and the other drakes to give their opinion. There were no arguments or counter-suggestions. Only Maznar remained silent.\n\n\"Then it is settled. For ease of transition, the first council will be the first to be appointed, not chosen. Every ddraig and haeraig present here know what is expected of them, and as such should form the first council,\" the wyvern said, looking around with a stern eye. \"I can trust you to select a leader from amongst you. I call on each of you to nominate another drake to act as the leader of all dragonkind.\"\n\nThe wyvern turned first to Ddraig Bakucic, who responded without hesitation. \"Ddraig Ellian.\"\n\nDdraig Kiarla was next, and her answer was the same. As was Ddraig Zeena's and Ddraig Boruc's. I stared around in shock. I had not expected this. Only Ddraig Nunahra and Haeraig Ilibela gave any hesitation to their answers, with the Xital dragoness unsure if she even had a vote, but by then I'd already received the majority of votes. They had all voted me the most powerful drake. Alaron didn't even bother asking me my nomination. It mattered for little.\n\n\"Congratulations, Ddraig Ellian. As ddraig of a united dragonkind, I believe it's your responsibility now to address your dragons,\" Alaron said, bowing his head to me. It was a gesture repeated by everyone else present, even Kyrus.\n\nI nodded and rose to my paws, holding my injured leg against my belly again. I hopped forward so I stood on the edge of an outcropping looking down. My heart skipped a beat in my chest as I looked down at how few survivors there really was. Only a few hundred drakes were gathered below, about the same number again for gryphons. About a dozen humans were interspersed amongst them. I noticed a few Xitals down there too, perhaps already trying to make amends for the evils inflicted by their former ddraig.\n\nI knew that any victory speech would be poorly received with so few surviving. It would feel hollow and unwarranted, so I didn't even refer to the battle we had just fought so bravely for. That wasn't what was needed.\n\n\"Today a new wind blows for dragonkind. One that will push us into a new era, where we don't hide away from the rest of the world. If you'll have me, I shall lead you all there, where we work together as one, and not have to worry about petty clan politics and rivalries,\" I said, my voice picking up in volume so that even the most distant drakes could hear me. I could tell I had them all listening to me intently. \"Those who can still fly, take to wing and head to Xital. There we shall all decide the fate of dragonkind. Everyone shall have their voice heard.\"\n\nI did not expect a strong response from my words, but I was surprised from the roars of approval from the bottom of the hill. Drakes from every clan cheered their approval, before wings were spread. One by one, they all started to fly, leaving only the healers and those yet to be healed amongst the humans and gryphons. Once in the air they all began to wheel around to the south, down towards Xital.\n\n\"Why Xital?\" Zeena asked me as I turned back around to face my newly formed council. Ilibela glared at me, grinding her teeth but wisely kept her silence.\n\nI was quick to reply. \"It's central, has the capacity to support a large number of drakes in terms of shelter and hunting grounds, and has been where dragonkind has been ruled from for generations. It makes sense to go there,\" I said. I looked around at the small group, but no one offered any dissent, for which I was glad. It would have been a poor start to my leadership.\n\nI hopped closer to Alaron and Kyrus. \"Will you be leaving us now, or will you join us in Xital for a short while? You will be free to share our hunting grounds for as long as you like.\"\n\nAlaron looked up to Kyrus for a moment, before both nodded. The gryphon chirruped and clicked his beak. \"The offer will be graciously accepted, Ddraig Ellian. It will be nice to rest our wings for a short while.\"\n\n\"I'm quite looking forward to doing the same, if I'm to be honest,\" I said with a smile, before turning around to my council again. \"You may all fly off and meet me there. I would like to stay behind until the last of the injured is able to fly again.\"\n\nI smiled towards my mate, who of course knew to remain behind. One at a time the others all approached to offer me words of encouragement and support, before they took to the air. Only Azlak lingered for more than a few moments. The seer was smiling. \"You have done an amazing thing today, Ddraig Ellian,\" he whispered in my ear, his eyes shining gold.\n\nI didn't have anything to say to that. I didn't really want to know what he had seen in the future, but I was glad that he believed I had made the right choice. I waited until I was left alone with my mate, watching the silhouettes of the others slowly disappearing into the blue sky.\n\n\"I can't believe that just happened,\" I said quietly, turning to my mate and resting my head on his shoulder.\n\nHe rested his paw on mine. \"Ddraig of all of dragonkind. I'm sure Ddraig Boruc would say otherwise, but I don't think any other drake has ever claimed that before,\" he said with a grin. I batted his body with a wing, but his smile was infectious, and I couldn't help but smile back at him. \"So. What are you going to do while you wait for the healers to finish?\"\n\nI closed my eyes. There was a presence in my mind, a stirring of power and unknown forces. Mushussu had roused herself. The metallic touch of her mind pressed against mine. \"Magic, Ellian. This is magic you can feel. Magic is returning to dragonkind at last.\" I could sense the guardian dragon's wide smile. \"A new age dawns.\"\n\nMy own smile matching the guardian's, I ran my tongue over the new glands in my mouth.\n\n\"I think I'm going to learn how to breath fire.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "It had been two months already. This was a future I had never once foreseen, but then my magic was still inconsistent at the best of times. Xital was thriving, the towering mountain overseeing so much activity.\n\nWord had quickly spread through the surviving clans that a new leadership had been set up within the former royal clan's home. Drakes had come from far and wide, abandoning the old clan territories to live within view of the lone mountain. Clan loyalties meant nothing now, and drakes from the north mingled with those from the south, the east, and the west. It wasn't perfect, and fights still broke out as drakes fought for the prime caves that dotted the landscape, and for the prime hunting areas.\n\nI sat with Kaz on the summit of the Xital mountain, looking over everything. A flock of gryphons wheeled and soared nearby. They had taken refuge with us for two months now, but Kyrus was talking of flying south soon, taking Alaron with him. Peace had been achieved thanks to their efforts, and they had extended the offer of friendship with Ddraig Ellian.\n\nA number of houses had also been built on the side of the mountain for the humans who would be remaining behind. About thirty humans would stay and live in Xital, this time welcomed onto draconic lands willingly. James McArthur was not to be amongst them. He too would be leaving soon, heading back to Trevena with the other humans who wished to return home. Going with them would be Maznar. My sister had endured many days of trial, explaining her actions to Ddraig Ellian and her council. They had judged that while she had acted of her own free will most of the time, she had been corrupted by humans and Tsona from a young age. They could not fault some of her actions against drakes, but nor could they trust her to remain in Xital. They were sending her back to Trevena to live amongst humans.\n\nThere had been little contact with Kernow on the other side of the mountains. What news did reach us told us that Erik Brightwell's power had faded almost overnight. With the defeat of his army, his control over his own nation had faded. Kernow had a new ddraig now; a new prime minister who had bigger problems to deal with on their side of the mountains than deal with us. Dragonkind was being given an opportunity to recover. We were not going to waste that chance. Ddraig Ellian the Three-Pawed was not going to let us.\n\nDdraig Ellian had been touched by magic in our assault of the Hellfire. She had been changed by that magic, and she was not the only one. My tongue teased at the unfamiliar fire glands in my mouth. Kaz had likewise been blessed by some of the ancient magic dragons had once possessed. We had been touched by the gods and by magic itself.\n\nI rested my head against Kaz's. Everything looked quite perfect for dragonkind to prosper once more. We had been in danger of extinction, but now we had a new start. A chance to build a new future.\n\nBut it was not mine.\n\nI smiled as I felt what I had been waiting for days to feel, what Kaz, Alaron, and Kyrus had all been waiting for. The slate in my paw buzzed.\n\nEsperance called.\n\n[ Dirus's Gift ]\n\nOver Three Thousand years ago\u2026\n\nIt was not a night of mystical portents. Lightning didn't arc across the sky, and no prophecies had ever been told of this day. It wasn't even a full moon. No great deeds were to be done, but a meeting was about to take place that would change the fate of Farenar for centuries to come.\n\nA lone dragon walked. White scales hid him almost completely against the deep snow that had built up on the mountainside, with just his black horns and scales betraying his presence. He had crossed the invisible boundary that placed him within the human Kingdom of Aegia. Few dragons went there anymore, having ceded that territory to the weak, short-lived humans several centuries ago. Some Aegians refused to even believe in the existence of dragons anymore.\n\nThe white-scaled dragon didn't care about any of that now. He just held his wings close to his back to stop the strong, mountainous winds from teasing them open. He had no desire to be dashed up against the looming cliffs around him. Snow crunched and melted beneath his paws as he walked towards a deep cave. From within, flickering firelight could be seen.\n\n\"Well met, Ruatha,\" a voice called out from within. Human.\n\nThe dragon ducked his head inside the cave and let his eyes adjust to the dark. The cavern was dark and deep, water dripping down from the roof and pooling in a large puddle that trickled away into some narrow crevasses in the stone floor. Half hidden behind an alcove to protect it from the biting wind was a large fire, sparking blue with magic, a large pot of food cooking above it.\n\n\"You're early, Alain. I wasn't expecting you until Dirus showed The Lady,\" the dragon said, approaching the fire and looking down at the two figures around it. One was human. An aged man, stooped over in his weathered cloak, wrinkled hands extended towards the warming fire.\n\nThe second figure was clearly not human. Despite the cold, the creature was barely dressed at all, instead using his thick pelt of silver fur to protect himself from the chill wind. Two pointed ears curled inwards as the dragon approached. This was one of the kaur, a race of feline creatures that usually lived in the mountains, using their thick fur to protect them from the elements, and their sharp claws to hint and kill their prey. It was rare for any of them to associate with a human.\n\nThe kaur looked up at the dragon through narrowed eyes. \"Sometimes we can't wait on the phases of the moon. No matter which face she shows, Dirus doesn't wait on us.\"\n\nThe dragon growled. \"I am unfamiliar with you, kaur.\"\n\nThe kaur smiled, showing off an impressive display of sharp teeth. \"My name is Gyus, shaman of my people.\"\n\n\"And why are you here, Gyus? I expected to meet the human alone.\"\n\n\"Relax, Ruatha. The kaur is an old friend of mine,\" Alain said, raising his hands up to the dragon's snout to lightly touch the small, black horn between his nostrils. \"He is here at my invitation.\"\n\nRuatha snorted and nodded his head, slowly laying down and resting his head on his snow-white paws. He kept one eye on the kaur at all times, not once lowering his guard. He knew about the snow-cats and the ferocity of their claws. They had been known to take down a dragon unawares. He didn't trust the human's words enough to risk looking away. The kaur seemed to be aware of this too, his toothy grin wide as his thick, bushy tail swayed from side to side.\n\n\"I am no threat to you, dragon. I am a shaman, sworn to protect and conserve, never to cause harm to others. Even dragons are safe from my vows,\" the kaur said. His claws were extended, but only so he could inspect them, not a demonstration of aggression.\n\nRuatha sniffed down at the kaur. He didn't know much of their culture, finding it primitive and simple at the best of times, but he knew enough to know that the cat was being genuine. Their shamans never used their arcane powers for harm. Instead they were magnificent healers, and were said to help control the weather and the growth of their crops \u2013 a great boon in the mountains where they generally lived.\n\n\"What news do you have for me, Alain?\" he asked, slowly turning his attention towards the small human.\n\n\"That's so like you dragon. Always needing information right away. What's wrong with sitting by the fire and warming up from a cold, winter night?\" the human replied. He didn't look up at the dragon, instead stirring a ladle through the big pot of stew that was cooking over the fire.\n\nRuatha turned his head and snorted. \"Do not keep me waiting, Alain. Why have you summoned me?\"\n\nAlain waggled his finger at the dragon, not answering the question and turning back to the cooking food. Ignoring the grumbling dragon, he simply dished up a bowl for himself and the kaur, not bothering to offer the dragon anything. Not that Ruatha would ever debase himself so much to eat any of the human's cooked food.\n\nRuatha flicked his tail and paced around the cavern as he waited for Alain and Gyus to finish their meal. They took their time, and the dragon went to sit down outside the cave while he waited. The cold winds didn't bother him at all, his own internal magic keeping him warm. The sky above was still clear, but snow drifted down around him, whipped up from the cliffs to drift slowly down the mountainside. It melted as it touched his scales, small rivulets of water dripping down his body.\n\nHe looked up to Dirus, the name given to the spirit who was said to reside in the moon that orbited Farenar. Little was known about her, but every species on Farenar had their own myths and legends about her. What most agreed on at least was that she had four faces that rotated as she waxed and waned each month. She currently looked down on Farenar as the Wolf, her face half hidden in shadow.\n\nIt was certainly true that some form of magic emanated out from Dirus, but just what exactly it contained was a mystery to all on Farenar. Not even the werewolves, who were most affected by her magic, knew just what caused their monthly transformations. Not that many sought to discover the reasons. Most werewolves lacked the mental faculties to properly worry about the workings of their world, and few other races wanted anything to do with the bestial creatures. In that regard, Ruatha was very much an exception. He had been fascinated by werewolves for many decades now, but had made remarkably little progress in unlocking their secrets. He had hoped the human mystic had been able to discover something.\n\nDistracted by his musings, the dragon didn't notice Gyus until the kaur sat by his side. The feline creature still held a steaming bowl of stew in his hands. A few dangling totems jangled from the kaur's wrists.\n\n\"You know the lykans will never accept your help,\" the kaur said with a low growl. His long, thick tail thrashed behind him, stirring up a small cloud of loose snow.\n\n\"Of course,\" Ruatha replied, glancing down at the kaur beside him. The feline was less than half his height, but the dragon had grown to be wary of the kaur's claws. He'd underestimated one of them before, and still bore the pink scars on his foreleg, blemishing his otherwise pristine white scales. \"I don't seek permission to help them. I just desire the knowledge of how they're so altered by Dirus. If they choose to use my knowledge afterwards does not bother me.\"\n\nGyus sneered. \"Maybe we shall discover a way to declaw the threat they pose to our people.\"\n\nThe dragon didn't answer that, instead just directing his gaze upwards towards Dirus again. He had no desire to use any of his knowledge to control or restrict the werewolves, but he acknowledged the danger they routinely posed towards the kaur, who called the shapeshifters lykans.\n\n\"Perhaps they can at least be civilised,\" Alain said, the human stepping out from the cave. Unlike the dragon and the kaur, he was troubled by the cold air outside, and was wrapped up in several layers of thick clothing. Even so, his face was still ruddy red from the chill wind.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Ruatha rumbled in agreement. It was not his responsibility to help develop the other races of Farenar, after all. None could match the glamour and wisdom of the dragons, and that was how it should be.\n\n\"Dirus sent us a gift a few nights ago,\" Alain said, sweeping aside some snow so he could perch on a jutting rock and face the dragon from a similar height. His arm gestured upwards.\n\nRuatha blinked and stared down at the human, before following his gesture up towards the stars and the half-hidden face of the moon goddess. Finally, this was what he had come for. A gift from the heavens was rare indeed, and for one to come straight from Dirus was a once in a lifetime opportunity, even for one as long-lived as a dragon. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"A light streaked across the sky and landed nearby. It came from her, I'm certain,\" the human replied.\n\n\"I felt it too. As did most of Aegia. Already the king is sending agents out to find it,\" Gyus added. The cat fondled one of the charms around his wrist. \"I am surprised you did not, dragon.\"\n\nRuatha growled, but otherwise ignored the vocal jab from the kaur, instead swinging his head back towards the human. \"And where did it land? Is it close by?\"\n\n\"It landed in the outskirts of Vuost,\" Alain said. His words were followed by a silence from all three. Ruatha's eyes had darkened as he looked down to the ground, glaring into the snow as though it had caused him great offence, but instead it was the insinuation Alain's words had made. The human knew well to keep quiet until the dragon spoke again. Gyus had wisely remained silent as well, picking up on the sudden tension in the cold air.\n\n\"Then the traitor will likely have it,\" Ruatha growled. He looked to the east, towards where the human village of Vuost lay.\n\n\"I would expect so,\" Alain confirmed with a nod of his head. The human avoided the fierce gaze of the dragon, instead casting his eyes back up towards Dirus. \"She has sent us a great gift, a small piece of herself.\"\n\n\"But why did it go to him?\" Ruatha said, before standing up and shaking the snow from his wings and tail. \"Thank you for your information, Alain. Perhaps I am not too late, and can pry her gift from the traitor before he steals it away for good.\"\n\nAlain and Gyus both stood up when the dragon did. \"Going so soon?\" the human asked.\n\nRuatha nodded. \"I can't risk the traitor using Dirus's gift. I must go straight to Vuost and claim it for myself,\" he said. He tested his wings against the wind, but even in this sheltered part of the valley, he could feel his membranes get tugged and pulled. He would travel on paw again. \"You know how to call me should you find something new.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Alain said, bowing his head. For a moment, the human reached out to place his hand on the dragon's white scales, but at a glance from Ruatha he wisely pulled his hand back again. \"Travel safe, great one.\"\n\nRuatha scoffed and pushed past the human without a second thought, stepping around the still-silent kaur in one stride. Not once did the dragon look back, and soon he had vanished into the snow, his white scales blending him in perfectly. Ruatha knew he didn't have much time to claim Dirus's gift. The traitor could not be allowed to keep it.\n\nVuost lay in wait for him.\n\nReturn to Farenar\u2026"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Dragons of Solunas 2) Dragon of Sand and Storm",
        "author": "H. Leighton Dickson",
        "genres": [
            "dragons",
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "SAND",
                "text": "\"The Sand and the Storm made the Mighty River Nahr, And the Mighty River Nahr made me.\"\n\nThat is a saying taught to the Reed people when they are young, but I think it works for dragons as well. For creatures of the sky, it is surprising how much of our lives are spent in the water. But perhaps more significantly, how much of our blood is spilled in the sand.\n\nI suppose this makes sense. We are forged on a Wheel of Elements \u2013 of sand, water, sun, and need. We are also created to thirst for fire, as this is our heritage and our birthright, given us by the great god Rath'nahr. The skies are our reward, our respite and refuge, for all the other elements have teeth. If we survive them, we are milled to shine like gold.\n\nI am Anekh Sun, daughter of Selis Anekh, dragon goddess of the sun. I was not born with this name, however, and it was because of the Wheel that I became her. Proud, strong, fierce, and good, Protectress of the House of Bey, symbol of the Ophar and the sun-rich land of Gifah. This Wheel of sand and sky began to forge me even before I was born, when my world was confined to the walls of a shell, and the golden scales that shaped my destiny.\n\nAll was gold then, liquid gold that flowed past my eyes and lapped my lids with the rhythm of my heart. Molten gold forming wing and tail, shaping claw and scale. Coiled and curled and occasionally turned, my world was bound in a leathery shell, where I slept and grew and dreamed. Sometimes, my dreams turned to those of fire, but those dreams were fleeting. For the most part, I was content to drift and dream, certain this world was big enough for me until one day, I heard something outside the shell.\n\nI had never heard anything before, and this sound woke me from my golden dreams into a new and urgent world of need. I remember flexing my spines and stretching my neck, but I was blocked by the smooth, strong wall of the shell. In darkness, I gnawed at the shell's lining with tiny front teeth. I scratched at it with needle-like claws. The lining sheered away but the leather was not moved. I listened again for the sound, but there was only silence. I wondered if I had imagined it, for dragons are creatures of reckless imagination, and I felt the urge to drift back to dreams when I heard it again. I nudged the shell with the pick of my beak. It caught and tore and, to my utter surprise, my nose pushed through.\n\nFor the very first time, air filled my nostrils and I lay still for several long moments. I had never thought about breathing. But now, I filled my chest, marveling in the sensation of ribs moving in and out, in and out. I raised my wing, pushed a claw through the hole, and forced my beak further. The shell split apart then, and my cheeks slid out between the leather into a wall of dark sand. The sound trilled again. I pushed with my back legs, reached with my front and slowly, weakly, I dragged myself out. The leather slid across my fledgling body and with each scrape of my tiny claws, the sand crumbled beneath. I tunnelled up, claw over claw, digging towards the warmth. I was dimly aware of other shells breaking beneath me, but I was focused on the scrape and the sound and the sand.\n\nScrape, sound, sand. My entire world then was the scrape, the sound, and the sand. In the Wheel of the Elements, sand was my first spoke. I recall blinking for the first time, grateful for double lids that swept grit from my eyes. This breathing was difficult too, as the soil pressed upon me, spilling down with each swipe of my wings.\n\nBeneath me, I could feel the struggles as other shells cracked, and other hatchlings began this same climb. They pushed upwards but caused the sand to crumble and shift. More than once, I tumbled back down to begin again. And so, I called out, a warble of pathos and tiny dragon beauty, and waited for the sound to return.\n\nSuddenly, the world above me thundered as great claws dug into the earth. They sheared huge amounts away with each swipe, and my eyes were blinded as light beamed down in a hazy wave. I blinked again and again only to see a vast set of teeth bearing down to meet me.\n\nBefore I knew it, I was swept up in a mouthful of sand, pressed between a ridged roof and a tongue. A blast of hot breath forced silt out between the teeth, and I realized that there were four others, wriggling, chirping, and struggling beside me. Then, our great cage began to move, up and down, side to side. I peered between the fangs, seeing a plateau of gold sand and blue sky, and a ribbon of green weaving through the dunes. My first smell of water was a sweet contrast to hot breath, and my chest thudded like a tiny drum at the sight of the river that would draw the line of my life in the sand. The glorious, relentless, mercurial River Nahr.\n\nThe banks of the river were lined with palms and when we stopped, the teeth leaned down to spit us into a sandy hollow. Our five shapes tumbled together, all legs and tails and dewy-wet wings, and I fought my way out from the jumble of them. I needed to see. I needed to know. For months, my world had been dreams and gold. Now, there was sun, there was sand, there was water, and there was the great trilling teeth that I later called my mother.\n\nShe was a small drakina, green and young, and I watched with wonder as she swung her fine head, plucking rushes from the riverbank and placing them carefully over us to block the sun. The rushes slid and she rearranged them clumsily but with great patience. I remember how it was something that she had to repeat many times a day, and I wondered if she was inexperienced in the ways of nesting. It was not a good place for a nest, I would later learn, for it was exposed to both predators and the elements. Perhaps we were her first clutch. Perhaps, there were no better options here along the banks of the Nahr. Still, it was home for the first few weeks of this new and wondrous life, and I would not have been who I am today without it.\n\nI shared the nest with four other hatchlings \u2013 two silvers, a green, and a blue. I was the only drakina, and I fought hard to get my share of the fish that my mother would regurgitate from her morning forays down the river. She would open her great mouth and we would madly scramble over each other for bits of flesh and scale. For the first weeks, we stayed deep in the nest, growing in strength and size. My brothers were restless, constantly snapping and biting at each other in mock battles. All except the green. The green was never a strong hatchling. I wasn't surprised when he didn't stir one morning, didn't mourn when our mother removed his dry body from the nest. I think she ate him. The sands of Gifah are harsh and the Wheel is relentless. Best he be gone early than endure a life of hardship caught under the spokes.\n\nA similar fate met my blue brother. One day, I was watching the Sons of Sobeth hunt for wraiths and wyrms in the reeds. Called sobethi, the Sons of Sobeth are very much like dragons, but they have no wings, and they make their home in the waters of the Nahr. It was both exhilarating and frightening to watch them in the rushes, their neck spines flat, only their eyes visible from the surface. Their patience was limitless, their speed deceiving. Many a wyrm disappeared in a splash of tooth and jaw.\n\nSo, my brother. As I've said, the young drakes were restless and playful, and they bullied me incessantly with nips and scratches and 'accidental' bumps. One day, I was watching sobethi on the banks of the Nahr when the whirlwind of silver and blue rolled my way. But this time, I was ready. As the blue bumbled into me, I swung my head and spat a wad of acid that caught him in one eye. He lurched backwards, wings flapping, and he tumbled down the high bank, tip over tail, through the reeds to splash into the dark rushing flow of the river.\n\nI flattened into the sand and peered over the edge, expecting the worst. To my surprise, he bobbed up, shaking his small head, and spitting water from his nostrils. He cocked his beak one way, then the other. Soon, he settled onto the waves and floated, wings folded across his back. His tail swayed smoothly behind, making the same wavy patterns in the surface of the water the way our tails do in the sand. He did not see the eyes moving towards him. He did not heed my chirps of warning. The river splashed once and he was gone, crushed by the Wheel in the jaws of Sobeth and leaving a trail of bubbles in his wake.\n\nThe silvers gave me a wide berth after that.\n\nThat left my two brothers and me. We were growing and hungry, so our days were spent foraging for food. We chased sandwyrms along the palm roots and flushed pic-beetles out of the scrub. We dug for and found scorpioch eggs, delighting in the sting as they went down our throats. But we needed more, so our mother spent less time at the nest, and more time away in search of food. Each night, she would return, cover us with her wing and raise her dragon voice to sing to the stars. It was plaintive and lonely and oh, so beautiful, and we would join her, warbling in fledgling harmony. Her heartbeat was the drum of my early life.\n\nDuring the hot afternoons, we'd stay down in the sand, and ventured out only in the cool of morning or evening. I enjoyed perching at the edge the riverbank, waving my thin wings in the river breeze, and dreaming of the day they would carry me on the winds like my mother. Sometimes the silvers would join me, other times I was alone. I didn't mind either way. The river was hypnotic and the smells from it filled my nights with dreams. I imagined what it would be like to catch a fish in my talons, to bite down and feel it squish between my teeth. Dragons are many things, but hunters first. It is said we were made by the god Rath'nahr to pull his skyboat, the Sun, but our bodies were created to slay, not pull. I understood that even at this age. While a dragon may be worshipped, she may never be truly tamed.\n\nAnd ah, the river. The river, the mighty Nahr. Giver of life and broker of dreams. I have spanned its fearsome length, from delta mouth to mountain source, from Penet in the north to Nabir in the east. I have fished in its waters; I have hunted its banks. I have loved and I have lost in the spokes of this river, the Sand and the Storm. I have watched the river people as they warred with each other, their towns turning to ash under a rain of fire, their homes swept downstream to feed Aketh, Sobeth and Haffih, dragon gods of floods, death, and water. And yet, I have seen these same towns rebuilt, for the reed people are as resilient as the rushes that grow along the water's edge.\n\nI remember the first time I saw the reed people. It was early evening, and the sun was almost finished her daily flight across the heavens, painting the sky a shimmering gold. At first, there was simply a dark shape on the Nahr, and I wondered if it was a very large sobethi, weaving its way through the waters. But as it came closer, I realized it was not a sobethi at all, but rather, a nest made of woven rushes that hung together far better than our nest ever did. A single white wing captured the breeze and I saw creatures dipping poles into and out of the water. Instinctively, I tucked myself into the sand.\n\nTo me, they looked like river reeds. Lean, and graceful, moving about on reedy legs and passing things to and fro with reedy arms. Their noises carried over the water too \u2013 barks and mumbles and laughs, not the chirps and trills of dragons. I breathed their scent as they passed \u2013 smoke and oil and hemp and salt. Pressed into the sand, I watched the nest-boat sail past, fascinated at the thought that this world held far more than what I had known. It was then that my brothers decided to join me on the bank, tumbling and wrestling and setting the great Wheel of our destiny into motion.\n\nBecause the reed creatures on the nest-boat saw us.\n\nI had been good, tucked into the sand and hidden with all my gold. I was always good, but my brothers, with their squabbles and flashing silver, were never good. This time, they were unmistakable. The reed creatures pointed and shouted, and my chest threatened to burst with fear. For their part, my brothers froze at the sight, eyes fixed on the nest-boat, and I was terrified that our lives would end, there and then. But the boat continued its slow journey downriver, soon becoming a speck in the glimmering surface of the Nahr.\n\nBelieve me, my dreams were vivid that night.\n\nI never saw the nest-boat the next day, nor the day after that, and I'm certain it would have become little more than a memory had not the Wheel sent us another challenge by way of our mother.\n\nShe had found a new hunting ground and began to bring back strange new kills, ones with flaxen pelts and tender meat. They smelled very much of the reed creatures, and some of them had bells tied around their thin necks. I didn't think much of it then. We were hungry and growing and innocent. We played with the bells for days until they sank deep in the drifting sand, and then, she'd bring us another.\n\nOne evening, as I perched on the riverbank, waving my wings, and watching the wyrms hunt pic-beetles among the reeds, a shadow crossed the sun above me. I glanced up to see my mother, spinning in wild circles above the dunes. She had a flaxen carcass in her talons, and the smell of it wafted down, mixing with the tang of blood and reed creatures. She was dragging one wing as she descended, and I scrambled towards the nest, diving in on top of my brothers just as she landed, shattering the roof with her neck, and sending the sticks raining down on us.\n\nAfter a long moment, I peered up, expecting to see the green leather of her wing stretched out across us. It wasn't, but I stayed. She had not called us up, and I always listened for her. I obeyed. I was good.\n\nIt has taken me a lifetime to learn a very different lesson.\n\nRegardless, my brothers scrambled over me to the surface, eager to see what she had brought home. Slowly, I followed, my claws sinking into the sand, unwilling to rise above it. I peered over the ridge to see my brothers tugging at the new carcass, tearing at its flanks, and gnawing at its spindly legs. Again, there was a cord around its neck with a bell attached. I knew this creature had belonged to the reed people and I knew that my mother had fallen upon the Wheel for hunting it.\n\nI crawled over to her. She lay, eyes glazed, jaws parted, blood collecting in the hollows of her teeth. Strange sticks protruded from her neck and belly and flank. I bit into one, feeling the wood splinter beneath my teeth. Her breath rattled so I released it, smacking my beak at the taste on my tongue. As my brothers gorged themselves, I curled up under her jaw, feeling her pulse drum weakly along my spine. At some point, my brothers crawled back into the nest, but I stayed, sharing my feeble warmth as the golden sun fled the skies, pursued into the horizon by her suitors, the moons.\n\nI had never seen the night sky before then. It was cold and vast and dark and bright at the same time. Creatures called to each other across the dunes. Scorpiochs scurried and sand beetles dug. The waves of the river laughed softly against the rushes. The brother moons danced overhead, one wide, the other a sliver. They looked like eyes watching me from above and I wondered if they were the eyes of Rath'nahr or some other god. At some point, I slept, waking only when the sky spun gold from the stars.\n\nMy mother did not see it. Her eyes were covered with sand.\n\nI lowered my head across my wings, a strange ache tightening my throat. I didn't know what came next. I didn't know anything at all.\n\nWhen my brothers awoke, they scrambled out, biting and chittering as usual. They returned to the carcass, ate their fill for the morning and tugged at the thread that bound the bell. Finally, one silver lumbered towards me, nudging at our mother with his sharp, shiny beak. Nothing. The second joined us and trilled at her. Nothing. He folded his silver wings and sat on his haunches, head cocked first one way, then the other. He trilled again. It was a plaintive sound picked up by the first, and together, they repeated it over and over again, warbling up and down in dissonant harmonies. It was heartbreaking and sad, and I was moved to join them. Soon, our juvenile voices echoed down the Nahr in fledgling dragonsong. Our mother had been young and alone, and the Wheel was relentless and cruel. We wove a story for her that still echoes in the Great Halls of the Sky.\n\nDay became night, night became day, and despair became detachment as the Wheel began to turn us to sand. At some point, the reed people came in their nest-boat from the Nahr, trudging up the banks and through the palms to find us. I remember the squeals of my brothers as they were gathered up and shoved into baskets. I remember hands around my own neck, prying me from my mother's body even as my claws strained to stay. I remember a chain clasped around my leg, and a bolt of twine binding my wings so I could not move. And the last thing I remember, before my own basket swallowed the sky, was the sight of my mother buried by sand, and the spokes of the Wheel on my back."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE HOUSE OF SEB",
                "text": "I was told the Great God Rath'nahr created the reed people while sitting one day on the banks of the river Nahr. The other gods had abandoned him, and he was lonely, so he wept, and his tears spilled onto the rushes. From them, the first men formed, stepping out of the waters and vowing to serve him forever. I believed it. They looked like the dried reeds that my mother would use to build our roof \u2013 thin and tanned, with nobs and branches, limbs and ribs. But I suppose they are like fresh reeds as well. They are strong, lean, easily bent but impossible to break. There are as many of them as grains of sand in the desert. If you pull one out, others take its place. Still, the Wheel rolls over them as well as dragons, and I ache almost as much for them as my own kind. Even now, I will protect them with my life.\n\nI spent several days on the nest-boat in a basket made of reeds, captive of a people made from the tears of a god. Several times, they opened the lid to drop in pieces of fish, but I was beyond hunger and thirst. I was a dragon, born in sand and forged by need, and I needed my mother more than fish. I could hear my brothers in baskets nearby, had no doubt that they devoured the morsels dropped to them. I wasn't resentful. It was their way to eat and wrestle and live, taking what the Wheel would give them and when. It's all that can be expected of a dragon, really. Our spirit rises and sets like the sun in the sky, or like the brother moons who pursue her.\n\nFinally, the nest-boat came to rest, and the basket was lifted from its perch. I felt my stomach lurch as it swayed, pieces of rotting fish sticking to the sides like scales. I could hear the barking of voices and the crunch of feet on wood, then sand, then stone. The world grew still, the lid was removed, and a hand reached in for me.\n\nI snapped my teeth but once again, the hand grasped my neck and pulled me, twisting and spitting, from the basket. My wings were still bound and I'm sure I looked like a wyrm, thin and pathetic like they are.\n\nThis man was lean. His hips were draped in rough linen and a collar of gold circled his throat. He pulled me close and slipped his fingers into my mouth to pry the gums from my back teeth. It was awkward, and I wrapped my tail around his arm for balance.\n\n\"You have removed none of her scales for seket?\"\n\n\"None, Master Seb. We know her value.\"\n\n\"Any sign of sythstone?\"\n\n\"None, Master Seb. We checked the dead drakina too. No sign.\"\n\n\"Good. You couldn't pay me to take her if that were the case.\"\n\nI gagged at his fingers, bit him again. My teeth did nothing. I was pathetic, a wyrm.\n\n\"Do you know why, Kida?\" the man asked.\n\nAnother reed person stepped into view. Smaller, thinner, with a smooth head and large eyes.\n\n\"Sythstone creates fire, and fire is the spear of the gods,\" she said. \"Once a dragon has tasted fire, she is dangerous and can never be trusted.\"\n\n\"Once she has tasted fire, she is having you for dinner.\" He flashed his teeth, then looked back at the first man. \"Unbind her. I need to see her wings.\"\n\nThe man released his grip on my neck and moved his hand to my feet, catching them as if he knew how to hold a young dragon, as if he did this every day. The first reed reached forward with a blade and suddenly, my wings were free. I battered and beat, but after so long bound against my back, they were trembling as if newborn. He pulled at them, stretching the leather, and testing the bones. I nipped at his hands again, tightened my tail on his arm.\n\nHe bared his teeth once again. I bared mine and hissed.\n\n\"Magnificent,\" he said, and he turned. \"Kida, what do you make of the new drakinet.\"\n\n\"She's beautiful, sebbah,\" she said. \"A gift from the goddess.\"\n\nHer eyes round and very dark, sparkling with life.\n\n\"The Ophar will be pleased,\" he said. \"We'll have wine tonight, I think.\"\n\nHe fastened two links of gold chain around my legs and passed me over to the one called Kida. She, too, held me as if experienced, and I snapped her fingers. But then, she did a most unusual thing. She lifted the other hand and laid it on the crest of my head, pressing down with a strong yet gentle touch. I froze mid-chomp as the hand trailed down my neck, smoothing the baby soft spines into place. She repeated this action, pressing and smoothing, pressing and smoothing, and I didn't know what to do. I should have bitten harder, torn the skin, drawn blood, but I didn't know what to think. At some point, the man called Seb turned away, and I softened my teeth, content just to hold the finger of this strange, young river person.\n\n\"You are a good omen,\" said the girl, drawing me close to her face, studying me with those great eyes. \"A sign from Selis Anekh of the Sun.\"\n\nShe ran her hand across the ridge of my eyes now and I believe I closed them. I may have trilled. I was young and tired, after all. Her voice was like the lapping of the Nahr.\n\n\"Little daughter of Anekh,\" she continued. \"It will go well for our house if the Ophar chooses you.\"\n\nI released my grip on her finger to look up at her. She smiled and I wished to fall into the dark, soft, sparkling world that was her eyes. It was the first wish I had ever made. Dragons are made of need, not wishes, but this felt like dragonsong, sweet and strong and sad like home.\n\nSeb returned.\n\n\"Take her to the drakmet,\" he said, fixing a length of fine chain to the links at my feet. He clipped them to a band of gold at the girl's wrist. \"The harness room has been emptied and filled with straw. Don't let her in with the others. Her scales are too perfect.\"\n\n\"I won't, sebbah.\"\n\n\"And don't feed her. She can't bond with you.\"\n\n\"One piece of wyrm?\"\n\n\"Water only. We have three days until the ceremony. She's thin but she won't die.\"\n\nAnd the tall man was gone, leaving me with the girl, chains of gold on my legs, and an ache in my belly.\n\n\"I'm sorry, little daughter of Anekh,\" said the girl called Kida. \"But the Ophar has commissioned a gift for the new courtyard, and if you are chosen, the House of Seb will be restored to glory.\"\n\nShe moved her hand again, and this time, I stretched my chin into it, eager to feel the sensation along my jaw and throat. She ran her hand down my neck, gently picking sticky bits of dried fish and basket from my scales.\n\n\"But I'll be with you until the Ophar's son has learned how to raise a dragon,\" Kida continued. \"With him, I think that will take a very long time. Besides, one piece of wyrm can't hurt.\"\n\nShe clutched me to her chest then, and I could hear her heart, strong and sure. It reminded me of my mother, so I tucked my face under her arm and stilled my trembling limbs. She gave me a squeeze and walked out into the sun-soaked streets of Wa'ast, Royal City of the Ophar, Scepter of the Gods and Ruler of the Golden Land of Gifah.\n\nThose next days went by quickly, and I learned about where I was and what was expected. Dragons are quick learners, (I quicker and keener than most) and I revelled in my time in the drakmet, or dragon nursery. It was a low building with mud brick walls, straw floors, and small windows high up. There were other dragons in the drakmet - greens, blues, greys, and browns, but no silvers like my brothers, and certainly no golds. Most were larger than me. I almost forgot how large my mother had been, how she'd carried us in her teeth and rode the breath of the wind. I still ached for her, and in truth, I missed my brothers too.\n\nI learned that Kida was a vaskar, or dragon handler. She had been at Seb's drakmet since she was very young and had worked hard to learn these skills. There were other vaskars in the drakmet, but I never saw them. I wondered if they each had a dragon of their own.\n\nEvery morning began with a bath in shakhet milk. I could barely sleep at night because of the joy that was shakhet milk. Kida would roll out of the straw, slip me a piece of wyrm, and carry me to a basin filled to the brim. It was the same temperature as the air, and I would leap from her arms into the deep white where I would splash and float and preen. She would rub the milk across the thin film of my wings, work it into the scales of my neck, and along the length of my whipping tail. I would gladly have spent entire days swimming and diving in glorious white. Besides, I would gulp great mouthfuls until my belly was full, and I had to admit it went down nicely after the wyrm.\n\nI'm certain the sebbah suspected, but he never said.\n\nThen, after the bath, came inspection. I wasn't sure what they were inspecting, but the sebbah and his reeds would spend hours measuring my teeth, my claws, my wingspan. They made sketches with chalk and paprush; they wrote figures on tablets of slate. It was then that I think I learned as much of Kida's people as they learned about me. They were not like dragons. They were not colourful like us, no greens or blues or silvers or golds. Rather, they were many shades of the same hue. Some were tall, others not, some thin, others round. They were smoother than dragons, though, with barely a scale or spine to be found. I wondered if they bathed in shakhet milk too. I wouldn't blame them. It was wonderful.\n\nFor three nights, I sat in her arms by the glow of the braziers, as Seb regaled his fellow reeds with stories of Sobeth, A'Toth, and Othorys, Naret and Harathor and, of course, Rath'nahr, the father of them all. According to legend, Rath'nahr crossed the heavens each day in a chariot pulled by Selis Anekh, Dragon of the Sun. Each night, he was pursued by his brother Syth in a skyboat pulled by twins Amok and Khamet, the dragon moons of the world. Seb spoke about the history of Gifah and the Ophar's court, of how dragons turned the tide for the House of Bey so long ago, and how there would always be a Great Gold, or the dynasty would fall to another house. He also talked about the dangers of something called sythstone. Wild dragons would eat it and breathe fire like the wind. It made my teeth ache to hear of dragons eating such a thing, but the heat in my belly told another story entirely. Those nights, my dreams were filled of gods, suns, moons, and fire.\n\nEach night, I slept curled in Kida's arms, safe and warm and sung to sleep by the drumming of her heart. I could hear the other young dragons in another room in the drakmet. I wondered if they had a vaskar to keep them warm, or if they only had each other. I often thought of my brothers and hoped that, wherever they were, they were together, wrestling and bumping and living as only they could.\n\nOn the end of the third day, Kida dimmed the oil lamp and lay down on a bed of straw. She pulled me with her, and I stretched out on her chest. She stroked my head and neck, smoothing the baby soft spines and studying me with her great, dark eyes.\n\n\"Tomorrow, everything will change,\" she said. \"I wish it wouldn't, but I know it'll be good. You'll do well, my Anekh Sun. You are too perfect for the Ophar to refuse.\"\n\nI didn't know what she meant, but I loved the sound of her voice. It lulled me to sleep every night, along with the sound of her heart.\n\n\"I remember when my mitra died, and my bappa took me upriver to Wa'ast for the very first time. I was very young, and scared, but he knew the sebbah was a good man and that I'd have a good home here as a vaskar. So, I know it'll be\u2026\"\n\nShe gathered me into her arms, tucked me under her chin.\n\n\"\u2026it will be the same for you. You'll see. You'll have all the wyrm you could ever want, and you'll grow strong and proud and safe\u2026\"\n\nShe trembled and I lifted my head. Water spilled like little rivers from her eyes, and I dabbed her cheeks with my tongue.\n\nSalt.\n\n\"You have a destiny, dear Anekh. One day, you'll be the Great Gold of Gifah. They will worship you because you took a journey upriver like I did. I'm happy here, and I know you'll be happy in the palace, but still, sometimes I miss my mitra, and I miss my ba, and I know I'll miss you\u2026\"\n\nHer voice caught and she hugged me tightly. I let her, not understanding the ways of the reeds, but I took her thumb in my teeth, gently and with great comfort, content to hold her in the way of dragons. I slept soundly that night, but truth be told, I'm not sure she did.\n\nThe next morning, my bath was different with scented oils and ikarat petals added to the milk. I was dried with the softest of towels and was taken from the drakmet into the blinding light of midday. The sun burned my tender eyes and scorched my fledgling scales. I was grateful to have Kida carrying me, for I'm convinced I would have curled up in a charred coil if left to myself.\n\nThrough my blinks, I could see white walls and towering columns and pillars painted with the most magnificent of patterns. Tall, green palms wavered in the heat. Colourful awnings flapped in the breeze. Reed people rushed past us, talking, laughing, shouting, singing. Finally, we slipped under a high stone lintel into a room that smelled of spice, and coolness fell like the night.\n\nI was immediately surrounded by a dune of people.\n\nThey poured fragrant oil on my head, and I closed my eyes, feeling it trickle along the ridges of my skull. I purred as many hands worked it into my skin, smoothed it across the delicate leather of my wings. They dried me with linen cloths and placed several trays of colour around me. One woman reached for my feet, and I snapped at her. Kida caught my beak in her hands.\n\n\"No, Anekh,\" she said. \"You must let them. It's for all of us.\"\n\nAnd she leaned forward, bringing her forehead to mine, her eyes becoming larger than anything in the world. I fell into them blindly, trusting my young life to her, only glancing briefly as women painted my talons with liquid gold. I cocked my head, now fascinated, as they stroked the colour across each wing claw, swept gold across the long talons of my feet. Kida held my beak, and I did not struggle. I did not even blink as delicate brushes drew lines in liquid kohl around my eyes. They painted my wings with the colours of dragons \u2013 blue and green and red and brown. Symbols whisked into my scales with brushes of hair and rush. They slid golden anklets around my thin legs, draped fine chains across my claws. Finally, they held up a collar of hammered gold with jewels of blue, green and red, and fastened it around my throat with a click.\n\nKida released my beak and they all stood back to admire me.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" said one.\n\n\"A gift,\" said another.\n\n\"She'd be worth a palace in seket,\" said another.\n\n\"No,\" said the first. \"She needs each and every scale to be perfect. Seb will have us flogged if even one is missing.\"\n\nThey all murmured at that.\n\nWith my painted wings wide, I hissed at them all.\n\n\"She has a temper,\" grinned a third.\n\n\"Just like the Ophar's son.\"\n\n\"Or the Ophar's wife.\"\n\n\"She scares me,\" said the first.\n\nAnd they laughed.\n\nI've never understood laughter. I suppose it's not something dragons do. It never fails to take me by surprise, and I never know if it is a sound of happiness or fury. Perhaps, it's a bit of both. Reed people are almost as complex as dragons in that regard.\n\nA shadow fell across me, and all the women stepped back as the sebbah passed between them. His eyes were painted too, and he wore a wide golden collar around his neck. I wondered if he were trying to look like a dragon. If so, I have to say he had not succeeded.\n\nHe studied me with his painted eyes.\n\n\"Well done. Well done,\" he said. \"But she's young and may not be enough. We have stiff competition with the House of Thah.\"\n\nKida looked up at him.\n\n\"They have two silver drakes,\" he said.\n\nHe caught my painted feet in his hands and held me high to study the designs on my wings, the gold on my claws, the kohl at my eyes. I lashed my tail and bit his thumbs in protest. My teeth were tiny but surely deadly.\n\nHe smiled.\n\n\"But she's dramatic, I must say. This may increase our odds.\" He glanced sharply at Kida. \"Have you fed her?\"\n\nKida looked down.\n\n\"She drinks the milk from her baths every morning.\"\n\n\"But no wyrm?\"\n\n\"No, sebbah. Only milk.\"\n\nI would gnaw the flesh from his thumb. It would be bone before he knew.\n\n\"Good. She'll be hungry and angry. Selis Anekh of the Sun should be a drakina of heat.\" He grinned again. \"Anekh Sun, Eye of Fire, Wing of Fury. We may stand a chance.\"\n\n\"And if not?\"\n\n\"Seket. She's young and her scales may be small, but the temple will pay well for a gold and Gifah needs the Weeping. It's late this year.\"\n\nHe turned and two men approached, carrying a golden case on long carven poles. A Wheel was engraved on its lid, and entwined in the Wheel, dragons. They laid it across the table, slid the heavy lid aside with a thud. The sebbah stepped forward.\n\n\"Well, little Anekh Sun, it's time for the goddess to choose your path. Temple sacrifice, or life forever in the Ophar's courts.\"\n\nHe folded my wings and lowered me into the case. I struggled in his grip and bleated a cry for Kida, my world, my girl that was strong as a dragon, but the lid slid over me, and the world fell black as a dreamless night."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE OPHAR'S COURT",
                "text": "It didn't take long for me to realize that there was a spoke of shadow on the Wheel of the Elements, since most of the changes in my life occurred in the dark. The sand pit where I was hatched. The basket of reeds on the nest-boat. This chest of gold. All dark, all confining, all portents of upheaval and change.\n\nI stayed very small in this case of gold as it bumped along, carried by men with poles. We finally came to a stop, and I wondered if they were planning to leave me here to die in the dark, covered in paint and smelling of spice.\n\nSoon, I heard muffled speech and the sound of many voices. Finally, the lid slid off and light spilled into the darkness. I sprang from the case, praying my untried wings would take me up and away from this horrible cage.\n\nMy teeth rattled at the yank of a chain and my feet were pulled down, held fast to the wrist of the man known as Seb.\n\nThere was silence for a brief moment, then suddenly, the room erupted in cheers.\n\nI flapped and hissed, snapping at Seb's fingers, bleating my most furious bleats. I wanted out, I wanted away. I wanted Kida and my baths and my brothers and my mother and the marvelous, terrible waters of the Nahr. The cheering deafened me and terrified me, and the room blurred as I tried to take it in. We were in a court with high pillars and beams of painted wood. Palm branches waved and oil lamps flickered, and the smell of dragon was very strong. The House of Seb stood in a row behind us, but behind them were more people than I had ever seen, but I was alone among them, and I could understand why the god Rath'nahr wept.\n\nA man stepped forward and the room fell silent once more.\n\n\"The riches of Gifah are pleasing to the Ophar,\" said the man. \"And the choice will be difficult. The House of Seb will present our final offering before the majesty of Rath'nahr.\"\n\nI saw Kida, pleading with her great, round eyes. I would have fallen into those eyes had Seb not spread his arms wide, pulling me out to the side like the balance of a scale.\n\n\"You honour us, wise Josiat, esteemed vizier of the court,\" said Seb, turning. \"And to our divine son of the gods, blessings from the House of Seb.\"\n\nHe bowed. I flapped in vain against it. There was a murmur in the crowd.\n\nHe straightened and turned in a slow circle, arms outstretched and taking me with him. I saw rows of men with cases of wine and rows of women with chests of jewels. There was furniture and ornaments and vases and silks all around as offerings and gifts. As we spun, I could have sworn I saw the flash of golden dragonscale beyond in the outer courtyard. But it was only a flash, for Seb turned to face the front once more.\n\n\"Selis Anekh, Goddess Dragon of the Sun,\" he said, his voice loud and ringing. \"Rises at dawn to serve her celestial master, Rath'nahr. From one horizon to the next, she crosses the heavens, pulling his fiery skyboat and giving light to all the people of Gifah.\"\n\nHe paused, and for some reason, my heart hammered in my chest. In front of us all, a man in white linen sat upon a seat made of gold, next to a woman as painted as I. On their left, stood a young woman; on their right, a young man. Behind them all, a man with hair the colour of the sun.\n\nSeb smiled.\n\n\"Today, most honoured Ophar, I present to you Anekh Sun, glorious daughter of Selis Anekh. Like her mother the goddess, she is perfect in every way, and she is a humble gift from the House of Seb to the Most Royal, Most Revered, and Most Divine House of Bey.\"\n\nThe man in white linen rose from his seat.\n\nI hissed at them both, beat my wings against Seb's arm. I bit his thumb, and he flicked my beak and lights popped behind my eyes.\n\nThe man stepped forward, the young man and woman flanking him like the moons. The painted woman stayed back, however, watching everything with quick, dark eyes.\n\n\"A golden drakina,\" said the man. \"A gift from the goddess, herself.\"\n\nLike Seb, his lids were thickly lined with the colour of slate. Unlike Seb, his scalp was covered in a tall headdress of green and gold, and he carried a staff of hammered bronze.\n\n\"She is Anekh Sun, Eye of Wisdom, Wing of Grace,\" said Seb. \"Raised in our very own drakmet. She will be your very own Winged Sun, elegant and proud, fiery yet bonded fully to the House of Bey.\"\n\nHe bowed slightly once again, and I was forced to bow with him, his fingers tight over my feet and talons. I beat my wings at the offence.\n\n\"If the Most Royal Prince Beyat wishes to meet her\u2014\"\n\n\"What about the Most Royal Princess Shesset?\"\n\nSeb straightened, and both he and the man called the Ophar turned. The young woman stepped forward. She was different than Kida, with small eyes instead of large, high cheekbones instead of round, and a wide smiling mouth. To me, she looked polished and sharp, like a spear.\n\n\"What if the daughter of the Ophar wishes to meet the daughter of the goddess?\"\n\n\"Shesset,\" hissed the painted woman. \"Know your place.\"\n\n\"Don't be a fool, Shesset,\" said the young man. He wore white linen at his hips, a blue sash across his chest, and a wide circlet of gold at his throat. \"A dragon is a king's symbol. And you will never be king.\"\n\n\"I'm first born, Beyat, and I can rule if father chooses.\" She glanced around at the crowd and grinned. Her eyes glinted like steel. \"And at least, the people will know my beard is false.\"\n\nThere was laughter from the court of reeds.\n\n\"Shesset,\" said the Ophar. \"Don't provoke your brother on the Day of Dedication.\"\n\n\"He wants the throne. I want the dragon.\"\n\n\"The drakina is mine by right,\" growled Beyat. \"As is the throne.\"\n\n\"And you\u2026\" The Ophar turned to him. \"Don't claim the throne while your father still sits on it.\"\n\nThe young woman grinned. The young man glowered and stepped back. The painted woman laid a hand upon his arm and the sun-headed man leaned in to whisper in his ear.\n\nSo much to take in. So much to see. I knew nothing of this world, these people. I wanted my vaskar to take me home.\n\nI looked to Kida, called to her. Her eyes flashed. She shook her head. I called again and Seb yanked the chain at my feet. I snapped again at Seb's wrists, wishing I were a sobethi. I would leave nothing but bubbles and blood. He flicked my beak again, and I sat back, folding my painted wings until the stars stilled their dance behind my eyes.\n\n\"Anekh Sun calls for her mother,\" he said quickly. \"The goddess will be honoured if you choose her daughter.\"\n\n\"She is a marvelous gift, husband,\" said the painted woman, and the Ophar held out his hand. She took it, sliding gracefully to his side.\n\n\"You are correct, Nefheru, best of wives and goddess of women.\" He turned to the crowd. \"These are all marvelous gifts! I will be sorely tested to choose.\"\n\n\"The gifts are not done yet, Majesty,\" said the vizier, and all eyes turned. \"The House of Thah wishes to present.\"\n\n\"The House of Thah is late,\" said Seb. \"And therefore, has renounced its right to present.\"\n\n\"The House of Seb denies an offering to our Most Royal Ophar and his Court?\"\n\nThe crowd moved aside as row of reeds pushed through. Vaskars, from the looks of them. Two men stepped forward.\n\n\"May the great god Rath'nahr smile upon the House of Bey by day,\" said one.\n\n\"And may the twin moons of Syth light his dreams by night,\" said the other.\n\nTwo silver cases were brought forward, carried by reeds on long silver poles. Both cases were placed with a single thunk on the smooth marble floor.\n\n\"Behold,\" cried the man, arms wide. \"The children of the moons, Amok and Khamet, gifts from the House of Thah!\"\n\nThe cases were flung open, and two drakes leapt up, streaking like arrows towards the high ceiling. Like me, they snapped down at the end of their chains, and they called to each other in shrill, metallic squeals.\n\nMy heart leapt to my throat. I felt the heat boil onto my tongue.\n\nMy brothers!\n\nI called to them, struggled with wing and tail and neck and teeth but Seb had my feet firmly clasped in his hand, links of gold chain wrapped tightly around his wrist. Likewise, they sprang towards me but were restrained by the reeds from the House of Thah.\n\nMy brothers were alive. They were alive! My chest would surely burst.\n\nThe Ophar stepped forward.\n\n\"Two silvers and a gold,\" he said softly, stroking his beard. \"The Heavens above us rejoice.\"\n\n\"Both in one season, oh great king,\" said the vizier. \"You have found favour with the gods.\"\n\n\"The House of Bey was born with the favour of the gods,\" growled Beyat.\n\n\"There is a saying in Remus,\" purred the sun-headed man. \"That there must be a Great Gold in the House of Bey, or it will fall.\"\n\n\"That is the saying, yes, Adriam,\" said the Ophar. He did not look at them, kept his gaze fixed on my brothers. \"But we still have Netjeh, and there are so many wonderful gifts.\"\n\n\"Netjeh is almost dead,\" Beyat hissed. \"He hasn't moved in years.\"\n\n\"You know nothing of dragons,\" said the girl, Shesset.\n\n\"Go back to your maps and your beads.\"\n\n\"Husband,\" said the painted woman, Nefheru. \"Son of the gods and light of my eyes, tell the court you accept the golden drakina for your son, and for the House of Bey.\"\n\nThe Ophar looked at her, then at his daughter and then his son. He looked at the vizier and the long row of supplicants with their cases and gifts. Finally, he looked at my brothers then at me, and stepped away from his wife. He raised his staff above the ground, brought it down once, twice, three times.\n\n\"Gentle people of the God's Court,\" he said. \"The House of Bey has ruled the Golden Land forever, and our pleasure is your profit. Today, you have made us proud with your offerings. Your generosity has made it impossible to choose which best honours the land of Gifah and the new court of Ruby Whispers. Will it be the jewelled headdress from the House of Seknethut, or the illuminated paprush scroll from the House of Rajet? Will it be the urn of black wine from the growers of Thenes or the cloak of rassa pelt from the Emperor of Remus?\"\n\n\"It is the honour of Remus, oh Glory of the Gods,\" said the sun-headed man. Adriam, the Ophar had called him.\n\nThe Ophar turned back to the crowds.\n\n\"Or will it be a dragon?\"\n\nHe looked at my brothers, who flapped and hissed. He looked at me. I cocked my head at him, blinked slowly, the kohl weighing down my lids. He smiled.\n\n\"It is true that Netjeh is old,\" he said. \"And as dragons age, they turn to stone, then to sand. And a Great Gold must be in the House of Bey, or the House shall surely fall\u2026\"\n\nI was tired and the paint on my scales was caking. I turned to nibble a flake of blue. Seb tugged the chain and I snapped at him. The Ophar laughed and raised his hands.\n\n\"You have made me proud today, People of the Gods!\" he announced. \"So today, I will make you all proud. I accept all of your gifts.\"\n\nThere was a murmur from the audience behind me.\n\n\"What?\" asked Beyat.\n\n\"Majesty,\" said the vizier. \"Such a thing has not been done.\"\n\n\"And yet, I have just done it.\" He stepped forward. \"Nefheru, you are my second wife and mother of my son, but you are the ruler of my heart. I gift you the jewelled headdress. Wear it in honour of the House of Seknethut.\"\n\nShe lowered her eyes but did not smile.\n\nHe turned to his son.\n\n\"Beyat, Son of the Ophar and Spear of Gifah, I gift you the children of the moons, Khamet and Amok. Royal silver drakes for the Second Seed of the Kingdom.\"\n\nI watched Beyat's hands curl into fists. I knew what it meant. I had claws of my own.\n\n\"Majesty,\" bleated the vizier. \"Your son\u2014\"\n\n\"Is second born, brilliant yet impulsive. He must learn to control himself, much like these young drakes, and perhaps under the guidance of his tutor from Remus, one day he will. Shesset, however\u2026\"\n\nHe turned to her, and she straightened like a spear.\n\n\"She is the Glory of the House of Bey, destined to rule in my stead when Rath'nahr calls me to the Fields of Ever Spring. Clever, strategic, and loyal. Her mother died giving her life, and I dedicated her then to the goddess Neburanna and to Selis Anekh, dragon of the Sun. It is only natural, then, that the daughter of Selis Anekh should be hers.\"\n\nHer eyes beamed like shafts of light.\n\n\"What?\" snapped Beyat. \"No, I don't accept this.\"\n\n\"It is the word of the Ophar,\" said the Ophar.\n\n\"It's wrong,\" growled the young man. \"To rule is my right.\"\n\n\"No one is ruling yet,\" said the Ophar.\n\n\"Perhaps no one is ruling at all.\"\n\nHe whirled, snatched my brothers from their vaskars and stormed from the Ophar's court, the sun-headed man trotting after him. My heart ached at the sight of my brothers, shrieking and flapping until they disappeared from the court. Still, I called after them, spread my wings and beat the air.\n\n\"He is fire,\" said Nefheru. \"Perhaps the moons will soothe him.\"\n\n\"Fire is the root of Gifah,\" said the Ophar. \"It makes us gods.\"\n\n\"The moons call the Nahr,\" said the girl, Shesset. \"And the Nahr gives us life.\"\n\n\"You will be a wise ruler, Daughter of Glory.\"\n\n\"Is the drakina truly mine?\"\n\n\"As much as Netjeh is mine,\" he said. \"As much as any man may own a dragon.\"\n\n\"Then, may I ask one more thing of the House of Seb?\"\n\nHe stepped aside, spread wide his hands.\n\n\"You are the light of my eyes,\" he said to her. \"Anything you ask, I give.\"\n\nShe smiled and turned to the House of Seb, folded her hands behind her back.\n\n\"Master Seb,\" she said. \"I am stubborn and proud like my father, and I like to get my way. But also, like my father, I know that there is much that I do not know, and that will make me a good ruler one day. In light of this, I ask you to add one thing to your generous gift today.\"\n\n\"Anything, Daughter of Glory,\" said Seb.\n\n\"Give me a tribute,\" she said. \"A servant from your worthy House. Bond her to me now and forever, to teach me the ways of dragons.\"\n\nHe gaped at her.\n\n\"Surely, the House of Bey has royal vaskars?\"\n\n\"Surely, we do.\" She grinned. \"But I do not want a royal vaskar. I want her.\"\n\nAnd she pointed to Kida. My Kida. My heart. My reed. I unfurled my wings at the sight of her and trilled.\n\n\"See?\" said Shesset. \"The goddess has chosen.\"\n\n\"Husband, no,\" said Nefheru. \"The girl isn't even Gifahn. Why bring a stranger into our house?\"\n\nThe Ophar turned to Seb.\n\n\"The girl is clearly not of Gifah,\" he said. \"Did you buy her in Karadoum?\"\n\n\"No, most glorious son of Rath'nahr,\" said Seb. \"Her father is an honourable man, a trader who brings me fledglings and fish. He bonded her to me to work as vaskar after her mother died.\"\n\nSeb glanced at my reed, then at the Ophar.\n\n\"It was said her mother was Lamoan.\"\n\n\"An ancient people,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"Once,\" said Nefheru. \"Lamos is no more than traders and thieves.\"\n\n\"One day, people may say the same of Gifah,\" said the Ophar. \"I approve this tribute.\"\n\nSeb nodded and Kida stepped forward, hands folded carefully in front of her. She did not look up.\n\n\"Welcome to the Ophar's Court, not-royal vaskar,\" said the princess.\n\nKida said nothing as Seb passed me over, and I can say that it was with great joy that I sprang onto her wrist. I snapped at the air once, vindicated, before scooting sideways to fold myself into the crook of her arm. Home.\n\n\"She knows you,\" said the princess.\n\nKida smiled shyly.\n\n\"She likes to be carried.\"\n\n\"Like a baby. What is your name?\"\n\n\"Kida, princess. It's the Lamoan word for destiny.\"\n\n\"Destiny,\" said Shesset. \"It is destiny, then, that I choose a Lamoan vaskar for my Great Gold. It is a crown and portent. I will unite all the kingdoms of the God's Land, one day.\"\n\nShe turned to the Ophar, bent her knees slightly.\n\n\"Thank you, esteemed father of Gifah \u2013 and of me \u2013 for the drakina and the vaskar.\"\n\nA reed rushed in from an outer court, dropped to his knees before the Ophar.\n\n\"A boat from Thenes,\" he said. \"The Weeping has begun!\"\n\nA cry went up from the crowd.\n\n\"The gods have smiled on your choice, oh wise Ophar,\" sang the vizier. \"The Nahr rises to bless you and the land of Gifah.\"\n\nI didn't know what this meant. I was young, and the Wheel rolled on.\n\nStill smiling, the Ophar leaned into his daughter.\n\n\"Learn what you can,\" he said. \"And do it quickly. I fear the fire is spreading and Netjeh is too old to catch it.\"\n\nShe nodded and turned her back to the great crowd of reeds. Kida moved to follow, slowing only for a brief moment to glance over her shoulder at the House of Seb. She lingered too long, I thought, and I butted her chin with my beak. She turned back and that was the last I ever saw of Seb and the House that bore his name."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE HOUSE OF BEY",
                "text": "Dragons are not good at counting.\n\nThere is one thing, two things, three things and four things. Even five things we can count, but then there is more up to ten. More than ten things become ten and. Ten and two. Ten and ten. Ten and ten and ten, like so. I think for reeds, counting is simple but for dragons, it is esoteric, a puzzle created for confusion. an arcane construct of numbers and the significance of amount. Reeds even count time and put great weight on its passing. Not so, dragons. We are as we are, when we are, whether we be under Selis Anekh, or under the cool, indifferent eyes of the moons. So, I don't how many days it was after I joined the House of Bey before I saved the life of the princess. It wasn't many, to be sure. Maybe ten. Maybe less.\n\nIt was the time of the Weeping, when the Nahr rose with floodwaters from the Rivers Sand and Storm. Josiat, the vizier, told stories of the Weeping, how it was the Nahr remembering the tears of Rath'nahr and blessing his people with silt-rich waters for their farms and orchards. I liked Josiat. He didn't know dragons, but he reminded me of Seb and my first days in the drakmet. I'm not sure he approved of Kida, however. She was not a Royal vaskar, and he often questioned her regarding my health, temperament, and training. He also spent much of his time overseeing the siblings' education. The mornings, he spent with Beyat, but Adriam was the prince's primary tutor now, sent as a diplomatic courtesy from a land called Remus across the Nameless Sea. I'm not sure what Beyat learned from either of them, but then again, I spent little time in the prince's company, nor the company of my brothers. That made me sad, and I would remember the times when they would wrestle and bump, and I would snap them away. I regretted those days, now, but with all the distractions of palace life, I found it easy to push such memories out of my mind.\n\nThe princess' room was large, bright, and high on a second level of the palace. It was open on one end with a wide, pillared terrace that overlooked the Court of the Great Gold. Near the terrace, I had a clay nest filled with strips of linen and irawat petals. Kida, however, slept on a divan at the foot of the royal bed, so most nights, I slept with her, tucked snug within her arms and dreaming under the drum of her heart. Breakfast was wyrm and fish. Dinner was shakhet lam and sweet cakes, and I drank all the milk I wanted from the pool in which we bathed. I loved that pool. If I'd thought that my small tub of shakhet milk in the drakmet was blissful, I can tell you that it was nothing compared to Shesset's pool. Every morning, it was filled with milk, lily petals, scented oil, and me.\n\nI can't even begin to describe the jewels I wore. A wide collar of hammered gold, encrusted with rubies and lapis, amber and crystal. I was bejewelled with leg bracelets on a fine chain, and rings on the talons of my feet. All the jewels were colours of dragons \u2013 red, green, blue and gold. No silver, never silver. I never stopped to wonder why, although in retrospect, I should have.\n\nMost mornings, we trained in the Court of the Painted Palm, a wide stone yard with pillars that held up a colourful roof. The princess was relentlessly curious about dragons and our care, so Kida shared everything she knew. She showed Shesset the proper ways to hold me, how to keep the arm steady when I would perch on a wrist, how to stand razor straight when I would balance on her shoulders and spread wide my wings like a crown. She showed her how to stroke my head and neck, going with the spines and flattening them with the slightest of pressure. And best of all, how to scratch the buds of my horns as they pushed through the scales in their bloodless advance.\n\nI learned many commands in Kida's Lamoan tongue during those days. Luf meant catch, and I became proficient at snatching tossed strips of wyrm with one snap of my beak. Tat meant bring, and I learned how to retrieve objects and willingly let them go. Paret meant perch on the tip of a pole, although why I needed to learn this escapes me to this day. I learned kevet \u2013 to flex my growing spines in preparation for filing; koht \u2013 to remain still for the kohl that daily lined my eyes; psat \u2013 to balance on Shesset's shoulders behind her head, arching my neck and holding my wings wide for hours at a time to maximize their regal effect. I was also taught teer, the command to fly, but truth be told, I never flew. My wings were only for show, painted every morning with stories of Rath'nahr, Selis Anekh, and the gods of Gifah. In fact, my wings were so heavy with paint, that the psat required all of my energy to keep them extended and still.\n\nThe afternoons, however, were spent with Josiat. The princess was clever with numbers and maps, strategies and histories, and she was eager to learn his many lessons. She also learned philosophy, religion, engineering and measures. She debated with Josiat in governance and spent hours learning how to use her voice to bend others to her will. Shesset was skilled in music and dance, in combat and with weapons. In fact, she kept a bow and set of golden arrows above her bed and would sometimes shoot at pots, urns and palms in her room. Her ladies-in-waiting didn't like this, and neither did the servants. She would laugh and pretend it was her brother and riddle the makeshift targets with arrows. I often wondered if she would slay him one day. Blood, it seemed, was both priceless and plentiful in Gifah.\n\nFor the most part, however, the lessons were tedious so I would nap, groom my spines, or stare out the balcony for a glimpse of Netjeh, the Ophar's golden drake. He slept beneath the stones in the Court of the Great Gold.\n\nAccording to Josiat, Netjeh had been with the House of Bey for generations. He was so old that he couldn't move, and the palace builders were constructing his tomb around him. In fact, it was almost finished, and I knew that soon, they'd slide the stones to close him in. Called a per ameht, it was a massive four-sided structure that was wide at the base and narrowed to a point high above the ground. It was made of mud bricks that were larger than men, and they used ropes and pulleys, scaffolds and logs to roll the bricks and slide them in place with dozens of workers. Sometimes, I could see Netjeh's large head inside the per ameht and would study him as the princess poured over her afternoon lessons.\n\nHe never opened his eyes. He never twitched a lip. I never saw him move, and if it hadn't been for the fact that his breath was hotter than the sun, I would have thought him a statue like so many others that adorned the palace. The Ophar had been right. Netjeh was slowly, steadily, turning to stone.\n\nI wondered how long he'd been here, how long he'd been sleeping. It wasn't difficult to imagine why he slept, for it would take so much food to keep a drake his size active. Sleep was the only way for him to live, and somehow, I knew he could stay alive like this forever. At some point, his soul would sink beneath the sand and cross the UnderRiver that flowed beneath the world. From there, his spirit would be weighed by the goddess Maeth and he'd fly to the Fields of Ever Spring. According to Josiat, reeds and dragons live with the gods forever in those glorious fields.\n\nI wondered if I might live to be as large as Netjeh, and what it would feel like to sleep the days away as if they were little more than blinks. I also wondered if my mother would have reached this size one day had she not stolen flocks for us. The last memory I had of her was her downed shape and the dunes that worked to consume her. Perhaps the wind would carve a per ameht out of her bones one day. I hoped she'd find good hunting now in the Fields of Ever Spring.\n\nNetjeh was not the only dragon in the Court of the Great Gold, however. Very young dragons flew through all the palace courtyards, squawking and singing and darting through the palms on their brightly coloured wings. Called flutterbys by the ladies of the Court, they would soar above me, entreating me to join them. Part of me wanted to, but they were only flutterbys, not Great Golds. Great Golds were royal dragons and the pride of the great houses. Shesset often said how I would be worshipped one day, so I could not entertain thoughts of play. I certainly never flew. My wings were too perfect, Kida said, my scales worth a thousand dragons. I was carried all over the palace, either in Kida's arms or on Shesset's shoulder, into and out of every room without ever needing to use my wings. In fact, like my early life on the banks of the River Nahr, I would perch on the bannister, feet chained to the posts, and fan my glorious wings in the evening breeze. Down below, reeds would stop and marvel at my beauty. They would wave and call me goddess, and some would bow or toss sweet figs up for me to catch.\n\nMy new life was opulent and sweet, and the air smelled of incense, oil and the rising Nahr. But the Wheel never stops rolling, from sand pit to riverbank, drakmet to shakhet pool, so on one of those mornings of this new and wonderous life, everything changed once again, setting my wing on the path of destiny.\n\nThe princess' ladies came in, as they did every morning, with her linens and her gold. This time, the Ophar's wife, Nefheru, came with them. I was Shesset's dragon, so I had little contact with the Ophar or his painted wife. But dragons are skilled at smelling strife, and I smelled it in her. She was a quiet woman, but her eyes danced with fire, like an overfilled oil lamp close to tipping. I knew nothing of reeds and their hatchlings, but clearly, she preferred Beyat over Shesset. Despite her plea for me on that first day, I often felt that she would be happier to see my golden scales pinned to a wall alongside the trophies or sold as seket in the healing markets.\n\nSo. That morning.\n\nI was playing in the shakhet pool, paddling and diving and snapping up all the irawet petals as they filled and sank. Shesset sat on the edge of the pool while they fussed over the many intricate braids in her hair. When Nefheru entered the room, she brought a scent with her that made me stop my splashing. It was a bone of memory from long ago, so I rose to the surface of the pool and floated there a moment, head cocked, breathing it in.\n\n\"I have your dedication dress,\" said Nefheru. \"Your father has commissioned it from the House of Thenet'kan.\"\n\n\"Show me,\" said Shesset.\n\nShe rose from the bath, and her ladies rushed to her with towels of fine cotton. Kida knelt at the edge of the pool, called me over.\n\nThe scent was there, skittering around my memory, but the petals and oils were so strong.\n\n\"Anekh? Come.\"\n\nNefheru waved a hand and the women held up two bolts of fabric, one a milk-white silk shift, and the other netted sheath with gold threads.\n\n\"It has been generations since there has been a dedication like this, with dragons like these,\" said Nefheru.\n\n\"Anekh,\" Kida repeated, and she tapped her fingers on the side of the pool. \"Come here.\"\n\nI ignored her and opened my beak, tasting the air with my tongue.\n\nShesset held her arms out as a shift was slid over her head. It was the colour of irawat flowers, delicate and ethereal.\n\nAnother woman stepped forward with the netting, and golden beads sparkled in the morning light.\n\nShesset reached out to touch the beads.\n\n\"Exquisite beadwork,\" she said.\n\n\"A rare and intricate process, I'm told,\" said Nefheru.\n\nShesset frowned.\n\n\"These are not beads.\"\n\n\"Scorpioch eggs,\" said Nefheru.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"In amber,\" said Nefheru. \"Completely harmless. As I said, a rare and intricate process.\"\n\nScorpioch eggs. I remembered digging for them in the sand of the riverbank, crunching them in my fledgling teeth. I also remembered the barbs and the stinging. I hopped up onto the pool's edge and growled, low in my throat.\n\n\"Anekh,\" said Kida. \"No, come here.\"\n\nThe princess turned her head.\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\"\n\n\"That drakina is spoiled,\" said Nefheru. \"That makes her dangerous.\"\n\n\"Like me,\" said Shesset. \"Spoiled and dangerous.\"\n\n\"You should skin her and sell her scales. Seket is a sought-after cure for many ailments.\"\n\n\"She's a Great Gold of Gifah,\" said Shesset. \"Symbol of the Ruling House.\"\n\n\"A Great Gold of Gifah, swimming in a pool of milk?\" Nefheru mocked. \"She's not your pet.\"\n\n\"And you're not my mother.\"\n\n\"Anekh, come,\" said Kida.\n\nAnd they raised the netted shift over the princess' head.\n\nFor all their strengths, the reeds have many flaws. Smell is one of them. Hearing is another. Dragon hearing is impeccable, and I heard the sound I'd heard during my days digging in the sand on the banks of the Nahr.\n\nI launched from the edge of the pool, talons extended, virgin wings beating furiously towards the princess. The women shrieked and dropped the netted sheath to the floor. I landed on it, clawing the threads, and snapping at the beads. Kida lunged forward, grabbed my tail, and hauled me backwards. She gathered me tightly in her arms, but I thrashed and flailed and tried to break free.\n\n\"I told you!\" cried the painted woman. \"She's dangerous!\"\n\n\"Why did she do that?\" cried Shesset. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Kida. \"She's never done anything like that before!\"\n\nThis was bad, very bad. I had to get the netting and the scorpioch eggs woven within its threads. I struggled in Kida's grip, hissing and snapping and needing to get to it. Bad. Bad. Bad. It was all I could think.\n\n\"I'm telling your father,\" said Nefheru. \"He'll send her to the temple at once. They'll skin her for seket before the moons rise!\"\n\n\"Princess,\" said one of the women, and she pointed at the netting. It was moving.\n\nSlowly, Shesset stepped over to it. She peered down before springing away.\n\n\"Gods in the heavens,\" she snapped. \"Get it out of here. Now!\"\n\nKida moved forward, hugging me tightly, despite my squirming. I could get it if only she'd let me free.\n\n\"They're hatching,\" she said, and she released me.\n\nI sprang from her arms onto the netting, snapping at the beads woven between the golden threads. Smaller than my scales, there were tens and tens of tiny hatchlings, their clear shells rendering them almost invisible amidst the flashing of the beads. But I could see them, and I could eat them. They popped against my teeth, crunching and stinging, but I gobbled them down, nonetheless.\n\n\"Bald Scorpiochs,\" said Kida. \"One sting is fatal.\"\n\n\"I said, get it out of here,\" growled Shesset.\n\nThe ladies moved forward with towels and urns. One of the women threw a blanket across the netting, and, gingerly, she bundled it into an urn. One of the tiny scorpiochs dropped out, ticking as it scurried across the polished tile. I pounced, catching it under my talon and tossing it into the air. Proudly, I swallowed it whole.\n\nShesset narrowed her dagger eyes at the painted woman.\n\n\"You brought this to me.\"\n\n\"It was your father's request,\" Nefheru said. \"A commission from the House of Thenet'kan.\"\n\n\"A dress made of Bald Scorpioch eggs?\"\n\n\"I'm sure there was a mistake.\"\n\n\"A dress made of live Bald Scorpioch eggs is a mistake?\"\n\nNefheru lowered her eyes.\n\n\"I was told the beading process is complex,\" she said. \"The eggs are dipped in liquid amber just before hatching. Clearly there has been an issue with the setting of the glass.\"\n\n\"Clearly,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"The House of Thenet'kan will be erased from the royal warrant.\"\n\nNefheru glanced at the ladies.\n\n\"Scrub this floor and make sure there are no eggs left anywhere. Gifah will not lose her only princess due to a scorpioch sting.\"\n\nAnd she looked back at me.\n\n\"Regardless, your dragon has dealt with it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Shesset. \"She's saved my life.\"\n\n\"We will need to commission another dress,\" said Neferhu and she smiled. \"By tomorrow, before the Dedication at the Temple of Neburanna.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I will wear one of yours,\" said Shesset. \"Bring me your finest dress.\"\n\nNefheru's fire eyes flashed, but she bent at the knees.\n\n\"Of course, my princess.\"\n\nAnd she turned on her heel and left the room, taking most of the air with her.\n\n\"Anekh, come,\" called Kida, and, this time, I willingly obeyed, my claws tapping as I pranced across the floor. I sprang into her arms and the princess moved to her side.\n\nScorpioch shells were stuck to my teeth, and I snapped my beak to rid myself of them.\n\n\"She did save me,\" Shesset said, and she stroked the baby-soft spines on my head. I purred at the touch. She rarely touched me. But now, she studied me with shining eyes, and I could almost see the Wheel of Elements spinning behind them.\n\n\"And she may have just saved Gifah,\" she said quietly. \"This was no market mistake, no beading accident.\"\n\n\"The Goddess has protected you,\" said Kida. \"It's an omen.\"\n\n\"She's the omen,\" said Shesset.\n\nShesset stopped stroking so I nipped her, catching her thumb in my tiny teeth. She gasped.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Kida, \"She does that. She's not biting, just holding.\"\n\n\"Daughter of Selis Anekh,\" said Shesset. \"She will light the path to my destiny.\"\n\nThe ladies in waiting returned to the room. One held up a brush, dripping with blue and red and gold.\n\n\"It is time for her wings, princess,\" she said.\n\n\"Her wings can wait.\"\n\nAnd I closed my eyes, content to let them pet me a while longer before the paint. I'm grateful I didn't know that it would be the last time for tens and tens and tens of days, that I would be content."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE TEMPLE OF NEBURANNA",
                "text": "The next morning, we joined the Ophar, Nefheru, Josiat, and a large entourage in the Court of the Painted Palm. The prince and his tutor were there too, with my brothers, Amok and Khamet, one perched on each royal shoulder. I trilled at them, eagerly flapped my wings. Their heads snapped in my direction, but they did not trill. They did not flap. Instead, they watched me with unwavering stares. Their beaks were bound so they could not open, and their feet were chained together with silver rings.\n\nKida reached up to comfort me, but the sight of them in that moment haunts me even to this day.\n\nWe were led in procession through many courtyards to the royal embankment on the river. There, a huge nest-boat made of wood, ebony and gold awaited us. It was only my second time on a nest-boat, and I learned that it was called a barge. It had two linen wings that caught the wind and a striped canopy that provided shade. Twenty reeds rowed against the currents, their long oars splashing into and out of the river like the beating of a dragon's heart. We moved through the waters like Sobeth himself and I saw many of his sons hiding along the Nahr's high banks. They watched us with hungry eyes.\n\nStill, I had to admit that I was happy to be back on the river.\n\nWithin hours, we pulled up to a stone embankment, where we were met by dozens of reeds. I took my place on the shoulder of the princess, and as a group, we were ushered beneath the lintel and into a vast inner court. My heart leapt to see flutterbys swooping between the pillars. A little blue with gold stripes swept down to me, twittering as he streaked past. I sang to him, and he returned, circling and singing until Kida chased him off. I did steal another glance at my brothers, perched like epaulets on the shoulders of the young prince. He walked at a respectful distance behind his parents, but his eyes were daggers. I suspected Shesset looked much the same, but, from my vantage point, I couldn't see.\n\nWhile the Wheel turned dragons to stone, it seemed to turn reeds into knives.\n\nSoon, the procession ground to a halt and a priest met us, arms wide.\n\n\"Welcome, oh esteemed Thutmen'nahr II, son of the gods Rath'nahr and Thutmen'nahr I. You are the Heavenly King, Ophar of the House of Bey, and Glory of the God's Land of Gifah. Welcome to the Temple of Neburanna, Sister-wife of Rath'nahr and Goddess of Life and Dragons.\"\n\nHe turned.\n\n\"Welcome, Nefheru, Beloved wife of the Ophar and ideal of all women. Welcome, Shesset-Isset of House Bey, Light of the Heavens and Daughter of Neburanna, sister-wife of Rath'nahr and lover of the Most High God. Welcome, Beyat-Rath of House Bey, Son of Othorys and Spear of the World. Your presence honours us all.\"\n\nAnd he bowed low to the ground, but not long.\n\n\"And welcome to you too, Adriam of Bangarden, emissary of Remus and trusted advisor to the House of Bey.\"\n\nAdriam smiled like a sobethi. Many teeth flashing in the sun.\n\n\"I am Tetterhu Toht, High Priest of the Temple of the Veterneht. I welcome you in the name of Neburanna, Goddess of all Dragons.\"\n\nThe priest bowed again.\n\n\"Today, on this Day of Dedication, we join with you to celebrate the goddess, Neburanna, in the ways of the gods, with games, food, and sacrifice. Our dragons will delight the Royal Family, even as they honour Neburanna in spirit, in flesh and in blood. But first, permit me to indulge you in a tour of the Divine Drakmet.\"\n\nA Divine Drakmet! Back at the palace, I delighted to watch the flutterbys from Shesset's terrace \u2013 they would dance before me, sweeping and soaring over the Ophar's courts, but I'd never set claw in the Royal Drakmet, so I was unfamiliar with how the little ones were kept. I'd often wondered if it was like Seb's, with low roofs and much straw. Surely, a Divine Drakmet would be more wonderous still.\n\nIt was the first of many disappointments. The buildings were very much like Seb's, long and low, with walls of clay and roofs of red tile, small windows, and straw floors. But, unlike Seb's drakmet, there were no common rooms for the young. Instead, they were walled off into tiny pockets, each containing its own dragon. The first building housed dragons as young or younger than I, and the windows were open so they could come and go as they pleased. Through the mesh screens, we could see them sleeping, playing, nibbling on bones from other, larger animals. My little blue and gold friend was there, and he leapt to the screen, running his small beak up and down the mesh. I leaned to greet him, but Shesset flicked my tail with her finger.\n\n\"Remember your place, Anekh,\" said the princess. \"They're beneath you.\"\n\nI resumed to my position. Still, my heart was heavy as the little blue and gold clung to the mesh, trilling as we passed.\n\nWe moved on to the second stable that housed dragons between one to two years of age. They were roughly the size of a full-grown reed, wings bound, and noses pierced with rings of hooped gold. But I sat forward when I noticed a very strange thing.\n\n\"What is that?\" asked Shesset, and she pointed to one of the stalls. \"Why are they missing their tails?\"\n\nBeyat snorted, but the priest, Tetterhu Toht, turned to address her as he walked.\n\n\"Ah, esteemed princess, clearly you are sheltered in the Ophar's Palace,\" he said. \"Chariot dragons have their tails removed for all manner of reasons.\"\n\n\"Have I not asked for the reasons?\"\n\n\"Forgive me, princess,\" he said. \"Firstly, their tails are long and strong and may become tangled in the wheels or strike the driver unless docked or wrapped. Docking is easier. It usually is done upon hatching, for then it is swift and almost bloodless.\"\n\nI shrank on her shoulders at the thought.\n\n\"Secondly, if for whatever reason, the dragon escapes, without his tail he cannot fly so it's easy to catch him. It is more responsible to avoid such a loss whenever possible.\"\n\n\"Why can't he fly without his tail?\"\n\n\"He needs it for balance, propulsion and direction. Without it, a dragon merely lumbers about on the ground, and we all know, they are not very able on the ground.\"\n\nIt was true. We are not very able on the ground. We were made for the skies, and my chest ached at the thought of losing a tail in the service of the reeds.\n\nNot all of the tailless dragons slept. A few watched us, their eyes dull and without life. I tried not to look at them as we passed.\n\n\"Don't worry, esteemed princess,\" Toht carried on. \"It's much easier to remove the tails when they're young, so healing is complete. That way, they are dependent from an early age.\"\n\n\"But you have flutterbys here,\" said Shesst. \"Why have these little ones not had tails docked upon hatching?\"\n\n\"Ah, there are many uses for young dragons, princess,\" said Toht.\n\nBeyat leaned in.\n\n\"Wait until you see what they do to the marakt dragons.\"\n\n\"Marakt?\" said Kida. \"I don't know that word.\"\n\n\"A chariot pulled by two dragons,\" said Adriam. \"Invented for the games in Remus. We call them biagars. They fairly fly across an open field.\"\n\n\"They're unbeatable in a conventional battle unless met with the four-wheeled khasets from Ikasos,\" said Shesset. \"Oh yes, I know what a marakt is. I pay attention to my studies.\"\n\nShe turned to Adriam.\n\n\"And no, they were not invented in Remus. I'm surprised you're allowed to teach my brother anything.\"\n\nAdriam laughed but Beyat growled, but no one said anything when we passed through the marakt stalls. The stench was overpowering and the dragons barely recognizable as such. Not only were they missing their tails, but a wing as well. Some left, others right, but each dragon lived with two legs, one wing, and no tail. Their backs were striped with welts both old and fresh, and without exception, they did not lift their heads as we passed by.\n\nI was grateful to leave that building and cross into the third. Here were the chariots. They were small boats made of gold, leather, and poles, resting on two great wheels of wood. They lined the walls in perfect rows, polished to gleaming in the windowlight. Chariots and harnesses, arrows and whips, armour and helmets and sandals and spears. I knew the Elements drove these dragons hard before the spokes.\n\nFinally, we left the buildings and the wide courtyard to be led outside to a large expanse of barren plain. The Ophar, his wife and children took seats beneath a canopy, and the rest of the party sat on wooden stools in the sand. Boys with shaved heads waved fans to keep the heat from sticking, and girls with shaved heads tended us with water and beer, bread and figs. For my part, I was allowed to leave Shesset's shoulder and snuggle deep into Kida's lap, wishing to forget the sight of the chariot dragons and their lifeless eyes. I wondered about my little blue and gold friend, happily flitting around with no thought of what lay in his future. Perhaps they didn't all end up in the traces. Perhaps some of them kept their wings.\n\nAmok and Khamet were also allowed to leave Beyat's shoulders, but they perched like statues beside him. There was no rest for my brothers, no arms to comfort, no gentle hand on the horns. It was not the last time I wished that they had died like the blue or the green on the banks of the Nahr.\n\nThe sun was hot and the conversation dull, and my painted lids were heavy as the afternoon wore on. I must have slept, and my dreams were filled with whips and wheels and a terrifying life without wings.\n\nAt some point, the Ophar shouted, and I lifted my head. The chariots had begun to roll and all reeds under the canopy sat forward to watch. I could see the tailless dragons bent forward in the traces, feet braced against the axle, necks strapped to twin shafts that carried along their flanks from chest to box. Wings beat just above the dry track and the wheels churned up dust in their wake. At some point, I realized it was a race, as six chariots thundered forward and fainted back. Whips snapped and wings struck wheels as the dragons flew madly onward. I don't know who won or who lost, but I knew then that these dragons had no better fate than the golden fields of Ever Spring for them when they died.\n\nAnother chariot was brought out, but this time, it was the marakt. A pair of drakes pulled the cart, and I could not look away as they swept into view. Two dragons, each less a tail and one wing, lashed together so that they moved as one. They looked like a single dragon with two heads. Up, down, up, down, their wings beat an unnatural rhythm and they surged forward pulling a single chariot with two reeds. One held the reins, the other held a bow with a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Following them, six reeds dragged a creature that thrashed against the ropes. It was large and lean, with great long horns, neck spines and a skin of brown scales.\n\n\"A Knebes Sand buck,\" said Shesset. \"They're a delicacy in my father's kitchen.\"\n\nI watched, fascinated, as it reared and tossed its magnificent head. Suddenly, the ropes fell away, and it was loosed, bolting from the chariots at breakneck speed.\n\nThe Ophar cheered as the marakt tore off in pursuit. Soon, they were little more than puffs of dust on the horizon.\n\nHe sat back.\n\n\"When I was your age,\" he said to Beyat. \"I hunted with my father. It is one of my most treasured memories of him.\"\n\n\"Too bad I have no such memory,\" said Beyat. \"Perhaps I will make them with my son when I am Ophar.\"\n\nFor my part, I hid deep into Kida's arms once again, wishing for my own bed, my pool of shahket milk, and the familiar Court of the Great Gold. At some point, I heard the cheers and knew the marakt had returned, but I didn't open my eyes. I could imagine them dragging the carcass of the sand buck, could hear them presenting its head to the Ophar as a gift. They roasted it for us that evening and we all dined well, even me. I was not hungry, but I ate the buck that had been slain for us. I knew then that I, like my brothers, had begun the ancient alchemy of turning to stone.\n\nThat evening, we attended a service in the temple proper, with worship offered to the goddess Neburanna. Cauldrons of scented oil were lit, palm branches burned, cups of wine offered, prayers sung. Neither the Ophar nor his family participated. They merely watched from golden chairs in the centre of the room. Several priests carried in a brazier of sizzling coals, set it before us with a song of thanksgiving. Toht approached with a priestess, each carrying an iron poker and a roll of paprush. They held up the scrolls to show an imprint burnt onto the page.\n\nToht turned to the prince.\n\n\"Beyat-Rath of House Bey, Son of Thutmen'nahr II, Rath'nahr and Othorys. Spear of the World.\"\n\nHe held up the poker. The end was wider, etched, and clearly the stamp that had burned this mark in the paprush.\n\n\"This is your seal,\" he said.\n\nThe painted woman gripped his arm. He said nothing, merely watched with eyes as cold as my brothers.\n\nThe priestess moved forward, turned to the princess.\n\n\"Shesset-Isset of House Bey, Light of the Heavens and Daughter of Neburanna, sister-wife of Rath'nahr and lover of the Most High God.\"\n\nShe held up the poker.\n\n\"This is your seal,\" she said.\n\nFor her part, Shesset sat back and smiled.\n\nTogether, the priests plunged the pokers into the brazier. The coals sizzled and spat.\n\nJosiat stepped between them, glanced first at Kida, then at Adriam. I chirruped as Kida gathered me in her arms once again. It was my favourite place in all the world. Nothing bad could ever happen when I was in Kida's arms.\n\n\"The God's Land is blessed with favour,\" said the vizier. \"And Neburanna was pleased to send us this most blessed feat. A gold and two silvers at one time, in one family. This has never happened before in all Gifah's history and is truly a sign of miracles to come.\"\n\nThe pokers were drawn slowly out of the brazier. The ends were glowing red.\n\n\"Anekh Sun, Amok Moon, Khamet Moon,\" said the vizier. \"We seal you to your house, forever to serve and be served as worship to the Great God Rath'nahr, by the power and will of his sister-wife, Neburanna.\"\n\nShesset sat forward.\n\n\"Keep her steady,\" she said to Kida.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Kida. \"She's a good girl.\"\n\nAs the priestess moved towards me, Kida tucked my head under her arm, squeezed my body firmly into hers. I did not even struggle. Nothing bad could ever happen. Our heartbeats were as one.\n\n\"Let it be so,\" said the Ophar.\n\nNothing bad.\n\nBut the poker.\n\nHeat, heat, heat, heat. There were no other words to describe it as the iron brand was pressed into my thigh. It was pain like none I had ever felt before. I struggled and thrashed but she held me still. The smell of scorching flesh stung my nostrils and my eyes rolled back into my skull. Acid rose from my belly, burning my tongue and scalding my throat. I wanted to die. I wanted to burn. I wanted the fire to race up my body and burst from my mouth as it should for all dragons, and it would be my power and I would be dangerous and beautiful, and no one would ever burn me again.\n\nRelief washed from skull to talons now as Kida held me up, trembling and frail, to show off the brand. The Ophar cheered but I could hear the whimpers of my brothers and the first thing I thought was that they were not yet completely stone. Perhaps there was hope for us all.\n\nOver the thunder of my blood, I came back to my senses, and I was aware of Tetterhu Toht chanting at an altar above a hammered gold basin. In one hand, he held up a narrow blade that gleamed in the oil light. In the other, a sweet, familiar blue and gold shape that trilled and twisted as he hung upside down from his feet.\n\n\"May Neburanna accept the sacrifice of her children,\" the priest droned. \"And may the gods be honoured by the lives and deaths of their servants.\"\n\nA flash of the blade and a spray of red and the trill ended like that.\n\nJust like that.\n\nWe made it back to the palace late that night and rather than sleep on the divan with Kida, I chose to sleep in my linen-filled nest by the balcony. It was strange and cold, but I was strange and cold, and the next morning, not even the waters of the pool could clean me."
            },
            {
                "title": "HAND OF THE PAINTED WOMAN",
                "text": "It was hot and there was no breeze, as Kida, Shesset, and I watched the reeds finish Netjeh's tomb. They were at the end, and it was almost impossible to see him now behind the walls of mud brick. I told myself I'd miss him, even though he did nothing. He was a reminder that some dragons could grow old and not die under a hail of arrows, be sacrificed to the gods, or maimed in the name of sport.\n\n\"Tomorrow, the last stone will be slid in place,\" said the princess. \"There will be a ceremony to honour him.\"\n\n\"That means Anekh will be the Great Gold,\" said Kida.\n\n\"The Great Gold of the House of Bey. That's important.\"\n\nKida looked down at me, ran her fingers along the ridge of my eyes. It felt good to think that maybe I would be one of those dragons that lived.\n\n\"Will she be sealed in a tomb like that?\"\n\n\"One day, yes,\" said Shesset. \"When she is too large to live in the Hall of the Ophar.\"\n\nI should have been content with our lessons and our luxury, but since the Temple of Neburanna, something had darkened within me. It was big and terrifying, but I told myself I was small and unable, so I did nothing about my privileged life. But sometimes, I would ache for those little dragons flitting about in the skies. Here in the Ophar's palace, there were more than I could count, but sometimes it seemed there were less.\n\n\"Although I can't imagine her sleepy like Netjeh,\" said the princess. \"She has a heart of fire, like her mother the sun.\"\n\nShe was right. My dreams had turned to those of fire. Heart of fire, wing of flame. There was a burning in my chest almost constantly. My throat ached, my mouth watered, and even though I could spit acid on the workmen below my terrace, I had never produced even a spark.\n\nSythstone creates fire, and fire is the spear of the gods, Kida had said. Once a dragon has tasted fire, she is dangerous and can never be trusted.\n\nWhat was sythstone and how could create it fire? But moreover, would I be dangerous and not to be trusted? After the searing brand while in Kida's arms, nothing was the same as it had been before. My dreams were dark, and so were my thoughts. I wanted to taste the fire that would make me dangerous. Maybe then, no one would sacrifice me to the service of the gods.\n\nMaybe it was good that Netjeh was being sealed. They would value me all the more once he was gone. Then, I would be worshipped.\n\nThat night, under the winking gaze of the moons, I awoke.\n\nThe palace was sleeping, and I was on the floor beside the divan in the room of the princess. I was too big to sleep in Kida's arms now and far too big for the basket on the balcony. Shesset had arranged for a special pillow that was stuffed with dried irawat flowers and I enjoyed having it all to myself. It was large and it was soft \u2013 a fitting nest for my royal dragon bones. I slept like a stone most nights, but that night, there was something. I raised my head and blinked in the darkness.\n\nThe room was dark and that was strange. Normally, an oil lamp burned in the centre, but for some reason, it had not been tended and had gone out. I listened again, turning my head to amplify sound in all directions. I would always hear things during night at the palace. The patrols of the guards. The quiet workings of the staff. The distant murmur of the city through the hours of sleep. If I listened close enough, I could even hear Netjeh's breathing, the rumble of ages as he slumbered and dreamed, almost closed up now in his per ameht of stone.\n\nTonight, nothing, not even the sigh of the moons through the balcony. I breathed in deep, catching the odor of bronze on the breeze.\n\nThere, the squeak of a foot on the floor. The creak of a string drawn overtight.\n\nThe shape of a man against the moonslight.\n\nI launched from the floor, a flurry of wing and talon and gold-painted scale. The arrow loosed as I struck the intruder, clacking wildly off the high ceiling. He dropped his bow and blindly swung a blade at my belly. Heat and pain spilled from the wound, but I tore at his chest with my talons, snapped at his face with my teeth. A second shape sprang over the balcony, and I barked for my reeds, my cry sharp as a twisted spear.\n\nKida sprang from the divan, snatching an iron lampstand and swinging it wildly as the second man rushed the royal bed. She fought like a dragon, my Kida, but she was young, and he was not, and his sword snapped like a hungry sobeth.\n\nI needed to protect her! I sprang away from the first man, but he grabbed my leg and yanked me down towards his chest. He was too big for me. He could crush me with the weight of his body. He squeezed the thin bone of my leg, and stars popped behind my eyes. Through waves of pain, I sensed his sword arm raise, and I knew one thrust of the blade would bring a swift end to my path. His hands and weapons were the advantage, but I was a Great Gold of Gifah. I plunged my beak forward, sinking my teeth onto his nose and tearing his face down to his lips. He howled and released me, as a voice cut through the dark.\n\n\"Anekh! Teer!\"\n\nFly!\n\nAn arrow whipped past my head and pinged off the stone of the balcony. I launched upwards, wrapping my tail around the man's throat to pull him taut, and he cried out as a second arrow thudded into his belly. I felt his weight increase and released him to slump to the floor. I flapped my wings madly, praying they would hold, and hovered over the dead man like a hummingbee over paprush.\n\n\"Drop your sword, wyrm of Syth,\" snarled Shesset. She was braced on the bed, golden bow drawn, arrow nocked and aimed at the second man. Kida held the lampstand like a pike, but she bled from many dark ribbons.\n\nThe man wheeled and fled, flinging himself over the balcony as a third arrow loosed from the bed. I heard the crunch as his bones hit the stone below. Kida rushed to gather me in her arms and guards poured into the room.\n\nI'm sure none of us slept that night. The thin bone of my leg was broken, and Kida took me down to the stables of the royal vaskars. They bound my leg in paper-soaked linen, and smoothed yellow salve into the slice at my belly. In turn, I tried to clean Kida's wounds, but she refused, not understanding that dragon tongues are cleaner than cloths dipped in foul-smelling tar. I wished the vaskars' hushed conversations could have lulled me to sleep but the palace was alert, the tension like a taut cord. Even my quiet Kida was strained, and I knew that something had changed tonight for all of us.\n\nI just wasn't sure what.\n\nAt some point, Kida carried me down to the Ophar's throne room. Many reeds were gathered, and she slipped quietly between the pillars, close enough to hear, but far enough to hide in the shadows. The Ophar's family, Adriam, the vizier, and a flank of golden guards were present. But, I noticed, the painted woman was not.\n\n\"The assassins are known to the general,\" said Josiat.\n\n\"They're from the Sedenes quarter,\" said the general.\n\n\"There're always assassins in the Sedenes quarter,\" said Beyat.\n\n\"But look.\" The general held up a small satchel. \"We found these in one assassin's sash.\"\n\nI peered forward from Kida's arms as he poured the contents into the Ophar's outstretched hand.\n\n\"Amber scorpioch beads,\" he said quietly.\n\nThere was footfall, and Nefheru was ushered in by four reeds with spears.\n\n\"Husband,\" she said, and she dropped to her knees. \"Glory of the Land of Gifah. This is not as it seems.\"\n\n\"Tell me how it seems,\" he said.\n\n\"We've found more beads in her bed,\" said one of the reeds.\n\n\"Scorpioch eggs,\" said another. \"In amber.\"\n\n\"How does this happen?\" asked the Ophar. \"When only weeks ago, my daughter was almost killed by scorpioch eggs not in amber?\"\n\n\"She has tried to kill me thrice,\" Shesset hissed. \"So, she can be mother to the next Ophar.\"\n\n\"How dare you?\" snapped Beyat.\n\n\"I don't know how any of this happened,\" Nefheru wailed.\n\nShe looked from Ophar to vizier and back again.\n\n\"I swear on my life, husband. I swear by the Great God Rath'nahr.\"\n\nThe Ophar said nothing, merely sat in his chair, eyes fixed on his wife. Beyat moved to take her hand, lift her to her feet. The kohl ran down her cheeks like rivers.\n\n\"I swear\u2026\"\n\n\"Father,\" said Beyat. \"Tell her you do not believe this thing.\"\n\n\"I believe this thing,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"Enough,\" said the Ophar, and they all remained silent for a long moment. My leg and belly were aching, and I wished to tuck my head into Kida's arms, but she was as taut as a strung bow. I leaned my chin on her wrist and waited. Finally, the Ophar sighed.\n\n\"Nefheru,\" he said. \"After Shesset's mother died, you lifted me from darkness. You were the petal of my heart. I delighted in raising you from concubine to wife, setting the title of prince upon the head of our son. But you have made no attempt to conceal your disdain for the Daughter of Glory.\"\n\n\"No, that's not\u2014\"\n\nThe Ophar raised his hand.\n\n\"But it is true.\" He leaned forward. \"This morning, we close the per ahmet on Netjeh, the Greatest Great Gold in Gifah's long history. When the last stone is slid to close him in to the Ever Dark, you, Petal of my Heart, will join him.\"\n\nShe collapsed once more to the floor.\n\n\"No!\" snapped Beyat. \"I refuse. I am Prince of Gifah and she's my mother. She won't be treated this way.\"\n\n\"She is a lowly concubine once more,\" said the Ophar, his voice as dull as unpolished stone. \"One who has conspired to kill the heir of Gifah. She will accompany Netjeh to the UnderRiver. If she is innocent, her spirit will be weighed, and she will continue the journey to the Fields of Ever Spring. If she is not\u2026\"\n\nNefheru moaned from the floor.\n\n\"If she is not, she will be devoured alive by Sobeth and his hungry sons.\"\n\n\"I forbid it!\" barked Beyat.\n\n\"You forbid it?\"\n\nThe Ophar pushed to his feet and even the prince stepped back.\n\n\"You forbid it?\" he seethed. \"One word from me and you will join your mother in the per ahmet of a dragon! You and your silver drakes!\"\n\n\"House of Glory,\" said Adriam. I had forgotten he was there. \"You are both Sons of the Gods and your wisdom is without equal. But your divine passions may have clouded your vision to another, more equitable path.\"\n\nThe two men glared at him. I suppose it was a breach of something, a rule or a code. I didn't know. Like numbers and laughter, the rules of reeds were a mystery.\n\n\"Exile her, oh exalted Ophar. Exile her to Remus, my land, my home. There, she will be treated justly but fairly, as befits the mother of a prince, and the wife of a king.\"\n\nHe glanced between them both. Just the men, not the woman.\n\n\"She can live out her days in solitude and penance, but she will live.\"\n\n\"You can guarantee this?\" asked the Ophar.\n\n\"I can,\" he said. \"My father is magistrate of Bangarden. I can even accompany her if it pleases you both, and I will return with his seal of acceptance.\"\n\n\"Father, no,\" Shesset growled. \"Don't do this.\"\n\nFor his part, Beyat said nothing, continued to glare with eyes like daggers. After a long moment, the Ophar returned to his seat.\n\n\"This is acceptable to me,\" he said. \"Josiat, prepare a scroll for the magistrate of Bangarden, requesting asylum for the royal wife on account of treason against the River Crowns of Gifah. I will expect detailed reports of her expenses and consent to cover her costs for as long as she lives.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"As befits the mother of a prince and the wife of a king.\"\n\nAdriam nodded, flashed his sobethi smile.\n\n\"I'll make arrangements at once.\"\n\nThe Ophar looked to Beyat.\n\n\"Remember this, my son. My compassion runs deep but the scales of justice must be balanced. Otherwise, we risk the anger of the gods.\"\n\nHe looked to the general.\n\n\"Take the Queen to her suite. Allow her to pack whatever a single chariot can carry. She shall leave before the sun rises, before Rath'nahr sees what has become of his favour.\"\n\nSilently, Kida slipped behind the pillar and returned to Shesset's room where she fed me fresh fish and sweet cakes. Despite my rewards, a veil of darkness soon fell over the palace. There was still blood on the smooth mosaic floors and splattered across pillar and wall. Shesset spent the night in the company of her father, and I'm certain the bodies of the attackers were taken apart, bone by bone. I knew then that the Wheel turned for reeds as well as dragons. It could crush as quickly as it could raise, and life changed with every turn.\n\nThat morning, they slid the last stone in place on the Tomb of the Great Gold, and I never saw Netjeh again. The painted woman, however, was already gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE NAHR",
                "text": "\"Adriam has returned,\" said Josiat.\n\nShesset paused. We were in the Court of Yellow Palms. She was holding a brush and had been painting elegant swirls around my eyes all morning. I could barely keep them open. I could barely lift my wings.\n\n\"That's soon,\" she said. \"What? Two months?\"\n\n\"Yes, princess.\"\n\n\"I hoped he'd stay in Remus.\"\n\nJosiat grinned.\n\n\"The Queen has been set up on an island off the Remoan coast.\"\n\n\"Why should I care?\"\n\nShe bent back to her work, strands from her long hair sticking to the paint. I never knew if it was real. All the other reeds shaved their heads, perhaps to look like dragons. Sometimes, they left tails and tufts. Sometimes they wore wigs of shiniest black. But I had never seen Shesset without hair. It was a mystery.\n\n\"I only say this to tell you that, with Adriam returned, I will not be needed in your brother's education. I can concentrate solely on you, my princess.\"\n\n\"Then, I want to learn about Remus,\" she said.\n\n\"Light of the Sun, you should learn about your own land. The God's Land.\"\n\n\"I know about the God's Land, Josiat. I want to know about our enemies.\"\n\n\"Remus is our ally.\"\n\nI watched the knife smile cut across her face.\n\n\"Yes, of course. That's what I meant. Penet, Nabir, Lamos, and Remus. Our allies.\" Her eyes gleamed as she turned her attention back to her painting. \"Remus is a long-time ally, isn't it?\"\n\n\"But of course, princess. Why else would they have sent Adriam as counsel? Why else would they accept a traitor queen for exile?\"\n\n\"Politicians have reasons for all things,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course, you're wise, my princess.\"\n\n\"I've heard strange things about Remus,\" said Kida. She was sitting next to me, helping me balance under the brush strokes. Her hands were soft and strong. \"Is it true they ride dragons?\"\n\n\"Apparently so,\" said Josiat. \"But I've never seen it.\"\n\nRide dragons?\n\n\"Well, I believe it,\" said Kida. \"Anekh would let me ride her.\"\n\n\"She's not big enough,\" Josiat snorted.\n\n\"She's young now, yes,\" said Kida. \"But when she's older\u2026\"\n\n\"You will never ride a Great Gold of Gifah. Know your place.\"\n\nShe lowered her eyes.\n\n\"I'll ride her,\" said Shesset. \"I'll be Ophar and I'll ride the daughter of Selis Anekh. My vaskar will train her and I'll ride her, and all the people will marvel at us both. Isn't that right, Anekh Sun?\"\n\nI cocked my head and blinked. Ride dragons? It was a wonder to consider.\n\nJosiat shook his head, but he grinned.\n\n\"I look forward to seeing that, my princess. It will be a day unlike any other.\"\n\nAnd with that, he left our company. Kida smiled and slipped me some candied wyrm. I chewed but it was without taste, for dragons are creatures of reckless imagination and the idea had captured me whole.\n\nReeds riding dragons. Netjeh was so large he'd never even have noticed a reed on his back. I tried to think of my mother. Memories of her had been fading so that she was little more than a splash of melancholic green, but yes, from what I remembered, she'd be a good size for a reed like Kida. And reeds seemed to know how to harness everything \u2013 from the wind to the river, from trees to each other. Chariot dragons were driven with whip and wheel and leather and rein. But one on one, skin to scale?\n\nI closed my eyes under the royal brush, lost in the idea of arcing through the skies with a reed on my back.\n\nWith Kida on my back.\n\nMy dreaming was interrupted by the cries of young dragons from a rooftop above. I knew their voices immediately.\n\n\"Those poor drakes,\" said Kida.\n\n\"Adriam.\" Shesset scowled. \"He's filling Beyat's head with dissatisfaction and rumor.\"\n\n\"Why did the Ophar accept him all those years ago, then?\" asked Kida. \"If he risked turning the prince against his own country?\"\n\n\"Nefheru convinced him,\" said the princess. \"She said it was important to have powerful allies.\"\n\nShe snorted.\n\n\"Nefheru wanted me dead to make way for Beyat.\"\n\n\"But your father stopped her.\"\n\n\"My father delayed her. He didn't stop her. She's still alive, isn't she?\"\n\nKida stroked my spines, scratched my growing horns.\n\n\"I wasn't idle when I spoke of Remus,\" said Shesset. \"They want our riches, our land, and our taxes.\"\n\nKida squinted up at the distant roofline, shading her eyes from the sun. The cries were plaintive, and I lashed my tail, called back to them.\n\n\"Beyat thinks my father's old and indulgent, and he is certain I will never rule.\"\n\nShesset laid the brush down and straightened, cast her eyes across the Court of Yellow Palms. She sighed.\n\n\"My father is a good man and a fine diplomat,\" she said. \"But he's a man of peace. He trusts too easily. He believed that Nefheru loved him and that Beyat loves him still and that Rath'nahr would never turn his back on his people.\"\n\n\"Don't you?\"\n\n\"I believe Rath'nahr wept for a reason when he created us.\"\n\nI flapped my painted wings at the sound of my brothers' cries. They were loud and shrill, and I could hear terror and need in equal measure. Kida also looked to the high terrace.\n\n\"What is he doing to them?\"\n\n\"Training them for war.\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"But Gifah's not at war. We haven't been to war in years.\"\n\n\"So why is Beyat preparing for one?\" Shesset's knife smile returned. \"Let's go ask him.\"\n\nAnd she bolted to her feet, leaving her paints and brushes to the cloud of women who trailed her like shadows. Kida held out her wrist. I hopped from my perch, golden chains swinging beneath me, and together, we followed the princess across the yard.\n\nInto the coolness of the palace, she led us up a series of steps and by the time we reached the top, even Kida was out of breath. A guard threw a glance but did not stop us as we passed out onto a wide rooftop terrace. From this height, I could see the entire city of Wa'ast, rippling in the morning heat, and my heart leapt at the sight of the Nahr that wound like a ribbon in the distance. In the middle of the terrace, Beyat savagely spun a silver chain over his head, and at the end of that chain, Amok.\n\nAround and around and around Amok went, his wings beating furiously, and I couldn't tell if he was flying or being spun like a toy.\n\nBeyat saw us and turned, stilling the wild arc. He raised his fist and Amok landed, wings extended, beak wide. Slowly, the prince turned towards us, wrapping Amok's silver chains around his wrist. He whistled.\n\nA silver arrow shot through the air past me. Khamet was free and he circled us again and again, bleating in a sharp, piercing voice. He had something in his talons, but it was a blur. Beyat whistled again and Khamet winged towards him. He came to rest on the prince's shoulder and dropped the blur into Beyat's hand.\n\nIt was a flutterby, one of the many young dragons that twittered through the courtyards. Its tiny head lolled, and I felt the acid rise in the back of my throat.\n\n\"Sister,\" Beyat said.\n\nHe didn't move, waited for Shesset and Kida to approach. I spread my wings and arched my neck, spines rising like a corona.\n\nBeyat tossed the dead flutterby to Adriam, who was sitting casually on the western parapet. He caught it, studied it a long moment before tossing it over the side. He rose and ambled over to the prince, the sun gleaming off his fair hair. The wind brought an unfamiliar scent with him. It set my teeth on edge and made water spring from my gums.\n\n\"Remus sends greetings,\" Adriam said. \"As does your stepmother.\"\n\n\"I'd heard you drowned in the Nameless Sea.\"\n\n\"The sea had no stomach for me.\"\n\n\"The sea and I are the same in that regard.\"\n\nShe turned to her brother.\n\n\"What are you doing to your poor dragons?\"\n\n\"My poor dragons,\" Beyat began. \"Are fit and ready, like dragons should be.\"\n\n\"You're too hard on them,\" said Shesset. \"They're young. Their bones are soft.\"\n\n\"Amok and Khamet are made of iron,\" he said. \"Unlike yours. She's a doll to be dressed up and carried.\"\n\n\"Anekh is the Great Gold. She must be protected.\"\n\nThe scent was captivating, at the same time both sharp and sweet. I breathed it in, filling my nostrils and throat with it, felt a strange stirring of acid in my belly.\n\n\"Protected?\" Beyat gestured at me in Kida's arms, and I bristled. \"Will you be carrying her when she's a yearling? Or will you have Josiat commission a little cart that your poor vaskar will pull?\"\n\n\"What I do with my dragon is my choice, brother,\" said Shesset. \"At least, she's not forced to play out war games like clay soldiers.\"\n\n\"I thought you were the strategist. That's what father says, isn't it? Tell me, does she sleep in your bed?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" growled Shesset. \"She has her own nest by the balcony.\"\n\n\"I meant your vaskar.\" And he smiled. It was the first time I'd seen it. Shesset's smile was a knife. This was a spear. \"She could sleep in my bed.\"\n\nAdriam laughed.\n\n\"And you could sleep on the floor,\" Shesset said. \"It's as hard as your skin.\"\n\nBeyat's eyes glittered as he stared at Kida. I hissed again, wishing for his finger between my teeth. I was older now. Stronger. I would snap it clean off, given the chance.\n\n\"Perhaps one day, I will sleep with two advisors,\" he said.\n\n\"Like the Crowns of Sand and Storm,\" said Adriam. \"One bronze and one gold.\"\n\nThe scent was stronger now, distracting, infuriating, and distinctly coming from Adriam.\n\n\"Look,\" said the Remoan, and he nudged the prince. \"She knows.\"\n\n\"She's a dragon, Adriam,\" said Beyat. \"Of course, she knows. All the stupid flutterbys in the courtyards know.\"\n\nAdriam's hand went to a satchel wrapped at his waist.\n\n\"They do. Truly. They follow me like shadows since I've returned. It's only because they're afraid of the twins that I find peace.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" snapped Shesset.\n\n\"Just a gift from Bangarden,\" said Adriam. \"For your brother and his drakes.\"\n\n\"I'm happy I got them,\" Beyat said. \"Gold is for old men and vain girls. Silver for daggers and spears. It's a warrior's metal.\"\n\n\"Silver is the future,\" said the Remoan. \"Remus will help you with that.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Remus will join Gifah,\" said Beyat. \"In the marriage bed.\"\n\n\"Hah,\" snapped Shesset. \"Your dreams are for fools and little boys.\"\n\n\"My father is in talks with your father,\" Adriam said. \"But I've told him I don't want you.\"\n\n\"I will never marry a Remoan,\" snapped Shesset. \"Nabir and Penet present far more attractive options.\"\n\n\"Nabir is gone,\" said Adriam. \"No one hears from them anymore.\"\n\n\"Nabir has withdrawn,\" said Shesset. \"But they were riding dragons before Remus stole its first egg.\"\n\nRiding dragons again. Sometimes I wasn't certain about this world of words. I'd never imagined a chariot before I saw one. Or scorpioch eggs in amber. But somehow, I could imagine a reed riding a dragon.\n\n\"Besides,\" Shesset went on. \"An Ophar marries for political reasons, so perhaps I won't marry at all. Gifah has no need of such alliances.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you'll marry a woman.\" Adriam turned his eyes to Kida. \"It's not forbidden in Remus. Is it in Gifah?\"\n\n\"When I'm Ophar, I will do as I please,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"That's what you say but, in the end, you won't,\" said Beyat. \"You're boring and afraid, just like Father.\"\n\nAnd he stepped back, held out a hand to his side and snapped a finger. Khamet leapt to his wrist. He reached over to unhook the silver chain at Amok's leg. My brother sprang to his shoulder, trilling and clicking with wild energy. My brothers looked magnificent and menacing and my heart broke at the sight.\n\nIt was then that I noticed their collars, slim and silver and tight at their throats.\n\n\"Remoan bands?\" asked Kida.\n\n\"Remus is generous with its resources,\" said Adriam. \"The drakina's collar looks like it would feed an army.\"\n\n\"Are you feeding an army?\" asked Shesset.\n\n\"Just training the Moons of Gifah,\" said Beyat. \"What have you taught this Great Gold, vaskar?\"\n\n\"More things than we care to tell you, brother,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"I was talking to the vaskar.\"\n\n\"It doesn't look like she's talking to you.\"\n\nHe laughed and it startled me. I've said before, I don't understand the laughter of reeds. It frightens me, just a little.\n\n\"Can she even fly?\"\n\n\"Of course, she can,\" said Shesset. \"Her wings are strong.\"\n\n\"Her wings are painted,\" he said. \"They weigh more than the statues at Thenes.\"\n\nHe stepped back, spread wide his arms. My brothers spread wide their wings. They looked like mirrors.\n\n\"I've never seen her on the wing. We are high above Wa'ast and there is a good strong breeze. Let me see her fly.\"\n\nShesset turned to look at me, but Kida shook her head, eyes pleading.\n\n\"Give me my dragon,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"My princess...\"\n\n\"She is strong and clever and knows the palace as I do. Give her to me.\"\n\n\"My princess, no\u2014\"\n\n\"No? You dare tell me no?\"\n\nKida passed me over and I fumbled on Shesset's wrist. I didn't know what to expect. My heart was racing as Shesset carried me to the edge of the roof. From there, I could see the Court of the Great Gold and the per ameht of Netjeh. I saw the palace and surrounding city gleaming in the morning sun. Rooftops were flat clay and shaded with poles. Smoke rose from kilns and bakeries and kitchens and braziers. The roads were congested. They rippled like wyrms as wagons moved through them. Lastly, like a dragon himself, I could see the glistening ribbon that was the River Nahr.\n\nNo, I echoed Kida. I was too young. The world was far too big for me, the sky even more so. I had never flown before. I was a carried dragon, a Great Gold. It was my privilege. It was my right.\n\nShesset released the links at my feet and the chains fell to the roof like bells. She looked at me, her eyes bright and dancing.\n\n\"Show him how you fly, daughter of Selis Anekh,\" she said. \"Show him why there will always be a Great Gold in the House of Bey.\"\n\nAnd before I knew it, she flung me out over the roof's edge, and I fell.\n\nI fell, tumbling, tip over talon; my stomach lurching as I plummeted like a stone towards the yard below. I fell, eyes stinging, head spinning, teeth cracking in my mouth. I flung my wings wide, reaching with every claw and scale and spine for the sky. To my utter surprise, I caught it.\n\nI caught the sky. I caught the wind. I caught the smoke of the fires and the shade of the roofs. I caught the sun as she beat down and I caught the heat as it swept up, and suddenly, I understood. As she beat down, I beat down. As the heat swept up, I swept up. Up and down, down and up. The secret to flying was to understand the Wheel of the Elements and to harness it.\n\nLike a chariot, I could harness it.\n\nI beat down once, twice, three times, spiralling off towards the per ameht's golden peak. Beat, beat, beat, but my heart beat faster and I barely noticed the shouts of the workmen as I tumbled through the air around them. Too much with the right wing, too little with the left, raise the head, tuck with the feet. My tail was a rudder and I remembered how the chariot dragons lost them for sport. Soon, I was beyond the palace walls, following the narrow streets and arcing above the heads of reeds and beasts alike. There was a rhythm. Beat beat, breathe in. Beat beat, breathe out. Soon, my world shrank to these alone.\n\nThe city rushed below me, and I surrendered all thought, allowing my dragon body to discover this new element. I barely knew it as I angled a wing over the city's harbour, altering my course to match the river. I wove between the sails of the boats, feeling a thrill when the reeds pointed as I flew by. The sun was high, and the water was clear, and my heart leapt to see my reflection in the smooth, blue surface. The sky was my birthright, my heritage, my kingdom. While on land, I belonged to the Ophar, but here in the sky, I was queen. Anekh Sun, daughter of Selis Anekh. I pulled no skyboat. I served no god. My rule was wing and beat, wind and wave and Wheel.\n\nAt some point, there was no city and there were no boats, and the sands of Gifah stretched all around, save for the ribbon of green on either side of the river. My shoulders burned with the motion of flying, but I knew it was because of my life of sloth in the palace of the king. I dropped my chin, feeling the rest of my long body follow suit, and soon, I was skimming the surface of the Nahr. I reached out my back talons, felt the spray as water cooled my belly and washed the paint from my wings. I lowered my beak, snapping up mouthful after mouthful to slake my thirst. I was wise, however, and kept a keen eye out for sobethi. I had no desire to end up splash and bubbles like my green brother. Not today, of all days. The day I learned to fly.\n\nMore boats, some big this time, and soon, another city of reeds appeared along the banks. I wove between the boats, feeling quite proud until a net slapped the water beside me. I had no desire to be caught and sold as seket in a market, so I raised my beak and rode the heat up and away from the fishers. The air was so much cooler up here, and below, the river was a narrow, winding ribbon of blue and green. Still, I followed, marveling at the vast golden land of Rath'nahr and the remarkable per amehts that rose up along the dunes.\n\nI thought of my mother once again. I knew that one day, I would go back and build a per ameht just for her.\n\nMechanical, methodical, elemental and pure, I flew low to the water when there were no boats, and high above it when there were. I didn't fear the reed people, but the princess had told me to fly, so I flew, thinking of nothing but beat and breath, wind and wing. The burn was gone now too, replaced by the cord and snap of my perfect design. I was glorious. Seb had said it. The Ophar had confirmed it. There was nothing in all the world to compare with a dragon. It was no wonder the reeds worshipped us. Neburanna, sister-wife of Rath'nahr, had chosen well.\n\nMore boats, more cities, little towns and villages. Truth be told, I believe I could have flown forever. The God's Land of Gifah stretched out as far as I could see, flat and pitted like hammered gold, but along the Nahr, she was green. Green and lush, with fields that hugged the river like a sleeve. Reeds worked in those fields, and I knew they were feeding the cities with fruit and bread, corn and meat. Beyond the sleeve, there was sand and scrub and roads and hills, more fields but less green. Wild pastures of belled flaxen bucks and slow-moving, great horned uru. I wonder if the princess Shesset had seen any of it. It would help her studies immensely, I reckoned, to see something in real life, as opposed to map and scroll.\n\nKida knew this, I told myself. Kida knew.\n\nAfter a very long time, the Nahr split in two like the spokes of a wheel. The Wheel was testing me, so I let the wind choose, followed it along the northerly branch, but it split again, and again and again. I rose on the heat to get a better view. It was then that I saw the most amazing thing.\n\nThe river was no longer a river. It had opened to become a vast, wide, endless stretch of green. From east to west, north to south, I could see no bank nor shore ahead of me, and I knew the time of flying had come to an end. Besides, my stomach was rumbling. It had been so long since my last meal, so I dipped a wing to arc down to the water. I had become very skilled at swimming with my mornings in the pool and I landed on the surface with barely a splash. I kept the shore in sight as I settled, folding my wings across my back, feet paddling expertly in the current. Waves took me up and down, much like the air, and I breathed deeply, noting the heavy smell of salt. I scooped a mouthful of water but gagged when I tried to swallow. I shook my head, clenched my eyes tight, and squeezed the salt out through my nostrils. Surprisingly, the water was sweet after that, and I was able to slake my thirst, though not the growling of my belly.\n\nI gazed down through the ripples of the water. There were shapes swimming around my feet. Fish! I had never caught a fish. But here they were, circling my talons as if tempting me, so I plunged my beak into the waters, snapped down. Slow, slow, slow, like diving through honey.\n\nI pulled my face up, snorted the water, and blinked at the pain behind my eyes. I shook my head and looked down again. The fish swam, mocking me.\n\nI studied my reflection as it rippled beneath me. The paint had streaked from my eyes down my throat to the collar of gold and jewels. A collar that could feed armies, but I couldn't even catch a fish to feed myself. I was helpless as a wild dragon. I knew nothing. Nothing at all.\n\nThe faint sound of voices echoed across the water, and I looked up. On the horizon, I saw a line of boats. The breeze carried the scent of bronze and oil, and I ducked low to the water, straining to see them better. They were bigger than fishing boats and smaller than barges, with sails that turned gold in the sunset. Large eyes were painted on the curved prows, making the ships seem as though they watched everything on the sea. They looked like ships of war, and I wondered if they were enemies or allies of Gifah? Shesset would know. Maybe Kida would too.\n\nI waited until they became little more than glimmers on the surface of the sea. When they were gone, I raised my head and glanced around.\n\nWater. Only water, and a distant shoreline that led home.\n\nIt was a very interesting moment for me, then. For the very first time, I was alone, bobbing what I would later learn was the Nameless Sea. There were no dragons. There were no reeds. I even doubted if there were sobethi. Perhaps this was the end of the world, where Rath'nahr spent his nights. Perhaps this was the realm of Aketh and Hapeth, dragon gods of water and floods, so I called out to them, my warbles echoing across the waves. Perhaps this was another spoke on the Wheel, and if I chose wrong, I would be destined to spend my life forever lost, far from the sands of Gifah and the reeds that tended her.\n\nThe princess had commanded me to fly, but she had never said return.\n\nIf I didn't, I would never see Kida again.\n\nKida. My reed. My world. She, who carried me like an infant, who fed me wyrm at risk of her life. She, whose heart drummed me to sleep at night, who served the princess yet loved me more. We were both caught in this tangled world of kingdoms, where a life could end with the flash of a blade. As I paddled and bobbed, I wondered at the strange relationship between Shesset and Beyat, Ophar's heirs both. But then again, it was the same as my brothers and I, and they were alive and thriving in the Ophar's Court.\n\nI looked up. The sky was streaked with purple, and I knew soon, the skyboat carrying Rath'nahr would be gone from the heavens, pursued by his brother and the twin moons of Gifah. Just like me, the sun was pursued by her brothers, the moons, and so I sang a lament to them all, my voice echoing across the rippling waters, returning to me empty.\n\nEmpty on the Wheel of the Sea.\n\nThe Wheel was strange and mysterious and unpredictable and cruel, but I was not. I was a good girl. I was royal. I wanted to go home, and for me, home was Kida. Home was Shesset the sharp, Josiat the wise, and the proud, proud House of Bey. I stretched out my neck and pushed with my feet, bringing my wings down until I was sky borne once more. I returned the way I had come, finding and following the branches until they became familiar and one. I didn't have to concentrate this time. It was as if I'd flown all my life. I knew the princess would be proud.\n\nI could carry her one day. I would.\n\nThe sky was black as the moons rose, chasing each other like young drakes. They were so like my brothers, so I leaned into my flight, strangely eager to see them again. I could fly with them. We could bumble and snap as we had done as hatchlings on the banks of the Nahr. While the river reflected silver in the moonslight, the lands on either side were as dark as the sky, making the horizon indistinguishable. The cities along the banks looked like dragon scales flickering with oil lamps inside the homes. The smell of fire set my teeth on edge, and I remembered the strange scent from Adriam this afternoon. He was from Remus, and Remoans rode dragons. Did their dragons have fire, and if so, why didn't we?\n\nAfter many, many hours, Selis Anekh and her skyboat of sun painted the sky pink. I had flown all night over river and dune, and soon, the great, marvelous, congested city of Wa'ast lay before me, sparkling like gems along the river. I spied the Ophar's Palace and arced a wing over Nehjet's per ameht. I spun through the Court of the Great Gold and whipped between the pillars and palm trees and urns. Finally, up to the balcony, to the railing of polished stone, where reeds would stop and admire as I fanned my wings in the daylight.\n\nHome.\n\nThe breeze wafted the sheer draperies and oil lamps flickered in the dawning light.\n\n\"Princess,\" came a voice.\n\nIt was one of the other attending girls, and I looked around the room. Swiftly, the princess rose from her bed.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" she whispered. \"You're back.\"\n\nI snapped my beak at her. I was hungry. I wanted my Kida.\n\nShesset turned to the girl.\n\n\"Quickly, fetch the vaskar.\"\n\n\"But my princess, she's\u2014\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nThe girl fled the room and the princess moved towards me on the balcony.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Anekh Sun,\" she said, her eyes shining like the Nahr. \"My father ordered it. I had no power to stop it.\"\n\nShe reached out a hand and I pushed into it, welcoming the warmth as she smoothed the spines along my head and neck. I cooed as she scratched the prongs of my young horns. She wouldn't hold me. She never did, so we stood for a long time, she content to smooth and scratch, I content to let her, until the slap of feet echoed on the mosaic floor.\n\nI could smell her from so far away, my reed, my Kida, but this time, her scent was mixed with blood. I rose up on hind legs, spread wide my wings, as she entered the room. Her shift was tattered, her eyes fixed on the floor, hands clasped tightly against her thighs. I trilled with joy, for I knew Kida meant food, and I was a hungry, tired dragon.\n\n\"Leave,\" the princess said to the serving girls. \"Leave us and don't return until noon. Tell Josiat I'll have no lessons today.\"\n\nThey obeyed, and there was silence for a long moment. I snapped my beak once, twice, three times. The smell of blood was very strong.\n\n\"Look. My dragon is restored,\" said the princess. Her voice was not its customary sharpness. \"And so is my vaskar.\"\n\n\"Yes, princess,\" said Kida, but still, she did not look up.\n\nI sprang from the railing and flew to them, proud to show off my new, strong, purposeful wings. But when I took my home on Kida's shoulder, she hissed with pain.\n\n\"Come closer,\" said Shesset. \"Let me see.\"\n\nKida said nothing but obeyed as Shesset leaned around to pluck at the linen shift. It sucked away from the skin, and I smelled fresh blood once again.\n\n\"I told them,\" said the princess. \"I told them it was me.\"\n\nKida clenched her teeth, gaze fixed on the floor, but she could not stop the Nahr from overflowing its banks. Twin rivers gleamed down her cheeks. Still, she said nothing.\n\n\"How many?\"\n\n\"Only ten,\" Kida said.\n\n\"Ten too many,\" said the princess. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"You did nothing,\" said my reed. \"The vizier\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly! I did nothing!\" Shesset seethed. \"Nothing! You warned me but I didn't listen, and now, you have taken the lash for my pride.\"\n\nNow, the Nahr flooded her banks as well. She took Kida's hands in her own.\n\n\"Never again,\" she said. \"I will be Ophar one day and I will be a good one. I will change the way we rule, but I start right now with how I live. Can you forgive me, oh dear Kida, royal vaskar and lover of dragons?\"\n\nFinally, Kida looked up, those great dark eyes wondrous and round. She nodded.\n\nI was happy to see Kida smile, but I was very hungry. I slipped my head in between them, snapped my beak once, twice, three times.\n\nThis summoned the Nahr all over again. Sometimes I think I will never understand reeds. Words and arrows, laughter and tears and blood.\n\nKida rested, tended by the princess with salve and more tears, and exchanged her tattered shift for one of the princess's fine dresses. She also joined Shesset in the royal bed that night. It was a good progression. From the floor to a divan to a bed in a matter of months. As for me, I was delighted to have the divan all to myself.\n\nBut I've said that dragons are not good at counting, and many things can happen in the span of one day. Things uncounted, things unseen and unknown, for during that day, there was a time, however brief, when there was no Great Gold in the Ophar's Court. The Wheel has spokes of sand and water, blood and gold, but also, I realized soon enough, it also has a spoke of silver. And that spoke was rolling across the Nameless Sea from the land of Remus, towards the great, terrible, sparkling city of Wa'ast."
            },
            {
                "title": "FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BEY",
                "text": "Once a year comes the Weeping, when the Nahr floods its banks and brings silt-rich waters from the mountains of the east. I believe the gods live, not in the heavens above or the rivers below, but in those mountains. Rath'nahr, Selis Anekh, Neburanna and the host of gods surely lived in the mountains. There must be much sadness among the gods for all the weeping water that was sent. However, I also believed that they could simply stop the Wheel at any time, freeing us all from its relentless weight had they the desire to do so.\n\nThe Palace was very heavy now.\n\nKida said that, with this Weeping, I was now a yearling, but that meant nothing to me. A year was ten and two of months, and a month was ten and ten and ten of days. As I've said before, counting things is not the strength of dragons. I only know that it was difficult for Kida to carry me, and even perching on Shesset's shoulders was a game of balance. I was young and proud and glorious as the sun in the sky. Every day, I would sit on the balcony, waving my painted wings at the reeds below me. They would stop and marvel. Some would fall on their knees with praise, others would raise their hands and sing of my fame. Sometimes, they held up wyrm or fish or sweet cakes, and since I now wore no chains at my feet, I'd sweep down above them and snatch the treats with my talons. Soon, I only accepted cakes. The reeds would squeal with fear as I soared down, laugh with joy as I spun in the air above them before returning to the balcony and my feast. My teeth were often sticky and sweet, my belly most often full.\n\nBut now, all this was changing. With this new season of Weeping, the reeds rarely stopped and marveled or offered me cakes. No, they rushed about in groups, preoccupied and whispering, and I tasted bronze on the wind. From my balcony, I watched encampments setting up all along the northern and western flanks of the city, with marakt chariots and soldiers with smoke and swords. I heard the word 'armies' and 'battle,' 'Remus' and 'war' far more than ever before.\n\nI knew there was change on the wind but still, the defiant sun of Gifah rose and set over them all.\n\nDuring that time, I also watched Khamet and Amok, as they often swept through the skies of the palace. The flutterbys disappeared at the first flash of silver, but my brothers were fast, and they killed many each day. Once, they knocked a green out of the sky just above my balcony and I watched it plummet to the ground below. The silvers were on it in a heartbeat, Khamet pinning the green tail with one talon while Amok danced around, biting the youngling trapped under their claws. Amok snapped and Khamet pecked, but they did not kill. It was a game, I knew, like the flaxen shakhets and the bells in the sand. The green hatchling flapped and peeped, and its blood speckled the stone with a Weeping of its own. As I peered over the railing, I was horrified at the sight, but more so at the waters springing up in my mouth.\n\n\"Net,\" cried Shesset, and she leaned past me, flung a clay cup at them from above. It shattered and my brothers launched in a flurry of silver, taking the flutterby with them.\n\n\"I hate those drakes,\" she said under her breath.\n\n\"The royal vaskars hate them too,\" said Kida. She too moved over to me and smoothed my hackled spines. \"They've had to increase the number of eggs and hatchlings they buy from the traders because the Moons kill so many.\"\n\nI watched them arc over the courtyard to disappear at the Prince's Terrace, and I envied them a little. I had never killed a fish, let alone a flutterby, but my teeth were strong, and I was certain I could. I remembered my mother and the dead things that she brought.\n\nShesset ran her fingers along my neck, stopping to spin my collar around my neck. It was loose and thick and heavy with jewels.\n\n\"Remus is everywhere,\" said Shesset. \"Even the Moons wear silver.\"\n\n\"Seb said Remoan collars prevent the calling of fire,\" said Kida.\n\n\"I knew it,\" said the princess. \"Adriam's brought sythstone from Remus.\"\n\nKida ran her hand along my forehead, twisted her fingers around my back-swept, yearling horns.\n\n\"He did admit it,\" said Kida. \"He was preparing his dragons for war.\"\n\n\"War is here,\" said Shesset and she leaned out over the balcony, looked out over Wa'ast to the dunes beyond.\n\n\"Nefheru's exile was convenient,\" she said after a long moment. \"There are rumors that she is the one leading the army across the Salt Dunes.\"\n\n\"Joined by Remus?\"\n\n\"Encouraged and supported by Remus, yes. Why try to conquer a rich land when you can invest in its instability and profit when it falls?\"\n\nKida's hand slowed. I nudged her, irritated at its stopping.\n\n\"Beyat will take the throne,\" said Kida.\n\n\"He will try.\"\n\n\"And he'll kill you,\" said Kida.\n\n\"He'll try that, as well. He'll also need to replace Anekh with the Moons as symbol of the House of Bey.\"\n\n\"That's impossible.\"\n\n\"Not if he kills her. Erases our history in gold and rewrites a future of silver. He said it himself. Gold is for old men and vain girls.\"\n\n\"Is that why the army is on the Wa'asti Plain?\"\n\n\"My father is preparing, but half-heartedly. He doesn't want to believe it. I'm only privy to some of it.\"\n\n\"You should be privy to all of it,\" said Kida. \"You have a good mind.\"\n\n\"I also have Josiat and Anekh and you,\" she said, and she turned, took Kida's hand. \"Between us, we may yet save the kingdom. But it won't be easy, or swift.\"\n\n\"The Wheel turns on its own,\" said Kida. \"We can't push or pull it either way.\"\n\nShesset smiled and together, they left the balcony. I remained, my eyes straining the skies for a sight of my brothers. The Wheel was rolling again, crushing all in its path, but this time, the Wheel was silver."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "I will never forget the night that the House of Bey fell.\n\nThe Remoan army made the Wa'asti Plain and the Ophar led the stand against them. For two days, they did not fight, for neither side wanted to be the aggressor. I wondered if the painted woman was indeed in their company, and if the Ophar had spoken with her. It was a moot thought, for after two days of inaction, posturing and impasse, the real war turned on the wings of dragons.\n\nIt was evening and the skies were Gifahn gold when I caught the scent on the river breeze. Not flutterbys, not chariot dragons. More like the heavy musk of Netjeh but many Netjehs thick in the clouds. Soon, the drone of wings shook both floor and pillar like a massive chariot. The golden skies grew dark then, and I pushed my dread deep, deep inside. Suddenly, Josiat burst into the room.\n\n\"Is the princess safe?\" he cried. He was accompanied by two reeds with arms filled of tattered cloth. \"Princess?\"\n\n\"Safe,\" said Shesset, rising from her settee. \"Josiat, where is my father?\"\n\n\"With the army, princess. He has ordered your removal.\"\n\n\"I'll not leave him.\"\n\n\"The Dragon Flights are coming, princess,\" he said. \"And our army will be turned to ash. We leave now.\"\n\n\"I won't leave my father,\" she hissed. \"This wasn't the plan!\"\n\n\"A barge is readied at the dock to take us to Karadoum, on the Island of Sand and Storm.\"\n\n\"No!\" And she clapped her hands together. I knew this command. I lit from the balcony balustrade and glided over to Shesset, landing on her with one foot on each shoulder. I spread my wings wide and raised my head over hers, barked three times to the painted ceiling. The vizier and his guards shrank back.\n\n\"My princess,\" said Josiat, eyes lowered. \"I took an oath to your father, but so did you. This time, you must listen and do as I say.\"\n\nHe swung a satchel from across his shoulders, pulled a cord to reveal a flash of metal. Bronze and gold. I'd seen it before.\n\n\"The River Crowns of Sand and Storm,\" said Shesset, her voice barely a whisper. \"Those belong to the Ophar.\"\n\n\"They belong to you now.\"\n\n\"No\u2026\"\n\n\"You'll need them to restore your claim to the throne.\"\n\nShe glanced up, sharp eyes filling with the Nahr.\n\n\"The Remoan dragons have darkened the sky,\" Josiat said. \"Once they break, he will die.\"\n\n\"I won't run,\" she said. \"I'm no coward.\"\n\n\"You are the Glory of Gifah,\" he said. \"And now, you are her only hope.\"\n\nKida stepped to Shesset's side, spear and bow in her hands.\n\n\"I will protect you with my life,\" she said. \"As will Anekh Sun.\"\n\nI barked again.\n\nShesset released a long breath, set her chin like a statue.\n\n\"We are daughters of the goddess,\" she said. \"We retreat now, regroup and return to restore peace to Gifah. But I will kill my brother.\"\n\nShe hissed now.\n\n\"I will kill him and Adriam and Nefheru and the Moons Amok and Khamet. I will rule as a dragon rules, and Gifah will be feared all over the land.\"\n\nShe was almost a dragon herself. She had more fire than I.\n\n\"And you will,\" said Josiat. \"But today...\"\n\nThe vizier passed Kida a pair of tattered shifts.\n\n\"Today, you are terrified servants fleeing a falling house. As for the Great Gold\u2026\"\n\nHe held up a woven rug.\n\n\"She is a dusty, old spice carpet. Hide her well, or we all die.\"\n\nKida called me to her wrist, and I reluctantly obeyed. As she took the rug, there was a splitting screech and the skies opened up over the Wa'asti Plain. Like a volley of arrows, dragons fell from the clouds. Large dragons swept down over the army, their wings churning sand into glass and their breaths blasting reeds into ash. Smoke billowed over the dunes as the dragons soared in perfect formation, spraying fire across the Gifahn troops again and again and again.\n\nSuddenly, the balcony rattled as a massive shape swept over us. I could see the red scales and lighter underbelly, the flap of wing leather and the whip of a striped tail. I could feel the heat as it swept by, setting the Painted Palms aflame and circling around in the purple sky for another pass.\n\n\"To the barge,\" said Josiat."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Today, you are terrified servants fleeing a falling house.\n\nLight and shadow warred as we raced through the halls, and reeds ran in every direction, weeping and wailing as dragonfire rained down from the heavens. Carved pillars were splattered with blood, stone columns chipped by blades. The air was thick with smoke and oil burned in slicks across the floors. There was chaos everywhere as reed fought reed, and all fled the turning of the tide.\n\nShesset, Josiat and the guards were far ahead, with Kida and I following, so as not to arouse suspicion. I was loosely bound in the makeshift carpet, but I could see the night sky seething with wing, coil, and flame. Blazing oil vats dotted the yard, contrasting everything with flashing light and deep shadow. As we rushed through the Court of the Great Gold, a huge, blue drakina landed on the stone with a swirl of wind and a boom that echoed across the yard. Kida skidded to a halt, almost dropping me in her panic.\n\n\"Kida!\" cried Shesset from across the courtyard.\n\nThe great blue head swung towards us, and the man astride her was clad in silver and gold.\n\n\"Go!\" shouted Kida. \"I'll meet you at the river!\"\n\nThe princess whirled and disappeared with the vizier, as the drakina leaned towards us, nostrils wide, breath hot.\n\n\"Portia likes your rug,\" called the rider from his mount. I could see his teeth flash. Smiles were like laughter. I trusted neither.\n\nKida clutched me to her chest, bound as I was in tassels and thread.\n\n\"You're not afraid of her,\" he said. \"You're brave. But then again, you carry both a carpet and a spear. You must be a mighty warrior.\"\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"And I would dearly love to see what damage a girl can do with a carpet of war.\"\n\nI could feel her heart pounding through the thickness of the rug.\n\n\"We do not wish to kill you,\" he continued. \"Remus doesn't make war on Gifah's citizens.\"\n\n\"Only on Gifah's king,\" Kida snapped. \"And his loyal army.\"\n\n\"Kings come and go,\" said the man. \"So do armies.\"\n\n\"Then go,\" she said. \"Back to your land across the Nameless Sea.\"\n\n\"We should,\" he said. \"But we follow our king's orders, and so we are here.\"\n\n\"Go.\"\n\n\"Your wish is my command. But here\u2026\"\n\nHe peeled a small satchel strapped to his thigh, tossed an object into Kida's hand. His teeth flashed again.\n\n\"Now you have three weapons, dear lady. A treat for the stolen dragon in your rug.\"\n\nAnd he turned his head, tugged a rein. The drakina grumbled but unfurled her great wings and launched herself into the sky, the wind sending sand like hot stingers into our eyes.\n\nKida looked down.\n\n\"Sythstone.\"\n\nThere was a shout and she looked up. Row upon row of soldiers marched into the courtyard, carrying an unfamiliar standard on a bronze pike. The Remoan army was in the palace, and Kida moved swiftly towards the outskirts of the court, tucking the spear behind her back. Familiar silver wings flashed overhead, circling above the invaders, as a second group came out from the palace and the Terrace of the Prince.\n\n\"Remoan brothers,\" called Adriam. \"Dear friends and liberators of the Gifahn people. I thank you for your service to the River Crowns of the Empire.\"\n\n\"Tell me my father is dead,\" came a voice.\n\nBeyat, clad head to toe in silver, snapped his fingers, and the Moons lit on his shoulders like mirrors. Their beaks were open, eyes shining in the firelight.\n\n\"Burned to embers with the rest of his army,\" said the sun-headed man.\n\n\"People are stealing things, Adriam,\" Beyat growled. \"Your dragons were not supposed to touch the palace.\"\n\n\"Apologies, my prince\u2014\"\n\n\"Ophar. My father is dead. I am Ophar.\"\n\n\"Most Esteemed Ophar,\" said Adriam, and he bowed. \"In the heat of battle, armies are notorious.\"\n\n\"Where is my sister?\"\n\n\"Hiding. She is as skinny as a wyrm.\"\n\n\"Find my sister and bring her to me. Find her dragon, slit its throat, and sell the scales for seket. And where is my mother?\"\n\n\"Here, I'm certain she\u2014\"\n\nBeyat swung around, spread wide his arms.\n\n\"Nefheru-Nassat, Wife of the Traitor Thutmen'nahr II. Mother of the Most High Beyat I of House Beyat! Show yourself to your son! Now!\"\n\nBack pressed against a pillar, Kida held her breath. So did I, even as I peered out from the end of the rug.\n\n\"You are responsible for this destruction, Adriam,\" he hissed. \"I will have my staff count all that is missing, and the amount will be deducted from the tithe.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Mother! Show yourself! Mother!\"\n\n\"Silver Spear of Gifah,\" came a voice over the crowd. \"Esteemed Seed of Rath'nahr. I'm here, my son, my life.\"\n\nThe soldiers parted as a chair of silver, carried by four reeds, entered the courtyard.\n\nIt was the painted woman. The four reeds carried her through the crowds and the burning chaos to her son. They lowered the chair to the ground. She extended her hand for Beyat to take, and he helped her to her feet.\n\nFrom across the court, I saw Amok's beak open, tongue extended tasting the air. With all the dragons in the city, and with me literally wrapped in spice, it was unlikely that he could pick my scent out of them all. Still, I shrank deeper into the carpet. Kida slipped around the pillar and quietly, made her way out of the court in the dark.\n\nAll around us, those once loyal to the Ophar abandoned their positions as the Remoan army marched through the halls. Servants wailed as they ran, some with baskets, others with urns; scribes rushed in all directions with scrolls of paprush clutched in their arms. Silver-clad soldiers pushed them all to the ground and stomped on paper, clay and reed alike. It was chaos and I was grateful when we passed under the great lintel of the palace and onto the narrow streets of Wa'ast.\n\nSoldiers had reached here too, and Kida kept to the alleys to avoid them. Torches were sporadic and the moons played hide and seek through the night clouds. She walked swiftly, her feet slapping on the hard dirt of the city road, but soon, the smell of the river was stronger than that of oil or smoke. City buildings grew sparse, replaced by huts, docks and jetties. I pushed my head out of the carpet as the flashing ribbon of the Nahr opened up before us.\n\n\"Where are they?\"\n\nShe stepped up to the embankment and peered over the river's edge.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she moaned. \"We're too late.\"\n\nShe laid the carpet on the stone and kicked it with her foot. I rolled out and sat a moment, disoriented and dizzy, but I spread wide my wings and breathed in the stories of war.\n\nI launched upwards on outstretched wings. There were riverboats and skiffs staked all along the bank, some nestled among reeds, some roped to the basalt stone, and others anchored further out in the water. It was dark but I knew sobethi hunted at night. I perched on a post, folded my wings across my back to watch.\n\n\"The Sand and the Storm made the Mighty River Nahr,\" said Kida. \"And the Mighty River Nahr made me.\"\n\nShe leaned out over the river, weight on the spear she still carried.\n\n\"They're going to the Island of Sand and Storm,\" she said. \"Karadoum and the Island of Sand and Storm. And that's east.\"\n\nShe looked around at the river, the docks, the skiffs.\n\n\"I remember from Shesset's maps. Karadoum is east, where the River Sand and the River Storm meet to become the Nahr.\"\n\nShe looked up at me.\n\n\"Come, Anekh. We can catch them.\"\n\nAnd she turned and trotted down the steep stone steps of the embankment, the spear clutched in her hand.\n\nSuddenly, a flurry of silver wings dropped from the sky, knocking her off her feet and sending her tumbling down the steps. It was Amok and I launched from the post to meet him in the air, teeth bared. He dipped downward, raking my tail with his talons as he hurtled past. I tucked and spun but he was behind me again, and I was not prepared for the blast of flame that hit my flank, scorching my scales with incredible heat.\n\nMy heart thudded at the realization.\n\nMy brothers could breathe fire.\n\nI peeled away and raced towards the water, Amok in furious pursuit. It was a terrible dance, whirling and spinning and tumbling through the air, and all the while, he sprayed flames across my path.\n\n\"Anekh!\"\n\nThe dark shape of Kida called to me from the bottom of the steps. I circled back towards her, feeling his teeth snap at my tail. He was trying to kill me. My own brother, turned from a silly, wrestling chick into a weapon of war, and I could barely breathe as we soared over the embankment. Kida was there, and she thrust the spear swiftly up, its tip flashing in the moonslight. Amok squealed, his wing sliced open, and I wheeled in the air as he crashed to the stone. He rolled over and over towards the river, body flailing, tail whipping, wing flapping like a torn sail. Kida towered over him and drove the spear into his breast. He thrashed wildly as she dragged him to the river's edge at the point of the spear, leaving a gleaming slick of blood in his wake. With a cry, she plunged him into the dark waters. They bubbled and the spear shook, but she held firm, and soon, there was quiet.\n\n\"Neburanna, forgive me,\" she said quietly, and she yanked the spear out. I flew to land on her shoulder. In the moonslight, I could see blood on her forehead and cheek. She reached up, laid a trembling hand on my spines, and released a long, deep breath.\n\n\"Anekh. My Anekh. We have to go.\"\n\nI sprang into the air, and she turned to make her way along the water's edge. Tethered to an embankment post was a small boat made of bound paprush. Once again, she glanced around before slipping the rope from its mooring.\n\n\"I claim this skiff for the House of Bey.\"\n\nFirst one foot then the other, she stepped into the boat and dipped the spear's tip into the water, pushing down on the shaft. The skiff glided away from the embankment and onto the inky surface of the river.\n\nI swept down to perch on the prow, spreading my wings until the balance adjusted for my weight. Kida used the spear as a pole, moving the boat like a barge, but we were set against the current, so it was slow going once the river grew deep.\n\n\"We'll never catch them like this,\" she said. \"Anekh, luf.\"\n\nAnd she held out the spear.\n\nI cocked my head at her.\n\nShe shook the end.\n\n\"Anekh Sun. Luf.\"\n\nCatch?\n\nI sprang into the air and grasped the end of the spear with my back talons, my wing strokes carrying me up, but she held me straight. I didn't understand.\n\n\"Anekh, teer!\"\n\nFly!\n\nBut I was flying.\n\n\"No, forward. Pull the boat!\"\n\nI twisted in mid-air, gripping the spearhead and beating down my wings. She hung on to the other end, braced herself against the bindings as I pulled and flapped. The boat jerked under my efforts, then jerked again, and suddenly, I understood. I was to pull this little boat against the current of the river. Soon, we were gliding across the surface of the Nahr.\n\nFrom the river, I took one last glance at the city of Wa'ast. The night sky over the palace flickered with gold and grey - flames and smoke reaching up to the stars. A war of reeds, a storm of dragons. The death of the Ophar, and the fall of the House of Bey.\n\nIt was dawn before we caught up with the princess' barge and I was exhausted. Kida tumbled over the boat's edge and crawled to Shesset's side under the dark canopy. She called me and I wearily obeyed. I was almost as big as she, but I didn't care, grateful to be taken into her arms once again. Her heart was the drum of my life, and it wasn't long before I surrendered to sleep. As I did, I realized this newest change had occurred in the darkness. The Wheel had turned once again, this time crushing the mighty House of Bey in its path."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE RIVERS OF SAND AND STORM",
                "text": "I suppose I should have been sad for the trials that befell my reeds during their time on the barge. It had taken only one day for me to fly from Wa'ast to the Nameless Sea, but it took many, many more days to go upriver to this Island of Sand and Storm. We were still 'servants fleeing a falling house,' and, to avoid the Remoan Dragon Flights that searched for us along the river, we soon traded the barge for a smaller fishing boat. It had few luxuries, no banners or royal standards, and the striped linen canopy covered only Shesset, Kida and Josiat. We also left many of the princess' attendants and ladies-in-waiting behind in those villages. The boat was small and so, our party needed to be small as well. Still, we had six strong rowers, and they worked non-stop, for the current was against us and the river was strong. But the little sail caught the breeze like a dragon's wing, and we moved through the waters like a Son of Sobeth. The princess was sullen the entire time, saying little even to my Kida, and she stared with dull eyes across the Nahr at the villages, markets and dunes that swept past.\n\nBecause of the Dragon Flights, Kida rubbed my skin in fish oil several times a day to disguise my scent, followed by a dusting of ashes to hide my golden scales. During the nights, I fell asleep watching the moons and singing to the stars in my beauteous dragon voice. And yes, I should have been sad for the reeds; for the princess and her court and for the fallen state of the House of Bey, but I couldn't. In fact, I believe I was the happiest I'd ever been, for now I was a river dragon.\n\nThey had left in such haste that they had taken no food. They had also taken nothing to trade with the many merchant boats and river towns along the way, and I knew they were desperately missing their cakes. I can tell you how much reeds love their cakes. Flat, white cakes, sweetened with honey and dates, or round, golden cakes dusted with spices and salt. Smooth cakes wrapped around figs, and crispy cakes washed down with beer. They had none of these, and I wonder if their bellies dictated their sadness. I loved sweets as much as any reed, but now I had no desire for cakes or figs or beer. Now, I had a river brimming with fish.\n\nBecause of my experience with shakhet milk pool and my limited time on the Nameless Sea, I thought I was an accomplished swimmer, but the first time I dove for a fish, I realized that I was, in fact, deluded. Water was thick and heavy, and caused more drag than a strong wind. It took several attempts before I did little more than bob back up to the surface. Kida watched me as I floundered, but I was hungry, and therefore committed. When I set my sights on a flat, grey tarfish flashing in the waves beneath me, I dove, and everything changed.\n\nMy inner lids covered my eyes of their own accord and the world of the underwater came alive to me. Fish, rushes, vines, sticks. Bubbles and rocks and bits of weed. It was as alive as the sky, more so, and I became a sobethi coursing through the waves. I kept my wings tight against my body and realized that my tail worked far better when I waved it side to side, rather than up and down like a dragon. So, I used my powerful tail as both propulsion and rudder, and I bore down on that tarfish who darted along the bottom. Faster and faster, I went, using my long neck to follow the fish as it dashed out of reach. Instinctively, I narrowed my eyes, opening my mouth as the spiked tail flicked before me. I felt the water spin across my teeth, felt the current sting my eyes. The tarfish dashed to one side and I rolled, sucking in great amounts of water and suddenly, it was there, fat and wriggling, between my teeth.\n\nI crunched and the fish burst.\n\nI cannot tell you how it felt as I crested above the waves, my prize proudly displayed for all to see. It flapped and flailed but I had it tight, its blood flooding my tongue with taste. Gripping it hard, I forced the water between my teeth and out my nostrils, as flesh squished and bones crunched with the force. And I threw my head up, tossing the fish to the back of my throat and swallowing it all in one gulp.\n\nI floated for a minute, wings folded across my back, very proud of myself, and I heard Kida call my name. I looked towards her. She leaned over the edge of the boat, her smile as big as the sun.\n\n\"More, Anekh,\" she called to me. \"Catch more. Luf.\"\n\nCatch.\n\nCatch fish.\n\nI leapt into the air, arced my long body and dove once more, entering the water like a golden spear. This time, the hunting was easier, and I caught a second tarfish within minutes, and then a third. Each time, I crested the water and swallowed, enjoying the crunch and slip of the fish in my jaws. Soon, however, my belly was full, and the next time I crested, I bobbed, holding one in my teeth, proud to have caught but not inclined to swallow. Contentedly, I looked to Kida.\n\n\"Here, Anekh,\" she said. \"Bring it here. Tat!\"\n\nAnd she gestured with her hand.\n\nThe rowers paused as I paddled over, my powerful legs and talons churning through the water. The boat rocked as I sprang to perch on its side. She reached for the fish, and I spat it onto the floor.\n\nJosiat grunted with satisfaction. He took it and passed it to one of the princess' women. I think her name was Tamal.\n\n\"Gut it,\" he said. \"We can dry it on the canvas and eat tonight.\"\n\n\"There are thirteen of us,\" said Tamal. \"One fish won't feed us all.\"\n\n\"She will catch more,\" said Kida, and she cupped my beak in her hands. \"Anekh, luf.\"\n\nI warbled at her and sprang from the edge, flipping backwards to enter the water with a great splash.\n\nI soon learned how to swallow fish while underwater but keep them in my crop, whole and uncrunched. This allowed me to catch many fish in one dive and vomit them all back up onto the floor of the boat. It reminded me of my mother, when she would open her mouth and feed us digested skarabs and wyrm. I was tending these reeds as if they were my hatchlings and I was sad for them that they weren't dragons. Still, they gutted the fish, and hung the flesh to dry on the boat's canopy and by evening, the entire crew shared a meal because of my hunting. Morale improved considerably because of my new skills, and despite the sour mood on the boat, I was inordinately happy.\n\nSeveral times a day, the sky would darken and a Remoan dragon pair would streak along the surface of the river. I knew they were still searching for us, and Kida would grab me and tuck me under a woolen wrap. She didn't need to rub my scales in fish, for I was a fisher dragon now. I stank of their oils and entrails and blood. Each night, I slept soundly in Kida's arms. I was as big as she, but still, I felt protected and safe. I know she was warmed by me, perhaps reassured that she had not lost me like everything else. I wished I could warm the princess the same way. She seemed lost as a withered palm in the breeze.\n\nOne morning, after a splendid catch of fat stonecarp, I dozed on the warm floor of the boat. Kida sat under the canopy next to the princess, folding something over and over in her fingers. The scent caught my fished-logged nostrils, and I lifted my sleepy head.\n\nJosiat frowned.\n\n\"What is that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sythstone,\" said Kida. I sat up now. The stone crumbled in her fingers, and it set my mouth watering.\n\n\"You have sythstone?\"\n\n\"From one of the Remoan dragon riders. I don't know why but he gave it to me.\"\n\nAcid pooled between my teeth, dripped out onto the deck.\n\nJosiat frowned. \"Have you given any to the dragon?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Kida. \"I never learned much about sythstone, other than it creates fire, and that once a dragon tastes fire, she is dangerous and can never be trusted.\"\n\n\"This is why it's forbidden,\" said Josiat, and he sat back to stroke his beard. \"Ophar Nekah'nessar III outlawed the mining of sythstone after the House of Keph burned down the Royal City two hundred years ago.\"\n\nI snapped my beak. This sythstone had captivated me and the heat rose in my belly to meet it. The acid on the floor of the boat had begun to congeal, turning into wax as it cooled in the shade.\n\n\"Beyat's drakes had fire,\" said Shesset, her first words spoken in days. She hadn't moved from her position under the canopy and sat, arms wrapped around her knees. \"He had an army, too.\"\n\nThe vizier lowered his eyes.\n\n\"So, how did Beyat do this?\" snapped the princess. \"How did he summon an army, arrange a coup, and kill my father all without the vizier knowing any of it?\"\n\nThere was silence on the boat. Even the wind held her tongue.\n\n\"Adriam of Bangarden, princess,\" said Josiat.\n\n\"I told you Remus was our enemy,\" said Shesset. \"They turned my brother against us, and in doing so, usurped my father's throne. I told you.\"\n\n\"And, I did tell your father,\" said Josiat. \"But he wouldn't act on it. He believed he still had time before Remus grew so bold as to wield the prince.\"\n\n\"He was wrong,\" she spat. \"You should have counselled him better.\"\n\n\"Yes, my princess, I should have. But I loved your father as a king and a friend, and I love his children even more. I prayed to the gods that Beyat would not be so weak, and in doing so, I failed you all.\"\n\nShesset stared at him for a long time, before turning her face away to watch the riverbanks once again.\n\n\"You will not love me this way, vizier. I demand your mind, not your heart.\"\n\nFor her part, Kida quietly slipped the sythstone into the satchel at her hip and I returned to the water, disappointed and finding solace there.\n\nOn the seventh day, we came upon another river town, and we could smell the smoke from a bustling market near the water's edge. Shesset called Kida, Josiat and I to her side. I perched on her knee and pushed my head under her hand, asking in my dragon way for a scratch.\n\nShe smiled sadly and obliged.\n\n\"We need to buy food and weapons,\" she said. \"Swords and spears, at the least.\"\n\nJosiat shook his head.\n\n\"We have nothing to trade,\" he said.\n\n\"We have Anekh Sun,\" she said.\n\n\"No!\" said Kida but Josiat shrugged.\n\n\"Surely, she could spare a scale or two,\" he said. \"Seket commands high price in the markets.\"\n\n\"Sell me instead!\" begged Kida. \"Please, princess! Don't touch Anekh!\"\n\n\"Peace,\" said the princess, stroking my bony head and running her hand along the yearling spines on my neck. They were not so soft anymore and were growing into a mane of thorns. \"I will never sell any part of Anekh Sun. She is the daughter of Selis Anekh and glory of the House of Bey. But this\u2026\"\n\nDown my throat to the gold collar studded with lapis and garnet and pearl.\n\n\"This was a gift from my father. It will bring even more than a dragon.\"\n\nKida nodded swiftly and she smiled. I thought I saw the rivers brimming behind her lashes.\n\n\"Besides, I still need a Great Gold if I intend to restore the House of Bey,\" Shesset added. \"Vaskar, remove her collar.\"\n\nKida unhooked the elaborate neckpiece I'd worn since my dedication, passed into Shesset's waiting hand. With a deep breath, the princess looked up and, for the first time in days, in her eyes, there were stars.\n\n\"Josiat, bring us to shore,\" she said. \"Today, we begin my family's restoration.\"\n\nThe vizier smiled, but his smile could not compare to Kida's. Nothing ever could.\n\nUnder the power of oar and sail and royal command, the barge veered towards the north bank, and the markets."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "On the evening of the ten-and-second day, we felt the first bump.\n\nThe Nahr was wide and marshy at this point, and the sail was not catching much wind, so the rowers were pressed to exhaustion. Both Kida and the princess sat outside the canopy, counting the stars, and watching the moons dip in and out of the clouds. They were like eyes, these moons, and tonight, one was wide while the other was barely a sliver, and I thought of my brothers. Amok was dead, killed by my reed as he sought to kill me. I thought of my mother and all her efforts to keep her clutch of five alive. Now, there was only Khamet and I, the others crushed under the spokes of sand, water, war and need. If dragons could weep, I would have that night.\n\nI wasn't alert when the first bump came, gentle at first, tentative, like a thing testing. I raised my head from my wing claws, breathed in the whispers of the night. There was a second, this time a scraping along the bottom of the boat, and I heard muffled voices as Josiat rose to speak with the head rower. If we had been in the barge, I wouldn't have concerned myself with the dangers of sobethi, but this was a smaller vessel, shallow and easily tipped. So, I scanned the dark surface, watching for eyes, spines and the familiar side-to-side waves made by their powerful tails.\n\nThere, a third and the boat shook. I barked three times to alert my reeds before I leapt from the deck and plunged into the water.\n\nThe Nahr at night is a terrible thing.\n\nBubbles become nightmares. Weeds become spears. I was grateful for my inner lids that magnified the faint moonlight and illuminated a world painted in black and green, highlight and shadow. I could feel the current of the river running west, and the wake of the barge running east. Above and beneath and all around me were the tiny eyes and powerful black tails of sobethi, churning up the waters and hungry for prey.\n\nI did not hesitate, for to hesitate would be death. I shot forward, ramming one with my yearling beak. I rolled and went after another, a creature almost my own size, catching its tail between my jaws. He was heavy and his long, scaled body lagged in the current, but I burst above the surface and unfurled my wings, dragging him away from the boat and onto the bank. I released him and wheeled, diving back in and hearing shouts of the reeds echo in the night.\n\nTwo sons flashed through the dark waters towards me, and I ducked low beneath them both. One flipped and followed, his tail a lethal whip. I swam to the boat, feeling the currents favour me this time and I burst from the waves next to the boat's shallow edge. The sobethi followed, his jaws and teeth rising out of the waters to snap furiously at my tail. My Kida was ready and with a flash of moons' silver, she plunged her spear into his mouth. He fell backwards with a great splash, and I tasted blood in the water.\n\nKida wasn't the only reed ready, and the rowers were as proficient with their spears as they were with the oars. The surface churned as I dove back in, as many sobethi thrashed side-to-side, impaled, and trailing blood in their wake. Through the waters I raced, grabbing the wooden shafts and swimming around and around each creature until the spear came loose. Swim up and burst out to drop the spear onto the deck before arcing around the sail and plunging back in. I was able to retrieve five spears this way, although two were broken, and soon, the Nahr grew still once more.\n\nHowever, the boat was taking on water.\n\nShesset's few attendants scrambled to stem the leaks but there were cracks in between the deck boards. They stuffed spare linen into the seams, but they quickly became soaked, and I knew this had been the sobethi plan. Sink it, capsize it, the only thing that mattered to them was to get the reeds in the water for a soft and easy meal. Clearly, they'd had experience with boats before, but, while small skiffs and rush-bound canoes might be an easy target, a fishing boat was a different thing. Still, the water did not stop.\n\n\"Wax,\" said a woman. \"Do we have candles or swarm wax?\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Kida. \"Anekh, come here.\"\n\nI hopped down from my perch on the boat's edge and lumbered over to her.\n\n\"Dragon acid turns to wax,\" she said, and she looked at me. \"But I've never trained her to spit.\"\n\n\"You're a vaskar,\" said Josiat. \"You can teach her anything.\"\n\n\"Hurry, please,\" said one of the rowers.\n\nKida thought for a long minute, and I waited, hoping she'd run her hands along my eye ridges or rub my young horns or scratch the tender scales between my jawbones. She did neither, but then, she slipped her hand into the satchel at her waist, pulled out the small chunk of sythstone hidden there.\n\nI sat forward, saliva immediately springing up on my tongue.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" asked Shesset from under the canopy. \"Do you want her to burn the boat to cinders?\"\n\nKida smiled, held the stone in front of my face.\n\n\"Can you smell this, Anekh? Sythstone?\"\n\nI could, in fact, smell it. It was tantalizing and sickly sweet, salty and sharp and heady and intoxicating. I snapped my beak, once, twice, three times. Nudged her hand with my nose.\n\n\"No fire, vaskar,\" said Josiat.\n\n\"No fire,\" she said.\n\nShe spat on the seams.\n\nI snapped my beak, feeling the acid bubble up my throat and bite the roof of my mouth.\n\n\"She doesn't know what you're asking,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"No, but she used to spit on the workmen below the terrace,\" said Kida. \"She thought it was a game.\"\n\nIt was true and I loved it. In retrospect, I'm not sure the workmen did.\n\nShe spat again, the waters of the Nahr black as they bubbled up through the cracks. She held up the stone, waved it in front of my beak. I shook my head, drool and acid flinging in all directions. The women behind me shrieked but I was fixated on the stone dancing before me.\n\n\"Spit! Htah!\" She spat again, and this time, I understood. The acid spilled from my teeth, so I spat a great wad onto the linen over the seam. It sizzled and steamed.\n\n\"Yes! Again! Htah!\"\n\nI spat again, and again, as a spring of fiery acid flowed inside me that I knew would never dry. Soon, all the cracks were covered in sticky white resin, and they cooled quickly, forming a barrier against the river and the sobethi that hunted its waters.\n\n\"Well done, dragon,\" said Josiat. \"And well done, vaskar. I will not doubt again.\"\n\nKida smiled and looked over at Shesset. The princess nodded.\n\nI watched eagerly as my reed broke a shard off the sythstone and held it out for me. I nibbled tentatively with my tiny front teeth, savouring the sweet, sharp taste on my tongue. I snapped my jaws, blinking at the sensation. It wasn't enough, and I closed my jaws over her hand, gnawing at the shard with my great back teeth. I took it now, chomping and crunching with eager glee. It shattered into smaller and smaller pieces until it was like sand, coating my teeth and sizzling along my gums. There was a flash of light behind my eyes as the acid raced up my throat once again, threatening to split my golden head wide with the pain. Sythstone and acid at the same time, and the roof of my mouth scorched with heat.\n\nI sprang backwards to the edge of the boat.\n\n\"Anekh, kah!\"\n\nI shook my head but could contain it no more, so I spread wide my wings and I exhaled, but this time, a plume of yellow fire sprayed out instead of acid. My eyes popped and my chest burned, and I breathed it out again, lighting the darkness like a beacon. One last time, and I took my time, savouring the crackle of the sythstone along my teeth, the tide of the flames as they rolled across my tongue, and the wave of coolness that swept up in its wake.\n\nAnd then it was gone.\n\nI sat back, gagged to rid my mouth of the sharp, cinder taste. My eyes were heavy, my limbs like dead weights, but I looked back at Kida. The entire boat was staring at me.\n\nYes, as I said, this time along the river was the happiest of my life.\n\nI slept soundly in her arms that night, and in the morning, the first of the gods came into view."
            },
            {
                "title": "KARADOUM",
                "text": "There is nothing in all the world like a statue of a dragon. We are magnificent and sleek, our smooth lines are ideal to be carved in stone, then shaped by the wind. Reeds, likewise, make fine statues as they are lean and rippling, and while they don't have wings or elegant tails, their bodies do have a certain grace. There are many, many other creatures in Gifah, all of which could be subjects for statues. But I have never seen any creatures like those statues built by the reeds of Karadoum.\n\nThey called them gods but in reality, they were basalt statues with reed bodies and not-reed heads. Dragon, sobethi or rassa heads, uru, iribis birds or scorpioch heads. Some heads wore golden hoods, others wore crowns and all statues held something, whether staff, spear or paprush scroll. Gleaming in the Gifahn sun, they rose out of the waters, their massive figures dwarfing even the pillars of the Ophar's Court. I saw first one, then a pair, then four, finally columns and columns, all leading us further upriver to the fork of Nahr where he split into the sibling rivers of Sand and Storm.\n\nI'd known it was coming for days because, at some point, the waters of the Nahr had begun to change. Streams of gold threaded the currents, and I could tell from the taste that it was sand. The fish had changed too, smaller and less barbed. I knew we were nearing the place that Kida had called Karadoum, the Island of Sand and Storm. It was an important city as well as a strategic port, and it also housed the Library of A'Toth which was tended by the Scribes of Karadoum. It sounded like an ominous place and on the evening of our ten-and-seventh day, the island-city finally came into sight.\n\nTorches and oil lamps beaconed us towards them, but it was twilight before our boat made landfall. The night air was cool and smelled of incense. A legion of armed guards holding spears, khopeth swords and torches awaited us.\n\n\"Majari,\" Kida whispered at the sight of them. \"The Hand of Rath'nahr.\"\n\nJosiat hoisted his satchel, swung it over his shoulders and the princess scowled at him.\n\n\"You don't need to bring that,\" she said. \"It is safer on the boat.\"\n\n\"It is safest with you, princess,\" he said. \"And where you are, I will be.\"\n\n\"Do not let them see,\" she hissed.\n\nHe smiled and stepped past her, up and onto the dock.\n\nKida turned to me.\n\n\"Anekh, psat!\"\n\nShe clapped her hands and I lit to Shesset's shoulders, wings spread, and neck arched so that my spines rose like a crest. I was her crown, her mantle, her glory. I was also altogether too big for her, but she had trained her whole life and, while she was slim, she was strong. Still, I hissed at the guards as we stepped off the boat and was satisfied to note that more than a few of them stepped back.\n\n\"Esteemed majari,\" said Josiat. \"The House of Bey honours you with the God's Light. Bring us to the Scribes of Karadoum.\"\n\nThe first guard thudded his staff on the stone dock and the legion split, allowing us passage between them. A black-robed priest led us down a long walkway flanked by statues, but soon, we entered a squared building with a narrow door. A brazier crackled in the centre of the room, and lamps hung from chains in the ceiling. I counted nine reeds standing in a semi-circle, and the room was flanked by those Kida had called majari.\n\nOne man stepped forward. He was dressed in a loose shift of white linen, with only a woven cord around his waist as a belt. He held a golden flail and nodded somberly at us all.\n\n\"Emissary of the House of Bey,\" said the man. \"Welcome to Karadoum. I am Lo Karaket, servant of A'Toth and curator of the God's Library.\"\n\nJosiat bent at the waist.\n\n\"I present to you Princess Shesset-Isset, Daughter of Thutmen'nahr II of the House of Bey and Ophar of the land of Gifah.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken, my lord,\" said Karaket. \"Thutmen'nahr II no longer rules the House of Bey, and the House of Bey no longer rules the land of Gifah.\"\n\nI could feel Shesset tense beneath me and I tightened my tail around her ribs.\n\n\"The gods do not suffer treason lightly,\" said the vizier.\n\n\"Treason is a subjective accusation, my lord.\"\n\nI was prepared, then, when Shesset stepped forward.\n\n\"Treason is an abhorrent accusation,\" she said. \"But it pales in comparison to blasphemy, lese-majesty and regicide.\"\n\nThe scribes were silent at this. She raised her chin.\n\n\"My father, Thutmen'nahr II, was a good man and a noble king, much loved by the people of Gifah. Now that he is dead, he sits at the side of Rath'nahr as a god of the heavens, along with Netjeh, the Greatest Great Gold in the history of the God's Land.\"\n\nAt the name of Netjeh, I barked once, twice, three times. The scribes stepped back as if afraid.\n\n\"I'll speak without pretence or decorum,\" Shesset continued. \"I intend to restore the House of Bey with or without the assistance of Karadoum. How it falls for you afterwards depends on how you fall tonight.\"\n\nKaraket gripped his flail.\n\n\"Karadoum is neutral,\" he said. \"We support the current ruler, whomever the gods have chosen.\"\n\n\"So, I cannot trust in your support?\"\n\n\"Once you sit upon the throne, you will have it.\"\n\n\"Until then?\"\n\n\"To do otherwise is, well\u2026\" He smiled. \"Treason.\"\n\nI wasn't a reed. I didn't understand their politics or polemy. But I did understand tension and the room was tighter than the string on a new bow.\n\n\"Is it treason, gentle scribes,\" Shesset began, \"To allow the daughter of a god to spend time in the Library of A'Toth?\"\n\nThey exchanged glances.\n\n\"Time spent in the Library of A'Toth is a gift for all who look upon it, even more so for those who may decipher its pages.\"\n\nShe smiled thinly, like a knife. Her eyes were daggers.\n\n\"It is a good thing, then, that someone has taught the daughter of a god to read.\"\n\nI thought I saw one man smile, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come.\n\n\"The gods have given us this library, and so, we honour them by opening it to you.\" The man spread his arms. \"Allow Nephi to illuminate your path.\"\n\nAnd he gestured to a young scribe with a shaved head and long face.\n\n\"My vizier, my vaskar, and I will visit the library immediately,\" said Shesset. \"I intend to set out on the Sand for Penet in the morning.\"\n\n\"You intend to raise an army in Penet?\"\n\n\"The House of Bey's intentions are reserved for those loyal to the House of Bey.\" Her knife-smile widened. \"Unfortunately, that does not include neutral scribes serving a false king.\"\n\nKaraket also smiled once again.\n\n\"You are a credit to your House, Shesset-Isset, and I look forward to the day of your rule.\"\n\nHe turned to the young man.\n\n\"Nephi, please show the Daughter of Glory to the Library. A'Toth will be honoured by her presence and his peace will be challenged by her tongue.\"\n\nMore men smiled this time, but I knew it to be true, every word.\n\n\"I will push my luck, gentle scribes, for some chalk and sheets of paprush for my vizier. We wish to make notes from A'Toth's great wisdom.\"\n\n\"It will be done as you request.\"\n\n\"And lastly, I trust also that a few cups of beer might be spared for my attendants, both here and on our humble boat? The Nahr is strong, and we have journeyed many days.\"\n\n\"Not only beer, princess,\" said the man. \"The bakers of Karadoum make the best fig cakes in all Gifah.\"\n\n\"I look forward to them, then.\"\n\nShe turned her razor gaze on the boy with the long face.\n\n\"Nephi, now please. My dragon is heavy and my shoulders groan with her weight.\"\n\nHe ambled towards the door. I spread my wings and snapped at him, and he moved much faster after that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "It was very late when we entered the labyrinthine halls and darkly lit rooms of the Library of A'Toth. It was an impressive compound containing scrolls, parchments and records going back hundreds of years. Some were stored in tubes and slid into holes in the stone walls. Others were folded in large envelopes made of linen. Others were bound in leather and stored under small statues, protected by the gods, if not the elements. The reeds spent hours poring over these papers by the light of many scented oil lamps. The words 'Penet', 'Nabir', 'treaty' and 'restoration' became dull but soothing wordsong for me, so I dozed on the top of a high pillar.\n\n\"Do you think King Marwethad will honour the Palm Treaty?\" Shesset asked as she looked up from her scrolls. \"It doesn't specifically mention a change of ruling house.\"\n\n\"This is the issue,\" said Josiat. \"Both Palm Treaty and Sand Accord call for support in case of open warfare. This is different.\"\n\nHe sat back and sighed.\n\n\"Still,\" he said, \"It was the House of Bey that signed those accords, not the House of Beyat.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Shesset. \"There may be old loyalties that we can leverage.\"\n\n\"It's the only thing we can hope for.\"\n\nShe thought for a long moment.\n\n\"What about Nabir? There is no explicit treaty, but my father always spoke of them as allies.\"\n\n\"Not allies,\" said Josiat. \"But not enemies, either. We have had little to do with the Nabiri since the Dragon Trade ended over a hundred years ago.\"\n\nI opened one eye at the mention of dragons.\n\n\"Again, that was an exchange between the House of Bey and the Nabiri,\" said Shesset. \"They may have heard of the usurpation of Gifah and the murder of my father, but they would have received no party from Beyat. Surely not yet.\"\n\nJosiat stroked his thin beard, thinking.\n\n\"He may have sent the Remoan dragons,\" he said.\n\n\"He wouldn't,\" Shesset growled softly. \"Nabir would not welcome an invading army as emissary. It's political suicide.\"\n\n\"Beyat's a spoiled child, not a politician,\" said Josiat. \"But you're correct, my princess. I think Adriam would council against the sending of dragons.\"\n\n\"And he has no infrastructure to support him,\" she continued, \"No dragonets to send to Nabir, Penet, or even Lamos across the Nameless Sea. And we took to the river before he did. We should have the advantage of time if he goes by boat.\"\n\n\"The advantage of time only,\" said Josiat. \"He has the throne. He has the army.\"\n\n\"I have the birthright,\" she said.\n\n\"A murdered king's blessing is nothing compared to a living king's blade,\" he said.\n\nShe said nothing.\n\nAround another brazier, Kida sat with Nephi amid mounds of paprush and chalk. Kida was dragon-like in that she couldn't read, but Nephi was a helpful translator and tried to answer her questions. I gazed down at them, glowing in the warm light of the braziers.\n\n\"Dragons came from Nabir,\" she said to him. \"They live wild in the mountains and tame in the cities.\"\n\n\"That's the story,\" said Nephi. \"Although according to the Record of Amenophor, it's much more complicated than that.\"\n\nShe leaned forward, her large eyes gleaming in the lamplight.\n\n\"They ride them, just like the Remoans do. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. The stories made me want to ride a dragon.\"\n\nNephi snorted.\n\n\"Well, you won't be riding dragons in Penet,\" he said. \"They are forbidden to even enter the land.\"\n\n\"How do you stop a dragon from entering your land?\" asked Kida.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Nephi. \"But you won't be bringing her to the palace of King Marwethad, that is certain.\"\n\nHe pointed at me atop the pillar. I flattened my spines at him. I did not like this Nephi. I would bite his thumb very hard.\n\n\"But she's a symbol of the throne of Gifah,\" said Kida.\n\n\"Not anymore,\" he said. \"Best to sacrifice her now to the gods' favour and sell her for seket in the Market of Give and Take. You could buy an army with her golden scales.\"\n\n\"You're a vain boy,\" said Kida. \"Anekh will never be a sacrifice.\"\n\n\"All dragons become sacrifices sooner or later,\" said Nephi. \"As a vaskar, you know better than most.\"\n\nKida looked down, silenced.\n\nI hated this word seket, and it bothered me to hear it now. Selling of dragon scale as a cure for disease, but that was all I knew about it. I wondered if that was why the flutterbys were sacrificed in the temples? But then, I'd never heard seket mentioned other than in conversation about me. Were the reeds healed by any dragon scales, or just by golden ones? I could believe it, but that didn't make it right. The conversations lulled and the wordsong stilled, but I did not close my eyes.\n\nIt was a very long, quiet hour.\n\nNow, I have said before that dragons have excellent hearing, so it was the crunch of sandal on stone that first roused me. Most reeds go without footwear of any kind, so I was alerted and opened my eyes to see a glint of silver in the darkness. I barked and rose up, spreading my wings as five soldiers stepped into the light. They trained their arrows on me.\n\n\"Helots of my esteemed brother,\" said Shesset and she too rose to her feet. \"Am I being ordered back to face a sham trial?\"\n\nThey carried both spear and khopeth sword and their skin was painted with stripes of silver.\n\n\"Please come with us, princess,\" said a silver man. \"We have a barge waiting.\"\n\n\"On who's orders, helot?\"\n\n\"The orders of Beyat, First Ophar of the House Beyet, Son of Thutmen'nahr II, Rath'nahr and Othorys, Spear of the World.\"\n\n\"On what count?\"\n\n\"Treason.\"\n\n\"There was no treason,\" she spat. \"Ask the Ophar's vizier if you doubt.\"\n\n\"I have my orders, princess. You, the vizier and the vaskar are to come with us. If not, we are ordered to kill you all and return with your heads.\"\n\nHe raised his sword.\n\nJosiat touched her arm.\n\n\"Princess, perhaps we should go. We can state our case in the Ophar's court.\"\n\nShe scowled.\n\n\"I will not be dragged back on the whim of a murderer.\" She raised her chin. \"There are majari in every corridor. They will kill you before you can give the order.\"\n\n\"I see no majari, princess,\" said the silver man.\n\n\"What's more, the drakina breathes flame. I suggest you leave before she roasts you where you stand.\"\n\nI lowered my head and snarled, let the flames roll and lick across my tongue. He remained still for a long moment, and I watched the battle play across his face.\n\n\"Forgive me, princess, but you leave me no choice. Archers, kill the dragon.\"\n\nI sprang from my pillar as arrows sliced through the darkness to clatter against the stone where I had lain. I arced my wing and plunged, calling the acid in a burning wash up my throat. It was only my second time breathing fire, and I had little control of it, but the sythstone on my teeth sparked and I sprayed flames wildly onto the heads of two archers as I swept past. They howled as the fire melted their skin, and I swept up again, vindicated.\n\nSuddenly, my shoulder burst with unexpected heat. I had been struck by an arrow and my head spun with dizziness and waves of pain. I tumbled to the floor, striking a soldier in my clumsy descent and together, we crashed in a flurry of golden scales and silver paint.\n\nI could have stayed down forever. I could have curled upon myself in a tight ball, squeezed my eyes against the agony. But I heard Kida scream, so I struggled to free myself from the soldier beneath me. He grabbed my throat and tried to roll over to crush me under his weight. I snarled and sank my teeth into his chin. He shrieked, releasing me, and I spat him out to scramble away. Nearby, two archers writhed on the ground, their faces burnt from my fire. I swung my head \u2013 two silver soldiers remained between me and my reeds, their swords drawn. One lunged towards the princess, but Josiat threw himself in front of her and the curved blade sank home.\n\nFinally, the majari flooded in through the corridors like the Nahr during the Weeping, and they struck down the two soldiers left standing. With efficient grace, they moved between the moaning three, plunging spears through flesh and fabric to clink on the stone floor. Soon, the library was quiet. Small fires had sprung up on the library's scrolls and Nephi scrambled between them, attempting to douse them before the entire room caught the flames. Karaket strode from the shadows, but my attention was taken as the vizier sank to the floor.\n\n\"No,\" commanded Shesset. \"You're not allowed to meet the gods yet. You still have work to do. Get up.\"\n\nHe smiled, reached up to stroke her face.\n\n\"Glory of the House of Bey,\" he said. \"You are far more clever than you know. Wear the Crowns of Sand and Storm with pride, Daughter of the Gods.\"\n\nTears of the Nahr ran down her cheeks.\n\n\"And you will be with me when I take that crown. Do you understand? Josiat, I command you. Josiat\u2026\"\n\nHer voice became a whisper as his hand fell away. She caught it, clutched it tightly to her cheek.\n\nKida crossed the floor to me. I tried to move but my wing buckled beneath my weight. I arched my neck to see the shaft of the arrow sticking out of my body. I snapped at it, grabbing it with my teeth but light burst behind my eyes, and I snarled again. This was how my mother had died, pierced by the arrows of men, and the fury rose in my breast. I called the flames and sprayed the shaft. The thin wood sizzled and curled.\n\nKida grasped my beak.\n\n\"No, Anekh,\" she said. \"I have to pull it out.\"\n\nI growled at her. Truth be told, I would have bit her, had she not had my beak clasped in her hands.\n\nShe pressed one palm against my shoulder. Blood bubbled from the wound, and I hissed.\n\n\"Anekh, be still.\"\n\nShe wrapped her other hand around the shaft of the arrow, and with a deep breath, she yanked it free. Blood sprayed across the floor. Pain, pain, and more pain. I snarled and snapped at her, and it was then that I noticed the majari had surrounded me, their own khopeth swords ready to cut me to pieces.\n\n\"No,\" she gasped, and she pushed to her knees, laid her hand on my neck. \"She's good now, aren't you, Anekh? She's good.\"\n\nI growled again. My wound was stinging, and the blood flowed from my shoulder down my wingbone to my claws. I bent to clean it with tentative swipes of my tongue. The tang of blood was nothing compared to acid, ash, and flame, but it was new and sharp and a sign of how dragon blood was so easily spilled in Gifah.\n\nShesset rose to her feet.\n\n\"How did they get here?\" she growled, and she looked up at Karaket, her eyes burning like dragonfire. \"How did my brother's soldiers know we were here?\"\n\n\"Esteemed princess\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you send them?\"\n\n\"The Scribes of Karadoum are neutral\u2014\"\n\n\"Neutral unto death?\" Her hands curled into fists at her sides. \"You turn a blind eye to treason, but you cannot pretend to have no part in the murder of a king's vizier. The wisdom of A'Toth has left this place and the heavens weep at your fall from the heights.\"\n\n\"We have saved you,\" he said. \"The majari did not have to intervene, but they did. You should be grateful.\"\n\n\"The majari serve the Crowns of Sand and Storm.\" She tugged the satchel from Josiat's body, pulled at the cord to reveal the gleam of green and gold. \"They serve me.\"\n\nThere was silence in the library of A'Toth.\n\nOne majari nodded at her. He was a tall man with glyphs tattooed on his cheeks and chin.\n\n\"She speaks truth,\" he said. \"We serve the Crowns.\"\n\n\"There are more soldiers coming,\" Karaket said. \"Leave now before you lose more than a vizier.\"\n\nThe princess looked down at me.\n\n\"How's my dragon?\"\n\n\"She's injured but I think she'll be fine,\" said Kida, and she stroked the spines of my neck. I growled and continued licking. The bleeding had almost stopped.\n\n\"You can't carry her,\" said Shesset. \"Can she fly?\"\n\n\"I don't know, princess.\"\n\n\"Assault on a Great Gold,\" she snarled. \"Another in Karadoum's list of treasons. Get her up. We leave now.\"\n\n\"I will take them to their boat,\" said the tattooed majari.\n\n\"Make it swift, Abshir,\" said Karaket. \"We're all in danger now.\"\n\nWith Kida's help, I took a tentative step. My wing claws curled under the strain, and I growled again. I tried to follow Kida towards the dark doorway, lumbering and limping in an awkward, land-borne gait.\n\n\"I'll carry her,\" said Abshir, the tattooed man, and he stepped forward, bent towards me. I flattened my spines and growled again.\n\n\"Anekh,\" said Kida.\n\n\"Peace, young dragon,\" he said, and laid a hand on my spines. \"Like you, I serve the River Crowns of Gifah.\"\n\n\"Hurry,\" hissed Shesset.\n\nI turned my head away. I was big but he was strong, and my tail lashed against his legs as he gathered me into his arms.\n\nThe princess turned to survey the library. Karaket stood in the centre, surrounded by majari, while despite Nephi's efforts, the chambers were still littered with small fires and smouldering scrolls.\n\nPaper everywhere.\n\n\"What do you treasure most, oh esteemed Karaket of Karadoum?\" asked the princess.\n\n\"Clearly not politics or personalities or royal houses, princess,\" he said.\n\n\"What do you treasure?\" Each word bitten and precise.\n\n\"Knowledge, princess,\" he said. \"Knowledge and the preservation of knowledge.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Think of this as a gift from the House of Bey. Perhaps, one day, you will gain more than knowledge. Perhaps, one day, you will gain wisdom.\"\n\nAnd she looked at me.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" she said. \"Kah.\"\n\nThe fire rose up my throat, rolled off my tongue and burst between my teeth like a song. The scribes screamed but Abshir held me tight. I sprayed the walls, and the parchment roles inside them caught, flames tunnelling deep into the stone. I sprayed the floors and the scattered paprush caught, rushing like an oil spill. I sprayed the tables and both treaties and fig cakes and wood caught, leaping like hands reaching to the heavens. I sprayed tight and far, and the records in Nephi's arms burst like fireworks and all the men shrieked as flames danced all around them.\n\n\"Run,\" said Shesset.\n\nAnd they bolted down the corridor, feet slapping on the stone floors. Reeds rushed in all directions, not knowing how to meet the chaos, and shouting as they scattered. Soon, we were out into the cool air of dawn.\n\nWe raced to the docks to find a boat moored next to ours and a silver soldier stepped onto the embankment at our approach. His sword was drawn, his face furious. I didn't wait for the command and blasted the sails with my flames. He howled and fell backwards into the river. Our own crew scrambled to the oars as Shesset and Kida climbed aboard.\n\nFor his part, the majari slid to a stop at the end of the dock. I was almost as big as he was and I flailed in his grip, but he was strong and held me firm.\n\n\"Princess,\" he said. \"I am bound to Karadoum, unless you give the word.\"\n\nShe spun round, her eyes flashing like blades in the firelight.\n\n\"You serve the Crowns,\" she snapped. \"Join us and serve.\"\n\nHe stepped over the rail and onto the deck.\n\nBoth Shesset and Kida collapsed, and I sprang to the prow of the barge, wings wide, beak open. As the boat pushed out onto the River Sand, the towering statues watched us go. Karadoum glowed like an angry sun as flames from the library reached into the night sky. Soon, Selis Anekh peeked above the horizon, pulling the skyboat of Rath'nahr into the dawn. But we were away, gone, escaped down the river and it was two years before I set claw in Karadoum again."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE RIVER SAND",
                "text": "The northern fork of the Nahr took us onto the River Sand. It was called this because of the silt carried in the current, giving the water a yellow cast. I could see it. I could taste it. The fish were different, flatter and oilier and they slid down my throat like wyrm. The river itself grew wider as well, and the riverbanks were lush with trees. There were palms and cedars, acacia, gumyum and peppers. Along the banks, villages came and went, but there were no large cities, which I thought was surprising. I was also surprised to see small per ahmets dotting the shorelines. I wondered if they housed kings or dragons, and if so, whom.\n\nThere were many creatures along the riverbanks that I had never seen before, and I listened as Kida told me their names. There were huge, round serat'horns, ridge-backed river wraiths and a type of stone buck with tiny horns, iridescent scales, and a neck so long that it could reach the leaves on the highest branches. We awoke every morning with the chittering of riversnakes and the skittering of water wyrms. We went to sleep every night to the drone of salt beetles and the song of the stars.\n\nI did see sobethi so I was wary. I perched every evening on the side of the boat, watching for the familiar ripple, and listening for the dreaded splash that accompanied their hunts. We had survived one attack. I wasn't convinced our little boat would survive another.\n\nI saw no dragons, however. No Remoan Flights searching for us along the river and no wild ones like my mother nesting along the banks. There weren't even the little flutterbys that used to fill the palace skies. It broke my heart to think that they were bred for sacrifice. Happy young dragons enjoying life and adoring their reed masters until the Wheel rolled over them and crushed them for the simple act of being. And while my wing was healing, I could not forget the fact that I had taken yet another wound in the cause of the princess. I would forever wear her seal, burned into my thigh as a scar.\n\nEach night, as I watched the moons rise over the God's land, I ached for my brothers. Amok was already gone, sold down the UnderRiver for a chair of gold. I wondered if Khamet would fare better, and if I would ever see him again. I wasn't sure how I would feel if I did. My brother was my enemy, a thing that should never be.\n\nIn the days on the River Sand, I became skilled at breathing fire. The shards of sythstone seemed permanently attached to my back teeth and since I could call the fire at any time, it only took a spark to produce a mouthful of flame. I would sit on the edge of the barge and wait for debris to float by. Sticks, reeds, lilies, unsuspecting water wyrms. As we rowed one way and they floated another, I'd track them with my eyes and adjust my breath for angle and reach. Soon, I was able to hit almost anything. Fire was the sigh of the sun, the breath that burned. My right and my heritage, claimed and true. However, I do admit to some regret at the bleats of the unsuspecting wyrms as I turned them to ash.\n\nI also learned to cook the fish that I caught. While I preferred them cold and raw, the reeds didn't, and one blast of flame was faster than leaving them to dry all day on the canopy. With the loss of Josiat, I knew I needed to do more to help protect these poor, lost reeds and filling their bellies was an easy thing.\n\nThe majari had joined us. His name was Abshir. He was older than Kida but younger than Josiat, and he was nearly as quick as me when watching for sobethi. He also worked the oar like the other reeds, and I think they were all grateful for his presence. Nothing was said, true, but dragons are skilled at interpreting silence.\n\nIn that vein, I realized that Shesset was turning to stone.\n\nOne evening, as we passed the lights of a riverside village, she, Kida and the last of her attendants sat beneath the canopy, watching Selis Anekh disappear beneath the horizon and her brother moons take flight across the sky. Amok the smaller was a sliver that night while Khamet was wide. Kida stroked my growing horns and scratched my thickening spines. Half the oarsmen rested while the other half rowed, keeping the northeasterly direction strong against the current. It was a moment of sadness and calm, much like the first days on the boat.\n\nKida looked up.\n\n\"Why did you choose me?\" she asked, the first words spoken in the whole of the day.\n\nSlowly, Shesset turned, eyes blinking slowly.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"During the dedication, why did you ask for me? You had royal vaskars and other women in waiting. Why did you choose me?\"\n\n\"I want what I want.\" Shesset shrugged. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\nKida sat forward.\n\n\"You once told me that when you became Ophar, you would be a good one. That you would change the way you rule, starting with how you lived.\"\n\nAbshir glanced from vaskar to princess and back again, but the princess simply stared at her.\n\n\"You have a good memory.\"\n\n\"Did you mean any of it?\"\n\n\"Every word.\"\n\nKida thought for a moment.\n\n\"You also told Josiat that he was not to love you the way he loved your father,\" she continued. \"That he was to love you with his mind, not his heart.\"\n\nShesset narrowed her eyes.\n\n\"What of it?\"\n\n\"Do you wish the same of me?\"\n\n\"I wish both from you.\"\n\n\"Why did you burn the library?\"\n\nKida had stopped scratching my horns. I nudged her to continue. The princess shifted, looked out over the waters.\n\n\"I\u2026We needed\u2026\"\n\nKida waited. Abshir glanced between them both. The oarsmen rowed. The sail flapped. The riverbanks slipped by. I've said it before. Dragons feel tension. We feel it acutely, like a wing or a claw.\n\nFinally, the princess turned to face her vaskar.\n\n\"No. I was angry. They had mocked my father's death. They belittled my position and the legitimate call to war. And they killed Josiat! Dear, good, gentle Josiat!\"\n\nHer tears flowed now.\n\n\"I rebuked him for loving too much! I called him weak, and he died in my arms, protecting me!\"\n\nHer eyes were glistening and fierce.\n\n\"I was so angry, and I wanted them to feel the pain that I felt. The pain I still feel! I wanted them to lose what was important the same way I had lost those things. I wanted Karadoum to burn the way Wa'ast burned.\"\n\nKida nodded.\n\n\"And they did burn, princess. Only now Gifah has lost a treasure and we have lost a valuable resource.\"\n\n\"I am looking forward, dear vaskar, not back.\"\n\n\"So, you are fighting for yourself, then, not Gifah.\"\n\n\"I am Gifah,\" she snarled.\n\n\"Josiat was Gifah,\" said Kida. \"The Libray of A'Toth was Gifah. Gifah is more than you, my princess.\"\n\nThere was silence for a long moment and Kida took a deep breath.\n\n\"I'm saying that, if you want to be a good ruler, then you must think beyond yourself. People can be resources, and we are just as valuable as a library or a bag of crowns. Yet, I got the lash because you tossed Anekh over a wall to prove something to your brother. Josiat is dead because you wanted to prove something to the scribes. What other resources will you waste because you have something to prove?\"\n\nThe princess stared at her, face frozen like a river statue, but to her credit, she said nothing.\n\n\"You're the daughter of a goddess and have learned strategy your whole life,\" Kida went on. \"Please use it for Gifah, otherwise we're no better than dead. You are so clever. You've a mind like no one else I've ever met.\"\n\n\"You talk to dragons,\" muttered the princess. \"So that's not saying much.\"\n\nThere was a pause, a long bitter silence, then a sound like a snort. It was Kida's laughter, and it startled even the oarsmen. Reeds. I will never understand this part of them.\n\nShesset sighed.\n\n\"Continue to speak freely, vaskar,\" said the princess. \"I will try to listen.\"\n\n\"I think that's a good start.\"\n\nShesset sat for a moment longer, before rising to her feet. She crossed the deck to the side of one of the oarsmen. She laid a hand on his arm.\n\n\"Rest now,\" she said. \"It's time I took a turn at the oar.\"\n\nThey all stared at her, but finally, the oarsman left his position, resting in the shadows beneath the striped canopy.\n\nShesset gripped the oar, began to row and breathing returned to the royal boat.\n\nIt was in the early red hours of dawn that I realized we were being followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "I've said it before. Dragons have excellent hearing.\n\nDip, splash, swing.\n\nI raised my head.\n\nDip, splash swing; echoing above the sighing of the river.\n\nI growled, flicked my tail, and beside me, Kida stirred.\n\n\"Anekh?\"\n\nI pushed myself up and spread wide my wings, opening my beak to breathe in the sights, sounds and smells of the river. It was dark, the water darker, but the distant glint of moonslight on metal was clear, as was the flash of stars across the waves.\n\nKida turned to nudge the sleeping princess.\n\n\"No,\" Shesset moaned. \"Rowing is the hardest thing I have ever done. I would chop off my arms if I could only hold a blade\u2026\"\n\n\"Princess, we are being followed.\"\n\nImmediately, Shesset sat up and Abshir rose to his feet. Together, they peered back across the River Sand.\n\n\"Perhaps another barge heading to Penet?\" said Shesset. \"The bridge is sure to be close.\"\n\n\"Bridge?\" asked Abshir.\n\n\"A construct that spans the river. The Waterwall Bridge is the border between Gifah and Penet.\"\n\n\"There've been many boats on the river, princess,\" said Kida. \"But Anekh's never reacted like this.\"\n\nI could hear them. Splash and dip, splash splash dip.\n\nThree boats filled with soldiers. I could smell the bronze of their swords. I could hear the silver on their tongues.\n\nI growled again.\n\n\"Curse Beyat,\" the princess hissed.\n\n\"All hands to the oar!\" snapped Abshir.\n\nThe resting reeds sprang to their posts and the barge surged forward under the power of frightened men.\n\nI barked across the waters, even as my chest thudded like a summer storm.\n\n\"Tell her to burn them,\" snarled Shesset. \"They will be little more than ashes floating on the river.\"\n\n\"Anekh,\" cried Kida, and I spread wide my wings. Just then, an arrow whipped past my head, disappearing into the dark water beside the barge. Another followed suit, and then another. Kida grabbed my tail and pulled me back into the boat.\n\n\"She's already wounded, princess,\" she said. \"She can't risk taking another arrow.\"\n\n\"And we can't risk falling to Beyat,\" said Shesset. \"We'll all die then, not just my dragon.\"\n\n\"Your dragon is strong and fast,\" said Kida. \"She can pull the barge and add her strength to the oars and the wind.\"\n\n\"Do it,\" said Shesset. \"But if they come too close, I will unleash her. There will be nothing left for the sobethi.\"\n\nKida scrambled past the oarsmen to the bow of the boat.\n\n\"Anekh,\" she gasped. \"Anekh, come here and pull.\"\n\nShe held up a hemp rope.\n\n\"Luf!\"\n\nJust like we did before, the night Wa'ast burned.\n\nI sprang into the air and snatched the rope with my back talons, wheeling around the sail to the prow. I felt the boat jerk as I stretched out my neck and laid into the wind.\n\n\"Pull!\"\n\nThe river spray cooled my belly and the boat moved swiftly now, aided by oars, sail, and dragon. The River Sand was choppy, making our way difficult, but behind us, three boats edged closer with each stroke. I fought the rise of acid in my throat. I could drop this rope, sweep around, and burn them all, but the princess had said no, and we all obeyed the princess.\n\nI am convinced now that dragons know more than princesses.\n\nThe sun rose as Selis Anekh pulled the great god Rath'nahr into the sky, and the heavens painted strokes of pink, orange, and gold to welcome him. The song of the River Sand increased to a roar and ahead of us, I saw a shadow rising from the river to the skies across the land. It was a mountain range, a tall wide flat escarpment like the step of a god, and dividing it, a ribbon of gleaming white. Spray rose up where it hit, breathing clouds of white in the early morning pink.\n\nWe were nearing the foot of a waterfall, and my heart sank. Clearly, the River Sand continued his way up and over and into the land of Penet. There would be no way to carry this boat up a mountain like that, not on the strength of six reeds and a dragon.\n\n\"The Waterwall!\" cried Shesset. \"The bridge should be very soon!\"\n\nI narrowed my eyes through the waterwall mist, trying to focus despite my aching wings and racing heart. There! Just moments away, I could see a band of shadow stretching across the river, almost silhouetted in the waterfall's white spray.\n\n\"Once we pass beneath its stone, we are safe to claim asylum!\"\n\n\"Will Penet's soldiers recognize the claim?\" cried Abshir over the roar. \"Will Beyat's honour our sanctuary?\"\n\n\"They must,\" said Shesset. \"Or we're dead. They'll kill every one of us.\"\n\n\"Anekh will burn them before it comes to that,\" said Kida.\n\nAnother sound could be heard over the roar of the waterwall. The drum of wings, the heartbeat of my people. I threw a glance behind me. Three great shadows bore down on us from the west.\n\n\"Dragons!\" cried Abshir.\n\nThey were far away but gaining swiftly. An arrow splashed into the river beside me, and I dropped my head, throwing more power to my shoulders and forcing my wings to beat stronger, faster, harder. I didn't even feel the wound reopen and the blood begin to ooze.\n\nAs we closed in on this thing called a bridge, I realized that it was huge and made entirely of quarried stone. It spanned the wide River of Sand from side to side, with massive, curved archways like posts that straddled the water. I had never seen anything like it. In my memory, there were no such 'bridges' along or crossing the Nahr. This looked as if it had stood forever, and the waters flowed around its legs like morning fog. On the stone ramparts, I could see reeds silhouetted in the morning sun. They gathered along the edge as we neared, holding spears and bows of their own.\n\nA dragon bellowed, the sound echoing along the river. They were closing in, and I knew one blast from their mouths would end our race in ash. Pushing past her people, Shesset scrambled to the prow, bracing as the boat rocked and bumped across the choppy waters.\n\n\"No, princess,\" said Kida. \"The arrows\u2014\"\n\nShesset rose to stand at the very front of the boat and held Josiat's satchel high above her head. The linens fell away to reveal the marvelous bronze and gold headpiece, the River Crowns of Gifah. Slowly, dramatically, she set it on her head, and spread her arms wide.\n\nIn the mist and dawn light, she was glorious.\n\nA Peneti arrow splashed to the right of the prow, another to the left. It was clear they didn't intend to kill, simply to deter. One by one, chain mesh curtains rolled down between the arches of the bridge, intending to block passage beneath and prevent entrance to the land of Penet.\n\n\"Men of Penet,\" she cried out to the figures on the wall. \"I am Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II of the House of Bey, and Ophar of the land of Gifah!\"\n\nI flew harder. The reeds rowed faster. Only the centre arch remained open.\n\n\"I greet you in the name of Rath'nahr, father to both our peoples and wise ruler of all the gods!\"\n\nThe hull of the boat thudded now as arrows rained from above and we beat faster still. Faster as the drum of wings grew loud and close. Faster now, as the last mesh curtain roll down on the last arch. I swept beneath it, and the curtain rattled as I struck the links with my spines.\n\n\"I claim asylum under the Palm Treaty and seek an audience with King Marwethad under the Accord of the Sand!\"\n\nThat final curtain paused, and the rowers ducked as they swept beneath. Shesset did not, and the oarsmen caught the mesh curtain, sweeping it over their young monarch's head. Then, we were under the stone and darkness fell upon us even as the rowers carried us forward. My wingtips struck the waters with each stroke and I'm sure I held my breath as the metal curtain splashed into the river behind us. The silver soldiers were now barred but the dragons above were not.\n\nSilently, we swept out from under the bridge, holding our breaths in the early morning light. There was no blast of fire nor snap of teeth. There was no hail of arrows or volley of spears.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" called Shesset. \"Release. We are at the mercy of Penet.\"\n\nI released the rope and swept up to the bridge to hover over the stone parapet. It was lined with Peneti soldiers, their arrows and spears trained on the three great dragons hovering just beyond, their great wings blowing spray across the stone. I could see the Remoan riders, deep in their leather saddles, cursing as they were prevented from entering Penet by the unspoken rule of kings.\n\nA great blue drakina bellowed again, and I recognized her from the night Gifah fell. Portia. Her name was Portia. They had let us go that horrible night. They had let us live.\n\nHer rider leaned forward.\n\n\"We have no quarrel with Penet,\" he called over the drum of Portia's wings. \"We are charged with returning the rebel of Gifah, and her stolen dragon.\"\n\nOn the bridge, a reed in red held high a staff. It had a golden stalk of wheat at its tip, and I wondered if it was the symbol of Penet.\n\n\"Likewise, Penet has no quarrel with Gifah,\" he said loudly. \"Nor does it wish to make war with Remus, long an ally. However, the Waterwall Bridge has been crossed and asylum has been claimed. King Marwethad is now sovereign over the lives of these fugitives and this dragon. Depart to your lands, with a promise from our King that all pleas will be heard, and justice will be served in his good time.\"\n\n\"Not acceptable,\" cried a silver soldier from one of the boats. \"The princess has stolen the River Crowns of Gifah. She is under penalty of death from Ophar Beyat of House Beyat.\"\n\n\"That is now in the court of kings,\" said the man with the staff. \"You know a dispatch has already been sent. Leave now. This will be my last request.\"\n\nSuddenly, an arrow whipped through the air from one of the Gifahn boats. I wheeled as it whipped past me, striking a man who stood behind. He cried out and fell backwards and the line of Peneti archers released their volley, pelting the three Gifahn boats with tens and tens and tens of arrows. Reeds screamed, waters churned, but it was over in moments. The River Sand was fed. I lit back on the stone of the bridge and peered down at the three boats. They drifted away on the bloody current, taking the slain soldiers with it downstream.\n\nThe three Remoan dragons had not moved, and they hovered over the carnage, unswayed by the sudden turn of the tide. The man with the staff looked up.\n\n\"You are far beyond the borders of Remus, skyborn,\" he said. \"And I'm certain you don't want to cause yet another war for your emperor. Leave now with your honour, and that of the Remoan empire, intact.\"\n\nFor a long moment, the only sound was the beating of great wings. Portia's eye blinked slowly in the dawn light as she hovered over the waters. I marveled at her grace and strength. One blast would render this line of reeds to char. Three dragons could melt the stone beneath their feet. And yet, this was not her fight, and she waited under the saddle of her rider, a Remoan mercenary.\n\nSwiftly, the rider yanked her rein and the three dragons peeled away, splashing waters with their great wings. Then, they were gone, receding like shadows as they flew back along the river towards Karadoum. I barked before whirling in the air and dropping back to my boat, landing on the prow on the safe side of the bridge. A thin river of blood ran down the scales of my chest and belly, and I gripped the rail with my back talons. I didn't tuck my wings, however, and kept them wide as a fleet of small boats left from the southern bank. I wasn't sure if I had any fight left, but I was a Great Gold. I was noble, royal, proud, and good, so I arched my neck, causing the spines to stand up like the rays of the sun.\n\nThe first boat had rowers, archers and a reed holding a spear. We bobbed for several moments on the surface of the Sand as they closed in around us. Abshir and Kida stood behind the princess, flanking her on either side, but for her part, Shesset remained as if stone, arms crossed against her chest. Wearing the Crown of Sand and Storm, she looked as regal as any of the statues of Karadoum.\n\n\"Princess Shesset-Isset,\" said a tall reed in linen and gold, his voice loud to be heard over the roar of the waterfall. \"Welcome to the garrison of Waterwall. I am General Burhaan, commander of the Waterwall Border Patrol. Under the Accord of the Sand, I welcome you in the name of King Marwethad.\"\n\nShe nodded, ever so slightly.\n\n\"It is a four-day journey upriver to the royal palace in Moradin,\" he continued. \"And the route is rich with waterfalls and mountain crossings and marvellous cities of silver and gold. I will accompany you and your party when we depart first thing tomorrow morning. But if it pleases you, today you should rest. Tonight, I offer an evening of refreshment here at the Waterwall.\"\n\nShesset nodded again, but I could see the tension in her shoulders. I could taste it in their words.\n\n\"I thank you for your kindness,\" she said stiffly.\n\n\"It is our great privilege. But there is one thing that will prevent you from making the journey with us\u2026\"\n\nHe turned his eyes on me.\n\n\"Dragons are forbidden in Penet.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked Kida.\n\n\"Penet is a land rich in resources. We are known throughout the world for our fruit trees and our crops, our flaxen shearers and our long-horned uru. You see, our greatest assets are agricultural, and as such, dragons are a threat to our way of life.\"\n\n\"My dragon is no threat, oh wise General,\" said Shesset. \"She is the daughter of Selis Anekh, goddess of the Sun, and, as a Great Gold, she is the very symbol of the House of Bey.\"\n\nHe smiled.\n\n\"I understand, princess, but there are no exceptions. Not even when your father made excursion here seventeen years ago. He understood the need to keep his Great Gold in Wa'ast. We can arrange to accommodate your drakina while you go on to enjoy the hospitality of our kingdom.\"\n\n\"Please, princess,\" begged Kida. \"We need her.\"\n\nShesset said nothing.\n\nWe bobbed up and down on the surface of the waters, he in his boat, we in ours.\n\n\"We have been on the river for almost a month,\" Shesset said finally. \"Can we make shore to rest and discuss this like children of the gods?\"\n\nHis smile widened.\n\n\"Our homes await, esteemed daughter of Gifah. You and your crew are welcomed to enjoy the hospitality of this modest border town.\"\n\n\"And we will discuss how you will properly accommodate my dragon.\"\n\n\"That will be our foremost conversation.\"\n\nAnd just like that, the politics were over, and the relief flooded through the boat like the Weeping. Kida moved swiftly to my side.\n\n\"Anekh,\" she said, brows drawn as she examined my open wound. \"Oh, my Anekh.\"\n\nIt didn't hurt, so I let her tend me as the rowers followed the fleet of boats to shore.\n\nThe entire complement disembarked and made their way towards a building of white-washed bricks, and I stayed, perched on the prow, until I could see them no more. I swung my head to survey the docks, not surprised to see the darting eyes of every Peneti in the vicinity. No dragons in Penet. This was a sad country, then, and I raised my head and bugled a long cry before leaping into the air and splashing into the river. I caught three fat shore wyrms and made sure to eat them, loudly and lustily, in full view of the reeds. Then with my belly filled, I curled up on the canopy. The smells from the village were intriguing, but I was tired after so long on the water. I missed my divan. I missed my shakhet baths. I missed the Ophar's court and Netjeh's slumbers and the little flutterbys swooping between the rooftops. I fell asleep to the roar of the Waterwall, and the river's song filled my dreams.\n\nAt noon, I roused again to fish and preen. The air was warm, the river spray cool, and I sunned myself, wings spread wide and beak open. My wound was almost closed, and I welcomed the looks from reeds passing by on the river or moored in their skiffs or walking on the shore. No dragons in Penet, indeed. They were clearly amazed, and perhaps a little afeared, and I wondered how they could stop a dragon if she flew into their lands. Politics is a past time of gods and reeds, not dragons. We are no respecters of borders.\n\nKida didn't return by late afternoon, or early evening, or even midnight, and for a while, I stayed curled up on the canopy in the aft of the boat. The moons called me out, however, and I watched them chase each other overhead. Amok and Khamet, twins of silver and shade, and my heart ached. While they shared the sky, they would never be together, and they would never catch their sister the sun. And so, I sang for them that night, for my brothers and my mother and Netjeh and for all the dragons who lived and died in this great, terrible land. My song slid up and down the dragon scales, heartfelt and lonely and infinitely sad, and once, just once, I could have sworn I heard an echo.\n\nHow could one stop a dragon?\n\nI slept fitfully that night, alone on my boat, and it was early morning when I heard the familiar steps of my reeds on the docks.\n\n\"Anekh.\"\n\nI rose and stretched, slapping my tail, and shaking my neck spines. They were growing in beautifully. I knew because I would often gaze at my reflection when the river was calm. Spines and spiral horns and shimmering scales. I was a Great Gold. I was a treasure, surely deserving the worship of the reeds.\n\n\"Anekh.\"\n\nKida stepped down onto the deck, and I looked to see the princess, the majari, the general and a few other reeds on the embankment. There was a strange, wheeled cart behind them, with bronze bars and a flat roof. An older reed in a long linen shift left the group and followed Kida onto the boat. He had a full beard and fuller belly and he stood behind her, holding a few strips of leather and chain in his hand.\n\nKida knelt down beside me, ran her hand along my neck. I nuzzled her, enjoying the feel of her fingers on my skin. She took a deep breath.\n\n\"Anekh, you are a good dragon. A very good dragon.\"\n\nI knew it to be true, despite all the hardships that had befallen me.\n\nShe rested her forehead on mine.\n\n\"We have to go east to the king's city of Moradin, but dragons\u2014\"\n\nHer breath caught in her throat.\n\n\"Dragons are forbidden.\"\n\nSilly reed, I thought. I was bonded to her and the House of Bey. Where she went, I went also. I took one of her hands in my teeth, content with the holding, while she stroked me with the other.\n\n\"But they are good and gracious hosts. They have made a historic exception.\"\n\nWith my tongue, I could taste the salt of her skin, the spices of the meals she had eaten, the oil she used to clean her hands.\n\n\"You will come with us,\" she went on, stroking my chin and jaw and eye ridges. \"But you will not fly.\"\n\nI looked up at her. There was something in her voice. I could smell salt and tension. Sometimes reeds were a puzzle.\n\n\"You will not fly. You will not swim. You will not walk. And no, I will not carry you.\" She smiled with her mouth, but the Nahr spilled from her lashes. \"But you will ride in comfort like a princess, pulled by an uru in that lovely cart.\"\n\nThe cart did not look lovely.\n\nThe man with the beard and the belly stepped forward. He pulled a silver band from his satchel.\n\n\"This is Anis Ixaak, King Marwethad's Wardyr of Beasts,\" Kida went on. \"He has found you this new collar.\"\n\n\"It's from Remus, where the Dragon Flights come from,\" Ixaak said. \"They have perfected the care and husbandry of dragons.\"\n\nHe passed the band to my Kida. She turned it over and over in her hand.\n\n\"It's not as pretty as your old one, but still, I think it'll serve us well.\"\n\nI peered down to study it, took a nip with my tiny front teeth. Kida laughed.\n\nSuch a strange thing, laughter.\n\nWith both hands, she opened the band and placed it around my throat. It fastened with a click.\n\nIt was tight, and I shook my head. My first collar was not like this. My first collar was gold and jewels, soft and loose. I reached up to scratch at it with my hind talon, but Kida took my foot in her hand.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"You must leave it and wear it always. And these\u2026\"\n\nThe reed called Ixaak passed her the chains. I recognized them from my time with the House of Seb and my early training in the Court of the Great Gold. She fastened first one, then the other, around the slim bones of my leg, just above my taloned feet. I lifted first one, then the other, shook first one, then the other, hearing the chain rope rustle and clink.\n\nI didn't need these anymore. I was a yearling, a Great Gold, a good girl, a royal dragon. I bent down to gnaw them off, but Kida caught my beak in her hands.\n\n\"No, Anekh. You must not struggle. This is the only way you can come with us.\"\n\nAnd Ixaak passed her the strips of leather. She slipped them over my beak and around my head, tugging it tightly as it sat just beneath my young horns. I shook my head and snapped at her.\n\nExcept I couldn't.\n\nI pulled my head back, tossed it again, tried in vain to open my mouth. I couldn't. The leather straps had my long muzzle bound shut and I turned a wild eye to Kida, to Ixaak, to the princess and the majari and all the reeds standing along the dock. I sprang back to perch on the barge's rail, but the foot hobbles had me fast. Kida reached for me, but I battered her with my wings and tossed my head. I could fly. I could still fly, and I launched up into the morning sky, but the Wardyr had a holdfast, and his grip was sure. I thumped back onto the deck in a rattle of chains as two other reeds rushed forward.\n\nI would burn these leathers off and the hobbles too, so I called for the fire, but the fire would not come, and acid pressed out between my teeth. My eyes stung with the force of it.\n\n\"Please be still, Anekh,\" cried Kida. \"I promise once we're in Moradin, you'll be free again.\"\n\n\"Cover her eyes,\" shouted Ixaak. \"She will calm once we cover her eyes.\"\n\nAnd the reeds on the dock leapt into the boat, with their many hands and many covers and many commands. I saw Kida weeping and Shesset on the dock, hugging her ribs, eyes shining like liquid daggers, her mouth a tight, grim line. They wrapped one eye, then the other, and then I saw nothing. And they folded my wings and lifted me from the boat like when I was taken from the banks of the River Nahr. They carried me in darkness once again, bobbing yet bound, to the cart of bars and the weeping of reeds and the laughter of the Wheel around me."
            },
            {
                "title": "PENET",
                "text": "At some point, they removed my blinders, but nothing else, and so, I travelled in that little cart, watching with dull eyes as we headed into the foothills of Penet. We were a part of a king's caravan with reeds in carts, and reeds on foot, and their voices rose and fell like the river. Occasionally, Shesset would laugh, but I never heard Kida and I wondered if she laughed too. I wondered if she wept. I must admit I didn't much care. The feel of her hand setting the chains was burned into my skin like the brand of the princess on my thigh.\n\nAs we travelled along a red, mud-brick road, the River Sand rushed nearby, now churning white as both river and road climbed into the mountains. It smelled good to be near the water, and my heart ached with the desire to swim and dive, to fish and to fly. But in this cage, I couldn't stand, could barely fit my folded wings, and the tip of my tail flicked out between the bars. Chains bit into my scales, leaving patterns in their wake.\n\nThe carts were pulled by long-horned urus, and I'm certain the beast following me was terrified as I watched him from the back of my cart. His eyes were round and ringed with white and constantly fixed on mine. I wondered if he thought I was going to eat him. I wondered that myself. I had only ever hunted fish. I knew the reeds ate urus, but I wasn't sure I could ever eat something so steadfast and hard-working, despite the growling of my dragon belly.\n\nBesides, I still wore this dreaded collar and head muzzle. I couldn't even open my beak.\n\nPenet was land of red. The road was red. The stones were red. We passed groves of ruby cloud fruit and fields of russet grass, the kind that was harvested to make sweet cakes. We passed villages of scarlet brick and clay, and always, the reed people stopped to watch as we rolled by. We passed per ahmets grouped in threes. They were smaller and sharper than those in Gifah and made of red stone. I wondered what beasts were enshrined within them, since it seemed dragons were not. It was a rich, red, bountiful land but I cared for none of it.\n\nLike Shesset, I was turning to stone.\n\nNight came, and with it, the moons. Two blinking eyes, slivers of their usual orbs, lids closed as if to stay hidden, or to hide from sight the world of men. Only then would Kida would come to me, bringing water in a leather flask, but she was not allowed to open the cage door or remove my muzzle. She slipped her hand in and poured the water over my beak, hoping some of it made it to my tongue. I turned my head away, however, wing claws crossed beneath my chin. Hope was a thing for reeds and free dragons, not Great Golds in uru cages.\n\n\"It won't be long,\" came a voice and Ixaak appeared from the shadows. \"Besides, it's hot on the road to Moradin. She'll drink soon enough.\"\n\nKida scratched my elbow with the tips of her fingers.\n\n\"Where will she go, once we reach the King's palace?\"\n\nThe big man smiled.\n\n\"Why, to his bestiary, of course,\" he said. \"King Marwethad has a wonderful menagerie.\"\n\n\"But no dragons?\"\n\n\"They are forbidden.\"\n\n\"She's a good dragon,\" said Kida. \"She wouldn't cause any damage to your kingdom.\"\n\n\"Dragons are how the House of Bey took Gifah from the House of Thenet,\" said Shesset as she too approached my cage, followed by Abshir the majari. He was her shadow, now, speaking little but watching all. \"Dragons are power.\"\n\n\"And power corrupts,\" said Ixaak.\n\nShe raised a brow.\n\n\"But not you, princess,\" he added quickly.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\nI flicked my tail, not looking at any of them.\n\n\"She's angry because of the muzzle,\" said Kida. \"And this stupid collar.\"\n\n\"You can't take them off,\" said Ixaak.\n\n\"You are speaking to Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II of the House of Bey and true Ophar of the land of Gifah,\" said Abshir. \"She is a threat to her brother, the usurper Beyat, and you know the resources he has sent to kill her. I can assure you he has sent assassins, and while I am majari, I am only one. This dragon is far greater protection than I could ever be.\"\n\nIxaak thought for a long moment.\n\n\"You may remove the muzzle,\" he said. \"But the collar stays.\"\n\nImmediately, Kida's hands were through the bars and behind my horns.\n\n\"But she stays in the cage,\" he added.\n\n\"Until Moradin,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"Until Moradin,\" said Ixaak.\n\nMy reed pulled the leathers from my face, and I shook my head, snapped my beak several times. My tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of my mouth.\n\n\"Feed her,\" said Shesset. \"She is a growing drakina.\"\n\nI rapped my tail on the cart. It was the smartest thing a reed had said for days.\n\nAnd so, it went like this for many days, travelling by cart during the day, talk around my cage by night. Soon the road grew busy with carts and reeds and urus and buyers and sellers, and all stopped to stare as we rolled past. In fact, at one point, we halted, and a heavy cover was draped over the roof. That was the last I saw of the red road to Moradin. I suppose that was the last they saw of me, so maybe that was the intent.\n\nAt one point, I could have sworn I smelled dragons.\n\nI'd only known a few grown dragons in my life. My brothers, my mother, the great Netjeh, and the Dragon Flights of Remus. Dragons have a scent unlike any other creature. Even under the sun-dappled cover, I lifted my head and breathed.\n\nYes. Dragon. I was sure of it.\n\nBut then it was gone, replaced by the smoke and smells of the city.\n\nWe rolled into the King's palace in the early evening. I could tell because of the rising noise and reverent music, then quiet as we rolled into the shade of a cool building. I had lived long enough in the Ophar's palace to recognize the sounds of a king's hall. I could hear voices announcing the arrival of the princess, and voices announcing the entrance of the king. Once, a corner of the woven cover was lifted and a young face peered through, but I heard Ixaak yell, and the face disappeared. I waited for a long while after that, my tail tapping in frustration outside the bars.\n\nI'm sure I dozed a bit when the cart suddenly jerked forward, rolling again through shaded halls until sunlight warmed the cover and I knew that, once again, we were outside. Before I knew what was happening, the cover was yanked off and the door of the cage thrown open. Blinded by the sun, I lunged forward, snapping my wings open and leaping from the cage. Up, up, up I went, intending on getting as far away from my prison as possible but I was yanked to a halt midair by the chains at my feet. I bleated my displeasure and wheeled in the air, wings beating to keep me in place. I looked down to survey the scene below.\n\nSandstone and whitewash and tile and brick. Pillars painted with greens and blues, tall palms waving in the breeze. It was an open courtyard much like the Court of the Great Gold and many reeds stood in a half-circle, Kida, Abshir and the Wardyr Ixaak among them. Shesset stood next to a man in sweeping robes and they both gazed up at me, hands shielding their eyes from the sun. The man in sweeping robes threw back his head and laughed, and I wished I had fire to burn the tongue from his mouth.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" cried Shesset. \"Daughter of Selis Anekh, goddess of the Sun and servant to the great Rath'nahr, symbol of the House of Bey and the great land of Gifah. Come and greet Marwethad, King of Penet and Son of the River Sand.\"\n\nAnd she held out her arm.\n\nI flapped my wings, glancing from Kida to Shesset beneath me. I had been caged. Me, a Great Gold of Gifah, caged like a sacrifice.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" said Shesset and she held her arm higher. \"Come.\"\n\nI knew what she wanted. She wanted me to land, to be petted, to be admired. She, who had caged me, a good dragon.\n\nI was a good dragon.\n\nI bleated to the sun but descended, reaching with my talons until I caught her arm. I was entirely too heavy for her and kept my wings moving and wide for balance. Shesset threw a glance at Kida. My reed rushed to help, and I hissed and squawked as they held me between them.\n\n\"This is Anekh Sun, my Great Gold,\" said Shesset and she turned her eyes to the robed man named Marwethad. \"You may touch her.\"\n\n\"She will not bite me?\"\n\n\"She will not.\"\n\nHe reached tentative fingers and I nipped at them.\n\n\"Naht,\" said Kida and she flicked my chin.\n\nI shook my head, watched Marwethad reach forward again. I hissed but did not nip as his dry fingers touched my ribs.\n\n\"Oh,\" he breathed, and ran first fingers, then hand, along my side, under my wing, up my neck to the spines at my throat. \"Oh, she is warm.\"\n\n\"And strong,\" said Shesset. \"Without this foreign collar, she could destroy an army.\"\n\nMarwethad nodded but said nothing, engrossed in the study of me. He touched my chin, my young horns, the ridges over my eyes. I bared my teeth at him, and he gasped.\n\n\"How old did you say?\"\n\nShesset looked at Kida.\n\n\"One and a half years,\" said my reed.\n\n\"Old enough to breed?\"\n\nKida was silent. I growled deep in my throat, not knowing this word.\n\n\"Vaskar?\" prompted the princess.\n\n\"Old enough, yes,\" said Kida. \"But the drake must be young too or\u2014\"\n\nA cry echoed from beyond the court and shadows swept across the sun. All reeds looked to the skies and my heart leapt to my throat.\n\nThree winged shapes, circling, silhouetted in the sun. Dragons. I knew it! No one could stop a dragon, no policy or agreement, no bridge nor invented division.\n\n\"Remus?\" barked Shesset and Abshir rushed to her side.\n\n\"Not Remus,\" cried the king, and he held his hands out. \"Not Remus!\"\n\nThese dragons had a distinctly different scent and I beat my wings furiously until my reeds released me. I rose on the stifling hot wind to meet them, but I couldn't, bound to the earth as I was by the chains in Kida's hand, and so I flapped and flailed at the end of the tether, wishing I could meet them in the clouds above.\n\nThey circled lower and lower, one blue, one grey, one red, and their wings lifted the sand into swirls beneath them. I called to them, singing the only song I knew. The blue sang back and, as he descended, I noticed a red banding stripe running the length of his body from snout to tail. He was twice my size, as was the red, but the grey was larger still, with a pale underbelly and spots on his wings.\n\nTo my utter shock, there were reeds upon their backs, but no silver. These were not Remoan riders. These were not Remoan dragons.\n\nI folded my wings and allowed myself to sink back to Kida's arms. She gripped me tightly, but, I think, not because I was heavy.\n\nEveryone stepped back as the trio touched down on the tiled ground and the sound of their breath filled the courtyard. First the grey, then the other two, spread wide their wings and lowered their heads and I noticed the shape of a hand painted in gold across each eye. The riders slid from their backs, their sandals raising dust as they struck the stone. Together, they strode over to the princess and the king, while the red rider followed several paces behind, both hands on the swords at his hips.\n\nThe king spread wide his arms.\n\n\"Dejenai! Nakosa! Penet welcomes you!\"\n\n\"It's been too long,\" said the older man and the two embraced like brothers. He was shorter and grey with a thick chest and a bad eye. The blue rider was younger and taller, and he did not embrace. Rather, a swift nod and the flash of a smile, but his eyes had fallen on me.\n\nKing Marwethad turned.\n\n\"This is a miraculous day, when all of the nobles of the God's lands assemble together in peace. I am blessed to introduce King Dejenai and Prince Nakosa of the Nabiri Skyborn to Princess Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II of the House of Bey of Gifah.\"\n\n\"Your father is with Rath'nahr in the Great Halls of the Sky,\" said King Dejenai, the man with the bad eye. \"He will be missed by those of us who have not made that journey.\"\n\nShesset nodded.\n\n\"I did not know you knew my father.\"\n\n\"By correspondence only. I had no occasion to visit Gifah, and he had no occasion to visit Nabir. Such is the life of a king.\"\n\n\"Why do you chain your dragon?\" asked the prince and all turned to him.\n\nShesset straightened.\n\n\"In Gifah, we do not chain our dragons,\" she said. \"But we are not in Gifah.\"\n\n\"Forgive my son,\" said Dejenai. \"His tongue gets the better of him at times.\"\n\n\"As does mine,\" said Shesset.\n\n\"In fact,\" said Marwethad. \"I was just discussing with the princess how to set up a limited breeding program in Penet. We've been closed to change for so long.\"\n\n\"As a child, I had heard you rode dragons,\" said Shesset. \"I'd thought it a myth.\"\n\n\"And we prefer to keep it that way,\" said Nakosa. \"It offers a surprising advantage on the battlefield.\"\n\n\"I need such an advantage if I'm to reclaim my country.\"\n\n\"That's an ambitious thing,\" said Nakosa.\n\n\"I am an ambitious woman.\" Shesset's eyes gleamed. \"Ask anyone who knows me.\"\n\nDejenai laughed.\n\n\"Your father must have loved you very much.\"\n\n\"I loved him more than my life.\"\n\n\"And your brother?\"\n\n\"A murderer, usurper and traitor.\"\n\n\"He's bought an army from Remus. How will you defeat such strength?\"\n\nHer smile was that of a knife.\n\n\"With armies of Penet, the navies of Lamos, and the dragons of Nabir.\"\n\n\"Such an ambitious woman!\" Nakosa laughed now.\n\n\"We can discuss this, and many more things, over dinner,\" said Marwethad. \"The dragons can stay in my bestiary in Diddad Wat. There are many cages and pens available.\"\n\n\"Our dragons do not live in pens,\" said Nakosa.\n\nKida lowered her eyes. Kingdoms and policy, laughing and knives. It was confounding then. I confess it still is.\n\n\"Well, Ixaak will think of something,\" said Marwethad. \"Dragons, and people of the dragons, go with him. Kings, princes, princesses \u2013 all the God's children,\" and he grinned, \"Will come with me.\"\n\nI watched the God's children disappear beneath the painted pillars, while Ixaak shrugged, turned, and walked the other way. Kida kissed the top of my head and followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "There were many courtyards in the palace of Marwethad, King of Penet, and Ixaak brought us to one of them. He'd spread the chaff from the sweet grass of the fields, and I thought it perfectly suitable bedding under a wide, open sky. The Nabiri dragons met us there and I marveled at their size and freedom. Grey, red, and blue, striped and spotted, they were almost the same as the Remoan dragons, and I studied them like I had never studied anything in my life.\n\nIxaak had also brought several slaughtered beasts that I assumed were uru, and the Nabiri dragons made short work of them. For me, I hadn't eaten anything save slivered wyrm in days, and I fell upon the flesh with relish. My razor teeth sliced large chunks and I tossed my head back, eager for them to slide down my throat. They didn't, and I retched, bringing them back up and onto my tongue.\n\n\"The collar,\" said Ixaak when Kida asked. \"It prevents them from swallowing large pieces of food whole.\"\n\n\"But why?\" asked Kida.\n\n\"To keep them dependent, I suppose,\" he said. \"Dragons are dangerous predators.\"\n\nAs I spat out the flesh and proceeded to nibble it with my tiny front teeth, Kida's fingers toyed with the band.\n\n\"Anekh is not dangerous,\" she said softly.\n\n\"She could be when she's older,\" he said, and he gestured at the Nabiri dragons. \"The bands would also prevent their fire if I had the authority to collar them. You cannot tell me that, even now, their fire is not dangerous.\"\n\nKida said nothing. It didn't matter. I was so hungry that I grabbed a piece, tossed it onto my back teeth and chewed. Dragons don't chew. We don't have the teeth for it. We tear and swallow, grind and slice. And so, it took a long time to chew and chew and chew that piece of uru, and the acid bubbled up in my mouth, turning it all into mush that slid down my throat like a paste.\n\nI gagged and shook my head, eyes watering at the sensation.\n\nIt was twilight when I'd finally eaten my fill. Kida had settled down in the sweet chaff, her back against a pillar. I curled next to her, wings folded across my back, head in her lap. The stars were out, and the moons were high, one slowly opening now while the other still winked. The sky was clouding over, claws of red and pink and purple, and I wondered what it would be like to fly through them, if the clouds would brush my scales like wool or slip over my wings like linen. I had never been so high. Truth be told, I had never been so free either. Not like the dragons of Nabir, even with riders on their back.\n\nThere was a sound, and I snapped my head, growling.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" said prince Nakosa of Nabir.\n\n\"For what?\" asked Kida.\n\n\"For startling you,\" he said.\n\nShe held her tongue, I knew. Restraint was her signature, discipline her strength.\n\n\"You're Lamoan,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\"My mother was from Thima,\" she said. \"A city on the shores of the Nameless Sea. My father was a Gifahn trader who worked the markets along the coast.\"\n\n\"How did you come into the service of the princess?\"\n\n\"I worked as a vaskar in Wa'ast and studied my way in,\" she countered. \"Not all are born in a palace.\"\n\n\"Forgive me twice then,\" he said, and he turned his head. \"I need to check on Anshassar, Kharsis, and Bask.\"\n\n\"The dragons?\" asked Kida. Her eyes gleamed at the words. \"They are remarkable.\"\n\n\"Bask is mine,\" he said. \"Bask, son of Bash. He's young, so I can only pray he'll behave.\"\n\nAnd he smiled. Kida ran her hand along my spines.\n\n\"I've never worked with dragons so large. They are culled before their third year in Gifah.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"For all your accomplishments, Gifah is still a land of many chains.\"\n\n\"How does it feel to ride them?\" she asked.\n\nHe folded his arms and looked over at the blue drake, nibbling on the grey's wings like a brother.\n\n\"Free,\" he said, after a while. \"That is why we are called Skyborn. It is like nothing you've ever known, until you know it. You are reborn once you have flown.\"\n\nKida said nothing, continued to stroke my head.\n\n\"Will you stay with her?\" the prince asked.\n\n\"Her?\" asked Kida. \"My dragon?\"\n\n\"Your dragon?\"\n\n\"The royal dragon, the princess's dragon. Not mine. She\u2014she's not my dragon.\" She glanced up. \"Is that what you mean?\"\n\n\"Yes. No. Both,\" he said, and he shrugged. \"Marwethad and your princess are in talks to see the Kingdom of Penet support her claim for the throne of Gifah. They've sent a message to Illyrio of Lamos, requesting ships. It will take months, if not years, for the plans to be approved and the armies to be readied. Tardek is the war city of Penet. That is where your princess will go if she is to fight for the right to rule.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" said Kida. \"I go where she goes.\"\n\n\"But your drakina doesn't. Your drakina goes to Diddad Wat, where the King's bestiary is. In exchange for the armies, Marwethad gets to breed your dragon when she's ready. She'll go south while your princess goes east.\"\n\nKida hugged me tighter, and I held her thumb. I wanted to slink over to the drakes, sit in their shadow while the sun still sang.\n\n\"She's a fine drakina, but she's still young,\" he said. \"I hope she's not used up to restore some golden chair. It's not worth it.\"\n\nHe gazed over at the drakes, sighed.\n\n\"Well, it's been an honour to meet you, Kida of Lamos.\" He gave a small bow. \"And you too, Anekh Sun of Gifah. I pray you success and long life.\"\n\nKida looked up.\n\n\"Are you leaving?\"\n\n\"At dawn,\" he said.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"This is vanity,\" he said. \"There will be no Nabiri dragons joining your campaign, and because of that, you will fail.\"\n\nHe bowed again.\n\n\"Sky bless, sister.\"\n\nHe left the pillar and strode over to the dragons, speaking to them in soft, musical tones. They purred at his approach, trilled as he ran his hands along their scales. How I wanted to go with them, mount the clouds, sweep the mountains. But I was here in a stall with sweet chaff and sadness. Still, I had Kida, and I knew she'd never let me go south while she went east. She would never do such a thing. Never.\n\nI should have remembered the Wheel and how it turned, how it crushed all things under its spokes. I wouldn't have slept if I had remembered. I wouldn't have dreamed had I known.\n\nWe were parted the next morning at dawn."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE BESTIARY",
                "text": "The bestiary was south of Moradin and not surprisingly, I made the journey in chains, collar, and muzzle. And yes, in an uru cart.\n\nIt was an uneventful trek along a single, palm-lined road, flanked on both sides by arid hills and desert plains. Red sand and red rocks, markets and pointed per ahmets. All leading to Diddad Wat, the summer home of the King.\n\nIt was as large as the Ophar's palace, surrounded by a river carved by reeds.\n\nOnce there, I was dragged into a cage that allowed me to turn around, and no more. It was as high as my wings were high, and as long as I was long, from point of beak to tip of tail, with a stone base and iron bars for walls and roof. There was also a floor-to-ceiling metal mesh screen that could be pulled across the floor when they cleaned it, and it took three reeds to do this task \u2013 two to lever the mesh and one to scrub the stone floor. Truth be told, they cleaned it every day, so I was in no danger of sickness or ill health. Also, I was still a good dragon. As best I could, I lifted my tail and shat outside the bars.\n\nThe cages lined the periphery of a large courtyard, and to be fair, each cage was nestled beneath a leafy, damal tree that gave us shade during the hottest times of the day. There was a wide expanse of gardens in the centre of the court, and while the flowers, shrubs and exotic grasses were a respite for eyes, it was the central fountains that were the true blessing. There, fresh water leapt and bubbled all day, and often, the spray was carried on the breeze to keep us cool. Ixaak was a conscientious wardyr, and I do believe he had our best interests at heart.\n\nBesides, I knew Kida was coming back for me. She was my reed, and I was her dragon. It was only a matter of time.\n\nMost days, I lay in the coolest part of the cage, hoping for the overspray from the fountains. I had long since stopped studying the others collected in this courtyard menagerie. There were two different serat'horns, a flat-backed river wraith, a very old sobethi (who was the first and only sobethi I'd ever pitied), several armoured plainsbucks and a tawny rassa. I was the only dragon, and people paid to come and see.\n\nThis wasn't how Ixaak made his living, however. He was a dedicated servant of the king, and he delighted in showing off the king's collection to his many friends, colleagues, and political associates. Ixaak himself was very generous with both time and possessions, but there were many reeds needed in the upkeep of such a place. It was they who made a small fortune on the side, slipping customers under the gates and over the walls when Ixaak and his family had gone to bed.\n\nIt was an entirely sedentary, tedious life for a dragon. For any creature for that matter, and the rassa would pace from end to end of his cage, from the first breath of Selis Anekh to the rise of the brother moons. He was big \u2013 almost as large as me, with great powerful forelegs, a ridged spine and curved fangs that hung like daggers over his bottom jaw. Of all the creatures in Marwethad's collection, he was the only one I feared. I was glad we had an empty cage between us.\n\nI was never forced to wear the muzzle. Many hands had removed it after placing me in the cage, sliding the mesh wall to keep me in place and freeing my beak. The hobbles above my talons were still there, though, as was the collar, or silver band. It was heavy and tight, and pressed upon the middle of my throat, preventing me from swallowing anything larger than diced wyrm or fish. I remember the first time a bucket of wyrm slop was slid into the cage. I looked at it, then at the reed who had brought it. But I made the best of it and ate it, right down to the last sticky scrap of pink. I then played with the bowl for a while. It was, to be honest, the most interesting thing I'd done that day. But the novelty of wyrm slop in wooden buckets wore thin very quickly, and soon, I'd simply eat and be done.\n\nAfter many days, Ixaak came by to inspect my compound. He had with him a very small reed who walked with a crutch and a twisting gait.\n\n\"Well, Gaviid,\" he said to the boy. \"Here she is. A Great Gold from Gifah.\"\n\nThe boy gripped the bars with both hands.\n\n\"She's so beautiful, abbahay,\" he breathed. \"What's her name?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Gaviid. What would you call her?\"\n\nHe thought a long moment.\n\n\"Emay,\" he said. \"It means golden, I think.\"\n\n\"You're a very smart boy.\"\n\nGaviid smiled.\n\n\"Do they really ride her?\"\n\nIxaak laughed.\n\n\"No one rides dragons, Gaviid,\" he lied. \"But this one has pulled her share of river boats, or so I'm told.\"\n\n\"The Nabiri ride dragons.\"\n\n\"Also, a myth. It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"I would ride her\u2026\"\n\n\"You would ride her?\"\n\nThe boy nodded.\n\n\"You mean, you would fly?\"\n\nAnd with a swift motion, Ixaak grabbed the boy by the arms and swept him up into the air.\n\nLaughter again, and I wondered if the man would throw the child into the rassa cage. Instead, he swung him up and onto his shoulders, snatching the crutch from the ground as they turned to leave.\n\n\"Can I feed Emay, abbahay?\"\n\n\"I'll get Cawil to give you some lessons. But you have to be very careful.\"\n\n\"I will, abbahay. I promise.\"\n\nAnd then they were gone, leaving me with the fountains and the bucket and the bad-tempered rassa pacing next door.\n\nDay turned to night, night turned to day. I watched as the dance of the sun and the moons became routine, a mundane tedious repetitive cycle changed only by the waxing and waning of the brothers. I smelled the fruit grow and ripen and I saw the grass turn to seed and blow away in the wind. I heard natural thunder for the very first time, and for the very first time, I felt water fall from the sky in the form of rain. There was no rain in Gifah. All water came from the Weeping, and so, the first time the clouds opened and the waters came down, I was afraid. Soon, I learned to delight in it, and I would close my eyes and open my beak and let the water splash into my mouth and run down my throat.\n\nAnd I lived outside in those rains, enjoying them far more than the scorching heat of summer or the arid winds of winter. I lived through the howl of the karads \u2013 windstorms that filled the skies with sand and buried entire villages in dust. I slept in those times, when they would seal our cages in cotton tarps to protect us from the sand. I slept and I dreamed, and I thought of Netjeh, too large to move, to weary to try. I often thought of Kida, her great dark eyes, her gentle hands, her spirit of protection and her quiet strength. She was coming back for me, I knew. But then my throat would grow tight, and I'd curse the band that she'd placed there, and dark thoughts began to intrude, bringing with them the first shadows of doubt and needles of fear.\n\nBut I chased those thoughts out of my mind. They brought nothing but ache and loss and memories of young dragons and death. So, I slept, and ate and grew, all in that little cage in the compound of the king's wardyr. The only highlight in my day was Gaviid.\n\nHe was allowed to feed me every other day, and he would wait patiently for Cawil and the others to slide the mesh into the centre of the cage, forcing me back against the far wall. I went willingly, for now, my bucket of fish and wyrm slop was one of my only diversions. Cawil would unbolt the cage door and Gaviid would scramble in and wait again for the bucket to be passed into his arms. He'd slide it in through the little square hatch and watch with wide eyes as I dove in with relish. I wish I could say that I took my time. I really should have, all things considered, but my entire life was centered around two buckets of bloody, slimy flesh. It was hard to remember that I had once been a Great Gold.\n\nEven in the rains, Gaviid would come. Sometimes, he'd reach in to touch my scales and I'd rest my nose close to the bars, warming him with the breath from my nostrils. I loved those moments, remembering Kida and how she'd stroke my eye ridge or my horn buds or my chin. Gaviid learned to trill, and we'd play trill and repeat for as long as his father would let us. Once, he brought me a whole fish and I foolishly tried to swallow it but was forced to retch it out and grind it into mush with my many great teeth. It took me the better part of an evening to finish that fish, something that once had been gone in a gulp. Still, it was different in a time when nothing was, and I was grateful.\n\nGaviid was often sick, so his father soon forbade him from spending much time in the menagerie, and certainly not in the rains. Days would go by, and I wouldn't see him, but when I did, I was as happy as a caged dragon could be.\n\nOne night, while I dreamt of Kida and the River Nahr, I caught a scent that didn't belong in the bestiary.\n\nDragon.\n\nI lifted my head. It was dark with only one moon smiling down on me, and I heard the rush of wings in the wind.\n\nI rose to stand, pushed my face against the bars, and breathed in his scent. There, his shape silhouetted against a starless sky and in near silence, he landed in the courtyard, wings wide, tail lashing. He lumbered to the fountain, and in the moonslight, I could see he was the deep green of jungle leaves. He breathed in the scent of the water, lowered his head, and spat a wad of acid at the base of the fountain. Marking his territory, I knew, because it cooled to soft, pungent wax in the night air. Then, he drank deeply, great gulps of cool, fresh water. The bucket I got daily was stale, and my throat ached at the thought.\n\nAfter he drank his fill, he tossed his head up and down, splashing the water over the sides. He was playing, and my heart ached at the sight. I wondered if he'd ever swam, if he dove for fish or taunted sobethi or played in the reeds along the banks of a river. He was a wild dragon in a land that forbade them, and to me, he was a beautiful thing.\n\nThe plainsbuck bleated from a cage across the court and he lifted his head, snorting as he sifted the scents of the various creatures in the bestiary. His nostrils flared and he swung his head in my direction. I flattened against the floor of the cage.\n\nThe green drake took one step, then another, his knuckled wing claws thudding on the earth as he moved towards me. He cocked his head, first one way, then the other, before stretching his neck out to the bars. And then, he trilled. It was soft, quiet, a rumble like distant thunder rolling from his tongue and I rejoiced at the music of his voice.\n\nI trilled back.\n\nHe lashed his tail and tossed his head and my chest threatened to burst. He pranced in a wide circle, neck arched and crested with spines. He was magnificent and he knew it and I wanted to push myself from these bars and leap into the night to fly with him and never return.\n\nHe circled back now, pressing his beak to the edge of the bars. I did the same. He breathed out a long, deep breath and I inhaled him. Smoke, musk, sythstone, acid. Wild. Freedom. Sky.\n\nI was a dragon in a cage.\n\nThere were whispers and the flash of a torch, and I knew Cawil was bringing a secret, paying guest to view the king's collection. The drake stepped back and snorted before rearing up on his strong back legs and leaping into the air. His wingbeats sent wafts of dragon musk down as he disappeared into the night.\n\nI, too, had been a free dragon once.\n\nI did not sleep or dream after that.\n\nHe did not come the next night, or the next, but he did come again a few weeks later, landing quietly in the courtyard for a long drink at the fountain. I trilled at him, and he swung his head, streams of water spraying from his beak. He arched his neck, his crest and winged forelegs stiff as he strutted to my cage. Once again, he pushed his muzzle between the bars and droplets of water gleamed in the moonslight. I darted my tongue across his chin to catch one, savouring the taste, fresh and sweet as spring rain. He opened his mouth so that water spilled between his fangs, and I lapped it up eagerly. His scales were like pebbles, and I nibbled them with my tiny front teeth. I heard him purr as he pressed his jaw, then throat, against the bars.\n\nThe grooming of dragons. So different than Kida's brushes and paint.\n\nHe returned every few nights after that, and I wondered if he had a route that he maintained. With Penet's persecution of dragons, he would have needed to hunt at night and stay hidden during daylight, so I had taken to thinking of him as Mehen, the great dragon protector of Rath'nahr as he travelled the underworld during the long, cold nights. It was one of the things I remembered from my time in the drakmet, when Seb told stories by the brazier.\n\nBetween the visits of Mehen and young Gaviid, I had something to look forward to other than green water and buckets of wyrm.\n\nThere was a month when the rains were late, and drought stretched its killing fingers across the land. To my despair, the central fountain dried up and the damal leaves withered, leaving us baking in the heat without relief. In fact, it was so hot that many of Ixaak's servants did not show up to care for us, leaving Cawil and young Gaviid to do all the work. Beasts grew hungry, and I could only imagine Mehen in the wild with no reeds to tend him.\n\nThat night he came, as green as a jungle vine, and he immediately made for the fountain. I heard him grumble in the base of his throat, watched him gnaw at the basalt with his powerful teeth. He turned his head and looked at me and through the moonslight, I could see his sunken cheeks and hollows around his eyes. It was then that the plainsbuck bleated. It was then that everything changed.\n\nSlowly, Mehen approached the buck's cage, head low, tail lashing. The leggy creature bleated again and again, darting from one end of its small pen to the other. In the next enclosure, one of the serat'horns wailed as the dragon advanced. He pulled back his head and opened his great mouth and the dark courtyard flashed with the breath of dragonfire. In a burst of flame, the plainsbuck went down, head and wild legs thrashing, and the moment a hoof came through the bars, Mehen struck, catching it in his jaws with powerful force.\n\nOil lamps came on all throughout the great house, accompanied by the shouting of the reeds, and still Mehen did not release. The buck's dying cries ceased, and the air was filled with the scent of charred flesh, but he tugged and tugged until finally, the sizzling leg came off in one go.\n\n\"Go! Go!\" cried Ixaak as he and Cawil rushed into the yard. \"Cursed beast, begone!\"\n\nMehen tossed the leg to the back of his mouth, hoof out one side, bloody thigh out the other, and he charged Ixaak, snapping his wings and leaping skyward before they met. He was silhouetted by the moons in an instant, but my heart had shattered in a thousand tiny pieces. I knew what was coming. I knew how this would end.\n\n\"What is it, abbahay?\"\n\nIxaak looked down at Gaviid, with his crutch and his great, round eyes.\n\n\"A dragon,\" he said. \"But it is over now. Go back to bed.\"\n\n\"A wild dragon, abbahay?\"\n\n\"Yes. We will need to inform the king.\"\n\n\"Will he send archers?\"\n\n\"I suspect so.\" He laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. \"Now, go. I have to help Cawil with the buck.\"\n\n\"Well, at least the rassa will eat tomorrow,\" said the boy as he headed back to the house.\n\nWithin three days, there were soldiers in the bestiary. Archers with their bows and quivers, swordsmen with their blades and spears. They placed vats of water in every corner, left baskets of fish by every door. To lure the wild dragon or disguise their scent, I didn't know, but I knew it would be bad. There would be no bars or cages for my jungle-green dragon, only death at the point of many blades.\n\nEach night thereafter, they waited for him in the shadows. Each night, I hoped he would not come.\n\nBut of course, he did.\n\nWide-eyed moons that night, as if the night goddess, Naret, watched with interest the affairs of reeds and dragons. As if the twins, Amok and Khamet, watched as well, eager to witness the death of one of their own. It was then that I hated the moons and the night and the goddess. All bad things happened under their insatiable gaze. My mother's death, the fall of the House of Bey, the Burning of Karadoum, and now this. I was Anekh Sun, daughter of Selis Anekh, Goddess of the Sun, and I was powerless because of the reeds and their cages, their collars and the night.\n\nMehen died that night as swiftly as he came. I barked to warn him when I heard the rustle of his wings, but it didn't deter him and the moment his talons touched down, the arrows loosed, thudding into his green body like the beating of a drum. He bellowed and coiled to spring, but a second volley shredded the leather of his wings. The soldiers rushed him next, swords drawn, and he sprayed them with a blast of dragonfire. Some fell to the ground, screaming as they burned. A third volley of arrows and he swung his great head, flame spewing from his tongue, tail lashing as his body hit the stone. The spearguard came next, hurling the weapons from the darkness, then moving closer as his struggles slowed. They stabbed him repeatedly until the last twitch of a talon, the last flutter of a wing. The smell of blood overpowered even that of the fish.\n\nThere was silence then, save for the moaning of a lone serat'horn, and the weeping of a young boy under the arch of a door.\n\nIt was then that I knew Kida was never coming back."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE KARAD",
                "text": "If the death of Mehen was the beginning of the end of my months in the bestiary, then the 'end' of the end was the night of the karad. The day had started off unnaturally quiet, with not even a breeze to cool the skin. The drought had meant that the reeds could barely keep us watered and the old sobethi died that week because of the lack. They did not move him from his cage and his body quickly became a haven for piks, skarabs and sand wyrms. I hadn't seen Gaviid for many days and I hoped he hadn't succumbed to this heat as well. I would be sad if that were the case, but I had already lost one friend in this horrible place. A second wouldn't have surprised me.\n\nThe wind started just before noon, turning the sky the colour of stone. Inside the cages, creatures either paced furiously or made themselves as small as possible. I was one of the latter, folding my wings across my back and curling my neck and tail into a tight coil. By mid-afternoon, the sky was green, bringing with it pellets of sand that stung like skorpiochs. Soon, a bank of red cloud rolled towards us like a tide.\n\nIxaak and Cawil came early to feed us and to lower the awnings meant to protect us from the sand. The wind howled now and the grit that came with it was strong, shredding the cloth within minutes. Useless, I thought, and I tucked my head beneath my wings to shield my eyes.\n\nCawil paused, one hand on my gate, the other cradling a bucket in his arms. He tossed my bucket in, spilling its contents across the stone floor, and struggled with the latch on the door of my cage.\n\n\"This is pointless, wardyr!\" he cried. \"None of them will eat in this!\"\n\nI didn't move, caring more to stay tucked into myself and out of the sting of the sand.\n\n\"The last karad howled for six days,\" shouted Ixaak from the wraith's pen. \"The king lost all of his collection in one week! I can't let that happen again!\"\n\n\"But wardyr\u2014\"\n\n\"Do your job, Cawil! Marwethad pays you well!\"\n\nCawil snarled and moved on to the rassa. He tossed the bucket and slammed the gate with such force that I felt the bars rattle from here. For his part, the rassa did not budge, preferring to stay curled up just like me. For the first time, I admired his way of thinking.\n\nThe sky fell upon us then like a collapsing wall of sand. Baskets rolled across the compound, the damal trees bent and snapped, and the fountain \u2013 our beloved fountain, respite during the hottest of days \u2013 tipped and shattered across the tiled ground. Sand piled up next to me and I thought of my mother, green and young and buried under the banks of the River Nahr. I wondered if that would be my fate as well. The last Great Gold of the House of Bey, trapped and buried in a cage like a wyrm.\n\nThe karad howled and the sky raged, and I could hear the two reeds shouting to each other over the wind. But over it all, or perhaps under it, I heard a strange sound that was not wind or sky or reeds, and I opened one eye. The rassa gate had blown open and, through the buffeting fists of sand, I could see the great beast move towards it.\n\nThe men struggled against the wind and threw their bodies against the door to force it closed. Through the bars, I saw lethal claws flash, shredding wool and linen and flesh. Ixaak howled but the wind howled louder, and I quickly lost sight of them in the chaos of swirling sand. I thought I saw two figures lurch across the court, but they disappeared from view as the dust rose like a wave. I tucked my head back under my wing for the rest of the night.\n\nThe karad lasted for many days and it was impossible to tell noon from night. There was sand and darker sand and the wind's howls deafened me, so that I'm not certain when it stopped. I remember trying to raise my head, but a crushing weight pressed down on me. In fact, it took me back to my days in the shell and the journey up through the sand of my birth.\n\nIt seemed the Wheel was as cruel and relentless as ever.\n\nAnd so, at one point, I stirred, and the sand spilled. I moved, and the sand spilled. I stretched and pushed myself to my claws and the sand spilled. I shook and the sand flew like it had all week. Now, I was the karad in one weary, golden dragon body.\n\nIt was the dead of night. The moons hovered low and heavy, and the stars danced as if they'd never been gone from the sky. As I looked around the courtyard, it was unrecognizable, merely dunes along the walls and drifts across the stone. I barked into the silence, calling for the river wraith or the serat'horns or the rassa to answer, but none did.\n\nPillars shone in the moonslight, rising from the sandy courtyard where they had not been before. Some tall, some not, some erect, others leaning, I counted nine pillars of solidified sand in the bestiary's yard. I pressed my face to the bars to see them better. Glass. They were pillars of golden, gleaming glass, spun by the karad and worn smooth by the wind.\n\nBetween three of them, where the fountain used to be, I saw a mound rise out of the dunes. It was the rassa. He was not in his pen, and he shook for several long moments to rid the sand from his pelt. Slowly, he padded off towards the courtyard's outer wall, pausing once to look back at me. Then he was gone, swallowed up, a tawny shadow lost in the night.\n\nThey found Ixaak early that morning, buried at the entrance to the rassa pen, dead from the rassa or from the karad, I'll never know. I never saw Cawil again, either, or the rassa, or the river wraith. The serat'horn survived, however, and he was shipped off to the Border Markets to pay for some of the bestiary's debts. Since the buying and selling of dragons was forbidden in Penet, this was not an option for me, and I waited many days without food or water before someone came to look at me.\n\n\"It's a shame,\" said a reed, one of two. He was small and stocky with a hoop in one ear. \"Ixaak was a fine man. Very generous and compassionate. He lived for these creatures.\"\n\n\"He died for them, too, apparently,\" said another. He was tall and broad with tattoos on his cheeks and lips. \"What happened to his son? The little crippled boy?\"\n\n\"Too many debts,\" said the hooped man. \"I saw him the other day in the Beggar's Quarter.\"\n\n\"He won't last a week.\"\n\n\"I know. His body is frail, but at least his heart is light.\"\n\nThe tattooed man nodded.\n\n\"I pray Othorys is swift and merciful,\" he said. \"I heard there was a rassa?\"\n\n\"Gone.\"\n\nHe grunted.\n\n\"I have a buyer for a rassa, but not a dragon. Unless\u2026\"\n\nThe hooped man waited patiently.\n\n\"Unless I take her to the Market of Give and Take.\"\n\n\"There is no Market of Give and Take,\" said the first. \"It's forbidden.\"\n\n\"As forbidden as the sale of a dragon,\" said the tattooed man. \"Besides, where do you think I'd be selling the rassa?\"\n\n\"You are going to get yourself killed, my friend,\" the hooped man grunted. \"The Market throws dangerous dice.\"\n\n\"Games which I live to play.\" The tattooed man stroked his chin. \"I could ask Kunyane. He runs a travelling circus.\"\n\n\"The maab?\"\n\n\"They tour the Glass Road across the Wyldelands, all the way to the River Storm.\"\n\n\"They could handle a dragon?\"\n\n\"You said she's tame, yes?\"\n\n\"A Great Gold of Gifah. She probably lived better than you or I.\"\n\nThe tattooed man studied me, and his eyes shone like pebbles.\n\n\"She is very beautiful,\" he said. \"Perhaps Sakariye wants her himself.\"\n\nThe hooped man grinned.\n\n\"Sakariye is a glass trader and a thief. What would he want with a tamed dragon?\"\n\n\"A very skilled glass trader and a very rich thief,\" said the tattooed man. \"A tame dragon could guard his hoard.\"\n\n\"He could skin her and sell her scales for seket. There's great profit in the selling of cures.\"\n\n\"Seket be praised, she'd be worth a fortune. But it would be a shame to kill her.\" The tattooed man glanced at the other. \"Are the Gifahn soldiers still looking for her? I heard something about Remoan dragons\u2026\"\n\n\"It's been almost a year. I was surprised Ixaak hadn't showed her to them, out of his foolish, generous heart. He trusted everyone, that man.\"\n\n\"He did, indeed. Has she bitten anyone?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. Ixaak said Gaviid would spend hours here with her. That boy loved her, and she never once hurt him.\"\n\nThe tattooed man stepped forward, placed a hand around a bar. I brought my beak close, breathed in the scent of his fingers. Honey, tobacco, oil, cypress.\n\n\"A tame dragon,\" he said softly. \"A Great Gold.\"\n\nOne finger moved, timidly touched the curve of my lip.\n\n\"What does she eat? And that's a Remoan collar, yes? Is there a key?\"\n\nThe hooped man shrugged.\n\n\"So many questions,\" he said. \"Sadly, I have no answers.\"\n\n\"Hm. Would Gaviid know?\"\n\n\"More than me.\"\n\n\"Find out about the key. The Beggar's Quarter, you say?\"\n\n\"Last I heard.\"\n\n\"We could just let her go\u2026\"\n\nThe hooped man stared at him. His mouth opened, then closed. He ran a hand over his forehead.\n\n\"That\u2026that would be very easy.\"\n\n\"She died in the karad.\"\n\n\"She died in the karad. Hmm.\"\n\nThey turned to walk away.\n\n\"Well, let me know if the very rich thief Sakariye wants her,\" said the hooped man. \"I need to figure it out before the king's soldiers come back.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said the tattooed man. \"Why don't you buy Sakariye a drink and convince him.\"\n\nAnd Sakariye put an arm around the hooped man's shoulder.\n\n\"He's thirsty.\"\n\nI watched them trudge away over the mountains of sand. I lay my head back down, content with my fate to meet Othorys and have my heart weighed against the scale of truth. I was a good dragon. Kida had said it herself. I was a good dragon.\n\nI was good.\n\nBut Kida wasn't coming back.\n\nTwo days later, a cart rolled up to my cage. It was pulled by a long-horned uru, and I could smell water and dried salt wyrm. I lifted my weary head. The very skilled glass trader and very rich thief called Sakariye slid the bolt open and held both doors open for me. It didn't take much coaxing, and I dragged my aching body from cage to cart. It was small and creaked under my weight, but it contained a barrel of fresh water, and I plunged my face in and drank it dry, barely hearing the latch as the door closed on my life in the bestiary. He chained one back foot to the inside of the cart, and flapped canvas over the sides. As the cart rattled off, I curled around so I could peer out the back and watch the streets of Diddad Wat go by.\n\nBack out towards the palm-lined road, but we veered south this time, cutting through the narrow lanes of the summer town. It was much the same as Wa'ast and I thought of the time I'd escaped with Kida the night the Ophar died. Huts and awnings, market stalls and alleys. Smoked fish rolled in sheets of paprush, and headless wyrms swinging upside down. Incense and oil, tobacco and sweet cakes. The smells told the stories of the busy lives of reeds, and I closed my eyes, content to read it with my nose. We were almost at the end of the town when a new story reached my nostrils, and I opened my eyes. The flies were thick, and the sun was baking but this road was pressed with reeds. They were young and old, and they stood, sat, crawled, bound in tattered linens, and begging at the sides of the road. As we passed, some followed us. One grabbed the bars of my cart, and I shrank back.\n\n\"A golden dragon!\" he cried, and I was surprised to see he had no teeth. \"She has seket in her scales! One touch and I am healed!\"\n\n\"Seket!\" croaked another.\n\n\"Seket!\"\n\n\"Seket!\"\n\nThe cry was taken up and soon, a horde of reeds followed us, their many hands reaching in through the bars, trying to touch me. A whip cracked above their heads, and they shrank back, bloody and wailing.\n\nExcept one.\n\n\"Emay!\" came a thin voice and my heart leapt in my chest.\n\nA young boy, dirty and bruised, hobbled after us through the pressing mob, his crutch flailing like a sobethi tail.\n\n\"You can't take her! She's mine!\"\n\nI pushed up against the bars and called to him.\n\n\"My dragon,\" Gaviid cried again. \"No! Bring her back! She's going to fly me away! We're going to fly! Emay!\"\n\nMy heart ached at the sight of him, moving as fast as he could through the crush of bodies on the road. Suddenly, the crutch slipped and he fell, swallowed up by the crowd in our wake. I called again and again and again, but there was nothing. I laid my head on the floor of the cart and closed my eyes, trying in vain to rid myself of the sight of him, the little boy who wanted to fly, and the Wheel that had crushed him as it turned."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE GLASS ROAD",
                "text": "The rains started the day we left Diddad Wat.\n\nIn all my life, I had never experienced rains such as those in Penet. The goddess of the Gifahn skies, Naret, never wept over her children the way she wept now over this land of Penet, and I wondered if it was because of their lack of dragons.\n\nI wondered many things in those days on the Glass Road, for once again, I was trapped in a cart pulled by an uru. I wondered if this was the same cart as before, when I was unceremoniously brought from the Waterwall to Moradin, and finally, to the bestiary at Diddad Wat. If so, it had grown smaller. I was pressed in on all sides by the bars and the roof and the floor, and changing positions was problematic. I began to understand Netjeh, so big for his per ahmet that dreams were his only escape.\n\nPerhaps the cart had not grown smaller. Perhaps I had grown bigger.\n\nI wondered how long I'd been at the bestiary of Marwethad. Months, yes, but the ringed man had said a year. Long enough to outgrow an uru cart. Long enough for a princess to raise an army. Long enough for Kida to forget.\n\nWe were headed south, I think. Or perhaps west. I couldn't tell anymore, and truth be told, I didn't care. The view outside the bars changed gradually, the flat golden red of Diddad Wat turning into the thirsty foothills of the Glass Road. I overheard Sakariye saying that it was an overland road linking Penet to the Sun Steps of Nabir on the banks of the River Storm. A 'short-cut' across the Wyldelands, he'd called it, but I didn't know what a 'short cut' was, as opposed to a 'long cut', when in fact, he wasn't cutting anything. I only knew that we were nowhere near the River Sand, or the mighty Nahr, and yellow grass went on forever like the dunes of Gifah. Still, in the distance, I could see a range of low mountains just beginning to green with the coming of the rains. I wondered if they were as thirsty as I.\n\nPillars of glass dotted the landscape. They were like those left by the karad in the wardyr's courtyard, and I understood why it was called the Glass Road. Some tall, some short, some jagged, some clear, the pillars clustered in uneven groupings across the plains. I wondered about the strength of winds needed to produce them. Even in the rains, the pillars were surrounded by tents, and I knew there were reeds working to sheer thin slices and chip large slabs. Carts pulled by uru and serat'horns journeyed in all directions, delivering the glass to cities and ports alike.\n\nWe joined a caravan early on, the maab owned by a reed called Kunyane and his wife, Kiin. It was a travelling exhibition, a showcase of jugglers and magicians, contortionists, and exotic beasts. It was a very colourful band, with blue-dyed tents and jewelled lanterns and golden wheels pulled by creatures painted with circles and stripes. Kiin was equally colourful, with tattooes on her brow and chin, hoops around her neck, and hair piled high with wrapped ribbons. I never liked Kiin. She always carried a spear and smelled of saffron, lantern oil and blood. Every morning, she would strike the bars of my cage with her spear and laugh. I think she enjoyed hearing me snarl. She took delight in watching me hiss.\n\nThey talked frequently about the Market of Give and Take. Sakariye kept pressing the idea of taking me to the Sun Steps, that the Nabiri would pay a ransom for the Great Gold of Gifah, but Kunyane and Kiin disagreed vehemently, citing the profit to be made in the selling of cures and seket scales. Frequently, their talks became arguments and the tension in this maab became uncomfortable for all reeds involved. As for me, everything was uncomfortable now and the last thing I wondered was whether dragon souls were weighed the same way reed souls were when we died. When we died, I was certain we'd sink down to the UnderRiver, but what happened to us afterwards? If light enough, were we allowed passage, like the reeds, across the great Salt Sea to the Fields of Ever Spring? If that were the case, I hoped I would see Netjeh again. I hoped I'd see my mother.\n\nAnd so, we stayed on the Glass Road for many days. When we would come upon a settlement or village, the maab would stop, unhitch the uru and circle the carts. Sakariye would pitch a large tent overtop the cart, and while I couldn't see out, conversely, no one could see in. Soon, a crowd would gather and even in the rains, reeds paid to enter the tents to watch the magicians, dancers, contortionists and beasts. They were especially eager for their first glimpse of dragon. I'm sure he got rich, richer than he had been before as a 'very skilled glass trader and a very rich thief,' but as for me, I became a little less 'dragon' each day. Fading, empty, listless, thin. I used to think I was turning to stone but now I knew I was turning to sand.\n\nAt night, once he'd emptied the villagers' pockets, Sakariye would sleep atop my cart, for the ground was rocky and wet and swimming with beetles. Before he'd take to his strange bed, however, he'd light an oil lamp, sit in front of the cage, feed me strips of salt wyrm and talk. He regaled me with stories of the adventures of a man who had a little boy. The boy loved to collect glass rocks, ride urus, and make whistles out of the reeds along the River Sand. There were many adventures, but they always ended the same way, with the little boy losing his footing and getting stuck in the heavy silt of the river until a sobethi freed him with its great, horrible teeth. There would always be tears then, and my heart broke for Sakariye and that little boy. I wondered if his riches eased his sadness or doubled them.\n\nThe nighttime stories reminded me of my early years with Kida and Seb in the drakmet of Wa'ast. It was a pleasant connection, perhaps the only pleasant thing in those weeks on the Glass Road. The collar had become very tight, and breathing was difficult. I didn't care to eat anymore \u2013 it was too difficult to swallow even the salt wyrm that'd I chew into paste. I'd lost the taste for it in my mouth. Even the rains couldn't wash it down, but I could feast on the stories forever.\n\n\"Come, my girl,\" he'd say to me. \"Please eat.\"\n\nAnd he'd hold a sliver of wyrm to my beak, waggle it as if waggling made it any better. Sometimes I would take it, very carefully with my tiny front teeth, and he would touch me then, run his fingers across my scales while I tried to choke down the wyrm.\n\nSometimes, I'd let him stroke my neck, smoothing the stiffening spines and running his thumb across the silver band that cut into my throat.\n\n\"Right here,\" I'd hear him say. \"There's no key, just a click. It would be so easy\u2026\"\n\nHe'd withdraw his hand then.\n\n\"A little closer,\" he'd say. \"Wait until we're a little closer. Then, you'll soar over the Sun Steps and be with your people. And maybe I'll join you and fly over the water's edge. Maybe, I'll get to see my boy again. But my heart is not light, for I am a thief and there is no place for me in the Fields of Ever Spring.\"\n\nI enjoyed those nights because the alternative was misery. Some nights, he would spend the evening with Kunyane, drinking wine and playing bone dice. It was then that Kiin would slip in, smelling of saffron, and dim the oil lamp that cast the tent in a warm glow. Then, she'd lift the tent flap for reeds of her own, collecting gold as they stepped in. They'd laugh when she'd poke me through the bars with the blunt end of her spear, squeal when I'd rage against it, and my chest burned with heat from trapped flame and fury. I longed to burn them, as I'd burned the papers of Karadoum. I longed to bite and tear and rend, but I was more caged than in Diddad Wat, a Great Gold of Gifah reduced to a spectacle for barter and trade.\n\nOne night after her customers had left, Kiin stayed and turned to the cart that had been my prison these last weeks. I growled at her, bringing my head down as low as the cage allowed.\n\n\"That's too small for you, isn't it, dear Nagira,\" she said, poking my face with her spear. \"But don't worry. You won't be there for much longer. The Market of Give and Take is only two days away.\"\n\nShe leaned in. I bared my teeth, almost tasting her flesh in my jaws.\n\n\"Then, we will be rich, and your troubles will be over.\" She smiled, the tattoos stretching across her chin. \"Win, win.\"\n\nAnd with that, she left the tent, but I could still smell the saffron.\n\nFury is a kind of fire. Both start in the belly and rise, burning the chest and tightening the throat before finding release through the mouth. For me, now, in this tiny cage with my leg chained to the cart and the collar squeezing the life from me, both fury and fire came up as acid, rolling across my tongue and dripping between my teeth. The bars sizzled with each drop, and I cocked my head. The acid that was still a weapon, and I was still a dragon. Maybe not a 'good' dragon anymore. The good dragon was a construct, built over my bones like a per ahmet. It was then that I realized that once upon a time, oh so long ago and for only a few short weeks in the nest on the banks of the Nahr, I had been wild.\n\nThe good dragon could be forgotten, along with her vaskar.\n\nI set to work on the bars of the cage.\n\nSakariye returned later that night, staggering into the tent, and barely making it up to the top of the cart. I was angry with him as well, and that night my dreams were filled of saffron and blood.\n\nAnd so, I dreaded the next morning, when the tents were packed away and the urus hitched to the caravan of carts, because it was one day closer to this Market of Give and Take. I didn't know what it was, but it sounded ominous and final and not at all something I wanted to see. Like the royal boat on the river Nahr, the acid burned for only a short time before cooling into wax, and I was making little progress on my attempt to escape this cage. Still, as we rattled along the Glass Road under a canopy of blue stripes, I kept at it, working one section of bars with acid and tooth.\n\nThat evening brought more rain, more reeds, more gold, more spectacle, and it was even longer and louder than before. When the crowds finally died away and Sakariye turned down the oil lamp for the night, both Kunyane and Kiim entered the tent. The reeds held long, narrow jars and the contents smelled the same as Sakariye after an evening spent in their company.\n\n\"Look at these,\" barked Kunyane. \"Glass flasks! I feel like an Ophar!\"\n\n\"Filled with the best beer from Karadoum,\" sang Kiin. \"We traded one of the old uru for it.\"\n\nSakariye clapped his hands.\n\n\"Good trade,\" he said. \"But first, food for me and the dragon.\"\n\n\"Tonight is our last night together,\" said Kunyane. \"Beer is our meal of choice!\"\n\nSakariye grinned.\n\n\"I'll drink to that.\"\n\n\"And besides,\" said Kiin, passing him a flask. \"You're two days from the Sun Steps, and the Storm. She'll be free to eat her fill once you ransom her.\"\n\n\"What's another night without salt wyrm?\" asked Kunyane.\n\n\"She doesn't eat it anyway.\"\n\n\"True, true, true,\" said Sakariye. He lifted the flask to his lips, took a long deep drink, and smiled. \"Good trade.\"\n\n\"The uru was old,\" said Kiin. \"No legs for pulling anymore and not enough meat for a soup.\"\n\nTogether, the three of them climbed to the top of the cart and conversation flowed down like the rains.\n\nI pushed on the bars with my beak.\n\nNothing.\n\nI pushed on them with the top of my head.\n\nNothing.\n\nI opened my mouth and slid my teeth up and down, feeling the iron grate and the bars flake. They tasted sharp on my tongue. Still, I would not be daunted, and I added the acid to the working of my teeth. As the night wore on, the laughter above me grew louder, more unsettling, and at one point, a glass flask tumbled past the bars to shatter on the rain-soaked earth.\n\nMoments later, a body followed, and I raised my head as Kunyane and Kiin climbed down from the roof.\n\n\"He's out,\" said the man, nudging Sakariye with his sandal, but beside him, Kiin pointed.\n\n\"Look,\" she hissed. \"Those bars are almost chewed through!\"\n\nI recoiled into myself, dripping acid through my teeth. I would kill them both. I would eat the smiles from their faces. I would tear the laughter from their throats.\n\nI lunged forward and the cage shuddered at the impact, but Kiin met me, thrusting her spear between the bars into my chest.\n\nHeat. Heat. Fire and heat.\n\nI arched my neck and caught the shaft between my teeth, crunching down with all the force in my aching, starved body. It shattered in half, and I bellowed my fireless fury as the reeds staggered back.\n\nHeat. Heat. Fire and heat. Red changing everything before my eyes.\n\nJust like the arrow in the library of A'Toth.\n\nI recoiled and thrashed against the cage bars.\n\nHeat. Heat. Fire and heat. Red changing everything before my eyes. Cold descending like the rains, not even a dry salt wyrm to live on.\n\nI tasted blood on my tongue but the Wheel rolled on."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE MARKET OF GIVE AND TAKE",
                "text": "In the Book of the Creation of the World, the dragon, Aphorys the Dark, always existed.\n\nHe swam through the black waters, alone and master of all the realms. He was exceedingly pleased with his worlds until one day, he saw something he had never seen before, and that was light. Bewitched, Aphorys swam towards the light only to find himself, reflected in a mirror. Where he was shadow, however, his reflection was light, and he thought she was as beautiful as the fire that burned inside his belly. And so, he named her Selis Anekh, goddess of the Sun. But the moment the words left his mouth, the mirror shattered into a thousand shards and Selis Anekh was released into the worlds, bringing light and life with her as she went.\n\nEven today, she ushers her most beloved creation, Rath'nahr, across the sky in a boat blazing as the sun. Every night, they are pursued by Syth and his dragon twins, the moons Amok and Khamet into the darkness still ruled by Aphorys. If they catch him, they will surely kill him and his goddess dragon. Aphorys will swallow them whole and then, he will swallow himself, becoming Orophys, Dragon of the End. When that happens, all light, and life, will surely end with him.\n\nIn all truth, some days I am Anekh. That day, I was Aphorys.\n\nEvery bump of the road, every rattle of the Wheel, sent stars bursting behind my eyes. The spear was embedded in the hollow between my wing and my neck, in the very same place that the silver arrow had been, and I couldn't move without blood bubbling up on my tongue. I remembered my mother then, and me as a young hatchling, biting at the arrows in her body in my innocence. This was how she died \u2013 terrified and in agony.\n\nMy heart broke anew for the plight of dragons. We were around since before the creation of the world, and yet, slave to the children of Rath'nahr.\n\nMy wing was not the only thing burning that day.\n\nI had not seen Sakariye since his fall from the roof of the cart, and now we rolled along a packed dirt road, worn smooth by the wheels of hundreds of vehicles. I was still covered in canvas, so could see nothing, but even in my weakened condition, I could tell we had entered a city much like Wa'ast or Moradin or Diddad Wat. Reeds were noisy creatures. Their shouts rose over even the bleating of uru and kitchen wyrms, their laughter above the drums of incessant rain.\n\nThey were going to kill me for my scales.\n\nThe rain bounced off tents and awnings and heads and feet. The roads splashed like the whispering Nahr.\n\nThey were going to kill me, a Great Gold of Gifah, daughter of the Sun. They would skin me and sell me off, scale by scale, as a balm for sickness and a cure for disease. They would flay my flesh and grind my bones and lie to make a profit from the suffering and naivet\u00e9 of their own people. Dragons were many things \u2013 noble, grand, godly, proud, but mystical we were not. I was a creature of shakhet milk, not seket. It was absurd. It was futile.\n\nSmells of a market \u2013 smoke, spices, offal, salt.\n\nThey were going to kill me for a lie.\n\nFruit, meat, fish, blood.\n\nNot if I killed them first.\n\nAnd so, I rested on the cart ride into this new city where the Market of Give and Take made its home. I rested and I chewed. I fought against the stabbing pain in my body as I chewed the bars with acid and dagger teeth. I scraped the slate floor of the cart near the bars with my wing claws, blinking back the fire with every movement. My mother, brother Amok, dear Mehen and my little blue striped friend had all died at the ends of blades. I wouldn't succumb to the same fate.\n\nThen again, I was only cargo, a Great Gold of Gifah, a product to be bartered and sold. Even Kida knew that.\n\nIt was afternoon when the rains stopped suddenly. So did the cart, and I knew we were under a roof of some sort. I was grateful. The long road to this market was exhausting, and I was determined to meet my fate.\n\nThe uru bleated as the cart was wheeled into a circle and I could smell incense, oil and fire. Shadows of reeds moved along the canvas, and footsteps crossed a stone floor.\n\n\"Welcome, friends, to the Market of Give and Take.\"\n\nIt was a deep voice with an unfamiliar accent.\n\n\"The business that is done in this particular Market is forbidden, and therefore, has never, nor will ever, happen. Is that agreed upon by all?\"\n\nAnswers of yes all around and I counted eight distinct voices, including that of Kunyane and Kiin. I would know them in a heartbeat. Their voices were, and are, burned into my memory like Shesset's seal on my skin.\n\n\"I am your moderator, Symon of Malao,\" he said, and he staked a torch deep in the ground. \"I neither Give nor Take.\"\n\nAnother voice.\n\n\"Haran Sweet of Mundus,\" he said. \"Take.\"\n\nAnd another.\n\n\"Salaris Pyr of Tabathae. Give and Take.\"\n\n\"Seth Kunyane of the Glass maab, along with Kiin, my partner. Give.\"\n\nAnd so, it went. Soon, each voice had sounded off and they all began to barter with each other in hushed tones. Flasks were opened with a hiss, gold was exchanged with a clink, and laughter rose with incense and oil into a heady mix.\n\n\"Your turn, Seth Kunyane!\" the one called Haran laughed. \"What is a maab performer doing at the Market of Give and Take?\"\n\n\"Have you brought a dancing jaffebuck to sell?\" cried Salaris Pyr.\n\n\"Or a juggling river wraith?\"\n\n\"Ooh, perhaps he has brought us a contortionist?\"\n\nThey murmured and clinked flasks as Kunyane laughed. He stepped over to the cart.\n\nWith dramatic flair, he flung the canvas from the roof and swung a torch towards me. Light kissed my eyes and I flung myself at the bars of the cart, roaring as I never roared before.\n\nTheir screams were satisfying.\n\nThey scrambled back, swinging both spear and sword but Kunyane waved them back.\n\n\"Respect,\" he barked. \"She's a Great Gold of Gifah.\"\n\nTheir spears did not waver, but soon, one man peered closer.\n\n\"I have never seen a dragon,\" he breathed. \"But here, a Great Gold.\"\n\nI lashed my tail, bared my teeth at them all. I would eat their faces but spit out their hearts.\n\n\"She's bleeding,\" said Pyr.\n\n\"She tried to kill me,\" growled Kiin. \"She has the temper of a shrike.\"\n\n\"Is this the one the Gifahn soldiers are searching for?\" asked Symon the moderator.\n\n\"The very one, born and raised in the palace of Thutmen'nahr II, forced to flee with the princess after the coup.\"\n\n\"I heard she brought the wrath of Remus down upon Gifah,\" said Salaris Pyr of Tabathae.\n\n\"Why haven't you turned her in?\" asked another. \"Surely, there is a price for her head.\"\n\n\"She's too valuable for a bounty,\" Kunyane said. \"And I am a man of bountiful good sense.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do with a dragon?\" asked a man in pink silk. \"Can she dance for you?\"\n\n\"What is any of us going to do with a dragon?\" said another. \"We'll have Marwethad's army on us like flies if they find out.\"\n\n\"Why are you selling her?\" asked Symon. \"You should add her to your maab. People would pay to see a dragon.\"\n\n\"Too much work,\" said Haran Sweet. \"Feeding her would cost a fortune, and you never know what the Glass Road brings.\"\n\n\"Seket,\" hissed Kunyane. \"She's worth a fortune in cures.\"\n\nSeveral men nodded, stepped forward with their torches to see me better. I swung my head between them, snarling.\n\n\"Every day she grows, so do her scales,\" said Pyr. \"You're sitting on a lifetime of profit.\"\n\nKunyane snorted.\n\n\"Every day she grows, so do her teeth. What do you know about dragons?\"\n\n\"Do I look Nabiri?\"\n\n\"Too much work,\" agreed another man. \"She's a dangerous creature. Wise men don't gamble with danger.\"\n\n\"Too risky,\" added another. \"Especially with both Marwethad and Beyat the Usurper after her. Turn in the head only and sell the scales.\"\n\nSymon nodded. \"Every single scale will make you a fortune. You'll never need to work again.\"\n\nThey all murmured at this.\n\n\"We all buy her,\" said Sweet. \"The Market pays your price, and we do this very thing. We will live in houses bigger than Marwethad's palace!\"\n\n\"We have the means,\" said Pyr. \"We can kill her in the morning. She's half dead already. It will take days to divide the scales among us.\"\n\n\"What do you say, moderator of the Market?\"\n\nThey all looked to Symon.\n\n\"Name your price, Seth Kunyane of the maab,\" he said. \"The Market gives, and the Market takes.\"\n\nKiin grinned at me in the torchlight. I growled at her, curled my claws on the hard floor of the cage.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nThey turned now as a ninth reed entered the Market. He was tall and square with tattoos on his cheeks and lips.\n\n\"She is not for sale. She is not for trade. She does not belong to Seth Kunyane of the Glass maab, nor his viper of a wife. She belongs to me, gifted by Ixaak of Diddad Wat, the king's wardyr.\"\n\nTwo dozen guards peeled from the shadows thrown by the pillars, swords and spears raised, as the man stepped into the room.\n\n\"Sakariye Tull,\" said Symon and he waved at the guards. \"He is known to me. Let him pass.\"\n\n\"I repeat,\" said Sakariye. \"The dragon is mine, stolen from me along with my cart and my uru, by these thieves and liars.\"\n\nHe swept a hand at Kunyane and Kiin.\n\n\"He is lying, kind moderator,\" said Kiin. \"She was traded to us last night for a cask of summer beer.\"\n\nSakariye continued over to the cart.\n\n\"I know what's in your beer, witch.\"\n\nHe looked at me for a long moment, his dark eyes locking with mine. I was angry. I was fury. I was fire. But I was dying.\n\n\"I can prove that she's mine,\" he said quietly as he rolled up his linen sleeve. \"How many of you have ever touched a dragon?\"\n\nMurmurs from all.\n\n\"Kunyane? Kiin? No?\"\n\n\"You never touch a dragon, fool,\" snapped Kiin. \"They are not kitchen wyrms.\"\n\n\"No,\" said the glass trader and thief. \"They most certainly are not.\"\n\nAnd he raised his hand to the bars. I growled, low and rattling in my chest.\n\n\"What have they done to you?\"\n\nHe gripped a bar with trembling fingers. I stared at them, bared my bloody teeth.\n\n\"The Sun Steps are calling, my girl. My goddess\u2026\"\n\nHe slipped his hand through.\n\nI could bite it clean off, even with the spear.\n\n\"And that collar is far too tight.\"\n\nThe scent of his fingers. Honey, tobacco, oil, cypress.\n\nHe had never hurt me. He had told me stories.\n\nI nudged his fingers with my beak. He was cold where I was hot.\n\nThere was silence for a long moment as Sakariye stroked my muzzle. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to think. My wing claws curled under, and I dropped to the floor of the cart with a rattle in my chest. My head was so heavy, and his hand was a balm.\n\n\"Get these imposters out of here,\" barked Symon. \"Fifty lashes each for lying to the Market of Give and Take.\"\n\nThe guards fell upon them, catching them both by the arms.\n\n\"Wait,\" cried Kiin. \"You can still be rich!\"\n\n\"The Market is still open!\" said Kunyane.\n\n\"Kill the glass trader and then, the dragon.\"\n\n\"We only ask a small fee, being the ones who brought her here.\"\n\n\"We do not kill each other,\" growled Symon. \"Here, we do business.\"\n\n\"Death is good business,\" spat Kiin.\n\n\"Seket is life,\" said Kunyane. \"People need their cures.\"\n\n\"Well?\" asked Symon. \"The offer stands, Sakariye Tull. The Market will make you a rich man.\"\n\n\"I'm already a rich man,\" said Sakariye. \"And I withdraw this false offer. The Market is closed.\"\n\n\"The Market is closed when the Market closes,\" said Sweet. \"And you are not the Market.\"\n\nSakariye reached up to tug at the canvas flap.\n\n\"There are always rules, Haran,\" he said. \"You cannot Take what I do not Give.\"\n\n\"There are rules, thief,\" said Sweet.\n\n\"Name your price and we will Give,\" said Pyr. \"Otherwise, the Market may be closed to you forever.\"\n\n\"Then it's closed forever,\" said Sakariye. \"I'm tired of it anyway. Time to settle down and enjoy my profits. Maybe I'll buy Ixaak's place, start a collection of my own.\"\n\nSweet stepped forward. Three guards followed, their spears gleaming in the torchlight, and I pushed myself to my claws, snarling.\n\n\"Give us the dragon.\"\n\nSakariye glanced up.\n\n\"The matter is ended, Haran.\"\n\n\"Give us the dragon,\" said Pyr, and he too stepped forward.\n\nThe others pressed in. Symon moved to the front of the cart, unhitching the uru with the rattle of cords. I could hear its pitiful moan as it wandered off into the darkness of the temple.\n\n\"Your uru is gone,\" said Symon. \"And if you're wise, you will follow it. But the cart, and its contents, stay.\"\n\n\"You're fools,\" snapped Sakariye. \"You think this is a Remoan collar but you're very wrong. You forget she's a Great Gold, heir to the flame of Rath'nahr and trained by the vizier of Thutmen'nahr II to protect the royal daughter.\"\n\nHe snatched a torch from Haran's hand, swept it from side to side.\n\n\"I was supposed to bring a rassa but he is dead, burnt alive by the breath of this magnificent beast. Ixaak taught me her commands and with one word from me, she will turn you all to ash. Is this how you wish the Market to close? In a glorious blaze of dragonfire and a pathetic puff of ash?\"\n\nI snarled again and the men fell back. I wished I did have my fire. Reeds in the Market burned as easily as water wyrms on the River Sand. I had learned that these last years. My teeth ached with sythstone as acid bubbled up between them, dripped onto the cart's slate floor to sizzle and smoke.\n\n\"He lies!\" barked Kiin. \"She has no fire because of the collar. He told us so himself.\"\n\n\"The Market demands a Take,\" said Sweet. \"Symon, you have no choice.\"\n\n\"I have no choice,\" said Symon, and the guards moved towards my cart. I bellowed at them, threw myself against the bars. They rattled under the impact. I looked down.\n\nSplinters. Finally.\n\nSakariye raised his hand to the cage door bolt.\n\n\"You can try to take her,\" he said. \"But can you do it before I release her? She's young and her scales are strong. You throw one spear and may kill me, but you'll have one live, angry, free dragon\u2014\"\n\nShe was fast, I had to admit. Kiin snatched a spear from the hand of a guard and pitched it across the room. Struck with lethal force, Sakariye staggered backwards before collapsing onto the stone floor with a thud.\n\nThe scent of his fingers. Honey, tobacco, oil, cypress.\n\nI bellowed, acid spraying from my teeth and I flung myself into the bars again.\n\nSmoke, musk, rathstone, acid.\n\nMehen.\n\nFire as a second spear pierced my wing. I rammed the bars again.\n\nGaviid. Josiat. Netjeh.\n\nAnd again. One bar sprang from its mooring.\n\nThe little blue and gold from the Temple complex, and the dragons under harness in the chariot races. Dragons sacrificed for blood and worship and pleasure and sport.\n\nAnd again. Two now, then three.\n\nMy mother killed by arrows. My brothers turned by a prince.\n\nThe Ophar. Shesset. Kida. Betrayers all.\n\nWith a final lunge, the gate shattered, and I spilled out onto the stone floor, a deadly golden coil of teeth and claw and scale and rage. Rising slowly, I unfolded my great golden wings, arched my deadly spines, lashed my long-silent tail. I dropped my head low to the ground and bellowed at them all as both guards and sellers scattered like sand in a windstorm.\n\nAll except Kunyane. He was not as fast as his wife and I lunged at him, catching his leg in my teeth. I whipped him side-to-side like a wyrm until the bones rent from the hip and blood sprayed across the floor.\n\nI barreled forward, leaping onto the fleeing back of Symon the moderator and knocking him face first to the ground. He screamed as my teeth sank into his neck and my back talons shredded the flesh of his buttocks and thighs.\n\nKiin next and I lunged for her but was yanked back to the floor as she fled the temple. Snarling, I turned to look \u2013 the chain on my foot was still attached to the cart. I bit at it, but it was sound and strong and would need many days of acid to work myself free.\n\nThe Market was closed now, the traders gone, with only the pitiful moaning of an uru somewhere in the dark.\n\nI swung my head around, taking in the low, pillared room where I had been Given and Taken back. It looked like a temple, with painted ceilings and no windows and coloured tile on the floor. It was empty now, for even the guards had fled, and I lumbered over to where Sakariye lay in a river of blood.\n\nHe reached a bloody hand for me, and I lowered my beak to breathe in his scent.\n\nHoney, tobacco, oil, cypress.\n\nHis fingers trembled as they slid across my neck.\n\nStories and tears and glass and loss. A little boy and the teeth of a sobeth.\n\nThumb on the edge of the silver band at my throat.\n\nStories. His stories.\n\n\"Go,\" he said. \"Anywhere, my girl, but go.\"\n\nSeb's stories, and Kida's.\n\nThe silver band clicked.\n\nNever mine.\n\nThe collar fell away, along with his hand. Air flooded into my throat, burning with coolness, the muscles weak from constriction. I filled my chest again and again, feeling the crackle of sparks along my teeth.\n\nI looked down. The glass trader and thief was gone. I hoped he would find his way to the boy in the Fields of Ever Spring, but I needed my own story.\n\nI took a step, blinking back the pain shooting from my wing and shoulder.\n\nThe cart yanked behind me. I growled.\n\nI leaned in and took another step. And another.\n\nThe cart had wheels. I made it move.\n\nIn the Market of Give and Take, I lowered my head, stretched out my trembling wings and leapt into the air.\n\nAnd for the first time in my life, the Wheel turned for me."
            },
            {
                "title": "BREAKING THE WHEEL",
                "text": "I could not tell you how difficult it was, for the first time in a year, to fly. Not only fly but fly beneath a low ceiling between pillars of painted stone with a spear in my neck and a wheeled cart behind me.\n\nI dipped, I turned, I spun, and I dodged, my wings stiff and unresponsive. Twice, I hit the pillars as I swept past and both times, suns exploded behind my eyes. But I pushed through with each downbeat, strained with each up. The cart rattled behind me, loosing pieces of wood, slate, iron and spoke against each pillar it struck. Still, I was flying, and I was free, and the Wheel was mine to serve or shatter as I wished.\n\nI saw guards, ran them down with a taloned swipe at their heads. I saw Sweet and Pyr race towards the golden light of the streets and I flattened my spines, streaking towards them like an arrow. I swept overhead and caught them, crushing their heads with my talons, and leaving their bodies like bloody shat in my wake.\n\nThe trailing cart bumped over them like dirt.\n\nFinally, the streets, and I landed between the entry columns, the cart scraping to a halt behind me. I could not fold my wings across my back, so I held them out at my flanks, trembling and stiff. People saw me and screamed. Unlike laughter, I am never confused by their screams. It is a sound with obvious meaning, and the street instantly erupted in chaos. It was like the rough waters of the Nahr as reeds fled the marketplace, scrambling over each other to get out of my way. I bellowed at them, and my rage echoed through the streets. And not only did I bellow, but I released the flames that had been trapped inside me for over a year, since Kida had fastened that cursed band around my throat. I roared and sprayed, swinging my head, first one way, then the other, and all manner of stalls caught fire under my breath. Carts, barrels, awnings, fruit, meat, and awnings burst and blazed, causing light and shadows to dance across the streets. It was early evening, the rains incessant, and the flames sizzled in the downpour. Smoke billowed all around and I lifted my beak, sifting the hundreds of scents for one alone.\n\nI found it.\n\nI snapped my wings and lumbered out into the street.\n\nOne step, two, and I launched skyward, bringing my injured wings down in a powerful stroke, knocking the braziers and fruitstands in their path. Higher and higher I went, each wingstroke causing the spear to bounce and stab. My eyes popped with the strain, but the tang of blood was fire on my tongue, and I met the rain with relish. Beneath me, the shattered cart swung like a bell, smashing stalls and walls, but I stayed low, sweeping through the narrow streets, tracking the one scent that was burned like flame into my mind.\n\nSaffron.\n\nThe streets were a maze, and the moons were rising, but she was a beacon by her scent alone. I ignored the pain when a wing struck a statue, paid no heed when the cart bounced off a stone wall. Below me, reeds shrieked and pointed and ran but the rain felt good against my dry scales, and I longed for the river where I could dive and be free.\n\nBut first, saffron called for blood.\n\nThere, her ribbons flashing in the dark streets, she ran like a plainsbuck, glancing over her shoulder as the cart smashed behind her. I dropped like a stone, catching her arms, and sinking my talons into the flesh at her shoulders. She howled and I beat my wings, carrying both her and the weight of the cart up, up, up above the rooftops. She twisted in my grasp and snagged the shattered spear, sending pain racing through my bones. Beat, beat, went my wings, and I reached down with my beak, snapped my teeth at her thrashing legs. She clutched the spear with both hands, screaming and twisting like a wraithe.\n\nWith the cart and the chain and the reed and the spear, I was losing altitude. My head spun from pain and hunger and weakness. I did the only thing I could do.\n\nI released her.\n\nShe flailed for a moment, clutching the spear, and swinging helplessly above the city. Her weight shifted my balance and I banked to avoid striking the peak of a clay spire. Suddenly, the spear jerked free from my shoulder, taking both flesh and blood as it went, and then, her weight was gone. I did not see her hit the ground.\n\nI was nearing the outskirts of the city now, so I forced myself to climb. The cart was cumbersome, and I was weak, and I couldn't gain the height needed to soar into the clouds. And had it been other circumstances, I'm sure I would have found the city beautiful in its own way. No, from here, I could see the mountains, lush and green in the abundance of rain, and more than this, I could smell the river.\n\nThe river.\n\nOh, how I couldn't wait to skim along the surface, drag my talons in the waves, dive for fish and taunt sobethi along the banks. Perhaps I would find another dragon like Mehen, a fine jungle drake full of life and pride and himself. Perhaps a blue like the Nabiri Bask, ridden by the serious prince of the Skyborn. Or perhaps none, and I lived out my days alone in peace and dignity. There could be worse fates for a Great Gold of Gifah. I was certain I had just escaped all of them.\n\nAlone.\n\nWith the city gone, the land stretched out before me, mountains rising in the distance, glimpses of pink and purple gleaming under the gaze of the moons. The river was there, I knew, the elusive Storm, carving the mountains like a blade. I had never been to mountains. I had never seen the Storm, and I was alone, draining blood with every wingbeat and dragging an unwieldy, crippling cart.\n\nI was flying by instinct now, wing and breath, beat beat beat. Following the scent of the river, wing and breath, beat beat beat. I was a wild dragon now, alone and free and flying in the twilight. My head was light, and thoughts trailed behind me like a chain. Like a broken cart.\n\nI almost didn't see them then, the small, pointed per ahmets of the Glass Road and the Wyldelands. The cart struck one as I flew overhead, shattering the rest of the wood and smashing the stone peak to the ground. I circled back on it, exhausted but awake, and landed on the shorn top, wings wide and aching.\n\nI swung my head, hissing to the rain, barking out a challenge, but there was no reply. I called again and again, with the same result. I was alone so I settled myself, carefully coiling my tail and gingerly folding my wings across my back. I could sleep here for the night. It was high and it was safe, a perfect perch for a dying dragon, but my heart would not settle, and my eyes would not close.\n\nIt was my first night outside the company of reeds.\n\nI nudged the oozing wound under my wing, sprayed it with a film of acid. With the rain still beating down, the acid cooled almost immediately into the thick, gummy wax that had patched up the hole in the river barge. I had saved the reeds then. I had been brave and resourceful and good. I was brave and resourceful still. But good?\n\nGood was a term given me by the reeds, but here, there were no reeds. They had been washed away with the rains, along with the good.\n\nI thought of Sakariye who told me stories by lamplight, his fingers clutching at the bloody spear. I thought of little Gaviid, so brave with his dreams of flying, falling beneath the mob in the crowded street. And Kida, my Kida, my reed, my world, giving me up to follow a princess for a kingdom that had turned its back on us both.\n\nThere was no reed to control me, no reed to direct me, no reed to protect me. I was alone, and it was a strange, unsettling thing. I was in the Wyldelands, alone and free, with the remains of a cart to remind me what I'd lost.\n\nAt least, I thought as I tucked my head beneath my wing, there was no saffron."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "That night, I dreamed of Kida. We were in the palace of the Ophar, sleeping on the divan at the foot of the royal bed. She was weeping as she held me in her arms, and I was struggling, but I didn't know why. She was my reed, my life, my world, and she flicked my beak with her finger. Then, she rapped my head. Then she slapped me.\n\nI opened my eyes.\n\nStones.\n\nI was being pelted with stones.\n\nSometime during the night, the rains had stopped and now, the goddess Selis Anekh was rising with the dawn, turning the clouds pink and orange as she flew. I lifted my head and looked down. There were glass pillars dotting the fields, and at the foot of the per ahmet, a trio of reeds, throwing rocks at me and shouting in a strange tongue.\n\nI growled and pushed up to my feet, the chains rattling around the broken carapace. They bolted but regrouped quickly, scrambling for rocks and chunks of stone. I could have burned them, I realized, but it seemed a cruel and needless thing, so I snapped open the leather of my wings. Blinking back the ache, I launched into the air above them. The remains of the cart and rattling wheels swung dangerously close to their heads as I soared over them, and their shrieks were music to my ears.\n\nI think it was the first time I understood the concept of laughter.\n\nI flew on from there across the greening plains, leaving the per ahmets and glass columns behind. The land was rising, and I could smell water strong on the breeze. I vowed to fly until I reached the river or succumbed to my injuries along the way. And so, I flew by instinct, starving and bloody, dragging a chain of wood and wheels behind me, leaving thought and memory behind with each downward beat of my wings. Beneath me, the land was gold and green and rocky and lush. I had never seen so much green. Gifah was gold and Penet red, so this was a new thing for me. I could not help but think of Mehen, and my heart ached for his proud, wild beauty. I also vowed that, one day I would be as wild as him or I would die trying.\n\nStill, a part of me felt empty, as though I were missing something. As if I were wrong, somehow, less.\n\nAll morning I flew over this new land, rising higher on cooling winds. Beneath me were mountains with trees like a blanket, and valleys torn into the earth as with dragon claws. I saw small villages and single huts, but I kept flying. I didn't miss the company of reeds. What I did miss was their food and my belly had long ceased growling. I'd lived on wyrm for years, learned to exist like Netjeh on as little as a grain of sand. My head was growing lighter, however, and I knew that I could easily die of hunger or thirst before my wounds killed me. So, you can imagine my joy when I saw a herd of uru wandering the rocky hills.\n\nI was not a wild dragon. I didn't know how to hunt but I knew how to fish. Surely, it couldn't be that different.\n\nOne uru grazed alone, a fair distance from the others. It was brown and grey, with four great scaled horns and a spinal ridge that was worthy of a dragon. Also, around its neck, it wore a bell, and I knew this creature belonged to the reeds. I remembered my mother, bringing home flaxen creatures with tender flesh. I remember my brothers and I playing with the bells for days.\n\nI remembered her unseeing eyes, body riddled with arrows and spears.\n\nThe reeds had killed my mother because of a creature with a bell.\n\nThe reeds had killed Mehen because of a creature in a cage.\n\nI had killed a reed who'd smelled of saffron, yet I was still aloft.\n\nAnd so, I lowered my head and dove, feeling the weight fall into my talons. I stretched them wide, eager to catch its ridged spine in my grasp, eager to drop my full weight on its long, curved neck. I was a wild dragon, teeth and talon, scale and claw. I would kill it in a heartbeat, without mercy, without a thought.\n\nIt looked up at me.\n\nIts eyes large and round and brown as new earth, trusting, serving, seeing, fearing. The life of an uru, slave to the reeds.\n\nI couldn't.\n\nI lost my nerve and swept up, forgetting the shattered cart trailing behind. A jerk of chain and crack of bell reminded me, for in an instant, they struck the uru, chain catching around its low neck and snapping upwards as I ascended. I was yanked back to earth, dropping onto the scrub with my talons wide, wings outstretched.\n\nThe creature moaned pitifully as it lay, twisted in chain and wood and wheels, and its forelegs thrashed feebly against the scrub. Nothing else moved, not its tail, not its hind legs, not its heavy-horned head. I launched into the air, flapping once, twice, three times but that was it, for I was tethered to the cart and the cart was tethered to the uru.\n\nI landed again and barked to the wind. The other uru had gathered, watching our fate from a respectable distance and I barked at them too. Pathetic creatures, bound and belled to serve the reeds. Not I. I was wild. I was free and yet, here I was, as bound and belled as they.\n\nI lumbered over to the uru, saw the white of its sad brown eye. It was bigger than a fish, but I was bigger still. I brought my jaws down on its throat, feeling the soft scales of it pelt burst beneath my teeth. Flesh next, tougher than fish, darker, redder, bloodier, and the scent almost blinded me. This was not a fish. I had never killed like this. I had never.\n\nI placed one foot on the creature's flank and pulled my jaws away, bringing red and pink along with them. I tossed my head back, swallowing the mass in one go. I gagged up the flesh and tried again and again. I bit and tore and swallowed and gagged. I had been a year in a Remoan collar. My throat was constricted and tight.\n\nThe urus watched me with sad expectant eyes.\n\nI snarled and snatched a chunk of flesh, tossing it to the back of my throat. I crunched and crushed and chewed, just as I had in the bestiary, just as I had in the cart. I called the acid and felt it sizzle, turning the flesh into liquid and I raised my beak, letting the ooze slide down my throat like oily water.\n\nI did it again and again and again until I'd eaten my fill and my belly was warm with the sun and the uru. I launched into the air once again, brought my wings down with all my strength, but I was still stuck. I twisted, raged, snarled, tugged, there was no moving the dead weight at the end of the chain, and I dropped to the ground once again.\n\nI brought my head down to bite at the heel brace. Nothing. My teeth merely slid off, scraping the metal, and catching my skin. Acid! I called it and it came, scalding its way up my throat and stinging my eyes as I sprayed it across the chain. The metal sizzled and hissed but turned to wax and I remembered it had taken days to weaken the iron bars of the cage. I bit at it again and again and again, wincing as my teeth shredded my own flesh and I shook my head, snorting the taste from my tongue.\n\nI looked up. There were skarabs and sand wyrms scuttling around the carcass, hoping to scavenge an easy meal. The other uru had gone back to grazing and I wondered at that. I was still a deadly predator, a dragon bigger than them. Did they know I was trapped by this infuriating device, or was it the fact that one had died so the others were safe?\n\nThe purchase of life by payment of death. One loss for much life.\n\nI looked down at the brace above my talons, tight and oozing with my own blood.\n\nLoss for life. It seemed the way of things in this world of reeds.\n\nI blinked back the agony as my teeth sank into the flesh above my heel talon, tore through tendon and sinew alike to saw across the hard whiteness of the bone. My head spun as my jaws worked and my blood mixed with that of the uru, staining the scrub grass a familiar Penet red. Skarabs were already at work on the uru, crawling across its flank and skittering between its ribs. Even now, some of them nipped at my tail with their tiny pincers, and I knew that, if I didn't move, I would be bones by midday. I lashed my tail, sending them sailing against the grass and the rocks. Their bodies were snatched up by the sand wyrms, their tiny wings and bobbing heads comical as they gobbled up the beetles that had tried to gobble me.\n\nThe Wheel rolled over all of us, it seemed, making no distinction between wyrm and uru and dragon and reed.\n\nMy jaws struck bone and I almost succumbed to the emptiness of sleep. But the chittering wyrms and skittering skarabs kept me awake, and I attacked my leg with renewed fervor. I had lost all feeling in it now. There was just waves of heat and nausea and the taste of blood until I felt the sickening slide of the brace and then nothing. Nothing at all, but lightness and air. I lurched away from the carcass on two wing claws and one foot, and I pulled my severed leg tight against my belly. I looked back. The abandoned talons were already curling in the bloody grass. The skarabs were already on it.\n\nI leapt into the air, relieved to find no burn from the chain, nor tug from the cart. The wheels were gone, and I flew high, higher than before. The skies spun but I flew, yielding to the wind and the sun and the beat of my wings. I crested hills, and dove through valleys, alternately green and yellow and the grey of scoured stone. I flew for hours, thinking nothing, feeling less, waiting for blood loss to send me crashing to the ground. Soon, a valley stretched below me from horizon to horizon, and in the valley, a ribbon of light. My heart leapt within me at the sight of the river, rushing and furious and white.\n\nThe Storm.\n\nI knew the way that led to Gifah. I could tell by the strange tug inside my breast. Gifah was northwest. Northwest to the Nahr and to Wa'ast, to pillared temples and sun-drenched courts. To order and familiarity and great houses and gold. But it also led to Karadoum and Khamet and the prince who ushered the Fall of the House of Bey. So, as I soared over the valley and felt the cool spray rising from the waters, I raised my wing and angled south. South to freedom and the unknown and to the angry, defiant, untamed spirit rising inside me.\n\nI could not tell you, however, if it was good.\n\nAnd so, I flew south for a day and a night, the moons of the world smiling down on the River Storm and the dragon that flew as though dead.\n\nIt was dawn when I came to the Steps of the Sun."
            },
            {
                "title": "A THOUSAND STEPS",
                "text": "The stories were true, all of them. The Steps of the Sun were dragons.\n\nNine dragons were carved into the mountain, one atop the other, larger than the great statues of Karadoum or those at the temple complex of Neburanna. They were intricately carved, elaborately painted, and unique from each other in form and pose. Gold, silver, lapis, verdigris, cobalt, red, ebony, ivory and copper. Each was glazed in a different colour but the glaze was worn from wind and time. Each was easily the size of Netjeh, if not larger, and their glorious bodies formed a massive stairway from the river to the top. The Storm roared on either side of this stairway, a double waterfall larger than any I had ever seen. Along the crest, a temple spanned the entire breadth of the escarpment.\n\nThey had carved a path for Rath'nahr. He was carried to the heavens on the backs of dragons. I knew it now, and the truth of it was breathtaking.\n\nI could see reeds moving along the stairway, tiny dots clad in white, journeying up the stone ramps that fronted the statues, and I wondered if it took them an entire day to reach the top. Boats and barges were hauled up from the river to the escarpment's edge, and I saw uru pulling great wheels of chain and rope. I remembered similar modifications made when we'd navigated the cascades of the Nahr and the cataracts of the Sand, but no cascade or cataract could rival the sheer size and splendor of this waterwall. It was a fitting nod to the ingenuity of the reeds, the power of the river, and the majesty of dragons.\n\nI continued towards the waterfall, for neither the canyon nor the river went anywhere else but up. The roar grew louder, the spray cooler, and the early morning sun beamed down to almost blind my eyes. I could die now, I thought as I soared closer. I could close my eyes and let the Wheel crush my weary bones, let the fall break my neck, and let the river fill my lungs with water. It would be a fitting end for any dragon, even one as young as I, and I closed my eyes, prepared for the shock that would send me to the Fields of Ever Spring.\n\nSuddenly, I heard a dragon call, and I angled my wing, sweeping up moments before I would have struck the rock. Reeds turned as I swept past, and I unfurled my damaged wings to catch the updraft. When I crested the waterfall, a red drakina rose to greet me. She had a rider on her back.\n\nMy chest ached as I hovered before the temple, for beyond it, was a vast, green land. Mountains had replaced the low hills of yesterday, purple peaks tipped with moons' silver. The River Storm was wide and shining, and morning mist rose from the waters like dragon's breath. And there were dragons, many, many dragons, some with riders, others without, roaming the skies.\n\nNabir.\n\nA blue drake rose to hover next to the red, and then a striped green, all with riders perched on their backs. I should bow, I thought. I should land on the temple wall, spread wide my wings, and lower my head in deference and respect. I should follow them and see what sort of life they would find for me in this strange, new, humbling land. It would be a mercy, and after all I'd been through, mercy was a rare and precious thing.\n\nNo.\n\nThese dragons had reeds on their backs and for a few short, miserable days, I had tasted life out from under the harness of reeds. I would never be caged again.\n\nAnd so, I beat down my wings, arcing into the skies above the trio and soaring over the temple and the waters of the River Storm. The three arced wings in pursuit.\n\nThey were faster than me, and stronger, well fed with intact wings and both feet. I had been caged for almost a year, chained, banded, and fed mash like a hatchling. And yet, they did not catch me, seeming content to flank me at a distance. Like an arrow, we swept along the River Storm, and over the winds, I could hear the reeds shouting to each other. I thought I heard the word 'Gifah', but I didn't care. I kept my head low, eyes fixed, wingtips splashing the surface of the river. To my left, the red drew closer, and I saw the rider with a coil of hemp rope in his hands. I glanced to my right. The same. I felt them closing in like the pincers of a skorpioch.\n\nWith a deep breath, I dove into the water, tucking my wings and lashing my powerful tail side to side. It felt so good to be in the water once more, and my inner lids slid across to protect my eyes from the waves. Silt, weeds, rushes, rock. Bubbles streamed from my nostrils and the rippling current soothed my skin. For a moment, I reveled in the simple pleasure of the river.\n\nIt was a very brief moment.\n\nFor I bent my neck and whipped my tail, circling back the way I had come. I lifted my head and burst from the waves, trailing the water behind me like rain, and I stayed low over the river, casting my eyes around to spy the dragons. I did not, for a minute, think I had lost them. I also knew that I couldn't stay over the water, so I arced a wing away from the bank in the direction of the mountains.\n\nI passed over small boats, and when I reached the far shore, over huts as well. The land was lush and rocky, the air humid and thick, and I rose with the mountains, slipping in and out of clouds that hovered between the peaks. Entire cliffsides were covered in shrubs, and vines strung across canyons like linens in the Ophar's palace. But one thing took my breath away, nearly overwhelming my weary mind, and it was the trees.\n\nI had never seen so many trees. In Gifah, trees were palms or figs, and they were used sporadically for shade and decor. Here, there were trees everywhere, on the mountains and in the valleys, along the river and rising out of the rock. As far as I could see, there were trees, and I swept down over them, sweeping them with my wingtips, marveling at how they moved. It reminded me of Mehen, and I wondered if this had been his home before he'd come to Diddad Wat and me.\n\nThe peaks were high and narrow, ridged like the back of a great dragon covered in all the green. I swept between them, needing to find a place to stop. I knew the trio of dragons was still above me, soaring silhouettes like spots on the sun. I didn't care. I'd been flying for a day and a night. I had taken a spear to the chest and a spear to the wing. I had chewed my foot off for the skarabs and the wyrms. I needed to stop. I needed to rest. I needed help and I needed solitude.\n\nIt wasn't until I saw steps, however, that I arced a wing, and I've since wondered at that. Steps carved into a cliff side, and the steps led up to a black opening like an open mouth. I soared up past the steps, circled around the peak to study the darkness. Flanked with carved pillars and a stone lintel, the opening was wide and rectangular, and I realized it was a temple built into the mountain. Within the darkness, a single light flickered with the promise of warmth and welcome.\n\nI was still drawn to reeds. Still, I chose them to soothe that emptiness inside.\n\nI flew to the opening and leaned back, wings wide, talons reaching for the ledge. I touched down, feet hitting the warm stone \u2013 Foot! Only one, and my bloody heel struck now, sending lights flashing behind my eyes and pain shooting throughout my body like arrows. I pitched forward, scraping chin and breast and belly as I slid before coming to a stop in a tangle of wing and tail and limb. I lay for a long moment, waiting for the waves to subside. They did, leaving pebbles of ache and the throb of my pulse in my throat. A dark silhouette moved towards me.\n\n\"Mother?\"\n\nThe night fell like a hammer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "I dreamed of shakhet milk, rubbed into my skin.\n\nI dreamed of kohl, painted across my eyes.\n\nI dreamed of brands, searing into my thigh, imprinting names of ownership, belonging and service.\n\nAnd I dreamed of Amok, beautiful, dangerous, angry and dead.\n\nDeath. The smell of death and blood and smoke and sharp mustard.\n\nI opened my eyes to the sound of humming.\n\n\"Mother.\"\n\nI raised my head, swung it to see a reed kneeling beside me. He was thin and bony, with a grizzled grey head shaved to the scalp. He was binding my leg in linen, and I growled at him.\n\n\"Rest, dear Selisanaa, mother of the sun,\" he said, and he smiled a toothless smile. \"You must heal. You are safe in Gesse for as long as you need.\"\n\nI noticed his eyes. White and cloudy, like mist over the Nahr at dawn.\n\nHe turned back to my severed limb, ran his boney fingers along the bandages.\n\n\"I've cleaned your injuries here, here, and here\u2026\" He moved his hand along my flank to the shoulder, patted the spear wound on my wing. It was no longer coated in wax. \"And dressed them with a buji poultice. I've sent the niwanii for some palm oil and lemon. They should be back soon.\"\n\nHe moved back towards my thigh, hovered frail fingers over Shesset's brand. I growled and rolled over onto my other flank, lashing my tail as I did so because it hurt, and I was angry.\n\n\"Forgive me, Mother. I am too familiar.\"\n\nHe pushed to his feet and, as I watched him shuffle across the rocks, I swept my gaze around this new, old place. It looked to be a cave turned into a temple, with a rough stone floor and rocky ceiling that sloped low over my rook. The curved walls were carved with images, but unlike the temples of Gifah, there was no paint or colour to be seen. Several iron braziers glowed with coals, lighting the cavern deep into the mountain.\n\nHe shuffled back to me, lowered a deep carved bowl to the floor by my beak.\n\n\"Drink, dear Mother,\" he said, his cloudy eyes watching but not seeing. \"Life begins and ends with the Storm.\"\n\nWater. I dropped my face into the bowl and drank, sucking the water up in sweet streams between my teeth. It flowed over my tongue and down my throat, and I waited for the familiar pinch of the collar as it restricted even fluids passing its dreaded ring.\n\nNo pinch. The collar was gone. I kept forgetting.\n\n\"I wish to see you,\" he said. \"But I cannot with my eyes, only with my hands. So, if you growl again, I will stop.\"\n\nAnd his hand touched me once again, moved across my scales, warm, light and dry like flower newts. He wasn't Kida. He wasn't a vaskar. I should have been angry, but there was peace in his touch. Clearly, I was not as wild as I had hoped.\n\nBesides, the water was very good.\n\n\"I think you have had a strange life, Mother,\" he said quietly. \"You are not a wild dragon, and neither are you Nabiri Skyborn. I've known my share of both, but the world is filled with new and wondrous things. I am merely a speck in the eye of the gods.\"\n\nI finished the water and tipped the bowl with my beak, enjoying the feel of the liquid making its way down the length of my long throat. I remembered Mehen, splashing his beak in the fountain, simply playing as wild dragons do. No, I was not wild, but neither was I caged. It was a strange place to be.\n\nThere was a shadow at the cave's squared mouth, and I growled again.\n\n\"Come up, Kekket,\" said the old reed. \"She's not wild.\"\n\nIt was another reed, a woman this time, middle-aged and rounded, and she stepped up into the temple with caution. She wore bright colours and a hat that held a large basket on the top of her head.\n\n\"Well, she hasn't eaten you yet, M'tawe,\" said the woman. \"Not that there's much on you to eat.\"\n\n\"I've been told I could make a good soup.\"\n\nWith tentative steps, the woman crossed the stone floor, removing the basket and laying it by one of the braziers.\n\n\"I brought the lemon as well,\" she said. \"But the niwanii are afraid to take the stair now if a dragon waits for them at the top.\"\n\n\"Then I'll go hungry for a while. The gods know what is need and what is want.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with her neck?\"\n\n\"I think it was an ill-fitting collar,\" he said. \"It must have been on for months. Years, maybe. It has left its mark.\"\n\nI lifted my head and sniffed the air. Lemon, yes, but meat. Uru, by the scent, and wyrm. My belly rumbled. It had been so long.\n\n\"Bring it here, Kekket,\" said the old reed and he waved the woman over. \"I suspect she's hungry.\"\n\n\"This is your sadaka,\" said Kekket. \"The villagers gather it for the Monk of a Thousand Steps, not a runaway dragon.\"\n\n\"The villagers gather it to keep the Monk of a Thousand Steps alive and in Gesse,\" he said.\n\n\"To keep his wisdom alive and in Gesse,\" she corrected.\n\n\"The Monk has made many mistakes in his life, but this\u2026\" He laid a hand on my neck. \"This is not one of them.\"\n\nThe woman sighed and came closer, finally laying the basket at his feet.\n\n\"I will not weep when she eats you,\" she said.\n\n\"You will laugh.\".\n\nHe plucked a red haunch out from the weave, stretching out his arm and bringing it up to my beak.\n\n\"Eat, Mother,\" he said. \"The people of Gesse keep their oracles well.\"\n\nMeat. Uru meat. I snatched it up, my eyes rolling back in my head as my teeth tore through the muscle and my jaws crunched into the bone. I shook my head, spines snapping against my neck. Eagerly, I crunched and cracked and chewed, throwing back my head and tossing the mangled haunch down like I had in my early days. I waited for the catch and gag of the collar.\n\nBut the haunch went down.\n\nIt hurt all the way, but it went down.\n\nI snapped my beak, once, twice, three times and swung my head to study the monk.\n\n\"I know,\" he said and patted my neck. \"Whatever was there was too tight. I had to battle an evil spirit to relax the muscles. You should feast much better now.\"\n\nI rolled back on my tail, brought my remaining foot up and scratched with my talons. The scales were tender, the spines misshapen, and ridges rose up like mountains over a valley that ringed my throat. But, thanks to Sakariye, there was no collar. It was all coming back.\n\n\"It will take time to heal.\"\n\nSakariye had removed it in the Market of Give and Take. I had killed and eaten an uru on the plains of the Wyldelands. I could feel the sythstone on my teeth.\n\nI rocked forward and called it \u2013 the sigh of the sun, the breath that burned \u2013 and it came, leaping up my throat and bursting into my mouth. I held it for a long moment, feeling the flames lick the roof of my mouth, delighting as they bit my tongue and baked my teeth. I released it then, spraying the rocks and the basket and the simple furnishings and the altar. The monk laughed, the woman shrieked, and I pushed myself to stand, balancing on one foot and wing claws, severed limb tucked up into my flank. I lumbered across the rocky floor, swinging my great wings to use their claws as feet. Walking. I never walked. But here, now, maimed as I was, I walked. It was an awkward lurching gait \u2013 talon, claw, claw, talon, claw, claw. I made it to the wide, square opening and leaned out, clutching the ledge tightly, and I breathed flame once again, spraying the sky and the mist and the mountain and the stair. I filled my chest and breathed again, my tongue scorching, my eyes watering but my heart bursting with joy at the effort.\n\nAnd I bellowed out over the deep valley, rage and heartbreak and sorrow and triumph. I believe it echoed forever.\n\nIn the temple of Gesse and with the Monk of a Thousand Steps, I was free.\n\nI turned and lumbered back to my corner under the low ceiling and the rock. I turned in a circle, cradling my leg close to my body, and dropped to the stone floor, satisfied.\n\nWell, not entirely.\n\nI dropped my head into the charred basket, throwing the last of the meat to the back of my throat and swallowing without chewing. It went down like thorny sobethi, but it went down all the same.\n\nChar. Smoke. Ash. Ember. It was music on my tongue.\n\nI sighed, a deep, rumble that rattled my chest, and sounded like distant thunder. I wrapped my tail around myself and tucked my head under my wing.\n\n\"She will kill us all,\" muttered Kekket, beating the scorched wood with rocks until only wisps of smoke remained.\n\n\"Ah, what a profound exit,\" said the monk.\n\n\"This is not wisdom. It is chaos.\" She straightened and wiped her hands on her multi-coloured skirt. \"Shall we bring more tomorrow? Targa has sacrificed an oryks for you and Gabaya has the first of his new moon plums.\"\n\n\"Please,\" he said. \"And have the niwanii bring sticks and rushes and branches with them when they come.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"For her bed,\" he said. \"Let them know that the Monk of a Thousand Steps has a guest.\"\n\nAnd he smiled.\n\nAs for me, I closed my eyes, savouring the taste of cinders in my mouth and dreaming of the sun."
            },
            {
                "title": "MOTHER",
                "text": "The Gesse Valley was rich and rocky, verdant and fierce, and I explored a little more each day, not willing to go too far and inadvertently trespass on some wild dragon's terrain. I established a small territory for myself, marking cliffs and canopies with acid that sizzled first before turning to wax. I had seen Mehen do it at the fountain in Diddad Wat. I still remembered his scent.\n\nThe skies went on forever, and I marveled at the cold the higher I went. On the tallest mountain, there was white, and it was a most wondrous thing. White and cold, slippery and smooth. It was as if the clouds had come to earth and, while I was a Great Gold with the desert wind in my blood, I loved to settle my scales into the white, feeling the clouds become water. I knew then that rain wasn't created by the goddess Naret weeping for the reeds. In reality, it was sky dragons. The twin moon dragons and Selis Anekh herself, soared through the clouds, churning them into water and raining them down onto the land below. Truly, dragons were the guardians of all life, and I took to calling this mountain, the White Horn. I could see all the world from its heights.\n\nStrangely, I still felt my foot. Even after it had been gone for months, I would sometimes forget and try to land with both, only to stumble awkwardly to the ground. Or I would feel sensations\u2014spasms, cramps, or aches from a limb that no longer existed. It was strange, but my life was strange, so I adapted. I was good that way.\n\nI returned to the monk's cavern each night, where he would share his sadaka, or basket of fruit, meat, and sweet breads. I did not touch the fruit or leafy things. Dragons are not impressed by banais, qale, or moon squash. Gingeh cakes, however, are a different matter entirely. Dragons are much impressed by gingeh cakes.\n\nAt night, he would sit cross-legged beside my nest of sticks and regale me with stories of the lands of Gesse and Nabir. He spoke often about the first dragons that made the world. His stories were different than what I had been told by Seb and Kida, Ixaak and Sakariye, and yet, the words strangely similar. Selisanaa instead of Selis Anekh, mated to Stellores instead of Styl Horys \u2013 sun dragon to lord of the night sky. He spoke of Ankhares, not Ankh Horys, as titan of the seas. When he moved, he left trenches in the oceans so deep that no light could reach, and no fish could live. The monk spoke of Nerisanaa, not Nerys Anekh, as goddess of the earth, and insisted that the Gesse Valley nestled between the ridges of her spine. He called them the Spines of Nerisanaa, her peaks the Seven Sisters, and while dragons are not good at counting, I thought there were far more than seven. He talked about Apophores, the dragon before all things, and Orophores, the dragon after all things. He never spoke of Rath'nahr or Syth, Othorys or Neburanna or any of the Gods of Gifah. In fact, other than the dragons, most of what he believed was different from what Kida had believed, and, also, from what Sakariye believed. I wondered then how much was true, how much was tradition, and how much was story. Reeds loved their stories. I must admit that I loved them too. Perhaps, I was part reed. Perhaps, my time with them had made me so.\n\nThe monk was called M'tawe, and he taught these stories to people that climbed the stair each day. They brought him their sadaka, or offerings, in exchange for his stories. They also sought his wisdom and decisions on matters that ranged from taking a wife, to buying a field, to solving a conflict. It was monotonous and I rarely paid attention. They were all frightened of me until, one day, I unknowingly answered their prayers. One day, I killed a mountain wraith.\n\nWraiths are dangerous beasts with dagger fangs and long, strong, dragon-like bodies. Their legs are tiny, plentiful, and barbed, and they undulate like waves when they move across water, sand, or branches. They are usually found along the banks of rivers but can live in the dunes as well. Here, I would sometimes see them gliding through the treetops of Gesse, snatching up small animals and feasting on the nests of other creatures. I had little experience with wraiths, save the one I'd shared the bestiary with in Diddad Wat. They weren't sobethi, so I had no inclinations about them either way.\n\nOne morning, after I had refused half of the monk's sadaka (it was all tubers, roots, and inedible greens), I lumbered over to the ledge and sprang off, tucking my wings and diving straight down over the reeds who were making the climb. I loved this moment \u2013 the lurch of my belly into my throat, the rush of breath in my chest, cold wind across my eyes. The reeds shrieked and ducked into the rock, and I cruelly admit I loved that as well.\n\nI plunged along the steep mountainside until I lifted my chin ever so slightly. Then, my wings snapped open, catching the wind, and relishing the lurch of my belly at the change. I swept upward then, swimming through the air as though underwater, my tail rising and falling in time with my heart.\n\nClearly, a dragon was meant for both sea and sky.\n\nI soared through the valley, sweeping my gaze along the ravine's moss-covered rock and low-hanging cloud. Even up the steep slopes, a canopy of trees created a blanket of green and I thought of Mehen once again. I'm not sure why. I had known him such a short time, and that spent on opposite sides of a cage, but I was a mature drakina now. More than once, I had thought of taking a mate.\n\nNot yet, I told myself as I swept over thatched-roofed huts and wyrm coops, dipped a wing at the belled uru grazing in thorny pastures. I'd never eat one of these uru. They belonged to reeds of Gesse, and I would respect that. Still, the wild uru that roamed the steppes were fair game for me, and I had hunted more than once on these wild, rugged peaks. Despite their speed and their horns, uru were easy prey for a dragon. They never thought to look up, so dropping down from the skies and snapping their necks offered them a swift, merciful end, and me a thick, tasty meal.\n\nI had also become skilled at 'flushing', in which I'd sweep over the jungle and smack the treetops with my tail as I went by. The canopy would burst with flower newts and crested wyrms, and I would feast as I circled overhead, snapping my jaws into a veritable sea of frightened, flying things.\n\nI swallowed them all in one gulp, intact, whole.\n\nIf a dragon could laugh, this would have been the time.\n\nAnd every day, I flew to the highest ridge of the Seven Sisters, the White Horn, and marveled at the panorama around me. To the west, the wide ribbon of the River Storm that, according to M'tawe, travelled to the lands of the Nabiri Skyborn. To the east and north, a dusting of cloudy white along the tops of the surrounding mountains. Still, the sky above these low clouds was amazing and I was content to sit atop the White Horn and fan my wings in the goddess' sunlight, surveying the Gesse Valley beneath and imagining it the spine of the ancient Nerisanaa, mother to all the earth.\n\nSometimes, I saw dragons.\n\nDragons in the distance, streaking, dancing, hunting, and I watched them with a stabbing heart. Part of me wanted to join them, but it was a move into the unknown. Were dragons creatures of the herd like reeds? Were they solitary like rassa, or familial like sobethi? Or were they content to be near each other, yet distinctly apart, like uru? I had no idea and so I watched, drawn yet wary, mature yet inexperienced in the ways of my own people.\n\nI often wondered if we were a people.\n\nCertainly not like the reeds, whose communal lives took on a life of its own. Towns, cities, temples, and armies, these were things unknown to other creatures, and I often wondered why. Was it their curious hands that allowed them to build, or their ability to communicate that allowed them to exchange ideas in order to build? Dragons had ideas. Dragons had imagination and dreams and hopes and fears, but we did not build. My mother's attempt at a nest of sticks was doomed to fail, while a reed could build a per ahmet of stone to house even the largest of us.\n\nIt was a mystery. Now, I had the freedom to ponder it.\n\nThat morning \u2013 the same morning I had refused the sadaka \u2013 I flew along the valley and heard a cry. I arced a wing and soared between the Seven Sisters, listening for the cry yet again, adjusting my flight to track them. It came from an uru field deep in the Hamabi Gorge. There were only a few families in the Gorge, reeds who struggled to tend their roaming herds. I remembered a man speaking to M'tawe about a pair of mountain wraiths making raids in the night. He had petitioned the monk's prayers and guidance but that was weeks ago, and I hadn't been paying attention because of the gingeh cakes.\n\nI swept down into the gorge, and as I arced over the hilly field, I was surprised at the strange, spiked plants growing out of the rocks. Spikes and spines and barbs and needles \u2013 truly, this was the back of a dragon. Uru had scattered between them, anxious and bleating, and I smelled the copper tang of blood. I circled back once more, spying a carcass, its young neck and limbs twisted awkwardly against its flanks. I landed, wing claws taking my weight as I settled onto the scrub.\n\nI wondered why the carcass was still there. Wraiths hunted to eat, like dragons. So, here was a young uru buck, dead, and no wraith for the eating. I swept my eyes between the spikey trees.\n\nThere was a wraith waiting on the rocks.\n\nHe sat, coiled like a basket, his small eyes shining like glass, mouth grinning with razor-edged teeth. I had no idea why he was waiting. Surely, the young buck had made an easy meal, but he sat, coiled and still, watching me with unblinking eyes.\n\nThere was motion in the high grass, and I saw the writhing coils of another mountain wraith as it wrapped itself around some prey. It was the largest wraith I'd ever seen, more than able to bring down a grown uru. But this time, he had a reed in his grip, a boy no more than ten summers. The powerful jaws were closed around the boy's foot, and the long body was already wrapping around th legs, beginning the relentless process of crushing the life from him as it moved. The boy's mouth was wide, his arms rigid, and in his hand, a stick.\n\nIt was then that I remembered Gaviid, the valiant little reed who walked with a crutch, lost in a crushing mob of sickness and need. I hadn't been able to help Gaviid. I'd never been able to make him fly.\n\nI lumbered forward and lunged, sinking my teeth into the wraith's spine. It tightened its coils, lashed its tail across my eyes, but I held fast, crunching muscle and bone and many tiny scrabbling legs in my teeth. I called the acid into my mouth, flooding the flesh from inside and out. Its scales sizzled and the muscle split but still the creature constricted, and I knew the boy was going to die unless I killed it.\n\nIn the same way that I'd blasted river beetles on the Sand, I called the fire. Tightly, sharply, I burned the flesh between my teeth. Smoke curled up around my beak and I bit down as hard as I could. Suddenly, my jaws snapped together. I shook my head and the coils fell away in two parts. The boy dropped to the scrub, and I sank back, folding one wing across my spine and waited for him to move. He didn't move.\n\nI looked back over to the rock at the base of the spikey tree. The first wraith was gone.\n\nThere was a stab of pain as it sank its grinning mouth into the bones of my bad leg and with a slap of constricting black, the wraith wrapped itself around me like a chain.\n\nI reared back on my tail, scraping the grinning head with my free talons but it did not relent, and its many tiny, barbed legs dug into my scales like hooks. Coiling, wrapping, twisting, crushing, every movement caused its body to contract. I snapped my wings open and rose into the air, but the writhing creature clung fast, and I dropped earthward once more.\n\nHeat, heat, pressure and heat, the wraith wrapped around my bones, its long body coiled across my ribs next. I threw myself to the ground, thrashing with wing and claw as slowly, this creature turned my bones to sand.\n\nI arched my neck and curled into a ball, clamping my jaws over its skull, and calling the flame once again. It rolled up my throat to bathe the head in flame. I smelled burnt flesh as its scales sizzled, but the coils tightened even more. I bathed it's head in fire once again and my jaws crunched down until I tasted blood, salt, and jelly on my tongue. Finally, the many legs quivered, and the coils fell away to roll over and over on itself in the throes of death.\n\nTwo wraiths. Two.\n\nI rolled up onto my talons and swung my head to look for the boy. His eyes still bulged, his limbs were still stiff, and the wraith's jaws still held fast onto the bloody stump that had been his foot. I leaned over, lowered my beak down to breathe him in. There was no scent of death like there had been with Ixaak or Sakariye, so very carefully, I nudged him.\n\nHe drew in a great shuddering breath, and then another. He looked up at me and blinked once, twice, three times.\n\nHe screamed.\n\nI rolled back and snapped my wings wide, leaping into the air with a push from my taloned foot. Beat, beat, beat, my wings carried me up above the field again. I heard voices but I did not look back. I didn't want to see the crushed uru, the bloody wraiths, or the frightened boy whom I had saved.\n\nI flew directly home that day, back to the nest of sticks in the Temple of a Thousand Steps. Several reeds were there, some petitioners and two niwanii who served and cleaned and cooked for the monk. I ignored them all and lumbered across the stone to my nest, climbing up and curling my long body into a tight ball. M'tawe called to me but I tucked my head under my wing. Later that night, he came to me with his basket of food, but I had no appetite. I'm not sure why. Dragons are hungry creatures, and an offering of food is never in vain. Still, I couldn't eat, and I wished to be gone, lost in a world of fish and water and trees and wild.\n\nReeds compromised us.\n\nHe must have sensed something, that monk on the stair, for he sat with me in the nest all night.\n\nThe niwanii came the next morning with another basket and fresh water. I wanted neither and I could hear M'tawe speaking quietly with Kekket. I didn't care. I was good. I had helped. I had killed the pair of wraiths and saved the boy with the stick. For some reason, I wanted them to know that. I wanted their praise or wonder instead of their fear, when in truth, I should have left the nest and the monk and the company of reeds altogether. I'm not sure why I didn't, although, in truth, I think I knew.\n\nI tucked my beak back under my wing and wished for sleep.\n\nLater that afternoon, I heard voices, and when I peered out from under my wing, the temple was filled with reeds. They carried spears decorated with the tufts of uru tails. My heart thudded in my chest. They were still filing up the steep stair and there was no way for me to leave without taking some of them with me. I was trapped once again, caged by the people I had sought to protect.\n\nI pushed to stand, balancing on wing claws and one foot.\n\nTwo men stepped forward, and M'tawe shuffled in between. There was a ripple in the crowd and another figure hobbled through, stick tapping on the stone floor like a claw.\n\nIt was the boy.\n\nI lowered my head and growled, lashing my tail behind me.\n\nI was big enough. I had fire. I could kill them all. Surely, they knew this. Surely, they knew.\n\nThe boy looked me up and down, nodding once. I realized that, like me, his foot was gone at the heel.\n\n\"Yes, abwana,\" he said finally. \"This is the dragon.\"\n\n\"Mother,\" said the monk. \"Selisanaa of the Sun.\"\n\nThe two men stepped aside, and three women approached carrying baskets. They knelt and laid the baskets in front of my nest, and I could smell meat and bone and fish and wyrm.\n\n\"Gold Mother,\" said one of the reeds. \"You have slain the wraiths that have plagued our town, and saved the life of Teti, our young shepherd. We prayed to your master, but it was you who answered our prayers.\"\n\n\"Mother Selisanaa,\" said the other man. \"Stay and bless us with your protection for the length of your days.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mother,\" said the boy, Teti. \"Stay.\"\n\nWith his stick under his arm, he hobbled up to me and reached out trembling fingers. I breathed him in, warm and sticky-sweet and smelling of uru. I pushed my beak into his hand, and he sobbed.\n\n\"Mother,\" they all said, and one by one, they came forward, laying baskets at my claws.\n\n\"Selisanaa of a Thousand Steps.\"\n\nI looked to M'tawe. He was smiling like a slivered moon.\n\nI was no longer a Great Gold of Gifah. I was Mother Selisanaa.\n\nAnd I happily accepted their sadaka. In fact, I think I ate all of it that morning.\n\nFor two days after that, I ate better than the monk. I woke early and left to fly over the valley, soaring over the Valley of Gesse and through the Harambi Gorge. I wove between the Seven Sisters, all the while watching for wraiths and rassas, sobethi and wyrms. And for two nights after that, I came home in the golden light of sunset, as Selisanaa of the Sun blessed me and my land and my people with light.\n\nOn the eve of the third day, there was a dragon waiting for me."
            },
            {
                "title": "BASK, SON OF BASH",
                "text": "I recognized the scent immediately. I had met this dragon before but now, I was wary of both wild and Skyborn alike. I angled a wing and swept up behind the temple's jagged peak. I had come this way so many times before, knew where to perch to peer down at the Thousand Steps that led to the temple and the monk. It was very high, the valley sheered steeply below, and the greens were overshadowing the greys. Still, it was the mountains. Rock was the root of all things.\n\nI landed carefully, my severed limb still causing me strife, but I clutched the edge of the rock face with my wing claws and peered down. I could see the dark shadow of the temple entrance, and at the edge, blue wing claws, regal and folded.\n\nRegal like his rider.\n\nI dove straight down, the wind biting my eyes like teeth. Before the top step, I twisted and clutched the edge with my taloned foot. I spun through the opening, head lowered, and wings spread wide, hissing as I came to rest. The blue shrank back, tail whipping behind him, and I smelled the boil of fire in his throat.\n\n\"Bask, no,\" said a voice and a reed stepped between us, hands up as if to placate. It was Nakosa, son of Dejenai, Prince of Nabir and First of the Skyborn. I remembered him from Penet and the palace of the King.\n\nI bellowed now at the dragon in my lair. Bask the blue, with black spines and hand prints painted in gold across his eyes. He was bold to think he was welcome in my lair. I was the Mother Selisanaa. Me. He had killed no wraiths for the Narambi herders. He had saved no child. This was my temple, my den, my nest. He had no right to be here when I had already staked my claim.\n\nHe flung wide his wings and bellowed back, the membranes of his jaws rippling and red.\n\nNakosa stepped between us, laying a hand on Bask's neck. M'tawe did the same, both hands out, seeing everything with the flats of his palms. It was all I could do not to bite them clean off.\n\n\"This is our Mother Selisanaa, my prince,\" said the monk. \"I've been told she's as gold as the sun.\"\n\n\"Her name is Anekh Sun, daughter of Selis Anekh of the House of Bey.\"\n\nThe prince grinned.\n\n\"I've met her before,\" he said. \"In the palace of King Marwethad. She's a Great Gold of Gifah.\"\n\n\"I wondered,\" said the monk. \"She has a naming brand on her thigh.\"\n\n\"The name of Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II of the House of Bey and appellant to the Throne of Gifah.\" Nakosa tugged at the blue drake's harness, removing it, and setting it on the stone. \"I've met her as well.\"\n\n\"The people of Gesse care nothing for Gifah nor their royalty,\" said the monk. \"But this magnificent creature protects them and, so, they adore her.\"\n\n\"She was bred to be worshipped,\" said Nakosa.\n\nIt was true.\n\nI was tired and wanted to get to my nest but this blue drake was in my way. He had been so much bigger then, so majestic and regal. But I had been young and easily impressed. Now, I was a Mother Goddess, and he wore a rein.\n\nI snapped at him. He snapped at me, flames licking between his teeth. I had my fire. I could breathe the same.\n\n\"The princess will want her back.\"\n\n\"She is a free spirit,\" said the monk. \"She's not mine to give.\"\n\nNakosa slipped the rein from his dragon's jaw.\n\n\"The princess has an army.\"\n\n\"A dragon has the wind.\"\n\nAnd M'tawe turned to me, hands spread wide.\n\n\"Fly, Mother,\" he said. \"You belong to the Scales of Nerisanaa and the Mountains of the Moons.\"\n\nI bellowed and leapt backwards, plummeting straight down, my spines whipped flat against my neck. He was right behind me, this Bask. Bask, the Nabiri Skyborn mount of a prince. I could feel him, his heat, his breath. I could hear the sound his body made as it thundered in the wind at my tail.\n\nI swung my neck and arced a wing, my body curving into the ravine just above the canopy of trees. I leaned forward, eyes narrowed, as I threw everything into my wings. Beat, beat, beat, beat. Faster, stronger, swifter, fiercer. I would lose this tamed blue in the Seven Sisters and wait him out in the Narambi Gorge.\n\nUp and down and in and out I flew, weaving between the great peaks like rushes in the river. The river! I doubled down, flying harder than I had ever flown before. He was still behind me, his breath like fire on my tail. This audacious blue drake thought it was a game and I a prize to be won. My heart leapt when the glimmering ribbon of the River Storm came into view.\n\nI soared over the huts along the riverbank, over the boats and barges and skiffs, ignoring the reeds who raised their hands as I swept overhead. Finally, the water, a great wide stretch of brown and white, churning and wild and fast. He descended to my flank, his wingbeats easily keeping up with mine, and I realized that, while I had grown in both size and wisdom, he was still older and larger and far more experienced. This was a game for him. I was a prize. He was bold but I was smart, a goddess worthy of worship, and before I knew it, I arced downward and plunged into the river.\n\nThick and dark the currents moved, my wings tucking instinctively to my sides, my tail sweeping in powerful strokes as I swam through the waters. Oh, how I'd missed this, the water and the waves, the many sensations that rippled across my scales to cool my seething blood. I could swim like this forever, fishing for starred eels and hunting sobethi. River wraiths, too, now, were my enemies. I would kill them without a thought if I saw them on rock, tree, or riverbank.\n\nFor a brief moment, I forgot about that cocky blue drake. I was simply a creature of the waves and the sea.\n\nJoyfully, I burst up from beneath the surface, spinning water in all directions. The sky was streaked with purples and pinks, and I was the sun, golden and warm and glorious. He was hovering half a bank away, and when he saw me, he trilled a curious call. He beat his wing downward, unhurried and pensive, flying with head low as if studying the water. He reached down with his talons and dragged them across the surface, spraying water across his belly and tail. I headed back upriver, slowly now, allowing him to catch up and I watched him dip his wingtips into the waves, then his chin. Clearly, it was a new thing for him, this river of delight, and I marveled at something so simple. Then again, I had been a Great Gold. He was ridden. Magnificent, yes, but bound to a reed in ways I had never been.\n\nStill, I had been sun to Kida's moon. I could never forget that. Even painful memories lived.\n\nThe moons were rising now, smiling twins in a vast indigo sea. Together, we flew side by side to the boats and the bank and the huts. Back to the ravines and gorges of Gesse, and the jagged peaks of the Seven Sisters. This was my land, and it was filled with wonders. I showed him the cliffsides with the strange spikey trees. I showed him the rocks that crawled with green, and the clouds that hung low like the breath of a dragon. Up, up, up I took him, skimming the Scales of Nerisanaa and onto the steep plains of cooling white. Finally, up to the highest peak, the White Horn, where the air was thin, the land was vast, and the heavens went on forever.\n\nHe was the sky. I was the sun. We were wing to wing when he bit me.\n\nJust a nip at my shoulder but it was enough.\n\nHow dare he? I was Selisanaa and Selis Anekh, mother and goddess rolled into one. I snapped back at him. He bit my neck this time, and I spun in mid-air, snarling and raking his flank with my talons. He threw back his head and bellowed, his voice echoing through the Sisters, but it wasn't fury or pain. It was something else, something I had only become aware of when I met Mehen, when I had tasted the fountain water on his chin.\n\nI bellowed too now, twisting into the drake as we soared through the night skies. My wings battered his, his tail whipped mine and our jaws batted and bit as we spiraled up to the stars. He spun around and sank his teeth into the back of my neck, not piercing but firm, and I marveled at the sensation of his talons on my flanks. I arced backwards, taking us back down to the White Horn and into the deep blanket that crowned her.\n\nWe hit the soft whiteness hard, sinking as if in water, necks and tails entwined like a pair of wraiths. We thrashed together, rolling through the white and crashing across the rock. There was no rider; there was no monk. There was only breath and bellow, couple and claw. Only the stars and the white and the fire in my throat and I released it, spraying flames into the night sky. It turned the white to water and a flood poured down over the rocks. Bask pinned me to the rock with his great weight, and I yielded, his belly moving across my spine like a mountain, his breath scorching my scales like a karad. His teeth daggers against my neck, I bent my head back, mouth wide, flame rolling across my tongue.\n\nI arched my back and welcomed him.\n\nI'm not sure how long we remained on that mountain, but the moons were across the sky when we returned to the Temple of a Thousand Steps. I landed first, crossing the floor to take my nest before he could. The monk yawned and the prince looked up wearily from his place on the rock.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said the monk. \"Kekket will not be happy.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked the prince as he rose to his feet.\n\n\"We'll need sand tomorrow,\" he said. \"Lots of it. Unfortunately, there are many stairs.\"\n\nThe prince shook his head and gathered the harness.\n\n\"I won't take her,\" he said. \"I must tell my father, however, and I can't say what he'll command. But for me, for now, she stays.\"\n\n\"You will make a fine king, Nakosa Skyborn.\"\n\n\"So, you say.\" He grinned, tugging and strapping the leathers into place. \"Until you pay tax.\"\n\nI watched from my nest as the prince swung up onto his mount. It seemed a perfect fit, I thought. The spines dwindled along our necks, and the dip in our shoulder made a perfect resting place for a reed's leg. I wondered at the weight. Bask was large, and the prince was grown. I wondered if I could carry the monk. He was thin as a river rush. I was certain I could.\n\nBask turned and lumbered awkwardly to the temple's edge. His great wings came down and together, they launched over the side, disappearing into the beams of morning sun. The last I saw was the flick of his tail, brash and taunting and showy and gone.\n\n\"Here, Mother,\" said the monk and he set a barrel of water by my wing. \"You'll have a thirst.\"\n\nHe was a very wise reed, and I plunged my face in the barrel, drank deeply the cool, sweet water. I had called much fire tonight. We had both turned the White Horn into a flood, had likely sent some rocks crashing down the mountainside in our wake. I hope I'd crushed some wraiths while doing it.\n\nI finished the water and the monk offered me a gingeh cake, which I also accepted greedily. He patted my neck once, twice, three times before he turned and shuffled back to the bag of dry rushes that served as his bed.\n\nYes, I knew I could carry him.\n\nI could carry Shesset. She was thin and spindly, like the monk.\n\nI tucked my head under my wing.\n\nI could probably carry Kida if she cared enough to try.\n\nSleep came quickly, and that night, I dreamed of blue."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "I realized, as I leapt from the edge of the Thousand Steps, that I had rarely ever touched another dragon.\n\nIt had been so profound to me. The grate of his rough scales, the sting of his talons, the lash of his tail. Even still, other than my brothers, I had never felt the skin of another dragon. All my contact had been with reeds or in a very few instances, prey. I had no experience with my own kind as equal until that night with Bask.\n\nKekket and the niwanii had filled my nest with sand. I didn't know why but it was nice. Cool, first, then warm, and I found myself digging little holes into it with my claws, nudging it into piles with my beak. For some reason, it took me back to that first day when I left the shell and crawled through an eternity of sand to meet the sun and the great, smiling teeth of my mother.\n\nSeveral weeks later, I flew over the valleys and gorges of Gesse, leaving the weaving of the Seven Sisters for another day. With the river in my wake, I angled my wing and headed south.\n\nI had seen glimpses of dragons before, so I rode the air currents for several hours until I caught their scent. For us, the sense of smell was keen, as keen as a reed's vision, and I coursed through the skies \u2013 south, southwest, southeast, now east \u2013 until I caught the trace of dragon spoor.\n\nI leaned into the wind, my wings carrying me further with every beat. Soon, I was farther than I had ever been, past the last wax marker I'd left for myself as Mother of Gesse. I was free and unfettered, with no collar or muzzle or hobble to bind me. It reminded me of the time when I was young, and I flew along the Nahr to the Nameless Sea. That had been an adventure. This? This was terrifying and exhilarating at once.\n\nThe scent of dragons grew stronger, and mixed with that, brimstone. This mountain was different than the Seven Sisters, wider even than the Spines of Nerisanaa. Smoke and cloud billowed from its peak and my heart leapt into my throat. I bent low to the wind, feeling wave after wave of heat as I arced up over green cliffs and black rock, and rounded the smoldering peak. What I saw beneath me shook me to my core.\n\nTruly, it was the Mouth of Aphorys, the door to the underworld where Rath'nahr journeyed each night.\n\nIt was a lake within a lake \u2013 a fiery, boiling, red crater contained within a ring of fresh water. Beautiful, terrible, opposing yet entwined, and steam hissed where they met, creating clouds in the process. Rocks floated in this lake within a lake. Wisps of steam carried up from the surface and currents spun in twisting vortices down, down, down to the black depths.\n\nNo, I thought, not the Mouth of Aphorys. If the Seven Sisters were the spines of the ancient Nerisanaa, then this was her Eye.\n\nThe stench of brimstone was overpowering, and I almost turned away until I noticed the dragons.\n\nThere were nests in the cliffs surrounding the twin lakes, tucked into crevasses and fissures and cracks. There were nests on wide ledges and nests in protruding rocks. There was even a young drake sitting atop one of the floating stones, fanning his wings in the heat.\n\nI perched on the rim, cocked my head to take it all in.\n\nTucked under a cleft in the rock, a red drakina noticed me first and she raised her head and sang. It was a warbling, eerie and beautiful sound, taken up by a grey, and then, a nearby blue. Soon, the entire crater echoed with dragonsong and I spread my wings wide, hoping to catch all of its music with my skin.\n\nA great green drakina landed beside me, wings wide, head low. On the other side, a bronze drake, but he did not land, preferring to beat his wings at me from the air. I knew nothing of dragon ways, nothing of the etiquette of my own people, so I bowed to the drakina, wings also wide, head low but eyes averted, respectful and still. She stretched out her neck and breathed me in, her nostrils warm with the lake's strange heat. The drake dropped to the stone and nudged me from behind. I growled, and he barked shrilly over the crater. Soon, I was surrounded. Blues, greys, greens and reds, nudging and nipping, sniffing and snuffling. Earlier, I had complained about a lack of dragon touch. Now, it was entirely too much.\n\nThe bronze drake shook his spines and nudged me again. This time, I snapped and the green drakina leaned past me and caught his face in her teeth. But it wasn't an attack, and I watched with wonder as she arched her neck and trilled, her green spines alternating between sharp and flat, sharp and flat. Immediately, the drake yielded, relaxing his body and folding his wings. He trilled in response, and she held him down for a long moment before releasing him. He took off, complaining as he disappeared into the crater and a nest tucked deep within the mountain. The drakina barked once, twice, three times and all the dragons that had surrounded me took to the air, returning to their nests and rocks as if nothing had ever happened.\n\nThe drakina remained, however, and she nudged my flank, pushing my branded thigh with her beak. She breathed down to my severed limb, and I watched with curiosity as she paused, mouth open to enhance the scent. It seemed to be an inspection, and I remembered the mornings spent in the drakmet of Seb, poked, prodded, inspected, and cleaned. She nudged my tail next so I lifted it, wondering if she could tell that, only weeks ago, I had been mated. Finally, she snorted and stepped back, folding her great wings across her back.\n\nShe cocked her head at me, and, for a very brief moment, I saw my mother.\n\nThen, she turned and flew off, back down to the crack in the cliff where she lived.\n\nWhere she lived with her eggs and her hatchlings, and I felt odd.\n\nI needed a nest.\n\nI looked around at this strange, wonderful, terrible place.\n\nI had indeed been mated to Bask, son of Bash. I needed a nest for my eggs.\n\nI would have eggs. Soon, I would have hatchlings and Bask would be their sire.\n\nI knew it in my bones.\n\nBut I had no idea what to do. Just like my mother, I had no idea. But there was one thing I did know \u2013 the monk would help me.\n\nI unfurled my wings and leapt from the rim. I was the Mother Goddess and I was going home."
            },
            {
                "title": "OMENS",
                "text": "Several weeks passed before the first egg came, then another day before the second.\n\nThat last week was uncomfortable as the growing eggs pressed into the bones of my hips. I spent days pacing the temple \u2013 laying, sitting, stretching, circling. Kekket and the niwanii had brought dozens of large pitchers filled with sand to the top of the Thousand Steps, moving the sticks to create a centre both deep and soft. It was like the Eye of Nerisanaa, warm sand surrounded by cool sticks, and I found myself digging one pit, then another, as I moved and rolled and moved again.\n\nAll the while, the monk waited on his stool by the brazier, telling stories and talking to the breeze. He was frail, I thought. Frailer than normal. I didn't know how long reeds lived, but his movements were slow, and his breath smelled of bones. Still, he adored me, and I knew I would serve him for the rest of his remaining days.\n\nFinally, there was one morning where I didn't touch the sadaka. I couldn't sit. I could only lie, but even my tail was uncomfortably placed.\n\n\"It's time, Mother,\" said the monk, and he patted my neck.\n\nWith a deep puff of breath, I arched my back, lifted my tail, and shuddered as a wave of pressure rolled down my spine. Then it was gone. I looked behind me to see a large, speckled, leather oval, nestled in the sand.\n\nAn egg. A dragon egg. My dragon egg. Mine.\n\nI needed to bury it deep in the sand, and I turned to dig with my wing claws. It would have been easier had I been able to balance with both back feet, but still, I made do, scraping down to the temple rock with my claws. I nudged the egg until it tumbled into the hollow and I covered it with sand and sticks until it was a mound. I thought a moment, remembering my earliest crawl from the depths, so I levelled the top with my beak for an easier hatch.\n\nNo. It would be cold. I dug a new hole and rolled the egg in, nudged more sand over the shell.\n\nI glanced up. The monk was smiling. Sometimes, I wondered if he could see.\n\nI snorted and stretched out, covering the nest with my long body, and tucking my head under my wing.\n\nI did sleep that night, but a second wave of pressure woke me early. Another egg arrived within minutes, smaller and speckled, and I buried it next to the first. I was hungry after that and ate the contents of two sadaka baskets. Then, I believe I slept for a full day, and when I woke, I thought I'd dreamed it all. I was glad the monk was asleep, for he would have smiled more as I dug and nudged to find the two eggs, safe and whole in the sand.\n\nI coiled myself around the mounds, and I'm sure it was days before I left. Kekket brought me the baskets and was good enough to hold them while I gobbled them down. Once, in my haste, my teeth accidentally crunched through the staves and she barked at me, holding up two rings and some splintered stalks. I grunted and laid my head back down on the sand, rebuked but unapologetic.\n\nThe people of Gesse continued to come, making the long trek up the One Thousand Steps, now thrilled at the thought that their Mother Goddess was truly a mother. They said that dragon eggs were good omens, and I had given them two.\n\nWithin weeks, the baskets could not fill me, so I began to hunt again. It felt good to be soaring over the valley after laying for so long curled up with the eggs. I also resumed my duty of protecting the people and remember vividly the day I swept over the fields of a man named Terek. He grew moon plums and guavas, and sometimes, his wife would bake plum cakes for me. I liked plum cakes, even though the seed gum stuck to my teeth like paste. They were sweet and chewy and not at all green. Nothing green is fit for dragons.\n\nTerek was working in his orchard, and there was a strange, familiar scent on the breeze. From the sky, I could see a shadow stalking towards him through the trees and the tall grass. I dove down like a spear, landing on it, breaking its spine with the force of my weight. This time, it wasn't a wraith but a rassa, with its long fangs and golden hide. I remembered the rassa in Diddad Wat then, felt a strange pang of guilt. It was fleeting, however, and I sprang back up again, its heavy, furred body in my talons. I swept over Terek's head and dropped it to the ground in front of him. He waved at me, and I knew I would have a nice basket of plum cakes within days.\n\nIt was sunset when I returned, to find the monk, weeping. There was a welt on his head and rivers in his eyes. Water was proof that reeds came from the Nahr, but closer to the Nameless Sea where all was salt and fish and sky. I leaned my great face onto his, breathed in the sharpness of the tears and the copper of his blood. I wondered if he had fallen again. He was frail, like a leaf in the dry season.\n\n\"Mother,\" he moaned.\n\nI pushed past him and climbed up onto my nest, dug with my claws into the soft, warm sand. I needed to turn the eggs. I needed to turn them.\n\nI needed to find them.\n\n\"Oh mother\u2026\"\n\nI tore the nest apart. Sticks, stones, sand, bark.\n\n\"Gone,\" he moaned. \"She was a new niwanii. I didn't know her. I didn't know.\"\n\nI spun a tight circle on the mat of wood and rock. My eggs were gone. They weren't in the temple, and I swung around in front of him, and bellowed. I bellowed until my breath pushed him to knees. I bellowed until he clapped his hands over his ears. I bellowed until blood trickled from his nose.\n\nI sprang from the nest, my tail smacking him against the stone wall as I went. But I didn't look back, and I barreled to the mouth of the cave and bellowed again so that my cry echoed long and far over the valley. I breathed deep the twilight for the scent of my eggs, caught it on the breeze east towards the river. I launched into the dark to follow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "It was a community without a name, which was strange because reeds have a need to name things. There is power in a name. Which is why I was Mother Selisanaa the Goddess. I was power and now, I was fury.\n\nIt was night, with only one moon for light and I wondered if it was an omen, too. One moon, one brother. If I could save one egg, even just one, I could rest. Out of my mother's five chicks, only two survived their first year.\n\nSo, I swept over the tall fence that surrounded the village, over the thatched roofs and earthen paths inside. The fence was made of bound tree trunks chiseled to a point and standing on end. It might keep a rassa out, but nothing could stop a dragon. No. Reeds built things to keep us in, but I was done being kept.\n\nI landed with a growl, and stalked through the small town, tail lashing, my footfalls thundering in the quiet night. The scent was almost masked by woodsmoke and ananais oil, but I found the hut near the fence line. It was made of mudbrick and grass, and there was a small, untended garden with withered seedpods by the wood-stick door. I could hear voices from inside, and I crouched low as the door swung open and a woman stepped out.\n\nShe froze.\n\nShe was the one, I recognized her scent from the temple. The scent of egg and monk and fear. She spun on her heel and disappeared back into the hut, screaming furiously from within. A man emerged, spear in hand, and he shook it at me, shouting as if I should be afraid. I was Mother Selisanaa the Goddess, a Great Gold of Gifah. I rose over him, and he jabbed the spear at me, but I caught it and snapped it in my teeth.\n\nI bellowed now, a sound that awoke the entire community and others peered outside their doors before ducking back in again. I bellowed at them as the man disappeared into the hut.\n\n\"It's your fault!\" screamed the woman from inside. \"I told you she would know! I told you we would die!\"\n\nI could hear the sound of a table being dragged to block the door. As if a table could stop a dragon. As if a door could.\n\nI snapped at the roof with my great jaws, ripped it off like the tines of Kekket's basket. Their screams rose into the night, echoed now by the shouting of the villagers. They had found their courage, but I had found my eggs, and I stepped my wingclaw onto the mud brick wall, buckling it like wet sand. The couple staggered out onto the path, each carrying a satchel, and they turned to run. I swung my head to follow.\n\nSuddenly, my hip stung with the bite of skorpiochs. I swung around to see a villager holding a spear in his hand.\n\n\"Go home, Mother!\" he shouted. \"Leave and we will save your eggs and bring them back to the monk. But leave!\"\n\nMy blood ran down the shaft, and I roared at him. He fled down the dirt path, and I roared again, shaking my head, and blinking away the needles. More villagers hurled spears at me, so I pulled my wings down in a great, earth-scattering stroke and leapt up into the sky. Up, up, up I went, even as spears were flung towards me from below. I winced as one, then another pierced my flank and thigh. Most bounced off my leathery hide and rained back down on them like Gifahn arrows.\n\nI found the scent in a heartbeat and flew after the pair as they raced towards the gate and the jungle that lay beyond. Several villagers ran after them, some with spears, others with torches. I didn't care. I wanted my eggs. I swept down on the man and caught him in my talons. He screamed as I carried him up, just like Kiin and the Market of Give and Take, and he dropped the satchel. Far below, the woman caught it and bolted down the hard dirt path towards the fence, the gate, and the jungle beyond.\n\nI flew over her and dropped him on the path in front of her. Just like Kiin, I did not care to hear the crunch.\n\nThe woman skidded to a halt.\n\n\"Mak?\"\n\nI swept down to block her path, landing with a thud that shook the trees. A crowd was forming around the man on the ground. I could smell his blood as the woman dropped to her knees beside him.\n\n\"Mak, no.\"\n\n\"What have you done, Ejjae?\" cried a villager. \"How do you anger the Mother?\"\n\n\"The eggs are worth more than her scales!\" said another. \"Mak said he could sell them up river, and we would all be rich!\"\n\nI growled now, lashed my tail furiously. The flames rolled on my tongue, licked the roof of my mouth, danced between my teeth.\n\n\"Give her the eggs, Ejjae,\" said another. \"Don't be a fool.\"\n\n\"He's dead,\" moaned the woman called Ejjae. \"The dragon has killed my husband.\"\n\n\"Just give her the eggs,\" said a man.\n\n\"Get her out of our village,\" said another.\n\n\"Do you know how hard it is, carrying the sadaka for a dragon up those steps?\" She looked up. Her eyes were filled like the Weeping. \"Can you imagine three? My mother breaks a little every day with such heavy baskets.\"\n\nOne by one, the villagers moved aside as I lumbered towards the woman. I towered over her now, my breath rumbling as she clutched the satchels to her chest.\n\n\"People are wrong. The monk is wrong. A dragon is not a good omen.\"\n\nShe met my eyes, her own fierce and proud, raised the satchels over her head.\n\n\"Ejjae, no!\"\n\n\"A dragon brings only death,\" said the one called Ejjae. \"Go back to Gifah where you belong.\"\n\nAnd with a roar of her own, she smashed the satchels into the dirt.\n\nI heard nothing. I felt nothing. I was a dragon turned to stone.\n\nWith a deep breath, I set her ablaze.\n\nShe twisted on the hard-packed road, flames catching her hair and her clothes and her skin. The villagers screamed and raced for water, but it was too late for Ejjae. She was a twitching husk in a matter of heartbeats, alongside her husband broken on the road. I bent down to gather the satchels in my teeth, tossed them back onto my tongue and leapt into the night sky. I noticed the cold wind now, and the black sky. The lone moon and the hollow valleys. I tried not to taste the bitter salt ooze through the weave of the sacks, tried not to imagine the sliding shells over dewy wet bodies. I could save them. I was their mother.\n\nThe temple was dark when I returned, no candle or oil lamp, no brazier or stories to warm me.\n\n\"Mother\u2026\" His voice was thin, but I was busy.\n\nI lumbered over to my nest, dug and scraped, scraped and dug as I tried to reassemble what I had torn apart earlier. When I had finished, I rolled the satchels from my tongue onto the sand. They were both wet and dark, with a sharp, oily scent, but I had no hands, no miraculous reed fingers by which to open them. I trilled and turned to nudge the monk.\n\n\"Mother,\" he said again.\n\nHe clasped my face in both of his hands, leaned his forehead against mine but I pulled my head to the nest. He came with it, released me to pat the sticks, stones, and sand with his boney hands. They found the satchels and slowly, he worked the leather strings until the mouth of the bags opened. He worked them gently, until the shells slid out.\n\nTwo chicks, blue with gold stripes. I held my breath as one little head curled weakly in the sand. They were not ready. I knew this somehow. They were not fully formed, and the splitting of the shell and loss of the slime inside brought them to a slow, sticky end. I climbed up onto the nest, coiled my long body around the two little shapes. Reached down to breathe warmth over them both, trilling and cooing and pleading like a distant wind. The curling one opened its mouth, and I saw its tiny teeth and pink tongue. Its eyes were open, even as it stilled.\n\nI swung my head to the monk.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Mother,\" he said, and his hands trembled as he crawled over my limbs into the nest. \"I should have read the leaves. I have failed us all.\"\n\nI whined as he slid his frail body between my wings and my flank, but he was light as a dry reed. I barely felt him nestle in. I whined again, but it was plaintive and sad as everything that was in me broke that night.\n\nI lowered my head over my chicks.\n\nBad omens. I was a bad omen.\n\nMy birth had brought about the death of my mother and brothers, the emtombment of Netjeh and the downfall of the Ophar. My life had been traded for Josiat's and Ixaak's and Gaviid's and Sakariye's. In my lifetime, Mehen and the little blues and all the dragons of the Temple of Neburanna. Great Golds were not good omens. Great Golds were bad.\n\nI did not sleep, fearing the step of Kekket or the niwanii. They would come and they would know. I had burned a woman tonight. I had dropped a man from the sky. And I had blamed the monk, had roared at him until he burst, my fury all but snuffing his breath like a candle. I was not a good dragon.\n\nKekket did come that morning, but early. She was frantic and worried and let out a long wail when she found us. I didn't raise my head. I didn't move. My chicks were cold under my chin, the monk was cold against my flank. She lowered her basket and dropped to her knees. I waited for her shouts, for her curses, for her strong fists to beat my face and neck and beak. But instead, she lifted her head and sang.\n\n\u2003\"Mother in the Temple of a Thousand Steps,\n\n\u2003Monk of the Temple breathe his last.\n\n\u2003Spirits soar on the wings of gold,\n\n\u2003Mother in the Temple of a Thousand Steps.\"\n\nI raised my head and joined her.\n\nMy song slid up and down the dragon scale, sometimes sharp, other times round. The temple echoed with our song, and I admit, I sang louder than I normally would in the company of reeds. I sang long and loud, and continued, even after Kekket left that evening. I sang it all night, leaving the nest to stare out over the valley, sending my lament through the Seven Sisters and the Spines of Nerisanaa and beyond.\n\nI returned to the nest at dawn, curling myself around the three dead souls, and giving myself over to a bone-weary sleep.\n\nBy noon, many reeds had made the trek up the mountain. Some were from the town, some from the river. There was no sadaka that day, but I'm not sure I would have eaten. I was weary. Weary of this life with reeds and hope, weary of this life with cages and spears. Go back to Gifah where you belong, Ejjae had said. But she was wrong. But did I belong in Gifah? I had lost my mother, my home, my reed, my position, my friends, my clutch, my future. I did not want to hear the whispers of those who wanted me dead, nor those of the ones who wanted me gone. Without the monk, I was untethered, unpredictable, dangerous. Without the monk, I should be gone.\n\nAn argument broke out later that day, as the spearman from the village recounted the tale of me breaking down the house and burning the pair. They didn't care that my eggs had been stolen, just that I had burned a woman while she yet lived. I would have burned them all at that moment if I had cared to. If I cared.\n\nBut Kekket was strong, and she chased them all out. She told the niwanii that she needed to plan M'tawe's journey to the afterlife. It needed to be done right, and I allowed her to move his stiff, dry body out of the nest. She spent the rest of that day wrapping him in strips of leechy leaves, then linen, then wool. They broke his bones easily and curled him into a basked the size of my foot. They poured oil on him and set candles all around, sang songs well into the night. Then, they left, and I was alone with the dead, until the dragons came."
            },
            {
                "title": "SKYSONG AND SKYBORN",
                "text": "It was very late when the dragons came.\n\nI believe I had slept, but at one point, heard the sound of talons on rock. I opened my eyes, to see a great, green face, flickering in the light thrown by the candles. I lifted my head. It was the drakina from the Eye. Behind her, a dozen dragons here in the Temple of a Thousand Steps.\n\nShe lowered her head, breathed in the scent of my dead chicks, and trilled at me. It was sad, it was heartbreaking, but I had no will to trill back. I had no will at all, and I watched with disinterest as the others spread out into the temple, pushing, sniffing, nipping, exploring. A young red nudged the basket of the monk, but it creaked, and he backed up swiftly and launched himself out of the cave. A blue nibbled the water bowl, tipping it and spilling water across the floor. Another joined him in the splashing. A small brown sprang onto a wooden chair, which teetered for a moment before shattering under his weight, while another nudged one of the monk's candles, fascinated by the flame. It tipped over and rolled dangerously close to the basket, and the wick flickered against the oil-damp weave.\n\nThe green drakina turned and barked, and one by one, they left the temple until only she, I, and an old grey drake were left inside. She ran her beak along my cheek, nibbling and nipping with her tiny front teeth. There was no intimidation, and once again, I was reminded of my mother. I was as inexperienced as she had been. The drakina snorted and turned, padding over to the grey. He was perched on the edge of the temple, wings folded majestically across his back. She did the same, settling in the entrance, front wingclaws gripping the ledge.\n\nAnd then, she sang. Starting low and rising in pitch, it slid up, then down in tenor, sometimes sharp, other times deep. It took me back to the Ophar's palace and the nights of harp, sistrum and cymbal. The drakina's lament was picked up by the drake, then another outside, then another, and soon, the entire valley of Gesse was echoing with dragonsong. They were making music for me.\n\nI rose from my nest to perch beside them. I didn't sing but I marveled as the night sky was filled with dragons dancing.\n\nSweeping, soaring, swirling, spinning, they sang, and they danced over the Thousand Steps until the moons joined in, peering out from behind the night clouds to shine their light on the spectacle. The drakes, proud and preening, tossed their heads and beat their wings as they spun about the sky. The drakinas, regal and strong, chased each other's tails and soared up and down the steep mountainside, catching tiny rocks and sending them bouncing down the stair. Even some of the hatchlings were flying now, and I watched them try out their young wings, finding their balance and learning their rhythms. I remembered. It had been so different for me on that day when Shesset threw me from the roof.\n\nDown below, I could see lanterns flicker on in houses and farms, towns and villages all throughout the valley, and I wondered what those poor reeds thought. I wondered if Kekket was standing down below, hands on hips, cursing the monk who had allowed me to stay.\n\nThey sang for most of the night, and it was only when Selis Anekh chased the moons from the sky that they left. Just a flick of a wing and one by one, they were gone. The grey drake next, and finally, the drakina. She rose and scraped her talons across the rock before launching herself into the valley. I never saw her again, but I know that, somehow, she had saved me.\n\nI returned to my nest, nudged the chicks one last time. They would never sing like these fine dragons. They would never soar. My mother would have eaten them. She ate the green that died early on. So, I did too, snatching up their tiny bodies and their leathery shells in my jaws, and swallowing them whole, returning them inside where they had begun.\n\nI padded over to the basket and the monk. The monk I did not eat, although I think he would have wanted it. The oil had soaked his wool and linen and leaves, and there was a thin wisp of smoke rising from the bottom, where the candle had smoldered for hours. I would miss him. His kindness and his humour, his stories and his boney hands. I was glad to have been with him at his death, but I wished he could've lived forever. But he wasn't a dragon. He was only a reed, frail and easily bent by the wind. I wished him good life in the Fields of Ever Spring.\n\nI turned and leapt off the edge, soaring down the One Thousand Steps for the very last time. I didn't see the wool catch, nor did I know that the temple burned that day. His one last story met a lonely, fiery, and dramatic end. Many times later in my life, I wondered if, perhaps, he was more dragon than I."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "I didn't know where I was going, I didn't know why I flew. I knew there would be a place for me at the smoking mountain and the Eye of Nerisanaa, if, and when I needed, but something drew me back to the water. The River Storm was healing. The River Storm was life. Fish and rushing currents, deep blue and soothing mud. Even though it was crowded with reeds and boats and cities, I hoped for something else along its rushing whitewater banks.\n\nSo, I soared through the valley of Gesse, as Rath'nahr lifted his hand to the dawn sky, streaking the world with pink and yellow. The land below was thirsty, and I knew the rains would be coming soon. I settled into a contented rhythm. Beat, beat, beat of my wings, the low, smooth undulation of my neck and tail as my serpentine body soared through the skies. It was efficient and tireless, and I knew I could fly like this for days. Dragons are made to fly. It never grows wearisome or burdensome. In the skies, we never need strive.\n\nSo, it was with a strange sense of contentment that I saw the River Storm, and his shining ribbon of brown. I lowered my head and narrowed my eyes, wings beating in time with my heart. Over the dry riverbanks and fences, the fishing huts and the border of yellow rushes that lined the shores. Once the rains came, the rushes would be submerged, and the river would swell to the fishing huts and the fences. The Storm was life, the same way the Nahr was life, and I wondered at the dragon god of the water. Ankh Horus in Gifah, Ankhares in Gesse. I was the daughter of Selis Anekh, but I wondered if my father had been him.\n\nI dove into the water, like that night with Bask, and tucked my wings against my flanks as I sped through the currents. Side to side went my tail, and my inner lid rose to cover my eyes. I loved the world beneath the waves. The bubbles and the brown, the silt from a land I did not yet know. I remembered both Kida and Shesset spoke of Nabir and the Kingdom of the Skyborn. Bask had come from Nabir. Bask, the proud, boastful blue, with a gold hand painted over each eye.\n\nI rose to the surface, blew out my breath and deeply inhaled another, but this time, did not leave the water. I began to swim like the sobethi, low and flat, with only eyes and nostrils out of the waves. At least, that's what I told myself. I'm sure my backswept horns and neck full of spines announced the fact that I was no sobethi to all the reeds who watched from the boats.\n\nIt didn't matter. I used to be a creature of stories, of reckless imagination, of dreams. I could be again, if I tried.\n\nAnd so, I swam upriver for days, navigating the rocks and overcoming the strong currents with my powerful tail. I fished at will, slating my hunger on the sweetest of flesh. I slept in the rushes, warm and buoyed, and groomed by the pics and white flower newts that lived by the banks. The reed people left me alone, and I was grateful for that. And for a time, I was content.\n\nOne day, as I swam upriver, I tasted a new silt in the water. It was rich and mixed with clouds and I knew there would be a waterwall soon. The banks of the River Storm were rising again, with escarpments of red stone and embankments on either side. The sky overhead constricted as the river cut through new mountains until the sky was the ribbon and the river was all. By noon, I heard it, growing from a hiss to a hum to a roar, and by evening I saw it. Not as tall as the Steps of the Sun, but tall nonetheless, it rained five plumes of white down to the river below.\n\nJust like at the Steps of the Sun, there were many boats and skiffs, barges and sunsails being pulled up by uru and wheels. Just like at the Steps of the Sun, there was a temple built across the crest, beautifully carved limestone atop massive stone supports. The waterwalls flowed around and between these supports, and I couldn't imagine the force of water that would rush over the edge come rainy season. And sitting atop the carved lintel, dragons.\n\nI pushed out of the water then, beat my wings to rid them of the spray, and they saw me. I rose, spinning and soaring and daring these poor saddled Skyborn to stop me. They trumpeted the alarm, but I rose up, up, up to the top of the waterwall, and I soared over the temple to the land beyond. And I marveled at that land. It was miraculous.\n\nAtop the waterwall sat a lake as large as a sea. It was surrounded on all sides by mountains, and along the banks, a city unlike any I'd ever seen. The buildings were tall and spired, with circular walls and clay roofs. The streets were crowded and colourful and the scents of the markets wafted over the smell of fish. In the centre of the lake was an island, and on the island was a palace much like the one I'd grown up with in Gifah. Bridges ran to and from the island, and along the roads, carts were pulled by both uru and plainsbuck.\n\nBut the skies were filled with dragons.\n\nRed dragons, green dragons, blue dragons, grey. Some flew alone, others in pairs, and without exception, they were saddled, ridden by reeds like Nakosa and his father, and my heart skipped at the knowledge that I had found the fabled kingdom of Nabir.\n\nA pair flew in above me; another pair fell in at my tail. I was unbridled, unsaddled, unridden and free, and I wondered if this was allowed in Nabir, or if I was breaking yet another unspoken rule of reeds. I dipped my head, aiming for the lake, when a trio appeared beneath me, and another appeared at my flanks. I was effectively surrounded by dragons, but I did not fear, nor did I rage. I was a Great Gold of Gifah. Captivity was not an option and I dared them to take me with net or spear.\n\nOur strange company turned and shepherded me towards the palace on the lake. I let them, angling my wing, and dropping my head. One of the riders blew a curled horn as we circled the palace, and I could see reeds scrambling down below. The palace was large with many levels, domed spires in some areas and others open to the evening sky. From one of those open courtyards, a blue flew out to greet us. He had gold hands painted across his eyes.\n\nIt was Bask, son of Bash, and this time, he wore no rein."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Prince Nakosa made a special arrangement for me to stay in a place he called the Pike and share a stall with Bask. I was not Skyborn. I had never worn a rein, so I knew this was an accommodation because of my past. He had met me as a Great Gold. He had met me again as a Mother Goddess. I'm quite certain that my noble ties swayed any perceptions he may have had to my benefit, so I was appeased.\n\nAnd I am happy to say that King Dejenai adored me.\n\nI spent many days in the throne room, along with his great grey, Anshassar. It reminded me of the temples of Gifah, with high pillared ceilings, columns and tiles and statues of dragons, rassa, sobethi and men. Only here, there was little gold. All was ebony and oiled wood, palms and carved cacaciar. Dejenai would feed me delicacies made for his court. He wasn't supposed to, but sometimes he would pretend to slip. An eel roe cake would fly in my direction, and I would snap it out of the air before it touched the floor. I would grin at Anshassar, then, with eel roe paste stuck to my teeth. He would grumble at me, not because he was jealous, but because he was old. Not as old as Netjeh, but still, grumpy and slowing, and he growled every time I came near.\n\nI could be the King's dragon, I thought to myself. I wouldn't growl or grump.\n\nThe days we spent touring the city, flying over rooftop and mountains, lakeshore and bridges. When Nakosa rode, we would fly over the temple and the waterwall, and I loved to gaze down to the bottom where reflected colours arced like ribbons in the spray. When Nakosa didn't ride, we would fly up, up, up to the clouds, chasing the sun and trying to spy Selis Anekh and the sky-boat. It was cold up there, and I wondered how Rath'nahr could live, when the reeds so loved their candles and fire.\n\nBask had a stone-hewn stall in the Pike, one of the mountains overlooking the city. All the Skyborn did, and again, in the same way as the Temple of a Thousand Steps, a connecting web of wooden stairs wound its way across the cliff face. Dragons are not good at counting, and I lost count of the stalls after ten and ten and ten and ten. But there were more, and I knew that in the ranges beyond, there were even more. We shared that stall, Bask and I, but I refused to mate with him. The fear of losing eggs was too fresh, the ache too deep. Fortunately, he didn't try, and I found myself enjoying his preening and posturing. The others were another story, entirely.\n\nIn fact, the Skyborn drakes were relentless.\n\nSince I was a new drakina without a clutch, I was the focus of their attentions, and from sunset to sunrise, I had a procession of suitors. They would flap all around my ledge, trying to catch my attention, trying to draw my eye. I wasn't interested. I had been imprinted in my youth by Netjeh the Noble, and Mehen the Magnificent. I had been mated by Bask, son of Bash, the Skyborn mount of a Nabiri prince. Clearly, the call of a clutch wasn't as strong in me as my pride. I was Great Gold and would be until I died.\n\nI was with them for months, when, one day, a barge was raised over the waterwall and onto the lake. There was something about it that I remembered, and I caught a scent that was at once familiar and strange. It was evening, then, when the curled horn blew, summoning Bask to the palace of the King. As was our new custom, I flew with him. My heart thudded in my chest when I spied the barge, anchored off the island's rocky shore, for carried in the boats and the docks and the ground of the palace, was the Golden Standard of Gifah.\n\nGifah. A barge from Gifah. My world was about to change.\n\nThere was an open terrace on the roof, where important, visiting dragons of important, visiting men, stayed. I often found myself here. The terrace was warm and sunny, or warm and rainy, and music would float up on the breeze from the courts below. It also offered a perfect view of the king's Court of Laws, where he entertained diplomats from all kingdoms of the world. Bask and I landed together, and he leaned over to watch the world of reeds play out below him. I stayed back, afraid of what I would see.\n\nHe swung his blue head, the golden handprint flashing in the sun. He trilled at me. I pressed myself low to the floor, flattened my spines, and slunk forward. Clutching the terrace ledge with my wing claws, I peered over the side.\n\nThey were from Gifah. I recognized the clothing. White sheaths, golden collars, flat sandals, transparent gauze. Soldiers were clad with breastplate and helm, but I noted no spear or shield, no sword or flail. No one would be allowed to bear arms in the Court of Laws or the presence of the king. Still, Anshassar coiled behind the king's large chair, and I wondered if the Ophar would have died had Netjeh been so near. I would always be in the room if I were ever a king's dragon.\n\nDejenai sat on the wide, carved seat, looking regal and impressive as the procession filed in. Nakosa stood at his side, hands clasped behind his back. Both king and prince wore patterns of black and gold, and Dejenai wore a headpiece of dragonscale and horn. My chest swelled at the sight. The Skyborn of Nabir. I was honoured to be with them.\n\nTwo men stepped forward carrying tall earthen vats. They laid them at the foot of the throne and stepped back into the procession. A woman stepped forward next, dropping to her knees, and lowering her eyes.\n\n\"Fermented shakhet milk,\" she said, indicating the first vat with the tip of a hand. \"From King Marwethad's divine flock.\"\n\nShe waved at the other, but I'm certain I didn't see.\n\n\"And Desert Plum Wine from the lost vineyards of Suradan on the Glass Road.\"\n\nI'm not sure I remembered to breathe.\n\n\"I bring greetings from Queen Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II and Glory of the House of Bey.\"\n\n\"Rise, daughter of Rath'nahr, and emissary of the Land of Gifah,\" said the king.\n\nKida smiled and rose to her feet."
            },
            {
                "title": "KIDA",
                "text": "Kida.\n\nShe was taller, leaner, and dressed in red and gold. Her hair was also longer and braided into many tight knots atop her scalp. She stood before Dejenai like a queen and my heart swelled at the sight of her.\n\n\"You and your people will be welcome in Nabir,\" said the king, his voice echoing across the mosaic floors. \"As long as you stay, you will be welcome.\"\n\n\"You are an honoured king of an honoured people,\" said Kida.\n\nHer voice was strong, clear. She was not the quiet thing of my youth. She had grown. But so had I.\n\n\"My son says you are Lamos-born,\" said the king. \"I have never met a Lamoan. They are as much legend to the Nabiri as Nabir is to Gifah.\"\n\nShe smiled a quick smile, and I thought my chest would burst.\n\n\"We all have legends,\" she said. \"They are as life-giving as bread.\"\n\n\"It's how the world is built.\"\n\nDejenai leaned forward in his chair.\n\n\"But you are not here because of Lamos, are you, girl?\"\n\nThe blood quickened in my throat. Kida wouldn't leave the princess unless there was a great need.\n\n\"The king speaks the truth,\" she said.\n\n\"So, tell me then. Why are you here?\"\n\nMe! I knew it in my bones. She had heard of the Mother of a Thousand Steps and had come to get her.\n\n\"I have been away from my home for so long,\" she said. \"But my home is not Lamos, honoured king. My home is Gifah.\"\n\nI was a Great Gold of Gifah. She had come to take me home.\n\n\"And we are taking it back from the usurper, Beyat, and his silver legion from across the sea.\"\n\nBeyat.\n\n\"We?\" asked the king.\n\n\"The princess Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II and Glory of the House of Bey.\"\n\nThe princess. She was here for the princess.\n\n\"Shesset-Isset rises like Rath'nahr to restore the God's Land to his people,\" she said. \"And with the help of King Marwethad, she has raised an army in Penet to be her sword.\"\n\nNot me.\n\n\"I ask again, daughter of Lamos, why are you here?\"\n\n\"As we speak, the princess is heading to Karadoum, where a small Flight of Remoan Dragons guard the city. She leads a fleet of Peneti warships, and a legion of five thousand Peneti warriors follow in their wake along the banks.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"There is a second cabal of Peneti soldiers \u2013 a secret legion \u2013 coming over the mountains, prepared to lay siege to Wa'ast from the northeast. King Marwethad has also assured us the aid of Lamos, my birth nation. They are already sending a fleet into the mouth of the Nahr.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, girl, but Lamos is a faithless nation. She looks to the needs of Lamos, no further.\"\n\n\"Not when their ancestral enemy, Remus, is involved.\"\n\nDejenai snorted and behind him, Anshassar tightened his tail.\n\n\"Beyat has sold his birthright to Remus,\" Kida continued. \"Remoan Flights guard the holy city of Wa'ast and patrol the skies with their dragons.\"\n\n\"So, she sent you, a daughter of Lamos, to ask for ours?\"\n\nShe'd forgotten that she'd once had a dragon. I would have guarded them all with my life.\n\n\"Yes, oh honoured king. She does.\"\n\nThe king of Nabir glanced at his son but said nothing for a long time.\n\n\"You have told me the how, not the why. I give you one last chance to answer my simple question.\"\n\n\"I have journeyed along the Glass Road with a small retinue to bring you this.\" Kida held out a scroll. \"She proposes an alliance\u2014\"\n\nDejenai waved a hand, but Kida stepped forward.\n\n\"\u2014a marriage.\"\n\nBoth men looked up.\n\n\"A marriage?\" asked the king. \"To me?\"\n\n\"To Nakosa, most honoured prince of the Nabiri,\" said Kida, \"A joining of two great kingdoms under one sun and two moons.\"\n\nSlowly, the king sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the chair's hand rest. For his part, Nakosa could have been a carving for all that he had moved.\n\n\"And where would they rule this joined kingdom?\" the king asked after a moment.\n\n\"From the halls of Karadoum,\" she said. \"And the Island of Sand and Storm.\"\n\n\"So,\" said the king. \"The daughter of Gifah gets a king, and the son of Nabir gets a queen. I'm certain the duties extend further than the marriage bed.\"\n\n\"Gifah is a pearl among kingdoms,\" said Kida. \"You know this to be true. Any royal house that makes such an alliance will be established forever and will lack for nothing.\"\n\n\"Gifah is not hers to give.\"\n\n\"It will be, once we take it back.\"\n\n\"With Nabiri dragons.\"\n\n\"Commanded by a Nabiri prince.\"\n\nMy throat had grown tight, tighter than when banded with silver. All was politics in this world of palaces and princes. Dragons were merely pawns in the game, little more than winged dice.\n\nBask cooed at me, bobbed his blue head as I clutched the ledge, sending tiny pebbles down to the mosaic below.\n\nNakosa looked up.\n\n\"Perhaps, father, we should ask the dragons.\"\n\nAnd he held out his hand.\n\nBask sprang from the ledge, his weight sucking the air in a cool sweep behind him. Anshassar bugled as Bask circled the throne room, a regal flash of blue and red, before settling onto the mosaic and arching his neck like the sky. Nakosa laid a hand on that great chest, and I felt a rush of pride. We are magnificent creatures.\n\nBask swung his great head up and the room echoed with his call. All eyes turned my way, including the largest in the world.\n\nShe saw me.\n\nI ducked low and slunk back. I wasn't ready for her. I wasn't ready. I lumbered to the outer edge of the terrace, breathing deep the cool mountain air, feeling the lake spray prick my eyes. The sky was golden like the sun, and I welcomed the warmth of her breath as she ferried Rath'nahr into the dark, chased by the moons. Just like I had been chased from my home by my brothers. I felt a stirring within me.\n\nHome. Gifah was my home. It still called to me, even after all this time. The sand and the dunes, the palms and the river. That mighty River Nahr, with its tides and its depths. It was why I kept coming back to the company of reeds, why I could never take my place among the dragons of Nerisanaa. I had been raised in the palace of the Ophar with its pillars, columns, and courts. My life had been Netjeh, Josiat, Shesset and Kida.\n\nMy Kida.\n\nBut was she?\n\nI was no longer hers, so was it possible she was no longer mine?\n\nWere dragons possessive? Did we so easily covet what we did not have?\n\nI leapt from the terrace and soared over the city, sweeping up to the Pike and the stall that belonged to Bask. It was strange that I presumed I had access without him. We had mated, so I suppose there was familiarity. But even as I settled onto the pile of rocks that served as his bed, I realized it was not my nest. I had no nest, no den, no lair of my own. I never had. I was not like the drakinas of the Eye. Even the Temple of a Thousand Steps belonged to the monk. He had shared with me because of his great heart.\n\nI missed him.\n\nI closed my eyes and must have slept until there was a scent and I knew Bask had returned to the aerie. I raised my head to see Nakosa slide from his back and reach up a hand for Kida.\n\n\"Anekh,\" she breathed.\n\nNot Anekh.\n\nShe stepped closer.\n\n\"Anekh.\"\n\nI pushed to my claws, keeping my stump tucked close to my body.\n\nShe reached out a hand. I growled.\n\n\"Be careful,\" said Nakosa. \"She's been free a very long time.\"\n\n\"I thought she was dead.\" Her eyes were still larger than anything, larger even than the Eye of Nerisanaa, and the waters of the Nahr gathered behind them. \"They told me she was killed in a karad.\"\n\nI had been. I died in that place.\n\n\"Oh, look at her horns. Look at her spines. She's so beautiful\u2026\"\n\nTrembling fingers approached my beak and I growled again.\n\n\"Her foot?\"\n\nA foot she had chained, so long ago.\n\n\"And her throat? The scales are damaged, the muscles withered\u2026\"\n\nBecause of a collar she had clasped.\n\n\"I'd forgotten you were a vaskar,\" said Nakosa.\n\n\"Once,\" she said. \"Yes, once I was a vaskar. I was happy then.\"\n\nI watched her hand now through narrowed eyes, growled one last time.\n\n\"Net, Anekh,\" she said and stepped closer, arm outstretched, fingers reaching, reaching\u2026\n\nI snapped my jaws down on her hand. She cried out and a sword appeared at the prince's side.\n\n\"Wait!\" Kida gasped.\n\nShe had grown but so had I. My mouth had closed over her entire arm.\n\nShe held her breath.\n\nHer hand pressing between my teeth, soft and brittle and frail like a reed. They were reeds, persistent and fragile and easily uprooted. Just a little more force and a little less thought, and she would be like me. Maimed, crippled, less. Like Gaviid the brave. Like the Monk of a Thousand Steps, who saw more without his eyes than the sighted ever could.\n\nNo.\n\nNot less. Never less when the spirit grows in the body's wake.\n\nI growled again but let it roll around in my chest as I moved my tongue along her wrist and across her palm. Her skin tasted of sand and salt and ink and paprush. She was older now, forging a life with Shesset, she of the steely eyes and the knife smile. Daughter of Thutmen'nahr II and Glory of the House of Bey. Rightful Ophar of Gifah.\n\nGifah. The land that breathed like a setting sun, that bit like a sharp wind.\n\nI released her and turned my head. She sank to her knees.\n\n\"Oh, my Anekh,\" she whispered and buried her face in her hands.\n\nBask cocked his head and trilled. Nakosa laid a hand on his neck.\n\n\"My father will gift you a royal barge for the trip back, but he will not give you dragons.\"\n\nKida nodded, let her hands fall to her thighs.\n\n\"Then we will lose. The Emperor of Remus has sent Dragon Flights to guard the great city.\"\n\n\"Then the Emperor of Remus is the Emperor of Gifah.\"\n\n\"Beyat was a fool,\" she said, and she pushed to her feet. \"He thought he could peddle the legions of Remus, but instead, they used his vanity to gain a foothold in the God's Land.\"\n\n\"Puppet kings happen all the time.\"\n\n\"Shesset will be no one's puppet.\" She turned to him. \"Will you accept her offer?\"\n\n\"I will,\" he said. \"It's a good match. And from what I remember, she has a fierce spirit.\"\n\nKida nodded swiftly, mouth tight, eyes strangely bright.\n\n\"She does. She is a powerful woman. You will be very happy.\"\n\n\"More than that, I will be doing what is right for both kingdoms and I will be proud.\"\n\nShe nodded again.\n\n\"But Gifah is not your home,\" he said. \"Why pour yourself out for a land not your own?\"\n\nI could see her struggling with the river behind her lashes. Oh, the Weeping of the Nahr.\n\n\"You love her,\" he said, and the rivers released.\n\n\"I love her,\" she said through her tears. \"Yes, I love her. I can't imagine my life without her. She is proud and fierce and stubborn and sharp. But she is good and clever and wise and strong. Until Gifah is secured, I have no will of my own. Only loyalty to my queen, and duty to my adopted land. I will fight for her until my last breath.\"\n\n\"Then I have made the right decision,\" he said. \"If she inspires such faith in her people.\"\n\nShe wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands.\n\n\"In me, at least. Maybe I'm a fool.\"\n\n\"You love dragons in all their forms.\"\n\nShe smiled.\n\n\"Maybe one day, we will make a royal trip to Lamos.\" He shrugged. \"I understand it's poor now. Mostly ruins. Crumbling temples and floating markets and people selling pieces of history. Only a shadow of what once was.\"\n\n\"A Land of Once but No Longer.\"\n\n\"Once but No Longer.\" He looked at me. \"Try to touch her again.\"\n\nShe swallowed and raised a hand. I intently watched as her fingers reached for me, reached, reached\u2026\n\nTouched.\n\nShe closed her eyes, and once again, the rivers spilled their banks.\n\nIt was like the kiss of the sun, warm and tingling across my scales. Touch. It needed no words, no language, no common tongue. It was a song of its own.\n\nMy Kida.\n\n\"Perhaps you will have a dragon after all,\" said the prince.\n\n\"I couldn't,\" she said. \"She's lost so much already. She should be free.\"\n\n\"She is,\" he said, and now he stepped over, ran a hand along my neck, smoothing my spines, scratching my horns. Touch. Not only a song for dragons. \"But she was never wild. She always comes back to people. The Monk of a Thousand Steps thought she was a ha'arat.\"\n\n\"A ha'arat?\" Kida glanced up. \"A spirit that journeys between life and death?\"\n\n\"Like that,\" he said. \"But she journeys between worlds, between our world and the dragon world.\"\n\nShe looked back at me and smiled.\n\n\"Anekh Sun, Ha'arat of Worlds.\"\n\nA title I graciously accepted. I bent my head to nibble my wing claw. I'm sure there was a bit of dirt.\n\n\"Would you try to ride her?\" Nakosa asked.\n\n\"I'm not sure I could.\"\n\n\"You've already flown from the throne to the Pike on Bask. Are you afraid?\"\n\n\"No, it's just\u2026\"\n\nHer voice trailed off and he cocked his head. Much like Bask, I reckoned.\n\n\"It's not my place,\" she said finally. \"She's a Great Gold, the dragon of a queen. I couldn't. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\"You are asking a Nabiri king for dragons to help wage a Remoan proxy war on behalf of a Gifahn princess,\" he said. \"What is your place, exactly?\"\n\nShe laughed.\n\nIt was music.\n\nHe turned and strode off to the wall of straps, peeled a set of black leathers from the hooks. As he made his way back, I growled and flattened my spines against my neck.\n\n\"She doesn't like the harness,\" said Kida.\n\n\"She doesn't have to like it,\" he said. \"But she'll have to wear it. You're an inexperienced rider. You'll fall off at her first dip.\"\n\nHe passed her the rein and hoisted the harness that wrapped around a dragon's belly. I shrunk back and snarled this time. Bask trilled, confused.\n\n\"Besides,\" he said, \"With a missing limb, her balance is wrong. You won't be an easy fit.\"\n\nI would not wear these things. I'd worn a hobble and, in the end, lost my foot. I'd worn a collar against my will, and it had almost killed me many times over. A part of me was still Anekh, but another part was not, and I would be subject no more to the whims of reeds.\n\n\"Anekh?\"\n\nI left Bask's nest of stones and lumbered past the reeds in my three-beat gait to the mouth of the cave. Bask swung his head towards me, nipped at my shoulder but I snapped back at him, and peered over the steep side of the Pike. Below me, the Nabiri city stretched out in a circle around the lake, glistening like jewels around a royal throat. The lake itself gleamed in the setting sun, purple and gold and flickering white, and in its centre, the palace of Dejenai the King.\n\nIt was a Wheel of a very different sort.\n\nI tipped forward, letting the earth pull me down, and down I went. The wind stung my eyes, rattled my teeth and I gloried in the sensation of down. Down, down, down, faster than my blood, faster even than thought, certainly faster than I would have with a reed on my back. I was no tame dragon, no chariot-beast or marakt-maimed. I was free, if not wild. There was no rein to turn me, no harness or leather to bind me to a reed. And the Wheel, that accursed crushing Wheel of the Elements, had been shattered for me along the Glass Road when I chewed off my talons rather than yield.\n\nI swept up then, avoiding the rocks at the base of the Pike and angled my wing towards the lake. Drakes warbled at me from their aeries, but I soared past. I needed no drake. I needed no reed. I needed the sky and the water and the power of my wings. I breathed deeply the lake air, the coolness of the approaching dark, the scent of eel roe cakes baked in the palace kilns. And lastly, the barge of Gifah, with its golden standard catching the last of the light.\n\nGifah. The bones of a thousand dragons crushed into sand by the Wheel and time.\n\nI circled the boat, watched as the crew waved and wept as I flew by.\n\nGifah. The land of the gods and their children, the reeds.\n\nI saw Abshir, and my heart leapt at the look of wonder on his face.\n\nGifah, the pearl of kingdoms.\n\nI ducked low, touching the water with the tip of my wing, spraying the barge with sweet fresh water. The crew cheered and my heart shattered.\n\nGifah, the land of my birth, mother of the Nahr.\n\nThe Sand and the Storm made the mighty River Nahr, and the mighty River Nahr made me.\n\nI heard Bask bugle from the palace roof and arced to meet him. He was there with Nakosa and Kida, and I landed carefully. Kida watched me with her great dark eyes, expectant and full of awe.\n\nI lowered my head, extended one wing.\n\n\"Please,\" moaned Nakosa. \"At least one rein\u2026\"\n\n\"Let me try without,\" said Kida.\n\n\"It's been nice to know you, Kida, vaskar of Gifah.\"\n\nShe stepped over to me, ran her hand along my neck to my shoulder, delighted to let it rest there a moment before reaching up and grabbing a horn. I leaned into her as she stepped on my wing and swung her leg up. It felt heavy and off balance, but she was neither, so I knew it was me. Slowly, she lowered herself down onto the hollow between my neck and shoulder.\n\nI have to admit, it felt strange.\n\n\"Release the horns, now,\" said the prince. \"They're too far forward to hold. You'll need to try to hang on by the spines but be careful. I've heard of many riders impaled by a sudden turn or abrupt stop.\"\n\nI shook my head, and the spines snapped back and forth against my neck. I felt her hands grip the two nearest my shoulders and I relented. I stepped back and raised my wings, curious at how her weight went with me. I dropped down to the stone, lashing my tail now and feeling her weight settle across my back.\n\n\"May your gods be merciful to you, sister.\"\n\nI turned to peer over my shoulder.\n\nShe was bent low across me, draped across my neck in her perch. Her knees tucked in the crook of my wings; her legs followed the bend of my shoulder.\n\n\"Please don't throw me off, Anekh,\" she said.\n\nI lumbered to the edge of the roof. I felt strange, unbalanced, heavy.\n\n\"I can't believe you're doing this,\" said Nakosa. \"Please, just let me tie your legs.\"\n\nI stretched out my wings, a challenge to my brothers, the moons.\n\n\"I have carried her all my life,\" she called as the wind plucked at her words. \"Now, it's her turn to carry me!\"\n\nI opened my wings and sprang from the roof.\n\nNot a deep plunge like my descent from the Pike, and I arched my back above the lake, feeling the leathers catch the sky. I stayed low over the water, very aware of this reed on my back. My wingbeats were awkward as I tried to find a rhythm. Up, down, up, down, and my body followed in a serpentine flow. Still, her body didn't interfere, and, other than weight, it was as if she wasn't there. Beat, beat, beat, over the lake and the boats and the bridge to the shore.\n\nI soared up and over the city, it's fires and lanterns glowing like stars beneath us, while the stars glimmered like lanterns above. I wondered if she'd caught her breath yet, if she'd remembered to exhale. She'd always been a quiet one. I felt her shift her weight, leaning forward to grip my spines better. She was almost flat on me, and I had to admit she would have been more secure with a harness. I felt a pang of guilt, but it didn't last long. It did make me wonder about riding dragons at all, and the partnership that surely had to have been in place for years. Was Nabir the first land to ride dragons? Was Remus? Were there no stories of the first dragons and their riders?\n\nBelow us, the palace gleamed in the moonslight, so I brought us back to the water, low enough so that the tip of my wings splashed the lake's surface with each beat. Soon, we settled into a rhythm that could have carried us all the way back to the Nahr had we the time.\n\nAbove us, the moons shone, reflected in the water below. In that moment, we were between worlds, Kida and I. A ha'arat dragon and her reed. It was mythical.\n\nGlowing with torches and lantern light, the royal barge sat low in the water.\n\n\"There, Anekh, khem!\"\n\nI circled the barge, and spied Abshir watching us from the uppermost deck. He waved and smiled as wide as the moons. I was glad he still lived.\n\nI leaned back, drumming my wings to bring me slowly to the top deck. Most reeds scattered and I realized they were not Gifahn or Nabiri, but Peneti, unused to the comings and goings of dragons. I touched down with foot and stump, then rocked forward to take our weight with my wing claws. Slowly, the barge dipped in the water under my weight.\n\nI growled and swung my head towards the Peneti, keeper of cages and binder of dragons.\n\n\"The rumours were true!\" cried Abshir and he strode forward. \"Is this truly Anekh Sun, she who razed the Library of A'Toth and brought Karadoum to its knees?\"\n\nHe had no fear, for he reached up to take my beak in his wide hands.\n\nI let him.\n\n\"It is,\" said Kida. \"And she is so much more, but first please, Abshir, can you help me off this dragon?\"\n\nHe bolted to her side, and I lowered so that my belly touched the coolness of the deck. She was rigid, her hands stiff and bloodied from gripping my spines, her legs raw and chaffed from the iron of my scales.\n\nBut even as he helped her, he could not help but marvel.\n\n\"It is her,\" he breathed, running a hand along my thigh. \"The searing is Shesset's.\"\n\nHe passed her over to a host of women, who gathered her to themselves.\n\n\"Do we have dragons?\"\n\nShe glanced up, tried to smile.\n\n\"Well, we have one.\"\n\n\"Two,\" came a voice and the barge rocked once more, as Bask, son of Bash, landed on the deck."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE RIVER STORM",
                "text": "We were three days now on the River Storm, and it was vastly different than her sister, the Sand. Whereas the Sand was wide and deep, the Storm was wild and frothy, with cataract after cataract, cascade after cascade, interrupting the smooth flow downstream. I was impressed how the reeds managed to move the barge from top to bottom of waterwalls with no damage. They used a series of ropes and pulleys and sheer strength, lowering the barge in stages with tension lines on both banks of the river.\n\nDragons didn't do things like that. We never try to recreate or manage our environments like that. We adapt. Reeds overcome. It was curious and gave me more questions than it answered.\n\nWe were too big for the barge, so I taught Bask the ways of the river. For a dragon that had lived in a city on the banks of a lake, he had never swum, and it took him a day to find his way in the water. The current was strong, the water sweet, but he took to it like a sobethi once he understood. We needed to use our tails differently than in the air \u2013 side to side, as opposed to up and down. It was counterintuitive since the sky is our natural element, but once the rhythm was found, it came easily to him. It was life to me, and I rejoiced to be back on the water.\n\nEach day, we swam alongside the barge like river guardians, catching fish for our reeds and ourselves as we wished. We were larger than any sobethi now, so there was no fear, and to be honest, I dared any to try to hunt Bask or I. I did kill two that swam beneath me, and I happily crunched their stony scales with my powerful jaws. They didn't make a good meal but their blood in the water was sweet.\n\nFinally, the rains started, casting the sky in shades of grey, and the clouds were heavy and cold. Still, it was a glorious time of my life, and I purposefully did not think about the war that was awaiting us beyond the Island of Sand and Storm.\n\nBask and I mated again. We had been hunting in the rushes (I secretly hoping for another chance at sobethi), and the blue drake had managed to snare a large anglefin in his jaws. He burst from the water, proudly tossing his head, and displaying his catch. I could hear Nakosa and Kida cheering from the barge. Cheering for such a silly thing as a fish, so I darted through the water and lunged at him, trying to snatch it from his beak. He tossed his head again, ducked and flapped like a hatchling. I barked at him, and he launched into the air, the fish flashing in his teeth.\n\nI leapt after him.\n\nKida's people have their stories, Nakosa's have their legends, but dragons alone know the truth \u2013 our coupling makes the thunder and calls lightning. And it did that day. I chased him, that boastful blue, biting his tail and his feet and his flank, until he swung his head back and bellowed. The fish was gone, and I was furious, and I bellowed back, raking his belly with my talons. He beat down his wings, arching his neck and twisted his body towards me. I met him swiftly, gladly, fiercely, as thunder rolled, and lightning cracked the sky. We spun through the rain, necks wrapped, tails entwined, wings extended and racing. Our coupling took us to the moons and back. I never did get the fish.\n\nWe plunged back into the river, once spent, and the wave splashed over the barge. Bask rolled in the waters, preening his wings, and slating his thirst, while I sank low like a sobethi, savouring the sensations that echoed through my body. I was grateful that the rains had made the tide high and the current strong, so I could doze and be carried along, with only my tail waving slowly in the water. Before I did, I slid one eye up to the barge beside me, where Kida and Nakosa stood watching us from the rail. For the very first time, I wondered how reeds mated. I'd been completely unaware of such things when I lived in the Ophar's court. I wondered how they chose mates, how they paired up and when they laid their eggs.\n\nThe rains continued the next day when Kida flew again. She was ready this time, her legs wrapped in strips of linen, her palms in strips of leather. She also wore a woolen headcovering to keep her face and throat warm. She stepped out onto my back from the deck of the barge and slid across my shoulders as if home. I pushed out of the river then, my tail propelling me forward, my wings forcing the water down, and I emerged from the Storm like a skyboat, golden and glorious as the sun. We rose above the river with every beat of my wings, Bask and Nakosa a blue shadow beneath us. We soared and we dipped, we circled, and we dove, and not once did Kida fall off. Truth be told, I was gentle with her again. I had lost her once in the palace of Marwethad. I didn't want to lose her again.\n\nWe flew along the River Storm until we came to the last cataract before Karadoum. It was not a waterwall, so the barge could navigate it without pulleys. Still, Nakosa leaned to the side and Bask banked and went down, landing on a large rock cut on the riverbank. I followed, impatient for her to be off my back, for I had seen a school of moonfish and I was hungry. The reeds sat and talked, while Bask and I hunted, and when I was sated, I climbed back on shore to rest until the barge caught up. Bask stretched out beside me, his tail across mine. The rain was warm. I was tired and full of fish, and I enjoyed the wordsong of our reeds.\n\n\"Do you think she'll catch?\" asked Kida, rubbing the sensation back into her legs.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Nakosa. \"I heard that she had laid two in Gesse, but that they died.\"\n\n\"Hm,\" said Kida. \"Sometimes, the inexperienced ones do lose the first few clutches. That's why we raised them in the drakmet ourselves.\"\n\n\"How could you raise an experienced drakina if you do it yourself?\" asked Nakosa, picking at the greening grass with a dagger. \"How could they ever get the experience?\"\n\n\"They couldn't. They needed us to do everything for them. I suppose it was our way of keeping them dependent.\"\n\n\"Prisoners.\"\n\n\"Partners.\" She shrugged. \"I was a child, doing an important job in a prestigious drakmet in the royal city. I don't make life, but I lived.\"\n\nHe smiled, picked at the grass.\n\n\"Do you talk to her?\"\n\n\"Talk? To Anekh?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"The Skyborn can talk to their dragons. It's how you make a bond, because once they're big, it's impossible to control them even with a rein.\"\n\n\"You talk, with words?\"\n\n\"Without. With thoughts and wishes, with impressions. I want to go down, I look down, I think down, Bask goes down. I want to go east, I look east, I think east, Bask goes east. Like that.\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"I don't have that gift.\"\n\n\"I think you do. She wouldn't have bonded with you, otherwise.\"\n\nShe looked over at me. I raised my head and looked at her.\n\nNakosa grinned.\n\n\"See? Welcome to the Skyborn, Kida of Gifah.\"\n\nI snorted.\n\nReeds.\n\nI lowered my head and slept until the barge."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Two days later, the statues appeared.\n\nI remembered them, towering out of the river like gods, with their reed bodies and creature faces. Dragons, rassa, sobethi, wraith. They were glorious and fearsome, and they signaled that at some point, we had crossed the border into Gifah.\n\nMore statues now, in twos, then fours. It would still be hours before we made Karadoum. The first dragon, a lone green sentry, watched the river from the top of a statue, his rider clad in Remoan silver. It was early morning, the skyboat of Rath'nahr hidden behind clouds, and all was grey and heavy. Bask was in the water, invisible because of his colour, and I was in the sky. Kida and Nakosa had made a good plan, but I had never fought a dragon before. Remoan dragons were trained for war. I was trained to reign. There was a vast difference.\n\nKida shivered with the cold and the wet, but we needed to be high so the drake couldn't breathe our scent. We approached from the southeast, as high up as we could, and I felt my heart grow as cold as my rider. I wasn't sure I could kill a dragon, for he was only doing the will of his reed. I tried to remind myself that this dragon brought death at the whim of the Emperor of Remus and his vassal, Beyat. None of them had anticipated a Great Gold, bringing it all back like lightning.\n\nI hovered a moment, high overhead, arched my neck and dove like an arrow.\n\nDown, down, down, I plunged. I thought not of Kida, just of my prey. He was a wyrm, a wraith, a sobethi. He grew larger as I flew closer, and the wind bit my eyes and rattled my teeth. At the last minute, he swung his head up and flung his wing. I swerved and felt Kida slip, losing her balance on my rain-soaked back. I twisted awkwardly, raking his rider with my talons, and yanking him off his mount. I carried him for a wingbeat before dropping him, twisting and screaming, into the river. Just like Kiin and Mak, the egg thief of Gesse. The drake sprang from the statue but reeled as Bask struck him from the waters below. They spiraled through the air, smashing into statues, and crashing against the stone. Bask had a grip on the sentry's green throat and the drake spewed flame wildly as he thrashed. Nakosa stood in the stirrups and plunged a spear deep into the green's neck, just above the shoulder, and blood sprayed across basalt. Bask released his grip, the prince yanked the spear back and the Remoan dragon plummeted into the river below.\n\nWeighed down by his armour, the rider struggled in the dark waters, managing to yank his helmet off and toss it to the side. It was a foolish decision, as Nakosa pitched his spear once again. Both man and dragon disappeared into the deep.\n\nI struggled to find balance as Kida swung from my spines, so I winged up to perch on a statue, allowing her the time to climb back on. Bask landed on the statue next to us, and the prince wiped the rain from his eyes. He turned.\n\n\"Her foot threw off her balance,\" he said. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\nKida shook her head but wrapped her arms around her ribs.\n\n\"No,\" she gasped. \"But I need leathers. I need a harness. I will be a millstone if I slip or fall.\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"I have a harness,\" he said. \"I brought it from the Pike. But you did well. Both of you.\"\n\n\"This was one,\" said Kida. \"There are two more at Karadoum.\"\n\n\"There are two of us,\" he said. \"We will win.\"\n\n\"If Rath'nahr pleases.\"\n\n\"If the moons align.\"\n\nThe rain was heavy as we returned to the barge. There, they approached me with the harness from the Pike. I fought the dread as Nakosa tried to bind it across my back. I fought the terror and memory, fear and fury, and I broke out in a fierce trembling. I was a Great Gold. I would fight for Gifah. But the memories of cages, collars, and carts rattled my bones, and I could barely catch my breath. Even Kida's hand could not soothe.\n\n\"No,\" she said finally. \"The gods know what I need. I'll ride her without harness.\"\n\n\"You'll die.\"\n\n\"My heart's light,\" she said. \"And Othorys is just.\"\n\nIt was mercy, then, that we left immediately for the Island of Sand and Storm.\n\nWe were headed for war this time, and the plan was simple but riddled with dangers. We were going to meet Shesset's army, along with the boats from Penet, at Karadoum where there were two more dragons stationed. We were going to try the same strategy \u2013 approach from sky and river and aim to take the riders. The dragons themselves had no will to fight any army. They were bonded with their riders, so if we took the riders, the dragons would yield. He counselled Kida to be prepared because I had swerved to balance my phantom foot and would likely do so again. More importantly, to also be aware that Shesset's army would not know we were coming, and they might assume that we were also the enemy. They would shoot us with spears and arrows before we got close enough for them to see.\n\nWe flew in the dark, without the brother moons to guide us, only the wide, dark, gleaming ribbon of Storm below. I didn't need light. I recognized it by scent alone, for we had been here before, also in the night. Soon, we didn't even need the moons because the glowing horizon drew us onward. I knew that, once again, Karadoum was burning. Perhaps it was destiny that I was here now as it burned again, and I took some comfort in that.\n\nTogether, we soared, higher than the smoke and higher than the pointed peaks of the temple library. Through the statues and pillars, I saw hundreds of war sails on the river with hundreds of footmen on the mainland side. Two large dragons swept above them, spraying fire on both, and the air streaked with arrows.\n\nThere were soldiers fighting on the river. There were soldiers fighting on the banks. There were even soldiers fighting in Karadoum itself and I wondered who the majari served now. The two Remoan drakes wheeled beneath us, a red and a grey, catching their breath before raining fire once more.\n\nWe hovered for a moment, Bask and I, trying to mark out the flight path of the drakes below. I was younger than Bask, and far less experienced in the art of war, so I peeled right, claiming the smaller of the two. Bask would be better suited to the large red spiralling down over the warships. Shesset needed as many of those ships as possible if she was to take on Beyat and his silver soldiers. As for me, I had faint hope of taking on any large drake who had been trained for battle all his life.\n\nBask dropped from the sky like a stone and caught the red drake's rider in his talons. He arced a wing and soared towards the stone temple, the drake following in pursuit. Bask looked as if he would hit the high walls, when he wheeled in mid-air, releasing the rider to smack into the stone. The drake bellowed as arrows pelted mercilessly from below, and he plummeted from the sky, crashing between the pillars of Karadoum.\n\nI turned my attention to the smaller grey.\n\nI plummeted down, hoping Kida would be secure across my back. The young drake beneath me was unawares, couldn't catch my scent because of the fires, and he veered towards another warship, blasting the red and white sails of Penet with his flame. Hot wind burned my eyes, and I folded my wings back, dropping all my weight into my talons. Closer, closer. He angled shoreward, banking deep and his wing hit mine just as I was about to strike. I spun and swiped at the rider as I swept past. I raked his shoulder and neck, and felt his helm yank under my claw. But the drake had seen me now, and he rolled in the air towards me. I wheeled, spraying both him and his rider with fire before tucking my wings and plunging into the river below.\n\nI forgot that Kida was on my back.\n\nThe water was black and boiling, and from the depths, I could see the flames dancing along ship and beam. There! His silhouette crossed the light, and I burst out, soaring over him in a heartbeat, and snatched the rider from his back. His scream was cut short as I crushed the helmet within my claws and dropped him into the river. Because of his armour, he sank like a stone, and the drake spun in wild circles over the ripples and bubbles and blood.\n\nSuddenly, Bask hurtled from the sky and onto the young grey. They crashed onto the shore in a tangle of wings, lashing tails, and fire. Nakosa leapt from his saddle as the embattled drakes thrashed over and over into the lines of chariots, and foot soldiers scattered to avoid being crushed in their wake. The urus and their carts weren't so fortunate.\n\n\"Go!\" cried Kida, and I wheeled in the air, glad that she had managed to somehow stay on my back through the water. She sprang from my back as I landed roughly, and I lunged at the young grey. He swung towards me, but I was ready and caught his beak in my jaws. Just like the great green drakina of the Gesse crater, I arched my neck and, with his face in my teeth, I trilled, my spines alternating between sharp and flat, sharp, and flat. Immediately, he yielded, and I softened my hold so that it was firm not fierce. The young drake buckled to the ground, eyes closed, submissive. Finally, I released him, and he curled himself into a ball, hiding his beak beneath his torn wings.\n\nFascinating. The way of dragons.\n\nSpears in hand, the foot soldiers rushed towards us, and Kida leapt from my back and met them, palms forward.\n\n\"Nay, nay!\" she cried. \"Ikthalees Shesset-Isset, Kida mebendet de Gifah!\"\n\nThe Peneti warriors lowered their weapons, and she pointed towards the island, where the battle still raged.\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nThey sprang onto the boats, and soon, the roar arose anew from Karadoum as hundreds of Peneti warriors swept across the island and through the temple grounds.\n\nI heard the grey drake whining as it trembled between Bask and I. Nakosa approached him, laid his hands on the bloody neck.\n\n\"Peace, young warrior,\" he said. \"Peace.\"\n\nBehind him, Bask trilled.\n\nKida rubbed her hands along my shoulders.\n\n\"Thank you, Anekh,\" she said. \"Once again, you have saved us.\"\n\nI brought my beak up to her face, breathed in the sweat and the smoke and the fear. I released my own breath in a puff, and she smiled. She was my world. She always had been.\n\n\"And I thank you, Prince Nakosa,\" she said. \"Even one Nabiri Skyborn is worth a thousand Remoan Flights.\"\n\n\"Our odds were good,\" he said, running his hands over the young grey. \"First, two on one, then two on two. The odds won't get better.\"\n\nThe grey whined, and my heart ached at the sound. He was as young as I, likely bred for war and now, his rider was gone, leaving him without a rudder. Nakosa lifted the great chin in his hands, breathed into the dragon's nostrils, and the drake lowered its head, pressing his forehead into the prince's body. He patted the bloody neck.\n\n\"But we now have three dragons,\" he said.\n\nAs the first beams of Selis Anekh reached across the sky, a smoking barge pulled away from the island of Sand and Storm, pushing across the river by many men with long poles. A figure in gold stood on the prow, thin and bloody, wearing armour plates and a gauze scarf across her face. On her head, the River Crowns of Gifah, but I would have recognized her in an instant even without it.\n\nThe barge bumped onto the riverbank, and she leapt from the prow, moving like a rassa through the pelting rain. She stopped in front of us, and both Kida and Nakosa bowed.\n\n\"Prince Nakosa,\" said Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II. \"You turned the tide and rescued my fleet. I owe you my life, and the lives of my people.\"\n\n\"I am honoured to serve the Glory of the House of Bey,\" he said. \"And, if she deems me worthy, to one day marry her.\"\n\nShe grinned the knife grin that I remembered from so long ago. She swung around, her eyes falling upon me, and I could see them gleam from the heat of battle.\n\n\"Kida,\" she snapped. \"Is that my dragon?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE RIVER CROWNS",
                "text": "The morning sky was red as blood. The rains had stopped, the fires were out and Shesset summoned the scribes of Karadoum to gather before her in the outdoor hall of the Temple Library. All the people of the city were gathered as well, and the army of Penet flanked the courtyard, standing between the pillars like statues, row upon row upon row. She stood under the wide stone lintel, with Abshir on one side and Nakosa on the other. She was dressed in gold and bleached linen and wore the River Crowns of Sand and Storm.\n\nBecause of those crowns, the majari had turned, offering her fealty and loyalty, service and swords. And even more impressive then, was the fact that Kida and I stood behind her as well, with Bask on my right, and the young grey on my left. I could only imagine what we looked like to those reeds who had never seen a dragon before, let alone three towering before them, glorious in our scales and wings and smoke.\n\nA man was brought forward. I remembered him as Karaket, lead Scribe and curator of the Library of A'Toth. He had refused aid to the princess and had allowed soldiers into the temple library. I had been pierced by an arrow because of this man. Josiat had died because of him. He stood like a statue while Abshir read a list of crimes from a paprush scroll.\n\nOnce he was done, Shesset turned to the people.\n\n\"I am not a god,\" she said, her voice echoing across the stone courtyard. \"Nor am I a goddess. It is not my divine right to weigh hearts or condemn men to the UnderRiver because of the evil of their deeds.\"\n\nShe looked out across the sea of faces.\n\n\"I am Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II, child of Neburanna, and Glory of the House of Bey. It is my divine right to condemn men to death for treason and murder. And so, I condemn this man, Karaket of Karadoum, to death for treason and murder.\"\n\nThe man stared at her. I could see his knees were shaking as he tried to summon his spine.\n\n\"Gifah has rarely sanctioned executions for high crimes because Gifah has long been a land at peace,\" she continued. \"Gifah is no longer a land at peace, and it will not be until I wear the false beard of Ophar and sit on the throne in Wa'ast.\"\n\nShesset laid a hand on my scales. I grumbled deep in my chest. She never touched me. I didn't understand.\n\nShe looked at Karaket.\n\n\"But you, Karaket of Karadoum, are sentenced to die by dragonfire.\"\n\nThe scribe moaned and buckled to his knees as a murmur rose from the crowd. Kida glanced at Nakosa, who nodded swiftly. I glanced at Kida, but she would not look at me.\n\nDeath by dragonfire? Bask's? Mine?\n\n\"There will always be a Great Gold in Gifah,\" she said to the crowd. \"Anekh Sun, daughter of Selis Anekh, was raised in the Courts of Wa'ast and bears the seal of the House of Bey. I trust you remember her, Karaket of Karadoum. Because of you, she nearly died at the hands of the Usurper's silver.\"\n\nKaraket was a weak man, it was true. He had been responsible for the death of Josiat. He had chased us out when we needed sanctuary. He had turned his back on the daughter of his king. Yes, he was a very weak man. But was he bad?\n\n\"Anekh Sun is the spear of Gifah,\" said Shesset.\n\nCould I kill him?\n\nI had burned the God's Library of Karadoum, and I had killed Kunyane with my teeth. I had sunk my talons into Kiin and Mak, had dropped them from the heights and broken their bones. I was not clean. I was not good.\n\nKaraket reached for Shesset's hem.\n\n\"Please\u2026\"\n\nBut I had burned Ejjae to death when she had smashed my eggs. Even still, I see her kneeling form ablaze, the heady rush as her flesh melted into gum.\n\nI called the flame, relishing the burn as it rolled along my tongue, scorching the roof of my mouth and dancing within the prison of my teeth.\n\n\"Anekh Sun is the spear of Gifah,\" she repeated. \"And I hold the spear. Beyat, the Usurper, killed his own father and you supported him. You are so very guilty.\"\n\nI lowered my head, close enough to bite. I could see the pores of his skin and the tiny hairs on his cheeks. I saw his mouth twist in prayer, saw the Nahr spill from his eyes.\n\n\"But I am not Beyat.\"\n\nShe stepped away from me, took her place on the step above the crowds, raised her hands wide.\n\n\"I am Shesset-Isset, daughter of Thutmen'nahr II, child of Neburanna, and Glory of the House of Bey. And while I have condemned Karaket to death, I commute his sentence and consider it paid, for while I am an Ophar of justice, I am also an Ophar of mercy. Remember that, oh people of Karadoum, for I will set my crowns here on the Island of Sand and Storm. This will be Gifah's royal city and the Gods' Land will flow once again with milk and honey.\"\n\nA cheer went up from the people and a cool wave of relief washed through my body. I was glad I didn't have to burn the reed. I wasn't sure if I could do it.\n\nNo. I was sure, in fact, that I could.\n\nShesset turned to Abshir.\n\n\"Dismiss the people,\" she said. \"And remind them to be generous with food for the army. Karadoum will benefit from the Peneti soldiers, so we need to treat them well.\"\n\nHe nodded, moved past her, while she looked at Karaket.\n\n\"Rise,\" she said.\n\nHe did but grabbed her hand and drew it to his forehead.\n\n\"Thank you, most glorious Ophar,\" he said.\n\n\"Remember mercy,\" she said, her eyes like shiny daggers. \"Now, I will have you draft a scroll. We will deliver it to Beyat, calling for his surrender. If he agrees, he will be met with the same mercy. If he does not, he will be met with war.\"\n\n\"Yes, most glorious Ophar,\" said Karaket. \"I await your blessed words.\"\n\nShe nodded, turned to Nakosa.\n\n\"You'll deliver it to my brother?\"\n\n\"As agreed, betrothed,\" he said. \"Bask and I will leave once the scroll is dry and sealed.\"\n\nBask? Leaving?\n\n\"By boat, it takes two weeks,\" she said. \"But flying should take only a few days.\"\n\n\"We'll be ready,\" he said. \"But it's a futile gesture. We don't have enough men.\"\n\n\"If we had Nabiri dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"But we don't.\"\n\n\"I will not be swayed.\"\n\n\"I won't try to sway you.\"\n\nShe grinned now.\n\n\"I believe I've chosen well, betrothed.\"\n\nHe grinned. Together, they turned and walked into the Temple, leaving Kida standing quietly under the lintel. This time, she glanced at me. Her eyes, so large, so wise, tipped down at the edges now, like the corners of her mouth. I swung my head for her touch, but she too turned and walked into the cool shadows while I was left with the dragons at the gate.\n\nAlone, I took to the river. It was remarkable to be once again in the convergent waters of the Nahr, not his offspring Sand or Storm. The Nahr was vast. The Nahr was rich, and from his cool, sweet currents, I watched all things. I watched the sun cross the sky and watched the boats from Penet gather on the Nahr. I watched my Skyborn Bask and his rider disappear over the golden sands of Gifah. This was a restless, troubling thing. There were eggs inside me, chicks that would be bound to Gifah and the House of Bey until they were culled at two. Unless, like the Weeping, the land was met with change. Unless the daughter of Thutmen'nahr II changed them.\n\nAt some point, the young grey joined me. I thought his name should be Chance. He had been given another chance by Nakosa and Kida, and he was taking it without a reed to guide him. I taught him to fish, and he took to it quickly, as all dragons do when given the opportunity. We stayed in the water that night, fishing and resting between the Peneti ships. We watched the moons chase the sun and the sky fill with stars. I had forgotten that the sky was so big in Gifah. Now, its beauty ached within me.\n\nThat morning, I felt the urge to go to the Library, and I knew it was Kida. Nakosa had been right. The reed 'thought' up. The dragon went up. The reed 'thought' east. The dragon went east. I was a controlled thing, the 'Spear of Gifah', little more than a weapon in an army of thousands. I wondered at Chance, with no reed now to call him or bend him to their will. I thought of Bask, noble and proud and ridden, and I thought of the dragons of Nerisanaa, wild and free and not.\n\nWith Chance at my tail, I rose from the water and met Kida at the Library. We were leaving for the Temple of Neburanna, inching towards Wa'ast and Beyat and my brother. My heart was heavy and filled with dread.\n\nWe took to the sky then, Chance and I, sweeping above the boats and over the armies that marched along the banks of the river. Their progress was slow but steady, and every village they swept through offered food as supplication to the army and the gods. I knew they'd taken supplies from Karadoum, as the city had not only housed the former library, but it was a bustling marketplace of trade and commerce. The Temple of Neburanna would be the same. Still, all I remembered was the sight of dragons, caged and maimed for the sport of reeds.\n\nThe skies cleared as we made our way into the land of Gifah. There was no rain in Gifah, only the yearly Weeping that flooded the banks of the Nahr, refreshing the land and quenching its thirst. Three days the armies marched, and the boats sailed downriver, with Chance and I sweeping over them like protector gods. Kida didn't take to my back during that time, because of the princess, most likely. I could have left then, could have arced a wing and returned to the Eye of Nerisanaa and the colony there. It would have been easy, and I would have been justified. It would have been interesting to take young Chance with me. He hadn't left my flank since we'd downed him, and I wondered if he had ever lived free of his rider. I wondered if he ever knew his mother. It was clear he needed an anchor, as bound to the reeds as any flutterby or uru. I thought of M'tawe, how he'd said I kept coming back to them too. Anekh Sun, Ha'arat of Worlds.\n\nPerhaps, I hadn't shattered the Wheel as I'd thought, and perhaps, it turned for me still.\n\nAnd so, we arrived at the walls of the Temple of Neburanna at dusk on the third day since leaving Karadoum. The sky was streaked with clouds. The sun was low in the heavens, but so were the moons. I'd only been here once, and that was the day of our dedication, the day of games and 'celebration,' the day my brothers and I were branded with hot irons and sealed to the House of Bey. I'd hated that day all of my life. I was not happy to be back.\n\nSeeing it from the air this time was a heady thing, as opposed to when I was carried from stable to stall in Kida's arms, and Chance and I circled the complex, casting long shadows across the large courtyard below. Reeds rushed into and out of the many buildings, and flutterbys called to us as they spun through the air in between. The fleet had already begun pulling up to the shore and the army was raising dust as it crossed the fields towards the southern wall. In a golden chariot surrounded by warriors was Shesset herself, wearing the River Crowns. I circled until they drew up to the massive gate before I lit onto the parapet above it. Chance landed on the far side of the gate. The stone cracked and pebbles rained down to the sand below.\n\n\"No!\" cried a priest. I remembered him. Toht was his name. I remembered his pride and his cruelty, his zeal and his seal. He was trapped on the parapet between Chance and I, and he waved his hands at the princess. \"No, you are forbidden!\"\n\n\"Open this gate,\" she cried. \"Open it in the name of the House of Bey!\"\n\n\"Leave this land, false queen! Beyat is Ophar!\"\n\nBeyat. I hated that name. I would kill him as easily as I had killed Ejjae. I leaned forward and bellowed, long and loud so that more pebbles rained down. I swung my head towards the priest and bellowed again, bringing the heat with it this time so that he trembled in his sandals at the threat.\n\n\"You will open the gate and welcome the rightful Ophar,\" she cried. \"And the city of Neburanna will tend the armies and navies of their queen, or our dragons will turn you to dust.\"\n\nThis time, I rose on my back legs, unequal as they were, spread wide my wings and threw my head into the sky. I bellowed a third time, summoning all the dragons and dragonets in the temple with my song. Chance joined me and within a heartbeat, a flock of colourful flutterbys rushed us, swirling in the wind. I could hear the cries of those in the stables, locked behind chain and mudbrick and service. It was beautiful, wild anarchy, and I was the queen of it all.\n\nI lowered to the parapet, swung my head back to the priest and snarled.\n\n\"Open the gate,\" Toht cried to the acolytes in the yard. \"Open the gate.\"\n\nThey did.\n\nShesset and part of the army flowed through, like the Weeping of the Nahr, sweeping in and filling the entire courtyard with their bodies. I watched them for a while until Chance barked at me. He was hungry. So was I, but I had something else gnawing at my belly. I unfurled my wings and sprang into the air, circling once before coming to land in the centre of the courtyard, reeds scattering in panic as I did. There, I saw the young priestess who had branded me. She did not flee but stood, as painted and proud as I had been in my youth.\n\nShesset's chariot pulled up in front of me, and Kida stepped down. She moved towards me, hand upraised, but I was not here for her. I lowered my head, opened my jaws, and bellowed loud and long and, once again, the temple erupted in the cries of many dragons. Flutterbys streaked round me, adding their shrill voices to the song. Chance landed beside me, raised his head, and roared, and I am certain we cracked the foundations of that horrible place with our chorus.\n\nI arched my neck, the spines standing out like the rays of the sun, and I turned my eyes to the princess.\n\n\"What does she want?\" she asked as she stepped from the chariot, lowering the crook and flail to her sides.\n\n\"The dragons,\" said Kida. \"I think she wants us to release the dragons.\"\n\nThe princess fell silent, gazing to the ground as she thought. Then, she looked up, and a grin slid across her face.\n\n\"The gods have chosen well,\" she said.\n\nShe moved past Kida, and this time when she touched me, I did not growl.\n\n\"Release the dragons.\"\n\n\"But princess\u2014\" said the priestess.\n\n\"Ophar,\" corrected Kida.\n\n\"These dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"Are no longer slaves,\" said Shesset. \"Remove their collars and release them to the training grounds. Slaughter one hundred sand bucks to feed them and give them as much sythstone as you have in the stores. Then slaughter one hundred more sandbucks to feed all of us. Do this without question or I will cast you out of this temple without shoes on your feet.\"\n\nThe priestess nodded swiftly and disappeared. For her part, Shesset merely stood, stroking my golden beak with one hand, and looking at me with new eyes.\n\n\"Two queens were forged that day,\" she said softly. \"I had forgotten that. But I won't forget any more. You are the true daughter of Selis Anekh, and I am grateful that you have returned to Gifah to rule with me.\"\n\nSuddenly, a shadow crossed above us. I didn't need to look to know that Bask had returned. My heart lifted as he circled the courtyard, but then I noticed that his wings beat an awkward rhythm, and he stumbled as he landed in the middle of us. He smelled of sky and smoke, Wa'ast and blood.\n\n\"Quickly,\" Nakosa gasped. \"Get the princess to safety.\"\n\nHe leaned forward, yanked the bolt of an arrow from his mount's shoulder.\n\n\"They're coming,\" he gasped.\n\nAnd suddenly, the sky was filled with dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "ENEMY WINGS",
                "text": "It reminded me of Gesse, and the Eye of Nerisanaa. The darkening skies rolled with wing and tail and rippling scale. Dragons everywhere, sweeping from the clouds like a volley of silver-tipped arrows.\n\n\"War dragons!\" cried Abshir.\n\n\"The Remoan Dragon Flights!\" said Nakosa.\n\nReds, blues, greens, and greys, with harnesses of leather and plates of silver hammered over their scales. They swept down in perfect formation, raining fire in swaths across the army assembled on the plains below.\n\n\"We're not ready!\" snapped Shesset. \"This is not the way!\"\n\n\"Your brother has no honour,\" said Nakosa. \"But honour isn't an advantage in war.\"\n\nHe straightened in the saddle.\n\n\"Tell my father that I am proud to be his son.\"\n\n\"You tell him,\" said Shesset. \"When he attends our wedding.\"\n\n\"It would have been a good wedding.\"\n\nNakosa yanked on the rein. Bask bellowed and launched himself into the dragon-filled sky, Chance at his tail in a heartbeat.\n\nKida turned to me.\n\n\"Go, Anekh. Fight for us, but don't die for us.\"\n\nAnd she pushed me with both hands. She couldn't move me. I was too big.\n\nI swung my head to the plains, to where loyal Peneti screamed beneath the flames. I tried to count the soaring, sweeping tails, but night was falling and so were the clouds. Ten, and ten and almost ten. We had three.\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nI raised my wings, bringing them down in a great stroke, and I sprang from the parapet, joining the fury of wings above me.\n\nI remembered the night of the Fall of the House of Bey, when dragons filled the skies and rained fire on the army from above. I was merely a watcher then, wrapped in a carpet that smelled of spice. But to actually join a sky battle is like nothing I can describe, and it is far worse at night. Wings, flame, blackness, talon. The winds churn at every beat, the heat scorches the surface of your eyes. There was only a single winking moon to give us light, so bursts of flame flashed through the night with terrible illumination.\n\nThe sky was thick with sand raised on the beating of so many wings. It bit my eyes and stung my throat, making it hard to catch my breath, but catch it I did, and I called the fire that lived in my breast. I blasted rider and dragon alike as I spiraled through their midst. I raked flanks with my talons, tore wings with a flash of my teeth. It was easy at first, like a river full of unsuspecting fish, and I realized that these Remoan Dragons had never reckoned with enemy wings. No nation other than Remus and Nabir possessed war dragons, so I'm sure they were not expecting Bask, Chance and I to break their lines just by flying through them. Over the howl of the winds and the screams of the army, I could hear riders shouting commands, and I knew that the current would turn swiftly against us once we became the focus, not the army below.\n\nSo, I made it count, flying above their lines and waiting for the flashes of dragonfire that showed me a target in the darkness. I swept down then, snatching rider after rider from the backs of their mounts, releasing them to meet their gods in the dunes. Those I couldn't remove, I pierced with my good foot and talons, and their blood left trails like smoke in the sky. I was very aware of my lameness, however, and the fact that I still favoured a missing limb. For every rider I disabled, I failed a strike with my phantom foot. Still, I'm sure I removed more than one head from Remoan shoulders that night.\n\nChance flew deftly and with precision. He was a Remoan drake, after all, and these were his kin. I could see him weave between the dragons, using his speed and lack of rider to throw them off balance. A mounted dragon had to obey certain sky rules, not be as quick or agile as those without. As a result, Chance shredded many wing leathers and crippled many fighting beasts. But, like me, his prey were the riders, for riderless war dragons were simply dragons. They had nothing vested in victory or loss. Without a rider, they were like Chance \u2013 rudderless, feral, and free.\n\nBask, was another story. He attacked with fury as he barreled his way through the Flights, first down, then up, spiralling like a karad in summer, trailing blood like the Nahr. I saw him take a Remoan red down outside the temple gates, and launch back to the sky, leaving him to the mercy of the marakt dragons and their fury. He was relentless and savage and, in that moment, my heart soared. It was a very brief moment.\n\nA grey drake struck my flank and I spun wildly as pain burst from my ribs. He lashed again, raking my tail with his talons and opening ribbons of red. I rolled swiftly, knowing that, with a rider, he could not, and I came up beneath him, dragging my teeth along the soft tissue at his belly. A back foot slashed my cheek, and I pushed my neck into it, using my horns and spines to puncture his ribs before a second set of jaws closed upon my wing.\n\nTwo, now. Two Remoan dragons, and I knew the current was turning. I released the grey and arrowed straight down, taking the second dragon with me. I spiraled as I went, knowing this was difficult for the rider to control, even with their harnesses and straps. Suddenly, I snapped open my wings and the dragon pitched beneath me, flinging his rider out of the harness to plummet into the sands. The drake bellowed and followed.\n\nIt was then that I realized he loved his rider.\n\nThey all loved their riders.\n\nFlash and flame, fire and breath.\n\nDragons and reeds, fates entwined since the creation of the world.\n\nThere was a roar of wind and I looked to the river. Five shapes in the night sky peppered the Peneti warships with dragonfire. Sails blazed and reeds howled as fire danced along the beams. But over the smell of dragon and smoke, I could smell the water. It was deep and fresh and more home than the walls of the Ophar's Palace. I curled my aching body, bore down on the fight and the shimmering, flashing ribbon that was the Nahr.\n\nI swept down towards the first ship, swerving just before I struck the sails. I angled my wing so that my talons hit the river's surface, spraying water up and onto the boat. Steam hissed into the sky, dampening the flames, but not putting it out. I soared back up and hovered, wings beating the hot wind as I spied for an opening. A flash of rolling breath rushed at me, so I tucked and dove again. The new dragon followed but I didn't care. The ships moved swiftly, and I aimed for the small black gap between them. Reflections of fires rippled across the waters, and I pulled my head up just as I plunged into the river, belly first. A massive wave rose to flood the decks and the waters immediately doused the flames. I tucked, dove under the boats, and came up on the other side, shaking my head and blinking in the darkness. A great weight struck from above and I went under once again.\n\nA dragon, its talons at the base of my horns, stabbed into my skull, threatening to crack me open like a seed. But I was home in the River Nahr and he was not, and I let the weight take me down. I rolled in the water like a sobethi, tucked my wings tight and whipped my tail back and forth, carrying me deeper still with each lash. Soon, the attacker's flanks were underwater, then his wings, and I knew that his rider would be panicking now, strapped as he was on the back of a submerging mount. The moment the talons released was the moment I made my move, sweeping up from the waters with a furious slap of my tail, to spin in the darkness above him. I landed on his back, crushing his rider under my weight, and clamped my teeth on the drake's crest, forcing his head under the water. I knew what it was like to fill my chest with the river, the panic and bursting ache that followed every time. He thrashed wildly now, but I stayed on him and soon, I felt him yield under my talons.\n\nWith a deep breath, I beat my wings down, rising into the night over the river, pulling his great head up with me until he shuddered and spat out the water. He would not fight now, but it was not a victory.\n\nThere were still so many dragons.\n\nFlash and flame, fire and breath.\n\nIt was dark and I couldn't see Chance or Bask. I couldn't even see the Temple of Neburanna. We were losing this battle. Shesset and her army from Penet could never win against Remus and their Dragon Flights. Nothing could win against dragons. Once again, I thought of Gesse and the Eye of Nerisanaa, where the skies danced with wing and tail and rippling scale.\n\nA drakina struck me from above, her talons piercing my shoulder, her hot breath on my spines. It was a solid grip and I spiraled downwards, plummeting towards the bone-crunching dunes below. Suns popped behind my eyes as her claws dug deeper and acid bubbled up in my throat. I sprayed fire as I spun, hoping some of it might catch her rider, but suddenly, there was a jerk and a dark shape plunged past my line of sight. The drakina released me and I swung my head up, snapped my wings open to break my fall. Still, I landed awkwardly in the sand and looked up as thunder rolled overhead.\n\nNot thunder.\n\nFlash and flame, fire and breath.\n\nSkyborn.\n\nI breathed them in as they swept past, sifting the winds that they brought with them. Ten and ten and ten and ten. New dragons, fresh from the south, no trace of silver or Gifah or gold. No, my heart leapt as the Nabiri Skyborn swept through the darkness above me, chasing down Remoan dragons, forcing them to the ground or ridding them of their riders. I flattened myself into the sand as they thundered overhead in wave after wave. The skies were alive and roiling, and even in the darkness, it was a fearsome, exhilarating thing.\n\nAs Remoan dragons hit the dunes, Peneti warriors swarmed them with swords and spears. The surviving Flights turned wing and beat back towards Wa'ast, the Skyborn following in pursuit. All along the walls of the temple, oil lamps sprang up in the darkness, but I stayed in the sand a while longer. I was bleeding, spent, and the sand was cool and soft and dark.\n\n\"Is she one of theirs?\"\n\nThe voice was like something from a dream.\n\n\"I think this is the Great Gold.\"\n\n\"Seket?\"\n\n\"Gods, the worth.\"\n\n\"They'll never know. Just one scale\u2026\"\n\nI opened one eye as the spear flashed, and heat burst behind my eyes. A spear, just like Kiin. I had killed her without mercy. I bellowed in pain until the acid spilled between my teeth. I had killed Ejjae too. The acid caught and I swung my head, spraying fire over a Peneti footman, who screamed and staggered back. Three others tried to run, but the sand was deep. I pushed myself to stand and sprayed them all now, snarling as they curled into dark hearts within balls of flame. The air smelled of burning flesh, and I watched, unmoved, as they turned to kindling, until they turned to ash.\n\nThey all wanted my scales to cure their woes. Even now, even still.\n\nAfter all I had done, after all I had become.\n\nI understood all too well why Rath'nahr wept. They were a heartbreaking people.\n\nOver the descending quiet, a dragon song rose in the air. It was plaintive and sad, and I knew at once it was Bask. I launched into the air, ignoring the pain from my neck. The spear bumped against my shoulder as I flew across the dunes towards the temple, and I circled the courtyard, wary and stiff, before dropping unceremoniously to the ground.\n\n\"The Great Gold!\" cried a reed.\n\n\"Tell the princess!\" barked another. \"The Great Gold is alive!\"\n\nThere were several dragons in the courtyard, and I saw Chance, sitting back on his haunches, one wing held awkwardly out to the side. He bleated at me, and it broke my heart. I lumbered over to him, reached out my neck and blew softly into his nostrils. He closed his eyes, breathing me in.\n\n\"Anekh!\"\n\nI swung my head as Kida rushed from the temple, followed by Abshir. She raced across the courtyard and flung herself against my shoulder, wetting my scales with her tears. I looked down at her. She was so small to me now. I'm not sure why I hadn't seen it before.\n\n\"Abshir, grab this spear!\"\n\nThe man did, and I snarled as he pulled it out in a few painful tugs. Kida ran her hands along my bloody flanks. I swung my head and caught one in my mouth, held it as I used to, content merely to have her arm rest upon my tongue. It used to be her finger. Oh, how life had changed.\n\nShe smiled sadly.\n\n\"Anekh Sun,\" she said, and scratched my chin with her free hand. \"My Anekh Sun.\"\n\nIt was true that the Remoan dragons loved their riders. I loved mine too.\n\nI heard Bask again, and lifted my head, sang out in response. Chance joined in, and our song echoed across the valley.\n\nHalf of a slaughtered uru was brought to me but I had no belly for food. Bask was weeping over the dunes and I felt it in my bones. I returned to the parapet as the skyboat of Rath'nahr sent its first spears of light across the heavens. It revealed a valley of glass - sand and flesh and chariot and leather, scorched by dragonfire and littered with the dead. I watched as Gifahn, Peneti and Nabiri worked together to gather the slain\u2014reed and dragon both\u2014and pile them together on the plains.\n\nNear the scorched banks of the Nahr, I saw the great Anshassar next to a bloody blue shape. I left the parapet and winged over the smoking dunes to land beside them, sand puffing up under my weight. I lowered my head against Bask's beak, blew gently into his nostrils. I don't think he knew I was there. In the dawn light, I could see his missing eyes, his shattered horns, his shredded wings, and I knew that, today, there were two slain princes of Nabir.\n\nI watched with a heavy heart as King Dejenai carried the body of his son to lay him gently on one of the piles. Anshassar breathed his flame across it and Bask raised his head one last time, poured out his sadness as a gift to Selis Anekh. He did not stop singing, and I joined him, watched as the black smoke carried the souls of the slain to the skies.\n\nAnshassar joined his voice to our song. It was the sliding dragon scales of heart and beauty, wind and death. Another drake landed, then a drakina, and soon, there was a flight of Skyborn weaving their stories into the dawn. Bask had stopped singing, and slowly, painfully, he dragged his broken body into the Nahr. The waters turned red around him, and for a moment, he looked like a sobeth, only his long beak, neck and spines visible above the surface. As if called, the Sons of Sobeth slid from the banks in his wake, and I watched his body jerk and twitch as they dragged him down into the depths. For the first time, I did not hate them. The Wheel rolled for them too, beginning and ending, death and life. The river splashed and he was gone, leaving only a trail of bubbles in his wake.\n\nMy mother, my brothers, Mehen, now Bask.\n\nI had mourned so often, that now, I couldn't. We become sand before we turn to stone.\n\nWe left for Wa'ast at noon."
            },
            {
                "title": "SUN AND MOON",
                "text": "Dejenai rode out first. He was to lead the Peneti force and meet those that were joining the attack from the northeast. Also, if the day went to plan, there would also be a Lamoan fleet attacking from the river. The Nabiri king took ten and ten and ten Skyborn with him, and according to Shesset, the city of Wa'ast should have fallen by midday. My heart was heavy as I watched him mount his great Anshassar and leave the temple courtyard. He had just lost his son, the light of his eyes, the flower of his heart, and yet, he rode. He was a king among reeds. He had slipped me eel roe cakes. I would follow him anywhere.\n\nWe flew out at noon with a Flight of ten. Shesset was to come in to Wa'ast, riding her Great Gold, something no other Ophar had ever done in the history of Gifah and its Great Golds. She spent most of the morning unusually silent, moving amongst the marakt dragons, touching them with childlike hands. It seemed she was holding the Nahr back behind her eyes, and I wondered at that. Then again, she'd lost much along this journey. One day she would be a statue when she too turned to stone.\n\nShe sat on my back, tucked in behind Kida. It was strange to carry two reeds, and I was mindful of my speed. Skyborn flew above and below and around us, like Selis Anekh ferrying the god across the sky. The sun was high, but so were the moons that afternoon, and one seemed to be closing in on the skyboat of Rath'nahr. I wondered what would happen if a moon caught him during the day. Surely, the chase didn't end at night. Maybe the chase never ended at all.\n\nThe last of the chariots had left earlier, along with the remains of the Peneti fleet. They were pulled by marakt dragons, and I was proud to see them working in the service of something other than sport. It took several hours to make Wa'ast by river, even longer by road, and a contingent of surviving foot soldiers stayed behind to secure the Temple under Abshir. Reeds betrayed each other without thought, so it seemed like a good decision.\n\nChance stayed behind as well. He'd broken a wing and deserved to heal. The last I saw him, he was stretched out in the shade of the temple wall, eyes closed and covered in flutterbys. They were grooming the blood from his scales with their tiny front teeth. I never saw him again after that, and I hoped he was happy, wherever the Wheel took him.\n\nAnd so, we flew.\n\nIt's strange to think that, with hundreds of troops marching wide along the north bank of the Nahr, and hundreds of sails flapping in the breeze alongside, there was silence. All day, silence, weighing like a blanket of gold-woven fleece. Even the marakt dragons moved like a soundless wave, followed by a tide of archers. Everyone was thinking. Everyone was wrestling with their fears. For me, it was personal.\n\nKhamet the Shining, the Last Moon of Gifah.\n\nSomewhere on the flat, sandy plains between the holy city of Wa'ast and the Temple of Neburanna, I was going to meet my brother.\n\nMy heart was filled with both anticipation and dread. I wanted to see him, to know that he was alive and thriving in the Palace of the Usurper, but I also knew that it would be a spear to my chest to see the deadness in his eye after so long under such a man. Could he be my brother in any way? Could he still be the wild tangle of life that had wrestled and bumped and lived on the banks of the Nahr? Would he remember me or Amok or our mother from the time before time, or had he been so broken and remade that his world was nothing but Beyat and blood?\n\nAnd so, when we saw the cloud of black smoke over the desert's edge, I knew we were riding into a very different battle. Through the smoke, I could see dragons circling, casting shadows across the sand, and my heart thundered in my chest. Were they Remoan, or were they Nabiri? If Dejenai had triumphed, the city would be ours. If not, I would be joining Bask and Mehen in the Fields of Ever Spring.\n\nI beat on, my wings moving as if they had a will of their own, dreading my approach as the city itself took shape. Wa'ast had always been a city of contrasts, with her basalt pillars and her mud brick, either painted in vibrant colour or left to wash white in the sun. Per ahmets set outside the city walls, along with the peaks of those few cradled within. I thought of Net'jeh, walled up before his dreaming eyes could see the fall of his beloved Ophar. It was then I saw the sails.\n\n\"Look!\" cried Kida over the wind, and she pointed to the river.\n\nAll along the Nahr, the Peneti boats sailed alongside others bearing a design I remembered from my time on the Nameless Sea. They sat low in the water, with long curving prows and striped sails. But it was the large painted eyes that I remembered, as I had ducked low in the waves to stay hidden from their sight.\n\n\"They came!\" Shesset barked. \"Lamos came!\"\n\n\"King Dejenai said they wouldn't!\"\n\n\"Thank the gods he was wrong. Lamos hates Remus. I knew they would need little excuse.\"\n\n\"And there!\" Kida pointed east of the city, where reeds surged against each other like waves. Reeds in silver, reeds in red, reeds in armour, reeds in leather scale. A second battle had taken place along Wa'ast's eastern wall, a land battle of sword and spear, chariot and bow. It looked to be over, and I saw the golden wheat standards of Penet raised over the sand.\n\n\"The second legion!\" Shesset cried.\n\n\"He was true to his word,\" said Kida. \"Thank the gods.\"\n\n\"Thank King Marwethad,\" said Shesset. \"I may have to marry him, now.\"\n\nWe angled over the city walls, and I could feel her weight shift as she placed the River Crowns on her head.\n\n\"Time to become a god,\" she said, and held her arms wide. For her part, Kida bent low over my neck. She was wrapped in gold cloth and was almost invisible on my back. It was all for Shesset, I knew. The people would see and marvel at the sight of a conquering Ophar riding a Great Gold. It was prophecy fulfilled, they would say. The will of the gods.\n\nShesset had always been gifted in strategies. She was a knife among reeds.\n\nAs we soared over the city of Wa'ast, I looked down, remembering the narrow streets and terraced roofs, the palms and the farmers' markets. There was considerable destruction, with crumbled walls, blackened timbers, and small fires everywhere. We flew through the smoke, and I spied the bodies of dragons splayed across roofs and roads alike, scales bloodied, wings bent.\n\nBut as we flew, reeds stopped and stared. Some pointed. Some fell to their knees. We swept through the city, slowly, methodically, allowing all to marvel and worship and weep.\n\nMy flight rose as we soared above the walls of the palace. There were no flutterbys to greet us and I remembered how Amok and Khamet would hunt them without mercy. There were many living dragons, some wounded Remoans but mostly Nabiri Skyborn. There was no gleaming silver, and I forced my dread deep, deep down. We flew around the Court of the Painted Palm and the Royal Drakmet, finally circling the courtyard that had been my early life. Our escort peeled away, and I landed roughly, with foot and stump and wing claw as brace. I was not used to carrying two reeds and I was relieved when Kida and Shesset slid off my back onto the ground. I folded one wing behind my back, arching my neck so that my spines stood proud against the afternoon sun.\n\nAnshassar bowed in the way of dragons, head low, wings high, and I was glad to see him.\n\nThere were many soldiers in the court outside the palace, and King Dejenai turned towards us. Shesset passed the twin crowns to Kida and strode over to him.\n\n\"They are bringing him out now,\" he said.\n\n\"Alive?\"\n\n\"That depends on him.\"\n\nWe waited for some time, and I sifted the air for the scent of Beyat, Khamet and the painted woman. I could hear the weeping of the reeds outside the palace walls, the shouting of generals and servants, the wail of dying dragons. The city had indeed fallen. Now, we were waiting to make it new.\n\nI heard the crunch of sandals on stone. A legion of Peneti foot soldiers emerged from the rich shadows of the columned hall. They had only one man between them, and I flattened my spines at his approach.\n\n\"Adriam?\" hissed Shesset.\n\nHe flashed his sobethi smile as he turned and bowed before King Dejenai.\n\n\"Greetings, esteemed generals and valiant leaders. You are on sacred ground. May I ask your names, please?\"\n\n\"I am Yashir Yar,\" said one. \"General of the Fourth Heavy Division of the Peneti Army, representing King Marwethad the Benevolent of Moradin.\"\n\n\"I am Illio Katekolis,\" said another. \"First Captain of the Areesian Fleet of the Council of Lamos.\"\n\n\"And I am King Danaea Dejenai of the Nabiri Skyborn.\"\n\n\"I knew this,\" said Adriam. \"There is a strong resemblance to your son, whom I had the recent honour of meeting.\"\n\n\"My son is dead,\" said Dejenai. \"Killed by Remoans like yourself.\"\n\n\"Ah, the tragedy of war.\"\n\nHe bowed again.\n\n\"I am Adriam of Bangarden, son of Magistrate Aaronus Aronadai, Emissary of Emperor Tinova of Remus, and Vizier of Ophar Beyat I of House Beyat. Welcome to Gifah.\"\n\n\"This is madness,\" growled Shesset. \"I am Shesset-Isset of House Bey, Light of the Heavens and Daughter of Neburanna, sister-wife of Rath'nahr and lover of the Most High God. I ride a Great Gold and bear the River Crowns of Gifah.\"\n\n\"So dramatic,\" said Adriam. \"It's in your blood.\"\n\nDejenai narrowed his good eye.\n\n\"You are the Remoan counsel and tutor to Beyat?\"\n\n\"Vizier, now, excellence. To the Ophar of House Beyat.\"\n\n\"Where is my coward brother?\" growled Shesset.\n\n\"How you've grown, Shesset,\" he said and \"You were but a child when I last saw you.\"\n\n\"Skinny wyrm. Isn't that what you called me?\"\n\n\"We were both young and foolish.\"\n\nHe grinned and turned to the men.\n\n\"Forgive the informality but the Ophar wishes to negotiate terms.\"\n\n\"There are no terms,\" said Shesset. \"There is surrender or death.\"\n\nThe Peneti general stepped forward.\n\n\"The Usurper has a dragon in there,\" he said. \"It will not let us near.\"\n\n\"Khamet,\" said Kida.\n\n\"Tell my brother\u2014\"\n\n\"Your Ophar.\"\n\n\"My murdering brother,\" she continued, \"That we will discuss terms once he has released his claim on the throne of Gifah and accepted the rightful rule of the House of Bey under the invading forces of Penet, Lamos and Nabir.\"\n\n\"He wishes to share the throne,\" said Adriam. \"There is a precedent in the Book of the Rule, if I'm not mistaken.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken, and I will never share the throne.\"\n\n\"You were the one responsible for the Remoan Dragon Flights?\" asked Dejenai.\n\nAdriam smiled again.\n\n\"Of course, excellence. Remus is highly regarded among nations\u2014\"\n\nDejenai moved quickly for an elder. He stepped forward, his sword flashed, and Adriam staggered backwards, clutching at the fountain of red bubbling at his throat.\n\n\"My son is dead,\" said the king. \"Now, so are you.\"\n\nAdriam buckled to his knees, eyes wide, mouth gaping, before he pitched facedown onto the stone of the court. His sun-coloured hair stained red in its own blood.\n\n\"That may not have been the most sound diplomatic strategy,\" said Dejenai, sheathing his sword.\n\nShesset stood for a long moment.\n\n\"We will drag Beyat and his painted mother out of the throne room by force.\"\n\n\"He has a dragon,\" said Yashir Yar.\n\n\"So do I.\"\n\nShe turned to me.\n\n\"Kida, send her in.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "There is a spoke for silver on the Wheel of the Elements. There is also a spoke for gold. That is wise, for the Wheel is wise. The Wheel is unforgiving, impartial, and fair. It just goes around and around and around, like the Moons of Syth pursuing the Sun of Rath'nahr.\n\nThe moon, Khamet, pursuing the Sun, Selis Anekh.\n\nWe were so well named.\n\nI snaked under the columned roof, waiting for my eyes to adjust from the brilliant afternoon light. I could smell him even here. I could hear the rumble of his breath. Sun beamed in through the skylights, brightening the colours painted on the walls, pillars, and ceiling, and deepening the shadows. It was this room where I had first been presented, a gift for a god, gifted to a goddess. How I ached to be here again.\n\nI heard him snarl and I lowered my head. There was no disguise, no attempt to hide. Beyat sat on the Ophar's golden seat, his mother at his side, and wrapped around it like a giant wraith was Khamet.\n\n\"Gods, she's a cripple,\" said Beyat. \"I remember when she said I was hard on my dragons.\"\n\nKhamet pushed to his feet and my chest tightened. I was weary, while he was fresh. I had been injured just yesterday in the battle of the Temple, while he was strong and unscarred. He had two strong legs, a full rippling throat and a will of iron. I could see the fire roll across his tongue as he breathed it in and out, in and out.\n\nHe lowered his head and took a step towards me.\n\nI moved between the pillars as if they were the trees in the forests of Gesse. I was not disadvantaged. I had hunted uru and wraiths, sobethi and sandbuck. A fast flutterby would have been his only challenge.\n\nLight, shadow, colour, wash. His silver scales reflected them all.\n\nWe circled each other, tails lashing, heads low, the columns our fences, the ceiling our sky.\n\nI was a Great Gold. I had been caged and I had fought myself free. I had been robbed, and I had avenged. I had given life, and I had taken. I had been free in jungles and in rivers, and I had served these reeds with every scale on my body.\n\nAround and around and around we paced, circling each other in the Throne Room of the Ophar. Both Beyat and his mother watched us with wide eyes. I couldn't tell if it were anticipation or dread. This chamber seemed to summon those things. I remembered them when I had been gifted. I remembered them when Nefheru had been caught.\n\nI had been young then, a fledgling, then a calf. Today, live or die, I was a goddess.\n\nKhamet slowed, lowered his sleek head. I watched the tip of his tail, tapping up and down on the smooth stone. Like a wraith, he moved, but I had killed wraiths. I had torn their bodies in two. They were nothing to me.\n\nHe opened wide his mouth and sprayed his fire, but I met it with my own and the heat melted the paint on the pillars. I heard a shout from Beyat but Khamet launched himself across the stone, fire spilling from his tongue. My wings beat down in a powerful stroke and I sprang high, his jaws closing on the tip of my tail. I twisted above his head, dropping with all my weight, clamping my teeth at the base of his horns, and pushing his head to the ground. I tore at his shoulders with my wing claws, raked his spine with my talons. He rolled beneath me, and I released, hovering just beneath the ceiling as he recoiled. I had drawn first blood. I knew the next moves would be crucial.\n\nHe coiled and sprang again, but I was gone, streaking between the columns just like in the Market of Give and Take. He was at my tail, and we wove in between the pillars and palms, sending fronds and chips of basalt to the ground as we went. And suddenly, we were outside, reeds scattering as we burst from the hall, and the sunlight threatened to blind me as I whipped over the courtyard walls. I soared around Netjeh's per ahmet, spinning higher and higher until I saw the gold-clad peak. Khamet struck me then from the side, sent me careening into the limestone, and little pebbles tumbled down the sides. It knocked the breath from my body, and he was on me in a heartbeat, beating me with his wings, raking my belly with his talons. I blinked back the pain and caught the soft tissue of his throat in my teeth. I collected my haunches and pushed off the crumbling wall, rocking him backwards under my weight and taking him down along the steep inclines of the per ahmet's wall.\n\nA dragon on its back is a vulnerable one, and I beat him down, down, down to crash on the blackened stone below. Reeds scattered like water wyrms as we thrashed wildly, locked in a death grip with each other. I called the acid into my throat when he raked my eye with a wing talon. I released him, gagging, and shaking my head in order to see.\n\nHe was gone now, and I leapt into the air to follow.\n\nI couldn't see through one eye, but still, I followed, snapping at his tail as he soared back through the Court of the Great Gold. He turned his head, sprayed an arc of flame and I veered as heat scalded my neck. Khamet skimmed the ground, his wing claws striking the mosaic stone as he rushed onward, me matching his speed, beat for beat.\n\nI saw the reeds ahead. They had pulled Beyat and Nefheru from the throne room and I saw them all duck and scatter as Khamet arrowed towards them. He angled his wing and arced upwards. Beyat grabbed his sister and shoved her towards the approaching dragon. Swifter still, Kida flung herself into the path.\n\nKhamet caught her in his talons and began to rise.\n\nKida.\n\nShe screamed and twisted in his grip.\n\nKida.\n\nHigher and higher went my brother.\n\nHigher and higher went my Kida.\n\nI flattened my spines. There was nothing now. There was no throne. There were no crowns. There was no Gifah nor Goddess; there was no before, no after. There was nothing but Kida and my brother and the sky. Higher he went, my silver brother, straight up like an arrow. Her blood sprayed my beak like the rain in Gesse, warm and fat and relentless in its fall.\n\nWe were so high now, high as the clouds. So high that the sky was cold, and the land was hazy, and it was then that he arced his long body to let her go.\n\nHe let her go.\n\nHe spun in the air as I swept to catch her, struck me on a downward spiral with his great horned head.\n\nI spun too, spraying fire as I went, smelling the burning of his spines and scales. I twisted away, head angled downward, and plummeted like a stone from the White Horn.\n\nShe is a dot, a blur, a speck.\n\nI flatten my spines, force my heart into my wings.\n\nI have forgotten Khamet. I have forgotten Shesset and Beyat and the God's Land of Gifah.\n\nThere is only Kida, the wind, the ground, and me.\n\nShe reaches for me, and I stretch out my talons.\n\nHer eyes, the largest things in the world.\n\nThe wind, whipping her linens like sails, like wings.\n\nHer hands, soft and strong, best to scratch a growing horn or itch a flake of drying paint. Like claws of her own. Reaching. Reaching.\n\nThe wind, once my friend, my source, my life. The wind biting my eyes, flaying my skin.\n\nHer mouth, small and fine, a tongue most often held, now wide in terror, in free fall, in faith.\n\nI will save her.\n\nThe ground is racing, growing, laughing.\n\nThere is only her eyes and my will.\n\nI will save her.\n\nMy talons stretch, stretch until they crack, until my eyes pop out of my skull.\n\nMy world.\n\nHer eyes.\n\nThe ground is here, and I swipe one last time and sweep upwards, feeling her safely caught in the grip of my claws.\n\nBut the Wheel turns one last time."
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON OF SAND AND STORM",
                "text": "As dragons turn to stone, so also turn our hearts. The Wheel, while unforgiving, is also fair. Impartial, equal, just. It ends where it begins, as all things do; finds flowering in its root. It is a circle, after all. The Circle of Life, the Wheel of the Elements. So, there was a certain symmetry in the act of my phantom foot. It was Kida who fixed the chain to my leg; I who was forced to chew it free.\n\nI didn't catch her. I will never forget the sound.\n\nI landed beside her, my legs trembling from the exertion, wings twitching from the flight. There was a pit where she hit, with a ring of sand from the impact. I leaned my beak down into the pit and breathed in the scent. I had smelled it before. Josiat. Sakariye. The Monk of a Thousand Steps. I listened for the drum of her heart, the beat of her heart that had drummed me to sleep for so long, but now there was silence. I blew softly into her face. Her eyes did not close, just like my mother's.\n\nHer eyes round and very dark, no longer sparkling with life.\n\nThey had been, once. They had been my world.\n\nFoot soldiers moved towards us, but I bellowed at them, sprayed fire in a great circle all around. It charred the scrub and burned the sand, turning it to glass.\n\nI swung my head, looked to the city. There was a flash of silver in the sunlight as Khamet winged down into the palace.\n\nI was stone.\n\nI had not broken the Wheel. I had become it.\n\nThe wind tasted different as I leapt into the air. Dry and hollow. Sharp and sweet. My wings felt different as they beat upwards. Once upon a time, it had been beat beat, breathe in. Beat beat, breathe out. But now, it was beat, breath, beat, breath. Mechanical, like the workings of a chariot. Like the spokes of a wheel. I flew straight up to Selis Anekh, Goddess of the Sun, but she too was different. Cold, wide, bitter, burn. Everything was different now as I rose on the wind.\n\nOr perhaps, it was me.\n\nI spun slowly around under the prickling rays, breathing in and out, letting the sharp, dry, sweet air fill my chest and blow away the embers of my heart. Below me was the great city of Wa'ast, centre of all things, yet root of none. I could keep flying. I could go higher, straight up to my mother the Goddess, let the cold and the light take me to the Fields of Ever Spring. It would be easy but no. My place was the river.\n\nMy place had always been the river.\n\nI arced in the air, bent my neck towards the Palace of the Ophar. Slowly, at first, I beat my wings. Slowly, then strongly, then fiercely I flew. I was an arrow. I was a Spear, Daughter of the Sun. I was lighter than the Scale. I was Seket. I was Goddess.\n\nThey never saw me coming, not even Khamet, as I swept straight down, hidden in the brilliance of the sun. I caught Beyat's head in my talons, hearing the snap of his neck as I pulled him off his feet. The painted woman screamed, and my brother bellowed, and I winged towards the river. I let him go then and his lifeless body spun as it fell, striking the side of a Lamoan ship before hitting the water. Like my blue brother, a splash, some bubbles, and he was gone. I paid homage to Sobeth with this gift.\n\nI heard Khamet behind me, so I dove in, felt the currents wash my scales like a waterwall. I swam through the dark waters, wings tucked, tail lashing from side to side, mechanical, removed. Bubbles steamed from my nostrils and still, I wished I could breathe it in. I gloried in the river. Even still, I sing in her depths.\n\nThere was a splash, and I knew he'd followed me in. Foolish Khamet. I was Goddess of the River, born on her banks and forged in her currents. He was nothing. A palace pet. A flutterby without joy. A tool.\n\nI burst up through the surface, spraying water like arrows into the sky. With a flip of my tail, I circled above him just like I had with the Remoan drake at the temple and landed on the back of his neck. He struggled to surface but I added my weight, keeping his head under the waves. Still, I carried him forward, letting the rushing currents fill his mouth, allowing the darkness to flood his chest. I wanted him to drink his fill of this wonderful, terrible, relentless thing that I loved. The mighty Nahr. Giver of life and broker of dreams. We had shared this life once, so long ago, when our mother carried us to our nest on its banks.\n\nStill winging forward, I push him deeper.\n\nOur brother, the green, had died in that nest. Our brother the blue, here in these waters. The silvers, eager and reckless and full of life, sharpened on the Wheel as a whetstone sharpens metal. Sharpened by Beyat and Adriam and the great, terrible House of Bey.\n\nFaster I flew, and farther, dragging him between the boats and beneath the waves. I was the Wheel now, mechanical and removed. I was stone, hard, unforgiving, cruel. I had killed wraiths, I had killed reeds and I had killed dragons equally. In the same way, I would kill Khamet.\n\nA flurry of colour rose from the banks, and from the corner of my eyes, I saw flutterbys.\n\nThe Sand and the Storm made the mighty River Nahr, and the mighty River Nahr made me.\n\nThere were many ships moored along the banks, and all reeds watched as I drowned Khamet the Shining, Son of Beyat. But it was the flutterbys that I saw, swirling and dancing on the rushes that lined the river. Dragonets and fledglings full of life and promise.\n\nI slowed my wings, looked down at the drake under my talons. There was no struggle, there was no fight. I released him and hovered over the river, ready to plummet back down at the first sign. His silver shape carried on below the surface for a few moments, then it slowed against the current, bobbing, shapeless and dull. It sank in the dark, silt-heavy waters, and I waited for the splash that said sobethi. But the sobethi never came.\n\nThe Sand and the Storm made the mighty River Nahr, and the mighty River Nahr made me.\n\nI dipped down then, catching a horn with my talons, and I dragged his floating body towards the shore. There were Gifahn ships, and Remoan ships, Lamoan ships and Peneti. There were fishing boats and market boats, barques and barges, mooring posts and stone embankments, but with teeth and claw and force of will, I dragged him up through the boats and docks and rushes to the shore. I released him then, and sat on my haunches, one wing tucked behind my back.\n\nAll the world met on the waters of the Nahr, formed from the abundance of Sand and Storm. I, too, had been formed from the abundance of Sand and Storm, but Khamet had been formed from stone.\n\nI don't know where the song came from, then, when I lifted my beak to the sky. I had sung it when I mourned my eggs so long ago. Bask had sung it with the death of his noble Nakosa. But it was more than a song of loss but of life, and I sang for the drakina of Nerisanaa and her wonderous, wildling band. I sang for the blues and the greens and the greys, the reds and the browns. For Chance the Eager and Mehen the Free. I sang for the Nabiri Skyborn and even for the Remoan Flights. I sang for the wingless ones, defaced and faithful, and the innocent hatchling flutterbys, whose blood bought the blessing of the gods.\n\nMy song echoed, unaccompanied, across the waters until I heard the tiny voices of flutterbys. They swirled around Khamet and me, warbling their fledgling songs in high, tremulous keys. Our song caught in the sails of many ships before I let it go to disappear in the warm breeze. The flutterbys settled on me like pic-bugs, on my head, on my spines, on my tail and on my wings. There was no sound then, save the flapping of distant sails and the sighing of the river. It was the silence of the world breathing. I looked down.\n\nKhamet's eyes were glassy, his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth. But I was certain the soft tissue of his throat throbbed once, when I heard a sound.\n\nI reached my beak to breathe in his scent, sending my own breath hot into his nostrils and eyes. I trilled at him. Slowly, he blinked, his lid scraping the glass of his eye like a stonesmith's lathe. His tongue flicked and water ran like a creek between his teeth. I trilled again.\n\nI watched the spines along his neck flex and relax, watched him vainly try to lift his head. I trilled a third time, and the flutterbys scattered as he heaved himself higher onto the bank. He rested for a long moment, before shaking his great head and retching a barrel full of water onto the scrub. He looked from side to side, snapping his beak, then settled his gaze on me.\n\nThere was no sound, other than the breeze and the lapping waters and my brother, breathing.\n\nHe trilled. It was thin like a bubble.\n\nSlowly, with great effort, he gathered his wings and launched into the sky. He circled once above the bank, before turning west to follow the river. He rose higher and higher, becoming a silver star in the clouds.\n\nI never saw him again.\n\nI did not return to the palace. Rather, I returned to the place where Kida died. Her body was still there. Understandably. There had been a great battle and she was only one of the fallen. But, for me, she was the only one.\n\nShesset was there with a company of men. She was on her knees in the sand, and for the first time, she did not look like a knife.\n\n\"No,\" she moaned. \"No, this is wrong. This is not the plan\u2026\"\n\nThe Nahr spilled and sand stuck to her cheeks.\n\n\"Forgive me, dear Anekh Sun, Daughter of the Goddess. It wasn't worth it.\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"I loved her.\"\n\nLove.\n\nI had known that, once.\n\nAll around us, reeds moved to tend the injured, mourn the dead, pile the bodies, begin again. I couldn't see the Ophar's Palace, nor the Court of the Great Gold, but I was told later that Nefheru was buried alive in the sand outside the city gates. I didn't care. My life was neither richer, nor poorer because of it.\n\nReeds stood around, waiting on the princess. No, on the Ophar of Gifah. Even Dejenai, kind, wise, strong Dejenai, waited on her. In the distance, Anshassar lay, claws crossed, wings folded elegantly across his back.\n\nI snorted and rose to my feet. Shesset looked up but I ignored her and balanced on my wing claws and stump to finally, truly, take Kida in my talons. I sprang into the sky, then, sending sand like needles in the rush of my wings. Each beat took me higher, and I returned to the river to follow my brother west.\n\nThe sun was high in the sky, and I flew for hours. The clouds had begun to streak pink when I found the spot on the banks where I had been born. The very spot where my mother had died. The palms were thicker, the rushes thinner, but I knew it in my bones. There was the mound that had buried her, and the depression that had been our nest. Five chicks hatched, two remaining. I was not good at counting, but that, I knew.\n\nI hollowed out the depression and buried Kida deep. Sand was, after all, first of many spokes on the Wheel. It was fitting that it was also her last.\n\nI turned to my mother and the shifting per ameht of sand that had formed over her. I gathered my breath and blew across the sand, longer and hotter than I'd ever blown. I rose into the air and flew in slow circles around it, painting the melting, gleaming mound with flame. I dropped back down, watched the mound harden into a shimmering surface that reflected the sun's fading light.\n\nGlass.\n\nA new spoke on the Wheel.\n\nI lumbered to the edge of the river and stretched out. Like Anshassar, I draped my wings across my back and crossed my claws in front of me, content to watch the drama play out in the sky. Selis Anekh was the sun, Khamet and Amok the moons. They pulled no skyboats, they served no god. They were dragons, gods in their own right, and now I took my place among them, Goddess of the Nahr. I would watch the river forever.\n\nAnd I did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "It seems so long ago that I laid my eggs. Like my mother, I hollowed out a depression in the sand for the nest. Not so deep, however, and under a river palm for shade. I remember 4 eggs and 4 hatchlings. Three blue and a green. No silver, no gold, and for that I was glad. They hatched, and they lived. They wrestled and they thrived, and I taught them to fish in waters, to harvest pic-bugs and scorpioch eggs, to watch for sobethi lurking in the reeds. As they matured, they left the nesting grounds for mates and lives and legends of their own.\n\nI didn't miss them.\n\nThe reeds did not harass me in my station as river watcher. I think they knew I was there to protect them, and they rowed quietly as I reclined on the bank, wings folded, claws crossed. Some bowed, some touched their hearts. Often, they brought gifts of meat and dried fruit and cakes, and sometimes they would sacrifice an uru or sand buck and request a prayer be answered or a petition heard. I never answered prayers, but I did eat well.\n\nAlong with the offerings, reeds often brought gifts of jewels, gold, and carvings along with their paprush prayers, and they would leave them between my claws. At night, other reeds would slip in to steal the things left for me. I didn't mind. I had become a Market of Give and Take of my very own.\n\nDuring those early years, I never let a Remoan warship back onto the Nahr. Each one that tried, I turned to cinder. I think, because of this, I held the power of nations in my claws. It was a fitting revenge against the land that had caused so much strife, and it set Gifah apart as a nation defended by dragons.\n\nOnce a year, Shesset would visit, bringing a parade of viziers and ministers, generals and suitors. Eventually, she brought a son. She would kneel between my claws, from dawn to dusk, head bowed in silence. She did this for many years and I barely noticed as she got smaller, thinner, greyer. She told me that her people would begin building her per ahmet behind me. It was tall and beautiful and adjacent to the per ahmet of glass that I had made for my mother. But when her people began to measure me with their levels and their rods, I knew they intended to build a per ameht around me. I lashed my great tail, destroying the foundation and dissuading them of that notion. They moved it directly behind my reclining form. It took them years to complete it, and it was the largest per ameht ever constructed. To this day, I believe it still is. Then, they built a third and a fourth, and then a temple dedicated to Selis Anekh herself. Eventually, my mother's clearing became what is now called the Valley of the Queens.\n\nA fitting tribute to all of us, I thought.\n\nOne year, Shesset did not come, but her son came in her place. Then later, another Ophar, and another. A city grew up around the Valley of the Queens. It was loud and busy as reeds came to visit the temple and the per ahmets and me. There were many boats, and then ships with tall sails and barges that carried armies. Chariots became carts, carts became wagons, wagons became engines. I think there were wars. Years became decades, but I didn't count them. Dragons are not good at counting.\n\nBy then, I rarely moved, not even to hunt. I was very large and covered in a thick layer of sand and so, under the blistering gaze of Selis Anekh, I eventually baked into stone. I remembered the statues along the river at Karadoum, and I wondered if the reeds thought I was not dragon but sculpture now. I had much time for thinking, and I finally understood Netjeh, how he slept his days away and why he dreamed his path to the Fields of Ever Spring.\n\nThe Wheel turned and I watched, until one day, Selis Anekh herself came to me.\n\n\"Come, dear daughter,\" she said. \"I am tired of pulling the skyboat of Rath'nahr. Let us trade places. I will watch the river and you can carry the god. All the people will gaze up at you and cover their eyes and marvel.\"\n\nI thought a long moment.\n\n\"I have no wish to carry the god,\" I say. \"I am no chariot dragon, forced to do the bidding of the reeds. I have pulled a cart and shattered it on the stones of a per ahmet. I have harnessed my flame to create glass and I founded the Valley of the Queens. I have broken the Wheel of Elements and reforged it in my image. I am Goddess of the Nahr, so, while the river still flows under my claws, I will stay and protect the land of Gifah.\"\n\nShe left me then, satisfied, but she also left me thinking.\n\nThe Sand and the Storm made the mighty river Nahr...\n\nBut what did the mighty river Nahr truly make?\n\nThe Nameless Sea, wide and vast, vibrant and deep.\n\nPerhaps one day, I will leave the Valley of the Queens and take to the Nahr once more. My wings will span his great banks, my shadow will bring the night. One dip of my talon will flood cities, one flap will bring storms. I will leave the mighty Nahr for the Nameless Sea and search out Ankh Horys, the great dragon titan of the sea, who leaves trenches in the oceans so deep that no light can reach, and no fish can live. I will search for Aphorys, dragon god of the beginning, and I will search for Orophys, dragon god of the end. And I will take my place among the legends of the world, and perhaps then, I will soar to the skies to find my mother, Selis Anekh. Then, I will free her from the chains of a god.\n\nI flex my claws.\n\nThe stone cracks.\n\nThe sand begins to spill."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragonfriend 3) Dragonsoul",
        "author": "Marc Secchia",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Awakening to Death",
                "text": "\"She's dying.\"\n\nGrandion's words were brittle, laced with dark-fires. They pierced Hualiama's awareness like whetted scalpels. Grievous. Wounding. Shocking her toward full consciousness.\n\n\"You cannot restrain your daughter this way, Empress.\" Sapphurion's deeper, smokier tones, torrid with anger.\n\n\"That thing is not my daughter!\" Azziala hissed.\n\nSilence pooled about Lia, as thick as congealed blood.\n\nDying? Even her mother's hatred paled in the light of the Tourmaline Dragon's distress. How could she be dying? Last she remembered\u2013mercy! A violent battle above the Dragon's Bell, falling, burning in the crucible of Razzior's incandescent Dragon fire\u2026 and then, a miracle of claw and scale. Or had she dreamed of a place to which a soul alone could travel?\n\nThe Empress of the Lost Islands snarled, \"Even now, the lizard awakes. Remember our bargain, Grandion. Six days to report, one week to recover. The comet presages the rising of Dramagon's Elect. This is the dawn of our long-overdue vengeance upon the Island-World!\"\n\nFootsteps tapped rapidly into the distance as the Empress departed.\n\nSuddenly, huge nostrils snuffled at her neck. The startling delicacy of that touch raised the most incredible frissons of sensation throughout her body. Hualiama would have giggled, save that she felt utterly debilitated; as if a rolling Island had slowly pulverised the length of her spine. The battle must have just finished. Where was she? By the nearby, cave-contained echoes upon stone, she suspected Azziala's lair at Chenak Island, the most westerly of the Lost Islands. How had she returned here? Her skull felt as if it were clamped around a granite boulder; every thought dragged through a wearisome quagmire of pain.\n\n<How does she resist so strongly?> Grandion wondered in telepathic Dragonish. <All those drugs, the battering of fifty Enchanters augmenting her mother's powers, and Lia's mind remained inviolable\u2013yet they stole all of our secrets, shell-father. They ripped us apart like a Dragon stripping flesh from bone!>\n\n<You must arise, o Princess of Fra'anior,> said Sapphurion, nuzzling her flank. <Quick-wings!>\n\nGrandion said, <Princess? No longer.>\n\nA royal ward, aye. Far too much nuisance-value to be a real princess. As surely as the twin suns' rising, her adoptive father King Chalcion would disown her for outright rebellion, not to mention breaking his ribs. He had vowed to renounce her often enough over the years. Now she had learned the identities of her true birth-father and birth-mother, each as hateful and power-hungry as the other, and she remembered Azziala slaying Ra'aba, the Roc, with her own hand. Then, the mystery shrouding Hualiama's existence in the womb. A child, dead for two days, returned to life. Impossible.\n\nYet here she lay, her nostrils filled with the fusty odours of a well-used rug.\n\n<Hualiama,> said the Dragon Elder, nudging her again. <By my wings, Grandion, I'd give all the jewels of Gi'ishior for the healing powers of my Qualiana this hour. Take her quickly to the Land Dragon, shell-son. Secure the healing she needs.>\n\n<So that Azziala might employ her powers in the annihilation of all who oppose her planned conquest?> Yet the nuances of Grandion's Dragonish betrayed his deep concern.\n\n<Focus on the mission,> Sapphurion growled.\n\n<Aye.> In her mind's eye, Lia saw Grandion's huge, spiky blue head nodding. <My Dragonlove will find a way. That is her gifting. The one power even the Empress of the Dragon-Haters cannot possibly oppose.>\n\nRight then, Lia knew she could not have opposed pollen floating on a Fra'aniorian zephyr.\n\n<Unnh\u2026 Grandion?>\n\nHer drawn-out mental groan elicited bugles and exclamations of delight from the male Dragons, but she had never felt so peculiar. Her body felt unaccountably heavy, while her belly enlivened to a fizzing, effervescing sensation that made Lia imagine having swallowed a nest of vexed hornets. Grandion and Sapphurion's fussing caused constellations of iridescent fire to explode behind her unyielding eyelids. Her spinal column, especially at its base near her tailbone, tingled with exotic fervour, giving rise to an incongruous compulsion to dance over thunderclouds and slide down rainbows singing at the top of her lungs.\n\nClearly, her brain had been pickled at length in a barrel of berry-wine.\n\nSapphurion urged, <Dragon-swift now, shell-son. Snaffle the Dragonfriend into your paw. Wing away ere the Hater changes her mind.>\n\nTalon-tips prodded her belly. Another paw rolled her carefully onto her side. Draconic warmth. Soft, yet steely, Grandion's well-known paw enfolded her limbs and ribs. The cinnamon-vanilla redolence of his hide tickled her nostrils with forbidden scents.\n\n<Mind her fragile wings,> hissed the Tourmaline.\n\nWings? Lia chortled aloud. Silly Dragons. Her overlarge eyes fluttered open, strangely unfocussed, lighting upon a world swirling and cascading with white-fire filigrees. Astonishing. Oh, and a large blue nose hove into view, slap between her eyes\u2013achoo!\n\nAs she sneezed, clouds of sulphurous white smoke spurted from her nostrils. Lia gasped, <Oh no!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "It had not been a dream.\n\nClasped in the Tourmaline's protective paw, the bewildered hatchling Dragoness was but an observer as Grandion charged up a short ramp, flitted between a massive set of sliding granite doors, and launched out over the void. Suns-beams caressed her flesh. They gilded the male Dragon's gemstone beauty as his great body stretched out upon the breeze, blotting out the sky above, for Grandion measured over ninety feet from muzzle to tail-spike, and one hundred and ten feet across his fully extended wingtips. He powered upward into frigid skies the fathomless blue of a terrace lake seen by moonlight, swiftly surmounting the snow-rimed crown of Chenak Island. Lia's vision wobbled violently before settling upon the twin suns dipping gingerly into the vast, burnt-umber Cloudlands ocean stretching West of the Lost Isles; at once, her secondary nictitating membranes flicked into place, filtering the powerful glare.\n\nHer gaze dipped to goggle myopically at her unfamiliar body. Flying ralti sheep\u2013well, not exactly a woolly bleater, not in a million Island-World dawns. She saw scales of a blue as fathomless as the colours crowning the evening sky. Four neat, reptilian limbs sprouted from her svelte torso. Five perfect little talons adorned each forepaw, slightly bigger on her hind feet. Three talons pointed forward, splayed more widely than a Human hand, while two opposing 'thumbs' completed a fantastically dextrous Dragon's paw. Lia flicked her wings in mounting astonishment. She gaped at her flanks, as sleek as any rainbow trout.\n\nOnly under a Mystic Moon could this be real.\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon's fire-eyes lit upon her, and Hualiama quivered beneath the tenor of his regard. All twelve feet of her, right down to her\u2026 tail. What a wondrously weird notion.\n\n<Awake, o Dragonsong of my soul?> inquired Grandion, ardently.\n\n\"I'm a Dragon? Still?\"\n\nHis brow-ridges crinkled with amusement. Switching to Island Standard, he rumbled, \"Most Dragonkind share a similar experience every morn, Hualiama. Aye, by my wings, you remain a Star Dragoness. Your dreams have taken wing. By Fra'anior's breath alone! Never in the history of this Island-World has such a transformation clothed Human flesh in draconic splendour. You are\u2013\" his voice descended into a husky splutter \"\u2013indescribable. I\u2026 I understand at last. Our oaths, our fire-promises; all is made whole. The prophecy is fulfilled by such perfection, a Dragon's hearts must out-soar the very stars.\"\n\nA million words could have been spoken. All that was perverse and forbidden about a liaison between a Human and a Dragon, all their suppressed feelings and uncertainty and terror, had perished in Razzior's mighty fires, only to arise phoenix-like from the ashes, arrayed in a glorious newness of possibility. She was a mere hatchling in size, but fully Dragoness. Undeniably, wholly, the embodiment of a draconic fire-soul. Yet was this the whole story? The prophecy Grandion alluded to, which Amaryllion the Ancient Dragon had uttered, foresaw the advent of a third great race upon the stage of Island-World life. A third power would rise to balance that of Humankind and Dragonkind, ushering in a time of imbalance, and foreshadowing the overthrow of ancient powers. She was the harbinger of this age. Lia quashed her fears. Of this, she could not speak as yet. Let his joy shine unsullied.\n\nTentatively, she inquired, \"Indescribable\u2026 in the best possible way?\"\n\nHow he laughed! His guffaws propelled them toward the brightening stars in a series of great lurches, and when Lia managed to focus her eyes past his body to the open skies, she saw a marvellous sight, a brilliant comet blazing right across the midline of the Blue Moon, its major tail trailing more than halfway across the sky, while a second, smaller white tail spun off at a narrow angle. The comet of prophecy? It must be, this new portent.\n\nAs she gazed at the diamond-brilliant phenomenon, the cosmic white-fires shifted like sweeping veils to reveal a great white Dragon sleeping in the comet's heart. Cold. Callous. Eloquent of all that was formidable and supremely dominant about the Ancient Dragonkind. So desperately soul-shadowing was that apparition, Lia gasped and squeezed her eyes shut. The Tourmaline immediately comforted her with a mellifluous word, saying:\n\n<A life birthed in fire,>\n\n<Star Dragons sing starsong over her cradle.>\n\nShe whispered, \"The prophecy is coming to fruition.\"\n\nThe Dragon made a low, agreeable hum. \"Let us not speak of prophecies, my third heart. Let us simply be two Dragons, enjoying the freedom of the skies together.\"\n\nTwo Dragons? Even those simple words triggered mystical white-fires which cascaded afresh across her vision, an insight into the fabled elemental fires of the draconic creation legend; the belief that all matter, in its most elemental form, was comprised of white-fires. White for order, truth, and love, for the most desirable manifestations of dragonhood. Dark-fires represented chaos, depression, and eternal obliteration, symbolic of all that Dragons feared most.\n\nWhen she ventured another glance, she saw only a comet.\n\nAll mysticism and lore aside, Lia did not exactly feel stuffed to the eyeballs with the mischief of a frisky dragonet. She wanted to shift her position in Grandion's right forepaw, but the slightest movement produced unbearable pain. Was this what he meant? Her wings felt weighed down with lead, and her hearts-beat was sluggish and laboured. Dragons were meant to be full of vim and fire and irascibility. It was all Lia could do to hold up her head.\n\n\"Grandion, why did you say I'm dying?\"\n\nHis heavy sigh expelled many cubic feet of creamy, chthonic smoke from his nostrils, and caused him to bounce in the chill evening air. \"Because two weeks have passed\u2013\"\n\n\"Two weeks? Two\u2013eighteen days, Grandion? You jest\u2026\"\n\nHis reflexive growl simmered down. \"Two weeks ago, the Empress of the Lost Islands laid all Dragons low. Last week she allowed Sapphurion and me to wake from the Command-hold. Since then, we have plumbed every ounce of lore and skill we possess to discern the cause of your illness and keep you alive, but to no avail. Your eye-fires grow dim. Your breath weakens. Your claws and hide are losing their natural sheen.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't understand.\"\n\n\"I drove a bargain with the Empress\u2013a vile, soul-shadowing\u2026 necessity.\" He spat a stream of fire from the corner of his mouth. \"I speak of her, and of my fierce yet worthless pride. You crossed the Island-World for a blind Dragon! You, Dragonfriend, wooed and battled and tore a defeated Tourmaline from the place of uttermost null-fires, and gifted him life. How could my fires answer these deeds, I roared? How despicably did I treat you in return?\"\n\nHis grieving thunder split the skies, rolling over the archway crowning the peak of Chenak Island. The Place of Reaving where Hualiama had suffered, frozen solid, and become blue-star, the embodiment of her name. Was that the moment Dragon fire had entered her soul?\n\nSurely, she had lived with the fire since before her birth.\n\nThe White and Blue Moons, waxing to fullness, stood almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the darkling skies to shine their baleful gaze across the Lost Islands, which loomed above the pallid Cloudlands like linked bracelets, two loops of Islands joined by northern and southern 'bridges' across the Buffer Zone, that symbol of eternal enmity and the battleground between Human-controlled territory to the West and Dragon territory to the East. The Islands were geographically anomalous in many ways, but none more so than in terms of climate. The Human Isles were bitterly cold, caught in the frozen grip of an almost-permanent midwinter, while the Dragon Isles, despite their extreme northern latitude, remained balmy in comparison. Knowledge gleaned from the Dragon-Haters' extraordinary mind-meld informed Lia that most crops were husbanded in sheltered valleys near thermal springs or vents, while most Human communities relied on artificially warmed underground strongholds for survival.\n\nBitterly, the Dragon hissed, \"We were as Human babes in the Enchantress' paw! Ralti sheep! The Empress snuffed us out, our fires, our life. You alone defied your mother, even drugged at twenty times the permitted dose, despite being beaten and tortured\u2013your fires burned anyone who dared enter your mind, more draconic than the mightiest of the Dragonkind. Listen to my dark-fires jealousy, Hualiama! Listen!\"\n\n\"I listen,\" she growled back at once, stung beyond forbearance. \"I hear Grandion the great-hearted\u2013\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"The one for whom I burned!\"\n\n*GRRROOOAARRR!!* Yet the thunderous crack of his Storm-power betrayed deeper emotions\u2013relief. Amazement. Delight that she suspected was centred upon the scrap of draconic life he clutched in his paw.\n\nInfusing her voice with a snap of command, she said, \"Situational assessment, Dragon? Brief me.\"\n\nHe gave her a quirky look, mouth agape like a hound with its tongue lolling. \"By the fiery pits of Fra'anior, this must be the smallest Dragon Elder I have ever beheld.\"\n\n\"Don't try my patience, Tourmaline!\"\n\n\"Or you'll break out in song and dance?\"\n\n\"The deadly dancer?\" She smiled wryly, agog at the unfamiliar sensation of lips stretching over a hundred needle-sharp fangs. \"As a Dragon, that'll all be different now.\"\n\n\"You danced into my hearts, Human girl.\"\n\nHualiama did not point out the obvious, but the slight hitch in Grandion's breathing told her he had noticed his mistake. No, Human no longer. That truth had flown into the night. However, he was being awfully sweet. Was this a result of the liberation they had both craved for so long? Freedom at last to enjoy togetherness and romance, even if their time must be shadowed by an Island-shaking war to come. How could she stop her delightful birth-mother from abusing her daughter's powers in conquest of the Island-World?\n\nIf daughter she was. Lia wished she understood. How could a person spring from a Human womb, yet experience lucid eggling-dreams? And oh, she remembered the impish blue-haired Hualiama she had discovered within her, who had promised that after a surprise, all would become clear. <Fat, waddling chance of that,> she snorted inwardly. Plenty of surprise. And all the clarity of a sultry volcanic thunderstorm rolling across the twenty-seven Islands of her native Fra'anior Cluster. Her eyes rested speculatively on the twin holes from which a Dragon's breath of uttermost winter had emerged to bathe her bones in the Reaving. She had lost her necklace down there, the simple thong upon which she had threaded the White Dragoness' scale. <Mamafire.> The eggling had called the White Dragoness, who had somehow enraged Fra'anior himself, <Mamafire.>\n\nEggling and mother-Dragon had protected each other, impossibly, across time and space. So little made sense. A dream, an echo of Amaryllion's power within her? It must be.\n\nGrandion said, <No. I forbid you to seek that necklace. Far too dangerous an undertaking for a hatchling.>\n\n<How did you know?> Smoke boiled past her nose. Wow.\n\n<The direction of your gaze,> he said.\n\n<That was the one token I possessed of my past,> she replied, painfully aware of how much the nuances of her Dragonish revealed.\n\n<A token,> he said. <My duty is to protect your hatchling-life. Forgive me, but I cannot allow it.>\n\nForgive? Allow? Hualiama's head shook involuntarily, sparking spasms of pain in her torso. Could she so much as shake a wingtip? Perhaps Grandion was right. He was a changed Dragon, almost Human in the tenor of some of his emotions. What traditionalist firebrand of a Dragon, such as Razzior or Andarraz the Green, would ever apologise or ask forgiveness? It was simply\u2026 undraconic. Now her belly-fires churned alarmingly. Her Grandion was more. A thinking, compassionate Dragon. Insightful in his outlook and ways. He had never been willing to simply charge through life without reflecting upon his actions, though he had made mistakes and did not always apologise immediately, he always returned to those events, chewing them like a Dragon sharpening his fangs on a meaty bone.\n\nFaintly, she said, \"I've much head knowledge about Dragons, Grandion. Now I need to learn how to be one. Will you help me?\"\n\n\"I'd be honoured,\" replied the Tourmaline, with an aerial genuflection of his wings.\n\n\"I shall be a model student,\" Lia joked, but the pain returned, sharper and more debilitating than before. \"Aaaaah\u2026\"\n\n<How can I help, o firesong of my soul?>\n\n<Speak. Distract me with stories.> She must hold out. Siiyumiel had healed Grandion's sight. Surely, he could heal a Dragoness of whatever strange malady had incapacitated her.\n\nShortly, Grandion said, \"Following the battle at the Dragon's Bell, Azziala returned to her fortress to recoup. Many Dragonships were lost in the battle and many of her Dragon Enchanters were slain, including a number of powerful Councillors\u2013you do understand that she sees your accomplishments and rebellion as further proof of your fitness to rule at her right hand?\"\n\nLia did not. Reflection gave way to pain spreading through her limbs, as thick and slow as treacle, cloying and clinging to every newfound pathway of her being. She was a Star Dragoness. Supposedly. She had touched Sapphurion with white-fire power and restored his life. Yet she could not heal herself? She must struggle. Summon the power. Fight\u2026\n\n\"You alone resisted the Command-hold,\" the Tourmaline continued. \"They could not apply the magic successfully. The Empress set to work upon you with fifty Enchanters, and with torture and drugs meant to break your mental resistance, but in a week, all they achieved was to fly headlong against the adamantine fortress of your mind. They lost a further eleven of their strongest and fittest to your fires. Now, Sapphurion and I are commanded to find healing for you. The Empress threatens to use your kin and the lives of all Dragons against you, should you deviate from her plans.\"\n\nShe gasped, \"Dying is not an option?\"\n\n\"Our fates depend on your continued health,\" Grandion confirmed.\n\n\"Affurion?\"\n\n\"The Lost Islands Dragons remain at large. Azziala seems content to make her preparations. But many Dragonkind have been sacrificed to raise up new Councillors and to clothe her Dragonships.\"\n\nHer eyes no longer responded. \"Elki? Sao\u2026 oh Grandion, I burn\u2026\"\n\nAn eruption of agony knotted her limbs and wings. Hualiama faded as if she had fallen into the Cloudlands. Darkness conquered her heart, soul and mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "She walked amidst stars. So dark was the night, its blackness seemed cut of velveteen cloth. Whereas before, the stars had dazzled, now they appeared diminished, bowed over a hexagonal colonnade of milky white marble\u2026 she knew. She ran, holding nothing back. Above, the stars bowed over a wide bed covered in pristine white linens, stooping to chime elegiac starsong over the girl slumbering there.\n\n\"No!\" Lia sprinted up the white marble steps to the bedside. \"Oh no, Human girl\u2026\"\n\nShe lay so still. A wealth of wavy white-blonde hair tumbled over the pillows, lacklustre, blending in to the sheets. Her skin was snow rather than her native Fra'aniorian tan.\n\n\"What have I done? Wake up. Oh mercy, wake up. Please, my darling petal. Wake.\"\n\nAt one level, Hualiama's mind whirled between amazement at calling herself 'Human girl', and the incongruity of her identical twin inhabiting her dreams once more. She touched her own blue tresses, thinking, 'This is me? Who am I?' But far more urgent was the realisation that the bones of the sleeper's knuckles, where her hand lay carelessly outflung upon the linens, pressed against her pale, almost translucent flesh like jagged peaks seeking to worm their way through the thinnest of parchment; that her exposed left cheekbone described a sepulchral slash above the hollow of her cheek. She had aged forty years, appearing\u2026 withered. Just the husk, the sweet youth of twenty-one summers, burned away.\n\nLia bit her knuckles. \"Oh, petal. Help me understand. Why are you\u2013we\u2013dying? What did I do wrong? All I ever wanted was the chance to spread my wings.\" A sob shook her frame. \"Please. Don't fly to the fires, not yet. We must be together. That's our destiny, don't you see?\"\n\nShe stroked the other girl's fingers, feeling the skin crinkle like aged scrolleaf. Bending, she tested the girl's breath against her cheek. Aye. Still alive, but her flame guttered. She murmured encouragement, but her other-self was too deeply unconscious to respond. Was her soul divided? Damaged? Cleft in twain, as the balladeers might enrobe this ruin in verse? How was it that she saw herself, and spoke to herself, in this manner? Pensively, she tried to summon magic to ease the girl's pain, and it seemed for a moment that the other-self's breathing eased. Then, the sleeper rolled over and fixed her empty eye-sockets upward.\n\n\"You stole my life!\" rasped blonde-Hualiama.\n\nLia screamed, then screamed again as the face crumbled. Black fires spurted between the cracks riven in her flesh. As the prone body exploded in flame, a great wind rose to blast heat into blue-haired Hualiama's face. She stumbled backward and tumbled into space, before striking her head sharply against the bottom step.\n\nFaster than thought, she was gone.\n\n[ Dying to be Reborn ]\n\nHualiama snapped back into her Star Dragoness' body with a visceral wrench. *Gaaaaarrgggh!* Her smoke\u2013only smoke, not Dragon fire\u2013slipped between Grandion's curled talons, and whipped away on the breeze.\n\n\"Awake, my beauty?\"\n\nShe coughed agonisingly. \"Just about.\"\n\n\"My lecturing proved a slumberous song most irresistible?\"\n\nHis lip curled upward, exactly like a Human's smile bar the glimmering of a few dozen fangs in that mighty maw. Dawn's beneficent glow marred his physical beauty in no imaginable facet. In fact, the gleam of his scales was positively migraine-inducing, trapping the suns' rays like ten thousand living prisms and reflect them back in uncountable hues of his signature tourmaline blue, a lighter lake-blue than his shell-father's sapphire, and the daylight sky compared to Hualiama's midnight-blue colouration with its dusting of white. She bit back a growl of discontent. Captivity had agreed with Grandion. He had no right to ponce about in ruddy draconic splendour while she resembled a tattered, moth-eaten old rug!\n\n\"I'm moulting,\" she blurted out.\n\n\"A poor sign,\" he sighed, gently stroking her spine-spikes with the tip of one talon. Lia almost leaped out of her new hide. Heavens that tickled, in a way that made her fires blush. \"You'll moult more freely when you see who's waiting for us.\"\n\n\"We're already there?\" The tiny Dragoness peered about curiously, wishing to shake herself free of that awful dream, but she knew any shaking would introduce excruciating pain to her joints. \"Grandion, this doesn't look right. There's the Bell, what's left of it, but why are there mountains\u2013oh.\"\n\nHe chuckled indulgently. <Siiyumiel awaits.>\n\nHer mistake. This was the right place. Grandion must have flown rapidly, right through the night, winging her across the breadth of the Lost Islands. Now they descended rapidly toward the Dragon's Bell from a height she estimated at two miles above what navigators called 'Island-level', which in the Lost Islands was two and a quarter miles above the Cloudlands, while at her native Fra'anior, the greatest volcano in the known world, the sheer cliffs surmounted a full league in height. The bell-Island still bore the scars of the ferocious five-way battle two weeks before. The Lost Islands Dragons. Sapphurion's forces from the Halls of the Dragons at Gi'ishior. The Dragon rebels under Andarraz and Razzior. Azziala's Dragon-Haters. Grandion and his Dragon Rider, the crux of it all. Hated and hunted in equal measure. Its crown and flanks were scorched in many places, and the Bell itself\u2013Lia hung her head\u2013had partially slumped toward the ground, melted by a Star Dragoness' fire.\n\nBut the breath-stealing wonder was the Land Dragon lying asleep a quarter-league northwest of the Dragon's Bell, dwarfing the Island.\n\nAt rest, Siiyumiel seemed a monster washed ashore by some unimaginable Cloudlands tide. He was roughly oval in shape, no less than a mile wide at his girth and three times that in length. Hualiama did not want to imagine how deep beneath the toxic billows his body might extend. Seven neat, regular rows of light brown peaks arrayed his stellated carapace, which struck her as solid rock rather than Dragon hide, from the smaller two hundred foot peaks around his periphery, to the towering thousand-foot summits in the centre of his back. A girl could hike amongst those mountains. His head lay hidden within his foreparts; yet even from this distance, she sensed the mighty furnaces of his magic.\n\nSiiyumiel was the Guardian of Wisdom of the Shell-Clan Land Dragons, according to legend, the mightiest of the Land Dragon Clans North of the Rift. Aware her jaw was dangling, catching insects, Hualiama shut her mouth slowly.\n\n<The Island sleeps,> she murmured, utterly failing to eliminate a plethora of contextual awe-indicators from her mental voice. <How can any living creature be that gigantic, Grandion?>\n\n<Perhaps the friend of an Ancient Dragon might instruct a lowly Lesser Dragon in such mysteries?> he sniped.\n\n<If size counts, I am the lesser Dragon.> The Tourmaline snorted an amused fireball at this sally. Emboldened, Lia added, <But in sheer, wing-shivering awe, I am the greater. We promised to return. This feels right, Grandion.>\n\n<You're trembling, little one,> he trilled. <Strength to your forepaws. Allow me to ease your pain, with your permission.>\n\nAgain, an implicit apology. Lia had a crazed urge to shout, 'Who stole my Dragon?' But perhaps the witticism was better left unspoken. Dragons tended to misinterpret Human humour, in her experience, leading to unpredictable results.\n\nShe observed in mounting surprise as Grandion revisited a mental technique she had employed on him, soothing her pain by taking it upon himself. Blues were the most natural and adept draconic magic-users, but he made what she had sweated over appear, well, as easy as a Dragon shooting the breeze. Moreover, Lia sensed a deep intertwining of their powers, an augmentation and harmony founded in soul-togetherness, as perplexing as it was profound. Philosophical outpourings sufficient to overflow terrace lakes had been written by Human and Dragon sages regarding the advantageous qualities of marriage or long-term liaison between their respective kinds, and the draconic ascending fire-promises touched upon this notion, but nothing she could recall spoke to the unambiguous amplification of magical powers.\n\nHad Grandion noticed? Here was a mystery to bedazzle her fading soul.\n\n<Thank you, my\u2026 uh, Dragonlove? Sorry, I'm not so good at endearments as yet. I'll practice.>\n\nHis eye-fires whirled with passion and amusement as he gazed down at her. <A Dragoness must to grow into her paws, we say.>\n\nHer fey spirit had always kept a touch apart from him, she realised, a safe distance in a sense abetted by the forbidden nature of their liaison. Now she was a Star Dragoness. Her last excuse had been burned away\u2026 and it scared and thrilled her, beyond measure, to taste this new dawn in her life.\n\nGrandion said, \"Now, I will summon the Great One. Affurion's kin know of our arrival, but have chosen not to display their wings. And I have no doubt Azziala tests the breezes, wishing to discern if she is able to Command these Land Dragons. Her allowing us freedom\u2013if freedom it is\u2013cannot be without purpose. Agreed?\"\n\n\"Agreed!\"\n\nYet her double eyelids seemed too heavy to resist, shuttering of their own accord as Grandion's swoop pressed her stomach\u2013stomachs, to be accurate\u2013against her spine, and her Dragon senses fed back the minutiae of increasing pressure and temperature. The wind's passage over her tongue stupefied her brain with the knowledge of thousands of distinct tangs and odours and pollens and grit and gases. Awesomeness. Rolling over her in tingling waves, vital and alive, yet even the sparkling of her senses could not disguise the diminished awareness they beat against.\n\nGrandion's voice rang out over the Cloudlands:\n\n<Arise, o brother of the deeps,>\n\n<Siiyumiel-ap-Yan\u00fbk-bar-Sh\u00fbgan,>\n\n<Hearken to our call!>\n\nThe beast drowsed. Yet as the Tourmaline Dragon called out a second time, Lia sensed a prodigious stirring of magic, and then a series of deafening reports *KRA-KRA-KRACK!!* fired against her ears in a barrage of thunder. As before, his foreparts split open to reveal the dark purple inner parts of the Land Dragon, then his scaly grey-blue head pushed out from a gap between the tipped-over mountains, revealing no less than seven great, flaming eyes arranged at even intervals around the circumference of his skull. Perfect panoramic vision, her inner engineer noted. That would be a trick, although with her Dragoness' eyes positioned either side of her skull, her extended range of vision was giving her a decent headache. The folds of Dragon hide smoothed out with a great rustling sound as Siiyumiel's neck extended as if fitted with invisible rollers, and the corners of his mouth, located two hundred and fifty feet either side of the awestruck Dragoness, curved upward in what was clearly a draconic smile.\n\n<Creatures of the heights!> he boomed.\n\nAlthough he remembered to modulate his voice, the force of his outcry still slugged Grandion a goodly hundred feet sideways in the air. The Lesser Dragon corrected with a low growl, his right wingtip brushing the Island as he angled for a landing beside the Bell.\n\nAs the obligatory exchange of formal draconic greetings proceeded, Siiyumiel's vast jaw ground to a halt a few tens of feet shy of Grandion and Hualiama, shaking the Island beneath their paws. <So, the she-Dragon is revealed,> he said, even more gently. <She is born, the daughter of star-fire!>\n\nMarvellous, redolent magic washed over her.\n\n<I-I thank you, Siiyumiel,> she whispered. <How did you know? How did you see before any other Dragon?>\n\n<Foresight is a product of my Balance-power,> he rumbled. <Just as my Sight bade me tarry to witness the birth of the Star Dragoness for whom our Island-World has groaned many a season, and as I now see you, struck low\u2026 it is the song of my thread in the Balance of the Harmonies to restore you to full health. Only\u2013>he paused with the delicacy of a living behemoth\u2013<I must confess, I know not how, exactly.>\n\n<If you do not know, o Guardian of Wisdom, what hope have we?> Grandion put in.\n\n<Alastior. Thou quick-winged Son of Truth.>\n\nHualiama did not grasp the reference, but her companion bowed his muzzle to the ground. <May my hearts ever burn bright with received honour. Now, Hualiama\u2026>\n\n<I know. Thou art hasty, creature of the upper air,> Siiyumiel chuckled, <but I understand. You arrived barely in time, for her soul prepares for its eternal flight. Approach, little one, that I might touch thee with my paw.>\n\nHualiama froze, then blurted out in an unfortunate squeak, <Uh\u2026 gently?>\n\nNo mind. The Land Dragon's carapace dipped slightly to the South, and after a surprisingly long pause, an Island-slapper of paw appeared, tipped by a trio of blunt, metallic claws each three times longer than Grandion's wingspan, she estimated. Whereas Grandion could encompass her curled-up Dragoness' body in one paw, this paw could have comfortably curled around the entire Dragon's Bell Island. Soft apricot colours infused Siiyumiel's eye-fires as he inclined his head and tilted his talons, clearly puzzling over how to touch a hatchling-sized Dragoness without splattering her upon the rock, improbably reminding her of how the Palace servants used to deal with the seasonal invasion of charflies, which hatched as larvae in the lava flows around Fra'anior.\n\nSoon, they settled upon an awkward arrangement. Siiyumiel rested his paw upon its side, making a sloped roof over the two Lesser Dragons, while a clearly protective Grandion stooped beneath to press Lia against the Land Dragon's warm, pliant hide.\n\nSiiyumiel's eyes flicked from fiery to opaque as a membrane slid over them, then the foremost eye, the largest one in the centre of his forehead, brightened until it blazed white, shooting a powerful, heated beam of light upon Hualiama. Having expected to be flattened by some titanic magic, she was more than startled to see her Dragonflesh grow transparent beneath this transcendent gaze, and while she had the impression of being examined to the depth of her elemental nature, Siiyumiel did not otherwise move, gesture or apparently even draw breath for the next hour.\n\nShe itched. Fretted. Took a snap at Grandion's lower lip when he ordered her to keep still. Of course, he lauded this behaviour as perfectly draconic.\n\nLia decided that if this continued, he'd earn himself a rash of bites and bruises!\n\nBut eventually, Siiyumiel vented an almighty, <HMM!!>\n\n<By my wings!> Grandion snorted, digging his talons into the bedrock to prevent them from being blown away by a gust of richly spiced wind.\n\n<I find no defect in her draconic\u2013>\n\nThe Tourmaline roared, <Defect? This Dragoness has no defect!>\n\n<Patience, Alastior.> Siiyumiel seemed amused, yet his tone communicated anxiety. <The imperative to act with haste, which is anathema to bottom-dwellers, remains. The tracery of draconic pathways of fire and magic, and the aura-effects of her soul-fires, reveal no immediate physical malady one may treat by means of the physical sciences. So we will move at once to the greater and more mystical dominion of Harmony.>\n\n<Harmony?> snorted Grandion.\n\nLia, by contrast, was all curiosity and openness to experimentation. <Harmony? Teach me, Siiyumiel.>\n\n<Knowledge must wait upon life,> he reproved. <I will teach thee the meditations to bring yourself into a state of Balance. Concentrate on my song, o Star Dragoness, and focus your mind upon my words. Will yourself into a state of wholeness\u2013no, high-dweller, it is not that easy!> Grandion flicked his wings in annoyance as Siiyumiel chopped off his protest at the knees. <Were this enigma so straightforward, would we not this moment be taking our ease over a tasty philosophical conundrum, or learning a Star Dragoness' insights into Harmony?>\n\n<But I know nothing. I need your teaching, Siiyumiel!> Lia blurted out.\n\nFor the first time, the great, dignified Land Dragon seemed floored. Well, perhaps he already walked upon the floor of the world, Lia did not know. But his great jaw sagged and he produced an undignified mental splutter.\n\nThen, Siiyumiel thundered, <Who is thy shell-mother, little one?>\n\n<One mother is called Azziala, the woman you saw. The other, I dream\u2013>\n\n<Two mothers?> The monstrous forepaw withdrew to deliver a vigorous scratching to his lower neck, shaking their Island once more. Hualiama imagined she was standing on the deck of a Dragonship juddering in the breeze. Siiyumiel growled, <Duality. A fascinating Harmonic nuance.>\n\nAnnoyingly\u2013of course\u2013he refused to explain more. The light of his central eye shone, the paw returned, and the Dragon set about hypnotising her, as best she could tell. The Shell-Clan Dragon had her work through a series of increasingly bizarre visualisation exercises aimed at reintroducing Harmony to her being, while he sang a deep, intensely moving Dragonsong in words neither Grandion nor Hualiama understood. The wash of magic was gorgeous and compelling. Hualiama wished for health and wholeness and concord and the rising of her Dragon fires. Nothing happened. She imagined true flame and summoned white-fires to her aid. Failure. By their seventh attempt, she was humming along with Siiyumiel and wishing that by some miracle, she could dance. That would surely winkle out whatever strange malaise had infected her, wouldn't it?\n\nSooner than seemed possible, noon arrived and Grandion brought her fresh kill, a giant rock hyrax.\n\nRaw, bloody meat. Yum. Apparently irresistible to a hatchling, though her Human turned up her pert nose in disgust.\n\nOver lunch, she explained the mystery of her existence, about her Human mother and her eggling-dreams and the soul-wrenching desire she had always experienced, to learn to fly. Siiyumiel suggested her new draconic manifestation was clear proof that she had always somehow been a Dragonish fire-spirit incarnated in Human flesh, impossibly, but the vibrant crimson swirls of colour which entered his eyes proclaimed his consternation. But as she spoke again of Amaryllion's inexplicable gifts, the fifty foot wide eyes beaming down upon them cleared to a purer, almost translucent flame of a kind Hualiama had never seen before, emanating a magical or visual Dragonsong that electrified every bone in her body.\n\n<I begin to grasp a vision,> said Siiyumiel.\n\nLia sniffed, <How does any Dragon grasp the definitively ungraspable, Siiyumiel?>\n\n<Lia! Manners,> Grandion warned.\n\n<We were all hatchlings once, o Alastior,> said the great Land Dragon, his lips curling left and right in a return of that smile which from their perspective, spanned three quarters of the horizon. <Patience. I must reflect deeply and rapidly upon this matter.>\n\nAnd with that, his eyes shuttered and Siiyumiel appeared to fall fast asleep!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Hualiama had never been much enamoured of the discipline of patience, as the monks of her monastery knew all too well. But now, tolerance was enforced. Ill health was a pitiless taskmaster. Nothing in her broad experience of magic could have prepared her for this sense of powerlessness. Inanition. The knowledge that all of her resources, all of her stubbornness, her heritage and gifting, had come to nought. All she had was the vague intuition that her life should not end so\u2013and the wisdom of a Land Dragon.\n\nGrandion snugged her in his paw and curled his body around them both, creating a warm, safe space. Her body felt glued to the ground, incapable of ever rising again.\n\nAs sleep claimed her, she heard the Tourmaline Dragon whisper, <I couldn't stand to lose you, Blue-star.>\n\nShe dreamed of flying through the cosmos.\n\nWhen Lia awoke, she found Siiyumiel watching her through the tiny space created by the bent of Grandion's wrist, the sheltering curve of his shoulder, and the edge of the Tourmaline Dragon's overarching wing; the Land Dragon's expression, unfathomable.\n\nWithout a word of preamble, he said, \"Hualiama Blue-star, the power of Balance or Harmony is, in essence, the power of seeing what truly is. We must see the true nature of the Island-World. No matter how it presents itself, it is this power of inner sight or as we say in Dragonish, true-seeing or even white-fire wielding, that underpins and informs our discernment of Harmony. I'd posit that without truth, Harmony cannot exist.\"\n\nSwitching to Dragonish, he continued, <We Land-Dragons call this body of lore 'the Balance of the Harmonies'. We believe that all matter, all existence, and all spirit-forms of creatures both corporeal and incorporeal, exist in an enormous, yet delicate, Universe-spanning state of interdependence. All life is a function of Harmony. Chaos is disharmony. Events are stanzas and melodies in the song of Balance, and they can tip the Balance unexpectedly. Consider the departure of your friend Amaryllion Fireborn, or the imminent advent of Numistar Winterborn, the Ancient Dragoness, according to the sign ablaze in the heavens.>\n\n<Whaaa\u2026> Grandion wheezed.\n\nEqually staggered, Lia gasped, <The comet is\u2026 it is an Ancient\u2026 no!>\n\nShe had seen Numistar at the time of her Reaving. How could she have known? She had thought that but a hallucination, a product of Azziala's magic and the deathly cold of Reaving wreaking havoc with her mind! Even Grandion had imagined fighting Numistar's storm en route to the Lost Islands, she gleaned from his mind now. Coincidence? Let a hatchling's wings shiver\u2026\n\n<Let no falsehood blacken your tongue, Star Dragoness!> Siiyumiel ticked her off.\n\nAt once, the Tourmaline Dragon's paws enfolded her. <Gently, Siiyumiel! You underestimate your strength.>\n\n<Interpretation of visions is a shell-mother's vegetable-pulp to her hatchlings,> complained the Land Dragon, but regret-indicators moderated his tone. <Hualiama. Tell Grandion what you sensed.>\n\n\"I\u2013I thought it was just a feeling. A fleeting fear.\"\n\n\"And now?\"\n\nAngered by Siiyumiel's challenge, Hualiama tried to struggle to her paws, but collapsed with a groan. \"I sensed Numistar Winterborn travels within that comet\u2013if not her body, then her spirit.\" Shielding her with his paw, Grandion exhaled a stream of fire. \"Aye, Grandion. I dismissed it as\u2026 as hatchling-nightmares. Silly fears. Siiyumiel, this cannot be. The Ancient Dragons departed this Island-World aeons ago. Amaryllion was the last.\"\n\nThe Land Dragon said, \"Yet one has evidently betrayed the Onyx Dragon's purpose. You yourself told me, stars will plummet from the sky.\"\n\nEvery scale of her hide cried out at once. Lia gritted her fangs, drawing a quiet word of support from the Tourmaline, even as his belly-fires reached a pitch that vibrated throughout his body.\n\n\"You thought the prophecy related to you,\" Siiyumiel observed, in the quietest whisper he had yet essayed. \"Not all is your fault, little Blue-star, nor is draconic hubris inexcusable. Some events are beyond even a Star Dragoness' ambit. Aye, Numistar's star shall fall upon this Island-World. You saw beyond what is apparent to the naked eye, quarrying the truth from a comet's heart\u2013and thus, I deduce your innate potential to discern the Balance of the Harmonies.\"\n\n\"Some Dragons would shiver, proclaiming our ruin,\" Grandion said, \"yet I say, they have not yet beheld the treasure I have held.\"\n\n\"Grandion!\"\n\n\"You growled, Hualiama?\"\n\n\"My paws are only this big.\" She held up a forepaw to illustrate.\n\n\"Your hands were far smaller, yet mighty were their deeds,\" he countered.\n\nUnfortunately, a hatchling-sized Dragoness' growl wasn't about to scare her eight-times-larger companion. Grandion's chortling told her she was just being cute, which was possibly the best way under the twin suns to fire up her anger.\n\n\"If you two have finished mingling fires,\" the Land Dragon said indulgently, \"our task is to seek your personal harmony, Hualiama. Do you remember when we first met and you saw my inner fire-form bowing to you?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Grandion.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Lia.\n\nSiiyumiel said, \"I've baffled you by overcomplicating the issue. I want you to seek your true form. Seek with the utmost strength of your hearts, Hualiama. Scour all that you know of your past and all that you are, as you summon this inner magic. Then, show us that truth.\"\n\n\"Her true form is this Dragoness,\" stated the Tourmaline.\n\nLia nodded slowly. \"My spiritual form?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" rumbled Siiyumiel. \"Gird up your courage. May you dive as deep as a Land Dragon.\"\n\nWith this peculiar blessing, the Shell-Clan Dragon began his particular, multi-harmonic humming again. Hualiama wanted to protest. Had he snoozed an entire afternoon away to offer her such a simplistic solution? Had they not tried and failed? Was she not weary of the search for her origins, and truth be told, afraid of what more she might discover? She had searched and found Ra'aba, then Azziala. Who could know which of them had abused the other? Both were insatiably evil and selfish to the core; both had hated her with a consuming passion. Still, Siiyumiel had touched upon and clarified a conviction hitherto unvoiced in her conscious mind. Her life's vision must not be to become what they were not. She must find Hualiama. The real Hualiama, whoever or whatever that was.\n\nChild of the Dragon. Child of ruzal?\n\nShe had been the beneficiary of much love, too. Undeniably. Flicker, Amaryllion, Queen Shyana, Elki, Sapphurion and Qualiana, and of course, Grandion. Yet one person had always stood out as the oddity. Her other-self. The dream-twin with blue hair\u2026 or was she now the dream? Which of them controlled this life she lived?\n\nThe voice from her nightmare grated in her mind, 'You stole my life!'\n\nHad this Dragoness somehow stolen a Human's life, becoming a ghastly mirror-image of the relationship between her father and Razzior the Orange Dragon? Horrific.\n\n<Never!> she groaned.\n\nWith that, Hualiama summoned her deepest reserves of determination, the same willpower which had catapulted her across the Island-World in search of Grandion. Whispers of white-fire spread along the magical pathways of her draconic being. She was no life-stealer. Never would she conquer another being; she and Grandion had both learned that lesson, and lived with their regrets to this very day. Fire shone from her paws, scales and muzzle, wreathing her being with power, even as a star wrapped itself in its train of bedazzling majesty.\n\nGrandion's horrified shout broke briefly into her awareness. <Hualiama! Don't fly to the fires!>\n\n<I fly to thee,> she sang.\n\nBlue-star must dance with Blue-star. They must embrace, and be one.\n\nAs the Land Dragon's song swelled, the face of her Dragonlove receded behind veils of white-fires, shimmering as though seen through great heat. <Help me, Grandion. Help me understand\u2026 to be\u2026>\n\n<Be what?> Though he groaned, the Tourmaline Dragon poured the strength of his magic into her, helping Lia reach beyond what she was able in her weakened condition. He gave unstintingly, yet not without reserve, questions and uncertainty underlying a shining desire to be what she needed, no more and no less, and not to impose his ideas and will upon her as he had before. This was the meaning of fire-promises, she realised. The form of words was merely an indicator of the intense intimacy of sharing the fires of united souls, yet this fusion was in no way automatic. It was learned.\n\nIf she stole life, she must return life.\n\nShe must die to be reborn.\n\n<I waited for you. Be free, Hualiama.>\n\nShe did not know who it was that spoke. It seemed two voices spoke at once, and with that, a newfound, fragile expression of magic flowered inside of her. Unfolding. Swathing some aspects of her nature as warm cloths swaddle a newborn infant. Unfurling other parts as a bud unfurls its petals to greet the suns' warm kiss.\n\nGrandion voiced a bugle of enormous surprise and grief.\n\nLia blinked. What? She felt most peculiar, as though her soul had once more traversed the Island-World and her poor, abused flesh had been forced to rush and stretch in unexpected ways to catch up.\n\nThe she looked down at herself, and screamed!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "When Hualiama screamed, all three of Grandion's Dragon hearts leaped into the throes of a volcanic rage. Wrenching. Pounding. Drenching his wings and limbs with molten-fire rain. Should she not be pleased? No. She was horrified. Guilty delight at her response rose in his craw, rapidly engulfed by an inner flood of tangled, uncontrollable emotions.\n\nHuman again! How could this be?\n\nSiiyumiel had betrayed them in the worst possible way.\n\nYet the enormous Shell-Clan Dragon appeared content. \"This problem, I can treat,\" he said. \"Grant me a moment.\"\n\n\"You stole my Dragon!\" she wailed. \"You\u2026 stole\u2026\"\n\nCrimson splattered her lips as the girl collapsed against his paw. Grandion lowered Hualiama carefully to the ground. She looked ghastly, grey of complexion rather than the pink he remembered, and so emaciated, her skin was but brittle cloth drawn over skeletal bones. She was malnourished, he realised. Not just hungry, but wasted; lingering upon the cusp of death. This was the problem? This putrefying thing had been hiding within her draconic flesh, corrupting, even poisoning the Star Dragoness?\n\nShe rasped horribly, \"How, Siiyumiel\u2026\"\n\n\"After minutely analysing the molecular structures of your being, I shall project and synthesize the exact micro-nutrient requirements to support a course of magical healing,\" he replied, clearly misunderstanding her question.\n\n\"My Dragoness is gone!\"\n\n\"Hush,\" urged the Tourmaline. \"Save your strength.\"\n\n\"No, Grandion\u2026 how? Why? It cannot be. I'm sorry, I've failed you\u2026\"\n\nHer whisper tore from a ravaged throat, no less wing-shivering than had she bellowed directly into his ear-canals. Grandion had no answers. For a few, glorious hours, she had been his. The very melody of his soul, unfettered, flyaway, yet so fleeting. Hope had made its habitation in his third heart. He wanted to bugle his grief and loss until the Dragon's Bell rang for it, but he withheld for one simple reason. If Hualiama lived, all was not lost. Could her fire-soul be redeemed from this husk of Human flesh?\n\nGrandion said, \"Siiyumiel, we must\u2013\"\n\n\"Patience!\" snapped the Land Dragon.\n\nAnd with that, he released the floodgates of his magic. What had been before was a zephyr; now came the storm, yet so narrowly focussed upon Hualiama, Grandion felt the powerful wash as a play of colours teasing his senses, together with the tell-tale, scale-prickling side effects of intoxicating magic. The girl's bare limbs twitched against the ground, but her sigh was the first truly peaceful sound the Tourmaline had heard cross her lips in more than a week.\n\n\"Now divide this, and feed it to her. Slowly. It is potent.\"\n\nGrandion's paw snapped up to catch Siiyumiel's offering as it rocketed forth from his mouth. Kinetic magic? Either way, he was not about to be struck down a second time! But a glob of a black, tar-like substance slapped into his palm and stuck there. He sniffed it curiously. Disgusting. Like one of those Human herbal concoctions they swore healed all ills. Moving with cautious haste, he slipped a digit beneath the girl's neck to tilt her head, then with the smallest talon of his left forepaw, scooped up Siiyumiel's medicine and brought it to her mouth. So delicate. So baby-birdlike in comparison to his maw. Grandion halved the amount, and then touched her lips with his claw-tip.\n\n\"Open.\"\n\nHer depthless eyes flicked open. \"Qualiana?\"\n\nGrandion's thought-memories filled with melancholy orange fire. Shell-mother! Oh, the loss\u2026 Lia must be hallucinating. \"Eat.\" A moist pink tongue licked once, twice.\n\n\"Ugh\u2026 foul.\"\n\n\"The best medicine always is,\" he said, with forced cheer.\n\nThe blue eyes lidded. Did she sleep? Grandion's focus-magnification highlighted the moisture brimming beneath her eyelids. No. This was not slumber. In a moment, the pearlescent liquid touched her pretty eyelashes\u2013he bridled at this suggestion of illicit Humanlove emanating from his third heart\u2013and a glistening teardrop tiptoed the length of three filaments and spilled down her cheek. The capillaries just beneath her skin appeared slightly flushed, indicating heightened emotion. Yet at another level, he marvelled, focussing even more narrowly upon the teardrop, down to the microscopic level. Aye, did he not detect tiny whorls of flame-magic embedded in that moisture? Aye! Her unique magic lived!\n\nHumans saw tears as precious. Joyful, grieving, they cried at the oddest times. The Tourmaline shuddered beneath the force of a talon-curling urge to seize anyone or any creature who dared to make this girl cry, rend them limb from limb, and char the remains until they blew away as ash over the Cloudlands. Siiyumiel first. How dare he wrest Hualiama's future from her grasp and toss it into the nearest volcano?\n\n\"Eat, Lia.\"\n\nShe ate slowly, not without struggle, making hatchling-like mewling noises of distress every time he bade her swallow. Yet even as his thoughts darkened toward the Land Dragon, Grandion's senses thrilled to the enlivening of Hualiama's flesh. Her heartbeat deepened and strengthened beat by beat. Fine, fiery colour crept across her hollow stomach, expanding toward her throat and limbs, while a tiny frisson began in the atrophied muscles\u2013a sensation Grandion knew twice over from personal experience\u2013as Siiyumiel's potent brew percolated into her system. Toward midnight, the Land Dragon produced another, smaller glob of ultra-concentrated nutrients.\n\n<Bid her eat this. Then, she must sleep,> said Siiyumiel. <All true healing requires sleep.>\n\nGrandion said, <What of her Dragoness?>\n\n<Do her soul-fires not burn within?>\n\n<You know what I mean, o brother of the deeps. Yet\u2026 pride speaks. I am not unthankful. Hualiama and I would express due gratitude, Siiyumiel. Gratitude that transcends description.>\n\nThe Land Dragon performed an obeisance with his eye-fires. <May my service be acceptable, mighty Tourmaline. It is not without purpose, for the future of my own kind, I must secure also. I prophesy a crucial role in the future of our deep-dwelling kind\u2013for both of you.>\n\nGrandion stiffened in surprise. <White-fires truth?>\n\n<I wish that true-fires would burn between us, wing-brother. Forever.>\n\nRising slowly from his cramped position guarding Hualiama, the Tourmaline Dragon considered these words, and tasted their fiery goodness in his third heart. <She will succour your kind, too? Then let us be wing-brothers, indeed. I am honoured to bind my wings to our oath.>\n\n<I burn in reflected honour, o mighty Tourmaline. I, too, bind my fires to this oath. Now, I must assume the role of teacher. I wish to teach you several deeper uses of the art of filtering, at the auditory, psychic, physical and emotional levels. I believe this knowledge will be your strong right paw against the depredations of Azziala, the so-called Empress of the Lost Islands.>\n\n<As the Dragons of Fra'anior say, even after a thousand years, a volcano shall explode in reply.>\n\nThe Land Dragon's laughter was a rumbustious shaking of Grandion's every fibre. <Aye, but let us not wait a thousand years. A day or two shall suffice. Even a bottom-dweller must learn to value clarity over obfuscation.>\n\nThe Tourmaline grinned back, disguising the nausea that racked his stomachs as he considered Hualiama's fate. Siiyumiel thought a day or two would reveal a new truth? Never had he so feared to summon the white-fires of hope to his third heart. Instead, he jested, <Thus, you shall obviate obfuscation.>\n\nSiiyumiel roared, <Then let us to the meeting of fierce and fiery minds!>\n\n[ Siiyumiel's Balance ]\n\nWaking, She Knew the balm of her Dragon's embrace. Stirring, she knew the loss of her wings. Rising, she knew the pain of rebirth. Nothing worked as it should. Everything hurt with a freshness and piquancy that brought tears to her eyes, but the Princess of Fra'anior refused to give those tears credence. End the war. Find her Dragoness. Escape from her mother\u2013these were her priorities. She stood, despite her legs wobbling like tender reeds.\n\n\"Glance at me in a way I don't like, and I swear I'll slap you to the Rim-Wall Mountains!\" she greeted Grandion, grimly cheerful.\n\nAll her Dragon could do was choke on his own smoke.\n\nPlanting her hands on her gaunt hips, she faced seven ranks of mountains and shouted, \"Siiyumiel, mighty Lord of Wisdom and assorted whatnot, I demand answers!\"\n\nWell. Not a decent shout, but it woke the Land Dragon from his undeserved slumber.\n\n\"Don't hold me, Grandion.\" Lia bent over, trying to catch her breath. Ooh, life was a pain. Literally. \"Alright, Dragon, just this once, I'll accept your help. Don't get used to it.\"\n\nThree hundred feet offshore, Siiyumiel cracked open his main eye, revealing a narrow strip of glittering fire. \"Is the Dragonfriend always this spirited?\"\n\nLia eyed him as menacingly as a half-dead invalid could manage. \"I count an Ancient Dragon amongst my friends. Yet, I must thank you\u2026\"\n\n\"You're a great deal smaller than some of the parasites that plague Land Dragons.\" Siiyumiel appeared to stretch, for though he barely moved, Lia felt and heard a series of massive cracks and groans emanate from his body. After several minutes, the noise settled and so did the Island beneath her bare feet. The great eye and its neighbours cracked further open, swirling in complex patterns of inner fire, agitated.\n\nHualiama abandoned the remonstrations she had been planning to unleash. \"I sense your conflicted feelings, o mighty Siiyumiel,\" she called. \"Speak to me.\"\n\nSpeak to her grief. Speak to the searing betrayal writ upon her heart. Lia wanted to scream, to rail, to cast herself off the Island rather than endure\u2026 what, humble humanity? Ungrateful for the very blood that pulsed in her arteries? O desolate girl! Yet could these Dragons not understand that to touch glory, then be robbed, was a fate infinitely crueller than to merely observe from the fringes, excluded by her very nature from ever participating?\n\nGrandion did. Every scale on his body proclaimed his outrage.\n\nTurning to her, the Tourmaline spat into his palm and held it out, cupped. \"Drink first.\"\n\n\"Your spit?\"\n\n\"Water, from my water stomach.\"\n\nHualiama shot Siiyumiel a glance meant to convey that her demand would be forgotten at his peril. Fine. The contents of a Blue Dragon's water stomach, used to fuel their ice and Storm attacks, was supposed to be pure and sweet, according to the scrolls. Dragons did not apparently produce saliva in the same way as Humans. To the Dragonkind, spit was Acid, the mainstay of a Green Dragon's offensive weaponry. His water should therefore be completely potable.\n\nDipping her hand into the liquid, she took a cautious taste. \"Sulphurous, yet satisfying,\" she said. \"Not quite scale mites, but it'll do.\"\n\nGrandion's ire rose immediately. \"Are you not hungry? Shall I cook you a portion of leftover\u2013\"\n\n\"Yum, raw hyrax!\" she snarled. \"Er\u2026 on the other paw, I'll have my portion cooked, please.\" Lia smothered a treacherous giggle. What? Where had that growl sprung from, and what was this unfamiliar gladdening of salivary glands as she considered raw meat?\n\nRather ponderously, Siiyumiel said, \"This re-clothing in Human epithelium was not a result I computed, Hualiama. I am\u2013\" he struggled mightily, before resorting to lifting his head and thundering to the skies \"\u2013remorseful! I thought what I had observed was the inclosing of your Star Dragoness, so vital to the future of our Island-World, into the casement of Human bone and flesh. That she was merely hidden. Yet I detect no physical or magical signature of the Star Dragoness in the immediate vicinity. Your being evinces Balance. Your Dragoness demonstrated the same Balance. It is\u2026 inconceivable.\"\n\nAlmost, she teased him. The Land Dragon sounded so mournful.\n\n\"We Shell-Clan thrive on logic. We calculate to astonishing degrees of accuracy the probable flow of events, or in your case, the precise antidote to your famishment and the multiplicity of delicately balanced parameters which had to be understood in order to provide the optimal solution for both healing and re-nourishment of your being\u2013do you understand?\"\n\nGrandion said, \"I understand that Lia loves to flout draconic logic at every opportunity. Chargrilled steak of hyrax, o Princess?\"\n\n\"I'll chargrill your ruddy rump, you oversized male chauvinist gecko!\"\n\n\"I meant it positively.\"\n\n\"Islands' sakes, Grandion, that must be why I'm dancing over meadows of fireflowers singing my favourite excerpts from the Flame Cycle!\"\n\nBoth of her draconic companions flicked their nictitating membranes, indicating surprise.\n\nLia added, \"I know. Dragons seldom understand sarcasm. Consider it a verbal fireball and you'll have the right idea.\"\n\nPunctuating his riposte with a rude wing-tap on the crown of her head, Grandion said to the Land Dragon, \"Human females are like volcanoes. They usually require a proper little eruption before simmering down.\"\n\nShe gave him the arms-folded, foot-tapping benefit of her filthiest glower. Perhaps the dearth of so much as a stitch of clothing spoiled the effect, although the Princess tried to ignore that inconvenient fact. Grandion bared his fangs lazily in response.\n\n\"We might consider recreating the conditions of her ascension to the draconic sphere,\" mused Siiyumiel, clearly preoccupied with weightier deliberations. Odd, how his speech meandered between formal draconic metre, sprinkled with thees and thous, and the more intimate metre used in familiar settings.\n\n\"Aye, the fire of fifty hostile Dragons and a small lava pit ought to suffice,\" suggested the Tourmaline.\n\n\"Grandion!\"\n\nWas he just pleased by her recovery, that she was coming in for the full wing-tugging benefit of his sense of humour?\n\n\"I forget for how many years I've been meaning to roast that cute rump of yours,\" he added.\n\n\"Cute?\" Her eyebrows crawled toward her hairline.\n\nHis inner fires performed an impressive draconic blush. \"Hatchling-cute,\" he amended hastily. \"Titchy-size-cute.\"\n\nUgh. She was not fooled, not even slightly. So the male Dragon was still possessed of that wicked propensity to admire her scale-less Human limbs and eye-filaments and globs of mammary tissue upon her\u2013unholy windroc droppings! Lia pulled herself up with a mental start. Where were these peculiar thoughts coming from? She crossed her arms self-consciously and sank down in his paw. Not comfortable!\n\nWas Dragon fire really the answer?\n\nLia said, \"Siiyumiel, show me what you saw. Please.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Between them, Grandion and Siiyumiel worked out a way of using the Blue Dragon's projection magic in concert with the Land Dragon's eidetic memory to replay the exact moment of Lia's transformation, as they had come to call it, in excruciatingly slow motion, on a panel of frozen air between them. Over and over, they examined that Dragon's whisker of time in which the Star Dragoness appeared to blur away as if eaten from the inside by white-fires, only for the form of a Human to coalesce simultaneously in that very space the Dragoness had vacated.\n\nA quarter-ton of Dragon replaced by a tiddly few sackweight of tasty Human Princess, Grandion opined. That was the physical conundrum. Simply put, something could not arise from nothing, nor could a mass of Dragonflesh instantaneously vanish into thin air. The sums did not add up. This was impossible by any known law of physics, metaphysics and Dragon science\u2013which Grandion and Siiyumiel discussed at vast length. Certainly an education for the subject of their vigorous debate, but the matter proved ultimately to be a fruitless pursuit of the ungraspable.\n\nHualiama drank and ate, and tried to focus on her recovery.\n\nThen, as the afternoon heat baked her white-blonde head into a fine muddle, they all three settled down for a snooze\u2013Siiyumiel massively indolent, Grandion resplendent in his gemstone raiment and Hualiama, as charmingly nude as a freshly peeled tinker-banana. She covered herself modestly with her hair, which struck her as fuller and longer than she remembered. Waist length. Knotted like a crimson-crested weaver's nest. Because naturally, she admonished her thoughts with boundless vexation, a girl should be paying attention to the state of her hair when she was embroiled in a battle for her life with enemy Dragons and evil Enchantresses who marched off to perpetrate genocide, while on the side, she sought to rid the Island-World of Shinzen's inbred Giants and the scourge of ruzal still buried within her flesh!\n\nHa. If she curled up, the royal locks made a serviceable blanket. Utility over beauty. Her sister Fyria had always managed enough preening and primping for ten princesses, anyway.\n\nShe'd set about slapping the Islands into shape\u2026 later.\n\nBesides, she needed to have words with blue-haired Lia about ruzal. If this was some trick of Dramagon-spawned filth\u2013mercy, would the ruzal find a way to live on without her?\n\nFirst, she should yank a Dragoness' tail. Lia dozed, and slipped away to the dream-world."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "\"You! Human girl! Get your rascally parakeet-cheeks over here. I've a few fireballs to shoot at you\u2026\"\n\nOther-Hualiama stood beside one of the marble pillars, gazing out at the endless ribbons of stars. She wore an impeccable white Fra'aniorian lace gown with a train a mere four feet long, above which her tumbling, deep blue tresses made a second train. Without turning, she said, \"I'm so glad you came to visit. Feeling better?\"\n\n\"Better enough to be furious with you! How dare you steal my Dragoness? Feckless Human, I'll burn your toes to a cinder for\u2013\"\n\n\"You're our Human.\" To her embarrassment, Human-Lia produced a squeak of outrage. \"We must be feeling better to be this angry. Have I done wrong?\"\n\n\"Where's my Dragoness?\"\n\n\"Right here.\"\n\nShe stumbled up the steps. \"You're infuriating!\"\n\n\"Quite possibly the most infuriating person we know?\" asked the girl, turning to smile mysteriously over her shoulder. \"Come look at the stars, Human girl. I double-dragonet dare you.\"\n\n\"And a sackful of manky multiplying maggots to you!\"\n\nTo me? To you? Oh, what was the use? Hualiama padded over to her twin, noticing en route that her present Human guise also wore an identical gown hand-crafted in the finest Fra'aniorian tradition, only hers was a deep blue, the better to set off her pale hair and deep blue eyes. Right. Swallow the impatience. Then wring answers out of the girl-creature's neck like a washer-woman wringing out her linens.\n\nShoulder to shoulder, they stood and gazed at the splendour of stars.\n\nAfter a long silence, blonde-Lia said, \"Your surprise certainly was inspiring. We were a Star Dragoness, at least for a few days.\"\n\n\"We are a Star Dragoness.\"\n\n\"Our mother being?\"\n\n\"Istariela, mate of Fra'anior. I think.\"\n\n\"Whaaa\u2026 whaaaat? I think I need to sit down!\"\n\nInstead, their hands sought each other unconsciously. Intertwined. Laced together, as they always had been. Or was that a hand and a paw?\n\nBlue-haired Hualiama said, \"Since you woke me, I've been thinking a great deal. I'm sorry to have caused you so much grief. But we are inseparable, don't you see? Two sides of one coin. We are one fire inhabiting one heart, despite how we appear in this place.\"\n\n\"You saved my life. You sought me across the Island-World.\" Gazing deep into her alter-ego's eyes, blonde-Lia said, \"I remember being in a dark, terrifying place, and then there was light, and white-fires, and comfort. I had died, but my spirit had not yet flown. We sang together as one restored from death to life. And from that day I knew eggling-dreams, and carried you here.\" Taking the girl's other hand, Human-Lia placed it upon her heart. \"Here.\"\n\n\"I can never thank you enough.\"\n\n\"I am honoured to have carried you these many leagues and years, Star Dragoness. But now you must fly. The fate of this Island-World lies in your paw.\"\n\nThe other sighed. \"I'm not sure you understand.\"\n\n\"I understand I'm denying a Star Dragoness her destiny. Stifling, repressing\u2013\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nTo her shock, blue-haired Hualiama began to cry! Lia held off stiffly for a moment, before enfolding the other girl in her arms. \"You're right. I haven't the first understanding.\"\n\n\"You think I'm an invader\u2026 a parasite\u2026\"\n\n\"No!\" This time, blonde-Lia felt tears start in her eyes. \"I didn't mean\u2026 I'm so grateful for this life, it aches like knots in my bones\u2026 if I can help\u2026 help in any way\u2026\"\n\n\"Your courage succoured an eggling and our mother from the wrath of the Onyx Dragon\u2013even now, mighty Fra'anior seeks us. Yet, not out of animosity, I sense, though his motives are unclear\u2013\"\n\n\"Impossible. This would have been long before I knew you, before you entered my life\u2013is that what you're saying?\"\n\n\"Is time a road?\"\n\nThe classically inscrutable reply. Never had other-Hualiama seemed more draconic. Yet when she looked deeply into the other's gaze, Human-Lia found no subterfuge or deceit. This was the truth, as she grasped it. Somehow, she shared life-space with a Star Dragoness, the incarnation of Blue-star, the Hualiama of draconic legend. Somehow, they had contrived to help each other elude death's claw. But was it not time to\u2026\n\n\"Separate?\" they whispered simultaneously.\n\nOnly when they both shuddered did Lia realise a grievous thought had been given voice.\n\n\"Is that what we want?\" rasped Dragon-Lia.\n\nHuman-Lia shouted, \"No! Yes\u2026 no, I don't know. No. Is it even possible? Must I not grant a Dragoness the life she deserves? Even if I must maim my own heart in the doing?\"\n\nIn reply, her mirror-image sang:\n\n<Before the dawn, before the spark,>\n\n<Took fire upon the wings of life,>\n\n<Two mothers lived, two spirits grieved, and touched,>\n\n<Eternity.>\n\n<And in eternity did mingle two sparks,>\n\n<And become one flame.>\n\n<Thus prophesied, thrice born, lived twice,>\n\n<Amaryllion's gift: true oneness.>\n\nBeautiful, and bewildering, of course. Human-Lia said, \"I\u2026 I hate trying to wrangle meaning out of the depths of obscure lyrical prophecies! You're saying we have two mothers, that much is clear. But we are one. Inseparable\u2013in eternity did mingle two sparks?\"\n\nThe Dragoness-image, or whatever the girl was, turned away, but Lia refused to relinquish her hold on those precious fingers.\n\n\"Look. I'm earning myself a fine migraine trying to understand this.\" Gracious, she was a stubborn creature! Blonde-Lia smiled grimly. So this was what it was like to deal with herself? \"You woke up, having been bound for twenty-one years. Yet I've always known I had flame within me, have always yearned for it, danced toward the flame\u2026 I knew, Hualiama. But who's the real Hualiama? Is there such a person? Am I, or are we, some kind of Dragon-Human hybrid? A freak? Stop shaking your head! I must know!\"\n\n\"I wish I knew,\" mumbled blue-hair. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You're a Dragon! You aren't sorry!\"\n\n\"I'm Hualiama, and I am the most wretched of creatures\u2013I weep terrace lakes for all the anguish I've caused\u2013\"\n\n\"Be still!\" Lia drew a deep breath, before she reeled the other girl back into her arms, despite her resistance. Blue-hair refused to look at her. \"Wow. Snap of the old royal command there.\" Now she was babbling like a dragonet. \"First, if I must drill it into that hard-as-Dragon-scales head of ours to make you understand, I will\u2013I do not want to be rid of you. Ever. Not on this Island, not on the next, nor on any Island of life to come! Secondly, what has been cannot be changed. Besides, I\u2013you\u2013are me. We are me. We are\u2013I love you. That sounds lame and so clich\u00e9d it's about to curl up in shame and crawl off under a rock somewhere, I know, but I do.\"\n\nAnd she had the kind of pronoun confusion that would have driven her royal tutor into snarling apoplexy. But she simply did not possess the language to describe this riddle. You? Us? Multi-layered me? Me squared? Divisible yet indivisible?\n\nOther-Lia turned and pressed her head against her shoulder as though she wished to burrow back inside the shell. They held each other, trembling with desperation.\n\n\"Look, can't we try to work this craziness out?\"\n\n\"Without being immolated in fire, as you were suggesting earlier? Human girl, what if this means you can never have yon toothsome Tourmaline? And he is ultra-toothsome. I've peeked\u2013hope you don't mind.\"\n\n\"Ouch. You had to bring that up, didn't you?\" Lia stared over her twin's bowed head to the stars; were they as faraway as the edge of the Universe, or merely the boundary of her sanity? \"I don't see how I can ever, er, have him, as you put it. Ironic. If we separate, I'm Human and it's forbidden. Stay together and we're something\u2026 else. Other. Not quite Dragonkind. Either way, we're the only\u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013mixed up, crazy\u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013half Human, half Dragon\u2013\"\n\nDragon-girl corrected, \"Fully Human, fully Dragon, summing up to\u2013\"\n\n\"Two hundred percent mischief?\"\n\nPushing apart enough to catch the spark in each other's eyes, they began to chuckle. Five seconds later, they were laughing so helplessly, they had to lean against each other to keep standing. Finally, their stomachs hurt too much to continue.\n\nHualiama tucked a few white strands away from her twin's mouth, and gently thumbed away the tears. \"So, Human girl, what do you suggest we do now?\"\n\n\"I suggest we let her out.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\nHuman-Lia loosed a wicked, Dragoness-worthy chortle.\n\n\"Tell me!\"\n\n\"Don't hatchlings need to play?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "With Hualiama fast asleep, Grandion embarked on a swift hunt to clear the dark-fires of defeat and dejection from his mind. His fire-stomach felt grimy, as if crammed with ash. The consequences were clear. To roost-love a Human would be to live as a pariah amongst the Dragonkind. Right-minded Dragons would embark upon honour-quest after honour-quest to rid the Island-World of their odious presence. Had he already written this fate for himself? Aye, perhaps, but he refused to drag the Princess of Fra'anior down with him. She was regarded as striking amongst her kind. Should she choose a mate, what right-minded Human male would refuse?\n\nBetter he terminate this liaison now. Today.\n\nNo. Sapphurion would counsel patience. As he stalked a sleek young bushbuck on the Island one over from the Dragon's Bell, Grandion tried to force that forbearance to infuse him from wingtip to tail-spike. Follow in his shell-father's ways? How young Grandion, with his head stuffed full of fire, would have ground that notion between his fangs!\n\n*Snick!* He beheaded the buck with the razor-sharp point of his fore-talon. Clean kill. Instantly, he clamped his lips to the severed neck and gulped down the warm, spurting blood.\n\n'A carnivore gratefully accepts the gift of life,' was the ancient teaching. How much more he appreciated that saying now that he knew the bloodletting practices of the Dragon-Haters! Disgusting, binding the Dragon's magic into the blood before harvesting and drinking it. Azziala and her cronies had been on a drinking binge since the battle, building and honing their powers to a new pitch of perfection\u2013perhaps intending to bind the Land Dragons to their cause. Cunning. What creature, or Island, could stand against?\n\nHe knew one, born of star fire. Perhaps that was his preordained role\u2013the trusty companion. Grandion gnashed his fangs in impotent fury, before snatching up the bushbuck's remains with fang and claw, and wheeling back to where he had left the royal ward resting in the shadow of a boulder.\n\nWhat did the ascending fire-oaths mean if they could never be consummated?\n\nBut the wink of suns-light off blue scales resting in the lee of that boulder made the Tourmaline spill the hunter's spoils from his sagging jaw. By Great Dragon's seven thundering heads! Long seconds of frozen indecision saw the carcass lodge way down the cliff, a half-mile above the Cloudlands.\n\nThen, he dived for the Star Dragoness with a triumphant bugle, <Thou!>\n\nPerhaps Hualiama misunderstood his intent and the speed of his approach, for at the very last instant, she flashed into a sidestep like dark water flowing across the ground. Grandion braked sharply, then landed with a show of control and approached her with a swagger, displaying every inch of muscle and scale to its maximum potential.\n\nShe purred, <Mmm, sulphurous greetings, o chunky monster.>\n\n<You reverted?> he blurted out. <How?>\n\nHow fast her eye-fires whirled, her three hearts racing hatchling-speed at the sight of a majestic Tourmaline! With a coquettish tilt of her head, she said, <I spoke to myself and returned as me. I'm awfully hungry, Grandion. Sorry. Were you bringing a meal?>\n\n<I failed to observe the transformation,> Siiyumiel put in, unusually blunt for a bottom-dweller.\n\n<This wasn't the work of your Balance power?> Grandion clarified.\n\n<No. It was an unconscious change, perhaps transpiring without forewarning,> said Siiyumiel.\n\nFixing the mite with narrowed gaze, the Tourmaline growled, <I am not fond of trickery, Hualiama. Give me your word this is neither an illusion, nor a projection, nor some power of> ruzal? Consciously gentling his tone, he added, <I know you understand the gravity of this issue.>\n\n<Share fresh kill with me, Grandion?>\n\nShe deflected the question. What was Lia hiding? Yet also, the tone of her response took him right back to the roost, to his shell-mother's care for a Human mite. Could Qualiana, with her peerless command of the healing and nurturing arts, have somehow anticipated this change of fires at the deepest level of her unconscious mind? Immediately, the Tourmaline tipped precipitously off the cliff's edge and dived a near-vertical mile in search of the mislaid snack. A bushbuck was a mere morsel for a fully-grown Dragon, but it should sate a hatchling's voracious appetite for half a day, at least. Bizarrely, he plunged between the Shell-Clan Dragon's carapace and the Island, almost as if he traversed a ravine.\n\nFurling his wings instinctively to avoid an outcropping, Grandion snatched the bushbuck's remains out of the shallow crevice where it had lodged and swung upward once more.\n\nThat sound. Unfamiliar Dragons!\n\nAt once, his belly-fires roared into life. He had been remiss, leaving her in a Land Dragon's care. What did Siiyumiel know of aerial combat? Where had these hostiles been hiding? Priming his fires, his ice and his shielding, Grandion hurtled upward with his fullest power, silent and deadly intent."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Hualiama startled out of her reverie as a shadow flitted over her resting-place. Dragon attack! Instinct alone flung her beneath the swing of Siiyumiel's flashing paw. Fluttering wings! *Smack!* A familiar roaring brought the Dragon's Bell to resounding life as a Brown Dragon tangled sharply with two other Dragonkind\u2013feral? Lia peered out from beneath the unexpected dungeon-bars effect of Siiyumiel's talons closing over her, not to grasp, but to protect. Her flanks heaved with panicked gasps. Grunts! A volley of Grunts smashed into the Land Dragon's paw and the nearby rocky ledge with stunning disregard for life or limb.\n\n<SIIYUMIEL!> roared the Land Dragon, an almighty challenge.\n\nMagic thrummed in Lia's ears. Pressures seesawed between painful extremes, causing a scream to rip from her throat. Rays of intense light speared out of the Land Dragon's mighty eyes, striking with pinpoint accuracy to smash a trio of Grunts against the mountainside; next, they sheared the wings off two Blue Overminds attacking a Brown she belatedly recognised as Affurion, leader of the Lost Islands Dragons. Half an eye-blink later, Grandion corkscrewed upward into the fray, spraying a jagged sweep of ice from his throat. A cloud of grey Swarm Dragons with their curiously underslung jaws received the full brunt of his ire. She saw all with incredible clarity. Here, the reflexive strike of Affurion's talons to finish the one lone Swarm which had escaped the lashing ice-storm. As Grandion expectorated a fireball, a visible bulge travelled the length of his throat, making the scales glow from beneath like ingots warmed in a furnace. Instantly, a firestorm laced with lightning engulfed his target, a Blue Overmind.\n\nIf this was a battle-group of Lost Islands Dragons\u2026 Hualiama focussed on her vibrating toes. Aye, the underground attack of burrowing Anubam! Again her reactions were liquid lightning, framed in a secondary layer of conscious battle-thought, as Dragons called it, which separated draconic reactions from a Human's blind mental shortcuts. She rode the rising rock. Lia twisted aside as cracks gaped beneath her paws, poised upon an explosion that formed almost calmly around her body, then sank her talons into the shoulders of a Brown Anubam emerging beneath her and snaked her head around to savage his muzzle. Her fangs were too tiny to make much of an impact, so she substituted ferocity and an attack aimed at his left eye as the Brown bugled his pain, taking her for a wild but brief impromptu ride across the battleground. She tasted rich, golden Dragon blood an instant before Affurion dropped his considerable tonnage upon the Brown's spine and snapped it.\n\nA rising howl warned them both. Grunt!\n\nAffurion's paw scooped her out of the way, flinging her off the Island. With a startled screech, Hualiama flapped her wings and managed an awkward fly-glide that arced over the crown of Siiyumiel's head and terminated in a skidding, spark-producing landing on the nape of his neck. *Wham!* She fetched up against the lip of his carapace in a tangle of wings and paws.\n\nOh no. Grandion and Affurion were facing off over the Dragon's Bell, raging at each other!\n\nHer Dragoness bounded up to her paws as if electrified by one of Grandion's lightning attacks. Charging back over the top of Siiyumiel's head, Hualiama launched into the air\u2026 and discovered she was not much of a flier. Not yet. With a howl, she tumbled past the Land Dragon's row of eyes and plummeted down past his body. She caught flashes of pink evening sky. Rock rushing toward her. Tourmaline scales zipped through the air above. Brown? Were they fighting? Lia fluttered frantically, bravely, and suddenly found herself the filling inside a smashed-together combination of Grandion, Affurion, and another of Siiyumiel's paws.\n\n\"Oof! Rotten windroc droppings,\" she cried.\n\nGrandion snarled, <By the First Egg, what did you think you were doing?>\n\n\"It's a battle!\"\n\n<And she's a fiery-of-spirit Dragoness,> said Affurion, with an indulgent grin Hualiama summarily placed on her 'most want to bite' list. <Courage, little one. The battle's over. Rogue Dragons from our group, I'm afraid. But we routed those craven sheep, didn't we, wing-brother?>\n\nGrandion returned a brotherly mock-bite against Affurion's neck. <Strength to your paw, mighty Affurion.>\n\nMale Dragons. Posturing and congratulating each other. Preening and boasting. Was there need to add to their already overblown egos? While they swapped further compliments, she turned upon Siiyumiel's paw and gazed up into his lava-lake eyes.\n\n<Speak, o Star Dragoness.>\n\nShe realised he spoke directly to her with the aid of shielded telepathy. According to the lore she knew, this channel of communication was almost impossible to eavesdrop upon. At the speed of thought, their conversation proceeded.\n\n<Is this Balance, Siiyumiel? I sense it is, but I know so little.>\n\n<Somehow, each manifestation of> Hualiama, he said, stressing her name with an ancient-prophetic indicator, <appears to be perfectly Balanced in its own right. Even the Ancient Red scientist-mage, Dramagon, failed to achieve this result despite thousands of seasons of experimentation.>\n\n<Am I\u2013>\n\n<No, you are not Dramagon's experiment. In all I perceive and conclude from what you have shared, this is not the Dragonsong of his fire-soul, Hualiama. Nor are you Amaryllion's creation. You are a vessel, a miracle, and the bearer of prophecy's seeds. What is given, is that the flowering-in-beauty of your life will influence our Island-World profoundly. Therefore, the performance of your life's task must accord with your third heart's fires.>\n\nShe chewed this over in her mind, adding it to a conviction already established within her hearts. <Then a Star Dragoness must learn to weave Balance, justice and truth. She must listen as much to the groaning of volcanoes as to the song of the stars\u2013will you teach me how to listen, Siiyumiel? My paws are surely too tiny for this great a task.>\n\n<Search your hearts. What will you accomplish first?>\n\n<A personal quest. I must find the white scale, my shell-mother's scale. It will serve as a lodestone, a reminder to always seek the higher path.>\n\nThe Land Dragon asked, <Does this mean you've learned your heritage?>\n\n<Aye. I am the daughter of Ra'aba and Azziala, and the shell-daughter of Istariela by\u2013I believe\u2013Fra'anior himself.>\n\nDid she believe? As the Land Dragon's inner fires and eye-fires erupted in response to her assertion, Lia swallowed a lump in her throat as black and cutting as a shard of granite. Truly? With his fabled powers, surely the Onyx himself had purposed this, or at least foreseen that his progeny should remain in the Island-World beyond his departure. Why hunt Istariela, then? Was it the White Dragoness' egglings who represented the betrayal she remembered him roaring about, or another matter entirely, something beyond her ken? And might she not one day find her egg-siblings, should that grace be granted her?\n\nWas Fra'anior friend or foe?\n\nBefore she knew it, Hualiama had assembled all of these thoughts and all she knew of her heritage, and conveyed an infinitesimally brief yet world-shaking package of information to the great Wisdom of the Shell-Clan.\n\nHis entire body, miles long and deep, quivered as though she had picked up an Island and slapped him across the nose with it.\n\nOnly, where was his nose?\n\nThe budding Dragoness was still mired in this enormously important contemplation when Siiyumiel suddenly folded himself up in reverse. The eyes shuttered. With a deep groan and a shudder, his body began to sail backward from the Island. His head withdrew into its protective armour. At once, Grandion scooped her up in his right paw and made an agile leap to the Dragon's Bell Island, almost landing on Affurion's tail.\n\nSinking with surprising rapidity into the Cloudlands, Siiyumiel called, <This changes the Balance of the Harmonies, Hualiama. I must retire to consider your revelations.>\n\n<Siiyumiel, I\u2013>\n\n<I will find you, Star Dragoness.>\n\nHualiama stared after the receding mountain peaks of Siiyumiel's shell. Why did she sense she had just stumbled over her own paws?\n\n[ Sarzun Dragonhold ]\n\nThat eveNing, AfFURION flew with Grandion and Hualiama to Sarzun Dragonhold, the ancient roost of the Lost Islands Dragons. Thick cloudbanks marched overhead in ranks as regimented as sullen soldiers wearing dark grey uniforms, but although heat built upon heat and thunder fulminated all about, no rain appeared to be in the offing. When she realised where they were headed, Lia began to protest, but Affurion laughingly assured her that Azziala knew everything there was to know about the Stronghold already. Besides, anything truly important would be hidden long before she arrived.\n\nGrr! Grandion caught her about the waist before she launched herself more than ten feet off his paw in a spitting, snarling mini-rage.\n\n<Dragon emotions,> he chuckled.\n\n<Oh. Mercy, Grandion\u2026 is it always like this?>\n\n<Like rivers of fire coursing along your nerves? Aye, Dragoness. But you learn control, and how to channel the rage into great battle-magic.>\n\n<In your extensive experience of being a Dragoness?> she teased.\n\nAffurion snorted with laughter, momentarily turning the Tourmaline Dragon into a flying mass of knotted muscle and thundering fires. Without delay, the slim, double-winged Brown pointed with his left foreclaw. <Behold, Sarzun Dragonhold.>\n\nThey swept toward a trio of mile-wide crater-lakes crowning a lush Island, their rims curiously smooth and regular, as though formed by a planned geological process. Such was the power of the Ancient Dragons. Lia imagined there must be fine hunting amongst the bristly, dark green coniferous forests bearding the rugged slopes and shadowed ravines. Her stomach gurgled and clenched at once. Her new Dragon eyes picked out deposits of olivine, jade and chalcedony stone upon those igneous slopes, and the scales along her spine prickled as she became cognisant of an unfamiliar magic pervading the very air.\n\n<Aye,> said Affurion, observing her reaction. <This Island benefits from a natural shielding magic, which is the primary reason Dragons made their home here. None can approach with impunity; certainly, none possessing the subterfuge of the Dragon-Haters.>\n\nThe Star Dragoness replied, <It is almost as if the two halves of the Lost Islands were created to exist in eternal opposition>.\n\nThe Brown Dragon dipped his wingtips in respect. <A claw-tip touch upon what many Dragonkind suspect, Hualiama. We know not why we were created thus.>\n\nAs huge and pockmarked as an ancient boulder, the Yellow Moon rolled across the sky above the Lost Islands, passing by so closely, she imagined a paw could reach out and scratch its dusty, citrine-yellow surface. Beyond the aspect of its western curvature, Hualiama saw the great comet stretching across the sky, its coma hidden behind the Yellow Moon, so that the two separate tails appeared to stream away like a child's white ribbons trailing across the deepening indigo of the evening sky. What would become of the Island-World if the notoriously malevolent Numistar returned to rule and reign?\n\nHer gaze swung dizzily to the craters, zooming in to discover streams of Dragonkind issuing from the honeycomb rim walls, which rose a good thousand feet above the slowly-roiling turquoise lakes, then her vision panned out again to spy many more thousands of Dragons, mostly Swarm, rising to orient upon the visitors with clear intent.\n\n<Steady your eye muscles,> Grandion advised. <For now, choose a single focal point until you learn fine control of your magnification. I will also teach you the magical enhancement of Dragon sight. That's a higher Blue skill.>\n\nClearly, the Tourmaline intended to revel in the role of teacher.\n\nIt was hard not to feel chary and skittish given his sheer physical presence; more so the possessive clasp of his paw and the surging of eye-fires each time Grandion regarded her. Lia had to remind herself she was twenty-one years old, no mere stripling, and certainly not an ordinary Dragon hatchling. Life's experience had scarred and moulded her.\n\nThe power of Dragon sight was hers.\n\nLia said, <Grandion, please show me how to work this magnification. What are your Dragonkin doing, Affurion?>\n\n<Waiting upon a Star Dragoness,> said Affurion.\n\nOh. Her wings flicked anxiously. Lia stilled herself with an angry growl. Great Islands, there was just so much of her now, yet she measured only twelve feet from muzzle to tail-spike. What would it be to meet her father in this guise? Mercy, would he ever dare to raise a hand to her again? More likely, he'd fix a price on her lizard-head and point the Royal Guards at her scaly hide.\n\n\"Grandion, how do you know I'm a Star Dragoness? If they're so rare, how do the Dragonkind recognise one?\"\n\n\"Noble Sapphurion identified your qualities.\" *Grrr\u2026* she warned. \"Your skill with Balance magic proclaims your heritage. Mighty Siiyumiel knows the same\u2013do not allow doubt's dark-fires to shade the clear light of your inner presence, Hualiama.\"\n\nDid she scent another draconic half-answer? \"Aren't Star Dragons meant to be white, like my shell-mother?\"\n\nGrandion tipped his wings to catch a warm breeze, speeding them toward the faraway Dragonhold. With a droll, negating gesture of his free forepaw, he snorted, \"Aren't hatchlings meant to accept the wisdom of their elders? Why no, she wishes to dance. This Tourmaline would never constrain that dance, for one might as well seek to enchain the beauty of starlight itself.\"\n\nStunning. She wheezed aloud at the piercing clarity of his insight, her little hearts suddenly pulsing in her throat, chest and stomach with a single, startled drumbeat. A promise to treasure. Aye, she must discern Fra'anior's intent. To earn the lifelong enmity of an Ancient Dragon was no laughing matter.\n\nShadowed of soul, she turned her attention to their destination.\n\nSarzun Dragonhold slowly rose from the softly layered mists above the Cloudlands, a long, many-humped slab of black granite that brooded over its surrounds like a beast lying in wait for an unwary traveller. Lying in the north-western quadrant of Dragon Territory, it was still a number of hundred leagues from the Buffer Zone that separated Dragon lands from Human, warm from frozen. Sarzun lay on the rim of a vast, mostly extinct under-Cloudlands volcano, although there were several active vents on the southern and south-eastern aspect, called Jandibor and Qualizar, apparently named for famous leaders of the Lost Islands Dragonkind.\n\nThe Island was more extensive than it first appeared, its upper parts robed in dense coniferous forests that housed myriad subspecies of draconic life, according to Azziala's intelligence. These were sub-intelligent Dragon species; as they departed the Dragon's Bell, Affurion had pronounced them worse than feral Dragons, and the forests of the Lost Islands as the deadliest realm in the Island-World, after the inside of an angry Dragon's gullet. Many were powerful ground-burrowers, similar to the Anubam, but other Dragonkind grew rooted in place or in cracks and crevices, apparently belonging more to the plant kingdom than the animal. Another entire class were Dramagon's prototype Grunts\u2013massively armoured, massively powerful six-or eight-legged Dragon species Affurion called 'Dracopods' or more fondly, Dozers, as they were renowned as much for their ability to doze in the suns-shine as for their love of rampaging through the forest, apparently taking exception to anything that dared to stand in their way\u2013rock, tree or cliff, it mattered not. Then came the exotics\u2013climbers, slingers, insectoid Dragonkind, lake-dwellers, bat-like cave Dragons, and many more.\n\nQuite the menagerie compared to Fra'anior's population of Lesser Dragons and dragonets.\n\nObeying Grandion's steady instruction, Lia focussed on the hundreds of Grunts lining the rims of the central caldera. Deep red in colouration, they appeared to absorb the suns' lowering rays and reflect them from their metallic Dragon hides, which hung off their jowls and bellies in great folds of flexible metal. These Dragons, the Tynukam, ate rich metallic ores to supplement their diet. Judging by their size and squat, powerful stances, Lia realised they could not fly far. That was why Overminds like Affurion were required to wield Grunts in battle, hefting these poor fliers with their fabled Kinetic power and propelling them at the enemy to strike like living fire-bombs.\n\nPerhaps her devastating white-fire attack on Razzior and his renegades made her a Star Dragoness? Still, eyeing the thousands of Swarm and the seventy or eighty Overminds gathering above the Dragonhold, Lia felt an out-and-out fraud. Princess? Fraud! Truth be told, she was an adopted foundling. Dragon? Fraud also\u2026 maybe. She shrank into Grandion's paw. No\u2026\n\nUgh. Suddenly, a thought sprang fully-formed into her mind. Say she was half-Dragoness, or wholly so\u2013surely that meant she already possessed all the resources to be a Dragon?\n\nWhy should a Dragoness be uncomfortable in her own hide?\n\n<Hsst. Blue-eyed monster? Wake up.>\n\nTo experience the waking of another consciousness within her consciousness, and to know it was also her\u2013aye, that was upside-down rainbows beaming over the Island of her life.\n\n<Hmm? Says the other blue-eyed monster?>\n\nHuman-Lia said, <I wanted to ask if you wouldn't mind handling this part for us? Actually, the whole Dragon\u2026 thing. It's yours, really.>\n\nThere was a silence so prolonged, she wondered if she had caused herself grievous insult. Then, the inner voice said, <I didn't ask. I didn't want to\u2013>\n\n<Be a parasite? How can you be, if we are one? Uh\u2013sorry. That came out badly.> Aye, she knew better. They both knew. <This is my final decision, Dragon-brain. Take it, or take it.>\n\nSoft, relieved laughter filled her mind. <Your negotiation doesn't leave even a hatchling wiggle-room, does it? Then we understand ourselves. Let our entwined life be our strength. I will look after us\u2013>\n\n<I know that. You've done so since before I was born.>\n\n<It needs saying. And, oath-making. Therefore, I swear this upon the fires of our soul.>\n\nSouls, she wanted to say. Yet that would be a lie. <This I also swear upon our soul's life.>\n\nAn everlasting perturbation unsettled her twofold soul, yet Hualiama found herself in a place of inner tranquillity. Was this Siiyumiel's Balance? Draconic awareness pervaded her mind, yet she was both part of that fabric, and the fabric itself. The music and the notes, inseparable. There was neither a sense of oppression nor loss, yet a paw had grasped the helm of her life, just as Lia had often piloted her solo Dragonship around the Fra'anior Cluster.\n\nShe was Dragonkind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Grandion peered at the mite clasped in his paw. With a droll whirl of his eye-fires, he inquired, <Afeared of a royal occasion, Princess? For though Dragons have no kings and queens, a Star Dragoness is royalty indeed. Will you not grant Affurion's kin the honour\u2013>his voice cracked. <What is it?>\n\nAs if she had shed one skin for another, Hualiama unfolded herself from that quailing position, stretched in a delightful rippling of midnight-blue scales from muzzle to paws, and assumed a confident stance upon his paw. Grandion sneezed a fireball of delight. Her strength-from-weakness power, the hallmark of her feminine mystique! Every fire in his body thunder-sighed at once as Hualiama examined the Tourmaline with unaccustomed boldness, gazing into his eyes as if beholding the mesmeric intensity of a Dragon's gaze for the first time. Grandion shivered. Who was she, who clasped his third heart in her tiny paws and whispered her soul-fires therein?\n\nIn a soft purr, she said, <May I ride upon your shoulder, mighty Tourmaline?>\n\nGrandion's throat thickened; beside him, Affurion gave a gruff roar of approbation. <Worthily spoken, little one!> And he invited her to spring upon his wrist, and raised her to Grandion's right shoulder, saying, <Receive the honour due a Star Dragoness.>\n\nShe replied, <Only when our work is accomplished, noble Affurion, will there be occasion for praises.>\n\nAffurion lowered his muzzle with studied dignity. <A draconic word.>\n\nAs the two large male Dragons swept toward the great congregation of the Lost Islands Dragonkind, Grandion's gaze swept over the many thousands of pairs of fire-eyes silhouetted against the deepening evening, drawing closer and closer, until at a moment when they were barely a mile offshore, the waiting Dragons drew breath and roared in a single voice, <DRAGONS, UNITED!!>\n\nHualiama's talons dug into his scales, but she did not falter.\n\n<AFFURION!> thundered the Brown, a great laugh of welcome. <Come, wing-brother. Will you honour our tradition?>\n\nGrandion's entire length tightened with the ingathering of his Storm-power. When he announced himself, it was with a peal of real thunder that shook the air for miles about. <GRANDION!>\n\nOn his shoulder, Lia shook her muzzle. <Poser. Trying to deafen me?>\n\nAffurion chuckled, <Prodigious do the Dragons of Fra'anior grow, o Grandion. Now, mighty Hualiama?>\n\nHow on the Islands was she supposed to step into his paws? No Dragon hatchling possessed a battle-roar to speak of. Yet even above the wry snicker that informed him she perfectly understood the incongruity of this request, the Tourmaline sensed magic drawing together within her being, a magic that chased a great thrill of recognition along his wings like a delicate tracery of fire. She sucked in an everlasting breath and then held it, vibrating slightly with the deep concentration she brought to bear on her magic-weaving.\n\nFor a moment, nothing happened. Grandion's hearts accelerated. <Strength\u2013>\n\n<Thank you, Grandion.>\n\nRegret-tones betrayed her true feelings. She was not strong. She had just recovered from a terrible experience. He must teach her how to understand, measure and control the magical potentials within her being. Even Dragon magic required time to recover and concentrate within the organs; as she grew, that window would reduce. He must not assist too much.\n\nThe white highlights and edgings of her deep blue scales began to glow as though traced by the very white-fires he had seen through her eyes. The intensity of light emanating from within escalated rapidly, turning virtually impenetrable Dragon hide translucent, as if the tiny Dragoness possessed magical pathways unknown to other Dragons. The little chin lifted, an oh-so-Hualiama gesture, to view the massed congregation with her customary forthrightness.\n\nHis wingbeat almost seized up. Star-power! He saw glorious starlight, now so brilliant that his secondary membranes shuttered instinctively, filtering the blue-tinted dazzle atop his shoulder. Dragon royalty, resplendent!\n\nAnd her song soughed over the Dragons, soft and compelling, declaring her name thrice:\n\n<Hualiama, Hualiama,>\n\n<Hoo-ah-lee-yah-ma.>\n\nEach repetition waxed more lyrical than the last, until every Dragon's fire thrilled within him or her, and with one accord, ten thousand throats opened to echo the five syllables of her name in pure Dracotonic harmony. Lia's wings spread, joyously trembling, to salute their response, and then as the Lost Islands Dragonkind continued to hum those five notes, her descant soared over all, wild and exhilarating and free. Grandion could not understand what magic allowed her to project her voice so effortlessly, but thrice over, the number of oath-significance in draconic numerology, she sang her name again, before changing her words for the final three repetitions:\n\n<I will serve thee, I will serve thee,>\n\n<I will serve thee all my life.>\n\nWhat a pledge! Grandion sang with the others as his tiny passenger unabashedly electrified the entire draconic population of the Lost Islands. The Tourmaline wanted to laugh, but he dared not. Oh, Lia! A Dragon might traipse around the Island-World in her slipstream merely to see what sleight-of-paw miracle she would conceive of next.\n\nYet the voice that replied almost smashed him from the sky:\n\n<SO ENTER THY ACCEPTABLE SERVICE, NOBLE STAR DRAGONESS!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "When the voice of the very Islands shook her marrow, Hualiama's paws clenched so hard on Grandion's shoulder, her leg and shoulder muscles cramped up. <So enter thy acceptable service, noble Star Dragoness!>\n\nShe could not allay the fear that stabbed so deep, the shards of courage shattered and the willpower that absconded with her tongue and reason. Such authority; so familiar! It shocked her memories into startled focus. His was the manifold presence which had terrified an eggling; he was the Island-spanning storm which had sought her White Dragoness mother across the many leagues, hunting her, crying 'traitor!'\n\nThe voice said, <Do I know thee, Dragoness? Doth my soul thrill to the verimost song of thy fires?>\n\nYet now his thunder seemed unaccountably gentle, a yearning of infernos rather than the fury of imminent destruction. Could she risk\u2026 <Numistar returns,> she said. Deflection. Classic Dragon logic. <Her star rises.>\n\n<Aye, little flame, Numistar betrayed her brethren most sorely,> came the reply. The sevenfold thunder, though infused with fury, conveyed notes of concern for a hatchling. Unmistakably, she spoke to the fabled Black Dragon. How? Even his Dragonish was like imbibing the richest of berry-wine, subtle and aged, rife with complexities beyond her comprehension.\n\n<Still thy fears and align thy thoughts to mine, little mouse,> he said. <I know thy defiance in hiding my Istariela was enacted for pure-fires love; aye, I perceive thou art that eggling-spirit with whom I spoke, years of thy time ago. I know thee. As surely as she loved thee, Istariela used thee to fly to a hiding place beyond even an Ancient Dragon's ken. She veiled the knowledge of her eggs from me, concealed her brooding and hatching and mothering\u2013>\n\n<And this is why, great Fra'anior, you pursued her with raging Storm and\u2013>Hualiama bit her tongue painfully.\n\n<Nay\u2026> he laughed curtly. <White-fires truth? Partly, little Dragon-spirit. Aye.> The restless raging of his fires, expressed beneath that all-conquering presence, quietened into a new Dragonsong. <I grieve the forever-separation from mine kin. But there are greater dangers; the Nurguz who seek the ultimate destruction of the Dragonkind and the destructive warring of our own kind, and for these reasons, I and mine kin were forced to depart. Thus we sought to protect thee, and all Dragonkind. Yet now, thou alone must remain to oppose the advent of Numistar's fervid fire-spirit.>\n\n<Fra'anior, I\u2013>\n\n<SHOW ME WHO YOU ARE!>\n\nWithout, she became aware of the touch of Grandion's paw; of his soft, soothing interrogative. Yet within, her thoughts were fixed upon Fra'anior, the great seven-headed Dragon of Onyx. How could she be speaking to a legend? Where did he live; somewhere beyond the Island-World, yet clearly able to influence events and oaths\u2026 and he recognised her spirit, even though he did not acknowledge the truth as yet. Even Fra'anior did not see or know all, a realisation that provided perverse comfort.\n\n<I am Blue-star,> she said, using the ancient Dragonish form of her name.\n\n<Formidable, thou art.>\n\n<I am called the Child of the Dragon, and the Dragonfriend.>\n\n<Thou art Dragonkind, yet more, the song of fire-beauty inimitable. How is this possible?>\n\nShe said, <In my flesh, I carry the final gift of Amaryllion Fireborn to the nations before he departed for the eternal fires. Yet, I have never met my shell-mother, save in my eggling-dreams.>\n\nSofter still, Fra'anior soothed, <Strength to your paw, little star. I would know thy Dragonsong. I\u2026 must. Wilt thou honour this desire of mine third heart?>\n\nHonour him? After a moment's renewed tongue-chewing, Hualiama said, <Seek the truth within your hearts, great Fra'anior. You yourself said, do you not know me? For I am she who was born twice, the daughter of a White Dragoness.>\n\n<Thou art Istariela's\u2026 progeny? By whom?>\n\nWhat? How could he not know? Jealousy-disbelief indicators shaded his speech. Yet there was in her hearts a song that knew no words, a rising tide of emotion mingled with inexpressibly sweet harmonies of fate and love and tragedy and hope, that caused her to splutter, <I-I suspect\u2026 I-I fear and I tremble\u2013>\n\n<Me?>\n\nCould she stagger the greatest of all Dragons? So done.\n\n<ME? Thou\u2026> from a world-shaking roar to a ravaged whisper, his telepathic voice switched in an instant's penetrating insight. <It is not possible. The final battle with Dramagon twisted mine flesh, injured me in ways beyond redemption. I could never sire another hatchling\u2026 could I?>\n\nHualiama had the sense of huge heads shaking and snaking about in such a welter of disbelief, his long necks tangled themselves up in a fine knot.\n\n<It is not\u2026 real,> he gasped. <It cannot be, my soul, my song in thee, yet I sense\u2026 I recognise thee and the dark-fires of regret shadow mine soul, for how cruelly I mistreated thee before\u2026 and what is this hope, this cherished-love that binds my hearts, oh my wings, have I woken to a living dream of joy inexpressible in all the tongues of Dragons and Men? It cannot be! Is it truly thee, thou who art the offspring of Istariela's fire-life?>\n\n<Denials, great Fra'anior?> she returned pertly, yet with a mental obeisance of awe, mingled incongruously with the merriment of respite. Truth told. Now, the courage to wag her mental tongue? <You might as well slap your muzzle with your paw and see what is realer than this.>\n\nAt last, his answering laughter poured over her and through Hualiama like torrential rain. She was a tiny echo of his fire-life. She was birthed of his spirit, bearer of the unmistakable imprint passed from shell-father to shell-daughter.\n\n<I have a beautiful hatchling! SHE IS BORN!!>\n\nAt the zenith of his triumph and prodigious delight, Fra'anior's voice cut off as though a moon had eclipsed the suns. Hualiama became aware of a new presence, gazing toward her with the eyes of inner sight, and a voice as cold and deathly as the depths of a never-ending winter sneered:\n\n<So, Numistar's adversary is revealed. She is Hualiama, spawn of the not-barren Fra'anior!>\n\n<N-No!> She must hide, avert, shield her identity!\n\n<NUMISTAR RISES!> roared the comet. <SHE SHALL AVENGE! AND SHE SHALL REIGN FOREVER!!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"All was glorious, until you fainted like a stunned deer,\" said Grandion, sounding decidedly muzzle-out-of-joint. \"You demanded too much of yourself. You are a hatchling with a hatchling's resources and command of magic. When will you learn, Hualiama? When will you\u2013oh, I breathe smoke into the wind!\"\n\nHe had no inkling of all that had passed between her and Fra'anior?\n\n\"I'm listening with all six ear-canals, Grandion,\" she protested, trying to rise. No single limb obeyed. Evidently, Dragons experienced adrenalin-fuelled stress as well; having encountered Fra'anior, she felt as if half her brain had combusted and the remainder was obscured by smoke.\n\n\"Down! Lie still!\"\n\nShe lay beside the lake in the three-quarters circle created by Grandion's flank, neck and tail, facing West, to a realm where the last traces of the suns-set laced the clouds with rose and fire. The lake-surface gleamed like the flanks of a brass cauldron sat beside an open forge. At least a hundred Dragons eavesdropped openly on their conversation, while the majority of those gathered on perches, inside tunnel-mouths and alongside the lake for an evening bath, play or courtship, inclined their fire-eyes to the unique pair lying on a black volcanic beach beside the lake.\n\n\"I humbly obey your commands, mighty Tourmaline,\" Lia said, attempting a flirtatious flare of her fire-eyes.\n\n\"Plainly, that'll be the day the suns fly backward around the moons!\" he raged, losing his temper to the tune of an impressive fireball launched over the crater lake.\n\nMercy. Perhaps more cheek was needed? \"You bellowed, my lord Dragon?\"\n\n*GNNAAARRRRGGGH!*\n\n\"Allow me, noble Grandion,\" said a familiar voice.\n\n\"Elki!\" Hualiama screeched, springing to her feet, only to stumble and fall flat over Grandion's hind paw. Elegant. \"Elki, is that\u2013oh.\" Lia meant to throw herself into his arms as she always used to. As a Dragoness, she summarily flattened the Prince of Fra'anior. Awkwardly, she squirmed off her brother's chest. \"Sorry.\"\n\nHe made a song and a dance of patting himself down and checking all limbs were intact. \"Alright, get over here, beastly sister.\" A waggle of his eyebrows accompanied the word 'beastly'.\n\nFor that, she stood\u2013delicately\u2013on his breastbone. \"Very funny, Elki.\"\n\n\"Glad as always to see your devastatingly handsome brother? First Human ever to set foot in Sarzun Dragonhold, let me tell you.\" He strained, but failed to budge her paw so much as a half-inch.\n\n\"Inspiring application of the natural charm there, Elki.\"\n\n\"I'd appreciate a touch less sarcasm, Short Shrift. So? Suitably surprised?\"\n\n\"Bowled over.\"\n\n\"That's me,\" he grinned. \"Islands' sakes, will you get off\u2013better. What brings your inexpressibly wonderful brother here, you were about to ask?\" Elki dusted off his reinforced leather jerkin. \"Came to warn you. Your blood-mother neglected to inform you of the penalty if you fly more than twenty-five leagues offshore of the Lost Islands.\"\n\n\"What, mother dearest doesn't want to lose her lizard-daughter just yet?\"\n\nGrandion made a welcoming gesture with his forepaw. \"What penalty, o Prince?\"\n\n\"Azziala's Dragon Enchanters perfected a subliminal, geographically bound Command last week. Fly one inch outside the demarcated boundaries, and your hearts will arrest instantly. Mizuki's, too.\" The Tourmaline Dragon bared every fang in his jaw. \"Aye. Rather less charmingly, the Empress took the trouble to demonstrate on a sick Red.\"\n\nUgh. Her mother. Hualiama scowled at no Dragon in particular. \"So you're playing messenger boy?\"\n\n\"I didn't fancy the alternative.\"\n\n\"Wise. I'm grateful, too.\" She glanced around quickly. \"Where's Mizuki? And Saori?\"\n\n\"Mizuki\u2013\" Elki covered his mouth with a furtive gesture \"\u2013is over there. Preening for you-know-who. And my other deadly darling is back at Chenak Stronghold. Hostage. In case I work out how to restart Mizuki's hearts before we perish in the Cloudlands, perchance. Your mother does enjoy dominating every detail of her disloyal vassals' lives.\"\n\nBrother and sister chuckled darkly, like evil twins contemplating a bloody rebellion.\n\n[ The Blooding ]\n\nAffurion had been behaving as if he was oblivious to the Copper Dragoness' presence as he spoke to a group of grizzled Dragon Elders, but Hualiama had to stifle a chuckle as he broke away from them and sashayed along the shoreline toward their group. Oh, aye? That proud arch of the neck, the flexion of his powerful thigh-muscles, and the bared talons tearing up rock and sand with unnecessary force? He was twice the fraud she could ever be.\n\nNearing them, Affurion called, \"Noble Star Dragoness, is this Prince Elka'anor of Fra'anior?\"\n\n\"My brother, the Prince\u2013we call him Elki for short,\" said Lia, with an uncoordinated sweep of her left wingtip. \"Elki, it's my pleasure to introduce the mighty Affurion, leader of the Lost Islands Dragons.\"\n\n\"May the most sulphurous blessings of the Great Dragon abide with you and your kin, noble Affurion,\" said Elki, with a very proper Fra'aniorian bow\u2013five hand-twirls each accompanied by a complex dance-step. Mercy, when had that sweetmeat-stealing scamp turned into a diplomat? \"I am Elka'anor, Prince of Fra'anior, and I am honoured beyond words to be the Dragon Rider of Mizuki, the Copper Dragoness.\"\n\n\"Aye, I had the honour to meet Mizuki as an ally in battle,\" said Affurion, who knew exactly who the Copper was, but was playing his part to the hilt. Lia felt her fires roll in her belly like a Human rolling her eyes. \"She is indeed magnificent.\"\n\nSaid at a tone and volume guaranteed to carry to the attentive ears of a certain Dragoness. Naturally.\n\nAffurion continued, \"You must tell me more about this Dragon-Rider partnership, o Prince. For it is only for the Star Dragoness' sake that we allowed a Human foot to tread within the portals of Sarzun Dragonhold. This bond-magic intrigues me.\" The Prince bowed in assent. \"But now, as you appear recovered after bringing the sacred gift of starlight into our presence, o Star Dragoness, I wish to formally invite you to the ceremony of First Blooding. Although we Lost Islands Dragonkind have a few customs peculiar to our realm, it is not dissimilar to the celebration granted to all Dragon hatchlings after the first week of their life. Yours has been delayed, but I would request the honour of proposing that the Blooding be performed here, at this ancient seat of draconic authority, and that your prime benefactors, in the absence of your true shell-father, shall be the Tourmaline Dragon and the Prince.\"\n\nHualiama looked to Grandion, intrigued. Many scrolls of Dragon lore she had read hinted at this ceremony, but mention was always accompanied by a moniker or margin note that the ceremony was secret and of obscure origins, an oral tradition never handed down in written form.\n\nThe Tourmaline voiced a weighty rumble, made by deliberately stoking his belly-fires while leaving them trapped behind the powerful sphincter muscles controlling his fire-stomach. <Common life, common blood, common fires. Aye. A pleasingly draconic proposal.>\n\nAffurion turned to Elki. <I honour-much,> said the Prince, in his broken Dragonish.\n\nLia lowered her muzzle. <It shall be as you wish, noble Affurion.>\n\nAt once the stalwart Brown, half again as long as Grandion but much leaner and more snake-like in the torso, flared his double wings and pointed his muzzle to the sky, trumpeting, <ARISE TO THE BLOODING!>\n\nHis evocative bugling pierced the early evening with the sweet, clarion note of a trumpet. At once, a group of fledgling Overminds burst out of a nearby roost-cave, laughing and exclaiming with excitement. A posse of several dozen stolid Grunts shambled down to the lake shore, accompanying an Elder who stood head and shoulders above the rest. He was a Dragon of such great age, his eye-fires appeared rheumy and dim, and he leaned heavily on the shoulder of a young helper with the stump of one amputated wing. Lia saw family groups gathering in the mouths of caves, from the largest grey Grunts to tiny Swarm hatchlings, barely a foot long but already filled with the energy of sackfuls of mosquitoes. The pinpricks of eyes drew together, the massing of incandescent orbs driving back the darkness until the vast caldera assumed the function of a natural amphitheatre, a strange realm gleaming between the vaulting, velvety sky, the jutting fire-lit cliffs, and the still, still lake below.\n\nUpon the tranquil waters, Lia saw the reflection of stars and blazing Dragon eyes commingled, as if to depict a portent of her life, although its exact meaning eluded her.\n\nShell-daughter of Istariela and Fra'anior. White and Black. As Elki would say, roaring rajals! Every hair on her Human's neck stood to attention like a solider on the parade-ground\u2026 and that was a peculiar notion for a Dragon, akin to the scale-tingling wonder that made her shiver now. How did one ever grow into paws such as those that shaped the Island-World?\n\nNot by fretting herself silly over the unattainable.\n\nRising, Hualiama indulged in a prolonged and delicious stretch of her spine. Fantastic! No wonder felines liked to test their litheness. She paced several impatient circles as Affurion waited for the arthritic Grunt to settle himself nearby, a mere thirty feet from Lia's position near Grandion's flank, while Mizuki threaded her way forward before settling on her belly beside Elki.\n\nThe Prince whispered, \"Can't help but think there's ten thousand Dragons out there examining my edible properties, Mizuki.\"\n\n\"We don't eat intelligent creatures,\" said Mizuki.\n\n\"That's supposed to comfort me?\"\n\n\"Depends if you're intelligent or not. Are you?\"\n\nThe Prince slammed his elbow into the Dragoness' side, and then performed a silent, wincing dance, clutching his bruised limb. Dragon and Rider were clearly communicating excellently. Now, if Affurion burned for Mizuki, what of Affurion and Saori? Could they be a match? Enter Hualiama from left-stage, the wizened, toothless old matchmaker? She had to laugh at her pretensions.\n\nAffurion raised his sleek muzzle to the sky, his ruff of skull-spikes very modest compared to Grandion's thicket, and Lia noticed that he sported at least double the number of fangs of the more familiar Western Dragons, a double-row of slim white swords only a foot long\u2013only? Only powerful enough to snap a ralti sheep in half in a single bite! With a visible throbbing of the throat, created by the upper palette vibrating to produce a Dragon's highest song-notes, Affurion carolled in the Dragonish high-poetic style:\n\n<Many the burning ages, amidst the furnace of fire-life nascent,>\n\n<Of soul-life transcendent, did the ancient Dragon-Spirits,>\n\n<Upon the winds of cosmic fate, cast their kin to wander,>\n\n<Even as the starry wanderer does cross our skies this night.>\n\nGrandion slipped a rapid thought into Hualiama's mind, <Dragons love to change the words every time, apropos to the occasion. That is why this ceremony will never be written down in the annals of our lore.>\n\nAh. So it was a test of poetic skill as well as memory? Intriguing. Yet she glanced to the comet, blazing noticeably closer overhead. What a mighty comet must have brought the Dragonkind hence, the marvellous First Eggs hid within its belly like a Dragoness pregnant with a joyous abundance of her brood-to-be. Yet Istariela had somehow contrived to steal seed from Fra'anior, and this inference shocked her. Why would the noble Istariela, celebrated of ballad and lore, act like a common thief? Then she had chosen not to share the miracle with Fra'anior, her soul-mate, but rather, to hide her pregnancy from him? Bizarre. Was she entirely whole in mind? Or had she turned to evil?\n\nShe had a shell-brother and a shell-sister somewhere in the vastness of the Island-World. One day, she would seek those eggs. Another promise, gladly given.\n\nYet Affurion moved on, steadily recounting the histories in epic metre of elevated Dragonish, how the great egg-bearing comet had smashed into the world, and how the fires of that unimaginable conflagration shaped the mighty, uncrossable Rim-Wall Mountains and carved out the Cloudlands oceans wherein Land Dragons frolicked in realms as immense as the skies above. From amidst the ashes of destruction rose the Ancient Dragons, born of those star-travelling eggs. Fra'anior, firstborn of the Dragonkind, shaped the Islands with his deft paw and set the habitation of Lesser Dragons and Humans upon the heights, miles above the permanent layer of toxic clouds.\n\nThen, the Brown leader's tale took an unfamiliar twist.\n\nFollowing a destructive war between the shell-brothers Dramagon and Fra'anior, Dramagon the Red fled eastward to carve out new lands for himself, far from the great Onyx Dragon's dominion. Affurion related how Dramagon, having betrayed and sorely injured his older shell-brother in that terrible battle, had stolen a number of Islands and sailed them across the Cloudlands ocean toward the eastern stars. Archaeological evidence and fossilised plant matter suggested that the Lost Islands had once enjoyed a much warmer climate. The Dragon lore recounted how Dramagon had established his domain in the far South-East, near the fortress Shinzen had claimed for his own. But the interference of one experiment with another had led the mighty, misguided Dragon scientist to establish an 'isolation laboratory' where he intended to perfect the variants of Humankind and Dragonkind he had conceived of and bred, where the two main races might by centuries-long conflict sharpen each other into the tools he desired. Therefore, he caused the Lost Islands to migrate northward into the frozen latitudes they now occupied, and divided Humankind from Dragonkind by the stroke of his paw, creating the Buffer Zone. Dramagon struck record of this laboratory from memory and lore. Thus, the Lost Islands came to be.\n\nWhile the elderly Grunt now raised his voice in recounting the genealogies of the Lost Island Dragons, Hualiama contemplated discussing this mystery with Siiyumiel. Surely, he must know the truth of 'sailing' Islands? The obvious possibility was that Dramagon had carried the Islands in his paw, or raised them as Fra'anior had been able\u2013but that was not the inference of this retelling.\n\nHer eyes were just beginning to shutter as the Grunt droned on interminably, when Affurion commanded every Dragon's attention with another of his haunting bugles.\n\nHe announced, <Two weeks ago, a different starry wanderer was conceived of battle-song, born amidst the fiery rage of fifty wicked Dragons of the West. We of the Lost Isles are honoured above all Dragonkind to witness the birth of a Star Dragoness, she who is spirit-sealed in the likeness of the fabled White Dragoness, Istariela. Moreover, she is Hualiama, named for the promise-star of the ascending fire-promises of the Dragonkind, the star whose light dances beneath the twin suns as they rise above the Eastern Rim Wall. If you search the skies, my kin, with all the strength and cunning of your paw and wing, heart and soul, you might one glorious morn sight Blue-star.>\n\n<Yet this evening, Hualiama walks among us, a draconic fire-soul incarnate, wreathed in the veriest beauty of wing and scale, who breathes fire like any of us, yet hers are the purest white-fires of starlight. This I declare and aver, for I witnessed with mine own eyes the utter destruction this budding Star Dragoness wreaked upon the enemies of true-fires.>\n\nLia bowed her muzzle shyly as a number of nearby hatchlings and fledglings purred audibly. Now a promise-star? Let it be! However, to be cast as the destroyer made her clench her paws angrily.\n\nAffurion announced, <The first Blooding signifies family, and this is the Blooding of heart. Prince Elka'anor, we ask you to represent Hualiama's family.>\n\nA young Dragoness approached Elki bearing raw heart-meat in her paw; she appeared even more nervous than the Human. Elki scooped up a bloody handful.\n\n<Feed your sister,> said the Brown. Yum. Human-brain was retching in a corner, but her Dragon had no problem with the bite of diced-up heart her brother presented her. <A Dragon's strength flows from the heart. Each time you eat, hatchling, may you be nourished by the heart of your prey. May a hatchling remember and honour the heart that once beat with animal life.>\n\nHualiama bowed her head, and dined fastidiously from Elki's hand.\n\nNow, more Dragons began to line up on the shore\u2013Grandion first, then the elderly Grunt and Mizuki, followed by several hatchlings not a month or two older than Lia.\n\n<Blood,> Affurion continued. <Blood is the carrier of life, the physical mystery which enables the existence of a soul in flesh, nourishing living creatures with its constant flow. Let a hatchling remember and honour the blood she drinks, and be nourished in soul as much as in flesh, by this life-giving liquid.>\n\nShe drank from the Tourmaline Dragon's cupped paw, acutely conscious of his proud, adoring gaze.\n\n<Gristle. Even the less tasty parts perform a function. May a hatchling be reminded that all Dragonkind were created with a purpose, from the least to the greatest, from the ugliest to the most beautiful. Gems may be hid within dross. May a hatchling eat gristle and be nourished, just as all Dragonkind nourish the magical life of the Island-World.>\n\nShe ate.\n\n<Joints,> Affurion continued. <Joints remind us that no life is able to successfully exist in isolation. Just as the organism depends upon joints and ligaments for locomotion, so let a hatchling be reminded of the great network of life surrounding her, and may she be nourished, strengthened and protected by this life-affirming truth.>\n\nShe crunched down a mound of knucklebones.\n\nSo the blessings and admonitions continued, some simple, some profound. Meat. Muscle. Intestines\u2013oh, how fondly she remembered Flicker's delight in slurping down intestines! Bone. Brains, for the seventh sense of prescience. Tongue. Hide. Blood vessels. Stomach. The liver, symbolically linking the filtering of blood to the way a Dragon's perception filtered the world's reality and presented it to the senses. Kidneys. Nothing was forgotten, no part left unexplained, until the night was far advanced and Hualiama's belly swelled like a firm little barrel, squeezing her ribcage from the inside.\n\nThe ceremony of Blooding culminated with a final blessing from Affurion, Grandion and the Grunt Elder, who went by the name of Tome. They cried in concert:\n\n<Blood of our blood, bone of our bone,>\n\n<May your life be nourished, its destiny known,>\n\n<For in the great congregation of Dragons, when new flame is born,>\n\n<All Dragonkind raise the joyous anthem\u2026>\n\nEvery Dragon in the congregation joined them in a thundering finale:\n\n<She lives! She breathes!>\n\n<Blessed eggling, born to fly,>\n\n<SHE IS BORN!>\n\nUtterly sated, Hualiama slept."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Come the dawn, the Tourmaline woke her with a gentle paw. \"Wake up. Time to hunt, my beauty.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026 what? I'm not hungry.\"\n\nAffurion chuckled, \"Come. Let her scent prey, my hatchlings. Then a Star Dragoness shall hunt, and dance, and fly!\"\n\nA shrill *meeeh-hehh* galvanised every muscle in her body. A buck! Drool!\n\nFiery draconic chuckles surrounded her as a sly paw snatched the offering from beneath her muzzle before Hualiama could snatch it with her talons. She sprang to her paws as though stung by a wasp. A group of perhaps three or four dozen hatchlings surrounded her or waited nearby, Dragons less than three years old, some already as much as forty feet in length. In their midst stood a dainty eastern four-horn buck, wide-eyed and trembling\u2026 Lia lunged instinctively, and came up with a pawful of fresh air.\n\nRending the beach sand with her talons, she rounded upon the Brown Elder. Dragons did not pout. They smoked. \"What is this, noble Affurion?\"\n\n\"A game. Your first hunt.\"\n\n\"This looks more like a game of 'bait the clumsy newborn'.\"\n\n\"You must catch the buck,\" he explained. \"It is the job of your peers to draw you out, to teach you the speed and stealth and cunning a Dragoness requires in the hunt.\"\n\nHualiama had a bad feeling this would mirror her basic training in the monastery, where she had spent weeks having the stuffing knocked out of her by a bevy of handsome young warriors. Nevertheless, if this was the game they meant to play\u2026 she eyed the tan buck with interest. Tasty. An Eastern variety of bush-springer, if she did not miss her mark. They could jump like grasshoppers, dodge on a brass dral and the hunters she knew swore they could smell an incoming arrow before it left the bow.\n\nThe hatchlings spread out, forming a loose ring around her, with a few in the middle to apparently encourage proceedings, or get in the way, or\u2013right. How hard could this be?\n\n*Thump.* She ate sand.\n\n*Whack.* She ran into the flank of a grey Grunt hatchling.\n\n*Slap.* A paw knocked her spinning.\n\nA quarter-hour of fruitless chasing later, one pint-sized Dragoness was hot, bothered and decidedly irritable, besides not having come within ten feet of her alleged breakfast. Panting heavily, she surveyed the scene. Grandion's smirk. Affurion's encouraging nod. The hatchlings huddled together, plotting their next subterfuge. Her ire boiled, making her feel fevered and languid\u2013clearly, not recovered yet from her ordeal. No. She was not graceless Hualiama any longer. She had defeated Ra'aba, the finest swordsman of Fra'anior Cluster, in single combat. She was a dancer, not a flat-pawed toddler-equivalent. She had a twenty-one year old brain in a hatchling's body.\n\nShe must finish this quickly.\n\n<Help me, Human-Lia,> she said to herself.\n\nA dancer's awareness soaked into her limbs. She tested the balance of her body, the play of her incredible Dragon musculature and reflexes. This was a body honed for hunting, for combat, for graceful flight, and she had never appreciated these facts as much as at this moment, for she had been too preoccupied with comparing her new Dragon-self to her more familiar Human form. Grandion had already spoken of knowing the potentials of her body\u2013but there was a difference between knowing and knowing. Her strength had always been grounded in the intuitive realm, and in her ability to couple an engineer's delight in detail and innovation with reliance on her instincts.\n\nShe crouched. Coiled like an angry cobra, hissing, <Alright, Dragons, let's play.>\n\nHualiama shot across the ground. A dance-step took her around the Grunt's shoulder and beneath a twenty-foot Overmind's belly. He blinked as she blurred past. Leap! Twist! Her opening gambit brought her within a foot of the terrified buck before her teacher-tormentors snatched it away.\n\nWhirling with a balancing flick of her wings, Hualiama stormed into the midst of the hatchlings, forcing them to toss the buck out of her path. A small Red caught the creature deftly before releasing it toward the outer circle. She sprinted across the ground, all four legs pumping in concert, but the buck escaped once more, with the help of two hatchlings who cut her off. A twelve-foot youngster would never be as strong and fast as her older peers. Still, she could be smarter. She could take advantage of a dancer's fluid economy and precision.\n\nAye, she could dance.\n\nDeep breath. Defy the pain. Go! Lia spun between three hatchlings as though they stood still. She rippled over a sweeping wing-stroke, burst through a group of Green Swarm without so much as brushing a single wingtip or paw, and used a Blue Overmind's lashing tail-slam to slingshot her toward the buck. Stretch out a paw and\u2013what? The buck flew!\n\nShe yelled, <Affurion!>\n\n<Fly, little one. Fly!>\n\nCheat! Rage fuelled her skyward spring. Her wings pumped as she chased the flying animal between the rising hatchlings, her dance instantly transformed into aerial ballet, instilled with the beauty she had always strived for, the wonder of rising so lightly, not even gravity could constrain her soaring.\n\nThey could not touch her.\n\nWith a deft, dragonet-worthy spiralling somersault, Hualiama snagged the buck even as Affurion tried to slip it by her once more. Her landing was a hard thrust of the forepaw, breaking the animal's neck instantly\u2013the cleanest of kills. Then the Dragoness sank her fangs into the jugular, and tasted the rich, metallic tang of fresh kill-meat in her throat, and she remembered the Blooding and all she had learned. May she be nourished, and grow in all the lessons this new draconic life would teach her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Two further days they tarried with the Lost Islands Dragons, who poured into Hualiama every iota of lore and experience they possessed, until her head felt ready to burst like an overripe prekki-fruit, and she dreamed of the secret Dragon library beneath Ha'athior Island, where scroll-Dragons rose up to flay her hide as the Dragon-Haters did in order to armour their Dragonships.\n\nOn the afternoon of the fifth day, with Hualiama feeling much stronger, she and Grandion, together with Elki and Mizuki, made ready to depart Sarzun Dragonhold. Grandion did not want to test Azziala's deadline of six days, and since there had been no sign of Siiyumiel's return, there was no reason to tarry.\n\n\"You will fly the first two hours, minimum,\" growled the Tourmaline. \"By my wings, would you look at those ralti sheep goggling at your brother?\"\n\nAll those Dragons ablaze with fury would be more accurate, Hualiama thought. No Dragon enjoyed the sight of a Human riding Dragonback in the apparently dominant position\u2013even if it was the only sensible place for a Human Rider, it still rankled. Elki had explained the oath-bond, yet the idea was still clearly as curious as a purple-spotted windroc to these Dragons. Partnership with a Human? All they knew was centuries-old enmity.\n\n\"Two hours?\" She flexed her wings enthusiastically.\n\n\"No less. And you will demonstrate perfect flying form, or the severest of punishments shall befall you.\"\n\n\"Blast her with fireballs!\" called Elki.\n\nMizuki extended her wings, rotating them to stretch and warm up the vital, highly flexible shoulder joint, where the primary wing-bones inserted into the socket, anchored by iron-hard ligaments and the huge flight-muscles of the pectoral and shoulder area. She added, \"Bite her tail!\"\n\n\"Haunches,\" said her brother.\n\n\"Elki!\" Hualiama shrilled, blushing up a petite firestorm.\n\n\"Right\u2013concentrate on the angles and making smooth strokes. Don't rush the wingbeat,\" said Grandion, so dourly she knew immediately he was disguising his discomfiture.\n\n\"Wait!\" Lia bounded over to Affurion, who was preoccupied with making the proverbial fisherman's knot of not ogling Mizuki as she flexed in the bright suns-shine. \"Affurion, I mean, noble Brown\u2013\"\n\n<Blue-star?>\n\nShe paused, recalling how Dragons parted. <I thank you for the gift of the Blooding, and all the knowledge you shared with me. May our claws, united, ever rend the enemy.>\n\nHis brow-ridges crinkled, indicating pleasure. <May it be so, noble Star Dragoness, o pride of Fra'anior.>\n\n<Thank you, wing-elder.>\n\nHe lowered his muzzle with care, rubbing each side in turn against her muzzle, near the eyes. <May you fly forever strong and true, wing-daughter.>\n\nThey had not spoken of strategy, but Lia realised it must be in the forefront of his mind. She said, <We will find a way, Affurion. Numistar Winterborn's arrival will change the Balance. Times both troubling and glorious lie ahead.> She paused. This was her voice, but where had those words sprung from? <May white-fires safeguard your hearts.>\n\nThen she turned to Grandion. The Tourmaline gave a small nod.\n\n<Let's burn the heavens!> she cried, springing skyward.\n\nBy accident, her parting wing-stroke clipped the tip of Affurion's nose, causing her to gust upward on the wings of a startled, fiery sneeze."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "\"That was extremely rude,\" Grandion reproved once they were out of earshot.\n\nHualiama pumped her wings hard to keep up. \"I wasn't intending to wing-slap a Dragon Elder. Islands' sakes, can we slow down?\"\n\n\"We're already wallowing in the air.\"\n\nThis earned the Tourmaline a belch of smoke that immediately whipped back over Hualiama's eyes, making her blink and lose her form. \"Faugh. Do I smell like that? Right\u2026 how's this, Grandion?\"\n\n\"Do you call that, 'the flight of the drunken windroc'?\" Elki called across from Mizuki's back.\n\nGrandion growled, \"Keep your uneducated opinions to yourself, Human Prince! Mizuki. How shall we set about modifying this flapping mess?\"\n\n\"Control of the wing-struts to cup them on the downward stroke, would be a good start,\" she mused. \"A narrower angle on the upstroke, Hualiama. You need to lessen the resistance, while actually providing uplift as you sweep the wing forward. You're what Humans call an engineer, aren't you? Like a Dragon scientist? Then observe the Tourmaline and simply copy what you see.\"\n\nOoh. So simple. Dragonflight was supposed to be natural for Dragons, wasn't it? Lords of the air, masters of the gulfs between Islands. A touch of instant mastery would be perfect. She sighed.\n\nAccordingly, Grandion slowed his wingbeat, demonstrating the right form. \"Good, Lia. Just at the nadir of the down-and-back movement, most Dragons rotate the shoulder and secondary wing-joint like this. No, more rotation. Don't forget to splay the struts near your wingtip. You're very ragged\u2013better. Now you look like a Dragoness.\"\n\nThis earned him a smirk-cross-pout. \"Really, Grandion? What clued you in first\u2013the wings?\"\n\n\"All hatchlings are surly rascals,\" he opined, chuckling agreeably. \"The fine muscular control will improve with experience.\"\n\nA Dragon's wing was furnished with literally thousands of ancillary muscles, mainly lining the primary wing-bones and wing-struts, allowing for superb control of the leathery, membranous surface. That level of control, however, sent masses of feedback to her brain, which struggled to process the flood of information. Fix the form of her wingtips, and the central struts sagged. Focus on one wing, and the other dragged. Where she floundered, the other two Dragons pulled ahead as smoothly as Helyon silk, adding tens of feet to their lead with every wingbeat. However, when she focussed on Grandion, Hualiama discovered an entirely unexpected benefit of their oath-connection. Because he was thinking about the mechanics of flying, that knowledge lay right on the surface of his mind, but so too each sensation. She spied on his mastery of the wind's flow over his body, from his wingtips right down to the action of slitting his nostrils to reduce air friction. The exact coordination of the muscles. The perfect streamlined position for the body. Sneakily, she lifted that knowledge from his brain, and imbibed it like a dragonet diving into a cold waterfall on a sultry Fra'aniorian day.\n\nThis was the goal. This was synchronicity\u2026 abruptly, Hualiama felt that visceral 'click' she sometimes enjoyed when perfecting a dance-move. Every component part merged into an anonymous aggregate, rather than the muscles fighting each other for dominance and wings flapping in hopelessly opposed orientations. Wow! She slid through the air like a river trout swimming upstream. Not labouring\u2013revelling. Laughter burbled in her throat as wind-song tickled her Dragon senses unbearably. She stretched. Accelerated! The thrill!\n\n\"Whooo\u2026 wheeee!\" she yelled, blazing past Grandion before her left wing folded beneath an unexpected change in air pressure.\n\n\"Hualiama!\" Elki yelled happily.\n\nNo mind. Lia turned an incipient stall into a barrel-roll and managed to glide smoothly onto the horizontal once more. \"Smoking volcanoes! Grandion, did you see that? Did you?\"\n\nHe performed a florid aerial bow. \"Astounding.\"\n\nMizuki just shook her muzzle. \"How does she do it? One moment, an impressive imitation of a flying ralti sheep, the next, she's flying like a Dragoness of ten years' experience.\"\n\nHualiama snarled at the sheep-reference.\n\nGrandion laughed openly at Mizuki's puzzlement. \"It's a Hualiama talent.\"\n\nMmm. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, the handsomest Dragon in the entire Island-World.\n\nWithout the stress and confusion of labouring over all the technicalities, Hualiama found herself liberated to enjoy the fulfilment of a dream she had treasured all her life\u2013the dream of flying. Oh, it was glorious. Beyond glorious. Her every Dragon sense lit up as though the suns shone within, their smiles chasing along the myriad magical pathways of her being, and the joy that welled from that gossamer tracery of liquid fire could not have been withheld, not even in the darkest season of her life. She spiralled away from the larger Dragons, her throat vibrating with notes of joy, her jubilant wingbeat bouncing her about like a dragonfly flitting over a lake, now carolling a Dragonsong of her hearts' deepest magic, now throwing her head back to laugh or cry, she knew not which, nor did it matter.\n\nShe was flying! A Human girl, flying!\n\nNothing in her life could compare to this. Shackles, shattered. The simple, life-changing power of freedom. The beauty of airy spaces yielding to the supple play of her wings upon the warm breeze.\n\nFrom pure, exuberant joy flowed dance; Hualiama began to vocalise the Soul Dance movement from the most famous dance-opera of all, known to both the Dragons and the Humans of Fra'anior\u2013the Flame Cycle. She turned to perform a conductor's introduction for Grandion, Mizuki and Elki, demanding their participation, before she danced ahead of them and around them until the day was old and her strength was spent, and Grandion directed their small Dragonwing to an Island at the very edge of the Buffer Zone, where a Dragon could look across the divide and see the dark, jagged rampart supporting the Human-controlled Islands.\n\nToo wing-weary to move, the hatchling curled up, and fell asleep almost before her muzzle touched the ground.\n\nHer dreams winged amongst the stars.\n\n[ Daughter of Rebellion ]\n\nTHe PRince of Fra'anior was not the lightest of sleepers. Ordinarily, Grandion too would have closed an ear-canal or three, but they slept adjacent to enemy territory. So the Tourmaline dozed with one eye slit-open in the manner of the Dragonkind, his hearing alert, and his magical awareness primed to detect any unusual sound or hint of danger on the breeze. For his part, the Prince snored indelicately.\n\nEven so, the Dragon almost missed the moment she changed.\n\nMagic, so delicate and fragile it blew across his scales like spiderweb dreams, brought a faint stirring to his consciousness. It was the change of pressure that triggered alarm. The Dragoness had vanished. Hualiama had returned, enfleshed in her customary Human form. Five feet tall. Slim and supple, yet possessing a notable muscularity that reminded him of nothing more than a Dragoness. Grandion stifled a groan, as did the girl. She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. How could she change again? His right forepaw curled silently into a fist. Traitor! Fickle female\u2013yet, a Dragon's judgement must not burn hastily. Patently, she had no control of the magic.\n\nHe must not be a fool. To seat a Dragon Rider seemed somehow tolerable in the eyes of the Dragonkind, akin to a moons-madness or eccentricity. To claim Humanlove, as he had bellowed at the Dragon's Bell\u2013that was a Dragon of another colour, a deadlier beast altogether.\n\nSo Grandion watched covertly as the Human girl rose into the dawn's beneficent glow, her pale hair wreathing her body in an astonishing mass. She was thin, he fretted\u2013too thin? Her scapulae protruded like wings budding beneath the skin. Perhaps Humans must also eat like Dragon hatchlings, enjoying the fat as much as the meat? All that plant matter they consumed could not be healthy.\n\nShe padded over to her brother, and frightened him into a witless, gibbering dragonet-hatchling.\n\n\"Lia? You're\u2026 you? You're you!\"\n\n\"Aye,\" she said. Her doleful whisper revealed much to a Dragon's perception. \"Will you be a dear brother and surrender your shirt?\"\n\n\"Cloak? No, the shirt. Shirt's better, even if it's ripped, and a bit smelly. Mind, you'll still look like the dawn over Fra'anior. This\u2013oh, Lia, dear one, I'm so torn up inside for you. Does Grandion know?\"\n\nThe white-fire head nodded once. \"Aye.\"\n\n\"And he\u2013\"\n\n\"He's being noble-Grandion; treating me like a diamond, Elki. I've\u2026 Islands' sakes, every time I start thinking about\u2026\" Her hand rose, wiping what had to be tears from her cheeks. The eavesdropping Dragon's third heart turned to ice. \"He's so beautiful. So\u2026 I'm over the Islands for him, Elki. Hopelessly, forever, over the Islands. He's changed, somehow, through all of this. He's thoughtful and kind, tender and true, fierce and loyal\u2013if anything, I love him more, every day and every moon.\"\n\n\"I hadn't noticed,\" her brother lied, with a quiet chuckle.\n\n\"Aye, the very suns dawn in his eyes\u2013all of that nonsense the balladeers spout\u2013that's me.\"\n\nThe Prince helped her button up the shirt, before drawing her into his arms. \"Silly waif. You need some serious fattening up. What happened? You're healing properly? Promise?\"\n\n\"Aye. Not dying anymore. Mostly.\"\n\nWith a soft execration, he rubbed his eyes fiercely. \"You're far too stubborn for that\u2026 aren't you, sister-petal? Priceless, infernal girl. Dragonship-wrecked your brother's heart, you did.\"\n\nDid they not know both Dragons must be listening? So isolated they seemed, this brother and sister, perhaps feeling they stood alone against the world. Dragon Rider. Dragoness. His seventh sense tingled with foreboding. Giants of history-to-be, this pair. Did they hearken to destiny's summons, as he did?\n\nHer voice was muffled against the Prince's shoulder, never sounding smaller, nor more lost. \"We can't be together. We just can't, Elki.\"\n\n\"You can't control\u2026 this?\" he asked.\n\n\"No. And even if I could, word would get out. One change at the wrong moment\u2013\"\n\n\"Hold on. You're saying this isn't a projection? Not a trick, like you said Grandion\u2013\"\n\n\"No. It appears to be a complete transformation. My Dragoness vanishes, magically. So does my Human, in the reverse process. Where could we live, brother, that we wouldn't be ostracised by Human and Dragon alike? Where my freakish, accursed magic wouldn't doom my Dragonlove? How could I live never knowing when a war-hammer would slam down upon our lives? How?\"\n\n\"Shh.\"\n\nShe quivered as if consumed with grief; then Hualiama vented a low, bitter laugh. Straightening, she called, \"Alright, Grandion and Mizuki. Please don't pretend not to be listening, whilst I blab all my secrets\u2026 oh.\"\n\nThe Copper Dragoness clasped Lia's slight frame in her forepaws. \"You will find a way. This oath-bound love cannot be denied.\"\n\nThe moisture in her eyes winked like starlight as Lia's regard shifted; Grandion stilled, awed by the power of that gaze. \"I\u2013I guess you know now, Grandion.\" She sniffed once, hugely. \"Therefore, I must tell you, though it kills me to say\u2013\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nShe flinched as if his desperate cry were the slap of a draconic paw. \"Grandion, we cannot\u2013\"\n\nHe groaned, \"No\u2026 please!\"\n\nThe Tourmaline hated the sound of his pleading. Hot shame swelled his gorge; swallowing hard, he turned his shoulder as if with the bulk of his body, he could deflect the coming storm. Those words must be spoken; their hearts, broken.\n\nInstead, he heard a light footstep beside his shoulder. A hand touched his neck, stretched up and found the smaller, more sensitive scales beside his left eye. Febrile. Delicate. Trembling at the draconic emotions raging within her tiny breast. For the longest time she simply stood with him, the connection communicating more than the strongest Dragon's hearts could bear.\n\nThen she whispered, \"I will never regret knowing you, Grandion.\"\n\nEven the most roseate dawn must weep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The heir to the throne of the Lost Islands rode Dragonback into Azziala's stronghold, as she had done once before. What ignorant fools they had been, thinking to raid the Dragon-Haters' lands on their own, seeking the Scroll of Binding. The Empress would not be fooled\u2013she could lift the information directly from their minds, and any possible subterfuge would be doomed. Azziala held every advantage. The only weapon available to Hualiama was the unadorned truth. What would her mother believe? Azziala was a subtle, calculating creature. She would try to winkle out and understand every nuance and angle before drawing her own conclusions, yet this mystery concerned the deepest of Dragon lore, and extended beyond that, perhaps. Therein lay a chance. If doubt crept in. Error. If the formidable mental machine of the Enchanters could be misdirected\u2026\n\nWhen they arrived, the Empress was not present. Lia learned from the mental network that Azziala had flown to Burak Island on a tour of inspection, checking the readiness of her armies.\n\nWooden-faced, she allowed Grandion to be led down to the Dragon holding pens. She did not watch him leave, but turned to the Prince. \"Where to?\"\n\nElki rubbed his hands briskly. \"What do Haters do for fun?\"\n\nAs Lia and Elki walked along a gantry above the Dragonship bays, they collected a discreet escort of Royal Elites, the highly-trained core of Azziala's forces. No doubt, the Enchanters would be lurking.\n\nEven for that reason alone, she decided that fomenting trouble was in order. The Dragon-Haters must not be allowed free rein. Arguably, there was good reason to allow Azziala's and Shinzen's forces to smash into each other\u2013only, the Kingdom of Kaolili stood between, and the result would not be ugly. It would be genocide.\n\nAnd a hatchling must defy Numistar? Even Fra'anior had the grace to sound uncertain on that score.\n\nAzziala's war preparations proceeded with frightening zeal. The Dragonship bays where Mizuki and Grandion had landed were full to bursting with new Dragonships armoured with Dragon hide. Blue-clad engineers screamed orders as they swarmed over the vessels. Pipes hissed. Hammers clanged sharply as a nearby group of blacksmiths forged parts in an open-mouthed furnace, supplemented by a trio of Dragon Enchanters. The Enchanters wore the characteristic sweeping robes of terrace-lake blue and tall, mushroom-shaped hats, while the blacksmiths and other workers wore azure skullcaps, bright blue leather trousers and sturdy boots. Hualiama wondered how they tolerated the cold, going bare-chested even in the chill of the caves, which was barely alleviated by the intensity of that roaring furnace. Intriguingly, the Enchanters and Smiths worked together on shaping the metal, using magic to speed the heating, cooling and hardening processes. Accelerated engineering, she thought. This was how Azziala could build a mighty army in a short space of time. However, the Empress had concealed her true strength from her daughter. What other secrets would she have withheld?\n\n\"We've been assigned chambers together in the same sub-cavern set as the Empress,\" said Elki, leading the way. \"All of our movements are monitored. You're sharing with Saori.\" Lia raised an eyebrow. \"Aye, certain matters of propriety must be observed. Our union is not yet sanctioned by the Protocols. So I am assigned an adjoining chamber.\"\n\n\"With visiting rights?\"\n\nElki turned fireflower-red. \"Apparently so.\"\n\nWell, that was an Island too far. Lia coloured. \"Ah, do you know what became of my blades?\"\n\n\"Your Nuyallith swords? In our room. Saori has been keeping them polished in the hope, she says, that you might yet dismember your mother.\"\n\n\"Delicate creature, isn't she?\"\n\nElki bowed, chortling, \"I sure picked the prize prekki-fruit, didn't I? This way to the lifts.\"\n\n\"I think she picked the prize,\" said Lia.\n\nAfter seeing the state of the war preparations, there was little levity in her tone. Even so, Elki snagged her with one arm and squeezed her shoulders. \"You're the best sister in the Island-World.\"\n\nA smile tugged the corners of her mouth. As far as brothers went, wasn't he almost tolerable? Occasionally?\n\nAs the lift-cage rattled twenty-two floors upward through the vastness of Azziala's underground fortress, and the temperature rose a few notches, Elki explained how he and his contingent of fledgling Dragon Riders had run into Sapphurion and his forces in the Eastern Isles. After tangling briefly with the Warlord Shinzen's outriders, the Dragon Elders of Gi'ishior had declared their intent to chase down Grandion\u2013why exactly, Elki could not say, but the prime suspect was, once again, the Scroll of Binding. The Dragonkind feared that power more than anything else. Sapphurion had divided his force, leaving one third of the Dragons\u2013those unable to sustain a long enough flight to reach the Lost Islands\u2013to ally with the Eastern Dragons and the Kingdom of Kaolili, while he led the rest on an epic northward flight, which had ended in treachery, disaster and defeat at the Dragon's Bell.\n\n\"After which I, unsurprisingly, had to go chase down my reprobate baby sister once more,\" Elki concluded.\n\nShe punched his arm.\n\n\"Wow, I appreciate the rescue, o mighty Prince of Fra'anior,\" he added, patting himself on the back.\n\n\"If you say so yourself,\" said Lia.\n\n\"You are the very twin suns warming my life, precious sister.\"\n\n\"Brother, what do you want?\"\n\nMercy, it was good to have Elki's company, she realised. Even if they were dangling halfway down the proverbial volcanic fumarole on the end of a fraying rope, he still managed to find a touch of humour to lighten her mood. That in turn clarified her thoughts, turning them to healthier, more productive paths.\n\nA swish of blades through the air greeted their entrance into the spacious chamber assigned to the runaway royals of Fra'anior. Saori paused in a ferocious, snarling pose, arrested by Elki's soft whistle. Evidently, the sight of a perspiration-streaked warrior-woman wearing little more than a loincloth and indecently brief upper-body armour was somewhat distracting to her brother. Perish the thought. And Saori's form was a swordswoman's perfection; tall, lissom and strong, unlike the diminutive Princess who was not even slightly jealous.\n\nLia punched her brother's arm again. \"You were saying?\"\n\n\"Ouch. Stop bruising the royal personage.\"\n\n\"Hualiama!\" Saori yelled, breaking her pose to throw herself into a very un-Eastern hug. \"Elki, you found her!\"\n\n\"My awesomeness is catching,\" he said, modestly.\n\n\"Stand still!\" Saori snapped. Elki yelped as Saori's sword-point menaced his nose. \"Don't move a muscle.\"\n\nHe squeaked, \"Just my throat? To scream in unabashed terror?\"\n\nUnexpectedly, the Eastern Isles warrior smiled at Hualiama. \"Watch this. I've been working very hard on my cultural adaptation skills.\" Holding the trembling Prince ransom by dint of pressing the flat of her sword against his neck, Saori rose onto her bare toes and, with a gasp at her own daring, kissed him smack on the lips. \"See what I did? In public, too!\"\n\n\"My sister is not the public,\" Elki protested, rather weakly.\n\nSaori growled, \"Give me due credit.\"\n\n\"Right now, I'll give you anything you desire. Fancy a nice little Island-Kingdom? Twenty-seven Islands and an oversized volcano, all for you?\"\n\nLia chuckled, \"This cultural adaptation must be so challenging for you, Saori.\"\n\nJust then, Yinzi, Hualiama's old midwife, appeared from an inner chamber. One look, a glad cry, and Lia found herself the recipient of a second hug, an enormous embrace from an enormous woman. \"So glad you're back. And well! Just look at the colour in these cheeks! No longer a lizard.\" She pinched both of Lia's cheeks as if she were a child being shown off to a long-absent relative, and then more pensively, touched her forehead with the tips of three fingers of her right hand. \"May Dramagon's light pervade your life, burning away the falsehoods of those lizards.\"\n\nHualiama bit her lip so hard, she tasted blood.\n\n\"Saori.\" Yinzi spun her about. \"We do not kiss a Prince in such a disgraceful state. You reek. Into the bath with you, this instant. You too, chicklet. Go cleanse your body of the sulphurous stench of those vile reptiles.\"\n\nImagine her Dragoness dunking Saori in the bathtub? Hualiama had to stifle a giggle as a naughty mental image intruded. Anyways, it would be a good chance to catch up with her prickly friend and to share the news.\n\nWith a longing glance at the pair of Nuyallith blades displayed on the stone wall opposite the entryway, Lia ducked into the bath chamber. Some of the Lost Islands technology was perfectly civilised, and hot baths were more a necessity than an option in this frigid climate. The brass bathtub was the variety where a person sat upright on a step, immersed up to the neck in warm water. Judging by the enticing aromas, they also provided a decent line in bath soaps and fine oils.\n\nEven renegade Dragon-channelling Princesses could appreciate a touch of luxury.\n\nWith a sly poke aimed at Saori's ribs, she said, \"So, stinker, have you seen one of these before? This is called a bathtub, and if you want to impress a Prince\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Two nights later, with her mother en route home from Erak Island, the most northerly of the Human cluster, Hualiama snapped into her Dragoness form mid-combat with Saori. The blunted practice blade whanged off her nose-scales.\n\n\"Ancestors!\" yelled Saori, scrambling backward.\n\nRoar! Lash out! At the very last second, Lia pulled her instinctive talon-strike with a cry of dismay. \"Saori\u2026 I'm so sorry. Oh, roaring\u2013\"\n\n\"Get away from me!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry!\" The Eastern warrior wore two neat claw-lines on her right bicep. Bright blood welled up. \"Stupid fulminating rascally Dragon reactions. Elki! Elki, can you help?\"\n\n\"Sure, I'll boot your scaly backside for daring to lay a claw on my Saori,\" he growled. Not joking.\n\nClutching the wound to stop the blood flow, Saori said, \"Do you think combat's the key, Lia? You were engrossed in your Nuyallith forms. Something about that triggered the Dragoness\u2013maybe you just have to want her enough, and she appears?\"\n\nHualiama settled her wings with an agitated ruffle. \"You don't hate me?\"\n\n\"No. Just a fright.\" Saori ran her free hand through her short, dark bristles. Her slanted almond eyes crinkled into a smile as she reached out to remove Lia's shredded undershirt from her skull-spikes. Her transformation had managed to fling her leggings all the way to the fireplace.\n\n\"Don't,\" said Lia, bracing herself.\n\n\"You're beautiful and cutesy, but decidedly lethal,\" said the girl.\n\nCutesy? Her talons clenched, but the desire to yield to the anger and rip something to shreds was not insurmountable. However, her belly region heated up noticeably and smoke poured from her nostrils. Hualiama trembled as she fought to master her surging Dragon emotions.\n\nThat was the exact moment Yinzi bustled into the room, and screamed.\n\nWhat she saw writ in Yinzi's expression, broke her resolve. Blood sapped from the old midwife's cheeks as if stolen by claws of ice. Betrayal. Horror. In a flash, Lia whipped through the doorway, rebounded off the far wall of the corridor, and fled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Reason returned as Hualiama scaled an air vent toward the open air. She paused, clinging on with her talons punched into the natural cracks in the vertical tunnel, deliberately slowing her breathing. Frigid air streamed over her body, down into the fortress. Odd. Surely the reverse flow would make more sense? Her nostrils tingled at the cold; at the unfamiliar smells of damp and tangy minerals and musty pollens flowing from above.\n\nA frozen world, yet still that liberty beckoned. Did the Dragon Enchanters not consider the air vents a possible vector of attack? They appeared undefended. That said, this thousand-foot vertical tunnel was barely large enough for a Dragon hatchling, but it would be no trouble for smaller Swarm Dragons.\n\nShe knew where she must go. The Place of Reaving.\n\n<Sorry, Grandion.>\n\nShe could not sense his mind. Had the Haters applied a Command-hold once more?\n\nRapidly, Hualiama scaled the remaining length of grey granite tunnel, emerging into a blizzard. The weather stunned her. She had never seen snow whipping in so fast, it flew sideways in great, stinging flurries. How could she survive in this? She must find shelter\u2013no, that was silly Human-thinking. Was she not a walking furnace? Her skin a natural coat of armour? Laughing at the sizzle of snowflakes striking her eyeballs, Lia cast about in the night. Flying might be dangerous until she became stronger, but perhaps that would develop as her Human recovered\u2013she had improved enough to fight for ten minutes at a time with Saori, but her muscles were still woefully bereft of their full strength. Was the vigour of her two forms linked somehow? Health-wise, that was certainly the case\u2026\n\nSetting her muzzle toward higher ground, Hualiama pressed herself into a run. She must train this Dragon-form as much as she had ever honed her Human body in the rigours of dance and the martial arts.\n\nBattered by the storm winds, the Dragoness fought her way up the mountain above Azziala's fortress to the Place of Reaving, where her Dragon-spirit had safeguarded her life, and she had seen the star Hualiama at dawn. How could a frozen body have seen a star? Mystery. She was disillusioned with mysteries. No. Tonight, she had one simple goal. Retrieve her shell-mother's scale.\n\nChild of the Dragon. Daughter of Rebellion. Those must be her titles.\n\nPeering over the edge of the hole, Hualiama was once again struck by a faint yet richly complex aroma she recalled from Ha'athior Island. Dragon-smell. Somehow, notes of cinnamon and vanilla overlaid a slightly sulphurous, smoky odour, yet the bouquet presented to her senses was far more. She struggled to quantify her intuition. Could the physical sense of smell function as a gateway to some higher form of discernment, the notes of which caused hordes of colourful, monad-like impressions to swarm across her senses as though the very act of perception were a harbinger of consciousness itself? Intriguing. She breathed as deep as she dared. Perhaps some form of low-dwelling Dragonkind lived in the subterranean realms, patiently gnawing at the roots of Azziala's realm?\n\nBriefly, Lia considered kicking over the hateful archway where the Enchanters chained their victims, there where the gap between the two imaginary nostrils narrowed, but still the person dangled over an unknowable drop. Grandion might rip that archway off the mountain, but this hatchling was in no shape to attempt the same.\n\nCold air drifted upward into her face, but not the deathly blast she had endured. Had that been later, during the night? Did she risk being deep-frozen if she\u2026\n\n<Hualiama, lest you forget, we're a Dragoness,> her other-voice chided. <Let's take our courage in our paws. The end will be worth it.>\n\nThe Star Dragoness chuckled softly. <Thank you, Humanlove.>\n\nTraumatised silence.\n\n<If we cannot learn to love ourselves\u2026>\n\nThe girl spluttered, <I\u2026 oh, mercy, how can we say this? Can we? I'm\u2026 speechless. I sense truth. And I know I must not act out of fear. But I can't, I just\u2026 can't. Yet.>\n\nHualiama spread her wings, drifting downward into the dark. <Very well, what will you call me? I don't wish to be labelled other-anything, anymore.>\n\nThe Human girl said, <Right. Sorry if I hurt you\u2013us.>\n\nHow strange, to feel herself pondering away, almost as if a second brain were spatially superimposed on the first.\n\n<Dearest scale-brain?> Lia teased herself.\n\n<Well, you are my very dear Dragon.>\n\n<Possessive. And cheeky. Who's ten times your size, I ask you? Besides owning the wings?>\n\n<My soul, magnified. O wing\u00e9d jewel of\u2013>\n\n<Stop,> Dragon-Lia cut in uneasily. <That's just embarrassing.>\n\n<Therefore, I shall call you Dragonsoul. My Dragonsoul.>\n\nJoy incarnate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Literally aglow with elation, the Star Dragoness tucked up her wings, experimenting with the speed of descent. Her Human had just turned a Dragoness' insides into a mixture of sloshing nausea cut through by red-hot lava. Was she supposed to be able to knock herself out of the sky like that? Roaring rajals! Also, slightly creepy. Like this place.\n\nShe must be far below the level of the Human fortress by now, but the aperture showed no signs of changing, or opening out into caves, or doing anything she had imagined. What did strike her, was that the walls were growing less rocky and more organic in nature\u2013shifting toward rock-infused flesh? Strange veins of bluish, bioluminescent material appeared to snake through the substrate, but when she touched them with a curious paw, they felt no different from frozen rock. Most peculiar.\n\nAs she descended, the pressure increased noticeably. Grandion had taught her that Blue Dragons could work out their altitude to within ten to fifteen feet of accuracy by closely observing changes in air pressure. What she was most concerned about was the effort of flying all the way back up again. Lia hovered briefly. Continue, or return?\n\nWithout the slightest warning, the air suddenly sucked away beneath her wings.\n\nPanic! Lia tried to flare her wings to slow herself, but the downward gale was far too powerful, buffeting her wings until she feared she'd tear a muscle or a few wing struts. She plummeted. The walls rushed by, faster and faster, the bright vein-like features leaving streaks on her retinae. What had Grandion taught her? Recalling his instruction, she shifted her primary wing-bones, the equivalent of the Human elbow or secondary wing-joint, outward while keeping the more delicate 'wrists' or tertiary wing-joints, tucked firmly against her sides. She flattened her body and forced herself into a more horizontal orientation, increasing the wind resistance. Surely, a body could fall only so fast? Aye, her engineer wailed, but that was somewhat in excess of one hundred and twenty miles per hour. A collision at that speed would be fatal.\n\nOh no. The passage divided at last!\n\nHualiama had no choice in the matter. With a roar that reminded her of an almighty inhalation, the tempest sucked her away into the rightward passage and she glanced off the wall, thankfully at an acute angle. *Thump!* She spun helplessly. Instinct made her tuck into a ball\u2013any flailing, and she'd break a limb or wing instantly. *Whack!* Her left shoulder took the brunt of the blow, but again the angle saved her a worse injury. Lia tumbled tail over muzzle, or whatever the Dragonish saying was, skidding along and yelping in concert with the increasingly frequent, bruising impacts as the passage opened up at the same time as flattening out.\n\nShe spied a gorge ahead. *Screeeech!* Her talons made a sound like chalk drawn across slate as she employed twenty talons and even her tail-spikes to slow herself down, but she could find no purchase on the super-hard, seamless stone. With an unhappy wail, Lia slewed about as she approached the edge of the gorge; the freezing wind howled over the lip, growing perversely stronger as it tugged at her wings and curled treacherously beneath her body, prying her grip loose.\n\n\"No! You\u2026 will\u2026 not!\"\n\nHer soft hatchling talons bent beneath the force of terror. The cliff-edge appeared to be lined with large teeth, or at least, protrusions, perhaps twenty feet long, and dangling from the very end of one of those, Lia spotted something she had never expected to see again\u2013her old necklace, apparently frozen to a knob of ice. She could not have aimed more exactly for the spot had she spent months practising, for she slid along that frozen spur, tail and muzzle drooping either side as she scrabbled for grip. The gusts kept knocking her about. Finally, with a desperate wrench, Lia twisted her long, serpentine neck backward over her shoulder, and tried to sink her fangs into the rock.\n\nShe slipped, and the wind died as suddenly as it had risen.\n\nThe Star Dragoness dangled by her teeth, with a certain paucity of elegance and sophistication, above a huge gorge filled with a strange purple carpet at its base, along which moved a steady procession of the most enormous plants she had ever seen, neatly segmented as though chopped purposely into three hundred foot lengths. Great leaping Islands! What was this place? Her eyes slowly twizzled upward. The vaulting roof of the cavern was ribbed like the supports of the ballroom of Fra'anior's Palace, each support picked out by a violet colour, while the main surface was a pinkish grey which faded into the violet where each section intersected. The gorge was a good quarter-mile in length\u2013no, not a gorge, but rather a roughly oval aperture below which the carpet rippled along with peristaltic regularity, transferring\u2026 food\u2026 along a tongue? Into a gullet?\n\nLia stiffened. No!\n\nYet she had seen the inside of Amaryllion's mouth. This was larger still, but she could guess roughly that she hung somewhere at the back of a monstrous throat, where the nostril-openings connected with the start of the larynx\u2013if only she could believe her instinct. Despite the blasting cold, she felt and smelled a hint of warmth from the purple tongue. This was a living creature, surviving somehow in temperatures that must be unimaginably inimical to life as she understood it\u2013and even as this thought formed, so Hualiama became aware of the pulse of magic surrounding her. She sensed the signature of draconic life, as slow-moving as basal rock itself, indeed so sluggish that she had entirely failed to identify its true nature during her ride down\u2013Lia snorted with laughter between her clenched fangs.\n\nShe had slid down its nostril.\n\n[ Deeper ]\n\nAlright, tiny brain, picture this. A Land Dragon as large as an Island. No, it was the Island. This was a beast of such imagination-sizzling magnitude, it stood on the base of the Cloudlands and breathed clean air from the world leagues above. It ate chunks of plant matter each three or more times the size of Sapphurion. The Land Dragon had to be thousands or even tens of thousands of years old, and its brain apparently worked so slowly, that she might have to wait days for a thought to form. The whistling wind was its breath, and her Reaving had been the product of the Dragon's night-long exhalation.\n\n\"Excuse me as my head implodes!\" she gasped.\n\nIn the ultimate irony, Azziala and her Dragon-Haters lived Dragonback. They had burrowed into a Dragon's shell.\n\nShe knew another fact. Affurion's tale was true. These Islands had not sailed. They had walked. Even more bizarrely, the Fra'aniorian saying, 'Great leaping Islands' held more than a grain of truth. How many other Humans unwittingly lived atop Dragons? Long may their Islands sleep!\n\nTreacherous, disbelieving giggles forced their way out of her throat, beating back the fear.\n\nNow, she sensed the warmth of her breath melting her perch, enough to loosen the White Dragoness' scale and to warm the peculiar, egg-shaped protuberance which must have snagged there months or years before.\n\nHer inner voice snorted, <Right, Dragoness! We've claws and wings. How's about doing something sensible with them?>\n\n<Like squishing cheeky Humans?>\n\nWith an ungainly scrabble, Hualiama clambered atop her perch and reached for her treasure. Naturally, her brain was still flitting about like an excitable dragonet. Wondering, why the relatively brief inrush of breath?\n\n<Never wake a sleeping Dragon,> the Human-presence teased.\n\nDragon-Lia huffed, <You're such an annoyingly right straw-head!>\n\n<I'm the brains, you're just hot air and magic.>\n\n*Grr!*\n\nNo mind. Her forepaw seized the prize. A weak tingle against her hide. Had Lia not been engaged in trying to understand her environment with all of her Dragon senses, she might have missed it. Magic. Her eyes widened. Very, very gently, she blew warm air over the protuberance. As the casement of ice melted and dripped away into the void, she sighed. An egg. Aye, a dragonet's egg. Just a tad larger than Humanlove might easily cup in her hand; an oval of pearlescent white, unlike the multi-coloured, jewel-like dragonet eggs of Fra'anior. The egg felt frozen solid, but had she sensed a flicker of flame within? Glancing about, clasping her perch three-pawed while her right forepaw held the white scale and worried at the egg, trying to loosen it, Lia saw a few mounds of what might be other eggs scattered about the huge cavern, all rimed by frost. Yet, this one felt special.\n\nBeware a change in the wind, her scales informed her.\n\nA hoarse 'GGHHAAAA!' booming through the cavern rattled her fangs and almost shook her loose from her perch. Puffy cream clouds boiled across the purple tongue, seeming to move sluggishly at first, but that was only a trick of enormous scale and perspective. Hualiama thought she had been cold before, but the chill that diffused over her body now was more than the absence of heat. It was a piercing frost that blighted her bones, stealing heat from her body like a thief running rampant in the night. This was the cold which had Reaved her. It was the memory of a nightmare that woke one sweat-soaked in a haunted room, so terrified that even a scream would not form in the throat. A sharp whistling sound began deep within the stony halls of the creature's body. A blast must come.\n\nAttack! *Chip-chip-chip* with the claws! Lia frantically worked at summoning her inner flame, despairing that she had only a hatchling's fires to work with. The clouds bulged grotesquely toward her as if bent on surging out of that throat to utterly consume a feckless, trespassing Dragoness. Concentrating furiously, desperately, she produced a tiny flare of white-fires. Grab! She palmed the slippery egg ineptly, given her inexperience with paws. It squeezed between her talons like a lump of wet soap.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nFlaring her wings, Lia leaped and executed a catch quicker than the thought which had launched her downward. Before she could start to address the snarky sense of 'congratulations, what a clever little Dragoness we are' deep in her mind, the wind thumped her like a fist to the belly. She snapped her wings shut. Too slow. Pain stabbed into her left secondary wing-joint as the bone smacked against one of those protuberances, but the hurt was rapidly numbed by the cold lifting her toward the cavern's roof. Before the mist closed overhead, she spied the long, narrowing trumpet-shape of the nostril, and Dragon reactions took over. Flick the wings. A hummingbird-like flutter corrected her flight and speared her body into the opening, mere inches from braining herself on one of those protruding ribs, perhaps the palette of the Land Dragon's throat.\n\nThe cold! So intense, she could feel the blood vessels congealing in her wings; surrounding her like a dense blanket, suffocating her ability to resist, to break free. Hualiama fought with all of her strength. Growling, groaning, her willpower tearing from her muscles the power she demanded to rise above those billows, the rush intensifying as the vertical tunnel narrowed\u2026\n\n<Fires, Dragoness! Ride our fires!>\n\n<How?> She did not care to insult her ridiculous Human side, but the question was the snap of a Dragon's jaws.\n\n<Must I show you, you poor lamb?> Apparently, Humanlove had no such qualms.\n\n*GRR!*\n\n<Remember how Ra'aba cut us? How he laughed, yet that memory ultimately fired us to our victory? How the blades danced, wreathed in the flame of Dragon fire forged metal?>\n\nShe remembered Azziala's hate. Razzior's attempt to murder her. The inferno of a feral Dragon's attack. Her belly ignited as if she had tossed oil into a bonfire.\n\nBrutal, molten passion coursed through the veins and arteries of her Dragon form, pooling in the three distinct locations of her hearts, the upper throat, the chest and deep in her belly, before radiating toward her extremities. The already-frozen wing membranes thawed, stinging her sensitive nerve endings into renewed life. *Hiss!* To her surprise, she noticed moisture steaming off her body. The pain invigorated, driving the Star Dragoness into a searing vertical ascent. Grandion's voice played in her mind, correcting her posture and wing-form, until she rocketed up the narrowing nostril barely ten feet ahead of the surging cold front.\n\nEndlessly she struggled, her ears creaking and popping as what she realised had been a potentially dangerous pressure, lessened. She drove her wings to their maximum, until the wingtips met beneath her lower tail. Stretching out, she became as sleek and compact as a falcon plummeting toward its prey.\n\nPinpricks of light above! The aperture leaped toward her, magnified. Starlight\u2013had the storm already passed over?\n\nWith one final surge and a bugle of triumph, Hualiama shot out of the Land Dragon's nostril like a crossbow bolt sprung from a highly tensioned bowstring. She raced for the open skies, seeing clouds billowing out of at least ten similar orifices on this side of the Island alone. How many nostrils? How many mouths might it take to feed such a behemoth?\n\n*CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!*\n\nDragonship! Back-winging frantically, Hualiama slapped obliquely into the underside of a Dragonship's air-sack.\n\n\"Dragon, obey!\"\n\nBlackness streaked her vision, but the laugh that raged out of her throat, stunned her. <FOOLS! I AM HUALIAMA!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "\"Dragon, obey!\" yelled the Enchanters, a clear edge of panic infecting their voices.\n\n\"No. Not today.\"\n\nInstinct made her lash out with a psychic blast; the female Enchanters screamed and one fainted. Lia spiralled past the Dragonship's nose, hunting a familiar presence.\n\n<DRAGON, OBEY!>\n\nAzziala's power was monstrous, seizing her as if her head had been wedged in a vice and a sadistic torturer slowly ratcheted up the pressure. Yet the steely core of her psyche would not yield. The terrible grip could not find purchase.\n\n\"Mother.\"\n\n<DRAGON, OBEY!>\n\nDespite an instant migraine that sheeted darkness over her vision, Hualiama found a way to raise her left forepaw in a cheeky salute to the crysglass window behind which her mother's blue-in-blue eyes burned, baleful. She said, <Make me.>\n\nThe Empress made a cutting gesture with her hand. Her lips moved. \"It's Hualiama.\" She added, in her mind, <Delighted to see you returned to full health, Hualiama.>\n\nOnly her mother could make a welcome sound like an invitation to the gallows.\n\n<Delighted in equal measure, mother.>\n\nAzziala beckoned. <Come. We need to have another time of mother-daughter bonding. Share with me all the intelligence you gathered from Sarzun Dragonhold. I sense you have much to relate.>\n\nHualiama jutted out her chin.\n\n<Obey, or I will flay your precious Tourmaline and turn his hide into a rug for my throne-room.>\n\nFor a long, long moment, fire-eyes burned into blue. This was the issue. As long as Azziala held hostages and Hualiama was unwilling to let her loved ones die, what could she do? Which would she choose when the stakes became higher? When the fate of Kaolili Kingdom's innocents must be weighed against the destruction of Grandion, Sapphurion and all the Dragons, and the eventual enslavement of all Humankind? Evil must not win the day.\n\nThen again, she was not the one whose kingdom ambitions rested upon the backs of the very beasts she sought to destroy. After glancing up at Numistar's comet, burning ever closer and brighter, Hualiama made her decision.\n\nTime to ally herself with the Empress. The Balance must be shaken."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Part of her wanted to spring upon the odious woman who had despised the babe in her womb, celebrated her apparent death, and taken the first opportunity to bargain her life away to Ianthine, the mad Maroon Dragoness. Dragon-Lia pictured quarrying out her mother's intestines and throwing them to the windrocs. Human-Lia quietly reminded her that the Empress had her magic defences on hair-trigger alert, and one of those constructs was an escape via teleportation. No, Azziala did not trust her daughter. That made the feeling entirely mutual.\n\nAll this, she hid beneath her finest psychic shielding, enhanced with Juyhallith mental techniques. No doubt Azziala could read her far better than she cared to admit. The Star Dragoness prowled around the navigation cabin with every ounce of menace she possessed, making the quintet of Azziala's stooges draw back in alarm.\n\nHumansoul reminded her that a Dragoness must play a deeper game. She thanked her inner presence.\n\nThe Empress leaned across the Navigator's table, wetting her golden lips with the tip of her tongue. \"Aye, I had sensed the strangeness of that comet, but you claim it's an Ancient Dragon?\"\n\n\"The spirit of an Ancient Dragon. Just as the spirit of a Dragon possessed my Human body, and manifests itself from time to time, as you see. That is what Siiyumiel taught me.\"\n\nWithin, Lia apologised to herself for the lie.\n\nThe Empress raised one bony forefinger, and thrust it across the highly polished jalkwood surface as if she wished to ram her hatred right through the Star Dragoness' hearts. \"Draconic subterfuge. When you show me how you change back into a Human body, I will see the truth in your eyes. I will read your mendacities like an open scroll.\"\n\nHualiama knew she must not rage like this, her thoughts rendered ungovernable by the toxic brew of loathing and desire for revenge coalescing in her Dragon-hearts. The Dragoness yielded to her Human mind, yet still, the transformation shocked her. The scale and the egg dropped, but she caught them with extraordinary reaction-speed, despite the unexpected switch to Human digits and limbs. It worked? Panting with a rush of adrenaline, Hualiama faced her mother, tangentially noting the tenderness of her left elbow. Did injuries also replicate between her two forms?\n\nAzziala leaped out of her chair with a volley of wild curses.\n\nThis uncontrolled form-shifting magic was bound to cause problems. Lia smiled grimly, pushing a few blonde strands away from her face. \"Aye, mother. I can't control the beast. But I am Hualiama, and I need you to understand the threat facing us all.\"\n\nDragon Enchanters poured into the room, shouting their Command-holds and falling over each other in their anxiety, but Hualiama whisked forth the benefits of a royal upbringing. Drawing herself up to every inch of her five-foot stature, as if she were clothed in magnificent royal robes rather than her natural state, and with attitude sufficient to stun a Dragon, Lia snapped, \"You! Give me your cloak this instant.\"\n\nThe pasty-faced man dropped his cloak into her hand.\n\nShe drew the cloak over her shoulders and clasped the front shut. \"Alright, fix your eyes back in their sockets. Anyways, most of you Councillors have seen me naked before.\"\n\n\"Where's the Dragoness, mighty Empress?\" stammered the foremost woman. Although she was young, her hair was already turning iron-grey\u2013a side-effect of the consumption of Dragon blood and the magic it contained.\n\n\"Gurzia, this is my daughter, Hualiama. The one who killed your mother.\"\n\nAzziala appeared to derive vicious pleasure from making this statement. The young woman's face remained golden, but her fists clenched white-knuckled at her sides. Lia nodded at the woman, regretful. \"Shazziya was your mother?\"\n\nThe Empress said, \"The eyes, daughter. Always examine the eyes. By the Protocols!\" She clapped her hands sharply. \"Since we're all present, let us convene.\"\n\nGurzia's hatred was a palpable force; the tall, strong woman seemed on the point of leaping at Lia to strangle her, when Azziala called together the circle of Councillors. They held hands to facilitate the linkage of minds through physical contact, but this time there was no inclusion of Hualiama\u2013a clear signal. No trust. Thirteen pairs of identical blue eyes had barely blinked when her Council of Twelve, and the Empress herself, turned to Lia, who was the shortest by a head apart from her mother. Yet she felt the proverbial Dragon in the room\u2013or a wart, or something equally delightful. The massed eyes judged. Pared back the flesh to find secrets near the bone.\n\n\"You fear Numistar Winterborn, therefore you wish to forge an alliance of convenience,\" said Azziala. \"Yet we discern that the greater fear is the loss of your usefulness to the Empress, linked to the fear that your status atop the draconic hierarchy will end with Numistar's advent. That, it will.\"\n\nTo these charges, she had no answers.\n\n\"To you, uniqueness has always served as a source of strength and pride. Pride shall be your downfall. Possessed by a Dragon, there is no place in this Island-World where you shall not be hated.\" Her mother spoke without inflection, but Hualiama could taste the underlying relish and imagine a dagger twisting between her ribs. \"Therefore, the sooner you learn the Protocols of Hate, the stronger you will become.\"\n\n\"I'll never be like you.\"\n\nHer mother spoke in the same monotone, as if Lia had not responded. \"I've a job for you in our newfound alliance. You will assume responsibility for readying my Dragon army, minus my Dragon Enchanters, whom I shall require should negotiations with Numistar fail. You will accelerate the schedule of bloodletting and be responsible for choosing those lizards which will die. Your preparations will be perfect, and the Dragons' obedience, faultless.\"\n\nHualiama eyed her mother with a mixture of caution and shock. \"You're releasing the Dragons?\"\n\nRoaring rajals, the woman was devious! The position was lower than any other of her Councillors, but above all the Dragons\u2013above Sapphurion, even. An invidious role, despised by all.\n\n\"You will discover, my daughter, that my Enchanters have made significant progress in the construction of subliminal Commands using the knowledge you passed on to Ianthine, and by extension, to us. You would not believe the devious ways in which magic can be inserted into the draconic mind. I will leave you to discover the exact constructs and forfeits for yourself.\"\n\nLia hissed between her teeth.\n\n\"Aye, this should provide ample reason for the Dragons to hate you even more than they already do. Thus, you shall walk in the Protocols of Hate, and your soul shall be forged anew.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Grandion whirled toward his shell-father, raging, <You cannot support me! You'd lose the respect, the leadership of all the Dragonkind! I cannot roost-love a Human!>\n\n<Grandion, oh, shell-son\u2026>\n\nThe Tourmaline gashed the cavern-floor with his talons, circling the walls of the circular granite chamber with the fury of a caged Dragon\u2013for caged they were. The door of this cell was twenty feet thick. That was no match for an enraged Blue, but his shell-father refused to be goaded. Rightly so. Grandion wished for a pinch of the patience his father displayed.\n\n<We raised her. We know her, Grandion\u2013you have known Hualiama since your hatchling paws cracked the shell. We all loved a Human babe with true-fires love. There is nothing perverse in caring for the innocent, even a child of another species. Who wanted her? We did. Who nurtured her life? We did. Is life not a treasure beyond\u2013>\n\n<I will not make you a traitor to the Dragonkind!>\n\n<Shell-son, I am already convicted under the rune of our law. For three and a half years, Qualiana and I concealed a Human child within the Halls of Gi'ishior itself.>\n\n<A minor infraction!> Grandion gnashed his fangs against his father's hulking shoulder, but both Dragons knew the true target of his wrath. <My third heart is torn, shell-father. Speak truth's fires! This liaison, this treachery of my hearts, it is perverse, undraconic, unthinkable! How, what\u2026 what have I done, to love a Human?>\n\n<You opened your third heart to the song of her fire-soul.>\n\n*GNNAARRR-NNOOOOO!!*\n\nThe Tourmaline's thunder crashed in the enclosed space, shaking dust and pebbles from the cavern roof. His hearts raced as if he tore through the middle of a Dragon-battle, pulsing so fast, the crimson of battle-rage sheeted over his vision. Wrong! Deviant! Forbidden! Words of accusation crashed through his mind. The girl, who had sung to him in a cave beneath the holy Island. Her outrageous courage in succouring a crazed, blind Dragon from Shinzen's lair. Standing up to Razzior. Wishing to lay down her life for the Dragons, yet even that fate had been denied her. Hualiama was, in every way, beyond extraordinary, beyond admiration\u2026 yet she was Human. Maybe. Human and Dragon. A wing-shiveringly exquisite hatchling. He simply could not erase her from his hearts. She was more than written there. The Dragonsong called Hualiama lived within him.\n\n<Do not be hasty, shell-son,> Sapphurion advised, rubbing his muzzle against Grandion's flank. <I sense a greater purpose at work here, greater than you or I see or understand. Do you wish to lose her?>\n\nHe groaned, <Nooo\u2026 oh, no, I could not live\u2026>\n\n<Look at me. Shell-son\u2013>\n\n<No!>\n\n<LOOK AT ME!>\n\nGrandion's head jerked up. By his wings! He had never heard Sapphurion rage like this, grief and power and majesty exploding in his breath, commanding the respect Grandion knew was due to his draconic sire. <Shell-father?>\n\nIn the ancient metre, Sapphurion declaimed:\n\n<Fire-promises belong to the Dragonkind, given aeons ago,>\n\n<The assurance of souls united, the soul-seal eternal,>\n\n<Given and received. Thus, Hualiama is Dragonkind,>\n\n<She cannot be other.>\n\n<The voice of Ancient Amaryllion crooned over her existence,>\n\n<Speaking white-fires immortal, elemental of creation, the breath of life itself,>\n\n<She cannot be other.>\n\n<A Star Dragoness journeyed from realms beyond knowing,>\n\n<To grace our Island-World with wing and word and star-fire,>\n\n<She cannot be other.>\n\nHow could one immutable truth coexist with another immutable truth, yet the two be mutually exclusive? Her existence was physically, spiritually, existentially impossible\u2013except for another immutable fact.\n\nHualiama lived.\n\nProof, complete with hands and paws and laughter, that\u2026 his quick ears caught the beat of a familiar tread, ever so lightly shivering through the basal rock to his awareness. He had been yearning for her. As if spirited forth, Hualiama came.\n\n<She is something new,> Grandion said.\n\nThe tread faltered. Lia called, <Grandion? What does that mean?>\n\n<We need a new word for a new kind of Dragon,> said the Tourmaline, more firmly. <She withstood the lava-attack of an Orange Elder, and the hottest fires of four dozen Dragons besides. What Dragon could claim such a feat?>\n\nWithout, Hualiama must have worked the entry mechanism, because the doorway began to grind open on its rollers, shifting toward Grandion's left paw. There in the gap, he saw Hualiama smiling, wearing a blue woollen dress which fit her like Dragon hide, Prince Elki leading an orrican by a rope, and Saori standing legs akimbo, as if ready to spring into battle at the drop of the proverbial feather. Behind them came Mizuki, filling the lantern-lit corridor with her dusky copper beauty.\n\nLia bowed extravagantly, half a dozen Fra'aniorian twirls and a dance-step to boot. \"Share fresh kill with us, noble Dragons?\"\n\n\"When you've finished your peculiar cultural dance,\" said Saori.\n\nGrandion's eyes flicked from Hualiama to Mizuki, remembering how the Human girl had unsubtly tried to point him in the Copper Dragoness' direction. <At least she's a real Dragoness.>\n\nA thought filled with dark-fires."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Lia apprehended the Tourmaline's disloyalty with a sensation like a dagger to the gut, yet she appreciated the dark-fires of draconic sadness that accompanied his regard of Mizuki. It took all of her courage to smile in greeting, to wave Elki into the cave with the placid orrican, apparently oblivious to its imminent fate. The orrican was a dark, shaggy heap of bovine ugliness, renowned for the strong flavour of its meat and for its stupidity\u2013exceeding that of the ubiquitous ralti sheep, a most impressive feat. It also provided many essentials for the Dragon-Haters, including food, hide, leather, bags made from the stomach cavity and even glue from its melted-down hooves and horns.\n\nShe said, \"Grandion?\"\n\n\"We discussed your nature,\" he explained. \"There's a need for a new word to describe what type of Dragoness you are.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's easy,\" said Elki.\n\n\"Shall we share a meal first?\" suggested Sapphurion, his attention clearly focused on the jovial and very enthusiastic workings of his stomach.\n\nHualiama scowled at her brother. \"What exactly is easy about me, Elki?\"\n\nThe Prince rubbed his hands with glee. \"Well, if I may elucidate\u2013\"\n\n\"Eruption incoming.\"\n\n\"\u2013you are a delightfully intricate paragon of feminine sophistication, by a million leagues, far too confounding for us poor, simple males to ever wrap our bedazzled brains about,\" Elki opined, drawing open laughter from Grandion and Saori. \"Your nature, however, is simple.\"\n\nShe folded her arms, wishing her deepening scowl could have been accompanied by a handy fireball to appraise her unbelievably irritating brother of how unbelievably irritating he was being. \"You have it all worked out?\"\n\n\"I have it all worked out,\" he confirmed, airily.\n\n\"Elki, honestly, you drive me up the Island cliff and back down again!\"\n\nHe said, \"I'm with Sapphurion. Let's eat.\"\n\nDeftly, Sapphurion slit the orrican's throat, gripping the beast with his left forepaw so that its death throes would not endanger the Humans; the right, he cupped to catch the spurting blood. <Drink and be nourished, and grow in wisdom, my Dragonkin,> he said.\n\nNext Hualiama knew, she was pushing past Grandion, shouting, <I want some! Bring that paw down to\u2026 huh?>\n\n<Huh?> Grandion agreed.\n\n<Drink.> Sapphurion tilted his paw.\n\nReason had just begun to intrude when the tang of fresh blood struck Lia's nostrils. She heard herself make a noise she had never made before, a cross between a snarl and a desperate mewl. Then she was leaping and grabbing at Sapphurion's paw, licking, slurping\u2026 and at the same time, distantly, utterly disgusted at her behaviour.\n\n<Dragonsoul! Control yourself.>\n\n<Uh\u2026 sorry.>\n\nHad Grandion spoken? Or her? Unsure of anything now but her hot, raw humiliation, Hualiama retreated, fighting for control. She did not want to look at Saori or Elki. She could not. But that meat\u2026 oh, great Islands! Never had her body so craved bloody cuts of veal, she was actually drooling. She backhanded her mouth and groaned softly, curling up, \"Oh no.\"\n\nElki's hands raised her gently. \"It's alright. This is your Dragon's emotions mixed in with yours, see? You are both Dragon and Human at the same time.\"\n\nShe whispered, \"Elki, I'm in no state to debate philosophy with you. I need meat. I need\u2026\" A claw-tip offered her a bite. Raw, but that was best. Lia ate greedily. \"More?\"\n\nShe ate this offering more politely, resisting the urge to bolt the meat. Grandion's fire flared as he barbecued the next portion; the sound of sizzling fat almost set her off again. Elki did not seem to mind. He had his belt dagger out, and set to carving bite-sized portions for her, blowing on them and then popping them into her mouth as quickly as she could eat, as if she were a baby bird. Sapphurion offered Mizuki a choice slab of haunch, while the Tourmaline appeared content, like Saori, to hang back and wait for the others.\n\nEating like a Dragon hatchling. Was this to be her new life?\n\nThe Prince said, \"Right, simplifying this matter to terms even those whose function merely serves to prettify our company\u2013yie!\"\n\nMizuki tickled his neck with her left fore-talon. \"Explain this Human term, 'prettify'? Does it equate to, 'I want to die?'\"\n\n\"It does rhyme nicely,\" said Saori, trying to look vapid.\n\n\"I'm told that the heat from all those volcanoes around Fra'anior has deleterious effects on the Human brain,\" Sapphurion put in, unexpectedly.\n\n\"It's a stretch to imagine this talking monkey has a brain,\" suggested the Copper.\n\nTwining his arms across his chest, Elki ignored his Dragoness pointedly. \"Here we go. Hualiama has the power of Shifting. As in, she Shifts between her Human and Dragon forms. Unlike the mythical Dragon power of Projection, which we all know is entirely impossible\u2013\" Grandion coughed discreetly \"\u2013this is a Shift of physical states or shapes, which meantime remain linked at the level of the spirit or the soul. This is why she evinces draconic behaviour even while in Human form. There is but one soul.\"\n\nGrandion's jaw hung slightly askew as he stared at the Prince.\n\nHualiama said, \"Alright, genius, so where's my Dragoness right now? In my pocket?\"\n\n\"Perhaps so, but at that size, she'd be incredibly dense,\" Saori put in.\n\nLia's fists clenched. \"Dense?\"\n\nThe Prince explained smoothly, \"No, dear sister, it is clear from the symptoms of starvation that your Human form existed in a real, physical sense, and was wasting away to nothingness, while your Dragoness' form languished under the Command-hold. Again, you're eating like a hatchling. The physical forms are more than allied.\" Elki interlaced his fingers. \"Not like this, although that is one idea. No, you Shift between planes of existence. When you're here, you're also there, so to speak. Human and Dragoness exist synchronously in time, in space and in spirit, even though only one form or aspect of your nature reveals itself at a given moment. When you Shift here, the physical form manifests accordingly.\"\n\nNow, Hualiama found herself imitating her Dragon. Her lower jaw sagged like a broken hinge.\n\nHow could Elki not know about her inner space where Human and Dragoness met, and yet put words to what she had not even begun to understand?\n\nColouring under the silent scrutiny of the small company, Human and Dragon alike, Prince Elki said, \"So I, uh, came up with a word. I hope you'll like it. Because I want you to know that your existence is neither a lie nor a fraud. I've known you for all of my eighteen years, and I can vouch for the fact that you, Hualiama, are the most truly authentic person I know. You dance through life, just yourself. No fa\u00e7ade, no deception, just pure Hualiama.\"\n\nShe sniffed, \"You're\u2026 trying to make me cry?\" Lia grabbed his hand before he could look too shamefaced. \"No, Elki. You're extraordinary. Have you been secretly glugging the juice of the prekki-wisdom tree?\"\n\nHe laughed softly at the reference to a ballad they both remembered from their childhood. \"So that's why I stowed away on your Dragonship. I've always wondered.\"\n\n\"You didn't tell me that detail!\" Saori said crossly.\n\n\"Saved Lia's life,\" said Elki, returning to his natural diffidence, \"ran into Mizuki who shredded a few windrocs who were bothering us, and of course, I discovered you, o Saori, fetchingly occupying a sack.\"\n\n\"A sack?\" the three Dragons chorused.\n\n\"Ouch! Long story,\" said the Prince, rubbing his arm where Saori had punched him. \"Best decision of my life, truth be told, pinching you from Qilong, Dread Pirate-Lord of a thousand Isles, scourge of the Western\u2013\"\n\n\"As I recall, Saori nabbed you,\" Hualiama corrected.\n\n\"I've always thought silence a marvellous virtue in sisters.\" Elki winked at Lia. \"Anyways, before I get distracted with embellishing tales of my indubitable magnificence, shall I tell you the word?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" This time, a chorus of five.\n\n\"It has a certain, charming simplicity\u2013\"\n\n\"Such as, I'll bite you if you don't speak quickly?\" Mizuki interrupted, flexing her talons near his throat.\n\n\"Shapeshifter.\"\n\nAn awesome silence billowed around them, like waves of Cloudland stirred by a rampaging storm of Land Dragons.\n\n\"You are a Shapeshifter Dragoness. The third race.\"\n\n[ Third Race ]\n\nQUestions Swarmed through her mind like an infestation of fire-ants. How did it work? Could she simply summon her Dragoness from this 'other' place? Her Human body ached in every place her impromptu ride up and down a Land Dragon's nostril had bruised and battered her Dragoness-body. If she ever became pregnant, would she have babies or eggs? Or\u2013boggle the mind\u2013would they be both? How could one woman become the progenitor of an entire race? Yet more curiously, Hualiama knew peace. Somehow, her rapscallion brother had plucked a jewel out of pure dross, stitched together a masterpiece from a tailor's offcuts. The word, the whole idea, simply fit.\n\nShapeshifter. They tossed it around for a few minutes with mounting excitement, before Hualiama briefed them on her new status in Azziala's realm. Naturally, His Insightful Highness had a few things to share on this score too.\n\nHe said, \"Fantastic news, Lia. You'll soon engineer a solution to the bloodletting problem. Obviously, the Enchanters couldn't give a brass dral for any Dragon's health. They're after the hides anyway. We'll help you figure out how to keep our Dragons alive, meantime we turn your particular skills on this Command-hold magic. I fancy fomenting a little mutiny\u2026\"\n\nSapphurion rested his huge blue paw on the Prince's shoulders. \"That's the spirit, youngling.\"\n\nOh aye, they would discover in a week or so the secret which had eluded a hundred generations of Lost Islands Dragons? Lia fumed inwardly. What further encouragement did Elki need? Yet he had just whisked the proverbial purple dragonet out of the bag, with an insight which arguably held the key to her entire existence and future. Chewing rotten tinker bananas, Lia? Rather than fussing about her brother earning rightful acclaim for his contributions, perhaps it was time to dust off that girl who loved engineering solutions\u2026 if she didn't tinker Grandion's head off his shoulders first!\n\n\"We'll need to count and survey the Dragon populations of Azziala's fortresses,\" she said. \"I'll discuss their needs with the Councillors and Dragonship Engineering. Then, we'll work out a schedule and a methodology to ensure the weaker or sicker Dragons are able to return to good health. Sapphurion, do you know how quickly Dragons regenerate their blood supply?\"\n\n\"No, Dragonfriend. But we will learn. I'll search out capable Dragons to be your right paws in each of the Dragon-Hater fortresses.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll need research teams, too. Can you rustle up a few scholarly Dragons?\"\n\nSapphurion assented, while Grandion put in, \"Siiyumiel taught me a range of techniques which may prove useful.\"\n\n<Really? When, Grandion?> Lia asked.\n\n<While you slept, Siiyumiel expounded much Dragon lore to my attentive ears.>\n\n<Full of surprises, aren't you, my Tourmaline?>\n\nGrandion rumbled contentedly.\n\nUnaware of this exchange, Saori warned meantime, \"Within minutes, Azziala will know what we've discussed here.\"\n\nLia said, \"Aye. She knows the Dragons will try to escape. In fact, she's expecting it and sees it as another test\u2013don't you, mother?\" Her bold sally produced no reply.\n\n\"What was that?\" said Mizuki.\n\n\"A tremor? I felt it, too,\" said Grandion. \"Different to volcanic activity.\"\n\n\"It's the Land Dragons.\" That stunned her companions! Lia said, \"I mean, this entire Island is a Dragon.\"\n\nAll three Dragons ruffled their wings in shock, but it was Grandion who growled, \"Lia, are you certain you've returned in your right mind?\" When she fixed her most mysterious smile\u2013indeed, her most draconic smile\u2013upon him, it produced a second, more agitated ruffle. \"Returned from where, is the question! What trouble have you caused this time, o Dragon-Shaker?\"\n\nHis clever play on words changed the meaning of the word 'Dragonfriend' into a positive yet surprising influence, one that shook a Dragon for good.\n\n\"I woke the Island,\" she said diffidently. \"And, I returned with these.\"\n\nGrandion frowned as she produced the dragonet egg from her pocket, then hissed between his fangs as she drew the scale-necklace from beneath her clothes. \"You disobeyed my orders, Lia! You went\u2026 exploring.\"\n\n\"Orders?\" Sapphurion queried. \"Is that the nature of your relationship, shell-son?\"\n\n\"I misspoke. Mis-thought, too, it appears,\" snarled the Tourmaline. \"I sought to protect the Dragonfriend; she cared not for my sheltering wing and my forethought for a hatchling's needs and abilities.\"\n\nShe had hurt him! Hualiama stood abruptly; Grandion recoiled, but the small chamber gave him no space to retreat further. Nevertheless, he would not bow the proud arch of his neck to approach or nuzzle her, as he ordinarily might have.\n\nStanding on her tiptoes, Lia could reach his chin at her fullest stretch. Stroking the tough scales that lined the point of his jaw, she said, \"You were right about the danger, Grandion, although it was not as we had imagined. The freezing weather of these Isles is the breath of mighty beasts, drawn from a place of terrible cold beneath the Cloudlands. May I share my thought-memories with you? And will you accept my regret\u2013\"\n\n\"Why? Why do you make this so difficult, Dragonfriend?\"\n\nShe sighed.\n\nThe Tourmaline's stiffness resembled a petrified tree. \"I understand the need for connection with your shell-mother. I also see one may command the wind, yet it blows as it wishes.\"\n\n\"Grandion, I am not ungovernable. I know I treasure silly things. This scale means the world to me. I picked up the egg because I felt drawn to it. You see, I oftentimes don't even understand these consuming passions\u2013oh?\"\n\nHe did not bend, but instead, offered his paw, palm upraised. Ceremoniously, he said, \"Will my Dragon Rider ascend?\"\n\n\"Dragon?\"\n\nInstead of answering her query, he lifted her until they could see eye-to-eye. What she saw there, stung and thrilled her in equal measure. Understanding. Respect. More than a touch of frustration. If fire could ever claim gentleness, that was the tenor of how he burned for her. Much was clouded, as though he harboured an Island's weight of doubts\u2013rightly so. Yet as he searched her eyes, perhaps seeking the flame within, she realised that the Dragon was emoting his reiteration of the oath-promises, so freely and innocently given years before, which had shaped both of their lives ever since, and the Island-World around them.\n\nThen, he said, <I trust thee, Hualiama.>\n\n<I honour thee, Grandion.> Not the oaths. Him. Giving her Dragon the chance to take that first backward step, with integrity.\n\n<Thou,> he whispered. She winced. He must release her and grieve, but he refused.\n\nUnwillingly, helplessly, she replied, <Thou.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "When a Dragon wished to ponder a scientific problem or a thorny philosophical issue, it was common practice to take to the heights, and from a commanding position to gaze over the Island-World, seeking to draw such inspiration from natural harmony and beauty as would raise the fire-soul to a state similar to the Human concepts of meditation or holy contemplation. Dragon lore called this practice far-seeing. Most especially, Dragons who undertook the sacred fire-quest, often wandering for seasons and even years, would employ far-seeing in an attempt to discern the flight and purpose of their lives. Similarly Master Jo'el, the monk and her mentor, had often stressed the need to draw aside and ground the soul amidst the great mysteries of a grain of sand, an ant, or the vastness of the Universe beyond the Island-World and its five moons.\n\nThus, when she scaled an unknown peak above the caldera of her Island home in her dream, Hualiama expected to meet her Dragoness-self in that dream-chamber amidst the stars. Dragonsoul was her muse, her counterpart, her source of surprises aplenty.\n\nShe did not expect to meet Fra'anior.\n\nTurning from an extended contemplation of the eastern horizon, she saw him there, coiled amidst the Islands, the enormity of his being filling the eighteen league-wide caldera as though it were built to serve as his roost, and the gaps between the rim-Islands had been fashioned to provide comfortable hollows in which to rest his heads. Five heads slumbered, but two were awake, towering above her with their characteristic mantling of storm-clouds, as though the Ancient Dragon wore for his robe the might of Nature herself. Fra'anior was called the Great Onyx, the gleam of gemstone black his armour. Each scale was as broad as the beam of a Dragonship, and his presence was so fearsomely dark and brooding and awesome, that it seemed there should be no need for night to shroud this corner of the Island-World. Matchless in power, cried the ballads, the fearsome enslaver of Humankind. Where he moved, all must tremble.\n\nHualiama inclined her head respectfully, did not bend the knee. Were this her shell-father, by some miracle, such a genuflection would be strange and inappropriate.\n\nFour great eyes burned upon her, effortlessly defining the ineffable majesty of the Dragonkind. Lia's stomach churned. Dragon fear. Rightly so.\n\nAt last, in a voice like thundering waters, he announced, \"I sense the spirit of one I know, but not the bodily form. I am not accustomed to being deceived. Tell me, art thou Hualiama?\"\n\nA startling echo of Grandion's response. Furthermore, the breeze blew a blue strand of hair across her eyes. Her gut performed an unhappy dance. She was Dragon-girl? He was not the only one who was confused. And so, beginning with a desperate quaver in her voice but growing in confidence, Lia declared her name and lineage, and showed Fra'anior the shell she wore about her neck.\n\n\"Shapeshifter?\" he growled at last. \"Equally a servant of Dragon and Human natures? This was never the plan for the paramount power of the Lesser Dragonkind.\"\n\n\"Did Istariela do wrong, o great Fra'anior?\" Lia inquired.\n\n\"I should have apprehended this cunning design of the Star Dragoness earlier,\" said the Onyx Dragon. \"This she concealed even from mine seventh sense, such was the traitoress Istariela's power over the Balance. The purity of a Dragon's soul-fire was never meant to be adulterated. Even Dramagon dared not cross to an Island of such perversity, though he many times prowled about its shores. Tell me, little one, is this Amaryllion's paw at work? Is he a traitor, too?\"\n\nHow hateful his language! Dismay ate at her gut as if she had been forced to swallow acid. Was she, a creature of unknowable perversity, to be rejected by another parent? Six parents was a wealth by any measure. Two adoptive, one dead, one fled, one as evil a woman who had ever lived, one existing beyond the Island-World but apparently, she disgusted him.\n\nAll that Hualiama touched, crumbled into dust and blew into the Cloudlands.\n\nYet his mood seemed fickle, sliding from a visible boiling of the storm about his heads one instant, to open curiosity the next. He said, \"Tell me of Hualiama's doings, little hatchling. Why dost thou carry an egg? Explain this bequest of Amaryllion's, which was just now foremost in thine mind?\"\n\nShe sensed coercion present, but either Fra'anior withheld or his power was so subtle, she could not detect its workings upon her mind, for Lia slowly began to converse with him, and soon found herself speaking with unaccustomed freedom and boldness. Let a shell-father know his shell-daughter. Please, let him see her worth, let him value and not despise the unforeseen fruit of his body.\n\nSo she spoke of that fleeting sense of connection with the dragonet's cold, cold egg, and all she had shared with Grandion, Mizuki, Sapphurion, Elki and Saori of her healing at Siiyumiel's paw. She described her five-day-old campaign to revive all of the Dragons, of her recalculation of the bloodletting schedule and her experiments with Dragon nutrition to try to stem the steady flow of deaths related to their mistreatment at the hand of Azziala's Dragon-Haters. Fra'anior hissed when she described how some of the Dragons she had despatched to hunt to provide a more varied diet had attempted to escape, only to perish in the Cloudlands. She digressed into describing the fledgling attempts by Elki and Saori to develop a Dragon Rider lore and code of conduct, and how Fumiko's husband, the blacksmith Tadao, sought to revive the ancient art of forging weaponry and Dragon battle-armour in Dragon fires. The great, flaming eyes watching her blinked in concert when Hualiama granted Fra'anior a taste of the Dragon-Rider oath-magic, which she believed was Amaryllion's true gift breathed into her flesh.\n\nWhen questioned, she related her eggling-dreams of Istariela and the prophecy of the Child of the Dragon. This turned his rumbling down a notch, mellowing the mighty Onyx's belly-fires into the purring of the largest rajal in existence, a sound that rose and fell in conjunction with the soughing of her soul. Yet when she shared the secret of how the eggling-spirit had travelled across the Island-World in search of a ruined, stillborn Human babe, she felt the resultant quivering of his great body through her bare feet, and saw the Island-sized heads shaking in consternation.\n\n\"This is a newfound magic and most perilous indeed,\" said the Ancient Dragon. \"The ways of magic are elusive and fresh, even as the song of life endlessly renews, adapts and struggles with its internal imperative to master its environment and challenges. One is ever the student, never magic's absolute master. Learn this lesson well, little one.\"\n\n\"I hear you, Great One.\"\n\nThe great eyes regarded her with fierce, humbling pride. \"A Dragon's heritage is not merely physical or generational, as with Human procreation. There is also spiritual heritage, by which we believe certain fire-spirits can be regenerated or even re-embodied in the draconic young, passing a magical or gifted heritage between unrelated Dragons. Yet this is not entirely what Istariela has achieved\u2026 I don't think.\" The admission of self-doubt caused huge fires to pour out of his nostrils, but he directed the conflagration away from her frail Human body. Nonetheless, the blasting heat sucked Lia's lungs dry. \"This must remain between us\u2013our secret, Blue-star.\"\n\n\"How greatly mine hearts yearn to truly know thee, to be with thee, and to clasp thine beauty in mine paw. Yet the price would be prohibitive. And there are battles here, battles to be fought which are beyond thine ken and relate to the Ancient Dragon-Spirits\u2013for this reason, I cannot always be with thee. But I will be with thee in spirit, and I foresee\u2026 a knowing grips my bones\u2026\"\n\nThe wash of his indrawn breath slammed her to her knees.\n\n<MOTHER TO MYRIAD, THOU SHALT BE!>\n\nFrom her knees, his roar knocked her flat on her back in an ungainly tangle. She groaned, <Whaaa\u2026> For white-fires billowed through her being, the visionary power briefly imperious, then gone. She wondered if Fra'anior spoke a prophecy, or spoke the prophetic into being, such was his power.\n\n<Peace, little one,> he said apologetically. <This power of prophetic utterance grips me most sorely. These are words which just now came to me through mine seventh-sense contemplation of thy existence. Thou shalt be mother to myriad, for I see a mighty host gathered before my foresight, shining and beautiful, fey and proud, warring and living and loving and dying as ever did the Humankind and the Lesser Dragons, the fruit of mine labours.>\n\nHe broke off abruptly, as if biting the words short.\n\nIn the sudden absence of his words, her shaking was visceral, her tears, a Cloudlands-bound waterfall. <I'm not so much the motherly sort, Great One,> she stammered.\n\n<The course of life waits upon its right seasons,> he replied.\n\nAll she knew was that war and destruction would precede any hoped-for future, even that prophesied by an Ancient Dragon. His febrile gaze acknowledged this truth.\n\nFra'anior said, <Yet, this Word must be accompanied by a great caution. I sense a taint within thee, the spirit-life of my old foe, Dramagon. Not inborn, but resident. I must warn thee never to have hatchlings until that taint is expurgated from your being, Hualiama. It would\u2026 I fear the worst. I will watch, and help, and meditate upon how to deny the ruzal any further purchase on thy life, for it is a magic most foul and perverse.>\n\n<If good and evil exist in eternal Balance, o Fra'anior, can this purpose ever be accomplished?>\n\nHis laughter was thunder. It was delight. It caused the Islands to dance upon their foundations. As her dream faded, she heard him say, <Thusly might thou mantle thyself in the dance of wisdom, o foundling-treasure of mine third heart.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "From the mysteries of the Universe, to death. Large-scale destruction. On the ninth and final day of the week after she willingly entered the Empress' service, the Star Dragoness walked the halls of Dardak Tertiary, one of three fortresses on Dardak Island, with Grandion and Sapphurion. Released from the Command-hold, the Dragons had revolted. Over a hundred slain. Another two hundred were maimed beyond hope of healing, their injuries inflicted by Enchanter-prepared Dragons which, they recognised now, had been cunningly seeded amongst the ranks. At the first sign of rebellion, the Dragons had fallen upon each other and torn each other and their comrades apart.\n\nNo Dragon-Hater had lifted so much as a finger in defence. There was no need.\n\nGolden blood had congealed on the walls and the bodies piled at the base of a central volcanic pipe\u2013if volcanic it was, Hualiama thought\u2013by groups of Dragon labourers. Here, Sapphurion paused before the huge mound of broken, bitten, torn Dragon bodies, his muzzle bowed and his eye-fires a deathly shade of orangey-<black. He said, Fools! To squander all life and magic\u2026>\n\n<They disobeyed orders,> Grandion said. The hides should have been flayed, and the blood collected.\n\nSapphurion growled, <Come, Hualiama. We must deal with this.>\n\nAs the Island shook beneath their paws, Sapphurion threw her a significant glance. Her network of Dragon leaders had been tracking the underground activity of tremors, and the data showed clear signs of increase across the Cluster. The Land Dragons stirred.\n\nTogether, with Grandion trailing a wing-length behind, the Dragon Elder and the hatchling winged upward to the pipe's open exit, to where the Lost Islands Dragons waited. The leader of this group, Jyrandia, was a powerful Blue Overmind, one hundred and forty-two years old. She had been severely weakened by bloodletting, but was now slowly improving under Lia's regimen of staggered blood collection every fourth day, supplemented by improved diet and vigorous daily exercise. Amusingly, Grandion reported that a number of the Dragonkind had taken to calling her 'Hatchling Elder-Paws' in private. She'd work them even harder in that case, Lia grumbled!\n\nAs they emerged into the luminous late evening, Lia imagined there must be a rare five-Moon conjunction, but this was not the case. The light was the comet, bending its blazing trail toward the heart of the Lost Islands\u2013aimed at the Buffer Zone, Yul'xi the Red Overmind scientist had calculated, way to the West of the open-topped mountain where the Dragons had gathered in the natural amphitheatre formed by the mouth of the pipe they had ascended, comprised of an olivine and grey dacite superstrate, as recorded in the Haters' geological knowledge-archive. Yet her eyes were for the assembled Dragonkind. They numbered perhaps four hundred, a cross-section of the different Lost Island subspecies. Her scales thrilled to an underlying tension in the air, a hint of danger that Grandion and Sapphurion clearly picked up on, because the tempo of their inner fires amplified noticeably.\n\nJyrandia inclined a wingtip. <Fiery greetings, noble Dragons. Come, stand in the assembly.>\n\nA space had been left just slightly upslope from the Blue Overmind\u2013a neat illustration of draconic hierarchy, in which the more powerful always took the higher ground.\n\nSapphurion subtly guided Hualiama toward the highest point, a jutting rock. Yet when he stood at her right flank and Grandion to her left, they overshadowed her. Clever. Thus, they augmented her authority without assuming primacy in the hierarchy.\n\n<We grieve,> Jyrandia began, Dragon-direct. <Yet, many of our number question this policy of obedience to the Dragon-Haters. It is dishonourable. Dragons should die in battle.>\n\n<As did those below?> Sapphurion interjected.\n\n<Aye!> A number of Dragons snarled, none more so than a sixty-foot Red Overmind standing just a few paces downslope, his muzzle positioned lower than Jyrandia's by the barest width of a scale. Ah, Lia thought. His animosity burned intensely.\n\nThe Red snapped, <They died in glorious battle, not the cold-hearted cowardice of a Dragoness who serves the Empress heart, wing and paw!>\n\nSapphurion bared his fangs. <What is your name, youngling?>\n\n<CHAKUR!>\n\nThe brazen battle-challenge did not faze Sapphurion, veteran of many a draconic council. He said, <I am Sapphurion the Blue, Dragon Elder of Fra'anior, leader of all Dragons beyond these Isles, north of the Rift. This is my shell-son, Grandion, and this is\u2013>\n\n<The traitor!> Chakur almost howled.\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon's talons tore rock from the slope, but Sapphurion's upraised wing stilled his incipient charge. <Your fires burn brightly for the fallen, Chakur. You accord them great honour.>\n\nA diplomatic answer, but Chakur would not hear it and Lia suspected that Sapphurion knew this too. Her hearts-beat trebled, causing the blood to sing in her ears and pound in her throat. Battle-readiness. Furious cascades of magic tumbled within her body, strangely concentrated in her additional Dragon stomachs and organs, feelings for which she had as yet, no name.\n\n<She is a traitor to all Dragonkind. I claim battle-right!>\n\nAgain, Sapphurion chose to reply quietly, but with a clear edge of inner steel. <And what say the Elders amongst your number?>\n\n<We are divided,> Jyrandia said, the weariness in her voice communicating much.\n\nRaising his voice, Grandion declared, <Dragons! Wing-brothers and wing-sisters! The time for battle is soon coming. Yet what will it avail the Dragonkind, should the battle be won and the yoke of the Dragon-Haters remain unbroken? The hunter's paw must know cunning. Let stealth veil his wings. We are weakened, aye, but our spirits remain unbowed.>\n\n<Empty words!> Chakur thundered, along with many of his brethren.\n\n<There is no glory in being slain by hidden magic!> Grandion roared back, easily amplifying his voice above the others with a touch of Storm-power. <You dishonour the spirits of those past, leaving their bodies to rot so that the quotas remain unfulfilled and more Dragonkind must die!>\n\n<Quotas? The Star Dragoness would have us fawn and crawl upon our bellies! I claim battle-right\u2013against her!>\n\nChakur goaded the Tourmaline into expelling an enormous, raging fireball. He cried, <Battle against a hatchling? You're the coward here, Chakur!>\n\n<It's only first blood, like the blood she demands of us,> said the other, a devious curl of crimson entering his fire-eyes.\n\n<Null-fire son of a scabrous windroc,> sneered Grandion, whose diplomatic skills had not yet developed beyond the 'needs polishing' stage. Chakur coiled, smoking at the jowls.\n\nArguments between Dragons were usually highly charged affairs. Stuff bellies full of fire, equip each Dragon with talons and fangs and a temperature of rage directly linked to their inner furnaces, and there could only be one outcome. Any macho posturing was the briefest of preludes to an all-claws-in brawl. Thus it was now. Chakur's thigh-muscles had barely straightened when Grandion, on equally high alert, blurred into motion. The powerful Tourmaline seized the incoming Red in a headlock with both forepaws and, whirling with the momentum, body-slammed him almost atop an elderly Grunt who sidestepped by the proverbial rajal's whisker rather than provide Chakur a soft landing. The Red Overmind bounced off the rock. The Grunt kicked him in the jowls for good measure\u2013clearly, no devotee of Chakur's.\n\nMeantime, ten Dragons piled into Grandion with a chorus of savage growls. To her surprise, Hualiama found herself deeply mired in the fray, champing on a Brown Anubam's lower lip while the Brown tried to secure a mouthful of Grandion's left wing. The Anubam smashed her away with a cuff of his oversized forepaw. Lia saw stars.\n\nNext she knew, lightning flashed near Grandion and Sapphurion bellowed, <SAPPHURION!> Two Dragons who had not even joined the fray, dropped in their tracks as though poleaxed.\n\n<No\u2026>\n\n<First blood!> shouted Chakur, spearing toward Hualiama out of a tangle of paws and wings, his mighty jaw agape.\n\nShe roared back, <I accept!>\n\nThe Red, and twenty Dragons behind him, suddenly faced a storm wind that blasted them back across the volcanic pipe. Grandion! Sapphurion! The powerful Blues had joined forces, and the windstorm they generated was enough to make Lia spring desperately into a small crack, lest she be swept away to Kaolili.\n\nAll of the watching Dragons bellowed as one. Then, silence fell as though commanded by the strike of Fra'anior's paw.\n\nJyrandia growled, <And another two fall. When will this madness end, Chakur?>\n\nHe spat golden blood. <When I have satisfaction. The Star Dragoness accepted my challenge. Let it be first blood.>\n\n<Hualiama, no!> Grandion gasped.\n\n<I\u2026 uh, did agree. A moment's battle-madness\u2026>\n\nThe Tourmaline stared at her for a second, aghast. <Lia, Chakur means his first bite to be a killing bite. You do understand, don't you?>\n\nBeyond Grandion, Chakur was laughing. <You accepted, so-called Star Dragoness. Or are you such a coward, you'd have this Blue thug fight for you? A pox on your sire, and a greater pox upon the blighted womb that whelped your miserable egg!>\n\nInstantly, Hualiama saw crimson. She launched past Grandion so fast, the Tourmaline missed his reflexive attempt to catch her, and she slammed into the mountain of Dragonflesh that was Chakur before he managed to wipe the nasty smirk off his lips. Only a slight jerk of his head saved his left eye. She knew she could do little to damage him, so she struck for the most vulnerable part she knew. But her hatchling claws skidded off his scale-armour a mere half-inch from the orb of the eye, unfortunately, drawing no blood.\n\nWith a terrible roar, Chakur flung her off; Hualiama fluttered her wings to absorb the momentum, then closed again with the Red Overmind. He allowed her to attack almost unopposed, waiting for the moment to bite or stun her with a paw-strike. Hualiama tried for his wings, but Chakur was too quick and compact, defending with psychic strikes and shielding as much as with superior body-position. She was a gnat fighting a boulder. Lia tried to find fire, but her hatchling-level ability only produced a brief sputter that made the Red chuckle horribly; then, an unseen boulder smashed against her right shoulder and neck. Kinetic attack! Stunned, Lia dropped in a heap. Somewhere nearby, Grandion's panicked bugle cut through the roaring in her ears.\n\n<Dragonsoul? You have to wake up! Up! Oh, unholy\u2026>\n\nJaws descended toward her Dragoness' head, agape. There was no escape, for the Red Overmind filled her vision, and his forepaws were cupped about her body, denying any possible avenue of escape\u2013bar one. Into his mouth.\n\nHuman-Lia triggered the jump."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "<HUALIAMA!>\n\nTerror caused all three of Grandion's hearts to contract agonisingly as the dark blue tail vanished inside the Red Overmind's champing maw. Chakur's jawbones worked as he tried to use his tongue to manoeuvre the Star Dragoness into position for a fatal bite.\n\nSuddenly, as clear as a Dragon's bugle, a feminine voice cried, <I taste first blood!>\n\nShe'd cut that worm's tongue! Of course! Grandion's jaw, and those of all the Dragons he spied in the corners of his vision, sagged in smoke-wreathed shock. What a gambit! Sheer, bloody-beautiful, draconic genius!\n\nChakur did not agree. <Now die, traitoress!>\n\nTipping back his head, he tossed Hualiama headfirst down his gullet, expanding his neck like the egg-eating serpents of Franxx to achieve the unlikely feat of swallowing another Dragon. The Tourmaline hardly felt himself move before he fell upon Chakur, flipping him like a hapless ralti sheep onto his back. Grandion roared incoherently, trying to throttle the Red to prevent Hualiama from sliding down into the powerful acids of the food stomach, aware at some level, that this was an inconceivable act of cannibalism, punishable by death under draconic law.\n\nHe pinned Chakur in an instant, but the ralti-stupid, bloated-looking shock that overtook the Red Overmind's eyes arrested the Tourmaline's attack momentarily. Magic. Grandion sensed the gathering of power as pure and concentrated as the heart of the twin suns, and instinct caused him to twitch his head aside.\n\nHualiama's white-hot flame did not so much roar out of Chakur's flank as whisper, but it cut with the searing, ice-flame clarity of starlight. Broadening, it beamed across the lip of the pipe, by some bizarre coincidence, lighting exactly and only on the two Blue Overminds who had fallen to the curse of the subliminal Command-hold. They vaporised, along with a hundred-foot trench of rock behind them. Swarm Dragons standing less than a foot outside the light's ambit, survived unscathed.\n\nThen, the little Dragoness clambered out of the hole she had perfectly carved into the Dragon's side, as if she were crawling out of her princess-bed, or whatever Humans did\u2013Grandion realised he had not the first clue about Human beds, but what did that matter?\n\nLaughing with sweet relief, he reached for the Star Dragoness.\n\nWhirling beyond the tips of his grasping talons, Hualiama sprang aloft to cuff the stunned Red on the left shoulder. <Didn't you hear me call first blood, Chakur?>\n\nThus, she succoured his life, by offering the path of honourable submission. The Red Overmind staggered to one knee, dropped his muzzle and spread his wings in a posture of abject surrender. <O peerless Star Dragoness, my life is yours to command.>\n\nShe said, <Rise, o Chakur, and fly with me. We have dead Dragons to honour.>\n\nSuch regal grace, tempered by the power of mercy. Grandion's hearts burst into a wild, thrilling Dragonsong. Hualiama!\n\n[ The Islands Shall Quake ]\n\nFive hours after the swift, horrifying battle against Chakur the Red, Hualiama awoke with a Dragon-sense. Numistar's bleak presence approached.\n\nShe knew that the comet's perigee was not due for another three days, according to the Dragons' best calculations. Yet her entire being thrummed with an undeniable sense of foreboding. Stepping cat-pawed to Grandion's side, she batted his muzzle with her paw. <Arise, o Tourmaline.>\n\nHis eye cracked open, as did Sapphurion's just beyond him. Grandion said, <What?> And more tersely, immediately, <What ails you, Dragonfriend?>\n\nShe cried, <To the surface!>\n\nBeing Dragons, they did not waste sulphurous respiration on the niceties of debate. Grandion and Sapphurion burst of their narrow cave, one of the Dragon pens located high up in the underground fortress of Dardak Tertiary, home to over six thousand Humans and three thousand eight hundred Dragonkind, and charged off down the tunnels. Despite her smaller size granting her a manoeuvring advantage, Hualiama was hard-put to keep up with the male Dragons as they raced along the neat grid of granite tunnels, carved wider here to allow the Dragonkind easy access.\n\nIn less than a minute they charged past the startled and smokily disgruntled watch-Dragons, through a double row of massive containing doors, now left permanently open, and burst out into the tranquil night. Grandion's talons threw up sparks as he skidded to a halt. Had she been a foot taller, Hualiama would have fetched up with a nose-to-scales view of his left haunch. Dodge! Duck! Dragon reactions rocketed her across the talon-scored flagstones of a flat portico area, and onto the open terrace space atop Dardak's tallest mountain, six thousand two hundred feet tall.\n\nAll was brilliant. Only the steaming panting of three Dragons standing in mute awe beside a low, mortar-packed retaining wall broke the silence of deepest night\u2013a night vanquished by the retina-searing brilliance of the comet hurtling through the atmosphere toward the Lost Islands. A huge, fiery gas corona streamed away from what Lia realised must be thousands or even millions of tons of burning rock, throwing a white tail so far beyond the moons, it brushed the stars like a feathery white ribbon. Dragon astronomers taught that the complex orbits of the five moons protected the Island-World from most of the dangerous cosmic debris, as evidenced by the heavily pockmarked face of the Yellow Moon. How had Numistar avoided a fiery impact against a moon? Her comet had visibly altered direction, Lia concluded, skirting Yellow as it speared down from high above the north-eastern horizon.\n\nPerhaps the creepiest aspect was the contrast between the knowledge of an unimaginable impact just moments away, and the utter silence that enveloped the Dragons.\n\n\"Shouldn't we warn someone?\" Lia asked, in a small voice.\n\nSapphurion's shrug betrayed his despair. \"What would it avail?\" But he turned to the watch-Dragons. <Warn our kin, and the Haters. Warn them, too.>\n\nSo still and clear was the night, Hualiama's Dragon sight could easily make out the massif of Chenak, lying a few points west of south from Dadak, and across the Cluster, Irak and its neighbouring Islands, and even Burak's white-tipped peaks cresting the horizon, one hundred and sixty-one leagues to the southeast. Northeast lay the terraced Island of Erak, its treble layers of gleaming lakes maintained just above freezing-point by no less than ninety-four hot springs. She had her draconic hunters working on fishing the lakes for grayling, whitefish and striped trout up there, as the rich fish oils appeared to work wonders for Dragons weakened by long captivity. Vitamins. Minerals. Hmm. If only she had access to Siiyumiel's capabilities, she could fatten up these Dragons no end.\n\nThat baleful light hung almost motionless in the sky, an illusion since the comet had to be travelling at a tremendous speed, yet from their perspective it seemed only to swell slightly as it approached.\n\n\"It's not one piece,\" said Sapphurion, lifting his paw to point.\n\nGrandion said:\n\n<A multitude of stars plummet\u2026>\n\nHualiama's wings quivered reflexively. Sapphurion's observation was accurate. If she focussed carefully, filtering her eyesight with her responsive nictitating membranes, she could make out at least seven separate nuclei within the comet, one much larger than the others.\n\nSapphurion said, \"Dragonkind see in a far wider spectrum than Humans, Lia. Again, we Blues are the masters of this skill. Remind me to teach you the theory. It's likely this ability will only manifest as you enter your fledgling years, but there are few rules where cheekily delightful Star Dragonesses are concerned.\"\n\nThe hulking Blue was twenty-five feet tall at the shoulder, one of the mightiest Dragons she knew, but even his voice betrayed a noticeable tremor as he spoke. Hualiama almost mentioned how sweet he was, even as he disguised undraconic fear behind a jest, but most Dragons would read insult into such a remark. Proud creatures. Often unbending, as she had once thought of Sapphurion\u2013yet he and Qualiana had taken an unprecedented risk in bringing a Human babe into their roost, and caring for her.\n\nImpulsively, she said, <Whatever happens, Sapphurion, you will always be my roost-father.>\n\nSuch a purring vibrated from his chest! For a moment, the dark-fires of anxiety cleared from his eyes, and the great Elder lifted his wing to snug her beneath as a fowl might gather a chick to her warm breast. There they stood, flank to flank, watching the comet quicken across the sky.\n\nGrandion chuckled, <Roost-father isn't even a Dragonish word. But it's perfect.>\n\nThe light waxed brighter, accelerating as it dove. Hualiama knew that no power in the Island-World could prevent what was to come. Numistar Winterborn, with monstrous guile and foresight, must have planned for this day thousands of years ago. She had concealed her intent from Fra'anior himself, taking herself into exile with the greatest of all Dragons, before marooning him somewhere in the beyond. Vile. Shrewd. Draconic to the core. These unsuspecting, innocent Land Dragons that awaited her impact\u2013poor Islands!\n\n<It's so quiet,> Grandion breathed.\n\n<Aye, I believe that means the comet would be travelling faster than the speed of sound, which is\u2013>Lia calculated rapidly\u2013<approximately two hundred and twenty leagues per hour. A shade above.>\n\n*Grr,* he growled, without menace.\n\nShe eyed him archly from beneath his father's wing. <Surely my mighty teacher is well-versed in the sciences?>\n\n*Grr!*\n\n<Out of the mouths of babes and hatchlings\u2013>\n\n*GRR!*\n\nImitating a piping Human child's voice, Lia said, \"I'm not scared of you, Gwandi, you big, bad Dwagon.\"\n\n<HA-HA-HA!> he snorted. \"Careful I do not dangle you by your tail and paddle your rascally behind.\"\n\nNervy joking must give way to wing-shivering awe. Faster and faster the comet streaked downward, burning through the atmosphere. No need for magnification now. The white corona flared and fizzed as the nuclei began to break up further, as far as Hualiama could tell, and though she exerted her best efforts, she could not detect any trace of Numistar within. Magic, aye. Magic that she\u2026 saw? Detected? Exactly how, she was rather less certain. A Balance-sense?\n\nThe comet would not fall into the Buffer Zone, as predicted, but rather closer to the centre of the western Cluster-Islands. Lia ascertained that main nucleus within was smaller than she had imagined, perhaps no more than a quarter-mile across. Still, that mass represented a quantity of velocity-energy that would detonate like the infamous hydrogen experiments of a Dragon scholar called Sartorax, a minion of Dramagon's who had famously blown a hole in the side of the Halls of the Dragons at Gi'ishior, vaporising himself along with a few laboratories and, the histories recorded somewhat randomly, a collection of unusual animal-horns from around the Island-World. Why would a historian bother to record that detail?\n\nShe heard Dragons pouring out onto the balcony behind her, but Lia had eyes only for the comet. Now, bathing the Island-massifs in its blinding glow, the true speed of approach became apparent, the explosive mix of rock, ice and gases stretching out like a single, vastly elongated star. She braced her paws. Closer. A whistling sound climbed the register, rising within seconds to a piercing pitch\u2013brace! Down. Down, impossibly rapid. The comet slammed into\u2026 nothingness. Hualiama gasped as the blazing mass shot into the Cloudlands like a crossbow bolt fired point-blank into a deer's flank.\n\nBlink. Gone.\n\n*KRRAAABOOMM!!* A sound-wave rolled belatedly across the Islands, crushing her against Sapphurion's side and causing the watching Dragonkind to cry out in alarm. The Cloudlands lapped and rippled outward from the point of impact, then sloshed back together as if a vast stone had been tossed into a lake.\n\nSuddenly, seconds later, the entire Island shuddered and tipped like a Dragonship catching a breeze. This caused a much louder outcry, a scrabbling of claws and the cross snapping of Dragons thrown against each other as the perturbation rippled outward. Sapphurion and Grandion dug in, for the entire Island swayed side-to-side. On the heels of the first, a second, far louder detonation conducted through their paws and hearing from far beneath the Cloudlands. Even the Tourmaline Dragon was struck to his knees; he shook his head drunkenly, which was exactly how Lia felt. Not even Dragon ear-canal muscles could have protected her from that terrible, echoing explosion. Gazing about rapidly, unsteady upon her paws, she saw Chenak and Irak swaying like trees lashed by a storm. Secondary and tertiary explosions continued to shake the Lost Islands, but the greatest shock was visible at Erak. A weird, fizzing sensation crawled beneath her scales. What? No!\n\nHualiama pointed northeast, wheezing, \"Great Islands. Grandion, no\u2026\"\n\nErak cracked into three distinct segments. Great sheets of white water cascaded briefly down its flanks as the peaks began to sink into the Cloudlands. Sluggishly. Hideously. A few Dragons fluttered bravely off the sinking peaks and issued from the exposed caves, but not many. A flotilla of nine Dragonships broke away, her amazing Dragon sight furnishing her the detail of people dangling from ropes; light blue robes fluttered briefly as several Dragon Enchanters lost their grip and fell into the Cloudlands.\n\n\"That's twenty-four thousand people! Oh, stop it, please\u2026 someone!\"\n\nHer plaintive wail vanished over the deeps. No Dragon could speak; Sapphurion put his paw over her back, and held Lia gently as the aftershocks continued. Erak dipped into the Cloudlands in terrifying silence, as if its knees had been cut from beneath it\u2013and perhaps they had, though Hualiama had no concept of what manner of legs it might take to support an Island's mass.\n\nIn a matter of little over three minutes after that initial impact, the last peak of Erak Island bowed away beneath the Cloudlands. Erased, forever.\n\nMeantime, as Dardak Island's rocking began to settle, a deep, animalistic groan resounded through the rock beneath their feet, clearly the cry of a beast in pain, confused and angry. So low was the sound, it was almost subliminal, felt as much as heard. Out between the Islands, the Cloudlands air slopped about like soup in a bowl. Hualiama stared. Was that a glow emanating from below? Aye, a whitish-red glow lit the clouds from beneath. Had the comet penetrated the very crust of the world, reaching to the fabled fires within? Had it given birth to a new volcano?\n\nDragons gathered to their left and right, watching in awed silence. Chakur. Jyrandia. A grizzled Grunt Elder, Tobak\u2013he could have been the shell-brother of Tome, who had honoured her at Sarzun Dragonhold. The groaning resounded again, sounding more like speech, this time. Lia's talons gashed the stone, disquieted.\n\nTobak grated, <We're moving.>\n\n<Moving?> Lia echoed.\n\nEvery Dragon looked around in surprise, as if they expected the stones to be marching off to the horizon in pairs.\n\n<Look.> His massive, gnarled grey paw swept above her head. <There's an eddy in the Cloudlands, directly alongside our Island. As yet tiny, but detectable. You can just about see Irak and Burak beginning to change orientation, see? Irak turns. Burak sails westward.>\n\nShe had to squint and screw up her brow-ridges to eventually grasp what the Grunt Elder had so effortlessly detected. Imagination? No, the Islands really were moving, at approximately the speed of a feral land-snail. Perhaps a quarter-mile an hour, her inner engineer asserted. Dragoness-Lia sent Humansoul a mental salute. <Clever, for a dancing dragonet.>\n\n<Pompous paw-prancer,> came the response. <How's about we ring in a few orders?>\n\n<By my fires, uh\u2026 such as?>\n\nHuman-Lia snorted, <My, don't we need to grow into our mischief-stirring paws? However, this is serious, Dragonsoul. You saw Erak die; we should prepare every Island for evacuation. Snip-snap, girlie. Get talking.>\n\n<Girlie? You'll pay for that!>\n\nHer stomach clenched. Humansoul was right. Not just light on her feet, was she? Slipping out from beneath Sapphurion's wing, Hualiama took a four-pawed stance that she knew had to look less than impressive in a twelve-foot hatchling. Yet the Tourmaline Dragon observed her mien, and immediately alerted the other Dragons with a commanding word. In three seconds, a hundred pairs of fire-eyes gazed down at her.\n\n\"Right,\" said Lia, in a grief-ravaged growl. \"We've work to do, Dragons. Jyrandia, I need your fastest fliers to wing to every stronghold and warn them to prepare for potential evacuation. We do not want to lose thousands more Dragons and Humans. Use Empress Azziala's name if necessary. Get it done. Grandion, go do the same for Affurion and his kin. We'll pay through the nose for flying out there again, but you're the only Dragon I know who can be certain that there is no lingering Command-hold lurking in his mind.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oath-magic links us.\"\n\nGrandion blinked slowly. \"How do you propose\u2013\"\n\n\"No time. Snap to it, Dragons! The day of Imbalance grows no younger.\"\n\nAs Jyrandia reeled off her orders, pair by pair, Dragons fanned out across a vivid display of aurora brightening the East. For a mere second, Hualiama's gaze lingered on the streamers and curtains of light appearing to play overhead, beauty to make her throat ache\u2013or was it the anguish of sensing the heart-crushing outcry of thousands of departed souls, a chill of Disharmony? Her paws felt numb, her hearts-beat laboured and purposeless. Grandion spoke to her, but Lia barely heard. Where was her spark of courage now?\n\n\"Come, Hualiama, we must fly to Chenak and brief the Empress,\" said Sapphurion, sternly but not without kindness.\n\nShe said, woodenly, \"Aye, noble Sapphurion. Grandion, fly strong and true.\"\n\n\"Aye, Dragoness. May you soar to the stars.\"\n\nHow did Dragons weep? How did any soul weep for the fate of her world?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Hualiama winged aloft, knowing not glorious flight, but a sapping sense of enervation and defeat. Defeat? Before the battle had even commenced? She beat her wings furiously, until even Sapphurion had to stretch his sinews to catch up with her, as if she were fleeing the scene of Numistar's homecoming. What form would the Ancient Dragoness take? At three-quarters of a mile in length, Amaryllion had been regarded as undersized, a mere waif. Hualiama could relate. The under-Cloudlands glow had already spread many leagues beyond the Lost Islands, the clouds churning slowly, as if ancient talons stirred a gruesome potion, preparing to rain destruction upon all creatures of the Island-World.\n\nThe Blue Elder gave her time and space, winging silently upon her right flank. She saw his great jaw set; his eyes dark and brooding, betraying the savage bent of his thoughts.\n\nSlowly, dawn spread her wings across the eastern horizon, flooding the skies with streaks of crimson, like the magnificent volcanic dawns of Fra'anior Cluster. Hualiama realised that a great quantity of dust and underworld gases must have been thrown up into the atmosphere by that explosion, for she tasted a strange rankness in the air, and she had sneezed grit out of her nostrils a dozen times already. The sensitive leading edges of her wings felt abraded.\n\nWithout preamble, Sapphurion said, <If your shell-mother was Istariela, o Blue-star\u2026>\n\nHer wingbeat stalled and snarled. He knew! And her reaction betrayed her as surely as a spoken word. Great leaping Islands\u2026\n\nHe growled, <You do not wish Grandion to know? I noticed you elided this information during our briefing several days ago, when you returned to Chenak. Is it not of the first importance?> She hung her head, feeling very much the youngling beneath his censure. <Yet, the seeking of your shell-mother's scale reveals your third heart, Hualiama. Is this matter not so grave, so intense and intimate, that to speak thereof resembles a form of sacrilege? And immodesty far exceeding ordinary draconic hubris?>\n\n<I have spoken with the Onyx, o Sapphurion,> she said, touched by how well he knew her.\n\nAye, I am the illicit shell-daughter of a towering draconic legend. Right. How well he touched her discomfort, her shame, her disinclination to accept that heritage.\n\nHe nodded. <Your life's flight begins to take shape. Was Fra'anior not said to be infertile?>\n\n<Istariela found a way.> He was halfway into an acknowledging tilt of his wingtips, when Lia added, <Without the Great Dragon's foreknowledge, or blessing.>\n\nSapphurion expelled a monstrous belch of flame. <What? Explain!>\n\nHer blue muzzle shook slowly, side to side, and the Elder knew what she did. There could be no understanding Istariela's motives if the White Dragoness chose to withhold the truth. This must be the scandal the lore-scrolls failed to pinpoint. For this reason, Onyx and White had fought, and for her transgression, Istariela had been banished to a place beyond knowing. Hualiama grasped one more truth\u2013one known also to Fra'anior. She was complicit in hiding her shell-mother. As an eggling she had somehow, through time and space, transferred to Istariela the power to elude the Onyx Dragon's grasp. Now, there was no way to bring her back. Perhaps it was Istariela who had banished herself for fear of Fra'anior's wrath? Her shell-father grieved that loss. All his terrible majesty poured into the pain of betrayal, expressed in storms and fire which had frightened an eggling-spirit into giving Istariela the White exactly what she needed\u2026 why? The question haunted her. Why?\n\nThe Sapphire Dragon's regard seared the air between them, his brain behind that gaze clearly raging like a bonfire, the thoughts sparking and boiling and coalescing within. He said, <I foresee this will become the crucial question of your life, Star Dragoness. The crux, upon which all will rise or fall. The heritage of Star Dragons has been cast into disrepute. You are the kinship-redeemer, the source, the weight of Fra'anior's paw upon our Island-World. You are restoration; never more truly, the promise-star.>\n\nShe fluttered along gamely, feeling ralti-stunned by the force of his words. It was too much, too grave and threatening and fragile, to grasp at once.\n\nFinally, Lia said, <Sapphurion, I will need your help in one matter.>\n\n<Star Dragoness?>\n\n<There is a soul-shadowing darkness upon my life, the heritage of> ruzal. <I cannot allow this spirit of Dramagon purchase upon my life, Sapphurion, for I am damaged and unstable, the product and focus of forces too great for any Dragoness to hold safely in her paw.>\n\nNow it was he whose wings drooped, dispirited. <I understand.>\n\n<Do you, o roost-father?>\n\n<You wish to cast off the Tourmaline, or at least, to distance yourself from him. I am not without sympathy. It is not pride, but fear and the spectre of events past, that causes this word to be spoken. Grandion\u2026 my shell-son may not readily understand. He will not give up.>\n\nHe would not understand at all. Hualiama whispered, <Aye.>\n\n<Yet I must counsel you with a word, if you will allow.> Noting her slight nod, he said, <A Dragoness must choose if she would fly alone, or together with wing-brothers and wing-sisters. Remember, o Dragoness; remember and honour those who would fly this course with you.>\n\nJust as solemnly as he, she said, <I promise to heed this word, roost-father.>\n\nUnexpectedly, he reached out and tipped her spine-spikes with a playful push of his right wingtip. <Besides, I don't see us giving you any choice in the matter. Respectfully. So you're welcome to crisp that in your little fire-stomach, Dragoness!>\n\nShe laughed so hard, Sapphurion had to rescue her from an ignominious fall from the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Four hours later, Hualiama stood before the Council of Haters in her raiment of Dragon scales, having strips torn off of her by her visibly infuriated mother. \"You issued orders in my name?\"\n\n\"Aye, mother.\"\n\n\"Prepare for evacuation. Pack essential belongings. Ready the Dragonships?\" Azziala's voice grew shriller with each phrase.\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"You created chaos! All my systems, my careful plans\u2013\"\n\n\"Perhaps you feel you can afford to lose another twenty-four thousand?\"\n\n\"You sent an envoy to Affurion!\"\n\n\"The worst form of treason, helping my own kind\u2013\" Azziala screamed a curse, but Lia forged on. \"Odd as it may appear to you, mother, these are also my people and I acted to protect them. Did I do wrong?\"\n\nOne of her new Councillors had the temerity to make an assenting noise. Azziala's staff, a heavy replica of the previous one she had smashed at her first meeting with Hualiama, blurred as she moved with infeasible speed. The heavy gemstone-tipped top end smacked into the woman's temple with a sickening, audible crack of bone. She slumped.\n\nGurzia knelt quickly, checking the pulse. \"Dead.\"\n\n\"I despise insolence,\" Azziala said, without inflection. \"Promote Payturki of Irak at once. Hualiama.\"\n\n\"Mother.\"\n\nNothing like a murder to ground her mother's mental state. Immediately upon braining one of her cohorts, the Empress exuded calm and control, acting as if nothing untoward had taken place. It took every ounce of Hualiama's willpower not to glance at the fresh corpse or run screaming from the room.\n\nUnholy windrocs, the woman was monstrous!\n\n\"Upon your lizard's return, you will blood him triple the normal amount and bring the offering to me. That is the punishment I decree.\" Lia tried to disguise her reaction. Triple! That would cripple the strongest Dragon. \"What you fail to understand, daughter, is that this lizard will betray, overpower and use you even as I was betrayed and used by your father. That is the nature of lizards. Worse, you are a freak. Dragons value the purity of their precious soul-fires above all else. Serve the lizards as you wish, it will avail you nothing. Eventually, he will turn on you. He must. It is inevitable.\"\n\nAgain, that peculiar, twisted tone of caring. This was a mother who thought of Reaving as a love-gift to her daughter. Lia lifted her chin. \"He will not.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Hualiama, how do lizards understand honour?\"\n\nBlood roared dizzily in her ears, filling her body with unbearable heat. She could not answer.\n\n\"Rule of law, right of paw,\" Azziala recited. \"He is no Dragon, who does not uphold the law. By your very existence, unless you defeat the possessing spirit, you will doom his. Grandion must destroy the freak, or himself suffer the fate of right of paw. The scales of draconic justice are clear.\"\n\nHow had the Empress come to understand draconic law so well? Did she make a closer study of the Dragonkind than she dared to admit, seeking out any and all weak points in their society as much as their psyche? Once more, Azziala's acuity reigned supreme. Slowly, she hemmed Lia in, closing the jaws of her trap.\n\nThe Empress urged, \"Just let me in, Hualiama. I will cleanse your soul of the lizard, of ruzal, of all that besets your life. No? How very strong-willed you must think you are.\"\n\nShe forced herself not to divulge how deeply her mother's words distressed her. \"We must plan for Numistar.\"\n\nTurning to her Councillors, Azziala said, \"Once more, my daughter's intelligence and insight has proved its worth. We have learned we dwell atop the backs of the accursed lizards. This is an examination. A Reaving of our collective will. Dramagon's purposes must be known. Therefore, gather my Dragon Enchanters from every Isle and fortress, every one that can be spared. It is time to put our Controls to the test, to harness these Land Dragons to our cause. Two days.\"\n\nHualiama could not resist. \"Far quicker if you flew Dragonback.\"\n\nThe golden eyes narrowed. \"Perhaps you'd prefer to blood your brother instead?\"\n\n[ Sailing the Deeps ]\n\nA DAY LATER, Human-Lia stood atop the still-frozen heights of Chenak Island, waiting for the Dragon. Her Dragon. Dreading what must be said. She was not too preoccupied to take note of the minutest changes in her surrounds, as if her inner Dragoness sharpened her senses even further than normal\u2013she noted the slightly elevated temperature of the Land Dragon's breath, and the increased frequency of its exhalations, close to one every two hours, now. The redolence of cinnamon-vanilla magic had increased exponentially. Puffy clouds of condensation poured from each of the Land Dragon's nostrils, forty-five in all, scattered all across Chenak Island. Formerly Chenak, she should say. The great Island-beast must have its own name\u2013which probably took a week to utter in grinding rock-speak, she imagined.\n\nBehind, behaving exactly like a flotilla of Dragonships, came the rest of the Lost Islands, clustered together as though by family group or affiliation. Burak Island had split into five separate beasts, and after a manoeuvre of disquieting facility, lay clustered together just ten leagues East of her position now, sailing along on a roughly parallel course of five compass points West of due South. Further back, obscured by a band of bad weather, the rest of the Islands had only just begun their glacially slow migration\u2013hopefully, including Sarzun Dragonhold. She would not know until Grandion returned.\n\nOf more apposite concern was the fact that the whitish disturbance in the Cloudlands had spread beyond their present position. Lia could not imagine what changes might be taking place down there, but whatever was brewing in the cauldron of the deeps, it could not be good news.\n\nThe wind from the North was a bitter bully, cutting effortlessly through her thick woollen dress, woollen undergarments and even thicker, fur-lined leather jacket, gloves, scarf and the strange hats these Lost Islanders wore outdoors, with their side-flaps tied by thongs beneath her chin. Well, she appreciated the protection for her pointy ears. She could feel neither fingers nor toes, nor ears nor her nose. Charming location. Give her a nice volcano to sit upon any day.\n\nActually, volcano-sitting was technically possible for a Dragoness. Wow. She giggled with peculiar solemnity.\n\nThe black, heavy cloudbank blanketing the northern horizon remained impenetrable to Human vision. No surprises there. A certain Tourmaline Dragon stubbornly refused to make his grand appearance. With a burdened sigh, Lia retraced her steps via the elevator shaft to her chambers, outfitted for Lost Islands royalty. Shutting the door, she padded over to the fireplace\u2013one of few allowable luxuries\u2013added three dark jalkwood logs, and poked the coals rather listlessly until they deigned to display a few sparks of life. She kicked off her heavy, fur-lined orrican hide boots and used one bare toe to nudge the rush basket containing her white dragonet's egg closer to the warmth. If it was a dragonet, and not some other base form of Dragonkind concocted by Dramagon's obscene experiments\u2026\n\nStinking windrocs! In a brief but satisfying fit of petulance, she divested the rest of her cold-weather clothing and flung the items in various directions around the room. Yinzi would grumble at the mess. Ha. Lia slipped into soft, fresh undergarments of a cotton-like cloth made from huzik plant-fibres, and a white linen smock such as those worn by Lost Islands girls, only, the 'standard' size reached to her knees. Decent. The material was rather sheer, but since the undergarments resembled the grandmother-issue coverall variety of ladies' attire, Hualiama chortled to herself, she might just take the risk. Even Eastern Isles warriors managed to manufacture more comely undergarments\u2013but they also did not go ripping them to shreds when their Human form morphed into a Dragoness.\n\nLong habit made Lia set her Nuyallith blades close at hand, before she returned to contemplating the egg. Was it snug enough? The right temperature? Sapphurion said that Dragon eggs incubated at precisely seventy-three degrees, a temperature the brooding mother Dragon maintained by heating her body as she curled around her eggs. Dragonets were different, however. Perhaps she should sit on the egg? Brood over and sing to it, as her shell-mother had sung over Lia's egg?\n\nVery softly, Hualiama sang the opening lines of one of her favourite ballads:\n\n<Alas for the fair peaks, my love, my fierce love,>\n\n<Alas for the scorching winds, which stole thee away\u2026>\n\nThat melancholy song had been one of Flicker's favourites, she remembered. It spoke of the abiding love of a Dragon and Dragoness separated by many long leagues, as she and Grandion had been unwittingly separated, and as death now separated her from her dearest and truest friend. Oh, Flicker! What she would not give to feel his hot little paw wind its way around her neck one more time, or the nip of his fangs as he threatened her earlobe with a fate most horrific. Straw-head. That was his preferred insult. Snarky little pest. He had made up a whole library of insults especially for her\u2013but Flicker had given his life to protect her from Ra'aba, valiant to the tragic end.\n\nA tear plinked down on the egg with a curiously musical sound.\n\nCrossly, Hualiama reached out to wipe the shell dry with her fingertips. \"Ouch! What?\"\n\nShe sucked her right forefinger by instinct, then checked the tip. Cut? Pinprick? No. She glanced sidelong at the egg, smooth and innocent and\u2026 oh. Alive? Was there hint of flame which spoke to the flame within her?\n\nCharily, she reached out. <Sulphurous greetings, little one.> Nothing. Still, the tough, jewel-like surface felt chill, as if the heat of the fire were not quite the right sort of heat or\u2026 Hualiama slipped her hands tenderly around the egg and cupped it to her cheek, then into the crook of her neck, as Qualiana had once cradled the life of a Human babe.\n\n\"Not much of a mother, am I, if I don't know the simplest things\u2026\"\n\nBody heat. Contact. Queen Shyana taught classes for expectant Fra'aniorian mothers, and one of her mantras was the need for connection between mother and baby from the time of conception onward. Babies heard, sensed and responded far earlier than mothers imagined, she said. Babies thrived on contact, preferably skin to skin, and interaction with parents, carers and siblings. Did Hualiama not know this truth for herself, her earliest Human memories being the haunting echoes of hatred, death, and a flight across the Island-World in a mad Dragoness' paw, which had nigh killed her?\n\nThe egg seemed dormant now, but Lia knew what she had felt\u2013just the briefest flicker, as if a candle guttered in a strong breeze.\n\nSparks must be fanned into life. Fires, stoked.\n\nHualiama sang:\n\n<Gliding, soaring, dipping over the brow of the Island-World,>\n\n<Suns in our faces, wind buoying our wings\u2026>\n\nWeeping quietly over the egg, holding it against the pulse of her neck, she curled into a foetal position on the rug. Willing the flame to return, to flicker into life. Should her warmth drive away the freeze of a thousand years? Impossible. Yet she crooned:\n\n<Freedom to roam as widely as our hearts desire.>\n\n<Moon-riding, windroc-hiding, tickling the clouds with our toes\u2026>\n\nShe did not know how long she lay there, communing with the egg by the fireside, when she sensed movement, perhaps the furtive scuff of a foot upon the thick, brown orrican-fur carpet.\n\nSnatch up a blade! Leap, whirl\u2026 what?\n\nHer hands stayed the blow, juddering with the force of her shock.\n\nTransported through time, six years funnelled into the space between heartbeats. Before her, his hands carefully held apart to indicate a lack of threat, stood a young man clad in the purple of the Fra'aniorian Royal Guard. A decidedly leopard young man. Her sword-point would not stop quivering. Lia began to lift a hand self-consciously to her hair, but the limb refused to obey. For what arrested her was neither his uniform nor the powerful, muscled frame with its trim waist set off by broad shoulders, nor the flip of jet-black hair that softened a noble brow. It was his eyes, crinkled up by his smile, which etched familiar striations in the young man's cheeks and around his mouth as if he was much accustomed to smiling, particularly at weak-kneed royal wards.\n\nBlue eyes. Eyes of inhuman, sparkling gemstone hue. Tourmaline blue.\n\n\"G-G-G\u2026\" Hualiama spluttered. Ugh. She was not a blushing sixteen anymore! \"Get out! I mean, what are you doing here? Stinking windroc eggs! Are you\u2026 Grandion?\"\n\nThe smile only broadened. Great Islands, he was tall, and how dare he appear so perfect and ultra-leopard and toy with her heart like this? Despicable Dragon!\n\nShe heard Flicker's voice echo in her memory, his dying words. <Silly, beautiful fire-eyes. Choose the Dragon. He's a rascal, but a noble one.> Noble? She'd have his ruddy noble head with one swish of her blade! That, or she would be obliged to kiss him. Immediately. And evermore.\n\nThe blade moved, but Lia halted the forward thrust an inch from his neck. \"How real is this projection, Grandion?\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026 real enough to bleed,\" he said, his smirk slipping toward alarm. \"Probably real enough to die.\"\n\n\"Where are you, right now?\"\n\n\"Mostly here, but my residual consciousness remains with my Dragon body at Sarzun Dragonhold. I'm stuck behind the storm.\" She growled ominously. How formidable must he be to project over so many leagues? \"A storm of volcanic particles, toxic gases, strange winds and powerful magic, Lia. We Dragons have never seen anything like it.\"\n\nBriefly, an image of a downward-pointing whirlwind slipped into her mind. Rocks and ash roared around in a circle, together with a bluish glow of electrical discharge or magic, funnelling down into the Cloudlands.\n\n\"Numistar's work,\" said Human-Grandion, unnecessarily. \"Affurion ordered all Dragons to take shelter and wait out the storm. I will return as soon as I am able. And, may I note how divine you look, o Princess?\"\n\n\"No, you may not!\"\n\n\"The facts are incontrovertible.\"\n\n\"Roaring rajals, you rock-headed, insensitive\u2026 splodge of windroc spit!\" The man flickered noticeably as the Dragon's control slipped beneath the heat of her ire. \"This is not real! How dare you sashay in here all inhumanly fit and gorgeous and oh-so-kissable, and be a construct of your benightedly sneaky Projection magic\u2013don't you see? I want you; I need you so desperately and I can't have you and this does not help! Neither on this Island, nor any Island of the future!\"\n\nHualiama lowered the sword before she yielded to the temptation to carve her feelings into his flesh. On second thoughts, she put the weapon down on a plain table, which held a clay water jug and a small basket of bread. Safer.\n\n\"Hualiama.\" The gravel, the hurt in his voice!\n\n\"Grandion, stop.\"\n\n\"Lia, my nature is to burn truly, to burn so brightly that only truth can remain in that crucible.\" He stepped toward her; she retreated behind the low table, crossing her arms as if to ward off the ardent Dragon's regard. \"I am fire, Hualiama. I blaze, but I will never consume you. I promise, upon my wings, that I will never hurt you again.\"\n\n\"Don't make promises you can't keep.\"\n\nThe tourmaline eyes pleaded, a blue so intense, Lia gasped and floundered as if she were drowning. He said, \"Did we not breathe soul-fire together?\"\n\n\"Stop! Please, Grandion. You are a Dragon and right now, I am Human and this\u2026 this\u2026 it freaks me out, it's so wrong and perverse, seeing you in the guise of a man\u2026 ugh!\" Hualiama squeezed her eyes shut, fighting for control, holding the dragonet's egg against her stomach. \"I cannot destroy your honour, for that would drag you to destruction. I'm no good for you, Grandion.\"\n\n\"Good?\" He stopped just beside the table, close enough to touch, the chiselled fingers held out as he pleaded, \"You're more than good for me. You're my fire-life, the song of my wings, the breath\u2013\"\n\n\"I'm a freak! A ruzal-tainted freak!\"\n\nShe wept a storm, more than startled to hear a crackle and smell a faint tang of ozone in the room. Had she done this?\n\nGrandion responded at once by singing, very softly, <How do you love the fire?>\n\nYet she had not become the fire, as they had sung together. She had become one-of-a-kind, the loneliest of all creatures. She had tempted this beautiful Dragon into transgressing the deepest mores of his kind; now, he acted unrepentant. Worse, her treacherous heart\u2013he was not attractive! No! He was thirty-plus tons of magical lizard, so love could never factor in the equation\u2026 oh, the damage she had wrought! Why would her traitorous heart not listen? The pain, stabbing through her abdomen in a ghastly echo of Ra'aba's wounding attack\u2026\n\nEver so tenderly, his left hand caressed her cheek, fingered the strands of her long hair and then thumbed away the tears collecting in the corner of her eye. Hualiama could not trust herself to look at him. Love an image? Tempting. Just pretend all was well. If the physiological processes which had formed the warm hand, the caring touch, and the timbre of his voice could be so perfect, what did the metaphysical side matter? Except for that flicker. And the thousand details she knew she would soon regret, like the burning temperature of his skin and the unnatural light in the eyes and his scent, unmistakably draconic. That hint of cinnamon was a dousing of cold reality. Still Dragonkind. Still forbidden.\n\nGrandion said, \"If this is painful to you, Hualiama, then know that my pain is as real as yours. Yet no matter how much you fear our oaths, you cannot hide from them.\"\n\nHad he conferred with Sapphurion? Had the older Dragon betrayed her confidence?\n\nHe added, \"I believe in the power of oath-magic. Not blindly, but with dark-fires and trembling\u2013even I, a mighty Dragon.\"\n\nUnable to hold back any longer, Hualiama lifted her gaze to search his eyes. The magic was crystal-clear, but the host of feelings she saw seething there, far less so. Panic thrashed her heart. Had she succeeded in driving him away? Truly? No! Come back, my Dragon! Come back!\n\nHe said, \"These oaths will bring us together again, without a shadow of dark-fire doubt. Yet the time of that flight lies, as yet, at an unseen juncture of our lives. So, I am not returning to you. Not yet.\"\n\nShe bit her tongue rather than cry, 'No!' More separation? Could she bear to live?\n\nLacing his fingers into hers, Grandion the man drew her irresistibly to her feet. \"Aye, I am Dragonkind, as patient as the seasons are long. I never forget a promise. I bid you watch the skies for sign of a Tourmaline Dragon, Hualiama of Fra'anior, Shapeshifter Princess.\"\n\n\"Grandion!\" Her fingers clutched his, painfully tight. \"Where are you going?\"\n\nFor a moment, his free hand stroked the fingers of her left hand, still cradling the dragonet's egg, as if seeking to imprint upon her heart a message of caring, of faith that the flame could still burn in the most adverse of circumstances. Then he slipped that hand behind the nape of her neck\u2013a touch awkwardly, as though he had once observed the gesture but did not quite know how to reproduce it\u2013and his heated lips pressed against the blonde crown of her head. Again, the muscles did not move as required for a proper kiss. Grr. She should teach him\u2026 if she succumbed to the sweetest burning\u2026\n\n\"Tickles,\" he guffawed, rubbing his lips. \"After an unspecified number of days I intend to spend with Affurion's kin, working on a few ideas and passing on some teaching, I will depart on a personal mission which I am confident will be of infinitely greater value to you than a return to Chenak, which places me at risk of being used as a pawn to secure your good behaviour.\"\n\n\"You're downright infuriating,\" she congratulated him.\n\n\"I certainly hope so,\" he agreed, beginning to fade. \"Besides, this should free you\u2013\"\n\n\"Grandion!\"\n\n\"Magic\u2026 interference\u2026\"\n\nHis image wavered, before solidifying again. Hualiama took that moment to throw her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek to his stalwart, uniformed chest. Oh. Three hearts? Evidently, the Dragon's anatomical knowledge needed a touch of adjustment. The real danger lay in her visceral response to his entrancing beauty.\n\nShe said, \"Be careful out there.\"\n\n\"I will never stop\u2013\"\n\nHualiama stumbled forward into nothingness. A sharp cry escaped her lips, quickly crushed between her teeth. Aye, well done, Island girl. She had chased away her Dragon. Provisionally. Whereupon he had turned around and unveiled a plan which must have been brewing in his devious lizard-mind all along. She had earned herself a draconic stalker. Marvellous. And a Cloudlands ocean of heartache, a new source of worry, and another cup of her dear mother's bile\u2026\n\nWhat would he never stop? Loving her?\n\nRaising the egg to the firelight, she saluted the absent Tourmaline Dragon drolly. \"Shall you and I watch the skies, o most noble and puissant egg? That's the problem with Dragons, and Human Princesses, for that matter. We're both as stubborn as the foundations of our Islands are deep.\"\n\nThe memory of Flicker's dry laughter made her smile.\n\nStraw-head."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "The following afternoon, Hualiama stood on the forward gantry of her mother's Dragonship, watching the last stragglers of Azziala's forces gathering around Chenak. The weather ahead was glorious. The weather aft, diabolical. Lia had seen Fra'aniorian thunderstorms aplenty. The huge, open caldera generated unique forms of weather worthy of celebration by the balladeers, such as ball lightning, wind-shear so powerful it tore Dragonships in half, and localised 'liquid ice' updrafts which had several times snatched unwary Dragons into the skies, immobilised them in icy tombs, and hours later dashed the hapless creatures to the ground in a shattering explosion.\n\nThe sky behind, for want of a better word, looked hungry. Clouds of a night-dark, filthy green hue appeared to boil up out of the Cloudlands over a storm-front thirty leagues wide and four high, a rampart so great, Sapphurion said, that no Dragon could fly over it. A number of previously Human-controlled Islands, which had been observed to be on the move, now lay behind that barrier, along with all of the Dragon Territory. The previous evening, Azziala had ordered Lia to despatch a Dragon team to investigate. Five Dragons had tried to fly around the storm, vanished, and so far had not reappeared.\n\nThe storm-front kept pace\u2013exact pace\u2013with their progress, which had accelerated to an estimated two and a half leagues per hour. At this rate they should cover the fourteen hundred leagues to Kerdani City in a matter of seventeen further days' travel.\n\n\"What's this nonsense? Blue hair?\" Azziala said coldly, flipping Hualiama's braid over her shoulder.\n\n\"Whaaa\u2013\"\n\n\"Even more freakish than usual, daughter. Now we're playing with hair dye?\"\n\n<Dragonsoul, you are in so much trouble!>\n\n<Not my doing.> Dragon-Lia sounded three-quarters asleep. How was that possible? Souls slept? She could tell that other-Lia slept in whatever realm or plane of existence she inhabited now?\n\nHuman-Lia settled for a shrug. \"Only so much fun you Dragon-Haters have in the evenings.\"\n\nThe Empress vented a snort of pure disgust. \"Frivolous child! Ready your Dragons. I want our utmost resources available when we take control of this beast.\"\n\n\"They are not used to operating in a mental network\u2013\"\n\n\"Then my lizard-daughter had best work on convincing them, hadn't she? Where's that vile Tourmaline of yours, the one who's always panting around your skirts?\"\n\n\"He took off, mother,\" Lia said honestly.\n\n\"Ha. I knew it.\"\n\nHualiama tried to school her expression into that of a demure, dutiful daughter, although the idea itched like a rough monkish shirt. \"Aye.\"\n\nAzziala said, \"Ready the Dragons!\"\n\n<Ready, Sapphurion?>\n\nSapphurion, leading a team of fifteen Blues and Mizuki in addition, each in turn responsible for a hundred further Dragons, nodded from his position near the Place of Reaving on the peak of Chenak Island. <Ready.>\n\nUsing her tightest telepathic shielding, Lia added, <If you happened to accidentally knock that archway over, noble Sapphurion, I wouldn't be ungrateful.>\n\nThe crimson of battle-fury shaded Sapphurion's reply. <Let no enemy stand!>\n\n\"Ready,\" said Hualiama.\n\nAbruptly more awake, her inner Dragoness whispered, <You focus on not getting our brain fried. I'll work on keeping Human-mother out. Did you not perceive her plan?>\n\n<Ah\u2026 no,> she admitted.\n\n<Thankfully, we've a few tricks up our sleeve\u2013see? Pretty mental shields.>\n\nHuman-Lia's mind spun. <What? Girl-Dragon, that's awesome\u2026 what is it?>\n\n<Naturally, I am awesomeness with wings.>\n\nUgh. Some aspects of being a Dragon were not so desirable. Excessive smugness and boasting probably topped her list.\n\nAn amused thought entered her head that actually, the shield-schematic she perceived was a result of Grandion's work with Siiyumiel, a multi-layered or multi-phasic shielding methodology. As she examined and began to grasp how the magical constructs interrelated and buttressed each other, her inner engineer was turning mental cartwheels, making Dragonsoul wriggle\u2013as best she could describe the sensation\u2013with satisfaction. Filters. Deflectors. Lockdown protocols. Something called flash-armour. The nuances of environment-detection which triggered different responses or phases, from mental attack to physical jeopardy. Human-Lia frowned. She was unconvinced, particularly regarding the layered responses to the Command-hold which attempted to isolate the basal physiological and emotional processes from the higher mental functions. Efficiencies could be gained. Aye. Given opportunity\u2026\n\nSiiyumiel had taught her that a Star Dragoness had a skill aside from all of Grandion's fantastically complex machinations, called a psychic bastion or bastion-ward, and this was the innate power which had rendered her mind impervious to Azziala and her Haters while Hualiama had lain unconscious. Moreover, the psychic bastion actually absorbed magical power directed at it and reflected that power back at an attacker in the form of a highly focussed psychic blast. That was the fate of half of Azziala's previous Council members. Dragons' talons! Her Star Dragoness could do all this?\n\n<We need to study this together, Dragonsoul,> she told herself.\n\n<What, you think you can better centuries of draconic scientific development?>\n\nHualiama bit her lip. <I wasn't trying to start an argument with myself, so you can just tone it down in there!>\n\nGreat. Her schizophrenia was evolving nicely. And her sneaky Dragoness had turned her hair blue. Or did that mean she was Dragoness-Lia? The Dragoness having supplanted her Human form\u2026 oh, honestly. Had the eggling-spirit not protected the Human babe since before she was born? Survival first, another nasty little thought intruded\u2013for what was the alternative? Death. Thereafter, Human-Lia had ignored\u2013or suppressed\u2013the Dragoness for two decades. Who owed whom in this scenario?\n\nAnd then, she had no more time for thought.\n\nShe stood beneath a waterfall. Magic pounded through her, such a draw that she crashed to her knees, clutching the metal safety rail instinctively.\n\n<DRAGON, OBEY!>\n\nThe monstrous Command, the concerted effort of eight thousand Dragon-Haters supplemented by close to one thousand seven hundred Dragonkind, rolled across the deeps like subterranean thunder. To a beast, the Lesser Dragons recoiled as though struck by an earthquake. Hualiama sensed fully a third of her Dragon array fall away instantly, overcome by the backlash even though the Command was not directed at them. She fed back through the link, through Sapphurion and his Blues, lifting up the Dragons with a warm touch. <Be strong. Direct your thoughts here, to the white-fires\u2026> unexpectedly, she stood amongst a vast congregation of glittering Dragon minds, as though a constellation of stars had gathered about the Star Dragoness.\n\nGravely, she bowed. She had no need to imagine the dark blue wings that spread in honour, the muzzle that bowed in a gesture of the deepest respect. <I will serve thee. Arise and burn, my brethren.>\n\nThe minds rallied beneath her direction. The ranks reformed, the links between them swelling with strength, glowing with re-established power. Fed through Hualiama, the Empress' power swelled to incandescent enormity, as if the woman herself grew to a giant's stature.\n\nLining the gantries of five hundred Dragonships, which were gathered so thickly in the skies above Chenak that a preternatural twilight enshrouded the peaks, the blue-clad Dragon-Haters bent their collective will, together with Azziala, to the subjugation of a mighty draconic mind. Lia had suggested her mother should experiment upon a smaller foe, but that clearly offended the Empress. Chenak's Land Dragon was twenty times the size of any of Burak's five, a hoary beast with a mind as strong as mountains.\n\nUnder the unbearable strain of mental attack, the creature bellowed her challenge, <YIISURIEL-AP-YURON!!>\n\nA Land Dragoness, Lia realised, reeling beneath the minutes-long roaring of her draconic name, the syllables crashing over the massed Dragon Enchanters like tidal waves of Cloudlands darkness. Angered, Yiisuriel sought to simply drown out Azziala's forces. Several dozen Dragon Enchanters pitched overboard from their vessels, overwhelmed by the clash of powers; a lucky half-dozen fell upon the narrow sacks of the Dragonships flying beneath them, but the balance fell hundreds of feet to their deaths. Many others slumped upon the gantries, insensible.\n\n<To me!> Azziala's mental grip held them; simultaneously, she demanded more of Hualiama. <More power, daughter. Rouse those lousy, lazy lizards! I need MORE!>\n\nHer mind was afire. She gripped the guardrail so hard, Lia felt the metal bend. Monstrous, her strength. Draconic. Yet she must not reveal her Dragoness-presence\u2026 metallic-tasting blood streamed from the inside of her bitten cheek, yet Hualiama felt her knees lock. She rose. Somewhere near at hand, her Dragoness lifted her, supplementing her strength where Human flesh must fail.\n\nHer mother's determination would allow no reverse. Azziala was a creature forged of matter beyond flesh, adamantine and unbending, even as the titanic force she wielded met its match in the Land Dragon beneath them. For her part, Lia still supplied the collective magic of over twelve hundred Dragonkind. Fighting another Dragon. How could this end well?\n\nWrong! Traitor! Yet, she must not waver.\n\nHualiama straightened her shoulders. Courage, Human girl! For the freedom of the Dragons, one must fall. <Here, mother. Take it all.>\n\nAs she quarried deep, a picture of a lens suddenly entered her mind. Starlight could not exist in isolation. Dragons said that starlight sprang from the hottest, most unadulterated fires of all, the luminous hearts of stars. Only because of that unimaginable inner furnace, could starlight ever shine forth.\n\nHer power shifted the draconic magic into focus. Modulating the quantitative draw, Hualiama shone as never before. <Try this, mother.>\n\nHer Dragoness echoed, <Be incinerated\u2026>\n\n<Yeeeessss!> cried Azziala, raising her fists to the sky. <Oh yes, Hualiama! I knew you would see the Way!>\n\nYiisuriel quailed. Her song guttered, all effort now given over to shoring up her failing defences. The Empress bore down with an ugly, triumphant cry.\n\nThat was when instinct swung Hualiama about so sharply, she wrenched her neck. A disturbance in the Cloudlands. A swelling of clouds. Two leagues off, closing fast. The awareness of a huge, familiar magic, and titanic, lashing surge of Dragonsong that washed her vision with crimson. She froze. At that speed, that momentum\u2026 the Land Dragon's mountainous shell surged upward, forging directly toward her position, roughly six hundred feet above the centre of Chenak Island, a stone's throw East of the Place of Reaving.\n\nA new, monumental battle-challenge split the late afternoon like an echo of the comet's explosion.\n\n<SIIYUMIEL!!>\n\n[ Of Pests and Miracles ]\n\nSqually winds scudded ahead of Siiyumiel's charge, buffeting the Dragonship fleet. The two hundred-foot balloons swayed violently, cutting across each other's paths and snarling hawsers and crumpling navigation cabins. Navigators shouted contradictory orders as the four manual propulsion teams of each Dragonship set to working the turbines. Five men per group each grabbed spokes of the wheel-drives, which were horizontal, spoked wheels seven feet in diameter, mounted in the belly of each vessel. Driven by teams of drive-labourers in perpetual revolutions, they provided the main propulsion\u2013unlike Lia's hot-air-powered solo Dragonship. The cumbersome airships rose and sank and shuddered as the relentless wind bullied and beat them away from Chenak.\n\nThe Dragons' mental co-operation disintegrated in a heartbeat as the Dragonkind bolted instinctively for the skies, intent on saving their own hides\u2013save Sapphurion. He rallied the Fra'aniorian Dragons with a series of sharp commands and led them skyward.\n\nHualiama found herself stranded on the bow of her Dragonship as it slewed slowly, too slowly, onto a more southerly bearing. Siiyumiel's passage cleft the dirty grey Cloudlands, his progress somehow both stately and unbelievably rapid. His course bent, tracking the Dragonships. No, her Dragonship. His head breached the open air, this time not extended far from his open shell, but his seven blazing white eyes were no less striking. Two miles. One. Relentlessly, he surged from the deeps as though drawn by hawsers flung around unimaginable pulleys attached to the Yellow Moon, higher and higher, driving an oblique course across the nose of his fellow Land Dragon.\n\n<DRAGON, OBEY!> roared Azziala.\n\nSiiyumiel responded with a screech of Disharmony that nearly lifted Lia's head off her shoulders. She and every soul on her Dragonship crumpled to their knees, clutching their ears in agony. Through tears, she saw his white eye-beam strike out. Vessels exploded, sliced apart as if by perfect, surgical knife-strokes.\n\nTorched by a brief touch of Siiyumiel's light, the Dragonship cabin behind her back exploded in a ball of flame, blowing Lia off the gantry.\n\n<KEEERRUMMP!> The Land Dragon collided with Chenak. Brutal as that collision was, Siiyumiel's momentum carried him up and over the Island's flat nose. As he ground and smashed boulders the size of houses beneath his body, four or five monstrous paws lashed out, corralling vessels and Dragons with indiscriminate abandon, yet Hualiama could not help but conclude that he had one purpose, and one purpose only\u2013to show a Star Dragoness what it was to be a mosquito swatted against a wall. That image beat against her consciousness with alien insistence. Dash the traitor against the Island. Splatter her brains with his paw.\n\nAbove her tumbling body, Siiyumiel's onrushing mountains eclipsed the suns. Here he came. Falling. Chasing her toward the Cloudlands.\n\nHualiama cried out inwardly, <Oh Dragon, please\u2013>\n\n<Always. Be me.>\n\nFor the first time, Hualiama triggered the Shift-magic deliberately. Desperation wrung the needed power from her body. Infolding, her humanity was sucked away somehow into or through a rippling convergence with the simultaneous unfolding of her Dragon-self. *Whomp.* Air displaced softly around her, as if disquieted by her sudden bulk. Lia made frantic grabs for her precious items\u2013the egg, worn in a small sling-bag beneath her tunic top, her Nuyallith blades and, oh! With the new, elongated thong she had thoughtfully tied to the white scale, the necklace fit her Dragoness' slender neck perfectly. She had just begun to congratulate herself when a spar of debris pierced her right flank. Pain! She barrel-rolled and ricocheted first against the edge of Siiyumiel's descending paw, and then off a rocky Island outcropping. *Thump. Crash.* She somersaulted away, somehow airborne again, inanely preoccupied with trying to decide if she still possessed all of her teeth. Fangs. She would feel these bruises, alright.\n\n<DRAGON, YOU WILL DIE!>\n\nAzziala's voice rose once more above the battle.\n\nNo! Lia glanced about frantically. Sapphurion, Mizuki\u2013where was the Copper Dragoness in this delightful windroc's breakfast?\n\nHer three hearts clenched horrendously inside her neck, chest and stomach as the Empress' vile magic lashed out, ruzal-like in its twisting of reality, corrupting all that was hale and sound into the antithesis of what should be. Siiyumiel voiced a ghastly, animalistic groan on the vocal, mental, emotional and subliminal levels, freezing the golden blood in her arteries. Injured, even such a beast as he! Never had Lia known power to compare to what her mother wielded. Only\u2026 had she learned it from ruzal? From Lia herself?\n\nMomentarily, the Star Dragoness fluttered free, trying to collect her senses.\n\n<Caught you!> Mizuki cried, with a snatch of her paw followed at the speed of thought by, <Oh, unholy\u2013>\n\n*THUD!*\n\nTwo Dragonesses and two Dragon Riders thumped into the relatively soft, flexible Dragon hide just where Siiyumiel's neck exited the lip of his carapace. Hualiama tried to scramble to her paws, but the corkscrewing momentum of Siiyumiel's fall pinned her in place. His neck twisted as it withdrew, trapping her left hind leg in the thick folds of his skin.\n\n<Mizuki!> she wailed.\n\n<Quickly, to me!> cried the Copper Dragoness, but her abortive leap only slammed her against the lip of Siiyumiel's carapace. She rebounded with a snarl.\n\nThe din sounded as if two mountains had engaged in a bout of fisticuffs. Yiisuriel dipped beneath Siiyumiel's great weight, rolling his body off the front of her Island\u2013her nose, perhaps, although where exactly that started or ended was anyone's guess. Try as she might, Hualiama could not break free of her Dragon hide prison. Mizuki pulled desperately at her shoulders, but had to dodge away as her wings came in danger of being similarly trapped.\n\n\"Get out, Lia!\" yelled Saori. \"Get out!\"\n\nElki just looked green.\n\nSiiyumiel's gnarled, thick neck obscured the sky. Rock spun past them. Now, the bulge of his retreating head pulled them inward, the body parts folding back together like a perfectly-fitting jigsaw, blotting out the blurred scenery as the Land Dragon took action to protect himself. Hualiama screamed and struggled wildly. No help. The folds of tough Dragon hide had engulfed her entire hindquarters and were slowly but surely crushing her ribs\u2013or would have, save that Mizuki thrust her own, much larger leg alongside Lia's torso to be similarly trapped, securing space to breathe. Just.\n\nFour or five times, massive impacts shook Siiyumiel's body. Then there was eerie, unending silence. Falling into nothingness.\n\nPrince Elki squeaked, \"Oh, windroc poo. I think we've gone and fallen into the Cloudlands.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Affurion the Brown came to stand alongside Grandion the Tourmaline. <So melancholy, wing-brother?>\n\nGrandion lifted his clenched right paw, staring at the space left where his talons curled back to the palm. <Would you believe, Affurion, that I held a star, and let her escape? Such a fool has never lived, or flown, or crawled beneath the Islands upon his belly like a worm. I am a craven\u2026 WORM!>\n\nHis thundering echoed around the caverns where the Lost Islands Dragonkind roosted, protected from the powerful, poisonous storms without. Many growled or snorted fire in response; a number of hatchlings chirped in alarm at the raw hearts-fire exposed by that cry, and dived beneath their shell-mothers' wings.\n\nShaking, the Tourmaline added a very undraconic, <SORRY!>\n\nAfter a moment, he felt Affurion's paw rest heavily upon his shoulder. <Odd thing about stars,> he said. <They cannot shine when caged in a paw, or when enchained by an Empress' lust for power.>\n\nGrandion snapped reflexively, nicking four scales off the Brown Elder's shoulder. The Brown simply accepted the angry display as just and due.\n\nThe Tourmaline snarled, <Are you saying I smothered her? Possession is a Dragon's right\u2013>\n\n<Possession?> The Brown considered this word. <What should a Dragon possess? How, moreover, ought a Dragon to possess his beloved? Does he seize and dominate, or enjoy and keep?>\n\n<You're playing with words!>\n\n<How does a Dragon embrace a fire-soul, o Tourmaline?>\n\n*GRRRR!!*\n\n<By what might or right may a Dragon entrap a living flame in his right paw?>\n\n<Philosophy!>\n\nAffurion only chuckled smokily. <Ah, wing-brother, would you explain to this ill-informed Dragon, when does a Dragoness burn brightest? Some of us lack the courage of three hearts. They have not so much as fired a promise-oath across their beloved's flanks.>\n\nHe spoke of Mizuki. Suddenly, Grandion felt ashamed of his intransigence. He felt equally irritated at this response. He was becoming positively Human in gentleness\u2013despicable! <Wing-brother, would that I could be your strong right paw in this matter,> he said. <Know only that my third heart is promised to another. Some Dragonesses respond to the subtle play of fires upon the desirous orb\u2013>he broke off, laughing aloud. <Ah, mighty Affurion, how I stumble into thy trap!>\n\nRaising his left paw beneath Grandion's neck, Affurion rubbed necks with him, as if they were roost-brothers and not Dragons who had barely known each other for a month. He whispered, <Aye, so you released a star. Shall the dawn skies not extol her advent, which outshines even the twin suns in the nascent radiance of her presence?>\n\n<You're a warrior-poet.>\n\n<Aye, a poet. But a warrior? The Copper is a warrior wing-born. I lead so many, my fires shadowed with portents of struggles and winging to the eternal fires to come\u2026>\n\nGrandion held the Brown fiercely. <Does a Dragon juggle destiny, or does destiny juggle the Dragon?>\n\n<What? Is this Fra'aniorian wisdom?>\n\n<Is a leader's work to burn and fall like a comet, or to hold a course unswerving, with the strength of volcanoes?>\n\nBy way of reply, Affurion bit the Tourmaline's skull-spikes. <You are not to twist my philosophy against me. Let no dark-fires possess your hearts, noble Tourmaline. Your destiny is to perform your task nobly and well. Should the Great Dragon roar for us, Hualiama will return to you, shining her unique light upon the matched flight of your wings over the Islands. And her forever-love will be your possession, even as it possesses you.>\n\nSuch words should make a Dragon lose track of his own wings and paws.\n\nFrom the fullness of his third heart, Grandion responded, <Equally, let no dark-fires possess your hearts, noble Brown. Your destiny is to lead these Dragons ably and well. Should the Great Dragon roar for us, you will secure a new roost for the Lost Islands Dragonkind, far from the depredations of these children of Dramagon's spirit. You are not fated to struggle forever.>\n\nFormally, they genuflected wingtips toward each other, then with identical smoky chuckles, returned to the business of teaching the Dragons the secrets of Siiyumiel's resistance against the Command-hold magic.\n\nStill later, as he prepared to launch out on his long flight down to Kaolili and the fledgling Dragon Rider group, the Tourmaline caught himself staring at his empty paw. Aye, he had much work to do. What he longed for most, however, was to cup scales of the deepest blue there in his palm, and to know that he and the Star Dragoness could envisage a future together.\n\nAs surely as he lived and breathed, he would find a way. May it be."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "In the impenetrable darkness, Mizuki's fire-eyes burned like lamps. \"Can you breathe, little one?\"\n\nLia was growing heartily tired of the moniker 'little'. Fair enough, the Copper Dragoness was at least six or seven times her size. Did these Dragons have to relish the term quite so blatantly? She said, \"Enough to complain at your knee digging into my ribs. But I can't move an inch.\"\n\n\"Good Dragoness. Make sure you squash my sister properly,\" Elki advised.\n\n\"Why did you come after me?\" Hualiama growled.\n\n\"Oh, I must have missed the moment her Highness forbade us to rescue her,\" sniped her brother. \"As in, this clever Dragoness I know was about ten inches or so from braining herself on a rock.\"\n\n\"Oh. Thanks, Elki.\"\n\nHe waved an arm languidly. \"All known forms of worship gladly accepted.\"\n\nSaori had already unbuckled her seatbelt-arrangement and walked down Mizuki's flank, because they appeared to be lying at a thirty-degree angle, Siiyumiel's tumbling fall having unaccountably smoothed out. Thankfully, his shell's seal gave the impression of perfect closure. Her sensitive Dragon's nose detected a rank, noxious whiff in the air, however, and she knew they would soon be breathing poisons.\n\n\"Mizuki. Are you any good at semipermeable shields?\"\n\n\"Better than your Grandion.\"\n\nLia felt her eyes flare\u2013a very peculiar sensation. She snarled, \"You had better\u2013\"\n\n\"Lia!\" yelled Saori, smacking her shoulder for emphasis. \"You girls can fight and bite later. Mizuki, please put the pride aside and help her. All of us. Lia can explain, but I think the pressure's going to kill us first, followed shortly by contagion\u2013\"\n\n\"Or if His Islandic Majesty decides to scratch the fleas on his neck, we're also dead,\" Elki put in, correctly but rather unhelpfully. \"I do believe we're doomed.\"\n\nSaori whirled on him, fists balled. \"I did not promise my life to a soggy blanket! If you think, o Prince of Fra'anior\u2026. *mmm*\u2013stop that!\" Her attempted slap caught the pointy tip of his left ear, making Elki yelp. \"Kisses do not solve the Island-World's problems, contrary to your very peculiar beliefs!\"\n\n\"Sure go a long way, don't they, sister dearest?\"\n\n\"What? How am I part of this lovers' tiff?\"\n\nThe Prince said, \"Hualiama once kissed a monk\u2013at considerable length, I'm led to believe.\"\n\nSaori's face was a twisting picture of amazement, loathing and curiosity. Hualiama's entire body boiled with her blushing. She faltered, \"I\u2026 uh, Elki! We had to escape a Dragon. Anyway, Saori, I only managed to convince that monk to take his vows. Must have been a terrific kiss.\"\n\nPoor girl. Had Lia slapped her cheek with a rainbow trout from the famous terrace lakes of Helyon Island, Saori would have been no less taken aback.\n\nElki, never one to be put down for long, added, \"Saori, I gladly promise to teach you all you could ever want to know about kissing. Later. When we escape. Mizuki\u2013\"\n\n\"Working on it, my Rider.\" <Star Dragoness\u2013>\n\n<I'll follow your lead. Shall we construct overlapping, augmented shields?>\n\n<Aye. Like this. Good. You need to filter both tangible particles and the more insidious gases. More restrictive is better. Here are the constructs\u2026>\n\nHualiama felt an odd popping sensation in her ear canals as the pressure equalised, and her careful shield bubbled into Mizuki's. She and Grandion had been working on this technique, but her practical experience was very limited. The magical constructs Mizuki presented to their shared mind-space were fascinating, at first resembling intricate threads of white, glowing string, but as she looked more closely at each individual filament, the constructs magnified into multi-stranded threads of draconic rune-language, of which she knew only the barest smattering. She could try to grasp the whole, but the detail, the fiendishly byzantine product of thousands of years of draconic shield-research\u2026 Lia bit her tongue in concentration. Right. Keep it simple. Following the Copper Dragoness' lead, she pushed the pneumatic shield outward, helping to develop and sustain a porous membrane that filtered the air as it passed through. Almost immediately, her nostrils flared in appreciation. Sweet.\n\n<No, Hualiama, you're filtering the oxygen. Let these particles through, scented like\u2026 aye, think of the fireflowers of your native Fra'anior. Magic has its own scent. It's often that magic-aroma that'll help you perceive the right properties. Much better. On to the pressure shield. Usually, we use this for high flying, not for low, so we'll invert the constructs. Let me teach you how.>\n\nAfter ten minutes spent constructing a secondary shield-layer, Lia said, \"Mizuki, if Lesser Dragons can shield like this, why do they never fly beneath the Cloudlands?\"\n\n\"Because shields are imperfect,\" replied the Copper. \"Toxic magic still leaks through, as well as physical poisons, and because\u2026 I don't know. Only Land Dragons have what it takes to survive down here. This is their realm, in which we are intruders.\"\n\nWorriedly, Lia said, \"Can we help Siiyumiel? He feels hurt.\"\n\n\"Because there are predators unknown to your kind,\" rumbled Siiyumiel, weakly. One of his eyes snapped open, flooding the interior of his carapace with unexpected light. \"And why would you help me, traitoress? To succour your contemptible existence?\"\n\n\"To ensure that light lives to Balance darkness,\" she replied. Oh. Esoteric, but logical.\n\n<You talk like a monk,> Human-Lia snorted, deep inside. Dragon-Lia turned up her nose at the incorrigible mite.\n\nWhen Siiyumiel did not reply immediately, the Dragoness looked around. Apart from being stuck like ticks in the ruff of an animal's neck, she and Mizuki appeared to be safe from any pressing danger. No pun intended. The Land Dragon's folding carapace had trapped them in a cavern perhaps one third of a mile wide, at least on this side of his neck, a space easily large enough for Mizuki to fly about inside, never mind a hatchling-sized Star Dragoness. A maroon field of folded Dragon hide surrounded them, the skin knobbly and tough, like a tortoise's hide but far thicker. Hualiama wondered where his paws were\u2013inside this cavern, or elsewhere on his body? Where the folding, protective covers fitted together, she saw that the seal was fortified by a second layer of thick, rubbery brown hide that appeared slightly moist, as if designed to be glued together. How, then, did a Shell-Clan Dragon breathe?\n\n\"I appear to have developed an unexpected infestation,\" said Siiyumiel, with forced joviality. Lia did not want to admit it, but he sounded dreadful. His eye somehow managed to communicate a faint smile. \"What do you call your parasites? Scale mites?\"\n\n\"Three fleas and a louse,\" said Elki, earning himself identical snarls from the three females. \"Siiyumiel, could you kindly bend your neck the other way? I mean, I fully understand anyone who wants to flatten my intransigent little scale-mite, I mean, sister\u2026\"\n\n\"She's your sister?\" Groaning softly, Siiyumiel shifted his neck. As the folds loosened, Hualiama and Mizuki wriggled free.\n\n\"What happened, mighty Siiyumiel?\" asked the Prince.\n\n\"Damaged\u2026 secondary heart-nodes\u2026 cluster,\" he gasped. \"Can't heal myself\u2026 no strength. Find other Shell-Clan. So far. Dying, dragging you to death\u2026\"\n\n\"No,\" said Elki. \"Show us where to go. We'll get in there and help you.\"\n\n\"Get in where?\" Mizuki and Saori blurted out.\n\nThe Prince waved his hands vaguely. \"Wherever we need to be. Near his hearts. Clobber them into motion. Stop the bleeding\u2013right. It's a stupid idea, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Insane,\" murmured the Copper, her eyes riotously agleam.\n\n\"Insanely brilliant,\" said Saori, apparently entertaining a scandalous inclination to undergo another round of cultural training with her Prince's lips. \"Lia saved Sapphurion. Siiyumiel, open your mouth and show us which way to go.\"\n\nHualiama clicked her dangling jaw shut. Great Islands, were they seriously intending to execute this crazy plan? Right. Siiyumiel was so mind-bogglingly humungous, they could probably walk down his throat into his stomach or swim down an artery. And then? She had no idea how to use her healing power, if she actually had any.\n\n<Simple. A matter of Balance,> Siiyumiel's thought entered her mind.\n\nSimple? For a Land Dragon, maybe.\n\n<This way, little fleas.>\n\nLia said, <Ooh, I'm so going to swat\u2013uh, never mind, Siiyumiel. Physically infeasible.>\n\nIn a moment, Mizuki had picked up Elki and Saori, and Hualiama leaped onto the Copper Dragoness' back to make the business of maintaining the shield easier. Gracious heavens, she was still holding her blades and the egg. She passed them to Elki for safekeeping. Then, Mizuki flew into Siiyumiel's mouth and down the violet tunnel of his oesophagus, four hundred feet wide. Flew! Lia shook her head in disbelief. Under which moon would anyone ever believe this story? At another level, she felt Mizuki adjusting the pressure shield and she increased her contribution accordingly, sensing the enormity of the air density building without. What happened to air down here? Was it still air, or more like swimming through liquid?\n\n<One league under the Cloudlands,> Siiyumiel murmured. <I've fallen into the middle deeps\u2026 into my egg\u2026> his voice faltered. Was he delirious?\n\nElki said, \"Quickly, down into the\u2013what did you say? Tertiary food-stomach?\"\n\n\"Quaternary chamber, tertiary food-stomach,\" Lia corrected, pointing with her foreclaw. \"Fly down that tunnel, Mizuki. Quick-wings.\"\n\nFlipping over Dragonship-sized clumps of plant matter, Mizuki shot into the acidic domain of the tertiary stomach. Glistening bands of flexible tissue stretched across a cavernous chamber comprised of many ventricles, most stuffed with half-digested khaki and brown vegetable matter that resembled tree-sized leaves. The sharp tang of powerful draconic stomach acids hung heavy in the air. Stomach muscles the size of fully grown trees slowly churned and kneaded the mixture, making flying a treacherous affair even for a Dragoness of Mizuki's flying prowess. Following Siiyumiel's increasingly feeble directions, Hualiama directed Mizuki between the bands, deeper into the stomach. The Copper hissed unhappily as acid dripped onto her tail and lower back; Lia realised they had neglected to shield her lower body.\n\nMizuki pushed on to the place indicated. Here, they heard a rushing sound behind the stomach lining, a major artery leading to the damaged heart-nodes.\n\n\"Quick. Make the cut,\" said Saori.\n\nLia cried, \"Wait\u2013\"\n\n*KERAACK!*\n\nMizuki snatched her paw back. \"By my wings! Some form of lightning I've never encountered.\"\n\nElki cried, \"Your talon! It's melted!\"\n\n<I warned you\u2026> Siiyumiel sighed. Lia stared! Nothing broke Dragons' talons. Ever. <Innate magic. Can't\u2026>\n\n<Can,> said Lia. \"Saori. Give me one of my Nuyallith blades.\"\n\n\"It'll melt the metal,\" protested the Eastern Isles warrior.\n\n\"That's why I don't plan to use the actual metal,\" said Lia. Elki began to protest, but Saori elbowed him in the ribs. \"I managed this once\u2026\"\n\nGripping the blade awkwardly in her right paw, Hualiama summoned her memories. Shut the eyes. Lift the knowledge of Nuyallith from its resting-place and weave it with the magic of dance\u2026\n\nMizuki whispered, \"Whatever is the mad Dragoness doing?\"\n\nDancing. Shutting out the whispers, Lia extended her wings. Beyond awesome. What girl had ever dreamed of dancing the Soul Dance with the fluidity of a Dragon's wings to enwrap her dance, to spin her endlessly in the air without ever needing to touch down? Yearning burned in her breast. The draw of the flame which had always characterised her deepest linkage with dance, the irresistible candle to a Human moth fluttering about that flame.\n\n<The flame is me.> Who had spoken\u2013Humansoul, or Dragonsoul? <I am a living flame.>\n\nSpinning in the air, Lia released the inner burning. Fire washed her vision. It crackled over her wings and shot from her talon tips, passing dangerously close to her brother's upturned face, but he did not flinch. He smiled, gesturing in a wide, crescent-moon shape with his arm. She understood. Tightening her focus, Hualiama directed the flame along her forepaw and into the red Nuyallith blade, which ignited eagerly. Tapered flame shot four feet from its tip, so hot, it appeared white-blue. Lia flipped her wings. The flame-blade bit deep, hissing and spitting. Though Siiyumiel's strange, electric-like discharge sprang across the gap to her paw, she would not relent. She must do this.\n\n<My turn,> said Mizuki, as Lia finished her cut. Thrusting her talons into the gap left by the cut, she peeled back the deadly stomach lining, five feet thick, to reveal another layer of soft tissue beyond, thin enough that they could see the arterial blood running golden behind it. A three-quarters-full blood vessel?\n\n\"Make the cut at the top,\" said Elki.\n\n\"But the artery won't close itself,\" said Lia. \"Siiyumiel said the stomach would heal instantly, but he needs his magic for an artery.\"\n\n\"We'll stitch it with strips of cloth, or something,\" said Elki. \"You take Saori, swim down to those hearts. We'll follow. Quickly, Lia.\"\n\nSqueezing between the artery and another, whitish layer of tissue or membrane just above it, Lia wielded her sword a second time, then allowed the fire to gutter. She was smoking. Her right paw was a throbbing mess.\n\n\"Go!\" The Prince booted her in the rump.\n\nDragon-Lia needed no second invitation\u2013neither to pay the Prince back later, nor to leap inside. Siiyumiel had said his blood was safe to swim in, and the flow was fifteen feet deep. But he had not mentioned its scalding temperature. Catching Saori before she burned herself, Lia turned and plunged into the semidarkness. The golden blood swooshed along, so rich and dense that Lia felt as if she were swimming in soup, but it was relatively easy to keep her head above the surface. That was, until the artery bent and she tumbled over the edge of a waterfall.\n\n\"Your\u2013glub! Shield, you\u2013glug!\" yelled her friend.\n\n\"Saori!\" She dived.\n\nClutching Saori to her breast with a half-sob of relief, Hualiama pushed out a shield-bubble. So close was the fit, it cleaned Saori almost completely before pressing outward, surrounding them with a slightly shimmering bubble of air. They bobbled and bumped along the artery, riding the slow, surging swells as they travelled the half-mile deeper into Siiyumiel's body to where the secondary heart-nodes were clustered. Further arteries joined from the sides or ran parallel, until the world filled with the rushing of blood and the glorious, dizzying scent of Dragon blood.\n\n<Ventricle-pumps ahead,> Siiyumiel's voice intruded. <Time to cut out.>\n\nPeering ahead, Hualiama spied the problem. The great, magic-powered muscles lay silent. Twisted. Blackened and atrophied, where they should have shone with health and power. The entire area had become grotesquely swollen as blood rushed together, but could not leave fast enough due to the lack of muscular action.\n\nThe rush of blood sucked the Dragoness and the warrior through a rent and dumped them both at the edge of a walled cavity, just outside the heart-nodes, which were linked like beads on a string.\n\nSaori said, \"Alright, Star Dragoness. Unpack whatever you did for Sapphurion, and save this Land Dragon.\"\n\n[ Surgical Precision ]\n\nSTANDING KNEE-DEEP in golden Dragon blood, Hualiama tried to recall what had happened, that fateful day the white-fires flowered out of her, delicate and uncontainable, falling upon the attacking Dragons with the outrageous fatality of starlight kisses. Amidst that obliteration, Sapphurion had not merely survived. He had been healed. Snatched from the portals of the Dragons' sacred eternal fires and returned to fiery life, hale and well.\n\nOne issue. She had absolutely no idea, under the heavens or on any known Island, how she had achieved that stellar result.\n\nOh, and she had a matter of minutes to scrag several cubic miles of Land Dragon by the carapace and haul him back from the same fate, before they dropped to the bottom of the Cloudlands. How did she keep landing herself in these impossible situations?\n\n<Easily,> teased Humanlove. <By being ourselves.>\n\n<You\u2026 go carol to the dawn or something!> Dragon-Lia snarled. <I'm trying to work here.>\n\n<No. Learn to dance.>\n\n<Honestly, you ridiculous little\u2013uh, genius. I understand. And\u2026 I apologise.>\n\nHer Human did not gloat. <Hurry, Dragon\u2026 love. Dragonlove.>\n\nThe first time. The Dragoness wanted to fly around the Blue Moon, screaming her joy to every star that would listen. But she must work fast.\n\nFor the Human girl meant, think, but don't overthink. Dance. A certain Dragoness was tying her paws in knots trying to engineer a rational solution, when she needed to rely on instinct. Dance. Even if the stakes were life and death, dance. Perhaps, afforded time later, she might work out what she did to Shapeshift or heal or summon Star Dragoness power. But this was the moment to dive right into the core of her abilities, of who she was, and simply give the power room to flower.\n\nAnd now she was thinking in rhyming verse? Hualiama clacked her fangs together in annoyance.\n\nThe Dragoness curved her long neck, made a flutter step, an elegant arch of her wings. Feel the flow. Be the flow. Trust that the magic would do what she did not understand. Saori had found a lump or a bone to stand upon, lifting her out of the hot lake of blood. The girl's face glowed. No, it was white fire that guttered the instant Lia brought it to the forefront of her mind, but sprang up again the moment she pretended not to notice. Grr. Yet when she tripped closer to examine the results of her mother's handiwork, there was Imbalance. She was its polar opposite, light in the darkness. Giving up the dance, Hualiama pressed her cheek against the wall of Siiyumiel's heart.\n\n<My heart for yours. Let there be\u2013>\n\n<\u2013Balance,> echoed Siiyumiel, opening the pathways of his being. Guiding and welcoming her.\n\nSiiyumiel's flesh glowed with a new inner radiance where she touched him, a perfect portal made of the first muscle of this heart-node. Though she saw change and wholeness, the tissues remained dormant. Then, Lia sensed Mizuki sailing down the artery, just a few feet shy of that muscle.\n\n<Mizuki! Lightning attack!>\n\n*BOOM!* The Copper Dragoness' instinctive response jolted the thick ring of muscle so hard, the force punched Hualiama ten feet backward. A quiver!\n\n*WHOMP! WHOMP!* The first segment of muscle contracted sharply, but arrhythmically.\n\n\"Hualiama!\" The artery wall muffled Elki's voice. \"Hold off just a\u2013\"\n\nThe change spread like fire devouring a load of kindling. Upward. Outward. Rippling colours. The muscle fibres and tissues returned to a healthy blue-and-green tapestry, shot with gold as the six-inch-thick capillaries and ancillary vessels refilled with fresh Dragon blood. Health bloomed. Connective tissues far thicker than any Dragonship hawser thrummed with renewed resilience. The entire area trembled beneath her paws, raising sloshing amplitude waves across the lake of Dragon blood.\n\n\"\u2013we're still in\u2013hoooolleeee\u2013\"\n\nHis scream was lost behind a wall of sphincter muscles as an entire heart-node abruptly fired, settling into a fierce rhythm. The hissing and rushing of blood doubled in volume. Hualiama began to understand what the nodes were for\u2013essentially, sequential bands of magic-powered, muscular pressure pumps that fed the heart ventricles with untold lakes-full of blood at high pressure. She stumbled sideways, trying to reach Mizuki and Elki, but they kept being pushed along, squeezed, squirted and generally pummelled from every direction as they passed along the node-tubes and shot into the small mountain that was the Dragon's throbbing secondary heart.\n\nUnfortunately\u2013or happily, depending on one's perspective\u2013her hopping and scrabbling about and quick flight up a swollen ventricle between sheets of supporting connective tissue which sifted colour like a chameleon's hide beneath her startled gaze, only appeared to spread the goodness. Infectious goodness.\n\nSuddenly, Hualiama spun in the air. \"The\u2013\" Her Nuyallith blade spun end-over-end through the gloom toward her nose. \"Whaa!\"\n\nHer paw snapped out and collected the point of the blade neatly through the webbing between her fore-talon and second talon. Excellent reactions.\n\n\"Go get them!\" yelled Saori.\n\nMost certainly. Only, she was not entirely sure how she'd find her charming brother and his deadly sidekick in the maelstrom of blood-flow developing inside that throbbing heart. Extracting the sword with a wince, she flew upward again, tracing the senses and the flow, aware that the Land Dragon's tremendous size might just prove decisive if only they could survive the pressure and heat; conscious also of magic draining rapidly from her body as the healing proceeded unabated, not requiring her attention any more.\n\n<Over here!> Mizuki's mental shout made her spin and dive to her starboard flank. Steely grey talons pierced the blue heart muscle. <Help!>\n\nFlipping the blade in her paw, Hualiama made a deep cut. Mizuki's fisted paw immediately punched out, driving a wriggling, gold-painted Prince of Fra'anior into the open, along with a spray of blood that almost choked Lia. Nevertheless, she seized Elki by the scruff of the neck\u2013a cat pouncing on an oversized rat\u2013and swung him off his feet.\n\n<Save him,> Mizuki hissed, before the torrent tore her away.\n\nLia stared at the muscle, already knitting together beneath her disbelieving gaze. If Siiyumiel had this kind of natural healing ability\u2026\n\n\"Mizuki!\" yelled Elki, distraught.\n\n<I'll help her,> came Siiyumiel's voice, stronger now. <Down this way, Dragoness. We must act before the heart reaches full function.>\n\nWhat, this waterfall had not reached its crashing crescendo?\n\nDumping Elki unceremoniously near Saori, Hualiama darted away again, sensing Siiyumiel's power now flooding through her. What was it about healing, that it was most difficult to perform on oneself? No mind. Lia upended herself and shot into a narrow, dark space that led beneath the heart, a mountain of muscle at over a thousand feet wide and perhaps five hundred tall. Still not healed, here. The muscle and tissues appeared blackened and wasted, as though shrivelled by a nearby fire. Azziala's handiwork. Stretching her wings, Hualiama raced toward the goal Siiyumiel showed her, the exit-point of several major arteries where Mizuki might be able to find grip and squeeze through the thinner, less active arterial walls.\n\n<Make the cut!>\n\n<Sii\u2026 Siiyumiel!> she gasped. What if she cut too much? She could barely hear herself think amidst the rising din.\n\nOut of time. The tiny Dragoness flipped beneath the artery, driving the blade into the wall as she used the momentum of her flight to make a twenty-foot slice. Blood fountained out, then abruptly slowed as a golden Dragoness plugged in the hole. Lia cut again, obliquely, widening the gap so that Mizuki, panting and wild-eyed, could squeeze through. The instant her tail was out, though, she turned and helped Lia shoulder the large flap back into place, straining against the rapidly increasing flow.\n\nHealing magic flared white-hot, making both Dragonesses jerk back in surprise.\n\nMizuki smiled at the Star Dragoness. <Your nose is smoking.>\n\n<You've changed colour.>\n\n<Not bad for a Dragoness who only found her wings last week.> Mizuki walloped her on the shoulder. <Right. How do we escape from a Land Dragon's body cavity two leagues beneath the Cloudlands?>\n\n<Simple,> said Lia. <We dance.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Fifty miles southeast of Sarzun Dragonhold and seven miles above the Cloudlands, Grandion turned to scan the vista. Hualiama? Had he sensed her presence across the leagues, a faint tinkling of starlight-laughter on the edge of his consciousness?\n\nThe emptiness mocked his yearning.\n\nTaking advantage of a brief break in the unnatural weather, the Tourmaline had shot away from the Dragonhold, low and keen, braving the buffeting of frigid winds and the oily, lung-clogging particles filling the air. He coughed again, hawked and spat out a greyish glob the size of Hualiama's head. Mucous protected his lung-membranes, but he would not have managed to fly much longer through that muck. Passing between the neat ranks of migrating Land Dragons, he wondered how they kept to such an even depth. Could it be that these Island-Dragons did not actually crawl on a substrate, but sailed like the Humans' boats on Gi'ishior's terrace lakes? If he watched the peaks sailing along from this distance, they did appear to bob along very slowly, as they trod or swam their stately course.\n\nChenak led out, followed by a flotilla of fifty-two smaller beasts. Then came the deathly, grey-black storm, hanging over the other Land Dragons like a burial shroud. Or a parasitic spirit\u2013his scales tingled with foreboding as the ancient lore came to mind. Null-fire fool! Only in legend could a creature infiltrate and possess a Dragon.\n\nThe roiling storm spread over an area of perhaps a hundred square leagues, self-contained, clearly artificial, as if the Cloudlands boiled upward. Lightning played constantly among the greasy black thunderheads. By its behaviour, the storm was clearly following or linked to the Land Dragons. Even through that magical shroud, Grandion and Affurion had detected a great disturbance late the previous afternoon, a faint shock conducted through the Island beneath their paws.\n\nSomething had happened\u2013to the Star Dragoness, his seventh sense whispered.\n\nWhat thought he to gain, hanging here like a slack-jawed, feral beast? He must fly the long leagues to the Kingdom of Kaolili, and hope there was no residual Command-hold inside of him, ready to strike him down at a predetermined moment or location. Grimly, the Tourmaline scanned the skies, broadening the spectrum of his eyesight to the infra-red range to detect the changes of temperature caused by weather fronts or winds, or better still, a Dragons' Highway. Aye! Delight surged in his chest. Three leagues higher, near the practical limit of draconic high-altitude flying, he detected a good strong breeze\u2013not a Highway, but a steady aid to a Dragon in need.\n\nHis wings beat, a forceful surge. His challenge rang out: <BLUE-STAR!>\n\nWith a faint harrumph of surprise, the Tourmaline Dragon powered toward the open skies."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "\"Elki, I\u2013what?\" Hualiama shivered.\n\n\"Aye, what is the word. And how. When, why and 'what on the Islands' also come to mind,\" said her brother, at the peak of his chirpy, most exasperating form.\n\n<Blue-star!> Grandion? So far away\u2013what was he up to? \"Brother darling, where did you leave your Dragon Riders, and Naoko's people?\"\n\n\"Darling?\" His eyebrows waggled like dancing caterpillars. \"I put them in charge of the Kingdom of Kaolili. On the way, we also met a chap commanding his army of airships\u2013what was his name? Smarmy little fellow.\"\n\n\"Commander Hiro?\" Oh, she remembered him!\n\n\"Hiro, aye\u2013do I detect a certain animosity? Lia smothered her snarl. Hiro, who had priced her hair and a few other matters inside his perverted mind? Slime! \"I thought the Riders would best serve by joining forces with Kaolili, rather than being overrun by the Warlord's superior numbers. Why do you ask?\"\n\nShe shook her head slowly. \"Grandion. I think he's headed South. Fast.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Saori nodded. \"He, of all the Dragons, enjoys some freedom.\"\n\n\"Off on another of his noble causes,\" said Lia, wondering where the Tourmaline drew the line between being noble and being rebellious\u2013a question she might ask herself!\n\nElki sneaked in a quick kiss. Saori pushed him off. \"Honestly, can't a girl get a moment's peace?\"\n\n\"Not when she's so volcanically gorgeous,\" he replied, with his most charming, Prince of the Realm shall sweep Lovely Maiden off her feet, smile.\n\nHualiama rolled her eyes. The Dragonesses had returned from death-defying surgery upon a Land Dragon's secondary heart to find the warrior and her Prince locked in passionate embrace. Mizuki evidently found the whole idea of kissing quite revolting.\n\nElki protested, \"I need tall tales to tell the children, one day. Boys, I kissed your mother inside a Land Dragon's heart cavity.\"\n\n\"You're despicable!\" Saori said hotly, accepting Hualiama's blade and sheathing it at her right hip.\n\n\"I can but try.\"\n\n<Actually,> Siiyumiel said to Lia, and whispered softly in her mind.\n\n\"Oh. Oh!\" The Star Dragoness eyed Saori speculatively. \"Oooooh.\"\n\nElki folded his arms across his chest. \"Could we try words of greater than one syllable, and a modicum of intelligence? I know I'm the pretty one and you're the brains, dear sister\u2013ouch!\"\n\nLia swatted him aside with her paw. \"Saori, can I have a little listen?\" Without waiting for a word of reply, she positioned her left central ear-canal against the Eastern Isles warrior's muscular abdomen. \"Hmm. Oh, aye.\"\n\n\"Right, weird Dragoness,\" Saori complained, squirming away and taking refuge near the Prince. \"What are you two up to? Mizuki? Is this some weird Dragon\u2026 thing?\"\n\nMizuki's belly-fires trumpeted her rage. \"I am neither weird nor a thing! Hatchling! Explain your behaviour.\"\n\n\"Your Dragon Rider has been a naughty boy.\"\n\nMizuki looked at Elki, who glanced at Saori, then furrowed his brow at his sister. \"Are we five years old? Naughty?\"\n\n\"Not that kind of naughty. Naughty-naughty.\"\n\nElki's face screwed up in a dozen different expressions as he tried to puzzle this through, but it was Saori who gasped first. Her hand flew to her mouth. Blushing rather violently, right up to the hairline of her short-cropped hair, she mouthed, 'Truly?'\n\nThe Dragoness nodded, almost bursting into laughter as Human-Lia capered around in her mind, screaming something incoherently joyous. \"It's faint, but definitely there.\"\n\nElki was still wandering around an entirely different Island. \"What? What's there? Where?\"\n\n\"Impossible!\" Saori burst out. \"I was\u2026 oh no. My mother's never going to forgive me. It can't happen like this, Lia. It's just not\u2026 possible.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it is, and it has,\" Hualiama said softly. Why so distressed? Shouldn't Saori be delighted? They had made promises and were clearly hopelessly rainbows-over-the-Islands for each other.\n\n\"It is, was and ever shall be?\" Elki shouted, losing his composure. The Copper Dragoness' acoustic shield dampened his shout, but it was also the only way they could hear each other above the cannonade of heart-nodes firing sequentially. \"You females\u2013what?\"\n\nWinding her arms around his neck, Saori kissed the tall Prince even more firmly than the first time. \"Shut the trap.\"\n\n\"Mmm\u2013s'good, but I'm still\u2026 mmm\u2026 fuddle-brained.\"\n\nMizuki had been frowning up a thundercloud, but she finally caught on too, and a great, hot burst of laughter gusted over the pair of Humans. \"In Human culture, isn't it appropriate to congratulate the expecting couple?\"\n\n\"Expecting? What are we ex\u2026 pec\u2026 t-t-t\u2026 no. Yes? No. Can't be!\"\n\nMizuki's paw whipped out. \"Careful.\"\n\nElki wobbled on his decidedly unsteady knees. \"That kind of naughty? Great Islands!\" Suddenly, with a hair-raising shriek, he seized Saori's hands and set off on a wild, capering, heel-tapping dance. How he laughed! Spinning her around, he planted a smacker of a kiss on her cheek, crowing, \"Yes, yes, YES!\"\n\nSuddenly, he paused mid-step. \"Definitely fuddle-brained.\"\n\nSaori smiled tremulously as he wiped tears off her cheeks. \"Pleased, Elki?\"\n\n\"Totally, undeniably, quadruple-rainbows-over-Islands, dancing like a mad dragonet\u2026 I shall, of course, assume full responsibility,\" he said, switching from spluttering delight to solemnity in a millisecond. \"Fully fifty percent. Sixty, with negotiation. Because you were also a tad naughty, you wonderful temptress. And my willpower happens to be non-existent when it comes to all things Saori. But I'm one hundred and fifty percent over all Five moons! And a million stars! Isn't this fantastic\u2013Lia, you're serious, right? No joke?\"\n\nHualiama shook her head. \"Siiyumiel noticed first.\"\n\nElki scratched his neat beard with a worried air. \"The mother. That's a problem, Saori. Do you think I could speak to your mother, say from a hundred feet distant\u2013two hundred\u2013strapped to Mizuki's back in case I need a quick getaway? While Grandion sits on her chest so that she can't get to me to\u2013\" he made a cutting gesture at his neck. \"I mean, compared to the Empress\u2013with due respect, Lia\u2013it's kittens and rajals.\"\n\nSiiyumiel rumbled, \"We should start purging poisons immediately lest the foetus be endangered. Come. We'll consult with my Shell-Clan brethren. Put up your shields, little ones.\"\n\n\"Could we work out how to stop infesting your body, Siiyumiel?\" said Hualiama. \"Perhaps the digestive tract?\"\n\n\"We're planning to be excreted as Land Dragon faeces?\" Elki snorted. \"I do have standards, sister!\"\n\nLia pretended to fan her nose. \"I definitely caught a whiff of your standards.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Five hundred and fifty leagues south of the wandering Lost Islands, the following morning, Grandion rested briefly on the wing as he scanned the outlying Islands of the Kingdom of Kaolili. An obscure branch of Dragon lore suggested that Kaolili had once been Fra'anior's garden, before war between the Ancient Dragons had broken the famously verdant Islands into individual pieces, scattering them across the thousands of leagues that constituted the greatest Archipelago North of the Rift. Certainly the scenery was a soul's balm, although a Dragon might have preferred a few towering cliffs or a handy volcanic lake in which to ease his aching muscles. He powered on, thinking over Hualiama's idea of a penetrative shield. A Shapeshifter Dragoness could not possibly settle for a traditional viewpoint on draconic techniques honed over thousands of seasons, could she? Shields for defence. That was the mantra.\n\nUnfortunately, it was also wrong-pawed. Or rather, just one paw where a Dragon needed four. Protection, counteroffensive measures, the inclusion or exclusion dichotomy\u2013she had thoughts about that too, citing 'leakage' of magical signatures\u2013and all-out offence, Lia's latest innovation. She could not resist engineering everything, including his flight instruction, which she had admittedly received with fiery joy. Draconic magic, especially that of Dragons in the Blue and Grey spectra, was proven to aid flight dynamics. Indeed, many famous Dragon scholars believed that without magic, Dragon flight was flat-out impossible. Toss a cheeky Star Dragoness at the problem, however, and she was designing shields to shape airflow over a Dragon's already streamlined body\u2013and he had just attested her theories, measuring his physical and magical output over the course of this journey. Eighteen hours. Five hundred and fifty leagues. Even allowing for the wind's assistance for ten of those hours, he should not feel this fresh. With a flick of her diminutive wing, she had just conjured\u2013he calculated his reserves rapidly\u2013a seventeen percent improvement in a Dragon's long-distance flying stamina!\n\n<You're a beautiful flier>, she had said, with a flash of those depthless blue eyes in which his soul had swum seemingly for eternity. <But your stalwart chest does generate considerable wind resistance, Grandion\u2013ha ha! Stop your ridiculous preening, you ego-mad Dragon.>\n\n<Stalwart? Naturally!> His low growl billowed smoke over the Human girl.\n\n<If you can pay attention to more than the beauty of your scales, I've an idea. Let's take Siiyumiel's layering technique and create a penetrative shield around a pneumatic inner layer, like this. This will effectively direct the airstream away from the more resistant parts of your physique.>\n\n<Grr,> he said, flexing his pectorals.\n\nPlayfully, she threw up an arm to shield her eyes. <Oh, Grandion, oh, the dazzle! I'm positively woozy\u2026>\n\nHe could not stop thinking about the Star Dragoness. If only a Tourmaline had her facility with engineering solutions. Not even Hualiama could un-engineer the juxtaposition of her Human and Dragon parts. His mind kept generating and discarding scenarios in which they winged into the suns-set together. Hiding. Taking a disguise. Living in the remote Western Isles. Bribing the Dragonkind to look to another Isle. Placing a Command-hold on local Dragons. Fleeing from Island to Island all their lives\u2026 where was the joy in any of that? She was right\u2013burn it in the hottest of volcanic hells! Why could she not settle for simply being a Dragoness?\n\n<Simply, Grandion?> He snorted a fine fireball away to his port flank. <Since when was that girl, that Dragoness, ever simply anything?>\n\nAnd that, as the draconic poetess Suphiara the Green would style the matter, was the shimmer of her wings carving across a five-moon conjunction. Grandion's right forepaw mirrored the clenching of his third heart. Reject a Tourmaline, would she? That only made her a hundred times more desirable. He would woo and win her, or he was no Dragon.\n\nFuelled by his anger, Grandion did a little carving across the moons of his own. What was she doing, anyhow? Sitting on a Land Dragon's back drinking some vile Human brew with her mother the Empress of Dragon-Haters, while he burned the heavens in service to the Dragonkind?\n\nAh. He spotted a patrolling Dragon. So, the third of the Dragon force from Gi'ishior which had been left behind at the Kingdom of Kaolili, under the command of the highly-respected, wily Red Elder, Zulior, the shell-brother of Grandion's mother Qualiana, were as well-organised as he expected. Although, that young Green was not paying attention.\n\nLessons needed to be delivered by claw and fang. Grandion checked the optical elements of his shielding. By his wings, that stupid ralti sheep would never know what had struck him.\n\nThe Tourmaline hunted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "At that very moment, Hualiama, Saori, Elki and Mizuki were reclining in the relative luxury of a dormant digestive incinerator chamber, upon thrones comprised of mounds of grey soot. Lia had just woken from the sleep of a hatchling so weary, her very marrow groaned for relief. This was the Land Dragons' equivalent of burning the rubbish, Elki joked. The chamber was circular, roughly two hundred feet in diameter, with a single, narrow outlet only a Human could have squeezed into. Siiyumiel had explained that Shell-Clan Land Dragons had two main digestive modes, normal and blast-ejection, which served dual purposes\u2013additional jet propulsion vented from special spiracles on the base of the carapace, enabling faster travel, and a deadly form of defence when an enemy or parasite attacked from an unexpected quarter.\n\nNaturally, the Prince descended into hysterics for an hour at the idea of rocket propulsion by excrement, until even the dignified Land Dragon lost any semblance of composure and nearly split their eardrums with booming bellows of displeasure.\n\nNow, the mighty Land Dragon met with his Clan of five dozen members in the Barrens, as the vast territory bordered by Herliss, Gemalka and Pla'arna to the West, the Rim-Wall Mountains in the North and the Lost Islands in the East was called. The Humans and Lesser Dragons looked on with the benefit of the images Siiyumiel projected into their minds. He did not appear to see colour, nor were outward structures necessarily the most evident feature of what his form of harmonic sight presented back to the watchers. However, the images portrayed in thousands of shades of grey were superbly detailed. Lia easily made out a ravine above which the Land Dragons collected, swimming through the ultra-dense air like a group of turtles suspended in a lake. The ravine was a mere sixty leagues wide and eight deep, according to Siiyumiel's waveform measurements, bounded either side by precipitous mountains four and a half leagues tall.\n\nPickle her mind and serve it as a side-dish to a feast!\n\nHowever, there was little life. Here in the North, the preferred feeding grounds were located around the roots of the Islands, particularly Immadia and Herliss, in Immadior's Sea, south of Immadia, and in the far northeast, near the Rim-Wall, where mineral-rich thermal upwellings led to an explosion of plant life over vast areas. This meeting-ground, however, enjoyed the services of an easterly current from Immadior's Sea, which regularly delivered Island-sized rafts of allegedly delicious plant matter to the ever-hungry Shell-Clan.\n\nThe Land Dragons sang draconic telepathy to each other across the deeps. Tiiyusiel, a female barely a third of Siiyumiel's size, had brought intelligence from the Lost Islands, whom they called the Air-Breather Clan. In Siiyumiel's sight, her form was a gleaming lacework of draconic magic and fires, bordered by a darker, shadowy outline just barely recognisable as Shell-Clan. Although the Dragons were curious to meet and speak to Siiyumiel's passengers, there appeared to be protocol to follow; all deferred to Janiisiel, a visibly grizzled male of a mere seven hundred and fourteen 'circuits of the Island-World about its suns', as he summarised the intelligence he had received just hours before by what he called longwave-speech from the Hura Shell-Clan, three thousand leagues to the South.\n\nThree thousand? Imagine the ease of communication around the Isles if Humans could somehow learn to replicate that! Engineer-Lia charged off in design-mode.\n\n<A group of mixed Stellates, Deep-Dwellers and Mountain-Runners attacked the Hura Clan,> said Janiisiel. <They appeared feral, or under the control of a single governing Dragon, although none was identified among their number. Having murdered seventeen Hura and carried off eight, they retreated into the Trench of Maa-Ak-Uura, and have not been detected since.>\n\nAbove the others' wailing, Siiyumiel thundered, <GREAT IS THE GRIEF OF THE SHELL-CLAN!>\n\nThe four tiny observers shuddered at the Dragons' unbridled mourning.\n\nThe Land Dragons threw questions about\u2013why would historically inimical Clans co-operate in this way? Had the Stellates not resettled in Herimor two hundred and ten orbits before, crossing the Rift? They debated the 'feral' observation and the kidnapping of Shell-Clan. This was undraconic behaviour. What was their purpose? But Hualiama was drawn to Janiisiel, to a shadowing of doubt concealed in his mind. Was he withholding information?\n\nWithdrawing her attention from the debate, Hualiama shielded her thoughts and sent to the elderly Land Dragon, <O great one, may I respectfully query\u2013when the purpose of these wicked Dragonkind was mentioned, I saw dark-fires wreathe one particular thought.>\n\nAfter a long pause, Janiisiel replied, <You see much, for a miniscule high-dweller.>\n\n<I sense doubt over crucial intelligence,> she said, Dragon-direct but infusing her words with the strongest context-indicators of respect and deference she could fashion.\n\n<Aye.> His angry rumble rippled out of his mind in suffocating waves. <I fear I misheard. Only because of your heritage, and the understanding I sense of Balance in your mind, do I confess: age dulls my senses. I did not detect all the longwave-speech I should have in my function as Clan Speaker.>\n\nSiiyumiel growled, <Hualiama, who are you speaking to? Cease this disrespectful behaviour at once!>\n\nIgnoring his interference, Lia said, <O Janiisiel, would you allow my white-fires to touch your thought-memories? Siiyumiel taught me the re-harmonising of scattered memories when we sought clues to my past. My white-fires seem particularly proficient at this task.>\n\n<Hualiama!> Siiyumiel snarled.\n\nBut the great Clan-Speaker drifted closer to the Wisdom of the Shell-Clan, breaking out of his position in the sphere formed by the close-packed Land Dragons as they deliberated. Janiisiel said, <The Star Dragoness brings wisdom. I must confer with her.>\n\nSiiyumiel managed to turn his silence into an eloquent ode to indignation.\n\nThe older Dragon said, <Will you tell us how you became host to two Lesser Dragons and two Humans, o Siiyumiel, before you judge my need?> Lia winced. <Yet in this, I sense Balance. Whatever transpired, you have performed a remarkable service by bringing these kindred souls into the Conclave of the Shell-Clan. And verily have they restored your health.>\n\nWith that, the older Dragon bowed his inner fires to the younger.\n\nFor all their ponderous majesty, Hualiama realised, the mightiest of Dragons were fire-souls like any other, achingly beautiful in their revealed selves. This was the way of seeing truth Siiyumiel had tried to explain to her, where the veil of the physical seemed as gossamer brushed by a breeze, and the world beyond the Island-World drew close enough to touch. For a moment as fleeting as a dragonet's wingbeat, a glimpse of the glorious unknown might intrude, profound, spine-tingling and magical.\n\nWithout knowing what she did or why, she leaped to her paws and sang:\n\n<Wing\u00e9d soul did bow to wing\u00e9d soul,>\n\n<And the deepest of Deeps did tremble,>\n\n<Evermore.>\n\n[ Stinking Liars ]\n\nTWo minutes later, Hualiama clenched her paws and lost her rag spectacularly, courtesy of Dragon-furnace emotions. She yelled, <Next time you lose seventy three point six\u2013whatever percentage that was\u2013of your circulatory and heart function, Siiyumiel, will you kindly crack open your brainless beak and tell someone?>\n\nOne million, four hundred and nineteen thousand tonnes of Land Dragon hung his head glumly. <As you wish, Star Dragoness.>\n\n<And you, Janiisiel! Pride wings no Dragon to the eternal fires\u2013uh, not that you have actual wings.> Suddenly Hualiama floundered, realising that she was screaming her lungs out at a pair of Dragons rather fuller of life's experience than her, either of whom could squash her like a flea. <Uh, and I don't wish you'd fly\u2026 walk\u2026 to the fires, anytime in the next thousand years\u2026>\n\nWith a bow to Siiyumiel's Clan, watching in their shared mental space, Mizuki said smoothly, <What the Star Dragoness means is, she is honoured to join her fires to those of the noble Shell-Clan in the eternal dance of the Dragonkind. We Lesser Dragons and Humans would receive your wisdom, mighty Janiisiel.>\n\nIn that blackened, sooty chamber, dimly lit by the ever-present luminescent quality of Siiyumiel's innards, the foursome glanced at each other pensively. The Land Dragon had been translating simultaneously into Island Standard for the Humans and Upper Dragonish, as he called their language, for Mizuki and Hualiama. The Shell-Clan used at least two other dialects of Dragonish for communication, the longwave-speech for vast distances, and their own dialect of Dragonish that shaded utterance with echoes of harmony and song, product of their Balance-magic.\n\nTo their surprise, however, Janiisiel bade Tiiyusiel speak first. <The issues are connected, I believe. Tiiyusiel, share with your kin.>\n\n<The mighty comet brought a new power smashing down amongst our Air-Breather brethren,> said the youngster. <I did investigate, by the light of mine eyes and every finesse of my mental processes, to discern this was a spirit of draconic power like unto the Ancient Powers, and concluded\u2013>she conveyed a vast, detailed set of mental notes, investigations, impressions, hypotheses tested and discarded in a single breath, giving Lia an instant headache\u2013<it seeks physical form. The Air-Breathers were not suitable for this Power's purpose, so the female Dragon-spirit sought another manifestation. Oddly, that form comprised a life of many thousands of fragments, each smaller than these tiny fires you host, Siiyumiel, appearing to my questing senses like this\u2013>\n\n<Dragonets!> Hualiama blurted out. <I apologise\u2013>\n\n<Speak,> Janiisiel commanded her.\n\nWell, time to shake the paws of the earth-shakers. <Recently, I spoke to Fra'anior the Onyx\u2013>\n\nPandemonium! Siiyumiel and Janiisiel bellowed until their kin settled, but in that brief time, Lia learned her claim was blasphemy to the Land Dragons' beliefs. Evidently, she had better not admit the greater, as yet unproven scandal\u2013that she might be his illicit shell-daughter! Instead, she said:\n\n<Fra'anior spoke to my spirit in a portent-filled dream. Dire and dreadful in the panoply of his majesty, was the great Onyx.> That quote from the ballads generated a mere dozen or so Island-quivering growls, but their temperature simmered down noticeably. <I believe by my seventh sense, he wished to warn us of the return of Numistar Winterborn from the place of exile. And this is what I saw within the comet.>\n\nIn shocking contrast, utter stillness greeted the image she passed through Siiyumiel's mind to the watching Shell-Dragons. A stillness of paw and awe, he fed back to her. They acknowledged the validity of her inner sight; the awful portent of that vision.\n\nBut Tiiyusiel blurted out excitedly, <This harmonises with what I found! The precise notes of chill flesh and vast, ancient soul-fires\u2026>\n\nShe hesitated as Janiisiel's regard snapped toward her, but he only said, <May our Shell-Clan fledglings imitate the courage of the four voyagers amongst us.>\n\nSlowly and thoughtfully, Hualiama summarised for them, drawing on information and nuances fed to her by formidable draconic minds. Numistar's spirit had travelled in the comet, but it lacked physical substance. Therefore, she had landed amongst the Air-Breathers, seeking perhaps to possess and use their bodies, but had deemed them unsuitable. Now, she must be hatching the frozen dragonet eggs\u2013Lia bade Saori show the Shell-Clan the egg she held\u2013and inhabiting each, she assumed, with a fragment of her soul-fire. A hive-creature, Saori put in, similar to the wasps of her native Eastern Isles. A hive-consciousness, Elki mused. All the pieces would be linked, as if one mind inhabited many bodies. What, then, was the connection with this mismatched group of Land Dragons in the South?\n\nJaniisiel said, <The Numistar of legend is not a creature renowned for her mercy. Her malice was once contained by Fra'anior, Amaryllion, Dramagon and their kin. Numistar will move against any and all powers that oppose her absolute dominion. That includes the Empress of the Lost Islands, the Warlord Shinzen, the Clans of Land Dragons, the high-dwelling Dragonkind, and a Star Dragoness. She will destroy each and every one, or bend their power to her use.>\n\nLia fought an urge to burrow beneath the nearest handy Island and hide there for eternity. Nausea coiled in the pit of her stomach.\n\nFor Land Dragons, this group displayed unusual haste\u2013perhaps an indicator of the degree of their agitation. Toss a comet into their realm together with an Ancient Dragon's spirit, she supposed, and they had every right to be disturbed. Yet this news of Janiisiel's also troubled her. The elderly Dragon described again the report received from the southern Clan, slowly reproducing each of the pictograms or 'thought-runes' gleaned from the marauders and reassembled with Lia's help, repeatedly remarking how esoteric a form of Dragonish communication this was. The monks used to play a similar rune-game, she remembered. The trick was to disguise a concept or message within a pictogram that looked like a valid rune, but was not. Master Jo'el had been gifted with a draconic subtlety in his gameplay; the acknowledged rune-master, committed to bamboozling his peers and a certain female apprentice monk on a weekly basis.\n\n\"Definitely a search or a quest,\" said Elki, picking out the second rune in the sequence. Lia found his mental activity fuzzy, but understandable.\n\n<Here, the comet?> Siiyumiel suggested.\n\n<With a tail of great age,> added Janiisiel. <This comet, or the first comet to impact our Island-World?>\n\nThe Land Dragons generally agreed this could not be determined. There was a suggestion of abduction, of the use of force; another rune which appeared to be a play on Hualiama's name, blue-star, but it was changed to 'white-star' while preserving the suggestion of the star that appeared at dawn, beneath the rising of the twin suns. Her response felt as if every scale on her body tried to crawl off in a different direction at once.\n\n<This one is power,> said Mizuki. <Great\u2026 transforming, or corrupting, power. See?>\n\nMuch discussion and speculation ensued, but they made little more progress. The Shell-Clan moved on to debating the southward migration of many Land Dragons, including the displaced Lost Islands. Strangely, many Clans had begun to journey toward Herimor over the past six seasons, all of them citing changes in the Balance of Harmonies, or a sense of 'calling' that could not be ignored. Already, great swathes of the North were depleted, growing wild and unkempt in the absence of the prodigious appetites of the Land Dragons.\n\n\"All paths point to Herimor,\" said Elki. \"What can this mean?\"\n\n\"That there is a prize in Herimor, something dear to Land Dragons or crucial to their fate,\" said Saori. \"Look. This rune is not a sign of questing, it is a warding. Those strange Land Dragons you mentioned are a scouting group. Perhaps they divined Numistar's advent, and came to investigate whatever threat she poses to their treasure, or plans\u2026\"\n\nSiiyumiel puzzled, \"What treasure do you imagine, little one? Unlike your high-dwelling comrades, we are not the type of Dragonkind to be seduced by pretty baubles and shiny booty.\"\n\nWell, neither was Lia infected with the urge to hoard gold\u2013so far. Dragon lore and Human ballads alike expended countless reams of scrolleaf on the matter of mean, greedy Dragons brooding over their sparkly treasures, rearranging and enumerating them endlessly. Oh. Rearranging? Hualiama glanced at Elki, wondering if he was thinking the same\u2026 his eyebrows peaked. \"Aye, sister. An idea?\"\n\nShe said, \"Siiyumiel, can you rearrange those runes in your mind, working through possible configurations that would fit them into place like a jigsaw puzzle?\" He growled an interrogative. Her voice sharpened against her will. \"Put that monstrous brain of yours into gear, and work out all possible layouts of those runes that could spell out a different message.\"\n\nTiiyusiel's eager voice intruded, <Can we play, Star Dragoness?>\n\n<All Dragons can play,> Lia returned, smiling mentally at the young Land Dragon's enthusiasm.\n\nThe Shell-Clan set to with a will, breaking up into family groupings as a rising chorus of chatter and even laughter\u2013the laughter of Islands, it seemed\u2013rose around them, conducted through Siiyumiel's carapace to listening ears. Hualiama ran through Siiyumiel's instructions again, and touched a paw to each of her companions, trying to minimise the impact of the ambient poisons on their bodies. She wished she knew better how to help them.\n\n<We must take you aloft soon,> said Siiyumiel, echoing her suspicions. <Until you learn better shielding or more powerful healing, little one, you cannot survive here in the realm of Land Dragons.>\n\nHowever, when four hours had passed with no further discoveries, they took their leave of the Shell-Clan and Siiyumiel swam toward the surface of the Cloudlands. En route, he told them, \"We will gather the intelligence of allied Land Dragon Clans and try to formulate strategies to combat the Empress and Numistar. There is a real danger they will form an alliance, or one or both will join this Shinzen creature. Evil is abroad, my friends. When the roar of battle resounds across the deeps, will you join us?\"\n\n\"You have my word,\" said Lia.\n\n<And mine,> Mizuki added, with a fierce growl.\n\nElki and Saori added their word, and that of the Dragon Riders.\n\n\"Now, you should prepare to cut into my digestive tract,\" said Siiyumiel.\n\n\"Oh no,\" groaned the Prince of Fra'anior.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" said Lia.\n\n\"I just want to make it clear as crysglass, sister, that I did not sign up for this particular duty when I joined your crazy expedition,\" Elki complained. \"You've pulled a few madcap stunts in your time, but this takes the purple spotted rajal.\"\n\n\"Oh, brother. Your attitude stinks.\"\n\nThe tall Prince kicked up a cloud of soot with a moody growl. \"You know, I wish you could turn into a Human right now so you can appreciate this experience properly.\"\n\n<Aww,> said Dragon-Lia to herself. <Is my lovely Human feeling left out of this adventure? I'd gladly let you boss this part.>\n\n<Ah\u2026 no thank you.>\n\n<Say, 'Hello, Island-World'. Whoops!>\n\nWith a sound like tinkling bells in her ears and a distinct whiff of cinnamon-vanilla magic, Human-Lia popped into being, yelling, \"You feckless, heartless, nonsensical glob of Dragon-snot!\"\n\n\"Wow, it worked,\" said Elki, sounding more amazed than pleased, which was the only thing that saved him a thorough pasting at that point. \"What's with the snot, sister?\"\n\n<Dragons do not have snot,> Dragoness-Lia pointed out, smugly. <They have ear-wax and scale-mites\u2013>\n\n<Just you wait, trickster. Revenge will be sweet.>\n\nLia began to hold out her right hand, then switched. Freaking windrocs! The right was scalded, throbbing away, and bled from a neat hole through the webbing between her forefinger and second finger. Exact replication of wounds. Final proof her forms were physically linked\u2013should she be comforted, or concerned? A shame clothing did not survive her transformations\u2026\n\nHer brother unbuttoned his brown leather flying jacket, then removed his tan linen undershirt and handed it to her with an exaggerated sigh. \"Nasty habit you're developing here, sister, constantly pinching my clothing.\"\n\n\"Is this an official complaint, Your Highness?\"\n\n\"Easy, rajal. Let me help you,\" he replied, seeing her cradling the right hand.\n\nSaori slipped the sword-belt around Lia's waist and settled the Nuyallith blades in their sheaths. \"Next time, Elki, she can have my tunic top.\" He pretended to start panting heavily, but the warrior added, \"I'd wager Elki would wade knee-deep through any sewer in the Island-World for that\u2013wouldn't you, my brave, handsome Prince?\"\n\nElki bowed elaborately. \"I hereby dedicate the utmost reek of my odious presence to thee, and thee alone, o Saori.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "When he was particularly annoyed, Zulior the Red famously had a penchant for spitting lava. Grandion had always wondered if his shell-uncle's mannerism was deliberate or uncontrolled. Right now, his roar splattered the Tourmaline with a healthy slug of red-hot lava, but Grandion merely blinked away the droplets aimed at his left eye and ignored the sizzling against his scales.\n\n<I will tolerate no argument to the contrary, youngling! Am I heard?>\n\n<Loud and fiery, noble shell-uncle,> Grandion conceded.\n\n<Your report is both troubling and joyous,> said Zulior, spreading his wing over his nephew's shoulders in a brotherly-mentoring fashion. He had taken Grandion's personal report separately from that delivered to the five wing-leaders of his forces. <Besides, this is for me. My gifting is logistics and organisation, not thrashing other Dragons in battle\u2013unlike you, Tourmaline. Your gifting is the flow of battle-song, the rousing of Dragon fires, the combat-vision that sees beyond the clash of fang and paw. They listen to me\u2013but they battle-love you.>\n\nDraconic laughter gurgled over the battlements above Kerdani City's gates. Zulior was a mountainous Red, one of the few Dragons to match Sapphurion in size and strength. Zulior stood no less than twenty-four feet tall at the shoulder, and though his hundred-and-twelve foot length was fourteen feet shy of Sapphurion's enormity, he outweighed the Blue Elder by five tonnes, all of it muscle. Logistics? Grandion sniffed forlornly, wishing he could have the Red fly at his shoulder. His uncle had not phrased a request. He would support Grandion, offer wisdom and strategy\u2026 but he could not divide his attention between leading at the battlefront and organisation when war approached on four potential vectors\u2013Shinzen's forces, Azziala, Numistar, and the as-yet-unknown quantity represented by Siiyumiel and his kin. That would be, in a word, fatal.\n\nGrandion eyeballed a troop of Kaolili citizen militia trotting purposefully out of the gate; they seemed motivated to put significant distance between themselves and the watching Dragons. He smiled toothily to ensure they moved even faster.\n\nThat said, these Humans were so organised and disciplined, it practically made the eyes water. Did none of these Easterners possess a mind of their own? For they all looked alike, behaved alike and worked alike. Out on the plains, below the low mound on which the city walls stood, a second battlement rose with impressive speed. The lines of fortifications were drawn with precision to a fraction of an inch. Even the slaves digging foundations or the labourers carrying bricks worked in exacting rhythm, singing in their musical Eastern dialect, five hundred spades hurling dirt into the air at exactly the same moment or laying bricks with exacting click-clack rhythms. Crazy. Poor creatures. To say nothing of their obsession with bathing! Their midday break consisted of half a cup of some tasteless, starchy grains and a communal bathing ritual using buckets and wooden scoops to toss water over each other.\n\n<Good workers,> Grandion harrumphed, before turning to his shell-uncle. <Right. We've a week, maximum, to slap these Dragons into Command-hold-resisting war machines. Arrange to bring me all the Blues, first.>\n\n<That's easy,> said Zulior. <There's only four, including you.>\n\nThe Tourmaline scratched his chin. <The rest having flown with Sapphurion, rebelled at the Bell\u2026 aye. Fourteen slain. Fine. Bring me the best of the other colours\u2013and those Dragon Riders. I will train them also.>\n\n<That will be tricky, since our Dragons and theirs have had a few\u2026 disagreements.>\n\nShinzen's advance had been halted four hundred and eighty leagues from the Kingdom's capital by Fra'aniorian Dragons working in cooperation with Commander Hiro and the Dragonship fleet, but the latest intelligence revealed a significant build-up of the Warlord's forces in that area. He was securing his supply lines and consolidating his position, which boded ill for Kaolili. An estimated eight hundred Giants were now deployed on the ground, with more arriving daily from the South as his extermination policy bore its dreadful fruit and increasing numbers of troops were released to join the battlefront.\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon's gaze turned to the tent-camp situated on the plains West of the city. Refugees poured in daily, bringing gruesome tales of destruction, cannibalism and woe. The Warlord's Giants were not fussy about their diet, preferring meat which could be easily caught. His paws curled in disgust. Eat another intelligent creature? Barbaric. Prey on Human hatchlings and young? His fangs ground viciously as battle-rage sheeted over his vision, washing the white tent-city, already holding forty thousand souls, with a portentous veil of crimson. And he had squabbling Dragons and Dragon Riders to contend with?\n\n*GRRR!*\n\nGrandion curled his lip. <Oh, do they?> He rolled his shoulders happily and checked the sharpness of his fore-talons. <Wing me to the offenders, o Zulior, and I shall instil the required discipline.>\n\n<Youngsters,> snorted his uncle.\n\n<Your problem is that you possess too much pomp and gravitas,> Grandion needled, sounding so much like Hualiama that he almost choked on his own mirthful smoke\u2013or was it the spirit of Flicker, that cheeky dragonet, which indwelled him now? <I'm the wild shell-child, the bane of my parents' existence, remember?>\n\n<And how!> Zulior agreed, feelingly.\n\nThe Tourmaline threw a comradely mock-punch at his shell-uncle's ribs. <Tell you what. I'll beat the living pith out of them; you patch them up afterward. Deal?>\n\n<Always told Sapphurion you were nothing but a lava-thug. I'll wager that Star Dragoness will make a real Dragon out of you yet.>\n\nGrandion thundered, *GRRROOOAARRR!!*\n\nThe massive Red's lips curled away to expose his fangs. <Good, I was hoping you'd say exactly that.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Three Humans lined up atop Siiyumiel's open final-stage food processing region, equivalent to the Human large intestine, struggling not to gag, throw up, or faint\u2013or all three at once. Huge muscles slowly rolled beneath their feet in peristaltic waves, passing the final by-products of the Land Dragon's waste along for disposal. Excellent fertiliser, Siiyumiel had joked, describing how the action of Land Dragons fed, churned up and renewed the ecosystem beneath the Cloudlands.\n\nHe had failed to capture the nostril-cauterising reek of his ultra-concentrated faeces.\n\nClutching his chest, Elki wheezed, \"Tell me again why we can't create a shield-bubble down there?\"\n\n\"Natural defences,\" said Hualiama, eyeing the sludgy brown-black river her sword-cut had opened. \"At least Siiyumiel's backside-equivalent is above the toxic gas layer, he assures us.\" She pictured a mallard tipping up to feed from the bottom of a pond, its rear end wriggling above the water.\n\n\"Defences? Against what?\" asked the Prince.\n\nSiiyumiel rumbled, \"Imagine a Borer two hundred feet long, with mandibles and mouth-hooks thicker than your legs, forcing its way up your\u2013\"\n\n\"Stop!\" yelled Elki, turning a colour that resembled a mouldy white sheet, if that were possible. Whatever was left in his stomach bolted for freedom. Dropping into the wide rent, it briefly sizzled like meat cooking over a fire, before vanishing. \"Curse it\u2026 I don't have words.\" He wiped his mouth, and pleaded, \"Make this quick, Siiyumiel, please. Of all the places in this Island-World I'd least like to die\u2026\"\n\n\"How hot is the liquid?\" asked Saori.\n\n\"Fifty-eight degrees centigrade, the coolest I could manage,\" said Siiyumiel. \"Otherwise the consistency would become so thick\u2026\"\n\nThe Prince waved a hand feebly. \"Mizuki. Kill me now.\"\n\n\"Tempting,\" she purred.\n\nHualiama said, \"This will burn, but not too much\u2013if we're quick. Once we're in, hold your breath. We'll flow through to the terminal holding chamber in five seconds. Then, it should be approximately twelve seconds between Siiyumiel initiating the suction-ejecta pump mechanism to us being blasted out\u2013\"\n\n\"In a Human bombardment?\" asked Elki.\n\nLia wagged a finger at him. \"Try not to make wasteful jokes.\"\n\n\"Just passing through,\" said Elki.\n\n\"Brother, your sense of humour is completely constipated.\"\n\nHe shot back, \"Imagine squeezing Mizuki out? Now that's a whopper.\"\n\nLia laughed openly at Saori's agonised expression. She could well imagine Eastern culture did not lend itself to gutter humour. She said, \"Whatever you do, Saori, hold your nose and try not to swallow any. Mizuki?\"\n\n\"Ready to fly,\" she growled.\n\n\"Alright!\" cried the Prince. \"One Land Dragon healed. Time to flush ourselves down a living drainpipe.\"\n\nAs Mizuki clasped them in her paws, Saori was grumbling, 'Not alright. Not alright on any Island in this world.' She had no choice in the matter. The Copper's left forepaw squeezed her against Elki, while Human-Lia had a solo ride in her right forepaw. Mizuki lowered herself headfirst into the alimentary canal, just above a sluggish flow of foetid, slowly bubbling waste. The Land Dragon's digestive system was efficient, but the enormous quantities of nutrients required to sustain him meant that inevitably, some portion must be unusable, and the normal bodily functioning of his organs also generated mineral deposits and by-products of magical processes. Pinching one's nose was no help whatsoever. The stench gaily grabbed the throat with claws of fire and acid. Elki started coughing and hacking violently, but then he clasped his mouth with his left hand and nodded to the Copper Dragoness.\n\nShe leaped charily. *Plop.*\n\nLia counted in her mind, <One\u2026 two\u2026>\n\nAt first it seemed she had only stepped into scalding mud, for Mizuki tried to keep her Human cargo above the surface for as long as possible. The flow pulled them along relentlessly. Then the muscles kicked in. Squeezing like a monstrous Dragon's paw <\u2026 three\u2026 four\u2026> a wave of burning sludge buried Hualiama momentarily. They rushed through a tunnel barely wide enough for Mizuki, splashing, slopping <\u2026 five\u2026> as she gasped a final breath, something rancid burning her tongue. Lia's surprised cough bubbled through the slop in front of her face. Clamp the jaw shut! Gripping the dragonet's egg inside Elki's shirt as best she could, Lia felt the mixture churn beneath Mizuki's abdomen. *GLU-GLU-GLUUU\u2026* under they went! Sucked away like leaves bobbing helplessly in a Cloudlands-bound torrent, the foursome disappeared in a whirlpool of broiling, loose faeces.\n\nSiiyumiel had liquefied the mixture as best he could to aid the cooling process. Nevertheless, pain washed over Lia's body; the heat, more scalding than the hottest bath she had ever taken. Like a feral Dragon's fire, she thought, recalling the time Grandion had burned her. Her eyes felt as if they were melting in their sockets. Every inch of skin screamed and her lungs were afire, but Lia knew she must hang on.\n\n<\u2026 ten, eleven\u2026> the pressure ratcheted up to unbearable levels. She became aware of a low rumbling and shaking, as if they approached a waterfall. All she knew was the clasp of Mizuki's paw and the mental roaring of the Copper Dragoness as she fought to keep her precious cargo safe.\n\n<Thirteen.> She had to breathe! Breathe! The darkness lurked behind her eyes, sucking away her consciousness\u2026\n\n<\u2026 fifteen, sixteen\u2026> the great muscles clenched. Rippled. Bore down like a woman's womb in the final throes of labour.\n\nHualiama braced herself.\n\n*PSSSSSHH-BOOOMM!!*\n\nMizuki and her three Humans blasted out of the Dragon's downward-pointing defecator tube in a spray of sludge so fine and dark, it appeared to be raining droplets of night. The Copper Dragoness shook herself with the enthusiasm of a wet dog, rattling Lia's teeth and wrenching her neck, but the worst of the sticky slush sloughed off her scales and wings. Suddenly there was a gust of fresh air in her nostrils and Lia instinctively tried to breathe, only to inhale a less-than-savoury load of Siiyumiel's waste.\n\nShe coughed helplessly, along with Saori and Elki. Even Mizuki flew poorly from beneath Siiyumiel's sky-occluding backside, convulsing as she fought to clear her nose and lungs. Eventually, a fireball smashed simultaneously out of her nostrils and mouth, burning out the muck. Lia only wished.\n\nThe Copper soared upward upon outspread wings, breaking free of the searing rain.\n\n<Thank you, Siiyumiel!> Mizuki bugled.\n\n<Aye, thank you!> Hualiama called. <Let us know when you find the key to that message.>\n\n<I WILL ARISE!> Siiyumiel thundered. <Let me touch you before you depart, little ones. It is the least gift I can give my surgically precise saviours. Neither of the twin suns has ever beheld such a mighty deed!>\n\n\"No, because we were stuck up\u2013\" Elki chuckled as Saori slapped a grimy hand over his mouth. He managed to wriggle free briefly to deadpan \"\u2013where the suns never dared\u2013\"\n\nShe caught him again. This time, there was no escape."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Facing the Dragons of Gi'ishior and the Eastern Dragon Riders of Naoko's tribe, Grandion sneered, <Any more complainers? Come on, you sons of worms, I'll take you on five at a time! Seven! Ten\u2013no takers?>\n\nA chorus of pitiful groans rose around the parade ground the Tourmaline Dragon now owned. Bar two, he also owned every Dragon within it, including several Dragons artfully draped over a few nearby buildings. Oops, slip of the old paw there, as Hualiama would have said.\n\nStrutting over to a pile of four mostly comatose Reds, he thundered, <What say you, Dragonkind?>\n\n<We submit,> came another weak groan.\n\nGrandion's gaze flicked hummingbird-quick to his shell-uncle, standing six hundred feet away across the parade ground. Zulior's expression was perfectly stern, but a tightly-controlled hoot of laughter came to his nephew's awareness. <Twenty-eight? That's a record for you, isn't it?>\n\n<Indeed. Job done, I'd say.>\n\nTurning in the opposite direction, Grandion inclined his wingtips with the utmost respect to Yukari. Beside the gigantic Aquamarine Dragoness, Akemi surveyed the scene with a characteristic scowl and arms folded across her chest. Twelve of her new Dragon force and sixteen stalwarts of Gi'ishior had just been thrashed at Dragon fisticuffs by a single beast.\n\nYukari snorted, <Oh, nobly done, youngling. Nobly done indeed. A mighty display of male draconic hormones. Now a harder task\u2013to render them conscious again.>\n\nGrandion tried to disguise his smirk with a half-bow of the muzzle, but he knew that blind Dragoness or not, Yukari could read him like an open scroll. Her budding use of Akemi's sight only made her the more dangerous. Releasing a controlled portion of his magic, Grandion summoned all the water in the air around him, from the ground and from the clouds above. Good. His water stomach swelled with a fresh load, already cooling rapidly. A touch of care, lest he freeze these feckless fools who had dared to disdain his command.\n\nExtending his throat, the Tourmaline exercised his water stomach muscles and sprayed a fine, freezing rain over the nearby group of Reds. <Wake up. Time for training.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "After three hours of flying back toward the Lost Islands, now visible on a storm-mantled horizon, Mizuki twizzled her neck to gaze at her three Riders. \"If the Dragon-Haters indeed perfected this geographically circumscribed Command-hold, shouldn't I be dead fifty leagues back?\"\n\nHualiama snarled, \"Aye!\"\n\n\"The Empress of Liars,\" said Saori, feelingly.\n\n\"Most intriguing,\" said Elki, making a tent of his fingers while trying to look inscrutable. \"Hualiama, I've never pictured you as a brunette. This is novel.\"\n\n\"Why, my fine Dragon Rider, this is merely the latest fashion trend\u2013heavenly fragrances pasted to mortal flesh.\"\n\nLia smiled over her shoulder at her dung-encrusted brother, feeling the gunge stuck to her cheeks crack audibly as it dried in the cool breeze generated by Mizuki's flight. They all resembled brown-black mud statues of indeterminable but emphatically swampy origin, plastered from head to toe in the stringy, tenacious by-product of a vegetal diet. That breeze tore away the worst of the stench before it could permanently cauterise the nostrils\u2013mercifully.\n\n\"O Princess, thy perfume doth stink most magnificently!\" opined the Prince.\n\n\"Art thou Prince Feculence Dung-Blot the Niffy, hailing from the Isle of All Pong?\" Lia inquired.\n\n\"Ordure! Ordure in my court!\" cried Elki, imitating their father King Chalcion's most pompous tones with great relish.\n\nWhile brother and sister fell about laughing, Saori folded her arms and rolled her eyes extravagantly. \"You two are quite mad. How is this acceptable behaviour for royals, may I ask\u2013Elki! I am not a straitlaced Easterner! You're the one with the ridiculously conservative traditions, with headscarves and fifty-three types of bows for every occasion\u2013\"\n\nLia needled, \"I'm convinced he's the one who was adopted\u2013\"\n\n\"Me, adopted?\"\n\n\"From a troop of monkeys!\"\n\nAn hour later, when they were all dry, crusty and starting to itch intolerably, Mizuki sang out sight of the Land Dragons upon the horizon.\n\nHualiama gazed over the khaki fields of Cloudlands to Chenak Island, literally steaming along as its breath frosted at far more regular intervals than she had expected. How fast were they moving now? Three and a half to four leagues per hour? Almost certainly, the Dragon Enchanters had taken control of the Land Dragons and were working them as hard as physically possible. Yet behind, that ever-present localised storm still stuck to the Islands like a wasps' nest to a stick, its colour noticeably whiter than the black-green band of clouds building on the horizon behind them.\n\nShe pointed. \"With luck, a friendly rainstorm to soak us to the skin.\"\n\nHer brother prodded her firmly in the ribs. \"But is it the type of luck that blindly befalls one, or the luck created by Her Most Starry Highness, Burner of Heavens and Bringer of the Mystical Star-Fires to the Presence of Humble Peasants\u2013 *urk*?\"\n\nSaori pressed her belt-knife firmly against the Prince's neck.\n\n\"I meant me. I was talking about me,\" he gabbled.\n\n\"Vain popinjay,\" sneered the Eastern Isles warrior, clearly still irked by the 'straitlaced' comment. \"Some weak-willed females might even consider you handsome. I will decide after you lean back here and give me a kiss. If it isn't a complete Island-shaker, I shall be most disappointed.\"\n\n\"A popinjay is a type of Fra'aniorian songbird, might I point out,\" Elki said. \"And, in my culture, 'shaking the Island' is a euphemism for what landed you up with a wriggling dragonet in the tum.\"\n\n\"A what?\" Saori blurted out. Her golden Eastern skin-tones blossomed into a fine suns-set colour, those few parts visible beneath her brown mask.\n\nHualiama closed her ears to the smooching couple and turned to scan the horizon ahead one more time. If only she could enjoy that with her beloved\u2026 but hers was a different fate. Leaning closer to Mizuki, she said, <So, Copper Dragoness, I've heard there's a Dragon-power which can tell truth from a lie?>\n\n<If there is, I don't know it,> said the Dragoness.\n\n<Liar.>\n\n<Prove it, Shapeshifter girl. Is your existence not a veiled truth?>\n\nClenching her fists, Lia beat them against the spine-spike immediately ahead of her and then wrung her injured right hand. Mizuki might as well have voiced her true-fires thought. Was not Hualiama's very existence, at its core, a lie?\n\n[ Enchaining Dragons ]\n\nELKI caught lia's arm on her way out of their chamber. \"Need a shirt, sis?\"\n\nShe ensured his left shin understood how solidly Dragon-Hater cobblers fashioned their wares. Her boots were definitely the type made to last fifty years and were only ever likely to win a prize in a beetle-stomping contest. \"I'm decent. Livid enough I'm worried this egg will hatch from the heat of my anger, but decent.\"\n\n\"Stay strong, sister.\" Elki was becoming quite the hugger. She peered up at her tall brother, who managed to look faintly smug, as ever. He asked, \"Bandages?\"\n\nLia held up her right hand. \"Won't win me an ounce of sympathy with my devious mother, but aye\u2013proof. Physical linkage, existential headache. It's a Shapeshifter's life.\"\n\n\"Actually, it's dead funky,\" he said, shooing her along with his hands. Her Dragoness took a mental snap at his fingers, drawing a chuckle from Human-Lia. \"Cheered on by your inner Dragoness? You are a weird one. Go create mayhem. Go on. Channel that dragonet of yours. Better still, stick him in the egg.\"\n\n\"Elki, you definitely are an egg-head.\"\n\nBrothers. Honestly, his brain had exactly three settings\u2013sleep, silly and Saori. She could not wait for him to attempt a traditional Fra'aniorian bride-kidnapping on his beloved. Unmissable entertainment. Actually, Hualiama would likely be the one to organise the event. And to convince the hot-headed warrior not to destroy Elki at the time\u2013perhaps delayed destruction was the best she could hope for? More of a conundrum than planning how to neutralise various armies all targeting Kaolili, and the impossibility of escape from her mad mother.\n\nThe hobnailed boots tapped down the corridor to her mother's door. Lia steeled herself.\n\nAt that very instant, she heard, <Hualiama, OBEY.>\n\nAn immense weight settled upon her mind. Lia's feet jerked forward, slamming her face-first into the wooden door without recourse to use her arms to prevent the collision. \"Ouch!\"\n\nRuddy\u2026 <OUT!> Her mind flared; Azziala performed the mental equivalent of a duck and a dive, but not before Hualiama's natural bastion performed its purpose. She heard a wild yell from within the room and scuffling noises. <Ha. Felt that, mother?> At least she had command of her own limbs once more. Lia touched a finger to her nose and drew it away daubed with blood.\n\nPressing open the door, Lia saw the Empress rearranging herself on her customary throne, located at the far end of an oval chamber she used for less formal activities, such as delivering briefings and planning with her Council. A smudge of crimson on the flare of her left nostril proclaimed that she had suffered a similar injury to her daughter. Azziala drank deeply from a goblet of Dragon blood, before fixing her eyes upon Lia over the rim.\n\n\"You should tie your hair back, daughter. It's immodest,\" she grated.\n\nLia had not suffered Saori's irritated, jerky efforts with the brush for a quarter-hour after a much-needed scrub and disinfection\u2013her third consecutive bath since returning from the depths of Siiyumiel's bowels\u2013for the Eastern warrior to attempt braiding her waist-length hair. White-blonde to the Haters' habitual brown and black. She was certain she still smelled faintly rank. Nevertheless, as she approached the golden throne-seat, carved with runes of power and the supposed image of Dramagon on the tall backrest, which towered eight feet above Azziala's petite frame, she made sure to sway her hair a little\u2013saying without words, 'I am unbound, as free as the Dragons of the air.'\n\n\"I have reviewed your report,\" Azziala said severely. \"I am most gratified by your attempts to bring a further potential ally, or source of power, into our ambit.\"\n\nLia's jaw barely avoided a nasty collision with the rush-covered floor. What? She studied her mother warily. The hands lay upon her thighs, resting lightly upon the blue Helyon silk dress she wore. Azziala was further covered from shoulder to elbow by a dark-blue, orrican wool cloak against the cold of her underground lair. Neat boots shod her small feet. The jewel-tipped, golden rod of office rested against her right hip, whilst at her throat, she wore a white jewel Hualiama did not recognise, although she readily identified the mineral as horiatite, the magical stone from Ha'athior Island. The jewel was massive, as large as Lia's splayed fingers, a seven-pointed central star surrounded by stylised runes, many of which she did not recognise. <Power over\u2026 abyss\u2026 eternity>\u2013that much she could read. She committed the text to memory nevertheless.\n\nThe Empress leaned forward, her golden face set in planes as hard as a granite statue. \"Assess for us the threat from the South.\"\n\n\"If Numistar seeks this unknown treasure and the Land Dragons are concerned enough to launch an expedition across the Rift\u2013which is apparently far less uncrossable than legend would have it, for the Dragonkind at least\u2013then we can conclude it must be an artefact or secret of great power,\" Hualiama said. \"Numistar's true motivation is unknown. We must exercise extreme caution where she is concerned. Any development, any stirring amongst the dragonets, must be treated as an emergency. Less so the far South. We can wait for the Land Dragons to decode the message or for fresh intelligence. Meantime, we must prepare for Kaolili.\"\n\n\"The Kingdom does not concern me. The false disciples of Dramagon are our initial target. However, should Kaolili not provide the utmost cooperation\u2026\"\n\nShe made a cutting gesture at her neck.\n\nAware of minds snooping around hers, Lia said flatly, \"I've met the King. He's a shrewd man, a calculator of odds like you. His honour will not allow your forces unopposed access to his Kingdom's airspace or resources.\"\n\n\"That's unfortunate,\" said Azziala.\n\nHer mother's new Councillors did not have the gumption to interfere, as did the old. Hualiama glanced around her as the Empress' glacial pronouncement made more than a couple of her inner circle quake visibly. Gurzia. Pure hatred. The Councillor to her right, a tall, heavyset woman with what appeared to be a permanent scowl graven upon her features, which still showed a hint of the natural pink skin-tone beneath, must be the new recruit. Payturki of Irak. In addition to the usual heavy blue robes, she wore a sky-blue wimple over her greying hair as if to underscore her devotion and piety.\n\nOdd. Did she feel a vibration from the dragonet's egg?\n\n\"So, daughter, an artefact of great power?\" At last, Azziala cracked a smile\u2013literally, for her strange skin folded upon unnatural, geometric lines. \"Such as the Scroll of Binding?\"\n\nHualiama kept still. The egg jiggled again. <No. Not now, little one.>\n\n\"You don't think you could be Numistar's target, do you? Considering Istariela's special relationship with Fra'anior the Onyx\u2013\" her lips twisted the words until they suggested the utterly abhorrent \"\u2013I wonder that a Dragoness of similar powers might not be her goal. Or a useful tool.\"\n\nWetting her lips, Lia replied, \"What could I offer Numistar that she doesn't possess already? Not that I would. I\u2013\"\n\nAzziala's face twisted so sharply, Hualiama wondered if the ghastly twin was about to make an appearance. \"The unstoppable power of ruzal. Conveniently suppressed in that cranium of yours. Putting together what we learned from the Maroon lizard, we Councillors conclude that ruzal is a magic most intimately related to Dramagon's signature talents\u2013and therefore, it is of great value to us. Infinitely greater value than, say, your continued health or life.\"\n\nThrough blood-bitten lips, she replied, \"Dear mother, how very charming you are.\"\n\nThe Empress regally ignored the bait. \"I considered Reaving you again, but that is against our Protocols and oddly, I find the Place of Reaving was destroyed during the lizard's unsuccessful attack. Strange.\"\n\n\"I wished it gone,\" Lia laughed hollowly. \"I didn't expect the ever-noble Sapphurion to listen to me.\"\n\nAzziala said, \"I think you lack the proper motivation, Hualiama.\"\n\n\"I think you're taking over the Dragonkind again.\"\n\n\"The larger ones, yes. And a few to bargain with, such as Sapphurion and what's-her-name, the Copper lizard?\"\n\nLia forced her expression to remain neutral, but her voice constricted as she traded verbal punches with her mother. \"Because your geographically bound Command-hold never existed?\"\n\n\"Fool. Of course not.\" Azziala snapped her fingers. \"Other structures do work, however, which you would do well to beware of. A ban and a bane upon infighting. Death upon treachery. Debilitating pain sufficient to stop a Dragon's heart. But I didn't summon you here to talk about petty distractions, Hualiama. I want to taste your devotion to the cause. I need you to convince that lizard-spirit which possesses you, to give up its secrets.\"\n\n\"She's incorrigible.\" <Ha, take that, Dragonsoul.>\n\nShe sensed her Dragoness close at hand, listening with a stillness that in turn, brought sombre overtones to Human-Lia's thoughts. What had Dragonsoul\u2026 did she have a premonition?\n\n\"You will therefore assign ten Dragons apiece to investigate each of these Land Dragons' nostrils and to destroy any dragonet eggs or hatchlings they might find. Further, you will choose fifty Dragons each day to investigate that storm.\"\n\nHualiama gasped, but not for the reason Azziala thought. The egg tapped sharply against her sternum. Would it crack soon? Yet she knew Azziala's decree would spell death-sentence for many Dragonkind. She dropped her gaze. Choose? Who could make such a choice? How could a commander send troops into battle knowing many would die; how could they live with their conscience thereafter?\n\n\"Perhaps the deaths of fifty Command-held Dragons a day will convince you to more assiduously seek a way to share the ruzal magic with a wider audience? A righteous, deserving Human audience?\"\n\nHow could she circumvent this order? Or turn it to the Dragons' advantage? But Lia had barely half a second to think furiously before Azziala continued:\n\n\"And as for thinking you may hatch a dragonet's egg\u2013that is odious, daughter, and it will not happen in my stronghold.\"\n\nLia froze, sensing the unveiling of a vindictive purpose in her mother.\n\n<DRAGON, DIE!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Sobbing, cradling the egg to her bosom, Hualiama fled her mother's presence. Begging\u2026 <don't die, little one. Don't\u2026> but the fragile flame was gone. Snuffed out.\n\nAzziala's sick gratification! The pinch of her monstrous fingers upon the candlewick of a life!\n\nRough laughter chased her down the corridor, beating her ears like feral windrocs, abruptly cut off by the door slamming shut behind her. She burst into her room. Lia stumbled over the threshold, her bad hand stuck in her clothing as she tried to extract the egg from its pouch. Elki's attempted catch turned into a despairing lurch. She crashed upon his outflung left leg, curling instinctively around the egg, the protective mother-Dragoness.\n\n\"Lia, what\u2013\"\n\n\"No, no, she can't\u2026 she killed him! Just like that, oh, Elki\u2026\"\n\nCrimson was the colour of hate, the crimson of blood, thundering in her ears and pumping wildly in her heart. How dare she? How dare her mother\u2013\n\n\"I heard. It's alright.\"\n\n\"No it isn't, you stupid\u2013don't you see! He's dead!\" Lia held out the egg, pleading, \"Bring him\u2026 bring him back\u2026\" Who was she even asking?\n\nJust so, she had lost Flicker.\n\nCatapulted back in time, a scene flashed into Lia's mind. Lamentation. A grief so deep, her life's-Island felt quarried out from the inside, the remaining structure too fragile to endure. Her apprehension not only of Amaryllion's sorrow, but of the Ancient Dragon somehow communing with the remnant of Flicker's fire-soul before it flew to the eternal fires. When it flew? Before? It was not too late!\n\nHope was a crossbow bolt, a shaft of burning, consuming ecstasy fired through her heart.\n\n<For the sake of thy spirit, Amaryllion\u2026> a deep, rattling groan shook Hualiama as white-fires cascaded through her body. All was washed in white. She saw into the egg. She traced the expiring flicker of life, the merest wisp of smoke. Her Dragon-form whispered the truth that where there was smoke, there was fire\u2026 and within her being, another gift trembled on the cusp of incarnation. Willing. Tremulous, yet ready to soar.\n\nFire rose, lambent\u2013the fire of a dragonet's spirit once breathed into her being. Thick beads of sweat pearled on Hualiama's brow, soaking her clothing; made the Prince somewhere, far away yet holding her person affectionately, exclaim in shock. Elki's idea. Genius. A chance for wholeness\u2013not that tragedy could ever be expunged, but perhaps there was an opportunity, a second beginning, that might by some miracle beyond her limited understanding redeem the past.\n\nIn the maelstrom of power, she knew tranquillity. Lia whispered, <You taught me that death is only a new beginning\u2013Bezaldior!>\n\nThe world shifted.\n\nPerhaps in the place where pure and noble desire met desperation, where the will knew no other way save incoherent, desperate, soul-excoriating hope, the numinous might be compelled to pierce the present reality\u2013or was the truth that those white-fires were always present, and a person simply lived among them, unaware?\n\nLovingly, she breathed fire over the egg. <Let it be.>\n\nElki yelped, slapping at his smouldering trousers, but Hualiama merely lifted the precious egg away from him, into the air, and exhaled again. A veil of shimmering fire expelled, impossibly, from her Human lungs, as if the air was transubstantiated into fire in the very act of breathing. Yet this was not physical breath, but rather, an expression of the outpouring of her spirit.\n\nA dragonet danced fleetingly in the fire, so rapidly present and gone that all she saw was the afterimage upon her retinae, and then\u2026 a quiver!\n\n\"Mercy!\" Lia almost fumbled the slick ovoid.\n\nKneeling now, cupping the jewel-like egg in her palms, Lia felt a distinct tapping against her palms. Her tears fell like sultry rain, unstoppable. Just beyond the rocking egg, Elki's eyes were as round as wine goblets, brimming over with wonder. \"Did you just\u2026 did you?\" he whispered.\n\n\"I think I did. Well, not consciously.\"\n\n\"Aye, I know,\" he breathed. \"You performed a Hualiama dance-step. One small step for Hualiama, and the world sang, 'O death, thou art not welcome here'. Not this day.\"\n\nHe quoted from the <Lay of Rolodia,> a ballad based on tragic events two hundred years before\u2026 yet her mind had no space for contemplation, for the egg wriggled as if to communicate delight. Then the tapping began again, becoming sharper and more insistent by the moment. Lia encouraged the eggling in Dragonish, speaking tenderly over it, promising warmth and welcome and love.\n\n*Tap-tap-tap.* What a travesty to crack such a beautiful egg, with its pearlescent outer shell that trapped and refracted prisms of light *\u2026 scratch-scratch\u2026* yet was not birth a kind of wrenching, a breaking free of the sheltering womb or eggshell, a portrait of life's struggle for survival from the first? So it was for the eggling. For long minutes, as Hualiama wondered how her mother could not possibly have detected the magic unleashed nearby, the eggling tapped and scratched and scrabbled inside the egg with its tiny claws, and then before her astonished eyes\u2026 *crack*. A chink opened. No, a fissure. The white point of a nose peeked out as if to scent the world for the very first time, a delicate bud no larger than her thumb, crowned by a sharp, tooth-like bone that Hualiama realised was used for breaking open the shell. It withdrew, then attacked the eggshell once more as she sang mellifluously:\n\n<He breathes! He burns!>\n\n<The Dragonsong of living fire,>\n\n<Blessed eggling, born to fly.>\n\nThe tiny creature stilled as if to listen to the notes of her song, then trilled inquisitively, *Eep?*\n\nSuddenly, there was a flurry of movement within the shell. Lia did not know what to do. Cradle it? Put it down somewhere? Wipe her wet eyes? Fearful of dropping her rather lively burden, she drew it toward her lap. Elki's eyes had become no narrower; was that a suspicious hint of moisture trapped in the whiskers of his left cheek? He mouthed, 'Priceless.'\n\nIndeed. What price, a life? A small, contrary part of Lia which had protested the breathing out of her spirit, suddenly expanded with realisation. She had not lost anything. Nor had she given up, or sacrificed part of her fire-soul. Instead, miraculously, she had multiplied Flicker's gift into this living soul.\n\n*Chip-chip\u2026* *crack!* With a sharp report, the eggshell suddenly split in two, and there, in her palms, lay a perfect little dragonet curled up nose to tail, as white as snow with the daintiest pink trim around his talons and muzzle, the undersides of the wings, and the pinprick-small scales around his flaming eyes, which were no bigger than the fingernail of her smallest finger. Stretching luxuriously, the dragonet uncurled to a surprising length, at least seven inches from muzzle to tail-tip; exquisite in every detail, down to a decidedly rotund little pot-belly. Her eyes drank deep of his beauty. Breath-stealing. Humbling. Was this an echo of how mothers felt when they beheld their newborn for the first time?\n\nThe little male cocked his head sideways, exactly as Flicker used to, to examine her person. *Eep?*\n\n\"Wow!\" said Elki.\n\nStartled, the dragonet sprang to Lia's shoulder, his claws pricking painfully as he managed to entangle himself in her hair. <Easy, little one.> She raised her hand; the dragonet squeaked, *Eep!* She laughed softly. <No biting. I'm a friend.>\n\nThe little creature hissed and warning-nipped at her knuckles.\n\nThe Prince laughed again. \"Why, Hualiama, I do believe you've become a mother. Congratulations.\"\n\nShe wrinkled her nose at him. \"Aye, I laid an egg. Well done, me.\"\n\nAn inrush of breath clued her in to the fact that Saori was lying abed, well hidden by a pile of pungent orrican furs these Lost Islanders swore were better than blankets. Her almond eyes were aglow, the smile curving her lips, as unconstrained as Lia had ever seen of her.\n\n\"That was beautiful,\" Saori said, perhaps referring also to the life stirring within her womb. \"What was that many-coloured flame? Did you just soul-transfer to a dragonet?\"\n\n\"Mercy, I suppose\u2026 I did?\" said Lia, as darkness swirled around the edges of her vision. The last she remembered was the sensation of falling toward her brother's lap."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "\"You slept for three days,\" Saori growled. \"Your dragonet's been an absolute pest, refusing to leave your side\u2013save to eat the eggshell. Is that normal behaviour?\"\n\n*Eep! Eep! Eep!*\n\nA white rocket shot into the furs piled upon her chest. <Alright, little one. Alright. I'm awake.> Rescuing the frantic dragonet from his misdirected flight, Lia brought him to her lips and dropped a kiss on top of his head, which had a prickly ruff with skull-spikes just half an inch long, and points as sharp as daggers.\n\n*Frreep!* protested the dragonet, expelling a tiny curl of smoke.\n\n\"He doesn't like kisses,\" Saori observed.\n\n\"He'll soon learn\u2013like someone else I know.\" Lia brought the dragonet to her neck, where he snuggled against her pulse.\n\n\"Break another of your fingers?\" the warrior returned, but without the slightest trace of heat, apart from the traces of pink that infused her cheeks. \"What'll you call him? Why did you sleep so long? Overuse of magic?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" growled Elki, who also coloured as Lia's gaze lit on him sewing one of Saori's tops with a fish-bone needle. Domesticated, her brother. \"How much magic does Shapeshifting require? And healing? How are you feeling, Lia? You looked awfully pale and worn that day you passed out. Poor, fainting little Princess.\"\n\nThe growl that emerged from beneath the blankets was a thousand leagues from proper Princess-behaviour.\n\n\"Never mind, my little lambkin, big brother saved you from scraping your exceedingly lovely nose on that nasty, cold floor.\"\n\n\"Elki!\" Saori and Hualiama snapped in concert.\n\nNonetheless, Saori leaned over Lia to feel her forehead. \"Hmm. Definitely Dragoness-temperature.\"\n\n\"Whaaa\u2026 fine, you two pranksters,\" Lia huffed, struggling to rise from her pillow. Still so enervated? \"Missed me, perchance? Let's see\u2013aye, that magic sapped far more from me than I expected. My Dragoness is probably due to make an appearance, just as soon as I can figure out how to pay her back for making me swim through a lake of Land Dragon poo. I'm feeling well rested, thank you, and may I remind you that I am far more snappish than your average royal? As for a name, I haven't decided yet. It feels wrong to call him Flicker.\"\n\n*Erreeep,* said the dragonet.\n\nSaori said, \"I think he disagrees.\"\n\n\"Oh, we're all experts on dragonet hatchlings, are we?\" Lia fumed. *Eep-eep!* \"What does he want now?\"\n\n\"Food, probably,\" said Elki. \"I'd want food, if I'd eaten a bellyful of eggshell. I've always wondered why there's so little dragonet-shell to be found around Fra'anior. Now we know.\"\n\n<Hatchlings eat shell to aid bone growth and scale-hardening,> said Dragoness-Lia.\n\n<Thanks.> Lia repeated this for her brother and Saori.\n\n\"I'll fetch food and water,\" Elki volunteered.\n\n\"For five,\" Saori pointed out.\n\nHualiama tickled the dragonet's tiny white spine-spikes with her forefinger; he took a playful nip at her hand, then with a joyous trill, burrowed beneath the pillow-roll. A slight quivering there and a querulous chirp betrayed expectation. \"He wants to play,\" she laughed, prodding the pillow-roll. *Eep-eep-eep!* The dragonet batted her fingers, claws sheathed. \"Come here, you bundle of mischief. Let's see if we can raise a growl out of you, you big, bad dragonet.\"\n\nSoul-transfer?\n\nWhat was the gift Amaryllion had bestowed upon her, that day he breathed the fire of an Ancient Dragon into a Human girl? She could not keep this gift to herself. She must learn what it meant; how to find ways to pass it on to others, for that was what she sensed Amaryllion had purposed. The gift was for many.\n\nA smile touched her lips. An Ancient Dragon's instruction-manual to mystical gifts might have proven handy, rather than navigating as if on a starless, moonless night. Aye, but she sensed she was beginning to grasp the Balance represented by a tiny dragonet's new life. It inspired a girl to dance.\n\nFlinging aside her bedcovers, Hualiama stretched her limbs. Aye, life was a dance.\n\nDance was laughter.\n\nLaughter could drive away her fears, for a time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "<Your life is a Dragonsong of dance, shell-daughter.>\n\nHualiama startled so hard, she leaped out of her Dragon-hide\u2013and then back into it. Manifestly, her Shapeshifter magic wavered away from her Human form and back to scale and hide, leaving her shaken. She whirled. Fra'anior!\n\nIsland-flipping, sneaky-pawed monster! How did an Ancient Dragon of his size sneak up on anyone? Was this a waking dream? Disconcerted, she could not summon so much as a puff of irritated breath.\n\nThe great Onyx regarded her with the quadruple grandeur of four heads jutting out of his habitual thunderstorm, eight massive draconic orbs roiling with fire and spitting lightning, and his own personal thunderstorm prowling and growling about his long necks. He had the awe and reverence part polished to a gemstone gleam, Dragoness-Lia decided, having to stiffen every joint to keep from quailing. He who overshadowed Islands must have grown accustomed to intimidating\u2013well, the rest of creation, more or less. But then even Fra'anior's heads, in concert, did a double-take. His eye-fires flared in surprise.\n\n<We are honoured, shell-father,> said Human-Lia, slipping her hand into her Dragoness' paw. Again, she found herself on that mountaintop above Fra'anior, but her instinct refused to accept that she dreamed. <We dance to try to build an understanding of Harmony, as best we can.>\n\n<We? Two of thee?> Fra'anior's mouths dribbled streams of fire.\n\n<Aye, this is my pet Human,> said the Star Dragoness, but her voice cracked on the word 'pet', spoiling her cheeky statement.\n\nHuman-Lia just laughed merrily. <Ah, mighty Fra'anior, meet my Dragonsoul. She's pure mischief, but such a delight, I'm grateful\u2026 to her>-she gulped\u2013<for my life.>\n\nFra'anior just stood there, leaking multiple waterfalls of liquid orange flame. Then he shook himself from heads to faraway, unseen tail, she presumed. <One soul? Human, or Dragon?> One of the heads descended precipitately to examine her, so closely that Hualiama felt the heat of his burning eye. Mighty magic swirled within, reaming her through and through. Then he snorted, <Only one fire-soul; thou hast but one. 'Oh, thou two-tailed Dragon, how thou lashest thy foes!'>\n\nLia smiled at the quotation from the <Saga of Magioral Forlar,> a famous Green Dragon of yore. <I have but one tail, mighty Fra'anior,> said her Dragoness\u2013\n\n<\u2013But what a tale it is,> Human-Lia put in.\n\n<And that tale I will extract from thy sassy hide,> the Onyx thundered in response, but he moderated his tone immediately. <Fear not, little mouse. I am merely unaccustomed to\u2026 to having a shell-daughter. Listen. Long have I meditated upon the conundrum of this Empress' Command-magic. There is a power which was known to my Istariela\u2013while she sojourned amidst mine beloved Islands\u2026>\n\nHualiama would not have believed it, but as Fra'anior's voice thickened, she realised what she should always have known\u2013he had feelings. Powerful, raging feelings. His third heart, if he had but three, could be wounded. It had been.\n\nHe said, <It is called the Word of Command. I believe Azziala, she who thou called the mother of thy Human form, uses a debased form of this magic. To combat it, thou must summon the> ruzal\u2013\n\n<No! No, please\u2026>\n\n<Aye, o fire of mine eye. A perilous path indeed.>\n\nBoth of her forms shook their heads, taking in each other's dread. \"No, Fra'anior,\" said Human-Lia, placing her slim hand upon her Dragoness' shoulder. \"Say it cannot be.\"\n\nThe Ancient Dragon replied, <Command magic is unique among the disciplines. It must be verbalised. Once spoken, the effect is immutable\u2013it cannot be un-spoken. Natural magic may combat it or resist over time, but as I just saw in thy thought-memories, when that woman spoke the death of thy dragonet, the foul deed was thus instantly accomplished. I thought no power in the Island-World could oppose death\u2013save thine, it seems, though thou must understand how fragile a work was wrought, was it but yesterday in thy time?>\n\n<Aye. Yesterday evening. But noble Fra'anior, noble shell\u2013>Human-Lia's telepathy stalled. He was too mighty! How could she claim even a fraction of his power, to be cut of such a draconic tapestry? <I-I am\u2026 afraid. It is too much. Life and death, the mingling of fires and hosting of a soul within me\u2026>\n\nTo her embarrassment, Lia felt tears pricking her eyes. Her Dragoness stroked her back and shoulders with a warm paw. <Peace, Humansoul. We will find a way.>\n\nShe asked her Dragoness, <And safeguard this power from Numistar, Shinzen and Azziala?>\n\nThe hatchling clicked her talons. <Simple\u2013not so, mighty Fra'anior?>\n\n<Not so,> he replied, frowning ponderously. Clearly, her sarcasm washed past him; the tenor of his gaze communicated preoccupation, even dismay. <Azziala's form of this magic operates simultaneously upon the physical and the magi-physical planes of existence. They perform poorly on Humankind, but deathly-well upon the Dragonkind.>\n\nIf what he said contained so much as a grain of truth, how could she have resisted her mother? Astonishing.\n\nCarefully but firmly, the Star Dragoness said, <The purity of white-fires must overrule.>\n\n<Thou art stout-hearted, mine shell-daughter. Yet I fear this view may be mistaken. For the greater good, thou should ready thyself to unleash the ruzal even should it injure thee.>\n\nDragon-Lia shuddered in concert with her Human girl. <Must I suffer in my flesh that the enchained might know freedom?>\n\nThe great muzzle lowered slowly, past the mountain, until a mighty ruff of skull-spikes soared forest-like above her awed gaze. Her eyes rose and rose. 'Dragon kebabs!' her mind wailed in a welter of strange echoes-within-echoes. Fra'anior was insanely huge. He was a beast for whom the honorific 'mighty Dragon' had surely been coined, yet failed miserably to capture the skull-bruising, brain-frazzling immensity of his presence. For an instant she was that eggling, terrified and alone, before the girl pressed her shoulder beneath her Dragon-neck, and lifted both hands to clasp her neck just behind the skull-spikes.\n\n<Fear not,> they said to each other.\n\nFra'anior's voice issued from well beneath Lia's paws and feet, and also from his other heads, until his speech resembled storms thundering and fulminating between themselves. <Courage, my shell-daughter. I shall instruct thee in the powers and perils of Command-magic. Yet hear me well. There is a greater danger called upon the one who speaks such magic, and this is the battle I fight for thee. Each time thou speakest mine younger shell-brother's secret name, hast thou not heard? Or apprehended the ambit of this utterance? Tell me, how far does Amaryllion's secret name resound?>\n\n<Far,> Hualiama said, with dawning realisation. <Far beyond this world\u2013doesn't it, o Fra'anior?>\n\n<Far and wide, indeed,> he agreed. Once more, the head rose, until Hualiama faced what appeared to be a wall of fire\u2013his eye, roiling like a volcano's restless belly, with colours for which she had no names, as they presented themselves in dancing flame before her magical senses. <See? Your world, your existence, is but one of many possible manifestations of life. In some planes of existence there live creatures of vile appetites, utterly unimaginable to thy kind\u2026 and they seek power, Hualiama. They hunger for what is thy possession. Numistar is one such creature, but many more incline greedy and insatiable eyes to the beauteous font of thy white-fire magic.>\n\nBlonde-Lia whispered, <Must we refrain from using his name-power?>\n\n<I will protect thee in the realms beyond thine ken; this is mine task, a high calling. All I ask of thee is to use these powers wisely and well.>\n\n<And my task, mighty Fra'anior?>\n\n<To deny Numistar Winterborn access to the last First Egg of the Ancient Dragons.>\n\nAlastior!\n\nSEVEN STRaight days and nights, Grandion and his Dragon-forces bloodied their claws in battle, before Kaolili's lines broke.\n\nTwo armies brawled over a line of Islands stretching forty leagues from southwest to northeast, numbering one hundred and ten major landmasses, and innumerable smaller rocks and outcroppings which made the pale lime Cloudlands in these parts resemble a shallow, treacherous terrace lake. This area was called the Shintori Archipelago, or more fondly by the soldiers\u2013at first, before they came to curse its rockiness\u2013the Rock-Garden of the East. Following predictable Eastern mentality, five hexagonal forts of identical design guarded the archipelago at meticulously planned intervals, each dark granite-block massif constructed atop an artificial hill of similar standing, some two hundred feet above the otherwise flat, boulder-strewn Islands. Mohili wheat was the main crop of this region; it grew wild, sprouting in five-foot, lime-green streamers from every possible crack and crevice and beneath every black granite boulder, apparently requiring neither encouragement nor active cultivation.\n\nThe weather had been fine, but this day had dawned grey and squally. Capricious winds yammered around the second-from-southernmost outpost, where Grandion commanded his battle-wing against Shinzen's Giants and their supporting Eastern Dragons, over one hundred in number. Giants charged over the sodden ground, attacking the fortress with roughly-hewn scaling ladders and grappling hooks, while groups of their brethren provided cover via a steady pelting of boulders and their newest discovery, crossbow bolts pillaged from the downed Dragonships of Commander Hiro's fleet.\n\nSeven days of gruelling battle. Giants popping up like weeds amidst the tangled sarsens. The ever-present danger of shield failure, and the piercing magic he could not make muzzle or tail of\u2013Grandion himself wore a four-foot, broken-off length of wood in his left upper thigh, and another bolt had breached his shield to puncture his lower left flank.\n\nAlready, he had lost thirty percent of his force to Shinzen's Giants, his Dragons and Dragon Riders unable eventually to avoid the flurries of war crossbow bolts and magic-flung boulders in the heat of battle. No shield resisted this giant-magic sufficiently. Shinzen himself had vanished like Dragon flame snuffed out between clenched fangs.\n\nHualiama would have worked out this conundrum. *GRRR!*\n\n<Greens!> Grandion ordered. <Another pass.>\n\nImmediately, sixteen Greens formed up one hundred feet beneath him in a wide, double-V formation designed to facilitate a concentrated field of Dragon fire and acid spit. The Tourmaline led a sweep from the North, intending to clear that flank and give the defenders respite. Below, nigh two hundred Giants laboured like agitated ants to build a stone ramp leading to the fortress walls.\n\n<Go!>\n\nThe Dragons wheeled and dived. Immediately, a flurry of boulders hurtled aloft, but with Grandion's support, the Greens survived the backlash thanks to their primitive shields. Acid sprayed over the Giants, each Dragon instinctively picking a target or group of targets. *Psst! Psst!* The Greens shaped the acid-shots with their tongues and fangs. The attackers danced and dodged; flesh and rock boiled where the powerful acids struck. Grandion shot bolts of ice, keeping the covering Giant-mages hopping, spoiling their aim. Aye! One through the neck! Another, impaled through the abdomen by an eight-foot shard! His fires surged. Battle! Blood! Death dealt by his paw!\n\nYet Giants swarmed unceasing, ever more aggressive with their return fire. Bolts! The Tourmaline tilted his shields to deflect, but even so, young Tarbuzi to his port flank and his shell-father, Yenuko, took shots that snapped wing-struts. The Giants had become smarter still, baiting the crossbow bolts with wire hooks and the foul poisons they secreted from special glands in the pockets of their cheeks. To his starboard side, the wily Ryuki flipped between four converging bolts before snapping out with her paws, decapitating three Giants in an intricate manoeuvre. Defenders on the wall, too weary to cheer, raised hands in salute as the Dragonwing shot by overhead.\n\nSuddenly\u2013 <'Ware above!> Grandion jinked upward, hurling himself bodily into the path of an ambush by seven enemy Reds. Two he scragged by the scruff of the neck and slammed together with his Tourmaline strength, snapping wings and bones. His muzzle snapped sideways, clashing fangs with a smaller Red. Grandion's ice-slurry snuffed out the female's fireball; he did not miss with an icicle-attack that ripped into the roof of her mouth.\n\nYenuko flipped past Grandion's instinctive wing-tuck; the powerful Green hammered into his opponent, kicking open a quintet of bloody, golden trenches in his flank.\n\nRoar! Snap! Thunder! The Tourmaline Dragon broke free with a triumphant, bugling challenge that rallied the Greens and the covering Reds higher up. Battle! Again, he drove upward, slicing into a secondary force of a dozen Dragons sidling in from the South and soon broke free from the melee, leaving a trail of destruction strewn along his flight path.\n\nPowerful, praiseworthy deeds of paw and fang!\n\n<Grandion. Grandion!>\n\nHis head snapped about. A hulking Blue\u2013 <Raiden? Why have you abandoned\u2013>\n\n<We've been overrun. Came to warn you.>\n\nRaiden looked awful\u2013he was blood-splattered, wearing a dozen fresh wounds. Fully a third of his right wing hung in tatters. Fumiko, on his back, raised her Eastern recurve bow in a weary salute. \"Grandion.\"\n\nGrandion said, \"Where's Vinzuki?\"\n\n\"My mate's fighting rear-guard,\" Raiden called. \"Shinzen attacked. Five hundred Giants. Dragons you've never seen before. Orange\u2026 with two green heads each.\"\n\n\"How long do we have?\" Grandion snapped.\n\n\"A quarter-hour,\" Fumiko and her Dragon responded simultaneously.\n\nThe Tourmaline grimaced, but his heated reply was forestalled by a peculiar break in the weather. Coincidence? Grandion shivered delicately as the storm clouds drifted apart in concert with his scrutiny of the final fortress; indeed, all along the line, the weather-front showed signs of breaking up. His gaze, however, was fixed at maximum magnification upon that fifth and final fortress. Sickly green mists drifted over the scene\u2013poison gas, his initial analysis suggested. Seventeen Kaolili Dragonships beat away at a full retreat, while more slowly to their rear, the Warlord Shinzen's bulky transport-Dragons flapped ponderously beneath the weight of six Giants each, transferring them to the next Island.\n\nHis hearts lurched with an injection of battle-hormones. Two miles above, a vast, dense mass of orange scales rippled across the sky like a many-legged, green-spotted centipede, chasing a battle-group of Dragon Riders and Western Dragons led by Akemi upon Yukari. The Oranges were so many and flying in such a tight formation, Grandion saw not a hint of sky between their ranks.\n\nYukari was about to be overhauled.\n\n\"What happened?\" he grated. <Dragons! To me!>\n\nSwiftly, Raiden described the attack. Oranges had bombed the fortress with poison-gas fireballs. Those defenders who were struck directly died agonisingly, their liquefied flesh bubbling through their armour; those indirectly affected were incapacitated by violent vomiting followed by paralysis. The Giants, apparently unaffected, had ravaged the remnant of the defenders within minutes. Skyward, Shinzen's Orange Dragons attacked with unconventional ropes\u2013like spiderweb, Fumiko put in. The burning ropes and gluey webs entangled Dragons, forcing them to land; direct poison-gas strikes on heads and muzzles had blinded or paralysed other Western Dragons. Those that landed, the Giants tore apart.\n\n\"We must help Yukari,\" Grandion decided aloud.\n\nFumiko, dark and lithe upon Raiden's back, waved her bow and uttered an Eastern word the Tourmaline did not recognise, but the tone was unmistakable. He whirled to follow her gesture. <Null-fire worms!> he swore feelingly.\n\nOrange-and-Greens. A second Dragonwing numbering four hundred plus Dragonkind beat toward the Shintori Archipelago from the Southeast, less than two hours distant and closing fast.\n\nCalculation was unnecessary. His small battle-groups could not oppose these numbers, not separately and probably not together either. Grandion bawled, <Yushimo! Sound the retreat below. Subayi\u2013the Northern fortresses. Vathi, brief Commander Hiro\u2013he won't enjoy retreating. Convince him.>\n\nRaiden said, <What about Yukari?>\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon swung about again, eying Shinzen's advance. Raiden was right. His duty was to his Elder. Sweeping his right wingtip forward until it pointed directly at the foe, Grandion roared, <DRAGONS! ATTACK!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Dragons, attack! But not blindly; not without forethought. As he led thirty-two Dragons in a southward sprint to relieve Yukari, Grandion grilled Raiden and Fumiko on the tactics of these new Dragons. Lizard-Dragons, Raiden sniffed. Their bites were also poisonous, in a way the Blue had never seen before\u2013they appeared to inject a necrotizing toxin from a pair of long, tubular fangs in the upper jaw, which ate through flesh and muscle like a Dragon supping on a delicious haunch of deer. Grandion hated to admit it, but closing with these Dragons in traditional forms of battle was probably\u2026 unwise. His scales itched.\n\n<Blue-star, what would you do?> he inquired of the oath-magic within, dark-fires despairing.\n\n<Penetrative shielding.>\n\nThe thought formed so clearly, with a hint of well-remembered laughter, that Grandion's wingbeat snarled up. What? <Hualiama? Where are you?>\n\nSilence. But the nuances of that thought were unmistakably external. Lacerate-those-enemy-worms? That was not a concept shaped by Tourmaline neurons. By his wings, if the Blue-star was with him\u2026 Grandion lifted his muzzle to see Fumiko and Raiden staring at him with identically quizzical expressions.\n\nRaiden said, \"Do you often talk yourself into a stall, mighty wing-brother?\"\n\n*Grr!* He must save his strength, and mute his draconic belly-fury for the moment. Grandion assessed his group, questioning them with telepathic fleetness. Shield-skills. Higher magical functions. Magical reserves. He had three Greens, two Reds and Raiden the Blue, who might be capable of producing and sustaining such an elegant yet power-draining shield construct. He thought-projected the required forms with them. The rest? A feint. He shared and refined the strategy with his battle-group as they winged along at over thirty leagues per hour.\n\n<This is undraconic,> said Raiden.\n\n<It will take mighty courage and firmness of paw,> Grandion snarled back. <Aye, there's nothing noble about this type of warfare\u2013save that for the ballads and praise-songs. This is survival.>\n\nThe other Blue nodded slowly. <Songs are sung only by survivors.>\n\nCloser. An orange-scaled tide about to swallow Yukari's Dragonwing. The two-headed Oranges were gnarly monsters, clearly based on some lizard-like ancestry, in all likelihood Dramagon-spawned crossbreeds. One hundred and twenty foot wingspan. Eastern double-wing anatomical structure, four in all, as if the wings had been duplicated by some process beyond Grandion's ken. Their scales were rough, spike-edged platters with no pretence of aerodynamic slickness, and the two heads of each beast, from midway up the long, sinuous necks were a brilliant lime-green colour, a poisonous hue.\n\nCloser still, Grandion could make out the curved fangs of their smiles. They must think his battle-group feral, thirty-two taking on over five hundred, by his estimate.\n\n<Ready\u2026> he called. Shields solidified around him. <Courage, Dragonkin. Trust in the magic.>\n\n<Like stars,> said that inner inkling\u2013not even a voice. Not a telepathic call. Something deeper still, a means of communication outside of all Dragon lore, the Tourmaline suspected.\n\nHe flashed the construct to his fellow-Dragons. <Fall upon the enemy like fatal talons of starlight!>\n\nRaiden understood. <BLUE-STAR!!> was his battle-challenge, immediately echoed by every Dragon in Grandion's Dragonwing as they speared toward Yukari's force. The air, cool. The rush, thrilling. Three hearts pounded inside his throat like a troop of maddened Human log-drummers. Grandion's paws tightened into fists. Hualiama had better be right about her penetrative shields, or this would be the shortest, most idiotic frontal assault in history.\n\nThe Orange Dragonwing loomed before them in a wall of living Dragonflesh, struck agleam by the twin suns' peering through the clouds. The forces flashed toward each other at a combined speed of over sixty leagues per hour. The Tourmaline sent Yukari a tightly-focussed thought\u2013<Stay your course!> Above, his diversionary teams split off at angles, thundering challenges and insults at the massed Oranges. Fireballs seared the sky. Acid sprayed from the Greens, coupled with a boiling-glue attack from the solitary Grey in Grandion's force, the fierce and striking Dragoness Makani. The trailing Dragoness of Yukari's group bugled in dismay as a set of fangs clamped into her tail. She and her Dragon Rider vanished into the oncoming wall of orange scales as though swallowed up, never to be seen again.\n\nThe Oranges' eyes ignited with fury and wonder, clearly unable to accept the vector of attack. Necks writhed in confusion; the realisation that the impending collision would kill those Dragonkind foolish enough to sustain such an impact head-on. Even Yukari's wingbeat stuttered.\n\n<SPLIT!> Grandion roared. Every muscle in his body tensed. <NOW!!>\n\nShimmering wings of shield-magic sprang from his body, bending backward slightly at the tips due to the momentum of his flight. Five shining blades like the arms of a five-pointed star, they were, fronted by a single spike that extended fifty feet ahead of his muzzle. White-fire power rippled into being as Grandion shot by above Yukari's back, so close that his trailing shields-arms came within a foot of brushing her upward wing-stroke.\n\nFor a millisecond, he was a living star.\n\n*SHOOP! SHOOP-SHOOP!* Each Dragon he pierced was a sharp tug against his mind, the strain on his magic, unprecedented. *SHOOP-SHOOP-SHOOP!* He sliced through wings and tails and necks like a Dragon clamping his fangs into the tender underparts of his prey. Grandion sensed the Orange Dragonwing folding around each point of entry as the cutting edges of Hualiama's unique shield-magic exacted a dreadful toll, yet the effect was a kind of friction, making him feel as if he swam through mud. A Green and two Reds of his force fell away, stunned and overwhelmed. He must help! Stalling deliberately, Grandion turned to the aid of Raiden and the others. As he corkscrewed through the fray, the impacts came faster and faster, battering his mind and strength. Paws and jaws swung toward him. In response, he barrel-rolled rapidly, creating a vortex of destruction that washed a world of tough Orange Dragon bodies with golden blood; body parts exploded around him, a welter of injuries so horrific, even Grandion's mighty hearts baulked.\n\nHis magic stuttered. A dismembered head struck him in the chest, the piercing fangs automatically pumping venom into the muscle near his first heart. More bites, upon the wings, tail and paws.\n\nPain seared above the adrenaline-rush of battle. He sensed a magical poison mutilating his body even as he had torn into the enemy Dragons. The taint spread insidiously.\n\nDarkness gathered in his fires, around his eyes, his wings folding like the weakest of hatchlings.\n\n<Hualiama\u2026>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "One moment Hualiama was eating lunch, the next, she found herself lying face down in a bowl of thin, unappetising vegetable soup, which smelled strongly of orrican fat.\n\n\"Uh\u2026 what?\"\n\nElki hooted, \"Lia! Did you just fall asleep mid-sentence?\"\n\n\"I\u2013did you hear\u2026 something?\" she stammered, pawing at her face ineffectually. \"Grandion?\"\n\nHer adorable brother reached out to pluck a stringy green vegetable from her hair. He popped it into his mouth. \"Nope. But this is tasty. Missing your flame, your muse, that blue-scaled prowler of stormy skies?\"\n\nLia flicked another unidentifiable chunk of vegetable at him. \"Funny.\"\n\n\"Not as hilarious as planting our oh-so-cutesy royal nose in a bowl of nasty soup,\" he suggested, but then sighed and stirred his own bowl as if wishing to stir Shinzen's intestines with a red-hot poker. \"No progress on releasing Mizuki?\"\n\nAcross the table in their quarters, Saori laid her hand warningly on the Prince's arm. \"Don't add to the pressure your sister's already under. Please. The Empress wants access to her head. Learn to think like a warrior, Elki. Our job is to keep that head intact. Nothing more.\"\n\nHe said, \"Stop imagining your spoon is a sword, Saori, and my sister might actually relax.\"\n\n\"Um. I'm not hungry anyway.\" Saori pushed her bowl away moodily. \"I hate the waiting. No sign of dragonets. No Numistar. No word from the Land Dragons, Affurion's Dragons or any other kind of Dragon. Just blood, blood and more blood. Your pet's cute, though.\"\n\nHualiama stroked the dragonet sleeping on her lap. \"Saori, you're besotted.\"\n\nWith an angry shriek, the Eastern Isles warrior leaped to her feet, jolting the table. Lia caught her own bowl, but Saori's abandoned portion flipped end over end, drenching both the dragonet and the lap holding him.\n\n*Eep! Eep!* cried the dragonet, leaping into the air.\n\n<Stupid Human!> Hualiama flung the bowl back at Saori, striking her on the shoulder.\n\nThe warrior flushed with anger. \"Now, listen here\u2013\"\n\n*Eee\u2026* the dragonet screamed at such a pitch, Lia clapped her hands over her ears. Rigid, he dropped almost to the table, before catching himself with a last-instant wing-flip.\n\n\"Oof!\" Lia coughed as a white mite thumped into her stomach. \"Claws in, you little\u2026\" To her shock, the dragonet ripped open a button of her blue dress and dived beneath the fabric, as if he wished to return to the inside of his egg!\n\n\"What's the matter with him?\" asked Elki, pointing at the quivering lump beneath the dress. \"And, why's your hair just turned blue, out of the blue, so to speak?\"\n\n\"Roaring rajals!\" Lia pulled a blue hank over her shoulder, shocked out of her draconic fury. \"Right, weird magic\u2026\"\n\nFocussing within, she asked, <Dragonsoul, what're you doing?>\n\n<The dragonet's terrified. What did you\u2013>\n\n\"Numistar!\" Lia cried.\n\nHualiama bolted for the door, leaving Saori and Elki in her wake. Flinging herself into the tunnels, she retraced the route that she had taken as a Dragoness to view the comet's onset. Short legs and a recovering body she might have, but the heart of a Dragoness beat in her chest. She heard two pairs of running feet fading behind her as she sprinted along, one hand cradling the dragonet against her body, the other arm pumping with all of her strength.\n\nAs she ran, thoughts galloped through her mind as though pounded into being by her boot-shod feet slapping against the smooth, stone-carved tunnel floor. Seven days. Six forays so far. Not a single dragonet's egg had been found deep within the Land Dragon, Yiisuriel, but only four of sixty exploring Dragons had returned alive. Lia wondered if fifty-six frozen carcasses now lined the inside of the Land Dragon's nostrils. Or had a greater danger emerged from the deeps?\n\nThrough the fabric of the mental network, a voice boomed, <DRAGONS, ARISE!>\n\nAzziala. She must have sensed a change in the magic, a flicker in the endless rhythms of a Land Dragon's life-magic, which had slowly begun to permeate Lia's awareness. Perhaps she and her mother had more in common than Lia imagined\u2013o hateful thought!\n\nBursting onto the outside portico, she looked immediately to the Place of Reaving, the nearest nostril. The midday suns highlighted movement, a flutter of almost-translucent wings. Two. Five more. Foot-long dragonets began to pour out of the nostril as if a cave mouth exhaled bats, only these were draconic creatures that resembled the larger Lesser Dragons in every significant detail. All over the Land Dragon, and those further afield, white dragonets began to rise over the Lost Islands like a mist. Tens of thousands. Millions.\n\nMercy.\n\nAt another level, Hualiama was aware of the Dragon-Haters' mental network buzzing and heaving. Lesser Dragons burst out of every stronghold to fall upon the dragonets tooth and claw, but there were so many, it was as if they flailed at passing clouds. Fire flared. Low rumbles resounded from the fireballs launched nearby; from afar, orange flares billowed ahead of the hunting Dragons. After several minutes of unopposed slaughter, Azziala herself emerged aboard her Dragonship to survey the scene, and her Commands began to ring out, echoed by every Dragon Enchanter and more faintly, by those manning the Dragonships on Islands further afield. <Dragon, die. Dragon, die. Dragon\u2026> almost, it seemed that white snow drifted to the ground, but this was bodies; living fire-souls snuffed out.\n\nAn icy wind played about the peaks of the migrating Land Dragons.\n\nUpon that wind drifted a presence colder than the farthest reaches of space. Legion dragonets stirred. Hualiama clutched her own hatchling instinctively. <Be strong, Flicker.>\n\nOh. It slipped out.\n\nA shrill chittering rose from the dragonets nearest Hualiama. Their reddish, albino eyes flared with an unnatural radiance. As one, the tiny creatures turned to maul their attackers. Snarls of fighting Dragonkind developed as if by magic. Stunning savagery. Animal tearing into animal. Behind her, Elki gasped. Screams resounded from the nearby Dragonships cresting the peak of Chenak before Azziala reorganised her draconic defence, flinging Sapphurion and his kin into the fray.\n\n\"Mizuki!\" Elki shouted, fixated on the Copper as she whistled past Azziala's flagship. Her Shivers power literally tore swathes of dragonets apart.\n\nDespite the efforts of the enthralled Lesser Dragons, who numbered in the thousands, the dragonets were innumerable, swooping and diving over the peaks in thick clouds, like the worst imaginable swarms of summer pests\u2013only, these pests came furnished with lightning reflexes and razor-sharp talons and fangs. The fighting was thickest around Azziala. Lia sensed the Empress drawing deep of her thralls, causing Dragons and Enchanters alike to wilt as she plundered them for resources. Lia ducked instinctively as a mass of several hundred dragonets whooshed by not ten feet overhead, but they seemed intent on mobbing Azziala; just forty feet off the bow of her Dragonship, Sapphurion fired fireballs so fast, his concussive strikes sounded like a throbbing drumbeat.\n\nIt twisted Lia's gut to see the respected Dragon Elder reduced to a mindless thug in Azziala's service.\n\n<Be free.>\n\nShe bit her lip. Hide it! Yet even amidst the chaos of battle, she sensed her mother's hateful regard\u2013the inner twin\u2013responding to the presence of ruzal. Azziala noted the dark, delicate spiderweb of power that instantly disintegrated her Command-hold over Sapphurion.\n\nThe great Blue whirled so fast his form was but a blur; he attacked Azziala with every power at his command. Perhaps a tail-strike? Lia was unsighted for a second, but the lightning-shot fireball that enveloped the Empress' Dragonship was certainly his signature strike, followed a millisecond later by a swift paw-swipe that shattered the gantry where she had been standing.\n\nAzziala blinked into being right next to Hualiama. \"Cunning, my daughter. I do appreciate a little attempted assassination to keep your mother alert.\"\n\nLia opened and shut her mouth without being able to utter a sound.\n\n\"Watch this.\" <DRAGON, SEIZURE!>\n\n\"No!\"\n\nTwo hundred feet away, Sapphurion jerked as though punched in the head. Lia saw the magic bloom. Saw the Empress' diabolical construct burst every blood vessel in his brain. And she could not stop it, for she seemed trapped inside a chamber, an echoing space within which all her magic turned upon itself. Azziala's revenge.\n\n<Nooooo!>\n\nAll her screaming was inside her own head. Then, another voice intruded, anguished and irresistible. <Hualiama!>\n\nHer knees crumpled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "A Dragon knew weakness, but his Dragoness had the baffling power to turn weakness inside-out. He knew failure, but she knew worse. All paled before the knowledge of his shell-father's passing on to the eternal fires. Hers was a Dragonsong of feral, desolate grief, tearing through his hearts and his soul like the thundering torrent of a Cloudlands-bound waterfall: <I killed Sapphurion!>\n\nHer thought-memories played her false. With tender strength, Grandion pacified, <No, you did not. Sapphurion made the choice to attack. It was his decision.>\n\nShe keened, inconsolable, <No, it was me, I did it, I made him, oh Grandion\u2026>\n\nHow did they even speak across the many leagues? The Tourmaline shifted restlessly, feeling as though he slept and must somehow awaken. <Thou\u2013>\n\n<No! Don't mock, not now\u2026>\n\n<I need thee,> he communicated, soul-to-soul. <Unwilling, we did this before. Now I invite thee within. Help me, thou\u2013>\n\n<I-I cannot, please! How can you trust me? How?>\n\n<With my verimost soul, thou who art my soul-strength, my Dragonsong\u2026> he had to do this. To honour Sapphurion's legacy, the shell-son had to live, to avenge. <This is my sacred duty. Help me!>\n\nTo his shock, Grandion realised that he had drawn Hualiama in. No longer was he the conqueror. He had yielded to Blue-star, and all was light, and the beauteous melody of her presence.\n\nWhite-fires."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Hualiama entered a familiar place. Once, she and Grandion had wrestled and each had tried to dominate the other. Now she knew this was a sacred place, the habitation of another soul. She must tread with holy awe, not in the ignorance and anger of before.\n\nOddly, Dragoness-Lia chuckled to herself, she had accused Grandion of knowing how to be a Dragoness. It was true. He also had inhabited her mind. Virile potentials surrounded her, shot through with the heady scents and cinnamon-magic tastes of a male Dragon, yet his being was fouled with a brand of magic she knew all too well\u2013Dramagon's signature ruzal, which had corrupted him like a magical canker. She apprehended his pure, overriding need for vengeance. That was the way of Dragons. Yet the dead could never avenge. She sensed his deep injuries, his inanition.\n\nWith quiet expectation, she sang:\n\n<How do you love the starlight?>\n\n<It winks in your eye, and sparks off your scales,>\n\n<It leaps o'er the Islands, straight to your hearts,>\n\n<And lives within, ever burning.>\n\nA true balladeer might have honed her words, but it was a specific mood the Star Dragoness sought to create. Balance. Rightness. Why it was so much easier for an outsider to perform this task in a body not her own, remained a mystery to her. Gradually, as the white-fires whispered along the pathways of his being, reversing the foul handiwork of necrotic ruzal-toxins, Hualiama became aware of many enemies surrounding her Dragon, and the sensation of other Dragonkind holding him airborne so that they could take turns to sink their poisoned fangs into his wings, tail and even his lips.\n\nFriendly bunch of wing-brothers, weren't they?\n\nHualiama smiled bleakly. So these worms and cretins thought they could bully her Dragonlove, did they? What beast in the Island-World was more vicious than a Dragoness spited?\n\nYet it should be done\u2026 properly. Examining Grandion's shield-constructs with the rapidity of thought, Lia identified four errors perpetrated by her own misunderstandings of Siiyumiel's teachings, and corrected those. Ugh. What else had she missed? Separately, she marvelled at the melding of powers flowing through their oath-connection, wishing to grasp its essential workings, yet time and perhaps distance mitigated. Not now. She lacked strength. She must stir his Tourmaline powers while leaving him a gift.\n\nA womanly touch."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "A Dragon's keening must turn to battle-rage. In the instant before conscious thought intruded, Grandion triggered his shields and attacked.\n\n*GRRAA\u2013* by his wings, he was hale. Entirely\u2013shock! Wonder! He was full, as the Humans of Gi'ishior would say, of pep and vim. The Tourmaline surged toward the magic-signature of Yukari, revelling in the sensation of his wings cleaving cleanly through the press. Sparkling blue mini-dragonets of magic whirled before his astonished eyes. Again, the magical output was prohibitive, but his peculiar shield-armour sparked a new dragonet every time an enemy Dragon touched him, even along his penetrative blades. On impact, those dragonets vaporised limbs and wings and fangs; they even chased away into the fray to detonate against unsuspecting enemy Dragons!\n\nWhat was this? Blue-star's gift of holy retribution!\n\nGrandion's delighted, vicious, mournful laughter shook the ranks of enemy Dragons. Shell-father! Be avenged! His paws and tail struck in concert, even though there was little need. Grandion carved a path of vengeance and the reflected-glory of his noble shell-father's passing to the eternal fires\u2013may his flame burn forever! Never had he fought like this. Dragons swarmed him like a mantling of thick lava, the mass of Oranges drawn to mindlessly attack the pure light shining in their midst; in the eye of the Dragon, all Grandion saw was a whirl of ruinous splendour. Battle-mirth filled his hearts, yet it was in no way animalistic or feral. It was righteous. His paw knew no rest; his zeal for the fight, no stanching. Mighty was his crusading Dragonsong.\n\nWith an almighty thunderclap, Grandion released his Storm-power, howling, <SAPPHURION! Beloved shell-father thou wert!>\n\nA thousand star-like dragonets painted the world in shades of intermingled blue and white, the sign of a Star Dragoness.\n\nOh, Hualiama! She had succoured him once more, by the decisive fate-painting of her paw\u2026\n\nGrandion exploded out of the mass of Oranges, right on Yukari's tail-spike, just behind the Dragonwing which fled the advance of Shinzen's force. Dragons rained from the sky before the eruption of his power. He whirled in the face of hundreds of enemy beasts, the mystical imperative contained in his being so potent, he feared that to release it might rip out his breastbone. Yet nothing in the Island-World could have denied him now.\n\nGrandion's throat swelled prodigiously. <I AM\u2013ALASTIOR!!>\n\n[ Ancient Powers ]\n\nSTooping over HUALIAMA on the portico above her Chenak Island stronghold, Azziala's head snapped about so sharply, she immediately clutched her neck in pain. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"I see Tourmaline strength ripping apart a Dragonwing of hundreds, mother,\" Hualiama said dreamily. \"Mighty is he, whose thunderous refrain blunted the muzzles of his foes, scattering them to the seven winds\u2026\"\n\n<Alastior!> The world reverberated as though a mighty draconic paw had struck a gong hidden at the root of the Islands. A delicious shiver trembled her every scintilla, body and soul.\n\nThe Empress' hands fisted on Lia's collar. \"What the volcanic hells is wrong with you, daughter?\"\n\n\"Wrong?\"\n\n\"Feckless child, you stir these ancient powers\u2026\"\n\nAzziala indicated the sky with a lift of her chin, where the draconic brawl had been replaced with streamers of white dragonets pouring into the unnatural storm, which lay directly north of the fifty or so Land Dragons which transported a nation of Dragon-Haters toward their common enemy\u2013Shinzen. The dragonets fluttered toward a gap in the angry black ramparts of cloud, which for the first time, opened like a fantastical land appearing at the end of a dark canyon, the sunlit, Dragon-borne peaks of Affurion's realm. A sky-window full of tiny specks proclaimed that the Lost Islands Dragons, too, had risen to oppose Numistar Winterborn. Dragonets fell in their thousands, but millions escaped, winging swiftly into that dark maw between before diving into\u2013Lia squinted and rubbed her eyes\u2013what appeared to be a green, glowing whirlpool in the Cloudlands!\n\nWhat magic brewed in the depths? Hualiama sensed it as she had once felt the enmity of Razzior the Orange, as if a Dragon's talon trailed along her spine, teasing the prey before a swift thrust ended it all.\n\nA few stragglers fluttered away from Chenak, pursued relentlessly by the Land Dragons and Dragonships of Azziala's command. Across the sailing Islands, the wanton carnage spoke mutely of the clash of Dragonkind. Hundreds of larger Dragons' corpses lay amidst the white fields of dragonets, from Yellow hatchlings to the oldest Browns, driven forth to battle by the Dragon-Haters' ruthless commands. The mental network responded already, calling forth Enchanters to blood and flay the slain Dragons for their Dragon hides.\n\nHualiama pressed her fingers to her temples. Oh, Sapphurion! How still he lay, golden blood leaking from the major arteries feeding his fire-eyes. How noble, even in death.\n\n<Let me out.>\n\nOh no. <Mercy, Dragonsoul, please\u2026>\n\n<Let me out! We must honour him.>\n\n<No. Azziala\u2013you must lie low, Dragoness.> Muting the inner snarling, Hualiama pushed to her feet. With her back held so straight her old royal tutor would have choked on his favourite berry-wine, the Princess of Fra'anior processed away from her mother.\n\n\"Lia!\" She made no answer. \"Hualiama, come here!\"\n\n\"I've a Dragon to honour.\"\n\n\"You will listen\u2013\"\n\n\"Numistar seeks a First Egg of the Ancient Dragons, mother. Think upon that.\"\n\nHualiama threw the words carelessly over her shoulder as she walked toward the end of the portico area, yet what she caught out of the corner of her eye made her blench. That usually impassive, golden face twisted into a terrible yet utterly soundless scream. The twin! Yet self-loathing made Lia turn away. Another secret babbled to the world. Or would it force her mother's hand, introducing yet another complication to an absurd snarl of powers?\n\nAlready the past receded, immutable.\n\nAzziala did not interrupt again as Lia hiked quickly up to where Sapphurion had fallen. She slowed, having to wipe her eyes twice to be able to see the way. <Silly, lovely Humansoul,> said the Dragoness within her, tenderly. Lia wept harder. <He was our first father, our roost-father, wasn't he?>\n\n<I\u2026 aye. He snatched a stinking, sodden Human babe from Ianthine's paw and brought her to a safe harbour.>\n\n<He loved us,> Dragon-Lia agreed. <It wasn't our fault he chose that instant to attack. Listen. Mother's leaving. We mustn't leave Sapphurion.>\n\n<Why?>\n\n<They'll take his hide. He deserves better.>\n\nFury clenched her fists; she wished she could punch the tears away. <If only we had Dragon fires. We could give him a proper send-off.>\n\n<We have fires.> Warmth clasped her heart, like an inner draconic paw cupping a Human heartbeat. Whisper-soft, a cherishing gesture. <Star fires. Wouldn't that be\u2013>\n\n<\u2013a perfect, honouring\u2013>\n\n<\u2013Dragonsong of true-fires love for one who loved us?> Human-Lia finished. <Aye, Dragoness. But let's not destroy our clothes for once. Give me a moment and I'll welcome\u2026 us.>\n\nSoft, melodious laughter faded in her ears. <Humansoul, you're the best friend a girl-Dragon could ask for.>\n\nAs Hualiama rapidly divested her outer garments, she moved behind the cover of a few low, cold-blasted bushes. Was Azziala truly gone? She had a nasty habit of spying on her daughter's doings, continually hunting for the keys to her ruzal.\n\n<Dragonsoul, I'm glad a smidgen of my awesomeness is rubbing off on you.> She pictured Elki. <Even if you insist on changing my hair-colour unexpectedly.>\n\n<Shall we try scales next time?>\n\nMercy, the Dragoness didn't mean that, did she? Could a Shapeshifter become stuck in a partial transformation? Uncomfortable at best. Deadly at worst. Herein lay an unknowable danger, one that made skin and scale crawl identically.\n\nDeliberately pushing that fear aside, Lia stripped off the last of her underwear. <Well. You'd better hope we don't turn into a pink-skinned, blonde-haired Dragoness. Come on. Snip snap.>\n\nSo much death. She knew Dragonsoul was only trying to alleviate the acid anguish lodged deep in her soul; they both recognised the grief-indicators underlying their apparently light-hearted exchange. No, there was no light here. Only the absence of fire, of warmth, of the irreplaceable magic that underpinned draconic life. She had failed Sapphurion. No Dragon was meant to live forever, outside of the eternal fires, yet she could not help but feel a demeaning sense of wastefulness in the manner of his death.\n\n<Roost-father.> Lia bowed to Sapphurion. Nothing fancy, not an elaborate Fra'aniorian genuflection. Respect. Deep reverence, even, for a Dragon who had been in so many senses, a giant in her life. Mentor. Protector. Wholly accepting of a creature of another species.\n\nThen, she invited her Dragoness to emerge. It took some minutes to trigger the shift, a process she so imperfectly understood. Enwrapping. Inwardly dissolving. Unfurling to occupy a greater physical volume than before, every tracery and iota of her being faithfully replicated, yet somehow transformed in the most intimate detail\u2013mysteriously, other.\n\nOne could but marvel.\n\nThe Star Dragoness inclined her muzzle gracefully and raised her wings in salute, a curious mixture of the draconic and a Human ballet-step, her sorrow unabated by her Shapeshifted form. Now, Dragon fires streamed within her body, not within her belly as expected, but all throughout her body in red-hot silken filaments, from her muzzle to her tail, and right out to her wingtips\u2013the paean of her melancholy.\n\n\"Step aside, Dragoness, before we blood you too!\"\n\nHualiama whirled. Dragon Enchanters! A trio of men wearing the usual mushroom-shaped blue hats and ornate, deep blue robes faced her, scowling. By the insignia on their cloak-pins these were Enchanters from Burak, a stronghold of lesser status in Azziala's realm.\n\nThe tallest of the trio stepped forward officiously. \"You heard us. Clear off, lizard.\"\n\nClear off? Lia snarled, \"Lay one finger on this Dragon, and you'll regret it.\"\n\n\"Do you dare defy the Empress?\"\n\n<Enchanters, obey\u2026> Hualiama snapped her jaw shut. No! Having released the ruzal once, it slithered out all too eagerly, despite her mental lockdown. Unholy windrocs! It subverted her magic that easily? What if it took over entirely, subordinating her Star Dragoness powers to its wicked will?\n\n<Return to your quarters. No.> She sighed. Nothing for it. <Secretly move among the Dragonkind, removing the additional bindings placed within their minds, making every effort to ensure you are not caught. You will forget you even had this conversation or received these orders. Go.>\n\nThe trio of Dragon-Haters ambled off, ignoring her and Sapphurion.\n\nMercy, ruzal was this easy to use? Or did it seek to use her? A Star Dragoness must not yield to darkness. Stuffing the hateful magic back into its imaginary cave as far and deep as she could, she visualised her white-fires instead. Even if a hatchling had no flame to breathe, she must find a way to honour Sapphurion. As always, her emotional state affected the responsiveness and intensity of her magic; barely a thought triggered that familiar tightening sensation in her belly. Her vision bleached to ashen, almost blinding shades of white, as if she stood upon the threshold of a star. Glancing to her paws and wings, she discovered she blazed star-bright.\n\n<Best honour mighty Sapphurion before we're drained and unable, Dragonsoul,> her Human advised very quietly.\n\n<We will.>\n\nHow did one push light about? Sheer, bloody-minded draconic willpower? No. It had to be cajoled. Whispered. Coaxed into being. Hualiama leaped nervously as a bush right in front of her nose exploded into flame. A living lake of radiance lapped over Sapphurion's body, finding there an unexpected, still-latent magical potential and rousing it into flame, just as Amaryllion Fireborn had done for himself, she recalled belatedly. The core of Sapphurion's body heated up like a furnace. Hotter still. Dragon hide could withstand temperatures of several thousand degrees, allowing them to bathe comfortably in all save the hottest of lava, but she instilled the heat of incandescent starlight in his flesh.\n\nAs much as she shone, she mourned.\n\nHualiama wished she had words to sing over him, to speed his soul upon its eternal flight. Was it as Dragons believed, that from the flame, the fire-spirits of the ancestors gazed down upon the living, judging their deeds? May even the spirits know his greatness.\n\nRaising her muzzle to the skies, she sounded a single note of exquisite clarity, so high up the vocal range that Human hearing could not apprehend it. Every Dragon for leagues about inclined his or her ear to that ultrasonic cry and raised their own bugles of grief-knowledge. Lia sang in honour of the Blue Dragon Elder:\n\n<Sapphurion was he, the shining jewel of Fra'anior,>\n\n<The very orb of the Great Dragon's eye,>\n\n<Who this day blazes among the eternal fires,>\n\n<His deeds shall be sung forever!>\n\n<Great-paw! Strong-wing! Wisdom of the Isles was he,>\n\n<Shell-father, roost-mate of Qualiana, venerated by all,>\n\n<He is: Sapphurion the Jewel-Hearted, a treasure like rainbow-song\u2026>\n\n<Who is no more, but burns, eternal.>\n\nTo her amazement, as she sang, a new purpose entered her magic, weaving through the white-hot, metallic powder rendered by the consuming fires. Slowly, in the crucible, those carbonised particles drew together as if animated by a will of their own, fusing in intolerable brightness into a new form of crystalline beauty, until all that was left upon a circle of melted rock in the place where the great Dragon had fallen, was a gemstone. A sapphire.\n\nFor a moment, all Lia could do was stare at the gem, as her body shuddered uncontrollably, racked by the aftereffects of such a tremendous output of magic. Mercy. What was this?\n\nThe deep blue gemstone was circular and faceted like an ordinary gem, but fashioned in the likeness of a Dragon sleeping curled up, muzzle-to-tail. Imprinted in the crystal lattices were sparks of a lighter, diamond-like hue, that shifted as she moved gravely toward the stone, picking out details of the Dragon's appearance\u2013scale-patterns, fangs, talons, as if the gemstone represented in some indefinable way, the very life and form of a Dragon. She half-expected it to uncurl and wing away.\n\nHer paws clasped the stone, as large as her Human's torso, to her breast. The Star Dragoness returned to retrieve her effects and walked soft-pawed back to her quarters, joined by Elki and Saori at either flank.\n\nThey did not speak."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Shinzen's forces poured up from the South, rolling over the Kingdom of Kaolili in a wave of death and destruction. He commanded tens of thousands of Dragonkind, they learned, drawn from a secret network of breeding chambers riddling the southern tip of the Eastern Archipelago. The Giant Warlord had emptied those chambers in their entirety, and abandoned his old home to gather the dust of aeons. Massive Dragonwings of identical Oranges torched Island after Island, methodically. The Orange horde bracketed the Archipelago from East to West, sweeping the ground with rolling firestorms of Dragon fire and poison, leaving no stone uncharred, no settlement intact..\n\nAll Grandion and his vastly outnumbered forces could do was to bloody the nose of the beast, and that they did. Endlessly. Ruthlessly. Perfecting the killing stroke.\n\nSmoke billowed over the East, ever-laden with the sweetish smell of scorched flesh and the distinctive, bready char of mohili wheat. The Humans fled in every conceivable vessel at their disposal; Commander Hiro plying his fleet of Dragonships\u2013bolstered by every cargo vessel and merchant ship and single-handed Dragonship owned by the nobility\u2013twenty-seven hours per day to carry refugees back toward the capital city, but it was never enough.\n\nThe Tourmaline and Yukari and Zulior led their Dragonwings in endless raids against the powerful Oranges, cycling back to Kerdani City to rest as the battlefront swept northward toward the huge, flat Island that housed the largest city among the Human population of the Island-World. Kerdani was now fortified by seven concentric layers of battlements and moats constructed and strengthened with the able help of many Brown Dragons, and manned by King Taisho's troops.\n\nOften, his restless eyes searched the horizon. Where was Hualiama? When would her star rise?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "\"I'm flying out this evening,\" said Hualiama.\n\nElki nodded, hiding his evident concern behind an affected yawn. \"Azziala wishes an alliance with Siiyumiel? Logical. Any alliance at all\u2026\"\n\n\"You travel with Mizuki, too?\"\n\n\"Right away. Bringing the fireflower of accord to Affurion.\"\n\nIndicating the north-lying Islands, the Prince said formally, \"The storm has broken, sucked down into the Cloudlands. What brews below none may know, sister, but you will furnish intelligence to the Empress regarding goings-on beneath the Cloudlands and seek formal alliance with the Land Dragons. Saori and I will seek accord with the Dragonkind, or at the very least, a truce for our mutual benefit. This is unprecedented in Lost Isles history. The Empress made clear the displeasure of her Council at this unilateral action on her part. I cannot imagine such a truce will be honoured\u2013but we must try.\"\n\n\"We must try.\"\n\nDisregarding his stiffness, Hualiama drew her brother into an embrace. \"Mizuki remains under a Command-hold. Be careful.\"\n\nSuddenly, he hugged her back fiercely. \"You always dreamed of Dragons, Lia. Always. When you were small\u2013I remember the day, it was after your formal adoption, when Queen Shyana first brought you from the city-house to live at the Palace. You were just a snotty-nosed little mite of five summers\u2013\"\n\n\"Elki!\"\n\n\"Well, close to the truth. You used to speak to the dragonets, Lia, while you fed them in your room. We thought you were crazy.\" Lia laughed as he pretended to stroke his beard in puzzlement. \"Now I realise you were just talking Dragonish. And you sang all over the Palace\u2013how you sang! You see, even at that age, you already knew the words to the Flame Cycle and Saggaz Thunderdoom, all the draconic ballads. Every word, every note. You told me Qualiana taught you to sing.\"\n\n\"Qualiana?\"\n\n\"Aye. It just sprang into my mind\u2026 today. Because of Sapphurion's passing.\"\n\n\"Elki, how come you remember these things? I'm three years older than you, as best we know.\"\n\nTo her surprise, her dapper brother blushed rather violently. \"I was, sort of\u2026 besotted. Aye, that's the word. Besotted\u2026 with you.\"\n\n\"E-Elki!\" She snorted a puff of smoke.\n\n\"Faugh! I'll admit, in all that Dragon-nonsense, I never imagined the scary, scaly, sulphur-breathing variety of sister.\"\n\n\"Scary? Explain yourself, scoundrel.\"\n\nSaori approached behind the Prince of Fra'anior, carrying warm jackets for flying, and their weapons. A quizzical smile curved her lips as she saw them talking earnestly together.\n\nThe Prince said, \"When I was six and you were nine, I had a proper fight with King Chalcion. I announced in the middle of a royal dinner to four hundred guests that you were my true love, and I intended to marry you, adoption or no adoption.\" Elki touched his left eye. \"This scar is what he left me. To this day, I've had slightly blurred vision in this eye. Headaches, too.\"\n\n\"Because of me?\"\n\nSaori gripped his arm with the air of a Dragoness entertaining a buck to dinner. \"You fell in love with your older sister?\"\n\nElki spluttered, \"Adopted older sister. I was as hopelessly and innocently infatuated as only a six year-old boy\u2026 uh, completely spoiled me for, ah\u2013\" the warrior's eyebrows peaked \"\u2013well, I've grasped the error of my ways. It's taken me years to get over being jilted\u2026 first for a monk, then for a Dragon.\"\n\n\"The hallmark of a desperate woman,\" Saori suggested, in a tone of saccharine acidity.\n\n<Dragonsoul!> Human-Lia snapped. <Are you going to let her speak\u2013>\n\n\"Don't you insult my Human like that,\" growled the Star Dragoness, just as acidly as Saori. \"She's too polite to spell out how she truly feels. I'd skip words and move straight to skinning your prissy Eastern behind\u2013\"\n\n\"Ladies!\" Elki pushed between them. \"No fighting, biting or skinning of Humans allowed. I love you both in significantly different ways. Mostly appropriate ways. Except regarding a certain Eastern enchantress. I keep having these wicked, wicked thoughts\u2013mmm\u2013I'm such a bad\u2026 ouch! You bit my lip!\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Saori. \"Hualiama, sorry. I'm just jealous; strict Eastern honour-code, you know. Like wearing a rope jacket. We're a funny, traditional society, much like you Fra'aniorians.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nParallels between Fra'anior and the East? Lia tried for a bland response, and almost succeeded. She was nothing like Saori!\n\nElki checked his lower lip for blood, but unfortunately for the sulk he was contemplating, there was no permanent injury. He settled for making a mumbling diatribe about all the strong women in his life, those who enjoyed swords just a little too much, those who had talons like swords, and those who indeed chose between swords and talons at inopportune moments.\n\nThat was when an earthquake struck the Island."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Hualiama was in the air before her mind properly registered what she had felt. An impact. A massive force or collision, yet when she looked, the Air-Breathers seemed unmoved. No. Chenak dipped! As she slowed her racing skyward, feeling slightly foolish, she scanned the Islands with her Dragon senses alert. What was this? The quintet of Land Dragons, once called Burak Island, split apart as though fleeing\u2026 she could not say from what, but that was how their behaviour struck her. One Dragon slewed sideways as though it had run aground somewhere far beneath the Cloudlands. Another shuddered side-to-side as though repeatedly pummelled by an unseen enemy, before suddenly losing three miles of above-clouds height in a precipitous swoop. Lia bit her tongue between her fangs, but the Land Dragon appeared to make a partial recovery.\n\nNow, listening, she became aware of a muffled, faraway draconic bellowing, and again, as she attuned her senses in the ways Siiyumiel had taught her, the faint tang of Dragon battle-magic teased her awareness, leaving a rank metal aftertaste on her tongue despite her not physically having tasted anything. An under-Cloudlands battle? Or the still-absent Numistar at work?\n\nHualiama knew she must act.\n\nFluttering short ways offshore from Yiisuriel's upper flanks, she allowed her wings to fold to a compact minimum and dived for the Cloudlands. One mile. Two. The pressure and ambient temperature increased noticeably as she dropped. She perceived an easterly breeze of perhaps two leagues per hour. The rank stench of orrican faeces washed from what must be a lower outlet pipe of Azziala's fortress. What an instrument her Dragon's body represented!\n\nTemperature inversions and the insulating effect of miles of super-dense air kept most Land Dragon magic from detection by the high-dwelling Lesser Dragons, she had learned. So when Hualiama, after several minutes' descent made her call, she gave her shout every ounce of power she possessed.\n\n<Siiyumiel, I need to speak with you!>\n\n<Hualiama. Report.>\n\nUgh. Not the reply she desired. <I'm investigating, mother. Land Dragon battle down below.>\n\n<Numistar?>\n\n<She's the prime suspect.>\n\nLia's eyes lit on a disturbance in the Cloudlands along Yiisuriel's flank. Oh? Was Siiyumiel trying to sneak up on her?\n\nFirst, a forked tongue emerged, comfortably large enough for five of Grandion to sleep upon side to side. Then came a flat, spatulate head, the exact colour and texture of mouldy mohili bread. The Land Dragon surged upward with apparent ease, its massive, hooked claws digging tens of feet into the naked rock with every running step. The tiny Dragoness almost laughed as the lizard-like Land Dragon oriented his single huge eye upon her\u2013an ambush! Who did this ground-grubber think he was? Without wings? By a peculiar trick of perspective, the beast seemed to swell as he charged up into the clear air; Lia belatedly began to realise just how monstrous this type of Land Dragon was. Every step covered hundreds of feet. His tail and hindquarters emerged from the clouds after a staggeringly long interval.\n\nEngineer-Lia tried to classify him according to what she had learned from the Shell-Clan. Water-Runner? Murk-Runner? All of the four-legged Land Dragons were called 'Runners' because they used their legs and tails as primary propulsion, unlike those that swam, floated, had tentacles or thousands of insectoid legs, or used gas or water propulsion systems for locomotion.\n\nShe was still busy classifying, when the Land Dragon flicked his single eye and smashed her out of the sky with a cannonade of Harmonic magic.\n\nLights exploded behind Lia's eyes. Reeling as though she had run headlong into a boulder, she tumbled toward the Cloudlands, dimly aware of the Runner-Dragon making a magnificent, salmon-like leap in her direction. His leap covered the better part of a mile; she could not have flown out from beneath him without some form of teleportation. A heroic blunder.\n\nDarkness swallowed her as though a Dragon had taken a bite out of the twin suns. A hard, sticky surface slapped into her belly and legs. She screamed! No! She could not lift her wings. She was stuck to the Dragon's tongue like a fly trapped in amber. But her captor had barely begun to retract his glue-covered tongue when a second beam of light speared at a low angle over the Cloudlands, instantly separating tongue and Star Dragoness from the flabbergasted creature that sought to dunk her into his realm. Steam exploded around Lia as the light vaporised Dragon-flesh. Bellowing incoherently, the Land Dragon watched his severed tongue part directions with his mouth. His paw grabbed the end of his tongue just as evening-darkened clouds closed overhead.\n\nShe had not taken a breath! Frantically, Lia slapped up a pneumatic shield. She could not bubble it around her entire body; something in the glue-trap prevented her from separating her body from the adhesive layer, as she intended.\n\n<Stupid, blighted worm!> she snapped, angrier at her own stupidity than the attacking Land Dragon.\n\nGreat. Her head sat in a bubble, which was all the clean air she had managed to trap in her panicked state. Right. She should initiate the particle and gas filtering, and try not to think about the poisons already leaching into her body, or the powerful alkaline adhesive scouring her sensitive wings.\n\n<SIIYUMIEL!!>\n\nHis voice alone could smash these Air-Breathers about. Despite her head-bubble, Lia felt both deafened and bruised by the impact of the Shell-Clan Dragon's challenge. She heard other voices rise about her, unseen in the opaque upper layers of Cloudlands gases. Different tribes? Rapidly, she tried to separate out the contrasting accent-indicators of their speech. Shell-Clan she knew. There were at least a dozen in the vicinity.\n\nLia heard:\n\n<Bring the Air-Breathers down!>\n\n<Cut the gas ventricles and drown the high-dwellers in the Cloudlands.>\n\n<\u2013I'm hurt!>\n\n<Shell-Clan four leagues off, closing fast. Drive them off, brethren! Steady in the ranks.>\n\n<\u2013Too large\u2026 urgh!> That was a fatality. Lia winced.\n\n<Ha ha! Pathetic Welkin-Runners.> What under the five moons were Welkin-Runners? <Made a nice smear on the rocks back there.>\n\n<Alarm! Alarm!>\n\nWho was attacking whom? Was another Clan attacking the mobile Lost Islands in order to bring down Azziala and Affurion, at Numistar's command? With Siiyumiel and his allies defending or attacking? Were any of the Land Dragons allied with Numistar?\n\nMore importantly, who would come out owning the severed tongue?\n\n<Hey. Wings-without-brains. Know anything about star-fire?>\n\nShe was so going to swat Humansoul one of these days. Did she always have to be right? The Dragoness snickered, <Alright, keep your clothes on>.\n\nPointedly ignoring the sneaking suggestion that her Human form was faultless, perfect and implausibly astute, Lia worked on summoning her special fire. In a moment, she burned herself clean off the slab of tongue, inhaling a goodly lungful of greasy white smoke before she worked out how her shield was not correctly filtering smoke particles. Mizuki had taught her to restrict more vectors of contamination rather than less; it did not help to forget a whole class of filter-constructs, however!\n\nInexperience would kill her in this environment.\n\nSmoothing out her descent, the twelve-foot Star Dragoness plunged out of the murky upper layer into a realm where everything was poised to kill her.\n\n[ Carnivorous Intelligence ]\n\nFOLLOWING a DARK-FIRES depressing council of war with King Taisho and his ministers that evening, the Tourmaline Dragon chose to walk through the torch-lit streets of Kaolili town rather than fly the half-mile to the feeding troughs and temporary roosts set up for the Dragons in an old set of grain warehouses. The mood was sombre. Neat houses had been boarded up. Families hid in the poorer sections of town, in the catacombs and storage chambers beneath the city. Green-uniformed squads of soldiers were stationed at every intersection. Hastily-constructed stone walls blockaded roads against incursion by ground troops. Had these people seen Warlord Shinzen's Giants in action, they would not have bothered.\n\nThey had nowhere left to run. Responsibility for these creatures weighed on Grandion's shoulders. In his rebellious youth, he would have decried feeling in any way answerable to Humans. Once, he had even clasped a Human child in his paw, intending to murder her to seal his loyalty to Razzior. The dread in her eyes had spoken to his third heart\u2026 and he had baulked. Regret coupled with joy as this memory faded in his mind. That day had been the germ of his transformation since; of becoming the Dragon he had always wanted to be.\n\nOddly, a few people reached out toward him in passing, or made signs he understood as inviting blessing from a Dragon. To these he nodded regally, saying, 'Strength to you.' What else could he say? He had no magic formulae to prevent war, and the destruction to come.\n\nTwo days. Two daybreaks, and orange wings would fire the dawn skies over Kerdani.\n\nHe had to admit, these Humans were better organised and braver than he had expected. There were no signs of looting. The soldiers exuded an air of watchfulness, of steely purpose. There was no panic as stores were set away underground and doors barricaded.\n\nDanger. His battle-senses pricked up. That precise footstep behind him, repeated. The faint rustle of cloth against stone. A Human was\u2026 stalking him?\n\nHe almost laughed aloud. Idiot! Did they know nothing of Dragons?\n\nMore warily, he walked on, causing these tiny, dark-haired Humans to press against the buildings either side of the road to avoid being trampled underfoot\u2013at least, that was what they must fear. Unlike the Dragonfriend, Grandion could not shrink his size to cause them less concern. He was bigger than any of their houses, hulking over the blacksmiths' forges he passed now, thirty-one shops working overtime to produce weapons and armour for the war effort. The heat of those open, roaring forges made him pause for a moment, groaning and flexing his weary spine as he imagined bathing in a Fra'aniorian volcano. Oh, for fierce heat to caress his aching bones! Yet his pause was not without purpose. The cloth-shod feet paused too, the very absence of sound pinpointing their position amongst the local pattern his senses had identified. There. Deep shadows between two forges to his starboard flank hid a lean-to half-filled with forge materials, discarded tools by the metallic smell. Aye, he scented metals and young-boy sweat, but not fear-sweat.\n\nIntrigued, the Dragon paused to scratch a non-existent itch. The Jade Moon glinted between the moving cloudbanks, briefly glinting off a pair of watchful, slit eyes before they shuttered as if sensitive to the touch of that light. The boy knew magic\u2013whether he understood his power or not.\n\nHis paw snapped out.\n\nEmpty air. Feet tapping a crazy getaway down that narrow alleyway.\n\nNot wishing to destroy any buildings, Grandion hopped over the forges, cutting off the anticipated line of retreat. The boy was sharp. He had doubled back, crawled into a narrow gutter, but the pounding of his heart gave away his position. Still no real fear. Who was this boy, who faced a hunting Dragon without fear? A fool, or a warrior born?\n\nThe Tourmaline, however, could not reach him without tearing down a few walls. Time for a change of tack.\n\n\"Be welcome to exit the shadows, boy.\" The soft breathing hitched slightly. \"I would gladly converse with thee\u2013but now, I am hungry and weary beyond measure. I tarry this night at the old warehouses over on nineteenth street. Come ask for me, and we shall talk. The pass-phrase is, 'No gem is Tourmaline, but living fire is he'. Understood?\"\n\nSilence greeted this arbitrary pass-phrase. This time, Grandion let a grin touch his lips. If this boy had a quarter of the spirit he suspected in him, let him come. The Dragons set no guards, for they had no need.\n\nThe Tourmaline extended a talon and pointed it directly at the boy's hiding-place. \"Come, or I swear I shall hunt thee through this city myself.\"\n\nThen, he blinked. The boy was gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Hualiama's wings strained to slice through the thick, viscous atmosphere above what struck her as a gloomy crysglass terrarium populated by monsters, not one of which was less than a hundred times her size. The mutilated, screaming Land Dragon tumbled away into their midst. Below, the abyssal demesne seemed endless, fading into the distance far more quickly than in the clear air above\u2013but that near horizon was more than enough for her to see dozens of Shell-Clan approaching at speeds she could scarcely credit, their limbs tucked up beneath the vast oval carapaces, their heads barely peeking out of their slit foreparts. Trios of forward-facing white eyes blazed like lamps in the void.\n\nNearer her were the Runners, the individuals varying between a quarter-mile to half a mile in length, she estimated. They evidently struggled in the upper altitudes where she flew; most swam about lower down, as best she could see in the murk, or clung to the Air-Breathers with their four paws in squat stances that reminded her of nothing more than black-banded geckoes, which grew up to ten inches long, waltzing up the walls of the Fra'aniorian Palace. And occasionally, she remembered with a smile, they might by 'accident' land on her sister Fyria's bed. Fun! Swirling quickly in the treacly air, she saw that the Lost Islands were tall, pyramid-shaped creatures, so enormous that their underparts vanished into the gloom more than a league below. Hundreds of tentacles and mandibles depended from multiple mouths which started approximately a mile lower down their bodies; otherwise, they possessed no form of physical defence apart from their gigantic size. Hundreds of Welkin-Runners swarmed around the bases of the nearest Air-Breathers, apparently chopping or cutting at something.\n\nInconceivably, Siiyumiel had revealed that the Air-Breathers floated. Lia refused to accept that as fact. Yet if the Welkin-Runners caused enough damage, what would happen to the Lost Islands' peoples and Dragons in the world above?\n\n<Hualiama!> Siiyumiel's bugle resounded in her ear-canals, angry and distressed.\n\n<That scale-mite is the Blue-star?>\n\nLia whirled. Nearby, dangling from Yiisuriel by their talon-tips, several chunky Welkin-Runners had turned avaricious, green-streaked eye-fires upon her. One sneered, <Flaytox-ap-Urax I am, little one. Welcome to the realm where big Dragons play.>\n\nHis 'welcome' came coloured with fatality-markers. Without further warning, powerful beams of light-magic pummelled her. Lia was saved only by the fact that three Runners attacked simultaneously, their beams causing unintentional amplitude interference. Nevertheless, she felt as if she had stepped beneath a roaring and frothing waterfall of pastel radiance. The Dragoness lurched away, frantically trying to concoct a reflective layer to add to her shielding.\n\n*Wham!* The Harmonic-light assault redoubled. How could light have weight, how could it batter and confuse and hurt like this? She was a mosquito in a storm.\n\nOther Welkin-Runners approached, she judged by their hunting calls. All wanted the glory of bringing home the prize\u2013her. Why? The Dragoness hunkered down, working with scattershot haste to modify the essential shield-properties Siiyumiel and Grandion had painstakingly taught her. A Runner sprang for her with a swipe of his huge forepaws, but the one called Flaytox reached out, sank his talons into his fellow-Dragon's hips and yanked him backward. Using Yiisuriel's flank to brace his forequarters, Flaytox proceeded to back-kick the surprised beast so hard with the heel of his left hind foot, that the wash of that monstrous impact rattled Lia's fangs even thousands of feet away. Golden blood spurted; the flaccid Welkin-Runner fell away into the void, unconscious.\n\nWould he bounce? Or would the increasingly dense air eventually slow his fall enough to save him? Yet already, she saw shoals of smaller piscine predators closing in, descending from the ceiling of opaque clouds above her head. Most visitors to this realm must be eaten before they ever struck the clear blue middle layers, which Siiyumiel had called the 'air-ocean', a strangely evocative, ancient word.\n\nFurther beams speared past her from the incoming Shell-Clan, cuffing Flaytox about the jowls as brutally as he had just defeated his foe.\n\nSwim! Dodge! Hualiama stretched her wings to try to reach Siiyumiel and his kin, but a corralling swipe of Flaytox's paws headed her off. Besides, there had to be a thousand of the fish-like predators out there now, perhaps attracted by the scent of blood.\n\nSuddenly, an indescribably chill presence blazed from between the Air-Breathers. <Ah, Hualiama.> She could not see the creature, but Numistar's complex form of communication instantly distinguished her even from the Land Dragons. <An unexpected boon. Come, little one. Bring me your gifts.>\n\n<Mercy\u2013no\u2026>\n\nHualiama fought back, but an unknowable compulsion had seized her body. Worse, she could not even twitch her wings\u2013a frigid air-current played over the sensitive membranes, wafting her forth with ghastly, terrifying ease. In moments, she drifted out of Flaytox's glowering ambit, pulled along in a north-easterly curve around the equivalent of Yiisuriel's rump.\n\nAs scornful and chilling as the wintry blast of her name, Numistar added, <Ruzal and star-fire shall win me access to the ultimate prize\u2013the First Egg you graciously exposed to my knowledge, and the unimaginable, uncontainable powers of the star-travelling Dragon Spirits shall reside in my paw! Mine alone!>\n\nWhy had she never considered the power contained in those First Eggs, which must have sustained draconic fire-life across the leagues between the stars, cocooning and nurturing and perhaps even shielding those proto-spirits from the depredations of time itself? What could Numistar do with such a font of magic? She shuddered to imagine. Resist! Whatever Numistar wanted of her, Hualiama would resist to her very last breath, and beyond.\n\n<Come, whelp of Fra'anior.> The Ancient Dragoness twisted the words like wind-blasted ice shards. <Why you? Merely, that your powers hold the key to the treasury of my future.>\n\n<N-No,> Lia stammered. <Never!>\n\n<You will serve me hearts, soul and wings.> The voice became dulcet, utterly beguiling. <All I need is the glamour of my irresistible presence. Once you gaze into my eyes, I will possess your soul forever.>\n\nAs Numistar Winterborn ground home her hegemony over the helpless Star Dragoness, the scene beyond Yiisuriel, between the migrating Air-Breathers, slowly unfolded before Hualiama's gaze. Entrapped or not, her jaw dropped. She screamed a long, thin wail of horror.\n\n<Noooooo!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Sated by a meal of very fine royal bark-deer, Grandion settled back into his nook and eyed the cavern, chock-full of sleeping Dragons. Ha. By his wings, if that boy could sneak in here, he deserved more than to live, he deserved one of\u2013what were those ridiculous toys Humans handed out\u2013aye, a medal. Most probably, he was a thief and that was the last Grandion would ever see of him.\n\nHe sealed the matter with a derisive puff of smoke.\n\nNow for his favourite recreation, stalking the Star Dragoness from afar. Humans thought males hunting females was\u2013well, risqu\u00e9 at best, from what he understood, and abhorrent at worst. Peculiar creatures, Humans. They did the opposite of what they preached. Just consider how Saori had hunted and captured the Dragonfriend's brother! It just went to prove that Humans could, on occasion, behave in civilised and positively draconic ways. Even a proud Tourmaline might not have balked at a little hunting, a clash or two of the fangs, with an eager Star Dragoness, rather than having to suffer this infernal, coy hiding game! Of course, what Dragoness would refuse to flip a provocative wingtip in front of a gleaming-of scale, handsome male's muzzle?\n\nEspecially a rare Tourmaline!\n\nGrandion heaved a ninety-foot sigh, settling his muzzle upon a bed of fragrant straw the Humans had provided, clearly thinking of Dragons as some kind of pack-animal that needed a soft bed. Stone was fine. Gold and gems, better. He had quashed the vocal protests of some of his troops. Accept the gift for what it was. Try not to think of how the dust would aggravate the scale-mites.\n\nBy the First Egg, when it mattered, Hualiama had come to him and saved his hide. That sealed the matter. Games? This Dragon would not give up. Flirtation? Aye, he would give more! Suppressing her feelings? He would surface them like a hot oil treatment brought out the underlying beauty of a Dragon's scales! He was a proud Dragon, the shell-son of a legendary warrior and leader, whose paws\u2026 trod amongst the eternal fires.\n\nOh, father! How the mighty had been slain by that Dragon-Hater filth!\n\nAfter a very long time, Grandion deliberately shuttered his eyes. Let his hearts find the right winds; noble winds, that might honour the heritage of his shell-father and all his draconic ancestors. Let him fly to Hualiama. To the stars."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "The girl sang:\n\n<Softly gild the night with stars,>\n\n<Gently burning swells the dawn,>\n\n<In twin-suns splendour shimmer the skies\u2026>\n\nHualiama's eyes lit upon her Dragon-form approaching, upon the blue-haired girl padding as always from an invisible portal into this shared soul-realm, to the open, colonnaded bedchamber. Her voice cracked slightly in surprise.\n\nThe Dragoness responded with an improvised echo:\n\n<Day and night, white and black,>\n\n<Are both not lit by stars?>\n\n<Duality, dichotomy, two who are one,>\n\n<Inseparable\u2026>\n\nWhen her twin's song faded amongst the colonnades, Human-Lia reached out and took her hand. \"Come. Sit with me a while. Be welcome. Let us talk of duality and dichotomy.\"\n\n\"The bastion-ward?\" smiled the other girl.\n\n\"Sit!\"\n\nBlue-hair considered this command, head askance. \"I can see why Fra'anior had so much trouble with Humans. Demanding creatures, aren't they?\" Nevertheless, she perched on the white linens beside her Humansoul, and her deep blue eyes crinkled. \"Been engineering a little magic? We saved our Grandion's life, although he was suitably surprised at the womanly touch we gifted him.\"\n\n\"Smoking macho lizard!\" Lia said feelingly.\n\n\"Mmm, and how!\" agreed Dragonsoul, with a rather different emphasis. \"Sorry. Feels peculiar, doesn't it? Don't go all coy on us; we know how we feel about him, don't we?\" She coaxed, \"Don't we?\"\n\n\"That's your Island.\"\n\n\"Our Island. Nice blush, by my wings.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're incorrigible.\" Human-Lia looked away to the brilliant, ever-night tapestry of stars. \"Look. Azziala uses magic which is cousin to the Word of Command. It makes no sense. That first time after the battle at the Dragon's Bell, she vanquished us\u2013utterly. We were gone, unconscious for two weeks. Yet during that time and afterward, we were able to resist our Human-mother. Even better, Siiyumiel comes up with a clever phrase, this psychic bastion-ward fiddle-faddle mystical malarkey.\"\n\nThose distinctly blue eyebrows quirked upward in concert with her twin-smile. \"Say that again?\"\n\n\"Where was that ward when Grandion\u2026 dominated us? When Azziala\u2013what? You brought the dragonet? How's that even poss\u2013oh! Soul-connection, oath-magic, something? Right?\"\n\n\"Admirable scientific precision there,\" teased her twin, chuckling as the dragonet poked his muzzle out of her lacy, trailing sleeve. A tiny tongue tasted the air, before his fire-eyes lit upon Lia.\n\n*Eep!* He shot over to her, but almost as quickly stalled mid-air as he did a double-take. *Eep-oh-what?*\n\n<You're starting to talk, little F\u2013uh, little one?> Blonde-Lia chuckled as the white mite made a sober examination of her tumbling locks. To her twin, she said, \"Is it my imagination, or has our hair grown a few inches every time we meet here?\"\n\n\"I hadn't noticed. The so-called 'hair thing' is\u2026 novel, for a Dragoness.\"\n\n\"Now who's being imprecise? Stand up, Dragonsoul. Turn around.\"\n\nIgnoring the dragonet, who was still fixated by her tresses, Human-Lia ran her fingers through the wealth of deep blue possessed by her twin. \"Below our backside, now. Have you seen? Do you think Grandion fancies these\u2026 uh, haunches?\"\n\n\"Mine, aye,\" said the Dragoness, archly. \"Yours, less so\u2013I hope. I mean\u2026 unholy windrocs! That came out badly.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nAwkward. The blue-haired twin stepped away, clearly fighting shame. Hualiama stroked the dragonet's teensy, perfect spine-spikes. Great leaping Islands, how beautiful was he? Alright, Lia. Admit it. Part of her was jealous of Dragonsoul. She could have the Tourmaline. A Human could never dream\u2026 but there were many types of love, Amaryllion Fireborn had taught her. None were profane, he claimed. The truth was, some forms which were not pure-fires-love were indeed profane, but equally there were many Islands a soul could find in love. It did not need to be\u2026 mated-love. Her mind supplied the Dragonish where she recoiled from the Human idea.\n\nShe would excise the profane; find an honourable path. Nothing less would be true to her nature and principles.\n\n<You really are obsessed with my hair, aren't you?> she said to the dragonet.\n\n<Straw-head,> he chirped.\n\nHualiama slipped off the bed to land with a bump on her tailbone. \"Ouch! You said\u2013did you?\" Cupping that scrap of fire-life in her palms, she stared into his fire-eyes, her own eyes suddenly brimming, her heart leaping with insane hope. \"What did you just say?\"\n\n*Eep?*\n\n<Say that again.> Holding up a handful of hair, she said, <What is this?>\n\n<Straw-head.>\n\n<Flicker!> Hualiama clapped her free hand to her mouth to forestall her yelp. Instead, a huge volley of sobs burst out, hand or no hand. <You're Flicker, reincarnated\u2026 how?>\n\nEarnestly, the dragonet shot a string of hatchling-babble at her, but ended with a very clear, querulous, <Straw-head?>\n\n<Mercy, you are\u2026> he cocked his head aside exactly as Flicker used to, with a sage air.\n\nAll that was Hualiama quaked in awe.\n\nGently, she pressed a miracle into the hollow of her neck, murmuring his name over and over. Blue-hair came to sit with her, holding her Human form, reaching over her shoulder to stroke the crooning, purring dragonet with a wondering finger. He arched his neck in pleasure, and mock-nibbled at her earlobe and her twin's fingertips.\n\nIn all the Island-World, in a place beyond the world, there were two girls and a dragonet called Flicker, and their joy.\n\nAfter a time that touched eternity, Human-Lia asked, \"I don't suppose you have any answers regarding the psychic bastion?\"\n\n\"No, but we could ask him,\" whispered Dragonsoul.\n\n\"Flicker? He's only a baby.\"\n\n\"No, him.\"\n\nPushing aside her tumbled hair, Hualiama recoiled at the sight of Fra'anior bending his burning eye upon the colonnade. What struck her most forcibly was the tenor of his nearest fire-eye, a deep, rich apricot in the main with streamers of indigo, gold and dozens of colours swirling through the vast, torrid surface of that orb; his manner bespeaking love as vast and abiding as the mightiest reaches of the Island-World.\n\nIn a voice like many flutes produced by the upper draconic palette, Fra'anior said, \"A beautiful family reunion. What happiness is mine! Never would I have thought this possible; not I, nor any of the Ancient Dragonkind. Perhaps Dramagon imagined such a goal as the pinnacle of his work, whereby he might live immortal. While we Ancient Dragons live long, it is not our physical forms which burn eternally in the great fires of the Dragonkind. Yet Amaryllion Fireborn birthed a purpose in thee, Hualiama, and thou hast brought it to fruition\u2013indeed, to rebirth.\"\n\n\"Yet I must counsel thee with words of warning.\" His voice deepened. \"When Numistar and Azziala and Shinzen, and indeed, the remnant of ruzal within thee, apprehend this power thou hast demonstrated, my shell-daughter\u2013such a power even I, Fra'anior the Onyx, never wielded by all the might of my magic\u2013they will conclude that the pursuit of the First Egg is but dross in comparison with what is the possession of thy right paw.\"\n\n\"Has not Numistar Winterborn achieved the same?\" countered Hualiama's Dragoness-form.\n\n\"No. She imprints and possesses, subjugating flesh by her power. But the original genetic weakness of aging holds true, even given a perfect imprint. Flesh will fail. No matter how many times she renews her herd of thralls, Numistar knows in the deepest coldness of her soul that what she holds in containment will age, and die.\"\n\n\"And how exactly are different?\" inquired Human-Lia.\n\nAgain, his fires muted with apparent concern. \"Shell-daughter, you literally absorbed a fire-soul into your soul, nurtured it, and returned it to enfleshed life. True-fires be spoken, you contain within your mortal flesh a second-soul-aspect, able to coexist in oneness and peaceably\u2013for the most part\u2013\" his eye-fires danced with a teasing air \"\u2013and manifest at will, which is a skill you are learning. Thus, you traverse the boundary of flesh and spirit and return, whole and beautiful. So very\u2026 beautiful.\"\n\nHis tremendous belly-fires roared and wept like a rainstorm, proclaiming the depth of his feelings.\n\n\"I\u2026 I grow maudlin and foolish,\" Fra'anior muttered, sounding trenchant yet unrepentant. \"Time marches to its own drumbeat. Hear mine conjecture. Dragon-powers exist in latent forms, especially the higher magical powers which usually manifest after the fledgling years. Likely, this bastion-ward ability lay present but dormant in thy psyche until the trauma of thy birth in fire. It revealed the second true-facet of thy nature, and Balance was restored to thine being. With Balance came the knowledge of joint physical needs. Aside, I must adjure thee to experiment with Shapeshifting regularly\u2013at least once or twice each week\u2013to ensure that both forms are physically nurtured. Thou hast made much progress in the emotional and spiritual reams, as is evidenced by this place, representative of thy soul-life. Now, ensure also the physical manifestation is appropriately cultivated.\"\n\nOne Hualiama or the other made to reply, but Fra'anior added quickly, \"Moving on. I posit the bastion, duly awakened, did flourish in thy being\u2013growing stronger and more well-formed, especially as Azziala unwittingly abetted the process by providing conditions of considerable duress. Thou knowest, the spoken Command still impacts thy physical flesh. Unfortunately, that appears to be an unavoidable consequence. The Empress surely knows this, and schemes to employ this knowledge against thee at an opportune moment.\"\n\n\"Mercy,\" said Human-Lia, succinctly.\n\n\"Makes sense,\" agreed the Dragoness, gravely. \"We thank thee for thy counsel, mighty shell-father.\"\n\nFra'anior's great eye twinkled\u2013literally, with cascades of white, inner sparks. \"A duty most congenial, and an honour to this old fire-breather.\"\n\n\"Ha, formalities and nonsense,\" snorted the Human girl. \"Just call him 'Dad'.\"\n\n\"Dad?\" squeaked blue-haired Lia.\n\n\"Dad?\" bellowed Fra'anior, amused to the tune of a huge, instantaneous thunderstorm.\n\nThen, the two girls inclined their heads simultaneously. \"I think we're in trouble. Grandion\u2026\"\n\nDarkness swallowed the scene. Screaming, they pitched into a depthless void."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "When his eyes opened, it was to light upon a charnel-house. For a gut-twisting, stunned second, Grandion could but stare. One thought dominated his mind. Cannibals!\n\nTaboo. This was taboo\u2026\n\nWhere was he? Underwater? A dozen Land Dragons\u2013they must be, these creatures were too outsized to be anything else\u2013lay near the base of underwater mountains, tethered there by tentacles or hawsers, and though the scene should be dark, it was lit by some kind of bioluminescence in the environment coupled with wide strips and dots of a brilliantly luminous material on the flanks of the mountains. The light was plentiful, allowing the Dragon to perfectly apprehend a scene out of the darkest nightmares of his kind. The Land Dragons had been trapped and flayed. Millions of white dragonets swarmed over and inside of the bodies, feeding voraciously. In the distance, two or three such scenes were repeated. So much golden Dragon blood ran from the partially-consumed carcasses that it cascaded in curiously sluggish rivers down the dark slopes, feeding an enormous, pulsating host of predators and scavengers that had gathered to partake of the bounty\u2013only, they dared not approach the white dragonets.\n\nGrandion understood why.\n\nThose were not natural Dragonkind. The foot-long dragonets ate with one purpose, with one motion, with one mind. The super-mind controlling this uncountable mass of smaller fire-souls pervaded the entire area with a bitter, physical aura of a kind he had never before apprehended. Yet he knew. This was Numistar Winterborn. Crushingly enormous. The arctic breath of snows was her signature, which the Tourmaline Dragon had only ever experienced in the height of storms over the Island-World, yet this felt colder. More profound\u2013a spiritual cold, he sensed. Her spirit was replicated in each of these dragonets, individually tiny, yet in their millions, attaining to the magnitude of an Ancient Dragon.\n\nAt last, he understood where this realm was. This was where Hualiama found herself\u2013yet what was she doing here?\n\n<Can't escape. Grandion\u2026>\n\nShe needed him! He spared no thought for gloating. A pure, draconic fury burned in his breast as Grandion apprehended the peril of her situation. Somehow, when they needed each other most, the oath-connection came into its own. They became more. Across the leagues, they melded in ways that made a Dragon's heart-fires swoop and swoon. Yet what could he do?\n\n<I am here, Dragonfriend.>\n\nA stout declaration. Her delighted gasp was practically the only movement she was capable of, for the air surrounding her\u2013he snorted in surprise as her underdeveloped hatchling Dragon-senses delivered their payload of data and impressions to his watching mind\u2013was as still and inflexible as glass. Numistar! What power was this, that she could command the very flows of the air?\n\nObeying his instinct, Grandion reached within Hualiama for the knowledge he needed of this realm. No, the avaricious paw would not reach further, to that\u2026 Onyx power\u2026 within her? He reeled. She had travelled beneath the Cloudlands! She had healed Siiyumiel. His muzzle shook side-to-side in a very Human-like gesture of awe. This girl\u2013this Dragoness! He could not keep track of her doings. But she did not appreciate the level of toxins present in her system, many operating in the magic plane, in ways he had never imagined. She could not endure much more.\n\nThe Tourmaline had great strength, but Numistar's might was that of an Ancient Dragon. No strength of his paw could tear her loose.\n\n<Siiyumiel!> he cried. <Shine your light\u2026>\n\nGiven the Shell-Clan Elder's angle of approach, the light-of-Dragonsong that reached his senses was only the periphery of the main beam. Not enough! The equation was simple. Siiyumiel's Balance-magic did nothing whatsoever to weaken Numistar's hold on Hualiama. Grandion wanted to grit his teeth, but even that was a struggle. Quick-wings. He racked his brains for a solution. Something to make Numistar flinch. They must force her to withdraw, for he sensed, more a seventh-sense intuition than any concrete insight, that her power was neither fully developed nor perfectly coherent as yet. When it was\u2026\n\n<Hualiama, can you conceive of a strategy, a vector?>\n\n<Vector?> his hostess wheezed. <Vector\u2026 means light.> Grandion projected puzzlement. <Prism.>\n\n<Aye! A prismatic effect should modify the light's course\u2013but how?>\n\nSwiftly pouncing upon the hypothetical constructs flickering through her exhausted mind, Grandion struggled to make sense of what he knew was at best an esoteric branch of shield-physics. What use had prisms when no standard draconic attack used light? He remembered Sapphurion teaching him unusual magnification techniques, but a certain fledgling Tourmaline had been too preoccupied to listen to his shell-father. Yet he and Hualiama drew together, pooling their knowledge, and with his strength, they modified her shields fundamentally.\n\nAs he faded, drawn back to his sleeping body, Grandion cried, <Siiyumiel, we need your light!>\n\n[ Treble Ambush ]\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon's awareness hurtled back into his body so precipitously, his paw twitched and jumped three feet. It brushed Human-flesh. The boy twitched. Too late. He wriggled, but his strength was far too tiny to shift Grandion's grasp.\n\n\"I see a mouse trapped in mine paw,\" said the Tourmaline, cracking open an eye. \"How did you enter this place?\"\n\n\"On my two feet,\" hissed the boy.\n\n\"Sneaking past one hundred Dragons?\"\n\n\"They were sleeping.\"\n\nGrandion stared into the stormy grey eyes, taking in their air of defiance, the hunted, ragamuffin air of the boy he had trapped. He remembered this boy. Dragons seldom forgot. He said, \"I see a warrior fallen on hard times.\"\n\n\"A warrior?\" spat the boy. \"Do you know who I am; what I have become?\"\n\n\"What do you seek here, Jinichi?\"\n\nThe boy jumped as Grandion plucked his name out of the halls of his memory, from his search for the lost Scroll of Binding. He remembered unblinking grey eyes watching the Tourmaline Dragon over a campfire as he made inquiries of their Council of Elders. His people were the Nikuko, a feared and hated warrior-caste with legendary magical powers, at least in the legends of the East. The Dragon still remembered those eyes. They had made his scales itch.\n\nNow, the youngster of perhaps fifteen summers had to iron a tremor out of his voice. In his clipped Eastern dialect, he said, \"I am Jinichi. Informally, I am known as Jin. I am the last of my people.\"\n\n\"You seek revenge.\"\n\n\"Aye. No. I seek\u2026 the impossible.\"\n\n\"Sneaking through a cave filled with Dragons is technically impossible,\" the Tourmaline pointed out, striving to identify the exact nuances in the boy's manner. \"But you have magic.\"\n\n\"Don't say that!\" he yelped, waving his free arm. The other was trapped by Grandion's curled talons. By his scales, the wretch stank! Had he been bathing in some foul Human midden? He wore his hair long, apparently to disguise the layered tattoos on his cheeks and neck.\n\n\"I am Dragonkind. I speak the truth as I perceive it. Why are you here?\"\n\n\"I cannot say.\"\n\nGrandion had no need to simulate anger. The blazing of his eyes was clearly reflected upon the boy's golden Eastern skin, and in the dark pupils of his eyes. \"For a sneaking wretch, you're remarkably untalkative this evening,\" he said, dourly. \"You reek. But your manners stink far worse. A warrior without honour counts a dog as his superior.\"\n\nAlthough he used an Eastern saying he had learned from scroll-lore at Gi'ishior, the impact of his words was far deeper than he could have imagined. The boy blanched to the colour of draconic white-fires, then screamed incoherently at the Dragon. Before he could think further upon the matter, Grandion stretched out his paw and dunked the lad in the nearest water-trough.\n\n<Just washing this stinking Human,> he announced.\n\nHe lifted Jin out. The boy started screaming again. *Splash.*\n\n<I'm hazing him for bad behaviour,> Grandion added, drawing a few sniggers from the Dragons resting nearby. The boy gurgled and kicked; the Dragon held him under. Hopefully not too long. Dragons could hold their breath for over fifteen minutes. How many for Humans\u2013perhaps five?\n\nWell, his struggles weakened all too soon. The limbs convulsed. The Dragon hauled him out. Oh. A slap of the paw between the shoulder blades, and Jin vomited water. \"Can't swim?\" Grandion inquired, unkindly.\n\nHualiama would have slapped him; called him a mean and nasty beast. One hundred fangs gleamed in his jaw. He should not disprove her words.\n\nThe boy tried to roll away, his body somehow clinging to the shadows, but a snick of talons arrested that idea. Pressing one talon against that reed-thin neck, the Dragon rested a paw upon his captive. This boy was far too good at sneaking about. He needed to understand this peculiar brand of magic, and the inexplicable draw he felt toward the youngster. Half-drowning him, whilst providing a moment's entertainment, was probably not the answer. Why not\u2026 Hualiama's Way?\n\nGrr. That Dragoness was burrowing under his scales and into his hearts.\n\nLeaning in close, Grandion said, \"Jinichi of Roninida Island, do you wish to become a Dragon Rider?\"\n\nFor the first time, he read fear in those clear grey eyes. \"No\u2013\" the Dragon let his talon press just a little against the voice-box, not enough to draw blood \"\u2013yes! Yes, but I can't! I dream of Dragons\u2013curse it! Don't you understand, Dragon? I have lost my tribe, my sword and my honour. I'm nothing. Nothing! Worse than a dog. I've lived like a sewer rat on these streets, stealing mohili bread to live.\"\n\n\"Then we are alike.\"\n\nJin could only stare at the Dragon. His throat worked, but no words emerged.\n\n\"I dishonoured my people. My entire race. When I first met you, I was a disgraced Dragon honour-bound to an impossible quest. A dog, not a Dragon. Yet I have learned that honour bestowed by others is worthless. What truly matters is the honour of deeds of word and paw, and the pure-fires of a true heart. Can you live with the man you see in the mirror, Jin? You need to ask him these questions. You are Nikuko. You have powers. You dream great dreams. I say you are Jin\u2013Jin the Apprentice. Do we understand each other?\"\n\nVery slowly, the throat bobbed again. \"Aye.\"\n\n\"Good. Then first, you need to learn about the Dragonkind. You'll find a scrubbing-brush against that far wall. I'm itchy.\"\n\nJin dared to waggle an eyebrow. \"Itchy?\"\n\n\"All over,\" Grandion clarified. \"After that, there's a hundred other Dragons in here who'll need cleaning, scrubbing and polishing. When you're done, I expect you to be able to recite their names, colours, lineage, history and powers. I will question you. Any mistakes\u2026\" He hooked a talon toward the water bucket. \"Understood?\"\n\n\"Draconic notions of honour are\u2026 peculiar,\" ventured the teenager.\n\nThe Tourmaline sheathed his talons with a studied air. \"Boy, nothing makes a Dragon more irritable than itchy scales. Learn fast.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Hualiama floated in tantalising light, yet her awareness was dim. Dulled by exhaustion. The force surrounding her body varied as she flexed her wings; she existed upon borrowed strength.\n\nNumistar. Aye. She must fight Numistar, but she was so weak. Shifting restlessly, Hualiama again felt the distant draw weaken and change, then strengthen once more. So leaden of wing. Neck lolling. Oh. What was that bellowing?\n\n<Fight! Orient ten degrees starboard and forty-eight vertical!>\n\n<Uhh\u2026 Siiyumiel?>\n\nWith a wriggle, Lia oriented herself in what she thought might be the right direction. Someone who was used to walking with two feet on the Island was accordingly not accustomed to three-dimensional spatial navigation, but she had plenty of experience piloting Dragonships. Two further corrections, and suddenly she sensed the flow of magic intersecting her position escalate, as though an earthquake had cracked open a terrace lake. Suddenly her wings, freed from external governance, could flex. Siiyumiel immediately shot through further detailed instructions, directing the Star Dragoness into the middle of his highly focussed beam which speared in from over four miles distant.\n\nDazzled, she used her secondary optic membranes to filter the light. Now she saw Siiyumiel's beam streaming from the northwest, somehow bending around her body as though the light-magic had taken fright. It shot off between the Air-Breathers at a bearing of five compass degrees south of east, with a sharp downward angle. Dragonets skittered away from that powerful blast, much as she realised Land Dragons used their Harmonic light to frighten away predators. Lesser Dragons had no such skills. Dark shapes circled her with predacious tenacity. By the quality of the ambient light, she realised that night must have fallen in the world above.\n\nWhere the refracted beam fell, angling around the flank of an Air-Breather, Numistar's power was weakened enough for many dragonets to fall, especially those struck by the centre of the beam; the predators noticed this too, closing in with sharp thrusts of wings and fins. Smoke boiled from the area of impact. The faint, soprano shrieks of dragonets fell upon her ears.\n\nShe shifted, feeling the peculiar shield ripple with her movement\u2013who had built this unfamiliar construct? Of course. Grandion's doing. <Thank you, my Dragon.>\n\nAs best she could calculate, Hualiama played the beam across the nearest clusters of dragonets feeding on\u2026 oh! Oh, stinking windrocs, what was the Ancient Dragon thinking? Simple. No different to Azziala blooding Dragons, only this was more direct. What was the largest source of meat under the Cloudlands? Clearly, Numistar Winterborn needed to grow her strength. That was her exact plan. Siiyumiel's light injured Numistar, but there were so many clusters of dragonets, Hualiama realised she was only clashing with a small percentage of Numistar's totality. How did one fight myriad?\n\nA wounded Dragoness would lash out.\n\nHualiama turned at once and fled, forging through the viscid air toward Siiyumiel. She should feel no shame, in this deadly environment, in sheltering behind the biggest, baddest behemoth she could find. Behind her, Numistar raised a monstrous, pain-crazed bellow.\n\n<BLUE-STAR! YOU WILL BE MINE!>\n\nShe fled faster.\n\nFor long minutes, her scalp behind her skull-spikes crawled with the expectation that Numistar would seize her by the wingtips and drag her off to that ghastly feeding ground. Yet Siiyumiel rallied his kin. Multiple attacks, though smaller and weaker than the mighty Elder's efforts, radiated between the bulk of the Air-Breathers like beams of the brightest lamps Hualiama had ever seen, cleansing some of the nearer carcasses of predators and dragonets alike. The approaching Shell-Clan came under attack from their kin, the Welkin-Runners, who launched off the Islands to latch onto their larger brethren. They attacked the heads and under the carapaces where the Shell-Clan's limbs attached to the body\u2013groins and armpits, in a manner of speaking\u2013with huge, punishing blows of their talons. Siiyumiel's Clan remained in compact formation, helping each other peel off the attackers, crushing them between their monstrous bodies or scorching Dragon hide with directed blasts of their Harmonic magic.\n\nPower against agility, Hualiama realised. The Shell-Clan were all power grounded in the mountainous strength of living, breathing furnaces; the Welkin-Runners, fast and brutal, their thuggish individuality giving way under sustained attack to an instinct for self-preservation. They fought in fluid groups, trying to swarm the Shell-Clan by sheer weight of numbers and drag them to the flanks of the Air-Breathers or down to a more solid-appearing substrate miles below, where dozens more Runners waited.\n\nSiiyumiel's light-beam abruptly cut off, leaving her without night-vision and alone. Dark shadows descended immediately. These were a class of under-Cloudlands predator scavengers called Borers, vastly elongated reptilian creatures that drilled their way into a weakened Land Dragon's flesh. If successful, they laid their eggs within, and ate them from the inside out over a period of years. They had ten fin-like wings protruding from the upper body, a further ten on the midsection, and a large thicket of motile fins on their tail ends.\n\nHualiama had half a second to think her shields might hold, when she learned how deadly these creatures were. *Drrr!* A drill-like appendage blasted through with a type of high-frequency, cutting Harmonic magic. She snapped her wing aside in the nick of time. Freaking feral windrocs! *Drrr!* She dodged again, shoring up her shields frantically but losing a two-foot diameter patch of scales on her left upper flank. Pain and panic accelerated every system, every impression, every reaction of her Dragon body as she raced through the press, before stalling amidst an overwhelming thicket of Borer bodies. She punched and pushed blindly but only ran headfirst into enemy after enemy, tearing herself free each time, desperate, unnerved.\n\n*Drrr!* Her nose shook briefly; a reflexive lick of her tongue brought her the taste of her own blood.\n\n<Away, sweet Dragoness,> cried Humansoul, earning herself the umpteenth slap of their brief partnership in Shapeshifter life. <Come on. One of us, five thousand of them. Perfect odds.>\n\n<Indeed, if I had any magic left!> snarled the Star Dragoness. Yet tranquillity pooled within her breast\u2026\n\n<Please use our gorgeous wings together with our brains.>\n\nHualiama snapped something she had definitely not learned in the royal halls of Fra'anior. That Human! Snarky and right, the most annoying possible combination.\n\nThis exchange occupied a conversational space as brief as thought. Her Human's intervention brought clarity. Swirling away between the thrashing bodies, the tiny Dragoness pretended she was playing at her first hunt with the Dragon hatchlings and fledglings of Sarzun Dragonhold. She danced. Numbers worked against the enemy unless they worked as a team; these Borers were anything but. Frustrated, they tore and drilled chunks out of each other. The spurting blood maddened them further. Lia dug into a torso with her talons for a brief ride, only to discover that these creatures were able to twist themselves into knots. She barely escaped a chomping mouth with the end of her tail.\n\nThen, Siiyumiel's unique magic swept the area nearby. Bodies blasted apart, swirling in clouds of vaporised, stinking flesh. With a dragonet-worthy flip of her wings, Hualiama arrowed for the open space. She barrel-rolled over an incoming attacker, stall-and-dipped beneath three converging bodies, and danced away from the grasping mouths and wings, into the open.\n\nThe Land Dragon bathed her in polychromatic glory. <Strength.>\n\nLight and Harmony chased the weariness out of her limbs. Her body buzzed in surprise, in gratitude, as Siiyumiel's healing power washed over her. She lowered her muzzle. <Awe-respect.>\n\n<Tiiyusiel, take the Star Dragoness aloft. We will speak, little one, but your task now lies ahead. The roots of Kaolili begin but ninety leagues from this place, where the deep-bottoms rise. Soon, the Air-Breathers will truly walk.>\n\nShe snickered involuntarily as Siiyumiel revealed what he thought of her original idea that these living Islands walked on the underbelly of the world. The Cloudlands were so much deeper than she had imagined. Six, eight leagues deep in many places. Deeper still were the trenches that reached the very molten core of the world, and the apparently bottomless Rift which separated the North and Herimor. The relentless, massive pressures of those depths would eventually overwhelm even a Land Dragon; they supported entirely novel forms of life, mysterious even to the Shell-Clan.\n\nLight-beams played around her now in glorious display, as though stars danced with swords in the gloom beneath the Cloudlands, cutting and clashing, etching and burning.\n\nThe Shell-Clan swept in, bold but beleaguered, cutting across the westerly flank of the Lost Islands as they pounded the Welkin-Runners with synchronised discharges of their eye-magic. Hualiama could not keep track; the strobe lightning confused her senses, but she oriented on the signature of Tiiyusiel's magic and followed that to a meeting with the young Shell-Clan Dragoness. Blasts of green-tinged light from the Welkin-Runners tossed her about like a flea cast adrift in an ocean of dark and light, but she fought through nevertheless.\n\nAs she finally shut her eyes against the piercing light-shocks, Hualiama managed to make an understated landing near Tiiyusiel\u2013actually, right against the eyelid of her primary eye.\n\nLight-blink-light!\n\nSo intense was the blaze behind her, Hualiama's wings became almost transparent. She darted aside, gripping lightly with her talons, before Tiiyusiel had even formed the thought that resting in the eye of her light-cannon was not the wisest choice for a Lesser Dragon.\n\n*Boom! Boom!* The Land Dragoness lurched. Her detour, Lia apprehended, had taken her out of the pack and into danger. Four Runners clung to her carapace, pressing her down with their combined weight, while one quarried at the exposed skin of her nape. Tiiyusiel groaned, trying to fly a steady course.\n\nFly? Swim? Float? Lia cried, <Strength, Tiiyusiel! Let me help\u2026>\n\nThe incredulous Land Dragoness had neither choice nor warning as a touch of Hualiama modified her shields.\n\n*KAAAABOOOM!* The entire underworld shook as Tiiyusiel's Harmonic blast shifted into her shields and then flashed outward. The four grappling Runners exploded into thousands of charred chunks of Dragonflesh. Two miles away, the wash staggered Siiyumiel and kin, but more so their attackers. Talons unclenched. Mouths gaped in shock. A few of Siiyumiel's command bellowed in anger at Lia's interference, but most seized the opportunity to land unopposed blows and scrape clean their fellows' carapaces.\n\nPoor Tiiyusiel responded as if Hualiama had slapped her across the muzzle with an Island, but Siiyumiel was already beaming in his healing power.\n\n<Sorry, I didn't mean\u2013>Lia coughed, and vomited weakly.\n\n<No, it was bravely done. A tad clumsy on the execution,> said Tiiyusiel, her voice shaking palpably. Human-Lia rolled her eyes somewhere inside the Dragoness. Inelegant Lia. The tale of her life. <Watch this. If a Land Dragon should pinpoint-direct such Harmonic magic through the shield-construct\u2013>\n\n<No, you need a more precise delivery mechanism, something like this,> said the Star Dragoness, with an inner nod at her Human engineer\u2026\n\n<Excellent,> Tiiyusiel agreed. <All-round protection! Noble Siiyumiel\u2013>\n\n<Already processing the idea, my shell-kin,> he agreed, with a flare of excitement-indicators. <Take our friend up-world quickly. Hurry. Truly, her deeds proclaim her the Dragonfriend.>\n\nLia was uncertain as to what her blunder had achieved, but the Land Dragons seemed inordinately energised. Tiiyusiel soared away immediately, the furnace-engines of her magic providing lift and thrust. She swam into the dark upper cloud layer. The battle vanished from Hualiama's sight, but not from her mind. The flashes and detonations of magic continued as the Shell-Clan pressed home their assault. Had they come to save her?\n\n<Not you alone,> said Tiiyusiel. <But you provided impetus for our assault. Numistar Winterborn gathers to herself an army of Land Dragons. We are uncertain as to her intent.>\n\nQuickly, Hualiama described the existence of an unhatched First Egg, the vital information the Land Dragons had sought and failed to identify before. As she spoke she realised aloud that Numistar must know something of its location\u2013why else would she require Land Dragons, if the First Egg were somehow accessible from the above-Cloudlands world? The mismatched group of Land Dragons which had travelled North from Herimor must have been seeking the unmatched power of the First Egg, but they too could not know its location\u2013or did they? Did they seek to learn Numistar Winterborn's intent and oppose her, or was their motivation more sinister yet?\n\nShe and Tiiyusiel agreed that the truth of that matter remained unknown.\n\nFrom her side, Tiiyusiel confirmed the Shell-Clan's reading of the Balance, that there were too many powers gathered now in one corner of the Island-World for there not to be an explosion of war. Already, war raged in the under-Cloudlands realms. Now, Tiiyusiel showed her the thought-memories of the Shell-Clan responsible for gathering intelligence from the South. Warlord Shinzen's bulky Dragons served as rapid transport for his Giants, Island-to-Island. Seen from a low angle, the Giants overran and torched a Human village, followed by celebrations and the nauseating images of pairs of Giants spit-roasting bodies in the flames\u2013she promptly threw up again. Yet the memories rushed on; Tiiyusiel's attempt to be responsive to her shock, she suspected. From below, she watched a gigantic Dragon-battle rolling over a cluster of Islands, even catching a glimpse of Grandion storming mightily through the fray, flexing his Tourmaline muscles to smash the two-headed Oranges out of his path with electrifying disdain.\n\nGrandion battled a force hundreds of times greater than the Dragonwings he appeared to command\u2013that too, was a revelation. Lia shook her muzzle, filled with disbelief. Even if they allied with all the Lost Islands Dragons, the magnitude of these forces\u2013mercy.\n\nHalf an hour later, Tiiyusiel breached the Cloudlands and surged into a realm of clean, scudding winds; several leagues to the East, a localised rainstorm broke over Yiisuriel's dark peaks, sending great white torrents of water cascading down her flanks. After taking her leave, Hualiama launched into the teeth of the wind and beat her way to a Dragonship landing bay. Dispirited, agitated and sick to her stomach, Hualiama trudged up to her quarters.\n\nThere, a white firebolt greeted her with aerial cartwheels of delight. <Straw-head!>\n\nShe had to laugh."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Hualiama retired that evening following another delightful interrogation-session with Azziala and her Councillors, which lasted five hours and left her with a headache better suited to a creature of Siiyumiel's size than a small Dragoness. To her surprise, her Dragon form decided she had endured quite enough for one day and would prefer a disembodied head to one that threatened to drop off of its own accord. The transition seemed especially arduous; a deep inner wrenching, yet the relief to appear in Human form had never been sweeter. Her blinding migraine vanished as if tossed into the nearest volcano.\n\n<Dragonsoul, that was bad.>\n\n<Doubly rubbish as a Dragoness, aren't I? Stupid decision landed us in the Cloudlands. We were rescued by Grandion and the Land Dragons; sent back upstairs with my tail between my legs, only to enjoy a beating from our mother. Fabulous day.>\n\nHuman-Lia checked on Flicker, who slept pressed up against the fire-grating, snoring with a sound like a contented feline's purr. She placed another log on the small fire. <Which of us tattled about a First Egg to the mother-monster, simultaneously revealing its presence to Numistar?>\n\n<Who gets the prize for the lengthiest rash of poor decisions?>\n\n<Ugh. Get some rest, Dragoness-friend.> Lia sighed moodily. Despite being exhausted, she also felt too keyed-up to rest. <Off to bed. What further mischief can I cause there?>\n\nThe Star Dragoness' guffaws faded inwardly. Hualiama grimaced. Sorry, Fra'anior, but for once she hoped to rest undisturbed. If only she had not chased Grandion away. Yet she had resources in this place, as evidenced by Elki's ungentle snoring next door. The problem was that with so many conflicting forces swirling about her, she had absolutely no idea what to do next. Every action she contemplated seemed fraught with a million calamitous consequences; the potential for levelling Islands or annihilating entire populations. Therefore she did nothing. Where was her vaunted courage? Fled beyond the moons?\n\nShe knew she must rise to dance, but instead felt muzzled, subdued, even paralysed.\n\nBlades. The Nuyallith forms were a kind of dance, highly prescribed yet flowing, as if freedom could only exist or flourish within the tightest of bounds. Hualiama turned to contemplate the blades, laid at her bedside by Saori\u2013who was herself, the very definition of warrior-discipline. Some might call her predictable. Others, deadly. Within her forms, Hualiama had learned, Saori was almost unbeatable. But create a form which was slightly unusual or illogical, and her Eastern sensibilities began to fray at the edges.\n\nStepping lightly across the room, she touched the well-worn hilts. Saori knew a secret. How many hours had she not spent learning it for herself?\n\nDance began with form. Expression sprang from knowledge. Even Siiyumiel's notions of Balance and Harmony did not spring so much from a mystical connection with the Island-World, as from a profound understanding of its fundamental science. Of course, Land Dragons possessed brains the size of small Islands to contain and process the storehouses of knowledge gleaned from their extraordinary awareness of the natural world. The Dragonfriend, rather less so\u2013but she had been a monk.\n\nGranted, Lia might have moved the brothers more to frowning, eye-rolling and the odd impious thought than to scaling the spiritual heights in meditation!\n\nHer fingers curled upon the leather-bound metal tangs. Blue blade in the left. Red in the right. Each dark length of metal was superbly balanced, inscribed with a neat line of runes down the centre channel, and more beneath the handgrip, she believed. Forged of meteorite ore in a furnace supplied by Dragon fire, the three-foot blades were both lighter and stronger than anything else in her experience, but held an incomparable edge and were undeniably magical. The blades slipped free in a faint whisper of metal that made her Dragon senses tingle. Barefoot, clad only in a thigh-length white under-shift and a waterfall of pale blonde hair, Hualiama crouched slightly into the ready position. The dry voice of Master Khoyal played in her memory, summoning the first of the Nuyallith forms. Water blocking light. Heron-strikes. Breaking the hammer. She spun into a whirlwind attack. The angry cat. Each form of defence or attack had a name, a form, often a flow of linked techniques.\n\nEven her fierce concentration must give way to instinct. Faster and faster, Lia whirled around her room, carving the air with increasing abandon. Released into dance. Even while drawing inward, her awareness expanded. Each flashing orbit of a blade, though finely controlled, sang of ruinous, explosive potential concealed within beauty's course, imploring her for release\u2013yet her soul could not allow release. Not now.\n\nShe heard a light footstep outside her door. A rustling.\n\nLia stilled instantly. The blades hung loosely at her sides. What? Her nostrils flared, taking in the faint redolence of Dragon magic coupled with a rank taint, one she did not recognise\u2013\n\n*BOOM!*\n\nA brown fist flattened the door. She caught a glimpse of glistening grey-brown scales slithering aside from her doorway\u2013an Anubam? No time. Dragonets poured through the doorway in a living wave. White wings, two feet in wingspan. Pinkish eyes, fixed on her with a oneness of purpose she had never observed in dragonets before. They did not attack immediately, but surrounded her with slow menace, so closely linked, they all breathed and blinked at exactly the same intervals. Freaky!\n\n<Bring me the Star Dragoness.>\n\nNumistar! It could be no other. Hualiama had but a fragment of time to ponder how the dragonets' draconic minds seemed muted, almost inaccessible to her magic, when Azziala's mental voice boomed:\n\n<AMBUSH! DRAGONS, OBEY!>\n\nMuscular spasms immediately claimed a dozen or more dragonets, but their fellows turned, squeaking, <'Release. Release.'> Several dragonets returned to their previous posture, but most did not. Wild, brief scraps developed before the overtaken animals were slain without a hint of remorse. Line of sight, Lia remembered. The Haters required visuals to enact their Command magic. How did Azziala do it? She clutched her blades, breathing evenly, watching the single-minded organism watching her. Was this assassination? Or a kidnap attempt?\n\nThe dragonets sprang! Hualiama had no chance, no room to move aside. Instead, the blades flashed around her person in the wings-of-iron defensive technique, shearing their way through dozens of the creatures. Flicker! She heard his cry over near the fireplace; immediately, she carved through a swirling mass of bodies, her head jerking as small, strong paws seized her hair and clothing, her arms and ankles; her rising Dragoness-magic shoving them away briefly, but she had so little to give\u2026 the blades sang faster through the air as the agile white dragonets attacked not with fire, but with clouds of icy white breath that chilled her skin and rimed her nostrils\u2026\n\n<DRAGONS, OBEY!> The massive wash of Azziala's blanket-Command darkened Lia's vision. Dizzied, she crashed to her knees. Blood spurted from her nostrils. Dragon-thunder in the corridor! Her mind seemed trapped down a dark tunnel, her need clamouring within, the ruzal uncoiling hungrily in response as tens and then hundreds of paws seized her besieged body and raised her into the air.\n\n<Dragon, please!>\n\n<We\u2026 can't, oh Humansoul\u2026>\n\nShe couldn't Shapeshift? She lacked the strength? Mercy, if the Empress would simply release\u2013dimly, she heard the chants of Dragon Enchanters in the corridor without, suddenly cut off. Too many dragonets. They were accustomed to picking individual targets; only Azziala's extreme brand of power allowed her to attempt otherwise. Through the mental network, she heard cursing as her mother tried to teleport into the chamber, only to be denied by Blue Dragon shielding; by Dragons stolen from Affurion's forces. Numistar had to be imitating Azziala! The adjoining door burst open to admit Saori, screaming and brandishing her daggers, and Elki running in holding a blanket\u2013what? Deeper in the fortress, more screams. Minds winked out of the mental network. Many minds. Images of thousands of dragonets pouring through the sleeping levels, slaying indiscriminately, flashed into her awareness. She was cold, so cold; Numistar's power exerted through the dragonets stifled her ability to respond except in her mind. Azziala countered with monstrous fury expressed in psychic blasts that struck down dragonets by the hundreds and many of her Enchanters too.\n\nHualiama twisted and bucked, fighting tooth and nail. Her forehead slammed against the doorjamb!\n\nElki, blood streaking his cheeks, dived for her with the blanket outstretched. \"Lia! Wrap up!\"\n\nWrap up? She almost laughed, before the blanket smothered her and the stone floor rose to smash into her left hip, elbow and shoulder. Drat, her bother weighed a ton! He was somewhere on top of her, thumping and kicking dragonets through the thick blanket\u2013and bruising his outraged sister's jaw\u2013but the jolt somehow helped her to focus.\n\nAzziala bellowed, <DRAGONS, DIE!>\n\nHer heart almost seized up. <Flicker! Please>\u2026 sweating, screaming, fading, she knew only the warmth of her Dragoness bracing her within.\n\n<BRING ME HUALIAMA!> Now the Ancient Dragon's mental roar overwhelmed the Dragon-Haters' shared mental space. <BRING HER!>\n\nGrief, between her mother and Numistar, there was no room to think. Paws seized the blanket, jerking her about; Lia's head popped out. At least two hundred dragonets seethed over her prone body. Elki gripped a dragonet by the tail, employing the hapless, shrieking creature like a swatter to smack his opponents left and right. Flicker fought and bit his way over her stomach, defending her with ferocity disproportionate to his size. Drat the pests, they had tied her up! To her astonishment, Hualiama discovered that the dragonets had managed to truss her inside the blanket using a pair of Elki's trousers for her torso and Saori's underwear for her ankles!\n\n<Up and away!> squealed the dragonets, heaving in concert.\n\nShe scooted helplessly out of the doorway and down the stone corridor, dragged feet-first by fifty members of Numistar's new body. Saori raced after, managing to flow like quicksilver between the attacking dragonets while simultaneously dicing them up with her sword. Dragon attack! The Eastern Isles warrior rolled smoothly, dodging a Brown Overmind who sprang past Lia, destroying a section of the wall of the chamber next to Elki's room. What? Where had that beast\u2013oh!\n\n\"Affurion, help!\" yelled Hualiama.\n\nHer head and accordingly her view, rattled with every bounce along the rough corridor floor as the dragonets charged onward. She saw the huge Brown fold himself double in the narrow corridor. His crimson eyes lit upon her, before his flame-filled mouth gaped open.\n\nOh no!\n\nLand, Ho!\n\nGRRAAARRRGGH! A fireball blossomed behind the sprinting Saori, silhouetting her slender, sword-waving form against a background of roiling orange flame. The warrior dropped flat on her face; exactly the right reaction, because the fireball sizzled less than half a foot over her back and pounded into Hualiama's upraised, blanket-wrapped legs, cleaning every dragonet off her body save Flicker, who had somehow flattened himself over her mouth and face\u2013protectively.\n\nWas Affurion enthralled? Azziala's stooge?\n\nEnwrapped in smouldering cloth, Hualiama had no time to think of anything but figuring out how to breathe around Flicker's unmentionables. Alright, he had saved her face from a roasting. Clever dragonet. Now he leaped into her chest, hissing at the Brown Overmind, who charged directly at them, not holding back an ounce of his strength. Fangs! Blazing eyes! Terror shredded her belly as Affurion's thundering paws shook the corridor. Thirty tonnes of enraged, jaw-champing, fire-sizzling male Dragon stampeded toward the royal ward of Fra'anior. Trussed as neatly as a Crescent Islands porker to a spit, it was all she could do to try to squirm aside. She managed a half-roll before Affurion's talons scraped the stone beneath her body, flipped her roughly into his palm, and imprisoned her torso.\n\n<Dragonfriend!> he panted. <Away with thee!>\n\n<Away? What the volcanic hells are you playing at, Affurion?>\n\n\"Yaah!\" shrieked Saori.\n\n<Get off my tail, you madwoman!> howled Affurion. Lia was being pounded up and down with his every running step, but suddenly she scented clean air. His wings snapped wide. They were airborne. The back of her head clipped the low retaining wall of the porch as the Brown Overmind dipped rapidly over the edge, clearly aiming to avoid any line-of-sight attacks. She cried out, but the damage appeared to be superficial.\n\n<DRAGON, OB\u2013> the cry of three Dragon Enchanters manning a Dragonship directly ahead of them cut off abruptly as a speeding Grunt transformed the bow end of their vessel into a crumpled mess of struts, fabric and shattered crysglass. Hualiama flinched. Not pretty.\n\n<We learned from Siiyumiel and Grandion how to detect their special optical shielding,> said Affurion, baring his fangs at the destruction. <And how to improve our own.>\n\nBehind, from the rapidly receding Chenak Stronghold, clouds of white dragonets fluttered swiftly out of the nostrils, attacking Dragonships and Lost Islands Dragons with indiscriminate abandon. Numistar had sought her, Hualiama realised. That was the goal of the attack. The Winterborn and the Empress continued to trade pleasantries, shaking the Air-Breathers and every living soul borne upon their backs, while Affurion accelerated rapidly away to the South. Untouched. Unconstrained.\n\n\"What are you doing with me, Affurion?\" Hualiama demanded.\n\n\"Lia!\" Saori shouted from way behind.\n\n\"By my wings, are you still there, you pest?\" snapped the Brown, bending his neck to regard his tail with consternation.\n\nSo she was. Saori clung to his tail just above the final tail-spike with the air of a thousand year-old lichen attached to her favourite boulder. The prospect of flying several miles above the Cloudlands on the tail of a peeved Brown Dragon clearly did not faze her in the slightest. The girl waved her sword threateningly. \"Nobody steals my friends, understood, Affurion?\"\n\nHis eyes blazed, but to Lia's surprise, he grunted, \"Very well, warrior-girl. Come up here and cut your friend free.\"\n\nA whiplash flick of his tail shot Saori through the air above them. With a wicked chuckle, Affurion flexed his wings and surged after the screaming warrior, before catching her nonchalantly in his free forepaw. Being a male Dragon, this performance came complete with a variety of triumphant, muscular contortions and a bugle of self-congratulation. Reversing her sword, Saori stabbed him between the knuckles in the very same movement that he used to catch her!\n\nHualiama felt the jolt of pain surge through Affurion's body, but a second surprise piled hard on the heels of the first. The Eastern Isles warrior and the huge Dragon eyeballed each other. Flame met fury. Dragon fire met Human determination. The air crackled audibly as the Brown Overmind bent his blazing eye upon Saori, but she did not move a muscle, apparently mesmerised or terrified, Lia did not know which. Twenty or more shallow breaths later, she saw the Dragon's eye-fires mellow through orange and apricot colours to a beautiful, clear yellow, the very palest hint of yellow, and the ensorcelled girl gasped, her hand relinquishing the sword to fly to her throat. She swallowed audibly.\n\n<Thou\u2026> his voice husky with emotion, Affurion could barely splutter a word.\n\nSaori giggled like a girl ten years her junior, \"A-A-Affurion?\"\n\nThe Dragon growled, \"What trickery is this? A glamour of Herimor? She\u2013Dragonfriend! Explain at once, before I\u2026 before I\u2013\" he choked out \"\u2013release me at once!\"\n\n\"Nobody's holding you, mighty Affurion,\" said Hualiama. Ha. The Dragon Rider magic had the Brown in its sights, and though he looked as comfortable as a shorn rajal, Affurion would soon learn he had no choice in the matter. \"Saori, help out here, would you? Why are you taking us South?\"\n\nThis question swung Affurion's wings onto an easier bearing. He said, \"I promised the Tourmaline I would act when I saw fit to drag you forth from your mother's roost. Perceiving Numistar's cowardly attack, we seized the opportunity. And, removing you from the Lost Islands increases our chances of survival, o Star Dragoness.\"\n\nHe had the grace to state the last with a few token regret-indicators in his sub-vocal Dragonish that accompanied the Island-Standard delivery.\n\n\"I understand,\" said Lia, tersely. The avaricious eyes of Azziala and Numistar would be drawn to Kaolili, for that must be his intent, rather than to the Lost Islands Dragonkind.\n\n\"Do you?\"\n\nDid she understand who was the prey in this game of Dragons? \"Well, I appreciate you weren't about to pause to ask the Winterborn or the mad Dragon-Haters for permission. That would have been marginally less fatal than your fireball.\"\n\n\"Hmm!\" he rumbled forcefully. \"Perfect shot. Roasted toe of Human Princess aside, I achieved my exact goal.\"\n\nHualiama and Saori both laughed at his droll humour, although the Eastern Isles warrior still sounded rather more breathless than the situation warranted. Now, the Dragon transferred his cargo into one paw so that Saori could exercise her carving skills on the blanket. In a moment, the charred cloth dropped away to reveal a Princess clad only in a scanty, mid-thigh under-shift, and a face that contorted as she checked her smoke-blackened toes. Aye, ten. Mostly unharmed. She touched her left eye gingerly. Swelling up like a ripe prekki-fruit.\n\nSaori sneered, \"I see we are dressed for the occasion as always, Hualiama.\"\n\nLia bristled. Call her a tramp without saying the word, would she? \"Grow your hair, Saori, I dare you.\"\n\n\"Down, little rajal.\"\n\nClaws extended, Lia leaped at her friend and took a snap at her throat! She pulled back in embarrassment. \"Uh\u2026 sorry. Dragoness.\"\n\nAffurion peered curiously at her. \"The other manifestation of your fire-soul can\u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013transform your hair colour?\" said Saori, wonderingly. \"Look. Amazing.\"\n\n\"Oh mercy, not again.\" The hank of hair Saori produced was a striking mixture of white-blonde and deep blue tresses. Setting aside her Nuyallith blades with a glum air, Hualiama perched her rump on the Brown Overmind's inner left knuckle. \"Alright. I can't fix my weirdness. But as for you, girl, I'm afraid you have a major fixation on Affurion here.\"\n\nSaori's face moved through a fine spectrum of apoplectic rainbow colours. Ha! Sweet revenge.\n\n\"Fixation in a magical sense,\" Lia clarified. \"Oath-fixation.\"\n\n\"If I understand your obtuse logic, then may I categorically state that I am not the type of Dragon to desire a Dragon Rider,\" Affurion snorted crisply.\n\n\"Nor am I fixated on a Dragon, unlike you!\" muttered Saori. \"Though I'll grant, you appear to have reason. Bizarre, but definitely reason. When I first saw you making moon-eyes over that Tourmaline Dragon, I thought you were the most disgusting, immoral piece of filth I had ever\u2013\"\n\n\"Stop! Islands' sakes, Saori.\" Lia fanned her cheeks unhappily. \"I'm not exactly comfortable with the outcome, alright? I'd enjoy being reminded of who's the freak around here just a little less often. Can we agree to stuff your war-hammer honesty down your fumarole? Now. I'm not sure either of you can deny this Dragon-Rider linkage, once it's present. But you can try.\"\n\nAffurion and Saori snarled almost identically at her.\n\nThe Princess of Fra'anior made a typically Fra'aniorian shrug, twirling both hands to emphasize her frustration. \"Very well, stubbornness rules the day. Whichever of you chooses to see sense, write me a scroll, will you?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "\"Land, ho!\" Saori sang out, pointing ahead.\n\nStill visibly, smokily miffed, the Dragon muttered, \"Told you an hour ago.\"\n\nAffurion sounded as though he had swallowed a bushel of crossbow quarrels. His plan, which had drawn protests from both Saori and Hualiama, involved dropping the Princess off with the first friendly Dragon or Dragonship they spied, and then beating his wings back to the Lost Islands as quickly as possible. Saori would return to take care of Prince Elki, who by virtue of being Mizuki's Dragon Rider, ranked somewhere rather higher in the Brown's draconic reckoning than either girl he now carried\u2013with patent prickliness\u2013between the spine-spikes above his shoulders.\n\nBeing a Dragon, the extent of dissent he tolerated was a Dragon's whisker above zero.\n\nLia promptly demanded a return to his paw, curled up, and took a nap.\n\nShe awoke from an eggling-dream of her White Dragoness shell-mother to hear a *ding-ding-ding* nearby. Oh. Dragonship. Qilong's Dragonship! Well, here was a surprise worthy of the name. The navigation bells jingled cheerfully as the Steersman brought the Dragonship onto a new heading and Qilong, he of the purple shirt and violently clashing suns-orange trousers, strutted out of the navigation cabin and took his habitual legs-akimbo stance on the forward starboard gantry.\n\n\"I am Qilong, dread pirate-lord of forty-three Islands!\" he yelled.\n\nWell. No change there.\n\nHis eyes lit upon Saori, seated far above Hualiama's position in Affurion's left forepaw. The Prince of Kaolili described a sumptuous bow. \"Ah, she who was once my bride-to-be, how many moons is it since I had thee ensacked in my cabin, awaiting my majestic ravishment?\"\n\n\"Ensacked, my lord Qilong?\" Saori had to be chewing on her own liver up there, judging by her tone. Lia was certain 'ensacked' was not even a word.\n\n\"For I, the mighty Qilong, dread scourge of fifty-eight Islands, do declare\u2013\"\n\n\"We brought you a present, o most puissant Qilong!\" the Eastern Isles warrior interrupted. \"Behold!\"\n\nPuffing out his chest, Qilong examined Affurion's length and quite clearly came up with nothing at all. He called up, \"Thou art a gift most kingly. What fair wind brings thee to mine dining-table, o most ravishing maiden?\"\n\n<What is this peculiar little fellow doing?> Affurion asked privately, with great amazement. <Is this a Human courtship ritual?>\n\nLia chuckled, <In a manner of speaking. Watch.>\n\nStanding up in Affurion's paw, she waved to attract the crew's attention. Ah, there was Genzo, the First Mate who was the brains of the operation, and the mountainous Steersman Sumio, who had to be part Eastern Giant, or she was a pink-spotted rajal.\n\n<Closer, Affurion.>\n\nAffurion had to furl his wing carefully to avoid buffeting the Dragonship. He extended his forepaw, granting Lia a first-hand viewpoint to appreciate the exact pallor of Qilong's terror as it dawned on the dread pirate-lord exactly what, or who, Saori intended her present to be. With a long, piercing wail that would have been the envy of any vapid court maiden the Island-World over, Qilong bolted down the gantry, threw open the nearest cabin door, and pitched headlong inside, with a huge clash and clatter of what sounded like body armour.\n\n<Impressive,> said the Brown Overmind, meaning it.\n\nA further scream sounded from within that room. \"Spider!\" squealed the redoubtable Qilong, emerging to fling a very substantial, very hairy specimen of the Eastern bird-eating spider into the Cloudlands. The door immediately slammed shut behind him once more. Lia was not quite certain, but she thought she heard sobbing and gnashing of teeth in there.\n\nGenzo's smile conveyed the full magnificence of the gap between his front teeth. \"Ah, my little quadruple overlapping rainbow of joy has appeared at last.\"\n\nSumio rumbled, \"He's been smoking tekiweed.\"\n\nWhatever tekiweed was. Probably the contents of Commander Hiro's favourite pipe, too. With a swish of her indecorously short shift, Hualiama paraded across Affurion's talons and alighted on the Dragonship's gantry. Genzo's leer suggested he had just ogled the Isle of Paradise, but when he made to embrace her, Sumio stepped forward with startling swiftness for such a huge man and slammed a meaty fist upon the precise crown of the First Mate's head. Lia remembered that manoeuvre rather too well. Genzo's cheek struck the metal gantry with a fleshy slap.\n\nSumio executed an abbreviated Eastern bow, which was all the bending his enormous belly allowed. \"He'll thank me when he wakes.\"\n\nAffurion said, \"Brief them thoroughly, Princess. Although, judging by recent events, I believe there's one surprise you might want to consider not giving the noble Prince of Kaolili. The sight of you might just slay him.\"\n\n\"Already slain,\" came from behind the door.\n\nThus Lia returned to the territory of Northern Kaolili, boarding Qilong's Dragonship with a suitable episode of drama and mischief-making. How long it seemed since she had essayed a one-woman assault on what she had taken for a pirate vessel, only to discover a new friend inside a sack, following which her own brother had attempted to offer his chained-up sister to the pirate-lord!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Grandion extended the smallest talon of his left paw. \"Last one.\"\n\n\"Aye, mighty Dragon.\" Jin wielded his metal file manfully, despite his bruised, blistered hands and evident fatigue.\n\n\"Then scare yourself up a decent meal, and work on putting meat on those bones,\" the Tourmaline advised. \"If I'm to swat you, I require something substantial to hit.\"\n\n\"Aye, mighty Dragon.\"\n\n*Grr\u2026* the boy never stopped. Grandion had never seen anyone, Human or Dragon, work like him\u2013apart from Hualiama when she was in one of her moods that swung from immense discipline to self-punishment. Stoke his fires, he missed that girl. That Dragoness. His other forepaw clenched painfully, the sheathed talons bending with the force of his passion. He would have Hualiama for his own! Nobly and rightly, he would find a way to woo that incomparable Dragoness to his paw, his hunt, his roost! But how? How could he beat his brain into white-fire paths, not the madness and folly of Humanlove?\n\nForcing his attention back to the boy, he said, \"So, Jin, I'm about to travel South again. Just one hundred leagues to the battle-front. I trust you've considered the strategy problem I set you yesterday?\"\n\nHe bit his lip, sharpening Grandion's talon with sure strokes of the file. \"Aye, mighty Dragon.\"\n\nWhen no reply was immediately forthcoming, the Tourmaline hissed, \"Whenever you're ready.\"\n\n\"Aye, mighty Dragon.\"\n\n\"Find another answer before I sit on you!\"\n\n\"Aye, mighty\u2026 Tourmaline.\"\n\nGrandion mock-snapped at him, while secretly turning third-heart-backflips at the boy's spirit. Aye, if any Human after the Star Dragoness should rightly have been born a Dragon, it was Jinichi. Fire. It burned within him, a heart of fire. \"Speak.\"\n\n\"It strikes me that the problem is collateral damage, mighty Tourmaline,\" he ventured.\n\n\"Elucidate.\"\n\nJin shrugged. \"Bluntly speaking, Dragons tend to tear each other to shreds. In any given encounter so much damage is done that the victorious Dragon must almost certainly retire afterward. To counter this issue, you require ranged weaponry, Dragon body-armour and more co-operative battle tactics. Many Lesser dragons might never learn to co-operate, but your Riders will.\"\n\nA true word. Grandion allowed warmth to enter his voice. \"Aye, Jin. How would you convince Dragons to wear armour?\"\n\n\"Is history not written by the winner?\"\n\n\"Indeed. And what manner of ranged weaponry do you recommend?\"\n\nReversing the file with the hand-speed of a born swordsman, the boy sketched rapidly on a flat patch of dust beside Grandion's paw. \"Perhaps, an adaptation of current technology. Imagine harness-mounted war crossbow emplacements carried Dragonback? Two, or even four emplacements on a bigger Dragon's back. You said projectile weapons are the hardest for non-Blues to shield against.\" His voice warmed as the sketch took shape. \"Archers. They take shots as the Dragon closes with or breaks away from his enemy, when he is rendered vulnerable by a mighty strike. Dragon lances. Imagine the penetrative power of a thirty-foot metal lance driven by a Dragon's explosive thrust!\"\n\nThen he coloured, perhaps realising he had spoken more in one breath than he had ever spoken to the Tourmaline Dragon before.\n\nGrandion had a vision of this boy talking engineering and design with Hualiama in a cosy roost, just the two of them together, and he cricked his neck with a jerk of dismay. Green fires sizzled in his eyes, their colour clearly communicated to his Dragon senses. No! How could he allow her to be with another\u2026 how could he forbid it?\n\nMighty were his paws, yet they could never be mighty enough to hold his beloved Dragonfriend\u2013Hualiama!\n\nRoughly, he gathered his paws beneath him, forcing the boy to scramble aside. \"I need to go!\"\n\nThe Tourmaline charged out of the warehouse, uncaring of which Dragons his tail or wings struck on the way out. With a mournful bugle, he launched for the skies.\n\nBattle! He must douse his sorrows in the ordeal of battle!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "Hualiama primped, Princess-style. She chuckled at herself in the small brass mirror in the shower-chamber of Qilong's personal quarters. Nice black eye, girl. And enough cuts on her face alone to make one imagine she had mistakenly ambushed a thicket of rambling rose. A bucket-and-scoop bath in a small wooden tub proved an unexpected luxury. Prince Qilong had offered her the use of his grooming tools, oils, perfumes, scrubs, soaps, hair combs and trimmers, and a plethora of other items she honestly had no clue how to use, nor did she even recognise. He and her sister Fyria would have bonded like Dragons and lava. Fyria had a whole room in her chambers set aside for beautifying herself, not to mention eleven different maids.\n\nPoor Qilong. He was mortified he could not offer her the finest silks of Helyon for her raiment. She had suggested she did not expect to find silks on a Dragonship of war, and she was much more comfortable in a shirt and trousers, o gracious Prince. He looked offended. She apologised. He apologised more.\n\nShe was just not used to the type of man who kept twenty-three freshly prepared, scented hair-oils on his dresser.\n\n<And you can stop sniggering right now, Dragonsoul!> she added privately.\n\n<What? Poor, titchy Human, have you no conception of how much Dragons enjoy bathing, oiling, scrubbing and beautifying their scales, wishing merely to outshine a glorious twin-suns dawn?>\n\n<Oh. I forgot.>\n\nLaughter diminished within her, as if her Dragoness drifted off to sleep. <Enjoy your dinner with Prince Qilong, Humanlove.>\n\nShe did exactly that. Bemused, Lia eyed the Prince across the dining table, an hour later, after the third course of a feast of spicy Eastern magnificence. Aye, it had taken the entire first course to reassure him that death in boiling lava, lightning strikes from her hands, decapitation or rooting around his innards with the point of a red-hot poker were not foremost on her mind. The Prince of Kaolili appeared to be plagued by a basketful of phobias. But once they fell to discussing the war and strategy and the merits of the very fine wines he served, not berry-wines as enjoyed in Fra'anior, but a type of sweet Eastern fruit called subigrai, Qilong revealed a first-rate mind and a bone-dry sense of humour that had her chuckling multiple times. Her enjoyment infected him with confidence. No more declarations of mastery of many Islands. Making strong headway on his fourth glass of the heady wine, he had turned into a loquacious storyteller, regaling her with tales of a misspent, bizarre youth, his misadventures flinging him from fumarole to volcano as his bewildered parents tried and failed to understand him in any detail whatsoever.\n\nFor her part, Hualiama teased the Prince about secretly being Fra'aniorian, desiring to kidnap a bride for himself.\n\nThe spectre of war remained ever present, however, so that when Emburifor the Red arrived to convey her to Kerdani City, the congenial dinner ended quickly. Qilong promised to closely consider her advice to retreat from the northern front and allow Azziala and Numistar easy access to Shinzen; the difficult part, they agreed, would be protecting Kaolili's citizens.\n\nParting upon the forward gantry as the suns-shine of early evening bronzed the Eastern Archipelago's garden-like Islands, he bowed stiffly from the waist. \"Fly safely to Kaolili, o Princess. Will you promise to brief my father as to the evils that beset us? And aid us with every power you possess?\"\n\nFrom Emburifor's palm, she bowed with equal formality. \"It is my duty. I truly believe, Prince Qilong, that the Lost Islands will bypass the sparsely populated North and proceed straight to Kerdani City itself. I promise to do all in my power to aid your Kingdom.\"\n\n<The barefoot Princess sallies forth,> murmured her Dragoness.\n\n<Don't make me blush. Besides, he has no clue about our powers.>\n\n<Better that way.>\n\nEmburifor said, \"I shall convey Affurion's intelligence to the Dragons under the Tourmaline's command.\"\n\nInteresting. What had Affurion wanted to convey to Grandion? Hualiama glanced briefly up at the Red, but he did not otherwise acknowledge her presence.\n\nWith mighty strokes of his eighty-foot wingspan, the stolid Red rose into the deepening evening. All that Lia knew of him was that he was a Dragon born and raised upon Gi'ishior. Emburifor seemed incurious about his passenger, giving monosyllabic answers to her questions, even in Dragonish. The scaly, silent type. So she gazed out to the West, thinking upon the almost-mythical Islands out there in the vast Cloudlands ocean, places with exotic names like Helyon, the Fingers of Ferial and faraway Immadia, famed as much for its mountainous beauty as, scholars fell over themselves to agree, the surpassing beauty of its women. Trust the fusty, male-dominated world of academia to agree on that essential fact! The Kingdom of Immadia was said to be the northernmost habitable Island of all, and to be guarded by legion Ice-Dragons and powerful Human enchantresses. She snorted quietly to herself. Aye, and the people probably piloted their Dragonships around the twin suns and rode Land Dragons for sport!\n\nSouthward they drove at a rapid twenty-eight leagues per hour, given the urgency of their errand and the benefit of a strong tailwind which whipped in from several points West of North. Hualiama gathered her borrowed cloak around her body, and put up the hood to mute the worst of the blast. Island after Island rolled by beneath them, verdant with mohili wheat and often dotted with wild cattle. Such a green, temperate land. She spied tranquil lakes and waterways from the air, glistening like beads of furnace-heated metal as the suns set, while flocks of white doves, narrow-banded egrets and broadwing charmers regularly fled the Dragon's low-flying passage. Several times, she heard the haunting song of the Eastern balladeer nightingale, according to Elki, the finest songbird in the Island-World.\n\nShe sang several of her favourite ballads. To her amazement, Emburifor joined in enthusiastically and very skilfully indeed, but when she complimented him on his musicianship, he snorted and fell silent at once.\n\nCarried swift and sure across the leagues in Emburifor's strong paw, they passed the fourteen hours of night in this season and at the limit of the Red's endurance, approached the heavily guarded and patrolled metropolis of Kerdani.\n\n<To the Palace, Dragonfriend?> Emburifor asked.\n\n<Nay, to the Dragons' roost, for my Grandion should be there,> Hualiama replied. <Thank you for your mighty efforts, Emburifor. You burned the leagues with honour.>\n\nThe Red swooped soft-winged over the perfect grid streets and rows of ornate, identical houses, before banking sharply to come to a landing in the wide cobblestone courtyard between rows of towering, stone-walled storehouses. Dawn's false blush had just touched the sky. Hualiama alighted stiffly. Three hundred and thirty leagues in a night. Awesome flying.\n\nEmburifor's paw rested briefly upon her shoulder, staggering her. <Strength to your paw, noble Dragonfriend,> he said. <Grandion roosts yonder, with a strange boy as his servant.>\n\n<A servant?> Not like the Tourmaline at all.\n\nThe Red ambled off at once, clearly seeking a meal and rest. Lia peered after him for a moment. All that gruff standoffishness, then a warm parting? Peculiar.\n\nAfter inquiring for directions from a snappish Green, Hualiama quickly moved between the resting Dragons to the rear of a huge, open room that smelled indelicately of tired, injured Dragons. Many were openly aggravated at the sight or scent of a Human; she kept her eyes fixed just ahead of her toes and moved on swiftly. Why? Did they not know who she was? Or did they resent a Dragon Rider? Next time, a grand entrance as a Star\u2013\n\n\"Oof!\"\n\n\"No Humans allowed! What're you doing\u2013\"\n\nHualiama gave the teenager attempting to place her in a stranglehold from behind exactly one second to spit out his challenge before she revived a wrestling manoeuvre Hallon and Rallon had taught her, at her considerable cost, on the hot arena sands of the monastery training ground. Despite that he was half a head taller than her and several sackweight heavier, she made him eat dust. He groaned, but she had a Dragon's grip on the nerve-centres of his neck and left shoulder. Stubborn brat! She quelled his squirming with an agonising pinch of the nerve.\n\n\"Right,\" she hissed, more Dragoness than Human in the heat of her anger. \"Who might you be? Grandion's servant?\"\n\n\"I am no-one's servant\u2013*aah!*\"\n\n\"Shut the fumarole. Where's the Dragon now?\"\n\n\"Flown south\u2013creeping maggots, will you get off me, man?\"\n\n\"That's lady, in case you missed it.\" He made another groan, patently dismayed. \"And no, not until you apologise for your cowardly attack.\"\n\n\"Never\u2026 *gnarrrrr\u2026* alright, alright! I surrender. Only because you're a so-called lady.\"\n\nFor that, she gave his nose an extra grind in the dirt before releasing her hold. The teenager, more a young man in her estimation, rolled over, but was not foolish enough to test her reflexes a second time. His shadowed grey eyes regarded her warily. Magically.\n\nWhat? Mentally reeling, slamming up barriers on every front, Lia essayed her most fatuous smile. \"Islands' greetings. They sent me from the North with intelligence for Grandion,\" she babbled. This was the Tourmaline's alleged servant? A boy with secrets? \"Is there another Dragon I can report to? When will Grandion be back?\"\n\nHer fists clenched. Wretched Tourmaline, had he not spoken of her to this boy? Was he a replacement Dragon Rider for Grandion? So help her, she'd make Tourmaline toast-bread out of that Dragon! She would etch her name in star-fire on both of his flanks and ride him roughshod through Fra'anior's royal place, singing the Flame Cycle at the top of her lungs!\n\nMeantime, she pasted a smile in place, borrowed Fyria's exasperating habit of batting her eyelashes, and placing her hand on the young man's arm, cooed, \"Ooh, are you a warrior? So\u2026 muscly.\"\n\n\"Jin,\" he spluttered, turning scarlet.\n\n\"Oh, Jin. What a fine name.\" She squeezed his arm again, while occupying her seething imagination with the pleasing image of grinding Grandion's guts through a meat-mincer. \"So, Jin, who can I deliver my message to?\n\nIt took him seven tries to form a coherent word after that. Lia counted.\n\nAfter all, she was a Dragoness.\n\n[ Oaths that Bind ]\n\nGRandion GATHERED hIS Dragonwing for another pass. \"Yukari, Akemi, cover us from above.\" Dragoness and Rider nodded. \"We should have relief from Kerdani by midday.\"\n\nRolling her fire-eyes, Makani the Grey snarled, \"A Dragonwing of the limping and wounded, mighty Grandion?\"\n\nRaiden snarled, \"Some of us are still fighting!\"\n\nA low rumbling from Yukari's chest brought their attention to the largest Dragoness, the battered, blind Aquamarine, who fought courtesy of her Rider Akemi's sight. \"We honour you, Raiden and Fumiko, Vinzuki and Tadao\u2013all Dragons gathered here,\" she said. \"Our work is to purchase time. For I sense a change in the breezes of the Island-World. Strange alliances will be forged. Mighty deeds wrought. I see\u2026 I see a girl with blue and white hair\u2013why does she sorrow?\"\n\n\"That's Hualiama,\" the Tourmaline Dragon blurted out.\n\n\"The originator of your\u2014 starlight-assault-shield?\" said Yukari. Surprise caused her to switch to Dragonish mid-sentence.\n\n<She's\u2026 creative,> Grandion protested.\n\nSeveral of the Dragons laughed at the befuddled-wonder nuances in his speech, but Yukari said privately to him, <I told you she was a Dragoness, didn't I?>\n\nHe replied, <Seventh sense. Wing-shivering!>\n\n<Truth be told, youngling, I was just being contrary, obeying the fates in ways I scarcely understood. A star? My seventh sense saw no such end. Perhaps in order to resolve this conflict which drives you so bitterly, you need to discover your inner creativity, the antithesis of logical, draconic-brained solution-making.>\n\nGrandion bowed his muzzle. <Aye, mighty Aquamarine.>\n\nAs always, his conversations with the venerable Dragoness came laced with white-fires truth, the searing power of her seventh-sense-insight humbling his lesser perception. With every fibre and fire of his being, he desired to be like her, formidable in wisdom, yet curiously humble in her ways. Certainly, she had been irascible and provoking that day he and Hualiama encountered her in her magical pool, but Yukari had also been immediately accepting of his feelings\u2013most of his feelings\u2013for Hualiama, deriding his use of Projection-magic while accepting his soul-deep yearnings. The Dragoness had seen the glorious flight of the future when all Grandion had seen was pain and defeat.\n\nYukari said, \"One more open-clawed talon-strike to the muzzle of the beast. Then, our noble leader will return to Kerdani.\" His fires raged! \"Aye. A Balance changes. A shift must come. We will continue the battle here. Grandion, o son of my fires, o quick-winged flame of truth, now is the hour to rouse your might and expend your righteous fury upon the adversaries of true-fires!\"\n\nThe Aquamarine Dragoness' challenge fired his wrath and passion like nothing before. His scales thrilled! The song of his fires whitened to blinding beauty! Suddenly, the tiredness of days and weeks sloughed off him like lava running off a Dragon's back as he rose from the magma, glowing like the heart of a furnace, and he drew a breath of the Island-World's air and magic unlike any that had ever filled his lungs before. Grandion saw realisation burning in the eyes of the Dragons ranged before him\u2013Vinzuki and Raiden, Makani, Ryuki the Red and Tarbuzi and Yenuko, the Eastern Greens, many Dragons and two dozen Dragon-Rider pairs, down to the youngest, Kimiko, a girl of Naoko's tribe of but fourteen summers, and her Green fledgling, Chamako. Now they would fly. Fight. Smash the enemy from the skies!\n\nSensing Grandion's fierce gaze, Kimiko raised her Haozi hunting-bow aloft and yelled, \"Dragons and Riders, let us burn the heavens together!\"\n\nHualiama's salute! If it were possible, his inner infernos burned even higher. So searing was his inner flame that Grandion saw smoke rising from his own paws. He must expend it!\n\nStaggered, the Tourmaline whirled, and beat his wings. <Follow me!>\n\nIn his ear-canals was the whistling of wind as Grandion accelerated toward the battle-front just three leagues distant, where Commander Hiro's Dragonship fleet had come under heavy attack from a Dragonwing of no less than two thousand double-headed Orange Dragons; but in his hearts, all this Dragon knew was the pure, thrilling battle-song of white-fires. In that instant, he knew what compelled Hualiama to dance from fate to fate. Elemental force. The overwhelming desire to respond to the song raging in his hearts. The awareness of a Dragonish nature perfectly designed for the joy of soaring and battling and loving in the airy spaces.\n\nImmense skyward acceleration catapulted him far ahead of his fellows. Grandion rose higher and higher from his already great altitude of three leagues above the Cloudlands. The thinness of air screamed in his lungs. The Dragonships were dots beleaguered by a cloud of orange. Four hundred air vessels, holding off the green-headed Dragons with catapults, crossbows and arrows, their armour smoking as it came under sustained fire. The Oranges were not using their poison gas because the prevailing wind blew against them. Wind\u2026\n\nFurling his wings, Grandion dove. He plummeted like a falcon hunting its prey. Faster! He stretched out his body and trimmed his wings for the ultimate slipstreaming, using Hualiama's clever shields to shear through the frigid air of the heights. Five miles distant. Four. The wind in his ears built to a shriek as the Tourmaline considered the wind, the storming, blustering, restless winds of his Island-World, and funnelled those winds toward his plummeting body. Storm raged! In his mind, a tiny girl with fluttering white-blonde hair leaped into a treble spin before landing with butterfly grace, her bare right leg extended in sinuous, muscular perfection, and Grandion channelled that knowledge back into his attack. Corkscrew, the Humans called it. A sustained barrel-roll that would concentrate the winds about his rotating body, his draconic magic reaching far and wide to muster the forces of Nature to his beck and call\u2026 he spun! Again! A growl of thunder; the sense of clouds gathering both in his wake and before him, as though conjured into being as the skies conjured carrion-birds at the advent of battle.\n\nBelow his position, the Orange Dragons reacted. He had taught them the meaning of hatred and fear; he had vented his Tourmaline-fuelled spleen upon them. They drew together, rising in a knot as if linked into a single organism, forming shields, and readying wings and belly-fires.\n\nCloud-blackened sky and fertile green Islands switched places as he twirled toward the Orange Dragonwing, the fires and potentials tightening his belly into an unbearable knot. Closing in. Three miles. Two. The Oranges spread out like a field of ralti sheep exposed to the wing\u00e9d hunter.\n\nDid Hualiama not love the ballad of <Saggaz Thunderdoom?> The words raced through his mind:\n\n<Bestriding boiling thunderheads, the Thunderdoom arose,>\n\n<His roar a trump of thunder,>\n\n<Like wing\u00e9d lightning his mighty paw,>\n\n<Struck the skies asunder!>\n\nSo the magic rose in him, the Blue Dragon power of Storm, and his throat enlarged with the voice of his thunder, and all four paws clenched as though to mimic the action of drawing his storm together, and Grandion the Tourmaline Dragon thrummed in every bone and muscle and sinew.\n\nHe had never known speed like this. A dark windstorm to wreathe his wings. Lightning playing from wingtip to tail, from his paws to the clouds, lighting his storm tunnel from within. *Flash! Flash!* Grandion had a millisecond to consider the unexpected benefit of his having outpaced his fellow-Dragons, that the extreme angle of his attack would take him beyond the Dragonships, so that his Storm would fall primarily upon the enemy Dragons. Cutting shields! An infusion of her Star-power!\n\nWell within that final mile now, his challenge belled out: <ALASTIOR!!>\n\nHe smote them with the paw of the Thunderdoom."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Mid-sentence, Zulior snapped out his paw as Hualiama folded softly over his talons. She clutched her heart. \"Oh, I feel\u2026 alright?\"\n\nThe stalwart Red touched her solicitously. \"Strength to thee, Dragonfriend.\" So huge was his paw, his talons covered her back from neck to knees, but Lia appreciated the outpouring of his healing strength. \"I have not Qualiana's gifting in the healing arts, but there are talon-times and knuckles-of-the-fist times, are there not?\"\n\nShe chuckled weakly at his rough jest, a transliteration of a draconic saying. Blunt instrument or not, she tingled from head to toe. \"I thank thee, mighty Zulior. Roost-uncle.\"\n\nHis delighted bugle rang out over the courtyard, causing many Dragons to lift their heads in surprise. \"How you do redefine the nature of familial relationships, Dragonfriend!\" he boomed. \"So, Grandion borrowed your power through the oath-connection you were telling me about?\"\n\n\"He did, I think.\" Hualiama frowned, pushing off his paw with a self-conscious flexion of her arms. \"Is he in trouble, Zulior? Should we fly to him?\"\n\nHe snuffled once in her direction, his foot-wide nostrils flaring, as if to ascertain that all was well with her. Gruffly, he said, \"I have not the Aquamarine's facility in the higher arts, but I believe you would know if Grandion were injured or worse, Hualiama. This oath-power is a strange, binding magic. Who knows the purposes of the Great Onyx in blessing the speaking of such an oath as shared between you and the Tourmaline?\"\n\nWho knew indeed? She rubbed her chest thoughtfully, wishing strength to Grandion's paw, wherever he was. Pensively, she pushed back her hood and shook her hair free, as if intent on shaking free the remaining cobwebs in her head.\n\n\"Perhaps I should transform in secret, and try to heal some of these Dragons?\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should brief the King?\" Zulior countered, lifting his massive chin to point behind her.\n\nHualiama turned to spy the King of Kaolili marching briskly into the courtyard, flanked by his retinue of Councillors. Great. She had wobbly knees, an icky stomach and a mortifying memory of her previous interview with the King, clad only in her bath towel. One better, this time. She wore a grubby pirate's cloak, a man's shirt and Dragon-Hater coverall underwear, but still had bare feet\u2013an insult in Eastern culture.\n\n<Straight back and shoulders, o Princess of the Overlarge Volcano,> her Dragoness teased.\n\n<That's the perfect compass-point, Dragonlove.>\n\nHualiama straightened her back, squared her shoulders and essayed a commanding tilt of her chin. Princess-presence, personified. Halfway through these adjustments, an invisible fist socked her mind into the following week.\n\nHer knees hinged and Hualiama remembered nothing more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "The advent of the Tourmaline Dragon's Storm-blast made the massed Dragonwing of Oranges unfurl and peel apart like the petals of a large flower.\n\n<With the peal of his thunder,>\n\n<He smote them asunder!>\n\nA tinkle of feminine laughter. Poetry etched upon his awareness, as clear-cut as the edges of his talons. The Blue-star rode with him! Grandion's hearts sang! He existed between the complex beats of his pounding hearts, the moment of striking the Orange Dragons magnified into excruciating leisureliness in his acuity, so that his mind had time to resound with each individual note of his fury, and every sensation and scent and assessment of the situation arrived individually, to be tasted and savoured and acted upon. A fist of black-edged clouds crumpled a Dragon's wing. Forked lightning blasted about him in uncountable multiple strikes, literally detonating three heads before his marvelling gaze. The leading edge of his shield pierced bodies like a living sword, an invisible talon-stroke worthy of an Ancient Dragon.\n\n*WHAA-BOOM!!* The impact rattled him to the marrow, a thunderclap that flung the Dragons apart for a thousand feet in every direction, smashing ribs and dislocating shoulders and snapping tails.\n\nDarkness engulfed him; a Dragon blinked in memory of his first sight after breaking the eggshell. He saw paws, wings and whole Dragons raining from the smoke-streaked sky all about, and a hole ripped through the Orange formation that perfectly framed the bulk of Yukari, rushing to his aid. Grandion shook himself slowly. What had happened? He smelled ozone. Lightning still played between numbers of the green-headed Dragonkind, dazing them; the balance of his Dragonwing struck almost unopposed, tearing further, smaller holes in the formation. Yukari's attack was especially powerful, a chain of lightning that crackled through her foes quicker even than a Dragon's eye could follow, striking seven beasts out of the sky.\n\nYukari raced past him. <A respectable blow, youngster.>\n\nHer strength touched him briefly, shocking the Tourmaline out of his dazed contemplation.\n\nHe had unwittingly raided Hualiama's power, he realised. What damage would such a draw have wreaked upon her Human form, or done to a hatchling? He called for her within, but heard no reply.\n\nWere these his wings? He could barely feel them. Nor could he hear the sounds of battle, as he expected. When he flew, he felt like a wineskin sloshing about with water.\n\nThe Aquamarine cried, <Raiden, Vinzuki, protect the Tourmaline!>\n\nWith that, the green-headed ones rushed inward, bellowing their hatred of the Tourmaline and all that he stood for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "Hualiama awoke snorting at a pungent scent. However, that was immediately followed by a sip of fresh water offered from a golden chalice, and a gentle waft of large feather fans to stir the air about her aching head. Sweet. Her nose wrinkled. She lay upon a luxurious pallet, her weary brow supported by cushions of Helyon silk, while four slaves held an awning overhead to shield her from the hardly ferocious morning suns, and two servant girls fanned her with very large feathers of a bird whose magnificent plumage had unfortunately been plundered to supply her royal comfort.\n\nHer eye further fell upon the King of Kaolili taking his ease upon a throne nearby, enjoying a similar standard of treatment as he spoke earnestly with Zulior the Red.\n\nShe grated, \"Why do I lie thus when the world is at war?\"\n\nHowever, standing up was more than she could manage. Lia settled back on her pillows and accepted an Eastern candy-gum from a golden platter. Actually, life could be worse. She could be Grandion, pouring out heart and lifeblood for a foreign kingdom.\n\nAcross the courtyard, Jin's gaze prickled. Hualiama raised her chin. <Deal with you later, young man.> To his credit, he did look as if he had swallowed a mouthful of raw windroc egg.\n\nZulior said, <A modicum of respect for a King, Star Dragoness!>\n\n<Aye, noble Dragon.>\n\nNot for nothing had she been raised the daughter of royalty in one of the noblest and most ancient Human courts in the Island-World. Hualiama raided her unique royal bag of manners, gumption and public show. Asking a servant to help her sit up, she greeted the King cordially. If he was surprised at her appearance, his expressionless Eastern face did not show it. His greeting, however, betrayed an underlying satisfaction which she took to mean calculation, perhaps a bride for Qilong, or leverage to gain a goal she could guess at\u2013safety for his kingdom. Could she keep the secret of her Shapeshifting out of his devious grasp?\n\nInside, her Dragoness looked on with alert interest, for which Lia was grateful.\n\nWith the niceties dealt with, she set about describing to the King the dangers posed by Numistar, the Land Dragons and Azziala. A lump shifted beneath her clothing. Flicker! How long had he slept? Why was he waking only now, and how had he survived her ridiculous fainting antics?\n\nHe should be a good conversation-starter.\n\nReaching down her top, Hualiama extracted the startled dragonet by his tail. \"Behold!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "Following a three-hour cross-examination by the King's Councillors, Hualiama sulked off to a quiet corner behind a stack of rainwater barrels and transformed into her Star Dragoness. She flexed her claws. Human-Lia might have exercised polite restraint, but her Dragoness was a different gemstone-cut. Hiding her clothing and weapons, she took Flicker upon her shoulder and snuck off in search of mischief.\n\nWell, injured Dragons.\n\nWhile her Human sweated pure lava dealing with Grandion and a King's demands, her Dragoness had apparently been resting and recovering her magic. Now there was an unanticipated benefit of being a Shapeshifter!\n\nThe infirmary warehouse was a hotbed of irascible Dragons. Scaly beasts made poor patients. Several Reds near the entrance were bellowing for Sunfyora, a pale Yellow Dragoness\u2013no, her colour must be Citrine-Blue, Lia decided\u2013working on an Eastern Green with a clearly snapped wing primary, over on the far side of the huge open area of hard-packed sand. When she stepped over to the Reds to ask about the Healer-Dragon, they quietened immediately with that draconic fondness for hatchlings that Hualiama had always noticed and appreciated. Dragons loved younglings. At once the fire-eyes mellowed to apricot, and the nearest Red, an eighty-foot bruiser with four missing fangs in his upper left jaw and a hole the size of a cart in his lower left flank, nuzzled her encouragingly.\n\n<Sulphurous strength to thee, thou radiance of the skies,> he rumbled, in a voice like a proximate earthquake. <Ask after Sunfyora, the Citrine-Blue yonder. Art thou a student?>\n\nOf life, aye. Of many things. <Aye, noble Red, I wish to learn the healing arts,> she replied, truthfully. She had learned a great deal of theory from Siiyumiel, but the practice applied to the real hurts and appalling injuries she saw about her, was another Island entirely.\n\n<I shall take thee hence, youngling,> the Red offered immediately.\n\n<I thank thee, noble\u2026>\n\n<Burliki the Red, of Fraxx,> he declaimed, striking the obligatory draconic 'admire-my-muscles' pose.\n\nNo older male would importune a hatchling for her name. This was standard Dragon culture. They wound between many Dragons who wore terrible injuries\u2013amputated limbs, torn wings, fang-pocked hides and missing eyes, not to mention burn wounds and a number of Dragons that appeared to have been poisoned, who writhed about in terrible pain\u2013and approached Sunfyora. She was a pretty, slender Eastern Dragon built along the lines of Mizuki\u2013much leaner than the Western Dragonkind of Fra'anior, with a less pronounced neck-ruff and a leaner frame overall. Though she was sixty feet long, she stood only twelve feet tall at the shoulder, Lia estimated, and her harried manner bespoke too many hours spent treating too many Dragons.\n\n<Sunfyora, your student,> Burliki said.\n\n<At last. Hold this wing while I pull the bone straight.>\n\nRight. <I can't reach, noble Sunfyora,> Hualiama said diffidently, earning herself a doting purr from Burliki and several other Dragons nearby, who were also waiting for treatment.\n\nSunfyora barely glanced sideways. <Those null-fire idiots! I asked for an experienced healer-Dragon, not some hatchling still yolk-slick around the skull-spikes. Make yourself useful, youngling. Your skills?>\n\nLia asked, <Skills?>\n\n<Training! Where were you trained?> Sunfyora examined the splintered primary closely, her secondary membranes blinking in a way Lia had never observed before. Or were those tertiary membranes, or some property of a draconic eye unique to the Citrine-Blue? <While I twist the bone back into alignment\u2013are you listening, hatchling? Can you not follow the simplest instructions? On my word!>\n\nGripping the Green's shoulder joint with one paw pressed flat against the hide and the other positioned near the secondary wing joint, Sunfyora flexed her muscles, pulling outward while twisting an eighth of an inch at a time. Concentrating deeply, Hualiama followed her instructions, settling the bone splinters back as exactingly as possible. The Citrine-Blue applied her magic along the bone; after a few minutes Lia unobtrusively joined in, first observing how the expert healer worked, before supplying her own sense of Balance. White-fires flowered delicately along the three-foot break site. The long bone splinters shifted slightly before drawing together as if welcoming wholeness. The Star Dragoness reached out to prod a recalcitrant splinter back into place before the flesh sealed over the bone. Good as new. Drawn on, she worked on the main arteries that ran along a pronounced groove on the inside of the bone, restoring full flow, and soothed the bruising and nerve damage. The Green's wing trembled as the arteries and capillaries feeding the sensitive surface visibly swelled and stiffened. He flexed the outer third with a gasp of amazement.\n\nHualiama lifted her muzzle. <Oh. How was that\u2013>\n\nSunfyora stared at her as if she had seen a two-headed rajal stroll into the room and start dancing the Flame Cycle. She said, <Who did you say you were, little one?>\n\n<Uh, is it good? The wing, noble Dragon?>\n\nThe Green lifted his wing gingerly, then waggled it with growing confidence. <By the First Egg\u2026 impossible! Look, wing-brothers!>\n\nThe Citrine-Blue snapped, <Don't you try flying just yet! A day's rest at least\u2013I think. No, go outside and test it, carefully. Hatchling. Over here. Show me what you can do with these poisoned bite-wounds.>\n\nRe-grafting puncture wounds was more complicated. Hualiama made an attempt under Sunfyora's direction, but the complexities of the draconic dermal and subcutaneous tissues defeated her at first. Draconic hide boasted no less than three distinct layers of hide-armour, all fed by complex nerve, vascular and magical systems, which the healer-Dragoness saw with what she called Deep Sight, a Dragon-power Hualiama had never heard of. Coupled with her own emergent understanding of Balance, they steadily rebuilt a Red Dragon's horrible neck-wounds from the inside out.\n\n<You have power, hatchling!> Sunfyora muttered at one point.\n\n<Power, perhaps, but a lack of knowledge and experience in how to apply it,> the Star Dragoness said ruefully.\n\n<Straw-head,> Flicker murmured into one of her ear-canals.\n\nThe Citrine-Blue snorted happily, bathing Hualiama's shoulder in a friendly curl of fire. <No hatching grows into their paws in a day. Now, let's send this fine Red on his way. Two days, and that new skin will harden into full armour. Ready for another problem? Burliki has severe intestinal and skin damage\u2013>\n\n<I'm Hualiama,> Lia blurted out.\n\nSunfyora made a pleased ruffle of her double-wings. <I guessed. The mighty Tourmaline spoke of the birth-in-fire of a Star Dragoness. We all expected you to be-> she coughed a delicate smoke-ring <-bigger.>\n\nFrom her other side, the chunky muscle-mountain that was Burliki wafted scented fire over them both, tingling Lia's highly sensitive nostrils with notes of anise, tarragon, a host of tangy metallic scents beyond her ken and a rich floral bouquet unexpectedly similar to the fireflower perfume of the Fra'anior Cluster. Sunfyora nudged him slyly and suggested that neither she nor the Star Dragoness spoke Franxxian Aroma-Dialect, and could he desist from wafting over her patients? Another intriguing nuance of draconic life she had not encountered in her travels through scroll-lore. Observing their interaction, Lia concluded that despite her protestations, the resulting acceleration of hearts-beats and burbling of belly-fires implied that those scents had the desired effect on Sunfyora.\n\nAn hour later, Burliki was the proud owner of a shiny new patch of Dragon hide larger and wider than Dragoness-Lia was tall.\n\n\"We could do with combining these techniques with Human medical science,\" Lia mused aside to Sunfyora. \"Stitching intestines beforehand would have shaved half of the time off of what we just achieved. Teach me more, please, noble Dragoness.\"\n\nThe Citrine-Blue made a smoky humph that implied Star Dragoness magic was somewhat unique. \"If you learned to draw upon the injured Dragon's resources, that would conserve your strength.\"\n\n\"We did well,\" Lia protested.\n\n<Mud-for-brains,> Flicker muttered in his sleep. Hualiama considered the patch of warmth sleeping beneath her skull-spikes, in the hollow between the skull-plate that anchored the spikes and her neck itself. Flicker reincarnate. The second Flicker. How poignant her memories. She could not stand to lose him again.\n\n\"We've two hundred and seventy-six patients left,\" countered the other Dragoness.\n\nLia showed her a few needle-sharp hatchling fangs.\n\n\"Point taken.\" Sunfyora gave her a playful wing-slap. \"Let's get to work, student!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "Four hours after midnight, Grandion spied the relief spearing through a cloudbank and frowned. How had Zulior conjured up such a miraculous number of Dragons? By the pale, beautiful light of a full Blue moon, his magnified sight picked out the individuals in that group, whereupon his hearts quickened to the tune of a fine, smoky snort of wonderment. By the First Egg of all Dragons! There came Burliki, flying with relative ease, and had not Tenzu of Tyrodia's right wing been shredded so severely, the Brown had been forced to walk the last four leagues back to Kerdani? Yet he soared aloft, favouring the right only marginally.\n\nGrandion led his paw-weary, battered Dragonwing on an intercept course. Ten more Dragons appeared from the clouds. Two dozen!\n\nRaiden growled, \"What is this, o Tourmaline?\"\n\nFumiko, who had been dozing in her seat between his spine-spikes, straightened up with a bark of laughter. \"I know, Grandion\u2013don't you?\" His scales prickled in anticipation. \"Don't you Dragons scent these things with your sixth or seventh sense?\"\n\nNo seventh sense was needed. Grandion could smell those little laughing paws from a hundred leagues off. A resounding chuckle vibrated deep in his chest, a near-subsonic rumble. Where she was concerned, just listen to the logical fallacies in his thinking. Laughing paws? O Dragon of muddled fires! He bugled quietly, \"Hualiama.\"\n\n\"Oh, how romantic!\" the blacksmith Tadao sighed, drawing an amused glance from his warrior-wife Fumiko.\n\nHere was another masterpiece of her paw. A family of Dragons and Dragon Riders, the mated pairs of Vinzuki and Raiden oath-linked with Fumiko and Tadao.\n\nGrandion pumped his aching wings, sweeping his battle-scarred body up to the incoming Dragonwing. Romantic? She refused his advances! He must woo her, entice her, with the uttermost draconic cunning, or his ascending fire-oaths meant nothing.\n\nYet if Blue-star had rebelled against her mother's dominion, that too was a sign and a portent. He lauded the decision. Shinzen's Giants and Dragonwings closed in from the southwest, south and east. The huge Island that housed the Human capital city lay but fifty leagues ahead. If she had reached the capital, that meant the Lost Islands could not be far behind\u2013a pawful of days at most.\n\nThe battle must draw together at Kerdani.\n\n[ Rainbows over Islands ]\n\nHUaliama slept flank-to-flank with Sunfyora in the Dragon fashion, her paws twitching lightly, now and again, as she dozed restlessly. Eggling-dreams beset her. Chaotic, filled with desperate liaisons with her White Dragoness mother and Fra'anior's thundering and endless fleeing from the wild storms of the Ancient Dragon's presence. Again and again, she tumbled away over the Islands of the world, seeking her soul's rest, her home, unable to find what she desired most\u2026 and she whimpered and cried out, and Sunfyora comforted her with a motherly paw and a warm word.\n\nAt last came a time when she fell deeply asleep, and found herself in what she had come to think of as her soul-space, the home she and her Human shared.\n\n\"Humansoul?\" she called, padding up the steps to the bed\u2013which held a scaly intruder!\n\nA Dragon! A wing, a girl slumbering between paws as white as anemone petals\u2026 Numistar! Oh mercy, it could not be! Her paws froze with shock, her mind charged up the steps and pounced on that Dragoness in a terrible, rending battle-fury, but her body refused to obey.\n\n\"Numistar! Get away from her!\"\n\n\"Numistar?\" said the White Dragoness, in tones so ineffably sweet and melancholy, Hualiama's fires sorrowed and swooped toward darkness. \"Do you know me so little?\"\n\n\"I-I\u2026 Istariela! Shell-mother!\"\n\nShe bounded up those steps in a flash and crashed into the beautiful arch of her mother's neck, the diamond-frosted scales, the scent she had so long imagined filling her nostrils with cascades of hope and sorrow and ecstasy. Hualiama cried, <Tell me you're real! Is this real? Shell-mother?>\n\nMay she crawl back inside the eggshell; may she re-enter her mother's womb!\n\nIstariela's paw clasped her close, desperate, tender, trembling. A wordless crooning rose from her throat, before she choked it off, saying, <As real as my spirit-presence embodied across the leagues, my darling shell-daughter, my song, my third-heart. How I have longed for this day.>\n\n<So you are present? In this Island-World?>\n\n<Hualiama\u2026> her head jerked; her paw clenched painfully tight. <He hunts. Please, let this be\u2026 let it suffice. How I wish I could be closer, yet\u2013>\n\n<Yet I am to endure the terrible choices of two exiled, absentee parents?>\n\nHuman arms wound around her neck. The girl touched her Dragoness' cheek, her eyes brimming with more understanding and grief than either soul could bear. She, of all people, knew first-hand the pain of separation and loss. Then the Human girl had learned the shattering truth of her parentage; despite that, Humansoul was still generous with her love. The Dragoness sighed up a gust that shivered every scale on her body.\n\nHuman-Lia said, \"We know, don't we? We honour our legacy, being shell-daughter to the most legendary Dragon-pair in history, yet what heartache they chose\u2026\"\n\n\"Fate's choice?\" echoed the Star Dragoness, with a bittersweet chuckle. \"Do we choose a fate, or does fate choose for us?\"\n\nIstariela's face was a picture of puzzlement, even suspicion. \"There's two Hualiamas? Explain your\u2026 ah, self? Selves?\"\n\n\"We believe we may be the third race,\" Dragon-Lia began, only to be halted in her tracks by a screech.\n\n\"That prophecy is about you?\" the White Dragoness gasped. \"Already I have seen its portents, but concluded that the 'third race' was Dramagon's creation, or an event heralded by the comet of Numistar Winterborn. I don't know if you understand, that though I see that your bodies appear separately in this place, they are not truly separate. I see oneness. More than cohesion, more than unity. You\u2026 and you\u2026 are linked\u2013why? One soul-presence blurred, like two flowers sharing a single stem\u2013\"\n\n\"We can help a bit,\" Human-Lia said, \"but there's much to learn. My brother Elki described our state, our abilities, as Shapeshifting. We are one soul manifest in two likenesses, perhaps as you might imagine the two sides of one coin. Our physical forms coincide\u2013in oneness, inseparable, except in this place. It appears that injury to one form reflects in the other. Though I don't know how a wing-injury might reflect on our Human form, for example. These forms must recharge differently. The Human can starve if only the Dragoness manifests for a period of time\u2013I need to test the parameters\u2013but the Dragon magic can replenish while the Dragoness is\u2026 elsewhere. And it does seem that we may be a Star Dragoness, although we aren't sure\u2013\"\n\nIstariela growled, \"You are a Star Dragoness, and my progeny!\"\n\nBoth forms of Hualiama bowed simultaneously, making Istariela's beautiful brow-ridges wrinkle in consternation.\n\nShe whispered, \"So close it is, I almost grasp a prophetic truth\u2026\"\n\nHer eyes lidded, then opened upon pure white flame. In a great voice, the White Dragoness recited:\n\n<Could it be that from tragedy,>\n\n<Beauty might rise,>\n\n<In form unbeknown to me?>\n\n<Let it be. Let it be! LET IT BE!>\n\nThunder without storm rolled across the starlit skies, shaking Hualiama in ways and depths she could not begin to articulate. Once more, the treble power of oath-making! Thrice spoken, once ordained, Fra'anior the Onyx had taught her, stressing great caution in the making of such oaths.\n\nA sulphurous wind wafted into the chamber.\n\nNow Istariela quaked from muzzle to wingtip. <What have I done? I have summoned him\u2013you cannot trust Fra'anior, my precious ones! Never!>\n\nShe winked out of existence, making both Hualiamas stumble forward in surprise. In almost the same instant, a titanic voice smote her world:\n\n<ISTARIELA! TRAITORESS!>\n\nLia knew she had to wake. She had to flee Fra'anior, for if she were caught with the White Dragoness, he would punish her, too\u2026 <away. Away, Hualiama!>\n\nAnd she was gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "Grandion prowled into the infirmary building, ninety feet of predatory silence. Shielded. Pad-footed. Even his breathing stilled, and he banked his belly-fires despite their agitated churning at the prospect of meeting Hualiama once more. Last time he had Projected himself into her presence, she had rejected his advances\u2013rightly, he had concluded, but her refusal still rankled.\n\nRock-headed, wilful, exasperating\u2026 female!\n\nWho was the more infuriating, her Human or her Dragoness? Dealing with one female was more than enough for most Dragons, but two? Insanity.\n\nThere she was, scales agleam with inner radiance as though she dreamed amidst starry realms, casting a pool of light where she lay alongside Sunfyora. Without so much as disturbing a blade of straw on the floor, Grandion slipped over to her flank, imagining how she would react. A shriek? A bugle of delight? A coy whirl of her half-lidded fire-eyes to regard his massively impressive masculine poise, before a demure dip of her gaze?\n\nCloser. A wingtip-touch separated them now.\n\nThe Star Dragoness' eyes flicked open, perfectly focussed on him. <The most sulphurous greetings of the Great Dragon to thee, noble Tourmaline.>\n\nAs if he had never left.\n\nThe Tourmaline's fires thundered up into his throat; he immediately swallowed them back down again, lest he engulf a hatchling in the inferno of his mortification and annoyance. The result was that he stood flat-pawed and gaping like the most idiotic of feral Dragons, while Hualiama stretched as the dawn spreading its artful wings across the sky, and smiled a smile that obliterated any control he might have imagined exerting over his knees, or any other bodily movement. Overbalancing, he pitched forward on his nose.\n\n<Oh, you're injured,> she cried. <Where does it hurt, my beloved?>\n\nBeloved? Nowhere so injured as in his third heart.\n\nHer reaction was dismay. Grandion heard himself mutter an inanity about torn wings as the Star Dragoness immediately fell to fussing over him, checking his various wounds; while her tiny hearts pounded away at hummingbird-speed, as if she swirled through the midst of an aerial battle, betraying her agitation with every pulse. Emotion clogged his throat and crammed into his mind. Relief. Sorrow. Transcendent love mingled with undraconic fear. For he knew that all the might, magic and power of a Tourmaline Dragon lay defenceless before what he felt for her, the starlight of his nocturnal skies.\n\nHow he thrilled to the caress of her magic upon his hypersensitive wing-membranes, a sensation at once soothing and enflaming, and the affectionate touch of tiny paws setting straight wing struts and arranging membranes to be healed; he heard within her resonant harmonic magic a deeper, more enchanting Dragonsong than anything he had ever imagined, a song of restoration and mending and passion which beguiled his hearts until his breast hurt with the very fullness of the sum of the Island-World's wonder. Even breathing seemed superfluous. Exaltation! Stupefying, wing-shivering glory!\n\nHer breathing came faster and faster, gasping, wheezing, her touch ever more frantic and fleeting. 'Soul-connection!' he wanted to cry. 'Love overwhelms all with billows of fragrant fire!'\n\n<No\u2026> she panted. <I cannot, I must not\u2026 oh, Grandion!>\n\nShe flashed away from him, incredibly fleet of paw and wing. Panicked. Wild-eyed. Her sinuous form streaked a zigzag course between the tall, thickset beams which supported the ceiling, carved of the trunks of jinsumo trees, and darted toward the wide-flung doorway before Grandion was able to do more than shift a paw.\n\n<Hualiama!> He lurched after her, running, dodging with Dragon-reflexes so that neither tail nor wingtip touched a sleeping Dragon in passing, but his greater bulk counted against him. Grandion was five seconds behind the fleeing hatchling as she passed the warehouse exit, seventy feet wide and thirty tall. The moment he charged through the doors, he coiled his massive thighs and sprang for the skies, clearing the buildings before taking his first downward stroke. *Whap!* Dust exploded across the courtyard. *Whap-whap-whap!* Rapid, circumscribed flutter-strokes fuelled his monstrous acceleration as the Tourmaline Dragon streaked toward the dawn's first blush. Aided by the gleam of a three-quarters Yellow Moon dominating the eastern horizon, he cast about, first low and then high. Vanished? Impossible\u2013no, there! A hint of disturbance as she nipped through a puffy, lowlying cloud. The hunter in him roused. Dragon senses reached out. His nostrils flared wide, drinking in the scents of daybreak, including faint traces of her unique, complex Dragoness-scent, marking a trail that to his heightened perception described an artist's skyward-pointing brush-stroke.\n\nUpward! His entire body flexed, raising howls of protest from his tired, overworked muscles. But he was Tourmaline. He hunted for joy. Storm winds filled his wings as his magic and strength catapulted the Dragon toward the upper curvature of the Yellow Moon.\n\n<Hualiama!>\n\nTiny wings fluttered like a blue moth amidst the dusky clouds.\n\n<Hualiama, my third heart, come to me. Be with me.>\n\nShe strained harder, somehow managing to maintain her lead. Pride in her Dragoness-strength caused a delighted bugle to vent from his throat.\n\nGrandion swept through the sparse altostratus cloud layers and vaulted into the endless airy dome above. He had miscalculated the hour. It was a few minutes after dawn, but the rising suns were eclipsed by the Yellow Moon, streaming out from behind it in great, thick spikes of golden light, as though the skull-ruff of a golden Sun-Dragon rose to salute the heavens. Beauty to enflame a Dragon's hearts forever.\n\nThat light reached across the world as his chase lengthened and the suns rose, until her hatchling-proportioned strength began to fail, as it surely must.\n\nThen he called to her in silken tones, soothing her overwrought state, although he sensed the near-feral response of earlier had long since abated. Could he conclude that she was Dragoness enough to desire and invite his chasing? Surely too simplistic an answer.\n\nAh, by his wings! Now let the supreme draconic wiles of a Tourmaline Dragon dazzle his oath-partner!\n\nWith a confident laugh, Grandion reached for the Dragoness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "Undone by a word, ambushed by her emotions, Hualiama saw no path but to flee. She had no choice. Once that millisecond decision had been taken, she was at the mercy of draconic reactions and battle-readiness and, if she were honest, plain and simple fear. She flew as if she could slough off that angst like a butterfly breaking free of its chrysalis. She flew even when the panic abated and she knew Grandion chased her, because her humiliation would not allow otherwise.\n\n<Please catch me. Please leave me alone.> Her thoughts swung between two diametrically opposed Islands. Where would she fly? She did not care. Out here she might play in golden suns-beams and sport with the dawn, sensing from far off the gazes of the watch-Dragons upon her, but not giving a rotten prekki-fruit peel for their regard.\n\nSo when Grandion's laughter reverberated against her belly, she voiced an involuntary squeak of dismay, <Dragon!>\n\n<Aye, Dragon,> he laughed, touching her right wingtip with his left. He rolled smoothly beneath her, before popping up on her port flank with a discomfiting grin. <Wingtips!>\n\nThis time, his touch deliberately rocked her in the air.\n\n<Grandion! What are you doing?>\n\n<Ugh, squeak-monster,> her Human complained within. <Can we act our age, please?>\n\n<What do you mean? He's the one chasing me.>\n\nHumansoul managed to project a mental image of folding her arms across her chest, accompanied by an infuriating smirk. <Let me draw the runes for you, wing-sister. One fine morning over the Islands, a gorgeous chunk of male Dragonhood spies a pretty Dragoness. He's brewing molten lava for her. The thought of him makes her fly like a drunken windroc\u2026>\n\n<What? You pesky little\u2013>\n\nBut the Dragoness' furious response was forestalled as Grandion whooshed beneath her, turned an aerial somersault-and-a-half almost in front of her muzzle, and tapped her wingtips somehow from above, upside-down in the air. <Wingtips. Don't you know the game?>\n\nThe Star Dragoness gulped, <No\u2026 will you teach me?>\n\nHer Human almost split her sides laughing. <Now who's flirting?>\n\n<What are you doing, Tourmaline?> The Dragoness scowled mutinously at the insouciant male Dragon, who flipped her left wingtip again before she could snatch it back. <Stop that at once.>\n\n<Make me.>\n\nHonestly. Fires back of the fangs, smoke, the conceited posturing of a strapping young Dragon. Ooh. Irresistible. Dragon-Lia struggled to keep a level flight, and failed. Human-Lia could not stop chortling. The Dragoness decided she would slap that irksome Human girl so hard\u2013<Grandion!>\n\nNow he was flying backward through the air, his forearms folded across his chest, while from the crook of his left elbow, he waggled a talon at her in an extraordinarily faithful mimicry of her royal tutor back at Fra'anior. He boomed, \"Now, Princess, you shall recite the lay of the major Islands from West to East, not missing a single one, or we shall be at our lessons all day.\"\n\nHer jaw dropped. Had he spied on her? When?\n\nBreaking that Human pose, he flowed like a river of gemstone-blue scales about her bedazzled, irresolute flight-path. <Wingtips. Wingtips.> Everywhere she turned, Grandion was there. Dizzying. Maddening. Resplendent of scale. The fire-scent of his presence, deliciously overwhelming. <Wingtips. Come on, Hualiama. You ask what we're doing? We're dancing. This is how Dragons dance.>\n\nDancing? Of course.\n\nMemories of courtship-rituals filtered slowly into her mind as she whirled around and around, both unwilling and unable to abscond from the adoring ambit of her Dragon. Dancing aloft. Shooting the fragrant breezes above the Islands with her beloved. The ages-old ceremonies that preceded the breathing of ascending fire-promises between male Dragon and female, which they had already begun. One was even her namesake, <Blue-star.>\n\nWas love not a dance? When knowledge and purpose and tenacity failed her, where had she always turned? Dance. Yet now another craved to join her. He wanted to be her focal point, her flame, her muse. There was much that was not possible between them, which might never become possible, and would undoubtedly be consumed in days to come by the violent paroxysms of war. Yet the moment presented itself to her. All that was required, was to take destiny into her paws, and dance.\n\nStilling herself in the air, Hualiama lifted her muzzle imperiously. <Alastior, I affirm that I am Blue-star, shell-daughter of Istariela and Fra'anior the Onyx, and I would have this dance with thee.>\n\nIt was not a request."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "Dragon and Dragoness danced a stately prelude. Wingtips patting. Necks entwining. Fire-eyes fixed upon each other in the slow, spiralling ascent of matched flight.\n\nIt was Hualiama who wriggled free first, with a bright shout of laughter and a cheeky dart aimed at his left wingtip. She slapped it with her tail before spinning away. A coy wing-flip shot her past Grandion's nose, which she managed to tap on the way past with her fore-talon, the rascally mite! Then she was somersaulting, diving, pirouetting and jiving to the beat of their Dragonsong, her bright laughter washing over him like the suns-shine. He matched her every manoeuvre, a larger, more dignified counterpoint to the irrepressible celebrations of his tiny companion.\n\nLinking paws and wingtips, they tumbled carelessly through the air, carolling wildly, whispering sweetly, the songs of linked-love, bonded-love, air-under-wings-love, which Lia's Dragoness remembered from memories passed down from her mother.\n\nThey danced far above the city, alone and undisturbed, following only the melody of unfettered hearts. As they circled ever closer, Grandion began to breathe his fire, creating great billows for her to laugh and sport and play within, diving through the flame or batting it mischievously with her wings, until it seemed she existed solely because of the scent-closeness of him, and the wonder of white-fires began to sheet over her vision, and a new magic flowered in her heart. She could not yet give of her belly-fires, but there was more to a Star Dragoness than he or she imagined. Hualiama drew to herself and into herself the warmth and essence of the rich golden suns-beams, feeding deeply on the primal life granted by warmth and light, and radiated back her love for the Tourmaline Dragon, whose gaze across the intimate space of their dance was fixed upon her, ever burning.\n\nFaster. Closer. Sweeter burned their ardour, the commingling of draconic fire-life now endless, an eternal ring of fire. They flew through realms of golden fire, and that fire was each other.\n\nThis was why she had blown apart a mountain for him. This was the memory of the first time she had seen Grandion break free of the dark lake by the monastery, sleek and monstrous and beautiful, and the marvellous lightness of her first flight upon his back. This was the reason a fey Human girl had dared to sing for a Dragon. For it was right. It was right and true, and sparked concentric circles of white-fires which raced toward the curvature of the far horizons, leaving in their wake vast, circular rainbows of white and blue gleaming upon the clouds\u2013incredible, unfathomable magic.\n\nThus a Star Dragoness danced with her Tourmaline, and the rainbows over the Islands were love."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "Jinichi held out his palm. \"It rained some kind of incense. All over the Island. Smell this. The apothecaries are already devising perfumes and draconic love-potions and selling them for sacks full of gold drals.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Grandion.\n\n\"It's disgusting!\" snorted the teenager.\n\n\"It's magic,\" said Hualiama, nuzzling Grandion as best she could. If only she could grow up faster! She might romance him as high as two feet above his knee.\n\nJin spat, \"You two. You could've told me. Rainbows. Dancing. And what, by the point of my sword, happened to the girl? Where's the Princess?\"\n\n\"You don't have a sword,\" Grandion pointed out. \"You're a scale-scrubber. Junior rank.\"\n\nHualiama put in, \"Grandion, why do you have a warrior and prospective Dragon Rider scrubbing scales and carrying water?\"\n\n\"And sweeping the sleeping quarters,\" the Tourmaline clarified.\n\nJin began, \"I\u2013\"\n\n\"We should find him a Dragon,\" said Lia.\n\n\"Do you think?\" Grandion scratched his chin, pretending to consider this idea. \"Would this miserable waif perhaps be raised out of a state of ruinous ignorance by being assigned to one particular Dragon?\"\n\n\"Now listen\u2013\"\n\n\"I'm hungry, ragamuffin,\" announced the Tourmaline. \"Scuttle off to the pens and fetch me the biggest ralti sheep you can find, whilst we converse about important matters\u2013such as your future.\"\n\n\"I am right here!\" Jin almost screamed.\n\nGrandion looked amazed. \"Still? Run along, boy. My beloved could eat just about anything right now. Except you, because I can smell your armpits from the next Island. You shouldn't forget to bathe at the end of a day's work slaving in service of the Dragonkind.\"\n\nPoor boy. He spluttered and snorted in a fist-clenched fury. Hualiama helped by sneaking up behind him and slipping a paw over his mouth. \"Shut the muzzle. Grandion's a rotten tease. But we should find the right Dragon or Dragoness for you. I sense the magical imperative; I sense you know this too. Is there a particular Dragon you feel drawn to?\"\n\nOver her paw, Jin's eyes grew wild with emotions she did not understand.\n\n\"Or is there more? We should talk, but not now. Zulior is about to sound the alarm.\" Glancing sidelong at Grandion, Hualiama said, \"Will you bear this apprentice Dragon Rider upon your back, noble Tourmaline?\"\n\nHe growled, \"There is but one for me\u2013\"\n\n\"Train him,\" she interrupted. <Handle our secrets with care, Dragon.>\n\nHis belly-fires raged. <How dare you lecture me about secrets, o daughter of Onyx. Why do I sense, Hualiama, after all that I have done and suffered for thee, that you are still unprepared to trust me?>\n\nShe gaped at him, speechless.\n\nAbove the city, Zulior the Red bugled the rallying-cry. <Dragons, arise! To me!>\n\nGrandion deliberately turned his flank to her, a posture of rejection. \"Come, Jinichi. Let's get you to the weapons-master. Today, you'll fly with me.\"\n\nFrom dancing among suns-beams to the misery of isolation. Hualiama winged heavily to a sky riven with the smoke of Dragons, above the dark slate roofs of Kerdani, nestled amongst low green hills, and looked to the horizon. Darkness. A storm? The southern horizon was the same slate-grey colour as the town below, strangely speckled with orange and green, as if the clouds had been infected with an unimaginable fungal contagion. Dragons, Lia realised. Her eyes focussed carefully. There was more. Dark columns of ant-like men crawled along the ground, shepherded by many more of Shinzen's Dragons. Even at a distance of over fourteen leagues, her Dragon sight picked out the glinting of metal armour, the spears and pikes rising above the thickly-packed, marching Giants. An invasion force.\n\nRiding between her skull-spikes, Flicker shuddered slightly. <Bad Humans?>\n\n<Aye, and bad Dragons,> Lia replied.\n\n<Flicker help straw-head,> he piped, bravely.\n\nShe laughed softly. <That you shall, my brave flame-heart.>\n\n<Come to me.> Zulior's command interrupted her dismayed, wing-frozen response to the sight of full-blown invasion. Obeying his orders, Hualiama flew up to land upon his shoulder. He said gruffly, <You and Grandion picked your morning to dance the first level of fire-promises, didn't you?>\n\nShe hung her head.\n\n<It was inspiring,> he added, unexpectedly. <Did Sapphurion and Qualiana's spirits not dance with thee, amongst those rainbows above the Islands? Thy power hath beautified the dawn as I have never heard, or seen or envisioned, in all my years of draconic fire-life. We Dragons were honoured to be spectators to the first promise of your union, Star Dragoness.>\n\nYet she had hurt Grandion. And must continue to, until the fates were known. Who could she trust with the secrets of her lineage and powers, if not the Tourmaline Dragon?\n\nNumistar knew. Stirring upon his shoulder, she checked the northern horizon. Empty.\n\n<I meant that you must save your strength, Hualiama,> Zulior added, with an emotional timbre of fatherly-concern. <Be not ashamed to be who you are.>\n\nShe snorted smoke, moved and delighted. He could not know how profound such an idea might prove, for to accept all that she was\u2013she might more easily move the suns backward around the Island-World. Kindness and fiery directness wrapped into one statement. Drolly, she said, <Truly, shell-uncle?>\n\n<Be not ashamed,> he repeated. <In this fire-life a Dragoness must strive, above all else, to be true of heart and paw. That way, we can stand against the day of evil, and even when all flesh and blood and bone and magic should fail, we may yet stand.>\n\nWords to seal within her hearts forever.\n\nFlashes of fire lit the South as Burliki led his Dragonwing on raid after raid, cutting into the belly of Shinzen's forces; undeterred, the mighty army rolled on. Above the city, Dragons gathered to Zulior. At the western periphery, activity had exploded across the Dragonship fleet as the soldiers checked the vessels, securing armour and loading crossbow bolts and shrapnel, stoking the wood-fired engines and causing the airships to strain against their mooring hawsers. Soldiers dashed along the defensive ramparts and walls, taking their assigned positions.\n\nHualiama knew that King Taisho had placed ten divisions of his army in the far South to oppose the landing. If they were to survive an encounter with Shinzen's Giants, they would need the support of Dragons from the air. That was Zulior's strategy, long since worked out with the King.\n\n<The ground troops will not reach the city until the day after tomorrow,> the Red briefed his Dragons. <Chamuko, check the North. We expect invasion imminently.>\n\nThe veteran Yellow growled, <Aye.>\n\n<We'll need every Dragon we have. In four hours, I'll expect your Dragonwing to return South to blood their fangs in battle.>\n\n<By my wings!> snarled the Yellow, with bloodthirsty enthusiasm.\n\nZulior did not waste further breath with pretty speeches and niceties. Bellowing, <For the Great Onyx, for Fra'anior!> he pounded the air with his wingbeats, and the Dragonwing formed up behind him, a dense wedge three hundred strong. It was some minutes before Hualiama spotted Grandion rising behind them, with Jin upon his back. Was she jealous? Madly! With him came twenty Dragons and Riders, the balance of the force drawn from Naoko's warriors.\n\nFourteen leagues was a small distance for Dragons. Zulior set a rapid twenty league per hour pace, enough to put strain on wings and ligaments while balancing the need to conserve strength. She caught Grandion having a quiet word with the Red, demanding that he take care of the Star Dragoness. With a low chuckle, Zulior praised his shell-nephew's envious heart.\n\nThe lowlying band of squally weather had hid the true mass of Shinzen's Dragonwings. Hualiama's hearts sank even as she responded to Zulior's request to help the Blues shield half of their Dragonwing, which would attack low while Grandion's command would strike higher up, providing necessary aerial cover. Zulior the Red ordered optical shielding. No warning for the Giants. Hualiama sensed several thoughts in the Red's mind, disquiet at taking a hatchling into battle, concern for the 'fire-asset' who was a Star Dragoness, and the desire to have her learn, to see, to bring her unique abilities into the battle. Ah, so he did have reason for separating her from Grandion. A leader with an eye fixed upon the future. She should have guessed.\n\nCloser they swooped. The front of Orange-Green Dragons was a mile high and ten miles wide, uncountable numbers. More slunk upon the ground. Transport Dragons swung up to the Island, dropping off their loads of Giants, male and female who formed into battalions one hundred strong. As if they were not already powerful enough, these Giants wore heavy metal breastplates, shoulder plates and arm guards, and greaves upon their calves. Their feet were shod with leather sandals, and each Giant wore a skullcap with an additional nose guard and flap of chain metal that protected the back and sides of the neck. Their spears were twelve feet tall and as thick as sapling trees, and their black war-hammers sported heads the size of Human-Lia's torso. Strapped to their left forearms, each Giant carried a convex shield nine feet tall by three and a half wide, emblazoned with the symbol of a Red Dragon rampant upon a field of gold.\n\nEach Giant looked absolutely identical in stature and demeanour. They marched in ranks ten deep, the beat of their exacting tread audible from a mile distant.\n\nHualiama sensed magical potentials rising all around her now. Fire for the Reds. Lava for the Yellows and Oranges. Ropes of poison-like jungle vines writhing in the bellies of Green Dragons. Electricity and Storm in the Blues. A darker, earthier scent about the magic of the Brown Dragons, and here, the unique signature of the Grey Dragoness called Makani.\n\nIn their midst stood a Star Dragoness who understood why she had to play a secondary role, and hated it. If she was to win this war, to contribute with her rare powers, why had the fates seen fit to make her but a hatchling? So that she might dazzle them with her cuteness? Bat her fire eyes and mesmerise Shinzen's horde into casting themselves into the Cloudlands? She gritted her fangs. Ha!\n\nZulior picked his target, a column of Giants five hundred strong. He swept his wings forward. <Leave none alive! Strike, my Dragonkin! Attack speed. Wait for my mark\u2013>they arrowed toward the Giants at a blistering pace, all but invisible. *ZULIOR!!*\n\nA staggering wave of flame, acid and lava seared the dawn.\n\n[ The Siege of Kerdani ]\n\nCRashing! Thundering! Roaring! Dragon fire engulfed the Giants, sweeping onward to smash into the Orange Dragons just behind them. Hualiama found herself roaring right along with them, as though a single, primal beast voiced its animosity from many throats. Yet many Giants leaped or sprinted out of the conflagration, apparently resistant to fire even though their shields and armour glowed red-hot. Others lay unconscious, smouldering where they had fallen. A flurry of rocks and javelins soared up from a second column of Giants just ahead; Oranges sprang skyward, orienting on the marauding Dragonwing.\n\nA shattering roar! Grandion's Storm pounded the converging Oranges half a mile overhead, smashing Dragons into each other as a funnel churned through their formation. Her Reds and Oranges drew breath.\n\nLia leaped in mentally. <Pure-fires, my Dragonkin.>\n\nHer intervention was imperfect, a surprise, too esoteric for some of the Dragons to understand. But many responded, internalising the touch of white-fires she brought to their magic, and the resultant second wave of fire that swamped the marching Giants was laced with lightning-like streaks of white, far hotter than before. This time, screams and a loud sizzling of flesh rose from the burning column as the Giants broke ranks in many places. Inhuman torches charged out of the conflagration before collapsing. The answering barrage of rocks was ragged; the Browns now charged in, flipping large boulders to crush stricken Giants beneath. Seconds. That was all it took to devastate the column, wiping hundreds of lives off their Island.\n\n<FOR THE ONYX!> Burliki bellowed, sweeping by overhead from an angle Hualiama had not even seen. Suddenly, the battle closed in from all sides. The Giants rallied, pounding the pillaging Dragonwing with boulders they tore from the ground with their magic; some even leaped tens of feet into the air, swinging their hammers with devastating effect to break ribs and wing-bones. The huge men behaved as if impervious to pain. Zulior jinked through the field of fire, picking off a Giant with a molten boulder that visibly caved in his skull, before rallying his Dragons with another cry.\n\nDanger! Oranges closed in thickly, trying to overwhelm and snarl the advance. Grandion and two Blues flashed by not ten feet from her position, spraying shards of ice from their gaping mouths. Hualiama flinched beneath the assault, digging deep to keep the shields intact. Even so, they lost two Reds as a volley of javelins pierced the shield, pinning them three or four times each in the chest and belly.\n\n<Bolster that shield!> Zulior snarled.\n\nUnfair. Impossible. Yet she must try. The power required to shield so many\u2026 her strength would fail within seconds. What could a Star Dragoness do in this situation, when Dragons fell all around her, snarling with the incoming Oranges now, fighting tooth and nail, claw and fang? As injuries mounted with inconceivable speed?\n\nAt this rate, they would not last the morning.\n\nGrandion tore through the fray, mixing Storm with Ice and Lia's penetrative shielding, fighting with the strength of ten, driving green-headed enemies before him like a herder forcing ralti sheep to hurry across his pasture. No wonder the Dragons followed him. Awesome Tourmaline! Yet he was unique. Few Dragons could match his achievements. And when the enemy numbered thirty for every one of their allied force, and those numbers were not diminishing in the slightest, they'd need the strength of Fra'anior himself to bloody Shinzen's nose.\n\n<Fra'anior,> Flicker whispered in her mind.\n\nGreen heads continued to pour forth from the approaching storm, as though spitting forth from a vast dark maw. Suddenly, the Star Dragoness saw all with extraordinary clarity. With three Dragons commanding Dragonwings, Burliki seemed to think the plan was to attack, not to disengage and find relief for his exhausted force. He swirled back into the thick of the enemy, taking his Dragons and Riders with him, sustaining terrible losses. That note in his thunder! Had he gone feral? Scroll-lore claimed that was always a danger for Dragons consumed by battle-rage. Now she knew the legend for truth.\n\nQuick as lightning she tried to touch his mind, but recoiled at his crimson rage. Grandion and Zulior, seeing their kin in trouble, closed in from above and below. The Oranges poured over and around like a Cloudlands-bound river swollen by torrential rains. Surrounding them. Trapping them, penning them for the slaughter.\n\nShe had so little magic. Hualiama had expended it dancing with Grandion that morning. Fool! Igniting the Islands with rainbows of romance\u2026 still, as Dragons said, 'How beautiful over the Islands are the wings of love.' Perhaps he thought her a beautiful fool.\n\n<Fra'anior,> Flicker insisted. <All Dragons\u2026 straw-head.>\n\nThe Dragoness blocked him out. How could she change the Balance? How\u2013\n\nHuman-Lia's voice, however, could not be denied. She called urgently, <Listen! Flicker means, every Lesser Dragon ever born carries the essence of Fra'anior within them.>\n\nThe Dragoness gave a mental shrug. <Huh?>\n\n<Your shell-father, fire-wings. Show them your father. Rouse them\u2013>\n\n<Of course!>\n\nDragons ripped into each other in the terrible press. Each two-headed individual of Shinzen's group possessed a crucial advantage in one-on-one combat. Lia caught a glimpse of Tadao being hounded off his Dragoness' back by a snapping head. He dropped into the fray, but Raiden snatched him up mid-air with a reflexive back-footed swipe.\n\nDeep breath. Summoning her memories of the one they called the Great Dragon, the Onyx of the Ages and father of the Dragonkind, the Star Dragoness thrust his presence into every friendly mind she could reach. Channelling his multiple-throated fury, she roared:\n\n<Awaken thy ardent hearts, thou my kin, and smite thine foes with the wrath of ancient thunder breaking the Islands asunder! Thou art imbued with mine magic, and with the zeal of myriad mighty Dragons! Strike! Rend the adversary, thou Dragon-pride of Fra'anior's right paw!>\n\nPerhaps pretending to be a veritable Dragon-God was less than honest, even if she could claim to be his shell-daughter. But the rage she provoked was not. The Dragons' snarls deepened to an impossible, almost subsonic level, unnerving both her and their enemies, viscerally. Muscles clenched and jaws champed. And the magic! Every ounce of marrow in her bones froze. She had created belief, but could not herself believe what rose in these Dragons. Strength of Onyx. Somehow the sound, the mood and the magic passing between her friendly Dragons created a collective force beyond anything she had imagined or intended, where they not only drew on each other's powers, but together, possessed the strength of paws that raised the very Islands.\n\nSuddenly, the space into which the Dragons had been forced became a killing field. Snarling like fiends, they rounded on Shinzen's Dragons. Rending. Maiming. Tearing off limbs and biting through necks. Hualiama saw Burliki plucking an Orange Dragon's wings off its back with his bare paws. She wanted to vomit.\n\nWhat had she done?\n\nShe cried, <Grandion, take them out!>\n\nThe Tourmaline heard. Leading the way with mighty blows of his paws, he punched, kicked and tore a path to clear air, quickly followed by the Dragon Riders and then the insanely strong Dragons of Zulior's force. Grandion immediately turned to defend the stragglers, the injured Dragons, cleaning Vinzuki's back of three Oranges and slamming himself bodily back into the trap's jaws to pull Raiden loose from a snarl of gnashing fangs by main force. Then he flipped on a wingtip and streaked though the final gap, causing the Orange Dragons to close ranks over nothing but air filled with droplets of golden Dragon blood.\n\nDespite that he had ten thousand enemy Dragons at his back\u2013or perhaps because of it\u2013Grandion winged toward Hualiama with a discernible swagger. She had to shush her inner Human, who evidently thought his pretension hilarious.\n\nHe reached out to caress her muzzle with his right wingtip. <Quite the clearest image of Fra'anior a Dragon ever did see. Smart thinking, Blue-star.>\n\n<It was Flicker's idea.>\n\n*Eep!* he squeaked happily. <Awe-eep? Aw-ship?>\n\n<Awesome,> Grandion advised rather solemnly, touching the dragonet with the same wingtip. <Not just a pretty little dragonet, then? Say, 'I'm awesome.'> The Tourmaline bowed his muzzle with exaggerated regard. <You saved our fire-lives, noble ally.>\n\nSo puffed up with pride was he, Flicker could not even voice his customary 'Eep!'\n\nThe noble Lesser Dragons fled the enemy lines with alacrity. Looking back, Hualiama saw that the Orange Dragon advance had stopped. Odd. That many Dragons, what were they waiting for? The keys to the city gates? Shinzen's Dragonwing hovered as though waiting for an as-yet-undetected signal. Within minutes, they were swallowed up by the storm."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "\"You just can't resist meddling, can you?\" Grandion said, bracing Hualiama's upper legs and torso with his palm halfway up Raiden's flank as she struggled with a leather strap. She set her feet either side of the eight-inch buckle and heaved a third time. \"Another Hualiama engineering feat.\"\n\nVinzuki snorted, \"The day I wear a harness like that is the day I fly over the twin suns bleating like a ralti sheep.\"\n\n\"Got it!\" Hualiama finished threading the belt, and paused to wipe her forehead. \"And I said to myself, the day I let a male paw my backside\u2013and look at me now.\"\n\nGrandion and Vinzuki both laughed smokily.\n\nRaiden said, \"Yours isn't scaly enough by half, by my wings! Now this\u2026\"\n\nVinzuki nipped his shoulder fondly as Raiden swatted her haunches a punishing blow. She purred, \"Paw away, o thou passion of mine third heart.\"\n\n\"Now she's a warrior-poet?\" asked Fumiko, taking pains to appear amazed.\n\n\"Take notes, my fierce wife,\" said Tadao, from up above. \"How's this catapult emplacement, Hualiama? Jin and I have affixed and tightened the ratchet straps as you instructed.\"\n\nFumiko folded her arms in unconscious imitation of Vinzuki's pose. \"Huh.\"\n\nPoor Jin. He was trying to be Eastern-inscrutable and failing miserably. Hualiama only had to glance in his direction for him to start blushing. What did he think about a girl teasing her Dragon? She should desist. Or she should tell him. Many of the Dragon Riders already knew, or had worked it out. How long could this secret truly remain with her and Grandion?\n\n\"Ready the Dragonwing!\" Grandion commanded. \"Vinzuki, Raiden, you have your orders.\"\n\nRaiden, heavily armoured and carrying four catapult emplacements upon his back, nodded gravely. \"No rolling. Keep those poor Humans on my back. They'll be affixed with safety ropes. Two men to each emplacement, a loader and a weapons master.\"\n\nHualiama knew the plan. She had worked out Jin's idea with the teenager, turning concept into reality\u2013jury-rigged reality, but that was her specialty. Raiden the Blue would be hunting Giants. Fire only tickled them. A six-foot metal crossbow bolt through the gullet tended to demand a better level of attention. Add a touch of Eastern poison, proven to work on the Giant-kind\u2026 she scaled the belt to the top of Raiden's back. Decision time. Trust, that was all she knew. She must offer trust.\n\n\"Jin. A word.\"\n\n\"About the emplacements? They'll turn through two hundred and seventy degrees, and sixty vertically or horizontally,\" he said, waggling one bearing-mounted crossbow to demonstrate.\n\nShe leaned close to him, hearing his heartbeat leap. \"Jin. You're right about me. I am the Dragoness\u2013the Star Dragoness. We are one and the same.\"\n\n\"You're magical? A trick of Dragon magic?\"\n\nSweet boy. He sounded mortified. She said, \"No, I was born a Human, but also a Dragon. I'm a Dragon Shapeshifter, Jin. The first and only of my kind.\" His grey eyes clouded over with shock. Lia said, gently, \"I'm a woman with a woman's feelings. I'm also a Dragoness, the small blue one you met the other day. I can be either Human or Dragoness when I wish. If you like, I'll show you my Shapeshifter\u2013\"\n\n\"No,\" he gasped. \"That's wicked. Just\u2026 impossible, I mean.\"\n\nHe meant exactly that. Repugnant. Unthinkable. Hualiama began to touch his arm sympathetically, but Jin shrank back. Harshly, she said, \"I won't apologise for who I am.\"\n\nThe troubled eyes flicked to Grandion. \"He's mine\u2013he was\u2026 I've work to do. See you aloft, Princess.\"\n\nGrandion was his? The yearning in the boy's heart, the way the Tourmaline had taken him under his wing\u2013he had assumed he was to become Grandion's Dragon Rider. Then a girl had interfered. She had stabbed him in the heart, and ripped his dreams from his eyes and trampled them underfoot. For the first time, Hualiama felt ashamed of her powers.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said at last, to his back.\n\nJin's spine stiffened."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "Seated once more upon Grandion's back, Hualiama glanced across at Jin. He had returned her gaze just once, his expression unreadable from that distance, but she felt his magic burning. Mercy, what that boy had inside of him she just did not know, but it was not comfortable.\n\nRaiden rose heavily, weighed down by eight catapult engineers, Fumiko and Jin, who would provide cover for the engineers with his powerful Haozi war bow and, judging by his preparations, more than a few esoteric weapons. Grandion had informed her that Jin came from a warrior people, the Nikuko, much like Saori's people but more secretive, oppressed and misunderstood. Her heart softened toward him. He would come to understand, in time, how it must be between her and the Tourmaline. Meantime, she would keep a weather-eye out for a Dragon or Dragoness for him.\n\n<Shall we fight linked?> Grandion's thoughts intruded.\n\n<I'd like that,> she replied, knowing what he meant. Together, they were powerful. In part this was a draconic challenge. Try to be rid of me, his undertones snarled. Just you dare break your oath, Dragonfriend!\n\nThey rose into the still night air. In the two days following his Dragons being bested in battle at the South of Kaolili Island, Warlord Shinzen had committed his forces on land\u2013his entire force. The patrols had confirmed it; the leagues south of the city were crawling with Orange Dragons and Giants. Not a single uninjured individual remained on the Islands further afield.\n\nZulior had snarled, \"Either Shinzen's stupid, or he knows something we don't. I scent the latter. Find out what it is!\"\n\nThat very afternoon, the long-distance patrols had spotted the Lost Islands one hundred and fifty leagues offshore of Kaolili Island itself, drifting along slowly. They saw no signs of life, but signs of a great battle were rife. Clouds of scavengers could be seen from leagues off. Thinking upon this, Hualiama balled her fists. Elki. Saori. Affurion and Mizuki, and all the Dragonkind\u2026 what had happened? Why had they not sent word?\n\nFor her part, Hualiama wore Eastern warrior armour designed for women. Pliable, tacky-soled leather boots gave her good grip on Grandion's scales. Her greaves concealed four throwing daggers at each calf. Her knees and lower thighs were bare, the upper part protected by a blue split skirt made from pleated armour, with further under-armour fitted to her hips and thighs, all belted tightly at her trim waist. The belt would ordinarily hold scabbards, but for her, held a further brace of curved hunting daggers and the first of several quivers full of short Eastern arrows. For her Nuyallith swords, the King had ordered shoulder-scabbards found and custom-fit to a sleeveless leather-backed, banded plate-metal corselet that made her look like a miniature Grunt wearing its silver-red armour.\n\nAccording to the armourer, it was very important that her outfit look meticulously fitted and match her 'mystical pond' eyes. At which, Hualiama rolled said ponds and buckled the forearm guards in place, similar to the wristlets her friend Inniora had once fashioned for her. She balked at the helm. The field of vision was far too restrictive. In an aerial battle, that would be a deadly restriction. Instead, she braided her long hair, which had returned to fully blonde, and tied and clipped it firmly in place behind her neck, where it could not interfere with her sword draw.\n\nIn moments, the Dragons rose above the warehouses and sideslipped on a brisk north-easterly breeze, keeping low, fully shielded. The night was fully dark due to low cloud cover remaining after the squally storms of the last two days, but Hualiama found her vision brightened noticeably after she connected with Grandion. Wow.\n\nHe said, <Mind-meld. We work together so naturally.>\n\nAn emotional sledgehammer. Dragons could be so direct at times; at others, they could be enamoured with subtlety to the point of obfuscation.\n\nLia wondered if a Human Dragon Rider could take advantage of other facets of a Dragon's battle-awareness, such as sighting, taking reaction shots or avoiding debris. Grandion thought so. She touched her bow; checked the four extra quivers of arrows arranged around a seat. A saddle arrangement would be so much simpler, if only Dragons would shelve their pride but for a moment\u2026\n\n<Feints and covers. Take the starboard and port, high-left, high-right,> the Tourmaline ordered, peeling off his covering Dragonwings efficiently. <Check all shields.>\n\nHis wing-commanders reported back in turn.\n\nThey rose over the shallowly-sloping rooftops. No need for angles to shed snow here, for the weather was almost never severe in Kaolili. Lia gazed out over the more industrial and mercantile zones to the inner wall. Pray it held against Giants who could leap twenty and more vertical feet in a single bound. Beyond the thick inner defensive curtain wall, over three hundred years old, was a newly built range of outer fortifications designed to hold Shinzen's ground troops at abeyance. The great Brown Dragon-fashioned ramparts stood eighty feet tall, crowned with further defensive towers and battlements forty feet thick. Sharpened stakes lined the base of the wall above a moat a further thirty feet deep and sixty feet wide. Would it be enough?\n\n<We'll make for Shinzen's tent,> Grandion said quietly to his small command. They numbered just four Dragons\u2013Grandion, Makani, Raiden and Vinzuki.\n\n<That wasn't the plan,> Raiden observed. <Zulior should be informed. By my belly-fires, you never actually agreed, did you? Cunning.>\n\nThe Tourmaline snorted immodestly, <Aye. We must test this new form of warfare, but the chance to strike that worm Shinzen should not be missed.>\n\nHualiama shook her head. Dragons!\n\n<La-La?>\n\nShe patted the dragonet seated on her lap. <Not upset with you, my friend. Eyes and claws sharp.>\n\nSuddenly, her head popped up. Jin. Staring at Makani, a dull light burning in his eyes. What the volcanic hells was that countenance? She had better watch the boy. The roots of his Island ran deep.\n\nThe foursome whipped rapidly over the outer rampart and over the moat, turning sharply onto a bearing three points south of east. The watch-fires approached already. <Soft wings,> said Grandion. <The green pavilion tent. Quarter-mile. Raiden?>\n\nThe hulking Blue swept into the lead, shadowed by Grandion directly overhead. Silence enveloped the Dragonwing as they glided over the enemy camp, barely disturbing the flames.\n\n<I will prove you are not the aberration you think you are,> Grandion said abruptly.\n\nLia's concentration shattered. <What?>\n\n<I will prove to you we are meant to be together. That you are mine.>\n\n<Possessive beast!> The word slipped out. Hualiama bit her tongue mentally. <Sorry. But how, by all the stars above, Grandion, do you intend\u2013>\n\n<The more you try to deny me, the brighter I will burn for thee,> he declared. <I have no doubt. I will be yours and you will be mine, as oath-bound fire-soul lovers, Hualiama. We are destined to be together.>\n\n<Then decry this fate, o Tourmaline! Deny it! I will not separate my forms. I cannot.> Tears pricked her eyelids warmly, but she blinked them away. Not now. Not when she needed to be vigilant. <We made oaths. But my Dragoness and I, we are one. Kill one, you kill both. Suppress one and she will die. What is done cannot be undone.>\n\n<And should not be,> he shot back.\n\nHualiama looked down in surprise. She was certain they were rushing through the air, but in the intensity of their conversation, the world's doings slowed to a crawl. She saw a rat peering up at them, its paw frozen in the act of raising a small, gristly bone to its gaping mouth.\n\n<What do you mean? Don't you experience self-doubt, Dragon? Is everything so straightforward to you, every problem solvable?>\n\n<No.>\n\n<Then speak. What will you do, Grandion?>\n\n<I\u2026 I don't know! But I know I love you, Blue-star, as the stars love the\u2013>\n\n<Love is not enough.> She sucked in a sharp, shuddering breath of realisation. <It's the brutal, unadorned truth, Grandion, my sweet, sweet darling. I cannot be other.>\n\n<No!> he groaned, the communication between them private, tense, throbbing with grief and anger, hurt and shattered hope. At the speed of thought, their conversation raced onward. The rat was only starting to register surprise.\n\n<Isn't that the draconic way? To speak true-fires as we see it?>\n\n<It is\u2026> the great Dragon gulped. His mind worked so furiously, an image of waterfalls of mental fires played within her mind. <I can\u2026 I will find a way, impossible as it seems.>\n\n<Do not speak to me of ways. My father Ra'aba found such a way with Razzior, and it was a perversion, Grandion. Such evil. And I fear I am similar.>\n\nThe Tourmaline seemed to want to shake her; what lay deep within him could not find expression. He struggled, fought, kicked at the goads and failed to articulate the great waves of emotion crashing through his breast. At length, he snapped:\n\n<Never. Not that. If you truly are the shell-daughter of Istariela and Fra'anior, then there must be a way, a power\u2013>\n\n<This is not about powers, my third heart!> Her cry cut him short, cut him to the quick. <This is about souls, about the elemental mysteries of life itself\u2013>\n\n<You transferred a soul into a dragonet.>\n\n<We cannot be together, Grandion. I cannot be that person, bargaining with souls, shaping life\u2013no person should be. I am so sorry I never told you about Fra'anior, but it was too immense, too crushing; a heritage far more than I could face, to learn that after all this\u2026 I still cannot have my parents. Only your shell-parents were true.>\n\n<I AM TRUE!> He thundered mentally, then stilled just as quickly. <I was not, before, but now I am.> White-fires of truth wreathed his words. Lia knew a mighty declaration was coming; her entire being froze somewhere between wonder and outright horror as he said, very slowly, <This I swear upon my honour and fire-life as a Dragon, Hualiama\u2013>\n\n<\u2013Nooooooooo! Grandion!>\n\nHe paused. <What do you think I'm going to say?>\n\nHualiama threw up her hands mentally, and then on second thoughts, swatted his inward grin with a psychic paw sized to please her shell-father. <Something as reckless and wholly impracticable as this Dragoness-girl I know?>\n\n<Exactly.> Whiter burned his fires, until in her mind, Grandion's presence shone as brightly as her own star-fires. Pure belief, without a trace of a shadow. <For if I love thee greatly enough, o song of my third heart; if I love thee more greatly and widely and deeply and intimately than a Dragon has ever loved his beloved, then I swear I shall change my fires and magic for thy sake, o Hualiama of Fra'anior. A third time I swear, that if truly I do love thee, I shall become as thou art. I shall become Human.>\n\nAlmost it leaped off her tongue to scorn his draconic pride, when a familiar perturbation shook the inmost fabric of her world.\n\nA vow. Thrice spoken, once ordained.\n\nAloud, she whispered, <Oh beautiful Tourmaline, who is all of mine heart, what mighty deed hast thou wrought?>\n\n<I have wrought love.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "The Tourmaline Dragon emerged from his inner dialogue with Hualiama, cleansed. Renewed. The world burned in shades of splendour so inexpressible, his hearts wept.\n\nHualiama! His was the Dragonsong of love.\n\nAnd though the world's rushing intruded upon his senses, he knew only an abiding sense within his deepest fires that he could only describe as consecration. At last, after so many disasters, a Tourmaline Dragon had spoken a true word and the voices of the ancient Dragon Spirits had honoured him. What did it mean? Must he divest his Dragon hide for Human flesh? He knew not, but he trembled. Destiny engulfed his fire-life and the feeling was so unadulterated, so exquisite, that all else paled into insignificance. Arise, o Grandion! Arise to love a living star!\n\nThe Dragon shadowed Raiden closely as the Blue oriented on Shinzen's towering pavilion, watching the quadruple catapult-strike rip through the tent's walls and through the inner chamber, and he saw\u2026 nothing. The Warlord was not present. Of course.\n\n<Alert! Sound the alarm!>\n\nGrandion's mental bellow was directed tightly enough at Zulior, Raiden, Vinzuki and Makani that no other Dragon heard; at once, the Red Elder changed his course to angle directly skyward, casting about with sight and magic and every Dragon sense at his disposal to sniff out the danger.\n\nHe snarled down at Raiden, <We complete the experiment, but watch the skies.>\n\nOn Raiden's back, the crossbow engineers reloaded proficiently. Jin snapped, \"Targets, Grandion?\"\n\n\"Fire at will!\"\n\nSome unseen, unheard signal passed through the camp. Giants scrambled out of their tents, fully armed and ready for battle. What was this, Grandion wondered? Had they stumbled across a secret night-time assault?\n\n<Thwack! Thwack!> The first two crossbows fired true, pinning a pair of Giants squarely through their torsos. The third missed, but Jin did not miss his shot, feathering an arrow perfectly through the slit in the visor of a Giant who flashed by beneath them. The fourth crossbow bolt sprang aflame. So, the oil and spark-stone trick had worked. The Dragon's eyes followed the bolt's path into a pile of supplies.\n\nBarrels\u2026 *KAAABOOOMM!*\n\nThe Dragons rocked violently as a mini-volcano of oil barrels exploded in sheets of flame a hundred feet high. <Strengthen shields,> he ordered, knowing the light would reveal their presence. No time for optics. They had to find out what mischief Shinzen was fomenting.\n\nHualiama's bowstring sang. Another Giant dropped in his tracks. Others sprang aloft, taking wild swipes at the Dragons passing overhead. Raiden took several blows to his shield but held firm, his paws snapping out to decapitate one luckless Giant who jumped better than his fellows.\n\n\"Catapults take too long to reload,\" Lia muttered.\n\n\"Fifty Dragons-worth?\" Grandion inquired.\n\n\"Hmm. And how many tens of thousands of those green-headed lizards?\"\n\nThey shared toothy grins, briefly. Grandion spitted a Giant on his talons and cleaned his paw with distaste. \"Tough as Dragons, aren't they? Dramagon must have mixed in qualities drawn from the Dragonkind.\"\n\nBelow, Raiden's catapult engineers rapidly worked the winches, tensioning their weapons. The loader dropped in a bolt as soon as the tough cord was fully tensioned, settling it in a groove running the length of the weapon. 'Clear,' each man called as the loading completed. Their fellows took aim, fingers curled on a trigger just beneath the weapon as they sighted along the shaft. Then came a sharp twang followed by *whap!* as the bolt crashed home, hopefully accompanied by a yell of pain.\n\n\"There!\" cried Grandion, echoing Zulior's cry, far above.\n\nHualiama saw a dark river of Giants pouring toward the moat on the city's western periphery. Orange Dragons flew ahead of them, but rather than attacking the defenders on the wall, they began to cast themselves bodily into the moat! Quickly, a pile of bodies built up. The Tourmaline snarled something acerbic beneath his breath as the living bridge grew before their disbelieving eyes. Lia rubbed her eyes. Why not just airdrop Giants into the city? What was this?\n\nLia said, \"My guess is this is punishment for failing to kill us in the South. The Warlord is stamping his authority.\"\n\nThe pile was ten feet above the waterline and growing. Dark specks flew over the ramparts as the defenders threw down oil barrels, then came a massive explosion as Ryuki the Red did what his colour loved most. On his back, the Human girl gasped softly.\n\n\"This is war,\" growled the Tourmaline. \"But those are not Dragons. They are worms. Come. Fly with me.\"\n\nShinzen had clearly decided the Dragons' entire role in his initial attack would be to pave the way for his Giants to assault the city. And Humans called the Dragonkind arrogant?\n\nOrange Dragons continued to fling themselves on the burning pile, coming under withering fire from the battlements. The bodies slid about, slick with water and boiling juices, but the sheer mass and weight anchored Shinzen's bridge within the moat, and bodies continued to pile against the wall, quickly covering the spikes and reaching upward. In the background, the Giants waited in a single dark mass, several thousand individuals in number.\n\n\"Shinzen!\" Hualiama cried, pointing.\n\nThere he was. Head and shoulders taller than his kin. His black scale armour made him look like an upright-walking Dragon. A leather belt over a foot wide girdled his midsection, holding a pair of massive hammers. Upon his head, a silver helm crowned the dark, flowing hair, overshadowing a furrowed brow that was as craggy as it was brutishly majestic. Grandion's right paw fisted. Hualiama had cast herself into that Giant's paw to rescue her Dragon.\n\nShinzen's hands rose. He flung them outward, smashing two Western Dragons out of the sky. Where they landed, the Giants descended like an oily river, their hammers rising and falling in a dreadful rhythm.\n\n<He's mine,> snarled the Tourmaline. <The siege of Kerdani has begun.>\n\nFlexing his talons, he summoned Hualiama to the battle.\n\n[ Giant Rage ]\n\nRAiden flowed below Hualiama and Grandion, his Riders picking targets with ease. Crossbow bolts smashed into the unmoving press of Giants, gathered before the eighty-foot ramparts with chilling immobility. Hualiama saw several bolts penetrate two Giants, pinning them together. Mere flea bites on the body of the beast. Her vision, sharpened by Dragon sight, focussed narrowly on Shinzen. He had dangled her from his paw. She had danced for him; tried to assassinate him. Why was he here, if not seeking the power secreted within her being by Ianthine, the mad Maroon Dragoness?\n\nOnce, she had absconded from Shinzen's lair aboard a blind, captivity-weakened Dragon. Now she rode a fit, battle-hungry beast against the Warlord. Potentials surged within Grandion's breast. Storm. Ice. Lightning.\n\n<White-fire lightning,> she said, touching his powers. Melding with him. Giving her strength to the Dragon, curiously, for how could a Human be the more powerful creature? Yet she was starlight enwrapped around a core of Onyx. He was the readiness of paw and scale, the hair-trigger reflexes, the sculpting of ice and lightning in flawless tourmaline gemstone.\n\nGrandion swooped, steadying, feinting for the right flank of Shinzen's forces. The Warlord ignored the Dragon's subterfuge, sprinting toward them. Lia suspected they had one strike.\n\nShe shouted, <Alastior, arise!>\n\nThe Tourmaline stiffened. Shinzen thundered on, raising his hammers.\n\n*GRRRAAANDION!!*\n\nThe Dragon's challenge deafened her. His muzzle snapped sideways. A shaped bolt of lightning-chased ice rocketed out of his throat, centred on Shinzen's torso. Simultaneously, oily black fire spat from the Giant's hammers. Lia had a second to think that the Giant wielded a variant of ruzal; that there would be negation or cancellation. Instead, magic detonated between them. A giant paw slapped Grandion sideways. Shinzen flew backward, literally flew, having sprouted eight-foot shards of ice in his belly and left shoulder.\n\nLia saw and comprehended in slow, unfurling snippets of awareness. Grandion's mind winked out, unconscious. Shinzen slammed into a squad of his Giants, knocking over two dozen. The explosion catapulted her helplessly off Grandion's back before the Dragon crash-landed; she saw the flash of an armoured belly and then *keerump!* She bounced off a Giant, perhaps a scout, who had been crouching ahead of the main force. She found her knees, shaking her head. The Giant's face was bellowing, but she could not hear so much as a whisper. He raised his hammer. *Boom!* The shock conducted through her feet. Lia forward-rolled under the rotating, flaccid body of the Tourmaline Dragon as he bounced over her and slammed into the Giant, breaking his neck with a terrible crunch of bones.\n\nGood. That left her standing next to an unconscious Dragon, facing a few thousand peeved Giants. And Shinzen. The black eyes gleamed like obsidian as he considered the girl straightening up, her hands loose, not immediately leaping to her swords.\n\nThen he rose with massive, deliberate menace, wiping crimson off his mouth.\n\nNo Giant moved. Shinzen hefted a war-hammer in his left hand, then pointed it at her. Dragon fire slammed down not ten feet behind him. A crossbow quarrel pinned a nine-foot thug to his left, and the Warlord did not twitch an eyebrow.\n\n\"You have my ruzal, girl.\"\n\nThe ears were working again. She said, \"Come and fetch it.\"\n\n<Oh, Humansoul,> the Dragoness groaned inside of her. <Baiting the Giant?>\n\n<How's about we help each other?>\n\nTo the Giants either side of him, Shinzen growled, \"Slay the lizard. Leave the girl for me.\"\n\nHe flexed those gigantic shoulders, before plucking a shard of ice out of his stomach. He tossed the bloodied chunk aside. Reaching up with his left hand, Shinzen yanked the piece out of his shoulder; it had pierced him clean through the torso below the collarbone, but that seemed little bother.\n\nWhirling the hammer from hand to hand, Shinzen stalked her. He said, \"I've heard that Numistar Winterborn seeks a Princess of Fra'anior. Could it be she seeks my prize? Or could the answer be more\u2026 starry?\"\n\nHualiama breathed deeply, centring her mind on the Nuyallith forms, trying to keep somehow between the ranks of advancing Giants, Shinzen, and Grandion. What did he know? Did news travel this fast amongst the evildoers of the Island-World?\n\n<Wake up, Dragon! Wake\u2026>\n\nAcid! Crossbow bolts! The Giants leaped forward as Dragons attacked from above; Hualiama ducked at the passing swish of Makani's claws as the Grey wheeled overhead, collected five blows from leaping Giants before her boiling-glue attack splashed over them. Giant-flesh melted like water where her glue struck and stuck.\n\nHualiama's hands rose. <Fra'anior, if ever I needed your strength, NOW!>\n\nShinzen's power slammed outward from his hammer. She met a moving wall of air and fire with the twin blades crossed in front of her face, the iron-hands technique cleaving the force as his dark fire passed either side of her body. Hualiama drew the blades apart, calling upon her Dragonsoul's fire to imbue all she had learned from Master Khoyal.\n\nThen she darted sideways, engaging the Giants closing in on Grandion's prone form.\n\nFire flowed along her arms and hands in living rivers, turning red and blue as it passed along her blades. Hualiama whirled into the advance. Her blades streaked the night with colours as she tore into the Giants nearest Grandion, by sheer desperation forcing them back, by the power of blades slicing through flesh and armour with predatory abandon. She danced lightly beneath flying hammers and leaped up onto Grandion's nose before diving off again to break apart a knot of Giants aiming for his head.\n\nRoaring, \"She's mine!\" Shinzen waded through his own men, flailing with his hammer.\n\nThe air froze around Hualiama. She shattered that hold with a laugh, the ruzal joining in gleefully, conflicting, pulling her defences apart as it slithered between her and the knowledge of Nuyallith, corrupting the forms.\n\nThe Warlord pounced! Hualiama rolled aside, her now-dark left sword skittering off his leg armour. Raiden and Vinzuki hovered directly overhead, braving the danger of leaping Giants as their Riders and crossbow-men made their shots count.\n\nAgain, Lia dodged the crushing hammer. One direct hit and he'd break her arms like twigs. She danced in and out, striking so fast that she opened a flurry of cuts in Shinzen's legs, arms and back, but he too was faster than any mortal man, stronger of body and mind, and deadlier by far. His hammer-strikes arrived faster and faster, chasing her around Grandion's head. Shinzen guffawed at her increasingly frantic efforts to protect both herself and her Dragon. He palmed the second hammer and attacked at double the speed.\n\n\"What? Protecting the lizard?\" he sneered, smacking Grandion a glancing blow on the brow-ridge.\n\nSlamming, crushing, his hammers fell upon Grandion's muzzle like rain, the sounds a dire drumbeat on her consciousness. Chips of white fang-enamel sprayed out of the Dragon's mouth. Hualiama flung herself at the Warlord. The blazing blades skidded off his magical armour, sliced into his belly, his right knee. Shinzen roared! Then, with a thrust faster than a cobra's strike, she pierced his left wrist, causing his nerveless fingers to release the hammer. The blade stuck between his bones. Lia refused to release her weapon. The Warlord roared with mad laughter, twisting his hand slowly, forcing her to her knees. Then he twisted rapidly in the opposite direction. Lia sprang upward in anticipation; even as she rotated upside-down vertically before his face, she jerked her knee forward to smash his nose. The nose-cartilage popped with a fleshy *snick!*\n\nShe landed lithely, still clutching her sword. The blade burned in his flesh, but far darker burned the eyes of the Giant above her. His right hand shot down to trap her fingers against the hilt. With the right blade, she pierced his armour above the heart and drove as deep as her reach allowed, just four or five inches, before the Giant's huge left boot kicked her legs out from underneath her.\n\n\"Diseased whelp of a windroc!\" Shinzen roared, stamping with his boots, putting all the monstrous weight of his body behind each kick.\n\n\"I made you prettier!\" she retorted, twisting the blade in his chest.\n\nHer Dragoness crowed evilly within her. <Nice one, Humansoul. Now give him my fire!>\n\nShinzen's boots crushed her calves, her thighs, her hips and stomach as he trampled her like a feral Dragon venting his spleen on his prey.\n\nThen, white-fires drove upward from the pit of her stomach and raced along her arms in a flash, gleefully driving into his flesh. Shinzen thundered in pain! His entire body convulsed with muscular spasms as what appeared to be an electrical discharge played havoc with his nerves.\n\nSuddenly, a great roar rose from a thousand throats. \"To the walls! To the walls!\"\n\nWithout warning, a Dragon's tail lashed down and smashed Shinzen away, up into the air. He fell into the seething mass of Giants. The noise was indescribable. Bellowing. War-cries. Dragons thundering overhead. Hualiama could not hear herself think. Tottering on her bruised, battered limbs, she collapsed in an attempt to retrieve her red sword. She waved the blue blade aimlessly at Giants as they charged by, but they seemed to have no care for her or her Dragon. All were consumed with the need to assault the walls.\n\nHualiama staggered back to Grandion. <Wake up. Oh my beauty, rise\u2026> his hearts beat. He would recover consciousness, but his lips and muzzle were split in four places. No immediate danger.\n\n\"Ho! Princess! Grab on!\" A rope-ladder slapped the ground nearby.\n\nEscape? She glanced up, seeing Commander Hiro's flagship floating a hundred feet above. Well, she could not do better for Grandion just now, and with Raiden and Vinzuki making to land nearby, they would see to his safety.\n\nShe must conserve her strength, her magic.\n\n<Come to me when you awake,> she told Grandion, even though he could not hear. Through the oath-connection, he would find her.\n\nSheathing her swords on her back, Hualiama leaped for the rope ladder. Her left arm could barely lift above shoulder level, the shoulder having taken a heavy blow from Shinzen, so she climbed using her right hand and the crook of her left arm to hang on. Her legs felt like putty. She'd wear bruises for weeks, she realised. The soldiers above heaved on the rope ladder, pulling her quickly to safety as the tide of Giants surged toward the great rampart not three hundred feet distant. Black figures swarmed over the pile of Dragon bodies, leaping for the top of the battlements. Numerous armoured bodies already clung to the wall like flies, using their strange affinity with rock to simply stick to the surface and crawl up on all fours. Lia groaned. How could they fight enemies who simply walked over walls?\n\n*ZULIOR! ZULIOR!* Bawling a wild, trumpeting challenge, the Red streaked through the fray, through the drifting smoke of torches and Dragon fire, like the clean sweep of a blade. His Dragonwing bathed the lower wall in fire, while smaller, more agile Dragons higher up targeted the Giants already atop the ramparts. They plucked individuals from the wall and hurled them to their deaths from heights of hundreds of feet.\n\nHands grabbed her armour, heaving her over the forward gantry.\n\n\"Welcome aboard my vessel, Princess of Fra'anior,\" said Hiro, with his peculiar, twisted smile.\n\nLia bowed curtly. \"Let's see to the defences, Commander.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" He nodded slightly.\n\nWhat? She heard a soft footstep. Lia began to whirl, but the strike to her skull was calculated and precise. She pitched forward into darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "Grandion woke with a spine-wrenching start. \"Hualiama!\"\n\n\"Easy, wing-brother,\" said Raiden. \"You took a beastly blow to the head\u2013\"\n\n\"Shinzen? Lia?\"\n\nVinzuki, fierce as ever, cried, \"We must blood them on the rampart! Crush their craven bodies! Shinzen assaults the walls, noble Grandion. Already, the first line of defence is overrun.\"\n\n<Lia? Blue-star, where are you?> He could neither feel her, nor sense her presence\u2013where was she? In trouble?\n\nJin said, \"The Princess went with Commander Hiro, noble\u2013\"\n\n\"Hiro?\"\n\nGrandion could only gasp a word of soul-shadowing horror. That weaselling, perverted caricature of a man with his lusts and plans and inner sickness\u2026 he was twisted! Hualiama!\n\n\"Aye, she's aboard Commander Hiro's Dragonship,\" confirmed the young warrior. \"She'll be safe there.\"\n\n\"Safe?\" With a roar, Grandion lurched to his paws, but the balance of his inner ear-canals was all wrong. He pitched over on his side immediately, wrenching his outthrust right wing. He bellowed in helpless, furious rage. <Hualiama! BLUE-STAR! Hear me!>\n\n\"What's the matter with him?\" Jin asked.\n\n\"Vinzuki, Raiden! Leave me. Find her. Go to that Dragonship. Rip it apart if you must\u2026\" The Tourmaline heaved for breath, feeling in his chest a sensation that to a Dragon was foreign\u2013panic so deep, he could barely fill his lungs. \"This is what he's like.\"\n\nA picture. Fumiko immediately screamed, raising her Haozi recurve bow. She must have caught the image too. She shouted, \"Fly, Dragons! Fly!\"\n\nRaging as much with the force of the Tourmaline's emotions as with their own sense of moral outrage, the mated pair of Red and Green Dragons took to the air, beating dust around the grounded Tourmaline's head.\n\nGrandion tried to spread his wings again. Hopeless. No Dragon could fly like this. Could he fight Giants? Surely! But the greater danger was to Hualiama, he sensed, and if he could not reach her\u2026\n\nWith all his heart, he keened, <Hualiama!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "<Hualiama!> The cry echoed in her mind. She started. There was a naked man in her room, his back turned to her. He stretched, limbering up for\u2013oh, mercy. Her upraised hands jerked against ropes. She rather suspected his intended sport involved a Princess of Fra'anior, her arms lashed above her head and her feet apart to the corners of the bed.\n\nHer Human's scream was muffled by a gag.\n\nThe Dragoness within regarded this reaction with amazement, cutting off the scream in an instant. Humansoul and Dragonsoul regarded each other with consternation.\n\n<What, this doesn't bother you?> gasped Human-Lia.\n\n<What, this bothers you?> scoffed the Dragoness.\n\nThe man turned, holding a small, sharp dagger in each hand of curious design, similar to the fish-filleting blades from Rolodia Island. \"So, Princess, it's just you and me. I've waited for this day, knowing it must surely come. The day I draw the magical power of innocence from your maiden body and attain immortality!\"\n\nPerhaps her Dragoness did not fear this man, but the Human part of her was definitely underwhelmed by her situation. Hiro's torso and limbs were a mass of scars. Below the neck, there was no inch of flesh upon him which had not been repeatedly mutilated. Now, judging by the way he ran his thumbs over the razor-sharp edges of his blades, he intended to extend that obsession to her. And become immortal? He must live on the Island of insanity.\n\nAlright. She tested the ropes without hope. These Easterners knew far too much about knots. <So, Dragoness, what's the cunning plan? Me being fresh out of magic?>\n\nHiro's features twisted again in unnatural, opposing directions as he climbed up onto the bed. \"Scream, girl. I wanted to hear you scream as I slowly flay your beautiful skin.\"\n\n<Dragonsoul!> she howled, aghast.\n\nHiro cocked his head in puzzlement, as if he had heard her telepathic scream.\n\n<Summon me with all our strength. I can't just take\u2013I need you!>\n\n<Yesterday already!>\n\nHualiama had desisted because she knew there were ropes and surely, a transformation would place her draconic limbs in jeopardy? White sheeted over her vision. Terror. Fury. A Dragoness scorned! Her Dragon-form blasted into being. Snap! Crack! The ropes pinged loose as her polymorphic limbs manifested within the bonds and swelled to a thickness that could not be contained by the knots. Lia's forelimbs broke free. A Dragon's anatomy meant that her legs could not be splayed as they had been, so her transformation simply tore the lower end of the bed apart.\n\nHiro froze, a fatuous grin half-twisting his lips as he took in the creature he had meant to assault.\n\nSaccharine-sweet, the Dragoness said, \"Shall I disrobe for you, Hiro?\"\n\nHe stabbed reflexively with his daggers.\n\nShe lashed out with hooked talons, and tore out his throat.\n\nA moment later, she kicked down Hiro's cabin door. The gore-splattered Dragoness punched her way through the Commander's soldiers and leaped over the gantry. Her wings snapped open.\n\n\"Commander. Commander!\" she heard behind her.\n\nThese soldiers had knowingly abetted their Commander's madness. The Human within blanched in horror and squeezed her eyes shut, but to a Dragoness, the need for dark-fires retribution burned in her hearts, overpowering all else. She roared at the shrinking-lily girl within. Mercy? Burn that in a volcano! A Star Dragoness must protect the innocents, the lives Hiro and his ilk would in the future scar and bury in the fire of their madness. This was Balance, too.\n\nSpying Raiden incoming, she shouted a curt word to him.\n\nFire blossomed in the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "She wanted to seek the Tourmaline. Instead, to her shock, the Dragoness found herself back in her starry meeting-place with blonde-Lia. The girl sat upon the bed, holding her knees tucked up to her chest, rocking. Her hair tumbled about her and spread over her back, shoulders and arms like the foamy billows of a waterfall, never more beautiful. Aching a Dragoness' hearts.\n\n\"Humansoul?\"\n\nThe girl wept.\n\nThe Star Dragoness said, \"Hualiama, we are one. We need to know that sometimes, justice is best served quick and ugly. And if you need me to be the paw of justice, then let it be so.\"\n\nShe wept harder.\n\nLia had never understood her other-soul less. What was this Human response, this power that Grandion sometimes extolled\u2013what did he call it? Strength-from-grief? All she saw was a shrivelling coward unable to make tough decisions, unwilling to give an evil man the end he desperately deserved. Yet this girl had stood against Ra'aba and Azziala and King Chalcion, and against Razzior and Shinzen and more, with audacity the Dragoness could not fathom. How could courage be built on air? How, when war engulfed the Islands and despair rose like the smoke of charred hopes and prayers to the uncaring heavens, could this orphan discover the gift of dance?\n\nInconceivable.\n\nShe had joined her fire-soul to enigma.\n\nShe moved to the girl's side. Perhaps Humanlove felt the same. Perhaps she loathed the Dragon within.\n\nBlue-haired Lia whispered, \"Do you hate me, petal?\"\n\nPetal. Endearments, when out in the Island-World, Giants overran a city and the Tourmaline wandered, lost and lonely?\n\nHuman-Lia gasped between her sobs, \"You despise me, Dragonsoul. All creatures despise me already. Yet from you, this hurts most. I can't stand it. I'd rather die.\"\n\n\"Despise you? Liar!\" The Dragoness fought back her fire. \"Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't you see that I love you? I love us! And if that man would maim and violate my very self, our precious soul, do you see that I could not stand it either? I'd rather die than let him touch a single hair upon our head. I'd die for you, Humansoul!\"\n\nEyes of fathomless blue. Magnified by tears. Hualiama stared at her Human self, willing her, by some miracle that involved every fibre of her body, to understand. Her hearts felt wrung out, beleaguered, yet somehow a nucleus of hope remained. Her Human did not speak.\n\n\"I am fire,\" the Dragoness blurted out. \"Forgive me if sometimes, the fire must burn!\"\n\nShe fled.\n\nYet the girl's cry chased her into the night. <Thou, my Dragonsoul. Thou\u2026>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 75",
                "text": "The Star Dragoness stalked the shadows, searching for her Tourmaline. Searching for relief. Thousands of Giants swarmed over the outer defences, relentlessly slaying the men of Kaolili, and no heroics of Dragon or Dragon Rider could stay their blood-madness. They kept rising from the ashes of injury and destruction and flinging themselves on, and on, and on, stopping only when their legs collapsed or a decapitating talon-stroke flung a head to the ground, or a crossbow-bolt passed through the heart. Smoke poured heavenward as fires razed the battlements. The defenders rallied in tight, well-disciplined units, requiring four or five soldiers to bring down a single, isolated Giant.\n\nNowhere was the Tourmaline Dragon to be found. Hualiama fought until her wings could barely hold her aloft, mourning the loss of Dragons like Ryuki and Yenuko, stalwarts of the Eastern Dragonkind, and five more of her Riders and their Dragons. She fought with touches of star-fire and rallying-cries to the Dragonkind, reorganising and revitalising the defence where only chaos remained. She led Raiden and Vinzuki in quartering the city, ensuring no Giants penetrated the inner curtain wall to fall upon the populace. Not yet. Not on her watch.\n\nSo passed the night in deeds of paw and fang too numerous to recount, and when the dawn broke bloody over a city as besieged as her hearts, she saw Shinzen standing legs akimbo upon the eastern rampart, above the fray, shaking his enormous fists at the sky. \"Let my Dragons arise!\"\n\nThe cry rippled between the waiting Orange Dragons like wildfire. Teased and tantalised all night by the clash of battle and the screams of the wounded and dying, and by the smell of charred flesh carried upon the breeze, the two-headed Dragons were more than ready to take wing against the enemy. And so it seemed to the despairing Star Dragoness that a second dawn rose to replace the first, a dawn of wings that stirred the air like a storm and scaly orange bodies that covered the firmament in a living, flowing carpet of resplendent, fiery beauty, as over thirty thousand enemy Dragons took to the skies.\n\nGiants poured out of the broken fortifications. Still so many!\n\nShe gathered a Dragonwing to her side, forced at last by tiredness to ride upon Burliki's right shoulder. They were pitifully few, gathered like funeral-watchers to witness a storm that would fall upon the city and wipe it from the map. Nigh a million souls thronged the streets, the majority refugees from the Islands already torched by Shinzen's forces.\n\n<Hualiama.>\n\nA gravelly voice made her whirl with a squeal of delight. <Grandion!>\n\nThere he was. Blackened with soot, bloodied of paw and muzzle, yet still proud of bearing as he winged up behind Burliki, flanked by Raiden and Vinzuki. There was nothing for it. Her wings fluttered frantically, shooting her over to the Tourmaline; he caught her soft-pawed, then held her to his muzzle. They rubbed against each other's sensitive scales near the eye.\n\n\"Troublesome mite,\" he growled throatily.\n\n\"My jewel did wander, but he came home,\" she replied, failing to remember where the quote came from.\n\n\"Quite a few, aren't there?\" he suggested, thumbing a talon at the enemy.\n\nThe tiny Dragoness laughed, \"Sheep in a pen, my Tourmaline. Shall we shear them?\"\n\nTheir laughter mingled, sad and fey, as the press of Orange Dragons thickened, rising skyward as if a storm-front effortlessly darkened the sky.\n\nGrandion touched her spine-spikes fondly. \"We'd need a bigger marvel than me turning Human. Ridiculous notion! Giving up my wings\u2026\" Fire leaked between his fangs. He said, \"Yet why such a wing-shiver, little one? I'll still be\u2013\"\n\n\"Land Dragons!\" Hualiama swivelled her neck, scanning the northern horizon.\n\nShe glanced to the buildings below. They had begun to shiver much as she had just shivered, yet she saw nothing on the horizon as yet. What was this? Abruptly a familiar, silvery blur caught her eye. Grunts! The formation of Orange Dragons imploded in numerous locations as a staggered wave of Grunts smashed into bone and wing, spreading devastation.\n\n<My, what a beautiful morning!> sang Affurion. <Dragons, attack!>\n\nAll three hearts leaped into her throat as in the best tradition of the Lost Islands Dragonkind, legions of Dragons appeared from nowhere, from behind shields honed by generations of fighting the Dragon-Haters. The humming Swarm. The cunning Overminds. The powerful Browns, called the Anubam. And waves of heavy Grunts, rocket-propelled into battle by the Overminds among them.\n\n<Affurion!> Hualiama's shriek split the morning, making every Dragon nearby wince and smile simultaneously.\n\nOh, he looked as pleased as a Dragon with new wings. <Need a paw, Blue-star? I've a few thousand for you. You need to go head off those Land Dragons before they crush the city.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<They're the bad sort. Some kind of Runner?>\n\n<Welkin-Runners?> Lia gasped.\n\n<Aye. But Siiyumiel also sent reinforcements, since we asked. Mist-Runners. Look to the West.>\n\nMercy. Thunder upon the hills. The water remaining in the moat danced a crazy, rippling dance. Trees swayed. Fumiko was shouting something about warning the denizens of the city. Hualiama knew there was no point. None whatsoever. For she saw a posse of Land Dragons come charging over the lush green hills of Kaolili. They were the four-legged lizard-like Runners, standing no less than four hundred feet tall at the shoulder and measuring a third to a half of a mile in length; some individuals were brawnier still. In the morning suns-shine their turquoise, luminescent hides gleamed with spectacular displays of flashing lights. Lia was astonished they could run in the thin air, but perhaps that aided these Welkin-Runners. Turquoise blue, hence the name. Sky-Runners. Odd how dwellers above the Cloudlands thought of everything below the Islands as abyssal, hellish depths. Truly, the Land Dragons dwelled in their own sky.\n\nNow a second round of thunder intersected the first as a further battle-group of Land Dragons poured over the hills from the West; flatter, sleeker, darker individuals sporting poisonous yellow stripes. Their talons were razor-sharp, curved blades that cut tens of feet deep into the sod with every step, propelling them in a curiously tiptoe running orientation.\n\nHualiama rounded on Affurion. \"I'm supposed to head them off?\"\n\n\"Aye. They all want you, Star Dragoness. Go play the tease.\"\n\nInfuriated beyond words, she looked to Grandion for a sign that he understood and would back her up as she told the Brown Overmind exactly which sewer he could shove his insinuations into, but reeled in shock as the Tourmaline touched wingtips with Affurion in a brotherly-regard gesture. What the volcanic hells? Traitor! She'd swim him backwards through the lava-lakes of Fra'anior! She would not turn him into a Human, she'd turn him into a lesser spiny toad, the one with the pink blotches on its warty back! Following which she'd fricassee said toad on a roaring pyre, taking care to stand upwind from the noxious fumes. Of course, of all the betrayals in her life, this hardly rated a mention.\n\nTherefore, when one day she took him home, she would give this pet Dragon some serious house-training. With this agreeable thought, she abandoned his paw for the open air\u2013not without a pert parting waggle of her wingtips. <Catch me if you can, my handsome Tourmaline.>\n\nHis eye-fires brightened appreciably.\n\nDistracting Grandion was like tossing sweetmeat for dragonets. Those Land Dragons? She had seen what their eye-cannons could do. Now she intended to make herself entirely the wrong kind of target. But for the sake of Kaolili\u2026\n\nShe flashed across the dawn at top speed, stretching out her body for maximum streamlining. She flew directly North. As she raced along, she gathered her mental strength. Human-Lia would have to help with this one. Those Land Dragons needed to hear a few things.\n\n<Hey, you slugs!> What? The Dragoness could not believe what had just emerged from her mouth. <Aye, you slithering, slimy bottom-feeders, you excrement of Borers, you sluggish hangers-on at the base of the food-chain! I am Hualiama, the Star Dragoness! Here I am, null-fire slugs! Do you not seek me?>\n\nHer Dragoness was unimpressed by the insults. Where was the eloquence, the sophistication? But the Welkin-Runners apparently heard enough. With a series of dull roars, they shifted direction to pursue the Star Dragoness, clipping the northern edge of the city as they stampeded by. Lia would not have wanted to be a citizen on those streets seeing Land Dragons bearing down on her city, ten times the height of any building. Razed. Only rubble remained of that eighth of a mile; the destruction wrought in mere seconds. How fast were they? Breath exploded from her lungs as she dashed a short ways West, leading the Land Dragons into each other's path. Grief, those running steps covered hundreds of feet every second, certainly faster than a fluttering hatchling!\n\nLight sizzled around her. Lia shielded, attempting to create a mirror effect. Pathetic. Worse than useless. The weight of the light-beams, even glancing blows, knocked her out of the sky. Grandion swooped for her in a series of sharp, spiralling loops, trying to anticipate where the light-beams would strike. Multiple images of herself suddenly peeled away from their converging forms, confusing the Land Dragons temporarily.\n\nGrandion panted, <Projection tricks. Occasionally useful.> He snatched her out of the air. Light washed over them, slapping Grandion's tail skyward. He grunted at the pain of impact but held firm. As his tail swung up, the Tourmaline instinctively dived downward, taking them out of the light-beam. Hualiama smelled a sharp tang of burned cinnamon. His scales were smoking!\n\nNo time for that. <Go low,> she cried from his paw.\n\nHe understood. Tourmaline flashed earthward, drawing the Land Dragons' attacks with his sharp movement, while Lia focussed on their shielding. Aye! Siiyumiel had taught her how to bend light. What if she just bent it\u2026 a little more?\n\nThis was where the mathematics of oath-magic defied reason. One plus one had many answers, all of them greater than two. Her mischievous inner engineer was flipping backward somersaults.\n\nAs Grandion dived, Hualiama's magic fused with his shield, turning the Tourmaline Dragon into the living gemstone for which his colour was named. Unfortunately, her initial effort refracted a light-beam to vaporise a hundred-foot section of the city wall. Oops. But she learned from that mistake. Two or three refractive points were needed, shaped as bands in the optical shield, as best she could implement her theories in a scale-frying, avalanche-approaching hurry. Fail, and they would be incinerated in the heat turning her world into a yellow-white furnace oven, for at least four beams had converged on them. Adjust! Wrench the shield into shape and\u2026\n\n*KAAABOOOM!*\n\n<Unholy windroc entrails, you bellicose beauty, did you see that Land Dragon fly?> Grandion screamed happily.\n\nNo, she was fixated by the sight of a severed leg tumbling past them, the bone dangling from its end thicker than the waistlines of three Sapphurions rolled together. The Tourmaline supplied a celebratory mental image. Lia could not look. They had harmonised five separate beams and blasted them back through the chest of a Welkin-Runner, blowing the male Land Dragon apart like hydrogen-bearing rock tossed into a bonfire\u2013one of Elki's early scientific experiments, as she recalled. His eyebrows had taken months to regrow.\n\nSpitting light in all directions, Grandion jinked and dodged, whirled and fluttered through the stampeding herd, dodging the monstrous paws as they thundered down all around, kicking up a blinding spray of dust and dirt. The tracking beams cut through the murk, homing in unerringly on the fast-flying pair, only to be refracted back as fast as they arrived. All was reaction-speed. The Tourmaline Dragon sliced across knees, dodged steely talons and dived beneath bellies, spitting blades of light in all directions. The Welkin-Runner charge snarled up as the great beasts slewed into each other, but their pained bellowing was nothing compared to the impact of the Mist-Runners storming headlong into the fray. Skull met skull and paw clashed with paw in a series of shocks that shook Kaolili Island to its roots. The monstrous bodies tangled in an incredible snarl of snapping teeth and swingeing talon-blows as the Land Dragons assaulted each other with vitriol born of centuries of enmity.\n\n\"Duck!\" Hualiama yelled.\n\nGrandion balled himself about her as they stuck between two veritable mountainsides of Dragonflesh, but thankfully the crush was too fleeting to break bones. The Tourmaline raced away with a bellow of effort, finally making it to clear air. He beat skyward with an audible whoosh of air from the lungs, a draconic sigh of relief.\n\n\"Well, that'll crush every crop for leagues about,\" said Grandion, making to dust his paws in satisfaction before remembering he held someone in his paws.\n\n\"Decent flying, Dragon,\" Hualiama complimented him.\n\n\"Decent?\"\n\nEvidently, not enough of a compliment. Lia was too weary to summon up an ode to his gallantry. Instead, she said, \"As in, flying that decently should be declared illegal on ten thousand Islands. Now come on, Dragon. The real battle lies yonder.\"\n\n[ Annihilation ]\n\nGRandion powered skyward on the wings of a back-pawed Human-style semi-compliment, he told Lia, earning a fine burble of laughter followed by a demand to be released from his paw. He rolled his fire-eyes. Incurable wisp of a girl. He had it on good authority that the Humans of Sylakia and Jeradia loved to gamble, but what sane creature in the Island-World would want to gamble against his Hualiama? She played ridiculous odds and won. Routinely. What power was that? Providence? Or the Onyx connection she claimed, a notion so scandalous it bordered on blasphemy?\n\nThe Dragoness sprang lithely from his paw to his shoulder now, riding the wind of their passage imperfectly so that her tail slapped his left eye on the way past. The Tourmaline scanned the battle-front of Orange Dragons, which, though pockmarked like a pumice boulder by the systematic pounding delivered by the Grunts, still stretched across the horizon in numbers uncountable. Where was his cunning new wing-brother, Affurion?\n\n\"I sense the Empress,\" said Lia.\n\n\"Affurion said the Haters had not left the Lost Islands when he redeployed all of his kin onshore,\" Grandion responded.\n\n\"He's wrong.\"\n\nGrandion swallowed his annoyance. Hatchlings should not come furnished with twenty-one year old intellects. It was wrong on so many levels, it made him imagine one of their milk-suckling, helpless babes standing up in its cradle to spout the wisdom of the great draconic scholars. He hissed, \"Then find her.\"\n\n\"We've a bigger problem, Grandion. Numistar's on the move. That's her.\" He flexed his neck to check the hand-sized black cloud on the horizon, before turning a querying whirl of the eye-fires upon the Star Dragoness. She hissed, \"Can we work on the trust? That's her! We'd better warn King Taisho to batten down his Dragonships. Moor them, preferably undercover. Get the citizens off the streets.\"\n\n\"Cripple his fleet? What will Commander Hiro say?\"\n\n\"Hiro's dead.\"\n\n\"You\u2013\"\n\n\"He's dead. Ask Raiden.\"\n\nBy his belly-fires! Tasting the nuances of her speech, he knew she had killed the Commander. No question. But what was Raiden's part? Burning the evidence? Whatever the case\u2026 he said feelingly, \"Dragons never spit out the bones!\"\n\nEyes shuttered, the Dragoness scented the wind. All her mien was otherworldly to him, for a breath, she seemed to travel beyond, to the realm of white-fires. Her wings vibrated uncannily before resettling at her sides.\n\nHer eye-orbs had turned white. Pure white, as if no flame existed in them at all.\n\nGrandion shivered in his turn. \"What do you see?\"\n\n\"Ice.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "As the spectre of war and death stalked the Isles, Hualiama had learned, time sometimes fled and sometimes passed with excruciating slowness, as though seeking to indelibly imprint upon the observant mind the full compass and exacting detail of every horror. To dwell upon these images was numbness and grief. To ignore them was inhuman. Yet could the mind ever comprehend slaloming in desperate flight between paws that stamped tracks sixteen feet deep into the sod with every footstep, or a rolling maul between lizards that dwarfed the very city over which they fought? Could she grasp the numbers ranged against Kaolili?\n\nThe Tourmaline Dragon, being a logic-driven male of his kind, compartmentalised neatly. He worked with Zulior to despatch messenger-Dragons to all points of the compass, each command efficient and succinct. A stream of information fed King Taisho and his defenders. They organised Dragonwings and sent cover for Prince Qilong, sweeping into the city now with his airborne troops from the North, ahead of that ink-blot cloud growing on the horizon. The others thought little of her assertion that Numistar Winterborn's cold invaded from the North, but a bitter wind had sprung up, and Grandion and Zulior issued orders as though her seventh-sense inkling were incontrovertible fact. They conferred with Affurion and made adjustments to best support his forces, and ordered Dragonwings\u2013or 'Dragondigs' as the Anubam flippantly called themselves\u2013of Brown Dragons underground to seek out any and all Giants and to engage them in teams of seven to ten Dragons strong.\n\n<No prisoners,> Affurion warned. <Work together and our kind will survive.>\n\nHualiama considered this. Rightly, Affurion seemed concerned for the survival of his diminished nation of unique Dragonkind, the Indubam, Tynukam, Dramubam and Anubam. There had been further running battles against Numistar, Azziala and the Land Dragons all the way down the Eastern Archipelago to Kaolili and many, many losses, including over a dozen of the smaller Air-Breathers. The Brown Overmind had made the momentous decision to abandon their ancient Dragonholds for the uncertain lands of Kaolili, and had already opened negotiations with King Taisho for a more permanent solution.\n\nSuddenly, Lia's four paws clenched as one, scrabbling for grip on Grandion's scales. Siiyumiel?\n\n<Siiyumiel? Great one?>\n\nFaraway, his voice resonated in her mind. <The Lesser Dragons fled our approach. We destroyed many of your enemy as they traversed the Cloudlands, Blue-star. But we are few and distant, unable to ascend the Island to the place where you battle. Numistar comes, little one. Be alert.>\n\n<Thank you, Siiyumiel.>\n\n<I've designed a special attack. Can you rise and allow us to focus our Harmonic magic on you? Gather it, like this\u2013> plans and calculations and esoteric draconic scientific concepts cascaded through her mind <\u2013but this atmosphere of yours is weak. You may need to come closer, at least a league from your current position.>\n\nPlacing her slap in the middle of thousands of Orange Dragons. Excellent notion.\n\n<What will this magic do?>\n\n<Deliver a knockout blow to Lesser Dragons.>\n\n<We need any advantage our paws can scrape up,> Grandion interrupted. <We'll do it.>\n\nMoments later, the orders rushed out. Blues to support Grandion and Hualiama, led by Akemi and Yukari the Aquamarine. They settled on a small force, just a dozen Dragons and four Riders. Lia worked through the shields with them, watching from the corner of her eye the Orange advance slowly\u2013so very slowly\u2013winging toward the city of Kerdani. Why so slow? Her eyes traversed the terrain, from the Land Dragon battle raging to the West to the Giants reforming in their dense ranks, yet fewer in number by far. Why? Where was Shinzen hiding? Again, she tested the wind. Where was that dark, oily magic, that remnant of ruzal-like darkness she recognised from before\u2026 if the Oranges avoided the city\u2026\n\n\"Affurion. Beneath the city. Shinzen's attacking from beneath, I'm almost certain of it. We must protect the King. That's why his Oranges\u2013\"\n\n\"The King allows no Dragon within five hundred feet of his palace,\" Affurion put in.\n\n\"Then find a way,\" Lia suggested heatedly.\n\nMeantime, the Tourmaline shook his muzzle. \"Too many threats.\"\n\nImpulsively, the Dragoness sprang over Grandion's thicket of skull-spikes to the slight indentation between his brow-ridges, poked her head over the side, and eyeballed him from a distance of four inches, so close she felt the heat of his fire-eye upon hers. \"Must I teach thee to dance?\"\n\nHis laughter belled out. \"Nay!\"\n\n\"Then let us burn the heavens, Dragons!\"\n\nBurn, they did. As Affurion whirled away, bellowing his orders, Grandion gathered the small Dragonwing with a commanding sweep of his right wing. A single shield enveloped them, produced and sustained with the help of the Blues, Yukari's strength dominating the group. They winged out at a rapid clip, Hualiama orienting on the faraway Shell-Clan, just barely visible over the curvature of the Island's shore twenty-two leagues distant. She exchanged data rapidly with the Shell-Clan Elder. Battle statistics. Progress. Her intuitions, which Siiyumiel immediately reflected in support. Aye, a good reading of the Balance. She must listen more closely to her instincts.\n\nOddly, Yukari's battle-laughter was the only sound their group made as they sliced smoothly into the ranks of Orange Dragons, the blade-like shields piercing and hacking and maiming without the group suffering a single substantive injury in return. They blasted through waves of Dragon fire, poison gas and even acid spit, the multiplicity of shield-strands ramming it all aside.\n\nLia stiffened. That mental signature\u2013<Dragons, OBEY!>\n\nGasp! Wheeze! Here came the Dragon-Hater Dragonships and\u2013her eyes bulged involuntarily\u2013Azziala aboard Mizuki with Saori and Elki in attendance! Her mother was riding a Dragon? The entire Island-World stood upon its head and waggled its tongue rudely.\n\nRoaring rajals, they were the Empress' insurance! She commanded her own Dragonwing this time, all Dragons of Gi'ishior that Lia recognised, each bearing one of her Councillors.\n\nEven from that distance, the Empress' eyes appeared to contain an especial glow destined for Hualiama alone. <Islands' greetings, daughter,> she thought. <Pleased to see your dear mother?>\n\n<No. What the hells\u2013are you a Dragon Rider now?>\n\nThe woman laughed coldly, throwing back her white-haired head. Just half a league off and closing in on the eastern flank of the mass of Orange Dragons, her expression was visible to a Dragoness' sight at maximum magnification.\n\n<Your idea, Hualiama. We're here to help, of course. Then you'll come home to Mommy. Because you've been a very, very disobedient girl.>\n\nUgh! The way she spoke, Lia knew she meant, 'Come grovelling or I will blast Saori and Elki into mindless, gibbering idiots and use Mizuki's hide to clothe my next Dragonship.'\n\nThe Dragon-Haters, true to their word, plowed into that flank with a vengeance. Her mother played the odds. She expected to come out on the winning side, with Hualiama tamed and in hand. That meant destroying the threat posed by Shinzen, calculating that the Dragons must surely expend their strength upon each other before she stepped into the victor's position\u2013and all this, before Numistar arrived!\n\nQuietly, Grandion said via private telepathy to her, <If that's the Hater, offer an alliance. It's the only way any of us will survive this.>\n\n<An alliance with the unholy?>\n\nHe mentally spread his paws. Lia followed through, though she knew already that Azziala would expect this move. Necessity commanded their response. Her mother was not grateful. The Empress commanded their support. Support she would have, just as soon as a Star Dragoness could conjure up a minor miracle, for the green-headed Dragonkind responded to Azziala's presence as though she had provoked them to life, at last. Lia felt the commands flowing through the great mass of Dragons. Attack the intruders. Drive them off. Gas them.\n\nGrandion drove onward, but at a cost. Their small Dragonwing was suffering now, taking a pounding from the Oranges all about. She returned her focus to the problem of Shinzen's whereabouts. She said to Grandion, <Hope you've got a plan for us regarding Shinzen.>\n\nJust nearby, the Tourmaline's mind was calculating too. He said, <Strike until our force abates, then we'll pull a switch. I'll have Makani and Jin take you down while I pretend you're still here.>\n\n<Down? Where?>\n\n<To the Palace. We know Shinzen. He'll find a way in. You're the only one who can stop him in your Human form\u2013Shapeshifter advantage.>\n\nHualiama shifted worriedly. <Won't he be expecting exactly this?>\n\n<I'll shadow you with Yukari's help. Any trouble, we'll tear that Palace apart to extract you.>\n\nAlive? Now that would be a miracle. Unable to think of a better plan, the Star Dragoness called out to Siiyumiel, <Ready, noble Elder.>\n\nSavage laughter boomed in her mind. <Do you think so, little one? Do you indeed?>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "Harmonic power washed over her like an everlasting crescendo of sound, a symphony that swelled with the triumphal notes of horns, the sweet wail of pipes and flutes that reached ultrasonic notes and the melody of a thousand stringed instruments. Hualiama bathed in the converging offerings of nineteen Shell-Clan, in a place of music so wondrous, so savage and overwhelming, that she lost all track of who she was and what she meant to do. Staggered. Spun away upon billows of crashing glory.\n\nSomewhere, a tiny voice was shouting for her. <Hualiama. Hualiama!>\n\nOver twenty leagues from the source, the power of their Harmonic magic was still enough to overwhelm her utterly. Singing. Dancing. Weeping terrace-lakes for the Island-World she loved\u2026\n\n<Hualiama. Come back.>\n\nShe tumbled and played in an ocean of sound. What else mattered?\n\n<ALASTIOR!!>\n\nShaken! Lia crash-landed mentally and picked herself up in almost the same quarter-note, painfully aware of her mistake. The shield was broken. Grandion fought like a beast, a vicious light in his eyes. Yukari snapped with her mighty jaws, taking a knot of three Dragon-heads at once and crushing them with a single bite. She had allowed this! Her, and her absurd notions of dance\u2013no, that was the very point, the way the Harmonic magic flowed into her now, as though she were the focal point of a spiritual world that drew an endless, almighty breath. The dance was a physical expression of the Harmony of her being, of the way she perceived her world. Essential. Formative. Soul-song. She lifted her voice to croon:\n\n<A twirl of wings did greet the suns,>\n\n<Frolicking, prancing, gambolling amidst motes,>\n\n<Of life's streaming gold.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "Her song was barely a murmur expressed via the musical capabilities of a Dragoness' throat, but it turned every Dragon's head for hundreds of feet about. Mesmerising. As enthralling as the colours of dawn, the little Star Dragoness floated slightly apart from her Dragonwing, and Grandion saw in her fire-eyes and spilling from her scales a radiance of unearthly allure, as if her song spoke in all the colours of rainbows, with the warmth of eternal fires and the chiming notes of his own soul.\n\nAll that was right and wholesome and pure dwelled within her paw; yet purity possessed a terrible power. This hymn of Harmony demanded that all sing its song. It reamed evil, for there was no place for Disharmony within its dominion, no compromise, no leniency.\n\nHualiama gestured. The Harmonic magic gushed out, and she knocked Dragons from the sky.\n\nDespite his hopes, there was nothing pretty or easy about what the Shell-Clan Elder had suggested she should do. The power demanded was extreme, the labour and concentration required, more so. The Orange Dragons resisted with the collective fury of the Dragonkind, swarming about the invading Dragonwing with vicious snarls, resisting the punishing force of the Harmonic magic to the last. Drinking deep of the oath-connection between her and the Tourmaline, Lia shone upon the enemy, rebuking, chastising, whipping the Dragons until their fires snuffed out and they fell in twos and threes, then tens\u2026 minutes crawled by, then hours. Everywhere they turned, there were more Dragons. The battle roiled and raged, the thunderous mental commands of the Dragon-Haters growing ever more distant as Oranges mobbed the Dragonships, driving them away to the southwest. Enchanters smashed down on the fields in a rain of blue robes. Shreds of Dragonships drifted down to cover their bodies. Dragons fought each other to the death; the carnage, unlike anything Grandion had ever beheld.\n\nHualiama held her part powerfully, seemingly indefatigable.\n\nThe last quintet of Mist-Runners, victorious at last, crushed hundreds of fallen Orange Dragons as they slowly limped back to the edge of the Island, twenty leagues distant, and clambered back down to the deathly realm that, conversely, supported their life.\n\nGrandion fought with Yukari. The elderly Dragoness was neither as quick as she had been in her prime, nor was her vision as channelled through Akemi perfect, but what she saw, she killed. Together, they rallied their Dragonwing and kept the Star Dragoness in their midst, safe to continue destroying the enemy. Slowly, the Orange horde drove his Dragonwing backward, away from the Haters and toward the city, until at last even the magical fonts of the Shell-Clan must have been exhausted, for the magic guttered and with it, Hualiama's strength failed at last.\n\nThe suns were high in the sky, but on the point of being overtaken by the oily-dark storm Hualiama had observed. They had been fighting for five hours.\n\nYukari said, <It is time, Tourmaline. Execute the plan.>\n\n<You sensed\u2013> Grandion lowered his eyes to the city. In the square courtyard of a house close to the Palace, he saw a dozen Giant raiders boiling out of the ground, closely pursued by a battle-group of Affurion's Anubam. They fought in a tight snarl, crushing houses as the tiny figures of dark-haired Easterners fled the scene. <Makani! Call the Dragon Riders, Yukari. I must prepare\u2026>\n\nThe Dragons retreated toward Affurion's forces now. They hovered over the city against a gloomy backdrop of oleaginous cloud, beating back the fringe of the Orange Dragonwing. Grandion eyed the weather suspiciously, tasting notes of tingling magic and premonition upon his tongue, meantime conversing rapidly with Hualiama. She would have to transform into her Human guise to penetrate the Palace, he told her, using Jin's expertise and local knowledge\u2013the boy knew far more than Grandion wanted to question him upon. But he was loyal, and that counted for much in the Tourmaline's estimation. Makani would shadow them with the fabled hunting skills of a Grey Dragoness and Grandion would remain in close contact via their mental link.\n\n<Good hunting,> said the Tourmaline, sharing strength with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 79",
                "text": "Hunting? Her wings were ready to drop off with exhaustion. The Grey Dragoness slipped swiftly out of the fray and down to the city, where Dragon Riders patrolled to prevent random Orange Dragons from fire-bombing the populace. The streets were still not empty. Hualiama had expected King Taisho to exert better control over his people.\n\nDown in the barracks, she disappeared to find her clothing and weapons. Transforming into her Human form was a desperate struggle that again, proclaimed how diminished her magical resources were. A prickle on her neck? She whirled, but saw no-one. Fuming, almost certain someone had been spying on her, Lia donned her armour and sheathed her weapons.\n\nShe stalked back to the barracks, but Jin was exactly where she had left him, speaking with Makani in low tones.\n\nIn that Eastern fashion Lia had observed, the teenager refused to meet her eyes, appearing to focus on the region of her chest instead. Hualiama came within an inch of hitting him. Great leaping Islands, her draconic emotions were just so volatile\u2013not that her Human had been anything less than volatile, she reminded herself with a deep chuckle that evidently startled Jinichi.\n\nThey prowled the streets of Kerdani City beneath thunderous skies.\n\nHe moved beautifully. Hualiama had never thought that about a Human before, far less a man. Ra'aba had possessed a rajal-like grace of movement, but Jin's hunting style was like a shadow moving beneath a leaf. Magical? A flash of his eyes to check her location, and she knew that for a truth. What a burden to be the last of his people; in some ways, similar to her. One of a kind. So with sympathy and grim purpose united in her heart, she tracked the lithe youth through the back streets of Kerdani, coming by shadowed alleyways and unexpected shortcuts to a back wall of the Palace grounds. A thirteen-foot grey brick wall greeted them.\n\nThe first droplet of rain struck the back of her neck. A chill wind ruffled the trees behind that wall, as though clawed fingers ran through hair preparatory to sinking their razor-sharp points into the skull beneath.\n\nJin took a running start, two steps up the brickwork surface, and wriggled onto the top with the ease of a dragonet. He whispered, \"Need a hand?\"\n\nHualiama took a similar run-up, stepped lightly against the wall, and caught the top with her fingertips. A wriggle and a heave later, she sat beside him. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nHe somersaulted out over a backing ditch filled with sharp stakes. Lia did the same, landed and forward-rolled. She came smoothly to her feet and darted after Jin as he scooted through the thick foliage behind the Palace's attractive ornamental gardens. Every bush and tree had been shaped by hand, creating a fantastical landscape of the creatures of the Island-World. They padded past a couple of soldiers, coming at last to a small metal grating set in the ground.\n\n\"Aeration for the storage chambers,\" he said, not even breathing hard. \"You've trained at espionage?\"\n\n\"I was a warrior-monk,\" she said.\n\nJin picked at a scab on his chin in consternation. \"What kind of a Princess are you?\"\n\n\"That answer would probably shake you out of your boots; besides, I haven't entirely worked it out myself. Care to open the grating, or shall I?\"\n\nA hailstone plinked off the grating. Two more.\n\nThe teenager knelt, pretending to work with a tool, but Hualiama felt his magic reach out in the same breath and turn the simple lock. *Click.* Fraudster.\n\nThey worked together to lift the heavy, rusted metal grating and set it aside. Then, the heavens split apart at the glacial roaring of Numistar Winterborn, and she hurled the fury of her retribution down upon the Island of Kaolili. Ice. Ice as thick and heavy as stone, smashed into the city with a thundering that drowned out all else. Lia and Jin bolted down the hole like a pair of scared rabbits. Lia dropped in feet-first, but Jin followed with a headfirst dive, landing right on top of her. They clashed heads sharply.\n\n\"Idiot!\" snarled Lia.\n\n\"Move, you stupid vixen!\"\n\n\"There's another grating. Just a\u2013mercy!\"\n\nJin's body jerked as ice pounded the ground outside and shot into the hole in a spray of needle-sharp fragments, slicing open Lia's cheek and nose. Jin fared worse. Bracing herself amidst the flying shards and aware of the teenager cursing in her left ear, she booted the grating. Twice. It broke free with a horrendous clatter that was thankfully drowned out by the storm's full-throated roaring outside. In a trice, the two Humans wriggled through the gap and dropped a short distance into a chamber three-quarters filled with sacks of grain.\n\nThey took stock. Lia dabbed her nose. \"Won't improve my looks. Can I help there, Jin? Defending yourself with your backside?\"\n\n\"Get your freaking hands off me!\" he snarled. Crimson spread visibly down his leg.\n\n\"Touchy. But your foot's bleeding badly.\"\n\n\"I'll live.\"\n\n\"And Shinzen will rue the day. Now shut your stupid fumarole, boy.\" Lia ran her hands over his foot. \"It's a deep cut. It'll hurt, but this is the real problem.\" Without warning, she reached for his thigh, her hand a blur of speed. She yanked a dagger of ice out of his thigh and slapped her palm over the spot. \"Pierced your artery. You were bleeding to death.\"\n\n\"What have you\u2013\" His anger subsided in a gurgle of amazement. When she lifted her hand, the bright flow of blood had already subsided to a trickle.\n\n\"You'll live to insult a few more women,\" Lia growled.\n\nJin dropped his burning gaze, seething with emotions she could guess at. She bound his thigh with a length of cloth the teenager cut from his own shirt. At length, he grunted, \"We've Giants to worry about.\"\n\nWith one last, incredulous glance at the size of the chunks of ice shattering inside that short, curved aeration vent, Hualiama followed the sulky youngster into the darkness beneath Kaolili's royal palace. He was right. She could practically smell Giant in here, that dank, oily power of Shinzen's which so closely mirrored the ruzal still lurking within her.\n\nLia rubbed her breastbone dejectedly. How would she ever be rid of this curse?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 80",
                "text": "The Tourmaline Dragon blinked as he saw the storm turn to pursue the Dragon-Haters. Great, writhing black thunderheads filled the sky, speckled with white in the upper reaches where Numistar's dragonets appeared to be riding the powerful updrafts. Her voice was the booming of thunder, a cacophony of hatred and ruin, and her presence created chill so deep, it froze the golden Dragon blood in his arteries and hearts. He knew they had miscalculated terribly.\n\n<Get down!> he screamed. <Affurion, the Browns\u2013dig us shelter! Now!>\n\nAt once the proximate Lost Islands battle-group turned on a brass dral and dived, from the slowest Grunt to the fastest Swarm Dragon. Affurion bellowed at the stragglers, a triplet of Overminds still wheeling over the North quarter of the city, engaged with several dozen Orange Dragons. Anubam reared up in dozens of locations across the city, flicking paving stones and even houses off their heads and backs as they stared upward in patent astonishment.\n\nGrandion's eyes were for the North. Those stupid Dragons, those people and soldiers still wandering around on the streets\u2026 in a Storm-amplified voice, he rattled the shingles and shutters of the city for a half-mile about. \"Danger! Take cover! Take cover!\"\n\nHe had never seen a storm like it. Oily darkness like staring down the open maw of the largest Dragon in existence. Palpable malice. A load of ice in those upper altitudes that he could only marvel at. The wind was a frigid whip, knocking the smaller Dragons about as they descended; Affurion roared his orders, but his voice was drowned out by sharp clattering that began to the North of Kerdani City. Hailstones. Not pretty, round hailstones. These were chunks of ice larger than a Human's head. Smashing. Exploding on impact. In the blink of his eye, the northernmost battle-group of Dragons vanished into a pounding storm-front that from this distance resembled an iron curtain, only the Tourmaline knew better. That was death, even for Dragons.\n\n<Down!> he bellowed, slapping Yukari across the muzzle with a wingtip in his desperation. <Get underground, Dragons!>\n\nThe Anubam below quarried into the ground like the maddened caveworms Grandion had once encountered in the Western Isles. Dragons darted under cover as the hailstorm intensified, driving across the city faster than a man could run. Affurion ordered the Grunts to be the last under cover\u2013they, of all the Dragonkind, would be the most likely to take the brunt of that storm and survive.\n\nAs Grandion paused to allow other Dragons to scuttle into the hastily-dug tunnels, he had a moment to glance toward the already-obscured Palace, to hope that Hualiama had made it indoors in time. He would not be able to keep his promise to help her if she encountered Shinzen now. By his wings, he had never been more thankful that the Dragon-Haters had been driven off, at least for the time being. If the Ancient Dragoness would kindly chase down and destroy that Dragon-Hater fleet and the Empress of all Haters in the doing, so much the better for everyone.\n\nAloft, the voice of Numistar Winterborn roared and raged, sparking thousands of bolts of lightning that hammered into the already besieged city, smashing tiles, caving in roofs and battering down doors. Any resulting fires were instantly buried under untold sackweight of ice. Her Storm swept across the city unheeding of any life in its path.\n\nAffurion grabbed his wing. <Hide!>\n\nLike worms, the mighty Lesser Dragons cowered beneath the earth and hoped that the Ancient Dragoness' ire would leave them unscathed.\n\n[ Mother of all Battles ]\n\nJin ran lightly upstairs, balanced on the balls of his feet. Reaching an unsuspecting guard, he chopped the base of the man's neck with a hard-edged hand. The man slumped; Jin caught the body and eased the unconscious fellow to the ground.\n\nHualiama zipped by him, taking the stairs three at a time. Giants! She smelled their earthy scent. The tingle of magic was there in her nostrils, causing strange lights to flare behind her eyes. She slipped behind a large column opposite the entrance to the King's Hall, where they expected to find King Taisho. Though she moulded to the shadows, her young accomplice seemed born to them. He flattened himself momentarily beside her, before pointing to a secondary column and motioning upwards.\n\nNot the direct approach. Good. Too dangerous.\n\nJin pressed a short length of treated rope into her hands. \"Know how to use this?\"\n\n\"Ladies first,\" she said, indicating he should proceed.\n\nHe did not enjoy that! Lia reminded herself that she had not the first idea what notions of honour his Nikuko warrior-caste might entertain. This was evidently a grave insult. No mind. She took the sting off her words by beating him to the column.\n\nCasting the rope around the foot-wide grey stone column, she wrapped the free ends several times about her wrists, before tugging sharply to check her grip was secure. Then she walked upward, gripping onto the column with her knees and the inward-turned soles of her boots, making an inchworm motion. Good speed? Jin clucked at her from below, suggesting she should hurry up. Hualiama froze as a Kaolili Guardsman paraded by in full view. If she smelled Giants, why were these soldiers completely oblivious? Or was that another Shinzen trick?\n\nContinuing up the twenty-foot column, Lia reached the base of a tertiary-level walkway around the King's Hall. Reaching up, she gripped one of the ornamental railing supports and swung herself neatly up onto the walkway. She crouched, checking both ways. The boots of patrolling soldiers disappeared around a corner not ten feet away. Perfect. Now\u2013oh, Jin was already with her. He dropped even more lightly than her, scanning the area.\n\nHe pointed two fingers at an archway. Go.\n\nThey flashed across the space, again hugging the shadows as they peered inside. Soldier. Hualiama stole forward, elbowing Jin in the process, and did the necessary.\n\nThe young warrior let out a hiss of annoyance. \"He was mine.\"\n\nLia just held a finger out and mouthed, 'No talking.'\n\nAnd now a sulk. Great. Had she been this awful when she was fifteen, traipsing around the Islands with a Tourmaline Dragon and\u2013where on the Islands was Flicker? Grief, she needed to start looking after that dragonet properly.\n\nNo time. For Shinzen's voice boomed within the King's Hall, demanding outright surrender.\n\nLia peeked over the hip-high balcony. King Taisho stood before his plain, tall-backed throne on a small dais at the head of the hall, flanked by the bevy of Councillors that kept his elbows warm. His face was expressionless yet somehow severe at the same time. Facing him was Shinzen, fronting a wedge of ten Giant soldiers, while further Giant-magi patrolled the smaller functionaries' doorways and the main entrance of the hall, throwing up the magical barrier which Hualiama had detected earlier. She felt its subtle draw. Everything was normal. Nothing to report here.\n\nThe hall's roof was cracked in dozens of places, but held firm against the weight of ice. She realised that the hall could not be at the uppermost level of the Palace. If she was not mistaken, several rooms must have collapsed above, but not enough to break the strongly buttressed hall except in one corner, where some masonry had fallen onto the highly polished, green marble floor.\n\nJin rotated smoothly through an overarm throw!\n\nToo horrified to stop him, Lia could only watch as his small throwing dagger arced toward the nape of Shinzen's neck\u2013poisoned, obviously\u2013but the Warlord simply reached up a hand as if preparing to scratch an itch, and trapped the blade in the palm of his hand, careless of any cut.\n\nHe said to the King, \"Giants are immune to poison. Men, fetch me that fool.\"\n\nTaisho had not budged. Hualiama squinted around the ornate hall one more time. Gold trim. Wonderful paintings and hangings. A thousand places an assassin could hide. Something struck her as odd down there, but she did not have time to work it out. If Shinzen appeared that confident, then he was the only threat she should care about.\n\nGiants sprang toward her from the ground level. Lia ducked out of the balcony and sprinted, soft-footed upon the carpet, back toward the head of the hall. Take the last balcony. Ignore the Eastern soldiers just starting to point at her as she sprinted forty steps along the walkway to the final, curtained archway. She forward-rolled beneath a speculative spear-thrust, kicked off the soldier's boots and vanished between the curtains before the reflexive swing of a short sword trimmed her long braid and her neck with it. She leaped forward deftly, touched down on the balustrade, and somersaulted through the air, crossing twenty feet as she dropped against a tapestry. Clutching her blue blade above her head with both hands, she ripped a neat line down a priceless heirloom as she descended with the gracefulness of an acrobat lowered by a rope, just to the right of the King of Kaolili.\n\nWell. For once, a landing that went to plan.\n\nLia drew her second sword.\n\nShinzen, peering over the King's head even though the monarch stood upon his dais, grunted, \"Princess, you just keep turning up like the proverbial bad dral. Do you want to warm my bed this badly?\"\n\n\"The warming will be done by your blood after I gut you like the brainless ape you are,\" she retorted. \"Give it up, Shinzen. My Dragons have the Palace surrounded.\"\n\n\"You're a terrible liar, Princess. This whole little charade had your name on it from the beginning. Give me my ruzal and we can all go home.\"\n\nFrom the corner of her eye, Hualiama watched Jin shimmying down from the same balcony she had vacated as though he possessed a gecko's sense of balance. Magic. She would have that boy's guts\u2026 he was a fraction of a step ahead of several Giants. They stopped as Shinzen raised his arm lazily.\n\n\"Come, girl. You and me. Single combat. Winner gets the power.\"\n\nStill that odd, uneasy feeling! Lia wet her lips, trying to keep the conversation flowing while poking around the hall with her mind. The Giants' magic interfered, however. \"Ruzal is not so easily given, Shinzen.\"\n\n\"No. Nor is it adequate explanation for why the greatest powers of this age congregate where you walk, Princess.\"\n\nWarlord Shinzen had no interest in playing the yokel this day. His speech was lucid, the hatred seething in his dark eyes, plain for all to see. The hammers lifted from his belt to be hefted in meaty paws the size of Hualiama's head. He gestured curtly for King Taisho and his group to step aside.\n\nThe King said, \"I will not be bullied in my own hall, Shinzen. You and your kind are an abomination, a curse upon\u2013argh!\"\n\nInvisible magic shovelled the men aside, piling the King and his Councillors in an ungainly heap beside the dais. \"I do not waste breath on lesser men,\" Shinzen rumbled, his eyes filling with an unholy light. \"We are alike, Princess, whether you like it or not. Your power sings to mine. They long to join\u2026 to feel our kinship.\"\n\nOn the haft of his huge hammer, his fingers fluttered in a curiously girlish gesture, and Hualiama felt a stirring in her breast. Ruzal. The blood drained from her cheeks, only to pulsate like gelid sap deep in her belly. A hungry awakening, as though the spirit of Dramagon stirred in recognition of his children. Shinzen's whole concentration was on her now, his pupils dilated, the already defined veins on his neck and massively muscled arms throbbing manifestly, horribly, in time with the sensations invading her breast. His lips twisted into a bestial grin.\n\nShe would not give the ruzal to a creature like Shinzen, no matter the cost. Never.\n\n\"Aye, Princess. Rightly you say, this power is not easily given. It must be taken, stolen from the last dying gasp of breath crossing your pretty lips.\" Now the full madness of his laughter crashed over her, knocking her backward against the tapestry and sending Jin stumbling involuntarily off the dais, his hands clapped to his ears in agony. Shinzen bellowed, \"Dramagon's power persists in death. It revels in death. It demands death!\"\n\nThe hammers whirled from wide on either flank. Lia barely leaped backward in time, her slightly trailing left foot catching a glancing blow on the arch that threw her off balance. She flutter-stepped on the sweeping arc of Shinzen's left arm as the heavy hammers crossed, then executed a twisting sideways double-spin that aligned with the direction she was falling. Collapsing her knees to take the shock, she rolled smoothly into a warrior's ready position. The Giant chased after with a shattering roar. She had to leap again. Shinzen's power lashed out immediately, pummelling her body backward. Lia skidded down the long marble floor, gasping for breath.\n\nThe Warlord pursued her more deliberately now, the hammers punching in a one-two motion that pummelled her into a forced retreat down the hall, jerking her about as though she were a straw puppet used for warriors to pound until their arms tired of the training. Yet she had strength. Her Dragoness voiced an approving roar as Lia braced beneath the onslaught. Her boots gripped the floor. Her fingers flexed on the sword hilts.\n\n<I am Balance.> She centred herself.\n\n<I am the wind.> She bent away from Shinzen's blows, allowing them to pass over her.\n\n<I will face the day of reckoning with courage.> With a shout, Hualiama sprang to meet the Giant.\n\nIn. Out. The swords hacked into Shinzen as though he were a block of granite. Shinzen executed his scissors-tactic once more, but Lia spun around the horizontal axis of her body, holding the swords almost flat against her frame to avoid the converging hafts of his hammers, before flicking the blades at the end, with an abrupt twist. One blade bit into his left wrist, the other severed the forefinger of his right hand.\n\nEven as Shinzen stared stupidly at the stump, Lia was rising into a leaping pirouette, whipping her swords around with the centrifugal force of her rotating body. *Snick! Snick!* The Warlord roared and swung as the blades slashed across his left ear and cheek, but she was a wisp, a Dragoness dancing through battle with that incredible, all-embracing awareness, that decelerated perception that allowed her a split-second's extra time to anticipate moves as rapid as Shinzen's. For this, she had eaten arena sand over and over again. She had taken beatings in training from masters and students alike and had risen to her feet, bruised and humiliated, to carry on. Even though she wore the welts and contusions of the Giant's recent beating, she knew deep in the molten-fire core of her being that she could never allow a creature like Shinzen to prevail. His path was to consume, to dominate, to kill. Her way was to shine where nothing but darkness seemed able to exist.\n\nAt last, she grasped something of her purpose. A convergence between the tidal forces pulling her life in so many impossible directions.\n\nHualiama bent her back like a supple reed, allowing a hammer-blow to fizz past her chin, before slashing deeply with the blades once more. The Nuyallith forms rose in her mind, hypnotically implanted by the monk Ja'al. Knowledge injected itself directly into her muscles. The cobra-thrust up into his left armpit. The double-windroc technique spiralling into the whirlwind attack, piercing Shinzen's armour in dozens of places, but as yet, she was unable to land a crippling blow.\n\nBlood splattered off the Giant, but he kept right on coming at her, bellowing like a bull. Hualiama folded softly around a blow meant to crush her ribs, riding the head of his left-hand hammer in a half-circle before falling away. She tumbled head-over-heels, then reversed direction to meet his lumbering charge and for the first time, caused Shinzen to trip over his own hammer. Nigh ten feet of Giant measured his length in the King's Hall, shaking the paintings and tapestries on the walls.\n\nThe Warlord rebounded with another brutish roar. His answering blow, even though she leaped and twisted away, flung her spinning through the air. Land. Twist again. Hualiama groaned at a glancing blow to her left shoulder, but wriggled away through his legs, hacking at his ankles on the way past, but the iron-like thews resisted being hamstrung. O mosquito, bite harder! Lia scrambled away to collect her thoughts for a vital half-second.\n\nShe was the child of the Dragon, the great Onyx Dragon, and that heritage could not be denied. Four of Jin's daggers whirred into the Giant's back as Hualiama's dancing turned a charging Shinzen this way and that, always cutting, always flitting away like a butterfly before he could land a decisive blow.\n\nFire rose within her, shining and uninhibited and thrilling, fuelling the extraordinary height of her leaps as she performed the aerial splits right over the Warlord's head. Her downward strikes chipped bone off his skull, opening fleshy gashes ten inches long. Maddened with pain, the Giant flung a hammer at her. It caught the inside of her right knee, a perfect, laming blow. She collapsed with a sharp cry, rolling away to the dais as he dogged her retreat. Jin! He was right behind her, trying to help her rise!\n\nNow she had to protect the boy.\n\nThe Giant kicked her backward against Jin, brutally. Sharp pain stabbed into her left side. The ribs! He kicked again and again, battering her upraised legs, seeking to debilitate. Toying with her. Waiting for the moment of fatal vulnerability, when he could look into her eyes and see the dying terror he so craved.\n\nNever!\n\n<Humansoul!> cried her Dragoness.\n\nA picture. A desperate gambit. With a pointless war-cry, Hualiama threw her battered body at Shinzen as his boot swung in again. She collapsed against his shin. No need to pretend hurt. Blood dribbled from her mouth as she groaned loudly and long. The Warlord kicked her off with a curse; he thrust her body against Jin in order to create the space needed to swing his hammer.\n\n<Dragonsoul, give me strength\u2026>\n\n\"Curse you, Dragonfriend!\" roared the Giant.\n\nShinzen loomed over her, every muscle in his neck and shoulders standing out in rigid relief as he twirled the hammer into a massive, two-handed overhead wallop. Sliding forward abruptly on her knees, inside the arc of his blow, Hualiama whipped up her blades in the breaking-the-hammer defensive technique. They sliced exactly into the joints of Shinzen's descending wrists. With a flaring of light, they sheared right through both wrists simultaneously. The power of his blow caused the Giant to dismember himself.\n\nBehind her, Jin cried out as the flying hammer-head audibly cracked bone.\n\nLia ignored him, for the Warlord had dropped to his knees. His eyes bulged grotesquely as he took in the blood spurting from his severed wrists. Hot droplets splattered her armour, her neck and right cheek. Jerking forward with a wrist-reversal to flip the cutting edges to the outside, Hualiama thrust her blades upward into the base of Shinzen's neck, grating against his backbone. She ripped outward with every last ounce of her Dragon-fuelled strength, tearing through muscle and tissue and the great carotid arteries feeding the brain.\n\nEven so, the Giant did not die easily.\n\nHe slumped forward, knocking her once more against Jin. Shinzen's head thumped into her lap. He tried to speak, but could only make a ghastly whistling sound from the ruin of his throat. His chest heaved. Unable to draw breath. Staring in disbelief, yet moisture leaked from the corner of his eye, a tiny echo of the crimson pulsing in ghastly waves from his gaping throat. Did he know regret? Then, very slowly, his eyes rolled up to white and his body gave a single, parting shudder. His spirit was gone.\n\nSilence struck the hall so deeply, it roared in her ears.\n\nHualiama hesitated, but then reached over and pressed the Giant's eyelids closed with her fingertips, saying, \"May you sleep in death as you never rested in life, and the evil you represented, die with you.\"\n\nThe Dragonsong of death filled her being. Elegiac.\n\nHer head lifted. The Giants stationed around the King's Hall stood petrified with disbelief, but King Taisho moved toward her, nodding sagely. \"You have served my kingdom above and beyond a duty of honour, Princess Hualiama.\"\n\nHe nodded again\u2026\n\nA hand slipped around her head to press something against her nose. Her ears caught a tiny tinkling of glass. A smell of bitter anise ambushed her, a pungent taint that she drew into her lungs in a half-breath before her mind registered\u2013'danger!'\n\n\"Jin?\" she gasped, her blades tumbling from nerveless fingers.\n\nParalysing cold spread through every muscle in her body. With a soft exhale, Lia slumped like Shinzen before her. Any power of movement or feeling belonged to a stranger. The boy kicked himself out from beneath her, letting her head crack against the marble floor, but there was no pain, only numbness. Poisoned! Jinichi stood briefly in the frozen ambit of her vision, his lips compressed into a thin line as he regarded her with an expression somewhere between grief and hatred.\n\n\"Begone, Nikuko,\" said the King, harshly. \"You've served your purpose here.\"\n\nThe teenager regarded the King darkly. \"My reward?\"\n\n\"All that you are due will be given you,\" Taisho said evenly. \"All the peoples of Kaolili will thank you when we forge our new alliance. Behold.\"\n\nHualiama lacked the power to turn, but the sound of that first footfall was a death-knell to her hopes. Azziala! Low laughter beat against her ears. \"Aye, the boy has served our purposes well, o King. And you have delivered your part of the bargain. My fugitive daughter. What was the poison you used, boy?\"\n\nShe felt nauseated. Betrayed by the King she had trusted and served. Betrayed by a jealous boy. Her heartbeat crashed louder and louder, as if war-drums swelled with their dreadful beat, until all the world collapsed around her.\n\n\"Ordibathik serum,\" he said, a word which meant nothing to Hualiama, nor evidently, to her mother either.\n\n\"Which is?\" Azziala grated.\n\nJin's voice shook slightly as he replied, \"A compound particular to my peoples' apothecaries. A paralytic nerve agent with additional magic-dampening properties. The Princess will be unable to use any of her powers for a period of time dependant on her resistance.\"\n\nNo magic? Aye, her Dragoness seemed dormant, her open connection with Grandion, blunted. Even her telepathic Dragonish was unavailable, somehow dampened and locked away by the serum. Magical poison? Hualiama had never imagined such an attack, especially not from Jin, whom Grandion trusted implicitly. This was the wrongness which had struck her about the King's Hall. Even the Giants had not known that Azziala lurked in anticipation of executing her masterstroke.\n\nShe was undone.\n\nThe footsteps approached steadily. Azziala said, \"Now, we wait. With Shinzen's forces neutralised as Affurion and his lizards chase them to the death, we will require the Tourmaline's presence here in order to force the Princess to obey. Meantime, Numistar Winterborn chases my phantom fleet to the South. By the time she realises her mistake, we will have possession of the ruzal and you and I, dear Taisho, will secure our places as leaders of a new world order. You will have the East, and I will command the rest of the Island-World.\"\n\nThe familiarity in her mother's voice sickened her. So this was King Taisho's plan to save his kingdom? A betrayal\u2013did Jin know how he had been used? He must, although the boy gave no indication, for as he moved out of her line of sight, his face was an unreadable mask. Traitor! Now she knew who had spied on her at the barracks, Jin and his virtuoso sneaking ability, leering at her nude, transformed body. What lies had Taisho fed him? Had he even known about the Empress?\n\nAll too soon, the storm's distant thundering abated as Numistar raced southward, hunting Azziala's fleet. Those who would be sacrificed for the greater cause. And Grandion came.\n\nShe still sensed that much. As always, the oath-connection operated at a level deeper than or different to ordinary magic. She could not say how she knew it, but she detected his approach before the Empress did, and though every fibre of her being wailed and warned, she could not prevent his seeking her, for the Dragon was frantic with need. Lia heard Azziala's Dragon Enchanters readying themselves. Dozens of voices. Perhaps the greater part of the Dragon-Hater forces.\n\nAnd here she lay like a beached trout. Powerless. But her will was indomitable, she assured herself. A psychic bastion-ward could never be breached.\n\n<Oh my Dragoness, what will we do now?>\n\nShe was silent.\n\nGrandion burst into the hall, bugling his fury, and lasted two seconds. Hundreds of Dragon-Haters piled in to subjugate the Tourmaline; despite his powerful protections, without the support they had always drawn from each other, he was unable to withstand their prodigious attack.\n\nAzziala raised her arms, drinking in their power. <DRAGON, OBEY!>\n\nWith a groan, Grandion settled nearby. Her Dragon! Oh Grandion, shell-son of Sapphurion, how low thou art fallen! And now, the susurrus of blood in her ears was all the lament she could sing for him. Noble Tourmaline. Faithful to the girl who had spurned him.\n\nAgain the tapping boots, circling her prone body. Hualiama lay where she had fallen, in a sticky puddle of Shinzen's blood, unable to lift a finger.\n\nAzziala said, \"I have observed much about you, my daughter. I know that ruzal cannot be stolen from you. It must be given willingly. And I understand that despite your avowed affection for this lizard, you would regard withholding the power of ruzal from those you see as evil, as a higher imperative even than suffering the sight of his death\u2013and I can make that death the most terrible, lingering event, unimaginable to you. Misguided as you are, you have inherited your mother's flair for intractability and wilfulness.\"\n\nShe could not focus her eyes, but Hualiama saw the golden form of her mother leaning into her field of vision from her right side.\n\nIn a strange voice, Azziala cried, \"I Reaved thee, my flesh and blood, with the Reaving of love, and thou hast despised thy inheritance. I succoured thee to the place of thy birth, and thou hast denied thy inheritance. In all thy dealings, thou hast played me false, Hualiama. And so I conclude, that a foul spirit hath inhabited thy very soul, and by this spirit thou my true and beloved daughter, hath been brought to the place of mockery and wrongdoing.\"\n\nShe could not break in. Azziala could never break in\u2026\n\n\"Thou art two, not one, lizard-soul and Humansoul ensconced in one flesh. Truly it was that day, you did not die. Hualiama, your soul was stolen away by Ianthine the Insane, the first and last lizard I ever made the mistake of trusting. She took an unborn infant to her laboratory, and there, by the power of her ruzal, she fused Human life with the draconic and birthed the monstrosity that you are!\"\n\nHer shriek could only make Hualiama jump inwardly. No! This was a crazy, twisted misinterpretation of those events. The eggling spirit had danced with her, had it not? She had sought Hualiama across the many leagues, across the Island-World\u2026 and they had connected in a place of dying need and in love. That was the truth. Incontrovertible truth.\n\n\"And now, it is my duty\u2013for the sake of the goodness of this world\u2013to correct this foul perversion which is meet in your flesh.\" She paused to breathe raggedly through her nostrils. \"Hualiama, as your loving mother, it is my duty to Reave the Dragon-spirit out of thee. I will rend thy being in twain. And when you are released from the demonic spirit, you will at last be free, and mother and daughter can be together forever. It is our destiny.\"\n\nDemonic? Draconic? Lia's mind spun. She had once heard that most ancient language from a monk. What was his name? He had recounted to her the ancient belief that angels were spirits of pure fire, and that Dragons were the embodiment of those spirits.\n\n'Girl, you must be an angel.' Tears leaked unheeded down her cheeks as she recalled that conversation with the kindly old archivist monk. Had his words been prophetic?\n\nEqually, she knew that angelic spirits had their opposite. Ancient spirits of pure darkness, of evil. Demons. Some scroll-lore posited that various forms of insanity proved the case for possession by these spirits\u2013how else could a man gain strength enough to lift and throw a boulder larger than he was tall, or to wrench a house off its foundations? So old was this language, it had been rarely used for the last thousand years.\n\nWould that she could quiz Fra'anior about this ancient lore\u2026\n\nAzziala seemed to view her unbidden tears as evidence of defeat. Leaning closer, until Lia could see the exact gleam in her eyes, she said softly, \"We cannot touch you from without, Hualiama. We both know that. Still, even the most impregnable fortress can be betrayed from within\u2013historically, that is the most successful and efficient tactic in warfare. I know about your psychic bastion-ward. I have examined all of the protections the profane lizard-spirit placed around your being. You think you're invulnerable. But I say there is a way in. A way through the heart.\"\n\nWith that, she glanced at Grandion. \"I'll have the Dragon attack you through your precious oath-connection. Do you think you can withstand that, Hualiama? Your very love for this beast will be your downfall.\"\n\nHualiama's soul cried out in mortal terror."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 81",
                "text": "An eternity later, Azziala continued to attack Hualiama with all the force of Tourmaline-founded power. Lia screamed for the umpteenth time. Her world was pain. Everything was pain. Such agony wracked her being that it seemed even the paralysis must be overwhelmed, for she was slowly, inevitably being forced apart by a sensation like a burning wedge being driven into her mind by a gargantuan hammer, her inmost being fraying and tearing as the Empress tried to cleave Dragon from Human. Her form wavered, flickering back and forth between a sickening multiplicity of phases, growing and shrinking bizarrely as the Shapeshifter magic struggled against the forces applied via the oath-connection. Droplets of golden Dragon blood as well as crimson Human blood squeezed from her brow. Her bones morphed and changed, stretching her flesh into strange new shapes before snapping back to normality.\n\nThe Empress would not relent. Hualiama would not relent. The sensation was deeper than thought, deeper even than pain, an excruciation of her living soul. Lia considered death. It had never struck her as nearer or sweeter; as a respite from hate and hurting, loneliness and despair.\n\nShe screamed again as the wedge drove deeper. Had she not been paralysed, she would have long since bitten off her tongue, Lia realised. She had relented once and given in to the ruzal, only to hear her mother crow in delight and seize the offering for herself. No. She must never, never give her mother what her ambitions demanded\u2013neither in life, nor in death.\n\nThe Dragoness writhed in as much distress as her, and Lia could not stop it. She watched the destruction of her own self, the spiralling into madness, and she knew she could not hold out much longer. Her mind would snap.\n\nAnd Grandion? Would he know? Twice, the Dragon had roared and apparently tried to fight back, but the Haters reinstated their Command-holds and Azziala's torture continued.\n\nCould a Word of Command divide the indivisible?\n\nAt some point as she floated in a burning river of suffering, she remembered King Taisho commenting that Jin had fled, that he would despatch his spies to track down the youth and finish him. So much for his reward. A dagger between the ribs would be his just portion. Just moments later, Prince Qilong arrived to demand to know the source of all the commotion. He departed speaking no word of response to his father's low dismissal. Worthless popinjay.\n\nNow she floated on that volcanic river once more, no longer aware of where or who she was. Dragoness and Human seemed committed to a macabre dance of tearing apart and coalescing and shifting, all the while being immolated in the dark furnace of Azziala's imperative, but she knew her two forms would suffer worse than death for each other. No matter the force or cost, they always came back together. Perhaps the Empress sought to defy a fundamental law of the universe such as gravity or entropy or eternity; again and again, Lia reached for her Star-power or white-fire or anything that she could possibly imagine to fling back at her mother, save the dreadful, abstruse temptation of ruzal, that ultimate repudiation of all that was wholesome and beautiful about magic and draconic fire-life. Yet there was no power here. No possibility. Only the endless, macabre dance of anguish.\n\nThe sound she heard was the breaking of her soul.\n\nNo! What? A vast draconic bellow\u2013the roof came crashing down!\n\n\"Numistar!\" someone shouted.\n\n[ Awesome-Pants ]\n\nHalf of the King's Hall lay in ruins. Inanely, Hualiama thought it a boon that Shinzen's body had not been desecrated, crushed by falling masonry. Another part of her brutalised mind observed a grey wing rapidly passing over the brand-new hole. What the\u2013ice pelted in, exploding with sharp reports on the green marble flooring. Azziala shook her fists at the sky, yelling her Commands, but there was nothing up there, just bleak, towering cloudscapes and icy rain blasting into the hall.\n\nA mighty clap of Dragon-thunder shook the Palace.\n\n\"The Ancient Dragon! Get the King to safety!\" Qilong made himself heard, although in a reedy, pathetic whine. \"You! Watch the Princess! O Empress, help us, please. We're getting slaughtered out there.\"\n\nAzziala cast Lia a longing glance, then turned on her heel. \"Fetch me a Dragon. Numistar must have detected our subterfuge. Princeling, that girl's your responsibility. Get her somewhere safe. Do you think you can possibly guard a paralysed prisoner?\"\n\n\"As you command, mistress,\" said Qilong, quavering of voice.\n\nThe hall resembled a chaotic battlefield, strewn with ice and bodies, Giant and Human. From the sounds Lia heard, Azziala and King Taisho rushed out together. A detachment of the King's Guard stood over her, sharing uncertain glances, those she could see. But now, the dread pirate-lord of a variable number of Islands plucked her out of the pool of blood with nary a squeamish squeal, and surprising ease, crying, \"Follow me, men.\"\n\nThey marched through an endless set of corridors, passing from opulence to a clearly more functional part of the Palace. Lia's head lolled against Qilong's garishly green-striped uniform jacket or alternately, flopped against his forearm.\n\n\"Waaarrrggh?\" Lia asked.\n\nShouting! Lurching! A roar! Suddenly Qilong was running. Lia caught a glimpse of Makani to the rear, casually gluing a cohort of royal soldiers to a stone ceiling. Mercy. Sumio's bald pate gleamed briefly in lamplight. The man darted off and she heard a horrible gurgle as he did something unmentionable to an unseen assailant. Then Flicker dived into her unresponsive, unfeeling arms and tried to burrow beneath her neck-armour, crooning and flicking her face with his hot forked tongue.\n\nJin cried, \"Where to?\"\n\nWhat on the Islands was happening? Lia's battered mind could not string events and impressions into a coherent sequence.\n\n\"Follow me, men,\" cried Prince Qilong. He did not do well with variety in his stock lines, but Hualiama's dulled ears caught the sounds of a growing number of boots in the corridor as they raced along, now a whiff of herbs, perhaps a storage room, now mohili grain, now a dank, dimly-lit section of underground tunnel, clearly little-used.\n\nShe almost giggled. Qilong planned to rescue her?\n\nWhat of Grandion? They'd left him behind! No! \"Ulllmaarrrggh,\" she protested.\n\nQilong spared a moment to pat her cheek absently. \"Don't you worry, little Princess. We're taking you somewhere safe. Somewhere far away from that freakish rajal you call a mother.\"\n\n\"Lurgle praaaarrrgh?\" That was all she could gurgle. Little Princess? Insufferable\u2026 saviour! Lia tried a grin, but that slack-jawed effort clearly only managed to frighten him.\n\n\"I'll explain everything, I swear,\" he gasped. \"Save your strength.\"\n\nRight he was. She had never felt quite so much like a sack of skin in which the bones had been shaken up and left in odd orientations. Her eyes rolled about without any control whatsoever. Jin, that traitor, ran alongside Qilong as though it were the most natural place in the world. She had to force herself to remain conscious. She faded into and out of darkness, her physical body somehow disconnected from her mind. That was a stranger's body, a body aching in every muscle and ligament, and deeper yet. A body only beginning to scream about violation, anguish, ruin\u2026\n\nFighting! Weapons crashed and clanged somewhere; there came a crescendo of shouting and Prince Qilong lowered his head to bull through a crowd of battling men. Qilong? Power, focus, man of action\u2013Qilong? Lia caught glimpses of the pirate-lord's crew dealing with Royal Guards with commendable competence before Makani shot past in a gust of cinnamon-scented wind and did what Dragonesses did best. Blood and gore, and indeed entire body parts, dripped from the tunnel's walls and ceiling.\n\n\"Alright. Sack.\"\n\n\"Grragurrr!\" Lia howled. No chance. Into a burlap sack she tipped. Onions. The sack reeked of rotten onion peel.\n\nThen there was more bouncing and jouncing and at least four kicks and cuffs that she counted, along with a slew of uncouth banter about the sack's contents and what might be done therewith, before she heard the unmistakable creaking of a Dragonship's hawsers and boots banging urgently on metal gantries. The two-timing sneak! Treacherous rajal! Having given up on Saori, Prince Qilong had seized the chance during the mother of all battles to snitch a new bride and abscond to the furthermost Isles of his benighted kingdom!\n\nThe number of names she called him in her mind. Did he not care for the destruction of Kaolili? For the fact that the Empress of the Lost Isles was about to seat herself upon the throne of the East, upon his father's throne? What by all the volcanic hells of Fra'anior itself did Qilong think he was doing? Because when she woke, and her Dragoness woke with her, she would give that quisling Prince far more than rotten onions to deal with!\n\nAs a tide of exhaustion caught up with her, Lia noticed that evening had already fallen. She heard the leathery snap of sails being deployed, the chanting of men on the back-breakers as they worked the manual turbines, and a heading of Yorbik being announced by the Steersman.\n\nYorbik? Ridiculous. That was way, way across the Cloudlands\u2026"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 82",
                "text": "The Tourmaline Dragon surfaced from a sleep filled with dark-fire nightmares in which he repeatedly burned Hualiama until a face of charcoal screamed at him from his sleep. He woke, bellowing, *GNNAAARRGGHH!*\n\n<Wing-brother! Be silent. Good, you're awake.>\n\nGrandion gathered his thoughts from the farthest reaches of the Islands. <H\u2026 Huuuu\u2026.>\n\n<Good news. She's gone with Prince Qilong.> A paw checked his eyelids. Grandion blinked in pain as light stabbed in. <The Empress makes plans to depart the East for Gi'ishior.>\n\n<Qi-uunnnh?>\n\nThe Brown Overmind checked his eyes again. What was the null-fires idiot doing? Why could Grandion not rise and greet the dawn as any Dragon worth his wings ought to?\n\nHe blasted his brain into order. <Wha\u2026 what is this? Where? Her?>\n\nRapidly, Affurion said, <Four days have passed.>\n\nFour! It could not be. The Tourmaline's thoughts scattered in undraconic, dark-fires dread, unable to accept this information. No. What could the Empress have done in four days?\n\n<Azziala used your oath-connection to torture Hualiama, but in a surprise manoeuvre, Makani broke into the Palace that evening, pretending to be Numistar,> the Brown explained. <In the confusion, Prince Qilong absconded with the Blue-star and the boy called Jin. The Grey Dragoness travelled with them. By fast Dragonship, they made for Yorbik Free Federation.>\n\n<Impossible!> snarled Grandion.\n\n<It wasn't our plan,> said the Brown. <As best we've pieced together the evidence, this crazy scheme was initiated by her dragonet.>\n\n<Flicker? The dragonet?> At last, the Tourmaline dragged his eyes open and tried to focus on his wing-brother. <Impossible. That feral-brained little whippersnapper\u2026 what happened after that?>\n\nAffurion performed a wing-shrug. <Briefly, Numistar did return to engage Azziala, but they appeared to reach some agreement before the Winterborn chased off West in pursuit of Qilong's Dragonship. Then, Azziala gathered her people and began to transfer them back to the Air-Breathers.>\n\nGrandion's brows furrowed. <By the First Egg, Affurion\u2013four days? FOUR? Please assure me that you jest.>\n\n<The Empress drove you both to the brink of fire-extinction, wing-brother. Healing has been difficult, but Sunfyora performed a miracle of fire-stoking to bring you thus far.>\n\n<No\u2026 she's been gone\u2026 Makani's with\u2026 and Jin? That's good, isn't it?>\n\nAffurion shook his muzzle. <Jin was the betrayer, noble Grandion. Word is that Hualiama slew Shinzen with her own hand, before the boy poisoned her with a special compound which his Nikuko tribe\u2013>\n\n<NO!> Grandion tried to surge to his paws and fell back, panting heavily. <No. I trusted him\u2013I let him\u2026 help me, Affurion. I must go to her. I cannot allow\u2026 never again. Never!>\n\nThe Brown stilled him with a wingtip-touch upon his muzzle, firm yet sympathetic. <You've just recovered from the Command-hold, as has Mizuki. Elki and Saori have been working with the Dragonkind to design a strategy to combat Azziala. Rumour is that she seeks the First Egg in the Natal Cave of Fra'anior Cluster. Do you know of such a legend, noble Grandion? Could this be true?>\n\n<No,> he said, bewildered. <I don't know. The Cave's been empty for as long as Dragons have lived at Gi'ishior. Does she seek to rule all Dragonkind, Affurion? Does she?>\n\n<That is the knowledge we must seek. Meantime, gather your strength. You will fly to the rescue of your promise-beloved. We will make that happen. By my wings, we will!>\n\nHis fires wept. Once more, the foundling star had been torn from his paw. This time the fault lay squarely upon his shoulders. The Dragon-Haters had found a way to assail and injure Hualiama through the deepest oaths that bound a Dragon to a Dragoness, through Grandion's own third-heart fire-promises. When it counted most, his paw had not been strong enough.\n\nHe did not deserve to love a star."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "Hualiama awoke aboard Qilong's Dragonship minus fetters, minus sack and in full possession of all of her clothing and weapons. Confused, she stared about the cabin. There was a pleasant taste in her mouth and her stomach was neither gnawing through her backbone, nor was her throat even dry.\n\nHowever, every inch of her body felt like a bone which had been chewed over by rabid hounds.\n\nShe checked the cabin again. Aye, these were Qilong's personal quarters. No, there was no sign of the self-styled terror of the Isles. Aye, her paired swords lay close at hand, and a white dragonet, the delight of her soul, snoozed upon her pillow-roll. No, the sack lay neatly folded at her bedside as if to proclaim its lack of complicity in any crime whatsoever. She sniffed the air. Someone had set a brazier smoking, supplied with incense and medicinal herbs upon fresh coals, if she did not miss her mark. Her brow furrowed. Right, she had found a rat\u2013someone had removed her clothing, bandaged her in various places beneath, and then returned everything to normal.\n\nA light snore sounded from the foot of the bed.\n\nRoaring rajals! If that was Qilong, she was about to frighten him out of every remaining year of his life. Taking a light grip of one of the swords, Hualiama crept down the bed with difficulty. She peeked.\n\nNo, it was one of those perky Kaolili slave-girls whose ministrations Grandion had enjoyed rather more freely than a reptile ought to. The girl was pretty and petite, with long, jet-black hair framing an oval face of elfin beauty. Her full lips curved upward as she slept. A contented slave? Hmm. The slave-girl slept beneath a thin, lime-green cotton sheet, and her pillow-roll was a kind Lia had never seen before, a carved block of jinsumo wood. Islands' sakes, how could that piece of furniture enable comfortable sleep?\n\nLia settled back, swallowing down bile. She had to admit, she felt far worse than she had initially thought. Wounded. Fuzzy. Beaten. Further trying to identify the unfamiliar scents upon the night air, brought her no further illumination. She had no idea where she was, only that the Prince himself had whisked her away from his father's kingdom to Dragons only knew where, and she had better\u2026\n\n\"Mercy! Don't do that.\"\n\n\"I apologise, Mistress. I heard your breathing change,\" said the girl, kneeling beside the foot of the bed.\n\n\"Uh\u2026 call me Lia. Please.\" While she bade her heart resettle in her chest.\n\n\"That would be most improper.\"\n\n\"What's your name?\"\n\n\"To address me by name would dishonour your great reputation, Mistress. I would be most honoured if you'd call me Thirteenth Slave.\"\n\nBefore she could stop herself, Lia made a disgusted noise. The girl immediately looked crestfallen. Oh, mercy. How to rescue this? Serenity writ upon that lovely face could not disguise her response. Carefully, Lia said, \"On my home Island of Fra'anior, I grew up in a great and noble house where we hold to many traditions, much like the royal houses of the East. Some you would find familiar, and some, most peculiar. For example, regard this dragonet. We sing with dragonets.\"\n\nOnly a slight quiver of the left eyebrow betrayed the girl's surprise.\n\n\"Our men kidnap their brides and carry them off in their Dragonships, and even Princesses are expected to train at weapons-craft and to become powerful warriors. I am a Dragonship engineer and pilot, as well as a warrior-monk, and a singer and dancer. In our culture, we know each person's given name, which we believe shows respect for the individual. So I would know every member of our royal household, down to the lowliest kitchen boy. We are also very careful with titles. Moreover, we employ a great variety of formal and informal bows to indicate, without naming the person's title, that we know who they are and the precise nature of their relative standing to ourselves in our culture, along with nuances for time of day, the formality of the occasion, and so on. In our love of nuance, our cultures are alike.\"\n\nQuietly, the girl interjected, \"My given name is Isiki.\"\n\n\"Was I that obvious?\"\n\n\"The Mistress is always right,\" the girl returned, with perfect composure. \"May I bring you something for your comfort, Mistress? I am instructed to supply your every need.\"\n\n\"What I need most is information. Where am I? What is my situation here?\"\n\n\"Prince Qilong asked to be informed as soon as you wake. I am assigned to be your handmaiden. I am to assure you that you are safe, cared for and far from those who would threaten your life.\"\n\nWell. Lia knew of one pressing need that could not wait. But she had to rely on Isiki's help to cross the narrow gap between the bed and the garderobe, and to suffer the embarrassment of having her clothing loosened so that she could relieve herself\u2013uncovering bruises and bandages fit to supply a war-infirmary. Ugh. How weak? And how long had her Dragoness\u2013mercy!\n\n<Dragoness? Dragonsoul, are you\u2013>\n\n<Humanlove! Oh, blessed be the wings that bore you hence! I was so worried, almost beside myself\u2026> Lia smiled as a warm sensation filled her heart. Ah, an invisible inner hug. Now there was medicine for the soul! <Don't you ever leave me like that again. Wasn't your fault, of course. You've been unconscious for four days.>\n\n\"Four days!\" Hualiama gasped.\n\n\"Mistress?\"\n\n\"How long have I been unconscious? Where are we?\"\n\nMoments later, she was shaking her head in disbelief. Four days out into the Cloudlands? At least\u2013she checked herself rapidly\u2013her bones felt as if they had generally returned to their rightful locations, even if every joint ached and every muscle felt like a cloth wrung out by a washer-woman's strong hands. And she still had possession of the accursed ruzal. Lia exited the garderobe and shuffled to the bed like a woman seventy years her senior.\n\nMoons and stars, what was Qilong's strategy in this? \"Girl\u2013uh, Thirteenth Slave\u2013please make me comfortable. Fetch food and water, and inform the mighty Prince I am ready to receive him at his convenience.\"\n\n<Aye, I'm about ready to receive him too, growled the Dragoness, showing her mental picture of talons exiting their sheaths.>\n\n<Exactly.>\n\nLia caught an odd sidelong glance from Isiki. Surely the girl had not heard? Had she spoken Dragonish aloud? Add this peculiarity to Jin's abilities and her neck was itching as if her Dragoness had a severe case of scale-rot. Something very peculiar was afoot in the Island-World. Hualiama meant to find out what it was.\n\n\"Is that boy Jin aboard this Dragonship?\" she inquired, with honeyed menace.\n\n\"Yes, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Could you make arrangements for him to be hurled overboard, forthwith?\"\n\nIsiki bowed fluidly in the Eastern fashion. \"I shall confirm your orders with the Prince at once, Mistress.\"\n\nOoh. Good answer. Hualiama cracked all of her knuckles one by one, despite that they were hurt and grossly swollen, sending the girl scurrying out of the cabin in response. Jin had better have a story fit to out-con the cleverest con-artist in history, or he would be the unwilling beneficiary of flying lessons in the vicinity of the nearest cloud."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 84",
                "text": "When Qilong was done grovelling and explaining\u2013a great deal more of the former than the latter\u2013Isiki cracked open the door to permit the sweat-soaked Prince to exit, and Jin, equally pasty of complexion, to enter. Hualiama would have preferred a moment to herself to compose and calm her thoughts. Four days out of Kaolili, sailing a brisk following breeze which had forced the fleeing vessel onto a heading just three compass points shy of fully northwest\u2013that put them on a direct course for the famed silk-producing Island of Helyon. Not massive Yorbik. Not unless they wanted to fly directly into Numistar's tender clutches.\n\nThe Prince's plan had been straightforward. Remove one Star Dragoness from the Eastern Archipelago in the hope that would ensure his nation's survival. Admirably simple. Lia would have called his scheme na\u00efve, save that it appeared Qilong had made exactly the right call. It was Numistar's winds that chased them across the vast Cloudlands ocean between Kaolili and the central Islands, a distance that no Dragon would dream of covering in solo flight\u2013except with the support of a Dragonship, and that was the Grey Dragoness Makani's idea. She slept up top at irregular intervals, shadowing the Dragonship every hour she did not rest.\n\nWhat would Azziala make of this? Lia had no idea on the Island or off of it. But with neither the ruzal nor a First Egg likely to be gained in the East, Hualiama concluded that the Dragon-Haters would either completely abandon their plans for Kaolili, or set up a base of operations in the East while they scoured the Island-World for rumour of the First Egg. She doubted the Empress would chase her problematical daughter across the leagues. Not now. She knew that Lia must inevitably come for her, and she held the Tourmaline, Elki and Saori hostage.\n\nNow, she studied Jin as he stood framed in the doorway, his left arm encased in a sling.\n\nMust she find mercy for the traitor-turned-rescuer? He had fled the Palace only as far as the barracks, where he had spoken to Flicker and Makani, and conceived the plan which had brought her this far, almost a thousand leagues from Kerdani City.\n\n\"Kill me,\" he blurted out. \"Kill me, great lady. The dishonour is too great. I shamed my people, my sword and all of the Dragonkind. I cannot live with this shame.\"\n\n\"Jin\u2013\"\n\n\"Kill me!\" His scream echoed in the room, startling Flicker into wakefulness. Lia soothed the dragonet with a touch. \"Tell me you hate me, tell me you will cross my unworthy neck with your swords\u2026\"\n\nHer fingers tightened on the hilts of her Nuyallith blades, but she did not bare so much as a quarter-inch of metal from the scabbards. The temptation was agonising. He had cost her victory, her Dragon and her health. He had cost her hours of the most insufferable torture her ingenious mother could devise, delivered via the very mechanism that breathed life between her and Grandion. She had almost lost her mind and her soul to this boy, and what she saw in his eyes, made her want to spit.\n\nRemorse.\n\nHualiama had always thought herself a merciful soul. Yet she realised she had secretly hoped Jin might be defiant, that she could summon her Dragoness and execute him in an act of clean, conscienceless vengeance. Remorse removed that power. It removed any possible peace of mind over the deed. It invited mercy, and this was one of the hardest decisions she had ever had to face.\n\nFor the longest time, she had no answer.\n\nEventually, the silence forced her hand. Lia croaked, \"Why?\"\n\nHe tottered forward to the bedside, crashed to his knees. \"Slay me, Princess. I'm begging you\u2013\"\n\n\"First, I need to know why. Why did you do it, Jin?\"\n\nBecause they had convinced him that Hualiama was an inhuman monster, a Western enchantress possessed by a Dragoness. He had seen her change with his own eyes, he admitted. He had believed the lie that she had come to Kaolili to instigate a draconic uprising against the Humankind, aiming to drive Man off the Eastern Islands forever\u2013just as his own people had been wiped out five years before, not by Giants as he had been told, but in truth by King Taisho's own forces.\n\n\"King Taisho promised not to hurt you,\" he said, sobbing brokenly at this point in his meandering tale. \"But then he handed you over to the Empress, and she\u2026 and when I saw you shattered, there on the floor, lying in the pool of blood of the very monster you had slain in service of my kingdom, and still they betrayed you\u2026 I could not understand.\"\n\nWhat Lia could not understand, was the intensity of the connection she felt with this treacherous, tortured soul. She would never have made such a decision. He had. Yet what burned in her heart when she considered him? Nothing she had ever felt before. A sulphurous mystery.\n\nHe explained earnestly, \"I saw her try to force the Dragon-spirit out, but it was not as they said. Spirits do not amalgamate with a living soul. They dominate and subjugate. Under such terrible coercion, any ordinary possessing spirit would have fled the mortal coil, leaving the subordinate creature to perish. My people know these things. Our lore is much concerned with the spirits\u2013I could tell you many legends, Princess. Many. That day, four days ago, I saw something different. I saw one soul, one spirit, inseparable. I realised she was trying to rend a soul asunder, and that is a deed fouler than any under the twin suns. It was an abomination!\"\n\nHe made to spit superstitiously, but discovered Isiki's foot just nearby, and desisted. \"Knowing my blunder and my dishonour, I set out to correct it before I killed myself. And I will do it. If you refuse to strike off my dishonoured head, Princess, I shall fall upon my own blade\u2013\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nJin's hand held steady beside his lower belly. \"This dagger is poisoned. You cannot stop me in time. Neither you, nor your slave-girl.\"\n\nLia said, \"Isiki, step away from Jin.\" The girl obeyed, flushing at the public use of her name. \"Jin, no.\"\n\n\"I am honour-bound\u2013\"\n\n\"No, please.\" He glanced up through his lashes. In a voice roughed by need and incipient horror, Lia grated, \"I beg of you\u2013\"\n\n\"No!\" His hand quavered in horror, but refrained somehow from piercing the flesh. \"You cannot beg. That is\u2026 unfair\u2026\"\n\nShe said softly, \"I am begging you. Jin, I'm not very familiar with honour-cultures. Let me tell you my history. Once, I was adopted. Someone took a chance on me and adopted me; it just so happened, that my adoptive parents were King Chalcion and Queen Shyana of Fra'anior. So I'm a princess, but in a sense, not royalty. Before that time, I was raised by Dragons. And from times earlier than I can remember, I yearned for flame. I yearned for an inner fire that burned within me whenever I felt angry or sad, or particularly happy, such as when I dance\u2026 this flame lived within me, and I did not know what it was.\"\n\nHis eyes burned, a shade of lambent grey that made her think of lanterns. Though she did not hear the words, she saw him mouth, 'I know.'\n\n\"Now I know that I am a real Dragoness, as much as I am a real Human. I have just told Qilong the same. I am a Shapeshifter Dragoness, Jin, and I know what it is to be alone, and to be the only one of my kind. Jin, look at me.\"\n\nHe kept his eyes fixed upon the blade, yet his entire body shook like a reed in a flooding river as emotions coursed through him.\n\n\"Look into my eyes, or I'll turn you into a dragonet.\"\n\nFlicker murmured in protest. Throughout this exchange, he had been watching them both very closely. Making his decision, he hopped onto Lia's lip, and nuzzled her arm with a satisfied purr. <Good.>\n\n<More than good. I need to thank you properly later, you awesome dragonet.>\n\nJin fought it, but a tight, sad smile had a grip upon his lips. So rife with storms were his eyes, Lia caught her breath. She was no mind-reader, but as best she could tell, sincerity shone in the tenor of magic she detected there. Agitation and anxiety mingled with white-fires truth.\n\nShe said, \"I won't pretend I haven't been hurt by your betrayal, Jin. I won't pretend there isn't part of me that does want to wring your scrawny little neck, before dissecting your entrails minutely and scattering them for the windrocs. There's two parts of me; I'm not sure my Dragoness feels the same way, entirely.\"\n\n<She does,> Flicker informed her, interrupting the Dragoness within. Dragoness-Lia had not stopped growling since Jin dared to enter the cabin.\n\n\"I'll talk to her,\" Lia temporised. \"Now, I'm begging you because death\u2026 death is the easy way out.\"\n\nJin and Isiki jumped identically, then glanced at each other with expressions that queried exactly which Isle of madness the foreigner on the bed currently inhabited.\n\n\"Aye, the easy path,\" she said grimly, certain of her ground. \"I am not enamoured with easy, cheap paths to honour, for they are fleeting and soon forgotten. Jin, I beg you to make the hard choice. Stay the course. Perhaps one day you might learn another kind of honour, one that involves much struggle and sacrifice, perhaps a notion of honour somewhat sullied and frayed around the edges, but infinitely the more precious for that it was dearly purchased.\"\n\nBesides, pouring out his life now would be a tragedy. A waste of potential. Lia still wanted to find a Dragon for him, but this was not the moment.\n\n\"Will you think upon my proposal, at least?\" she pressed.\n\nStill, the dagger did not move. She beseeched him with her eyes. The boy still seemed to be fighting the call of his heritage. Lia observed how skittish he and Isiki behaved around each other; how acutely aware each was of the other, despite their inability to even share a glance. Frozen teenagers. She wanted to hoot with laughter, but refrained. Oho!\n\nShe said, deliberately addressing the air between the pair, \"Besides, we Fra'aniorians say that honour is like a woman, Jinichi. She is whimsical and multifaceted, possessing an enormous capacity to amaze. If you truly desire her, you must pursue her with all of your heart, soul and mind.\"\n\nWell, that was a free paraphrasing of the ballads, but close enough.\n\nRising, Jin bowed until he folded almost double. \"Your wisdom is my anchor, o Princess.\"\n\nThen, he fled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 85",
                "text": "Endless Cloudlands tan dappled with umber rolled to the horizon. Beyond the compass of Human vision, the Star Dragoness saw the very slight discolouration of bluish smoke which indicated Human habitation. Helyon. Prince Qilong wanted to put down to re-provision there, but the storm which had pursued them for two further days since her reawakening, had other ideas. It had taken a day's pause, perhaps for Numistar's white dragonets to feed in the realms below the clouds, before racing after the fleeing Dragonship with renewed vigour.\n\nGale-force winds whistled through the rigging. The side-sails that gave a Dragonship its name and characteristic Dragon-like appearance had been storm-lashed, triple-strong, to the supporting spars, and the broad, white silk sails crackled and snapped with the action of the wind. The ropes thrummed and sang as if strummed by a whimsical lute-player. No chance to turn for Yorbik, Hualiama judged, given the wind sweeping relentlessly from a point East of South. Qilong was a capable pilot. Yet where did this mean Numistar Winterborn wished to drive them? Beyond Helyon and into the vast, uninhabited expanse called Immadior's Sea, which ended at the fabled Isle of Immadia? Behind, a broad storm-front swept across the Cloudlands as if a vast animal churned and chewed up the toxic expanse, regurgitating greasy, polluted black clouds into the atmosphere above.\n\nLanding in winds this strong would be tricky verging on suicidal. Flying aloft beside Makani, Hualiama found herself bounced about and buffeted by the changeable, icy breeze. As a result, her Dragoness felt as ornery as a feral rajal stung by a hunter's arrow.\n\nYet to be flying, albeit stiffly, was a wonder. She had always read Dragons healed quickly. This was craziness. The ribs, just a faint twinge. Most of her bruises were yellowing up nicely. To think that two days ago she had been unable to rise from bed unaided\u2026\n\nFlicker, bravely fluttering alongside her, suddenly babbled, <Ship stop-no? No. Danger. Dragons get water and nibbles, good yes, yes, very yes?>\n\n<Uh\u2013right.> Lia checked with Makani, who waved an agreeable wingtip circle. <Do you mean, we should fly ahead to secure supplies without the Dragonship actually making a landing? Numistar would punish anyone who took us in, that's for certain.>\n\nThe tiny white muzzle peeped, <Eep-aye. Clever Lia. Wrong place stop. Smell wrong.>\n\n<Huh,> said Makani. <We should teach the dragonet to speak less nonsense. He does, however, advance a sound idea. Our destiny lies far beyond Helyon, I sense.>\n\n<What Lia say? Flicker is awesome-pants?>\n\nLaughing merrily, Lia asked, <Where did you pick up that phrase, Flicker?>\n\n<Qilong teach me Human-speak.>\n\nMakani snorted a great puff of smoke-laughter. <Qilong? Of course, he primps and poses like the most narcissistic of male Dragons.>\n\n\"Awesome-pants,\" the dragonet chirped clearly. \"I am awesome-pants.\"\n\n[ The Reach of a Dragon's Wings ]\n\nAFter Flying Several hours with Grandion and Mizuki, Affurion saluted them with a wing-dip. \"May you fly beyond the five moons, Dragons and Riders,\" he said formally. \"We will track the Haters on their way West, with Siiyumiel's help. May we meet in a place of white-fire suns.\"\n\n\"Fly strong and true, noble Dragon,\" Grandion returned.\n\nSaori lifted her hand as if wanting to speak, but swallowed instead and turned to check the straps binding her seat between Grandion's spine-spikes. The Tourmaline sighed. <Wing-brother?>\n\n<We should not separate a woman with child from her man,> he said stiffly.\n\nGrandion snapped, <I've never met such an obstinate, prideful granite-head!> He meant regarding the Copper Dragoness, too; all three Dragons knew it.\n\n<Then let me be obstinate and focus on rescuing my kind and bringing them to a safe Dragonhold.> Nevertheless, Affurion added aloud, \"Elki, much remains that could be spoken between us. Promise me you will keep Saori and your unborn child safe until we fly together again?\"\n\nElki nodded. \"I promise, mighty Affurion.\"\n\n\"I will\u2026 hold you all in my third heart,\" he growled gruffly. \"All of you.\"\n\n\"All that is Copper shall sing at the advent of thy wings against the fragrant skies,\" said Mizuki, choosing a famous epic poem, but personalising it in a way the Brown Overmind could not possible misunderstand.\n\nBlushing up an enormous belly-fire storm, Affurion turned and blazed away to the South.\n\nGrandion shook his muzzle. \"Ha.\"\n\nMizuki and Saori sniffed with equal perplexity. \"Ha.\"\n\n\"I fear that to explain would be largely redundant,\" said Elki, patting Mizuki's powerful shoulder, \"therefore I shall contribute a fine, ringing 'ha!' to the conversation.\"\n\nThey all looked at each other, and laughed.\n\nAnd so the northwest shore of Kaolili Island vanished into the distant horizon that morning, as the Dragons drove into the bright blue beyond at a steady eighteen leagues per hour\u2013double a Dragon's ordinary long-distance flying speed, but they had one large advantage forging through the Cloudlands two leagues beneath their position. Her spiked shell cleft the grey-green cloudscapes with enviable ease, her mighty bulk driving through the thick air and leaving a long trail of slightly sparkling disturbance behind her, the magic-enhanced output of her rearward-facing blast-ejectors. In other words, Elki took pains to inform them, Shell-Clan Land Dragons were the mightiest poo-powered predators of all.\n\nTiiyusiel. Rather than suffering a slow Dragonship escort across the long leagues to Helyon Island\u2013Hualiama had been spotted four hundred leagues shy of Helyon by a small Saga-Runner, the previous evening\u2013they had a frisky, enthusiastic youngster. Siiyumiel's talon-stroke of genius.\n\nThe Dragoness' stellated carapace slowly dipped beneath the clouds. <I shall rise at dawn, my friends. Travel fast, for I forge forth to tame the mighty S\u00fb-tar-Ingrar Current.>\n\n<At dawn!> the Tourmaline called back.\n\nAye, if Lesser Dragons had a handy moving Island to land upon and rest, they could envisage a crossing that was out of reach of even a Dragon's wings. Perhaps they could catch up with the much slower Dragonship bearing Qilong and Hualiama.\n\nGrandion scanned the horizon all that long, golden afternoon as the Dragons winged northward, following the helpful airstreams swirling in the wake of Numistar's forty league-wide storm. The suns vanished for a long period behind the waxing Yellow Moon, but toward evening, reappeared beneath Yellow's underbelly, casting vast golden fingers of light across their path, a quality of light comparable in many ways to the unique volcanic suns-sets of the Fra'anior Cluster. So viscous and gilded was the sunlight, the Tourmaline Dragon pictured himself swimming in a terrace lake of pure, liquid gold, and so his hearts' hope swelled into his throat and he sang in slow, worshipful Dragonsong:\n\n<Oh for wings to bear my soul,>\n\n<Beyond the cloudscapes of my dreams,>\n\n<Escaping the mortal coil that binds a being,>\n\n<Into flesh and blood and bone.>\n\n<Beyond this present world,>\n\n<Into eternity.>\n\nMizuki made a harmonising bugle of approval, but Prince Elka'anor called over, \"Is it common for snappish, hundred-foot armoured fortresses to be moved to feats of epic poetry, o mighty Tourmaline?\"\n\nGrandion found his laughter sounded decidedly sheepish. Grr! Embarrassed, he spluttered droplets of fire from his jaw as he growled, \"It is common in Dragons who have spent time around your sister. That was her composition.\"\n\n\"I thought I detected a special whiff of sisterly mischief,\" the Prince said jovially.\n\n\"There's more mischief afoot,\" said Saori. \"We're swapping, Elki. Mizuki and I want to have a girl talk. Privately.\"\n\n\"What, out here?\" Elki sounded aggrieved. He waved his hands, indicating the pristine expanse of cobalt-tinged Cloudlands all around them. \"There's nothing but\u2026 nothing. Hundreds and thousands of leagues of nothing.\"\n\n\"Including that tiny bit of nothingness between his ears,\" Saori put in, drawing monstrous chuckles from their mounts. Elki did not appreciate this in the slightest. He sulked out of Mizuki's helping paw and mooched dramatically up the curve of Grandion's shoulder to his spine-spikes.\n\nSaori blew kisses at him, standing boldly upright atop the Copper Dragoness' left shoulder.\n\n\"The more beautiful they are, the more fickle,\" sniffed the Prince.\n\nMizuki whirled her fire-eyes at him. \"I greet thee most sulphurously, handsome Human.\"\n\nElki's knees caved in. He sat down with a bump. \"How do women do that?\"\n\n\"What is 'girl talk'?\" asked Grandion, as Mizuki wheeled away, cutting through the suns-beams with a simple flexion of her widespread wings. \"A peculiar Human custom?\"\n\n\"No. It's when girls get together and braid their hair and talk about boys\u2013I think? Uh, not that Mizuki probably braids anything\u2026 except the limbs of her victims. Actually, I've no idea. Girls are a mystery. Wouldn't you say, Dragon?\"\n\n\"Dragonesses are a mystery. Girls are\u2013\"\n\n\"Worse?\" Elki suggested mournfully.\n\nSoftly, their laughter fell upon the evening's endless silence and vanished from existence. Grandion winged on steadily, checking his speed. Good. Out here, a Dragon's senses could begin to trick him; the unbroken emptiness, to play with the mind and will. But his hearts burned with unquenchable longing. This Tourmaline would neither be distracted nor dismayed, nor turn an inch aside from his course. This time, he would cross the Island-World for his beloved Dragoness and no power, draconic or magical or Human, would stanch his tenacious fires, nor mute his thunder.\n\nHe had been lucid for some moments of Hualiama's torture. A pox, a mighty curse upon that Hater's head! May the claw of the Great Dragon strike her very existence from the face of the Island-World! Would that his fires had been snuffed out, than see his beloved suffer like that ever again. Did she know he had fought the Haters with every ounce of his magic, and beyond magic and willpower and knowledge, even? That he had fought like a dull, unthinking beast focussed only on her need? That he had seen, heard and experienced much of her suffering, for Azziala had callously left those channels open rather than entirely subjugating his mind as before? Before that, he had seen her thought-memories and knew she had triumphed over Warlord Shinzen. And then a curious gesture, a Hualiama gesture\u2026 which moved his heart inasmuch as he failed to understand her ways.\n\nHe said, \"What does it mean when a Human shuts a dead person's eyes?\"\n\n\"Who did that?\" Elki asked in surprise. \"That's not an Eastern custom.\"\n\n\"Your sister, after she defeated Shinzen,\" said Grandion. \"The Giant had fallen, strangely, with his head on her lap. She reached out and drew his eyes shut, saying, 'May you sleep in death as you never rested in life, and the evil you represented, die with you.' She was\u2026\"\n\nThe Dragon could not find words. Elki supplied, \"Kind?\"\n\n\"Aye, kind. Why? The enemy deserved to be burned in flame, to be gutted and flayed\u2013she killed him horribly. She cut off both of his hands and then opened his throat. Any Dragon would be proud.\"\n\n\"Oh well, that makes it all better,\" Elki said sarcastically.\n\nGrandion blinked his secondary eye-membranes, certain he was being insulted but not understanding how or why.\n\nThe Prince said, \"Sorry. You didn't deserve that. Grandion, there are behaviours we would say are quintessentially Human, that define our humanity. We do not desecrate the bodies of the dead. That's a custom in the Western Isles. There are those who would argue that makes Western Islanders barbarians\u2013dancing over the bodies of the enemy, eating their brains, mutilating their corpses, staking them upside-down to be eaten by ants\u2013suchlike. I digress. Some believe we should not invite the vengeance of the spirits, for in a sense, they fear the dead or the wrath of their ancestors.\"\n\n\"This is far from Lia's conduct,\" the Tourmaline said heavily.\n\n\"No, you're right. She was showing compassion\u2013\"\n\n\"To the dead?\"\n\n\"Even to the dead. Magnanimity in victory.\"\n\n\"Weakness!\"\n\nElki shook his head. \"No, the opposite\u2013strength. She showed respect for the deceased even when he deserved none. Don't you see? This is moral backbone; transcending the baser nature, the animal\u2026 within.\"\n\nIncensed, Grandion began to take a backward snap at the Dragon Rider, then halted the gesture with a shudder. Was this what Humans thought? That Dragons were just the thinnest layer of intelligence masking feral, vicious fiends? That they were animals acting upon bestial instincts? Now he could not even clash his fangs at the Prince lest he substantiate that very accusation! Grr!\n\nThe Prince cried, \"Hear me! We are all animals in some sense, Grandion. I can speak for my species. For certain, Human behaviour is sometimes worse even than what we see in the animal realm. Did you not witness the behaviour of Shinzen and Azziala, and even the craven King Taisho? But if we can set the animal aside to act with intelligence and integrity and honour, even when it hurts most\u2013that is the mark of true character. That is what I've learned from you, and from Hualiama.\"\n\nAnd just so, the fires of his understanding flared like molten silver, so pure and sweet and true, Grandion could scarcely gasp a breath.\n\n\"That is why I stowed away on my sister's Dragonship and followed her around the Island-World,\" added the Prince. \"What about you, Grandion? Why do you fly to her?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 86",
                "text": "As Helyon Island loomed on the horizon, Hualiama and Makani commenced the replenishment runs, sparking a monstrous, flashing lightning-display from the storm behind. Numistar raged. Her thunder growled and crashed without pause along the entirety of her storm-front. The winds rose to a whistling shriek, bending the low fenturi trees whose broad, sheltering leaves and ovoid purple fruit-clusters supported untold millions of the famous Helyon silk-spinners, a type of fruitarian spider unique to the Helyon cluster.\n\nHelyon was a narrow Island lying low in the Cloudlands, entirely devoid of natural features that might break the force of Numistar's breath. Its lovingly tended gardens rolled and tumbled through a series of pretty scooped-out dells, tracing the watercourses that criss-crossed the Island like an elegant Fra'aniorian lacework, its clear gemstone-green waters fringed by the thick burgundy shrubbery of fenturi trees. Most of the people appeared to live in small, grass-roofed lodge huts barely taller than the gnarled trees that supplied their livelihood, and as Hualiama swept low over their plantations bearing five one hundred sackweight bags of imported mohili wheat sold for a price that had turned Prince Qilong's face grey, she saw small, pale faces upraised in wonder or fright.\n\nFor the first trip, she and Makani battled the rising wind; Hualiama almost standing still in the air at times before the larger, more powerful young adult Dragoness, despite being heavily loaded with ten half-ton water barrels, reached out and literally dragged her aboard the Dragonship.\n\n<No shame in being a hatchling,> growled the Grey.\n\nRight. <How far do you think Numistar will drive us?> Hualiama asked as Qilong's crew fell to unloading the Dragons. Each man wore a safety rope. Isiki and Jin were in the thick of things, wrestling one of the man-sized sacks of mohili wheat between them.\n\n<Jin, Qilong and I discussed this question last night,> said the Grey. <Are you aware of the Ice-Dragons of the North, Dragons that hail from Islands far beyond Immadia?>\n\n<Er\u2026 I thought they were legend? And there was nothing beyond Immadia?> Hualiama flipped away from the gantry, following Makani as they shot back to the town\u2013more a hamlet with a very large Dragonship landing field and cargo operation beside it\u2013to fetch more supplies. Fruit and unfamiliar northern vegetables, this time, along with a load of firewood to supply heat to the Dragonship's floatation chambers. <Just a girl from a hot volcano thousands of leagues to the South, here.>\n\nMakani bared her fangs in a savage grin. <Take pride, hatchling. You're a girl-Dragon! We're the fiercest, most beautiful creatures in the Island-World!>\n\n<We are,> she agreed, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. Boasting. It made her scales itch.\n\nAs they loaded up, the Grey Dragoness said, <Our legends tell tales of a clan of Lesser Dragons from the North, whose scales are ice and whose claws spark the mighty lightning-storms of the North. Where they fly, eerie lights called aurora play in the sky above the vaulting, snow-bound peaks of Immadia. Their name is peculiar to the ear\u2026>\n\n<Chrysolitic Dragons,> Lia remembered. <Chrysolite is an icy, whitish-green mineral, a type of metal silicate, if I recall rightly.>\n\nThough what would a Chrysolitic Dragon look like? The scrolls were rather less clear on that point. A whitish, pale green Dragon-colour? And oddly, her mind dredged up a reference to 'Dragons that looked like windrocs'. Feathered Dragonkind? Surely not.\n\nWith a toss of her dagger-sharp skull-spikes that had the dock labourers falling over each other to vacate the immediate area, the seventy-foot Dragoness snarled, <The far North is the ancestral seat of Numistar Winterborn, is it not? Numistar drives us hence. She wishes to go home, for there she might derive the power spoken of in her name, the power of deepest winter. You and I both hail from Fra'anior Cluster, with its eternal volcanic summers. We cannot imagine the power of winter. We have never known such a cold, beside which even the frosts of the Lost Islands must epitomise the balmiest springtide day. Does the Saga of the Winterborn not inform us:>\n\n\u2003<Born of the atramentous void between the stars,>\n\n\u2003<Numistar's breath doth frost the heavens,>\n\n\u2003<In ice-spangled streamers of death?>\n\nHow Dragons adored a poetic turn of phrase.\n\nWould Helyon's Island-gardens survive Numistar's breath? Hualiama feared to entertain the question. For if they stopped, or wherever they tarried, they would invite the Ancient Dragoness to smite that nation with the very streamers of death her saga pictured so graphically.\n\nWould a Star Dragoness invite death to cross the threshold of Immadia?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 87",
                "text": "That day, as the Lesser Dragons rested upon her shell from dawn to noon, Tiiyusiel divulged news that the Prince's Dragonship had whistled past Helyon Island in the grips of a terrible windstorm and sailed directly on into Immadior's Sea. Again, Hualiama had been spotted with the Grey Dragoness Makani, before the Land Dragon patrols had been forced to dive deep to avoid a massive weather-disturbance beneath the Cloudlands. They had barely escaped with their lives.\n\nGrandion prodded Prince Elki with his foreclaw. \"We've gained a third of a day.\"\n\n\"Unnh\u2026 how does a five-foot mischief beat a ten-foot Giant in single combat?\" grumbled the Prince.\n\nA five-foot mischief? Perfect. He filed that in a Dragon's infallible recall for future use. Grandion said, \"How does a word from her lips realign the very stars?\"\n\n\"I know this game,\" Elki mumbled, rubbing his eyes blearily. \"Did I oversleep? Does my breath smell? How does a whisper of feminine guile wind a ninety-foot Tourmaline Dragon about her littlest finger?\"\n\n\"How does word of the East write its soul-bonds upon a faithful Prince's heart?\" Mizuki put in, with a fond clack of her fangs in Elki's direction.\n\n\"Apparently, with the proximate gleam of her beguiling eye. My girl, however\u2013\"\n\n\"Saori's sleeping,\" the Dragoness advised. \"She's pregnant. The scrolls say Human females sleep extra during early pregnancy.\"\n\n\"What, are you to be our midwife too, now?\" the Prince complained.\n\nGrandion snorted with laughter. \"I suggest you grow used to the idea of being a father soon, o Prince of Fra'anior. The patter of bare feet shall soon enter your roost. Great happiness will be yours.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\nThe tenor of the Prince's question caught the Tourmaline flat-pawed. He revisited his assertion, tasting it, checking the resonances so fleetingly present beneath his speech. Was this another moment in which his magic subconsciously drew on their oath-connection, drawing into his fire-soul a hint of the knowledge of Balance? Did he prophesy?\n\nBeneath his paws, Tiiyusiel rumbled contentedly, \"He speaks with the assurance of Balance.\"\n\nElki stared wildly around him. \"What? Happiness? When we're chasing a vengeful Ancient Dragoness to her lair, there's war beneath the Cloudlands, and the Empress of Haters is off to make merry mayhem at my home Cluster? Are you quite mad\u2013happiness?\"\n\nWhen none of the Dragons answered immediately, he added, \"Grandion, I've a poser for you. Tell me about my sister\u2013tell me about when you knew her. Before she came to the Royal Court of Fra'anior, I understand there may have been a more-than-illegal patter of bare feet in your roost. How was that for a Tourmaline hatching? What was Hualiama like?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"It was complex. I was a jealous little beast. But let me tell you of Hualiama. She spoke Dragonish before she ever spoke a word of Human, Elki. She lapped it up like her mother's milk\u2013not that she ever\u2026 well, perhaps the happier memories. Her bare feet did not patter so much as whisper around our roost, for from the moment she could pull herself up with Qualiana's talon or against Sapphurion's resting-couch, she was destined to dance. My shell-mother would sing for her and she would dance, at first just a step or two before she'd wobble and fall over, laughing breathlessly; then two or three steps, and then a babyish twirl\u2026 I remember it well. There were times it seemed to me that smoke indwelled her eyes and shadows beset her soul, for night after night, she would wake screaming from her hatchling-nightmares. I understand that now, for Azziala planned to murder her in the womb. Egglings sense these things. And then there was Ianthine and the battle with my shell-mother for her possession. All of this must colour a person's perception of life, o Prince. Perhaps this is why the Blue-star's feet are ever restless. She is always dancing, running, fleeing the nightmares of the past.\"\n\nThe Dragon startled. He had ruminated aloud and gained new insight. Peculiar. The lore-scrolls said Human females were exceptionally adept at this skill, tweeting their thoughts like parakeets, but gaining insight and understanding in the doing.\n\nTo his further surprise, Grandion felt the Prince, unbuckled from his seat, walk boldly down over his skull-ruff and onto the ridge between his eyes. There the Prince knelt and put his arms as far around the Dragon's muzzle as he could reach. He whispered into an ear-canal. \"Then you must show my sister the place called home, Grandion. Can you do that for me? Will you?\"\n\nA second time in twenty-seven hours, the power of speech was struck from the Dragon's mouth. He had no reply. Who was this Prince, that he could speak thus to a mighty Dragon of Fra'anior?\n\n<Oh for wings to bear my soul\u2026>\n\nWhat barrier did a few thousand leagues present to the wings of his soul? Calling urgently to Mizuki, the Tourmaline Dragon launched skyward with the Human still clinging to his nose. To his everlasting shock, the Prince was laughing uproariously.\n\nMadman."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 88",
                "text": "<Oh for wings to bear my soul\u2026>\n\nSo she had sung, and she had grown wings.\n\n<Let my soul take wing upon dawn's twin fires\u2026>\n\nSo she had yearned, and her soul had winged to worlds beyond her imagination.\n\n<Mamafire!>\n\nSo an eggling had cried, and the White Dragoness had responded, placing her shell-daughter at the centre of the enmity between her and the great Onyx, Fra'anior. How she longed to reconcile them, to find where her shell-mother had fled and to understand the reasons behind that apparently self-imposed exile. Why did Fra'anior hate her so? How could such a love, celebrated of ballad and fable, have descended into the pit of hatred?\n\nNow she sat with Flicker and reminded him of the ballads he had loved, and to her wonder and delight, he remembered them well. He sang his old descants flawlessly. Lia embarrassed herself by weeping up quite the terrace lake. The dragonet touched her cheeks in wonder, delicate of paw, and his tiny eyes turned a deep, rich orange colour at the emotions her smoky soprano stoked in his breast. The little creature lapped up the tears with his tiny, flicking tongue, snorting at the saltiness. Then Flicker decided that nipping her left ear was his new favourite game.\n\nHer song ended in a yelp of pain. <I'm not meat! Your fangs are far too sharp.>\n\n<Straw-head.>\n\n<Go chew on a knuckle-bone, you\u2013oh, whatever. Shall we raid the kitchen?>\n\n<Smile cook meat?>\n\n<Aye, I'll bat my eyelashes at the cook and secure you his tastiest treats,> Hualiama growled, trying to decide which part of the rascally parakeet who considered her left shoulder his personal perch, to chargrill first.\n\nFlicker returned to investigating her earlobe. <My straw-head.>\n\nHe knew he was irresistible. Grr.\n\nHaving secured a tender strip of venison haunch for the voracious dragonet, Hualiama wandered up the starboard gantry, picking up her shadow on the way. Isiki treated her assignment with life-and-death seriousness at all times. In the main crew cabin, she heard the men training at wrestling, judging by the grunts, shouts and thumps shaking the Dragonship. Maybe Sumio was walloping them five at a time. Most of the men were afeared of taking her on, or perhaps Prince Qilong issued further orders regarding the royal personage. Lia whirled suddenly.\n\n\"Isiki, how are your hand-to-hand combat skills?\"\n\n\"I'm competent, Mistress,\" she said, lowering her gaze. \"But I am ordered\u2013\"\n\n\"To help the Princess take gentle and appropriate exercise.\" Indeed, Lia knew she would have to ease into further exercise or training. She still hurt in far too many places and had attempted to hide how much replenishing the Dragonship had taken out of her. \"Agreed?\"\n\n\"I could not stop you, could I, Mistress?\"\n\nThat demure murmur was the most ridiculous cover-up she had ever heard. Nevertheless, Lia said, \"Of course not. I'd chew you up like this venison I'm feeding Flicker here.\"\n\nThis time, she watched attentively for Isiki's reaction. Easterners were very guarded emotionally, but there were signs to be read, especially if she focussed on channelling her Dragoness' senses through the narrower, more limited ambit of Human perception. A leap of the pulse. A slight whitening of her tan knuckles. Indeed! Her challenge had struck home, and Lia was perversely pleased. Indeed, she was feeling decidedly cantankerous, seeing as her ear was being chewed up like an old bone and her Shinzen-provided bruises painted her skin in a variety of purples and yellows that made her look like a surreal suns-set splashed on canvas by a deranged artistic genius.\n\nPerhaps she should confirm her suspicions. Lia said, \"Isiki, is it my imagination, or are these bruises and wounds healing faster than normal?\"\n\nThe slave-girl, just an inch taller than Hualiama, considered her for a moment with those dark, almond-shaped Eastern eyes. \"The truth is, Mistress, that your notions of normal should be adjusted for life as a Shapeshifter Dragoness. Have you studied the matter at all?\"\n\nNow bluntness bordering on insult, disguised in her polite, lilting Eastern speech-patterns? Lia ventured, \"Isiki, can you read and write?\"\n\nAgain, a frisson of anger. \"I am educated, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Sorry. Didn't want to assume. Hidden depths to your Island, you devious little dragonet.\" After a confused moment, Isiki essayed a tiny smile of understanding. \"Will you help me document\u2026 things?\"\n\n\"Things. Of course, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Shapeshifter issues. Like how often I can safely transform. Linkage between the forms. Aspects of magic affecting one manifestation or another, new Dragon-Rider lore, battle techniques, shared mental techniques where one enhances the other\u2013I suspect you've a secret scholar hiding behind that Eastern reticence, haven't you? And will you teach Flicker to read?\"\n\nNow, Isiki's hands trembled noticeably as they approached Jin on the bow gantry, leaning against the railing and staring moodily over a spreading disturbance beneath the Cloudlands. Without turning, he said, \"There's a legend of a volcano out here somewhere in Immadior's Sea, Princess\u2013a volcano raised by Immadior the White. She was the shell-sister of Numistar, as good as the Winterborn was evil, even though the two could easily have been mistaken for twins. Well, Makani tells me Dragons usually come in triplets. What a brood that must have been!\"\n\nLia nodded. \"I know the legend, Jin. They say that the middle of Immadior's Sea is the place farthest from an Island-shore anywhere in the Island-World. The deepest, loneliest stretch of Cloudlands of all.\"\n\n\"Before this journey, I'd never been more than an hour offshore of an Island,\" he said. \"Ordinary sailing, Prince Qilong informs me, should take us from Helyon to Immadia Island via Pla'arna and Gemalka in a matter of sixteen days.\"\n\n\"Sixteen?\" Over her hand, which muffled her gasp, Isiki's eyes had flown wide.\n\nJin gazed earnestly past Hualiama to Isiki. \"I'll protect you ladies\u2013uh\u2026\"\n\nHis Eastern tan could not hide that blush, nor did Lia miss Isiki's instant colouration on her other side. Grief, maybe she should just pop the teenagers in a room together? Then again, she was not much used to playing the matronly chaperone. Nor did she intend to start. Ever.\n\nLia inclined her head. \"We are grateful you chose to journey with us, noble warrior.\"\n\n\"Noble?\" Bitterness turned his voice to acid.\n\nHauling out her inner Princess, Lia dusted her off and sallied into battle, royally. In a voice of honeyed iron, she said, \"Nikuko warrior, the Island-World away from the Eastern Archipelago is wide and its peoples many. Nobody knows your heritage. To them you will be a mysterious Eastern warrior. They will judge you by your deeds. Therefore, I adjure you to teach them what it means to be Nikuko. What matters is right here.\" She thumped his chest with her forefinger as though wishing to implant the truth by dagger-strike if necessary. \"Right in here, you carry the seeds of\u2013\"\n\nHis fists clenched on the metal safety-railing. \"I have no sword.\"\n\n\"I will give you a sword.\"\n\n\"I have no honour!\"\n\nHonestly? The only person who could claim that honour, was himself!\n\nAt which, Princess and Dragoness switched places in a flash and Lia saw crimson. \"Aye, what you do possess in abundance is the obstinacy of an entire flock of ralti sheep!\" she roared. \"If a Princess of Fra'anior who just happens to be a Star Dragoness and the shell-daughter of Istariela, her fabled, gloriously starry self, cannot give you a ruddy sword and the opportunity to go recover your benighted, longsuffering honour, then tell me, Jin: who in the entire Island-World can perform this miracle, you bleating, null-brained excuse for a smokeless volcano?\"\n\nA long, painfully tongue-tied moment of shock faded into Jinichi's unexpected smile. He guffawed just once, as though an unknowable burden had been torn from his chest, and then he turned to face Lia, and bowed very deeply, holding the pose until she scrambled to match his bow with one of her own.\n\n\"As the Star Dragoness has decreed,\" Jin said softly, \"so let it be.\"\n\nAnd then he entirely spoiled the gravity of the moment by inquiring, \"How exactly does a smokeless volcano go about bleating?\"\n\n[ Immadior's Roost ]\n\n\"We Plan TO change direction?\"\n\nGrandion scratched his chin unhappily. Walking about a living Island talking to the ground beneath his paws certainly brought out the worst in his scale-mites, but this was a Dragon of a different colour. Tiiyusiel surged through the billowing Cloudlands, the choppiness of the air in this region of converging currents forcing the Lesser Dragons to shield themselves and their Riders from upwellings of brown-tinged toxic gases. Nothing about Tiiyusiel's carapace, save the regularity of her budding mountains, indicated that they stood atop a Dragon. How was it that there had been so little commerce and interaction between the Dragons of the heights and the Deep-dwellers over the centuries? They each lived as if the other kind did not exist.\n\nThe Land Dragoness repeated, \"I spoke to Siiyumiel last night by longwave-speech. Reception was imperfect but we were able to exchange essential information. The group of Land Dragons\u2013Stellates, Deep-Dwellers and Mountain-Runners, together with the kidnapped Hura Shell-Clan\u2013emerged from the Trench of Maa-Ak-Uura near the Island-mass you high-dwellers call the Fingers of Ferial and travelled on into the Sea on a north-westerly bearing.\"\n\n\"Immadior's Sea?\" asked Saori. \"Siiyumiel is concerned for your safety. Why?\"\n\n\"Safety is my Shell-Clan Elder's duty.\"\n\nThe Eastern warrior paused to take a sip from her water gourd. \"Of course. I meant, what is the danger to a mighty Land Dragoness?\"\n\nTiiyusiel said, \"We speculate. It is unprecedented for ancient foes to cooperate in this way. We Land Dragons are not famed for peaceful cooperation, unlike the Gi'ishior-centred command of the high-dwelling Dragonkind.\"\n\n\"Speculation?\" Saori pressed.\n\nGrandion smiled appreciatively at the Eastern warrior. Dragon-direct.\n\n\"We surmise that a great common cause has united these disparate clans,\" Tiiyusiel said, not without a deep vibration caused by the roaring of her inner furnaces. \"Or\u2026 they are mad. It is not easily understood. There are tones to the communication we've overhead, which lead us to theorise about some hitherto undetected form of\u2026 of mental imbalance. Which is more than unusual in Dragons so closely attuned to Balance and Harmony. It is\u2013\"\n\n\"Unthinkable,\" Saori said quietly. \"Against your fires, or however you Dragons might put it. Minds in harmony self-regulate, right? The presence of other Clan-members helps this process.\"\n\nThe Land Dragoness gasped, \"You understand?\"\n\nSaori rubbed her perfectly flat stomach. \"I suppose I'm moved to think differently about life these days.\"\n\n\"She's referring to her baby,\" Mizuki clarified for Tiiyusiel's sake.\n\n\"Our baby,\" Elki corrected. Then he paused as if struck by a Dragon's paw. \"Our\u2026 oh. We're having a baby! Great leaping Islands, we're\u2026\"\n\nThe Prince fainted with spectacular abandon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 89",
                "text": "The long leagues. The gulf. The Cloud-ocean, the far song, the moon-drowning chasm and the never-ending horizon. The balladeers had coined many names for the emptiness between the Islands. No words that Hualiama could ink, could perfectly capture the soul-quivering, monotonous, illuminating vastness of the spaces between the Islands. Distances so enormous that no technology of Man or Dragon had ever served to accurately measure their extent. Dragonship Steersmen talked about days and weeks of travel. Three days here. Six there. Immadia was so far North that few scholars or balladeers had ever laid eyes upon its rugged mountains, yet many had written odes in celebration of its beauty. Even Helyon silk was costly in part due to the transportation cost, and that Isle stood only partway to Immadia.\n\nHualiama found it inspirational.\n\nWhat if the Islands could be brought closer? By Dragon Riders or by better Dragonship technology? The problem was the age-old issue of fuel for fires. Fires to heat air, fuel to propel a vessel. The best fuels were dense, long-burning ooliti wood or various oils, but both sources were costly and prohibitively heavy. Oils were extracted by labour-intensive pressing processes and ooliti wood was primarily found in the far South. Again, transportation was an issue. Hualiama had no doubt turbine design, streamlining, improved heat retention and better sail technology could refine a Dragonship's performance, and she sketched out or recorded a slew of ideas for all of those, drawing Jin into her musings, but the fundamental limitation of fuel remained. Perhaps steam-driven engines would be more powerful? But that would require stores of water. Another weight.\n\nUgh. She rubbed her temples, peering at Jin, seated to her right at the writing desk and Isiki opposite him. Both dark heads bent assiduously to their work. Maybe she could design a love-powered Dragonship? Every other ballad suggested love was the most potent force under the twin suns. Or, she studied Flicker, who was making an intent examination of the runes Isiki scribed with her quill pen on a scrolleaf, could she design a dragonet-powered engine? They had inexhaustible fonts of energy, apparently. Strap a hundred dragonets to a large wheel and they'd propel a Dragonship hundreds of leagues\u2026 and shred her afterward.\n\nPeculiar, how Numistar appeared unable or unwilling to corner the fleeing Dragonship and drown it in the Cloudlands. Had all the battles with the Haters, Affurion's Dragons, Shinzen's forces and the Shell-Clan depleted the Ancient Dragoness' resources so severely that she now lacked the strength to land a killing blow? More likely, the Winterborn tarried for some reason that escaped them as yet.\n\nAye, a mere fifty-league-wide localised storm that appeared to reach deep into the Cloudlands? Lack of strength? Silly Human, her Dragoness would say. Now, if she could hitch up a Dragoness and create some kind of Dragonship star-drive\u2026\n\n<I would chop your insolent bones into inch-sized pieces and mount your head on my wall,> suggested her Dragoness, neither asleep nor hibernating as Human-Lia had assumed.\n\n\"Fire,\" said Flicker, reading in his babyish voice. \"Ship\u2026 ship\u2013\"\n\n\"Shapeshifter,\" Isiki encouraged. \"Say, 'Shapeshifter.'\"\n\n\"Straw-head?\"\n\n\"That's hair,\" said the slave-girl. \"Shapeshifter hair.\"\n\nLia blurted out, \"That what? What dragonet-scrawl are you writing over there?\"\n\n\"I'm writing about physical changes in the Shapeshifter race,\" Isiki said. \"For example, the shift in your natural eye-colour from smoky green to blue. You mentioned accelerated hair growth. Have you noted any other changes? Excess body hair?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nIsiki chewed her quill pen, then pointed. \"Those can't be normal.\"\n\n\"These? My br\u2013you flaming wretch!\" Lia pulled her hands back under the table again, but the damage was done. Poor Jinichi looked as if he was about to combust. \"I am petite, but\u2026\" She indicated Jin and mouthed, 'Shut your fumarole!'\n\nFlicker looked on with a gleam in his eye that Hualiama did not trust one iota. Did he remember a particular conversation\u2026\n\n\"Big,\" he piped, as clear as a tiny bell.\n\n\"Flicker, I swear\u2013\"\n\n\"Big fruit!\" he squeaked, darting for the ceiling. Lia lunged for him, tipping a table full of ink-pots and quill pens and spare scrolleaf onto Jin's lap. The teenager produced an unhappy gurgle of shock-cross-mortification.\n\n\"You're a dead dragonet!\"\n\nHe somersaulted past her outstretched hands with ridiculous agility, chanting, \"Big fruit, big fruit, Lia's got big\u2026\"\n\nLia charged around the cabin in hot pursuit, yelling, \"Pest! Flying cockroach! Mosquito! So help me I'll spit you for a kebab, you\u2013stop! Stop!\"\n\nHer outthrust right fist punched a head-sized hole in the cabin's rear wall. *BOOM!* The flame generated by her fist shot across the next cabin, where Prince Qilong and his jolly crew sat at dinner, blowing a hole through Sumio's upraised wine-goblet and knocking a spicy leg of fowl, which Qilong was evidently using to illustrate a conversational point, clean out of his fingers. The morsel splashed down with a sizzle in a bowl of berry-wine beside the petrified royal's left elbow.\n\nTo a man, the crew stared through the splintered hole at the very red-faced Princess in the other cabin.\n\nAt the top of her lungs, she yelled, \"Do I have big fruit? Do I? I ask you!\"\n\n\"Of course, Princess. Most assuredly you do,\" Qilong spluttered in a placatory tone, no less baffled than the rest of his crew.\n\n\"Men!\" Lia struck a note that made the crystal decanters on their table sing. She smashed the toe of her boot through another section of the wood panelling for good measure, and stormed out onto the gantry to cool off.\n\nApparently there were explanations inside the cabin\u2013Sumio's low rumble carried in the cool evening air\u2013and then, howls of laughter. Cackles. Hoots. She could not stand it. Lia shuddered, knowing that if she unleashed her Dragoness, there would only be a puff of smoke left in the sky to show for a Dragonship full of people she was coming to regard as friends. Aye, it was funny, but also maddening. She knew what she must do. Marching to the stern end, past the main double-turbines to port and starboard, she set about yanking off her clothing. Wrecking yet another outfit would surely crown what had to be the most humiliating evening of\u2013well, recently. Too many to count.\n\n\"Mistress?\"\n\n\"Thirteenth\u2026 Isiki? Hold these, please.\"\n\n\"At once, Mistress. Will you be flying?\"\n\n\"Aye, Shapeshifting has a way of destroying clothes. Note that down, would you?\" Hualiama bit her tongue. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"No need to apologise to a mere slave.\"\n\n\"Isiki, one more humble this, meek that and mincing-me gibberish and I'll have my Dragoness slap some sense into\u2013you! Islands' sakes!\" The Prince stood on the gantry like a stunned ralti sheep. Lia had never been more thankful to be holding her clothing in front of her body. His bulging eyes\u2026\n\n<Let me at that skanky mouse!> roared her Dragoness.\n\nHuman-Lia snapped, \"You had better get inside, o Prince, before I do something I'll very much regret!\"\n\nWailing, \"I humbly apologise!\" Qilong beat a full retreat, complete with a dive back inside his cabin.\n\nHer hands shook uncontrollably as Hualiama shovelled her clothing into Isiki's arms. \"Forgive me. I have to fly.\"\n\nFlexing her knees, the Princess of Fra'anior performed a perfect backward dive off the Dragonship's stern gantry.\n\n<Let me out! You\u2013it's my turn. I deal with situations like this!>\n\nLia gritted her teeth painfully, feeling the air rushing over her body and the sensation of her stomach cramming into her throat. <Dragoness, you kill in situations like this.>\n\nThe Star Dragoness vented a word better suited to a Sylakian dock-worker than a royal. But she knew. The Human girl knew she knew. So as the girl plummeted like a falling star, as the Grey Dragoness flying above the Dragonship began to react, there was an inner clenching of fangs to match her physical form. The wind whipped her long hair against her taut back as Hualiama dived headfirst from the Dragonship's altitude of a league and a half above the Cloudlands, the clouds below like a silvery-blue carpet gleaming beneath the fulvous eye of the full Blue Moon.\n\n<Hualiama!>\n\nHer head whipped about, buffeted by the rising wind. <Shell mother?>\n\nBriefly, silhouetted against the stars as she narrowed her eyes against the frigid, rushing wind, she saw an image of the White Dragoness, Istariela. She was a petite, eye-catching Dragoness of a mere fifty feet in length, with an understated ruff of skull-spikes and a compact musculature optimised for speed rather than power.\n\nShe cried, <Shell-daughter, you must find the Chrysolitic Dragons before Numistar does!>\n\nIstariela blinked out of existence before Hualiama could formulate the first of her many questions. Great. Mother-mysterious, how charily thou dost avoid thy daughter. Nothing about her upbringing had been normal, so why should she wish for normality now?\n\nSuddenly, Lia realised that the foot of Numistar's storm was sweeping toward her position far faster than she had imagined. <Dragoness!>\n\n*Wham!* The growth-shock punished her stomach muscles. That transformation had been so much on the cusp that it exploded outward, thumping her innards as if her skin were a drum. Hualiama gasped at the change of pressure and sensation, then her wings snapped out and she shot forward as though unleashed from a war crossbow. A tearing pain gripped her shoulders momentarily as she adjusted to the strain. Unlike her Human, her Dragon-form's stomach had no trouble adjusting to high-speed manoeuvers, however. Laughter burbled from her mouth as the hatchling accelerated, outpacing Numistar's storm.\n\n<Mamafire! Look at me!>\n\nWhen the Grey Dragoness eventually caught up with the fast-flying hatchling, she asked, <Who were you talking to out here?>\n\n<I imagined I saw my shell-mother,> Lia said, feeling her fires darken with loss.\n\nBut Makani, falling into flying formation with her said, <A great volcano lies ahead. It must be Immadior's Roost. While we fly ahead, tell me about your shell-mother. Who was she, little one? I heard you grew up in Sapphurion's roost. What was the great Elder like, Hualiama? What was the flight of his wisdom?>\n\nHualiama squinted. <That bump? That's Immadior's Roost?>\n\n<Even Star Dragonesses must learn the ways of the world's winds,> said the Grey Dragoness with a wing-shiver of appreciation. <Will you be offended if I suggest a few improvements to your flying technique?>\n\n<For an eternity of about a quarter-second,> Lia assured her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 90",
                "text": "Eternity was slightly longer than a quarter-second. Makani was a patient and clever teacher, making her try different postures, wing-orientations, flares of the wing-struts and concentrate on different muscle-groups until suddenly, the whole came together unexpectedly and she slipped through the air with noticeably greater ease than before.\n\n<Beautiful,> Makani exclaimed, shivering her wings a second time.\n\n<This feels fantastic,> Lia admitted.\n\n<Great. We've a few hours yet until we reach your grossly misnamed bump. Has the story about your shell-mother brewed long enough in your fire-stomach, little one?>\n\nLia told her tale as they flew northward.\n\nSeen in the light of the rising suns, the 'bump' was a volcano that rivalled Fra'anior Cluster in sheer, horizon-dwarfing magnitude, Hualiama observed, a mountain with a base over forty leagues wide rising at a shallow angle to a ferociously smoking peak situated perhaps two miles above the Cloudlands. Great rich rivers of lava ran like orange veins down its flanks in at least a dozen locations. The boulder-strewn slopes were desolate and fire-blackened, smoking with the volcano's inner heat. A pall of smoke and noxious gases drifted eastward across the scene, and heat shimmered ferociously in the air above. Even as Lia watched, glowing lava burst out of the central caldera and slopped over the rim in a fresh wave of destruction.\n\n<Volcanic hells,> whispered the Star Dragoness.\n\n<Dying.>\n\nWhat was that? Her muzzle jerked, seeking.\n\n<Dy\u2026>\n\nThe Grey Dragoness advised, <Caution, little one. I scent Dragonkind. Yet what manner of Dragonkind, I cannot say. There is magic present\u2026>\n\n<Magic of great deeps,> Lia responded softly, tasting the nuances upon her tongue. <Primitive and wild magic. Come, Makani. We must heed the call.>\n\nWith clear reluctance, the Grey Dragoness followed Lia toward the great volcanic cone. It had none of Fra'anior's stark majesty, with league-tall granite cliffs topped by verdant bursts of tropical vegetation, but in its own way, the uncompromising presence of the mountain spoke its own brooding Dragonsong of rising from the deepest roots of the Island-World, strong-shouldered and unbowed, year after year after year building its base above the Cloudlands. Lia followed her instinct around the western edge, skirting the worst of the sulphurous gases and blasting lava, which as she rose over the rim-wall, popped and fizzed and sheeted upward in great curtains. This volcano was more than active. It was young and fierce and deadly.\n\nMakani said, <Do not fear unnecessarily, Hualiama. Lesser Dragons can survive lava for periods of time if we are not buried beneath it.>\n\nThere would be no landing for the Dragonship here, Hualiama knew, inclining a wingtip to show the Grey she had heard. Qilong should steer clear.\n\nHer wings flexed softly amidst the heat-shimmer and turbulent, heated winds. A mile across the open, glowing orange caldera filled with magma, a lightning storm played in the clear air, its colours flashing from turquoise to purple to searing yellow. Her own scales glimmered with the play of magic in the air, causing odd, frightening sensations to course along her spine-spikes. Again her muzzle snapped about, following a Dragon-sense to a sense of large bodies shifting behind a veil of smoke, but the impression was too fleeting to quantify.\n\n<Strength to your paw, little one.>\n\n<Dying\u2026>\n\nOn this western periphery many of the lava flows had cooled, or perhaps there had been a single explosion that dumped a layer of rock and pumice atop the lava lake, carving out a fantastical landscape of impossible rock formations; tall columns and waves and spirals of gleaming mineral deposits. In places, geysers must have erupted and the water boiled away, leaving a green, salty rime upon the stone. The stench was overpowering, catching in her throat and irritating her nostrils and eyelids.\n\nShe jinked, following the faint call through a maze of archways and lava-carved gullies into a cathedral of stone, glistening silica and quartzite deposits laced with darker igneous rock and gemstone deposits.\n\nLia said, <We should take some of this to\u2026 watch out!>\n\nA loop of lava rose and fell from a hole in the floor. A loop? Surely not. The blazing orange rock lifted again and Hualiama knew her mistake. That fifty-foot thick loop was no rock. It was a Dragon's body, formed of molten magma\u2013yet oddly, darkened and cracked crazily in many places as though its fire had guttered.\n\n<Dying, help\u2026 me\u2026>\n\n<Quick, we must help,> cried Lia, clipping her wings sharply as she reached out.\n\n<Don't touch it!> Makani roared.\n\n*KAABOOOM!!*\n\nRock splattered across the cave and the Star Dragoness with that explosion; yet she cupped her wings and swerved, ricocheting off a column with no more than a bruise to her dignity and a growl of annoyance.\n\n<Roaring rajals, what form of magic was that?> she spluttered.\n\nThe Grey Dragoness tried to herd her away with her wings. <A dangerous one! I warned you!>\n\n<Dragon? Dragon, can you hear us?>\n\nMakani snarled and snapped at the hatchling, driving her backward, but the orange lava surged again. Suddenly, an unmistakably draconic head heaved up from the hole and flopped onto the rock alongside. Well, it was Dragon-shaped, but Hualiama could not make out much more of this Dragon-like creature. Scales? No, a body of lava apparently held together by magic. Eyes? Aye, eye-like depressions appeared in the lava where eyes ought to be\u2013ovoid eyes larger than the Star Dragoness in their longest dimension\u2013and a sensation similar to the Land Dragons' Harmonic magic passed over her body in a fiery frisson. Lia gasped as her wings burst into flame!\n\n<Makani! Makani\u2026>\n\nThe creature blinked. The fire snuffed out.\n\nThe lava-Dragon radiated heat like a furnace. Lia hid behind a column before flitting forward again, dodging Makani's exasperated grab for her tail. <Dragon, can you understand us? Can I help you?>\n\n<Help? Little one of great power\u2026 I am dying here in this tidal pool, isolated from the goodness my kind require.>\n\nThe voice was faint and exhausted, yet lilting in a way that spoke to Hualiama of fires rising and falling and glowing rivers flowing as brightly as the heart of the suns themselves. Its Dragonish, though couched in this peculiar accent of fire-notes, was also clear and understandable.\n\n<What's your name? Don't look at me!> Lia ducked away again, her tail and hindquarters smoking, too hot to touch. The Dragon made a strange, crackling sound she did not understand. <That's your name?>\n\n<Help\u2026>\n\nCharily, watchful for another glance from the lava-Dragon, she reached out with the same power she had applied to Siiyumiel's heart. Furnace temperatures blasted through her body, but this time she was more prepared, radiating it away rapidly with an application of the shielding she had developed to redirect Siiyumiel's light-cannon. Makani yelped and flinched away as Hualiama blazed; the Star Dragoness focused on applying her magic in new ways, in strange and unfamiliar pathways as she sought to detect and learn the Balance of this unimaginable creature. Magma Dragon, she learned. Its body was primarily comprised of molten metals fused into structures and organs which bore little resemblance to her own, but the mind was what drew her, shining and potent, yet diminished by what she sensed was starvation.\n\n<Alright, noble Crackle\u2013> she dubbed him laughingly <-let's see if we can warm you up.>\n\nWhite-fires gushed out of her into the lava-Dragon, sparking a tremor that shook his body and raced out in the caldera. Crackle's doleful bellow was matched by other, far greater voices resounding from the lava lake without. Hualiama realised that she had not delicately brought Balance into being. She had pounded him with the magical equivalent of a Balance-earthquake. Headache. Agony. Then, fiery relief.\n\n<Cut him a path to the caldera, Makani!> Hualiama cried.\n\nA booming chorus of draconic voices shook the cavern; she heard lava slopping about, splashing upon the rocks, now leaking through the ceiling above them. A shadow fell over the cave's entrance, making Crackle's colour suddenly appear brilliant, devoid of the dark patches she had seen before. Had she done enough? Lia hoped so.\n\nThe Grey Dragoness stalked forward, apparently uncaring of the lava-Dragon's gaze. <Stand firm.>\n\nA dark fireball rocketed out of her mouth. *BOOM!* Lia staggered. *BOOM-BOOM!* Makani's head snaked about, firing precision shots at points she envisaged, perhaps fault lines in the rocks.\n\n*KKRRAAACK!* A brief avalanche; a monstrous wave of heat rushed over her!\n\n<Crackle?> He was gone. Or was he?\n\nA sensation like an earthquake conducted through the rock to Lia's paws. Quicker than thought, she slapped a shield around Makani. No time for big-Dragon little-Dragon politicking. They needed to escape. Now. <Follow me, Makani!>\n\nThey darted upward toward a narrow chasm. The Grey fired another one of her dark, explosive shots and then slammed her body into the hole, tearing the rock asunder with the strength of her shoulders and forearms. With a low, wicked laugh, the Star Dragoness modified her shield. Blades of light pierced the paradoxical gloom as a wave of radiant lava rushed toward them, the fury of hundreds of lava-Dragons carried upon its curling brow, the power of their combined gazes smiting the two flying Dragons and turning their shield into a blazing comet.\n\nRoaring, straining, fighting, the Blue and the Grey shot into the peak of the curving cliff of lava overhead and punctured it like a living spear of white, exploding through the far side in a triumphant shower of molten rock. Higher they rose. Higher and higher, tearing free of those vicious gazes.\n\nHualiama began to laugh in relief, but then Crackle's voice came to her via shielded telepathy, slicing through her mirth. He cried, <Drawn from the deeps of the world, from the eternal fire-melting-core, was I, blasted by the rising fires into a realm of cold, uncaring winds. Crusted and broken was I. Grieved and starving was I. Cool and darkened was I. Then you came, Star Dragoness. Then you came, and a Lesser Dragon lifted up one of the Magma-kind and restored his fires. She was the white-fires of his draconic life, the Dragonsong of blaze and surging-oceanic-billows of thousands of degrees of ardour.>\n\nPoetic, but she understood his fires. Lia bowed inwardly to Crackle's mental presence, barely discernible amidst the raging of his kin. <I am honoured to serve, noble Magma Dragon.>\n\n<Ask me a boon, Star Dragoness, and I shall give two.>\n\n<I seek a First Egg of the Ancient Dragons,> she blurted out. <Do you know where it is?>\n\n<It is said great powers hide in the roots of the Island-World. I know not, but I know where I would look. A deep-dwelling Dragonkind inhabit the deepest cracks leading to the innermost fires of our world, who for aeons have claimed possession of a great treasure\u2013the greatest treasure, they call it. Yet of late, for a thousand years of your short-lived time, there has been rumour of a strange stirring amongst these Dragonkind, tales of hauntings and mind-freeze and new ambitions. I would seek word of your First Egg amongst the S'gulzzi, little one. That heat and pressure of those places, fifteen leagues below your freezing world, in the abyss just North of this place, are intolerable to your kind and mine, but perhaps starlight can imagine a way.>\n\n<I\u2026 thank you, Crackle.> S'gulzzi? What under the Islands was a S'gulzzi, a name expressed with a sibilant hiss made deep in the throat?\n\n<Crackle?> His laughter crackled around in her mind, making Lia momentarily see fires leap across her vision. <Your curious inner radiance-reflections amuse me, little one. Here. Name yourself and I shall name myself. Then, a parting boon, a life-debt expiated.>\n\n<I am Hualiama, Blue-star!> To her surprise, the speaking of her name resounded as if struck from a gong. Was that her true name, or secret draconic name?\n\n<And I am\u2013Incendior!> His secret name. Yet she had no time to think. The Dragon added, <Think upon the rock that explodes. Fuel\u2013>\n\nAnd his voice vanished in the turmoil of Magma Dragons rampaging through their lava lake home, fulminating at the escape of intruders.\n\n<Fly, Hualiama, fly!> Makani's cry stung her from contemplation into motion.\n\nBehind them, the volcano blasted lava thousands of feet into the sky. Lia knew she was bound to receive a verbal talon in the neck from the Grey Dragoness after they out-flew the range of flying debris. Why was it that her first instinct was to fly into trouble, rather than away from it? What would happen to those Magma Dragons inside an exploding volcano\u2013had her actions triggered an eruption?\n\nAnd could she conclude that for reasons of Balance, she had somehow been destined to rescue that Magma Dragon? Mercy.\n\nYet his surprising response had condensed certain valuable information for her. She had learned things, neither of which made much sense as yet. The S'gulzzi. A type of exploding rock for fuel. What had Crackle meant? Lia wished she had Siiyumiel to ask, but he was over a thousand leagues away with the Air-Breathers, she assumed. Moreover, the subject of the First Egg was not one to be broadcasting around the world beneath the Cloudlands.\n\nAs they reached clearer air, Hualiama searched for Qilong's Dragonship. Her marrow froze.\n\n[ Mountainous Landings ]\n\nIn the SOMNOLENT light of a noon interrupted by the Yellow Moon's imposing bulk, Grandion gave the undeserving Islands of Pla'arna Cluster a lengthy, contemptuous glare, before aiming his furrowed brow at the western horizon. If only a Dragon could leap over Islands as effortlessly as rainbows arched through stormy skies. His mien suddenly mellowed. Drawing the breeze so deep into his lungs that he practically felt his tail swell with the air intake, Grandion reached out with his senses, calling, <Hualiama?>\n\nA hint of volcanic dust. A trickle of starlight laughter. The unaccountable urge, despite his wing-drooping exhaustion, to dance. Aye, it was enough.\n\n\"We will rest here,\" he decided.\n\nHer lack of argument betrayed the Copper Dragoness' fatigue.\n\nTiiyusiel, from a mile beneath the clouds, called, <We can press on. I will swim.>\n\n<You're running out of ejecta,> the Tourmaline pointed out. <Four and a half days of travel at top speed\u2013even a Land Dragoness must rest. And if we rest, you will travel far faster.>\n\n<Very well, I concur. Suns-set?>\n\nShe did not protest? Startled, Grandion calculated briefly. <Two hours after.>\n\n<Aye,> said the Land Dragon.\n\nTiiyusiel sounded, making for the fertile substrate one to two leagues beneath the Cloudlands.\n\nThey winged onward for two further hours, nearing the first of Pla'arna's rugged Isles, which stood a mere mile and a half above the dark-spotted Cloudlands in this place, which slowly boiled from beneath under the force of an upwelling current Tiiyusiel had noted. The Isles were dark-fanged, weathered spits often rising in multiple spires from a single base just barely visible in the first layer of toxic cloud, giving the Islands the appearance of many draconic paws holding talons aloft. A few of the Human-inhabited Islands were connected by rope bridges, but the majority were inhabited by a clannish group of Lesser Dragons notorious for their hoarding of diamonds and their rough dealings with any marauding Dragons they suspected of stealing their treasures\u2013make that any foreign Dragon in the Island-World, give or take.\n\n\"Reception committee,\" said Elki, softly. \"Hostile?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" said Grandion.\n\n\"What will you do?\" Mizuki asked curiously.\n\n\"I don't know about your customs in the East, but they're likely to insult us and then challenge me as the largest male to single combat. I will reciprocate, thrash a few of them, and make my demands.\"\n\nIndeed. The Dragonwing of twenty strapping males slighted Grandion and his entire lineage, disparaged Gi'ishior, goggled at the sight of Humans flying Dragonback, and made a variety of boorish and graphic propositions to Mizuki for good measure.\n\nGrandion sighed. <Alright, you lousy sons of flatworms,> he snarled. <Choose your three strongest Dragons and I will pound them back into the filth from which they were spawned.>\n\n<Three?> Yuhurak, the beefy Brown who was the leader of their Cluster, thundered in amazement. <You want\u2013>\n\nThe Tourmaline flexed his shoulders and twizzled his neck meaningfully. <Alright, if you insist. Choose five of your pathetic, scale-rotted, hideously deformed runts. All at once, on that Island over there.>\n\n<Five?> Yuhurak had clearly inherited size in place of brains. <At once? I accept! We will have the pretty Dragoness for our roost when we win, and the Humans for slaves. What are your conditions, you spavined son of a\u2013>\n\n<Shut your cracked fangs, you diseased whelp of a blind windroc,> Grandion interrupted cordially. <My conditions are, that upon my inevitable trouncing of your five biggest bleating sheep, I shall require you to gift me twenty sacks of your finest diamonds, and then you will fly every able-bodied Dragon of your entire Cluster up to Immadia at top speed to engage in glorious battle with Numistar Winterborn, the Ancient Dragoness. Forthwith.>\n\nYuhurak gasped something like 'awkhak'!\n\nMizuki grinned admiringly at her wing-companion. <By my wings, Tourmaline!>\n\nElki kicked his Dragoness surreptitiously. \"He's taken. Don't you start any family feuds, Copper!\"\n\nMeantime, Grandion took great pains to study his talons indifferently. <Didn't see that broadside coming, did you, Yuhurak?>\n\nThe Brown could not refuse and still call himself a Dragon.\n\n<Come on. Over to the Island,> Grandion snorted, flexing his mountainous shoulders one more time for emphasis, making the striations stand out seven inches deep. <Remind me what names you called my shell-father, and I'll carve them on your sorry hide.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 91",
                "text": "For eight hundred leagues and the better part of three days, Numistar threw dragonets and lightning at Qilong's Dragonship without thought or intelligence, just a blind, flailing attempt to knock them out of the sky. Blue and Grey defended the airship with shields as long as their strength held out, then the crew took up with nets, spears, crossbows and swords. The Winterborn threw her main strength at them. Gale force winds. Hail. Sheets of ice. Chain and ball lightning. The storm raged endlessly, sometimes growing dark tentacles or whirlwinds out of the Cloudlands that rushed at the dirigible until Hualiama and Makani combined to knock the attack off course, sometimes darting in guileful winds that buffeted the Dragonship in an attempt to overstrain the sails or break the spars. The crew worked shifts on the back-breakers twenty-seven hours a day to keep the Dragonship a rajal's whisker ahead of the storm.\n\nHualiama was so worn out, she could barely see straight. Yet, she and the Grey Dragoness worked well together. The Grey had enormous endurance and no small cunning, able to judge exactly when shields could be dropped or a few minutes of rest risked, and between her, Jin and Isiki, they formed a deviously draconic triumvirate that kept thinking up new ways to surprise Numistar. They hitched Makani to a harness and had her tow the Dragonship to a high altitude, escaping the storm for a few hours so that essential repairs could be made in relative safety. They developed the idea of magical storage to 'catch' Numistar's lightning attacks, only to return them with interest when the flurries of dragonets came in, thousands strong. Lia wondered\u2013was this the behaviour of a rational mind? Dozens of times a day, they might have been overwhelmed if the attack had been pressed or another angle sought. The assault always fizzled. Why?\n\nYet Numistar was slowly, relentlessly pounding them into incapacity. They lost eight men to dragonets and three to lightning, but somehow won through to the third morning away from Immadior's Roost, when Makani wearily raised the shout, \"Immadia! I see the Enchanted Isle!\"\n\nLia's Dragoness-hearts pounded in her chest. \"Immadia!\"\n\nEvery eye on the Dragonship gazed North. Immaculate white peaks vaulted toward the first blush of dawn. The Island stood in stark, isolated splendour like a dark jewel wearing a crown of brilliant white, surrounded by a mirror-calm lake of ultramarine Cloudlands, quite the most unique colour Hualiama had ever seen. Upon the flanks of those mountains she saw bands of dark green, virgin coniferous forests, and above the immense, half-league-tall cliffs, the Island's three layers of terraced lakes reflected back the effulgence of dawn. A verdant green plain faced the travellers, snaking back into five precipitous valleys nestled between the snowbound, Dragon's-fang peaks.\n\nQilong whispered, \"They call Immadia the jewel of the North.\"\n\n\"Well is she named,\" Jin replied, rubbing his eyes with his left hand. Never one for sentimentality, the statement surprised Hualiama. Then she noticed the very tip of the little finger of his right hand resting against Isiki's fingers on the railing. Rascal.\n\n\"Bah, it pales in the light of Fra'anior's magnificence,\" Makani snorted. Then the Dragoness snorted again as she, and everyone present, realised how unconvinced she sounded.\n\nHualiama turned slowly in the air, hovering above the nose of the Dragonship, which was crowded with men. Silent. Hopeful. This was the Island of salvation. This was the northernmost Island in the world, beyond which, it was said, only ice and winter had reign. The Isle of magic, of enchantresses whose legendary beauty outshone the very dawn. The chill morning air had a nip to it that Hualiama had only ever experienced at the Place of Reaving, for the breath frosted before her mouth and those of the Humans as they goggled at this vision.\n\nThe North. She was more spectacular than their wildest imaginings.\n\nLia quoted from The Saga of Tanugar:\n\n<When Fra'anior did raise the Islands,>\n\n<He did fashion Immadia to be their crowning glory,>\n\n<And placed upon his Isle a people tall and most fair,>\n\n<As fair as the breath of a dew-spangled morning.>\n\nThen, drawn by a mysterious power beyond her ken, she turned slowly to her right wing, and saw beyond the sweeping darkness of Numistar's storm, a mighty Dragonwing approaching at a distance of eight or nine leagues. She blinked, looked thrice, but the Dragonwing remained stubbornly real, flying a steady course for Immadia above a disturbance in the Cloudlands that she recognised as the wake of a fast-moving Land Dragon. Far in the lead of the Dragonwing, she saw an unmistakable flash of tourmaline blue and thrilled to the power of wings that strained to sprint toward her with an indefatigable wingbeat. How his hearts must be celebrating, leaping about like crazed dragonets\u2013just like her own, the blood fizzing and roaring in his ear-canals as he took in the sight that greeted him!\n\nWho could keep silent at such a moment? <Thou\u2026 ALASTIOR!>\n\nAt first note of her overjoyed scream, the storm vented a peal of world-shaking rage and surged toward them.\n\nDarkness lifted out of the Cloudlands upon the skirts of that storm as Numistar Winterborn roused to rage, and with rage came the clarity Hualiama had expected all this while, all the long leagues from Kerdani City to Immadia. The clouds boiled, rising miles into the sky before her aghast eyes, expanding with the windstorm feeding them beneath, and in the deathly cold of that elevation, the Ancient Dragoness prepared her ice. Her malice sharpened palpably, expressed in a plunging of temperatures which her soaring dragonets greeted with a chittering chorus of glee. A white mist steamed from the storm's maw, a cold so deep it bit like a ravening Dragon.\n\nNumistar boomed, <Now, shell-daughter of Fra'anior, behold the face of your doom!>\n\n<Daughter of whom?> Makani almost fell out of the sky.\n\n*GNNAAARRRR!!* the storm growled. Monstrous. Driven. Rushing forward in a great, rolling wave of blackness and poisons churned up from the deeps.\n\n\"Get to the turbines!\" Hualiama bellowed. \"Makani, the Dragonship!\"\n\nGrandion was not close enough. He would arrive soon, but the murky curtains drawing around them and sweeping across the skies above like a funeral shroud, would not wait. She could not stop shaking. He had come for her. He had chased her halfway around the Island-World!\n\nNo time for a harness. The Grey Dragoness sank twenty talons into the Dragonship's air-sack and threw her weight forward, beating her wings with all of her might. As if dragging a boulder, the powerful Dragoness hauled Prince Qilong's brave crew away toward Immadia while the men, with curt cries and orders, organised themselves. The storm chased after.\n\nFourteen leagues. The treacherously beautiful, snowy slopes beckoned, the small town beyond nuzzling their skirts like a hatchling Dragoness seeking comfort from her shell-mother's fires. Still the clouds billowed upward, reaching fantastic heights, as though the Winterborn built for herself a fortress of blizzard and lightning. The storm fulminated, spitting dense flights of dragonets that appeared briefly from the clouds only to be swallowed up again, driving the hapless Dragonship before it like a ralti sheep being driven to the slaughter. Numistar's displeasure was a constant, low roll of thunder that bespoke malevolence born of the most ancient of days, a hatred which had carried her across the long, dark leagues contained in the heart of a comet. They were riders of the storm. A speck facing a world in turmoil. Grandion's Dragonwing vanished behind the tempest. Closer. The clouds accelerated with an awful, mesmerising majesty; unstoppable.\n\n\"Get me up there! Up there!\" Jin's screaming finally penetrated Lia's horror.\n\nWailing, <What the hells have I done?> the hatchling swooped, plucking up the teenager by his shirt-back and trousers. She dumped him on Makani's back.\n\n\"Me too! Me too!\" screamed Isiki.\n\nGrief, that girl was waving a Haozi war-bow as if she knew how to use the weapon. Lia had learned Isiki was a terrifically skilled open-hand combatant; they had taught each other and Jin many tricks from their respective styles. Go! Her Dragon paws and strength could carry a Human without any trouble. In a moment, she had Isiki seated behind Jin on the Grey's back.\n\nThe slave-girl carried Lia's swords at her belt. She patted the hilts. \"For you, Mistress, should you need them.\"\n\nJin passed her short length of rope. \"Tie yourself on.\"\n\nThe slave-girl's hand shook. Hualiama could not tell if she was terrified or elated not to be rejected by the warrior. \"I will. Jin, to ride with you\u2013\"\n\nHe croaked, \"I don't want to lose you, Isiki. Ever.\"\n\nPrecious!\n\nIsiki's eyes welled with tears not caused by the vicious cold streaming from the storm-front, less than a mile distant now and closing fast. \"Oh, Jin\u2026\"\n\n\"I love you!\" Jin almost lost his seat as the wind cuffed Makani cruelly, beating her wings against the Dragonship. With a groan, the Dragoness righted them, but the port storm-sail ripped with a sharp *crack!*\n\nThe slave-girl had a grip of his left arm. \"But how, Jin? You're a free man. I'm a slave.\"\n\nHualiama kicked Jin in the hip to right him. \"Get up there. Makani, is this\u2013\"\n\n\"I want the oath.\"\n\nLia stared at the Dragoness. Events were moving too fast. \"You what? But you said\u2013\" The Grey's answering stare was wild, proud, incontestable. \"Alright. Jin?\"\n\nHis suddenly pale face dipped, once. \"Not without her. Will your magic find her, too?\"\n\nIsiki? She had no idea, but Hualiama was fresh out of desire to meddle with the destinies of others. They were bound to crash-land on the peaks West of Immadia City, and the villagers and people of this Island were about to awake to a shock both rude and utterly devastating. Judging by the hair-raising tone of Numistar Winterborn's vengeful howling, she intended to blast those mountains right off Immadia's back. These Humans would be chaff in her storm; detritus to blow about as she wished.\n\nAt last. She could release into the storm a token of her defiance. Let Numistar know this: Hualiama of Fra'anior, the mightiest almost-royal trouble-stirrer in the Island-World, intended to build a band of Dragon Riders to be reckoned with. More than a token. A force. A new power. A way of life, a philosophy, that would fly directly in the teeth of the grasping, rapacious evildoers of her world. She would seek out Riders. Men and women of character, like Jin and Isiki\u2013not only the noble or those society regarded as worthy. Dragon Riding was for all.\n\nWith a fierce, defiant smile, Hualiama summoned the inner dancing of a dragonet. She roused the gift which lived in her custody, which had been yearning, she realised, to be shared with these precious souls. Jin the dishonoured, last of his people. Isiki the slave-girl, the lowliest of her society. And Makani, a rare colour of Dragoness, unique among the Dragons of Gi'ishior.\n\nHer secondary eyelids blinked rapidly. White-fires flared everywhere, as if always present, even in the wings of the storm now outpacing the Dragonship to the East and West. Even Numistar was born of these same fires, subject to the essential forces that sustained her universe. The magic poured forth from her mind and Hualiama danced through the air above the trio, laughing with soft delight and relief. Ah yes, she should never have denied what she had always know. Jin had the fire. Isiki had the heart and will, unbowed by her life of servitude. What would the making of new Dragon Riders release in them?\n\n\"Fire-souls must unite,\" she cried. \"Repeat this oath after me: 'May we burn the heavens together, as Dragon and Rider.' Makani?\"\n\n\"May we burn the heavens\u2026\" Pure white light flared behind the Grey's fire-eyes. The Dragoness gasped, \"May we burn, and burn, and burn, as a Dragoness and her Riders!\"\n\nJin and Isiki echoed her words, that same pure light flaming within their souls, for it seemed a Star Dragoness saw through the veil of their flesh to another dominion within, a place where oaths were spoken and the purposes of hearts gleamed in crystal-lattice clarity, and magic reigned supreme.\n\n\"Lots of burning,\" Jin spluttered at length, unable to tear his eyes off Makani.\n\nIsiki wound her arms around his neck from behind, around the Grey Dragoness' spine-spike, and passionately kissed whatever she could reach, which happened to be Jin's left ear and neck. He twisted his head and snatched a return kiss full on her nose.\n\nThe young man gulped, \"Oops.\"\n\nThe slave's eyes widened. \"Oh no, this is forbidden. Isn't it? Jin, I'm\u2013\"\n\n\"You're beautiful. Kiss me,\" he said, aiming properly this time.\n\nThe Grey Dragoness spared a moment for laughter. \"Now we are family. My strength is yours and yours is mine. I feel it already.\"\n\nHualiama shook her muzzle. Just like teenagers to sit there smacking lips on the back of a Grey Dragoness as if the storm of the ages was not about to fall upon their heads. Perhaps she should remind them? Bah. Let them enjoy a forbidden kiss. She would figure out the mess later\u2013if there was a later.\n\nHer scales prickled, lift like a hound's hackles along her back before refusing to resettle. <Makani, shields!>\n\n<Now!>\n\nThe Grey Dragoness' cry preceded a titanic lightning-bolt aimed at the Dragonship's stern. *KAAABOOM!* The vessel slewed, knocking every man on the gantries to their knees. Smoking ruin. Shouts as the crew raced to put out the fires. Lia's shield expanded around the airship. *KAAABOOM!* Another bolt. A rising hum, the awareness of electrical potentials thick in the air. The clouds pulsated, forming into dark, claw-like appendages that reached toward the fleeing Dragonship, still scudding on the wind toward Immadia, just two miles away now\u2026 *BOOM! BOOM!* Concussive blasts of lightning shocked them from all sides as Numistar set to with earnest. Not for her the subtle approach. Hualiama felt every one of the blows against her mind, greater and greater, until she had to squeeze down and think about nothing else. Makani was there too, supporting, and to a lesser extent the minds of Jin and Isiki, linked through the Grey Dragoness. But they were not Grandion, and both Hualiama and Makani were ragged from days of fighting Numistar's unrelenting attacks.\n\n*BOOM!* The port sail ripped away. *KAAABOOM!* Spars splintered from the starboard.\n\n<Hold her!> Makani shouted.\n\nMountains loomed. Too low. If they struck the forests at this speed, they would be shredded. <Up!> Hualiama shouted. <Get us up!>\n\n\"Men inside! Brace!\" roared Jin, in a voice that Hualiama had never heard him use before, and she suspected the teenager had not thought himself capable of. \"We're going to crash!\"\n\nWith a rising hum, the storm struck again. *BOOM!* One of the port-side turbines exploded.\n\nNumistar had the strength of an Ancient Dragoness. How could Hualiama deny her? Yet she knew she had souls on board that must be brought to a safe landing, so she dug deeper than ever before. Tourmaline, Onyx, White\u2026 could she find a colour of strength to see them safe to Immadia? The Dragonship slewed under the hammer-blows of lightning and the terrible press of the wind, heading directly toward the retaining wall of the second layer of terrace lakes. One man was wailing hysterically, several others praying, their voices drowned out by each explosion, only to rise again.\n\n*KAAABOOM!* Lia fell against the air sack, setting it alight with the power coursing through her body. <Grandion? Grandion, are you there?> Her body convulsed as another round of lightning, four consecutive bolts, pounded the shield she had drawn around their airship. It flickered, losing shape in concert with her fading consciousness. Dragon blood leaked from her mouth onto her paws.\n\nShe saw Fra'anior through pain-wracked eyes. <I'm in you, Hualiama,> he whispered. <You are the unique intersection of colours, exactly as you imagine; yet I say, you are more.>\n\nAs Numistar pressed her assault, Hualiama suffered each and every blow; but she had survived worse. She had survived the insane strength of her mother's hatred. She had refuted her father's ambitions. She was a new alloy of Human and Dragon; all that was strong of both, multiplied. Human stubbornness. The will to survive, to overcome, and never to give because the core of her light was love. Draconic strength. The fire-soul which burned eternal, unquenchable. Humansoul. Dragonsoul.\n\nShe was Onyx and White, and the Tourmaline of oath-magic. Together, those colours made a deep, matchless blue. The blue of a Star Dragoness.\n\nThe terrace-lake wall loomed dead ahead, a quarter-mile tall. They could not avoid it. Behind, she heard Numistar give a low growl of malicious satisfaction. Forked lightning crackled almost constantly between the storm, the Dragonship and the land, creating a crazy filigree exactly like the white-fires which inhabited the world beyond the world; the unknowable beyond Lia had once unwittingly wished for. Closer. Three hundred feet. Two hundred.\n\nStorm rose in her belly. \"BRACE!\"\n\nHualiama sprang to her paws, riding the nose of Prince Qilong's Dragonship as they speared forward. Shaping her shields. Honing her mind to a dagger's pinpoint precision and sharpness. She would have one chance at this incision. Just one.\n\nBuilt by the Ancient Dragons to contain the precious rainfall that sheeted off the tall Islands in great torrents to feed the Cloudlands below, terrace lakes were a crucial aspect of Island life and often supported large populations of freshwater fish and water birds. Their buttressed walls were hundreds of feet thick, built to dam up vast bodies of water and sealed by magic.\n\nHer penetrative psychic shield pierced one such wall. It sheared through the great stone wall like a spear-thrust piercing a man's belly. Slowly. So very slowly, Lia knew she saw in conscious battle-thought. Makani's beating wings bore them onward, traced in great, vastly extended sheets of fire augmented by Numistar's lightning fed through their shield, so that she appeared to be a firebird, flying through stone that exploded upward, downward and to either flank in fountains hundreds of feet long. Then came the torrent. Shock. Massive pressure. Blue water sheeting over their shield as the Dragonship slowed, contained in a bubble of air, and then laboriously, impelled by the Dragoness' magical wings, forged onward and upward. A lake trout peered curiously at Lia as it sailed by on the rapidly increasing torrent. Makani groaned, grinding her fangs terribly; Hualiama was her foundation, Onyx unbreakable.\n\nThey breached from the shattered lake like a leviathan throwing back its head in mammoth sport, sheeting water from their back, and accelerated upward into the storm winds once more.\n\n<How dare you defy me! Numistar shall avenge!> the Ancient Dragoness thundered. <SHE SHALL REIGN!>\n\n<Not as long as I live!> Hualiama shouted back, feeling like a mosquito taking umbrage at a cyclonic storm.\n\nThe voice of the Ancient Dragoness' storm raised waves on the terrace lake as its waters cascaded through the breach torn by the Dragonship. <Taste my wrath, shell-daughter of Fra'anior!>\n\n<Not today, Numistar!> Not an overly imaginative response, but Hualiama cared less. Her will was adamantine; her hearts pounding with fresh purpose. Her claws clenched the deflating sack as she turned to confront the Dragoness, looking past Makani. Hot words rose with her gleaming, darkly majestic fires. <Strike me, o pernicious daughter of darkness. Strike and hold nothing back! For I am my shell-father's right paw of justice, and my shell-mother's heart of starlight.>\n\n<DIE! DIE! DIE!>\n\nWith each cry, Numistar Winterborn threw a more powerful barrage of lightning at the Dragonship. The terrace lake exploded upward in geysers of steam. The forest behind caught fire. The sack smoked from a dozen fires, but by some miracle continued to hold together. Lia grimly reflected back the power of lightning, hoping the crazy undirected bolts would cause some damage, any damage at all, to the rampaging Ancient Dragoness.\n\nStill they rose, scraping over the retaining wall of the uppermost lake level and slaloming toward the next band of forest. A powerful updraft caught them, shaking the Dragonship and tearing cracks in the cabin walls as conflicting winds twisted the vessel. Ice shattered upon the shield. The roar of her new attack drowned out even the storm's thunder as hailstones over two feet in diameter pelted the shield over the Dragonship, but Hualiama and Makani denied even this. Melded. Locked together. Screaming with a supreme effort, they brought the Dragonship up over the rising forests and on to the fields of eternal snow beyond.\n\nHer voice quaked the Island. <YOU WILL PERISH!>\n\nSo saying, the storm stooped in concert with her voice, its hurricane-force winds knocking the Dragonship tumbling end over end. The snow changed places with the sky. Lightning crashed all around them. Relentless. Overpowering the Dragoness' strength. Driving them toward darkness. At the last instant, Hualiama abandoned shielding the vessel and enwrapped every living soul aboard in light. Love could bring them to Immadia, whole.\n\n*KAAABOOM!* The Dragonship exploded in a fireball of destruction."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 92",
                "text": "Hualiama stirred, thinking, 'I've snow up my nose.'\n\nWhat she had was a dragonet on her nose. What was Flicker doing here?\n\nNumistar! Great Islands! She squirmed to her paws. All around her, across a landing area strewn with smoking debris, dazed Easterners slowly pulled themselves out of the wreckage. Genzo, grinning. Sumio, rubbing his bald pate. Qilong, somehow managing to look dapper despite his trousers smouldering in three separate places. Makani? Where was the Grey\u2013there! She rolled over painfully, unclenching her forepaws to release Jin and Isiki separately. Lia sagged with relief. All accounted for.\n\nThen she heard a new note on the wind. Chittering. Screeching. The fluttering of hundreds of thousands of wings. White dragonets poured down from the black clouds, their tiny pink eyes blazing with unnatural hatred.\n\nNumistar meant to finish them off.\n\n[ The Snows of Immadia ]\n\nHUaliama waded through the knee-deep, powdery white snow. \"To arms! To arms, men! Stand together!\"\n\n\"Impossible odds,\" moaned Qilong. Lia was just about to blast him, when he whipped out his curved Eastern sword and yelled, \"To me! We are men of Kaolili! We are not beaten yet!\"\n\nHad the mountains turned into Land Dragons and slunk off into the Cloudlands, Hualiama would have been no less surprised. Who was this man? He wore Qilong's clothing, but his bloodied face was screwed up in a determined snarl, and something in that expression captured his men's hearts as surely as a Dragon clasped prey in its talons\u2013intense, almost savage.\n\nThe Prince raged, \"We will die with honour! Make every blow count, men! Numistar lives in each dragonet, so kill them all!\"\n\nThat was it. Qilong had touched and named what she had intuited; Numistar was weaker than before. She was mighty, but her numbers had been whittled away by constant warfare. Every kill reduced her power a little more. They had to hold out. If Grandion and his Dragonwing could reach them through the storm, they might stand some chance against the Ancient Dragoness\u2013the chance of a gnat lost in the Cloudlands.\n\nAlready, the first dragonets spiralled down toward her. Mere feet away. Hualiama leaped into the air, followed a half-second later by Makani, hastily settling her two Riders on her shoulders. She pushed her punishing, reflective shield outward. <Numistar! You repulsive maggot, was that the last whimper of your puny wrath?>\n\n<Go Dragonsoul! We are together!> her Human shouted within.\n\n*KAAABOOM!*\n\nLightning blasted once more, but Hualiama reflected it back outward with an infusion of starlight, all around her. Dragonets combusted mid-air. A ring of smoke briefly puffed upward, the remnant of thousands, before whipping away on the breeze. A dense wave of dragonets smashed into the pair of Dragons, then immediately into the crew. Bodies. Teeth. Talons everywhere, little muzzles spitting words of killing and maiming and ravening. Four men fell at once, clawing helplessly at their faces; Hualiama found herself forced backward under great duress. She shoved back, infusing her shield with starlight power. So little left. Petals floated on the breeze, blowing up a dragonet every time they touched one. The sweetish stench of burning flesh galvanised the nostrils of every Dragon, amplifying their battle-rage.\n\nThe battle raged back and forth. Makani fell under a squirming pile. Lia blasted her loose with a despairing surge of magic. The Dragons landed beside the crew, curving about them to protect them with their bodies, forming a half-moon shelter within which the men could draw close and protect each other against the storm of white bodies that raged over them like a blizzard. Lia saw even Flicker giving of his strength, breaking up attacks upon Qilong and Isiki as the slave-girl loosed a flurry of arrows from the top of Makani's back. The Grey Dragoness fired glob after glob of superheated glue, taking out tens of dragonets at a time. Yet they had come so thickly upon the beleaguered crew, the morning darkened toward a preternatural twilight. Jin tacked Isiki about the waist and slid down the curve of Makani's flank with her, landing lightly beside Qilong in the thick snow.\n\n\"To me! Defend the Dragons!\" Qilong shrieked. His left eye had been clawed out, but he still fought like a madman. \"Together, men! Drive them back!\"\n\nIce pelted down. Careless of her own body spread out in its multiplicity of untold thousands, Numistar hurled hailstones at the group; Lia threw up a shield again, and within a matter of minutes, found her group buried beneath a dome of thick ice, which solidified over her shield.\n\nAn abeyance? Aye. She dropped her magical defences warily.\n\n\"Nice!\" Jin clapped her on the shoulder as Hualiama whirled, searching for enemies. A few men duelled briefly with dragonets, slaying them.\n\n\"Wasn't my doing,\" she panted. \"Makani, you\u2013\"\n\n\"Fine,\" groaned the Dragoness.\n\n\"Where are you wounded, you lying beast?\"\n\nThe Grey stared at Lia. \"Another time, I'd have your wings for the insult, hatchling.\" With a snap of her jaw, she sliced in half a dragonet which had been aiming to ambush Isiki. \"Alright. I can't fly. They damaged my nerve bundles on the left side, secondary wing-joint.\"\n\n\"I can try to\u2013\"\n\n\"See to Qilong.\"\n\nThe Prince flapped a hand in Lia's general direction. \"Don't worry about me. I've always wanted a properly piratical eye-patch.\"\n\nIn the gloom of their icy prison, his face was drawn. Lia asked, \"Are you in pain?\"\n\n\"As if a blacksmith poked his forge-irons into my eye,\" Qilong replied.\n\nLia touched him, then Makani for good measure. That was it. Were her magic a dishrag, it had just been wrung dry. And ten thousand claws scrabbled at their icy prison from the outside. Any Island-shaking ideas, Star Dragoness?\n\n<ALASTIOR!!>\n\nWell, that sufficed to shake her Island! Her Tourmaline certainly knew how to make an entrance. Hualiama ducked reflexively as the orange of raging Dragon fire lit up the ice from the outside. Orange prisms. The colour of her ardour. Forbidden no longer. Yet impossible, most certainly\u2013which made her treacherous heart dance like a dragonet practising her aerial cartwheels on a blustery day. He was Grandion. He was Tourmaline. Her heart would acknowledge no other.\n\nShe cast a wild look in Makani's direction.\n\n<Go to him,> urged the Grey. And she added, <You're glowing white.>\n\nThe dragonets had quarried a hole through the eastern side already. They were no match for the scale-bright, sizzling joy of a Star Dragoness.\n\nLia burst out into a whiteout, but she had no need for eyesight. Her heart followed that oath-connection right to the source. Scales of tourmaline blue winked at her through the massive press of dragonet bodies. She cried, <Thou, my heart-jewel!>\n\n<Thou, the starlight Dragonsong of eternity\u2026> his soft bugle was wholly at odds with the open-taloned waving of his forepaws as he liberally sieved dragonets out of the air. <The Dragonwing comes! I found thee an army!>\n\n<All in a day's awesomeness, eh?>\n\n<I outpaced them all, o stolen Princess.> He cleared the air around her so that Lia could briefly catch a glimpse of his bloodied smile. <Your brother flies hence, leading many Dragons of Pla'arna, Gemalka and Herliss. An army of crusty malcontents ripe for the seductive, overpowering paw of a Star Dragoness.>\n\nDespite fighting for her life in the midst of a raging Dragon-battle, Lia blushed. <Grandion!>\n\n<How many leagues did I wait for thee to speak my name thus?>\n\nFar, far too many. Lia fought close to the towering Tourmaline, wary of his scything paws but grateful for the sheltering presence, for the linkage with him that promised the restoration of her magic through the mighty fonts of his resources. They patrolled the area over her ice-dome, but the dragonets tore at it relentlessly, exposing first Makani's back and shoulders, then the heads of Qilong and his crew. The frigid wind howled over the site, hampering the white dragonets more than the partially protected men, rising to an ululating pitch of outright frenzy as the battle momentarily stalled with neither side making much progress.\n\nThen, Dragon-thunder rolled over the site. Flame speared through the darkness as Northern Dragonwing tore wide rents in Numistar's dragonet-body, only for the white dragonets to swirl together again in their limitless numbers. They swarmed the much larger Lesser Dragons with sharp cries, cutting lips and wing membranes with their razor-sharp talons and aiming particularly for the vulnerable eyes. Lia saw many Dragons curling flame out of the sides of their mouths to protect their eyes\u2013perhaps a planned tactic? She swirled upward with Grandion, slashing instinctively with her paws. Here and there, she saw light flaring\u2013Tiiyusiel's eye-cannon piercing the storm from just offshore of Immadia.\n\n*Whomp! Whomp!* Mizuki's signature attack! Golden blood rained from above together with ice and sleet as the Copper Dragoness pounded the dragonets with her Shivers power, at last drawing a great bellow of pain from Numistar.\n\nYet the strength of an Ancient Dragoness held more than firm. She was born of old, a Dragon of powers forged in an age when the mightiest of the Dragonkind roamed the Island-World, crafting and warring and loving, and developing the great traditions of draconic science in an attempt to recover what had been lost in their great journey from the stars. Numistar also had thousands of years of cunning to draw upon, the experience of many conflicts and a lifetime of hatred and scheming against Fra'anior and his allies. Dragons snarled and fell as the dragonets shredded wings and damaged eyes. Phenomenal, multi-forked torrents of lightning blasted ceaselessly from above, knocking the less powerful Dragons to the ground where they were set upon by champing hordes of dragonets. Open wounds provided instant routes into Dragons' bodies. Hualiama saw dragonets crawling into empty eye-sockets and tearing mouthfuls out of still-waggling tongues. Ravenous. Cruel. Inexorable. How could she stop this? How to prevail against insurmountable odds, where the very elements of darkness took form to rend and destroy?\n\nHers was a quest for light beneath a storm-riven sky.\n\nLia rode with Grandion, striking with her paws and burgeoning magical resources where possible, but their Dragon force was being pounded on all fronts by the weather; that weather was an overwhelming blend of Numistar's whiteness comprised of ice, wind-blasted snow, lightning and dragonets, not to mention the scything wind. Grandion retreated toward Makani's position, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Mizuki as Hualiama supplied waves of white-fires to keep their wings clean of dragonets. Yet they flailed against unending legions.\n\n<HUALIAMA!> Numistar's mountainous fury slammed her into Grandion's flank. She fell half-stunned to the ground, landing in a steaming heap nearby Jin and Isiki. The slave-girl immediately bent over her, slapping Lia's cheek as if she were a Human.\n\n\"Here. Take these.\"\n\nLia stared stupidly at her Nuyallith blades. \"I'm a Dragon.\"\n\nIsiki pressed the blades on her. \"You said these made flame. You can't breathe fire. We need any advantage we can imagine.\"\n\nAbove and around her, Numistar raged. This was her home territory. The temperature, dropping precipitately. She felt Dragons falling to the ground as shocks through her paws. Lia growled, \"Dragons don't fight with swords.\" Swatting a dragonet away from her face, she stared at the slave-girl. \"We're getting slaughtered out there and you're\u2013\"\n\n\"His idea.\" The Eastern Islander held out her hand, palm-up. Flicker stood there, looking as pleased as a newly minted brass dral. \"Flicker said you defeated someone called Roraba? Did he mean the Warlord Shinzen?\"\n\nFlicker squeaked, \"Lia no fight. Dance.\"\n\nHualiama's eyes widened. Ra'aba! He remembered the confrontation which had ended in his death!\n\nClearly she appeared completely witless, for the dragonet added, \"Flicker say stupid straw-head too much fight. She dance. Flicker awesome-pants?\"\n\n\"If we win this battle, you can call yourself anything you like!\" Snatching up the blades, the Star Dragoness planted a kiss Dragon-swift on Isiki's cheek. \"Take care of Jin, you mischief-maker.\" Then she bowed formally to Flicker. \"May I have this dance, o dragonet-lord of awesomeness?\"\n\nHe really was awesome. Qilong was just a pretender."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 93",
                "text": "The Nuyallith blades appeared undersized even in the paws of a hatchling Star Dragoness, but their power was not. Forged of meteorite metal in a furnace heated by Dragon fire and imbued with magic, they were the finest tools of a forgotten generation\u2013but only tools, unless coupled with the knowledge of the disciplines of Nuyallith. Suddenly, Hualiama found a decision crystallising in her mind. This knowledge should not die with her. One day, she would return to her monastery and gift the Nuyallith lore to the people to whom it belonged. Her monk-brothers. They were the perfect custodians of this knowledge.\n\nHer hearts swelled with Dragonsong. There, in the roaring crucible of life-and-death combat, Hualiama raised her voice and began to sing the soul-dance from the Flame Cycle. Sumio and Genzo gaped at her as if she had gaily twirled off the cliff-edge of insanity. But Grandion knew. His contribution was voiced at first in hoarse bursts from a throat roughened by too much fire-breathing, but he kept time and his volume swelled with an infusion of Storm power. Mizuki did not know the words but she hummed loudly as she stormed past, puffing her Shivers briefly above Hualiama's head to clear her a path into the white-upon-white mayhem. Elki waved his sword in a riotous salute-come-defensive stroke and then, catching wind of her song, warmed up his well-trained baritone. Flicker launched into an intricate harmonic descant, while the Harmonic magic of the Land Dragon's increasingly sporadic light-shots created a percussive, counterpoint drumbeat that introduced the element of the unexpected to her dance.\n\nInspiring! Their chorus of approbation fired her Dragon hearts.\n\nYet her Dragoness still knew nothing about the forms and ways of Nuyallith magic. For that, she needed her paramount weapon. <Humansoul. We need you. Can you teach a Dragoness how to dance?>\n\nAn inner smile sparked white-fires that lit up her third heart with a palpable *whoosh!* The Dragoness was quite certain her every scale was aglow, making her blend in perfectly with the screaming snow and thronging dragonets.\n\nThen, that determined voice which always glinted with hints of paranormal potential, said, <Teach us to dance? Dragonsoul, I'm honoured, but this knowledge already lives within us. It is ours.>\n\n<Then lead. Our paws yield the floor, Humanlove. Show us the way.>\n\nShe saw a vision of starlight falling upon an endless onyx ocean.\n\nBugling her Dragonsong, the Star Dragoness launched into the fray. The blades ignited in her forepaws as power channelled through her body, forming a nimbus of blue-white flame about her wrists and digits before flowing down the blades and blazing outward to a distance of ten feet in sharply defined, blue-hot cutting edges. Yet always before her was Flicker, drawing her into the dance, into the place where instinct supplanted physical function and all was subsumed to the song underpinning the languid-seeming movements of her limbs and wings and body, but in reality she knew that the movements were as rapid as a Dragon's reactions.\n\n<Dance, my Dragonsoul! Now, DANCE!>\n\nFlicker before her. A girl twirling within. Nothing else mattered.\n\nThe Nuyallith blades whirled about her spinning body in a coruscating, flaming form of destructive shield-armour. Hualiama pressed deeper into the storm, inviting Numistar Winterborn to assail her, to throw thousands of dragonets and titanic bolts of lightning at the star rising within the storms of the Ancient Dragoness' being. Each dragonet was a pinprick of light, as though the swords flailed through a amphitheatre filled with shining fire-souls, and they yielded to the darting blades as if they were moths drawn to a pyretic, lethal end. Flaring. Briefly incandescent, then gone.\n\nShe had no awareness of time passing, just the dragonet-dance of Flicker before her and the destruction falling from bodies blown into mortal dust before her blades. Her Dragoness laughed viciously. This was her role. Perfect, draconic ruin. Tasting of the golden rain of dragonet blood, the sharp metallic tang, the tingling of dying magic. She was the scorching blade slicing into Numistar's belly, provoking bellows of pain as her dance broadened, becoming wilder, stronger, more and more savage in keeping with the aeons-old savagery of the beast she assaulted. That tinge of wrongness within her? Crushed. That knowledge of grief swelling in a weak Human breast? Denied. This was justice. This was the madness of battle-joy, the Dragonsong of the righteous avenger. This was\u2026\n\n<Horrific,> sobbed Humansoul.\n\nBefore the feral Dragoness could do more than snarl her frustration, Flicker chimed in, <Hualiama give second life. Life, not slaughter. Flicker weep Human tears.>\n\nAt the crux of her immolating fury, Dragonsoul perceived a new reality: the power of mercy. It was, in its own way, a sword greater and more penetrating than any other, for it divided an immortal soul, cleaving good and evil, changing the very face of destiny. She turned her genocidal fury inward. Transformed it. All her magic, her grief, her raging thirst for revenge, she channelled into a single, despairing cry:\n\n<BEZALDIOR!! BE FREE!>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 94",
                "text": "Istariela and Fra'anior eyed each other across an unknowable divide of time and space, yet the greater gulf was the grief that divided their lives, hearts and souls. The grief of an Ancient Dragon was abyssal, expressed in depths so profound they seemed to plumb eternity. The grief of a star was a place where even the purest light was traced with shadow, for to behold it was to feel every shadow of one's own heart, and to weep.\n\nHumansoul and Dragonsoul stood hand in hand between the columns at the very edge of their realm, gazing at their shell-parents.\n\n<Will you reconcile for our sakes?> the Dragoness asked softly.\n\n<Will you declare peace, and give reborn love a chance?> asked Human-Lia.\n\nTheir questions fell upon silence.\n\nEndless silence.\n\nSo much was spoken in that silence, the very farthest reaches of space whispered their names.\n\nIt was the Great Onyx who broke first. With a sob, he cried, <For thy sakes, Hualiama, all love is possible. Yet mine third heart mourns, inconsolable. I\u2026 I cannot bear this fate!>\n\nAnd with that, the Onyx Dragon fled.\n\nThe White Dragoness whispered, <All that is fair of dark and light do meet in thee, beloved shell-daughter. In time, I promise, you will come to understand my misfortune.>\n\nWith a wild, inchoate cry, Istariela fled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 95",
                "text": "Blue-star drifted over the battlefield. A few stray snowflakes drifted down from a clearing sky; the first blue, a brilliant, eggshell blue, peeked between the disintegrating cloudbanks as though fearful of gazing upon a scene of such carnage. The suns, partially concealed beyond the full Blue Moon, flung quadruple overlapping rainbows amidst the clouds. Beauty to herald the vanquishing of evil. Too much to bear, her shell-father had said? He spoke truth. Heart-lacerating truth. For her hearts wept sorrow upon sorrow for the pain, the misery, the anguish etched upon the visages of those mercifully beyond pain. Dragon bodies and dragonets were strewn across the snowy slope over an area exceeding a square mile. So heavy her wings. So grievous the price of victory.\n\nHer head turned, listening to the parting whisper of Numistar Winterborn's presence upon the breeze, leaching away into the ground and the Cloudlands far below Immadia Island.\n\n<Nay, I am not defeated, Blue-star. You've merely released me to take on a new, more powerful manifestation\u2013that which I secreted in the North aeons before your time. My master-plan reaches its pinnacle.>\n\n<Return to these Isles, Winterborn, and I will strike you down once more. I will end your existence.>\n\nMocking laughter faded into the distance. <Beware the Ice-Raptors, o child of Onyx. Beware the curse of Numistar upon thee and thy kin!>\n\nWhat a cruel shiver gripped her wings! But the Tourmaline came to her, gentle of paw, and drew her into a simple embrace, muzzle against muzzle. <Thou, the star watching over our Isles.> Ruefully, he added, <Numistar hasn't perished?>\n\nLia gulped, <We only won a skirmish. Only\u2026 a skirmish. Curse this fate, Grandion\u2026>\n\nHe held her close, so close, and with such kindness, her resolve almost shattered. Hualiama gazed past his flank, unseeing. To have fought so hard, for so long, only for Numistar's spirit to have evaporated like mists over the caldera!\n\nNo, she would never curse fate. She would embrace it; in time, teach it to dance. Hualiama's dance.\n\nGrandion said, <Will you come and help me tend the wounded? They are very many.>\n\nLia sighed. Did service never end? <I will do what I can.>\n\n<You can do much,> said Grandion, and the tenor of his response made her look up. Dragonets. Thousands of dragonets watched her, foremost among their number, Flicker. She shook at first in remembrance of their claws and fangs, but their behaviour was not the same as before.\n\nNumistar's dominating power had vanished.\n\nFlicker said, <Lia healed us. She gave fire-life.>\n\n<Lia, Lia, Leee-yaaa\u2026> sighed the dragonets, crowding forward. They came to touch her, first in ones and then rapidly in threes and fives, on her spine-spikes and muzzle and paws and tail, on her wings and ear-canals and belly and chin. Each touch lifted her, a tiny spark of strength. Some said, <We give. We give.>\n\nOf course. To dragonets, this was not worship. This was their expression of thanks for new life, a communal giving. No single dragonet of the eight or ten thousand left, those she had released with her final Command that broke Numistar's power, demurred. They filled her with new strength. The strength of many.\n\nSo she must respond. Lia inclined her muzzle in obeisance. <This Star Dragoness thanks the mighty white dragonet-kind for their answering gift of life. May it nourish many, as the dragonet-kind themselves are nourished.>\n\nDipping her left wingtip, the Star Dragoness spiralled down to the battlefield and found her first patient, a wounded dragonet. Why not? She bathed the female in starlight.\n\nWho was next?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 96",
                "text": "\"Dragonships incoming,\" Prince Qilong said to Elki, as the two men watched Hualiama carefully pressing the skin on Isiki's cheek together. Three neat, parallel talon-cuts had gouged her to the bone, thankfully missing the right eye. Lia's magic flared along the cuts, sealing the wound. The Prince's eyes dipped. Qilong hissed, \"By my ancestors' beards!\"\n\nLia glanced up sharply.\n\nJin's hand jumped away from Isiki's. The young warrior, patched to within an inch of his life and still being bandaged by Elki with strips of cloth recovered from the wreckage, flushed brightly.\n\nThe Star Dragoness rapped, \"Prince Qilong, may I speak as Fra'anior to Kaolili?\"\n\n\"Aye!\" he spat. \"Never, in all my years\u2013what shamelessness is this? A Nikuko warrior and a slave-girl?\"\n\n\"Fra'anior wishes to make a purchase from the Kingdom of Kaolili.\"\n\n\"A purchase? This is hardly the hour\u2013oh.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I rather skipped over protocol by investing your Thirteenth Slave as a Dragon Rider. On behalf of all Fra'anior, I hereby offer public apology for my hasty, thoughtless actions.\" Grandion snorted forcefully, blowing all of the Humans' hair about. Lia added, \"I am lamentably unversed in the civil traditions of Kaolili.\"\n\nQilong bowed, declaring sagely, \"On behalf of my kingdom, I, Prince Qilong, the masterful pirate-lord of seventy-three Islands, do accept your gracious apology, o Serpentine Potentate of the Smoking Cluster.\"\n\nElki's sudden fit of coughing sounded suspiciously like laughter.\n\nHad he pinched that phrase from her cheeky-as-a-parakeet brother? Forcibly straightening her lips, Lia responded, \"By way of recompense, I therefore propose to relieve the Kingdom of Kaolili of the worthless wretch's services, this impertinent and disrespectful Thirteenth Slave.\" A seething Isiki made to protest, but the Star Dragoness hissed her into silence. \"What is the going price for such a lazy, unhelpful girl?\"\n\nMost of the Eastern faces around them registered surprise or amusement. Qilong said gravely, \"In light of Kaolili's recently compromised finances, I propose the treasury-draining sum of\u2026 thirteen brass drals.\"\n\n\"I'll offer no less than ten,\" Lia said promptly.\n\n\"Seven.\"\n\n\"Three well-used brass drals, and that is my final price.\"\n\nIsiki had to cover her mouth to muffle her laughter; her almond eyes sparkled over the edge of her hand.\n\n\"One brass dral rusted beneath a barrel for a hundred years, and the spit on my hand to seal the bargain!\" Qilong finished grandly, shooting a fine gobbet onto his palm. He held out his hand. The Dragoness shook gravely.\n\n\"This is how they do business in Fra'anior?\" Saori asked in amazement. \"What on the Islands was that, Hualiama? Do you propose to let her\u2026 and him, just\u2013\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. Get to work, slave,\" said Lia, finally losing her unequal battle against a smile. \"You belong to Fra'anior now. I will not have slave-girls kissing warriors in my kingdom. It is simply not done.\" Isiki glanced uncertainly at her from beneath her lashes. \"However, since we stand upon Immadian soil and you happen to be a new Dragon Rider\u2013no, belay that. To work! See to your Dragoness.\"\n\nElki began to protest, \"But Lia, the Kingdom doesn't keep s\u2013\"\n\n\"Shut the fumarole!\" Lia barked, cuffing her brother a fine blow on the left shoulder.\n\nThe crew spread out, retrieving pieces of their cargo and personal effects that stuck out of the ice here and there, including weapons, supplies and Qilong's bed, which of all items aboard, had miraculously survived the explosion and crash landing perfectly intact. Meantime, a small flotilla of Dragonships approached from the direction of Immadia city, a-bristle with weaponry and hostile intent. The Northern Dragons gathered about their fallen in groups of five or six and immolated the bodies in fire, each time singing a brief Dragonsong that sped the fire-soul on its journey to the eternal flame.\n\nTo Hualiama's surprise, the Northern Dragons appeared philosophical about the great numbers of dead. Mizuki explained how Grandion had tricked them into battle, but the general tone bespoke honour or even celebration of lives lost in glorious combat. Several Reds composed odes of praise for their kin. There was no remonstration with Grandion. To face an Ancient Dragoness in battle would be the boast that sustained many of these Dragons until they too passed on to the fires.\n\nGrandion brought Yuhurak the Brown to Hualiama, who was taking a third look at Makani's nerve-damaged wing. \"Noble Yuhurak suggests we appoint a Human to negotiate with the Immadians.\"\n\n\"What about Elki or Qilong?\" she asked.\n\n\"Immadia is a matriarchy,\" Yuhurak explained. \"They also have a long and complicated history with the Northern Dragonkind. Currently, Dragons are forbidden from landing on Immadia's shores.\"\n\nPrince Elka'anor cast a roving eye over a battlefield still littered with over two hundred Lesser Dragons, almost half ground-bound until their wings healed enough to fly, and the thousands of dragonets gathered around Flicker, who appeared to be holding court. \"You don't suppose they'd accept a minor error? A few apologies, a sackful or two of diamonds, and we all part as best friends?\"\n\nYuhurak was the first Dragon Lia had met who laughed openly at Human sarcasm. \"Aye, Prince of Fra'anior. But while the smashed terrace lake, the ruin of their seasonal crops and the landing of a few hundred Dragons may escape notice, this invasion by a duo of misplaced Fra'aniorian royals most certainly will not.\"\n\n\"No?\" asked Elki, amazed.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What about him?\" Elki stabbed a finger in Qilong's direction.\n\nThe Prince puffed out his chest. \"I'm invading, too.\"\n\nSaori put in, \"Are you honestly not sending in a Dragonwing? Grandion, you lead the negotiations. Swat a few of their Dragonships, flex your muscles\u2026\"\n\nLia winked at Grandion. \"Say, Tourmaline, how do Dragons spell 'negotiate?'\"\n\n*Grr-grrrr,* he purred, while blatantly casting about for a witty reply. \"With the three essential 'B's' of course\u2013bite, burn and bury.\"\n\n\"Enough said. Slave. Where might I find my clothing?\"\n\nIsiki pointed to a charred metal frame which had once belonged to a barrel. \"I'm afraid I put your personal effects in there for safekeeping, Mistress.\"\n\nShe voiced a low cry of regret, but her brother patted his tattered pockets. \"Scale of White Dragoness and jewel of Sapphurion all intact. Fear not. Thy noble brother hath not neglected to succour his beloved sister's essential treasures amidst this minor outbreak of violence.\"\n\n\"All the way from the Lost Islands? You're magnificent, Elki!\" she enthused.\n\n\"Undeniably.\"\n\nIsiki put in diffidently, \"I do have a suggestion, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Aye?\"\n\n\"You can wear my slave-girl's tunic. It's decent.\"\n\nElki, Saori and Qilong hooted with laughter. Lia shrugged. Fine. She had briefed the King of Kaolili clad only in a bath towel. Why not meet a few warrior-royals dressed as a slave-girl? At least she proposed to wear actual clothes this time.\n\n<Your diplomatic skills are also in dire need of embellishment,> Humansoul told her.\n\n[ A Royal Mess ]\n\nThe Immadians Approached without haste, checking the situation with the calm of veteran soldiers. Their uniforms bore no special insignia, but royal purple featured strongly on belt inlays and scabbards, cloak fringes and armoured headgear. How did they produce that exact colour\u2013was it amethyst, Lia wondered? Striking. She noted the innovative design of their Dragonships\u2013much larger than any she had seen before, beautifully streamlined and armoured with flexible, lacquered layers of what appeared to be wood\u2013and the grim intent of the male and female soldiers clustered around the double war-crossbow emplacements. They were unusually tall. Some individuals had to top seven feet, she estimated, and they were all well-proportioned, with the muscular bearing and alertness of professional soldiers. Swords were the weapon of choice, unlike the war-hammers more common South of the Spits, which separated the far North from the middle-upper latitudes of the Island-World.\n\nWith the same calm, one of the Dragonships sideslipped away from the fleet and lowered a hundred feet. A rope ladder unfurled toward a relatively unscathed patch of snow; a screen of warriors rapidly deployed, then two women descended in their midst. Royals, by their bearing. The foremost was a head and a half taller than Lia, a woman who looked as though she wrestled rajals in her spare time. The second vanished behind the first. Just Lia's size and as slight as a reed, yet she too moved with palpable authority\u2026\n\n\"Who's in charge of this mess\u2013this invasion?\"\n\nThe tall woman removed her helm as she spoke, shaking loose her long, ice-blonde hair. She was striking. Icy blue eyes. High cheekbones. A mouth set not in hatred, but not in welcome either. Even her brusque, military delivery lilted with half a dozen vowel sounds unfamiliar to the ear, so evocative and lyrical\u2026 almost like Dragonsong.\n\nStunned, Lia struggled to summon a coherent word.\n\n\"You, Dragon. You are not of the North,\" said the commanding woman. \"Are you the Tourmaline of Gi'ishior? The famously rebellious shell-son of Sapphurion?\"\n\n\"Sapphurion has passed on to the fires,\" Grandion growled. \"Aye, I am Grandion of\u2013\"\n\nThe woman said, \"What do I care for Sapphurion? You invaded Immadia's shores. Wrecked our crops. Dumped five feet of snow all over our city. Now I see our second terrace lake lies empty and my people face a winter of starvation. What have you to say for yourself, fire-breather, before I fill your hide with holes and bury you beneath the snows of Immadia?\"\n\nHualiama felt the wild note of his fires vibrate the air between them. That callous mention of Sapphurion had touched a nerve. She thought to him, <Grandion, stand down. Let me deal with this.> Aloud, she said, \"I am the Princess Hualiama of Fra'anior\u2013\"\n\nThe cold blue eyes appraised her. \"You? Dressed like a street urchin?\"\n\n*GNNNARRR!!*\n\n\"Grandion!\" Lia warned.\n\n\"Aye, muzzle the animal,\" laughed one of the soldiers.\n\nThe very Island seemed to gasp with the same horror that froze her feet to the spot.\n\nHe sprang! So fast was the coil-and-launch response of a Dragon, the soldiers guarding their leader did not even have time to gasp. Lia slammed up a hard projectile-shield, causing the enraged Tourmaline to skid off thin air a mere foot above the Immadian royal's head and slew into the dangling rope ladder. The Dragonship lurched as the ladder tore free.\n\nCatapults twanged, but the Dragon was far too fast. He had already sprung up beneath the Dragonship, curving his neck to deliver a huge fireball, when Lia reflexively slapped a shield around him. *GRAAARRRGGH!* Thunder, muffled. Still, the air shook. Soldiers beneath him clapped their hands to their ears in pain.\n\n<Grandion. Listen!> She inverted the shield, but he tore it apart like aged scrolleaf. Feral? No time. Drawing on the Dragon's own power, Lia smacked a second shield across his nose. Full opacity. Now he was ninety feet of implacable fury wearing an impenetrable helmet. <Grandion. I'm going to make you land. Don't, please don't fight me. I need you now more than ever.>\n\nShe drew his pain into herself.\n\nThe way Hualiama arched her back and roared at his agony made the Immadians scatter, drawing their weapons with oaths and curses; bells clanged on the Dragonships as the crossbow engineers worked frantically to reorient their weapons. Mercy! Grandion reached through her and with a cunning cast of his Storm-power, managed to whisk the soldier who had spoken unwisely up into the air and over to his paw. The Princess whirled to track the movement. Not fast enough.\n\nIt was all unravelling. The script she had developed in her head for meeting the famously proud Immadians was a scrolleaf in tatters.\n\nIf he could snatch her powers\u2026\n\nAs the catapults groaned and men bellowed, at least fifty Dragons took to the air, orienting on the Immadian force. Hualiama swiped Grandion's thunder right out of his throat and bellowed at both vocal and magical levels:\n\n\"STOP! Dragons, stand down. Hold your fire!\"\n\nShe marched smartly over to Grandion; in truth, not having anything as exacting as an actual plan in her mind. <Dragons, enough battle for one day. The Winterborn remains at large. Let us reserve our fire for evil, not for allies.> And to the Tourmaline, she said, <I know your pain, noble Dragon, but we need these Immadians. You're much too grown-up a Dragon to be playing with toys. Let the poor man go.>\n\nHer wry humour punctured his dark-fires madness. Slowly, the Dragon's quivering stance eased. His fires settled to a dull roar. Unclenching his fist, he released the soldier, who tottered two steps and fell on his rump, but before anyone could develop further foolish ideas, Hualiama rushed over to him and took the young man by the hand.\n\n\"What's your name?\"\n\nHer smile appeared to freeze his blood. Eventually, he spluttered, \"You command Dragons? Uh\u2026 I'm Jemzal, your\u2026 uh\u2026\"\n\n\"Just Hualiama. Now, who are your leaders?\"\n\n\"Their Highnesses.\" He coloured under her scrutiny. Inside, Dragonsoul was having a very annoying fit of the fiery giggles at the expression plastered on the befuddled young man's face. He whispered, \"You have pointy ears? Uh, sorry! So sorry. These are Queen Imaytha and Princess Shayitha. Sorry.\"\n\nLia drew the man to his feet\u2013leaping Islands, he was a young mountain! A boy by the fuzz on his chin, yet a boy who stood six feet eight inches in his boots. \"Come. I would like you to meet my Dragon and best friend, Grandion the Tourmaline Dragon, of Gi'ishior. Dragons are fierce and proud creatures, Jemzal, but they respond very well to compliments. Try one.\"\n\n\"You're the girl who\u2026 rides\u2026 him? We heard, from the traders.\"\n\n\"Aye?\" Lia said blandly. All the way up in Immadia? Their story had travelled.\n\n\"The tales are true? Humans commanding\u2013\" Grandion's growl made him modify his sudden volubility very hastily indeed \"\u2013cooperating with Dragons? Riding them? How does that work, uh, great lady? How do you address him? O magnificent\u2026 uh\u2026\"\n\n\"Noble Dragon will suffice,\" said Grandion, holding out his paw. \"My response was forged in the fires of grief. I will not attack again.\"\n\n\"That's Dragonish for, 'I'm sorry I attacked you,' \" Lia translated, bringing Jemzal's hand up to press against Grandion's paw. \"And, 'magnificent Dragon' will do very nicely. For you are magnificent indeed, my fiery wing\u00e9d dawn burning over the East.\"\n\nThe Tourmaline began to croon, then cut off the sound with an annoyed hiccough of acrid smoke. Jemzal seemed to want to laugh, but terror had stolen his tongue.\n\nPitching her voice with the skill of a trained singer, Hualiama said, \"We are very sorry for this royal mess. As I said, I am Princess Hualiama of Fra'anior. I am Grandion's Dragon Rider. This is the Copper Dragoness Mizuki. Her Riders are Prince Elki, my brother, and Saori of the Eastern Isles. This is Prince Qilong, heir to the throne of Kaolili and his brave Dragonship crew. And here is the Grey Dragoness Makani and her two Riders, Jin and Isiki. Our issue is with Numistar Winterborn, the Ancient Dragoness who devastated your land, and we will do everything in our power to restore the damage. We are a very long way from home and we seek allies, not conflict. We also seek knowledge of Chrysolitic Dragons.\"\n\nThe tall Immadian raised her hand in a curt gesture. \"Stand down! We will talk, Hualiama of Fra'anior, while you keep your Dragons out of our city. That is not negotiable.\"\n\nIt was on the tip of her tongue to retort, 'Then we can't talk.' But her inner Dragoness was clearly in a snarky, triumphant mood, interrupting her thoughts to chortle, <We really are an all-the-Island-or-none-at-all kind of girl, aren't we?>\n\n<Honestly, Dragoness, you sound like a three-B's kind of negotiator too.>\n\n<Learn to save a few surprises for later, Humansoul. It's more fun that way.>\n\n<Like you waited two decades to ambush me?>\n\n<Now you're learning\u2013street urchin.>\n\n<You've a brain full of cracked eggshell, you deluded excuse for an overgrown dragonfly.>\n\n<I'll be taking a rest from my monumental labours, now.> Dragonsoul yawned ostentatiously. <You go figure out how to clean up the mess we created. A royal mess, indeed.>\n\nThat Dragoness! She was a hoot. <Pop you up on the ornament-shelf, dust you off when needed?>\n\nDragonsoul pretended to snore. Ostentatiously.\n\nThe Human executed a fancy Fra'aniorian genuflection. \"Agreed, o Queen Imaytha.\"\n\nPlacing her hands on her hips, the tall warrior laughed. \"Oh no, I'm Shayitha, Princess of Immadia. This is Queen Imaytha, my sister.\"\n\nThe diminutive woman stepped around her sister, doffing her helm. \"Islands' greetings, travellers.\"\n\nHualiama stared.\n\nBehind her, Prince Qilong made a sound like a mewling kitten. \"Oh, goddess.\"\n\nThe Queen of Immadia effortlessly defined the word 'beautiful'. Beauty so flawless, it was ethereal; almost otherworldly. Like her countrymen, she had skin of the finest alabaster, but her hair was an impossible golden-orange in colour, as if fire framed her face and tumbled down her back. Her eyes were the famous amethyst of the House of Immadia. To behold her was to wonder if such beauty could even exist in mortal flesh. Gentle and graceful as a bubbling brook she might seem, but Lia saw something more.\n\nMagic. The legendary Immadian Enchantress lived, and breathed.\n\nIn the Queen's mesmerising eyes, recognition flickered. Understanding. A sense of knowing one another, as if kindred spirits had journeyed afar and been reunited.\n\n\"She's moon-song over the deeps,\" Qilong whispered.\n\nQueen Imaytha moved forward as if trapped in a dream of her own, her demeanour provoking a scowl on her much taller sister's face. Drawing close, she reached out and took Hualiama's hands in her own. The Immadian trembled, the depths of her emotions, unfathomable. Then, she seemed to melt, for she drew Lia into a warm, heartfelt embrace which she held so long, the Fra'aniorian began to wonder if something were horribly amiss.\n\nTears wet her shoulder!\n\nThe Queen drew back slightly, not relinquishing her hold on Lia's arms. They were of a height, their eyes exactly level, but Imaytha seemed in danger of falling over at a breath of wind, so slight and delicate was she.\n\nIn her chiming voice, she said, \"You shall be honoured guests, for truly I proclaim, Immadia is home and hearth to your soul, o Princess of Fra'anior. Share life with us.\"\n\n\"Imaytha!\" her sister remonstrated.\n\n\"Oh, slay me for but a smile,\" Qilong continued to embarrass himself in drivelling worship.\n\n\"Shayitha, you do not understand what I sense.\" The amethyst eyes seemed to look far beyond the world, perhaps into the future. \"Fra'anior brings a gift of new fires to our land. We must receive her with all honour.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 97",
                "text": "The following day, Immadia paid its traders in the currency of pure white diamonds of Pla'arna, and all available trader and military Dragonships travelled southeast in search of supplies to sustain the people through the coming winter. Grandion and Yuhurak the Brown flew down to the second terrace layer to assess the damage to the retaining wall, which was severe. There could be no recovering the lost water, but the coming winter would refill the lake if the wall could be repaired. They set five Browns to the restoration work, with a further twenty Reds and Greens in support, carrying boulders to the site. Other Dragons flew Immadian soldiers to the outlying villages to survey the storm damage. Numistar's storm had crushed many huts or staved in roofs; all needed urgent repair before the real snows arrived. Immadia City was in better shape, for the sturdier stone buildings had withstood even a very heavy snowfall and punishing quantities of hail. The building site of their new fortress, however, a castle atop a hill overlooking the small city, had taken a severe battering from the lightning.\n\nFrom the rooftop balcony of the palace, the fur-draped Fra'aniorian gazed over the city as its lamps winked in the early evening dark, and shivered. Bitter, bitter cold. A thick blanket of snow. What a peculiar, exotic place! The people rode flightless birds called terhals through the streets; the mountains shadowed all, but with a presence more motherly than ominous. Somewhere amongst the snowbound peaks, Flicker was helping the dragonets establish colonies. Like it or not, Immadia had acquired a population of white dragonets.\n\nMercy. Mercy had allowed Numistar to escape\u2013perhaps. Could she have done differently?\n\n<No, Humanlove. We are who we are.> Her Dragoness wriggled sleepily. <Besides, two evils don't cancel out to make a good.>\n\n<But how can we find these Chrysolitic Dragons, o my soul? These Immadians don't even know what lies fifty leagues beyond their northern shore. A border of mist, storm and legend, they say. No sane pilot would travel there.>\n\n<Now we're sane? How you insult us!>\n\nHuman-Lia laughed. The Immadians certainly were touchy and traditionalist, but not in a bad way, she sensed. Besides, insanity was to contemplate taking a Dragonship to that eerie northern border when she could take her Dragon instead. She said, <Ice-Dragons haven't been seen for two hundred years. Life in the North is hard. Harder than my home Cluster, by far.>\n\n<We've landed amongst friends, Humansoul. And remember, the Winterborn mentioned Ice-Raptors. Not Dragons.>\n\n<The curse of Numistar. Thanks for the reminder.>\n\nVanished Dragons. Ice-Raptors were apparently a fireside tale for scaring little children\u2026 yet she knew she would travel beyond that border, beyond its eternal, cloying mists. Numistar must be defeated. Then, the long journey South to confront her mother; to oppose whatever mischief she intended for the Dragons of Gi'ishior.\n\nHearing a footstep behind her, Hualiama turned, expecting Queen Imaytha. \"Jin!\"\n\nHe was wild, shambling, his dark shoulder-length hair mussed as though he had just woken from a sleep spent wrestling a thousand dragonets. His face twisted strangely as he regarded her.\n\n\"Jin?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I\u2026 what's happening to me?\"\n\n\"What do you\u2013mercy!\"\n\nThe teenager held his hand outstretched. There, in the palm between them, a flame burned. It did not wink out or sear his skin, but appeared to rise and fall slightly in rhythm with his breathing. His grey eyes pleaded with Lia; in the semidarkness, they burned with a distinct inner light.\n\nHe cried, \"It's always been\u2026 the flame. It calls. Burns. Fills my dreams. And when my people died, I was the one, the only one, to escape. Do you understand?\"\n\nShe shook her head mutely.\n\n\"It carried me through the battle. There's something wrong\u2013a curse upon my life.\"\n\n\"No, Jin. It's right.\"\n\n\"No! You've made it worse.\" A blade winked in his hand. A dagger, curved and deadly. \"The trouble began when I met you.\"\n\nHualiama extended her hands, her Dragoness poised within. \"Jin, put the knife down. Listen to me.\"\n\n\"No! You stole my Dragon, gave me another\u2013how can you love a Dragon, woman? You're sick!\"\n\n\"I am a Dragon.\"\n\nWhy this? Why now? Hualiama did not understand the forces driving this young man. How had his troubles ever begun with her? That was an excuse. A convenient lie. For all she knew, he had murdered his own people\u2013no. Now it was her leaping to crazy conclusions. She clenched her fists. Only one living soul had ever been infected with fire like this, and she had her Dragonsoul to show for it. This boy was Human. A tortured, hurting soul, frightened of the fire within.\n\nFrightened of the fire\u2026 <his own fire.>\n\nEvery hair on her arms stood to attention as the unthinkable truth crashed down on her. Impossible. Wild optimism. Fear. The knowledge that she need not be alone. The necessary abdication of pride in the perception of her own uniqueness. Aye, she was unique, but only in that she carried the parting gift of Amaryllion Fireborn to her Island-World.\n\nFor was that not his Dragon-Name? Fireborn.\n\nThis fate had been written in the stars since long before her eggling-spirit twirled in its first dance of life.\n\nWith an inchoate scream, Jin rushed at her, the blade held high.\n\nHualiama opened her mouth and breathed forth her fire-soul, directly into his face. <Thou shalt be reborn of fire and spirit, Jinichi of the Nikuko. I adopt thee. I name thee Jin the Dragon.>\n\nThe teenager crashed to his knees. Eyes bulging. Helpless. Overcome. The blade spun into the darkness, plinking off an unseen stone planter. He clawed momentarily at his throat as if burned, but he was mistaken. This was a type of fire that penetrated deeper, eternal and ever-burning, embracing the very soul. Then Jin exhaled in wonder, and Hualiama breathed in a curl of cinnamon-vanilla scent.\n\nThere in his inmost being stood a soul-tracery etched in the whitest of fires, nascent of wing and paw, a living flame.\n\nShapeshifter."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(The Waters of Nyra) The Waters of Nyra II",
        "author": "Kelly Michelle Baker",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Glacier",
                "text": "[ The Semi-Princess ]\n\nThe little red dragon dared not open her eyes. Behind closed lids, bright spots of color flickered by at monsoon speeds: Zealer Stones, hundreds of them, all under water. Tendrils of current seeped farther and farther into her ears, and she feared their touch would freeze her whole brain solid. Claws dragged her forward, up, down, sideways\u2014she couldn't tell.\n\nHer head burst into the air. Nyra sucked in a gargling breath, stretching her lungs in a body that felt shrunken. Above was a black ceiling interspersed with rock and hardened dirt; the polished surface of a cavern. There were no Zealer Stones up here, yet the room had plenty of light from those in the water. Jatika, the Zealer who held her captive, waded at her side. There was a rock shelf ahead, brushed over by a thin film of wetness. The Zealer let her go. Blind haste pulled her forward. She clambered over the ledge on limbs she could not feel. At last she splashed to dry land, warmer, yet her shivering intensified.\n\n\"The caribou have gotten smaller. And reptilian,\" said a voice from the back of the cavern, far from the glowing water. Nyra saw a figure. It was big.\n\n\"No time to explain,\" said Jatika. Only his head peeped from the surface.\n\n\"Aunt Kodi's on the wilds again,\" scoffed the figure. It rose to its feet, coming closer. It was another Zealer, hunched and rickety, ice and bones. \"And you want me to eat the problem.\"\n\nJatika groaned from the little pool. Nyra expected him to follow her out of the water, to push her down with darker punishments and darker lies. But he stayed put, staring past her at the spindly Zealer.\n\nThere was a hole behind him, shimmering beneath the teal surface. A passage? Yes. She'd traveled through a submerged tunnel to get here. For a moment, she thought to spring back in. But Jatika met her with a cold glance, and her limbs went still.\n\n\"Just don't do anything you'll regret,\" said Jatika, as if reading her thoughts. But he addressed the rickety Zealer, not her. \"And for Quay's sake, dump your carcasses.\"\n\n\"As long as you're dumping yours.\"\n\nJatika huffed into the water and was gone. Nyra shivered at the ground, without direction, without will. Just the lingering petals of shock clinging to her mind and body.\n\n\"Good Light,\" muttered the bony Zealer. \"Usually you can't rattle Jatika. You must be extra vexing. Lucky me.\"\n\nEverything went quiet, all but for the steady drips pattering down from Nyra's drying muzzle. The Zealer peered intently at the wall, at nothing. At its side was a pile of bones.\n\n\"Well, knowing your name would be nice,\" said the other dully. The Zealer still watched the wall, as if it were asking the rocks and dirt a question instead of Nyra.\n\n\"I've got all day,\" it continued, \"but I'd rather not wait.\" Its voice was low and monotonous, so low that Nyra was unsure of its sex. It could have been a young buck or an especially deep-speaking female. She assumed the latter given its mature stature yet smaller size compared to Jatika.\n\nNot that it mattered. Nothing mattered. Did it?\n\n\"Nyra,\" said Nyra at last. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Olieve.\"\n\nDrip, drip, drip.\n\n\"What's happening?\" Nyra quaked.\n\n\"You want details, then. Wasn't sure. I thought you'd be more for gawking.\" The Zealer paced around the Agring, as if to size her up.\n\n\"As to what's happening,\" said the Zealer, \"I was hoping you'd tell me.\"\n\nNyra drew in her forelimbs protectively. She tried stretching her claws. They barely moved. Numb with cold. Numb with fear.\n\n\"Alright,\" said the other. \"Maybe you can tell me what you know, and I'll fill in the cracks. Together we'll create an epic.\" She had the same accent as the other Zealers, though every word gave the impression of disinterest.\n\n\"I was outside, and they got me,\" said Nyra, wringing her paws, trying to get some feeling back. \"They started to ask questions. Then they said things\u2026\" The things they'd said. Such awful things.\n\n\"Things,\" pressed the Zealer when Nyra went quiet. Nyra couldn't repeat them. They were too horrible. They were false. Instead, Nyra skipped ahead to when the Royals started barking orders.\n\n\"They brought me down here because I was spotted,\" offered Nyra. \"And now someone is gathering in a main cave. I\u2026 don't know what that means.\"\n\n\"You came from outside\u2026\" The Zealer turned a fraction in Nyra's direction, but only just. She continued to watch the wall.\n\n\"Yes, I was\u2026\" her breath caught. With a blast of terrible vigor, she jumped to her feet. \"Oharassie!\" she cried.\n\n\"Ohara\u2014\"\n\n\"He's still out there!\" Nyra whirled back to the glowing water, studded with Zealer Stones of every size. \"He can explain this, why I'm here. He'll prove everything. I've got to let the guards know.\" She readied herself to dive in.\n\n\"You're getting ready to go in the water right now,\" observed the other. It was nearly a question, only not. Nyra thought it a stupid thing to ask\u2014her diving posture was plain and obvious.\n\n\"No, no, don't do that,\" said the Zealer with a negligible pinch of personality.\n\n\"There's no time!\" cried Nyra. Oharassie would leave at sunsets. That was the bargain. And with no daylight to be seen, who knew how much time had been wasted?\n\n\"Stop,\" the other commanded, so assuredly that Nyra hesitated. \"You can't swim the tunnel alone. And Jatika won't be at the other side to save you even if you tried. You're one special kind of crisis. He's at the main cave, most likely.\"\n\n\"When will he be back?\" Nyra demanded.\n\n\"Depends on a lot of things. But you aren't getting through that water alive. It'll turn you into an icicle before you reach the end.\"\n\n\"Then can you take me through? Fast? Before I freeze?\"\n\n\"This is a prison. It keeps us in.\"\n\n\"But you're a Zealer, he's a Zealer, and he got me through!\" she cried.\n\n\"Ah,\" said the other. \"But Jatika is whole.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" said Nyra. The seconds were bleeding away.\n\n\"Jatika,\" the other stepped out of the shadows, \"has sight.\"\n\nNyra leaped backwards. The Zealer's eyes were milky white. Whiter than the sharks at the Green Spot. And they were bigger, not just compared to the sharks, but to the other Zealers', like her eyes were compensating for a loss from which they could not recover.\n\n\"Navigation. Can't do it at all in the water.\" She stretched her lanky, light blue limbs, and her wings lifted one at a time in what looked like a well-rehearsed and methodical motion, reaching up, out, back in, up again, and finally down. Each wing got the same treatment. The time it took was agonizing. Nyra's heart quickened. The Zealer, however, looked as bored as ever.\n\n\"Now,\" said the Zealer, \"you seem to have a reason for wanting to get out of here so fast. This is fair, but tell me why.\"\n\n\"M-my friend,\" Nyra stuttered. \"My friend is out there. An Aquadray. He said he'd wait for me until the sunsets in case something went wrong.\" He said nothing would go wrong.\n\n\"This Aquadray took you here\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes!\" No time. \"He swam me over and showed me where to go. I need to get to him!\"\n\n\"Not going to happen.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"The suns have almost set.\"\n\nNyra shook her head. \"No. No, they haven't. I was just out there. The suns were in the middle of the sky.\"\n\n\"Sure, but it's winter.\"\n\nLate fall, Nyra corrected privately. Or was it winter now? It didn't matter. \"So?\"\n\n\"So there's only a few hours of daylight left. I doubt the guards will be back in between now and then. As I said, you're one special kind of crisis. They have to take care of what you started. It'll take awhile.\"\n\n\"What I started?\" Nyra hated that blank-white stare, that blank voice. But the other spoke the truth. Nyra remembered Oharassie's warning about short winter days, where Quay appeared less and less in the sky.\n\nBut what if he waited for her now, with more wise words and good ideas?\n\nDamn the winter and its daylight!\n\n\"I have to get out there,\" Nyra insisted.\n\n\"You won't.\"\n\n\"But what if the guards come back in time?\"\n\n\"Doubt it.\"\n\n\"Why aren't you helping me?\" she cried.\n\nThe Zealer sighed and strode past Nyra to the pool. \"I could explain guard shifts, flight patterns, day and night cycles, whatever you wish. I could tell you the time of day and location to a see a caribou defecate. I could tell you what's in the fecal matter. But none of this is going to get you out there.\" She ladled a wing into the water.\n\nNyra seethed.\n\n\"So, I'm going to guess that you're an Agring.\" The Zealer sat down, looking quite comfortable. Buzzing erupted in Nyra's head. Chatting? Now? Bees swarmed behind her eyeballs, wanting out of the blackness.\n\n\"Nyra is where the Agrings live, that's how I figured it out,\" continued the other. \"And your hero's welcome is also a good indicator.\"\n\n\"I guess that makes you brilliant,\" spat Nyra.\n\nThe Zealer ignored the comment. \"You came here for help.\"\n\nPleading ebbed upon Nyra's anger, creeping over a roaring flame inside. She was prepared to fly all the way back across the ocean and batter the world down along the way, for all its obstacles, oppression, and disadvantages. She felt that determined. But when the red dragon spoke, her voice cracked weakly.\n\n\"They won't help me.\"\n\n\"And you don't know why.\"\n\n\"No, I don't.\" The flame inside her disappeared. Between her loosening jaws rested the waters of her story, the tale she'd known to be real since the earliest stages of dragglinghood. How she was the descendent of explorers and warriors, and most importantly, of heroes. \"Zirus said that I was wrong. He said the Nammocks never saved your young ones from the cave-in. We killed them instead. And it started a war.\" Nyra realized she'd dried off as tears streamed down her face, shattering at her feet in teal stars. Behind her came the gentle swill of the underground pool, the only beat in a space of no music.\n\nThe Zealer cocked her head. Light flickered in and out of her absent stare while the rest flashed brilliantly on her faceplate. \"Pop a haunch, Nyra,\" she finally said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Sit down,\" she said almost kindly. Reaching back, the Zealer nosed through what looked like dry straw. \"Nibble on this. You sound like you're going to be sick.\" She dropped long green stems at Nyra's feet. Lavender flowers wrinkled their way to the stems' heads. The other ends were frayed and splintery. Unappetizing. Nyra wasn't hungry anyway. She sat down.\n\n\"I think I'm the less confused one at the moment,\" said the Zealer. \"I can barely believe it, but it seems true. There's no way you could know...\" The clouds of her eyes rolled around, annoyed. \"But I think both of us will be happier when we have the same story. I don't know much about you, but you're speaking more nonsense than I've heard in a long time, and that's noteworthy.\"\n\nNyra suppressed a scowl.\n\n\"Bother is, I don't know where we should begin in this mess.\"\n\nNyra spoke slowly. \"I want to know what's going on. Where I am, why I'm here, and why everyone is treating me like poison.\"\n\n\"The very beginning then,\" said the rickety Zealer. \"Just as I thought.\" Light blue lids closed over her vacant eyes. Nyra had heard of meditation, to be lost in a peaceful place of one's own invention. In every other second the Zealer's lids fluttered, so lightly that Nyra was surprised to notice. Inside, the Zealer was thinking on a straight path, and the Agring knew she was treading it on the careful steps of pure intent. It wasn't meditation. It was caution.\n\n\"Stop me if I go too fast,\" the Zealer said, opening her eyes.\n\n\"I will,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Alright then.\" She sat up straight. \"Right now you are a prisoner of the Sorja herd, led by Royal Zirus and Royal Arjell.\"\n\n\"Sorja!\" exclaimed Nyra. \"I know that name.\" Sorja was the Royal of the old, old story, who had granted the alliance.\n\n\"That you do,\" said the Zealer. \"But it's easier if you don't interrupt.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"So, Arjell and Zirus lead the Sorjas, who were clever enough to capture you. But the Sorjas are only one group of two living in these caves. I suppose you don't know of the Raklisall herd.\"\n\nNyra flew back in her mind, to dozens of Gatherings and redundant stories. There had never been a Raklisall herd. Of course, there had always been one Zealer group, not two. She'd heard the term moments before from a Zealer guard, but that was the first time.\n\nNyra shook her head.\n\n\"I thought not. It's an ugly name to Agrings, even if lost in time. Or in lies.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"Remember. No interrupting,\" said the Zealer. \"I'll get there.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Raklisall was Sorja's mate back in the day. They ruled some three-hundred years ago. She too has a herd named after her today, and it is the enemy of Zirus, Arjell, and all Sorja members alike. Of course, evil is in the eye of the beholder. For Raklisalls, all Sorja dragons are the enemy. But you were lucky to land where you did, that is, on Sorja territory.\"\n\nNyra, feeling anything but lucky, fought the urge to interrupt.\n\n\"But we weren't always two separate groups. Up until a few centuries ago, us Zealers were together. We had no prisons, and there was no need for guards. I'm sure there were arguments like any family, but all in all, we were as tight as a wolf pack.\n\n\"Then the Agrings came, maybe four or five of them, the number's unknown. But they called themselves 'Nammock,' and accepted our hospitality. How long they stayed with us, again, no one knows. Only one relevant moment stuck, and it was how they came to leave.\"\n\nNyra listened with rapt attention, completely forgetting the roots prickling into her chest, and how they should have reminded her of the dry bedding back home. The Zealer's face tightened, as if something irritated her sinuses. Maybe it was the ugliness of the story.\n\n\"This occurred in the time of Royal Sorja and Royal Raklisall, the 'king' and 'queen' for all intents and purposes. And they ruled the herd as a unit, just like Zirus and Arjell do now for their respective herd, as countless others have done before them. On that morning of the cave-in, Royal Sorja and Royal Raklisall were not at one another's side. Not that this is uncommon. Mates can't be with each other constantly. I think I'd off myself if Zacka was always with me. Though I guess we're getting a blizzard of alone time now\u2026\"\n\n\"You have a mate?\" said Nyra. She couldn't tell the other's age, but had assumed she was young because of her diminished size.\n\nA grin glimpsed under the Zealer's faceplate. It was fleeting, but enough for her to pardon the unwelcome interruption. Then it was gone. \"Well, maybe not a\u2026 recognized one. Then he'd definitely be dead by now, or captured. But that's jumping ahead. Back to history.\"\n\nNyra gave no complaints.\n\n\"Sorja, the male Royal, had gone away, hunting most likely. While he was gone the nursery caved in, which at the time was packed to the stalactites with dragglings. They were probably having a lesson. Legend has it that a few teachers were in there as well. Anyway, Raklisall, the female Royal, rushed to the scene and found it completely sealed tight with ice and rock. Beyond the wall were cries and screams, albeit very muted, but enough for her to know that the dragglings were alive. She worried about air and how long it would last. It became a race against time, and a dear one\u2014her youngest son was among the stuck.\n\n\"She demanded that everyone report to the cave-in. Inevitably the Agrings showed up, as they were staying with us at the time. Now, whether the Agrings offered to help or Raklisall requested it is unknown. Depends on who you ask. But what happened happened, and no retelling will change it. I personally don't think it matters either way in terms of the war.\n\n\"Because the obstruction contained so much ice, Raklisall decided, or accepted, that fire would be the fastest and most effective way to topple it. And the Agrings did just that. But it backfired, pun intended. The blockage toppled alright, but with it came the ceiling of the nursery. Today you can still see a slight depression above ground where the hole was repaired.\n\n\"Suffice it to say, no one inside survived. Sorja came home soon after and was understandably furious. But it wasn't the accident itself where he directed his anger. Instead it went at Raklisall, his mate, for her reckless decision. Royals rule together. They are one body by law, and something as drastic as a cave-in should have warranted a joint decision, in Sorja's opinion. Raklisall pleaded that it was an emergency, but Sorja chastised her for her panicky nature. He said the dragglings could have lived in there for days without outside air, and he would have taken a slow-paced approach.\"\n\nNyra made a hesitating sound, and the Zealer stopped accordingly, at last welcoming a pause. The Agring tried to get the many new names in order before asking her question. \"You say Raklisall was panicky?\"\n\n\"Yes, and I know what you're thinking. Almost anyone would lose it under that kind of pressure. But Raklisall was\u2026 not level headed at the best of times. I'd probably be killed for treason if I said this at home, but she lost all credibility because of what she did next.\"\n\n\"And that was\u2026\"\n\n\"Raklisall retaliated against Sorja. Understandable, but she did it in the strangest way. You remember me telling you that you were lucky to land where you did.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nyra. \"You said it was better to be a Sorja prisoner than a Raklisall prisoner. But you said Royal Raklisall wanted the Agrings to help. Wouldn't her decedents today\u2026 or her herd, wouldn't they be alright with Agrings\u2026\"\n\nThe other held up a claw. \"Ah, but as I said, Raklisall was not sound of mind, and whom she called a friend in one moment was an enemy in the next. She returned Sorja's rage, but she spat most of her fury at the Agrings, calling them tricksters. It was like she believed them magical, evil spirits, something of that ilk. Very superstitious accusations. She had them escorted away, all the way across the ocean. When she returned, the Royals split. The reason why is a foggy one. I believe that Raklisall's behavior frightened Sorja, who maybe had a preconceived idea that his mate was irrational. I guess he'd know. Either he banished her and her followers, or Raklisall left on her own volition. We don't know, but the two established their own herds. But Raklisall did not go far. She'd lived in these caves and tunnels all her life, as did her grandfathers dating back to no one knows when. She would not leave, and I suspect she tried to drive Sorja out. Sorja, of course, resisted.\n\n\"So our home was cut in half, right down the middle essentially, with the Royal female on the western side, male on the east, and everyone else taking a stance behind them.\"\n\nNyra blinked.\n\n\"It sounds fake to you, I assume, like something from a really ancient story. You know, the kind with no details and simple characters. That's what I always think. But the evidence is here, it happened, because to this day my kind are divided on opposite ends. The details may be lost, but even a blind dragon can see the basic truths.\"\n\nNyra felt herself shaking and tried to stop. The Zealer then continued, her story quickening as if to press the chills out of Nyra's body.\n\n\"As I said, you landed on the Sorja side, and I told you that you were lucky.\" Had the Zealer carried any color in her tone, Nyra would have believed she was trying to be reassuring.\n\n\"Sorjas dislike Agrings for sure\u2026 you've already experienced that. Your kind contributed to the murders, whether in volunteering or being asked. Nevertheless, the Sorjas are comparatively rational. I'm positive they understand that you, Nyra, are not your ancestors, and that you're not going to burn down our homes on a whim. Furthermore, you don't breathe fire, I presume.\"\n\nNyra didn't answer. She couldn't breathe fire. She'd never learned. Perhaps she never would.\n\n\"But the Raklisalls\u2014now hovering around the one connecting room between the sides, called the main cave\u2014are not so balanced. Three-hundred years ago, when Raklisall and Sorja divided, she took her loyalist followers, and from them have spawned subsequent generations trained to hate not only Sorjas, but the evil dragons that deceived them: Agrings. You were witches, so to speak, with your cursing fire. To the Raklisall herd, Sorja banished them, and wouldn't have done so had it not been for the Agrings. Because of Agrings, we live in fear of invasion and take-over from the opposing herd.\"\n\nNyra furrowed her brow. \"We live in fear? Who's we exactly?\"\n\nThe other swished her tail. \"I'm in a Sorja prison. They don't imprison their own. By we, I mean me and my herd. I am a Raklisall.\"\n\n\"You are?\" said Nyra. \"But you speak of them so poorly.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said the Zealer, and Nyra could have sworn her eyes were smiling. \"I'm a rare case.\"\n\n\"What about your capturers? Do they know?\" asked Nyra. \"Why bother keeping you prisoner if you don't like your own herd?\"\n\n\"You clearly don't know much about war.\"\n\nThis time, Nyra didn't hide her scowl.\n\n\"And that's delving into personal territory, Nyra,\" said the Zealer.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean everything I've told you so far is common knowledge.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" said Nyra slowly.\n\n\"My personal story is not common knowledge. Some parts are, but not all of it.\"\n\n\"Can't you just tell me why you're here?\" A funny feeling told Nyra that the Zealer wanted to share the story, let the whole thing run out of her mouth. Like she wanted to use her voice and feared that her excuses to use it were running out as her tale reached its end. She just needed some prodding.\n\nAfter several seconds, Nyra spoke again. \"You've already told me some personal opinions.\"\n\nA high, almost shrill cry made Nyra jump. The Zealer was laughing, lightly and femininely. \"Yes, that's me, never shutting up about opinions. It's a wonder Kodoral didn't try to kill me sooner.\"\n\n\"See!\" cried Nyra. \"You keep talking about being killed and having enemies. You clearly have enemies, and you are a prisoner. I know that much already. Why stop there?\"\n\n\"Alright, alright,\" said the Zealer, relieved and amused. \"It doesn't matter, anyway.\" Nyra didn't understand. All of this seemed to matter a great deal. But she didn't think it wise to question.\n\n\"I'm being held here as a sort of bargaining chip,\" said the Zealer. \"I may come off as a plain dragon, but the Sorjas have decided to find me interesting. I suppose I am, being heir to the Raklisall herd.\"\n\n\"The heir?\" said Nyra. \"Like a princess?\" she thought of Jesoam, who would fantasize about Zealer princesses, and how her brother Emdu would tease her.\n\n\"NO!\" shouted the Zealer. Nyra jumped again, squeaking as she landed down on the prickling roots. The Zealer's head reeled, her nose scrunching with contempt. \"I detest that word. Being the heir does not make you a princess. I told you that the Royals were kings and queens for all intents and purposes, but those have never been the actual titles. Everyone has always called them Royals.\"\n\nNyra's blood settled in her veins, cautiously. \"So then what does everyone call you?\"\n\n\"Everyone calls me Olieve.\"\n\n\"So Olieve means princess\u2026 for all intents and purposes?\" Nyra added quickly.\n\n\"No, Olieve is my name.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Nyra had forgotten the name. At the time, it was irrelevant, and even now, with her mind swirling with the weight of the world, names seemed more of a courtesy or an amusing detail.\n\nOlieve sighed. \"I always hated those stories as a youngling, about princess dragons. Vapid little heroines.\"\n\n\"It's alright, so does my Mum.\" Thaydra had a problem with anything trite. Stories about orphans made her especially furious: how all the heroes that went down in history seemed to lack one or both parents. Blaze would then argue that he was technically an orphan, but might still be capable of great things, just like the stories. The thought made Nyra's heart itch, and she felt grateful to have a living mother. It also filled Nyra with a terrible hypocrisy, that she was amidst an adventure and, in fact, had one parent. But that was not the same. She wasn't a hero. She was just\u2026 stuck.\n\n\"As it happens,\" said Olieve, \"I'm not really like a princess, anyway. My father is the first heir, and I'm second after him. But I'm still a victim of a stereotype. You've no doubt heard a story with an evil aunt.\"\n\n\"A few come to mind,\" said Nyra distantly.\n\n\"My father's older sister is named Kodoral\u2014Aunt Kodi\u2014and she leads the Raklisalls today. But she's never taken a mate. Well, not formally. Seeing as I'm her eldest descending relative, I'm next in line for leadership after Father.\"\n\n\"How old is\u2026 eldest?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"I'm twenty-three,\" said Olieve. \"My brothers are related to her too, of course, but I'm the oldest, so I have the Royal Right.\n\nThe oldest inherits the throne, thought Nyra. Sounds like a Kingdom and Queendom to me. She snorted.\n\n\"You find that funny.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Nyra. Her family didn't have a hierarchy. There was voting involved, in a system Nyra never quite understood. She'd never thought of Fuhorn as Queen. She was the Alpha, nothing quite so regal. Maybe she's just a semi-queen.\n\n\"So you think that makes me a semi-princess,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"I was thinking out-loud, wasn't I?\" said Nyra.\n\nThe Zealer nodded, then pressed on. \"So, because I'm a dragon of\u2026 importance, the Sorjas are trying to use me in a strategy, one they've tried to employ time and time again. You see, Zirus wants to end the war.\"\n\n\"How?\" said Nyra. Developing in her mind was a maniacal picture of Olieve's herd, red-eyed and silver-clawed.\n\n\"He wants to use me as an incentive to talk. He'll give me up once the Raklisalls agree to a civil meeting. But my Aunt, despite Zirus' many attempts, has never condoned the idea of reconciliation. She refers to the past and won't let it go, living on it to the point of madness. Some say she's the reincarnation of Raklisall herself. Correction,\" she grunted, \"I say she's the reincarnation. She somehow thrives on this hate and madness, and doesn't trust anyone. She speaks as if Zirus himself banished her to the more dilapidated parts of the caves. The Sorjas realize that Kodi is stubborn. What they don't seem to accept is that I'm a bad choice for a bargaining chip.\"\n\n\"Does your aunt hate you?\" offered Nyra.\n\n\"Spot on,\" said Olieve. \"I've told the Sorjas as much, but I'm their only chance. They'll hang onto me until they can come up with a better plan. I'm the only one who's been stupid enough to get captured in a three-hundred year feud.\"\n\n\"How did you get captured?\"\n\nA growl rumbled from the Zealer, and she tapped her faceplate. \"My thinker took a holiday. While my parents were out hunting. Always a problem is hunting,\" she muttered. \"Aunt Kodi asked for me to do her a favor. 'I need your talent,' she said, and maybe because I was flattered, I obliged.\"\n\n\"Your talent?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Not really,\" Olieve shrugged. \"Father says it's a talent, but I've never thought so. It's my hearing. And touch, sort of. Because I can't see, I rely on sound and touch for just about everything. So I've become hyper sensitive. I can identify voices from distant caverns and sometimes hear through walls. You wouldn't believe the gossip I've picked up over the years.\"\n\nNyra almost grinned.\n\n\"Anyway, Kodoral used this as an excuse to get me to come with her. She told me that she'd found a 'weak spot' on the Sorja side. Apparently, one of our guards had ventured close to the Sorja territory on the previous day and thought he'd heard voices beneath the ground. Kodoral said it was probably a cavern close to the surface, close enough to pick up murmurings, but not nearly audible enough to comprehend what anyone was saying. 'Not for a normal dragon,' she told me.\n\n\"I told you I could hear halfway decently, but I can also feel for vibrations.\" Olieve fluttered her claws. \"I used to run my paws across the walls of my home so I could get around and not bump into things. I'd feel the walls humming in certain places, and I knew that there was a dragon speaking on the other side, even if I couldn't tell by my ears alone. Anyway, Kodoral wanted me to use this to help her find the weak spot again. Why she couldn't ask the guard to help her find it again, let alone explain how a guard managed to get into the Sorja territory unscathed in the first place\u2026 in retrospect, those would have been top-rate questions.\" She shook her head, her lids creasing, like she had more to say on the subject but instead chose to castigate herself privately. The blind Zealer continued.\n\n\"So I went with her outside, just the two of us\u2014that should have tipped me off\u2014and we journeyed carefully towards the Sorja territory. Then in a flash, I could hear my aunt flapping away and new, unfamiliar beats coming in my direction. I tried to run, almost went over the cliff in fact, but of course the Sorjas got me. And I've been in here ever since. Two months now.\"\n\n\"I know the feeling,\" Nyra said. She didn't know what it was to be a prisoner, not like this, but she knew the time of two months, and what it was to be away from home that long. But what was scarier? To live it traveling over the ocean, not knowing the whereabouts of your next meal? To be chased down by monsters? Or to live it in utter blackness? It was no question to Nyra. Her life had been scarier, living with the fear of death and failure. But stripped down to the nakedness of isolation, Nyra knew a snippet of what it must have been like to be Olieve.\n\n\"I think Kodoral hoped I'd get executed for spying. But the Sorjas aren't that ridiculous, to her chagrin, I'm sure. Still, I'm no longer a threat to the Raklisall throne as long as I'm stuck here.\"\n\n\"Why does she hate you?\" asked Nyra. \"Is it just that you don't see eye to eye?\"\n\n\"Eye to eye,\" whispered Olieve, amused. \"The animosity predates me. As I've said, my father is Kodoral's younger brother. Maybe that alone is enough to keep them at odds, sibling rivalry and all that, but it's of course much more complicated. Father's the odd one in the family. And in the herd. He was raised to hate the neighbors like everyone else, but as he grew older he developed an annoying habit: rebelliousness. He drove my grandparents crazy, I'm told, siding with the Sorjas whenever they disagreed on anything, whether it was relevant to the argument or not. 'Maybe I'll just live with the Sorjas. I'll bet their curfews go after sundown.' It was just a way of getting what he wanted. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But it's said that all bluffs have some element of truth. He became distant with his parents and older sister. Then he started courting my mother, who also had the same rebellious habits. In secret, they had their own ideas, their own opinions on the war. And over several years they became quite unlike the other Raklisalls.\n\n\"Since my brothers and I were born, my parents have largely kept their opinions to themselves. They want us to be safe, so they usually just stay neutral on any issue Kodoral presents. But Kodoral hasn't forgotten. Father's still the dragon he was as an adolescent, more mature, but she knows. And as it often goes, values move down the line, into the children. This makes my brothers and me tainted, disloyal, and potentially mutinous. And because I'm the eldest I get first place in the insubordination contest.\"\n\n\"Kodoral hasn't taken a mate?\" Nyra wanted to confirm, thinking of values and bloodlines.\n\n\"Sterile,\" said Olieve shortly. \"She's had suitors, lots of them. Shopping for fertility. For awhile, she didn't think it was her.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\n\"Now that I'm gone, it's only a matter of time before she tries to off my brothers. Quay only knows how. I'm in here by dumb luck and dumb thinking,\" she muttered. \"Getting rid of my brothers won't be so easy. My parents are no doubt watching them like falcons. They'll know that my getting caught wasn't an accident.\"\n\n\"Why would she want to kill your brothers?\" asked Nyra, thinking she already knew the answer.\n\n\"I already said. They'll be next up for Royals if I die.\"\n\n\"But won't that be suspicious? If suddenly all three heirs die or disappear?\"\n\n\"Yes. But no suspicious dragon would care as long as he was getting his way in the end. And my herd consists of Kodoral's followers, except for my family and a few others. Aside from us, the herd will be as happy as killdeer to see my family gone. They aren't supposed to know that Aunt Kodi and my Father are at odds, but of course they do. Kodi wants the world on her side. It's best that her followers scorn Father and his family.\"\n\n\"Who is heir if you and your brothers die?\"\n\n\"Floor goes to Kodoral. She gets to choose. And she has plenty of disciples that fit her fancy.\"\n\n\"Bad news,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"It's a funny business,\" said Olieve, \"being torn between sides. Here I am cheering the Sorjas on but wishing I was back home. The rest of the time I don't care, wishing Zacka and I had our own colony on the other side of the continent. Better yet, move to Vewsai, find someplace tropical, if the 'tropics' exists.\"\n\n\"So you're a purple dragon,\" blurted Nyra, not entirely sure what she meant by it.\n\nOlieve cocked her head, biting a pondering tongue between her teeth.\n\n\"Never mind,\" sighed Nyra. That strange image of a dark lilac creature from elapsed dreams lingered like the yellow stains of aged Agring fangs. Somewhere, millions of Oharassie-lengths from here, Opalheart was soaring over golden green hills where fine tree nettles made the fur of the forest. Bristone was there too, a ways down by the Reservoir, the mist blurring the blue outline of haunches, muscles, and almond eyes. Bristone, who like Olieve was the niece of a higher power (for all intents and purposes), and could not stand aside Agring or Sperk without discomfort.\n\nThe scene changed. There were other shapes, smaller ones. A distance from Opalheart flew Blaze, older just as Nyra had grown older. Watching below was Mother, lowly mother with her head high, the rest of her forever grounded. Her face was blank.\n\nDid Opalheart speak to Thaydra anymore? What would they discuss? Maybe Nyra the continent. Maybe Nyra the draggling, who never grew to be a dragon. She was surely dead to them. It only made sense for her to die. Did they ever dream that she had lived? That she'd traveled the island chain? That she'd fished? That an Aquadray, not the monster of fables, but a real Aquadray, found her and saved her from the frozen tide? Did they dream that she, Nyra, had reached the Zealers?\n\nAnd last of all, did it ever cross their dizziest thoughts that the truth was a lie?\n\nSpinning in the quiet, Nyra's head reached that dead tired feeling after a hard day's play. But then again she always stayed up to eat, stayed up to be satisfied. And now she felt a very different hunger, one that no fish could satiate.\n\n\"Why is this news to me?\" she said. \"Not your life story, but the cave-in story and how it ended. I should know all of that. I should know that it ended badly. I thought I knew exactly what happened. I could recite it myself. My brother and I used to make fun of the Zealer story because we'd heard it so much.\" Blaze had sleepily mouthed the story at Gatherings along with Fuhorn. \"Why did my ancestors lie?\"\n\nOlieve's milky eyes oriented to the floor. \"I don't know. It's completely backwards, I'll say that. I'll bet that no one understands it,\" she spoke slowly, carefully. \"But it sounds like Zealers aren't the only ones with historical inaccuracies. We can make some good guesses about what happened with our kind, but as far as Agrings go\u2026 there's still a lot of mystery. All we know is that they left and snuck a Zealer Stone with them, which we'd given as a gift prior to the disaster. Us Zealers followed them over the Vousille Ocean and stopped at an island right before your coast. The Agrings went the rest of the way alone. Or something like that. The Zealers never landed on Nyra. I guess that gave your ancestors an opportunity to fabricate their adventure, even if we don't know why. Though I can't imagine what story they'd come up with for the mark.\"\n\nThe mark. The one Zirus had mentioned. Though Nyra had a different name for it. A happy name, or neutral in the very least. 'Mark' was so ugly a word.\n\n\"Raklisalls wanted to warn the Agrings never to come back, as dramatically as possible, of course. So they brought a giant Stone from home and wedged it into the ocean floor. To keep evil away, or some rubbish.\"\n\n\"The Green Spot,\" said Nyra somberly.\n\n\"The Green Spot\u2026\" repeated Olieve.\n\n\"On the horizon of where I live there is a little spot on the water where it glows green. But we never knew what it meant.\"\n\n\"That's the one,\" said Olieve. \"Raklisall had it put out there to warn the Agrings to never come back. Evidently it didn't work. Quite a superstition, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Quite.\" The bees in Nyra's head hit her skull with stingers outward. If Olieve was talking, Nyra didn't hear a thing. Green Spot, cave-in, purple, Sorja, prison. She could hear their wings buzzing out actual phrases.\n\n\"\u2026So whatever story the Agrings told afterwards is not part of our history,\" said Olieve quickly. Her vacant gaze fluttered distractedly, and Nyra wondered if Olieve could sense the raging insects in Nyra's head. Turning away, the Zealer nosed the pile of bones Nyra had noticed upon entering the cave. Olieve nudged them towards the water, occasionally tearing at pieces adhered together by tendons and tissue. One by one they plopped in, floating listlessly to the dark walls.\n\n\"It's not fair,\" said Nyra.\n\nOlieve ripped at the bones, not looking up. \"That's life.\"\n\nFire roused in the Agring all over again, lacing her insides as though they were covered in fish oil. Life's not fair. That's the truth, no matter who tells it. But this wasn't just unfair. This was much more. For she had done the impossible. She'd tried and conquered, and those who worked hard, those who reached the stars in every ludicrous fairy tale she'd ever heard, had always won. Always won their respect, glory, love interest, etc.\n\nAnd she, the one of reality, had not asked for anything nearly so fabulous. What hero ever asked for help? Just plain old help as their ultimate goal? No, it was never for the sake of others, to plead for assistance to save one's family and friends. Not really. A tale or two disguised itself in martyrdom, to teach young dragons to share, to give, to have patience, but every single one concluded with a great reward. He or she received their own prize manifested in fame, and it was this trophy, against the better judgment of parents, that the children remembered.\n\n\"I didn't ask for this.\"\n\n\"I did,\" scoffed Olieve. \"Ever since I was a scale-snippet, I dreamed of being stuffed in solitary confine\u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" shouted Nyra. It bounced off the walls, like a dozen Agrings had cried in unison. \"I didn't choose to come here. I didn't volunteer for this. Even when we planned to escape at the same time, even when Mother asked me, I didn't want to go.\"\n\n\"Sensitive ears, Ny-Ny. You gotta lower your voi\u2014\"\n\n\"You lower yours!\" Nyra's sight exploded with stars, suddenly dizzy, but she did not fall. \"You don't know what I've done. What happened to you? Wandered outside and got caught two lengths out? I journeyed. I was almost eaten and drowned and frozen\u2026 what else?\" she panted. \"There was more. More than you and your stupid family. I was supposed to win. Getting to Garrionom was the last step. Then I'd be done. And now what? Does this look like done to you?\"\n\nOlieve did not answer. As their eyes locked, impossibly through the circumstances, Nyra saw before her a hideous creature. The Zealer for so long had been a relic of beauty, woven by elders' tales and in elegant sand illustrations. Nyra had pictured a dragon whose image superseded all splendor and redefined anyone's understanding of majesty. But just as the mountains outside were smaller than her carefully crafted imagination, the mighty Zealer ripped through her cerebral canvas and left the pieces to rot in ghastly places unknown.\n\nThe hero fails.\n\nThe dizzying stars in her vision settled upon the softly glowing waves. Behind her the monster breathed. A monster unlike a Sperk, for Darkmoon, despite her grievances, resided in a place loved and familiar, where the sun shined and the moons beamed into eternity.\n\n\"They all lied.\" Blurs of shadow coiled her outsides inward, shutting, shutting out. And then she censored whatever the real world offered and where the stories commenced. She felt blind, blinder than any semi-princess, blinder than her lying, ignorant lineage."
            },
            {
                "title": "Perspectives and Presumptions",
                "text": "Just as Olieve promised, not a whisper of activity came for several hours. The next time Nyra saw a face, aside from Olieve's, was maybe a day's length later. She could not be certain without the suns. Nevertheless, it was clear that enough time had gone by. Oharassie would be long gone from the Southern Coast (or whatever it was the Zealers called their territory).\n\nThe first visitors came as a strange sight. Two heads approached from the pool. Only it was no longer a pool. The water had receded, so far that a shaft of air expanded all the way down to the other side, the freedom side, where Nyra had first been plunged into the icy depths. There was just enough air space for the Zealer guards to swim with their heads above the surface, carrying large balls of snow in their gaping mouths.\n\nWhat are they doing? Nyra almost said aloud. The Zealers heaved out, walked past her, and plopped each snowball in a small depression in the cave's back end. They turned to leave. Nyra watched them, waiting for a comment, a reprimand\u2014anything. One of them hesitated, shiftily looking to the Agring.\n\nOlieve broke the silence. \"No interrogations for our guest,\" she observed.\n\n\"No,\" said the hesitant Zealer, focusing on Olieve. Nyra recognized him as Jatika, the one who had captured her. At his side was Sigeen, the second Zealer she saw on that first horrible day. He looked downright cross.\n\n\"Kodi is still in the main cave, I bet,\" said Olieve. \"You're too busy for baby dragons.\"\n\n\"It's a serious issue,\" growled Sigeen. \"And not your business.\"\n\n\"Ouch,\" said Olieve. \"And here I thought you liked me.\"\n\n\"It's just a complication,\" said Jatika. \"We're doing what we can. Once they're suppressed, Royal Zirus will talk to the Agring and decide what's to be done.\"\n\n\"Guess this means I'll know the most about her for a long, long time,\" taunted Olieve. Sigeen groaned. Then he and Jatika disappeared down the tunnel. Nyra didn't realize she was scratching at the snowballs until Olieve addressed her.\n\n\"Fresh water,\" Olieve explained. \"They bring it in whenever the tide is low. It melts and we drink it. But seeing as I'm never running races in here, I don't get all that thirsty.\"\n\nA hum seemed to vibrate around Olieve, almost visibly, like a mirage on a hot afternoon. Nyra had said nothing for hours, and the Zealer looked starved for chatter. Nyra wasn't in the mood. She slumped down, pretending to nap.\n\nAside from the occasional sneeze or grunt, the silence droned on. Again, Nyra had no idea for how long. Was she sleeping at night without the moons' guidance? Would the guards be coming once a day? All were mysteries to her, yet few curiosities could open her up to her blind companion. For now, she knew enough, and not a bit of it encouraging. She feared learning anything more would dishearten her further.\n\nOlieve began speaking when Nyra awoke (if she'd ever slept, Nyra wasn't sure). Wearily, the Agring responded, but always with clipped words and only when she absolutely had to. This lent itself to long pauses and discomfited throat clearing, at least for Olieve. It was a slow and strange process of making acquaintance, and Nyra sensed that Olieve wished it would go faster, trying on different topics in hopes of sparking Nyra's interest. Nyra heard an eclectic assortment of ice-breaker lines, from the inane to downright bizarre; to wondering what the weather was like outside, to how many sardines it would take to engulf an Aquadray.\n\nOddly, the Zealer never once asked about Nyra's life back home. Presumably she wanted to know, as Nyra came to Garrionom asking for help. But Nyra had never explained why this help was needed, not to Olieve. In a way, she was grateful that the Zealer didn't ask. The Sperks' image plagued her private thoughts quite enough, and to hear them described in words, even her own words, might slash her to ribbons. It would be a reminder of failure. There was still a horrible problem to fix back home, and instead of finding relief, Nyra had found a whole new problem that was never supposed to exist. She'd spent several headaches trying to keep the memories at bay. They always returned, but if she could help it, they would not escape her mind.\n\nWhy Olieve would not ask was a mild mystery in a puddle of ambiguity. Perhaps Olieve was sensitive, if Zealers could be such a thing, and sensed the fire radiating off the topic. Or perhaps Olieve was simply a selfish conversationalist. Thaydra hated such dragons, who seldom, if ever, took interest in the affairs of others, unless scandalous or self-serving. Nyra could easily accept that Olieve was selfish.\n\nThe Zealer talked out-loud for long stints. At the best of times, her conversations were rhetorical. She'd explain things, often addressing the exact questions Nyra was thinking. And though Nyra refused to comply with any question other than the direct, she began to crave answers again, and felt relief when the mysteries became fewer and farther from the next. Over several days, Nyra learned much.\n\nOne of Olieve's more fascinating explanations was about the pool. After eating their caribou, which was usually delivered at the same time as the snowballs, Olieve broke the bones into small pieces and dumped them into the water. The first few times, Nyra watched this process in a fog, falling in and out of an erratic sleep, dreaming of floating ribs and vertebrae. When she awoke, the bones were always vanished.\n\n\"It's a tidal pool,\" Olieve said. Nyra had heard of tidal pools from Grandma Tega. They didn't exist on the Northern Coast, but back in the day, Tega would travel with Grandpa Nyra farther south, where the mosaic rock morphed down into a beach. There, water collected between rough stones, producing a series of individual ecosystems, lush and colorful, beautiful and deadly. Sometimes they stretched for lengths on end, independent from the rest, yet connected in tide by the great sea.\n\nThe cave's tidal pool was not exactly like Tega's descriptions. There was no life, no array of color, but there were avenues for the water to rise and recede. At the base of the cliffs outside were holes, which were the result of melting and shifting ice. Most were small and underwater, deep enough for the current to pass through, yet small enough to keep prisoners inside. It was a strange idea, for no penitentiary Nyra had heard of possessed anything so detrimental as holes. It was this anomaly that gave their residence its peculiar appeal. During high tide, the one exit was sealed off, making the cave inescapable to the blind Olieve and the temperate-blooded Nyra. During the low tides, watch-dragons took their posts on the other end of the air-shaft, out of sight. This was when food and snow balls were delivered, when they could be carried over the salty water. Most convenient of all, the pool acted as its own refuse system: one, for carrying away bones and unwanted leftovers to the outside sea, and two, carrying away what inevitably became of the wanted foods (which surely made the guards appreciative).\n\nThere were other answers too, such as more details about Olieve. As always, the conversation began abruptly, and with the Zealer's initiation. She asked Nyra how old she was, commenting on her small form and contradictorily muscular wings. Nyra, not knowing if this was an insult or compliment, gave her a one word reply. Olieve then offered her age again, twenty-three, just as she'd done the first day. Twice as old as me. Nyra's heart fluttered fearfully.\n\n\"It shouldn't scare you,\" the Zealer said, and Nyra hoped that she hadn't been thinking out-loud. It made her stew angrily, hating being thought a coward. Olieve went on to say that twenty-three was not very old, and how she'd felt about the same since age fifteen. \"It's just reaching some point in maturity when you've learned the big things and have an idea where you're headed. Father tells me I got it early. Not sure how happy he is about that. He thinks I should have been younger longer.\" Her face was warm. Nyra got the feeling that Olieve was close to her father.\n\nIt was when the Zealer slept that Nyra felt most comfortable, just as she felt at ease when Mother slept. Nyra could think without fear of infiltration, that neither facial expression nor talking out-loud could do her harm.\n\nWaking from her fourth sleep cycle since capture, Nyra eyed Olieve, who slept on the cave's opposite side.\n\n\"Thirsty,\" said Nyra groggily. That was what she felt the last four days: unending thirst. She expected it was the change in lifestyle. The ocean had taught her not to drink, and to derive most of what she needed from fish and fall storms. Now that she was seldom moving, the feeling of home came back, where she always had access to water. In the cave's nothingness she craved it, not needing it, but constantly bearing the illusion of need. The need was a maddening tick, a farce that preyed on the lack of preoccupation.\n\nArching her neck, Nyra peered though the shadows towards the depression. Dried up. On her other side the tide was up. Drinking water wouldn't be coming for a while.\n\nThe Agring traced a claw in the compacted dirt, a rare spot in the chamber that was not made of rock. Her brow furrowed. The dirt would not puncture. Straining, she pushed her claw downward until flashes of pain zipped up her paw. She drew away. Only a small, barely visible dot remained on the ground.\n\n\"Alright, invisible drawing then,\" she murmured to herself. That's what Blaze called the act of drawing through the air. It wasn't drawing so much as sign language, waving ones claws around as if tracing a picture in the sky. They'd invented it when they were six so that they could send messages without their cousins understanding. Emdu always thought they were swatting at flies. Jesoam didn't care to notice. Over the years they'd come up with over forty signs, just basic things, like fish, Agring, Mum, stupid, bad smell, etc.\n\nOn her pallet of nothing, Nyra tried to sketch an Agring tail. It didn't come easy. Blaze was the drawer, not her. In the Reservoir sands he'd make scenes, musing over what a whale might look like, or a battle between a Sperk and giant caterpillar. Nyra would be next to him, brandishing a crooked circle. Mother praised them both equally. \"Now, tell me about this picture.\" That's what she'd always say: tell me about this picture. Naturally, Blaze went on and on about details that no one but he himself could possibly see, attaching stories and character backgrounds. Nyra wondered where he got the ideas. Then Thaydra would come to her daughter. Look, Mum, it's rounder this time. What else could she say? Once in the heat of an argument, Blaze told Nyra why Mum always used the same phrasing when asking about their illustrations. \"She's sparing your feelings, Nyra. Mum has no blink in Roendon's Light as to what you're trying to make.\" Nyra spat on his drawing that day, which resulted in a few bruises and cuts. Thaydra never learned the reason for their fighting, even though they both were grounded for eight sunsets.\n\nThat was her life. One argument, then another one, often new, often part of a series. Maybe she and Blaze could've started a performance, fighting publicly for the herd's viewing pleasure. Jesoam would add music.\n\n\"I was thinking about your name, and wondering if anyone calls you 'Ny' for short.\"\n\nSurprised, Nyra threw her claws up and nicked her cheek. She swung around to see Olieve sitting upright, fully awake.\n\n\"Well, good morning to you, too,\" said the Zealer.\n\nNyra huffed. A thin line sang below her eye. \"Don't do that.\"\n\n\"Don't wake up. I'll try.\"\n\n\"No, not that\u2026\" breathed Nyra. \"Don't\u2026 you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know what you mean. But that doesn't tell me much about your name.\"\n\nNyra was up, thirsty, and Olieve was asking random questions. The day had officially begun. \"Ny? No, not really.\"\n\nOlieve sucked her tongue. \"Not really,\" she repeated. \"Not much of a description.\"\n\nNyra groaned. \"Fine. My mum calls me Ny, very rarely. And my cousin went through a phase, but she only did it because she was writing a stupid song lyric and needed to come up with a rhyme for 'oversupply.'\"\n\n\"So Blaze never calls you Ny.\"\n\nNyra paused. \"I never told\u2026 I never mentioned him to you.\" Did I?\n\n\"You did. Just now, talking to yourself. Apparently Blaze is a good drawer.\"\n\nThat's it, no more thinking, thought Nyra. \"No, my brother never abbreviates my name.\"\n\n\"But you abbreviate his.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Nyra paused again. She did abbreviate his name. In fact, she seldom called him by his full name. Granted, Blazing Fire was a journey in itself to say. \"I hardly ever say Blazing Fire. Mum does sometimes, mostly when we're in trouble. But not me.\"\n\n\"Blazing Fire,\" said Olieve suspiciously.\n\n\"Yes. But how did you know that his name was abbreviated?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"Blaze is a short and inelegant name. I assumed it wasn't complete. Though I did not expect Blazing Fire. That's a little redundant, like Flaming Flame.\"\n\n\"He was named after his father,\" said Nyra defensively.\n\n\"His father. Hmm. So then your father was not named Flaming Flame. Your mother was promiscuous, then.\"\n\nNyra didn't know what promiscuous meant. Not wanting to reveal her naivety, she addressed Olieve's initial misunderstanding. \"My father was Shadow, that was also abbrev\u2014\" Nyra stopped short. The image of her father popped up, behind him red, then yellow, then white fire stemming from a blue beast. He'd been murdered by Sperks. Nyra still couldn't bring herself to discuss her enslavers, those symbols of her failure.\n\nThe Zealer pivoted her head. Her eyes found a wall, and her ears stiffened. She began to feel forward until she found their picked-clean caribou, still intact.\n\nNyra turned away, hoping she could find the dot in the ground and turn it into a giant cricket tackling an Aquadray.\n\n\"I'll say this,\" said Olieve, inspecting the caribou remains. \"Being in here makes me feel better about food. Can't hunt for myself. I've been on expeditions, but if I tried to catch anything I'd get a mouth full of hooves and broken teeth. Here, I'm not guilty of being useless.\"\n\nA pause. Nyra turned back to her drawing.\n\n\"Not that I'm completely useless. I'm a mean tracker, mostly in the tween seasons when the herds are migrating. Can hear the hoof beats if they're close. Comes in handy when the wind is going the wrong way, or if there's a blizzard.\"\n\nA pause.\n\n\"And food in here means company. Can't say I hate that. Getting a rise out of Sigeen is easy. He pretends to hate me. It's fun and funny. And Jatika knows some alright jokes. Those two aren't so bad.\"\n\nPause. Done?\n\n\"You snore you know.\"\n\n\"No, I don't,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Then that's the most gnarled sleeping I've ever heard.\"\n\n\"I don't.\" She didn't snore. If she did, Blaze would have complained a long time ago, especially because he had the noisiest nasal passages in the family. He didn't do it too often, but when he did, Aunt Dewep claimed that she could hear him from her burrow. If Nyra snored, Blaze would have jumped at the opportunity to bring her down to his level.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Olieve, rolling her milky-white eyes. \"Then on a completely unrelated note, you should probably sleep next to me at night.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You shiver, too. I may be an ice dragon, but I'm warm blooded like the rest of them. You'd sleep better if you stole some body heat. And then I'd sleep better.\"\n\n\"Why would you sleep better?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Because maybe you'd quell that rockslide on the back of your tongue if it wasn't stunted with ice.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\nOlieve rolled her whole head this time, enunciating every word, \"Better sleep, less snoring. Maybe. Worth a try. It's not that hard, Ny.\"\n\nIt was like speaking to a riddler, only Blaze wasn't here to brag about the answer and give Nyra sweet, aggravating relief. It was like Olieve wanted her upset, wanted isolation in this sunless hovel, pushing what little was left out with her dry enthusiasm. There she was, motionless, pivoted, unsmiling, unlaughing. Uninteresting. Unraveling Nyra's wits.\n\nNyra looked at Olieve's head, twisted toward the wall.\n\n\"Why don't you look at me when you speak?\" Nyra spat.\n\n\"Because you're too beautiful to look at. The sight might blind me\u2026\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" Nyra shouted. \"Teasing. That's fun, isn't it? You enjoy it, rubbing me the wrong way. You could at least look me in the face when you do it. You know where I am.\"\n\n\"I look at others by my rules.\" She snapped her ears straight up, lining parallel to her white horns.\n\n\"You look at me with your ears?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Brilliant,\" said Olieve.\n\nFor a second Nyra felt a wash of pity. Here they were, together, but in varying senses of loneliness. Dark to everything, the Zealer was closed inside herself in a windowless prism. Nyra lived inside a colorful prism where the light shined and reflected on everything, but without another's company, may have been nothing.\n\n\"What a wonder that you made it to Garrionom,\" said Olieve. \"You'd think that'd take some kind of intelligence.\"\n\nNyra's pity evaporated. \"How does Zookoo like that?\" she said bitterly.\n\n\"Don't know 'Zookoo.' Don't know 'that.'\"\n\n\"How does your semi-mate like that you never look at him?\" Nyra said through clenched teeth.\n\n\"Ah. You mean Zacka. Very cheeky,\" the Zealer scoffed. A familiar bend shaped her mouth\u2014the Olieve beam. \"Probably shouldn't have mentioned him to you. Could be killed, though I'm sure Kodi has her suspicions as it is. He's crafty, but being discreet isn't easy. I'm often being watched.\"\n\nKilled. Suspicion. All words that put the premise out in the open, but without details. Olieve kept her secrets for safety, by the laws she'd invented for her strange, specific self. She wanted to tell them and shove away the pretense of discretion. Nyra only needed to wheedle them out. Ask the indirect, lightly pry the smallest boulders from the dam, little trickles at a time. On its own, the wall would explode under pressure, and Nyra would only have to handle the splash.\n\n\"You said he wasn't your recognized mate,\" Nyra said. Suggesting. Olieve liked suggesting, didn't she? Play the game, just as Blaze had pried information from Opalheart that day on the Reservior. Although Opalheart was na\u00efve. Olieve was not, at least by Nyra's impression.\n\n\"Well, sort of. Mother and Father know about us. They discourage it. And I know what you're thinking. You think they don't approve, as parents sometimes hate the mate choice of their offspring. It's not like that. They love Zacka, daresay they adore him. But they are afraid for him. He's like Father, the strange one in his family. Zacka's rebellious.\" Her grin widened at 'rebellious,' but only just. Anyone meeting Olieve for the first time might still mistake her smile for indifference.\n\nNyra thought a moment. \"So they don't want him to get caught with your family because Kodoral is at odds with them.\" Imply.\n\n\"That's part of it. If he gets caught hanging around me too much, Kodoral will find an excuse to push him seaward.\" Olieve jabbed a claw towards the right wall, the direction of the cliff. Nyra tried to think of a new prompt. She didn't have to. Olieve continued on her own.\n\n\"Covering up his death would be easy, opposed to mine or my brothers'. If he's a traitor, he'd be done in, no questions asked. But it goes one step further. I'm heir. When I take a mate, he will share my power when the time comes for me to have it. Therefore Kodoral will want to squash anyone who might share my beliefs. Kill them off, keep me nice and depressed.\"\n\n\"Why would she want you depressed?\" Direct question. Oops.\n\n\"If I'm depressed, I'm unstable. If I'm unstable, I could do something crazy. Suicide, for instance.\"\n\n\"But you would never do that to yourself,\" Nyra implied.\n\n\"No,\" said Olieve. \"But Kodoral would. Kill me or hurt me enough to keep me from speaking ever again, and then blame it on my own dejection. For this reason, Kodoral would love to learn about Zacka; the perfect excuse to get the destruction rolling.\"\n\nNyra pictured a large Zealer stomping smaller ones into mud. One by one the little dragons formed a line, peering down the row as their friends vanished, sinking as they watched.\n\n\"I know what you're doing,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"What?\" said Nyra. She looked away. Should I look away?\n\n\"I know what you're doing. But don't worry about it.\"\n\n\"Worry about what?\"\n\n\"Getting all of this out of me.\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2014\"\n\n\"Seriously, Ny. I wouldn't be babbling on if I thought it was going to damage my glamorous life.\"\n\n\"I'm not trying to damage your life.\"\n\n\"No. Don't see how you could. You can't do anything with this information, let alone without it.\" She spanned a paw around the room. \"And even if you could, I'd likely not care.\"\n\n\"But shouldn't you care?\" asked Nyra, dumping the charade. \"You're telling me, a stranger, everything. You've been doing it ever since I came. Zacka's supposed to be a big secret, but you brought him up on the first day. And the war, and your family? The bargaining chip thing? You barely hesitated.\"\n\n\"Not sure I follow you.\"\n\n\"You're an heir,\" explained Nyra. \"Shouldn't you have political prowess, some nonsense like that? Shouldn't you keep your mouth shut about this stuff? Fuhorn never spouted out details to the Sperks. The Agrings had secrets. You don't tell the enemy everything. Even I know that.\"\n\nNyra jolted. She'd mentioned the Sperks.\n\nOlieve grazed right by it. \"I don't pretend to have political prowess. All this,\" she waved her claws over her face, \"all this talking, this is boredom. The last outlet. I've had a whole life in the dark. I depended on sound. Then Kodoral tricked me, and suddenly that was gone. I've been in here for two months. That's a lot of time to be clever. But none of my ideas have gotten me closer to home.\"\n\n\"Now you get to talk. Because I'm here,\" offered Nyra, feeding the topic.\n\n\"Right. I can see again, so to speak. My echoes aren't the only sounds hitting the walls. Believe it or not, Ny, chatting with you is slightly more dynamic than with the air. At least you snore back.\"\n\nNyra huffed. \"Still seems risky.\"\n\n\"Not really. Over the months I've blathered a great deal about Zacka. Jatika probably reported it to Zirus. But that doesn't matter much. He wouldn't let the Raklisalls get wind of it. The Sorjas don't want blood on their claws. They wouldn't want Kodoral murdering anyone because of their idle gossip.\"\n\n\"But there could be a mistake,\" said Nyra. \"It could leak out, like me. Zirus is trying to keep me a secret, but isn't it your herd that's gathering in that main cave right now? Trying to pick up Agring-gossip? I'm stuck down here but I'm not a perfect secret. Sharing a cave\u2026 isn't it just a matter of time before they find out every Sorja secret? Vice versa?\"\n\n\"Hmm\u2026 perhaps,\" she nodded. \"Yes it is. Case in point, Zirus has picked up information over the years that we didn't want him to have. For some secrets, we made great strides to keep them hidden. But it doesn't always work. Some secrets are just too blatant to hide.\"\n\n\"For instance?\"\n\nOlieve bit her lip, and at last, looked like she was withholding something. But it was a fleeting instant.\n\n\"Well, you are a prime example, as we've said,\" answered the Zealer. \"The Raklisalls know you're here.\" She averted her blank eyes. More strangely, she averted her ears. \"But as far as Zacka goes, it's moot. As long as I'm not home, he's worthless,\" she said this, but didn't look entirely convinced. \"Without me at home, his chances of becoming Royal completely die out. He's like any other herd member, so long as they don't find out he's mutinous. Unless I had his eggs laying around waiting to hatch, which I don't, Zacka has absolutely no tie to power. So in the end, the Sorjas just don't care about Zacka. I'm a poor bargaining chip, nothing more. Still, I'd rather my herd not know about him. Then he can stay safe until I get home. If I ever get home.\"\n\nThe tide had receded down the rocks, a butterfly's length closer to the tunnel which led to the rest of the caves, where razor-sharp whispers wracked the halls.\n\n\"I could still cause a panic,\" said Nyra. \"I could press the Zacka issue. I could lie and tell Jatika that you had an egg and dumped it in the tidal pool. That could get back to Kodoral, and then she'd know that you two are connected.\"\n\n\"There'd be no evidence.\"\n\n\"But it could bring bad attention to Zacka.\"\n\nOlieve smirked. \"Tell me then, Nyra, can I trust you?\"\n\nAt first Nyra didn't understand the question, taken too aback by the other's voice. Olieve's inflection had changed, like a different dragon altogether. It was abrupt, jarring, but strangely inviting. Nyra didn't know why. Again she found the water, creeping down and down at a glacial speed.\n\n\"Telling them all that still wouldn't help me go home,\" mumbled Nyra.\n\n\"Exactly.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Stomachache then Break",
                "text": "So what are these good jokes of yours?\"\n\nJatika looked up at Nyra from the giant snowball at his feet. Crisp and glistening, it had already thawed in the cave's heat, hard and shiny.\n\n\"Come again?\"\n\n\"She tells me you know some good jokes,\" said Nyra, nodding towards Olieve, who pretended to sleep in the corner. A small stomachache was keeping the Zealer in disagreeable spirits. She warned Nyra that chatting would not be a priority today. Nyra didn't mind in the slightest.\n\n\"I know a few,\" said Jatika, laughing lightly. He'd become more agreeable with time and less skittish around Nyra. In spite of the situation, she had decided he was not completely intolerable.\n\n\"But most of them aren't mine,\" he said. \"The really gritty ones are from Sigeen, though he'll never tell them to Olieve.\" He shook his head. \"Guarding isn't his forte. It's demeaning, he thinks. He'd rather be with the high-ups making decisions and advising.\"\n\n\"How did he get stuck with us?\" asked Nyra. \"Step on Zirus' tail?\"\n\n\"That's Royal Zirus,\" corrected Jatika, though he remained good humored. Jatika had a mellow quality about him. He worked efficiently, always giving the prisoners caribou and water in a timely manner. But he also made the effort to be kind. That was a Sorja-thing, according to Olieve, and she again stressed Nyra's fortune in landing where she did on the coastline.\n\n\"Sigeen didn't do anything,\" Jatika elaborated. \"He's just young, too young to have earned his desired position. He'd rather be with Zirus discussing defense tactics than delivering dead ungulates to delinquents.\" He emphasized every 'duh' sound, pleased with himself. Nyra felt miffed as Jatika liberally left out the 'Royal' in his leader's name. Maybe that was only a privilege for close friends and top subordinates.\n\n\"I'm not important, then, if Sigeen wants nothing to do with me,\" she said acerbically.\n\n\"Ha!\" said Jatika. \"If you say so.\"\n\nNyra knew she was important, a 'special kind of crisis,' and yet the Royals had not come to see her. Olieve had an explanation. It was true that Nyra was a unique enemy. But she herself was not the paramount threat. It was the disaster in her wake: the paranoia she'd sparked amongst the Raklisalls. She, the invader, would have to wait until things calmed down. This was what Olieve surmised, but Nyra hoped to hear it from a higher power. Jatika would not be so yielding, though. He had a position, after all, and a future. Unlike Olieve, he had a great deal to lose.\n\nNyra sighed.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" he said, \"you're still important enough to be a top-security prisoner.\"\n\n\"But if I'm so important,\" whined Nyra, \"doesn't Zirus want to question me?\"\n\n\"Royal Zirus will question you,\" he said. \"and Royal Arjell.\"\n\nNyra snorted.\n\n\"Have optimism. You'll have the honor of my company until he decides what to do with you. That's good news, yes?\"\n\nNyra smiled a little. Like Opalheart, he made things brighter. Because she compared him to the good-natured Sperk, for awhile Nyra assumed Jatika was a youthful dragon, most likely in his late teen years or early twenties. Looking carefully, though, thin lines traced the edges of his eyes, and his jaw sagged ever so slightly down his neck. He was not elderly, nor was he very young. Perhaps he was a tad older than Thaydra, breaching into his forties or just shy of them. Then again, age had always evaded her best logic. Everyone in her family looked the same from year to year, because she too grew from year to year. To her, the Agrings were frozen in time, occupying a special space where no wrinkles lengthened or voices roughened.\n\n\"Well, I'm going to see what I can do about getting you some fresh caribou. You've been getting stock-pile carcasses for the last few days. They taste dreadful.\" He looked at her expectantly. It took Nyra a second to realize that he was fishing for a response.\n\n\"Oh, no, they don't taste any different to me. But Olieve says they've been moldy.\" Hence the stomachache complaints.\n\n\"Ha!\" pronounced Jatika. \"She would say that, wouldn't she?\" He eyed the sleeping Zealer discerningly. \"She's a brazen one.\"\n\n\"Why haven't they been fresh?\"\n\nHe said nothing.\n\n\"Kodoral will have her guards barricading the hunting grounds,\" mumbled Olieve, curled fetally in the corner. She did not face them. \"Kodi'll try to starve the Sorjas into giving up information. Or you, Ny. Of course the Sorjas can still get in. She'll only have the resources to block the convenient south side. The caribou herds can be accessed from other points. But to avoid trouble, the Sorjas are relying on storage, at least for now.\"\n\nJatika pursed his mouth, hiding a smile. \"You think yourself quite clever, don't you?\"\n\n\"I'm right,\" said Olieve. He did not contradict her.\n\n\"Alright, your Royalness,\" said Jatika. \"Since you're all-knowing, what are my plans for today?\"\n\n\"Still about hunting,\" said Olieve, gripping her stomach miserably. \"You are going to try and crack into the hunting grounds. Likely from an easterly approach. It's the most out of sight.\"\n\n\"And you know this how?\" he asked.\n\n\"The caribou churning my stomach is especially old. The store is running low. It's time to hunt, but you aren't nervous about it either. You are confident you can make it in and out of the grounds. And you are going at night. Normally you go at daytime, but infiltration will be easier in darkness. You have to act fast. Likely now.\"\n\nJatika laughed again with a look of admiration. Nyra assumed Olieve had guessed correctly yet again. He waded into the steadily rising water. \"I should be back when the tide comes down again.\"\n\n\"Wait!\" Nyra shouted. Jatika's eyes flared to meet hers, alert and perceiving. Nyra could see why he was a top guard.\n\n\"Yes?\" he said.\n\n\"You didn't tell me a joke.\"\n\n\"Right,\" he said good naturedly. \"What do you call a faceplate with no feelings?\"\n\n\"Hmmm\u2026\" Her brow furrowed. \"Something hard, or having to do with hard. Difficult?\"\n\n\"Un-care-atin.\"\n\nShe didn't get it.\n\n\"That's stupid,\" mumbled Olieve. Whether it was stupid because she didn't understand or the joke was terrible, Nyra didn't know. Olieve's temper did not invite her to ask. The semi-princess gave a sonorous snort and spoke no more.\n\n\"Don't forget to dump the leftovers. I'll bring you something fresh at sunrise, if I can,\" Jatika said, and before Nyra could request a new joke, Jatika dipped out of sight, leaving her with Olieve's fitful company.\n\n\"Alright,\" she said to the ripples he left behind. They rolled to the refuse holes, out of sight and to the ocean.\n\nNext to Olieve rested the so-called moldy carcass. Legs snapped and splayed, the thing looked like it had been chewed and rejected, as if a Dragon Hawk had tried to swallow it whole before spitting it out again. Olieve hadn't finished breaking it apart after they'd eaten their fill. She gave up once the pains set in. Other than a few snapped legs, it was in decent tact.\n\nNyra came close. She wrinkled her nose, detecting a light stink. Why did Olieve have to be so lazy?\n\n\"I'll dump it myself,\" she said quietly. Grabbing a leg, Nyra tugged the carcass towards the water. The leg detached in one jerk. Nyra was sent rolling. She got up, shaking pebbles from her ears. The leg flopped from her mouth. Olieve must have broken that one already.\n\n\"Well, that's one,\" she grumbled. She heaved up from behind, pushing. Loose fur snagged over rocks, and twice the antlers pivoted into the dirt. But eventually, both living and dead made it to the water's edge. Detaching the remaining legs was not too difficult. By stepping on the joints and holding the hooves in her mouth, she made clean breaks. She soon found pleasure in the sounds of a crack. Olieve noticeably jumped during the first few. After about four snaps the Zealer was still again.\n\nChewing away the sinews, Nyra plopped the pieces into the water. They floated to the surface.\n\n\"Hurray!\" she exclaimed, quietly. The tide was almost up, the refuse holes almost completely obscured. Still, she could see her handiwork drifting towards the south wall, ready to be carried away.\n\nShe looked back at the body and head. Bulky, spiny, big. The rest of the caribou was far too large to dump.\n\n\"It'll have to wait,\" she said. Nyra's limbs felt jiggly. She crashed down, wanting to feel nothing until the tide made it through the next cycle. Somewhere in her stomach swam aged meat, but no matter how much she concentrated, Nyra didn't feel any sickness. Nevertheless, she nibbled on the stray green stems that littered the cave floor, just for safe measure. The purple flowers were supposed to kill pain. Olieve had eaten several this evening.\n\n\"How many days have passed?\" she mused, laying her head down. Olieve had a trick for time keeping. The Zealers were diurnal, and like Agrings, did most of their hunting in the daytime. Therefore, when a meal came, a hunting period had just ended, meaning it was the sunset tide. Nyra tried to confirm this with Jatika a few times, but Olieve would never let him answer. She preferred to know by her own deductions.\n\nThis pattern was ruptured, though, with the coming of 'moldy' meals. They did not come from hunts, and their arrivals had been irregular in the last few days. This made Olieve furious, in an ever monotonous fashion, but no less potent. Nyra suggested that they count back since the last time they ate something fresh. But the Zealer, far too put out, said she was far too sick, and promptly settled into the angry nap from which she still had not recovered.\n\n\"Five fresh days, then the moldies started. Three molds, and no new caribou today. All two low-tides apart. It is evening now. Nine total days down here.\" She moaned at the realization. Nine days. Nine days of pacing the same spot, breathing the same air, having the same company. What was worse; this or the sea? She'd spent so long flying over the same blue, landing on similar lonely islands, with no one to chat with but herself.\n\nNyra counted the caribou deliveries a second and third time to confirm her accuracy. That was both delightful and horrifying, to think a gap in her life was being filled with inane numbers. She pushed it aside. The point was that Jatika would hopefully be back at sunrise, maybe with a joke she understood and a meal that roused her cell-mate. A checkpoint in an existence of very little. Mother had once suggested making up checkpoints to break up time. They were tools against boredom. 'Think of something to look forward to,' she'd say, 'and that will keep you going.' She then went on to advise against wishing one's life away, which left even Blaze puzzled.\n\nNyra watched the refuse holes. Head to the ground, she couldn't see the bones floating on the surface. Perhaps they hugged the ledge closest to her, out of sight. But she preferred to think that they'd drifted outside, even though the tide was going in rather than out.\n\nWhat if the tide never stopped, rising and rising and rising forever? She and Olieve would drown. Nyra had thought of this before, and shared the thought with her companion. 'Won't happen,' Olieve had said. She told Nyra that they would be rescued. Zirus would order them out immediately.\n\nShe didn't share it with Olieve, but the Agring Warren was also at risk to flooding. But it was an unlikely scenario. The Sperks had assured as much. It was part of a trap, set to ensure the enslavers' security. When Darkmoon's father arrived, killing Fuhorn's mate and declaring reign, he demanded the Agrings build homes for his colony. The Sperks could not, would not dig, with the excuse that they were cave dwellers. The Coast had no caves to speak of, and so the Agrings would have to dig, just as they'd dug for themselves. Fuhorn, always devising despite her recent grief, had a scheme in mind. 'We can only make them in the riverbed,' she'd said. 'To excavate the dry land for dragons your size would take years. If we dam Fitzer's Lake, the soft soil and low ground will cut that time to months. Additionally, to access your homes from the riverbed walls would better simulate the cave's you're used to.'\n\nAuborntree, Darkmoon's father, agreed. But Auborntree was patient, watchful, and saw the dam breaking in Fuhorn's composed eyes. He envisioned the Agrings piling the stones higher and higher, whispering of the fissures they'd left and loose spots of soil. He saw the drowning bodies of his family within their new homes. Such was Fuhorn's plan, though she assumed the Sperks were ignorant at the time. Auborntree spoke up. The Sperks would live in the riverbed only if the Agrings relocated their own Warren. Before, the Agrings had lived on a hill top, at an elevation above the water line. Auborntree made them move to the middle field. He would let them build a dam as long as all dragons, Agring and Sperk alike, lived close to Fitzer's Lake. If the Sperk Burrows flooded, so would the Warren. Thus the Dam was made secure. The old Warren was filled in, forbidden to be crossed by any Agring. Nyra thought she could spot where the old openings once existed, in places where the grass looked slightly uneven. Thaydra said it was impossible to tell. She'd never lived in them either.\n\nWhatever memories Nyra relived afterwards were lost in true sleep. She wished she had taken a spot closer to Olieve. The air cracked into her skin, cold but not enough to lift her weary limbs. She shivered lightly until the chill was no longer bothersome. Besides, the cold was better than Olieve's current spirits.\n\nHer subconscious disagreed. Temperature over temper. For when Nyra awoke, a great faceplate brushed at her side. Nyra had moved in her sleep right next to the Zealer. She sat up with a start. Olieve shifted, nearly rolling over Nyra. She jumped out of the way, scarcely evading suffocation between a flank and hindquarter.\n\nBlaze's sleep walking must have rubbed off on me, she thought. Her left side was wet, sweaty. Olieve was like an ice-blue fireball. No wonder the Zealer was never cold. The chilly room came as a relief now.\n\nSpotting the caribou head and torso, Nyra remembered her project. Project decimation, she thought tiredly. She loped to the water's edge.\n\nThe leg bones were still there. On the far left corner hovered her night's work, a splintery pile of stained sticks lapping up the rocks and ice. The tide was going out at last, pulling the bones to the refuse holes. But the debris appeared terribly congested. Stuck. They wouldn't get through the holes on their own.\n\nFix it. Olieve might wake to the caribou's torso and head, but Nyra was going to get rid of the leg bones on her own.\n\nShe'd not been very close to the holes before. There was an especially large one right beneath a ledge, which surfaced twice daily at low tide. This was where the bigger bones were carried away. Olieve often stood on this ledge, jamming them inside. Nyra always watched, fearful of the biting water.\n\nThe Agring still felt the warmth of sleep, the hot residue that had pinched her to Olieve. The idea of cold water didn't seem so bad. Taking a breath, Nyra waded in.\n\nGood Light! It stung. Not so much as the first time on the day she was captured, but it stung. \"Dunk,\" she murmured. Mother said to dunk all the way when in cold water. It made it better. Nyra had done it a fair number of times at the Reservoir; the refreshing, summer Reservoir after a sweaty game of tag under the twin suns.\n\nShe clambered on the ledge above the refuse hole. The water was at her chest. She'd have to reach underwater to stuff the bones in. Nyra gathered the smallest fragments. They were easiest\u2014they'd go in first. Grimacing, she jabbed a piece into the wall, groping for the hole, whose location seemed to dance on the surface. Over and over the bone jarred on rock. At last it struck nothing and disappeared. Success.\n\nNyra grabbed a second one. She leaned against the wall and immediately recoiled. The wall here was stone and ice, encased in a membrane of winter. Summer must have been a different world, and she pictured the caves melting to reveal a doubled size. If anything ever melts up here. She doubted it. This was the land of permafrost, a phenomenon that reflected the name. Permanent frost, Dewep had said in a lesson. Winter never left, it only receded and worsened.\n\nShe leaned in again, now prepared for the cold touch. One by one the debris disappeared, each shove pushing each bone closer to the outside ocean. She saved the largest piece for last, the one still held together by recalcitrant tissue.\n\nIt bounced back. She tried again, going slowly. Her face grew numb, brushing the surface.\n\n\"Not gonna make this easy,\" she sputtered into the water.\n\nIt jammed.\n\n\"Come on!\" She stared it down, sternly. The hole simply wasn't big enough. In a sudden spell of anger, she thwacked it with her tail spikes.\n\nCrack! Something broke. She was stuck. With great effort, Nyra ripped her tail blades out, examining them for signs of damage. They all winked back, no gray threads weeping from the surfaces. Unhurt.\n\nBubbling erupted from below. In their wake, shards of blue white.\n\n\"Ice!\" The ice beneath had cracked. Bits of rock floated up, too.\n\nIf she could just chisel the hole a little wider. Warily she eyed Olieve, and then the underwater tunnel, sealed in the high tide, but not for much longer. What sort of trouble would she be in for damaging the wall? Would anyone notice?\n\nThey won't notice. Neither Jatika or Sigeen ever examined the hole. Besides, she had no intention of mutilating it completely. Just a little hollowing out, just a little more space to allow a little more debris. She slammed the wall again. The movement was sluggish underwater, but powerful. Two more chunks of rock dislodged. A single bead of sweat dropped down to her nostril, making her sneeze forcefully. Just a few chippings, a few casualties of unwanted ice and rock.\n\nShe leaned back to the wall for leverage, cold to the touch of her perspiring forehead. Swing! Crack! Another piece! She hunched down. A long shard of rock floated up to meet her.\n\nBut this was no rock. A soggy leg fragment bobbed back to the surface.\n\n\"NO!\" she exclaimed, slapped the water. A rainstorm spat up to the ceiling, dousing her. Messing it up! Disturbed by the impact, another bone floated up. They all wanted to disobey, all wanted to humiliate her.\n\n\"I wonder if you can be louder,\" mumbled Olieve, dry on the bank.\n\n\"Not now!\" Nyra hissed.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt whatever you're doing,\" continued Olieve. She did not face the pool.\n\n\"I've nearly got it,\" insisted Nyra.\n\n\"Just postpone the madness for when I have functioning insides.\"\n\nNyra ignored her. Pressing against the wall again, she gave another thwack. Angry heat rumbled at the base of her neck, itchy, like insects in a broiling hive. They wanted out. The bones wanted out. She wanted out. Stop! a voice said. It was hers. Her eyes squeezed shut, hoping to drown out the protests.\n\nYou're making it worse. They'll see the damage. You'll be in trouble.\n\nHot tears spilled on her cheeks as more bones returned to the surface, as if to drift back to the caribou and take shape once more. To be whole again when she, Nyra, felt so broken. Her face burned. She coughed, and it was as though no skin lined her mouth at all. No protection, just stinging. She swung out her tail and bashed against the wall one last time.\n\nCrack!\n\nNyra fell sideways into oblivion. A crash, and then water washed down her blistering throat. A new sting, the cold kind, wincing thickly in her nostrils. Not air. She'd fallen into the pool.\n\nBut even amongst the confusion and panic, the Agring knew she'd fallen the wrong way.\n\nSputtering upward, Nyra surfaced, her right side numb from the impact. The side where she'd hit the water, and the side where no water existed moments before.\n\nShe looked up. The wall was gone. In its stead was a cavern, and at its center the bones she vowed to never see again. Down the cavern was light unlike anything she'd seen in days. It wasn't huge, but it was there. On the other side was the true shine of the night world.\n\nOut.\n\n\"Don't think I even want to know,\" said a monotonous voice. Olieve was standing at the pool's edge, ears pivoted towards Nyra's handy-work. Upgrading from nonchalance, she looked mildly curious.\n\nThe Agring bobbed like a dead thing for a moment in the water, the weight of her irises magnetized to the waiting outside. Tracing the walls, the full scope of what happened took shape. The cavern glistened with the dew of the sea. No amount of damming could repair it.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" Nyra's limbs stuttered more than her words as she splashed to the Zealer. Tripping over claws, some numb, others excruciatingly alive, she managed to find footing on the bank.\n\n\"I can hear the surf. More than normal,\" said Olieve. \"You were really bored.\"\n\n\"This is bad.\" Shiny walls smiled on her whirling brain, and she didn't know which spun more quickly. \"Just look at it!\"\n\n\"I'll try,\" said Olieve.\n\nJokes were the last thing Nyra needed now. \"Don't you get it?\"\n\n\"Pretty sure I do,\" said Olieve. \"But maybe you could confirm my suspicions.\"\n\n\"I broke the wall!\" It seemed like a stupid thing to describe. There it was, open and wide, as if a screaming mouth was shouting the truth from the very ocean. And yet she was disposed to word-making, describing this cataclysmic thing to a dragon that was much stronger and more capable. \"The whole thing went down. I was trying to loosen the hole with my tail, just a little\u2026 and\u2026 and SMACK! It was gone!\"\n\n\"The tide's still up, but going down,\" said Olieve, flicking a claw at the water surface.\n\n\"I am dead.\"\n\n\"Can't say I disagree.\"\n\n\"I am dead.\"\n\n\"Can't say I disagree.\"\n\nNyra whipped around to Olieve. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"I want to say 'what's all this we business,' but that's jejune. Maybe the real question is what\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you get it\u2026 you\u2026 you\u2026 pine-tree face!\" Nyra fumed. \"I just broke the prison.\"\n\n\"Guards couldn't have heard,\" said Olieve. She dipped her claw again, confirming the water level.\n\nNyra rolled her head, mouth agape. \"They couldn't have\u2026 what does that even mean? It doesn't matter if they heard. They'll see it the second they come back. Most of us have eyes, you know.\"\n\n\"Charming.\"\n\n\"I don't get it. I was just pushing and it caved in. I made an effort to not do much damage. Really, I did. Now there's a huge space, bigger than you, even\u2026\"\n\n\"Than me.\" Olieve pivoted her ear a fraction closer to Nyra.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe Zealer closed her eyes.\n\nHead throbbing, Nyra gazed upon the open cavern. From the ceiling hung dripping icicles, the few that could survive the wafts of salty spray. Teeth.\n\n\"Really, I made a conscious effort,\" Nyra sighed.\n\n\"You said that.\"\n\n\"You aren't helping. You never help.\"\n\nThe waves outside were loud. Nyra felt a sense of familiarity. Once there was a time when the day ticked on over the course of sunshine, where always in the background wafted the sea. Since leaving home, the waves had become the seconds. Life became darker with the water, more real, a battle to survive. Then in prison the sea-time vanished. To hear it again was nothing short of haunting.\n\nSuddenly water drained from her ears. She was not aware that they were clogged. Perhaps they never were. But in that moment, her head washed into new clarity.\n\n\"We should get out!\" The wide open space of the world was everything she'd wished for in the last nine days, to look out on the horizon where home lingered, lengths and lengths away. It could be real again.\n\nOlieve didn't respond. Twangs of panic drummed Nyra's spine as she took the other's silence as skepticism.\n\n\"Well, shouldn't we? We can leave! There's plenty of room for you. And you can fly, right? We can go back to the Northern Coast. And then my family will work something out. They'll be happy, no, ecstatic to see you.\" A plan was forming in her head, a tentative, maybe stupid one. No matter. Stupidness would be worked out later.\n\nOlieve's face was unchanged. Nyra felt her head going light. Carefully, she forced her thrumming panic into smaller beats, and with the greatest dignity she could muster, tried to keep calm.\n\nDon't panic. Of all the battles she'd encountered, even those that had been life threatening, she'd never registered in her mind the urgency to win. A light was shining on the other side of this problem, literally. She could not lose.\n\n\"Please,\" she said gently. \"Please, we have to go. It's our only chance.\"\n\nThe Zealer's ears relaxed, and her eyes found the gaping hole. Squinting oh so subtly, Nyra saw the other's eyes crease into focus, her mouth faintly taut by a hidden, inner musing. There were some places Nyra could never go, in spite of the places she'd been and all she had proven of herself. Nobility and bravery were Oharassie's words, and he'd called the Agring both time and time again. But words only went so far, and the planet was so much bigger than her long, long journey. In Olieve's face, Nyra saw her own limitations, the places she'd yet to see, the tasks she'd yet to accomplish, and everything in the unknown future.\n\nFinally, lackadaisical as always, Olieve spoke.\n\n\"Alright then. Let's go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Sunrise",
                "text": "Nyra was struck with sudden hesitation with Olieve's agreement. At once, two invisible forces tugged at her, one like a loop through the nostrils, the other at her tail. To go forward was to be free and once again face the sea, where monsters reared their terrible heads. To stay here was safe, but stuck. Never moving forward.\n\n\"Sitting around is capital,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"So\u2026 we should go now?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"This is your plan, not mine.\"\n\nResigned, Nyra dipped in. A splash smacked from behind. Nyra yelped angrily, blinking away ocean until Olieve's came into view.\n\n\"Not as bad as I thought,\" sputtered the Zealer as she surfaced.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" hissed Nyra, watching ripples run towards the exit shaft, still closed off in the tide, but soon to open. \"Do you want to get caught?\"\n\n\"Not particularly,\" said Olieve, ears towards the shaft. \"You're worried about my waves making it to the other side.\"\n\n\"That and the noise!\"\n\n\"They'll vanish in the current. I'm not an impetuous dragon, Ny. I'm thinking this through. Well, as best as I can, considering the fair warning you gave.\"\n\n\"Stop saying impetuous,\" she grumbled under her breath.\n\nJust past the new cavern was a small tunnel, from which came glorious moonlight. The hole to the outside was smaller than she'd thought. There was a small space of air at the top of the tunnel, but most of the opening was underwater.\n\nOlieve. Would she fit?\n\n\"Um, Olieve?\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026 I'm not sure about you getting out.\" Nyra dared not look back, unable to face her blind companion.\n\n\"You're worried about the opening's size,\" said the Zealer.\n\n\"Maybe three Agrings could squeeze in there at one time. But it would be cramped. They'd have a hard time moving forward together.\"\n\n\"Three yous. Hold still.\" Claws touched Nyra's back as Olieve moved past. The Zealer felt the edges of the hole, reaching down below the water. \"I'll make it,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nyra said.\n\n\"Let's just see what happens,\" said Olieve impatiently. \"You first.\"\n\nNyra looked at the air pocket above. It wasn't big enough for her to surface. She'd have to hold her breath.\n\n\"You'll make it,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"You too,\" said Nyra automatically, still examining the air pocket. \"But you'll have to fold your wings tightly.\" Nyra recalled falling to the sea during the Dragon Hawk attack, not knowing when she'd be able to surface, and again when she was plunged into the prison tunnel. There was a time she could dive with no fear, like the night she explored the Green Spot. But even then she was nearly sliced by a shark. The whole business of diving twisted her stomach into a knot.\n\n\"Maybe we can wait a little longer,\" offered Nyra. \"The tide is still going out. The air pocket will be big enough soon.\"\n\n\"No waiting,\" barked Olieve. \"Jatika will be back at low tide.\"\n\n\"But what if I freeze?\" pleaded Nyra. \"You said I would never make it swimming down the shaft on my own. How is this any different?\"\n\n\"The distance to the ocean isn't as long as the prison tunnel.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Simple reasoning.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said the Zealer. \"We'll just sit here until hypothermia sets in.\"\n\nNyra ignored the comment. \"I can't hold my breath for very long,\" she said, hoping she was wrong, but daring Olieve to come up with a worthy contradiction.\n\nThe Zealer held up a claw from the water. \"It won't be for long. The tunnel will only narrow for a short while. It opens up wide at the cliff face. I know. I saw it. Years ago.\"\n\n\"You saw it?\n\n\"Fine. Zacka saw it. But his eyes are as good as mine.\"\n\nAnother protest tried to squirm its way out, only it had no shape.\n\n\"Also, I think you are underestimating how long Agrings can hold their breath.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" said Nyra, swinging around. Reading the other's face, Nyra tried to find a falter, a crease of emotion. None.\n\n\"Never said I did. Only that you underestimate yourself.\"\n\nAnd you don't make any sense.\n\n\"And now you are wasting time,\" said Olieve, paddling closer.\n\nWordlessly, Nyra dove under. She had a brain freeze. Gripping her skull, she waited for it to subside. Then she forced her eyes open, squinting, not for the cold, but for the light.\n\nShe waded in place. Just as Olieve said, the hole opened up ahead, enough for a clump of bones to easily float away in low tides. There was more air at the top too. They wouldn't be holding their breath for long.\n\nShe resurfaced. \"I'm going to swim to the end. I'll be back.\"\n\nIf Olieve had responded, Nyra missed it in a deep breath and a splash. Nyra raked through the water, plumes of ripe ocean buffeting her face. She felt streamlined, her whole body a red tongue extending from the cave's yawning mouth. Every few seconds she glanced above, noting the pockets of air morphing in and out of shape, like liquefied mirrors. Occasionally they disappeared, split by the low hanging rocks into smaller fragments. They'd grow bigger with every pull of the tide.\n\nThere came a pang in her lungs. Nyra was suddenly washed in a brighter glow. The cave opened further, and the blackness of her peripherals vanished. The water was different, too. So subtly, the tides pushed and shoved with greater fervor. With one kick, Nyra burst into the glorious dawn. Cool droplets pattering down her nose, she tilted her head as water seeped from her eyelids. She feared that shaking the wet away might take the moons with it. She saw all she hoped for, the claustrophobia dashed off on the backs of a millions stars, fading in the imminent sunrise.\n\nIn her mind she zoomed a thousand lengths through clouds and sunny days, of gray and blue waves until she reached the Northern Coast. Somewhere, under a slightly different blanket of stars, were Blaze and Mother. And maybe, she hoped, they were peering through that slant of midnight luminescence that often graced their burrow. Maybe they also zoomed to a land far away, picturing a red dragon on the other side.\n\nNothing stopped her from dashing wherever she wished, toward home armed with wiser eyes.\n\nEyes. Olieve. Yes, annoying, pitiful, wise Olieve, who knew everything. Nyra had peace and quiet, at last. But Olieve wanted out too. The two dragons had an answer starting in a common place. It began here. In freedom.\n\nDiving under, Nyra pumped back as fast as she could to her waiting companion.\n\nOlieve tapped her claws against the wall, impatiently. \"I was beginning to think you were having a holiday with the fish.\"\n\nNyra barely caught Olieve's words as she shook water from her ears.\n\n\"Take your time,\" said Olieve edgily.\n\n\"Not far,\" breathed Nyra. \"I made it on one breath, no trouble. It's just a short stretch of tunnel, fairly wide, and then it bursts open. We're set!\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Not a single star of enthusiasm danced on her faceplate.\n\nNyra tried to hasten the process. Her paws were becoming difficult to feel. \"We're ready! I'm ready. There's no time to lose.\"\n\n\"Just give me a moment,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"There are no moments!\" exclaimed Nyra. \"Our moments are between now and first-sunrise, when Jatika comes back. Like you said. And it's starting to get light out there.\"\n\n\"I just have to\u2026\" began Olieve, but Nyra did not hear the rest. She dove under.\n\n\"Wait!\" said Olieve, but it was muffled by Nyra's splash. She pictured Olieve's face, angered. But at least anger would get Olieve to follow.\n\nAgain she surfaced to the shimmering white beams, biting air, and fresh pops of fizzing sea foam. Wading, Nyra waited, anticipating Olieve's exhale at her side. One, two, three, four seconds\u2026 it did not come.\n\n\"Oh, Olieve,\" she groaned. She dove back. Oddly, the passage seemed darker than before. Nyra could hardly see the path back, as if the Zealer Stones ahead had vanished. She paddled further. Still no Stones, no sign of the prison pool. Where had they gone? Had she taken a wrong turn? Impossible. There was only one route.\n\nThere it was. A blockage, masking the Stones' light. A cave in? she thought with panic. No, the blockage was light colored, not rock. Could it be ice?\n\nThe ice moved. Fast, wildly.\n\nNyra saw the wide eyes of Olieve behind the flashing faceplate, silver claws flailing everywhere.\n\n\"Olieve!\" she gargled, but the word disappeared in a bubble. The Zealer whipped her forelegs about, heaving, pushing, in a flurry of silver pearling from her mouth.\n\nShe was stuck in the passage.\n\nTHWUMP! Olieve's image swam as she punched Nyra's snout. Warm salty tears blended with the cold sea. Prickles erupted from Nyra's forehead, slamming her eyes shut. There came a squeal. Nyra opened her eyes. Not blind. Olieve was the blind one.\n\nAnd she was drowning.\n\nOlieve's wing tip claw sliced the water. Nyra thanked her luck that the blunt side had delivered the punch. The other wing was lodged within the rock. Above the air pockets scattered into a million pieces, writhing with the sporadic bubbles leaking from below.\n\nOlieve had to get unstuck or die, while Nyra watched the Zealer's eyes turn from dead to real dead.\n\nNyra surged forward, outstretched in what she thought was a calming gesture.\n\nOlieve grabbed Nyra around her middle. Tight.\n\nStop! her mind shrieked. Nyra's paws flew to her sides, trying to pull Olieve away. Insanity swam in her friend's face, the primal desperation between pain and perishing. For the briefest second, Nyra saw her body inside Olieve's stormy eyes. There, the twin Agrings had a single desire\u2014to breathe.\n\nNyra touched Olieve's faceplate, gently. The grip around her body loosened. Olieve withdrew and grabbed her own wing. She flexed it out, then tight against her body.\n\n\"Close them,\" Nyra said in a flourish of bubbles.\n\nOlieve's wings closed. Teal appeared from the other side; the glow of the Stones. Nyra put her tail in Olieve's paws.\n\n\"Follow,\" Nyra gurgled. She swam forward then up. She burst forth, and her exhale was echoed at her side, louder and larger.\n\n\"Next time,\" gasped Olieve, \"remember that I can't see very well under water.\"\n\n\"I am so, so, so, so sorry,\" pleaded Nyra, sincere and grateful at the same time.\n\nOlieve grabbed Nyra to her. Nyra squirmed.\n\n\"What are you\u2014\"\n\n\"You're freezing,\" said Olieve. \"I'm not. You need to warm up.\"\n\nNyra's squirming slowed. Olieve was warm, and being close calmed her beating heart. They stayed like that for a few moments, Olieve's ears flared, Nyra thinking.\n\n\"So,\" began Nyra, \"I guess the question is where to take off. Maybe we should swim out a little first? Then by the time it's light we'll be far enough away\u2014\"\n\n\"You're forgetting that I want to go home, too.\"\n\nNyra's voice cracked, her jaw sagging open. \"So\u2026\" she said tentatively.\n\n\"I'm not sure what you have in mind.\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" began Nyra. \"I was thinking we'd head south. Away from here.\"\n\n\"I suggest we go to my home, and then figure out an appropriate course of action.\"\n\nBack to the Zealers. Different Zealers. The worse ones, according to Olieve.\n\nShe could betray me.\n\nOlieve seemed to read her thoughts. \"Don't swallow a lemming, Ny. I'm not going to leave you to die, or turn you in, or whatever you're hyperventilating about. Just listen. Going to the Northern Coast now isn't going to solve your particular problem. I know you came to bring back a Zealer, or more than one, ideally. But I'm only one, and I'm not very intimidating. We need to get to my family, lie low. Take time to come up with answers, for your issues and mine. We'll figure something out.\"\n\nIn the east, the sky waned to a baby blue, and the stars winked out on horizontal fronts of color. Olieve must have sensed it too, for her words hastened a fraction.\n\n\"Jatika will be back soon. And unless he got kicked in the head since last we saw him, that hole is going to greet him like salt in the eyes. When that happens, hordes of Sorjas will fly out south. They'd catch us, what with your small wings and me slowing us down. If we go with my plan, we'll have a better chance.\"\n\n\"What if I ride on your back?\" Nyra said desperately. \"And guide you. You're bigger. We'd get south faster. Beat the cold before it travels too far south.\"\n\n\"The cold is already here. And even so, no chance,\" Olieve said. \"Look at me. I'm a rabbit next to a wolf. My wings couldn't beat out those of a Zealer soldier. And I've not flown in over two months. I'm not strong.\"\n\nNyra stammered in protest.\n\n\"Drop it, Nyra. We don't have time.\"\n\n\"But how are we going to get to your home? Are we just going to walk over some boundary and expect to be safe?\"\n\n\"Yes, we will saunter right in, singing, in fact. That would be a nice touch.\" Olieve shook her head. \"A good power ballad, hope you have good lungs. Last time I sang, a rock cracked from the ceiling and almost clogged my brother\u2026\"\n\n\"Alright, I get it,\" Nyra spat. \"What's the plan?\"\n\n\"We can't saunter in for two reasons. One, we can't have the Sorjas seeing us and risk being recaptured. Two, and this is the tricky part, we can't let the Raklisalls see you.\"\n\n\"What if I hid?\" offered Nyra. \"What if your herd saw just you? What would happen?\"\n\n\"Lead us west, and stay close to the wall,\" whispered Olieve. \"That sun will break soon. We need to swim and talk.\" She let Nyra go. It was cold, but she could feel her appendages again.\n\nOlieve continued. \"If it were me alone, the cross would be simple. Raklisalls would spot me and quickly usher me into the territory. Aunt Kodoral wouldn't like it, but she'd be forced to take me back in, as she still plays the happy-family ruse. But because you are with me, getting home is exponentially more complicated.\"\n\n\"Could we convince them that I'm good?\" said Nyra. \"They hate Agrings, I get it. But they'll see what I am. I'm not some\u2026\" she tried to find the words, \"magical thing. I'll tell them. I'm just Nyra. And if your aunt doesn't want to help me, then alright. I'm sure someone will.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you assume that Kodi will be reasonable. Any patient, sane beast can see you're not evil-incarnate. But a sane beast she is not. Even if you aren't a witch, she'll make you one.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Suppose Kodi saw you as the very plain, young dragon that you are. She'd still go through painstaking effort to keep your plainness from the herd. You are a valuable weapon, Ny, no matter how small. Imagine me coming home from prison with the one who made the prison necessary in the first place, the dragon that started the war to begin with. Then I go on to defend this Agring, how we're friends and that I want to help her. Suddenly I become the insane one, if Kodoral spreads the right wrongs. Perhaps I'm bewitched. Then I explain your story to my family, and they take my side. Then we are all under the Agring's nasty spell.\"\n\nNyra nodded. \"An excuse to get rid of you all.\"\n\n\"Precisely. Kodoral herself doesn't have to believe it. But if it's enough to off those who threaten her throne, then let the madness begin.\"\n\n\"Good Light,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Good Light, indeed.\"\n\n\"So what do we do?\"\n\n\"We go to my secret place, where the killdeer call. I think we can get to it without being spotted. If we head out west enough and stay against this cliff face,\" she tapped the wall, \"we'll eventually hit a thick patch of shrubs growing above the snow. There, we'll climb. It's far enough into the Raklisall territory to be out of Sorja surveillance, and so the Raklisalls never watch it closely. The water below is largely unwatched. We're heading to it now.\"\n\nNyra looked up the wall. Small sticks protruded here and there from the ice and rock, becoming thicker as she looked westward. Pawholds, she thought. She and Olieve could be spotted if they flew. But in staying close to cliff in a vertical climb, they would be hidden.\n\n\"We have to get to the secret place before the first sun gets too high,\" said Olieve. \"Once word gets out that we've escaped, both herds will have hawk eyes trained to every mouse hole.\"\n\n\"Then what?\"\n\n\"We wait for Zacka. It's a gamble. He might not go there anymore, what without my most exquisite presence. But it's a fairly safe assumption that he'll be there. He has nothing better to do at home. It's not like he ever gets guard duty.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\nOlieve's tone lightened on an infinitesimal grin. \"You'll just have to meet him.\"\n\nThey paddled on in silence for awhile. Nyra was freezing again, but her limbs did not fail. She assumed it was hot adrenaline keeping her going. Nyra offered her tail to Olieve, thinking her companion might want more guidance. But this made the Zealer grumpy. Nyra backed off.\n\nEvery so often Nyra touched the wall, glancing upward to where its black face met the sky. For a moment she wished she had been born male, so that her dark gray skin could blend into the crevices. She hugged the nooks and crannies as tightly as she could, weaving in and out, ready to hide if it came to it.\n\n\"How is it I got out and you never did?\" whispered Nyra, looking back. Olieve's tail, adorned with a plate similar to the one on her face, had just lolled to the surface. It looked sharp and strong. It could have chipped away at the prison easily.\n\n\"I don't snore quite like you.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Never mind.\"\n\n\"Tell me. If anything, summarize.\"\n\n\"I'll try.\" Olieve reached out to Nyra. The Zealer felt along her flank. \"This is the side on which you were pushing. Pushing on ice,\" she suggested.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But you aren't numb here.\"\n\n\"I'm numb all over,\" Nyra countered. \"But it's less numb, now that I think about it.\"\n\n\"It's burning up.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Nyra's paw flew to her flanks. Both were slightly warm to the touch.\n\n\"That's fire heat.\"\n\n\"Fire heat?\" Nyra was puzzled. \"You mean just really hot.\"\n\n\"No, I mean that literally. Not sure, Ny, but I think you were trying to breathe fire.\"\n\nShe'd tried no such thing. \"No Agring can breathe fire except Mum. And she practiced. A lot. No one can do it otherwise.\"\n\n\"You mean she practiced on purpose.\"\n\n\"Well, yes. Long story. It was back around when I was born and she was really depressed. She used to\u2014\"\n\n\"You've been practicing, I think, but on accident.\"\n\nNyra stopped swimming. \"How can you practice breathing fire on accident?\"\n\n\"I told you. Snoring.\"\n\nNyra slowed. \"What?\"\n\n\"Keep swimming,\" Olieve prompted. \"You snore a lot in your sleep. Yet you told me you were not a snorer. Back home, you probably kept warm in the temperate climate. But here, you're freezing. Automatically your throat and chest begin to rumble, creating the friction that makes sparks in your fire pockets.\"\n\n\"How do you know how fire works?\" Agrings knew. They knew innately, well, the elders did. They could feel it back in the day.\n\n\"I once dissected an Agring.\"\n\nNyra gulped.\n\n\"Just fooling,\" said Olieve. \"The science of fire is a known thing, even if I don't have it. In retrospect, keeping you in an ice prison was a dreadful idea. Zirus assumed you couldn't do it. You aren't allowed to, after all. But without heat, the wall would not have yielded so easy.\"\n\nEasy. It hadn't been easy.\n\n\"I could have hacked at the wall on my own in the last few months,\" said Olieve. \"But it would have been slow, not fast enough to finish in the course of one high tide.\"\n\n\"Plus you wouldn't know where to go once you got out,\" said Nyra, catching on.\n\n\"Yes, a leading dragon is useful. So you see, I might run warm like any living thing, but I can't outcompete a dragon that produces the hottest thing in existence.\" She made a contemplative sound. \"If fire is the hottest thing in existence. This one summer gave me a run. Thought I'd lost my body weight in sweat. I had a deathly temperature. Grossness poured out of me like a musk oxen in labor\u2014\"\n\n\"I thought this was supposed to be a summary?\"\n\n\"Now you know why I said 'never mind.' I don't do summaries.\"\n\n\"So,\" said Nyra, \"you knew that I was starting to breathe fire while I was snoring, but never told me.\"\n\n\"Your business, not mine. I'm not one to ask questions.\"\n\nNo, Olieve did not ask questions. She lived her life in a guessing game. That way, Nyra supposed, she never had to bend her vocal chords past the bare minimum. And yet Olieve knew things beyond the games. Things she wouldn't know about unless Nyra told her. Like the fact that she wasn't allowed to breathe fire. But of greater importance, Olieve had implied that she knew about the Sperks\u2014the self-ascribed marks of failure, of how Nyra was not the only one suffering in the wide world. That back home, Blaze, Mum, and the others raced toward a dead-end fate. And Nyra, the unchosen savior, could not pull them out. She couldn't talk about it, she couldn't share it with Olieve.\n\nBut Nyra had heard the subtle hints of the Zealer's anti-questions, where Olieve was given ample opportunity to make implications and pry out the flesh of Nyra's past eleven years. She never did. She let them slide away, always.\n\n\"Going to the northern coast now isn't going to solve your particular problem. I know you came to bring back a Zealer, or more than one, ideally.\" Those had been Olieve's words only moments ago.\n\nHow was that possible? Nyra had spoken of the Sperks in front of Jatika and Sigeen when she first met the Royals. But Jatika and Sigeen never spoke of them again during her incarceration. And Nyra had been at Olieve's side all of that time.\n\nThe sky brightened. The sunrise, the new start. The start without a dead end where Nyra could possibly, possibly regain her goal.\n\nNo more secrets.\n\n\"Olieve,\" she said carefully, \"what do you know about my particular problem?\"\n\nThe Zealer had stopped. Olieve looked upward, eyes blank, body rigid.\n\n\"You're going to have to do it alone,\" she said.\n\n\"What?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Shh,\" spat Olieve. She didn't breathe. Nyra followed her example. The Zealer's ears quivered, as though something drummed against them. Nyra heard nothing.\n\n\"Damn,\" said Olieve. \"She's coming.\"\n\n\"What?\" Nyra whispered. \"Who? Who's coming?\"\n\nOlieve spoke very, very fast. \"Zacka tells me it's the second-to-south most mound, and it's half the size of the others. One of the smaller hills. It's the farthest west.\"\n\n\"Wa-wait-wait\u2014\" stammered Nyra.\n\n\"Our place,\" murmured Olieve. \"Pay attention. Look for thick vegetation, then climb. Once you get to the cliff top there's a series of small hills. You want one that's about half the size of the rest. Of this size, it's the second farthest to the south and the farthest west. There is an entrance covered by a rock and knaproot. Hard to see from a distance, but obvious up close. Only crest the cliff if it's dark, otherwise they might see you.\"\n\n\"What's happening?\" Nyra's turned to the clifftops, then to the horizon. \"Is some\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you absorb everything I just told you?\" Olieve's tone grew desperate.\n\n\"I don't know. Ye-yes, but\u2026\"\n\n\"It's where the killdeer call, Nyra. If all fails, listen for killdeer.\"\n\nThe Zealer began to babble to herself, neither ears nor eyes facing Nyra. \"They've nothing to lose if I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Olieve, what\u2014\"\n\nThe Zealer turned to Nyra, and if there was ever a time the Agring saw sight in her companion's eyes, it was now in the form of pure intensity.\n\n\"I'll get them all to the well. Everyone together, and you'll push them out. Snore, it's the only thing you have that we don't.\"\n\n\"Snore?\"\n\n\"Be the witch. They'll let you go if you do. Zacka will help.\"\n\nNyra was speechless.\n\n\"Now hide.\"\n\nNyra didn't need to be told twice. Washing in and out of sight was a crevice, widening beneath the water. Squeezing in, she all but disappeared. There was just enough room to tread and breathe.\n\nOlieve bobbed like a tree branch. Her ears pointed up the cliff. There were wing beats above. A shadow of points and curves appeared and vanished, then a resounding crunch shook the wall just above her hiding place. Little snips of rock plopped to the water. Nyra suppressed the urge to yelp out-loud.\n\n\"Hello, Auntie,\" said Olieve.\n\nNyra's heart leaped. A plated tail flashed into her small field of vision. Perched just above and out of sight was Kodoral, Royal of the Raklisalls.\n\n\"I wouldn't have pegged you as a swimmer, Olieve,\" said a strange voice, sweet voice. \"It must be slow going.\"\n\nNyra could barely accept that this new voice came from the depraved Royal of Olieve's stories. Her voice sang in the caring, nurturing timbre of mothers.\n\nOlieve shrugged. \"I'm used to moving slow. Been doing it for twenty-three years now.\"\n\n\"That's alright. I've been being patient for forty-six,\" came the sweet voice. This time it chilled Nyra to the bone, for pairing the sound with a creature so menacing was paradoxical. The tail swayed. It was darkened with slate freckles.\n\n\"You are patient,\" said Olieve. \"It was the bones, I assume. I'm surprised you could see them from so far away.\"\n\n\"They were difficult to spot, yes.\"\n\n\"And you knew they had to do with me.\"\n\n\"When your niece disappears and strange debris occurs within sunsets, yes, one makes ties.\"\n\n\"But not curious enough to look further.\"\n\n\"No, dear. Too much attention, too many Sorjas,\" Kodoral said conversationally, as if speaking of a slight inconvenience in weather. \"I don't fancy being ambushed.\"\n\n\"You're taking a risk now.\"\n\n\"A little. But I'll have you back home soon, Olieve. You know I don't like to linger.\"\n\n\"Didn't linger much after my special mission.\"\n\n\"Oh, now, now, Olieve,\" said Kodoral, sounding hurt. \"You understand why it happened.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"So tell me, dear niece,\" chimed the Royal. \"Why do you smell so\u2026 unfamiliar?\"\n\n\"I may have had a roommate.\"\n\nNyra's jaw clenched. Why admit this? Perhaps the Agring odor was too strong to hide, and so Olieve had no choice. But how could Kodoral know the Agring scent? Perhaps it was so alien it could only be from a foreign dragon, and since the Raklisalls knew that Nyra was imprisoned, it was an easy connection to make.\n\n\"Did you now,\" said Kodoral, intrigued. \"Who would have guessed Zirus was so hard pressed for prisons.\" She laughed. \"Your friend is nearby?\"\n\nIn a blip of sheer horror, Nyra saw Kodoral's speckled face appeared at the opening.\n\nNyra made ready to strike.\n\n\"It opted to stay behind,\" said Olieve with no trace of edge. Kodoral's head vanished. Not seen. Zealer night vision must have been diminutive compared to Agrings. Maybe this accounted for the glowing stones in their caves. Or vice versa.\n\n\"It's too cold out here for an Agring,\" continued Olieve.\n\n\"Agrings,\" said Kodoral, amused, like the word was somehow delicious. \"Good swimmers, I've heard.\"\n\n\"So I'm told,\" Olieve yawned.\n\n\"Care to confirm?\"\n\n\"You can scour the ocean if you'd like,\" said Olieve. \"I'm personally more concerned about the Sorjas barreling down any second.\"\n\n\"Very wise,\" said Kodoral.\n\nNyra got the feeling that Kodoral wished for a more direct conversation. But maybe it was a projection of Nyra's own frustration: she was without answers, armed only with the terrible apprehension of what would happen next.\n\n\"You don't plan to off me now. Not just yet,\" said Olieve. Her words were slow, careful. Terror also leaked in, a sentiment not typical of the rickety Zealer.\n\n\"No,\" affirmed Kodoral.\n\n\"And I know why.\"\n\n\"I expect you do. But let's see how you fare once at home.\"\n\n\"Let's.\"\n\nNyra began shaking, making little ripples. Whatever bravery she still had had flown off, or was burned away by the rising sun.\n\n\"Let's,\" said Kodoral.\n\nA shadow descended on Olieve. Nyra sank down as Kodoral flapped to her niece's side. Olieve dove under, and just as Nyra had done countless times in her sea travels, Olieve breached from the water in a narrow leap, flared her wings, and was flying.\n\nThey were gone.\n\nNyra exploded from the hiding place just in time to see\u2026 nothing. The sky above the cliff was blank.\n\nAlone.\n\nWithout thought the Agring doubled back, lengths and lengths, until she pushed through the ribs and hooves that now escaped on the lessening tide. The journey across the cliff had taken ages, it seemed, but going back took the time of a hiccup.\n\nThe prison tunnel yawned before her. She dove through, even though a full air pocket had formed above. She barely noticed, arriving back in a few kicks. Slicing out of the water, Nyra landed brutally on the ledge, back to the musty space she'd called home these last nine days. It was warm in here, so much warmer than the bleak outside.\n\nShe didn't know where else to go.\n\nA splash reverberated from behind. She spun back to the escape hole, fearing that Kodoral had followed her inside. There was no one. Just the tide beating out.\n\nShe spun to the other tunnel. The main one, formed by a millennia of glaciers. On the other side a shape swung down to meet the water, something large and lax drooping from its jaws. A fresh caribou.\n\nThe tide was at its lowest. Meal time. Jatika was coming down the shaft."
            },
            {
                "title": "Sunset",
                "text": "Nyra found herself back outside, swimming lengths and lengths away from the prison. The cliff had lost none of its intensity, despite any resolve or confidence the Agring told herself to carry. She had a plan. When it would begin, she did not know. Time would tell, just as time told everything.\n\nThe vegetation on the cliff face grew thicker as she swam west. Within them were footholds. Clasping the rocks, Nyra hoisted up onto the first ledge she could find. It slanted steeply. She toppled, but caught a protruding rock, stopping fast. There was another rock, then another. In the wretched past, she recalled waves ripping her from the face of the Northern Coast. Today, at the Southern Coast, the waves were calm. They wanted her to succeed. Or didn't care. Just as well. She'd had quite enough personification when it came to nature.\n\nOne hoist, then another. Again and again. The vegetation became less slippery as she drew farther from the water. Up ahead, new branches sprouted, thick and prickly. She looked down. The fall was great, but it did not scare her. Her wings would save her, although they would not make her safe. This was Raklisall territory, even if the far western end. To fly risked being seen. In hugging the cliffs she all but disappeared.\n\nNyra managed the ascent's first half virtually unscathed. As her muscles fatigued, she grew sloppy, getting scratched by the many branches. By the time she crested the top, she was covered in marks. They hurt, but they'd have to wait. Up here, she was vulnerable, a red dot on a blanket of snow. Garrionom stretched plain and white until it hit the jagged twin mountains. Far ahead lay the frozen basin, close to where Jatika stole her away. Somewhere in between was the Sorja entrance, and even closer, that of the Raklisalls. She slunk to the ground, the snow at her belly highlighting just how present she was.\n\nA sudden cry snagged her eardrums. Nyra thrust her tail forward, ready to attack.\n\nTwo lengths off, a white plume perched on two black sticks. It hopped her way. A snip of obsidian opened on its face, revealing a perfectly pink mouth.\n\n\"Kihh-deer!\" it chirruped before taking off. It hovered a little before landing by other plumes, each poised on their own sticks, their jet beaks hidden in pristine feathers. Others ran between heaps of snow, in a patchwork of hills argyled in weedy plants.\n\nNyra lowered her tail. So these were killdeer. Where the killdeer call. She was in the right place.\n\n\"Second hill to the south and farthest west.\" That's what Olieve had said. Nyra had pictured much bigger hills. These were lumps, reminiscent of warren mounds. The hills back home were much bigger.\n\nTucked away was the mound Olieve described. Dots of knaproot circled it, nearly obscured in snow. Only the dry and spiny seedheads surfaced. Nyra walked around. The snow was flattened on the other side, or cleared away. Nyra came closer.\n\nFootprints.\n\n\"Zacka,\" she murmured. Nyra knew nothing of snowfall, nor about the patterns they left behind. But these tracks looked crisp. She didn't know if this was good or bad news. Suppose he had just been here, and wouldn't return for days and days? She'd be in the mound, waiting, perhaps freezing, perhaps starving. And worse yet, sitting idly while her plan turned obsolete.\n\nThe sun was strong on her back, hanging low in the west. Roendon would soon appear, and with him, excruciating cold. Inside would be warmer. Hopefully.\n\nThe opening was covered by a white rock. She hadn't seen it at first, mistaking it for snow. How clever. It put her in mind of Fuhorn's boulder, which the Alpha used to shut the Gathering room. Maybe it was an old custom shared between Zealers and Agrings, if there was once a time when they were the same dragon, back and back to when the Coasts joined as one. More likely, it was common sense.\n\nNyra wedged in a claw and pried. In one heave she fell backward. The rock popped out after her. Knaproot scattered everywhere, framing a half-circle opening wide enough for a dragon slightly larger than Olieve.\n\nTaking a deep breath, she ducked in. Dark. No Zealer Stones. A nostalgic glow of comfort warmed her insides. This place was like home. She could have believed Blaze and Mother waited for her in the back.\n\nSomething stirred.\n\n\"Zacka?\" she trembled.\n\nA shadow slammed full force to her chest. She arced backward, spine almost snapping in two. She twisted sideways, thumping so harshly she could feel a bruise purpling her skin.\n\n\"Who are you?\" hissed the other, the orange tinge of sunset dancing off its faceplate. Nyra answered with an airless cough. The wind had been knocked from her lungs.\n\nA paw outstretched behind her. She craned to look back. Her attacker found a boulder, another white one, and pulled it into place. The suns went out, leaving mere ribbons of sky. The paw returned. To her horror, it came down upon her neck. Fangs were bared a breath from her own.\n\n\"You're not a Zealer,\" the voice said, awed. Nyra tried to retort, but her lungs wouldn't fill properly. She gasped, exercising them back into life.\n\n\"It's true!\" the other cried. The voice was light and airy. Clearly male, but dashed with a feminine quality. The opposite of Olieve.\n\n\"What's true?\" she said hoarsely.\n\n\"Olieve was right! Or Ressenjie and Frazen were. Or me.\" He laughed. \"You're here.\"\n\n\"You're here,\" said Nyra. \"Olieve was right twice. Once for each of us.\" She could just make out the other's features. He was bigger than Olieve, not that that said much. He was probably a regular sized male, though the contours of his frame suggested he was slight. His limbs, though only outlines now, were thinner than those of Jatika or Sigeen, and his neck spiraled to the ceiling like a lanky stem.\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"You're Zacka.\"\n\n\"For all intents\u2026 for all intents and purposes,\" he murmured, still awed. \"Terrakeizaq, to everyone but Olieve.\"\n\nThe creature before her was not the Zacka from her imagination. He had been something of fantastic proportions, a barrel-chested rebel against Raklisall causes. He was someone, the only one maybe, who could vanquish the lazy glare of Olieve and tease her face into a smile every time she mentioned him. Nyra had assumed it was Zacka's handsomeness (what made someone handsome, especially a Zealer, she didn't know) that brought out Olieve's muted rendition of 'bashful.' But he wasn't these things. Like Olieve, he was small and frail.\n\n\"And you're the Agring. I don't know\u2026 I don't know your\u2026 name.\" He treaded each word carefully, as if he didn't know what route his speech should take or what to ask next.\n\n\"Nyra,\" she said. Her thoughts reeled at a pace that matched his stumbles.\n\nHe laughed without a smile, and shook his head. \"It's so\u2026 it's so strange. She relayed the message without even saying your name. What they say is true; one dulled ability brings out the others. Scary to think\u2026 think how well she must perceive her surroundings. Like she's reading our thoughts.\"\n\nHe backed away, letting her sit up.\n\n\"Olieve told you\u2026 told you to come here as well?\" he ventured.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said simply. It's not simple at all. \"Sort of. I didn't know for sure what she wanted me to do. But seeing as you're here, I think I got it right.\"\n\n\"So, it's true that you know Olieve?\" he said. \"You know her personally, I mean. You'd have to, to know my nickname.\"\n\n\"We were imprisoned together. Up until our escape.\"\n\n\"Your escape,\" he repeated. \"Right. I can't tell you how shocking it was to see Olieve, after all these months.\" He became somber, but his words were more streamlined. \"Kodoral told us it was the Agring's\u2026 your fire that did it.\" He examined her, looking for confirmation. The attention was bothersome at first\u2014so intent, direct. Then she realized he may have been acting normally, only she had become used to a sightless Zealer face, with no pupils with which to fix her.\n\n\"Fire? Sort of. Olieve says my body heated up. This cracked the permafrost. Sounds far-fetched to me.\"\n\n\"Oh no, no, I believe it,\" he said, nodding vigorously. She liked him immediately. She could sense terrible tension in Zacka, like he harbored the exact same fears. Now that they were together, she had so much to tell him, so much to say to ensure her plan worked. Yet at the same time he had information, things she might need. To tell her stories first or to hear his\u2014she wished time would slow by the windings of her tail, allowing for everything at once. She'd made so many assumptions in the last few hours. To move forward, she had to be sure they were right.\n\n\"Where is Olieve now?\" Nyra started.\n\n\"I'm first, then, in the exposition game,\" he sighed. It sounded like something Olieve would say.\n\n\"Please,\" she said, trying to remember what exposition meant.\n\n\"Pop a haunch.\"\n\nNyra popped a haunch.\n\n\"Kodoral brought Olieve back this morning,\" he said. \"The return of the heir was a shock, as I said. All these months Kodoral has publicly mourned the loss of her niece. 'My followers and I are strategizing day and night for her return.'\" Zacka snorted. \"She said this, but did nothing, of course. Olieve would never get away, so long as the Sorjas wanted her. I think Kodi hoped Olieve would be executed. It wouldn't be\u2026 it wouldn't be Sorja-like, but Kodoral hoped.\n\n\"This morning it all changed. There was Olieve, trotting back to the Raklisall cave with Kodi at her side. We were elated. But then things turned funny. Instead of going straight to her family, like any welcomed-home hero would, Olieve was sent straight to the holding room. The prison room, essentially.\"\n\n\"Mmmm,\" whimpered Nyra. Her heart sported no surprise as she pictured Kodoral's serene face ushering Olieve deeper into the caverns.\n\n\"An order was called to fetch those closest to her. Her father and mother. I wanted\u2026 wanted to go too.\" He looked forlorn.\n\n\"But you didn't,\" assumed Nyra.\n\n\"No. We are not at all associated as far as the herd's concerned. Not closely, anyway. It's for my protection,\" he said, agitated.\n\n\"I know,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Ressenjie, Olieve's father, doesn't share Kodoral's desire to prolong our little civil war. This is only known to a few, namely Kodi's closest followers and Ressenjie's, Ressenjie having very few. I'm one of them, but we are a very secret society. We put ourselves in danger thinking the way we do.\"\n\n\"Old news,\" affirmed Nyra, not wanting to be rude, but needing to skip ahead.\n\n\"I digress,\" he said. \"So I didn't see Olieve today. Her parents went and they later relayed the meeting to me. They entered the prison room together, and inside were Olieve, Kodi, and some of her followers. Witnesses, in retrospect. Olieve and her parents embraced, exchanged fond words and such, but something in Olieve held back. She was quiet, not at all behaving like someone who'd been cooped up for two months. A passerby would have thought her bereaved. Olieve's parents, of course, knew better. They know\u2026 they know how Olieve works better than anyone, except me, maybe. She was thinking, being careful under the eyes of Kodoral. Like she had a secret she had to tell, but didn't know how to in front of her aunt.\n\n\"Well, Kodi didn't like Olieve's silence. Over and over she prompted Olieve, trying\u2026 trying to get her niece to share her story, the one where an Agring befriended a Zealer. Eventually Kodoral ended up telling Ressenjie and Frazen all Olieve had shared on the flight home. There wasn't much, only that Olieve had been housed with the recently captured Agring and that they were on good terms. Very good terms. And that the Agring had used fire to escape. Olieve nodded as Kodoral went along, not adding a single detail other than a quick 'yes' here and there.\n\n\"Ressenjie and Frazen couldn't\u2026 couldn't believe this. Not the fact that their daughter befriended a so-called enemy, but that she would share this with a dragon so prejudiced, so\u2026 conniving!\" Zacka shook his claws. \"They asked 'How could you do this?' hoping Olieve would understand the true meaning of their question. She replied 'It couldn't be helped.' They'd meant to ask, 'How could you say all of this to your aunt?' But they didn't understand Olieve's answer.\"\n\n\"I know,\" offered Nyra, rising on her feet a little. \"My scent. When Kodoral captured Olieve, I was hiding. Kodi could smell me on Olieve, or she was smelling me myself. There is no way Olieve could have lied about being around me. And seeing as Kodi knows I was with the Sorjas\u2026\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" shrugged Zacka. \"But that still doesn't explain why she revealed your friendship. Why didn't she lie? Why didn't she say you were enemies?\"\n\n\"I can only guess,\" said Nyra. In truth, she had an idea why. It was part of the plan. But she needed Zacka to continue. Time was short.\n\n\"Anyway, Olieve's parents would have jumped in to defend their daughter. But just as Ressenjie was about to start, Olieve gave them an infinitesimal nod. So very small, Kodi didn't see it.\"\n\n\"Why the nod?\" said Nyra. This she didn't know.\n\n\"Here's what we think. Kodi wanted Olieve's parents to defend their daughter, and Olieve wanted to prevent that from happening.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"If Olieve befriended an Agring, an enemy, that makes her a traitor. If her parents back her up, that makes them traitors as well. Kodi wants Ressenjie and Frazen entangled in a scandal.\"\n\n\"So they all look insane. Bewitched,\" offered Nyra. Now she remembered. Olieve had explained this very thing, how her parents defending their daughter could hurt them. In that little nod, Olieve was protecting her mother and father.\n\nZacka cocked his head. \"Witch, yes. That's a word she likes. Olieve told you more than I would have expected.\"\n\n\"She talks. A lot.\"\n\n\"Even when imprisoned, it seems,\" he said fondly.\n\n\"So then what happened?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"Well, Kodoral, sensing she would glean nothing more, called the reunion to an end. Her witnesses escorted Ressenjie and Frazen from the room. You can imagine how painful it was for them, leaving their daughter with Kodoral, not knowing what might come next.\"\n\nNyra recalled the pained face of Thaydra as Darkmoon stood between them at the cliff edge. She had wanted nothing more than to press her face to her mother's and be pulled to safety. Had Olieve felt the same way?\n\n\"But just before leaving, Olieve said something loud enough that her parents could hear.\"\n\n\"And that was?\" Thaydra's image faded away.\n\n\"I only wish I could have heard them call again.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\" said Nyra on the tip of understanding.\n\n\"A code,\" explained Zacka, \"for a place. This place. That's what we call it. Where the killdeer call.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" exhaled Nyra. \"So her parents knew what that meant.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Zacka. \"This place is a secret, but no secret to them. Although sometimes I wish it was,\" he said wryly. \"But they leave us alone anyhow.\"\n\nNyra was not interested. \"So what did Kodi do? When Olieve said this.\"\n\n\"She wanted to know what it meant. She demanded an explanation, but Olieve was ready. 'My brothers,' she said. 'You didn't let them come to see me. I wish I could've heard their playful calls again.' Kodi didn't seem convinced. But whether she tried to wheedle her niece any further is unknown: Ress and Frazen were escorted out of the room before they could hear anything more. And that's the last they saw of Olieve. It's the last\u2026 the last time anyone has seen her, for that matter. Except for Kodi.\"\n\n\"So her parents told you all of this, and then you came here?\"\n\n\"I've been here ever since this morning, waiting. I didn't know exactly what I'd find. The Agring crossed Ressenjie's mind. But who knew? Olieve made it as clear as she could that this was the place to be. And then what would happen would happen.\"\n\nTaking a few deep breaths, Nyra tried to grasp what she was up against. It was supposed to get less complicated once Zacka came. Now that she had the details, her plan seemed all the more complex, if not impossible.\n\nZacka began to pace, a swishing outline in the darkness. \"I still don't understand why she told Kodi the truth about your relationship. She could have easily lied. She didn't have to say you were friends.\" He paused. \"It's as though\u2026 it's as though she wants to get on Kodoral's bad side.\" His eyes flashed with desperation.\n\nNyra feared to tell him her theory. It could horrify him, paralyze his will. But she needed him to know everything.\n\n\"If I didn't know better,\" he continued. \"I'd say she had given up, and was just looking for a way to go out with a bang. Get a public execution going, get everyone together to hear her last words as a rebel.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" prompted Nyra, willing him to get there on his own.\n\n\"Oh, you don't want to know,\" said Zacka, rolling his head dramatically. \"We had an execution last year, or maybe she told you that already.\"\n\n\"She didn't,\" said Nyra, paws tingling.\n\n\"Last year, Kodi caught wind of a romance between a Raklisall guard and a Sorja. Executions are rare, but they take place in a room called the Well Room. Kodoral makes a speech, then you are pushed into a hole lengths and lengths deep, filled with water. You drown. The Raklisall guard got that treatment. She was a friend, too. It was\u2026 awful.\"\n\nI'll get them all to the Well, Olieve had said right before Kodoral captured her. Everyone together, and you'll push them out. Olieve's plan. Now Nyra's.\n\n\"Tell me more about the Well Room,\" asked Nyra, hoping to picture it. \"Is it like a Gathering room?\"\n\n\"That depends on what a Gathering room is.\" He did not cease his pacing.\n\n\"It's a place where the whole herd meets to tell stories.\" She kneaded her paws to the hard ground, wishing she had a snowball to crunch.\n\n\"You have a gentle family. But to answer your question, yes. It's a Gathering room.\"\n\n\"So if Olieve or anyone is executed,\" she ventured, \"every Raklisall will be there\u2026\"\n\n\"Especially for Olieve,\" he said, almost pacing into her. She leaped out of the way just in time. \"She's of Royal Blood.\"\n\n\"And this Well Room,\" she said, \"it's close to the main cave, isn't it? The one connecting the two territories.\"\n\n\"Pretty much. The Well room is the first room you hit when entering our territory, assuming you are coming through the main cave opening. In fact, if going that way, you have to cross through it in order to get to anywhere else in the Raklisall end of the caves.\" He stopped treading. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" she stammered, \"I know why Olieve is doing this.\" It was all so risky. But after the deliberations, the inferences, and the decoding, Nyra knew for sure what it was Olieve had tried to communicate in so few words.\n\nIt made sense.\n\n\"And?\" he said.\n\nNyra felt elated, or the closest one could feel to elation given the task ahead. But in hearing Zacka's theory align with her own plans, there was solidarity. Subsequent to scaling the cliffs, swimming the seas, and bearing the weight of the world, the clouds in her mind parted before a glimmer of hope. She wouldn't be fighting this battle alone.\n\n\"Don't worry. Olieve knows what she's doing.\" Nyra actually jumped in the air. Zacka was taken aback. \"We should worry, I suppose. But Olieve has a plan.\"\n\n\"Does it involve execution?\"\n\n\"It's her way of getting everyone in the same place.\"\n\n\"How is that helpful?\" he asked.\n\n\"She's organizing the end of the war,\" said Nyra. \"And her own rescue. At the same time.\"\n\n\"Her rescue?\" he said, coming closer.\n\n\"To save a semi-princess,\" she affirmed. Olieve would hate me. \"I guess that makes you a gallant prince.\"\n\nHe grimaced, torn somewhere between enthusiasm and anxiety. \"What does that make you?\"\n\n\"I don't know. The fly that buzzes around your head and gets in the way.\"\n\nZacka bit his lip, pinching off the smile he'd surely deemed inappropriate. \"Well then, if Royal-to-be Olieve has a plan, tell me what to do.\"\n\n\"First,\" breathed Nyra, \"and I realize this is tricky\u2026 you have to get me into the Raklisall caves.\"\n\n\"Alright. We can work on that,\" he said. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"I'm going to need dry stems.\" She shuffled a few wrinkled flowers at her feet, remembering the day when she and Blaze saw Thaydra eating vanilla flowers on the Dam, a day not so long ago, when Nyra lamented being punished for childish errors. How far away it was.\n\n\"Attainable,\" he nodded.\n\n\"And one more thing.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nShe clacked her tongue contemplatively before asking: \"Can Zealers fish?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Underwing",
                "text": "Nyra had never ever been inside someone's wing. There was a time when Mum could wrap up both she and Blaze with room to spare. But Thaydra never carried her dragglings this way. No one did. There was no need, and for good reason. As she now discovered, it was terribly uncomfortable.\n\nEnveloped from the coming night, Nyra jostled between the membranes of Zacka's left wing. It was his best side, just like Mum's, or rather it was before her left wing was lost. But carrying a dragon, even one so small as an Agring, wasn't easy for either of them. Nyra did not remember being in an egg, but in that moment, with her tail crunched up to her face and her hindquarters scrunched halfway up her torso, Nyra could nearly taste yolk in her mouth.\n\n\"Can't you walk more smoothly?\" she complained, her voice muffled heavily in the folds.\n\n\"Nyra, I couldn't walk more smoothly even if I could breathe.\" At first Nyra didn't know what he meant, and sniffed the air suspiciously. Ah, fish. To Nyra, it wasn't powerful, even though she was doused in herring guts. To her, it was no different than the subtle scent of fresh salmon entrails. But Zacka labored under the aroma. He had a more acute sense of smell, and furthermore, no taste for seafood.\n\n\"Well, that's good news,\" said Nyra. \"If you can't breathe, neither will anyone else. They'll never smell me.\"\n\n\"Let's hope,\" he snorted. \"I still think it's a feeble excuse.\"\n\n\"It's the best idea,\" contested Nyra.\n\n\"I know, but\u2026 Zealers don't fish.\"\n\n\"We have to pretend.\"\n\n\"One further,\" he said, \"how do I explain my wing. It's sagging under the weight.\"\n\n\"Again, best idea.\"\n\n\"I know, but\u2026 it's a stretch.\"\n\n\"Just say a swordfish swatted it. It's injured, but nothing serious. Alright, Zacka?\"\n\n\"Terrakeizaq,\" he corrected, stopping.\n\n\"Hey!\" shrieked Nyra, thrown forward in the folds. She bumped against bone.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he muttered sadly.\n\nNyra squirmed back into place as best she could. Her nose throbbed.\n\n\"It's just that I don't like that name.\"\n\nShe wrinkled her snout. \"But that's what Olieve calls you.\"\n\n\"Olieve and Olieve only. And only in private. Publically, she calls me by my full name. Just as everyone else does.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with the nickname?\"\n\n\"If she used it publically,\" he said, \"Kodoral might find out we're close.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" said Nyra, insulted. \"What I mean is why don't you like the name itself?\"\n\nHe sighed and began walking again. \"Doesn't it\u2026 doesn't it sound a little feminine to you?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Nyra, wishing she could see his face.\n\n\"It ends with that 'uh' sound. Like\u2026 well, like Ny-ruh.\"\n\nThat didn't make sense. It certainly wasn't the case in the Nammock herd. Thaydra was a doe's title, but Nyra's name went either way. She was partially named after her grandfather. Likewise, it wasn't like continents had genders. 'Uh' sounds were completely neutral.\n\n\"What about Sorja?\" she suggested.\n\n\"Old name. Who knows what they were thinking back then.\"\n\n\"Jatika!\" she exclaimed suddenly. \"You probably don't know of him, but there's a Sorja herd member named Jatika. He took care of Olieve and me. He's a guard, a top guard. And a father, I think.\"\n\n\"So you imply that only real males have dragglings? And are guards?\" he said darkly.\n\n\"No,\" Nyra retorted. \"I'm just saying that Zacka doesn't have to be feminine, Zacka! And even if it is, who cares?\"\n\nHe ignored her. Nyra almost dug her claws with frustration, until she remembered the giant wing keeping her safe. With that came a pang of empathy. She recalled one of her last conversations with Olieve, where she said Zacka never had guard duty, implying that he wasn't appropriate for the role. Nyra didn't give it much thought in the middle of their escape. Now, in seeing him and burdening him, she began to understand. Perhaps Zacka had suffered un-pleasantries due to his slight stature. Maybe young females didn't look at him\u2014an honor so vital to the adolescent mind (or so she'd heard). Only one pair of eyes danced in his presence, and they were to the ballet of blindness.\n\nAn apology caught in her stomach, swelling barely enough to reach her throat. Her tongue lay heavy, still, and stubborn as always. Scraping her mind's recesses, she dusted off cobwebs, trying to find anything of intrigue.\n\n\"You don't have to talk, Nyra,\" said Zacka.\n\n\"Who says I want to?\" she said.\n\nShe felt him shrug, lifting her up a fraction. \"I can tell.\"\n\n\"Then what should we do to pass the time?\" she said. She wanted to distract him from discomfort without letting him know.\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\" offered Zacka. \"That's a good conversation starter. Mated pairs say it a lot.\"\n\nYes, and get bopped on the nose, she thought. Aunt Dewep always asked this of Uncle Flame Thistle, usually when he was quiet and gearing up for a nap. Dewep didn't do well with silence. Thaydra, too, was talkative, though she had no mate with whom to initiate this controversial question. Instead she had Blaze, who always complied.\n\n\"Well,\" Nyra began, and she started speaking before realizing what was on her mind. \"I'm curious about Olieve, I guess.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\nShe paused, putting her thoughts together. \"I was just wondering why Olieve wanted to help me. After we escaped.\"\n\n\"What was she going to do? Abandon you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nyra said. Straining upward, she found a patch of thinned skin. On the other side came the light glow of the moon, very faint. \"Maybe. She got on my nerves a lot.\"\n\nZacka gave a short laugh.\n\n\"She made fun of me,\" said Nyra. \"We didn't come close to killing each other or anything, but we were a far cry from best friends.\"\n\n\"Really,\" he said knowingly.\n\n\"I just wonder why she's putting herself at risk. She could have just gone home and condemned me. And I guess most of it's self-serving. She's doing this to end the war. But it's for my own good, too. If we do this thing, I have a chance of getting home again.\"\n\n\"I see,\" he said.\n\n\"She had enough problems,\" mumbled Nyra. \"And even with those aside, she never seemed to care much about anything.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\"\n\nNyra thought this obvious. \"For one thing, Olieve spilled the whole history of the Zealer war before knowing who I was. She should have kept more secrets, I think. I'm glad she told them, but she probably shouldn't have, right? But as long as it didn't hurt her chances of getting home someday\u2026 well, nothing mattered.\"\n\n\"So you think you know Olieve pretty well?\" said Zacka.\n\nNyra wasn't sure how to answer. It seemed she would know Olieve well in their nine, agonizing days. But did she really? Moreover, did Olieve know her well? The Agring thought not. Her story was a long one, and she'd kept some of the greatest pieces hidden.\n\nLike the Sperks.\n\n\"Alright,\" Zacka said, cutting her thought away. \"Have you\u2026 have you ever met anyone who builds themselves up? Who says they are much more than they appear to be?\"\n\nNyra pondered. Everyone built themselves up at some point. Blaze did. He was clever, and didn't always hide it well. But he was eclipsed by another.\n\n\"Jesoam,\" she said. \"My cousin. She tells everyone what a wonderful singer she is. And she's terrible.\" Mum disagreed, and told Nyra that Jesoam was talented, just woefully conceited. But this skirted the point.\n\n\"Imagine Olieve as the opposite of Cousin Jesoam,\" Zacka explained. \"Olieve stays low key, never speaks too colorfully, often babbling about things no one but she would find interesting. It makes her sort of unlikable. And that dullness makes her come off lazy.\" He took a dramatic breath. \"None of it is real.\"\n\nNyra sorted. \"Some of its real. She's monotonous. Don't tell me that's fake after nine days together.\" She bit her tongue. Disgracing Olieve, in the midst of their plan, and aside Olieve's mate no less, would have earned her a wallop from Mother.\n\nZacka took no discernible offense. \"That's Olieve through and through, but she only does this so that very few will pay her any attention. I remember Olieve as a draggling. She'd yell, she'd scream like any young dragon. But as she grew up, and as her friends grew into respectable adults, Olieve retreated into their shadows. You see, to Olieve, everyone else was more important. They could contribute to daily life. So she grew to detest attention, because it highlighted her inadequacy.\"\n\n\"Her blindness?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"Correct,\" said Zacka. \"Olieve is dissatisfied with herself, and for this reason, tries to fade out except among those she loves. But that doesn't make her lazy. Or stupid. Not by a long shot. In fact, she's only done one foolish thing in all her life, in her opinion, and that was running the errand for Kodi that got her captured. And I assume she did it to try and fill her own void.\"\n\nOlieve wouldn't have had the chance to tell Zacka how much she hated herself for letting Kodi dupe her. Zacka knew her well. They must have shared true trust and understanding.\n\n\"So why would she trust me?\" Nyra went on. \"Almost immediately?\"\n\n\"Because she's horribly perceptive and choosey with words. And she's fast about it. Olieve would have analyzed every single thing she was telling you, censoring wherever she deemed it necessary, leaving out information you could use\u2026 could use to hurt her.\"\n\n\"What information could I use to hurt her?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Could I tell you if I knew?\" There was a smirk in his voice. \"But honestly, there was very little risk for her in telling you the whole story. So she did.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Nyra sadly, expecting a more interesting explanation. \"So did she just need someone to talk to? Or did Olieve truly trust me?\"\n\nHe clacked his tongue several times before answering. He spoke slowly. \"In the beginning, no, probably not. But when I say the beginning, I mean the very, very beginning, like the first few seconds. If Olieve were to trust you, she'd know almost instantly. And I think she did\u2014trust you, that is.\"\n\nHe got quiet, crunching through the snow one heavy footfall at a time.\n\n\"But we've strayed from your initial question,\" said Zacka after a moment.\n\n\"What was that again?\" she asked.\n\n\"You asked why Olieve wanted to help you,\" said Zacka. \"Other than for being self-serving.\"\n\nNyra nodded, and then remembered he couldn't see her. \"Yes,\" she replied.\n\n\"Think about Olieve's life. What did she ever have? Me and her family. That's it.\"\n\n\"That's what everyone wants,\" said Nyra, a tad impatiently. A few months ago she'd wanted to fly, soaring away across the sea, away from guards and grownups. Those were foolish wishes. Disdainful waters filled her sinuses. She shook them away.\n\n\"That's what everyone needs,\" replied Zacka. \"That's what we crave at the end of the day. But what about in-between? Happiness isn't just love, it's purpose. Having a place.\"\n\n\"Work and play,\" she offered, thinking of Oharassie, who had a philosophy for everything and knew the deepest tissues of life. Zacka was far too young to carry old wisdoms. Yet he was older, maybe twice as old as Nyra, and knew the joys and pains of war, love, and other things Nyra had not seen, or had met far too fast to comprehend.\n\n\"Precisely. Work and play,\" he said. \"You can have all the love in the world, but you would go mad if you couldn't contribute to that world. Most take solace in their jobs or hobbies. You Agrings fish. You dig tunnels, even if not under the best circumstances. Olieve can't do any of those things. Hunting is completely off limits. She can fly with guidance, but taking down a caribou could kill her. She can't guard, for obvious reasons. And those are just the main jobs. Olieve struggles with the little tasks too, though she'd never admit it. Day to day life for Olieve is more monotonous than her voice, and that says something.\"\n\nRunning, hiding, swimming, and a storm of other activities the Agrings enjoyed, that she enjoyed, rode on the simple fact that the world yawned before her. For Olieve, that mouth was closed forever.\n\n\"Then you came along,\" continued Zacka. His step took on a new spring. \"Someone with a real problem, and with no friends. In a place where you had no one, she became a someone. She could have left you to die, or better yet, turned you in to Kodoral. But she didn't. She chose to side with the Agring, the timeless enemy. By helping you, Olieve is climbing through a new window. For the first time, she's an asset.\"\n\nNyra leaned towards his ribs. \"It's still self-serving.\"\n\n\"Definitely,\" he said without a hint of hesitation. Breeze whistled across the flaps of Zacka's wings, howling to the unseen barren landscape. Sharp drafts sang to her ears.\n\nThe Zealer fidgeted uncomfortably. \"But you know, I think it's more than that,\" he said giddily. Too giddily. \"Granted, it's not like her, but I'd bet she did it because she's helping a friend, too. She doesn't have many of those.\"\n\nNyra listened to the pattering laugh that followed. Forced, she thought, and she knew he only said this to make her feel better.\n\n\"So why are you saying so much to me? Like Olieve did?\" she mumbled, wondering if she could squeeze out Zacka's veiled motives, just as he freely sputtered out Olieve's.\n\n\"Olieve has great perception,\" he said simply. \"But mine is better. You are good, Nyra. I can tell.\"\n\nShe smiled a little.\n\n\"But we are going to have to pick this up later. We're close to the west entrance.\"\n\n\"We're there already?\" she breathed.\n\n\"Nearly,\" he said. \"Tell me, this cousin of yours, does she act at all when she sings?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Any good?\"\n\n\"Dreadful.\"\n\n\"Well then, maybe this won't be so bad for you. Prepare yourself\u2026 prepare yourself for some of the worst acting you've ever heard.\"\n\nShe tensed.\n\n\"No laughing,\" he warned. \"Or I'll have to improvise why I chortle like an eleven-year-old female\u2026 of an unrecognizable species.\"\n\nShe held back shivers. Gradually the crunching of Zacka's claws turned to clinks. The snow is hardening, she surmised. For the last hour he'd walked a round-about that drew attention away from his secret place. Now, he hit worn, well traveled ground. They could only be close to the bustling Raklisall caves.\n\n\"Remember, no sounds.\" He spoke through clenched teeth.\n\nNyra waited.\n\n\"Terrakeizaq!\" came a call so close that Nyra nearly jumped. Dim light filtered through the wing membrane. No silhouettes. The speaker was in front of Zacka, out of sight.\n\n\"Geshter,\" Zacka responded, and Nyra imagined him nodding in greeting. He stopped. \"Still on duty, then?\"\n\n\"Sadly,\" sighed the other. \"You wouldn't believe the shifts these last few days. Longest of my life. I'll admit,\" he lowered his voice, \"I was a bit excited when the Agring rumors flew out. A change, you know? But now, all this extra work\u2026 not worth the hype.\"\n\n\"Seconded,\" said Zacka.\n\n\"Count yourself lucky for being on tracking crew. Your work got halved since this mess. Mine doubled.\"\n\n\"I'll rub it in twice as much, then,\" laughed Zacka, moving forward. \"I suppose I'll see you later\u2026\"\n\n\"Great Roendon!\" blurted Geshter. Nyra's ears flattened as a shadow sprang over Zacka's wing. \"Whatja do to yourself?\"\n\nNot moving, not breathing, Nyra watched in horror as Geshter's silhouette came close, bumping harshly at her hindquarters behind the sheer film of Zacka's wing.\n\n\"Hey!\" shouted Zacka. Nyra's lungs froze, a rock-hard scream dropping to her stomach. Zacka jerked away. Nyra knocked against his flank. The wing tightened, and there was scarce enough room to exhale. Very slowly her air streamed out, clammy vapors pooling on her face.\n\n\"What?\" Geshter retorted.\n\n\"That hurts,\" said Zacka, apologetically. \"I've some\u2026 I've some top-rate bruises ready to sprout up. Can't even hold it right.\"\n\n\"Whatja do? Get kicked again?\" asked Geshter.\n\n\"No,\" said Zacka. \"I wasn't caribou tracking. I was\u2026 I was fishing.\"\n\n\"A fish did that?\" said Geshter, and his shadow came close again, examining the sagging wing.\n\n\"Swordfish, if you can believe it. Huge. Twice this size.\" Zacka must have made a measuring gesture.\n\nSilence. Two sets of breaths, neither her own. There were the sounds of Zacka, far too even. Or was that normal breathing? His were eclipsed by the other set, which drew in systematically. Short sniff, long, short sniff, long\u2014the investigative kind.\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" said Geshter with an air of confidence.\n\n\"You don't?\" said Zacka, sounding truly puzzled. His acting wasn't at all terrible.\n\n\"Nah,\" said the other. \"You smell like fish alright, but there's something else. Can't put my claw on the scent, not yet\u2026\"\n\n\"When have you ever been around a fish? You probably\u2026 probably don't know the scent.\" Zacka remained calm. Nevertheless, it must have been the wrong suggestion, as Geshter's voice roughened.\n\n\"What are you hiding?\" asked the guard.\n\n\"Nothing!\" said Zacka, dropping his amiability.\n\n\"Maybe Kodoral would like to examine you then. Since you have nothing to hide.\"\n\nNyra waited for a scuffle, for Geshter to come crashing upon Zacka. Tucking her claws into fists, she tried to sheath anything that might harm Zacka on the impact. What was to be done with her tail, she had no idea.\n\n\"Alright,\" said Zacka. He was calm again. \"It's not just plain old fish smell.\"\n\n\"Knew it,\" said Geshter arrogantly.\n\nZacka sighed. \"When the swordfish\u2026 when it swatted me, it must have gotten spooked. If I'd known this would happen, I'd have never chased it down\u2026\"\n\n\"Spooked?\" said the other.\n\n\"Swordfish have\u2026 a scare tactic, it turns out. You know, like squid and ink?\"\n\nGeshter said nothing. It was a bad analogy. Squid ink was common knowledge to Agrings, but likely not to Zealers. Clearly Zacka was learned. The same could not be said for the arrogant guard.\n\n\"Swordfish, apparently, have a defense mechanism.\"\n\n\"It inked you?\"\n\n\"Worse\u2026\" said Zacka.\n\nThe guard paused, putting the imaginary facts together. Nyra's muscles crunched to her middle, a black hole sucking itself in. Madly she wished to see outside and know if the guard was poised to attack. What would she do when she rolled from Zacka's wing? Explain, or fling into the brawl? What would her companion do? So close beside her, she wished she and Zacka could collaborate. But they couldn't. A perilous guessing game reared ahead, one of erratic strategy.\n\nA pawn of luck flung forward on a burst of sound: an obnoxious guffaw, accompanied by the clatter of giddy claw tips.\n\n\"You\u2026 you didn't see it comin'?\" Geshter heaved raucously.\n\n\"Right in the face,\" said Zacka. \"Defecation. Didn't waste a second in marking the rest of me either. I stayed in the water a long time to wash it off. That's why I'm out so late. But the smell's still as strong as ever.\"\n\n\"By Quay, Terrakeizaq, I can't believe you wanted to eat something that nasty.\"\n\n\"I didn't,\" said Zacka, \"once I got sprayed and bruised.\"\n\n\"Sure, sure. You had to be a hero.\"\n\n\"No, it's not that.\" A tinge of offense peppered his inflection.\n\n\"Sure, sure,\" Geshter repeated.\n\n\"Can I go then?\" Zacka said. Geshter made an uneasy sound, as if trying to come up with another taunt. Nothing came.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Geshter, disappointed. \"But hurry back to your den. Don't want you stinking up the whole cave.\n\nZacka dashed forward. Nyra wondered how badly she must smell for Zacka to compare Agring scent to fish scat. She quickly forgot as the twilight dipped to pitch black.\n\n\"In we go,\" Zacka murmured. He tilted sharply downward. Nyra lurched nose-first into the crux of the wing. Her fists crunched at her chest, useless. Full weight forward, her nostrils sealed shut, pushed so tightly against Zacka that she suctioned his skin on each inhale. Finally he stabilized. She took in a breath as quietly as she could.\n\nThere was a familiar teal glow. The Stones. She recalled that first day when Jatika took her down into the caves. Stones had flickered everywhere. A twist wrenched in her stomach, and she was grateful that they weren't flying.\n\nA soft drone buzzed ahead. Voices? Yes, quite a few of them, accompanied by the muted thuds of feet.\n\n\"So many out and about,\" Zacka murmured anxiously. \"More than usual.\" Nyra took the hint to be extra quiet.\n\n\"Hello, Terrakeizaq,\" said someone. Then another dragon greeted Zacka. Then another. If Zacka responded, it could not have been more than a polite nod. He didn't speak or break stride. With each footfall, Nyra imagined another Zealer passing by, and hoped he or she would not do anything to hinder Zacka's progress. But the comments were no more than simple observations, the most incriminating being, \"you stink!\"\n\nHis wing increasingly bumped rocks. At first she thought he was careless on purpose, wanting to make the bruises from his make-believe fish-fight. She dismissed the notion as his wing jammed a wall. Nyra stifled a cry of pain. He wouldn't do this on purpose. He was tired, his wing drooping fast.\n\nTaking a sharp right, Zacka stopped. His claws scrambled in what sounded like dirt. His breaths were ragged.\n\n\"Help me,\" he whispered. \"But be silent.\"\n\nHis wing opened. Nyra fell out, taking a gulp of fresh air. Disorientated, she unclenched her stomach, wings, claws, and things she never realized were clenched in the first place.\n\n\"Help me,\" he repeated. Nyra spun around to see him heaving a rock studded with obsidian, quartz, and other stones she'd never seen before. She was in a small den. Beyond the rock was an opening, no doubt the one they'd just come from. Jumping forward, Nyra throttled all her might aside Zacka. The rock shifted and sealed. Zacka traced its outside, checking for gaps. There were none. He collapsed in a great 'wumph,' throwing every limb hither thither to the ground.\n\n\"For an eleven year old,\" he panted, \"you're gargantuanly heavy.\"\n\n\"It's muscle,\" Nyra said dazedly. The room radiated in teal, like everywhere else. She expected it would be years before the Zealer Stone at home became special again, assuming she made it home. Like her prison, this den had level ground and dark walls. The ceiling was low, scarcely taller than an average Zealer, making it a bit claustrophobic. On the floor was a small depression for water.\n\n\"So this is where you live?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he panted.\n\n\"By yourself?\"\n\n\"Yes. Mother and Father have their own cave. My older sister lives with her mate.\"\n\n\"Has Olieve ever been here?\" Nyra wondered out loud. The air was not as fresh as she'd initially thought. Zacka must have kept the room shut a lot. It couldn't have been well ventilated.\n\n\"Not much,\" he said. \"Remember, Olive and I are a secret. The few times she's been here other friends have come too. It's our sort of ruse of a public get-together.\"\n\nNyra sat down. The room was scarcely big enough for more than a few dragons. Whatever get-together Zacka hosted, no more than six could have been in attendance, and none comfortably.\n\n\"So what now?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Sleep, that's what you are going to do,\" he said. \"I need\u2026 I need to find out what's happened with Olieve since I've been gone. For all I know her visitation rights have been expanded.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Nyra, hopeful.\n\n\"No, not really,\" said Zacka. \"But there might be news. Maybe her parents got to see her again. Anyhow, they'll have an update.\"\n\n\"You're going to see them now?\" she said, a little panicky as he edged towards the rock. She didn't want to be alone. Not here.\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" he assured. \"No one will come in as long as this is sealed,\" he pointed to the boulder.\n\n\"Aren't you tired?\"\n\n\"My wing is about to drop off. I could sleep for a month right now. But time may not be our ally,\" he said. \"I can't sleep not knowing what's going on.\"\n\n\"Well, neither can I!\" Nyra protested.\n\n\"You have to try. Who knows\u2026 who knows when we'll need you on your feet again.\"\n\n\"I guess,\" she grumbled.\n\n\"Olieve's parents need to know you're here. I have tracking-duty tomorrow morning, but I'll try to skip out. If I can't, we can arrange for one of them to look after you. We'll think of something. Don't worry.\"\n\nNyra didn't smile but felt better. She'd nearly forgotten what it was to be taken care of. Her belly dripped to the ground. It was warm.\n\n\"I'll be back soon,\" he whispered, gathering his splayed limbs and getting up. \"Close this the second I'm out. I'll help you as best I can from the other side.\"\n\nBegrudgingly, Nyra rose to her feet.\n\nA scratching met her ears as Zacka touched the rock.\n\n\"Was that you?\" she said.\n\n\"No,\" he said shortly. He was perfectly still. \"Someone's outside.\"\n\nNyra lowered her ears. \"Where.. wha-what do I do?\"\n\n\"Bedding,\" he said, pointing behind her. There was a pile of dried vegetation. \"Get underneath. I'll find out who it is.\"\n\nThrowing herself on the pile, Nyra frenzied through the stems until she hit ground. Zacka appeared overhead, then disappeared as a grassy bundle plopped everything out the view. She heard him pad back to the entrance.\n\nThe scratching came again. Carefully, Nyra peered out from her spot, lifting up a fraction so that a few threads fell away from her eyes. Zacka had his ear pressed against the boulder's base.\n\n\"It's Frazen,\" he said, throwing himself at the obstruction. Scarcely a fissure had opened when a shadow flew in without invitation. Zacka closed up the room.\n\n\"What happened?\" said the other. It was a female voice, familiar but with different delivery. It was like hearing Olieve if she were capable of vocal color. The new Zealer was of average proportion, about the size of Arjell. Though shorter than Zacka, she was heftier, and did not at all reflect Olieve's petite stature. But the face, illuminated in Stone-glow, had the hidden complexity of Nyra's cell-mate.\n\n\"It was a message,\" Zacka said quickly. \"What Olieve said. The Agring was there. Young, female\u2014everything Kodoral described.\"\n\n\"And she's here?\" said Frazen, eyeing the bedding pile.\n\n\"Nyra, come out. It's alright,\" said Zacka.\n\nNyra hesitated, feeling the pull of security in those fragile stems. Rising on all fours, she let them fall. Frazen watched, mouth agape somewhere between awe and a hiss.\n\n\"Frazen, this is Nyra of the Nammock herd,\" said Zacka. \"Nyra, this is Frazen, Olieve's mother.\"\n\nOne reserved step at a time Nyra came closer. Prickles leaped up her spinal cord. To be so exposed, to be so vulnerable\u2026\n\nTo be in the presence of a mother.\n\n\"It's true,\" Frazen said. \"An Agring. And we thought we'd seen the last of them.\"\n\n\"Not that lucky,\" said Zacka.\n\n\"Come closer,\" said Frazen. Nyra did. Raising her claws, Frazen gently took Nyra's face. \"This little thing. Olieve defends it at her own risk.\" Frazen seemed far away, like she spoke to a mystical higher power that reigned over destiny. It was unsettling to hear this in Olieve's voice, if Olieve were one to be awed, and behold them in Olieve's eyes, if she were one to see.\n\n\"We've figured that one out,\" said Zacka. \"Why Olieve is putting herself as risk. Your daughter has a plan, and Nyra is the key. You, Ressenjie, and I might be able to make it work.\"\n\n\"And this plan?\" asked Frazen, still fixated on Nyra. Nyra got the feeling the question was directed at her and not Zacka.\n\n\"Long story,\" said Nyra, her hot breath wrapping Frazen's claws. The Zealer's face hardened, angrily. Nyra was afraid Frazen would squeeze those claws. But then she softened, and her paw flew away. The mother dragon dropped to the ground, anguished weeps hiccupping out.\n\n\"Frazee!\" exclaimed Zacka, rushing to her side. He held a wing over her head, as if to stave off imaginary rain from her already leaking eyes. \"Frazee, what's the matter?\"\n\n\"Oh, Terrakeizaq,\" she sniffed. \"It's what I came to tell you.\" She reeled away from his wing. \"Long stories\u2026 there's no time for long stories. There's no time for anything.\"\n\n\"What has\u2026 what has she done?\" Zacka asked. Nyra knew he was referring to Kodoral. His forelegs shook so badly that Nyra looked down to see if the ground tremored. A lump rolled behind her tongue.\n\n\"Olieve,\" gasped Frazen. \"Kodi intends to execute.\"\n\nZacka's wing closed, and relief washed over his face. He continued to shake, but his words grew steady again. \"That's part of the plan.\" He met Nyra's gaze. \"It's what Olieve wants. To get everyone in the same room for an execution. But we'll save her. We just need to time to\u2014\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter, Terrakeizaq. Time\u2026 we don't have it.\"\n\nZacka paused. \"How much\u2026 how much of it do we not have?\" Nyra looked between the Zealers, unblinking.\n\n\"It's too soon!\" Frazen jumped up, pacing wildly. \"Ressenjie is trying to reason with Kodi now, but it won't work. It never does. He's a fool to try, but what else can we do?\"\n\n\"Frazen,\" Zacka commanded. \"When is it?\"\n\nShe stopped weeping. Her eyes widened to the size of moons, Roendon's open soul swimming in each. Nyra found herself at Zacka's side, in the path of Frazen's bewildering sight. The Agring could not tell which dragon Frazen gazed upon, or neither at all.\n\n\"Olieve's execution is tomorrow. No, today,\" she amended. \"Midnight's passed, and the suns will rise shortly. My daughter. Today. At sundown.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "To Save a Semi-Princess",
                "text": "Like Olieve, Zacka had spent much of his life below the radar. He avoided attention and, just as well, it didn't find him. Nyra had suspected that he wasn't handsome, and thus a victim to the prejudice of onlookers, who judged the face-value of beauty even if they claimed otherwise. It was a poison called assumption, spawned from Zacka's sinewy form and frail wings.\n\nBut in those infant morning hours after Frazen stormed into Zacka's cave, the Zealer became the center of attention. As he and Nyra left Geshter behind that night, Zacka's ridiculous tale spread, bouncing on sprightly whispers between rotating guard shifts. Soon, everyone working that night knew his clumsy yet courageous venture by heart. And it was this circumstance that made Nyra's plan glow a little brighter in a somber night.\n\nThey acted quickly. Moments after Frazen's news, Zacka began a midnight tour of the Raklisall caves, calling upon Ressenjie's secret followers. Half-asleep, they responded to Olieve's story with skepticism, unsure if they were dreaming. But as the nonbelievers returned to Zacka's cave and laid eyes upon the rumored Agring, they were all ears. Not wasting a second, the selected Zealers fed Zacka's faux-fishing tale to anyone who hadn't yet heard, targeting the young and daring. Soon everyone wanted a taste of swordfish, or to prove they could wrestle one to the sea floor. How hard could it be? If Zacka came close, anyone could.\n\nFlitza, a rare friend of Olieve's, helped to spread the word. She found as many young Zealers as she could and arranged a fishing extravaganza. Flitza was one of many recruiters, but Zacka attributed the final turnout to her efforts. Of all the young females in the herd, Flitza was the most beautiful, the most unattached, and the most likely to get everything she wanted, or in this case, what Olieve and Nyra most wanted. Just before daybreak, she led the hunting charge. Zacka stayed behind, preferring to strategize at home. He would skip his daily duties, pretending to be ill. Nyra figured he wanted to stay as close to Olieve as possible, even if he couldn't see her.\n\nFlitza returned at second sunrise with a fleet of followers, bearing the most impressive trophies. Over forty adolescents sported bragging-rights-sized fish. Most had never fished before, and those who claimed to be experts were rotten liars, according to Zacka. But it didn't matter, as most were persistent enough to try until successful. And they were so preoccupied by their catch that they took no notice when Flitza led them home the wrong way.\n\nIt wasn't the wrong way, per say, but the road less traveled. Normally, they would have used the west entrance, the one Nyra had entered underwing, safely within Raklisall territory. Today, Flitza lead the party home through the main cave, where the Sorja and Raklisall turfs connected. Apparently, this opening was seldom used. That Nyra had been taken by Jatika through this entrance during her capture was unprecedented. It was only done for the sake of urgency, according to Zacka, as Nyra needed to be stashed away hastily. The protected Sorja entrance was far from where Oharassie had taken her on the coast line. To Nyra, it seemed unlike Jatika, who always seemed so careful, to have taken her through the main entrance and put her in plain sight of the Raklisalls. But guards, even the cleverest ones, could make mistakes. Casstooth had proven as much in falling for Blaze's distracting chatter before the fire and mistaking the mysterious bones for Nyra's carcass.\n\nFlitza had landed in the main cave with her posse in tow. The hunters crowded inside, skirting past the strangely unperturbed eyes of guarding Sorja's along the opposite wall. The group disappeared into the Well room; the first room in the Raklisall territory after the shared main cave. Flitza appraised each catch. Gushing out amazement, no one noticed how she ran her claws down the fish, nicking the soft underbellies just below the pectoral fins. The young Zealers dragged their kills through the room, sliming the floor with yellowed oozes of the foulest kind.\n\n\"What is all this?\" shrieked one of Kodoral's top guards. Agape, he watched Zealer after Zealer zoom in past his post, each dripping with elation and disgusting liquids. Flitza apologized over and over, only breaking to point her followers in the proper direction.\n\n\"Walk along the south wall,\" she shouted. \"Let's not make a bigger mess than we already have.\" The hunters followed a slimy path, curving through the Well room and then deeper into the Raklisall caves. The guard, though clearly not pleased, let them go, knowing it foolish to send them all outside again to a different entrance. Flitza turned to follow her crew deeper into the caves, tail swishing proudly behind.\n\n\"That's it.\" Flitza shrugged as she finished relaying her ventures to Zacka, Nyra, Olieve's family, and loyal followers. She stunk of fish entrails, but beamed. They were in Ressenjie's dwelling, which was considerably larger than Zacka's. Ressenjie had snuck Nyra in underwing with greater ease than Zacka, though getting her to the other side of the caves had not been simple. Guards were everywhere, giving extra attention to the executee's family. But Ressenjie was clever, and Nyra began to see where Olieve got her acerbic wit.\n\n\"The oil,\" said Olieve's father. Frazen was leaning in next to him, jumping when anyone so much as coughed. \"Is it well distributed?\"\n\n\"I didn't have much time to survey,\" admitted Flitza. \"But near as I could tell, it leaked heavily around the room.\"\n\n\"What about the west end,\" said Frazen frantically. \"It's got to block the rest of the Raklisall caves. It won't work unless\u2014\"\n\n\"We mostly walked the south wall and then the portal deeper into the caves,\" reassured Flitza. \"As I said, I didn't spend much time looking things over, but it'll be fine.\"\n\nFrazen looked unconvinced.\n\n\"Don't worry. If this works,\" Flitza glanced at Nyra, \"we will have absolutely nowhere else to run but to the Sorjas.\"\n\nOthers followed Flitza's gaze to the Agring. Nyra scratched an imaginary itch. Flitza had gathered the materials while Ressenjie made key decisions. But in the end they looked to Nyra, running all ideas by her and double checking the protocol. The plan was rooted in her abilities. Without her, everything would crumble.\n\n\"So what now?\" said Nyra, hoping to divert attention back to Flitza.\n\n\"The second sun is well up,\" said Flitza. \"You think Kodi will make a formal announcement soon, about the execution?\" she asked Olieve's parents.\n\n\"Very likely,\" said Ressenjie. \"I wouldn't be surprised if she were making the rounds now.\" He looked about the room, catching the eye of each of his followers. \"That being said, it can't be so crowded in here. You all should be home when she or one of her guards drops by. Let us know if there's any outstanding news, or of any changes.\"\n\nOne at a time the Zealers headed out, stopping at the entrance to look both ways before slipping away. Ressenjie followed them.\n\n\"I'll check for news, too,\" he said. \"Stay here, won't you Zacka? With Frazen?\" Frazen stood stoic, leaning in slightly as if Ressenjie had not left her side. He hesitated. But Zacka nodded, drawing closer to the distraught mother, taking her mate's place. Reassured, Ressenjie left them in silence. Frazen, jolted by the quiet, sat up straight. Without her Royal-blooded mate, she was in charge. Her sons, Olieve's brothers, were huddled nearby. She muttered something to them that Nyra didn't catch. The mutter must have made sense to the dragglings, as they each jumped up and followed their mother into another room in the den. There, they whispered mutedly.\n\nZacka appeared from behind Nyra. \"You alright?\" he asked.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said way too happily.\n\nZacka cocked his head. \"You should get some sleep.\"\n\nNyra exhaled unsteadily and shook her head.\n\n\"Come on,\" he smiled weakly. \"Try? You have until sunset. Try?\"\n\n\"No, I can't sleep during the day,\" said Nyra. \"I've never been a napper. Mum thinks I'm crazy, but I can't nap easily. And I especially can't today.\"\n\nZacka nodded, and his eyes turned distant. Maybe he imagined a finer place, where life sustained threats no more sinister than the common cold. Maybe Olieve was with him in this far off place, safe. Nyra wished she could come up with a place like this of her own, just as she had so many times in her journey. Now she could not. The bitter taste of the future forbade it.\n\nShe lay down. Beads of sweat ran down her forehead, finding her eyes. She blinked them away. Her throat sweltered. Though so very tired, she did not sleep. She closed her eyes, but there were always the background whispers of Frazen in the next room and Zacka's intermittent pacing. Time was slow and so very heavy. Maybe that's what it was to grow up. To grow heavier, not just in body, but in burdens. Eleven was supposed to be her favorite age. She was no longer sure, no more than she was sure of the foreboding evening to come.\n\nHours passed.\n\n\"I'm really sorry.\" It was Zacka, nudging her side. \"Ready?\"\n\nShe opened her eyes. Stung by the light, she found the dark curve of Zacka's wing. Instinctively, she crawled inside, just as she would amble to play-places back home. There was the sound of the boulder shifting and Olieve's mother and brothers from behind. Then they were on the move.\n\nNyra bounced into alertness on each of Zacka's steps. An onslaught of to-do's entered her mind, all of which were too late for practice. It was like test-day with Aunt Dewep, the answers she'd memorized inconveniently forgotten.\n\nFish smells became stronger and stronger. To her it was faint, or rather, commonplace. To the Zealers, it may have equated to the scent of death.\n\nDeath.\n\nI can't do this, she thought. She shivered. Zacka's wings clenched, probably trying to hold her still.\n\nI have to do it.\n\nThey must have entered the Well Room, for she was suddenly surrounded by quiet conversations. Males, females, young and old, chattered indistinctively. Some were slow and somber, other frantic and fast.\n\n\"I know,\" said Zacka. Nyra jumped. His head pressed to hers from the other side of the wing. He was afraid too. Maybe more so, though she wasn't sure he had the right. His other half was at stake, but Nyra was the witch. So long as he hid behind the plate of his face, Zacka would be safe. Nyra had no mask. Once she came out into the open, there would be no turning back.\n\n\"Brace yourself,\" he whispered.\n\nSuddenly his wing opened. Nyra rolled down, freed.\n\nThe room was bright, crossed with dark shapes: wingtips, hindquarters, tails, etc. The obstructions were friends and familiar strangers, blocking her from the eyes of the prejudiced crowd. They shrouded her like a fleshy eggshell. Zacka shielded her the most, pressing against her tightly. Beyond him was Ressenjie, wearing a dogmatic expression. Frazen was behind him with her sons, nostrils flaring rapidly. Past her and the others was the room itself, pieced together in the mere snippets Nyra could see. Leaning under and over, she peered beyond the anxious Zealers. The room was huge: an argyle of mosaic rock, ice, and the ever glowing stones.\n\nThe light ahead was biggest and brightest, shining from the ground. There was a small rise, like a stage with a little dip in the center. She rose on her toes. The dip wasn't much wider than a Zealer's shoulders. It glowed brilliantly, shooting a beam of teal to the ceiling.\n\n\"That's the Well!\" Nyra hissed. Zacka shot her a warning glance. Ressenjie coughed loudly. She fell to her belly.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she mouthed. No one else noticed the outburst, preoccupied in personal conversation.\n\nThe Well it was. Out of sight, the depression on the stage held water, wrapped in a tight tube. Suffocatingly tight. Unlike the Sorja prison, Olieve would not be able to climb out once submerged.\n\nA hush fell over the crowd. She had not realized how noisy it was. Nyra squinted to the stage, where Kodoral pulled out from the shadows. The Royal held her head high, marching upon the platform, where she stood poised in grave dignity. Nyra felt very vulnerable, expecting Kodoral's eyes to pierce her sanctuary. Nyra edged back in the little space available.\n\n\"Friends,\" rang Kodoral, soft and sweet, but with a clang of command. \"I owe you an apology. Most of you woke this morning ready for your routine.\"\n\nBut?\n\n\"I'm also sorry for not having better foresight. And not just for this last minute meeting. I wished I'd had better judgment of our kind and our enemies.\" She looked around the room, printing her remorseful gaze upon the Raklisalls. Nyra lowered as Kodoral found Zacka.\n\n\"I believed a particular curse had been banished. I've given you false ideas of security. For this, I'm everlastingly regretful.\"\n\nBut?\n\n\"Communal safety must always be a top priority, and I'm sure you understand that I put it above everything, out of my love for this herd and my belief in its potential. I love it, believe in it so much that I'll purge\u2026\" she rolled her shoulders nervously, \"the falsities which threaten us.\"\n\nAt this, noises bubbled up again. The nearest were waspishly opposed, though quiet. More distant voices spoke gratefully, relieved that the disease hovering around them was identified and targeted.\n\n\"I didn't expect this spell to come back\u2014that mind-bender which stole the rights of the great Royal Raklisall.\" At this, cheers rose. Kodoral puffed up with their agreement and stepped forward in an angry jerk. Her voice, however, remained as sweet as ever.\n\n\"It was Agring magic which skewed Royal Raklisall's judgment, making her believe they would save the nursery. It was they who played their tricks at Royal Sorja, turning his heart.\n\n\"We've fought back, and still the Agrings of Nyra plague us. There was a time I believed them gone for good. But I'm afraid we weren't fast enough this go-round. I wasn't fast enough, and I am sorry. The Agring curse is back in full throttle, and has once more tainted Royal blood. Twisted it.\"\n\nKodoral stepped to the side. Another figure came forward, lithe and petite, with a fuzzy head. Nyra blinked, willing it into focus. The head was brown and furry, the texture of a caribou flank.\n\nZacka's breath drummed like summer hail. It was a caribou hide draped over a face, fluttering before quickened breaths. Olieve's breaths.\n\n\"It pains me that this had to happen here. Now, within these generations. And it stings more so that it's hit my family. My niece, the closest I'll have to a daughter in my barren life. But what of you? My other loved ones? As bereaved as I am to do this now, it horrifies me to think of what might happen if the spell were to spread. This disease\u2026 I imagine it hopping amongst us, festering.\" She drew closer to her niece. \"And I know that if Olieve were in her right mind, being the intelligent creature she is\u2026 was\u2026 she'd have come to the same resolution.\"\n\nOlieve's mouth parted, just visible below the mask, as if to scream in defense, only the cry was mute and moot.\n\n\"As long as the Agring haunts our land, we must take every precaution. We are exposed as long as the Agring lingers. It's our duty to fight back and not give into tricks, even at the most heartbreaking expense.\"\n\nKodoral moved behind Olieve. Her tail flicked feistily.\n\n\"Mortal Roendon,\" said Zacka.\n\n\"What?\" whispered Nyra.\n\n\"Oh Roendon's Death, Nyra, it's now.\" He turned white behind his faceplate. His wings parted a little.\n\nKodoral was readying to push Olieve in the Well.\n\n\"N-now?\" stammered Nyra. \"You mean now now?\"\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nIt happened like waking up too fast. Whipping a wing up, Zacka slapped Nyra's backside so hard that she leaped upon the platform into naked light.\n\nThere was an immeasurable second where no one reacted. No gasps, no screams. Kodoral turned her head very slowly from Olieve to Nyra, as though an insect had chirruped for the umpteenth time.\n\nThey saw each other in disbelief, so awed that neither knew how to properly react.\n\nPlease, someone do this for me.\n\n\"Well?\" quaked Olieve, speaking for the first time. Nyra was standing right in front of her and Kodoral on the stage for all to see.\n\nGo.\n\nNyra coughed up the smallest blue ember of a shredded knaproot. In slow motion, it swayed to a glistening patch of stone.\n\nIt landed down. It sputtered a little. Then laces of orange spread out like serpents.\n\nHere we go again.\n\nTerror roared at Nyra's back as the room went up in blazing panic. The floor danced in hot yellow, ricocheting to the ceiling. Nyra registered very little of it, nor did she move. Kodi was all she saw, equally still.\n\nOlieve ripped the mask from her face. Firelight mirrored in her eyes, the blind Zealer appeared to glance about the cavern. Zacka bounded past Nyra to Olieve. Behind, the crowd shied away from the roaring flames. There was one escape. Trampling and shoving, hundreds of pale blue bodies gravitated toward the main cave. Black and smokeless, it beckoned them, the friendly jowls of a lesser of two evils.\n\nAt the back of the fray were familiar faces. Ressenjie went along the flame line, herding the confused and frightened. In front of him was Frazen, grinning ecstatically. She bounded gleefully between the shrieking Raklisalls, sons at her heels. She paused to glance up at Olieve. Her smile widened. It was a side of Frazen Nyra had not dreamed possible.\n\nNyra faced the Well again, chuckling despite herself at the thought of Kodoral's face. But when she turned around, the Royal had disappeared. Zacka and Olieve were moving towards Ressenjie. Nyra was alone on the stage. She leaped down to join her friends.\n\nRessenjie had nearly herded all the Raklisalls to the main cave. Zacka trailed a small ways behind, making sure Olieve did not tread on any oil. Soon the room was empty but for the two young Zealers and Nyra.\n\n\"We did it!\" Nyra breathed, reaching Zacka. Olieve watched Nyra with her ears.\n\n\"You did it,\" he corrected, looking nervous, but happy all the same.\n\n\"And I did it,\" said Olieve, the only one who could remain monotonous when shouting over fire crackles. \"Not dying takes talent, you know.\"\n\nThe Well Room narrowed to a passage: the short tunnel that would lead them into Sorja territory. Echoing ahead were the voices of the Raklisalls, some still shrieking, others shouting directions.\n\nAlmost through. Almost done.\n\n\"Setting in motion an execution,\" said Zacka. \"Not your most\u2026 not your most brilliant plan, Olieve.\"\n\n\"It worked!\" Nyra retaliated.\n\n\"A shame it did.\"\n\nNyra recognized the last voice as a shining tail crashed full speed into Zacka's head. A tumult of hissing flared as Kodoral jumped fluidly away. Olieve following the point of her taut ears. Zacka lay belly flat, vanishing in and out of smoke curtains.\n\n\"Get away!\" Nyra snarled. Kodoral faced them, a mere outline in the glow. Violent yellow shimmers gleamed from her faceplate.\n\n\"So much trouble. So much magic,\" said Kodoral. She did not bellow over the noise, and her mouth hardly moved. Still, Nyra heard the Royal like a whisper in her ear.\n\n\"Zacka, Zacka,\" said Olieve, feeling about his groggy form. One wobbly limb at a time he found footing. Dark blood dripped behind his horns.\n\n\"Too much for such a small thing,\" said Kodoral. Nyra cringed, waiting for the other to pounce. Kodoral's tail snapped again, ready to deliver another blow, and Nyra knew the flat of the blade would pivot to a stab this time.\n\nBut Kodi did not come closer. Instead she backed away like a ghost, stepping over oil toward the fire-veiled west entrance. Then she was gone in smoke.\n\nThere was a scream. Nyra looked down the tunnel leading to the main cave. Barreling towards her were Olieve's parents.\n\n\"It's alright!\" called Nyra, stepping past Olieve, who helped Zacka to his feet. She feared Ressenjie would collide with them if he didn't slow. \"We're alright, Zacka's fine\u2014\"\n\n\"Get out NOW!\" Ressenjie shouted.\n\nNyra stood stupidly still, distracted by sudden rain pattering her wings. Olieve peered about, confused, wincing at the debris chiming against her faceplate.\n\n\"Oh, Ressenjie!\" shrieked Frazen, striding a fraction behind her mate.\n\nWhat happened next came very fast. The rain on Nyra's wings turned to hail. It hit the ground, black and sharp. Shielding her face, she found the ceiling.\n\nCollapsing.\n\nShe spun to Olieve, who nudged the disorientated Zacka toward her parents. Nyra jumped towards Olieve to ram her through the tunnel. A rock bounced down in Nyra's path. She tripped, slamming into Zacka instead. He skidded forward several paces.\n\nA head-sized chunk crashed down between Olieve and Zacka. Nyra grabbed Olieve and the Zealer fell back with her. There was a deafening thud and dust flew over them, smattered in cold droplets. Nyra coughed her way into clarity.\n\nWhere's the opening? Rocks thudded down thickly, heavily, all of them wet.\n\nOlieve began to scream dreadful, colorful sounds, so alive that it could not have been Olieve at all. Yet it was. The Zealer scratched at a chunk of rock, where Zacka had been a moment before. Nyra couldn't see him. Either the passage was blocked, or the debris was too thick. She couldn't tell. But he was missing, leaving Olieve and Nyra alone in a quickly shrinking space.\n\nOlieve clawed fervently, knuckles swelling with blood, swiping air and rock intermittently. Nyra bit her rump. Olieve kept clawing. Nyra bit again, harder. Olieve stopped, ears twitching into a blur. Roughly, the Agring prodded the Zealer away from where Zacka had vanished. She followed with confused obedience.\n\n\"How do we get out now?\" Nyra cried. Olieve said nothing, straining to keep her head up under the falling rocks and dust. Nyra could scarcely keep her eyes open.\n\n\"Olieve! Olieve, we'll die!\"\n\n\"The other tunnel,\" said the Zealer. \"The one you blocked with the fire. Tell me if it's open.\"\n\nNyra whipped about. The fire was dying under the dust. But smoke choked out most visibility.\n\n\"I can't see anything.\"\n\n\"What about the third tunnel,\" coughed Olieve.\n\n\"I thought there were just two.\"\n\n\"Three,\" Olieve said. \"Behind the Well. It's how I entered. For the execution. Normally closed, but open now.\"\n\nNyra looked beyond the stage, just close enough to see. Before it had been black with shadow. In the firelight, a tunnel glistened at the back.\n\n\"It's shiny!\" shrieked Nyra. \"Covered in fish oil!\"\n\n\"No, no, that's not oil,\" said Olieve, moving towards the stage. \"Take us there.\"\n\nWater then. Melting ice. Nyra pushed Olieve through tendrils of smoke. When they reached the stage, she moved to Olieve's front to lead. The Zealer's breath was on her tail tip.\n\nThe tunnel was bright a few lengths inside. Lighter than teal. Nyra saw only a few Stones. The floor was wet. Noise raged on behind them, ever falling, ever closing.\n\nThey came to a cavern larger than the Well Room. Though it had no Stones, it was brighter than any other room she'd seen in the Zealer caves. The walls were lined in blue ice. Above was a sheet of translucent white, and beyond that, sunlight.\n\n\"There should be another tunnel on the other side of this room,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"Should?\"\n\n\"I think,\" said Olieve, breathless. \"This room is forbidden, except to executees. I don't know it.\"\n\n\"You were just in here!\" cried Nyra. \"You should know!\"\n\n\"I'm blind!\" Olieve cried back.\n\nNyra peered about. On the left was a hole. A tunnel.\n\n\"There.\" She tugged Olieve.\n\nShe got three steps closer before an Agring-sized piece of ice crashed down a few lengths ahead. More pieces fell, some small, some too large for measure.\n\nThe cave in had caught up. Spreading, although the fire had died behind them. It was all connected in ice, falling apart several shards at a time.\n\n\"I don't think we'll make it!\" screamed Nyra.\n\n\"Quiet, just let me think.\" Olieve stared vacantly downward, biting her lip until it bled. It didn't look like she was thinking at all.\n\nTugging Olieve's foreleg, Nyra moved forward, the ceiling splintering to meet them.\n\nA figure stood at the tunnel.\n\nKodoral.\n\n\"They say to be wary of your desires,\" said the Royal Zealer from the other side. Much as it was in the Well Room, her voice carried. \"I wanted a sustainable future.\" She regarded the ceiling as if it were inconvenient weather. Then her eyes snapped to Nyra's. They were sad. \"You are a curse, Agring. Small, but no less devilish.\"\n\nOlieve growled deeply.\n\n\"I'll pray that the next time we see your kind you'll land under my jurisdiction. Where no mercy is given to magic.\"\n\nThe room brightened as she spoke, as though Kodoral were calling the deities down to bolster her prayer.\n\nThen Kodoral was gone, swallowed by the tunnel, away from the falling above.\n\nThe room grew brighter still. The ice-sheeted ceiling crumbled, opening to the pristine sky. A thin blue crack formed straight above.\n\nNyra knew where they were. By the basin. The flat sheet of ice. The one Oharassie had described, the one she had seen. There was a lake nearby, a reservoir of sorts. Like home.\n\nNyra jumped up on Olieve's back.\n\n\"Fly up!\" Nyra cried.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" hissed Olieve. More chunks fell, growing past Agring-size to Darkmoon-size.\n\nA cavernous roar emanated from an unknown direction, echoing over the polished walls. It grew louder and louder, crashing.\n\n\"The basin's cracked,\" murmured Olieve. Nyra barely heard.\n\nThe crashes grew. Nyra blanched.\n\n\"Something's running at us!\" Nyra cried.\n\n\"It's water,\" said Olieve. \"The basin. It's cracked. On the other side of the walls. It won't hold.\"\n\nBreaking in a cold sweat, Nyra fell dizzy. Swimming in her periphery was that blue crack, way up above.\n\n\"You have to fly up,\" pleaded Nyra. The frothing water pounded closer. She couldn't tell where it was coming from. But it was coming, behind the walls once so sturdy, now ready to crack under the wash of disaster. \"If we wait, we drown. Or get crushed.\"\n\n\"Maybe I want to be crushed,\" Olieve said brokenly.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nShe trembled. \"What if Zacka was crushed?\"\n\nThat terrified Nyra more than Kodoral's appearance moments before. And maybe it was more terrifying than Darkmoon's declaration on the clifftop. For in all her tribulations, no one had been lost yet. In her small and terrible world, no one so important had left it.\n\nDid Zacka...?\n\nNyra shook it away. \"I don't want to be crushed.\" She countered Olieve's sadness with straightforwardness: a peculiar role reversal after their nine days together. In that instance, Olieve had no savvy response. Nyra was the knowing one.\n\nOlieve must have sensed the danger at last, or was awoken by new will. For at Nyra's words, the Zealer flared her wings, expanding her size from frail to magnificent. She took a breath, leaned back, and pushed up.\n\nAirborne. Nyra willed to the sky with closed wings. Killing icicles stung downward, shattering on Olieve's faceplate.\n\nLive.\n\nThe blue crack grew from a thread to a tree-trunk, weaving jaggedly as lightning.\n\n\"Tuck your head!\" she called to Olieve, whose horns helmeted Nyra. Olieve did as she was told, letting the points fly first.\n\nNyra closed her eyes. Sitting up, she shot out a stream of fire, so furiously it glowed like a sun behind her lids.\n\nIntense heat, a bash, and the splintering of needles as Agring and Zealer burst out into the twilight.\n\nNyra shouted triumphantly to the moons, crisp air tunneling down her burning throat. Olieve answered her call with a gasp of disbelief. Moonlight bounced back on the mountains, turning white snow to chilly cobalt.\n\nBelow, the ground sunk in geometric pieces, breaking apart with a sound like thunder.\n\n\"What's happening?\" said Nyra, alarmed.\n\n\"The glacier,\" shouted Olieve. \"It's collapsing.\"\n\nNo sooner had she said it, the untouched plain of white cracked open to the Raklisall caves beneath. A flurry of snow, water, and crystal ice flew up to meet them, and Nyra understood what it was to fly blind.\n\nIt cleared, just in time for the ground to rush at Olieve's feet, several lengths away from the broken glacier.\n\n\"Go slower,\" said Nyra. \"Slower. You are about three Zealer-heights up.\"\n\nOlieve threw her wings forward, barreling the air. Nyra gripped tightly. Surprisingly, the Zealer landed with as much grace as the seeing.\n\n\"We need to go back,\" said Olieve. \"Lead the way.\"\n\nNyra gaped at the collapse, off in the distance.\n\n\"Go back where?\" Nyra said incredulously.\n\n\"Back to anything. Anyone,\" said Olieve.\n\nGrabbing Nyra's tail, Olieve waited. Nyra turned toward the Sorja caves. They had landed far in the east. Nyra suspected they were already on their territory.\n\nA cavalcade of figures appeared, flying towards them.\n\n\"Someone's coming,\" Nyra said tensely.\n\n\"Tell me who,\" Olieve demanded.\n\n\"Can't tell,\" Nyra said.\n\nThe flying creatures gleamed pale blue, like the majority she'd come to know. But one in particular, the one in the front, outshined the others in near translucence.\n\n\"It's Zirus!\" Nyra exclaimed. \"And next to him\u2026 Jatika! And about ten others I don't recognize. And one of them\u2026 it's wobbly. Not flying straight like the others.\"\n\n\"I don't see how that matters,\" Olieve spat impatiently.\n\n\"I think,\" began Nyra. She didn't want to speak too soon, especially now. \"The wobbly one might be Zacka.\"\n\n\"Zacka?\" said Olieve aghast, shoving Nyra wayward.\n\nNyra knew for sure now: that lanky neck atop narrow shoulders moving ever closer. \"Yes.\"\n\nThe visitors landed perfectly side by side, Royal Zirus in the middle. Each closed his or her wings in unison. Only one fumbled out of the choreography.\n\n\"Olieve?\" said the fumbling one.\n\n\"Zacka!\" shrieked Olieve.\n\n\"Told you,\" muttered Nyra.\n\nThe two Zealers ran to each other like lovers from a long-winded story, only unlike any tale Nyra knew, they paused a nose-length away. Embraced by the mere sight of one another (or for Olieve, the mere presence), they began an onslaught of crammed words, overlapping and interrupting, yet neither stopped to accommodate the other. They were decorated lyrics to a monotonous tune, which together made a jumbled song. Jumbled, but of perfect sense for its makers.\n\n\"Nyra's a good pusher. Ress and Frazee\u2026 they pulled me out. Not perfectly, you see\u2014\"\n\n\"Aunt Kodi wouldn't even discuss it. No trial, straight to sentence\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014Caught up with Jatika right afterward. You know him, don't you?\"\n\n\"\u2014Guess it's a good thing Nyra can see. Then again, we can't have her thinking she's talented\u2014\"\n\nNyra walked past them to Jatika, and at his side, the Royal of the Sorja herd.\n\n\"You've come back to us in one piece. Good,\" said Zirus. \"It worked, then.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nyra panted. \"You were right. Olieve was planning her own execution.\" Nyra looked to Olieve for confirmation, but the other was still babbling with Zacka.\n\n\"But the cave-in wasn't planned,\" continued Nyra. It should have been, in retrospect, as fire had caused the cave-in in the old story. But this fire had been small, at least compared to Thaydra's. Who would have known it would melt enough ice to cause so much chaos? It didn't matter. Zacka was alive. Everyone important to her was alive, and then some. Perhaps all.\n\n\"Understood,\" said Zirus. \"But the general intent rang through. We have our Raklisalls where we've long wanted them, at last.\" He then looked past Nyra, confused. \"What of Royal Kodoral? She's missing. I would have thought she'd emerged with you\u2014\"\n\nOlieve interjected. \"She took another route. Further in. She'll have to emerge eventually if she's alive.\"\n\nZirus nodded to Jatika. At that, Jatika and four followers kicked up and away. Nyra watched them glide off, wondering how far Kodoral had gotten, and if the deranged Zealer expected to see Sorjas on the other side.\n\nOlieve beamed. Really beamed. Zacka leaned at her side, exhausted, but similarly delirious. Fresh out of words to exchange, Olieve padded to Nyra, Zacka dragging his feet beside her.\n\n\"So,\" said Olieve to Nyra. \"My stomachache went away. Thanks for asking.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Other Agring",
                "text": "By the time Nyra was escorted back to the Sorja caves, learned that Kodoral had been apprehended, and saw everyone safe and together, the young Agring at last felt sleep deprivation. Royal Arjell led Nyra to a private nook, dark and quiet. She didn't like the Agring any better for herding the Raklisalls into the Sorjas' clutches, or if she did, she hid it well. Perhaps in Nyra's success she'd proven the Royal wrong. After all, Agrings were not deserving of favors. But it mattered little. For the next few hours, Nyra curled up into the bliss of dreamless sleep.\n\nFor a little while Nyra forget her worldly cares. At last she was secure. Since reaching Garrionom, she'd been among so many enemies and very few friends. The Sorjas had kept her alive, but imprisoned. The Raklisalls thought her magical. There were so many hurdles, so many opportunities to lose. Either she was very clever or terribly lucky. She figured the latter. Oharassie would have thought the former. But just as the old story promised, Agring and Zealer were now friends.\n\nGaining Sorja favor had been a disorderedly process, and it began when she least expected. When Jatika came back down the air shaft the previous night, right after Olieve was taken by Kodoral, Nyra readied to dive back outside. But she was too slow. The Zealer guard came ashore with a mouthful of fresh caribou. Nyra, having no defense prepared, spilled everything: how Olieve wanted her to use fire to push the Raklisalls from their caves, how she was supposed to rendezvous with Zacka in a place with killdeer birds. And there was a bit about a well. Jatika listened carefully. In a whirlwind she couldn't quite remember, the Royals abandoned their preoccupations and came to see her, and she found herself repeating the story several times.\n\nAlthough the plan from Olieve had been cryptic, and Nyra's recollection distorted by panic, Zirus knew what it meant. Nyra possessed a power that no one else carried. If only they could channel it to their advantage, not just for the Sorjas, but in a way that rescued Olieve as well. They wanted to end a war, Olieve wanted to be safe and at home. Buried within Olieve's hasty words was a solution.\n\n\"It's a trick,\" Sigeen had protested, imploring the Royals. Since Nyra and Olieve had spent so much time together unsupervised, Sigeen suspected an alliance between them. Suppose the two planned to battle against the Sorjas with firepower? Suppose Nyra turned on the Sorjas and this was just a plot to gain their trust? Nyra had no proof that she was trustworthy. It was Jatika who stepped up in her defense. Of all the guards, he knew Olieve the best. For two long months he had listened to her stories, including her contention with her aunt and poor potential as a hostage. Olieve was not an enemy, but rather a dragon of unfortunate bloodline and a moment of bad judgment.\n\n\"Nyra traveled an ocean to find peace,\" said Jatika. \"If anyone can appreciate our cause to end the war, it's her.\" Sigeen grew quiet. The Royals gave Nyra permission to infiltrate the Raklisall caves. Nyra should have been honored by their trust, and a small part of her felt relief in befriending her capturers. But herding the Raklisalls to the waiting claws of the Sorjas? Alone? She had no knowledge of these things. Zirus then stressed the Zacka idea. Again, Olieve had thought steps ahead. Nyra had only to get to Zacka, then she wouldn't be alone.\n\nFor hours they had deliberated. The first sun had nearly set. With great reluctance, she went back outside, expertly placed out of sight by Zirus' leading advisors. She swam to the west-side cliff, climbed, and found Zacka waiting at the top. One draining thing had led to another, and she'd gained Raklisall favor, even if it was in the form of rebels: Frazen, Ressenjie, Flitza, and a pawful of others. All new allies. All keeping her safe.\n\nSo now, she slept.\n\nNyra awoke to fresh stresses. The Sorja cave population had doubled overnight. Lifelong-enemies were now in close proximity. The Raklisalls required sun-round and moon-round surveillance. There was no use for the Raklisall caves. Thanks to Nyra, they'd flooded. The damage was not permanent, according to Jatika. The crack in the basin was small and would freeze again. The flood waters could be removed, as could the cave-in debris. Until then, all Zealers would have to stay in tight conditions. But Zirus was patient. At first the Raklisalls were screaming Kodoral's name, demanding her jurisdiction in all upcoming decisions. Zirus tried to be as just as possible. After things quieted, he gathered the irate Zealers to have a vote on Kodoral's supremacy, and whether or not she should continue to govern her own herd. Nyra thought this a dreadful idea, but Zirus knew better. To her extreme surprise, the Raklisalls voted against Kodi's reinstatement. Nyra asked Olieve why. As if it were obvious, the Zealer explained how her father's followers, the rebels, no longer had to hide. They openly voted against Kodi's return to power. These dragons, though vastly outnumbered by Kodoral's followers, won by the other side's silence. For under the gaze of Zirus and while between his walls, the Raklisalls cowered, as the depraved often did. This made sense as Nyra looked unto their paranoid faces. She then felt silly for asking Olieve in the first place.\n\nKodoral's sentence was pending. \"Briefly pending,\" Arjell assured, who barely swallowed her fury to treat the matter with care. Kodi was to live a long life, this much was known. But it would be monitored and have restricted liberties. While touring the caves, Nyra caught Kodi's voice in a nearby room. The Royal was quiet and polite. Once more, Kodoral did not seem at all like the aunt of fantasy stories. Nyra wondered if it was reasonable to feel sorry for Kodi\u2014a dragon who so earnestly wanted to keep her place and follow the legacy of her ancestors. Of course, to wonder if it was reasonable was a far cry from actually feeling it.\n\nMost everything else became lost in politics. Nyra picked up the basics here and there while exploring the caves. She really only listened when it involved familiar names. Ressenjie was one such name. With Kodi removed, he and Frazen were active Royals. But the physical line between herds, now firmly erased, left unhealed scars. No law existed to accommodate two Royal pairs. Zirus and Arjell had no intention of dictating Raklisall decisions with Ressenjie and Frazen in their charge. That being established, the leadership titles remained ambiguous. Zirus and Arjell took primary lead, for the Zealers lived under their roof, but Ressenjie and Frazen spoke for the wayward Raklisalls\u2014a task nearly too much for one leading pair. For the time, the couples were in collaboration.\n\nAfter exploring, Nyra visited with Olieve's family, who offered to take responsibility for her. Nyra accepted. Their hospitality was so comfortable that Nyra quickly forgot she was receiving it, and had to constantly remind herself to give thanks to Olieve's parents. It turned out that Olieve's twin brothers were exactly Nyra's age. The two knew many games, ones that gave even cousin Vor a run for his creativity. The greatest were the picture puzzles. At home, Blaze would etch in bark and break it into pieces, usually in slivers too small for proper reassembly. But these puzzles, crafted by Olieve, were nothing short of artwork. Olieve, despite her handicap, proved a talented artist, etching landscapes or figures onto flat softstone. But these masterpieces were old, before Olieve's capture. Olieve wasn't staying with her family now, and since that morning was nowhere to be found. Zacka was missing too. At last, the two no longer had to hide their friendship, and though Nyra cared little to know the frustrations of a hidden romance, she imagined the two were somewhere celebrating the lifted weight.\n\nThen, two days later, they showed up, fluttered and giddy (well, Zacka was giddy). They had a special announcement: they wanted a Union. After so long in hiding, it seemed fit to solidify their bond in a public ceremony. Frazen ran up to embrace them both, while the brothers shrugged in an 'it's about time' sort of way. Ressenjie gave them his blessing, and the room grew so thick with family sentiment that Nyra felt out of place. That was until Zacka called out her name, crediting their Union to Nyra's efforts. Then she felt downright humiliated.\n\n\"It's all for Zacka's sake,\" Olieve insisted when Zacka left to spread the word. Frazen bustled in the corner, elated and frustrated over last-minute arrangements. \"He's the one who really wants a Union.\" Olieve responded to her mother's preparations with the same nonchalance as all things. But every so often, when the young Zealer said Zacka's name, Nyra caught sparkles of euphoria upon Olieve's face.\n\nFor being thrown together as quickly as it was, the Union was surprisingly ornate. Held in the Sorjas' most polished chamber, friends and family wound the stalactites with the brightest knaproot flowers, while on the walls hung smooth caribou pelts. Nyra, who had never attended a Union before, did not know what to expect. Smoothing pelts upon the floor, she recalled Agring tradition. The process was dully simple: the intended couple made an announcement. The word spread, and it pretty much ended there. Such had been the case with Ackeezo (Fuhorn's eldest living son) and his mate Firedust. Being the only Agrings to declare a Union since Nyra's birth, this was all she knew. Perhaps Unions had been more elaborate before the Sperks.\n\nBut whatever Agring custom should have been no longer mattered on the Union Day, when Zacka and Olieve stepped to the center of a mass of spectators. The two engaged in a sort of dance, a slow kind, where wings flared and brushed at the tips. They moved together like they'd practiced their whole life, and Nyra wondered how Olieve could possibly be so graceful. But she was, and Zacka, lanky and skinny, matched her. The two circled in closer together until their faceplates met flat against each other in a small 'tink.' On that tink the crowd erupted in cheers, and the couple flapped their wings behind loving eyes. Nyra flinched from the sudden noise, but recovered under the crowd's infectious smiles.\n\nEveryone retired to a feast, which like the concept of decoration, Nyra had only heard about in theory. At home there were rare nights when she sampled more than one fish species in one meal, but it never exceeded two kinds. At this Union there was rabbit, ice boar, and animals Nyra had to ask the names of several times before she remembered and forgot again. She sampled everything but the caribou, which in itself came in several cuts and sizes.\n\nIt was lovely, and though the celebration was not hers, the Agring knew a strong sense of accomplishment, as though this Union was a triumph for all who partook in its festivities.\n\nBut beyond the hustle and bustle, the fond words and fine foods, Nyra recalled other families. There was another life, where mothers and fathers dined together. Far away, they worked and waited. Waited again and again only to walk the long bleak line that was their existence. Somewhere, in the same evening, the sun had not yet set in the sky, where the late-afternoon wore tight muscles and wounded spirits.\n\nNyra had run a long race. Now she was at a checkpoint, one she'd expected much sooner, but with more rewards than she'd imagined.\n\nYet checkpoints weren't finish lines.\n\nAs the festivities waned away, Nyra remembered tomorrow's appointment. Zirus and Arjell wanted to speak of these distant afternoons and the dragons within them. Nyra had tasted a slice of peace in the world, but the world had many flavors. The Royals knew this, and these wonderful and terrible distractions of Garrionom were to come to a close. Olieve would be gone away with Zacka to travel and the rest of the herd would be recuperating. It was time to face business.\n\nAt sunrise, Nyra approached the Royal Chamber. She paused, taking a moment to study the outside walls. She'd been here once before, on the day she was captured. Now she could see it properly: the smooth arch of the entrance, studded evenly with Stones. Jatika had held her captive last time. Sigeen, too. Today Nyra entered alone, meeting guards who bowed away with smiles instead of sneers.\n\n\"Ah, Nyra Nammock,\" came Zirus' voice. Arjell sat at his side, frosty as ever, but with a relaxed stature. Other Zealers circled the room, offering greetings to Nyra. She did not know their names, but for another pair centered with Arjell and Zirus: Ressenjie and Frazen.\n\n\"I trust you enjoyed last night's festivities?\" said Zirus.\n\nHer attention flicked to the Sorja Royal. She'd been watching Frazen, who smiled warmly at the Agring. So motherly.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Nyra, not as brightly as she should have.\n\n\"And you are rested?\"\n\n\"Er\u2026 yes.\" Nyra had done little sleeping last night, what with the late hour-feasts and games, not to mention tidying up (with which Nyra assisted, thereby earning even greater favor from Frazen).\n\n\"I'm happy to hear it,\" said Zirus. He looked at her, quietly. Nyra was reminded of his gaze that first day and how she had once wished he'd look away. Those red eyes bothered her still, though not as much.\n\nArjell cleared her throat.\n\n\"Nyra, as you well know, our priorities have changed drastically in the last few days. It's strange to us,\" she regarded her mate, \"to no longer fear Royal Kodoral. We've made a lifestyle of worrying. It will be an adjustment for everyone.\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" said Nyra, not knowing what else to say.\n\n\"We owe it to you,\" continued Arjell, a little hastily, like it was a sour taste she needed to get out of her mouth, but Frazen's and Ressenjie's heads bobbed approvingly.\n\n\"Jarring as the change is,\" said the Royal, \"and the tribulations blossoming as a consequence, it's effaced in light of everything else. Whatever lies ahead, it will be resolved.\"\n\nNyra squirmed, vacillating between pride and discomfort.\n\n\"Nyra,\" said Zirus, leaning forward. \"We want to apologize for our negligence. Understand that when you arrived, our opinion of you was distorted. You asking a favor of us took everyone aback. And then your presence intensified our issues with the Raklisalls. So we kept you hidden, trying to settle the commotion happening right above your head. Then before we could reach you on our own terms, you made other plans.\"\n\nArjell chimed in again. \"What we want to impress upon you is that these problems have ceased. And because of what's happened, we want to redirect our task list.\"\n\nNyra blinked.\n\n\"More to the point, Nyra,\" said Zirus, \"We intend to make you our number one item.\"\n\n\"If you'll accept,\" Frazen added worriedly. \"We'd understand if you'd be cross.\"\n\n\"Or untrusting,\" added Ressenjie.\n\n\"No-no!\" Nyra shook her head vigorously. \"I wouldn't. I mean, I'm not mad at anyone. I was\u2026 but, well\u2026 that was before...\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" offered Zirus, holding up his claws, \"we should proffer our proposal.\"\n\nNyra was silent.\n\n\"We, and by 'we' I mean all Royal parties and their most trusted fellows, have developed a strategy to address the problem that drove you here.\" Zirus looked to the surrounding crowd and cleared his throat. Jatika and Sigeen emerged from group and took places aside the Royals.\n\n\"It's our understanding,\" he continued, \"that you Agrings have little chance of conquering the Sperks by your own means. You've shed enough sorrow trying.\"\n\nNyra winced to hear of the Sperks. She'd not discussed them in so long. But Sperks were not a secret in her current company. Nyra had told them everything that first day.\n\n\"I'll assume you've made no preparations to get home?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Nyra, thinking this obvious. \"I can't survive by myself out there. And I don't know where Oharassie is. I've been preoccupied.\"\n\nZirus chuckled. \"Yes. And rest assured, we've no intention of sending you home alone. As it is, Ressenjie took the liberty of sending out a few scouts to find your Aquadray friend. We'll find him.\"\n\n\"I'm riding back with him?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"That's not our plan, no. Ressenjie is looking for Oharassie only to give him peace of mind that you are safe and well. As for you getting home, we'd like to offer our services.\"\n\nNyra cocked her head. \"You will take me back?\"\n\n\"Not me, per say,\" said Zirus. \"But if by me you mean Zealers, then I'll keep my word to the fullest. I'd like to offer you the securest transportation possible.\" Jatika bowed his head. Sigeen nodded lightly.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Nyra, smiling a little.\n\n\"Don't thank us too soon,\" warned Arjell. \"This is a two-part offer. Getting you home will be trivial. I'm more than confident our guards will deliver you intact. The second part is a slip trickier.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Zirus confirmed. \"Upon arriving at the Northern Coast, Nyra, it is our plan to have Jatika and Sigeen reason with the Sperks. We can't spare many Zealers, I'm afraid. Keeping the Raklisalls in check will require our numbers here, more than ever. But fear not. Jatika and Sigeen do not intend to confront the Sperks with violence. These are two of the brightest minds in my guard. With proper negotiation and a little deception, we'll have your kind freed.\"\n\n\"Deception?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"The Sperks need not be aware of the exact number we are sending. For all they'll know, an army will be waiting at your Green Spot, or at the treeline beyond the hills you've described. It's an old trick, and one we've employed before.\"\n\nThe room stilled. She became aware of every breath and its owner. Everyone watched her, expecting something, but she did not know what.\n\n\"You alright?\" said Ressenjie in his friendly voice. Beside him Frazen smiled, interpreting Nyra's shock for delight. But it wasn't so. Where Nyra should have felt happiness she felt utter unease. She imagined Darkmoon and his followers. All forty-six. Confronting them were Sigeen and Jatika, and though they stood a head higher, the Sperks blocked away the cheery azure in crushing cobalt. Reason. That's what Zirus said. Darkmoon was not a reasonable creature. If he was, Nyra would be home now, taking a long nap on a full belly of fish, caught by her when and where she wanted.\n\n\"I\u2026\" Nyra began.\n\nRising voices about the room interrupted her. They grew, chattering, bickering. Some murmured agreements, fully confident that this would work. Others sounded unsure, fixing Nyra with sad glances.\n\nThere was a separate set of voices coming from outside the chamber.\n\n\"I know where I'm going,\" said a monotonous voice.\n\n\"Really? How many times have you been here?\" said another.\n\n\"Every night,\" said the other sarcastically. \"It's where I played with the Royals on tournament days.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Zacka as he and Olieve came into view.\n\nNyra cried out. \"Olieve!\"\n\n\"We've stopped moving,\" noted Olieve, irritated.\n\n\"I thought you didn't want me to lead you anymore,\" tested Zacka. Olieve ignored him and pressed forward.\n\n\"We're here, daughter,\" said Frazen. Olieve trotted towards her parents. Zacka followed, looking discontent.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Zirus. \"To what do we owe this pleasure?\"\n\n\"Secret place not to your liking?\" offered Ressenjie.\n\n\"That's the trouble,\" said Olieve. \"It's not a secret anymore. So it has no name. I didn't want to stay somewhere without a name.\" Zacka muttered something about 'where the killdeer call' being a perfectly fine name.\n\n\"Sure,\" said her father offhandedly. Frazen looked confused.\n\n\"We couldn't quite settle into our post-Union time,\" said Zacka. \"There was\u2026 there was too much going on at home. It seemed\u2026 it just seemed like a better idea to be around.\"\n\nZacka padded aside Olieve, his mate. Mate. Despite the grandeur of the Union, and despite all of Olieve's talk of Zacka in the prison, it was odd for Nyra to digest. In their time together, the twelve-year gap between them had blurred. Olieve seemed too young. But there she was: a half in the room's third Royal pair.\n\n\"Couldn't this news have waited until after the meeting?\" said Arjell.\n\n\"No, had to come, Arjell,\" said Olieve. \"Purely to inconvenience you.\"\n\nArjell's eyes sharpened. Frazen's jaw dropped. Olieve noticed neither gesture. Only Nyra's small snicker came out obvious, which Nyra immediately regretted as Arjell glared at her.\n\n\"Olieve wanted to be a part of the decision,\" said Zacka quickly. \"We knew\u2026 we know the content of today's meeting. Olieve wants input.\"\n\n\"Then by all means,\" said Zirus, for Arjell seemed to have lost all proclivity to speak. \"What say you?\"\n\nOlieve cleared her throat. \"I want to be an escort.\"\n\nThe words had barely escaped her mouth before Frazen and Arjell said 'absolutely not' in unison.\n\nOlieve's composure was strained as she spoke. \"I assume you have no good reason. Aside from the one I've heard a million times. The stupid one\u2026\"\n\n\"It's not stupid,\" whined Frazen. Nyra expected it was a whine she'd uttered time and time again. \"Daughter, you can't do it. I wish you could, but it's simply too perilous, you\u2014\"\n\n\"It's my decision,\" commanded Olieve. She spoke dangerously, her voice dropping so low she could have been male. The Zealer's eyes flared, bursting suns exploding from cataract clouds.\n\n\"Wrong,\" said Ressenjie. He regarded his child sternly. \"It is not your decision.\"\n\n\"Father,\" said Olieve. \"It's not wrong.\"\n\n\"Maybe through some loophole it is not, but by common law, I believe it is.\"\n\n\"You believe it is,\" Olieve challenged. \"Not inventing what it is to suit your needs.\"\n\n\"No,\" he corrected. He reflected his daughter's voice, like slowly falling leaves before the blast of winter. \"It is not a crime to want you safe, even if it means fabricating guidelines to keep you home. For a parent, anyway. But I am speaking of actual law.\"\n\nOlieve snorted.\n\n\"You can't go on a whim,\" he explained. \"This is a leading Royal decision, so long as we claim it as a confidential assignment.\"\n\nOlieve didn't retort. Zacka looked at her impatiently, willing her to ask a question. She did not. Zacka sighed. \"What do you mean?\" he asked Ressenjie.\n\nRessenjie blinked. \"Nyra's escorting is a sensitive matter. She's a sensitive species on a sensitive mission. We, the Royals, could therefore mark it as a confidential assignment, which would exclude uninvited volunteers. Should we choose to do so, the acting Royals would decide who could and could not participate.\"\n\n\"Not a free for all?\" said Zacka hopefully.\n\nRessenjie shook his head. \"To go, you'd have to have Royal approval.\"\n\nOlieve lowered her head, her mind ticking. \"You've not made it confidential,\" she implied. \"Not yet.\"\n\nRessenjie hesitated. \"Correct,\" he conceded.\n\nZirus nodded. \"Olieve, we've been discussing the matter for all of a few moments. Before you joined us, your parents, Arjell, and myself, had only come up with the proposal in its simplest form. We know that Jatika and Sigeen are going, but Nyra has just arrived. Few decisions have been finalized\u2014\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter!\" shouted Frazen. Arjell nodded, much more fervently than Zirus had done. \"She cannot go, she\u2014\"\n\nRessenjie cut his mate off. \"Olieve,\" he paused. Creases tightened on his nostrils. His claws drummed the floor. \"You understand where we are coming from with this. As parents. Who have your best interest in mind.\"\n\n\"Right, Olieve, we only\u2014\" said Frazen.\n\n\"Let her speak,\" said Ressenjie.\n\nFrazen glowered.\n\n\"Please,\" he added with a touch of submission.\n\nThe room became dead silent. Even Olieve, who'd stormed in on top of the world, seemed overwhelmed by her new pedestal.\n\n\"Well,\" said Olieve. \"Jatika and Sigeen are going. That's not many. Given the nature of Nyra's problem, I think there should be more ambassadors.\"\n\n\"And you believe you are the dragon for the job,\" said Ressenjie.\n\nOlieve shuffled. Nyra had never seen Olieve uncomfortable. Concerned, during their escape, and irate when Zacka disappeared in the cave-in. But never uncomfortable. Olieve wanted her father to be happy, proud even, and ultimately bless whatever path she chose, even if the rest found it reckless.\n\n\"I know Nyra,\" said Olieve. \"Better than any of you.\" She looked at them all in turn in her own special way\u2014with her ears. \"We've come so far in just days, because of her. Now she needs us. I want to be there.\"\n\nFrazen made a croaking sound, looking between Ressenjie and Olieve, pleadingly.\n\n\"I know I can do this,\" Olieve added.\n\nRessenjie took a deep breath. Zirus nodded infinitesimally. Arjell's face widened.\n\n\"Then you should go,\" said Ressenjie.\n\nOlieve beamed.\n\n\"Out of the question!\" Frazen clambered to the Sorja Royals. \"Zirus, you know this is nonsense. It's not just dangerous for her, but the whole mission! You know she'll slow them down\u2014\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mother,\" said Olieve, but didn't break her grin.\n\nZirus fruitlessly tried to squeeze in a word amid Frazen's protests, his jaw parted in opportunity. Ultimately, it was Zacka who shouted and quelled his mother-in-law to silence.\n\n\"I'll go, Frazen. I'll be her eyes,\" he said.\n\n\"You?\" scoffed Frazen. Zacka looked back at her, hurt. She looked away, voice cracking, searching for redeeming words which died too late.\n\n\"S'alright, Frazee,\" he muttered. \"I know. I'm not built for special missions. But if Olieve wants to do this, do you think you could stop her anyway? Law or no law?\"\n\nNo one replied.\n\n\"I made a promise yesterday,\" said Zacka. \"Maybe you remember. I vowed to protect Olieve, 'to the sky's final star and the seas near and far?' Did I speak loud enough? Did you all hear me?\"\n\n\"We heard, Terrakeizaq,\" said Ressenjie. \"And we heard Olieve repeat it.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Zacka. \"Olieve made the promise too. Do you think, after only a day in Union, she's going to let me out of her sight?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" said Ressenjie with a hint of warmth.\n\n\"Right. To her, my coming along is not for her protection. It's for mine. Without her, who will protect me?\"\n\n\"Swell logic, Zacka,\" said Olieve. \"Thought that one through, I see.\"\n\nZacka tossed his head. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nThe two smiled admiringly, Olieve garnished with joy, Zacka peppered in worry.\n\n\"That resolves it, then,\" declared Zirus after a few short whispers with Arjell. She still looked unsettled, but nodded with her mate. They both turned from Frazen. \"Represent us well. Aid our friend.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Olieve, waving a paw. \"Knowing when we leave would be nice.\"\n\n\"Mind yourself, young Royal,\" snarled Arjell.\n\n\"Settle down, everyone,\" said Zirus. \"Olieve brings up a fair point. When do they leave?\"\n\nNyra had just assumed he was speaking to everyone in the room. Only when no one replied did she realize that the focus had returned to her.\n\n\"Wait, you're asking me?\" she quaked.\n\n\"I can think of no one else,\" said Zirus. \"It's your home, your journey. We offer our services, but you must set us on the path.\"\n\nNyra stammered. All she'd wanted was to go home, since the first seconds when Darkmoon edged her to the cliff. Thus far her quest, her need, was based on the hard-bent desire to return. Was it happening at last? But more importantly, was it happening properly, and was it right to ask for more. Four ambassadors. Was it enough? It couldn't be. And yet Zirus, so much older and so much wiser, said it would suffice. She was eleven. What did she know?\n\n\"Well, as soon as we can, I guess,\" she said instead, wishing she were braver. \"It's too cold for me to fly on my own, I think. You Zealers are warm,\" she said, remembering that sweaty sleep next to Olieve. \"I'll probably be fine taking turns riding the escorts.\"\n\n\"Ah, homesick so soon?\" said Zirus in his quiet way. But he was jovial. \"I suppose things have been a little chilly here. Who wouldn't want to leave?\"\n\n\"And it's been a little raving-lunatic around here, too,\" added Olieve.\n\n\"No argument there,\" grumbled Zacka as the rest began to murmur amongst each other. Ressenjie said something to Zirus. Nyra heard her name.\n\n\"\u2026later,\" he said, and this was the last word Nyra caught in his conversation.\n\n\"Very well,\" said the Sorja leader solemnly, eyeing something beyond Ressenjie. \"We'll take a recess.\"\n\nOlieve was suddenly on her feet and brushing past Nyra for the exit. Others followed.\n\n\"Wait, wait, what's happening?\" stammered Nyra. Why were they leaving? What had she missed?\n\nZirus looked at his mate, but addressed Nyra. \"A recess,\" he repeated.\n\n\"But we just started!\"\n\n\"Yes, a quick recess, for everyone but the Royal pairs and top guards. There is much to plan, young one,\" he said. \"We must discuss our negotiation tactics. In private for now.\"\n\n\"Negotiation tactics?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"Your dilemma will take more than a simple request to resolve. It is in our best interest to prepare for every scenario possible. I have, of course, not been to the Northern Coast. The ambassadors must be trained on what we've gleaned from your description, which though thorough, cannot completely prepare us.\"\n\n\"Well, what else do you need to know?\" said Nyra.\n\nHe smiled. \"You needn't worry. We have what we need. Now all we must do is decide how to solve the problem. You needn't take part. It will be a long and boring chat.\"\n\n\"But what about the rest of us?\" said Nyra.\n\n\"You'll be informed of the essentials once we've decided.\" He spoke quickly now, and glanced past Ressenjie once more. \"But now is not the time. As I said, you get a recess.\"\n\nNyra took this as the final word. Completely dissatisfied, she meshed with the crowd leaving the chamber. The Royals (both pairs), and Jatika and Sigeen, vanished from sight, alone with their privacy and fancy plans.\n\n\"A word, Nyra.\" Olieve leered above. She waited at the entrance. Zacka stood at her flank.\n\n\"I'll be along soon, Zacka,\" said Olieve. Zacka's ears drooped, but he nodded, returning back to the Royal Chamber.\n\nNyra didn't waste a second. \"Shouldn't you be with the rest of the Royals?\"\n\n\"Not just yet,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"But why did the meeting end so fast?\"\n\nOlieve took in a deep breath. \"Mother.\"\n\n\"What about her?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"She's very unhappy. No. That's an understatement. She's terrified.\"\n\nNyra looked toward the chamber but could not see inside. \"I thought this was about discussing strategies?\"\n\n\"A quick lie,\" explained Olieve, \"to spare you some family drama. The truth is Mother was about to lose it. Over me leaving. And Father really didn't include her in the decision. He does that sometimes. He strives for quick resolutions and forgets that Mother has her own opinions. And this was a big opinion. He'll pay for it now.\"\n\n\"So what's going to happen?\"\n\nOlieve shrugged. \"Nothing. I'm still going, whether she likes it or not. She thinks I'm going to get killed out there.\"\n\n\"Because you're bl\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Olieve said shortly. \"Hoped I'd heard the last of it. Zacka's been pestering my ears off ever since I wanted to cut short our post-Union. He hates my going even more than Mother. She is just a little louder about it.\"\n\nNyra knew very well the opinions of mothers and the restrictions they imposed. To go see the cliffs, to climb the distant trees\u2014they were all things Thaydra had dubbed too dangerous. Too illegal.\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" said Olieve. \"Father called the meeting off because he could see Mother was about to burst. We'll have a long talk about it, then everything will be alright. Then we'll talk strategies, brief you on how we'll tackle the Sperks, and be on the wing in no time.\"\n\nNyra flared up inside. How Olieve knew of the Sperks now was clear enough. Surely Zirus or Arjell had told her, just as Nyra had told them. There'd been more than one opportunity, as Nyra had hardly been joined to Olieve's flank since the rescue. Still, there was that old itch, telling her that Olieve knew of the Sperks beforehand, early beforehand, and it instilled a strange swell of apprehension in the young Agring's chest.\n\n\"Nyra, you're stewing,\" said Olieve.\n\n\"I know,\" admitted Nyra. \"I was just thinking about something.\"\n\n\"Share.\"\n\n\"I was wondering,\" she began, peering at the vacant eyes, for the millionth time wondering just how much swam inside. \"Do you know\u2026? I mean, I don't know\u2026 how you learned about the Sperks. The first time, I mean.\"\n\nOlieve nodded. \"Ah. Read my mind. You and I have been living together too long.\"\n\n\"How did I read your mind?\"\n\n\"I said I wanted a word with you,\" said Olieve. \"There's something we've not discussed yet, namely your Sperks. And because we've not, I think a lot has gone missing.\"\n\n\"So you have known about the Sperks. For awhile.\"\n\n\"Yes. I get the feeling I've known longer than you think.\"\n\nNyra turned on the spot, frustrated. \"But why are we talking about this now? I tried\u2026 I didn't want to talk about the Sperks, I just didn't.\" Her logic was spinning into a corner. She took a breath. \"But why didn't you say anything?\"\n\n\"For the reason you just described,\" said Olieve. \"You seemed to have such an aversion to the subject. Killed me not to know why sometimes. I eventually figured you had too much to deal with.\"\n\n\"Close enough,\" said Nyra. It was surreal, discussing the Sperks with her. So surreal that Nyra nearly forgot that she didn't have an answer yet.\n\n\"Olieve,\" she blurted. \"How did you know about the Sperks if I never told you?\"\n\nOlieve's eyes creased. \"Guess it makes sense, you not knowing. Zirus would have brought it up today. He wanted to find a way to tell you. But it all falls on me now. There's just no way you'd know, unless he came back, and that's not possible, especially since you came\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't understand!\" yelled Nyra. It echoed sharply. She didn't care. \"Olieve. The beginning. Now. Pretend I don't know anything. Because I don't.\"\n\n\"Fine. Pop a haunch.\"\n\n\"No, I'm standing.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Olieve made an awkward motion, like she wanted to sit down but changed her mind. \"I'm going to make an assumption here.\" She paused and spoke slowly. \"You don't realize that you are not the first Agring to come here.\"\n\nNyra hesitated, puzzled by the double negatives. \"No, I realize it,\" she finally said. \"My ancestors, the ones you Zealers hated. They were the first\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no,\" interrupted Olieve. \"Not including the ancestors. I'm talking about recently. In my lifetime, in fact. Almost in yours.\"\n\nNyra frowned, not following.\n\n\"As I said,\" the Zealer continued. \"It would not make sense for you to know. According to this Agring who came here, the Nammock herd would have thought him dead, just as your family probably thinks you are dead.\"\n\nNyra felt an explosion in her head. A thousand questions burst forth in her brain, each of which screamed to be answered at the same time. Who was it? What did he survive? But then it occurred to her that, whoever he was, he was not here now, and the mystery Agring's presence, or lack-there-of, became the most pressing matter.\n\n\"What became of him?\" Nyra asked.\n\n\"Let me back up,\" said Olieve, fidgeting. She too looked like she wanted to say many things at once. \"You remember, when we first met, I told you that you were lucky to have landed on the Sorja side.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I said this from experience. Grant it, I was very young at the time. But I was there when that Agring skewed its path too far into Raklisall territory. He was apprehended, naturally. And Kodoral kept it very quiet, even in her own herd. Arjell and Zirus knew almost nothing at all, or so they recently told me. They saw an Agring get picked up and then taken away from the Raklisall caves a few days later. He was from the infamous Nammock herd, and he needed help with Sperks. But they knew little more.\"\n\n\"Taken away?\" said Nyra, again picking one in a cornucopia of questions.\n\n\"Yes. Flown south. See, Kodoral, after all the years of preaching how Royal Raklisall had been duped by an Agring\u2026 well, you can imagine how much an actual Agring showing up frightened her. She wanted nothing to do with him. Wanted him dead.\"\n\n\"So she killed him,\" said Nyra dismally.\n\n\"He wishes, I'm sure,\" said Olieve. \"Kodoral is very superstitious. What mythology she follows exactly we may never know, but something about killing an Agring, a demon, made her blood shiver. Maybe she thought it would curse her, the way your ancestors supposedly cursed Raklisall all those years ago. Dark magic and all that nonsense.\n\n\"Instead she decided to move it, far away so that whatever blood it spilt, it could not possibly touch her claws. It, or he, needed to be trapped, where he could not come back to the Zealers any more than return to his people. She knew from history that delivering an Agring home didn't do much to keep it in place, seeing as this Agring came after we warned your ancestors to never come back. So this time, the offending Agring needed to be taken somewhere and stay there, maybe as a warning to the at-home Agrings that those who leave will not return.\"\n\n\"But where did she take him?\" Nyra tried to make a picture in her head, to imagine these events as they fell to her ears. All that materialized was black smoke.\n\n\"An unknown place.\" Olieve lowered her voice. \"And I mean unknown in every sense. I'd be inclined to think it fake if Kodi had not changed because of it.\"\n\n\"Changed?\" Nyra couldn't think of Kodi being different.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Olieve. \"Kodi isn't superstitious for the sake of fairy tales and discarded mythology, not completely. There was an incident in her youth which aggravated her paranoia. According to Father, she went traveling as an adolescent, as many do, sort of like your ancestors. But she got stuck. On an island.\"\n\n\"Island?\" Nyra didn't know why she kept repeating Olieve. It was as though the story was not coming fast enough, and Nyra needed to pry it out at an unattainable speed.\n\n\"Something there drove her mad. She saw things that made her believe in living shadows. And they, or the experience, did something to her. See, there's a reason why Kodi believes in the impossible. She lived it, or thinks she did in any case.\"\n\n\"And that's where she dropped him. The Agring. On this island,\" confirmed Nyra.\n\nOlieve nodded. \"She wanted him to know madness. Because, in her warped mind, Agrings are a piece of her own madness. She is how she is because of a trail back in time, because she leads a banished herd, who was banished because of Raklisall, who was driven to remorse by Agrings. To her, leaving an Agring in that spot was a full circle in revenge. There he'd be tortured, but not by her hand. There, he'd know the slice of a monster's teeth. This way she diverted the Agring curse to that of a greater caliber, while she flew back north to the safety of her own battles.\"\n\nSmoke continued to furl in the wash of Nyra's concentration. It didn't make sense, none of it did. She felt that grip, that tight clench on home twist uncomfortably in her brain.\n\nNo one escaped. No one got away.\n\nAlive.\n\nFrom the black swirling in her mind nosed a dot of color, slight and slender, one she'd never seen, but pictured at every Gathering and in the occasional mutterings under Thaydra's breath.\n\nAnd she knew the answer as she asked:\n\n\"What was the Agring's name?\"\n\n\"His name,\" said Olieve, \"was Crimson.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "River",
                "text": "[ Thaydra ]\n\nShe ran.\n\nFrom her crimson tail to the relieving span of forever, Thaydra had rushed forth with purpose. She raced across the tumbling green grass, spraying storms of newborn dew. For up ahead was the glorious nothing\u2014eternal blue opening to the dangerous world, promising sleep.\n\nShe only had to reach it. And she would, oh so soon. What of time? Once she'd bled hope, dampened by an unbelieving herd, rejuvenated in togetherness. But regardless of the trepidation and despair she shook away, there was always a pair of shining green-yellow eyes, feisty like her own. They would stay forever. Time did not matter when bound in a promise.\n\nThe promise had broken. There it was, then there it wasn't. The world, spinning bleakly as it did, bustled with the jagged noises. Each note shrilled a waspish truth:\n\nHer daughter was dead.\n\nSo she ran.\n\nLight and free, wind sang against her face. Freedom. Her heart dropped to her claws. She jumped. Airborn, hung by the stillness just before the plunge.\n\nTeeth ripped her back. She thumped down, right before the edge. Her tail stung, not with pain, but with nostalgia. She'd been bitten there before, years back. Sun Fire had done it; her dearest friend, biting out of love. Sun Fire had cursed at Thaydra that night for trying to fly back to their dying mates. Damn you, Thaydra! Sun Fire had said, tugging Thaydra back.\n\nFeeling her tail jerk back now, Thaydra could feel those words returning. To be damned again, for love.\n\n\"Mum!\" said a voice.\n\nIt was not Sun Fire.\n\nThaydra twisted backward, away from the frothing grave far below.\n\n\"Mum!\" screamed the voice again.\n\nThaydra raised her head to the face of Sun Fire's mate, Blazing Fire. Only he was young, much younger. And wasn't he dead now?\n\n\"Mum, mum, what are you doing?\" he shrieked.\n\n\"Who\u2026\" muttered Thaydra. Here, the son of Blazing Fire fixed her with pleading eyes.\n\nYes, of course. It was Blaze. Her Blaze.\n\nWhat happened next was blurry to her recollections. Someone led her back home. Many cajoled, a few got her talking again. The faces meshed together.\n\nThat was months ago. Now, Thaydra gazed out onto the winter sunset, at the very spot she'd nearly taken her life. But she would not leap again, even if the others feared she would. They didn't matter. Trifle were the confused, as were the offended. Trifle were the scares, the escapes, and most of all the Sperks.\n\nAll that mattered was the way Blaze had looked at her that day. How he'd released her tail and peered past the reflection of his own pain. So very far past her. To him, she wasn't there. She'd left him. To him, she'd never come back.\n\nEver since, she'd spent her days effectively alone. Sometimes she worked, sometimes she didn't. The Sperks didn't scold her. What did they care? What could she do? They'd seen her now for what she was\u2014a dead thing. A thing void of life since she'd seen her daughter fall.\n\nBut Thaydra knew herself, and she was painfully alive. Only after Blaze caught her did the mother dragon realize her reason for living was not ripped in two. Not exactly. For every rip produced two sides, and in her case, only one had gone away. Just one.\n\nShe'd wept at Blaze's feet. Childishly. She was the brave one, sworn to forever hold her dignity for her offspring. Blaze needed her more than ever. He suffered too. He'd been just as close to Nyra, admittedly closer. A part of Thaydra had envied their bond, but it was a small part. That was how it should be. They'd have a friend in each other for life, and would long after Thaydra was gone, just as Thaydra would have her sister Dewep after their mother passed.\n\nNot to be.\n\nBlaze looked at her with same vacant gaze she'd fixed upon the headlong ocean, every day, ever since. He did not ignore her completely. He couldn't, living in the same den. He whispered and repeated, accepted and acknowledged. But in every word he spoke and in his gestures, Thaydra found the rigidness of loss. Somehow, the two dragons cycled back into routine, never meeting eyes unless by chance, or on the occasion Thaydra broke down, begging forgiveness. Every time, Blaze lifted his ears to limp attention. He'd even mumble a response on her luckier days. Thaydra would apologize and explain until her throat knurled to tree roots. Then he'd turn away, and Thaydra would hemorrhage on the same solitary wound.\n\nShe breathed deeply now. The air was vacant, the sweetness of autumn long extinct. Cold nibbled at her flanks. Dead leaves plastered to her foreleg. The whole Northern Coast was spongy with them.\n\n\"I've muddled everything,\" she breathed. Yes, that's what she was, a muddler, and it hardly began with Blaze. She'd muddled with his mother, who'd given her life to save Thaydra's. His father, too. The escape attempt had been Thaydra's crusade. They had followed and perished. They should have stayed behind. Mere days before the attempt, she and Sun Fire had their greatest argument. Thaydra forbade her friend from coming. She was frail, and Thaydra knew even then Sun Fire would not survive. But Sun Fire, timid though she was, would not back down.\n\nThaydra had taken it upon herself to protect Sun Fire. Isn't that what she did best? Caring for others?\n\nThe way you cared for Crimson? her mind sneered.\n\nSun Fire had been foolish. Not just in coming along, but in convincing Thaydra to bring the eggs. Sun Fire was a soon-to-be parent, driven by that traditional maternal madness. Thaydra had also borne an egg, not days before Sun Fire. Unlike her best friend, though, Thaydra's bones lay still, unfettered by a motherly rattle. She cared for the egg, turned it, warmed it, but her mind was set steady on the escape attempt. That came first, though she never said it out-loud. The egg should have been more important. But for Thaydra, the escape held the future in firmer claws.\n\nThaydra wanted to leave the egg behind. Dewep would mother it for as long as it took. Thaydra begged Sun Fire to do likewise. Eggs would slow the journey. The dragglings within would likely die. Sun Fire waved the logic away. She'd not have her child imprinting on another's face. At first, Thaydra cursed her down, calling her a fool. Don't whimper to me when it's cold and dead over the sea. But as the departure day neared, Thaydra tread upon the truth behind her anger. Sun Fire was a fool, but just as much, was she, Thaydra, a bad mother? Plagued by the eerie anomaly of her instincts, Thaydra agreed to take the eggs, in hopes that her bones would one day shudder.\n\nBringing the eggs was Sun Fire's fault. But where did the blame begin? This manipulation, this guilt, could never be rooted in the gentle Sun Fire. It was Shadowed Fire. He, after all, was the one who wanted offspring. Thaydra was married to hope and the adventure of what might be. Mated for life, Shadow swore to forever dance aside her, but as the torrent of the waltz wore on, he pined to settle with what little they had. Always he encouraged, always he hoped, but he feared that Thaydra had given up on the present. You're in the future, Thaydra. What of now? He'd said this more and more as the seasons accumulated. More and more she felt selfish. In the end, she surrendered on the grounds of love, dreaming that in pregnancy she'd understand his desire.\n\nYou'll be a good mother, he'd told her excitedly. She was younger then. Every so often, between spurts of pessimism, she believed him. Etched on her heart were tally marks for every twilight when the escape tunnel grew longer and every day the egg neared hatching. And finally, one tally for every dragon who pulled and pushed against her final decision.\n\nI'm the manipulator, she thought. I'm to blame. Not Shadowed Fire. Not Sun Fire. As much as the others pulled and pushed, none did so as fervently as Thaydra.\n\nBut she didn't push or pull anymore. She did nothing. And she did it alone.\n\n\"Thaydra?\" said a voice.\n\nShe remembered the present and its lonely sunset. Rovavik shined pink in the magenta light. As always, he looked like Shadow in the early moments she spotted him. She'd not yet met him without feeling a fluttered heart\u2014always, for over a decade. But then he would come closer, and select wrinkles and scars would warn her otherwise.\n\n\"Rovavik, my darling brother. Shouldn't you be in? Casstooth is sure to snarl.\"\n\nThe gray dragon smiled weakly. \"Casstooth knows. She all but pushed me back inside the burrow until Opalheart came along. I'll tell you, he can smitten-up anyone.\"\n\n\"Not so. Bristone hasn't taken to him. He'd like that, I think. She's\u2026 what would we call her?\"\n\n\"Impenetrable,\" offered Rovavik.\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\nThey were quiet for awhile. Rovavik offered up the next topic.\n\n\"Darkmoon should be back soon,\" he muttered.\n\nThaydra grunted.\n\n\"He's been gone for a moon now.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Either he's found a prize so big it's taking awhile to get them back or he's still searching. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll find nothing.\"\n\nLucky, mused Thaydra. Who's lucky?\n\nRovavik took a quick breath, as if to speak again, then closed his mouth. Thaydra realized she was making an ugly face. Relaxing, she tried to look friendly.\n\n\"Tesset argued with Fire Dust today,\" he said tentatively. \"Tesset says there's no reason to hold off breeding anymore. She wants more younglings.\"\n\nThaydra's blood percolated, bubbling between anger and amusement. \"Does she,\" she said. Rovavik was not a gossiper. He'd speak of Tesset, his adulterous mate, only as needed, and usually within the most generic of news. To speak of her with anything remotely scandalous meant it bothered him intensely. Thaydra listened with rapt anticipation.\n\n\"Fire Dust doesn't like the idea. She and Ackeezo have abstained from offspring the whole time they've been mated. I think Fire Dust would feel cheated if Tesset gave in. Tesset already has three children.\"\n\n\"She could always beat out Tesset,\" growled Thaydra. \"Breed first, rob Tesset of being a rebel.\"\n\nRovavik shook his head. \"It's too much pressure, being the first to breed after such a long dry spell. Fire Dust must be afraid of what everyone else will think. She's the only one who chose a mate after the ban. She has sacrificed the most. She'd hate to break the streak.\"\n\n\"As she should,\" said Thaydra stiffly. \"Does Salef get a say in all of this?\"\n\n\"Tesset's mate is against it,\" said Rovavik. He rarely referred to Tesset's mate by his name, Salef. Thaydra never asked why. She expected it poisoned Rovavik's tongue.\n\nShe laughed without humor. \"What will the poor promiscuous Tesset do\u2014\"\n\n\"Thaydra\u2026\"\n\n\"\u2014crawl into Ackeezo's den, I expect, if she hasn't done so already,\" she broiled. \"And why stop there? What about Moon Fire\u2014\"\n\n\"Thaydra!\" Rovavik hissed. Thaydra recoiled, astounded by her own vulgarity in the presence of someone so reserved. She'd never heard him hiss before.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" she breathed. \"I was crass. I'm sorry, Rovavik.\"\n\n\"Don't apologize\u2014\"\n\n\"No no, I must,\" she said. \"I just\u2026\" a lump rose in her throat, \"there's so much to grieve about, to worry over. And Tesset shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things. But\u2026 I just hate that she acts the way she does, on top of everything else. I just hate her so much.\"\n\n\"I know you do,\" said Rovavik. He was gentle again.\n\n\"I've tried, you know,\" Thaydra sniffed, \"to be civil. I wake up some mornings and tell myself to be affable. I want to look at the herd and not single her out. She's like a sore against the rest of them, so offensive I can't help but notice.\"\n\nRovavik listened, pursing the lip area behind his fangs. He did not look at her.\n\nThaydra prattled on. \"And then I can't bring myself to try. I see her, and forget why I wanted to be nice in the first place. She'd never be civil in return, even if I was. She hates me just as much. So is it worth it? Or is it better to just accept this?\" She brought up her claws and flailed them violently.\n\nRovavik offered only silence. Thin winter air whistled between them.\n\n\"It's all so childish,\" she murmured.\n\nRovavik shifted in the needlegrass. \"You might look at things through Tesset's eyes.\"\n\nThaydra slumped. \"I do, but everything turns blood-red and fire drips from the sky.\" She laughed lightly.\n\nRovavik did not smile. \"Tesset dislikes you, Thaydra. But how would you like someone who was always hostile?\"\n\n\"So we shout a bit,\" she shrugged. Rovavik still looked unsettled. \"Is there another reason for her to dislike me?\" she ventured.\n\nVery softly, he said, \"A few.\" A cloud passed overhead in a seasonally rare clear sky. Rovavik faded to a shadow under its cover, almost disappearing.\n\n\"And they are?\" she asked.\n\n\"Hypocrisy,\" he said.\n\nThaydra stood erect in disbelief.\n\n\"Thaydra.\" He winced. His speech was forced, as though battering through a storm. \"You accuse Tesset of, how to put it politely\u2026 being more than friendly to more than one male in her lifetime?\"\n\nIt had not been worded like that before. Tesset was shameful, yet something was amiss in his description. Thaydra had called Tesset adulterous more times than she could count. Why Rovavik shied away from the word now she couldn't say.\n\n\"Thaydra,\" he continued before she could ask. \"You say these things of Tesset, after your youth?\n\n\"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"This hypothetical with Ackeezo or Moon Fire\u2026 is it really fair, when half the heard knows you courted both back in the day\u2014\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Thaydra.\" He was firm. \"I'd say more names, but seeing as you already know them.\" He shook his head. \"See it in Tesset's eyes.\"\n\nThaydra flexed her claws. \"But that's different,\" she said cautiously, fearing he'd cut her off. \"I was young, and was not committed to anyone. And neither were they.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" agreed Rovavik. \"You've committed no crimes. She did. Still, she is not the dragon you make her out to be. Her offense was a long time ago, yet it angers you to the point that you blame the rose for growing red.\"\n\nThaydra snorted. \"I was never a cheater,\" she reiterated. \"We are not the same rose.\"\n\n\"That you are not,\" he agreed. \"But you both have known multiple males. That angers her. You are not the same. I realize this. But it's how she feels. To her, you are a hypocrite, even if her opinion is misguided.\"\n\nIt was wrong. He would not waver, but it warmed her to know that he was on her side.\n\n\"And the other reason?\" Thaydra asked.\n\nRovavik faltered. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You said there were a few reasons for Tesset to dislike me. You've given me one.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said quietly. He looked away.\n\n\"Nice try,\" said Thaydra, her good humor returning. \"You've called me hostile and a hypocrite. Let's see what else you can come up with.\"\n\nHis mouth stretched widely across his face, as if to will away an unbearable pain. Thaydra was about to tell him to never mind the story, whatever it was. He spoke before she could stop him.\n\n\"It's my fault, not yours,\" he said. \"I did it, just before she bore Aisel and Fidee.\"\n\n\"Did what?\"\n\n\"She\u2026 Tesset\u2026 she was unfaithful. She went to Salef so soon after our son's hatching. But I'd be a false martyr to say she did it unprovoked.\"\n\nHe swallowed. Thaydra could tell he had a weight on his shoulders, yet felt Thaydra was a poor confidant. Offended, Thaydra wondered why. They'd always been close. She'd rant, he'd listen. He'd have sorrow, then she'd encourage him towards happiness. It was their way.\n\n\"Some months before the affair, I'd admitted to her that I was suffering. I've hated myself everyday for saying it. I'd do it differently in a second life\u2026 wait silently until my heart changed.\" He swallowed. \"But that's all done and over.\"\n\nShe waited.\n\n\"I told her I was suffering because I loved another.\"\n\nThaydra gasped: the very idea of Tesset victimized, but even more so, Rovavik at fault for anything in his sinless life.\n\n\"She\u2026\" he stammered. \"This other was never\u2026 she'd never see me that way. There was someone else. Then he was gone, and she was taken by grief. I joined Tesset, because she was a friend and was kind. But by the time Tesset left me, this other had found someone else. My brother.\"\n\n\"Oh Roendon's Light\u2026\" she said.\n\n\"It was you, Thaydra.\"\n\nShe peered passed him as a dark cloud grew from the east, its shard-ridden body barreling over itself like flint-rock. It was a cloud of a hundred pieces, with little windows of pink opening and closing between flapping wings. At the head flew the largest shard, not black, but bluer as it approached, with gargantuan haunches followed by a whipping tail.\n\n\"He's found them,\" Thaydra quaked. \"Darkmoon. He found more Agrings.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Follow In, They Follow In",
                "text": "We could save him,\" Nyra insisted, swooping below Olieve. It was the second time she'd said it that day, and probably the millionth since starting their journey south. Sigeen had shot her down the first time. A rescue was too dangerous. Nyra knew that. But in spite of Sigeen's acerbic logic and Jatika's gentle reasoning, it seemed there was no way to save the long lost Crimson.\n\nOlieve tilted, making way for the little dragon at her belly. Zacka eyed Nyra crossly. He'd been watching Olieve's every flap with falcon-like precision. Yet the blind-dragon managed surprisingly well, the sounds of breathy wind acting as a second sight.\n\n\"No chance,\" said Olieve. She agreed with Sigeen and Jatika. Though she was Royal, they were the authority on all decisions related to the journey. Frazen had ensured that. Olieve made a point to be as involved as possible. Thus far, she agreed with all major decisions. Nyra wondered if the Zealer Royal truly approved or if she harbored disagreements. Olieve was smart, much more so than Nyra, but she was not trained in military stratagems. Perhaps the blind Zealer was afraid to speak up, insecure because of her lack of education. But Nyra didn't think that likely. Olieve was as opinionated as she was confident. If she didn't agree, the whole ocean would know about it at once.\n\n\"But we should,\" said Nyra. The Agring nabbed a gap at Olieve's side, forcing Zacka to scoot away. Ahead flew Jatika, cutting the breeze into manageable threads for those behind. The gentlest blows were near the middle, and that's where Nyra usually stayed. When not flying, she rode Jatika, curled up in a tight ball, one foreleg swung around the Zealer's neck, the other snuggled tightly to a cleaned caribou hide. The hide weakly emulated the conditions of Oharassie's fins, blocking out the most feisty blows of winter. But overall the insulation was poor. Cooped up and cold, Nyra became cranky, wishing to understand the muffled conversations beyond the musky white fur. It was just warm enough to fly on her own for an hour at noon, where she babbled incessantly.\n\n\"You know it's him,\" Nyra said. \"The Sliver. The one who rescued me from the Hawk that day. It has to be Crimson.\"\n\n\"We know,\" said Olieve. The first day she had been patient, listening to Nyra's arguments. But irritation now prickled through her monotonous voice.\n\nCrimson survived the blow when he fell to the water some seventeen years ago. How, Nyra could only guess. At Gatherings, she'd imagined his body crushed to the ocean floor by Darkmoon's weight. It wasn't so. Far away the Agring had surfaced, unseen. Maybe he stayed at the Green Spot, and like Nyra, waited for a savior.\n\nOf course, no one came. They never did.\n\nCrimson had 'perished' in the springtime, as the story went. It would have been warm then, allowing a placid rout to Garrionom without fear of freezing. The journey would have been long. Three months? Six? Maybe more. Surely, he'd survived on fish, just as Nyra had. But the tale puckered with one great mystery: the bones. At the Green Spot, Nyra had been saved by the Xefexes, who'd cleverly used a carcass to feign her death for Casstooth. However briefly Nyra had seen them, she knew that they once belonged to an Agring. Whose if not Crimson's? Father came to mind, as did Blaze's parents. The bones were yellowed, clearly old (Casstooth hadn't been close enough to notice, Nyra assumed). But it couldn't be them. Anyone she'd ever known to perish were buried in a place seen only by Fuhorn, back where the hills rolled into the forbidden treeline.\n\n\"It's ludicrous,\" Sigeen said now. \"No one could live on the island that long.\"\n\n\"But he did,\" complained Nyra. \"He saved me. He was there.\"\n\n\"Does it occur to you,\" said the Zealer darkly, \"that you imagined a rescuer?\"\n\nShe was silent.\n\n\"It was dark. It was beginning to storm,\" said Sigeen. \"You admitted to hearing things on the wind. A song, yes? One you'd heard before? Couldn't you have just as easily imagined a voice?\"\n\nNyra was too angry to respond. Crimson had crashed down upon her. She'd waited in the ocean, watching him breathe fire at the Hawk and then fly back toward the island. She didn't know what these images were at the time, split above the water's surface. But now she knew. And yet in Sigeen's accusation, she felt the sickening bile of doubt creep into her throat. She was tired that day. Was it all just an illusion? Had she fallen to the ocean on her own? Had the Hawk flown away via some other distraction, an unremarkable diversion created by chance?\n\nJatika flew to her side. Olieve made way. \"I believe you,\" he whispered. Nyra smiled at this, ready to start up her argument again. But Jatika cut her off.\n\n\"But to save him isn't feasible, even if he lived,\" said the Zealer sadly. \"We can't go anywhere near that island, you see. Even if it isn't anything like what Kodoral described. It isn't magical, it isn't cursed. That's her own superstition. But it houses a deadly predator. To land there risks the lives of everyone here.\"\n\n\"I know. But we\u2014\"\n\n\"Furthermore,\" said Jatika firmly, \"Crimson is likely dead by now. You told us that the Sliver came out to the ocean to save you? And that the Hawk chased him all the way back?\"\n\nNyra nodded, almost imperceptibly.\n\n\"Agrings are small and slow compared to anything much larger. Crimson got to you because the Hawk was targeting you alone at the time. Once you were out of the way, it went after Crimson. The distance from your spot to the island was a long one. Think back, Nyra. On his small, small wings, would Crimson have made it back to the island alive?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said in a tiny voice. \"He breathed fire. Hawks can't do that. Crimson was prepared.\"\n\n\"Yes. But even so?\"\n\nNyra had no answer. Perhaps Jatika was saying this just to quiet Nyra. Perhaps it was just a loose argument stemming from his own fears of the island, even though it did make sense.\n\nBut if Jatika was correct, it meant Crimson had died saving her.\n\nOlieve fidgeted at Nyra's side, eyes downcast. The Agring had never seen her sad before. Death was difficult news, and Nyra supposed that Olieve was uncomfortable with it as a topic of conversation. Death did not lend itself to humor, even the monotonous kind. It invoked heightened emotion, pressing the Royal to pry empathy out of some sealed-tight chamber in her heart, which Nyra assumed was a dusty place.\n\nNyra tried to forget her remorse. After all, she'd spent most of her life knowing Crimson was dead. He was dead still, only much more recently. The final fact remained unchanged.\n\nBut as she fell asleep that night, on a far north island and nestled between Olieve and Zacka, she imagined Crimson alive somewhere in the wild world. And not just as a distant stranger, but as her friend. He had been a friend to Thaydra, or much more as the herd implied. There quivered an intangible bond between the young Agring and this long-lost warrior. The vibration of life brought them together. In her fantasy, she would save the Sliver. But the fantasy didn't last long. The Hawk chomped her courage to pieces; the Hawk and the strange song.\n\nJatika was right, and Nyra miserably remembered how very young she was.\n\nDays passed. Nyra spent most of her time stewing under the caribou hide over her disagreement about Crimson, but more so, what would happen when they reached the mainland. The future would be better, not just according to the Zealers, but the grand dreams of Mother, Fuhorn, and everyone else fighting for that brighter tomorrow. But earning freedom for her family was another hurdle. She was tired, wishing she could somehow skip ahead a season and take a long nap in the sunshine. Instead she held the hide closer, shielding the crisp present and biting future from her toiling thoughts.\n\nAt least the Zealers took care of her now. At the claws of Jatika and Sigeen, she never hungered, although that didn't happen overnight. Neither knew a thing about fishing. Nyra offered tips, showing them how to best grasp their prey.\n\n\"Think of it as a rabbit,\" she'd explained, believing a rabbit the best analogy, even though Zealers usually tackled much larger quarry. Jatika listened carefully and learned. Sigeen watched from a distance. Jatika caught on quickly and passed the knowledge on. Soon Sigeen was similarly skilled. Even the frail Zacka caught a fish or two. Nyra wondered if he yearned for swordfish, hoping to live up to his false talent.\n\nFrom that moment on, she never had to hunt. Better yet, she had no fear of dying. Only a fool would attack four Zealers. She didn't fear fatigue either\u2014they did most of the flying. They were fast, with bigger wings and greater stamina. They covered great distances, often skipping over islands and moving to the next.\n\nOlieve slowed them down. Nyra would not have noticed if Sigeen hadn't muttered it under his breath, loud enough for Zacka to hear. Zacka did not argue, but looked plenty miffed. It had to be true. Olieve constantly extended her claws to Zacka, needing to touch something in the empty space. But she needed him less and less as the days drew on. Now, Olieve zoomed seamlessly and, against Nyra's predictions, rather quickly. Small and lithe, Olieve squeezed into thermals where others could not. She notched into air pockets with room to spare.\n\nAccording to Jatika, Nyra would be home in a month. Nyra had expected it to snow. It hadn't yet, and according to Jatika, it likely wouldn't. Snow was rare on the ocean, he explained. Rain, however, was as present as ever. By evening her caribou pelt was often soaked. Stretching it flat upon the sands of their resting islands, she'd let it dry under the cold stars. Eight to nine hours helped, but the air hung pregnant with humidity. How very paradoxical it was that Oharassie, a creature who thrived in water, had kept her drier than the land-dwelling Zealers.\n\nFor about forty sunsets they went like this. She'd ride, she'd fly, they'd hunt, and a very convenient island would rear out from the sea before anyone became too exhausted. Jatika and Zacka had the best stories to pass the time. Both had led interesting lives, though very different. Jatika, as it turned out, wasn't a native of the Sorja herd. His parents came from a distant land, in Garrionom of course, but leagues and leagues away from the twin peaks. When they arrived, he was almost snatched away by a Raklisall before the Sorjas emerged. They later joined the Sorja ranks, where he grew close to the Royal family. This was how he became one of the top guards and a Royal Collaborator. Zacka, too, had his share of tales, most of which involved hiding his relationship with Olieve. They'd had a number of close calls over the years. Olieve nodded as he told his stories, throwing in details. But mostly, she stayed quiet, keeping her neck rigidly forward. \"Flying blind,\" she said, \"isn't as easy as it looks.\"\n\nOf Sigeen Nyra did not know much, and what she'd acquired mostly came from Jatika. He hardly spoke to Olieve or Zacka, ostracizing them almost as much as Nyra. They were outsiders. Raklisalls. Crazies. Maybe Nyra was one step worse, Agrings being the reason for such animosity in the first place. As Fuhorn once said, prejudice was one of those things long lived without being alive. It was a parasite slow to die, because like unlearning a bad habit, prejudice often vanished under the weight of willpower, and true willpower was hard to come by.\n\nThinking. Chatting. Flying. Sleeping.\n\nThen one morning Nyra found a teal blotch on the ocean. Privately, she studied it, waiting for it to break into a million fish or to fade.\n\nA head broke the surface, as big as her body, straddled by two protuberant eyes.\n\n\"Hey!\" she shouted from her caribou hide.\n\n\"What is it?\" said Jatika, looking for danger.\n\n\"Down there,\" she said. \"An Aquadray!\"\n\nThe beast below lifted its head. Through the water Nyra saw its pectoral fins thrust forward, slowing to a stop. It could hear them.\n\n\"Let's go see,\" said Nyra. Sigeen muttered a warning. Too late. Nyra spiraled down.\n\n\"Hey!\" she shouted. The beast snorted spray from its capacious nostrils, showering the little Agring. Nyra flapped in place, waiting for the air to clear. The Aquadray came into focus.\n\nHer heart sank. Not Oharassie. Though gargantuan, this one was a bit smaller. More obviously, its rumply skin was smoother than she remembered. This was the Aquadray equivalent of youth, she assumed.\n\nThe beast revered Nyra curiously.\n\n\"Yes, land thing? Have you lost your way?\" came the deep voice, like rumbling bones. Male. Indeed, he sounded much younger. As if anyone could be older.\n\nHe smiled broadly, a zip of recognition flitting on his broad ears.\n\n\"Not at all,\" she said, panting as she flapped in place above the water. She came level with the impossibly large head. Behind him, a green mound slid up from the water, yellow membranes shooting skyward.\n\n\"You may rest if you'd like,\" he said, rolling his spines sideways to reveal a broad surface laced in sea kelp. Nyra thumped down, overcome by excitement. It wasn't Oharassie, but on the back of an Aquadray she felt a rush of warm nostalgia.\n\nHe eyed the Zealers, flapping cautiously above. \"And them?\" he said.\n\nSigeen, the closest, looked positively furious, beating the air murderously. Jatika and Zacka were plainly shocked. Only Olieve showed no signs of consternation.\n\nNyra laughed. \"I think they'd rather fly. They've never seen your kind, I don't think.\"\n\n\"They and everyone else.\" He turned his attention back to Nyra. Like Oharassie, he had a possessing focus, like she were the only creature in the world that mattered in that moment.\n\n\"So, an Agring in the middle of the ocean with Zealers. I'd bet my spines you are Nyra Nammock?\"\n\nNyra jumped to her toe tips.\n\n\"You're one of Oharassie's sons!\" She squealed the words. She couldn't remember the last time she'd squealed out of joy.\n\n\"Ha. I dare say not.\" He ripped a flipper from the clinging waves and waggled it. \"Grandson, my dear. And one of the younger ones. Do I look that old?\"\n\n\"No, sorry,\" said Nyra, grinning. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Uhjegrah, sired by the twelfth youngling of Oharassie and Yahinuve.\"\n\nNyra thought back. \"Yes!\" she exclaimed. \"He told me your name. He told me all of your names.\"\n\n\"Of course he did. But they all must sound the same to an Agring. Jeenuvegrah, Yaharrienuve. There's a lot of sound-recycling in our big, big family.\"\n\n\"He told you about me,\" she pressed. \"So you saw him recently?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" he nodded. \"How often do we find something so terrestrial in something so aquatic? Not even driftwood finds its way a quarter into the ocean, not often. He told us, my mate and me that is, all about it in our last visit. My mate recently calved our first. We took the young one to see his great-grandsire. We left the sea willows not six sunsets ago. He caught us up on his ventures. Who would have thought he'd have news that interesting? The most he ever reports is the latest lightning storm.\"\n\nSea willows. Oharassie's home! Jatika had estimated this morning that they were about three quarters to the Northern Coast. Oharassie, if she remembered properly, was around that point, where he'd agreed to take her the rest of the way. Wherever they were in this middle-of-nowhere, a friend was nearby.\n\n\"Which way are the willows from here?\" Nyra said briskly.\n\n\"You're more or less on course,\" said Uhjegrah, checking the sun. \"Maybe a hair too far west. But you know, he's not around.\"\n\nA rock thumped in her stomach. \"Not around?\"\n\n\"Storm chasing,\" he said casually. \"He left the same time we did, but south. He reckons a storm is coming. He'd predicted one a season or so ago, and traveled quite a ways to see it. In fact,\" he paused, \"that's what he was up to when he found you, so he tells me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nyra, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice. \"He was looking for a Mal Storm. He said it never came.\"\n\nUhjegrah nodded. \"That's the story. Now he says it's the same one, only late. Very late.\" He shook his head admiringly. \"Grandaddy and his storms.\"\n\nNyra eyed the sky. Gray and boring.\n\n\"But tell me what happened with you,\" he said. \"Grandaddy was a little hesitant bringing you to those Zealers. He knew they were a strict bunch, but thought it was the best thing for you. Are they treating you well?\" He whispered the last bit, eyeing the Zealers above with a touch of scorn.\n\nShe told the tale, starting from the beginning. Uhjegrah listened to Nyra as if she were an old friend. He had probably learned every detail in the first half of Nyra's quest through his grandfather. But he listened anyway, intent and curious. This is what it must be like to be famous, she thought, having friends you don't know.\n\nInto the afternoon, Nyra went through her chapter with the Zealers. At that time, Olieve and Zacka lighted down to listen. A little later, Jatika and Sigeen found a bare spot on Uhjegrah, both looking nonplussed, but welcoming the chance to rest. When Nyra finished, the first sun was waning out.\n\n\"Nyra, we really should leave,\" said Jatika.\n\n\"Likewise,\" said Uhjegrah. \"I'm way overdue. It'll be my mate's turn to hunt shortly. Wait 'till she hears that I met you. She'll think I swallowed puffer-fish poison.\"\n\nThe Zealers flew up one at a time until Nyra was the only one left.\n\n\"Keep on your course,\" said Uhjegrah. \"You'll hit an island before dark. It's not big, but has decent tree shelter.\"\n\n\"Will you tell Oharassie?\" asked Nyra. \"I mean, the next time you see him. Can you tell him I'm alright?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" said Uhjegrah.\n\n\"Oh\u2026 and thank him again?\" she said.\n\nUhjegrah bowed. \"He'll be happy to know you are well.\"\n\nShe opened her wings, readying to take off.\n\n\"Oh, and Nyra?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you couldn't see him,\" he said sorrowfully. His sincerity echoed Oharassie's.\n\n\"Me too.\" She lighted off.\n\nThe Aquadray gave one last smile, and was gone. Nyra was suddenly very sad.\n\nThey flew until second sunset. Though she'd spent the better part of the day sitting, Nyra felt wearier than she had in awhile and fell asleep almost instantly in the cool sand between Zacka and Olieve, where above the tiny stars punctured thickening gray pelts of clouds.\n\nIt didn't rain that night.\n\nThen at noon the next day, the sky exploded in needles.\n\nIn the span of an hour, fog thrilled up from nowhere. But it wasn't the gentle fog Nyra knew from winter nights back home. It stung, punched through with nettle-thin rain that stabbed her caribou hide. She couldn't keep her eyes open long. Holding Jatika tightly, she hoped his faceplate would keep his own eyes safe.\n\n\"No good!\" Sigeen shouted over the wind.\n\n\"We're already off course,\" called Jatika.\n\n\"How much?\"\n\n\"Hard to figure. We need to land first chance.\"\n\nJatika had worried earlier that morning, smelling static in the air. He wanted to wait it out a day, knowing the skies would darken by the afternoon. Sigeen smelled it too, but unlike Jatika, thought they could brave it. He insisted they cover as much ground as possible while the storm was manageable. Though skeptical, Jatika agreed (Olieve and Zacka had no opinion). The group took off into the growing gloom. At noon, Nyra was chattering away to Zacka about Aquadrays when a snarling gust sent her tumbling backward. She regained control just before smacking the ocean. She took refuge with Jatika again. Too soon the wind grew more violent. Olieve became more rigid, thrown awry by her violent surroundings.\n\nNow, peeking past Jatika's shoulder, Nyra caught a glimpse of the ocean. Flecks of spray scraped up and out from here to the horizon like cuts on skin. She pulled the hide over her face. The stinging sleet numbed her wing, and the shouts became a lullaby. Drifting, she felt a familiar rumble in her throat. When the shouting stopped, an immeasurable time later, her cradle rocked to a standstill.\n\n\"We've landed,\" said Olieve. Nyra looked out. Her friend stood tall in a colorless world, blurred to near-darkness. Nyra slid from Jatika to a spongy surface. It was freezing.\n\n\"Huddle, everyone,\" said Jatika. \"Or it's a cold death.\" Nyra barely heard him. Warm flanks padded her every side. Then she was asleep.\n\nWoken by beads of sunlight, Nyra coughed into the muffling skin of a Zealer. Cramps crunched her elbows, jammed beneath someone's ribs. Like a new hatchling she wrestled out, heaving limbs of Zealer off of her until she found fresh air.\n\nThey were in a forest. Fingering through the trees fanned intense sun rays. Last night's fog was completely burned away, evident only by the heavy mist settled on the spindly brown branches. Harsh, twisting shadows etched over the leaf-littered ground. The trees were gnarled like the thick claws of an ancient beast. But odder still, they retained most of their leaves, green and unfaded. Foliage had been absent from the islands on the journey home so far. She'd not seen intact leaves in a long while.\n\n\"Huh,\" she muttered aloud, sniffing the nearest branch poking at Olieve's back. It smelled moist, sweet even. And it was warm to the touch. In fact, the very air was warm, like the tropical places Fuhorn once described. Nyra eyed the sky, fearful the Zealers had taken her too far south. The suns were along the same arc as yesterday. Still in temperate waters. Stupid to think otherwise.\n\nShe popped the rest of the way out from Olieve and Zacka. Their backs rose heavily, sore limbs thrown about. Sigeen and Jatika were nowhere to be found. Hunting, probably.\n\nIt was like being alone. That last time Nyra knew true solitude she was clambering over the serrated teeth of survival, scaling cliffs to find Zacka and save Olieve. To be safe and warm and still know the bliss of silence was a delight indeed.\n\nStay or walk?\n\nWalk.\n\nThe tree trunks were splintery, curling up as individual scales did on a Sperk's neck, revealing cream-colored bark. The leaves were broad with waxy surfaces, emulating the rumored rainforests, where creatures swam in air thick as tepid water. The leaves had a purpose, according to Fuhorn. They soaked up the blasting suns and, in layer upon layer of foliage, made canvases of protection for the creatures below. She had certainly missed this island on the way north. That made sense, as Jatika had said they were off course.\n\nFinding a trail-like gap, Nyra meandered toward the daylight. The beach couldn't be far. Maybe there'd be a shallow spot to catch something. She walked for awhile, almost as long as it would have taken to cross the Green Spot island. She figured this was an unusually large place. That explained the trees, which became more diverse with every pace\u2014more space, more species. Pausing to sniff a shriveled weed, Nyra wondered if the island had glorious flowers during summertime.\n\nThe rocks were abnormal too. Some were geometric, others perfectly flat, most of them light in color. One had a divot full of rainwater. She lapped it up greedily in a few short licks. Still thirsty, she looked about for more puddles. There had to be more what with all the rain last night.\n\nFinally the trees parted. Only no ocean revealed itself. Instead, she looked out onto a flat plain, spiked with yellow grass. On the far sides low rising plants budded upward amongst more of the same broad-leafed trees. But it was what lay behind the trees that proved most astounding. The far side sported several pillars of rock, towering to the sky and ending in flat tops, like arms with open palms to hold the suns.\n\nThe openness invited her. Elated, Nyra scuffled through the short grass. The ground was muddy, squishing between her wriggling toes. At last she saw the ocean on her left and right, just hidden by more of the funny rocks. The island seemed divided into two clumps of trees: the ones from which she came, and those straight ahead interspersed with pillars. Nyra spun across the clearing, flaying mud in a great messy shower. Some hundred revolutions later she stopped, glorified by how everything spun on without her. Delayed sickness buzzed on her brows, and she held a paw to them until things were still. Focusing on the tall pillars, Nyra regained footing. Looking closer, the pillars were multicolored, from deep red to light cream, but mostly a ruddy yellow. Some were squat, but most scrambled to the clouds. She wagered the tops vanished when foggy. Odd as they were, Nyra had an inkling they were not new to her. Where had she seen them before? Not in Garrionom. Certainly not at home.\n\nFeeling sticky, she scraped mud from her claws, slopping down to her slimy footprints, distorted in her dizziness.\n\nBut she wasn't dizzy anymore. She looked again. The prints were not hers. They were shorter, but thicker. Mammal paws? Mammal prints were rare back home, and usually came in the form of mice. These prints were too large for any mouse she'd ever seen.\n\nShe looked to the strange pillars, familiar yet not, as if they hid the answer. Of course, in concentrating oh so earnestly, Bristone's song entered her head. Shut up! Bristone sang on. Nyra huffed. It made sense to hear it now, in this mysterious place. The melancholy Sperk surely would have loved the rock towers, to craft some ill-fated tale around their multihued spires. She'd fashion them into a song.\n\nA shadow passed overhead.\n\nShe looked up to perfect blue before a slice of night blocked her vision.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she whispered.\n\nTeeth slammed down at her sides.\n\nNyra cried out as a hideous upper jaw pinned her to the ground. Aside each of her flanks, long, emerald fangs jammed through the mud, constricting her to a narrow prison. Between the fangs she saw daylight.\n\nThere was a gap in the teeth ahead. She leaped to it.\n\nA beak stopped her, snapping.\n\nGrinding to a halt, Nyra clambered backward. Back to the throat. Only it couldn't be a throat. The beak was in front of her, snapping still. Nyra's head brushed the ceiling, serrated. Feathered. Feathers as hard as rock.\n\nShe realized she was not inside a mouth, but under a belly. The belly had spears on either side, trapping her. There was one way out. Forward. The beak blocked it, opening to a lashing tongue. A splitting shrill burst from the beak, so strident her hearing seemed to explode. It withdrew, still shrieking. Nyra gasped. Smoke smoldered about, and she feared the beast was burning her alive. Then her throat stung. It was her leaking smoke.\n\nThe belly-cage shook, rocking side to side, the spears lifting and slamming back into their muddy holes, widening and pooling like blood to a fatal wound. Nyra swayed with them, almost crushed or skewered from second to second. Scrunching down, she waited to be spliced open.\n\nSomething bit her from the back.\n\n\"PULL BACK!\"\n\nInstinctively, she tried to jump away from the pain, but the bite held her tail in place.\n\nThe beak snapped, so fast, so fast\u2026\n\nCool air hit her rump. The bite squeezed.\n\n\"NOW!\"\n\nThe bite yanked her backward.\n\nLight. Out in the open. A monster of feathers thrashed ahead, wings thrown wide. She'd been pulled out from under the monster's rump.\n\nShe knew the monster.\n\n\"COME ON!\"\n\nNyra ran blindly, registering the coming rocks, the shrieks behind, and the flash of gray kicking up mud in front of her.\n\nPetite squeals peppered the shrieks. Smaller animals.\n\n\"What's\u2026 that?\" she exhaled one word at a time.\n\n\"Capybara,\" said the Sliver. \"Don't slow, it's coming.\"\n\nNyra dared a look back. The Hawk was hopping like a sparrow; a large, slender sparrow, half dragon, half bird, flickering in iridescent green. Comical, to be so big and birdlike, only it wasn't funny at all. The hops spanned four Agring lengths, each lapsing in a second. She may as well have stood still.\n\n\"Don't slow, I said!\" shouted the Sliver.\n\nThey were nearly to cover. Three lengths, one, and then the trees engulfed them in a noisy shake. Snagging twigs raked her face. It took everything to keep her eyes open through the clawing branches.\n\nBeige lapped up the sky ahead, higher and higher. The pillars. She'd smack right into them.\n\n\"Duck down,\" said the Sliver.\n\nJust before hitting rock, the Sliver twisted into a cracked between the pillars. It vanished inside. Nyra dove after. She tripped, she tumbled. It was darker. A cavern? Something slammed behind her. The Hawk, just outside, too big to squeeze in. Another slam, a boom, and the unbelievable shrieks. If she didn't know better, and she didn't, Nyra would swear she was in a mouth again and the raining pebbles above were congealed saliva.\n\nThe pounding stopped. The cries thinned. Quieter, quieter until nothing at all.\n\nRagged breath shook her stomach. The pillars spiraled above, close together. The Sliver was beside her: gray, with a black stripe down its dorsal side. White fangs flashed, dotted with mud flecks. Yellow eyes gleamed from a shadowy face, dark but for several fresh cuts and a scarlet splotch upon its nose.\n\nIt coughed.\n\n\"Thaydra?\" he said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Amid the Hoodoos",
                "text": "Thaydra?\" he repeated.\n\nThe weight of her thoughts slammed her mouth closed. Ghosts swam out from her imaginings. Together, they condensed on the other's nose tip: red, like a beak.\n\nCrimson.\n\nThe spaces between the pillars formed a sort of cave. The Hawk would pass above them at any moment, casting its terrible shadow, waiting them out. One second. Two. Nothing. Not one rustle. Just quiet.\n\n\"Where's the thing?\" she said.\n\n\"Thing? Oh, the Hawk.\" The other began to circle about her. Crimson was not the youthful Agring she'd imagined falling from the cliff face. His body curved lithely in places, but bulged stoutly in others. Lines reminiscent of tiredness creased his face. Yet he was still young, with alert ears and avian quickness. He was the Sliver, though not of the night. Now he rescued her by day. Most importantly, he was a Sliver of home.\n\n\"It can't get us here,\" he continued, coming back to her front. \"Never fear.\"\n\n\"Never fear,\" she repeated under her breath. Everything was made of fear, at least in the real world. Only snippets of the distant past were safe. Like home. Or the Sorja caves.\n\nThe Zealers.\n\n\"My friends,\" cried Nyra. \"They're on the other side\u2026\"\n\n\"There are others?\" He gazed so intently that Nyra looked away.\n\n\"Four.\"\n\n\"Agrings?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Zealers.\"\n\n\"Zealers,\" whispered Crimson. In a blink she was shoved aside as he galloped to the crack in the pillars, looking out to where the Hawk had chased them moments before.\n\n\"There,\" said Nyra, jamming a claw towards the tree patch on the opposite side of the island. \"What if\u2026 should we\u2026 what do we do?\"\n\n\"Just wait.\" He backed away, holding a paw over his mouth. It was an odd gesture. \"Are they deep in the trees?\"\n\n\"I-I don't know,\" she stammered. \"I mean, I think so. I walked awhile before I got out in the open.\"\n\nHarsh breaths wracked his chest. \"They're fine for now,\" he said. He kept his paw on his mouth, nervous, overwhelmed. Or so it looked. She presumed to understand, as she felt these things in her own bones.\n\nShe looked past him to the opposite side of the island. Surely Olieve and Zacka had woken by now, roused by the raging shrieks of the Hawk during the attack. They'd see that Nyra had disappeared.\n\n\"When they come looking for me,\" she said, \"and get out in the open...\" she had a horrible thought. Her legs buckled. \"Jatika, Sigeen\u2026 they could be dead already!\"\n\n\"You said they were Zealers?\" He withdrew the paw from his mouth, as if registering this fact for the first time. His teeth were clenched, like holding an intense anger at bay.\n\n\"Yes!\" she grimaced, inching back.\n\n\"Zealers?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" she cried.\n\n\"They'll know better.\" He was suddenly calm, with an arrogant flick in his tail. \"They won't go out in the open. They'll have smelled the Hawk by now, your hunters. And it's not eaten yet today. No one is dead.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" she said. Her heart pumped loudly in her ears.\n\nCrimson held his head high, scratching his ears as if the whole thing were a trivial matter of tidal patterns. \"I can tell. I've been watching it for so long\u2026\" he stopped midsentence and jumped back, like he had only just noticed she was there. So captivating was his stare, so befuddled. He looked at her like she had sprouted seven heads.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he said.\n\nShe hesitated, afraid he'd lash out again. \"I'm Nyra,\" she said simply.\n\nHe didn't look convinced. Did he think she was lying? How could he? He didn't know her. He would have never heard of her.\n\n\"You called me Thaydra,\" she offered.\n\nThe gray Agring leaned in, inspecting her. Finally, he nodded. \"I knew that,\" he said stubbornly. \"I know you're not. You're far too young. Yes, that makes sense, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Uh\u2014\"\n\n\"You look like her,\" he sighed. \"She'll be in her early thirties now. And you look younger than her when I left. But that's neither here nor there, is it?\"\n\n\"I'm her daughter. I'm eleven. And a half. Not thirty-three. She is thirty-three.\"\n\nA single laugh punched from his mouth. Then he frowned.\n\n\"Eleven,\" he said. \"Too young to be my daughter, then.\"\n\nNyra squirmed, affronted. She'd had a father, a good one, according to Thaydra, of sound mind and agreeable temperament. This was not Shadowed Fire. She was about to argue but he cut her off.\n\n\"I can't tell you how strange it is to see you. After seventeen years. To even speak to someone. And hear words? They sound wrong. And silly.\" Though he spoke and paced before her, she kept waiting for the edges of his form to fade out and vanish as he always did once the story was over. But Crimson was clear as starlight. Beads of dew reflected off his flanks. Cracked skin rippled his ankles where he'd likely cut through twigs and roots over the years. He was real. It made her anger fade.\n\n\"They told stories about you,\" Nyra whispered. \"You died in the end.\"\n\nCrimson leaped to her, a breath from her face.\n\n\"You were going to the Zealers, yes?\"\n\nNyra leaned away. \"Yes. You saved me on the way up.\" Part of her worried that he wouldn't remember, that the instability of his nature would extinguish even the most vivid memories.\n\n\"How could I forget?\" he said. He moved closer, his fangs nearly brushing hers. \"I saw the Hawk take off that evening. It didn't angle down, so I knew it wasn't after a cetacean, but airborn prey, which hardly ever happens. I followed it to open water. I'd hoped\u2026\" he chuckled, buffeting Nyra with strangely sweet breath, like the moist air around them. \"I'd hoped to escape. And could have. But I opted to save you.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said, wanting to sound grateful as she leaned farther away.\n\n\"You made it, then, to an island out east. That's the one I went to when I flew up north. You can see it from this island on clear days, just barely. But then you actually made it all the way to Garrionom. In winter no less.\" He sounded skeptical. He probably didn't believe her. She was just as unreal to him, so much so that personal boundaries went to the wayside.\n\n\"I had some help.\" She got to her feet, furtively putting distance between them. \"An Aquadray swam me up. He took me the rest of the way.\"\n\n\"And you met the Zealers,\" he laughed louder and longer this time. \"And now they are banishing you.\"\n\n\"Banishing? What? No. No, they are helping me.\"\n\n\"I see,\" he said disbelievingly. \"So no this?\" He waved his claws, spanning across their nook. \"No life-sentence? No torture, or anything of that ilk?\" He outstretched a paw, as if to touch her. He stopped mid distance. \"What did you do right?\"\n\n\"That's not a short story.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" he pleaded.\n\nNyra was about to begin when a surge of anger slammed her temples.\n\n\"Now wait a moment!\" she cried, jumping up. \"You\u2026 you're supposed to be dead!\"\n\n\"Not dead,\" he shrugged.\n\n\"So I see!\" she cried, sounding like Thaydra. \"What happened? How have you survived all these years? Have you been on the island all this time?\"\n\nHe shrugged again.\n\n\"Well?\" she demanded. Her elbows rattled, and she realized that they were locked.\n\nCrimson hung his head. \"Darkmoon fell on me. I wriggled away in the water. I held my breath and swam. He would not have noticed. Then I got to the Green Spot. And I flew. And flew some more. Found Zealers. They weren't very nice. They brought me here. You are up to speed.\"\n\nNyra blinked.\n\nCrimson shrugged a third time. \"Sorry, draggling. I wish I could say it's been an interesting seventeen years. Truth is, I've just lived. I've eaten, I've slept, I've tried and failed to learn the language of the capybara\u2014\"\n\n\"What in Roendon's Light is a capybara?\" Nyra spat, hardly aware that she'd used an expletive, in front of a grownup no less.\n\n\"A very large rodent. The Hawk eats them.\"\n\nNyra looked worriedly to the outside, remembering her friends.\n\n\"Your Zealers are fine,\" Crimson assured. \"And I'm not just saying that so you'll give me all the attention.\" He smiled as though he'd said something funny. \"They might not have known the Hawk was here when landing, what with the storm ripping any smells away, but trust me, they'll know now. No one out-smells a Zealer. That's how Kodoral found me, when I first landed at Garrionom.\" He paused, as if expecting to explain who Kodoral was. Nyra gave no indication of curiosity, and so he pressed one. \"No one would come looking for you in broad daylight now that the Hawk's squawked. Best thing to do now is wait.\"\n\nCrimson sat down. Though given no prompt other than the pressing silence, Nyra began her tale. Unlike Oharassie, he would interrupt the story often, asking her to clarify the facts she used offhandedly. Alive though he was, Crimson was oblivious to every happening in the years leading to Nyra's birth, and then her entire life. He knew so little, like she was telling the story to a complete stranger and not a member of her own family. Most of his interruptions pertained to Mother. After losing Crimson, Thaydra had taken a mate. Nyra stopped speaking after saying her father's name, for Crimson looked so traumatized she thought anything more would kill him.\n\n\"Shadow,\" murmured Crimson. \"He was the only one who didn't chase her!\"\n\nNyra went on to explain her father's violent murder, making the other peer guiltily aside for having chastised Thaydra's choice. Nyra described her mother's maiming, Fuhorn's leadership, the herd's coping, Gatherings, her exile, interspersing back to the Zealer chapter so much she couldn't figure which tale was the main one. At long last, she reached Zacka and Olieve's Union and her journey of the last few weeks.\n\nNyra clacked her tongue. Parched. Dew had dribbled from the branches hours ago. Now they were dry. The sky above had dimmed, peeking between the dizzying stones now tinged with afternoon color.\n\nLegs folding beneath him, Crimson blew introspective whistles over a forked tongue. \"The Zealers said Agrings were enemies. We were demons! And witches. That's what Kodoral called us. Seventeen years ago.\" He snickered.\n\n\"This is funny?\"\n\n\"Oh no no,\" he said somberly. \"It's positively dismal. It's just\u2026\" he swayed from side to side as if nauseous. Nyra worried he'd tip over.\n\n\"It's messed up?\" offered Nyra.\n\nHe straightened, arrogantly flicking his tail again. \"Well, that goes without saying.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Give me a few years,\" he said. \"Maybe by then I'll grasp the concept that you are actually here. And that this fantastical story is real.\"\n\n\"Seconded,\" said Nyra, distracted. The Zealers were safe, said the expert. But the fact remained that she could not see them. She felt alone, trapped in a tight place, just as the Hawk had held her within that cage of gnarled spears. Her head began to throb.\n\n\"Never fear, we'll find them,\" he said, reading her mind, or I'm thinking out-loud for the thousandth time.\n\n\"What were those things coming off the Hawk's belly?\" she asked. \"That made the cage?\"\n\n\"You mean the talons?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"The Hawk makes a cage with its talons when catching the capybaras. I expect it used to hunt like an eagle,\" he made a cringing motion with his claws, \"but the Hawk is old and has arthritic talons. It now uses its beak to kill. So, when land-hunting, it lights down, caging its prey before delving in with the beak. Sometimes it just spears prey to the ground, but its aim is terrible. Still, the capybaras have gotten that treatment more times than I can count.\"\n\n\"Ow,\" she moaned, scrunching her paws to her chest.\n\n\"You're lucky it missed. It misses a lot, but not always.\"\n\nNyra shivered.\n\nCrimson jumped to his feet. \"But that's in the past! Live in the present. How much of the island have you seen?\"\n\n\"Not much,\" she admitted. \"I couldn't see anything when we landed.\"\n\n\"I'll be thorough, then,\" he said with enthusiasm. It reminded Nyra of Mum in 'mission mode.'\n\n\"The island's in two halves,\" he continued. \"The hoodoo side and leafy side.\"\n\n\"What's a hoodoo?\"\n\n\"These?\" He pointed at the closest pillar, incredulous. He gave her a 'how can you not know this' look. \"We are on the hoodoo side. Most of the hoodoos are so close together that the Hawk has no hope of squeezing through. I spend most of my time here. It holds the most rainfall, what with all the bowled rocks. There are a few fishing spots here, since any sea water between the hoodoos is extremely shallow. Most food comes from the leafy side.\" He pointed to Nyra's muddy trail from the other end of the island. \"Some of the trees fruit, or have nuts, though not in winter. I eat roots year round. That's what the capybara do. But there's not much vegetation on this side. I think it's the shadow cast by the hoodoos. The tasty plants are far away, in the sun.\"\n\n\"Roots all winter?\" she said, disgusted. \"And nuts and fruit the rest of the year?\"\n\n\"That or starving. And who are you to judge?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Have you ever had fruit?\" said Crimson.\n\nShe hadn't. No Agring had. In fact, she wasn't sure she'd ever seen an actual fruit. Nyra had tried berries, every one of them awful. Berries on the Northern Coast were bitter. As for nuts, she'd seen almonds, but had never thought to taste them.\n\n\"Trouble is I can't cross between the two patches whenever I like. If we tried to cross now, it'd catch us. There's a tall hoodoo, one larger than the rest. I call it the Perch. Guess why.\"\n\n\"Why?\" said Nyra, honestly having no idea. Having her guess seemed childish.\n\n\"The Hawk lives there,\" he said. \"Day or night, rain or sun. The Perch is high enough that I can't tell if it's sleeping or awake. It can see the entire island from up there. I can't cross over the clearing. Except,\" he paused dramatically, \"in bad weather.\"\n\nNyra looked up, trying to see the Perch.\n\n\"We are out of view now,\" he said. \"But the clearing is always in full view. When it rains the Hawk sleeps. I've watched it hunt the capybaras, but it never does so in the rain, as long as the rain is heavy. I think water weighs on its feathers. Or maybe it's just lazy.\"\n\n\"So,\" she pondered, \"when it storms, you cross from the koodoos to the tree patch.\"\n\n\"Hoodoos. And yes.\"\n\n\"So when it's sleeping, why not use that time to escape?\"\n\n\"Because it sleeps during exceptionally bad weather. It takes advantage of the only time it knows I'll never get away.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\nHe started over, but where Nyra expected frustration she saw excitement. He put her in mind of Jesoam, elated to be sharing one's particular brand of expertise. \"I can never tell when it's sleeping because it stays so still on the Perch. Only in bad weather am I certain. It knows I'd die trying to get out during a bad storm, and we have many out here. It trusts I won't try\u2026 well, knows I won't try.\"\n\nNyra groaned, discouraged. \"So it sleeps when the weather is bad enough to keep you on the island, but you are still able to cross the clearing between food and shelter at those times.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" he said proudly.\n\n\"So when will it storm again?\" she whined. \"When can we cross to the leafy side? The Zealers aren't safe!\"\n\n\"They're safe,\" he assured. \"The leafy side isn't perfect for shelter, but it will keep them hidden for now.\"\n\n\"And the storm?\"\n\n\"Tonight. Last night was just the teaser. This storm isn't finished.\"\n\n\"How can you tell?\" said Nyra, feeling more repetitive in her questioning than Grandma Tega, who insisted on knowing the food preferences and sleeping habits of everyone she met.\n\n\"The capybara. They get ornery before Mal Storms. They sense it.\"\n\nNyra groaned again. The second sun was still high in the sky. If a storm was on the way, it hid itself well.\n\n\"I look forward to meeting them,\" laughed Crimson. \"Especially this Jatika. He sounds strong. If he's fast, he might be able to bridge the clearing in good weather. That will be useful.\"\n\n\"Useful?\" she asked, new worry putting a bad taste in her mouth.\n\n\"Yes, and that's just the tip of it. Having Zealers around will do a world of good. Everything will be quicker and more efficient.\"\n\n\"No no no, wait,\" said Nyra. \"Why are you saying this? Like we're staying?\"\n\nHis face fell.\n\n\"You made it in,\" he said simply.\n\nNyra faltered.\n\n\"You're trapped now.\"\n\nIt was Nyra's turn to laugh. \"No, the Zealers are here. We'll get back to them and leave. And go home!\" she shouted."
            },
            {
                "title": "He shifted his feet. His wings twitched",
                "text": "\"Come on!\" she teased, but felt no joy. She waited for him to crack into a smile. \"You don't think four Zealers can figure this out?\"\n\nA creeping feeling began in her toes, inching up to her brain. She imagined herself in thick, green feathers, growing large. Bigger and bigger, until she was the Hawk. Larger than Crimson, larger than Olieve, larger than the four Zealers put together. And then some. A lot of some.\n\n\"Nyra, you are merely another mouse in a long lasting game,\" said Crimson.\n\nShe trembled. \"The Zealers\u2014\"\n\n\"Six mice then. Or two mice and four rats. Here, we are the same, where the hunter is absolute.\"\n\nHer eyes welled. Stop it. They welled more. \"What about Kodoral? She dropped you off here, didn't she? And she got back. How did she get out?\"\n\n\"Fair question,\" he said, upbeat, ignoring her tears. Insensitive or ignorant, she could not tell. \"Kodoral didn't get close to the island. She dropped me in the water, a fair distance away from the shallows\u2014the shallows that keep me from diving out of the Hawk's reach the few times I've tried. She dropped me, and I unknowingly swam to land. Right into the trap.\"\n\nEars itching, Nyra rubbed them raw, pulsating over her flaming forehead. What else? There has to be something else.\n\n\"But she did get away!\" she exclaimed. \"I mean, the first time she came. Olieve told me that Kodi got stuck here as an adolescent. It's what drove her mad: the Hawk and being trapped. But she got away somehow. I saw her, Crimson! She's alive, in Garrionom, right now!\"\n\n\"You've told me,\" he said. \"But did Olieve ever tell you how her aunt escaped?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nyra said, crestfallen. \"I'm not sure that she knows. I think it was sworn to secrecy,\" she said, making the last part up, not wanting to sound na\u00efve.\n\n\"Ha!\" He jumped up. \"Olieve may not know because Kodi's ashamed, but it was no small matter. Even me, a demon, heard how Kodoral got out. She told me to make a point. She made it clear that although she got out, I could never do the same. A young Kodoral had been gone exploring for so long that her parents sent half the Royal guards to find her. They came to her rescue alright, but at a cost. They landed and quickly realized what they'd done. But, being the brave idiots they were, they flew in every direction creating a diversion. The Hawk chased and caught them up one by one. Only a few survived, Kodoral included, flying off while their friends got their lives crunched out.\"\n\nNyra tried to stifle a whimper before it leaked out.\n\n\"I know. Blind fellowship,\" he said.\n\nShe raked over her ears again and again. \"No, no, this will not happen.\" Jatika in the least could never be bested. So what if the Dragon Hawk was a dozen times larger? Jatika was a warrior, and warriors didn't die unless they came from stories. Did they? No one had ever died in Nyra's life, except the old. It wouldn't happen now. No one would get the best of Jatika.\n\n\"Don't\u2026\" said Crimson, taking Nyra's paws.\n\n\"There's six of us,\" she heaved. \"We'll think of something.\"\n\n\"There is no something,\" he said. He didn't sound upset at all. \"I've done everything.\"\n\n\"No you haven't.\"\n\n\"Seventeen-years,\" he chanted.\n\nMaybe he wanted to be realistic. Maybe, despite Nyra's great experience of the wide world, he wanted to be a grownup again in the presence of someone smaller. But Nyra had known growing up, spending the better part of her life learning the rights and wrongs from peers and elders. And although much younger than almost everyone in the Nammock herd, she'd done so much more in very little time.\n\nCrimson, however, had not grown like her or anyone else. Could one grow away? How old had he been when he'd left the Nammocks? In his early twenties, Nyra estimated, perhaps about Olieve's and Zacka's age. Perfectly grown up. But when did it stop? Did growth end after childhood?\n\nCrimson was not normal. He'd been alone. What did that do to a dragon, other than make them lose hope? Just as Nyra had trouble imagining her life without Sperks, perhaps Crimson couldn't see his without a Dragon Hawk.\n\n\"It's different now,\" he said hurriedly. \"I've never had help. Maybe there's a chance.\"\n\nHe's trying, she thought. He's trying, but doesn't believe it. How long had it taken Kodoral to go mad? Nyra studied Crimson. Maybe it was just the euphoria of speaking to someone again that made him so strange.\n\nNyra thought she could go mad before the suns touched down if no glimmer of hope danced in their wake.\n\nWe'll get away. Just focus on getting to the Zealers tonight. Go from there. They'll have a plan.\n\nThey had to."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Maelstrom",
                "text": "In the low groan of evening came folds of dreary color. From the suns descended throaty puffs of clouds. Something unexpected pricked far below Nyra's skin. Under the blotting heavens was terror, ready to bend bones into gruesome angles.\n\nSprightly rain italicized the gusts misting the island, trying to cheer away whatever jagged shadows jarred above. Then it thickened and grew cold. Patter turned to splatter. The droplets narrowed, teething downward. Lightning clapped silver in the sky, highlighting leaf veins, cobwebs, haggard rock faces, and nooks and crannies of the most secluded shelters.\n\nPeering from her hideout, Nyra didn't blink through the brightness. Time to go, she thought bitterly.\n\nAnother crash. Crimson flashed white with her, his red nose indistinguishable from his gray body in the blind. They shared a gaze, a brief one. Crimson turned away, meandering through the hoodoos towards the brush. Nyra was unable to move. She was safe here, leaps beneath the monster's clutches, squeezed amongst the pillars.\n\nWait\u2026\n\nBut as he rounded out of sight, she followed, drawn on by that uncaring driver called instinct. They'd planned, they'd made a choice. Get to the edge. Run like fire. Don't stop. Get to the leafy side.\n\nShe should have reviewed the plan more. What had she pondered this last, silent hour? Stupid things. How much sap was in that tree compared to that other one? Is there a tree out there with only sap in the center? What would happen if you cracked it open?\n\nShe shook it all away, repeating the primal details of their dangerous endeavor. Taking a breath, she tried to let everything else go. Just the steps. Automatically she drove her paws, forward and forward until Crimson came into view again. He was at the edge of the rocks, by the thicket that had scratched her so terribly on the way in. Through this section, they'd meet the smallest point in the clearing. Crimson traveled it often, but apparently not enough to detangle the dried sticks and thorny seed heads.\n\nShe walked low on his advice. The capybara cleared the best trails, but they were at an Agring chest level. Kneeling down, she imagined an insect on a forest floor. Down here, everything towered up and away. The thunder rumbled on, lighting the sky lilac. The hoodoos behind her were black on the purple heavens.\n\nShe saw the Perch, taller than the rest. The top was hidden, obscured by twigs about her face. Surely the Hawk was there now. She wanted to see it, needing to know it was sleeping, even if Crimson said it was hard to tell for sure.\n\nThunder struck.\n\nThe clearing emerged, where the Hawk had nearly caught her earlier that day. Crimson stopped, poised at the edge. Nyra paused, a step behind. Sloshing ahead was an ocean of mud, growing wetter by the second. They would be able to run only so fast.\n\nCrimson breathed, in-out, in-out. Watching his chest rise and fall, full of life, Nyra trembled. She wanted to ask him again exactly what to do next, though they'd discussed it several times. But as she croaked a subtle sound, it seemed to echo on the land, like someone had shouted in her ears. She promptly closed her mouth. Crimson did not react. Instead, he put his paw on hers and squeezed.\n\nHe leaned back. Nyra mimicked.\n\nWait\u2026\n\nAnother thunder crack, with many forks working as one. The Agrings pushed off together into the expanse. The beat of her heart raced an octave higher. It was like plunging into ice. Not for the rain\u2014blazing down on her wings, springing white halos off her skin\u2014but in the absence of shelter. It reminded her of when Darkmoon cornered her to the cliff. It was the feeling of cold exposure.\n\nThe ground warbled in mud, suctioning her sodden feet in and out with loud pops. Each footfall shouted as loud as the overhead thunder. She dared another look back. The Hawk coiled hookishly at the top of the Perch, at last in complete sight. Her spine tickled so harshly it hurt.\n\nThe tree cover reared up ahead. Four lengths, three, two\u2014she jumped the last step. Leaves and branches cuddled her close. Crimson breathed fervently, the corners of his mouth twitching. She could not smile, not yet. Her heart beats slowed. She thought clearly again.\n\nBehind her, the Hawk's outline was in its same place. So very still, so very asleep.\n\nIt shuddered.\n\nNyra flitted farther into the trees, Crimson at her side. The Hawk went still again. Not woken. Yet.\n\nAt that moment, the weight of the island fell from her shoulders. All the stress, all the worry bubbling in that muddy clearing, troubled her no longer. Now, Olieve was close. And despite Crimson's doubts, Nyra knew better. The Zealers would have a plan. They'd all get out and in days be home at last.\n\nWater plopped on her nose and wings, the angry stings of needle rain pampered down by the canopies.\n\nIt's almost over, she crooned inside.\n\nNyra ran headlong to where she'd woken that morning. She thought of Olieve's empty expression and the others greeting her with surprise. What would she share first? Her near death experience with the Hawk? That Crimson had lived, despite their predictions? Or the strangeness that they had stumbled upon this island in the first place. She could imagine Zacka repeating his sentences, shocked at the coincidence, while Olieve would go on to explain how it was no coincidence and that it made perfect sense: This island is just one on the track connecting Garrionom and Nyra. You, Ny, would have landed here on your way up if that Sliver hadn't pushed you away. No shock that we landed here too. Jatika, warm as usual, would welcome Crimson to their party. Sigeen would grumble, she was sure. But it didn't matter. The Zealers would explain the mission, instill confidence in the doubtful Crimson, whereby Nyra would mutter told you so.\n\nNyra remembered the present when Crimson jolted to a halt. She'd fallen behind and bumped into him. She looked past his wings. They'd reached the spot. What he saw must have been halting, indeed. To see a Zealer for the first time after all these years.\n\nBut as she stepped beyond him, she saw\u2026\n\nNothing.\n\nThe Zealers were gone.\n\nNyra stared vacantly in the empty space, as if expecting them to materialize from thin air. It was the right spot. There was a divot in the ground where they had all piled together to sleep. Nyra dropped her nose down, looking for clues. What do you expect to find? Crimson twitched at her side, either bewildered by her behavior or searching for evidence. She didn't pay enough attention.\n\nStraightening up she ran to the nearest edge of the tiny clearing. Surely the Zealers were in the woods, close by. She ran to the opposite edge, then another. There was just the lilac darkness and silhouettes of curvy trees. She darted left and right until every edge was covered. Nothing.\n\nWhere are they?\n\nShe glanced at Crimson. He eyed her pleadingly, waiting for an explanation. His end of the bargain was fulfilled. He'd gotten her across the void alive. Now the duty fell to Nyra. She was responsible for finding the Zealers. It was supposed to be the easy part.\n\nCould they\u2026 could they have left\u2026 without\u2026?\n\nCrimson wasn't looking at her anymore. He watched his feet, crestfallen. Nyra came closer, not sure of what to say or do.\n\nBut he wore a fiery focus, not sadness. Nyra followed his gaze to his feet.\n\nHe was standing in Zealer tracks. She hadn't seen them before. Crimson had unknowingly blocked them. Nyra whooshed past her companion to the woods. She could barely see the prints in the dark, but they were there, her own feet falling into each. She followed them out to the open field of mud, stopping just a hair from exposure. Far on the left was where she and Crimson had entered, and to the right, dunes rolling to the snarling ocean.\n\nStriding off in the open were Jatika, Sigeen, Zacka, and Olieve. They appeared almost invisible in the rain sheets, blue bodies glittering in and out. They walked away, toward the hoodoos. Looking for me. They moved slowly, lingering below the clenched claws of the sleeper perched wickedly above.\n\nFrom behind came a sharp whisper of warning: Crimson telling her to stay put. She tensed. Above, the Hawk was still.\n\nThey'll make it. Just stay put. Stay put.\n\nThen, highlighted in blurry brilliance, Olieve twisted uneasily in the downpour, pursing mildly at the sky, no more troubled by the raking claws of peril than those little patters above her vacant eyes. If the Hawk saw the Zealers now, three might make it. But Olieve\u2014unseeing, unknowing, and utterly vulnerable\u2014would surely perish.\n\nNyra shot out into the open. She shouted Olieve's name. The storm raged in full. She cried louder, hoping for a single trace of sound to weave its way through the silver curtains to the damp ears of her defenseless friend.\n\nBut aside the storm, aside the shouting, fear, and every other horrible distraction, Bristone's song came back into her brain. Too preoccupied to fight it, Nyra listened to it play in her head.\n\nShe recalled every word as she heard them:\n\n\u2003Drifting on the sea of seas\n\n\u2003By a lulling, pulling breeze,\n\n\u2003Floating on the rain of rains,\n\n\u2003Aided in serenest feigns.\n\n\u2003Soaring on the frost of frosts,\n\n\u2003No ties hyper those who've lost\n\n\u2003Balanced on the dawn of dawns,\n\n\u2003Deduce what's said to quiescent pawns.\n\n\u2003Follow in, they follow in,\n\n\u2003In to greet the beautied sin.\n\nNyra might have closed her eyes and been in mist instead of rain, where it was a sunnier day, and her greatest tribulation was a petty punishment. That day, Bristone had serenaded in her lovely voice before grumbling back to her murky temperament. She'd spoken of the song and what it meant, but Nyra remembered nothing of the Sperk's description.\n\nThe song repeated itself now. It must have cycled through quickly, for she'd breached so little ground. It seemed to fall into a warp absent of time. Nyra's shouts ceased. She needed to listen more closely, though she didn't know why it was so important.\n\nIt went on. Only the voice wasn't Bristone's. It trilled more lightly, more fluidly, and was strangely pure, as though it had not passed over tongues to reach the singer but was borne from the singer itself. This was the true voice for which it was written, Nyra knew. The origin. So smooth, so faultless that just one could uphold its magnificence. The words meant something, not just as lyrics, but in a way that embodied what she was and that which was around her.\n\nThe words changed.\n\n\u2003The hunter, the hunted, sway to dance,\n\n\u2003The former born to coax, entrance,\n\n\u2003For mine is universally sung,\n\n\u2003Once the final hour's rung.\n\n\u2003Lullaby, Serenade, Hypnotize, Seduce,\n\n\u2003Dreamed into a language truce,\n\n\u2003Not wish nor whim can here prepare,\n\n\u2003The latter's loss to hunger's snare.\n\nThe sky rattled into pieces, the Perch shedding at the top. Shuddering, no, shaking, in a way that was deliberate. Wings expanded, feathers flared.\n\nThe top of the Perch leaped away, hovering, then listing, silently and slowly as a pelican in flight.\n\nThe Zealers ceased to move, at last seeing Nyra, but not the monstrosity creeping upon them. Their faces were printed with fear. They felt the song too, heard it, vividly imagining shadows on their bare backs.\n\nScream, warn them.\n\nShe breathed.\n\nToo late. The Hawk crashed down between the Zealers and Nyra. Its beak opened in the muted moonlight. It snapped. She jumped. The Zealers vanished from sight, blocked away by a living horror.\n\nNyra flung skyward, driving headlong into the rain. The air turned thin quickly. Up and up she climbed, yet the beast seemed to stay the same size. Impossibly big, it writhed below on the ground, bothered by little blue insects\u2014Jatika and Sigeen, with Zacka pushing Olieve toward cover.\n\nNipping at the beast's wing tips was Jatika, skirting off just as the deathly beak swung away from Sigeen, who attacked the opposite side.\n\nDistraction.\n\nA gust knocked her several lengths through the air. She rolled, unable to see sky or ground. She had to take cover and fast. Reeling in confusion, she slanted to where she knew the tree patch began. But she could not see it. Where am I? she panicked. The clearing was gone too. Everything below was black. Blind as Olieve.\n\nCrimson appeared, flapping toward her, smoke pooling from his nostrils. She spotted the trees, far off behind him.\n\nShe'd been blown over the ocean.\n\nThe Hawk shot up from the island, following Crimson. Fast, so fast the seconds turned invariably precious.\n\nShe wanted to bite herself for not diving for cover and not taking advantage of the Zealers' stalling. Why didn't she pay attention when they landed yesterday? She would have recognized this horrible place, for its tall trees that were not trees at all. She hated herself. And she cursed Crimson, to whom she was indebted, but would never be able to repay.\n\nThis is really it.\n\nBlack spittle frothed from the animal ocean, very loud, yet she did not hear it well over the screams pulsing from her brain, twisting her entrails to hardened knots. The song twittered on, horrible but strangely comforting too.\n\nCrimson's mouth moved. He was shouting something right next to her. She only heard the song.\n\nA wave swelled from the sea, larger than the rest. It peaked higher and higher until it seemed to rival Garrionom's twin peaks. Why did it look so high?\n\nBecause it's higher than me, she thought with dull panic. She was in line with the ocean surface, her wingtips just beating the water. She needed to fly up.\n\nNo. If I angle up, the Hawk will catch me sooner. Did it matter?\n\nRealization popped over her fear, granting her a final power. I have a choice. She brightened. A choice in death.\n\nHawk or Ocean.\n\nSuppose if?\n\nShe tensed, readying. She did not see the Hawk a length away. She didn't see its jaws open, nor its colorless eyes swirling moonlike to her single universe. Instead, she saw the four spots behind the Hawk. The little blue insects.\n\nTwo sunrays punctured the east. She tasted the air, hoping to catch what lay below the ominous clouds. She was just another mortal about the race, as mortals always raced and would forever.\n\nQuay, would you tell me if you were there?\n\nA paw took hers while she hovered in the sky. An odd gesture. Crimson.\n\nThe wave rolled closer.\n\nSomething swallowed the Agrings together. The mouth, or the sea. There was no telling. She may have flopped along a tongue, sliding back and back into a waiting throat. Or it was the ocean, chomping her skin to bits. She would struggle, she would squirm, until she dipped peacefully into the bottomless black, where little things would digest her graying flesh to white bone.\n\nThe pinching stomach lashed acidic saliva or salty currents. Bubbles, no, fangs swirled above and below, side and front. Her lungs began to squeeze, and tiny nips crackled her chest. How long would it take to die? How sensitive would she be to the black claws threading through her fading spirit?\n\nOne last wish came, white and fuzzy, bordered with faces of family and friends, landscapes and memories:\n\nBe fast, she wished to someone, or no one. Just one blow, then make it over.\n\nClaws grabbed her. In a blast of fresh air, she popped from the prison. Water cascaded from her limbs in waterfalls.\n\nPink morning widened from Quay's opening eye, glorious brows of canary searing out the gloom. Bright, so bright that Nyra felt the storm was burning away from each pull of her lungs. Sodden, wet and alive, she looked down at the ocean, unclenching to a thousand fizzles.\n\nThere it was: a single patch of baby blue, carrying her up heavenward as it often happened after death in fables. Jatika. Another patch appeared, and another, and another. Four altogether. Ah, four. From Sigeen hung another creature, like her, dripping, exhausted, but living.\n\nSmaller and smaller shrunk the waves. The heavy roars of writhing ocean, and the sopping beast flailing within it turned to whispers. The Hawk, swallowed, at last, by the one thing in the world that was bigger. There it was: a shadow of a diabolic kind snapping its razored wings fruitlessly from the callous, loving sea."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Green Spot",
                "text": "Nyra knew she had survived the storm of storms. Her luck should have run out long ago between scouring the seas and skirting a cave-in. The young Agring had had ample opportunity to be squished, impaled, and any other colorful way to die. Yet she lived now on the last stretch of the Vousille Ocean.\n\nWhen they reached another island at mid-day, Nyra could not sleep. She was tired, but the Hawk flared in her mind. It must have been the same for Crimson. He stayed awake with her while the Zealers dozed. Together they watched the mottled sunshine above, obscured in thickening clouds. The storm of storms was over, but not the winter.\n\n\"What is that song?\" Nyra said quietly so to not wake the Zealers. As much as that eerie tune haunted Nyra, it could not parallel Crimson's pain, or so she figured. After seventeen years stranded, he would have heard the song a fair number of times. Wouldn't he? The song had come up twice for Nyra in her travels, both in the midst of the Hawk.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" he murmured, scratching shapeless patterns in the sand. \"But I think it's a hunting call.\"\n\nHunting call. Yes, that was what Bristone had said. The Sperk mentioned a dark predator with scales rising from the skin. She'd meant feathers, whether the Sperk knew it or not.\n\n\"What do you mean a hunting call?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"One like no other,\" said Crimson. \"It's a song everyone can understand no matter what their language. It's universal.\"\n\nNyra's brow furrowed. It was too whimsical, like she was hearing Bristone all over again. \"If we are the only ones who've heard it, how do you know it's universal?\"\n\n\"Because we're not the only ones,\" he explained. \"Well, we're the only ones that I know personally, but there were stories, long before I left the Northern Coast. Sperk stories, not Agrings', and certainly not for dragglings. I overheard the guards speaking of Hawks. Sperks are worldlier. They know much more of far off places, and that includes strange animals. Sperks believe that Hawks have a special song for their prey. And all prey understand it, from dragons to capybaras.\"\n\nNyra shook her head. This was magic talk. Though she could not know the future, or even the existence of deities, she knew that magic was just a thing of fables. She was old enough to know better. Even the glowing Zealer Stones had a reason for glowing. She didn't know what it was, but there was an answer, and it had nothing to do with the fantastical.\n\nYet the Hawk, in all its terrible grandeur, was far more story-like than anything real. And she'd now seen so much of reality at its darkest. If anything in the wide world were capable of true magic, might it be this bird-dragon? She didn't share this out loud, though she knew Crimson would agree. She would not believe in magic, but it reminded her of something that Grandma Tega used to say, how lying to oneself often made life livable, but caught up to you before the end.\n\n\"What are the odds Bristone would talk about the song and then I'd hear it?\" she asked, hoping a logical question would turn the conversation.\n\n\"Who is Bristone?\" asked Crimson.\n\nBristone was sixteen: he'd left before her birth. \"A Sperk,\" explained Nyra. \"Darkmoon's late-mate's niece. Regaleye's daughter. She sang the song once.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Crimson. \"Darkmoon's late-mate's niece. Late. I keep forgetting Royalwing is dead. Your father had some courage, I'll give him that\u2026 killing a Sperk\u2014\"\n\n\"But what are the odds Bristone would sing it and then I'd hear it?\" Nyra insisted, staying on the topic.\n\nJatika lifted his head from the pile of sleeping Zealers. \"Crimson just explained that,\" he said, yawning. He'd been listening the whole time. Nyra was further grateful she'd not expressed her fears of the Hawk and magic. To say such things to the practical Jatika would have been embarrassing.\n\n\"It's a well known song,\" continued the Zealer. \"It's not much of a coincidence that this Bristone sang it, although the origins are often fuzzy, as most who hear it first-hand do not survive.\"\n\n\"But Bristone knew it,\" said Nyra.\n\nJatika nodded. \"Then she heard accurate folklore. As did Zealers, it turns out. I recognized the song last night. The Hawk Lullaby.\" There was a flicker of fear in his brave eyes.\n\n\"Did you learn about the song through Kodoral?\" Nyra asked Jatika.\n\n\"Ha,\" said a second Zealer. Olieve's head popped up from the pile. \"Kodi would never share that with a Sorja, just as she never told me how she escaped the Hawk as an adolescent. More secrets to play, like to scare Crimson when she took him to the island.\"\n\n\"Did you know the song, Olieve?\" asked Crimson.\n\nThe Zealer stretched out her long claws. \"Like Jatika said, we Zealers have accurate folklore.\"\n\nNyra stood up. \"You never told me you knew the song!\" she accused.\n\nOlieve did not react.\n\n\"We were imprisoned for days,\" Nyra continued. \"You never mentioned a song, or talked about Hawks.\"\n\n\"It wasn't relevant,\" she countered. \"You never mentioned a Hawk. That said, you win the award for hypocrisy: she-who-never-spoke-about-herself.\"\n\n\"I talked about myself,\" said Nyra quietly.\n\n\"Sperks,\" reminded Olieve. \"You couldn't be bothered to bring them up either.\"\n\nNyra had no response to that.\n\n\"I think we should sleep,\" said Zacka, hidden somewhere behind the others. Nyra grumbled and lay down again, her anger soon lost in slumber.\n\n\"For the love of Quay, stop circling!\" said Sigeen on the flight six days later.\n\nCrimson grinned, nearly clipping the Zealer's chin. It was Crimson's forty-somethingth time rounding about the flying party. Nyra had lost count after thirty-seven.\n\n\"Oh, look who's in charge?\" scoffed Crimson. \"And why so cold?\"\n\nSigeen scowled. \"Is that a jab at Garrionom, or me?\" He didn't look happy with the retort, like he wished he'd been cleverer.\n\n\"I meant your mother,\" said Crimson. \"Or has she warmed up now?\"\n\nSigeen growled, readying to lunge.\n\n\"Enough,\" said Jatika, but he held back a snicker.\n\nCrimson's vigor was contagious. It had taken a few days, but he was at last over the trauma of the Hawk. And why not? The monster was far behind, and ahead the freedom he had given up on long ago. Nyra found it rejuvenating. Not that the Zealers were bad company. But after that first trek from the Southern Coast, Olieve's and Zacka's sassy banter became redundant. Crimson, however, came up with games, like aerial tricks. Sigeen shot them down, fearing they'd expend too much energy. Or maybe the Zealer didn't want to deal with the noise. Either way, Jatika would agree, albeit more politely. Nevertheless, Crimson brought the fun back. He was most fond of telling stories. Truth be told, they were a bit mundane. Not much had happened to him in later life, and most of his stories of home Nyra had heard before. But he told each with such zest that she couldn't help but be enraptured. To him, all was fascinating.\n\nHis few good stories involved escape attempts from the Hawk. Birds didn't fare well in water, except gulls and geese, as far as he knew. Thus he'd spent years dreaming of how to get the Hawk wet and then get away. Rain didn't seem to do the trick. The Hawk closed its feathers tight in storms, keeping the moisture out. Crimson admitted jealousy of Nyra, who'd gotten it wet during her trip up north when it struck down from the sky and into the ocean. It had wriggled from the water mostly dry, except for maybe its talons and belly. The other night the Hawk had driven toward them face-first, straight into the waves and soaking its wings. 'Teamwork,' Crimson had said. 'We did it together.' Nyra had no reply. She only remembered flapping in place, blocking out whatever wits and cunning Crimson remembered.\n\n\"I've told these stories to myself so many times, pretending I was back home telling someone else,\" he said now.\n\n\"Who would you pretend to talk to?\" Nyra often asked questions about the stories, which encouraged him. It made him boastful. He believed himself a fantastic storyteller, and told Nyra it was a skill he'd inherited from his mother. She didn't mind. It passed the time.\n\n\"Thaydra,\" he said, \"and my brothers. Ackeezo followed me around everywhere as a draggling. He wanted to be me. I expect he will again!\"\n\nMum was a favorite topic of his. He would ask about her happiness, taking Nyra's news with varied degrees of acceptance. 'I want her well,' he'd say, but his face often betrayed the words. He'd pout over Mother's contentment, not on purpose, but it showed. Perhaps it was one more hint that she had moved on. Never did he mention Dada, not directly. Instead he'd asked sideways questions, or dropped little comments so that the subject of Shadow, namely in the eyes of Thaydra, might be broached. Nyra admitted to not knowing much about her father. When this happened, Crimson would mellow down. He's getting tired, Nyra figured. But it was more than fatigue. In such a small time he'd learned so much, most of it unhappy. For Crimson, many harbored hopes were dashed, and worse yet, the lives of loved ones, including his brother (Blaze's biological father). The Northern Coast had gone on without him.\n\nWhen not telling or listening to a story, Crimson flew alone, out of conversation range, wearing a very sad expression. He and Nyra had been flying more as they traveled south (Sigeen had stopped arguing about making good time). The air was warmer, and they didn't freeze as easily. Crimson would always come back, cheerful and with new stories. His vacillating moods had Nyra wondering if either his sadness or happiness were fabricated. Yet both came across sincere. Was he always like this, or had the island made him unstable? It was one of many questions for Mum when Nyra returned home.\n\nHearing her own recountings of life through Crimson's ears, she began to fear for her own absence. Would anything have changed in the last season? As Nyra well knew, the greatest changes occurred in the blink of an eye, and they were as unpredictable as they were irreparable. On the night she'd left, the Northern Coast was upside down. What of the aftermath? Vor had tried to leave first, shrinking beneath Darkmoon as the Sperk crashed to the cliff edge. As the first one trying to get out, Vor would surely be punished, wouldn't he? The twins had done worse, far worse, chasing Nyra down the cliff as she fell. Darkmoon stopped them, too. And Jesoam! Jes had caught fire. And then there was Fuhorn, their leader...\n\nAnd Mum. Darkmoon would have punished Mum for sure. He did punish Mum, banishing her child. Even at her young age, Nyra felt a flicker of maternity and shuddered. What was that like? What was it like to never see your offspring again? To imagine it\u2014a cold and lonely little body, nature flushing out its life, and Thaydra, powerless to breathe it back in.\n\nThat had to be punishment enough. Had to be. But an itch in her brain reminded her of Thaydra's wings. Darkmoon has maimed Mum even after killing her mate and friends. Maybe their deaths were simply retribution for his own loss, and not an actual punishment, and so he maimed her to kill her spirit. It hadn't worked. Thaydra endured. Even now, in banishing Nyra, Thaydra's family was not completely tarnished. She had Blaze.\n\nWhat became of Blaze?\n\nStop. Sweat beaded her ice-cool forehead. Stop there.\n\n\"Crimson, watch Nyra,\" said Olieve, coming to her side. Zacka followed his mate, cross. He didn't like Olieve getting too close to the ocean. Nyra was drifting low. Crimson was a length above, turning sad again.\n\n\"Ny sounds lonely,\" Olieve shouted up to Crimson. \"And she could stand to study your flight patterns; get an idea of how an adult moves.\"\n\nNyra frowned. \"What do you mean?\" she hissed so only Olieve could hear. \"He's hardly flown at all in\u2026 well, practically forever! And you can't even see! How can you tell\u2014\"\n\nOlieve's ears quivered in warning. \"You're listing, and he's moping. Try to keep him happy.\"\n\n\"How can you tell he's moping?\" asked Nyra.\n\n\"He hasn't said anything since he mentioned your mum today. Ergo, moping.\"\n\nOlieve lifted up as fast as she had come, Zacka in tow. Nyra followed up to Crimson, who began to beam.\n\n\"Don't worry, I know what they're doing,\" he whispered cheekily. \"You're a great flier. I'll try harder to smile.\"\n\nNyra cleared her throat uncomfortably.\n\n\"Hey, listen here,\" he said, tapping her elbow. \"What's gray and has a red beak?\"\n\nRiddles! When was the last time she'd even thought of riddles? Probably the last time Blaze upstaged her in solving one. Crimson wanted her to guess him, but it was a trick. In the herd, his nose had been famous. Fuhorn, watching the birth of her first youngling, saw a patch of scarlet burst from the hairline-cracked shell. Hastily, she named the infant Crimson: the first prepared female name she and her late-mate had come up with. But as the fissure deepened, their would-be-daughter turned gray. Male. Unwilling to renege her proclamation, and seeing as none of the other three eggs hatched female, the name stuck.\n\n\"Beak, beak,\" she muttered. \"Beak. So a bird, I guess. But I don't know any birds with\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes you do!\" Crimson cut in. He swooped in front of her playfully.\n\n\"Oh, oh!\" she exclaimed. \"Gulls! Some are gray and have little red tip on their beaks. That's it, isn't it? I got it right?\"\n\n\"Right! Smart you are. You must be Thaydra's.\"\n\nThere again, he mentioned Mother. \"Got anymore?\" she asked, remembering what Olieve said.\n\n\"Hmm,\" he said. \"None come to mind. There's no inspiration out here. I came up with the last one because my nose is right in front of my face. So unless this,\" he spread a paw across the horizon, \"becomes interesting, I'm out.\"\n\nNyra looked around. \"The Zealers? Any riddles about them?\"\n\n\"Tons, I'm sure.\" Then he whispered, \"But I'm not sure foul-face would put up with them.\" Seeing Sigeen's hardened expression, Nyra agreed.\n\n\"How about,\" she found two waves rolling high. They had spear-like crests at the tops. \"Those. Those funny waves. See them?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do,\" said Crimson, squinting. Then his eyes widened. \"Good Light! I spoke too soon!\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"The ocean being boring!\" he shouted.\n\nThe two waves were lighter colored than the rest. They grew bigger.\n\n\"They aren't waves, Nyra. Look, they're whales!\"\n\nZacka gasped from above. Jatika exclaimed as well, and even Sigeen broke into surprise.\n\n\"Whales?\" she said. But they aren't real. No animal could thrive where it couldn't breathe, nor hunt in darkness with sound. These were stories, where mythical mammals flushed up a lake's worth of water on each breath, like fire bursting from dragons.\n\nThen it happened. A tower of mist spouted, so high it would have enveloped the entire flying party if they came too close. Thousands of sun spots dazzled the cusp of the blowhole, dancing back over a sickle dorsal fin. The whale went under, its tale ripping up a waterfall from the sea. It disappeared and appeared again alongside its companion.\n\n\"Hookbacks,\" whispered Crimson through a dropped jaw.\n\nSmaller whales jumped about the sickles. Clad in stripes, they torpedoed along the larger animals, emitting a strange yet cheery giggle. They were no larger than Nyra.\n\n\"Dolphins,\" said Crimson. \"Black-vines, I'd bet.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this?\" muttered Nyra, unable to retract her open mouth.\n\n\"Mother. She saw them before the Sperks came. These, and many other species. She described them to us.\"\n\n\"Fuhorn?\" said Nyra. \"She traveled from the Northern Coast?\"\n\n\"That she did. Long before I was born. She didn't go far, but saw Black-vine dolphins and Hookbacks.\"\n\nShe had a thought. \"Do you know how far she went?\"\n\nCrimson looked at her, catching the nervous edge in her voice. \"A day's journey at the most. It was in winter. I think that's when the whales feed some ways north of the Green Spot. Why?\"\n\nThe whales went under again. \"A day. In winter,\" she said out-loud to no one. \"So we're close.\"\n\nThe Zealers' first concern was whether or not landing at the Green Spot would be safe. Nyra said yes. She'd stayed at the island for a month with no one knowing. They'd be fine. Sigeen continued to ask about it multiple times, always in a different way, as if to trick her into rethinking the question. This annoyed her at first. Then she became concerned. She was aware of just one instance when a Sperk actually crossed the watery gap between the island and main land: Casstooth. Casstooth had come looking for Nyra, making sure the Agring was dead. Other than that, Sperks tended to avoid large bodies of water (Opalheart being a charming anomaly, and Bristone a bizarre mistake). But what if this had changed? She couldn't think of a reason for that and shook the idea away.\n\nThere were bigger things to worry about. The fact remained that the Zealers would face the Sperks, even if not at the Green Spot. Over the journey, the Zealers debated the validity of landing at the Green Spot at all. To Olieve, waiting at the island was just a way to procrastinate. Jatika disagreed. By stopping at the island, they'd be well rested to face the Sperks. Olieve conceded (though she didn't seem passionate either way). Nyra stayed quiet for most of these discussions. The Zealers were the experts. They would be the ones leading the charge. But secretly, Nyra wanted to stay one night at the Green Spot, to rest, but foremost, to think. She wanted to see her family now more than anything. But she needed her own personal plan of what to say and how to say it. She'd thought about it a lot in the hours riding Jatika. Yet it wasn't enough. The coast needed to be in sight. Until then, she'd never grasp the truth of what was to come.\n\nUltimately, the Zealers agreed to rest at the Green Spot when the time came. Zacka pointed out that seeing the coast ahead of time might influence their tactic. Nyra didn't understand how, but the rest thought it a wise idea. Like her, Crimson kept silent, but she had the feeling he didn't agree with the rest.\n\nThey were flying the day after they'd seen the whales. The morning was full of conversation, but by afternoon, the group ran out of words. For an hour they flew silently.\n\nAt last, Crimson took a sharp breath.\n\n\"I can't believe it,\" he whispered at her side.\n\nA long line of brown bumped up over the horizon. Faint, but there. The Northern Coast.\n\n\"Is that it?\" said Zacka. He was nonchalant. But what did it mean to him? Zacka, Olieve, Sigeen, nor Jatika knew not what it was to see that long line furl up over the sea just behind the island of the Green Spot. They did not know the chilling strangeness to see the cliffs from this angle, nor the life it offered.\n\n\"Yes,\" gasped Nyra. \"We're home.\" Good light. Home.\n\n\"Narrow in,\" said Sigeen as he took place in the front. Jatika followed, then the Agrings, so small they could afford to stay side by side in the single-file line. Olieve then Zacka took up the back.\n\nJatika shouted above the wind. \"Stay as straight as possible. And fly low. The island has to block the view of anyone on the coastline.\"\n\n\"Like Darkmoon,\" muttered Crimson.\n\nLike Mum.\n\nYes. Mum, Blaze, Fuhorn and the whole bunch. The cliff beyond the island was blurry, but there was a mighty chance she was staring into their faces at that very moment.\n\n\"Stay straight,\" reminded Crimson. Nyra was drifting. \"We have to focus.\"\n\n\"I can't focus,\" she breathed. \"How can you focus?\"\n\n\"I can't,\" he shivered. \"You're absolutely right.\" Tree tops could now be seen at the Green Spot, all leafless. Sigeen looked back, assessing each dragon's position. He lowered down until he nearly skimmed the waves. They all followed, puffs of spray close enough to gulp them seaward. Nyra caught her red reflection skimming the surface. Here I am.\n\nIt took a great deal of time to get there, much longer than she expected. For when the trees became their own stalks and the beach became visible, the suns had moved far westward. The first one was dipping, turning the east a cerulean blue, molding sky and sea together as if inviting deep sea beasts to swim heavenward without transition.\n\nThe colossal arms of the coast stretched out before them. Nyra hoped to catch a glimpse of details. But the closer they drew, the more the island blocked the cliff.\n\nSigeen splashed to the sepia sands. Jatika dropped down behind him in the shallows. Nyra and Crimson flew past both, straight to land. Claws flexed, she melted beneath a million fine grains, her wings flopping languidly to the ground. Her tail thudded heavily, and her head lolled downward. Like the sky and sea tonight, she felt no boundary between herself and the island. My island.\n\nShe burst into tears. Punishment, the Reservoir, the fire, the dark decent after Darkmoon bashed her away, the unknown, the Hawk, Oharassie, the Zealers, the lies, the prison, the cave-in, the Hawk again, and nestled between each, the apprehension of not knowing where it all would end. And now, if ever possible, if ever thinkable, she was here.\n\nNo one touched her. No one spoke. For all she knew they'd left, and she was waking from a long, long dream from months before, like she'd fallen asleep at the Green Spot the night after the banishment and had yet to declare her journey north. It was the coda of her life, as Jesoam might have put it, where music must jump to a place just before the end and go on from there. The end was nearly here.\n\nCurling up into a tight ball, Nyra let her sobs bleed out until they were little breaths. Her whimpering ceased when faint moonlight hit the sands.\n\n\"She done yet?\" came Sigeen's voice.\n\nA paw fell upon her back. \"Come now, Nyra,\" said Crimson.\n\nNyra sniffed, peering up. Olieve and Zacka watched her.\n\n\"Tides drawing up,\" droned Olieve. \"You're getting wet. We'll stay here with you, but I'll blame you if Zacka gets hypothermia.\"\n\nStumbling, she came onto all fours, suddenly cold. \"Alright, I'll go.\" Her tail was numb, submerged in the creeping tide and weighed by tangled kelp. She walked close to Zacka, his light-blue skin pulsing with warmth. Crimson took her other side. Olieve led them to the trees, feeling forward with a brave paw. Together, they were swallowed in temperate shadows.\n\n\"We all could use some rest,\" cooed Jatika. He sat on a pile of dead leaves. Beyond was the tree Nyra had once slept in. Zacka eased to his belly. Olieve plopped down beside him. Nyra took the spot next to her.\n\nCrimson snorted. \"I couldn't sleep if I had a concussion. There's too much to hash out.\" He stood tall, perfectly awake.\n\n\"That there is,\" says Jatika. \"Sigeen and I had a look at your coast while you were on the beach. It's remarkable how closely the cliffs resemble Garrionom's. They were doubtlessly one, back before dragons took shape.\" He faltered under Crimson's unflinching stature. \"We'll get a better look at daylight, then come up with the best approach.\"\n\n\"But I know what the coast looks like,\" pleaded Crimson. \"I know what's at the top, night or day. Nyra knows too. There's nothing to wait for.\"\n\n\"Fly up there now, then,\" suggested Olieve. \"Give Darkmoon a hardy lick on the chin and roast a victory herring.\"\n\nCrimson smiled a little, sitting down. \"I'm not suggesting we fly up there this second. All I'm saying is that I can't understand how you can be tired.\"\n\n\"I'm not tired either,\" said Nyra meekly. It was a lie, but she couldn't see herself sleeping either.\n\n\"Two psychos,\" said Olieve. \"I'll take bets on a third.\" Her ears flicked to Zacka.\n\nJatika sighed. \"What do you want to work on?\"\n\nCrimson hesitated. Nyra figured he didn't know what to do with the attention now that he had it. He relaxed when Nyra cleared her throat.\n\n\"I want to know what you all thought when you saw the Northern Coast today,\" she said, feeling a little more alert. \"You said you will come up with an approach when you see it better tomorrow. What do you mean?\" She felt very loud in a quiet place. Wordy, too. She wished Blaze were here to use his words. Perhaps he was using his words for something else at this very second, a few maddening wing-beats away.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Jatika. \"We mean that there are a few ways we could approach the Sperks. Much of this will be dictated by topography and routine. We want to see the morning activities before actually jumping up there, among other things. These will dictate our decision. It might be best to fly from where we are now. On the other claw, if we think it will give us better vantage, it might be wise to fly west along the coast, land in the forest, and then come in from the south. There's also the question of who shows up first. Should we let the Sperks see just the Agrings initially, or show ourselves all at once? The combinations are bountiful and we cannot sift through them until we know what we're up against.\"\n\n\"Each method will have pros and cons,\" added Sigeen.\n\n\"Such as?\" asked Crimson.\n\n\"It's impossible to say,\" said Sigeen curtly. \"As attested by Jatika, we can't know until we see.\"\n\nOlieve huffed. \"Come off it. You know what the biggest con is.\"\n\nNyra looked between Olieve and Sigeen. Olieve must have sensed Nyra's confusion, as she tilted her ear to Nyra and said, \"No matter how we zip out there, those Sperks are going to get fired up. Trick is how to keep them chilled as much as possible.\"\n\nNyra stiffened at the thought.\n\nJatika reached to Nyra, leveling a paw to the ground. \"There will be a panic. But we will do everything to keep it minimal.\"\n\nZacka rolled his head to Olieve's flank, his lids drooping. \"S'too bad\u2026 it's too bad we can't warn the Nammocks ahead of time. Then they could be ready when the Sperks get ambushed.\"\n\n\"Terrakeizaq, we are not ambushing,\" growled Sigeen.\n\n\"But you know what I mean,\" said Zacka. \"The Sperks won't be happy. What if the Agrings were ready? We could secure a better outcome.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Crimson blasted. Nyra jumped.\n\n\"What?\" said Zacka groggily.\n\n\"Warn the Nammocks?\" Crimson laughed. \"It's preposterous. No, ludicrous!\"\n\n\"I was being hypothetical,\" said Zacka, too tired to be offended.\n\nCrimson ignored him. \"How could we get a message in if no one can even get out?\"\n\n\"Everyone,\" said Olieve, pointing to Crimson. \"I give you the most hypocritical statement of our lifetime.\"\n\n\"Aside from Nyra and I getting out,\" said Crimson hurriedly. \"And Nyra doesn't really count. She didn't escape. Darkmoon wanted her gone. I'm the only example of where an Agring got out against Sperk will.\"\n\n\"They don't know that,\" said Nyra, hurt that her escape was belittled. \"As far as Darkmoon knows, you're deader than rocks.\"\n\n\"Not the point,\" Crimson said. \"Point is, we cannot sneak a message to the Agrings without the Sperks knowing.\"\n\n\"Everyone,\" said Olieve, \"I give you the most literal reaction of our lifetime.\"\n\n\"Quiet, Olieve,\" mumbled Zacka.\n\n\"I'm defending you,\" she grunted.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nMoonlight, diluted by cloud cover, washed upon the little party through the twiggy shadows. There was a glow about them, a halo of peace. They needed a plan, steady as night. Nyra took a deep breath.\n\n\"Everyone at home will panic when they see us,\" she said. \"Warning the Agrings first\u2026 I don't see how it would do anything, even if it were possible.\"\n\nJatika shook his head. \"Well, impossible though Zacka's idea is, preparing one's team is a must, if reasonable to do so.\"\n\n\"Prepare for what, exactly?\" she said.\n\nHis tongue, flicked, lost for words. Or he had them, and preferred not to say. Olieve jumped in.\n\n\"Prepare in case of a siege,\" she said dully.\n\nAware of her long fangs, the Agring's lips tremored against their pearly surfaces. Zacka was sitting up now, swaying as Nyra swiveled with sickness. He threw Olieve an accusing look.\n\n\"We probably\u2026 probably don't have to worry, Nyra. Chances are this will go civilly.\"\n\n\"Don't be so sure,\" said Sigeen. \"Our presence will not be taken well. You can't guarantee such niceties\u2014\"\n\n\"If the Agrings knew that we were coming, Nyra,\" interrupted Jatika, \"they could be ready for the worst. That's all we're saying. But it's moot.\"\n\n\"The worst,\" she repeated. Her claws trembled, rumbling to her elbows. \"Like the Sperks attacking you?\"\n\nOlieve nodded. \"That's what we've been talking about the whole time.\"\n\n\"I didn't\u2014\" Nyra quaked. \"I thought you just meant preparing my family\u2026 mentally.\"\n\n\"That's partly right,\" said Jatika cautiously.\n\n\"Partly,\" said Sigeen. \"It is what it is. But warning the Agrings is out of the question and it's causing tension.\" He cleared his throat authoritatively. \"I suggest we talk about something we can do. Or better still, wait until morning when things aren't so emotional.\"\n\n\"Twenty-seven years old and already a curmudgeon, Sigeen,\" said Olieve. \"Way to over-achieve.\"\n\nSigeen glared. But whatever comeback he had ready was never uttered, for in that second, squeals exploded from the beach.\n\nEveryone jumped to their feet. Flaring wings and tales, the Zealers took on a defensive stance, their lips curling and teeth flashing.\n\n\"Tell me what's happening,\" Olieve demanded.\n\n\"Don't know,\" said Zacka, taking her searching paw to his.\n\nNyra realized she was the only one not standing. Her heart beat steadily. She had no fear.\n\n\"I know what it is!\" she exclaimed. Galloping from the brush, she followed the soft teal glow to the island's southern end.\n\n\"Stop!\" hissed Sigeen. \"You'll be seen.\"\n\n\"No I won't,\" she hissed, tripping over brambles. \"It's too dark. And we're too far away.\"\n\n\"But who's shrieking?\" said Jatika as the cries grew louder.\n\n\"I think I know,\" said Crimson.\n\nNyra stopped in the open. \"Them.\"\n\nBordered by light blue radiance buzzed the glistening forms of the Xefexes. Pouring from the sea, they slopped up to Nyra, chirruping and bobbling their slender heads. She felt a thrill upon recognizing each and every face. Turquoisish, Violetish, Yellowish, and finally Reddish, with her many decorative fins, came bounding up in greeting.\n\nOnly Reddish is male, Nyra reminded herself. Oharassie had told her. How strange it was, to have a friend change that way. But as Reddish fixed her with those bulbous eyes and ever-smiling mouth, Nyra didn't care.\n\n\"Oh Roendon, it's close!\" panicked Zacka as Yellowish circled him.\n\n\"Nyra, don't\u2014\" warned Jatika.\n\nNyra bobbed her head with Reddish, wriggling her wings to the beat of his many fins. \"It's alright, these are the Xefexes!\"\n\n\"The Xefexes?\" They asked in unison, save for Olieve, who didn't like questions.\n\n\"Yes,\" Nyra panted, exhilarated by the strange, energetic language of her friends. Growing dizzy, she stopped bobbing her head. Reddish continued in earnest, making little scratchy sounds. \"I forgot about them. How could I!\"\n\n\"But why are they doing that?\" whined Zacka, trying to stifle his ears to the screeches.\n\n\"They'll stop soon,\" promised Nyra. \"There's a shark. They sleep on land for half the night to avoid it.\"\n\n\"Sharks?\" asked Jatika. \"But aren't sharks small?\"\n\n\"Maybe where you live. Not around here. This one's big, nearly as big as the Xefexes. I don't think it can see very well. It comes after them at night when the Zealer Stone glows.\"\n\nNyra swung accusatorially to her companions.\n\n\"Your stone is messing them up!\" she yelled.\n\n\"Pardon?\" said Jatika.\n\nNyra jabbed a claw at the light. \"You put the stone there to begin with.\" She laughed with irony and anger. \"It's your fault!\"\n\n\"Ancestors' fault,\" corrected Olieve.\n\n\"Right. The stone,\" said Crimson. He stepped forward, getting a better look at the glistening water. \"I never took the time to see it when I was here. It must be big to be so bright.\"\n\nNyra nodded. \"Pretty big. They,\" she nodded to the Zealers, \"would have had an awful time carrying it down.\"\n\n\"Ancestors, not us,\" Zacka corrected.\n\nVioletish lumbered to Nyra, beginning the bobbing ritual all over again. Others followed, and soon the entire pod was chirruping at her. A few held back, the Zealers hovering in pairs upon pairs of protuberant eyes.\n\n\"We should help them,\" she said. \"Jatika, Sigeen, I bet you two could get that stone out. It's not so deep.\"\n\n\"Swell, Ny,\" scoffed Olieve. \"While we're at it let's pitch the island on fire.\"\n\nCrimson scowled. \"Why not?\" He turned back to Nyra, smiling, clearly infected by the cheery squawks and croaks of Reddish.\n\n\"Nyra,\" said Jatika, \"even if we could get the stone, we wouldn't.\" He nodded to the Northern Coast. Nyra understood, astonished at her own stupidity. If the Green Spot suddenly vanished, the Sperks would be down here in a tail flick, ocean or no ocean.\n\n\"Put it from your mind, Nyra,\" barked Sigeen. \"It's a bad idea.\"\n\nOlieve laughed her rare, short laugh. \"Oh Sigeen, be sure to rest up before squashing the next dream. It must be exhausting.\"\n\n\"You agree. You said so yourself.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I'm so much funnier.\"\n\nSigeen hissed, to which the other smiled, grinning more broadly as his hisses intensified. Whatever was so funny, Nyra didn't care to know. She gave all of her attention to Reddish. Good, that's what the Xefexes were. Simple and good. So was Oharassie, though less simple. Or was he? The Xefexes were not lesser, just different, he'd said. Due to their language barrier, Nyra hadn't seen their intellect on the same plane as her own. But Xefexes could be Agrings if only their throats were capable of releasing lower tones, just as Agrings could be Xefexes if they could squeak.\n\n\"I wish we could speak,\" she sighed. Reddish nodded. If they'd grown with the same customs, Nyra would have taken it as a nod in agreement.\n\n\"It's too bad, really,\" she mused. \"Say you could speak as we do, then you could deliver a message to my family. You could leap out of the water,\" she jumped to emphasize her point, \"and whisper in their ears when they come down to fish. The Sperks couldn't stop you, and by the time they tried, it'd be too late. The message would be relayed.\"\n\nSigeen's voice came into her head, layered over the real one jabbering at Olieve. Put it from your mind. It's a bad idea, his voice said.\n\n\"I know it's a bad idea,\" said Nyra, hoping to shut the Sigeen in her head up. Slumping, Nyra clacked her tongue. The ocean slurred up a length or two from her feet.\n\nHer ears prickled. \"You listen quite a lot, don't you?\"\n\nReddish sniffed shortly.\n\n\"You can't speak my language,\" she said. \"But you understand.\" Getting her fish in the morning. Dragging the Agring bones ashore. Scaring Casstooth off.\n\nReddish's spines began to buzz.\n\nThey know. They know because they pay attention.\n\nShe pictured the Xefexes leaping from the water, but they weren't whispering, and they weren't alone.\n\nShe leaped between Olieve and Sigeen. Stopping mid argument, they and everyone else watched her. Nyra looked at each Zealer and Crimson in turn.\n\n\"What if I delivered the message?\" she said, waving a confident paw to Reddish. The squealing had completely died.\n\n\"The message?\" said Jatika, bewildered.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nyra, elated. \"The message\u2014to warn my family that you're coming. To prepare them for battle or a siege, if it comes to that. I could deliver it.\"\n\nNo one answered, either too stunned by her brilliance or her sheer stupidity. Or maybe they couldn't see what she foresaw; the stark possibility of success.\n\nOlieve tilted her ears. \"Sorry, Ny-Ny. But if that's your idea, you deserve to be picked clean by the Hawk.\"\n\nSigeen nodded, and she could see him redirecting his hostility from Olieve to her. Nyra, however, was immune, invincible by hope and that little thing called impulse.\n\n\"What are you\u2026 what are you thinking of, Nyra?\" said Zacka. \"Going right up there and telling them?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Well, yes, actually.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nNyra paced. Watching her feet, the Agring hoped the ideas would come out cohesively. \"Listen. In my experience, there's a foolproof way to distract someone. Like when we rescued Olieve. You create a disaster.\"\n\nJatika sighed. \"You set the Well Room on fire. I don't see how that applies here.\"\n\n\"I'm not necessarily talking about fire,\" Nyra said. \"Just chaos in general.\"\n\nOlieve and Zacka were engaged in a private conversation. Distracted by their mutterings, Nyra turned to them. Zacka gave her a fleeting look of apology before explaining.\n\n\"Olieve and I, we were just wondering, what is it with you Agrings and engineering disasters?\"\n\nNyra frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe didn't even take a moment to think. \"Your mum coughs up fire so the herd can escape. Then you cough up fire so Olieve can escape. Not to mention the cave-in.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean for it to cave in!\" Nyra shouted.\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" said Zacka. \"Disasters are your answer to everything.\"\n\n\"Not that I minded being rescued,\" Olieve interjected.\n\nNyra scowled. Jatika opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Even he could not muster any politeness for her radical notion.\n\n\"No chaos,\" said Sigeen. For once he didn't sound angry, but more like a parent who was tired of screaming. \"Whatever we tried, it would invariably draw attention to our current position, incurring more antagonism than we could handle. There's a way to do this. I'm afraid a disaster is not it.\"\n\nNyra stammered fruitlessly before Jatika cut in. \"He's right. Any distraction we make, no matter how well planned, would draw attention to the wrong place.\"\n\nEyeing the mainland, Nyra absorbed the wide gap of ocean. Sigeen followed her gaze.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Nyra,\" he said. For the first time in their long journey, he sounded empathetic. \"I know what you're thinking. There's no way to make a disaster up there. We can't move from this spot until the time is right.\"\n\nNyra snorted. \"You aren't listening,\" she said.\n\nCrimson stepped forward. She'd forgotten he was there. Seeing him, another Agring in a circle of doubting Zealers, made her heart thump a smidge louder; a friendly reminder that this thing in her head could in fact materialize.\n\n\"What is your idea?\" he asked.\n\nPlacing four paws firmly on the ground, Nyra held her ears erect. \"Alright. So, you all agree that you can't move from this spot. For the sake of delivering a message.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" came five replies.\n\n\"I couldn't agree more,\" she said. Then she nodded to Reddish, Violetish, and the fifty-some others in their wildly eclectic group."
            },
            {
                "title": "Coda",
                "text": "It wasn't a sunny day, but she wished it were. As it usually went, sun was symbolic of good omens. Whether omens actually existed in real life Nyra was not of authority to say. But given the complication of today's endeavor, and everything that could go wrong, a little sunshine might have led the way to triumph\u2014rays to lap the hero homeward.\n\nShe was getting full of herself. Focus.\n\n\"It's a risk,\" said Sigeen, not for the first time. Yet he'd stopped saying it was a bad idea after Nyra explained everything. Though the Zealers were reluctant, all were in favor. With careful execution, it just might work.\n\nNyra stepped closer to the encroaching tide. The Northern Coast ahead was gray in the drizzle.\n\n\"Are you sure you're ready?\" asked Jatika. He had suggested waiting a few days so Nyra could collect her strength. But she would do it now. If she waited a few more days, the demons of doubt might descend upon her already flighty bravery.\n\n\"Risk,\" emphasized Sigeen. He whispered to Jatika, like Nyra was not meant to hear, but she did. \"Now we are taking orders from a draggling?\"\n\nNyra wasn't giving orders. She couldn't tell the Zealers what to do any more than defeat the Hawk in a wrestling contest.\n\nIf they want to stop me, they will. Sneaking into the Northern Coast? It could not be done. Yet she would do it. Tomorrow, there would be forty-six Sperks irate that Zealers were crossing their land. The Zealers had their plans, but there still existed the possibility that this would not go well in the end. Her whole family would suffer unspeakably. At least they might.\n\nUnless they knew ahead of time. Unless they fought back.\n\n\"I have to warn them,\" she said, shaking a little. She scrunched sand in her claws, bracing herself.\n\n\"Also,\" said Sigeen, as if her resolve were an interruption. \"You are assuming that your Xefexes will cooperate.\" He looked skeptically to the sea. There shimmered several dozen heads, waiting.\n\n\"They will.\" Of this she was most certain.\n\n\"You're sure?\" asked Zacka.\n\n\"Yes, Zacka,\" she said. He did not grumble at his nickname anymore, though only Nyra and Olieve were allowed to say it. \"They'll understand what to do. Just wait and see.\"\n\n\"And we'll know they've\u2026 you've been successful\u2026 how?\" he asked.\n\nThat was a good question. She hadn't thought of it. She was surprised the others hadn't either until now.\n\nCrimson spoke up. \"I know,\" he said to everyone. \"If it works, fishing is sure to resume in the afternoon. Unless something catastrophic happens, like the Sperks catching Nyra, Darkmoon will have the daily schedule go back to normal once the chaos has passed. When he realizes no one is hurt, and it looks like no one is going to get hurt, he'll have his mind back on the daily quota. Seeing as Nyra's not going to get caught, she can ensure her family keeps working. We'll see the Fishers from here, and know all went well. The perfect signal!\" He flashed a grin in her direction. \"No pressure.\"\n\nShe smiled crookedly.\n\n\"That's not a perfect signal,\" countered Sigeen.\n\nOlieve shuffled in from the far side of the beach. She'd been 'watching' the cliffs very carefully, as if to hear the shape of the Northern Coast. \"I'm loath to say it, but Sigeen is right,\" she said. \"Fishing doesn't necessarily mean Nyra made it into a burrow unnoticed. They aren't directly related events.\"\n\n\"Sure they are!\" exclaimed Crimson. \"Fishing! It means everything's normal. It's the most normal thing we have up there.\"\n\n\"But what the Xefexes are about to do is extremely abnormal,\" she persisted. \"Slaves are valuable. Darkmoon may not want to risk sending the Agrings back\u2014\"\n\n\"No matter what happens,\" Nyra said loudly, feeling her confidence dwindle with each of Olieve's words, \"you all will come tomorrow at first sun up. If I get in trouble, I'll just have to hold out for a few hours.\" She didn't know what would happen to her between now and sunset if caught, but couldn't bear any more logic. She waited for Sigeen to spit some rancid retort, one so sensible she'd be sick and forget the whole thing. Instead, they all watched her, like she was a rabbit in a field of eagles. Only Crimson regarded her normally, but she wasn't sure of his comfort. Why did he agree? Why really? Was it because he thought it through and believed in her? Or was there more? He'd been anxious for action. Stuck in solitude for an adolescent's lifetime, Crimson may have left whatever patience he had in the hoodoos. Suppose anxiety made him blind to good reason?\n\nThe only one on my side is stir-crazy. What does that say about my rationale? Rationale. Mother would call that a good word.\n\nMum.\n\nOlieve coughed quietly, no longer looking argumentative.\n\n\"Get going,\" she said in her ever-monotonous drawl. \"It's ludicrous, but it makes sense.\"\n\nNyra's ears perked gratefully, then realized that Olieve wouldn't see it. She still forgot Olieve's disability from time to time, recalling it moments after an uncomfortable silence. But, as it was with Olieve, tweaks of motion and minute twists of muscle inexplicably caught her attention, by sound, wind, or some sense Nyra would never recognize. Olive nodded knowingly.\n\n\"You got my family ready for chaos,\" she said. \"And they're safe at home right now, unless rabid oxen gobbled them up after we left. But we'll assume that's unlikely. Your family needs the warning now.\" She lowered her ears, which Nyra thought akin to the uncomfortable lowering of eyes. \"Your family needs to be ready now. I wish I could do it for you.\"\n\nTurning away, the Zealer scratched her flanks with great attention, not sure how to handle sentimentality. But it didn't last. Olieve straightened up again, rolling her shoulders. \"Alright, that's enough of that,\" she said quickly.\n\nThe tide rushed across Nyra's claws. \"Ah!\" she cried. Reddish did a fair copy, squeaking out an octave higher. He treaded to her, stopping a length out.\n\n\"All ready?' Nyra said, soaking up a final look at the Zealers and Crimson.\n\n\"Good fortune, young Agring,\" said Jatika. \"But if we don't see the signal within reasonable time, we will not wait until the tomorrow. We will come for you.\"\n\nNyra nodded.\n\n\"Good fortune,\" grumbled Sigeen.\n\n\"Good fortune,\" said Zacka.\n\n\"Stop wasting time,\" said Olieve.\n\nLastly was Crimson, \"Say hello to Thaydra for me.\"\n\nMustering up a little ball of optimism, Nyra smiled. \"Say hello tomorrow, yourself.\"\n\nPlunging, Nyra combated the little waves to where Reddish waited, wading before the gloomy precipice of Nyra's Northern Coast.\n\nSkimming the sea atop a Xefex back was not at all like riding Oharassie. The Aquadray had protective spines and membranes to keep her dry for long hours. Now, the ocean splashed her so fervently that she thought herself underwater more than once. Nyra took careful breaths, holding them before Reddish slammed against the next current. On the peaks of each wave, Nyra saw a few things:\n\nFirst, fishing was starting. Though hard to distinguish in the murky weather, colorless dots materialized against the mosaic cliff face. She followed one. Could it be Uncle Rovavik? Next to him, cousin Vor?\n\nSecondly, she saw the other Xefexes. Closest was Violetish, her bulbous eyes darting between the laden Reddish and the task ahead. Others were all around, spouting puffs from their pulsing nostrils. Nyra could spot each by name, catching enough of their heads to see their prominent color or pattern.\n\nHolding a paw to her brow, Nyra filtered out as much water as she could. More spots came over the cliff face.\n\nThey had color now. A few grays. A few reds.\n\nI'm red, she thought with sudden horror. If she could see the Fishers, they might see her, in spite of the obscuring sea.\n\nReddish looked back at her. A little groan came from his open mouth.\n\n\"Going under now?\" she said as softly as she could. The Xefex cackled in response, showing rows of needle teeth along a beaming mouth. He made a gasping sound.\n\n\"Take a big breath?\" she asked as a wave bumped her face. Reddish repeated the motion.\n\n\"Remember, I can't hold it as long as you.\"\n\nHe repeated, more urgently.\n\n\"Alright.\" Holding her head high above the spray, she took in the deepest breath she could.\n\nSploosh! Currents buffeted her face, pelted with bubbles so loud they echoed in her mouth. Locking her forelegs over Reddish's neck, Nyra braced a second late as he suddenly kicked forward. She whiplashed, trying not to gurgle out any precious air. She opened her eyes to slits. The Xefex's wings pumped gently, yet somehow it was enough to blast them forward. Hugging close, she tried to be as streamlined as possible. Reddish was warm, hot even.\n\nReddish bumped her flank with a fin. At first she thought it was an accident. Then he did it again. They moved up and her head broke the surface, but only just. The coast loomed ahead, much bigger. Reddish started sinking again. Nyra took a few short recovery breaths before the big gulp, her chin snapped shut by the next wave taking them under. They torpedoed forward. A few moments later, she felt the familiar bump at her flank. She resurfaced, this time no further than her mouth. She took a breath, and went under. They did this several times, each preceded by a bump of warning.\n\nThere were sounds. She couldn't hear them well at the surface, with the roar of waves in her ears. But beneath, she heard little squeaks, ones she recognized as happy. Much fainter, though, were other cries. They were far uglier, so chilling her grip loosened a little on Reddish. She knew those sounds.\n\nThey were the cries of Agrings.\n\nShe surfaced. Nyra stretched so her eyes just peaked over the water. Batting salty lids, she looked for the coast, hidden behind a swell of ocean. They went under. She surfaced. Only the very top of the cliff was visible. She tried stretching up higher. Reddish tugged her down. Frustrated, she thought of letting go all together and surfacing on her own, but then understood. Reddish was only bringing her up when the waves could keep her hidden.\n\nOn the next wave they met an earsplitting cry. Nyra got a quick glimpse of the world above.\n\nThe Xefexes in all their color were jumping high to the sky. Violetish, Tealish, and the rest of the rainbow leaped straight up, fins spread wide, snatching Agrings. Nyra watched three Agrings go down before going under the next wave. The screams reached her beneath, frantic as a death rattle.\n\nGet ready.\n\nReddish dove deep. Nyra held tight. They dipped to darkness. Nyra's chest felt explosive and pinched all at once. She coughed up her air in a silver flurry.\n\nOh no.\n\nBefore she could grieve her empty lungs, Reddish switched upward, and as rapidly as it went dark it grew light. Brighter and brighter. Nyra turned weightless. The water thinned.\n\nIn a complex maneuver, the headlong sea spat them to the bleak outside. The cliff face rushed down before her eyes. Reddish's fins snapped open. Nyra popped away from his back. She whipped her wings out. In a half-second, she saw Reddish enclose on an airborn Agring at her side, sheer terror in his eyes. The other Agring and Xefex crashed down together.\n\nShe was on her own.\n\nShe veered to the nearest crowd to hide in plain sight, in chaos. There were three Agrings. Nyra flew to them, copying their movements and frenzied expressions. Her heart thrummed a million thrums, for the danger and for the faces she'd soon see. It stuck thorns in her gut, making every pore shriek alive. Left and right Agrings were flapping in such calamity it seemed they were doubled in number. It appeared no one could focus. They couldn't comprehend the fallen loved ones, waiting with baited breath for them to surface. She felt relief, interspersed with a bitter twist in her joints. Just as planned.\n\nThe Sperks bordered the cliff edge. Nyra shied away, fearing her face would betray her even at this distance. Two Sperks leaped down. Clumsily, they ambled to aid the much nimbler Agrings, their bulky backsides jerking awkwardly between wing strokes. Casstooth flapped among the two. The rest watched warily from the top.\n\n\"There he is!\" came a shout. A female from Nyra's safety-crowd pointed seaward. Following the other's claw, Nyra found the spot where Reddish had dropped, the water nearly healed from the scarring blow. A sputter emanated from the center.\n\n\"I see!\" cried another female, and just as she did so, Nyra saw an Agring snout clamoring at the broken surface.\n\n\"We have to get him out,\" said the first female. She looked at the crowd desperately, waiting for them to initiate the rescue. For all she knew, a Xefex waited to nab her down, too.\n\nNyra swallowed, taking place in the ring of flapping Agrings.\n\n\"We'll hoist him out,\" Nyra suggested, twisting so her wings flapped over her face. That was a good plan, wasn't it? It would get them moving. They'd be focusing on the fallen. They'd recognize her eventually. That was inescapable. But as long as Casstooth and the other Sperk (Shalebreeze, by the look of it) kept at bay, she'd hush the Agrings to silence. No one would hear their cry of surprise\u2014it was far too loud everywhere. Then she'd be ushered to a burrow. Safe.\n\nBlend in, she thought. Do what everyone's doing. Another crowd was scooping up an Agring from the ocean, just as Nyra had suggested to her own group. And behind them another, and another.\n\nNyra dropped down until her wing tips scratched the surface. The two females, seeing Nyra's close proximity to the would-be danger, leveled to the fallen Agring. The third one in their party was male, and young.\n\nCousin Emdu.\n\nBiting her tongue, she held back a cry. He was just as she remembered, only leaner. He was bigger too. But to see him fly disturbed her. She had never seen him fly before. At eleven, he wasn't supposed to, and wouldn't start training until spring. Just as she feared, home had changed.\n\nOne of the females was staring at her. Nyra turned away, grasping for the fallen Agring as a wave threw him upward. The other caught him on the first try and the second female lowered to help. She'd been staring at Nyra, too.\n\nThey know I'm wrong, she assumed. They're too distracted to really think about it, but my face is bothering them, even if they don't know why. Yet.\n\nThey. Knots tightened in her neck. They. The group of Nyra, Emdu, and\u2026 the females.\n\nIt snapped in her head like fire sparks.\n\nShe had no names for the two females.\n\n\"Roendon's Death,\" she quaked. The two females were completely unknown to her\u2014alien visages who never belonged. It sickened Nyra like a claw needling an open wound.\n\nI'm in the wrong place. She couldn't be, but somehow she was. The wide Vousille Ocean with all its mysticism had shifted out the truth, pointing Nyra to a realm of mixed reality. Here, where cousins took different shapes. Here where families were not families. It was like being in the far too distant future.\n\nHow long have I been gone?\n\nCold rain pattered her face.\n\n\"Help!\" said the first female. She didn't look confused anymore, just desperate to save her sodden friend.\n\n\"Piannib,\" said Emdu to the first female, \"where should I grab?\"\n\n\"Get under his left wing. Turrigaff will take the right. On the count of four,\" she said.\n\nPiannib. Turrigaff. Strange names for Agrings.\n\nOutstretching, Nyra readied to grab whatever the next wave tossed. From this angle, it looked like a shoulder.\n\n\"Four!\" shouted Piannib. Carried on a swell, the fallen Agring punched into Nyra's arms, nearly taking her down with him. She grasped at every limb available. The group spaced itself evenly around him. Balancing the weight clumsily between them, the victim hung in what looked like an uncomfortable position. He'd fallen unconscious. Nyra tried to cradle his front in her lap while hovering. She didn't feel this pose would last.\n\nThe victim's head rolled upon her stomach.\n\nIt was Blaze.\n\nNyra reeled.\n\n\"Oh, Quay,\" said Emdu, saying the words as she thought them. Nyra looked to her cousin, frozen in utter shock.\n\n\"Nyra?\" Emdu said, aghast.\n\nPiannib nearly dropped her share of Blaze. \"Nyra. What do you mean Nyra?\" she said, gathering Blaze back up.\n\n\"NYRA?\" Emdu repeated, loudly this time.\n\n\"Oh, no no no,\" Nyra muttered.\n\nHe dropped Blaze's wing. \"Oh, Quay, it's NYRA!\"\n\nNyra blanched, mouth sagging into what was surely a stone-white gape of horror.\n\n\"Hey, grab that wing,\" scolded Piannib.\n\nEmdu ignored her. \"What's\u2026 what's happening?\" He epileptically peered about the other crowds, as if to inventory every dragon. Nyra tightened her grip on Blaze, afraid she would have to let go in trying to cup a paw across her cousin's mouth.\n\n\"Emdu, Emdu, listen, just listen\u2014\"\n\n\"But, Nyra\u2014\"\n\n\"Please,\" she begged, \"stop saying my name. They can't know I'm here.\"\n\nThe Sperks bustled above, some readying to dive. Occasionally one took notice of their group before flitting to the next. Casstooth was preoccupied, trying to scoop up another Agring but unwilling to touch the water.\n\nNyra still blended, for now.\n\n\"I need to get to the Warren,\" she said to her cousin. \"Without the Sperks seeing.\"\n\n\"The Agring Warren?\" Emdu said, dazed.\n\n\"Of course the Agring Warren!\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Turrigaff. \"You mean to say you're the Nyra? Thaydra's Nyra? And Blaze's Nyra?\" she nodded at Blaze with emphasis.\n\n\"Yes, yes, and yes,\" said Nyra, spitting the words out as fast as she could.\n\nLowering his voice, Emdu took her brother's wing again. \"But how are you alive? Your bones! Casstooth saw them!\"\n\nCasstooth at last dove to the other Agring in the water. She didn't seem to hear.\n\nYet.\n\n\"Casstooth saw your bones!\" he repeated.\n\nBalancing temper, fear, her brother, and the confusion of these foreign faces, Nyra felt the sky itself might be the trifle to break her back.\n\n\"Emdu,\" she strained. \"I'll explain later. But there won't be a later unless you shut up.\"\n\n\"Alright, but\u2026\"\n\n\"I mean it!\"\n\n\"Alright, I'm shutting up,\" he promised.\n\n\"Good,\" said Nyra, sounding much more confident than she actually was. \"I need to get to the burrows. Can we make this happen?\"\n\nConfusion crossed Emdu's face. Nyra was not sure if it was because he lacked an answer, or was unforthcoming to break his promise of silence. Piannib answered. Unlike Nyra, her confidence looked sincere.\n\n\"It'll be tough,\" she whispered. \"There's no telling what the Sperks will do once we reach the top.\" She shaded her eyes with a paw. \"Hold on. Let's see what happens.\"\n\nAnother group was almost to the cliff edge, holding an Agring. The Sperks at the top parted, letting them through to safety. Then they disappeared.\n\n\"The best thing we can do is hope they focus on the injured.\" Piannib nodded to Blaze, \"and the able-bodies can slip away unnoticed.\"\n\n\"Alright\u2026\" Nyra trailed off.\n\n\"Plus,\" piped Turrigaff, \"Darkmoon will be much more interested in the sea monsters.\" She tensed up as Violetish spiraled on a water spout not a few lengths off. \"Roendon, I hope they don't kill anyone.\"\n\n\"They won't,\" said Nyra. Turrigaff didn't appear to believe her. It didn't matter just yet.\n\n\"Should we get him up then?\" asked Turrigaff, her uneven wing beats causing a tilt on Blaze's right side.\n\n\"Yes, let's move,\" said Piannib. \"But make sure Nyra's face is blocked. At a distance, she'll look like Jesoam. Nyra, us three will take the weight. You position yourself around Blaze wherever you can be most hidden. Once we get up there, try to slip out. We'll escort you if possible, but no guarantees.\"\n\nNyra nodded. She let Turrigaff take Blaze's limp head. Finding a spot near his tail, Nyra leaned behind Emdu's rump.\n\n\"Fly up,\" ordered Piannib. Limited in vision, Nyra followed their tug, paws lightly pressed to Blaze in a feigned effort. Emdu flailed ungracefully. Nyra had to constantly shift to stay behind him.\n\nThe cliff top arched to them, revealing the brilliant grassland of the Northern Coast. Her breath caught. The Reservoir, the hollow river bed, and the Agring dens hiccupping along the foreground. It all was there. It was real.\n\nBlaze groaned. Nyra loosened her grip, realizing she'd been squeezing his tail. Like Emdu, he was bigger than she remembered, but not so big. Proportionately, he looked like her, broader about the wings but leaner. But there was something else different, too. A horrible pain hit her gut as she realized he looked terribly frail, ribs poking from thin skin.\n\n\"Nyra, the Sperks are inspecting the fallen,\" said Piannib, careful to hush Nyra's name. \"Everyone else is wallowing around confused.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" said Nyra, afraid of her own voice.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Piannib. \"But no one's paying much attention to the wallowers.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Nyra, though she felt no reassurance seeing so many Sperks at the edge.\n\n\"We'll land you as close to the burrows as we can. Then stay out of the way. Disappear.\"\n\nThe grass was four lengths away. Three. Two. I'm touching down. To relish the feel of the grass should have been ceremonious. But it wasn't. She pushed all feeling away from those elegant blades, crushing all sentiment beneath her palms.\n\nA Sperk. By Good Light, a Sperk, in all its hideous and comfortable familiarity, rushed to meet them.\n\n\"Regaleye!\" shouted Piannib. Nyra ducked behind Emdu, trying to appear inconspicuous as the little Agring crowd parted for the royal-blue dragon.\n\n\"Is there damage?\" demanded Regaleye, her pupils a pair of shimmering black pools.\n\n\"Hard to say,\" said Piannib.\n\nRegaleye shot her head down, a nose-tip away from Piannib's face. \"Did you check him?\"\n\nThe Agring leaned backward, bending so far her ears nearly touched her rump. \"No-no,\" Piannib stammered. \"We didn't have the chance. We just fished him out and\u2014\"\n\nA voice croaked.\n\n\"Nyra?\"\n\nElectrified, Nyra peered beyond Emdu. Blaze's visible eye was wide open. It stared right at her. He'd said her name.\n\nNo.\n\nThe other Agrings stiffened. Nyra wished the clouds would crash down hide them. Instead the Agrings fixed her with piercing stares, like talons prickling her entire body.\n\n\"What?\" said Regaleye, distressed by the silence. She took no notice of the Agrings' reaction. \"What did he say?\" The group snapped to attention before the Sperk could trace their gazes. Regaleye lowered to Blaze. \"Speak up!\"\n\nBlaze's eyes rolled vacantly. His jaw tightened.\n\n\"He's in shock,\" Regaleye diagnosed. \"Well, is that all?\" She looked at Piannib.\n\n\"In shock. Yes. Most likely.\"\n\n\"Find someone who knows,\" spat the Sperk. \"Fetch Fuhorn, or something. And you,\" she fixed Emdu, falling only an eye-blink short of Nyra's face before Nyra ducked away.\n\nEmdu held his breath. Nyra forgot what breath was.\n\n\"You,\" sneered Regaleye to Emdu, \"wipe that stupid expression away. You look like a dead rodent.\"\n\nRegaleye turned, galloping after another fallen Agring and the poor crowd with which it came.\n\nThe exhale Emdu let out could have fogged the Reservoir. The breath Nyra took could have sucked it up.\n\n\"That was close,\" said Turrigaff.\n\n\"That's an understatement,\" agreed Nyra.\n\nBlaze blinked up at the sky. His legs jumped, folding beneath his body.\n\n\"Nyra,\" he choked. His elbows flexed against his ribs. Vertebrae stood on end upon his back, stretched like knobs under a thin wrapping.\n\n\"He's sick,\" said Nyra, frightened. \"What's wrong with him?\" She knew she had to leave, well aware of the Sperks bustling beyond Emdu's protective body. But her feet rooted themselves in the crackling grass, the grass on which she and her brother were born.\n\n\"Nothing's wrong with him,\" soothed Turrigaff. \"He's not sick, he's just\u2026\" she trailed off. Piannib gave her friend a look which clearly instructed silence.\n\n\"Heartbroken,\" said Emdu lugubriously.\n\n\"Why?\" panicked Nyra as Thaydra swam into her brain. \"What's the matter? Where's Mum?\"\n\n\"Listen, Nyra,\" said Turrigaff, \"your mum is\u2026\"\n\nPiannib stamped her feet. \"Have you all gone mad?\" she snarled. She rounded on Nyra, fangs bared. Nyra jumped back, alarmed by the sudden hostility from a fellow Agring.\n\n\"Go, GO!\" hissed Piannib. The outburst was for both Nyra and Emdu.\n\n\"Emdu,\" whispered Nyra. \"The dens. Now.\"\n\nHe didn't budge.\n\nShe nipped his leg. He sped off, Nyra on his left, all the action on the right.\n\n\"This is insane,\" panted Emdu.\n\n\"You don't even know,\" she heaved. Emdu was fast. Nyra had not sprinted much recently.\n\nFuhorn's burrow yawned ahead, larger than the rest. Emdu slowed as Nyra flitted past, diving into the darkness first. She nearly bumped the opposite wall before stopping her momentum. Emdu came behind her, collapsing from shock, exhaustion, or a combination. They were alone.\n\n\"What now?\" he said.\n\n\"What's wrong with my mother?\" Nyra said.\n\n\"Thaydra?\" said Emdu. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"Piannib said s-something,\" she stammered, afraid to continue. \"She made it sound like\u2026 is Mum alright?\"\n\nEmdu gaped. \"Thaydra's fine. But who cares! You're fine? Why are you fine?\"\n\nHer two dearest were alive. Maybe not well, but alive. She'd work from there.\n\n\"Nyra? Nyra!\" said Emdu.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said honestly. Immersed in the cozy safety of Fuhorn's den, her sensitivity to the outside world abated. Everything was just as she'd left it, save for the other thirty-one Agrings of the last Gathering. Thirty-one familiar faces.\n\nThere were more now.\n\n\"Emdu!\" she shouted. \"Piannib. Turrigaff. Who are they?\"\n\n\"Agrings,\" he said.\n\nNyra clenched her teeth. \"Emdu, I really don't have the patience for stupid. Think!\"\n\nEmdu flinched. \"Uh, sorry. That's right. You don't know\u2014\"\n\n\"What don't I know?\" she demanded. Emdu couldn't talk fast enough.\n\n\"They're the Iritees. Another herd. Darkmoon enslaved them about a month ago.\"\n\nShe fixed on her cousin in disbelief.\n\n\"No, truly,\" he said, seeing her perplexity. \"Darkmoon got more.\"\n\nHer joints wobbled. \"You're serious, aren't you?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\nNyra shook, her head wriggling leaf-like on the stem of her neck. \"Wha-wha-how? Why?\"\n\n\"We weren't breeding. And even after you left, Fuhorn held her ground. Darkmoon said that if we continued to boycott, he'd get more Agrings. And it would be on her head.\"\n\nNyra paced. \"Yes, yes, I remember. Mum told me, way back when. At the time it was only a threat. But I didn't think he'd do it. Actually, I never thought about it all.\" Why would I? I was banished. There were a thousand other things to think about at sea.\n\nEmdu swallowed. \"Fuhorn didn't have perfect support from the Nammocks anymore when it came to breeding, after the fire. Some wanted to give up the ban. They were\u2026\" he twiddled his claws. \"They were really scared after what happened to you. They didn't want trouble. Tesset volunteered to breed immediately. But Darkmoon said it didn't matter. The generation gap was over eleven years. So even if we bred, it would be awhile before a new batch of Fishers were ready.\"\n\nA sour taste burgeoned in her throat. Bees buzzed in her brain, clouding together to a nauseating bundle. She threw her head between her legs. Don't be sick, don't be sick. She couldn't deal with this, not on top of everything else.\n\n\"Listen, Emdu,\" she said, staring at the ground. \"You have to make sure fishing resumes. As soon as possible.\"\n\nHe came closer. \"Fishing? Who cares about fishing! Are you crazy?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Listen, this is very important\u2014\"\n\n\"Those things!\" he cried. \"They'll kill us!\"\n\nSquinting, Nyra tried to understand. The Xefexes. He doesn't know. She looked at him. The simple act of standing up straight nearly made her vomit. \"Emdu, they aren't dangerous. The Xefexes, the things, they did what they did on purpose.\"\n\n\"They want to kill us on purpose?\" he said.\n\n\"No. They are helping us. But I don't have time to walk you through it. Trust me, it's fine. The Xefexes will stop attacking soon, if they haven't already.\"\n\nHe trembled.\n\n\"Emdu, can you do this?\"\n\nHe quivered. \"What if Darkmoon won't let us fish?\"\n\n\"You don't think he will?\" The question was more for herself than her cousin.\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Emdu. His eyes darted smartly in his head. \"You're right. Sperks have to eat. If someone wants to fish, he'll let them.\"\n\nThat had to be true. All but for the time Fuhorn threw that fish at Darkmoon's feet last fall, fishing had always resumed.\n\n\"Good,\" said Nyra, relieved. \"Now, go make sure it happens.\"\n\nHe paused, and Nyra could see him reverting back to that confounded state, where Nyra had returned from the dead and gave him visions of impossibility. He began to stutter, flitting bits of names, actions, and expletives from his quivering jaw.\n\nTaking his face in an a gesture that reminded her of Crimson, Nyra pressed her forehead sternly to his. \"Emdu. Do this. I promise to explain. But they'll be a lot of worry unless you can get the Agrings back on the water.\" She sounded so much braver than she felt. A piece of Thaydra budded in her homesick heart.\n\nEmdu nodded.\n\n\"Then see you later,\" she murmured.\n\nHe leaped to the exit. He turned, making sure Nyra was indeed very real, then ran out.\n\nShe waited. Outside the shrieks died down. Voices came, triggering her senses greater than any smell she'd ever encountered. She heard Aunt Dewep. Regaleye. Agrings mixed with Sperks, the loved, the hated, the mediocre, those with whom she'd never shared more than a glance or mutter, and those she'd never met at all. All the vocal colors splashing on the weathered stains of her upbringing. How funny was the past.\n\nA scuffle reached the den entrance. Nyra backed away to the darkest corner. A figure dropped in, shining with light rainwater. It was a worn, yet energetic outline.\n\nFuhorn caught her breath.\n\nEven in minute visibility, Nyra absorbed every forgotten detail. In the most warming stories of homecoming, the lost loved ones did not change. Consumed by the longing of love, the wrinkles of time became embalmed, allotting no serrated tears of age. Fuhorn, to Nyra's relief, was no exception. Despite the hard truth of aging, the stress, the worry of her losses, and tribulations of the new Agring herd, the old Alpha bore the same resemblance Nyra had once known: sags nibbling her eyes, extra folds between her toes.\n\n\"You're here,\" the elderly dragon whispered. Nyra nearly crumbled.\n\nNearly. Because another voice outside stopped her heart.\n\n\"Fuhorn, Fuhorn!\" said the voice. Again a scuffling, and another wet Agring entered the room.\n\nA wall blocked Nyra's throat, backed by two lungfuls of ice.\n\n\"Everyone's accounted for,\" the newcomer panted. \"Got them all landed. No major injuries.\" Relieved babbles spilled so rapidly from the other that she did not notice Fuhorn's paralysis.\n\n\"But my nephew's turned fanatical,\" said the newcomer. \"He's insisting on going fishing again! Him, of all dragons! And the twins are going out and a few Iritees too. I nearly tackled them, but they still\u2026\"\n\nThen Thaydra came eye to eye with her departed daughter."
            },
            {
                "title": "Through Almond Eyes",
                "text": "If not one disaster, it was another. More often than not they were little things. A splinter here, a sick day there. Otherwise the Agrings worked tirelessly with scarce complaints. Extreme deviations could be counted on one paw\u2014those events which spanned outside the circle of his control. Thus far he could count them on three claws. Only the second deviation haunted his dreams. But they were just that now: dreams. The shriek of its agony had deafened to a nighttime whisper.\n\nWhen that ill-fated Fisher crashed beneath the waves today, a fourth claw sprung up amongst the dusty three of yesteryears.\n\n\"Vor went under!\" shouted Regaleye. Standing sentry, she leaned dangerously over the edge, wings teetering for balance. Darkmoon jumped to her side, watching the commotion below. At first he saw nothing. The Agrings circled like bewildered insects, unsure if surprise or fear plagued them. Waves washed away whatever disturbance Regaleye indicated.\n\n\"What's happened?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Vor!\" she exclaimed, jabbing a claw seaward. \"He went under!\"\n\nCasstooth sprung to his side, abandoning her patrol of the Agring Warren. He nodded in her direction. In a second Casstooth spiraled to where Vor had vanished.\n\n\"Was it intentional?\" he said.\n\nRegaleye shook with rage, her limbs knotting like a bulging tree trunk. \"He was skimming for fish,\" she said incredulously, watching Casstooth scan the rolling sea surface. \"And he tripped over a wave.\" She said this slowly, giving it carefully thought.\n\n\"You are unsure,\" observed Darkmoon.\n\n\"Well,\" she shook, \"it had to be a wave. But it looked more like a\u2014\"\n\nA cry silenced her. Another Agring was screaming a few lengths from Vor's disappearance point. It plopped under.\n\nDarkmoon saw it just in time. A serpent had taken the slave down.\n\n\"Xefexes,\" he noted.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Regaleye huffed.\n\nHe was inclined to agree, tempted by the sweet scent of skepticism, and its daughter, reasoning. The sea dragons beleaguered the horizon and nothing more. To see them locally was unprecedented.\n\nSuddenly Vor surfaced, flaying on the water like an injured bird. Nearby a sea serpent cackled, reeling gaily through the shadows of the petrified Fishers. It funneled to the cozy nook of a wave, moved right, then sprung upon a second Agring, dragging it beneath.\n\n\"Call them up!\" cried Regaleye, stomping the cliff edge, spraying rocks and grass to the sea. \"Pull them out before those things drown them!\"\n\nThe second Agring emerged, white foam coalescing on its drenched wings.\n\n\"Patience,\" Darkmoon soothed.\n\n\"You have to call them up,\" hissed Regaleye. \"Casstooth can pull the fallen ones out.\"\n\n\"To pull the Agrings out would invariably put Casstooth at risk,\" said the Alpha Sperk.\n\n\"What if the slaves die, Darkmoon?\"\n\nOn cue, three more Agrings went under. Darkmoon felt his heart quiver to the beat of Regaleye's staccato breathing. A few panicked Agrings took refuge on the cliff top, ignoring their protocol to return full mouthed. But largely, both the Nammock and Iritees herds scrambled in danger's range.\n\nSnapping his tail, Darkmoon faced his disciples. They lined the cliff edge, transfixed by the disaster, awaiting orders or regarding the scene with guilty humor. There were about ten of them. The rest were in the forest, as Sperks often were.\n\n\"One volunteer,\" he said, \"will assist Casstooth. Hover above the fallen. Pull them out, only if it can be done without risk.\" Scanning through the Sperks, he searched for Opalheart, the buffoon who bothered about his peculiar niece. He'd volunteer immediately, what with his love for water and silly penchant for Agrings. He must have been away.\n\n\"Shalebreeze,\" he said, choosing a volunteer himself. \"Recruit nearby Fishers to pull out their comrades. Do not enter the water. I will instruct you otherwise if necessary.\"\n\nShalebreeze leaped to the unwelcoming waves. Some Agrings froze, disconcerted by the uninvited creatures spawning from both the sky and sea. Others took comfort in Casstooth and Shalebreeze and did not hesitate when given orders. Their words were muffled to Darkmoon by the distance, the crashing of waves, and the screams. More Agrings went down, one every few seconds. The unscathed aligned into orderly circles, pulling out their loved ones.\n\nCasstooth rushed back up, cradling the soggy form of Vor. The Agring fell to the grass, tendrils of water seeping from everywhere like strands of saliva.\n\nVor's muzzle twitched. Life. His breath was shallow.\n\n\"His lungs are waterlogged. Tilt him forward,\" Darkmoon advised. Casstooth seized Vor's shoulders and jerked his head over the edge. The Agring convulsed. Frothing vomit hurled from his throat and splashed loudly to the cliff face. Casstooth moved him away from the drop. His eyes opened, taking in the world with fresh anxiety.\n\n\"What's happening?\" he croaked, face wide despite the rain. He grasped his neck, alarmed by the foreign sound of his salt-stained voice.\n\nIgnoring his question, Darkmoon turned to Casstooth. \"Retrieve the others,\" he ordered. She nodded, spilling over the cliff again.\n\n\"Tell me,\" demanded Vor. It surprised Darkmoon. Vor was foolish, the kind the Agrings called brave. Yet he was not one to raise his voice, least of all to authority.\n\n\"It's of no consequence to you now, Agring,\" said Darkmoon. \"All you need know is of your own wellbeing. Do not leave this spot. Should you choose to aid your family prior to their rescue, you will be disciplined accordingly.\"\n\n\"Rescued from what?\" Vor pleaded. \"What's down there?\" he began to crawl away from his spot, moving back to the edge.\n\n\"Heed my words,\" warned Darkmoon. He remembered Vor in the last disaster. He'd been the first to try and fly out.\n\nA dark cloud passed overhead. They'd have to hasten before the storm intensified. Even now Vor blended into shadow, his outline hazy in the thickening silver.\n\nShalebreeze landed at the cliff edge dropping Dewep. Whatever hopes Vor had of returning to the sea were forgotten by Darkmoon as Dewep's cries shook the Coast. Fuhorn appeared with her son Ackeezo. They'd been at the fish pile when the disaster began.\n\n\"Turn her over,\" said Fuhorn urgently. She was ordering Shalebreeze. A Sperk. Fuhorn ordered anyone in spite of species.\n\nDarkmoon growled. \"She cries, Agring. Her lungs are em\u2014\"\n\n\"Her lungs are not emptied, Darkmoon,\" spat Fuhorn, rolling Dewep on her side. Dewep coughed up water, though not nearly as much as Vor. Fuhorn began to massage her friend's chest.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" crooned the Agring Alpha.\n\nDewep gasped. Her normally high voice deepened to a near match of Thaydra's, albeit on the groggiest day. \"My children.\"\n\n\"They're fine,\" Fuhorn assured, but she'd have no way of knowing. Darkmoon studied the Alpha, looking for a false note. He detected none. Her words were more likely a comfort than proven fact. Time would tell.\n\nTime did, for in the next second, Jesoam's iconic wails crescendoed to meet them. Dewep was immediately overtaken by her daughter. Jesoam looked undamaged\u2014she'd not been snatched.\n\nHe watched Fuhorn again. He searched her eyes, her ears, her arthritic claws for any sign of trickery. Fuhorn, unlike the conceited Jesoam, was a true actress in the art of deceit, and the only dragon so adept in her craft that Darkmoon often missed the truth behind those placid expressions. Thaydra would be her prime competitor, if the act was born from rivalry. Instead one thrived upon the other, Fuhorn on Thaydra and vice versa, leaving Darkmoon in the audience to scrutinize the missteps which seldom came.\n\nBut Fuhorn's alarm, growing in the creases on her forehead, looked true. She hid it from Dewep and Jesoam. Darkmoon could see the jumping of her flanks. The Agring Alpha's panic offered him a welcome calm. For as her heart felt fear, it meant the disaster was just as surprising for her as it was for the Sperks. Today's chaos was not engineered by Agrings. It was not an escape attempt.\n\nOf course it isn't, he thought. At all angles it could not work. There had been no communication between Agring and sea beast. How could they? They did not speak the same language. Furthermore, there had been no sighting of the two species in proximity to each other, let alone with enough time to scheme. Xefexes lingered by the Green Spot. On more than one rare instance he'd seen them leap, little dots on brilliant sunsets. But they never came any closer than the mysterious shining light.\n\nSo in logic, he relaxed in Fuhorn's fear.\n\nThe question then remained why the Xefexes chose now to attack after years and years of peace. Surely they knew of the Northern Coast inhabitants just as Darkmoon knew of them. Was today a celebration of sorts, which they chose to commemorate in mischief? Thus far, no Agring was badly hurt. The Xefexes spouted out, wrapped tightly around their unsuspecting quarry, and vanished as quickly as they appeared, letting the slaves go. Precaution was nevertheless essential. The Xefexes were unknown creatures, flaring deadly spines and bone cracking flippers.\n\nBy the time Darkmoon deemed Dewep unhurt, the cliff was covered with soggy dragons. Flame Thistle vomited at his left. Further down Fidee nursed a puffy elbow while her brother assessed her wing membranes for breakages. Then there were the new Agrings, those Iritees, as they called themselves. Only a month since the enslavement, Darkmoon had yet to learn all their names. He'd made no conscious effort, yet a few stuck in his memory. The louder they were, the faster they adhered.\n\nPiannib, he thought as he spotted her cresting the edge. A male Agring sagged in her claws. She'd been one such dragon, a loud one, an Alpha. Headstrong, she and her mate protested protocol so frequently that each outburst blended into the other. Injustice. That was her favorite word, and she could find it in anything down to an accidently swallowed fish bone. Each time, Darkmoon turned his back, letting her rants die in the mid-winter breezes. He advised the guards to behave similarly. Only the even tempered guards obeyed, for Piannib's rants often morphed to insults, most of which Casstooth refused to let slide off the tail tip. The Iritees Alpha put him in mind of Thaydra. Piannib was a more exasperating version. But in a strange twist of higher pronouncement, Piannib's outbursts filled the void of Thaydra's new aptitude for silence. Thaydra had spoke fewer words since the last escape attempt. He thought about it. Too much.\n\nPiannib had Blaze, by the looks of it. Too far away to assess, Darkmoon wondered if the young dragon lived. Lying very still, Blaze rested deathlike as his rescuers buzzed about, sliding in and out of view. Another Iritees assisted Piannib, one he could not name, and behind her, Emdu and Jesoam. Regaleye ran to them, checking Blaze.\n\nDarkmoon peered below. The commotion was slowing. The Xefexes cackled, looking him straight in the eye. But they no longer caught Agrings. Instead they circled their downed victims, their dorsal sides reminiscent of an encroaching shark in a fable. More rescuers flapped nearby. Vor flew among them. Darkmoon made note of it.\n\nHe focused on the unsnatched dragons, those never taken by the Xefexes. Counting went quickly, for the Nammocks at least. He spotted twenty-four of the thirty-one in seconds. The other seven were hidden or moving about too quickly.\n\n\"Regaleye,\" he called as she padded from Blaze's rescue party. \"Make an Iritees count.\" She knew them better than he did.\n\nShe nodded. \"Two are over there. Piannib and Turrigaff. The rest are around.\"\n\n\"See the rest,\" he said, returning the nod. \"No crevice ignored.\" With that she bounded off, rattling off names as she passed them. Darkmoon restarted the Nammock count.\n\nDewep, Jesoam, Flame Thistle, Fuhorn\u2014each face scratched upon a blank edifice in his mind. Reading west to east, he watched the last Agrings trickle up the cliff. Others watched from above, Thaydra among them.\n\nFidee, Aisel, Ackeezo. They all assembled in the same pattern: landing and nursing the injured. Systematic and precise, nearly admirable.\n\nFire Dust, Tesset, Salef, Tega, Rovavik. Then at last those furthest east: Blaze and his four rescuers\u2014two unknown Iritees, Emdu, and Jesoam.\n\nFinished.\n\nWasn't it?\n\nSomething was wrong. There was a break in the pattern. All the Agrings he could see stayed with the fallen. Except two, the young brother and sister, who ran away, like river stones which inexplicably traveled upstream. They were running to the Agring Warren.\n\nNo, he thought. That wasn't what made it wrong. It was how Jesoam's face carved itself on pre-existing lines in his mind.\n\nHe'd counted her name twice.\n\nThe chalky outline in his head fleshed itself, shining with the redness of a fatal wound. It traced upon the fleeing female he watched now, hiding in Emdu's shadow. Jesoam, the lean and lithe, now bulged. This youngling brandished brazen wings, coupled to a muscled chest built beyond the scope of Northern Coast duties. Her core stretched across smooth ribs, poised before flexing limbs.\n\nNot Jesoam. Nammock faces pounded his temples in a lightning show. All of them, over and over. Not once did an Iritees thunder by, for even in his confusion, Darkmoon knew this fleeing Agring was a predecessor to the revised role-call. Again, he went through all the females, anyone it could possibly be.\n\nFuhorn. Fidee. Thaydra. Tega. Thaydra. Dewep. Thaydra. Thaydra.\n\nThaydra\u2014her old wing birthed from sea flesh and sewn back upon her body. That's what this female was. Like looking at a memory.\n\nThe mystery dragon dove into Fuhorn's burrow, flicking seven tail spikes air-ward before going under. An old thud woke upon his own tail\u2014a long healed bruise where he'd slammed her away forever.\n\nNyra.\n\nShivers ran up his bark scales to his ear tips. The world shrunk to a single dot, repeating the image of her running away. She had died in fire's shadow, like Shadowed Fire as it were\u2014a mimic of her father's death by name.\n\nHe readied to charge, to pound her to the death she had already suffered, the long-gone bruise of his tail resurrected.\n\nWait.\n\nThe Agrings cried in the background. His Sperks scolded, quelling the catastrophe with impatient condolences. It droned out to silence, leaving behind a place only Darkmoon occupied. He, and the Agring protected underground. That small piece of Thaydra. Thaydra, who thrived in the alcoves of rebellion. His dear Royalwing perished in sight of Nyra's virgin shell. The incinerated coast flared before Nyra's innocent form. She was harmless back then. A child. What of now?\n\nShe was always na\u00efve. She spurred action inadvertently. It was a day, some fifteen sunsets before the fire, that Nyra and her brother conversed. The Agrings are not breeding, they'd mused. Innocent, yes, but they were overheard. They were reported. Darkmoon confronted Fuhorn, which caused her, as he later learned, to reschedule her escape plans. Nyra had great impact, all because of naivety.\n\nOf course, he knew the Agrings had ceased to bear offspring. Perhaps his subjects paid no mind, being too obtuse and lazy. But Darkmoon saw it like his scars reflected on Fitzer's Reservoir. Still, he did not play to the hand of dictatorship. No. Instead he chose to wait out the opponent's self assurance. There'd be an accident, a slip. It would come, and with it their downfall.\n\nTime passed, and still no younglings. Darkmoon felt no spite. Quite the contrary. He felt the chase's thrill. What a worthy adversary. How clever it was, to forego children. What care, what restraint! He admired them, as a player admired a foe when seeing himself in their strategy. It could have played out longer, only not for Shalebreeze, who'd overheard Blaze and Nyra that day at the Reservoir. Imperceptive and fearful, the young Sperk ran to Darkmoon with his horrible discovery. Had it ended there, Darkmoon might have salvaged the situation. But Shalebreeze was loud, and within the hour the whole Sperk herd whispered. The scandal, writhing in sticky gossip, spurred undesirable apprehension amongst his people. Darkmoon feared they'd approach the Agrings themselves, feeding the tension. So at long long last, he confronted Fuhorn, washing away that stickiness caking his herd's teeth.\n\nThat was then, in the time of na\u00efve Nyra. Now she returned an evolved creature, pulling along a disaster, only he did not know how.\n\n\"Darkmoon!\" called Casstooth, breaking his thoughts. \"The Agrings want to continue fishing.\"\n\nThe sun had moved in the sky, so slightly that only the most perceptive could tell. He was one such dragon.\n\n\"Who?\" he said calmly, not meeting Casstooth's gaze, finding a cloud. Part of him was still far away, thinking. He needed to stay there.\n\n\"Who?\" said Casstooth, exasperated.\n\nIf only his methods were unquestioned. \"Which Agrings,\" he clarified.\n\nShe quivered disbelievingly. \"I don't know. Vor for sure. They just started talking about it. I can't say how many are willing.\"\n\nSo the Agrings did not fear the Xefexes. They would risk themselves for petty routine. Why?\n\nBecause no risk exists.\n\n\"Now Dewep's joining in,\" yelled Casstooth over her shoulder. An Agring crowd gathered before the Sperk guards, pleading to continue the day's chores. Darkmoon looked for one Agring in particular. Emdu. He'd been with her last. He pondered the wings of news, and how fast they spread when either tremendously trifle or enormously important. Nyra's presence would be enormous. How many ears had it reached in this short time? Surely the informed wanted to see the homecomer. Why not plead fear of the Xefexes, refuse to fly, and see Nyra sooner? Backwards reasoning. Why?\n\nAt last Emdu came into sight, walking from behind an Iritees dragon Darkmoon did not know. Emdu pleaded louder than the rest. Assertive, cunning\u2014all the things Emdu was not when it came to work.\n\nFishing is his idea. To divert attention? Perhaps. To draw away from the underground secret? It wasn't very clever, but too clever for him. Not his idea. He was delivering it, but it wasn't his plan.\n\nIt's Nyra's plan. Nyra's pushing them away, for now. For what merit?\n\nThe facts eddied together, narrowing, focusing. Nyra, the only one not confined to the Northern Coast, had accessed the Xefexes. She alone possessed the means to communicate with them. Returning now, she informed Emdu that no Agring would be killed. That this was safe. That this was planned. A horrible distraction.\n\nAh.\n\nHe found the sea. She'd left upon it and then came back, drifting off the haze of the Green Spot, glowing wanly under the mauve storm. That island. It's where she must have drifted after banishment. Somehow she tricked Casstooth into thinking her dead, hiding behind another's bones.\n\nHad the Xefexes helped Nyra then, too?\n\nIt begged the question of her whereabouts all this time. So, Nyra had found friends in the Xefexes, perhaps a guest at their hospice through fall and winter. Was it possible? Yes, he sighed bitterly, for no one had returned to the Green Spot since Casstooth's report. Perhaps the Agring fished out of sight on the island's northern side. Or maybe her friends brought everything to her. So many avenues of survival.\n\nI did not check for myself.\n\nMad with isolation, Nyra might have reeled from the chill of mid-winter, driven sick by her family's closeness, knowing they lived just wing-beats away. Even the violence of her castaway could not deter this. She needed to return, and so with her squeaking companions, organized a return tactic.\n\nBut to what end? What did she plan to do now that she was here? Hide in Fuhorn's burrow forever? Submit her waterlogged guilt to him until her last drop of dignity evaporated? Whatever it was to live seasons without the sound and touch of family, he'd never known. Was it enough to drive one home again, even if home was miserable, even dangerous?\n\nMaybe. Whatever it was to be a lonely eleven year old, it did not explain why she needed the Nammocks fishing again. It was imperative, somehow.\n\nA Xefex tumbled off the waves. The rest breached behind it, chirruping loudly. Was that triumph? Taking a long breath, wind fluttered his vocal chords. Speech. Speaking. How was it she communicated with these creatures? Was it all intuition that hatched this plan? Perhaps the two species found a common language while sharing the island. Was that possible? It must have been.\n\nVor flew seaward. Underpine hissed threats after him, but did not follow. Dewep copied Vor. Darkmoon paced the edge. Below, Dewep shined bright red on the gray ocean, a beacon in the dull drizzle.\n\nSignal.\n\nWhat if the act of fishing spoke, like a phrase in the common tongue between Xefex and Agring? Leaning forward, Darkmoon watched Dewep skip lightly on the waves. For the first time, he saw wonder in her color, acknowledging the oddity that was dimorphism. An incident of nature, or a weapon against him? Other Agrings followed, both genders. The Green Spot glowed back, the only entity brighter than the females swarming below. The Xefexes did not jump anymore, no doubt resituating at home, taking shelter from the storm and darkening waters.\n\nWhat was Dewep saying with her flesh? And Fidee? And Piannib? What demanded attention? And who was looking? The Xefexes? Nyra had made it home unnoticed (so she believed). Otherwise, to his knowledge, nothing worth mentioning had taken place. Letting the Xefexes know she was safe\u2026 was it worth the risk of suspicion? There'd be peace of mind, but no furthering of aims. The con outweighed the pro, he thought. Why convey this message in the first place? The lack of fishing would suggest Nyra had not succeeded. The Xefexes would know her failure, but to what avail? Sea bound, they could offer no assistance. Could they? Not with flippers, not with the Northern Coast as their obstacle. They could not scale the cliffs to help her.\n\nWas the whole ordeal for mere closure? A one-way memorandum?\n\nA black cloud passed overhead. The Green Spot brightened.\n\nUnless it isn't for the Xefexes. Out there watched a force which could scale the cliff side if all failed. A rescue waited.\n\nThe island. Land.\n\nSo land creatures. A low growl curled upon his trembling jowls. The island did not house larger creatures. If it did, he'd know it after nearly four decades. But something was there now, a power great enough to rescue Nyra. A competitor, an enemy in an eco-chain where Sperks were not the sole kings.\n\nWhere did she find land creatures brave enough to save her? Beyond the island was the Vousille Ocean, waiting to drown away life in a thousand divots and rises. There were rumors of an island chain, though he'd never seen it. There were no other places to go. Where\u2026\n\nAnd the answer hit.\n\nThe Zealers.\n\nThe Zealers, the bright dragons of snowy whispers. Yes, he knew of them. Agrings, though wholeheartedly believing themselves discreet, could not escape the inevitable bleed of living near Sperks. They chattered, and their enslavers were not deaf, least of all in almost forty years of time. Bits and pieces reached Sperk ears and, after a generation or so, he learned the storyline. He knew the legend of the Zealer allies, these unearthly beings from the north, so striking they exceeded mortal propriety. They were nearly dismissible as myths.\n\nBut Darkmoon knew them to be real. He'd heard of them in childhood, possessing a mental picture long before his parents made the pilgrimage to the Northern Coast. The Zealers lived on his parents' tongues during the mountain days, before Father led the Sperks' bone-chilled hearts from unthinkable malediction.\n\nDarkmoon shivered. Zealers were real, according to Sperk rumor as well as Agring. Great snow-blue dragons from the globe's top most sanctuary found solace in perpetual winter, with ornamented faceplates and tail spikes like upside down fir trees. Every Agring description matched the Sperks, intertwining it with a personal relationship of promised comradery.\n\nHad Nyra actually traveled to Garrionom? Beaten the odds during shortened days and frigid temperatures? Not by herself, of course. No muscle, no prowess of the wing could afford a miracle of such caliber. But she was not alone. She had Xefexes. Had she saddled her way up north with those who better knew the journey?\n\nYes. No. His mind spun in a skull that rarely quivered. Nyra and Zealers. Strictly impossible.\n\nYet here was the logic. And nothing healed the wound of calamity like the balm of knowledge.\n\nIf it were true, he would be ready."
            },
            {
                "title": "Back From the Dead",
                "text": "Mum,\" Nyra said. The edges of her sight vibrated. Only Thaydra stood still. Thaydra regarded her daughter like stone, unable to perceive the other etched in the darkness. Nyra tried to swallow, but her throat pinched closed.\n\nLightly, Thaydra shook her head. She mouthed no.\n\nFuhorn quaked on the fuzzy edges. \"I thought Emdu was mistaken.\"\n\nThaydra began breathing very fast. Nyra tensed, afraid her mother would die on the spot. It would be Nyra's luck, after so much good luck, for Mum to die now.\n\nPlacing a paw on her friend's shoulder, in a way that suddenly reminded Nyra of the odd gestures of Crimson, a grin crept upon Fuhorn's face. \"Our Nyra. Home.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nyra, standing tall, willing Thaydra to come closer. Hold on. Please, Mum, hold on for me.\n\nThaydra ceased to hyperventilate. The mother dragon licked her fangs, like tasting a fragrance so long gone the spice had grown foreign.\n\n\"You're really\u2026\" said Thaydra. It sounded like an unfinished phrase. But Thaydra spoke it with such finality.\n\n\"I'm really. I'm home, Mum.\" I'm home, I'm home, I'm home.\n\nIn a wash of warmth and red, Nyra disappeared in Mother's tail, limbs, neck, and breath.\n\n\"You're alive, you're here,\" Thaydra cried.\n\n\"I swam,\" sniffed Nyra thickly. \"When Darkmoon knocked me down I swam to the Green Spot. And then\u2014\" but she couldn't continue as Thaydra nuzzled her mouth tightly shut. Just as well.\n\nOne sound alone could surface Nyra in that moment. A voice whispered her name from across the den. She lifted from Thaydra to the eyes of Blazing Fire. Outlined by ethereal morning light he watched them both. The arch of his brows lifted, eyes glassy.\n\nHe hesitated. Just for a moment. But he hesitated.\n\nThen he too ran to Nyra, and the circle of she and her mother widened, linking the wealth of scents and voices she'd never forgotten.\n\nNothing else mattered. For now, the world was right.\n\nLike any pragmatic society, the Nammocks instilled death's finality upon its children. Most chose Roendon and Quay to explain death as beacons in a graveyard's thicket. But it was not reversible, ever. To the Agrings of Nyra, she had somehow done the impossible. Nyra met the evening head on with her family's touch. In glorious claustrophobia, she nearly swooned. Lost in this trance was time, smothered by the much cozier present. Finally came the sunsets, and then Nyra remembered how time did not stop for sentiment.\n\nNo one saw the moonrises that night. Full bellied by the late-evening Fishers, the Agrings crammed excitedly in Fuhorn's burrow. The Alpha warned their voices down almost incessantly. It never lasted, either because of the room's contagious animation, or the Agrings' inability to take Fuhorn's beaming face seriously.\n\n\"The burrow's been expanded,\" Blaze explained, catching Nyra's alarm as a seemingly endless parade dribbled in from their personal den holes. \"You'll see when we get to our den. The passage between ours and Fuhorn's is a lot smaller than before. We had to make room. It's still crowded, but better.\"\n\n'Crowded' took new meaning. The last time Nyra witnessed a Gathering, thirty-one pairs of eyes had fixed on Fuhorn. Now that number was doubled with the Iritees herd, maybe more.\n\nNow, everyone fixed on her.\n\n\"Hush now, everyone,\" soothed Fuhorn, leveling a paw to the floor. They obeyed, sensing the need for silence. There were over sixty breathing mouths.\n\nNyra gulped.\n\n\"They're all yours, Little Shadow,\" crooned Thaydra.\n\nNyra had already spent the better half of her immeasurable day telling her story. The Xefexes, the sea, the Aquadray, and Zealers, etc. Initially, she had sputtered them out in a jumbled order. In each telling she improved, looking to Mother for encouragement. Thaydra asked a lot of questions, which counter to sense, increased in number with each successive telling. Almost everyone had heard pieces at this point. But with the exception of Mum, Blaze, Fuhorn, and Grandma Tega, none had heard it all from beginning to end.\n\nThey all watched, expectantly.\n\n\"Well,\" Nyra muttered. She needed to be louder. \"A lot of this will be redundant.\"\n\n\"Then they'll just think you're me,\" called Fuhorn from the audience. She'd never in her life been in the audience, not in Nyra's memory. The Zealer Stone was at Nyra's feet for the first time. One stone of the millions she'd now seen. Yet it was still somehow unique.\n\n\"Well,\" she rolled it between her claws. \"I-I guess it starts where we left off.\" How poetic.\n\nFor two hours she regaled them. Stutters turned to phrases, phrases turned to stories, and soon she was miming the speed of Oharassie, the gestures of the Xefexes, and so many details much, much larger than description. Her paws crinkled menacingly when Kodoral perched above the crevice where Nyra hid in the Garrionom cliff face. Then there was the Hawk, for which neither gesture nor word could respire to life. But nothing came close to eclipsing the story of Crimson. This shocked everyone, most of all the elders. Fuhorn had wept. She never wept. But of almost equal shock was the story of the ancestors. Nyra allowed a silence in the room upon telling them it was a lie. Many shook their heads in disbelief. Jesoam even tried to argue, so possessed by the dramatic tale she'd been fed since egghood. But after a few questions from the crowd, the shakes turned to nods. Everyone was somber for a while after that, and Nyra feared they had stopped listening. But soon enough they began reacting to her story with the same eagerness as before.\n\nAt last, the story concluded in the burrow, the heroine of the story fusing with the storyteller amongst glowing teal faces.\n\n\"So the Zealers,\" shuddered a voice from the back. An Iritees, no doubt, as Nyra didn't recognize it. \"They are here to help? Even after what the Nammocks did years ago?\"\n\nNyra nodded. \"You better believe it.\" A few laughed. More questions cropped up. Nyra answered them. More than once they ask the same question twice. The sum of her journey, with all its dizzying pieces, was so astronomically impossible that many needed to hear parts multiple times. Her answers sounded embellished, but they were all true. She made no inventions and, if anything, watered down the horrors for the sake of saving time and getting to the next question. It was a first.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" said cousin Vor, after Nyra described the Hawk for the fourth time. Nyra looked to Fuhorn. The old dragon wore a quizzical expression. For once, she was not the strategist. That duty fell on Nyra. After her journey, she probably came across as a great leader. But she felt nothing of the kind. She'd usually had someone else to rely on. Olieve had told her to find Zacka so he could help her plan a rescue. Oharassie took her North. Someone else usually led the way, or pulled her forward by the nose.\n\nIt wasn't over yet.\n\n\"We wait,\" she shrugged. \"We get ready as best we can, though.\"\n\n\"How?\" said Dewep, pulling Jesoam and Emdu close.\n\nNyra drummed her claws, watching her peaceful family, not sure how to ask them to defy their natures. \"Well, the Zealers are coming at daybreak. The whole reason I came here was to warn you.\"\n\nNyra waited for the panic the word 'warn' typically incurred. Dead silence continued.\n\n\"Here's the thing,\" she said slowly. \"The Sperks aren't going to be happy when Jatika, Sigeen, Olieve, and Zacka get here.\" She swallowed. \"I came early so you could be ready for the worst. You know, if the Sperks\u2026 attack the Zealers.\"\n\n\"Attack?\" cried an Iritees in the back. All the Iritees were in the back. The Nammocks were in the front. Nyra belonged to them, and so they had the best seating. \"But can't the Zealers stop the Sperks? I thought you said they were big?\"\n\n\"They are big,\" hastened Nyra. \"Bigger than Darkmoon, except Olieve, but the difference is negligible.\"\n\nThaydra whispered \"good word\" from behind.\n\n\"And there are forty-six Sperks,\" said the Iritees, \"and only four Zealers.\"\n\n\"Why didn't this Zirus send more?\" someone else whined.\n\nFuhorn gruffly stepped forward. \"Royal Zirus sent what he thought appropriate,\" she barked. \"And given Nyra's story, I'd call him sensible. He has a community to rebuild back home, not to mention a governance system. I expect everyone to be grateful and embrace his gift.\"\n\nNo one replied to that. Fuhorn's made it clear that there would be no further word from anyone on the subject. It took Nyra a second to realize she was the exception.\n\n\"Zirus sent four, that's what we have,\" Nyra affirmed. Fuhorn nodded in approval. \"He didn't want us to fight. He isn't violent. He wants us to win peacefully. And the Zealers are tricky. Darkmoon doesn't have to know that there are only four. And for all he knows, Zirus could be sending more in the future. To prevent conflict, Darkmoon would be smart to end the enslavement now.\"\n\nI hope.\n\n\"How do we get ready?\" prompted Vor. \"I understand coming to warn us was a fast decision, but did they equip you with advice?\"\n\nHis sympathy gave her confidence. \"Not much, unfortunately. They agreed to let me go, but they don't exactly know what will happen. They want us\u2026 I want us to be prepared mentally. And if it comes to it, physically.\"\n\nOld Grandma Tega sighed. \"We'll get it done. It's not the first time we've been a tad ill-prepared.\"\n\n\"Tega's right,\" said Fuhorn. \"The Zealers are going to do their best, and we'll do ours. We've changed plans overnight and we'll do it again.\"\n\nA few cheered weakly.\n\n\"Come now,\" cried Thaydra. Her enthusiasm had not changed a bit. \"This is exciting!\"\n\n\"They're worried,\" murmured Blaze, much more darkly than the Blaze Nyra left behind. She scanned the room. Upon the faces were plastered mixed concerns.\n\n\"An attack,\" said Flame Thistle, regarding Dewep and his younglings. \"It's just\u2026 it's a lot to\u2026 there's so much at stake.\"\n\n\"Yes!\" piped Jesoam. \"What if someone's killed?\" One could rely on Jesoam to say the exact wrong thing at the wrong time, even if everyone else was thinking it. Time had not dulled her insensitivity.\n\n\"We'll be fine,\" said Thaydra. \"This is the best chance we've ever had. Our numbers are more than doubled with the Iritees. And they know how to breathe fire. We can't give it up for a little risk.\"\n\n\"Look around, Thaydra,\" said Tesset angrily. \"Everyone in this room has something to lose. You should care about that especially now, seeing as you're not invincible anymore.\"\n\nBlaze winced noticeably. Submissive fidgets crawled up Thaydra's limbs.\n\n\"I've never been invinc\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" said Fuhorn before Thaydra's voice could rise. \"We can't have a civil war now. Speak cordially or I'll have your tail spikes snapped off.\"\n\nTesset and Thaydra glowered, but said nothing.\n\n\"I won't dumb it down and say we've nothing to lose,\" said Fuhorn. \"And I will not demand violence from anyone who feels the risk is too great.\"\n\nNyra felt her heart deflating.\n\n\"But I also believe this,\" said Fuhorn. \"It's this feeling of family that's held us together. We've had ample time to break in these long generations. Yet we've mended each other's spirits, because our community is the number one thing that's made our lives worthwhile. But there's a close contender: hope. And while love feeds our needs, hope feeds our will. That stinging, painful will which never died with the sunsets. Now here's the chance to starve out the poison. We can eradicate that sorrow we've needed to keep the hope alive. Make it obsolete. Only then can our togetherness be free of burden.\"\n\nFuhorn puffed simultaneously with Nyra's swelling heart. Stronger cheers erupted, mixed with weeping.\n\n\"If you choose to stay out of reach tomorrow,\" said Fuhorn, \"I will not have it held against your integrity.\" By I, it was clear that no one would hold grudges. \"And Iritees, you're excused from obligation. It's our mistake that brought you here. We owe you our efforts.\"\n\n\"No,\" said a male around Jatika's age. He stood beside Piannib, fangs flashing. \"I won't sit out, Fuhorn. And there are many who will follow my lead.\" Several Iritees nodded, maybe all of them.\n\n\"Good,\" said Fuhorn, \"because fire would be nice, and most Nammocks can't burp hotter than body temperature.\"\n\nPiannib's stern jaws broke into a small smile.\n\n\"What are your orders, Fuhorn?\" said the male.\n\n\"Right,\" said Fuhorn, stamping emphatically. She scanned a paw across the room, heralding the family, the known to the new, the young to the old. \"We've until Roendon goes shut-eye. Let's have some ideas.\"\n\nOn a stale bed of grass she rolled and tossed, squished between the unevenly breathing bodies of her mother and brother. They could not sleep either. In many ways it was like she never left. Though far from chastising her brother (overwhelmed by the relief of simply seeing him again), Nyra could just see herself complaining about the crunchy bedding. She could nearly feel herself sucking her lower lip with irritation if Mother were to list the morning chores. Like a chill, Nyra felt the shadow of old routines fall upon her weary disposition, with all the quirks of home waiting to nestle back into their proper places.\n\nBut of course it wasn't so simple.\n\nRealizing they wouldn't sleep, she and Thaydra spoke softly. Blaze listened. They did not discuss tomorrow, nor Nyra's experience. She wished to unburden herself as much as she was sick of discussing it. But Thaydra nuzzled her snout, gently sealing it closed whenever Nyra broached the subject of the journey.\n\n\"We'll hear it again when we're free,\" she whispered.\n\nBlaze cleared his throat and began reminiscing about the old days: funny things Jesoam had said, who won the most races last summer, etc. They lingered on the memories briefly with limited enthusiasm. They went on like that for awhile in an onslaught of 'do you remembers.' Nyra added to the stories when she could think of something. Thaydra also threw in thoughts.\n\nBlaze kept his responses to Mother short, saving the lengthy replies for Nyra. At first, it made her feel insightful, like everything she said was unusually intelligent. Maybe he made her feel special now because of the circumstances. Still, it didn't explain why he had so little to say to Mum. Nyra stayed in the middle of them, physically and in conversation.\n\nPauses lengthened inside yawning mouths. Thaydra listed to the floor, though her eyes were wide.\n\n\"I love you both, you know,\" she said.\n\n\"Me too,\" said Nyra. It was a phrase Nyra had heard more times today than in her life. But something was wrong in the way Thaydra said it now. Was it the fear of it being one of the last times she'd hear it? Or was it that Blaze, who always responded to Mum first, said nothing back?\n\n\"We're together again, all three of us,\" Thaydra sniffed. \"It's been dreadful, being ripped apart. More than my own life I wanted things back to normal for you two.\"\n\n\"I wish,\" whispered Blaze. It sounded like a complete phrase, but Nyra wondered if it was open ended, just as mother had spoken open-endedly when they were reunited.\n\nThaydra winced, like an invisible insect nibbled her lids. She shook it away.\n\n\"So tomorrow,\" said Thaydra. \"I have a request for you. I beg that you'll follow it.\"\n\nNyra blanched. \"What is it?\"\n\nThe mother dragon got to her feet, turning her jagged white scar to them.\n\n\"What, Mum?\" said Nyra, again taking Blaze's place as the first to speak.\n\nThaydra looked vacantly at the wall. \"I gave you an order in the last escape attempt. You didn't listen.\"\n\nNyra didn't understand. Confused, she turned to Blaze.\n\n\"We left the burrows,\" he murmured, so quietly Nyra almost didn't catch it.\n\n\"Yes, Blaze,\" Thaydra said. \"You and Nyra left the burrows during the fire. I've since been haunted by your disobedience. If you had not left, that,\" she paused, \"that may not have happened.\"\n\nNyra sulked guiltily. But it wasn't exactly true. Yes, she had left the burrow, putting herself in sight of Darkmoon during the fire. But would the evening have gone differently had she stayed in the den? Likely not. Thaydra still would have been punished, and what better way than to banish her child? Nyra would have been underground had she obeyed, but if Darkmoon wanted her out, he would have made it happen, somehow.\n\n\"I'm not saying it's regrettable,\" Thaydra continued. \"The Zealers are here. Nyra is back. But you must listen this time. I can't trust we'll be so lucky, that you'll be so lucky, ever again.\"\n\n\"Tell us what you want us to do,\" said Blaze, impatiently.\n\nPain crossed her face. \"I want you to stay out of the way if things go wrong.\"\n\nNyra felt color returning to her face, too fast, making her feel worse. \"You mean, not help?\"\n\n\"I mean not put your lives in danger.\"\n\n\"Fuhorn said we can choose to fight if we like,\" said Blaze darkly.\n\n\"And as your mother I choose for you,\" said Thaydra, turning from stern to pleading halfway through. \"I know you've been assigned posts tomorrow\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes!\" interrupted Blaze. \"Where we'll have optimal battle vantage should the worst\u2014\"\n\n\"But we have enough Agrings,\" Thaydra continued. \"Your absence won't matter. There are plenty of us.\"\n\n\"So what do we do?\" countered Blaze. \"Scurry to the burrow if Darkmoon starts taking you out?\"\n\n\"No. I want you to run away.\"\n\n\"Run away?\" Nyra cried.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Thaydra. \"If the Zealers go down and we lose, I don't want you on the Northern Coast any longer. No. I need you to fly to the woods.\"\n\nNyra gulped. \"The tree line?\"\n\n\"The tree line,\" Thaydra nodded.\n\nBlaze stepped forward. \"You want us to fly to where Shadow died. And my parents. You want us to breach open ground.\"\n\n\"But you'll make it,\" said Thaydra fiercely. \"When I tried it, we had Darkmoon and Royalwing on our tails and nothing to distract them. Tomorrow will offer plenty of distraction. Odds are that no one will notice a few Agrings slipping away, just as no one noticed Nyra getting in today.\"\n\n\"And if they do?\" said Blaze.\n\nThaydra hesitated. \"Just do your best.\"\n\n\"That's not an answer,\" he said.\n\n\"You'll make it.\"\n\n\"We can't do this unless you prepare us.\"\n\nA scream began to roll up from Nyra's heart. Stop it, stop it. Her legs shook, intensifying with Thaydra's sadness and Blaze's vitriolic retorts.\n\n\"Stop it,\" Nyra hissed. \"We'll do it. We'll do it, Mum.\"\n\nBlaze shut up.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Thaydra breathed. A paw ran to her fluttering eyes, which Nyra only noticed now were glistening.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Thaydra said, bounding to the tunnel connecting their den with Fuhorn's.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Nyra whined as Thaydra's head vanished.\n\n\"I'm going to talk to my sister,\" said Thaydra forcefully. She kept her face hidden in the opening, her words muffled in the soft dirt. \"And Ipsity's parents. All the young ones should go with you tomorrow.\" Her words waned out as her whole body disappeared.\n\nNyra felt every muscle pump behind her temples as she whirled to Blaze.\n\n\"What is going on?\" she hissed.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he shrugged, turning away, keeping his face out of view.\n\n\"Ah ha!\" snapped Nyra, standing up.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"There is something wrong. If there wasn't, you would have asked 'what are you talking about?' Instead you denied it.\"\n\nHe grunted, becoming entranced by a dirt stain on his tail blade. \"You're being crazy.\"\n\nNow, more than ever, she needed her brother. \"Blaze,\" her voice broke, \"I've just flown over the ocean. Alright? And I came home, and everything's messed up.\"\n\n\"It's always messed up here.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean. More than normal!\" she cried.\n\nHe said nothing.\n\n\"Blaze,\" she said, \"you're not the same.\"\n\nHe turned farther away. She could not take it.\n\n\"Even right now. I'm doing all the talking. I'm figuring things out. That's your job. It's like we've switched roles, and now I'm the loud one.\"\n\n\"It's been a loud day,\" he murmured.\n\n\"No but\u2026\" she sputtered. \"It's still wrong. You are wrong. You've evolved.\"\n\n\"So have you.\"\n\n\"I should hope so,\" she said. \"But you have too. And I don't like it. You look unwell. Like you're sick.\"\n\nA grimace spread upon his mouth, like a thin veil over secrets once anemic, now blown to epidemic proportions. He curled to the ground, burying his paws beneath his tail.\n\n\"Blaze,\" breathed Nyra. \"What happened between you and Mum? She keeps talking like she's trying to pry words out of you. And you don't give in.\"\n\nHe looked at her head-on. Plum tones blossomed beneath his gray face.\n\n\"She tried to kill herself.\"\n\nThe stone of Nyra's solidarity cracked, brought to living sound as she toppled to her stomach.\n\nBlaze stood up. \"It happened the day after you left. She just\u2026\" his wrist spun, \"ran for the cliffs.\"\n\n\"But she stopped,\" urged Nyra, easing up.\n\n\"No,\" said Blaze. \"She was going to go through with it. I caught her barely in time.\"\n\nNyra buzzed. Too much today. Too much thinking.\n\n\"Did she apologize?\"\n\nBlaze sighed. \"She's done nothing but since it happened.\"\n\n\"Well, it was a bad day,\" she said weakly. \"And she seems to want to make amends, so\u2014\"\n\nRage flamed Blaze's features. \"You don't get it,\" he sneered. \"She wanted out. She didn't think she had anything left to live for.\"\n\n\"Blaze!\" countered Nyra. \"Of course she did\u2026\"\n\nHis look silenced her. She understood.\n\n\"Mum forgot you.\"\n\nHe shook his head. His face grew distant, alien, embodying his new relationship with Thaydra.\n\n\"No,\" he whispered. \"My Mum died before I was born.\"\n\nHexed by guilt, judgment, and horrible realization, she did not know what to say. What to think. Her family, as she knew it, was lost in plain sight.\n\nBlaze clenched his jaw, mute. Compared to the old Blaze, he was very mute indeed.\n\nComfort. Comfort, Nyra screamed inside. What are the words? What did they say in stories when families quarreled?\n\nThere is no story for this. The mother never ceases to love.\n\nNever.\n\nThaydra padded back in on unhurried paws, small and quiet.\n\nAshamed.\n\nThaydra had heard everything.\n\nSunrise was near. Today, no one would jump from the coast to fish. For as the sun promised to blink up, Zealers would arrive at the cliff edge. Until then, the Nammocks and Iritees would wait in their burrows.\n\n\"I can't imagine it,\" whispered Thaydra. Together, the family huddled at the den entrance, craning to where the east sky tinged salmon pink. The cliff jut protruded a few lengths ahead. There, Olieve, Zacka, Jatika, and Sigeen would appear.\n\n\"Four Zealers, Mum,\" said Nyra. Even the stone-cold Blaze looked dazzled at the thought. He and Thaydra had exchanged no words since last night. Nyra hated to know that this was normal. It made her remember the leaves the Xefexes had pressed to her wounded body, way back when the shark had injured her. She wanted to be her family's leaf.\n\n\"And Crimson will be with them,\" Nyra added. One more piece of happiness. More leaves.\n\nLast night, upon hearing that Crimson lived, Thaydra was understandably astonished. In fact, she'd rebuked Nyra for making jokes. As the story unfolded it became clear that Nyra was telling a real character in her saga. Mentioning Crimson now, Nyra scrutinized Thaydra, waiting for a glimpse of fawning, excitement, embarrassment\u2014anything. There it was. A twitch. Nothing more but a jump in Thaydra's jowls. What did it mean?\n\nWhat do I want it to mean? With the other two parts of her three-dragon family at her hips, there existed a specific balance. Or, there had been balance, back in the day before Thaydra's would-be suicide. Suppose Nyra got it back to normal; Thaydra's optimistic chatter, Blaze's observations, and her own on-and-off laconic nature. Once her mother and brother rediscovered harmony\u2026\n\nWhat if Crimson were added to the mix, becoming the fourth dragon? Crimson, whom she'd known, whom she'd saved and vice versa. Whom she'd tried to understand through his vacillating personalities. He was a friend. And despite his oddities, he was good, even entertaining.\n\nBut what is a father?\n\n\"You're mouthing,\" whispered Blaze. She stole a side glance to Thaydra. Mother looked pointedly forward.\n\n\"Casstooth will start screaming any second now,\" said Blaze, filling the silence. Nyra felt a snippet of his old self returning, the old Blaze who stated almost everything. Maybe it was urgency that roused him. There were much larger fish to catch than old quarrels, even serious ones.\n\nIf any Agring was late, Casstooth would start stuffing her snout in burrows, reprimanding. The shriller the shout, the later the Fisher.\n\nHow strident will she be when no Agring reports to the sea?\n\n\"Time will tell,\" said Thaydra, responding to Nyra's thoughts. She'd said that out-loud, she knew.\n\nA light shaft crossed the den. Sunrise? Nyra lifted on her toes. No, just a cloud passing away from the dimming moonlight. Today was hazy, the aftermath of sparkling rain. It was the kind where rainbows emerged under diaphanous cloud cover. Beautiful weather, dreamlike. Not the kind one imagined for conflict. Maybe this was a good sign.\n\nNot a story. This is real. Weather was incidental.\n\nShe went over it in her head again: the tale of the near future. The Zealers would come. Distracted, the Sperks would turn, and only then would the sixty-some Agrings rise from their holes. There would be shock, shouts, and then the settlement, however that took form. Civil negotiation? Everyone hoped so. But as it was in tales, the first plan could not work. So the Agrings prepared for a second plan, ready to position in the stance of battle.\n\nEveryone ready to fight. Except me, Blaze, Jesoam, Emdu, Ipsity, and his two siblings. The eleven and twelve year olds. Ready to run away.\n\nCowards. Because Mummy said so.\n\nTime ticked. Blaze breathed.\n\n\"It comes,\" whispered Thaydra.\n\nThe sun broke on their faces.\n\nHer heart thrummed. Nyra hunched down, waiting for the yells of Casstooth, waiting for a Sperk to claw a burrow open. Waiting for the rage.\n\nWaiting for the shining faceplates: the only beacons to frighten the Sperks.\n\nSilence.\n\nOpen mouthed, Thaydra's teeth glimmered over an expectant tongue, poised to speak. Blaze's nostrils flared.\n\nSilence.\n\nNyra mouthed without words. Exchanging looks, the two siblings implored each other for answers.\n\n\"Where's Casstooth?\" whispered Nyra, beseeching her mother. She became small again, infantile to the heroic schemes she had helped to craft the night before.\n\nThaydra ignored her daughter and padded out a nose-length, just enough to see outside.\n\n\"Oh Quay,\" she murmured.\n\nThunder rolled in Nyra's chest as her mother bounded completely out. Instinctively, the young dragon leaped after her, with the whoosh of Blaze in her wake. In that split second she dreamed terrible things: foreign flames, the glowing teal of Kodoral's Well Room, and the Hawk.\n\nWhat she met was... nothing.\n\nFrom north to south and east to west, Nyra saw not a single dragon. Barren were the cliffs where the Sperks usually took sentry. Behind her, the hills rolled sadly, boasting no blue specks nor almond eyes.\n\nIt was just her, Thaydra, and Blaze.\n\nFrom one hole over Fuhorn surfaced, equally confused. She scanned the scene as Nyra had done, returning her gaze to Thaydra for validation.\n\nWhat's happening? The Alpha's face said. But Thaydra couldn't even shrug. She was too shocked. Nyra herself could not swallow over the locked distension in her stomach.\n\nMore faces emerged. Flame Thistle. Piannib. Ackeezo. All with the same expression.\n\nThis is wrong.\n\nIn the silence, Dewep gasped, eyes pinned upon the coast. Nyra followed her gaze.\n\nAnd then many things happened at once.\n\nIn the second it took for Nyra to turn, Olieve popped over the cliff edge, hoisted by the guiding paws of Zacka. Jatika followed. Sigeen was last.\n\nA cloud passed away from the eastern morning, sharpening Quay's first eye.\n\nThen in a rush of shrieks, the Sperks charged from the hill behind the Agring Warren."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Waters of Nyra",
                "text": "Before Quay's first eye rolled lazily awake, Crimson watched the Zealers take off. The Agring kneaded the soft sands, pumping his talons as the ice dragons did their wings.\n\nI should be with them.\n\nIt was risky, him tagging along. Maybe not so much as Nyra sneaking into the Northern Coast, even if all signals pointed to her success. But accompanying the Zealers would only anger Darkmoon further. He'd survived, outwitted the Sperk Alpha. Nyra had done the same, and that was far too much as it was. For now, it was best to wait.\n\nWait for the Zealers to mess it up.\n\nCrimson's fears spread inside like brittle nettles. Something could go wrong, would go wrong, and he'd be here alone. The outcomes, most of them dire, multiplied fast in his mind, each more dreadful than the last. There were a million combinations, bifurcating to new fates of danger.\n\n\"You're not allowed in the water,\" he scolded his feet. They wanted to move. He needed to stay. It was their fault.\n\nThey're jealous. Of Zealer feet. They'd been envious of Nyra yesterday too. But he'd coaxed them still, far more concerned for her welfare.\n\nUntil he came, after Nyra left. He came suddenly, literally out of the blue, and then Crimson's feet screamed injustice. The newcomer, the strange, impossible-in-every-way newcomer, would get to partake or at least try (though how, Crimson did not know). He had permission from the all-reigning Zealers. He probably didn't need it. The Zealers couldn't stop him if they tried.\n\nThe Zealers. The beast. The Northern Coast. Nyra. Mother. His brothers. Way over there, far away.\n\nAnd there's Thaydra, too.\n\nNot knowing what he'd find, and knowing it might bite him in the end, Crimson shook the Zealers' decree away. He ripped from the sands and plunged southward into the ocean.\n\n\"They knew.\"\n\nSpilling from the hills like Scar water, tens of enraged Sperks charged to the stricken Agrings. Grass rattled noisily on the plains, swathing the world like fire until crushed by the stampeding monsters.\n\nThey did not stop, reaching the Agring Warren in seconds. Nyra ducked. A Sperk whooshed overhead, so fast she couldn't identify it. The sun blotted out then reappeared.\n\n\"Mum!\" she shrieked.\n\nThaydra was next to her, also ducking. Dotted over the Warrens crouched the other Agrings, shrinking cravenly as Sperk after Sperk leaped over them.\n\nNyra whipped around. Olieve's ears stood on end. That was all she saw before Darkmoon blocked the Zealer from view. Olieve made some sort of protest sound, or maybe it was a retort to the Sperk's rude greeting. Whatever it was, she didn't get a chance to repeat it before all four Zealers jumped into the sky.\n\n\"Back out!\" shouted Jatika. He lifted above the royal blue swarm, catching Olieve's wrist in what looked like a painful jerk. Olieve rolled in the air, a whisker short of Darkmoon's snapping jaw.\n\nBewilderment swirled on the Zealers' faces. Jatika held his free paw up in a calming gesture. He shouted something. It sounded like 'peace.' Nyra couldn't be sure. His electrified face betrayed his suggestion.\n\nThe Sperks slowed to gauge the cliff. Casstooth took off. Others followed. Jatika dropped his paw, swung Olieve northward and exchanged a brief, alarmed look with Sigeen and Zacka. The Zealers zipped towards the Green Spot, flapping scarcely ahead of the infuriated monsters.\n\nThey're going away.\n\n\"The rest, stay!\" called Darkmoon, scowling upon the vanishing Zealers and the chase-party flapping behind them. The remaining Sperks, numerous in number, breathed heavily, seething. Their jaws smoked.\n\nDarkmoon rounded on the Agrings.\n\n\"Pin them,\" he growled, eyes flitting like ravished rats between the Nammocks and Iritees. Nyra sunk aside her brother. The Sperks dispersed, looking ready to rip apart every Agring they apprehended.\n\n\"No,\" growled Fuhorn dangerously, stepping before the Agrings, her sons at her side. Obsidian smoke trailed from her nostrils.\n\nDarkmoon's eyes narrowed. The Sperks did not falter, coming closer.\n\nA male Iritees stepped beside Fuhorn. Piannib's mate.\n\n\"Do it!\" cried Fuhorn to the Iritees. The guard Shalebreeze snarled and pinned her down. His claws clenched. Fuhorn, flattened to the ground, bellowed again. \"Do it!\"\n\nThe Iritees remained dubious, transfixed by the Sperk towering above.\n\n\"Do it now!\"\n\nShalebreeze readied to grab the second Agring.\n\nThe Iritees belched a stream of flame.\n\nLittle volcanoes erupted up and down, sideways and backways. Iritees were vomiting white hot fire upon the belly, legs, and faces of their capturers. In the deep red and periwinkle fire of both Sperk and Agring, the dragons of the Northern Coast became a single body of unrelenting turmoil.\n\nBlaze smacked Nyra's head down just in time to miss a fire stream. They trembled together, the red glow sizzling just a length away. Rolling, Blaze dragged her left, nearly clipped by a Sperk's hind feet. They crashed into Fidee, whose petite smoke shrouded her uncharacteristically venomous face.\n\nAlways the fire, always the chaos. Nyra felt no sense of control. Here, there was no map of fish entrails, no opportune web in which to snare their victims. This was chaos of the labyrinthine kind. No way to navigate, no safe passages.\n\n\"They shouldn't be doing this,\" said Blaze, shifting his weight closer.\n\n\"Shouldn't be\u2026\" Nyra trailed off. Her eyes watered. Smoke was trickling from her own mouth, burning her throat as she hyperventilated.\n\nFuhorn was on her feet again, freed from the stunned Sperk who'd held her. Shimmering between fiery flashes, Fuhorn was unlike anything Nyra had seen in Gatherings. Fuhorn's wrinkles seem to vanish in the colored hues, her graying patches shaken away as she swung her murderous tail blades. Catching them in the thigh of a Sperk, she roared, matching the Sperks piteous howls.\n\nAnother Sperk came from behind the Agring Alpha.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Nyra and Blaze yelled together. Fuhorn could not hear them through the shouts and smolder.\n\nFuhorn turned just in time, coughing violet flames at her attacker. He recoiled.\n\nNyra couldn't help but swell. She remembers. After all these years, Fuhorn remembers how to do it.\n\nA red blast simmered near Nyra's backside. She scuttled forward, nearly bashing into Casstooth, who sparred broilingly with several nameless Iritees. Their light blue flames, though strong, were like aspens among Casstooth's sequoia-thick jets. Fuhorn, farther off now, took on other Sperks. Behind her were other Iritees, pressing forward with the same bravery. Turrigaff, the Iritees from yesterday, spat up a flame. In a sudden gasp she stopped, flipping sideways to avoid a Sperk's retort, barely dodging incineration.\n\n\"We're going to lose,\" Blaze murmured.\n\nThe Sperks were too powerful. Even though outnumbered by Agrings, they were collectively stronger. Fuhorn must have known this, that the Sperks could retaliate with their fantastical flames. Nyra had forgotten, stupidly forgotten, that the Sperks were also fire-breathers. They never used it, and perhaps Fuhorn thought they'd be too under exercised to fight back. And there would be Zealers, with their great politics and clever threats.\n\nNot to be.\n\n\"We have to go,\" said Blaze, yanking Nyra away from Casstooth. The Iritees were backing away from the Sperks.\n\nNyra stammered incoherently.\n\n\"Now,\" Blaze said warningly. \"This won't last much longer, and we won't be able to sneak off.\"\n\nNyra shook her head vigorously. \"Sneak\u2026 sneak off? But, the Zealers\u2026\"\n\n\"It didn't work, Nyra!\" he hissed.\n\nSo this was it. Over. Now? After everything? The Zealers had told her not to come yesterday for fear of something going wrong. Was this the wrong? Was the red and blue fire in the sky her inadvertent, foolish doing? In a few months, an increment where she usually did nothing but stack stones and play tag, she had broken all the boundaries, betraying the customs to which she'd long become conditioned. Nyra had made it there and back.\n\nFor what?\n\nLuck had ended. The consequence of her efforts: nothing. And worst yet, while she lived, while she ran, her family was sparing her life with the greatest exchange they had to offer; their freedom, if not their lives. All for a dragon who'd built up their hopes then squandered everything.\n\nBlaze pulled her under another jet. She numbly fell.\n\nI wish I had died. She'd never wished it before. But the voice inside her head was invariably hers. So many times to die. The rocks, the Hawk, the sea, the cave in. All chances.\n\nAll futile.\n\nAnd now her family screamed.\n\nBlaze nudged her southward as Casstooth spun around to meet them.\n\nThaydra jumped between Blaze and Nyra from nowhere. Blue erupted from her throat. The guard jumped backwards.\n\n\"Go!\" shrieked Thaydra. Casstooth grasped her own jaw, burning raw under her dry eyes. Thaydra's own eyes glistened.\n\nTime slowed. Nyra reached for her mother, a gentle paw reaching across an ocean-wide gap. For a moment it seemed Thaydra would lift her paw as well and they would meet and never ever be parted.\n\nTime jerked back, and so did Nyra's body as Blaze slammed her side. Thaydra knocked out of view, and the grass rushed beneath them.\n\nThey ran. They ran so fast.\n\nThe screams did not soften behind them.\n\nThrough the trees was their last chance. Blaze practically ran at a free-fall speed, an inkling of disobedience nibbling his conscience. He'd never been this far south in his life. It wasn't allowed. Yet his feet ran faster than his hammering heart, keeping him alive and killing him all at once. Nyra jostled at his side, in shock and disbelief.\n\nEmdu and Jesoam, he remembered. He was supposed to grab them, too. And Ipsity and his siblings. For a moment he faltered, and Nyra skipped seven paces ahead. Infinitesimally, he turned his head.\n\nNo, he thought, picking up the pace before Nyra noticed he'd stalled. To go back risked Nyra. And though the idea of frail Jesoam crying in the smoke and Emdu dithering in the fire jets made Blaze's stomach plummet, the risk of putting Nyra back in peril, after so much peril, boasted no comparison. They'd have to be left behind and, maybe by a stroke of fortune, escape on their own.\n\nHe knew they never would.\n\nHe shook the thought of his cousins and the other younglings away. Nyra was alive. She'd been dead once before. He had already endured that, swallowing every spine of life that had followed.\n\nNyra huffed like a winded antelope, galloping faster. She was more muscular than he, sculpted by the wild. He strained to keep up. Behind, the sounds of battle raged on.\n\nThe Agrings had sent their plans spiraling at the first fire breath. Now there would be punishment on top of failure. There might even be casualties, although not much. Darkmoon would never kill any of his slaves on purpose. The Sperks were breathing fire defensively, not in attack, although the Agrings would have been too scared to notice. The Agrings wouldn't be hurt no more than they'd win, as long as it stopped before any accidents.\n\nThey should have given up, swallowed their smoke, and waited for the off-chance the Zealers developed a retaliation strategy. But this was all in retrospect. The Agrings had simply followed the plan, the fire plan, acting exactly as Fuhorn instructed the preceding night. What else were we supposed to do?\n\nNo right answer existed between flames and submission.\n\nTree needles took shape, springing from rough branches. Cover and safety.\n\n\"Blaze,\" said Nyra. He'd heard her speak all last night, and still the voice sent him into jolts.\n\n\"We'll make it,\" he panted.\n\n\"Blaze,\" she repeated. Tension infected her voice.\n\nHe looked back.\n\nA Sperk crested the closest hill behind them. They were still in the open, right at the edge of the tree line.\n\nPushing Nyra, Blaze stumbled behind the nearest trunk. Firs muffled together ahead, cut through by sunlit fingers. There were a thousand places to hide, only no time to do so.\n\nThe Sperk galloped down, and for a fleeting moment relief imbued his decimated spirits. For in their capture, he'd have no more responsibility, no more of the ambiguities or guessing games which made up life. Just everything as it always was.\n\nExcept I must keep Nyra safe. He would get them away, just as Mum instructed.\n\nMum. Had he made eye contact with her in that final moment? Had he wanted to?\n\nYes, he thought, acid creeping into his tear ducts. Yes, he'd wanted to. She had tried. She made a mistake, an unforgivable one. But then she had tried. And loved. And never stopped, even when he did.\n\nHe'd never see her again.\n\n\"It's Bristone,\" his sister gasped.\n\nHe wiped his tears, swallowing a lump on the back of his tongue. The melancholy Sperk ran toward them, looking through the tree they hid behind as if it were invisible.\n\nBlaze blanched as blue flames erupted from Nyra, hitting his senses like a bad omen. Blaze hissed aside the snaps and crackles spitting from his sister.\n\nBristone slowed to a march. Bloodlust busied her face. Nyra and Blaze hastened backwards, tangling in the brambles and roots before toppling on the forest floor.\n\nBristone fell into the shadows, stopping.\n\n\"Well?\" she snapped. She breathed shakily, and there was something unstable in her movements. She could not make up her mind between shouting or simply killing on the spot.\n\n\"What happens now?\" the Sperk said venomously.\n\nBlaze, too frightened to be quizzical but too confused to be passive, looked to Nyra. She appeared equally undecided.\n\n\"Was that your big comeback, then?\" Bristone seethed, winded. Her legs shook, near collapsing. They shined. She was burned.\n\n\"Big\u2026 come back\u2026?\" ventured Nyra.\n\n\"Bringing Zealers here?\" Bristone swung a paw down, making the Agrings jump. \"You brought them in to kill us. A surprise slaughter? Was that it?\" She didn't shout this time. Instead she was cool and low, like giving a stern lecture on behavior.\n\nShe'll attack if we don't answer.\n\n\"Yes, I will,\" Bristone growled, answering his thoughts. Blaze realized he had adopted Nyra's thinking-out-loud habit. Now of all times.\n\n\"No,\" said Nyra.\n\n\"No? What?\" the Sperk enunciated.\n\nNyra shivered badly. Blaze leaned to his sister, attempted to hold her still. She jostled him off.\n\n\"The slaughter bit,\" said Nyra. \"We didn't\u2026 that's not what we were trying to do.\"\n\n\"Roendon's feces you didn't,\" snarled Bristone, and even now, Blaze couldn't help but recoil at the imprecation. Nyra didn't budge. She'd known so much more than draggling fears.\n\n\"This wasn't an attack,\" said Nyra. \"It wasn't. We wanted to negotiate\u2026\"\n\n\"You wanted to kill us.\"\n\nTo this Nyra had no response, and Blaze knew well why. No Agring could deny their hatred for their enslavers. Any Agring would want them dead. It was a not-so-secret wish through the generations.\n\n\"No,\" said Nyra at last.\n\n\"Lies!\" said Bristone, shouting again.\n\n\"No!\" Nyra retorted. \"Bristone, listen. I didn't bring them back to fight. We prepared for the worst\u2014\"\n\n\"You made fire. That's illegal\u2014\"\n\n\"We PREPARED,\" Nyra shouted over the Sperk, \"in case anything went wrong. But the Zealers planned on negotiating before doing anything violent.\"\n\nBristone snorted, crouching as felines did before hooking rabbits. \"And it did turn violent.\"\n\n\"Not because of the Zealers,\" Blaze heard himself say. \"The Sperks, you frightened them off\u2014\"\n\n\"For fear of attack,\" interjected Bristone. \"They'd kill us. We\u2014\"\n\nBlaze waved a paw. \"I know, we know, but that would not have happened.\"\n\n\"You can't know that,\" sneered Bristone. \"Zealers\u2026 monsters from Quay-knows how far off\u2026 we couldn't spare any precautions.\"\n\n\"That's one presumptuous precaution,\" spat Nyra. Good word, thought Blaze, mad at himself for the sound of Mum it made in his head, and then sad.\n\nHe'd never see her again.\n\n\"You're right, Bristone,\" said Blaze.\n\nNyra looked at him like she would bite his head off.\n\n\"The Zealers would have killed you in the end,\" he said, his anger doubling. \"Because we're one big threat to you\u2014the Agrings, or the lack of us. If you lost us\u2026 if the Zealers set us free and chased your kind off, you'd die of starvation. Lazy starvation.\"\n\nBristone's mouth puckered.\n\n\"Yes,\" laughed Blaze. \"Indolent Sperks. Big, but no brass. No fare for the sea. You couldn't swipe your way out of a tidal pool.\"\n\nBristone looked off. A flicker in her cheeks sent a sour look upon her muzzle, like she was having a revelation, although he knew Bristone had not learned anything new. It was reassessment that plagued her now, the mere reminder that despite the self-ostracization from her herd, she too was guilty of playing the game. She'd watched the fish piles with the rest of them, rising by a species much weaker than herself.\n\n\"You brought a horde to kill us,\" Bristone murmured.\n\nNyra shook her head, carefully, coaxing a bee from a hive without sending it into frenzy. \"No,\" she said. \"There are only four Zealers.\"\n\nDon't tell her that, thought Blaze.\n\n\"I have to,\" whispered Nyra, answering the thought he'd spoken out loud. Then to Bristone: \"There are only four. And they aren't even a warrior group. They are trackers and guards. And the female, the Royal one, she can't even see.\"\n\nBristone fixed on Nyra suspiciously. It won't work, thought Blaze. Ingrained in her own survival, Bristone would not welcome the idea of Zealers, or anything that threatened her family. Just as Agrings hated Sperks, one could not toggle the prejudice of a lifetime.\n\n\"Sperks are Sperks, Nyra,\" growled Blaze.\n\n\"Mmmm-mm,\" Nyra muttered, halfway through a shake and a nod. \"But Opalheart and Bristone have always been the purple-est.\"\n\nBlaze did not understand.\n\n\"You brought them here to get you out, then,\" said Bristone.\n\nNyra nodded. \"That and only that.\"\n\nThey said nothing for awhile. Too long a while, and Blaze wondered where the line of thinking which separated Bristone and Nyra traced itself, or if it wavered off on the latest breeze.\n\nA distant cry broke the silence. The battle. It raged on. Blaze looked to Nyra. She had vanished. Rustling above, Nyra clambered up the nearest fir.\n\n\"Stop!\" commanded Bristone. Blaze climbed after his sister, forgetting that it was his first time scaling a non-Reservoir tree in his life. Meeting Nyra at the top, he found ocean as far as the eye could see. Bristone watched angrily below. Blaze clung tight. Nyra searched the horizon.\n\n\"Olieve, where are you?\" Nyra whined, hunching down, about to take off.\n\nAnother cry rang from the Coast. Mum? He couldn't see the Coast well. Branches were in the way.\n\nBlaze held out a paw. \"Nyra don't\u2026\"\n\nShe leaped, flapping three lengths above his vantage point.\n\n\"Oh,\" he grumbled. He flapped to her side. Blue wisps of fire persisted near the Warren, and maybe it was because they were miniscule compared to the scarlet flames, but Blaze spotted fewer and fewer.\n\nIndeed, the Agrings were failing.\n\n\"We can't stay here,\" he said sadly. \"I'm sorry, Nyra.\"\n\nNyra gasped. Blaze covered his ashamed eyes.\n\n\"Nyra\u2026\"\n\nShe didn't look at him. Nor the battle. Instead she looked west, towards the bend in the cliff and the great, slanting divot of the Scar.\n\n\"Look,\" she breathed, pointing a claw. Blaze followed the fine white point. Like a slice of sunlight, it lingered below the Scar, where fresh water crashed upon the frothing sea.\n\nThere was a spot on the ocean.\n\nStupidly, his mind flew to the Green Spot. Only this spot, this little patch below the Scar, was not like the infamous light. It was in the wrong place. It was too close to the continent and, unlike its relative, was visible despite the sharp deterrence of day.\n\n\"What is that?\" Blaze asked.\n\nNyra exhaled long and raucously. \"It's Oharassie.\"\n\nSpits of fire everywhere.\n\nThaydra saw other flashes beyond the blossoms from her own throat. The Zealers had left and a stone fell in her gut. But it was not so heavy to quell the flames. They rejuvenated her everlasting potential\u2014the lifeblood she'd almost forgotten.\n\nThe fires shrank, too fast. Those hopeful blue shimmers subsided upon faithless faces.\n\nGiving up?\n\nShe saw Casstooth round upon the children. Thaydra forgot whatever adversary she had been battling. Her lone wing opened and she raced, vomiting heat. The Sperk had not seen Thaydra coming and jumped away in shock and pain.\n\nBehind Casstooth, Piannib crouched in Darkmoon's shadow. The Iritees Alpha hissed, and her tongue danced madly. But she did not breathe fire. Thaydra saw other mothers, other fathers, in the same submissive stance of Piannib. The Iritees, blessed with their gifts, traded fire for glares, as if wishing a malicious leer would be enough to bring their foes down.\n\nThe fire was dying. Yes, giving up.\n\nIt clicked in her head.\n\n\"Go!\" she shouted to her children.\n\nThey left.\n\nShe breathed fire again, and again. Not watching Blaze and Nyra, nor thinking of the last goodbye they would never share.\n\nCowards. Her own family, cowards. The most crucial moment of their lives was not enough to inspire them. All because of fear. Fear was always the end-all, the demise of dignity and rise of diffidence. Last night she'd asked the Iritees to cast aside their worries. In the thrill of impending rebellion, they made their promise. Now in the hubbub, they grew afraid again, disheartened by the Zealers' flight and the prowess of the Sperks. They did not burn, but their spirits dwindled to ashes. Piannib and the rest had too much to lose. Everyone, afraid of loss, but for Thaydra, always the revolutionary, always running forward. Thaydra, who in her periphery watched Blaze and Nyra vanish over the hills\u2026\n\nAnd taking with them the last thing Thaydra feared losing more than freedom.\n\nBy the time she noticed Darkmoon approaching, the fire had completely gone. Unknowingly, Thaydra had removed herself, watching the anguish of her failing people.\n\nAll alive, because the Sperks must keep them so.\n\nBut dead inside.\n\nDarkmoon was in front of her, center stage before a respectfully silent audience. Just like her daughter all of those nights ago.\n\nThaydra grinned. My daughter. Alive. Both children alive.\n\nDarkmoon swiped.\n\n\"Ha!\" she sidestepped, bounding delicately over his repeated blows. He snapped, she leaped, and she felt no fatigue.\n\nThe ground behind curved up slightly.\n\nHe was herding her to the edge.\n\nDarkmoon leaned in as though to whisper. Thaydra copied, like a friend preparing to hear a coveted secret.\n\n\"You did this,\" he hissed. His swishing tail creaked under his bark scales, whipping snake-like at the tip. \"Always Thaydra, setting the world on fire.\"\n\nNot a one battled anymore. Amidst the burns and bruises, every head, Sperk and Agring alike, turned to watch in mute anxiety.\n\nThaydra's back claws slipped. She jerked them up, barely regaining balance.\n\n\"It's a long drop, Thaydra,\" he chided.\n\nShe looked over her shoulder. She should not have, but did. It was so far, so austere.\n\nIt filled her with calm.\n\nDarkmoon swished his tail, mesmerizing, tantalizing, and hypnotizing to a final peace. She watched and waited.\n\n\"I thought once,\" crooned Darkmoon, \"that no one could survive it. Until Little Thaydra.\"\n\nHa.\n\n\"But she opened her wings that night,\" he growled. \"Even at the pitiable age of eleven, without any lessons, a sniveling draggling opened her wings before crashing. Just for a moment.\"\n\nAnd it was enough, Thaydra thrilled.\n\nHe crept closer. Thaydra stepped backward again. This time both legs toppled. She scrambled up.\n\n\"You,\" he sneered, \"I don't expect will succeed.\"\n\nThe scar of her missing left wing was white and waxen. Sterile to the skies. Forever. Standing tall, Thaydra opened her remaining wing.\n\nThey got away. I'm ready.\n\n\"So be it,\" she whispered.\n\nShe'd jump. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She'd jump.\n\nOn the count of four.\n\nDarkmoon, in his almond eyes, counted with her.\n\nOne\u2026\n\nTwo\u2026\n\nThree\u2026\n\nA sliver of gray scrambled to her side from below, lead by a scarlet nose. Mounting the cliff, the new Agring stood poised, much older than she remembered, but in wearing the quixotic expression of a curious child, became young again. He faced Darkmoon with a smile she knew from dusty memories.\n\n\"Four,\" said Crimson.\n\nThe gray Agring pulled her over, the aghast face of Darkmoon spiraling up and out until the deafening splash.\n\nThaydra crashed into the sea with Crimson.\n\nCrimson. The dead.\n\nHe saw it with his own eyes, so close it was unmistakable. For a fleeting moment though, Darkmoon believed it was someone else, just as he had mistaken Nyra for Jesoam yesterday. The mind made sense of what it perceived, splicing fact from fiction and using truth to compile a plausible answer. His mind scrambled to do this now, joining broken fragments of thought and image to explain the Agring who had vanished as quickly as he'd appeared.\n\nDarkmoon had crashed upon the Agring seventeen years ago. Or was it twenty? Time swam in immortal circles, upon peaks where life superseded death and suns set in the south. He focused, harder than he had ever focused in his life. Harder than the night Royalwing was lost. Somewhere was sense. And he would find it.\n\nBut the red snout kept coming back in his brain. One match. One explanation that couldn't be, but was.\n\nThe bubbles far below popped and fizzled.\n\nThey will surface.\n\nAnd when they do\u2026\n\nDarkmoon readied to leap.\n\n\"Hey!\" said a voice.\n\nDarkmoon saw the ghost in his mind before turning to face it. Within his sacred hovel of linear thought floated Thaydra, sleek, slender, cunning, and wretched. She laughed, mocking him, her ears flitting up in the way they did when she was being clever. He knew this voice, knew it from Thaydra's dragglinghood. He was young then, too. The voice had deepened through the years, until it regenerated in another.\n\nHe turned in the direction of the Reservoir and met Thaydra, silhouetted on gray skies and speckled sunlight. Just like the voice, the Agring was young again. Eleven, perhaps, yet nearly mature. Her small body was enhanced disproportionately\u2014a trophy of precocial power. Other parts wasted away\u2014the scars of traumatic endeavor.\n\nNot Thaydra. Little Thaydra. She lived too. Like Crimson. They came back. Impossibly, they came back.\n\nShe waited\u2014the savior created by petty dreams.\n\nBut no more.\n\nHe charged.\n\nThough far away, far enough that Nyra had to shout at the top of her voice, Darkmoon charged to her so forcefully she nearly felt battering wind on her skin. Nyra had barely a moment to acknowledge her mother's disappearance over the cliff side.\n\nThe empty space between Agring and Sperk compressed at a suffocating speed. Nyra flipped around and ran. Time. Always too much or too little. Never just right. Would she make it? Or would he split the empty air until he cleaved her body in two?\n\nThe space was halved, the yellow of his eyes in livid detail, cut to viper-fang pupils.\n\nJust us.\n\nThe riverbed yawned to meet her. Checkpoint one. But still so much more ground to cover before the monster caught up. Enough time? Distance? Speed? She knew nothing, only that they made a sum whose consequences were unthinkable.\n\nFour steps. Three. Two. Nyra leaped to the riverbed. Airborne, she thought of Bristone, who'd been in the riverbed another morning long ago. In her mind, she saw Bristone with a cross expression. But despite her dark nature, in Nyra's imagination and in real life, the young Sperk had a family. Because of family, Bristone helped her now. She hoped. Oharassie had been persuasive to Bristone and Blaze, who'd protested the whole thing. It was too dangerous. Nyra couldn't argue with that, running as she was now. But she had to do it.\n\nCrashing down to the riverbed floor, Nyra rolled to a bruising thud. Dust flew up in her face, little rocks digging her flesh open. Pain stood in abeyance. She'd feel later.\n\nThis would happen. Or she'd die trying.\n\nPlease don't die.\n\nNyra bounded through the tall walls, weaving so fast that any obstruction would kill her on impact. The walls slid in and out like clouds: flipping panels readying to reveal the focal end.\n\nA loud thud hit the ground behind her, so forcefully that Nyra was propelled a length forward. She nearly tripped, but held fast.\n\nShe looked.\n\nDarkmoon zig-zagged between the walls with uncharacteristic dexterity, his bulky form unscathed by the diminutive passage. Hunting's fervor on his face, the Sperk's wings shot out. They severed the bank-side as easily as fangs on fish flesh, rocks spattering like flayed blood.\n\nHe can't open his wings all the way.\n\nYou'd be dead if he could. One pump would put her in his grasp.\n\nTwisting left, Nyra entered a new turn. On the side were level rocks, stepping stones making a leisurely decent. The ground below was weathered and smooth.\n\nThere was one more turn before the Dam.\n\nAbove gleamed the suns, the eyes of Quay shining through gray films, turning the world ethereal yellows through a thick, tangible atmosphere. Whispers of rain prickled her nose, fresh as spring tree sap and feathery leaves.\n\nThe pounding behind her intensified, shaking the earth, nearly crippling her strides.\n\n\"Please, let this work.\" Nyra thought out loud.\n\nThe turn appeared. She arced left.\n\nThe Dam, sturdy to strife and ever-grinding generations, laced in the moss and grass of ages, towered to the optimistic sky.\n\nAt the very top perched a slate form.\n\n\"Nyra!\" shouted Blaze from above, standing rigidly upon the highest rock. Sun fire outlined him. He seemed to glow.\n\n\"Blaze!\" she called.\n\n\"Nyra!\" he shouted again, and though Nyra could not see him well in the light and through the speed at which she raced, the Agring knew that her brother addressed someone else. Calling over his shoulder, he repeated her name as if he did not see her far below.\n\nBut he did. Nyra knew better.\n\nBlaze snapped his wings open so hard he flipped into the air, bellowing incoherently at the Reservoir.\n\nHot breath washed thickly over Nyra's tail.\n\nWings out, Nyra sprang on the nearest boulder.\n\nClaws grazed the rocks. Her own. Other clatters came too close behind.\n\nMist squirted her belly. Light as insect wings, but there.\n\nThe rock on which she stood shook. She jumped up, opening her wings.\n\nDarkmoon grasped her tail.\n\nMist furled over her face in curtains. She twisted away. It sprayed past her to Darkmoon.\n\nThe grip on her tail wrenched off.\n\nA boulder shot out, nearly slashing her wing. Water spat like a jet of Sperk fire. The mist thickened. She jumped, mounting boulders just as they tremored and catapulted away. More spray. More jets. She could hardly see.\n\nThen the Dam roared open, and with it, the trail of rocks Nyra had climbed mere blinks before.\n\nSkidding up, Nyra flapped to Blaze, high in the sky, awestruck to the tumbles and rolls below. A thick spray furled to meet them. Everything vanished in white. Nyra squinted, desperately blinking out the very air.\n\nThe wash dropped away. There it was: an image dreamed a thousand times by the young, and remembered by eyes old enough to have seen it. There, in a landscape of decades long gone, rushed Fitzer's River to its proper end.\n\nAnother explosion. Nyra looked back. From the center of the restored lake rose the very ocean itself. The lake heaved up, and from it came a shining green mass. There in the liberating fog pulsed those familiar nostrils, each wide enough to fit her head inside. Behind perched the bulbous eyes, verdant and broad, curled between two arches. The neck, long and supple, flexed impossibly high. Yet it all was dwarfed aside the smooth, behemoth body and shaking flippers, all of which, despite the oldness of his bones, mustered up to prove a worth Nyra had once doubted.\n\nPivoting upward, the beast seemed to touch the far-off firmament. He breathed deeply, sucking in the nearby mists so forcefully that a clear space hollowed around his snarling head. On the other end of the lake, a tail shot out, towering higher than the crying birds. It slapped the water's surface, shattering it to rain which poured up rather than down.\n\nSo arresting was Oharassie that nothing could have possibly made Nyra look away. But in the midst of the preposterous came the impossible, and as the Aquadray's booming bellow rung up past the invisible stars, an even greater sight drove her attention east:\n\nWhere the battle once ensued, the Sperks horded together, so long disposed to nothing but sleep, gluttony, and aimless wanders.\n\nTogether they swarmed to the sky, and together they oriented to the ambiguous south from which they had once arrived, fluttering away\u2026\n\n...away\u2026\n\n...away\u2026\n\n\u2026until their dots dissolved into the weather.\n\nRain came."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fitzer's Lake",
                "text": "Nyra bridged past the one-way mirror to what was always an unattainable glory.\n\nIt was the day after, and the Agring found herself guffawing with Jesoam, Emdu, Blaze, and the other younglings from Nammock and Iritees in places they'd seen only from a great distance. They were deep in the forest, where flora and fauna alike readied for spring. Zacka and Olieve came too, wanting to escape Jatika, Sigeen, and their responsible discussions.\n\nNyra had, of course, been to the trees yesterday under the snarling watch of Bristone. But today she wove between the barky pillars without fear, whiffing up vanilla and raw seed cones more heavily than ever before. There were unfamiliar birds too, with strange twitters and hoots. So illegal were these sights and sounds. As she chanced looks back towards the rolling hills, anxiety panged her gut, the same anxiety she felt whenever trouble caught up with her. She had to remind herself that she was free. That morning, after experiencing her very first hunt on the Northern Coast, Nyra was at a loss. The games she'd once played didn't seem satisfying. Jesoam was in similar temperament, and naturally chose a vocal remedy. Brazen as always, she asked her mother what to do. Dewep, who basked in not having to fish at all that day, cheered, \"Go play in the woods!\" Not a one among the young needed a second bidding. And so they romped over backs of yellow-green hills with two malingering Zealers following behind.\n\nAfter Blaze and Nyra's decent from the Reservoir yesterday, the world had changed. Flapping incredulously beneath a swiftly moving cloud, the siblings had pattered down with the sudden rain, standing together, dripping before many disbelieving faces. There, in a sea of gray and red and the two blue blotches of Opalheart and Bristone was a new society. The Zealers had flown back, too. Jatika was burned, as was Olieve. But they lived. Nyra felt a standstill in the land, her veins calcifying to icy quiet.\n\nEveryone. Every Agring. Some lay motionless, tired, nearly unaware. Some were bloodied, others bruised. But they lived. They lived by virtue of fear\u2014the Sperks' fear that losing Agrings would mean the loss of themselves. For who among the Sperks thought it wise to kill off something so valuable? Only Darkmoon, for all his shrewdness, forgot in the moment's fervor, targeting both Nyra and Thaydra. In the end it hardly mattered, as not even his remains polluted the freely flowing river.\n\nThen came the noise. The tears, the cheers. Nyra drank them in. It was an instance truly preserved in that 'now,' which she would never have believed unless humbled in that specific sphere of gratitude. Nyra was there, and a piece of her would stay there forever.\n\n\"Nyra!\" called Blaze now, wrenching her from memories. Though perhaps not quite so precious as yesterday, now was now, and the future burgeoned ahead.\n\n\"Alright,\" she shouted, gleefully dodging a nine-year-old Iritees.\n\nWhen they finally returned home, the Nammock and Iritees herds draped languidly along the coast, enjoying the temperate breezes beneath a filmy sky. A few were missing, no doubt scouring the shores for fish. Maybe a few explored new areas of the forest. Such had been Nyra's intent, before Emdu started a game. But there was always tomorrow.\n\n\"Everyone's outside,\" observed Blaze. He started counting. Nyra copied. A ways west was Vor, joined by Bristone and Opalheart, nettling about the torrent Reservoir mouth, looking for ugly traces of the Dam to rid.\n\n\"Lake mouth,\" Blaze corrected.\n\nThinking out-loud, thought Nyra. He was right. It wasn't a Reservoir anymore.\n\nThaydra appeared a short distance off. She prattled to another Agring, his unmistakable red nose nodding animatedly.\n\n\"Ah!\" Crimson exclaimed, catching sight of Blaze and Nyra. Thaydra saw them too, and before Nyra could speak, her mother exploded into a wild grin.\n\n\"We're moving out of the Warren!\" she cried. Her solitary wing walloped the air, ready to embrace anything in its path.\n\n\"W-what?\" stammered Nyra. Whirling around, the Agring dens stared back at her.\n\n\"They aren't safe anymore,\" explained Thaydra, regarding the burrows like they'd done something superb. \"The Sperks had us build those things close to their most eastern tunnel. Big set-up, to ensure that if the Sperk Burrows flooded, we'd go right down with them\u2014their little incentive for us to keep the Dam top notch!\" she laughed bombastically. \"Guess it was top-notch if no one but an Aquadray could crack it.\"\n\n\"B-but,\" Nyra felt close to tears. Her home, her sanctuary? After everything?\n\n\"Oh, don't be so dramatic,\" said Thaydra affectionately, jostling Nyra. \"They haven't flooded yet, but it's a matter of time.\"\n\nNyra recalled the flooding on the Raklisall caves. Sorja had said ice would repair the damage in good time. But the Northern Coast wasn't so self healing. What was lost was lost.\n\n\"But where will we live now?\" demanded Blaze. Unlike his sister, he did not look into Thaydra's eyes. Instead, he stared sternly past.\n\n\"O-oh,\" said Thaydra. It was her turn to stammer. The mother dragon deflated to monotony reminiscent of Olieve. \"The old ones, I suppose,\" she muttered. Tossing her head southeast, she indicated a far off hill overgrown with vegetation. \"It's filled in, but we'll rebuild quickly.\"\n\nNyra spasmed angrily. For Mother and Blaze to be caught up in quarrel after the end of all ends was too unfair to endure. Nyra made to leave.\n\n\"Hold it,\" barked Crimson. Nyra turned to spot his red nose inches from hers, breathing fishily down at her. The perplexing dragon tapped her wingtip repeatedly, as if to further garner her attention. \"There's a little mystery we need to clear up,\" said Crimson. \"The swashbuckling tale of my death?\"\n\nNyra hadn't the foggiest as to what he was talking about.\n\n\"From the beginning,\" cooed Thaydra, invisible behind Crimson's pressing face.\n\nCrimson sighed, exhausted by the notion of storytelling. Even in her current discomfort, Nyra empathized\u2014they'd both done a lot of storytelling of late. Between Nyra's homecoming and Crimson's resurgence from what had always been death, the two had lived almost exclusively in exposition.\n\n\"See here,\" he began, brandishing an authoritative claw. He backed away a smidge, just enough for Nyra to sit up straight. She noticed his wings were pinched together, and bulging, like they held something. \"Your mother and I took a walk down to the Scar.\"\n\nNyra blinked. Blaze blinked too.\n\n\"Chatting, and all that,\" he said defensively, misunderstanding Nyra's confusion. In truth, Nyra was having a hard time picturing Mother down at the Scar, what with the torrent waters rushing so dangerously. Nyra then remembered the free-flowing river, rendering the Scar almost dry. Thaydra could easily tread over it now, as could anyone taller than a rabbit.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Thaydra said. She eased a palm on Crimson's chest, pushing him backward from her daughter. \"The Xefexes were down there, watching us. Then that Reddish one came on shore, their leader?\"\n\nNyra gave an affirming nod.\n\n\"Well, Reddish was dragging something I think you'll find interesting.\" Thaydra looked at Crimson. Loosening his pinched wings, a rickety pile of yellowing sticks clanked to the ground, crumpled and fowl.\n\n\"The bones!\" she cried. \"These are the bones I saw at the Green Spot!\"\n\n\"We figured,\" said Thaydra and Crimson in tandem.\n\n\"These saved my life,\" Nyra breathed. \"The Xefexes brought them up when Casstooth came. She saw them and thought it was me! I guess she\u2014\"\n\n\"Old news,\" yawned Crimson.\n\nNyra found the wingtip of the gnarled remains, pallid and putrid. \"I thought these were yours,\" she said to Crimson.\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nThaydra shook her head. \"My darling,\" she said to Nyra. \"That day at the Green Spot, did you get a good look at these?\"\n\nBack then the bones had scared her. Even the rock-solid Casstooth could not stomach them well. After Casstooth left, Nyra was more preoccupied by the Xefexes. Then Reddish took them away, and Nyra was glad to see them gone.\n\n\"No,\" Nyra admitted. \"I didn't get a good look.\"\n\n\"Look now,\" ordered Crimson excitedly. He fidgeted, scrutinizing her face for that spark of revelation.\n\nThe bones, though once so daunting, were few\u2014just a few strands connected by decayed tissues and filthy splinters. Poised at the top was the claw she knew to be an Agring's.\n\nNyra groaned dejectedly. \"I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for.\"\n\n\"Keep looking,\" egged Crimson.\n\n\"It's an Agring?\" said Nyra with a trickle of a question. Surely it was, but who knew? Surely it was Crimson, too, yet he stood before her whole and well.\n\n\"We don't bury at sea or anything,\" Nyra ventured. \"So it couldn't possibly be anyone from\u2014\"\n\n\"They're mine.\"\n\nNyra met her mother's proud gaze.\n\n\"How?\" said Blaze, so sincerely baffled that he forgot to be cold.\n\nThaydra took the rotted wingtip in her pearly claws. \"About twelve years decomposing at sea. Still well preserved considering the time, although I know nothing about such things.\n\n\"Very well preserved,\" said Crimson.\n\n\"These are my wing bones,\" she said, pointing to the cliff. \"When Darkmoon ripped it from me, I stood right there, where the cliff juts out a bit. He ripped the wing off and threw it to sea, as you well know.\"\n\nNyra sucked air through her teeth noisily. Blaze copied.\n\n\"And it's been there ever since,\" said Thaydra. \"The Xefexes found it and must have held onto it. Then they put it to excellent use when you needed it, Nyra.\" Thaydra laughed.\n\n\"Very excellent use,\" said Crimson.\n\nNyra looked at the bones once more. Despite the terrible image the story put in her mind, Nyra joined her mother in laughter. Crimson joined in too, louder than the rest.\n\nWhen it died down, Nyra found Blaze again. He did not laugh. Expecting a hostile retort, Nyra readied to say something to her melancholy brother. But Blaze did not look hostile. Like the fa\u00e7ade of the nautilus, Blaze seemed to swim deep inside himself, beneath an expertly fashioned surface. Back in the day, she could sometimes pop him out. But he was deeper now, so much deeper. Nyra knew that cracking him now would be next to impossible.\n\nA distraction came in the form of Mother, whose laugh had died to a beaming smile. Thaydra's eyes found Crimson's.\n\nA chill ran through Nyra's heart.\n\nShe fled.\n\nNyra searched for a distraction. Anything interesting, anything unique to deter her from Thaydra's displaced affection.\n\nAutomatically she angled towards the Reservoir, the 'allowed' spot. She could have gone anywhere she wanted. But in her confusion, her nose pointed to a familiar place. She settled by the haphazard remains of the formidable Dam.\n\nVor was there with the Iritees Turrigaff. Nyra threw them a friendly nod before scurrying off. She didn't much feel like chatting, and all the same he looked engrossed in conversation. She found the Scar, dribbling a mere whisper of its former force. Larger tracks mingled with small, obviously the lumbering paws of Bristone and Opalheart (the only Sperks who'd not vanished) and those of various Agrings. They spattered together with no apparent reason or purpose, all but for two sets, which took a leisurely slope down to the sea. Mother and Crimson, no doubt, and the same prints came back to where she stood now\u2014old against fresh.\n\nNyra followed the prints down. The expanse of beach blew into breathtaking view. Nyra could now take the time to see it. This beach. Her beach. Just one Agring and the sea.\n\nOr so she thought.\n\nBasking far to the left and half-immersed in cerulean tide was Oharassie.\n\nShe called the first thing that came to mind:\n\n\"So now you go on land?\"\n\nLike waterlogged seaweed, the great beast lifted his immense head. He stretched his neck, the bulbous eyes rounding from shimmering lids. A tongue flicked from his cavernous mouth.\n\n\"I'm enjoying a sun-sleep while I can,\" he yawned, showing stalagmites and stalactites of teeth. \"The willows shade the suns away.\"\n\n\"I actually wanted to talk to you\u2014\" Nyra slipped down the last slope, tripping to the slushy sands.\n\n\"A bit clumsy today?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Nah,\" she sneezed. \"I've just never been this far down before. I guess I'm nervous.\"\n\n\"Why nervous?\"\n\n\"I was just thinking about the ancestors. How they lied.\"\n\nOharassie nodded knowingly.\n\n\"The ancestors,\" she piped. \"The ones who traveled across the ocean to find the Zealers. They lied when they came home. They said that Zealers were friends. I mean, it's a good thing they did, I suppose, otherwise I would have never gone north and we wouldn't be free now. But I wish I could know why they lied.\"\n\nOharassie laughed. \"That's a lot of emphasis,\" he teased, putting her in mind of Olieve. He slapped his flipper, and Nyra jumped away in time to not be doused.\n\n\"Despair not!\" he cried over the splash. He squeaked a sound so high it was comical. Nyra would have never guessed it could come from something so large.\n\nInstantly, Reddish danced up from the waves, a red dwarf beside a verdant universe.\n\n\"Reddish!\" Nyra called. He clicked back amiably.\n\nOharassie cleared his throat. \"So, we've heard the Zealer side of things. We've heard the Agring side, too. Maybe we should hear a chapter from the all-important witnesses.\"\n\nNyra cocked her head, lost.\n\n\"I think you'll find their take enlightening.\"\n\nNyra looked to Reddish. He wore a broad smile, as always.\n\n\"The Xefexes speak too, you know,\" said Oharassie. \"And they understand you a great deal, even if not the other way around.\"\n\n\"I know they understand me,\" said Nyra defensively. \"They picked up on my plan to jump up and snag the Fishers. But they learned how to understand me.\" She said this with confidence, yet she didn't know for sure. \"How could they possibly know about the ancestors?\"\n\nReddish shrieked at Nyra. Taken aback, she took it for anger. Yet unmistakable pleading lingered in the other's face. Oharassie made hushing noises, or what sounded like hushing noises. Whatever they were, they calmed Reddish.\n\n\"The Xefexes,\" said the Aquadray, \"have understood much over the years. Since a great while back, long before me, the Xefexes have been watching their land-neighbors. Over generations, or so Reddish tells me, they became versed in Agring language. They can hear atop the cliffs and when you fish. It's imperfect, but they know a lot, more than I wagered.\"\n\nReddish squeaked, a signal Nyra knew to be one of approval.\n\n\"We listen,\" said Oharassie.\n\n\"Did you,\" she said, \"just translate that? From Reddish?\"\n\n\"He said it a tad more eloquently, but congratulations, Nyra.\" He beamed. \"You just had your first thorough exchange with an Aquatic Xefex.\"\n\nNyra's mouth hung open. \"But\u2026 how\u2026 how do you know\u2026 Xefexish?\"\n\n\"I'm old,\" he shrugged. That seemed reason enough. \"As I said,\" continued Oharassie, \"they know much. They picked up on your Sperk issue over the years. They heard the Agrings up on the cliff tops, out of sight. They could even see the tops from a distance when there was no haze. Just a bit at a time. And they've reacted.\"\n\n\"Reacted?\" said Nyra.\n\nOharassie nodded. \"I remember you telling me that the Xefexes were usually gone in the morning, while you stayed at the Green Spot? That's because they were herding fish to the Fishers, making sure they got plenty enough to start the day, to feed themselves and get enough to the Sperks, so no one would be troubled.\"\n\nNyra turned back to Reddish.\n\n\"They wanted to help however they could.\"\n\nThough Reddish's beak held the same curve and his cheek bones the same arch, Nyra now saw perception in where once lay the mute qualities of the foreign. Reddish was one of her own kind now, a communicator of all things grand and trivial, with not one barrier between them save for the great Aquadray, who made the pass as fluid as water.\n\n\"The Xefexes have never been to Garrionom,\" said Oharassie, \"but they know your story. They saw the ancestors, you see, when they returned home. The Agrings stopped at the Green Spot. The Xefexes listened, and the story was passed down\u2014\"\n\nReddish interrupted with a croak.\n\n\"Well, passed down as best they could. He can't promise accurate details.\"\n\nNyra's tongue caught in her throat.\n\n\"Would you like to hear it?\" said Oharassie.\n\nNyra exploded in a resounding \"YES!\"\n\nOharassie flattened his ears. \"Go ahead,\" he said, nudging Reddish.\n\nThe Xefex appeared to forget his translator. Looking full on at Nyra, he began a deluge of whistles, clicks, and grunts. Nyra could decipher not a one, but she listened seamlessly.\n\n\"The young Agrings, five or six,\" translated Oharassie, speaking over Reddish's babble, \"landed at the Green Spot shaken from their northern adventures. On the beach, our own ancestors listened, hidden as the Agrings conversed. There, we learned what happened.\n\n\"While friendly at first, an ill-fated cave-in caused a rift between Zealer and Agring. There was an evil queen, especially terrifying, that called them magical sinners. The Agrings were forced to flee. Flying home, it appeared that the group had escaped without any ties to the Zealers. But upon landing here, the youngest flyer, barely from dragglinghood, accidentally let slip a secret: she had taken back a glowing stone from the caves.\n\n\"The other travelers were shocked. But the draggling coveted it so, painstakingly concealing it on the journey home. The others, fearing the stone and not wanting to explain it to the Nammocks, voted to dispose of it. But the draggling was belligerent. The stone was her treasure. The others, unable to dissuade her, and maybe just unwilling to overpower her protective older brother who was their leader, could do nothing more.\"\n\nReddish made a harsh smacking sound, halfway between a cry and a growl. Oharassie did not translate this, and Nyra took it as exasperation. Reddish regained composure and started again, Oharassie's rendition in tow.\n\n\"A plan was formed around the stone\u2014a less-shameful version of the story, for none of the swell-headed Agrings wished to divulge the real version. For the sake of being consistent, the leader, the most pompous of all, thought it best to keep their tale as true to the original as possible, so to ensure it could be easily retold again and again, as they surely would in years to come. Yet while he should have omitted the cave-in tragedy, he sought to aggrandize himself, and proclaimed that they would keep that part of the story in, but change the outcome. He made the stone a reward for saving the nursery and fabricated a strong friendship with the ice dragons.\n\n\"Most of the others, conceited as they were, thought this approach was too convoluted with horrible pitfalls. Still the leader, blinded by arrogance, insisted that his version kept almost all of their journey's details intact. To him, this was safest.\" Reddish made the same frustrated sound. \"Us Xefexes think that a part of him actually grew to believe his tale. Because the Agrings had given their best effort to save the nursery, we think that made them heroes in his own distorted perspective. How the Zealers reacted was the Zealers' fault.\n\n\"The Agrings left for home, and the Xefexes heard rumors of how their story was received, how the Agrings believed they had friends in far off places. And this fictitious friendship became worshipped as time went on. It was just a few days after the Agrings left the island when a troop of Zealers landed. The Xefexes feared something dreadful would happen, assuming the irate Zealers had come to wage war. Instead, they wedged a glowing rock\u2014one so big it took the largest of them to carry it over the sea\u2014into our shallows. They called it a marker, one to ward off evil. It was intended to be a reminder to the Agrings, to chill their hearts, to scar them for their sins. The Zealers went home. Of course, most of the Agrings were never wise to its purpose or what it was.\"\n\n\"But why?\" whined Nyra. She did not mean to groan, only her frustration bled through. \"Why didn't anyone figure out what the Green Spot was?\" she asked this directly to Reddish. The barrier of Oharassie seemed completely gone. \"A glow on the water is pretty strange. Didn't anyone fly out to see what had happened?\"\n\nTo Nyra's surprise, Reddish shook his head, a halting sort of sway, like it was unnatural. He did indeed know her customs well.\n\n\"It's true that before the Sperk enslavement,\" said Oharassie-Reddish, \"the Agrings were more than free to fly over the ocean as they pleased. Nevertheless, no one ever came near the Green Spot. The Agring fear of Xefexes stretches far, far back, despite us having almost no relations. Is that right?\"\n\nNyra nodded. Xefexes were never so legendary as Aquadrays and Hawks, but like any youngling, she'd been warned of anything unfamiliar.\n\n\"Xefexes have never harmed Agrings, not our pod at least, but perhaps somewhere such a thing did happen, and so the legend was birthed. Your herd knew that the island was in Xefex territory, and steered clear.\"\n\n\"But couldn't anyone figure out what it was?\" persisted Nyra. \"I mean, the traveling ancestors come back with a teal stone, and a few days later a green glow is on the water. Why didn't anyone figure it out?\"\n\n\"You've just said it. The stone your herd holds onto now is teal.\" Reddish pointed his snout to his smooth, light blue underbelly. \"The Green Spot, as your kind have named it, is green. The connection is not so simple to make.\"\n\nNyra wasn't convinced.\n\n\"I think,\" he continued, \"it's likely that the travelers themselves figured it out. They probably saw that Spot and surmised it was another Zealer Stone, having experienced the evil queen's superstitious nature. But for the rest of the herd, who were lied to, it was a difficult match to make. Think about it, Young Agring\u2014prior to you seeing it up close, did you ever dream that the Green Spot was really a Zealer Stone beneath the surface?\"\n\nNyra sighed, feeling silly. \"No.\"\n\n\"That's because it looked different to you from the cliff tops. The shade is different than the glowing stone you stand so close to in your meetings\u2014the Aquadray tells me that you use it in meetings. Light is different in water. You had to be swimming right next to it before making the connection.\"\n\nGawkily, Nyra bobbed her head up and down.\n\nReddish cackled. \"Even if some ancestral Agrings made the connection, it was never passed down. It was a crazy theory destined to die in time.\"\n\nGoing back, Nyra remembered the chilly waves and the blinding glow of the obvious Zealer Stone. How big, how blatant! She only saw it for a second and knew, even in the midst of a shark scaring her witless.\n\n\"The shark!\" she exclaimed so abruptly that even Oharassie jumped. \"The shark! It's still alive?\" she realized it was a stupid question immediately. The Xefexes had jumped from the water two days prior. The shark lived.\n\nReddish gave a frightened little spasm and looked left and right as if to see the toothy fish approaching. \"Almost every night. For generations,\" he said through Oharassie. \"Some of us want to move away forever. Others are too afraid to leave. We've made a life of it, hopping on land at night. We've been lucky, mostly.\" He edged further up the shore.\n\n\"You almost get killed all of the time,\" Nyra grumbled, drooping to hunched shoulders. \"That stupid stone\u2026 you can't get it out.\"\n\nReddish had a look of skepticism (although his permanently smiling mouth made it difficult to tell).\n\n\"As it happens, Nyra,\" said Oharassie, and Nyra knew he was speaking for himself now, \"I've been discussing that very matter with our friends.\"\n\nReddish squeaked.\n\n\"It's no trouble,\" waved Oharassie with a flipper that could have, and probably did, take out the Dam in a single swoop. \"With Agring permission, I'd like to remove the stone and bury it out of sight.\"\n\nNyra blanched. \"Move\u2026 move the\u2026 the Green Spot?\"\n\n\"The shark has poor eyesight,\" pressed Oharassie. \"The stone allows it to see enough to harass the Xefexes. Reddish believes that the shark will move elsewhere if the stone is gone.\"\n\nFeeling a little dizzy, Nyra leaned down. The Green Spot? Gone forever? She'd made this very suggestion to the Zealers the other day, but they had shot her down. Though a sensible request now, Nyra felt the iconic light's disappearance would be a task equivalent to moving mountains. That little green glow? Was that not a fixture of home?\n\nHome is changing.\n\n\"Nyra?\" said Oharassie.\n\nNyra swallowed. \"Yes,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Yes\u2026 what?\" said Oharassie leaning in. Reddish copied.\n\n\"Yes,\" repeated Nyra loudly. \"You may remove it. Well, I think you may. I'll\u2026 I'll have to ask Fuhorn. I'm not in charge. I'm eleven. Almost twelve.\"\n\n\"So you are,\" said Oharassie. \"But capable.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Nyra. \"But I'm guessing that Fuhorn'll say yes.\"\n\nOharassie nodded. \"Me too, my dear. Me too.\"\n\nA late winter film made the light blue sky sheer, chasing off yesterday's storm by the push of spring. The suns shined through.\n\n\"I'll take out the stone when I leave,\" said Oharassie, \"Reddish says that this is suitable.\"\n\n\"Leave?\" asked Nyra, snapping from her trance. \"Why\u2026 when? When are you going?\"\n\nOharassie laughed softly, the kind you gave to an especially na\u00efve child. But Nyra, in the thrill of disappointment, felt no anger. Everything would be right with the world as long as Oharassie stayed.\n\n\"I'll bother you for a few days more, Nyra. Don't you worry,\" he smiled. \"Plenty more time to get sick of me.\"\n\nA bubble formed in her throat, stinging up to her eyes.\n\n\"But I have a home too, one that I'm happy to say brings me as much joy as yours will now bring you. And I've family expecting me at the willows. I can't have them worrying. Nobody likes an inharmonious family, do they?\"\n\n\"No,\" mumbled Nyra miserably. \"I guess not.\"\n\nOharassie's promise to linger put Nyra at ease in the following sunsets. However, with the great number of non-Agrings at the Northern Coast, it became dismally apparent that she would utter many goodbyes in the near future. The first came in the form of Bristone and Opalheart, those shapes so objectionable that, in another day, Nyra would have cheered seeing the backs of them. No longer. It took Nyra about four seconds with Opalheart to remember how likable he was. His leaving was yet another part of home changing forever.\n\nNyra's sentiments were unique. Walking to the treeline to bid farewells, the two Sperks were accompanied by a pathetically small group\u2014a petite throng of oddities willing to treat their ex-enslavers cordially. The normal ones stayed at the Coast, muttering indiscernible grumbles when Opalheart mustered the cheeriest 'so long' ever heard on a Sperk tongue. Nyra, Thaydra, Fuhorn, Crimson, Blaze, and the Zealers made up the group. Was this goodbye forever? Opalheart would not say the word 'forever.' Maybe he didn't want to dishearten anyone. He couldn't predict the future anymore than Nyra. Whatever the end would bring, Nyra relished their leisurely pace to the treeline.\n\nCalling Opalheart a friend was a natural effort. Bristone did not warm so easily, even if she had helped in the end, letting Nyra conspire with Oharassie and ensuring that her own kind were nowhere near the Dam at the time of breakage. Like Olieve, she was monotonous in spite of the infectious happiness. But unlike the garrulous Zealer, the Sperk stayed at the fringes of the group, taking refuge in the shadow of Opalheart. Nyra at first assumed this was just Bristone being Bristone. Still, a sag greater than normal dripped from the Sperk's otherwise imposing stature. There was a sadness to her, or a coldness Nyra had never before detected. This angered Nyra, that anyone dared usurp the mirth from these revolutionary times. She'd risked her life to procure them, as had many.\n\n\"She's lost a lot,\" Thaydra whispered in Nyra's ear about halfway through the walk. They were cresting a hill, and Nyra had temporarily fallen a few strides behind Opalheart, with whom she'd been conversing.\n\n\"How do you\u2026\" Nyra trailed off. \"Was I thinking out loud?\" She looked worriedly to the Sperks ahead. \"Did they hear me\u2026\"\n\n\"No,\" said Thaydra. \"They didn't hear. Only we heard.\" She nodded to Blaze, spaced from Thaydra's other side. Blaze stared vacantly away, neither warming nor flinching to the sound of Mother's voice. He was simply there, as he had been ever since the bone incident. Busy with Dam repairs, fishing, and discussing everything with the thorough-minded Jatika, Nyra hadn't had a moment alone with her brother since.\n\n\"Her world's been turned upside down,\" whispered Thaydra, slowing her pace so the Sperks could get farther ahead. \"And not just hers. Opalheart is just as young. Now he's about to venture out into the unknown woods and find his missing family, having no idea where to begin.\"\n\nNyra looked ahead. Opalheart chattered blithely with Crimson.\n\n\"That's a lot to tackle,\" said Thaydra.\n\nNyra felt a pang for the misplaced Sperk. Finding empathy for Bristone was harder.\n\n\"I'm gonna\u2026\" began Nyra, sauntering forward.\n\n\"Yes, go and see them again,\" urged Thaydra.\n\nOn the way up to Opalheart, she nudged against Jatika. Of all the Zealers, she had spoken to him the most in the last four sunsets. Methodical and wise, Jatika was determined to set everything straight before leaving, and that included seeing the last of the Sperks off. After all, it was because of the great blue dragons that he'd traveled across an ocean. There was a lot to repair, and Jatika would not leave the Northern Coast until all was right.\n\nThere was one subject in particular that he had brought up multiple times, always when Opalheart was around. Again and again, Jatika asked him the same question, hoping to derive diverse answers each time, just as Sigeen had once done with Nyra (it must have been some sort of strategy learned in guard-training). 'Would the Sperks come back?' he asked. The answer never changed: no. Still, Nyra had fears. Reassuring though Opalheart was, the thought of his family sent chills to her wingtips.\n\n\"So you're sure they won't come back,\" murmured Nyra, catching up to the Sperks. Squeezing between Opalheart and Crimson, Nyra readied for the same reply.\n\nOpalheart laughed, tossing his head back in explosive hilarity. \"Rest well. An Aquadray? That will keep my family away forever. It's like a fireless-dragon. They simply don't exist!\"\n\nSigeen grumbled audibly.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Opalheart. \"Forgot. Bad example. But you know what I mean, Nyra. Something so supernatural as an Aquadray coming out of the Reservoir\u2014it's enough to make them never come back.\"\n\nNyra furrowed. \"But an Aquadray\u2026 Oharassie, he's not supernatural.\"\n\n\"They don't know. I know, only because Bristone warned me in advance. Otherwise, I might have flown off with the rest of them. But my family will think it was something much greater than themselves.\"\n\n\"I still don't believe that,\" said Nyra, having heard this explanation before.\n\n\"Darkmoon's father, Auborntree, had strange faiths. And he passed them on to others\u2014the older Sperks, his family, et cetera. Even though Darkmoon had no belief in anything supernatural, many of the others ones did.\"\n\n\"Because of what happened in your original homeland,\" finished Nyra. She thought of Kodoral, and how spreading fallacies could turn one to madness. There was so much superstition in the world. She never knew. How was it that so many leaders were so corrupt? It was yet more proof that being a grownup did not make you right. That gave her grief and joy all at once.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Opalheart. \"Something scared Auborntree back at our old home.\"\n\n\"You don't suppose it was a Hawk?\" offered Crimson.\n\nOpalheart shook his head. \"That's a good guess. But I don't think so. I never learned what it was, but I got the sense it was something\u2026 intangible. Even worse than a Hawk.\"\n\nNyra didn't think that fair. Opalheart had never seen a Hawk. He couldn't measure the scariest things in the world. But she let him continue.\n\n\"Auborntree thought whatever it was would kill them, and had the Sperks move far away\u2014\"\n\n\"So far away that we couldn't feed our own mouths.\"\n\nThat was Bristone, spitting the words out, looking loathingly at her feet.\n\nOpalheart fell silent, as if waiting for more. Bristone said nothing.\n\n\"Right,\" mumbled Opalheart. \"Some hang onto that fear, whatever it was. Maybe that's why they fled from Oharassie.\" He smiled. \"Or maybe we're over-thinking it. Perhaps they flew for their lives simply because a monster burst out into their homeland. That'd scare anyone witless. Me included!\"\n\nNyra agreed. She too had been frightened, even knowing and expecting Oharassie to do what he did.\n\n\"But you still don't know what made the Sperks leave home in the first place,\" said Crimson, trotting in pace with Nyra.\n\nOpalheart shook his head. \"Can't solve them all, not even with an Aquadray at our disposal. The reason why is extremely confidential. Sure, we've all made guesses. But it doesn't matter now. The point is, the Sperks will not be returning the Northern Coast after the Aquadray-scare.\"\n\nNyra sulked, unconvinced.\n\n\"I'll make sure of it!\" Opalheart shouted, authority brimming his upbeat voice. \"When we find the herd, I'll strongly advocate looking for a good home where prey is attainable. Ha! What a shock we're in for, having to hunt for ourselves!\"\n\nThaydra came up aside them. \"Oh, come now, you've hunted for yourself.\"\n\nOpalheart waved a paw. \"What? Ten fish a year? Oooo, settle in the desert, the rains have come!\"\n\nThaydra beamed at the Sperk the way a mother admired a learning child. \"You'll be wonderful, my darling. Both of you,\" she said, peering over to Bristone.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Opalheart sheepishly. Bristone glanced at Thaydra with an expression one sunbeam above cold\u2014her version of a maudlin gratitude.\n\nNyra tripped over something knotted. Stepping up, she saw a root snaking from the ground. Green bushels blossomed above. The trees.\n\nOpalheart made a resigned sound, his jaw pursing contemplatively. \"So,\" he piped, claws jumbling together next to Nyra's.\n\n\"So,\" said Nyra. She too fidgeted. Forest blossomed ahead until thick trunks became distant twigs and green nettles, fading into far away blues.\n\n\"Coming out here on foot, and yet it still came fast,\" sighed Opalheart. \"The end of the walk, the unknown ahead.\"\n\nThaydra nudged Nyra aside. The mother dragon's voice croaked tearfully as her head pressed on Opalheart's flank. He dipped to meet her.\n\n\"You were very well behaved,\" cooed Thaydra.\n\nOpalheart snorted. \"As far as you know.\" He blinked rapidly.\n\nFuhorn cut in. \"It wouldn't have happened without you,\" she said. \"You were watching the Reservoir the night Thaydra set the coast afire. And because of it Nyra left, and she found\u2026\"\n\n\"Found the feline which ate the reptile which ate the fish which ate the impossibly small thing at the bottom of an ocean,\" interjected Olieve. \"One big messy hoop.\"\n\n\"But with success,\" added Fuhorn.\n\nThe Zealers stepped up, Olieve first, feeling tentatively towards the humbled Sperk. \"Your travels will take you south,\" said Olieve. It sounded like a set up for something poetic, something supportive. Instead she left it at that, no hints of encouragement on her bland face.\n\nZacka cleared his throat. \"Yes, you are going south, but if you ever find yourself going North, we'll put you up. Though I wouldn't\u2026 I wouldn't extend this offer to your family.\"\n\n\"If you go way too far south,\" grinned Crimson, \"you'll circle around north again. What a clever way to travel.\"\n\nSigeen rolled his eyes. Jatika smiled.\n\n\"Be well, Sperks,\" said Jatika, standing up straight.\n\nNyra looked about for additional speakers. Only Blaze was left, wallowing at the end of the party.\n\n\"Thank you, Opalheart,\" Blaze said distantly. \"And Bristone\u2026\" he ventured. \"Thanks for not ripping us limb from limb that day we interrupted your nap.\"\n\nThe corners of Bristone's mouth twitched. Her almond eyes found the young Agring. \"Shouldn't have been napping anyway,\" she said.\n\nThat left Nyra. The last farewell, the one they'll remember most. Nyra strained to find the right words. She knew from a lifetime to hate them, but didn't. Fondness billowed on that cloud of disdain, turning it purple.\n\n\"Mighty bellows on your wings,\" said Nyra.\n\nOpalheart beamed. Bristone breathed deeply.\n\nThen the Sperks turned their backs and were gone.\n\nLight breezes sang through the leaves, harmonizing with the wings of newly hatched insects. For awhile they listened, Agrings and Zealers, saying nothing.\n\n\"We'd best go home,\" said Fuhorn finally, rolling her shoulders. \"We have work today.\"\n\n\"Work,\" mumbled Olieve, \"Now that's a fine morale booster.\"\n\n\"Oh, but it is,\" attested Fuhorn. \"Work is the best tonic for sadness.\"\n\n\"Sadness,\" said Olieve. \"The thing we came here to drive out is driven out. A travesty, indeed.\"\n\nFuhorn marched ahead. The rest followed. \"Lazy dragons don't have to work if they don't want to.\"\n\nJatika looked alarmed by the sudden tension. But Nyra knew better. Olieve and Fuhorn had gotten on swimmingly since first meeting. Though Olieve would never admit it, Fuhorn was an older idol where so few existed in the young Zealer's upbringing, or so Nyra surmised. For days they'd been bantering, but it was all a game. Sometimes, Olieve almost came out of her monotony.\n\nNyra started after Fuhorn until she noticed her mother. Unlike the rest, Mother did not step forward, staring mournfully at the northern horizon.\n\n\"You can all fly ahead,\" she smiled. She made sure to look at no one in particular, skirting her attention to leaves and stones. \"Vor's expecting the Zealers at the Dam ruins to move boulders. Don't keep him waiting.\"\n\n\"We'll wait, Mum,\" said Nyra. It's what Blaze would have said in the old days.\n\n\"No no no,\" insisted Thaydra. \"Enjoy the dry while you can. It's going to rain shortly.\" She looked evasively upon the clouds, none of which were particularly dark.\n\nEars drooping, Nyra made to do as Mother told. Thaydra's disability became heightened since the Dam's fall. With the skies freed, she became the one Agring restricted by limitations.\n\n\"Hey now,\" said Jatika. He leaned to Thaydra. \"How about you come with us?\"\n\nThaydra's mouth parted a little, her forehead furrowing.\n\n\"But\u2026\" quaked Thaydra. Crimson and Fuhorn gasped mawkishly. Sigeen bit his lip. Zacka laughed.\n\n\"Come now,\" urged Jatika, dipping his belly to the ground.\n\n\"You better do it,\" said Olieve. \"Jatika doesn't take no for an answer. I once dared him to eat moldy caribou in the prison. He didn't show up the next day, and I know it's because he threw up so much\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't finish that,\" snapped Zacka, still laughing.\n\nNyra flicked between her mother and the expectant Zealer. Jatika kneeled farther, his left wing ramping up to his long, periwinkle back.\n\nFuhorn giggled tearfully. \"Go on.\"\n\nMaybe it was the trustworthy character of Fuhorn's voice, or the atypical emotion that came with it. Whatever the source, it prompted Thaydra one step at a time to climb upon the Zealer's mighty back.\n\n\"Hold tight,\" grinned Jatika.\n\nWhat Nyra saw became a glorious blur leagues upon the hazy sky. Jatika lifted up, then the others. Nyra and Blaze joined in last, awestruck. Soaring in thinning atmosphere, that place nearly transparent but to the beating wing, Nyra found her mother. Flitting over thermals, Jatika swirled and swayed. Thaydra was a little red patch behind his neck. There, she turned into something for which there was no description. She glowed.\n\nFor a glorious second, hour, or millennia, they stayed there, all together, the lowly lands below forgotten. At long last Jatika touched down. The rest followed in suit. Thaydra dismounted.\n\nNyra ran around the Zealer, ready to examine Mother's face again, to hear this impossible venture brought to word.\n\nShe never got the chance.\n\nBlaze met Thaydra first. In a whirl of adoration, her brother lost himself before the dragon he'd for so long called his Mother. Thaydra stood still, wrapped desperately in the limbs of the inconsolable Blazing Fire.\n\n\"It's alright, Mum,\" he squeaked.\n\nThaydra relaxed, malleable to her long lost son like two joined petals of a spring flower. He said other things too, trifle perceptions from silly incidences long gone. Most slipped past, unimportant. Yet in knowing him and knowing Mother, Nyra saw the leaves of past and present and where they met and where they mattered. Ever since before her children's birth, the burdens of a thousand pains scarred garishly upon Thaydra. Nyra saw this, but Blaze saw something too. For in Thaydra's unbridled moment in the sky he saw her loss, all those accumulated travesties pinning her down in those long years. For so long, Thaydra had no freedom, and although burdened, she never faltered but for once.\n\nJust the once. And Nyra saw in her brother's face the self-disgust for denying Mother's apologies. Thaydra had been weak that day, not so many moons ago. And luckily, one so devoted as Blaze was there to pull her back to strength, even at the cost of his own.\n\nNow, his strength was back.\n\n\"You found it again,\" Nyra whispered.\n\nNyra knew completeness after that. Thaydra and Blaze did not go back to normal overnight, having grown so much apart in the last season. But soon enough they began teasing each other as they once did. Blaze started talking a great deal more, sharing his many theories and observations. Nyra was the quieter one again, though not so much as she once was.\n\nThe Iritees had not yet left, keeping the Agring numbers at a whopping seventy-seven. With the old burrows unsafe and the new ones not yet built, everyone congregated outside, usually in the rain. Many intended to leave, and soon. A ways down east was a wonderful piece of land weathered by Iritees for generations. They waited for Piannib and her mate's go-ahead to leave, but the Alphas had yet to announce a day.\n\n\"It's the breeding thing, isn't it?\" said Nyra a few afternoons following Opalheart's and Bristone's departure. She and Blaze worked on the new burrows, loosening dirt and digging.\n\n\"Well,\" Blaze sneezed raucously. He disappeared in a cloud. \"I think a lot of them are hanging around because of the general euphoria. The Sperks being gone\u2026 it's a big deal. And even though the Iritees weren't around for most of the enslavement, they still feel a part of it.\"\n\nGlory thieves, thought Nyra.\n\n\"But yes,\" continued Blaze, tossing a rock downhill. \"The breeding thing is partly why. The Nammocks have no mate choices left. Now some forty new faces show up\u2014there's bound to be pairing.\"\n\nAnd pairing there was. Lonely Nammocks, once thought destined to a life of solitude, had a second chance. Dragons Nyra knew from birth were changing, growing new traits like tinkling laughs or vivacious ways of carrying themselves. Most noticeable were cousin Vor and Turrigaff\u2014the adolescent who helped hoist Blaze to the cliff tops during the Xefex attack. Even the youngest, like Jesoam, acted differently (the Iritees had male eleven-year-olds). Nyra was disgusted. Thaydra thought it adorable the way her niece ferreted around one of the young males. Then Thaydra would turn suspiciously to Blaze and Nyra, scouting the young Iritees for fixating faces. Nyra and Blaze saw no one but playmates that might soon leave, and explained as much to Thaydra, who sighed in relief before running off to find Crimson.\n\nCrimson. A friend, but nevertheless cumbersome in Nyra's mind. She was determined to put the idea away until an older day, where there was less revelry to be lived. Mother seemed happy, as did Crimson. What would happen would happen, even if Nyra wished to know where it was going.\n\nWhen not working, Nyra split her time between the Zealers and Oharassie, who planned to leave on the same day. She chattered with Olieve, who told her own rendition of their chapter in Garrionom. Olieve was a funny storyteller (when not a prison-mate), and Nyra soon gave up her own rendition to laugh along with the other listeners. The fun made the time pass far too fast, so much that Nyra wondered if she should have tempered their hours together so to elongate them. But that crisp, dewy morning at last came, and the Zealers stood at the Northern Coast, stretching their wings for the long flight home. Unlike the Opalheart and Bristone departure, all the Agrings gathered to see them off.\n\n\"Now don't you go too far west,\" said Grandma Tega, fussing about the Zealers' feet, making one last check of their bellies. She'd made a point of learning their dietary preferences during the visit\u2014a gift she had not exercised lately.\n\n\"I don't think we need to fear the west,\" said Jatika. \"If you're worried about that Hawk, we'll of course take precaution and veer east\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't be too careful,\" chided Tega, scowling over Olieve and Zacka's thin frames. \"And feed these two. I don't want anyone going hungry.\"\n\n\"No one's going hungry, Tega,\" said Fuhorn. The creases of the Alpha's eyes were webbed with happiness.\n\nEach in turn, the Agrings ushered up to the Zealers to say goodbyes, some with enthusiasm, others with groggy nods. Many were tearful, others concise. Jatika embraced them all warmly, Sigeen bowed curtly, and Zacka played spokes-dragon against Olieve's apathy.\n\nFuhorn, Thaydra, Crimson and Nyra gathered at the front last. Thaydra asked the question Nyra dared not for fear of the answer:\n\n\"When will we see you next?\"\n\nNyra held her breath. The ocean, so blue and full of forever? Never.\n\n\"You know, Agrings,\" said Olieve, becoming animated in the way only Olieve could be animated, which was to say almost indiscernibly. \"You always show up at the caves uninvited, and then proceed to drag us south by finagling some truce out of us. Or stealing. I'm sure you'll come up with something in the next sixteen generations.\"\n\nJatika cleared his throat, scanning the immense crowd. \"The Agrings are always welcome,\" he said. \"But I hope you won't wait another three-hundred years.\"\n\n\"You need to come,\" said another Zealer. Distinctly not Zacka nor Olieve, Nyra spun about only to find Sigeen. Sigeen, making a welcoming remark.\n\nHe turned cold accordingly. \"Because Terrakeizaq and Olieve are sure to get sick of each other,\" he said. Biting his lip, he scratched the ground. Humor? From Sigeen? A mighty strange thing. Nyra was unduly amused, and mimicked his lip bite.\n\n\"We'd love to oblige,\" said Fuhorn humbly. \"It's our turn to visit. You've done quite enough, coming all this way for us.\"\n\nOlieve waved her claws. \"We didn't do anything.\" She balanced a paw on Zacka as she wrung the other in the air. \"Oharassie came all this way too. And did all the work. Double effort, double glory. Anyone can see that. Sometimes I wonder who the blind one really is.\"\n\nFuhorn frowned. \"Belittle your contribution if you like,\" said Fuhorn. \"But everyone was a part of this. If you hadn't been up in Garrionom, Nyra wouldn't have gone North\u2014\"\n\n\"To find the Zealers who brought her home who ran into the Aquadray who brought on the downfall which caused the joy which onset the farewell that got the Zealer rambling to her untimely death. Tsk tsk.\"\n\n\"We're here now because of you, even in the most twisted way,\" grinned Crimson. Olieve waved a paw again. Zacka swelled proudly.\n\nThaydra was looking at Nyra. Go on, her eyes said, flashing in the sunlight. One more sunray, one more grain of time melting away the presence of ice. Nyra coughed, though her throat did not itch. \"Oharassie's going to take the Stone out tonight,\" said Nyra. She should have said something heartfelt or grateful. But thoughts of the Aquadray's departure made her sadder. \"He'll do it when he leaves.\"\n\n\"That's right!\" exclaimed Thaydra.\n\n\"Are you sure you don't want to stay a little longer and take it back?\" asked Crimson earnestly. \"It's just going to end up at the bottom of the ocean.\"\n\nTo Nyra's surprise, the Zealers burst into laughter.\n\n\"Yes, that's precisely what we need,\" said Olieve. \"Another glowing rock. Besides, if Sigeen and Jatika haul that thing home, no one will be able to carry the semi-princess when she's feeling weak.\"\n\n\"Don't expect\u2026 don't expect me to carry you,\" laughed Zacka.\n\n\"I know,\" said Olieve somberly, but her filmy eyes smiled.\n\nAckeezo placed something in Fuhorn's paws. The Zealer Stone. Nodding curtly, the Alpha turned back to Olieve.\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" she began. Rolling the Stone in the grass, Fuhorn's claws glowed a soft, nostalgic teal. The color suddenly looked very sad. \"Nevertheless, I must insist that you take this back. We took it unrightfully. It is a symbol of hostile relations. I pray its absence will represent a more genial future.\" Though her words were resolute, Fuhorn wore an expression of unmistakable longing. For as evil as the Stone now seemed, it was once loved. At her feet rolled years of promise, of hope, however falsely rooted. She set it at Olieve's claws, then stepped back again.\n\n\"I think not, Agrings,\" said the semi-princess. Nyra waited for the jibe, the crack at how their caves were littered with stones and that this one would intensify the clutter. Instead, the blind Zealer picked it up, and with the grace of the seeing, strode elegantly back to Fuhorn. Fuhorn took it back, smiling.\n\n\"Goodbye, Agrings,\" said Olieve. Her eyes did not shimmer, yet they were unlike how Nyra had ever seen them before. They were warm. \"We will see you soon.\"\n\n\"Soon,\" assured Fuhorn. Nyra nodded, forgetting that Olieve couldn't see. But the Zealer's ears pivoted to Nyra in sync, and Nyra knew that somehow, in the acutely perceiving senses of the young ice dragon, the gesture had not gone unnoticed.\n\nAnd then the Zealers of Garrionom were gone to a new and promising day.\n\nDew drops became vapor, vapor became afternoon breeze. The evening turned orange, then began to fade under burgeoning starlight. The window to the next journey, whatever it was, waited. Knowing this era would soon end, Nyra flew seaward to bid the final farewell.\n\nOharassie floated on sunset-silver waves, triangles of brilliant color splashing his smiling chin. Nyra took a familiar place upon his mighty back. Chuckling, he lifted his head to greet her, and like a time almost forgotten, Nyra saw twin Agrings in his compassionate eyes. The figure inside had changed and yet looked very much the same.\n\n\"You've changed much, my dear,\" said Oharassie, answering her thoughts. Nyra didn't know how. Her throat was too tight to speak. Even her thoughts couldn't sneak out. Oharassie just knew, as he always knew so much. Swallowing, Nyra pulled the tightness down into her belly.\n\n\"I'm the same,\" she croaked. She felt embarrassed to be making this farewell on her own. The others had said their goodbyes hours earlier. It was Fuhorn who suggested Nyra see Oharassie off alone. Nyra agreed, thinking it fitting.\n\n\"Thankfully, yes,\" he said, glowing yellow now in the last lid of sunlight. \"You are very much the same. And it's a lovely thing. Undervalued, too. Too often we stray from ourselves, especially in extremes. And Quay knows you've seen extremes!\"\n\nNyra forced a laugh.\n\n\"But I see change. You have grown.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" said Nyra. She knew that he meant in the spirit, not the physical. She did not think it true.\n\n\"You have,\" he insisted. \"But growth of the delayed kind. You feel unchanged now, being your lovely, resilient self. But it's dormant inside you, and I think you'll be a stronger dragon one day for it. You'll see.\"\n\nThe Agring clacked her tongue, mildly embarrassed, but too distracted by the impending farewell to retort. Recalling her ever-wavering opinion of praise, Nyra stared off as she changed the topic of conversation.\n\n\"You speak more than one language,\" she said, trying to keep her voice steady. A new subject\u2014one to slow the path of parting.\n\nThe Aquadray slapped his fins happily. Nyra swayed on his back. She smiled despite herself.\n\n\"Alas, I am a polyglot,\" he exclaimed. \"One of my favorite characteristics, if I may be so self-important.\"\n\nNyra steadied upright. \"How many do you know?\" She could only imagine the breadth of the ocean. Beneath, where the sea willows wove to dizzying depths spun a world she'd only dreamt, in a thick molasses of darkness where uncounted languages sprung from shadows. And that was just the sea. Of other continents? The possibilities might never end.\n\n\"Oh,\" he pondered. \"I've probably forgotten more languages than most learn in their lifetime.\"\n\nNyra snorted with humor. \"That's pretty conceited.\" Good word.\n\n\"Dreadfully pompous,\" he said.\n\n\"Dreadfully,\" she said, thinking that if anyone deserved a moment of affectedness, it was the great Oharassie.\n\nThe idea made her crinkle into tears.\n\nOharassie nuzzled her stinging nose, \"Now, now. None of that. Can't have the warrior of the age getting weepy!\"\n\nWarrior of the age. That was a new one, and one of many titles conferred to her in the last few days. Before the charisma of Oharassie, the legendary monster turned angelic guardian, Nyra felt nothing of the warrior sort.\n\n\"Please don't go yet,\" she begged.\n\nOharassie let out a long breath. Still nuzzling on Nyra, his eyes wandered, thinking. They looked very old.\n\nFinally, he spoke. \"Nyra, in stories, have you ever heard the grownups say 'you are alive in my heart,' or something of that like? Where the one leaving says that they will stay in spirit?\"\n\nNyra sniffed and nodded. She knew that trope well.\n\n\"It's utter nonsense.\"\n\nNyra withdrew, thoroughly surprised.\n\n\"Yes,\" he continued. \"I could tell you I'm not leaving because I'm inside you somehow, or that I will guide you. But how is that the same? You can't talk to me after I leave, not in the way we are speaking now. It's a shoddy way to comfort someone.\"\n\nIndeed, thought Nyra, feeling even more miserable. Now would have been ideal for a whimsical tale, where goodbyes were beautifully sentimental and uplifting. This one was turning ugly.\n\n\"But,\" said Oharassie.\n\nThank Quay and Roendon.\n\n\"\u2026.my not being here in the future does not mean I was never here at all. I am here now, and was, and I hope you find those memories at least somewhat pleasant.\"\n\nNyra made an affirming smile.\n\n\"There is no magic in the world Nyra, not that I know of. And so I make no promise to materialize for you in the future, nor that recalling me will chase the nastiness of life away. But I can guarantee you this. You will remember who I was, quite well I think. And when you find yourself needing my advice, or you simply wish to see me, you'll have a marvelous past on which to reflect. And if you remember well enough, just maybe you'll be able to imagine what I would say.\"\n\nNyra cocked her head. \"That's a funny principle.\"\n\n\"That's the Yahinuve Principle.\"\n\nLight bended to scarlet in the heavens. Oharassie looked the color of a large, female Agring.\n\n\"Mind you, that's just the opinion of an old scale,\" he said. \"And his late-mate's chatty habits.\" He peered out on the horizon, finding the Green Spot, now just coming into its evening glow. It was time.\n\n\"You'll take that stone out when you leave, then?\" asked Nyra, going over the plan, keeping him here.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" he assured. \"I gave it a good look. It shouldn't be too difficult to dislodge. I'll move it out a fair ways, where the seafloor dips to black. There it won't bother anyone but for a few halibut.\"\n\nNyra was unable to wrap her mind around the Green Spot leaving for good. How different the horizon would forever be.\n\n\"It's for the best,\" she sighed.\n\n\"Indeed it is,\" said Oharassie. Together they shared silence, the wizened to the fresh, the wet to the dry. The savior to the savior.\n\n\"You have free wings now, Nyra. I welcome you to fly to me some warm season.\"\n\nNyra's eyes leaked freely. \"I will,\" she promised. She jumped up, airborne. Oharassie's back dropped beneath the blue just as she pushed away.\n\n\"Goodbye, my dear,\" said the deep voice. \"Make it home again.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Nyra repeated. \"I'll miss you.\"\n\n\"As will I.\"\n\nHe dipped below, a light shimmer blanketed in ocean. Rolling his flippers, he punched forward, sending a frothing splash up the cliff walls that showered Nyra. Finding the sky, she flew to the cliff tops.\n\nNyra rounded up to meet Thaydra and Blaze lying at the edge. Bathed in lightly flicking grasses, Blaze leaned upon his mother, blinking lazily in the impending nighttime. Thaydra whispered at his side, perhaps telling stories as they waited for Nyra's private affair to finish.\n\nContent.\n\nNyra hovered above them, enthralled by their startled faces.\n\n\"Make way!\" she called. Thudding down, the others squirmed away as Nyra wedged between them. The two straightened up, and Nyra took the moment to brush a paw across her damp eyes.\n\nQuay's second eye was glistening just above the sea line, illuminating the ocean with dapples of golden light.\n\n\"That's that,\" said Nyra.\n\nThaydra found her daughter's paw. Behind, Blaze's tail blades clinked with hers.\n\n\"Yes,\" Thaydra whispered, closing her eyes.\n\n\"Feel different?\" asked Blaze.\n\nNyra shrugged. \"We'll see.\"\n\nAnd see she would. For just as Oharassie promised, it was the past, not the future, that she could reflect upon with certainty. There, in living those eleven years, she'd had a constricted knowledge of the world, suffocated by a lack of free-will. That was what she had known, thus it had given her warmth. But in her plight, a deluge of crisp cold found her, a rinse of all things, stripping away the muddled warmth to reveal the wide ocean unexplored.\n\nThe ocean was large. She knew better than anyone, maybe. It was larger still. She'd seen a trifle dragon-scale on a perpetual body. Discovery waited, tempting the thirsty tongue. Only in thirst were these things found, and by virtue of experience, closed in wisdom.\n\nThe Green Spot disappeared.\n\nNyra had no thirst, not on the verdant cliff tops interposed between Blazing Fire, Thaydra, and the mahogany horizon, where Quay and Roendon's gaze tied together rock, sea, and sky. Now, she had no thirst at all.\n\nBut if one day she did, there would always be water.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Character List ]\n\n[ Agrings ]\n\nAckeezo: Son of Fuhorn and Nodruha, Fire Dust's mate. No dragglings.\n\nAisel: Tesset's son, brother of Fidee.\n\nBlaze/Blazing Fire Jr.: Nyra's step-brother, Fuhorn's grandson by blood.\n\nBlazing Fire Sr.: Blaze's father. Fuhorn's son. Killed during the second escape attempt.\n\nCrimson: Fuhorn's eldest son, ex-love of Thaydra.\n\nDewep: Thaydra's sister, Nyra's aunt, mother of Emdu and Jesoam.\n\nEmdu: Nyra's Cousin, son of Dewep and Flame Thistle, brother of Jesoam.\n\nFidee: Tesset's daughter, sister of Aisel.\n\nFire Dust: Ackeezo's mate. No dragglings.\n\nFlame Thistle: Dewep's mate, Nyra's uncle, Thaydra's brother-in-law.\n\nFuhorn: Alpha female of the Nammock herd.\n\nIpsity: An eleven-year old. Moon Fire's son.\n\nJesoam: Nyra's cousin, daughter of Dewep and Flame Thistle, sister of Emdu.\n\nMoon Fire: Sun Fire's brother. Father of Ipsity.\n\nNodruha: Fuhorn's mate. Killed by Auborntree as the start of the enslavement.\n\nNyra: Our heroine, but surely you knew that.\n\nPiannib: Alpha female of the Iritees herd.\n\nRovavik: Shadow's brother, Thaydra's brother-in-law, ex-mate of Tesset, father of Vor.\n\nSalef: Tesset's mate, father of Aisel and Fidi.\n\nShadow/Shadowed Fire: Nyra's father, Thaydra's mate.\n\nSun Fire: Blaze's biological mother. Killed during the second escape attempt.\n\nTega: Nyra's maternal grandmother.\n\nTesset: Salef's mate, mother of Aisel, Fidi, and Vor, ex-mate of Rovavik.\n\nThaydra: Nyra's mother.\n\nTurrigaff: Female in the Iritees herd.\n\nVor: Son of Tesset and Rovavik.\n\n[ Sperks ]\n\nAuborntree: Darkmoon's father.\n\nBristone: Regaleye's daughter, Royalwing's niece.\n\nCasstooth: A guard, female.\n\nDarkmoon: Leader of the Sperks.\n\nOpalheart: Friend of Thaydra's, male.\n\nRegaleye: Royalwing's sister.\n\nRoyalwing: Darkmoon's deceased mate, Regaleye's sister, Bristone's aunt.\n\nShalebreeze: A male Sperk.\n\nUnderpine: A male Sperk.\n\n[ Zealers ]\n\nArjell: Female Royal of the Sorja herd, mate of Zirus.\n\nFlitza: A young female.\n\nFrazen: Olieve's mother.\n\nGeshter: A guard for the Raklisall side, male.\n\nJatika: The lead guard for the Sorja side, male.\n\nKodoral: Leader of the Raklisall herd, Olieve's aunt.\n\nOlieve: Nyra's prison-mate.\n\nRaklisall: Female Royal of the old story. Also the name of Kodoral's herd.\n\nRessenjie: Olieve's father, Kodoral's younger brother.\n\nSigeen: A guard for the Sorja side, male.\n\nSorja: Male Royal of the old story. Also the name of Zirus' and Arjell's herd.\n\nTonuritt: Guard for the Sorja side, male.\n\nZacka/Terrakeizak: Olieve's mate.\n\nZirus: Male Royal of the Sorja herd, mate of Arjell.\n\n[ Aquatic Dragons ]\n\nOharassie: The Aquadray.\n\nReddish: The leader of the Xefexes.\n\nUhjegrah: Oharassie's grandson.\n\nVioletish: A Xefex, Reddish's mate.\n\nYahinuve: Oharassie's deceased mate.\n\n[ Deities ]\n\nRoendon: God of the night, male counterpart of Quay.\n\nQuay: God of the day, female counterpart of Roendon."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Wings of Fire 2) The Lost Heir",
        "author": "Tui T. Sutherland",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2003When the war has lasted twenty years...\n\n\u2003the dragonets will come.\n\n\u2003When the land is soaked in blood and tears...\n\n\u2003the dragonets will come.\n\n\u2003Find the SeaWing egg of deepest blue.\n\n\u2003Wings of night shall come to you.\n\n\u2003The largest egg in mountain high\n\n\u2003will give to you the wings of sky.\n\n\u2003For wings of earth, search through the mud\n\n\u2003for an egg the color of dragon blood.\n\n\u2003And hidden alone from the rival queens,\n\n\u2003the SandWing egg awaits unseen.\n\n\u2003Of three queens who blister and blaze and burn,\n\n\u2003two shall die and one shall learn\n\n\u2003if she bows to a fate that is stronger and higher,\n\n\u2003she'll have the power of wings of fire.\n\n\u2003Five eggs to hatch on brightest night,\n\n\u2003five dragons born to end the fight.\n\n\u2003Darkness will rise to bring the light.\n\n\u2003The dragonets are coming....\n\nA dragon was trying to hide in the storm.\n\nLightning flickered across the dark clouds. Hvitur clutched his fragile cargo closer. If he could make it over the mountains, he'd be safe. He'd escaped the sky dragons' palace unseen. And the secret cave was so close. \u2026\n\nBut his theft had not been as stealthy as he thought, and eyes as black as obsidian were already tracking him from below.\n\nThe enormous dragon on the mountain ledge had pale gold scales that radiated heat like a desert horizon. Her black eyes narrowed, watching the gleam of silver wings far up in the clouds.\n\nShe flicked her tail, and behind her two more dragons rose to the sky and dove into the heart of the storm. A piercing shriek echoed off the mountains as their talons seized the moon-pale ice dragon.\n\n\"Bind his mouth,\" the waiting dragon ordered as her soldiers dropped Hvitur on the slick, wet ledge in front of her. He was already inhaling, ready to attack. \"Quickly!\"\n\nOne of the soldiers grabbed a chain from the pile of smoldering coals. He threw it around the ice dragon's snout, clamping his jaws together with a sizzling smell of burning scales. Hvitur let out a muffled scream.\n\n\"Too late.\" The sand dragon's forked tongue slithered in and out of her mouth. \"You won't be using your freezing-death breath on us, ice dragon.\"\n\n\"He was carrying this, Queen Burn,\" said one of the soldiers, handing her a dragon egg.\n\nBurn squinted at the egg through the downpour. \"This is not an IceWing egg,\" she hissed. \"You stole this from the SkyWing palace.\"\n\nThe IceWing stared back at her. Hissing steam circled his snout where the hot chains met cold silver scales.\n\n\"You thought you got away unnoticed, didn't you?\" Burn said. \"My SkyWing ally is not a fool. Queen Scarlet knows everything that happens in her kingdom. Her lookouts reported an IceWing thief sneaking away, and I decided finding you might add some violence to my boring visit.\"\n\nBurn held the large egg up to the light of the fire and turned it slowly. Red and gold shimmered below the pale, smooth surface.\n\n\"Yes. This is a SkyWing egg about to hatch,\" Burn mused. \"Why would my sister send you to steal a SkyWing dragonet? Blaze hates any dragon younger and prettier than she is.\" She thought for a moment as rain drummed on the ledge around them. \"Unless \u2026 the brightest night is tomorrow. \u2026\"\n\nHer tail flicked up like a scorpion's, the poisonous barb inches from Hvitur's eyes. \"You're not in Blaze's army, are you? You're one of those insipid underground peacemongers.\"\n\n\"The Talons of Peace?\" said one of the soldiers. \"You mean they're real?\"\n\nBurn snorted. \"A few worms crying over a little blood. Unwrap his chains. He won't be able to freeze us until his scales cool down.\" The enormous sand dragon leaned closer as her soldier pulled the chain away. \"Tell me, ice dragon, do you really believe in that pompous old NightWing's prophecy?\"\n\n\"Haven't enough dragons died for your war?\" snarled Hvitur, wincing at the pain in his jaws. \"All of Pyrrhia has suffered for the last twelve years. The prophecy says \u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care. No prophecy decides what happens to me,\" Burn interrupted. \"I'm not letting a bunch of words or baby dragons choose when I die or what I bow to. We can have peace when my sisters are dead and I am queen of the SandWings.\" Her venomous tail dipped closer to the silver dragon.\n\nRain pattered on Hvitur's scales. He glared up at her. \"The dragonets are coming, whether you like it or not, and they'll choose who the next SandWing queen should be.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Burn stepped back and turned the egg slowly between her talons. Her forked tongue slipped in and out of her smile. \"So, IceWing. Is this egg a part of your pathetic prophecy?\"\n\nHvitur went still.\n\nBurn tapped lightly on the eggshell with one long talon. \"Hello?\" she called. \"Is there a dragonet of destiny in there? Ready to come out and end this big bad war?\"\n\n\"Leave it alone,\" Hvitur choked out.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Burn said, \"what becomes of your precious prophecy \u2026 if one of the five dragonets is never hatched at all?\"\n\n\"You wouldn't,\" he said. \"No one would harm a dragon egg.\" His blue eyes were fixed desperately on her talons.\n\n\"No 'wings of sky' to help save the world,\" Burn said. \"What a sad, sad story.\" She began tossing the egg from one front claw to the other. \"I guess that means you should be very, very careful with this terribly important little \u2014 oops!\"\n\nWith an exaggerated lunge, Burn pretended the wet egg was slipping through her talons \u2026 and then she let it fall over the side of the cliff into the rocky darkness below.\n\n\"No!\" Hvitur shrieked. He threw off the two soldiers and flung himself toward the edge. Burn slammed her massive claws down on his neck.\n\n\"So much for destiny,\" she smirked. \"So much for your tragic little movement.\"\n\n\"You're a monster,\" the IceWing gasped, writhing under her talons. His voice cracked with despair. \"We'll never give up. The dragonets \u2014 the dragonets will come and stop this war.\"\n\nBurn leaned down to hiss into his ear. \"Even if they do \u2014 it'll be far too late for you.\" Her claws ripped through the silver dragon's wings, shredding them as Hvitur shrieked in agony. With a swift movement, she stabbed her poisonous tail through his skull and flung the long, silver body over the edge of the cliff.\n\nThe ice dragon's screams cut off long before the echoes of his corpse slamming into the rocks below.\n\nThe SandWing turned her black eyes to her soldiers. \"Perfect,\" she said. \"That should be the last we hear about that stupid prophecy.\" She held out her talons so the rain could wash away the glistening dragon blood. \"Let's go find something else to kill.\"\n\nThe three dragons spread their wings and lifted off into the dark clouds.\n\nSome time later, far below, a large dragon the color of rust crawled over the rocks to the broken body of the ice dragon. She nudged his tail aside and lifted a shard of eggshell from underneath it, then slipped back into the labyrinth of caves under the cliffs.\n\nStone walls brushed against her wings. She breathed out a plume of flame to light her way along the dark passage, deep into the mountain.\n\n\"I stand with the Talons of Peace,\" hissed a voice in the shadows. \"Kestrel? Is that you?\"\n\n\"We await the wings of fire,\" answered the red dragon. A blue-green SeaWing emerged from a side cave, and she tossed the eggshell at his feet. \"Not that it'll do us much good now,\" she snarled. \"Hvitur is dead.\"\n\nThe SeaWing stared at the eggshell. \"But \u2014 the SkyWing egg \u2014\"\n\n\"Broken,\" she said. \"Gone. It's over, Webs.\"\n\n\"It can't be,\" he said. \"Tomorrow is the brightest night. The three moons will all be full for the first time in a century. The dragonets of the prophecy have to hatch tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Well, one of them is already dead,\" Kestrel said. Rage flickered in her eyes. \"I knew I should have stolen the SkyWing egg myself. I know the Sky Kingdom. They wouldn't have caught me a second time.\"\n\nWebs grimaced, scratching one claw over the gills along his neck. \"Asha is dead, too.\"\n\n\"Asha?\" A spurt of flame shot from Kestrel's nose. \"How?\"\n\n\"Caught in a battle between Blaze's and Blister's forces on the way here. She still made it with the red MudWing egg, but she died of her wounds soon after.\"\n\n\"So it's just you, me, and Dune to raise the little worms,\" Kestrel growled. \"For a prophecy that can never be fulfilled. Let's break the cursed eggs now and be done with it. We'll be long gone before the Talons of Peace return for the dragonets.\"\n\n\"No!\" Webs hissed. \"Keeping the dragonets alive for the next eight years is more important than anything. If you don't want to be part of that \u2014\"\n\n\"All right, enough,\" Kestrel snapped. \"I'm the strongest dragon in the Talons of Peace. You need me. It doesn't matter how I feel about nasty little dragonets.\" She eyed the eggshell on the floor, rubbing her scarred palms together. \"Although I thought at least one of them would be a SkyWing.\"\n\n\"I'll find us a fifth dragonet.\" Webs pushed past her, scales scraping against rock.\n\n\"There's no way back into the Sky Kingdom, brainless,\" she said. \"They'll be guarding the hatchery closely now.\"\n\n\"Then I'll get an egg somewhere else,\" he said grimly. \"The RainWings don't even count their eggs \u2014 I could take one from the rain forest without anyone noticing.\"\n\n\"Of all the horrible ideas,\" Kestrel said with a shudder. \"RainWings are wretched creatures. Nothing like SkyWings.\"\n\n\"We have to do something,\" Webs said. He hissed as his tail sent the eggshell skittering across the floor. \"In eight years, the Talons of Peace will come looking for five dragonets. The prophecy says five, and we're going to make it come true \u2026 whatever it takes.\"\n\nA wave roared onto the beach and crashed around Tsunami's talons. Her webbed claws sank into the wet sand. Her blue wings billowed in the wind.\n\nShe lifted her head, breathing in the wild sea air.\n\nThis was where she was supposed to be. This was her ocean.\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Glory said mockingly behind her. \"You guys, that's the smell of freedom.\"\n\n\"Freedom smells a lot like fish,\" Starflight observed. \"Which, to be clear, is kind of nose-curlingly awful.\"\n\n\"I love it,\" Tsunami said. This was what the Talons of Peace had stolen from her. They'd kept her trapped in the stale, dreary air under the mountain her whole life, when she was meant to be out here, flying and swimming and living like a real SeaWing.\n\nStarflight glanced up at the sky and edged back toward the dark foliage that lined the beach. \"Shouldn't we stay under the trees? What if a patrol spots us? I mean \u2014\" He stopped and took a deep breath. \"We must stay under the trees. All right. Yes. Everyone back into the trees right now.\"\n\nThe others ignored him, although Sunny gave him a pitying glance.\n\nTsunami bent her head to study the waves washing over her talons. Small shapes, silver and green and yellow, darted through the shallows. The ocean smelled much more alive than the cave river.\n\nWas it only a week since they'd run away from their guardians? It was hard to remember exactly how long they'd been trapped in the SkyWing prison.\n\nBut there was one thing Tsunami remembered clearly: the sound of bone snapping under her talons.\n\nShe poked a hole in the sand with her claw. I had to kill that SeaWing. Queen Scarlet forced us to fight. There was no other way out of the arena. He was crazy. It was him or me.\n\nThe same thoughts kept circling in her head like lame-winged dragons. She shook her head and flared her wings. This was ridiculous. Was she a dragon or a scavenger? Dragons were meant to be fierce warriors; one little death shouldn't rattle her so much.\n\nBesides, Glory had done worse with her deadly venom, and she didn't seem bothered at all.\n\n\"You know what I love?\" Clay said mournfully. \"Fish. Lots of fish. Big fish I can eat, not these little wriggle-scraps.\" The MudWing sat down on the sand beside Tsunami. His stomach growled loud enough for all of them to hear.\n\nSunny giggled. \"Clay, it's only been a day since you caught that enormous pig for all of us.\"\n\n\"Wasn't enormous,\" Clay said. He sighed, his wings drooping. \"That was the smallest pig in the whole world.\"\n\n\"You should have eaten my carrots.\" Sunny clambered up to sit on his back and peer out at the ocean. The sun was just rising in a peach-pale sky, casting broken paths of light across the water. Two of the moons, barely slivers like thin claws, were vanishing behind the mountains.\n\n\"I'm serious, everybody,\" Starflight said. \"It's not safe out on the beach, not with all the MudWings and SkyWings looking for us.\" The NightWing was standing well out of reach of the waves, trying to shake sand off his talons.\n\nAs far as Tsunami was concerned, they'd already wasted a day flying south of the Diamond Spray Delta, basically because Starflight had worried and complained until everyone agreed. Yes, the SkyWings were after them. Yes, they were probably mad about the dragonets' escape from SkyWing prison. And they were pretty definitely mad about the part where Glory maybe killed their queen on the way out.\n\nBut Tsunami didn't want to keep running. She wanted to find her family. Once they knew who she was, she was sure the SeaWings would protect her and her friends.\n\nMost of all, she really wanted Starflight to stop fretting, complaining, and bossing. It made the others ner vous and harder to organize. She almost wished the NightWings hadn't given him back.\n\n\"Why are you so worried?\" Tsunami asked him. \"If they do recapture us, won't your NightWing friends come swooping in to rescue you again?\"\n\nStarflight fluttered his wings indignantly. \"I'm not worried for me,\" he said. \"I'm trying to keep all of us safe.\" He glanced at Sunny and ducked his head.\n\n\"I'm keeping us safe just fine!\" Tsunami protested. \"When have I ever led us wrong?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Glory pointed out, \"there was that one time we got captured by SkyWings and their queen nearly killed us all....\"\n\nTsunami smacked her tail into the water to send a cold wave over Glory. The RainWing hissed and jumped away from the sea.\n\n\"Stop it!\" Sunny said. \"Stop fighting, all of you. Clay, stop them.\" She patted the top of his head to pull his attention back from the tiny fish swimming around his feet.\n\n\"Oh, yes, let's hear from our bigwings,\" Glory teased. Her scales this morning were gold like Sunny's, but with drifting splashes of ocean blue. She sat down and yawned at Tsunami, displaying her venom-spitting teeth.\n\n\"Hey,\" Clay said, nudging Tsunami's wing with his own. \"It's all right for Starflight to worry. We don't even know if Queen Scarlet is alive or dead. But,\" he added quickly, \"I know you want to find the SeaWings as fast as possible. So let's find them instead of fighting about it, and then we can get to safety sooner.\"\n\nTsunami shot one more narrow-eyed look at Starflight, then turned back to the ocean. Clay was right; the important thing was to find her family and a safe place for them all to hide.\n\n\"Aww,\" Glory said. \"So wise and big.\"\n\n\"I think he is,\" Sunny said, wrapping her forearms around Clay's neck. Starflight sat down, flipping his tail around his talons unhappily.\n\nGlory settled her sun-colored wings. \"So now what? Should we shout 'Hey, SeaWings, we've got your missing princess!' and wait for dragons to bound joyfully out of the ocean?\"\n\n\"With a feast!\" Clay cried, startling a seagull into the air. \"There was a feast at the end of the story! When the missing SeaWing princess got home, her parents were so happy they made a feast. I remember the feast. They ate a whole whale. That was a good feast. I bet I could eat a whale. Do you think we'll get a feast?\"\n\n\"The Missing Princess was just a story in a scroll,\" Starflight said. \"We have no idea what we'll actually find in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\n\"That's true.\" Clay's wings drooped. \"It might not be what you're hoping for, Tsunami. Like finding out my mother sold me for a cow.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" said Glory. \"It was at least two cows.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. Comforting,\" said Clay.\n\nIt wouldn't be like that for Tsunami. She was sure of it. Maybe Clay's dreams of his family had turned out all wrong, but hers would be perfect. Especially now that she knew her egg had been stolen from the Royal Hatchery.\n\nShe was the daughter of the SeaWing queen.\n\nNot only that, but according to Starflight, none of the queen's other female dragonets had survived to adulthood. Tsunami was the only living heir to the SeaWing kingdom. One day, she would be queen of the SeaWings.\n\nTrue, that meant one day she'd have to fight her own mother to the death to become queen. But that day could be as far off as she wanted it to be. Not something she had to think about now.\n\nShe spread her wings and breathed in the salt-spray air again. Out of the corner of her eyes she kept seeing tiny creatures pop out of the speckled sand and then vanish again.\n\n\"I could just dive in and look for the SeaWing palace,\" Tsunami suggested.\n\n\"Out there?\" Starflight sounded alarmed. He spread his wings and shook sand off them, blinking anxiously.\n\n\"Where else do you suggest I find the SeaWings?\" she asked.\n\n\"Swimming in the ocean is not like swimming in an underground cave river,\" Starflight lectured. \"There are strong currents and unpredictable waves and, and big things with teeth \u2014\"\n\n\"I'm a big thing with teeth.\" Tsunami grinned at him.\n\nHe didn't laugh. \"It's not safe,\" he said. \"What if we lose you?\" Tsunami wanted to poke his wrinkled-up worried snout with her sharpest claw.\n\n\"Starflight, cheer up,\" Sunny interjected. \"Tsunami can do anything. And how is she supposed to get home to her family if she can't go into the sea?\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Clay heaved himself to his feet, scattering sand and nearly dislodging Sunny, who grabbed his neck with a yelp. Sand and seashells and tiny, astonished crabs flew through the air as he lashed his tail.\n\n\"Ow! Stop that!\" Glory commanded, covering her eyes.\n\n\"What about us?\" Clay's big brown wings flapped. \"I didn't think of that! Tsunami, we can't go with you to the SeaWing palace. We can't breathe down there! How can we stick together if you're underwater?\" He clawed at the water, leaving deep gouges in the wet sand. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nTsunami kind of adored Clay when he was in a tizzy. She also adored that it had taken an entire day for it to occur to him that the Kingdom of the Sea was underwater.\n\n\"Seriously?\" Glory said to Clay. \"All of those geography lessons, and not a single one sunk in?\"\n\nClay turned in a confused circle. Crabs scurried out of the way of his giant talons. \"What?\"\n\n\"The SeaWings have an above-water palace, too,\" Starflight said in his \"see, you should have studied more\" voice. \"So they can receive guests, like their SandWing ally Blister. It's on an island somewhere in the Bay of a Thousand Scales.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Clay sat down with a whooshing sigh.\n\nSunny patted his shoulder. \"I didn't remember that either,\" she offered. \"So we go there, right?\"\n\n\"Not easily,\" Starflight said. \"Both SeaWing palaces \u2014 underwater and on land \u2014 are well hidden. That's how they've lasted so long in this war, even though they don't have fire like the other tribes. Nobody can find them to attack their homes.\"\n\n\"Sounds like the NightWings,\" Glory sniped.\n\n\"It's nothing like the NightWings!\" Tsunami cried. \"SeaWings aren't trying to act all mysterious and pretentious. They're just being sensible about guarding their home.\"\n\n\"There are over a thousand islands to search, but it's still probably \u2014\" Starflight stopped midsentence and glanced at the sky again. \"Does anyone else smell fire?\"\n\n\"Three moons, Starflight. I'm not hiding in the trees every time some little thing spooks you,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"Wait, I think he's right,\" Sunny said, lifting her head. \"I hear wingbeats.\"\n\n\"I do, too,\" Starflight said. The spiny ridge along his back stood up in alarm, and he bolted for the trees, running as fast as he could.\n\n\"From this far away?\" Tsunami said skeptically. \"I don't see anything up there.\" But just as she said it, she spotted a cluster of red specks like spattered blood in the sky, winging down from the mountains in the northwest.\n\nA SkyWing patrol was coming their way.\n\n\"Quick, into the water,\" Tsunami ordered. It was closer than the trees, and would hide them just as well.\n\n\"No way,\" said Glory. She sank to the ground, spreading her wings, and shifted color. Her scales flowed into the rocky, sandy pattern below her until she was impossible to see, especially from the air. It happened so fast, Tsunami nearly lost track of where she was. Glory was getting better at that trick.\n\n\"Fine. Come on, Sunny.\" Tsunami reached for the little SandWing.\n\n\"I'd rather not,\" Sunny squeaked. \"I can make it to the trees. I'll fly really fast.\" She jumped off Clay's back and flapped after Starflight.\n\nTsunami stamped her foot, spraying ocean water across the sand. Glory made a muffled, grumpy noise.\n\n\"It'll be safer in the sea,\" Tsunami huffed. She cast a worried look at the sky. The specks were getting closer fast \u2014 maybe faster than Sunny could hide. But it was too late to catch her now. Tsunami turned and dove into the ocean.\n\nClay was already burrowing into the shallow mud shelf, displacing startled flatfish and sending up clouds of minnows. The MudWing didn't have a problem with water like the others did, since he could hold his breath for up to an hour.\n\nTsunami breathed in and salt water rushed into her gills. It surprised her how sharp it felt, like inhaling smoke. It was nothing like the crystal clear water of the underground cave. What's more, the current kept trying to shove her back to the beach, then yank her out again.\n\nBut she plowed forward and down, past Clay, beating her wings as the water got deeper. Schools of tiny purple fish whirled away from her like stars exploding. Over the edge of the sand shelf, the deeper ocean floor was covered in bundles of eel grass. Waving dark green tendrils reached up to brush Tsunami's underbelly.\n\nShe glanced up at the sky above her \u2014 still empty \u2014 and decided to risk surfacing. She had to be sure Sunny was safely hidden.\n\nThe thunder of wingbeats echoed in her ears as she poked her head out and turned toward the beach. The little SandWing was almost to safety. Tsunami could see Starflight standing under the trees, reaching his front claws out to pull Sunny in.\n\nOverhead, an orange shape shot past, flying at full SkyWing speed \u2014 faster than any other tribe could fly. A red dragon flew close behind the first, followed by three more. Their enormous wings nearly blotted out the sun as they whooshed over the dragonets' heads.\n\nTsunami sank a bit lower in the water, but it seemed like the patrol was going too fast to notice a lone SeaWing in the ocean. Maybe these soldiers weren't hunting for the escaped prisoners.\n\nThen she saw the last dragon \u2014 sunset orange, flames flickering from his nose, with a jagged tear on the tip of his left wing. He flew slower than the others, bringing up the rear, and his head swung back and forth, dark eyes searching the ground below them.\n\nTsunami found herself holding her breath. The SkyWing's snout swung toward the trees just as Sunny's tail whisked out of sight.\n\nHe paused, beating his wings back to hover in the air for a moment.\n\nWas he staring at the trees?\n\nHad he seen Sunny?\n\nWhat if he called the others back? The patrol dragons were several wingbeats away already \u2014 but one shout could bring them hurtling around at lightning speed. Sunny and Starflight were no match for six full-grown SkyWing soldiers.\n\nActually they were no match for one SkyWing soldier. The two of them together would probably have trouble fighting a sleepy bat.\n\nA curl of smoke rose from the SkyWing's nose, and he opened his mouth. If there was any chance of saving her friends, Tsunami had to shut him up.\n\nShe burst out of the water in a great leap, smashing her tail behind her for momentum. Her wings powered her up to ram right into the SkyWing's underbelly.\n\nHe coughed out a puff of fiery smoke and clutched his midsection, the breath knocked out of him. Tsunami had a few moments before he could recover enough to call for help. She ducked around him, slammed her tail into his head, and landed on his back as hard as she could.\n\nThe SkyWing nearly fell into the water, but he fought back up into the air. Tsunami kicked at his wings with her claws and slid back toward his tail, trying to drag him down with her weight. He was too big and too strong for her up here; only taking him by surprise had given her a temporary advantage. She needed to get him in the ocean to even out the fight.\n\nThe orange dragon snarled and twisted, shooting a blast of flames out of his snout, which barely missed her. Tsunami yanked him down toward the water, but his massive wings beat harder and harder. It felt like a hurricane whistling around her ears. She could tell that he was gaining height, and in a moment he'd be strong enough to call the other soldiers back.\n\nYou're not getting my friends! Tsunami thought fiercely. She found the vulnerable spot on his tail and sank her teeth in. He convulsed with pain, nearly throwing her off, and shot another blast of fire under his wing at her.\n\nAt first Tsunami thought he had missed. Then she felt a searing trail of agony spreading along her neck. It felt as if someone were trying to saw through her scales with a scalding-hot wire.\n\nShe closed her eyes and clamped her jaw harder, determined to hang on although spots were starting to dance in her vision.\n\nSuddenly the dragon lurched toward the sea. Tsunami's eyes flew open.\n\nClay had flung himself between her and the dragon's snout, spreading his fireproof wings. His claws clamped on to the SkyWing's back, and the extra weight drove the soldier down and down, toward the sea.\n\nTogether, Clay and Tsunami dragged the SkyWing into the ocean. He fought wildly the whole way, but his flames couldn't hurt Clay's fire-re sis tant scales, and his giant wings couldn't help him once he was underwater and cut off from breathing.\n\nAs soon as they hit the water, Tsunami swam to the SkyWing's head and held it below the surface until he stopped thrashing.\n\nShe let go and so did Clay. The dragon's body began to drift slowly toward the seafloor.\n\nA shudder rippled through Tsunami's scales. Him or me.\n\nThis didn't feel right.\n\nWhy couldn't she be ferocious and not care?\n\nShe swam after the dragon and grabbed one of his wings, then looked back up at Clay. He met her eyes, and to her relief, didn't even hesitate before swimming to the other wing.\n\nThey dragged the SkyWing up onto the beach. The current had carried them farther away than Tsunami had guessed, and it was painfully hard to swim back to shore, especially with a full-grown dragon weighing them down.\n\nShe gritted her teeth, ignoring her exhaustion and the pain from the burn on her neck. She was a SeaWing. This was supposed to be her element. She was the boss of the ocean, not the other way around.\n\nBy the time they reached the beach, the rest of the patrol had vanished from sight. She wondered how long it would be before they noticed this one missing and came back to look for him.\n\nTsunami collapsed onto the sand beside the SkyWing. Clay peered into the dragon's snout, then started thumping his chest.\n\n\"What is wrong with you?\" Glory's voice snapped. The RainWing materialized from the sandy background, turning her scales a darker shade of brown so they could see her. She glared at Tsunami. \"Why did you do that?\"\n\n\"Oh, you're welcome,\" Tsunami said. \"Just saving your life, as usual.\"\n\n\"By attacking random dragons?\" Glory cried. \"In another moment they would have been gone! And what are you doing?\" She jabbed Clay in the side with one of her wings.\n\n\"Uh,\" Clay mumbled. \"Fixing him.\" He kept thumping the SkyWing's chest.\n\n\"What?\" Glory yelped. \"You can't let him live!\" She tried to grab one of Clay's forearms, but Tsunami shoved her away.\n\n\"We don't have to kill him,\" Tsunami said. \"We'll tie him up and leave him here.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Glory said. \"How about a trail of cow parts, too? And a map of where we're going? Or perhaps we could set this part of the forest on fire, just to make sure everyone knows how to find us. Would you like me to spell out 'DRAGONETS WUZ HERE' in giant rocks?\"\n\n\"Fine!\" Tsunami said. \"Here he is. You kill him.\"\n\nGlory looked down at the unconscious dragon and hesitated. \"I don't kill dragons who can't fight back,\" she said finally.\n\n\"Why not?\" Tsunami said. \"Just splat some venom on his face and melt him, if it's that easy for you.\"\n\nGlory sank her claws into the sand, scowling. Bubbles of dark purple began spreading across her scales.\n\nSunny and Starflight landed on the beach beside them. Sunny gave the SkyWing a horrified look, and Tsunami remembered that she'd been trapped in another part of the palace during the arena fights. She'd never seen her friends battle another dragon.\n\n\"Is he all right?\" Sunny asked Clay.\n\n\"Try this,\" Starflight offered, coming over to help. Clay shifted aside, and they rolled the dragon onto his stomach.\n\n\"Why did you attack him?\" Sunny blurted at Tsunami. The little SandWing's harmless tail flicked back and forth anxiously.\n\n\"To save you!\" Tsunami said, stung.\n\n\"But he wasn't even doing anything,\" Sunny protested. \"He was just flying by.\"\n\nAll four of them were looking at Tsunami like she was the kind of dragon who hid under rocks and bit innocent passersby for fun. She arched her neck indignantly.\n\n\"I thought he saw you,\" she growled. \"He was about to call out to the others. I saw him open his mouth!\"\n\n\"So did I,\" said Glory. \"I'm pretty sure he was yawning.\"\n\n\"Pretty sure?\" Tsunami said. \"Would you risk our lives on 'pretty sure'?\"\n\nWas he yawning? Did I attack him for nothing? That can't be right. I saw danger and reacted appropriately. Didn't I?\n\n\"Maybe if you'd just stopped to think for a second \u2014\" Starflight said.\n\n\"Or forever? Like you? Think think think, worry worry, never do anything?\" Tsunami cried.\n\nThe SkyWing suddenly coughed, and seawater flooded out of his snout. Clay ruffled his wings with a pleased expression.\n\n\"Oh, wonderful. Our enemy will survive. Well done. We have to get out of here,\" Glory said. She took a step back and glanced at the sky where the other soldiers had disappeared. \"So what do we do with him now, O Great Leader?\"\n\nTsunami had no idea. She glanced around frantically. Maybe if they could find some vines to tie him up with...\n\n\"There's a tree,\" Starflight said, jumping to his feet. \"In the forest.\"\n\n\"No way,\" Glory said. \"A tree in the forest?\"\n\n\"Being sarcastic is not helping!\" Tsunami snapped at her.\n\n\"I mean, a fallen tree,\" Starflight said. \"We can use it. Glory, stay and guard him; Clay and Tsunami, come on, quick.\"\n\nClay charged up the beach behind him. Tsunami paused for a moment \u2014 she didn't like leaving the soldier, even if he wasn't fully awake yet. She also didn't particularly like taking orders from Starflight.\n\n\"Go on, hurry,\" Sunny said, nudging her with one wing.\n\nNot far into the forest, a large tree had fallen, with the top of its branches brushing the sand. Clay and Tsunami shoved and rolled it onto the beach and dragged it back to the SkyWing while Starflight flapped around squawking instructions. As if we need to be told how to move a tree, Tsunami thought grumpily.\n\nThe soldier's eyes were blinking awake as they reached him. He coughed and coughed again, lifting his head to peer groggily at the dragonets.\n\n\"So how does the tree help?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"We put it on top of him,\" Starflight said. \"So he'll be trapped in place, at least long enough for us to get away.\"\n\nTsunami hated to admit it, but it was a good idea. She helped Clay wrestle the tree over until it lay heavily across the orange dragon's back and wings. The SkyWing tried to push himself up, but the tree kept him pinned to the sand.\n\n\"What if he's stuck here forever?\" Sunny worried. She reached over and brushed some sand off the SkyWing's snout. He snorted a puff of smoke, and Clay pulled her back. \"Maybe we should just let him go.\"\n\n\"We can't do that,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"I wish you hadn't attacked him,\" Sunny said, ducking her head.\n\n\"Me too,\" said Glory.\n\n\"It wasn't the smartest move,\" Starflight agreed.\n\nTsunami's gills flared, and she spread her wings. \"You don't know that!\" she said. \"Maybe I saved us! Again!\" She looked at Clay, but he only shrugged as if he wasn't sure. Thanks for the support, guys, Tsunami thought angrily. When all I'm trying to do is keep everyone safe.\n\n\"Don't worry, Sunny,\" Clay said, patting the little SandWing's head. \"His friends will come looking for him eventually.\"\n\n\"Eventually or soon,\" Glory said. \"So like I said, let's seriously get out of here.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" the SkyWing rasped. His voice was hoarse and deep. He wriggled, lashing his tail across the sand. \"Don't leave me like this.\"\n\nStarflight stepped into his line of sight and gazed down at him. \"Remember we could have killed you,\" he said. \"Remember that the dragonets of destiny were merciful. We want peace, not more death. We have come to save Pyrrhia.\"\n\n\"Oh, good grief,\" Tsunami said as Glory rolled her eyes. \"No more hanging out with NightWings for you.\"\n\n\"I thought it sounded nice,\" Sunny said. Starflight shot her a grateful look.\n\n\"Sunny, don't encourage him,\" said Glory.\n\nCarefully Starflight draped a few large leaves over the dragon's head, so he couldn't see where they went. He pointed toward the forest and mouthed, \"Just to be safe.\"\n\nTsunami sighed. More flying in the wrong direction. She wanted to go home already. Home to the ocean and the SeaWings and her royal parents.\n\nBut she couldn't argue about it with the SkyWing listening, and the others were already nodding. All of them were ready to follow anxious, overly cautious Starflight yet again. And none of them thought she'd done the right thing by attacking this SkyWing, even though it was to save their stupid scales.\n\nAs they lifted into the sky, she cast a longing look over her shoulder at the ocean.\n\nSoon, she thought. Soon I'll be with my own dragons.\n\nThe Bay of a Thousand Scales was farther away than Tsunami had realized. She'd been studying the map of Pyrrhia since she was tiny, but it was hard to fit that picture over the enormous world below her. She kept expecting to find neat little spirals of islands that would fit in the palm of her talons. Instead, she found herself flying over vast expanses of empty ocean, dotted here and there with a solitary outcropping of rock.\n\nAfter they took a long detour inland to convince the SkyWing they'd gone in the opposite direction, they circled around south and flew out to sea. They managed to make it to a small rocky island shortly after night fell, but according to Starflight they were still a long way from the Bay of a Thousand Scales. He'd calculated the distance and their speed and had a long boring lecture ready to explain it all. The rest of them fell asleep halfway into it, and he spent the next day sulking about that.\n\nStill, Tsunami had to admit \u2014 if only to herself \u2014 that it was useful having someone with all the geography and flight plans in his head. For a few days they stopped whenever they saw an island, ate a seagull or fish if they could catch any, and then flew on. Tsunami tried diving into the ocean several times and was disappointed to discover she couldn't swim as fast as she flew. The only good news was that the ocean water helped to heal the burn on her neck.\n\nIt was four mornings later when Tsunami finally woke up on an island that was officially part of the Thousand Scales.\n\nShe started awake from a dream in which their cave had collapsed and was slowly crushing her to death, and discovered that Clay had rolled over on top of her in the middle of the night. Grumbling, she wriggled out from under him and let his tail flop over onto Starflight's head.\n\nThe five dragonets were packed into a cavern halfway up a tall sea cliff. It was cramped and uncomfortable and smelled of seagull droppings. Clay had barely been able to scrunch his wings low enough to crawl inside.\n\nAnd why were they sleeping in this horrible spot instead of on the nice white sandy beach below?\n\nTsunami sat down in the cave entrance and glared at Starflight, which wasn't very satisfying since everyone was still snoring away. Clay was stuffed against the back wall with Sunny between his front talons and Starflight curled up alongside. Even Glory had her tail draped over Clay's. Her scales glinted orange and gold in the light of the rising sun, with bursts of red when she shifted sleepily.\n\nStarflight had been acting so weird since the NightWings gave him back. Suddenly it seemed like he wanted to argue with Tsunami about every thing. If she said, \"Let's sleep on the beach! It'll be fun!\" he'd say, \"No, no, we have to sleep in a hidden cave; that'll be much safer.\" Safer! As if there was anything to worry about all the way out here, in the middle of the night.\n\nBut everyone was still mad at her about attacking that soldier, so they all voted with Starflight.\n\nShe didn't like that development at all.\n\nTsunami watched them sleep for a moment. It was so hard to lead effectively when everyone kept questioning you and complaining about every thing. She only wanted what was best for them. Didn't they know that? She'd always figured she would fight a hundred SkyWings to protect them.\n\nBut maybe I shouldn't. Maybe my friends don't want my protection after all.\n\nMaybe they wanted Starflight to be their leader instead. Even though he'd never risked one scale on his body for them.\n\nTsunami glanced down at the sea, sparkling aquamarine below her. Somewhere in those blue-green depths was her family \u2014 her parents, her kingdom, every thing that should have been hers, if the Talons of Peace hadn't stolen her away and ruined her life.\n\nPerhaps the problem with her friends was that they were from different tribes, all stubborn and muddled up instead of sensible like SeaWings. Maybe her own kind would understand her better. They'd appreciate her instead of yelling at her.\n\nWell, she didn't have to sit here waiting for everyone else to wake up. It wasn't like they'd be much help when it came to searching anyway.\n\nTsunami stretched her wings and then tipped forward out of the cave opening. Wind whistled past her snout, tugging at her tail as she plummeted down the cliff. At the last moment, she snapped her wings open and sailed across the top of the water, skimming it with her claws. Joy tingled through her scales. She spun and dove into the water.\n\nThe sea was warmer here and busy with underwater life. Her splash sent what seemed like thousands of fish scattering away, several of them disappearing into a pinkish-orange coral reef that curled out of the sand like a petrified forest. A blobby dark blue octopus goggled at her from the branches. Tsunami kept seeing flickers of bright yellow and silver at the edge of her vision as fish fled from her webbed claws.\n\nNo welcoming committee of delighted SeaWings, though.\n\nNo glowing jellyfish marking a path to Queen Coral's castle. No cavalcade of bowing seahorses and bejeweled lobsters to lead the way.\n\nNot that she'd been picturing the homecoming scene from The Missing Princess or anything.\n\nTsunami swam along the coral reef, peering at the creatures hiding in the nooks and holes. A hideous thing she thought might be an eel stared back at her. Little orange-and-white fish nestled in the waving lavender anemones.\n\nShe still wasn't used to swimming in the sea, and that frustrated her. Unexpected currents kept knocking her off balance. The salt water felt like it was scraping roughly against her gills. Where were her natural SeaWing instincts? Her world was supposed to make her stronger, faster, tougher \u2014 not pathetic.\n\nShe swam all the way to the next island, fighting the currents. More of the pinkish coral reef stretched across the sand here as well, dotted with waving green fans and lacy dark purple ferns. Her wings felt sore and tired, so she spread them wide and floated near the surface, not far from the land.\n\nSomething flashed below her in the shadows of the coral reef.\n\nSomething very large.\n\nTsunami had a brief vision of all the large, toothy things that might live in the ocean, then dismissed it. If it was a shark, she would kill it and bring it back to the others to eat \u2014 mainly so she could see the look on Starflight's face.\n\nShe flicked her tail to swim closer.\n\nIt was another SeaWing.\n\nA shiver rippled across her scales when she saw him, and part of her wanted to bolt right back to her friends.\n\nDon't be a smoke-breather, she scolded herself. This is what you were hoping for: a dragon from your own tribe.\n\nShe took a deep breath. The strange SeaWing had dark blue horns and sky-blue scales several shades paler than hers. He was paddling by the reef, shifting his talons and wings slightly to change course. His head turned alertly from side to side.\n\nWell, it wouldn't hurt to follow him for a while first, Tsunami told herself. She crept along the top of the reef, peering over the edge at him. Her claws caught on small gaps in the coral. She accidentally poked an indignant black lobster, which came bustling out with its long whiskers bristling and pincers snapping. It took one look at her and hustled right back into hiding.\n\nUp here, the reef was covered in a layer of green mosslike algae. Tsunami passed a couple of large sea turtles slowly swimming nearby. An enormous, tentacled thing like a sea spider sat nibbling bits of algae. The tips of its eight dark purple legs glowed orange-yellow and so did its eyes.\n\nThe SeaWing down below stopped suddenly and glanced around. Tsunami flattened herself against the reef. Knobbly bits of limestone poked into her underbelly. She peered through one of the holes at the other dragon.\n\nHe spun slowly, staring into the ocean depths. Had he heard her?\n\nBut he didn't look up. The dragon checked around him one more time, then lit up the stripes along his wings.\n\nAlmost immediately another dragon swam out of a cave in the coral reef.\n\nHmmm, Tsunami thought, much less handsome. His green scales were perfectly nice, but she didn't care for the black spiral patterns on them. She'd never seen a pattern like that on a dragon before. And his face wasn't nearly as handsome or friendly-looking as the first dragon, although perhaps that had something to do with the giant bruise swollen over his left eye.\n\nShe wondered if they were guards switching patrol duty. If so, they were being quite strange about it.\n\nThe two dragons floated in place, staring at each other, for what seemed like an eternity. Occasionally the stripes on one SeaWing would light up, then on the other. They moved their talons about as if waving away fish, even though no fish went anywhere near them.\n\nAnd then the spiral-marked dragon ducked back into the cave, and the blue dragon swam on.\n\nSome kind of SeaWing patrol ritual? Tsunami wondered. I guess I'll have to learn all that stuff in order to become queen. She lifted her wings to swim after the first dragon, and a pair of yellow-striped fish wriggled out from under her and shot away.\n\nThe sky-blue dragon swam back the way he'd come, toward the stretch of open sea between this island and the one where Tsunami's friends were sleeping.\n\nNow or never, Tsunami thought. She'd rather meet this dragon than the other one, and she'd rather do it while he was alone, if she could. That seemed easier than trying to explain herself to a whole bunch of dragons at once.\n\nShe beat her wings to catch up, dove over the edge of the reef, and swam around in front of him.\n\nThe SeaWing started back in an eddy of ripples. His eyes were a blue so dark they were almost black.\n\nTsunami pointed up at the surface. Come on out of the water so we can talk, she tried to signal. Hopefully he'd figure out what she meant.\n\nTo her surprise, he whipped around and fled. His tail smacked a wave of water in her face.\n\nWell, that's unfriendly, she thought. She swam after him, swinging her tail to propel herself even faster. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw her chasing him, and put on a burst of speed.\n\nWhy was he running away? And how was he so fast?\n\n\"Stop!\" she tried to yell through the water. \"I just want to talk!\"\n\nOf course that didn't work. He didn't even slow down.\n\nBut then he twisted to look back at Tsunami, and so he didn't see the whale that suddenly loomed out of the deep in front of him.\n\nTsunami waved her talons and pointed. \"Watch out!\" she shouted in a cascade of bubbles.\n\nThe SeaWing smacked into the whale's side and careened backward. The whale was only slightly bigger than the dragon, with ridges all along its back and a flat, mild-mannered face. It made a weird squeaking groan and blinked at the SeaWing in confusion.\n\nThe dragon was still shaking his head, trying to reorient himself, when Tsunami caught up, grabbed his tail, and pinned him to the sand.\n\nThe whale blinked again and swam on. Eddies rippled around the two dragons as it powered away through the water.\n\nNow what do I do? Tsunami thought. I have to get him to the surface to talk to him, but if I let him go, he might try to escape again.\n\nShe frowned down at the dragon and pointed at the surface again. Flashes of sunlight shimmered up above them, like pieces of broken gold-white glass floating on the water.\n\nThe other dragon tipped his head to one side. Luminescent stripes lit up along his wings, flashing fast, then slow.\n\nAll right, Tsunami thought. I can do that, too. Maybe he's testing me.\n\nShe lit up her own stripes, illuminating the ones on her snout, then the ones along her tail, and finally her wings. See? My stripes flash, too. I'm a SeaWing. Now let's go up and talk.\n\nSlowly she spread her wings and lifted up, prepared to grab him if he tried to bolt again. He scrambled upright but stayed with her. Encouraged, Tsunami swam a bit closer to the surface. He followed, but only for a bit before he stopped and looked around.\n\nHis stripes flashed again, this time along his neck and tail.\n\nImpatiently Tsunami lit up her stripes one more time, mirroring what he'd done.\n\nThe SeaWing's wings flared open with a whoosh that scared fish into the reef. He lunged toward Tsunami, fast as a minnow. His front talons reached for her.\n\nTsunami roared, blasting him in the eyes with bubbles, and sliced her claws across his snout. She didn't know why he was attacking. Maybe he was a traitor SeaWing. Or maybe he was guarding his territory or trea sure. Perhaps he thought she was an intruder, although he wasn't much of a guard if his first instinct was to run away, and his second was to attack with no reason.\n\nHe'll be sorry when he finds out who I am! she thought fiercely.\n\nShe kicked his underbelly hard with her back legs. He coughed up a stream of bubbles and fell back. Tsunami spread her wings, snarled at him one more time, and shot to the surface.\n\nShe burst into the air and kept beating her wings to rise into the sky. In the distance, she could see the cliff-side cave and the worried faces of her friends poking out.\n\nAn enormous splash sounded behind her. The other SeaWing surged out of the ocean. His massive tail whacked the water twice as he lifted into the air, sending giant waves rushing in all directions.\n\nHe looked even bigger out here in the air. His hooked claws gleamed sharply in the sunlight. His dark blue eyes were fixed on her wings.\n\nThe first true citizen of her kingdom she'd ever met, and he was coming to kill her.\n\nTsunami shot toward the island where her friends were. The SeaWing was close on her tail. He roared something, but the wind whipped it away so she couldn't hear it.\n\nShe saw Clay wriggle out of the cliff and take to the air. That's what she needed \u2014 backup. With a quick twist of her wings, she aimed for the strip of white sandy beach where she'd wanted to sleep the night before. The other three could stay safely in the cave. She and Clay together could handle this SeaWing.\n\nShe hoped.\n\n\"Wait!\" her pursuer yelled. \"Where are you going? What's wrong?\"\n\nTsunami's wings missed a beat, and she nearly dropped into the ocean. She swung around, hovering over the sea between the cliff and the beach. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Clay veer into a circle in the air, waiting to see what she would do.\n\nThe other SeaWing paused as well. He kept the length of two dragons between him and her. The scratches on his snout were bleeding.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Tsunami cried indignantly. \"Didn't you just attack me?\"\n\n\"I certainly did not!\" he protested. Glowing lines flickered along his snout. \"I thought you \u2014 that's the normal \u2014\" He seemed to be getting more and more embarrassed. \"You said you liked me!\" he finally burst out.\n\n\"I didn't say anything of the sort,\" Tsunami said, astonished.\n\nThe SeaWing's brow furrowed. \"You very clearly said you liked me, and you'd followed me all the way out here to tell me that.\"\n\nTsunami just about fell out of the sky. \"You are a delusional squid-brain,\" she cried.\n\n\"Well, maybe not in those exact words!\" he said. \"All right, it was a little confusing. Maybe a lot confusing. But the message was in there. And why else would you be chasing me?\"\n\n\"When, exactly, do you imagine I said all this?\" Tsunami demanded. \"Shortly after you attacked me, perhaps?\"\n\nThe other dragon touched his snout gently and winced. \"You were the only one doing any attacking,\" he said. \"I was being friendly after what you said.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" Tsunami said. Maybe she'd misunderstood his actions. Maybe his approach had been a SeaWing greeting ritual she didn't know. In which case... his poor snout. She winced guiltily. Perhaps she shouldn't have gotten defensive so quickly. \"Tell me exactly what you think I said.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"I said, 'What are you doing all the way out here?' and you said \u2014\" He paused, rubbing his front talons against his head. \"You said, 'Hey, sparkling teeth, I totally love three of your claws but not the others, and I wish your nose was a herring so I could eat it, and also your wings sound like sharks snoring.'\"\n\nTsunami burst out laughing.\n\n\"All right, I get it,\" she said, although she didn't really. Did all SeaWings have a strange sense of humor? Would she have to develop one, too? \"You're making this up.\"\n\nHe stared at her. \"Are you seriously going to pretend you didn't say any of that?\"\n\n\"Of course I didn't,\" Tsunami said. Maybe he wasn't kidding. Maybe he was mentally unbalanced. \"I didn't say anything at all \u2014 we were underwater, remember?\"\n\nThe strange dragon hovered for several wingbeats, glowing stripes lighting up along his blue scales. His face slowly went from confused to angry as he frowned at her.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I'm a SeaWing,\" she said hotly. \"Just like you, so no need to get hostile.\"\n\n\"A SeaWing who doesn't speak Aquatic?\" he growled. \"Not likely. What are you really? How did you make yourself look like a SeaWing?\"\n\nTsunami's heart sank. Aquatic?\n\nSeaWings have their own language?\n\nOf course they do, she realized. It felt like the tide was going out inside her, leaving nothing but stretches of bare sand. And of course nobody ever bothered to teach it to me. Just one more creative way the Talons found to ruin my life.\n\nWhy hadn't she thought of that before? Three moons, she was as thick as Clay. The dragons of the sea had a whole palace underwater \u2014 of course they needed a way to communicate down there. They couldn't just pop to the surface every time they needed to chat.\n\nShe glanced down at her webbed talons and remembered the gestures she'd seen the two SeaWings making while their luminescent stripes flashed. Talon signals and glowing stripes \u2014 she must have said all that nonsense with her stripes without realizing it.\n\nBut how can I be queen of the SeaWings if I don't even speak their language?\n\nAnd why didn't anyone ever tell me about this?\n\nClay had never met a dragon of his own kind before. That's why he knew nothing about MudWings. But Tsunami didn't have that excuse: one of the guardians who'd raised them had been a SeaWing.\n\nSo why, why, had Webs never taught her the SeaWing language or even told her they had one?\n\nAll those scrolls about SeaWings... now that she thought about it, there was plenty of dialogue in the underwater scenes, like in The Missing Princess when the lost daughter found her parents. Tsunami had always assumed that was a storytelling technique, not an actual underwater language.\n\nShe looked up and met the SeaWing's dark blue eyes. His head was tilted curiously.\n\n\"You don't look guilty,\" he observed. \"You look sad. And I imagine it would be hard to fake those.\" He nodded at the webs between her claws. \"So where did you come from, and what's wrong with you?\"\n\nTsunami bristled. \"There's nothing wrong with me,\" she snapped. \"I just happen to have been raised by idiot \u2014\"\n\nHis gaze suddenly shifted behind her. \"Look out!\" he yelled. His tail whipped around and slammed into her, knocking her aside. She spun toward the water, dizzy and shocked. Her wings brushed the ocean waves as she righted herself and turned around.\n\nThe strange SeaWing was grappling with Clay up in the sky.\n\nTsunami gasped. The SeaWing was full-grown, bigger than Clay, and he was not afraid to lash out with teeth, tail, and claws. But she could tell Clay was holding back, worried about hurting a possible ally. He ducked his head between his front talons and tried to dive away, but the SeaWing seized Clay's tail and dug his talons viciously into Clay's scales. Clay howled with pain.\n\nThe other dragon started to drag him down to the ocean, where he would have all the underwater advantages of SeaWings, and Clay would eventually drown.\n\n\"Clay!\" Sunny shrieked, launching herself out of the cliff-side cave.\n\nTsunami got there first. She smacked the SeaWing over the head with her tail, seized his wing in her talons, and yanked him away from Clay when he turned around in surprise. He tried to spin around her to get back to his prey, but she blocked him with her wings and lashed out at his snout again. He flinched back, and that was enough time for Clay to scramble out of reach.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" the SeaWing yelled at Tsunami. \"I'm saving you from that MudWing!\"\n\n\"Well, don't!\" Tsunami yelled back. \"He's my friend!\"\n\n\"But \u2014\"\n\nSunny slammed into the back of the SeaWing, landing between his wings and wrapping her talons around his neck. \"Leave him alone!\" she panted.\n\nThe SeaWing looked more astonished than alarmed. He wriggled his shoulders and twisted his neck, trying to see what was on his back. Sunny kicked his wing, and he yelped.\n\n\"That's my other friend,\" Tsunami said. \"Sunny, try not to hurt him too badly. We need his help.\"\n\n\"I hardly think this gnat is going to hurt me,\" the SeaWing growled.\n\nSunny kicked him again. \"Promise me you won't attack Clay,\" she said.\n\nHis eyes went to the brown dragon circling just above them. Clay rubbed his head anxiously.\n\n\"The MudWings are our enemies,\" the SeaWing snarled at Tsunami. \"If you don't know that, then you'd better leave the Bay of a Thousand Scales before Queen Coral's army finds you and does what they always do to traitors.\"\n\n\"I'm not a traitor,\" Tsunami said. \"And Clay is not your enemy.\" She glanced up at him, then back at the SeaWing. \"You'd better learn some respect, squid-brain. We're the dragonets of destiny.\"\n\n\"Riptide,\" Sunny said again. \"That's a funny name.\"\n\n\"I like it,\" Tsunami said. \"Fierce and scary, like mine.\"\n\nRiptide was pacing the beach, lashing his tail in a long swooshing trail through the sand. His sky-blue scales glinted metallically in the morning light. He had claw-mark scars along his pale underbelly and what looked like an old bite mark on his tail. Tsunami was pretty sure he was only a couple years older than she was. The scratches she'd given his snout had finally stopped bleeding. She hoped those wouldn't leave scars, too \u2014 he had a very handsome snout when it wasn't all clawed up.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"So the Talons of Peace are real.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately,\" Glory muttered.\n\nRiptide glanced at her, and Tsunami felt a weird tingle of jealousy run through her scales. Glory had found a large rock to perch on, spreading her wings open to the sun, and her scales were shimmering silver and rose.\n\n\"I thought everyone knew about the Talons,\" Sunny said.\n\n\"Just rumors and whispers,\" said Riptide. \"None of the tribe queens would be pleased to find a member of the peace movement in their midst. Conspiring with other tribes? Stealing eggs?\" He shook his head. \"Queen Coral would kill any dragon she found working with the Talons.\" He gave Tsunami a searching look she didn't understand.\n\nClay was sitting with his tail in the water. He had muddy sand packed over the spot where Riptide had clawed him. Sunny sat next to him, giving Riptide fierce looks whenever he paced too close to Clay.\n\n\"And you're the dragonets of destiny. For real. The ones in the prophecy. That's real.\" Riptide stopped, inhaled deeply, and blew out again. \"And you're here. In SeaWing territory. Just like \u2014\" He glanced at Tsunami again, then went back to pacing.\n\n\"I know it's thrilling,\" Tsunami said. \"But we're really looking for somewhere safe to go. The Talons of Peace treated us terribly, and I figured the SeaWings would welcome and protect us.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Riptide said not very reassuringly. \"So you were all raised in a cave?\" He stopped in front of Tsunami. \"With no ocean? Never? You never went into the ocean?\"\n\nThis seemed to be the hardest part for him to believe. \"Not until we escaped,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"But that's awful,\" said Riptide.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Tsunami said, flaring her wings. \"I know it was. I've always said our life was miserable, but these dragons keep arguing with me.\"\n\n\"Not me,\" Glory said.\n\n\"I can't believe the Talons did that to you,\" Riptide said, clawing the sand.\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" Tsunami said. \"They really are the worst.\"\n\n\"Even Webs \u2014 Webs didn't take you to the ocean?\" Riptide asked.\n\n\"You know about Webs?\" Sunny asked.\n\nRiptide ducked his head and frowned at his talons. \"He's pretty infamous in the tribe. We all know he deserted during a battle, and later he came back and stole one of the queen's eggs. At least, Queen Coral was sure it was him. But nobody knew if he stole it for the Talons of Peace or for his own reasons. We're not really supposed to talk about the Talons of Peace rumors.\"\n\n\"Didn't anyone think he might have stolen the egg to be part of the prophecy?\" Starflight asked.\n\nRiptide nodded. \"Some of us did. But again, nobody talked about it. Queen Blister doesn't like hearing about the prophecy, so that's also been a forbidden topic.\"\n\nTsunami wrinkled her snout. \"Blister gets to decide what SeaWings can talk about?\"\n\nRiptide shifted uncomfortably and picked up a large conch shell. He twisted it between his talons. \"You'll want to call her Queen Blister when you meet her,\" he said.\n\n\"Not until we decide she should be queen,\" Tsunami said stoutly. \"That's up to us, remember?\"\n\nIt looked for a moment like Riptide was trying not to smile.\n\n\"Well,\" Starflight stammered, \"she is a pretty good \u2014 I mean, she's the smart one \u2014 I think we'll probably \u2014\"\n\nTsunami tilted her head at him. What was he rattling on about? He snapped his mouth shut and went back to picking sand out of his scales.\n\n\"Did you know Webs?\" Clay asked Riptide.\n\nThe SeaWing dropped his gaze. \"Not really. He ran away during a battle when I was only two years old. But I've been hearing about his treachery my whole life.\" He sighed. \"I really can't believe he never took you to the ocean in all that time.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" Tsunami said. \"And he never taught me Aquatic. I wish I had all the Talons of Peace here so I could bite them.\"\n\n\"To be fair, the Talons were just keeping us safe,\" Sunny interjected. \"They needed us to survive to fulfill the prophecy.\"\n\nTsunami snorted, and Sunny gave her an injured look.\n\n\"But the prophecy,\" Riptide said. He pointed at Glory. \"It calls for a SkyWing. She's not a SkyWing.\"\n\n\"It's a little complicated,\" Tsunami said as a hint of sea green rippled across Glory's scales. \"Anyway, I'm not sure we really care about the prophecy. But we do care about finding the families we were stolen from.\"\n\n\"I care about the prophecy!\" Sunny protested. She poked Clay's side, and he nodded agreeably.\n\nStarflight cleared his throat, but Tsunami hurried on before he could start lecturing again. His egg hadn't been stolen; the NightWings had handed it right over. So maybe he didn't care about getting home, but she certainly did.\n\n\"Only a few days ago, I found out I was stolen from the Royal Hatchery,\" Tsunami said. \"So... so I thought maybe my parents were looking for me. Like in The Missing Princess? Do you know that scroll?\"\n\nRiptide definitely squashed a smile this time. \"I do,\" he said. \"It's required reading in school.\"\n\n\"School,\" Starflight said in the wistful tones Clay used to talk about food.\n\n\"Required reading?\" Tsunami echoed. That was odd. It was a fairy tale, not a historical document. And not, perhaps, the best-written scroll she'd ever read, although it was still one of her favorites because of the story.\n\n\"But I can't take you to the palace,\" Riptide said firmly. \"Not with him along.\" He jerked his head at Clay.\n\n\"Weren't you listening?\" Tsunami said, exasperated. \"He's not a regular MudWing. He's certainly not allied with Burn or the SkyWings. You can trust him.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should stay here,\" Riptide suggested, \"and I'll bring Queen Coral back to you.\" He glanced across the water at the other island, where he'd met the green dragon with the black spiral patterns. Tsunami wondered if he was wishing for reinforcements.\n\n\"Nope,\" she said. \"We're all coming with you.\"\n\n\"I'm in enough trouble with Queen Coral,\" Riptide protested. \"That's why I'm stuck patrolling all the way out here. If I bring a MudWing back to the palace, I might as well pull out my own teeth.\"\n\n\"Ew!\" Sunny cried. \"That's not a real punishment, is it?\"\n\nTsunami didn't want to know the answer to that. She wanted to meet her mother without images of horrible things in her head. \"Think of it this way,\" she said quickly. \"What happens if Queen Coral finds out you met her missing daughter and didn't bring her back to the palace?\"\n\nRiptide squirmed and wrinkled his snout. \"Can't I bring you and leave the others?\" he asked. \"At least until Queen Coral gives her permission?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said stoutly. \"We all go together. She'll understand once she realizes we're the dragonets of destiny.\"\n\nRiptide sighed. \"All right, but he has to be blindfolded.\" He looked at the other three, rubbing his chin. \"It'd be better if they could all be blindfolded.\"\n\n\"What am I going to do?\" Glory asked. \"Round up some scary RainWings to come sleep on your roof? I thought no one was afraid of my tribe.\"\n\n\"We're not,\" Riptide objected. \"Afraid of RainWings. Pffft. What a thing to say.\"\n\nMore streaks of pale green appeared along Glory's scales and then faded away. \"Wonderful,\" she said. \"So no blindfold for me, then.\" She tossed her head and turned back to the ocean.\n\nRiptide looked doubtfully at Starflight and Sunny.\n\n\"The NightWings know every thing,\" Starflight said loftily. \"It's no use trying to keep secrets from them. I mean, us. I could just use my powers to figure out where your palace is.\"\n\nTsunami rolled her eyes. Starflight had no powers whatsoever, as far as any of the dragonets knew. But if he wanted the SeaWings to think he did, maybe that could be useful eventually.\n\n\"Please don't argue with him,\" Tsunami said to Riptide. \"Once he starts yammering on about how amazing NightWings are, we'll never get him to shut up.\"\n\nStarflight ruffled his wings in outrage. Riptide muttered something under his breath and started poking around in the shallow water below the rocks.\n\n\"You can blindfold me,\" Sunny offered. \"I don't mind.\"\n\n\"If you do that, she can ride on my back,\" Tsunami suggested. She missed having the little SandWing come lean against her trustingly. Sunny was still acting jumpy and ner vous around her, four whole days after her fight with the SkyWing soldier, as if Tsunami might suddenly attack someone out of nowhere, for no reason.\n\n\"Or my back,\" Starflight jumped in quickly. Tsunami frowned at him. Why was he trying so hard to take her place?\n\n\"You think you're strong enough?\" she challenged.\n\n\"Sure he is,\" Sunny said. \"I'll ride with him, and you can lead Clay.\"\n\nWell, fine, then, Tsunami thought. I guess everyone's giving the orders now.\n\nRiptide came stomping back with several long strands of thick black seaweed. Sunny immediately looked like she was regretting her offer. But she let the big SeaWing wrap the seaweed tightly around her head, covering her closed eyes.\n\n\"Ew,\" she said, shivering. \"It's all wet and slimy.\"\n\n\"I like wet and slimy,\" Clay said, ducking his head to make it easier for Riptide to blindfold him.\n\n\"That's weird, Clay,\" said Glory.\n\nRiptide's attention was focused on plastering seaweed all over Clay's broad head. When he was done, it looked more like an octopus trying to eat Clay's brain than a blindfold. But of course, Clay didn't complain. He never complained about anything except being hungry. It was one of the things Tsunami loved about him.\n\nTsunami helped Sunny climb awkwardly onto Starflight's back, balancing in the narrow space between his wings. The SandWing was small, but Starflight wasn't as burly as Tsunami or Clay.\n\n\"If you can't handle it, tell me and I'll take her,\" Tsunami said to him.\n\nStarflight nodded, breathing deeply. His wings curled in, and he shivered as Sunny lay down, rested her head on his neck, and clasped her forearms trustingly around his shoulders.\n\nTsunami turned to Clay and brushed one of his wing tips with hers.\n\n\"Can you feel that?\" she asked. \"If I do that in the air, can you stay with me?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Clay said doubtfully.\n\n\"I'll fly on your other side,\" Glory said, hopping down from her rock. She reached up and nudged his other wing. \"That way we can steer you together.\"\n\nClay shook his head a little and a loose flap of seaweed went glop flop against his neck. \"This is really strange,\" he said. \"It's as dark as the underground river. Only with breathing, so, better. I'm in favor of breathing. Definitely better than not breathing.\"\n\n\"Just don't go too fast. And listen to me,\" Tsunami ordered.\n\n\"To us,\" Glory chimed in. \"And we promise not to drown you.\" She gave Tsunami an arch look.\n\nIf I do decide to drown somebody, I know who's at the top of my list, Tsunami thought, shooting a glare back at her. \"All right, let's go,\" she said to Riptide.\n\nThe sky-blue SeaWing waved his talons in front of Clay's face to make sure there was no reaction. Finally he sprang into the sky with the dragonets close behind him.\n\nTsunami forgot to be mad at Glory and Starflight as they flew over the bay. Green-and-white islands glowed like scattered jewels in the ocean below them. Several of them were shaped like claws, curving neatly through the water. From up by the clouds, she could see part of the spiral pattern in the archipelago. And when they swooped down close to the sea, she saw pearlescent pink dolphins leaping in the clear water.\n\nGlory told Clay about the dolphins, and his head went up hopefully. \"Can we eat them?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" Riptide called back over his shoulder. \"Queen Coral has forbidden it. She thinks they might be distantly related to us.\"\n\nTsunami glanced down at the sleek darting shapes. Related to dragons? What a bizarre idea. It didn't really fit with how she'd imagined her mother.\n\nWell, I can stop imagining soon, she thought.\n\nShe had no idea how the SeaWings had managed to hide a palace on one of these islands. From the air, it seemed like you could see every thing \u2014 the white sand below the azure waters around the islands, every hole in the twisting rock formations, every palm tree and cormorant nest and scraggly bush on every cliff. There were a lot of small islands, but surely the enemy had searched every one by now, after eigh teen years of war.\n\n\"Here comes our welcoming committee,\" Riptide said, just loud enough for Tsunami to hear.\n\nShe spotted a formation of blue and green dragons flying toward them \u2014 fifteen or more, with huge wings and bared teeth. She could hear them hissing from a distance.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Riptide muttered.\n\n\"Clay, stop and hover,\" Tsunami instructed. He paused in the air, with Glory close beside him.\n\n\"What's happening?\" Sunny asked, lifting her head from Starflight's shoulder as they caught up. Starflight, for once, didn't say anything. His jaw was set, and it looked like he was using all his energy to stay aloft with Sunny.\n\n\"The advance guard,\" Riptide said. He swung in a slow circle around the group and stopped in front again, facing the incoming dragons. \"They make sure no one even gets close to the Summer Palace.\"\n\nA few moments later, they were surrounded. The flapping wingbeats filled their ears and pushed the air currents around.\n\n\"Rrrriptide,\" growled the dragon in the lead. His scales were a green so dull it was almost gray, like stone where moss had been scraped away. He had tiny bone-pale eyes that never seemed to blink under a knobbly protruding forehead, and his horns twisted strangely toward each other. Tsunami noticed that, unlike Riptide, the new dragon had no battle scars. Which either meant he stayed away from the fighting \u2014 or he was a very skilled fighter.\n\n\"What are you dragging home now?\" he snarled.\n\nRiptide looked him straight in the eyes. \"I've found the missing princess.\"\n\nThat's not how I would have put it, Tsunami thought. I was the one doing all the finding out there.\n\nA ripple of shock went through the other SeaWings. Tsunami's scales felt like insects were crawling under them as the guards all stared at her. She lifted her snout and tried to look regal and imposing.\n\n\"Oh, really?\" said the leader. \"You, Riptide? Of all dragons? What an unusual coincidence.\" His unsettling eyes scanned Tsunami from wing tips to claws, as if she were a dead eel someone had left half-eaten on the beach. Tsunami wanted to shred the skeptical, arrogant look right off his face.\n\n\"And who are you?\" Tsunami demanded.\n\nRiptide winced. \"This is Shark,\" he said. \"Commander of palace defense and brother to the queen.\"\n\n\"Oh, really,\" Tsunami said, deliberately making her tone even more insolent and challenging than Shark's. She was not about to start her life with the SeaWings by kowtowing to every soldier dragon who came along. Even if he was her uncle.\n\nShark narrowed his eyes until they nearly disappeared into his scales. \"What makes you believe this snip of a dragon comes from the stolen royal egg?\" he asked Riptide.\n\n\"Why, do you lose a lot of eggs?\" Tsunami jumped in. \"Maybe whoever's in charge of defense isn't doing such a good job, then. Oh, wait, that's you, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Her story makes sense,\" Riptide said desperately. \"She knew about \u2014 about Webs. He raised her. And look at the glow patterns under her wings.\"\n\nAll of the SeaWings craned their necks to stare at Tsunami's wings. She snapped at a couple who got too close, then peered around to see what they were seeing.\n\nUnder her wings, when she lit them up, the luminescent stripes formed spirals around the outer edges. Starbursts shaped like webbed dragon footprints branched away from the lines in the middle. Was that weird? She glanced at the other SeaWings. Most of them had smaller starbursts and no spirals. Only Shark's patterns matched her own.\n\nBecause we're both royal. She lifted her head and met his gaze triumphantly. But one day I shall be queen, and you will always be nothing but a soldier.\n\nShark let out a long hissing breath. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Kill the other four and bring her.\"\n\n\"Don't you touch them!\" Tsunami yelled. She whirled and smacked a SeaWing out of the sky as he reached for Clay. Starflight had already ducked below Clay's massive wings. Glory drew her neck back and bared her fangs.\n\n\"I am the queen's daughter, and I order you to leave these dragonets alone,\" Tsunami shouted.\n\nThe guards looked from her to Shark uncertainly. His eyes were pale reflecting pools, hiding his thoughts. He slowly raised one talon and made a strange circling motion with it \u2014 a sign in the SeaWing language, Tsunami guessed. Whatever it was, it worked. To Tsunami's relief, the guards backed away.\n\nBut when she glanced at Riptide, she noticed that he still looked tense and unhappy. Maybe he's just afraid of Shark, she thought.\n\n\"Very good,\" she said, trying to sound like she was in command. \"Now take us to my mother.\"\n\n\"The queen is conducting business at the Deep Palace,\" Shark said flatly. \"We will take you to the Summer Palace, where you may wait for her.\" He made another talon signal, and two of the guards broke away from the group, winging off across the water. Taking the message to my mother, Tsunami thought, her wings expanding with joy. They were so close to every thing she'd always imagined. I'm going to meet my parents today.\n\nIslands flashed by below them as they flew on, now with a tight guard of SeaWings. Some of the islands were small patches of sand, barely big enough for one dragon to land on, and others were towering, jagged rocks shooting out of the water. Ahead, Tsunami saw one that looked like a huge dragon skeleton, with holes and gaps all through the pale stone.\n\nThe stone skeleton's nose pointed toward another island, this one ringed with forbidding-looking rocks and presenting only a high, sheer cliff face on all sides. The top was a rioting jungle. Thick green vines and trees pressed so close together that there was not a single spot clear enough to land on.\n\nTsunami was startled when Shark suddenly swerved and dove toward the base of the cliff. He splashed down between two spiraling rocks, sharp and evenly matched like dragon horns, and vanished into the azure water.\n\nShe blinked. Where had he gone? The water was so clear here that she could see fat black turtles strolling across the sand at the bottom of the sea.\n\nBut then, one by one, half the guards around them dove for the same spot, and each of them disappeared the same way \u2014 gone before the bubbles of their splash had cleared.\n\n\"Clay, stop,\" she said, brushing his wing. \"Riptide?\"\n\n\"It's the entrance to the Summer Palace,\" Riptide said. \"There's no other way in. You'll all have to swim.\"\n\nSunny let out a small, unhappy noise. \"How far?\" she asked Riptide.\n\n\"You only have to stay underwater for short swims,\" he answered. \"It has been redesigned so Queen Blister in particular can visit.\"\n\n\"And she hates water,\" Sunny said hopefully, \"since she's a SandWing, too.\"\n\n\"Is she, uh \u2014 is she here now?\" Starflight asked.\n\nRiptide shook his head. \"She is not fond of swimming, and even after all the changes we've made, she rarely visits.\"\n\nTsunami was secretly a bit relieved to hear that. After meeting Burn, she wasn't looking forward to encountering the other two rival SandWing sisters. What if they were all equally dangerous and crazy and controlling?\n\nBut eventually the dragonets would have to choose one of the three to win the war. To be fair, Tsunami thought they probably needed to meet both Blister and Blaze.\n\nThen again, if Tsunami's mother liked Blister \u2014 enough to alter her palace to accommodate her \u2014 surely that was a sign in Blister's favor, wasn't it? Maybe they didn't have to meet Blaze. Maybe supporting the SeaWings and Blister would be the obvious right thing to do.\n\n\"Stay close behind me,\" Riptide said. \"I'll light up my stripes so you can follow, and I'll flash them to signal you to surface at the breathing spots.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Clay said. \"So... about this blindfold, uh... any chance \u2014\"\n\n\"Once we're in the tunnel,\" Riptide answered. He turned and dove for the dragon-horn rocks.\n\nTsunami flipped her tail into Clay's front talons and dove after Riptide, towing Clay behind her. Her scales tingled with excitement.\n\n\"Deep breath, Clay,\" she called.\n\nShe was not far behind Riptide when he dove into the water, but even so, she nearly lost him in the fizz of bubbles that swarmed up in her face as she splashed down. She blinked frantically, searching for a hole or a tunnel entrance.\n\nLong, sun-colored tendrils of kelp grew up from the sandy floor, glowing an orange gold in the light filtering down from above. They were clustered around the base of the cliff, waving like a forest of octopus arms as tall as the five dragonets laid end to end.\n\nThe hole in the cliff must be hidden by the tendrils, but where?\n\nThen Tsunami saw Riptide's glowing tail knocking the golden kelp curtain aside, and she plunged after him. It was hard to swim as fast as she wanted to with Clay clinging to her tail. She could feel him trying to beat his wings and kick helpfully, but he kept accidentally whacking into under water boulders and slowing her down.\n\nShe poked her head into the forest and felt the tendrils of kelp slide and slither around her snout. Up close she could see little clear globules growing on them. These were surprisingly sticky, while the rest of the tendril was slippery smooth. It felt like gigantic golden inchworms were swarming around her.\n\nShe had to swim through a thick patch, following the glimmer of Riptide's lit-up tail, before reaching the cliff wall. Suddenly the tendrils slithered away and popped her out into a dark underwater tunnel.\n\nNot entirely dark \u2014 Riptide was directly in front of her, his luminescent stripes all glowing. He reached around her, guided Clay into the tunnel, and unwrapped the seaweed blindfold. Clay blinked and rubbed his talons against his eyes, then immediately turned back toward the faint sunlight, searching for the others.\n\nGlory came through next, her snout wrinkling as she pushed tendrils off her wings. Tsunami noticed that her scales had ripples of the orange-gold color crisscrossing the silver that had been there before. She wondered if Glory had done that deliberately or if her scales automatically tried to match their environment when she was stressed.\n\nAfter a long pause, Starflight burst through after her. His face was puffed up like he was about to explode and, on his back, Sunny was shivering violently.\n\nRiptide flashed the lights in his tail and shot upward, aiming for a hole in the tunnel roof not far inside the entrance. Tsunami was expecting more of a swim and was surprised when her head almost immediately popped out into air.\n\nIt wasn't much air \u2014 a tiny cavern, barely lit by a faraway gleam of sunlight up a long narrow chimney. The dragons' bodies were still in the watery tunnel below. There was only enough room in the cavern for their heads, all gathered closely in the pool. Tsunami could see right away that there was nowhere to climb out. This was a place to stop and breathe, nothing more.\n\nSunny and Starflight both gasped for air like they hadn't breathed in months. Clay fumbled in the dark to pat Sunny's head and pulled her blindfold off as well.\n\n\"Good thing this breathing hole is here,\" Clay remarked to Riptide. \"So close to the entrance, I mean.\"\n\nRiptide inclined his head in a sort of nod. \"Queen Blister insisted on it.\"\n\nTsunami felt the whoosh of several SeaWing guards swimming past below them. She knew there would be a few of them bringing up the rear, making sure none of the dragonets ran off to spread the news of the Summer Palace's secret location.\n\nShe couldn't keep her wings still. They thrummed like trapped dragonflies, wanting to spring loose. She was so close. This was her palace! Her dragons were only a few wingbeats away! After six years of imagining what this would be like, she didn't think she could stand another minute of waiting.\n\n\"Let's go, let's go,\" she said, splashing the others enthusiastically with her tail.\n\n\"Good grief,\" Glory said with a shake. \"It's like you've been possessed by Sunny or something.\"\n\n\"Come on, we're almost there.\" Tsunami flashed her stripes happily, and the other dragonets covered their eyes.\n\n\"I can swim from here,\" Sunny said to Starflight. \"Or I'll hold on to Clay if you all go too fast.\"\n\nStarflight looked disappointed and relieved at the same time.\n\nRiptide sank below the surface, and Tsunami ducked after him, too excited to wait for the others.\n\nNow it was easy to follow Riptide's glowing scales. The tunnel twisted up and down and around corners, with frequent stops like the first for breathing. Too frequent, if you asked Tsunami; each one made her want to bang her head into the cliff walls. She lost count after the fourth stop, but there had to be at least ten. How long was this tunnel?\n\nThen suddenly, finally, there was light ahead \u2014 real light, not glowing scales. A moment later they swam out of the tunnel into an open lake, lifted their heads above the water, and breathed in deeply. Green-tinted sunlight dazzled their eyes at first, but as her vision cleared, Tsunami saw dragons.\n\nOver a hundred blue and green dragons surrounded them, all of them staring expectantly at Tsunami.\n\nHer tribe. Her dragons. Her future subjects.\n\nThey had reached the Summer Palace of the SeaWings, in the heart of the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\nOverwhelmed, Tsunami spread her wings to float on the water and gazed around.\n\nThey were inside the island, surrounded by towering cliffs on all sides. Far above them, sunlight filtered through a thick green canopy \u2014 the vines and treetops she'd seen from the sky, woven so thickly it looked like a jungle from above. Like an emerald umbrella over the island, the canopy protected the Summer Palace from view and gave the light a sea-green quality that made Tsunami feel like she was still underwater.\n\nWaterfalls cascaded down from several holes in the cliffs, like slender dragon tails of silver, bursting into spray as they hit the lake. The only exit Tsunami could see was the tunnel behind her.\n\nFour pillars of blue-tinted white stone spiraled out of the water, winding toward one another until they formed a towering pavilion in the middle of the lake. The pavilion had twelve circular levels, each one smaller than the one below. There were few walls, most of them very low, and the whole structure was latticed with curving shapes and holes and little wading pools. It didn't look like it had been built; it looked as if it had grown that way, although Tsunami was pretty sure that was impossible.\n\nDragons were clustered along the edges of the pavilion, on ledges of the cliffs, and all across the water. She'd never seen so many faces like her own, dark blues and pale greens and sharp see-in-the-dark eyes staring.\n\nThe only sound was the splashing of the waterfalls, the soft hush of dragons breathing, and the quiet lapping of waves on the beaches around the lake.\n\nAfter a moment, Starflight spotted the nearest stretch of sand and set off for it in a frantic paddle that sounded horribly loud in the silence. Sunny and Clay and Glory followed him.\n\nTsunami stayed where she was, ignoring the tiredness that was flooding her scales. She wanted to make a good impression on the dragons of her kingdom. Many of them were floating on the water, like she was, but many more were perched in cave openings all along the cliff or on rocks that jutted out of the water, while others lined the shallow beaches. Tsunami wondered what they'd all been doing before she appeared to capture their attention.\n\nShe spotted Shark hunched on one of the spirals of the closest pillar. She rather thought he should have given some sort of welcome speech, but he only stared at her with his pale, unblinking little eyes.\n\nIn the story, the royal parents had swept forward with a parade and a whole orchestra to welcome back their missing princess. But her parents weren't here yet, and now that she thought about it, dolphins playing harps would probably be a bit silly looking.\n\nWell, she was a future queen, and she wasn't going to be intimidated by crowds of staring dragons. She shook her head and lifted her neck out of the water.\n\n\"Hello, fellow SeaWings,\" she called, and then paused as her voice echoed off the rocks, much louder than she'd expected. \"I'm Tsunami, and, um \u2014 I'm very happy to be home at last, and \u2014 and I look forward to meeting each of you.\"\n\nThree moons, was that the most awful speech in the history of Pyrrhia? What were all these still, silent faces thinking? Could the dragons see Tsunami's natural royalty? Were they excited that she'd be their queen one day?\n\nShe remembered her royal stripe patterns and lifted her wings out of the water so everyone could see them. To be sure they were visible, she lit them up, and then, with a sinking feeling, remembered what she'd accidentally said to Riptide. She really, really hoped she hadn't just told her entire kingdom that they had delicious fish breath or something.\n\nA murmur ran around the gathered dragons, but she couldn't tell if it was good murmuring or bad murmuring. She turned to Riptide, who was watching Shark with a grim expression.\n\n\"I think you should take me somewhere I can wait for my mother,\" Tsunami suggested in a low voice \u2014 or she thought it was low, but the echoes still skipped back to her across the water. And now there was more murmuring. Tsunami wished she had NightWing powers so she could hear the dragons' thoughts.\n\n\"Up there,\" said Riptide, nodding to the top of the pavilion. He glanced at Shark again. \"You should bring your friends.\"\n\nThe other dragonets were sprawled on the white pebbles of the beach, in front of a tall cave opening lined with sand. They had their wings spread out and were gasping in a rather undignified way. All except for Glory, who was sitting neatly by the cave, peering in. Her silver scales were now mottled with azure blue. Any SeaWings who weren't staring at Tsunami were staring at her.\n\nTsunami thwacked the water with her tail to get their attention. When Clay finally looked over, she pointed to the pavilion. He nodded, and she lifted into the air. Her wings felt heavy out of the water, and it took a few beats to get her balance. She wished the SeaWings would go back to whatever they were supposed to be doing.\n\nRiptide flew up beside her. He looked uncomfortable with all the scrutiny as well.\n\n\"Tell me about the Summer Palace,\" Tsunami said, trying to distract herself.\n\nHe flicked his tail at the cliffs. \"Guest rooms are in the caves. Queen Blister usually stays in the one closest to the tunnel. We brought in extra sand to line the floor for her, and it's the only cave where fire is allowed.\" His snout turned toward the pavilion as they flew higher. \"She meets with Queen Coral on the second level from the top, which is only for visiting royalty. Each level has a different purpose \u2014 for instance, there's a floor for dragonet school visits, one for celebration spectacles, and one for war planning. When they are here instead of the Deep Palace, the Council meets on this level, halfway up.\"\n\nHe paused, beating his wings, so Tsunami could look across the middle level. Twelve dragon-sized pools were arranged in a circle with small channels running from one to the next and crisscrossing the center. Glittering emeralds the size of fish eggs, which were embedded in the stone, spelled out words by each pool. Tsunami saw one marked TREASURY, one labeled DEFENSE, and another that said SECRETS & SPIES. Before she could read any further, Riptide turned to fly higher.\n\n\"Council?\" Tsunami said, catching up to him.\n\n\"They prefer the Deep Palace, as does the queen,\" Riptide said. \"Only Shark and Lagoon are here at the moment.\"\n\nTsunami had no idea what he was talking about, but she didn't want to reveal how ignorant she was of SeaWing politics. She wondered if there was anything about a council in Starflight's favorite scrolls.\n\n\"So which level is for missing princesses?\" she joked.\n\n\"I think the top pavilion would be best,\" Riptide said. \"That's for new visitors, and we hardly ever have any of those. Queen Blister was probably the last \u2014 oh, no, it was that NightWing.\" He landed gracefully on the uppermost ledge of the pavilion, his claws catching on polished ridges in the bluish-white stone.\n\n\"What NightWing?\" Tsunami asked, landing beside him. This level was bigger than she'd expected. A spiraling starburst of webbed talon-print shapes was carved into the floor and filled with glittering water, lined all along the bottom with tiny pearls. Tsunami realized the pattern was the same as the one on her wings.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Riptide answered her. \"He only spoke with Her Majesty and Queen Blister, and all I heard was that he wanted to fly out through the canopy instead of the tunnel \u2014 but of course they wouldn't let him do that. He looked big and bad-tempered.\"\n\n\"Sounds like Morrowseer,\" Tsunami muttered, although she didn't exactly have a lot of other NightWings to compare him to. But he seemed more meddlesome than the rest of them. While most of the tribe hid in their secret location, being all mysterious and unhelpfully powerful, Morrowseer kept turning up... delivering the dragonet prophecy, inspecting the dragonets, trying to get Glory killed, saving Starflight (but no one else) from the SkyWings, then giving him back once everyone had escaped. Tsunami could easily imagine him poking around here, although she couldn't guess why.\n\nRiptide glanced down at the dragons below, including Shark, who hadn't moved from his spot on the pillar. \"I can't believe you spoke to Shark like that,\" he whispered. \"I've never seen anyone talk back to him, apart from the queen and Queen Blister.\"\n\n\"He deserved it,\" Tsunami said, settling her wings. \"Arrogant blowfish-head. When I'm queen, I'll make him go sit in a lagoon and grow seaweed.\"\n\nRiptide coughed hard to cover a laugh. \"Don't talk like that!\" he whispered. \"Don't you know the difference between brave and reckless? Shark will eat you and your friends for lunch if he thinks you're a threat to him.\"\n\n\"Pfft,\" Tsunami said. \"He can try.\" She shoved away the creepy memory of Shark's unblinking, malicious eyes.\n\n\"By the moons, you make me ner vous,\" Riptide said.\n\nOne end of the top floor was raised and carved into a magnificent dragon throne, studded with emeralds and sapphires and shot through with gold lines in the shape of waves. Beside and below the throne was another, smaller throne carved to match, with the same patterns made of tinier gemstones.\n\nTsunami tilted her head at the second throne. It looked too small to be for a king. So was this for her? Had Queen Coral prepared a throne for her missing daughter, waiting all these years for her to come fill it?\n\nShe took a step toward it, her heart pounding with excitement. A throne of her own! Already!\n\nThe arrival of her friends stopped her, as the four dragonets crashed down around the ledge. Sunny landed lightly, avoiding the channels of water, but Clay somehow stumbled as his claws hit the stone and nearly somersaulted right off the other side. Glory darted in his way and pushed him back, then made another loop around and landed close to the throne. Her green eyes studied it closely; she looked almost ready to climb onto it herself.\n\nStarflight arrived last, catching on to the side and pitching forward as if his wings had barely been strong enough to carry him. He lay there like a woeful black puddle for a moment, taking deep breaths. Sunny hopped over a watery footprint to nudge his wing gently.\n\nTsunami managed not to roll her eyes, but really. Couldn't everyone at least try to act a little more impressive?\n\n\"This is a really big thing!\" Clay said to her and Riptide. His tail accidentally splashed Glory, but she was too busy looking at the throne to snap at him. \"I mean, this thing we're standing on. What do you call it? It's really tall \u2014 taller than our prisons in the Sky Kingdom, I think.\" He peered over the edge, missing Riptide's sharp look. Tsunami realized they hadn't told him about being captured by Queen Scarlet and the SkyWings.\n\n\"I like it,\" Clay went on, sitting down and splashing Glory again. \"Of course, it's much nicer to be this high when your wings are free. But at least the SkyWings gave us a pig sometimes. Do you have pigs? Octopi would be all right instead if you don't. Or squid. Or manatees. I could go for a manatee right now. Or a whale. I'm not fussy, is what I'm saying. Say, how did you make this big thing? Did it take forever to build?\"\n\nRiptide blinked for a moment, following Clay's train of thought. \"The pavilion? An animus SeaWing designed it, many generations ago, and magicked the stone to grow this way,\" Riptide said. \"Even so, it took nearly ten years to reach this form.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" said Clay, and Tsunami couldn't help being impressed, too. She hadn't realized animus dragons had that kind of power. In their lessons, Webs had told them animus dragons could enchant chess pieces to play themselves. Sometimes they left curses on their jewels to poison anyone who tried to steal them. But making a whole pavilion grow from stone \u2014 that seemed like strong magic, more powerful than anything the NightWings could do.\n\nStarflight was clearly thinking the same thing, judging from his disgruntled snout. Tsunami hurriedly interrupted before he could begin a lecture.\n\n\"This top level is where Queen Coral meets new visitors, like us,\" she said importantly to her friends. \"So when she arrives, everyone please act like dragonets of destiny instead of half-drowned seagulls, for goodness' sake.\"\n\nSunny looked wounded, and Starflight sniffed loudly while Glory turned up her snout like she wasn't taking any orders from Tsunami. Clay poked his nose over the edge and blinked at the lower pavilion tiers.\n\n\"Which level is the feasting on?\" he asked. \"You do have feasting, right?\" His wide brown eyes turned to Riptide. \"No reason. Just wondering.\"\n\n\"Sure, sometimes we have feasts,\" Riptide said. \"Especially when Queen Blister is \u2014\"\n\nA commotion from below interrupted him. Tsunami sprang to the edge and gazed down at the lake.\n\nA huge blue SeaWing, exactly the color of Tsunami's scales, burst out of the tunnel. Vines of pearls were woven around her horns and neck and wings, and a twisted white horn with a wicked-looking point was attached to the end of her tail. She had odd black stains on her claws, but she was the most beautiful sight Tsunami had ever seen.\n\nAll over the palace, dragons were folding down into low bows.\n\nThis had to be her mother \u2014 queen of the SeaWings. Tsunami reached to grab Riptide's forearm, feeling dizzy with joy.\n\nBut as Queen Coral shot out of the water, Tsunami saw that she wore a thin, webbed harness with a long cord... which led to a harness on another dragon, flying close behind her.\n\nThe second dragon was much smaller \u2014 a dragonet only about a year old, perhaps. She flapped her wings frantically, trying to keep up. With a jolt of shock, Tsunami spotted the royal pattern of stripes on the underside of her wings.\n\n\"Who is that?\" she hissed at Riptide. He was backing away to the edge of the floor, the farthest spot from the throne.\n\n\"That's Anemone,\" he said, blinking in surprise. \"Your sister.\"\n\nAn enemy.\n\nAnemone.\n\nAn enemy.\n\nIt took Tsunami a few moments to realize what Riptide had actually said. Her skin prickled, hearing an enemy, an enemy, until it sank in that he'd been saying a name.\n\nAnemone. Tsunami's sister. Another heir to the throne.\n\nSo much for being special. So much for her guaranteed future kingdom.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Glory said, echoing her thoughts. \"Looks like you've got some competition. Maybe you're not destined to be queen after all.\"\n\nTsunami whirled toward Starflight, her gills flaring. \"You said I was the only one,\" she cried. \"You said none of the others survived.\"\n\n\"That's what I read,\" he protested. He spread his black claws. \"Blame the Talons, not me. Our scrolls were often old and outdated. The Royal Lineage of the SeaWings, from the Scorching to the Present must have been written before this one was hatched.\" He nodded at the little dragon flapping behind the queen.\n\nAnemone was a pale, pale blue, almost white like an IceWing, with hints of pink along her wings and ears and horns. She looked a little bit like the dolphins they'd seen earlier, and Tsunami wondered grumpily if that was really why Queen Coral had forbidden SeaWings to eat them \u2014 in case one of them ate Anemone by mistake. Anemone's eyes were large and blue, and tiny strands of pearls were woven around her neck and tail as if to match her mother's.\n\nThat could have been me, Tsunami thought. I could have been the one with matching pearls and a matching throne and a mother who loved me, if the Talons hadn't stolen me from my home.\n\nShe didn't have a chance to notice anything else, because suddenly Queen Coral was landing and running toward her.\n\n\"My baby!\" Coral cried. Enormous blue wings whooshed around Tsunami, enveloping her in a hug that smelled of sea air and starfish. Pearls pressed into Tsunami's face as Coral cuddled her close. Her wet scales were warm and her talons were gentle as she stroked Tsunami's head and back and wings.\n\n\"I knew you'd come back to me,\" she said. \"I knew you were out there, trying to find your way back. I never stopped searching for you.\"\n\nIt was exactly what Tsunami had always wanted to hear.\n\nActually it was word-for-word what the queen said in The Missing Princess, but Tsunami shoved that thought aside.\n\nShe leaned into her mother, feeling elation flood her from horns to claws. Someone does want me. I have a place in the world.\n\n\"Mother,\" whined a tiny voice from behind them. \"Ow. That was too fast. I think I hurt my claws.\"\n\nQueen Coral let go of Tsunami, whirled around, and tugged Anemone closer with the harness cord. The little dragonet crept under her wing and held out her front talons with a pitiful expression.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sweetheart,\" Coral said, carefully examining Anemone's claws and then giving them a quick lick with her forked tongue. \"Is that better?\"\n\n\"I guess,\" Anemone said, flexing her talons mournfully.\n\n\"Look, darling, it's your sister. The one I told you about, who was stolen six years ago.\" Coral reached out and slid one webbed talon over Tsunami's snout. \"Isn't she gorgeous?\"\n\nAnemone blinked at Tsunami. She was really tiny, no taller than a scavenger, and she didn't look very strong. Maybe I don't have to worry about her, Tsunami thought. She'd be easy to defeat, and obviously I'd make a better queen.\n\nThen she felt a stab of guilt for thinking about something like that on her first meeting with her real family. She held out one of her front talons to Anemone, and after a small pause, Anemone pressed her own talon against it.\n\n\"Hi,\" Tsunami said. \"I'm Tsunami.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Queen Coral said. \"A good name. Webs did one thing right.\" Her green eyes narrowed. \"Where is he now? I have been planning his punishment for years.\" She glared over Tsunami's shoulder, but when Tsunami looked around, the only dragon there was Riptide. He had his head ducked and his wings folded as low as he could get.\n\n\"I knew he was a coward and a deserter,\" Coral said, \"but after he returned to steal my egg... well, let's just say it won't be a quick death.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Sunny squeaked. \"Please don't hurt him. He was the only one who was really nice to us.\"\n\n\"We don't know where he is anyway,\" Tsunami said as Queen Coral turned to stare at Sunny. \"He escaped when \u2014\"\n\n\"What are you?\" Coral asked Sunny. Her gaze fell on the other dragonets, and her tail lashed dangerously. \"WHY IS THERE A MUDWING IN MY SUMMER PALACE?\" She took a step toward Clay, gills flaring.\n\n\"These are my friends,\" Tsunami cried, leaping in front of Clay. \"You can trust them, I promise. We were all stolen from our homes as eggs. We're the dragonets of destiny, from the prophecy.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" muttered a voice, and Tsunami realized that Shark was now perched on the rim of the ledge along with nine other very large dragons.\n\n\"Oh,\" Queen Coral said slowly. \"Oh, I see.\" She studied Clay suspiciously, then turned her gaze to Starflight, Sunny, and Glory. \"Yes, that was the rumor. If you believe in things like prophecies, of course. Dragonets of destiny. Well, Queen Blister will be so interested to meet you. We'd better make sure you don't go anywhere.\" She flashed the royal patterns along her wings and clapped her front talons together. Seven burly SeaWings rose up behind the dragonets, claws twitching ominously.\n\n\"Put these four in Blister's cave,\" Queen Coral commanded, \"and set a guard so they stay there.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sunny cried. \"But we came here to be safe! Not to be prisoners again!\" She squeaked in terror as one guard snatched her into the air. Starflight stared after her, frozen in place with his claws half outstretched.\n\n\"Nobody touches me,\" Glory snarled at the SeaWing who was reaching for her. Black clouds billowed up in her scales.\n\n\"Don't hurt Sun \u2014 ow,\" Clay yelped as three SeaWings landed on him at once, pinning him down. \"Ouch! Ow!\" One began lashing woven seaweed ropes around his wings and claws and snout.\n\n\"Wait,\" Tsunami said. She clasped her talons pleadingly. \"Your Majesty... Mother.\" The word felt so odd on her tongue, even though she'd imagined saying it a million times. \"You don't have to do this. They're my friends, and I brought them here so you could protect us. I swear they're trustworthy.\"\n\n\"It's for their own safety, too, dear,\" Coral said, stroking Tsunami's head again. \"We won't hurt them, of course. You've come to the right place for protection. But they shouldn't wander the palace unsupervised \u2014 most of my dragons will attack MudWings and unfamiliar SandWings on sight.\"\n\n\"Or whatever that is,\" Shark muttered, sniffing at Sunny. Starflight shot him a glare, then looked away quickly as the SeaWing turned his gaze to him.\n\n\"I guess this means no feast?\" Clay said mournfully. He rested his snout on the stone with a sigh.\n\n\"Food can certainly be arranged,\" said the queen. \"Lagoon, make sure our guests are well fed.\" A plump turquoise dragon bowed and dove off the ledge. \"See, darling, we'll take good care of you all. Please tell that one to stop looking so fierce.\" Coral flicked a claw at Glory, who was still facing off with a ner vous-looking SeaWing guard.\n\nTsunami thought, uncomfortably, of Glory's secret weapon. In the SkyWing palace, they'd discovered Glory could spit a deadly venom, which seemed to be a RainWing skill most dragons didn't know about. It certainly hadn't been in any of the scrolls, which rarely mentioned RainWings at all.\n\nBut Tsunami hoped Glory would decide to keep her venom a secret for now. Melting one of the queen's guards probably wasn't the best way to introduce the dragonets of destiny to the SeaWings.\n\n\"You don't have to tie them up,\" Tsunami said. \"They'll go with you.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" Glory growled.\n\n\"Calm down, Glory,\" Tsunami said. She hoped her mother and the other dragons would see her as the leader of the dragonets. \"You heard the queen. It's for your own safety. You'll be fine.\"\n\nPlease don't argue with me in front of my mother, Tsunami prayed.\n\nGlory glared at the SeaWing guard for a moment longer. \"All right,\" she snarled. \"I'll go with you. But I still say nobody touches me.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Queen Coral purred with another gesture and flash of her stripes. \"Off you all go, then. Tsunami, darling, come sit with me and let's talk.\" She swept over to her throne, towing Anemone behind her. The tiny dragonet settled onto the small throne, flicking her pearly wings and watching Tsunami's friends with big eyes.\n\n\"It'll be all right,\" Tsunami said to Clay as the guards hefted him into the air. \"I'll come join you very soon.\" He nodded, still looking rather anxious. Another guard tentatively tried to shoo Starflight off the edge. The NightWing backed away from him unhappily, then turned and flew after the guard who had Sunny.\n\nTsunami watched her friends spiral down to the cave by the entrance \u2014 brown and gold, black and silver, all of them so out of place here. She saw them vanish into the dark hole, and then the guards emerged and planted themselves outside. It didn't look like the way you'd treat guests.\n\nAt least it's better than the SkyWing palace, she thought. At least we're not being forced to fight to the death. My mother is keeping us safe. She's really being welcoming, in her own way. She glanced up at her mother's warm eyes. Especially to me.\n\nHer mother reached out her talons to her, smiling. She was perfect \u2014 just what Tsunami had always imagined.\n\nHer friends would be all right, Tsunami was sure. They were in the SeaWing palace now. She was home with her family. This was her lifelong dream.\n\nThere's nothing to worry about, she told herself. Nothing at all.\n\n\"Here,\" Queen Coral said, taking a strand of pearls off her own horns. \"You're so unadorned, my beautiful dragonet. I have to start making up for all the presents I missed giving you.\" She leaned forward and draped the pearls around Tsunami's neck. They were heavy and smooth, sliding coolly across Tsunami's scales.\n\nMy first trea sure.\n\nIt was a strange thrill, having something of her very own. All dragons loved trea sure \u2014 it was the only thing they had in common with scavengers. But this was more than a shiny, beautiful thing. It belonged to Tsunami and nobody else. And it made her look even more like her mother.\n\nTsunami stroked the pearls with her claw and tucked her tail around her back talons. She wished Anemone would stop staring at her. She must hate me, she thought. I would if I were her. She must know I want the throne she thought was hers.\n\nBut not yet. Now was the time for getting to know her mother.\n\n\"Can we talk alone?\" Tsunami asked. The ten dragons were still perched like creepy sentinels, with Shark the creepiest of all.\n\n\"Of course,\" said the queen. \"Council, you are dismissed. Moray, send a message to Queen Blister and see how quickly she can get here. As for you, creature, go back to your guard outpost and stay there until someone actually wants to see you.\"\n\nRiptide crouched, nodding, and dove over the edge. Tsunami leaned out to watch him swimming into the tunnel.\n\n\"What's wrong with Riptide?\" she asked as the other ten dragons also flew away in a thunderclap of wingbeats. \"I thought he was nice.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Queen Coral said with a shudder. \"He can't be trusted. Webs is his father. Their bloodline is tainted with betrayal.\"\n\nTsunami felt like a giant wave had just knocked her over. \"Webs is his father?\" But she'd liked Riptide \u2014 and all along he was the son of her kidnapper. Which he'd carefully never mentioned. What else hadn't he told her?\n\n\"Nasty family,\" Coral went on. She lashed her tail, nearly hitting Anemone in the head. \"Not fitting company for royalty by any means. We keep him as far away from us as possible.\"\n\nPoor Riptide, Tsunami thought. It wasn't his fault his father had turned traitor, but he suffered for it anyway.\n\nAnd yet, he had hidden the truth from her, and she didn't like that at all.\n\nWas Queen Coral right about him? Surely she knew her own subjects better than Tsunami did.\n\nBut there was still a part of Tsunami that hoped she'd see him again.\n\nShe glanced at Anemone. \"So \u2014 we were saying \u2014 alone \u2014?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, Anemone never leaves my side,\" Queen Coral said. She reached over and lovingly patted the little dragonet's head. \"I finally got a living daughter, and I'm keeping her that way.\"\n\n\"By watching me every second,\" Anemone said. She widened her eyes at Tsunami, who wondered if she'd imagined a hint of sarcasm in her sister's words.\n\n\"And now I have two daughters!\" Queen Coral said proudly. \"Possibly four by the end of next week, if Tortoise does her job right.\" She gave Tsunami a worried look. \"Maybe we should make a harness for you, too, dear.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, that's all right,\" Tsunami said, eyeing the straps that lashed Coral and Anemone together. \"I've managed to take care of myself up to now. I promise I'll stay alive.\" Much as she already loved her mother, she could not imagine being attached to anyone every moment of every day.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" said the queen. \"Well, we'll think about it.\" She studied Tsunami's shoulders as if she was mentally measuring her for a harness anyway.\n\n\"I have to tell you something,\" Tsunami said, hoping to change the subject. \"I \u2014 I don't know the underwater language. Webs never taught it to me.\"\n\nQueen Coral stared at her. \"What is wrong with that dragon?\" she growled. \"It's all right, sweetheart. We'll have Whirlpool teach you \u2014 he's a terrific teacher. Right, Anemone?\"\n\nAnemone shrugged.\n\n\"So what do you know?\" Queen Coral asked. \"Did they teach you anything?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Tsunami said. She didn't want her mother to think she was unfit to be queen. \"We had lots of battle training. And Webs taught us the history of Pyrrhia. We learned all about the Scorching and how the tribes were founded and how we nearly wiped out the scavengers. Um, and he did geography, too. Dune taught us hunting. Kestrel was supposed to teach different tribe strengths and weaknesses, but mostly she just yelled and tried to set us on fire a lot.\"\n\nAnemone's eyes were bright with interest. \"Why don't I get to learn those things, Mother?\" she asked.\n\n\"You will, dear,\" said Queen Coral. \"When I think you're ready.\"\n\n\"What do you study?\" Tsunami asked.\n\nAnemone glanced up at her mother. \"How the Council works,\" she said. \"Aquatic, of course. How to interpret battle reports and order our defenses. Managing the food supply and the treasury, although the Council commanders really do all that.\"\n\n\"It's still important to stay on top of them,\" purred the queen. \"Dragons do their best work if you watch them closely the whole time.\"\n\n\"But mostly I'm stuck in training sessions with Whirlpool,\" Anemone said. Her wings drooped.\n\n\"For what?\" Tsunami asked. \"Aquatic?\"\n\n\"Never mind, dear,\" Queen Coral interrupted. \"You'll see eventually. Were the Talons of Peace very cruel to you?\"\n\n\"Terribly!\" Tsunami said. This was one of her favorite topics. \"They never let us out of the caves at all! They acted like we were brainless snails! Nobody ever listened to me. And they wouldn't tell us anything about our families or where we came from. I only found out about you a few days ago.\"\n\n\"My poor, poor baby,\" Queen Coral said, stroking Tsunami's head again.\n\nExactly, Tsunami thought. This was the sympathy she'd always wanted. Although she didn't appreciate the skeptical look on Anemone's face.\n\n\"What are these?\" Tsunami asked. She leaned forward and touched the dark stains on the queen's talons with one claw. They looked too dark to be bloodstains, but she couldn't guess what else they were.\n\n\"The perils of my job!\" Queen Coral said with a laugh. \"Well, my hobby. My art, you might call it. I should show you.\" She sprang to her feet, tugging Anemone up with her. \"And then you can meet Whirlpool. You'll adore him. He's just the most wonderful, brilliant young dragon.\"\n\nTsunami was nearly certain she caught Anemone rolling her eyes. She followed the two of them down four levels to a floor with low walls and several shapes like large cauldrons molded into the stone. Black and blue webbed talon prints trailed all around the floor, and a raised podium stood at one end with space for an audience of thirty dragons in front.\n\nAt the other end was a long gray stone table with a scroll spread out on it, held down at either end by a small seahorse carved of dark brown wood. Tsunami peered at the scroll, which looked only half written.\n\n\"That's my work in progress,\" Queen Coral said proudly. \"Whirlpool, come here!\" She bustled over to one of the cauldrons, and Tsunami realized they were all packed with neatly rolled scrolls.\n\n\"This is beautiful,\" she said, lifting one of the carved seahorses. They were heavy and intricately detailed, with curiously dragonlike expressions on their tiny faces.\n\n\"Orca made those,\" Queen Coral said sadly. \"My first daughter. She was a very talented sculptor.\"\n\nFirst daughter? What happened to her? Tsunami hadn't thought any of them lived long enough to become artists. She gave Anemone a quizzical expression, but her sister was watching the queen intently. I'll ask Starflight later. Orca must be in that lineage scroll he was going on about.\n\nA dark green dragon with pale green eyes rose up from the Council level. He had a remarkably large gold hoop piercing one ear and dappled, light green scales in wave patterns along his back. He also had the same dark stains on his talons.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" he said with an elaborate bow. \"And Your Smaller Majesties.\" His voice was oily and slow, like squids creeping into Tsunami's ears. She guessed this was Whirlpool, although he didn't look particularly \"wonderful\" or \"brilliant.\"\n\nHe bowed to Anemone and Tsunami as he settled onto the floor behind the stone table. His eyes almost immediately went from them to the scroll in front of him, and he tilted his head thoughtfully. After a moment, he reached forward and dipped one claw into a small pool of black ink in the top corner of the table. With the ink, he scratched a few more words at the point where the scroll went blank.\n\n\"Oh,\" Tsunami said, glancing from his talons to her mother's. \"Oh, it's ink.\"\n\n\"Yes, dear,\" said Queen Coral. She pulled an armful of scrolls out of the cauldron. \"It's a special formula made of squid ink and a touch of whale blood, so it never fades. Immortality is worth a few claw stains, don't you agree? Whirlpool invented it. He's terribly clever.\" She peered at the words he'd written. \"Exactly what I was thinking! This is an exciting one, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Certain to win all the awards in the kingdom, Your Majesty,\" Whirlpool oozed.\n\nQueen Coral piled four scrolls into Tsunami's talons. \"These are my favorites. You can read them all tonight, and tomorrow I'll give you four of my other favorites.\"\n\n\"Read all these tonight?\" Tsunami echoed, dismayed. Reading was Starflight's specialty. She liked it fine, but only if there were exciting stories and female warrior dragons. She didn't read very fast, and really she'd rather be fighting something.\n\n\"Start with this one,\" Queen Coral said, plucking one of the scrolls free.\n\nIt was The Missing Princess! Relief flooded through Tsunami. \"I've read that one!\" she cried. \"That was my favorite story ever.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Queen Coral looked delighted, and Tsunami was pretty sure Anemone had rolled her eyes again. \"I wrote it for you!\"\n\n\"You \u2014\" Tsunami looked from Queen Coral to Whirlpool and the scroll on the table. \"You wrote The Missing Princess?\"\n\n\"I wrote all of these.\" Queen Coral waved her talons at all the scrolls in the cauldrons. \"I'm really quite prolific. Whirlpool makes sure hundreds of copies are instantly made and distributed all over SeaWing territory \u2014 and wherever else on Pyrrhia we can send them. My communications herald, Moray, is in charge of the printer dragons who make the underwater copies. She also makes sure they go to all the schools. But Whirlpool organizes my readings here. Isn't he brilliant?\" She lowered her voice and winked at Tsunami. \"And don't you think he's very handsome?\"\n\nWhirlpool looked up and gave Tsunami a toothy smile that didn't reach his eyes. His teeth were weirdly small, and his eyes were too pale and blobby, like frog eyes. Tsunami couldn't help thinking of Riptide, who was much more handsome, if you asked her \u2014 although she knew better than to tell Coral that.\n\n\"He'll make a fabulous king one day,\" Queen Coral added in a loud whisper.\n\nOh dear. Tsunami hid her shudder. Is Queen Coral throwing him at me? She glanced at Anemone and saw the little dragonet quickly erasing a hopeful expression from her face. Hmmm. She bet Anemone could clear up a lot of mysteries, if Tsunami could get her alone for a moment. Too bad that was impossible.\n\n\"Your Majesty.\" They all turned and found another Council dragon hovering in the air behind the queen, with a smaller dragon beside her. \"I'm sorry to interrupt, but Urchin just arrived with strange news. I knew you'd want to hear it right away.\"\n\n\"Of course, Moray,\" said Queen Coral. \"You always know what's best.\"\n\nMoray's scales were the same dull gray green as Shark's, and her eyes were also small and colorless. Tsunami wondered if they were related. The Council dragon pressed her snout into a brief smug look. \"That's because I have had excellent training at the side of the most wonderful queen in Pyrrhian history,\" she said.\n\nOh my word, Tsunami thought. This time she was able to catch Anemone's eye, behind the queen's back, to make an \"Is she serious?\" face. Anemone looked startled for a moment, then made a face back that Tsunami was pretty sure meant \"Believe me, it gets worse.\"\n\nMoray went on. \"Apparently a dead dragon has been found only a few islands from the Summer Palace.\"\n\n\"Oh, how sad,\" said Queen Coral with a little yawn. She glanced at her scrolls as if she wanted to get back to them. \"What happened to him?\"\n\n\"Her,\" said Moray. \"And we don't know yet. But the strange part is that it's not a SeaWing. It's a SkyWing.\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" Queen Coral leaped to her talons. \"That close to the palace?\" She snapped at the air and spread her wings. \"Get Shark and Piranha and take me to the body. Now.\"\n\nThe queen shot into the air with Anemone flapping wildly to keep up. Tsunami dropped the scrolls and jumped after them, flying in a tight spiral down to the water. This was her chance to see the queen in action!\n\nShe thought she heard someone shout her name as she splashed down. Sunny or Clay? The water rushed into her ears, muffling the cry. They didn't have to worry; she wouldn't be gone long. They'd be safe here.\n\nShark whipped past, churning up the water as he charged into the tunnel ahead of her. He was between her and Coral now, but Tsunami wasn't going to let that stop her. She swam after them as fast as she could. She felt another dragon close on her tail, but didn't turn around or slow down.\n\nIt felt like only moments later when Tsunami's snout emerged into the golden kelp curtain. She followed the eddies left by the dragon tails ahead of her and realized they weren't going to the surface.\n\nSo they weren't flying to the body; they were swimming there. Which made sense. They were SeaWings, after all.\n\nAll right. I can do this. Tsunami ignored how tired her wings felt and beat them harder, determined to keep up. Even so, the two dragons behind her quickly passed her \u2014 Moray and another from the Council, who she guessed was Piranha.\n\nShe saw both dragons dip down in the water and suddenly speed up. Despairing, she tried to do the same thing \u2014 tipping her wings to dip down to the same level. A fierce current immediately caught her up and shoved her along after them.\n\nFor a moment, Tsunami struggled against it. She didn't like being caught by anything stronger than her. But then she realized the other dragons were using it to travel faster, and she'd have to do the same thing if she wanted to stay with them.\n\nSlowly she relaxed and let the current sweep her along. It gave her a chance to look around. A school of black fish with silver speckles shot by overhead, like a flock of crows or NightWings, spinning and whirling in shifting formations. Large translucent mushrooms sprouted from the ocean floor, with tiny orange fish clustered around them.\n\nA pulsing reddish-pink octopus wobbled by, and Tsunami wondered if they were delicious; they were definitely slow enough to catch.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement behind a swarm of iridescent jellyfish. She squinted and realized it was Riptide, following her from a distance. She lifted one of her wings and waved to him, and after a moment, he sheepishly waved back.\n\nShe didn't know what he was supposed to be doing, but this probably wasn't it.\n\nStill, she kind of liked having him there, so she wasn't going to tell Coral on him. Not until she decided how mad she was about the \"Webs being his father\" secret anyway.\n\nThey swam for what felt like miles, over wide stretches of algae-covered coral reef that looked like ancient stone ruins: palaces and temples that had collapsed long ago. Occasionally a large greenish-silver fish would dart up, swim alongside Tsunami for a moment, notice her with a start of alarm, and flash away again. She was hungry but too tired to try eating any of them.\n\nEven with the help of the current, Tsunami felt ready to collapse. Finally, up ahead, she saw Moray and Piranha sweep up to the surface. Relieved, she struggled out of the current and followed them into the air.\n\nQueen Coral was already standing on a large, craggy boulder that jutted out of the sea at the base of an enormous cliff. Anemone was crowded onto a tiny outcropping beside her. Not far away, a seal edged ner vously into the water, trying not to attract their attention.\n\nWaves pounded the rocks, roaring like angry dragons and spraying salt water over everyone who was clustered around the queen on smaller rocks.\n\nTsunami found a jagged black rock the right size for her and clambered up. For a moment she just breathed, happy not to be moving. She had no idea how she'd make it back to the Summer Palace. Deal with that later. Far off to the north, she saw a bank of dark clouds huddled on the horizon, muttering and flashing.\n\n\"She's been dead a day or two,\" Shark said grimly. \"Killed quite violently, by the looks of it.\"\n\nTsunami glanced down at the broken red body snagged on the rocks. Shark was leaning over the corpse, inspecting the deep slashes across the throat. He shook his head and stepped back.\n\nA bolt of shock and terror shot through Tsunami.\n\nShe knew this SkyWing.\n\nIt was Kestrel, the dragon who'd raised them.\n\nKestrel was dead. And somebody had clearly murdered her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Tell.\n\nDon't tell.\n\nMother needs to know who it is.\n\nBut what if she thinks we killed her?\n\nTsunami didn't know what to do. It was too strange a coincidence, Kestrel turning up dead a few islands away at the same time as the dragonets arriving at the Summer Palace. If Tsunami admitted she knew her, wouldn't her mother's first thought be that the dragonets had killed her themselves?\n\nAfter the way her friends had been looking at her lately, Tsunami didn't want to risk getting a similar reaction from her mother... the \"What kind of dragon are you really?\" and \"Can you be trusted?\" and \"Who else might you attack?\" looks.\n\nShe worried about it all the way back to the Summer Palace \u2014 mercifully, they flew back, giving Tsunami's swimming muscles a rest \u2014 but in the bustle of orders and flying messengers, there wasn't a moment to talk to the queen on her own anyway.\n\nBack at the palace, Queen Coral told Tsunami to wait for her and took a few Council dragons off for a war meeting. Tsunami sat on one of the pavilion pillars, watching dragons dart about.\n\nWho would kill Kestrel? Apart from Glory or me, that is?\n\nShe glanced at the cave where her friends were being held, where guards were still posted outside. She knew she should go check on the other dragonets... but what would they think when they heard about Kestrel?\n\nWhat if her friends decided it wasn't safe here? Starflight might convince the others that Kestrel's murderer could be nearby, waiting to kill them, too. He'd talk them into leaving the Kingdom of the Sea, and Tsunami wasn't ready for that.\n\nThey were all too mad at her right now to listen to sense. And they were probably pretty grumpy about being stuck in a guarded cave all afternoon, too.\n\nIt'd be better to wait and tell them every thing after they had a chance to see how wonderful it could be here. Tomorrow she'd ask her mother to bring them out for a feast or something, and that would cheer up at least a couple of them.\n\nYes. That's a better plan. Avoid them until tomorrow, then tell them every thing.\n\nBesides, she was so, so tired. Darkness had fallen as they flew back to the Summer Palace, and now the cavern was lit only by trails of glowing jellyfish in the water below. Not that it mattered to SeaWings, who could see in the dark, but her friends probably wouldn't be too thrilled about having no light either. Another argument that could wait until tomorrow.\n\nShe was relieved when the queen finally came down from the Council level and led her across the lake. Queen Coral's chambers at the Summer Palace were in a vast underwater cave below one of the waterfalls, lined with waving tendrils of forest green and brilliant gold anemones. Stone carvings of dolphins danced around the entrance. The walls were studded with emeralds and pearls, and the beds were soft expanses of bubbly seaweed.\n\nA bed was already made up for Tsunami next to Anemone's. She collapsed onto it with a sigh. Sleeping underwater on comfortable seaweed instead of a hard ledge of stone was even more wonderful than she'd ever imagined.\n\nShe fell asleep to the sound of the waterfall splashing overhead and didn't wake up until the next morning.\n\nWhen she opened her eyes, she found the pale pinkish-blue head of Anemone leaning over her. Tsunami yelped and leaped back, crashing into the stone wall and bouncing off it in a stream of bubbles. She had a wild, brief moment of thinking Anemone had been about to kill her, and then her sister waved her talons and made a shushing gesture.\n\nAnemone pointed at Queen Coral, who was still asleep. She clasped her talons in front of her and flashed some of the stripes along her wings and tail.\n\nSorry, little sister. Tsunami spread her front talons and shook her head. I wish I could.\n\nAnemone flashed her stripes again, then smacked her head, remembering that Tsunami didn't know Aquatic. She frowned in frustration.\n\nTsunami felt equally frustrated. They couldn't sneak off to the surface to talk; Anemone was trapped here by the harness tethering her to the queen. And Tsunami couldn't communicate underwater. They'd never have a chance to talk privately.\n\nShe swam over to her sister and studied the harness. It was made of a stretchy, gummy, clear material that seemed to cling to Anemone's scales, as if it had grown along with her. It probably has, Tsunami thought, wondering if the poor dragonet would have to wear this until she was Tsunami's age, or even older.\n\nWhen Tsunami tugged on it lightly, Anemone shook her head. She mimed trying to wriggle out of the harness and pointed to the queen again. Not possible without waking her up, Tsunami guessed. If it's even possible at all.\n\nAnemone carefully eased toward the entrance, glancing back at the queen. The cord between them uncoiled. The little dragonet lifted off the floor and swam up toward the top of the door, stretching the leash to its full length. She beckoned Tsunami after her.\n\nWhere the waterfall met the lake, just behind the cascade and right outside the cave entrance, there was a small pocket of air. At the end of her leash, Anemone was barely able to reach it with her snout. Tsunami popped her head out beside her.\n\n\"Clever,\" Tsunami said, glancing around. Here they were also hidden from view, if any SeaWings were out and about this early in the Summer Palace.\n\n\"I hope she doesn't wake up,\" Anemone said. She blinked at Tsunami for a moment, then burst out, \"Oh, I'm so glad you're here!\" She reached out one of her front talons, and Tsunami pressed it like they had the day before.\n\n\"Really?\" Tsunami said, astonished. But aren't we rivals? If I'm here, doesn't that threaten your chance at the throne?\n\n\"Maybe you can make her less crazy,\" Anemone said in a whisper. \"Or maybe she'll set me free now that she has you. Maybe you could talk to her. I need to get out of this harness. Tsunami, you have no idea how awful my life has been.\"\n\nTsunami stared at her, hearing the echo of her own words. \"Your life has been awful?\" she said. \"You can't even imagine awful. Try being raised under a mountain with no ocean or proper sunlight and only a river to swim in. Try being raised by three dragons who hate you and treat you like a blobby tadpole.\"\n\n\"I am treated like a tadpole,\" Anemone protested. \"Mother doesn't trust me to do anything by myself.\"\n\n\"You're only, what, one year old?\" Tsunami guessed. \"I'm sure that'll change.\" Well, I'm mostly sure. Halfway sure. \"And at least she cares about you.\"\n\n\"She cares about me way too much,\" Anemone said. \"I never get to do anything except whatever she's doing. At least you have friends. I never even see any other dragonets.\"\n\n\"Well, I was sort of stuck with those four,\" Tsunami said. \"And they're always arguing with me or getting mad about something.\" She felt a pang of guilt about not visiting them the night before. They must be wondering where she'd gone.\n\nWell, maybe if they miss me for a while, they'll be more pleased to see me when I do show up.\n\n\"They seem great,\" Anemone said wistfully. \"I always wanted brothers and sisters.\"\n\n\"Don't you have brothers?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Yes, but Mother thinks they play too rough, and she won't let them near me. My cousins are all possible suspects in her mind, except Moray, who's perfect and boring and old and can do no wrong. And nonroyal dragonets aren't special enough for me to play with.\" Anemone sighed, blowing bubbles across the water at Tsunami.\n\n\"I guess my friends are all right when they're not complaining,\" Tsunami admitted. \"They complain a lot, though.\"\n\n\"I tried complaining once,\" Anemone said with a stab of venom in her voice. \"Mother nearly got me a gag to match the harness.\"\n\n\"At least somebody loves you,\" Tsunami said. \"And you're with your own kind. And you know your own stupid language.\"\n\n\"She loves you, too,\" Anemone offered. She paused, glancing down into the cave. Queen Coral was still fast asleep, her blue scales rising and falling smoothly. \"I hope you'll take Whirlpool,\" Anemone blurted. \"Three moons, I was so sure I'd have to marry him. But now you're here, and you can have him and that'll be much better.\"\n\n\"No way!\" Tsunami said, lashing her tail. \"No, no, no.\" An image of Riptide flashed in her head, which was ridiculous, because she hardly knew him either. \"Absolutely not. First of all, I don't have time to get married. I have to stop the war and save the world.\" And/or learn how to be queen of the SeaWings. \"Second of all, that dragon? No, thank you. I'd rather have my tail nibbled off by snapping turtles.\"\n\nAnemone giggled. \"He's dreadful, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Your Smaller Majesties,\" Tsunami smarmed, imitating his fake grin and tiny bow.\n\nAnemone had to stick her head under the water so her giggling wouldn't shake the harness and wake the queen.\n\n\"Anyway, Mother can't decide who we marry,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"Really?\" Anemone said doubtfully. \"She gets to decide every thing else.\"\n\n\"We're royalty,\" Tsunami pointed out. \"Meaning we do whatever we want.\"\n\n\"Gosh, that is not what I've seen,\" Anemone said. \"More like 'we're royalty, so we only get to do what historical SeaWing queens would approve of us doing, for the good of our subjects, for the honor of the throne, for the YAWN, CLAW ME TO DEATH ALREADY.'\"\n\nTsunami laughed, but her gills felt choked and her scales prickled uncomfortably. She'd never thought of royalty that way. Did queens really have to worry about honor and other dragons' approval?\n\nWhat would happen if a SeaWing queen \u2014 or potential queen \u2014 decided to, say, marry someone the rest of the tribe disapproved of? Or chose not to get married at all?\n\nIt would be harder to rule subjects who didn't respect you. Tsunami had enough trouble with her usual four. She imagined a whole grumbling tribe full of Glorys and Starflights. But no one would dare argue with the queen, would they? Maybe it depended on the kind of queen you were. No one argued with Scarlet in the SkyWings, that was for sure.\n\nBut Scarlet was murderous and insane. Not exactly the role model I want to follow.\n\nShe stretched her wings out to feel the splashing of the waterfall. Outside their hidden spot, she could hear the quiet noises of the Summer Palace waking up. Dragon wings fluttered overhead. Bubbles burbled up from underwater caves where most of the SeaWings were sleeping. Pots clattered on the kitchen level of the pavilion, reminding her of how hungry she was.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Anemone whispered, glancing down. \"I think she's waking up. We'd better go back in.\"\n\nTsunami hesitated. Should she go visit her friends now? But what would her mother think if she woke up and found Tsunami gone?\n\n\"All right,\" she said, \"but I have one more question. What happened to Orca?\" If Anemone could tell her, she could put off going to ask Starflight about it.\n\nAnemone's pink-tinted wings shivered under the water. \"She challenged Mother for the throne when she was only seven years old,\" she whispered. \"Everyone says it was horrible. She nearly won, but Mother killed her in the end.\" She glanced down again. \"It's weird. Mother worships her and misses her, but lots of dragons still hate Orca for nearly kill ing their queen. Don't ever mention her name around Moray.\"\n\n\"Moray,\" Tsunami echoed. \"She seems \u2014\"\n\n\"Drippy? Fatuous? About as interesting as sea slime?\"\n\n\"I was going to say odd,\" Tsunami laughed. \"But those work, too.\"\n\n\"Uh-oh!\" Anemone vanished below the water. Tsunami followed her, swimming back to her bed a few moments before Queen Coral opened her eyes. The queen sat up and stirred the water with her wings as she stretched. She beamed at Tsunami and Anemone, reaching to stroke their heads gently with her talons.\n\nThe queen gathered her strands of pearls from the coral branch where they'd hung during the night. Carefully she draped them around herself again, then decorated Anemone the same way.\n\nTsunami hadn't taken off the one she'd been given the day before. Her mother smiled at this and produced another long strand of pearls, these a shimmering pale purple and oddly shaped instead of round.\n\nWith expert talons, Queen Coral wound them around Tsunami's chest and wings. They were beautiful, but it was strange to have something weighing her down. Tsunami felt almost as if she was wearing a harness of trea sure. She wasn't about to complain, though. The Talons of Peace had never given the dragonets beautiful things.\n\nFinally the queen beckoned for them to follow her to the pavilion.\n\nTsunami wasn't sure how she felt about being treated the same as Anemone, a one-year-old dragonet. But she did like how her mother kept patting her, as if she wanted to make sure Tsunami was real.\n\nAs they flew up to the pavilion, Tsunami saw several guards clustered on one of the lowest levels, half of them sleeping and half of them drinking something steaming out of handheld cauldrons. She noticed that they looked well fed, well rested, and content, not thin and grumpy like Queen Scarlet's guards in the SkyWing palace. Proof that my mother is a better queen than Scarlet, Tsunami thought.\n\nWhen Queen Coral landed on the Council level, a flurry of wingbeats sounded all over the palace. Council members swept down from caves or surged up from the water below. Coral settled herself in the largest pool, which was labeled QUEEN. She tugged Anemone into the water with her, although it was a bit of a squeeze, and the little dragonet had to curl under the queen's wing.\n\n\"Mother,\" Anemone protested. \"Quit squashing me.\" She wriggled around until there was a little more space for her.\n\nSmall turquoise dragons darted in with platters of food, laying them all around the pools as Council members slipped into their places. Tsunami stood awkwardly to the side. She felt like her tail and wings were in the way of every thing.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Queen Coral, finally noticing. \"Tsunami, you can sit there. Tortoise is guarding the hatchery at the Deep Palace, so she won't be joining us today.\" The queen pointed her claw at a pool two down from hers, labeled DRAGONET CARE in tiny emeralds. The wet stone was chilly under Tsunami's talons as she climbed into it.\n\nThe pools on either side of the queen said DEFENSE and COMMUNICATION. Shark splashed down in the first one, and a moment later, Moray landed in the other.\n\n\"Good morning, Your Majesty,\" Moray said, bowing and dipping her wings. \"I know yesterday was a shocking day, but I hope you slept well. I worried about you all night.\"\n\n\"Thank you, dear,\" said the queen. Her eyes were scanning the rest of the Council. Whirlpool flew up beside Moray. His pool was labeled MAGIC & PUBLISHING. Tsunami tilted her head at him. How did one become an expert in either of those things? What kind of magic did he know anything about?\n\nShe glanced around, wondering if there was a pool for the king, but she didn't see one. Queen Coral hadn't said anything about Tsunami's father yesterday, and in all the excitement about Kestrel's body, Tsunami hadn't had a chance to ask. Maybe he was at the Deep Palace. Maybe she could meet him later today.\n\nShe remembered some of the Council from the day before \u2014 the plump dragon, Lagoon, who'd been sent to feed the other dragonets, sat in a pool marked AQUACULTURE. Piranha, the one who'd gone with Shark to examine and dispose of Kestrel's body, was in WAR. Tsunami didn't know any of the other dragons' names, but from where she sat she could see the labels TREASURY, JUSTICE, and HUNTING.\n\nShe didn't really understand this \"Council\" business. She wasn't sure what they did or why they were necessary. Wasn't it enough to have a queen? Couldn't Coral just decide every thing herself?\n\nThat's what I'd do, she thought. I'll get rid of this Council and run the tribe like a proper queen. Maybe it worked for Coral, but Tsunami didn't need or want eleven dragons following her around offering advice all the time.\n\nHer stomach rumbled, and she tried to remember when she'd last eaten. The platters around her were loaded with raw ruby-red fish, most of it sliced and deboned and arranged into fancy rolls with seaweed. She'd only ever eaten fish raw and whole, or sometimes scorched when her friends decided to set their dinner on fire.\n\nA few cauldrons held seething mountains of tiny green crabs. Three large bowls contained some kind of salad of octopus tentacles and herbs that Tsunami had never seen before.\n\nShe plucked out one of the tentacles and tasted it. It was rubbery but sweet, with a tang like lemons and salt. She reached for another one and realized the whole Council was staring at her. Nobody else had started eating yet.\n\nOops.\n\nAll the Council eyes swiveled toward the queen, who was staring at the bit of octopus in Tsunami's claws. Coral shook herself and smiled.\n\n\"It's all right,\" the queen said, clapping her talons together. \"Naturally I forgive my long-lost daughter any accidental impudence. As we all know, she was raised by barbarians, so she couldn't know any better. I give you all permission to eat.\"\n\nTsunami crushed the tentacle between her claws. Raised by barbarians! Perhaps it was true, but what a thing to say to Tsunami's future subjects. They'd think of her as the dragon who knew nothing about SeaWing customs. How would she ever earn their respect with that reputation?\n\nWas Coral deliberately making Tsunami look foolish in front of the other dragons?\n\nTsunami studied her mother while Coral helped herself to the largest pieces of fish and crunched through talonfuls of crabs. She dropped bits of food into Anemone's open mouth as she ate.\n\nMaybe not. Maybe Tsunami was seeing problems where there weren't any.\n\nBut maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little more careful from now on.\n\n\"Pearl, report,\" ordered the queen after the dragons had eaten in silence for a while.\n\n\"No change,\" said the elegant pale green dragon in the trea sury pool. \"All your jewels are safe, as always. No scavengers can get to them, and no dragon would dare to try.\"\n\n\"Splendid,\" said Coral. She upended the last of a cauldron of crabs into her mouth. \"Shark, report.\"\n\n\"I am concerned about our defenses,\" snarled the gray-green dragon. He glared at Tsunami. \"The intruders in our midst are a danger to us. We have no idea whether they might have led others to our palace, or what they might be planning.\"\n\n\"Now, now,\" said the queen. \"Those are our guests, not intruders. If my daughter trusts them, then of course I do, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" Tsunami said quickly. \"Because I was thinking maybe they could join us for breakfast. I'm sure they're hungry. And if they could see that they're really welcome here...\" She trailed off as Coral shook her head.\n\n\"Only Council members and royalty are allowed at Council meetings, darling,\" Queen Coral said, running one claw along a strand of her pearls. \"But they certainly won't go hungry. Lagoon, did you make sure they were served an ample breakfast?\"\n\nThe turquoise dragon nodded.\n\n\"They can have the rest of this as well.\" Queen Coral waved her talons at the breakfast leftovers. The same small dragons from before darted up from the kitchen level, collected the platters, and flew down to the cave with them. Tsunami watched over the edge of the pavilion. None of her friends even poked their heads out. Were they sulking in there? Were they still mad at her?\n\nWell, she was doing a fine enough job of embarrassing herself. She didn't need them to come out and help. Raised by barbarians, friends with other tribes... not the stuff most queens were made of.\n\n\"Whirlpool, report,\" said the queen, smiling at him.\n\nWhirlpool touched the hoop in his ear and flared his wings. \"Anemone's lessons are going wonderfully,\" he said. Tsunami wasn't sure why his voice was so irritating, but it felt like claws scraping on stone to listen to him. \"And your scrolls have never been more popular. The latest has been bought by every single SeaWing in the tribe.\"\n\n\"Mostly the underwater editions,\" Moray jumped in. \"Those tend to sell the best. Of course, I spend all my energy promoting them \u2014\"\n\n\"But I've or ga nized another reading,\" Whirlpool interrupted. \"Every high-ranking dragon is clamoring to attend. We're charging an emerald apiece this time.\"\n\nQueen Coral waved her tail thoughtfully. \"I want to be sure I'm reaching the eel-eating masses as well, though,\" she said. \"I mean, my writing should be shared with everyone, not just those who can afford it.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Moray said. \"That's why the schools have all changed their curriculums again to be sure the dragonets have enough time to read every thing you've written. It's the most important subject they study.\"\n\n\"You can't be serious,\" Tsunami burst out. \"More important than how to fight the war?\"\n\nCold silence.\n\nQueen Coral pressed a talon to her chest, looking injured. \"Darling, my writing is about every thing. As you would know if you'd finished the scrolls I gave you yesterday. What did you think of them?\"\n\nTsunami guiltily remembered the scrolls she'd tossed aside as they flew off to see Kestrel's body. She hadn't even gone back to the library to get them.\n\n\"Uh,\" she mumbled. \"The Missing Princess is still my favorite.\"\n\nA chuckle ran around the assembled dragons. Tsunami felt hot with embarrassment. Councils were so stupid! She would never ever have something like this when she was queen!\n\n\"That reminds me,\" said the queen. \"Whirlpool, Tsunami needs lessons in Aquatic. Can you believe she never learned it, poor thing?\" She tapped her claws on the stone in front of her. \"Such a sad upbringing.\" Her face was sympathetic, but her stripes were flashing, and Tsunami wondered angrily if she was saying something different to the Council, knowing Tsunami couldn't understand.\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty,\" Whirlpool said. He inclined his head toward Tsunami. \"I would be happy to instruct the princess.\"\n\n\"Piranha, report.\" Queen Coral snapped her head around to the war pool.\n\nThe war commander was so clawed up that she seemed to be more scars than scales. One horn was snapped in half, and several of her teeth were broken.\n\n\"Still no information about the dead SkyWing,\" Piranha growled. Tsunami ducked her head. Eventually she had to tell her mother the truth \u2014 who Kestrel was, how Tsunami knew her. But she didn't want a harness attached to her, or some kind of permanent guard. And she felt like she should tell her friends first. I'll tell her later. I will.\n\n\"A war party returned early this morning,\" Piranha went on. \"Do you want to hear their report?\"\n\nQueen Coral sighed and gestured with her claws.\n\nPiranha called over the edge and two soldier SeaWings came flying up from a lower level. One was too injured to fly, so the other supported him. They spiraled in a jerking, awkward motion and landed heavily in the center of the Council meeting.\n\nThe SeaWing who couldn't fly had long burns along his side and one wing was scorched almost entirely black. Claw marks along his underbelly were still oozing blood, which dripped into the sparkling channels between the Council dragons, staining the pearls red. Tsunami saw the queen give her decorated floor a concerned look.\n\nThe other SeaWing had a scorch mark in the middle of his tail and a horrible gash in his neck. He was breathing heavily, and bubbles of pale red blood foamed out of his gills.\n\n\"Let's hear it,\" Queen Coral ordered.\n\n\"Something strange is happening in the Sky Kingdom, Your Majesty,\" said the one who couldn't fly. \"The battalions \u2014 it's as if nobody knows who's in charge. We were patrolling the outer islands, and we were attacked by three separate wings. The first squadron was half SkyWings and half SandWings. During the second attack, we heard the SkyWings yelling, 'For Ruby!' and in the third, at least one dragon shouted, 'The queen is not dead! Long live the queen!'\"\n\nQueen Coral sat forward, splashing water over the edge of the pool and squashing Anemone over to the side. \"For Ruby?\" she echoed.\n\n\"One of Scarlet's daughters,\" growled Piranha. \"Does that mean Queen Scarlet is dead?\"\n\nTsunami clenched and unclenched her talons. How much should she tell the Council? She didn't want to reveal Glory's secret weapon. They never knew when they might need it. And they weren't even sure Glory had killed Queen Scarlet during the escape.\n\n\"We would have heard if there had been a challenge, surely,\" said Moray.\n\nQueen Coral shot a stern look at the blue dragon in the secrets and spies pool. \"Why don't you know anything about this?\"\n\n\"None of my spies have reported in for days,\" he protested. \"I had no idea anything strange was happening in the Sky Kingdom.\"\n\nThe soldier who couldn't fly was leaning more and more dizzily against his companion. Puddles of blood soaked their claws.\n\n\"Mother,\" Tsunami said. \"Shouldn't somebody look at their injuries?\" She pointed at the soldiers.\n\nCoral eyed them up and down. \"Anything else to report?\"\n\n\"Twelve casualties,\" the soldier croaked. \"All the rest badly injured.\"\n\n\"But nobody followed you back to the palace?\" demanded Shark.\n\n\"We were careful,\" he promised, wincing with pain. \"We took the longest routes back.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Queen Coral waved her talons dismissively. \"You may go.\" She flicked her tail at the smallest Council member, in the DRAGON HEALTH pool, who ushered the soldiers away. Moray immediately jumped out of her own pool and started cleaning up the blood on the floor.\n\n\"If there is chaos in the Sky Kingdom, maybe this is the time to strike,\" Coral said. She wrapped one strand of pearls around her claws. \"We should send the rescue mission now. We could get him back today.\"\n\n\"We don't know enough,\" growled the secrets and spies dragon. \"If Scarlet is dead, how did she die? Did Ruby kill her, or is she fighting with her sisters for the throne?\"\n\nMoray hissed at the blood under her claws. \"Like the SandWing rivalry all over again. Making the war even worse.\"\n\n\"Or has Burn taken over?\" Piranha suggested. \"She would, if she was there.\"\n\n\"But Scarlet's daughters might not listen to Burn the way Scarlet did,\" said Moray.\n\n\"What could have happened?\" Coral said. \"Queen Scarlet was so strong.\"\n\nTsunami shifted uncomfortably, feeling the cold water seeping through her scales. She couldn't hide what she knew, not when her mother needed the information so much. Or at least she could share some of the dramatic highlights. \"Um,\" Tsunami said. The entire Council turned to stare at her. \"That... might have been us.\"\n\nThere was a shocked pause.\n\n\"You!\" barked Piranha.\n\n\"Ridiculous,\" snarled Shark.\n\n\"Queen Scarlet found us under the mountain,\" Tsunami said. \"She held us prisoner in her palace, and when we escaped, we sort of might have killed her. Maybe. I'm not sure. I will say we tried.\" She quite liked the horrified look on Shark's face at that bit of news. Starting to respect us a bit more? she thought.\n\n\"You were at the SkyWing palace?\" Coral lunged out of her pool, swarmed across the stone, and seized Tsunami's front talons in her own, clutching them so hard it was a little painful. Behind her, Anemone was yanked half out of the pool with a squeak of protest, but Coral didn't seem to notice.\n\n\"Did you see a SeaWing named Gill?\" the queen cried. \"Green scales, big and powerful, with brave eyes?\"\n\nTsunami felt sick. Gill. Yes, she remembered Gill \u2014 but not the way Queen Coral described him. She'd been forced to fight Gill in Scarlet's gladiator arena after he'd been deprived of water for months and driven mad with thirst. He'd been covered in scratches, as if he'd tried to drink his own blood.\n\nThe sound of dragon bones snapping between my talons.\n\n\"I did see him,\" Tsunami said slowly. A gasp went up around her, whispers traveling from one Council member to the next. Shark's pale, unfriendly eyes were like octopus arms coiling around her neck.\n\n\"Can you tell us where he is?\" Queen Coral asked ur gently. \"We've been planning a rescue mission, but he's not in the regular prison with the others. And we've got to get him back, Tsunami. You have no idea how important it is.\"\n\nTsunami curled her tail in close to her talons. She wanted to dive into the lake, crawl down to the bottom, and stay there forever with her wings over her head.\n\n\"He's \u2014\" Her voice cracked. She swallowed and started again. \"He's dead.\"\n\nShe'd had no choice but to kill the desperate SeaWing in the arena. It was his life or hers. She hadn't wanted to kill him... at least, she was pretty sure she hadn't wanted to kill him. But when she did \u2014 the truth was, Tsunami had loved the look on Queen Scarlet's face when she broke Gill's neck. She liked the feeling of being powerful and dangerous.\n\nGill's sanity had been long gone anyway. It had been easy for Tsunami not to think about where he came from or what his life was like before he landed in the SkyWing prison. It was easier not to think of him as a real dragon.\n\nShe'd never imagined her own mother desperately planning to get him back \u2014 or that she'd have to explain his death to anyone.\n\n\"Dead?\" Queen Coral released Tsunami's talons and staggered backward. Her claws splashed in the winding channels, slipping on pearls. \"How?\"\n\n\"Um,\" Tsunami stammered. Did she really have to admit this in front of all these dragons? \"In the arena.\"\n\n\"But he refused to fight,\" Coral said. \"We heard about it, through our spies. He convinced each of his opponents to lie down and refuse to fight along with him. He has \u2014 had a way with words. No one who met him would be able to kill him.\" A smile flickered across her snout and vanished. \"Queen Scarlet was furious, I heard.\"\n\n\"She was.\" Tsunami swallowed again. \"She punished him. It was \u2014 really awful.\"\n\n\"What do you know about his death?\" Shark demanded coldly.\n\nTsunami stirred the water with her claws. \"She drove him mad. She kept him away from water until he lost his mind and \u2014 and when he was crazy, he was dangerous. He was barely even a dragon anymore. He had to be killed.\"\n\n\"Really,\" Shark said, and Tsunami felt horribly sure he had guessed the truth.\n\n\"Why?\" Tsunami asked. \"Who \u2014 who was he? An important general?\"\n\n\"More than that,\" said Queen Coral in a hollow voice. \"Much more. He was my husband.\"\n\nDarkness seemed to be rushing into Tsunami's vision, sucking away all her breath. She knew what Queen Coral was going to say next, and she would have fled back to the mountains to avoid hearing it if she could.\n\n\"Tsunami... Gill was your father.\"\n\nQueen Coral dropped her head and slowly dragged herself back to her pool. \"Dead,\" she said. \"My Gill is dead.\"\n\n\"No more eggs,\" Moray whispered. She was still crouched in the center of the floor, scrubbing at the blood. Her eyes had a weird glow to them. \"No more dragonets, no more challenges.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily. She could marry again,\" Whirlpool murmured. Moray shot him a glare.\n\nCoral didn't seem to hear either of them. She pulled Anemone into her wings and clutched her tightly. The little dragonet wriggled a bit, then gave up and rested her head on Coral's shoulder. She blinked in a resigned way at Tsunami over their mother's back.\n\nTsunami felt like oceans were pressing against the back of her eyes. Her scales were heavy, as if they were clogged with seaweed.\n\nBut I didn't have a choice.\n\nDid I?\n\nHe was my father. And I had no idea.\n\nBut he wasn't a real dragon anymore. He wasn't anyone, inside his parched scales. He was gone, and I had to survive. I had to survive to protect my friends and fulfill my destiny.\n\nNothing helped. She hadn't really thought about other options when she'd killed the SeaWing in the arena. It was impulse and wanting to prove something to Queen Scarlet.\n\nShark was still staring at her, unblinking. Tsunami bared her teeth at him.\n\n\"I must grieve,\" said the queen. \"Council dismissed.\" She stepped to the edge of the pavilion and flew off to her cave, still holding Anemone.\n\nThe Council dragons peeled off to various caves and other levels of the pavilion. Tsunami buried her head in the pool and clutched her horns. Now what was she supposed to do?\n\nShe definitely was not in the mood for seeing her friends. It would not make her feel any better to face their remarks about what a terrible dragon she was. The kind of dragon who attacked other dragons for no reason. The kind of dragon who did what she thought was right, but was always wrong.\n\nThe kind of dragon who could kill her own father.\n\nSomething tapped her on the top of her head.\n\nShe emerged from the water and found Whirlpool rubbing his claws together. \"Time for your first lesson,\" he said in his oily voice.\n\n\"Now?\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"Why not?\" He spread his talons. \"It is never too soon to begin filling our minds with knowledge.\"\n\nTsunami hissed softly under her breath. This was not going to be fun. But perhaps it would be distracting.\n\n\"Come,\" he said, strutting to the edge and diving over. Tsunami reluctantly followed him into the cavern lake. He was hovering several lengths below the surface, flashing his stripes at her.\n\nTsunami sank to his level and watched him. She kept her own scales dark. She most definitely did not want to say something to him like what she'd said to Riptide. If Anemone was right about Coral's plans for him, Whirlpool did not need any encouraging.\n\nAfter a few moments, Whirlpool swam up to the surface again. His pale green eyes seemed far too big for his eye sockets.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" he said. \"Don't your stripes light up?\"\n\n\"Of course they do!\" Tsunami snapped. \"But you haven't told me what we're saying or anything.\"\n\n\"Just imitate me,\" he said officiously, and dove again before she could argue.\n\n\"Rrrrgh,\" Tsunami growled.\n\nThis time she imitated each flashing path of light \u2014 along her wings, her tail, her sides, alternating and sometimes flashing faster or slower. It seemed to go on for an eternity. Finally Whirlpool nodded with satisfaction and rose to the air again.\n\n\"Excellent,\" he proclaimed.\n\n\"What's excellent?\" Tsunami demanded, spreading her wings to float. \"What did we just say?\"\n\n\"We recited the first chapter of the queen's very first work, The Tragedy of Orca. It's extremely moving, glorious writing. You nearly repeated it perfectly.\"\n\nTsunami wanted to splash seawater up his annoying snout. \"But I didn't learn anything.\"\n\n\"Oh, you will,\" he said. \"With repetition comes perfection. Shall we go on to the second chapter?\"\n\n\"No!\" Tsunami said. \"Teach me something I can use. How do you greet strangers? How do you warn other SeaWings of danger?\" How do you say \"I'm sorry I killed my father?\" She shook herself. \"For moon's sake, at least show me how to say 'I don't speak Aquatic.'\"\n\n\"All knowledge can be found in the queen's writing,\" Whirlpool insisted. \"If we recite three chapters a day, we should get through her entire body of work in about five years.\"\n\n\"I have to get out of here,\" Tsunami said. Before I tie your stupid tail around your stupid snout and leave you in a bundle at the bottom of the lake. She turned and swam toward the exit tunnel. It wasn't quite as dramatic as storming out of a cave, which she hoped would be the first and last time she missed anything about life under the mountain.\n\n\"I am not impressed with your work ethic,\" Whirlpool called. \"This may take us closer to seven or eight years if you \u2014\"\n\nTsunami plunged her head under the water so she wouldn't have to listen to him anymore. The exit tunnel yawned ahead of her, and she shot into it as fast as her wings could beat.\n\nOutside the Summer Palace, the sky was gray and overcast, which suited Tsunami's mood perfectly. Wind whipped the sea into white-tipped peaks, knocking Tsunami around even more than usual. She tried paddling away from the palace underwater, but currents kept flinging her into the jagged boulders.\n\nShe was sick of fighting with the ocean. Why wouldn't it welcome her, like it was supposed to?\n\nWhy couldn't she start over as a normal SeaWing with normal problems, instead of having her past mistakes suckered onto her tail like overgrown leeches?\n\nFrustrated, she swam to the surface and flew into the sky. It didn't make sense that flying should be easier for her than swimming. What kind of SeaWing didn't love the sea? The kind that shouldn't be queen, maybe, Tsunami thought.\n\nLooming out of the water ahead of her was the island of rocks shaped like a giant dragon skeleton. Tsunami banked toward it, studying the holes and gaps. She chose the cave where the eye should be and landed in cool semidarkness. The stone was smooth like pearls under her claws.\n\nShe flapped her wings to dry them and turned to look out the entrance.\n\nA dragon head popped into her view, then vanished again.\n\n\"Wow,\" Tsunami said. \"You are the worst at staying hidden. Has anyone ever told you that you should definitely never be a spy?\"\n\nRiptide slowly poked his head around the mouth of the cave. \"I think I'd make a splendid spy,\" he said with dignity.\n\n\"Aren't you supposed to be patrolling the outer islands, where we met?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"Perhaps, but as you can imagine, I don't have a very important job.\" Riptide made a wry expression. \"Her Majesty can't trust me with anything vital.\"\n\n\"You do seem like a shady character,\" Tsunami said, remembering that she was supposed to be mad at him, too. She could yell at him. Her first instinct was to yell at him.\n\nMaybe I should stop listening to all my first instincts.\n\nShe scooted back farther into the cave. \"Come on in. I'm just recovering from an Aquatic lesson with Whirlpool.\"\n\n\"Oh, Whirlpool. Queen Coral's favorite instrument of torture,\" Riptide said. He climbed into the cave beside her, shaking water droplets from his scales. The cave was only big enough for three or four dragons, so they were closer together in the dark than Tsunami had expected.\n\nWhen she was much younger, Tsunami had had fleeting crushes on Clay and Starflight \u2014 before she realized that Starflight could be massively annoying, and that sweet loyal Clay saw the other dragonets as brother and sisters. But they were the only dragonets her own age that she'd ever met. Even though they weren't SeaWings, who else was she supposed to like?\n\nNow here she was, alone with a SeaWing... a SeaWing who looked at her as if he didn't see a future queen, or a father killer, or anything but a dragon whom he liked very much.\n\n\"Coral told me Webs is your father,\" she said quickly, awkwardly. \"Why didn't you say something when we met?\"\n\n\"It's not how I usually introduce myself,\" he said. He coiled his tail around his talons. \"It makes dragons see me a certain way. I'm sorry, I should have told you. I was hoping you might, um \u2014 I'd like to know more about him.\"\n\nTsunami shook her head, tempted to say, No, you wouldn't. \"Is that why you've been hanging around watching me?\" she asked instead.\n\nHis dark blue eyes caught the faint light from outside. \"That and other reasons,\" he said. \"I was worried about you. There aren't a lot of... outspoken dragons in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\n\"I can say whatever I want,\" Tsunami said boldly. \"I'm the missing princess. Mother loves me so much, she'll have a harness on me by the end of the day if I'm not careful.\"\n\nRiptide snorted. \"I'd like to see any dragon try to put a harness on you.\"\n\n\"Then they'd really find out how 'outspoken' I am,\" Tsunami said. She opened and closed her wings, accidentally brushing against his. Oops. Say something, quick. \"Webs wasn't so bad,\" she blurted. \"Not as bad as the other two.\"\n\nHe tilted his head.\n\n\"We had three guardians. The other two, Dune and Kestrel, hated every thing,\" Tsunami said. \"Except maybe Sunny. Nobody hates Sunny \u2014 she's too sweet and simple and lovable.\"\n\n\"She sounds frightful,\" Riptide said, and Tsunami laughed.\n\n\"But Webs \u2014 he wasn't just trying to keep us alive. He taught us every thing he could, except Aquatic, I guess. He taught us history and geography and all about the prophecy, and he wasn't even that boring about it. When it was his turn to hunt, he tried to bring back prey he knew we liked. It would have been worse without him.\" She fell silent, thinking. She'd never tried listing good things about Webs before. It was a lot harder than complaining about him, like she'd done her whole life.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Riptide said. \"You can tell me the truth.\" The end of his tail flicked up and down. \"I want to hear the bad stuff, too. It's good for me.\"\n\nTsunami took a deep breath. \"He should have protected us better,\" she said. \"If he was the only one who cared, he should have stopped Dune and Kestrel from hurting us and telling us we were worthless. He should have fought for us, and he never did, except right at the end when Scarlet and the SkyWings attacked.\"\n\nThat's one thing I do, she thought to herself. I fight for my friends, even if I'm doing it all wrong.\n\nRiptide nodded, looking down at the stone under his talons. \"Weak and cowardly,\" he said. \"That's how he's always been described to me.\"\n\nTsunami reached out and touched his wing with one claw. \"That doesn't mean you're anything like him,\" she said. \"It's not fair to punish you for what he did.\"\n\nSomething tingled in the air between them, like the sky outside, waiting for the storm. This is MOST improper for the future SeaWing queen, Tsunami thought. But maybe I'd rather have this than a throne anyway.\n\n\"Would you like a real Aquatic lesson?\" Riptide asked with a smile.\n\n\"I demand one,\" she answered.\n\n\"It's dark enough in here,\" he said. \"All right, here's what you say to Whirlpool next time you see him.\" The stripe on his tail lit up three times.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Tsunami said, copying him. \"What did I just call him?\"\n\n\"A squid-brain,\" Riptide said. \"My new favorite insult, thanks to you.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure this lesson is teaching me much more than his did,\" Tsunami pointed out.\n\n\"Hey, now I'm offended,\" he said. \"All right, you asked for it.\" He sat down and pointed to his snout. \"These stripes usually indicate a question. Like this for why, and like this for how, and like this for when.\"\n\nTsunami mimicked him, memorizing the patterns of flashes. It was easier than she'd expected. Maybe there was one part of being a SeaWing that she wouldn't be a total failure at.\n\nAfter she had the question patterns down, Riptide said, \"Try this one: I. Will. Protect. You.\" Stripes flashed along his side, and he gestured at the same time.\n\n\"I don't need protecting,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"I know,\" he answered, \"but knowing you, you'll probably need to say it to someone one day.\"\n\nTsunami liked that. I will protect you, she echoed, flashing it back at him.\n\nHe smiled a little sadly. \"I wish you could,\" he said.\n\n\"Why not?\" she said. \"I am a princess. I can do whatever I want.\"\n\n\"Not while someone else is queen,\" he pointed out. \"All right, here's how you indicate different kinds of danger.\"\n\nRiptide showed her other stripe patterns and some of the talon gestures as well. It was all fascinating, and Tsunami wasn't sure how much time had passed when she finally glanced out at the wind-whipped sea and realized she should be getting back.\n\n\"Mother might be looking for me,\" she explained. \"But thank you. You have no idea how helpful this was.\" All of this, she thought, realizing she'd managed to forget about Gill for a little while.\n\n\"Has Blister arrived yet?\" Riptide asked.\n\nTsunami shook her head. He took her front talons in his.\n\n\"Be wary of her,\" he said. \"She has her own plans, and I don't think protecting SeaWings is high on her list.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Tsunami said. \"Oh,\" she added, freeing her talons. \"What does this mean?\" She tried to imitate the circular gesture Shark had made yesterday.\n\nRiptide tilted his head at her. \"If you mean this,\" he said, doing it perfectly, \"then it means something like Not right now, we'll finish this later.\"\n\nTsunami stared at him. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Pretty sure,\" Riptide said. \"Why, who \u2014\"\n\n\"Yesterday, when I stopped Shark and the guards from kill ing my friends,\" Tsunami said, jumping to her feet, \"that's the gesture he made to them. You're telling me he was saying 'we'll just kill them later'?\"\n\nRiptide rubbed his snout. \"Maybe,\" he said unhappily. \"But if Queen Coral hasn't ordered it, then I'm sure \u2014\"\n\n\"How would I know?\" Tsunami cried. \"What if she has ordered it, and I didn't understand her?\" She ran to the mouth of the cave. \"I have to go back. I have to check on them. I haven't even seen them since yesterday.\" She leaped into the air, catching the air currents.\n\n\"Be careful!\" Riptide called after her. \"I'll be out here if you need me. Just \u2014\" The wind yanked away his last words.\n\nTsunami dove into the water, between the spiral dragon horn rocks. She powered through the kelp into the tunnel, shooting between the rock walls. She was going so fast, she didn't see the dark shape waiting above her in one of the breathing holes.\n\nShe thought she was alone until talons slammed into her back and sharp claws closed around her neck.\n\nGiant wings smashed Tsunami to the rock floor of the tunnel. She tried to twist around, but her attacker kicked her in the head and then shoved a hood that smelled of seaweed over her snout so she couldn't see. Tsunami shouted and struggled, lashing out with her claws and tail. Her attacker was bigger than her, and heavier, so Tsunami could barely move under the weight. It seemed like he or she was wearing something to make them heavier; she felt something metallic clank against her spines.\n\nFishhook claws dug into her gills, and Tsunami shrieked with pain. She felt blood swirling away from her neck into the water.\n\nI'm not going to die here! she thought ferociously. Killed by a coward I can't even see! I don't think so!\n\nShe remembered how Sunny always managed to wriggle free during their battle training sessions. The tiny dragonet used her small size to slip out of almost every hold Tsunami could think of.\n\nTsunami scrunched her legs and wings in close and ducked her head, rolling into a tight, spiky ball. Her attacker's grip loosened around her neck and, as the dragon fumbled for Tsunami's snout, Tsunami was able to squirm down and shove her opponent over her head. A blast of bubbles slammed into her as the dragon crashed into the wall.\n\nBefore she could pull her hood off, the talons were back, clutching her forearms. Tsunami kicked viciously at the underbelly that had to be in front of her and felt her claws snag painfully on metal rings. Her attacker made no sound, but a moment later the dragon's tail hit Tsunami so hard she thought she heard bones crack.\n\nThe other dragon's wings began to press her down toward the rock floor again. Whoever it was knew how to fight like a SeaWing; they had all the advantages of this world. So use something they haven't seen before. Tsunami thought of how Glory used distraction whenever she fought Kestrel. Tsunami's scales couldn't change color, but she bet she could still be pretty distracting.\n\nShe flared her wings open and closed, open and closed, as fast as she could, stirring up the water around them. She felt her attacker pause as if confused. On her third flare open, Tsunami suddenly lit up all the stripes all over her body in what she hoped was a blinding flash.\n\nHer attacker's talons slipped, and Tsunami struck out with her claws again. Again she flared her stripes, as bright as she could make them, so she could even see the light through her hood. She reached to shove her attacker away, and suddenly whoever it was... was gone.\n\nTsunami flailed in the water for a moment, fending off the attacks she expected from every side, before she realized there was no one around her anymore. She reached up and yanked off the hood, then felt the movement of somebody coming up the tunnel from the outside.\n\nShe whirled around, ready to fight, and Riptide leaped back, waving his talons. Tsunami whipped her head back and forth, but there was no sign of anyone else.\n\nAll right? Riptide signaled.\n\nWho? she signaled back with the stripes on her snout. Who? She didn't have any of the other words she needed.\n\nHe spread his webbed claws. I don't know. Then he pointed at her. All right? He lit up all his stripes, and she guessed he'd seen the light from outside.\n\nShe nodded impatiently. She didn't have any way to explain that she was grateful he'd come, but she needed to chase down her attacker now.\n\nAll right, she signaled back. Then she spun away, swimming fast down the tunnel toward the palace.\n\nTsunami burst out of the water into a scene of eerie calm. Dragons were lounging peacefully on beaches and cliff edges, or playing underwater and darting through the waterfalls. She searched the water and the pavilion with her gaze, looking for anyone who might have just been in a fight. Surely she had left some kind of mark on her attacker.\n\nNo one was acting suspicious. Tsunami glanced up and saw her mother's tail poking off a level of the pavilion near the top \u2014 the library level. She beat her wings, rose out of the water, and flew up to her.\n\n\"Hello, dear,\" Queen Coral said as Tsunami landed. She was surrounded by scrolls, several of them half unrolled. Anemone was curled on a curved white boulder beside her, looking bored out of her mind. \"I've been reading out loud to your sister. It's her favorite part of the day. We've just finished the story of how I chose Gill to be my husband.\" She sighed gustily. \"He adored my writing, too.\"\n\n\"Mother \u2014\" Tsunami started.\n\n\"He was a perfect candidate for king,\" Coral said. \"He came from a very noble family. Nothing to worry about in his ancestry. A lot like Whirlpool in his intelligence, too.\" Coral sighed again.\n\n\"Mother \u2014\" Tsunami said again.\n\n\"Luckily you've arrived just in time for my epic poem, On the Differences Between Oysters and Clams. It's an elegantly well-crafted metaphor about class differences and genetic superiority, as Whirlpool always says.\"\n\n\"Mother,\" Tsunami interrupted firmly. \"Someone just tried to kill me.\"\n\nQueen Coral sat up, scattering drops of ink from her claws. \"What? Who dared?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but they must be here now,\" Tsunami said. \"Somewhere in the palace. We should gather everyone and \u2014\"\n\n\"The eggs!\" Queen Coral yelped. \"The eggs must be in danger!\" She started flinging scrolls back into cauldrons.\n\n\"What?\" Tsunami said, bewildered. \"What eggs?\"\n\n\"Two eggs with female dragonets,\" Anemone explained to Tsunami. \"They're in the Royal Hatchery, in the Deep Palace. They're due to hatch in a couple of days.\"\n\n\"And if someone attacked you, they'll probably go after the eggs, too!\" Queen Coral cried. She dashed to the edge of the pavilion. \"Moray! Whirlpool! Hurry!\"\n\n\"But my attacker is here,\" Tsunami said. \"I'm sure of it. Not at the Deep Palace.\"\n\n\"So we have to get there first,\" Queen Coral insisted.\n\n\"But we could catch them here.\" Tsunami didn't understand why her mother couldn't see the obvious thing to do.\n\n\"Mother, what about Tortoise?\" Anemone asked. \"She's supposed to guard them, isn't she? That's Mother's Council chief of dragonet care,\" she explained to Tsunami. \"This week anyway.\"\n\n\"The others have all failed me,\" Queen Coral said with a grimace. \"Tortoise probably will as well. She didn't even want the job. Nobody wants it! The most important duty in the Kingdom of the Sea, and all my cowardly subjects hide from it. MORAY!\" she bellowed.\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Moray slithered up from the level below. Tsunami eyed her as she climbed onto the library floor. Did she look like she'd just been in a fight? Tsunami couldn't tell. Moray wouldn't look at her, but that wasn't new.\n\n\"Moray, we must get to the Deep Palace at once,\" Queen Coral said. \"I feel that my eggs are in danger. My scales tell me so.\"\n\n\"What about whoever attacked me?\" Tsunami demanded. \"We have to catch them and punish them!\"\n\n\"It's more important to stop them from hurting my eggs,\" Queen Coral said grimly. \"Someone has been kill ing my daughters for years. These are the last two Gill left me, and I won't let anything happen to them.\" She turned to Moray, who was sitting close beside her and gazing worshipfully at the queen. \"I wish you would guard them, dear. You never fail me.\"\n\n\"But every thing I do for your scrolls is so terribly important,\" Moray said. \"They're like your other children, really. I couldn't abandon them.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Queen Coral said. She patted her pearls and flicked her wings open. Behind her back, Tsunami caught Moray shooting a look full of hatred at Anemone. Wow, she thought. I wonder what that's for.\n\nDo you hate all of Queen Coral's daughters?\n\nEnough to try to kill me?\n\n\"I sent Shark on ahead this morning after breakfast, but he never worries enough,\" Queen Coral said, clicking her claws together. \"He doesn't even believe there's an assassin. He thinks it's all bad luck.\" She shook herself with a hiss. \"He even told me once that perhaps I wasn't meant to have daughters. He's lucky he's my brother \u2014 and your father, Moray \u2014 so I let him live. WHIRLPOOL! WHERE ARE YOU?\"\n\nAnemone winced and put her talons over her ears.\n\n\"Stay very close to me in the Deep Palace,\" the queen ordered Tsunami. \"We really have to put a rush order on a harness for you. They've been working on two for the new dragonets, but clearly yours is an emergency.\"\n\n\"I can take care of myself,\" Tsunami said, ruffled. \"Obviously. I'm still alive, so whoever attacked me failed.\" She gave Moray a hard look, but the Council dragon only shifted her wings as if she didn't care.\n\nPitter-patter, pitter-patter.\n\nAll the dragons glanced up at the canopy far overhead. Raindrops were spattering across the green leaves.\n\n\"Ah, the precipitation I predicted,\" said Whirlpool, landing beside Coral. \"My apologies for not appearing instantly, Your Majesty; I was distributing scrolls to the kitchen staff.\" He didn't look as if he'd been in a fight \u2014 and Tsunami didn't really think the ridiculous dragon could have overpowered her for a moment.\n\n\"We're going to the Deep Palace \u2014 now, as fast as we can.\" Queen Coral dove over the edge so suddenly that Anemone was yanked off her talons after her. Tsunami followed and found herself in a swarm of dragons midair as all the Council members hurried after Queen Coral as well.\n\nThey crowded into the tunnel, tails smacking into snouts and wings tangling. Tsunami got pushed into the middle and found herself swimming beside Whirlpool.\n\nToo late, she remembered she had meant to check on her friends. Why can't I be a better dragon? she berated herself.\n\nShe tried to turn and go back, but Council dragons were there shoving her forward. After nearly getting clawed in the face a few times, she gave up.\n\nSurely they're all right. Especially if Shark is in the Deep Palace already. I'll come right back and see them after we check on the eggs.\n\nOut in the sea, Queen Coral immediately found a current and swept off. One by one, each of the dragons followed her.\n\nTsunami glanced around, scanning the coral reefs and underwater boulders. Her heart jumped a little as she caught a glimpse of sky-blue scales. Riptide was still out there, watching for her. She waited a moment until she saw him dart from one rock to another. He was following them \u2014 following her \u2014 to the Deep Palace.\n\nPleased, although she felt a bit silly about it, she swam into the current and let it carry her after the others. She was starting to get the trick of how to angle her wings so it could sweep her along as fast as possible. It was a bit like flying, but with a lot more to dodge. Then again, fish managed to get out of the way pretty fast when they saw the dragons coming.\n\nAbove them, rain pattered down harder and harder on the water's surface. The light faded, and Tsunami imagined the dark clouds rolling in. She hoped her friends would be all right in the Summer Palace. Surely there were storms there all the time. At least they were in a cave, so they wouldn't get wet.\n\nTwo giant sea turtles swam by, going in the other direction. They eyed the dragons warily, but nobody stopped to eat them. Explosions of tiny pink fish popped in and out of the waving anemones along the coral reefs. Something large and yellow was lying flat against the sand; it opened its eyes, stared at Tsunami, and closed them again.\n\nAfter a while, an island loomed in front of them, with immense coral reefs clustered all around it. Orange branches twined around purple star-shaped clusters. Lacy fans the color of rust sprouted from pale pink umbrella shapes. Blue-and-silver fish darted in and out of the holes.\n\nThe SeaWings swam out of the current and around the bend of the reef, and then the lead dragons ducked into a canyon in the ocean floor.\n\nTsunami followed them down. As her eyes adjusted to the growing darkness, she saw a vast expanse of white-and-green coral reef spreading along the sides and floor of the canyon. It curled into caves and towers and underwater gardens full of glowing colors. In the center of the canyon, the coral spiraled up into an enormous palace, swarming with SeaWings.\n\nSeaWings were every where \u2014 swimming in and out of the windows and doors of the palace, shooting up to the surface and diving to the bottom of the canyon, tending the gardens, gently cleaning the coral, lugging large fish in from the hunt, or sitting in small circles with groups of dragonets, reading from thin stone tablets.\n\nThe only signs of the war were a few troops drilling in formation around the palace, and a group of soldiers gathered in one of the gardens, each with terrible bandaged wounds. Tsunami saw two with missing feet, one with scorched holes where his eyes should have been, and several with black scars twisting their wings or tail. Several couldn't swim anymore, but had to be helped through the water by nurse dragons.\n\nAs Queen Coral swam past, dragons snapped to attention, saluting or waving. She waved to each of them with a wide smile. Tsunami noticed that most of them waved to Anemone, too, and the little dragonet smiled and waved back.\n\nSurrounded by Council members, for once Tsunami was able to sweep by without a whole lot of staring and pointing. For a little while, at least, nobody knew who she was.\n\nThey swam through the wide front entrance into a coral cavern sparkling with emeralds and sapphires. A statue of Queen Coral loomed in the center, her talons outstretched benevolently.\n\nSeaWing servants hurried in from all directions, their luminescent stripes flashing at the queen. Coral swept past them all and charged down a tunnel at the back of the hall. Some of the Council broke away to swim to other parts of the palace, but Moray and Whirlpool stayed with the queen, and so did Tsunami.\n\nThe tunnel curved down and around in a spiral, getting warmer and warmer as they descended. Tsunami felt warm jets of water bubbling up through the coral under her talons. At the bottom was a stone door, and in front of the door a skinny seaweed-green dragon crouched, gobbling something hungrily in her claws.\n\nHer eyes went wide when she saw the queen, and she dropped her octopus with a shriek. The remains floated up to the ceiling as she flapped her talons in a panic, flashing her stripes so fast she looked like a lightning storm gone mad.\n\nQueen Coral roared and threw the door open, smacking the green dragon back against the wall. The queen shot inside, towing Anemone behind her.\n\nThis is where I should have hatched, Tsunami thought with a rush of confused excitement. She swam through the doorway and gazed around. The Royal Hatchery.\n\nThe warm jets bubbled along every wall, heating the room, which was shaped like the inside of a large, pale egg. A SeaWing dragon carved from dark green marble stood in the center of the room; garlands of blue and purple underwater plants were woven through her horns and along her wings. The base of the statue said ORCA. She looked tough and beautiful at the same time. Tsunami wondered if Queen Coral's first daughter had carved her own self-portrait, and if she'd known it would be a memorial one day.\n\nShe glanced around and caught the hateful look Moray shot at the statue. Maybe all her fawning over the queen is for real, Tsunami realized. Maybe she actually means it when she goes on and on about how wonderful Queen Coral is.\n\nMaybe she would even do anything to protect Coral from her daughters.\n\nNests made of seaweed were tucked into niches in the floor, with wide pathways stretching between them. Dragon eggs took a year to hatch, so there should have been clutches at different stages, from newly laid to nearly hatched. But there were no new eggs to be seen. Because Gill has been gone, Tsunami thought with a stab of guilt. And he's not coming back.\n\nOne clutch of three eggs was tucked against a wall, and in the nest farthest from the door, there were two eggs...\n\nQueen Coral hurried to the far nest and roared again, a howl of fury and despair that reverberated through the water. She sank down beside the nest and picked up a piece of broken eggshell.\n\nOh, no. Tsunami started forward, but Moray pushed past her and knelt beside the queen, leaning against her side. Anemone glanced back at Tsunami, looking sick.\n\nOne of the eggs was still intact, but the other was smashed. The little blue dragonet inside had been strangled to death. Her neck was twisted in a horrible way, and her head flopped sadly as Queen Coral gently picked her up.\n\nTsunami stared at the body in shock. It \u2014 she \u2014 was so tiny. Who would do this to a baby dragonet? How could anyone?\n\nTO MY SISTER.\n\nShe felt Anemone's cold talons slip into hers, and she squeezed them tightly. Whoever it was wanted to do this to Anemone as well. This was why the queen insisted on the harness and protected her daughter in such an extreme way. Seeing the broken body of the hatchling, Tsunami felt nearly crazy enough to do the same.\n\nNo one would ever, ever hurt Anemone, not while Tsunami was around. And whatever she had to do to protect that other egg, she would.\n\nQueen Coral rose to her feet, knocking Moray aside. She shot back across the cave to the door, but the skinny green dragon was gone. Anemone yelped a stream of bubbles as the queen blasted up the tunnel with her in tow.\n\nTsunami started after them, then turned and looked down at the last egg. Moray had already followed Coral. Whirlpool was hovering uselessly in the doorway. If Tsunami went after Coral as well, who would be left to guard the egg?\n\nBut no one can get in except through that door, she thought, staring around. That door from that tunnel. So how did someone get past Tortoise?\n\nShe turned in a circle, staring at the smooth walls. Come to think of it... how did Webs get in here to steal my egg? Surely there had been guards back then, too. Surely the queen had tried to protect her eggs, even six years ago. Webs couldn't have fought past them alone. So how did he get in?\n\nTsunami narrowed her eyes at the nests and the stone dragon. A secret entrance. There must be.\n\nWell, one thing was for sure. She wasn't leaving this egg alone in here.\n\nShe crouched beside the nest and gently lifted up the last intact egg. It was surprisingly heavy \u2014 or perhaps not that surprising, considering a baby dragonet was supposed to pop out of it in a day or two. Cradling the egg to her chest, Tsunami swam out the door of the cave.\n\nWhirlpool flashed a whole lot of stripes at her, waving his talons indignantly and pointing at the egg.\n\nTsunami gave him a wide-eyed, puzzled expression. Maybe you should have taught me some real Aquatic, sea slug. Then you could yell at me all you want, she thought.\n\nHe lit up his scales again. With a friendly smile, Tsunami lit up the same patterns back at him, then added squid-brain with her tail stripes, like Riptide had taught her. She swam away up the tunnel, leaving him gaping in surprise behind her.\n\nAs she swam up and around, she started to hear shrieks of pain echoing through the water. She hesitated, then beat her wings faster.\n\nIn the main entrance hall, Queen Coral had Tortoise pinned under her talons. A crowd of SeaWings had gathered, watching in silence.\n\nThe skinny green dragon was shrieking in one long, high-pitched scream. Tsunami stopped and pressed herself back against the wall, horrified. Queen Coral had already yanked out each of Tortoise's teeth one by one. They rose through the water, tiny and white, toward the roof. Now Coral had her claws stabbed into Tortoise's exposed underbelly. Clouds of blood filled the water, nearly hiding the queen and Tortoise in a red haze.\n\nWould I have to do that, if I were queen?\n\nCould I ever, ever do that?\n\nAnemone had rolled herself into a ball, floating in the water above her mother with her eyes tightly shut and her talons over her ears.\n\nQueen Coral's scales lit up in a slow, menacing way. Tsunami didn't understand most of it, but she guessed Tortoise was hearing about how she'd failed the queen.\n\nTortoise's stripes flashed weakly.\n\nThe queen snarled and twisted her claws harder into Tortoise's underbelly. Tortoise gurgled up a bubble of blood. Her stripes flashed again, and then, as her head began to loll sideways, she spotted someone in the crowd around them. She clutched at the queen's talons and pointed, her stripes flashing frantically.\n\nShe was pointing straight at Shark.\n\nHe stared back, unblinking as always.\n\nQueen Coral leaned down, pressing Tortoise into the floor. One more message flared through her scales, and then she seized Tortoise's head in her talons and smashed it against the rough coral floor.\n\nTsunami turned away just in time, huddling around the egg with her eyes closed. She didn't care if she looked like a one-year-old dragonet, hiding her face. She did not want that image in her head for the rest of her life.\n\nWhat was Tortoise saying about Shark?\n\nWhatever it was hadn't convinced Queen Coral, anyhow.\n\nTsunami kept her eyes closed until she felt the eddies from other dragons swimming away. She peeked around and saw Moray busily cleaning up the blood and bone fragments that were floating around the main hall.\n\nGROOOOOOOSS, Tsunami thought. Moray must really adore Coral to be willing to do that.\n\nTortoise's body was hooked on an outcropping of coral by the front door, like a used-up deer carcass waiting to be taken to the trash heap after dinner. Queen Coral loomed over Shark, clutching Anemone to her chest and exchanging a heated luminescent conversation with her brother. All the other SeaWings had scattered to faraway parts of the palace.\n\nTsunami started toward her mother, but stopped as a strange shape flashed by one of the windows. What the \u2014 that wasn't a dragon. She swam a bit closer and peered out.\n\nSharks \u2014 actual, dead-eyed sharks with enormous jagged teeth \u2014 were swarming around the front entrance, sniffing at the blood that still leaked from Tortoise's body. They were bigger than Tsunami had expected \u2014 big enough to eat a dragonet the size of Anemone, she guessed \u2014 but even as she watched, two SeaWing guards darted down and killed five of them with a few blows of their tails.\n\nShe turned back and saw Whirlpool swimming up to Queen Coral. He interrupted her conversation, waving his talons furiously and pointing at Tsunami.\n\nUh-oh. Tsunami took a deep breath and held the eggshell closer. Well, I'm not giving this up.\n\nQueen Coral swam over with a half frown on her face. She pointed to the egg and gestured commandingly for Tsunami to give it to her.\n\nTsunami flashed her stripes in one of the few patterns she knew. I will protect. She wasn't sure how to say it. She pointed at the egg. I will protect.\n\nThe queen blinked. She lit up a few of her stripes, including one pattern on her snout that Tsunami recognized as how.\n\nTsunami shook her head. She didn't have enough Aquatic to answer that. I will protect, she said again.\n\nShe spotted the eyes of several SeaWings peering around doorways at her. Most of them looked shocked and disbelieving. She saw her sister glance from Tsunami to the crumpled remains of Tortoise, then back again. Anemone's face was pale and anxious.\n\nOh.\n\nTsunami realized what they were seeing. She was putting herself in Tortoise's place. She was taking the job nobody wanted. She hadn't even thought of it that way.\n\nWhich meant, if she failed... she might be punished the same way, too.\n\nQueen Coral tried flashing some more questions at Tsunami, but finally she flapped her wings and pointed to the surface. Tsunami pressed the egg to her chest and followed her mother, up and up and up through winding tunnels and cavernous palace rooms, through emerald-studded coral and pearl-laced curtains of golden sea grass. They swam to the top of the palace, where a guard stood watch over a view for miles underwater.\n\nHe saluted to the queen, and she swam up past him toward the gray light overhead, where raindrops pelted the surface of the water. Anemone paddled in her wake, glowing like a pale blue pearl in the dark sea.\n\nThey emerged into a storm so fierce, it almost felt like they hadn't left the water at all. Tsunami faltered in the air as wind and rain tried to sweep her back into the ocean. The egg was slippery in her talons. Don't you dare drop it, she hissed to herself.\n\n\"This way,\" shouted the queen, banking toward the nearest island. A large cave yawned open onto the beach. Rough, dirty, and muddy, it was still the driest spot they could see. The three of them huddled into its shelter.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\" the queen demanded as soon as Tsunami's claws touched the ground.\n\n\"Someone has to protect this egg,\" Tsunami said. \"It's not safe in the hatchery.\"\n\n\"It'll be safe in the hatchery if I put all my guards on it,\" Queen Coral fumed.\n\nTsunami shook her head. \"Haven't you tried that before? Has it ever worked?\" She paused and glanced at her sister. \"What did you do for Anemone?\"\n\nThe queen shook out her wings. \"I slept by the egg myself, for the entire year,\" she said.\n\n\"You did?\" Anemone said. Rain dripped off her tiny pale wings into puddles around her feet.\n\n\"I barely left the hatchery. I let Gill run the war for me, but \u2014 that's how I lost him.\" Coral's voice caught and she frowned. \"I can't ne glect my duties as queen, now that he's gone.\"\n\n\"So let me do this,\" Tsunami said. \"Let me protect this egg.\"\n\n\"But you have to stay in the hatchery,\" the queen insisted. \"It must be kept warm, especially right before hatching.\"\n\nTsunami glanced down at the egg. She didn't trust the hatchery. Anyone could sneak in to attack both Tsunami and the egg, especially if there was a secret entrance. Besides, she couldn't stay in the Deep Palace; she had to go back and check on her friends. \"I have a better idea,\" she said. \"Trust me. I'll take it back to the Summer Palace.\"\n\n\"The Summer Palace!\" The queen flared her wings. \"No, you don't want to do that in this weather. It gets terribly flooded there during a storm. Better to wait out the rain here at the Deep Palace, where you'll hardly notice it's happening.\"\n\n\"Flooded?\" Tsunami echoed. \"Do you mean \u2014 the caves? And the beaches? Where my friends are?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Queen Coral waved her claws dismissively. \"I'm sure they'll be all right. Can't they swim?\"\n\n\"Not like we can,\" Tsunami said. \"I'm going back to check on them.\"\n\n\"With my egg?\" Coral growled.\n\n\"You've tried trusting everyone else,\" Tsunami said, taking a step back toward the pounding rain outside. \"Now trust me. I promise this dragonet will hatch safely.\"\n\nHer heart beat like the thunder in the clouds. Was this, finally, the right thing to do? Was she doing it for the right reasons? Or was she being impulsive again \u2014 trying to prove something instead of thinking it through?\n\nI'm doing this for my father. I'm doing this to make up for all my mistakes.\n\nAnd I'm doing this to save my little sister. How can that be wrong?\n\n\"If anything happens to that egg,\" Queen Coral hissed, \"I'll lose two daughters that day.\"\n\nSo much for being a special princess. \"I need a harness for it,\" Tsunami said, looking her mother in the eye. See. I'm not afraid of you. Maybe you should think about how your next queen will come to power before you start threatening me.\n\n\"The harnesses they were making for the dragonets,\" Anemone piped up. \"One of those should work.\"\n\n\"How will you get back to the Summer Palace?\" Coral demanded. \"You don't know the way, and my court is staying here with me.\"\n\n\"I'll find it,\" Tsunami said, but a ner vous shiver went through her wings. She did not want to be wandering the ocean alone during a storm \u2014 especially when her friends needed her.\n\nIf Riptide is still out there... Please let Riptide still be out there.\n\n\"Wait,\" she said as the queen started for the entrance. \"I have a question. Tortoise pointed at Shark while she was dying. Was she saying he attacked the egg?\"\n\nCoral flared her wings, looking shocked. \"Certainly not!\" she said. \"My own brother! He wouldn't dare!\"\n\n\"She wasn't saying he killed the egg,\" Anemone agreed. \"She said he'd given her permission to leave her post. He brought her an octopus to eat.\"\n\n\"The fool.\" Coral gnashed her teeth. \"I've told Shark a million times that vigilance is the only way to protect the eggs. If that means going days without eating, then that is what my trusted councillor must do. He's too soft with them.\"\n\nRight, Tsunami thought. \"Soft\" is definitely how I'd describe Shark.\n\n\"Well, Tortoise didn't think anything could happen,\" Anemone said. \"Not while she was right outside the door and only away from the egg for a few moments.\"\n\n\"Why didn't she stay with the egg to eat?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"Nobody eats inside the Royal Hatchery,\" Anemone said primly. \"It's a pristine hatching place designed for royal dragonets. And if you get blood in the water, sharks will try to find their way in. Regular sharks who eat dragonets and eggs, that is. Hatcheries other than the Royal Hatchery get attacked by them all the time.\"\n\nTsunami shook her head. She couldn't help feeling like following all these rules was only helping the assassin. And it was pretty convenient that Shark had set Tortoise up like that \u2014 not to mention giving himself a chance to sneak in and kill the dragonet.\n\nShe shook out her wings. \"Take me to the harness,\" she said.\n\nQueen Coral reached toward the egg, then stopped herself. She gave Tsunami another hard look and led the way out into the storm.\n\nThis time they swam down through the murky, churning water and around to the back entrance to the palace. The queen burst into a room that seemed to be a workshop where small SeaWings crouched over sea grass weavings and marble carvings. Tsunami paused as her mother thundered to the far end of the room. She lifted one of the weavings in her claws and realized it was made of the same material as the harness \u2014 rubbery, stretchy, and waterproof \u2014 only these were woven in colors, not clear like the harness.\n\nQueen Coral flared her stripes angrily at a dragon who had frozen over a marble carving. He hurried into a back room and returned with a tiny harness flopping in his talons. Coral pointed at Tsunami, and he took it over to her.\n\nThis dragon was old, she noticed, and shaking with fear as he tried to fit straps around Tsunami's neck and shoulders. They flapped loosely; it was meant for Coral and was too big for her. And of course the smaller harness was supposed to fit a little dragonet with limbs and a tail, not a smooth round egg.\n\nThe old dragon gestured helplessly at the harness, and Queen Coral poked it, growling a stream of bubbles. The queen yanked Anemone closer and pointed at the harness, flashing some of the royal stripes in her wings.\n\nAnemone hesitated, then reached out unhappily and touched the harness. To Tsunami's astonishment, the straps around her shoulders suddenly shrank until they fit perfectly. The other webs snaked and wove closer until the egg was securely bound to her chest.\n\nShe grabbed Anemone's talon. Her sister felt cold and weirdly hard to the touch, and her eyes were out of focus. Tsunami shook her, and Anemone blinked until she was looking at Tsunami.\n\nWhat? Tsunami flashed the stripes on her snout.\n\nAnemone shook her head and made the circular gesture: Not right now, we'll finish later.\n\nTsunami wanted to know more, but the gesture reminded her of Shark and her friends. She had to get back to them. Protecting this egg was important, but watching out for the other four dragonets had been her first duty her whole life.\n\nShe bowed politely at the queen and the old harness-maker, then swam out of the palace and back through the gardens she'd seen on their way in. She wasn't going unnoticed now. Everywhere she passed, SeaWings stopped to stare, then lit up their wings in hurried conversations after she went by. She could sense them pointing at the egg. She wasn't sure if they knew she was the missing princess, or if they only knew she'd volunteered for the suicide mission of saving the queen's last female dragonet.\n\nShe remembered swimming into the canyon, so she climbed out and swam around the bend in the coral reef. The Deep Palace disappeared behind her, and the wide dark ocean yawned in front of her.\n\nAll right, you asked for this.\n\nNow what?\n\nTsunami twisted around, hoping to see something familiar.\n\nTo be honest, hoping to see Riptide.\n\nBut the ocean was dark and wild, and it seemed like every thing alive had gone into hiding until the storm passed.\n\nSo I figure it out myself. Tsunami set her jaw. She patted the egg through the harness. Don't worry. I can do this.\n\nThey'd ridden a current most of the way here. Did she have to fight it all the way back? She swam slowly forward until she felt the water try to shove her away. Maybe she could just keep a wing tip in the current and follow it that way.\n\nSeveral wingbeats later, she pulled away from the current to rest, exhausted and confused. Why was this so hard?\n\nRiptide, where are you?\n\nPerhaps she could find her way back in the air instead. She just had to look for the island shaped like a dragon skeleton \u2014 how hard could that be?\n\nTsunami lashed her tail to power to the surface. She burst out into a pounding cacophony of thunder and roaring waves. Rain crashed down on her scales like hailstones. The wind immediately tried to grab her and carry her off.\n\nShe fought to stay balanced and fly straight, but she was already lost. She could see an island to her left, but she didn't know if that was the one close to the Deep Palace, or if she'd been swept to another, and whether it was on the way back to the Summer Palace or not.\n\nA dark shape on the surface of the water caught her eye. She rubbed her snout, shaking off the raindrops.\n\nRiptide?\n\nShe flew lower.\n\nIt wasn't a dragon. It was some kind of odd vessel, like a large bowl, floating on the water. And huddled inside of it were two scavengers, scrawny and soaking wet.\n\nThat doesn't help me at all, Tsunami thought. I'm not even hungry right now.\n\nShe beat her wings to soar upward again, and one of the scavengers looked up. Its eyes were as green as Glory's, in a smooth face the same brown color as Clay's scales. Tangled dark hair snarled around its shoulders.\n\nTsunami had seen a few scavengers up close before \u2014 one in the mountains and two in the SkyWing arena. It struck her again how dragonlike their eyes were. It was sort of unsettling, really.\n\nShe wondered if they could breathe underwater or swim, because these two were about to get swamped and end up at the bottom of the ocean.\n\nUnless I help them.\n\nAs if I have time for that!\n\nShe hesitated. Maybe all scavengers looked that way all the time, but if she had to guess, she'd say their expressions were terrified.\n\nOn the other hand, I might as well help somebody. Maybe it'll give me luck.\n\nTsunami swooped down and snatched up the vessel in her talons. It was heavier than it looked, and she immediately dropped it. The two scavengers let out their long, piercing bird shrieks as the vessel smacked back into the water.\n\nOh, calm down, Tsunami thought. She flew around in a circle, fighting the gusts of wind, and wrapped a front talon around each scavenger. They both shrieked some more and banged uselessly against her claws.\n\nHow do scavengers accomplish anything? Tsunami wondered, flapping toward the island. They don't seem to have any useful dragon qualities. And yet they manage to steal trea sure and occasionally kill a queen and start a war.\n\nThat's right, she remembered, giving the scavengers a little shake. I'm mad at your kind. It's your fault all of this is happening.\n\nThey screamed in a satisfyingly terrified way.\n\nOn the other hand, it's pretty unlikely that it was these exact scavengers who killed Queen Oasis and set off the SandWing war of succession.\n\nSo I suppose I'll let them live.\n\nShe dropped them on the island beach. They staggered to their feet and fled up toward the trees and the caves without a backward glance.\n\nPathetic little creatures.\n\nTsunami's wings ached from fighting the storm. She had to try going back underwater.\n\nShe dove in with a splash and spun, searching the dark water again for Riptide. Had he given up on her? Was he hiding from the storm, like a smart dragon would, figuring she'd be safe in the Deep Palace?\n\nWell, there was one thing that had gotten his attention before. She opened her wings and lit up all her stripes, like she had done in the tunnel. The glow blazed through the water, and then she shut them down again and waited.\n\nNothing.\n\nShe tried again. It gave her a bit of a head ache, lighting up all her stripes like that, and left her dazzled blind for a few moments afterward. She'd done it sometimes for the other dragonets when the caves got too depressingly dark or Kestrel tried to punish them by taking away all the torches. Glory hated that the most. She couldn't stand the dark.\n\nTsunami thought about the Summer Palace, where there was no fire allowed except in one cave, and all the light came through the canopy up above. Not much light could be filtering down from the sky in the middle of the storm. Her friends were probably sitting in the dark right now, listening to the water climb up the beach toward them.\n\nI have to get back to them, Tsunami thought, blazing all her stripes on again.\n\nRight in front of her, Riptide flung up his wings to shield his eyes.\n\nTsunami grabbed his claws and turned down her stripes. She jabbed her talon in the direction she thought the Summer Palace was. Oh, why don't I know how to say anything useful?\n\nHe rubbed his eyes and squinted at the egg attached to her. His expression said, \"Something you forgot to mention?\"\n\nShe whacked his tail with hers and pointed again. She remembered the pattern for urgent and lit it up.\n\nRiptide nodded and began paddling toward the surface.\n\nWe don't have time to chat, Tsunami thought, frustrated, but she followed him because she had no choice.\n\nBut before he reached the air, Riptide swung around and slid into another current. As far as Tsunami could tell, it went in the direction of the Summer Palace. He beckoned her after him, and Tsunami ducked into the current as well.\n\nAll right. I suppose I could have looked for one of those.\n\nMaybe traveling the sea wasn't about being strong and fighting with it all the time. Maybe it was about trusting the currents and knowing where they were. Maybe it would just take time before she figured them out.\n\nShe lashed her tail to keep up with Riptide as they swung around islands and dodged billowing clouds of translucent jellyfish. The current sped them along, but the journey still felt endless, and Tsunami couldn't stop thinking about her friends.\n\nShe should have fought harder to make her mother accept them. How could anyone not trust Clay? Every thought he had was written all over his big, sweet, goofy face. And Sunny \u2014 those two were the most trustworthy of the bunch. Tsunami didn't think Sunny had ever had a negative thought in her life. She did what she was told, and happily. She believed the best of everyone, even Kestrel and Dune.\n\nWhich didn't say much for Sunny's judgment or intelligence, but the point was, the littlest dragonet would never hurt or betray anyone \u2014 not even a bunch of SeaWings she barely knew.\n\nStarflight was the opposite of Sunny: very smart, totally unreliable, terrified of the world. He tried so hard to know every thing, just so he could be useful in some way. He wasn't brave. He wasn't a good fighter. He didn't even have any useful NightWing powers yet. Most of the time, Tsunami felt sorry for him... at least, when he wasn't trying to steal her position as leader of the group.\n\nBut if Queen Coral would give him a chance, she might see that his intelligence could be really useful, especially in fighting the other tribes. He probably knew more about the war and the different tribes than any other dragon in Pyrrhia.\n\nGlory... well, Coral didn't know it, but Glory was probably the least trustworthy and most dangerous of all of them. Her secret venom proved that. Tsunami curled her talons in. In the SkyWing palace, why had Glory waited so long to save her friends? If she'd used the venom on Queen Scarlet earlier, Tsunami wouldn't have had to kill her father.\n\nPlus she always talked like she didn't care about the prophecy, then got mad when other dragons pointed out that she wasn't in it. It was hard to figure out what she really wanted.\n\nAnd Tsunami could definitely live without her sarcastic comments.\n\nBut Glory had saved them all, in the end, in the Sky Kingdom. She'd killed to protect her friends.\n\nAnd I notice nobody seems all mad at her about that, Tsunami thought bitterly. Instead I'm the crazy impulsive one. Like that's fair.\n\nStill, if Glory would do that for them, then Queen Coral should learn to trust her, too.\n\nWhen Mother gets back to the Summer Palace, Tsunami thought, I'll talk to her. I'll make sure she treats them like my friends, not prisoners.\n\nNo matter how mad they made her, Tsunami didn't want anything bad to happen to any of them. And after two days of SeaWings, she had to admit she kind of missed them... even Starflight and Glory.\n\nThe spiral horn rocks loomed out of the dark ahead of her, with the golden sea grass curtain behind them. Riptide paused at the rocks, swimming backward as if he was going to leave her there.\n\nTsunami wound her tail around his and faced him. Come, she said, wishing she knew the patterns for \"please\" and \"I might need your help\" and \"the queen is far away and won't return until the storm is over.\" But all she could say was come.\n\nApparently that was all she needed to say. Riptide nodded and gestured to the curtain, letting her lead the way. She unwound her tail and ducked through into the tunnel.\n\nThe current in the tunnel felt faster and heavier than before. She splashed out into the Summer Palace cavern and turned toward the beach.\n\nThe white pebbles had been swallowed by the rising water, and the cave mouth was already partly underwater. There were no SeaWing guards, and no sign of her friends outside the cave. Tsunami looked up, wondering if they'd been moved to a higher cave. But all she saw was a few curious SeaWing faces peering down.\n\nMost of the dragons had taken refuge out of the way of the dripping canopy. Being all wet was wonderful, but having your head splatted one annoying drop at a time was not as much fun.\n\nTsunami paddled over to the beach and felt the pebbles scrape under her claws as she climbed up to the cave. The water was only up to her underbelly, but she could tell it was rising quickly. It lapped around the egg, chilly and unwelcoming, and Tsunami remembered that she was supposed to keep it warm. Hang in there, little sister, she thought. Not much longer.\n\n\"Hello?\" she called into the cave. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she saw one giant lump of shadows piled near the back.\n\nHer heart lurched.\n\nNo.\n\nWere those her friends' bodies?\n\nHad she come too late?\n\nA small head lifted up from the top of the lump. \"Tsunami?\" squeaked Sunny's voice.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Tsunami blurted. She waded over and realized the bottom of the lump was Clay, stretched out in the water, half-submerged. Lying on top of him was Glory, and on top of her was Starflight, and at the top of the pile sat Sunny, well out of reach of the water.\n\n\"This is a terrible strategy,\" Tsunami pointed out as her friends opened their eyes, one by one. She covered her relief that they were alive by scolding them. \"Seriously, whose idea was this \u2014 Starflight's? Look, once the cave fills with water, you'll be stuck in here, and even if it only covers Clay, he can't hold his breath for the entire storm. Why haven't you moved to another cave?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Glory said icily. \"The SeaWing princess has time for us all of a sudden.\"\n\n\"It's only been a day,\" Tsunami said uncomfortably. \"Mother's kept me busy.\"\n\n\"Well, we feel so blessed that you found time to visit. Please do impart some more incredibly brilliant wisdom on us.\" Glory wriggled and twisted her neck to glare up at Starflight. \"Get your honking great claws off my wings before I bite you.\"\n\n\"We can't go anywhere, Tsunami,\" Sunny said as Starflight hurriedly adjusted his position. \"We couldn't leave Clay.\" She pointed down at Clay's talons.\n\nClay lifted his front talons with an apologetic expression. Silver chains ran around each ankle and were bolted to rings in the floor. He had them around his back talons as well.\n\nShock stabbed through Tsunami, followed by fury. Had her mother ordered this? If so, she must have known Clay could drown in the storm, and she didn't care. She'd lied to Tsunami that her friends would be all right.\n\nBut maybe she didn't know. Maybe this was Shark's doing.\n\nIf that's the case, I'll rip him apart.\n\n\"I knew you'd come for us, though,\" Sunny said. \"I mean, I thought you'd come yesterday. Or this morning. Or when the storm started. But I knew you would come. Eventually. Well, I was pretty sure.\"\n\n\"I was sure you wouldn't,\" Glory said. \"Don't you have a feast or a coronation or a beheading to attend?\" She squinted at Tsunami. \"Is that an egg? Wow, they work fast in the Kingdom of the Sea. Who's the lucky father?\"\n\n\"Glory, stop sniping at me for TWO SECONDS, please,\" Tsunami said. She slung the harness off and carefully passed it up to Sunny. \"Sunny, I need you to take care of this. It has to stay warm, and you're the only one who can keep it that way.\" She hoped the natural warmth from a SandWing's scales would be similar to what the egg would have in the nursery.\n\n\"Me?\" Sunny's voice was filled with delight. \"You want me to do something important?\"\n\n\"Really important,\" Tsunami said. \"That's the very last female dragonet Queen Coral may ever have. Somebody wants it dead, and we're going to make sure that doesn't happen.\"\n\nSunny wrapped the harness around herself twice and nestled the egg into her warm scales. When Tsunami glanced up, she thought she saw a pulse of dark blue moving inside the egg. \"So keep it warm and safe, and for goodness' sake don't break it, and don't let Clay anywhere near it in case he accidentally sits on it.\"\n\n\"I would never!\" Clay protested. His stomach growled loudly.\n\n\"Haven't they at least fed you?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"We got some breakfast leftovers this morning,\" Clay said with a sigh. \"Very extremely tiny small crabs.\"\n\n\"I am going to claw someone,\" Tsunami snarled. So was Lagoon lying to Queen Coral? Or was she ne glecting the dragonets on the queen's orders?\n\nTsunami crouched to study the chains. \"Did you try melting them?\" she asked Sunny and Starflight. \"Like you did when you freed me, under the mountain?\"\n\nStarflight leaned over and pointed at a few blackened sections of the chain. \"We tried,\" he said. His voice sounded more deflated than usual. \"It didn't work. This metal must be like the SkyWing wires, reinforced in some way.\"\n\nTsunami heard splashing behind her and whirled around, but it was only Riptide.\n\n\"How do we get these off?\" she demanded.\n\nHe rubbed his snout ner vously. \"You'll need the key from the guards,\" he said. \"But they'll never give it to you.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that,\" Tsunami growled. \"Hide if you need to,\" she said to Riptide. \"I might have to bring a guard back with me. By force, with my claws through his ears,\" she muttered as she stomped out of the cave.\n\nSeaWing faces disappeared all over the palace when they saw her glaring around. But she remembered the lower pavilion level where she'd seen guards resting and drinking from cauldrons. She could see a few huddled shapes there now. Perhaps they assumed they could watch the cave from over there, out of the rain.\n\nTsunami flapped over to the pavilion and landed next to a large cauldron that bubbled and smelled like green tea. Four guards were clustered around a low table, playing a game that involved rolling fish bones. They all froze when they heard her talons thud down. Slowly they turned toward her, and she guessed by their guilty faces that they weren't supposed to leave the cave.\n\nShe couldn't tell if they felt guilty about leaving her friends to drown, too, or if they were only worried about how the queen would react when she found out Tsunami had sauntered right into the dragonets' cave.\n\n\"Give me the key,\" she growled.\n\n\"Uh,\" mumbled one of the guards. \"What key?\"\n\n\"Don't make me bite you!\" Tsunami shouted. \"The key! Right now!\" She stepped forward, lashing her tail threateningly.\n\nAlthough all four of the guards were larger than her, they quailed backward. She wondered how many of them she could hurt, if she attacked quickly.\n\n\"We can't!\" protested a second guard. \"We have orders!\"\n\n\"Orders from whom?\" Tsunami demanded.\n\n\"Our \u2014 our commander,\" said the first guard.\n\n\"Shark?\"\n\nThey all nodded fervently, as if they were hoping she'd now go away and yell at him instead of them.\n\n\"Too bad for him,\" Tsunami said. \"Key.\" She held out her talon.\n\n\"But we can't,\" said the second guard again.\n\nTsunami studied his scales, looking for weak spots. She knew she was fast and strong, and she was pretty sure she could knock two guards over the side with her tail while she clawed a third in the face with her talons. Perhaps she could use her teeth on the fourth \u2014\n\nShe remembered the feeling of SeaWing scales sliding under her claws and shuddered. She'd looked at Gill this way, too, in the arena, sizing him up so she could defeat him. What was she about to do? Hurt more dragons, just for being in her way?\n\nDragons she didn't even know \u2014 dragons who could be her brothers, her cousins \u2014 dragons who had families, who were more than nameless guards to somebody.\n\nMaybe her friends were right about her.\n\nThe guards looked terrified, as if they were waiting for her to attack them. But they also knew what Coral was capable of, and surely Shark as well. Tsunami couldn't think of anything scarier than what her mother had done to Tortoise. She didn't really want to try.\n\nSo if she couldn't be more scary than her mother... maybe there was another way. Maybe she could convince the guards, instead of fighting them.\n\nShe remembered the dragons in the SkyWing prison, singing the song about the dragonets coming to save the day. Maybe these guards were like those dragons \u2014 believing in the prophecy, wanting it to come true. Maybe she could use that instead of just hitting them with her tail like she was tempted to.\n\n\"Listen,\" she said fiercely. \"Don't you know about the prophecy?\"\n\nThe guards exchanged glances. She guessed that the prophecy had been talked about plenty since the dragonets arrived.\n\n\"Great. So do you remember anything in the prophecy about a group of octopus heads letting the MudWing drown before he could save the world? Did I miss that part?\" She lashed her tail. \"Do you want to be the ones who ruined Pyrrhia's only chance of stopping the war?\"\n\n\"No,\" blurted the third guard. \"The war has to end.\" He ducked his head. \"You saved my brother today when you sent him to have his wounds tended. She would have kept him standing there for the rest of the Council meeting.\"\n\nTsunami was shocked into silence for a moment. Was that true? Did Queen Coral let soldiers die like that? For no reason?\n\n\"Which one was your brother?\" she asked.\n\nHe indicated his throat \u2014 the one with the gash and the blood coming from his gills.\n\n\"Oh,\" Tsunami said. \"What happened to his friend?\"\n\nAll the guards shook their heads. \"Too late,\" said the first guard. She crushed the fish bones between her front claws and looked away.\n\n\"We want to help you,\" said the third guard. \"But if we support a new queen before the challenge is even made... it could go really badly for us.\"\n\nSo somebody does see me as a potential queen, Tsunami thought, pleased.\n\n\"I told you, she can't be our new queen,\" said the first guard. \"The dragonets in the prophecy have to be outside the war to stop it.\"\n\n\"Besides, Anemone is supposed to be our next queen,\" growled the fourth guard.\n\n\"You don't know what the prophecy means,\" argued the third guard. \"Maybe they're all supposed to rule their tribes and stop the war that way.\"\n\n\"That's not possible,\" insisted the second guard. \"Two of them are male.\"\n\nTsunami got the feeling they'd been having this argument for a while.\n\nThe third guard turned to her suddenly. \"You tell us,\" he said. \"What's your plan? If you really are the dragonets of the prophecy, how are you going to make it come true?\"\n\nTsunami shifted her weight on her talons. That was the question she couldn't answer. The Talons of Peace hadn't taught them what to do. Nobody seemed to know. As much as she liked to talk about how the dragonets would choose the next SandWing queen, she couldn't imagine how that would work. Who would listen to them? Even if they went around the whole continent saying \"How about Blister, we like her. Let's have Blister win,\" what good would that do? It wouldn't stop Burn and Blaze from fighting.\n\nBut some dragons believed in the prophecy \u2014 soldiers exactly like these four. She couldn't let them see that she had no idea what she was doing.\n\n\"Listen,\" she said. \"I don't know if I'm supposed to be the next SeaWing queen or not. Sometimes I think Queen Coral is doing every thing right, and then sometimes \u2014\" She stopped, remembering Tortoise. Would Anemone be a better queen, one day when she was old enough? Would Tsunami?\n\n\"But I do know this,\" she went on. \"We can't fulfill the prophecy without Clay. He's the heart of our group. Without him, the rest of us will fall apart, and we won't be worthy of any destiny at all.\"\n\nShe stepped toward the first guard, whose expression was wavering between belief and worry. \"I know you don't trust MudWings. I know you obey Shark in every thing. But we're talking about the end of the war. You thought nothing you ever did could bring peace or save the dragons you care about, but right now you can make all the difference.\" She took another step closer. \"Just give me the key.\"\n\nThe guard twisted her talons together and looked at the others. Two of them nodded; the fourth looked away, her tail twitching, as if she wanted to be left out of the blame.\n\n\"I'll do every thing I can to protect you,\" Tsunami promised.\n\nThe first guard reached into a niche in the table and pulled out a pair of heavy silver keys. She placed them carefully in Tsunami's talons.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Tsunami said. \"What are your names?\"\n\n\"Snail,\" said the first guard. She pointed at the others. \"Flounder, Herring, and Kelp. Please.\" She paused. \"If you do become queen, please remember us. Whatever she does to punish us, please take care of our families.\"\n\n\"And stop the war,\" Herring said fiercely. \"Whatever you have to do.\"\n\nTsunami stepped back, curling her claws around the keys, and saluted to the guards. She took off from the pavilion and flew back down to the cave.\n\nThe water was nearly up to her wings by now. Clay was standing, watching the rising water unhappily, with Sunny still perched on his back. Glory and Starflight were in the water with Riptide. They both looked tremendously irritated at how wet they were.\n\n\"Hooray!\" Sunny yelped when Tsunami held up the keys.\n\n\"Wow,\" Glory said. Swirling waves of bright yellow shifted through her scales. \"I did not think that was going to work.\"\n\nTsunami plunged her head under the water and lifted the shackles around Clay's ankles. She found the lock for the front talons quickly, inserted one of the keys, and freed him. The other key unlocked the chains on his back talons. Clay kicked them away and shook out his wings as Tsunami stood up again.\n\n\"All better,\" he said, grinning at her. His stomach roared in disagreement. \"Well, almost all better,\" he amended.\n\n\"Let's find somewhere dry, and I'll see about food,\" Tsunami said. She herded them out of the cave ahead of her. Riptide paused, still in the shadows, and she turned to him.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she whispered. \"You saved my friends.\"\n\n\"I didn't do much,\" he whispered back. \"I could never boss anybody into doing what I want. You're really good at it.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Tsunami said. \"Sometimes bossing doesn't work, and you have to try something else. It'd be much easier if everyone just did as I told them.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I should get out of here before someone sees me.\"\n\nShe nodded and wound her tail around his. \"I'll look for you again tomorrow, if I can. There's a lot of Aquatic I still have to learn.\"\n\nHe smiled and slipped out of the cave into the water. She waded onto the beach and watched his sky-blue scales vanish into the underwater tunnel. She was glad she'd found at least one dragon she could trust in the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\n\"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,\" Glory started.\n\n\"Don't you dare,\" Tsunami said, shoving her into the lake.\n\nThe RainWing squawked indignantly and flapped up into the air, showering them all with cold droplets. Rain was still dripping down through the canopy, and small waves scudded across the surface of the bay.\n\n\"Let's try that cave,\" Tsunami said, pointing to one far up the cliff. \"If there's anyone in it, I'll clear them out.\"\n\nGlory snorted.\n\nBut the cave turned out to be empty and dry, and once they all huddled into it, it felt warm as well. Sunny immediately curled around the egg, stroking it and murmuring to it. Starflight blew a small spurt of flame into the air to heat them up.\n\n\"The dragonet can't hear you,\" Tsunami pointed out to Sunny.\n\n\"We don't know that,\" Sunny said. \"She might be scared. I'm just telling her it's all right, and we'll take care of her.\"\n\nTsunami hid a smile. She was glad Sunny had agreed to take the egg \u2014 she'd been a little worried that the little SandWing might still be too mad at Tsunami to want to help. But maybe she'd forgotten about Tsunami attacking the SkyWing soldier. Or maybe Sunny was always willing to help. She didn't fight about every thing just to be difficult, like Glory did.\n\nClay nudged Tsunami with his snout. \"We're happy to see you,\" he said. \"Tell us about the tribe. Does everyone adore you? Are they good fighters? What do they eat?\" he finished wistfully.\n\n\"Let me find you some food first,\" Tsunami said, turning toward the cave entrance. She was surprised at how warm and happy she felt to be back with her friends again.\n\nThis was how she'd expected to feel among the SeaWings \u2014 like she was coming home.\n\nSo why don't I?\n\nTsunami dropped three cauldrons on the cave floor \u2014 one packed with fish, one with clear water, and one with a seaweed-mushroom salad. She'd found them on the kitchen level, unguarded, so she thought they might as well go to the dragonets.\n\nSunny seized the salad cauldron and shoved her nose into it. Starflight peered at the fish, and then, without even asking the others if they'd mind, he shot a burst of fire into the cauldron, which left all the fish blackened and smoky tasting.\n\n\"Hey,\" Tsunami protested. \"I like them raw.\"\n\n\"Overruled,\" Glory said. \"Raw fish is gross.\"\n\n\"Raw fish is awesome,\" Tsunami insisted.\n\n\"You have unreliable taste,\" said Glory. \"You think your terrifying mother is awesome.\"\n\n\"She is not terrifying!\" Tsunami said. \"She's a wonderful queen!\"\n\n\"That is what all the scrolls say,\" Starflight pointed out through a mouthful of charred fish.\n\nTsunami looked up at the cave ceiling and shifted from talon to talon. \"Er,\" she said. \"Well. Apparently she... wrote a lot of those herself.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Starflight blinked in astonishment. \"She's a writer? I had no idea. That's so \u2014 I mean, I wish I \u2014 do you think she'd read something I \u2014\" He stammered to a stop and fidgeted for a moment with the cauldron. \"It's cool, is all,\" he mumbled, shoving a fish in his mouth.\n\n\"Anyway, it's not just the scrolls. Her subjects think she's a great queen, too,\" Tsunami said loyally. Most of them. I think.\n\n\"Compelling,\" said Glory. \"Except for the part where she's kill ing off all her daughters.\"\n\nTsunami stared at Glory, too shocked to respond.\n\n\"Well, wait,\" Clay said. \"That's just a theory.\"\n\n\"A good theory,\" Starflight observed. \"With her daughters dead, and no sisters either, no one will ever be able to challenge her for the throne. She could be queen for a hundred years and die peacefully in her sleep instead of in combat.\"\n\nSunny pulled the egg closer to her and patted it reassuringly.\n\n\"No!\" Tsunami blurted. \"You're so wrong! She would never \u2014 you haven't seen how protective she is. I mean, look at how she takes care of Anemone.\"\n\n\"Like a crazy dragon,\" Glory interjected, waving a smoky fish at Tsunami.\n\n\"It's a good way to make herself look innocent,\" Starflight offered. \"Besides, think about when the murders started.\" He waited, with an \" isn't it obvious?\" look on his face.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Clay said, rubbing his head. \"Did we really study this?\"\n\n\"I don't know either,\" Sunny whispered to him.\n\n\"Starflight,\" Tsunami growled. \"Just tell us.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" he said. \"It was right after the only challenge Queen Coral has ever faced. Her first clutch of eggs had one female in it \u2014\"\n\n\"Orca,\" Tsunami guessed.\n\nStarflight nodded with a pleased expression. \"You do remember! She challenged the queen almost the moment she was full grown. I'm sure Coral was more shocked than anyone. Especially when Orca almost killed her. Queen Coral only won by accident, impaling Orca on that narwhal horn she has on the end of her tail.\"\n\n\"So?\" Tsunami said. \"Why would that make her murder all her future daughters?\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" Glory scoffed. \"She saw how close she could come to death. She realized if she let any of her female children grow up, she might be dead within seven years. Much easier to kill them all in their eggs, or as little dragonets, before they become a threat.\"\n\n\"Stop it!\" Tsunami clutched her head. It couldn't be true. \"She's not like that. She loves her daughters. When she found the other egg broken \u2014\" Tsunami paused, realizing how much they didn't know. She backed up to tell them all about the Council, her mother's scrolls, the mysterious dragon who'd tried to kill her in the tunnel, and the way Queen Coral had reacted when Tortoise failed her.\n\n\"So you see,\" she finished, \"it can't be her kill ing off the female dragonets. She wants them alive more than anyone.\"\n\n\"Someone tried to kill you?\" Clay said. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'd like to know what would have happened to us if they'd succeeded,\" Glory said angrily.\n\n\"Are you saying Sunny's in danger now?\" Starflight demanded at the same time. \"Because of that egg? Why would you do that to her?\"\n\n\"I don't mind,\" Sunny said, cuddling the egg to her chest. But she looked paler than usual.\n\n\"No, listen,\" Tsunami said. She took a step back toward the cave entrance. \"Don't you see? We're doing a good thing by keeping this egg alive. And now Queen Coral has to take care of all of us, because we're protecting her daughter. She can't chain you up and not feed you anymore \u2014 if that was even her idea in the first place.\"\n\nGlory and Starflight exchanged \"yeah, right\" glances. Tsunami frowned at them.\n\n\"And if we find the real assassin,\" she hurried on, \"then we'll be heroes.\"\n\n\"Not if it's your mom,\" Glory said firmly. \"Which it is.\"\n\nTsunami wanted to kick her. \"It can't be my mother,\" she said again. \"The dragon who attacked me in the tunnel didn't have a dragonet attached. Where are you suggesting she stashed Anemone while she came after me? And how could she have broken one of her eggs when Anemone is with her at all times?\"\n\n\"She could have sent someone else,\" Starflight said. \"Or the attack on you could be unrelated to the princess murders. Perhaps there's another reason someone wants you dead.\"\n\n\"Ooo, I have a few guesses,\" Glory said.\n\n\"I think it's Shark,\" Tsunami said, ignoring her. \"Tortoise pointed at him before she died. He was at the Deep Palace before the rest of the Council. If I'm right and there's a secret entrance to the hatchery, he could have snuck in to kill the dragonets without anyone knowing. And he could have attacked me in the tunnel, too. Queen Coral thought she'd sent him on ahead already, so nobody knew where he was exactly.\"\n\n\"Tsunami,\" Clay said, nosing her with his snout. His forehead crinkled worriedly. \"It doesn't sound like you're safe here. Maybe we should go.\"\n\n\"Or at least we should go,\" Glory suggested. \"You can stay here if you really want to. We could leave now, while no one is guarding us.\"\n\nTsunami hesitated. It was so much harder to fit in with the SeaWings than she'd expected. And she didn't like seeing sides of her mother that scared her. She preferred the image in her head that she'd dreamed about her whole life \u2014 the loving queen from The Missing Princess.\n\nShe fingered the pearls around her neck, thinking of how Coral had given them to her the moment she saw her, and how happy she had been.\n\n\"No,\" Sunny said unexpectedly. \"I'm not leaving this egg until it hatches.\" She rested her talons on it protectively. \"And we can't split up. We have to fulfill the prophecy together.\"\n\n\"I agree with Sunny,\" said Starflight. \"I don't love it here either, but we have to stay until we meet Blister. That was the whole point of coming here.\"\n\nNot for me, Tsunami thought. She'd forgotten that Blister would be coming to meet the dragonets. She was not at all sure that was something to look forward to.\n\n\"Then I think you should stay with us,\" Clay said, taking Tsunami's talons in his again. \"So we can keep one another safe.\"\n\nThat was what Tsunami had planned to do anyway, but hearing it from Clay, and seeing Sunny nodding vigorously behind him, made her feel much better. They couldn't hate her too much if they wanted her to stay with them.\n\n\"All right,\" she said as if he'd convinced her. \"Then I can help you protect the egg as well.\"\n\n\"You'd better,\" Starflight muttered, glancing at Sunny with a worried look.\n\nThey curled up together to sleep, sheltering the egg in the middle of their pile. Tsunami rested her head on Clay's shoulder and listened to the rain pattering on the canopy far above them. Last night she'd slept underwater on seaweed, and it had been the most comfortable sleep she'd ever had. But even though she was back in a cave, something about the rise and fall of Clay's deep breathing under her snout was more calming than any seaweed bed or pearl-studded underwater palace.\n\nIt wasn't until she was almost asleep that she remembered she'd forgotten to tell the others about Kestrel.\n\n\"WHERE ARE THEY?!\"\n\nTsunami bolted awake out of a nightmare about the last egg slipping through her claws and smashing on a coral reef. She blinked and checked under her wing. Sunny was still curled neatly around the egg, keeping it warm. The little SandWing lifted her head as if something had woken her up as well. What was it?\n\n\"WHERE ARE THE DRAGONETS? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER? WHERE IS MY EGG?\"\n\n\"Up here,\" called an unfamiliar voice with a weird hiss to it.\n\nTsunami leaped to her feet. A shape was coiled in the cave entrance, watching them. Glittering black eyes met Tsunami's. A poisonous tail barb flicked up and down. White-gold scales marked with black diamond patterns caught the glint of sunlight now trickling through the canopy.\n\nThe storm had passed.\n\nAnd there was a SandWing watching them sleep.\n\nTsunami didn't have to remember the illustrations in their scrolls to guess who it was. She poked her friends with her claws.\n\n\"Wake up, you lazy snoring manatees,\" she hissed.\n\n\"You're a lazy snoring manatee,\" Glory mumbled with her wings over her head. \"And you smell like one, too.\"\n\n\"You're going to feel very silly in a minute,\" Tsunami whispered crossly.\n\n\"Oh, if you insist,\" Clay muttered, mostly asleep. \"I suppose I could eat one more hippo.\"\n\n\"Clay!\" Tsunami yanked on his ears, and he sat up with a bewildered look, shaking his head.\n\n\"Aww,\" he said, his wings drooping. \"What happened to the hippos?\"\n\n\"Look,\" Tsunami whispered, pointing toward the cave entrance.\n\nHer friends all went silent as they saw the SandWing in the shadows.\n\n\"Well, hello,\" said the stranger with a sly smile. Tsunami shivered without quite knowing why. \"So nice to meet you. I'm Queen Blister. They're up here,\" she called again. \"Staying dry out of the storm, I presume,\" she went on conversationally. \"Very wise. I would have done the same thing.\"\n\nA flurry of wingbeats announced Queen Coral's arrival on the ledge behind her, followed by Anemone and three SeaWing guards. The queen poked her head into the cave and saw Tsunami.\n\n\"Where is my egg?\" she demanded, eyeing the other four dragonets.\n\n\"Safe. And warm, like I promised.\" Tsunami stepped aside and let her see Sunny coiled around the egg.\n\nQueen Coral hissed and lashed her tail. \"You never said anything about a SandWing touching my egg.\"\n\n\"Oh, but think about it, Coral,\" Blister interjected. \"These are not ordinary dragons. These are the dragonets of destiny. If they can't be trusted with our future, who can?\" She smiled again, but Tsunami couldn't shake a weird feeling of uneasiness.\n\nQueen Coral took a deep breath, then turned to Blister with outstretched arms and wings spread wide. \"Queen Blister, my friend,\" she said. \"You got my message! I'm so glad you came. I knew you'd want to hear right away that we found the dragonets.\" She waved her tail at Tsunami and her friends.\n\nTsunami squashed a flare of irritation.\n\nBlister clasped Coral's front talons in hers and quickly let go. \"I was thrilled to hear it,\" she said. \"And one of them was your beautiful missing daughter, as we always suspected.\"\n\n\"I knew the Talons of Peace must have sent Webs to steal her,\" Queen Coral said. \"Tsunami, say hello to my ally, Queen Blister.\"\n\n\"We've met,\" said Tsunami. She felt her friends behind her: Starflight frozen in fear; Sunny craning her neck for a better view; Glory studying her claws as if she wasn't that interested; Clay curious but mostly trying to keep his stomach from growling too loudly.\n\n\"Then introduce your friends,\" Coral ordered, smiling at Blister again.\n\n\"Clay, Sunny, Starflight, Glory,\" Tsunami said, flicking a claw at each of them as she said their names. Queen Coral frowned at her.\n\n\"Marvelous,\" said Blister smoothly. \"All so brave and clever-looking. I heard you weren't a SkyWing, Glory, but that doesn't bother me. SkyWings are overrated, don't you agree?\"\n\nGlory's wings twitched, and a ripple of dark pink shifted across her stone-gray scales.\n\n\"You 'heard'?\" Tsunami demanded. \"How? Nobody knew that except our three guardians. They didn't even tell the other Talons of Peace.\"\n\nAnemone gazed at her from behind Coral's wing, her blue eyes wide. The SeaWing guards shuffled on their feet ner vously.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" said Blister. Her eyes flicked to Tsunami and away. \"Let's just say I have friends. NightWing friends.\" She slithered up to Starflight and brushed one claw slowly down his neck. \"So I've heard a lot about you.\"\n\nThe NightWing dragonet really looked as if he might turn to stone and never move again. Tsunami would have kicked him if she'd been closer. Don't be so impressed by her. We're the ones with the power. According to the prophecy, we choose the next SandWing queen, and she knows it!\n\nBlister glanced down at Sunny, who was frowning. \"Sweet,\" she said, chucking Sunny under the chin. \"And you must be the burly one,\" she said to Clay. She reached out and squeezed one of the muscles in his forearm.\n\n\"I guess,\" Clay stammered.\n\n\"I'm sure you've heard things about me, too,\" Blister said, returning to Queen Coral's side. Her tail slid across the cave floor like a snake, the poisonous tip rattling on the stone. \"But you can't always trust rumors and propaganda, especially when it comes to a big responsibility like the prophecy. So ask me anything you like. I'd be delighted to help you make your decision \u2014 although of course I hope you'll choose me.\" Her glittering eyes swept over all of them again and back to Coral. \"So, Coral, what's for breakfast?\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Glory muttered. \"Fish.\"\n\nClay blinked at the queen hopefully.\n\n\"Yes, what a good idea. Let's go eat,\" said Queen Coral. \"And then you can tell me the latest updates from the war. We hear something odd is going on with the SkyWings. Anemone, Tsunami, come.\"\n\nTsunami's gills flared. She was not a baby dragonet to be ordered around. And she had no intention of leaving her friends alone again.\n\n\"Let the others come, too,\" Blister said before Tsunami could speak up. \"I'd love to get to know them better.\"\n\nCoral wrinkled her snout at the dragonets. \"All right,\" she said doubtfully.\n\n\"You can leave that here,\" Blister said, nodding at the egg.\n\n\"No!\" Coral and Sunny said at the same time. The SeaWing queen gave the little dragonet a surprised look.\n\nSunny hugged the egg closer. \"No way,\" she said. \"It stays with me.\"\n\nBlister shrugged, and Tsunami suddenly wondered how she felt about new dragonets who might threaten her ally's life. Maybe it was in Blister's best interests to make sure no one survived to challenge Coral. She certainly seemed sinister enough to be the assassin.\n\nBut Blister couldn't breathe underwater, so she couldn't get to the Royal Hatchery. She might be involved, but she couldn't actually be committing the murders. It had to be a fellow SeaWing.\n\nThe feasting hall was two levels above the kitchens, so the smells of pickled fish and roasting seagulls (\"in honor of our SandWing guests,\" Queen Coral explained) surrounded them as they arranged themselves around the long, low oval table. Queen Coral's seat was higher than everyone else's, but Blister's, right beside her, was not much lower.\n\nStarflight was seated to Blister's right, with Tsunami next to Anemone on her mother's left. On Tsunami's other side was Whirlpool, who played with his hoop earring, slurped loudly as he ate, and droned on about Coral's latest book even when nobody seemed to be listening.\n\nSeaWing guards were arranged around the perimeter of the floor, interspersed with SandWing soldiers who had arrived with Blister. The SeaWings stamped their talons and swished their tails, casting dark looks at the SandWings.\n\nTsunami spotted Snail and Herring among the guards. Their eyes darted anxiously from side to side, as if they were wondering how they were still alive.\n\nBecause Mother wants to make a spectacle of them, Tsunami guessed. Coral was probably waiting for the right moment to punish them in public, the way she'd punished Tortoise.\n\nWell, two can play the spectacle game, Your Majesty.\n\n\"MOTHER!\" Tsunami declared dramatically as the waitstaff set bowls of soup in front of each dragon. Beside her, Whirlpool jumped and nearly tipped his bowl onto himself. Even Queen Coral looked startled.\n\n\"I have something DREADFULLY SHOCKING to tell you!\" Tsunami announced. She wanted this to be loud, so every dragon could witness it.\n\n\"Oh?\" said Coral. \"Could we discuss it after breakfast? In a civilized fashion?\"\n\n\"NO,\" Tsunami said, louder than before. \"This is TOO SHOCKING.\"\n\nEven SeaWings not invited to the feast were starting to peer out of their caves and poke their heads out of the lake to hear what was going on.\n\n\"Well, perhaps \u2014\" Coral started.\n\n\"WOULD YOU BELIEVE,\" Tsunami said, \"that my friends \u2014 the DRAGONETS OF DESTINY, remember \u2014 were CHAINED UP? And STARVED? In YOUR CAVES? By YOUR DRAGONS?\"\n\n\"What?\" Coral said, flapping her wings. She looked thoroughly alarmed, but Tsunami couldn't tell whether that was because the news actually surprised her or because she was being confronted openly with what she'd done.\n\n\"I KNOW!\" Tsunami practically bellowed. \"It's UNBELIEVABLE. I'm sure you didn't know anything about it, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Coral said in a hurry. \"I would never treat any dragonets that way! Especially my dearest daughter's dearest friends. Who are part of the prophecy and every thing.\"\n\n\"And I'm sure you'll want to punish the dragons who disobeyed you by treating my friends so terribly,\" Tsunami said. \"Right? Like, for instance, the one who lied to you about keeping them well fed?\" She shot a glare at Lagoon, who froze with a sea snail halfway to her mouth, suddenly realizing what was going on.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" said the queen. \"Guards! Throw Lagoon in one of the underwater dungeons!\"\n\n\"But \u2014\" Lagoon said. \"But I was only \u2014\"\n\n\"Next time you'll obey my orders,\" said the queen. A stripe quickly flashed under her wings, but Tsunami spotted it, and it was one Riptide had taught her.\n\nSilence.\n\nOh, Mother, Tsunami thought sadly.\n\n\"Can't I even \u2014\" Lagoon said, reaching wistfully for her cauldron of soup as the guards pulled her away.\n\n\"No breakfast for you,\" the queen ordered. \"Think about how that feels as you sit in my dungeon.\"\n\nTsunami was fairly sure Lagoon wouldn't actually suffer very much. Queen Coral would have her back at Council meetings before long. But Tsunami wasn't done.\n\n\"And GUESS WHO ordered your guards to chain up Clay?\" Tsunami demanded. She flung an accusing talon toward Shark. \"COMMANDER SHARK! Of all the dragons who should obey you in every thing! Is that not UTTERLY SHOCKING?\"\n\n\"It is,\" Coral said. Tsunami thought she might be grinding her teeth, but she hid it well. \"I find it quite hard to believe.\"\n\n\"Imagine the distress the poor guards felt,\" Tsunami said, \"when I explained to them that you would never have ordered those chains on Clay. To have to choose between their commander and their queen! Naturally they chose you, of course. That's why they gave me the key to Clay's chains. Because they understood that's what you would have wanted them to do. Right?\"\n\nQueen Coral gave Tsunami an appraising glance. Beside her, Blister was eating her soup with an amused expression.\n\n\"Very good,\" Coral said slowly. \"It sounds like those guards are practically heroes.\"\n\n\"And Shark \u2014\" Tsunami prodded her.\n\n\"To the dungeon with him as well,\" the queen said with a wave.\n\nShark didn't protest like Lagoon had. He snarled at the guards who approached him, shot Tsunami a look full of hatred, and headed off to the dungeon without another word.\n\nSplendid, Tsunami thought to herself. It didn't guarantee that Snail and the other guards would be safe, but surely that had to make it more difficult for Queen Coral to punish them for last night.\n\nNot only that, but with Shark in the dungeon, even for only a day or two, Tsunami felt like she and her friends and the egg would all be a lot safer.\n\n\"Such excitement,\" Blister said. \"If we're quite finished with our morning theatrics, I would love to ask you brilliant little dragonets about the prophecy.\"\n\n\"Starflight can recite it for you,\" Tsunami said. \"He's really good at memorizing things. And then repeating those things over and over, especially when no one cares to hear them.\" She shot a grin at Starflight, wishing he would relax. He looked too petrified to eat.\n\n\"How splendid! How impressive!\" Whirlpool said from beside her, in a voice of sincere admiration. Tsunami wrinkled her snout at him. He probably would get along well with Starflight, now that she thought about it. But Starflight was not even remotely as awful or annoying as Whirlpool.\n\n\"I assume you have a plan about how to fulfill this prophecy,\" Blister said. \"I mean, you must, right?\"\n\nA tense hush fell over the feasting table. Ears were pricked all over the palace. Every dragon in Pyrrhia wanted to hear the answer to this.\n\nTsunami felt like bees were crawling under her scales. Of course they didn't have a plan. They'd only recently escaped from under the mountain and then the SkyWing palace. They'd barely had time to stop and think, or even a safe place to do that. And nothing they'd ever been taught had prepared them for what they had to do. Thanks for that, too, Talons of Peace, she thought bitterly.\n\nBut they couldn't admit that to all these dragons... especially the ones who were counting on them.\n\n\"We're working on it,\" she said. \"Obviously we can't say too much.\"\n\n\"This is the information-gathering phase,\" Glory offered unexpectedly.\n\nBlister gave Starflight a significant look.\n\n\"Um,\" he blurted. \"But. We think you, of course \u2014 I mean, obviously you \u2014 er \u2014 you'd make a great, uh, queen. Of the SandWings. That is. The other two \u2014 hardly any competition \u2014 really, it's, um, a clear, so to speak, sort of, um, choice.\"\n\n\"Starflight,\" Tsunami said sharply. \"What are you doing? You don't speak for all of us.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" said Blister. She narrowed her eyes at Starflight. \"Then who does?\"\n\n\"We each speak for ourselves,\" Glory said before Tsunami could answer.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Sunny piped up.\n\n\"And we haven't decided anything,\" Tsunami said firmly. She wished she were close enough to kick Starflight and make him shut up.\n\n\"I'mjustsayingshe'dbeallright,\" he mumbled, subsiding. Blister looked mildly disgusted.\n\n\"You're quite right, NightWing,\" Coral said, patting Blister's talon. \"She's an excellent queen.\"\n\nBlister smiled, but Tsunami noticed that she moved her talon away as soon as she could. She also noticed that Blister called her mother simply \"Coral,\" while the queen of the SeaWings kept referring to her ally as \"Queen Blister.\" Tsunami wasn't sure she liked the way they acted around each other.\n\nTsunami wanted to trust her mother's choices. She wanted to like Blister. It would be uncomplicated to choose Blister as the SandWing queen. Then the dragonets could stay safely in the Kingdom of the Sea and support the SeaWing side of the war.\n\nSo why didn't she want to do that?\n\nWhat was it about Blister that felt so... wrong?\n\n\"Oh,\" Queen Coral said. \"Queen Blister, I meant to tell you, the strangest thing happened. We found a dead SkyWing in our territory the other day.\"\n\nOops. Tsunami still hadn't told the others about Kestrel. Something new for them to be mad at her about. She sighed.\n\n\"Really,\" Blister said. \"That sounds like good news to me.\"\n\nCoral laughed. \"You're right, that's true. But what's really strange is she'd been poison-stabbed by a SandWing. Why would a SandWing and a SkyWing be fighting all the way out here?\"\n\nTsunami hadn't known about the SandWing poison. She only remembered the blood pouring from Kestrel's neck.\n\nHer tail uncoiled as she realized \u2014 I don't have to worry, then. Mother will know it wasn't us who killed her. None of us could do that, not with Sunny's useless tail.\n\nAt the same time, questions began pounding in her head. What SandWing would want to kill Kestrel? She scratched her gills, puzzled. Had Burn found her and punished her for what happened to Queen Scarlet? But why would either of them be in SeaWing territory?\n\nBlister shrugged, resettling her wings. \"That is very peculiar,\" she said.\n\n\"I wonder who she was,\" said Queen Coral. \"She had these odd burn scars on her palms \u2014\"\n\nTsunami reached over Whirlpool and grabbed for Sunny's forearm, but it was too late to stop her gasp of horror.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Sunny cried. \"That sounds like Kestrel! Tsunami, what if it was Kestrel?\" She pressed her claws to her snout, her eyes welling with tears.\n\nA heavy silence fell over the table. Every SeaWing in the entire palace seemed to be staring at Sunny and Tsunami. Queen Coral was giving Tsunami a particularly intent look.\n\nAcross the table, Glory and Starflight both had their mouths open in shock.\n\n\"Tsunami?\" Coral said slowly. \"Is there something you want to tell us?\"\n\n\"All right,\" Tsunami said, squirming. \"Yes. I'm sorry. I saw her. It was Kestrel.\"\n\nSunny let out a sob and buried her head in her talons. Clay patted her on the back awkwardly.\n\n\"Your SandWing seems surprisingly distressed about this SkyWing,\" Blister observed.\n\n\"Kestrel was one of the guardians who raised us,\" Tsunami said. \"Although she wasn't very nice, Sunny. She doesn't deserve your grief.\"\n\nSunny's wings trembled, and she didn't look up.\n\n\"So,\" Coral said, leaning toward Tsunami. \"Explain this to me. You recognized this SkyWing \u2014 a SkyWing I have now been wondering about for days \u2014 and you chose not to tell us who she was. Why is that?\"\n\n\"I didn't think knowing who she was would explain anything,\" Tsunami said. \"I knew her, but I have no idea why she was out here or who killed her.\" She glanced at Glory and Starflight and Clay apologetically. \"And I wanted to tell my friends first. Kestrel wasn't a good parent, but she was one of the only parents we ever knew. I thought they should know \u2014 and I just haven't had a chance to tell them.\"\n\n\"I understand perfectly,\" Blister purred. She stroked Coral's talon with one claw. \"Forgive her, Coral. It can be very shocking, seeing the dead body of a dragon you know. Especially when you've probably wanted to slash her throat yourself once or twice in your lifetime \u2014 right, Tsunami? I know I felt that way about my mother most of the time.\"\n\nTsunami looked up slowly, her green eyes meeting Blister's cold black gaze.\n\nHow did she know?\n\nQueen Coral had only said that Kestrel was stabbed by a SandWing. Tsunami clenched her talons under the table.\n\nSo how did Blister know that Kestrel's throat was slashed?\n\nTsunami didn't know what to do. Should she accuse Blister of lying \u2014 of murder \u2014 in front of all these dragons? How would Queen Coral react?\n\nStop yourself, she thought. Think. Don't lash out immediately, the way you want to. She shot a glance at Starflight. He was smart enough to have noticed Blister's mistake, and sure enough, there was a puzzled expression on his face.\n\nHe met her eyes and shook his head a tiny bit.\n\nTsunami took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Perhaps he was right. She might put her friends at risk if she picked a fight with Blister right now. Better to wait and watch. And hope that Starflight could use that giant brain to figure out why in the world Blister would have killed Kestrel.\n\nBlister's dark tongue flickered in and out of her mouth. She leaned toward Coral, smiled at Anemone, and said, \"How is our secret weapon coming along?\"\n\nAnemone dropped her head and stared unhappily at the table.\n\n\"Wonderfully!\" Coral said. She patted Anemone's head, beaming with pride. \"Why don't we show you? Whirlpool, come along.\"\n\nWhirlpool puffed out his chest and stood up. Curious, Tsunami got to her feet at the same time, but Queen Coral shook her head, her pearls dancing in the green light. \"You can skip this, dear. I'm sure it won't interest you.\"\n\n\"I'd like her to come,\" Anemone piped up. \"Please?\"\n\nCoral and Blister exchanged a significant look. They don't trust me, Tsunami guessed. They don't want me to know about any \"secret weapon\" until they're sure I'm on Blister's side.\n\nWell, too bad.\n\n\"I'm sure it'll be very interesting,\" Tsunami said with earnest enthusiasm. \"Everything you do is interesting, Mother.\" She blinked her large green eyes at Queen Coral. Across the table, Glory snorted and then tried to hide it with a bout of coughing.\n\n\"Please?\" Anemone said again.\n\n\"All right,\" Coral said with a sigh. \"But not the others.\" Her gaze flicked suspiciously to Clay.\n\nTsunami followed Coral, Blister, Anemone, and Whirlpool to a high level of the pavilion she hadn't visited before. It was shaped like a bowl, with low walls and a slight slope down to the center. Weapons were lined up along one side: white twisting horn spears like the one attached to Coral's tail; battle armor of chain link or scales hammered over more scales; gleaming metal claws like the ones scavengers carried in all the scrolls. None of the weapons looked particularly special or secret.\n\nBut \u2014 Tsunami looked sharply at the wall of weapons again. That battle armor... surely that was what her attacker had been wearing in the tunnel. That was why she hadn't been able to claw him (or her). She remembered her claws scraping uselessly against metal. And one of the vests definitely had a nick in it. So who had access to this level?\n\nProbably everyone, she thought ruefully.\n\n\"May I?\" Whirlpool said officiously, gesturing to one of the strands of pearls on Coral's wings. She dipped her wing so he could remove it. He strutted to the center of the bowl and carefully laid the rope of pearls on the floor in front of him.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, rubbing his talons together. \"See if you can make it crawl over to the wall.\"\n\nTsunami looked around. Who on earth was he talking to? Where was the secret weapon?\n\nAnemone sat down next to Tsunami and sighed. \"Do I have to?\" she said. \"It seems like a waste.\" Tsunami stared at her.\n\n\"Practicing is never time wasted,\" Whirlpool said, wagging a claw in a way that made Tsunami want to snap it off.\n\n\"But I don't want to end up like Albatross,\" Anemone said. She flicked her wings and edged a little closer to Tsunami.\n\n\"He made an entire pavilion grow from stone before he went mad and tried to kill everyone,\" Whirlpool said patronizingly. \"You have a way to go before that happens. Now. The necklace, please.\"\n\nAnemone sighed again. She held out her front talons and, to Tsunami's amazement, the necklace began to slowly wind toward the wall, moving in curves like a snake.\n\n\"Oh my gosh,\" Tsunami blurted. Suddenly every thing made sense \u2014 the \"magic\" in Whirlpool's title, the self-adjusting harness in the Deep Palace. \"Anemone! You're an animus!\"\n\nAnemone dropped her talons, and the necklace stopped moving. \"I know,\" she said with an expression like she would rather be descended from sea cucumbers.\n\n\"We've had a few animus dragons in the royal family,\" Coral said proudly. \"But not in several generations. Anemone was hatched just in time to help us win this war.\"\n\n\"Careful,\" Blister said with a hiss.\n\n\"She doesn't have to know our whole plan to guess that an animus dragon would be very useful in battle,\" Coral said. \"There are lots of marvelous things we can do with this power.\"\n\n\"Yes, watch this,\" Whirlpool said. He picked up a metal armor breastplate and flung it up in the air, over the edge. \"Catch it with a spear!\" he called to Anemone.\n\nNone of the spears moved. The breastplate plummeted toward the lake.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Anemone said, not looking very sorry. \"You didn't give me enough warning.\"\n\n\"Ow!\" someone yelled from below.\n\n\"Anemone,\" Whirlpool said with a sigh. \"Battle is all about quick thinking.\"\n\n\"How would you know that?\" she said.\n\nHe frowned at her.\n\n\"Try it again,\" Queen Coral said, clapping her front talons together. \"And this time do as you're told, Anemone.\"\n\nWhirlpool flung another flat piece of metal armor into the air. Instantly one of the narwhal spears shot after it and pierced it through.\n\nBlister and Coral applauded, but Tsunami thought it was more interesting that the spear then carefully brought the armor back to rest safely on the floor.\n\n\"Impressive,\" Blister said. \"But not much more impressive than what I saw last time. What about progress? What about bigger objects? How much longer must this training go on?\"\n\n\"I'm sure she's nearly ready,\" said Queen Coral.\n\n\"Years. Lots more years,\" Anemone said at the same time.\n\nBlister's forked black tongue slipped through her teeth, and she narrowed her eyes at Anemone. \"Coral,\" she said, tilting her head.\n\n\"Stay here,\" Coral ordered. She slid as far away as the harness would reach and crouched with her wings spread, whispering to Blister.\n\nWhirlpool strutted over to Tsunami and Anemone. Anemone gave him a glare, and suddenly the pearl necklace he'd left on the floor whirled around, whipped under his belly, and soared off the ledge. With a yelp, the green dragon raced after it, diving over the edge.\n\n\"This is what you have to save me from,\" Anemone whispered quickly.\n\n\"Boring lessons with Whirlpool?\" Tsunami answered. \"Sure, I'll get right on that.\"\n\n\"No, not just that,\" Anemone said, wrinkling her snout. \"Although he is awful. All he ever asks me to do is make things move. I can enchant any inanimate object to do my bidding, and he's like, 'Make this spear dance! Now make that chair walk from here to here!' It's insulting, really.\"\n\n\"What else could you do?\" Tsunami asked. She glanced at Coral and Blister, but they both had their backs turned and were sharing their own secrets.\n\n\"According to Blister, I should be able to enchant the Sky Kingdom's palace to cave in on all the SkyWings,\" Anemone said softly, looking up at Tsunami. \"She also wants me to curse a spear so it will search for Burn's heart and not stop until it kills her.\"\n\nTsunami coiled her tail closer, trying not to look as shaken as she felt. If Anemone could do either of those things, she really was a secret weapon. Power like that could end this war in a week.\n\n\"I don't know for sure if I can do any of that,\" Anemone said. \"I'm scared to try. I don't want to try. Every time an animus dragon uses her power, she loses a bit of herself.\" Tsunami's sister held out her talons as if they might not really be hers. \"Albatross was a prince and a hero at first, but they didn't know about the price of animus magic then. Building the pavilion turned him evil.\" She slipped one talon into Tsunami's grasp. It felt colder than ice and hard as stone. \"I don't want that to happen to me.\"\n\nHow can I possibly save you? Tsunami wondered. Even she was tempted by the kind of power that could bring peace so quickly. But she couldn't ignore the fear in Anemone's eyes.\n\n\"First I'll catch the dragon who's trying to kill us,\" she said, curling one wing around Anemone. \"Maybe then Mother will let you off the harness and start to trust you more. Maybe she'll listen when you tell her you don't want to use your power.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" Anemone muttered.\n\nTsunami didn't know what else to say. She had no words of advice ready for dealing with strange magical problems. But she did have a lot of other questions for Anemone, and this might be her only time to ask them.\n\n\"Can I ask you a question?\" she said. \"If none of Coral's daughters survived, who would be queen after her?\"\n\nAnemone flicked her tail around and studied the end of it. \"Who knows? I don't think a queen has ever died and passed on the throne peacefully, at least not in our kingdom. And who else would challenge her? I heard Uncle Shark say once that maybe a son should inherit. But I guess it would probably be our cousin Moray. Except she doesn't want the job \u2014 she wants Coral to be queen forever. At least that's what she says.\"\n\n\"You don't believe her?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"There's just something weird about her,\" Anemone said. \"Isn't there? It's like she must be faking, because nobody could really act like that all the time and mean it.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Tsunami said. \"But I think the assassin is Shark. I bet he wants Moray to be queen, and if none of Coral's daughters survive, it'll have to be her.\"\n\nAnemone snorted. \"Moray would rather die than challenge the queen.\"\n\nTsunami saw Queen Coral's wings flutter closed. \"In the meanwhile,\" she whispered quickly, \"keep acting like you need more training. Make mistakes sometimes if you have to. Make them think you aren't ready for as long as possible.\"\n\n\"Mistakes,\" Anemone said with a sigh. \"Why didn't I think of that?\"\n\nQueen Coral slid back to them, twisting her snout from side to side. \"Where's Whirlpool?\" she asked.\n\n\"I think he lost something,\" Anemone said innocently.\n\n\"Queen Blister wants you to try \u2014\" Coral started, but stopped as the SandWing's head suddenly went up. Blister stared around the cavern, poised in her eerie stillness, nothing but her eyes moving. Tsunami felt hypnotized by her; Anemone and Coral were equally silent, waiting.\n\nBlister's gaze slowly lifted to the canopy of leaves and vines overhead.\n\nThen Tsunami heard it, too.\n\nSomething was moving around up there.\n\nSomething big.\n\nQueen Coral hissed softly. \"I'll call my guards,\" she said.\n\n\"Wait.\" Blister lifted one claw. Her voice barely stirred the air. \"We want to catch whoever it is, not scare them away.\" She flicked her tail. \"Come.\" Quietly she slid over the side of the pavilion and flew to the cliff wall.\n\nCoral and Anemone went after her, and Tsunami followed close behind. She wasn't sure she'd been invited, but she didn't care.\n\nBlister landed on a ledge beside the tallest waterfall. The water spilled out of a hole high above, nearly at the level of the canopy. It rushed in torrents down the cliff wall, dividing around boulders and sending out small clouds of spray.\n\nAnd it was loud, loud enough to hide the sound of their wingbeats as the four of them flew higher, staying close to the falls.\n\nShe is clever, Tsunami thought, glancing at Blister. Why does that make me more ner vous about her instead of less?\n\nAt the top of the waterfall, the SandWing hovered for a moment, studying the canopy with her glittering dark eyes. From this high, the dragons far below looked like lizards, scurrying around the pavilion and swimming in the lake. Tsunami spotted Whirlpool, paddling frantically in circles with his talons outstretched. He was still trying to catch the pearl necklace as it twisted away from him.\n\nThe canopy was thick and green, with vines twisted together over centuries and leaves the size of dragon talons. Up close, Tsunami could also see small blue flowers shaped like broken eggshells shining in the small sunlit gaps.\n\nSomething stirred the leaves. Something was crawling through the vines not far from the edge of the cliff. Something the size of a dragon.\n\n\"A spy,\" Queen Coral hissed under her breath.\n\nSuddenly Blister darted up into the leaves, quick as a cobra striking. She sank her talons into the hidden dragon and ripped it out of the canopy. In the same movement, she whirled and threw the dragon at Tsunami.\n\nStartled, Tsunami reached to catch him and found herself face-to-face with Webs.\n\nWebs, one of the guardians from the Talons of Peace. The traitor who had stolen her egg from the Royal Hatchery, who had never taught her the underwater language.\n\nShe barely had time to register the terror on his face before he slammed into her, and they both crashed into the cliff wall. He flapped his wings, pulling back, and she caught her breath as she righted herself.\n\n\"Oh,\" Blister said, sounding disappointed. \"It's just a SeaWing.\"\n\n\"Not just a SeaWing.\" Queen Coral seized Webs by his neck and shook him. Her green eyes were sparks of rage and triumph. \"This is Webs, our tribe's biggest traitor. I've been looking for him for years.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Webs croaked. He scrabbled at his throat. \"Please. I've come to beg for mercy.\"\n\n\"Mercy,\" Coral hissed. \"After what you did.\" She shook him again, harder. \"Mercy denied.\" She flung him into the air and slammed her tail into the side of his head with a horrible-sounding CRACK. Webs went limp, his eyes closed, and he plummeted toward the lake below.\n\n\"Webs!\" Tsunami yelled. She knew she should hate him, too, considering the life he'd forced on her. But she found herself diving after him.\n\nAll over the Summer Palace, SeaWings stopped to look up, gaping at the sight of a dragon falling from the sky. None of them moved to help him. Tsunami beat her wings desperately, trying to catch up. Would he die if he hit the water from such a height?\n\n\"Clay!\" she shouted. \"Clay! Help!\"\n\nClay immediately burst out of their cave, blinking and befuddled but ready.\n\n\"Catch him!\" Tsunami shouted, pointing. Clay shot away from the cliff, banking around to intercept Webs's body as he fell. The two dragons collided in midair, and Clay tumbled, trying to hang on to the heavier, larger dragon.\n\nBut he slowed him down enough for Tsunami to catch up. She lifted Webs from the other side until his front half rested on Clay's back and his back half lay across her shoulders. Carefully she and Clay struggled over to the pavilion, collapsing on the first level they could reach \u2014 the library, as it turned out.\n\nWebs sprawled across the black and blue talon prints, his head lolling to the side. Blood trickled out of one ear.\n\n\"Wake up,\" Tsunami said, shaking him. \"Come on, you can't die. Not before I get a chance to yell at you.\"\n\n\"Where did he come from?\" Clay asked.\n\nThump, thump, thump. The other three dragonets landed around them. Glory looked down her nose at Webs, dark green zigzagging through her wings. Sunny crouched beside his head. The egg was cradled underneath her, making it hard for her to get too close, but she reached out and touched his snout with one front talon.\n\n\"Webs?\" she said softly. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Search the area.\" Tsunami heard Queen Coral's voice barking orders. \"Make sure there are no more Talons of Peace lurking around.\" She spat out the words Talons of Peace as if they tasted like rotten fish.\n\nTsunami glanced up uneasily at the canopy overhead, where a dragon-sized gap now yawned in the green leaves. A bolt of sunlight shone through, and she couldn't help but worry what else might find its way through the protective cover. Had Blister thought about that at all before she struck? Surely she wouldn't deliberately endanger her allies... but maybe she didn't care about them enough to treat their defenses cautiously.\n\nQueen Coral swooped into the library, her face majestic with fury. She loomed over Webs as Blister, Anemone, and Moray all arrived behind her.\n\n\"Why would you save his life?\" the queen hissed at Tsunami. \"After every thing he did to you?\"\n\nI don't know, Tsunami thought. Why didn't she want Webs dead? It had been instinct that sent her flying after him. Maybe I want to give Riptide a chance to meet his father, like I never really got to. Or maybe I'm not ready to lose our last guardian yet. For most of her life, she'd only known seven dragons, and two of them had died in the last ten days. That seemed like more than enough to her.\n\n\"I thought he might have information we need,\" she lied. \"Maybe about the Talons \u2014\"\n\n\"Or,\" Blister interjected smoothly, \"perhaps now we can find out how he snuck into the Royal Hatchery to steal the egg. Clever dragonet. Tsunami must get her brains from you.\"\n\nQueen Coral hissed and glared down at Webs. \"I suppose interrogating him would be useful,\" she said. \"Moray, wake him up.\"\n\nMoray dove over the edge and returned with a large clamshell full of seawater. She threw this in Webs's face with no particular gentleness. Sunny let out a little yelp and jumped away from the splash.\n\nWebs coughed and sputtered and snorted water back out his nostrils. He sat up slowly, holding his head and gingerly wiping his snout dry.\n\nHis gaze landed first on the dragonets, and Tsunami was surprised to see his whole face light up with joy. He stared from Clay to Glory to Starflight as if he couldn't believe they were all alive. He held out his front talons, and Sunny clutched the one closest to her, smiling back at him.\n\n\"But the SkyWings,\" he said. \"I thought you were dead! How did you \u2014?\"\n\n\"We escaped,\" Glory said coldly.\n\n\"No thanks to the Talons of Peace,\" Tsunami added. \"Or stupid unhelpful Morrowseer.\"\n\n\"It was amazing,\" Sunny said. \"You should have seen us! We \u2014\"\n\n\"We'll tell you about it some other time,\" Clay interrupted. Sunny looked up at him, then over at the SeaWings, and snapped her mouth shut.\n\nWebs saw Queen Coral and the thunderous look on her face, and Blister coiled menacingly behind her. He shuddered, then winced as if that had made his head hurt even more.\n\n\"Welcome back,\" Coral snarled at him. \"I thought you were too cowardly to ever return here.\"\n\n\"I know I am not worthy of your mercy, Your Majesty,\" Webs said, staggering to his feet so he could kneel in front of her. \"But I heard \u2014 I hoped...\"\n\n\"Why did you steal one of my eggs?\" Queen Coral demanded. \"You could have stolen from any other dragon in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\nTsunami's wings twitched. And that would have been all right? Are you only angry because he stole from you? Not because a dragonet's life was ruined?\n\n\"It had to be an egg due to hatch on the brightest night,\" Webs said in a wavering voice. \"And it had to fit the prophecy \u2014 the SeaWing egg of deepest blue. I'd seen your eggs when I was guarding them, before I... before I left.\"\n\n\"You mean ran away,\" Coral snarled. \"In the middle of a battle.\"\n\nLooking at Webs, Tsunami couldn't believe he was Riptide's father. Riptide was so much stronger and braver than this shivering old dragon.\n\n\"I remembered her egg,\" Webs pressed on, his wings drooping. \"It was so blue \u2014 it had to be the right one. I'm so sorry, Your Majesty,\" he said in a rush. \"But the prophecy is so important. I would never have betrayed you for anything else, but for peace... How could I not do as the Talons asked?\"\n\n\"So how did you get into the hatchery?\" Coral's tail lashed threateningly. \"I had guards posted at that door every moment until the eggs hatched.\"\n\nTsunami leaned toward him. If he knew of a secret way in, surely that would point them to the dragonet killer.\n\nWebs hung his head. \"I drugged the guards,\" he said. \"I \u2014 I knew someone who helped me slip a sleeping potion into their evening meal. They were asleep when I crawled in and out again with the egg. It wasn't their fault.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Coral said dismissively, \"I killed them anyway. As for the someone who helped you \u2014 your wife, I assume?\"\n\nWebs flinched.\n\n\"I wondered about that,\" Coral said. Her expression was mildly pleased, as if she was finally putting the pieces of an old puzzle into place. \"Stupid of her not to run away with you. Of course, that's why she was reassigned from the kitchens to active duty in the war soon after. Too bad that first battle was such a bloodbath.\"\n\nWebs looked as if all the light had been scraped out of his scales. Sunny made a woeful, sympathetic noise and edged closer, twining her tail around his. Even Glory looked a little sorry for him.\n\nTsunami had never thought about Webs leaving behind a family until she met Riptide. Even then, she hadn't pictured him abandoning a wife and baby dragonet. Maybe he really did care about the prophecy more than anything, if he was willing to give up so much for it. She would not have made the same choice, herself.\n\n\"Now I know the dragonets are safe,\" Webs said quietly. \"So you can do whatever you like to me.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Coral rumbled. \"We can start with you telling me where to find the Talons of Peace.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Tsunami asked as Webs shook his head. \"Why would you want to find them?\"\n\nCoral showed all her sharp white teeth. \"Revenge, dear. They stole from me, and no one has ever gotten away with that. Now I must hunt them down and exterminate them.\"\n\n\"Don't you have more important things to do?\" Tsunami demanded. \"I think they're awful dragons, yes, with a really misguided sense of how to raise dragonets to fulfill a prophecy. But all they want to do is end the war. Isn't that what everyone wants?\"\n\n\"We're not trying to end the war,\" Blister said in her slithering voice. \"We're trying to win it. I hope you can see the difference.\"\n\n\"But kill ing the Talons of Peace won't help with that. They haven't hurt anyone but us five,\" Tsunami said, waving her talons at the other dragonets.\n\n\"In fact,\" Starflight said out of the blue, \"they almost certainly saved Tsunami's life.\"\n\nThe NightWing froze as everyone turned to stare at him. Queen Coral hissed menacingly. Even Webs looked confused.\n\n\"What?\" Coral growled.\n\n\"Well,\" Starflight stammered, \"the \u2014 the \u2014 the other female dragonets in her hatching \u2014 all died. The same way every one of your potential heirs has died. Whoever is kill ing them, Webs took her egg away before the assassin could get to it. If her egg had stayed in the hatchery, she'd be dead. By stealing her, he \u2014 and the Talons of Peace \u2014 actually saved her life. Uh. Right?\"\n\nTsunami felt like she was shape-shifting, all of her bones being shoved from one skin into another. No. The Talons of Peace ruined my life. I've always known that. It's the truest thing I know. They didn't save me.\n\nBut she knew in her scales that Starflight was right. They did save her. By accident, but they did. Webs did.\n\nShe remembered all her dreams of how her life should have been if she'd hatched here and been raised by her own mother. None of them would have happened. She'd have been dead within the first week, her neck snapped like the sad little dragonet in the eggshell.\n\n\"Your Majesty!\" The small messenger dragon from before \u2014 Urchin, Tsunami remembered \u2014 tumbled out of the air and skidded to a stop at Queen Coral's claws. He bowed as low as he could, covering his head. \"We found a suspicious dragon lurking outside. He must be working with Webs.\"\n\n\"Bring him to me,\" Queen Coral growled in a voice that rang off the cavern walls.\n\nUrchin pointed down at the tunnel, and they all leaned over to see Piranha and a troop of SeaWing soldiers dragging someone into the Summer Palace. They heaved him out of the water to fly him up to the queen. His webbed talons flopped to the side, his eyes were closed, and a claw mark slashed along his sky-blue scales was bleeding heavily.\n\nTsunami's stomach flipped inside out like a jellyfish.\n\nIt was Riptide.\n\nWebs's green scales paled nearly to gray as Riptide was tossed onto the floor between him and Queen Coral.\n\n\"No!\" he cried. \"He had nothing to do with this! He's never had any contact with me.\"\n\nMoray tossed another clamshell of water over Riptide, and he groaned, shielding his eyes.\n\n\"It's true,\" Tsunami said desperately. \"Riptide wasn't here with Webs. He's \u2014 he's been helping me. Um, with my Aquatic.\" It was true, but it sounded like a lie, even to her own ears.\n\n\"Whirlpool is supposed to teach you that, not this miserable creature,\" Queen Coral said with narrowed eyes.\n\n\"Whirlpool is a horrible teacher,\" Tsunami flared. \"I'd be better off taking lessons from a barnacle.\"\n\nRiptide pushed himself slowly up to sitting. He glanced around at all the faces staring at him. His gaze stopped on Webs, and the two dragons looked at each other for a long moment.\n\n\"Admit your treachery,\" said the queen. \"Betrayal runs in your family, after all.\" She swiped at Riptide's snout, but he stepped out of reach. Piranha hissed and poked him in the side with a narwhal spear.\n\n\"Don't hurt him,\" Tsunami said. \"Please. He's not working for the Talons of Peace, I promise.\" She was surprised to see Riptide wince. He looked down at his claws, avoiding her eyes.\n\nWas there something he hadn't told her?\n\n\"Throw them both in the new prison,\" Coral said with deep disgust. \"We'll find out what we need to know about the Talons later, when I'm feeling a little more violent.\"\n\n\"Don't you have one more question for them?\" Blister interjected. She'd been quiet for so long, it made Tsunami jump to hear her voice.\n\nCoral swung her head to look at the SandWing.\n\n\"Why they killed all of your heirs,\" Blister purred. \"I mean, obviously it was them, right?\"\n\n\"Obviously!\" Coral burst out. She glared at Webs and Riptide.\n\n\"Working together,\" Blister murmured. \"It's the perfect climax to the story.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Coral agreed.\n\n\"No!\" Tsunami said. \"That makes no sense!\"\n\n\"Just like one of your brilliant mysteries,\" Blister went on, ignoring Tsunami. \"The Claws of Murder, for instance. Or A Tail of Blood. That one was genius.\"\n\n\"It was,\" Coral agreed even more fervently. \"They're the perfect murderers! It all fits!\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't!\" Tsunami shouted. \"Why would they do that? There's no motive!\"\n\n\"Of course there is,\" Coral snarled. \"Blister, explain it to her.\"\n\n\"So that Tsunami could return as the only living heir, of course,\" Blister said smoothly. \"If they killed off all the other possible heirs, she would become more and more valuable. A bargaining chip if they ever needed it. A powerful tool when they wanted to use her.\"\n\n\"Nobody uses me,\" Tsunami spat.\n\n\"Wait, Webs can't be the murderer,\" Clay said. His large brown head tilted to the side. \"He hates kill ing other dragons. That's why he ran away from you in the first place.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Queen Coral said, waving a talon. \"He ran away to protect his own scales.\"\n\n\"Even so, I'm not sure that theory works,\" Starflight said, gazing vaguely into the air as if he was trying to solve a math equation. \"The princess murders started two years before they stole Tsunami's egg, so the Talons, and especially Webs, wouldn't have known they were going to steal a royal egg at that point \u2014 Webs didn't even know he was going to be a Talon at that point. And Webs has been underground with us for the last six years. He couldn't have flown here and back every time he wanted to murder a dragonet.\"\n\nStarflight shook his head. \"No, I'm afraid it doesn't \u2014\" His eyes met Blister's, and he abruptly slammed his mouth shut.\n\n\"What he said,\" Tsunami said desperately. \"Exactly.\"\n\n\"So his allies in the Talons of Peace did his dirty work,\" Blister said, unperturbed. \"You know it makes sense, Coral. The Talons have been your enemies for so long. Of course it would turn out that they're the ones behind the murders. It's the ending that wraps every thing together.\"\n\nCoral nodded. Her talons twitched toward the nearest scroll, as if she couldn't wait to write all this down.\n\n\"Why are you doing this?\" Tsunami demanded, stepping closer to Blister. \"Why pin the murders on Webs and Riptide, unless you're covering your own tracks?\"\n\nBlister gave a hoot of laughter. \"It doesn't matter to me what happens to SeaWing princesses,\" she said. \"Except that I feel my poor ally's pain, of course. I'm merely pointing out the obvious to her. These two should be executed for their crimes as soon as possible.\"\n\nYou want Webs dead, Tsunami thought. And you killed Kestrel, I'm sure of it. But why?\n\n\"Brilliant, just brilliant,\" Coral said, clapping her talons together. \"Take them away, and we'll plan their execution later.\" Piranha and her guards closed around Webs and Riptide. Tsunami didn't have a chance to say anything more to them before they were dragged off, and Riptide still wouldn't meet her eyes. She clenched her talons in frustration.\n\n\"You know what this means?\" Coral went on, delighted. \"We can return the egg to the Royal Hatchery. It's safe now.\"\n\n\"It isn't!\" Sunny cried. She wrapped her talons around the egg.\n\n\"It certainly is,\" said the queen. \"With Webs locked up, the egg can hatch in the Royal Hatchery, just like it's supposed to.\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" Tsunami said. \"I'm not risking a dragonet's life because you've fallen for this crazy story Blister has invented.\"\n\nBlister's obsidian-black eyes glittered malevolently at Tsunami.\n\n\"It will be perfectly safe,\" Coral said, waving her claws. \"Besides, every queen in SeaWing history has hatched in the Royal Hatchery.\"\n\nSilence prickled between them. Tsunami was thinking, I didn't, and surely Coral was, too. You'll eat those words when I'm queen, Tsunami thought, but she wasn't sure she meant it anymore. Did she even want to be queen here? Especially if it meant allying herself with Blister \u2014 or breaking away from her and then dealing with the consequences?\n\nOnly one dragon could change Coral's mind about the egg. Tsunami glanced at Blister and realized at least one thing was true: Blister couldn't care less what happened to the SeaWing heirs. She was studying her claws, looking slightly bored.\n\n\"Fine,\" Tsunami said, squaring her shoulders. \"But I'm staying with it until it hatches.\"\n\nQueen Coral tilted her head. \"In the Royal Hatchery?\" she said. \"All night?\"\n\n\"I'll make sure she hatches safely,\" Tsunami said. She glanced at the egg, glowing blue and green below the white shell. The dragonet was close to hatching, pressed against the thinning walls. Every once in a while the egg rocked in Sunny's arms.\n\n\"But when I catch the real murderer,\" Tsunami went on, \"I want you to promise that you'll let Riptide and Webs go free.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" Coral snorted. \"Webs will never be free again.\"\n\n\"Even if I save your last heir?\" Tsunami demanded.\n\nCoral scraped her claws across the rock. \"You won't have to,\" she said. \"We have the assassins now.\"\n\n\"So it should be an easy bargain to make,\" Tsunami said. Blister stared at her coldly.\n\n\"All right,\" Coral said, waving one talon. \"I'll promise you Riptide. But Webs has too much to answer for.\" Tsunami noticed Blister settling back. So it was definitely Webs she wanted dead, not Riptide.\n\nThat was the best she could do for now. She'd have to think of another way to save Webs.\n\n\"But Tsunami, we said we should stay together,\" Clay protested. \"We can't protect you down there.\"\n\n\"And whoever's coming after the eggs will be just as happy to kill you, too,\" Glory pointed out.\n\nTsunami shook her head and flexed her claws. \"Not if I catch him first.\"\n\nIt was pitch-dark in the Royal Hatchery. Dark and horribly quiet.\n\nTsunami could see in the dark, of course, but every thing was gray and a little blurry. The only flashes of color came from the eggs when the dragonets inside moved. Across the cave, she could see the three male eggs peacefully leaning against one another. They had nothing to worry about.\n\nGuards were stationed outside the door, but Tsunami was the only one in the hatchery. As soon as the door closed behind her, she prowled around all the walls, poking every thing that stuck out and hoping a hole would suddenly yawn open in the floor. She circled the statue of Orca several times, shoving at its talons and tail and pedestal. But nothing happened. There was no sign of a secret entrance anywhere.\n\nFinally she curled up beside the egg and stared fiercely around the room.\n\nAll right, assassin, she thought. I'm ready for you. She had a narwhal spear lying on the floor beside her, although she had no idea how to use it. But she wouldn't be taken by surprise again.\n\nThe warm jets of water billowed silently up through tiny holes in the coral, surrounding the eggs in a bath of heat and small bubbles. It was a little too hot for Tsunami, but she didn't want to move away from the egg. She poked her nose underneath it, checking again for a secret trapdoor, but the floor was smooth and polished like the egg itself.\n\nA flutter moved in the eggshell, like a heartbeat, as the dragonet inside tried to stretch her wings. Tsunami rested her front talons on it for a moment. She wondered if Sunny was right that the dragonet could hear them. She pressed her snout up to the egg and whispered through the water.\n\n\"Don't worry. I'm here to protect you.\"\n\nThe tiny wings fluttered again. Tsunami leaned closer, wishing for some noise, some light, in the hot, silent, dark room.\n\nScrrrrrrraaaaaaaaape.\n\nTsunami's head shot up.\n\nStillness. Darkness.\n\nAnd yet... she had a creeping feeling that someone was suddenly in the room with her.\n\nScrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaape.\n\nHer scales tingled between her wings, as if squirrels were scuttling down her back.\n\nShe stood up and flexed her claws. The one door to the hatchery was closed. The eggs were still. The only movement in the room was the blip of small bubbles rising from the floor.\n\nBut wait...\n\nThe statue.\n\nHadn't it been facing the door before?\n\nShe stared at it until her eyes hurt.\n\nHad it turned its head? Was it looking at her?\n\nTsunami's whole body was shaking. She blinked through the darkness at the statue of Orca.\n\nThe statue stared back. Its eyes were sapphires, she remembered, but in the shades of gray here they gleamed as obsidian-dark and vicious as Blister's. She was sure the statue had been facing the door when she came in. But now its head was turned toward her and the egg, watching them darkly.\n\nImpossible, she started to think, and then \u2014\n\nScrrape. Scrrape. Scrrrrape.\n\nStone claws curled around the top of the pedestal.\n\nA stone tongue flicked between jagged sharklike teeth.\n\nNobody's sneaking in, Tsunami had a moment to think. The assassin's already here. She's been here all along.\n\nAnd then the statue hurtled off the pedestal, talons reaching to snatch the egg.\n\nTsunami flung herself between the statue and her unhatched sister. Green marble claws raked Tsunami's neck, heavier and thicker than a real dragon's, like shards of rock stabbing between her scales. One caught in her gills and ripped a wider hole. Blood bubbled out as Tsunami shoved the statue away.\n\nSorry, broke the rules, blood in the hatchery, Tsunami thought dizzily. She staggered back, pressing one talon to her neck.\n\nHow could she fight a statue? How could anyone beat a dragon of solid stone?\n\nIt attacked again, relentless as the tide. The statue plowed into Tsunami and knocked her backward. Its weight bore down on her, crushing her against the floor. She struggled, clawing at its snout, but her claws scraped uselessly against marble and sang with pain.\n\nThe statue was trying to walk over her, willing to trample her on its way to the egg. One foot came down heavily on Tsunami's chest, and she felt tiny crack crack cracks stabbing through her ribs.\n\nYou are not getting to that egg.\n\nTsunami reached up and wrapped her front talons around the dragon's snout. She yanked it down toward her, dug her claws into the eye sockets, and popped the two sapphires free. They tumbled into her palms, gleaming and heavy.\n\nThe stone dragon didn't roar in pain or collapse or any of the things Tsunami had been hoping for. It stopped, swung its head from side to side for a moment, and sat back on its haunches, lifting its weight just long enough for her to wriggle free.\n\nShe took a deep breath, thick with gurgling blood, and yelled, \"HELP!\" as loud as she could. Even muffled by the water, surely a scream would be heard by the guards outside. \"HELP! HELP!\"\n\nIf there were still guards outside.\n\nQueen Coral, convinced of her own theory, might have promised them to Tsunami and then sent them away, certain they wouldn't be needed.\n\nWhether they couldn't hear her or weren't there at all, nobody came.\n\nThe statue felt its empty eye sockets curiously, then patted the floor around it as if it thought its eyes might have accidentally slipped out. Tsunami took a step back and dropped the sapphires through two of the water jet holes. She needed all the advantages she could get.\n\nCarefully she reached over the egg and picked up the narwhal spear. Would this do anything against stone?\n\nThe statue flicked its tongue in and out, tasting the water. Slowly it turned its sightless face toward Tsunami. She knew an animus dragon must have cursed the statue, but she didn't know how these enchantments worked. Would blinding it stop it, or was it set to keep trying, to kill no matter what, until all the royal heirs in the hatchery were dead?\n\nShe guessed it was enchanted to kill only when it was sure no guards were around \u2014 no queen, no one to witness its crimes and stop it from striking again.\n\nBut Tsunami was an heir. She wasn't a witness. She was a target.\n\nIt stepped toward her. The floor trembled a little at the weight of each talon coming down.\n\nTsunami wanted to lead it away from the egg. If she could open the door, would that be enough to turn it into a frozen statue again? Or if there was no one there, would it chase her into the palace?\n\nBut she was afraid to leave the egg, even for a moment. The statue was fast. It could crush the egg with one foot and keep chasing her without missing a beat.\n\nAnd if she tried to carry the egg with her, the statue could crash down on both of them, shattering it easily. It was safest in the nest, as long as Tsunami stood in front of it.\n\nShe hefted the spear and pointed it at the dragon. Normal fight rules didn't apply here. She could try piercing the eye socket, but there was no brain in there to skewer. No heart to find through the scales, not even the vulnerable spot on the tail all dragons had.\n\nThe statue's snout lifted, its empty eyeholes as dark as deep sea canyons.\n\nWas it smelling her? Tasting her in the water? Or could it hear her?\n\nWhatever it was doing, it seemed to know exactly where she was, eyes or no eyes.\n\nThe statue leaped straight at her. She braced the spear against the floor, and the statue's chest slammed into it. Jarring shock thrummed through Tsunami's talons, as if she'd been stabbed in both palms. The statue ricocheted back, and Tsunami saw bits of dark green stone crumble away into the water. So maybe it can be smashed into little pieces.\n\nThe statue came on again, fast, but this time reaching out in front of it. Tsunami tried to move the spear out of its reach, but it caught the narwhal horn in its front talons and yanked it sharply out of her grasp. It swung the spear around in an arc, and Tsunami had to duck and roll away to avoid being skewered.\n\nThe only sound the statue made was the scraping of stone against stone. It didn't roar, or growl, or grunt like a regular dragon in battle. It was as horribly silent as the rest of the hatchery.\n\nTsunami wondered if it could talk, or hear, or communicate in any way.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" she shouted at it, throwing caution to the currents. \"Who enchanted you?\"\n\nInstead of answering, it tossed the spear aside and leaped at her once more. Tsunami dove underneath it, grabbed the spear, and whirled to put herself in front of the egg again.\n\nShe couldn't smash the statue while it was moving. It was too fast and too strong. But if she could trap it somehow...\n\nThe statue spun and crashed its tail into her side. Tsunami was knocked off her feet, flying through the water into the wall. Crack went something in her chest and stab went another bolt of pain through her whole body. Breathless, she forced herself back to the egg, jabbing at the statue with the spear to push it away.\n\nIt reached for the spear again. This time she tilted the spear up and stabbed it violently into the statue's open mouth.\n\nThe spear lodged in the stone and stuck. The statue's claws scrabbled along the shaft of the horn and tried to yank it out, but it was wedged in tightly. Tsunami shook the spear from side to side, and the statue's head wobbled along with it.\n\nShe leaped to an empty nest and jammed the blunt end of the spear into one of the crevices. Now the statue was pinned like a sheep in a dragon's claws. It whipped its tail and beat the floor with its talons, trying to push itself free. Its wings thrashed the water into wild currents so Tsunami could barely stay upright.\n\nTsunami fought her way back to the egg and picked it up. Just as she did \u2014\n\nTap tap tap.\n\nThe egg cracked down the middle and a small green head poked out. Dark green eyes blinked at Tsunami.\n\nTsunami smiled and flashed a few tiny stripes along her snout to say hello.\n\nThe statue was writhing and smashing the floor now. Tsunami was afraid it would knock itself free in a minute. She clutched the dragonet and swam for the door as fast as she could. When she kicked it open she found that, indeed, there were no guards outside.\n\nBut as the door opened, the statue went still.\n\nTsunami turned in the open doorway to look at it.\n\nThe enchantment only worked in secret. It dropped away when the door was open. Whoever had set the curse didn't want anyone to look in and catch the statue at its deadly work. Tsunami guessed that the spell also alerted the statue when someone was coming down the passageway, so it normally had time to return to its pedestal. And the statue would remain still as long as anyone else was around \u2014 like the queen or her guards. This statue was meant to keep murdering dragonets for as long as it could.\n\nWell, not anymore, Tsunami thought fiercely.\n\nEven Queen Coral would have to believe the truth once she saw the statue as it was now. Marble Orca, once serene and regal on her pedestal, was trapped by the spear in battle position. Her claws reached out hungrily and a snarl transfigured her face. Coral would know for certain that this was the killer who had been hiding in her hatchery all these years.\n\nNow the question was... who had enchanted it? An animus dragon, of course. But it couldn't be Anemone, who hadn't hatched yet when the princess murders began.\n\nTsunami had a new theory. Animus power runs in the royal family.\n\nBut if Shark or Moray had this kind of power, they would be using it for so much more. They would use it to fight battles, to win the queen's favor, to be the secret weapon she wanted so badly. If Shark's goal was the throne for his daughter, he'd have used his magic to get rid of Coral herself instead of knocking off her dragonets.\n\nAnd if the animus was Moray, she'd have offered her power to the queen long ago, for Coral to use however she wanted.\n\nNo, it was another royal dragon. Tsunami was sure of it.\n\nShe stepped back into the room, leaving the door open. She remembered Coral's words. My first daughter was a very talented sculptor.\n\nTsunami settled the newly hatched dragonet around her neck, wincing at the pain from her gills.\n\nOrca may have died years ago, but she left a deadly gift behind.\n\nCarefully she stepped over the nests and stared into the statue's face.\n\nEmpty. Lifeless. Just a statue now.\n\nA statue that she and Coral would be happy to smash and smash and smash until it became a million of the smallest pieces of rock in the ocean.\n\nOrca's weapon would never assassinate another dragonet or crush another egg. Its killing days were over.\n\nBright morning light filtered through the canopy, casting puddles of green sunshine all across the Summer Palace. Tsunami opened and closed her wings, grateful that she didn't have to be at the Council meeting with Blister that was going on overhead. After last night's battle in the hatchery, Tsunami just wanted a break from scheming dragon queens and war plans for a little while.\n\nThe little emerald-green dragonet romped on the beach, kicking up sand and stopping in surprise when it drifted into her nose. She sneezed hard enough to knock herself backward, then sat up and gave Tsunami an indignant look.\n\n\"Well, stop putting sand in your nose, then,\" Tsunami suggested.\n\nHer little sister shook herself, spotted a tiny crab digging in the sand, and pounced. The crab vanished into its hole, and the dragonet looked at her empty talons in confusion.\n\n\"What's her name?\" Sunny asked. She leaned into Tsunami's side for a moment, and Tsunami felt a fizz of relief in her chest. Sunny had forgiven her, or forgotten she was mad in the first place. Either one was fine with Tsunami.\n\n\"I'm trying to think of the perfect name,\" Tsunami said. \"Mother said it was up to me.\"\n\nThe dragonet glanced up from her digging. Sand covered her snout like a mustache.\n\n\"Maybe you should call her Walrus,\" Glory offered, dissolving in giggles.\n\n\"She's not a Walrus!\" Tsunami said. \"She's much more dignified than that!\"\n\nThe dragonet jumped at an insect in the air, lost her balance, and landed with her head in the sand and her tail sticking straight up. She flailed her wings furiously until Sunny gently lifted her free.\n\n\"Very,\" Glory said. \"Very dignified.\"\n\n\"She's awfully cute,\" Clay said. \"I think she has your snout, Tsunami.\"\n\nTsunami flicked her tail, pleased. She looked around proudly and noticed that Starflight was sitting a short way from the rest of them. He was staring up at the pavilion with an anxious expression, running sand through his claws.\n\nGlory followed her gaze. She leaned over and poked the NightWing sharply in the ribs.\n\n\"What's going on with you?\" Glory demanded. \"Why are you crawling around licking Blister's talons?\"\n\n\"I'm not!\" he protested.\n\n\"You really are,\" Tsunami said. Starflight wouldn't meet their eyes.\n\n\"I just think she'd be a good queen,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"No, you don't,\" Glory said. \"Back under the mountain, you specifically said she was kind of evil and probably had sinister plans for all of Pyrrhia.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did say that,\" Clay agreed. He poked a hole in the sand for the dragonet to climb into. \"I remember that.\"\n\nStarflight flashed him an annoyed look. \"That you remember?\"\n\n\"So why do you suddenly looooove her so much?\" Tsunami asked. Her little sister rolled into the hole and then jumped back out, flapping her wings to shake off the sand.\n\n\"Blister's smart,\" Starflight stammered. \"She's \u2014 uh \u2014 she's better than Burn or Blaze.\"\n\n\"I don't like her,\" Sunny said, to Tsunami's surprise.\n\n\"Really?\" Starflight said, his wings drooping.\n\nSunny shook her head. \"She called me 'sweet' like that's all anyone needs to know about me.\"\n\n\"But you are sweet,\" Clay said, patting her head.\n\n\"It kind of does sum you up,\" Tsunami agreed. Sunny scowled at both of them in a way Tsunami thought was pretty cute. \"But I agree that I don't like her either. More than that, I don't trust her. I think we need to meet Blaze. Maybe all the stories about her brainlessness have been exaggerated.\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" said Starflight glumly.\n\n\"So we can go?\" Glory asked Tsunami. \"And look for Blaze? You mean we're done here?\"\n\nEven the baby dragon stopped digging for a moment to look at Tsunami. She felt a stab of guilt at the hopeful expressions on her friends' faces. She hadn't realized they wanted to leave the Kingdom of the Sea so badly.\n\nWingbeats sounded in the air above them, and they all looked up to see Coral, Anemone, Blister, and Moray circling down from the Summer Palace pavilion.\n\nThe green dragonet scampered up to Anemone as soon as she landed and tackled one of her talons. Anemone laughed and flipped her over. Their little sister yelped, struggled upright again, and started clawing her way up Anemone's leg.\n\n\"Have you picked a name?\" Anemone asked Tsunami.\n\n\"What do you think of Auklet?\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"That's a kind of seabird,\" Starflight said in his know-it-all voice to Clay.\n\n\"Oh,\" Clay said. \"Cool. I mean, I knew that.\"\n\nTsunami liked the look on her mother's face, watching the two sisters. She looked proud, protective, happy for them. Tsunami was right about her: Queen Coral wouldn't kill her own daughters, even though one of them would one day grow up to take her place. She cared about them, perhaps a little too much, but Tsunami thought that was better than not caring at all.\n\nShe wondered if Blister or Burn had any dragonets. Starflight would know; it must be in the scrolls somewhere. Tsunami had a feeling Blister would happily kill off her own dragonets if she thought it was necessary. Those glittering black eyes hid more secrets and plans than Tsunami wanted to know about.\n\n\"Orca's statue has been destroyed,\" Queen Coral said with a sigh. \"It was so beautiful, too. She was so talented. I can't believe she hid her animus powers from me. She could have trained with Whirlpool, too.\"\n\n\"Wow. She really missed out,\" Tsunami said, winking at Anemone.\n\n\"We'll have to examine all the things she carved,\" Coral mused. \"Just to make sure there aren't any other enchantments lurking around.\"\n\n\"We're sure it was Orca, right?\" Tsunami asked. \"No one else in the palace could be an animus?\" She wasn't able to stop herself from glancing at Moray, who glared back.\n\nCoral shook her head. \"Before we destroyed it, Anemone reanimated the statue and made it reveal who had enchanted it. It said Orca, plain as day.\" She sighed again. \"Orca carved that statue and dedicated it to the hatchery shortly before she challenged me. I gather she expected to win, so she was setting up a way to get rid of her possible heirs and challengers.\"\n\n\"That explains her last words to you,\" Moray hissed.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Coral sadly. \"She said, 'I did this all wrong. You're going to rule forever, aren't you, Mother? You should thank me. No one can stop you now.' \" The queen looked down at Anemone and Auklet, playing in the sand. She stroked Anemone's head with a wistful expression.\n\n\"But...\" Clay said hesitantly. \"But if Orca was the assassin, then who attacked Tsunami in the tunnel?\"\n\nQueen Coral shrugged. \"We'll catch them eventually,\" she said. \"That's how stories work.\"\n\nAnemone gave Tsunami a frustrated look.\n\nTsunami still thought that her attacker might have been Shark. He was already out of prison, patrolling the Summer Palace with a bad-tempered expression on his snout. And he certainly hadn't been pleased or supportive when she staggered out of the hatchery with the dragonet, blood pouring from her gills. She reached up and touched the seaweed bandage on her neck. Her ribs ached whenever she moved, too, but the healers said she just had to rest and let the fractures fix themselves.\n\nRest! The dragonets of destiny have no time for rest! she thought ruefully.\n\n\"Now that we know the real assassin,\" Tsunami reminded Coral, \"you promised to set Riptide free.\"\n\n\"I know I did,\" said the queen. \"But I'm not sure quite what to do with him. Clearly he can't stay in my kingdom. He'll have to crawl back to those Talons of Peace and see if they'll take him.\"\n\n\"Maybe he can come with us,\" Tsunami said, then snapped her mouth shut. But it was too late. Coral and Blister were both staring at her in a very uncomfortable way.\n\n\"With you?\" Coral said slowly. \"Are you going somewhere?\"\n\n\"We \u2014 I \u2014 yes \u2014 I think we should,\" Tsunami said. She felt her friends shifting closer together behind her. \"I don't belong here, Mother. I wanted to, but \u2014 I'm only causing trouble, and I'm not doing what I was hatched to do. I don't speak the underwater language. I don't understand the Council. You have two daughters now who could be great queens one day.\" She nodded at Anemone. \"But my destiny is somewhere else. I have to go stop the war. With my friends.\"\n\n\"And how do you plan to do that?\" Blister said softly.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Tsunami said. \"We'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"We were thinking we should go meet Blaze,\" Clay suggested. \"Just to be fair.\"\n\nAck, Clay, shut up, Tsunami thought with a wince.\n\n\"But it won't change how we \u2014 I mean that we think you're \u2014\" Starflight said hurriedly to Blister, then trailed off under Tsunami's baleful look.\n\n\"No,\" said Blister. The diamond patterns on her back writhed as she stepped closer. \"No one is leaving.\"\n\n\"You can't tell us what to do,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"I am your choice,\" Blister hissed. \"The Ni \u2014 the Talons of Peace want me.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Glory said. \"Do they know that?\"\n\n\"It's not their decision anyway!\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"Your lives could be very easy from here on,\" said Blister. \"All you have to do is tell everyone the dragonets of destiny have chosen me as the next SandWing queen. And you can do that from here, where I can keep an eye on you.\"\n\n\"Where you can keep us prisoner, you mean,\" Tsunami said angrily. \"We've had quite enough of that, thank you. Mother, tell her you wouldn't do that to me.\"\n\nQueen Coral gave Blister an anxious look. \"My dear, I'm sure they will still choose you after meeting Blaze. No one would choose her in a million years.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but first they have to survive that long,\" Blister said smoothly. \"You know better than anyone how dangerous it is out there, Coral. Remember what happened to Gill. We'll really be protecting the dragonets by keeping them here.\"\n\n\"Oh, that makes sense,\" Coral said, sounding relieved. \"She's right, Tsunami. Just stay here and we'll take good care of all of you.\"\n\nTsunami looked back at her friends. Starflight looked miserable, but the others \u2014 they looked hopeful, as if they trusted Tsunami to get them out.\n\n\"This isn't the right place for my friends either,\" Tsunami said. \"Glory wants to go home \u2014 right, Glory? And Sunny should find her parents. It's not fair that I get to do those things and they don't. We just \u2014\" She squared her wings. \"We have to go, and if you try to keep us, you'll be no better than the Talons or Queen Scarlet.\"\n\nBlister glared at Starflight. \"Don't you have something to say about this, NightWing?\"\n\nHe stared miserably at his talons and didn't respond.\n\nShe hissed. \"Useless. There is something wrong with all of you, isn't there? But you're the dragonets I have, and I'm not letting you go.\" Blister turned to Coral. \"Throw them in your prison.\"\n\n\"She wouldn't do that,\" Tsunami said. \"Mother? Right? You wouldn't do that?\"\n\n\"It might help your decision,\" Blister hissed, \"if you knew exactly who killed your husband in the SkyWing arena.\"\n\nTsunami felt her scales turn to ice. This was it. The moment her secrets came out and she got what she deserved.\n\nCoral's gills flared and her eyes widened. \"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"You know he died in the arena,\" Blister said. \"But do you know who his opponent was? The dragon who ripped the life out of him?\"\n\n\"Maybe you should also know,\" Starflight said suddenly, \"that Blister killed Kestrel and is lying to you about it. And that she wants Webs dead for her own reasons and doesn't care about your daughters at all.\"\n\nBlister arched her neck like a cobra and hissed at him. Starflight threw his wings over his head as if he expected her tail to come stabbing down. But all she said was, \"You'll be sorry for that, useless NightWing.\"\n\nCoral wrapped her wings around Anemone and Auklet and took a step back toward the water. She looked from Blister to Tsunami like she wasn't sure who to trust anymore.\n\n\"Don't listen to them, Coral,\" Blister said. \"They're only dragonets. And dragonets never know what's best for them.\"\n\n\"I think we can be pretty sure prison isn't at the top of the list, though,\" Tsunami snapped. \"And from now on, Blister, you show some respect and address my mother as Queen Coral.\"\n\nSmoke curled from Blister's snout. Tsunami wondered what Coral would do if the SandWing attacked the dragonets of destiny right in front of her.\n\n\"I don't know what's going on,\" Coral said, signaling with her tail. A platoon of SeaWing guards appeared from one of the caves. \"But for your own safety, Tsunami, you're staying here for now.\"\n\n\"Mother!\" Tsunami yelled. She smacked a guard in the snout with her tail and bared her teeth at another. \"Think for yourself for once! Let us go!\"\n\nBut Queen Coral turned away, avoiding Blister's gaze as well. She curled Auklet into one of her talons and flew back to the pavilion with her daughters.\n\nTsunami fought the guards, but there were too many of them, and her ribs were still screaming with pain from the night before. One by one, each of the dragonets was overpowered and dragged off to the same prison cave where Riptide and Webs had disappeared the day before.\n\nSeaWings watched from all over the pavilion. Tsunami had never been so humiliated. Some dragonets of destiny they were, tossed around like lumps of trea sure to be hoarded.\n\nThey'd come to the Kingdom of the Sea looking for safety, and instead they were prisoners once again.\n\nThe prison cave was high on the cliff wall, not far from the canopy, overlooking the pavilion below. Tsunami hadn't paid much attention to it before, except to notice that Riptide and Webs had been taken there. But as the guards flew them up to the cave, she realized that it glowed with a weird blue light, and she could hear strange crackling sounds coming from inside.\n\nSharp spears prodded her into the cave entrance, and she felt damp stone under her claws. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw a path winding into the huge cavern ahead of them.\n\nThis wasn't the underwater prison Lagoon and Shark had been sent to. This was where Queen Coral kept the real threats. Including, Tsunami realized as she was shoved along the stone floor, several prisoners of war. She saw at least three SkyWings, hissing short blasts of flame at their captors. An IceWing lay with his wings spread out, gasping faintly from the heat he wasn't used to. Two SandWings were caged together, one of them curled in a ball with his eyes pressed shut, the other pacing and snarling.\n\nThere was even a giant MudWing with chains around her ankles like the ones that had been on Clay. She tilted her head curiously at Clay as he went by.\n\nBut the strangest thing about the prison wasn't the dragon prisoners, or even the staggeringly large size of the cavern.\n\nIt was the cages.\n\nThere were no bars, no doors. Instead, a channel of water as wide as two dragons encircled each prisoner, trapping them on islands of stone \u2014 some large enough for multiple dragons, some with barely room for one. More water poured from grooves in the ceiling down to the channels, creating cascading walls around the islands.\n\nAnd all the water walls and all the moats glowed the same bright blue and gave off the same fizzing, crackling sound. The imprisoned dragons flinched away from any stray droplets that splashed toward them, and they kept their tails carefully tucked up on dry land.\n\nThe path wound around and between the islands like a long bridge. The ceiling above was covered in glowworms, casting an eerie light over all the strange prison cells.\n\nTsunami twisted to peer into the moats. What were the prisoners so afraid of?\n\nIridescent purple jellyfish pulsed here and there, adding their light to the glowworms up above. Tsunami knew that their tentacles could sting, but surely not badly enough to keep the prisoners in. If it were her (and soon it will be, she thought), she'd leap right through the water wall, splash through the moat, and fight her way out, no matter how many jellyfish were in her way.\n\nSuddenly she caught sight of a dark green shape swimming in one of the channels. It was as long as a scavenger and as thick around as a dragon tail, with no legs or arms or wings. As she squinted at it, another one surfaced not far away, and she caught a glimpse of a flat head with sunken, dead eyes. Nostrils flared at the end of its snout, and then it sank into the water again. Bubbles fizzed and snapped for a long moment where it had been.\n\nSunny pressed close against Clay, her gray-green eyes enormous and terrified. Tsunami glanced around at Starflight and saw him studying the cages as well. Maybe he would understand what was going on.\n\nShe didn't spot Webs or Riptide, but the dragonets were pushed along so fast, and the water blurred the features of the prisoners so it was hard to distinguish between the few imprisoned SeaWings she could see.\n\nThe guards finally stopped at one of the largest prison islands. There was the same moat around it, but no water came from the ceiling here. Tsunami couldn't see anything swimming in the moat either.\n\n\"Hop over,\" growled one of the guards. \"All of you.\"\n\n\"What if we don't?\" Tsunami asked.\n\n\"Then you'll be dragged off to separate cages, instead of getting to share one,\" he answered.\n\nClay jumped over the moat immediately. His talons scraped against the hard rock floor as he landed with a heavy thud. He turned and reached out to catch Sunny as she leaped after him. Starflight followed, and then Glory, and finally, reluctantly, Tsunami flapped her wings to lift herself over the chasm and land beside her friends.\n\nAnother guard pulled on a chain that hung along the wall. Something clanked and groaned from within the stone as she drew the links through her claws. Tsunami leaned forward and saw a small door opening in the underwater wall of the moat. Three of the thick green creatures wriggled through it, their dead eyes staring creepily up at her.\n\nA whoosh sounded from above, and talons yanked her back from the edge just as water came sluicing down. Tsunami looked up at the cave roof, then around to see that it was Starflight who had pulled her back. He let her go and twisted to watch the waterfall that now surrounded them. His claws tapped ner vously against one another.\n\n\"What are those creepy things in the water?\" Tsunami asked him.\n\n\"I think \u2014 I think they're electric eels,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, brrrr,\" Glory said, shaking out her wings as if they were covered in bugs. \"The scrolls about them gave me nightmares for months.\"\n\nSunny twined her tail around one of Clay's forelegs as if she was trying to get even closer to him. \"What's an electric eel?\" she asked.\n\n\"They give off a kind of shock,\" Starflight explained. Behind him, a blue fizzing light sparked up the waterfall and vanished again, making them all jump.\n\n\"It would feel like getting hit by lightning,\" Glory added.\n\n\"And it can be strong enough to kill a dragon,\" said Starflight. \"Especially in salt water, and when the eels are as big as the ones down there.\"\n\n\"So all this water around us \u2014\" Tsunami started.\n\n\"Could be charged with deadly force at any time,\" Starflight said. \"Not all the time \u2014 it's not a constant current. But if they're mad or hungry, they're probably giving off shocks pretty frequently, and then just touching the water could transfer that to you. Even if it only stunned you, it would hurt a lot.\"\n\nTsunami frowned at the cascade. Through it she could see the blurry outline of the guards slithering away. Evidently they trusted their nasty prison setup to keep the dragonets in.\n\n\"I can't believe we're prisoners again,\" Clay said with a sigh. \"Why does this keep happening to us?\"\n\n\"I know!\" Sunny agreed. \"Doesn't anyone trust the prophecy? If they believe in it, can't they have faith that we'll do the right thing?\"\n\n\"Everyone is trying to make sure the prophecy turns out the way they want it to,\" Tsunami said. She turned in a circle, but there wasn't enough room to pace without brushing her wings or tail into the water. She sat back down with a growl. \"It would be helpful if the stupid prophecy had been a little more clear about what was supposed to happen.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you use your venom when they grabbed us?\" Starflight asked Glory.\n\n\"Believe me, I will,\" the RainWing said fiercely. \"I'm waiting for the right moment.\"\n\n\"I think that's smart,\" Tsunami said. \"Even with Glory's magical death spit, we probably couldn't have fought off the whole palace, and it would have given away our best secret weapon.\"\n\nGlory looked surprised. \"Well, thank you,\" she said. \"Although I'm going to vote against calling it 'magical death spit,' please.\"\n\n\"Maybe tonight,\" Tsunami said, lowering her voice. \"When most of the palace is sleeping. Maybe we can fight our way out then.\"\n\n\"Past the water with the shocks that might kill us?\" Sunny asked. \"What good is magical death spit against lightning eels?\"\n\n\"Electric eels,\" Starflight corrected her.\n\n\"We are NOT CALLING IT MAGICAL DEATH SPIT,\" Glory said.\n\n\"Or \u2014\" Tsunami remembered the guards who had given her the key. \"Maybe we can convince someone to let us go.\"\n\n\"I like that plan,\" Clay said, bobbing his head.\n\n\"I like the one where we melt everyone's eyeballs on our way out the door,\" Glory said.\n\n\"With magical death spit,\" Sunny said, then buried her head in Clay's wings to hide her giggles as Glory glared at her.\n\n\"Three moons, Glory,\" said Tsunami. \"That's horrible.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" Glory asked. \"What happened to the SeaWing who'd fight her way out of anything?\"\n\n\"I'll still fight,\" Tsunami said. An image of Gill flashed in her mind and she shivered. \"I'm just saying, there are a lot of these guards who are really on our side. I bet we can find someone to help us.\"\n\nSunny lifted her snout. \"Did you hear something?\"\n\n\"Like what?\" Starflight asked.\n\nThe little SandWing hesitated. \"It's hard to be sure over the water sounds.\"\n\n\"Probably nothing,\" Tsunami said. \"Nothing helpful anyway.\" Sunny frowned at her.\n\n\"Someone's coming,\" Glory observed. They could see a pale shape flitting along the path toward them, although it was blurred by the waterfall.\n\n\"Is that what you heard?\" Starflight asked Sunny.\n\nShe shook her head, looking perplexed.\n\nAs the dragon came closer, Tsunami thought she recognized her coloring. But surely it couldn't be \u2014\n\n\"Anemone?\" she called.\n\n\"There you are!\" Anemone hurried over to their cage. She stood as close as she could get to the moat and the crackling water. Tsunami wished she could reach over and wrap her wings around her little sister.\n\n\"You're unharnessed!\" she cried.\n\n\"I know, isn't it wonderful?\" Anemone stretched her wings wide and beamed. \"It's only for a little while.\" She tugged at the web that was still fitted closely around her chest. \"I'll be snapped in again later. But Queen Coral said I could go fly around while she has Auklet fitted for her harness, as long as I don't leave the Summer Palace. This would be the happiest day of my life if I weren't so worried about you.\"\n\n\"Can you set us free?\" Clay asked hopefully.\n\n\"And then come with us,\" Tsunami suggested. \"We'll never make you use your powers, I promise.\"\n\nAnemone shook her head. \"I wish I could. But Coral and Blister will be furious enough about losing the dragonets of destiny. Think about it \u2014 if their secret weapon disappears, too, they'll hunt you down like sharks after prey.\"\n\n\"That's a good point,\" Starflight agreed in his let's-all-be-sensible voice.\n\n\"I don't care,\" Tsunami said. \"I don't care if every dragon in Pyrrhia is searching for us. We'll keep you safe, a lot safer than you are here.\"\n\nAnemone shifted her wings. Even through the water, Tsunami could see the mournful expression on her snout. \"I just \u2014 I just don't think I'm ready to live my life like Webs did, never able to return home,\" she said. \"I'd miss Auklet. And I think the SeaWings need me here. I think Mother needs me, so she's hearing another voice besides Blister's.\"\n\nTsunami knew that was all very logical, but it still made her scales itch to think she'd have to abandon her sister when she'd only just met her.\n\n\"All right,\" Clay said. \"You could still set us free, though, right?\"\n\n\"They'd know it was her,\" Glory pointed out.\n\n\"That's true,\" Tsunami agreed. \"It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"But there's something else I wanted to do for you,\" Anemone said. She lifted something in her front talons, and Tsunami realized she was holding a pure white narwhal spear.\n\n\"Spear,\" Anemone said solemnly, \"find the dragon who attacked Tsunami in the entrance tunnel and bring him or her to us.\" She let go, and the spear flew up the path out of the cave.\n\nThe other dragonets stared at her in awe.\n\n\"Is that really possible?\" Clay asked. \"That'll actually work?\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" Anemone said, pressing her claws together.\n\n\"You didn't have to do that,\" Tsunami said, worried. \"Do you feel all right?\"\n\n\"Just a little cold,\" Anemone answered. She rubbed her tail between her talons with a rough scraping sound.\n\nThey waited. And waited.\n\nAnd finally they saw someone stumbling down the path toward them. The spear seemed to glow in the dark as it jabbed the dragon in the back and wings and tail, driv ing it along.\n\n\"Ow!\" a voice echoed through the cavern. \"What is the meaning of \u2014 why am I \u2014 ow! what \u2014 ow! Stop! Ow! I will report you to the \u2014 OW!\"\n\n\"Well, that's not Coral,\" said Glory.\n\n\"And it's not Shark,\" said Tsunami. She scratched her horns, confused. She'd been so sure it had to be Shark.\n\n\"Not Moray either.\" Anemone stood up as he approached.\n\nThe spear prodded the dragon into place beside Anemone, on the edge of the electric moat.\n\nIt was Whirlpool.\n\n\"Whirlpool?\" Tsunami said, thoroughly astonished. \"Why would you want to kill me?\" She'd rather thought he was too boring to be a suspect.\n\n\"Rubbish,\" said the green dragon with a haughty air. \"I would never \u2014\" The spear poked him again, a little harder this time. \"Ow. My goodness. Anemone, I had no idea you were capable of such powerful magic. I must be a brilliant teacher. Of course, I'd be more impressed if it weren't stabbing me \u2014 OW.\"\n\nAnemone shifted on her talons uncomfortably. \"I didn't think it would be you,\" she said.\n\n\"We should tell Queen Blister how accomplished you are,\" Whirlpool said in his oozy voice. \"She'll be so terribly pleased.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare,\" Tsunami snapped.\n\n\"Do you really think I'll find you threatening from in there?\" he asked.\n\n\"If you do, I'll tell Mother you tried to kill me,\" she said. \"How do you think she'll feel about that?\"\n\nHe shrugged and reached up to play with the gold hoop earring in his ear. \"She may find it quite admirable, actually. After all, I was merely trying to ensure that Anemone dear would be queen.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Anemone's wings fluttered open and closed. \"You don't even like me that much. Why do anything for me?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Whirlpool said, \"frankly, I don't want to marry her.\" He pointed at Tsunami.\n\n\"Wow,\" Glory said cheerfully. \"That was totally on my list of reasons why someone might want to kill you.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Tsunami snapped. \"I'd rather be torn apart by tiger sharks than ever marry you.\"\n\n\"But I do want to be king,\" Whirlpool said. He held out his talons as if imagining more gold rings looping around his claws. \"So I thought if I got rid of you, I'd improve my chances of marrying a more agreeable daughter.\"\n\n\"I don't ever want to marry you either!\" Anemone cried.\n\n\"It's not really up to you,\" Whirlpool said, taking a step back up the path to the cave entrance. \"Once I tell Queen Coral and Queen Blister about what you can do, they'll be so grateful, they'll let me have anything I want. But of course, then you'll be very busy using your powers to win the war. And you probably won't survive that. So I should really ask for Auklet instead.\" He tapped his snout thoughtfully, as if he was musing to himself.\n\n\"You can't tell them!\" Tsunami shouted. She was supposed to protect Anemone from being used like this. It was the one thing her sister had asked of her \u2014 and instead now it would be her fault if Anemone became Blister's pawn.\n\nShe lunged toward the waterfall, but Clay jumped forward at the same time and held her back. Blue light crackled in front of them, and down below, the eels clustered menacingly like a sinister clump of seaweed.\n\nBut at the same time, on the other side of the waterfall, Anemone was moving, too. She seized the spear from the air, spun it around, and smacked the side of it into Whirlpool's head.\n\nHe staggered forward, then crumpled without a sound. His wings tipped sideways, overbalancing him, and in one sudden movement, his body slipped over the edge into the electric eel moat.\n\nAnemone yelped with fear and dropped her weapon. She reached her talons toward the water... but it was too late.\n\nA blinding flash of blue sizzled up the cascading waterfall. Tsunami jumped back, and all five dragonets huddled close in the center of the island. The water in the moat churned and seethed around the spot where Whirlpool had disappeared. Thick green tails thrashed through the bubbles and sparks flew as if several bolts of lightning were striking at once.\n\nSunny covered her eyes, and Clay put his wing around her. Tsunami wished she could do the same for Anemone \u2014 on the far side of the moat, her little sister looked petrified in place.\n\nSlowly the flashes calmed down until only an occasional zap appeared in the wall.\n\nAnd then they all stopped. The waterfall was quiet, and so was the moat.\n\nTsunami could see the eels, still clustered around a large, dark shape at the bottom of the pool. But their frenzy had subsided, and she guessed she was lucky she couldn't see any details of what they were doing now.\n\n\"Anemone!\" she called. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nAnemone didn't answer. Her blurred outline was motionless, as if she were one of Orca's statues.\n\n\"I'm not sure I should tell you this,\" Starflight said, \"but you might be able to go through the water right now.\"\n\nTsunami whipped around toward him. \"Really? Why?\"\n\nHe pointed to the eels. \"After a burst like that, they'll need a while to recharge. I think. So they might not be able to let off any shocks for at least a minute or two. Wait \u2014\" he added as Tsunami flared her wings. \"But I'm not sure. I didn't read those scrolls as often as the ones about dragons. I'm sorry.\" Starflight's black head drooped. \"It's probably not worth the risk. I wouldn't listen to me.\"\n\n\"But Starflight, you know every thing,\" Sunny said. \"I'm sure you're right.\"\n\n\"I could go through and turn off the waterfall,\" Tsunami said. \"Then it would only be me risking it.\"\n\nStarflight looked miserable. \"But it was my idea,\" he said. \"And if I might be wrong, shouldn't I \u2014\"\n\nPoor Starflight. Tsunami twined her tail around his. She knew he wanted to be brave and helpful. But this was the kind of thing she did, not him.\n\n\"Don't be silly,\" she said. \"This is my kingdom. I'm responsible for doing the crazy things here.\"\n\n\"Do you remember what the scrolls said about electric eels?\" Clay asked Glory.\n\nThe RainWing lifted her wings slightly. \"I don't think it was specific,\" she said. \"They can run out of charge for short periods of time, but I don't know if this is definitely one of them, or how long it might last.\"\n\nThink it through. Be more like Starflight. Don't be impulsive, Tsunami thought. But then... what if this is our only chance to escape? She glanced over at Anemone. And I have to help her.\n\nBut if I die, what happens to the others?\n\nShe clenched her talons. An image of her mother's Council flashed through her head. \"All right,\" she said. \"Let's vote.\"\n\n\"Holy moons,\" Glory said. \"Seriously, what have you done with the real Tsunami?\"\n\n\"Quickly,\" Tsunami said, shooting a glance at the quiet waterfall.\n\n\"I believe Starflight,\" Sunny said. \"I think you can make it through. Definitely.\"\n\n\"I don't,\" Starflight said glumly. \"I vote that nobody tries, just to be safe.\"\n\n\"Well, I want to get out of here,\" Glory said. \"And I'm willing to risk Tsunami's bossy scales to do it.\" She shot Tsunami a toothy grin.\n\nClay shook his head slowly. \"I don't know. You're too important to all of us, Tsunami. I don't think you should do it.\"\n\n\"Well, that doesn't help,\" Tsunami said with a snort. \"Now I just have to decide for myself anyway. Some Council you guys are.\" But those were pretty much the votes she'd been expecting. And she'd listened to all of them, and she knew what she wanted to do.\n\nShe took a deep breath, spun around, and launched herself at the wall of water. It felt like leaping into a freezing hailstorm, icy drops pelting her snout and closed eyes, slicing into her gills through the seaweed bandage, hammering the fractures in her ribs. She braced herself for lightning-sharp pain, but a moment later, her talons thumped onto solid rock.\n\nTsunami opened her eyes as she skidded to a stop. She'd made it to the other side of the moat, and her scales were still intact.\n\nShe grabbed Anemone's shoulders and shook her until the pale little dragon looked up to meet her eyes.\n\n\"You have to get out of here,\" Tsunami said. \"We're going to escape, and I don't want it to look like you were involved. Go find Mother and hang around where she can see you so you have an alibi. All right? Are you listening?\"\n\n\"But look what I did,\" Anemone whispered, pointing to the pool.\n\n\"You didn't mean to do that,\" Tsunami said. She knew way too clearly how Anemone felt right now. \"Anemone, it was an accident \u2014 you didn't push him into the moat! And if it hadn't happened, think how many dragons you might have had to kill with your powers. Now you can tell Mother that with no trainer, your powers seem to be getting weaker. Mess up all the time. Make sure she thinks you aren't ready and won't be for a long time.\"\n\n\"But one day \u2014\" Anemone started.\n\n\"One day very soon, this war will be over. We're going to end it. Trust me.\" Tsunami squeezed Anemone's front talons in hers. \"Now get out of here.\"\n\n\"Good luck,\" Anemone whispered.\n\nTsunami wrapped her wings around her sister. \"Good luck to you, too.\"\n\nAnemone fled up the cave path. Her pale wings fluttered like moths as she disappeared around the bend.\n\nTsunami hurried to the chain on the wall. The guard had yanked it down \u2014 could she pull it back up? She tried hauling the chain in the opposite direction and felt it slide jerkily through her claws. Clanking noises rattled from the ceiling, and she stopped for a moment, glancing up the path where the guards had gone. Were there guards at the entrance? What if they heard her?\n\n\"Hey, kid,\" a raspy voice croaked. Tsunami jumped and looked around.\n\nA scrawny SandWing was watching her from his prison island. Even through the waterfall, Tsunami could see the dark glitter of his eyes. \"You could do the same thing for me,\" he hissed. \"Set me free!\"\n\nTsunami turned back to the chain and kept pulling. She didn't know what was in store for Coral's prisoners, but she also didn't know why they were here, or whether they deserved it.\n\nExcept for two of them.\n\nSomewhere in this cavern, Riptide and Webs were trapped, possibly awaiting execution. She had to find them, too.\n\nWhat sounded like an enormous metallic groan echoed overhead, and then suddenly, the cascading water around her friends shut off. There was a beat of silence as they all stared up at the ceiling.\n\nSunny leaped off first, flapping her wings to clear the moat, and the others followed her quickly. Tsunami pushed past them to lead the way up the path.\n\n\"What about me?\" yelled the imprisoned SandWing.\n\n\"I have to find Riptide and Webs,\" Tsunami said to her friends. \"Did anyone see them on the way in?\"\n\n\"I did,\" Clay said. \"They're on one island together, not far from the entrance.\"\n\nThe five of them hurried along the path. Tsunami kept her wings curled in and tried not to look at the fizzing blue water walls or the lurking eels.\n\nThey rounded the last corner and saw the greenish light of the Summer Palace up ahead. Tsunami spotted the guards first, and pushed her friends back into the shadows.\n\nOnly three, she thought. Three guards stood on the ledge outside the prison, chatting and tossing their spears from talon to talon. They didn't look very threatening. And perhaps they were secretly on the dragonets' side, if they had allowed Anemone through to see Tsunami.\n\nShe didn't want to fight them if she could avoid it. She didn't want to shed any more SeaWing blood ever again.\n\n\"There,\" Clay whispered in her ear. He pointed over her shoulder. \"That island, just inside the entrance.\"\n\nTsunami spotted the two blue shapes moving beyond the wall of water. She also saw a chain running along the stone beside their island. If she could get to it without the guards noticing, and then move the mechanism without the guards hearing it, Riptide and Webs would be free to escape with the dragonets.\n\n\"There it is again,\" Sunny whispered. \"Don't you all hear that?\"\n\n\"Hear what?\" Clay whispered back.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Sunny said. \"I keep hearing \u2014 I think I'm hearing wingbeats.\"\n\n\"There are SeaWings flying all over the palace,\" Glory pointed out.\n\n\"I know,\" Sunny said. \"This is bigger, higher \u2014 I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"Don't worry so much,\" Tsunami said. \"I'm sure you're imagining things.\"\n\nSunny stamped one of her feet and craned her neck toward the outside. \"No, I'm definitely sure,\" she said firmly. \"I hear wingbeats above the canopy. Lots and lots of them.\"\n\n\"Sunny \u2014\" Tsunami started, but then Clay's head shot up, and so did Starflight's.\n\n\"I think she's right,\" Clay said.\n\nTsunami inhaled sharply, realizing what that meant. \"You don't think \u2014\"\n\nStarflight lashed his tail. \"I smell fire, too.\"\n\nTsunami didn't have time to think or come up with a safe, logical solution. She burst out of their hiding spot and ran toward the guards.\n\n\"Look out!\" she yelled. \"Warn the palace!\"\n\nAll three guards jumped and two of them accidentally dropped their spears over the ledge. They stared at Tsunami as if her horns were blazing columns of fire.\n\n\"Move!\" she shouted. Tsunami shoved them aside, stood on the ledge, and yelled, \"SeaWings! Mother! Look out! We're under attack!\"\n\nAnd then the first firebomb crashed through the canopy.\n\nPanic.\n\nScreaming.\n\nFor a palace surrounded by water, it was surprising how much caught on fire so quickly.\n\nLarge sections of the canopy collapsed, carrying flaming branches and leaves and debris down onto the Summer Palace. Tsunami saw dragons spiraling toward the lake, their wings alight with flames, shrieking with pain.\n\nThe firebombs were just logs set on fire, but they caused terrible damage as they crashed through the pavilion and knocked SeaWings out of the air.\n\n\"The SkyWings found us,\" said one of the guards, looking skyward in terror. As he said it, they all saw a wing of red and orange dragons soar overhead, dropping more bombs and breathing more fire down on the canopy.\n\n\"But how?\" said the second guard.\n\nTsunami thought of the hole left in the canopy when Blister ripped Webs out of it. Would that have been enough to lead the SkyWings here? So quickly? What were the chances a scout had spotted the hole, reported back, and gathered the forces for an attack only a day later?\n\nIt had to be something else.\n\nShe looked down and saw the lake water churning as frantic dragons tried to shove their way into the exit tunnel. Only one way in meant only one way out, and it wasn't big enough for everyone at once. She felt sick at the thought of all those dragons crammed into the small space together.\n\nThere was one other way \u2014 but flying out through the canopy, into the claws of the SkyWings, could be suicide.\n\nTsunami searched the mass of dragons for her mother, but she couldn't see ropes of pearls or wings the exact shade of her own anywhere. At least Coral wasn't one of the shapes with charred wings floating limply in the water.\n\nBlister was nowhere to be seen either.\n\nShark swooped past, yelling orders. Most of the dragons seemed too panic-stricken to listen to him, but a few rallied around and followed him up into the sky. Surely they would be outnumbered, Tsunami thought. Surely they didn't stand a chance.\n\nShe took a step toward the edge and felt someone grab her tail.\n\n\"Don't do it,\" Clay said, pulling her back. \"I know you want to fight, but we can't lose you like that.\"\n\nTsunami stopped. Every muscle in her body wanted to be up there, clawing at SkyWing snouts and smashing them out of the sky with her tail. The impulsive thing to do, she thought.\n\nOr she could listen to her friends.\n\nShe turned to the guards, who were all three trembling with fear, their eyes fixed on the fiery canopy up above. \"Go,\" she said. \"Defending the palace is more important than guarding the prisoners.\"\n\n\"But \u2014\" one of them started. \"But we can't let you \u2014\"\n\n\"You have to save yourselves,\" Tsunami said. \"And so do we. Trust me, fate wants the dragonets of destiny to survive this.\"\n\nThe guards didn't stick around to argue. They launched themselves off the ledge, and Tsunami saw one fly down to join the crush of dragons around the tunnel, but the other two flew up to fight alongside Commander Shark.\n\nShe spun and ran back to the prison island where Webs and Riptide were trapped. Clay was already there, fumbling with the chain on the wall. Tsunami showed him which way to pull it.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" she called to the prisoners. \"We're getting you out of there. Get ready to fly.\"\n\n\"Tsunami?\" Riptide's voice was lost in the creaking and clanking and rumbling of things moving in the ceiling. Abruptly the water stopped flowing, and Tsunami found herself standing across from the sky-blue SeaWing.\n\nHe smiled at her.\n\n\"Hey there,\" she said. \"The dragonets of destiny specialize in dramatic rescues, you know. Are you impressed?\"\n\n\"Very,\" he said, hopping over the moat to land beside her. Webs staggered after him, landing unevenly on the stone. It didn't seem like a good sign that a thin line of blood was still trickling from his ear.\n\nAnother pair of fiery logs crashed past outside, and more screams echoed from below. Riptide flared his wings, looking startled and horrified.\n\n\"The palace is under attack,\" Tsunami explained. \"It'll make escape tricky, but \u2014\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Riptide said, catching one of her talons. \"Tsunami. I have to tell you something. I \u2014 I do work for the Talons of Peace.\"\n\nTsunami stared at him. Her mother was right about Riptide? He was working with the dragons who'd ruined her life. She'd always hated the Talons of Peace. How could she have fallen for one of them?\n\n\"Please listen. I joined them because I wanted to find out more about my father, but they wouldn't tell me anything except that he was safe.\" He looked down. \"I've been working with them for a few years now, passing them information about the SeaWings.\"\n\nSounds like betrayal to me, Tsunami thought, although she wasn't sure whether she felt more betrayed for her tribe or for herself.\n\n\"You have a very bad habit,\" she said, \"of not telling me some critically important things.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm sorry. I was meeting with one of their agents right before I met you.\" Tsunami remembered the dragon with the black spirals on his scales. \"He told me to keep an eye out in case the dragonets of destiny showed up in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\nTsunami pulled her talon out of his grasp. Riptide had acted surprised to hear the Talons even existed. He'd pretended not to know anything about the dragonets of destiny.\n\nClearly he was a good actor, hiding a secret like this while living in the tribe all these years. So could she believe anything he'd said to her?\n\nBlood trickled from the gash on his side as he moved. \"I stayed close to make sure you and the other dragonets were safe.\" He spread his wings and held out his talons to Tsunami. \"I'm sorry I couldn't tell you the truth. I didn't think you'd trust me if you knew.\"\n\nHe was right about that. But she didn't particularly trust him now either.\n\nAn enormous crash sounded outside as something smashed into the pavilion.\n\n\"We have to go,\" said Glory from behind Tsunami. For once, she didn't add anything snide, and Tsunami wondered if she'd overheard Riptide's confession.\n\n\"Um,\" Clay's voice said behind them. \"Tsunami? Webs? Do we know this dragon?\"\n\nThey all turned and saw a large MudWing looming in the mouth of the cave. Her brown wings were creased with soot and a horrible scar pulled down one corner of her mouth into a strange grimace.\n\nWebs flicked his tail in surprise. \"I do,\" he said. \"She's with the Talons of Peace. She saved my life. Crocodile! What are you doing here?\"\n\nThe MudWing chuckled. \"Poor Webs. So wrong in so many ways.\" She stepped into the cavern and gave the dragonets an appraising look. \"These are the brats the Talons are so obsessed with? Scrawny.\" She lashed her tail. \"But the SkyWings want you back anyway. For the next queen to play with, I assume.\"\n\n\"Queen Scarlet is dead?\" Glory blurted. \"For sure?\"\n\n\"You're not working with the SkyWings!\" Webs cried at the same time.\n\n\"Of course I am,\" Crocodile said. \"Who knew that infiltrating the Talons of Peace would be so useful? I never thought I'd get the chance to follow an idiot SeaWing back to the secret palace we've been searching for all this time.\"\n\nWebs blanched and his wings drooped heavily, as if a whole new mountain of guilt had just landed on him.\n\n\"Plus, bonus dragonets of destiny,\" Crocodile said. \"I am so getting a promotion.\"\n\n\"Is Queen Scarlet really dead?\" Glory asked again.\n\n\"Nobody knows,\" Crocodile said with a shrug. \"She seems to have vanished. Nobody can even tell the same story about what happened to her.\"\n\n\"Well, lucky you,\" said Glory, \"you're about to find out.\" She snapped her mouth open and shot her black venom straight into Crocodile's eyes.\n\nThe MudWing bellowed in agony and fell back, scraping her wings against the cave walls. She clawed at her snout, but the acid was already eating into her scales. With another shrieking roar, she shot out of the cave and dove for the lake below.\n\n\"Let's go!\" Tsunami shouted, spreading her wings.\n\nThe five dragonets, Riptide, and Webs burst out of the cave. Below them, dragons were still trying to shove their way into the tunnel, and the churning mass of wings and scales around the exit didn't look any smaller than it had before.\n\n\"We can't go that way,\" Starflight said.\n\n\"We'll have to go out through the canopy,\" Tsunami said. They all looked up and saw three red dragons shoot by, breathing fire.\n\n\"I don't really love that plan either,\" Starflight said in a smaller voice.\n\nTsunami spotted her mother at last. Queen Coral was standing on the library level, casting one last look at her scrolls. They weren't on fire yet, but they were the most flammable things in the palace. If they went up, the smoke would fill the palace and kill even more dragons.\n\nHer littlest dragonet was wrapped tightly to the queen's chest. Anemone stood on the edge of the pavilion, unharnessed, waiting.\n\nAs they watched, Queen Coral began flinging her scrolls over the edge into the water. After a moment, Anemone joined her, and the queen paused to touch her daughter's head affectionately.\n\nShe can be a good mother, Tsunami thought sadly. And a good queen. She wondered if there was any version of Pyrrhia where they could have grown up as a family, she and Coral and Gill and Anemone and Auklet, normal and happy, with no one trying to kill anyone.\n\nToo late now. She had this other family, not at all normal, and they needed her more than anyone.\n\nShe soared up toward the tattered remains of the canopy. Another flaming log came barreling down toward them, and Tsunami yanked Glory out of its path. It plummeted toward the lake, careening off the pavilion and setting another dragon on fire as it fell.\n\n\"Sunny,\" Tsunami called. \"Starflight. Stay below Clay's wings.\" Clay stretched his fireproof wings out, and the two dragonets ducked underneath on either side of him.\n\nTsunami surged ahead to scout the sky outside. She flew out past the smoking leaves and nearly collided with a SkyWing. He held a log in his claws and was about to breathe his fire onto it before dropping it into the palace. But Tsunami sent him swerving out of the way, and when she saw what he held, she slammed her tail into his side. The log flew out of his claws into the ocean, and he tumbled after it.\n\nFive more SkyWings were flying around in formation to make another pass. Off to her left, Tsunami spotted a wing of huge MudWings carrying extra logs. The SkyWings zipped up to them, took a log apiece, and flew back to the palace to set them alight.\n\nShe hissed with anger. This was a brutal, carefully planned attack on a palace full of dragonets and innocent civilians. There was nothing fair or honorable about this fight.\n\nShark and his SeaWings were fighting another set of SkyWings in the sky to her right. Fire blazed and talons clashed against scales. She wanted to join them. She itched to be over there, slashing and clawing and battling the intruders who'd dared attack her family's palace. That was the kind of fighting she wouldn't feel guilty about afterward.\n\nBut the other dragonets were flying up beside her now, and she couldn't leave them.\n\n\"That way,\" she said, jerking her head at the biggest swathe of clear sky. From the sun she guessed it was south \u2014 south, toward the continent, which was where they needed to go.\n\nGlory shot past her immediately, and as she reached the sky her scales turned pale blue and white and gold, and she shimmered into nothingness. Tsunami couldn't even see a ripple in the air as the RainWing flew away.\n\nClay went next, spreading his wings to shield Sunny and Starflight. A SkyWing in the battle spotted them and swerved in their direction. Tsunami lunged at her, grabbed her snout, and kicked her underbelly as hard as she could. The SkyWing kicked her back, sending bright arcs of pain along Tsunami's fractured ribs. Tsunami lost her grip, and the SkyWing roared a blast of flame at Clay's departing back.\n\nHe shuddered as the heat licked along his scales but beat his wings and flew on, the other two dragonets safely protected. The SkyWing blinked with astonishment as Clay's wings faded back to brown instead of turning black or twisting into painful burns.\n\n\"Surprise,\" Tsunami said, and punched her in the snout.\n\nThe SkyWing crumpled and fell toward the ocean, landing with a splash and vanishing instantly below the waves.\n\nRiptide soared up out of the canopy, twisting around to make sure Webs was safe behind him. Tsunami turned to fly south and heard Riptide call her name.\n\n\"I have to help them,\" he called, lashing his tail toward the fighting SeaWings.\n\n\"But they'll put you back in prison,\" Tsunami protested. \"They'll punish you because we escaped.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" he said. \"Probably. But I have to help if I can. This is my home.\"\n\nShe knew exactly how he felt.\n\n\"Tsunami...\" He paused. \"I really am sorry. I hope next time... well, I hope there is a next time. When things are better for everyone.\"\n\nShe hoped so, too. She wasn't sure she'd forgiven him, but she wanted the chance to decide. She wanted him to survive the war, and she wanted to meet him again in a world with no Talons of Peace or destinies or secrets to worry about.\n\nBut there wasn't time to say all that. Tsunami flashed one of the patterns he'd taught her. All right. Then she added squid-brain, and Riptide smiled before turning to fly away into the heart of the battle.\n\nWebs and Tsunami swerved south together, wings beating side by side.\n\nBut other wingbeats were close behind them. Tsunami twisted just in time to see Blister lunge out of the canopy and seize Webs by the tail. She yanked him back toward her and stabbed her poisonous barb toward his heart.\n\nWith a yell, Tsunami barreled into them, knocking the SandWing off of Webs. Blister fell back toward the palace, hissing.\n\nTsunami grabbed Webs by his front talons and towed him after her.\n\nA few wingbeats later, Webs groaned softly.\n\n\"Did she get you?\" Tsunami demanded.\n\n\"She missed my heart,\" he said, \"but \u2014\" He lifted his wing to show an oozing graze near his tail. \"It's still poisonous,\" he said.\n\n\"We'll find a way to fix it,\" Tsunami said. \"Just keep flying until we get to land.\"\n\nShe looked back again and saw Blister hovering in the air, watching them go. Her cold, glittering black eyes seemed to follow Tsunami all the way to the edge of the sky.\n\nTsunami was on a beach again.\n\nThis time it was dark, long after sunset, and small stars shone in the sky like the silver scales on the underside of Starflight's wings. Tsunami stared down at the waves lapping over her talons.\n\nShe wondered if she'd ever see Riptide again. Or Anemone, or Auklet, or her mother.\n\n\"I know it's dark,\" Starflight said uncomfortably behind her, \"but \u2014\"\n\nTsunami sighed. \"But we should stay under the trees.\" She stood up and followed him into the woods, shaking the sand off her talons. \"I'm trying to be more like you, you know,\" she said to him. \"I'm trying to stop and think and use my head and all that smart stuff, but it drives me a little crazy sometimes.\"\n\nStarflight stumbled on a tree root and turned to stare at her. \"Be more like me?\" he echoed. \"Why would you want to do that? I wish I were anything like you! Especially brave.\"\n\nTsunami brushed his wings with hers. \"You're all right the way you are,\" she said. \"Someone has to be the thoughtful, careful one. And you made Blister pretty mad \u2014 that took some courage. Besides, I don't think this group could handle two of me.\" In the moonlight, she caught a half smile flitting across his face.\n\nWebs lay on a patch of moss, breathing in a nasty shallow way. Sunny was curled up beside him so her scales could give him a little warmth. Clay was peering at the scratch near his tail, which was still oozing and starting to turn black around the edges.\n\n\"We need help,\" Clay said. \"I have no idea how to fix this.\" His expression was woeful.\n\n\"Who would know how to cure someone of SandWing venom?\" Sunny asked. \"SandWings, I guess,\" she answered herself. \"But I don't know where we'd find one we could trust.\"\n\n\"The Talons of Peace?\" Starflight suggested doubtfully.\n\n\"I can't go back there,\" Webs said. \"And you shouldn't either.\"\n\nTsunami tilted her head at him curiously. After all these years of being a good Talon foot soldier, obeying their every command, suddenly he'd changed his mind?\n\n\"If Crocodile was an infiltrator,\" he said, catching her look, \"there could be others. I don't know who's safe for you and who's not.\"\n\n\"Seriously. Even the 'good' dragons all seem to have plans for us,\" Tsunami said, thinking of her mother.\n\n\"Gosh, I hope Blaze is better than the other two,\" Sunny said fervently.\n\nStarflight winced, but didn't argue with her. \"We can probably find her with the IceWings,\" he said, \"but we'll have to be very, very careful this time.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Clay agreed. \"I vote for not getting locked up ever again.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should try a different approach,\" Glory suggested. \"Maybe this time we could not barge in yelling, 'We're the dragonets of destiny! We're awesome and special! We'd make terrific prisoners!' Just an idea.\"\n\n\"Do you know what we're supposed to do?\" Sunny asked Webs hopefully. \"Did the Talons have any plans about how we could fulfill the prophecy?\"\n\n\"If they did,\" Webs said, \"they didn't share them with me.\"\n\n\"Awesome,\" Glory muttered. Tsunami glanced at her. The RainWing's scales were shades of black and dark green, blending in with the dark forest around them. An idea struck her.\n\n\"I know who might help Webs with the poison,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"Who?\" Clay asked.\n\n\"The RainWings,\" she said. Glory twisted around to give her a sharp look. \"Think about it,\" Tsunami went on. \"They have venom, too, obviously. They must know something about what to do when you poison the wrong dragon.\"\n\n\"True,\" Starflight said. \"Even if it's a different kind of venom... that's still a good point.\"\n\n\"And then we can look for Glory's family,\" Tsunami said. \"Which I think is only fair.\"\n\nGlory's face was expressionless, but small puffs of rose pink were blooming in her scales. Tsunami guessed that meant she was happy, since it wasn't a color they saw very often on her.\n\n\"Are you \u2014 are you sure?\" Glory said. \"That's what we should do next?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Sunny said. \"We should definitely go find your home, Glory.\"\n\n\"I bet it's beautiful,\" Clay said in his sweet, earnest way. \"And your family will be so happy to see you.\"\n\nWebs let out a small groan, but when they turned to look at him, he closed his eyes as if he'd fallen asleep. Tsunami was sure he was pretending, but what they did next wasn't up to him anyway.\n\n\"It's also closer to here than most of the other tribes,\" Starflight pointed out. \"We have to cross the outskirts of MudWing territory, but the rainforest should be basically due southwest of here.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Glory said crossly. \"You're not the only one who can memorize maps, Starflight.\"\n\n\"Perfect,\" Tsunami said. \"That's what we'll do.\"\n\n\"After we rest?\" Sunny asked hopefully.\n\nTsunami thought she could keep flying, all night if she had to. She wanted to put as much distance between them and Blister as possible. She wanted to shove all the other dragonets ahead of her all the way to the rainforest without stopping.\n\nBut she looked at Sunny's tired eyes and Starflight's drooping wings, and she settled herself close to Webs's tail. \"After we rest,\" she agreed.\n\nSunny lay down again with a relieved sigh. A few moments later, Tsunami saw her back rising and falling in deep sleep.\n\nClay flopped down next to Tsunami, his tail draped over hers. \"I'm sorry about your mother,\" he said. \"And the palace. And Blister. And Whirlpool. And Riptide. And \u2014\"\n\n\"All right, I get it, thanks,\" Tsunami said, cutting him off with a nudge.\n\n\"I hope they all make it through the attack,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Me too,\" she said. \"But they'll be safe in the Deep Palace. At least they have somewhere else to go.\" She thought for a moment. \"And I think Anemone will be a good queen one day. She has Coral's good qualities, but she thinks for herself, and she's still young. She'll get stronger and more in de pen dent as she gets older.\"\n\n\"If she's anything like you, 'in de pen dent' will be an understatement,\" Glory said. She tucked herself along Clay's other side and he put one wing over her. Starflight had tentatively nosed in beside Sunny, and now his eyes were closed as well.\n\n\"The Kingdom of the Sea wasn't the right place for me anyway,\" Tsunami said, partly to convince herself.\n\n\"What about your great royal destiny?\" Glory teased. \"What about how you'd be the greatest queen of all time?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Tsunami said with a shrug, \"I guess I'll have to settle for being the boss of you guys.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Glory said, but not in her usual sarcastic way. Amused yellow bubbles floated through her wings, and she reached over to nose Tsunami's shoulder. \"You can certainly keep trying.\"\n\nI will, Tsunami thought, but not because I think I'm the greatest and everyone should listen to me. I'll keep trying to lead you because it's the only way I know to keep you all safe. And maybe sometimes I'll have to listen, the way Mother listens to her Council, and sometimes I won't be able to do exactly what I want.\n\nBut even when she was mad at her friends, she knew she could trust them. And she had to be the kind of dragon they could trust as well.\n\nShe glanced up at the moons, two of them glowing pale and ghostly beyond the trees.\n\nThere were more important things than becoming queen.\n\nStopping the war was one of them. If the five of them were the only ones who could \u2014 then maybe that was what they had to do, whether Tsunami believed in destiny or not.\n\nShe wriggled closer to her friends. All of them were sleeping soundly now.\n\nSo the Kingdom of the Sea wasn't home after all, she thought. I wonder if anywhere ever will be.\n\n\"Well,\" Morrowseer said. \"So that didn't go as planned.\"\n\n\"You ne glected to mention a few things,\" said Blister calmly. \"Such as the fact that your five dragonets are remarkably annoying.\" She draped her barbed tail pointedly over her talons and folded her wings back.\n\n\"Yes,\" said the NightWing. \"True. But you might have tried to be a little less sinister at them.\" He stared down at the charred ruins of the Summer Palace. Fires were still smoldering on a few floors of the pavilion. Three days after the battle, nothing remained but smoke and corpses.\n\n\"At least Webs is dead,\" he said.\n\n\"Should be by now,\" she answered, flipping her tail up and down.\n\n\"Queen Coral survived?\" he asked.\n\n\"And both her brats as well,\" said Blister. \"It wouldn't be convenient for me if she died.\" She bared her teeth and hissed softly. \"Of course, now she's hiding in her Deep Palace where I can't get to her. And she insists that my secret weapon will be no use to me for years still. She's gotten all squeamish about animus powers since finding out about her first daughter \u2014 like she'd rather waste that little one's magic just to keep her from turning homicidal.\" Blister sighed a small burst of flame. \"It's not been my favorite week of the war.\"\n\nShe batted away a piece of smoking foliage. \"So, NightWing, I hope for your sake that you bring me news I want to hear.\"\n\n\"There is another option,\" Morrowseer said, \"but I'm not sure you'll like it much better.\" He spread his wings and beckoned to a green shape circling in the sky overhead.\n\nThe SeaWing landed carefully on the cliffside, vines crumbling to ashes below his claws. He glanced down at the palace and shuddered. Morrowseer noticed that he stayed well away from Blister. Perhaps he'd heard \u2014 or guessed \u2014 what had happened to Kestrel.\n\n\"This is Nautilus,\" Morrowseer explained. \"One of the leaders of the Talons of Peace. Nautilus, explain your backup plan to the queen.\"\n\n\"Possible future queen,\" Nautilus corrected, then jumped back ner vously as Blister raised her poisonous tail. \"Er,\" he said quickly, \"we have a... a set of alternatives.\"\n\nBlister's black eyes glittered with interest. \"Alternatives?\" she said. \"Really. My, my. I had no idea the Talons of Peace could be so devious.\"\n\nNautilus frowned. \"We prefer to think of it as planning for every contingency,\" he said. \"We have to do whatever's necessary so the prophecy will come true.\"\n\n\"Or true-ish,\" Morrowseer interjected.\n\n\"Of course,\" Blister said. \"Dragonets can be so unpredictable. You are very wise.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Nautilus said, pleased, \"it was my idea.\"\n\n\"Of course it was,\" she said. \"Very clever. We are talking about false dragonets, yes?\"\n\n\"But,\" rumbled Morrowseer.\n\n\"Yes,\" Nautilus said. His tail twitched. \"But. They're, ah \u2014 not quite perfect.\"\n\n\"Hmmm,\" said Blister. \"Worse than the originals? Is that possible?\"\n\n\"Well... different. Or else they'd be plan A,\" Nautilus said. \"Obviously.\"\n\n\"All I want to know is whether they'll do as they're told,\" Blister said.\n\n\"Um.\" Nautilus wrinkled his snout and stared at the sky. \"Maaaaybe?\"\n\n\"This does sound promising,\" Blister said drily. \"I can't wait to meet them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we can take the best options from each group,\" Morrowseer said. \"Kill the RainWing, obviously. We can probably work with the original MudWing.\"\n\n\"Your NightWing is useless,\" Blister said. \"Worst traitor I've ever seen.\"\n\nMorrowseer shook his head. \"That is very disappointing. We don't often kill off our dragonets, but...\" He sighed. \"If we must.\"\n\n\"Uh,\" said Nautilus, \"you might want to meet our other option first. I mean, not to interfere. Just a suggestion.\"\n\n\"And we'll definitely kill the SeaWing,\" Blister snarled.\n\nNautilus flapped his wings, backing away in a hurry.\n\n\"Not you,\" she said impatiently. \"Well, not right now.\"\n\n\"I thought Tsunami had some potential,\" Morrowseer muttered.\n\n\"Potential to annoy my tail off,\" Blister growled. \"No, she definitely has to go.\"\n\n\"We have dragons working on it as we speak,\" Morrowseer promised. \"Recruiting assassins is surprisingly easy in the middle of a war.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Blister flicked her tail menacingly. \"Those dragonets need to know they're not as valuable as they think they are. Anyone can be replaced.\" She smiled with all her teeth. \"After all... there's more than one way to fulfill a prophecy.\"\n\n\"Glory,\" Tsunami scolded. \"Bright-yellow scales are the one thing they might see. Go back to camouflage.\"\n\nGlory glanced down and saw the starbursts of gold that had appeared all across her scales. Those meant happiness or excitement \u2014 as far as she knew, since she'd seen them pretty rarely in her life. It drove her crazy when her scales changed color without her telling them to. They did that way too often. She had to squash every big emotion before it splashed all over her.\n\nShe concentrated on the steady drip-drip of the swamp around them, staring down at the thick brown mud oozing through her claws. She imagined the fog winding around her wings, slipping into the cracks in her scales, and spreading like gray clouds rolling across the sky.\n\n\"Aaaand she's gone,\" Tsunami said.\n\n\"She's still there,\" Sunny piped up. She edged closer to Glory and bumped into one of her wings. \"See? Right there.\" She stretched out a talon to touch Glory, but Glory moved out of reach. Sunny felt around in the air for a moment and then gave up.\n\nThe little SandWing had been unusually quiet for the last few days. Glory guessed Sunny hated the rain, too \u2014 the desert dragons were designed for searing heat, blazing sun, and endless clear-sky days. Even an odd-looking SandWing like Sunny still had the instincts of her tribe.\n\nReally, Clay was the only one happy about the weather. Only a MudWing could appreciate the squishing and squashing under their claws as they traveled through the swamp.\n\nStarflight swiveled his head suddenly. \"I think I smell someone coming,\" he whispered. He shuddered from horns to claws.\n\n\"Don't panic,\" Tsunami whispered back. \"Clay, you hide me and Sunny. Starflight, find a shadow and do your invisible petrified NightWing thing. Glory, you can shield Webs.\"\n\n\"No, thanks,\" Glory said immediately. She wasn't going anywhere near Webs, and certainly not to save his life. \"I'll take Sunny.\" She didn't like touching other dragons, but Sunny was better than Webs.\n\n\"But \u2014\" Tsunami started, stamping her foot.\n\nGlory ignored her. She lifted one wing and tugged the little gold dragon in close to her side. When she lowered her wing again, Sunny was hidden by Glory's gray-brown camouflage.\n\n\"Yikes,\" Clay said. \"That was so weird. Like Sunny just got eaten by the fog.\" His stomach grumbled woefully at the word \"eaten,\" and Clay shuffled his big feet in embarrassment.\n\nStarflight peered at the spot where Sunny had just been, twisting his claws in the mud.\n\n\"She's fine,\" Glory said. \"Go follow orders like a good dragonet, or Tsunami might fling you to the eels.\"\n\nTsunami frowned in her direction, but Starflight slunk away and found a dark tree hollow where his black scales melted into the shadows.\n\nNow Glory could hear it, too: the tramp-squelch-tramp-squelch of enormous claws marching toward them through the swamp. The heat from Sunny's scales was uncomfortably warm against her side.\n\nWebs hadn't moved while they talked. He lay curled against the tree roots, snout resting on his tail, looking miserable.\n\nClay shepherded Tsunami up next to Webs and spread his mud-colored wings to hide them both. It wasn't a perfect solution \u2014 a blue tail stuck out on one side, the edges of blue-green wings on the other. But in this fog, they looked mostly like a blobby mound of mud, which should be good enough.\n\nTramp. Squelch. Tramp. Squelch.\n\n\"I don't like this patrol,\" a deep voice grumbled. Glory nearly jumped. It sounded like it was coming from two trees away. \"Too close to that creepy rainforest, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"It's not really haunted,\" said a second voice. \"You know the only things that live there are birds and lazy RainWings.\"\n\nYears of learning self-control kept Glory from flinching. She'd heard \"lazy RainWings\" thrown around often enough by the guardians under the mountain. But it felt like an extra stab in the eye to hear it from a total stranger.\n\n\"If that were true,\" said the first voice, \"then Her Majesty would let us hunt in there. But she knows it's not safe. And you've heard the noises at night. Are you telling me it's the RainWings screaming like that?\"\n\nScreaming? Sunny turned her head a little, as if she were trying to hear better.\n\n\"Not to mention the dead bodies,\" the first voice muttered.\n\n\"That's not some kind of rainforest monster,\" said the second guard, but there was a tilt in her tone that sounded unsure. \"That's the war. Some kind of guerrilla attacks to scare us.\"\n\n\"All the way down here? Why would the SeaWings or the IceWings come all this way to kill one or two MudWings here and there? There are bigger battles going on everywhere else.\"\n\n\"Let's go a bit faster,\" said the second voice uneasily. \"They should really let us patrol in threes or fours instead of in pairs.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it.\" Tramp squelch tramp squelch. \"So, what do you think about the SkyWing situation? Are you for Ruby, or do you think...\"\n\nGlory strained her ears, but their voices faded into the mist as the two MudWing soldiers sploshed away. If only she could follow them \u2014 she badly wanted to know what \"the SkyWing situation\" was. Maybe her friends wouldn't notice if she slipped away for a moment.\n\n\"Be right back,\" she whispered to Sunny, lifting her wing and stepping away.\n\nSunny caught her tail, wide-eyed. \"Don't go!\" she whispered. \"It's not safe! You heard what they said.\"\n\n\"About rainforest monsters?\" Glory rolled her eyes. \"Can't say I'm terribly worried about that. I won't go far.\" She shook Sunny off and slipped after the soldiers, carefully stepping only on the dry patches so her claws wouldn't splash in the mud.\n\nIt was weirdly quiet in the swamp, especially with the fog muffling most sounds. She tried to follow the distant rumble of voices and what she thought might be the sound of marching MudWing talons. But after a few moments, even those became impossible to hear.\n\nShe stopped, listening. The trees dripped. Rain drizzled moodily through the branches. Small gurgles burbled out of the mud here and there, as if the swamp were hiccupping.\n\nAnd then a scream tore through the air.\n\nGlory's ruff flared in fear and pale green stripes zigzagged through her scales. She fought back her terror, focusing her colors back to gray and brown.\n\n\"Glory!\" Sunny yelled, behind her somewhere.\n\nShut up, Glory thought furiously. Don't draw attention. Don't let anything know we're here.\n\nThe other dragonets must have had the same thought and stopped her, because she didn't call out again.\n\nUnless it was one of them who screamed. But it couldn't have been. The scream had come from somewhere up ahead.\n\nGlory checked her scales again to make sure she was well hidden, and then sped up, hurrying through the trees toward the scream.\n\nThe fog was so dense, she nearly missed the two dark lumps that looked like fallen logs. But her claws came down on something that was decidedly a dragon tail, and she leaped back.\n\nTwo brown dragons were sprawled in the mud, surrounded by pools of blood that were already being washed away by the rain. Their throats had been ripped out so viciously that their heads were nearly severed from their bodies.\n\nGlory stared into the rolling gray fog, but nothing moved out there except the rain.\n\nThe MudWing soldiers were dead, and there was no sign of what had killed them."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Jane Austen's Dragons 7) Dragons Beyond the Pale",
        "author": "Maria Grace",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "regency",
            "dragons",
            "romance",
            "female protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "January 10, 1815, Darcy House, London",
                "text": "\"Elizabeth, Elizabeth!\"\n\nNo, please, just a little more sleep.\n\nA heavy, warm hand weighed on her shoulder, shaking her firmly enough to dislodge the fading dream from her head. Botheration! That one seemed worth remembering.\n\nWhere was she?\n\nShe rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Vaguely warm, rosy streaks of morning sunlight slipped past the drawn burgundy velvet curtains to play across the plush dark leather squabs as the coach rocked and bounced over the road in time with the horses' clip-clop.\n\nOh, yes, the carriage. They had left the inn at dawn\u2014it must be at least nine o'clock, now. So, they should be in London.\n\nAt last.\n\nDarcy had insisted they not push through last night, but rather turn in early and get a solid night's rest before arriving in town. At least as solid a night's rest as one got whilst traveling with an infant, who still was not apt to sleep through the night. And a very young tatzelwurm, who had only recently conquered her extended hatching hunger.\n\nThank heavens for Nanny, whose need for uninterrupted sleep was far less than her own. Even so, after the last several months in Bath, the dear drake might yet decide to hibernate for six months to catch up on her rest. No one would blame her.\n\nElizabeth pushed herself upright. Everything smelt of Darcy's sandalwood soap and shaving oil. Of course it did. She had been lying\u2014quite comfortably\u2014with her head in his lap. \"How long?\"\n\n\"Almost since the moment we left.\" He helped her sit straight.\n\nStiff neck, shoulders, back, everything, despite the excellent springs and generous squabs. Precisely why Papa detested travel even when his health had permitted it.\n\nDarcy slid the curtains open several inches. She blinked against the morning brightness and shivered. Even with the sun through the side glass, the coach was a touch cold, especially after having been cuddled up close to him.\n\nThe white ironwork fairy dragon 'cage,' mostly covered by its blue quilted cozy, swung gently on the hook opposite the door. April balanced on the swing, twittering. \"Perhaps you will now believe us when we insist you have been working too hard.\" She fluttered out and perched on Elizabeth's knees, scratchy toes piercing the grey-blue wool of her pelisse.\n\nA sunbeam caught the tiny fairy dragon's blue feather-scales just so. She sparkled like a little gem as she presented her chin for a scratch. Her soft hide was still vaguely warm from her hot-brick-heated 'cage.'\n\n\"I seem to remember you singing a great deal. Perhaps that might have had something to do with my excessive slumber.\" Elizabeth yawned into her hands.\n\n\"You slept, he did not.\" April pointed her wing at Darcy. \"What does that tell you?\"\n\n\"She is right,\" Darcy murmured, stroking April's back with his fingertip.\n\n\"There was a very great deal to be done, what with Twelfth Night and trying to take leave of Bath.\"\n\n\"Every dragon there must have called upon you, twice.\" Darcy's lips pressed into that hard, straight line that was not a frown but might as well be.\n\n\"Cornwall did not.\" All told, that was probably a very good thing.\n\n\"Cornwall is quite the exception to the rule. He will always resent the part you played in denying him the gold that Kellynch purloined from the Merchant Royal.\"\n\n\"Thankfully, the rest of the Blue Order Council and even the Brenin himself are satisfied with the outcome of the court proceedings. Cornwall was in violation of so many laws, it could have gone very badly against him.\" She stretched to dissipate a shudder that would have disturbed April.\n\nJust how narrowly had they averted disaster at that special court? Best not dwell on it just now.\n\n\"Not to minimize your outstanding success, my dear, but I hope our stay in London is not nearly so interesting.\" Darcy shook his head a bit, his dark hair falling just a bit into his face. Now they were back in town, he would need to see his favorite barber soon. The man he saw in Bath had hardly deserved the title of barber.\n\n\"On that we shall agree. I hope to apply myself to sleeping late, eating biscuits, and attending teas and parties with the other ladies of my rank.\"\n\n\"There are no other ladies of your rank,\" April murmured under her breath as she cleaned between her long toes.\n\nWhile that was only true in part, the isolation it suggested was not pleasant to consider.\n\n\"Has there been any word from Nanny's coach?\" Elizabeth pulled the curtains fully open and peered through the side glass, catching a glimpse of the black carriage, curtains tightly drawn, following close behind them.\n\n\"Not a one.\"\n\n\"Your hatchling seems very happy to travel with the little wyrmling. It is as though her purr is as soporific as my song.\"\n\n\"Junior keeper, if you please.\" Darcy cleared his throat and covered his ears lest April's ear nip catch him unawares. He had acquired that habit very soon after coming into April's acquaintance. \"I confess, I find it odd that our daughter, not even walking yet, travels with not one, but two companion dragons. You must grant it is very unconventional.\"\n\n\"I am convinced children would come into their hearing sooner if exposed to dragons at an earlier age.\" Elizabeth harrumphed, her hackles rising. Had they not settled this matter months ago?\n\n\"The Order might have a point, though. Children do pose a great risk of exposing the Order, especially if one is not certain whether they can hear or not.\"\n\n\"The Gardiner children have been well-versed in the dangers of exposing the secrets of dragonkind.\"\n\n\"But they are considerably older than Anne, and were identified as hearing before they were regularly exposed to dragons. Rustle avoided their company until it had been established.\"\n\nStubborn, vexing man! \"Are you suggesting that Anne cannot\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not question your decisions regarding our daughter. There is no doubt she is as exceptional as her mother. But I fear the ladies of the Order might not be as open to such ideas.\" He ran his fist along the edge of his jaw.\n\n\"They will just have to harden themselves to the idea that they do not know everything\u2014\"\n\n\"Lady Matlock questions your methods.\"\n\nWhy did he have to bring her up? She was nearly as exasperating as her husband's sister, the honorable Lady Catherine de Bourgh! That name, that family still left her clenching her teeth and biting her tongue. \"And what do I care for her opinions? She is not an officer of the Order.\"\n\n\"Some courtesy is required, as her husband is Chancellor of the Order, to whom even you have to answer. Not to mention Cownt Matlock is, technically, her Dragon Mate. And he has done us a great favor by walking Pemberley back to London for us.\"\n\n\"Probably as a means to get out of traveling with the good lady.\"\n\n\"Elizabeth?\" His tone stopped just short of rebuke.\n\nBotheration! He was right. Mama had taught her better manners than to even permit such untoward thoughts.\n\n\"Forgive me. I am a bit out of temper this morning. Perhaps I am in need of a bit of rest.\" She closed her eyes and leaned back into the soft squabs. A touch of a headache pulsed just behind her eyes.\n\nSo many hours spent reading and writing late into the night. So many dragons to meet. So many questions from Keeper and dragon and Friend alike, all needing answers. Even at the inns they stayed in, all run by members of the Order, minor dragons and their Friends had all but lined up to greet them and seek her advice.\n\nMost of the questions had been simple, even banal: advice for talon rot, bad teeth and scale mites; the management of pucks' hoards; territorial disputes between fairy dragon harems; hunting rights, rights of way. But there were just so many of them.\n\nAll the more reason to get those monographs written and distributed into the hands of Dragon Friends as soon as possible.\n\n\"You are working again.\" Darcy tapped her knee with his fingertips, his voice low and thoughtful.\n\n\"Not working, but thinking about all that needs to be done.\"\n\n\"Have you considered my suggestion? Apply to the Order for a secretary to assist you. I know there are several apprentice scribes, human and drake, that Lady Astrid has deemed ready to become journeymen.\"\n\n\"I just prefer to do things myself.\" She leaned back and sighed. \"I suppose I now know why Father fought so long against such help.\"\n\nApril twittered something disagreeable and Darcy muttered a dissenting sound. He knew better than to actually form words\u2014those she could always hear.\n\n\"But I shall learn from Papa's stubbornness. After we have recovered from this journey, I will speak to our esteemed Scribe myself.\"\n\nHe offered a warm nod of approval that ended well short of gloating at his success. At least he was not insufferable when he was right.\n\nThe coach stopped in the mews behind the Darcy House, near the little walled garden just beyond the terrace house's back door. Shadows still covered nearly all of the mews' space\u2014the sun only reached there after noon. Still, the private stillness of the familiar carriage house and small courtyard welcomed her.\n\nThe driver let down the steps with an echoing, metallic clank and opened the door. Crisp air flooded in, carrying with it all the unique London scents: coal smoke, the Thames, a particular mix of dragon musk different to that in the country. In a few days it would all fade into the background, but for now, each breeze would remind her they were in the city now.\n\nDarcy exited first. He preferred to hand her down himself. Such a dear man.\n\nA dark blur launched from the driver's box toward the roof. Walker.\n\nHe would be conducting a sweep of the area, checking for anything that did not meet with his approval. How protective he had become towards Elizabeth, Anne, April and even little Pemberley, and even more so since May had hatched. He and the wyrmling were inexplicably close\u2014an odd pair to be certain, but May adored her curmudgeonly cockatrice uncle. And he tolerated familiarities from her that none other would dare. Who else would dare lick his feather-scales, attempting to groom him?\n\nSuch an unusual, and very dear, draconic family they had formed.\n\nShe stretched, careful not to dislodge April from her shoulder, adjusting to the intrusive, even overwhelming, sounds of the city. Even so early, how noisy it was. Carriages with horses on the street beyond the mews; peddlers calling out about their wares; a tatzelwurm chasing a rat\u2014and catching it; a puck arguing with it over the catch. Not entirely unlike Bath.\n\nIt was home, though, and that made all the difference.\n\nKnee-high minor drakes, Slate and Amber, the Darcy family livery badge emblazoned on green baize vests buttoned across their chests, bounded out to meet them, with toothy draconic smiles. No doubt the housekeeper had fashioned those to help keep them warm in the chill weather. There was a reason Elizabeth liked the woman.\n\nApril warbled a greeting, which the drakes returned in kind.\n\n\"Lady Sage, Vicontes Pemberley arrived a few hours ago. She is sleeping in her nest in the cellar. I expect she might sleep for a day or more.\" Amber's deep yellow-orange eyes glittered in the sun; her well-oiled dark-green hide spoke of the excellent care the staff dragons enjoyed. It was good to see that continued without their presence in the house.\n\n\"I am not surprised. It is such a long walk for a little dragon.\"\n\n\"Cownt Matlock suggested he might sleep for a week,\" Slate added with an almost mischievous grin.\n\nNanny approached from the second carriage. More blue than green in the morning light, Nanny walked on hind feet with Anne cradled in her front legs. She moved like a tall, slender schoolmistress, posture perfect, each step purposeful and sure. May, the little black tatzelwurmling with tufted ears too big for her face, spring-hopped to keep up with Nanny's long strides.\n\n\"Mrrrow?\" May skidded to a stop, staring at Slate and Amber with startled, wide, golden eyes. They were not the first drakes she had ever seen. Perhaps she had forgotten Elizabeth's reminder they would be present.\n\nElizabeth stepped close to May, crouching to stroke the back of her neck. \"Slate, Amber, may I present our new Friend, May.\"\n\nThe lithe wyrmling stretched out her front paws and touched her chin to the ground. Slate and Amber licked the top of her head with their very long tongues. May looked up at them and licked their cheeks. Not the greeting she had been taught, but it worked. The drakes made a happy little warble in the back of their throats.\n\nElizabeth stood, knees still stiff and sore. \"Show May around the house, then make up a warm basket for her in the nursery.\"\n\n\"The nursery, Lady Sage?\" Amber cocked her long head so far it was almost upside down.\n\n\"Yes, she is to stay with Junior Keeper as much as possible. Slate, attend Nanny and help her with whatever she needs.\"\n\n\"Yes, Sage.\" They dipped in a small bow\u2014or was it more of a curtsey?\u2014and hurried off after Nanny.\n\nDarcy followed Nanny into the house with his gaze. \"Cats are generally not allowed in nurseries. Do you think\u2026\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Surely you have noticed, Anne sleeps so much better when May is with her. That alone should convince you! Besides, true cats do not harm babies, much less tatzelwurms\u2013who have far more sense than the typical cat. If that is not sufficient, Nanny will be there watching over them all. I know you trust her.\"\n\nYes, there had been an impatient note in her voice, and no, he probably did not deserve it. She kneaded the back of her neck. Would it be wrong to go directly to bed now?\n\nWalker swooped down from the roof and back-winged as his feet touched the ground. \"The Matlocks approach.\"\n\n\"So soon? We have been here less than an hour,\" Darcy all but stammered.\n\n\"You cannot imagine your arrival has gone unnoticed. I expect the call is not purely social.\" Walker raked his talons against the cobblestones. What was he worried about?\n\nDarcy pinched the bridge of his nose and wrinkled his forehead as though hoping to stave off a headache. \"Lovely, just lovely.\"\n\n\"And it seems Lady Matlock is with him.\"\n\nApril squawked a discordant note. Elizabeth winced before she could stop herself.\n\n\"Do you wish to be home to her?\" Darcy muttered through clenched teeth. His Aunt Matlock was too much like his Aunt Catherine for anyone's liking.\n\n\"Much as I would defer the honor of her presence, it seems that pleasure would come at a high price. Perhaps we can manage a cup of tea before they arrive?\" Elizabeth dragged herself toward the door and certain vexation, April twittering a soft, soothing trill in her ear.\n\nA quarter of an hour later, the housekeeper brought the tea service into the morning room, a lovely, snug room with dark furniture, a round table that could seat six, and bright white walls hung with drawings done by Lady Anne Darcy. The sort of place one wanted to linger and breathe in the fragrance of peace and rest.\n\nFive minutes later, before the tea was even poured, the butler announced the Matlocks' arrival. The earl and his wife swept into the room, wearing their rank like court robes.\n\nHe was tall and looked like nothing so much as an older version of his son Richard, though his nose was a mite sharper, more aquiline, and his hazel eyes narrower. She was short and plump and proud; her double chin lifted a mite too high, so her beady dark eyes seemed to be staring down at everyone.\n\nElizabeth and Darcy rose. April hovered between them.\n\n\"Uncle, Aunt, a pleasure to see you this morning.\" The way Darcy emphasized the final word reminded all that it was too early for a polite morning call.\n\n\"Lord Matlock, Lady Matlock.\" Elizabeth curtsied despite her knees' protest.\n\n\"Darcy, Lady Elizabeth. Oh yes, and April, too.\" Matlock looked straight at Darcy. It did not seem an insult so much as preoccupation. That probably was not a good sign.\n\nLady Matlock grimaced just a little. She did not approve of Elizabeth having a title in her own right, or so the fairy dragon gossip suggested. A title so newly created would never have the weight of one properly inherited so was hardly worth having at all.\n\n\"Pray forgive our call on the heels of your arrival, but there are matters that just cannot wait. I would see you in your study, Darcy.\" Lord Matlock turned for the doorway.\n\nApril squawked softly as Elizabeth bit her tongue. No point in reminding either of them that it might be wise to include her. Whatever the issue, if it concerned her, she would find out, likely straight from the dragon's mouth, as it were. Why was it so difficult to convince the men of the Council that things often went better when she was brought into a concern earlier rather than later?\n\nVexing, hidebound dominance seekers.\n\nA large, cold void filled the morning room, growing larger by the moment.\n\n\"Would you care for some tea, Lady Matlock?\" Elizabeth gestured Lady Matlock to a place at the table.\n\n\"What kind is it?\" April hopped across the table and landed on the edge of a dainty china saucer covered with tiny yellow roses, one intentionally set for her, which looked lovely against her bright turquoise feather-scales.\n\n\"Earl Grey.\" Elizabeth suppressed her smile. April had just recently developed a decided preference for the bergamot-infused beverage. She had refused to try it until she learned it was flavored with a fruit, then suddenly she was quite enamored with it.\n\n\"I would like some, with honey.\" April hopped from one foot to the other. It was entirely possible the tea was simply an excuse to drink honey.\n\n\"And you, Lady Matlock?\"\n\nLady Matlock stared at April. Not pleasantly, but in the way one glared at a disobedient child or a clumsy servant. Of course. Dragons at the breakfast table were not covered in etiquette manuals, not even ones published by the Blue Order.\n\nOne more monograph she would have to write.\n\n\"Ah, well, yes, please.\" Her face said she was only taking the tea to humor Elizabeth, but at least she was attempting to be polite.\n\nElizabeth poured the tea, sweetened April's with a shocking amount of honey, and sat down.\n\nLady Matlock looked at her expectantly. What was she waiting for?\n\n\"How is Cownt Matlock after his journey? It was very kind of him to walk Pemberley back to London for us.\" If she wanted small talk, then it would be about dragons.\n\n\"In little humor for conversation. He had no idea how much young creatures talked nor how many questions they asked.\" Lady Matlock's features softened just a little.\n\n\"I had wondered if that would be the case. I did try to warn him, but little Pemberley gets so ill in a cart or carriage, he insisted it would be an indignity for her to be forced into such a conveyance. We are very grateful for his help.\" At least she could say that with genuine enthusiasm.\n\n\"He did say you and Darcy have done well by her. She is showing signs of being an excellent young dragon, which must be considered a good thing, all told. Will you be presenting her at the Dragon Keepers' Cotillion next month?\" Lady Matlock sipped her tea, staring over the edge of the cup with an odd look of expectation.\n\n\"I think she is still full young for that. She has learned many of the proper greetings and displays when introduced to other dragons. But I do not think she is quite ready for so many people and so many dragons in company at once. Despite all she has learned, she is still a baby. It is one thing to have been forced together with many other dragons in court. It is quite another to try to manage all the trappings of a formal engagement as extensive as the Cotillion. I see no harm in waiting a year, or even two.\"\n\n\"Well, that is some relief.\"\n\n\"I am not sure I take your meaning.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should see the list of presentations this year.\" Lady Matlock opened her reticule and pulled out a neatly penned card. \"In particular, you may want to note the ladies you are sponsoring for presentation at the ball.\"\n\n\"I am sponsoring? You must be mistaken.\"\n\n\"I think not. This is the official Record and has been sent to all Keepers and other invitees.\" She tapped a spot at the top of the list. \"See here: Dragon Sage, Lady Elizabeth Darcy.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Mary Collins, Keeper to Longbourn, and her husband? Mr. Collins will be presented to the Order? When was this decided?\" And why now\u2014but perhaps this was not the company for that question.\n\n\"You will have to ask our Historian.\" Lady Matlock's lip curled just a bit.\n\n\"Why is Father not sponsoring them? He is an officer of the Order, even if he has retired as a Keeper.\"\n\n\"He is without title, Lady Elizabeth.\" Lady Matlock stared directly into her eyes.\n\n\"So, he is using that as an excuse to get out of his duties now?\" Elizabeth dragged her hand down her face and peered at the list again. \"Miss Lydia Bennet? No one has consulted me. Have Auntie and her schoolmistress approved?\"\n\n\"Another point to discuss with your father.\"\n\n\"Miss Georgiana Darcy? Should not you and Lord Matlock\u2014\"\n\n\"One would think so.\" Lady Matlock lifted her eyebrow.\n\n\"But why? It makes no sense.\"\n\n\"Pray, may I be frank with you?\" Frank? A Lady of the ton wanted to be frank? What was one to make of that?\n\n\"Pray do.\"\n\n\"I understand you had nothing to do with the dragons' decision to create you as Sage or as Lady Elizabeth; and that there were no machinations on your part when you became betrothed to Darcy in front of the Conclave; and that your relationship with dragons, your knowledge of them is all hard won and comes at a cost. There are many who do not see things that way. Many who are jealous of your rather, ah, as it is called 'fairy tale' story.\"\n\n\"That is absurd. What does that have to do with the Cotillion and sponsoring all my sisters at once?\"\n\n\"Not just your sisters, but Lady Wentworth as well. She and her husband are to be presented as Keepers to Kellynch.\"\n\n\"This is ridiculous! Impossible! How am I to possibly manage four presentations? Arrange for the dresses, teach them the protocols? There is so much other work to be done. The monographs alone that I need to write will require several months of effort.\" She clutched the edge of the table.\n\nLady Matlock leaned forward on her elbows, her eyes sharp and severe. \"Work that can wait until after the cotillion. You have been so busy managing dragons, I think you have forgotten there are people in the Order as well.\"\n\n\"They do not require a Sage in order to be understood.\"\n\n\"But they do require a sage to help them to understand how to take their place in Blue Order dragon society. And I do not mean only the debutantes. Perhaps you have not noticed, but not many of the Order have your ease with dragons, and it causes problems. So, if I may be so bold, Lady Sage, pause your salons and your manuscripts and attend to the rest of the Order's members, the human ones, with as much fervor as you have the dragons. I expect your future influence depends on it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Darcy led the way to his study at the front of the house. That Uncle stalked behind him, not speaking, spoke volumes: the matter was serious, not frivolous; and the information not to be casually trusted to the servants, human and dragon alike.\n\nSimply put, this was bad.\n\nDarcy paused at the study door to savor the image, just for a moment. His father's impressive mahogany desk, flanked by matching bookcases near the door, a pair of leather wingback chairs, dark brown and well-worn, near the fireplace, even the scent of wood smoke and old books, felt like home.\n\nIt seemed as though nothing had been touched since he left, just the way he preferred. The blue leatherbound journal on the desk had been left open to the page he had intentionally left it on, the books beside it bore a light film of dust. No doubt the housekeeper hated that, but it was exactly what he preferred. A man's study should not be interfered with.\n\nUncle Matlock closed the study door firmly, the sound like a throat-clearing introduction to an unpleasant conversation. \"Walker should be privy to this discussion.\" He headed toward the servants' door, opened it and checked the passage.\n\nThings were not simply bad. Apparently, they were very bad.\n\nDarcy opened the window and blew the brass whistle on the watch fob Walker himself had given him so many years ago, the one he could hear from miles away.\n\n\"Before I forget,\" Matlock sat in one of the wingback chairs near the room's ancient, iron dragon perch. \"My wife is talking to yours about the Cotillion. Best you know now. Elizabeth has been assigned to present your sister, both of hers, and Lady Wentworth at the affair.\"\n\n\"Nonsense! Who could have planned such a thing?\" Darcy slapped the top edge of the chair. \"She is already overburdened. Someone else will have to handle the matter. Aunt can present Georgiana, and her father\u2014\"\n\n\"I attempted to argue the same thing. But it seems there are those who would be happy to take the Sage down a peg or two by allowing her to falter in her social duties.\"\n\n\"How could you have permitted such a thing? After the affairs of Bath\u2014you know how hard she has worked. How could you sanction\u2014\"\n\n\"The invitations have been sent. To alter the arrangement now would only be to her detriment. The matters were established whilst I was in Bath, and there was little I could do once we returned. Besides, these affairs are overseen by the Cotillion Board, not the Council. I could hardly interfere.\"\n\n\"So, you support this ill-conceived attempt at\u2014\"\n\nUncle shrugged and flipped his hand, the same way he had dismissed Darcy when he was a boy. \"Frankly, there are much more significant matters that require my attention right now. The details of a ball are the least of my worries.\"\n\nWalker swooped in and landed gracefully on the wrought-iron perch. He pointed at the empty chair with his wing and squawked.\n\nDarcy obeyed, though he did not relax into the chair.\n\n\"Thank you for attending us Walker. It is only right that you understand the full breadth of what is happening.\"\n\n\"Pendragon's Bones! What is going on?\" Darcy glanced at Walker.\n\n\"What indeed?\" Walker hissed, focusing his piercing predator's gaze on Uncle Matlock.\n\n\"What I am about to tell you has not even been officially shared with the Council yet. I will be meeting with them directly after I leave here. Best close the window, now that I think of it. We do not need help from the local fairy dragons.\" Matlock marched to the window, closing it himself.\n\nHe did not call for Darcy to do it.\n\nVery, very bad.\n\nWhy did he not just come out with it?\n\nBack in his seat, Matlock rubbed his hands along his thighs. \"On the basis of bits and pieces of fairy dragon gossip that have been picked up here and there, I took a circuitous route home from Bath, visiting a number of less appealing establishments, and some rather dissolute dragon Friends along the way.\"\n\n\"Associates of William Elliot and Jet by any chance?\" Darcy asked.\n\n\"He was quite forthcoming with suggestions of those we might be interested in. No honor among that sort, to be sure.\"\n\nWalker snorted.\n\n\"His information led us to several interesting,\" he cleared his throat to punctuate the word, \"places and a few associates of your friend Mr. Wickham.\" Matlock allowed the name to hang in the air. He had never approved of Wickham and still held a grudge against Father for having favored him.\n\nWalker hissed and flapped. Even after all these years, that sound still raised chill-bumps on the back of Darcy's neck.\n\n\"Dragon hearers mostly, but there were a few dragon-deaf amongst them who had been let in on the world of the Order. All are in secure custody now, of course. Some are quite ready to talk in hopes of not being eaten, or worse.\"\n\nAnd who could blame them? \"What has been learned?\"\n\n\"We are still sorting that out. I am afraid it may be some time before we can piece it all together. All we are certain of right now is there is indeed an active band of smugglers dedicated to the traffic of dragons, their eggs, and,\" Uncle gulped, \"even their bodies and parts.\"\n\n\"Dragon's fire!\" Darcy leapt to his feet and began to pace the length of the narrow room. Anything to shed the electric energy coursing through his limbs.\n\n\"I have already sent word to Richard. He and Earl\u2014fine young cockatrice, by the way, Walker, worthy of your line\u2014will be working their way down from the north, looking into the matter. Several others with espionage backgrounds have also been similarly deployed. In the meantime, we must wait.\"\n\nWalker growled.\n\n\"And watch, of course.\" Matlock nodded at Walker. \"It is not a stretch to see how little Pemberley, now that she is far better known than a baby firedrake might otherwise be, thanks to Elizabeth's insistence she be part of every Blue Order activity possible\u2014\"\n\nDarcy clenched his fists.\n\n\"Save your offense and your arguments. I am not going to fall into a debate of whether or not such risk is warranted. The point is that we know there are those connected to the smugglers who are aware of Pemberley and see her as an attractive target for their efforts.\"\n\n\"Then we should return\u2014\"\n\n\"Cownt Matlock and I have considered that possibility, but we agree, Darcy House in London is much more defensible than Pemberley, where the extensive grounds are much more difficult to keep watch over.\"\n\nThat seemed more than a suggestion.\n\n\"He is right.\" Walker muttered as he paced sideways along his perch.\n\n\"On the Cownt's orders, there will be a cockatrice guard stationed on your roof. They will report directly to Walker. Several of our larger minor drakes will be assigned to your house staff for security inside. I will leave it to you to explain their presence to your wife and staff. Without revealing the true nature of our concerns.\"\n\nWalker growled. That should have caught Matlock's attention, but he seemed to ignore it.\n\n\"I cannot keep secrets from Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"I am not giving you a choice.\" Matlock leaned forward, elbows on knees and glared. \"She has proven herself impulsive and unpredictable\u2014\"\n\n\"And generally correct\u2014\"\n\n\"In critical dragon matters, yet. But the situation right now requires a delicate diplomatic hand. That is not her long suit.\"\n\n\"You do not understand. One does not keep secrets from her. She will find out; the dragons will tell her everything. I know you will order them not to, but you do not understand the power my wife has with them. They will tell her. Nothing I say or do will make a difference.\"\n\n\"The Order's members will obey my commands. You will obey me. Both of you.\"\n\nWalker shrieked softly, enough to raise the hairs on the back of Uncle's neck if the way he rubbed at it was any indication. \"Darcy is right. No dragon bent on her protection will fail to inform her of the truth. We are forthright creatures by nature, not deceptive ones. It is not our nature to conceal. Something she knows, and you do not appear to understand.\" The statement ended with an angry hiss.\n\nHad Walker really just told the Chancellor of the Order that he was refusing a command?\n\nUncle muttered and grumbled under his breath. \"Then it is on your heads to see that she does not interfere with our operations in any way. I did not want to mention this, but we have concerns for baby Anne as well. Apparently, she is as well-known as Pemberley and an equally attractive target\u2014\"\n\n\"And you did not think it essential to inform her mother of that?\"\n\nMatlock avoided Darcy's gaze. \"\u2014it is critical that she not leave Darcy House for any reason. We need a better understanding of what we are facing. Nanny will, of course, need to be brought in on our concerns and security measures. An additional drake and cockatrice will be assigned to their protection at all times. And I suggest you avoid admitting any persons into your home who are not vetted members of the Order.\"\n\nAnd all this he thought should be accomplished without informing Elizabeth? How had Matlock's judgment become so impaired? \"I will inform the butler. The Cotillion then? Will that not be cancelled?\"\n\n\"No, we cannot afford to do that and give away our hand.\"\n\n\"But the security risk of so many traveling to London?\"\n\n\"I have taken the liberty of assigning cockatrice patrols to discreetly watch over Georgiana, Mrs. Collins and Miss Bennet's travels here. They are not nearly so well known, nor likely to be of great interest to smugglers. But just in case.\"\n\n\"And Elizabeth?\"\n\nUncle rolled his eyes, closed them and shook his head, sighing. \"If you cannot keep her to Darcy House, she should travel via the dragon tunnels at all times, with a guard, never, never alone.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 11, 1815, Kellynch-by-the-Sea",
                "text": "The sun hung midway between dawn and noon, steadfastly refusing to deliver enough warmth to vanquish the prevailing chill. Anne rubbed her gloved hands over the arms of her navy-blue wool pelisse and pulled the heavy basket closer to her chest.\n\nWould she ever become accustomed to the near-constant sea breeze buffeting her every time she visited Kellynch's lair? Probably no sooner than she became accustomed to being addressed as Lady Wentworth\u2014it was still difficult not to look for some dowager lurking in the shadows when she heard the name.\n\nPerhaps Kellynch was right; using the dragon tunnels from the house to the lair would be more comfortable. If only they did not remind her of the dark alley behind the Bath Assembly rooms\u2014and Mr. Elliot.\n\nThankfully, Wentworth understood and did not insist.\n\nShe sucked in cold, salt-tinged air as she looked over her shoulder and across the open\u2014empty\u2014 meadow. Mr. Elliot and his cockatrice Friend Jet were safely ensconced in a Blue Order prison. Even if they managed to escape, Kellynch would not tolerate them anywhere near Lyme. With as many friends as Kellynch had made among the local minor dragons, and one other major dragon in the vicinity, Mr. Elliot could not possibly conceal himself anywhere near Lyme.\n\nShe smoothed the prickled hair on the back of her neck. An assault to one's person was not easily dismissed, even when one had been rescued by the man she loved. Yes, that was the part of the story she should dwell upon.\n\n\"Kellynch? Kellynch?\" She stepped into the dim stony lair, dank and smelling of dragon musk. How much warmer it seemed now out of the wind.\n\n\"Come in.\" The space filled with the sound of scales scraping stone. \"Have you brought their majesties, my wyrmlings?\"\n\n\"Of course I have. They would not miss a chance to visit with you.\" She set the basket on the floor. Corn, the black and white tatzelwurmling with white tufty ears and blue eyes, and Wall with the black nose and green eyes, tumbled onto the dusty limestone floor. They bounded down the tunnel, chirruping with glee as Kellynch's long, toothy grey-green head came into view.\n\nHe rumbled something almost like a great purr, which she felt in her chest more than heard. The wyrmlings pounced on him, licking his face and climbing onto the ridges above his eyes. Not the way one was supposed to greet their laird, but as long as they were all happy with it, what harm could it do?\n\nWho would have ever thought Kellynch could be a happy, easy-going dragon?\n\n\"When will you allow them to visit me on their own? I do not get to see them often enough.\" Kellynch muttered, slithering closer, careful not to dislodge Corn and Wall.\n\nShe crouched to scratch the itchy spot between his eyes, just able to make out his pout in the meager light. \"They are still small enough to be carried away by the local predatory birds. When they are big enough to no longer be prey, then they can visit whenever you and they wish.\"\n\n\"They could use the tunnels.\"\n\n\"Not until I am certain they will not lose their way. They are still very silly little babies and have occasionally lost their way in the house.\" She ruffled Corn's ears. Wall nudged her hands with his nose and demanded the same.\n\nKellynch sighed and snorted.\n\n\"Besides, you visit with them in the cellar nearly every day. You cannot be that lonely.\"\n\n\"It is not the same as having them in my lair with me. I have been alone so long\u2014\"\n\nShe sat tailor-style on the floor beside him, her hand on his scaly snout. \"I know you have. In fact, that is what I need to talk to you about. Are you certain about us traveling to London, and you remaining here, alone?\"\n\nKellynch grumbled, his lips working in little waves that rippled along his jaw. \"Not really.\"\n\nFinally, he confessed to the obvious truth. \"Then we will inform the Order that we will take the house that boasts a lair with tunnel access to the Thames. That way you will be able to join us easily.\"\n\nOne brow ridge rose. \"Wentworth says the house is not as pleasant as the other you were considering.\"\n\n\"It is a little enough thing to part with in the interest of your comfort.\" She scratched the ridges along his snout as he snuffled appreciative sounds.\n\n\"Is it true that I might attend the Cotillion whilst in London? I have never been to the primary Blue Order office.\"\n\n\"Indeed. The official invitation includes dragons with new Keepers. The three of us are expected to be presented at the Cotillion.\"\n\nPresented by the Dragon Sage. She swallowed hard. Was it a privilege or a punishment to have such a prestigious sponsor? Certainly, the expectations of society upon her would be higher because of it. Father would approve, if he were not banned from all Blue Order society events.\n\nWas Lady Elizabeth trying to mitigate the repercussions of Father's ignominy by her show of support? If only she and not Lady Matlock had written to her to tell her of it, it would be easier to judge what to make of it all.\n\nIf only Father had seen fit to have her come out to the Order when she began to hear and allowed her to attend a Keepers' Cotillion as a young woman. At least she would know firsthand what to expect now. If only he had not fallen from Blue Order society in disgrace, she would not be establishing herself while trying to overcome the huge hurdle he had raised before her. Yet more ways in which she was still paying for Father's failures.\n\nKellynch nudged her with his snout and trained a piercing look upon her. Could he tell what she was thinking or only how she felt about it? Who would have guessed he was such a perceptive creature?\n\n\"I should like to see such an event, if it would not be burdensome on you.\" How polite he was trying to be even though his longing to attend shone clear. He would love the attention and notoriety it would bring him. So like a true Elliot he was.\n\n\"I will consider it an honor for you to be there with us.\"\n\nKellynch rumbled happily. Corn and Wall purred along with him, though they had little understanding of why. His pleasure was enough to make them happy.\n\n\"You will bring their majesties?\" He crossed his eyes trying to focus on the wyrmlings perched on his nose.\n\n\"Of course, they cannot be left alone.\"\n\n\"Good, good. I shall go out and have a good feed now so I need not worry about fishing rights whilst I am there.\"\n\nHow much had Kellynch changed since that day in court? He seemed like an utterly different dragon to the angry, hibernating, threatening sea serpent he had been.\n\n\"That seems a sound plan. I am sure Wentworth will agree. I will take their majesties back to the house now and get them ready for traveling in the morning.\" She called Corn and Wall back to their basket. Though they lingered in their goodbyes to Kellynch, they did as they were bid. Someday, when they were grown, they would\u2014hopefully\u2014have the good sense of their sire, Laconia. But for now, they were silly, shatter-brained\u2014if very dear \u2014 little creatures.\n\nDespite the wind, she took the long way home. Kellynch-by-the-Sea was so different to Kellynch where she had grown up. How could she not miss the spreading old trees, the farmlands, the fields of sheep? The coast was not without its beauties\u2014and it made Kellynch and Wentworth so very happy\u2014but sometimes it still caught her off guard not to see her mother's gardens, or Lady Russell's.\n\nA dozen, no there were more than that, small and moderate-sized white rent cottages lined the main road from the manor to Lyme Regis. Several more were set back from the road with small lanes or footpaths leading to them. So many people looked to her as the mistress of Kellynch-by-the-Sea. It could be daunting some days, more so than at Kellynch where she was only standing in for the mistress of the manor.\n\nOn the whole, the tenants were pleasant and good-humored, many of them dragon Friends who were quite astonished that Kellynch enjoyed the company of the minor dragons on his estate.\n\nDespite all the new friends, Kellynch did not neglect Uppercross. Dragon tunnels linked the two estates, and they exchanged regular visits. Uppercross was developing a taste for fish, which Sister Mary definitely did not approve of\u2014it left his breath quite frightful!\n\nAccording to Lady Elizabeth's last letter, their whole relationship was very unusual among land dragons. But perhaps not so among marine creatures? She still hoped to visit them soon and learn more about England's only marine wyrm.\n\n\"Mrrrrow.\"\n\nWhen had Laconia come upon her?\n\nHe bumped up against her leg, all three stones worth of fluffy, black tatzelwurm jolting her from her reverie. \"Wentworth wonders where you have gotten to.\"\n\n\"I told him I would be checking on Kellynch. Is he very worried?\" She glanced past Laconia as a gust of chill air raced down the neat line of cottages.\n\n\"He is accustomed to having all his sailors at an easy distance.\" Laconia glanced over his shoulder and backed up two steps, a very odd movement for a tatzelwurm.\n\n\"And I am out of range of his spyglass, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Come back to the house with me.\" An odd note of concern tinged his voice as he turned for the manor.\n\nShe followed. \"Is there something wrong?\"\n\n\"It is difficult to say. A cockatrice messenger from the Order arrived not very long ago.\"\n\nMerciful heavens!\n\nAnne increased her pace to a near run; Laconia spring-hopped to keep up.\n\nAnne stopped in the study's doorway and stared at an unfamiliar hawk-sized cockatrice, red-brown and a bit weather-beaten, wearing a small pack embossed with the signet of the Order strapped to his back. He stood on Wentworth's desk, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.\n\nWentworth did the same as he stood, a mite awkwardly, at the far side of the desk.\n\nHe still had not got the room quite arranged to his liking. Long and narrow, he complained there was both too much room and not enough at the same time. Too big to be compact and efficient like the accommodations on his ship, but not spacious enough for the desk that had been shoehorned in and the three leather-covered chairs that seemed to take up the remaining floor space. A bookcase lined the long wall, opposite the windows, lacking both enough books to look scholarly and sufficient bric-a-brac to appear well traveled.\n\nHe declared the entire affair felt a bit like a midshipman's effort. At least he judged the desk chair comfortable and that sufficient sunlight streamed through the windows so reading was possible most of the day. That was something.\n\nSomeday she would have enough saved to commission a proper suite of office furniture for him. An extravagance he would never purchase himself.\n\nLaconia chirruped and pawed at the doorframe.\n\nWentworth glanced up and caught Anne's eye with a brief nod. \"There now.\" He opened the messenger's pack and removed a letter bearing the Blue Order Seal.\n\nThe cockatrice shook out his compacted feather-scales and scratched behind his tiny ear with his talons, leaning back on his dusty serpentine tail for balance.\n\n\"Laconia, show our guest to the kitchen for a solid meal whilst I read this and pen a reply. The wyrmlings may accompany you as well.\" That was not a suggestion, but an order.\n\nAnne placed the basket on the floor. Corn and Wall tumbled out and led the way to the kitchen, spring-hopping with speed only the possibility of a snack could induce. The Blue Order messenger flew low behind them.\n\nWentworth beckoned her in, and she shut the door behind her. He closed the window that the messenger had probably entered.\n\n\"Would it be too optimistic to hope it is merely an announcement of time changes to the Cotillion?\" She bit her lip and dodged around the clumsy chairs to join him near the desk.\n\nHe cracked the seal. \"Considering this is written in cipher, I imagine something less mundane.\" He yanked open the top drawer and removed a small red leatherbound notebook no larger than the palm of his hand. \"The specific cipher was pressed into the wax seal\u2014one that is reserved for only select operatives of the Order.\"\n\n\"So definitely not good news.\" She perched in the nearest chair, stiff and smelling of leather polish.\n\nHe fell into his chair. It groaned, long-suffering. \"It will take me some time to sort the message out. Tell me of your visit to Kellynch whilst I work on it.\"\n\n\"I still wonder that he is the same creature who threatened me in the sea cave. Though I suppose I should not be, considering what Lady Elizabeth has told me about dragons who have been wronged. They certainly take their offenses seriously.\"\n\n\"Indeed they do, large and small.\"\n\n\"Dragons or offenses?\"\n\n\"Both.\" He snickered softly though his brow drew low over his eyes.\n\n\"If he had his druthers, I think he would take up residence in the cellar under the house. At least he would if only it were a little larger and had a proper soaking pool for him, like his lair does\u2014apparently after all the decades without water, he is unwilling to do without again. But still, he truly hates to be alone. Can you imagine? He complained he had not seen Corn and Wall recently enough. Who would have thought he would be so fond of them? At times I wonder whether they are our Friends or his.\"\n\n\"According to Laconia, they talk of Kellynch constantly, honored by the attention of a true wyrm. Shatter-brained little creatures! I half expect that the Sage will ask you to write a monograph on their relationship.\" He glanced up from his work.\n\nOh, the way he looked at her! It would never grow old.\n\nThe crests of her cheeks heated.\n\n\"I imagine you are going to tell me he has decided to accompany us to London, no?\"\n\n\"He was rather considerate about it, though. He seemed concerned that the house with the lair might not be as pleasing as the other we had inquired after.\"\n\nHe set down his pencil and fixed her gaze with his own. \"And you are all right with the change? You are being presented into Dragon Keeping society by the Sage herself, after all. I expect we will be required to do a great deal of entertaining.\"\n\nShe swallowed hard, her eyes burning just a bit. He was so considerate. \"I cannot imagine a house with a dragon lair being any mean accommodation. As to it being unable to accommodate a large party\u2014I think that is rather a good thing. Hosting small events, for now, suits me very well indeed.\"\n\n\"A baronet and his lady need not be seen living as a baronet and his lady?\" The corners of his lips turned up just a mite.\n\n\"I think being seen as honoring one's dragon is living as a baronet and his family should, do you not?\"\n\n\"I could not say it better myself.\" He chuckled, picked up his pencil and began scratching away again.\n\nPerhaps on the journey to London they could talk about what entertaining Blue Order society during the Cotillion season would look like. Wentworth had no experience with such things.\n\nWould he chafe amidst the expectations of \"good\" society? Would he be accepted among them, or simply viewed a novelty\u2014a Dragon Keeping naval officer who had to be tolerated and humored whilst behind his back talk would fly? How hard did he expect, or even want, to work to be accepted? How important was it to him?\n\nHow important was it to her?\n\nHis expression slowly crumpled into a deep frown. \"It seems the plans you made with Kellynch are fortuitous. Lord Matlock himself requests that Kellynch remain with his Keepers in light of current events.\"\n\nA cold chill snaked down her spine. \"Does he say what current events?\"\n\nHe scribbled down a few more words. \"Apparently, Mr. William Elliot finds his accommodations in prison rather uncomfortable\u2014not gentleman's lodgings, it seems. He has attempted to trade information for some favors toward himself.\"\n\nShe clutched the edge of the desk. \"They are not going to release him, are they?\"\n\n\"No, that would be far too dangerous\u2014for him. Kellynch will never forgive the assault on his Keeper. Not to mention Elliot is far from paying his debts to the Order. I am sure he has only bought himself a softer bed or better rations. In any case, the information suggests there are those, dragon hearers and some dragon-deaf, maybe even some members of the Order itself, who are hostile toward dragons. There are hints of schemes to profit off trading in dragons and\u2014\" he gulped, \"\u2014their body parts.\"\n\n\"Gracious heavens!\" The dragon scale lotion she made from the scales Uppercross happily gave her was one thing, but this? The edges of her vision fuzzed and the room spun slightly. She clutched the arms of the chair.\n\n\"At this point, there is no way of knowing the accuracy of Elliot's information. It could have been merely a fiction traded for comfort. But then again, it might not. Matlock insists\u2014and I agree\u2014it must be thoroughly investigated.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course it must. The possibility is too awful to take lightly!\" Anne stood, knees shaking almost too hard to hold her up.\n\n\"Lord Matlock asks that we alter our travel plans. He has arranged for post horses so we do not need to stop and rest ours. He wants us to visit a list of persons and places of interest along the way to London. If we travel day and night, it will delay our arrival by a day, at most two.\"\n\n\"That does not seem so bad. I am sure it will be hardly noticeable.\"\n\n\"It will be uncomfortable. At best. There will be no sleeping at inns, we will take meals in the carriage, not at proper tables. It is a form of travel to which you are not accustomed.\"\n\n\"I am hardly accustomed to any sort of travel at all. I will make do.\"\n\nHe skirted around the desk and took her hands firmly. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"This is what we decided upon when we wed. I admit, I had not expected Order business to come up so soon, or to be so serious, but I will not back down from our commitment.\" Hopefully he did not notice her fingers trembling.\n\n\"Then I will write to him straight away.\" He pressed her hands to his cheek.\n\n\"I will adjust our packing in light of our new plans. Corn and Wall will need plenty of snacks and a few extra bones for teething.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "With a soft kiss on his cheek, Anne left to attend to those details she was so very good at arranging. Wentworth sighed and turned to the response he must pen for the Order. Did she have any idea what a wonder she was at \u2014well, anything or anyone she put her mind to manage?\n\nSeveral hours later, the housekeeper came to the study to announce a visitor\u2014one heretofore unknown to Wentworth. That notwithstanding, the stranger insisted he had been sent to see Sir Frederick. It was still strange to think of himself that way.\n\nAll things considered, Wentworth would have sent him away if the man had not insisted on waiting outside, with his two, according to the dragon-hearing housekeeper, rather large Friends.\n\nA man with dragons was probably important. Especially today.\n\nLaconia accompanied him to the gravel drive at the front of the pale brick manor house. Amidst neatly manicured shrubs, a rather imposing man, wearing a dusty greatcoat with two capes across his shoulders, waited beside a large travel coach, making no attempt to be unobtrusive.\n\nThe vehicle alone made that impossible. Despite a fresh coat of black paint and the lack of any crest or identifying markings, there was no mistaking the quality of the carriage. Far more than Wentworth could have afforded.\n\nBeneath the man's battered hat, grey-streaked brown hair hung limp past his jaw\u2014no effort to style it at all. Bushy eyebrows shaded his deep-set dark eyes, sharp and glittering like a raven's. He could have used the help of a good valet\u2014at least a week's worth of stubble dusted his jowls.\n\nTwo muscular drakes, standing waist high at their shoulders, sat on their haunches to either side of him. Their hides, well cared for under a coating of road dust, were dark brindle, their taloned feet broad, and their fangs imposing. They wore collars of Order-blue with embossed brass Order signets dangling beneath their jaws.\n\n\"Sir Frederick Wentworth?\" The man asked, doffing his hat and bowing a bit dramatically. He wore a battered brass Order signet on his small finger. Probably real. Few would fake that much wear.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nLaconia pressed against his leg, fur pouffed and eyes wide, but no amount of display would make him more formidable than the two drakes, who carefully watched the stranger.\n\n\"Me name is Alister Salt. The Order sent me and me Friends.\" He reached into his worn, grey coat and pulled out a surprisingly neat, folded paper bearing the Order's blue wax seal.\n\n\"I have not been informed\u2014\"\n\n\"The arrangements have only just been made.\" He pointed at the paper.\n\nWentworth opened the missive. How many letters had he seen in this handwriting since taking Kellynch-by-the-Sea? Regional Undersecretary Peter Wynn\u2014always such a joy to hear from. Best not roll his eyes in front of these strangers.\n\nThank you for your decision to let this travel coach and hire this driver and his hounds for your journey. My associates and I are sure you will enjoy the increased measure of comfort and safety they provide on your travels.\n\nPW\n\nInteresting.\n\nUnexpected.\n\nTelling. Or perhaps suspicious.\n\n\"Will you introduce your Friends?\" Wentworth asked.\n\nAlister Salt grinned widely\u2014only missing two teeth\u2014 as he looked at the two drakes and scratched behind their pointed ears. \"Most people see them as German Boarhounds, don't ya know. May I present Kingsley and Sergeant.\"\n\nThe two drakes, easily twelve or fourteen stones apiece, bowed, dropping their elbows to the ground.\n\nWentworth held his breath. Dragon introductions were always tricky, even for minor dragons.\n\nLaconia slither-stepped to the two drakes and sniffed their faces, jaw half-open and long forked tongue flicking. They dropped their hind ends to the ground, allowing him to smell them nose to tail. Twice. When he finished, he stood between them, the rich black fur between his shoulders standing on end, serpentine tail extended full length.\n\nThe drakes circled him, moving as a coordinated team, sniffing him nose to tail. They stared at each other over Laconia's head for a moment, conversing in facial expressions and low guttural sounds. Finally, they nodded at each other and dropped their chins to the ground whereupon Laconia licked the tops of their heads.\n\nOdd.\n\nAs the larger dragons, they should be showing dominance over Laconia.\n\nDid they recognize Wentworth's rank and impute that to Laconia? Either way, dragons did not relinquish dominance easily. That they conceded to the much smaller Laconia was significant.\n\nVery significant. On the other hand \u2026\n\nNo. Dragons, especially the often-communal minor drakes, were not, by their nature, deceptive creatures.\n\n\"They will do. The situation is \u2026 acceptable.\" Laconia strode up to Wentworth, proud and puffed as large as he could be. \"They smell \u2026 their scent is tolerable.\"\n\nWentworth exhaled hard. \"I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Kingsley and Sergeant.\" He offered his hand, fingers curled toward himself, for a smell.\n\nThe drakes took him at his word, sniffing his hand, his boots, and as much of the rest of his person as they could reach without standing up on hind legs. Rather personal, but not unusual for dragons.\n\n\"He will do,\" the slightly larger, darker Kingsley said in a deep, growly voice typical of drakes.\n\n\"We will guard him.\" Sergeant's tail tip flicked rather like a dog's.\n\nGuard. Not travel with, but guard.\n\nWas that Wynn's plan or Matlock's?\n\n\"We are not traveling alone. My wife and two wyrmlings sired by Laconia will be our companions.\"\n\n\"Mr. Wynn warned me of that.\" Alister Salt muttered, sliding his hands along the brim of his hat, his voice as gruff as either of the drakes'. \"Be there some way you can dissuade your missus from going with? It won't be no easy journey as I been told it.\"\n\nIf only he could. \"She needs must be in London soon. I expect this was arranged for her comfort.\"\n\n\"Thought as much, but it don't hurt to ask, you know.\" Alister Salt shrugged. \"It be difficult to make a long, fast journey comfortable for ladies, you know.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes I do.\" Nothing like having one's own sentiments held up before him.\n\n\"You should meet the final member of our merry band, then.\" Salt beckoned him to the well-appointed travel carriage and rapped on the box, just below the driver's seat.\n\nA panel popped open, and a younger, cleaner version of Alister Salt rolled out. He bounced to his feet and bowed. \"Good day, sir, me name's Leander Salt.\"\n\n\"My son, relief driver, and all-around right hand. With him about, you will always have a fresh driver.\" Alister snugged his hat back on his head as though that settled the matter.\n\nKingsley and Sergeant pressed in on either side of Leander and leaned into him hard.\n\n\"Aye, you brutes. You'll crush me with your antics!\" He scratched behind their ears. Both tails wagged hard enough to knock a man off his feet.\n\n\"Stop your complainin'. You like it, and you know it.\" Sergeant pressed in a little harder, grinning toothily.\n\n\"You see how you like it when I sit upon you some day!\" He pushed the drake back and crouched, laughing. \"I 'erd you be Laconia?\" He extended his hand to Laconia.\n\nLaconia sniffed his fingers and shrugged. \"He will do.\"\n\n\"I'll do, you 'erd that, dad? I'll do!\" Leander stood and the drakes laughed with him.\n\n\"An astute tatzelwurm if ever I met one.\" Kingsley seemed amused, letting out a sound neither a bark, a growl nor a chuckle, but a little of each.\n\nThe drakes treated Leander like one of their own. What better testament of character could there be?\n\n\"Seriously, sir, for all their antics, I got the best damn team to get you here to there and to do it safe as can be done. With them two running beside the carriage, few have ever considered bothering me, and those that did, well, they ain't around to regret it none now.\" Something in Alister's voice made it clear he was not exaggerating.\n\nFor all the dust and scruff that rendered them easy to overlook, this seemed like exactly the sort of crew he wanted on deck beside him.\n\nPerhaps there was more to the adage \"The Order cares for its own\" than he first believed.\n\n\"Excellent. We will leave at dawn tomorrow.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 12, 1815, Cheapside, London",
                "text": "Elizabeth's call on the Blue Order Matrons had been an astonishing waste of time. Short-sighted, unreasonable, dominance-seeking women! Easier to face down an angry firedrake with just her cloak and a table to stand on than deal with the likes of them.\n\nA squadron of cockatrix\u2014preening and squabbling and squawking\u2014and even less reasonable!\n\nHow surprising it was that the Dragon Sage did not feel up to the task of sponsoring young ladies for the presentation. They each had several young women under their wings. Even Lady Astrid, an officer of the order herself, performed the service without complaint. It might be possible to find another sponsor at this late date, if that is what the Lady Sage truly wanted\u2026\n\nThat final statement came with an unspoken threat. One she could not ignore.\n\nLady Matlock had been right. Ouch.\n\nElizabeth adjusted the torch in her hand to peer down the dark, damp, and dirty dragon tunnels leading from the Blue Order offices to Cheapside. How considerate of the tunnels to accurately reflect her mood.\n\nThose matrons of the Blue Order reveled in their transparent plot to see her fail in her social duties. Horrible creatures.\n\nBut this would not be the first time she had dominated a cockatrix on her own territory. They would not best her. She shook out the folds of her blue cloak, extending them slightly. There was something satisfying about looking 'big.'\n\nNo wonder minor dragons were so apt to do it.\n\nIf she could manage to mollify quarreling dragons, a gaggle of society matrons would not best her. She kicked a small rock out of her way, its sounds muffled by the soft mud that coated the tunnel floor, which smelled vaguely of the Thames.\n\nBrutus, an imposing minor drake guard who trotted alongside, stopped and looked up at her. He wore a harness with a brass Blue Order signet and an intimidating spiked collar to assist in passing as a large black guard dog. Sharp claws and a frightening bark helped the persuasion tremendously. His record as a personal guard for important personages was unmatched. He had even guarded Princess Charlotte\u2014a major achievement of his career. It was an honor to have him assigned as a guard.\n\nOne the matrons did not miss. Or appreciate.\n\nFor such an imposing figure, he really was quite personable, happy to chat about \u2013well, nearly anything that came to mind given the opportunity. The questions he asked! Was it possible he asked more questions than Pemberley?\n\nAt least he had agreed not to tell Pemberley any more stories\u2014liberally embellished\u2014of his work for the Blue Order. She shuddered. No youngster, human or dragon, should be hearing those.\n\n\"Just a little farther, Lady Sage.\" Brutus paused at an intersection to look and smell in all directions.\n\nIt would not be polite to remark that she knew precisely where they were and exactly how far she was from yet another conversation she dreaded.\n\nPapa.\n\nDear, frail, stubborn, unsympathetic, exasperating Papa. Heavens, he was very much like the Blue Order Matrons.\n\nWhat an unpleasant thought.\n\nHe had refused to attend her at Darcy House lest Mama find he had been there without her. Mama longed to visit Darcy House, he said, and wondered loudly when an invitation might be issued and how she intended to call there if Elizabeth would simply send around a card noting her 'at home' days.\n\nA task she would tackle as soon as she could be at home long enough to decide when she would be 'at home.' Not the sort of thing either Papa or Mama could understand.\n\nElizabeth had offered to call at Middle Set House, as Mama called the townhouse the Order had provided her, Papa, and Kitty to live in since Mary and Mr. Collins had taken over Longbourn. Situated in the middle of the street, she thought it a very clever name.\n\nBut Papa refused. He worried she might somehow disrupt the careful balance of his household. While he never came out and said it, he implied that she wreaked chaos with the dragons at any place she visited.\n\nHidebound, inflexible curmudgeon.\n\nThankfully, the Gardiners offered their parlor as a sort of neutral ground. They were truly the best sort of warm-bloods.\n\nWarm-bloods? Heavens! Perhaps she had been listening to a few too many dragons recently.\n\n\"And here we are. Pray let me through the door first and ensure the way is safe for you.\" Brutus trotted to the heavy iron-strapped oak door, unlocked it, and shoved it open with his shoulder. Iron hinges groaned like a wounded beast.\n\nShe extinguished her torch in a bucket of sand near the door.\n\n\"Come, come, Lady Sage, all is well.\" Brutus ushered her through and up several steps to the street level, walking so close that his side brushed her skirts. He locked the door behind them.\n\nShe blinked hard, the sunlight burning her eyes as the alleyway beside Gardiner's warehouse came into focus. Such a shame that the tunnels did not extend all the way to Uncle Gardiner's house, but the expense to dig the additional tunnels was not warranted even by her position.\n\nBrutus pressed against her side and encouraged her to take hold of the handle on his harness. Just for show and utterly unable to restrain Brutus should he need to move suddenly, it served as costuming to assist in the persuasion that he was really just a large, and possibly formidable, dog in the company of his mistress. Other pedestrians gave them a wide berth as they briskly made their way to the mews behind the Gardiner house.\n\nYes, it was more proper to enter through the front door. But going by way of the mews was far less likely to draw notice\u2014or at least that was Brutus' reasoning.\n\nWith carriage houses at the end of the mews and four-story town homes to either side, the effect was snug and shadowed, a little like a dragon lair, with a stripe of sunlight running down the middle.\n\nChildren's shrieks and giggles filtered through the narrow way. Was that little Daniel Gardiner's voice among them? Aunt had not mentioned he was still home on school holidays.\n\n\"Lizzy! Lizzy!\" Children's voices echoed off cobblestone and brick.\n\nBrutus bared his teeth, a soft growl rumbling in his throat.\n\n\"Those are the Gardiner children I told you about. There is no need for concern.\" She laid her hand on Brutus' tense, muscled shoulder.\n\nHer cousins bounded up, full of energy and mischief. Anna and Samuel, the littlest, had lost their babyish faces since their last visit. Joshua, the next, must have grown a full handspan and Daniel, the eldest, looked so like his father now! How could he have become a young man so quickly?\n\nAunt Gardiner followed, not far behind. She had not changed at all\u2014why was that such a relief? A few curls escaped her stylish mobcap, but that was the only homage she seemed to pay to the energy and activity of her lively family. A fashionable green gown with matching velvet pelisse accented her trim figure and lively steps.\n\nRustle, the Gardiners' Friend cockatrice, cawed from the rooftop. Like Walker, he was keeping watch over the family. Apparently being related to the Dragon Sage was, at least at present, something of a hazard to one's safety.\n\nBrutus called back to him in something that sounded much like a bark, but was really a form of dragon tongue that, to date, no warm-blood could decipher. One day she would sort that out, too. Eventually.\n\nThe children stopped a polite distance from Brutus. Good, they remembered at least something of the proper protocols for meeting minor dragons.\n\n\"Aunt Gardiner, children, may I present Brutus. He works for the Blue Order. Brutus, these are my Aunt Gardiner and her children, Daniel, Anna, Joshua with Phoenix on his shoulder, and Samuel.\"\n\nBrutus bent his front legs in a bow. Aunt and the children bowed and curtsied.\n\n\"You work for the Order?\" Daniel's eyes grew wide. He was still too young to readily contain his sensibilities. \"Would you, can you, tell us about it?\"\n\nBrutus looked at Elizabeth and Aunt Gardiner, head cocked, eye ridges inched high on his scaly forehead.\n\nDenying Brutus the opportunity to do what he loved best seemed cruel, and denying the children another dragon acquaintance equally so. \"With their mother's permission, you may tell them stories I would deem appropriate for Vicontes Pemberley.\"\n\nAunt nodded slowly. \"I think they would enjoy that very much. Daniel, take your brothers and sister up to the nursery. Brutus may join you there. I will send up a tray with some nuncheon for all of you.\"\n\nElizabeth pressed her lip. It might not be the right time to note that, apparently, she was not the only one who enabled dragon tea parties.\n\nJoshua hung back from the others, Phoenix still on his shoulder. How much the little fairy dragon had grown. Some of his first adult feather-scales were coming in, giving him a ragged adolescent look. \"Lizzy?\"\n\n\"What, dear?\"\n\nHe scuffed his toes along the cobblestones. \"Phoenix has a new trick we want to show you before you go\u2014please?\"\n\nAunt Gardiner sighed as though this was not the first time she had heard this request. \"Joshua, you should not bother\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not mind. Truly. I am never too busy for my cousins and their Friend fairy dragon.\"\n\n\"I knew you would say yes! Nobody likes fairy dragons as well as you!\" Joshua's dark eyes twinkled with excitement and mischief. What could he have possibly taught stubborn little Phoenix?\n\n\"Go along with Brutus. I will be in shortly.\" Aunt Gardiner took Elizabeth's arm and headed toward the house.\n\n\"Is he very much of a scamp?\"\n\n\"Joshua or Phoenix?\" Aunt Gardiner chuckled as she guided Elizabeth inside through a pair of French doors.\n\n\"Both, I suppose.\"\n\nThey stepped into the main parlor that smelt of dried roses with a hint of lavender. Finished in dark wood paneling and sporting older dark oak furniture, upholstered in varying shades of burgundy, all faded with age, it welcomed Elizabeth with a warm embrace. Just as it always did, and hopefully always would. Blocks and tin soldiers lay piled in one corner and an unfinished board game took up most of the small table near the windows.\n\nAunt paused to straighten the striped pillows on the couch. \"For all his attachment to me, Joshua and Phoenix have become as thick as thieves these last few months. Especially since Daniel left for school. You know, it was a week complete before Phoenix would speak to Daniel again after he returned from the autumn term.\"\n\n\"Fairy dragons certainly can hold a large grudge, especially for ones so small.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Phoenix still has not forgiven your father for his attitude toward the species as a whole.\"\n\nElizabeth shook her head and rolled her eyes. Precisely why April had not accompanied her on this journey. Her ear-nipping would not assist a difficult conversation. \"I am not at all surprised. Papa appreciates them when they are useful to his purposes, which sadly is typically not the case. He is not the only one to hold such a prejudice against them.\"\n\n\"Quite the shame, really. Living with Phoenix has shown us all a very different side to fairy dragons. When you are ready, your father is waiting for you in the study.\"\n\n\"His mood?\"\n\n\"Not terrible, although he did arrive by sedan chair, which you know leaves him rather out of sorts.\"\n\n\"Has his condition become worse?\" That would be the sort of thing he would fail to mention in his very sparse correspondence.\n\n\"I would not necessarily say worse so much as he is far more aware of his limitations now than when living at Longbourn.\"\n\nThat hardly boded well.\n\nAunt gestured toward the doorway, and they proceeded to Uncle's study.\n\n\"Thomas! Look who has arrived.\" Aunt Gardiner swept into the study, a smiling ray of sunshine.\n\nUnlike Papa's study, Uncle's was tidy, sunny and dust-free. Neat books\u2014including all the monographs that Elizabeth had written!\u2014lined the bookcase behind the desk. The family-heirloom, carved dragon perch sat exactly where it always had, near the window and the door to the little closet which was Rustle's own private dragon space.\n\n\"Good morning, Lizzy.\" Papa sat in an overstuffed dark brown chair placed in a sunbeam near Uncle's desk. He did not stand.\n\nThat was not surprising, all things considered. Sitting in the sun was usually a sign he felt particularly poorly. His face seemed a little more drawn, and his shoulders more stooped than the last time they met. How long had it been now?\n\n\"Good morning, Papa.\"\n\nAunt Gardiner backed out and shut the door.\n\nPapa stared at her in that particular way, which had always made her feel judged and found wanting. \"I have been meaning to speak to you about that cockatrix Viola.\"\n\nWhat had Viola to do with anything? \"I see, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I was not granted enough time with her. I was unable to take down a complete history. Why did you\u2014\"\n\n\"Her itinerary was entirely under the control of Mrs. Fortin.\"\n\n\"Well, she insisted on rushing back to that sanctuary of hers before I was finished. I am most put out.\"\n\nOf course, he was. How tempting it was to stand and flare out her cloak, her newest design, particularly well adapted to flaring out and holding that position. But that would hardly impress him. \"What do you wish me to do about it?\"\n\n\"Order her\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not have that sort of authority! She does not answer to me but to the Blue Order Lord Physician. He is responsible for all Sanctuaries and their caretakers. Speak with him if you want to interview her or her charges. He might even be able to arrange transport for you.\"\n\n\"I have no desire to travel.\" He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. \"Besides, your mother and Kitty should not be left to their own devices.\"\n\n\"That is new, is it not?\" New and not good.\n\nMuttering under his breath, he turned his face aside. \"The distractions of London are very much to their liking. Her quest to see Kitty well married means a steady presence of strangers at my table and in my drawing room. For reasons I cannot understand, your mother seems drawn to dragon-hearing families. Families whose members cannot seem to recall that half my family are dragon-deaf!\"\n\nPerhaps Mama had some residual ability to hear dragons. It would make sense, considering \u2026\n\n\"I dare not allow your mother in company unsupervised lest something untoward is said.\"\n\n\"Is not your secretary employed to assist with such things?\" A very persuasive minor drake had been assigned to Papa.\n\n\"Yes, yes, Drew is helpful, essential even. But I prefer to avoid relying upon him more than necessary.\"\n\n\"So, Mary and Lydia\u2014\"\n\nPapa slapped the arms of the chairs hard enough that he winced. \"They cannot stay with us. Absolutely not! And do not even suggest I should sponsor them for the Cotillion. It was difficult enough to manage your own Blue Order come out without drawing your mother's attention to it. I cannot be expected to do more than that.\"\n\n\"They are your daughters, as an officer of the Order\u2014\"\n\n\"They are your sisters. I warned you there would be repercussions to your \u2014choices. This is one of them.\"\n\nHaving sisters had never been her choice! \"I have an infant and responsibilities\u2014\"\n\n\"All in a household of dragon hearers. Even your servants hear dragons.\" He spat the words as though it were a bad thing.\n\n\"As do yours\u2014all provided by the Blue Order. It is your responsibility to \u2014\"\n\n\"No, absolutely not.\" He stood, slowly, painfully, and looked down at her. \"I am sorry you find it inconvenient.\"\n\nShe rose\u2014when had she become taller than he? \"We were months in Bath managing\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should have considered that before you accepted your office. What did you think it meant to work for the Order?\"\n\n\"Why do you think you can push off your responsibilities on me like you always have?\"\n\nHe edged a step back, brows drawing low over his eyes, and clutched the corner of the desk as if for support. \"Very well. If you refuse to sponsor your sisters, then they will simply wait until such a time as I can be certain your mother and Kitty can be sent to stay with Jane and Bingley.\"\n\n\"As they could have already been? I know they were invited to visit the Bingleys for Twelfth Night. You could have easily extended the visit to accommodate the Cotillion.\"\n\n\"I will not have you questioning the way I manage my family, Lizzy.\" His face turned red as he ground his teeth. \"It is your choice. Will you sponsor them or shall I send them back from whence they came?\"\n\nNo doubt he would do it, too. \"And you will offer me no assistance?\"\n\n\"What do you expect?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Never mind.\" She turned on her heel hard and stormed away, allowing the door to slam behind her.\n\nThree steps into the corridor, she stopped and leaned against the wall between two Gardiner ancestor portraits that had hung in those spots since she was a little girl.\n\nYes, she had been short-tempered and impatient. No, she should not have expected him to understand her situation or to be willing to go out of his way to help her.\n\nBut she had hoped, just a little, that he might.\n\nHad he always been this way? Had there not been a time when things between them had been close and warm and happy? It seemed like there had been. And she missed it.\n\nOh, how she missed it!\n\nOh, Papa, why could things not be that way again?\n\n\"Elizabeth?\" Aunt Gardiner peered at her.\n\nWhen had she arrived?\n\n\"I think you know why things can never again be the way they were.\" Aunt tucked her hand in the crook of Elizabeth's arm and urged her to walk toward the stairs.\n\nHad she spoken those words aloud?\n\nThe steps creaked softly under their feet.\n\n\"I know it is hard to be reminded of his flaws and foibles. But, for what it is worth, he is not exaggerating about your mother. Come sit with me, and I will tell you.\" Aunt led Elizabeth to her personal sitting room.\n\nDelicate flowers abounded throughout the small room, in the walls' paper hangings, the upholstery, the curtains. Tiny and tasteful enough not to overwhelm, but enough to give the sense of sitting in a quiet, private garden. Just what she needed.\n\nElizabeth sat in an overstuffed berg\u00e8re and pressed a plump green-striped pillow with little tassels on the corners to her chest. \"I thought moving to London was going to make things easier for them, with people and events to keep Mama entertained.\"\n\n\"One might say she is too well entertained.\" Aunt sighed as she eased herself into the corner of the pastel floral couch. \"Marrying off Kitty is her prime occupation now. More so than any of us would have imagined. She is frustrated neither you nor your father have used your connections to see Kitty well established in society. You are, after all, 'Lady Elizabeth Darcy' now.\"\n\nElizabeth scrubbed her face with her palms. \"You suggest I am too hard on Papa?\"\n\n\"I am in no position to judge that. I only mean to suggest that there may be something quite substantial behind his complaints.\"\n\n\"Did he even try to send Mama and Kitty to the Bingleys'?\"\n\n\"I do not know, but I think if he did, and they refused him, he would not be apt to own it. Most people do not like to admit to their failures.\"\n\n\"But why would Jane not\u2014\"\n\n\"How much have you corresponded with Jane since you became the Dragon Sage?\" Aunt's eyebrow arched in an expression she often used with the children.\n\n\"Not as much as I would have expected. But she has a home of her own to manage, so I expect she is busy.\"\n\n\"Probably, but she is also jealous.\"\n\nElizabeth sat a little straighter. \"Excuse me? Jane? That cannot be.\"\n\n\"She might not be prone to excessive displays of her feelings, but even I could detect those sentiments in her letters.\"\n\n\"Why? She has a wealthy husband and home of her own. I am sure she will have a child soon enough\u2014\"\n\n\"Not your daughter, Lizzy, your title. Your mother talks of it constantly, brags on it and extols the excellency of your situation, though she understands nothing of the truth of it. She does it to your father, too. Hints constantly that he, like Sir William Lucas of Meryton, should have been titled as well. I have even heard her suggest it might be because he was too lazy to pursue such things.\"\n\n\"That is brazen even for Mama.\" Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.\n\n\"I know he is proud of you, do not doubt that. But it is difficult for a man when his offspring\u2014\"\n\n\"You mean his daughter. He would have had no qualms about a son moving into such a role.\"\n\n\"I wish I could disagree with you. But it does not serve to dwell on such things. Though the dragons, and with them the Blue Order, might have very different notions about the female, I expect it will be quite some time before the rest of human society sees things the same way. Either way, it is difficult for him.\"\n\n\"What am I to do with him?\"\n\nAunt leaned close and laid her hand on Elizabeth's elbow. Warm, strong and soothing. \"You could start by forgiving your father for being what and who he is. I know he is maddening and stubborn, but I cannot imagine he will ever change. Holding on to your resentment will not improve matters.\"\n\n\"It would be so much easier if he did not continue to give me new things to resent.\"\n\n\"I know sponsoring both your sisters is a great deal\u2014\"\n\n\"It is not just them, but Georgiana and Lady Wentworth as well!\"\n\n\"Surely the Matlocks\u2014\"\n\n\"Apparently the Dragon Keepers' Cotillion is managed by a cadre of female despots much like Almack's! Somehow they have decreed I should sponsor Georgiana because she is Darcy's sister and Lady Wentworth because she was never properly presented to the Order and her rank demands a titled sponsor.\"\n\nAunt frowned and chewed her upper lip. \"It seems you have not made friends among the ladies of the Order.\"\n\n\"Me? What have I done?\"\n\n\"I imagine being given a title and an office in the Order is among their complaints.\"\n\n\"But Lady Astrid has as well, and I do not see the matrons conspiring against her.\" Elizabeth shifted in her seat. \"They seem to approve of her.\"\n\n\"Have you noticed how she goes out of her way to socialize with those despots, as you call them?\"\n\n\"I am the Dragon Sage, not the 'Ladies with nothing better to do than manage society' Sage.\"\n\nAunt snickered. Thank heavens she still had a sense of humor. \"I understand your frustration, truly I do. There are days I find Phoenix's and Rustle's squabbling far easier to manage than the machinations of the local matriarchs. Perhaps we can talk more about navigating those waters once we have survived the Cotillion. With your Uncle's position as an Honored Friend to the Order, we have been invited to attend. Perhaps there is some way in which I might help.\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Elizabeth gulped a breath of cool air, her eyes burning just a bit. \"Yes please, and thank you. Perhaps, do you think that you might be able to help me manage their gowns\u2014\"\n\n\"Would it help you to know that in anticipation of the event, your Uncle's warehouse has a ready supply of Order-blue silks and muslins and satin? With ribbons and lace to match. We also have a number of gowns already made up, just in need of tailoring.\"\n\n\"Gowns already made? Truly?\"\n\n\"Gardiner's warehouse has served the Order in this way for some time. Naturally, I only learned of it rather recently. But it seems your uncle worked with an Order-affiliated modiste on these designs. It is perhaps unconventional, but the nature of the Order Cotillion often makes it difficult for young ladies to arrange for their gowns before they come into town for the event. Order-blue is not a color easily obtained in the countryside. They often hope to have gowns made very quickly. While pre-made gowns do have their limitations, more often than not the debutantes are very pleased.\"\n\n\"Are you certain that is not asking too much of you?\"\n\n\"Mama! Lizzy!\" Joshua burst breathless into the parlor, banging the door against the wall behind. \"Come, you must see.\"\n\n\"See what? Are your sister and brothers all right?\" Aunt Gardiner jumped to her feet.\n\n\"Phoenix is ready! He says we must come to the kitchen immediately so that he can show you his trick.\"\n\n\"Him and his trick! When will he give this up?\" Aunt Gardiner rolled her eyes.\n\n\"What trick?\" Elizabeth stood and followed him to the stairs.\n\n\"Do not tell her; he wants it to be a surprise.\" Joshua trotted downstairs.\n\n\"He has yet to succeed, despite many attempts. I hope, if he fails in front of you that you will be able to convince him to give up this ridiculous effort,\" Aunt Gardiner whispered.\n\nGracious, what was Phoenix up to?\n\nJoshua led them to the tidy kitchen, dominated by a large fireplace. Aunt's cook chopped vegetables at a table near the window overlooking the mews and a scullery maid washed pots in the far corner. That scent, almost too faint to notice? Was there a pigeon pie baking for dinner?\n\nPhoenix hopped on the warm hearth of the fireplace. A low cooking fire glowed within.\n\n\"I brought them, just as I promised.\" Joshua pulled a small, wooden stool up to the fireplace and patted it, glancing at Elizabeth.\n\nPhoenix hopped and fluttered. \"You came! You came! I know I can do it this time!\"\n\n\"Do what?\" Elizabeth perched on the stool.\n\n\"I can breathe fire!\"\n\nThe scullery maid snorted.\n\nElizabeth blinked hard and glanced up at Aunt. \"I am sure I misheard you. Breathe fire?\"\n\nAunt Gardiner nodded, none too happily.\n\nPhoenix hopped and flapped hard. \"I can! I promise you. I can do it. Pemberley will be so impressed.\"\n\n\"I think this is not a good idea. You should not be so near the fire lest you get burned.\" Elizabeth reached toward him. There was a knack to swiping up a fairy dragon who did not want to be caught.\n\n\"I can do this! Watch!\" Phoenix hopped closer to the fire and held his wings wide. His throat expanded like a bright red balloon as he belched far more loudly than a creature his size should have been able to. Turning toward the flames, he hissed through his beak and a jet of flame appeared.\n\nPendragon's bones! It could not be!\n\nJoshua clapped and laughed. \"He did it! He did it! I told you he could!\"\n\n\"Merciful heavens!\" Aunt Gardiner gasped.\n\nDid they really just see\u2014\n\nBrutus dashed through the kitchen and out the back door, barking and growling, all fangs and fury.\n\n\"I fear Brutus is scaring off a delivery boy, excuse me!\" Aunt Gardiner ran after him.\n\n\"See, see what I have done!\" Phoenix trumpeted a funny sound.\n\nElizabeth held her hand out for Phoenix and lifted him to see eye to eye.\n\n\"No other fairy dragon has ever breathed fire! But I can! Just like Pemberley.\" His chest puffed, and he strutted across her palm.\n\nNo, not at all like Pemberley, but now was not the time to mention that. \"How did you learn how to do this?\"\n\n\"About a month ago we were in the carriage house, and he watched the horses eating straw.\" Joshua stood very close and scratched under Phoenix' chin.\n\n\"Foul, nasty stuff.\" Phoenix clapped his beaky jaws and spat.\n\n\"You tried eating straw? That is not for fairy dragons!\"\n\n\"I know. I told him, too. Made him all sorts of ill and bringing up wind.\" Joshua giggled.\n\n\"Of course it did, fairy dragons are not meant to eat it\u2014I am not sure any dragons are.\"\n\n\"But my wind, it makes fire!\" Phoenix clung to her finger and leaned toward the fireplace. \"I blew it out near a candle\u2014\"\n\n\"And nearly singed his face!\" Joshua said.\n\n\"I discovered I have a part of my mouth that I can close up over my throat. I can hold my wind in\u2014at least a little\u2014until I want to spew it out! I did that today! I can make it work!\"\n\n\"Clever little fellow! My Friend is the only fire-breathing fairy dragon in the world, Lizzy! I can't believe it.\" Joshua placed Phoenix on his shoulder.\n\nDragon's fire, literal dragon's fire! Only those two\u2014\n\n\"Neither can I.\" She dragged her hand across her chin. \"You do understand how dangerous this could be, do you not? Fire is not something to be handled lightly. Promise me, both of you, you will not do this trick again apart from your parents or Darcy or me watching over it. You could hurt yourselves badly, or even burn down the house.\"\n\n\"But I need to perfect my technique.\" Phoenix hiccupped.\n\n\"Yes, I know you do. We will figure out a way for you to learn how to do it safely, I promise you. No one will take this from you.\" Not that anyone could, regardless of what a good idea it would be. \"We just cannot have you hurting yourself, or others, with this trick of yours.\"\n\n\"But, Lizzy!\" Joshua pouted.\n\nAunt Gardiner returned. \"Brutus is a most effective guard, I must say. I never did manage to catch that delivery boy. I wonder what order we will be missing.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, Brutus is rather single-minded in his assignment.\" Elizabeth dropped her chin to her chest and sighed. \"After what we have seen here, I think, perhaps, Joshua and Phoenix should stay with Darcy and me, under Nanny's supervision, at least until we learn more about this little trick and how to manage it safely.\"\n\n\"No, certainly not. That is far too much trouble with what you have to manage already. I am sure\u2014\"\n\nJoshua smiled at Aunt and blinked in a way he must have thought looked innocent.\n\n\"Oh, Joshua.\" Aunt sighed, shaking her head. \"I suppose with all the dragons in residence at Darcy House, he could be kept under better watch there. I will have the housekeeper pack your things.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 14, 1815, Darcy House, London",
                "text": "Darcy entered Darcy House's attic nursery. Between Nanny, little Anne, May, and now Phoenix and Joshua, the plain, formerly sparse room had sprung to life. Children's furniture and toys\u2014some he remembered from his boyhood\u2014 had been freed from storage, dusted and polished until they looked new. The faded striped blue carpet from his nursery days still warmed the wood floor. Fresh white curtains dressed the windows and a child-sized table held books and games. A pair of soft chairs had been purloined from another room to give Nanny and Elizabeth comfortable places to cuddle with Anne and May. It was not the nursery of his childhood. Not that it had been bad, but in all ways the room was better now.\n\nThe fireplace adjacent to the windows held a cheery, crackling fire. Petite, black, and fuzzy, May curled in her generous blanket-lined basket near the fireplace, purring, whilst Phoenix in all his red scale-feathered glory perched on the edge, his wings spread in the warmth, twittering. Darcy yawned. The pair together were truly soporific.\n\nThat was probably why Anne did not awaken when he entered. A baby with preternatural hearing was a challenge indeed.\n\nIn the far corner, Nanny shared a large chair with Joshua. It should not startle him so to see a drake sitting in a chair like a lady, posture upright and perfect, but it did. She read from Tales of English Dragons: A Young Dragon's Primer to the Pendragon Accords. The same book she had been reading to Anne since she was born.\n\nIt would probably have been better if May and Phoenix seemed to be listening as well, but no doubt Nanny would ensure they would have their lessons, too. She was nothing if not particularly suited to her unusual mix of charges.\n\nHe probably should not be so proud Pemberley had already mastered that volume and was now being tutored by Barwines Chudleigh. The elegant amphithere, her maternal nature in full bloom with her own snakeling in residence, seemed delighted to take Pemberley under her wings, figuratively and literally. The two young dragons had become fast friends.\n\nPemberley was a very good little dragon.\n\nThanks to Elizabeth.\n\nShe had made all the difference in their lives and had given him the things he treasured most today.\n\nAnd he would serve the Order faithfully to do whatever it took to protect them.\n\nJoshua pushed away from Nanny and ran to him. \"Are we really going to the Blue Order today? Do they really want to see Phoenix?\"\n\n\"Do you recall what I told you?\" Nanny strode up behind him as Phoenix landed on Joshua's shoulder.\n\nDarcy cringed. Did every child-minder sound like his grouchy, old nursery maid?\n\n\"You told us many things.\" Joshua dragged his foot on the carpet.\n\n\"Forgive me, Mr. Darcy,\" Nanny laid her paw on Joshua's unoccupied shoulder. \"I am not sure this is a good idea. Both of them are full young for an audience with a major dragon, even one as even-tempered as Castordale.\"\n\nShe was, of course, entirely correct. \"The Order has insisted they come. Even the Dragon Sage herself has not the authority to countermand that request.\"\n\nJoshua swallowed hard.\n\nGood, he had not missed the implication of Darcy's tone.\n\n\"You must do your best to greet him properly and demonstrate proper decorum whilst you are there.\" Nanny squeezed Joshua's shoulder hard enough to make him squeak.\n\n\"Yes, Nanny,\" Joshua and Phoenix chanted, though their sincerity seemed questionable.\n\nAh, the arrogance of children.\n\n\"Come along now.\" Darcy ushered them out of the nursery.\n\nThankfully, all of their other guests were still occupied in the morning room. They made it to Darcy's office undisturbed.\n\nJoshua peered up at him as they entered the bright, tidy chamber. Hopefully this very formal, very grown-up room would set the tone for their conversation.\n\n\"Sit down. We need to talk.\" Darcy closed the door behind them.\n\nPhoenix perched on a neat stack of books on the desk while Joshua climbed into the large leather wing chair nearby, his feet not close to reaching the floor. \"It will be good to get away from all the silly girls.\" Forced lightness raised his boyish voice an octave. \"Cousin Lydia is still very silly no matter what Auntie says, and Cousin Mary\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop right now.\" Darcy slapped the desktop as he sat heavily, his desk chair groaning in protest.\n\nPhoenix hopped backward, off the edge of the books. His wings beat furiously as he tried to regain his footing and his dignity.\n\n\"Miss Lydia has used her time with Auntie at the Blue Order school to her advantage. She has become a competent Dragon Friend and a more accomplished young lady.\" Words Darcy had never thought he would hear himself saying, especially when Lydia still seemed so gay and frivolous. \"And Mrs. Collins has risen to the challenge of Dragon Keeping under very unusual circumstances. Elizabeth and I are very proud of her. And as for Georgiana\u2014\"\n\n\"I like her, she is pretty, and she doesn't chatter and giggle.\"\n\nHe was right, and her Friend Pax was certainly the most well-behaved fairy dragon of Darcy's acquaintance. \"You will not criticize those who are more accomplished than yourself. Particularly when there is so much at risk.\"\n\n\"At risk? I do not understand. Phoenix has learned a lovely trick that no fairy dragon has ever done before\u2014even Lizzy and Uncle Bennet say that. He is very special, and I am proud of him.\" Joshua stroked the back of Phoenix's head as the fairy dragon thrust out his chest and lifted his beaky snout.\n\n\"You were not told at first because you are a child\u2014no, do not get that look on your face. You are most certainly not a young man. Your attitudes and behavior brand you nothing more than a child.\"\n\nJoshua huffed and glowered. Phoenix tried to do the same, but only managed to look silly.\n\n\"You may stop posturing now. It only tells me I am correct.\" If Darcy had ever taken that attitude with Father or Uncle Matlock, he would have been quickly acquainted with Father's cane. \"Nonetheless, serious matters are afoot, and I believe it is better for you to be aware of them before we arrive at the Order.\"\n\nPhoenix cheeped and bobbed from one leg to the other. \"What? What? You think they will tell me I cannot show my new ability? I will not be stayed. Think how many I can gather to my harem this way.\"\n\nIt would be years before Phoenix was ready for a harem. Foolish adolescent. \"And therein lies the problem.\"\n\n\"I do not understand. What is wrong with a dragon doing what he can do?\" Phoenix pouffed his feather-scales and spread his wings. Trying to be big. Silly little flutter-tuft.\n\n\"All of us must live under the rule of the Blue Order.\" Darcy trained his gaze on Joshua. \"Your little Friend just declared he would not abide by their decisions. What do you say to that?\"\n\n\"Other dragons are allowed to use their abilities. Even little Pemberley has breathed fire. It would not be fair to make Phoenix stop.\"\n\n\"You realize, that makes both of you dangerous to the Order. Very dangerous.\"\n\nJoshua's face lost a little color. \"But he is a fairy dragon, and I\u2014according to you\u2014am only a child!\"\n\nPhoenix hopped toward Darcy.\n\nOne should not laugh at the instinctive games of dominance, even from a fairy dragon.\n\n\"I am much stronger than you believe. It is right for the Blue Order to take me\u2014and all fairy dragons\u2014seriously!\"\n\nDarcy gritted his teeth and counted to five. Then ten. \"Phoenix, you are correct. All dragons should be taken seriously. You must realize, fire is very, very dangerous. To man and to dragons. It is not a parlor trick or a means of attracting mates. It is a very dangerous ability, a weapon even, that in the wrong hands\u2014talons\u2014can cause a very great deal of harm. Cownt Matlock himself has taught Pemberley both how to use her flame and the very strict rules as to when\u2014the very few times\u2014it can be brought to bear.\"\n\n\"But I will only use it\u2014\"\n\nDarcy grimaced. These were children, he was trying to reason with children. \"Even if you can be trusted to do so, which is still highly questionable, there is the matter of other fairy dragons. If it becomes known that this is possible, how many others\u2014wild fairy dragons, even\u2014will seek to learn how to do it, too? If even a small percentage succeed, how much damage can be wrought? Remember, there is a reason that fairy dragons are not known for their wisdom or discretion.\"\n\nPhoenix pouffed even larger and chittered, hissing and flapping. Even if cute, anger was still the worst possible response.\n\n\"What will the Order do?\" Joshua's eyes were very serious.\n\nAt least that was a good sign.\n\nDarcy laced his hand together and rested them on the desk. \"I do not know. We will begin with a visit to Sir Edward Dressler, the Lord Physician of Dragons, and Keeper of Castordale. They will make an initial determination of whether Phoenix is unique in this ability, or it is something most or at least many other fairy dragons can do.\"\n\n\"What could they possibly do to us?\" Phoenix snorted and tossed his head.\n\nAnd this was why Bennet truly and completely disliked fairy dragons.\n\n\"They could order you away to a Blue Order school, like Miss Lydia, with a dragon watcher assigned. Unable to leave or return home without their approval.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound so bad.\" Joshua's lip quivered just a little.\n\n\"They also have the authority to sever your Friendship and send Phoenix to a Sanctuary for bird-type dragons who need careful management.\"\n\n\"I could go to prison?\" Phoenix squawked, eyes huge and afraid. \"I will not go. I will not leave my Friends.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your attachment to them, but the Blue Order does have the final say in these matters. Remember, whether or not you like it or approve of it, you are subject to their rules \u2026 and their discipline.\"\n\n\"Castordale will not eat Phoenix, will he?\" Joshua's face went completely white, and all of Phoenix's dominance shows deflated.\n\n\"No, of that I am certain.\"\n\nJoshua heaved a sigh of relief as he brought Phoenix in close to his chest.\n\n\"That sort of punishment requires a full judicial action, even for a fairy dragon. I am certain you both can be trusted to behave properly so that such an action can be avoided.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Both youngsters seemed suitably subdued. Hopefully that would last.\n\nHopefully.\n\nA blue-liveried footman, tall, somber and silent, greeted them in the front hall of the Blue Order offices. Joshua stared at him, his eyes finally fixing on the Blue Order signet the footman wore on the small finger of his left hand. Joshua glanced back at Darcy's hand, then rubbed his own, probably wishing for as much importance as full members of the Order had. Someday, he would have it, but not today.\n\nThe footman\u2014no doubt chaperoning them for Joshua's benefit\u2014guided them up the long marble stairs. Portraits of past Blue Order officers, human and dragon, each with a brass nameplate, lined the staircase, reminding all who passed of the legacy that they had sworn to uphold. Thankfully Joshua and Phoenix showed the appropriate amount of awe and reverence, trying to look everywhere at once as though trying not to miss any detail. Had Elizabeth been as they when she visited the Offices for the first time?\n\nProbably. At ten or was it twelve years old, she had been at odds with the Order over a fairy dragon as well. Pray this misadventure end as well as hers did.\n\nThey turned off the staircase at a broad landing that led into a hall wide enough for two men to walk abreast. The windows at either end of the corridor were frosted, allowing in light but not prying eyes. Strategically placed mirrors helped brighten the hallway enough to make out the faint claw marks on the worn limestone tile floors.\n\nThey stopped at an ornately carved office door.\n\n\"What is that?\" Joshua pointed at what looked more like a Pa Snake than an actual snake, curled around a tall rod, carved deep into the door, intricate and finely detailed. The orange agate dragon eyes glistened in the morning sun.\n\n\"That is a depiction of the Rod of Asclepius, the staff belonging to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. It is usually rendered with a regular snake instead of a dragon. Done this way, it is the symbol of the Blue Order Lord Physician of Dragons.\"\n\n\"A surgeon for dragons?\"\n\n\"No, he is a physician. He oversees the doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries who tend to dragons.\"\n\nJoshua whistled under this breath. \"I never knew there were such men.\"\n\n\"Most of England has no idea of their existence. Secrecy is paramount in the Order.\" That was a critical lesson\u2014if Joshua and Phoenix did not learn\u2014well, no need to borrow trouble for now.\n\nThe footman nodded somberly, opened the door, and announced their arrival.\n\nSir Edward Dressler stood from behind his desk. Tall and thin, almost gaunt, the top of his head was entirely bald except for a little wisp of hair in the center that swept to the left and blended into the sparse fringe, which ran from one ear to the other. Thick wire-rimmed glasses perched low on his nose\u2014he stared over them as often as not. Every one of his motions was calm and purposeful with an air that there was no crisis he could not manage. The sort of thing man and dragon wanted in a physician.\n\nThe room around him reflected the same calm precision. Large frosted windows poured their light into the room, reflected by mirrors on the opposite wall. Books in the three separate bookcases, all in order; Elizabeth's monographs had their own special section. Hopefully, he could keep his pride over that display under good regulation. Two large curiosity cabinets between the bookcases held carefully organized items and artifacts, which Sir Edward could lay hands on at a moment's notice.\n\nThe sound of many marching feet echoed from a large opening in the wall behind Sir Edward's large oak desk.\n\nJoshua jumped and looked around. Phoenix hovered near, scanning the room, perhaps checking for an escape route as fairy dragons often did.\n\n\"Do not fear, young man, it is only Castordale.\" Sir Edward walked toward them in precise measured strides.\n\n\"I believe Nanny told you to expect that sound.\" Darcy grumbled and glowered.\n\nJoshua hung his head. Perhaps he was feeling out of his depth. That would be a good thing. A humbling thing. A very needed thing.\n\nA very large, very blue Pa Snake slithered through the opening into the filtered light. Such a remarkable color, almost never found in nature. So blue it was almost unnatural.\n\nCastordale stopped near Sir Edward and reared up to be the same height as his Keeper. Darcy's arms would not have been able to span around him, had such a gesture not been entirely too intimate an action. At least ten feet of Castordale's tail remained on the ground, making him no less than sixteen feet long. Fangs as long as Darcy's hand protruded from his very snake-like head. They would have been frightening but for the curious and rather sympathetic expression in his glittering, jet-bead eyes.\n\nHe tasted the air with his long, forked tongue. Phoenix ducked behind Joshua, who stared slack-jawed. Darcy bowed deeply, from the waist, almost parallel with the floor and held that posture until Castordale flicked his collar with his tongue. Thankfully, he did not keep Darcy waiting.\n\n\"I understand this fairy dragon hassss appeared to breathe fire.\" Castordale's slithery-snakey voice hung heavy in the room.\n\n\"That is correct.\" Phoenix peeked around Joshua's ear.\n\n\"Pray, permit me to introduce the Sage's cousin, Master Joshua Gardiner, and his Friend, Phoenix.\" Darcy signaled the boy to bow. Phoenix landed on his shoulder and covered his head with his wings. Not perfect, but good enough.\n\n\"He does not really breathe fire, though.\" Joshua worried his hands together. \"Not like a true firedrake. It is just a trick. He is no danger\u2014\"\n\n\"We will be the ones to decide if he is a danger or not, son.\" Sir Edward stared over his glasses and crossed his arms. \"Tell me how he came to learn this trick.\"\n\n\"We went to the circus with my parents, you see.\"\n\n\"They brought a young fairy dragon with them to such a dangeroussss place?\"\n\n\"Oh no, they did not know he was with us. He hid in the collar of my coat like April in Cousin Lizzy's hood.\"\n\n\"Do not implicate anyone else in your disobedience. You both knew you were going against your parents' wishes.\" Darcy barely restrained the urge to swat him.\n\nJoshua jumped as though Darcy had. \"Yes, sir. At the circus, we saw the fire eaters and watched them breathe fire like dragons!\"\n\n\"And if a mere warm-blood could manage the feat, I was certain I, a proper dragon, might as well.\" Phoenix puffed up.\n\n\"But we could not figure out what the fire eaters breathed out that burned, so we gave up.\" Joshua turned to glare at the fairy dragon on his shoulder.\n\n\"You might have, but I did not.\"\n\n\"You must believe me. I did not encourage him.\" Joshua pumped his fists at his side.\n\n\"You did dare me to eat straw.\" Phoenix nipped his ear.\n\n\"Not because I thought it would make you belch fire.\"\n\n\"But you still\u2014\"\n\nSir Edward cleared his throat and they all looked at him. \"So, am I to understand you ate straw, young Phoenix?\"\n\nCastordale wrinkled his nose.\n\n\"He dared me to after we watched the horses do it.\"\n\n\"So naturally you did it, too.\" Castordale snuffed. \"Fairy dragons.\"\n\nJoshua rocked from heel to toe and back. \"The hay gave him a lot of wind. All afternoon and evening. After dinner that night, he breathed wind near a candle, and it caught flame! It was not as though we were trying to make it happen. Truly.\"\n\nPhoenix hopped into the air and hovered just in front of Joshua. \"I have been working on the feat ever since.\"\n\n\"With your encouragement, I imagine?\" Sir Edward caught Darcy's gaze and rolled his eyes, frowning.\n\n\"Um, ah, well, you see, sir, once a fairy dragon gets an idea in his mind\u2014\"\n\n\"Who do you think brought me the straw?\" Phoenix dove for Joshua's ear, but he covered it too quickly.\n\nSir Edward clapped his hands and both youngsters focused on him. \"And the straw, it is what enables this act? Without it you cannot accomplish it?\"\n\n\"No. Nothing else I eat makes me bring up wind that burns. I have tried with so many other things.\" Phoenix landed on Sir Edward's outstretched hand.\n\n\"I should like to examine you.\"\n\n\"I do not\u2014\"\n\n\"It will be in your best interest.\" Castordale leaned close to Phoenix, his heavy breath almost enough to knock him from his perch. \"And I should like to interview the boy privately, while you \u2014\" he looked at Darcy, \"\u2014go speak with Matlock. He asked that you report to him immediately.\"\n\nIt would have been nice to know that sooner.\n\n\"We will send for you when we need you again.\" Castordale pointed toward the door with his flicking tongue.\n\nDarcy hesitated a moment, bowed from his shoulders and let himself out.\n\nWas this how Bennet had felt when Elizabeth was examined by the Blue Order for membership? Probably not, who could know what that man actually felt? But it was how he would feel when it was Anne's turn.\n\nAssuming this whole affair did not utterly poison the Order for admitting youngsters into their ranks.\n\nDespite Elizabeth's insistence it was a good idea, Joshua Gardiner was the epitome of why it might not be suitable for young people to be introduced to dragons. He was a good lad, to be sure, but headstrong and arrogant as children were. Not old enough to have much sense about him and for that reason easy to manipulate. The wrong influences around him could lead to disaster. Hopefully this whole affair would help Elizabeth to see that before something truly tragic occurred.\n\nDarcy rapped at the Chancellor's door, inlaid with an intricate replica of the Order's crest. The primary officers of the Order needed no name placards at their doors.\n\nThe man himself flung it open and urged him inside. The door all but slammed behind him. On the ground floor, on the opposite side of the building from the Lord Physician's office, the dimly lit, large room smelled of limestone and candle tallow. Lined with cabinets and bookshelves, it lacked all the warmth of a proper library. More like a dungeon. The Lord Chancellor's presence seemed to fill the space with an ominous authority, a suffocating presence.\n\n\"It is about time, Darcy. I was told you arrived here nearly an hour ago.\" Matlock settled into his large desk chair behind his imposing desk bearing a painted seal of the Chancellor of the Order on the front. A pair of pewter candlesticks lit a small circle around them. \"Is it true about the fairy dragon?\"\n\nDarcy pulled a large blue leather wing chair closer to the desk and sat down. \"After a fashion.\"\n\nMatlock raked his hair back. \"Lovely. The Order does not need to be distracted by such things when there are far more important issues at hand.\"\n\n\"There has been news?\"\n\n\"We have reason to believe the suspected trade in dragons is in fact quite real.\"\n\n\"Pendragon's Bones!\" Darcy swallowed back the rising bile.\n\n\"You will like this even better. It appears there may be some Dragon Friends and previously unknown deaf-speakers involved.\"\n\nDarcy opened his mouth to speak.\n\nMatlock lifted an open hand. \"Moreover, it seems your friend Wickham was squarely in the middle of it all.\"\n\n\"But he was after a dragon to get a land grant to make him a gentleman.\" Not that such a thing was less repugnant\u2014well, no, it was less awful than trading in dragons themselves.\n\n\"No doubt he was, but like many of his ilk, he had connections, and possibly intentions, in many places. There is no telling what else he might have stooped to.\"\n\n\"How many dragons know?\" And how could they prevent more from knowing?\n\n\"Obviously, the Council knows and those connected to our investigations. Beyond that, we are not sure. Richard should arrive shortly with further news from the north and Wentworth from Lyme. Expect that we will be calling upon the Knights of the Order soon, including you and the Sage.\"\n\n\"Why her? This is a human matter. Elizabeth is already in danger\u2014\"\n\n\"The gossip will be out amongst the dragons as soon as the first fairy dragon or garden wyrm catches word of these matters, if the process has not already begun. You know that as well as I. The Dragon Sage will be necessary in calming agitated dragons and keeping them from taking matters into their own fangs and talons. We need her expertise to keep the major dragons from feeling men are a significant threat, lest they overthrow the Accords and plunge us back into the days of dragon war.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 15, 1815 Thames House, London",
                "text": "Anne groaned and stretched most indelicately in a sliver of evening sun that fell in a single bright stripe along the center of the mews behind Thames House, their temporary London home. Save a few very brief stops to change horses and attend to essentials, this was the first time she had stopped moving in four days\u2014or maybe five. It was difficult to tell anymore.\n\nAt least she thought that she had stopped moving. Closing her eyes, odd sensations in her limbs and head made her question whether it was true. She opened her eyes and stretched again.\n\nYes, it was good to no longer be in motion.\n\nThe traveling coach, with Kingsley and Sergeant trotting beside, trundled down to the neat little carriage house at the end of the mews. As delightful as the plush coach had been, leaving it was far better.\n\nWentworth had not exaggerated the trials of their journey. Especially regarding visits to some less than savory environs. Thankfully, Kingsley's and Sergeant's special talents had not been required, though in more than one village, she had been glad for their presence.\n\nWhether those stops provided what he had hoped for, he did not say\u2014speaking of such matters where they could be overheard was both foolish and dangerous. Hopefully they could find a measure of privacy soon\u2014away from gossipy fairy dragons and wyrms, where they might discuss oh-so-many things.\n\nAmong them, why did the Order find it necessary for Mr. Salt and his crew to continue on with them now they were in London? The convenience of a coach and driver was certainly pleasing, but such a highly trained team and luxurious conveyance seemed an unnecessary expense on the Order. At least the carriage house was included in the lease of the town house, so it would not be a hardship on the Wentworth budget.\n\nPerhaps she watched over that a little too closely. But after living with Father, it was difficult not to. Wentworth, though, did not complain, and it put Kellynch at ease to know the privations of his past were no longer a concern. So perhaps it was not a bad thing.\n\nShe turned toward the house. Four stories tall and connected to the dragon tunnels, it resembled Camden Place in many ways, though a mite less pretentious. If it was as pleasing inside as it was outside, Thames House would suit them very well indeed.\n\nA rather large, efficient-looking woman, probably the housekeeper, hired by the Blue Order, peeked out, flung open the back door, and headed toward them, brisk purpose in her steps.\n\nAnd so it would begin, Anne's tenure as mistress of yet another house, and her unofficial entrance into proper Dragon Keeping society. How strange and pleasing and busy it all was. Was it wrong to admit she looked forward to mingle in society that she might have something important in common with?\n\nA great number of tasks awaited her: Kellynch's lair to be fitted up to his satisfaction, the house to be set in order, essential entertaining to be planned, and an invitation from the Sage to be prepared for. Best begin immediately.\n\n[ January 16, 1815 Thames House, London ]\n\nAnne poured chocolate from an utterly remarkable chocolate pot. Blue, red and green Eastern Dragons encircled the white china vessel with a matching cup held in its delicate trembleuse saucer. No doubt anything consumed from such a piece of art would taste remarkable.\n\n\"Are you sure you are up to this, Anne? We only arrived yesterday. You are barely unpacked.\" Wentworth glanced at her over his newspaper.\n\nThe little morning room, painted a friendly pale green and overlooking the street, brimmed with the aromas of hot coffee, chocolate, and fresh Bath buns. A neat sideboard tucked into an awkward corner near the window, leaving just enough room for a round table that might seat six, if none were much larger than Anne. It seemed to suffer from the common morning room malady of being undersized and over-furnished. But somehow that just made it feel homey.\n\n\"I hardly think you would refuse an invitation from Lord Matlock because it was inconvenient.\" She sat next to Wentworth and sipped her chocolate.\n\nHeavenly, simply heavenly. Was that nutmeg and vanilla in the chocolate? And no chile, different to how she was accustomed to it, but so delightful. Hopefully the housekeeper would not insist on keeping the receipt a secret of some sort.\n\nOh, it was good.\n\nWentworth, easy in his favorite marine-blue banyan, snorted. \"It is an invitation to discuss our presentation, not a summons from the Order.\"\n\nAnne set her cup down very carefully. \"The Dragon Sage will be presenting us at the Dragon Keepers' Cotillion!\"\n\n\"It is only a ball.\"\n\n\"No, it is not!\" She rose and gripped the edge of the table. \"It is our formal introduction into Dragon Keeping Society. It is incumbent upon us to remember many in that society outrank us both, and yet will be asked to see us as desirable connections and ignore the very \u2026 unusual \u2026 circumstances of our family. Lady Elizabeth's demonstration of support, approval, and connection to us will smooth the way with other Keepers and allow us to move in Blue Order society.\" Why did her voice have to break just now? \"In the Navy, your rank and connections were sufficient, but that is not the way society\u2014particularly Dragon Keeping society\u2014works. We need this connection and the introductions she can make for us.\"\n\nWentworth set aside his paper and laced his still-calloused long fingers in hers, his expression somber. \"I am sorry to be so insensitive.\"\n\nDear man. The look in his eyes made it clear, the apology was sincere, but he did not really understand what she was about. He had not been raised in a baronet's house. There was much he had no reason to understand. But he was trying.\n\nWhat more could she ask? \"You will see to Kellynch's request while I am gone?\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes and chuckled. \"I am sure there is some connection to the Order who can be hired to clean out the tunnels between the Thames and the lair below the cellar. I cannot blame him for insisting that he should fit comfortably through the passage and not damage his scales. I took it on good faith when the solicitor said the tunnels were in good repair.\"\n\nKellynch had lost a substantial patch of scales and several whiskers attempting to traverse those tunnels last night. \"Laconia has been a dear, tending to Kellynch's wounds and keeping him company until he can get to his lair. We must see that your Friend has his fill of cream and cod when Kellynch no longer needs his attentions. At least Kellynch did not take offense and throw a fit. That is an improvement, is it not?\"\n\n\"He is in remarkable good humor, all things considered. Are you sure you want to bring Corn and Wall with you? They are such silly wyrmlings. Kellynch always appreciates their presence even more than Laconia's.\"\n\n\"They were included in the Sage's invitation.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. But she is the Sage, so I see no point in arguing.\"\n\nKingsley trotted beside the coach on the way to Darcy House, all the other traffic giving them a wide berth. Sergeant rode inside with her. The street, they said, was not wide enough for both drakes to run alongside the coach.\n\nCorn and Wall, who had tumbled free of their basket almost as soon as the coach door was shut, found him fascinating, sniffing him nose to tail and crawling all over him, purring and mewling. Patient, patient drake. For all his fierce looks, he seemed amused by them, though all the while never allowing his gaze to leave the side glass.\n\nThe coach stopped in front of an elegant town home in the middle of the street: Darcy House. So much grander than Thames House.\n\nGood. She would not be expected to emulate the Darcys' level of entertaining in her much more modest home. Strange relief that was.\n\nShe gathered the wyrmlings into their large basket. Alister Salt handed her down and helped her settle the weighty basket on her arm. Sergeant accompanied her to knock on the door with the brass drake's-head knocker whilst Kingsley stood on the street, near the coach.\n\nA somber butler greeted her, but hesitated when he saw Sergeant.\n\n\"Been ordered to see the Lady Wentworth is not left unprotected.\" Sergeant stretched out his front legs in a sort of bow.\n\n\"Pray, wait a moment.\" The door closed.\n\nOdd, a bit insulting even. It was not as though she were showing up for a morning call and the lady of the house needed to decide if she were \"in\" or not. She had been invited by Lady Elizabeth.\n\nThen again maybe not. If there were dragons in the house\u2014not if, this was the Dragon Sage's home, of course there were dragons\u2014territory, dominance and proper greeting protocols would all be significant. It would not do to have unfamiliar dragons encountering one another unexpectedly.\n\nThat was the sort of thing Anne needed to keep in mind. It would probably be the norm when associating more with Blue Order society.\n\nThe door swung open revealing Lady Elizabeth, a toothy black guard drake, wearing a spiked collar, at her side. Larger and more muscular than even Kingsley, he was not a dragon to be meddled with.\n\n\"Brutus.\" Sergeant extended his forelegs and lowered his head. The larger drake tapped the back of Sergeant's head with his snout.\n\n\"You know one another?\" Lady Elizabeth's eyebrows rose high.\n\nThe Dragon Sage did not know everything? Was that comforting or unsettling?\n\nBrutus glanced over Sergeant's shoulder, scanning the street behind them. \"Him and Kingsley, the other drake on his team. Is Alister Salt with you?\"\n\n\"And now his son has joined us, too.\" The tip of Sergeant's tail flicked.\n\nBrutus rumbled something that sounded vaguely like approval.\n\n\"Then I suppose there will be no issues.\" Lady Elizabeth backed away from the door to admit them inside. \"Brutus, will you introduce Sergeant and Kingsley to Walker and the rest of the household?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lady. Come.\" Brutus led Sergeant off.\n\nAnne's basket mewled. \"Oh, gracious! Should I have brought out the wyrmlings for an introduction too?\"\n\n\"Do not worry. The babies are too young to be expected to make proper greetings. May is quite excited for their visit. Pray come with me.\" Lady Elizabeth led the way to a grand marble staircase with tasteful wrought-iron railings. Odd that she was doing the service herself, rather than relegating it to a servant, but perhaps that was because of the dragons, too.\n\nHer bearing was confident, but somehow not proud. Her gown very fine, but not the sort that made one feel the difference in one's station. She was welcoming and proper, but not familiar in an uncomfortable sort of way.\n\nFor being home to those with such a significant role in the Blue Order, Darcy House did not scream out 'dragons' the way it might. Since her own installation at Kellynch-by-the-Sea, Anne had been approached by many Blue Order artisans pushing their subtle and not-so-subtle wares. Everything from china settings with draconic images like the chocolate set she had drunk from this morning, to casegoods with drawer fronts and side panels inlaid with dragons of every sort, to yards and yards of fabrics from simple Order-blue to those bearing full-out dragon depictions.\n\nApparently dressing one's house with dragons was a popular choice among those in the Order, though it seemed utterly at odds with the all-important need for secrecy.\n\nThe only obvious draconic influence in Darcy House were the dragons themselves. And there did seem to be plenty of them. A pair of drakes with livery badges zipped up the wide marble stairs beside them, bearing trays of dainties. Two maids followed with a full service for tea. A dark red, almost maroon, puck trotted behind the maids, with a feather duster in her mouth. Few would tolerate servants so much in the way of the family, but it did not seem to draw notice from Lady Elizabeth. More draconic influence?\n\nThey turned off at the large first-floor landing. Halfway down the spacious wood-paneled corridor, several colorful fairy dragons zipped back and forth, chittering too quickly to decipher what they were saying, but it seemed like they were excited to have spotted Anne's arrival.\n\nIncluding Corn and Wall in her basket, she had seen more than ten dragons in as many minutes. And that did not even include Nanny, little Pemberley and baby May, whom she had previously met! Gracious! Surely no other house in all of England could possibly have so great a draconic presence.\n\nNo wonder Lady Elizabeth saw no need to decorate with draconic images!\n\nCheery ladies' voices filtered from an open door on the street side of the corridor. Lady Elizabeth urged her inside the large plum and gold parlor where the maids and drakes were setting up for tea.\n\nThree ladies, all appearing younger than herself, sat on dark pink upholstered chairs and a sofa, backlit by a large window, hung with very sheer white curtains no doubt to block the view from the street. A stern-looking blue-green minor drake, lean and leggy, sat on a wooden chair behind a young woman who favored Lady Elizabeth. The drake looked exactly like a strict governess.\n\nBookcases, filled with books, mostly bound in Order-blue, lined the wall opposite the fireplace. Painted landscapes, probably of Pemberley, and two elegant ebony bombe chests populated the wall opposite the windows. It was difficult not to wonder what a Dragon Sage might store there.\n\nApril, Lady Elizabeth's Friend, perched on a low gold-painted table between the chairs, with three more fairy dragons hovering near: one pink, one white, and a tiny black and red one. A fluffy black tatzelwurmling, May, sat back on her tail, her front thumbed paws on the table, watching the fairy dragons flitter.\n\nHow had Lady Elizabeth taught her so much control that she did not try and pounce on the fairy dragons? Surely Corn and Wall would not be so well behaved.\n\n\"Lady Wentworth, may I present my sisters, Mrs. Collins, Miss Darcy, and Miss Bennet.\"\n\nMrs. Collins seemed the anthesis of Anne's elder sister: proper, demure, with little desire to draw attention to herself. Everything about her seemed sensible, a little plain, and maybe a touch severe, except for the fluffy, pink fairy dragon who flitted to her shoulder. Probably a woman with whom Anne would have much in common.\n\nMiss Darcy looked like Mr. Darcy in the best ways possible. Her smile was sweet, her eyes sparkling, and she looked adoringly at the brilliant white fairy dragon perched on her knee, almost blending into the white muslin of her gown.\n\nMiss Bennet seemed very different. She resembled Lady Elizabeth, in a round, soft, youthful sort of way. All fun, frivolity, and gaiety, but perhaps little sense\u2014that of course remained to be seen\u2014with a tiny black and red fairy dragon chittering from her shoulder to the somber drake behind them.\n\n\"Auntie, my sister's companion, sits behind them. You have already met April. Heather is Mrs. Collins' pink Friend, Pax quite relies upon Miss Darcy, and I should warn you of Cosette's temper. She quite resembles her brood mother, April, in temperament.\"\n\nCosette zipped toward Lady Elizabeth, but little blue April cut her off mid-flight, scolding.\n\nAnne's basket mrowwwed. She opened the lid and two black and white furry faces appeared over the edge.\n\n\"May I introduce Corn, with the white ears and blue eyes, and Wall with the black nose and green eyes. And before you ask, Kellynch, their laird, decided upon their names.\"\n\nMiss Bennet giggled.\n\n\"May, come and meet your nestmates.\" Lady Elizabeth crouched to beckon the wyrmlings.\n\nCorn and Wall tumbled out of their basket and met May in the middle of the room, near the tea table. They wound around each other, sniffing and purring and mewling. A Gordian Knot of tatzelwurms.\n\n\"They are so dear!\" Miss Darcy clasped her hands near her chest. \"Do you think they will try and chase Pax though? May has tried a few times, and it upsets her so.\"\n\n\"I expect they will keep each other quite entertained.\" Lady Elizabeth fixed her eyes on the wyrmlings, a warning note in her voice.\n\nAll three mewed and bobbed their heads. No doubt they would obey, as long as they remembered that was what they were to do.\n\nLady Elizabeth gestured toward an overstuffed chair covered in pale pink roses and took a seat across the tea table from her sisters.\n\n\"You must help her learn not to be so ridiculously sensitive,\" April chided, landing on the tea table near Miss Darcy. \"Pax is a fairy dragon, and it is fair to say that something will always be chasing us.\"\n\n\"Stay with me. I will protect you!\" A brilliant red fairy dragon zoomed in and landed on the table near April.\n\n\"Lady Wentworth, this is Phoenix, Heather's nestmate, who is staying with us for a little while.\"\n\nPhoenix puffed his chest and strutted, his bold red crest of scale-feathers flared to make him several inches taller. A male fairy dragon! So that was what the little blokes looked like!\n\nApril pounced and pecked the top of his head. \"Enough of your parading. We are not your harem. You are not dominant here. I would thank you to remember that.\"\n\nCosette dove in and pecked at him. \"Yes, remember that.\"\n\nPhoenix squawked and zipped out; his ego probably as bruised as his head. Poor little mite.\n\n\"Pray forgive him. Male fairy dragons can be a bit, well, full of themselves, especially with so many females about. I will have another word with him.\" Lady Elizabeth extended her hand for April to perch on it and scratched her under her chin. April flitted to her shoulder, and Lady Elizabeth began to serve tea.\n\n\"I understand you are lately married, Lady Wentworth.\" Mrs. Collins took a small plate and added a small cheese sandwich and several biscuits.\n\n\"Yes, just this last November.\"\n\n\"And you became Keeper to Kellynch as well?\"\n\nLady Elizabeth passed Anne a cup of tea.\n\n\"My husband and I did. Kellynch insisted he should have two Keepers. Lady Elizabeth is sponsoring our presentation as Keepers at the Dragon Keepers' Cotillion.\"\n\n\"She is sponsoring mine as well.\"\n\n\"Oh, you are Keeper to Longbourn! Forgive me for not remembering that immediately. I am still sorting out all the Keepers, estates and dragons.\" Hopefully she would not be the kind to take offense.\n\nMrs. Collins nodded, glancing at Lady Elizabeth, a little ill-ease in her look. \"Yes. My husband is dragon-deaf, but the heir to the estate. He was accidentally made a deaf-speaker. Just recently, he was deemed acceptable to the Order. We will be presented at the Ball as well, though he is still at Longbourn for the moment.\"\n\nA female Keeper, with a deaf-speaker husband? What did one say to such a statement? There could be no protocol for such a thing, could there?\n\n\"Lizzy is sponsoring us, too.\" Miss Bennet bounced on her seat. \"Miss Darcy and I are coming out at the ball! I never expected I would have a ball at my come out. I am so excited I hardly have words. I must have a gown that matches Cosette. She is the prettiest little thing, is she not?\"\n\nCosette landed on Miss Bennet's outstretched hand, warbling loudly, and a bit off key.\n\n\"I am sponsoring all of you to the Order at the Cotillion. But as to your gown, no, it will not match Cosette. The Cotillion Board\u2014\" Something in the way Lady Elizabeth said that, she did not like them, or did not approve, it was difficult to say. \"\u2014have decreed that all debutantes must wear gowns of Order-blue as has been the tradition of the Order since the first Keepers' Cotillion.\"\n\n\"But that is not fair!\"\n\n\"I see it no different to the rules of presentation to the King. And those court gowns are utterly useless for anything else. At least these we will be able to wear at other events.\" Tellingly, Mrs. Collins did not look at Miss Bennet.\n\nIt seemed she and Anne had a great deal in common.\n\n\"Order-blue is a lovely color and will look so good on you, Miss Bennet.\" Miss Darcy cringed a little as she spoke.\n\n\"Not as pretty as red, or a lovely white gown.\" Miss Lydia harumphed.\n\nAuntie grumbled under her breath.\n\nMiss Bennet's face fell just a mite. \"I suppose blue will do.\"\n\nLady Elizabeth nodded at Auntie, a tiny smile playing at her lips. \"Tradition decrees that there is quite a bit of preparation to be done for the Keepers' Cotillion. Unfortunately, there are not enough hours in the day for me to be able to dress and tutor each of you individually. I wish I could, but I simply cannot.\"\n\nMiss Bennet gasped and Miss Darcy looked crushed. Hopefully her own aching heart and held breath were less obvious.\n\n\"Lizzy, you promised!\"\n\nLady Elizabeth raised an open hand. How could a woman so elegant and put together look so haggard? The unruly dragons did not seem to tax her so much as her sisters. \"That is not to say I will not help you, or that you will be left unprepared, only that we will have to accomplish this rather less conventionally and more efficiently than we might otherwise have expected.\"\n\n\"Is there anything I might do to help?\" As the eldest of those presented, it did seem the appropriate thing to say, despite having no idea what she might bring to bear. At least she could breathe again.\n\n\"I was hoping you might be of a mind to do something like that. Perhaps you and Mrs. Collins might be in charge of seeing that all of you learn the greeting protocols? I have no way of knowing which of the major dragons will be there. There are over four hundred major dragons in England alone, and it is possible that some Irish or Scottish dragons might attend as well.\"\n\n\"Four hundred major dragons at the Cotillion?\" Miss Darcy turned as white as her gown.\n\n\"Oh, heavens no! It would not be possible. I do not think that many large dragons could tolerate the proximity of one another!\" Lady Elizabeth laughed. \"But with new Keepers presented, I expect there will be more than usual. The debutantes and new Keepers will be presented to Dragon Mates and expected to greet them, dragon and human. I wish I could say we will have a list of who will attend, but even if we did, dragons can be capricious. We will not be certain until the event itself. So, you will have to be prepared, knowing all the greetings and all the Dragon Mate pairs.\"\n\n\"How will they all fit in the courtroom?\" Mrs. Collins' eyebrows knit as though she were trying to work out the puzzle herself.\n\n\"There is a protocol to the greeting line. The dragons will enter by rank and line the edges of the room with sufficient space between them to prevent\u2014ah\u2014misunderstandings. The debutantes will begin at the highest ranked dragon and proceed around the room. When each dragon has been greeted by all the debutantes, he or she will retire and another dragon will take their place, until all dragons have been greeted.\"\n\n\"Merciful heavens!\" Miss Darcy fell back against the back of her seat.\n\n\"I fear that is not all. There will be minor dragons present with their Friends to whom you will be introduced, as well. Though those greetings are less formal and will happen throughout the evening as the minor dragons are apt to stay for the entire affair.\"\n\n\"How will we ever learn it all?\" Miss Darcy whispered.\n\n\"That is why I recommend you study together. Lady Wentworth and Mrs. Collins will be able to coordinate your efforts. Together with Auntie and Nanny to assist as necessary, I am certain you will be able to help each other to manage the task. I will of course be ready to answer your questions and to test you on your learning so that you will be confident in your readiness.\"\n\nMrs. Collins caught Anne's gaze with a cocked eyebrow. Anne nodded slowly.\n\n\"Pray tell me there will be dancing at the ball as well. It sounds as though all we will do is curtsey to dragons.\" Lydia rolled her eyes.\n\n\"There will be dancing, to be sure. The ball always begins with a traditional minuet, which you must learn.\"\n\n\"A minuet!\" Miss Bennet's lip curled back. \"But that is so old-fashioned. No one begins a ball with a minuet anymore.\"\n\n\"The Blue Order always has and probably always will. Mr. Darcy and I will bring in a dance master to teach you. It has been so long since I did my own minuet, I cannot be certain that I even remember it properly at this point.\"\n\n\"We are to have a dancing master! I have never had a proper dancing master!\" Lydia squealed and bounced. \"He will teach us more than a minuet, will he not?\"\n\n\"I hope you will thank me when you have finished your tutelage with him. He is said to be rather exacting. But as some will be apt to judge you on your dance steps, as is the case in any society, we want to make sure you are well taught.\"\n\n\"You are doing so much for us, Lady Elizabeth,\" Anne said, \"I do not know how to thank\u2014\"\n\n\"But what shall we wear?\" Miss Bennet planted her chin on her fist, pouting.\n\nLady Elizabeth gritted her teeth and said nothing, probably counting to ten. \"Aunt Gardiner will be arriving in just a few minutes to assist us with that point. In fact, I think I hear them now.\" Lady Elizabeth opened the door. \"Yes, yes, your timing is excellent, Aunt, do come in.\"\n\nA pretty, trim matron in an excellently made forest-green striped walking gown entered with three sturdy men carrying trunks and boxes. \"Pray put them there, near the bookcase.\"\n\nThe men grunted and obeyed.\n\nApril and Pax softly sang, \"Such pretty cats and little birds in this room and dogs in the hall. Lady Elizabeth has such a fondness for her many pets.\"\n\nEach of the men patted the wyrmlings on their heads; two of them looked like they wondered why they were doing so.\n\n\"Go down to the kitchen when you have finished. Cook will provide refreshment for you.\" Lady Elizabeth waved the men toward the door.\n\nSeveral minutes later, they returned with more boxes, several bolts of Order-blue trims and a dressing screen they set up near the fireplace.\n\n\"Lady Wentworth, may I present my aunt, Mrs. Gardiner?\"\n\nAnne stood and curtsied. \"Pleased to make your acquaintance.\"\n\n\"As am I.\" Mrs. Gardiner curtsied in return, poise and grace in her every motion.\n\n\"Lizzy said you would help us with our gowns?\" Miss Bennet jumped to her feet.\n\n\"Gardiner's warehouse has been working with the Order for years to provide garments for the Dragon Keepers' Cotillion. Many times, gowns are needed on very short notice.\"\n\nWas it wrong to believe dragons seemed averse to planning?\n\n\"So, we have taken to having gowns cut and made up in preparation for the ball, so they only need to be tailored and trimmed for each debutante. Some still prefer entirely bespoke designs, but many prefer the ease our approach offers.\"\n\n\"What an excellent idea.\" Mrs. Collins glanced back at Miss Darcy and Miss Bennet, who looked just a little crestfallen.\n\n\"I agree entirely.\" Anne said. \"Have you brought some of the gowns with you?\"\n\nLady Elizabeth nodded and smiled at Anne as though relieved to find an ally.\n\n\"Indeed, I have. Pray help me unpack them.\" Mrs. Gardiner gestured at the trunk next to her and several boxes on the floor nearby.\n\nAll the ladies set to work and soon nearly a dozen gowns were laid out on the couch and the settee, and hung from the dressing screen and the top shelves of the bookcase for viewing. Mrs. Gardiner pulled several chairs close and laid out ribbons and laces, silk flowers and bows until the room resembled a linen-draper's and modiste's shop made into one.\n\nEach gown was different and cleverly designed to be easily modified to fit a range of figures and tastes. The fabrics were all of excellent quality. Granted, they were rather plain, without trims, but it was easy to imagine how different lace and ribbons would enhance the gowns.\n\n\"Please, look through them. I see Lizzy\u2014ah, Lady Elizabeth\u2014has already had a mirror brought in. You might try on whatever you like. Several of our seamstresses will be here in an hour or so and can begin the fitting process.\"\n\nMiss Bennet squealed and dragged Miss Darcy up by the hand. \"This one, this one! It is perfect for you.\" She dove for a particular gown draped in layers of gauzy Order-blue muslin.\n\nDespite her effusive enthusiasm, Miss Lydia was correct. It would suit Miss Darcy very well.\n\nMrs. Collins wandered toward a demure gown, with slightly longer sleeves, a modest neckline, and several rows of ruffles along the edge of the skirt. She bit her lip.\n\nLady Elizabeth approached, nodding. \"I thought of you specifically when I saw that one.\"\n\n\"It is lovely, but the estate is still paying back Longbourn for all those years of salt that were not offered him. I do not think \u2026 perhaps this is not the year to do this.\"\n\n\"Mary, do not worry. Please, I want you to have this and any trim that you like for it. When I had my Cotillion, Papa found me a second-hand gown which neither fit properly, nor did I like very well at all. Uncle offered to make it better, but Papa\u2014you can imagine. I do not want you to have the same experience. You should have something that you like, that makes you feel like a proper part of the Order.\"\n\nAnne was probably not meant to overhear that exchange. How lovely to have such a caring sister. It was good that someone did.\n\n\"But I cannot \u2026\"\n\n\"Darcy has already set aside the funds for each of you. I know your taste. I do not have to worry about you exceeding my budget. Lydia, I may need to have words with. But not you.\"\n\n\"If you are certain.\" Mrs. Collins blinked back the brightness in her eyes. \"I would like that very much.\"\n\nThe door burst open. \"Lizzy, Lizzy!\" A little boy dashed in, hair frazzled and shirt half untucked. \"Lizzy!\"\n\n\"Joshua Gardiner, where are your manners!\" Mrs. Gardiner trotted across the room to the boy who resembled her greatly.\n\n\"I need Lizzy. It's Phoenix. He flew off in a huff and went to the kitchen. Now the warehouse men are there, and he is hiding from them. You know he does not like them. He likes to hide behind a loose stone he found in the fireplace, but I am afraid he will get too hot there and the heat will make him sick. Pray help me get him out.\"\n\n\"Silly little creature! Forgive me, I will return in a moment.\" Lady Elizabeth sighed and followed the boy out.\n\n\"Joshua and that fairy dragon have been inseparable since my eldest left home for school. They are alarmingly similar youngsters.\" Mrs. Gardiner shrugged with more good humor than Anne's sister Mary ever had about the antics of her own boys. \"Mary, dear, what do you think of these trims?\" She picked up some gauzy lace and two different widths of ribbon embroidered with little beaded fairy dragons and held them against the dress Mrs. Collins had been admiring.\n\n\"They are exquisite.\"\n\n\"Get me my pins, there in the small box. Let me show you what I have in mind.\" Mrs. Gardiner trimmed the sleeves, the neck and waist of the gown.\n\nGracious, what a difference it made! The once-plain gown became absolutely memorable. The woman was truly talented!\n\n\"Why not try this one on now, Mary?\"\n\n\"I would like it very\u2014\"\n\nA piercing cockatrice shriek filled the air, sending chills down Anne's back and a sense of dread permeating her bones. Her knees melted, and she grabbed the nearest chair for support. Feet\u2014taloned feet\u2014 pounded up the staircase and thundered toward them. Kingsley and Sergeant burst in, with two formidable black cockatrice winging in behind them, all wearing Order insignia.\n\n\"Stay here, do not leave this room. Lady Elizabeth and the boy have been taken.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 16, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "Wentworth sat at a wide stone-topped table beside Kellynch and across from Sir Carew Arnold, Minister of Keeps. The office, near the Blue Order courtroom on the lowest level of the Order offices, smelt of stone and burning torches. Their flickering light only added to the sense of a cold, dank medieval dungeon that lingering at the edges of his awareness. Happily, no iron chains hung from the walls lest he be entirely unable to escape the image.\n\nLaconia sat on the edge of the limestone tabletop, black tufted ears pricked, curled and ready to spring. Kellynch had asked for his attendance, in support as it were. Despite Laconia's dislike for crowds and unfamiliar major dragons, he stood by his laird, just as a good officer did his captain.\n\nLangham, Sir Carew's wyvern Dragon Mate, sat\u2014no, not exactly sat, more like crouched on her two legs\u2014how did one describe that posture?\u2014 beside her Keeper. Despite being one of the lower-ranking Blue Order officers, he enjoyed one of the largest offices, not because of prestige, but practicality. Significant space was required when one brought dragons to the table for discussion. It also explained why he was hidden away in the lowest basement\u2014getting major dragons into the above ground levels, except perhaps for snake and wyrm-types, was hardly feasible.\n\nDespite Sir Carew's slow steps, hunched shoulders, and thin grey hair in something of a disarray, his mind was quick and his temper rather short. Langham, a lean, even-tempered, female wyvern, her dark hide and wing leather sporting light streaks\u2014almost stripes, a most unusual pattern\u2014proved an excellent foil for Sir Carew. What was more, her presence seemed to soothe Kellynch's concerns that his voice would not be heard. No doubt that was her intended role in the affair.\n\nWhile it resulted in a few cross words and demands from her that Kellynch himself might not have made, the whole process went rather more smoothly and with far greater satisfaction to Kellynch than Wentworth had expected.\n\nAll told, this experience was probably as beneficial for Laconia as it was for Kellynch. Respect among the Order for all manner of wyrms seemed, in his eyes, rather low and seeing Kellynch's concerns taken seriously could not but raise his esteem for the Order.\n\n\"I will make arrangements for tunnel repairs immediately.\" Sir Carew scrawled something in his notebook.\n\nLaconia purred approval.\n\n\"While those are going on, Laird Kellynch, would you care to make use of a temporary lair here at the Order? With the Keepers' Cotillion coming up, I am afraid there are many dragons coming and going, so you may not have the privacy you might prefer \u2026\" Langham cocked her mostly square head and lifted her brow ridge, looking for a moment so much like Anne that he held his breath not to laugh.\n\n\"Might introductions be arranged? After so much solitary hibernation, a bit of company might be an agreeable bit of variety.\" Kellynch wrinkled his long grey-green toothy snout as he spoke, as though trying to remain noncommittal.\n\nHe was lying. The tiny twitch of the tip of his tail and lift of his long mustache whiskers marked him as very intrigued indeed.\n\n\"I can arrange for that. Most who come to the Order offices are not unamenable to a bit of company.\" Was Langham resisting a smile?\n\nNow this was a true Dragon Diplomat!\n\n\"I think I shall remain here for a few days, then.\" The fin down his back rippled, a sure sign of his good humor. \"Laconia, you and their majesties will be most welcome to visit me at any time.\"\n\nSir Carew hid a chuckle behind his hand. Word of Kellynch's tatzelwurmling friends and his particular name for them had spread through the London Order with the speed of a scandal sheet.\n\n\"If you would follow me, I will show you the available lairs that might suit you. You may choose the one you best prefer.\" Langham strode with surprising grace toward the tunnel opening. The table quivered in time with her steps.\n\nKellynch slithered off behind her, every inch radiating contentment with the circumstances.\n\n\"She is very good, is she not?\" A wry smile lifted the corners of Sir Carew's lips.\n\n\"I confess, I am impressed. Please convey my regards to Langham. Kellynch can be rather temperamental with regards to his comforts.\"\n\n\"Rather like a certain earl we know?\"\n\n\"Indeed. And I am to meet with him immediately upon finishing here with you. So, I must bid you good day lest I incur the wrath of the man, his dragon, or both.\" Wentworth rose, bowed, and left, Laconia weaving between his feet as he walked.\n\nThey climbed the multiple flights of stairs\u2014was it three or four\u2014at a comfortable pace. What sense in arriving flustered and breathless? No doubt this meeting would be more challenging than simply soothing wounded dragon pride. What were the chances Sir Richard brought better news than he?\n\nThey stopped on the ground floor, at a dragon-width door inlaid with an intricate rendering of the Order's crest. Glass, stones, polished wood, even a bit of porcelain here and there created an image as clear as a painting, a masterpiece of craftsmanship.\n\n\"Mroow.\" Laconia reared up on his tail, sniffing the air, and batted at the door with his oversized, thumbed paws.\n\nWentworth grumbled low in his throat. What was wrong with giving a man a moment to gather his thoughts?\n\nLaconia chirruped, harsh and raspy. That was one of his warning sounds; Wentworth tensed into battle mode.\n\nSir Fitzwilliam\u2014Darcy\u2014opened the door and ushered him inside the ample room. Mirrors multiplied the light filtering in from frosted windows, providing just barely not enough light to read by. Shadows obscured the contents of the shelves at the far side of the room, lending a rather ominous air to the space.\n\nLord Matlock sat in his command position near the center of the room, behind his mahogany desk, which bore a masterfully painted seal of the Order. Three large chairs were arranged in front of the desk. A man with an uncanny resemblance to Lord Matlock occupied the farthest seat\u2014Sir Richard Fitzwilliam, no doubt\u2014a juvenile grey cockatrice perched on the back of the chair, serpentine tail snaking down to lie across his shoulder. Lacking the commanding presence of the cockatrice guard, the youngster seemed gawky and out of proportion, much like a stage all young men went through. His tail, wings and legs seemed a bit too large for his body and disheveled, ragtag feather-scales stuck out from the top of his head, bobbing as he flapped his wings and squawked.\n\nLaconia stopped suddenly, nearly tripping Wentworth. \"Roooow?\"\n\n\"Laconia, Friend of Sir Frederick, may I present Earl, Friend of Sir Richard.\" Darcy gestured from one dragon to the other.\n\nLaconia slither-crept forward as Earl landed on the limestone tiles just behind Darcy. They circled Darcy, Earl's wings spread, Laconia's fur and body pouffed. Lovely, this would be a prolonged dance.\n\nJust for once, it would be nice if they could simply bow to one another and be done with it.\n\nSquawking and hissing as Laconia reared up on his tail to be as tall as Earl, the circling dance began anew. Earl lashed his powerful tail at Laconia, who caught it between his paws and bit it\u2014just enough to break skin. Earl screamed and pulled away. He should not have challenged the older, more experienced dragon.\n\nLaconia held on to Earl's tail until he touched his beak to the ground and Laconia plucked a single scruffy feather-scale from the back of his neck. Earl extended his wings and allowed Laconia to thoroughly sniff him beak to tail and back again.\n\n\"I warned you not to test him.\" Sir Richard extended his arm, protected in an elbow-length leather glove.\n\nEarl hopped to his Friend's arm, head down and grumbling, the universal expression of young lads shown their place by a grown man.\n\nLord Matlock cleared his throat. \"Perhaps now we may continue?\"\n\nLaconia jumped to Matlock's desk as Wentworth sat in the leftmost chair and edged it closer to Laconia.\n\n\"What is the news from the North?\" Matlock turned to Sir Richard.\n\n\"We came by way of Birmingham, Newmarket and Cambridge.\" Certainly not a direct route by any means. \"The blackguards are good at covering their tracks, that much I can say for certain.\"\n\n\"Which implies you are not certain they exist, yes?\" Matlock drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.\n\n\"Oh, they exist. What traces we found are unmistakable.\" Sir Richard's shoulders twitched in a barely concealed shudder.\n\n\"What did you find?\" Patience was clearly not one of Matlock's assets. If he just held his peace and let Sir Richard speak\u2014\n\n\"There was an apothecary shop near Newmarket that had a jar of wyvern scales for sale, marked as\u2014what was it?\" Sir Richard glanced at Earl.\n\n\"That is a component in a ladies' lotion, I am told,\" Wentworth said.\n\n\"Uppercross has a family receipt for the stuff,\" Laconia drummed his paws on the desk. He had always felt rather uncertain about Anne concocting the brew even after Uppercross had assured Laconia of his approval.\n\nEarl growled. Apparently, he shared Laconia's sentiment.\n\nSir Richard soothed the feather-scales on the back of his neck. \"There is no wyvern estate within thirty miles of Newmarket. Wyverns are not known for giving away their scales readily and certainly not to one who would sell them.\"\n\n\"All that tells us is some unscrupulous Keeper cleans up the lair and sells the debris. That is hardly proof of smuggling.\" Matlock's hands flexed in and out of fists.\n\nWentworth soothed Laconia's raised hackles. \"We saw the same between Hungerford and Pewsey and again in Ludgershall.\"\n\n\"And Basingstoke.\" Laconia spring-hopped to Wentworth's lap.\n\nGetting distance from Matlock? Interesting.\n\n\"That suggests something more.\" Darcy rubbed his chin. \"It seems worth looking for a link between those apothecaries. It is possible a branch of that trade could be involved. It seems a most likely candidate of all the trades. Who else would be likely to use such articles?\"\n\nLaconia and Earl growled in tandem. Who could blame them? Cockatrice feathers and tatzelwurm claws were often cited in fairy stories' magical potions. If there was a trade in wyvern scales, no doubt buyers could be found for their claws and feathers as well.\n\n\"The Dragon Sage has connections with an apothecary, Garland, whose Friend is a minor drake, Bedlow. He specializes in potions to soothe dragon ailments. We might be able to tap him for assistance.\" Darcy rubbed his right knuckles into left palm.\n\n\"It might be best to see that April does not find out we also found fairy dragon enclosures at a shop in Bedford. The locks were fashioned for keys not beaks and on the outside rather than the inside.\" Richard covered his ears briefly as though to dodge an ear-nip.\n\nLaconia shrieked and lashed his tail. Earl flapped and joined the chorus.\n\n\"Captive dragons?\" Matlock bolted halfway up from his seat.\n\nDarcy closed his eyes and shook his head. \"Elizabeth will be\u2014\"\n\nA soul-piercing shriek echoed down the dragon tunnel into the office.\n\nWentworth's ribs struggled to contain his heart as icy chills suffused his body. He barely ducked in time as a large cockatrice swooped to land on the corner of Lord Matlock's desk.\n\nLaconia dove for the floor, growling, and coiled to pounce.\n\nWalker.\n\nDarcy's Friend.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" Matlock slammed his fist on the desk.\n\nWalker, easily the most spectacular cockatrice Wentworth had ever seen, made himself very big and shrieked again, flapping and rearing back on his tail. \"They have been taken! They have been taken!\"\n\nLaconia sprang back to the desk, keeping his head below Walker's.\n\n\"Who?\" Darcy, paler than any man Wentworth had ever seen, barely forced out the word.\n\n\"Lady Elizabeth, the boy and his Friend fairy dragon! Mrs. Gardiner's men brought the fripperies for the ladies. Sergeant found two of them in the kitchen, insensible along with the staff. The other was gone. He must have played a part in taking them.\" Walker flapped, nearly slapping Matlock in the face.\n\n\"Gardiner's men have been vetted! They would not have been allowed in the house otherwise. How is this possible?\" Darcy pressed his hands into the edge of the desk, breathing hard. \"Brutus\u2014where was he?\"\n\n\"Our entire guard plus the two that Lady Wentworth brought were patrolling their stations outside the house. The house was thought secure!\" Walker hopped from one foot to the other.\n\nWentworth stood and backed away. Close proximity to a dragon that angry was neither wise nor safe.\n\n\"I have already alerted the cockatrice squadrons. They are all on wing. Brutus leads a team of drakes in search of the rented coach that took them. Rustle has been notified, and I expect Gardiner is tracing the origins of the coach and the missing man. Sergeant and Kingsley remain guarding the ladies at Darcy House.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell and dragon bones.\" Richard pounded the desk with his fist, exactly as his father had. \"Is this enough proof for you, Father?\"\n\nMatlock glowered. \"How could they have been so brazen as to take the Sage? What do they hope to gain by offending all the dragons of the Order? And why would they take the boy? The Gardiners are not nearly wealthy or influential enough\u2014\"\n\n\"They might have wanted Phoenix.\" Darcy bounced his fist off his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut.\n\n\"Whatever for?\" Matlock seemed to puff up like an agitated dragon.\n\n\"His new trick of breathing fire, do you not recall? We have no way of knowing who may have seen those two practicing that trick at the Gardiners' home.\"\n\n\"The creature is a fairy dragon! Who would take him seriously?\"\n\n\"Darcy has a point.\" Sir Richard's brow knit in a faraway look. \"Those who do not know dragons well would not necessarily recognize Phoenix as a mere fairy dragon.\"\n\n\"I have heard it said that if one squints and sees them from a distance, they look like tiny firedrakes.\" Wentworth edged another half-step back.\n\n\"You said that Pemberley's hatching is a widely known event.\" Darcy glanced at Sir Richard as though there were more to the story than was widely known. \"One who has never seen a firedrake might mistake\u2014\"\n\n\"Nonsense, utter nonsense!\"\n\n\"No, Father, he is right. If Phoenix was seen to actually breathe fire, even in some very small way \u2026\"\n\n\"Mrrrrow!\"\n\nWentworth gasped, eyes wide. \"Pendragon's Bones! What a prize he could have appeared to be.\"\n\n\"Damn, damn, damn, damn!\" Matlock's voice grew louder and deeper as he stood, fists clenched. \"Of course, a worthless little flitter-bit would bring such trouble upon the Order.\"\n\n\"No.\" Darcy snapped with all the force of a physical blow. \"Have you forgotten that the theft of Pemberley's egg was our first suspicion of traders in dragons? For all their faults, you cannot blame the fairy dragons for this.\"\n\nOdd to hear a knight of the Order defend the lowly flutter-tufts with such vehemence.\n\nMatlock snorted something that sounded like a surrender. \"I will alert General Strickland and call in General Yates and have him recall all the Pendragon Knights. Alert your households that you will be traveling. You should take up quarters here.\"\n\nLaconia's fur stood on end.\n\n\"Kellynch is staying until matters of his lair are sorted. That will leave Anne with only the tatzelwurmlings for protection. I cannot permit that.\" Wentworth laid a hand on Laconia's shoulders.\n\n\"Darcy House has already proven vulnerable. I will not\u2014\"\n\nMatlock grumbled and muttered. \"Very well. We will find quarters for your dependents here. We cannot have our resources spread thin protecting additional properties.\"\n\n\"But this is hardly a place for young ladies! Mother will\u2014\"\n\n\"Your mother is a loyal member of the Order.\" Matlock rounded on his son. Earl hopped to the back of Sir Richard's chair. \"She will do what needs to be done. I will ask her to make sure accommodations are appropriate for a party of ladies. And with Lady Wentworth and Mrs. Collins to chaperone, there can hardly be any further objections.\" He turned to Darcy. \"Pemberley should stay in the care of Barwines Chudleigh. She will be inconsolable when she learns of Elizabeth's absence and will need full-time supervision. We cannot have her hampering our efforts and making herself vulnerable. The last thing we need is dragons\u2014particularly young impulsive ones\u2014taking matters into their own talons.\"\n\n\"What about Longbourn?\" Walker shifted his weight and resettled his wings across his back.\n\n\"What of him? He has nothing to do with this.\" Matlock said.\n\n\"I expect him to make an appearance here no later than afternoon tomorrow. Lady Elizabeth may no longer be his Keeper, but he will not tolerate this insult to her.\" Walker cocked his head at Darcy, who nodded gravely.\n\nMatlock squeezed his eyes shut, muttering. \"Since Pemberley will not be using her lair, house him at Darcy House if you must. Mrs. Collins can tend to him via the dragon tunnels as needed. Who knows, we may yet have need of a major dragon's help in these matters. It could be to our advantage to have one ready to come to our assistance.\"\n\nDarcy leaned forward on the edge of the desk, voice dangerously soft and level. \"Sir, I think you underestimate Elizabeth's position with the dragons. The problem will not be having one ready to come to our aid. I fear there will be far too many dragons ready to exact justice for this insult to the Order.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 16, 1815, Unknown",
                "text": "Elizabeth swallowed back the bile and odd-tasting cotton wool coating her tongue. She wiped away a tear. How poignant and moving the tale told by the vibrant shade of blue that bobbed and wove next to her. So touching \u2026 how could she bear the anguish?\n\nShe curled into a ball and sobbed; deep, gut-wrenching sobs that had not been drawn out of her since \u2026 since \u2026 when was that? It should be clear, memorable. How could one mislay such a memory? It had such a profound taste. When was it she had tasted this before?\n\nThere had been a dragon involved, that was certain. All her most moving memories had a dragon involved. They had been the source of everything that had touched her.\n\nAlmost everything.\n\nThere was someone else. Someones else. Someone elses? Someones elses! Why were the words not there?\n\nChoking sobs overtook her, wracking her being until she was empty.\n\nBetter. Yes, that was better. Some of the fog washed away in her tears and in the lulling rocking that embraced her at the pace of a familiar clop-clip in the distance. Yes, that was pleasant.\n\nThink, think!\n\nShe used to be able to do that. Regularly. With ease, perhaps? Certainly, it had not always been so muzzy \u2026 had it?\n\nWhy were the colors singing? Make the orange-red stop singing!\n\nThere was someone, someone who smelt of sandalwood and shaving oil who could make it all stop. Yes, the memory was there.\n\nOh, that felt good, knowing!\n\nAnd another, small and soft. She \u2026 it was a she and the other, he!\n\nYes! Yes. The small one smelt of lavender and rose and dragon musk. Dragon musk?\n\nDragons. Images, comforting images floated in the air around her.\n\nSo many dragons\u2014small and large; very small and very large. Where were they? They should be here.\n\nAll of them. Cold-blooded and warm-blooded.\n\nWhere was he? What was his name. Sandalwood, yes, yes, sandalwood. She screwed her eyes shut and pressed her fists into them. Wisps of an image\u2014a face. Where was Sandalwood?\n\nHe would know what to do. He always did. He was always safe, and strong, and secure. Trust, she could trust him, always.\n\nThe dragons did.\n\nYes, yes, that was right. They did. And so did little Lavender-and-Rose. She trusted him, too.\n\nBut where was he? When would he come for her?\n\nSounds and motion. Splitting pain in her head. Sounds piercing her ears. She retched, spitting bile on something\u2014someone?\n\nShe forced her eyes open and pinpricks of light burned into her skull, rapier sharp and hot, but they did not burn her hand as she held it in front of her face. No, the light felt cold on her skin.\n\n\"Lizzy? Lizzy?\"\n\nSomething\u2014someone shoved her roughly.\n\n\"I \u2026 I don't feel right.\" Sounds of retching and vomiting beside her. The voice was familiar, but not Sandalwood.\n\nShe pushed herself upright\u2014what had she been lying upon and how did she get here? Where was here? Moving, here was moving, swaying and rocking; rhythmic clopping and crunching.\n\nSo loud, so very loud.\n\nBut the sounds were familiar. Think! Think!\n\nA carriage. Yes, that was it! She was in a carriage, with the familiar voice. Why? When? How had she come to be in a carriage? Where was it going?\n\nShe shook her head. Bleary, watery thoughts clung like a frantic animal. The world around her spun, flinging her retching on the hard, swaying floor.\n\nCool; a cool breeze filtered in with the light from somewhere. She gulped in fresh air even as it drove daggers into her lungs.\n\nThe little blue one who smelt like sweet \u2026 who? Was it \u2026 yes \u2026 April complained about the cold. She did not like it at all.\n\nApril! Her Friend April. Where was she?\n\nAnne! What had happened to Anne?\n\nElizabeth bolted upright, eyes wide. Where was Darcy?\n\nSpace spun around her.\n\n\"Are you all right, Lizzy?\" A boy, shirt stained, tears trickling down his cheeks, stared at her.\n\nJoshua.\n\nShe grabbed his cold little hand. \"Yes, I think I am now. And you?\"\n\n\"Why did they take us? You and me and Phoenix? What are they going to do with us?\" He pressed close to her.\n\n\"I do not know.\" She blinked her eyes hard, and everything faded into focus.\n\nThey sprawled on the dusty floor of a small coach with curtains drawn on all the side glass. Slivers of light danced around the curtains, brightening the space just enough to make out four, probably two pairs, of forest wyrms, one stationed in each corner.\n\nIn most respects they were typical, square-faced, shaggy brown-green forest wyrms. Snaggle-toothed fangs hung outside their closed mouths, giving them a rather fierce countenance. But their eyes were uncommonly blue. A wide stripe of a similar shade ran under their chins to their bellies. What sort of wyrms were these? No bestiary she knew described these.\n\nShe reached out toward the nearest one, the smallest of the females, fingers curled toward herself. The wyrm cocked her head and blinked, leaning a little closer.\n\n\"No!\" Phoenix\u2014where had he been hiding?\u2014bright red and pouffed big, hovered over her hand and pecked it hard. \"Do not touch them! They poisoned you!\"\n\nThe wyrm jumped, and she snatched her hand back and inched away from the wyrms. \"Do you know what happened?\"\n\nPhoenix chirruped and hovered before them. \"The delivery men came into the kitchen where I was\u2014I was resting from the twittery females. I hid from them. I never liked those men to start and there was a strange one among them. I think I heard his brother worked for Gardiner's. He came in his brother's place as his brother was ill. He was the one who called the wyrms in\u2014I think the wyrms made his brother ill. Then you came to get me out of the kitchen. I do not think that was part of their plan.\"\n\nShe rubbed her eyes again. \"I remember nothing of it.\"\n\n\"The wyrms came in, and you invited them for a scratch, but when you touched them, they poisoned you somehow and you fell, unable to move. They turned on everyone else in the room but the strange man. Rubbing against them until they fell over, insensible, too. I tried to escape, but the man had a net and caught me as well. He let two more men in. They had hidden in the coach we are now in. It has the number plate of a vetted carriage company, or so I heard. That's why it was permitted in the mews. Another carriage tried to enter the mews and took all the attention of the house guard, and we were carried away into a coach. Now we are here.\"\n\n\"Where are we? Where are you taking us?\" Elizabeth addressed the wyrms.\n\nThe largest one, a male, stared at her, bobbing and weaving as though she were prey to distract.\n\n\"You know you kidnapped an Officer of the Blue Order, yes?\" Joshua snapped.\n\n\"A member of the Blue Order.\" Elizabeth glowered at him. \"Do not exaggerate.\"\n\nHe clapped his hand to his mouth.\n\nThe largest wyrm, with a broken fang and a scar across the side of his face, exchanged glances with a smaller female at a diagonal from him. Probably his mate, and probably the leading pair of the cluster. Wyrms nearly always traveled in pairs.\n\nThe female smacked her lips, a gobbet of spittle gathering at the side of her mouth, and flicked her forked tongue. There was a small red knob atop her head, reminiscent of a mushroom cap.\n\n\"We were not to take the boy, the woman, not anyone. Only the little dragon.\" The smaller male near Joshua stammered, quivering and salivating. The small spots on his underside formed a rather hypnotic pattern as he wove back and forth. \"Why did they do it?\"\n\n\"They must be valuable, yes? The Movers like valuables.\" The smallest of the wyrms, a juvenile female, whose dull, flaky hide looked close to shedding, inched toward the small male. Probably her mate.\n\nWyrms often mated very early, even before they matured, and their pair bonds lasted for life. Many times, the surviving wyrm did not live long after the loss of its mate.\n\n\"Perhaps means good luck. Movers will be happy for more value.\" The one with the red head knob nodded with her whole body.\n\n\"Azure is right. Our luck is good today.\" The largest wyrm lisped slightly, probably from his missing fang. \"Indigo, tell your mate, tell Lapis! Listen to Prussian, trust Prussian. The boy, the woman are valuable. Will be good for us. It will make the Movers happy.\"\n\n\"Those are all blue pigments.\" Joshua whispered. \"I visited the colorman with Papa, and I heard them talking about those colors. Why would they all be named that way?\"\n\n\"You are right, but I have no idea.\" Not that it was particularly useful information right now, but it was good that he was thinking.\n\nMore important, who were these Movers?\n\n\"They want the red tasty one!\" Indigo, the smaller male, smacked his lips and lurched at Phoenix, who darted behind Joshua.\n\nIndigo and Lapis wove around each other and returned to his side of the coach, entwined.\n\nThere was a reason wyrms were not typically Dragon Friends. They preferred the company of one another to that of warm-bloods. It was an offense many found difficult to overlook, putting them below even fairy dragons in the Order's esteem. Major wyrms only fared slightly better. Right now, it was easy to see why.\n\n\"What do they want with the fairy dragon?\" Elizabeth directed her question to Prussian, who was probably the most intelligent of the cluster.\n\n\"Do not try and trick me, Blue Order woman. I am not stupid. That is no fairy dragon, is a baby firedrake! It breathes fire!\"\n\nJoshua gasped and opened his mouth to speak. Elizabeth elbowed him hard and caught Phoenix in her other hand, effectively shutting his beak.\n\nWho could possibly mistake a fairy dragon for a baby firedrake?\n\nHow could she use such ignorance to their advantage? Was it good she had not been their target? No way to tell right now.\n\n\"So, you know him to be a baby firedrake. We did not disguise his true nature well enough. What could you possibly want with a baby firedrake? They grow large and hungry very quickly.\"\n\n\"What is that to us? Not for us. The Movers want it to move it elsewhere. Money will be moved, and we will gain.\" Azure slithered toward her mate, the red knob atop her head bobbing hypnotically, and wrapped herself around him.\n\n\"Where will the Movers take the baby?\"\n\n\"Far away. There are those outside the authority of your Blue Order who think to make captives of such things.\" Prussian punctuated his statement with a loud clap of his jaws.\n\nCold shivers, like tiny, scratchy-legged spiders, coursed down her back. \"Why are you in league with them?\" And perhaps more importantly, who were they in league with?\n\nPrussian flattened his body, hissing and lashing out in feinting strikes. Azure mirrored his movements.\n\nElizabeth pushed Joshua back to avoid the yellowed fangs. She threw her arms wide, hissing and spitting first at Prussian then Azure. They shrank back. \"We are no threat to you. You have no right to threaten us.\"\n\n\"The Order has never served wyrms. We do not observe their law! Enough talk.\" Prussian made an odd keening as he wove in a deliberate pattern.\n\nAll four wyrms dove for them, rubbing their blue stripes wherever they could find bare skin. Her vision wavered and faded as her limbs turned to lead.\n\n[ January 17, 1815, Unknown ]\n\nStrange men's voices roused her from the talking colors and sympathetic floorboards. Cold air slapped at her face, shaking away the lingering muzziness and throbbing headache.\n\nShe looked up into the painful brightness, blinking her surroundings into focus. A large, angry, very human face stared into her eyes. A man; tall and straight with glasses, a green coat, and a vague air of refinement.\n\n\"Up with you, and no tricks.\" His hard boot shoved her ribs.\n\nDefinitely not a gentleman.\n\nShe pulled her legs underneath her, but her hands had been tied behind her back. How exactly was one to gain her footing under such circumstances? Rough hands, belonging to two scruffy but silent men, caught her as she tripped, feet tangled in her skirt. The same hands hauled her down from the coach and dropped her, barely balanced, on the packed dirt.\n\nWhere were they?\n\nThe air tasted of salt and a gull screamed overhead. The coast\u2014had they been unconscious that long?\n\nThe sun hung in the grey-mist sky, higher than it had been when Aunt Gardiner had arrived at Darcy House.\n\nIt had been that long.\n\nTraveling that many hours\u2014she knew her English geography, truly she did. If they had gone east, they would be near Dover. West would have taken them toward Portsmouth.\n\nShe glanced about. Docks nearby, warehouses at their back, with a narrow alleyway leading probably to a main street. If she ran, could she make it to the street and find help?\n\nShe shuffled her feet and tested her bonds. Her limbs barely cooperated. Such a powerful poison. If she tried, she could never make it, and there was little telling what would happen to Joshua and Phoenix if she did.\n\nWaves lapped the rocky beach perhaps thirty yards before them. And not another soul\u2014man nor dragon\u2014to be seen nor any useful signs of where they were\u2014wait, there. On that rooftop, a weathervane in the shape of a crescent moon and eight-pointed star.\n\nThe crest of Portsmouth!\n\nTrue, it made little practical difference, knowing where they were. But somehow it was comforting, grounding.\n\n\"Here's the cage. Carefully now, get this little thing in there, but mind yourself. We don't need no flaming!\" To her left, one of the scruffy men came around the back of the coach with a boxy iron cage in his arms.\n\nThe other scruffy man, on her right, held Phoenix in a net as he shrieked and struggled. When had that happened?\n\n\"Let him go! Let him go! You have no right!\" Joshua struggled in the not-gentleman's grasp, kicking at his shins and reaching for the cage.\n\n\"You will only hurt yourself if you fight, little firedrake.\" She said softly, looking at Phoenix. \"Both of you. Do as you are asked and do not become injured.\"\n\nJoshua settled down and the not-gentleman set him on the ground. \"What are we going to do with them? Why did you take them? This was not to be a kidnapping.\"\n\n\"What is you, woman? Some kind of governess?\" A fourth man climbed down from the box. Shorter than the not-gentleman, he walked with a swaggering limp\u2014his left knee or leg had been injured. His cheeks were ruddy and weathered and his thin hair poked out in unruly wisps under his battered hat.\n\n\"I am his protector.\" Elizabeth looked straight at the limping man. Something about the way the others looked to him suggested he was in charge.\n\nPrussian slithered beside her and reared up on his tail, but did not offer any information.\n\nInteresting. The leading wyrm did not fully trust the men they were with.\n\n\"Young ones need a protector.\" She flashed a warning look at Joshua, who immediately pressed his lips together. For all that he was a scamp, he also seemed to have the good sense to know when to allow a bigger dragon to manage the situation.\n\n\"Which one are you protector to?\" not-gentleman asked. The glasses perched on the end of his nose hinted he had some useful knowledge about dragons and perhaps even the Order. But not enough, it seemed, to know who she was.\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nPhoenix stopped fighting and chirped.\n\nThe limping man stood very close. Breath like a dragon and crooked front teeth. \"Then if you value their hides, I suggest you start your protecting by making sure they do as they been told. We ain't running a nursery here. The only one I know I'm gettin' paid for is the dragon. If either of you can't keep 'im in line, I ain't bothering with ya'. Yeah?\"\n\n\"Understood.\" Elizabeth stepped closer to Joshua. No one stopped her. Surely that had to be a good thing.\n\n\"Why did you take them, Corney, and what are you going to do with them?\" Not-Gentleman stepped into Corney's space.\n\n\"It were too easy to take 'em, and I have a sense for what's valuable. I be certain they's valuable.\"\n\n\"I am not. We need to wait on Scarlett. She knows these matters better than you. If she agrees, then we take them.\"\n\n\"I'm not a-waitin' on some fancy feathered female to tell me my business.\" Corney shoved Not-Gentleman back. \"If you don't want a part in this, then get out now. Go!\"\n\n\"I got you the dragon. You owe me. I want my share.\"\n\n\"You'll be paid when I am. That were the arrangement. You ain't gettin' paid any sooner. Now leave or come with. The tide is shiftin' and it's time to go.\" Corney crossed his arms and glared.\n\nNot-Gentleman muttered something untoward and stalked toward a rowboat of some sort, pulled up on the shore.\n\nThe scruffy men roughly shoved Phoenix into the cage. Poor little mite bore the ignominy well. She cringed as the lock was set. No dragon should be kept against their will.\n\n\"Move on, move on.\" The limping man called and trudged through the steady breeze to the cold stony beach.\n\nThe scruffy man who smelt like sweat grabbed her elbow and urged her and her calf's-foot-jelly knees along. His slightly less sour-smelling companion did the same with Joshua.\n\nGetting into a small boat, with the wind whipping her skirts and without the use of her hands, proved rather challenging, but at last, the boat was full: the captives, four Movers\u2014Corney, the sweat-smelling one at the oars, Not-Gentleman and the other scruffy man at the rear. The four wyrms stationed themselves between the captives and the rower. Were they Friends of the Movers?\n\nInstinct said no.\n\nThe fishy-smelling craft bounced and lunged on the choppy waters as the oars threw up cold droplets in a steady, unsympathetic rhythm.\n\n\"I do not feel well.\" Joshua's face was positively green. It was some mercy that by this time there was nothing left in his stomach to cast up.\n\n\"You will feel better after we are fed.\" Elizabeth looked at the presumed leader. \"You do intend on feeding us, do you not? I think it has been nearly a day since we have eaten. If the baby dragon does not have food soon, he might perish.\"\n\n\"And I will not eat if they are not fed.\" Phoenix twittered. Naturally, he could not give up all expression of defiance.\n\n\"Shut yer yaps, they'll be food in good time. If you behave.\" The limping man glowered at her.\n\nThat was enough. Now was not the time to belabor the point.\n\nThe outline of a ship appeared in the misty distance. Had it always been there, and she just failed to notice? Two masts, square sails with a long bowsprit at the front. A figurehead hung below the bowsprit, the front half of a lion, the back half of a fish. A sealion. Reminiscent of a tatzelwurm or hippocampus, but patently wrong. Like everything else was. A creature, a situation that could not, should not exist.\n\nLong and sleek and probably fast, the Sea Lion seemed the sort of vessel smugglers and privateers would probably favor.\n\nClearly this was not a crime of impulse or convenience. Some effort had been made in planning the affair. Certainly not a factor in their favor.\n\nBy the time they reached the Sea Lion, Joshua was not the only one feeling ill. Pray this sensation pass quickly.\n\nSailors lowered a rope ladder and the scruffy Mover from the back scampered up, the smaller wyrms, Indigo and Lapis, right behind him. How easily the wyrms navigated the coarse rope.\n\nCorney pointed at her, then at the ladder. He freed her hands\u2014how thoughtful.\n\nThe task was far more difficult than it appeared, with the boat and the rope seeming to move in opposite directions, tearing at her palms, dodging out from beneath her feet. No doubt there would be little help for her if she fell.\n\nNot the sort of motivation she would have preferred, but it was enough.\n\nShe scrambled up over the side just as her arms and legs threatened to give way.\n\nBy comparison, Joshua made the task look easy. Not-Gentleman carried the birdcage up, his movements seeming nearly draconic.\n\nUtterly unsettling.\n\nCorney hauled himself over the railing. \"Give the dragon here, Ayles.\"\n\nNot-Gentleman handed him the cage.\n\n\"Tie 'em again?\" A man with most of his face covered in burn scars asked.\n\n\"Don't bother, Nickleby.\"\n\n\"You sure, Corney? We don't need trouble 'ere.\"\n\n\"What trouble are a woman and a boy gonna be? At the first sign, throw 'em over and it be done. Put 'em all in the 'old. What do it eat?\" Corney held up the cage and poked at Phoenix.\n\nNow was a fine time for him to discover if he had appropriate food.\n\n\"Small bits of meat or fish cooked in broth would be best. He cannot eat hard tack or very much bread. And he must be fed at least three times a day. Four is better. He is tiny and cannot go without very long.\"\n\n\"And if I don't believe you?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Do as you will. But if you value your cargo, do as I say. I am sure a dead dragon is not worth as much as a live one.\"\n\n\"And if you're lying to me\u2014\" Little bits of spittle flew to punctuate Corney's threat.\n\nThey stared at each other for a long time.\n\nFinally, Corney nodded. \"Take 'em below. Tell Cooky to cook up a plate for the dragon as she says. After you see that the dragon eats, feed them.\" He leaned close and wagged a finger in Elizabeth's face. \"No trouble, you hear? None. I got no patience for it.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nHe handed the cage to Nickleby and turned away. Nickleby and Ayles propelled them across the undulating deck, down a ladder, and into a dark chamber, a lock clicking loudly behind them.\n\nA small grate in the ceiling allowed just enough light to filter through. The room could not have been more than ten feet across, and maybe as many feet deep, possibly less. One corner held a pile of still sweet-smelling hay. A currently empty bucket, for the necessary no doubt, occupied the opposite corner. Rough blankets, or perhaps feed sacks, lay rumpled in the center of the room.\n\nNothing else.\n\nNo furniture. No comforts of any kind. Almost like the cavern Netherfield\u2014rather, Netherford\u2014 had hid her and Lydia in. At least here they had some light.\n\nBut this place moved, rocking with the waves. Definitely the worst part.\n\nJoshua stumbled to her and grabbed her about the waist, holding her so tightly she could not breathe. Phoenix clung to the bars of his cage and keened\u2014a poignant, soul-rending sound she had never heard a fairy dragon make.\n\nHow tempting to join him. But to what end? It would not return her to Darcy and Anne and April and Pemberley any sooner. No, for that she had to keep her wits about her and her sensibilities under control.\n\n\"Lizzy, I'm so sorry. I don't know how anyone knew about Phoenix's trick,\" he whispered into her side.\n\n\"Where fairy dragons are present, there are few secrets.\" She rubbed his back.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"When they open the cage to feed me, I can fly out. I can escape and seek help,\" Phoenix said.\n\nElizabeth sat down beside the cage. Gracious, it was difficult to move about with everything rocking and swaying. \"You are very brave, my little friend, but without you, we are no use to them. You heard Corney. We will be thrown overboard if you escape. Our lives depend upon you not doing that.\"\n\n\"I do not like it.\" Phoenix extended his wings and pouffed out his feather-scales.\n\n\"None of us do.\"\n\n\"Then what shall we do, Lizzy? How shall we get home?\" Joshua wrapped his arms around his knees, his voice wavering just a bit.\n\n\"I am not sure yet. But in moments like these, I have always tried to think like a dragon and act accordingly. It has worked for me in the past, and I hope it shall now.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 18, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "Darcy stared into little Anne's face as she cuddled into his chest. The dim evening light filtering through curtained windows was just enough to make out her features. The confined nursery, tucked in an awkward gable of the Blue Order offices, was quiet, so quiet this late in the evening, though the building was usually filled with the noise of too many people and dragons. It was not home, but for now, it would have to do.\n\nShe looked so much like her mother and smelt of rose and lavender. Her eyes, her smile, her laugh, her special peace and satisfaction in the presence of dragons. She was her mother's daughter.\n\nEmptiness opened in his chest, and he pulled her in closer. She murmured a little sigh of contentment, unaware of the storm swirling around the Order.\n\nThey would find Elizabeth. Find her and bring her home.\n\nThey would.\n\nThey had to.\n\n\"Sir Fitzwilliam?\" Nanny whispered at his shoulder. Perhaps one day it would feel normal to hand his infant to a waiting, toothy drake, but even here in the Order offices, it still did not feel natural. \"Perhaps I should take her to her cradle now?\"\n\nThe move from Darcy House to the Blue Order offices had been difficult for Anne. It was not a building ever conceived to house an infant. Barwines Chudleigh, maternal instincts in full force, insisted on overseeing the project. In less than a day, a suitable space was identified and converted to a nursery. As astonishing feat of management as there ever was.\n\nUnfortunately, though well away from the hustle and bustle of the Order Business on the floors below, little Anne's preternatural hearing proved exceptionally problematic\u2014every little sound seemed to waken her from sleep. The little mite still did not sleep through the night under the best of circumstances. Hence the use of the awkward little storage room-cum-nursery that Chudleigh was embarrassed to even suggest little Anne stay in.\n\nChudleigh all but come out to say that, perhaps, Anne belonged in her own lair with Pemberley and her snakeling. But even Elizabeth would have taken pause at that idea. It was unlikely the baby could sleep easily with the noises of dragons coming and going.\n\nElizabeth had assured him Anne's issues would sort themselves out eventually. According to Mrs. Bennet's reports, Elizabeth had been a difficult infant, who rarely slept and started at the slightest noise. It was not until she was at least two years old that she was not a constant disruption to the household. Hopefully it would not take so long with Anne.\n\nLittle May's arrival had definitely improved the situation with her uncannily soothing purrs. Perhaps that was part of her appeal to Walker, who could not abide the sound of babies crying.\n\nIf only he could stay here with her. But Nanny was right.\n\nHe passed the baby to Nanny. \"I will ask Georgiana to send Pax to you. April is in no condition to assist in the nursery now.\"\n\nPoor creature. It had been difficult enough when Elizabeth was taken by Netherford. This was far, far worse.\n\nFor all of them.\n\nNanny's long blue-green nose wrinkled. \"I am sure I can manage without Pax's help. There is no need to separate her from her Friend. It is quite enough to have the tatzelwurm in the nursery.\" Something about the way she said tatzelwurm \u2026\n\n\"Anne's Friend's name is May, and I would enjoin you to use it.\" Darcy glowered and dodged around a small table, Anne's cradle, and a press to make it to the doorway. \"Did not the Sage make it clear to you that family Friends were to have free access to Anne, especially the fairy dragons?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, she did, but it is most irregular. The Order does not officially support the notion that infants or children should be exposed to dragons.\" It seemed Nanny missed the irony of her own statement. \"And I registered my protest to her, but she insists the infant can hear dragons even though none can really be sure yet. And to expose any infant to fairy dragons! The thought! They are senseless little flutter-tufts who will only\u2014\"\n\n\"Not another word against the species or our Friends.\" Darcy pulled his shoulders back and towered over Nanny just enough to remind her. \"If you cannot lay your prejudice aside\u2014\"\n\nNanny blinked rapidly. \"With respect, sir, it is hardly prejudice as you understand it. They and the tatzelwurm are prey. It is not natural\u2014\"\n\n\"Nor is it natural for human and dragon to live in peace. Yet we do. If you cannot abide by our standards, I will see that another suitable nurserymaid is found for our daughter. Feel free to give me your notice at any time. Until then, I will consider any repetition of this conversation, or one like it, to be your notice. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\nNanny bared her teeth in a draconic frown, but lowered her head slightly. \"Understood. Sir.\"\n\n\"Expect Pax to be here soon. Offer her warm tea with honey when she arrives.\" Nanny did not think fairy dragons had any business drinking tea or being served honey. Darcy turned on his heel and left.\n\nPerhaps he ought to go ahead and speak to Lady Astrid about finding a new nanny in any case. If she felt so strongly about mingling with prey, her attitude was not likely to change. That was not what Anne needed to be taught, even now.\n\nHe made his way down the scantly lit, narrow staircase to the primary guest quarters on the third floor. Where Anne should have been, in a room adjoining his own. His steps echoed on the limestone tiles. Why was nothing as simple as it should have been?\n\nRest, he needed rest. Probably should retire for the evening.\n\nA shadowy figure appeared before him, and Darcy stopped short.\n\n\"Darcy.\" Gardiner stood, several paces away, shoulders slumped, dark rings under his eyes. He had aged ten years since Darcy had last seen him. \"My wife came to call on her nieces and Miss Darcy.\"\n\nLovely. No doubt Gardiner hoped for an invitation. Darcy was hardly fit for company.\n\n\"Come.\" Darcy plodded past Gardiner and inclined his head toward an oak door carved with a fanciful depiction of a firedrake. It looked nothing like Pemberley, not even remotely. But it served as an outward sign of the sort of accommodations that could be expected behind the guest quarters door.\n\nThe invitation was neither formal nor even polite, but Gardiner was the rare and well-appreciated sort of family who would not notice such things. Today that made him tolerable.\n\nThey entered Darcy's quarters. A low fire lit the space in a somber orange-red glow. The room was exactly as large as it should be to accommodate the four-poster bed, cabinet, dressing table, and two large chairs near the fireplace with a small table between, and no larger. Elizabeth might have described it as cozy and intimate. But without her nothing could ever seem so.\n\n\"Brandy? Port?\" Darcy headed toward the decanters on the dressing table.\n\n\"Feels like the sort of situation for a great deal of cheap gin.\" Gardiner snorted, grim and weary.\n\n\"I suppose. But it is all have to offer now. I have not the will to head into the parts of town where cheap gin might be acquired. Will it do?\"\n\n\"Very gracious of you.\" He took the offered glass, cradling it in his palms, and sank into the nearest chair. \"How fares Pemberley?\"\n\n\"Not well.\" Which was, of course, a firedrake-sized understatement. \"She is beside herself, which is only to be expected, but dragon-sized tantrums are unpleasant, nevertheless. I have never been so grateful for Barwines Chudleigh before. No one else can manage Pemberley right now. She is entirely discontented to remain here, under the protection of the Order. Somehow, she has determined that she should be allowed to search for Elizabeth. She can fly now, after all.\"\n\n\"Not so very different from my children: too much ability, and too little discernment.\" Gardiner took a deep draw from his brandy. \"Daniel would give anything to be able to assist in the search for his brother. As would I.\"\n\n\"Imagine explaining to Pemberley that Elizabeth's abduction could easily have been intended to bring her out where she, too, might be taken. The very suggestion only makes her even more angry. How dare warm-bloods consider such a thing?\"\n\n\"I imagine an angry firedrake, even a very young one, is quite formidable.\"\n\n\"Doubly so when her favorite Keeper is involved.\" Darcy covered his face with his hands.\n\nGardiner hunched over his glass, head bowed. \"I am so sorry, Darcy. I feel responsible for this, you know. Those men, I thought they had been properly vetted, all their connections carefully examined. I cannot believe I allowed\u2014\"\n\n\"It was not your fault. Elizabeth would tell you the same. The men who worked for you were loyal. Even the one who sent his brother in his place. He is aghast at his brother's betrayal. It is hard to fault them either.\"\n\n\"I should not have allowed them to go to Darcy House\u2014\"\n\n\"How could you have foreseen such a thing? No one could have. No, this was not your fault. At the very least, we have found a few more avenues of investigation to follow.\" Darcy swallowed a large sip of brandy, relishing the burn down the back of his throat.\n\n\"That does not bring your wife and my son back.\" The words hung, threatening, dangerous, in the air.\n\n\"Not yet, but it will.\" It would. Darcy's fingers closed hard on his glass. Hopefully it would not shatter in his hand.\n\n\"Would that I had your certainty.\"\n\n\"It is all I have right now.\"\n\nThe crackling fireplace seemed to agree.\n\nA fist pounded on the door. He jumped and nearly dropped his glass.\n\n\"Sir Fitzwilliam, Sir Fitzwilliam!\"\n\nDarcy dragged himself to the door\u2014what new crisis could possibly warrant such an assault on his ears?\u2014and yanked it open, revealing a breathless, somewhat haggard, Blue Order footman.\n\n\"Sir, you are wanted in the lairs. Urgently.\"\n\n\"Pemberley?\" He clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.\n\n\"No, sir, Longbourn has arrived.\"\n\nOf course he had. What joy was his. \"Pray excuse me. If you wish, feel free to use my quarters until your wife completes her call.\" Darcy followed the footman downstairs.\n\nMrs. Collins joined him at the first-floor landing. Hopefully she would be helpful. Elizabeth thought her sister was becoming a quite competent dragon Keeper, but with Longbourn's temper, there was no way to predict the sort of tantrum to expect.\n\nLight and warmth faded as they reached the subterranean levels, where nearly all decoration ceased and the stairs grew narrower. Flickering torches filled the air with wan, yellow light and their own peculiar scent. Two more flights of stairs down, to the lowest level, containing the guest dragon lairs.\n\nSeveral steps from the bottom, Longbourn lunged to meet him face to face. Darcy stopped short, catching Mrs. Collins just before she fell headlong down the last few steps.\n\n\"It is true?\" Longbourn's booming voice echoed painfully against the stone walls.\n\nNot a spectacular creature on the best of days, the wyvern's hide was dull and dusty and his expression grim. Longbourn's breath reeked and his talons were ragged.\n\n\"He did not look like that when I left him.\" Mrs. Collins whispered. \"He is so particular about how his person is cared for. He barely accepts ministrations from me. Mr. Collins is not permitted to touch him.\"\n\nThat would have sounded like an excuse from another Dragon Keeper, but knowing Longbourn \u2026\n\n\"We do not know where she is.\" Darcy sidled in front of Mrs. Collins.\n\n\"Who has taken her?\" Longbourn's voice reverberated in Darcy's chest.\n\n\"We do not know that either.\"\n\n\"What is being done?\"\n\n\"Cockatrice and drake teams are searching for her, but to little avail so far. The carriage which we thought took her has been found, but it seems that the number plates have been switched and the wrong coach was followed. That is as far as the search has taken us.\" Darcy braced himself for a roar.\n\nMrs. Collins peeked over Darcy's shoulder. \"We have not given up though. The entire Order is determined to find her.\"\n\n\"I will help. I must help.\" Longbourn stomped. \"What can I do?\"\n\nAn excellent question that demanded, if not an excellent answer, at least some direction for something he could do.\n\n\"Gardiner's men tell us the kidnappers used poisonous wyrms to incapacitate everyone in the kitchen. That is how they took her so quietly, without notice. Do you know anything of such wyrms?\"\n\n\"Dragons were involved in her taking?\" Longbourn's tail lashed as he fanned his wings. If he could have belched fire, he probably would have. A drop of ochre venom gathered at the tip of his fang.\n\nDarcy gulped and edged back a step. \"It seems as though it may be possible.\"\n\n\"What kind of wyrms?\" Longbourn growled.\n\n\"The men who saw them only said they seemed to be forest wyrms, but had a blue stripe running down their bellies.\"\n\nLongbourn grumbled and growled low in his throat. A sound powerful enough to set Darcy's ribs and the hairs on the back of his neck vibrating as well. Longbourn sat back on his haunches, tail whipping.\n\n\"You are familiar with such wyrms?\" Mrs. Collins asked.\n\n\"I have never met such a creature. But there are stories. Old stories, the kind that Bennet likes. Or perhaps the bookish woman\u2014she might know something of them.\"\n\nLady Astrid! She would rejoice at something productive to do.\n\n\"There is something more, I can hear it in your voice.\" Mrs. Collins edged past Darcy. Perhaps it was good that she was here.\n\n\"I do not know for sure. But there are rumors.\"\n\n\"Tell us.\"\n\n\"No. No, it would not be good. There are matters which belong to dragons alone. Not to be shared.\" Longbourn shook his head in broad sweeps.\n\n\"If it could help us get Elizabeth back, I insist you tell us.\" Darcy spoke slowly. Longbourn would not respond well if he lost his own temper.\n\n\"No. Not a warm-blooded matter. I will see if the rumors are true. It might be nothing, but it is what I will do.\"\n\n\"There is something you should know before you go.\" A deep, slithery voice came from a dark corner far from the stairs.\n\nDarcy and Mrs. Collins jumped.\n\n\"Why have you been listening in on our conversation?\" Longbourn did not look toward the voice.\n\n\"You are in the public space between the lairs. This is not a place for secrets.\" Netherford slithered closer, his blue hide dirty and his whiskers frayed.\n\n\"What are you doing here? Richard said you remained at the Netherford estate.\" How long had the lindwurm been traveling alone?\n\n\"That had been our plan. But when I heard the news about the Sage, I felt compelled to offer my services.\"\n\nHow quickly word had traveled!\n\n\"As what?\" Longbourn looked over his shoulder as Netherford approached.\n\n\"There is a great deal of unrest among the major dragons at this news.\"\n\n\"The warm-blooded segment of the Order is not exactly pleased either.\" Darcy muttered.\n\n\"I think you misunderstand me, Sir Fitzwilliam.\" Netherford slithered in beside Longbourn and rose up to look eye to eye with Darcy, forelegs crossed over his chest. \"Word has gotten around that the Order is concerned about a possible trade in dragons and their parts and that it may be connected to the Sage's disappearance.\"\n\n\"Already? I had hoped for more time.\"\n\n\"The suggestion has been made that the Pendragon Accords are not being upheld by men and a few vocal dragons are wondering what should be done about it.\"\n\n\"Done about it?\" Mrs. Collins clutched the banister.\n\n\"You imply the dragons are threatening to take action on Elizabeth's behalf?\" Darcy said.\n\n\"I think there are many who are beholden to her and even more who are fond of and intrigued by her, who would be happy to assist in her recovery. But those are not the voices to which I refer. No, there are those who wonder if the Blue Order has outlived its purpose and if it is time for dragons to exert their will over men again, to remind them of whom they are dealing with.\"\n\nPendragon's bones! Who would have conceived? \"Which dragons precisely?\"\n\n\"I have a complete report to deliver to Lord Matlock. Once he has heard, I am certain he will wish to inform all of you as well. In the meantime, perhaps, Laird Longbourn, it might be wise for you to delay your journey long enough for the Order to draft a statement to the major dragons. That way you might position yourself as the bearer of the Blue Order's news and travel more freely among the dragon estates.\"\n\nLongbourn snorted and stomped and pawed at the ground.\n\nMrs. Collins approached Longbourn, hands held up and open. \"I know you do not wish to wait, but it seems like it would improve your chances of success. And if you find that your rumors of wyrms are not useful, then at least you will have done something that Lizzy would have wanted to see done. There is that.\"\n\nLongbourn pushed his head toward Mrs. Collins, and she scratched behind his ears. \"Very well, but I will not wait more than two days.\"\n\n\"That is generous of you. I am certain Matlock can be made to make a decision in that length of time. If you will excuse me.\" Netherford retreated through the tunnels.\n\n[ January 19, 1815, London Order Offices ]\n\nThe mantel clock in Darcy's guest chambers chimed nine times, morning light filtering in through the frosted windows. A few hours of sleep left him rested enough to try to do something useful, but not enough to be in a good humor about any of it.\n\nThe map he studied hung over both edges of the small table, crisscrossed with cryptic scribbling by Wentworth and Richard: their routes, their contacts, the locations where they had identified traces of dragon traffic. He penciled in the path Wickham took with Pemberley's egg, as best he could reconstruct it from memory. He would have to check with Walker on some of the details, especially on the cavern locations he and Elizabeth had searched near Meryton. Netherford might be helpful with that, too.\n\nWas he imagining it? His lines seemed to fit well with the others.\n\nHe fell back in his chair, raking his hair. How long ago that seemed. So much had happened.\n\nHow could he have lost her again? Acrid bile burned the back of his throat. He fought back the urge to be sick. Was this what it would always mean, their service as Dame and Knight of the Pendragon Order? Had he conceived such a thing could ever happen again, he would have forbidden her \u2026\n\nHe chuckled darkly.\n\nForbidden Elizabeth. As if that were ever going to be successful.\n\nOne did not forbid the Dragon Sage. Reason with her, yes; request respectfully, definitely; but forbid? Absolutely not.\n\nIt was hardly proper, unwomanly even; how he loved that about her.\n\nA woman who knew her own mind, had her own opinions and was not afraid to offer them. One who knew how to stand up to ridiculous dominance displays with her own. One who was not afraid to admit the rare occasions when she was wrong. One who expected him to do the same. A partner in every possible sense of the word.\n\nAnd because of all the things he loved most about her, she was missing.\n\nWould he ever see her again? How could he possibly raise Anne without her? Could he ever marry again?\n\nImpossible. Simply impossible.\n\nA loud rap at the door, not Richard's, though. He knocked like he was giving an order.\n\nBut who else would dare disturb him so early in the day? He shambled to the door and pulled it open.\n\nBennet.\n\nWhat was he doing here? How quickly could he make the Historian leave? Now was not the time he could listen to Bennet's criticisms of Elizabeth with grace.\n\n\"May I come in?\" Bennet seemed more hunched and frail than when Darcy had last seen him. A bit like Gardiner.\n\nPerhaps \u2026\n\nDarcy gestured him to come inside and shut the door. He pulled two chairs closer to the fire\u2014Elizabeth had often reminded him her father's discomfort was lessened\u2014and his temper improved\u2014when he was kept warm.\n\nBennet slowly lowered himself into the chair as though his joints were too stiff to move any faster. \"It is true then?\"\n\n\"I am afraid so. She, Joshua Gardiner, and Phoenix.\" Darcy steeled himself for the first bitter words.\n\n\"Longbourn came to visit me last night. He told me everything.\" Bennet wrapped his arms around his waist.\n\n\"I am surprised he was allowed at Middle Set House.\"\n\n\"He is not, but he came nonetheless. One cannot turn away a determined dragon.\"\n\nHe was right. \"Did that cause problems with your wife and daughter?\"\n\n\"It does not matter.\"\n\nSince when?\n\nDarcy sat up very straight. \"I was given to understand that it mattered very, very much.\"\n\nBennet rocked side to side ever so slowly, gazing vacantly into the fireplace. \"I have made arrangements for them. I just saw them off to stay with Jane and Bingley for a visit of indefinite duration. Several eligible fellows have moved into the neighborhood. Jane wishes to make the most of the opportunity for her sister.\"\n\n\"How convenient.\" Would that he had made the decision sooner.\n\n\"How is April?\"\n\n\"Beside herself. She has been staying with Mrs. Collins and the others in the rooms the Order has assigned them.\"\n\n\"I want to help.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, help?\"\n\nBennet winced. Apparently Darcy had not concealed the snide tone in his remark as well as he hoped. \"Longbourn told me about the wyrms you mentioned, that knowing more about them might be important to finding the kidnappers.\"\n\n\"We do not know, but at this point, anything might be helpful.\"\n\n\"I cannot be certain, but I recall something in the histories about them.\"\n\n\"What do you remember?\" Darcy resisted the urge to shake the words out of him.\n\n\"They are not common forest wyrms. I am certain of that. I think I saw reference to azure-striped forest wyrms in journals from two estates in the north. Farther north than Pemberley, I believe. I cannot recall the estates' names now, but I know I read of them here, in Lady Astrid's collections.\"\n\n\"I shall inform her of that possibility immediately.\" It was not much, but it was something. And that could qualify as help.\n\n\"That is not what I meant.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I did not send Mrs. Bennet and Kitty away so that I could sit and stare into my own fireplaces. I intend to go to the collections myself and begin looking for those journals. Perhaps Lady Astrid and her apprentices might wish to assist, but I will do the task myself. I have brought Drew, my secretary, to help.\"\n\n\"You need not trouble\u2014\"\n\n\"She is my daughter.\" His voice turned frail, brittle as he gripped the arms of the chair.\n\n\"And she is my wife. I will see to it everything that can be done on her behalf is done.\" Darcy sat straighter, expanding his chest.\n\n\"The last time I saw her, we did not part on good terms. I did not think it would be the last time that I saw her.\" Bennet's voice broke.\n\n\"It will not be. I am certain of it.\" Sometimes it was the right thing to lie.\n\n\"So, you will permit me to help?\"\n\n\"I would accept a team of fairy dragons and tatzelwurms if they thought they could be of assistance.\"\n\nThe mantel clock struck twelve times, midnight, as Darcy stumbled into his chambers. Another day with no more answers than they had before. Granted, he now knew a great deal more about forest wyrms in general and how necessary they were in the management of estate lands. But nothing useful toward his most pressing concern.\n\nWalker slipped through the open passage door, silent and dark as death. Had Darcy been prey, he would have been dead. Leaving the door to the dragon passages open was one of those little acts of trust that marked the decades of their Friendship.\n\nWalker glided to the mantel, above the low fire. A little show of dominance that: being over Darcy's head. Somehow it managed to be a demonstration of dominance and not at the same time. That Darcy permitted it was a statement of his esteem for Walker.\n\nNo one ever suggested having dragon Friends was simple or uncomplicated.\n\n\"I imagine this means you have no fresh news.\" Darcy stalked toward the decanter of port. It was tempting to drown himself in it, but something insisted he be ready at a moment's notice, so he merely used it to knock the razor's edge off his anxiety.\n\n\"No, not of that sort.\" Walker hissed the word, wings half-extended. \"You need to talk to April.\"\n\n\"I saw her just a few hours ago when I brought her a fresh jam and honey pot from Darcy House. I still do not understand why no one here deigns to provide her with sufficient sweets. It is not as though any other dragons have the penchant for them that fairy dragons do.\"\n\n\"That may not be the issue.\" Walker lifted his foot and picked at something between his toes. \"Go talk to her. Now. She is with Lady Wentworth in the ladies' sitting room.\"\n\nIt was late, and he was tired, and hardly in the mood for company. But what sort of Friend would he be to ignore such a demand? And it might be distracting for a few moments.\n\nHe set his port aside, back and shoulders aching. Had he aged so much in the last few weeks? Gardiner and Bennet certainly had.\n\nDarcy knocked at the ladies' door, the inlaid agate eyes of the carved drake staring back at him. Was that disapproval in its expression?\n\n\"I am so glad to see you, Sir Fitzwilliam.\" Lady Wentworth opened the door and ushered him in. Candlelight painted the otherwise domestic chamber in dramatic yellows and golds. \"She will not tell me what is troubling her, but it is clear that something is, very much.\"\n\nVague perfume, a mix of flowers, none Elizabeth's lavender, hung in the air.\n\n\"Would it be an imposition to ask that you permit me some time alone with her?\"\n\n\"I had planned on it. Corn and Wall will come with me as well. We shall be in the library if you have need of us.\" She slipped past him, the two wyrmlings in her wake.\n\nThe door clicked shut behind him, and he scanned the room. Signs of Elizabeth's sisters were strewn everywhere. A sewing basket, lying open on its side in the middle of the couch. Books, probably Georgiana's, sitting open on a nearby chair. A half-finished board game occupying a small table near the window. And April's fairy dragon 'cage' on the mantel to keep warm near the fireplace.\n\nA little mass of blue huddled on the cage floor, shuddering.\n\nDid fairy dragons cry?\n\nIt only took five steps to cross the length of the room. \"April?\"\n\nShe did not even lift her head.\n\n\"Are you well?\"\n\n\"No. No, I am not.\" She tucked her beaky nose under her wing.\n\n\"Pray, come out and tell me about it.\" He offered his hand as a perch. \"I brought the jam and honey as you requested.\"\n\nShe lifted her head slightly and looked at him with one eye, evaluating, considering. Her entire being drooping, she hopped to his hand.\n\nHe pulled a chair close to the low fire and sat down, holding her close to eye level. \"Pray tell me, what is wrong?\"\n\n\"What is wrong? What sort of fool are you? Everything is wrong and you know it. Everything is wrong!\"\n\nHe stroked the back of her neck, soothing ruffled feather-scales. \"Beyond the very obvious. What is wrong?\"\n\nShe rocked back and forth, keening softly. Her mournful notes raking his heart like tiny talons. \"What is to become of me? What is to become of me?\"\n\n\"Become of you? Whatever do you mean?\"\n\n\"If \u2026 if \u2026 something happens to her? What is to become of me?\"\n\nOf course. It was so obvious now that she voiced it. But it was a good question. He drew a breath to speak, but released it in a sigh. That was not the right thing to say.\n\nNor was that.\n\nNor that.\n\n\"What do you want? That is to say, should you not be the one to decide what is to become of you?\"\n\nShe looked up at him, head turned half upside down. \"Do you mean that?\"\n\n\"Of course I do. You know I am not apt to say what I do not mean.\"\n\n\"I am to choose my own fate, my own direction?\" Her eyes grew large as if surprised.\n\n\"Certainly. And in so far as I am able, I will see to it your wishes are honored. It is what Elizabeth would want.\" He scratched under her chin. \"I hope, though, that if such a decision does become necessary, you would choose to stay with me. I know I am not your particular Friend\u2014\"\n\nShe chirped, loud and sharp, and pecked his hand. \"I have never said that.\"\n\nIt was difficult not to drop her when she did that. \"I would not presume\u2014\"\n\n\"You do not need to. You are my \u2026 Friend \u2026 like she is.\" She ran her cheek along his hand.\n\nDarcy swallowed back a lump in his throat. \"I am honored.\"\n\n\"I know. That is why you are my Friend.\"\n\nHe drew her close to his chest, and she leaned into him. \"Somehow, my little Friend, we will all get through this, and things will be right in the world once more. I do not know how. But they will.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 19, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "Anne fought the urge to pace as she awaited Lady Matlock in the small parlor on the second-floor of the Order offices. The lower walls were paneled in dark wood, the upper walls painted in soft blues and the furniture upholstered in deep gold. Wooden dragon perches were interspersed among the chairs, sofa and low table.\n\nLadies should not pace, so she sat, straight and proper, digging her fingernails into her palms.\n\nAfternoon sun filtered through the frosted windows with a warm and friendly glow that released a light fragrance from a bowl of dried flowers. Perhaps one day she would become accustomed to the odd, muted light of the offices. Thankfully, she did not need the same precautions at home since her walls did not boast huge oil portraits of significant founding dragons of the Blue Order, nor were their descendants walking the halls.\n\nThe latter bit was a touch of exaggeration. Major dragons could only be found in the lower floors of the offices. Those above the ground floor generally did not have accommodations large enough for them. It seemed draconic imagery in all manner of d\u00e9cor took their place.\n\nShe smoothed her cream and plum striped skirts, a half-dress gown, supplied by Mrs. Gardiner just in case a meeting such as the upcoming one were necessary. She had been right; being properly garbed did help one to have the right frame of mind for such things.\n\nIn so far as it was possible.\n\n\"Lady Wentworth.\" Lady Matlock swept into the parlor, her own not-quite-Order-blue gown a mite more formal than might be expected for what was essentially a morning call.\n\nYes, this was going to be lovely. What a way to experience her introduction to the Blue Order Cotillion Board.\n\nMrs. Gardiner had offered no good opinion of the group. All were peeresses: two viscountesses\u2014granted, one was a dowager\u2014 two countesses and a baroness\u2014and they felt their rank very deeply. They enjoyed their reign as Blue Order's answer to the patronesses of Almack's. In fact, two of them were patronesses of Almack's.\n\nAnne swallowed hard as her limbs grew cold. These women were the arbiters of Blue Order society. It was in their hands\u2014or at least largely so\u2014 to decide whether she and Wentworth would be admitted into their good company or not.\n\nHeavens above! She sounded like Father!\n\nWhy be so anxious? It was not as though she had cared one whit for warm-blooded society and whether she was admitted into it. Typically, such company lacked the elegance, manners, accomplishment, and understanding to be worth associating with.\n\nSomehow, though, it seemed different for the Blue Order. Would not the good opinion of Dragon Keeping society be worth having? It surely should.\n\nShould it not?\n\n\"Are you ready.\" Lady Matlock did not ask a question. \"The Board has convened downstairs in the amphithere drawing room that they favor for their meetings. I will make introductions for you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lady Matlock.\" Anne stood and curtsied, more by reflex than intent. \"I do not understand why they have insisted on my presence. Do you know the business they wish to discuss?\"\n\nSomething in her posture suggested she truly did not care. \"I can only imagine it is in regards to the unfortunate disappearance of your sponsor before you have been properly prepared for the Cotillion.\"\n\n\"Surely they are not planning to go on with the event?\"\n\nLady Matlock's eyes bulged as though she had just said something very stupid indeed. \"Whyever not? Lady Elizabeth is not part of the planning committee. Why would her situation change anything about the Cotillion?\"\n\nAnne clamped her jaws shut. No point in saying something else equally offensive.\n\nLady Matlock led the way out of the parlor and to the grand stairs. Wrought-iron railings with fairy dragons supported a carved banister on either side of the polished marble steps, wide enough for four to walk abreast.\n\n\"Do not think I am unsympathetic to the plight of our Dragon Sage. She is my niece by marriage, after all. I am concerned. Truly I am. But I do not think the Cotillion would be halted by anything less than a direct threat to the Order itself.\"\n\nWhat exactly did they think the kidnapping of the Sage and of a dragon\u2014even a fairy dragon\u2014was? Oh, this meeting was going to be a joy.\n\nNot surprisingly, a gaudy, brightly painted amphithere graced the drawing room door, which sat slightly ajar. Lady Matlock pushed it open and paused in the doorway. Was that to allow Anne to become oriented or to warn the grand ladies that someone inferior was about to enter their exalted company?\n\nExpensive perfumes, several competing scents, vied for dominance in the large space. Five small couches, each bearing a single, finely dressed woman, ringed a low table holding tea and dainties. Tall windows with sheer curtains bestowed the ladies with lighting complimentary to their complexions. Was that why they liked this room?\n\nIt could hardly be because of the icy green walls, overpopulated with landscapes\u2014probably all dragon estates\u2014or the white-painted wrought-iron amphitheres which flanked the fireplace. Gracious, those were probably the ugliest things she had seen in the Order offices, yet.\n\nInteresting, no minor dragons occupied the room. How strange that seemed. Laconia and the wyrmlings were always in their company or Kellynch's. The Darcy ladies' fairy dragon Friends and little May were always near their Friends. Were these ladies too good to befriend minor dragons?\n\nOr perhaps no minor dragon would have them.\n\nThat was not the right attitude to begin this meeting on.\n\nEach of the fine ladies, garbed in Order-blue, wore the same expression Anne had seen in the society Father most preferred. Self-important and eminently aware of their own status.\n\nAt least it was an attitude she had a great deal of experience in managing.\n\n\"Good morning,\" Lady Matlock dipped the barest of curtsies. \"May I present Lady Wentworth, daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, baronet, wife of Sir Frederick Wentworth, baronet. His seat is Kellynch-by-the-Sea.\"\n\nAnne curtsied until her knee nearly touched the floor. They nodded at her as a single unit.\n\n\"Lady Torrington, Lady Dunbrook, Lady Jersey, and Lady Cowper, I present Lady Wentworth. Lady Dalrymple, I believe you are already acquainted.\"\n\nLady Dalrymple was a member of the Cotillion Board? How could she not have known that? Would having her cousin here make things easier? Likely not. She had taken great pleasure in the gossip of Father's social demise. Surely, she would hold that against Anne.\n\n\"Pray do come in, Lady Wentworth.\" Dowager Lady Dalrymple, with her deceptively pleasant expression and icy blue eyes, gestured toward a chair. A plain one. Set at an awkward distance from the other ladies. \"You do understand it is not our usual way to invite nonmembers into our meetings, but as you are my cousin, we thought to make an exception.\"\n\n\"I am honored by your invitation.\" Anne sat in the chair indicated.\n\nLady Matlock backed out and shut the door. Should it be meaningful that she did not turn her back on this group? Probably.\n\n\"We understand that you, Miss Darcy, Mrs. Collins and Miss Bennet have all taken up temporary residence here at the Order offices. I hope you find your accommodations comfortable.\" Lady Cowper had a youthful face and kind smile that matched her reputation as the most gracious and genuinely nice patroness at Almack's.\n\n\"Lady Matlock has been most gracious in seeing to our comfort. We deeply appreciate her efforts.\"\n\n\"Good, good. I am glad to hear that. Staying in a strange place can be most uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"Especially under such circumstances as these.\" Lady Jersey had that sort of long face that gave the impression that she was looking down her nose at one. If not literally true, it probably was figuratively. \"These are such trying times, you know, tragic really. That our membership has been so assaulted, that one of our own has been snatched. We all quite fear for our own safety now.\" She pressed her hand to her chest\u2014probably to show off her expensive gold rings\u2014and attempted to look aghast.\n\n\"The security at the offices is quite impressive. I am certain we have nothing more to fear. And when the Sage is returned\u2014\"\n\n\"If she is,\" Lady Jersey cut in sharply. \"There is no anticipating what that woman will do.\"\n\nWell, that was telling.\n\nLady Dunbrook, whose very blonde, nearly white curls clustered around her face suggesting a halo, cleared her throat and glared politely. \"The Sage is a revered officer, for all that she might be considered unconventional. We are given to understand that her comprehension of all matters draconic is exceptional\u2013even if incomprehensible to most of us.\"\n\nAnne pressed her lips hard. Now was not the time to contradict any of these knowledgeable ladies.\n\n\"Not that such a thing has ever happened before,\" Lady Torrington, who had the unfortunate distinction of looking like the dragon she kept\u2014an ill-tempered basilisk\u2014muttered under her breath. The question was, did her temperament match as well?\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Lady Dunbrook pushed off their chatter with an open hand. \"None of that comes to the point of our concern. The Cotillion is only six weeks away.\"\n\nThat was not a question. How was she supposed to respond?\n\n\"You and Lady Elizabeth's sisters were to have been sponsored by the Sage and without her here\u2014\"\n\n\"It is clear that you will not be ready for the Cotillion.\" Lady Jersey's eyes narrowed as she pulled herself up very straight.\n\nShe was enjoying this!\n\n\"It is such a shame. It must be very disappointing.\" Lady Cowper had the decency to appear distraught.\n\nLady Torrington squinted her small eyes at Lady Jersey, her lip curling back just a bit. Definitely a basilisk in temperament, too. \"It is just a ball. There will be another next year. I do not see why you make such an issue of it. Just tell her our decision, and be done with it.\"\n\nLady Jersey glowered at Lady Torrington, then turned the same expression on Anne. \"Yes, as to that\u2014despite the ramifications on the Sage's reputation, it is clear that you cannot be presented unprepared.\"\n\nAnne stood and shook out her skirts. Now was the time to be large. \"I appreciate your concern, ladies. Truly I do. I know you have the best intentions and greatest concern for our reputations, but I can assure you that it is unnecessary. We can go on with our presentations as planned.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Lady Dunbrook half rose in her seat, her very full bodice heaving. The look of utter shock on her face would be quite amusing under other circumstances. \"What are you going on about? Our decision\u2014\"\n\n\"Is certainly appreciated, but unnecessary. We will be ready in time for the Cotillion.\" Anne lifted her chin. She might not like playing dominance games, but that did not mean she was unprepared for it.\n\n\"How is that possible?\" Lady Jersey knocked the tea table with her knee, rattling all the china.\n\n\"Our gowns are on order from Gardiner's. They only need trimming and fitting to be ready. A dance master has already been engaged to see to our minuets\u2014\"\n\n\"I intend to introduce a quadrille to the Cotillion, just as I will introduce it at Almack's this year.\" Lady Jersey's cheek twitched just a mite as she spoke.\n\n\"Do stop going on about that ridiculous dance,\" Lady Dalrymple murmured, glancing aside, eyes rolling.\n\n\"The dance master was already made aware of your plans and has sent written confirmation that the quadrille will be included in our instruction.\" That was not exactly accurate, but she would make sure that it was so.\n\n\"And you already know how to appropriately greet all the Dragon Mates at the event?\" Lady Dunbrook's lip curled back in a sneer.\n\n\"The Sage has prepared a detailed course of study for us on that subject. We have the matter very well in hand, I assure you. We are all most confident.\"\n\n\"I do not like it. It is most irregular.\" Lady Dalrymple never liked anything out of the ordinary under the best of circumstances. \"Excuse my bluntness, cousin, but you do not come from a proper dragon Keeping family. Your father\u2014the less said on the matter the better\u2014 he never mingled among Blue Order society. How can you be expected\u2014\"\n\n\"Your concern is most gracious. I am most indebted to you for it. Rest assured, Lady Elizabeth's sisters and I take the standards of the Blue Order most seriously. You will not be disappointed in us.\"\n\n\"I will not risk embarrassment on the Cotillion floor.\" Lady Jersey stood, face flushing an uncomplimentary shade. \"How can the standards here be any less than we would hold at Almack's?\" She cast a meaningful look at Lady Cowper.\n\n\"This is hardly Almack's.\" Anne looked directly at Lady Cowper, who actually appeared to be listening. \"Are not all Keepers and future Keepers to be presented at the Cotillion? Even the hearing children of important Dragon Friends are presented. That is a very different standard to the one kept at Almack's.\"\n\nLady Torrington snickered a breathy, hissy sort of laugh. \"She does have a point. If they are not presented this year, they will be admitted next.\"\n\n\"But the Sage's reputation!\" Lady Jersey looked like she might stomp. \"How can she sponsor them if she is not here?\"\n\n\"Will it not show her to great advantage to be successful even without her direct presence? I am certain it will be an asset to her standing to permit us to attend.\" Then again, that might be the wrong way to try to argue this point. \"As members of the Order, I know that seeing our officers presented in the best light is important to you.\"\n\n\"But the risk of failure is no less great than the reward of success. It is too much\u2014\" Lady Dunbrook glanced around the room as though looking for an escape route. So, she did not like conflict. Interesting.\n\n\"Then test us yourselves before the Cotillion. The day before the Cotillion, examine us, with your Dragon Mates if you wish, and see if we are not acceptable. Dragons are not shy to offer their opinions. If they do not believe we are sufficiently prepared, then we will stand down with no argument.\"\n\n\"We cannot trouble our Dragon Mates with such trivial matters!\" Lady Jersey's eyes bulged.\n\nIt did make one wonder exactly what sort of terms she was on with her Dragon Mate.\n\n\"I do not know. Torrington might just find it amusing.\" Lady Torrington chuckled behind her hand.\n\n\"I no longer have a Dragon Mate now that my son has inherited the estate,\" Lady Dalrymple sounded genuinely sad. \"So my voice must be somewhat muted on this matter, but it seems like an appropriate scheme.\"\n\n\"But if you fail, you know the dragons will talk, and I do not think they will be kind.\" Lady Cowper clasped her hands in her lap. \"Would you truly wish to take that chance?\"\n\nAnne looked from one lady to the next. Their gowns and feathers and jewels, all a warm-blooded display of dominance. No, she was not going to allow them to peck the back of her neck. \"I am confident in the Sage's plans. We would be honored to be tested by your committee. I know we will make you proud.\"\n\nA quarter of an hour later, Lady Jibbering Idiot, a dramatic, tragic princess to be sure, and Countess Claptrap dismissed her from their exalted presence, after considerable debate pitting the latter against the former, with Anne's cousin, the warm-blooded basilisk and the halo-wearing viper appearing to switch sides simply for their own amusement.\n\nMrs. Gardiner's estimation of them had been kind and generous! No wonder Lady Elizabeth seemed haggard at the prospect of dealing with them.\n\nHad she done the right thing, standing up to them and insisting their presentations go on as planned? It had seemed right at the time. Allowing the Cotillion Committee to cast aside Lady Elizabeth's debutantes stank of the sort of games played in the ton as a whole. While the Sage was well able to manage dragons, it seemed the games of warm-bloods were more difficult for her to control. After all she had done for Kellynch, they owed her whatever assistance she could offer. Hopefully this would be looked on as assistance.\n\nIt was a risky move, though. Alienating the Cotillion Board would not be without its consequences. Such women would be masterful in their revenge. But what loyalty did she owe them?\n\nAnne paused at the door of the suite the Sage's sisters shared: two bedrooms, each with a dressing room, and a large sitting room between. The door carving depicted a fanciful large drake with inlaid agate eyes. She closed her eyes and listened, but there was little to hear. It was difficult to know what that might mean.\n\nEavesdropping was probably not a good habit to acquire in any case.\n\nHad it been a good idea to commit all four of them to this course of action without even getting their consent? The Sage's Bennet-blood sisters would likely support her choice\u2014they seemed to have a great deal of the same stubbornness and cleverness that the Sage had. Mrs. Collins in particular seemed the steady, reliable sort who could be depended upon in a crisis.\n\nBut Miss Darcy might be an issue. Kind, mild, and even a bit hesitant, she might lack the boldness to be able to stand up to the likes of so many warm-blooded dragons and their Dragon Mates.\n\nNo, stop, this line of thinking was not at all helpful.\n\nShe pressed the door open and slipped inside.\n\nUnder other circumstances, the sitting room might be considered the perfect scene of domesticity, with an attractive chamber, comfortable furnishings, and sufficient dragons in the d\u00e9cor to mark it as a Blue Order establishment. Mrs. Collins looked up from her soft chair near the frosted windows and set aside her book; Miss Bennet and Miss Darcy abandoned their board game on the low tea table near the brown sofa and sprang to their feet.\n\n\"Dare we ask?\" Mrs. Collins hurried toward her.\n\n\"Do not make us wait, tell us what they said!\" Miss Bennet all but ran to her side.\n\nFour colorful fairy dragons leapt from the table to hover in the middle of the room as Corn and Wall tumbled from their basket and wove around Anne's ankles, purring loudly.\n\n\"Pray allow her to sit down, Lydia. Can you not see that she has had a trying time of it?\" Mrs. Collins urged Anne to sit in a soft armchair near the fire.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Corn and Wall sprang into her lap, pushing their furry faces into her hands.\n\n\"Were they particularly awful?\" Mrs. Collins poured her a cup of tea and sweetened it to her liking. How dear that she had paid enough attention to recall Anne's preferences.\n\n\"Nothing that I did not expect.\"\n\n\"But what did they say?\" Miss Bennet, standing near Anne's seat, barely restrained herself from stomping, but Cosette hopping on her shoulder completed the image rather nicely.\n\nAnne drew a deep sip of tea. \"In short, Lady Jersey was rather convinced that we should not be presented due to the Sage's absence.\"\n\n\"This is unfortunate.\" Miss Darcy, who stood at a distance from the others, hung her head. But was that a note of relief in her voice? \"I suppose we will have to wait until next year.\"\n\nMiss Bennet whirled on Miss Darcy. \"How can you say that! It is patently unfair! We have been accepted for presentation. We should be able to attend the Cotillion. Our father and our sister are officers of the Order! They cannot keep us away.\"\n\nMrs. Collins waved the others into seats. \"Technically, that might be true, but without our sponsor, I am afraid they can take that step. Granted, it is only a delaying tactic and would not keep us entirely out of the Order\u2014\"\n\n\"Horrid warm-bloods.\" April zipped between Mrs. Collins and Anne, a bright blue blur. \"Can you not see what this is?\"\n\n\"I expect you will say it is a show of dominance,\" Anne said quietly.\n\n\"That is exactly what it is. It is what large dragons do. They wait until the dominant among them is away from their territory, then they swoop in to try to claim some of it for themselves. The Accords have made that maneuver illegal, but it seems that only applies to dragons, not men.\"\n\n\"That sounds precisely like what I saw happening.\" Anne lifted her hand, inviting April to perch.\n\n\"We must defend my Friend's territory. We cannot allow them to believe they are equal.\" April buzzed in dizzying circles in the middle of the room.\n\n\"But how are we to do that? It is not as if we have any recourse to their decision.\" Mrs. Collins poured jam into a saucer and lifted it toward April.\n\nThankfully she landed on the saucer and plunged her face into the jam. She had not been eating well since the abduction, and it seemed starvation did not agree with her temperament.\n\n\"I am glad to hear you say that.\" Anne leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes. \"I spoke rather boldly on our behalf. I was afraid I might have overstepped myself.\"\n\n\"What did you say?\" Miss Bennet bounced in her seat, sending Cosette back into the air.\n\nAnne took another draw from her tea. Was that Earl Grey? No, it was a touch too floral, but definitely flavored with bergamot. Somehow there was strength in the warmth of that cup. \"I told them about Lady Elizabeth's excellent preparations; Mrs. Gardiner's help with the gowns; the dance master hired; and all the study materials arranged. I argued that there is every reason to believe we will be able to make ready for the Cotillion whether she is here to prepare us or not.\"\n\nA slow smile spread across Mrs. Collins' face.\n\nOh, thank heavens!\n\nMiss Darcy gasped, and trembled as she lifted her hand to her cheek. \"What did they say?\"\n\n\"There was a bit of debate, to be sure, but at the end, it was agreed that we might continue our preparations for the Cotillion. They will test our readiness\u2014much as Lady Elizabeth said she would do\u2014before the Cotillion itself so they might be as confident in our preparations as we are.\"\n\n\"You are joking! How could you?\" Miss Darcy covered her mouth with her hands as soon as the words tumbled forth.\n\n\"Very easily, Miss Darcy. You do understand your sister's reputation is at stake in a very real way?\"\n\n\"It is not her fault this awful thing has happened.\"\n\n\"While that is true, it does not really matter. For whatever reason, the women of the committee do not appreciate her dominance over them and are seeking whatever means they can find to usurp it.\"\n\n\"That is not fair. Surely\u2014\"\n\nApril dove toward Miss Darcy, who cringed back. \"No, no one will care or interfere. It is the way with dragons. The smaller and the weaker will always be overshadowed by the large and powerful. No one until Elizabeth has ever cared about the plight of us little dragons. No one else will fight the she-dragons for her sake but us.\"\n\n\"Then indeed, we must stand up for her.\" Mrs. Collins stood and moved to Anne's side. \"I am with you, Lady Wentworth. We will not permit Elizabeth's territory to be lost to them.\"\n\n\"What about us, what can we do?\" Heather, fluffy and very pink, landed on Mrs. Collins' shoulder. \"There must be something we can do to help. Elizabeth has been so good to us, there must be some way we can help her.\"\n\n\"It is not fair! They keep us little dragons away from anything important and useful.\" Cosette returned to Miss Bennet's shoulder, warbling loudly. \"The cockatrice guards may go search for her. They have asked for all the cockatrice in London to be alert for signs of her. The small drakes who pass for dogs and the like have been set to look for her. But we\u2014we have been told to stay quiet and out of the way lest we get ourselves eaten by some passing cat or hawk.\"\n\n\"Indeed, indeed.\" April hovered near Cosette. \"They overlook us, even now\u2014now when our abilities might be the most useful of all.\"\n\nA cold shiver slithered down Anne's back, making it difficult not to twitch in a most unladylike manner. \"Pray tell, what do you mean? I have not had the pleasure of knowing any fairy dragons, so I know nothing directly of your strengths and abilities.\"\n\n\"Only that we are unreliable twitter-pates who have not a useful thought in our heads.\" Pax twittered from the back of Miss Darcy's chair.\n\nMiss Darcy turned, slack-jawed, to stare at her Friend.\n\n\"And that we have quick tempers and nip at ears at random.\" Heather mimicked ear-nipping.\n\n\"And that we are not very smart nor are our memories reliable.\" Cosette was adorable in her fluffy display of offense.\n\n\"And that we are forever putting people to sleep with our songs.\" Pax seemed desperate to add something less controversial to the conversation.\n\nAnne leaned forward, elbows on knees. \"Indeed, I have heard all those things. However, I also understand that the common opinion may very well be incorrect. So, tell me yourselves, what are your particular strengths?\"\n\n\"Gossip.\" April flitted to the arm of Anne's chair and settled her wings back as though she were crossing her arms over her chest.\n\n\"Tell me more.\"\n\n\"Our kind hear everything that is going on, nearly everywhere. People speak freely before us, as do dragons. We are too small to matter, you see, so they take no care around us.\"\n\n\"And we are so small, they often do not even know we are about. There are no secrets where there are fairy dragons.\" Cosette rubbed her head against Miss Bennet's cheek.\n\n\"The cockatrice and drakes are far more obvious, and they are not adept at putting many stories together to understand a whole picture,\" Heather added.\n\n\"This is something I have never heard or considered.\" Nor had she heard anyone else consider it either.\n\n\"No one ever does. Granted, not all of us can do it well. But with experience, we become very good at putting together the things we hear and creating a complex understanding.\" Heather looked directly at Mrs. Collins, who seemed more than a little surprised.\n\n\"Why have you never told me?\" Mrs. Collins scratched under Heather's chin.\n\n\"It never seemed important before.\"\n\n\"If I am understanding you correctly, it sounds as though you wish to assist in the efforts to recover the Sage?\" Was it possible? Corn and Wall purred in her lap\u2014or was that her own blood thrumming in her ears?\n\n\"Of course we do! Why is that so difficult to conceive?\" April hovered at Anne's eye level.\n\n\"You are the smallest of dragons. Is it not said that it is important to know when to allow a bigger dragon to handle matters?\"\n\nApril shrieked very much like a cockatrice as she dove for Anne's ear. \"Can none of you see what is right in front of your face? A fairy dragon is in the center of all this disruption to the Blue Order. A fairy dragon! The minorest of minor dragons, the worthless little flutter-tufts who some barely consider dragons to start with. Prey to nearly every other species of dragon! If we are found to be a danger to our kind, how do you think that bodes for our future? It is not inconceivable that we could be removed from the protection of the Order and left to fend for ourselves with the rest of the wild animals.\"\n\n\"Surely not!\" Anne let her hand fall from her well-nipped ear.\n\n\"What do you think will happen if it is determined that our kind brought England to the brink of dragon war and offered nothing useful?\"\n\n\"Are things that bad?\" Miss Darcy whispered, cuddling Pax close.\n\n\"Far more than you know,\" Heather murmured. \"No one has faith in our kind.\"\n\nMrs. Collins gasped.\n\n\"Rather the same attitude most have toward young ladies in general.\" Lydia tossed her head.\n\nAnne bounced her heel against the worn carpet as she chewed her lip. \"I have been told that dragons value boldness, and if ever there were a time for boldness, it is now. What is more, I think our studies in preparation for the Cotillion could offer an excellent cover for our real work.\"\n\n\"What are you thinking, Lady Wentworth?\" Mrs. Collins leaned in close, her voice soft and serious.\n\n\"If the Order intends to bring all its resources to bear to recover the Sage, then all the resources should be utilized. The risks are high, but you should be permitted to do what you are able to do. I say you should go out and seek whatever information you can find. Come back to us, and we will help keep track of it all and look for patterns. When we find something\u2014\" That was perhaps the boldest statement she had ever uttered. \"\u2014I will bring it to Wentworth and Sir Fitzwilliam. They will know how to present it to the Order so that it may be acted upon.\"\n\n\"I do not think I can do that.\" Pax trembled and cuddled into the crook of Miss Darcy's arm.\n\n\"As I recall, Sir Fitzwilliam has asked you to spend time in the nursery with Nanny and little Anne. Your presence would be missed. It will be up to you to make sure no one notices that your friends are gone on their mission. Are you up to that?\"\n\nThe little white fairy dragon's brow knit as though she were thinking very deeply. \"I think I could do that.\"\n\n\"The rest of us will have to manage our Cotillion preparations while disguising the fairy dragons' absence and recording and coordinating the information they bring back. It will be no small effort. It will require all of us to be committed to the cause. And willing to diligently guard our secret. If you are not certain of this course, you must speak up now. Too much is riding on our effort to go forth without full agreement. Even with that, I am not sure only three fairy dragons will be enough.\"\n\n\"Lady Astrid will be willing to assist, I am sure. Verona is swift and smart and savvy.\" April bobbed up and down. \"I will approach them.\"\n\n\"Are you all comfortable with that? What do you all say to this?\"\n\n\"I am not willing to sit around all day being stupid. The littlest always miss out on all the fun and adventure. I will do my part.\" Miss Bennet crossed her arms over her chest and nodded firmly.\n\n\"Longbourn has already gone to seek out information on the wyrms thought to have had a part in Lizzy's abduction. We have just begun to become friends. I do not think he would forgive me if I knew there was something we could do to help Lizzy and failed to act. Heather and I are committed.\"\n\n\"Miss Darcy? There is no pressure. Speak up and be honest, if you cannot, then you cannot. It will do none of us any good for you to agree to something that you cannot commit to. Will you be able to do this?\"\n\n\"Will I have to lie to my brother?\"\n\n\"No, you will not.\" April flapped definitively. \"If he finds out, he will see sense in the plan. It is the sort of thing my Friend would have approved of, so he will approve as well.\"\n\n\"Very well, then, yes, I will support this effort, too.\"\n\n\"What shall we do?\" Wall rose up on his serpentine tail and looked up at her with big eyes.\n\n\"Yes, we want to help as well, like Laconia does.\" Corn mimicked Wall's posture. Two tatzelwurms begging? Merciful heavens.\n\n\"Perhaps you might distract visitors from asking questions about the fairy dragons in whatever way you see fit?\" Mrs. Collins suggested. \"They could carry messages as well?\"\n\nThose were not bad ideas.\n\nThey purred.\n\n\"We are resolved to begin immediately, then.\"\n\nRecruiting fairy dragons and baby tatzelwurms into espionage? What had she just done?"
            },
            {
                "title": "January 20, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "\"The Chancellor is not in good spirits,\" Laconia muttered as he wove between Wentworth's feet on the rapid march through the dim, rather crowded corridors to Matlock's ground floor office.\n\nSomber portraits of human and dragon alike stared down at them, as if to judge their errand. There were some who avoided these halls just for that reason.\n\nPeople and dragons still stopped to stare at their peculiar little dance. A \"kind soul\" stopped to tell him, once, that being constantly seen in company with a tatzelwurm might not be the best for his image as a baronet. He returned the kindness by politely suggesting to Laconia that individuals with such opinions were definitely below his notice. One would think Order members who worked in the central office would know better than to insult a dragon, even a small one.\n\n\"How did you come by this information?\"\n\n\"Quill Driver, Lady Astrid's assistant.\" Laconia growled softly. \"He is reliable.\"\n\nWentworth winced. \"I did not mean to question you, old Friend, merely to get a sense of what precisely 'not in good spirits' might mean.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the expression 'fit to be tied' might capture it better?\" Laconia paused and looked up at Wentworth.\n\n\"What exactly did Quill Driver say?\"\n\n\"'Not fit to be around other predators' were his exact words, but that is not something that, as I understand, makes a great deal of sense in warm-blooded terms.\" Laconia's serpentine tail flicked.\n\n\"True, but it is quite a turn of phrase, is it not?\"\n\n\"You might be surprised at how poetical dragons can be.\" Laconia continued on. They turned the corner to the wider corridor containing Matlock's and several other important offices.\n\nHe was probably right. Poetry, human or draconic, was not something he had ever spent a great deal of time contemplating, despite Anne's protests that the letter he had written her was the most poetic thing she had ever read.\n\nThose were very special circumstances.\n\nAnd now look where they were. Neither of them had ever conceived of dealing with matters like these when they had agreed to take on Blue Order work. Anne was a determined and hardy soul, but this affair threatened to be beyond even her fortitude.\n\nBut she was working hard at it, dear woman. And if anyone could make a way through such circumstances, it was her. Clever, reliable, steadfast, wholly and utterly dependable. She did not always think those terms a compliment, but they were, of the highest order.\n\nMatlock's elaborate carved door stood ajar, so he slipped inside, pausing near the door to identify which dragons might already be within, and if introductions might be required. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the candlelight.\n\nHeavens above, what a crowd!\n\nCownt Matlock, his blue-green hide darkened to something close to the twilight sky in the dim light, hunched uncomfortably in the corner farthest from the dragon tunnel entrance. What kind of information could require the cownt's presence in an office not really large enough to accommodate him?\n\nLaconia pouffed, his fur standing on end. The hair on the back of Wentworth's neck did the same.\n\nA blue lindwurm curled tightly in the opposite corner as though trying to give as much space as possible to the other occupants. His long mustache whiskers and square snout gave him a rather scholarly look. Sir Richard sat nearby with his Friend Earl perched on the back of his chair. No doubt then, the lindwurm must be Netherford.\n\nDarcy sat near Matlock's imposing, carved desk where the Chancellor himself sat, looking impatient at best. Walker perched on an iron dragon perch just behind and to Darcy's right. An empty chair near a desk pillow suggested where Wentworth and Laconia should take their places.\n\n\"General Strickland will be here shortly, then we will begin.\" Matlock glanced at Wentworth as he drummed his fingers on the desk.\n\nWalker landed on the floor near Laconia. He spread his wings as Laconia reared up and puffed his body as large as he could. They danced in a circle three times around, hissing and chittering, slowly allowing the circle to close until they touched nose and beak in the center. Remarkable, a greeting of equals. How many of those had he ever seen?\n\nDarcy and Sir Richard exchanged glances with each other and with Wentworth, eyebrows cocked in such a similar fashion that their resemblance to each other was made all the more obvious. Was it the presence of the two major dragons that kept the small ones from vying for dominance?\n\nSharp brisk steps came through the door and it shut hard. Laconia spring-hopped to the desk pillow as Walker landed on his perch.\n\nMinister of Dragon Defense, General Strickland, stayed near the door, clearly awaiting introduction. Tall and thin as a whip, with tousled grey hair, and a large black patch covering what remained of his left eye. His face could have been an illustration for the word \"severe\" and his every movement echoed that. Responsible for domestic and international dragon defense concerns, he had earned the position through a long career in the 'conventional' army. There was hardly an officer, Army or Navy, who did not know his name or his reputation.\n\nMatlock conducted the appropriate introductions and General Strickland took the remaining seat, between Darcy and Wentworth.\n\n\"Yates, Abbot and Easterly are on their way here. I expect them to arrive in the next day or two,\" Strickland said, extending his hand, fingers curled toward himself, to Laconia.\n\nYates? They were calling in the head of the Knights of the Pendragon Order? However bad the situation had seemed, Yates being involved made it dozens of times worse.\n\nThe neat little swing-hitch in his belly turned into an ugly stopper knot.\n\nLaconia gave Strickland a cursory smell. His hair did not stand on end. All in all, that was a good sign.\n\n\"Excellent. You are familiar with Wentworth and Fitzwilliam's reports?\" Matlock pointed to them in turn.\n\n\"I have a few questions, but those can be addressed later in light of Netherford's new intelligence.\" Strickland looked directly at the lindwurm.\n\nLovely, just lovely. What else was going wrong now?\n\nSir Richard rose and stood near Netherford. \"Netherford had not planned to attend the Cotillion this year, so he remained at the estate.\"\n\nNetherford stretched a little further into the room. \"But gossip reached me that was too alarming to leave lie, so I went to investigate.\"\n\n\"What kind of gossip? Where did you hear it from?\" Strickland's words were clipped, like a man used to giving orders.\n\n\"The source is irrelevant as I have verified it all myself.\" Netherford gestured with his right paw as if to emphasize his point.\n\n\"I do not trust gossip.\" Strickland leaned back, arms crossed over his chest.\n\n\"What I bring is not gossip. I have spoken to all the original sources myself.\"\n\n\"What kind of source?\"\n\n\"Let the dragon speak.\" Matlock slapped the desk.\n\nStrickland's eyes bulged. Apparently, it was acceptable to be rude, but not have the behavior returned in kind. Telling, but not surprising.\n\n\"By your leave, General,\" Netherford tipped his head and waited until Strickland nodded. There was the diplomat in the room. \"On the way to London, I spoke with a wyrm in the north and a wyvern between there and London who had been approached by separate major drakes, both promoting the same, rather alarming, rhetoric. They suggest that the recent kidnapping of the Sage is indicative of men losing control of the Blue Order. They are chafing against the restrictions put upon them by the Order, wondering why they should acquiesce to creatures so much less powerful than themselves.\"\n\nDragon's fire!\n\n\"They are younger dragons who have never experienced dragon war, clearly seen in how casually they put forth the notion that it might be worth the casualties for dragonkind to establish dragon dominance in England once again.\"\n\nDragon war. He said dragon war.\n\nThe knots in his stomach unraveled into a twisted, tightening tangle.\n\nStrickland drew in a deep whistle with all the force of a string of military invectives. \"You spoke to the drakes as well, I imagine?\"\n\n\"No, I did not.\"\n\n\"How then can we be certain?\"\n\nTo his credit, Netherford only blinked. \"I beg your pardon, sir, but I would hardly expect such a drake to speak honestly with me, or even speak with me at all. With Sir Richard, a Knight of the Order and son of the Chancellor as my Keeper, I am hardly the sort of soul they would reveal such attitudes toward. Do you blame them? It is not difficult to imagine that I would bring such information directly here.\"\n\n\"What proof do you have that the wyrm and wyvern were correct? Why should we believe them? Both dragons are of low standing, all things considered. Would it not be in their interest for them to stir up trouble for their betters?\"\n\n\"That is not the way dragons would handle such matters, settling our conflicts through warm-bloods.\"\n\n\"That is not what I understand.\"\n\nNetherford's mustache twitched in time with Sir Richard's cheek.\n\nOh, Strickland was a gem indeed.\n\n\"Consider, if you will, what the wyrm and wyvern have to gain by spreading such a falsehood. Even should those drakes be somehow removed, they would obtain no new territory. Similarly, their charters with their Keepers remain unchanged. No material advantage would come to them by defaming the bigger dragons. And it is a dangerous game. To speak calumny against a bigger dragon is to invite retaliation, which, in case you are not aware, is specifically allowable in the Accords. Their very lives are in danger for having spoken to me.\"\n\n\"Then why would they?\"\n\n\"Because in a Dragon War, smaller major dragons stand to lose a very great deal and it is in their best interest to stave off such an occurrence. Maintaining that which they already have, and would not likely be able to replace, is a strong motivation.\"\n\nStrickland grumbled something untoward under his breath. For being a member of the Order, he seemed to have little respect or appreciation for Netherford.\n\nPerhaps it was because Netherford was French.\n\nMatlock cleared his throat. \"It is the official position of the Order that Netherford brings us notice of a credible threat to the Order, one that must be thoroughly investigated, and dealt with if necessary.\"\n\n\"If I may be so bold as to suggest, the return of the Sage and appropriate punishment of the kidnappers, and the dismantling of any possible smuggling networks would go a long way to proving the men of the Order have not lost their usefulness to its dragons.\" Netherford's tone remained even and smooth, despite his eyebrows now twitching like his mustache. What a feat of self-control.\n\n\"Such a thought has not been overlooked.\" Matlock rolled his eyes as though he were fed up with talk of the abducted Sage. \"Strickland, we need a coordinated approach among the army, navy and Pendragon Knights. In the meantime, Richard, you and Netherford are to conduct a thorough investigation of these allegations. Immediately. Wentworth, we have received reports from the cockatrice guard that unusual activity has been identified at the port of Dover, unfamiliar ships and cargos bound for France. Take Kellynch with you and investigate what you can there. Talk to the sea dragons and see what might be learned from them.\"\n\nLaconia rose up on his tail. \"You do realize, the sea dragons are not members of the Order nor have they any connection to the Sage.\"\n\n\"I am sure you will find a way.\" Matlock did not dignify them with a glance.\n\nThat was the military way of saying they would be expected to make something from nothing.\n\nIt would not be the first time.\n\nWentworth called upon Kellynch first. Not because his feelings were more important than Anne's, but rather that they were less reliable. Anne would be supporting and comforting, supplying an abundance of good sense as she offered to manage whatever needed to be done. Laconia had gone ahead to alert her of their impending departure.\n\nWho knew what to expect with Kellynch? Although his good days had been outnumbering the bad recently, with ongoing issues with the tunnels to the lair under the house, the situation seemed ripe for a tantrum.\n\nThankfully, today was a good day. He felt deeply the importance of being given a mission directly from the Chancellor of the Order. Wentworth left him happily mulling over the prospects of proving himself a valuable member of Blue Order dragon society and not the clever little thief that Cornwall had declared him to be.\n\nOh, how that little insult had stung his pride. But perhaps it was just the thing needed to remind Kellynch that cold-blooded dragon society would judge him just as much as warm-blooded society would judge his Keepers.\n\nWentworth plodded upstairs\u2014when would they be done with climbing this presumptuous grand staircase?\u2014 to find Anne.\n\nKnowing her, she would have his trunk packed and waiting for him.\n\nHe opened the door to their quarters, carved and painted with a garish lindwurm terrorizing a horse. Thankfully, the chambers within were not nearly so alarming. Truly, who thought that an appropriate decoration for a guest chamber door?\n\nThe rooms were finely finished, but a touch plain, quite to his taste really. Just enough furniture to be functional, but not enough to clutter. More significantly, they smelt fresh and sweet; they smelt of Anne.\n\nThat made them right.\n\nSoft light from the window bathed her as she stood by the large press, near his battered trunk, and added a neatly folded shirt to the carefully organized contents.\n\nHe swallowed hard. Did she realize how much such gestures meant to him?\n\n\"I think this should be sufficient for your trip.\" She smiled, a mix of sadness and resolve in her eyes. \"You are to Dover in the morning? I took the liberty of informing Alister Salt of your impending travels. He will be ready for you at sunrise. He seemed quite pleased to be of service. I got the sense he and his team prefer to be on the road as much as possible.\" She chuckled and shut the trunk.\n\n\"It would seem. Thank you.\" He sat on the trunk and pulled her down beside him. \"I do not know how long we will be gone.\"\n\n\"I understand. We will make do, though, keeping ourselves occupied preparing for the Cotillion and showing those she-dragons that they may not exert their dominance so easily.\"\n\nWentworth laughed. \"How easily you have adopted the mentality of the dragons, my dear. Has the exposure to all those fairy dragons begun to tax your good nature?\"\n\n\"About the fairy dragons.\" She had that look in her eyes.\n\n\"Why do I have a sense this is only going to make life more complicated?\"\n\n\"Because you have been dealing with dragons, and you know they make everything more complicated.\" She leaned into his shoulder. \"The Darcy contingent of fairy dragons have been very unhappy to be relegated to being decorative in the guest quarters and forbidden to do anything to assist in the Sage's recovery.\"\n\n\"I certainly can see her little blue Friend would be disturbed.\" Wentworth covered his ear.\n\n\"Apparently they are certain they can be a useful resource for information. They believe themselves to be the hearers of everything useful, and not, in the Kingdom.\"\n\n\"What are you telling me?\" He looked deep into her very determined eyes.\n\nHeavens, the last time she wore that expression, she was telling him she would stand with Kellynch at the Blue Order Court!\n\n\"After a long discussion with them\u2014yes, I know, we did have a long discussion with fairy dragons! In any case, it seems prudent to have them try and seek out what information they can regarding the Sage's disappearance.\"\n\n\"But they are senseless flutter-tufts. Surely the Order cannot support this. You will get no useful information out of them. Just bits and bobs of gossip that is of no worth.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that is true. That is why the Order does not need to know about it, at least right now.\"\n\nHe leaned back and sighed.\n\n\"I know what you are thinking, but what if they can be helpful? Can we afford to ignore any potential resource? I have gotten a sense of the trouble that is abounding in the kingdom. Is it wise to overlook any asset we may have in this situation?\"\n\n\"When you put it that way, how can I disagree? But if they discover anything, how will you\u2014\"\n\n\"All their information will filter through Mrs. Collins and me. Only that which we deem important or credible will go beyond our doors. If there is anything at all, you can be sure I will let you know. You will listen, yes? Even if it is from fairy dragons?\"\n\nHow was it she made such a thing sound so reasonable, and even wise? \"If your good sense deems it important, you can be certain I will listen, my dear.\"\n\n[ January 22,1815, Dover ]\n\nAlister Salt and his team pulled away from the modest Dover Blue Order offices, the wheels crunching and clacking against the cobblestone street. Golden rays of sunrise crept down the street as though reaching out to meet them. The coach would probably arrive back in London even quicker than they had gotten him to Dover. That man and his son could change a team of horses faster than any would have believed possible. Salt and his team were at least as fast, maybe faster than the Royal Mail.\n\nThe stories he had to tell! Like listening to an old seaman, difficult to tell where the facts ended and the imagination began. But it was warm and companionable, good company around the fire at the Blue Order office last night.\n\nToday they were both off on business once again.\n\nSalt air, sharp breezes, sea bird calls. Familiar, oddly comforting after the bustle and confinement of London. Perhaps he could achieve what the Order demanded, after all.\n\nWentworth, with Laconia at his side, took out a dinghy\u2014one with a sail\u2014 that the Order kept. He would talk to the local warm-bloods later in the day. Early morning and twilight were the best times to find sea dragons.\n\nMorning mist, hanging low in the barely pre-dawn sky, kissed his cheeks as his limbs found the rhythm of the waves once more. Was it possible he could taste the salt in the air? Perhaps he needed the sea as much as Kellynch.\n\nWhat would Anne think about purchasing a dinghy? He smiled in spite of himself. She was probably already arranging the budget for it. Dear, dear woman.\n\nKellynch met him in the calm, open water, far enough out that none would be able to see him rising from the surface of the ocean.\n\n\"This is entirely agreeable.\" Laconia put his paws on the edge of the hull, his mouth open, tasting the air with his long, forked tongue.\n\nWentworth brought his little boat alongside Kellynch. It was a neat, responsive little sailboat, so satisfying. \"How was your journey?\"\n\n\"It has been a long time since I have made such a journey. I had almost forgotten what it was like to truly be at sea.\"\n\n\"Have you missed it?\"\n\n\"I am a marine wyrm, of course I have. More than I think I realized.\" Kellynch bobbed in time with the waves.\n\n\"Enough to leave the land and return?\"\n\nLaconia leaned against Wentworth's leg, purring something that was neither agreement nor dissent.\n\n\"At first, I thought so, but I suppose I have become accustomed to the ways of the land as well. I think I would miss them. So, I expect I shall be content to live at the edge of land and sea. Kellynch-by-the-Sea is right.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we might find a way to sail like this together at Lyme as well.\"\n\n\"That would be pleasing.\" Kellynch smiled. He smiled! A toothy, terrifying expression, but it was a smile.\n\nIt should not make Wentworth so satisfied, but it did. \"Are there any local sea dragon pods?\"\n\nKellynch looked toward the open sea. \"I have encountered one, and some sea-dwelling cockatrice as well.\"\n\n\"Are they willing to talk with us?\"\n\n\"Of that, I am not yet certain. They have agreed to meet with you, in no small part because of Laconia's reputation, but what they will say, I cannot be certain. I expect they will have noticed your arrival and will make themselves known soon.\"\n\nLaconia chirruped and flicked his tail. He was used to being Wentworth's liaison to the sea dragons. Kellynch was thoughtful to recognize that. \"So, I suppose now we wait.\"\n\nBack on the Laconia, he had spent many an hour waiting on the sea dragons that Laconia helped him speak with. Often, waiting felt like wasted time, and sometimes it was. But often enough it proved sufficiently fruitful to make the effort worthwhile.\n\nLazy waves lapped at the hull as the mist gave way to a mackerel sky, golden light painting the underside of the clouds like a ceiling overhead. The sail luffed against him, resting as they waited, ready to be ordered back into service at a moment's notice. There was no calm like a sunrise over the ocean.\n\nThe sea's surface rippled in a deliberate, anticipatory way. He knew that look. Laconia chittered expectantly, fur pouffing and ears erect.\n\nThe first sea dragon broke the surface\u2014a small serpent-whale, about the size of a typical horse, a sort he and Laconia had encountered often enough. Their bodies were long and bulbous, like whales, with flat tails and a prominent dorsal fin like a shark. A short, thick neck began just in front of two short limbs sporting webbed fingers or maybe toes at the ends. Their heads were thick, but narrower than their bodies, with long, toothy mouths, ending in a long snout maybe as big around as his thigh. Their bodies were more slick than scaly, some mottled grey and white, some more brown, a few nearly black.\n\nThe one who approached was female\u2014she sported a small set of head fins near where it seemed ears should be. Males lacked the decoration. At least twelve more serpent-whales followed in her wake. In all likelihood, a dozen more individuals lurked in the depths, guards ready to come to the aid of the pod should anything go amiss.\n\nThe large female swam closer to Wentworth's vessel and brought her head and front flippers out of the water. Kellynch rose up, his squared head above hers, flattening his scaly body to look large. She bared her teeth and screamed an otherworldly sound. Kellynch growled and shrieked, weaving back and forth, rising higher out of the water with each pass. He dove down upon her, stopping just short of her neck, and touched the back of her head with his tongue. She fell back into the water with a commensurate splash, ceding dominance to Kellynch.\n\nAfter several moments underwater, she appeared once more, with head and flippers out of the water, staring at Wentworth.\n\n\"My Keeper, Wentworth, and our Friend Laconia.\" Kellynch bobbed his head toward Wentworth. \"The pod matriarch has a name you lack the ability to say. She has agreed to be called Dover.\"\n\n\"You are gracious to permit me a name that I can pronounce.\" Wentworth bowed from his shoulders. It had been sufficient when encountering other sea dragons. Hopefully it would be sufficient now.\n\n\"We have heard of you and your Friend. It is interesting that the stories are true. There is a land dragon that goes to sea. You two have a reputation for being worthwhile to deal with. Kellynch said you have something to ask of us.\" Dover's voice was high, like a fairy dragon's, but with more squeals and clicks.\n\n\"I have come to ask you for information. One of our kind was taken, and we believe has been forced on a ship that has recently traversed these waters or might well be in them.\"\n\n\"Why is this so important that you would seek us out?\"\n\n\"The woman in question is very important to British dragons. She is known as the Dragon Sage and has offered great service to the British dragons.\"\n\n\"The landed dragons. Of the Blue Order?\" Somehow, she did not sound as though she approved. \"We have heard of the Order and of the woman you seek. Why should we tell you what we know?\"\n\n\"You know something of her?\" Laconia leaned a little farther over the railing, purring. The sound seemed to ease Dover's agitation.\n\n\"Why would I be here if we did not? I repeat, why should we tell you anything?\"\n\n\"The Sage is very valuable. Unrest grows among the British dragons. There is growing fear that violence between men and dragons could erupt because of it. No dragon species will profit from that.\"\n\n\"He speaks the truth,\" Kellynch lowered himself to be closer to Dover.\n\n\"There has already been significant violence against my kind. It would be fitting for the warm-bloods to suffer for what they have done to us. We are harried by pirates, fishers and hunters. We have no legal recourse, treated like animals by the landed warm-bloods, ones who should understand and respect our true nature. Is not this conduct in opposition to your Pendragon Accords? Should we not have the same privileges as the landed dragons?\"\n\n\"Those Accords were drawn up with the agreement of the landed dragons of Britain. According to our laws, they do not pertain to any dragons beyond our shores.\" If only Matlock had given him something to bargain with!\n\n\"Kellynch is covered by the Blue Order.\"\n\nDamn. She was right.\n\n\"It was an illegal agreement offered by a powerful dragon who had no right to make such an agreement. The courts recently ruled to accept the agreement because it had remained unchallenged for so long, but \u2026\"\n\n\"Kellynch is a sea dragon, covered by the Pendragon accords. It does not matter to us how it happened, only that it has. If he is covered, then there is no reason why we cannot be part of them as well.\"\n\n\"We lack the authority to offer such relief. With the current crisis, I do not believe the Blue Order is ready to negotiate new treaties to include dragons beyond its shores.\"\n\n\"Then we do not know that we are ready to assist you in what you desire.\" She slapped the water with her front limbs.\n\n\"If you will help \u2026\" Laconia leaned over the water, extending a paw.\n\n\"No, we have no reason for trust. Give us assurances that the Order will assist us first, and we will assist you.\"\n\n\"Then you know where the Sage is?\" Kellynch said.\n\n\"I did not say that we did. I only said we would assist you in finding her. I did not make promises as to how.\" In truth, that was a more valuable promise than simply knowing where she was.\n\n\"I could offer the words you seek, but the truth is I do not have the authority to make the promises you ask for. I will not give you empty words.\"\n\n\"Nor will we give you what you seek. Find one dominant enough to give us what we ask, and we will help you.\"\n\n\"We may have very little time to find her safely.\"\n\n\"Then I suppose you must hurry. You may contact us only if you are able to offer what we have asked. Kellynch will know how to find us, but do not attempt to unless you are ready to discuss a treaty.\" Dover splashed hard with her tail and dove, the rest of the pod following.\n\nLaconia hissed, his tail lashing hard against Wentworth's leg.\n\nHow long would it take for a Blue Order messenger to get word to Matlock? More important, what would it take to convince him to offer the serpent-whales what they wanted?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Sometime after sundown, the storms began in earnest. Weathering a storm at sea proved so unlike doing so on land it was difficult to even think about them as similar events. One sheltered in a house, be it large or small, as the storm swirled around the structure, wreaking its havoc on the realm outside. But not so at sea.\n\nHere, their sanctuary became part of the storm itself, swallowed by some ethereal dragon. Hemmed in, bound without escape. The sea roiled and tossed the sloop about like a child's shuttlecock. Howling frigid winds shoved them, shrieking with glee, driving icy rain into the dark little hold. No recourse but to cling together, their shivers blending into terrified trembling.\n\n[ January 22,1815, On board the Sea Lion ]\n\nOn what might have been their third, fourth or even fifth morning shipboard, the winds died down and the sea settled. Poor little Joshua, despite his brave face, was pale and wan, matching Phoenix's dull and faded hide. Even the blue-striped wyrms, who now shared their dark, dank space in the hold, seemed faded and limp.\n\nIn theory, the wyrms were there to guard the captives. But snippets of conversation she heard from above suggested they had served their purpose for now and were being kept out of the way.\n\nDid the Movers not think that the wyrms could hear them talking? Perhaps they really did not understand dragons and their capacities.\n\nInteresting.\n\nHeavy steps approached, the lock rattled, and the hold door swung open. Two unfamiliar men tramped in, the feeble dappled light from above painting their expressions more frightening than they probably were.\n\nOh, how they stank!\n\nOne strewed several pieces of hardtack on the floor near the wyrms, muttering insulting things about them under his breath. The other pressed bowls and mugs into Elizabeth's and Joshua's hands and dropped a whole fish, probably boiled, into Phoenix's cage. Without words, they left.\n\nJoshua sipped the grog, sighing, most likely with joy that his stomach had finally settled. When they got back home, he would probably ask his mother for grog. The look on her face would be memorable.\n\nWhen they got back.\n\nIf they got back.\n\nNo, when.\n\nThe wyrms dove on the hardtack like starving creatures, which probably was not far from the truth. Prussian, the scar across his face pulsating, managed to get his jaws around a piece, but his small, sharply pointed teeth were no match for the biscuit. He shook his head and the hardtack flew from his mouth, landing near Elizabeth's feet.\n\nPrussian hissed and the others growled as they retreated and wound around each other in a writhing angry cluster.\n\nShe picked up the hardtack and dipped it in the greasy brothy soup of some form of meat and peas. Her stomach growled. It did not smell as dreadful as it looked. Darcy would be appalled at the very thought. The look on his face\u2014how rich that would be.\n\nWhat was he doing now? Was he with Anne? Did she even realize her mother was away, or perhaps Nanny and April kept her distracted so she did not yet know?\n\nWas that a good thing?\n\nWhat of Pemberley? Surely, she could not be so easily distracted. Who would comfort her, keep her from dangerous, rash choices? Chudleigh perhaps? Rosings? She dabbed her eyes with her sleeve.\n\nThe hardtack softened in the broth. She tore off a piece and threw it to Prussian. Eyes directly on her, he sniffed the hardtack, then touched it with his tongue. A moment later, he dove on it, gulping it down whole.\n\nShe tore off more and tossed pieces to the other wyrms. After gulping a large, sodden fragment, Azure tossed Elizabeth a second piece of hardtack, the red knob on her head seeming to flush. Hopefully that was a good sign. Elizabeth softened the sailor's biscuit and tossed it to the wyrm cluster.\n\nAzure and Lapis, the females, inched toward her, their long, forked tongues tasting the air.\n\nShe fished strands of meat from her bowl and tossed them toward the females, who slithered closer still. Soon, they were within arm's reach, taking dainty bites directly from her hands.\n\n\"Have they not been feeding you properly?\" she asked Prussian, clearly the leader of the little wyrm cluster, as she tossed him a bit of meat.\n\n\"There are many days the warm-bloods call banyan days, days without meat.\" Prussian rose up high on his tail as he hissed the words.\n\n\"Have you not told them you are predators, that you need meat?\"\n\n\"Why would they listen to us?\" He growled and inched closer to the females.\n\n\"Have they not had your help? Are you not as much a part of the crew as they? What was your agreed-upon share?\" Elizabeth spoke very softly but kept her head above his. This sort of discussion could prove volatile.\n\nShe sipped her grog. Not awful. They had even added a mite of lime juice to the water and rum. Apparently, the Movers wanted to keep them alive, for now.\n\nAzure twined with Prussian. Somehow it was comforting to see them behaving as normal wyrms did. \"You have strange ideas, Lady Warm-blood.\"\n\nLady? Hopefully that was a good sign. \"Whatever do you mean?\"\n\n\"We are wyrms, the least among dragons.\" Prussian wrapped his square shaggy head in front of Azure's.\n\n\"Except for fairy dragons,\" Joshua muttered.\n\n\"Indeed, he is right.\" Phoenix twittered and flapped over the now bare fish bones, making sure none missed his remark.\n\n\"Perhaps. But some of you are taken as Friends, kept in warm little cages and fed all the delicacies you care to eat.\" Azure rose up high on her tail, sniffing and tasting the air. She hissed toward Phoenix's cage.\n\nWho could blame her offense that Phoenix was given meat whilst they were not?\n\n\"I did not understand that wyrms often wanted Friends. I thought they were more content to live in their territories than in warm-blood dwellings.\" Did she know anyone at all who had a full wyrm Friend?\n\n\"We would be content to be allowed that.\" Lapis muttered as Indigo approached.\n\n\"I do not understand.\" Elizabeth held her breath and stared hard at the wyrms, skin tingling. Something important was in the air.\n\nIndigo entwined with Lapis, her hide dry and starting to shed, and thrust his head forward of hers, yellowed and stained fangs exposed. \"According to warm-bloods, we are neither appealing nor attractive. We look like the snakes you detest. We like one another more than warm-bloods. We are ill-suited to life as Friends.\"\n\nLapis bobbed her head hard, hitting Indigo under the chin. \"It is not merely the warm-bloods\u2014\"\n\nPrussian pounced, nearly landing on the twined smaller wyrms. \"Do not tell her anything. She does not need to know. It will only bring us more trouble.\"\n\nElizabeth bit her lips. It would be risky, but dragons valued boldness. \"I am more than you think I am. I can help.\"\n\n\"You are important to the Order?\" Prussian growled.\n\n\"I am.\" She tossed out another sliver of meat.\n\nAzure snatched it up. Prussian allowed that\u2014perhaps she would be clutching soon.\n\nIndigo snarled. \"The Order that has betrayed us, that cares not for our trouble.\"\n\n\"I have heard nothing about it.\"\n\n\"That is proof! That is proof! The Order ignores our complaints. The Pendragon Accords say that we are part, but they lie, do nothing for us.\" Azure retreated behind Prussian, her red head-knob just visible behind him.\n\n\"Tell me of your complaint.\"\n\n\"So that you can promise more empty words? No. Do not talk to her anymore.\" Prussian hissed and feinted several strikes toward her.\n\nElizabeth withdrew. She would get no more, at least for now. She tossed out several more gobbets of meat, and they gobbled them up. At least that was a good sign.\n\nLapis slid a hardtack toward them with her tail. Joshua scooped it up and dusted it off on his shirtsleeve. He broke it and offered half to Elizabeth.\n\nNo wonder the dragons could not eat it. She could barely break it with her back teeth. She dunked it in her grog as she sat on the pile of hay near Joshua and watched the wyrms.\n\nStrange, these creatures were very strange. Not nearly as confused and addled as most of their kind, in truth, they were more talkative and personable than most wyrms. What could have happened to them to leave them so angry and suspicious?\n\nAt least, like most wyrms, they were motivated by their stomachs. Perhaps a few more shared meals would loosen their tongues.\n\nAnd if it did not, at least the cluster would not starve. That was something.\n\nSeveral hours, or at least what felt like several hours later, Joshua poked her shoulder and leaned close. \"I think I hear the Movers talking.\" He pointed toward the ceiling, as though they were standing right above them.\n\nHow could she have missed that?\n\nShe glanced at the wyrms. They were woven into a tight cluster near the door, the females sleeping and the males keeping watch.\n\nElizabeth leaned back into the stale-smelling hay, her shoulder pressing into Joshua's as she clasped her hands in her lap and closed her eyes.\n\n\"How much has the damn weather cost us?\" That voice\u2014it was the not-gentleman\u2014Ayles, yes, he had been called Ayles.\n\n\"Two, three days, and I 'spect there be more storms a'coming.\" Corney's coarse voice was much easier to identify.\n\n\"Our buyer is not going to be happy. It already took too long to get the bloody creature in the first place.\"\n\n\"Damn him. So, he thinks there ain't any other out there who would want a baby firedrake\u2014a dragon fit for royalty? If he won't pay, we just take our things and find another. We might not even have to leave Bermuda to do it. I 'eard that there were another prince what would have a fire-breathing dragon for his court.\"\n\n\"How do you propose we find such a prince?\" Ayles' feet shuffled overhead.\n\n\"The same one who lined up this affair will find 'im.\"\n\n\"What is the name of this man?\"\n\nA foot hit the deck hard, followed by several off-rhythm steps\u2014 Corney's limp. \"You don't need to know.\"\n\nThe ball of wyrms jumped and several growled, staring at the grate overhead.\n\n\"If anything happens to you, there should be someone else who can find this mysterious dragon broker.\"\n\n\"Then you just best make sure that nothing happens to me, eh?\" She could imagine Corney poking Ayles' chest.\n\nSo it was true, there was no honor among thieves, and they even acknowledged it among themselves.\n\n\"What are you going to do with the boy and the woman?\" Ayles asked.\n\nElizabeth's heart pounded hard enough to drown out their voices. She held her breath. Joshua clutched her hand.\n\n\"Sell 'em with the dragon as handlers, trainers, what have you. If not, the boy is not too young for work. The woman looks good enough. I reckon we can get a decent price for her one way or the other.\"\n\nJoshua squeaked and squeezed her hand harder.\n\n\"And if they do not want them? If they are not worth what you think?\"\n\n\"I ain't worried about that none 'til we get to Bermuda and offload the dragon. I'll figure it out then.\"\n\nBermuda?\n\nBermuda. Did the Pendragon treaty extend to British territories like Bermuda? There was some statement about that in a recent paper the Minister of Foreign Dragon Affairs had written. Or was it a proposal?\n\n\"Are you certain we have the right dragon?\"\n\n\"What d'ye mean?\"\n\n\"Have you looked at that creature? He looks nothing like any of the bestiaries with fire-breathing dragons. You really think something that tiny is going to grow into a full-size dragon? Scarlett would have known for certain.\"\n\nPray that Corney believed it possible.\n\n\"Them firedrakes live hundreds of years. He gots plenty of time for growing up.\"\n\n\"He has done nothing to prove he's a firedrake. Nothing but fly around in that cage and eat. Oh, and sing a bit here and there. I do not think dragons sing. Who heard of a firedrake singing? You ought to make sure you got the right scaley before you see the buyer.\"\n\nDragon's blood! Why did Ayles have to be talking sense right now?\n\n\"I've 'ad enough of you questionin' me. Shut your trap and get back to navigating us a course there.\"\n\nThe men stomped away.\n\nElizabeth forced herself to breathe as she slipped her arm around Joshua's trembling shoulders. They were not prey to these men; she had to think like a predator, like a dragon.\n\nSeveral minutes later, a key rattled in the lock. Corney and Ayles tromped in.\n\nElizabeth jumped to her feet and met them in the middle of the room, shoulders pulled back, head high. \"Where are you taking us? What is to become of us?\"\n\n\"Some kind of fine lady, you are, I assume, or perhaps you used to be one.\" Corney slapped her with the back of his hand.\n\nShe shrieked, staggered back, and fell. How dare he!\n\nThe wyrms stared from their huddle in the corner. Had this been anywhere else, the dragons in the room would have killed him.\n\nPerhaps she had become too accustomed to that. She dragged herself up to her knees. Perhaps now was not the time to vie for dominance.\n\n\"You ain't getting far with that act here, missy. I don't care who or what you were. All we care about is whether that\u2014\" he pointed at Phoenix. \"\u2014can breathe fire.\"\n\n\"Of course I can do it!\" Phoenix hopped and flapped in the middle of the boxy cage.\n\n\"Then do it now.\" Corney crossed his arms and limped toward Phoenix.\n\n\"Just because I can do it does not mean I am able to do it on command.\" He tossed his head and turned his back on them.\n\n\"I think he is lying.\" Ayles crouched to look through the bars. \"No dragon so little can do such a thing.\"\n\n\"I can.\" Phoenix turned and pouffed.\n\n\"Then do it.\" Ayles rattled the cage.\n\n\"Not now.\"\n\nCorney grabbed Elizabeth by the shoulders and shook her until the room spun. \"Is this one of your friends? You wouldn't want to see no harm come to her now, would you?\"\n\n\"Do not threaten her. I will never perform if you threaten her.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps we just pitch you right off this here boat, yeah?\" Ayles stood and lifted Phoenix's cage, shaking it hard. He hovered in the middle, trying to avoid being struck by the moving sides.\n\n\"Stop that!\" Elizabeth staggered toward Phoenix. \"We have been tossed about like a child's toy for days in storms. He has hardly been able to keep down the little food he has eaten. He has no energy left for making fire. It is a very taxing thing for one so small.\"\n\n\"You are saying the rough seas have left him unable?\" Ayles snorted, lips drawing back in a sneer.\n\n\"It do make sense after a fashion, I think. Look how sick they been.\" Corney pointed at Joshua and Elizabeth. He wrestled the cage from Ayles. \"We invested enough in this venture, I ain't ready to throw it all away yet. I'll give you some time on calm seas, but I 'spect you to spew fire soon.\"\n\n\"I will. You will see.\"\n\nCorney pushed the cage at Elizabeth and turned toward the door. \"See that he is ready to flame.\"\n\nAyles opened the door.\n\n\"The wyrms, they need meat.\" Elizabeth braced herself for another assault.\n\n\"What?\" Corney turned on his heel and glowered.\n\n\"They cannot eat hardtack. Their teeth are not right for it. They will starve if you continue feeding them like that.\"\n\nCorney stared at the wyrms, grumbling. The wyrms bared their teeth as though to prove Elizabeth's point.\n\n\"They will be of no use to you when they are too weak to stand guard.\"\n\nCorney rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath.\n\nThey left, locking the door loudly behind them.\n\n\"You will get your meat.\" Elizabeth whispered. \"That's what he said under his breath.\"\n\nPrussian licked his lips.\n\nLapis inched a little closer. \"Can the small one really breathe fire?\"\n\nElizabeth nodded. Thankfully Joshua and Phoenix said nothing."
            },
            {
                "title": "January 23, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "How could Darcy not be sentimentally fond of the Blue Order library? The main library, which took up nearly half the second floor of the building, had been the place where he had found Elizabeth while desperately searching for solutions to Pemberley's problem. He had found those answers, and so many more that day.\n\nWould they be as fortunate today?\n\nBennet sat beside him at the long table, hunched over a dusty tome, mumbling under his breath. His drake secretary, Drew, jotted quick notes in the flickering light of the pewter candelabra in the middle of the table. His crest flared in and out as he wrote.\n\nApparently, Drew's hearing was particularly acute and allowed him to accurately perceive Bennet's muttering without asking for him to speak up. They actually seemed to work well together. Who would have imagined?\n\nDarcy stood and stretched. Three days he had been huddled here with Bennet and Lady Astrid. Even the wonderful scent of old books could not drive away the sense of being lost amidst shelves upon shelves of volumes, none offering firm answers.\n\nOn the other side of the table, Lady Astrid, quick and sharp, pointed out several more volumes for them to search. Already covered in library dust, Quill Driver, her assistant, a muscular deep-grey drake who wore glasses that matched hers, scurried away to find them.\n\n\"I have a good feeling about these next two journals. I definitely remember references to unusual forest wyrms in those Keeper's journals.\" Lady Astrid removed her glasses and rubbed her bloodshot blue eyes. Though a tiny woman, her energy seemed boundless.\n\nShe had slept very little since learning there might be something she could do to help. She and Elizabeth shared a friendship of equals, a rare thing for both women.\n\n\"I realize I am likely speaking out of turn here, but perhaps it would be helpful if there were some sort of guidance for what Keepers should be keeping track of in those journals. Perhaps even insist on an index like many ladies craft for their commonplace books?\" Darcy cringed as he spoke. Perhaps so much time in the dimly lit, crowded room was affecting his judgement.\n\nLady Astrid laughed, something she had not done in days. \"Yes, you are speaking out of place, and yes, you are right. It is a pipe dream of mine to have such directives in place. But not all Dragon Keepers are like our esteemed Historian, as I am sure you have noticed. Many barely keep records. If we were to add more demands upon them, I fear nothing would be recorded at all.\"\n\nBennet looked up and nodded briefly, the corner of his lips pulling back in a brief, tiny smile.\n\nLady Astrid was one of the few officers in the Order who seemed to get on quite well with Bennet. Perhaps it was because their peculiarities and penchants aligned so closely.\n\n\"I am done with this volume, Drew.\" Bennet closed the book and pushed it away.\n\n\"I will return it to the shelves.\" Drew scurried away.\n\n\"I need something from that section as well. I will go with you.\" Astrid followed.\n\nBennet hung his head, eyes closed.\n\n\"Are you unwell?\" Darcy sat down beside him. The hard, slightly too short chair had grown no more comfortable in the few minutes away from it.\n\n\"Who among us is well right now?\" Bennet raked his thinning hair and laced his hands behind his head. \"Lizzy has always been getting herself in trouble where dragons were concerned. Did she tell you the story of how she introduced herself to a basilisk? Or how she arranged to pull Dug Bedford's bad tooth herself, thus spawning a new call for dental surgeons among dragons?\"\n\n\"I did not hear that latter bit of Dug Bedford's story.\"\n\n\"I have never really given her the credit she deserves for her service to the Order and to dragonkind.\" How small his voice had become.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I have always intended to, eventually. At the time, though, it had seemed inadvisable to praise her uncouth methods. And then after, it always seemed too late and rather difficult to bring up.\" He shrugged, wincing. Was that the pain in his shoulders or his conscience?\n\n\"When she is returned, you must tell her. She would be happy to know of your approval.\"\n\n\"I doubt it would matter to her very much. I rarely see her now. She hardly writes. I do not think my opinion is one that matters to her at all.\" Bennet wrapped his arms around his waist and stared at the blank spot on the table.\n\n\"You have taken the comfortable route for a very long time. Now it sounds as though you may be having some regrets. If you have the opportunity to change that, it seems that a wise man\u2014\"\n\nBennet sniffed and looked aside. \"How is little Anne?\"\n\nNaturally.\n\n\"Sleepless, as I understand her mother to have been at that age. But she is never happier than when in the company of dragons. Little May is at her side as much as April was \u2026 will be at Elizabeth's.\"\n\nBennet nodded, rocking slightly in his chair.\n\n\"She is in a nursery in the attics here. If you like, I will inform Nanny that you are welcome to visit at any time. I am sure Anne would enjoy your company.\"\n\n\"That is kind of you. It sounds like she is very much like her mother.\"\n\n\"I think she is.\"\n\nBennet pursed his lips into too many expressions to clearly identify. \"I had hoped Elizabeth would permit me to assist her in her duties as Sage.\"\n\nDarcy bit his tongue. Now was not the time, nor here the place\u2014\n\n\"I have found the books!\" Quill Driver staggered to the table and dropped four volumes bound in Order-blue on the table, raising a small cloud of dust with an echoing thud. \"Let us each take one.\" He shoved books at them, and one at Drew's currently empty place at the table.\n\nDarcy rubbed his gritty, dusty eyes. What was the point of yet another volume? He needed to do something, not be stuck staring at illegible script about things no one cared anything for.\n\n\"Oh, this is interesting!\" When had Drew returned?\n\n\"What, what?\" Lady Astrid peered over his shoulder.\n\n\"Here, look, a reference to striped forest wyrms. The Keeper calls them Azure-Striped Forest Wyrms. It says he chased them out of his territory because of their venom. It seems touching their blue skins caused paralysis and hallucinations in the farm hands, allowing the wyrms to decimate the poultry, and even a small flock of sheep.\" Drew pointed at various spots on the page.\n\nDarcy shut his volume hard and bolted up from his chair. \"That aligns with the report given by Gardiner's men. I am sure they must be one and the same. What estate is that journal from?\"\n\nQuill Driver checked the frontispiece. \"Nunnington Hall. All these volumes are from there.\"\n\n\"Excellent! Sir Fitzwilliam, hand me your journal. I just heard Longbourn has returned and wishes to speak with you.\" Lady Astrid reached for the thick tome.\n\nDarcy bit his tongue. Best not tempt fate by hoping aloud for good news.\n\nSo many stairs. Five flights down, each growing darker and colder as he descended. Days like today, the entire Blue Order offices seemed like they were made up of stairs.\n\nAt the lowest level, Longbourn met him in the deep shadows at the base of the stairs, pacing. He should have waited in his guest lair. Was he impatient or controlling? Difficult to tell. It was never a good sign when Longbourn paced, though. Wings and hide layered in travel dust: another not-good sign.\n\nHe leaned in, close to Darcy. \"I found something.\"\n\nHis voice rumbled in Darcy's chest. Nothing like being direct. \"Pray tell me.\"\n\n\"The wryms you asked about, they are native to the north.\"\n\nHe probably should not mention that they had found that out themselves. \"How far north?\"\n\n\"Old Northumbria.\"\n\nThere was a lot of territory there. \"Into Scotland as well?\"\n\n\"Possibly, I could not trace them that far. But rumor suggests that they may be native to there, too.\"\n\n\"How widespread are they? Why have we not heard more of them? They are not in any of the common bestiaries.\"\n\nLongbourn sat back on his haunches and folded his wings, like an old man preparing to tell children a tale. \"In the days before men, the wyrms ate the vermin of the forest, but when men came, their livestock was easier prey. So, they have long been the bane of men. They tried to drive the wyrms out. When the wyrms appealed to the major dragons, as the Accords require, the major dragons sided with men and placed the wyrms under great restrictions. The wyrms have a great resentment against men, major dragons, and the Blue Order.\"\n\nDragon's blood! Another class of discontented dragons? Was the very fabric of the Order falling apart around them?\n\nNo, not now. This should be dealt with later. After. \"Did you discover any specific locations where they might be found today?\"\n\n\"There may be more, but Nunnington Hall and Bolton Castle were both mentioned.\"\n\n\"Do I understand correctly? These wyrms have currently been found at Nunnington?\"\n\n\"As I understand, there is a large cluster there that are kept in check by the dragon, Nunnington. Rumor has it several of the wyrms turned up missing in the last few months.\"\n\n\"Nunnington is only thirty miles from the coast at Scarborough. That puts them in easy reach of smugglers. I need to get this information to Matlock. Thank you.\" Darcy turned to leave. Wait, no. What would Elizabeth do? \"Is there anything that might be done for your comfort?\"\n\n\"Send my Keeper down to me. I will be in my lair.\" Longbourn stood and scuffed toward the tunnel.\n\n\"I will see to it.\" Darcy hurried upstairs, stopping briefly to dispatch a footman to Mrs. Collins.\n\nEverything Longbourn had reported made perfect sense. Wyrms were by their nature stupid, resentful creatures. If they had felt themselves oppressed by man and dragon, turning to work against both with smugglers was exactly the sort of thing they would do.\n\nWhile the major dragons were by far the most powerful dragons, the minor ones outnumbered them. Although the Pendragon Treaty and the Accords were almost exclusively drawn up for the interests of the major dragons, the minor dragons benefited from them, too.\n\nBut not nearly so much. Should they band together and reject the Blue Order, the result could be as calamitous as another dragon war.\n\nDragon war.\n\nThose words again. His belly roiled and blood roared in his hear.\n\nThey could not let it come to that.\n\nMatlock's elaborately-carved door stood ajar, so Darcy paused only to knock, announcing his presence, and went directly in.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Matlock snarled, barely looking up from his desk, strewn with cryptic documents.\n\nTall brass candelabras stood on either side of his desk, filling the room with reading light and the bacon-y odor of tallow. What was Matlock studying?\n\nDarcy approached the desk. \"I have information which may assist us in locating Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"Sit, sit and out with it. I have no time for civility.\"\n\nDarcy pulled a chair near and quickly related his conclusions about the azure-striped forest wyrms.\n\nMatlock squeezed his eyes shut, threw his head back and rolled his shoulders. \"Damn. Damn. Damn and bloody hell.\"\n\n\"Excuse me. I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.\"\n\n\"You are off chasing forest wyrms while I have significant issues on my hands.\" Matlock slapped the nearest pile of documents.\n\n\"You do not consider the implications of a minor dragon rebellion significant? Forgive me if I must differ with you on that point.\"\n\n\"Wyrms are stupid and easily manipulated. A few of Gardiner's fancy dried beetles and they will agree to do anything. You have seen that for yourself. How can they measure up to what I am dealing with now?\" He gestured across the piles on his desk. \"General Yates arrived earlier today with more news from the north and east.\"\n\n\"Not good?\" It seemed unlikely that the Grand Cross of the Blue Order Knights brought good tidings.\n\n\"Would you be surprised to learn that Pemberley is at the center of the latest unrest?\"\n\n\"Pemberley? How is that possible? She has not even begun to take part in the regular activities of the Order.\" Surely this was nothing more than rumor and hearsay.\n\n\"And apparently, therein lies the problem. Do you know how long it has been since a major dragon with a territory like Pemberley's has been hatched?\"\n\n\"Not precisely.\"\n\n\"Let us just say, then, that it is a very infrequent occurrence and several major dragons are disgruntled that the natural order of the world has been disrupted by the Accords,\" Uncle Matlock said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The natural way of things, it seems, is that baby dragons hatch without territory and must fight for it, gaining it as they grow, or they are killed by their elders. The Accords did away with those 'natural' ways, assigning territories to each dragon and its heir in perpetuity.\"\n\n\"And the dragons of England agreed to the Accords. I do not understand the problem.\"\n\nUncle Matlock grumbled and huffed under his breath. \"It seems there are those who object to the Accords now they are forced to see an infant major dragon's interests are protected. An estate like Pemberley, territory protected only by the Accords, is not a welcome reminder of the limits placed on major dragons.\"\n\n\"Are not all the major dragons served by that treaty?\"\n\n\"There are those, naturally powerful and cranky, who question that Pemberley's territory should remain unchallenged when the true way of dragonkind is to take what they can get and hold it for themselves. In short, they are intimating that the Treaty, the Accords, and the Order are not to their benefit. They cite our recent decisions against Cornwall as another disruption to the natural way of things. The biggest, most powerful dragon should always prevail. To them, Cornwall should have been permitted to slit Kellynch's belly to retrieve any remaining gold.\"\n\n\"Pendragon's bones!\" Who among the English dragons could possibly hold that such a thing would be beneficial?\n\n\"So, whilst we try to manage this nightmare, you had best give some thought to the defense of Pemberley or if it is even possible. If you have any still there who might be harmed in a hostile dragon takeover, it would be best to get them out now.\"\n\n\"You cannot be serious.\"\n\n\"Serious enough to have a meeting scheduled with Brenin Londinium.\"\n\n\"But he is old and lazy\u2014\"\n\n\"And mostly bored and self-absorbed. I am well aware. And Cornwall, the next in power, is utterly useless as well. That is why I will petition Londinium to make Cownt Matlock Grand Dug with full ministerial authority over the Conclave.\"\n\nDarcy clutched the arm of his chair and tried not to allow his jaw to gape. \"That will send Cornwall into a rage. What say the other dragons of the Council\u2014\"\n\n\"They agree to the necessity of it and will support Cownt Matlock. There are few choices. If a powerful dragon does not step up to counter this threat of rebellion, the Accords will not survive.\"\n\nHe was right.\n\n\"The Dragon Sage is important to this Order and to the dragons of England, but under these circumstances, I can offer no further resources toward her recovery. We must prepare for the possibility of full-scale insurrection.\"\n\nA quarter of an hour later, Darcy dragged himself from Matlock's office, the weight of the news almost too much to carry. How was this possible? He made his way upstairs to the attics by the force of will alone.\n\nNanny welcomed him into the awkward little nursery, scented with lavender and rose. The white walls and mismatched furniture that definitely did not fit the space made for an odd bastion of peace.\n\nA single glance at his face and Nanny offered to step out and allow him time alone with Anne. No telling what she inferred from his expression, but it was probably not far from the truth.\n\nHe gathered little Anne into his arms and settled into a large chair near the fireplace. She looked up at him, her eyes deep and intelligent, just like Elizabeth's. May wound around his feet, sniffing and purring. She could probably smell his anxiety. Tatzelwurms were peculiar that way.\n\nPax perched on the back of his chair, turning her head this way and that, twittering softly until he scratched under her chin.\n\n\"Where is April? Have you seen Walker today?\" Darcy asked.\n\n\"No. I think Walker was flying with the guard today, looking for useful information. April might have gone back to Darcy House to see the housekeeper for more honey or jam. The kitchens here do not seem willing to provide enough for her tastes. Now does not seem to be a good time to try to change her habits.\" Pax twittered a soothing melody.\n\nApril needed still more honey? No, Pax must be in error.\n\nPax and May were lovely creatures, but they were young, and untested. They depended upon him. While he could not blame Walker or April for their absence, tonight he needed the comfort of Friends he could rely on.\n\nIt was up to him and him alone to find Elizabeth now. With so few resources to bring to bear, and orders specifically against it!\n\nHow could they refuse to protect all that was dear to him? Even Pemberley estate was in danger and they offered little. The Order was failing him. Could he just blindly allow it?\n\nBut what could he do? Richard and Netherford had already been sent off on the Order's bidding. Wentworth was in Dover. Perhaps Longbourn could be of more assistance, if he could be trusted not to make things worse. With his temper, it was always a possibility.\n\nBut he was not even Keeper to Longbourn and had no real right to ask anything of him. At least according to the strictures of the Order.\n\nThe rather useless ones.\n\nFather would reprove him for that sentiment and Uncle Matlock declare him seditious.\n\nStill, without April and Walker, he only had a few young fairy dragons and tatzelwurms who might be of help to him. How was he to save his Lady with such an army at his disposal?\n\n\"Elizabeth would say 'think like a dragon and act accordingly.'\" He sighed and scratched under Pax's chin. \"But what would a dragon do in such times? And how am I to do it?\"\n\nPax peered down at May, who nodded a mite and purred louder. What could they possibly be thinking?"
            },
            {
                "title": "January 25, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "\"Five, six, seven, eight!\" Mr. Dodge, the dance master, rapped the floor with his walking stick.\n\nAnne pressed her temples with both hands. The sound echoed off the hardwood floor that had been cleared of furniture and carpet to facilitate their dance lessons in a small second-floor sitting room. With the couch, chairs, and small tables pressed up against the walls, the pale blue room was just large enough for them to form a small dance set and for Mr. Dodge to circle them and criticize\u2014or rather critique, that was what he called his constant barrage of corrections\u2014their steps.\n\nHe was a short man carrying a large stick, the sort of man Wentworth had little respect for. A furry mustache perched above his upper lip like a caterpillar hemmed in by his very high, very starched collar. His tousled hair was held so strongly by some sort of pomade, it would likely have broken had it been touched. Not unlike the seams of his very tightly-fitted tailored jacket that might burst if he breathed too deeply. A Rowlandson caricature if there ever had been one.\n\nShe sniffled and rubbed her nose. Chalk dust that smelt much like the stone floors throughout the offices made them all sneezy. But it did make the floor less slippery, so it was worth tolerating, even if the dance master had complained he was a teacher, not an artist the entire time he chalked the floor. Wonder that he did not burst a seam doing that.\n\nHow kind of the Cotillion Board not to object to their use of the Blue Order offices for such mundane purposes. Not that they had any authority to object, but it was not likely to stop them, in any case.\n\nOf course, it did not hurt that Lady Jersey had pounced on Mr. Dodge as soon as he arrived to review the quadrille steps she wanted to introduce. How lovely Lady Elizabeth's efforts proved so convenient for Lady Jersey\u2014not that it would ever be recognized.\n\n\"That will do, ladies, that will do. Enough of the quadrille.\" He waved them off the floor.\n\nThank heavens! It was not enough that her calves and feet ached, but now her head throbbed in time with the dance master's thumping.\n\n\"Your performance was not dreadful.\" He said that as though it were some kind of a compliment.\n\nIf it was, it would be the first to escape his lips. According to Pax, his cockatrix Dragon Friend was every bit as ill-tempered and particular as he. But that was only a rumor. A very easily believed one.\n\nHe glanced at Anne, eyebrow raised as though he was dealing with a very stupid woman.\n\nHonestly, she could hardly be blamed right now. How could one concentrate on dance steps when waiting, hoping for news from the patrolling fairy dragons? It seemed easy enough for Miss Bennet, who did not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, and for Miss Darcy, whose worry was relieved when Pax had been assigned to the nursery.\n\nThat probably was not fair, not entirely. They were both full young to truly grasp the gravity of what was going on. Miss Darcy was a quiet type of woman who might not show her true sensibilities easily, like her brother.\n\n\"Now for the minuet.\" The dance master clapped sharply and two eager, amiable, and eligible-looking young men appeared in the doorway. \"For the minuet, one must have a partner to learn with and practice with. Here are partners. Mr. Fifett and Mr. Oakley.\"\n\nMiss Bennet bounced on her toes and all but clapped, her broad smile far more enthusiastic than any young lady should be. Miss Darcy simply blushed. She did that a great deal.\n\nThe young men stepped forward and bowed, eyes on their prospective partners.\n\nThe names were familiar from the roster of Dragon Keepers they had been studying. Mr. Gregory Fifett, too rugged to be a dandy, but too polished not to appear to be one at first glance, was the heir of Holmewood, an estate near Bradford in West Yorkshire. Holmewood was a\u2014what was it, surely, she knew\u2014yes, a female wyvern, one of the younger major dragons of the Blue Order.\n\nMr. Allen Oakley had recently inherited his family seat called Ambleside Hall, near Cumbria and Windermere, in the Lake District. Young Mr. Oakley, blonde and blue-eyed, seemed very young, and a mite too innocent, to be charged with Keeping an ill-tempered water wyrm (different from a marine wyrm!). Said wyrm was no doubt the reason for stories circulating of a monster that lived in Lake Windermere.\n\nBoth respectable gentlemen, with minor estate holdings and dragons who did not particularly stand out as important. The sort of gentlemen who could most benefit from connections to young ladies like Miss Bennet and Miss Darcy.\n\nIt was just possible some payment had exchanged hands in the selection of these dance partners. It was the sort of thing Father would have done for Elizabeth had the opportunity arisen.\n\n\"You may go.\" Mr. Dodge waved Anne and Mrs. Collins toward the door. \"Married ladies have no need to show their plumage with a minuet.\"\n\n\"Truly? I have not heard\u2014\" Anne traded glances with Mrs. Collins. Was it married ladies in general, or those with connections to disgraced Blue Order members and the dragon-deaf? Hard to tell.\n\n\"The committee decided that years ago. It is old news. Everyone knows.\" He flashed his brows.\n\nEveryone except the Sage, it seemed. Was he in collusion with the Cotillion Board? No, that did not make sense. He could not risk his students failing at the Cotillion. But, still, something did not smell right.\n\nShe glanced at Mrs. Collins, who was already frowning. Probably sharing in the same line of thinking. Over the last few days, it happened quite often.\n\n\"My sisters need a chaperone. I will stay.\" Mrs. Collins folded her arms across her chest and settled into a chair near the wall.\n\nThe dance master glared at her, but she met him with a far more powerful glower of her own. He grunted and turned to the couples.\n\nAnne headed for a chair next to Mrs. Collins, but Corn appeared in the doorway, a demanding expression on his face. With the new responsibility they bore, the wyrmlings had matured tremendously in just several days. They were much more like their sire than she had expected.\n\n\"Go, I will keep Lydia proper, somehow,\" Mrs. Collins whispered.\n\n\"You must come to the sitting room, now!\" Corn's black and white tail lashed.\n\nThe claws on his thumbed front paws tic-tac'ed on the marble steps while the scales on his serpentine tale whispered softly behind. Anne all but ran upstairs to keep up.\n\nNo, she must walk like a lady and draw no notice to herself and Corn lest anyone suspect what was really going on. It was bad enough that the fairy dragons had been awfully conspicuous by their absence. More prying eyes she could do without.\n\nWalker stood on a small table near the sitting room windows, wings extended, game pieces and board scattered on the floor. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, keening softly while Wall licked at something between his feet.\n\nMerciful heavens!\n\n\"Help. She needs help!\" He opened his wings.\n\nApril lay in an awkward blue heap, blood marring her scale-feathers.\n\n\"Corn, find the Lord Physician, tell him I am bringing April!\" How to transport her without hurting her further? Yes! She dumped Mrs. Collins' work basket and made a little nest with a torn petticoat. \"May I place you in the basket to take you to Sir Edward?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. It is \u2026 not so bad \u2026 only a little blood.\" April's tone declared her a liar.\n\nWall backed away and Anne cradled the broken fairy dragon in both hands.\n\n\"My wing! My wing!\" Who knew fairy dragons could make such a blood-curdling sound?\n\nAnne barely managed to nestle her into the basket without dropping her. The wing was definitely broken.\n\nWould she ever fly again?\n\n\"I killed the hawk that had her, but not before its talons\u2014\" Walker peeked into the basket.\n\n\"She was seen! She was seen\u2026 Not east, west \u2026\" April collapsed.\n\nThank heavens she still breathed.\n\nShe grabbed the basket tight to her chest, and ran out, Walker winged his way ahead of her, scattering all in their path. No chance of keeping April's injuries quiet now.\n\nHe left her at Sir Edward's open door.\n\nSir Edward, already wearing a stained leather apron over his clothes, met her at the doorway. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"She has been careless since Lady Elizabeth's abduction. She got caught by a hawk whilst out today.\" All of that was an entirely true, if incomplete, picture of what had happened.\n\n\"This is very serious.\" He took the basket and strode to a brightly lit table in the middle of the room. Multiple mirrors focused light from the frosted windows and multiple candelabras on the table, throwing the rest of the room into deep shadow. The warmth intensified the herbal perfume filling the air, rather like an apothecary's shop.\n\nWith a touch far gentler than the size of his hands would have suggested, he removed April, still nestled in the petticoat, and peered at her. \"Pray excuse me, but I must understand your injuries.\"\n\nApril groaned, nodding just a bit.\n\nHe expertly turned her over, exposing the gashes to her breast and thigh. \"This\u2014the humerus is displaced from the furcula.\" He pointed to her breastbone. \"Hold her like this whilst I reset it. I fear this will be uncomfortable, April, but necessary.\"\n\nAnne swallowed hard. What was it about this sort of injury that always seemed to find her? She held the fairy dragon firmly.\n\nA swift move of thumb and fingers; April screamed, panted, then sighed. \"Better.\"\n\nWalker swooped in with Sir Fitzwilliam close behind. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Lady Wentworth may be able to tell you how it came about, but I can tell you, she has a broken wing for certain. There are cuts and bruises as well. I do not know yet what sort of internal injuries are present. She is falling into a state of torpor, which is typical of injured fairy dragons. I hope it will work to our advantage, conserving her energies and allowing us time to treat her wounds.\"\n\nSir Fitzwilliam peered over Anne's shoulder. \"Whatever can be done for her, do it. See that she is cared for\u2014\"\n\n\"My care has never been based on the size of the dragon, sir.\" Sir Edward glowered.\n\n\"She is my wife's Friend, and my own \u2026\"\n\n\"I understand. I will do everything possible for her. Leave and permit me to do my work. Walker can stay here with her, but you, both of you, should go.\" He gestured toward the door with uncharacteristic energy.\n\nThey stepped out.\n\n\"Will you join me in the library, Lady Wentworth?\" Sir Fitzwilliam's words had the force of an order, his expression so dark it was nearly frightening.\n\nAnne followed him upstairs and to a corner of the library, with two hard chairs and a small table. Flanked on three sides by bookshelves and the aroma of old books, they were well away from the windows, only the mirrors stationed throughout the space provided light.\n\nHe pulled a chair for her and sat down himself. \"There is something you are not telling me, Lady Wentworth, and it seems rather crucial that I know.\" The strain in his jaw belied the evenness in his tone.\n\n\"I suppose there is something to be said for draconic forthrightness. It does seem to save a great deal of dithering about in a conversation.\" Anne tried to force her features into something pleasing, but it was difficult when she was certain he could hear her racing heart.\n\n\"It does indeed. I expect, madam, we are on the same side here. We both seek to see Elizabeth and the rest returned safely as soon as may be possible.\"\n\n\"You are not satisfied with the steps the Order is taking towards their recovery.\"\n\nSir Fitzwilliam sighed. \"There are many priorities for the Order which all compete for a finite number of resources.\" His lips tightened into an expression of pure frustration.\n\nOh, the amount he was not saying! Wentworth had intimated some of the possible priorities before he had left\u2014none of them were good news.\n\n\"I suppose that is why your sisters, their Friends, and I have sought to devise a strategy to increase the available resources.\"\n\nDid it hurt when his eyes opened that wide? \"I do not understand. What resources?\"\n\n\"April and the other fairy dragons expressed deep concerns that since one of their kind is at the center of this incident, it would reflect poorly on their species. Since they are at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, they fear it could go very poorly for them in the future if something were to happen to the Sage.\"\n\n\"I would like to argue they are being silly twitter-pates, but I cannot. Once one begins listening to fairy dragons, what they say makes more and more sense. I believe the same is true of tatzelwurms, who are just above them in status. Rumblkins at Longbourn estate has found a way to be Friends with a woman who cannot even hear dragons. It is quite the relationship, to be certain. I know of no other dragon who has managed such a feat. It is worthy of respect, and understanding.\"\n\nIf anyone could be trusted, it was he. She swallowed hard. \"Then I am sure you will respect the fairy dragons' insistence that they should be allowed to help in the recovery efforts. It was their belief they might be able to discover information that others could not. Their very lowness would make them privy to gossip and information others would not have.\"\n\nHe braced his hands on the edges of his chair and leaned forward. \"Spies? The fairy dragons decided to become spies?\"\n\n\"After a fashion.\"\n\n\"But they are prey! The danger\u2014\"\n\n\"Obviously, you are correct. And believe me, it was discussed. But they argued, and I believe rightly so, that they deserved the right to bring their unique skills and abilities to bear to save Lady Elizabeth, and, I believe, themselves as well.\"\n\n\"Dragon bones! Who would have thought them willing, much less able\u2014\"\n\n\"April knew what she was risking and did so quite willingly. We are all fortunate Walker followed her out today and was there to rescue her.\"\n\n\"Did she say anything?\"\n\n\"Very little before the torpor set in. Only that Elizabeth had been seen.\"\n\n\"Seen? Where? When?\"\n\n\"A general direction, I think, but I do not know anything more specific.\"\n\n\"Damn, damn, damn, damn!\" Sir Fitzwilliam slammed his fist on the table, nearly toppling it. He fumbled to keep it upright. \"Pray excuse me.\"\n\n\"I am married to a sailor, sir. It will take far more than that to offend me. Unfortunately, all we can do now is to trust Sir Edward's ministrations and wait for April to awaken and give us her news.\"\n\n\"Will the other fairy dragons continue their efforts?\"\n\n\"After this, I do not think they can be stopped, although I expect Walker and whomever he can recruit from among his cockatrice acquaintances will be watching over them from here on out. Unless there is anything else, I should go to your sisters and tell them what happened. I will let the other fairy dragons know as well, when they return.\"\n\n\"You will keep me apprised of any news?\" He stood and held her chair. Was that gratitude in his eyes?\n\n\"Absolutely. Pray excuse me.\"\n\nMrs. Collins needed to be told of this first. Breaking the news to Miss Darcy would be difficult, she was so very sensitive. Miss Bennet would handle it much better. She was made of sterner stuff.\n\nBut perhaps\u2014yes, that made sense.\n\nFirst a letter."
            },
            {
                "title": "January 27, 1815, Dover",
                "text": "Wentworth rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The Blue Order offices in Dover provided only a single candle for his small room. Not precisely the best light for reading.\n\nNothing about the room was precisely the best. The bed, the chair, the press, the desk, all functional but nothing more. Not even pleasant to look at, the sort of articles that just faded into the background as they performed their purpose unremarkably.\n\nDover was hardly an important office, though it should have been. With access to the coast and the dragons there, and its proximity to France, it could have been an important hub of Order business.\n\nInstead, the Regional Undersecretary for Kent was adequate to his task, visiting the Dover office precisely as often as necessary, no more. The Blue Order offices were adequate, managing the Keeps and other Blue Order business, exactly as the Accords said they should. The Dover office was adequate, providing exactly what it should, and nothing more. His room was adequate \u2026\n\nDamn it all, adequate was not enough! They had little to offer and little incentive to put forth more than minimal efforts.\n\nHe stared at Anne's letter again, placed squarely in the center of the small writing desk. It smelt of her. The firm, practical loops of her handwriting managed to sound like her voice. If only she were here, too.\n\nShe was convinced there was something useful in the fairy dragons' intelligence, even if it was incomplete and sparse at best. But fairy dragons? Truly, who could take the creatures seriously? All fluff and twitter and nary a bit of sense.\n\nLaconia bumped his hand with his black furry head. \"Mrrooow.\"\n\nRather like the general opinion of tatzelwurms.\n\nBut Laconia was different. From the moment he cracked shell amidst those Gibraltar apes, he was different. He was thoughtful, serious, and sensible, not like those other tatzelwurms. Not even Corn and Wall had his clear-mindedness.\n\nThen again, Anne's letter detailed how very practical and useful the twins had become once given a purpose. Laconia had always had a purpose at sea with him.\n\nMaybe there was something more to tatzelwurms, and to fairy dragons, than was commonly accepted.\n\n\"You are agitated. What is in that letter?\" Laconia spring-hopped to the desk and put his thumbed paw on the paper.\n\n\"I do not know what to make of it. Anne tells me the fairy dragons have been seeking information on the Sage's whereabouts.\"\n\n\"That is a good thing. I do not understand why it did not happen sooner.\" Laconia sat back on his tail and licked his paw.\n\n\"So, you support the notion?\"\n\n\"No one minds their tongue around a fairy dragon any more than to a tatzelwurm or a servant.\" He had a good point. \"What did the fairy dragons say?\"\n\n\"April, the Sage's Friend, was badly injured and said little before falling into torpor. All we know is that the Sage was seen and in the west. It is very little to go on. But I have also received word from Matlock to continue our efforts here, in Dover\u2014\"\n\n\"Which is east from London.\" The tip of Laconia's serpentine tail flicked. He was annoyed.\n\n\"\u2014and to interview the major dragons of Kent. It seems there is a great deal of unrest among them, and the Order needs to understand its extent.\"\n\n\"You intend to do that?\"\n\nWentworth stood and stretched. \"Ordinarily I would. That is what an officer does. He follows orders.\"\n\n\"Not when they are stupid.\" Laconia licked his paw and slicked it over his face.\n\n\"Yes, even when they seem stupid, my Friend. I know you know that. More than once, you questioned, we questioned, our orders, but we followed them.\"\n\n\"As Captain, you made many decisions on your own. Good decisions.\"\n\n\"It is different on land.\" Damn it all, everything felt different and foreign here.\n\n\"If we do not act, the Sage may be lost.\"\n\n\"What is there to act upon? West? That is hardly an actionable piece of information.\"\n\n\"Come.\" Laconia hopped to the floor. \"We must discuss this with Kellynch.\" He spring-hopped for the door and slithered through.\n\nWentworth huffed and followed. He did not need a conference, he needed clarity, information \u2026 orders that he could follow in good conscience.\n\nDamn.\n\nLaconia did not look back as he led the way down the cobblestone street, to the beach, and the secluded cove where Kellynch had made a waterside lair. Wentworth fought to catch his breath, sweat trickling down the back of his neck despite the nip in the air and steady sea breeze.\n\nLaconia was rarely in such a hurry.\n\nShrubs and a few small trees obscured the cliffside in the little cove, helped by the shadow of the cliff. Waves lapped on the rocky beach, giving no evidence of the extensive passageway hidden in the cliff face.\n\n\"There is news?\" Kellynch slithered from the shadows, his whiskers crumpled and hide muddy. The cave there was not large enough for his comfort, but he seemed willing to endure the privation in hopes of being useful to the Order.\n\n\"After a fashion.\" Wentworth quickly related the contents of the letter.\n\n\"Fairy dragons? They are silly bits of fluff.\" Kellynch snorted. \"Still, has any other information come forth?\"\n\n\"Neither Anne nor Darcy has heard anything.\"\n\nKellynch exchanged a conversation of glances with Laconia. \"In the absence of other information, does it not make sense to pursue this?\"\n\nTruly? The dragons agreed? \"How does one pursue 'west' as information? Besides, Cornwall's territory is to the west and you cannot go there.\"\n\n\"That is true enough, but there is a great deal west that is not his territory.\" Kellynch snorted and wrinkled his snout. Cornwall would always be a very sore point with him.\n\n\"Matlock has ordered us to seek out the landed dragons in Kent, to interview them. He is concerned\u2014\"\n\n\"That there is discontent among them? I do not need to talk to them to know that is true.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\nDid Kellynch just roll his eyes? Who knew dragons were capable of that expression? \"The small dragons of their territory, they talk and I listen.\"\n\n\"Why would they talk to a major dragon about such things?\"\n\n\"Wyrms are the lowest among the major dragons. We are more approachable. All creatures appreciate being listened to. The minor dragons of the estates are supposed to be protected from me by their lairds, according to charter. So, it is safe to approach me to converse. I am sympathetic to their plight.\" Kellynch bunched his length in something that looked like a shrug.\n\n\"What have they been telling you?\"\n\n\"Their lairds are angry at the loss of the Sage and are losing faith in the Order and its promises.\"\n\n\"Over just one woman?\"\n\n\"She is not just one woman.\" Laconia snarled softly.\n\nThat was unusual.\n\n\"She is the Sage. She is the first human in our recollection who thinks like a dragon and understands us, represents our interests properly. That the Order would not feel her loss as deeply as we do is an insult of the highest order.\"\n\nA chill snaked down his back. Something in Kellynch's tone. This was deadly serious. \"I had no idea. I am certain Matlock does not, either.\"\n\nLaconia made a sound deep in his throat that could have passed for muttering.\n\n\"And therein lies the problem. The warm-bloods have ignored so many draconic concerns for so long, making this final insult nigh on intolerable. If the Sage is not recovered, I am not sure the Blue Order will survive.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, but you are so new to the Order yourself, how can you possibly know that?\"\n\n\"Those in high places talk to the low, thinking that those below them can do or will do nothing with the information.\" Kellynch seemed to shrug again.\n\n\"So, you would suggest\u2014\"\n\n\"That you ignore Matlock and think like a dragon,\" Laconia hissed through his teeth.\n\nIs that not what the Sage was said to do? \"I do not know how to think like a dragon. I am new to this world myself.\"\n\nKellynch swung his head in broad sweeps from side to side. \"But I am not. I am a dragon and know how to respond. Ignore Matlock's dithering and get us to the west. Laconia and I can begin talking to the sea-faring cockatrice. Dover's pod are not the only sea dragons. Perhaps once we are out of their territory, we can find some who will talk to us.\"\n\n\"You do realize what this means? Going against the Blue Order's direction? Your territory can be removed from you. Your admission to the Order can be revoked.\"\n\n\"So, I will go back to the sea and make my way there. There is plenty of unoccupied territory I could claim in the ocean. I fear it is you and Anne who will suffer the most if this goes badly.\"\n\nHe was right. What would Anne say?\n\nShe was the one who had sent him the information.\n\n\"Laconia? You will be affected by this, too.\"\n\nHis tail lashed, tossing beach rocks aside. \"I have told you already. You should not waste any more time.\"\n\nWentworth drew a deep breath. \"We will head west as soon as I can arrange a small ship and dragon-hearing crew.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "January 27, 1815, On board the Sea Lion",
                "text": "How many days had passed since the door locked behind them and the once-fresh bed of straw began to grow stale and musty in their shadowy, dank confines? Joshua sat near Phoenix's cage, knees drawn to his chest, watching the cluster of guarding wyrms in the far corners, fascinated. The younger pair, Indigo and Lapis, seemed to return the sentiment, frequently staring at him as though to work out what he was about.\n\nElizabeth stood and stretched. Too many, far too many days here. Where was \"here?\" Near-constant storms had beset them. How had that affected their journey toward Bermuda?\n\nAnd what would they do when they got there?\n\nHad there been any progress made toward finding them? Darcy would move heaven and earth and the Blue Order if necessary to recover them. What was he doing now? How many dragons had come to his side to help? Perhaps this might be a rallying point that would see major dragons working together in ways they had not before?\n\nMaybe, somehow, this would be a good thing for dragonkind\u2026\n\nWhat was she thinking? Dragons were always difficult and stubborn and often self-centered. If there were a way to make things even worse, that is what would happen.\n\nAnd Darcy would have to handle it and little Anne all alone.\n\nThis was not the way it was supposed to be. They were supposed to be together, managing affairs of home and hearth and dragon side by side. He had a way of seeing, of understanding, of planning different to her own. One she needed, especially now.\n\nCould she manage to think like him and like a dragon, too?\n\nDarcy would want to know about Bermuda and what could be expected there. She had read something about Bermuda at one point, but what was it?\n\nShe paced the length of the hold, across the weak sunlight filtering through the grate above them. Sometime in the recent days, she had got the knack, more or less, of traversing the undulating deck.\n\nGround that stayed firm beneath was definitely underappreciated.\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her temples.\n\nYes! Bermuda's first local parliament sat in 1612, well after the Pendragon Treaty came into being. Self-governing, with preferential treatment toward its own citizens; that meant if any Blue Order authorities existed on the island, they would have no power to enforce the treaty. It would be difficult to find any sort of legal aid. Without identification or a male relative, a woman and a boy would likely have little standing in court. Especially with the claims that Corney would no doubt make about them.\n\nBut surely there were dragons in Bermuda. There had to be. They could be prevailed upon for aid. Surely, they would be sympathetic and helpful, would they not?\n\nDragons had always been so before.\n\nA key jangled in the lock and the door groaned open. One of the two scruffy men who had transported them to Portsmouth shambled in, a tray with foodstuffs in his hands and a pail over his arm. He slipped a small fish into Phoenix's cage, handed bowls with hardtack, some sort of stew, and grog to her and Joshua, and set the pail down in the middle of the hold as he backed out and relocked the door.\n\nPhoenix set upon his meager rations with the ferocity of a tiny, hungry cockatrice. Semi-starvation had begun to take its toll on his color and energy.\n\n\"Do you think Mama will let me have grog when we get back? I think I have developed a taste for it.\" Joshua took a sip and winked at her.\n\nHe was a good lad, a brave, sturdy one for certain. His mask of calm and bravado did an excellent job hiding the fear that only revealed itself when he muttered in his sleep.\n\nPrussian slithered out of the corner shadows towards the dented rusty pail. He circled it, tasting the air around it with his long, forked tongue. Finally, he shoved it over, sending greasy meat scraps slopping across the floor. Azure, Indigo and Lapis, in that order, approached the puddle, waiting until Prussian took the first gobbet of meat. Then they fell into a feeding frenzy, just shy of a complete loss of control. Like Phoenix, their rations were inadequate, but it was better than hardtack.\n\nIn a very few minutes, Indigo and Lapis, the smaller wyrms, licked the floor clean as Prussian and Azure scoured the bucket. For all his ill-temper and scarred visage, Prussian was a reasonable leader, maintaining a dominance structure but ensuring the smaller members of his cluster received a fair share of their paltry provisions.\n\nDid all clusters operate this way? Fairy dragon harems all functioned similar to one another, but drake communities varied widely. Which did forest wyrms resemble? This was the first opportunity she ever had to interact with them so closely.\n\nElizabeth fished meat chunks out of her stew and held them out. The two females slithered close, Azure, with her red head knob, leading Lapis to eat from Elizabeth's hands.\n\n\"It was your doing. You made them bring meat.\" Azure slipped in close against Elizabeth's skirt, careful to make sure her blue hide did not touch bare flesh.\n\n\"When you spoke, they listened. They not listen to us.\" Lapis slid in along Elizabeth's other side.\n\nShe could not contain a sigh of contentment. For the first time since they had been forced upon this horrid vessel, something felt right.\n\n\"What means that sound?\" Prussian's missing fang left him with a peculiar lisp.\n\n\"I suppose it means I am glad to have all of you near. At home we have many house dragons, and I am used to having them close by.\"\n\n\"It is true,\" Joshua said. \"There are Slate and Amber, Friends of the housekeeper and butler, and the maid's puck Friend, I cannot recall her name, and April and Pax and \u2026\"\n\n\"Why you live with so many?\" Azure turned her head sideways, rather like April did when she was puzzled.\n\nHeavens, it was difficult not to scratch her under her blue-scaled chin. \"I suppose because I like them.\"\n\n\"No one likes wyrms.\" Lapis stretched toward Joshua for a scratch.\n\n\"That is not true,\" Joshua's attempt at an authoritative tone proved more cute than convincing. \"I like you very much.\"\n\n\"We are only ever liked for our stripes.\" Indigo muttered from near the spilt pail.\n\n\"She does not need to know that.\" Prussian's tail lashed.\n\n\"What harm is there? She got us meat.\" Azure rested her head in Elizabeth's lap.\n\n\"Getting meat is not the same thing as freeing us from the dragons.\" Prussian hissed as though to punctuate his opinion. \"It sounds like she is a Keeper, in league with the big ones.\"\n\n\"What dragons?\" The air around the wyrms seemed to crackle with the pending revelation. Something very important; surely it was.\n\n\"The ones who kept us.\" Lapis pressed into her side, making herself small.\n\nThat was a fear reaction. She scanned the wyrms' faces. Each wore the mien of prey not predator. \"What dragons do that? I have never heard of dragons keeping other dragons.\"\n\n\"The Blue Order knows. We have sent word.\" Prussian snarled. \"Our pleas for help were ignored.\"\n\n\"I do not know that they were ever heard, sometimes\u2014\"\n\n\"They were heard. The cockatrice that brought them said they were dismissed by the regional undersecretary of North Umbria.\" Prussian held his nose up like a man looking down upon another.\n\n\"There is no office by that name. It is an old name, not often used anymore. Perhaps the cockatrice was not \u2026 accurate.\" She meant honest, but that would not likely facilitate the conversation. \"Where are you from? What territory?\" Northumbria could mean Northumberland, in Ireland, or Yorkshire, Tyne or Wear, perhaps all of them. Or even none.\n\n\"Nunnington's hold,\" Azure said.\n\nNunnington Hall! \"Sir Bellingham, the baronet and deputy lieutenant for the North Riding of Yorkshire is Keeper, is he not?\" Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut. There was something about that Keep\u2026 Yes! Peter Loschy was buried in the church there as the slayer of the Loschy Dragon. That was the popular story, but it had been shaped by the Blue Order.\n\nThe grave actually belonged to Sir Walter de Teyes, the Lord of Nunnington Hall in 1300. The dragon, the ancestor of the current Nunnington, was not killed by Loschy or any other, but rather, officially agreed to a Blue Order Charter and accepted Teyes as Keeper.\n\nThe dragon slayer myth was a convenient way to explain the disappearance of the local dragon and the rise in favor Teyes appeared to enjoy.\n\nBut neither Nunnington nor the Keeper there had ever formed more than a passing acquaintance even into the current generation. They occupied separate spheres, much as men and women usually did. Which meant that it was hardly a well-managed Keep according to Blue Order standards.\n\n\"The Keeper likes his sport more than his dragon.\" Azure snorted and tensed.\n\n\"His dragon likes her sport, too.\" Indigo drew closer.\n\n\"Dragon sports? This is new to me. Pray tell me more.\" Elizabeth laid a hand on each of the nearby females. Their rising agitation needed some soothing presence. Hopefully they would not become too distraught and bite her inadvertently.\n\n\"She is a lazy, lonely wyrm. She wants for company and for entertainment.\" Azure pressed her head into Elizabeth's hand. Frightened, definitely frightened.\n\nThose were needs the Keeper should have been attending.\n\n\"The old Keeper wanted us gone from the land, said we ate too much from his property. Nunnington took to chasing us. Even invited other big dragons to join her hunts.\" Lapis wailed into Elizabeth's skirts.\n\n\"They tried to eat us.\" Indigo shuddered.\n\nElizabeth gasped and pulled the wyrms in a little closer. A landed dragon was supposed to protect those in their Keep, particularly those minor dragons who had imprinted upon humans, whether or not they had Friends.\n\n\"But they did not understand our defense.\" Prussian rose high on his tail and flared his head, cobra-like, reveling swaths of bright blue, otherwise hidden. \"Our poison works on major dragons.\"\n\n\"Not well.\" Azure curled into a knot. \"When they tried to swallow us, they had strange sensations. Seeing and feeling things. They no longer bored.\"\n\n\"They liked us very much for that.\" Lapis wrapped herself into a tight ball.\n\nIndigo slithered closer. \"We amused, they said. They collected us. Nunnington divided us among her friends. They kept us trapped in their lairs.\"\n\nPrussian rose up higher, his body puffing. \"She would lick our blue when she grew bored. Wanted those sensations. Then return us to the cavern.\"\n\n\"We were trapped; held captive!\" Azure bolted away and twined around Prussian. \"A heavy storm caused a mudslide that allowed the river into the cavern. We escaped, but there are more of us held.\"\n\nJoshua gasped and extended a protective arm around Lapis.\n\n\"Pendragon's bones!\" Elizabeth pressed her fist to her mouth. No wonder they had fallen in with the smugglers. \"I had no idea! No dragon is ever to be held against their will except by official judicial action. This cannot continue. When I return to the Order, I will launch an investigation\u2014you must tell me the names of all the major dragons involved. If I have to, I will go to those estates myself. I will see that the others are freed and those who held them are punished.\"\n\nMajor dragons, like the peerage, were always wont to see how much propriety they could flout, often treating the Order's rules as flexible according to their whims. But this? This was utterly beyond the pale.\n\n\"You can do that?\" Prussian leaned closer, eyes narrowed, studying.\n\n\"She can and she will do it, too.\" Joshua whispered. \"She is angry now, and no one, not even dragons stand in her way when she is angry\u2014\"\n\n\"Who is Lady Warm-Blood that the Order would listen\u2014\"\n\nThe door lock rattled and they all jumped. The wyrms scattered to their corners.\n\nCorney shambled in. Had his foot-dragging limp become more pronounced in the days since they had seen him last? Ayles, carrying himself a little less gentlemanly than before, with dirty shirt and boots, followed several steps behind. Was he angry, impatient, or simply tired? Or all three?\n\n\"Seems like you 'et all that were put in front of ye. Now that you been fed, it be time to do what you were brought to do.\" Corney pointed a scarred finger at Phoenix.\n\nPhoenix huddled in the corner of the cage, trembling. His matted red feather-scales lay limp against his body, his eyes big and round.\n\n\"Time to breathe fire.\" Ayles lifted the cage to eye level. \"We will have it now.\"\n\n\"Not now.\" Phoenix twittered, trying to sound big, but only managing frail and hollow.\n\n\"None of that nonsense now. You gots no choice.\" Corney balanced his fists on his hips.\n\n\"I am too weak.\"\n\nAyles shook the cage, bouncing Phoenix like a stuffed doll inside.\n\n\"Stop!\" Elizabeth grabbed for the cage. \"He is telling you the truth. He is too weak to even fly, can you not see! He cannot breathe fire under these circumstances.\"\n\n\"What circumstances exactly do you mean?\" Ayles stared directly into her eyes with a cold predatory gaze.\n\nHer breath hitched, but she forced words. \"He is cold and half-starved. I was not exaggerating when I told you his kind need to eat four times a day, at least. You give him meat, but not nearly enough. He is half-starved. And he is cold! His kind hibernate in the cold. He cannot help it. He needs to be in the warmth, the sunshine.\"\n\n\"It don't bother them none.\" Corney pointed at the wyrms huddling in the corner.\n\n\"They are of a different kind, who tolerate the cold better. They are as much alike as a pigeon is to a snake.\"\n\n\"A dragon's a dragon! That's what Scarlett said.\" Ayles stood so close she could feel his fetid breath on her face.\n\n\"No, they are not. No more than a horse is a whale or a boy. They are all different to one another and need different things. The wyrms are hungry, too, but do not need as much food as a \u2026 baby firedrake. They are from the north of England so tolerate the cold better. You cannot demand a performance if you do not take care of him properly.\"\n\nCorney stared at her for a long, uneasy moment. \"I do not think we understand each other, missy.\" He waved toward the door and Nickleby, filthy, hunched and scarred, shambled in. \"Take the boy. Ayles, bring the cage.\" He grabbed Elizabeth's arm. \"You come with me.\"\n\nJoshua screamed and kicked, but Nickleby tucked him up under his arm and hauled him out.\n\nEverything in her demanded she do the same. But to what use? In the middle of a cold, unforgiving ocean, what escape could there be? None, unless she found allies. And to do that, she needed her wits, and her strength. Struggling now would provide neither.\n\nCorney dragged her up a ladder to the deck, wrenching her shoulder in the process. Burning brightness assaulted her eyes. How long had it been since she had seen the sun full on? Though the chill wind scoured her face, the sunbeam's warmth still penetrated.\n\nShe forced her eyes open. Sea to the horizon in every direction. Nothing else.\n\nSo very alone.\n\nCorney forced her to the side railing, where several scraggly sailors waited. \"I'm gettin' tired of waiting on your baby scaly, missy, real tired. Ain't gonna wait much longer.\" He turned to Phoenix. \"Just so you be clear at what's what. Take her.\"\n\nThe sailors grabbed her arms and legs and tossed her over the railing. She landed with a thud into a small boat tied off just a few feet below the edge.\n\nJoshua and Phoenix screamed.\n\n\"Let her down, boys. Show 'er what the ocean be like without our kind assistance.\" Corney's voice seemed so far away.\n\nShe scrambled to sit up as the dinghy shuddered and bumped against the hull, descending toward the lapping waves. From the corner of her eye, the garish yellow Sea Lion figurehead, horrid unnatural creature, grinned at her, as though laughing at her plight.\n\nThe dinghy smacked the water with a tooth-jarring thump. The ropes securing it to the sloop fell away and it drifted back. Only a single line, tied to the front of the dinghy, tethered it to the sloop.\n\nSo thin, so frail. If anything should happen to that line \u2026\n\nShe held her breath against a welling scream. It would do no good. Demonstrating they could frighten her had no benefit. Shading her eyes, she peered up at the looming ship. Ayles held Phoenix's cage up so he could see her. Joshua peeked over the railing, horror in his eyes. It seemed as though Corney were speaking, but his words were lost to the sea.\n\nChill winds, waves splashed, dousing her thin garments with pure cold. She huddled down as far as she could, letting the hull provide a break from the winds. How long would they leave her here? Would they cut the rope? If they did, what then?\n\nHer teeth chattered, and she shivered, ears and nose and hands aching. A small blanket lay tucked up on one of the seats. Coarse and musty, it broke some of the chill. Perhaps there was something else\u2026\n\nNo. No oars, no food, nothing of use.\n\nUtterly and completely dependent on that single line to the Sea Lion. The figurehead laughed at her, mocking. So much like a dragon, but not\u2014mythical and useless.\n\nThe boat jolted with a resounding blow against the side. She screamed and clutched the nearest seat.\n\nA long, silvery speckled nose peeked over the side, horse-like, with large blue eyes and long lashes. A silver fin ran down its dark-streaked back like a mane. He resembled White, the Crofts hippocampus Friend.\n\nSea dragons!\n\n\"What are you? What are you doing here?\" What an odd, watery quality to the creature's voice.\n\n\"I am an officer of the Blue Order, the Dragon Sage. I am here as a captive, against my will. Pray, will you help me and the others who are held prisoner?\"\n\nThe creature bobbed with the rough waves, blinking slowly, studying her. \"Why would I meddle in the affairs of sailing men? They only bring trouble to us.\"\n\n\"I am not a part of them. They are not a part of the Blue Order.\"\n\nThe hippocampus whistled a sound between a nicker and a whinny. \"What is the Blue Order to me? To my pod? They are nothing to us. What authority, what importance do they have here?\" It pawed the water with its glistening front hooves. \"None, that is the answer, none. We are many here in the ocean, and they have ignored us. Why should we do otherwise?\"\n\nWhy indeed? \"I will represent your cause to the Order\u2014\"\n\n\"You are adrift in a craft you cannot even move. The water is too cold for you to swim if you could even manage such a simple task\u2014which I must strongly doubt. How precisely will you do that? What value has any promise you make now?\"\n\nHow did one answer such a challenge?\n\n\"No, we have no need of you.\" The creature dove, slapping a wave up over the side with its tail, catching Elizabeth in the face.\n\nShe stared into the sea, but it did not reappear.\n\nThe sea-dragon had just cut her.\n\nThat never happened."
            },
            {
                "title": "January 30, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "The sun rose and the world was as utterly upside down as it had been when Darcy retired the night before. He tossed the sheets and counterpane aside, resenting the bed for being empty beside him, especially when it smelt of lavender and her.\n\nHow totally unreasonable to be angry at a piece of furniture, but how could a man be reasonable under such conditions? Pacing the floor, the thin carpet, scratchy underfoot, one more detail that was simply not right.\n\nDragon's fire.\n\nHis valet arrived to prepare him for the day, silently presenting him with a newspaper and a very strong cup of coffee. Both probably essential before he dare face polite company. Or in Matlock's case, not so polite.\n\nTruly, how could he be expected to trundle off to Pemberley when Richard and Wentworth were sent off to do something that had the potential at least for being useful in recovering Elizabeth?\n\nFrom the cracked-leather wing chair near the fireplace, he scanned the newspaper for any scrap of pertinent information. It was surprising how often dragon-related articles appeared, if one knew what to look for.\n\nNaturally there was nothing beyond what Parliament would do about the smuggled tea and silk.\n\nHe drained his coffee and banged the cup against the small table with a satisfying thud.\n\nIf only April had been able to communicate her intelligence before losing consciousness. How long would it take for her to awaken?\n\nOr would she at all?\n\nHis throat spasmed so hard he could not draw breath. He sprang up and staggered to the window and shoved the transom open. Cold, fresh, London-smelling air poured in. Gulping and choking, he managed to draw one breath, then another. He panted, ribs aching, leaning heavily on the windowsill.\n\nPray, no. No more loss, not now.\n\nWalker swooped in through the door left open to the dragons' and servants' corridors and landed on the back of the wing chair. \"She has awoken!\"\n\n\"She is well?\" Darcy whirled so fast the room spun.\n\nWalker flipped his wings neatly to his back. \"It seems she will recover, but she is hardly well. Her wing will not be healed for weeks and it will be some time after that before she regains the strength to fly. If she is even able to again. She still has pain from the talon wounds and the scars could be significant.\"\n\n\"But she will recover?\" He balled his fists so hard they trembled.\n\n\"So it appears. She wants to talk to you.\"\n\nDarcy dashed out. He probably should have taken leave from Walker, but he would understand. His concern for April might have been greater than Darcy's own.\n\nHe pounded down the main stairs, like a mannerless adolescent, nearly knocking over several proper folk on his way. Thankfully, Sir Edward's Pa snake carved door was open. Good, otherwise Darcy might have torn that down to get inside.\n\nEarthy herbal scents filled his lungs as the room's quiet penetrated his anxious mantle. Somehow calming, reassuring, the promise of a healer who truly knew his craft.\n\nSir Edward met him just steps inside and led Darcy through the neat main room to a door beside a bookcase that carried all of Elizabeth's monographs. He restrained the impulse to take one and pore over it, just to hear Elizabeth's voice on the page.\n\nThe plain, narrow door opened to a small, warm stillroom, bundles of drying herbs hanging from the ceiling. Frosted transom windows lined the wall and lit the narrow space. Wall-mounted shelves lined the entire space, laden with bottles and boxes and equipment he did not recognize. A narrow work table occupied the center of the room, a basket surrounded by warm bricks in the center.\n\n\"April.\" Darcy peered into her basket, radiant warmth touching his face and hands.\n\nA bright blue mass of scabs and ragged feather-scales puddled in the center of the pale cotton-wool lining. Squinting, he could make out the outline of a beak and a face, bright eyes blinking up at him. \"How are you feeling? You have been sorely missed.\"\n\nApril lifted her head just a mite. \"Has she been found?\"\n\n\"No, yours has been the only intelligence. But you collapsed before telling us more than that she had been seen. Pray, what did you find?\" He smoothed her ruffled head feathers.\n\n\"A sea-faring cockatrice heard that she was seen in Portsmouth. Possibly with Cornwallis Jackson\u2014\"\n\nThat name! How many times had he seen it in various reports recently? Even in the paper today! What had that article said?\n\n\"She was taken aboard a ship, a\u2026 what was it called? Bermuda Sloop, no, that was not the name. It had a yellow creature on the front, a lion of some sort. Perhaps \u2026 yes \u2026 The Sea Lion. Heading toward Bermuda.\"\n\n\"When, do you know when?\"\n\n\"How long have I slept?\"\n\n\"Five days.\"\n\n\"Perhaps ten days ago. But \u2026 but storms. Many storms. There were storms, strong enough to confuse the navigator and slow their progress.\"\n\n\"Thank you! That is excellent, excellent news! You have been so brave to accomplish this. I am proud of you and I know,\" he swallowed hard, \"I know that she will be as well.\"\n\n\"Go, find her, find her now. I need to sleep.\" April fell back into the cotton-wool nest, snoring softly.\n\nSir Edward tapped his shoulder and beckoned him to follow, shutting the narrow door behind them.\n\n\"I believe she is out of danger now. She is a hardy little soul. Not many of her kind survive a hawk.\" Sir Edward pushed his glasses higher up his nose. \"You may send Walker back\u2014I doubt you could keep him away. She is not strong enough for other visitors yet. I would not have called you down except she was desperate to give you her news. I trust it was worth it?\"\n\n\"Indeed it was. Will she be able to fly again?\"\n\n\"I cannot say, but if it is up to stubbornness, then I am sure she will. It is best to let her rest now. I will send for you when it is safe for her to have company.\" Sir Edward escorted him out, shutting the door behind him.\n\nDarcy leaned against the door, letting his head fall back against it and drawing his first unencumbered breath in days.\n\nSoft footsteps approached. \"Sir Fitzwilliam? Walker came for me. He said she was awake.\"\n\nThank heavens it was Lady Wentworth and not one of the many people he would rather not see now. April's injuries had become the point of a great deal of gossip and speculation.\n\n\"She has fallen back to sleep now, but I am told she is expected to recover. I am sure Sir Edward will tell you more.\"\n\n\"Thank heavens!\" Anne pressed her hand to her chest, leaned closer and dropped her voice. \"Was she able to tell you anything?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I am going to Matlock with that word right now.\"\n\n\"Pray tell me what he says.\" Something in her expression said there was more to be told, but it would have to wait.\n\nHe bowed and all but ran to Matlock's office, earning not a few disapproving glances along the way.\n\nThe wide door with the Order's seal was shut. He rapped politely. Once, twice, thrice.\n\nNo answer.\n\nHe pounded a satisfying tattoo with his fist.\n\nMatlock yanked the door open. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"I have word on Elizabeth.\"\n\nMatlock grumbled and opened the door enough for him to enter. \"Come in and tell us what you know.\"\n\nThree imposing men sat around Matlock's central desk, obscuring the painted Chancellor's seal. Three candelabras behind the desk lit an array of maps and lists and notes strewn across the desktop.\n\nGeneral Strickland looked over his shoulder at Darcy, the dark patch over one eye even more severe in the uneven candlelight. Admiral Easterly sat beside him, his white hair ragged and unkept.\n\n\"Darcy, General Abbot, General Yates.\" Matlock gestured at the two men just beyond Easterly.\n\nGeneral Abbot, the Blue Order's Chief Army Liaison to His Majesty's Army, acknowledged Darcy with a nod. He had gone to school with Darcy's father and had once stayed at Pemberley. His manners were gentlemanly and his conversation informed. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, except for a few additional lines on his face, he was little changed from Darcy's memory of him.\n\nGeneral Yates wore a military-style coat in Order-blue, with the insignia of the Grand Cross of the Pendragon Order on his left shoulder. With a square jaw and pronounced shoulders, he might have been a knight's effigy carved from marble at a parish church. Not exactly the sort who seemed very conversational.\n\n\"Why are you not at Pemberley, Darcy?\" Matlock snapped as he sat behind his desk. \"I told you\u2014\"\n\n\"My dragon and my child are here. I have sent instructions to my steward and await his response. I have word on Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"Word, from where? I was not informed.\"\n\n\"Ten days ago she was seen in Portsmouth, forced aboard a Bermuda sloop called the Sea Lion, destined for Bermuda. She was in the company of Cornwallis Jackson, a known smuggler. His name has been bandied about in the newspapers as a known smuggler of tea and silk. He has appeared in a number of the reports you have recently received. An article in the Morning Post today confirms he has been seen both in London and Portsmouth.\"\n\n\"Bermuda?\" Easterly drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. \"There is no telling where they hope to ship that dragon from there. My guess would be India. Jackson is known to have ties there.\"\n\nYates sneered. \"The creature in question is a fairy dragon. I am quite certain there are British ladies with fairy dragons in India. It will do quite fine for itself there. I see it hardly our concern, especially in light of what is happening on British soil.\"\n\n\"I understand there is a crisis at hand, but with respect, sir\u2014\"\n\n\"With respect, Sir Fitzwilliam,\" Yates stood and glared. \"You are a knight under my command. I have not asked you for advice, nor for information. It is your place to wait for my orders and act on them.\"\n\n\"Have you forgotten, sir, that the Dragon Sage, an officer of the Order, chosen by the dragons themselves, and my wife, has been abducted by these same blackguards?\" The veins along Darcy's forehead throbbed.\n\n\"We are quite aware of that, to be sure,\" Abbot's tone bordered on conciliatory. \"But there are bigger problems at hand. Further reports of unrest have arrived. That is a far bigger risk than the loss of a single human officer, even one dear to you.\"\n\n\"Once again, sir, with respect, I do not think you understand the role she plays among the dragons themselves. If she is not recovered, I fear there is nothing you can do to stop insurrection. I believe her return alone\u2014\"\n\n\"Where did you come by your information?\" Strickland asked.\n\n\"Walker, and Elizabeth's Friend April\u2014\"\n\nYates slapped his forehead. \"The fairy dragon? You expect us to take the word of a fairy dragon in these matters? I have no words, Darcy. A Knight of the Order should know better\u2014\"\n\n\"I do know better than to discount the word of a dragon!\"\n\n\"Fairy dragons are hardly dragons and not worth listening to. Get out. We have actual work to do.\" Yates waved him to the door.\n\nBefore he could protest, Matlock grabbed him by the arm and propelled him to the doorway. \"Fairy dragons? Truly, Darcy? I need you back in Derbyshire, immediately. Tend to Pemberley. Interview the major dragons in the area. I need to know how deep the discontent runs there. Leave little Pemberley here, though. She does not need to be influenced by disloyal dragons.\" He pushed Darcy out and slammed the door.\n\nIgnorant, short-sighted warm-blood! Could he be made to understand that Elizabeth's abduction was central to the looming insurrection? Probably not."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Anne paced from the Chancellor's office, past the Secretary's office, past the Minister of the Court's, and back again. Past the scrutiny of somber portraits. And again. And again.\n\nThe carved dragon holding the scales of justice on Baron Dunbrook's door, and the inlaid one on Baron Chudleigh's door that looked down upon smaller inlaid major dragons representing each county of England, stared at her judgmentally. It probably was not seemly to haunt the dimly lit halls this way, rather like eavesdropping. But how could she not?\n\nSir Fitzwilliam stumbled out of the Chancellor's door, and it slammed behind him. Resounding, firm and final.\n\nAnne dashed to him. Oh, the look on his face! What had they said? \"I take it that did not go well?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\"\n\n\"Pray, sir, Longbourn is anxious to speak to you regarding April's news. May I join you, as there is \u2026 ah, something \u2026 I would like to discuss with both of you?\" She bit her upper lip.\n\nSir Fitzwilliam dragged his hand down his face and grunted. Too tired or too frustrated to argue? It hardly mattered. Regardless, she would be heard.\n\nThey descended three flights of limestone stairs in silence.\n\nLongbourn, looking as ragged as a dragon might, met them at the bottom of the stairs, in the large, open junction of the many corridors that led to guest dragon lairs. A single torch bathed the space in more shadows than light. A vaguely damp, limestone scent harkened back to the temporary lair Kellynch had used in Bath.\n\n\"What is the news? Is the flutter-tuft well?\" Longbourn scratched at the limestone floor.\n\n\"She will recover, but she was severely injured.\" Sir Fitzwilliam went on to explain April's intelligence and Lord Matlock's response.\n\nDisappointing, but hardly surprising. Not unlike the Cotillion Board, who seemed unable to consider anything but their own very limited viewpoints.\n\nLovely women all.\n\nLongbourn leaned into Sir Fitzwilliam's face, breathing hard. \"What are you going to do about it?\"\n\n\"I have been ordered back to Pemberley to interview\u2014\"\n\n\"You will do no such thing.\" Longbourn's stomp echoed painfully against the stone walls.\n\nSir Fitzwilliam chuckled grimly. \"I suppose not.\"\n\n\"You would disobey the Chancellor's orders?\" Anne held her breath. Perhaps, just perhaps.\n\n\"For Elizabeth, I would disobey the king.\" It was probably an exaggeration, but a sentiment as lovely as Wentworth's letter to her. \"My Uncle vastly underestimates Elizabeth's importance to the dragons. Her return will have a greater effect on dragon concerns than he imagines.\"\n\nLongbourn flicked his tail in what seemed to be approval. \"What will you do, then?\"\n\n\"That is an excellent question. We are rather low on allies and resources at the moment and\u2014\"\n\n\"Forgive me for interrupting, but I have some information you might be interested in.\" She clasped her hands tightly before her, lest their trembling detract from her words.\n\n\"Pray go on, Lady Wentworth.\"\n\n\"Wentworth was ordered to interview the major dragons in Kent. But when I told him of April's initial report, he determined they needed to be at sea searching for Lady Elizabeth. The letter I received today revealed he has arranged a sloop called Cerulean, crewed by Blue Order men. He intends to set sail today from Dover, heading west toward Portsmouth.\"\n\nSir Fitzwilliam gasped. \"I would join him, if there were some way to get there \u2026\"\n\n\"I believe I might help you there as well. Alister Salt and his team can carry you to Portsmouth. You can meet Wentworth's ship there and join his efforts.\"\n\n\"I would come, too.\" Even a Longbourn's whisper was hard on the ears. \"There is no moon in the sky for the next several nights. I can fly to Portsmouth. Will his ship hold me?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. It is not something he thought to tell me. I believe it is possible the vessel is large enough for that.\"\n\n\"I am for Portsmouth, then. Are you, Darcy?\"\n\n\"I cannot do nearly as much for the Order by going to Derbyshire as I can by finding her. Pemberley would never forgive me if I did not go myself to try. I can be ready to leave in an hour. Just tell me where to meet Alister Salt.\"\n\n\"I will make the arrangements with him and send word to Wentworth.\" It might be the end of the Wentworths as part of Blue Order society, but without Lady Elizabeth, there might not be any Blue Order society. They would find the Sage, somehow."
            },
            {
                "title": "February 1, 1815, On board Cerulean",
                "text": "Wentworth sat at his desk in the Cerulean's captain's quarters and fastened the satchel on the Blue Order messenger's back. The cockatrice squawked and flew. Not nearly so impressive as the guard assigned to the London offices, but this messenger seemed as sure and steady and fast. The latter seemed the most significant right now as he disappeared from view in the early morning sky.\n\nDawn had broken, and Darcy was waiting for him at Portsmouth.\n\nWentworth made his way onto the deck, sea air catching him full in the face. Somehow, it felt like home.\n\nIt would have been simpler had Darcy\u2014and Longbourn\u2014not insisted on joining him. Darcy was hardly a seaman and could prove more liability than asset. Nor was Longbourn a sea dragon\u2014could wyverns even swim?\u2014then again, he could fly and that might well be a boon. Assuming, of course, he did not cause problems being aboard the ship.\n\nHe laced his hands behind his neck and stared at the glowing sky. What was he thinking, permitting a wyvern on his vessel?\n\nSailors scurried about, doing precisely what they should have been doing, under the bo'sun's watchful eyes. Not unlike dancers on a ballroom floor, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of the vast ocean.\n\nThankfully, the Cerulean's crew was keen on the prospect of rescuing the Sage. At some point she had answered the navigator's letter regarding an issue with his puck Friend's hoard. Her advice had been good and he had felt the honor of her reply most exceedingly. His good opinion, apparently not easily acquired, was enough for the crew, and their judgement set. Hearing that the wyvern she once kept would join them on their mission only seemed to bolster their enthusiasm.\n\nWith a bit of luck, it would last.\n\nLaconia hopped to the railing and head-butted his shoulder. \"You are not pleased.\"\n\n\"Do you want Darcy thinking himself in charge of this mission?\"\n\n\"He is not that kind. He is dominant on land, to be sure, but he is no fool. He will permit you dominance at sea.\"\n\n\"Permit me? Excuse me. I do not need his permission to be captain.\"\n\n\"He will not challenge your dominance. You really must bring yourself under better regulation or he will sense weakness and challenge you.\" Laconia huffed and bared his teeth. \"You warm-bloods are no different to dragons, despite your insistence your ways are more civilized.\"\n\nWhat point in arguing? Laconia might even be right.\n\nThey were sailing on the advice of a fairy dragon, supported by a tatzelwurm. There was little hope for them as it was. Hopefully Laconia was right on both counts.\n\nWentworth opened his spyglass and scanned the shore for the familiar spire with the brass crescent and star. Somehow Portsmouth's landmark soothed his disquiet. There, and yes, the green signal banner atop the Blue Order offices. Darcy was waiting at the docks.\n\nHalf an hour later, two of the Cerulean's sailors rowed Darcy to the sloop. He climbed the ladder exactly as Wentworth expected a landman to climb. Ungainly, bordering on ridiculous. At least he did not slip and plummet into the sea and drown. That would have been unfortunate.\n\nIt took a moment for Darcy to gain his footing on deck. He bowed to Wentworth. \"I believe the correct phrase is 'permission to come aboard, Captain.' Greetings, Laconia.\"\n\nLaconia was right.\n\nWentworth nodded. \"Permission granted. One of my men will manage your things and show you about, but first, tell me what you know.\" He led Darcy towards the bow, Laconia following.\n\nDarcy moved slowly, fighting the movement of the deck. \"How long does it take for one to become accustomed to \u2026 this?\"\n\n\"It depends. Some never do. But since you do not seem to be made ill by the motion, it will probably come to you sooner rather than later.\" It was a good sign that Darcy would not spend the journey leaning over the railings, spilling the contents of his guts.\n\n\"Longbourn is waiting for us at a cove in the cliffs as you directed.\" Darcy scanned the deck as though trying to imagine the wyvern there. \"You are certain his weight will not be an issue?\"\n\n\"We do not carry cargo, so we are light to begin with. Even so, the Cerulean is sufficient to a wyvern. As long as he is not petulant and prone to tantrums. You are comfortable that he will be able to manage himself?\"\n\n\"For the sake of rescuing Elizabeth, I am quite certain he could manage to breathe fire if asked.\"\n\n\"Kellynch is expecting him. He swims below us even now. He has agreed to accept Longbourn into his territory without the usual formalities, given the uniqueness of the situation.\"\n\n\"That is good of him. Please convey my thanks to him.\" Darcy sounded entirely sincere.\n\nWentworth waved to the bo'sun. \"Have the Order flag run up.\" He turned back to Darcy. \"He will be alert to the sign? I do not want to waste time waiting\u2014\"\n\n\"Nor do either of us. Before anything happens that might prevent me saying so, thank you. I am all too aware of the risks you are taking on Elizabeth's behalf\u2014\"\n\n\"I appreciate your thanks, but pray understand that this is more than a personal favor. We owe the Sage a great deal for her actions on behalf of Kellynch, and we are happy to be able to act in her service. But what is at stake is more than just her person. The Order itself and the peace it maintains with dragonkind are at risk. I believe we both agree that protecting it is worth any price.\"\n\n\"Dragon ho!\"\n\nWentworth turned his back to the rising sun. The ominous, shadowy outline of a flying wyvern approached. Primal fear, instinctive and inescapable, suffused every limb. In the days before the Pendragon Treaty, if a man saw such a thing, it would have been the last thing he saw.\n\n\"Mrooooow.\" Laconia drew out the vowels, like a long, awestruck whistle.\n\nMen gathered on the deck, slack-jawed and staring. This would be a moment they would share with their children. Provided they survived what was yet to come.\n\n\"Clear the deck!\" the bo'sun cried.\n\nMen scurried aside as Longbourn circled the sloop. \"Permission to enter Kellynch's territory?\"\n\n\"He has granted permission.\" Wentworth waved him in.\n\nWing-wind, very different from natural wind, buffeted his face, laden heavily with dragon musk. The sloop sank slightly under the wyvern's weight as his feet thudded on the deck. Wentworth held his breath, listening, feeling through the soles of his boots, as Cerulean spoke to him. Thank heavens! She agreed to take this most unusual passenger.\n\nOff the starboard bow, Kellynch rose up above the waves, water sheeting off his length, glistening on his green-brown scales. He pulled his head just high enough to be barely above Longbourn's. Longbourn ducked just a bit to accommodate.\n\n\"I accept you in my territory,\" Kellynch rumbled in deep dominant tones.\n\n\"I recognize your territory,\" Longbourn boomed out matching notes.\n\n\"We will work together.\"\n\nLongbourn carefully spread his wings, as men dodged out of the way, and bowed his head. \"Cooperation.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Kellynch slowly receded back into the waves.\n\nDarcy exhaled heavily. Yes, he was right. That had gone very well. Surprising how well dragons could rally when the matter was sufficiently urgent.\n\nWentworth approached Longbourn. \"Good day, Laird Longbourn. The First Mate will show you the place that has been made ready for you on deck. He will instruct you in how to move so as not to upset the sails or the sloop.\"\n\nLongbourn nodded slowly as he carefully folded his wings. \"I will listen.\"\n\n\"So then, Darcy, what news have you?\"\n\n\"Elizabeth was seen by a sea-faring cockatrice, forced aboard a ship at Portsmouth, heading for Bermuda. We believe a smuggler by the name of Cornwallis Jackson\u2014\"\n\n\"Corney?\" Laconia reared up on his tail and hissed.\n\n\"You know him?\"\n\nDamn. \"I have pursued him on more than one occasion. Slippery little scoundrel. Do you know of the ship they are in?\"\n\n\"I believe it was called a sloop, a Bermuda sloop perhaps. Is that significant?\"\n\nDamn and bloody hell. \"Yes, we are familiar with the Sea Lion. It is a particularly fast vessel. But the recent storms would have slowed them down, giving us opportunity to catch them before they reach Bermuda's waters. It is exceedingly bold for him to try to operate out of Portsmouth, though, right under the nose of the Royal Navy. But that, too, sounds like him. Laird Longbourn, how is your long sight?\"\n\n\"All flying dragons tend to be longsighted. How else would we see our prey?\"\n\n\"Excellent. Will you be able to launch from the deck to look for a particular ship? I can describe the figurehead to you in some detail. There will be no mistaking it.\"\n\nLongbourn paced several steps port and starboard, the deck creaking beneath him. \"Yes, I will be able to do as you ask. Shall I go now?\"\n\n\"First, I will have the navigator give you the general bearings you will need. But before that. You are certain you wish to participate? The Order could\u2014\"\n\n\"They could, but they will not. They will agree, when she is returned. The men of the Order may not understand, but the dragons will.\"\n\n\"And if she is not? There is every possibility\u2014\"\n\n\"If she is not, then there will be far greater problems for the Order to deal with than one disorderly wyvern.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "February 1, 1815, On board Sea Lion",
                "text": "Elizabeth's stomach rumbled as she edged into the little sliver of sun painting the rancid pile of straw in the Sea Lion's hold, nearly empty tankard of grog in hand. Any little warmth that could be found was worth pursuing for however long it lasted. Someday she would wear the merino wool shawl Darcy had given her\u2014she might never take it off again. He would laugh at her for it \u2026 heavens, she missed the sound of his laugh. His and Anne's.\n\nEven through closed eyes, heat still trickled down her cheeks. She rubbed her face on her shoulders. Joshua should not see her thus. Perhaps a sip of grog would open the tightness in her throat.\n\nOver the past few days, the Movers had acquiesced to her plea for more meat for the wyrms. Their color and disposition had improved with their change in diet. Unfortunately, their extra portions had seemed to come out of her own soup bowl. All told though, better her hunger pangs than starving wyrms sharing their quarters.\n\nPhoenix, too, had rallied with extra fish tossed into his cage. His bright color was returning and he occasionally twittered, just a little. It was a good sign, but probably a dangerous one.\n\nJoshua pulled the cage into the sun. Phoenix extended his wings as though trying to soak up the meager warmth while he could. The two female wyrms, Azure and Lapis, lay on Elizabeth's either side, pressed against her legs. Indigo curled at her feet. Prussian rested in relaxed alert at the edge of the sunshine, watching the door more than he watched them.\n\nThough still somewhat wary, a full belly seemed to persuade Prussian that she and Joshua were cut of a different cloth than Nunnington's Keeper, the only other Order member they had known. Perhaps it was unwise to begin to consider a forest wyrm an ally, but in a place with so few, no possible confederate ought to be overlooked.\n\n\"How will you get the Order to listen to you when we return?\" Joshua asked, carefully scratching behind Lapis' ear.\n\nShe murmured contentedly. The two had formed an odd little bond. Was it possible they were becoming Friends? Indigo did not seem to mind\u2014he even seemed rather fond of Joshua himself; whatever happened, the two wyrms would do it as a pair. Wyrms did not separate unless one died.\n\n\"There is always a way to be heard.\" Oftentimes it did not make one very popular, but persistence and a strong voice generally got the task accomplished.\n\n\"We tried. They refused to hear our complaint.\" Prussian puffed up and flared the skin around his head. He often did that when annoyed.\n\n\"I wonder to whom it was delivered. If you sent a messenger, unfortunately, there are many ways in which its delivery could have been hampered. There are those who think they know what the Order should be troubled with and what it should not.\"\n\n\"Exactly as I told you. The Order will not hear us.\" Prussian trembled\u2014was it purely rage or frustration as well?\n\n\"I have been working to change the situation. A new system is coming into place. The Minister of Keeps has been appointing staff to take and hear complaints specifically from minor dragons. They took their roles just recently, so they would not have been available to your messenger earlier. A rather regal and bossy cockatrix leads them. She takes her role very seriously\u2014though I am still convincing her that fairy dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"And wyrms! We are as overlooked as they!\" Azure protested, the tip of her tail flicking sharply.\n\n\"And wyrms, to be sure. I am personally working with her to be certain she understands that all petitions must be taken seriously. Yours will be a teaching case that I am certain will make her well understand my insistence.\"\n\n\"What means that?\" Lapis leaned across Joshua and turned her head sideways.\n\n\"It means that she will see your captivity as the crime that it is and through that understand wyrms have an important voice in the Order, too.\"\n\nPrussian slithered closer, still flared. \"Why? You have nothing to gain from us. We have nothing to offer you.\"\n\n\"I ask nothing from you. That is not the point. What has happened to you is a violation of the Pendragon Accords and of common decency. I cannot stand by whilst that is happening and do nothing.\"\n\n\"And the firedrakes and other big dragons will listen to you? Why?\" Prussian leaned close, eyes narrow. \"Why would they deny their instincts and their pleasure to listen to a warm-blood?\"\n\n\"She is the Dragon Sage,\" Joshua said very softly.\n\n\"What is a Dragon Sage?\" Indigo asked.\n\n\"Someone who knows nearly everything about dragons.\" Joshua stroked the back of Indigo's head. \"The dragons themselves chose her.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Prussian's question seemed halfway between a demand and a plea.\n\n\"The dragons chose me as Sage because they trust me to understand dragons and to be able to communicate it to the warm-bloods.\"\n\n\"You are special warm-blood, then?\" Azure turned her head sideways, matching Lapis.\n\nHow many species of dragons did that?\n\n\"She is a very special warm-blood. All the dragons of the Council consult with her and listen to her.\" Joshua nodded with the vigor only a young boy could manage.\n\nElizabeth bit her lower lip. Time to take a risk. \"I think it best that the Movers do not know that.\"\n\nPrussian met her gaze with an expression peculiar to dragons. One that could only be described as burgeoning trust. \"We will keep your secret.\" Prussian moved into arm's reach, and she carefully scratched his ears.\n\nHeavy footsteps approached. The wyrms dashed to their corners in defensive coils. But something about their posture had changed.\n\nThe door creaked open, slow and ominous. Corney, dragging his bad leg a little more than before, limped in.\n\nAyles, hair freshly brushed with a fresh shirt too, sauntered in. \"Well-fed and bright-eyed, I see.\" He tucked his thumbs in his lapels. So satisfied and full of himself\u2014hateful creature. Pretending to be something he was not.\n\n\"Now's as good a time, then. Baby dragon, breathe that fire.\" Corney fumbled with a key. He opened the cage door and grabbled Phoenix in his clumsy, fat fist.\n\n\"Stop that, he cannot breathe! You are holding him too tight!\" Joshua jumped to his feet, but Ayles pushed him back.\n\n\"I can't!\" Phoenix wheezed. \"Let go.\"\n\n\"If I think you're a gonna fly off, the boy and the woman will pay.\" Corney kicked Joshua's shin. Horrible, horrible creature.\n\nJoshua yelped and clutched his leg.\n\n\"I will not.\" Phoenix's eyes darted from one side of the hold to the other, their last encounter with Corney no doubt fresh in his mind. What was he looking for?\n\n\"So long as we unnerstand one 'nother.\" Corney opened his hand and held Phoenix at eye-level. \"So it be time for fire, little mite. Breathe fire.\"\n\nPhoenix extended his wings and drew a deep breath.\n\nWhat did he think was going to happen?\n\nPhoenix warbled and twittered, flapped his wings, and lifted one foot, slightly off-balancing himself.\n\nDid she see that right? That glance between the two male wyrms?\n\nPrussian launched himself from the floor\u2014who knew they could spring like tatzelwurms! He sailed over Corney's arm and wrapped himself around Phoenix, rendering him senseless, as they both fell to the bed of fetid straw.\n\n\"Damn fool creature!\" Corney kicked Prussian squarely in the ribs.\n\nAzure screamed.\n\n\"Thought he was trying to fly off.\" Prussian gasped for breath, coiling to protect his injured side.\n\n\"The poison will leave the creature useless for at least a day now.\" Ayles looked like he might kick Prussian too.\n\n\"Damn wyrm.\" Corney turned to Elizabeth, a look of new purpose spreading across his face. \"I s'pose since I can't get satisfaction from the baby dragon, you will provide it to me instead. Tell him what his little show cost. Perhaps he be convinced to do otherwise on the morrow.\" He limped toward Elizabeth, one hand on his belt buckle.\n\nShe scrabbled back, kicking and clawing. Ayles grabbed Joshua with one arm and blocked the door.\n\nNo escape. Bile rose in her throat as her breath came in shallow pants.\n\nCorney grabbed her wrist and forced her into the corner and down into the straw. Was that Joshua screaming and kicking? She drove her knee into something soft and scratched his face with her free hand.\n\nHe grabbed at her wrist as a brown and blue streak sailed past, grazing her wrist with razor fangs. It\u2014Indigo\u2014clamped down on the meaty side of Corney's hand. Indigo wrapped his body around Corney's arm, blue skin to Corney's.\n\n\"Ya damn bloody foolish thing! Let go! Ya gots me \u2026 not \u2026'er\u2026\"\n\nAyles threw Joshua aside and rushed to Corney. \"Release him!\"\n\nIndigo unwound and fell to the floor, slithering to the far corner.\n\nCorney's eyes glazed and his knees buckled. He muttered nonsense syllables under his breath.\n\nAyles threw Corney's arm over his shoulder. \"Bloody fool. I told you Scarlett was right. There would be no good come of dealing with wyrms.\" He tried to kick Lapis and Azure as he dragged Corney out, but they dodged just beyond reach. \"This is the last straw. If you fail to produce again, we will be done with you.\" He called over his shoulder as he slammed the door.\n\nElizabeth staggered to her feet, the hold spinning around her. \"Joshua, see to Phoenix. Tuck him into your coat as he recovers. Hide the cage in the straw. Maybe we can keep him out of that dreadful thing.\" She waved her hand vaguely in their direction.\n\n\"Are you all right, Lizzy? You are bleeding. Indigo hurt you.\" Joshua's voice was very small.\n\nShe held up her wrist in the meager light. Trickles of blood seeped from a scratch, which might not even be considered deep. No doubt Indigo had not been aiming at her. Was he clever or skilled enough to have scratched her simply to cover his true target? \"It is nothing. Indigo was all things brave and noble.\" She rubbed her wrist on her filthy skirt and scurried to the corner where Prussian lay.\n\nIndigo and Lapis skittered from the corner to Joshua and pressed close. \"Is Prussian all right?\"\n\nAzure pressed close to her mate, her head across his side where Corney's boot had landed. The brown-green skin was turning darker, as though bruised.\n\n\"May I examine him? I hope to be able to help.\"\n\nAzure pulled back, keening softly, her mouth held just slightly open, tongue flicking in and out. Her posture was a defensive coil, but who could blame her after such trauma?\n\nElizabeth checked the color of Prussian's gums, his breathing, and felt along his somewhat caved-in side. Sir Edward had taught her those ways when treating Castordale after he had been accidently kicked by a running footman in the Blue Order office.\n\nPrussian hissed and lashed his tail as she touched his side.\n\n\"I am sorry, I did not mean to hurt you. I think you have several broken ribs. With your permission, I would like to tie them up, to support them. I think it will make you more comfortable.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, do so.\" Azure rubbed the side of her face along Prussian's.\n\nHe grumbled something that sounded like assent.\n\nFumbling with her skirts, Elizabeth found a convenient tear in her petticoat. A quick jerk removed a useable strip of linen. \"I need to get this around you, but it may not be comfortable.\"\n\nPrussian lifted his head just enough for her to wrap the bandage around. She tied it firmly around his side as he grunted and growled.\n\n\"Recover, yes?\" Azure whispered. Poor creature could hardly sound more distraught and lost.\n\n\"I cannot say for certain, but it is a good sign he has not fallen into torpor. That suggests his wound is not very serious. Perhaps the bones are only cracked and not fully broken. Maybe even just badly bruised. I am hopeful all will be well in time. May I carry you to the straw where you might lie more comfortably?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lady Sage.\"\n\nUsing her skirts, she lifted Prussian, surprisingly heavy for his size, and laid him in the straw next to where Joshua cradled Phoenix and the smaller wyrms. She sat down along his other side.\n\nAzure, Indigo and Lapis slipped in around Prussian, leaning into Joshua's and Elizabeth's warmth, their cool weight strangely comforting.\n\nPerhaps, just perhaps, she had Friends here, after all."
            },
            {
                "title": "February 1, 1815, On board Cerulean",
                "text": "Darcy paced Cerulean's deck, front to back\u2014or was that bow to stern?\u2014unsteady as a child first in leading strings. Sunset's warm rays painted everything they touched a vaguely golden hue. How did a man ever walk firmly when the surface underneath him bobbed like a cork in a stream? Wentworth and his men seemed secure enough\u2014blast them all. A gentleman should be master of his own knees at the very least! How those sailors scurried about so quickly, much less climbed those masts\u2014mind boggling.\n\nThe coast raced along beside them on his right, the ocean continuing into the horizon, unending, on the left. Such a sight! How did one grow accustomed to being alone in the middle of such vastness?\n\n\"Pacing will not make him return any faster.\" Laconia bounded to the nearby railing and looked him in the eye, black fur ruffling in the wind. His tail wrapped around the rail and his toes spread to steady him. Those thumbs definitely seemed to assist his balance.\n\n\"There is little else I can do. There is no useful employment for me here.\" He was not fit for even the most menial task shipboard. Perhaps he should have gone to Pemberley.\n\n\"You are not accustomed to that.\"\n\n\"No, I am not.\"\n\n\"You might make note of the sensation and remember it.\" Laconia licked his paw and slicked it over his face. \"Perhaps it will help you to better understand what it is to be a minor dragon. I grant that it is hardly the same thing, but there are enough similarities that you might consider it.\"\n\nWhat a very odd and thoughtful creature, this tatzelwurm. Hopefully May would take after her sire. \"That is the sort of thing I would expect to hear from my wife.\"\n\n\"But would you listen?\"\n\n\"Perhaps not always, but I do now.\"\n\n\"Like Wentworth listens to Anne, now. That is a good thing. It is a good thing to have a mate who is sensible. The hatchlings are far better for it. Yours will be a suitable Friend for our wyrmling.\"\n\nDarcy chuckled. Draconic bluntness did take getting used to.\n\n\"There, see!\" Laconia pointed just left of the glowing sun barely touching the horizon.\n\nA dark form hung in the sky, flapping slowly, growing larger.\n\nWhat a sight! How many had ever had the privilege of seeing a major dragon in full flight\u2014and lived to tell?\n\nA frisson of primal terror tickled at the back of his head. Should he not be running for cover?\n\n\"And there.\" Laconia pointed right of the sunset. A distinct squared head rose in silhouette just above the sea. \"I will fetch Wentworth.\" He spring-hopped away.\n\nPray that Longbourn had seen something! Surely he had\u2014he must!\n\nHe paced the length of the ship once, twice, three, four times.\n\nJust how long could it take the dragons to arrive? Perhaps it really was as they said, distances at sea were deceiving. And irritating. Very, very irritating.\n\nWentworth appeared and beckoned him to stand watch with him, the minutes crawling by as the sun dipped farther and farther below the horizon. At least Wentworth was not one to require mindless chatter to fill those idle moments. Such men seemed quite rare.\n\nLongbourn's wing-wind preceded him, making him felt throughout the vessel. Sailors scattered as the boatswain directed him where to land. No small amount of thought had gone into accommodating a wyvern shipboard.\n\nThough Longbourn obviously tried to land softly, a creature that size could only accomplish so much. He folded his wings and sat on his haunches, making himself as small as possible as the ship shifted and groaned around him.\n\nAlong Cerulean's left side\u2014was that port or starboard, what had Wentworth called it?\u2014Kellynch appeared at the railings, seawater still dripping from his long whiskers. How well his grey-brown-green blended with the colors of the sea.\n\nThe two dragons acknowledged one another with nods. Longbourn touched his chin to the deck.\n\nKellynch rose up just slightly higher and flicked his tongue in Longbourn's direction, but not quite reaching the back of his neck.\n\n\"I acknowledge your territory.\" Longbourn lifted his head slowly.\n\nHow kind of them to forgo the usual displays in deference to Cerulean's rather precarious situation.\n\n\"Pray tell me you have good news,\" Darcy said.\n\nLongbourn grumbled low, a sound more felt than heard. \"I saw nothing. Not yet.\"\n\n\"Nor I,\" Kellynch added, \"but there have been many storms to hamper their progress. It is too soon to lose hope now. We have only just begun the search.\"\n\nDarcy ground his teeth. Patience, it was right to have patience, even now.\n\n\"I fear the sea dragons have not changed their position, though.\" Kellynch bared his fangs in a deep frown.\n\n\"What position? What do you mean? I tried to speak to them, but they would not talk to me at all.\" Longbourn fluttered his wings just slightly, narrowly avoiding a collision with the sails.\n\n\"I had hoped that once we were out of Dover's territory, we would find other sea dragons more amenable.\" Wentworth turned to Darcy. \"We asked for their help near Dover, but they refused.\"\n\n\"Refused? Forgive me, but I do not understand. Dragons do not refuse to help my wife. The rest of us, certainly they do, with glee on occasion, but none has ever refused my wife.\" A vague fluttering of something very much like panic hovered nearby. How could this place be so utterly different to all he had known?\n\n\"It seems that Cornwall has had a great deal to say about her\u2014not complimentary\u2014near Land's End, and the word has spread.\" Kellynch muttered something untoward under his breath.\n\nDamn that bloody lizard!\n\n\"Matlock and the rest of the Council will know of this insult.\" Longbourn growled, barely constraining his tail-lashing to flicking the tip of his tail hard enough to be felt on the deck under Darcy's feet.\n\nHopefully Matlock would be made Grand Dug and be able to deal with the matter properly.\n\n\"But Cornwall is not a sea dragon. I am sure his calumny would be mitigated if we could offer the local pod what they want.\" Wentworth said.\n\n\"What they want? What do you mean?\" Why had they not mentioned this sooner?\n\nWentworth sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. \"I assume the local pod has the same demands as Dover's?\"\n\n\"That is what I have gathered. Many were asking me how I became affiliated with the Blue Order.\" Kellynch snorted as though he were tired of the questions.\n\n\"The sea dragons want recognition by the Order?\" Of course they would, and use Elizabeth's peril to achieve it. Darcy's shoulders knotted. Why would they not?\n\n\"Recognition, and protection. Gossip travels as fast in the dragon world as it does in the human\u2014perhaps faster as it has wings. Kellynch's admission into the Order has convinced the major sea dragons as well as many pods of minor ones that they should have the rights, protections, and privileges of the Accords applied to them,\" Wentworth said.\n\n\"Are they prepared for the responsibilities as well?\" Darcy clasped his hands behind his back.\n\n\"If granted the one, I am certain they would accept the other. In truth, sea dragons are not so different from their terrestrial cousins. Until now, Laconia and I have found them very dependable allies.\"\n\nLaconia sprang to the railing near Kellynch. \"This was the first time you could not provide what they wanted in a negotiation.\"\n\n\"I have not the authority to negotiate on behalf of the Order. I am merely an operative, not an officer.\" Wentworth's expression suggested he did not appreciate helplessness any more than Darcy did.\n\nDarcy looked at Longbourn, whose broad scaly forehead creased. He slowly nodded. Good. \"You might not have the authority, but it could be argued that I do.\"\n\n\"You are not an officer. How?\"\n\n\"My wife.\" Darcy lifted his hand. \"Make no mistake, I do not presume to usurp her position. However, she would hear the sea dragons, promise to bring their petition to Council and ensure that it is acted upon. I have no doubt that if I make that promise on her behalf, then, upon her return, she will act accordingly.\"\n\nWas it possible to see the hair on the back of Wentworth's neck bristling? \"And if something untoward happens to her?\"\n\nLongbourn grumbled deep in his throat.\n\n\"Then she will be unable to do as promised.\" Kellynch bobbed his head, approving. \"Giving them all the more reason to see her safely back to the Order.\"\n\n\"Do you truly believe they will accept what you offer?\" Wentworth asked.\n\n\"Given the alternatives, I will take my chances with the dragons. I think them likely to be far more honorable than the smugglers. Laird Kellynch, can you get us in touch with these sea dragons?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "February 2, 1815, London Order Offices",
                "text": "Anne peeked into April's basket near the fire in the ladies' sitting room. Sir Edward had insisted April needed a soft place to rest for several months to come and that, as nice as her 'cage' might be, it was not appropriate for her convalescence. That did not please her, but she forgave him when he promised he would see to it himself that she would be provided with as much sweet as she wanted for the duration of her indisposition.\n\nIt said much about April's character that she insisted upon sharing her abundance with Heather, Pax, Cosette, and even Lady Astrid's friend Verona. Poor little mites returned every evening exhausted and, for the most part, discouraged. April's news had been so exciting and encouraging. Now, the waiting and hoping for more sapped their souls. An extra measure of sweet helped them in the face of their disappointments.\n\nMrs. Collins returned several small pillows to the couch, where they belonged, and returned a board game to its box. Miss Bennet and Miss Darcy somehow never managed to finish the games they started. The two misses were enjoying tea in one of the sitting rooms with their minuet partners, Auntie acting as chaperone. Both seemed to like their partners rather well\u2014too well in Mrs. Collins' estimation.\n\nShe was probably right, but in the face of all that was happening, it was difficult to care.\n\n\"You are well, April?\" Mrs. Collins\u2014Mary, they considered themselves bosom friends now\u2014 peered over Anne's shoulder and checked the temperature of the bricks under the basket.\n\n\"As well as might be expected.\" April fussed with the flannel surrounding her. She must be tired, not reiterating her litany of\u2014justifiable\u2014complaints as she usually did. \"I wish we knew what was happening!\"\n\n\"Longbourn is attending to matters himself. You know how stubborn and determined he can be. Along with Darcy, I am quite certain whatever can be done is being done.\" Mary straightened and smoothed April's nest.\n\nCorn and Wall rubbed up against Anne's ankle and pointed toward the door. Given the tilt of their heads, those were not footsteps they knew.\n\nProbably not a good sign, all told.\n\nMary sighed and sat down beside April's basket. Anne followed Wall to the door, arriving just as a soft rap sounded. That was a woman's knock, but not Lady Astrid's.\n\nOh, this could not be good.\n\nShe opened the door. \"Lady Dalrymple, what a pleasant surprise. Pray come in.\" Wall looked up at her, green eyes wide. Even he could tell she was lying.\n\nLady Dalrymple swept in, adorned in pomp, circumstance and expensive calico unsuited to their modest sitting room. Did she expect to hold court here as she did in her own home? She would be sorely disappointed.\n\n\"May I introduce Mrs. Collins, Keeper to Longbourn?\" Anne gestured toward Mary, who quickly stood, her features arranged into a suitable look of politeness.\n\nLady Dalrymple acknowledged her with the barest of nods.\n\nLovely.\n\n\"To what do we owe the honor of your call?\" Anne gestured toward the grandest, though not most comfortable chair in the room.\n\nLady Dalrymple sat down very slowly, as though she expected an attentive audience for the act. \"You have no fairy dragons with you?\" She scanned the room.\n\n\"April is here.\" Mary pointed to the basket. April snored, a sweet little trilling sound.\n\n\"The injured one, yes? And the rest are off and about, are they?\"\n\n\"We do not keep them as prisoners or as pets in a cage. They are as free to come and go as we are.\" Mary practically bristled as she spoke.\n\nAnne picked up Corn and Wall and placed them in their basket, whispering, \"Stay here quietly.\"\n\nThey ducked under the edge of the basket and twined around each other. Clearly, they did not like Lady Dalrymple.\n\nWho could blame them?\n\n\"That is what I am here to talk with you about. Lady Jersey and Lady Cowper have sent me.\"\n\nAnne's jaw tightened, pulling her face into a painful grimace that usually passed as a smile to those who did not know her well. \"How are the countesses? Are they in good health?\"\n\n\"They are not pleased, Lady Wentworth, not pleased at all.\" Lady Dalrymple's fine eyebrow raised in a distinct arch.\n\n\"I am sorry to hear that. Is there something that might be done to ease their displeasure?\"\n\nLady Dalrymple paused, eyes flickering back and forth from Mary to Anne, considering, ruminating. \"After a fashion, I suppose there is.\"\n\n\"How might we be of service?\" Anne asked.\n\n\"The Sage's fairy dragon was left in your care, was she not?\"\n\n\"April was left in no one's care, madam.\" Mary leaned closer to April's basket as though ready to swoop her away from such disagreeable company. \"She is entirely capable of taking care of herself. Her Friendship with my sister and her husband in no way suggests she is dependent upon them.\"\n\nLady Dalrymple wrinkled her nose and sniffed in a porcine sort of way. Come to think of it, a great deal about her looks was rather porcine\u2014fat cheeks, squinty eyes, and inclination toward stoutness. \"Perhaps I should say it was incumbent upon you to see to her wellbeing.\"\n\nStill inaccurate, and now insulting. \"To what end is this questioning?\"\n\n\"It has come to our attention that the Sage's fairy dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"Her Friend,\" Mary all but hissed.\n\n\"Her Friend fairy dragon,\" Lady Dalrymple glowered, \"was recently injured, rather severely.\"\n\n\"She is recovering well. Sir Edward is convinced that she will be making a full recovery.\" Anne gestured toward the basket.\n\nApril snored again as though to prove the point. Was she actually asleep or just playing along for the sake of learning what she could? Was there really any question?\n\n\"There is some concern among the Cotillion Board that the fairy dragon was injured under your watch.\" Lady Dalrymple lifted both eyebrows as though to imply Anne should understand what she was not saying.\n\n\"Then the Board should be informed of the inaccuracy of their assumptions.\"\n\n\"I do not think you understand, Cousin. It does not reflect well upon you or the Sage's sisters that a dragon was injured while under your care.\"\n\nMary cleared her throat neither softly nor subtly. \"She was not under our care.\"\n\n\"It is a matter of semantics, that is all. A dragon, albeit a very small one, was injured and the fault lies at your feet, all of you. It is a matter that the Order cannot regard too lightly.\"\n\nReally? It was amazing that they considered it at all. \"What are you saying?\"\n\nLady Dalrymple pressed a chubby hand to her chest. \"All members swear to protect dragon life. That you have failed to suggests that perhaps you are not ready to be officially presented to the Order.\"\n\n\"Pray forgive my boldness, but what do you think you are threatening us with? You are aware that Mrs. Collins and I are both Keepers. We are already full members of the Order.\" Anne hid her clenched, trembling fist under her skirts.\n\n\"Certainly, nothing can change that.\" Something about her expression suggested she might wish that were different. \"But you have proven yourselves, and the young ladies, insufficient to the standards of polite Dragon-Keeping society. You will not be presented at the Cotillion \u2026 this year.\"\n\nOr probably ever, if the warm-blooded she-dragons had their way.\n\n\"Perhaps next year, we can find a sponsor willing to take on Miss Darcy and Miss Bennet and able to properly prepare them. As for you both\u2014you are Keepers, you are married. You hardly need presentation at the Cotillion.\"\n\n\"Except that it is considered the entry into good Blue Order society,\" Mary muttered.\n\n\"Are you suggesting, cousin,\" Anne allowed the word to take on a cold edge, \"that we are being cut from good society?\"\n\n\"I might not put it that way. In time, with good suppers and large parties, there will doubtless be those who do not find your company disagreeable.\" Lady Dalrymple stood and waited, but neither Anne nor Mary rose. \"You will express this to Miss Darcy and Miss Bennet, no?\" She strode to the door and waited again. \"Perhaps I should let you know that the Cotillion Board are not the only ones who have noticed this incident. I will not stoop to naming names, but shall we say, there are others concerned about what sort of Blue Order members you might be and what, if of course anything, needs to be done about it.\" She let herself out.\n\nAnne and Mary sprang to their feet simultaneously.\n\nApril poked her head above the edge of the basket. \"Awful, hateful, pompous warm-blood cockatrix!\"\n\n\"Did that sound like a threat to you?\" Mrs. Collins wrapped her arms around her waist.\n\n\"I would say so. Do you think they know about Longbourn and Kellynch, what Wentworth and Sir Fitzwilliam are about?\"\n\n\"They do not consort with fairy dragons\u2014they are above such company.\" April flapped weakly. \"So, it is not likely. But it will hardly remain a secret when \u2026\"\n\n\"If.\" Mary stared at the floor.\n\n\"When,\" April and Anne said simultaneously.\n\nMary sighed. \"When Elizabeth comes back, it will all be known: they went against Lord Matlock's Orders; they took matters into their own hands. There will be a price to be paid, no doubt.\"\n\n\"What do you think they will do?\"\n\n\"Truly, I have no idea.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "February 2, 1815 On board Cerulean",
                "text": "Wentworth descended the rope ladder and dropped softly into the worn dinghy beside Cerulean. Storm clouds hung over the horizon; the waves tossed the little craft in anticipation of the excitement that would soon be theirs.\n\nHe stared into the sky. Heavy ceiling of dark, roiling clouds, curtains of rain in the distance. Winds that tasted of a particular brand of storm. It was not going to be a good day.\n\nWhat would it be like, weathering a storm with the wyvern on deck? It was a topic he had never heard discussed, nor considered himself. Why would anyone have? Darcy would tell him that he would need to write a monograph on the subject when they returned to London. That was, of course, if the Blue Order did not summarily pitch both of them out on their arses for having ignored orders.\n\nNow was not the time to consider such things.\n\nDarcy clutched the gunnels, his face drawn in the expression of vague terror that most wore their first time exposed to the sea as it prepared to vent its fury. Pale, his face drawn, he did not give voice to his true feelings. He was made of sterner stuff. There was a reason he had earned Wentworth's respect.\n\nLaconia slithered down the rope and dropped in beside him. How many times had they done this very thing on the Laconia? Was it wrong to enjoy the familiarity of the moment?\n\nHe signaled to the oarsman and released the ropes. Like a baby cut free from its mother at birth, they were independent now.\n\nKellynch waited with Dover's pod, not far off. Odd that they should be so far out of their territory. It would have been better if they had been willing to come closer and allow Longbourn to join in the discussion. However, at some point, wyverns had preyed upon small serpent-whales and the distant memory was too much for them to ignore.\n\nDarcy chewed his upper lip, probably rehearsing his speech for the sea dragons. A good way to pass the time, all told, even if there was little chance he would actually have an opportunity to give his speech.\n\nThe oarsman stopped three or four yards from Kellynch.\n\nLaconia leaned out across the bow. \"We bring the Sage's representative to talk with you.\"\n\nKellynch sank below the waves in a move that felt so much like abandonment it was difficult not to call out. Darcy felt it too, given the way his fists clenched.\n\nAngry waves lapped and splashed over the hull. Pray this conversation did not take too long. The dinghy would not weather the blow that threatened.\n\n\"Mrow.\" Laconia pointed with his thumbed paw.\n\nNot far from where Kellynch had been, dark forms rose toward the surface.\n\nDover and her pod. And more? Two large females, matriarchs of other pods perhaps? More appeared in the distance. How many lurked beneath?\n\nDragon's bones! They were surrounded by enough serpent-whales to take down Cerulean, the dinghy and all hands with nary a trace remaining. Perhaps Longbourn would survive, if he could fly all the way back to shore.\n\nThis was negotiating on a whole new scale.\n\nA large male, easily half again the size of the females, surfaced in the middle of the matriarchs. The largest serpent-whale he had ever encountered.\n\nKellynch broke the surface, water sheeting off his square face and dripping off his whiskers. Though far larger than the serpent-whales, they drastically outnumbered him and could easily best him if they set upon him like a pack of wolves. Which they would if provoked, making his dominance tenuous at best.\n\nSweat beaded on Wentworth's forehead and trickled down the side of his face. Darcy had lost all color. Good, he understood the stakes.\n\nKellynch bugled softly. \"Patriarch of this coast, Delphinus, Matriarch Dover, Matriarch Memoriae, Matriarch Legatum, I present my Keeper Wentworth; Laconia, one of my Keep; and Sir Fitzwilliam, representative of the Blue Order's Sage.\"\n\nThe serpent-whales squealed and clicked. Wentworth and Darcy bowed from the shoulders. Hardly the proper form of greeting, but the water was far too cold to perform a marine greeting, not to mention Darcy could not swim.\n\nOn the whole, sea dragons tended to be quite tolerant of the limitations of the land-dwellers. Hopefully the dragons would be patient today.\n\nDelphinus rose up, front appendages above the water. \"Greetings to the representative of the Blue Order Sage.\"\n\n\"I bring you greetings from the Blue Order.\" Darcy leaned slightly over the water.\n\n\"Matriarch Dover has told me of her conversation with the seafarer.\"\n\nDover's head fins twitched. That was not a good sign.\n\n\"I would hear what you have to say for myself. Begin with the request you made to her.\" Delphinus slapped the water.\n\nHe was not pleased.\n\nDamn and bloody hell.\n\n\"The Dragon Sage of the Blue Order has been taken. She was seen forced aboard a sloop that took a course to Bermuda. We ask your help in locating her.\" Darcy's voice boomed out over the wind and waves.\n\n\"You are mate to the Sage?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Your kind mates for life?\"\n\nThat was not the expected question.\n\n\"We do.\"\n\n\"She is a Matriarch among your kind?\"\n\nTo his credit, Darcy hardly blinked. \"Yes, the Sage is one of our Matriarchs.\"\n\nDelphinus glanced at the females around him. \"Matriarchs are sometimes lost to bigger dragons. It is the way of things. Who stands to replace her?\"\n\nDarcy's jaw dropped, and he stammered.\n\n\"There is none among the Order who could replace her.\" Kellynch rose up a little higher. \"She is unique among her kind.\"\n\n\"Our daughter, who is but an infant, will likely carry her legacy, but it will be years before that can be possible.\"\n\n\"You are foolish to have one who cannot be replaced.\" Legatum's squeal carried a derisive note.\n\nLaconia hopped up on the gunnel and stretched out over the water. \"She is of a kind that has not been seen before. That is why it is so important that she is returned.\"\n\n\"Are you willing to help us?\" Darcy asked.\n\n\"How have she or the Blue Order helped us?\"\n\n\"She was critical to the admission of Kellynch to the Blue Order.\" Technically, Wentworth was not supposed to be a part of these talks, but those plans had already dissolved.\n\n\"Neither the landed dragons nor the Blue Order are quick to change. But now that a marine dragon has become part of us, there is a precedent for more,\" Darcy added.\n\n\"Do you offer us membership in the Order?\"\n\n\"I cannot do that. It must be approved by a vote in the Council. But I can, I will bring your petition to them and plead the case with them. Kellynch will represent your cause to them as well.\"\n\n\"And you know how they will decide?\"\n\n\"One can never truly know such things. However\u2014\"\n\n\"So, your promises are worth very little.\"\n\n\"Can you predict what your Matriarchs will decide under each and every circumstance?\" Kellynch snarled.\n\nDelphinus slapped the water with both appendages. \"I trust them to make good decisions for their pods.\"\n\n\"As I trust the Council to make good decisions\u2014\"\n\n\"For the Order. Not for us.\" Delphinus clicked and squeaked. Was that a form of dragon-tongue? \"I will consider what you have said. We will discuss this among ourselves and contact you when we have made a decision.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, but the longer we wait, the less likely it is that we recover her.\" Darcy clutched the railing.\n\n\"The Blue Order has waited all this time to contact us, and you expect us to hurry for you now? I think not. You will have my answer in due time. If you are in that much of a hurry, there are several marine wyrms like Kellynch that are known to hunt in the depths here, in places we cannot reach. Perhaps they might be sympathetic to one of their kind and hurry on his behalf. But then again, they might feel the wrongs he has suffered at the hands of the Order rather deeply.\" Delphinus slapped his tail, splashing the dinghy, and dove, the pod disappearing as though they had never been there.\n\nDarcy crumpled, cradling his face in his hands.\n\n\"She could not have convinced them either.\" Laconia said softly, nudging Darcy's hands with his nose.\n\n\"I know. Unfortunately, they do have a point, one that I have very little room to argue with.\"\n\nWentworth signaled to the oarsman. The winds had picked up. Being caught away from Cerulean in the storm would not make things any better."
            },
            {
                "title": "February 2, 1815, On board Sea Lion",
                "text": "Only the meagerest of sunbeams greeted them this morning. Was it a good thing that she had become accustomed to seeing through the gloom?\n\nThe taste in the air alone spoke of storms, and not the passing kind, but the sort that lingered all day, tossing them about like a shuttlecock in the wind. Such a delight of anticipation. Perhaps the Movers would forget about them for the time being.\n\nA heavy sigh seemed in order, but it would hardly improve their lot.\n\n\"How are you feeling today?\" Elizabeth sat up, the ghastly pile of straw slipping and sliding beneath her, and scratched Prussian behind the ears. \"That was a very brave thing you did for me, and I shall not forget it.\"\n\nIf\u2014no, when\u2014they ever got out of this hold, she would never have another straw-filled mattress in the house. Not even the lowest servant would sleep in this stuff.\n\nHe leaned into her fingers, a content little sound in the back of his throat. \"Hurts. Cannot move fast, but I can move. The band helps.\"\n\nAzure, still twined around him, extended her neck for a scratch, too. \"You great help.\"\n\nBeside them, Joshua carefully scratched Lapis and Indigo.\n\nPhoenix peeked out from under his collar. \"My ribs do not hurt so much either.\"\n\nShe held out her finger for him to perch upon and brought him very close. His color had returned and his eyes were bright, if shadowed with a dread only prey knew. \"You do look much better this morning.\"\n\n\"What will you do when they return?\" Lapis pushed her head into Joshua's hand.\n\n\"That, I fear, is a very good question.\"\n\n\"Think like a dragon?\" Joshua seemed so hopeful, though he clearly had no idea what it actually meant.\n\n\"It has served me well so far. Why should I turn away from that now?\"\n\n\"How do you know how to think like a dragon?\" Phoenix flittered back to Joshua's shoulder.\n\nThe wyrms turned to her with great interest. Somehow it felt like a great deal rested on her answer.\n\n\"I think that dragons and men are really not so different, at least in many cases. The biggest difference is men pretend an air of civility to cover up what is truly going on underneath. Dragons do not. If they are vying for dominance, they claim it for what it is. If they are fighting for territory, there is no doubt what is going on. Perhaps that is why I would generally prefer to deal with dragons.\" Hardly the sort of confession she would make among men, but hopefully the honest answer was also the right one.\n\n\"I think I would, too,\" Joshua muttered.\n\n\"Dragons are not always so nice.\" Indigo prodded Joshua to rub his ears. \"The big ones will have their way no matter what we do.\"\n\n\"I will see something done about that.\" If\u2014no, when\u2014heavens, she was thinking that a great deal today; probably not a good sign\u2014they got out of this hold and returned to Blue Order territories, she would go straight to Langham and Sir Carew with the matter.\n\nOh, the state of the Dragon State! Worse than the Order even suspected. How much was happening that she and the rest of the Order were unaware of\u2014\n\nHeavy feet, familiar feet, pounded beyond the door and a key rattled in the lock. Why now? Did they not have a storm to prepare for?\n\nPhoenix burrowed under Joshua's grimy shirt. The wyrms stationed themselves around the foul haystack\u2014but somehow it felt protective this time.\n\nElizabeth's eyes pricked and she blinked hard. Dear little Friends!\n\nThe door flung open, bouncing hard off the wall as it struck.\n\nA cockatrix resembling a brilliant red parrot swooped in, Ayles and Corney behind her.\n\nThe cockatrix landed, her long tail-feathers spread out on the grimy floor. She looked over her shoulder, staring at the floor, contempt in her eyes. It was the sort of expression Cait would have worn had she ever deigned to enter such a situation.\n\nThe wyrms slithered back towards Elizabeth and Joshua and closer to each other, hissing. Baring their fangs, they bobbed and wove, moves used to confuse a predator.\n\nThis was not the first time they had encountered this cockatrix.\n\nBeads of cold sweat gathered on Elizabeth's upper lip.\n\n\"There is no firedrake here.\" The cockatrix's voice was like the caw of a seabird, raw and grating. \"You fool! Why did you not wait for me on shore like I told you to?\" She whirled on Corney.\n\nAnother dragon accomplice?\n\nWhat did this cockatrix have against the Blue Order? Had she been trafficked as an exotic bird and not offered assistance? That was not unlikely; no cockatrix species native to England sported such colors. Perhaps she, too, had been denied protection by the Order since she was a foreign dragon.\n\nInteresting.\n\nTelling.\n\nDangerous.\n\nA trickle of cold sweat trailed down the back of her neck.\n\n\"I told you we should not have rushed into this. We had Scarlett working with us for a reason, same as those wyrms.\" Ayles flung his hands into the air, nearly striking Corney.\n\n\"How'de you know, missy smart-bird?\" Was Corney trying to have his eyes gouged out? Not that he did not deserve it at this point, but it would hardly help their situation.\n\nScarlett whirled on him and pecked at his feet. Corney skittered back, awkward and clumsy with his bad leg. He just dodged her sharp beak, but nearly fell in the process.\n\n\"Just what do you think a baby firedrake looks like?\" Scarlett extended magnificent orange-red wings.\n\nA cockatrix vying for dominance was never a good thing. Prevailing over Cait had been one thing\u2014Elizabeth had been prepared, and met her in open ground, with witnesses who would hold Cait accountable to honorable behavior. But here and now, under these conditions, Elizabeth would never be able to repeat that victory.\n\n\"Like a lizard with wings, o'course. 'Bout this big.\" Corney held out cupped hands.\n\n\"Idiot.\" Scarlett flapped, sending bits of mildewing straw scattering. \"A firedrake's egg is bigger than I; it would take a barrel to hold it. They are the size of a small child when they hatch. There's no hiding a creature that size in this hold. Whatever might be hiding in that boy's coat is no firedrake.\"\n\nJoshua covered the spot where Phoenix hid with his hands, pale and trembling.\n\n\"You lied to us!\" Ayles grabbed Elizabeth by the arm and yanked her to her feet.\n\nShe fell into his chest, fighting for balance. Thankfully he had not dislocated her shoulder.\n\nThe wyrms rose up on their tails, hissing and growling.\n\n\"You made the error entirely on your own.\" Elizabeth pulled back her shoulders. This was a time to be big. \"I simply failed to correct you.\"\n\n\"You said he breathed fire, you miserable bitch.\" Ayles raise a hand to strike.\n\n\"I wouldn't do that if I were you.\" Scarlett hopped between them. She really was quite lovely. \"If she is who I think she is, you've got much bigger problems than kidnapping the wrong dragon.\"\n\n\"What d'you mean by that?\" Corney stepped closer.\n\nOnly one step, no more. So, he was afraid of Scarlett \u2026\n\n\"She belongs to the Blue Order.\"\n\n\"Nearly all the dragon-talkers do. So what?\" Corney sneered.\n\nHe really did want his eyes clawed out.\n\n\"Word has been going around that an officer was taken. A female officer. An important officer. The Dragon Sage. The one who the dragons selected themselves.\" Scarlett looked Elizabeth up and down, then nodded vigorously. \"Yes, that is her. You idiots have taken the Dragon Sage herself.\"\n\n\"So's we 'ave a valuable hostage, what be the trouble in that? Means she could prove worth her feed, after all.\"\n\nAyles turned on Corney. \"Imbecile! These are dragons we are dealing with, not men! They will not pay ransom.\"\n\n\"Then we will kill her. The loss is theirs.\" Corney reached for his belt, probably for a knife.\n\nElizabeth scrambled back. Azure and Indigo slipped in front of her.\n\n\"No!\" Scarlett dove for his hand and ripped open a gash, nearly from wrist to elbow, with her beak. \"Perhaps that might work with any other warm-blood in the Order. But not with her. She is special to the Order Dragons.\"\n\n\"Then what do smarty-bird suggest?\"\n\nScarlett shrieked a blood-curdling, terror-inducing scream that Walker himself would have been proud of. \"There is only one answer for such an insult to a major dragon, much less every major dragon in England. They will kill you. Without question, without quarter, without mercy. They might even entertain themselves by making it a slow spectacle in front of the entire Conclave. No warm-blood in this world will be able to stop them. This entire ship is a death trap.\"\n\nBoth men turned ashen as they looked at one another, eyes wide, jaws agape.\n\n\"You have only one hope.\"\n\n\"And what would that be?\" Ayles' usually confident voice was more that of a small boy.\n\n\"Get rid of her, of all of them, now and get away from them as fast as you can. Hope the dragons find them and are satisfied. If they die, their deaths must not be on your hands. Hopefully that will be enough. If you survive this, do not contact me again. I want nothing more to do with dullards who think themselves equal to dragons.\" Scarlett leapt into the air and shot through the door.\n\n\"Bloody hell! I warned you! I warned you!\" Ayles jerked Joshua to his feet and headed for the door.\n\nCorney tried to block him. \"Stop. We worked 'ard enough to get 'em, I ain't throwing profit away.\"\n\nWith his free hand, Ayles grabbed the front of Corney's shirt. \"Did you not listen? We have to get rid of them and do it quickly. That is our only chance.\"\n\n\"You really think they's gonna find us? They ain't magic, they got no second sight. We be far and away from any o' them.\"\n\n\"Scarlett knows where we are. Where do you think she is headed now? How better to spare her own hide?\"\n\nCorney's eyes widened, and he grunted. Ayles dragged Joshua to the door. Corney followed with Elizabeth. The wyrms trailed behind, twining together in an anxious knot.\n\nHauled up the ladder and dropped on the slick deck, sharp wind and icy sea spray buffeted her face. Even filtered through swirling storm clouds, the sunlight burned and blinded. After so many days in the dark hold, would she ever be able to see properly again?\n\n\"Just pitch 'em over and be done. The cold water will make quick work of 'em and the fish don't leave nothing to find. They'll never know we hads 'em.\"\n\n\"If you kill them, the dragons will know.\" The whispery-slithery voice\u2014no voices, there were two\u2014rasped against her skull, tearing at her thoughts, her mind. \"They will know. The dragons will know.\"\n\n\"Set them adrift. Listen to Scarlett.\" Another, high-pitched, voice scraped through her ears.\n\n\"Angry dragons kill for revenge, slowly, painfully.\" This voice had authority.\n\nAyles rubbed his temples, blinking hard and stared narrowly at the wyrms gathered in a loose ring around them. The wyrms tasted the air, bobbing and weaving.\n\n\"Do what Scarlett said. They will die one way or the other, no one is here to rescue them. Keep their blood off us.\" Ayles waved toward the back of the ship.\n\n\"No point in wastin' a perfectly good dinghy on 'em\u2014\"\n\nAyles grabbed Corney by the shoulders and lifted him off the deck. \"Do as I say or I will pitch you over!\"\n\nCorney scrabbled back, with a string of invectives fit to impress Cornwall himself.\n\nJoshua clung to her, shuddering. If only she could offer him some comfort.\n\nAyles seized each of them by an elbow and propelled them to the back of the sloop, not pausing even as they lost footing on the slick deck. Two familiar scruffy men stood by ropes that hung over the side.\n\nAyles snatched Joshua under the arms and threw him over the side. A solid thud and a yelp. \"Now you, Dragon Lady.\"\n\nBefore she could react, she landed in the suspended dinghy beside Joshua.\n\n\"Release it!\"\n\nRopes creaked and the small boat swung against the sloop's hull as it dropped toward the roiling sea.\n\n\"They won't last in this storm.\" Corney peered over the side, laughing. \"Good riddance. To you as well.\" He slung something long and writhing over the side.\n\nPrussian yowled as he caught the edge of the dinghy with his single fang. Joshua grabbed him by the scruff of the neck\u2014wait, they had scruffs?\u2014and hauled him in beside Elizabeth.\n\nAzure screamed and threw herself over, nearly falling across Elizabeth's back. Indigo and Lapis followed, with slightly better aim. Joshua pulled them close as they landed.\n\n\"Good riddance to you and all the scalies!\"\n\nThe dinghy hit the water with a bone-jarring thud. Who ever thought the water could be so hard?\n\nVengeful waves caught the little craft, tossing it like a paper boat in a rain-swelled stream, dividing them from the sloop. Elizabeth and Joshua clung to the sides, keeping the wyrms between them. Screaming wind swept over them seeking to pitch them into the sea.\n\nHuddling low in the gathering pool at the bottom of the boat, they sheltered from the winds.\n\nAt last, a wan sunbeam poked through the clouds.\n\nElizabeth peeked up. The Sea Lion a speck against the dark sky. How had the sloop gone so far so fast?\n\nThere was nothing but ocean in all directions.\n\nMerciful heavens!\n\nNothing.\n\nAs though they were the only creatures left in the world.\n\nAlone.\n\nA wave bearing a grudge of its own caught her in the face. She sputtered and pushed frigid seawater away. Perhaps it would have been better to have been thrown to the waters\u2014it would have been mercifully fast.\n\nWhat was she thinking? Anne and Darcy were still out there. She would not abandon them. She had not even said goodbye to them.\n\nThere had to be options, there had to be something to do.\n\nPhoenix crawled out of Joshua's shirt, onto his shoulder, flapping against the sea spray.\n\n\"It is best you stay warm, close to him.\" Elizabeth dabbed water from his face with her sleeve. \"These waves could toss you out\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Phoenix stamped his foot on Joshua's shoulder. \"Do not tell me what to do. This is all my fault. I cannot live with that. Now that I am out of that cage, I mean to do something about this.\"\n\n\"Do something? What can be done?\" Joshua tried to cover him with his hand, but Phoenix hopped into the air and hovered between them.\n\n\"I am free to fly now. I will get help.\"\n\n\"Here, in the middle of the ocean?\" Joshua shouted over the rising wind. \"How do you mean to find anyone? There is no one. And this storm? How do you think you can fly in this storm? You are so small\u2014\"\n\n\"What has that to do with anything? I am a dragon. I will fulfill my commitment to protect the Order and its people as much as if I were a firedrake.\"\n\nThe wyrms raised their heads and rumbled something that sounded like praise.\n\n\"He is right.\" Elizabeth held up her finger as a perch. \"He is completely right. A small dragon is fully a dragon.\"\n\n\"But look at him, he cannot\u2014\"\n\n\"No, he should, he must be allowed this dignity to shape his own fate.\" She held him close to her face and looked into his bright, determined eyes. Though tiny, stubborn resolve ran through his every ounce. \"You know what is at stake. You know what you are up against. If you believe you are up to the challenge, then go.\"\n\nPhoenix bobbed his head, twittered and took off. Buffeted to and fro, like a feather in the wind, the dark clouds swallowed up his brilliant red, and he was gone.\n\n\"I'm never going to see him again,\" Joshua choked out the words, holding Lapis and Indigo carefully close.\n\n\"He has been called a firedrake so many times recently, perhaps he believes it is true.\" Azure shivered and pressed close to Elizabeth's leg.\n\n\"Fairy dragons have always wanted to be taken seriously. None can doubt their fortitude now.\" Elizabeth inched closer to Joshua, clutching tight to the side against the fresh onslaught of wind and waves."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Pelting, stinging rain renewed its assault. Joshua huddled close, keeping the wyrms between them, lest they be flung out into the maelstrom, as the dinghy bucked and heaved in the waves.\n\nAnother crash. A frigid deluge descended. Was that her own voice, screaming, as she fought the water's pull overboard? How much water sloshed around her? How much more could the little craft take?\n\n\"Lizzy, look out!\"\n\nAnother wave rammed into the dinghy's side, nearly capsizing it. More water gushed over the hull, dropping them low in the water.\n\n\"I will find help, too!\" Indigo sprang up and dove over the side.\n\nJoshua jumped, but Indigo had already disappeared into the waters. Brave, impetuous little creature would never survive.\n\nLapis huddled into Joshua in despair. \"He's not \u2026 we're not water wyrms\u2026\"\n\nHe wrapped his arms tight around the keening wyrm.\n\n\"Help me bail.\" Elizabeth splashed seawater over the side. \"We are not going to give up.\"\n\n\"But Lizzy \u2026\"\n\n\"Now! Phoenix did not give up. Indigo did not give up. We shall not give up.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Darcy braced against Longbourn's side as Cerulean rocked and plunged in the roiling seas. While the winds resembled bad storms at Pemberley, these tempests were something entirely unique. Perhaps it was the vast expanse of sea that allowed them to run wild. Nothing at home had ever compared to this fury, unrelenting from all sides.\n\n\"Get below, Darcy,\" Wentworth bellowed as he fought his way toward them. \"I can't have you getting swept over.\"\n\nLongbourn raised his head slightly and trumpeted. \"Look! Look!\"\n\nA red blur\u2014a cockatrix?\u2014 broke through the clouds and dove directly toward them. Wentworth jumped back as it raced between them.\n\n\"Remember me!\" Something fell from its grasp and it disappeared back into the storm.\n\nMore by instinct than intent, Darcy stared at the deck. A matted splotch of red.\n\nRed?\n\nFeather-scales?\n\nPhoenix!\n\nDropping to his knees, he seized the sodden red mass.\n\n\"What do you have?\" Wentworth skidded in close and peered into Darcy's hands. \"Dragon's blood! Is that\u2026? It is\u2026? Phoenix!\"\n\nA weak cheep filtered through the shrieking winds.\n\n\"Get him below! To my cabin, now!\" Wentworth shoved Darcy in the right direction. \"Warm him, get him to talk!\"\n\nDarcy stumbled and staggered\u2014it was easier to walk drunk than in this storm\u2014nearly falling down the ladder, but finally made it to Wentworth's cabin.\n\nQuiet, so quiet out of the winds. Dark. Only slivers of light sneaking through. No candles; too dangerous.\n\nHe pressed his back to the wall and slowly sank down. Cold, his hands, so cold they attempted to refuse his orders. But, no, he would not relent. Peeling them apart, he stared. Pray that sodden red mass be who he thought it was.\n\nIt cheeped and peered up at him, shivering too hard to speak.\n\nPhoenix.\n\nDarcy yanked off his cravat and dried sopping feather-scales, then tucked Phoenix into his shirt, under his coat, pressing him close with both hands. The sooner he was warm, the sooner he could talk.\n\n\"Darcy?\" How had such a weak voice survived the storm unprotected?\n\nDid that mean\u2014dare he hope?\n\n\"Did I hear Longbourn, too?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, he is above, on deck. Where are Elizabeth and Joshua? Are they alive?\"\n\n\"They were.\"\n\n\"Were?\" Darcy's hands shook, his throat nearly too tight to speak. \"What do you mean, were?\"\n\n\"When I left them, they were. Now, I do not know. So cold. Could not fly in the wind; thrown into the sea. Scarlett rescued me. Thought she would eat me, but she brought me here.\"\n\n\"Where are they? On the Sea Lion?\"\n\n\"No, Scarlett told them not to kill her \u2026 they put us in a dinghy.\"\n\n\"In this storm?\" Darcy clambered to his feet\u2014faster, why could he not move faster?\u2014 and staggered from the cabin, to the ladder, to the deck, falling over himself like a gin-addled beggar.\n\nLongbourn and Wentworth met him as he emerged into the gale.\n\n\"What does the flutter-bit know?\" Longbourn pressed his face so close he all but knocked Darcy off his feet.\n\nWentworth grabbed his elbow.\n\n\"They are adrift, in a dinghy.\"\n\nThe grimace on Wentworth's face said too much.\n\n\"I will tell Kellynch. We will find them.\" Longbourn backed up three steps and launched into the storm.\n\n\"He will fare better than I. He is so big,\" Phoenix whispered, his beaky nose scratching Darcy's collarbone.\n\nWentworth laid a hand on Darcy's shoulder. \"You realize, the chances of a small craft being found in good weather are poor. In this\u2026\"\n\nIt was difficult not to hate him right now. \"Hope is all I have. I cannot\u2014I will not\u2014relinquish that, not yet.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"I don't think this is working!\" Joshua flung out a handful of water as another defiant wave plunged over the side, nearly tossing the weary dinghy on its side.\n\n\"We have nothing else we can do. Keep going!\" She heaved a mighty splash over the hull with both hands.\n\nThe ocean swelled beneath them, rising higher, higher, higher than they had been before, then disappeared from under them. The boat fell faster than they. They landed, crashing hips, knees and elbows, throwing them both to the side.\n\nGroaning as loud as the screaming winds, the little craft listed toward the water, slowly, as though it were a game.\n\nThey threw themselves to the other side, but it seemed determined to dip below the surface this time.\n\nThump!\n\nThud! Jolting impact resonated throughout the hull.\n\nThe boat inched back into balance.\n\nNo wave had accomplished that.\n\nWhat was it? From where had it come?\n\nA gust sloshed more dark water over the hull. The dinghy sank lower, almost level with the roiling ocean.\n\n\"We're going to sink, Lizzy! We're going to sink. I'm so sorry. I never thought Phoenix's little trick\u2014\"\n\n\"This is much bigger than you or Phoenix. It is good that it has all been exposed. You are not to blame, either of you.\" He was right, though, just another inch and they\u2014\n\nThud!\n\nShe bounced. Something had struck the bottom of the boat.\n\n\"Look!\" Joshua pointed at a dark form leaping through the waves toward them.\n\nWas that leaping, or had it been thrown?\n\nIndigo splashed into Joshua. \"Help here.\"\n\n\"There! There!\" Joshua pointed as the dinghy rose slightly.\n\nThrough the pelting rain, several dark, oblong shapes rose out of the water.\n\nDragons? Perhaps, but who? What sort?\n\nIndigo raised his head weakly as Lapis twined around him. \"They help.\"\n\nTwo forms drew closer. Serpent-whales? Yes, they were certainly the sort of serpent-whales she had seen in the old bestiaries.\n\nThe larger of the two lifted its front appendages out of the water and whistled. \"The land-wyrm said you are the missing warm-bloods.\"\n\n\"You did it, Indigo, you did it!\" Joshua half-sobbed and pulled the pair close. \"I am so proud of you!\"\n\nShe grabbed the hull and leaned out as far as she dared. \"Yes, yes, we are. Can you, will you help us?\"\n\n\"You do not swim?\"\n\n\"No, and the cold\u2026\"\n\n\"Not terribly useful, are you?\" The second, smaller one\u2014an adolescent\u2014they were both adolescents, that unfinished look was too clear\u2014bobbed so close she could have touched it.\n\nIts large, intelligent, seawater-blue eyes registered concern.\n\n\"We are not of the sea. Will you help?\"\n\n\"Our patriarch has not decided.\" The larger one glanced at the smaller.\n\n\"Told the Matriarchs they should stay away.\"\n\nNo! Not like the hippocampus! Her chest clenched so hard dizziness threatened.\n\n\"Said he would decide when he decided. Could be a long time.\" The larger one clicked and whistled as though speaking privately to the other.\n\n\"We will not survive that long.\" What should she do? Was this a moment to be dominant? Companionable? Vulnerable? A Matriarch? How did these sea dragons perceive the situation?\n\n\"Matriarch said it is no benefit to us if you die, but she must obey the Patriarch.\" What was the smaller one implying?\n\n\"The wyrm nearly drowned to find us.\" The larger one pointed to Indigo.\n\nSo they had saved him!\n\n\"Says he trusts you. Says you will take their case to the Order.\" The larger one bobbed as a wave crashed over \u2026 him?\n\n\"Yes, yes, I have given them my word.\"\n\n\"The wyrm believes you.\" The smaller one rose a little higher in the water.\n\n\"You would take our case to the Order?\" The larger one's voice dropped into something low and serious.\n\nCase? The sea dragons had a case? What could they possibly want? \"Of course I will. That is what the Dragon Sage does.\"\n\n\"You cannot do that if you are dead.\"\n\n\"No, I cannot.\" She held her breath as the two adolescents conversed in looks, postures and sounds she could not understand.\n\n\"I will tell Memoriae.\" The smaller one disappeared into the waves.\n\nThe larger one backed away and stared at her, as though deciding what to do."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Phoenix snored against Darcy's chest. He had tried to remain awake, watchful for Longbourn's and Kellynch's return, but exhaustion overtook him. At least he had warmed enough next to Darcy's skin to be out of danger.\n\nCerulean heaved and plunged like an unbroken horse. Darcy pressed harder against the cabin wall. Wentworth had declared the storm bad. Not the worst he had weathered, but bad. How could he have survived worse than this?\n\nWhat sort of men were these sailors to manage such monstrous gales? An angry firedrake must be less dangerous. He had faced one down and lived to tell, but this?\n\nLongbourn was not a sea dragon. He barely flew at all over land. How would he manage against the raging winds and rain? Would he be lost too on top of \u2026 of \u2026\n\nNo, no, he must not go there. Must not think that. Not yet. There was so much at stake. He could not lose her, not now. Not like this.\n\nThey had not even said goodbye\u2014\n\nThe cabin door flung open.\n\n\"Longbourn approaches.\" Wentworth helped him stand.\n\nOne hand pressing Phoenix to his chest, he lurched to keep up with Wentworth's ridiculous surefootedness.\n\nA gust of wind sent him sliding into Wentworth. How had the deck become so absurdly slick?\n\nSailors scattered to make room for Longbourn, who landed on the deck in an ugly scrabbling-for-purchase heap. The deck lurched and bucked\u2014was it the dragon or the waves? Pray he had not injured himself.\n\nDarcy pushed sheets of rain from his face and fought his way across the heaving deck toward Longbourn.\n\n\"Nothing!\" He snorted, ocher venom dripping from his fangs. \"But a hippocampus told me he saw the ship southwest from here. Tell Kellynch.\" He flapped and snorted.\n\nDarcy dodged back, barely out of the way of Longbourn's relaunch. How did he know what was southwest in these conditions?\n\nWentworth shook his head. \"Go below, I will inform Kellynch if he returns empty-handed.\"\n\n\"He headed east, did he not?\"\n\n\"I am afraid so. The storm is not letting up, you need to go below.\" He gripped Darcy's arm. \"I am sorry to say this, but you need to prepare yourself. A small craft with landsmen has little chance \u2026\"\n\n\"I do not need to hear that.\"\n\n\"Yes, I think you do. I am sorry. More than you can know. I am sorry. But to ignore what is in front of you \u2026\"\n\n\"I cannot afford to give up yet. None of us can. If, and I do mean if, she is lost, the implications are too great to consider. Not just for me and my daughter, but for the Order, for all of England. If we lose her in this way, the dragons will be proved right. The Order will have failed them. If they lose faith in men, in the Treaty and the Accords, the darkness to come is truly inconceivable.\"\n\n\"How could so much come to depend on a single officer?\"\n\n\"Hope is a powerful thing, Wentworth. More powerful than we give it credit for. She gave\u2014gives\u2014the dragons hope that things could change, that things would improve. If that hope is shattered \u2026\"\n\n\"Then whatever happens, we must work to ensure that hope no longer rests on her shoulders alone. She cannot remain as the single voice to represent their interests. By all means, hope if you must, but hold on to purpose now, too. She would demand that of you.\"\n\nDamnation.\n\nWentworth was right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Cold. Winter in Derbyshire was not this cold. Would she ever be warm again?\n\nWould the world ever stop moving around her?\n\nWinds, rain. So much rain. Had there ever been a time without it?\n\nJoshua had stopped bailing and lay huddled around all four wyrms, who were falling into torpor with the cold. The edge of the hull, nearly level with the ocean, hardly kept back the cold blackness licking at its edges.\n\nWhat matter if it did or did not flood them, when the waves kept coming and coming and coming. Beating, crashing, pouring in against them.\n\nThe sea swelled, lifting them, tossing the boat. Was it possible it laughed as it did so? Ready to make its final claim.\n\nIf only she could hold Anne once more, speak to April, Pemberley, tell Darcy\u2014\n\nAirborne! A monstrous wave threw them aloft above the little dinghy, above the water. Was this how it felt to fly?\n\nWithout wings, she plummeted into the frothing jaws of the black ocean, swallowed whole.\n\nSharp, numbing cold enveloped, wrapping tendrils around her limbs, an irresistible grasp. Darkness, complete and compelling.\n\nSuffocating.\n\nAlone.\n\nNo\u2014what? Something smooth and hard beneath, propelling her up through the dark, breaking through.\n\nAir.\n\nShe choked and sputtered and gulped air. To breathe! Yes, to breathe.\n\nBleary, so bleary, everything around her. What, there? A small boat, their boat, on its side, sinking.\n\nA pale grey serpent-whale? How many were there? So many surrounding them.\n\nA deformed one, a growth on its back. No, no, a boy! Yes, a boy! Joshua! Another serpent-whale swam alongside, nudging him as he slipped from his precarious resting place.\n\nA hard nose nudged her. How had she come to be on the back of a serpent-whale?\n\nCold. Aching. Every inch convulsing in shivers that came from her deepest core, trying to force her from her perch just above the water.\n\nAnother nudge, but the wind \u2026 nearly slipping into the water again.\n\nChittering squeals and another nudge from the opposite side.\n\nYes, it was right; she was clumsy and stupid\u2014and so very, very cold. If only she could close her eyes. Yes, that would certainly help.\n\nToo hard to keep them open. Just a little sleep. Darcy and Anne, even Pemberley, April would understand.\n\nWait, what was that against the clouds?\n\nA dragon? In flight?\n\nNot possible. Looks like Longbourn.\n\nSo good to see him one last time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "What did it say about one when the best thing one could offer was to remain out of the way? Certainly, it was no compliment.\n\nDarcy had tried to use a chair in Wentworth's cabin, but somehow, sitting on the floor, firmly braced against the wall, felt much more secure. Huddling like a scared child\u2014that was what it felt like; probably looked like as well. Did the land\u2014or perhaps the ton \u2014feel as threatening to Wentworth?\n\nProbably unkind to hope that it did.\n\nPhoenix snored softly against his chest.\n\nWhat did that cockatrix mean when she screamed 'remember me' when she dropped him at their feet? Hopefully he would be able to tell the story once he awakened.\n\nBut what if he was the only one left to tell the story?\n\nDarcy clenched his fists, whole body trembling. Could he live without her? How?\n\nLoneliness had once been familiar, tolerable, even comfortable at times. But easy to give up, once Elizabeth became part of him. How did one return to that state?\n\nHow could he?\n\nAnne. Little Pemberley. April. Walker. The estate.\n\nHe was needed. What choice was there?\n\nBut being needed was not the same as being loved.\n\nLoyalty and duty. They would make it easier. But not the same.\n\n\"Dragons sighted!\" A fist pounded at the cabin door.\n\nNo! Not knowing and hoping was better than knowing for certain.\n\nHe pushed himself up, jelly-knees faltering with the pitching deck. What choice was there but to face the awful truth?\n\nSo much more difficult this time, climbing the ladder and crossing the deck to Wentworth. Laconia spring-hopped beside him as though to keep him from a drunken stagger through the pelting rain.\n\nWhen they reached land again, he would have to get very, very drunk.\n\n\"Look, Darcy!\" Wentworth handed over his spyglass, pointing to a dark form, barely distinguishable from the dark clouds.\n\nHands shaking, he raised it and tried to find the object Wentworth had pointed to. Damn, it was difficult to find a precise point. Who would have thought \u2026 wait \u2026 there!\n\nLongbourn, no doubt. How many other wyverns would be flying in the middle of the ocean, in the midst of a gale? But wait, what was that?\n\nHis flight was off, labored, even ponderous. Was the distant storm that bad?\n\nWhat had happened to his foot? Had he been injured? It seemed deformed \u2026\n\nThe glass tumbled out of his hand.\n\nWentworth caught it so expertly it seemed he had expected that to happen. \"You see it. It seems he is carrying something, someone perhaps?\"\n\n\"Sir, another!\" A sailor pointed at the sea in Longbourn's direction.\n\nWentworth peered through his glass. \"Pendragon's bones! Kellynch! With something on his back! Get the men ready to collect something from him! Quickly! Quickly!\"\n\nThe sailor scurried away, as surefooted as a crab in the sand.\n\n\"What did you see?\" Darcy barely forced the words out.\n\n\"I cannot be sure, but it might have been a person, a small one, carried above the water. I cannot fathom how he is able to swim that way!\" Wentworth turned aside. \"Clear the decks for the wyvern. It does not look like it will be a neat landing!\"\n\nLaconia leaned into him hard. \"You should go below. It may be some time before they arrive.\"\n\n\"I cannot.\" His feet were rooted in place as surely as the oaks of Pemberley.\n\n\"Then step back from the railings. There, you can lean against that bulkhead and hold on to the ropes. No sense risking being swept over. Go.\" Laconia shoved him along.\n\nLightning flashed and thunder clapped, lighting the two approaching dragons for a split second. Yes, they were indeed carrying \u2026 something \u2026 what else would they be carrying? It had to be Elizabeth and Joshua. Nothing else, no one else made sense.\n\nDid it?\n\nIf only he could pace, move about, release some of the electric urge to run toward them. Laconia pressed him back against the bulkhead.\n\nThe tatzelwurm was still there, like a child-minder keeping watch! A grown man did not need \u2026 then again, perhaps he did.\n\nTension spiraled, too much to bear, as the dragons grew larger on the horizon.\n\n\"Move bloody faster!\" No, the shout would not accomplish anything, but it did keep his heart from bursting. \"Faster, damn it, faster!\"\n\nLaconia pressed him back a little harder as his legs twitched to move. Perceptive little creature.\n\nPhoenix stirred and poked his head barely out of Darcy's shirt. \"What is happening?\"\n\n\"Longbourn and Kellynch return.\"\n\n\"Good. Then we can leave this awful place.\" Phoenix yawned and ducked back under the sodden muslin.\n\nHe was right, the seawater was awful. Never, never, never would he sail again, sea bathing, too\u2014that would be out. He had had enough seawater for a lifetime.\n\n\"Look! Look!\" Laconia pointed his thumbed paw at the sky. \"He carries someone!\"\n\nYes, there in Longbourn's grasp, a limp form, female.\n\nElizabeth.\n\nLaconia braced his knees to keep him upright.\n\nShe was not moving, just dangling, like a princess sacrificed to a medieval monster.\n\nPray, no! Breathe, she must breathe!\n\nEspecially since he could not.\n\nLarger and larger, faster now. Longbourn came into focus, Elizabeth dangling lifeless in his grasp.\n\nNo! She could not be!\n\nCloser, overshadowing the Cerulean now, its deck dodging away like a sick game of buffy gruffy.\n\nBack-winging rain into all who watched, Longbourn hovered, sailors assembled below, catching, gathering Elizabeth from his talons and rushing her toward Darcy.\n\nLaconia ended his vigil, stepping aside just as Darcy could bear no more stillness. He met the sailors as they laid her on deck.\n\nHe grabbed her hand. Cold, so very, very cold. She did not move.\n\nNo! No!\n\nHis bones melted, and he fell against her, head to her chest, some primal sound wrenched from his throat.\n\nWait! There, wait\u2026\n\nWas it possible?\n\nMovement?\n\nHe held up his hand in a universal bid for silence. The sailors obeyed, the winds did not.\n\nPressing his ear against her chest, he held his breath. A flutter, a tiny rise in her chest!\n\nHe bucked up, gasping, gulping rain and air. \"She lives! Get her below!\"\n\nSomeone slapped his back\u2014probably Wentworth\u2014 and yanked him to his feet. \"Go with her. Kellynch has the boy. I will tend them and hope for more good news.\"\n\nLaconia leaned into him as he staggered for the ladder. He probably could not have made it without the support.\n\nThe sailors laid her on blankets on the cabin floor, a pile of dry blankets heaped beside her.\n\n\"Get her dry and warm,\" one of them declared as they poured out, probably to help above deck.\n\nDarcy knelt beside her. In the dark, he could just make out Laconia's black form as he began sniffing her from the toes up. If she were injured, tatzelwurm spittle was the best medicine, especially since there was no surgeon.\n\nHe pulled her sodden garments away, wrapped her in blankets and pulled her close. \"Elizabeth.\"\n\nWas it his imagination or did she nestle just a little closer?\n\nThe door flew open, feeble rays of light staggered in ahead of Wentworth, who stumbled in with a boy\u2014Joshua\u2014 in his arms. A sailor followed with a bundle wrapped in what must have been the boy's coat.\n\nWhatever would he have brought with him?\n\n\"Over there.\" Wentworth pointed and the sailor set down the coat near the far wall.\n\n\"Be careful.\" Joshua's voice was weak, but clear. \"Lizzy?\"\n\n\"She breathes!\" Darcy reached into his shirt. \"And Phoenix!\" He scrabbled across to Joshua and Wentworth and placed Phoenix on Joshua's shoulder.\n\nThe boy sobbed, clutching the fairy dragon close. \"I never thought we'd see you again!\"\n\n\"I told you I would get help. I sent Longbourn and Kellynch.\" Phoenix muttered sleepily.\n\nGranted, that was not the complete story, but no need to bring that up now.\n\n\"I am so proud of you. The others, our Friends, how are they?\" Joshua pointed to his sopping coat.\n\nWentworth opened the bundle and wyrms tumbled out. Two, no, how many? Yes, two twined pairs in the shadows. Did they have blue belly stripes?\n\nDarcy glowered. \"Why? Did they not\u2014\"\n\nA cold hand touched his arm. \"They helped us. Take care of them.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Joshua crawled toward them. \"We're safe now. All of us. No one will take advantage of you again.\" He pulled the smaller pair close.\n\nWentworth glanced at Darcy and shrugged. \"I will send more blankets and see to Kellynch and Longbourn.\"\n\nDarcy helped Joshua out of his wet clothes and wrapped him with blankets.\n\n\"Wrap the wyrms, but do not touch their blue skin. Please, bring them here.\" Joshua reached for them.\n\nDarcy placed the wyrms in Joshua's care and returned to cradle Elizabeth.\n\n\"Is it true? Not some dream?\" she whispered, cuddling close. \"I smell sandalwood.\"\n\n\"It is no dream, though I can hardly understand how all of you have returned to me.\"\n\n\"I am so sorry. I never said goodbye.\" Tears coursed down her cheeks.\n\n\"We knew the danger. You should have been better protected.\"\n\n\"Things are worse among the Blue Order than you know.\" Her voice hitched.\n\n\"I am aware, though I fear the wyrms' tale will only complicate matters further.\"\n\n\"They have been wronged, but they risked everything to help us. I think some of them will stay with Joshua now, his Friends.\"\n\n\"I can only imagine what your aunt will say to that.\" He smoothed bits of wet hair back from her face.\n\n\"Anne? April? Pemberley? May? Our sisters?\"\n\n\"They are all well, safely within the walls of the Order offices.\"\n\nShe pressed her face into his shoulder, sobs wrenching through her in waves mirroring the storms outside. \"I still cannot believe you came for me. How \u2026 how did you find us?\"\n\n\"April was the one who first brought us information. Wentworth tried to engage help from the sea dragons, but they refused\u2014\"\n\n\"No, they did help. A group, young males I think, came to us. They might have been defying their matriarch or patriarch, I am not clear\u2026 kept us above water until Longbourn and Kellynch came.\"\n\n\"We thought them a lost cause.\" He pressed his face into her wet hair. \"Wentworth and I defied the Order, seeking the sea dragons' help to find you.\"\n\nThe door swung open, revealing a nimble sailor with a tray of food. \"Just cold porridge and grog, I'm afraid. And a joint of cold salt pork for the dragons.\"\n\nDarcy took tankards and bowls as the sailor placed the tray on the floor near Joshua and the wyrms. In just a few moments, the wyrms peeked out of the wraps Joshua held close, and Phoenix flittered to the tray.\n\n\"That is for you. Mind Phoenix, though. There will be plenty now. You do not have to gorge.\" Joshua helped the largest wyrm, with a single fang and a tied linen bandage around his middle, out of the blankets and toward the food.\n\nHe tasted the air and scanned the dim room, eyes locking on Elizabeth.\n\n\"This is my mate. He will see you are safe.\" She gazed up at Darcy with a look he remembered so well.\n\nYes, this was real!\n\nThe other wyrms moved out cautiously and set upon the joint, careful not to catch Phoenix in their frenzy.\n\nElizabeth sipped the grog.\n\n\"When we can have a fire again, I will see that you have tea.\"\n\nShe chuckled, weak and faint, but it was there. \"I fear I might have developed a taste for grog. I may just serve it at our next dinner.\"\n\nHe sat close and wrapped his arm around her shoulder, laughing until tears ran down his cheeks.\n\nThe smallest wyrms licked the bones one more time, then slithered to Joshua, bellies distended, a funny purry sort of rumble in their throats. Joshua arranged fresh blankets into a nest beside him and the four twined into a content cluster and slept. Phoenix nestled against his neck, just under his jaw, asleep as soon as he settled. Joshua snored a moment later.\n\nElizabeth watched them for a few minutes, but drifted off as well.\n\nBreathe, he must remember to breathe. The wondrous reality around him would not disappear if he breathed.\n\nWas it just his imagination? Had the sea calmed? Cerulean seemed to have lulled into a far more restful rhythm.\n\nThe door creaked open and Wentworth peeked in. Nodding, he beckoned to Darcy.\n\nHad he any idea how difficult it was to leave Elizabeth, even sleeping safely in a nest of warm blankets?\n\nThen again, Wentworth had never been frivolous. This must be important.\n\nCareful not to disturb her, Darcy made his way out and shut the door.\n\n\"Mrow.\" Something about the way Laconia's tail flicked.\n\nVery serious indeed.\n\n\"Come, the dragons are returning.\" Wentworth led him toward the ladder.\n\nYes, it was easier to walk now. It was not his imagination. \"Returning? Did they not already return?\"\n\n\"And they left after delivering their passengers.\" What was that, heaviness, finality in Wentworth's voice?\n\nWind and rain buffeted him as they emerged on deck, but not with the same furor as before. Grey, not black, clouds curtained the sky. Perhaps, just perhaps, there might be sunshine once more. Someday.\n\n\"There.\" Wentworth pointed into the distance.\n\nLongbourn and Kellynch approached, something dangling from Longbourn's foot. \"What is that?\"\n\nWentworth shook his head. \"Clear the deck for dragons!\"\n\nLaconia pressed Darcy back to safety as Longbourn hovered above and dropped something large, heavy and yellow on the deck. Cerulean groaned as his feet touched down.\n\nKellynch pulled alongside and looked over the railing. \"It is done.\"\n\n\"With witnesses.\" Longbourn rumbled.\n\n\"The serpent-whales knew the vessel. It seems the Sea Lion had tried to capture one of their young. You may find them more open to the Order now.\"\n\nWentworth approached Longbourn. Darcy followed. On the deck between them lay a battered wooden figurehead with the head of a lion and the tail of a fish.\n\nThe Sea Lion.\n\n\"Lost with all hands,\" Wentworth said more than asked.\n\n\"Record it so. You may tell the Order what really happened if you like. Or not. I do not care. There is no dragon in the Kingdom who will fault us.\" Longbourn settled his wings across his back.\n\n\"I am sure you are right.\" Wentworth clasped his hands behind his back.\n\nWhat had they done? A chill raced from his scalp to his shoulders.\n\nDragon justice. That is what they had done. Justice.\n\nKellynch coughed an odd sound and spewed out a box, a modest-sized sea chest, covered in slime. \"I do not know what is in that, but it seemed it might be worth retaining.\"\n\nWentworth brushed away the slime from the name plate. \"It is a gentleman's trunk. Bartholomew Ayles. There may be something useful. Thank you. You and you, take that below.\"\n\nDarcy approached Longbourn.\n\n\"If you disapprove, I do not need to know.\" He snorted hard.\n\n\"I do not know if she will approve.\"\n\n\"She may not, but she will understand. That is what makes her different. She will see that this was the only way forward, the only hope to stave off what has begun among the Order.\"\n\n\"I do not know that the Order will thank us for any of this. It is not what they ordered.\"\n\n\"But it is what was needed.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "February 6, 1815, Portsmouth",
                "text": "A slightly scruffy young cockatrice messenger landed on the windowsill and knocked on the glass of Anne's room at the Portsmouth Blue Order office, the second nicest accommodation the office had to offer. Since it was also Admiral Easterly's primary office as Naval Liaison, the facilities were far more comfortable than some of the other extension offices.\n\nIt seemed the whole of dragon-hearing Portsmouth had fallen into a dither with the news that the Sage would be visiting the offices! The entire building had been cleaned, stem to stern as Wentworth would say, with nearly every local Dragon Mate turning out to participate in some way. Some sent members of their dragon-hearing household staff to help, some offered objects of furniture or art to decorate or dishes upon which to serve the planned meals, kitchens promised food\u2014the sudden sense of community and cooperation was noteworthy.\n\nThe Order's regional undersecretary of Hampshire had also taken the liberty of scheduling several salons and talks for the Sage to lead, because after all, that was what she was known for. She certainly would not want to miss the opportunity to grace Portsmouth with her wisdom.\n\nNo, of course not. Her recovery from her trials could hardly be a consideration, could it? Hopefully Lady Elizabeth would not resent the intrusion too much.\n\nAnne sighed as she opened the window for the messenger.\n\nA lean and leggy cockatrice hopped to the dressing table near the window, careful not to mar the marquetry work with his talons. That, along with the rest of the furniture in the suite, were lovely, but hardly dragon-friendly, which seemed ironic all told, considering it was designed to host Blue Order dignitaries who would likely have minor dragons in their company.\n\nAt least the room was not also fitted out in Order-blue. That honor was reserved for the Darcys' suite. There was nothing wrong with the color, precisely, but it did get tiresome. The warm wood paneling and white walls of these lesser chambers suited her very well.\n\nSea air and dragon musk wafted in with the chill breeze. The latter far more pronounced now that local dragons were gathering in hopes of meeting with Lady Elizabeth.\n\n\"Cerulean is in the harbor, Lady Wentworth.\" The messenger extended his wings, emphasizing the importance of his news. \"The coachman awaits you downstairs.\"\n\n\"Excellent, pray tell the Gardiners that I will wait for them in the coach.\"\n\nThe messenger bobbed his head and flapped away.\n\nFor her sake alone, it would have been far too much trouble to take the coach for such a short distance. But Alister Salt insisted that it would be best to protect Lady Elizabeth and the boy from the attention they would surely draw if they walked to the offices from the docks.\n\nNo doubt, the local bands of she-dragons would be tempted to find fault with the Sage for her less-than-fashionable appearance after her travails at sea. As if any woman could be a fashion plate after such trials! It was the sort of thing her father would say. Certainly not the way anyone would wish to be greeted on their arrival.\n\nMoreover, it would not hurt to give the Gardiners a little privacy as well. Calm in the face of adversity they might have been, but keeping their composure when their son was returned would be too much to ask of any parent. The carriage really was the best choice.\n\nAnne shrugged on her navy-blue wool pelisse and headed downstairs. Could it be so simple? The return of the Sage would suddenly solve all the dragon tensions in the kingdom?\n\nWould that it might be, but nothing, nothing was ever so simple, especially where dragons were concerned.\n\nThe Gardiners perched on the plush coach seat across from her. A faint light in their eyes helped lift their weary faces. Not surprisingly, their focus fixed on the dock in the distance as they held hands, lips pressed together tight, as though speaking of the coming reunion might somehow make it disappear. Who could blame them?\n\nHer own anticipation of seeing Wentworth and yes, Laconia and even Kellynch, seemed insensitive to remark upon. She had not the same grief and anxiety fueling her expectations. So, they rode in relative silence, unlike the journey to Portsmouth, which had been filled by reading and rereading the tale of the rescue, in Darcy's own hand, carried by Longbourn directly to the Gardiners. A similar missive from Wentworth in which he shared a few details Darcy had not included in his, remained private.\n\nKingsley and Sergeant ran beside the coach, persuading the dragon-deaf they were the fiercest German boarhounds ever seen in Portsmouth, effectively discouraging even the dragon-hearing from following. They had claimed a share of responsibility in the Sage's abduction and had not been themselves since her disappearance. Now they ran with joyful draconic abandon as they chased away unwanted attention from the coach. It did not hurt that Alister Salt felt the honor of conveying the Sage to the office, then later back to London, very deeply.\n\nAnne pressed her cheek to the side glass, just able to make out the end of the dock in the morning mist. Calm waters lapped around it, a fitting foil to the storms Wentworth had described. A small boat had already tied off and shadowy figures were debarking, Laconia's the easiest to recognize.\n\nThe carriage rolled to a stop, and Alister let down the steps. Anne deferred to the Gardiners. Nothing should stand between them and their boy now. They took off running the moment their feet touched ground. That was as it should be.\n\nAlister, his trademark rag-tag appearance now so familiar, and even a little dear, handed her down. \"Kingsley and Sergeant will keep the gawkers at bay, but don't be dawdling. Quite a crowd is likely comin' if ye wait too long.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Salt. I am certain the Darcys will not wish to linger.\" She straightened her skirts and headed toward the reunions already in progress.\n\nThank heavens! There was Wentworth, nearly obscured by the mist, the last one off the dinghy. Yes, it was silly to worry about him now, but she did and probably always would.\n\n\"Sir Fitzwilliam, Lady Elizabeth!\" Gracious! It was definitely better that the Sage not be seen in this condition. Weariness hung over her like a wet, ratty cloak, her garments worn to rags, and only Laconia in her presence. When were there ever so few dragons with her? \"Mr. Salt awaits us to take you back to the offices.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Sir Fitzwilliam bowed from his shoulders, dark circles under his eyes and little color in his face. The shadows had lifted from his countenance, though, replaced by weariness too deep for words. \"Longbourn made it back to London, then?\"\n\n\"Indeed, sir. He spread the news of Lady Elizabeth's recovery as far and wide as he could on the way. There is more, but it should wait until we are at the offices.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He bowed again and ushered Lady Elizabeth toward the coach.\n\nShe cast a grateful look at Anne, which said everything it should have and more.\n\nLaconia wound around her ankles. Anne crouched to scratch under his chin. \"Thank you for taking care of them. I know you were invaluable.\"\n\n\"How did I know you would have seen to everything?\" Wentworth approached and helped her to her feet. The look on his face\u2014oh\u2014the one she would never have enough of.\n\n\"Once Longbourn arrived with the good news, what else was there for me to do?\" She laughed.\n\nHe pulled her close, tucking her head under his chin. Yes, it was improper and impulsive, and all things wonderful. \"I have never wanted to be back on land so much as I do now.\"\n\n\"And I have never anticipated a homecoming as much as this one.\"\n\nSeveral hours later, Anne knocked on the Darcys' door, tea tray in hand. Yes, it was a task more rightfully performed by a maid, but Lady Elizabeth certainly did not need gawkers, and that was what every servant in the building had suddenly become. The Order needed her to be strong and sure, ready with the answers at the inconsiderate events they would force upon her. Right now, she was all too human, too vulnerable to be the Sage. For just a few hours at least, she needed to be just a woman.\n\n\"Pray not now.\"\n\n\"It is Anne, Lady Elizabeth.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Come in.\"\n\nAnne slipped inside and shut the door behind her.\n\n\"Thank you so much for bringing a trunk of my things. I cannot remember a time when my favorite soap and a fresh gown were so very welcome.\" Lady Elizabeth did not rise from the leather armchair near the fire, looking a mite unwell, but it could have been the reflection of Order-blue, which dominated every corner of the chambers.\n\nWalls, curtains, linens\u2014only the mahogany furniture and matching leather upholstery had the audacity not to represent the Order's signature color. It was made up for by draconic carvings occupying every available segment of the wood: talon and ball feet, dragon-scale patterns, artistic drakes and wyrms climbing legs and along the edges of tables.\n\nIf there was a room designed to be the antithesis of Darcy House, this was it.\n\n\"I cannot take credit. It was your sister, Mary, who packed it. She hoped you would find it comforting.\" Anne set the tea tray down on a small table, with a ring of marquetry fairy dragons inlaid in the tabletop, and poured a cup of tea.\n\n\"She has always been so practical and considerate. I am very grateful to you both.\" Lady Elizabeth sipped her cup. \"Oh, gracious. That is a delight, though I fear I may yet find myself missing the taste of grog.\"\n\nAnne chuckled, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. \"Tell no one, but occasionally it is served at Kellynch-by-the-Sea for the same reason.\"\n\nLady Elizabeth laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. \"Pray excuse me. I dearly love to laugh, and there have been far too few opportunities to do so recently. Thank you. I must ask, Lady Wentworth\u2014pray, call me Elizabeth now, and may I call you Anne?\u2014\"\n\n\"I would be honored.\"\n\n\"What do I need to know of the happenings since I have been\u2014inconvenienced? Darcy has informed me of that which he thought was important, but I am sure you will have a very different, but equally valuable, perspective on what has transpired. Please, have some tea with me.\"\n\nAnne pulled a chair\u2014upholstered in a dragon-wing pattern\u2014 close and sat down. \"Most immediately important, I think, is that all of Portsmouth anticipates your stay. Salons, talks, and now two teas\u2014oh yes, and a dinner yet tonight\u2014have been arranged. I tried to dissuade them all, but\u2014\"\n\nElizabeth rubbed her temples. \"No, I understand. Perhaps now more than ever, these will be important if we are ever to right what is wrong with the Order. I know, they will not be sufficient in and of themselves, but they will help reassure the dragons that the Order has not lost its value. At the very least, it is a good place to begin.\"\n\n\"Happily, they are spread out over several days. I intend to insist that you are permitted to rest when not on display. Kingsley and Sergeant will assist in seeing you are not disturbed.\"\n\nWas that a sigh of relief? \"That would be most appreciated.\"\n\n\"Alister Salt will convey us back to London when we are finished here. I am told that at least one Blue Order office and two estates along the way have requested that you grace them with your presence as well. More requests may arrive yet. The journey back to London will take several days. Days I hope you will be able to take some rest as well.\"\n\n\"Grace them with my presence, you say?\" Elizabeth's laugh rang from the depths of her soul, as though to make up for the missed time. \"I hardly have any presence with which to grace anyone. I have barely been able to keep my eyes open since we set foot in this room. I fell asleep twice in my bath, as it is, even before I lay down! Mattresses and blankets are highly underrated, you know.\"\n\n\"I came to a similar conclusion myself whilst traveling non-stop with Mr. Salt and his team. A moving coach is a poor substitute for a proper bed. That will be one advantage to being forced to make stops on the way back to London.\"\n\n\"An excellent point indeed. I shall choose to count the blessings.\"\n\n\"I hope you and Sir Fitzwilliam approve of the plan for him to travel north to Pemberley to gather the information the Order sought whilst spreading word of your recovery. It was Longbourn and Kellynch's idea.\"\n\n\"I cannot say he is happy to be sent away, but the dragons had an excellent plan. I cannot help but imagine you might have had something to do with it as well, no? At least in arranging the services of young Mr. Salt?\" Elizabeth sipped her tea and raised an eyebrow.\n\nAnne looked aside and poured herself a cup of tea. If only her hands would not tremble! \"Both our husbands have been rather at odds with the Order's demands recently. They both opted to\u2014I believe you would say\u2014think like dragons, and, shall we say, procrastinate in acquiescing to the Orders' directives.\"\n\nIt had been bad enough that Father had been disgraced and lost all good connections as the result of his transgressions toward the Order. If she and Wentworth met the same fate\u2014even if it was for the right choices. What then?\n\nElizabeth stared at her for a long moment and pressed her lips hard. She trembled, then laughed until she had to set her teacup aside to double over, holding her belly. \"Forgive me, please. I know it is most unbecoming. But the image of my \u2026 our husbands thinking like dragons is really very dear, and a touch amusing, considering how much trouble I have found for doing just that.\"\n\n\"Not at all, I am just relieved that you are not put out with me for trying to mitigate the Order's ire.\"\n\n\"I am glad someone is attempting to do so on my behalf, for I shall surely incur more in the days ahead. I am only going to bring them more problems that they do not want to deal with. In all seriousness, thank you for what you did for April and the other fairy dragons. If it had not been for her information, I \u2026 we \u2026\" She blinked her eyes hard and sucked in a deep breath. \"Perhaps now they might be taken seriously, finally.\"\n\n\"April's injuries were taken quite seriously, to be sure. You may as well know that the Cotillion Board declared us all to be unfit Dragon Mates because April was injured on our watch. We are not to be presented at the Cotillion this year. Moreover, Mary and I, well, it was not said precisely, but the implication was that we would never be presented at all.\" Anne chewed her lip and avoided eye contact.\n\nAll levity left Elizabeth's face and her expression changed to something utterly draconic and predatory. \"Is that their game? Miserable warm-blooded cockatrix pretending to vie for dominance! They will regret this little game.\"\n\n\"But will it not be easier on you, not having to deal with the affair this year?\"\n\n\"Easier perhaps, but with dragons, taking the easier route often declares that you recognize you are prey, looking for the quickest route to flee.\" She sat up a little straighter, a little of her characteristic determination returning to her tone. \"I am not prey. Nor are you and my sisters.\"\n\n\"What do you intend to do?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I am not certain yet. I will let you know when it comes to me. Pray tell me, you and my sisters will be ready for the Cotillion?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "After a large dinner hosted by the Order for the local Dragon Mates\u2014one that Lady Elizabeth had every right and reason to decline, but did not\u2014Wentworth and Anne tramped upstairs, candle in hand, while the last few attendees continued to ply Lady Elizabeth with questions.\n\nIt was high time he had a little time to spend alone with his wife, regardless of what polite society might say. \"Truly, I do not know how she manages. She has the stamina of a dragon and the patience of a saint. How many times was she asked the same questions tonight, asked to recount the same story?\"\n\n\"Those jealous cockatrix should see what she endures before they start casting judgments upon her.\" Anne paused at the top of the stairs, drooping as though a weight had suddenly landed on her shoulders.\n\nWentworth led the way to their chambers, through a door not carved with some sort of dragon. Should it be a breath of fresh air to encounter a plain door? \"You did not mention it in your letter, but it is obvious something has transpired. What happed with the Cotillion Board?\" He set the candle on the mantel and pulled her down with him into the large wingchair near the cold fireplace.\n\nFinally, things felt right once more.\n\nShe cuddled into him, hiding her face in his shoulder. \"I did not like being away from you.\"\n\nHe arranged his arms around her warm softness. \"Nor I you. It has been far too easy to become accustomed to being home, every night, with you.\" Far easier than ever he imagined it could be.\n\n\"I would like to become accustomed to that.\" Her whispers gave the impression of a difficult confession.\n\n\"Do you not want to continue to work with the Order?\" He intertwined his fingers in hers.\n\n\"Honestly, I do not know. At this point, I just do not know.\" Pain, that was pain in her voice.\n\n\"What did those women do? I will understand if you cannot bear working for the Order, but this, this is not like you. Pray tell me, what happened?\"\n\n\"It is silly and stupid and should not matter at all.\" She shut her eyes and shook her head.\n\nThat only made it worse. \"Anne, please.\"\n\n\"We, Elizabeth's sisters and I, have been cut from the Cotillion as inadequate Dragon Mates because of April's injury. Miss Bennet and Miss Darcy may recover and be presented next year. Mary and I, though, will not. We will not be presented, not be invited, and by extension, not welcome in any good Dragon Keeping society. As I said, silly and stupid.\"\n\n\"You looked forward to that society?\"\n\nShe nodded into his shoulder as though embarrassed to speak the words.\n\n\"You never did have your proper share in society, with your father always pushing your sister Elizabeth forward. It seems patently unfair to be denied it now, I suppose.\" He stroked her back. She was trembling. \"Longbourn and Kellynch did not fault you for what happened. They were impressed with what the fairy dragons accomplished. Though there will always be detractors, I think the Order will begin looking at their smallest members rather differently now. Thanks to you and Mrs. Collins.\"\n\nShe sniffled and swallowed hard. \"The thought is rather appealing.\"\n\n\"And far more significant than any society a ball could grant us.\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting I should be indifferent to their cut?\" A cold note penetrated her voice.\n\n\"No, no. Their cut should be viewed in light of their contributions to the Order.\"\n\n\"I am not sure I take your meaning.\"\n\n\"Those women, they have title, wealth, connections. But what have they actually done for the Order? I can hardly put introducing the quadrille into the Keeper's Cotillion on the same level as changing the way Blue Order society views fairy dragons. Can you?\"\n\n\"I suppose not. But they are countesses and\u2026\" She tipped up her chin to look at him.\n\nHe placed a finger under her chin. \"Did not you yourself decry the shallowness of that sort of company? My dear, I know that is the kind of company you were brought up to admire as worthy and important, but the world is changing before our eyes. The ability to do things, to contribute, to change, and grow in the world is more significant than it ever has been. I believe it will continue to be even more so. Maybe those of grand estates and great titles will not choose to associate with us. But they are not the only Blue Order society to mix with. Consider the crowd tonight. How many of them were high-born or titled? Influential or wealthy?\"\n\n\"There were far more Dragon Friends than Dragon Keepers in attendance.\"\n\n\"The Darcys and ourselves were the only titles in the room. When it becomes more widely known what you and Lady Elizabeth's sisters did with the fairy dragons, I expect you will be something of a hero to the Friends of small dragons.\"\n\n\"There are those who could consider that being damned with faint praise.\" Anne chuckled.\n\nAt last, the sound he wanted, needed, to hear!\n\n\"I know those harpies have hurt you, and I am sorry for that. I will never feel that as deeply as do you, but that does not mean I am insensitive to it. I ask you again, do you wish to continue our work for the Order? You know the problems we uncovered will not suddenly resolve with the Sage's return. Things are going to be challenging for some time to come and a great deal of work will need to be done. It would be foolish to think things will become easier anytime soon if we continue.\"\n\n\"But that will be true whether we work with the Order or not. Keeping Kellynch, we cannot remain insulated against the disruptions in the Order.\" She was right. \"You enjoyed being at sea again.\"\n\n\"I will not lie to you, I did. So did Kellynch.\"\n\n\"I expect the Order will need you both to begin talks with the sea dragons.\"\n\n\"You have not answered my question.\"\n\nShe stood and began to pace along the fireplace. Her shadow in the single candle's light, thin and stark. \"I have not answered because I do not know. I do not like being left behind to wait, left to the clutches of the she-dragons. It was \u2026 empowering \u2026 to work with the fairy dragons and feel like we might contribute something useful.\"\n\n\"Lady Elizabeth and Lady Astrid are exceedingly useful to the Order. There is no reason why Lady Wentworth should not be as well.\" He rose and walked to her, taking her hands in his. \"I think Kellynch himself would be quite pleased with the distinction of having you classed with such esteemed company.\"\n\n\"Of course he would. He enjoys distinctions of any sort. But I am more concerned about your opinion.\"\n\nHe pulled her a step closer. \"You do not tolerate idleness any more than I being landlocked. If we are to serve the Order, your role must be more than waiting for me to return, embroidering cushions of little use and no beauty. Assuming, of course, the Order will have us at all. After what Darcy and I have done\u2014\"\n\n\"You do not believe going back to Dover now to interview the dragons there will be enough to allay the Earl's displeasure?\"\n\n\"There is no way to know. Disobeying orders is no small thing in the military.\"\n\n\"The Order is not military.\"\n\n\"No, it is not. But what is done is done. There is no point in worrying about that now. I must be off for Dover in the morning. I would rather make better use of our hours together.\"\n\n\"Like this?\" She rose up on tiptoes and kissed him."
            },
            {
                "title": "February 12, 1815, Darcy House, London",
                "text": "\"Will you be all right at home alone, Lizzy?\" Uncle Gardiner asked as Alister Salt's luxurious coach trundled toward Cheapside with Kingsley and Sergeant escorting on each side.\n\nNearly a week spent in leisurely travel, in an exceptionally fine coach, under Anne's zealous care that kept her undisturbed those hours she was not required to be present for Blue Order duties, had mostly restored Elizabeth's equanimity and sense of humor. How pleasant it was to laugh only at things that were truly amusing now, not simply at everything that stirred a reaction. That had been a mite embarrassing. Thankfully Anne and Aunt Gardiner were the souls of grace and discretion.\n\nLeaving Anne at Thames House had proved a bit more moving than she expected. So clearly, the exhaustion had not yet passed\u2014a little disappointing, but good to know. Was it possible to be tired of resting?\n\n\"I will hardly be alone at Darcy House. Little Anne, Mary, Lydia, and Georgiana are all there, with April and Walker. Brutus remains assigned to us, along with Nanny and Auntie. And there's the entire staff, human and dragon. I will be well attended.\"\n\n\"We would stay with you if you want. We can guard.\" Prussian peeked up over the edge of the large basket the wyrms occupied on the coach floor.\n\nHis color and strength had improved with good food and safe environments. The entire cluster's tempers had improved as well, charming the Gardiners on multiple occasions. It seemed at least Lapis and Indigo would be residing in Cheapside for the foreseeable future. They might be the first wyrm Friends in London. How would Blue Order society react?\n\nShe leaned across the coach to scratch Prussian's cheeks. \"I know you would, but with so many dragons already in the house, the introductions might be a bit fraught. And since the Darcy House dragons do not yet understand the circumstances that led you to be associated with Corney and his men, there may be misunderstandings.\"\n\n\"That is an excellent point. You recall how reluctant Rustle was to accept the acquaintance when he met us on the road last night.\" Aunt Gardiner straightened the blanket covering the cluster. \"Convincing a house full of dragons will be quite a challenge.\"\n\n\"You think we be not accepted by the Order?\" Azure peeked out, her red head knob brighter than ever.\n\n\"When the full truth is known, I am confident it will be well. But until then, we should be cautious. I think the outrage over Nunnington's actions will win you no little support. But pray, be patient whilst that is first verified, then made known,\" Elizabeth said.\n\n\"In the meantime, you will be welcome to stay with us. We will always welcome our children's Friends.\" Aunt scratched Azure's cheek.\n\n\"We have so many Friends, now!\" Joshua grinned at Phoenix on his shoulder. \"With six in the house, there will be one for every person! There will always be enough scratches for everyone.\"\n\nPhoenix twittered happily. Once they got past the predator-prey issues, he and the wryms had become quite comfortable, even friendly, with one another.\n\n\"Do I need to ask you to stay with us instead, Phoenix?\" Elizabeth pulled her shoulders back to remind him she was big.\n\n\"I have learned.\" He hung his head. \"Fairy dragons do not breathe fire, nor should they, nor will they ever.\"\n\nJoshua scratched under his chin. \"And I will not encourage him to learn new tricks. At least not ones that I have not asked you about first, Lizzy.\"\n\nShe sighed and rubbed her upper arms briskly. \"I hope that will be enough for the Order. They will no doubt be meeting with you in the coming days.\"\n\nIf only he knew how complicated things could become. Then again, it might be best neither he nor his parents did, at least for now.\n\nThe coach rolled to a stop in the mews behind Darcy House. Chills coursed down her arms. Home. Not so long ago, a place she might never have seen again \u2026\n\nUncle clasped her hand. \"Do not hesitate to send for us if there is anything you need. Absolutely anything.\"\n\n\"I am sure all will be well, but you have my word. Truly, I promise. No doubt the fairy dragons will hold me to that and go for you themselves should they feel the need.\"\n\nThey chuckled, avoiding the world-bending change she implied.\n\nAlister Salt dropped the steps and opened the door. \"You ready, Lady?\"\n\nShe allowed him to hand her down, Kingsley and Sergeant standing guard before and behind the carriage.\n\n\"We will be with Lady Wentworth should you need our services. Do not hesitate to send for us.\" Alister Salt bowed. Apparently, his hearing was acute even for the dragon-hearing. The drakes dropped their chins to the ground, their tails flicking.\n\n\"I am honored by your assistance.\"\n\nThe back door flung open. Mary, Georgiana and Lydia flew out, fairy dragons not far behind. May led a second wave, including the housekeeper, Slate and Amber, and the butler.\n\n\"Lizzy!\" Mary threw her arms around her. \"I hardly believed it when Longbourn told us the news. I am so relieved!\" Tears trickled down her cheeks.\n\nWas this staid, sensible Mary?\n\nHer own eyes burned and her vision blurred. She wiped her cheeks on her shoulder. She definitely needed more rest.\n\n\"You must tell us everything, Lizzy! We want to hear the whole story.\" Lydia clapped and bounced, but shadows lined her face.\n\nPoor thing. Though she would never admit it, this trial had changed her, too.\n\n\"Do allow her to rest a bit, Miss Bennet. Can you not see she is exhausted?\" Georgiana hung back slightly, Pax hovering near her shoulder.\n\n\"I will have your things taken inside.\" The housekeeper waved two footmen into motion. \"Will you wish for a hot bath or a tray to be sent up?\"\n\n\"Both, I think, but after I have seen Anne.\"\n\nThe staff bowed, curtsied, and scurried away.\n\n\"How was your journey?\" Georgiana wrung her hands.\n\n\"Very long, with a great many meetings. Perhaps we can talk over dinner?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Georgiana looped her arm in Lydia's and pulled her toward the house.\n\nWas it possible the two of them had become friends? It was not an unpleasant thought; they could do each other good.\n\n\"How is April?\" Elizabeth peered toward the open door, hoping.\n\nMary put Elizabeth's arm in hers. \"She is improved. Sir Edward says she looks much worse off than she is. Her wing was broken but the dislocation has not reoccurred. The talon wounds are still rather off-putting, but they are healing well. May checks her wounds daily, insisting on the privilege of attending to her hero.\"\n\nOh, that image!\n\nElizabeth gulped for breath, her throat tightening. \"Thank you, for all you have done. We would not be here but for\u2014\"\n\n\"Would it be awful of me to say it was nice to be able to be the one to help you for a change?\" Mary did not look at her.\n\n\"I still cannot believe all that has transpired.\"\n\n\"I think that feeling will remain for some time.\" She patted Elizabeth's arm. \"You will be satisfied to know Longbourn is quite pleased with himself, for what he did for you and what he has done since he returned. Little Pemberley has had her equanimity restored after he visited her and promised you would see her soon.\"\n\n\"I am certain Barwines Chudleigh has been quite busy with Pemberley and her own snakeling to tend.\"\n\n\"Her snakeling is charming, by the way. He is called Haldon, for the woods near her estate. An entirely suitable playmate for Pemberley. You will find him delightful.\"\n\nElizabeth caught her eye, studying her. \"I know that look on your face. What are you not mentioning?\"\n\n\"Household matters, nothing so important.\"\n\n\"Mary, if it is significant enough to trouble you, I need to know.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Mary huffed a heavy breath, shoulders sagging slightly. \"Nanny has been quite put out with the fairy dragons since April's injury. It has been rather tense around her. She does not like them visiting Anne, despite Mr. Darcy's insistence that they should be given free access to the nursery. She keeps May away whenever she can as well.\"\n\n\"Oh, merciful heavens! I warned her those attitudes were not acceptable. I do not want Anne raised around such beliefs! But with all that has been going on, and all I expect to come, I cannot be without a nurse.\" It was tempting to mutter a few draconic epithets under her breath, but Mary would be scandalized.\n\n\"Perhaps I might be able to assist? I could keep Anne for you until you are able to find another nursery maid.\"\n\n\"I cannot impose upon you like that.\"\n\n\"It might be good practice \u2026\"\n\nElizabeth stopped and took Mary's shoulders in her hands. \"Oh, Mary! Truly? That is wonderful news! I am so happy for you. Does Mr. Collins know?\"\n\n\"I have only found out for certain in the last few days. The baby just quickened and Heather tells me she can hear\u2014him, she believes it is a boy but I am not so certain\u2014him kicking and stretching. I was going to tell Mr. Collins when he came to town for the Cotillion.\" Mary's smile faded slightly.\n\n\"Anne told me what happened.\"\n\n\"I do not mind. I think I am rather relieved, truth be told.\"\n\n\"Nonetheless, do ask Mr. Collins to come to town. We shall have a large celebration of our own in honor of your news.\"\n\nMary gasped. \"You cannot be serious, in light of everything that is happening? Do you think it wise?\"\n\n\"Absolutely! If we wait to celebrate until it is convenient, then it will never happen. Besides, planning a party will help Georgiana and Lydia forget their disappointments.\"\n\nBut she would hardly forget the insult to herself. Dragons did not easily overlook such things.\n\nElizabeth peeked into the attic nursery, snug and neat, decorated with treasures from the Darcy family past. A low fire and pair of candles on the mantel lit the room in a soft, friendly glow. Anne slept in her crib; Nanny silently read A Young Dragon's Primer, sitting in a chair nearby. Quite the scene of domesticity, even without the little dragons who should have been present.\n\nLittle Anne slept so poorly. It would be cruel to wake her now. Waiting another hour for their reunion would be better. Elizabeth wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Better Anne's convenience than hers, though.\n\nShe swallowed hard and forced herself to her dressing room. According to Mary, April was there. Elizabeth steeled herself for the reunion. Knowing April had been injured on her behalf was almost too much to bear, and facing the reality \u2026\n\nA low fire warmed the dressing room, likely for April's comfort. An extravagant expenditure to heat the room for a single occupant who could have enjoyed a fire in another room, but one that April deserved.\n\nSave April's recovery basket, woven of sea reeds and lined with lambswool, nothing in her chambers had changed. Bold rose and vine paper hangings in pinks and yellows, with tiny blue butterflies, lent a garden feel to the space that April liked even more than she did. The furniture, chosen by Lady Anne Darcy, crafted of mahogany, with clean, elegant lines, suited her very well, despite Darcy's generous insistence that new could be bought if she desired. He was so very considerate. An overstuffed, faded floral armchair near the fireplace proved very comfortable. How lovely it would be to feel its embrace once more.\n\nThe perfume of dried lavender hung in the air. The housekeeper must have added some new sprigs to the mix in the bowl on her dressing table. She drew in another deep breath. So much better than the dank, cold smells of the Sea Lion. She rubbed her shoulders to dispel a building shudder.\n\nPerhaps they would avoid the seaside for some time.\n\n\"I am cold.\" April twittered and poked her head over the side of her basket.\n\nThat was an interesting sort of greeting.\n\nShe climbed out, slowly, awkwardly, and landed on the mantel, scars along her chest and leg stark against her blue feather-scales. Her entire posture seemed faded and a little limp.\n\n\"Your wing! It is no longer bandaged?\" Elizabeth hurried to her.\n\nApril carefully extended her wing, wincing slightly. \"Castordale's Keeper removed the wraps a day or two ago. He said the bones were knit, but that I ought not try to fly yet. Flap and stretch, but not fly. I do not know when I shall be allowed to.\"\n\nAllowed to? April had never before concerned herself with what she was or was not allowed to do.\n\n\"It must be very difficult not to fly.\" Elizabeth offered her finger as a perch.\n\n\"I do not like it. I do not like walking. It is a stupid way to move.\" She rubbed her cheek against Elizabeth's thumb. \"But you have returned. It was worth it.\"\n\nThe lump in her throat was nearly too big to swallow back. \"How can I thank you for all you have done?\"\n\n\"You rescued my egg before I hatched. We are Friends.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are.\" Elizabeth curled into the large armchair.\n\n\"I am cold. Do you not think it is cold?\" April huddled into her palm.\n\n\"We can move nearer the fire if you like. There is warm water on the hob. Shall I pour some for your bath?\"\n\n\"I will only be cold again when I get out. I would rather have tea.\" April fluffed her feather-scales as best she could. It only made the scabs and scars more obvious.\n\n\"Very well, I shall make you tea. Why do you not climb up on my shoulder under my shawl while it steeps.\"\n\nApril crawled under the soft, mustard-gold wool. She must truly be uncomfortable, or exhausted, to do as she was asked without argument.\n\n\"Now I am back, you can be here with me as much as you like. Or you might consider hibernating. All the local fairy dragon harems have tucked in for the winter and will not emerge until the weather warms.\"\n\nApril poked her head out from under the shawl. \"You have only just returned and are bored with me already. You just want me to be gone!\"\n\nElizabeth stared at her. \"Excuse me? What did you say?\"\n\n\"You heard me.\"\n\n\"What makes you think you are unwanted?\" She wrapped April in her shawl and held her up to look eye to eye with her.\n\n\"I am cold.\"\n\n\"You got cold at Longbourn and never complained of being unwanted there.\"\n\n\"It is colder here.\"\n\n\"I can assign someone to make sure you have fresh warm bricks\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not want warm bricks!\" April freed herself from the shawl. \"I want you!\" She pecked at Elizabeth's hand.\n\n\"Me? Whatever do you mean?\"\n\nApril hopped to Elizabeth's hand and bobbed from one foot to the other. Should it be so heartening to see her acting a little more like herself again?\n\nElizabeth scanned the room for a jam or honey pot. Yes, there on the tea tray on the table near the window. She retrieved it and held it close to April. Fairy dragons were always cranky when hungry.\n\nApril turned her back and harumphed.\n\nGracious! Never, never had she refused jam!\n\nShe set the jam aside and pressed April close to her chest. \"You are my oldest, dearest Friend. Pray tell me what is wrong. I truly do not understand, but I very much want to.\"\n\nApril looked over her shoulder into Elizabeth's eyes. \"Very well, though I doubt you shall even care.\"\n\nThat was a very serious accusation.\n\n\"Do you not like Darcy House? Has anyone here mistreated you?\"\n\n\"It is a strange place. But the gardens are very nice. The staff can all hear me.\" April resettled her stiff wing along her back.\n\n\"But do they listen?\"\n\n\"Yes, they do.\" She twitched her head and flicked her tail as though that did not make her particularly happy.\n\n\"And the staff dragons? Have any of the household dragons been unkind to you?\" It was a leading question, yes, but she needed to hear it in April's own words.\n\n\"There are so many of them!\"\n\nShe was right. Few households could count so many under their care. Oh! \"You are jealous?\"\n\nApril twittered and covered her face with her wings. \"You have so many to take care of now\u2014especially the hatchling.\"\n\n\"Little Anne? You are jealous of my daughter?\"\n\n\"That nanny dragon the Order sent\u2014she is rude and high-handed. She tells me to keep out of the jam and honey.\"\n\nFinally! \"I had intended to speak to her about her attitudes\u2014\"\n\nApril pecked her hand hard enough to draw blood. \"How could you allow that crusty old drake to speak to me that way? Did you know that since you have been gone, she keeps me from the nursery and any other room she might encounter me in?\"\n\nThat was new information.\n\n\"Phoenix lives in the nursery with the Gardiner children. Why do you encourage that but not permit me\u2014\" April pouffed up, full and fluffy. She was unfortunately cute when angry. \"What harm do you think I will bring to your hatchling? You seemed happy enough to have me there to soothe you when she hatched\u2014\"\n\n\"Born. Human babies are born, not hatched.\"\n\n\"Do not change the subject!\" April stomped, toes scratching Elizabeth's hand. \"Since her hatching, I have been all but banished from the household.\"\n\nSurely that was an exaggeration.\n\nSomething in the way April scowled \u2026\n\nThen again, perhaps not.\n\n\"Nanny forbids me from the nursery, from your chamber when she can\u2014you have no idea how hard she fought against my basket being here and having a fire to keep me warm!\u2014 even the parlor is off limits when the hatchling is brought out. She only allows the staff dragons in to perform their tasks and then leave as quickly as possible. But at least they are allowed in. But me? She hates me. Heather, Pax, and Cosette are afraid of her.\"\n\nAfraid. The fairy dragons should never fear in the household. She stroked April's ruffled feather-scales. Nothing in her posture or tone suggested she inflated the issue.\n\nWhy though? What could trigger such behavior? Nanny was the largest of the household dragons\u2014\n\nDominance.\n\nIt was always dominance with dragons!\n\n\"I think I understand now. I have been away, and in my absence, she has been trying to become the dominant dragon.\"\n\nApril warbled and lifted her head, her eyes forlorn. \"She did the same whilst you were so busy.\"\n\n\"The audacity! She is staff. You are my Friend. She should not believe she is dominant over you. A governess is generally above the lower staff, but not above the family. You, my dear, are family.\"\n\nApril's voice turned very soft. \"I have wondered.\"\n\n\"I am sorry and appalled I did not see it sooner. You shall spend as much time with Anne as you like. Nanny has no right to keep you from my daughter nor any room in the house. I will not have such a dragon in my house.\"\n\n\"I can help your hatchling.\"\n\nJunior Keeper. But now was not the time to insist on that.\n\n\"I can help her to sleep with my song.\"\n\n\"That would be welcome indeed.\"\n\n\"And I will help her learn to hear fairy dragon voices and\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course you will, and you should. I am your Friend. I want Anne to be your Friend, too.\"\n\nApril cuddled into her hand, tension leaving her posture.\n\n\"Now, allow me to make you some tea to enjoy with your jam, and I shall pay a visit to the nursery.\" No staff dragon would ever claim dominance over her Friend again.\n\nPutting on her cloak before confronting Nanny had been a good idea. Sometimes it was necessary to be bigger in order to get the point across.\n\nWho knew all\u2014absolutely every one of the family and staff dragons\u2014would turn up to see the spectacle, though? Unfortunately, that only spoke to the degree of disorder that had come to plague the household in her absence. Perhaps she should not have placed so much trust in the Order's choice of her personal staff.\n\nNanny's ego was so bruised, she tendered her resignation immediately and quit Darcy House minutes later. It was difficult to repine her departure, considering it was far easier than sacking her. The Order would probably not be pleased, though.\n\nShe needed to tell Mary again just how welcome her assistance with little Anne would be. Tomorrow they would sort out how best she could be accommodated near the nursery.\n\nFor tonight, though, Anne's cradle and the rocking chair that Lady Anne Darcy had loved would be in Elizabeth's chamber.\n\nLittle Anne snuggled into the crook of her arm as April sang sweetly from her basket. Elizabeth sank into the rocking chair amidst the lavender fragrance and flowered paper hangings. Only Darcy's presence could have made this any better.\n\nWas it possible? Did Anne seem more at peace now than before? Could she have sensed Nanny's dominance struggle and have been responding to it? Could that have been causing some of her sleeplessness?\n\nTomorrow was soon enough to ponder that.\n\nTonight was for gazing into her daughter's face in wonder. How close had she been to losing that opportunity forever? She swallowed hard and blinked hard. That must not happen again.\n\nIt was tempting to simply give up serving the Order to accomplish that. Tempting, but short-sighted and wrong. Whether or not she worked with the Order, the state of the Dragon State was frayed and threadbare. Whether she wanted it or not, her life was inextricably locked with dragons.\n\nQuitting would not change any of that. The best chance for Anne to have a peaceful future with dragons was for her to continue doing what she did.\n\nPerhaps with some modifications.\n\nBut that, too, was for tomorrow\u2014\n\nA soft rap at her door. \"Lady Elizabeth, a caller.\"\n\nWho would be calling now?\n\nThe door swung open and a cane thumped softly on the carpet.\n\nPapa? What was he doing here?\n\nMary peeked in over his shoulder and nodded. Mary? Why? She knew \u2026\n\n\"I trust your journey back from Portsmouth was not unpleasant.\" Papa shuffled in, hunched and awkward in ways she had not recalled him being.\n\n\"You will forgive me for not rising. Anne is asleep. April is in the basket on the mantel.\"\n\nHe nodded and continued his slow shuffle toward her. \"May I sit down?\" He pointed to the floral armchair, the only chair in the room with arms solid enough for him to push against to stand again.\n\n\"Please do.\"\n\nAnne stirred as though she might awaken, but she sighed and settled down.\n\nHe inched his way down into the chair and stared into the fireplace. \"Kitty and your Mother are at the Bingleys' now. Jane has made an introduction for your sister. Their latest letters suggest the new acquaintance may have some promise. At the very least, Kitty is quite content in her new situation.\"\n\n\"I am happy for her.\"\n\n\"They will be gone for some time, I believe.\"\n\n\"It must be a relief for you not to have to worry about them in London company.\" The edge in her voice\u2014hiding her true feelings was not her long suit.\n\n\"I do not blame you for being bitter. I should have sent them to stay at the Bingleys' for Twelfth Night and after.\"\n\n\"I am not bitter.\"\n\n\"As you say. But you are angry.\"\n\nYes, she was, and she had every right, every reason to be, and if he thought he was going to shame her out of it \u2026 \"What did you come for, Papa? You can see: I am here, and I am well. Anne is well. April is healing admirably. Darcy was well when he left with Leander Salt for Pemberley, and I have received daily intelligence that he continues to be so. He told me of your assistance in researching the forest wyrms, and I am grateful. If you wish to interview them, they are staying with the Gardiners. I am certain they would be happy to speak with you.\" Pray that would satisfy him.\n\nHe stared into the fire for a long time, expression unchanged. \"All I wanted was to see you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I suppose I deserve that. I understand why you would say that.\"\n\nShe bit her lip. The urge to contradict, to argue was so strong. \"What do you understand?\"\n\n\"I never told you how proud I was of you when you were appointed as the Dragon Sage. I should have told you.\"\n\nShe shrugged carefully, not to disturb Anne. It would have been nice, but it hardly mattered now.\n\n\"I was wrong not to appreciate all that you are, to ignore your unique bond with dragons, no matter how inconvenient it might have been for me.\"\n\n\"I know I have been a great inconvenience to you.\" Those words sounded bitter.\n\nThey were bitter.\n\n\"But you should not have been \u2026 I should never have seen you as inconvenient. It was foolish, short-sighted, narrow-minded of me to try to force you to be like other dragon-hearing girls.\"\n\n\"It is good of you to say that now.\" It was, truly it was. But why was he saying that now? What did he want from her? She had already promised him access to the wyrms.\n\n\"It is not just words. I do mean it. I am sorry.\"\n\nHad he ever spoken those words before? Did he even know what they meant? \"I hardly know what to say.\"\n\n\"Most women would be happy for the apology and accept it without question.\" He chuckled. \"But most women are not you. Dragons are cautious with apologies under the best of circumstances. And they are not apt to be content with mere words. I understand.\"\n\nSuch an unusual admission from him.\n\n\"I cannot give back those things you have lost because of me. Your Cotillion, the chance to have truly come out and mix in good Blue Order Society, to make certain choices for yourself \u2026 so many things.\"\n\nHad he any idea how many there were?\n\n\"You have done quite well without them, though, so there is that, I suppose.\"\n\nOf course, it was all perfectly justified by the outcome. Why was he bothering \u2026\n\n\"But it is not much, to be sure.\" He turned and caught her eyes.\n\nWere those tears on his cheeks?\n\nMerciful heavens!\n\n\"I hope, perhaps, that you and I might be able \u2026 that you would be willing \u2026 perhaps, to work together with me \u2026 perhaps on some writing?\"\n\n\"The Order assigned Drew as your scribe. I cannot\u2014\"\n\n\"That's not what I mean. Not for you to write for me, but with me. A monograph, written together?\"\n\nShe looked him directly in the eye. There was a hope, an earnestness there, new and unfamiliar. Was it worth the risk?\n\nShe had missed him.\n\nAfter everything that had happened, Longbourn had become her friend again. Perhaps he was not the only one who could change.\n\n\"What do you know about Nunnington? There are some forest wryms who have a very interesting story to tell.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "February 15, 1815, London Order offices",
                "text": "Cheerful morning sun forced Darcy's eyes open. He was in his own room\u2014filled with the familiar lingering scents of sandalwood and lavender. His own bed! How long it had been since he had awoken there! He reached to the other side of the bed.\n\nEmpty!\n\nNo, that was not possible. Could all of that have been a dream? His heartbeat grew loud, deafening in his ears.\n\n\"Good morning. You have been quite the layabed have you not? It is nearly seven o'clock.\"\n\nElizabeth!\n\nThank heavens!\n\nHe propped himself on his elbow, breathing once more, and looked in the direction of her voice. His favorite voice.\n\nThe one he had thought he might never hear again.\n\nSunbeams bathed her as she sat near the window, in Mother's rocking chair, little Anne in her arms. \"How very well Anne slept last night. She only woke once.\"\n\nWrapping his dressing gown around himself, he padded toward them. The carpet soft under his feet and the polished paneling on the walls gentle on his eyes. Was it possible everything could feel so utterly right?\n\nElizabeth smiled up at him, hair mussed, nightdress and dressing gown rumpled. In short, all things perfectly lovely. Little Anne grasped the edge of Elizabeth's sleeve in her chubby fist, eyes twinkling. How she looked like her mother.\n\nA flawless tableau.\n\n\"She seems absolutely content this morning.\" Darcy knelt beside them, offering his finger for Anne to clutch.\n\nShe grabbed it, and his heart along with it, giggling.\n\n\"Perhaps I am assuming too much, but it seems she is happier now that Nanny is out of the house.\" Elizabeth shrugged.\n\n\"I am not sorry to learn she is gone. She and I had words while \u2026 while Anne stayed at the Blue Order. I am not surprised she would have, again, forgotten her place in the dominance hierarchy.\"\n\nElizabeth laughed, softly at first, then blooming into a deep, soulful melody. \"I wonder how many homes in England consider the dominance hierarchy as part of household management?\"\n\nIt was hardly a ridiculous question. \"It is a little odd, I suppose, but perhaps there are those which would run more smoothly if they did.\"\n\n\"Pray, do not suggest I write a monograph on that, too! No matter how excellent an idea it is\u2014actually, it is a very good one. But have you any idea\u2014the list I have of monographs I need to write!\"\n\n\"You said it, not I. But you are right, it is an excellent notion. We should see Lady Astrid about finding you a secretary very soon. I am sure it would help you to get to all the writing you want to accomplish. Drew has helped your father\u2014\"\n\n\"About Papa.\"\n\nDarcy pulled a nearby footstool close and sat. \"What happened?\" Pray the man had not done anything stupid!\n\n\"He came to the house just after I returned.\"\n\n\"And? Do not keep me in suspense. I have had enough of that during the last few weeks to last a lifetime.\"\n\n\"I do not quite know what to make of it.\" She leaned down to kiss the top of Anne's head. \"He apologized.\"\n\n\"Ordinarily, that is considered a good thing. Is it not? Or has it gone out of fashion since I was last informed?\" Pray let Bennet not have utterly stuffed it up.\n\n\"I suppose, but it is just so very unexpected. I am not quite sure if I can trust it. Or do you think I am judging him too harshly?\"\n\n\"I will not try to tell you what to do, but when he came to me and apprised me that he had sent your mother and sister away so that he might do what he could to help in your recovery, his actions spoke louder than his words.\"\n\n\"He did not tell me why he had sent them off. I had no idea. I thought it was merely to assist in seeing Kitty married off.\"\n\n\"I heard the words straight from him. I think he came directly to the Order after sending them off. Understand, I am not telling you this to convince you of anything. It just seems you should know the full story.\"\n\n\"There is that, I suppose.\" She lifted her chin and stared out the window. \"It is just \u2026\"\n\n\"A very great deal of unpleasantness has come and gone and it is not easy to believe it is at an end?\"\n\nShe pressed her lips hard, nodding. Were those tears in her eyes? \"He asked that we might write something together.\"\n\n\"Together? That is new, is it not?\"\n\n\"Quite. At first it sounded as a means to have me work for him, but I think it was genuine. I suggested that a report on the situation at Nunnington might be a useful endeavor.\"\n\nA truly draconic suggestion. She was nothing if not true to herself. \"So controversial a situation? When the wyrms' tale becomes known, you know the stir it will create.\"\n\n\"Who better to help pen those documents then, than a revered historian with a reputation of avoiding controversy? Will that not lend credence to the tale?\"\n\n\"That could put you two at odds once more. Are you certain that is what you want?\"\n\n\"I do not want to be at odds with him. You are right. But neither do I wish to waste time writing pretty memoires and genealogies that obscure the truth.\" She shifted uneasily. \"I have been sorely reminded of how uncertain the future is. Dragon Keeping is difficult, dragons are difficult, and to pretend otherwise has not served the Order well. It will not survive if we do not change. That is more important to me than Papa's feelings, or I suppose even my own.\"\n\nSuch a world little Anne was heir to. \"I hope to find the Council in agreement with you.\"\n\n\"Those dragons are wise and sensible. I am certain they will.\"\n\n\"I meant the men, not the dragons.\" He chuckled despite her glower. \"I hope that Cownt Matlock has been granted status as Grand Dug. So many things would be improved by his direct oversight.\"\n\n\"Grand Dug? He means to be made Grand Dug?\" Her face colored and she nearly jumped to her feet, pausing only when Anne threatened to fuss. \"Who came up with such a plan? It must have been Lord Matlock, no doubt. Did they actually give any thought to the complexities of such a maneuver? Even if Cownt Matlock is the most dominant dragon after Londinium and Cornwall, some will take offense that he could be given even a form of dominance over Cornwall.\"\n\n\"Led by Cornwall himself, I would expect.\" He laid his hand on her shoulder.\n\nShe shuddered just a little. How few knew what the encounters with that particular angry dragon had actually cost her. Cornwall would probably never forgive the insult she dealt him. Such unforgiveness was a bitter pill to her whom all dragons loved.\n\n\"This is not a good plan. Cornwall is not happy with the Order as it is. To further press him this way seems foolhardy.\"\n\n\"I fear there are a great many who are discontent right now. With the Order, with its members, and with me.\"\n\n\"It is not as though you did not go to Pemberley and interview the dragons there as you were asked.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But even their ire toward me pales in comparison to Longbourn and Kellynch taking matters into their own talons and exacting justice on the smugglers.\"\n\n\"The dragons will understand \u2026\"\n\n\"But the men might not.\"\n\n\"Remember, it happened beyond the pale of the Blue Order. The Order refused to negotiate with the sea dragons; by their actions, they declared it was not Blue Order territory.\"\n\n\"It is difficult to see how that makes a difference.\"\n\n\"It makes all the difference.\" She passed Anne to him and stood, the air around her virtually crackling. \"Next to dominance, territory is of paramount importance to major dragons. The rules that govern a territory must be obeyed or the dragon holding the territory has rights of enforcement. The sea has no such regulations. Kellynch and Longbourn did not violate any Blue Order laws.\"\n\n\"I believe you, but the Council might be more difficult to convince.\"\n\nIn the deepest basement of the Order offices, Cownt Matlock, Barwines Chudleigh ,and Barwin Dunbrook sat beside Uncle Matlock, Lord Chudleigh, Lord Dunbrook, and Lord Torrington, amidst a hastily arranged collection of chairs and tables. They stared across the cavernous main courtroom at Darcy, Wentworth, Longbourn, and Kellynch, somber and subdued as only major dragons could be.\n\nUsually, the courtroom configurations were planned carefully, weeks in advance and reviewed by a special team, headed by Baron and Barwines Chudleigh. Typically, plans had to be adjusted multiple times before all human and dragon sensibilities could be accommodated.\n\nNo such preparations had been laid for this meeting.\n\nPerhaps that was why Vicontes Torrington had declined to attend, as was often her wont. All told, it was just as well. Basilisks' temperaments did not lend them to be well disposed to large meetings, no matter how carefully arranged.\n\nThe courtroom was far too large for this proceeding, but no other room in the offices could accommodate a firedrake, an amphithere, a major drake, a wyvern and a marine wyrm. So many wings and tails!\n\nStill, though, it felt strange, even oppressive for the echoing chamber on the lowest level of the Order and the levels of galleries above it, to be so empty. Only a fraction of the usual number of torches lit the space, creating odd, flickering shadows and swaths of darkness, haunting and even a little threatening.\n\nA long stone table, bearing the Sea Lion's figurehead, separated the council from their \u2026 interviewees. That was the polite term they used.\n\nNeither Longbourn nor Kellynch seemed to find it appropriate.\n\n\"Darcy,\" Uncle Matlock cleared his throat, a sound quickly lost in the vast darkness of the soaring ceiling. \"Which one of you sent the dragons back to find the Sea Lion?\"\n\nLongbourn rose to his feet and spread his wings, snorting and scratching the floor with his talons. \"I take umbrage at the implication that either of us would be taking orders to be sent here or there by anyone, much less by a man not my Keeper.\"\n\nKellynch rose up, his head level with Longbourn's. \"It is insulting to believe that you think us some sort of minions.\"\n\nBarwines Chudleigh slithered forward, her head above Kellynch's, spectacular feathered wings spread. No winged dragon sported wings as stunning as an amphithere's. \"There wassss no intention to insult. The question was poorly phrased.\" She turned back to glower at Uncle Matlock. \"You both worked together on the task?\"\n\n\"No, we did not.\" Kellynch glanced at Longbourn, who planted his foot hard as though to punctuate the statement.\n\nWhat?\n\nWentworth started and looked from the dragons to Darcy, forehead knit. So Kellynch had told him nothing, either.\n\nWhat was it about courtrooms and dragons that always inspired some form of drama?\n\n\"Then which one of you was responsible for sinking the Sea Lion?\" Lord Torrington, wrinkled and scowling, his deep-set beady eyes glittering with sharp intelligence, leveled a derisive stare. How like his Dragon Mate he was. Coincidence or contagion, it was difficult to tell.\n\n\"Neither.\" Longbourn bugled. The sound reverberated painfully from one side of the courtroom to the other. Was he enjoying taunting the council? It was a dangerous game at best.\n\n\"How was the ship sunk?\" Barwin Dunbrook growled, stopping just short of a snarl.\n\n\"Sea dragons,\" Longbourn said.\n\n\"A marine wyrm, a pod of hippocampus and some number of serpent-whales. I lost count. Together they tore a rather substantial hole in the hull. They left then and allowed the natural course of events to take place.\" Kellynch tossed his head in a noncommittal sort of way.\n\n\"And you did nothing to protect the crew from the draconic assault?\" Matlock pounded the table with his fist. \"Your oath to the Blue Order demands\u2014\"\n\n\"The oath only applies to Blue Order territory. You refused to open talks with the sea dragons, which clearly means that the oceans are not Blue Order territory.\" Kellynch clapped his jaws hard.\n\n\"Technically, we were trespassing in their territory.\" Longbourn stepped forward, a bold and dangerous move in the presence of dominant dragons. \"It was gracious of them to grant us passage. We had neither right nor authority to intervene in their actions.\"\n\nNor the desire, it seemed. But it would not help to mention that.\n\nUncle Matlock turned an unhealthy shade of red, then puce. \"How many other vessels are in danger now that they have the notion to openly attack\u2014\"\n\n\"Kidnappers and smugglers who have been harrying them and trying to capture them for quite some time. It was high time they defended themselves.\" Longbourn shifted his weight from side to side and growled.\n\n\"Consider it, if you will, a demonstration of good will from those who would be affiliated with us?\" The tip of Kellynch's tail flicked. Was that a good sign or not? Wyrm-type posture language was a little difficult to understand.\n\n\"Affiliated?\" Baron Dunbrook's gunfire voice ricocheted through the courtroom. \"They have violated the primary tenets of the Pendragon treaty, and now they seem to want to be affiliated with it, with us? That is simply not possible. They are a danger to everything we stand for. Actions must be taken\u2014\"\n\n\"Silence.\" Cownt Matlock rose and thundered around the table, approaching Kellynch and Longbourn, threateningly close, looming as only a firedrake could. \"If what they say is true \u2026\" He stepped in front of Kellynch and Longbourn, gazing down upon them, looking in their eyes, sniffing like tatzelwurms often did. \"And I believe it is, the sea dragons have come together to obey a draconic principle older than the Pendragon accords.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? I have heard of no such thing.\" Uncle Matlock stammered.\n\nGoverning principles older than the Order? There were no such things.\n\nCownt Matlock, Barwines Chudleigh and Barwin Dunbrook exchanged a conversation in glances, wing postures and tail twitches. Elizabeth could probably have made sense of it.\n\n\"It is something that has never been part of the Blue Order documents, not a thing that men ever needed to know,\" Matlock thundered.\n\n\"I am still not certain that they do.\" Dunbrook pawed the floor, his deep-grey hide blending with the grey stone walls and shadows, lending him a strange, ethereal sort of look.\n\n\"Humansss are too fragile for them not to know.\" Chudleigh wove from side to side in a mesmerizing dance.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Uncle Matlock looked like he might climb over the table.\n\nMatlock snorted and flapped, swinging his head to and fro, thinking. He smacked his jaws several times and huffed. Resigned? \"There are occasionally dragons hatched who have rare understanding, insight or wisdom. There is not an equivalent warm-blooded word. A significant sort of knowing. Not always a large dragon either. Their insight is sufficient to permit them a special kind of dominance and value among us. It is an unspoken agreement among all dragons that those rare creatures are protected and allowed liberties among us that others are not. The dragon who crafted the Pendragon accords with Uther was one such dragon. The Dragon Sage is another.\"\n\n\"But she is a warm-blood, not a dragon.\" Baron Dunbrook nearly jumped from his seat, eyes bulging.\n\n\"It does not matter. She is one of those special ones to us. What the sea dragons did was an act of honor toward the dragons of the Order, not an act of war. We must begin discussions with them soon. Kellynch, you and your Keeper\u2014\"\n\n\"Keepers, Cownt Matlock. I have two Keepers.\" Kellynch glanced at Wentworth, who stood.\n\nInteresting. Was Lady Wentworth taking cues from Elizabeth?\n\nWhat would that mean to the Order?\n\n\"I would be honored to accept the charge.\" Wentworth bowed from his shoulders.\n\n\"At the next Conclave, Longbourn and Kellynch, you both will be recognized for your efforts on behalf of the Sage.\" Matlock rose up on his back legs, towering above them all.\n\n\"None of their actions were sanctioned!\" Torrington sprang to his feet. He looked like he might jump to the table as he had seen Elizabeth once do. It probably would not go well for him. \"To recognize such actions\u2026\"\n\n\"Will do much to quell the current discontent. Dragons should be honored for acting like dragons, not warm-bloods. It is time the Order recognized this. Perhaps the Sage can help you understand. We are finished here.\" Cownt Matlock turned his back and thundered toward the tunnels, Chudleigh and Dunbrook just behind.\n\nAn hour later, a footman found Darcy in the reading room, comfortably hiding among those humans and dragons bent on losing themselves in a book. The sort of company in which he felt most at home. A vague tension hung in the room, more from the dragons than the human occupants, almost as though they could sense something important had been happening in the courtroom below.\n\nAmong the bookcases and curiosity cabinets that lined every wall, a shelf there had been dedicated to Elizabeth's monographs. He thumbed through the volume on hoarding hunger. Her voice was so very clear in those pages. An absolute pleasure to read in comparison to most Blue Order tomes, of which \"ponderous\" was a compliment.\n\nHe replaced the monograph on the shelf and followed the footman to Uncle Matlock's office. It was not as though he did not know the way, but it was an official summons, after all, and protocols had to be followed.\n\nA human form of dominance?\n\nProbably.\n\nThe footman opened the great carved door bearing the Order's seal and Darcy stepped inside. Only sunlight through the frosted windows lit the room, sufficient for now, assuming no one was going to do any heavy reading.\n\nUncle Matlock looked up from his paper-strewn desk and pointed to a chair clearly set in place for Darcy's use. Somehow Uncle was still able to draw up that small-boy-in-trouble feeling out of the distant past and make it entirely fresh and new.\n\nAnd tiresome.\n\n\"Pray congratulate Matlock on his new status as Grand Dug.\" Darcy sat down. A risky play, making that declaration, but baring one's teeth early was sometimes effective.\n\nHeavens, that was a draconic strategy.\n\nAnd it made sense.\n\nUncle grunted. \"Do not speak of that. We would just as soon not have too much attention placed on that change. It was just a legal formality to continue the practice as it has been done for quite some time. I am rather surprised that you noticed his new status so quickly. It must be Elizabeth's influence.\"\n\nInteresting.\n\n\"Are my reports from Derbyshire satisfactory?\"\n\n\"They will do.\" Uncle pushed a pile of papers aside and looked at him. \"You do understand the meaning of the word 'immediately,' do you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I do.\"\n\n\"And yet you chose\u2014\"\n\n\"I chose to think like a dragon and act accordingly.\"\n\nMatlock jumped from his seat snarling. \"I take that from your wife, as a fellow officer of the Order, but from you, I do not.\"\n\nSo Cownt Matlock's set-down had affected him as badly as Darcy had feared.\n\n\"What, precisely, am I to understand from that?\" Darcy slowly stood.\n\n\"When you are given a directive from me, you are to follow it.\"\n\n\"I gave you the reports you asked for. And arguably, no later than you would otherwise have had them, thanks to young Leander Salt and his team. He learned well from his father.\"\n\n\"Something which you could not have known would be available to you when you went off on your ill-advised quest.\"\n\n\"Ill-advised?\" Oh, how he wanted to slam his fist on the desk. \"My wife, the boy and the dragon have all been returned safely. We are on the way to establishing a maritime extension the Order never thought possible. I hardly consider that ill-advised.\"\n\n\"You flew off on the advice of a fairy dragon.\"\n\n\"Would you have considered it less ill-advised if the information had come from perhaps, Walker? Or mayhap one of the cockatrice guard?\"\n\n\"Cockatrice are noble, respectable dragons.\"\n\n\"But fairy dragons are not?\" Darcy crossed his arms over his chest and stood a little straighter.\n\n\"Dammit, Darcy, I did not bring you in to discuss fairy dragons.\"\n\n\"What, sir, did you call me here for?\"\n\nUncle Matlock dropped back into this seat. \"Were you paying attention to what was said in the court room?\"\n\n\"I would like to believe so, but there were a great many things said. To which are you referring?\" Darcy returned to his chair.\n\nUncle Matlock snarled again. \"Your wife, Darcy, your wife.\"\n\n\"I admit the dragon's remarks caught me rather by surprise.\" That was putting it mildly.\n\n\"Do you understand the implications of what was said?\"\n\nDid Matlock think he was an idiot? \"Perhaps it would be best if you were to tell me what you heard. Clearly, you are most alarmed.\"\n\n\"Alarmed does not begin to describe it. What happened in there threatens to disrupt the Order and perhaps dragon-human relations as we know them.\"\n\n\"Disrupt the Order? I am not certain that is what I heard. Perhaps you misunderstand?\"\n\n\"I hardly think so. Cownt, or rather Grand Dug, Matlock essentially declared your wife a dragon, claimed her as one of their own.\"\n\n\"It seems that would be a good thing, would it not?\" So, he had married a warm-blooded dragon. That was a concept to wrap his mind around, was it not? What did that mean for Anne?\n\n\"Perhaps. If it were anyone else but her.\"\n\nDarcy's thoughts crashed into one another like sheep crammed together in a pen, coming to a complete, chaotic stop. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Your wife is impulsive, unpredictable, and rash. It is impossible to know what she is going to do next and even more impossible to control her.\"\n\n\"How is that so very different from anyone else?\"\n\n\"Because not everyone has the ear of the dragons and claims to speak for them. You have seen as well as I how she plunges into situations in which she has no business. How easily she could be perceived to speak for us when she has no authority to do so.\"\n\n\"She would never do such a thing.\"\n\n\"What of those forest wyrms to whom she has promised justice\u2014\"\n\n\"She is doing what any member of the Order should do. Those wyrms are the victims of a serious violation of the law. Sir.\"\n\n\"They are very minor dragons, dragons without Friends. Essentially wild\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir, they are not. Since they have become Friends with Joshua Gardiner, it is clear that they were not wild hatched. Thus, they are fully protected by the Accords. That makes Nunnington a criminal. Full stop.\" No, he could not be implying \u2026\n\n\"Nunnington is a major dragon. Do you know how many cases there are of major dragons prosecuted for such a transgression, particularly involving minor dragons without a Friend at the time?\"\n\n\"Are you implying that major dragons do not have to abide by the rules of peaceful coexistence as outlined in the Accords?\"\n\n\"Do you think prosecuting Nunnington is going to improve the attitudes of the major dragons toward the Order? I can tell you with certainty, it will not. Show them one more place where their supremacy is challenged, and we may have a complete breakdown of the Accords. The risk is immense.\"\n\n\"Have you considered the risk of the minor dragons giving up on the Accords if they believe they are not protected? They may not be as powerful as major dragons, but they are far more numerous. Do you think we would be able to stop a rebellion from them?\"\n\n\"Nonsense\u2014\" Uncle Matlock paused and grimaced. Good, he was thinking. For all his bluster, he would think on the matter for quite some time. That was hopeful. \"There is still a network of smugglers dealing in all things draconic. Neither major nor minor dragon is safe from that.\"\n\n\"That is to say, the Order is beset from all sides.\"\n\n\"Precisely. And now we have a single member for whom any threat to her wellbeing could utterly destabilize the system, possibly destroying the possibility of restoring any sort of balance to the Order! Have you any idea how dangerous that is?\" Uncle Matlock had turned that unhealthy color again.\n\n\"Who but the dragons will know that of her?\"\n\n\"That does not mean she is safe, you know. Your forest wyrms have already proven that dragons can ally themselves with their enemies. Consider, Cornwall has a grudge against her.\"\n\n\"He would not \u2026\" The words caught in his suddenly constricted throat.\n\n\"I wish I could be certain. You have no idea how much I would like that.\" Uncle Matlock thumbed several papers on his desk.\n\n\"You have read my reports. Attitudes have improved with the assurance she has been returned.\"\n\n\"Indeed. But there are those who will need to see her for themselves. She will have to travel, and travel is dangerous.\"\n\n\"But little Anne\u2014\"\n\nUncle Matlock raised his hand. \"It is unfortunate. But the Sage has brought this on herself. It seems only her reassurances will satisfy the dragons. She must travel and you must accompany her for her protection. What you do with the baby is entirely at your discretion.\"\n\n\"She is my wife. Of course I will protect her.\" A wave of dizziness assaulted him. What would this mean?\n\n\"Not only from those against the Blue Order, you know. You must somehow protect her from herself. She must be brought under better regulation, for her own protection and the good of the Order. You are the only one who can do it. I do not envy you the task.\"\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\n[ February 16, 1815, Blue Order Offices, London ]\n\nP emberley, her bright red hide shining from a fresh oiling, trumpeted as Elizabeth emerged from the dragon tunnels. \"Come in, come in. I show you!\"\n\nShe waddled toward Elizabeth from the far side of the guest dragon lair, the largest the Order offices had to offer. It would be some time before she lost her baby ungainliness despite having learned, from Rosings and Matlock, to spit\u2014not breathe!\u2014fire and, from Chudleigh, to fly \u2014well, more like flap and glide, but she had managed to become airborne and that was all that counted in her mind.\n\nLarge enough for a high-ranking firedrake, the more or less round room boasted rough-hewn walls and a mostly smooth limestone floor. Not impressive to warm-bloods but pleasing to large dragons. Wall torches lit the space, their distinct smoky-oily scent hanging in the slightly stale air. Several candelabras stood among the torches, probably for the human guests, who usually found them more aesthetically pleasing than torches. Bedding and other articles of comfort specific to the guest dragon were absent, leaving a great deal of somewhat awkward open space.\n\nPemberley ran back and forth, from Elizabeth, and April who was napping under the collar of her spencer, to Lady Wentworth to Barwines Chudleigh and Cowntess Rosings. The latter had only recently arrived in London in anticipation of the Cotillion.\n\nTechnically, the guest lair had been assigned to Rosings, not Pemberley. How gracious she had been to permit her offspring to use the space to host her event.\n\nUncommonly gracious.\n\nUndraconicly gracious.\n\nAnd that look Rosings and Chudleigh just shared? It was more than an acknowledgement formal greetings were not currently required. No. There was something more. Was Rosings' red hide just a touch brighter than usual, and freshly oiled? Chudleigh's wings shone as though freshly preened for the event.\n\nOdd, very odd.\n\nAn exceptionally large, yellow-painted tea table with matching chairs had been brought in and set up in the middle of the lair. Stylized blue Eastern dragons flew around the circumference of the tabletop. How very strange it looked amidst the unfinished stone walls and floors. Between the torches and candles, one might just be able to do needlework in so much light. Certainly not an arrangement the dragons would have crafted without a purpose.\n\n\"Next time, little Keeper will come, too?\" Pemberley shuffled up, flapping excitedly.\n\n\"It was kind of you to invite her, but perhaps she needs to be out of leading strings before she can attend a tea party.\" She scratched under Pemberley's ever-itchy chin.\n\n\"Nanny-dragon really gone now?\" Pemberley's dark eyes widened as though with hope.\n\n\"Why did you not tell me you did not like her?\" Elizabeth crouched, taking Pemberley's face in her hands.\n\n\"Thought you liked her.\"\n\n\"You must always tell me when you think something is wrong. And especially if there is someone, man or dragon, in your territory that you do not like.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Pemberley hung her head, just a little.\n\nElizabeth kissed the top of her head ridge.\n\n\"Look! Look!\" Pemberley bounced toward the tunnel where two maids and a footman were bringing in the elements of an elaborate tea service. A silver urn for water; Blue Order china, white with a blue rendition of the Order's seal in the center, edged with a gold stripe; platters of delicacies made mostly for human tastes; but wait, no, the pile of roasted goose and turkey legs was clearly for the dragons.\n\n\"What are those?\" Anne nodded her head toward the maid carrying a tray with several exceptionally large tankards made of the same Blue Order china with pewter lids.\n\n\"Despite looking like they belong in a pub, those are dragon tea cups, of Castordale's design.\" Elizabeth winked. \"They are very clever really. Since he is a snake-type without any sort of appendage to grasp with, they are modified to be used that way. Now that I think of it, I was with him the first time I had tea with a major dragon. April of course likes tea with honey, so I would have it with her before then, but it is a different experience with a major dragon.\"\n\nSuch a peculiar look on Anne's face. She giggled, then covered her face with her hands and laughed. \"Pray forgive me. That just gave me the most amusing thought! Growing up with Lady Russell\u2014I had tea with a dragon many times and never even knew. Of course, she was able to manage the use of a standard teacup with the odd little fingers at the end of her wings. But still \u2026\"\n\n\"Entertaining dragons unawares, indeed.\" Elizabeth chuckled. How good it was to laugh again.\n\n\"You happy!\" Pemberley bounded up, almost going airborne as she flapped. \"I make happy you?\"\n\n\"I am always happy to be with you.\" She caught Pemberley in a brief hug.\n\nAn improper show of emotion, to be sure, but if the dragons did not object, and certainly Anne did not, then why deny Pemberley and herself the pleasure?\n\n\"Come, come,\" Rosings lumbered up behind Pemberley\u2014it was difficult for a dragon her size to walk gracefully in such a relatively confined space.\n\n\"Yes, do come and ssssit down, it is time for tea.\" Chudleigh extended her wings full length around the tea table. Resplendent, multicolored feathers glinted in the torchlight. Stunning, utterly stunning.\n\nAnne gasped.\n\n\"An amphithere in her full glory is spectacular, is she not?\" Elizabeth whispered.\n\n\"I suppose for a snake-type, she is,\" Rosings sniffed and ushered them toward the table. How truly charitable of her to allow a compliment to a less-dominant dragon in her presence.\n\nWhat had come over them?\n\nAnd why were there seven chairs at the tea table?\n\nA quick glance at Anne revealed she had no idea either.\n\n\"Ssssit here,\" Chudleigh indicated the two chairs closest to her, oddly separated from the others.\n\nPemberley plodded after them and sat on the floor beside Elizabeth. She was big enough now that she could quite comfortably reach the dragon cup set before her.\n\nPemberley was drinking tea now? When had that happened, and why did she not know? Had she been neglecting the drakling?\n\nPerhaps she was spending too much time away. That would have to be remedied.\n\nA footman appeared at the mouth of the tunnels, waiting, at attention, to be recognized.\n\nRosings ignored him in the way dragons ignored irritating creatures.\n\nHow long would she keep him waiting? Usually a count of ten was enough to establish Rosings' disdain.\n\nWhat did a count of twenty mean?\n\nChudleigh pointed her wing at the footman.\n\nHe cleared his throat, \"The Cotillion Board has arrived.\" He stepped aside.\n\nNo wonder he seemed so uncomfortable. What a very strange way to announce them. \u2026 Wait, what? The Cotillion Board?\n\nAnne's face lost a little color as she slipped her chair back a mite and stood.\n\nRosings pulled herself up to her full height and glowered. Five ladies stepped out of the tunnel and stared back stupidly.\n\nWho had they expected to see at a dragon's tea party if not dragons?\n\n\"Perhaps you are unaware of how to properly greet a Cowntess. Lady Elizabeth, Lady Wentworth, might you be so good as to demonstrate the proper etiquette?\" Rosings grumbled with disdain.\n\nElizabeth bit her tongue, hard, and sidled between the table and Chudleigh to join the warm-blooded she-dragons\u2014no, she should not think of them thus! Anne followed.\n\nThey stepped together in front of the \u2026 others \u2026, gathered their skirts and curtsied, knee to floor, bowing their heads until they almost touched the other knee.\n\nRosings stepped closer and sniffed them both and touched the backs of their necks with her tongue. \"Welcome, Lady Sage, Lady Wentworth.\" She looked expectantly at the she-dragons.\n\nThe well-dressed and bejeweled Lady Jersey's and Lady Cowper's eyes bulged, and they blanched. Though they attempted to curtsey, they offered a curtsey to the king, not to dragon ranks. The differences were subtle, but significant. Did they ever greet their Dragon Mates?\n\nBaroness Dunbrook, with her halo of nearly white curls, and Viscountess Torrington, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, magnifying her expression of distaste, followed suit, slightly more practiced but not happier to be recognizing Rosings' dominance.\n\n\"Pray forgive me, Cowntess,\" the rather porcine Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple curtsied halfway down. \"My knees no longer permit\u2014\"\n\n\"I care nothing for your knees.\" Rosings growled.\n\nAnne nodded at Elizabeth, and they went to Lady Dalrymple's sides.\n\n\"You cannot be serious, she cannot demand \u2026\"\n\n\"Yes, she can. It will not do to insult her. We will help you up.\" Anne gently took Lady Dalrymple's elbow.\n\nGrimacing and grunting, she dropped her knee to the ground and bowed her head sufficiently for Rosings.\n\nWith both Anne and Elizabeth lifting under her arms, the dowager made it back to her feet, barely.\n\n\"You have not greeted Barwines Chudleigh.\" What was Rosings about?\n\nElizabeth and Anne curtsied knees to floor and covered their heads with their arms. Best not wait to be asked to demonstrate. Rosings was in quite a temper.\n\n\"I cannot do that! I will not.\" Lady Dalrymple sputtered and stomped back down the tunnel, past the footman, who seemed to be holding his breath, given the color of his face.\n\n\"That wassss very rude.\" Chudleigh hissed, fangs bared. Amphithere fangs, while rarely seen, were most impressive.\n\nThe other four mimicked Elizabeth's greeting, missing all the subtlety in the gesture. But they tried.\n\nChudleigh slithered forth and examined the women, sighing.\n\nHow long was she going to make them wait?\n\nA long time.\n\nChudleigh tapped the back of each lady's neck with the tip of her tail. \"You may rise. I will, today, recognize you. Do not appear before me again if you cannot properly perform a ssssimple greeting.\"\n\nPemberley seemed to glance at Rosings for permission. After a brief nod, she waddled toward the four ladies. \"You come tea now. Sit, sit.\"\n\nLady Jersey and Lady Cowper shared startled and slightly offended looks.\n\n\"It is an honor to be invited to the Vicontes' first social engagement.\" Anne curtsied to Pemberley and headed for the table. Hopefully the she-dragons were intelligent enough to follow her lead.\n\nWith some hesitation, they curtsied and followed Anne to the table.\n\nPemberley pressed close to Elizabeth, whispering, \"Help me serve tea?\"\n\n\"Of course. You are doing splendidly. Barwines Chudleigh will be very proud of you.\" She laid her hand on Pemberley's shoulder as they took their places at the table.\n\n\"You like tea?\" Pemberley stood up on her hind legs and grasped the teapot with her forepaws.\n\nLady Jersey gulped. \"Ah, yes?\"\n\nPemberley poured the first cup of tea from a rather larger than average teapot, sloshing only a little. \"You take?\"\n\nElizabeth took the cup and walked it to Lady Jersey, who looked as though she might refuse it altogether.\n\nIt was probably a good thing that the dragon tea-tankards arrived already filled. How large a teapot would be required otherwise?\n\nAfter the ladies were served, Pemberley took her own draconic cup and sipped with a slight slurp.\n\nA drakling drinking tea should not be so adorable.\n\nWhat a shame the she-dragons did not appear to appreciate the sight as much.\n\nRosings lifted her own cup, taking a deep draw of her pungent tea\u2014it smelt much like the blend Castordale preferred\u2014without slurping.\n\nSuch manners! Had no one taught the countesses not to stare?\n\nRosings placed her tea-tankard on the table and lifted her head above Chudleigh's. \"The Barwines and I are pleased to announce that Pemberley is sufficiently prepared and will be presented at the Cotillion next month.\"\n\nWhat? That was not what had been decided. Rosings would not do this capriciously, though. There must be good reason.\n\nLady Jersey choked on her tea, while Lady Cowper nearly dropped her cup. But\u2014was it possible?\u2014Lady Torrington smirked?\n\nWhy?\n\nElizabeth patted Pemberley's back between her wings. \"I am so proud of you, Pemberley! I know you will do splendidly at your presentation. The rest of the Order will be happy to officially make your acquaintance.\"\n\nPemberley bounced from one foot to the other. \"I so happy!\"\n\n\"Pray \u2026 pray excuse me, Cowntess, but did I hear you correctly? Pemb\u2026Vicontes Pemberley is to be presented? We have not\u2014that is to say, she is not among the presentations we have planned for.\" Lady Jersey looked around at the other board members, perhaps looking for support.\n\nRosings snorted. \"Change the plans. What problem is that?\"\n\n\"But \u2026 but \u2026 we have been planning for months, we cannot possibly add another\u2014\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" Rosings stomped hard enough to rattle the table. \"You seem to perceive this as a request. It was not. Pemberley, my offspring, will be presented at the Cotillion.\"\n\n\"And I want presented with her sisters.\" Pemberley wound her neck around Elizabeth's waist.\n\nAnne gasped as she locked her gaze with Elizabeth's.\n\n\"That should not be sssso difficult, should it?\" Chudleigh slithered toward the she-dragons.\n\n\"That will not be possible.\" Was Lady Cowper usually that pale? \"They are not \u2026 that is, those the Sage is sponsoring have not demonstrated themselves prepared to be presented.\"\n\n\"That is not what Vicontessss Torrington told me.\" Chudleigh brought her wings forward across her chest. \"You must be mistaken.\"\n\nLady Torrington pressed her lips hard and turned her face aside\u2014trying not to laugh?\n\nLady Jersey and Lady Cowper turned to Lady Torrington, glowering.\n\n\"Do not look at me that way. Torrington does as she will. She decided it would be amusing to test their preparation for herself when she heard of your decisions\u2014\"\n\n\"To what decision is she referring?\" Rosings spread her wings slightly, her voice booming off the walls.\n\n\"Presentation to the major dragons is no small thing. We do not want any young lady to risk embarrassment \u2026\" Lady Jersey tried so hard to appear composed.\n\nDid Rosings just roll her eyes? \"Torrington has declared that is not an issue. Am I to understand that there was some \u2026 confusion \u2026 as to the Sage's sisters and Lady Wentworth's presentation? Surely they are among the most important debutantes to be presented this year.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, of course, Cowntess.\" Lady Cowper bobbed her head so hard it might have fallen off.\n\n\"I have request, too. I want her to dance at the ball.\" Pemberley looked up at Elizabeth.\n\n\"Of course I will dance at the ball, dearling.\"\n\n\"A minuet? You will dance minuet?\" Pemberley's eyes twinkled. Was this part of Rosings' plans?\n\n\"What do you know of the minuet?\"\n\n\"It is a special dance. Important dance. Barwines Chudleigh say most important lady opens the ball with minuet. You open ball.\"\n\n\"Pemberley is right. It would only be appropriate to celebrate your return by having you and Ssssir Fitzwilliam open the ball with your minuet,\" Chudleigh declared.\n\nElizabeth gasped and blinked back the burning in her eyes. How did Pemberley know\u2014no, it was Chudleigh. She remembered Elizabeth's only Cotillion. Few knew or remembered she had not even been permitted a minuet. \"No, there is no need for that. It would be far too disruptive to the Board's plans.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Lady Jersey stammered. \"Pray listen to Lady Elizabeth. The order for the minuet has already been established.\"\n\n\"Indeed\u2014\" Lady Cowper leaned slightly toward Rosings.\n\nElizabeth winced. Had she any understanding of the challenge she just offered a far bigger dragon?\n\nRosings growled until Lady Cowper shrank back, and still longer after.\n\n\"Perhaps we can rearrange the schedule.\" Lady Dunbrook looked expectantly from Lady Jersey to Lady Cowper and back again, a pleading note in her voice.\n\nElizabeth swallowed hard. \"Truly, it is not\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. As needful as Pemberley's presentation.\" Rosings' tone was more warning than anything else.\n\nPendragon's bones!\n\nThis was not about the Cotillion at all, but about making a statement; a statement about Pemberley, about herself, the Sage, about the state of the Dragon State. Only her exhaustion could explain how she missed such a thing! \"Of course, the Cowntess and Barwines are correct. I should be honored to dance\u2014\"\n\n\"With Keeper, yes?\" Pemberley pleaded.\n\n\"Of course with Keeper.\" Elizabeth stroked Pemberley's head as she beamed.\n\nHad the she-dragons ever seen a dragon smile before? Pemberley had the most amazing, genuine smile.\n\n\"Very good, very good.\" Rosings folded her wings across her back. \"I look forward, then, to a most memorable Cotillion.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Chronicles of the Belador World 6) Treoir Dragon Chronicles, Book 6",
        "author": "Dianna Love",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Sweat ran down the side of Casidhe's face in spite of cool air in this dark underground tunnel. Standing in chest-deep water and facing the possibility of dying here jacked her pulse out of sight. She hadn't left a note at the hotel for Daegan to shield him from the danger of meeting up with Herrick. She did not want a battle of those two dragons. Unfortunately, she'd told Tristan she needed some time to herself.\n\nDaegan would be honorable and respect that, dammit.\n\n\"No whinin',\" she muttered, tired of standing in water.\n\nShe'd gotten herself into this and would find a way out. Moving her booted foot again, she wiggled it beneath what felt like a crisscross of roots trapping it.\n\nHer routinely insubordinate sword had surprised her by finally sliding from the sheath after another obligatory begging. The blade pointed down, now glowing underwater. One would think that would illuminate the black hole, but she could see nothing past a few inches beneath the surface. All she had to do was cut enough roots to free her boot, then finish trekking the rest of this tunnel to the escape point.\n\nNot a big deal, right?\n\nMore sweat trickled down her face.\n\nHer backpack pulled on her shoulders as if it held big rocks when she'd only packed clothes and other necessities for traveling.\n\nNot even a heavy book this time.\n\nHad she made the right decision in sending her books with Tristan to a realm she couldn't enter?\n\nHer books were safer than her at the moment. Good point.\n\n\"Stop stallin',\" she grumbled, which did little to fill her with confidence.\n\nIf she jabbed wrong, the razor-sharp blade with a cranky attitude might slice through her boot and take her toes off.\n\nShe blew a breath upward, knocking a damp lock of hair from her eyes and poked the sword slowly around her feet. She tapped around, feeling for an opening for the tip.\n\nNothing yet.\n\nMaybe she should have taken her normal escape route she'd used for years, but every supernatural person looking for her could pick up her energy trail, her scent, or whatever, to follow her. Someone with a larger body than her average size would have a tough time following the main tunnel, but it would be even more difficult to reach her here.\n\nThat's why halfway through the main tunnel, she'd broken loose the dirt and rocks covering the entrance to this off-shoot from the primary path.\n\nShe'd told no one about this alternate route for the ten years she'd lived in Galway.\n\nNot even Fenella.\n\nCasidhe hadn't hidden anything about the tunnels from her friend. The woman did not like to be in a small place and feared darkness. Avoiding conversation on it seemed considerate.\n\nShoving harder, her sword skipped off toward her leg.\n\nShe froze.\n\nHer leg felt intact. She took a deep breath and kept moving the tip around six to eight inches from where her boot felt stuck. Panic rattled her chest.\n\nShe could die here.\n\nWould anyone care if she never showed up again?\n\nNot Fenella. Maybe not even Herrick if he had decided she was disposable.\n\nHer stomach soured with the lingering hurt of betrayal.\n\nFenella had been her closest friend for ten years. Her only friend.\n\nNo more. That's why Casidhe needed to reach Herrick's mountains before Fenella sent a message through the squire family system to him.\n\nFenella's family, not Casidhe's. She had never been part of any family. Only someone trained to do Herrick's bidding.\n\nLight from the sword dimmed.\n\nShoot. \"Okay, I'll try harder,\" she pacified the sword, which had a mind of its own at times.\n\nTaking a couple deep breaths of dank tunnel air to steady her grip, Casidhe changed her hold on the hilt and prodded around her boot with more effort. She slowly pushed her muscles, silently begging the damn sword for help.\n\nEvidently the sword approved. Light glowed really bright beneath the surface.\n\nIf she lopped her toes off, she should be able to grab them when they floated up.\n\nPressure on top of her boot backed air up in her chest. What was the sword doing?\n\nShe pressed down a tiny bit and the root moved down on her boot. The sword blade must be right on top of the root. Easing the blade to her right, she tapped a couple times.\n\nThat confirmed what she thought as the tapping didn't put pressure on her boot again.\n\nShe hoped.\n\nOnly one way to find out for sure.\n\nClosing her eyes to enhance her sense of feel, she started sawing up and down over the root. After a couple minutes, it felt as if she made no indentation.\n\nWas the root dead and petrified?\n\nHer shoulders drooped. She could not stop now. Moving the tip around, she tried to find a place to pry the root aside so she could wiggle her foot free of the boot. Not ideal, since she would face continuing without one foot protected against the chewed-up floor of the tunnel, but that beat staying here.\n\nA distinct sound of rocks hitting the ground way behind her stopped her motion.\n\nShe'd been focused on her task and failed to pay any attention to noises. There shouldn't be sounds down in this tunnel except water dripping and her exertions.\n\nShe held her breath, listening.\n\nThe bare clacking of rock on rock sounded again. Was someone down here?\n\nHer heartbeat took off like a rabbit trying to outrun a mountain lion. She tried to stay quiet while putting renewed effort into stabbing the damn sword around to free her boot.\n\n\"Cassssidhe,\" sang through the air in a whisper. The voice sounded male.\n\nChills raced up her arms. Who was in the tunnel with her?\n\nHeart pounding furiously, she jabbed the sword down hard. Missed her toes, but still failed to break any root.\n\n\"Cassssidhe.\" The whisper gained strength.\n\nHer body trembled and her hands jerked the sword. \"Cut the root!\" she hissed at the sword and shoved the tip down again.\n\nThe blade slid off the root.\n\nShe wanted to scream.\n\nGripping the hilt with white knuckles, she begged, \"Please, please cut it.\" Once more, she jammed the sharp tip down and the blade kept going into the root. Now it was stuck.\n\nOh, hell.\n\n\"Casidhe!\" the angry male voice shouted. \"Bring me my book!\"\n\nShe knew that voice. Cathbad.\n\nWhat would he do when he found out she'd sent his book to Treoir with Tristan?\n\nShe wiggled the hilt back and forth, trying to free the sword. It wouldn't move an inch and wouldn't pull straight up. Damn irritating weapon.\n\n\"Ya need to come to me, Casidhe. I know ya read the section I warned ya to not read without me. 'Tis fine by me. Now I can call ya to me.\"\n\nCould he do that?\n\nHell, yes. He was a druid thousands of years old.\n\nShe had to get out of here fast, which was pretty much impossible without power.\n\nFurious, she hissed at the sword, \"Either help or get out of the way, dammit.\"\n\nLight glowed brighter beneath the water. The sword yanked down hard, pulling her shoulders to the water. She strained to keep her chin dry. She couldn't even pull her hands from the hilt.\n\nWell, hell. She'd pissed off an ancient sword.\n\nAll of sudden, the sword eased up. She pulled it gently as she raised her body upright.\n\nShe turned her boot back and forth, working it free of the roots now that a big one had been cut.\n\n\"I am not jokin', Casidhe. I would prefer not to bang yar head, but I have no control over how my power drags ya to me, only that it will obey me. Ya have until the count of ten to convince me ya are comin' back, but no more. I am out of patience with everyone at the moment.\"\n\nGo to him voluntarily or get dragged by majik? Screw that.\n\nCathbad shouted, \"One!\"\n\nAs soon as the blade cleared the water, she waded forward, her boot free and foot still inside it.\n\n\"Two.\"\n\nHer body moved faster than she would have believed possible for slugging through the rocks and mud. Terror would do that to a person. The uneven ground tossed her off balance.\n\n\"Three.\"\n\nShe swallowed the urge to whimper. What would he do to her? Now she could walk, but only bent over.\n\n\"Four.\"\n\nHer legs and back muscles burned, but she would not stop. If she felt herself go backward, she'd try to use the sword to brace her.\n\n\"Five.\"\n\nThe sword stopped glowing.\n\nOf course. She shoved the blade into the sheath in her backpack, leaving her arms free to pull her through a narrow opening.\n\nHer body stopped suddenly. The blasted backpack got stuck.\n\n\"Seven.\"\n\nWait. What happened to six?\n\nWiggling out of the straps, she turned and yanked, dragging her pack through the opening. Rocks and dirt fell loose from above.\n\n\"Eight.\"\n\nThe next steps were slow and difficult through areas she had to turn sideways to pass through. The backpack needed to slim down, but that wasn't happening. She dug in her heels and leaned back as hard as she could.\n\n\"Nine.\"\n\nTears burned her eyes. Fear gave her another burst of power. She leaned forward then threw her body backward toward the exit, pulling with all of her weight.\n\nThe backpack broke free.\n\nShe landed on her bum.\n\nA cracking sound rippled overhead. Then another.\n\n\"Ten!\" Cathbad roared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Treoir realm\n\nStunned, Daegan stared through Ruadh's eyes at the gryphon village covered in piles of ice. Where was Tristan?\n\nRuadh blared a roar that shook the trees.\n\nIce exploded from one side of the village.\n\nTristan's gryphon burst free and screeched furiously, answering Ruadh.\n\nDaegan felt a jolt of relief unlike anything he'd experienced in a long time.\n\n<Hurry, Ruadh,> Daegan urged telepathically.\n\nHis dragon flew a tight circle, dropping as he did until his giant wings flared. Wind from his approach blew sheets of ice crystals away, but piles of jagged ice remained.\n\nThe gryphons in human form rushed away to clear a spot for Ruadh to land.\n\nFrozen water covered their wooden cottages and the ground. Those in human form were stunned silent. Two gryphons that had managed to fly away now returned, landing on top of the ice. They attacked chunks of ice with their claws to start clearing the cottages.\n\nTristan changed back to human form. Daegan clothed him in his normal jeans and T-shirt attire. Tristan turned to shove piles of ice away from where his gryphon had broken free of the ice.\n\nDaegan shifted, clothing himself as he ran over to give aid. Tristan must have shifted into his gryphon as the ice hit and tried to protect Alterant-gryphons.\n\nHis sister, Petrina, and Bernie were not anywhere to be seen.\n\nTristan shoved ice piles aside with Daegan clearing more just as fast.\n\nDaegan could have had Ruadh melt the ice, but he feared endangering anyone beneath it. \"How many are buried?\"\n\n\"Petrina and Bernie are right here, not far under.\" Tristan used kinetics to lift a tall pile of ice now dripping as it melted. He tossed that fifty feet away in an open spot then heaved a deep breath at the site of Petrina.\n\nTristan pulled his sister free first, hugging her to him.\n\nShe gasped for a breath, heaving hard. \"Bernie!\"\n\nDaegan saw a leg sticking out between her ankles. \"Ya may have been sittin' upon him, lass.\" He grasped a large section of ice, breaking it free from the pocket shielding Bernie.\n\nThe Alterant-gryphon's bright green eyes were wide open, but not moving.\n\nRelief washed through Petrina's face. Her deathly pallor regained some color.\n\nShe dropped down and patted his cheek. \"Bernie. Wake up, Bernie.\" Then she lowered her lips and blew air into his lungs.\n\nBernie's arms reached for her. His mouth formed a smile.\n\nShe lifted away and chuckled. \"Come on, Sleeping Beauty.\" She offered him a hand, pulling the skinny guy to his feet.\n\nDaegan assessed the damage. Those two suffered a few cuts, but Petrina held her left arm close to her chest. Wounds on Tristan's back oozed blood through the dark gray T-shirt Daegan had given him.\n\nGuilt slammed Daegan's middle.\n\nPetrina rounded on him. \"What the hell was that?\"\n\nTristan put a hand on her shoulder. His green eyes glowed brighter than usual with a promise of retribution for harming his sister. \"I will deal with this.\"\n\nShe pulled back and wrapped her good arm around the injured one. Water from her soaked short hair ran down her angry face. \"No. This is not on you. That dragon attacked our village.\"\n\nDaegan spoke up, powering his voice so all would hear. \"Petrina is correct. 'Tis my fault and I apologize to all of ya. As ya know, I've kept that dragon in the dungeon since we returned from Scamall with him. I would not allow him to leave until he spoke to me in person or by telepathy. That happened today and ...\" Daegan shook his head. \"I believed he was ready to be among people of this time. I had no idea he would mentally break and attack anyone. I assure ya he will return to the dungeon and remain there.\"\n\nShoving wet hair off her forehead, Petrina lifted her chin. Feminine green eyes flashed with the need for vengeance. \"Why don't you let us teach him a little lesson first?\"\n\nTristan hadn't taken his eyes off his sister.\n\nDaegan sympathized over the terror Tristan had suffered. It could be no less than the moment he thought he'd lost Tristan as well as the others.\n\nThough he'd been fortunate to have Tristan at his side since coming to Treoir, Daegan still knew little about the backgrounds of Tristan and Petrina, something he would remedy once the Imortiks were stopped. Tristan had shared how he first met Petrina in what he'd called the equivalent of a foster home run by a nonhuman. Tristan had decided to protect the fierce young woman even before he became an adult, creating a bond stronger than that of blood siblings. From the anxious look in Tristan's eyes, Daegan's second-in-command never expected his sister to be in danger on Treoir, and she shouldn't have been in this realm.\n\nWhile Petrina did not carry the same family blood as Tristan, she had the heart of a warrior just like him.\n\nDaegan explained, \"While I would enjoy seein' the ice dragon face all of ya to pay for his dishonorable action, I have much to deal with in Atlanta and other places. I wish to lock him in the dungeon immediately. I do not wish to leave Treoir without him secure. How badly are ya hurt, lass?\"\n\nShe scoffed. \"Nothing my gryphon healing won't take care of quickly. Tell that dragon our gryphons are tougher than him.\"\n\nWhile Daegan was proud of her, Petrina and Bernie had blood stains on their clothes. Even with gryphon-healing, bones had to be set, plus he would not leave without knowing his people were cared for.\n\nHe started to issue orders to see the healers, but held off, allowing Tristan to handle this as he saw fit.\n\nIn Tristan's uncanny way of knowing just what to say at times, he interjected, \"Bernie, if you don't have a broken bone, I'd like you to shift and fly Petrina to the castle healers so they can set her arm to heal straight.\"\n\nStick-thin and gawky, Bernie might not intimidate anyone in his human form, but he held a formidable gryphon inside of him just like the others. With one look at Petrina's arm, his bright green eyes turned murderous. \"That dragon hurt you, Petrina?\"\n\nShe growled under her breath, clearly not happy with lots of attention out here among her peers. \"An edge of ice hit my arm. You have anything broken?\"\n\nThat young man looked at Tristan's sister as if she were the goddess of his dreams. Bernie had no intention of appearing weak in front of her.\n\n\"No, I'm fine. Let me shift and get you to the healers.\"\n\nFor a moment, Petrina appeared ready to argue, then let it go. \"Okay, let's do this.\" She walked off with Bernie. He shed his clothes, wrapped them up for her to hold. Then he shifted into a magnificent gray and orange gryphon with a golden head.\n\nDaegan had been told of how the ones with golden heads, like Evalle, were considered special, but he had no idea why.\n\nTristan's gryphon did not have that unique head color, but every gryphon here would follow him into battle.\n\nAs Bernie's gryphon flew away with Petrina, another gryphon named Ixxter walked up. He had a bruiser's voice. \"What about all this ice?\"\n\nDaegan surveyed the area. \"Everyone move back from the heavy sections of ice. When I shift, my dragon shall melt it.\"\n\nEvery member of the village backed up quickly from the ice as if it were a bed of vipers, but more as a show of respect for Daegan's dragon.\n\nTristan moved to stand next to Daegan's dragon.\n\nRuadh lowered his big head close to the ground and huffed out short bursts of fire. Ice melted and ran through the land to a creek running alongside the village.\n\nWith the gryphons taken care of, Daegan spoke to Tristan telepathically. <I shall return as quickly as I am able.>\n\nTristan nodded and started issuing directions for cleaning up the village.\n\nRuadh hunched down and pushed up, flying toward the area where they'd left Skarde's dragon. Once Daegan realized the ice dragon intended to attack the gryphon village, Ruadh had blasted Skarde's dragon, knocking the beast away from the village. Then Ruadh drove Skarde's dragon down, shoving it into the tops of sturdy trees.\n\nOne tall evergreen with a sharp stub where the top had broken off had impaled the ice dragon's wing.\n\nThat would not be healed by the time Daegan found him.\n\nRuadh located the ice dragon's body among smashed trees and told Daegan, <Ice dragon not ally. Deserves death.>\n\nDaegan understood his dragon's uncomplicated thinking when it came to those considered enemies, but Daegan could not be so cut and dry when it came to killing any being while injured. He argued, <I may need this dragon to negotiate a truce with Brynhild.>\n\n<Both ice dragons dangerous.> Daegan agreed to a point, but if he could convince them Ruadh had nothing to do with starting the Dragani War, he would not have to battle those two dragon shifters constantly.\n\nIf Brynhild realized she had family, she might want a future where they did not have to fight the red dragon.\n\nDaegan told Ruadh, <Skarde and Brynhild are not allies yet, but if I kill Skarde I shall have to battle Brynhild again. This time to the death. Peace reigned before because dragons worked together. I wish for the chance to have peace again. To have fewer enemies, not more. Maybe even to have more power to call upon with these Imortiks.>\n\nRuadh said nothing more as he circled the broken silvery blue dragon trapped in the forest.\n\nDaegan said, <'Tis time to free the ice dragon's wing from the tree.>\n\nGliding around the spot with slow wing flaps, Ruadh found a place to land. He walked through the dense forest, breaking tree limbs as his huge body forged an opening. When Daegan noticed the base of the tree staked through Skarde's dragon wing, he waited to see if Ruadh had a plan.\n\nRuadh burned the lower half of the tree.\n\nSkarde's dragon groaned a loud noise filled with pain and misery, then sprayed ice water to prevent the fire from climbing the tree.\n\nThe tree trunk dropped down and sideways as the lower half turned into ashes. What was left toppled over, crashing against other trees.\n\nSkarde shouted curses in Daegan's head.\n\nDaegan ordered, <Silence. We must pull your wing free.>\n\nRuadh used his snout to lift the ice dragon's wing high enough to clear the broken stub. With one look at the ripped-up wing, Daegan saw no way the dragon could heal that damage soon.\n\nSpeaking through Ruadh, Daegan ordered out loud, \"Shift, Skarde.\"\n\nThe ice dragon flopped over with bones sticking out at odd angles from the wing and shifted. Skarde's human body was covered in a patchwork of bleeding wounds, but nothing as awful as his mangled arm.\n\nSkarde sagged and gently held the top of his arm against his body. His pain-filled eyes lost their arrogant glare from earlier.\n\nIn the wake of Ruadh pushing through the wooded area, they now had a clearing of sorts.\n\nDaegan shifted into his human body, ready to verbally rip Skarde to shreds for harming his people. He clothed the man with a pair of jeans.\n\nThe sound of flapping wings drew Daegan around.\n\nTristan's gryphon flew in fast.\n\nDaegan expected Tristan to return to his human body as soon as he landed, but the gray gryphon with clear scales hit hard, shaking the ground and emitting snarling sounds. The gryphon started forward with all focus on Skarde.\n\nDaegan intervened with a bump of his shoulder, startling Tristan's gryphon.\n\nSpeaking telepathically to his second, Daegan said, <Do not kill him, Tristan.>\n\nThe giant gryphon head swung low to him. <Petrina could have died! Not just her, but all of the gryphons still in human form.>\n\n<I understand.>\n\n<No, Daegan. This dragon has no conscience. He doesn't deserve your understanding. He doesn't deserve to live. Time to make him pay.> Ruadh spoke in Daegan's mind. <Agree with gryphon.>\n\nTristan's gryphon flapped to leap over Daegan, screeching a war cry at Skarde, who took a step back. The gryphon flapped enough to stay in the air with claws out.\n\nDaegan ignored his dragon and lifted his hands to stop Tristan's gryphon from getting past him. <Wait, Tristan. I share your feelings. I feared losing ya and wanted to kill Skarde, too.>\n\n<Why didn't you?> Tristan had never sounded so raw and ready to rip an enemy apart.\n\n<Please. Come back down, Tristan.> Daegan more than understood, he wanted justice as much as his second. Guilt would stay with him for a long time over the mistake he'd made in judgment today. One that his people had paid for. He struggled even now to see the bigger picture in spite of arguing with Ruadh.\n\nTristan's gryphon landed, but stomped from side to side making angry chuffing sounds.\n\n<I am sorry about Petrina. I know ya want to kill Skarde and I share that feelin', but we may need him.> Tristan's gryphon swung his head at Skarde, who stood still, watching for an attack. <We don't need him. He's a coward.>\n\n<I shall not argue that point. I wish to not add to my list of enemies and ask him questions about the time after Queen Maeve captured me. This may be my only chance for information. 'Tis selfish of me, I admit, but I have few other ways to gain this.> After a brittle silence, Tristan replied telepathically, <I won't kill him. Not right now. Please step aside, Daegan.>\n\nWhen Daegan complied, Tristan's gryphon opened his wings wide and moved forward in a threateningly posture, towering above the ice dragon shifter.\n\n\"Daegan,\" Skarde demanded quietly, never taking his eyes off Tristan's gryphon. \"Get your gryphon under control.\"\n\n\"'Tis my second-in-command. Ya owe him blood for harmin' his sister.\" Daegan would allow Tristan to put some fear into the ice dragon shifter if Skarde failed to show contrition and humble himself with an apology.\n\nSkarde spoke louder, showing a total lack of concern for his future. \"Your gryphon is no match for my ice dragon once I heal. I do not fear him.\"\n\nWhy would he goad Tristan?\n\nDaegan needed to knock some serious sense into this one.\n\nTristan's gryphon released a loud battle cry, then blew fire out horizontally above Skarde.\n\nShocked, the ice dragon screamed. When the smoke cleared, Skarde had no hair or eyebrows and bloody patches on his head.\n\nHe stumbled backward, his mangled arm still clutched against his chest. He stared up in horror at the gryphon.\n\nThe gryphon shifted, leaving Tristan in human form.\n\nDaegan clothed him immediately in jeans and a gray T-shirt once more. He remained silent to allow Tristan the moment to have his say. That was the least Daegan owed his friend after bad judgment on his part had resulted in an ice dragon flying freely in Treoir.\n\nVeins stood out in Tristan's neck when he shouted at Skarde, \"What the fuck is wrong with you? What kind of worthless piece of shit harms innocent people? Including a woman! You're disgusting.\"\n\nSkarde's eyes glowed bright blue with anger and tears. His voice shook. \"You do not know what my life has been\u2014\"\n\n\"News flash. I don't give a flying fuck what your life has been like.\" Muscles in Tristan's neck bulged. He curled his hands into thick fists. \"My life sucked for a long time, but I have never hurt an innocent being and I never harmed a woman. Only a spineless coward does that.\"\n\n\"I am an ice dragon,\" Skarde shouted back. \"Don't you dare call me a coward!\" His body trembled, probably from shock as much as anything else.\n\n\"Words mean nothing. Actions tell the truth.\" Tristan blew out a harsh rush of air, hooked his thumbs in his front jean pockets, then spit on the ground in Skarde's direction. \"What are we doing with this piece of crap, boss?\"\n\nSkarde shouted, \"You have no say\u2014\"\n\nDaegan roared, \"Shut! Up! He has far more say than ya. I agree with his words. I gave ya a chance to fly and ya attacked my people. Ya are fortunate my dragon did not burn ya to ashes as your dragon's wing was pinned on a tree.\"\n\nSkarde stood there vibrating. His face turned deep red and he yelled, \"Go ahead. Kill me!\" Misery loaded in those four words.\n\n\"I'm all in on that,\" Tristan tossed back at him with a negligent shrug.\n\n\"Not you. The red dragon.\"\n\nTristan sneered at him. \"Why should the red dragon waste any energy on killing something no more important than a tick?\"\n\n\"This tick buried your village in ice!\"\n\nThat snapped Tristan's tight leash on his control. He roared and punched Skarde, knocking him on his ass. \"You're screwed in the head, Skarde. I bet you can't even heal that broken nose.\"\n\nSkarde lay there moaning and clutching his damaged arm. Blood poured from his crushed nose. He muttered unintelligible words that ended in a curse.\n\nDaegan felt time pressing on him constantly. \"At the moment, ya may be of use, Skarde, but if it turns out ya no longer hold a value ... \" Daegan lifted his shoulders. \"Then I shall grant your wish. I have no reason to continue feedin' someone who is a danger to my people.\"\n\nSkarde struggled to turn over and push himself to a standing position. His skin had a greenish sickly hue. He laughed, edging close to an insane sound. \"You would starve me to death instead of a sword to my gut?\"\n\n\"I want first dibs if you change your mind about letting him live, boss,\" Tristan offered in all seriousness.\n\nDaegan nodded, but said, \"Thank ya for restraint, Tristan.\"\n\n\"Restraint? He burned me,\" Skarde argued.\n\nIgnoring the ice dragon, Daegan continued, \"'Tis time to teleport him to the dungeon.\"\n\n\"No!\" Skarde shouted. \"Do not leave me alone! I will fight the gryphon now!\"\n\nTristan cupped his ear. \"Did you hear anything, boss?\" He glanced at Daegan. \"Me neither. Ready?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nSkarde started babbling. \"I will talk. Do not\u2014\"\n\nDaegan reappeared inside the dungeon with Tristan and Skarde as the ice dragon finished, \"... force me to stay here alive.\" Skarde wore only jeans on his lower half, but to clothe him more would only get in the way of healing his body.\n\nBut Skarde's last words rang in the empty dungeon. Daegan finally realized this ice dragon did have a death wish.\n\nHe had no sympathy for someone who harmed innocents, but he recalled wishing for death after weeks and weeks turned into years of being captured by Queen Maeve.\n\nSpeaking to Tristan telepathically, Daegan said, <I need a moment. Watch my back and use your body to block his view of what I am doin'. Skarde knows to not shift until his arm has been set or the arm heals crooked.>\n\n<That dragon is getting nowhere near you, boss.> Tristan waited until Daegan had walked over to the side wall before he stepped in front of Skarde."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Daegan studied the area where he'd installed a bed, chair and table plus other amenities earlier for Skarde to reside comfortably in the Treoir dungeon. His attempt at providing a habitable environment for the ice dragon shifter had been met with obstinance. Skarde had never used any of the furnishings created for a human due to remaining in dragon form since arriving here.\n\nPausing to glance over his shoulder and check on Tristan, Daegan continued to create a spot to better contain Skarde. His second-in-command had his part handled.\n\nTristan stood with legs apart and hands at his hips. He provided a wall to block Skarde's view of Daegan while doing a commendable job of not strangling the ice dragon.\n\nSkarde shouted at Tristan, \"Meet me when I am healed, and you will beg for mercy.\" Oddly, Skarde shrank back, eyes wild, and wrapped his good arm around his body. He shivered and clenched his teeth, a mad man with a dragon inside.\n\nThat was a deranged dragon shifter. Daegan had failed to see more than he'd wanted, too anxious to gain an ally. Someone who knew his past and might fight alongside him today.\n\nHe shook his head at how he'd been blind to Skarde's demons. The fool tried to push Tristan to attack him even now. Skarde had no idea of the steel backbone and honor Tristan possessed.\n\n\"I'm down with kicking your ass, ice boy, but not until I'm allowed to fight to the death,\" Tristan retorted with casual indifference meant to insult a dragon shifter.\n\nForcing his words through chattering teeth, Skarde scoffed, \"You are a fool to believe your gryphon's little puff of fire can harm my dragon.\"\n\n\"Have you looked in a mirror since my little puff of fire?\" Tristan asked in a taunt. \"In addition to the gift of fire, you might have noticed I can also teleport.\"\n\nDaegan paused in forming a word for his ward to take in Skarde's reaction.\n\nThe ice dragon shifter pulled back, shaking his head. \"No. The red dragon teleports.\"\n\n\"Joke's on you, dipshit. I teleport, too.\" Tristan leaned forward and dropped his voice with a hard edge. \"I'm not like any other gryphon. If we ever get the chance to face off, I have a few other tricks. I'll be waiting to dance on your head, asshole, and teach you to never attack my gryphons again.\"\n\nOnce Daegan had a basic containment ward in place, he called to Tristan. \"Bring Skarde over here. I shall straighten his arm.\"\n\n\"I bring myself,\" Skarde ground out in a shaky voice reeking of agony. He might have a death wish, but he didn't want to spend his final hours in pain. He limped past Tristan on wobbly legs. Sweat ran from his face and his skin had a pasty quality.\n\n\"Tristan, I shall need a splint and cloth for wrappin'.\"\n\n\"I'm on it.\" Tristan disappeared.\n\nPointing at the chair, Daegan waited for the dragon shifter to sit. \"I shall make this quick, Skarde, but 'tis painful no matter how the arm is set.\"\n\n\"As if you care how much pain I suffer when you won't kill me and let me escape this hell.\"\n\n\"I had cared at one point, but not after seein' ya attack the gryphons, many of whom were in human form.\" Daegan fought back the need to bellow at this bastard. Being sick in the head did not forgive Skarde's heinous actions. \"I treated ya well. Why did ya attack my people?\"\n\nSkarde's head hung forward. He muttered in an agonized tone that made no sense. Sounding exhausted with fighting inside his head, his voice lost all arrogance when he lifted his head. \"I have never harmed innocents before now. You cost my family everything, then I am captured by your father's steward and spend thousands of years in the Scamall realm.\" He lifted his head. \"You speak of honor? You and King Gruffyn had no honor in the Dragani War. Now you live like a king yourself and I ... have nothing.\"\n\n\"Ya believe I started the Dragani War,\" Daegan ground out, tired of being accused of what he'd tried to prevent. That war had taken his family and his people when Daegan could not be there to protect them. He challenged, \"Ya never saw my red dragon, did ya? I know ya did not because Brynhild did not see my dragon either. Ya only heard the stories and ya convicted me of a crime ya had no evidence I committed. My red dragon held the peace for years. The last thing I wanted was war.\"\n\nSkarde's eyes tried to hide his shame but failed. He still argued, \"I do not believe your words. You left your family to face the Dragani War alone, which your father deserved, but not the others. Here you are again with family on Treoir. You live a gifted life again.\"\n\nTristan returned with his arms full of bandages. \"Tell me when you want this.\"\n\nDaegan wished to continue the argument but had little time left. \"I am waitin' on Skarde.\"\n\nBreathing rapidly, Skarde clenched his jaw and lifted his bad arm supported by his other hand.\n\nTaking in the mess of bone, muscle, and skin, Daegan chose the best two points to grip lightly for straightening his arm. \"I need the splint first.\" Gripping the mangled arm, Daegan quickly pulled the bones in line.\n\nSkarde yelled a raspy scream. His eyes rolled with a wild look, but he remained conscious. He clenched his jaw hard. Muscles in his neck and cheek flexed while he breathed in and out rapidly. Sweat rushed down his face and neck.\n\nTristan leaned in to clamp the splint in place.\n\nSkarde groaned with every movement.\n\nDaegan took the long, narrow cloth draped over Tristan's arm and used it to wrap the splint from shoulder to hand. Skarde's jaw muscles bulged. He made guttural sounds. The pain had to be excruciating, but he was being shown mercy when he least deserved it.\n\nWith the cloth tied off, Daegan motioned for Tristan to back up.\n\nDaegan followed him and lifted his arms, whispering words he'd been taught long ago. \"Ya shall stay here until I come for ya again.\"\n\nSkarde's eyes widened as his gaze followed Daegan's hands. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Placin' a ward around ya. Everythin' ya need is inside and ya will be fed. This ward shall keep the castle quiet while I am away.\"\n\n\"No!\" Skarde stood, weaving where he stood. Sweat poured down his face and chest. His voice shook with fear. \"I cannot do this. I ... I must shift to heal.\"\n\n\"Ya can heal just fine in human form, though not so quickly.\"\n\nSkarde's angry voice died to a weak demand. \"Do not leave me here unable to shift. My arm and head will have scars if I do not change into my dragon.\"\n\n\"Thought you wanted to die? Now you want to have a pretty corpse?\" Tristan took an aggressive step toward Skarde.\n\nDaegan held up his hand, a request for Tristan to wait.\n\nWhen his second stood down, Daegan spoke in a gravelly voice. \"The ice dragon clan I knew long ago stood strong as one family and with allies. Not one, male or female, would have attacked an innocent group. None of the male dragon shifters would have injured a female the way ya did with not a concern for if ya had killed her.\"\n\n\"I did not kill anyone,\" Skarde grumbled.\n\nDaegan roared, \"Ya should be protectin' those without our powers. Ya shall wear your scars to remind ya when ya had no honor. 'Tis a small penance for the destruction and injuries ya caused but know this. My dragon will not stand down a second time.\"\n\nTristan sent Daegan a telepathic message. <Tzader is looking for you. He says Lanna has asked you to see her before you leave Treoir.>\n\nGlancing at Tristan, Daegan gave a short nod, then slashed his gaze at Skarde. \"I have done all within my power to keep ya alive. Ya had better hope by the time I return again I have found a reason to continue feedin' ya. Otherwise, your future shall lay in Tristan's hands.\"\n\nSkarde jerked his gaze from the floor to stare at Daegan in defiance. He snarled, \"You are one to speak. You start a war then leave your family to fight it. You accuse me of hurting a female yet you left your sister defenseless. Where is your honor?\"\n\n\"Do not speak of my family,\" Daegan shouted, hating that he'd allowed Skarde to know he'd struck a raw nerve. \"I treated ya well after freein' ya from Scamall and savin' your sorry life. Ya wish to be enemies? So be it.\"\n\nSkarde kept shouting and screaming, \"I was there when you were not. No red dragon showed up to save his people. You know that. Their blood is on your head!\"\n\nDaegan had angled his head at Tristan, who teleported them immediately.\n\nAs they reappeared near the outer wall of the dungeon, everything Daegan had learned since being freed weighed heavily on his heart. Skarde's damning comments rang inside his tired mind. Daegan took a moment before entering the castle wall and placed his hand on stone carved many centuries ago. Just being in this realm, on this land, soothed a damaged part of his soul. His heart and soul were torn between his first life and this second chance he'd been given.\n\nTurning his head to Tristan, he admitted, \"I have been too understandin' with the dragon shifters. To find even one of those from my time twisted my thinkin'. I must begin to accept them as the enemies they are determined to be and let go of what I cannot find out about the past.\"\n\nTristan lifted a hand to his face and rubbed his forehead. \"I'm pissed as hell at that asshole in the dungeon, but I can see how you would want to save dragon shifters who had once been your allies.\"\n\nDaegan took in Treoir and all it meant to him. Not just a castle with people and Belador guards. Not just a protected realm, but ... everything he never thought to have again, starting with Brina, Tzader, and their bairns. Then Tristan and his gryphon clan, Evalle, Quinn, every Belador, and their allies.\n\nHe'd escaped the damned to live a new life.\n\nPerhaps it was time to let go of the old, no matter how much that thought hurt.\n\nTristan looked out over the Treoir land for a moment then came back to Daegan. \"I didn't get why you tried so hard to protect dragons that hate you. Not at first, because I wanted to kill anything that attacks you or our people. I've had some time to think about it since that day on the cliffs when you met Brynhild. That's when I realized how hard it must be to hide your dragon from the world and have none of your kind around.\" Frowning at some hidden thought, Tristan shook it off. \"I'll stay open to the idea of saving the dragon shifters if they show a change of heart to play nice. Skarde is probably already regretting what he did. Petrina will heal and I'll get over the urge to kill that ice dragon, eventually, but Skarde's not going to live long if he doesn't get his head out of his ass.\"\n\nJust when Daegan had sunk as low emotionally as he could after putting his people in harm's way, his chest eased with Tristan's admission. Daegan's lips twitched with almost a smile. \"Ya are correct. I shall have to remember that phrase about his head.\"\n\nTristan gave a quick grin. \"Let's go see what that little terror wants.\"\n\nDaegan started for the castle. \"Little terror?\"\n\n\"One of these days when you get to see Lanna riled up, cover your head. Her power is crazy.\"\n\n\"I have just witnessed her power with Ainvar.\"\n\n\"Oh, hell no. That was a reserved Lanna.\" Tristan laughed. \"She was once trapped in a basement beneath a building in Atlanta with a room full of innocent humans and two young male witches, one of whom she has a crush on. Even so, she would not stand by and watch one person die. When the warlock kidnappers threatened to kill everyone, Lanna got upset. That unleashed her power without her in control. It created a thunderstorm inside the basement and shook one of the largest buildings in that area of Atlanta.\"\n\nDaegan's lips parted. \"'Tis true?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. I don't know what she's been doing with Garwyli, but I hope that old druid can teach her how to manage her powers. She's sweet and protective. Nothing stops her from racing into danger, no matter how great the threat. Makes Quinn nuts all the time.\"\n\nDaegan could imagine Quinn trying to keep his tiny cousin safe from danger and the world safe from her. As Daegan took the steps to the castle entrance, his mind went to his own family. He thought back on Skarde's comment about Daegan not protecting his family.\n\nSkarde had mentioned Daegan's sister, in fact. That could only be Jennyver.\n\nWhy would that ice dragon care?\n\nDaegan shook his head, cursing himself for falling into an emotional trap Skarde baited with the right words. That ice dragon only thought to strike at Daegan by poking a raw wound.\n\nNothing more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Casidhe couldn't see a thing in this black tunnel, but she knew a cracking noise had to be bad.\n\nThe ceiling broke free.\n\nRocks and dirt crashed to the floor.\n\nWith a death grip on a strap, she dragged her pack and scooted backward as fast as she could in the midst of dirt showering her. She'd made it fifteen feet when the crush of dirt and dust flying around finally stopped.\n\nWhere was Cathbad?\n\nThe silence rattled her almost as much as the cave-in. She dug out her LED light.\n\nRocks and dirt had piled up to the ceiling.\n\nHer body wasn't being dragged through all that by Cathbad's majik.\n\nShe drew her knees up and dropped her head on her crossed arms. Coughing to clear her mouth and lungs, she wiped her lips on her sleeve. Then she just sat there, drained.\n\nIf Cathbad walked up right now, he wouldn't need majik to contain her.\n\nThe tunnel collapse and crazy druid had taken five years off her life.\n\nSitting up, she ran both hands over her hair. Her clothes were wet and filthy. No telling what her face looked like.\n\nThe ring!\n\nShe clawed at her neck, caught the chain, and lifted it to see the ring dangling there. Thank goodness. She fed the chain back inside her shirt.\n\nWhat happened with Cathbad? Not that she wanted to be yanked through this tunnel like a ragdoll, but she didn't think Cathbad made empty threats.\n\nWhy hadn't his majik worked?\n\nShe got to her knees and pulled the backpack into place on her back. Then she made it up on her noodle legs and continued her stumbling march to the end of the tunnel offshoot.\n\nWhat if she ran into another cave-in?\n\nCould she dig her way out before she suffocated?\n\nShe'd crawl across that bridge when she came to it. Cathbad worried her more than another wall of rocks and dirt right now. He believed he could call her to him. Why?\n\nAs she struggled another twenty feet at a time, she ran what he'd said through her mind again. <I know ya read the section I warned ya not to read without me. Now I can call ya to me.>\n\nHe had to be referencing the Before Ainvar book.\n\nHe thought she still had the book with her, giving him a way to use it against her. Relief slapped her silly over the simple act of sending the book with Tristan when he teleported her library to Treoir.\n\nSure, there was a chance she'd never see her books again, which physically hurt to think about. But she would have been at Cathbad's mercy if she hadn't given up her precious archive.\n\nShe'd been bent over so long, she'd stopped looking forward, just held out one hand so she didn't run into anything. After all this time in pitch black, suddenly seeing her scuffed and dirty boots surprised her.\n\nShe lifted her head.\n\nTiny shafts of daylight pierced the tunnel from thirty feet away. Adrenaline rushed through her shaky body. She took off on all fours, hurrying to reach the hole before it vanished.\n\nWith her life, that could happen.\n\nWhen she reached the opening, she tried to push through, but a tangle of vines grew there. That's why the light had not been solid.\n\nShe squinted, trying to see through the weave of thick wooden twists. She could make out nothing that would orient her to what waited outside. On her next breath, she dragged in a lung full of fresh air.\n\nShe'd made it this far.\n\nVines were not stopping her.\n\nBut that meant pulling out her sword again. What was the chance her sword would cooperate?\n\nShe wouldn't even speculate.\n\nReaching over her shoulder, she lifted a little at a time until the sword swung free and over her head. \"Thank you, Lann an Cheartais,\" she cooed to the sword, hoping it wanted out of this tunnel as much as she did.\n\nSucking in a long breath, she exhaled, calming her nerves first, then lifted the sword to swing down. She felt the first chop vibrate all the way up her arms. She kept whacking at the vines. Lann an Cheartais did not melt through them like it had the root, but neither did the sword refuse to cut.\n\nWas cutting wood and vines an insult?\n\nWhen she had enough of a hole for her to push through, she put away the sword and began shoving tree branches aside. She still could not see clearly beyond this point with a cluster of leaves on trees and skinny vines blocking her view.\n\nBut it smelled fresh and clean.\n\nThe only thing she recalled from the last time she'd climbed out of this tunnel ten years ago was a gentle sloping hill.\n\nPushing the backpack ahead of her, she yanked it away from sharp edges grabbing at the tough material. Her arms wanted to quit, but she held on and worked her entire body out the toothy hole.\n\nThen the backpack weight dropped, yanking her arms down fast.\n\nShe lunged out of the hole, figuring the backpack would knock weeds and branches out of the way, breaking her fall. Then she'd walk down the slope.\n\nNope. The universe had other plans. Her world dropped away. She fell ten feet before she hit wet ground with a thud. Her body slid and rolled madly down a hill. She yelled and held the backpack in a death grip. It bounced all around, slapping her.\n\nEyes closed, she kept her fingers locked around the strap and hoped it did not break. Finally the flipping around and rolling ended. She flopped on her back, staring up at a bright blue sky with clouds shaped as cotton puffs.\n\nBruised and cut, she wanted to just lie here panting. That would make it easy for Cathbad to catch her. At the moment, he had no idea where she had exited the tunnel. She tried to force herself to jump up and take off. Not happening.\n\nThe window of time for that druid to find her dwindled.\n\n\"How am I going to cross thousands of miles when I've barely made it a hundred yards from the tunnel?\" She waited just in case someone felt like hurtling advice at her.\n\nNope. After another moment of talking herself into moving, she struggled to her feet.\n\nHefting her backpack into place once more, she reached for the silver chain around her neck, bringing it up again to confirm she hadn't lost the ring in her tumble.\n\nAll at once, the running from druids, being captured, then betrayed by Fenella hit her hard. Could she make this journey and face a hostile Herrick?\n\nShe had to go to Herrick alone, but she'd love to have Daegan at her side again.\n\nShe missed him. Missed his unspoken support for anything she needed.\n\nHer heart wanted more time with him, but he'd been right to not become intimate with her. Now that she'd had a chance to think on it, she couldn't feel free to make that choice to share herself with Daegan until she met with Herrick. She intended to go her own way, but not before Herrick answered for all the years he'd misled her and she made it clear she was done.\n\nShe wanted to have her say before they parted ways. He owed her that much.\n\nThen she'd have to walk away from the clan. The idea of leaving all she'd ever known sickened her, but she'd never truly belonged. Not really.\n\nStill, it would hurt worse than a dagger to her chest.\n\nShe could not start her own life until Herrick explained why he'd let her believe she was part of his clan. She'd give him a chance to tell his side.\n\nShe also wanted the truth about the Dragani War.\n\nSo many questions she'd wanted to ask and hadn't for fear of backlash. Was Herrick immortal or had that ward played a role in him surviving all these centuries? Her squire tutors had warned her to never ask that question. Why?\n\nFrom what she'd pieced together over her many years of research, most dragon shifters lived three times as long as humans. What about Daegan? He'd been born of a goddess and king with dragon blood. Was he immortal?\n\nWhile she would not trust any words from Queen Maeve again, that woman had a serious library of material dating back before the Dragani War. So many things in those scrolls had contradicted what Casidhe had been taught. Words that painted Daegan as the force protecting the dragon shifter clans.\n\nAll of them, which included the ice dragons.\n\nShe needed the truth and facts before making any life-altering decision now waiting in the back of her mind.\n\nFeeling a spurt of energy, she headed to her next destination.\n\nShe pulled out a water bottle and an energy bar, chewing the nutty mixture and guzzling water with each step. She had a few miles to cross before she could thumb a ride. A farm truck would let her jump in the back, which would give her a chance to catch some rest.\n\nThe only downside would be walking across open fields.\n\nQueen Maeve could see her with that scrying wall.\n\nCathbad might have his own scrying unit.\n\nDid everyone but her have one?\n\nShe glanced up to see where the sun sat in the sky. Had to be around one in the afternoon. A lot of things could happen before she reached the airport.\n\nMaybe she should wait until dark, but Daegan had some person who could use remote viewing.\n\nNo, the longer she put off reaching the road, the more she killed her chance at escaping."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Kleio leaned against the open window. The view of the Caucasus mountain range in the afternoon from the second floor of Herrick's castle never got old. Good thing or she'd feel trapped living in a remote castle shielded by a dragon-shifter's ward.\n\nShe'd had a disturbing dream last night she couldn't shake.\n\nDreams were normally easy for her to understand, and more often than not, an indication of something she should focus on to incur a vision.\n\nThis one had been in fragments with no clear meaning.\n\nA disturbing dream even without a clear meaning.\n\nDifferent faces she could not identify and in strange settings, which reminded her of a time long before she'd been born. Possibly from as far back as Herrick's early life. The turbulent actions and images had brought her wide awake at dawn. In hopes of learning more about the dream, she'd tried to sleep again only to be denied.\n\nHerrick's pet griffon vulture, Stian, flew across the vista, gliding from time to time. Her gaze followed the bird a moment then drifted away to watch the castle workers below. If she did not know better, she'd think she'd gone back in time. All parts of this castle lived as Herrick had thousands of years ago. All except her area and even those changes had been modest.\n\nTwo children raced around playing with sticks and the dogs below.\n\nShe'd never wanted a child of her own. If she had, she doubted Janus, god of beginnings and transitions, would have chosen her to do his bidding for this world.\n\nThe first time she met him she was but a child herself. He was an imposing being she should have feared, but she'd experienced a reverent level of admiration the first time in his presence. Over the years, he became mentor and parent, raising her as much as developing her gift.\n\nIf she were honest, which she always strived to be, she'd admit a bit of hurt at the idea of not being visited by him again until she completed a journey she had yet to truly see. She replayed his words daily, focusing on what he required of her.\n\n<Your visions will expose a threat, free a life, and cost a bond.>\n\nEvery day brought the possibility of each declaration. Every word had a deep meaning.\n\n<Your vision will change your path and your path will change the course of the human world. The world will either survive what is coming or burn into eternity. Do not return to speak to me again until you have completed this journey and the future is clear.> Uncrossing her arms, she walked over the stone floor of her simple room furnished with a bed of thick dark wood. She often studied the symbols carved in the headboard, but had no idea what they meant. Herrick had refused to explain them.\n\nNothing appeared to be evil or demonic, so she let it go as she did so many times with Herrick.\n\nHe upheld his part of their agreement, so she pushed only when something mattered.\n\nThe mahogany armoire against the far wall belonged to her and matched the low chest moved here at the same time. Herrick had thought the screen in the corner and the basin she had to fill with water would suffice for her personal needs. No.\n\nDemanding a private bathroom had caused Herrick no little frustration. He'd tried to tell her how he preferred the clan live naturally as he had growing up.\n\nShe'd explained the definition of a deal breaker. She was not clan and did not care if others wanted to live in a primitive way. Then she'd reminded him how he had agreed to provide her living quarters equal to her current life when they first met. Except for her bathroom, she'd lived as sparsely as a monk.\n\nHerrick had been so excited to gain her agreement to live at his castle, he'd failed to realize the modern convenience most women would expect.\n\nWashing her face at the basin, she patted it dry and hung the towel on a rack.\n\nShe glanced in the mirror at her red-and-gold brocade skirt and long-sleeved white blouse. In a humdrum mood this morning, she'd left her black hair loose to cloud around her head and shoulders, but now was the time to get busy. With efficient moves of having worn her hair only two ways for years, she braided a long black length, tied the end, and tossed it all over her shoulder.\n\nGoing through her normal routine had done little to ease her mind over the dream.\n\nNothing would until she opened her senses for a vision.\n\nShe hadn't been able to pinpoint the exact location of the setting or why that mattered, but those details felt important.\n\nOne woman in particular from the dream interested her.\n\nKleio listened for any noise outside her room and heard none.\n\nShe opened her door to the hallway and checked that no one headed in her direction. With the only access to her room closed again, she lifted a heavy timber into the slats provided. That prevented anyone from entering uninvited.\n\nEven Herrick.\n\nAcross her bedroom and to the right of the window, she entered a room all were forbidden from entering, except her. Herrick often grumbled about being barred from any part of his castle.\n\nWhen he did, she merely waited out his rant.\n\nHe'd storm off afterward and she wouldn't see him for at least a day.\n\nNow that she thought about it, he'd left the castle early this morning in dragon form without a word to anyone. No one would dare question him. Herself included.\n\nAfter her last visit from Janus, she now questioned her failure to give more consideration to Herrick's habits.\n\nHe never remained absent from the castle more than two days. That in itself had been mysterious years ago when she first made this her permanent residence. Based on silent observations, she began to realize upon every return, he visited his lair immediately or very soon. The castle had been built against a mountainside thousands of years ago by one of the ice dragon ancestors. Herrick forbade anyone from passing from the castle into a large cavern inside the mountain the castle abutted.\n\nNo one ventured near his lair, or more specifically, his dragon's lair.\n\nIn recent months, she'd sensed something unusual in his secret area and made the mistake of bringing it up for discussion.\n\nHis response had been quick and vicious. Keep her nose out of things that did not concern her.\n\nHerrick had a temper best not triggered.\n\nStill, Janus had handed her a heavy responsibility to do more than inform Herrick of visions about him and his people.\n\nEven that had proved to be a recent disappointment.\n\nLast week, she'd rushed to tell Herrick of a vision where danger shadowed Fenella and Casidhe.\n\nWhat had he done?\n\nWarned Fenella.\n\nKleio had another vision of danger chasing Casidhe. She demanded to know if he had contacted the young woman.\n\nHerrick walked away without answering.\n\nHe'd sent no word to Casidhe.\n\nKleio paused to confirm the half-burned candles from her last visit had not been disturbed. There should be no reason for change, but she could not risk entering a trance only to find some being had been here and left her a trap.\n\nShe took a spot in front of the low altar, kneeling on the soft rug. After lighting the two yellow candles placed at corners of the altar, she brought to life the three purple candles arranged in a half circle in the center.\n\nSitting back on her knees, she inhaled deeply of scents meant to relax and enhance her experience while in an alternative state of mind.\n\nAs her mental pathways opened, she brought up images from her dream and lost herself in observing every detail.\n\nShe'd gone far back into time again. So strange when the journey Janus had spoken of would happen in today's world. This was not the time to analyze, but to take in every detail.\n\nSunlight slipped behind the horizon, throwing the last shadows across a castle high atop a hill and the land leading up to it. Nothing of this setting reminded her of Herrick's castle nestled deep in the Caucasus mountains.\n\nTwo different castle structures, in fact.\n\nClanging of metal against metal drew her to the people.\n\nSome men fought in pairs using massive swords, but appeared to practice only. They wore groin covers. Sweat poured down their tanned muscular bodies. Women dressed in natural wheat-colored peasant gowns of brown and cream with white blouses. They carried baskets of clothes, cooked over open fires, and visited in small groups.\n\nKleio drew in the aroma of some meat being cooked in a stew. Some women cared for children also in simple clothing from a medieval time.\n\nA noise in the distance caused the entire area to pause and look past the castle at something Kleio could not see.\n\nWhispers erupted. Wide eyes stared intensely with fear.\n\nBut she heard the loud roar of a beast and hard flapping of giant wings.\n\nSomeone shouted, \"'Tis not our red dragon!\" They all ran to grab children and hurry for the castle, screaming they were under attack.\n\nThe image spun and blurred.\n\nKleio struggled to hold herself in the moment. She had never been thrown from a vision, but this one pushed her away.\n\nHow could that be?\n\nShe called upon her powers and forced her way back inside the vision, battling the energy blocking her. Her body tensed and she leaned forward hard as if fighting a powerful storm.\n\nClenching her teeth, she pulled her hands together as she had when Janus had told her to behold the woman she would become. The woman she'd seen in a mirror with horns curling from her head had worn a black gown and gripped the hilt of a sword with the blade pointed down.\n\nEnergy flooded her.\n\nThe storm calmed, allowing her back into the vision.\n\nSweat trickled down one side of her face. She ignored it, intent on staying put and riding this vision to the end. She had never faced so difficult a time trying to reach for a vision.\n\nAs her sight cleared, Kleio observed a new setting. A young woman knelt in a chapel with walls of stone. Screams and shouts sounded far away. Was this a chapel inside the castle from earlier?\n\nRed hair of autumn colors fell to her waist in waves as she prayed. Her beautiful gown of subdued green had been sewn by the best of dressmakers. Based on the style and richness of the material, this woman likely held a high position in the castle.\n\nJust outside, someone screamed, \"Runnn!\" Then more voices picked up the shouts of danger.\n\nThe red-haired woman glanced over her shoulder, eyes flashing terror, but she returned to praying.\n\nWho was she?\n\nA large figure entered the chapel, remaining hidden in dark shadows.\n\nThe red-haired woman lifted her head, but remained on her knees. She did not turn to face the intruder when she spoke. \"Leave me. This is a place of worship.\"\n\nThe dark figure still said nothing.\n\nShe twisted her hands together and swallowed. Tears ran down her cheeks.\n\nThe world blurred again with flashes of fighting and people begging for their lives. So much pain and heartache.\n\nKleio gripped her chest, unable to prevent the agony from sliding inside her. She struggled to breathe. She begged for relief, caught up inside the vision, then finally ... silence and darkness.\n\nReleasing a strangled breath, Kleio grabbed her head and kept her eyes closed as she pulled herself together. She searched for the connection again and again, then gave up.\n\nTime had taught her the visions either come or they don't. She could not recall when she'd had so much trouble with any vision. Murmuring comforting words to ease her galloping heart, she cupped her hands to her chest and lowered her head.\n\nShe had no idea how much time had passed when a vision nudged her to pay attention.\n\nShe lifted her head, but kept her eyes closed.\n\nAn image began to form.\n\nNo castle or people.\n\nShe pushed to her feet and stood erect as if drawn to do so. Then her body floated in a smoky ether, which pulled her forward. Remaining calm had come so easily in the past, but those visions were nothing like what she had experienced today.\n\nShould she pull out and protect herself?\n\nJanus expected her to be his warrior with sight.\n\nHer hands trembled at standing strong. If she'd wanted a simple life without facing the unknown, she would never have become a seer for Janus.\n\nThat admission did nothing to build her confidence, but neither could she turn back. Not now. Not when it felt as if she were on the brink of something important.\n\nLights glowed and dimmed in the cloudy world she continued to be drawn through. She found no origin for the lighting. The smoke swirling around her appeared only as wide as her bedroom, but it seemed endless until her body stopped moving.\n\nPart of the smoke reshaped into hands, nudging her forward.\n\nHer skin chilled. She had never experienced that sort of touch during a vision. Remaining calm tasked her greatly.\n\nEvidently satisfied with her position, the ghost-like hands withdrew.\n\nWhere was she? She stared at a wall of haze that ebbed and flowed.\n\nOn occasion in the past, she'd had to wait for long periods until a vision reached the point of revealing itself. She'd come too far in this one to become impatient.\n\nTime swam around her.\n\nLulled by the gentle movements in the room, she started when the ghost hands shook her.\n\nHeart thumping fast, she sharpened her attention. Clearly, that appeased the filmy hands, which left her once more.\n\nAn ocean of thick and iridescent fog swirled this way and that until it subsided and began spreading out.\n\nWhen the fog thinned, she faced a rock wall.\n\nAfter all that anxiety, her energy flattened with disappointment at this dead end.\n\nWhat else could she determine about this vision?\n\nMoving around the room, she searched for some identifying factors besides feeling as if she floated in a cave. Fire burned from torches on the walls. On the other side of the room, steps appeared to ascend in an exit.\n\nShe tried to float there, but her body would not move.\n\nWhere were the ghost hands when she needed them?\n\nAir chilled across her skin. She sensed a change behind her and managed to turn only to find the stone wall still there.\n\nThis vision had drained her. She needed to leave and heal her energy.\n\nThe seer started to withdraw from the vision, but filmy hands on her arms stopped her. This couldn't be. She had never been held captive inside a vision.\n\nChills covered her skin.\n\nUnable to break away, she stared as the stone wall began to turn translucent ... then transparent.\n\nMore smoky air appeared.\n\nThis time, the fog dispersed a bit.\n\nWhat was going on?\n\nHelping hands pushed her forward until she saw an unclear image of a young woman sleeping on the other side.\n\nMaybe not asleep with skin too pale for life.\n\nWhy had the body not deteriorated if she were dead?\n\nIf this woman was from the medieval time Kleio had been viewing, she could have died of anything from childbirth to a plague.\n\nOr was that an altar her body had been laid upon? Had she been sacrificed?'\n\nDark energy began to rise around the woman.\n\nSomething felt wrong, very wrong. Kleio had never run from a vision, but she turned away.\n\nShe had to remain calm and not panic.\n\nThose hands pulled her around to face the young woman again whose face and body came into focus better.\n\nA gown the color of moss and sewn for a female of importance clung to her body. Red hair fell in waves over her shoulders and off the side of her altar.\n\nKleio could not breathe.\n\nThe young woman from the chapel turned her head to Kleio and begged, \"Help. Herrick is killin' me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Casidhe hoisted her backpack into place, fastening the straps as she stood on a sidewalk in downtown Luxembourg, Belgium. She watched people flow around her as smoothly as an unremarkable rock in a river beneath streetlights pushing away the dark night. She hadn't expected to arrive so late, but it would have been longer if she hadn't flown most of the way inside a cargo plane.\n\nAnd she wouldn't have managed to travel without documents had she not tapped her friend who boxed her up to fly in the pressurized area of a freight jet.\n\nShe'd tried to sleep, but it wasn't the most comfortable flight. Once she reached a squire house here, she'd get some rest.\n\nA tingle raced up her spine. Again.\n\nCall her paranoid, but she'd felt eyes on her since leaving that tunnel in Galway. No one approached her before she reached Shannon airport and her contact there hadn't blinked an eye. She had to be suffering anxiety from lack of rest and an overactive imagination.\n\nMaybe her stalker antennae had broken with so many people after her lately.\n\nVibration hummed against her chest.\n\nDammit. Not that again.\n\nShe turned her back to anyone watching and reached inside her shirt to hold the stupid ring until it calmed down again. The thing had scared her bad when it vibrated as the airplane took off from the airport in Shannon.\n\nSo now she'd have to pacify a nervous ring on top of dealing with a stubborn sword?\n\nShe'd worn this ring on a chain in college and after. It had never twitched. What the heck had this thing jumping around?\n\nAnd what did that mean?\n\nJust another pitstop on her way to Crazyville.\n\nWhen the ring quieted, she dropped the silver chain inside her shirt again.\n\nShe fell into step in the midst of people spread along the sidewalk. On her left stood a string of three-story-tall buildings of old-world architecture. She'd bet historical locations were on every street. Across the narrow street, cafe umbrellas covered diners and those only enjoying a glass of wine.\n\nShe caught a whiff of kriibsen. Her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled, but she could not spend money on the succulent crayfish dish. Whatever the squire family shared with her would be much appreciated.\n\nPeople jostled her as they passed on quicker feet.\n\nShe had pushed her legs enough today. Every step so far had been an effort. If her freight airline contact had not been on duty, she'd have had to wait until he showed up at work tomorrow or the next day.\n\nShe'd found him taking a late lunch nearby. Once she cooked up a story about having to take off without a local squire family packing her in a crate with all the supplies she'd need, her contact had been great, as usual. He'd taken one look at her dirty clothes and shoes and hustled her to a friend's nearby business where she'd cleaned up in the bathroom while they built her crate.\n\nShe'd never wondered how he managed to pass her crate through when needed. After today, she had the feeling he and his friend might smuggle on a regular basis and not just for a dragon shifter.\n\nAt the next corner, this part of the city opened into a plaza with more cafes and a couple food trucks. Pulling out her phone, she checked the time. After ten at night. How long would food trucks stick around?\n\nWhy waste time worrying when she just needed to locate the squire family? If she let paranoia rule her life, she'd never make it to the Caucasus mountain range.\n\nIn the next block, the crowds began to thin.\n\nFood trucks seemed to be shutting down.\n\nIn another ten minutes, she wouldn't get much choice.\n\nHer stomach nudged her to take a bird in hand and eat now. Not a wise choice. Stick to the plan and hurry up.\n\nShe pulled out one of her two packages of crackers left and munched while following the map on her mobile phone. She still had to reach Tegernsee, Germany, another five to six hours by car from here. Too expensive. She'd have to ask the squire family for help even if they had not been designated for travel aid.\n\nShe had enough money to live on for a week and would have had more in hand if she'd visited her cottage. Fear of meeting Cathbad or Queen Maeve had killed that possibility.\n\nNot to mention the demons and Imortiks.\n\nDaegan had explained how they were more prevalent in the city of Atlanta in America right now. There may not be a rift here, but hanging around to find out would not be smart.\n\nCathbad showing up in the tunnel had proven she'd been right to err on the side of get-the-hell-out-of-there-quick.\n\nSuspicion clawed at her neck.\n\nPausing, she pretended to tighten the strap on her backpack. No supernatural came flying at her.\n\nBetrayal had eaten away at her confidence.\n\nShe'd trusted Herrick and Fenella for years, believing she lived inside a close-knit clan. It surely had been close-knit, but she'd fallen through a gaping hole in it.\n\nPushing on, she thought about her upcoming meeting with Herrick. Could she be misjudging him? She'd jumped to conclusions on Daegan only to learn she'd been wrong.\n\nShe'd been so angry and hurt when she saw Fenella, she couldn't think straight. She'd lashed out mentally at everyone involved.\n\nNot the seer, who Casidhe had never trusted.\n\nThat was exactly why she hadn't slowed down to consider the seer's possible role in all this.\n\nNow that she thought back on her conversation with Fenella, had the woman been trying to tell her the seer was behind all of this?\n\nHerrick could be overbearing about finding Skarde. He'd been so crazed lately, he seemed to heed the seer's every word even more than normal and could have easily been manipulated.\n\nThat seer had been at the castle a long time.\n\nAnyone in her position of power could influence Herrick's every decision.\n\nHad the seer convinced him to use Casidhe to catch the red dragon? Huh. Maybe. If so, damn her.\n\nCasidhe would not betray Daegan, the man who held her heart, but neither could she be with Daegan until she could tell him the truth about everything in her life.\n\nThat would not happen until she freed herself of any obligation to Herrick.\n\nAll this mental gyration brought her back to her original plan to reach Herrick as soon as possible.\n\nA young man riding a skateboard came too close, forcing Casidhe to step off the sidewalk. He shouted his apology in Dutch without slowing down.\n\nShaking off the reckless board rider, she hurried ahead, glad to see she was closing in on the residential area for the local Connell squire family. She wouldn't mind catching a meal and some rest until leaving at daylight. No one should have to drive her to Tegernsee in the middle of the night.\n\nShe got lost twice then unlatched the pack and dropped it to the ground when she reached the apartment building. Exhausted, she pressed the buttons on a panel to call the family.\n\n\"Deich anseo.\" <Ten here.> The unit number spoken in Irish by this woman was a normal way of answering.\n\nSo far, this fit what Casidhe expected.\n\nShe had the right place.\n\nSmiling so she didn't sound as irritable and tired as she felt, Casidhe said, \"Would I be speakin' to Anna Hugh?\" Hugh had been used as a pseudonym for the Connells when Casidhe traveled to protect the families in case someone overheard her.\n\nShe had always prided herself on being part of the squire families, and until now, had believed the false name shielded them from fortune hunters.\n\nNow everything in her life took on a different meaning.\n\nShe'd been sent out with the last name Luigsech to act like a glowing beacon to draw in the red dragon.\n\nOne good point? That had been the reason she met Daegan.\n\n\"Aye,\" the woman answered slowly.\n\n\"Wonderful. I am Casidhe of Hugh from the north. I'm in town for a short visit and researchin' information on Dimma MacNathi.\" Dimma had been the scribe who penned the Book of Dimma in the eighth century. Using his name was code for Casidhe requesting shelter and travel help from any squire family and had been for the past ten years.\n\nShe'd been taught different codes for multiple situations.\n\nAnna's words shot out terse and sharp. \"Ya have wrung the wrong number. Ya want food, the trucks still run at this time. I know nothin' of some Dimma.\" The woman hung up.\n\nCasidhe stared at the button unable to speak. Her skin crawled with feeling exposed all of a sudden. Worse than exposed. She felt cut adrift in a sea of strangers.\n\nHad someone sent word to turn her away? Who? Fenella? Why would Fenella or anyone else deny Casidhe safe passage to Herrick?\n\nHad Herrick done this?\n\nShe might be angry at him, but he'd been the one to say over and over that family and clan came first. Both must be protected by all of them at all times.\n\nHurt burned deep at another confirmation she was not family, but she'd always believed she belonged to the clan.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nThis was the correct address and the woman had acknowledged the Hugh pseudonym.\n\nHerrick and Fenella had told Casidhe if she ever ran into trouble while traveling, all she had to do was knock on the door of any Luigsech or any Connell squire family on the list. Out of the twenty-nine families in this part of the world, she'd memorized addresses for seventeen scattered along the trip from Galway to Herrick's castle.\n\nThis Anna had rejected her even though she never even opened the door. A Connell family. Actually, the original name of Connell had been MacConnaugh.\n\nTears stung her eyes. The seer would push her out for sure.\n\nCasidhe could see it all so clearly now.\n\nKleio had probably seen Casidhe traveling to the castle in a vision. She would know how to get word out to anyone she chose. The seer could have sent word to turn Casidhe away as if it had come from Herrick.\n\nWhat would Kleio do when she realized Casidhe would not be deterred?\n\nNot after all this.\n\nCasidhe had an even greater journey ahead of her now. She'd make it with or without help from the chain of squire families. No one would prevent her from reaching Herrick and allowing him a chance to explain all of this.\n\nNo one would stop her from protecting him if the seer ruled his thoughts.\n\nAt least she hadn't accused Herrick of anything yet, not like she had Daegan. He'd forgiven her. She missed Daegan and longed to be with him, but that would end up with two dragon shifters battling to the death.\n\nDaegan would come out of worry for her safety.\n\nHer heart did a flip over knowing someone cared that much for her. She couldn't wait to sort all this out and get back to him. And she meant to have answers on everything, including what Herrick knew about her background and power.\n\nWhat to do now?\n\nShe had never met this particular Connell family in Luxembourg, but she'd stayed with the Luigsech family in Tegernsee. Plus, she'd seen them recently while returning from Herrick's castle.\n\nThat family would open their door to invite her in.\n\nBut now she had to find a way across borders without a current passport.\n\nHer stomach growled.\n\nShe could handle being hungry or tired, but not both at the same time. Food would invigorate her and help her think through her next steps. Backing away from the tarnished button panel for the apartment units, she hefted her pack again. It weighed more with every step on her sore legs.\n\nWhen she reached the business area again, one glance depressed her. Small cafes were shuttered for the night. A rat raced out of a dark shadow with a cat chasing it.\n\nShe grabbed her chest and backpedaled fast. Then felt like an idiot.\n\nShe couldn't make this trip if she started jumping at everything that moved. She had a sword when she could coax it out of the sheath. She had the number Tristan had given her for some guy named Trey in the US, but that would be if she had no other option and needed help.\n\nShe trudged toward the corner where she'd made the last turn, backtracking her steps until she reached a street with a little activity.\n\nHer gaze landed on a food truck in a spot that had been empty when she passed by the first time. It seemed to be the only one illuminated for business. Her resident paranoia urged her to hunt up a bar or restaurant, but nothing in sight for two blocks showed signs of life or being open.\n\nShe strolled over, taking her time approaching the tall box truck rehabbed with a serving window on this side. Two men speaking French argued whose fault it was for being late tonight. Ignoring them, she stepped close enough to read the menu board hooked on the side.\n\nWhatever they cooked smelled like a stew of yum. Her stomach growled painfully this time.\n\nA tall young man with the thin build of a runner appeared at the open window where orders were taken. He had a thick pile of blond hair on top and short on the sides. Maybe mid-twenties, he wore a white chef's tunic with stains, a tall white hat that had been starched, and a smile of perfect teeth.\n\nHis bright teeth struck a contrast with his almond skin and curly light-brown beard. He spoke light-hearted English. \"You look hungry, yes?\"\n\nHis shorter partner with a wide body and bald head faced the grill. \"So clever, Ferrand. Only hungry people walk up to a food truck.\"\n\nFerrand turned to his left and hissed, \"Shut up. First we are late because you fail to pick up supplies on time and now you insult our first customer.\"\n\n\"Only customer,\" his grill cook shot back. \"Is too late to come out tonight. Should have stayed home.\"\n\n\"Tell that to man we owe money on truck!\" Ferrand drew a long breath and released a loud, exaggerated sigh. He turned coffee-brown eyes with thick lashes on her. \"I am sorry. Please. Let me feed you. What would you have?\"\n\nWatching those two go at it like a married couple had loosened the tight muscles in her shoulders. Even the muscles in her face gave in and allowed her to smile. \"Are you ready to cook? Sounds like you just got here.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. This one.\" Ferrand flicked a thumb in the cook's direction. \"He only needs to light grill. We have Carbonnade Flamande. Is made of finest beef and my personal favorite beer. No one makes this better.\"\n\nThe surly cook slung an irritable look at Ferrand, who did not turn to acknowledge it.\n\nTo preserve their partnership or whatever deal they had, Casidhe glanced at the menu, but decided she was too tired to think. \"I would love a bowl of your Carbonnade Flamande.\"\n\n\"Excellent choice. I tell truth. We make the best.\"\n\nHis cook corrected him over his shoulder. \"I make the best. You make problems.\"\n\nFerrand clamped his jaws together and ground out a sound of warning.\n\nCasidhe paid and included a tip. Not extravagant, but enough to show her appreciation.\n\nWhile the cook made lots of banging noise while preparing her order, Ferrand asked, \"Where are your friends? We are very behind tonight. We need more business.\"\n\nGreat question. Where were Casidhe's friends?\n\nShe counted two right now. Daegan and Tristan.\n\nShe'd also like to have them with her to share a meal. She missed Daegan more than she'd believed imaginable. She'd never felt this lonely. It was all because Daegan had climbed inside her heart to take up residence and now was nowhere near her.\n\nClearing her throat, she said, \"I'm only visitin' for a day. Business trip. Nothin' social.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" He frowned. \"Is terrible. You are young and pretty. You should be here for romantic trip. Oh, wait a minute!\" He snapped his fingers. \"I remember you. Is good to see you again.\"\n\nWhat? Her brain had lost the ability to argue so she smiled at the flirt in hopes of moving this along. He probably said that to every female who wandered up.\n\nHe waved his hands as he talked. \"You will enjoy city. You must stay. This is most beautiful place to\u2014\"\n\n\"Order ready!\" the snarly cook shouted.\n\nShoulders drooping, Ferrand turned to his cook. \"Wrap the food tight so it stays warm. She must find place to sit and eat.\"\n\nThe cook slapped down a large serving spoon, making a loud racket. He wrenched around to face Ferrand. \"I warn you over and over. Do not think to boss me.\"\n\nFerrand shouted at him in French.\n\nCasidhe caught enough to know Ferrand considered the cook a child and a huge mistake to take into business with him. This sounded like an ongoing conflict.\n\nTheir words devolved into cursing with the two of them inches apart.\n\nWas she even going to get her food?\n\nThe angry cook threw his serving spoon, a towel, a long-handled flipper, then two more towels at Ferrand who batted them away.\n\nAll except the last towel. It was soaking wet and hit him in the face.\n\nThe door on the back of the truck opened and banged the side.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nFerrand jumped up and ran after the cook, shouting madly. For a heavy guy, the cook covered half a block fast then told Ferrand to have sex with himself.\n\nUnbelievable. Can't one freaking thing go right?\n\nCasidhe walked around to the back of the truck where the door hung wide open. Both men had disappeared, but she could still hear them shouting in the distance.\n\nGood thing for them she was no thief, but she'd paid for the food and wanted it. She waited a minute, heard more yelling and what sounded like a fight.\n\nWould the police show up?\n\nShe did not want to be around for the authorities to question everyone and ask for her out-of-date passport. Climbing up a short set of steps that appeared to fold away for driving, she hurried to the cooking area. Food had been wrapped, but not put in a bag. She lowered her backpack, which kept banging the sides of the narrow area, and hurried to find a bag. She snatched the first one up she found and shoved the hot food inside, then stuck it in her backpack.\n\nSirens sounded in the distance.\n\nHer pulse beat like a war drum.\n\nNo one here would bail her out if those sirens were coming for the men from this food truck.\n\nIf the police went to where she'd heard the men fighting, she'd have time to leave the area.\n\nYanking her backpack up to put on her back outside where she had more room, she turned and faced Ferrand.\n\nHis cook stood quietly behind him.\n\nOh, shit.\n\n\"I only grabbed my food,\" she explained.\n\nFerrand stared at her saying nothing. What was going on? Then he smiled, but not the charming one from before. This one belonged on a weasel.\n\nShe reached into her backpack for the sword.\n\nSomething bit her arm. A dart. Her fingers wouldn't grip the hilt. Everything around her wobbled.\n\nShe looked up.\n\nFerrand's sidekick entered the truck and stepped up next to his friend.\n\nThe ring buzzed against the skin on her chest.\n\nHer eyes rolled up in her head."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Evalle squeezed herself as small as she could to hide in a dark corner. She pushed her dark sunglasses into place. Now would not be the time for some human to see her unnaturally bright green eyes.\n\nA blade of sun just making an entrance at daylight slashed past one corner of her hidey hole. Not much protection from the sun, which would turn her into a charcoal briquette, but better than being caught completely exposed on the upper level.\n\nShe still couldn't believe a supernatural had captured Sen and Adrianna. A demigod and the most powerful witch Evalle had ever met once Adrianna took control of Witchlock. She had to find Adrianna. Sen could pound sand, but not her friend.\n\nFirst, Evalle had to save her own butt. Her phone had died, so that was out, but she had another option.\n\nShe called the Belador team coordinator telepathically, <Hey, this is Evalle.>\n\nTrey replied, <Where are you? I just texted you. Storm is about to rip this city apart to get to you before sunrise.>\n\n<My phone died.> She smiled. That was her Skinwalker mate and Trey wasn't joking. Storm would tear through any world to find her. She gave Trey her location, then added, <Find Quinn and send him. A being I've never seen showed up and snatched Adrianna and Sen.>\n\n<What?>\n\n<Yep. We've got demons coming from all directions and more Imortiks every day, now this. I want Adrianna back more than anything, definitely more than butthead, but ... much as I hate to admit it, we need both of them. With Daegan and Tristan out of pocket, Sen and Adrianna are two of our best weapons on the street even if we have to badger Sen to do his part.>\n\n<Got it. I've sent a text to Storm. I'll contact Quinn next. You gonna be okay until then?>\n\n<Sure. I found a dark corner to hole up in.> Trey withdrew from her mind. Her home with Storm was in a downtown Atlanta building not far away. Maybe twenty minutes in early-morning traffic if he hadn't taken off in the wrong direction first.\n\nPeople were starting to enter the garage down below. Evalle's sensitive Alterant hearing picked up every sound. Engines rumbled into the street-level parking, which would fill up first. People were talking.\n\nEvidently the scuffle she and Adrianna had survived with two demons and an Imortik, which had driven frightened humans away a half hour ago no longer worried them.\n\nEither that or curiosity seekers were showing up.\n\nEvalle could not leave this corner until Storm showed up and cloaked her from the sun. He should be here before people began parking on this level.\n\nA garbled noise like a cross between a snarl and something guttural out of a horror movie drew her attention around and up.\n\nSickle claws then hairy arms appeared to crawl down from the level above.\n\nWell, hell.\n\nThe demon attached to those appendages stuck its head into view. Corkscrew horns protruded from coarse brown hair covering each side of its head. The demon dove toward her level. It flipped and stuck the landing on two feet as long as her forearms.\n\nShe clapped. \"That's a ten no matter what anyone tells you.\"\n\nIts head angled to one side then the demon opened a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth.\n\nPinned in the corner, she quickly shoved a kinetic blast, knocking the demon backward. It rolled head-over-ass all the way across the deck, slammed into the short wall, and flopped down. Shaking its head, the demon sat up.\n\nGlowing red eyes turned her way.\n\nThen the six-foot-tall demon spawn of Big Foot stood and started forward. Its lower jaw hung open. Jagged fangs dripped saliva.\n\nYuck.\n\nNo problem. She could slap the demon around with kinetics until Storm or Quinn showed up.\n\nThat idea flew out the window at the sound of a vehicle from down below climbing the one-way ramp at the far end of her level. How could she keep humans safe from this thing while stuck in the shadows?\n\nWhen she checked the demon, it had heard the same thing and abandoned having her for a meal.\n\nShe threw kinetic hits to slap the hairy body, but it zig-zagged until too far away for her to make a direct hit. Sweat pebbled on her forehead and drizzled down her neck. That monster would kill any humans coming this way.\n\nShe called up her spelled dagger.\n\nThe demon slowed before reaching the ramp and waited like a predator preparing to attack easy prey.\n\nEvalle pulled her arm back and shouted, \"Here I come. You want me or not?\"\n\nThe demon twisted around.\n\nShe whipped her arm forward and released the blade. It zinged through the air, but the demon had enough time to lift an arm to knock the blade away.\n\n\"Shit! Why couldn't that work like in the movies?\"\n\nThe sound of the vehicle's engine grew louder as it neared the top of the ramp. A human would see the demon any second now.\n\nPlease let the occupants stay in the vehicle and not run away screaming.\n\nA demon would love an easy chase.\n\nShe couldn't believe it when the engine revved. Tires squealed, racing forward. A Jeep blasted into the parking area and drove the demon into the wall at her end of the structure. Contact made a nasty crunch.\n\nThe driver's door flew open. Black hair pulled back with a leather thong and with teak-colored skin thanks to his Native American genes, the man of her dreams rushed over to her. \"You okay, sweetheart?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I am now, demon smasher. How's your Jeep?\"\n\n\"It'll live.\" Storm pulled her into his arms and hugged her close. His heart pounded like crazy.\n\nNothing scared this man except losing her.\n\nShe felt the same way about losing him.\n\nColors dulled as his cloaking fell over them. She'd fought every battle alone from the moment she escaped a basement she'd been locked inside as a small child until she turned eighteen. After she escaped and ended up in Atlanta, this incredible man crashed into her world.\n\nSen had brought in Storm to catch Evalle in a lie and put her away. That hadn't worked out well for Sen.\n\nStorm's kiss cured any problem in her world. When he lifted his lips away from hers, he brushed the loose hair off her face and palmed her cheek. \"Where the hell is Adrianna? She promised me this wouldn't happen.\"\n\n\"Not her fault, babe. You're not going to believe what happened. Some weird being showed up and took her.\" Evalle nodded at the disbelief in his face. \"Took Sen, too. Thought they were a pair.\"\n\nStorm frowned in disbelief. \"Clearly a being who doesn't know either one of them.\" He glanced around at the still-empty parking deck where sunlight streaked through the open areas. \"You can tell me all of this once we deal with the demon. Stay close so you're protected from the sun. I'm going to widen the cloaking to include the demon.\"\n\nThey walked over to where the demon remained smashed between the Jeep's grill and a solid cement wall. Black liquid oozed from its mouth with every rattling snarl.\n\nStorm squatted down. \"Who do you belong to?\"\n\nThe demon hissed at him, but its glowing red eyes drooped with agony.\n\nSighing, Storm tried again. \"You're dying. I can put a spell on you to stay exactly as you are in constant pain while we find your creator. Or I can end this fast.\"\n\nA limp hairy arm flopped to the parking deck. The demon's bright eyes rolled around then landed on Storm. It wheezed every breath. More black gunk leaked from its nose, but it tried to talk. \"I uh ...\"\n\nStorm waited patiently.\n\nEvalle asked, \"What about civilians coming up to this level?\"\n\n\"I caught a security guard and told him to keep people from coming up. Told him we suspected a demon up here. I had no freakin' idea that was true. I just wanted to get to you without any interference.\"\n\n\"I-sha-uh ... \" the demon garbled and spit out.\n\nImpatient, Storm asked, \"What?\"\n\nEvalle jumped in. \"Wait a minute. I think it is trying to tell us.\" She asked the demon, \"Is your maker I-zubrrali?\"\n\nIts eyes opened wide with understanding. \"I ... bar... ee.\"\n\nStanding up to face her, Storm asked, \"Is that the person Reese thinks is her father?\"\n\n\"Yep. That's probably all we're going to get from this one.\"\n\nHolding his hands above the demon still pinned between his truck and the wall, Storm murmured a string of words in a rough voice Evalle recognized as him chanting.\n\nBright demon eyes dimmed then the lids closed. When it drew one last breath, the demon poofed into dust that swirled away.\n\nStorm had treated that creature more humanely than it deserved since it would have ripped her or a human apart and eaten every piece. Possessing demon blood from one half of his genetics, Storm could destroy demons without a second thought, and had done so when necessary. But he had his own code of honor, regardless of his roots.\n\nOnce Storm had the ashes cleaned up, he assessed the front of his Jeep. \"I can get that fixed with no problem.\"\n\n\"Evalle! Where are you?\" Quinn shouted, running toward them.\n\nJeans covered his long legs eating up ground with Belador speed. He'd been dressing down from his normal business suit look to work with the patrols. Tall with fair hair and an aristocratic profile, he wore a black turtleneck like a younger, deadlier version of Steve Jobs.\n\nStorm stepped outside the cloaking and held up a hand. \"She's safe. I'll bring you in the cloaking when you stop.\"\n\nQuinn slowed a few steps out then stopped, breathing hard. As soon as he was inside their secret shield, he asked, \"What happened?\"\n\nEvalle rarely saw Quinn so panicked, but he and Tzader had taken her on like big brothers when they found her. She could take down nonhuman monsters with no help on night patrols, but those two men had been her only shield against powerful Tribunal beings, including Sen, before Storm stepped into her life. She gave Quinn a bullet-point report, something she'd been learning to keep as brief as possible. With teams reporting to her as the interim Maistir, she now understood what a pain it was for someone to tell the entire story instead of significant highlights.\n\nAs the actual Maistir, Quinn listened intently. \"We must find Adrianna and Sen. Preferably before the Tribunal realizes their enforcer is missing.\"\n\n\"No kidding. Got any ideas?\" she asked.\n\nStorm crossed his arms, dark eyes intent on every word said. \"Can Reese help us track them?\"\n\nEvalle glanced at her mate. \"Uh, Storm ...\"\n\n\"What, sweetheart?\"\n\nQuinn lifted a hand. \"She's trying to be polite, because she doesn't know that I found Reese and we talked.\"\n\nEvalle let out a heavy sigh of relief. \"Finally. Did you two work things out?\" Not really her business, but she needed to know what to do if Reese showed up to help hunt demons again.\n\n\"We did. We're good.\" Quinn's face relaxed into a smile.\n\n\"Okay.\" Evalle nodded. \"So she's not demon hunting any more, right?\"\n\n\"Wrong. We've reached an agreement. I intend to keep her with me when she goes out on patrol, but she wants to do this.\"\n\nStorm's eyebrows lifted at that declaration.\n\nEvalle grinned. \"So glad to know I'm no longer the only one responsible for keeping her alive. We appreciate her help, but she's making me crazy when she comes out with the teams.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Quinn allowed. \"I still want her protected if I'm not present.\"\n\n\"You can bet on it.\" Evalle gave him a thumbs-up. \"Just glad you're sticking around for a while. We need you.\" She had never wanted to lead anyone, just doing her best to stay alive and keep her people and loved ones safe.\n\n\"Back to Reese,\" Storm said, reminding them what they had going on. \"Do you think she can track Adrianna and Sen?\"\n\nQuinn cupped his mouth. \"I doubt it if they teleported, which is what it sounds like.\"\n\nStorm quietly argued, \"But what if it wasn't teleporting? Didn't Reese see where your daughter was taken through a bolt hole?\"\n\n\"She did,\" Quinn replied in a thoughtful voice. \"Good point. We should at least determine if it was teleportation or if the being used another way to exit.\"\n\nHorns blew with the traffic getting heavy down on the street. Evalle interjected, \"We need a way to get Adrianna's car out of here. I don't like leaving anything of hers here, not with the way unknown supernaturals are showing up. I have no idea if they could use something of hers against her or us.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\" Quinn looked around, ready to take off immediately.\n\n\"Next level up. The body of a Belador is also up there.\"\n\nQuinn stopped short. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Sen.\" Evalle cleared her throat. \"A Belador climbed up to the top level. He was yellow with glowing eyes. We were trying to contain him to be picked up. Adrianna has been careful not to use Witchlock around a being we might save whose in the grasp of an Imortik. That's the only reason she was willing to wait on Sen once I sent a text to call him in.\"\n\nQuinn cursed. As an empath, Storm picked up on Evalle's misery. His warm gaze consoled her.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Evalle agreed with Quinn. \"Our Belador struggled to talk to me telepathically. He managed to tell me he had a wife and child right before Sen killed him.\" She fought back the sting of tears. The Beladors would watch over his family forever, but that would not replace a husband and father.\n\nShe pushed on. \"When Sen showed up, he started mouthing off about not having room for our crap. I questioned why not since he's a demigod. All this happened as I still had a kinetic field holding off the Belador-Imortik attacking us. Adrianna shouted for Sen to do something ... so he killed our Belador. Adrianna lost her shit. Sen said the death was her fault because she wasn't specific when she said to deal with it, but he also admitted he did it because he hates me. Those two really got into a shouting argument, then that being showed up and snatched both of them.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Storm asked, a permanent frown of confusion on his face as he listened.\n\n\"Well, the weirdo was really upset anyone had killed an Imortik. Sen mouthed off at him. Adrianna just happened to be standing too close to Sen. The being accused Sen of showing off for his girlfriend and they all disappeared.\"\n\nQuinn had a look of someone who saw a dancing turtle with his own eyes and still couldn't believe it.\n\nEvalle lifted her eyebrows. \"Yep, this is crazy stuff.\"\n\n\"Can we get inside Adrianna's car?\"\n\n\"Doubtful. It was locked when she was grabbed.\"\n\n\"Let me see if Trey can contact Tristan to come here and teleport inside Adrianna's car. We must leave the car where it is at the moment, though. Reese might do better sitting in the driver's seat without anyone else sitting there after Adrianna.\"\n\nWhile Quinn stared off as he called out telepathically, Evalle turned to Storm. \"I need to go up there, too.\"\n\n\"We will. My truck will still run.\" His truck also stayed warded against the sun. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. \"We'll get Adrianna back.\"\n\nEvalle believed Storm would do all possible to save their friend, but she struggled to commit to his confidence.\n\nQuinn's gaze came back to Evalle. \"Trey is contacting Tristan. Why don't you two meet me on the top level? I spoke to one police officer below and warned him no one should come up here, that it was a crime scene and more APD would be coming soon. I'll call one of our Beladors in the Atlanta Police Department to send officers to keep humans below this upper area.\"\n\n\"Sounds good.\" Storm walked Evalle over to the passenger side, then jumped in, and backed the Jeep away from the wall.\n\nWhen they reached the top level, Quinn was exiting the stairwell and speaking into his mobile phone. He shoved the phone inside his jacket and strode over to where the dead Belador remained.\n\nEvalle's stomach lurched.\n\nStorm parked next to Adrianna's fire-engine-red Lamborghini. Once he had Evalle out and cloaked again, she told him, \"See if you can help Quinn, okay? Then stay outside the cone-of-silence, so we don't have to put everyone inside here.\"\n\n\"I will.\" He gave her a quick kiss and left. The minute he did, his body changed to an unfocused image as if she stared through murky plastic.\n\nQuinn knelt next to the body, looking as heartbroken as she felt.\n\nStorm said something to Quinn, who stood and stepped back. Then Storm dropped down and placed his hands on the man's chest. Storm's lips moved. In the next moment, a yellow glow bulged around the body. Storm's face muscles flexed, and he seemed to be snarling his words. The glow shrank back inside the body and vanished.\n\nHad he pinned the Imortik inside?\n\nShe'd completely overlooked what had happened once the Belador died. Had the Imortik been trapped until Storm began freeing the man's spirit? Based on what Evalle knew about her mate, that's what he probably did first.\n\nWhy hadn't the Imortik been able to break free? Maybe because the Imortik had been trapped inside a nonhuman body that died before the yellow monster could take over.\n\nSo many things they did not know about Imortiks. For example, did all Imortiks function and react the same way?\n\nAfter another moment of Storm talking calmly, a frosted covering seemed to wrap the body. That must be some form of preservation.\n\nQuinn used kinetics to move the body to the side where the short perimeter wall tossed a shadow over it. He joined Storm as they walked back to Adrianna's car.\n\n\"Where is Evalle?\" Quinn looked around until Storm pointed to where she stood near the car.\n\n\"She's right there.\"\n\nTristan appeared so close to her she jumped. He looked the same as always in his dark gray T-shirt and jeans, but different too. He had a quiet edge to him now as if his time with Daegan had begun honing him, and in a good way.\n\nQuinn quickly explained what was going on and nodded at where Evalle stood, invisible to all of them.\n\n\"Got it.\" Tristan bent at his waist and looked inside the low-slung car. \"Let's try this.\" He vanished. His big body appeared in the passenger seat to avoid messing with anything Reese could. His too-big-for-exotic-cars body looked like sushi-grade tuna stuffed in a sexy can.\n\nIn another couple seconds, the door locks popped open and Tristan climbed out. He handed over a key. \"Is that all you need, Quinn?\"\n\n\"Yes. How did you find another key for her car?\"\n\n\"Adrianna had one stuffed on the visor. It's not like she worried about anyone stealing her ride.\"\n\nStorm asked, \"How's Daegan doing?\"\n\n\"Still has venom in his body, but being in Treoir gives him a super-charge. He took that damn ice dragon out of the dungeon to fly the island.\"\n\n\"He did?\" Quinn sounded both surprised and apprehensive.\n\n\"Daegan's patience was beyond belief. First, he saved that ice-dragon-shifter jerk and created a safe place for Skarde's dragon and his human form. Skarde never shifted and the bastard wouldn't talk until today. Once Daegan got him talking, he thought he could turn Skarde into an ally. In a show of good faith, Daegan took him out to fly with the red dragon. That ice dragon took off unexpectedly and attacked the gryphon village.\"\n\nEvalle shouted out loud, \"What?\" No one heard her. She repeated it telepathically to Tristan.\n\nTristan cringed and looked in her direction. \"Damn, Evalle. How about not shouting?\"\n\nStorm's eyes darkened at the tone Tristan had taken with Evalle, but she deserved it.\n\nShe sent an apology to Tristan telepathically. She knew not to shout in someone's mind, but a freaking dragon had attacked her friends.\n\nQuinn asked, \"Was anyone harmed?\"\n\n\"My sister had her arm broken and Bernie got banged up, but the healers have set her arm and gotten them healing faster. I was in the village and had half-shifted to protect Petrina and Bernie when I got pummeled with a load of ice.\" Tristan's green eyes fired up more with talking about his sister. \"Some of the cabins buckled. We'll fix that. My gryphon had a damaged wing, but I've been in Treoir for a while, so I healed immediately, especially with the push of power from the new Treoir births.\"\n\nQuinn smiled. \"I noticed a push of energy and figured Brina had given birth. I take it everything went well.\"\n\nEvalle sent to Quinn, <I noticed it too and never even considered the births.> She smiled. <That is so freaking cool.>\n\nTristan smiled, taking some of the edge from his face. \"Yep. Daegan will tell you all about it once we stop the Imortiks.\"\n\nQuinn glanced at Storm who gave a head tilt in agreement. \"Understood. Thanks for coming here, Tristan. I think that's all we need.\"\n\n\"Before I go, anything you want me to report to Daegan?\"\n\nQuinn pulled out his phone and started typing a text. \"I don't. I need to check on the car I sent to pick up Reese. You may want to talk to Evalle.\"\n\nTristan looked in her direction again.\n\nEvalle called to him telepathically. <Just tell Daegan we're fine.>\n\nTristan cocked an eyebrow. <How is Adrianna and Sen missing fine?> He lifted a hand. <Let me rephrase that. How is Adrianna missing fine?>\n\nQuinn took off and disappeared in the stairwell.\n\n<It's not,> Evalle admitted. She could not lose one of her closest friends. <But you two can't do anything about Atlanta or this world until you find the grimoire volumes. Do you think you'll have what you need in six days? Isn't that how long we have before we lose Devon and the others? We don't even know what happened to Renata.>\n\n<To be honest, Evalle, I've teleported to so many places at different times of the day that I'm losing track of time. I'll tell Trey to send us a daily reminder. We're working to return as fast as possible, but it will help to have updates on how much time we have left.> Holding onto hope was the most difficult thing when facing impossible odds, but no one ever succeeded by giving up. She had to get Tristan headed back to Daegan. <Thanks for being here every time we need it, Tris.>\n\nTristan looked down then raised a humble face to her. <You got it.> He vanished before anything else could be said.\n\nWould that Alterant-gryphon ever be comfortable with being thanked or complimented? Maybe not, but he'd come a long way since the first night they met when he tried to kill her.\n\nMuted screams erupted down on the street below.\n\nHell, what now?\n\nStorm ran over to the edge and looked down. \"Quinn? You need help?\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Evalle shouted, but not even Storm could hear her in this cloaking."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "From inside the tinted windows of a sedan, Reese watched the angry faces of humans shouting at her, \"Monsters! Get out of Atlanta!\"\n\nThose people didn't even know who, or what, she was, did they?\n\nA fit young man drove the black car Quinn had sent for her. Just like all the other Beladors who had driven her, he remained calm and held an obvious confidence, but the steering wheel creaked under his fingers.\n\nShe seriously doubted that tiny sign of stress was from fear of a human crowd. More like concern about delivering her unscathed to his Belador Maistir.\n\nShe asked, \"Is this car bullet-proof?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. The Maistir wanted you picked up immediately. I was closest. We didn't have time to send for an armored car. Please don't be concerned for your safety.\"\n\n\"I'm not.\" Could he hear the lie in her voice?\n\nHer car moved closer to the parking deck entrance where APD worked to keep citizens out. One woman ran forward and beat her fists on the windshield.\n\nAn officer pulled her off and directed her to stand behind a line created by yellow crime-scene tape.\n\nReese had her doubts about the strength of that tape against a mob.\n\nA thick-bodied man with a wide face and long hair to his shoulders yelled, \"If you're going up there with demons, you're not human. Stop murdering our people! Stop hiding the truth!\"\n\nShe maintained a stoic face to avoid agitating the crowd more. How would supernaturals, as well as their families, survive in the human world after this?\n\nWould all of them be hunted?\n\nWould humans ever believe that many, like her, protected humanity from really dangerous predators?\n\nStill, that man had nailed one thing. The supernatural community was doing its best to keep all knowledge about their people from humans. For now, anyhow.\n\nAt some point supernaturals would have to face the world and come to an agreement on how to coexist with humans. With chaos and violence erupting across the city and spreading beyond, now wasn't the time to say, \"Yes, we're the boogeymen you always hoped didn't exist. Here are cookies. Can we be friends now?\"\n\nShe had a stranglehold on the strap of the seatbelt crossing her chest. A movement ahead of the car drew her attention.\n\nQuinn appeared outside the parking deck at street level with his gaze locked on her car.\n\nThe angry mob surged.\n\nGut-wrenching fear grabbed her throat. She jerked forward. \"Quinn!\" Grabbing the shoulder of her driver, she ordered, \"Go help him or let me out so I can.\"\n\n\"The Maistir forbade me from leaving you alone in the car.\"\n\nGripping the door handle, she yanked with all her strength. Locked, of course. If she'd been a Belador, she could have broken it off or kicked the door open. Nothing gave way.\n\n\"Here he comes,\" her driver announced in a soothing voice that failed to lower her blood pressure.\n\nReese twisted around.\n\nQuinn broke free of hands grabbing at him. He angled his head to look up at the sky, or maybe the top of the structure, and shook his head at someone.\n\nBy the time she gave up twisting her neck to see what he saw, the rear passenger door lock clicked.\n\nQuinn yanked the door open and dove inside, locking it again. He leaned over, cupped her head, and kissed her temple. \"You okay?\"\n\n\"Sure. Why wouldn't I be when you're out there swimming through a riot?\"\n\n\"I heard what they were yelling at you.\" Hurt dimmed his blue eyes.\n\nShe leaned over and gazed into the rearview mirror with a cocked eyebrow.\n\nHer driver acknowledged her silent accusation with a shrug. \"It's my job, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Call me Reese and I'll let it go.\"\n\nHe flipped a quick look at Quinn, who nodded.\n\n\"Very well ... Reese.\"\n\nShe leaned back, ignoring the jeers outside, which began to fade as they entered the lower parking level.\n\nQuinn had been relaxed and smiling at her place before taking off to come down here. His haggard face now wore the strain of life as a Belador leader.\n\nHe brushed a wild curl from her forehead. \"Remember, we have a deal.\"\n\n\"I know. But I'm not fragile.\"\n\n\"Elroy might be,\" Quinn suggested with a straight face.\n\n\"That is never going to be his name.\" Reese placed a protective hand over her middle, but smiled at Quinn's attempt to lighten her mood with another goofy baby name.\n\nHis gaze raced over her as if he wanted to commit every hair on her head to memory.\n\nShe lifted a hand and tried to finger-comb her wild reddish-brown hair, which could probably scare a demon right now. She'd had no time to freshen up when he'd asked her to help.\n\nHe caught her hand. \"You look amazing.\" He kissed her knuckles as the car climbed another level.\n\nIn three words, he'd made her feel attractive no matter how she looked. \"You're sweet even if you are losing your eyesight. Fill me in so I can get up to speed fast.\"\n\nWhen the car paused on the next to last level, Quinn jumped out and retrieved a dagger. The crowd noise rumbled through the open door, but had dulled considerably.\n\nAs soon as they reached the top level open to the sky and parked on the opposite side of Adrianna's car from Storm's Jeep, trepidation churned Reese's stomach.\n\nWhat if she could not find Adrianna or any lead?\n\nHow many times had she told herself in the past to only focus on what she could do right now? Got it.\n\nShe jumped out the minute the door lock disengaged before anyone could open her door. Taking in the shiny red car and Storm, she asked, \"Is Evalle at home?\"\n\n\"No,\" Quinn answered as he joined Reese. He handed Storm Evalle's dagger and pointed at an empty spot between Storm and Adrianna's car. \"Evalle is standing there where Storm cloaked her.\"\n\nOh. Reese gave Evalle a wave.\n\nQuinn said, \"Evalle sees you and hears you, but we can't see or hear her except with my telepathy. She wants the window opened on this side of Adrianna's car so she can hear what you share.\"\n\nReese hurried over to the driver's door of Adrianna's car.\n\nQuinn followed her and leaned in to use a key to open the passenger window, then pulled his body out. \"As I explained on the phone, if you can't find anything, that's fine. We think sitting in Adrianna's seat will give you the best chance at being able to view where she went.\"\n\nReese climbed in and got comfortable. Holy moly. She'd never even sat in a car this expensive. The seat fit her like a glove.\n\nOkay, enough ogling Adrianna's sexy ride.\n\nReese placed her hands on the steering wheel and dropped her head back with her eyes closed.\n\nIn thirty seconds, her remote vision opened up. She watched silently as Adrianna and Evalle went on a new patrol from here, fought demons, then returned as light started highlighting the eastern horizon.\n\nWhen they came back up, she had a front row seat to what Quinn had told her happened when the two women arrived on this parking level.\n\nA bright yellow guy climbed up to this level from the far side. Imortik. Wait, not just an Imortik.\n\nEvalle identified him as a Belador.\n\nReese's fingers tightened on the steering wheel. She leaned back, not wanting to get up close to the yellow being as the crazed man ran at Evalle and Adrianna. Evalle held him off with a kinetic shield.\n\nReese started talking. \"Evalle and Adrianna are trying to save the Belador, but also stay away so the Imortik gripping his body doesn't jump into one of them. Evalle texted someone, then ... Sen showed up. She wants him to transport the Belador to VIPER.\"\n\nNibbling on her lower lip, Reese shook her head. \"What a piece of work. Sen's giving Evalle a hard time, saying he doesn't have room ... whatever. Jerk. The Imortik-Belador is slamming Evalle's kinetic wall. Adrianna snapped at Sen to deal with it. He ... oh, shit! You bastard, Sen. He killed the Belador.\" Tears burned her eyes. \"Evalle is holding the dead guy's head. Adrianna is getting up in Sen's face. She's really pissed, and Sen is egging her on. Adrianna's furious. She's walking over to him, reading him the riot act.\"\n\nReese took in everyone and continued. \"Evalle looks worried about Adrianna and is trying to calm her, but her witch friend and Sen are locking horns. Uh ... that's not good. Adrianna brought out her Witchlock energy. It's spinning above her palm.\"\n\nReese clenched her clammy hands, wishing she could throttle Sen. What a miserable demigod. She breathed in and out, slowing her panic. \"Sen is ... \" Reese jerked back against the seat, trying to get away from the being that appeared. She muttered, \"Whoa. What kind of being is that? Power. Lots and lots of dark power is covering the deck. Tall guy. Maybe seven foot, but skinny. Like he got stretched. Bony hands. Milky skin, whiter than a cadaver. Black hair, maybe dark blue. Boring face. Thin eyebrows, thin nose, thin lips. Swirling white eyes, glowing like molten energy. Blood-red centers.\"\n\nSquinting to figure out a small detail, she murmured, \"Tattoo on his cheek. Looks like ... a skull?\" She leaned forward. \"Dark energy flooding around him. His robe is shiny gold. Maybe copper. Black symbols float over the material. He's yelling at everyone about the dead Imortik, blaming Sen for showing off to his ... girlfriend?\" Reese's voice went up with her surprise.\n\nShe continued, \"Guy must be on crack to think Adrianna and Sen were an item.\" She flinched. \"A black cloud opened and swallowed them.\"\n\nReese cupped her head, working to stay in the moment as Sen and Adrianna vanished into a dark cloud. When everything came into focus again, she muttered, \"That's weird. Sen and Adrianna are floating horizontally behind the tall being. He might be towing them with majik. The black hole is opening into a foggy tunnel, sort of. Is he entering a room? Too dark. Everything blurry again. Oh, wait, they're still moving. Now ... Adrianna is in a dreary stone place like a medieval dungeon with her hands chained above her head. She's facing Sen, but her eyes aren't open. She's breathing, though.\"\n\nReese sat still for several minutes, waiting on something more. Then the being reappeared in another room. He shrugged out of his robe, now wearing a pale green button-down shirt and jeans.\n\nShe leaned in closer. What in the world?\n\nHe waved a hand casually at the room without looking up from where he stared down at something on a normal office desk. The room brightened with light glowing from some location or fixture out of her view.\n\nThis room did not fit with the dungeon at all. This space appeared too contemporary. She scanned every wall, surprised by the pictures and the modern window above his head.\n\nThe being stilled then lifted his head slowly. He turned to stare straight at her and flicked a finger in her direction.\n\nLight exploded in her face.\n\nShe screamed. Had that bastard blinded her?\n\nQuinn was there, pulling her from the car and into his arms. \"Reese, what's wrong?\"\n\nShe blinked and widened her eyes, thrilled she could see the parking deck. She lifted her gaze to Quinn. \"I'm okay. That asshat flicked power at me. I thought he blinded me.\"\n\nQuinn had been worried, but now looked stricken. \"Did he hurt you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What about\u2014\"\n\n\"Jethro is fine,\" she assured him, offering a smile to ease his panic.\n\nShaking his head, Quinn groused, \"You scared the crap out of me. I'm glad ... Royston feels okay.\"\n\n\"Dream on.\" She pushed apart.\n\nStorm joined them, explaining, \"Evalle followed me to this side and wants to ask some questions.\" Storm gave Reese an assessing look. \"We both want to know if you're okay first.\"\n\n\"Yes. What else did Evalle want to know?\" Reese turned that question to Quinn who would talk to Storm's mate telepathically.\n\n\"What about the tattoo? Evalle said she never noticed one.\"\n\nReese fretted, \"I'll have to draw what I can remember, but the best I can describe it is a skull covered in designs or carved with designs. Something tribal, but not like Native American.\" She sighed. \"I don't know.\"\n\nStorm asked, \"Did the designs remind you of Egyptian tribal or Celtic?\"\n\n\"Not really. It's as if you drew a square and kept drawing the line toward the center so it repeats the shape of the square as it shrinks in size, then repeats again. Reminds me of adult stress-relief coloring books. Does that make any sense?\"\n\nStorm's forehead drew tight with thinking. His gaze lit with an idea. \"Could it be Aztec or Mayan?\"\n\nShe snapped her fingers. \"Yes. That's what it reminded me of from art I saw often in San Diego when I lived there.\"\n\nQuinn asked, \"Could you tell what kind of realm they're in?\"\n\nReese propped an elbow on the car's roof. She took her time, trying to be sure of what she saw. \"This may not make sense, but I really studied the last place I saw him. When he came back from that dungeon, he made light glow in what appeared to be a normal room or more of an office space, based on the furniture and windows.\" She moved her gaze from Storm to Quinn. \"This is going to sound so freaking weird. I saw a picture of the city, Atlanta at night, on one wall and local sport teams' paraphernalia scattered around. I think Adrianna and Sen are right here in the city.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Adrianna licked her dry lips and squinted against the throbbing in her head, specifically her forehead. What had that strange being done to her? Who was he?\n\nShe struggled to shake off a dull sluggishness and come fully alert. Stone walls that belonged in a castle surrounded her. Real stone chunks that appeared to have stood for ... eons. No window. Long room with more chain stations, all just as stained and aged as the walls.\n\nWhere had she ended up thanks to Sen?\n\nHer arms and shoulders ached from being lifted above her head. She sat on a cold floor and the place smelled damp and putrid.\n\nAcross from her, Sen slumped with his arms up in the air, too. Bastard. Served him right for killing that Belador, but she had done nothing to deserve this. She wished the weird being would finish what he started with Sen.\n\nBe nice for someone to show Sen how he treated others.\n\nAngling her head to the side, she peered at her hand that held Witchlock and slowly opened her palm.\n\nThe energy came to life.\n\nThen it began to jut out of shape from its normally round look as if stabbed from the inside. Energy pulsed out in one direction then sucked in and poked out in other directions. Her energy should be a spinning ball of energy and not making a high-pitched noise as if trying to break free.\n\nShe snapped her hand shut.\n\nWitchlock had ... shrieked? That was ... not just new, but worrisome.\n\nA raspy groan dragged her attention to the demigod of her nightmares, who slumped with his legs outstretched on the same dirty floor.\n\nHis shackles glowed for an instant. She looked up at hers, also glowing, then it stopped.\n\nNot a promising sign.\n\nDid that crazy being have a way to constantly renew the power in the shackles?\n\nSen's chin touched his chest. He made another groggy sound.\n\n\"Wake up, jerk,\" she snapped at him.\n\nLifting his head, he showed off a black eye. \"What, bitch?\"\n\n\"It's witch, not bitch,\" she ground out.\n\n\"Pretty sure I had it right the first time.\" His acidic tone felt like sandpaper dragged over her skin.\n\n\"How'd you get that black eye?\" Not that she cared since he deserved ten of them if he had ten eyes.\n\n\"First attempt at escaping.\"\n\nWhen had he tried to escape?\n\n\"You can't heal a black eye?\" she gloated. \"Karma can be a mean bitch.\"\n\n\"This is healed for wherever we are.\" He ran his tongue inside his mouth and spit a tooth out to the side.\n\nLovely image.\n\nShe waited to see if he'd say more.\n\nHe yanked at his chains, muscles bulging with the effort. He snarled a deadly sound. Still plenty of fight in Sen. He banged his head back against the wall and his arms sagged as far as the chains would allow. \"Something is pressing against my power. Yours too probably. You'd have seen how I got my black eye if you hadn't passed out.\"\n\n\"I don't pass out. Try again, Sen.\"\n\nHe lifted his gaze and shook his head then stopped and pinned her with a smirk. \"Our captor slammed you from the back with a hit of majik and you landed against that far wall. You have your own black eye. We match.\"\n\n\"Ugh,\" she muttered, not happy to have anything in common with him. That black eye would explain her banging headache. Being the bigger person in this room, she offered, \"Much as the idea of doing anything with you revolts me, we should work together to get out of here.\"\n\nHe jerked one chain and leaned forward. \"Don't like me, huh? Big surprise being a Belador suck-up and bestie with a fucking Alterant.\"\n\nShe hated even breathing the same air as Sen. This demigod had done his best to put Evalle away more than once. He kept an extra load of hate in reserve just for Adrianna's closest friend.\n\nNo one could figure out why. Even after all Sen had done to her, Evalle would not attack him except in self-defense.\n\n\"What?\" Sen growled without looking up.\n\nAdrianna waited until he lifted his bludgeoned face again. In spite of being a demigod, Sen had been locked into slavery to the Tribunal and now sat here battered and imprisoned. What did that make the being who captured them?\n\nGenuinely curious, she angled her head to study him. \"With all the nonhumans out there, what did Evalle do to land on top of your hit list?\"\n\nHe huffed out a sarcastic sound. \"Trust me, she isn't at the top, but close.\"\n\n\"But why her at all?\" Adrianna waited, but he said nothing.\n\nShe'd feel a twinge of sympathy for someone who seemed to have no friends. She'd heard he'd been in charge of VIPER security for more than a few centuries. From what she could see, he had to perform whatever task the Tribunal handed him without question.\n\nShe had nothing better to do than keep prodding him. \"I'd ask if you have even one friend, but I seriously doubt you're capable of any type of relationship.\"\n\nHe flashed a furious glare at her, then looked away.\n\nHad she really struck a sore spot?\n\nWhat would he do to her? Not much if he could not at least teleport by now. Otherwise, he'd be gone by now.\n\nThis place and the shackles might slow Witchlock, but she doubted any being could shut down the ancient power. \"Come on, Sen. Surely you have the energy to answer one question.\"\n\nGrounding out a sigh, he rolled his head to face here and snarled, \"What? You still nagging me about that Alterant bitch?\"\n\nShe smiled at his aggravation and gave a single nod.\n\n\"She breathes my air.\"\n\nWhat a stubborn rock. Couldn't he just talk? \"Do you fear her? Is that why you can't admit the real reason?\"\n\nSen lifted his head fully this time. His hands fisted and the chains banged the wall. His blue eyes glowed hot. \"Careful, witch, or I might not find you so amusing.\"\n\nShe'd definitely hit his pissed-off button. Not stopping now, she changed her tone to serious. \"See, I'm not buying you got up one morning and decided to hate Evalle for no reason. That's shallow, even for you.\"\n\nSen's eyes continued to burn bright. \"You want to know the truth?\" he asked in a soft voice that would chill a monster.\n\nShe lowered her chin and let her power flood her eyes, then answered in a deep, inhuman voice. \"Oh, yes. I'd like to hear the answer to one of the great mysteries of our time.\"\n\nAngling his head to stare at the far wall, he breathed slowly for a moment as if trying to decide if he should say anything. \"I've been stuck at VIPER as enforcer for the Tribunal one thousand years, sixty-eight days, twelve hours, fourteen minutes, and ... whatever else since we were taken.\"\n\nWow. She hadn't expected that length of time, which meant he was at least a thousand years old. But how had he ended up stuck? Since Sen had decided to share this tiny bit, she remained quiet to see how far he would go.\n\n\"It should have ended at one thousand years, but then fucking Evalle came along. This miserable drudgery of dealing with lesser beings would be over now if Tzader and Quinn hadn't taken her in like a little sister. Damn Beladors.\" His voice had dropped to a guttural sound.\n\n\"What did Evalle do to you, Sen?\" He acted as if he hadn't heard her. \"Tell me! What changed? Grow a pair for once and tell the truth!\"\n\nWhen he swung his face to her, his eyes were feral and glowing. His fingers curled so tightly, blood ran from his palms. \"No one could figure out what to do about that Alterant when she was the only one running around free. Goddesses and gods do not like when unknown beings with serious power show up. Before my time was up, the Tribunal requested another hundred years of my service.\" He spit out the word service as if keeping it inside would poison his tongue.\n\nAdrianna had clearly hit his trigger button. Her heart tap-danced in her chest at how Evalle had never had a chance. She'd done nothing more than exist.\n\nHolding her gaze with his unyielding one, Sen snarled, \"One more day answering to VIPER and the Tribunal was too much. I could have ended my time right fucking then!\" Looking away, his lips curled back and his voice matched that of a mad animal. \"If VIPER had given Evalle a hundred-year sentence the one time they locked her away, I could have disappeared even then.\"\n\nWhile Adrianna could now understand, and maybe even sympathize a grudging bit with Sen's position, she could never justify such a decision. Lock an innocent person away for a hundred years just because she had been born?\n\n\"Why couldn't you fix the problem now, Sen? The Tribunal knows Evalle isn't going to slaughter humans or nonhumans at will. You could ask them to free you from this obligation instead of continuing to blame your misery on Evalle.\"\n\nSen looked incredulous for a second then laughed a dark sound. \"You really think it works like that with deities?\"\n\nShe heard the bitterness and couldn't argue with him. If she'd been forced into a position like his, she'd hate it, too.\n\nBut she wouldn't punish someone else the way he'd gone after Evalle. \"I don't get it, Sen. Who forced someone with your power to be a servant to the Tribunal? How could anyone do this to you?\"\n\nSilence reigned for a stretch, then he admitted, \"The Tribunal agreed to take me on as a favor.\"\n\nA god or goddess had handed him over to the Tribunal, which meant Sen had no ally dominant enough to go up against the being who placed him in servitude, and for so long.\n\nShe mused, \"A thousand years is ... mind-boggling.\"\n\nSen scoffed, \"A hundred years to anyone in the Tribunal is like a week to you inferior beings.\"\n\n\"Says the half-human being,\" she countered.\n\nHe glowered. \"I don't claim that half. I'm above humans and the rest of you.\"\n\n\"There you go again, trying to snub me when I might be able to get us out of here.\" When he continued to just stare at her with dead eyes, she added, \"Or don't you want to leave?\"\n\nSen's deadly eyes narrowed. \"I'll get out without your help. Don't expect me to drag you with me.\"\n\nConsidering what happened to him in the past, creating more enemies in the supernatural world was not wise, especially right now with Imortiks running wild. Unable to shrug with her hands chained above her head, she mirrored his detached emotion with her voice. \"Fine. That will make my escaping so much easier without you. But remember that I offered. You had a chance to form an alliance. It makes me wonder why you would pass up the opportunity to escape imprisonment.\"\n\n\"It's simple.\" He pulled his lips back, exposing all his white teeth, in a smile meant to send vicious animals whimpering away. \"I'm not owing anyone else again, and never someone beneath me in the power structure.\"\n\nThen what power held him here? She pressed on. \"If you're so above everyone else, why are those shackles keeping you from teleporting?\"\n\nSen yanked on the shackles and the room shook like they sat at the epicenter of a major earthquake. \"Why don't you shut the fuck up?\"\n\nDark energy rushed through the room.\n\nTheir kidnapper appeared on the right of where Adrianna sat. Would he give her water if she asked nicely?\n\nHe stood with his hands behind his back in a proper way. Same wacked-out gaze, but the red turned into pinpoints. She could do without his smile filled with pointy teeth.\n\n\"I am Tenebris.\"\n\nHer Latin was not the best, but she believed that name meant dark or darkness. Wonderful.\n\nUnlike when he initially yelled at Sen in fury, Tenebris now sounded as if he'd been sent by a superior to catch them up on today's schedule. \"The time has come to answer questions. Before either of you consider trying to ignore me or remain silent, I will share what happened to the last being who dared to deny me.\"\n\nHe held his hands in front of him eighteen inches apart with his palms facing each other. A growly sound came from deep in his chest. He moved his hands apart until his arms were stretched wide to each side of his chest.\n\nThe filmy shape of a body formed slowly.\n\nAs the image sharpened, so did the scent of old blood and decay.\n\nAdrianna breathed through her mouth and tried not to throw up. One leg had been ripped from the socket of the figure. Fingers appeared cut from each hand. Blood that had dripped from an empty eye socket had dried on the naked woman's cheek.\n\nHer other eye stretched wide in terror.\n\nShe blinked.\n\nAdrianna held back a scream of horror that she still lived. Any reaction would not save this woman.\n\nThe female's mouth opened, but no words came out. Just grunting. She had no tongue.\n\nAdrianna turned her gaze away.\n\nSen shouted, \"Fuck you if you think you can do that to\u2014\"\n\nLight flashed through the dungeon room.\n\nAdrianna blinked to clear her vision. The gory image was gone along with Sen and the kidnapper.\n\nHer heart slammed her chest. She fought to keep her wits about her.\n\nA long painful howl in another area. Now, she felt true sympathy for Sen. She had to find a way to get them both out in spite of his attitude. If that bastard Tenebris tried torturing her, she doubted Witchlock would allow it any more than she would.\n\nHowling turned into a scream that crawled across her skin. She gripped the chains holding her wrists to keep from unleashing Witchlock, the consequences be damned.\n\nBut Witchlock might just destroy the world around them as well as everything here. She never wanted to kill innocent people who had no idea what went on in here.\n\nShe would never like Sen, but after finding out what drove him to be cruel, she had a sliver of empathy.\n\nReleasing the chains to let her arms swing from them again, she opened her palm where Witchlock began spinning. Her powerful ball grew to the size of a canalope ... then lost shape again. She'd had this power long enough to know when something was very wrong. How would she get out of here without Witchlock?\n\nHer heart screamed at the thought of never returning to her home and friends. To never get a chance to set things right with Isak. She called on Witchlock to calm and work with her. Without this energy, Tenebris would win. She kept sending her power in soothing waves, anything to gain control of Witchlock.\n\nSeconds ticked by. She started to smile at the energy rolling into a ball.\n\nThe Witchlock's energy grew double in size and warped out of shape. Energy lifted her hair and sizzled across her skin.\n\nShe tried to close her hand and put Witchlock to sleep.\n\nHer fingers stopped halfway. She gritted her teeth and forced her hand muscles to work. Her hand and arm shook. Veins stood along her forearm. Her fingers turned white.\n\n\"No, Witchlock. Stop!\" she shouted at the ancient energy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Blurred images swam through Casidhe's mind. She fought through her mental fog and ... fell unconscious again.\n\nSomething irritated the skin on her chest.\n\nShe blinked a heavy-lidded eye open and kept blinking until she could see through both. Now if she could just process a thought. The hum of an engine vibrated through the floor she laid on.\n\nA truck.\n\nShe had enough information for now, but she couldn't turn or move her body. They'd tied her hands and feet. Kidnappers. More mental tips kept flooding in. Stale smell of food lingered. The food truck in Luxembourg.\n\nFerrand. Mean cook. Both phony.\n\nThat asshat Ferrand had stuck a needle in her neck, which explained the cottonmouth sensation.\n\nShe tensed, twisting her head at painful angles to look around. Where was her backpack? No! Her heart sank. What had happened to her sword?\n\nMaybe her sword would attack whoever tried to use it.\n\nBut the scepter!\n\nShe had to have that priceless treasure. Would these two know what they had? Were they even kidnappers? Who were they contacting for ransom?\n\nWhat if they contacted no one? Her skin chilled at the possibility of being caught up in human trafficking. Please, please, no.\n\nShe needed to hang strong. Thinking about being sold was not productive.\n\nAdrenaline burned off the last remnants of sluggishness. She had to escape these two. They hadn't attacked her physically, so far. If they did plan to ransom her, that wouldn't last a minute past realizing they'd grabbed the wrong woman.\n\nShe had no value.\n\nThat hurt to admit, but who would pay to get her back?\n\nDaegan. Hope lifted her spirits. She might be able to convince these two to call Trey at the number Tristan had given her. Daegan would stop at nothing to find her. He'd deal with these two as well. She didn't want a bloodbath, but neither did she want to end up as a human sex slave.\n\nOr had they captured her for someone else?\n\nWho?\n\nWere they supernatural bounty hunters? She dropped her head back, sick at that thought. Had Cathbad, Queen Maeve, or another player put a price on her head?\n\nHer only hope was reaching Daegan. He would come for her.\n\nHad he gone to the hotel in Galway and discovered her missing yet? Tristan indicated his boss would be busy for a day or so, but Daegan had a way of showing up sooner than expected. This would be a perfect time for his impatience.\n\nShe closed her eyes, thinking back on how peaceful and happy he'd looked when she woke to find him in her bed at the hotel. She couldn't recall a happier moment in her life. Watching him stare at her with warmth and eyes filled with caring. He'd been happy to see her and had been unhappy to leave her.\n\nNever in her life had she felt so coveted.\n\nWhy couldn't she have that every day of her life?\n\nShe had no idea how far this would go with Daegan, but she was all in. She wanted more with him.\n\nDaegan made it clear he wanted more, too.\n\nHe'd vowed to give them a chance once he protected the world from Imortiks and could pursue her with honor. He was her perfect man. Sexy as hell, a force nothing could stop, and gentle with her.\n\nShe'd have to explain how she ended up in this part of the world. With the way she'd been betrayed by her people, she had a hard time worrying about answering Daegan's questions honestly. He deserved her answers more than Herrick deserved the loyalty she'd shown him for her entire life. She'd explain to Daegan how she needed a couple days to first deal with something, then she would tell him everything he wanted to know about her.\n\nDaegan was reasonable.\n\nShe'd deal with Herrick, then call Tristan's guy the minute she found a place for her mobile phone to function.\n\nShe had no phone at the moment.\n\nThat brought her back to escaping.\n\nMaybe Daegan would bring in the person he'd used before to track Casidhe. Someone who used a remote viewing gift to search for her.\n\nThe ring on the chain laying on her chest buzzed, irritating her skin.\n\nWhat was with the ring and why had it started acting up today? Or yesterday. What time was it?\n\nShe ignored the itchy feeling on her chest she couldn't reach. That was the least of her worries right now. Herrick needed to explain the ring, too, when she arrived.\n\nIf she ever got to the Caucasus mountains.\n\nHow long would she have to wait? She licked her dry lips and called out, \"Hey. Can I have some water?\"\n\nThe men might not have heard her raspy voice over the engine noise.\n\nHow long had she been unconscious? She should feel rested, but the drug left her drained.\n\nThe truck took a sharp curve, jerking her body sideways. They drove up, climbing an incline. A tire dropped into a hole and back out again, bouncing her body against the hard floor.\n\nShe yelped.\n\nOut of the darkness, her backpack fell across her legs.\n\nShe had momentary relief, but would her pack still contain everything?\n\nHer stomach growled and clenched. When would this freaking drive end?\n\nMinutes crawled along until the engine groan decreased and the truck slowed.\n\nWish granted, but to be honest, she wasn't ready for whatever they did next. Her pulse kicked into high gear. She had to prepare for an opening to fight her way out. Her fingers had gone numb. She bent her fingers to close and open them, working the feeling back into her hands.\n\nPain needled through her fingers.\n\nThe truck bounced off of a somewhat smooth road onto a rough surface and stopped with a jolt. The passenger side door opened and closed. Then the rear door opened.\n\nThere stood Ferrand, not looking any happier than her.\n\n\"Why are you doing this?\" she demanded.\n\nSilently, he stepped up into the kitchen part of the food truck. He untied where she was bound to the truck and lifted her to her feet. Then he freed her hands and legs.\n\nThe door was open.\n\nShe rushed out and dropped to the ground, stumbling to her knees. She pushed up, disoriented by the dark. Clouds drifted past a partial moon, giving her some light.\n\nSwinging around, she searched the landscape for any indication of where she was. No lights from a house or building. Rolling hills. Open pastures. Trees in the distance.\n\nWhy would he stop here?\n\nShe should run.\n\nNot without her backpack.\n\nShe whipped around to hurry back to the truck and fight for her possessions.\n\nFerrand tossed her backpack to the ground at her feet, jumped down, closed the rear doors, and returned to the cab without a word.\n\nAs soon as the passenger door slammed, the truck drove off.\n\nWhat in the world? What had this all been about?\n\nCasidhe stood there staring at the truck until it disappeared around a curve. If those two had not kidnapped her for their benefit, then who was behind this?\n\nShe dug out a bottle of water, glad to see all her contents were still intact. She even had the bowl of food still wrapped up. Might as well eat it. If they wanted to kill her, they'd had plenty of time.\n\nHad the Connell family she'd contacted pulled strings to get her removed from their city? How would they know she'd go to that food truck?\n\nIt had been the only one on the street then.\n\nThat seemed even more odd now.\n\nShe ran it all back through her mind. That Connell person could have been alerted to Casidhe flying in and had her watched.\n\nThen when Casidhe asked for a meal, Anna told her food trucks were still about and sent her away.\n\nLow and behold, a food truck appeared.\n\nEveryone had a limit and Casidhe marched closer to hers every minute.\n\nShe'd always been impressed by the network of squire families. Not so much at the moment as she'd witnessed how they could be used against her just as easily as to help her. The idea that Fenella must have sent word up the line to other Connell squire families sickened her.\n\nShe lost her appetite and shoved the half-wrapped food back into the pack.\n\nLifting the backpack, she shrugged it into place again and tucked the half-empty bottle into a side pocket.\n\nWhere was she?\n\nWait! Her phone.\n\nShe dug into the place she always kept her phone and found the device in three bashed pieces. They'd intentionally broken her phone and left it for her to find.\n\nNo way to call that Trey guy to reach Daegan or use her phone to determine her location. She started walking uphill. Not because she wanted to torture her calves, but she needed a high point to give her a hint at where they'd dropped her.\n\nAfter walking a slow incline a couple hundred yards long, which felt like a mile up, she saw the twinkling lights in a village spread across a valley.\n\nBut her heart kicked up as predawn light crept over a mountain range behind the village, outlining the uneven top.\n\nAn odd outline formed in the middle of the ridge.\n\nShe'd seen that before and knew this area!\n\nPicking up her pace, she continued over the crest and down the road, begging her aching calves to hang with her a little longer. She slowed when she spotted a gnarly tree with no leaves that hooked toward the road like an old man bent over. Rushing ahead, she broke out a grin at the sight of a mailbox with vines crawling up the old wood post. A small flag of Germany waved from where it had been stuck in the box.\n\nShe knew the people who lived here.\n\nHer heart thumped wildly with relief.\n\nThose men had dropped her in Tegernsee and not too far from a Luigsech squire family. One she'd visited recently.\n\nMaybe the Connells had pulled back from her and left Casidhe to the Luigsechs. She didn't understand why or being kidnapped, but she couldn't wait to get with familiar faces who might know more.\n\nThe dirt road that peeled off from the main thoroughfare took a twisted path uphill again.\n\nShe shifted the backpack and walked with renewed determination. Funny how a taste of hope could infuse new energy into a tired body.\n\nExcitement drove her to walk briskly, ignoring her aches and pains. Soon, she'd be inside a cozy cottage with a sweet middle-aged couple and their two children. They would still have food left over even with dinner having passed a long time ago.\n\nThe stew Ferrand had given her soured in her stomach.\n\nIf the Luigsechs just welcomed her into their home, that would fill her soul.\n\nShe rounded the last curve and the quaint house sat at the base of a tall hill. The same hill she'd run down the morning Herrick had dropped her off on a plateau overlooking the Tegernsee Lake.\n\nTrees growing for many generations surrounded the home and a mix of flowers filled tidy gardens.\n\nShe hated to wake anyone, but these people rose early and would be understanding about her unexpected visit once she shared her circumstances. She lifted her knuckles to knock on the weathered wood door and listened for any sound.\n\nSomeone mumbled. Footsteps thumped over a hard floor to the door.\n\nCasidhe stood away, waiting for the woman or her husband to look through the peephole.\n\nThe husband groused, \"What do you want?\"\n\nCasidhe took a breath and gave the same password, using Hugh as her last name again. She finished with a smile.\n\nHe didn't answer at first, but spoke to someone, probably his wife. When he came back, he cracked open the door and kept his voice low. \"Go to the top of the ridge and wait.\"\n\nHer hope hit rock bottom. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\nHe looked past her and lifted his finger to his lips. \"Must be quiet.\"\n\nMore was going on than she realized. She nodded. \"Will you bring food and a blanket when you come up? I just need a little rest then I'm ready to be on my way.\"\n\nHis eyes held no warmth as she'd seen the last time. He nodded and closed the door.\n\nSuspicion chewed up her insides, but she could go no farther without help. If she tried to ask more questions, would she end up shipped out of here, too?\n\nShe would do as he said and wait. Until he proved he would not help, she had to give him a chance to talk away from his family. That was fair to ask of her, now that she thought about it. He hadn't acted mean or rude.\n\nNot like Fennella, who had clearly shut off all Casidhe's options for traveling.\n\nCasidhe swung around and headed for a path, which would take her up to a flat stretch of land higher up.\n\nHerrick's dragon had dropped her there when he'd flown her as far as he could on her way home last time. If this Luigsech family could not help her arrange for travel with someone, what then?\n\nShe finished the climb and reached the flat ground where she walked over to drop her backpack at the edge facing water. Sitting, she pulled up her knees and felt all the effort from tonight hit her hard. She crossed her arms over her knees and put her chin down. Wind ruffled waves below, forming white curls. All that adrenaline and hope oozed away.\n\nShe'd been on her own all of her adult life, but this felt like a deliberate shunning. Her heart couldn't take much more. Fenella had betrayed her. The seer, Herrick, or both had betrayed her.\n\nNo wonder that Daegan had captured her heart.\n\nBut he'd also pulled back. She understood. They came from two different worlds. Even she didn't know where her power and gift had originated.\n\nDaegan hadn't wanted to go too far with her, but he'd made his feelings clear. With all that had happened to her, she had a man who would cross the world and fight the kraken to protect her. Warmth spread inside her at that realization.\n\nShe'd see him again soon. Not just see him, but she'd kiss him to the point his control would snap, then she'd have him right where she wanted him.\n\nIn her bed.\n\nShe would figure out what was going on at Herrick's castle, have her talk with him, and clear the air. She'd have to tell him about Daegan. Herrick would not understand, but then she didn't understand why she'd been treated as no more than a lure for the red dragon.\n\nHer lips twitched, wanting to smile. She'd caught Daegan and he was hers now.\n\nMaybe once she and Herrick had an honest conversation, she could then go to Daegan and ask about Skarde. Everything inside her said Daegan would be reasonable. If he had Skarde or knew where Herrick's brother was, Daegan would hand him over. With another dragon pretending to be the red dragon, she could see how Daegan might have teleported Skarde to Treoir and kept him there until he found the imposter.\n\nJust who was that imposter?\n\nShe'd let Daegan explain how he'd come to have Skarde, if he did indeed possess Herrick's brother. Something told her he did, but she couldn't honestly put her finger on why she believed it.\n\nNo matter what, once Casidhe left Herrick's castle again, she intended to tell Daegan that Herrick lived and spill her entire life story. All that she knew of it. If what she'd read in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb was true, the red dragon had stood by every other dragon family at one time to protect the clans. There had been no stories about Daegan hunting treasures for his hoard.\n\nThere had been plenty of stories of him fighting to protect the lands.\n\nHe had been the peacekeeper.\n\nThat fit the man she loved.\n\nShe sat up. Loved? Whoa, she was jumping ahead. Yes, she felt deeply for Daegan, but ... she had to think about love. That had never been on her radar her entire adult life.\n\nIn her mind, love was a forever commitment.\n\nWhat about spending the rest of her life with Daegan?\n\nShe stared at the water that rippled here and there. Her heart and mind joined forces.\n\nForever with Daegan would be wonderful.\n\nHer energy rumbled again. She placed a hand on her chest. What was with that sound?\n\nA bird flew over, squawking.\n\nShe smiled, watching as it disappeared.\n\nNow was not the time to get ahead of herself. If Daegan could help her hand over Skarde, she might get Herrick to end a secret war he'd been waging against the red dragon his whole life since moving to the mountains.\n\nHe had to be tired of carrying all that anger.\n\nWasn't his number one goal to find Skarde? He'd sent Casidhe through the university then set up her and Fenella at the ancestral centre just for that reason.\n\nThe more she thought on that particular point, why would Herrick sabotage Casidhe now when she had the best chance at finding Skarde?\n\nMaybe he wasn't behind any of this.\n\nHis seer just might be driving all this interference. Kleio could have sent a message to Fenella as if it had come from Herrick.\n\nThat would explain the doors closing in Casidhe's face.\n\nHerrick had no reason for subterfuge.\n\nHe held the ultimate power over Casidhe and his people. All he had to do was send word he wanted her to stay in Galway. The longer she sat there thinking on the squire family rejections and not receiving a warning about danger as Fenella had, the more Casidhe believed Kleio could be trying to keep her from the castle.\n\nWhy? Had the seer received a new vision on Skarde? Did she know where Skarde was and wanted to be the one to hand over his brother?\n\nHad she come up with a way for Herrick to kill the red dragon? Still, why get Casidhe out of the way?\n\nCasidhe sat up. Her hands shook and her palms became damp. Had Kleio seen Casidhe and Daegan together and kissing in a vision?\n\nIf so, Herrick might believe Casidhe to be a traitor.\n\nShe slapped a hand over her eyes. Between beings with scrying walls, remote vision, and Kleio, Casidhe had no way to keep anything in her life a secret. She lowered her hand, eyes blinking away the sting of tears.\n\nWhy couldn't Kleio give her a break?\n\nDamn her. Casidhe would ruin the seer's plan if that was going on. She'd save Herrick from the seer and tell him what she suspected. She needed a chance to talk to him far from Kleio to figure out if Herrick had been poisoned against her.\n\nWind slid over her, ruffling loose hairs. Her skin pebbled in warning. She knew better than to ignore her sixth sense.\n\nWho watched her?\n\nNo one out at sea unless they had a telescope, but she'd left herself vulnerable from behind.\n\nShe reached into her backpack and jumped to her feet in one smooth move, turning with her sword ready to defend herself.\n\nA tall and muscular dark form walked toward her.\n\nWas it Daegan?\n\nHe shoved a hood off his head.\n\nNot Daegan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Entering the tall doors to Treoir castle, Daegan angled toward the hall on the right, which led to Garwyli's quarters. Blood still surged through his body after having dealt with the gryphon village. He wanted to go there and see for himself that his people and their homes were taken care of, but he accepted Tristan's assurance that repairs were being managed.\n\nIf not, Tristan would not have teleported away to help Quinn open a car in Atlanta. Daegan would find out more on that when he returned.\n\nStanding in the center of the castle, Daegan restrained himself from shouting for Garwyli. He risked disturbing Brina and the babes, even though they were far away, tucked deep inside her and Tzader's private family area. Also, with the old druid moving slower these days, Daegan did not want to cause Garwyli any undue stress.\n\nAs the druid's young prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Lanna feared Garwyli's days were running out and the druid would leave her to take his place. The young woman had a tender heart for everyone she considered hers to protect. But she struggled with the thought of losing Garwyli for more than losing a tutor. The old druid had become far more important to her.\n\nDaegan understood. He could not bring himself to accept that the old druid might pass soon. He needed Garwyli's wisdom and advice with the Imortik crisis, but more than that, he needed Garwyli alive and smiling. He needed his friend.\n\nThe door to Garwyli's area opened as Daegan approached.\n\nHe'd become accustomed to Lanna sensing his presence and opening the door, but the druid stood there this time peering down the hall.\n\nDaegan slowed his steps as the druid stepped out. Garwyli's white beard and hair reached his waist, all of it bright as snow on a sunny day. He always appeared in a simple robe, the one today a pale gray with a tasseled belt tied at his middle. His rheumy eyes shined with warmth, but that old druid could put the fear in a fool with a glare.\n\nClosing the door softly, Garwyli tapped his cane ahead of his steps. When the druid reached Daegan, he tottered on past him with a wave of his hand to follow.\n\nDaegan stayed with the druid, who slowly led him through a series of short halls until Garwyli paused in the middle of one walkway. He turned to a marble wall on his left and lifted a crooked finger. He drew an arched opening.\n\nThe stone wall vanished, exposing a garden Daegan had no knowledge of and a feeling no one else could access without this druid present.\n\nGarwyli entered with Daegan right behind him.\n\nThe minute Daegan took two steps inside, he felt a mild sizzle brush his skin. He had the sensation of life pulsing through the brilliant flowers of every color framed by deep green leaves on some and softer greens in other areas.\n\nTrees stood tall with wide branches stretching overhead as if protecting all who stepped beneath the leafy wings. Birds sung softly and tiny creatures chattered, all of it blending into a pleasant hum of life.\n\nDaegan opened his hands with his palms facing up. Tiny blue zings of energy skipped across here and there.\n\nHe glanced up to find Garwyli seated on a wooden bench carved with Celtic symbols. The old guy breathed deeply with his eyes shut, his face calm, and his gnarled hands propped atop the cane standing in front of his robed knees.\n\n\"Sit, dragon,\" Garwyli said in a congenial tone without opening his eyes.\n\nDaegan strode over to the bench, smiling at the old guy's joy of using dragon as his name. \"'Tis quite a garden. Energy flits around as a butterfly huntin' a flower.\" Daegan took a spot on the eight-foot-long bench. As he surveyed the lush surroundings, his gaze paused at where they'd entered.\n\nThe arched opening had returned to solid rock again.\n\nGarwyli opened his eyes and faced Daegan. \"Ya have been patient ta not press me for more than I had been ready ta explain.\"\n\n\"Ya owe me nothin' ya wish to keep to yourself, druid.\"\n\nThe old guy smiled at the moniker that had become a sign of their close friendship. \"I know Lanna has told ya I am trainin' her ta replace me.\"\n\nThere it was. Garwyli admitting the end of his days.\n\nDaegan's eyes stung, but he would not make this more difficult for his friend by revealing the pain cutting him up. Still, who would blame him? He had only recently gained this extended family and cherished each one. The possibility of not seeing Garwyli in the halls every time he returned to the castle sucked the joy from this moment.\n\n\"'Tis more than facin' my mortality some day in the future.\" Garwyli took his time forming his thoughts. He admitted, \"I created this garden long ago ta rebuild my energy as I aged.\"\n\n\"I feel the energy in here on my skin.\" Daegan's gaze picked up every little movement. Nothing in this garden appeared to be dying, not even a leaf. He swallowed, hoping this meant they had a way to save his friend. \"Ya should come here more often.\"\n\nLifting a hand to stall what Daegan was clearly suggesting, Garwyli said, \"When I first began ta absorb the energy here, blue lightnin' strikes would flash all about the garden, raisin' the hair on my head.\"\n\nNow Daegan understood what he saw. This was not the powerful garden of so many centuries past. Even this garden would slowly die.\n\nGarwyli's fingers moved slowly as if he heard a sound only he could detect. \"This garden has done its duty as I have done mine. 'Tis why I need ya ta know Lanna is ...\"\n\nDaegan prodded, \"Is what?\"\n\nGarwyli shook his head as if struggling for words. After a long silence, the druid frowned at some thought and continued. \"Tzader and the others who travel ta the human world often tell me of many unusual human discoveries. One is called a supernova.\"\n\n\"'Tis an odd word.\" Daegan seemed to always be learning of something new in this world.\n\nGarwyli stared off at nothing, still in a thoughtful pose. \"Over many thousands of years, humans have discovered much about what exists in the sky. They find planets besides the one they live on. Stars in the sky possess tremendous power deep inside at the core. I have no idea how all this happens and might not be explainin' it correctly, but if energy in a star runs out, the star explodes. A supernova is a very, very powerful and bright explosion. They say ta understand how giant the star was ya must think of a planet one million times the size of earth explodin'.\"\n\nDaegan could not comprehend anything of that nature nor why they were discussing it. \"I do not understand what ya speak of.\"\n\nGarwyli's eyes crinkled. \"I do like bein' able ta outwit ya.\"\n\nChuckling, Daegan sighed. \"Aye, ya have earned that right, but to be honest, 'tis easy to outwit me about today's world. Now explain what tree ya beat around in words a simple dragon shifter can understand.\"\n\nTapping a crooked finger on the top of his cane, Garwyli said, \"When my energy is no more, my passin' will be much like a small star not even the size of Earth. 'Tis ta be expected. But should we lose Lanna, we lose a supernova.\"\n\nChill bumps lifted on Daegan's skin at what he realized Garwyli said.\n\nThe druid angled his head at Daegan with a challenge in his eyes. \"She is the future of the Beladors, humans, Treoir, and many worlds besides ours. She has grown more powerful since I first met her, which was not long ago. She must be trained for her benefit and that of the people she is determined ta keep safe.\"\n\nDaegan considered the significance of what Garwyli shared. \"Ya do know she considers ya one of hers, do ya not?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" The druid sat quietly for a bit, then added, \"She wants me ta stay forever even though she knows I am not immortal.\"\n\nDaegan had been thinking on this and suggested, \"'Tis written in the chronicles how to use the river of immortality runnin' beneath the castle.\"\n\nShaking his head slowly, the druid said, \"'Tis been there the whole time I have lived in Treoir. I never wished ta live forever. I have had my time. I shall not die today or tomorrow, but when I leave, ya need someone ta take my place. Someone more powerful than I would ever be for the way the world is changin'. Ya need Lanna.\"\n\nDaegan took his druid's words to heart and agreed with Garwyli's thinking, with one exception. Had anyone asked Lanna if she wished to walk away from her life outside Treoir? The lass was barely an adult. Would this life mean she would never marry or have a family? Did she want that?\n\nThese things would be better discussed once Daegan could remain in Treoir longer than a few hours at a time.\n\nHe would find out what Lanna wanted.\n\nGarwyli would always put duty first, just as Daegan had, but now he wanted Casidhe to share his life.\n\nHow could he want a future with her while denying Lanna the same choice?\n\nThere was much to think on, but he had to leave here soon.\n\nEven so, he would not rush Garwyli who had asked so little of him before. \"What can I do for ya, druid?\"\n\n\"Do not allow Lanna ta drain herself tryin' ta save me. 'Tis yar duty ta protect her, even from herself.\"\n\nDaegan would fulfill Garwyli's wishes no matter how much it hurt the day he'd have to say goodbye to his old friend or how much Lanna would hate him for stopping her from using her powers to save Garwyli.\n\nEvery decision he made affected more than one person.\n\nHow had his father managed it? Daegan had fulfilled his duty as the protector of King Gruffyn's lands as well as all the other dragon clans allied with them. He would never be the king his father had been, which was why he had no plans to rule Treoir, only to protect it.\n\n\"What weighs on yar mind, dragon?\" Garwyli asked, always seeming to sense what others were going through.\n\n\"I am thinkin' how my father was a just and fair king, who watched over all our people and made good decisions. I was never trained to be a king. 'Tis why I am glad for Tzader and Brina, who will rule together.\"\n\n\"'Tis not what bothers ya,\" Garwyli argued.\n\nDaegan could not dance around the druid and win. \"I must make the right choices and decisions. I made a bad decision earlier today and it resulted in my gryphons bein' harmed. Those injured are healed and their homes will be repaired, but a greater mistake could cost many lives of humans and nonhumans.\"\n\nGarwyli tapped his finger a bit. \"Yar da would be proud of ya. He would not expect ya ta know this minute what is yet ta be learned.\"\n\nDaegan frowned, not finding help in his words. \"I understand this, but to make decisions without knowledge is to risk much. To risk myself and dragon is one thing, but 'tis much at stake today in our world. The burden lies with me to do right by all, as it should.\" Daegan propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his chin down to rest on his folded hands. \"I believed I was bein' right by the ice dragon to take him out to fly, but he attacked my people. They trusted me to not release an enemy in Treoir, the most protected place for all our people. I failed them.\"\n\nSighing loudly, Garwyli turned to him. \"Ya can only do what ya know ta be correct this day. Then do the same the next day and the next.\"\n\nDaegan had carried so much alone for so long, it felt good to share his inner thoughts with the person who would not judge him. \"I did just that in the past and left my family unprotected.\" His words fell off with his darkest admission. \"I fear repeatin' such a mistake today.\"\n\nThe druid studied his wrinkled hands and spoke with a quiet reverence. \"'Tis simple, Daegan. The past be carved in stone with lessons learned, the future waits ta test those lessons.\" He lifted his eyes weighed down with wrinkles and surrounded by bushy white eyebrows. \"The choices made today shall validate the past and determine the future.\"\n\nDaegan soaked up all Garwyli said and rolled each word around, taking all this wise druid said to heart.\n\nGarwyli was explaining how a decision made today would prove who Daegan had been in the past as well as who he would be in the future.\n\nIf so, he had been right to give Skarde a chance to gain his freedom. The mistake Daegan had made was in not insuring all others were safe.\n\nHe should have been the only one to face Skarde's attack.\n\nSkarde and the other ice dragons had believed the lie that Daegan's red dragon started the Dragani War. Showing Skarde kindness had been a step toward convincing him Daegan was not his enemy.\n\nOr based upon Garwyli's words, to have not given Skarde a chance to become an ally would have validated the ice dragon clan's belief from the past and would have insured they remained enemies in the future.\n\nDaegan could only make choices he believed to be in the best interest of his people and their world when pressed to do so and insure his people remained safe as possible when he took a risk.\n\nHe was not perfect, would never be, but he could perform his duty. His past had given him wisdom to use in this world.\n\nA weight lifted from his shoulders at realizing he could do this and find a way for his people to live in peace.\n\nEvidently Garwyli had said all he wanted. He rose slowly and tottered to the wall.\n\nIn two strides, Daegan stood right behind him. This time, when Garwyli lifted a finger to draw an arched opening, the wall sizzled as stones vanished.\n\nThe old druid's skin had a new flush to it as he left. He would be here for a bit longer.\n\nOn the way to his quarters, Garwyli waved a hand for Daegan to go ahead. \"Lanna wishes ta speak with ya.\"\n\nConcerned, Daegan asked, \"Ya do not wish to join us?\"\n\n\"Nay. 'Tis time ta visit the babes.\" His voice carried the joy shining in his eyes.\n\n\"I enjoyed our talk.\" Daegan teleported the druid to the end of the long hall leading to Tzader and Brina's private quarters without asking his permission. When Garwyli reappeared, he turned to Daegan and wagged a finger then went on his way.\n\nStifling a laugh, Daegan headed for the area where Garwyli trained Lanna.\n\nShe stood outside the door with her arms crossed. Lines of worry marred her smooth, but pale, skin and tight mouth. \"Where does he go?\"\n\n\"He wishes to see the bairns.\" Daegan reached the door and waited for her to step through.\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Why do ya sound concerned, lass?\" Daegan entered and closed the door.\n\n\"Garwyli goes off alone sometimes and ... I worry for his safety.\"\n\n\"I am not Storm, but I know when I do not hear all the truth.\" Daegan stood in the middle of the room. His gaze tracked over the small and large items added by a wise man who had spent many generations here. Lanna had put her stamp on the area too, proven by the light feeling in the space. He turned to her, wondering if she'd tell him the truth.\n\nGuilt piled up in her eyes before she glanced away. \"I speak truth that must be said.\"\n\n\"Lanna,\" Daegan started gently and waited for her gaze to lift up to his. \"Garwyli has been here a very long time. He has his secrets as do all of us. Allow him the room to do as he needs. He will not leave without makin' sure ya know first.\"\n\nA slight flush filled her cheeks, but she had even more of a pinched look. She wore her fear and stress with dignity. He hoped they both had more time with Garwyli.\n\nShe walked over to a tall window looking out on the lawn stretching from the castle to a dense tree line. She tucked her small arms across her chest, then turned around to lean against the window and face him. \"The ring speaks to me now.\"\n\nThis young woman had the ability to toss him sideways with a few words. \"Ya mean the half of my sister's ring I gave ya to hold?\"\n\n\"Yes. But messages are confusing. Garwyli tries to help. Is no good. He tells me to discuss with you.\"\n\nThis young woman might be a powerful being, but she lived inside a human vessel, which could crack wide open from strain. She was determined to do her duty, no matter what was asked of her. Pressure from the strain poured off her.\n\nHow could he ask more of her when she carried enough burden? \"Lanna, I appreciate your help, but ya have a lot to do here. This can wait.\"\n\nShe lifted striking blue eyes too mature for one her age. \"I understand you want to help. No one can take away what I feel. If you do not talk to me about ring, I add that to worries.\"\n\nDamn. He had to trust her the way Garwyli did, but he would spend more time with her once he could return for longer periods. \"Tell me your questions and I shall do my best to aid ya.\" Daegan had waited so long to hear anything about his sister, his palms became damp and his heart pummeled his chest. Could this tiny cousin of Quinn's be the one person to answer questions about his family?\n\nStraightening away from the window, Lanna seemed to push off her sadness about the druid and focus on the moment. In that moment, an incandescent power bloomed twice her size, sparkling.\n\nThen it was gone as quickly.\n\nHe began to understand what Tristan had been trying to tell him and what Garwyli called a supernova level of power.\n\nLanna opened her palm and extended it to him. \"I wish to hold ring again.\"\n\nDaegan fumbled trying to pull the ring out fast enough and hand it to Lanna. He was a fool to stand here, heart racing with anticipation of finding his sister who had not been immortal.\n\nExplain that to a heart still yearning for his family.\n\nLanna held the ring sandwiched between her palms and closed her eyes. Light leaked from her hands as if she had captured a small sun.\n\n\"Ring vibrates,\" she murmured.\n\n\"Yes,\" Daegan confirmed. \"Not much, just now and then.\"\n\nHer blond curls with black tips moved about then lifted around her head as if current surrounded her. She opened her clear eyes. Her hair settled again. Had she just released some pressure?\n\nShe explained, \"Ring wants to be whole. This half searches for other half and one who possessed complete ring.\"\n\nHe couldn't hide the anxiety in his voice. \"My sister, Jennyver. Do ya think that means my sister lives?\" Yes, that was a stupid question, but he had to ask it. Garwyli berated him any time Daegan dismissed someone from the past as dead. The druid often asked Daegan how he and Skarde could still be alive.\n\nLanna only allowed, \"I do not see her in this world.\"\n\nThis was why Daegan argued with Garwyli when the druid tried to convince him to think positively about finding his sister.\n\nEvery time Daegan got his hopes up his heart cracked open again. He muttered, \"'Twas foolish of me to think she still lives.\"\n\n\"Is not what I say,\" Lanna snapped, sounding short-tempered. Then she caught herself. \"I am sorry. I worry about ... things. If sister is alive or dead, I would see her. I would know.\"\n\nThe confidence of this lass awed Daegan. \"I shall do a better job of listenin', Lanna. What can ya tell me?\"\n\nShe walked around, gripping the ring in one hand and waving her other hand as she spoke. \"I am not sure. Is strange. I feel ring yearning for her. Sister is somewhere ... vision blurry like thick fog ... \" She stopped and shook her head. \"I do not understand location.\"\n\nFog could mean his sister had passed into the afterlife. Daegan suffered another bout of discouragement, but he would not give voice to negative thoughts here.\n\nOpening her palm, Lanna extended her hand for Daegan to take back the ring. Light no longer glowed from her hand.\n\nHe pushed the ring into a pocket. He'd kept the ring on his being with majik even when he shifted. \"Thank ya, Lanna. I will take all ya told me to heart.\" He started for the door.\n\n\"I read your father's chronicles each day.\"\n\nHe stopped and swung around. \"I recall you aidin' Brina and Tzader in locatin' the family names. So ya know how to read the Treoir writin'. 'Tis impressive.\"\n\n\"Garwyli teaches me. I know much, but not all words,\" she explained with humility. \"I read king's words about gifting daughters with special rings and how ring breaks apart for daughter to leave one half if kidnapped.\"\n\n\"'Tis true. I mentioned that to ya on my last visit.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you do not listen to your words.\" She held his gaze with the steel-blue eyes of a tutor who commanded a student's attention.\n\nWhere was Garwyli when Daegan needed an interpreter? \"I do not know what ya mean.\"\n\n\"I find note your father wrote later in chronicles. He said rings live and die with daughters.\"\n\n\"Yes, 'tis also what he told me when I was young.\" Lifting his shoulders, Daegan admitted, \"Much as I try, I do not understand how this half of Jennyver's ring is callin' to the other half. That would seem to mean my sister is still alive. Yet, I see no possibility of such unless she is hidden in a realm and still possesses one half of the ring. If so, how can one half know to hunt the other half if she is not in this world?\"\n\n\"I share all my visions with Garwyli.\"\n\nDaegan fought to keep his emotions locked down. \"And?\"\n\nLanna cocked an eyebrow at him. \"Garwyli said to pull a stone apart with my fingers would be easier than opening your mind to possibility your sister still lives. I try to show you what I know, not what I want or do not want. Truth only.\"\n\nDaegan stared at the floor. \"'Tis the right of it. My mind has a difficult time acceptin' what I cannot see with my eyes. I envy your gift of vision.\" He felt a deep weariness every time he opened himself up for more disappointment. \"Allow me time to think on all of this. I shall return or send a message if I have a question ya might be able to answer.\"\n\nGiving him a sweet but tired smile, she offered, \"I do not wish to raise hopes only to disappoint you. I will do all in my power to search more and help if I am able. Did you ask Luigsech woman about ring?\"\n\n\"I haven't had a chance, but I will.\"\n\n\"She is important.\"\n\nDaegan once again noticed the maturity Lanna had gained just by spending time with Garwyli. He felt Casidhe's importance, but Lanna meant with regard to finding the other half of Jennyver's ring.\n\nCould Casidhe figure out what happened to his sister with her resources, such as that professor?\n\nOnly she would know.\n\nHe'd tried to convince himself again and again that Jennyver was not alive and to stop chasing an empty dream.\n\nLanna had said, \"If sister is alive or dead, I would know. I would see her.\"\n\nShe had not seen Jennyver dead.\n\nFor the first time since he escaped T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and began hunting for his sister's burial site, Daegan questioned Jennyver's death more than her being alive."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Brynhild tossed bags on the sofa when she walked back in from a full day of searching for everything she needed.\n\nJoavan was proving to be more helpful by the hour.\n\nShe called over her shoulder, \"I will shower. Alone.\"\n\n\"You wound me.\"\n\n\"You will hurt more if you do not listen.\" In the bedroom, she pulled off the soft shoes, then dropped the black pants and gauzy shirt. In the large bathroom, she glanced at the mirror, admiring her necklace of bones sharpened into points.\n\nJoavan had not been impressed.\n\nHe did not have to be, only her.\n\nShe removed her new jewelry and took her time under the hot water in the bathroom of his hotel room. He called it a suite. Such an easy man to spend time around and helpful in this new world. He could stay with her as long as he became no problem. She rinsed the shampoo from her hair, feeling more like herself for the first time since entering this new world.\n\nEverything in this time was strange.\n\nShe missed her family and longed for the freedom to shift and fly whenever she wanted.\n\nNever had any human been a threat to her dragon before.\n\nThose flying machines with weapons were unlike anything she could imagine.\n\nOnce she'd dried off and pulled on one of the two robes Joavan had explained the hotel supplied, she smiled with appreciation at her new shortened hair. So easy to towel dry and walk away. Opening the door to the main area, she stood there, searching for Joavan. He had not given her reason to suspect he could be a threat, but she trusted no one out of her sight.\n\n\"There you are, dove.\" Joavan stepped in from the patio overlooking the city with a glass of wine in each hand. He wore the other hotel robe. \"I took the liberty of ordering enough food for you to choose whatever pleases you.\"\n\n\"That is acceptable.\" She took a glass and sipped. \"Today was good. We did much.\"\n\n\"You're a pro in the stores.\"\n\n\"I found it easy once I understand more.\" She'd kept mental notes of everything Joavan did from paying people to the words he used.\n\nCathbad thought to bury her in books.\n\nNothing would ever match being able to learn while living in the world. She sniffed the food, turning to find a table covered in upside down metal bowls.\n\nJoavan stepped around the table, lifting each metal covering as he called out different dishes. Always ready to please her.\n\nShe did not trust him one bit.\n\nShe wanted no man clinging to her. Definitely not a human.\n\nBut she liked having him around for the time being.\n\n\"Come. Eat while it is hot.\" A smile drew his lips up, showing off his attractive face.\n\nStrolling over, she took a seat and stared at the different eating utensils arranged with napkins. She had never been shy about eating and wasn't now, but neither did she want Joavan to think she was untrained.\n\nThe point of spending last night with this man had been to gain information and learn how to blend in with the humans.\n\nAnd to enjoy sex. Humans were such simple beings.\n\nHow difficult could this one be to keep around for a while?\n\nJoavan began serving meats, a strange vegetable called broccoli, sauces, and bread. She moaned with happiness over the bread. Her mouth watered at the succulent smells. Cooks in her time had created great feasts, but they would have been in awe of this food, too.\n\nWhile she ate, Jovan talked about all the things they could do tomorrow.\n\nWhen he wiped his mouth with his napkin, she mimicked him.\n\n\"But first, it is time to tell you who I am.\" Joavan placed his napkin to the side of his dish.\n\nShe shrugged and smiled with confidence. \"I know all I need to know.\" He had a nice body and was adept at kissing. He seemed intelligent enough to fit her needs.\n\n\"Oh, but you don't, dove.\"\n\n\"Please. I am not a woman who desires a mate. I will not become a servant or breeder for any man. Do not waste energy trying to impress me to change my mind.\" She stood and smiled to please his basic nature of being a man ready to rut. \"I did enjoy last night. Has been a while. You entertained me much.\"\n\nHe pushed his chair back and stood. \"I'm glad you enjoyed our time together and we may do that again.\"\n\nHis words made no sense. He might have sex again? Only if she desired such, because he was unimportant. She dipped her head in his direction. \"Then we are in agreement.\"\n\nHe lifted his hands, placing the fingertips together in a mirrored form in front of his chest. \"I know of the red dragon.\"\n\nSuspicion shot up her neck. He had tricked her. She backed up, arms and legs bulging with a coming shift.\n\n\"Please do not shift into your dragon, Brynhild. Give me a chance to share everything I know.\"\n\nMuscles in her shoulders and neck tightened. She was sick of men lying to her. \"I kill anyone who allies with the red dragon.\"\n\nHer body mass surged.\n\n\"Stop! Please. I am no ally of that bastard!\" Joavan shouted.\n\nThe rope on her robe fell open. She stood there heaving short breaths.\n\n\"I tell you the truth,\" Joavan said, voice calm. \"I will tell you everything if you give me a chance. I have not deceived you.\"\n\nShe wanted to scream at him that he had, but recalled how he had given his name last night. To be honest, she had not asked for more. Slowly, her body began to shrink, but her dragon was not happy and railed to get out.\n\nSilently, she told her dragon, <Wait. We will hear him out. If we do not like his words, we will destroy him with our energy.>\n\nAfter another moment, she pulled her robe into place and tied the belt. \"You have one chance to live. Take care with the words you choose. Start with how you know the red dragon.\"\n\nJoavan showed no sign of relief, except for the tense muscles in his neck softening. \"I met Daegan when the human military captured him. He suffered with a coating on his body from satyr spit. The coating was hardening and killing him. I gave him a solvent to clean the coating off then he backed out of our deal after I saved his life.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth and roared at him. \"You are no ally of mine if you protected the red dragon from death!\"\n\n\"You miss my point. I am no ally of the red dragon at all. If I had not needed his help, I would not have helped him in the first place. I learned from my mistake. I wish to partner with someone who will help me take that dragon down.\"\n\nCrossing her arms, Brynhild asked, \"Why would I partner with a human, witch, or whatever you are to have conjured a cure for that coating?\"\n\nJoavan smiled then disappeared.\n\nShe started and spun, looking for him everywhere. When she turned back to face the table, he reappeared.\n\n\"I am no human, Brynhild. I am Faetheen with both blood of a Fae and a druid. I needed help regaining a priceless jewel for my people. They must have it for protection. Daegan got his hands on my people's amulet and kept it.\"\n\nBrynhild's interest perked up, but should she trust this being, especially someone with druid blood? She could use a guide in this world. Humans were so fragile, even the men. She would likely kill one no matter how hard he tried to stay out of her way.\n\nThis man, this Faetheen, would not cling. He wanted to make Daegan pay for deceit. She wanted to destroy the red dragon.\n\nThat could be considered mutual goals.\n\nJoavan lifted his hand, drawing her from her thoughts. \"I can see you need proof you can trust me. Every minute you have been here, I could have taken you to my realm where I went a moment ago.\"\n\nHer hair bristled with her anger. \"Do not ever threaten me again and expect to take another breath.\"\n\nJoavan chuckled. \"If you think about it, I have been in more danger from you had you decided to shift while here. Why would I threaten a dragon shifter, especially one I wish to join forces with?\" He lifted an eyebrow, making it appear as a simple question. \"I merely wanted to show you how I could have taken advantage of you last night, but did not.\" His smile turned wicked. \"I do admit taking advantage of your exquisite body and would welcome another invigorating evening.\"\n\nHis charms did not work on her and would never control her. \"I decide when I want sex. Not now.\"\n\n\"I like a woman who knows what she wants. I only ask that you give me a chance. If you are willing to work together, we can both succeed at our goals.\"\n\nHis words echoed Cathbad's, but that druid had deceived her from the start. She did not believe his lies about how she ended up in that cave.\n\nShould she take a chance with Joavan? He had to tell her more first. \"What majik do you possess to help me?\"\n\nHe waved her toward him as he turned to walk out to the balcony. When she stood next to him and a light wind caressed her skin, he said, \"Do you see anything in the sky?\"\n\nShe took in the wide blue expanse. \"Birds.\"\n\n\"I was able to find you after a human military group shot your dragon down.\"\n\nHer fingers gripped the rail tightly.\n\n\"I got there right after they'd shot at your dragon. I then went with the trackers until they got too close. That's when I used my powers to send them in a different direction. I reached you just as you jumped in the water and followed you from the bank.\"\n\nShe lifted a hand from the rail and cupped her mouth, then asked, \"Why did you not show yourself then?\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"You had just been attacked and were injured. If I'd shown myself, you would have killed me.\"\n\nShe had to admit the truth of it. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I stayed with you until you reached this city. While you wandered around, I arranged for this hotel room then took my time approaching you. I wanted you to choose to come with me.\"\n\n\"If I had not?\" She turned on him, waiting for what his plan would have been.\n\n\"I would have eventually approached you to discuss the red dragon, but it would have taken longer.\" He leaned over and kissed her cheek. \"Now, let me tell you what I can bring to the table. I have infiltrated a human military agency to access their human resources, which is how I heard reports of a dragon spotted in the air where they found you. I can enter and leave that group whenever we need it.\"\n\n\"You think these humans can find the red dragon?\" She had her doubts, but she did not think Daegan was as clever as her and certainly not more so. He just had more warriors to help him.\n\nContinuing in his thoughtful tone, Joavan explained, \"The humans have something known as satellite images.\"\n\nBrynhild frowned. \"What?\"\n\nPointing up at the sky, he said, \"Satellites are machines thousands of miles in the sky that take pictures as the equipment circles this world.\"\n\n\"The gods have machines?\" Her eyes pinched to small slits.\n\n\"No, the humans. People today are very advanced. I saw pictures of your dragon and Daegan's in a battle over the sea on the west coast of the island now called Ireland. You had the upper hand until his dragon pulled a dishonorable trick.\"\n\nShe still stung from that loss. \"Yes. He has no honor.\"\n\n\"It was clear to me then that you wanted him dead. Having a Faetheen partner with access to human resources will expedite your wishes.\"\n\nShe had no idea what \"expedite\" meant, but took the happy expression as a sign he offered to give her what she wanted.\n\nSmart man, he did not push, but gave her time to think through everything he said. She could not get to Daegan without help, not in this new world. To do that, she wanted more than Joavan offered. She wanted the knowledge Cathbad kept promising, but not in small doses the stingy druid offered.\n\nShe did not want to sip from a cup. She wanted a barrel to draw from whenever she thirsted for more.\n\nJoavan would show her how to blend in with humans.\n\nHe would uphold his promise ... or he would die.\n\nTurning to lean back against the rail, she glanced at Joavan. \"I want to be invisible when in human world.\"\n\nHe angled his head and his eyebrows dropped low over his eyes. \"You don't mean you want to vanish, right?\"\n\n\"No. I need to change face sometimes. To look different.\" Her beauty would stand out now that she no longer appeared as a street beggar.\n\n\"Ah! That's what I thought. You wish to walk among the humans as if you were one of them and change your face and appearance sometimes. We can do that easily.\"\n\n\"Yes, that. I must be able to find Daegan without his Beladors alerting him.\"\n\n\"He's been leaving his people to hunt for a grimoire volume. We can find him either alone or with his second-in-command. His name is\u2014\"\n\n\"Tristan,\" she supplied. \"Cathbad captured him. When Cathbad left, I made Tristan help me.\"\n\nHe blinked. \"Doesn't he teleport?\"\n\n\"Yes. I made him teleport me outside cave, but he was under my control. I shifted and flew him to cliffs where I think Tristan called to Daegan.\"\n\n\"You have far more talent than just being a dragon shifter, dove.\"\n\nThough his voice held admiration, she turned a sharp gaze on him. \"Nothing is more important than shifting into dragon. Now, tell me how we kill Daegan.\"\n\n\"I am ready to do that, but I must get my people's diamond back from him.\"\n\nShe stalked away, waving her hands. \"Everyone expects me to allow the red dragon to live. No!\"\n\n\"Brynhild,\" Joavan said in that soothing voice.\n\nShe did not want to be soothed. She wanted to end Daegan's life. \"What?\"\n\nWhen he remained silent, she turned with hands on hips. \"What, Joavan?\"\n\n\"One question so that I know how to fulfill your request and return my diamond. Do you wish to kill Daegan quickly or make him really pay for the things he's done to you?\"\n\n\"You do not know what he has done.\"\n\n\"I don't need to, dove. What would give you the most satisfaction?\"\n\nShe considered his words. What would give her the most satisfaction? To make Daegan feel the deep pain of loss that burned in her chest. The red dragon had not seen his family killed and his home destroyed.\n\nAll her family died because of trusting the red dragon.\n\nJoavan's words sounded too much like Cathbad's. Like the druid, this Faetheen needed something from Daegan, but Joavan had played no games with her so far. He had not exposed his true identity last night, but she had not asked. She respected how he'd been careful in approaching her.\n\nA wise man. She had no patience for fools and admitted, \"I wish to make Daegan suffer greatly before he dies.\"\n\nJoavan smiled and opened his arms. \"Now, that's the way to think.\"\n\n\"What is this diamond you want? Will Daegan have it with him at all times?\"\n\nThe Faetheen told the story of where he lived in another world alongside this one and how a druid had taken a necklace with the diamond, which protected his people. She did not understand how a stone could protect someone, but that was not important.\n\nShe only cared about how to get to Daegan.\n\nJoavan walked as he talked, his hands waving around and his voice heavy with emotion. He stopped and stared up. \"Daegan knew I had to return the amulet for the protection of my people. I must have it back, and soon.\" Lowering his arms, he turned a sad smile to her. \"That is all, dove. Any suffering on Daegan's part on your behalf is a bonus.\"\n\nBrynhild felt energy rush through her, spreading happiness to every part of her being. She would no longer be lost in this world, waiting for every new threat.\n\nShe would be in charge. No one would dare cross her again. She had plenty of enemies between Cathbad, Daegan, his Beladors, and the humans with giant weapons, but she had never been anyone's prey.\n\nJoavan would answer her every question and turn her into a modern-day dragon shifter, capable of destroying Daegan. Plus he would watch her back with Cathbad hunting her.\n\nThat druid would not allow her to escape him so easily.\n\nWhen Cathbad showed up again, she would make him regret having shoved her into an ice pond for two thousand years.\n\n\"I don't know what is going on inside that gorgeous head of yours, dove, but I am ready, willing, and able to fight at your side.\"\n\nShe smiled, unable to stop herself, and quietly strolled over to him.\n\nHis eyes flashed with curiosity, but the man had backbone. He stood there, allowing her to make the next move. She moved close enough to smell the warm scent flowing from him and lifted an arm to drape over his shoulder.\n\nThey stared at each other until he whispered, \"What would you have me do first?\"\n\nShe slid her hands down the taut muscles over his chest and pushed the robe open, giving him a smile filled with desire.\n\nHis eyes darkened with hunger.\n\nMen were so easy to tame.\n\nHer voice dropped to a husky sound. \"You will satisfy my need for someone to show me how to live in this world and ... \" She stroked him during the long pause. \"In other ways.\"\n\nEyes steady on her, he lifted a hand and ran the back of his fingers down her cheek. Then his hand slipped inside her robe to cup a breast. \"You have not seen anything yet. Last night I had to behave as a human. Now, you will know the beast I can be.\"\n\nDid he think to impress her in bed? Men were always foolish to put so much value on sex.\n\nShe would allow him to do his best. After all, why not make the most of this man while she had him with her?\n\nStill, she would have to be very careful around Joavan. He had a hidden world and the power to pull her in with him. She had no doubt of his ability to back up his words.\n\nHe had also sought her out for his own needs.\n\nJoavan would balk at any attempt to kill Daegan until he had his diamond in hand.\n\nHe believed his goal was greater than hers, which she would allow ... for now. Once she had all she needed from him, they would part ways, diamond or not.\n\nJoavan moved his lips close to her ear. \"Where are you, dove? You are not here with me.\"\n\nShe studied his striking face for a man. Not a warrior, by any means, but a wise one with gifts. \"We must find the red dragon. Once we do, you will have all my attention.\" She could not spend hours in bed while Daegan flew around free.\n\nPulling his hand away from her breast, he withdrew from her in every way. \"Will you kill him?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" she lied. She would allow no one to stop her from destroying Daegan.\n\nHis relief was immediate. \"I can find him,\" Joavan stated, not even boasting. Just confident.\n\n\"We must take care of what is important first, then we play as much as we want,\" she mused with a soft smile, which did its job.\n\nJoavan grinned. \"I do love how you think. We find Daegan first. Then plan how to hold something over him. I will take back my amulet and aid you in taking down the red dragon.\"\n\nShe continued her indulgent smile. She needed no one's help, not a Faetheen's. If Joavan did not get what he wanted, she would rid herself of two annoyances at once."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The stale air in the ancestral centre in Galway carried a hint of ancient books and the woman known as Fenella.\n\nAnd the faint scent of coconut from wilting gorse flowers the lass had a fondness for.\n\nDaegan took in Tristan's glum face. \"Casidhe was not at the local hotel nearby where ya left her. She was not at her cottage. Nor does she appear to be here.\" On previous trips, he'd raced around shouting her name.\n\nNot anymore.\n\nHe had come to his senses when she was close ... or not. When her energy and heat were nearby, all of that called to him and soothed the beast inside him. Not Ruadh, but Daegan's driving need to be with her.\n\n\"I hate to say this, boss, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Do not tell me I have lost her yet again,\" Daegan grumbled, pressing his fingers to his temples. As much as she calmed him when nearby, he turned into a prickly bear when he could not find her.\n\nBoth of Tristan's eyebrows climbed his forehead and he fought a smile. \"Good news is that we've always found her. We can do it again.\"\n\n\"Neither of us will fit through that tunnel without a struggle, but we shall have to start there.\" Daegan passed through the opening from the front reception area to the rear of the building. Panic hit him at the sight of an empty room. \"Where are her books?\"\n\nTristan explained as he followed Daegan. \"You didn't want to talk until you found her or I'd have told you about helping her move her library. She didn't want to leave her books here alone and couldn't stay here safely.\"\n\nHaving that pointed out did little to ease Daegan's irritation. \"Ya could have mentioned somethin' as we searched the cottage.\"\n\nTristan said nothing. He tried to smother his amused look, but failed.\n\nDaegan angled around and snapped. \"I find nothin' humorous about any of this.\"\n\n\"Sorry, boss. I'm just, uh, ...\"\n\n\"Say it, Tristan.\" Daegan's mood darkened by the moment. Casidhe could be in danger this very minute and Tristan found this funny?\n\n\"I like seeing you happy.\" Tristan had said that so sincerely.\n\nWhat had happened to his second? \"Do I look happy?\"\n\n\"Not a bit.\" Tristan chuckled. \"What I meant was it's nice to see you so taken by Casidhe and her totally into you. I get that you can't bond with a woman who doesn't carry dragon blood, but with so few dragons to choose from, especially when the only female is a homicidal nutjob, can't you be with a woman like Casidhe and not bond your energy?\"\n\nAll the anger seeped from Daegan. He clutched his forehead. \"I do care deeply for her. I could not allow myself to become so close with a human, but Casidhe possesses a load of energy. Hers reaches for mine when we are together.\" Lowering his hand, he sighed heavily. \"'Tis the truth she turns me into a ravin' idiot when she runs off. I am not sure I shall survive this lass.\"\n\nTristan bellowed out a laugh and slapped Daegan on the back. \"I understand only because I have my own strong female to keep up with and survive. But I wouldn't trade mine for anything.\"\n\nDaegan's face relaxed into a smile. \"I have never been in such a dilemma before. She runs me ragged, but I do feel alive when I am with her as I have not in many a year.\"\n\n\"As it should be, boss. You're allowed to feel human even if you aren't.\" Looking around, Tristan said, \"She's definitely not here. You two still have to see the oracle again and we aren't any closer to shoving Imortiks behind that death wall.\"\n\nAll good points that Daegan should be making. Serious now, he strode to the rear of the building where her hidden door swung inches from the back wall. He pulled it wide and a sizzle of energy popped then a scent smacked him.\n\nDaegan snarled, \"Cathbad!\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Tristan raced up to him. \"Think he's still here?\"\n\n\"I do not know!\" Daegan stuck his head into the cool tunnel and shouted, \"Casidhe! Are ya there?\"\n\nHis voice echoed.\n\nFear would drive him mad. He had to find Casidhe. He roared, \"Cathbad! Ya will face my dragon!\"\n\nStill nothing.\n\nDesperate to find her if he couldn't hear her, Daegan wildly opened his energy and let it flood the tunnel, reaching for Casidhe's. If he did not find her, he would teleport in blind. He could not let Cathbad take her from him.\n\nTristan doubled over and disappeared.\n\nDaegan backed off his flood of power. He shouted, \"Tristan!\"\n\nHis second reappeared and went to his knees, holding his head.\n\nDaegan dropped down with a hand on his shoulder. \"What happened to ya?\"\n\n\"Tried to teleport to the middle and hit a wall as I started to reappear. I bounced back here but I don't know how.\"\n\n\"How could you teleport in without knowin' where to stop?\"\n\nTristan stood with Daegan lifting his arm. Squinting his eyes, he hung his head. \"Your power slammed me. I knew then it was either I go or you would snap and teleport.\"\n\nGuilt landed hard between Daegan's shoulders. He was losing his mind and putting people at risk again. What was wrong with him?\n\nCasidhe.\n\n\"Do not do that again,\" Daegan ordered, but in a soft voice. He knew the level of Tristan's loyalty and shouldn't have been surprised. No one should take a risk for her but Daegan.\n\nHe hooked his hands behind his neck, walking in a frustrated circle. \"Cathbad has her.\" Those words gutted him. He had no idea where to hunt, but ... he couldn't think. His throat thickened with emotion as he thought of all the ways she might die.\n\n\"She has her sword,\" Tristan offered, but his morose tone admitted he doubted even with an ancient sword that she could have fought off Cathbad.\n\nDaegan's stomach muscles twisted into knots. \"I ... \" His voice broke. \"I must find her.\"\n\nTristan leaned against the wall next to the hidden tunnel opening and rubbed his forehead. \"I should have put an electronic tracker on Casidhe when I had a chance.\"\n\n\"No!\" Daegan shouted at an empty room. All the maybes and should haves in the world could not fill the gaping hole widening in his chest. \"She would not go down without a fight.\" He clenched his eyes shut, pausing, then opened them. \"Something bad has happened to her.\"\n\nWhat would Cathbad do to her? He wanted her alive to hunt the grimoires, but alive came in many forms.\n\nThat evil druid would torture her.\n\n\"Boss! Your power.\"\n\nDaegan broke free of his nightmare. The room shook. Cracks formed in the walls. He sucked back his energy, breathing hard.\n\nTristan stood pinned to the far wall until Daegan's energy dissipated. Face pale from the strain, he walked back to Daegan. \"We'll find her. We'll start right now.\"\n\n\"How?\" Daegan could barely speak. Clearing his throat, he said, \"I don't have a scrying wall or dream vision or remote ...\"\n\n\"What about Reese, boss?\"\n\n\"Yes. Good thinkin'.\" Daegan dropped his arms and called telepathically, <Quinn? I need Reese. Can ya find her?>\n\n<Hi, Daegan. Yep. She's with our team.> Guilt hit Daegan again. Was he putting someone else at risk? She was pregnant. But ... she was out patrolling Atlanta.\n\nQuinn asked, <What do you need?>\n\nThat shook off Daegan's hesitation. <Would she be willin' to do her remote viewin' in the Galway centre again?>\n\n<I'm sure she would. Are you sending Tristan?>\n\n<Yes.> Quinn gave Daegan a spot Tristan could teleport to undetected. He added, <Once Tristan's here, I'll find him and send Reese back with him.>\n\n<Ya will not be joinin' her?> Daegan asked, wondering what had changed for Quinn to stop hovering.\n\n<I know she's safe with you two and ... she needs her freedom.> Daegan swore, <Ya know I shall protect her with my life as will Tristan. I do not expect her to be here long. I just need her to look from the centre again.>\n\n<Very well. I'll have her ready when Tristan arrives.> With Tristan standing patiently, Daegan hurried to explain, \"I called to Quinn. He's sendin' Reese to do her remote viewin'.\" Daegan told him where to meet Quinn. Panic building inside him, driving the urgency to find her. \"Hurry, Tristan.\"\n\n\"I'm on it.\" Tristan's words floated in his wake of teleporting away.\n\nLess than two minutes had passed when Tristan and Reese appeared. Her clothes were torn and her hair disheveled. \"Who has Casidhe?\"\n\n\"I fear Cathbad has her.\" Taking in Reese's bedraggled state, Daegan asked, \"Were ya fightin' somethin' in Atlanta?\"\n\nShe blew out a noisy breath. \"Blasted demons, but I'm going to find the being producing them and get one problem off our backs as soon as I return. Okay, where do you want me?\"\n\nAs Tristan had pointed out, all men had their own challenges with protecting the powerful women in their lives.\n\nDaegan experienced a fleeting moment of happiness born of realizing he had his own special woman. He felt a warm spot in his chest and ached to have her near again. He'd wanted time to figure out how to bring Casidhe into his life, but it was so simple now.\n\nHe wanted her and she clearly wanted him.\n\nThey would have a future together. He would make that happen.\n\nBut Casidhe would not be back in his arms until he gave Reese a place to start her remote viewing. Pointing his hand at the back room, Daegan explained, \"I believe the best place to search is next to the door she uses to enter her secret tunnel.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Reese strode past Daegan and Tristan and across the back area.\n\nDaegan told Tristan, \"Step inside the doorway to the tunnel ahead of Reese so ya can protect that side of her. I shall watch her back.\"\n\n\"Done.\" Tristan bypassed Reese with a quick teleport, then slipped through the doorway and hunched down at the bottom of the short stairs.\n\nReese stopped to scan the area and shoved her head into the opening. \"This looks busted open. Must not be much of a secret anymore. I'm gonna sit on the top step, Daegan.\"\n\n\"Do ya need anythin'?\"\n\nShe pulled her head back. \"Not right now.\"\n\nSitting on the step, she twisted her shoulders back and forth, loosening up, then took a couple deep breaths. With her hands cupping her knees, her breathing slowed.\n\nDaegan kept very still as it normally required a moment before Reese began speaking.\n\n\"Luigsech is hurrying through the tunnel, but the backpack slows her down some when she bangs into walls and has to duck to keep moving. When the tunnel ends, she's inside that big hollow tree again. She's pulling out small things to put in her backpack as if she's cleaning out the tree.\"\n\nReese went silent, which Daegan had seen happen before when she concentrated on what she saw.\n\nHer lips moved with no words until she angled her head with a surprised look and began speaking again. \"The Luigsech woman paused when she found a black velvet bag. She turned it up and poured a necklace into her hand, then she fastened the chain around her neck and dropped it down her shirt. She pulled on her backpack and ... she's heading back through the tunnel in this direction ... uh, what's she doing?\" Reese murmured as if speaking only to herself. She leaned forward. \"Oh, I see. She stopped halfway back to the centre and started pulling away rocks and dirt from one side. Uhm ... looks like she's opening up another escape route. Huh.\"\n\nDaegan hadn't expected yet another escape tunnel, but neither should he be surprised.\n\nLeaning slightly forward, Reese whispered, \"Luigsech dug a hole she could shove her backpack through then crawled in behind it. She's walking for a bit and ... she stepped into water up to her chest. Must have dropped off into a hole. I think her shoe is stuck and she's struggling to get her foot free. Oh, crap!\"\n\n\"What?\" Tristan whispered in a tense voice.\n\nDaegan leaned past Reese and shook his head at Tristan, who mouthed the word sorry.\n\nReese must have still been deep into the vision, because she didn't notice the question. Her breathing picked up. She was fighting for air as if she tried to help Casidhe breathe.\n\nDaegan could barely hold quiet himself. What was wrong?\n\nWas Casidhe trapped and sinking deeper in water as they stood here? Should he interrupt Reese?\n\nBefore he could do anything, Reese began narrating her vision again. \"Cathbad showed up. Son of a bitch! He can't get to her, though. Guess he can't crawl through the narrow areas Casidhe passed through. You'd think he would have majik for that. Maybe he doesn't trust going in there blind. He threatened to call her body to him. Said he could drag her involuntarily if she didn't come back on her own.\"\n\nFear rolled over Daegan when he'd never blinked an eye facing an enemy. But battling a physical enemy was easier than standing here helpless to save Casidhe.\n\nHe clenched his fists, but forced himself to remain still so Reese could find her.\n\n\"He can't do it,\" Reese uttered, sounding amazed. \"Cathbad wants a book and thinks she has it. That's how he is going to call her to him with majik. Wow. She used her sword to free her foot and kept moving. Cathbad is shouting, but he's not trying to physically get to her in the tunnel. He's counting down from ten to give her a chance to come to him and telling her he will find her no matter what. At ten ... hah! The ceiling fell in and she escaped, but the fact that she's not getting pulled through all that right now must mean she doesn't have his book.\"\n\nDaegan swept a look at the empty library. Good thing Tristan took her books to Treoir.\n\nClearing her throat, Reese talked on in a monotone. \"Luigsech is out of the tunnel and rolling down a hill, then she catches her breath and runs to a road. It takes her a while to get there. She, uh, ... hitches a ride to a local airport, and someone helped her get into a ... shipping crate? Yes. That's exactly what they did. Shipped her as freight. Sneaky way to fly.\"\n\nDaegan could see it all in his mind the way Reese described everything. Was Casidhe running away from Cathbad because Daegan and Tristan weren't there to help her?\n\nHe should have planned better to keep her safe. The minute he got to her, he was going to make damned sure she would not be in fear again.\n\nReese fell silent and her shoulders relaxed. She'd lost the tension of staying close to Casidhe.\n\nDaegan's hope hit the ground. Reese could only do so much. She could not follow someone teleporting.\n\n\"Imagine that,\" Reese muttered. \"I can see the airplane taking off and watch it fly for a while. Maybe hours. I can't see a benchmark in the air. The airplane landed.\"\n\nDaegan had held his breath until she said she could still follow Casidhe. Good thing he'd been born an immortal or his heart might not survive the ups and downs of hunting anyone this way.\n\nReese quieted again, but she remained intensely focused for several more minutes before she opened her eyes. \"I've reached as far as I can see to follow Luigsech traveling.\"\n\nDaegan offered her a hand to step out of the tunnel entrance. Once Tristan joined them, Daegan asked, \"What more can ya tell us, Reese?\"\n\nShe described how Casidhe snuck out of the airport in another city, then took off on foot with her backpack. Casidhe went to an apartment building next.\n\nReese scratched her head. \"It sounded like Casidhe was speaking in code. She used the last name Hugh instead of Luigsech. She seemed to think the people inside would open their door to her, but they blew her off as if she was some stranger.\"\n\nDaegan's anxiety over Casidhe's safety mounted. If Reese could get them close to the last location where she saw Casidhe, he would teleport there as soon as Tristan returned Reese to Atlanta.\n\nTristan asked, \"Was there any landmark in the town she went to after getting out of the freight box, something that would make it easy for us to find her?\"\n\nReese shook her head. \"You have to hear all of this first. When Luigsech reached what appeared to be an apartment building in that city and the person refused to help her, she got upset that they wouldn't even feed her. She turned and made her way back into the non-residential part and walked over to a food truck. The guy waiting on her shouted something that sounded like, 'I know you. It's good to see you again.'\" Reese shook her head. \"Sometimes I can hear the simplest things and other times not so much, but it seemed like something interfered with me catching the whole conversation. Anyhow, the two guys in the truck got into an argument. Something about that truck was blocking my view of everything. Luigsech had paid for the food. She went around to the back where the door was open and stepped inside. I couldn't see her after that.\"\n\nDaegan had no idea why Casidhe traveled that way when Tristan would have teleported her there. He paused and began connecting the dots, as Tristan called it. Casidhe had already been on her way somewhere when Cathbad happened to show up. She didn't ask Tristan to teleport her because she wanted to keep her journey secret.\n\n\"So nothing else after the truck?\" Daegan asked, grasping at any explanation, but still coming back to the only one that made sense.\n\nReese held up a finger. \"There's more. I stayed with it when everything went dark. After a bit, the truck came into view once more, but I could not see Luigsech until it stopped. Again, I have no marker for time, distance, or anything. In fact, when the truck pulled off the road, the land was still dark outside. The guy who had spoken to her opened the back and stepped in, then Luigsech jumped out. I thought she was going to run, but she turned around and he tossed her backpack to the ground. Then he closed up the back and drove off. She started walking. She eventually reached the top of a hill and raced down to a road on her left as if she knew exactly where she was headed. The dirt road wound around until it reached a single cottage. She did the same routine with the last name Hugh when she knocked on the door and the person said something about waiting above.\"\n\n\"Above what?\" Anxious this was all going nowhere and more confused than when they started, Daegan clutched his neck, trying to hang on.\n\n\"I didn't understand that either at first,\" Reese admitted. She'd started walking as she spoke, as if unable to be still. \"Luigsech seemed to know exactly where to go. She climbed a steep trail that came to a plateau about three times as long as this building. She walked to the end and sat down, staring at water. A lake, a bay, an ocean. I have no idea. After a bit, she half turned to look over her shoulder and stood up. This big figure I couldn't make out walked up.\"\n\n\"Was he an enemy?\" Daegan would have Tristan teleport to the last airport Reese could identify and find someone who could point them in the right direction. Casidhe could be captured and terrified no one would find her.\n\nTristan stared in deep concentration. \"You couldn't see the guy's face?\"\n\n\"No. He was wearing furs and leathers, like something out of a historical period.\"\n\nSweat broke out on Daegan's forehead. \"Could be a supernatural who dragged her off. Ya must know somethin' about where she is so we can save her, Reese.\"\n\n\"I don't think you need to save her.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nReese acted reluctant to share the rest but gave it up. \"Luigsech smiled at the guy and called him by name right before he changed into a dragon and flew off with her to some mountains. They just disappear from view at one point as if being cloaked.\"\n\nTristan's jaw dropped. \"What the hell?\"\n\nDaegan didn't understand. \"A male dragon? Skarde is in my dungeon and the other one flyin' free is Brynhild.\" He pushed his gaze at Reese. \"Ya said a name. What name?\"\n\nReese had a puzzled look on her face. \"It was odd. Sounded like she called him Herrick.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Bile ran up Daegan's throat and blood drained from his face. The walls started closing in on him. His voice came out strained. \"No. It cannot be.\"\n\n\"Who is he, boss?\"\n\nDaegan forced himself to keep his power in check, fighting for a breath. \"Skarde ... and Brynhild's brother.\"\n\nTristan muttered a curse.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Reese asked.\n\nDaegan couldn't answer her. His thoughts warped in all directions. He ran back over what Reese had narrated to them about Casidhe gathering her things from the tree. He'd believed the only thing that would keep her from him was danger. Cathbad. Queen Maeve.\n\nNone of this made sense. Casidhe knew the ice dragons?\n\nShe hadn't said a word to Daegan.\n\nShe'd packed to leave him. To go home. Her real home.\n\nEvery detail Reese shared flashed in his mind. He stumbled when recalling the tree where Casidhe kept possessions.\n\nShe'd put on a necklace before escaping.\n\nHe grabbed a thread, something to pull him from the hole he teetered toward. He rasped out, \"Tell me about the necklace from the velvet pouch.\"\n\n\"Why is that important?\" Tristan asked quietly.\n\nDaegan swallowed, trying to pull himself together. \"Casidhe told me while she was captive in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb she had listened to Queen Maeve and misjudged me. She admitted such and said she should have given me a chance to explain. 'Tis hard to keep my mind open to any explanation right now. Still, if the necklace does not have an ice dragon design, which would only be given to family or someone close, I shall allow her a chance to tell her side.\"\n\nHe could not bear to believe she had betrayed him.\n\nHis mind could see it clearly, but his heart refused to give up on her.\n\nReese explained, \"It was a thick silver chain with a weird looking shape hanging as a pendant. In fact, it reminded me of ...\" She turned to Tristan. \"Daegan won't know what this is, but you remember those rings with a weave design that came apart and went back together like a puzzle?\"\n\nTristan nodded, a sick look gathering on his face.\n\n\"That's what the pendant reminded me of. Half of a silver ring shaped with weird parts. Not enough to identify.\"\n\nDaegan reached a trembling hand into his pocket, his eyes burning and denial screaming in his head. He pulled out his sister's ring.\n\nReese gasped. \"Yes! Like that.\"\n\nWords flew around Daegan's head, buzzing him like angry hornets. He couldn't move or speak.\n\nTristan's gaze held a mix of compassion and anger. He offered quickly, \"Lanna said Casidhe would help you find the other half of Jennyver's ring. Sounds like she was spot-on.\"\n\nDaegan's head felt two sizes too big. He'd suffered pain in many forms, but this slashed him from head to toe. An earth-shattering roar burst from him and shook the room. Muscles bulged across his shoulders. How could he have allowed himself to be tricked again? Worse, to have opened his heart to Casidhe?\n\nNo, she was the Luigsech woman. He would not allow himself to think otherwise.\n\nDaegan's vision churned with fiery light. Claws broke through his fingertips and his dragon beat his insides, furious at their betrayal. Rabid thoughts screamed in his head.\n\nThis can't be true.\n\nThe evidence was damning.\n\nAnd Jennyver. How could anyone but Jennyver have that half of her ring? Only someone who stole his sister.\n\nDaegan held his head back, roaring with grief.\n\nRuadh felt the pain as deeply as Daegan. He opened his body to shift and allow his dragon to break free from the pain. Daegan had done this to them. No one should suffer but him.\n\nPower shot free, spinning and pushing his body to expand.\n\n\"Daegan!\" someone screamed.\n\nTristan's voice burst inside his head. <Stop, Daegan! Reese is pregnant. I can't teleport out.>\n\nCrazed noises filled Daegan's mind.\n\nRuadh's voice smothered the others. <Stop. You kill innocent ones.>\n\n<Nooo,> Daegan shouted, but Ruadh's words kept slamming his skull. He and his red dragon protected the innocent.\n\nRaudh kept droning on in Daegan's mind, dragging him back from the brink of insanity.\n\nHe breathed in and out, now crouching and heaving as his body sucked all that energy back inside.\n\nWhen he looked around, Tristan had Reese shielded behind him in a corner with both hands out forcing a kinetic barrier. Agony ripped his second's face.\n\nReese shouted, \"Tristan, what's wrong?\"\n\nDaegan gripped his head. What had he done?\n\nTristan's voice came into his mind. <Daegan, you okay? What can I do?>\n\nDropping his hands, Daegan stood slowly. \"'Tis safe again.\"\n\nTristan lowered his kinetic shield and helped Reese to her feet. He asked her, \"Ready to go back to Quinn?\"\n\n\"No.\" She marched across the room. \"Something is very wrong.\" When she reached Daegan, pale and shaking, she softened her voice. \"I'm here. Let me help.\"\n\nDaegan closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath. He could not lose his control again. Not like that.\n\nWithdrawing his claws first, Daegan cleared his raw throat. \"I am sorry for puttin' ya in danger, Reese. I ... was not expectin' what ya saw, but ya did me a great favor in comin' to help. I cannot thank ya enough. Please go back to Quinn and stay safe. There is nothin' more ya can do here.\"\n\nShe looked uncertainly from him to Tristan and back. \"Okay, I'll go, but come get me if you need me again. I don't know everything, but it sounds like this Luigsech woman has pulled a fast one on you. I'll gladly help you find her and get your sister's ring back. If you think she's a demon, I can blast her, too.\"\n\nHolding back the anguish waiting to rip out of him, Daegan forced his ragged words from a tight throat. \"I shall keep that in mind.\"\n\nReese blew a curl off her forehead that fell back in place immediately. \"Okay, Tristan. I'm ready to roll or ride.\" She brushed her hair back with her hands, muttering, \"Hell, I don't know. Maybe teleporting is more like flying.\"\n\nTristan sent another worried look to Daegan, but gave Reese a quick nod, then the two of them disappeared.\n\nDaegan cloaked the room and let out an inhuman wail. He shook his fists above his head. Neck and shoulder muscles strained from holding back his change.\n\nHe shouted, \"Why? What wrong have I committed to deserve this knife in my gut?\" Tremors shook the floor and walls. Pain wrenched his insides. He struggled between loss and fury.\n\nHow could he lose something he never truly had, though?\n\nLuigsech had lied to him. The whole time. What had she wanted? What had she been doing here for the ice dragons?\n\nWas there any way she could have known about Skarde?\n\nShe sure as hell knew about Jennyver.\n\nDaegan had lost his family. He never thought he'd lose someone else that would cut him as deeply. No matter how hard he wanted to just forget about what he'd felt for her, the pain of never holding her again threatened to strangle him.\n\nHe had to pull himself together and be better. He had to shove a wall around those feelings and lock them deep.\n\nMuch easier said than accomplished.\n\nHe dropped his fists and lowered his head. He would never have someone in his life. Not after this. He could never risk trusting another woman even if he found one who possessed power.\n\nEspecially not with a supernatural.\n\nSlowly, the structure calmed, but his insides would never be at peace again. From here on, his heart had no business interfering.\n\nOnce his control returned, his shoulders sagged. His body felt as if he'd been driven through a gauntlet with no weapon and fighting off battle axes. Every breath hurt.\n\nHe kept seeing Casidhe's smiling face. Luigsech, he reminded himself again. He had to chisel her out of his heart and couldn't do it with the name that had been his to hold.\n\nHow had she fooled him so easily?\n\nBecause she'd been taught by those who knew of the red dragon, taught by Herrick. She knew him better than he could have ever imagined. That cut deep.\n\nShe believed what Herrick's clan believed.\n\nShe knew the ice dragon clan hated him.\n\nShe'd convinced Daegan she cared for him intimately. Had he wanted someone to call his own so badly he'd made betraying him easy?\n\nHow could she belong to the ice dragons? The more he thought back over every moment with her, the less he understood. Why had she done this to him? She'd drawn him in close as a drunken moth to a dazzling flame then squeezed the blood from his heart.\n\nHe drove his hands through his hair and gripped hard, wanting to yank his mind out of this torment.\n\nHe had never appreciated Ruadh's presence more than right now and told his dragon, <Thank ya for stoppin' me from more damage.>\n\nRuadh said, <All pain heals.>\n\nOnly his dragon could bring what had happened into focus. Daegan had suffered before and would suffer again, but he and Ruadh would survive.\n\nHe had no idea how long he'd stood there before he removed the cloaking.\n\nTristan quietly said, \"I'm back.\"\n\nDaegan lowered his trembling hands to dangle at his sides. \"I am ashamed of my reaction. I have never been so thoroughly deceived.\"\n\nTristan crossed his arms and stared out the front window of the centre. \"She fooled me, too, boss. I'm sick over what she did to you.\" Huffing out a disgusted sound, Tristan shook his head.\n\n\"Did I harm Reese?\"\n\n\"Nah. She's tough. She told me to come for her again if you needed anything she could do and to let you know she isn't saying a word about ... what happened.\"\n\nOf all the anguish he felt over Luigsech, he was blessed to have those he cherished around him at his worst moment.\n\nTristan asked, \"What do you want to do now?\"\n\nDaegan straightened to his full height. Fire churned inside him and flowed through his veins. He had people waiting on him. Depending upon him.\n\nSpeaking in a clear voice, Daegan strived to sound like the dragon king his people deserved. \"I need that scepter in Luigsech's backpack. It must be delivered to the oracle, who can help me find the other grimoire volumes.\"\n\n\"Can we do all this without ... her?\"\n\n\"'Tis the plan.\"\n\n\"I'm ready to do whatever we need.\"\n\nDaegan had never had true loyalty from the dragon clans he'd battled beside to protect. Unlike those dragon shifters he'd known from birth, Tristan had proven an unwavering loyalty Daegan would always treasure. \"We shall find Luigsech and Herrick. I may need ya to aid me in regainin' the staff from her backpack. I do not trust her to hand it over freely after holdin' my sister's ring all this time.\"\n\n\"Let's do this, boss.\"\n\n\"Once I find them, I shall not leave until Herrick tells me what happened to Jennyver. If he dares to deny me, he shall regret having lived so long. I am not in a merciful mood.\" Daegan would never harm someone who did not attack him first, but neither would he allow Herrick and Luigsech freedom to take a step from him until he had answers.\n\nShe had escaped Daegan for the last time.\n\nHe'd find a way to meet with the oracle alone this time. He was done with Luigsech.\n\nHe moved around and sat on the edge of Fenella's desk as he considered where to go next. \"Reese's remote viewin' can only do so much. If I had time, I believe we could find Herrick and Luigsech, but time is fallin' through a crack as we speak.\"\n\nTristan drew his eyebrows tight and stared at the floor. \"I doubt Storm could track a dragon flying across unknown land and through mountains without a starting point. Reese said they vanished in the mountains. I wonder if Herrick has the same ability to cloak his dragon like Brynhild does.\"\n\n\"I do not know.\" Daegan had never known Brynhild had such a gift until recently. \"Storm would only be able to track them if we knew where Herrick landed. I fear that mountain range could run from horizon to horizon. Quinn once told me Lanna could find someone if she held a possession of the missing person, but she could not find Jennyver with the ring I carry.\"\n\nTristan snapped his fingers. \"Wait a minute. Lanna might be able to find Cas, uh, Luigsech, though.\"\n\nDaegan stilled, thinking on Tristan's words. \"Ya think we can locate somethin' personal of hers in the cottage for Lanna to hold in her hands?\"\n\nGrinning, Tristan rubbed his hands together. \"We have something better.\"\n\n\"What might that be?\"\n\n\"Remember I teleported Luigsech's entire library to Treoir? That library is her most prized possession. Let's put one of those books in Lanna's hands.\"\n\nDaegan inhaled a deep cleansing breath. \"Aye. Lanna shall show us the way to our enemies.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Casidhe preferred flying on the back of Herrick's dragon.\n\nLike the rest of her existence, her preference meant nothing.\n\nHer teeth chattered and her body ached from being battered around by wind while hanging from the dragon's claws.\n\nHerrick hadn't smiled or said a word before tossing her the cloak he'd peeled off before shifting into his dragon and immediately taking to the air. He'd made a fast arc, swinging around to fly in just above the flat ground where she'd stood at the edge, watching the Tegernsee Lake.\n\nShe'd hooked her arms through the backpack straps and shoved her hands in the wrong sleeves of the cloak to wear it backward. She'd hurried to protect her face and chest, trembling at the possibility the dragon would throw her off the cliff.\n\nShe'd barely been ready when his dragon scooped her from behind, yanking her muscles.\n\nHer stiff shoulders felt as if she'd been twisted into a noodle.\n\nShe couldn't feel her legs after flying all day. Herrick had taken a huge risk to fly during daylight. That showed just how angry he had to be. Darkness fell as his dragon finally approached the ward shielding Herrick's land from trespassers. The wide wings flapped slower as they passed through the ward. Inside the castle area where dark still shrouded the land, one of his men stood off to the side tending a fire.\n\nShe relaxed her body for the drop as the ground came up to meet her.\n\nThe claws opened. Wind blasted her down.\n\nShe tucked, hit, and rolled in a wobble, bouncing over the hard ground. The backpack dragged her to a stop.\n\nArms flopped away from her body, she lay there a moment staring up at the dark sky and trying to slow the dizziness.\n\nHis dragon screeched, flapping hard as it caught air then glided around.\n\nHerrick was angry?\n\nShe was fuming mad. Standing, she shook off the cloak but left her backpack on. At this point, it felt like part of her body. She swatted hair off her face and snatched up the cloak, only so no one else would have to pick up behind her, and headed into the castle.\n\nHer hands were frozen. Her face felt raw from the cold wind and her body hurt everywhere.\n\nShe'd reached the top of the steps when his dragon bellowed loudly, then a screech followed. Looking over her shoulder, she witnessed Herrick shifting back to human, then walking over to stroke Stian's head. He clothed himself in furs as he stood there chatting with his pet.\n\nHe cared more for a freaking griffon vulture than her!\n\nShe tried to yank the door open, but the heavy wooden covering had been built for someone the size of a Viking. No chance of being dramatic here.\n\nOnce inside, she tossed his cloak on a bench against a wall and strode over to the roaring fireplace.\n\n\"Do not think to run away!\" Herrick bellowed as that heavy-ass door slammed for him, dammit.\n\nShe had her backpack on the floor at her feet and had turned for the fire to warm her backside. \"I am not runnin' anywhere. I can barely walk after the last twelve hours.\"\n\nHis boots hammered every step he took. \"You would be wise to watch your caustic tongue. I am not happy with you.\"\n\n\"Oh, really?\" She crossed her arms. \"Funny, because I'm just as unhappy.\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly and stared at her as if she wore her head backward.\n\nThe normally subdued Kleio came running down the stairs and into the crossfire.\n\n\"Leave, seer!\" Herrick ordered, not taking his gaze off Casidhe.\n\n\"I have something you should hear.\"\n\n\"Did you not hear me?\" he yelled, swinging around to her. \"I said leave. Anything you have can wait.\"\n\n\"It is not what I have that is in jeopardy, but something of yours.\"\n\nHe drew up at that and seemed concerned.\n\nCasidhe had a strange feeling the seer was drawing his anger, as if to free Casidhe of his wrath. What should she believe? Was this merely some trick to get Herrick out of here so the seer could get to Casidhe?\n\n\"What do you speak of, seer?\"\n\nKleio wore her long hair braided in a thick rope down her back. Unadorned lavender eyes boosted her serious look. \"Your prized possession may not last long enough to barter a successful trade.\"\n\nKleio's bold statement sent Herrick back a step as if she'd struck him with a club. \"What ... what are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Do not deny this treasure exists,\" Kleio said in a challenging tone.\n\nWhat the devil was she talking about? Casidhe must be the only person to not know what treasure he possessed.\n\nHerrick started to shake his head, then stopped. His harsh voice fell off to a whisper. \"How do you know of this?\"\n\nThe seer gave him a censoring look most often saved for an annoying child. \"Even after all this time, you question my ability? That is not the issue at this moment. Time draws near to make your trade.\"\n\nWhat trade was this woman talking about?\n\nCasidhe appreciated a moment to gather herself so she could better deal with Herrick, but she did not trust help coming from Kleio.\n\nWhen neither one said a word, Casidhe found her backbone had thawed and stormed forward. \"What are you talking about? What trade?\"\n\nHerrick ignored her, focused only on the seer. \"Are you saying Skarde lives?\"\n\nKleio said nothing as her gaze swiveled to Casidhe.\n\nHerrick stared at Casidhe with confusion. \"Have you found Skarde?\"\n\nOf course. Everything was about his brother. More hurt than angry, she lifted her chin. \"I might have.\"\n\nHis face twisted into a vicious look. He bellowed and lifted her off the floor, shaking her.\n\nHer survival sense kicked in to remind her she was pissing off an ancient dragon shifter. \"Stop it! You're hurtin' me.\"\n\nHerrick roared, \"You know where my brother is and did not tell me?\"\n\nKleio reached for Herrick's arm, pulling on the thick limb. \"If you injure her, she will not be able to talk or serve you.\"\n\nHe dropped Casidhe faster than having grabbed a hot poker by the wrong end.\n\nShe stumbled backward, running into her backpack. For a fleeting second, she considered pulling out her sword. Then reality set in and reminded her Herrick had a bigger one and was still a dragon shifter. Got it.\n\nHerrick wiped his mouth, then closed in on her. His face shifted with anger, but his voice rolled with suspicion. \"What do you know of the red dragon? Is he the one who teleported you to see Fenella?\"\n\nAh, damn. But then Casidhe realized for him to know about her teleporting away from Fenella with Tristan that meant Fenella and the squire families had been in direct contact with Herrick when they deemed it important enough.\n\nThey could reach him any time.\n\nThe betrayal continued to expand and take on new life.\n\nCasidhe jutted her chin forward and straightened her stance. Pissed didn't begin to cover what she felt. \"I'm not sayin' another word until I get answers.\"\n\nHerrick's fists clenched. He reached for her.\n\nKleio spoke up quickly just before he touched Casidhe. \"I have warned you of dire circumstances. Do you not care to keep your treasure safe?\"\n\nHerrick stopped so quickly it was almost comical if Casidhe could remember how to laugh. Not anytime soon.\n\nHe was standing there one minute and racing down the main hall toward his cavern at the back of the castle the next. His frustrated roar bounced off the halls.\n\nCasidhe stared at him until he was gone. Her anger had a new target. \"What was all that about, seer? What trade, what treasure, and why is it in jeopardy?\"\n\nKleio glanced in the direction Herrick had disappeared. Seeming satisfied he was gone, she came back to Casidhe. \"You can never go forward as long as you allow others to set your path.\"\n\n\"I'm so not in the mood for your cryptic comments, Kleio. I've had a miserable couple of days. I'm not interested in riddles. What the hell is goin' on here?\"\n\nKleio sent another glance toward the cavern then suggested, \"See for yourself.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Daegan looked up as Lanna's soft steps entered the area where Garwyli trained her.\n\nShe announced, \"I am here.\"\n\nStraightening away from the window he'd been leaning against, he asked, \"Do ya remember when Evalle was taken to the Scamall realm?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" She clasped her hands in front of her.\n\n\"Ya could not see her then, could ya? But you told Storm to hurry.\"\n\nLanna's forehead drew tight with concentration. \"That is true. When Storm handed me emerald chakra stone kidnappers ripped from Evalle's chest, I sensed her pain. I feared she would not survive, but ... I could not see her. Do you wonder about sister?\"\n\n\"Yes. I will not rest until I know what the ring means when it jumps about. I wish ... to know if she lives or not. 'Tis not fair of me to ask that of ya, but 'tis all I can think about after ya said ya would see her dead or alive.\"\n\n\"I cannot see sister, because something hides her from me. I cannot say for sure she is alive or not.\"\n\nWhile he still had no definitive answer, he felt comforted by the chance to close the gap between belief she had died and fear she still lived, but was trapped.\n\nTristan, who Daegan had sent to bring Garwyli, opened the door and held it open. The druid tapped his cane all the way over to Daegan. \"Let's get on with it, dragon.\"\n\n\"As you wish, druid.\"\n\nGarwyli chuckled and tottered away ahead of everyone. Daegan smiled to see the old guy looking a bit spry. Lanna seemed just as pleased, though he doubted she knew why.\n\nDaegan had no idea how far back Garwyli's library stretched. The druid paused at the end of one long aisle and pointed his cane to the right. \"The Treoir chronicles are settled over yonder. Lanna is a tremendous asset to Treoir.\" He glanced at her over his shoulder. \"Ya have improved quickly. I am quite impressed.\"\n\nShe beamed under Garwyli's praise, which Daegan believed had to be earned.\n\nTristan lifted an arm, pointing down the aisle. \"The books I brought in are way back there. Want me to teleport, grab one, and come back?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lanna and Garwyli said together.\n\nTristan lifted both eyebrows. \"Ohhh-kay!\"\n\nLanna laughed. \"Am sorry, Tristan. Is best for me to choose book.\"\n\n\"Hmm. That's cool. What if I teleport all of us back there?\"\n\n\"'Tis a great idea, Tristan,\" Daegan said. \"I, for one, do not wish to make that trek.\"\n\nGarwyli scolded Daegan with a glare, but went along quietly.\n\nOnce Daegan reappeared at the rear of the library, he stood in a space with four heavy chairs adorned with thick cushions. A woven rug spread out twelve feet long beneath the chairs and a low table made of smooth wood.\n\nLanna volunteered, \"I find nice place when I first read books from Garwyli's library. Is my favorite.\"\n\n\"What a wonderful discovery.\" Daegan had no doubt the old coot had created that for her without her knowing it. Garwyli wouldn't even look him in the eye right now.\n\nDaegan stepped around, looking at books he could not recognize from the cover, but he knew the scents. One inhale and Casidhe's vibrant smile came to mind. This had been her happy place.\n\nHe could not think of her that way anymore. Not after what she'd done.\n\n\"Go on, girl,\" Garwyli urged as he walked over to a chair and settled. \"Find yar book.\"\n\nTristan picked a wall to lean against.\n\nLanna stepped up beside Daegan. She said nothing and continued two more steps into Casidhe's library. She shook her head, mumbling something, then turned to Daegan. \"You are not happy. Very ... hurt.\"\n\nDaegan did not want to discuss Casidhe. Luigsech, he corrected himself. \"I would prefer to only talk about findin' the woman who owns these books.\"\n\nGarwyli made an \"ahem\" noise.\n\nLooking chastised, Lanna walked through the row between shelves, running her fingers close to the spine of each book, but not touching any of those. She turned at the end and started up the next aisle.\n\nDaegan stepped over to keep her in sight.\n\nShe seemed lost in thought until her hand stayed in one spot when she took a step forward. Backing up, she gently removed the book, then held it reverently in both hands with her eyes closed.\n\nShe stood that way a long time, so long Daegan regretted having put her on the spot.\n\nTristan and Garwyli made noises of moving around behind him.\n\nGarwyli showed up next to Daegan, his hands propped on his cane, never taking his eyes off Lanna. Tristan stood behind Garwyli as if watching that the old guy did not fall backward.\n\nLanna lowered the book and walked forward to speak to Daegan. \"I know where she is...\"\n\nDaegan's knees almost buckled. \"'Tis great. Thank ya, lass.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" she said quietly. \"I know last place she was visible.\"\n\nThat did not sound promising. He held his questions to hear her out.\n\n\"Is mountain range.\"\n\n\"Reese told us that,\" Tristan admitted, sounding as ready to take off as Daegan.\n\nShifting a censuring glance his way, she asked, \"Did she tell exact location in mountains?\"\n\n\"Actually, no. She couldn't determine where the mountain range was in the human world.\"\n\n\"This I know.\"\n\n\"Truly, lass?\" Daegan asked, awed by the young woman's power.\n\n\"Yes.\" Her gaze drifted to Garwyli.\n\nDaegan took in the druid who said nothing, but his eyes and grim expression shouted something bothered him. \"What is wrong, Garwyli?\"\n\nSounding tired, the druid said, \"Nothin' be wrong, dragon.\"\n\nLanna pressed her lips together and stared down as she spoke. \"Garwyli not happy. He knows I must be there to show you location.\" When she looked up at her mentor, she said, \"I do not say this for me. I know only one way for dragon king to find this woman.\"\n\nShe spoke with solemn confidence, not as the busybody she'd often been referenced.\n\nDaegan had no desire to go against Garwyli's directive, but he had to ask, \"Is this a problem, druid? If so, ya must tell me.\"\n\n\"As I said, 'tis no problem. I only worry for her safety.\" Old blue eyes swung to Daegan. \"'Tis not meant to sound as an insult. I know ya are capable of protectin' her. But ya must protect her at all costs.\"\n\nGarwyli was reminding Daegan of their conversation in the garden. Daegan said, \"I will allow no harm to come to her even if it means turnin' back before I find the Luigsech woman. Ya have my word.\"\n\nTristan offered, \"Mine, too.\"\n\nAfter a deep breath, Garwyli told Lanna, \"Ya shall go with my blessin'.\"\n\nHer smile was one of appreciation, not of winning a battle. \"I will return quickly.\"\n\nDaegan's gaze drifted back to Garwyli's face where the old druid's steady, but grim, expression questioned if she would return at all.\n\nDaegan meant his vow. When he had no idea if Jennyver still lived, an unrealistic thought at that, he could not allow his desire to find her prevent him from keeping Lanna safe.\n\nLanna cradled the book in the crook of her arm to carry with her. Once they returned Garwyli to his quarters, Daegan, Tristan, and Lanna walked toward the front doors of the castle.\n\nTristan brought up a point. \"If Herrick knows something about Jennyver, how are we going to convince him to tell you, boss? His sister tried to kill you. Skarde would if he could. I'm betting Herrick might not be willing to talk before he goes dragon on you.\"\n\nLanna paid attention to everything said, but did not interrupt.\n\nDaegan had been thinking on the same thing. \"I have what Herrick will trade for.\"\n\n\"What will he accept?\" Lanna asked.\n\n\"His brother.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Cold wind slapped Daegan as he stared at snow-dusted mountains stretching as far as the eye could see beneath a moon not yet full.\n\n\"Is not far,\" Lanna consoled. She hugged the heavy fur cloak around her. He'd covered her from the thick wool cap pulled low over her ears to leather-and-fur boots.\n\nThe lass might be cold, but she refused to show a weakness.\n\nTristan's gryphon stood next to them. His gryphon had flown out across the mountains, searching for any sign of a village where Herrick might be living.\n\nHe returned without any new information.\n\nSkarde stood on Daegan's other side contained, muted, and protected by Lanna's majik. His fury seeped out, looking for purchase.\n\nDaegan asked Lanna, \"Where to now?\"\n\nShe peeled a glove off one hand and reached inside her cloak. She had the book strapped there so it would not fall. She closed her eyes for a long moment.\n\nTristan spoke to Daegan telepathically. <You want me to carry Skarde so Lanna can be close enough to talk to you?>\n\n<No.> Daegan appreciated Tristan's offer, but his second should not have to carry a man who had harmed his sister. Not unless Daegan had no other option.\n\nNot that Ruadh would enjoy carrying the ice dragon shifter, but Ruadh would do as asked as long as Skarde remained wrapped in a bundle claws could hold.\n\nLanna opened her eyes and pulled her hand back out to slide into the glove again. \"Valley is not far for gryphon or dragon. Is easier to find this valley if I fly with Tristan. When close, we land.\" She looked up at Daegan with eyes protected by clear glasses Tristan had suggested.\n\nDaegan lifted his chin in acknowledgment. \"I shall follow with Skarde.\"\n\nThe ice dragon made a noise, but too subdued by majik to be heard.\n\nOnce Daegan had Lanna secure on the gryphon's back, he shifted into his dragon. Ruadh lifted Skarde's body invisible to anyone not aware of the bundle, then used his rear legs to push off and fly, easily staying with Tristan's gryphon.\n\nLanna had been correct. It took only a few minutes for Tristan to make a slow sweep around a wide valley where nothing moved below.\n\nNo animals. No trees swaying in the brisk wind. Nothing except energy hovering over a wide area. A ward? What would it take to shield an area large enough to house Herrick and even a small clan? Herrick would not have survived so long without some form of clan.\n\nRuadh landed near Tristan's gryphon on a high ledge overlooking the valley.\n\nA vulture Daegan had noted while flying, which had disappeared, now returned. It circled them, close enough for Daegan to make out an eagle-shaped head. Daegan had never seen a vulture that large or with a head similar to Tristan's gryphon.\n\nRuadh took note, but dismissed the bird as no threat and shifted to give Daegan the human body. He helped Lanna off of the gryphon, then Tristan shifted. Daegan clothed his second immediately.\n\n\"Did you see that weird vulture?\" Tristan asked, pulling his cloak close.\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nLanna interjected, \"Is scout.\"\n\nDaegan dropped his gaze to her. \"What scout?\"\n\n\"Vulture not like other birds. Watched us fly. Eyes not natural.\" Spending no more time on the bird, Lanna said, \"This where dragon and woman disappear.\" She pointed down at the empty area they had flown around.\n\nTristan waited in silence, but he kept his gaze moving, watching the vulture flying in a wide arc around them. It began screeching.\n\nLanna turned to watch the vulture, too.\n\nDaegan had to make a decision on what to do next, but the vulture had gained his attention as well.\n\nLanna whispered, \"It watches us.\"\n\nThe vulture broke out of the circle it flew and angled down into the valley where it disappeared in a blink.\n\n\"You find how woman and dragon disappear,\" Lanna announced.\n\n\"'Tis a ward,\" Daegan agreed.\n\n\"Can we breach it, boss?\"\n\nLanna shook her head. \"Would be dangerous.\"\n\nDaegan agreed, but he had to get inside or bring Herrick out. Amazing that this ice dragon had found a way to survive all these years.\n\n\"Then what are we going to do?\" Tristan asked, clearly impatient to get moving.\n\nLanna puffed out a white cloud of air. \"We must wait.\"\n\nDaegan had no idea what the ward hid. This would turn far more dangerous soon if that vulture really was a scout for Herrick. He spoke to Lanna. \"I shall send ya back with Tristan.\"\n\nShaking her head, she repeated \"We ... must wait.\"\n\nBut for what? If Herrick had a way to leave the ward cloaked, Daegan's group could be attacked without a chance to shift into his dragon or for Tristan to teleport Lanna somewhere safe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Reese rubbed a hand over her hard stomach, which had yet to shape into a true baby bump. She'd never seen so many SUVs in such a small area. Even she and Quinn had shown up in one.\n\nEvalle pulled Storm's Jeep into the lineup at Sweetwater Creek, a historical cotton mill site west of Atlanta that had burned during the Civil War.\n\nWaving at Evalle, Reese asked Quinn, \"How many demons have they seen in this area in the last hour?\"\n\nReferencing his telepathic communication, Quinn said, \"Trey just updated me. There's been nine sightings in the last thirty minutes. They found one dead homeless person.\" He reached over to cover her hand, giving her an I-love-you-and-our-baby look.\n\nWarmth spread through her soul.\n\nShe would not think about yesterday or tomorrow, just this moment. And she would not allow her heinous father to harm the man she loved.\n\nShe flipped her hand and squeezed his, determined to sound confident. \"We're going to find I-zubrrali and stop this. Hopefully tonight.\"\n\nHe brushed his hand over her hair and shared a sad smile. \"I know, but I worry that he may get to you.\"\n\n\"Not a chance. After that unexpected road nap, I'm super charged.\" She hadn't felt sick recently, but sudden exhaustion would hit her fast. To keep Quinn out with his people, she'd slept in the back seat of his ginormous sport utility.\n\nCasper, a Belador ally, strolled up as Evalle joined them.\n\nReese reluctantly let go of Quinn's hand. They needed to have their game faces ready.\n\n\"Hey, Sunshine,\" Casper called to Evalle.\n\n\"Yo, Casper. I just love that nickname,\" she shoved back sarcastically. \"Okay, how many do we have with us tonight and what do we know?\"\n\n\"This is it,\" Quinn started.\n\n\"Really?\" Evalle looked around. \"What about all those vehicles?\"\n\nQuinn explained, \"I have a contingent of Beladors keeping humans out of a twelve-acre area. Some are APD and others are part of the park service. They should be able to handle a demon trying to get out.\"\n\nEvalle angled a confused expression at him. \"Trey just told me on the way in that nine demons have been sighted here and they've evaded everyone who tried to take them down. That's not a lot to contain, but we could use extra bodies to contain them.\"\n\n\"It's 'cause we're thin,\" Casper volunteered. \"Seven Beladors have gone to the healers just today.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" Evalle murmured. \"Sure am missing Adrianna.\"\n\nReese heard the personal grief for a close friend beneath her quiet words. Evalle was not one to stand still when a friend was in danger. Waiting to find Adrianna had to be killing her.\n\nQuinn lifted a hand to take the conversation. \"We'll find her, Evalle. I sent for Lanna, but she left with Daegan to help him. The minute she returns, Tristan will bring her.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Evalle sounded understanding, but she couldn't hide her disappointment.\n\nA sand-colored Hummer came barreling in hot.\n\nSensing something odd, Reese glanced in Evalle's direction.\n\nA ghostly-looking old man formed.\n\nDoing a double take, Reese whispered, \"Evalle?\"\n\nEvalle turned her way, which meant she stared through the ghost. \"What are you doing here, Grady? In fact, how did you get this far outside the city?\"\n\nHe frowned at her and grumbled, \"I'm here to help find our witch. I jumped on that Hummer soon as I heard them talkin' on the radio about findin' y'all.\"\n\nNow Reese remembered. That was Evalle's favorite Nightstalker. A good friend even if he was a ghoul who had died a long time ago. Nightstalker's were intelligence resources for supernaturals, but they rarely held any loyalty to one group.\n\n\"You need to hide,\" Evalle warned in a harsh whisper.\n\n\"Hmph.\" Grady turned invisible.\n\nThe Hummer had parked fast as if the driver owned this land. All four doors opened, spilling five big guys dressed in badass military looking gear.\n\nQuinn shared, \"The Belador team leader called to inform me Isak was headed this way. I said to let him pass.\"\n\nEvalle grimaced in the direction of the Hummer and spoke to Quinn from the side of her mouth. \"You know he's here for Adrianna, right?\"\n\n\"Yes. I had hoped we'd have something to tell him before he found out.\"\n\n\"Let me talk to him first,\" she suggested.\n\nQuinn nodded, which made sense. As Reese understood it, Evalle had known Isak longer than anyone, even Adrianna.\n\nReese had gotten to know Isak Nyght better while they were tracking Evalle's kidnapper. He'd known about nonhumans long before other humans. If not for him and his black ops team, she and Evalle might have been toast when a rogue group showed up hunting any nonhumans in the city.\n\nHe brought an extensive intelligence network with him when he became an ally of the Beladors.\n\nWith each powerful stride of that huge body, Isak sent the message he was not happy and would stop at nothing for what he wanted.\n\nHe smiled at no one as he strode over to Reese's group. \"Where. Is. She?\"\n\nHe'd spoken calmly, but each word carried a threat to anyone who delayed him from getting to Adrianna.\n\nEvalle jumped in first and held up her hand. \"Please don't go ballistic, Isak.\"\n\n\"I can't promise that.\"\n\n\"She's not here.\"\n\n\"I can see that, Sherlock,\" he snapped at Evalle. \"Stop stalling.\"\n\nEvalle looked sick at having to admit, \"We were on top of a parking deck in Atlanta this morning and had to call in Sen. Some being showed up and took both of them, but ...\"\n\n\"Then this being can't be one of your allies, right?\" Isak asked so softly chills ran up Reese's arms.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"That makes him fair game.\" Isak gave a hand signal for the group in formation behind him and he turned to leave.\n\n\"Hold it,\" Reese snapped out. \"We've been hunting Adrianna and Sen. We have intel.\"\n\nIsak slammed to a stop and did an about-face. \"What intel?\"\n\n\"I used remote viewing to follow her, Sen, and the strange being through a bolt hole. I can't pinpoint where they are, but I saw enough to think they may actually be here in the Atlanta area, not another realm.\"\n\nA muscle in Isak's jaw stopped flexing, but that couldn't be considered relief. He answered, \"Good to know.\"\n\nBefore he could turn again, Evalle interjected, \"Adrianna is our number one concern, but there seems to be more to this than what meets the eye. We need you to be in this with us.\"\n\n\"I'm on the hunt.\"\n\nQuinn said, \"Good. Then you agree to keep us apprised of all new information and not go off on your own, right?\"\n\nIsak said nothing.\n\n\"Give me a break, Isak,\" Evalle griped. \"We need each other. Plus, we all still have to deal with the Imortiks and demons. You'll find information we won't, but we have supernatural resources you can't duplicate. Adrianna would expect you to join us in the search, not go off on your own. You'll be sick if you find out we missed saving her because we didn't work together.\"\n\nIsak ignored all of Evalle's points, showing no remorse for his bullish attitude. \"I'm deploying enough teams to cover the city and outlying areas. We're killing anything that isn't Belador or a known ally.\"\n\n\"You can't do that, Isak!\" Evalle shouted. \"We have nonhuman allies you don't know about and you risk humans being caught in the crossfire. We've had clueless citizens running up with their damned phones to video Beladors fighting Imortiks, which is why some of our warriors are out of commission with healers. They had to divide their attention while fighting, but they protected the humans. Remember that rogue black ops bunch that drew down on us yesterday? They're out there, too. You'll have a bloodbath.\"\n\n\"Then call your people back and leave the demons and Imortiks all to me!\" Isak's voice shook with mounting frustration and no patience at being delayed for any reason.\n\nQuinn always surprised Reese in these tense situations when he could speak in a voice of reason. \"Everyone wants Adrianna back. Evalle's right that we should join forces. We have a woman with different gifts than Reese, who may be able to locate Adrianna. Work with us and\u2014\"\n\n\"Why isn't she here right now?\" Isak demanded.\n\nQuinn lost the effort to remain civil and snarled, \"She's on another continent helping our dragon, who is trying to locate the grimoires to save this world.\" He leaned forward with power spooling around. \"She's also my cousin, so back the fuck off.\"\n\nSo much for Quinn's reasonable voice, but Reese supported him a hundred percent. This was not the time to divide forces.\n\nIsak and Quinn glared at each other in tense silence.\n\nThen Isak turned and strode away, calling out, \"Let me know if you find her. I'm going through the city until I find something.\"\n\nEvalle hissed, \"Grady? Come here.\"\n\nThe ghoul took shape. \"What's goin' on?\"\n\n\"A being none of us have ever seen grabbed Adrianna, but we think she's still in Atlanta. I'll explain more when I come by your area. Please put the word out with Nightstalkers in Atlanta and find out anything you can.\"\n\n\"You gonna owe me big time after this.\"\n\nEvalle rolled her eyes. \"If you need that Hummer to return to the city, you better get moving.\"\n\nGrady jerked around at the sound of Isak's Hummer backing up to head out of here. He vanished and reappeared on top, grinning.\n\n\"Crazy Nightstalker better not get hurt,\" Evalle worried aloud.\n\nCasper tipped his cowboy hat back and exhaled. \"That went well. We'll end up with a civil war between humans and nonhumans in no time.\"\n\nEvalle and Quinn had matching dejected expressions.\n\nReese took in all three faces. \"Are we doing this?\"\n\nQuinn maintained his rigid posture as a leader and returned to the business at hand. \"Yes, but we're only staying an hour tops. I just sent a telepathic message to Trey, informing him about Isak and his team so our people will not confront them, but I need to return soon.\" His gaze flicked past her to Evalle and Casper. \"The good news here is that we have more combined power in our foursome than four Beladors. We'll be fine.\"\n\nEvalle listened with tight lines across her forehead. She didn't seem to be as confident, but she popped out a quick smile. \"Sure. We got this.\"\n\nQuinn began directing everyone. \"As always, it's better if we pair up. I'll take Reese and walk her east through the center of this area. You two cover this side.\" He pointed between him and back where the crumbled ruins of the brick mill stood.\n\nReese studied everything. Why would I-zubrrali set up here?\n\nHe hadn't been near water last time, so she dismissed the water to focus on the forest and remnants of the building. She still came up empty.\n\nWho knew how a preternatural serial killer thought?\n\nEvalle swung around, taking in the landscape in all directions. She turned back with her dark-brown ponytail flipping out of the way. \"Not to argue, Quinn, but ... with so few people, maybe Casper and I should split up so we can watch both sides of you.\"\n\nCasper stood with his boots apart and thumbs hooked in the pockets of his worn jeans. \"I agree with Sunshine.\"\n\nEvalle flipped him an annoyed glance.\n\nThe cowboy smiled as if proud of himself.\n\nReese took in the tense set of Quinn's lips. That man debated with how to do his duty and still keep everyone here safe. Hard to accomplish when their team of four had to spread out to cover the area.\n\nDecision made, Quinn instructed, \"Very well, you two parallel us. Casper, you don't have telepathy. How will you let us know if you run into a demon?\"\n\n\"You'll hear it scream.\" Casper grinned, totally unconcerned.\n\nReese moved a hand to her stomach. \"No time left to talk. I sense at least one demon.\"\n\nEveryone turned deadly serious. Evalle and Casper split up.\n\nQuinn asked Reese, \"Which way?\"\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nHe put a hand on her arm to stop her.\n\nWithout turning around, she repeated his words. \"We have an agreement.\"\n\nHe gave her a gentle squeeze, just enough to let her know he was trying to do as he agreed, but would keep her safe. His fingers stayed a few more seconds as if undecided, then slid away.\n\nReese walked forward at a steady pace, not rushing, but not lagging either. When she threw quick looks to her right and left, she caught glimpses of Evalle's vintage tan BDU, or Battle Dress Uniform, shirt then Casper's gray T-shirt and black Stetson.\n\nThe deeper they went, the more the trees began to thin out.\n\nEnergy inside her churned faster.\n\nUgh. She whispered to Quinn, \"I have more energy buzzing. Could mean multiple demons.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" His worry came through that one tight word.\n\nShe got it, but she could not sit in a protected room while her friends and others faced a growing army of demons. When no one thought she was listening due to sleeping, she heard one group tell Quinn the demons were turning into Imortiks faster every hour and Imortiks were harder to kill.\n\nThe way I-zubrrali, her damned father, whipped out demons, knowing they would be quickly possessed by Imortiks, she'd bet his goal was an army.\n\nBut how did he plan to control those monsters?\n\nThe energy heating her core ceased suddenly. Reese stopped walking.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Quinn asked, his gaze watching everything around her.\n\n\"My energy stopped humming.\"\n\nHis sharp blue eyes zeroed in on her. \"That's good, right?\"\n\n\"No. I have never had a demon fail to come for my energy. It's like crack to them. They can't make themselves back away. Something else is going on. Only someone more powerful can make a demon stand down.\"\n\n\"I-zubrrali?\"\n\nShe swallowed hard. \"Maybe. Probably. If he's shielding them from view, everyone out here is in trouble.\"\n\nLoud noise erupted on Reese's left. Then on the right.\n\nQuinn said, \"My perimeter Belador team just told me they're fighting demons.\"\n\n\"They're coming,\" Evalle shouted, running up to Quinn and Reese with Casper arriving from the other side at the same moment.\n\nHands shoved up, Evalle spun with her back to Reese. She slapped kinetic hits at the demons rushing out from the forest. Quinn already had Reese at his back with his hands shoved forward creating a kinetic wall.\n\nCasper raised his hands and shouted something like a war cry Reese didn't understand. Then a shimmering highland warrior took over Casper's body. This man had long brown hair, a bushy beard, a chiseled body bulging with muscles, and wore a Scottish plaid belted at his waist, which stopped above thick calves.\n\nHe lifted a sword and yelled, \"Ye vermin shall die!\"\n\nWhoa.\n\nDemons ran at them from all directions. Casper's alter ego sliced a demon from right shoulder to its waist on the left. The demon turned into orange dust that floated away.\n\nThere were still too many.\n\nEvery demon that died and disintegrated into ashes still left a horrid sewage smell.\n\nI-zubrrali had to be behind this ambush. Even a supernatural's energy would eventually become depleted.\n\nReese shouted, \"Open a spot I can blast through!\"\n\nQuinn said, \"No.\"\n\nEvalle and Casper ignored her.\n\nReese turned and jumped up on Quinn's back.\n\nHe kept slapping kinetic hits at demons and yelled, \"What the hell are you doing?\"\n\n\"Be still and drop your kinetics to six feet high.\" She leaned down and pleaded, \"Let me do the one thing I do best.\"\n\nQuinn ordered, \"Keep your wall up, Evalle. You and Casper protect my back.\"\n\nReese climbed higher on Quinn's back and hooked her legs around his neck, sitting on his shoulders.\n\nDemons coming straight at Quinn looked up and drooled. Literally. They rushed in. He knocked them off their feet with his power, but more came right behind that wave.\n\nReese spun her hands together and waited until four had made it close enough. She went overhead and slammed a hit down in the middle of their group.\n\nPower exploded. They turned to dust.\n\n\"Yes!\" She fist-pumped.\n\nDemons were leaping up and slapping at the top of Evalle's kinetic shield, trying to find a place to climb over. Their screaming banshee noise filled the air.\n\nReese took down another six demons with Quinn's help.\n\nMore were coming, crashing through the trees. How could anyone make that many?\n\nEvalle said, \"We have a new problem.\"\n\n\"What?\" Quinn shouted.\n\n\"I see yellow ones showing up.\"\n\nDemons surged on Casper's highland warrior.\n\nReese had two more coming at Quinn. Her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest. She hit the demons overrunning Casper then struck two rushing Quinn.\n\nBut that last hit was little more than a large spark. One not-yet-dead demon's body remained.\n\nShe now saw multiple yellow ones appearing at the back of the first attack. \"Quinn. We can't beat this many.\"\n\n\"I want you out of here,\" Quinn roared.\n\n\"Not without you.\" She would not budge on that.\n\nAll at once, every demon, yellow or not, stopped moving.\n\nReese turned slowly, searching everywhere for I-zubrrali. He had to be here. Terror rolled through her. She clutched Quinn, frantic to keep him and the others safe. Damn her miserable father.\n\nEvalle crowded closer to Quinn and whispered, \"What's going on?\"\n\nCasper returned to his natural form and backed up to Quinn. \"This can't be good.\"\n\nQuinn said, \"I think we have a firm answer on the demon origin.\"\n\nReese faced forward again, heart pounding as she searched.\n\nI-zubrrali had to be here.\n\nA misty veil formed and slowly fell away, revealing the greatest monster here.\n\nThere he stood in an all-white tunic and matching pants, holding himself as if all should fall to their knees in the presence of his superiority. He smiled at her.\n\nShe wanted to throw up. \"Why are you overrunning this world with demons, oh, sperm donor?\"\n\n\"You have a tart mouth.\"\n\nIf Reese closed her eyes, she'd think she was listening to someone with a professional speaking voice, one meant to calmly explain anything.\n\nBut with open eyes, she saw the bastard who had ruined her mother's life as well as Reese's. \"I'll take that as a compliment.\"\n\nHe continued smiling and her stomach turned. \"You got that flaw from your mother. She was fiery and full of words.\"\n\nA small moment of pain crossed through Reese's chest, but she could not change that this demonic superbeing had stolen her mother away from her tribe in the Pacific Northwest and raped her.\n\nRight now, he'd played this encounter so well that Reese was drained and unable to kill him. She whispered to Quinn, \"Any chance of finding Tristan?\"\n\nHe softly answered, \"No. I don't know what this being has done, but I can't reach any of my Beladors not standing here.\"\n\nNow that she had an idea of how I-zubrrali operated, she would have a trap they could set up quickly next time.\n\nShe had to keep him talking while she regenerated her energy.\n\nFirst, she had to find a way to get everyone out of here safely.\n\n\"You haven't answered my question,\" she prodded, looking for any chink in his unholy armor.\n\n\"Why I make demons should be obvious. I always need followers, even more now than ever. When an Imortik dives into a demon I have created, the Imortik belongs to me as well.\"\n\nEvalle cursed softly.\n\n\"What are you planning to do with your army?\" Reese asked.\n\n\"Ah, child, I would enjoy sharing that, but with too much knowledge, you might step in my way.\" He enjoyed every word that came out of his mouth. \"I have the feeling you wish to save your friends and the humans, though I do not understand that part at all. Still, if you want them to survive, I am willing to grant your wish.\"\n\nQuinn gripped Reese's legs as if holding her firm to prevent her going after her father.\n\n\"So now you want to step in and be a dad? Give me nice things and make my life wonderful?\" Reese put her hands on her thighs and leaned forward. \"I'll play your silly game. What will it take for you to grant my wish and put down all the demons then slither back beneath the rock you came out from under?\"\n\nI-zubrrali maintained a neutral mask, but his eyes suddenly glowed even though they were black. \"It is simple, daughter. I will give you a blood oath to destroy all my demons, even the ones possessed by Imortiks, and not make new demons for a thousand years. In exchange, give me the baby you carry right this minute. You can't birth that child alive, but I can take it from you and give the boy life. I'm making a generous offer.\"\n\nReese felt lightheaded, hot and cold, blood rushing fast through her ears. She put a hand over her middle.\n\nThe lives of all her friends, and Quinn, in exchange for her baby?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "A week ago, Casidhe would never have stood in Herrick's great hall shouting at Fenella or Herrick, and definitely not a seer, whose power had always intimidated her.\n\nToday, she'd had her fill. \"What do you mean to find out for myself, seer? How can I know anythin' when all of you keep me in the dark?\"\n\nKleio frowned, taking her time to reply. \"To trust blindly is to allow others to take advantage of you.\"\n\nCasidhe lifted her arms and looked up at the ceiling. \"Give me a freakin' break! Is there no one in this universe who gives a damn about me?\" She dropped her arms and stated, \"I've had about enough of people dumpin' on me today. Either say what you mean or stop talkin'.\"\n\nKleio held her head as if it hurt.\n\nServed her right.\n\nThe seer sighed. \"This is not a time to be foolish.\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean arguin' with a dragon shifter who can smash me with one swat? Yeah, that wasn't my brightest moment, but I'm so done with everythin'. I don't freakin' care. Have you turned Herrick completely against me? Were you the one who convinced him to use me as bait for the red dragon?\" Casidhe wished her words had come out strong and not bitter.\n\nSighing with pent-up frustration, the seer groused, \"Do you not see what is going on?\"\n\n\"Stop spewin' riddles. How can I see a damned thing? I don't live here and I don't have your omniscient vision. Admit it. You turned Herrick against me,\" Casidhe railed, ignoring the sadness growing in Kleio's eyes.\n\nWhy wouldn't the seer come clean and tell her the truth?\n\nKleio's voice fell, sounding hurt. \"I was the one who pleaded with him to send a warning to you and Fenella of danger coming to both of you. He only informed Fenella.\"\n\nTruth, but Casidhe had no trust in anyone here. After all the years growing up around the castle, these people were strangers to her today.\n\nA part of her wanted to take this great hall apart, make someone pay attention. Another part wanted to curl up in a corner and hide from all this, but that was the old Casidhe.\n\nNo corner here belonged to her.\n\nShe was on her own and not backing down. \"You never wanted me here,\" she accused Kleio, daring the woman to deny it.\n\nEyes shiny with emotion, the seer said, \"Oh, I did wish for you to be gone, but not out of any malice I hold against you. I have watched how Herrick has treated you since childhood. It was not my place to interfere, but I see that you will not survive if you do not stand on your own. And you cannot do that if you do not touch the truth with your hands.\"\n\nCasidhe's head felt disconnected from her body.\n\nShould she believe this woman or was Kleio so adept at fooling everyone that she thought she could spew any lie and everyone believed her?\n\nHer miserable conscience and sense of fairness raised its head to ask questions.\n\nWhat about the seer? Had Casidhe only seen this woman as a rival because of how Herrick turned to Kleio for whatever he needed and never gave Casidhe credit for her hard work?\n\nShould she accept what Kleio was saying as truth?\n\nIf so, that painted Herrick as a monster.\n\nKleio glanced at the long hallway Herrick had run through to reach his lair in the mountain cave. She quickly turned back to Casidhe and leaned closer, speaking softly. \"There is little time.\"\n\nCasidhe lifted a hand with her palm flat forward. \"Don't say another freakin' word if you can't tell me what Herrick is so worried about and some trade he's expectin' to do.\"\n\n\"You know the answer to the second question.\"\n\nIf Kleio had hit her with another riddle, Casidhe might have lost her mind. But the seer had said that as if she really expected Casidhe to know the answer.\n\nShe said the only thing Herrick should be worried about for a trade. \"Skarde.\"\n\nThe seer canted her head.\n\nWas that a yes from her? Casidhe rubbed her aching forehead. \"Did you find Skarde?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I don't even know for sure if Skarde is alive,\" Casidhe admitted in an angry shout. Then she studied Kleio closely when she asked, \"Have you had any visions about the red dragon comin' around Galway?\"\n\nNot a peep from the seer.\n\nDropping her hand to her waist, Casidhe took what she considered a don't-screw-with-me pose. \"Okay, for argument's sake, let's say Herrick does plan to trade for Skarde and he still thinks the red dragon has Skarde. Now you say he has a treasure to trade. You make it sound like it's a loaf of bread about to spoil, so you clearly know what it is.\"\n\nKleio pursed her lips and released a noise of exasperation. \"Use that mind of yours. What would the Treoir dragon king want above all?\"\n\nReacting to Kleio's annoyed tone, Casidhe replied sharply, \"I have no idea. Daegan is out fightin' Imortiks to save his people. He probably has a hell of a hoard, but he values his people the most. He ...\"\n\nKleio remained stoic, not making a sound.\n\nCasidhe walked around, thinking.\n\nThis should not be a difficult question. She sorted her thoughts out loud. \"Daegan is desperate to save Beladors and humans bein' overtaken by Imortiks. I doubt Herrick has captured a Belador.\" She snorted at that idea. Daegan would have found the Belador by now.\n\nCasidhe scratched her hair, wanting a bath and food. Unable to shake off her anger, she lost her patience and snapped, \"If Herrick doesn't have a Belador, that leaves family. All of Daegan's family is in Treoir.\"\n\nKleio arched an eyebrow that questioned Casidhe's last statement.\n\nCold fingers climbed Casidhe's spine. She lifted her gaze to the seer. \"What are you sayin'? Tell me now!\"\n\n\"Nothing. I am forbidden from sharing visions without Herrick's approval.\"\n\nThat was the reason for the riddles.\n\nCasidhe's face felt cold and bloodless. She could barely force out, \"Does Herrick have one of Daegan's family?\"\n\nWas that even possible?\n\nWhy not? Herrick and Daegan still lived. So did maybe even Skarde.\n\nFinally speaking, the seer replied, \"Only Herrick can answer that question.\"\n\nHands damp, Casidhe wrung them just thinking about the implications. She whisper-shouted, \"Where would he keep someone this long without any of us knowin' it?\"\n\nOnce again, the seer answered her with a question. \"Where is the one place none of us have ever entered?\"\n\nStunned at the possibility Herrick might be holding a family member of Daegan's, Casidhe slowly turned to stare at the long hall leading to Herrick's cave.\n\nHis dragon's lair.\n\nShock had her shaking her head. \"He has no one from today or Daegan would be tearin' this place apart to find that person. Who could Herrick have kept alive all these thousands of years? This is not a realm. It would have to be someone immortal, right?\"\n\nThe damned ring chose that moment to vibrate.\n\nCasidhe slapped her chest.\n\nKleio stared in shock. \"What is wrong with you?\"\n\n\"Nothin'.\"\n\nThe seer arched a stern look at that lie.\n\nCasidhe narrowed her eyes and her voice hardened. \"You have your secrets. I have some of my own.\" She had to find a way to prevent Herrick from going after Skarde until she had a chance to talk to Daegan.\n\nShe would not stand by and allow anyone to harm Daegan. He was the red dragon, but she had no idea what Herrick had been up to all these years. He had been planning a long time and Daegan didn't even know Herrick existed.\n\nShe would not lose Daegan to years of hate from an ancient war.\n\nKleio asked softly, \"Where is the ring Herrick gave you before you left for college? Do you still have it?\"\n\nThe question startled Casidhe. What did the seer know about this ring? Feeling irritable and smug, Casidhe pulled her hand from where she'd trapped the ring beneath her shirt and reached in to lift the chain.\n\nEnergy sizzled across her skin. A new and weird reaction.\n\n\"The ring now vibrates. That makes sense,\" Kleio murmured.\n\n\"I'm not even goin' to ask what you're talkin' about.\" Then she couldn't stop herself. \"What exactly does this ring mean?\"\n\n\"Find the owner of that ring, find the truth.\"\n\nNope. Kleio was incapable of a simple answer.\n\nInhaling deeply, Kleio hurried to speak. \"You must decide for yourself where that truth lies. To believe the truth, you must first see it with your own eyes then touch it with your hands.\"\n\nA noise drew Casidhe's gaze to the long hallway leading to Herrick's lair.\n\nThere he came stomping back with his dragon rumbling from deep in his chest.\n\nGood. Casidhe positioned herself with feet spread apart, ready for a verbal throwdown with Herrick. He was too arrogant to speak in riddles.\n\n\"Now, back to you.\" He pointed a finger at Casidhe.\n\nShe crossed her arms. \"What treasure are you hidin' that the red dragon would exchange for Skarde?\"\n\nHis eyes glowed. \"Do not dare to question me on anything. You have much to answer for.\"\n\nOh, hell no. Did everyone think to screw with her? \"I have done a great deal for you, none of which you show any appreciation for, but that's beside the point. Tell me the truth and I might be able to prevent a bloodbath.\" Casidhe believed the red dragon could hold his own normally, but Daegan had the Imortik venom in him.\n\n\"Your insolence is unacceptable.\" Herrick's shouting had to be waking the entire castle.\n\n\"I have asked little from anyone,\" Casidhe plowed on, temper roaring. If she was to spend her last day on earth here, she would not go without getting to the bottom of this. \"You never told me the truth about Fenella or that she was a member of the MacConnaugh squire family.\"\n\nHerrick's mouth opened. That hit home.\n\nCasidhe wasn't done. \"I have been one-hundred-percent loyal. I have had no life while I spent every minute searchin' for anythin' that would find Skarde for you. But you have never told me the truth about who I am or my power. Your squire families fed me half-truths about the Treoirs and the red dragon. Want to know how I know?\" She didn't give him time to answer and kept at it, shouting, \"Because Queen-freakin'-Maeve captured me and held me captive in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb. I was tasked with readin' books in her library from the time of dragons.\"\n\nShe paused for that to sink in.\n\nHerrick looked dumbfounded and Kleio was clearly shaken.\n\nNodding, she kept on. \"Yeah, that's right. I found a lot of conflictin' information, but I still would not question anythin' here. Not until after all the times I put myself in the path of danger to save Fenella, I find her relaxin' with her family. I knew right then I had been a fool. I had been used. She didn't need me.\" Casidhe drew in a deep breath and boomed out each word. \"She. Had. You! Must be nice to have family.\"\n\nThe seer grimaced at that, but Herrick's face turned colder by the second.\n\nCasidhe held his gaze. \"You told me nothin' but half-truths about the Treoirs and my background. This is your chance to give me all the truth and redeem yourself.\"\n\nThat did it for Herrick. He stepped toward her, head lowered, and speaking in a deadly tone. \"How dare you demand anything of me? A street urchin with nothing until I found you.\"\n\n\"Until you found me, which begs the question why you looked for me.\"\n\n\"You will pay for your impudence,\" he threatened.\n\nShe didn't know if everything she'd been through had crashed in on her or if she just did not care anymore. \"Touch me and lose all hope of gettin' Skarde back.\"\n\nNow that the words were out, she hoped like hell she could back them up."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Hair stood on Casidhe's arms from Herrick's power rushing through the room. She couldn't take back what she'd said.\n\nShe wouldn't.\n\nShe needed something to hold over Herrick to get him to calm down.\n\nKleio had quieted the minute Casidhe announced she was the only one who could hand Herrick his brother.\n\nEveryone else who lived in the lower quarters of the castle were not present, but Casidhe had no doubt the entire clan hid nearby, listening to Herrick's rants.\n\n\"Where is Skarde?\" The raw emotion in his voice hurt to hear when he'd never shown anything close to it for her.\n\nShe held her arms tight across her chest and doubled down. \"I'm not sayin' another word until you show me what you're hidin' in your dragon's lair. Or should I say the person you are holdin' prisoner.\" She read guilt in his eyes just as clearly as Latin text. \"You said you had somethin' the red dragon would absolutely trade for. I foolishly thought you meant gold or other treasure, but I now know for sure he would not value somethin' so trivial as trinkets.\"\n\nShock widened Herrick's eyes before they narrowed into mean slits. He demanded in a rough voice, \"You have become an ally of the red dragon? You betrayed me for that dragon?\"\n\n\"I have betrayed no one!\" Casidhe made clear. \"You raised me to find the red dragon. You sent me out with the Luigsech name, wavin' a flag to get the red dragon's attention. When he finally shows up, you do not get to accuse me of failin' to be loyal to you. I have been far more loyal to you than I have received in return.\"\n\nKleio's expression shifted with every word spoken. When Casidhe glanced at her to check the pulse of the room, the seer's proud gaze surprised her. That had been the last person she ever expected to nod and encourage her to keep speaking her mind.\n\n\"I. Want. Skarde!\" Herrick ground out as if chewing bricks, just repeating the same words Casidhe had heard her entire life.\n\nDid he think that would work with her right now?\n\nMaybe, since she'd fallen into line every other time. She'd been through too much to fold now. She would never have a chance to be with Daegan until this all got straightened out.\n\nStanding firm, Casidhe stayed the course, unwilling to answer another question from Herrick until he answered hers. She accused, \"Your prize possession is someone dear to the red dragon. Who?\"\n\n\"You will never know.\"\n\n\"Then you will never see Skarde again.\"\n\nHerrick raged, \"You will tell me where he is now!\"\n\nKleio stepped forward. \"I have always given you sound advice, Herrick.\"\n\nHe jerked to her as if he'd forgotten anyone else stood in the great hall with them. \"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"Every moment you spend arguing is one less minute you have to save ... your treasure.\"\n\nCasidhe put it together. \"Oh, hell! Is the person dyin'? If you let someone important to Daegan die and he finds out, he will destroy everythin' in his path to get to you.\"\n\n\"Only a fool would underestimate me.\" Herrick glowered at her.\n\nScreeching erupted outside.\n\nThe man tending a fire when Herrick's dragon had dropped her off came running inside. \"Sire! Your vulture is upset. I think it calls for you.\"\n\nHerrick ran out of the room without hesitation.\n\n\"Time is running out!\" Kleio yelled, panicking.\n\n\"For whom?\" Casidhe asked yet again. \"I need to know what's goin' on!\"\n\nThe heavy door to the castle slammed open. Herrick made a prehistoric sound. \"You brought the red dragon to my door!\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\" Casidhe couldn't breathe. This would go downhill the second Herrick went out to engage him. She had to think fast as Herrick pounded across the room to her.\n\nKleio whispered urgently, \"Use what you know.\"\n\nAgain, not clear.\n\nCasidhe lifted a hand and said the only thing she could. \"He's here to make a trade.\" If Daegan was here, then Tristan would be at his side. If Daegan did possess Skarde, he had only to send Tristan to teleport Skarde here.\n\nGood logic, right?\n\nWhat if Daegan did not have Skarde and had no idea where he was? If not, why was Daegan here?\n\nHad he found a way to follow her?\n\nShe had to talk to Daegan first, no matter what.\n\nPlease let him have Skarde. That would actually push Daegan and Herrick to negotiate.\n\n\"You lie,\" Herrick accused.\n\nAs if she would admit to that? \"Why would I lie? I did not bring him here, but he has a lot of people with gifts in his clan. He has a woman with remote viewin'.\"\n\nHerrick angled his head at her.\n\nExcellent. He had no idea what that meant. She pumped her head to nod three times. \"If the treasure you're holdin' onto is in jeopardy, what are you waitin' for?\"\n\nHerrick appeared to be in a dilemma.\n\n\"I want to see this person,\" Casidhe said, unwilling to argue more.\n\n\"No. You stay here.\"\n\n\"No!\" Casidhe shouted back at him. \"You need me. I want to know what you're tradin' with so I can make this work.\" Actually, she needed time to figure out what to do.\n\nIn a consoling, but compelling, voice, Kleio said, \"You must hurry, Herrick. Death will end all trades.\"\n\nHe pushed all that anger in Kleio's direction.\n\nShe lifted a hand. \"I am not the one who put you in this position. You wanted this day to arrive and it has come.\"\n\n\"You do not understand.\" This time, he sounded more weary than obstinate.\n\n\"Help us understand, Herrick.\" The seer kept trying to reach him without shoving too hard. \"What do you have to show the red dragon?\"\n\nCasidhe rubbed her tired eyes then slapped her hands to her hips, beyond tired of this crap. \"Daegan has figured out you have someone. I have no idea how he did, but he would not be here unless he knew.\" She hoped he came because he was worried for her, but then he'd really have to know this place existed.\n\nTo be honest, she had no idea how he found it or if he knew she was even here.\n\nThe vulture screeched again outside.\n\nKleio's voice shuddered. \"Time is almost gone. You will have nothing.\"\n\nCasidhe would never get this chance again to find out what Herrick had been hiding for so long. \"If you don't want Skarde, say so now. I'll go out and convince Daegan you two have nothin' to talk about.\"\n\n\"No!\" Herrick shook his fists in frustration then turned for the long hallway and took off running.\n\nOh, no, he was not leaving her. Casidhe headed after him. Footsteps rushed behind her. Had to be Kleio.\n\nWhen Casidhe reached the end of the hallway, she entered the infamous cave no one she knew of had ever ventured into. Herrick slowed and lifted his hand.\n\nKleio shouted, \"Do not bar us from the room if you wish Casidhe to aid you.\"\n\nHerrick stayed his hand then began moving it quickly, speaking terse words in a rapid pattern.\n\nOnce Casidhe and Kleio reached him, they stayed close.\n\nAs Herrick led the way downstairs, he continued his rant at Casidhe. \"You have sided with a dragon that destroyed my family and all the other clans. I will never have more than Skarde again. I will not be denied my brother.\"\n\nCasidhe would not waste breath trying to argue with him. She had doubts about the stories she'd been told of the red dragon's bloody rampage before Queen Maeve locked him away.\n\nHerrick would believe nothing she said.\n\nHe made a last turn and entered a quiet room with two torches burning. It was like stepping back in time. Rough-carved stone walls surrounded the small cave room. Her skin pebbled with tiny bumps from the chilly air.\n\nPlease tell her this person was not a corpse.\n\nHe continued his one-sided argument. \"You are wrong. I gave you the Luigsech name to protect you. Daegan would not kill someone he needed information from.\"\n\nHow was that consoling?\n\nCasidhe kept her mouth buttoned tight. Arguing would slow them down. Curiosity was eating her up. How many secrets had she lived around for all these years?\n\nThe farther down they went, the more the ring quivered.\n\nSo this ring really was connected to the person he had down there? Another way he'd set her up. She'd been wearing part of what had to be a Treoir family heirloom around her neck.\n\nHe stopped talking when he reached a wall at the far side of the room and murmured soft words.\n\nThe stone disappeared to reveal a foggy gray cloud.\n\nCasidhe stepped closer, but stayed behind him.\n\nWhen the smoky barrier dissipated, it left behind a misty wall, which cleared to reveal a young woman with pale skin. Copper-red hair able to reach her waist draped along her prone body laid on a bed of marble.\n\nCasidhe had no words. That woman belonged to Daegan's family.\n\nKleio gasped. \"That's her.\"\n\nHerrick turned to her. \"You have seen her?\"\n\n\"Yes. The vision that sent me to warn you.\" A tear ran down Kleio's cheek. \"She begged me to help. She said you were killing her.\"\n\nThe ring inside Casidhe's shirt continued vibrating. She lost it and railed at Herrick. \"How long have you had that woman here? Daegan's family? Are you kiddin' me? Is she even alive?\"\n\n\"She lives.\" Herrick swung back to the image. \"She remains in the same health she had when she entered.\"\n\n\"How can you know that?\" Casidhe snarled at him, staring at the young woman. \"How long, Herrick?\" She felt sick.\n\n\"You may not be able to take her out of there, Herrick,\" Kleio warned.\n\n\"How can I trade her if I do not?\" His agonized tone exposed how torn he was standing here.\n\nHe wanted Skarde, but he now feared handing over a body to Daegan if the woman did not survive leaving her cocoon.\n\nHerrick just now realized that Daegan would hand him a body in return.\n\n\"You can't leave her there,\" Casidhe asserted. No person should have ever been trapped that way. The ring on her chain continued to act up. \"Not unless you're willin' to bring Daegan in here to see her and let him make the decision to pull her out.\"\n\n\"The red dragon will never come in here!\"\n\nCasidhe's heart broke with staring at the woman. She thought she couldn't be any more disappointed and furious with Herrick, but he proved her wrong. \"Didn't you have a plan to take her out when you found Skarde?\"\n\n\"Of course I did, but ... now I am not so sure. I do not want Skarde harmed,\" he whined in misery.\n\nHe clearly hadn't cared that much about this woman or how Daegan would feel.\n\nCasidhe couldn't continue another step until that woman was freed. If she died, then at least she would no longer be left in a living hell of being between this world and the next. If the woman had spoken to Kleio in a vision, which Casidhe believed had happened, then her spirit remained locked in that chamber.\n\nCasidhe wanted this over with. \"Take her out and I'll take her to the red dragon.\" The ring hummed faster with energy.\n\nHerrick stepped closer to losing his mind every second. \"You will stay here.\"\n\nUnbelievable stubborn old shifter. \"If you go out there with this woman, you two will battle before any trade is made. Daegan will think you are trickin' him. I thought you wanted your brother. Alive,\" she added. \"What's more important right now?\"\n\nShe must have gotten through to him. He walked over to the wall and pulled a small stone free that had appeared to be part of the solid wall.\n\nHe withdrew a scroll that smelled as old as the ones in Queen Maeve's library and rolled it out. That he did not take long to read it had Casidhe thinking he had reviewed the text many times over the years.\n\nThe woman in the chamber turned her head to Casidhe. Her greenish-hazel eyes opened.\n\nCold chills climbed Casidhe's spine. She did live.\n\nThe ring felt as if it would jump from inside the shirt. She breathed out, \"Herrick?\"\n\nHe ignored her.\n\nKleio said, \"She lives.\"\n\nHerrick turned slowly. His tanned skin lost half its color. His lips parted. He uttered one word. \"Jennyver.\"\n\nCasidhe's mind exploded with pieces of information on the Treoir family. Jennyver had been one of Daegan's older sisters.\n\nDaegan would trade all he possessed to see her again.\n\nHe would also make someone pay dearly for what had been done to her.\n\nCasidhe started trembling uncontrollably. \"Get her out of there, Herrick.\" She didn't give a damn if she pissed him off. Bile ran up her throat at what had been done to Jennyver.\n\nHeaving one deep breath after another, he didn't move.\n\nKleio supported Casidhe by telling Herrick, \"You will have to live with your conscience later. Free this one now.\"\n\nSeeming incapable of speech, he stepped over to the misty wall and began speaking softly at first.\n\nCasidhe had no knowledge of the language he used.\n\nPausing to swallow hard, Herrick lifted his voice and spoke each strange word in a baritone that built energy with each syllable.\n\nPower sizzled in the air and zinged around, dragging a silvery trail of crystals.\n\nWhen Herrick reached the last words, he shoved his arm into the misty wall. It exploded.\n\nCasidhe covered her ears and ducked away, but looked around to find nothing tangible had blasted apart.\n\nThe ancient majik used to conceal and preserve the woman had reacted powerfully.\n\nShe hurried forward as wisps of smoke drifted away.\n\nJennyver shakily sat up and turned to lower her gown-covered legs down. She put a hand to her head and stared at Herrick. Her voice sounded as if she had a bad cold. \"I dreamed of you ... killin' me.\"\n\n\"I never harmed you,\" he argued in a weak voice riddled with guilt.\n\nJennyver looked at Kleio next. \"Are you dead, too?\"\n\nKleio's eyes were full of tears. She shook her head and sniffled.\n\n\"Where am I?\"\n\nHerrick stared at the floor. \"In my lair.\"\n\nThat really confused Jennyver based on her face. \"For how long?\"\n\nHerrick opened and closed his mouth without speaking.\n\nCasidhe held back tears and ordered, \"She deserves to know. Tell her, Herrick!\"\n\nWhen he said nothing, Kleio shook her head in disgust and told Jennyver. \"I know you are confused, but you have lived inside this space for ... many years. We want to reunite you with your family.\"\n\nWait until Jennyver found out her family was Daegan, who had also lived for two thousand years.\n\nCasidhe clamped her lips shut, worried about shattering this moment. She wanted Jennyver to live even if it put Herrick and Daegan at war. This woman had her life stolen thousands of years ago. How inhumane to do this to any person.\n\nTears clung to Casidhe's lashes.\n\nNot now. Not until she got this woman to her brother and got out of this hellhole.\n\nWhat would Daegan think when he saw Casidhe with Jennyver?\n\nWould he jump to the conclusion that Casidhe had played a part in all this? No. He'd comforted her when she battered herself over making the wrong judgement about him without facts and evidence.\n\nHe would give her a chance to explain, especially if she was the one to hand him a family member.\n\nJennyver's hand trembled when she lifted it to her lips. \"What of my father?\"\n\nHerrick whispered to Kleio, \"Put her to sleep.\"\n\nShaking her head, the seer argued, \"Not until you tell her the truth, Herrick.\"\n\nSilent as a mule, he stared Kleio down.\n\nThe seer started forward.\n\nHerrick blurted out, \"This is your fault.\"\n\nKleio told him, \"I would like to take credit for freeing her, but this is not my doing.\" She moved passed him to speak directly to Jennyver. \"You have been in here for two thousand years in a deep sleep without aging.\"\n\nJennyver's lips trembled. She looked as if she would faint any second. Big fat tears started rolling down her cheeks. \"Nooo,\" she moaned.\n\n\"How could you, Herrick?\" Casidhe asked, her voice thick with emotion. \"This is horrible.\"\n\nHerrick glared at her. \"Get out of here. Do not make me raise my hand to you.\"\n\nCasidhe stared at Herrick as if he'd just butchered a baby, not moving an inch.\n\nJennyver blubbered out, \"Are they all dead?\"\n\nBefore Herrick could say another tainted word, Casidhe explained, \"Your brother escaped T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb not long ago. He still lives. I fear the rest of your family passed two thousand years ago.\"\n\nTears rolled down Jennyver's cheeks nonstop. \"I was not with my father when he died.\"\n\nThat gutted Casidhe. She was glad to see the agonized expression on Herrick's face. He muttered, \"Hurry up, seer.\"\n\nKleio ignored him. \"We need to get her upstairs first.\" She asked, \"Please, come with me, Jennyver, so we can prepare you to go out in the cold and join your brother.\"\n\n\"Daegan is here?\"\n\nCasidhe hated every minute of this. She would not say that Herrick intended to trade Jennyver for his brother. That would almost sound justifiable, which his actions were not. She explained, \"We must take you outside a ward protectin' this castle, uh, cave. The red dragon is not allowed inside.\"\n\n\"I shall carry her,\" Herrick announced, clearly in a hurry.\n\nJennyver turned a searing gaze to Herrick and cleared her throat. \"Do not touch me.\" That was the order of a woman born to authority. Before she struggled to stand, Kleio stepped over to offer her a hand.\n\nBy the time everyone returned to the great hall, Jennyver's hair was damp from sweating and she breathed unsteadily from the exertion.\n\nCasidhe said, \"She needs a cloak and boots.\"\n\nHerrick scowled at her. \"Do not think to give anyone here orders.\"\n\nUnfazed, Casidhe replied in just as sharp a tone, \"You are wastin' precious time.\" She ran to the bench by the door where she'd tossed aside Herrick's cloak earlier.\n\nWhen she returned, she ignored his growling and held the cloak for Jennyver as Kleio kept the woman upright.\n\nThat blasted ring kept buzzing her skin.\n\nShe knew exactly what to do with it.\n\nCasidhe stepped back and reached around her neck to unclasp her chain. When she had it loose, she dropped the agitated ring on her palm and offered it to Jennyver. \"I think this belongs to you, but I never knew from where it came. I was told to keep the ring safe. The closer I came to you today, the more it vibrated. I never knew you were here and I'm gutted about what happened to you.\"\n\nThe woman stared for a second then lifted the half Casidhe offered and slipped it on a finger of her right hand. Energy buzzed around the ring and Jennyver touched it with a reverent look on her face as if saying hello to an old friend.\n\nHerrick gave Casidhe a look that promised she would pay for her insolent attitude as much as her association with Daegan. He sneered, \"Do not act so pious. You had nothing before I found you.\"\n\n\"I had self-respect,\" Casidhe countered. \"I will have a hard time forgivin' myself for my part in this even though you kept it secret from everyone here.\"\n\nKleio stepped out of her boots. \"You can wear mine, Jennyver.\"\n\nAs if dazed, which was understandable, Jennyver stepped into the boots. With her now properly clothed, it was time to hand her over.\n\nCasidhe would be lying if she said she felt confident in Daegan's reaction, but she believed he would put gaining his sister above retaliating today.\n\nHerrick ordered Casidhe, \"You stay in here.\"\n\nShe managed not to shout no at him. \"You would be wise to let me speak to the red dragon. He will not kill me.\"\n\nThat damn vulture was back screeching outside.\n\nThe door opened and Herrick's man stuck his head inside. Herrick strode to the door and stepped outside.\n\nKleio hurried to tell Jennyver, \"He wants me to put you into a light sleep. I will make sure it wears off in one hour.\"\n\n\"No! Not again!\" Jennyver took a jerky step back and faltered.\n\nCasidhe and Kleio rushed to catch her.\n\nJennyver had every reason to balk at being put to sleep again. The woman might never trust sleep after this.\n\nCasidhe suggested in a soft voice, \"Why don't you just pretend to sleep to appease Herrick, but you will actually be outwittin' him.\"\n\nThe seer smiled her thanks.\n\n\"Why must I even pretend to sleep?\"\n\nKleio explained, \"Herrick knows what he has done is very wrong even if he has yet to admit it out loud. He will not trust you conscious outside this ward when he has no idea if you possess any powers.\"\n\nJennyver frowned then sighed. \"I will pretend, but how will I leave?\"\n\n\"He must carry you.\"\n\n\"His touch disgusts me,\" Jennyver muttered. \"But I shall allow almost anythin' to reach my brother again.\" She wiped away a new tear. \"I am strugglin' with grief and hope.\"\n\nKleio hugged her. \"I understand, but stay strong so we may get you out of here forever.\"\n\nHerrick returned, pounding heavy boots over the stone floor. \"The red dragon is threatening to attack.\"\n\nKleio spoke in Jennyver's ear as Herrick closed in. The young woman went limp. \"Catch her!\"\n\nHerrick caught her before she hit the floor.\n\nCasidhe held so much anger against Herrick right now she might split in half if she didn't deal with it soon, but she couldn't wipe away a lifetime of caring for this clan. She would do all in her power to keep Daegan from harming the rest of those living here.\n\nShe would have time later for a discussion and for Herrick to answer for what she'd been through her entire life.\n\nAll of it would wait as long as Daegan got his sister back and both dragon shifters survived this meeting. This clan needed Herrick even if she no longer did.\n\nCasidhe took a step, \"You're not goin' without me.\"\n\n\"I don't need you. Daegan has Skarde with him.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Daegan had stomped back and forth more than he could take. \"What makes ya think that bird can tell Herrick anythin'?\"\n\nLanna had not moved since picking a spot to stare at the empty valley as if she could see into the ward.\n\nCould she?\n\nNo. That lass would share whatever she discovered.\n\n\"Vulture came to us for message,\" Lanna explained, having not been the least bit concerned when the largest vulture Daegan had ever seen landed in front of them a few minutes ago.\n\nTristan stood with legs apart and arms crossed, ready for whatever came next. \"You think he understood what Daegan said?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Lanna kept her gaze trained on one spot. \"Vulture understand every word. Even what you say and I say.\"\n\nTristan's voice came into Daegan's head. <Maybe I shouldn't have said the ice dragons were cowards in front of the vulture.>\n\n<'Tis not a problem for me.> Daegan paused to search for the bird, a dragon, anything. When he saw nothing, he kept pacing.\n\n<You think Herrick will come out, boss?> Lanna spoke up. \"Is rude to talk in minds.\" She sounded annoyed.\n\nDaegan paused. \"Tristan and I apologize to ya, Lanna. We often speak telepathically to keep from alarming someone.\"\n\nShe angled a droll gaze his way. \"I have seen much in life. Not so easy to scare.\"\n\n\"Good point and I apologize, too,\" Tristan said. \"I was just telling Daegan maybe I shouldn't have insulted the ice dragons in front of that vulture.\"\n\n\"Did you not mean your words?\" she inquired.\n\n\"I meant every word. First the female ice dragon tried to kill Daegan after making me chew off my hand. Then Skarde pulled his stunt in Treoir. I was hoping to piss off Herrick enough he'd come at us from the front and not our backs.\"\n\nLanna gave him a solemn nod.\n\nDaegan changed the subject. \"What are we waitin' for, Lanna? I trust ya to know more than many of us, but Tristan is as concerned for your welfare as I am.\"\n\n\"I will not be harmed. I trust dragon and gryphon. We must be patient to find answers you have waited long for. You told vulture to send out Herrick if he wanted brother. He will come soon.\"\n\n\"Soon,\" Daegan repeated sharply, his voice shaking. What could Herrick be waiting on?\n\n\"Is difficult, but worth this wait,\" Lanna said with understanding in spite of Daegan's short temper.\n\nHe felt every slow second as a stab to his soul. \"I tire of delays every time I am close to learnin' somethin' of my family. And the idea of Jennyver close ... I want answers now!\" Daegan had allowed as much time as he could for himself. Though it would be akin to tearing off an arm to leave, he had people depending upon him and would have departed by now if not for one question pounding his brain.\n\nWas Jennyver alive?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Casidhe had a death grip on Jennyver's cloak, keeping the woman from falling off the back of Herrick's dragon. A partial moon offered a smidgeon of light in this darkness.\n\nHerrick had been insane when he shifted.\n\nShe would pay for gambling everything to be included outside with Jennyver.\n\nShe'd told Herrick she could prevent bloodshed. Daegan cared for her and would not leave if he believed Herrick held her against her will. She had not said that to Herrick, instead adding that since no one knew what condition Skarde was in, Herrick would be putting his brother at risk as well.\n\nHis dragon's body lunged, flying fast in undulating serpent-like moves. Casidhe leaned down closer and gripped even tighter to a thick scale to stay put, then released Jennyver's cloak with her other hand and wrapped that arm around the woman's waist.\n\nJennyver gave her a fearful smile of thanks.\n\nWhen Herrick's silvery-blue dragon broke free of the ward protecting Herrick's land and people, energy zinged over her skin and Jennyver made a surprised noise.\n\nCasidhe gasped at the sight of Daegan's powerful profile high on a mountain top. Her heart clenched with him so close. What she wouldn't give to be clinging to his red dragon instead of Herrick's right now.\n\nTwo more people stood with him. The tall male had to be Tristan. What about the short female?\n\nWho could that be?\n\nAnd where was Skarde?\n\nIf Daegan had lied about bringing Skarde, there would be no stopping Herrick from attacking Daegan and fighting to the death.\n\nHerrick's dragon circled around Daegan and his people, then passed them by and continued on.\n\nWhat was Herrick up to?\n\nStian flew into view and took the lead only to the canyon floor. The vulture landed and brought its wings in, standing to the side like an odd sentry.\n\nCasidhe waited for the dragon to lower its body with a wing in place for her and Jennyver to use for climbing off. She whispered to Jennyver, \"Keep pretending.\"\n\nJennyver took a couple slow breaths then went limp again.\n\nOnce Casidhe was free of Herrick's dragon and held Jennyver, who slumped against her, Herrick shifted back to his human form. He decked himself out for a medieval war, including a huge sword in the sheath at his back.\n\nDaegan, Tristan, and the small woman had teleported to the canyon floor a hundred feet away. The moon passed from behind clouds, casting an eerie glow over them, bright enough for her to take in the grim expressions.\n\nShe didn't think Herrick could do the same.\n\nStriding over with an arrogant swagger, Herrick stopped to the left of Casidhe, who held Jennyver up on her right. He roared, \"Where is Skarde?\"\n\nDaegan stepped forward, demanding, \"Show my sister.\"\n\nUntil this very second, Casidhe did not truly believe he knew his sister was here. How had he figured that out?\n\nWhen Herrick crossed his arms in a stubborn stance, Casidhe lifted her free hand. \"Jennyver is here, Daegan.\"\n\nJennyver stood away from her and pushed the hood off her face, smiling at her brother. Tears ran down her cheeks.\n\nHerrick cursed, realizing he'd been duped. He grumbled out a string of words, which could be a spell, because light glowed around the three of them and that damn vulture.\n\nHerrick would add Jennyver not being unconscious to the rest of his imagined transgressions Casidhe had committed. She would handle that later once Daegan had his sister safely in hand.\n\nShe could not look at Herrick. The hurt she could now see in Daegan's face stopped the breath in her throat. He looked every bit a warlord, but his pain sat clearly in his gaze even from where she stood.\n\nDaegan called out in a voice raw with emotion, \"Jennyver?\"\n\nHis sister lifted a hand and spoke through tears. \"I am here, Daegan.\"\n\nHerrick roared, \"Hand over my brother now! He had best not be harmed.\"\n\nIn answer, Daegan's face contorted into a deadly warning. \"You have naught to accuse me of. I have kept your brother safe after rescuin' him from the Scamall realm. Your sister Brynhild attacked me just days ago. She fought to kill me. I spared her life as well when I could have struck her down. I have shown over and over that I am not the dragon who started the Dragani War. I would have brought Brynhild if she had not flown away.\"\n\nHerrick lurched forward with a hand on his sword. \"I want only Skarde. Hand him over.\"\n\nCasidhe was even more disgusted with Herrick after that admission.\n\nWhat would Brynhild think if she were here?\n\nThe small woman with Daegan turned and pointed at an empty spot next to her. A man Casidhe assumed to be Skarde appeared, but he could not move or speak. Only blink his eyes and mumble to prove he lived.\n\n\"Free him!\" Herrick shouted.\n\n\"Send my sister first.\"\n\n\"No!\" Herrick stood firm.\n\nCasidhe fought off panic. Unless Daegan had healed the venom in his body, he would need Tristan to teleport Jennyver. He had to know better than to risk Jennyver's safety by trying to snatch her out from under Herrick. Daegan might have discovered his sister had been held here, but he could not possibly know what Herrick might have up his sleeve.\n\nHerrick would retaliate if Daegan tried to trick him.\n\nPlus, why do anything risky? Daegan held all the cards to win his sister back. He had Skarde.\n\nCasidhe called out, \"I will bring Jennyver to the middle and you bring Skarde.\"\n\nHerrick's eyes burned bright blue and his pupils elongated. \"You risk all by thinking to overrule me.\"\n\n\"I am tryin' to keep everyone alive, includin' Skarde,\" Casidhe retorted. She'd foolishly hoped to reach a happy medium between two rival dragon shifters who couldn't be more unhappy at the moment.\n\n\"Nay! Take your hands off her, Luigsech,\" Daegan roared, his voice burning with anger. \"Ya shall not be welcome around my people ever again.\" His face twisted with being sick at heart then darkened into something far worse.\n\nThe mask of hate that dropped in place on Daegan's face stunned her.\n\n\"Daegan?\" she begged in a strained whisper. His words had reached inside and clawed her heart into pieces. He couldn't mean what he said.\n\nDaegan shouted in a voice laden with disgust, \"I should thank ya for trickin' me, Luigsech. Your skulkin' about allowed me to follow ya to this place or I would not have found my sister. Move away from her. I shall bring Skarde and come for Jennyver myself.\"\n\nCasidhe tried to speak, but emotion choked her words. Her hand fell away from Jennyver who weaved in place. Casidhe had expected Daegan to be confused, even angry, but he really believed she had betrayed him? She would crawl naked through fire to avoid hurting him.\n\nHow could he not give her a chance to explain?\n\nHow could he throw away the vow he'd made to her? They were going to be together after this. He told her how much he cared for her and ... she believed him.\n\nHerrick accused Casidhe, \"You lied again. You led the red dragon here!\"\n\nCasidhe's world crashed in on her. Blood rushed through her ears so loud she couldn't hear or deal with anything beyond her heart breaking open like a dam bombed to pieces. Unbearable pain flooded her chest. Tears clung to her lashes.\n\nHow could she lose him this way?\n\nDaegan waved the woman to him and warned in a booming voice for all to hear, \"My sister had better not be harmed beyond your repulsive actions so far, Herrick.\" He pointed at Skarde whose eyes were wide with panic. Skarde's body lifted off the ground and floated over to where Daegan stood. With a flick of Daegan's hand, Skarde's feet lowered to the ground.\n\nHerrick lifted his sword. \"If you have harmed a hair on my brother's head, you all shall die, starting with your sister.\"\n\nSkarde stared wildly at Herrick and tried to make noises.\n\nDaegan waited as the woman raised her hands at Skarde and spoke, but too softly for Casidhe to hear. When the young woman lowered her arms, she stepped back, her eyes locked on Daegan.\n\nSkarde moved one arm as if testing it. His other arm was bound up as if fractured.\n\n\"You broke his arm?\" Herrick raged.\n\n\"He broke it himself,\" Daegan snapped back.\n\nWalking toward Herrick with Daegan at his side, Skarde used his good hand to grab the cloth tied around his mouth. He ripped it off and yelled, \"It is me, Skarde!\"\n\nJennyver took a step forward and jerked sideways to her right. She screamed and vanished from sight.\n\nCasidhe lunged for her and grabbed air.\n\nEveryone froze for a heartbeat.\n\nHerrick stared, openmouthed.\n\nDaegan roared, \"Jennyver!\" and sent a stunned Skarde backward with his kinetics.\n\nSkarde started yelling and tried to run. \"No! I must\u2014\"\n\nThe woman with Daegan flashed her majik and Skarde was immobile again, eyes crazed.\n\nDaegan ordered over his shoulder, \"Get them out of here!\"\n\nTristan, the woman, and Skarde disappeared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"Nooo!\" Herrick howled and shifted into his dragon in a blast of power.\n\nDaegan changed into his red dragon even faster. Too shocked to think, he functioned on instinct alone, giving Ruadh the lead.\n\nHe couldn't believe he'd seen Jennyver. Alive and breathing. Within his grasp.\n\nHe'd considered sending Tristan to teleport her away, but he had made mistakes in the past he could not undo. As long as he held Skarde, he'd believed he had a safe way to regain her.\n\nWhy would Herrick yank her away?\n\nHad she been real or had Herrick played a majik trick to force Daegan's hand with Skarde? Why would Herrick take that risk with his brother's safety?\n\nDaegan couldn't sort through anything now.\n\nNot when he and Ruadh had to survive this battle. Rage drove him to tell his dragon, <I want Herrick to hand over my sister.>\n\nRuadh replied, <Must win battle.>\n\nDaegan agreed. They had to defeat Herrick so savagely he would have to give up Daegan's sister or die.\n\nNo more tricks. He refused to believe Jennyver had been a hologram or some other image. He'd seen her with his own eyes.\n\nShe lived!\n\nHis dragon flapped faster, lifting higher with every circle as they caught wind currents.\n\nHerrick's ice dragon, the most powerful of that clan, could not equal Ruadh's speed in a straight line, but had no problem climbing quickly in sweeping circles, too.\n\nHerrick had kept Jennyver all these years in some form, then showed her to Daegan long enough to rip his insides apart.\n\nAnd Casidhe had helped him.\n\nShe'd shocked Daegan yet again when he thought she could do no more to destroy him. She'd been part of the ice dragon clan the whole time he'd known her. When he'd asked her about the Treoir family, she'd shared small amounts when she clearly had known so much more.\n\nSuch as his sister still being alive and with Herrick.\n\nCould there be a greater betrayal for him? No.\n\nHe had no idea how Herrick had managed to keep a mortal alive that long. At the moment, Daegan didn't care. He only wanted his sister safe and to hold her again. To see a living member of his family a stone's throw away and not hug her gutted him.\n\nJust as much as forcing himself to acknowledge that Casidhe had never truly cared about him. He would get over that eventually, but it would take a long time.\n\nSome wounds never healed.\n\nRuadh swung wide and looked down, giving Daegan a view of Casidhe as she turned into a tiny speck. His last view of her as he'd shifted had been her falling to her knees and hands locked together pleading, while tears poured from her eyes.\n\nHe would be the greatest fool ever to take a step back toward her after today.\n\nHerrick's dragon swept back and forth in wide slashes.\n\nRuadh kept an eye on their opponent.\n\nAs the ice dragon flapped hard below, Ruadh folded his wings and dove, jaws open to blast a raging storm of fire.\n\nHerrick's dragon was not new to battles. He had fought with Daegan many times and knew how wily the red dragon could be. The ice dragon folded long silver-blue wings and rolled to one side, missing the fire.\n\nWings opening fast, Ruadh stopped the sharp fall and twisted then flapped around, now below the ice dragon. Ruadh flew straight up, a strain for his giant body, but it allowed for a direct attack.\n\nThis time his red dragon's fire hit its mark.\n\nThe ice dragon had been flying all these years, but maybe not in battle.\n\nHerrick's dragon roared in pain and banked hard to the side, flying erratically without both wings healthy.\n\nDaegan had not expected this battle to end so soon, but told Ruadh, <Take the ice dragon to the ground.>\n\nLunging forward with hard flaps, Ruadh blasted fire at the ice dragon's uninjured wing.\n\nHerrick's dragon curled in on itself, falling before the fire struck. The silvery-blue dragon spread his wings fast, yanking to a stop and spinning to face Ruadh diving at him.\n\nThe ice dragon shot sideways, then back. One of Herrick's personal moves. It worked to give his dragon an immediate advantage too close for Ruadh to maneuver away from.\n\nIce blasted from above.\n\nEven worse, the ice dragon had not attacked Ruadh's back but one wing instead.\n\nPain burst through Ruadh who kept his jaws shut against any sound, but Daegan felt the shuddering moan inside. He experienced the gut-wrenching agony just as Ruadh did.\n\nThey were spiraling down too fast.\n\nRuadh stretched his big neck around and puffed fire in short blasts at his frozen wing until the ice broke free. But the smell of burned wing surrounded them. Broken bones did not stop Ruadh from straining to open his damaged wing.\n\nDaegan's red dragon would force a broken bone to move and hold the agony inside just to demoralize an enemy.\n\nWith incredible effort, Ruadh swooped around in a wider circle than before and lifted up to find Herrick's dragon. Moonlight glanced off the shiny scales, so much easier to find at night than the red dragon's body.\n\nRuadh flapped slowly in pain without making a sound, allowing their healing to flood the injured wing. The longer they flapped with one wing barely gliding up and down, the better to convince the ice dragon they were not injured.\n\nUnlike Brynhild, Herrick's dragon had been battle-hardened. Much of those battles, Daegan had flown alongside the ice dragon siblings. He'd learned all their traits. Every ice dragon had been a worthy opponent, but none could take down the red dragon alone.\n\nDaegan had never considered the chances of winning a battle between his dragon and the entire ice dragon clan.\n\nRather than spend his time proving his dragon was the deadliest, he'd built allies of every dragon clan, just as his ancestors had.\n\nThat lasted until someone impersonated his red dragon and attacked other clans.\n\nHe'd given every one of the ice dragons living today a chance to become allies. He'd done as Garwyli had said and tried his best to prove by his actions today he had not started the Dragani War. If Herrick and the others could not see past their blind hate, so be it. That would not change the way Daegan treated others.\n\nHe'd been willing to call a truce even if they could not be allies after trading Herrick's sibling for Daegan's sister.\n\nThey'd treated him as a fool. No more.\n\nRuadh spoke to him telepathically. <Battle must end.>\n\n<Yes. We will wait for the ice dragon to come down then fight him to the ground.>\n\n<Ice dragon fights to death.> Daegan considered what Ruadh was really saying. Either they fought to the death or they lost, because Herrick would not pull back.\n\n<All I ask is to do your best, Ruadh. I would like to take Jennyver home and need Herrick alive to get her back.>\n\nRuadh said nothing, just angled around sharply as the ice dragon wove back and forth, slowly dropping above them.\n\nThey were coming very close to the canyon. If they fought too close, both dragons risked flying into a mountain if too caught up in the battle to manuever.\n\nHerrick's dragon made a move first, dipping sharply as it came down at Ruadh.\n\nThe wing bones had not fully healed, but Daegan trusted Ruadh's ability to battle even when damaged. His dragon arched up as Herrick's came too close, blowing ice.\n\nRuadh's slow speed allowed for twisting fast and landing on top of the ice dragon, claws shoved into the dragon's neck and shoulders. The ice dragon roared an inhuman sound of pain.\n\nThen something slapped Ruadh sideways, sending the red dragon tumbling over and over. Daegan lost sight of the mountains. Ruadh pulled out of the spin right as they banged against a narrow spot along the upper mountain range.\n\nDaegan felt the hit in their side.\n\nRocks shot away from the broken peak.\n\nWhat had knocked Daegan's dragon off Herrick's?\n\nRuadh found a spot and landed, then wrenched his neck to gaze up.\n\nTwo ice dragons flew across the sky, slamming into each other.\n\nBrynhild? Where had she come from? Herrick hadn't been interested in her at all.\n\nOne ice dragon wrapped up, spinning down like an arrowhead shooting toward a target. The other dragon whipped around and followed.\n\nDaegan asked Ruadh, <Do ya want to shift and see if I can teleport?>\n\nRuadh lifted his head and opened wide jaws, blowing a shaft of fire high in the air just as the spinning dragon raced toward the flames.\n\nBrynhild's dragon opened her wings and lunged to one side, but still caught some of the fire.\n\nRuadh told Daegan, <We do not run.>\n\nTrue, but Daegan would teleport away to spare his dragon being attacked by two that might be able to kill his dragon together.\n\nPushing off, Ruadh flapped fast, flying straight up. His dragon wasted no time trying to catch currents with Herrick's dragon heading straight for them.\n\nRolling to the left, Ruadh looked as if they were evading, but flapped slowly enough to make that a lie.\n\nHerrick's dragon flew in the same direction.\n\nWith both dragons flying parallel, the ice dragon started to swing wide jaws at Ruadh, but Daegan's dragon was ready.\n\nRuadh lunged at Herrick's dragon, ripping at every place his giant claws could slice into.\n\nThe ice dragon chomped hard, gashing Ruadh's shoulder.\n\nDaegan said, <Use your tail.>\n\nRuadh lashed at the ice dragon with the sharp bones sticking up along his tail and wrapped up the ice dragon's tail.\n\nDaegan felt the jerk of Herrick's dragon now focused on trying to free his tail. No chance.\n\nThey would both fall to the ground as they fought.\n\nRuadh never stopped attacking, taking advantage of the ice dragon's distraction. By the time Herrick's dragon realized how close they were to hitting the canyon floor, he shoved and battered his bony head against Ruadh's.\n\nDaegan's dragon waited. When the bodies spun with him on top, he broke free, pushing away.\n\nToo close.\n\nHerrick's dragon slammed hard, shaking the rocks and ground as it bounced and flopped, then stilled.\n\nRuadh tucked his legs and wings, hitting just as hard, but rolling over and over until they hit a wall of rocks.\n\nThat unleashed a landslide.\n\nHis dragon remained tucked, allowing small rocks and boulders to rain down on them. When it all stopped, Daegan asked, <How bad are ya?>\n\n<No flying yet.> That's what Daegan had feared. Now he had two ice dragons ready to come in for the kill. He didn't think Herrick had died, but maybe his dragon was in as bad, or worse, condition than Ruadh.\n\nRocks began moving away from them quickly.\n\nRuadh lifted his head. <Loyal gryphon.>\n\nDaegan was heartened to see Tristan, but called telepathically, <Watch for Brynhild. She is here as well.>\n\n<I'm watching, boss, but she's busy shouting at Herrick.> As soon as Tristan had enough rocks off that Ruadh didn't have to struggle to rise, Daegan asked for the human body.\n\nRuadh warned, <Do not trust ice dragons.>\n\n<I know. I shall take care.> Daegan gritted his teeth through the shift. His back, arms, and legs had been beaten bloody and pain stabbed his injured arm, but Ruadh had suffered the worst of it and spent the time on the ground healing important areas.\n\nClothed in loose jeans and a soft long-sleeved pullover, Daegan opted for what Tristan called sneakers on his swelling feet.\n\n\"Damn, boss. You able to walk?\" Tristan asked, no humor in his voice.\n\n\"Aye. For now.\"\n\n\"I got here as you and the ice dragon crashed into the ground.\" Tristan turned as Daegan caught up to him and fell into step.\n\nNot seeing the pile where Herrick hit clearly, Daegan asked, \"Is Brynhild still in dragon form?\"\n\n\"No. She shifted and went after Herrick's dragon.\"\n\nBrushing dirt off his face and out of his hair with his strong hand, Daegan said, \"'Tis good to know she cares more for makin' sure her brother lives than killin' my dragon.\"\n\n\"What I heard didn't sound nurturing,\" Tristan muttered.\n\nThey neared Herrick, who had also shifted and sat on the ground with his head in his hands. Blood ran down his arms and from cuts on his face.\n\n\"You disgust me!\" Brynhild yelled. \"I hear your words. You care only about Skarde. Not me. You left me for a druid to capture. I spend two thousand years deep in ice pond.\"\n\nHerrick lifted his head and spoke in gravelly voice. \"I did not know you lived.\"\n\n\"Liar! You did not look. Red dragon tells you I live and you do not care. You are not my brother. Skarde is not my brother.\"\n\n\"Do not act like a child, Brynhild,\" Herrick shouted back.\n\nShe swung her arms wide and whipped them back at Herrick.\n\nHis body went flying fifty feet.\n\nDaegan stopped. Tristan waited.\n\nHerrick shifted into his battered dragon and roared ice at her. She called up a shield and held it in front of her. The ice shot off in different directions as it made contact.\n\nTristan whispered, \"Looks like a new shield. Not the one I saw her use in Cathbad's cave.\"\n\nDaegan nodded.\n\nHerrick shifted back to his human form. \"You are a fool. You stand with your back to the red dragon.\"\n\nShe flipped around, shifted into her dragon, and blinked out of view.\n\nWatching her, Herrick stared as if he'd never seen her use cloaking before. Maybe he had not.\n\nDaegan was done with both of them. \"Enough, Herrick. I will fight ya for as long as ya wish, but we can end this right now. Give me Jennyver and I will bring Skarde back.\"\n\nHerrick stared at them for a long moment. \"I do not have her. She was stolen from both of us.\"\n\nHe shifted into his dragon and flapped away with crippled motions.\n\n\"Well, damn!\" Tristan grabbed his head. He walked around a minute. \"Now what, Boss?\"\n\nEverything from Luigsech's betrayal, to finding out Jennyver lived, to losing his sister again, and battling Herrick had drained Daegan of his rampage.\n\nHe said, \"We go home.\" People would pay for today, but he was not defeated. Not at all. He pulled the other half of Jennyver's ring from his pocket. \"We shall see what Lanna can do with this.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Casidhe limped to the castle from where Herrick's dragon had dropped her even higher off the ground this time. She didn't care.\n\nDaegan hated her.\n\nHow could he care so much and turn his back on her like that? Yes, she understood his anger and hurt, but ... he should have asked her for the truth.\n\nShe'd never fill the hollow spot in her chest again.\n\nIn a span of days, she'd discovered Fenella had not been the sister of her heart, she had no clan, she'd been used her entire life, and lost the man she loved.\n\nHow easy it was to understand love when she'd been hesitant before. Nothing could hurt any more than losing someone she loved. She would grieve, but not this minute. Not when she had to survive Herrick's wrath.\n\nShe stumbled up the steps, catching herself before she fell.\n\nThe door opened and Kleio stood there, hope in her eyes. \"Do both dragons live?\"\n\nMoving past the seer into the room, Casidhe said, \"All three survived.\"\n\n\"Three?\" Kleio hooked an arm around Casidhe, helping her toward flames dancing in the fireplace.\n\n\"Brynhild showed up.\" Even to Casidhe's ears, her voice sounded wooden.\n\n\"Did Jennyver go with Daegan?\"\n\nCasidhe stopped and made a sound that almost turned into a moan of pain, but she clamped her lips shut. Blinking hard, she got past the tears. \"No. She vanished.\"\n\nKleio released her to stand on her own. \"What? How?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Casidhe continued. \"She was there one moment and vanished the next.\"\n\nThe heavy wooden door slammed open, shaking the castle. Herrick bellowed, \"Casssidhhee!\"\n\nShe turned around only long enough to glare at the man who had destroyed her world. Then she limped to her backpack.\n\nHerrick growled and shouted, \"Do not turn your back on me.\"\n\nKleio wrung her hands and whispered, \"Try to calm him, Casidhe.\"\n\nCalm him? She wanted to strangle Herrick, but her hands would not reach around his thick neck. She hoisted the backpack to her shoulders.\n\nShe had to find Daegan, which meant convincing Tristan to talk to her first. Shit, Tristan had her books. She couldn't worry about that now, not when her every thought was consumed with reaching Daegan.\n\n\"You lost the woman and Skarde!\" Herrick ranted as he closed the distance between them.\n\n\"In fairness, Herrick\u2014\" Kleio said in a soft voice.\n\n\"Silence!\" Herrick slammed his huge boot on the floor. The castle walls shook. Sconces burst around the room. Glass scattered everywhere. The long table where they all took meals flipped over. He turned flaming blue eyes on the seer. \"You did not put the woman to sleep. Get out of my sight. Now!\"\n\nFrozen in place, a hint of fear washed over Kleio's features.\n\nCasidhe had never witnessed fear on that woman before. Herrick clearly only wanted to scream at her. Why put anyone else in danger?\n\nCasidhe gave the seer a tiny head movement, encouraging her to leave and not make it worse.\n\nKleio got her back up. \"Take care, Herrick. You are not my master.\"\n\n\"I am in this castle.\"\n\nShaking her head, Kleio walked away only to the stairs and stood on the bottom step.\n\nWith Casidhe as Herrick's primary target, he ignored Kleio's defiance. Shoving the force of his fury at Casidhe, he spoke in a threatening voice. \"You were tasked to find the red dragon, not to side with the enemy and become close to him. Then you lead him here when you were told only to report when you found the red dragon.\"\n\nCasidhe must have lost all her give-a-shit factor, because her mouth opened, and sarcasm came out. \"I found the red dragon.\"\n\nKleio gasped.\n\nHerrick's face turned bloodred.\n\nCasidhe crossed her arms, ready for Herrick to unleash his anger on her and maybe leave everyone else alone. Resignation settled into her core.\n\nThe sooner they got this over with, the sooner she could leave here, find a place for a well-deserved breakdown, and start rebuilding her life. Also, the sooner she might convince Tristan to help her talk to Daegan.\n\nAn impossible task. Even if she called the number Tristan had given her to reach him or Daegan, all the person answering had to do was act as if they had never heard of her.\n\n\"You have brought shame to this clan,\" Herrick snarled, pointing his finger.\n\nWhat a pile of crap. She took in a deep breath and shouted, \"Me? I'm not the one who stole someone's life and kept her like damn chattel buried alive in a cave! How can you point at anyone after what you did to Jennyver? Look how you treated another dragon family then you want sympathy for losin' Skarde today?\"\n\n\"You know nothing. You came from nothing and you owe me everything.\"\n\nShe felt like nothing right then. \"I owe you zero. I've more than paid you for feedin' and clothin' me.\"\n\nHerrick shook with so much rage, power zinged around the room.\n\nCasidhe understood his frustration at losing Skarde and his trading chip, but she was just as furious. In the past two days, she'd lost all she'd believed in and had been at the mercy of every supernatural who took a shot at her. He didn't even care if she forgave him. He thought she'd just accept more crap and continue as ordered.\n\nShe'd lived a lie long enough. No more.\n\nThe pain in Daegan's face would forever be burned into her mind. She'd lost all she had to live for.\n\n\"You,\" Herrick snarled, leaning toward her. A rumbling came from his chest, which sounded more like his dragon than Herrick. \"I trusted you with one job and you betrayed me. You betrayed this entire clan.\"\n\nOh, hell no. He was not laying this at her feet.\n\nUnfolding her arms, she let them fall loose. \"You can't seem to acknowledge all I've done for you since being a child. Not one time have you given me even a small bit of praise and you have never told me who I am or where I came from.\" She leaned forward. \"You sent a warnin' to Fenella to protect her. Not me, because I never mattered. My safety never mattered. Nothin' mattered ... except gettin' Skarde back, did it?\"\n\nHerrick's fist curled tight, forcing veins in his muscular arm to lift. His words were low and chilling. \"You do not question me ever.\"\n\nCasidhe couldn't stop the avalanche of pain and anger driving her own sharp reply. \"Oh, yes, I will. I grew up in the ten years I've lived away. I'm not a child anymore to accept everythin' dumped on me without question. I am owed answers. You set me up and got what you deserved. Don't think to blame me with your failure.\"\n\nHe held his arms out, shaking his fists, and dropped his head back. He roared over and over, rocking the castle.\n\nScreams came from the kitchen.\n\nCasidhe didn't know how to stop him. She hadn't thought he'd lose his mind and bring the castle down on the innocent clan.\n\nAll at once, he quieted, though heaving deep breaths. When he lowered bright glowing eyes, his voice shook. \"I would kill another who betrayed me.\"\n\nShe swallowed. At least he'd said it as if he had another option. She only cared about one thing. She wanted out of here to find a way to speak to Daegan.\n\nHerrick sneered, \"You shall be punished, then you will live in the dungeon for one year ... little girl.\"\n\nCasidhe couldn't believe his words. He would steal what was left of her life?\n\nNo. She felt a calm wash over her at reminding herself she had nothing left to lose. She reached over her shoulder and curled her fingers, hesitating then pulled her hand back to her front. What if the sword didn't budge?\n\nHe'd watched her and grinned in triumph.\n\nHerrick once told her the sword would come to Casidhe when it believed she'd earned the right to wield the ancient blade.\n\nKleio had told her she could go nowhere as long as others set her path.\n\nA whisper ran through Casidhe's mind. <Honor my sword. It will honor you.>\n\nCasidhe let her backpack fall to the floor to stand behind her. She dropped to one knee with her hand open and ordered in a confident voice, \"Come to me, Lann an Cheartais.\"\n\nNothing happened.\n\nShe stared at Herrick. His grin widened.\n\nHer energy erupted in a strange noise again, stronger this time.\n\nHis smile fell.\n\nA loud hiss sounded as the sword flew from her backpack, up in the air, then over her head to pause at her raised hand. She gripped the hilt. Power pulsed up her arm.\n\nShe stood, holding the sword in front of her face vertically, and declared, \"You are mine.\"\n\nGold and black armor began forming over her shoulders and down her chest, fitting every line of her body. Her power rumbled louder. Energy surged through her.\n\nHerrick's mouth dropped open.\n\nRaising her clear voice, she announced, \"No one will ever use me again. I gave you loyalty and protected you with my life. I did not betray you, but you have betrayed me. Do not dare to think you will punish me or lock me away anywhere. I am no one's little girl.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Impossible Magic",
        "author": "J.F.R. Coates",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "intrigue"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "The Axinstone has been reclaimed, but at what cost?\n\nAnzig is wounded after fending off the monstrous Nightwings, but he still expects a joyous return to draconic lands. He does not anticipate the secrets that await him, ready to shatter his life apart.\n\nMeanwhile, Ellian struggles to adapt to life outside Laxtal. She yearns to return, unsure if Ddraig Tsona is to be trusted with her clan. Does she confront him and risk humiliation, or sit back and wait for Anzig to return?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Impossible Magic",
                "text": "For two days, Mulner had been furious with me. I knew I had been risking my brother's fury by inviting fifty humans to camp near the nomad's lair, but I hadn't expected him to refuse to associate with me for all that time. Given that Vinzent still wasn't talking to me either, most of my time was spent with the humans and Airil. The Nixan barely left my side. Though he claimed that he simply wished to make sure I was safe amongst such dangerous company, we both knew that the humans weren't going to betray us and attack.\n\nWe had learnt a lot from the humans. Their leader, James McArthur, had told us all about the war and why humans were crossing the mountains into draconic lands. The human Prime Minister, backed by the wealthy former soldier, George Symons, wished to expand the human nation, and saw the lands east of the mountains as perfect territory to build their new cities. Rumour had it George had his own agenda with the Axinstone, but nothing had been proven. Either way, dragonkind had not taken well to the invasion and had fought back as best they could, but our clans were broken and divided. We had not been able to repel the invasion.\n\nA council had been called by Clan Xital, the undisputed leaders of dragonkind. They had sent my cousin, Anzig, the haeraig of our clan, out to steal a Nixan artefact of magic the humans had taken many years ago. Clan Nixa claimed that if the Axinstone was returned to them, they would have the power to push the humans back across the mountains.\n\nI didn't know if my cousin still lived. Ddraig Tsona of Xital had broken the news that my cousin was dead, and the Xital dragon had wrested control of Laxtal out of my paws. I had been banished, disgraced, for refusing to believe his words. Airil doubted the Xital ddraig too. He also believed my cousin was alive, and I looked across at the blue-scaled Nixan and smiled. Under the supervision of James, Airil was awkwardly holding a human weapon; what they called a gun.\n\nFor the last few hours, James had been showing us how to use some of their arcane technologies. Some we were familiar with, such as the small gas lighters they used to create fire. Laxtal still possessed a few of these little glass objects; relics from years gone by when humans and dragons traded in peace. Others, like the gun, were proving to be more of a challenge. They had been designed with a human in mind, and Airil couldn't grip the metallic device and operate it at the same time.\n\n\"It's no good,\" the Nixan said, finally giving up and placing the gun down.\n\n\"I didn't expect you to be able to use that,\" James said from where he was lying in the grass, ten feet away. He was leaning up against a tree, holding a book in his hands. I had tried to decipher the strange black markings that covered the inside of the book, but it had only resulted in giving me a headache that still hadn't gone away. It seemed to give the human some amusement though, as he had done little else for the past hour, except for occasionally giving Airil and me a little advice.\n\nThe rest of the human camp was not far away. Already there were signs they intended to stay much longer, to my brother's disgust. The humans had cut down many trees and turned the timber into small shelters. Unlike drakes, they preferred to live above ground, and were not content with our caves and warrens.\n\nI was having a hard time adjusting to the smell of the camp. The scent of human was one of danger. That had been ingrained into my mind for the past few years. Clan Xital had warned us to always be on guard when the scent of humans was strong. Now it was overwhelming, but I was slowly convincing myself that there was no threat present.\n\nAiril spread his wings and lay down beside me. He kept one eye on the cloudless sky, waiting for the hunting party to return. Mulner had flown out in the morning to hunt for the nomads, though he had made a point that he would not collect anything for the humans to eat.\n\nAll day the Nixan had been restless, and even as he lay down his wings kept twitching against his back. He constantly seemed to be on the verge of taking flight, avoiding my gaze a lot more than usual. I had already tried to ask what was bothering him, but for once he hadn't answered my question and had remained in glum silence.\n\nWhile Airil looked upwards, I looked to the east, back towards the territory of Clan Laxtal. The memories of losing the clan still hurt. I knew that if I had even the slightest chance of defeating Ddraig Tsona, I would return in an instant and reclaim what was rightfully mine. With Anzig missing, and Ddraig Astar having fallen in battle, I should be ddraig of Laxtal, but I had been defeated in challenge by the Xital dragon. If I returned and failed again, the shame would be too great. I would not disgrace myself like that.\n\nI had mulled over the idea of returning to Laxtal with the group of humans in support as a show of strength, but I had quickly discounted that. Ddraig Astar had been killed by humans. It would look bad if I wrested leadership of the clan back with human support. Whispers would lead to gossip, which would lead to accusations that I had arranged the death of our beloved ddraig, and as untrue as it was, it would only serve to undermine my authority.\n\nI glanced across at Airil, who had closed his eyes and appeared asleep. I knew the futility of going home, but I wasn't disheartened. My time amongst the nomads had been not only relaxing and enjoyable, but productive too. Once Mulner forgave me for bringing the humans, I knew we would share many good experiences with each other. He was my brother, after all.\n\nWe were still playing our part in the war with the human nation; tracking and hindering the main human army's progress as it gradually marched north towards Nixa. The human force, many thousands strong, made little progress each day. This worried Mulner. The army never remained stationary, but their slow advance suggested that they were waiting for something. None of the nomads had been able to determine what this was, or who they'd attack next. Their movements would suggest Nixa, but Airil was confident that the clan's magic would rebuff any attack, regardless of whether the Axinstone was in their paws or not. No invading force \u2013 human or draconic \u2013 had ever set paw within Nixa's lair, and Airil saw no reason why humans should be the first to break his clan's defences.\n\nI sighed and looked up at James. \"How would you defeat them?\" I asked him.\n\nJames frowned as he placed down his book. \"Who?\"\n\n\"The humans. You know a lot more about them than we do, so how would you try and defeat them in battle?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't even consider engaging them without equal technology. Whenever we've been at war in the past, you've always had an advantage because of your wings. It was so easy for drakes to escape our reach, but things have changed. George Symons has created a swathe of weapons designed specifically to kill drakes from a distance. These guns didn't exist ten years ago, but now they're standard issue,\" the human said.\n\n\"So what do we do?\"\n\n\"I can think of one thing. It may not work \u2013 it probably won't, but I can think of nothing else. We were not the only ones who had doubts about this invasion. I know there were at least a hundred others in the army who didn't like what we were doing, but they were too afraid to act. Between General Summers and George Symons, the whole army is cowed into submission by fear alone,\" the human said. He idly plucked at the grass with his hands, twisting it between his fingers before throwing the blades away.\n\n\"So if we were to challenge and defeat the two leaders, the armies should turn back?\"\n\n\"Our ways are not yours. Just challenging them wouldn't be enough. You would have to kill them, and you would have to do it in such a way that their deaths send a message to all of Kernow.\"\n\nMy wings fluttered in fear. I had never killed anything as large as a human before, and I doubted I would have the courage to fight one of them alone. Vinzent wouldn't hesitate. He would leap into the fray without a second thought or concern for his safety. I turned my head, expecting to see Vinzent lying by my side, only to remember that he hadn't spoken to me in two days. I no longer believed that he truly wanted to be my mate still.\n\n\"Of course, if you wanted to reach either of them, you would have to confront them in battle,\" the human added as he leaned forward. \"And to do that you will need to raise an army yourself. I heard you say before that the draconic clans are divided. You will have to find some way to unite them if you want to win this war. General Summers and Symons both know this, so they'll do anything they can to stop the clans uniting. They'll happily pick off your clans one by one.\"\n\n\"I don't know how that can be done,\" I said, shaking my head and looking to the ground. I had no authority amongst other drakes, not anymore. No ddraig or haeraig would now listen to me. It would have to fall to another drake to unite the clans.\n\nWind suddenly gusted around me as the beating of wings descended. Startled, I looked up to see the silhouetted form of my brother landing beside me. His teeth were bared and there was still anger in his eyes. I recoiled from him, expecting him to berate me for spending time in the humans' company again. It never came. Mulner had instead turned his focus to James.\n\n\"You say we have to kill this General Summers?\" he growled at the human. He had been listening in on our conversation.\n\n\"I'm not saying it will work, but I think it's your best chance of victory,\" James said, throwing his hands up defensively as he shuffled back slightly.\n\n\"Then I have a job for you both,\" Mulner said, turning to face me and Airil, who had lazily opened his eyes.\n\n\"Who said you could order us around?\" I demanded of my brother. I knew I shouldn't speak to him in that manner, but resentment of how he had treated me over the last few days came to the surface.\n\nMulner roared at me, advancing so his snout touched the tip of mine. \"I am ddraig in these parts. Beyond the clans my authority is everything. Are you challenging me for that, little sister?\"\n\nI bowed my head and flared my wings in submission. Of course I had no desire to challenge my brother. This small band of nomads was all he had for a clan. I would not dare take that away from him.\n\n\"What do you need us to do?\" Airil asked, more diplomatically.\n\n\"You should learn from this one, Ellian. He actually talks sense,\" Mulner growled as he took a couple of steps back from me, his eyes never once leaving mine. \"I want you to go to Nixa and tell Ddraig Krateos everything the human just told you. Any weakness we can discover and exploit, the better our chances. Take Vinzent with you. He tells me he got along well with Haeraig Zeena. If he can make the Nixans listen to you, then that's all for the better.\"\n\n\"I won't be able to carry them both,\" Airil said.\n\nMulner frowned and pawed at the grass. \"Then fly fast. We can't afford to delay,\" he said.\n\nI had to admit, I was a little disappointed. For a brief moment I had hoped Airil would be able to take us to Nixa in an instant. I wasn't worried about saving my wings, I was easily strong enough to fly to the clan of magic, but I wanted to experience the thrill of Airil's magic again. Nothing had compared to those brief moments of travel.\n\n\"If you think I can be of use, I volunteer to come too,\" James said, raising his hand into the air.\n\nMulner turned to Airil. \"Do you think your clan would let a human approach?\" he asked the Nixan.\n\nAiril didn't answer straight away. He kneaded the ground with his paws for a full minute before he looked up at James. \"I would love to have you come with us so you could speak to Ddraig Krateos yourself, but I don't believe you'd be allowed anywhere near the clan. I think it would be best if you remained behind.\"\n\nJames nodded and rose to his feet. \"Then I shall take my leave. If you need anything before you depart, please come find me. And Mulner, I hope this means you'll start to trust me. I mean only the best for both of us. Kernow does not need to fight this war.\"\n\nMulner said nothing, but refused to place his eyes anywhere near the retreating human.\n\n\"I will go,\" I growled, taking the chance to speak before my brother. \"But only on one condition.\"\n\n\"I already know what you're going to ask, and I can't make any promises,\" Mulner said quietly as he stared intently at a daisy. \"I've never trusted a human before and I don't see why this one should be any different.\"\n\n\"He hasn't killed us yet,\" I said playfully.\n\n\"That's because he hasn't had chance to speak with Vinzent. Seriously, that dragonet is sending me insane. I don't know how you put up with him in Laxtal,\" Mulner said, sticking out his tongue in disgust.\n\nI giggled. I was sure Vinzent had been pestering Mulner to take more decisive actions in the fight against humanity, just as he had been doing to me after we had been banished from the clan. The silver dragon had been dismissive of the nomads' involvement in the fighting, a matter which Mulner had violently taken offence to. Of course, now Vinzent would get his wish. He would finally go to Clan Nixa, where he had wanted to go ever since Ddraig Tsona had sent us away from Laxtal.\n\nI sobered up as I realised how insufferably smug he was going to be on the flight north. Mulner seemed to have the same thought, as it was his turn to laugh.\n\n\"I'm glad to be rid of the dragonet, but if he can convince Nixa to start uniting the clans, then perhaps I'll give him a little slack,\" my brother said brightly. He looked up to the sky, empty but for a lone eagle circling overhead. He stopped smiling. \"If you fly out soon, there's a cave to the north you can rest in overnight. From there you should be able make it to the Nixan lair before sunset.\"\n\nMulner placed his head on my shoulder. It appeared like all had been forgiven. \"Be safe, little sister,\" he said softly. \"I don't want to send you away, but I know Nixa will probably listen to you and Vinzent. They might even still treat you as ddraig of Laxtal. I know they wouldn't acknowledge a clanless dragon like me.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" I vowed.\n\nMulner pulled away from the embrace and looked into my eyes. I held his gaze for a few seconds then looked away. \"Just promise me this, Ellian. You go to Nixa, do what you have to do, and then come straight back home.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said.\n\nI looked across to Airil, who was smiling with his wings already unfurled and ready to fly. He seemed eager to be off. I groaned at the prospect of telling Vinzent where we were going, but there was no sense in delaying it. I kicked off from the ground and launched into the air. Airil and Mulner followed right behind me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "We had paused only to eat our fill from the pheasants killed by the hunters, before flying out shortly after the sun's highest point in the sky. I had been surprised by Vinzent, who had glumly nodded and remained silent after I told him we were to fly out to Nixa. However, it did not take him long to fly up to my wingtip and start pestering me with questions about why we were going to the clan of magic.\n\nI sighed and told him everything the human had told me, and gradually Vinzent's exuberance returned. He was already planning what to do once we had Nixa's assistance, already working out which other clans would be willing to back our cause. Clan Axaatl, of course, would be willing to help us, he told me. Ddraig Aranat had long been distrustful of the Royal Clan and it wouldn't take him much convincing of a Xital plot to fragment dragonkind. I chose not to mention that at no point had James told us any drake was involved in the human invasion. I just let him talk, his words sinking into mere background noise.\n\nFrom my other wing, Airil and I shared a mischievous grin. The Nixan wasn't paying any attention to Vinzent either. We had our own wordless conversation, amusing ourselves with the antics of the impetuous dragon. Vinzent carried on talking, oblivious to the fact that he no longer had an audience.\n\nI was glad he was returning to his normal self. I had been worried about his recent subservient behaviour, wondering if the shock of being banished from Laxtal had done significant damage to his confidence. Now my biggest concern was getting him to shut up once we located the cave Mulner had suggested we spend the night.\n\nI looked down at the ground slipping beneath our wings. We were passing over the expansive plains that made up most of Laxtal and southern Nixa. We could see for miles in all directions, right up to the foothills of the Sxinix Mountains in the west, and all the way to the unbroken, flat horizon that circled us completely. Though I couldn't see the human army itself as it slowly marched north, here and there I could see tell-tale signs of their presence. There were a few trees felled to provide firewood, and in the foothills I could see the swirling wisps of smoke that marked their encampment. There was no danger of us being seen, not from this height, but even so we flew no closer to the foothills than we had to.\n\n\"Ellian, are you even listening to me?\" Vinzent asked.\n\nI started. The sun was starting to sink low towards the horizon. \"I'm sorry, what were you saying?\" I said, hoping that Vinzent wouldn't start repeating everything I had been working hard to ignore over the last few hours.\n\n\"I said Airil's found the lair we're resting in,\" the dragonet replied with a huff.\n\nI looked around, and Airil had indeed started descending, aiming for a low band of hills that diverged away from the Sxinix foothills. We couldn't have been far away from the northern borders of Clan Zantiin. I could see nothing that indicated that the humans had come this far north, but I was still a little uncomfortable at their proximity. It only looked about five miles to the south where the smoke twisted and danced up from their encampment.\n\nThe air was starting to cool as the sun sank behind the mountains. I chased after Airil, who had already landed amongst the hills. I could see the shelter now \u2013 calling it a cave was probably too generous. It was little more than a deep alcove in the moss-covered rock.\n\nAiril beamed widely as I landed with Vinzent by my side.\n\n\"This is it?\" the dragonet said dismissively, summing up my thoughts perfectly.\n\n\"These hills mark the southern boundary of Nixa. This is a Nixan cave,\" Airil said brightly, using a tone of voice I wasn't entirely sure I liked.\n\nThe Nixan took a couple of steps back. His hindquarters disappeared into the rock. I blinked twice and shook my head, Vinzent doing the same. My vision didn't change. Airil was standing in the rock. Our confusion only increased the Nixan's mirth, and he chuckled as he disappeared entirely from view.\n\n\"Just close your eyes and walk forward,\" he called out, voice slightly muffled.\n\nI glanced across at Vinzent. A look of abject terror was on his face, his eyes wide and mouth slightly agape. Neither of us had ever experienced a Nixan lair before. I had no idea if this was normal, but I had heard that they were protected by magical means.\n\nIgnoring Vinzent's squeak of terror, I followed Airil's encouragement and closed my eyes. I took one step forward, then a second. I felt a brief resistance as my snout pushed against the cold stone, then, to my utter shock, the pressure gave way.\n\nI couldn't help it. I opened my eyes. I shrieked as my mind twisted away from the swirling vortex that greeted my eyes. Shafts of colour and edifices of darkness assaulted me. Bursts of light exploded all around me as I forced myself to keep walking.\n\nOut of the light materialised a blue paw. \"Take it,\" echoed Airil's voice.\n\nI didn't hesitate. I leapt forward and took hold of Airil's paw.\n\nImmediately the lights that had been accosting my vision disappeared, and I found myself in a brightly lit chamber with a roaring fire of green flames in the centre. Airil's pale yellow eyes were staring into mine. \"I said to keep your eyes shut,\" he said quietly, before turning away as Vinzent stumbled through the smooth rock just behind me. His eyes were still closed as he staggered forward, not stopping until Airil stepped on his tail.\n\n\"What was that about?\" the silver dragon growled as he opened his eyes and turned on the Nixan.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Nixan magic can be confronting for those not of our clan to deal with. Only a Nixan can pass through into one of our lairs without any repercussions.\" Airil said. He looked around at the small chamber, which was completely empty. \"We'll be completely safe in here though. No human will be able to find us.\"\n\nVinzent snarled, but turned away from the Nixan and curled up by the mystical fire.\n\n\"Is that what you always see?\" I asked Airil. I was horrified to hear my voice tremble in fear. I felt unsteady on my paws, but I hid this from Airil by lying down by the fire.\n\nThe Nixan shook his head. \"I can just pass straight through the boundary and not feel or see anything. Sometimes I almost wish I could see what you see, to experience what it'd be like just once.\"\n\nI stuck my tongue out at Airil as he curled up just beside me. \"Trust me. You don't want to,\" I said with a nervous giggle. \"I imagine it'll be much worse at the main lair?\"\n\n\"Probably,\" Airil admitted, eliciting a snarl from Vinzent on the other side of the fire, but otherwise the silver dragon said nothing.\n\nI sighed and stretched my wings. We had not exerted ourselves over the course of the day, but they were a little sore and stiff. I hoped the heat of the fire would restore them as I slept. If we wanted to reach the central Nixan lair in two days, we would have to push ourselves hard and fly fast and without rest. We would have to do our best to ignore the legendary hunting grounds of Clan Nixa as we flew. I hoped there would be time for hunting after we had spoken to Ddraig Krateos.\n\nI closed my eyes. Before falling asleep my mind wandered to the other side of the mountains. I was on my own journey now, sleeping in an unknown cave, probably far away from any other drake except for the two I travelled with. Had Anzig felt the same excited thrill I felt in my chest?\n\nPerhaps in Nixa I would find answers to my cousin's fate. Maybe some of the seers and telepaths could tell me where Anzig was, if indeed he was still alive. I assumed that he was going to be returning with the Axinstone. Without it, Clan Nixa would not have the strength to unite the clans, but that did not mean I would back down and shy away from my duties, for to do so would be to accept that Anzig was dead.\n\nMy cousin was alive. For a moment I was convinced he was in the chamber with me, but I opened my eyes only to see Airil and Vinzent.\n\nHis presence still lingered as I fell into slumber."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "Whispers.\n\nThey didn't stop.\n\nShadows started to approach me as I tried to move.\n\nThe whispers grew louder.\n\n\"He's still alive.\"\n\n\"He's hurt.\"\n\nA snarl. \"I can see that. Get Isikian. Isikian!\"\n\nYes, Isikian. The healer. If someone was hurt then the healer would need to see to them. For a moment I wondered who needed his help. Then my world exploded into pure pain. It felt like fire was burning out my insides. Light pierced into my eyes even though they remained closed.\n\nI couldn't even scream in agony. The pain was too intense even for that.\n\nOblivion was better than this. I longed to return to unconsciousness.\n\nA cool touch on my head.\n\nSlowly the pain receded until it was little more than a dull ache at the back of my mind. My eyes fluttered open to see the concerned face of Isikian staring down at me. Keita stood by his side. \"Anzig, are you alright?\" she asked.\n\n\"No,\" I whispered. I could taste blood in my mouth. Memories started to eke back into my mind. I remembered feeling scared. I was flying away from the great spectre. She had trapped me. \"Nightwings?\"\n\nThe healer shook his head as he pushed Keita away. \"Azlak says he saw her fall into the sea. We haven't seen her since.\"\n\nBehind Isikian other silhouettes began to move and come closer, more in to focus. Keita lingered just behind the healer, as did Azlak and Carlee. At the edge of my vision I could see Inilta's grey scales, as well as a flash of red I took to be Okazuni. I couldn't see Nataik, but I assumed she was there all the same.\n\nThe whispers persisted, though no one spoke. Slowly I turned my head, trying to find the source of the indistinct noises. My eyes were drawn to a large stone wrapped tightly in Inilta's tail. I felt a tightening in my chest, followed by a fresh wave of pain.\n\nIsikian followed my gaze and allowed himself a shadow of a smile. \"Yes, we have it. We found the Axinstone,\" he said. The healer's smile vanished as my head slumped back to the ground. \"Haeraig?\" I heard him ask in concern, but I was unable to respond.\n\nAgain I felt Isikian's paw on my chest, but this time the pain returned tenfold. It felt like my flesh was being rent apart.\n\nI heard Isikian panicked voice.\n\nThen there was nothing.\n\nNo pain. No sound. No light.\n\nTime passed. I couldn't know how long.\n\nIs this death?\n\nA voice cut across the void. \"Couldn't you use the Axinstone?\" Keita asked. I could see desperation in her eyes, but I knew it was useless.\n\n\"It's too dangerous. He's not Nixan, do you have any idea what could happen to him?\" I protested.\n\n\"But he's dead already,\" Keita cried. I relented at the anguish I saw in those yellow eyes.\n\n\"I can try,\" I whispered as I stepped forward and placed an emerald-scaled paw on the haeraig's lifeless body.\n\nEmerald? Was my paw always that vivid?\n\nI shook my head and cleared the errant thought away. Of course it had always been emerald. I had no time to think about the momentary delusion. With the Axinstone in my mouth, I reached into my well of magic, pushing deep to reverse the terrible wounds the haeraig had received. His left wing was little more than a tattered shred of flesh, but it was the gaping hole where his chest had been that was the problem. I didn't know how he had survived this long.\n\nI found the faintest spark of life, still stubbornly flickering. I gently gripped it and nurtured it, protecting it from fading away. To my eyes the haeraig's life was a tiny ball of golden light, enveloped in the blue glow of my magic. Flashes of green shouldn't have been there. There was another magic present, but it was neither hindering nor helping me. Like bellows on flame the spark of the haeraig's life grew. Willing it back to strength was easier than it should have been, and it was soon strong enough that I no longer needed to sustain it. I turned my attention to healing his body.\n\nI glanced across to Keita, who was nervously watching on.\n\nThe healer looked back down and shook his head again. Was it not working? There was definitely something wrong with my eyes. I blinked several times to clear my vision, but everything was still so blurred and unfocused. But of course, that was always how I had seen the world, ever since I had been a dragonette.\n\nOkazuni pushed up against my side. His paw touched mine as his head rested against my shoulder. The Nyrian knew the depth of emotion that I felt for Anzig. He had been my closest and greatest friends for so many years now. My heart felt like it was beating in my throat as the Nixan healer focused on Anzig once more.\n\nBlue light emanated out from the healer's paws as Anzig's wounds started to close up before my eyes. I took half a step forward, barely daring to breathe lest I distract Isikian. I stopped at a touch on my tail. I looked back to see Carlee, her eyes staring into mine.\n\nShe looked away first, but I released her tail anyway. The youngling wasn't going to interfere with the Nixan's magic. I hung back behind Okazuni, barely able to watch. I was no stranger to wounds as severe as the haeraig's, but that was no comfort. I had witnessed many a drake's death from battle injuries that seemed trivial compared to the gaping cavity in the haeraig's side. Ddraig Astar would never forgive me if his son died here.\n\nThe haeraig's chest rose and fell. He spluttered.\n\nMy eyes snapped open as I heaved for breath. I cried in pain before realising that nothing actually hurt anymore. My wings were quivering, heart racing. It felt like I had just flown at full speed for hours on end. I grimaced and forced my eyes shut again.\n\n\"Are you alright, Haeraig?\" Isikian asked.\n\n\"I... I think so,\" I replied, opening my eyes once more and looking up at the healer. He had placed the Axinstone on the ground, holding one protective paw over the precious stone.\n\nTentatively, I rose to my paws. I glanced back to inspect my chest, where there was no longer any evidence of the terrible wound I had seen there... no. How could I have seen the wound? I shook my head, confused, and decided to focus on the Nixan again as Inilta came forward to reclaim the Axinstone for himself.\n\n\"That was too easy. Nothing resisted the healing,\" Isikian whispered to his brother. I wasn't sure if those words were intended for me, so I pretended I never heard them.\n\nInstead I gently flexed my wings as Keita approached me. She put her head on my shoulder. \"Never do that again,\" she said quietly. I could feel her shaking. I had scared her more than she was willing to show. I had felt those emotions, though surely that had to have been a feverish dream in my agony.\n\n\"I can try,\" I replied, to which Keita pressed even closer.\n\nFor the first time I properly looked around at my surroundings. It only took a moment to recognise the place. We were just outside the mine entrance on the mainland, overlooking George's island. I had no idea how I had been able to cross the bay as badly wounded as I had been, but somehow we had escaped the humans' grasp. I could see the glow of a fire coming from within, so, feeling the cold of the night, I slowly moved inside. With every step I expected the agony to return, and judging by how close Isikian stayed to my side, he feared the same. Azlak had already curled up alone by the fire, and for some reason I felt compelled to shake off the healer and go to him.\n\nThe seer squeaked in terror as he looked up at me. \"I'm sorry, Haeraig, I shouldn't have left you,\" he grovelled, pushing himself as far down as the unyielding ground would allow him. \"I thought I'd killed you too.\"\n\nI was just about to forgive the seer and tell him he was not at fault, when my mind picked up on that last word the seer had uttered. \"Too?\" I repeated. Who else did the seer think he had killed?\n\nAzlak's eyes were wide as he tried to back away, but he already had nowhere to go. Keita had followed me across, as had Carlee and Isikian. They had quickly surrounded him. The seer looked between the two Laxtal dragonesses and whimpered, before looking down at my paws.\n\n\"I Saw you die in a human ambush. If you had stayed in Laxtal instead of coming here, you would have been killed a few days ago, along with hundreds of others. The only way for you to survive was to come and claim the Axinstone,\" the seer said quickly. He took a deep breath and continued. \"I never expected another to take your place on the battlefield, and in death, least of all your father.\n\n\"You are Ddraig Anzig of Laxtal. Your father is dead.\"\n\nInstantly, my chest felt it had been torn open once more, my heart, broken, falling in shards to the ground. My legs buckled below me, unable to support the enormity of the words I just heard.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Ddraig,\" Azlak whispered.\n\n\"Do. Not. Call. Me. That,\" I snarled at the seer, launching myself forward and striking him across the snout, drawing blood from the shocked dragon. He fell to the ground and cowered, his wings covering his face to fend himself from the anticipated blows that never came. I did not care if the seer spoke the truth. I knew I would not claim that title until I returned to Laxtal and learnt the truth. A dragon with the might of my father could not have been killed so easily.\n\nI pushed past Ketia and Carlee and stalked from the mine. I could hear pawsteps following me, so I took to wing in an attempt to lose my pursuer, but whichever drake it was took to the air too.\n\nIsikian's healing had been perfect; I felt no physical pain from the wounds I had suffered, but it was a different agony that gnawed at my insides now.\n\nI had a sudden memory of a time long ago, when I was still a dragonet. I could remember the first time I had ever seen father in council, how much power he possessed, and how confident he was. Everything he said was right, everything he did was something to admire, especially to a young dragon who would one day have to follow in his pawprints. Now that day had come, and those prints were far too large for my paws. I wasn't even half the dragon that my father was... had been.\n\n\"Anzig!\"\n\nCarlee's warning brought me back to the present. I was glad she had called out. Without realising where I was going, I had been flying out into the bay, directly towards George's island. I halted my flight and allowed the veteran dragoness to come up by my side. She said nothing as we slowly descended down to a small beach at the base of the cliffs, but I could hear her unspoken words rushing through my head.\n\nThere was a gentle calm to the waves folding over, gently caressing the sandy beach. Though it soothed me, nothing was ever going to heal my heartache. \"What do I do, Carlee? I can't replace my father,\" I said, my voice cracking as I tried to fight back my grief.\n\n\"You are Ddraig Astar's... you are his son. You can be his equal,\" Carlee said in a pained tone. \"You will be his equal.\" She was suffering as much as I was.\n\n\"I don't see how,\" I whispered, as she placed her wing around me like she used to do when I was a dragonet. I would never admit weakness to any drake other than Carlee. I rested my head against her shoulder. \"Why do I have no confidence in myself? Father always said it was natural for every haeraig to have confidence in themselves. I tried so hard to convince him that I had, but I was always terrified. I still am.\"\n\n\"I... I don't know,\" Carlee said.\n\nI looked along the moonlit beach. In the distance I could just about see the twinkling lights of the human city. The sight had lost all sense of immediate danger. I knew the humans would be looking for us, but they had lost Nightwings. Without her, I doubted they would ever find us.\n\n\"You have allies, Anzig. There are many drakes in Laxtal who will support your leadership,\" Carlee continued after a brief silence. \"The duties of haeraig will fall to Ellian, and she is a capable dragoness. The two of you will lead Laxtal to glory, I can tell.\"\n\n\"But I've done nothing to earn their respect. Father was able to control Laxtal so effortlessly because he had earned their respect. I won't have that,\" I said.\n\n\"Anzig, you are about to become a hero in Nixa. Don't you think Laxtal will see that?\" Carlee pointed out. I had to admit, she had a point. Haeraig Zeena had already promised an alliance should I return with the Axinstone. We had done the hard part in stealing it from the humans, now we just needed to cross the mountains and return home. An alliance between Nixa and Laxtal? I knew I should feel excited that I was bringing about such a momentous occasion, but I could not. I had done little to accommodate the success of the mission. If anything, Azlak had been the difference between success and failure. I had been outshone by the clan's omega. No one was saying it, least of all Carlee, but I knew it to be the truth.\n\nI chose not to share these worries with Carlee. I already knew what her answer would be. She would chide me for being silly, and try to convince me that everything that had happened was all my doing. But that was not true. I remembered all the times I had failed to act when I need to lead. I hadn't even been the one to seize the Axinstone: I had been reduced to willing Azlak along as he took the glory of laying his paws on it first.\n\n\"You are a great dragon, Anzig. You will become a great ddraig too,\" Carlee said, breaking in to my thoughts.\n\n\"Alright,\" I said, nodding my head, but not agreeing with her. For years I had convinced father that I was the haeraig he wanted me to be. I now had to convince Carlee and the rest of the clan that I was the ddraig they wanted me to be. Any mistake I made would be pounced on.\n\nI sighed and looked down to the waterline, where the waves gently lapped at the sand. The moonlight shone off the top of a glistening rock just beyond the surf. The farmer had come back to the moon; the same face as the first night from Xital. We had been three weeks already.\n\n\"I want to fly out in the morning,\" I said. I was still focused on the rock amongst the waves, but my mind was already thinking about how we should get home. \"George will be out searching for us, so we should get as far from here as possible. I also don't think it would be wise to take the same route back. We alerted a few humans to our presence. If word gets out that drakes stole the Axinstone, they'll all be on their guard.\"\n\nCarlee smiled. \"See? Spoken like a true ddraig. You've a good mind for this, Anzig. What's the matter?\"\n\nI had tensed up in fright. What I assumed was a rock in the water had moved. It rolled through the waves and washed up on the beach. When the water receded I could clearly see what it was for the first time. Though it was little more than a shadow against the sand, I could tell it was a black-scaled dragoness.\n\n\"Fetch Isikian,\" I asked of Carlee, and then as an afterthought, added, \"And the seer.\"\n\nThe veteran dragoness launched into the air without questioning me. I watched her fly away before slowly approaching the prone dragoness. A low moan emanated from her. She was still alive.\n\n\"Are you Maznar, or are you Nightwings?\" I asked the dragoness. This was the spectre that had haunted us ever since we had passed into human territory: an ordinary dragoness who had been enhanced by human magic to be of enormous size. As Maznar she had helped us through our dreams, but as Nightwings she had threatened to kill us, and had nearly succeeded in killing me before I had escaped.\n\nShe spluttered and spat out a mouthful of water. \"I am both,\" she said weakly. She started to chuckle, but this quickly descended into a coughing fit, bringing up more water from her lungs. She hauled herself a little further up the beach once she had recovered and looked up towards me. The familiar red glow of her eyes was absent. \"But right now I suppose you can call me Maznar.\"\n\nWingbeats heralded the return of Carlee, and she brought with her Isikian and his brother, as well as the seer, who lagged some distance behind. Inilta summoned a ball of flame to hover above his head, throwing Maznar into the light.\n\nI recoiled away from the sight of her and looked down at my paws. Blood poured from slashes either side of her face which cut deep through her eyes. She was completely blind, and it was all my doing. I had struck out at Nightwings as she had lunged for me, raking her across the eyes. This was the result of my actions.\n\nIsikian made to push past me and approach Maznar, but I flung a wing out to stop him. \"Can we trust her, Azlak?\" I asked the seer without even turning around to face him. He knew the spectre best. That was the only reason I had summoned him down to the beach. I had no desire to speak to him after he admitted to killing my father with his actions.\n\n\"We can,\" the seer said timidly.\n\nI growled and furled my wing, allowing Isikian to move forward and approach Maznar. He placed his paw over the dragoness's ruined eyes, who only flinched slightly at the sudden contact. Once more, the soft blue light of Isikian's magic emanated out from the healer's paw. When he stepped back, the shine of Maznar's red eyes glinted in Inilta's flames.\n\nShe blinked several times and held her paw in front of her snout, her eyes tracking every movement. She then bowed her head to Isikian. \"Thank you. I didn't deserve your help.\"\n\nThe healer smiled and backed away, allowing me to come forward again. \"You tried to kill us,\" I growled.\n\nMaznar stared down at my paws. \"I did,\" she replied.\n\n\"And how do we know you won't try again?\"\n\nMaznar's eyes were pained as she looked up at me. \"I never acted of my own free will. The humans had controlled me since the day I hatched and turned me in to Nightwings. I never wanted to be that demon,\" she said.\n\n\"But can they still control you?\" I demanded. I knew we could never trust the dragoness if the humans still had any influence over her behaviour, no matter what the seer may suggest. Azlak had already proved his advice was fallible.\n\n\"Not without the Axinstone,\" Maznar said.\n\n\"Then go with Isikian and the others. Lie by the fire and recover,\" I growled, before turning away and looking out over the bay. Four sets of wings fluttered away up the cliff. I wondered if I what I had done was wise. The dragoness had after all come close to killing me, and now I was welcoming her to sleep amongst us. I slumped to the sand and placed my head in my paws.\n\n\"Are you sure you're doing the right thing?\"\n\nI sighed. I should have known Carlee wouldn't fly back with the others. I could hear her paws gently crunching in the sand as she came back across to me before she sat down by my side. I kept looking out across the water. \"We know the spectre is complete evil. I can't see that she would have changed so suddenly.\"\n\n\"She isn't that spectre anymore,\" I said.\n\n\"Whose authority are we taking that on? The spectre's? Azlak's? I think we just learnt that the seer can't be trusted,\" Carlee said bluntly. I pulled my wing over my head. I didn't want to think about Azlak's betrayal. I didn't care that he said he had saved my life in forcing me on this journey. His actions had led to the death of my father, and that was all there was to it.\n\nCarlee wasn't ready to leave me yet though. \"Remember what I said to you about trust, Anzig?\" she reminded me. She waited for a response, but I wasn't about to give any. It didn't take long before she continued anyway. \"One of the most important things about becoming ddraig is learning who you can rely on for support, to know which drakes will never tell you a lie.\"\n\nI drew my wing back a little, so I was able to stare at Carlee with one eye. \"Will you ever tell me a lie?\"\n\nCarlee looked away. \"Only if I must,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Then how do I know you aren't hiding something from me? How do I know you aren't keeping a secret from me like the seer was?\" I snarled.\n\n\"If ever I hide something from you, Anzig, it is because you aren't ready to know the truth,\" the veteran said. \"Your father told me many secrets. Yes, some of them do concern you. There may come a day I may have to tell you some of them, though I hope I do not have to. But please, do not ask me what they are. I vowed never to reveal any of them unless the need was dire. I carry this knowledge to protect you, not to harm you. You must trust me on that.\"\n\n\"I know. I trust you,\" I whispered. I couldn't justify my anger at Carlee. She had been at my father's right wing for so many years now, and I knew she had my best interests at heart. At the same time, that didn't stop me disagreeing with her from time to time, and this was one of those occasions. I had spoken to Maznar through my dreams before we had even reached the humans' island, while Carlee had not. There was an honesty in her admission that she was no longer controlled by humans.\n\n\"Keep an eye on Maznar if you feel a need,\" I told Carlee.\n\nThe veteran nodded. \"Come back to the fire Anzig. It's been a long time since any of us have slept properly. I think we all deserve the rest if we're flying out tomorrow.\"\n\nI really didn't want to go back and face the other drakes. I would much prefer to stay out on my own, but it didn't take long before I relented. A cold breeze was blowing off the ocean, making Inilta's magical flames too tempting to resist.\n\nWhen I returned to the mine, Azlak retreated further away into the shadows. I curled up beside Keita, who entwined her tail around mine. With her touch I felt a lot of my worries fade. With this, I also started to feel the seeds of excitement grow. In just a few days we would be returning to draconic lands, and I would no longer need to worry about humans ambushing and attacking us.\n\nI closed my eyes and dreamt of Laxtal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "Not a moment had gone by that I regretted telling Ddraig Anzig about the death of his father. My snout still hurt from when the ddraig had struck me. The shock of that alone had stunned me. I had never known Ddraig Anzig to strike anyone in anger before, and I had never been the target of his wrath until yesterday. I had received no apology, nor did I expect one. I certainly didn't deserve one. The new ddraig had every right to be angry.\n\nI stayed some distance off the back of the group as we flew east. It felt good to be on the move again, after spending so long trapped in the mine and on George's island. The Sxinix Mountains were still well beyond the horizon, but I could almost sense their presence, the tall peaks urging us on. They were the physical boundary between human and draconic territory, and therefore the boundary between danger and safety.\n\nWe all knew that the humans would be out searching for us in their attempts to reclaim the Axinstone. However, they had lost one of their greatest weapons. Nightwings had been defeated, and the dragoness that had been corrupted to create the terrifying spectre now flew amongst our number. The shadowy form of Maznar flew not far ahead of me as she also lagged behind the rest of the group. She had not been openly shunned by all of the other drakes, but nor had they been keen to welcome her. Carlee had been vocal against allowing Maznar to join us, but for some reason Ddraig Anzig had rejected her pleas, instead trusting my word that the former spectre no longer posed a threat.\n\nIsikian had exchanged a few words with Maznar earlier in the day, but that had been the extent of her communication with the group. I had wanted to fly up to her side and speak with her too, but my confidence had been shattered by Ddraig Anzig's attack. I was relieved I didn't need to fly in the position of power yet. All we had to do was fly directly east. Only when we were closer to the mountains would I once again need to fly ahead of Ddraig Anzig and the others.\n\nFar below us the mostly empty countryside drifted by. We were fighting against a headwind, so progress wasn't as fast as we would have liked, but I was still confident we could make the mountains within two days. Away from the city of Trevena, signs of human settlement gradually diminished. They had still left their marks though; mostly in the winding black roads that twisted through the land, as well as the tall and thin metal poles that Nataik had said carried the electricity that powered their advanced technologies.\n\nI noticed that while all the other drakes would occasionally look down and take in the sights, Maznar kept her eyes firmly above the horizon. Not once did she glance down. She probably didn't want any reminders of what she had once been; a pawn controlled by humanity. Now she was free to live her life as a drake, assuming of course dragonkind would accept her. She was being tolerated at the moment, but I knew it would take some time before she was accepted.\n\nLike me, she was a mystery. Her origins were completely unknown. She had told us her egg had hatched in George's castle, but she wasn't telling us how the human got hold of her egg \u2013 if she even knew herself. She believed she wasn't a Laxtal dragoness, but her appearance was a little contradictory. Her snout and horns were similar to the Nixan brothers', but could also be said to share a little resemblance to Ddraig Anzig's. Either way, she couldn't be the mysterious drake from my recurring visions. The other Laxtal drake with magic was a dragon, I knew that for sure. The voice was definitely male.\n\n\"You surprised me, Little One.\"\n\nI looked up. Maznar had slowed down so she was flying to my left wing. \"I never expected any of you to survive, let alone actually succeed in taking the Dragon's Head Rune,\" the dragoness said. Her red eyes flicked around, moving from one place to another, never once settling on any one thing. No doubt a human trait she had picked up.\n\n\"I did tell you my visions were true,\" I replied.\n\n\"But everything I told you of George was true too. I still do not know how you managed to break his defences with such ease,\" Maznar said.\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"I'm saying that I don't think George was unaware of your presence there. It was almost as though he wanted...\"\n\nA large gold dragon stood over a smaller green one. The gold dragon had a shard of rock in his paws. The shard glowed as a dragon's head burned on its surface. A shadow stood over the two drakes. The dark form of a human knelt down and wrested the stone from the dragon's grasp, who tried to claw at the human's hand. Green arcs of lightning shot from the human's fingers as he held the Axinstone aloft. He pointed down at the cowering dragons. The gold one pleaded with the human.\n\nThe human laughed and thrust his hand forward. The green dragon shrieked as he was engulfed in magical lightning...\n\n\"...you to take it,\" Maznar said. She edged slightly closer to me, her wing slipping in beneath mine. \"What did you See?\"\n\n\"I... I don't think it's right to say,\" I said. I had not Seen that eventuality before. I was sure the human was George, though I hadn't seen him clearly. The dragon who had surely been killed was Ddraig Anzig, and the other I recognised as Ddraig Tsona.\n\n\"You know it would be so easy for me to find out. Once you're asleep and dreaming, I have access to every memory you have, even those you've forgotten,\" Maznar said, with a flash of her red eyes that reminded me of the spectre.\n\nI shivered in fear. Had I been wrong to trust Maznar? There were many secrets I held, locked away in the corners of my mind. I certainly didn't want her gaining access to my memories. \"I saw Ddraig Anzig dying again. I have seen him die three times now at the hand of George, all in different ways,\" I whispered. I hoped that my honesty would deter Maznar from prying into my dreams, but I still feared her reaction.\n\n\"All that means is this war is far from over. It would be naive to think you've defeated the humans simply by taking the Dragon's Head Rune. George was harvesting magic from that stone for years,\" Maznar warned. She veered away from me a little and for the first time looked down to the distant ground. I followed her gaze. We were passing over a large lake, upon the surface of which I could just make out a couple of tiny boats.\n\n\"I know you will do everything in your power to save Anzig. Quite simply you must. I may not know the future like you do, but I have seen a truth in his past that makes him crucial to this war,\" the dragoness continued. Her eyes were now on the ddraig, about fifty feet further ahead at the front of the group.\n\n\"What?\" I asked the dragoness, who didn't seem like she was about to reveal her secret.\n\nMaznar snickered. \"It is not for me to say. He must discover this for himself,\" she said.\n\nI growled but did not try and force Maznar to give me the information I desired. After all, it was none of my business. This was a secret of Ddraig Anzig's past, not mine. I had no right to know, and I doubted the ddraig would trust me with his secrets anymore.\n\n\"Isikian is suspicious of me,\" Maznar said. At that moment the Nixan healer glanced back and narrowed his eyes in the direction of the black dragoness. \"He believes I'm hiding something from you all, something about where I come from.\"\n\n\"And are you?\"\n\nMaznar revealed all her teeth in a malicious grin. \"I have watched George's dreams many times. My particular favourite of his was when a drake gave him a solitary egg. I hatched from that egg.\"\n\n\"A drake gave you to the humans?\" I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. No drake would voluntarily give up their own egg, especially not to a human. Eggs were one of the most precious things a drake could ever be in possession of. Only in dire circumstances were eggs passed on to another drake. But that was not the most worrisome thing of Maznar's revelation. There was the implication that the humans had a draconic ally.\n\n\"I always knew George was working with at least one drake, though I never once saw them. I was never able to get their name either. George isn't a magician, but I always got the impression he had been trained to defend himself against magic. I think I only saw what he wanted me to see, and nothing more,\" Maznar said. We were falling further back from the others now, but I was too interested to hear what the dragoness had to say to try and catch up.\n\n\"Have you told Ddraig Anzig any of this yet?\" I asked. Surely he would need to know this information. The knowledge that a drake had betrayed his species could be crucial.\n\nMaznar slowed down further, so much so that she'd almost stopped. I hovered just by her side, turning away from the rest of the group. \"He doesn't yet trust me. I doubt he will believe me.\"\n\n\"So why tell me? He won't listen to me, especially now he thinks I killed his father,\" I said bitterly.\n\n\"You did,\" growled another voice. I almost fell out of the air to hear Carlee right behind me. The veteran had silently flown back to us. \"If I had my way I'd leave you both behind, but luckily for you that decision is mine. So long as Ddraig Anzig wishes you to continue with us, I will honour that. But let me warn you now that if either of you threaten or cross him again, I will not hesitate to abandon you. Understand?\"\n\nI had never considered Carlee to be a friend, nor was she a drake who was even occasionally civil towards me, but never had she been so openly hostile. She terrified me, and I couldn't bear to look in her direction. I quietly told her that I understood, but Maznar remained silent as she also looked anywhere but at the older dragoness.\n\nWith a strong beat of my wings I pushed forward and started to catch up with the others, flying ahead of the two dragonesses. Carlee snarled as she barged her way back in front, but Maznar was content to remain at the rear. How much had Carlee overheard? I doubted it would have been much. The older dragoness would have been quick to condemn Maznar for suggesting there was a traitorous drake somewhere in the clans.\n\nCarlee had rested well in the time it had taken to steal the Axinstone. There was colour in her brown scales again, which had worryingly started to fade as we had been approaching the castle. I no longer feared her imminent death, and the resulting reaction the ddraig would have to that, but I still wondered if my last vision of her passing had been averted. That was one of the hardest things about my magic: I was rarely sure how far into the future, and in what order, my visions would come to pass. Some happened within seconds of the vision, but a few had taken years.\n\nI did not speak with Maznar again during the flight, instead I flew just off Isikian's tail. In the distance, the Sxinix Mountains started to rise up from the horizon, though I knew there was no chance of reaching them this day. I had not Seen anywhere for us to rest for the night, so I left that responsibility up to Ddraig Anzig. I was glad. I didn't want to advise the ddraig. He wouldn't trust me. In fact, I no longer trusted myself.\n\nBefore long we started flying over a massive forest that, as far as I could tell, didn't end until it reached the foot of the mountains. Here and there the green expanse was broken by a rocky outcrop or a lake. The path of several rivers and streams could be seen slicing their way through the forest, and once or twice I could see a small human village.\n\nAs the sun started to sink down behind us, Ddraig Anzig started to occasionally glance back. He kept doing so until he finally managed to meet my eyes. I whimpered. He gestured with a small flick of his eyes to join him at the head of the group.\n\nI flew beneath the others to join the ddraig, keeping just below his right wing. \"Why did you hide it from me?\" The ddraig's voice cracked as he spoke. I was alarmed. I hadn't expected this.\n\n\"I was scared. I'd killed your father. I thought you'd throw me out of the clan,\" I said.\n\nDdraig Anzig laughed nervously. \"If you'd actually have been responsible, then I may have done so. But I've been thinking... you acted to save me. You couldn't have known that your actions would result in my father dying,\" he said slowly, like he had been rehearsing those words for a while now.\n\n\"But I should have known. What's the point in being able to see into the future if I can't even know what the consequences of my actions will be?\" I protested. I didn't know why I was arguing against the ddraig, who was defending my actions, but it had brought up a common shame. I had no control over my magic. It was unreliable.\n\n\"Once we cross the mountains, I'll get Isikian and Inilta to train you. I'm sure they'll be able to help you to control your magic better,\" the ddraig said.\n\nI ducked my head in thanks. Isikian had already suggested that he would be willing to help me train my magic, but I wouldn't have been surprised if the healer had forgotten the promise. \"That would be most appreciated, Ddraig Anzig.\"\n\n\"Do one thing for me in return, Azlak. Never keep a secret from me again,\" Ddraig Anzig said, a touch of harshness returning to his voice. He had been hurt by my betrayal, there was no doubting that, and yet he appeared willing to forgive me.\n\n\"Of course,\" I said. At the forefront of my mind was the image of Carlee lying in the bloodstained grass, whispering her dying words into the ddraig's ear. That was followed by the ddraig himself dying, engulfed in human magic. Then there was the death of Ellian, who I assumed was now haeraig. There were so many secrets I kept from Ddraig Anzig, and I already knew I would never be telling him most of them. If ever he were to unlock my mind and somehow read my thoughts, all he would only find heartbreak.\n\n\"Have you Seen where we must rest tonight?\"\n\nI shook my head and lagged a little further behind the ddraig. \"It is remote here. I doubt we'll be disturbed by humans, no matter where we sleep. We just need to get close enough to the mountains to cross them tomorrow,\" I replied.\n\n\"Alright then,\" Ddraig Anzig said after a slight hesitation. \"I'm sure we'll find somewhere to rest.\"\n\nThe ddraig called Nataik up to his side next, as I slowed to the rear of the group, just ahead of Maznar. A few moments later, Nataik descended into the forest by herself. Ddraig Anzig angled down soon after, aiming for a small lake surrounded completely by trees. The water was stained brown by the trees that encroached right onto its banks, except for a small area on its southern boundary, where there was an open grassy patch. It was here that we landed.\n\nKeita and Carlee went straight for the water and drank their fill. Ddraig Anzig told us we would be waiting here for Nataik to return, and she would lead us to a suitable refuge for the night. There were fish in the lake, and once Inilta had caught one for himself, the others all started hunting for themselves with varying degrees of success. Just the two of us, Maznar and I, remained behind.\n\n\"Not hungry?\" I asked her as I spread out my wings, catching some of the speckled sunlight that filtered through the heavy canopy of leaves. My wings were already weary from the day's flight, fighting against the headwind had been tough.\n\n\"I... I have never hunted for my own food,\" the dragoness said, pawing at the ground. \"I was always given all the food I needed.\"\n\nI had never heard of a drake who couldn't hunt their own food, but I quickly realised I should have known Maznar would never have learnt. Drakelets were taught how to hunt at a very young age, but Maznar would never have been given that opportunity, having being given to the humans as an egg.\n\n\"I could show you if you like,\" I said, wearily furling my wings again.\n\n\"Another time, maybe. I shall watch the others for now. I have eaten recently,\" the dragoness said, much to my relief. Though I did want to help Maznar, I was exhausted, and I was thankful to settle back down in the grass. I closed my eyes, just to rest them for a few moments.\n\nThunder rumbled and lightning flashed. A storm was building in the east as black thunderclouds rolled in from the distance ocean. The smell of blood was in the air. A great battle had just taken place. Three drakes stood on the top of a hill bisected by a narrow gorge. Two dragonesses, one lilac, the other crimson, stood next to a small gold-scaled dragon. They look around the plains, where a number of humans were walking, occasionally stooping to pick something up from the sparse grass.\n\nThe red dragoness and the gold dragon took to wing and flew away to the north just as the rain started to sweep in. The lilac dragoness quickly took shelter from the storm and disappeared into the gorge.\n\nI stirred uneasily. A shadow passed over my wings.\n\nA voice I didn't recognise spoke. \"My son? You're my son?\" A bronze dragon stared down at another drake...\n\n...Okazuni stood before Vinzent. The Laxtal towered over the smaller red dragon, but that hadn't deterred Okazuni, who advanced on the larger dragon, teeth bared as he hissed. Ddraig Anzig dived in, putting himself between the two feuding dragons...\n\n...A shadow moved in front of me. \"I'm a Laxtal, but I have magic too.\"\n\nMy eyes snapped open. A shadow stood over me, mirroring my vision. For a moment my heart surged in hope, but then I glanced up and saw the red eyes of Maznar. She had a fish in her mouth and looked absurdly pleased.\n\n\"You caught that by yourself?\" I asked.\n\nMaznar nodded fiercely and dropped the fish at my paws. \"I caught two. That one's for you,\" she said brightly.\n\nI tried to protest and back away, claiming I wasn't hungry. In an instant Maznar's eyes turned cold. She trod on my outstretched wing with both forepaws, pinning it uncomfortably to the rough foliage. I felt a small pop in my shoulder as the joint was pulled back.\n\n\"That hurts,\" I hissed. I tried to escape from her paws, but she only pushed down harder until I cried out in pain. Her claws started to pinch the thin membrane of my wings, threatening to tear through the vulnerable skin.\n\n\"Alright, alright, please, just stop,\" I gasped, hoping she would relent. The fragile bone and sinew were being stretched too far. My jaw locked open as I whimpered and tried to resist writhing too far.\n\nMaznar snarled and pushed her claws in harder for a moment, before pulling away. Her eyes glared into mine. Without saying a word she turned away and left me alone with the fish she had caught for me.\n\nI whimpered, not daring to move my wing yet. Blood leaked from the small pricks her claws had left behind. My breath came out in short, sharp gasps. The pain was intense, but it didn't feel like any significant damage had been done. This time.\n\nStill breathing quickly, I looked at the retreating back of the dragoness. What had caused that?\n\nBehind her I could see the rest of the group gathered together. At some point Nataik had returned, and the Xigax dragoness was in discussion with Ddraig Anzig. I must have closed my eyes for longer than I realised, it had only felt like a few moments. I hadn't even had chance to think over the visions I had Seen. Other than the recurring vision of the unknown Laxtal with magic, I had never seen any of the others before. It had been some time since I had seen the dragonet Vinzent in any of my visions. I wasn't overly surprised. Now we were on the return to Laxtal, I expected to See more from my clan.\n\nIt wasn't much longer before Nataik led us back into the air. I growled and gritted my teeth together as the movement stung the puncture holes in my wing. The cold air felt like ice against the thin membrane. I said nothing about it. If I went to Isikian to heal the wounds, he would ask how I got them. If Ddraig Anzig learnt of Maznar's actions he would start to doubt her loyalty, which would in turn cast further doubts over my belief that she could be trusted. It would be better to remain silent.\n\nNataik took us on a short flight to a small cliff over the top of which poured one of the many rivers that meandered through the forest. I landed on the top of a damp rock, the spray from the waterfall coating my scales. I was the only one who took to paw, everyone else stayed in the air, waiting for Nataik to make the next move. Just visible behind the waterfall was a dark hole leading into a cave. Ddraig Anzig followed the Xigax dragoness inside, darting through the torrent of water and into the darkness beyond. A few moments later I was all alone.\n\nFor the first time I had chance to think about the visions I had Seen before Maznar had woken me. I had recognised the drakes in my first vision. Ellian was the one who had remained behind. Haeraig Zeena of Nixa was the other dragoness, and the dragon that had left with her... it had been me. Why would I have a need to fly away from the central lair of Laxtal with the Nixan? I didn't understand it.\n\nI sighed and turned away from the cave. I was scared of what was coming. There was a shadow over my visions, a threat of some major revelation that was still to be revealed. It was the shadow of Nightwings every time. She was going to play a significant role in this war, but I just didn't know what.\n\nI took to wing and slowly glided downstream. I had no desire to go into the cave just yet, and I hoped that some water could help soothe the stinging pain in my wing. Sunset was still about an hour away, so I had no reason to rush. The stream was hemmed in on both sides by the forest, the trees encroaching to just a few feet from the banks, covered by masses of reeds growing out from the fast-moving water.\n\nThe water bubbled over the stony bed, and the wind gently caressed the leaves of the trees. They were the only sounds I could hear. It was so peaceful here; I found it hard to imagine that less than a day's flight away was one of the largest human cities we knew of. Though most of Laxtal was barren and dry, there was one small part of our territory that was as lush and green as this, but I had only been there twice.\n\nThe dappled sunlight played tricks with my eyes, making me believe that the shadows between the trees were moving. Every time I turned to look, there was nothing but falling leaves and a few calling birds. Nothing to be concerned with.\n\nI turned a corner where the stream angled away to the left, and I almost fell out of the air. Just ahead was a stone bridge crossing the stream. A dirt road ran down the bank of the river on the far side of the river, before cutting straight across the river and continuing on the opposite side, then curling away deeper into the forest to my right. My alarm quickly subsided as I realised there was not a human to be seen.\n\nI fluttered down and landed on the bridge's wall, looking down into the stream. The reeds were thick here, and grew almost to the height of the bridge. There was a faint smell of human in the air, but it was an old smell. I was sure there was no danger. The cool water looked inviting, but I settled onto the stone wall, glad of the silence and time to compose my thoughts. I doubted any of my companions would come out and find me; I doubted they would even have noticed my absence.\n\nWith one leg dangling off the edge of the bridge, I closed my eyes and thought wistfully of Laxtal. There was nothing really waiting for me there; no drake who would welcome me home. My father barely acknowledged my presence in the time before we left. I doubted it would be any different now.\n\nA low rumbling caught my attention. I jerked upright and looked down the road. I could see a column of dust downstream, rapidly coming closer. I didn't stop to think and dived off the bridge, landing with a gentle splash and disappearing into the reeds. The water came almost to my neck. The cold water stung my wing, and I had to bite down hard to resist a whimper of pain. One of the great metallic beasts the humans used for transport \u2013 a car I'd heard Nataik call them \u2013 pulled up and stopped just before it got to the bridge. Barely daring to move, I listened as I heard metal slamming and the heavy footsteps of two humans, plus the lighter movements of two smaller ones.\n\nHidden in the reeds, I looked up at the bridge as two elderly humans came up to lean against the stonework. Two of their younglings came up beside them, one male and the other female. Both were blonde haired with eyes wide and innocent.\n\nThe two children each held a strip of reed, which they must have taken from the other side of the bridge. On a count of three, they threw their reeds into the water. They then darted back from the wall. I could hear them cheering from the other side of the bridge as the two slivers of reed floated down the stream. One of them yelled, \"Mine won, mine won!\"\n\nOne of the older humans also disappeared from the wall, leaving just the one that I could see. She continued to lean on the wall, looking out over the stream. I was not a good judge of human character, but as I looked upon the old woman's face, I could only describe her as kindly. Just from looking at her, I could tell that she would never willingly cause harm to any living creature. This human was no threat to me, of that I was certain. Her presence soothed me so much I almost found myself emerging out of the reeds and into her plain sight.\n\nI resisted and held firm. The human may appear gentle, but she could still be able to warn other humans that we were here, and those may not be so accommodating of us. These humans didn't seem like they were going anywhere soon, and I certainly couldn't get away without alerting them to my presence. I couldn't even move without making a noise, standing in the cold water and covered by the damp, clinging reeds.\n\nI heard movement right behind me. I turned my head back, trying to keep my body still and avoid creating any ripples. There was a gentle incline in the embankment leading right down to the water's edge. The two young humans had both ran down the slope, several pebbles in each hand. They started throwing the stones into the stream, shouting with glee as the water splashed up.\n\nThe younger of the two children looked up to the bridge and waved. \"Grandma, Grandma, watch this,\" she yelled, before throwing her pebble as far as she possibly could. The stone hit the opposite bank, sinking into the soft mud with a loud squelch.\n\nThe child crowed in delight, and the woman watching on laughed and clapped. \"Oh, well done,\" the woman said.\n\nI shivered. The humans had me completely surrounded now, though I doubted they knew I was here. The two children were so close they could almost reach out and touch me. They didn't seem threatening, and I doubted any of the four would cause me any direct harm. Even so, I didn't want any humans to know where we were as this would risk George discovering us.\n\nOne of the children ran back up the embankment to join the two adults, leaving the young girl alone by the waterside. She was still quite content throwing pebbles and bits of reed into the water, which she was stripping from the stalks that grew right by her. Her grasping hand met some resistance as she pulled. She turned to tug at the stalk. Her eyes widened as she stared directly at me.\n\nI tried to back away without making any noise, but the child just giggled and carried on throwing bits of reed into the water. She didn't even care about my presence. I kept a wary eye on her before glancing up at the bridge to see if anyone else had noticed me, but the woman on the bridge had turned around and was looking in the other direction. I couldn't see the other two, but I could hear their voices not far away.\n\nThe young girl threw the last of the reed she had plucked out from the ground and ran up to the other humans.\n\n\"Do you know what they call this bridge?\" the old man was saying. I couldn't hear any response, but I assumed neither of the children knew, for the man continued, \"They call it Robber's Bridge because once upon a time, robbers would hide in the reeds and jump out at travellers and take their money.\"\n\n\"I saw one, I saw one,\" the little girl crowed out. \"I saw a robber in the water.\"\n\nI shrank down into the reeds, glad my golden scales would help a little in blending in against the dull yellow reeds, but I needn't have worried, for the human didn't approach. \"I'm sure you did,\" the human said with a laugh. \"Come on squirts, or your mum and dad will be wondering where we are.\"\n\nThe two children groaned, but it wasn't long before I heard them get back into their car and start driving away, crossing the bridge and disappearing into the forest. A cloud of dust lingered long after they had gone, and it wasn't until that had been dispersed by the wind did I have the courage to emerge from the reeds. I shook dry my wings and quickly took to the air. I flew back upstream before any other humans happened to stumble upon the remote bridge. My paws and wings ached from the cold, and though I had been scared, I couldn't help but feel happy about witnessing the humans. They weren't all out to harm us, and that was a pleasant thought to carry back to the cave, where I rejoined my companions.\n\nNone of them even questioned my absence as I slipped in behind the waterfall and into the darkness. It was a small cave, and there wasn't much room left, so I was forced to lie in the entrance. I tucked in my tail so it wasn't caught up in the torrent of water, and for a while I just lay there with my eyes open, looking out into the forest. This was the sort of peace we would strive for."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "Clan Nixa was a beautiful land with wide open meadows fed by three large rivers that flowed through the clan's territory from west to east. Even from the great height we flew at, it was easy to see why the Nixan hunting grounds were famed across all of the draconic territories. Vast herds of deer roamed the lush landscape, as well as multitudes of rabbit and other smaller creatures. Wildcats and eagles also hunted in Nixa, but there was always plenty to feed all, even in the winter months. The sky had been clear all day, but as evening started to approach a thick bank of clouds was rolling in from the eastern horizon.\n\nWe were still some distance from the lair before a messenger came out to meet us. She introduced herself as Newita, and that she was to take us down to the central lair.\n\nThe Nixan dragoness didn't say much, except to exchange a few words with Airil, who then retreated back to us, looking a little uncomfortable. I remembered then that he had never been given permission to leave Nixa and help my brother and his nomads. I hoped he wasn't going to be punished for his actions, as he had been a great help to us on the borders of Laxtal.\n\nThere was nothing to identify the Nixan lair from above the ground. Only a few low mounds were visible from the air. Newita took us down to the top of one of the mounds, on the summit of which was a large rock standing upright and partially submerged in the dirt. Vinzent and Airil landed by my side, with the dragonet looking as perplexed as I felt. There was nothing to distinguish this as the entrance to the lair. Where was Newita leading us? The dragoness placed her paw on the rock, and the granite started to glow red.\n\nVinzent took a few steps back as the rock started to slowly spin and descend downwards. The ground started to rumble and shake as a glowing passageway started to emerge in the ground. It was nowhere near large enough for a drake to walk down, but that didn't deter Newita, who confidently walked forward and down into the passage. I shook my head and closed my eyes a few times, trying to work out how the dragoness had done it.\n\n\"Just don't think about it,\" Airil said, noticing my confusion.\n\nI looked across at Airil, mouth agape. How was I meant to just ignore what I had just seen? A dragoness had managed to fit into a gap that I knew for a fact was not large enough for her.\n\n\"Take a step forward and try not to think about what you're doing. Close your eyes if it helps,\" the Nixan said.\n\nI tried to follow Airil's advice, squeezing my eyes tight and moving forward. A red glow pierced through my eyelids, but I refused to open them, not until I nosed into the dragoness who had gone in before me. She huffed as I opened my eyes and nervously looked around. A red glow continued to permeate everything, providing more than enough light to see by, but I was very perturbed by what met my eyes. I found myself in a small chamber with no points of exit or entry, but even as I looked Vinzent and Airil emerged from what had appeared to be solid rock.\n\n\"Are we ready to go on?\" Newita said.\n\n\"Where to though?\" Vinzent asked. He was shaking as he stood by my side.\n\nNewita grinned widely. \"Onwards,\" she said, before promptly disappearing into the opposite wall.\n\n\"Just follow her. It's alright,\" Airil said, nosing my side.\n\nThis time I didn't stop to question how it could be done, I just walked forward and accepted that I would just pass right through what looked like solid rock. I met only the slightest resistance before I once found myself in another glowing red passageway. I couldn't see Newita ahead of me, but I could hear her pawsteps. The passageway twisted and turned, and in the shadows I was sure there were other pathways shooting off into the darkness. I didn't dare step away from the light. I had no idea where I would end up if I strayed from the path that had been placed before me.\n\nI kept on walking, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was barely moving at all.\n\nFinally, a stone wall rose up in front of me. I didn't hesitate and pushed through the barrier as though it wasn't there and emerged blinking and half blinded onto a small ledge. I gasped at the sight that greeted my eyes, once they had adjusted to the light. A massive chamber of smooth white stone that dwarfed the Laxtal lair spread out an impossible distance in every direction. The size was too great to fit beneath the few low mounds I had seen from outside. I could barely see the far distant ceiling. Light streamed in from several large holes that had also not been visible from the surface. I wrinkled my nose. I couldn't place what it was that irritated me, but something was unsettling.\n\n\"Welcome to Nixa,\" Newita said dryly as Vinzent and Airil emerged from the hidden passageway. The silver dragonet shrank back, but the wall had solidified behind him and he was unable to retreat back through the passage. \"Shall I take you straight to the ddraig's chambers? He is expecting you.\"\n\n\"It's alright, I'll take them,\" Airil said. \"I imagine Ddraig Krateos will want to see me too.\"\n\nNewita nodded and flared her wings. \"If you wish,\" she said before flying away. I soon lost her amongst the hundreds of other drakes soaring through the expansive chamber. Some flew to similar ledges located all around the chamber before vanishing into the rock.\n\n\"Shall we?\" Airil said, unfurling his wings and steadying himself, ready to launch into the air. I mimicked his actions, though behind us Vinzent was a little more reluctant to take to wing.\n\nThe Nixan led us almost directly up, towards the very top of the great chamber. Just beneath the domed ceiling was the entrance to a small antechamber. Smoke drifted out on a small breeze. My nose twitched at the smell. It was not a wood fire that burnt within, but one powered by coal. Only the richest and most powerful clans used coal for their fires in the best of times, but now it was scarce. Coal was mined in the far north by humans, in regions too cold for any drake to comfortably live. Since the war had started, coal and other luxuries traded from humans had become rare indeed.\n\nNo one was present as we entered the antechamber, which was carved from the same unblemished white stone as the main chamber. There was no other discernible exit, but Airil told me this was the entrance to Ddraig Krateos's personal chambers. I took his word for it. It was pointless arguing with a Nixan in their lair. Nothing was normal here.\n\nThe little chamber was warmed by a roaring fire in a small alcove to the side. Thick rugs adorned the floor. I recognised the patterns typical of some of the northern clans, who used the pelts of some of the native creatures there to craft the thick rugs that kept away all but the worst chill. It took a bit of effort not to lie down and curl up in them. Instead I sat down in front of the fire, spreading my wings a little and taking in the heat.\n\nVinzent sat by my side, his paws nervously clawing at the thick rug.\n\n\"Looks like you got what you wanted after all,\" I said quietly to the dragonet.\n\nInstead of boasting about his victory, Vinzent just bowed his head. \"I shouldn't have gotten angry with you. I know you were doing what you thought to be the right thing. Can you forgive me?\" he said.\n\n\"There's nothing to forgive,\" I assured Vinzent. Not that long ago I would have rested my head on his shoulder, but he was sat just too far away for me to do that, and I didn't move across to him.\n\n\"All the same, I'm sorry Ellian. If Nixa provide their support, then I will follow you back to Laxtal with an army in our wings. We won't let Ddraig Tsona control our clan any longer,\" Vinzent said.\n\n\"We still don't know Ddraig Tsona is helping the humans, Vinzent,\" I reminded the dragon, but he ruffled his wings and didn't respond.\n\nWings fluttered by the entrance, and I turned to see Haeraig Zeena join us in the antechamber. Her eyes widened as she saw us. \"Vinzent? Ellian? I wasn't expecting you. Are you waiting for my father?\" she asked. She never even looked across at Airil, who was sat just a couple of feet away.\n\n\"We have some information for your father,\" Vinzent said brightly, accidentally flicking his tail into my side as he spun around to face the Nixan haeraig. \"We've been spending time amongst the nomads, and...\"\n\n\"We'll tell Ddraig Krateos first,\" I growled, cutting across Vinzent, who I knew had been about to tell the haeraig everything.\n\n\"I'll go see if he's ready to see you,\" Haeraig Zeena said, darting past us and straight through the opposite wall with a burst of red light.\n\n\"I wish they'd stop doing that,\" Vinzent muttered as he approached the offending wall. He placed his paw against it, but it was completely solid. Though he pushed his whole weight against it, the wall did not allow him to pass.\n\nAiril chuckled and stood up. \"It won't let you through,\" he said. He placed his paw over Vinzent's and a red glow emanated out from the rock where the dragonet touched it. His paw started to sink into the wall before he recoiled in shock. \"Only a Nixan can pass through these walls. Other drakes can only pass through when a Nixan places a paw here to allow them passage; otherwise it's just solid rock.\"\n\n\"How does it work,\" I asked, coming up to the side of the two dragons.\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" Airil admitted. He backed away from the wall to look into the fire. \"It was all done so long ago now. No one knows what magic was used to create this lair, for it seems far beyond the magic of any drake here. It must have been a great effort by the entire clan. I doubt we'll ever create anything this grand ever again.\"\n\n\"It puts our lair to shame,\" Vinzent said, lowering his head.\n\nI growled, unhappy that Vinzent was so quick to dismiss our clan. Any slight against Laxtal could diminish our standing in the eyes of the other clans. Laxtal desired to be allies with Nixa. We wanted to be their equal, not inferior to them. No, our lair was not grand and magical, but it was beautiful in its own right.\n\nAiril shook his head. \"I loved Laxtal. I think I preferred it to here. It's the smell, mostly. Laxtal smells like a real place, but here... the lair has no scent,\" the Nixan said. He was right. Other than the coal smoke, there was no underlying scent I could detect. There was no smell of moss or plants like those that pervaded the caves of Laxtal, or anything else for that matter. It was sterile.\n\nI didn't have chance to respond to Airil though, as the wall behind us started to glow red again, and two dark forms stepped out. They resolved into the shapes of Haeraig Zeena and her father, Ddraig Krateos of Nixa. I bowed my head to the small bronze-scaled dragon, with Vinzent and Airil doing the same behind me.\n\n\"Ellian, what do we owe the honour? And Vinzent, am I right?\" the ddraig rumbled.\n\n\"We have information, Ddraig Krateos. Something that could help us fight the humans,\" I said, looking down at the Nixan's paws.\n\nThe ddraig looked down at me with a hard glare. \"What kind of information?\"\n\nStuttering a little, I told the ddraig about the humans we had tracked on the edge of Laxtal, and how we had gained their trust. A human village had sprung up on our side of the mountains, but these humans were allies to the draconic cause. They were able to provide us with information. I was allowed to speak without any interruption from the haeraig or the ddraig. Neither showed any reaction until I had finished, when Haeraig Zeena glanced up at her father.\n\n\"Your bravery has to be commended, Ellian,\" Ddraig Krateos said. He held out his paw. \"Come into my chambers and we can discuss this further. Zeena, if you can see to Airil and Vinzent.\"\n\nI looked across to Vinzent, suddenly worried that I was about to be parted from him. He had only come along because he had been familiar with some of the Nixans before, and I had hoped that he would have been able to convince Ddraig Krateos to make a decisive action in the war, but now it looked like it was going to be all up to me.\n\nVinzent made no protest though, and he allowed himself to be guided away by Haeraig Zeena, along with Airil. I turned back to the ddraig and briefly met his eyes, but I couldn't hold his gaze for long. Though his physical stature wasn't that impressive, there was a force behind those eyes that alarmed me. I had heard tales of the strength of his magic, and I caught a brief glimpse of it in his eyes.\n\nDdraig Krateos placed his paw on the wall of the antechamber, making it glow red once more. \"Go through, Ellian. I shall join you in a moment,\" he said.\n\nI tried to hide my surprise at being invited into Ddraig Krateos's chambers. I was not representing any clan, so there was no need for him to treat me with the honour and respect a visiting haeraig or ddraig deserved. I highly doubted that he hadn't heard of Ddraig Tsona's push for leadership of Clan Laxtal, and the Nixan assumed I was still in control of my clan.\n\nI pushed through the wall and into the ddraig's chambers. They were much more luxurious than the ones in Laxtal, where Ddraig Astar had resided. Just like the antechamber, thick rugs adorned the floor, and a fire blazed away in one corner, again feeding off a massive pile of coal. The smoke from the fire drifted up through a natural fault in the rock, leaving the room clear and warm. Hung on almost every wall was a number of decorations and adornments, ranging from human-made artworks to sculptures of ivory and gold. High up in an alcove was a small silver statue of a serpentine drake, similar to the one in Ddraig Astar's chamber. I was sure it was sculpted of the same dragoness, though there were a few little differences in her posture.\n\nWhereas the caverns in Clan Laxtal were lit by torches and flame, Ddraig Krateos's chambers were kept alight by several glowing orbs of light hovering near the ceiling. Though they gently moved as though caught in the ebb and flow of a gentle tide, the light they gave off was constant and un-flickering; a source of unwavering light. Just like the lack of smells irritated my nose, the light hurt my eyes; it was almost too perfect.\n\nA red pall to the chamber announced Ddraig Krateos's presence, and I turned and bowed my head to him as he settled down beneath the silver dragoness. \"So you gained the trust of some humans?\" he rumbled. I nodded my head. I had already told him everything the humans had told me, there was nothing more I could say on the matter without repeating myself, so I stayed silent. \"And what do you expect us to do with this information?\"\n\n\"I do not expect anything, Ddraig Krateos, but I hope it will allow you to devise a strategy to help defeat the humans,\" I said, looking down at the Nixan's paws.\n\nDdraig Krateos snorted in amusement. \"I appreciate your faith in Nixa's strength, but we alone cannot take on the human army. We would not be able to get close enough to this General Summers to challenge him. While we have many drakes with powerful magic, few of us are acclimatised to battle. We are not a clan of warriors, like Clan Xigax, or even Clan Laxtal,\" he said with a nod of his head, acknowledging the strengths of my clan.\n\n\"But if we were to get every clan united, surely then we could outnumber the humans so greatly we couldn't lose,\" I said. I tried to meet the ddraig's eyes, but once more I was intimidated by the great power I saw there and had to divert my gaze, this time gazing upon the silver dragoness directly above his head.\n\n\"Yes, we could unite the clans, but there is one thing in our way,\" the Nixan replied.\n\n\"Ddraig Tsona,\" I whispered.\n\n\"A Xital drake,\" Ddraig Krateos corrected. \"We have no evidence to suggest it is Ddraig Tsona who is helping the humans, and I personally think it unlikely. His actions in taking control of Laxtal could be used as evidence either way. We haven't heard any stories of destabilisation from your clan, nor of any further human incursions, so we have to say the Xital ddraig has the best interests of dragonkind at heart. Your suspicions of him may be ill-founded.\"\n\nI fluttered my wings at the reminder that I may have made a mistake in challenging Ddraig Tsona and losing my place in the clan. \"Surely we can unite the clans without alerting Clan Xital,\" I said, but I already knew such an action would be hopeless.\n\nDdraig Krateos agreed. \"No. There are few clans who would be willing to act without explicit permission from Clan Xital. Any move we make will quickly be made known to the Royal Clan and the traitor within their midst. We need to neutralise, or at the very least expose, the traitor before we can make any action.\"\n\n\"So what can we do?\"\n\nDdraig Krateos sighed and turned away, looking into the fire. \"I do not know,\" he admitted in a strained voice. It was probably a rare occasion indeed that the Nixan ddraig conceded defeat in anything, and I chose to remain silent until he spoke again. After all, I was not his equal, not anymore.\n\n\"I think the first thing is to know what is going on in Laxtal,\" the ddraig said eventually. He stared into my eyes for the few seconds I could hold his gaze. \"I have no direct authority over you Ellian, so you don't have to obey my commands, but I think it is for the best that you return to your clan. Speak to Ddraig Tsona about your meeting with the humans. Use his knowledge to work out who the traitor in Xital is.\"\n\n\"But what if Ddraig Tsona is the traitor?\" I whispered, feeling a tight clench in my chest at the prospect of returning to Laxtal. I couldn't work out if it was excitement or fear that gripped me, or even a little of both.\n\n\"He is not,\" Ddraig Krateos growled. \"Ddraig Tsona has nothing to gain by siding with the humans. It will be a drake in Xital who desires more power. Ddraig Tsona already is the most powerful dragon. He can't gain any more.\"\n\nI exhaled slowly and tried to convince myself to believe Ddraig Krateos. I had to trust his judgement on the matter; he had been involved in politics with Clan Xital for many years now. He would know Ddraig Tsona much better than I did.\n\nI thought of the promise I had made to my brother. That I would return straight to the nomads' lair. It took a couple of moments for me to break that promise. \"I shall go back,\" I said.\n\n\"Excellent. We will not be idle here. We shall do all we can to prepare before the Axinstone is returned to us,\" Ddraig Krateos said with a slight nod of his head.\n\nA flare of hope burnt in my heart. \"You really think Anzig is still alive?\"\n\n\"We are certain of it. We felt a surge of power yesterday that could only mean one thing. A drake is in possession of the Axinstone,\" Ddraig Krateos said.\n\n\"Then they could return within a couple of days,\" I gasped. Surely it wouldn't take them long to cross the mountains and return home.\n\nDdraig Krateos nodded. \"That's what we're expecting, which makes it imperative that we're ready to act as soon as we have the Axinstone. We don't want to give the humans and the Xital traitor any time to react to our power.\"\n\n\"Then I shall leave in the morning, Ddraig Krateos,\" I said. I knew it was too late to make any worthwhile distance tonight. I would be better off waiting until morning and getting a full day of flight, which would take me almost all the way to Laxtal.\n\n\"We shall provide shelter for you and your companion tonight, and I shall see you off in the morning if you return here,\" Ddraig Krateos said, before his voice took on a harsher note. \"But you will not be able to take Airil with you this time. If we are to be ready to defend our lands, we need every drake in the lair.\"\n\n\"I understand, Ddraig Krateos,\" I said, bowing my head. It annoyed me that the ddraig seemed to be blaming me for Airil's choice to help the nomads when I had nothing to do with it, but I hid this from my posture. I was in no place to argue with the Nixan, not when he had opened his clan to me for the night. Rarely were visitors permitted to stay within the lair; it was an honour usually reserved for visiting ddraigs. All others needed to find a place to rest in the moors, though there were plenty of suitable caves and burrows to take refuge in.\n\nDdraig Krateos dismissed me after that and opened up the portal through the wall for me to leave. Haeraig Zeena was already waiting for me on the other side, though there was no sign of Airil or Vinzent. The Nixan was reared up on her hind legs, and between her forelegs a ruby floated. I cleared my throat, and the ruby fell to the floor and disappeared into the rug as the haeraig lost her concentration.\n\n\"I'm sorry Ellian, I didn't expect you to be so quick,\" she apologised as she searched for the ruby. She eventually found it and returned it to a ledge just behind her. In a behaviour most unusual for a haeraig, she didn't look right at me. \"Vinzent told me everything about the humans. You're a brave dragoness, Ellian. There aren't many that would do what you did and approach humans like that.\"\n\n\"I just did what I thought was best,\" I replied, bowing my head and keeping calm, though inside I was glowing at the haeraig's praise.\n\n\"You deserve better than living with the nomads,\" the Nixan added.\n\nI glanced back at Ddraig Krateos's chambers, wondering if what was discussed in there was meant to be private. Surely the ddraig would be informing his daughter of the proceedings though, so I felt confident enough in telling Haeraig Zeena what had been planned.\n\nThe Nixan was startled, but not overly surprised that I would be returning to Laxtal to try and discover the identity of the Xital traitor. \"I think Ddraig Tsona would be more willing to listen to you now you've spoken to the humans,\" she said after a little pause, by which time she had started to lead me through the lair. We were descending through the great central chamber: down towards the far distant floor that never seemed to get any closer.\n\n\"I certainly hope so,\" I said. I knew I was risking my reputation in this. If Ddraig Tsona refused to listen to me then I doubted I would ever be able to return to Laxtal again, regardless of who was ddraig. My standing would be completely destroyed if I failed.\n\nThe Nixan banked away to the right, and as I followed her I caught a glimpse up at the ceiling. It was so far away now, but the floor below didn't appear to be any closer. She led me into a small cavern that wasn't hidden away behind any magical walls; it was open to the rest of the lair but for a thin sheet of fabric that hung over the entrance. A second, smaller chamber branched off the first, which was also shielded by a veil.\n\nVinzent was already waiting for us, and the dragonet bounded up to his paws when he saw us come in. Haeraig Zeena didn't stay for long, though Vinzent protested when she prepared to leave. The haeraig just smiled and said, \"I have duties to attend to.\"\n\nAs the Nixan flew away, Vinzent sighed and lay back down in front of the coal-fuelled fire that was burning in the corner. For all his eagerness in coming to Nixa and urging Ddraig Krateos to summon an army to reclaim Laxtal, the dragonet now seemed disinterested in what the ddraig had said. He didn't even ask me what had gone on in the ddraig's chambers, instead just lying in front of the fire with his eyes closed.\n\n\"I'm leaving for Laxtal in the morning,\" I said eventually, but even that barely drew any reaction from the dragonet.\n\n\"Already?\" Vinzent asked, opening one curious eye.\n\n\"Ddraig Krateos is expecting Anzig back soon. We need to be ready to act with the Axinstone, but we can't do that until we know who the traitor is within Xital. Ddraig Krateos thinks Ddraig Tsona could be able to work out who is feeding the humans information,\" I explained.\n\n\"That's it? That's all the help Ddraig Krateos is providing?\" Vinzent scoffed. \"We already know the traitor is Tsona.\"\n\n\"We have no proof of that,\" I growled. I thought we had ended this argument, but Vinzent seemed quite keen to pick it up again.\n\n\"No proof?\" the dragonet snarled. He pushed up against me, pressing his snout against mine and glaring into my eyes. \"Ellian, he forced us out of our clan, and for what? Because we dared question his mighty self?\"\n\nI took a step back and swiped across Vinzent's snout, making him recoil back in shock. \"He banished us because we challenged him and failed. The same happened to us as would happen to any drake who challenged the authority of the ddraig and failed to defeat them.\" With his mouth open, Vinzent turned away to stare into the fire. I almost approached him to place my wing around his body, but I held my ground. \"If Ddraig Krateos trusts Ddraig Tsona still, then so do I.\"\n\n\"So you're flying to Laxtal alone?\" Vinzent asked sombrely.\n\n\"Alone? What happened to you following me back to Laxtal no matter what?\" I asked with a hiss.\n\n\"I said with an army behind our wings. If we fly back alone we'll be killed. We need to take Laxtal back with force,\" the dragonet said with a sinister growl. His pale blue eyes glinted red in the firelight.\n\nI had to take a few steps back from the silver dragonet. I had never heard him speak like that before, and I was scared by the look in his eyes. \"I will not condone an attack on our own clan,\" I whispered, but I don't think Vinzent heard me.\n\n\"You keep saying we need to act in this war to help Anzig, but every time a chance comes along you always take the easy option,\" he snarled. Again he advanced on me, and once more I had to step back. \"You fled Laxtal when we should have stayed and fought. You supported Mulner when he was doing nothing to stop the humans roaming our land. And now you'll return to Tsona with your tail between your legs and just to try talk to him, to beg him for mercy. We should be going back to rip out his throat for what he is doing to our clan.\"\n\n\"He's not doing anything to our clan, Vinzent. Ddraig Krateos has heard nothing from Laxtal. No unrest or misdirection. There is nothing to prove he's trying to fragment dragonkind by taking control of Laxtal,\" I protested, but Vinzent just shook his head and growled.\n\n\"You have no ambition, Ellian. You'll never reclaim our clan if you're afraid to take risks. I thought you were better than that,\" he snarled. I was backed right into the corner now. I had nowhere to go and nowhere to look but right into Vinzent's eyes. Staring me down was not the dragon who had agreed to become my mate. This was a rival who desired the power I had once claimed.\n\nI felt utterly numb. This was a drake who had been at my side and beneath my wings since we were both hatchlings. He had supported me all the while, never once crossing me. Every word he spoke now was agony to my heart.\n\n\"I thought I could trust you to help me,\" I said, barely forcing a hoarse whisper out of my constricted throat.\n\n\"I thought I could trust you to be a decisive leader,\" he retorted. \"I thought you could be a mate I would be proud of.\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\nVinzent didn't answer for a few moments. He seemed almost ashamed as he turned away from me. \"You've always been my closest friend, Ellian. I hope you always will be. But, as a mate... I can fly higher.\"\n\nA growl built from the back of my throat before I unleashed it as a vicious snarl. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but Vinzent was unapologetic as he calmly faced me down. He made no attempt to try and ease the pain that was tearing through my body. I couldn't even think properly, certainly not well enough to formulate a response other than a savage snarl.\n\n\"I'll stay here and see if I can convince the Nixans to get an army to follow you to Laxtal,\" Vinzent said, but I barely even heard him. I wanted to lash out and strike him, but I was forced to hold myself back. He would easily overpower me if it came to a fight, and deep underground I didn't have the space to employ any of my tricks I had learnt from Carlee over the years. Vinzent would not be harmed despite his actions, and that frustrated me further.\n\n\"Are you even listening, Ellian?\"\n\n\"No,\" I replied bluntly. I curled up in the corner of the cavern and pulled my wing over my body in a clear sign I didn't want to be disturbed. With my eyes still open, I could see Vinzent's shadow moving through the membrane of my wing. He started to approach, before changing his mind and turning away. I could hear him muttering to himself, but I wasn't able to catch the words.\n\nFinally he fell silent, before retreating into the small antechamber.\n\nI remained awake for a long time. I was hurting too much to relax my mind enough to sleep. Truth be told, I was tempted to take to wing and leave Nixa immediately, but I doubted I would be able to escape the lair without the assistance of a Nixan drake, which I knew I would not be able to obtain. The only drake I could trust was Airil, but I knew I would have no chance of finding him. I was trapped here with the drake who had betrayed me.\n\nI would leave for Laxtal at first light, and I would be flying alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "I did not see Vinzent the following morning. I awoke early and flew directly to Ddraig Krateos's chambers and waited for the Nixan to rise. He did not keep me waiting for long, and he rumbled a greeting before guiding me out through the clan's defences. I tried not to show my fear to the ddraig as I walked through the glowing walls. Not once did he question the absence of the silver dragon.\n\nI emerged squinting into the sunlight, stood atop of one of the many low rises that marked the Nixan lair. I unfurled my wings and looked up to the clear sky. Conditions were almost perfect for flight; I would even have a tailwind to push me along my way. A storm had raged overhead throughout the night, but apart from a few damp patches of grass, there was nothing to show the lair had been victim to the violence of wind and rain.\n\n\"Send a messenger as soon as you reclaim your clan, or if you are able to determine who the traitor in Xital is,\" the Ddraig said. \"The moment the Axinstone is returned to us we shall be in contact with you to make a plan of action.\"\n\n\"I shall do my best, Ddraig Krateos,\" I said, bowing my head towards the more experienced drake.\n\n\"Good. Your best will be needed. You will need to convince Ddraig Tsona that it is in dragonkind's best interest that you lead Laxtal again. He should relinquish control without the need for a formal challenge,\" the Ddraig said.\n\nI nodded my head again. I was relying on Ddraig Krateos's belief that Ddraig Tsona could still be trusted. If the Xital ddraig was the traitor we were trying to find, then I knew to fear for my safety. Given the drake who was most vocal as Ddraig Tsona's aggressor was Vinzent, I was happy to put my faith in the Nixan. I no longer believed Vinzent's opinions were in my best interests.\n\n\"May the wind fly under your wings, Ellian of Laxtal. Prove yourself worthy of being a child of Nixa. I trust we will meet again soon,\" Ddraig Krateos said with an almost imperceptible bowing of his head.\n\nI acknowledged the ddraig's respects, before kicking into the air. Many of my worries would be left behind in Nixa. The only thing that mattered now was the clear blue skies before me, and the rolling plains of Laxtal beyond the distant horizon.\n\nI was returning home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "The mountains loomed high above us, rearing up to block out half the sky. Those great heights were all that separated us from the draconic territories. Our only worry now was crossing them. There were no issues of humans coming across us; we had seen no evidence of any settlement within miles, and they had no reason to cross the mountains this far north. They were using the much easier Gota-Sxinix pass on the southern borders of Laxtal. I would have loved the opportunity to take the southern pass, but it would have been crawling with humans, so our only option had been to stay in the north. Of course, this pass also had the advantage of taking us fairly close to the northern borders of Nixa. Isikian believed we would be at the Nixan lair within just three days.\n\nAzlak had taken the lead of the group once more as we flew up the side of the mountains. I still couldn't really see our destination, but the seer had assured me he knew where he was going. He had not answered me when I had asked if it would be anything like the ordeal we had suffered on our last trip across the Sxinix. That had been an arduous walk over a narrow path buffeted by icy winds. It had not been pleasant, but I knew I would be willing to endure much worse as we returned home.\n\nInilta flew just behind my wing. In his paws he clutched the Axinstone. The Nixan had not let the glowing stone out of his grasp ever since leaving the old mine. I could still feel its power pulsing; a rush of magic that manifested into a prickling heat on my scales. I felt invigorated by the energy that I was getting from the Axinstone, but I was trying to hide its effects from the Nixans. Isikian especially was quite concerned that I was so strongly affected by its magic.\n\nWe halted for a brief respite at the summit of a sheer cliff, giving us the opportunity to prepare for the mountains proper. I sat with Keita, looking back down at the forest we had emerged from. Here and there were the little signs of human activity. Small villages dotted the edges of the forest, the closest of which was still a few miles away, too far distant to cause us any concerns.\n\nThe only worry I had on my mind now was whether the humans would retaliate for the theft of the Axinstone. It was something I hadn't considered until now. There hadn't been any consistent fighting between our species in the war so far, just sporadic outbreaks of violence. The human George would know that drakes had stolen the Axinstone. What measures would he take to retrieve it? I was sure Nixa would be aware of the dangers, but I knew I would have to discuss the matter with Ddraig Krateos. I needed to know that the other clans would be safe from human retribution. Every clan that bordered the Sxinix needed to be alert: Laxtal especially. I trusted Ellian to have the clan prepared for anything, but knew she would have had a struggle to control the clan following the death of my father. We needed to hurry back before the clan descended into chaos and confusion surrounding its leadership.\n\nMy restlessness must have been evident, as Keita gently placed her wing over me. \"We're almost there. We just need to cross the mountains and we're safe,\" she said.\n\n\"For now,\" I replied. It all looked so peaceful now, but it couldn't stay that way. My clan would be looking to me to help guide them through this war, but I didn't know if I could do that. I had seen what humans were capable of, and I wasn't convinced we could be victorious. As ddraig of one of the ruling clans, it would be expected of me to devise some brilliant scheme.\n\nOf course, some drakes would point out the successful theft of the Axinstone, which could be considered my idea, but I could admit we had been lucky. I had also had little to do with the success of the attempt, and once more I doubted my ability to lead Laxtal. My father had left pawprints too big for me to ever hope of filling.\n\n\"We can win,\" Keita said softly. I looked across to her. She was staring down at the great forest, but I knew she wasn't able to see the details I could see.\n\n\"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\"Because Azlak says we can, and you have put your faith in him. I doubted him. We all doubted him, all except you. Now look at us, we've come this far,\" she said.\n\nI allowed myself a small smile. She was right. Azlak had been our guide for so long now, and he still seemed to believe we had a chance to defeat the humans. If Keita had decided to place her trust in the seer, then anything was now possible. She had been Azlak's most vocal critic at the start of the journey, and had even refused to acknowledge his existence initially.\n\nKeita growled as Maznar approached us. Whilst she had been able to finally trust Azlak, trusting the spectre had been another matter entirely. She disagreed with me in allowing Maznar to travel with us, but had reluctantly accepted my decision for the time being.\n\nMaznar bowed her head as she approached, deferring to both myself and Keita.\n\n\"Azlak says we should be taking to wing soon, Ddraig Anzig,\" she said quietly.\n\nThe dragoness had spoken little since we had left George's castle. Everyone was nervous in her presence, whilst she was reluctant to acknowledge the silence that surrounded her. I still saw the shadow of the spectre in her red eyes, and that unnerved me. I looked into her eyes and I relived the pain of my shattered wing and mutilated tail and chest.\n\nAzlak was the only drake who'd had a lengthy conversation with the spectre, but neither of them had revealed what was discussed. I got the feeling they were hiding something from me, but at the same time I could convince myself that I was simply being paranoid. Maznar would hold many secrets after spending so much time amongst the humans, and I trusted her to reveal the information she knew when the time was right. As for Azlak, he had every right to look away in guilt every time he caught my eye. I knew he still considered himself responsible for my father's death. There had been a brief moment when I had hated the seer with every thought, but over time I had relented to the degree that I was able to forgive him. I acknowledged that he had saved my life, and that he had been unaware that his actions would result in the death of someone most precious to me and the clan.\n\nKeita pulled me aside before we rejoined the others. \"Are you certain about the spectre?\" she whispered.\n\n\"It's been a long time since I've been certain about anything,\" I replied. I spread my wings, eager to get into the air once more. I just wanted to get away from human lands. On the other side of the mountains, maybe I would start feeling surer of things again.\n\n\"I thought so,\" Keita said, looking down at the ground. Her voice was dull, almost sorrowful.\n\nShe took to the air before I could question her meaning, and she didn't approach my wing again as I took my position just behind Azlak. Instead the dragoness hung back with Okazuni, delighting the Nyrian dragon with her presence.\n\nAzlak led us further still up the mountain. Initially, there was no sign of a route through the mountains, but the more we flew, I started to make out the outline of a steep valley that seemed to cut right between two gigantic peaks, piercing into a bank of thick cloud.\n\nThe valley looked like something had taken a swipe at the solid rock, leaving behind a thick gouge that was over a hundred feet wide. Even from this distance I could see a few mountain goats leaping from rock to rock, before scampering into some of the toughened shrubs and trees that clung to the rockface as we approached. It was not the narrow path that meandered above a great precipice like we had used to cross into human lands, but it still looked like we would have to make the journey by paw. I could see from the patches of snow that had fallen into the valley how the wind gusted and swirled, making flight risky.\n\nSure enough, Azlak led us down to the edge of the great ravine and allowed me to take the lead from him. He nervously told me that there was only one route to take through the valley. There were no detours to lose our way on, so his guidance was no longer necessary until we reached the open plains beyond the valley, which we would have to do before nightfall. He didn't expect to find anywhere to shelter between here and the far side of the mountains.\n\nI was left alone to furrow a safe path through the valley, having to negotiate loose stone that had accumulated over the years. Snow swirled down from the high peaks either side. In some places it had built up to form a thick layer, in others it had already started to melt and form large murky puddles. We walked around them, not knowing how deep any of them were; would I just splash through them or fall down a hidden abyss?\n\nIt was cold in the valley, with a piercing wind whistling between the two walls of stone. It howled and shrieked as it pushed against me, trying to tease my wings open and force me back down the valley.\n\nI emptied my mind and focused on putting one paw in front of the other to keep moving forward. If I weakened for just a moment, mentally or physically, the results could be dire. I simply couldn't allow my wings to unfurl. The wind was too strong to take flight. I could easily find myself dashed against the rock.\n\nOccasionally, I could hear grunts and snarls from behind me as the others suffered a little difficulty, but I couldn't look back. I had to keep my eyes firmly on the ground just before my paws. I trusted Isikian would assist anyone who fell and injured themselves. The healer had been sent to the back with the Axinstone, prying it from his brother's reluctant grip, so he would be able to see anyone in trouble and quickly tend to them.\n\nThere was an echo in the wind. I was sure I could hear voices in them, softly speaking to each other, though I was sure that none of the drakes behind me were saying anything. Like me, they were too focused on treading carefully to carry any conversation. I couldn't hear what was being said by the mystical voices. Every time I tried to listen to what they were saying, they faded away until I could barely hear them over the howl of the wind. I shook my head and tried to ignore them. It was no use listening to phantoms in times like these.\n\nIt was difficult to judge time as I pushed ever onwards. The sun was almost completely obscured by the sheer cliff walls that rose up either side of us, as well as a thickening bank of clouds we climbed towards. The light was rapidly fading, but I was sure nightfall was still some way off. I had received no warnings from Azlak that progress was too slow.\n\nAs the light faded, so did my vision. Shadows seemed to leap out of the rock as the darkness engulfed the valley. The ground underpaw was starting to get slippery as the clouds descended, blanketing the rock in moisture. I stumbled a few times but just managed to keep my balance. I called to the others to follow in my pawprints where I knew the ground was sure and firm.\n\nI heard Keita cry out in pain as she fell to the ground. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to keep pushing on, though I wanted to turn and see that she was alright. I had to trust Isikian that he would see to the dragoness.\n\nI felt the ground ease downhill slightly beneath my aching paws. I took heart with this, hoping that it meant the end of the ordeal was near. Claws scrambled against the rock to my side, and I caught a flash of gold as the seer moved up beside me, clambering over the loose stones to reach me.\n\n\"A storm is approaching, Ddraig Anzig. If we keep this pace I don't think we'll get off the mountain in time,\" the seer warned.\n\n\"We can't go any faster,\" I snarled, once again stumbling on the slippery rock as my concentration was broken by Azlak.\n\n\"We must though.\"\n\n\"What do you expect me to do?\" I growled. Keita had already fallen once; I knew that if we moved any faster others would start to struggle. We would be testing Isikian's abilities too much by risking more injuries.\n\nThe seer didn't say anything as he dropped back behind me once more. I could still hear him muttering to himself, barely audible over the howl of the wind. I glanced up at the clouds, and had to agree with the seer in one sense: it did look like a storm was brewing. The clouds were blacker than any I had seen before, and we were not far below them. If a storm were to break, we would suffer the full force of it, exposed in the narrow valley with nowhere to shelter.\n\nA flash of searing lightning lit the sky, followed almost immediately by a deafening crack of thunder.\n\n\"I warned him,\" I heard the seer say. I knew I had to turn around and berate him for his insolence, but as I did I slipped, only just keeping upright. I growled quietly and made a mental note to speak to Azlak later, and turned my focus back to the damp rock beneath my paws. We needed to get off the mountain before the storm released its ire upon us all.\n\nI shivered as the temperature dropped further. There was no longer even a hint of the sun behind the clouds, and against my best reasoning, I started to push harder. Maybe Azlak was right, and it was worth the risk trying to move quicker rather than get caught up in the mountains at night, during an oncoming storm.\n\nFinally we emerged onto open ground. The valley walls flattened and widened out, until all that was left of the deep cleft we had traversed through was a shallow bowl looking out over the wildlands that lay to the north-west of Nixa. Though it was covered in shadow with patches of rain falling already, never before had I seen a more beautiful sight than the draconic territories; land unblemished by humans.\n\nI did not hesitate before taking to wing. I could hear Azlak doing the same just behind me. Through the wild, gusting wind I fought to control my flight down to the far distant ground. Without any clear destination, I aimed for the edge of a large forest, much like the one we had just left behind in the human lands.\n\nWe were just in time. Large drops of rain pelted my wings as I descended, threatening to unbalance my flight and fling me out of the sky. With great relief, I landed safely on the soft ground, revelling in the feel of the dirt beneath my paws. I couldn't relax yet though. We needed some shelter from the rain that was rolling in from the east \u2013 a great curtain of water that was slowly approaching.\n\nAzlak was the next to land, and he came to the ground by my side. \"Where next?\" I asked him, hoping he already knew a place to shelter.\n\n\"I... I don't know,\" the seer said, looking around with despair. He hadn't Seen anything. I growled. His magic had failed us.\n\nThe others all came to land soon after. My mood lifted in seeing Keita amongst them, looking unscathed from her fall in the valley. Everyone looked toward me, but their focus was down at my paws, all waiting for me to explain our next move. Once again I had nothing. I didn't know these parts at all, and I had no idea where to find any shelter.\n\nI turned to the two Nixans. \"Do you know of any caves or nomadic lairs near here?\" I asked them.\n\nInilta didn't hesitate before shaking his head, but Isikian pondered the question a little longer. The healer stared at the mountains with intent, holding his snout high as he sniffed the air. \"I think I might know of one, Ddraig,\" he said after his contemplations.\n\n\"Then lead us, Isikian,\" I said. The healer unfurled his wings, resulting in a few groans from the others of having to take to the air again so soon after landing.\n\nIsikian led us back towards the mountains, but stayed low to the ground. The wind pushed us onwards, keeping us ahead of the worst of the storm, though we surely only had five minutes at most before it hit us.\n\nThere was a gaping cave at the foot of the mountains, much taller than Nightwings had been and at least three times wider than her expanded wingspan. There were strange symbols carved into the rock around the edges of the cave mouth, but I had no time to study them now. We all dived into the darkness that awaited us inside, and not a moment too soon. The torrent of water drenched the ground in moments.\n\nInilta wasted no time in producing a fire. The light from his flames didn't reach the far walls. The cavern was massive.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like this. Is it an old lair?\" I asked Isikian.\n\nThe healer shook his head. \"I don't know, Ddraig Anzig. Our clan has known of this place for a long time, but we've never been able to understand it. We do know it's not a natural cave, and there've been a lot of strange artefacts found.\"\n\n\"Is it safe?\" Carlee growled.\n\n\"As far as we've ever been able to determine,\" Isikian replied.\n\nI looked around, trying to penetrate the inky darkness without any success. Beyond Inilta's fire, the blackness was absolute. I noticed something. A crimson glow in the distance. I nudged Carlee to get her attention, and she growled again. I finally got her attention and nodded in the direction of the glow. Her eyes widened slightly, either adjusting to the gloom, or in surprise at what she saw. I whispered to her to take Okazuni and investigate.\n\nThey quickly faded into the gloom while we waited nervously for them to return. We had all seen the strange glow now. Keita and Azlak waited impatiently by my side. The seer was looking down at his paws, his eyes shining white. I resisted the urge to ask him what he was Seeing.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig, come quickly. You're going to want to see this.\" Carlee's voice shattered the silence, piercing the darkness. I could sense fear in her voice, or was it excitement? I immediately plunged into the void before me. I was not alone. I felt Azlak's and Nataik's presence alongside me as I went deeper into the nothingness before me.\n\nAlmost imperceptibly, the black of nothing was replaced by a red hue. I began to make out familiar dragon shapes, as though bathed in blood. It seemed everything that came into vision was. The cause of Carlee's consternation was a large stone tablet that was cracked down the middle. I glanced up to a shelf high above our heads. It was from up there that the crimson light was shining, but Carlee directed my attention to the slab at her paws. There were strange markings around the edge of the stone, just like the ones at the entrance to the cave.\n\n\"It looks like human markings, but I can't read what it says,\" the veteran said. She looked expectantly across at Nataik. The Xigax dragoness had proved in the past that she could read these strange, human-crafted symbols.\n\nIt took but a few moments before Nataik shook her head firmly. \"This is no language I recognise,\" she muttered.\n\n\"That one there says 'Nixa',\" Azlak said, looking over the shoulder of the dragoness. He traced a claw across some markings that had no meaning to my eyes.\n\nNataik growled as she looked at Azlak's marks. \"I think you're right,\" she said, before we were all distracted by a noise high above.\n\nIn the light of the red glow, I could just make out the red shape of Okazuni's head leaning over the shelf's edge. \"There's another one up here,\" he called down.\n\nNataik was the first to take to wing, and she had cried out in excitement before I was able to join him on the shelf. The source of the light was a large blood red stone set into the wall. It illuminated a number of carvings of differing shapes and sizes. Some were of the elegant markings the humans' language, while others seemed to be small images. I thought I recognised one as the head of a drake.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Nataik was whispering. I didn't glance over, knowing I wouldn't be able to recognise whatever it was she was excited about. Carlee and Azlak didn't show the same restraint. I was instead focusing on the glowing orb in front of me. I reached out with a paw, a claw's length from the stone. It felt cold, but at the same time I sensed a slight tingle of magic.\n\n\"The Eight thank the dragons of Sxinix for their assistance in reclaiming Kyte's rune,\" Azlak said slowly as he read from the stone slab. \"You will always find a powerful ally in Mount Ehran.\"\n\n\"Ehran? I've never heard of it,\" Carlee said with an annoyed snarl. I understood her frustration. Any ally would be useful now in the fight against the humans, but if Carlee did not know where this mountain was, or who dwelt there, then we had no chance of finding them before humans swept aside our defences.\n\nI placed my paw on the stone. There was a pulse of magic that flowed through me, but then dissipated as quickly as it had appeared. Whatever magic there had been in this place had long since gone, as had whoever had once lived here.\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?\" Azlak's awed whisper pulled my attention back to my companions. The seer's focus was on a small scrap of ancient parchment, decorated with elegant images inscribed on it. This wasn't human text, but a picture of a bird nestled in red flames. \"It's a firebird.\"\n\n\"A firebird?\" Carlee scoffed. \"A tale told to drakelets and nothing more. They aren't real.\"\n\n\"So what of this?\" the seer asked, not to be deterred by Carlee's scepticism.\n\nThe second image was of a creature I had never seen before. Its front half was like some sort of hunting bird \u2013 a hawk or an eagle perhaps, but it had the hindquarters of a wildcat.\n\n\"What manner of creature is that?\" I asked. Azlak shook his head, unable to provide any answer, but Nataik pointed out a small squiggle of blank ink the seer had missed.\n\n\"The humans call it a gryphon,\" she said. \"You might know it as a skycat.\"\n\nI had never of such a creature. I couldn't bring myself to believe it was real. Like the firebird it had to be a creature of myth and legend. Disappointed, and shaking my head, I believed that there was nothing here to help us.\n\nI turned from the small shelf and looked out into the darkness. It never seemed to end. I could not tell how deep the cave went, and there was a strange prickle of magic that tickled down my tail. There was something powerful here, something that rivalled the Axinstone.\n\nThough the fire tempted me, I took a few cautious steps deeper into the darkness. Pawsteps sounded behind me. I glanced back to see Azlak. I was tempted to tell the seer to leave me alone, but I was glad of the company. I bared my teeth at him, but did not chase him away.\n\n\"You feel it too, Ddraig?\" the seer asked. I did not answer him.\n\nThere was no echo to my pawsteps. The firelight seemed so small and pitiful behind us. The shadows clung close to my eyes, obstructing vision even to the end of my snout. Nothing could breech that darkness.\n\nSoot covered the ground beneath my paws. My nose wrinkled at an unpleasant scent, but I did not turn around. Had I been alone, I might have given up the search in the darkness, but Azlak's presence forced me to continue on. Phantoms returned to my mind. Whispers plagued my every thought.\n\nMy snout bumped into something solid. I yelped and fell back, striking my tail against Azlak's legs. My eyes watered. I angrily wiped away the forbidden tears before the seer could see the glistening moisture in my eyes. \"Inilta!\" I called out, half-turning to look back to the distant fire. \"I need your magic over here.\"\n\nAs I waited for the Nixan, the whisper at the back of my mind grew louder. It came from somewhere in front of me. Only one word repeated. \"Father?\"\n\nThe grey-scaled Nixan slouched closer. His eyes flicked through the darkness. He seemed as apprehensive about the shadows as I felt. At my command, he summoned his magic to illuminate what lay ahead.\n\nNothing could have prepared my eyes for what I saw. A dragon made of stone rose up from the floor. The statue was bigger even than Nightwings, and he was perched back on his hindlegs with his wings partially unfurled as though ready for flight. His distant face was twisted in pain and terror.\n\nA voice boomed through my mind.\n\n\"Father? Father, is that you? Father, I'm so sorry!\"\n\nThe light extinguished as Inilta fled in fear. I turned to follow with Azlak as the voice fell silent once more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "We found nothing else in the cave, though none of us were willing to explore more given the terror we felt when approaching the statue. None of us knew what the statue was in the cave for, or what it meant. No one spoke of the voice that had filled my mind, so I said nothing of it. The night had been uneasy, but our exhaustion had been enough to overwhelm our fear and unease.\n\nWe left the massive cave at first light, eager to put the cave behind us, and to be travelling south towards the Nixan borders. There was not much flying left now; we were close to the draconic territories. We just needed to keep the mountains at our right wing and we would be at the Nixan border by nightfall.\n\nThere was no trace of last night's storm: the sky was a beautiful, pristine blue. It was perfect flying conditions, and we were all glad for the relatively easy flight south. I was left alone for most of the day, but behind me conversation was light and playful.\n\nTowards the end of the flight, Isikian had come to my wing to inform me of a good refuge for the night. I eased back to allow the healer to take the lead, and once more the Nixan guided us towards somewhere to rest.\n\nIt soon became clear where the healer was taking us to; a towering mountain that rose high above any of the other peaks around it. Below the snowline, the ground was green undulated grasslands, punctured by claw-like shards of rock. Above the lush grass, where the mountain soured barren towards the sky I could make out what appeared to be networks of interconnected caves. These caves were inaccessible to anything without wings, as the first few hundred feet of the mountain consisted of sheer vertical cliffs, without even the hint of a cleft or fold to provide any purchase to climb.\n\nIn the gathering gloom, we landed high above the grasslands below, upon the northern slopes of the mountain, near a cave entrance. Exhausted, we stumbled into the mountain. A cold wind had started to blow, and we were grateful for its shelter. I paused for just a moment at the threshold of the cave to look back out over the surrounding land. To the north and east was dense forest, though beyond that I could just make out in the distant haze, the undulating plains that led into northern Nixa and Turaxa.\n\nInilta quickly lit a fire again \u2013 his flames erupting from the dusty rock floor of the cave. It looked as though our shelter for the night was occasionally used by nomadic drakes, though none were present at the moment. The charred remains of a fire was visible on the floor. The smell of charcoal lingered; it had only been a few days at the most since it was last occupied.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I asked Isikian as the healer moved to settle down near his brother. Lying nearby, Carlee kept an interested eye open.\n\n\"This is Kxisila. It's been known to Nixa for many years as a refuge if our lair is ever compromised,\" the healer explained.\n\n\"Kxisila?\" Maznar said slowly, the dragoness sidling up close to us. \"I have seen this place before, in the dreams of a human. They called it Dragon's Haven.\"\n\nIsikian sucked in his breath. \"The humans shouldn't know about this place. Unless they learnt how to fly, they have no way of scaling the mountainside,\" he said.\n\n\"They were not up this high. In the dream they were looking at the mountain from the bottom of the cliffs, but they knew what was up here. They remembered being told... by a dragon,\" Maznar explained.\n\n\"A dragon? Do you know who?\" I asked, worried by this. Of course, the dream could have come from a long time ago, before the war between drakes and humans, but I doubted this. Even then I doubted Nixa would have made the location of Kxisila known to humans.\n\n\"I'm afraid the human didn't know the name,\" Maznar said. She looked me right in the eye for a moment. \"But I can tell you that there is a dragon colluding with the humans. I don't know who, but I believe it's the same one who told them of this place, and they have good influence within their clan. He also gifted my egg to George, though he is not my father.\"\n\n\"Why haven't you told us this before?\" Carlee growled.\n\n\"Because it wasn't relevant until now. There's nothing anyone could have done with the information, even if I had told you,\" Maznar said, flaring her wings slightly in protest at Carlee's accusation.\n\nThe veteran dragoness snarled, but chose not to respond to the spectre, instead turning away and pulling her wing over her head. I had no doubt I would hear more about this later, but for the time being Carlee was willing to let the matter rest.\n\nI chose to focus on something else Maznar had said. \"How do you know this dragon isn't your father if you don't know his name?\"\n\nMaznar grinned a wide, toothy smile. I suppressed a shudder as I was reminded of those gaping jaws reaching for me, ready to devour me at the first opportunity. \"You forget, Ddraig Anzig, that I can see dreams. George often dreamt about the time he was given the great prize he so coveted: the egg of a drake. He also remembered he was told by this dragon that the egg was found abandoned in the wilderness. The dragon didn't know where my egg came from, but given my magic I would suspect Nixa,\" she said with a nod towards Isikian.\n\nThe healer exhaled slowly. \"That would take a worry off my mind, if I could be sure you were a Nixan,\" he said.\n\n\"I still search dreams every night to find who my father is, but I've never been able to reach into the sleeping minds of those in Nixa,\" the dragoness said mournfully.\n\n\"You wouldn't. No magic can penetrate the boundaries of the lair. You would have to be within the lair to see into the dreams of those sleeping there,\" Isikian said. The healer looked around, his head drooping as he looked to curl up on the floor. \"If you'll excuse me Ddraig Anzig, I must rest now.\"\n\n\"Of course Isikian, rest. We should arrive in Nixa tomorrow?\"\n\nIsikian smiled, lifting his seemingly heavy head up towards me. \"Nothing will stop us,\" he said, before bowing his head and backing away. He wearily crossed to the far side of the fire, his shadow dancing around over the uneven floor. His departure left me alone with Maznar.\n\n\"I may have told one untruth,\" the spectre said quietly. She pawed at the ground, her claws, easily gouging the ground, creating a trio of slashes. \"There wasn't just one egg found by the dragon. There were three. Three eggs, Ddraig Anzig. Only one was taken by human hands. You would do well to remember that.\"\n\nBefore she gave me chance to question her, Maznar slunk away into the shadows, her black scales rendering her near invisible in the darkness; almost as well as Nataik's chameleonic scales. Only her glowing, piercing, red eyes gave away her chosen spot.\n\nThree eggs? I had no idea what that meant, so I pushed it to the back of my mind in the hope that the spectre would explain further in the morning. I was tired of so many evenings throwing up mysteries and riddles. The dragon statue of the previous night still bothered me.\n\nI turned away and picked out the sheen of Keita's red scales in the darkness. She was lying near Okazuni and the tips of their tails were almost touching. I felt a pang of jealousy strike my heart. She opened her eyes and looked at me, and for a moment I thought she was about to rouse herself to come over to me, but she just shifted her wings and moved to a curled in to a more comfortable position.\n\nWith a strange sensation of light-headedness, I spiralled down onto the ground, alone by the fire. I squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to ignore the sinister thought running through my mind that I was losing the one dragoness I had ever loved; all because of my inability to take action. The voice was wrong, I tried to convince myself. Keita knew I loved her. Didn't she? I thought back, trying to find some indication that Keita had given, some sign that told me that she loved me in return, but my mind drew a blank. She had always been there for me, but only ever as a friend.\n\nI looked across at her with one eye, and I tensed up as I saw her tail slowly inch across to Okazuni's. The tips entwined as their breathing slowed as they fell into slumber. I shut my eye again and suppressed a pitiful whimper, trying to forget what I had just seen.\n\nKeita was mine. She had to be.\n\nI could not lose her.\n\nI would not lose her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "I awoke before the sun had risen, but I had not been the first. Okazuni and Keita were not in the vast cavern by the time I roused myself and left the cave to greet the first rays of light as they breached the horizon.\n\nThere was a strange hollowness in my chest I had never felt before, but instinctively I knew what it meant. A significant future had died here last night and it didn't take me long to realise what it was. The future I had once seen of Ddraig Anzig standing over a clutch of eggs had gone. Those had been his eggs, I knew now, and his mate must have been Keita. But she was gone, and Okazuni with her. I bowed my head in dismay. If the ddraig and Keita had been destined to become mates, then the ddraig's feelings for the dragoness must have been strong indeed. Now she would never be his. He had lost his future mate to a rival dragon. I could only hope that because the relationship had all been in the future the effect on the ddraig wouldn't be so severe, but I knew in my heart that he would take the news badly.\n\nNow I had something else in common with the ddraig. Neither of us had any prospects of a mate. Of course, the ddraig still had power and respect \u2013 there would be no shortage of dragonesses wishing to be his mate. However, there was no chance any Laxtal dragoness would give me a second glance, perhaps not even a first. None would agree to be my mate, not that any of them had taken my fancy. My desires lay elsewhere, but that did not matter. I would always be alone, with only the Laxtal dragon endowed with magic for company, but I knew we were not destined to be mated.\n\nI sighed and looked out over the expansive forest that encroached on the mountain, a hundred feet below. In the far distance I thought I could see the glimmer of water. That had to be the river that marked the northern boundary of Nixa; there were no other bodies of water anywhere near here, if my memory was correct.\n\nA dawn chorus started to erupt from the forest as the birds began to wake. Two dark forms flew out from the trees, ascending almost vertically to the sky. At first I thought it was two birds, until I saw them appear to entwine and start spiralling back down to the forest. I turned away, embarrassed at what I had seen. I covered my eyes with my wing, giving Keita and her new Nyrian mate some privacy.\n\nWings rustled as another drake emerged from the cave. Timidly, I uncovered my eyes, but the sky was clear and devoid of any drakes. I glanced back to see who had joined me, and was a little surprised to see the dull brown scales of Carlee. The old dragoness was normally one of the last to rise. Of course, she didn't even acknowledge my presence as she stretched out in the sun, spreading her wings as she took in the morning warmth. I expected nothing else from her. I may have been successful in guiding Ddraig Anzig to retrieve the Axinstone, but I knew my standing was unlikely to rise at all within my clan.\n\nI couldn't help but feel a little bitter at that. I had risked much, and I felt I had given a good account of myself throughout the ordeal. Only rarely had we been in any sort of danger I had not foreseen, and I thought I deserved some respect from my clan. Carlee though, was never going to give me that, but I hoped that Ddraig Anzig would be more forthcoming.\n\nSoon, we were joined by the two Nixans and Nataik. The dragoness emerged out of the cave looking ready to fly. Inilta carried the Axinstone with him, just as he had ever since we had reclaimed it. He had relinquished just the once, and then only to his brother. The healer lay down not far from me and spread his wings out to catch the morning sun, while Inilta and Nataik spread out down closer to the edge of the cliff.\n\nDdraig Anzig followed soon after, although he appeared confused and unsteady on his paws as he came out from the cave and approached us. His eyes were unfocused as he looked up towards the clear sky.\n\n\"Have you seen Keita?\" the ddraig asked before taking a seat on the grass by my side, forcing Isikian to shift to the side.\n\n\"N-no,\" I stammered, not wanting to reveal what I had seen the Keita doing. I had already been the bearer of too much bad news for the ddraig. I was not about to burden him with more.\n\nBeyond the ddraig, Isikian frowned. \"We shouldn't delay here. It won't be long before Ddraig Krateos is aware of our presence. It is not wise to keep him waiting,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm sure Keita will be back soon,\" I said, hoping that the ddraig wouldn't notice that Okazuni was also absent. I wanted to avoid having to tell the ddraig myself.\n\nThe missing couple weren't much longer. They returned just as Maznar was the last to emerge from the cavern. Okazuni was the first to land, with Keita taking to the ground just by his side. Her wing remained unfurled as she held it over the smaller Nyrian drake in a manner that almost dared someone to comment on it. I heard a sharp intake of breath from the ddraig as he glanced up to see them. His whole body convulsed in such a way that I feared the wound in his chest had somehow reopened.\n\nWith what looked like a gargantuan effort, the ddraig rose to his paws. \"So we're all here then,\" he said weakly, averting his eyes from Keita and Okazuni. \"I think we're eager to leave.\" At his words, the small group gathered together. Slowly, the ddraig's head rose until he looked strong and confident again, but I could still see the shadow of agony in his eyes.\n\n\"We've been through so much together. We did the impossible and took the Axinstone from the humans. That challenge is over now, but another one is set to begin. I hope I can count on you all to stay and help,\" he said quietly, but with everyone gathered so close, we all heard every word.\n\nIn turn, every drake pledged their support to Ddraig Anzig. His relieved smile briefly flashed a grimace when Okazuni and Keita spoke, but quickly continued barely before I noticed. \"We're from different clans. Some of us don't even have a clan. That unity is what we need. If we're to win this war we must act as one. Drakes of every clan must fly in unison to defeat the humans. We have already shown dragonkind that is possible. Just one short flight and we can begin in earnest.\"\n\nIt was so different from Astar's roaring speeches, but I was no less inspired by his son's quieter approach. If there had been any doubts in Ddraig Anzig's ability to lead and inspire, it was quelled in that short speech. I knew he had the quality in him: the quality of his father.\n\nWe took to wing a short time later, with Inilta taking the place by Ddraig Anzig's wing. Okazuni and Keita flew together a little way from the main group. As normal, I flew at the rear along with Maznar, but this time we were joined by Isikian. I had expected the healer to stay near the front, guiding the ddraig on the quickest route to the Nixan lair, but that job seemed to have fallen to Inilta.\n\n\"My offer of training you to control your magic is still valid. If we are given the time, I will spend as long as you need to help you. The same applies to you too, Maznar,\" Isikian said.\n\nThe spectre scoffed, but I was grateful that Isikian hadn't forgotten his promise, made what felt like so long ago. \"Will I get to see others with the same magic?\" I asked. I had never actually spoken with another seer. They rarely left Nixa, and I had never been to the clan of magic's lair. It would be interesting to know how the other seers controlled their magic, and if they had Seen any of the things I had Seen.\n\n\"I'm sure that can be arranged,\" the healer said, baring his teeth in amusement.\n\n\"I just want to spend one night there. So long as I learn who my father is I'll be content,\" Maznar growled.\n\n\"You'll want to spend more than one once you get there,\" Isikian replied, seemingly unperturbed by Maznar's apparent dismissal of his clan's home. \"If you learn who your father is surely you'll want to remain with him?\"\n\nMaznar growled again. \"He abandoned me when I was just an egg. Why would I want to stay?\"\n\n\"Then stay for the wonders of the lair. You are a Nixan, Maznar. I'm sure my clan will forget your history with the humans if you want to be part of dragonkind,\" the healer said. \"I won't waste words trying to explain what Nixa is like, because it is utterly beautiful, but, at this same time, indescribable. Only a Nixan can truly appreciate that. Drakes from other clans experience the lair in different, lesser ways.\"\n\nThe spectre stayed silent, but whether ignoring Isikian or mulling over what he had said, I was not sure.\n\n\"What do you expect me to see?\" I asked Isikian.\n\nThe healer hesitated and dropped lower in the air. \"I don't know. You have magic, but I don't know if you'll see the lair as a Nixan, or as a Laxtal. I suppose we'll just have to find out,\" he said uncertainly.\n\nI was suddenly nervous. What if I did see the lair as a Nixan does? Would that mean anything? Would Isikian and the rest of his clan see that as proof that I wasn't a Laxtal dragon after all? I wished I hadn't brought it up with the healer. It would have been easier on my mind if I didn't have to worry about what I would see.\n\nI fell back from the healer and Maznar as we flew south, following the line of the mountains on the edge of the great forest, flying ever closer to Nixa. There was no vision to confirm it, but I had a feeling something momentous was about to happen, something more than the return of the Axinstone. I tried to cast my mind out to See it, but nothing happened. It remained just an ominous expectation.\n\nWe crossed over into Nixa just before noon. The boundary was marked by a raging waterfall gushing out, and down the side of a mountain. The border then followed the river until it reached a small lake about a hundred miles to the east, where Nixa bordered Clan Reneza. The river hadn't always followed its current course. It had snaked through the plains some way further to the south. Many years ago, Nixan drakes had changed its course to mark their boundaries and leave a lasting reminder of the great power at their disposal.\n\nJust a few minutes after crossing the border into Nixa, Ddraig Anzig sent Nataik away. The Xigax dragoness quickly disappeared into the blue sky as she flew off to the south as we started to angle away from the mountains. As I followed where she had gone, I saw what must have worried the ddraig. Several wisps of smoke rose up from near the mountains, though what was causing it was hidden behind the foothills. It didn't look like a natural blaze, which although rare in these parts, could have been started by the lightning storm the previous night.\n\nWe eased to a slightly slower pace while we waited for Nataik to return to us, much to the consternation of the two Nixans, who just wanted to keep flying on as quickly as possible. Our caution was well rewarded, as she returned just a few minutes later with one breathless word. \"Humans.\"\n\nImmediately, the ddraig led us lower to the ground where we would be harder to spot from the foothills. I felt a familiar fear grip my chest as we descended. I had hoped we'd left the humans behind us, at least for a while. We needed the chance to return the Axinstone so Nixa could develop a strategy to defend our land. I knew this couldn't be a group of humans sent out to reclaim the Axinstone. We were able to cross the mountains in places the humans couldn't reach, so they couldn't have got to Nixa quicker than us. These humans had been here a while, deep in draconic territory. It worried me. No doubt it concerned the ddraig greatly too.\n\nI didn't hear what Nataik had to say to Ddraig Anzig about the humans, but they seemed to be far enough away that they didn't pose us any immediate threat. I noticed the ddraig kept on glancing back though, in the direction of the mountains. He was definitely unnerved by their presence. Even when the wisps of smoke had faded into the horizon the tension remained.\n\nAfter another few hours of nervous flight, Isikian moved up to the head of the group to fly at the ddraig's wing, with Inilta flying just behind. It was a Nixan guard of honour for the Laxtal ddraig as we finally approached the Nixan lair.\n\nA tingle ran through my spine as a dark dot in the distance started to come nearer. A Nixan messenger was coming to meet us. I was not surprised to see the red scales of Haeraig Zeena. Nixa would want to honour us on our return.\n\nHaeraig Zeena flew straight up to Ddraig Anzig and shared a few quiet, but excited, words with each other, before the Nixan haeraig inspected the Axinstone, which Inilta still fiercely clung to. Even now, Inilta did not surrender his hold on the precious stone, and I doubted he would, except to give it to Ddraig Krateos and none other.\n\nUnder Haeraig Zeena's guidance, we flew right for the Nixan lair. From the air, all that could be seen of the lair was five low hills in the shape of a drake's paw. On the top of each hill I could see a rocky shard that formed the paw's claws. It was to the nearest of these that the haeraig led us.\n\nShe waited for everyone to land near her on the summit of the hill, bowed her head towards the ddraig, and then addressed us all. \"You're to stay close to myself, Isikian, or Inilta,\" she warned. \"Our lair is a dangerous place for those not of our clan. Stay close to us. Don't wander and you'll be safe. Stray from the path and we may never find you again.\"\n\nOkazuni hissed under his breath, but otherwise there were no objections to Haeraig Zeena's grave words. We had all heard stories of the dangers of Clan Nixa and their lair. It was heavily defended by magic and was designed to prevent any enemy force from ever gaining access to the inner caves. Even Carlee, a veteran of many wars and the vanquisher of countless lairs, showed a flash of fear at Haeraig Zeena's warning.\n\nThe Nixan haeraig waited for a few more moments to let the true importance of her words sink in, before placing a paw on the shard of rock that was wedged into the hill. In an instant it shone with a crimson glow and started to spin, digging down and created a large passageway as it descended. It looked just about large enough to fit Inilta, the largest drake in the group.\n\nOnce again, Okazuni was disconcerted and he hissed and took a few steps back from the new passageway. He wasn't the only one. Keita too seemed troubled, and she squawked in fright as Haeraig Zeena led the way into the glowing tunnel. Ddraig Anzig followed right behind. If he was afraid he didn't show it as he kept close to Haeraig Zeena's tail. Keita, Carlee, and Nataik were coaxed in by Inilta, before Isikian followed Okazuni in, leaving me alone with Maznar.\n\nThe spectre smiled at me. \"You see what I see,\" she said knowingly, before diving in after the others.\n\n\"What do you mean? What do you see?\" I asked, scrambling in after her, but the dragoness just chuckled and didn't answer.\n\nThe tunnel sloped heavily downhill and was mostly made of dirt, though ribs of stone supported it every few feet. It was perfectly straight, with not a kink or deviation down its entire length. The walls shone with a consistent red glow that neither wavered nor flickered, providing a perfect light to see by.\n\nMagic assaulted me. There was so much power, just out of reach. It almost felt as though I could tap into the latent magic embedded in the very walls of the lair, if only I could touch it. I had to resist stopping and reaching out with my paw, knowing that the magic wasn't anywhere close physically, but was pushing only against my mind.\n\nAfter about one hundred feet, the tunnel broadened out into a small chamber just large enough for our group of ten drakes to fit comfortably. There was only one exit to the chamber, other than the one we had just emerged from. Haeraig Zeena waited for me to come into the chamber, before quickly counting to make sure everyone was still present. Once she was satisfied no one had been left behind, she plunged onwards into the opposite tunnel, again drawing a squeal of fear from Keita. As before, Ddraig Anzig followed the haeraig without hesitation, and the others all fell into line once more.\n\nThis second passage was much the same as the first, but it ran flat. It was also much shorter than the first, coming to an end after half the distance when it flared out into a massive cavern, far larger than anything I had ever seen before. The cave stretched almost as far as the eye could see in every direction, with the white walls of the far side a seemingly impossible distance away. The far distant floor, speckled with many different colours, looked to be at least a mile distant from the rocky ledge we found ourselves on, the ceiling almost as far too. I could just make out several large holes glowing with light, that punctured the cavern roof \u2013 whether natural or magical I could not tell. This lit the entire...\n\nThe great ceiling erupted in an explosion of flame and smoke, showering the lair with jagged shards of rock. Many drakes were killed instantly, with many more dragged down to the floor under the weight of the falling stone.\n\nSunlight streamed down from the gaping hole and shadows swarmed in from the light.\n\n...lair with a steady white glow.\n\nI shuddered. Never before had Nixa fallen to an invading force. Not once had an enemy even laid a single paw inside the lair. What manner of sorcery will be able to destroy the ceiling like that? It would have to be an immense power to be able to overcome the magic of Clan Nixa that held the lair secure.\n\nMaznar bared all her teeth as she grinned at me. \"You'll See all sorts of things in here you were never able to See before,\" she said. She raised a single claw and pressed it against my wing. I didn't move, for fear of tearing the vulnerable membrane against her claw. Her meaning was obvious. \"Make sure you tell me all the good ones.\"\n\nThe spectre looked around the empty ledge, then down into the great cavern, where the other eight drakes had already started descending to the floor. In the aftermath of my vision, I hadn't noticed them leaving. \"I think we'd better catch up,\" she said, removing her talon from my delicate wing membrane. A quick glance revealed my wing was not damaged.\n\nI didn't need to be reminded of Haeraig Zeena's warnings of staying close to the Nixans, and I dove after them, quickly catching up with Maznar right at my tail. A low rumble was emanating from the floor, and it wasn't until we were about halfway down that I recognised it for what it was. It was the welcoming roar of thousands of Nixan drakes. The floor was packed with what must surely have been every single drake in the clan, turning it into a writhing mass of colour. To one end was a raised podium, upon which stood Ddraig Krateos, flanked by four other drakes.\n\nDdraig Krateos reared up onto his hind legs, spreading his wings for balance, and roared to his clan. In an instant, they were silent.\n\nHaeraig Zeena landed on the podium first, and she bowed her head to her father. One of the dragons standing beside Ddraig Krateos moved aside and allowed Haeraig Zeena to take his place.\n\nDdraig Anzig was the next to pay his respects to the Nixan ddraig, though he did so with barely any movement of his head. The two dragons were equals; the leaders of two of the ruling clans. The only drake they would contemplate deferring to would be Ddraig Tsona.\n\nOne by one, the rest of us submitted to Ddraig Krateos. Maznar had hesitated when she looked at the intimidating eyes of the Nixan, but once she bowed her head towards Ddraig Krateos, he turned to Ddraig Anzig.\n\n\"Have you what you set out to retrieve?\" he rumbled. I knew he would already have seen the Axinstone, clutched in Inilta's paws, but the ddraig wanted to make a show of it in front of his whole clan.\n\nDdraig Anzig nodded once. \"Inilta, if you would,\" he said.\n\nInilta needed no further encouragement. He moved forward and placed the Axinstone on the ground next to Ddraig Krateos's paws. There was absolute silence. It seemed every dragon in the great hall had stopped breathing. The silence was deafening, shattered as Inilta spoke. \"I present you the Axinstone, Ddraig Krateos. Taken from the human George Symons and returned to its rightful place.\"\n\nSuddenly there was movement. The Axinstone began to rise, seemingly of its own accord until it hovered in front of Ddraig Krateos's snout.\n\n\"You have done well, child of Nixa,\" the Nixan ddraig said to Inilta, before meeting the gaze of all of us individually. No one but Ddraig Anzig could meet his eyes for more than a second. Each head in turn, bowed in deference. \"All of you have done this clan a great service, and for that we will always be beholden to each of you.\"\n\nThe Axinstone rose higher still, until it was visible to every drake in the chamber. The dragon's head on its surface shone brightly as it fuelled the magic of thousands of drakes, bathing all present in a red light. A low hum touched my ears, eerily similar to the machines in the human laboratory where they had been experimenting on the Axinstone.\n\nI couldn't help but gaze in wonder as the Axinstone continued to rise and glow ever brighter.\n\n\"Our power has returned!\" Ddraig Krateos had to raise his voice over the hum. \"The world shall tremble at the onslaught of our magic, restored to its full strength once more. All those who cross Clan Nixa shall be crushed by our fire, by our minds, and by everything else our clan can muster.\" His great voice boomed ever louder, until he was shouting, his words bouncing off the cavern walls and ceiling. So loud were they, I had to resist covering my ears with my wings. \"The humans who stole the Axinstone, who threaten our land and that of our neighbours shall be the first to feel our wrath. Children of Nixa, feel the power returning to you. Our enemies shall burn and we shall prosper.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos's chest heaved as he tried to draw breath. His wing bones were shattered, the membrane torn and tattered. He struggled and ground his teeth in pain and anguish as he tried to drag himself forward with broken legs. The shadow of a human streaked across the ground towards him. The ddraig was helpless to see it dancing and bouncing over the uneven surface. He knew what this meant. He knew to whom this dancing black shape belonged to. The dragon looked up with fear in his eyes as it towered over him.\n\n\"Clan Nixa, this is our time!\" The ddraig's climactic conclusion and the ensuing, almost deafening roar of his whole clan cleared my vision. I shuddered. I had never Seen Ddraig Krateos in a vision before, and it was unusual that the first time he had appeared had been his death. That didn't normally happen. I shivered and tried to hide my discomfort from the thousands of drakes, though I doubted I was the focus of any drake's attention. Most eyes were still on their ddraig; the remainder upon the Axinstone as it circled above our heads.\n\nDdraig Anzig had been speaking, but my ears still rang with the subsiding roars and shrieks of joy to hear what he had said. I looked across at the two ddraigs. They were almost the exact same height, with the Nixan being slightly taller. I had Seen them both die at the hands of humans now. Dragonkind needed a strong Laxtal and Nixa. The damage done losing both ddraigs in this war could be massive. I didn't know what I could do, but I knew I would need to do everything within my power to save their lives.\n\nThe collective noise in the cavern diminished enough for the spectacle to continue for some time, with Ddraig Anzig speaking more of our adventures. Prompted by the Nixan ddraig, he told the assembled clan a little of what we had seen in human lands. He spoke of the experiments the humans were running with the Axinstone, though I noted with interest that he made no reference to Nightwings or Maznar. No explanation had been offered for the additional dragoness in our ranks, but no questions had been asked.\n\nFinally the clan was dismissed, and Ddraig Krateos addressed Ddraig Anzig directly as the clan began to disperse. A few simply vanished from where they were standing, but most took the conventional route and took to wing, creating a thunderous applause of wingbeats. Isikian and Inilta took their leave and joined the mass exodus up into the higher reaches of the clan's nest.\n\n\"You have exceeded all expectations, Ddraig Anzig,\" the Nixan Ddraig said. His head dipped almost imperceptibly. \"By coming back with the Axinstone so soon you have given us a good chance to strike back at the humans before their defences are prepared.\"\n\n\"You honour me, Ddraig Krateos. We were just doing our duty,\" Ddraig Anzig replied.\n\n\"Come with me, Ddraig Anzig. Let us discuss matters further in private. We have a war to win, and you need to be brought up to date of all the latest developments this side of the mountains,\" the Nixan said, before he turned to the other Nixans who had remained by his side. \"Zeena, take the others to the guest chambers so they can rest. Take them up to hunt if they wish it.\"\n\n\"What do you wish us to do father?\" one of the other dragons asked.\n\n\"Scout out this human army on our borders. Their presence unnerves me, especially as they have evaded our scryers. I want to know what they're doing there, and what their plans are,\" the ddraig rumbled.\n\nNataik took a tentative step forward, drawing the gaze of the Nixan ddraig. The dragoness dipped her head to the ground. \"With respect, Ddraig Krateos, I know more about humans than any other drake. Allow me to scout out with your sons. I can interpret the humans' movements more than they can. Again, I mean no disrespect to your clan nor kin.\"\n\nDdraig Krateos growled as he pondered over this before nodding his head once. \"I agree. Nataik is it? If you feel you do not need rest, then yes, my sons will be glad to have you,\" he said. All it took was an almost imperceptible swing of the ddraig's head towards his sons for the request to be granted and so ordered.\n\n\"Stay close to us,\" one of Krateos's sons warned the Xigax dragoness as he unfurled his wings.\n\nThe five drakes took to wing, closely followed by the two ddraigs. I followed their flight as they spiralled ever upwards towards the far distant ceiling. It was such a long way, I imagined it would get quite tiring trying to get anywhere within the lair.\n\n\"Would you care to hunt this evening?\" Haeraig Zeena asked of us.\n\nWithout Ddraig Anzig, we were devoid of a clearly defined leader, and no one answered the Nixan before I spoke. \"I believe we'll be alright until morning, thank you,\" I said. We had eaten in the forest on the other side of the mountains. I knew I could wait another day before hunting again; I imagined the others would feel the same. However, I was rather surprised that the others deferred to my response, as no one else spoke.\n\n\"Then I will escort you all to the guest chambers. I wouldn't recommend straying from them without a Nixan to guide you,\" Haeraig Zeena said. Her eyes lingered on me for a moment. \"You'll have company in there. Perhaps you will be able to control the dragonet; he is from your clan after all. He's barely left me alone for the last two days.\"\n\nA Laxtal drake in Nixa? I wondered who that could be. Other than us, there was no reason for any Laxtals to be within the lair of the clan of magic. I doubted Ellian would have sent any drakes away from the clan in the absence of Ddraig Anzig. Something was amiss. I didn't need to see the flash of silver scales as Haeraig Zeena led us into the guest chambers to know that things were not going as they should. There should be absolutely no reason for Vinzent to be here. Ellian would not have sent him from her side if she was still in control of Clan Laxtal.\n\nThe dragonet didn't approach us while Haeraig Zeena remained. The Nixan reminded us once more of the dangers of the lair and how we needed to remain in the safety of the guest chambers. If we needed anything, there would be a guard stationed nearby.\n\nHaeraig Zeena looked into the corner and snarled at Vinzent deep in the room's shadows before she moved to leave. She paused in the entrance and exchanged a few words with the guard stationed outside, her voice raised for all of our benefit. \"The dragonet doesn't leave, Kaz. The others may do so if they wish, but not that one,\" she said disdainfully, with a flick of her head towards the corner. Then she was gone, a fluttering of wings fast fading into the great chamber.\n\nOnly then did Vinzent emerge from the shadows, and he slinked towards Carlee, his belly almost touched the ground as he moved forward. He was met by a vicious snarl from the dragoness. \"I think I have made a massive mistake,\" the dragonet said, staring down at the veteran dragoness's paws.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" Carlee growled. There was a hostility in both her voice and eyes that was usually reserved for me.\n\nVinzent whimpered as he started to answer.\n\n\"I allowed Ellian to leave here. She went back to Laxtal alone when I should have remained at her side and returned with her,\" the dragonet said.\n\n\"Why was she even here?\" Carlee snarled. She approached on the cowering Vinzent, who was not the self-assured dragon I remembered from before we left. This was a dragon stripped of all self-confidence. A shadow of his former self. A shadow from the shadows.\n\nI couldn't make out any of what Vinzent had to say for himself, such was the quietness of his voice, but he kept on repeating one name. Ddraig Tsona. What did the Xital ddraig have to do with this? I had Seen nothing to place him in Laxtal at this time, and now I was sheltered in Nixa, I was not sure whether I would be able to See anything outside of the lair.\n\nWhatever it was that had involved Ddraig Tsona, I was not to know yet as Carlee dragged Vinzent away into another chamber to speak with him privately. She warned us all with a glare not to follow.\n\nKeita glanced at Okazuni for a moment, before turning her attention towards me. Her usual disdain towards me was absent, and to my surprise she approached me. \"You've been looking at me strangely all day,\" she said quietly.\n\nI tried to avoid her gaze. I didn't want her to know what I had seen that morning. It had been a private matter between her and Okazuni and I didn't want it to look like I had been prying. It was bad enough that I knew secrets of her future without knowing the secrets of her present too. I sighed. I needed to say something.\n\n\"There was a future. One that is no longer possible. He would have been your mate.\" I whispered.\n\n\"Who?\" Keita said, with a sharp glance back towards Okazuni, but the Nyrian wasn't paying any attention to our conversation. No one was. Maznar's focus was on the distant, muffled echoes of Carlee's tirade upon Vinzent.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig,\" I said.\n\nKeita shook her head fiercely. \"No. You're wrong. He has never loved me like that. He's only ever been a friend and nothing more. I learned that and got over it a long time ago.\"\n\n\"No, Keita. He has loved you for years. I had a vision... You were to have two drakelets with him. But that future is dead now,\" I said. I didn't know why I was telling Keita this. I didn't want her to suffer for the choice she had made. Okazuni was her mate now, and that had been her decision.\n\nIf Keita felt any grief over my revelations, she hid it well. \"If he really felt that way, he should have told me. I was not prepared to wait for something when I couldn't be sure it was ever going to happen. It's his own fault,\" she said bluntly. I had no response, remaining silent as she returned to Okazuni and lay down by his side. The Nyrian spread his wing over his mate's body, and they started quietly talking to each other.\n\nThere was a fireplace in the cavern, but it was unlit and I couldn't see any fuel for it. But for now it wasn't needed, as the walls emanated sufficient warmth, providing a comfortable heat to lie in. Maznar turned away from the antechamber where Carlee had taken Vinzent, and for a moment it looked like she had something to say before turning again, settling and closing her eyes instead. She didn't look tired, but she seemed desperate to sleep, probably longing to peer into the dreams of all the Nixan drakes around her. There were still several hours until nightfall. The spectre would have to wait a little longer.\n\nUnlike the others, I could not settle. I was too restless to think about lying down and doing nothing. I put my nose outside the chamber to have another look around. There was only a small ledge separating the guest chambers with the sheer drop of the great cavern below. We had flown up so high from the floor, but the ceiling still stretched upwards a great distance still. Lying on the ledge, looking rather bored, was a blue-scaled dragon. This must have been the drake assigned to guard us, who I had heard Haeraig Zeena address as Kaz. He turned as I walked out to join him, and when he didn't demand I go back inside, I settled down by his side.\n\n\"What did the dragonet have to say for himself?\" Kaz said in a voice laced with venom.\n\n\"I don't know. Carlee is speaking to him now. Why is he here?\" I asked.\n\n\"He came here a few days ago with Ellian and my brother, who had been helping out with the nomads on the border of Laxtal,\" Kaz explained, but that answer only raised further questions. Why would Ellian have been with the nomads, when Ddraig Anzig had tasked her with leading Laxtal in his and his father's stead?\n\n\"Ever since then the dragonet has been annoying Haeraig Zeena, trying to convince her to raise an army and fly on Laxtal. He believes Ddraig Tsona is a traitor and is trying to fracture the clans by taking command of Clan Laxtal. Ddraig Krateos believes Ddraig Tsona is trying to strengthen dragonkind by ensuring all the ruling clans have an experienced drake leading them,\" the Nixan continued. I hissed softly as I pondered this, but there were still two questions I had to ask.\n\n\"Ddraig Tsona is controlling Clan Laxtal? Why? And where is Ellian now?\"\n\n\"I don't know the answer to the first. You'd have to ask Airil \u2013 my brother \u2013 that one. He spent a lot of time with the nomads. He was there when Ellian and Vinzent joined them. As for where she is, I would imagine she should be in Laxtal by now. She left two days ago. I understand she had information that could be important to the war, something that could help Ddraig Tsona and the other ruling clans fight back against the humans.\"\n\n\"Could it not have waited for us to return?\" I asked. It was strange that Ellian would fly out alone, only for her cousin to return with the Axinstone so soon after her departure.\n\nKaz shook his head. \"No one expected you to return so quickly. We were aware a drake had reclaimed the Axinstone, but we thought it would be another few days for you to cross the mountains at least. I assume Ddraig Krateos and Ellian thought the information too important to delay until the Axinstone's return,\" he said.\n\n\"Someone should fly after her,\" I said. I couldn't help but feel a little uncertain about the dragoness flying back to Laxtal on her own, but until I knew all the circumstances regarding her departure, I couldn't be sure of myself. I just had a feeling I was missing something I had already Seen, but not understood at the time.\n\n\"She'll probably have made it to Laxtal by now. There's nothing we can do to call her back,\" Kaz said.\n\nI pawed at the rock and looked up. There was a lot of activity as drakes flew back and forth across the chamber. Most of them were little more than specks of colour glinting off the light that poured in from the ceiling. \"Would I be able to see your brother? There's something not right about this.\"\n\n\"Ddraig Krateos wouldn't have sent Ellian alone if he thought something was wrong,\" Kaz said, but all the same he unfurled his wings and prepared to fly. \"I can trust you to stay here, right? Just sit here and don't let the dragonet out, or Haeraig Zeena will never forgive either of us.\"\n\nAs the Nixan flew off I glanced back into the chamber. I could not see nor hear any stirrings from inside, so I returned my attention on the great chamber, watching the myriad of movement going on above and below me. I couldn't explain it to myself why I was so desperate to learn the answers to what was going on around me. I had no business in knowing why Ellian hadn't been in Laxtal, but I felt like I was missing some crucial piece of information. As I waited for Kaz I tried to remember every vision of Ddraig Tsona I had Seen recently, but the only one I could recall of him was him being killed at the hand of a human.\n\nThere had to be something I was missing. It was moments like this I longed for better control over my magic. I needed to be able to control what I Saw. Had Vinzent been right to doubt Ddraig Tsona? It seemed absurd that the dragonet would be correct when the vastly more experienced and knowledgeable Ddraig Krateos believed he knew otherwise, but... something nagged at my mind. What had I Seen that I had overlooked?\n\nThin columns of powdered rock continued to tumble as bodies of hundreds of drakes plummeted to the ground. Vicious snarls, shrieks, and cries echoed down from above in response to the crack of human gunfire.\n\nOne voice boomed through the chaos. \"The lair is taken! Fly, Children of Nixa! Retreat to Kxisila,\" cried the voice of Ddraig Krateos. He then screamed in anguish and pain. His voice silenced. A shattered body fell to the black depths.\n\nThe destruction of Clan Nixa was close at hand.\n\nI trembled in fear. If Nixa fell, dragonkind would crumble soon thereafter. Quickly. Completely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "I hissed and turned away from Ddraig Krateos.\n\nThe Axinstone had been returned to its rightful place in the ddraig's chambers in the highest point of the lair. A statue of a serpentine dragoness; nothing like the terrifying statue we had seen in the cave, sat in an alcove above Ddraig Krateos's head. She held the precious stone in her mouth. I had just been informed as to the happenings in Laxtal in my absence, and I was worried by Ddraig Tsona's presence there. I did not doubt Ddraig Krateos's trust in the Xital, but I was concerned that he would not relinquish control of the clan back once I returned.\n\n\"Ddraig Tsona is honourable. He will not keep you from your rightful place as the leader of Clan Laxtal,\" Ddraig Krateos said, seeming to understand what my concerns were. \"I told Ellian the same thing. Ddraig Tsona has nothing to gain from betraying dragonkind. There is a traitor within Xital, but it is not from the head of the clan.\"\n\n\"I thank you for your words, ddraig, but I cannot tolerate a Xital leading Clan Laxtal.\" I couldn't recall such a situation ever happening before in times of peace between two clans.\n\n\"I know. I do not approve of the situation either,\" the Nixan ddraig replied. \"But it's the best option we have right now.\"\n\n\"I trusted Ellian to rule the clan. I know she is a capable leader. There was no better option to rule Laxtal than her,\" I countered. I knew I was bordering on disrespect, but I was annoyed by the Nixan's initial comment.\n\nDdraig Krateos shifted in discomfort. \"I do not doubt her as a future leader. She lacks the experience now, which is required to rule in times of war. She will make a fine haeraig if you choose to reinstate her into the clan and if she can win back the trust of the Laxtal drakes.\"\n\nI growled, somewhat appeased for the moment. We had more important things to discuss than petty squabbles over the competence of my cousin. Ddraig Krateos had sent out his four sons and Nataik to scout the human army we had seen on our way into Nixa. They were a long way north of the Gota-Sxinix and the western border of Laxtal where most human activity had been over the past months. Though the Nixan didn't fear an attack on the lair, he was worried that they might restrict movement of drakes in the area, picking off those who travelled the wildlands, and posing a constant threat towards the nomads.\n\nAbove the head of the Nixan, the Axinstone pulsed with crimson light several times. I could have sworn I heard some whispering emanating from the stone, but Ddraig Krateos didn't react and there was no one else in his chambers with us. One word repeated itself over and over again, different to what I had heard from the statue in the darkness. It sounded like a name, but not one I was familiar with. \"Bri'An,\" the stone was saying. \"Bri'An.\"\n\nI tried to ignore them and focus on Ddraig Krateos as he started revealing his plans to counter the advance of the human army. Clan Nixa was not renowned for possessing great warriors, but they were proficient at harrying and annoying enemy forces. Using offensive magic, they would try and divert the human army away from Nixan territory and back to the south. Ddraig Krateos required me to return to Laxtal as soon as possible and try and raise a powerful force out of the depleted clan. He was aware we had suffered massive losses in the ambush that had killed my father, and he recommended sending messengers out to the nearby clans to gather reinforcements.\n\nOf all the neighbours of Clan Laxtal, only Clan Axaatl was a ruling clan of equal power, and traditionally close friends of ours. I knew I could count on Ddraig Aranat for support, and we would be able to intimidate the others into providing drakes. I was sure Clans Xara and Gyzlan would be quick to fall under my command should I ask for their help. Once we had a strong enough army, Nixa would guide the humans into a location that provided us with an advantage, allowing us to move in and attack. Ellian had discovered that the humans' morale would crumble if their leaders were killed, so we would need to target them directly.\n\nI said little as Ddraig Krateos laid out his plans and schemes. In truth I was glad that a more experienced drake was able to take command of the situation. I had found myself unable to devise a plan of action in the attempt to steal the Axinstone. Yes, we were successful in the end, but it was not due to any great display of leadership on my part. In the Nixan ddraig, I could see a dragon who believed every choice he made. In many ways, he was similar to my father, but the Nixan's strength was a different strength. He dominated through the force of his mind and his magic, whereas my father had been an imposing figure of tooth, claw, and muscle. I knew I could never command the same respect as my father through physical presence alone. I needed to develop my mind like Ddraig Krateos had done, to outwit and outsmart opponents without a situation ever becoming physical.\n\n\"But will that be enough?\" Ddraig Krateos said quietly.\n\n\"It won't be easy, but I think it could work,\" I replied. There wasn't much else we could do.\n\nDdraig Krateos looked a little startled, but he quickly recovered his composure. \"We would need you to act fast in Laxtal. You will need to work quickly to generate enough support in the surrounding clans.\"\n\n\"I can leave tomorrow if I must,\" I said. I had hoped for a little time to rest first, but I understood the necessity of acting urgently. Hopefully I would have time to rest my wings in Laxtal.\n\n\"I think that would be for the best,\" Ddraig Krateos agreed. The Nixan then surprised me by bowing his head in an obvious display of respect. \"You have done great service to my clan. You and your kin are always welcome within this lair. You may not be of our clan, but you are certainly a child of Nixa.\"\n\nAnother flash of ruby light burst out from the Axinstone, followed by another tirade of whispers. \"Bri'An, Bri'An.\" Again, Ddraig Krateos was quite unmoved by the outburst. I twitched my head, trying to clear my mind without alerting the Nixan to anything amiss.\n\n\"The honour is mine Ddraig Krateos,\" I said, ensuring I bowed my head lower than Ddraig Krateos had. \"I hope the two of us can work together when the war has passed.\" I had already done something my father had never achieved as ddraig of Laxtal. There had never been a close bond between Laxtal and Nixa, just a cordial and mutual respect and nothing more. I had no illusions that one great accomplishment could transform me into a great leader, but it was a lift to my confidence to know I had achieved something that my legendary father had not.\n\nI departed Ddraig Krateos's chambers soon after. The Nixan had placed his paw on an alcove in the wall before I passed through the archway that divided his personal chambers with the small antechamber beyond. He didn't explain why he felt the need for such an action, but nor did I question it. I had noticed him perform the same motion as we had entered his chambers too.\n\nHaeraig Zeena was awaiting my return, ready to take me back to rejoin the rest of my group, down in the bowels of the lair. She didn't seem overly interested in what conversation had taken place between me and her father, and if anything looked a little annoyed by something.\n\n\"...show... Laxtal dragonet... he wants to... mate...\" I heard her mutter.\n\nI didn't know if those words were meant for me to hear, but I felt obliged to ask her, \"Is everything alright?\"\n\n\"What? Oh. Yes, of course,\" she said. She tilted her head as she looked across at me, respectfully avoiding my eyes as my rank required. Then she exhaled heavily and scratched at the rock beneath her paws. \"Ellian's companion seemed to have gotten it into his head that I want to be his mate. I've spent much of the last day trying to rid myself of his attention,\" she said.\n\n\"Vinzent?\" I asked in shock. I had thought the youngster was utterly devoted to my cousin, and wouldn't consider anyone else to be his mate. I couldn't believe I could have been so wrong. But then, I had already received one harsh reminder that I knew nothing of the devotions of other drakes. The one dragoness...\n\nI stopped myself. Purge the memory. I knew it wouldn't do to dwell on that.\n\nHaeraig Zeena nodded her head mournfully. \"I should never have shown him friendship.\"\n\nI had to blink and shake my head. I was certain the Nixan's mouth had not moved when she had spoken. Was she a telepath and able to put thoughts into my head?\n\n\"What is your magic?\" I asked the haeraig.\n\nHaeraig Zeena responded by lifting an emerald from the rock behind her without touching it. \"I can move things with my mind, just like my father,\" she replied. I must have been mistaken. \"Why's that I wonder?\"\n\n\"I thought I saw... never mind,\" I said, shaking my head again.\n\n\"Are you alright, Ddraig Anzig?\" the haeraig asked, tilting her head slightly to the side, and taking a hesitant step forward. With her concentration broken, so did the invisible thread break, causing the forgotten emerald to fall to the rug beneath her paws.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said, though in truth I felt I had been chilled to my very core, by an unseen icy blast of frigid mountain air. I could still feel the warmth of the walls and especially the scorching heat of the Axinstone behind me, but neither warmed my body.\n\n\"He's not alright. I should get...\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said, firmer this time and cutting across Haeraig Zeena. This time she didn't question me, but I could see she was puzzled. \"I think I just need to sleep.\"\n\nHaeraig Zeena sucked in her breath as she thought over that. \"If you're sure, Ddraig Anzig, I'll lead you down to the guest chambers. Kaz will be guarding you tonight. He's a healer, so if you feel unwell, please approach him,\" she said quickly.\n\nI growled at the implication of weakness in needing a healer, but the haeraig didn't apologise. She silently took to wing, and I followed suit as she dived out of the antechamber and into the great cavern.\n\nThere were a lot of drakes flying through the cavern, though they took evading paths in respect of our ranks. I doubted few recognised who I was, having only seen me once from a distance, but they knew Haeraig Zeena and they knew to get out of her way. One drake knocked into my tail as he flew past, but by the time I could react and turn to face him, he had already disappeared into the crowd.\n\nThat moment of hesitation almost caused me to lose Haeraig Zeena, but I chased and caught back up as she trimmed her wings and steepened her descent. The warnings of staying close to a Nixan in my head, I focused solely on the haeraig so I wouldn't lose her again, keeping her just a feet in front of me.\n\nI glanced behind me for a moment and saw the green dragon keeping close to my tail. Before me was a clear descent now that we were out of the busier upper half of the lair. Down here was only really used for rare visitors and when the ddraig wanted to address the whole clan. I looked back again. He was still close behind, but I knew he was lying when he said he was feeling fine. His eyes were glazed as he flew, as though his mind was far away. He was definitely more confident than he had been the last time we had met, at the Council of Xital, but something was certainly ailing him.\n\nI flattened my flight as we approached the guest caverns, dreading getting close to the silver dragonet again. If he dared...\n\nThe ddraig shot right past me, not even adjusting his flight as he descended further and further.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig?\" I called after him, trimming my wings once more and chasing after him. He was getting close to the ground and still he didn't alter his wings. He was going to...\n\nThe ground came up so quickly. I pulled my wings up as hard as I could until every sinew and tendon felt like it was being torn out, but it was not enough. I hit the ground with a sickening crunch. I was conscious for long enough to register the dust in my mouth mingling with the blood, the agony, and then the humiliation before my mind went mercifully blank."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"He wasn't feeling well. He didn't admit it, but I could tell something was wrong.\"\n\nThe voice of a concerned dragoness returned me to consciousness. I recognised the voice, though it took a moment to place it as Haeraig Zeena. I was lying on a stone floor, but beyond that I knew nothing of my surroundings. I was aware of nothing beyond my closed eyelids, and I kept it that way in an attempt to sooth an ache at the back of my mind.\n\n\"I could find nothing wrong with him, other than the damage to his wings and legs,\" an unfamiliar voice said. \"A few cuts and scrapes as well, but nothing else.\"\n\n\"I'm telling you Kaz, I looked back at him and his mind wasn't there. Something is troubling him,\" Haeraig Zeena said again.\n\n\"Did anyone else see him fall?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so.\"\n\nI heard one of the two voices come closer but kept my eyes closed as I tried to piece together what had happened. I knew I had hit the ground hard, but every time I went over the sequence of events leading up to the impact I became lost in my tumbling, swirling thoughts. Something had happened between leaving Ddraig Krateos's chambers and the impact that escaped my recollection.\n\n\"I don't think we should tell anyone about it then,\" Kaz was saying. I could hear his paws scuffing against the floor and his tail dragging behind. He was quite close to me now. \"I think he'll be grateful if this embarrassment wasn't made public.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Haeraig Zeena replied.\n\nA paw touched against my forehead. \"He's awake,\" Kaz said.\n\nI opened my eyes to look into those of a blue-scaled dragon. Kaz averted his gaze but moved no further away. \"I've healed your wounds, Ddraig Anzig, but I don't know what caused you to crash. It was nothing physical,\" the healer said.\n\nMy paws were shaky as I pushed myself up to a sitting position. \"I think I just... lost concentration,\" I said, my voice as uncertain as my paws. I tried to smile wryly at Haeraig Zeena, but it came out more as a pained grimace. \"I think sleeping would be a good idea.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you can fly?\" the haeraig said.\n\nI wasn't convinced, but I flared my wings anyway, wincing at the slight pain that still lingered. It wasn't far we had to go, and I wasn't about to be shamed a second time. \"I'll be fine,\" I said, knowing that once again the Nixan would not believe me.\n\n\"Together we'll help him up,\" Kaz said. I didn't know whether to snarl at Kaz for his insinuation that I was weak, or to thank him for his help. The healer seemed to know the position he had put me in, for his ducked his head in apology.\n\n\"After you, Ddraig Anzig,\" Haeraig Zeena said with a little reluctance.\n\nI nervously took to wing, desperately trying to maintain my focus this time. The two Nixans stayed right below me, ready to block my fall if I were to drop from the air again. If anything, their presence made me more afraid of failing. I had never thought so hard about each individual wingbeat before. Flight was normally such a natural movement, but now it was laboured and clumsy as I fought to stay aloft.\n\nAfter what felt like an age I was instructed to land on a small ledge on the side of the great cavern. I looked down to see how far we had come, and was shocked to realised it was barely a hundred feet.\n\n\"Kaz will be just out here if you need him,\" Haeraig Zeena said.\n\n\"I know,\" I said, bowing my head away from the Nixan. I didn't want her to be so concerned for me. It was setting a bad example for the strength of my clan.\n\nWithout another word, I walked unsteadily into the chamber to rejoin the rest of the group I had travelled with. At first I thought everyone was asleep; Keita, Maznar, and Okazuni were all curled up and gently breathing. Keita and Okazuni were lying together, tails entwined and wings overlapping. I ignored that corner and turned away. Then I noticed Azlak and a second dragon. I had to double take and look back out to the ledge just to make sure Kaz was still out there, because the dragon Azlak was talking to was identical.\n\nAzlak looked excited as he bowed his head towards me. \"Airil here has been starting to teach me how to control my magic,\" the seer said.\n\n\"He is already quite proficient. I'm surprised given how little training he has had,\" Airil said.\n\nThe seer glowed with the praise. \"Hopefully I'll get a few days to practice here.\"\n\n\"We'll be leaving in the morning unfortunately. We don't have any time to delay,\" I said, much to the disappointment of the seer.\n\nAiril took a tentative step forward. \"If I may, Ddraig Anzig, I would like to ask permission to join you. Not only will I be able to help Azlak more in Laxtal, but I'm concerned for Ellian. If there is a traitor in Xital, they could already have some influence in Laxtal through Ddraig Tsona, even if the ddraig himself isn't aware of it,\" he said.\n\nThe decision wasn't mine to make. It was up to Ddraig Krateos whether or not he would allow one of his drakes to leave the lair, but I had been told Ellian had trusted and liked this dragon. That was enough for me.\n\n\"You may come if your ddraig permits you,\" I said.\n\nAiril nodded. \"I shall ask him in the morning. I imagine my brother will want to come too. He didn't like me leaving him behind last time.\"\n\nI nodded, looking out towards the shelf outside. I presumed that Kaz was Airil's brother, hence the similarities between the two. It would be good having the two Nixans with us, especially if Isikian and Inilta remained as I expected. They had been away from home for a while now. I didn't blame them if they wanted to stay. I knew I wanted to be back at Laxtal, and was looking forward to leaving in the morning.\n\nNataik still hadn't returned. I wondered if she too would be remaining behind in Nixa, providing the clan of magic some information on human behaviour as they tried to develop an effective strategy in countering their movements. Until the fighting actually began, she would be bigger asset to Nixa than to Laxtal. She had been a strong, reliable companion during our time on the other side of the mountains, and though I couldn't call her a friend, I would miss her company.\n\nI left Airil and Azlak alone to their practice and lay alone in the middle of the room. I had been given a lot to think about over the course of the day, and that was even after trying to forget about my embarrassing crash. It had been a long time since I had lost control of my flight in that manner. I was grateful that only Kaz and Haeraig Zeena had seen it, and they had decided to keep it amongst themselves.\n\nI settled down and tried to think over what still needed to be done, but I was distracted by another voice running through my mind. It was like someone was whispering in my ear, but the only ones talking were Airil and Azlak, and this voice belonged to neither of them.\n\nI squeezed my eyes shut by the voice only got stronger. I could barely think as the voice dominated my thoughts. Before I realised what I was doing, I was on my paws and ready to approach Kaz, when the voice suddenly stopped. The silence was wonderful, and I collapsed back to the ground in relief, drawing a curious glance from Airil in the process.\n\n\"Twitchy as a ferret that one.\"\n\nWhat was wrong with me?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Come the morning I had no time to think about the voices, and mercifully they had stayed away and not disturbed me. We had been summoned early to meet with Ddraig Krateos, as he wanted to see everyone who was making the journey to Laxtal. We had gathered in the antechamber to his chambers, and with Haeraig Zeena present as well, it was a tight fit for so many drakes. Kaz and Airil had joined us also, hanging around near the back of the group as though they hoped their ddraig wouldn't notice or question their presence.\n\nMaznar had been restless, and she had not stopped moving since landing in the antechamber. At times she had tried to push her way to the front, before a sharp glance from Ddraig Krateos had sent her scurrying away to the back again. I tried my best to ignore her. It took all of my concentration to keep my thoughts my own. I couldn't allow myself to get distracted again.\n\nNataik hadn't joined us. She had briefly spoken to me earlier that morning, advising me that she wished to remain behind and help monitor the humans. We would miss her company, but I knew her skills were better needed here.\n\n\"I have already told you what needs to be done,\" Ddraig Krateos said, looking around at those gathered before him. He had spent a few minutes placing his paw on the head of every drake, whispering something in their ear. He told me I was a credit to my clan and my father's name. I had said nothing in return but felt my heart swell in pride. That was all I wanted, to know that I was acting honourably and giving a good representation of my clan, that I wasn't failing my father.\n\n\"All that's left for me to say now is good luck to you all. Fly strong and true. Our clans will lead the offensive against the human invaders so I am sure we'll talk again soon. May the wind be strong at your backs.\"\n\nHaeraig Zeena led us away after the ddraig had dismissed us, though Kaz and Airil remained behind with Maznar. I glanced back at the two Nixans, who after a few words with their ddraig also took to air and chased after us. Evidently Ddraig Krateos had allowed them to join us. Maznar lingered around the ddraig for a few more moments before she dived out of the antechamber without uttering a single word.\n\nThe stay in Nixa had been short; I had hoped for a longer rest in the clan of magic, but at the same time I was so relieved to be flying home. It was less than a two day flight between the Nixan lair and Laxtal though we would pass over the territory of Clan Pyrulus along the way. I wondered what sort of reaction I would receive. I had achieved the glory of reclaiming the Axinstone for Clan Nixa, but Laxtal was under Xital control for the first time in the clan's history, and this had come when I had been absent from my duties. There could well be some drakes that would resent that.\n\nWe made good progress that morning, leaving Haeraig Zeena behind just outside the lair entry. Airil and Carlee took up positions by my wings as we flew over the famed hunting grounds of Nixa. We had been provided with food before seeing Ddraig Krateos, but a few covetous eyes were cast down at the rich plains below. The grass was lush and green, and herds of grazing animals roamed in great numbers.\n\nAs the land rolled by beneath us, I started to feel nerves building. I had always been protected by the might of my father in Laxtal, but now that had been stripped away. I would be judged solely on my actions from here on out. I had made a good start but I would always need to prove myself further. My first act would be to convince Ddraig Tsona to relinquish control of the clan to me. He had already deposed Ellian for being too inexperienced, but she was not the true leader of the clan, and nor had she been the designated haeraig at the time. I had true claim to the clan's leadership. Ddraig Tsona could not justify remaining on as leader of Laxtal upon my return.\n\nWe rested for the night in an empty nomadic lair on the border between Nixa and Pyrulus. It was only a small cave, but it was the only one for quite some distance. There was evidence of drakes recently staying here too, as the wood storage had been quite depleted and the smell of smoke still lingered. I thought of Ellian, who had made the same journey just two days ahead of us. She would be unaware that we were so close behind, but she should be in Laxtal by now. I could only hope that she had been received well by Ddraig Tsona.\n\nWithout Inilta or Nataik, who had remained in Nixa with Ddraig Krateos's sons, we struggled to have a fire lit. Most of the nomadic lairs used human technology to light fires, and it took almost twenty minutes for Azlak to work out how to operate the small device. Finally a fire was lit, and we were able to lie down in comfort and prepare for the day ahead. Azlak and Carlee had both tried to comfort me and assure me that we would run into no problems, but I couldn't help but feel that it wouldn't be easy.\n\nAll day I had been picking up fragments of voices in my mind and I had struggled to maintain my focus and keep a level and consistent flight. I was terrified by it as I had realised what they were. I was listening to the unspoken thoughts in the minds of my companions. I had tried to hide myself away from the others, lest they discover this new secret. It was magic, I was sure. I looked across at Azlak \u2013 the only Laxtal with magic, the enigma Nixa had never been able to explain and the omega of the clan. That would be my life too if this ever got out. No one could ever know that I could hear the hidden thoughts of those around me.\n\n\"Someone should tell the ddraig.\"\n\nI lifted my head and looked around the small cave. Was that voice or thought? I couldn't even be sure who it was who had spoken \u2013 if indeed they had spoken at all. I put my head in my paws and suppressed an agonised whimper. This was not what I had wanted my return to Laxtal to be."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "Ddraig Anzig appeared to be highly stressed as we approached the Laxtal lair. We had passed from the lush plains that covered Nixa and Pyrulus and into the more barren Laxtal. We were just a couple of hours away now, and the ddraig's flight patterns were getting more erratic. Carlee flew by his side to try and calm him, but he kept shaking his head and trying to fly further away from the old veteran. I had never seen him so scared before.\n\nI looked across at Maznar, who had been flying at the ddraig's side for most of the journey, but had fallen back to fly with me as we made the approach to the lair. She had been quiet since leaving Nixa and had refused to tell me what she had uncovered in the dreams of the Nixan drakes. I could tell she had learnt something, but she coyly evaded the question anytime I asked, and I doubted I would learn anything she did not wish to reveal.\n\nKeeping pace just behind Maznar, and at the back of the group, was Vinzent. The dragonet had not spoken since leaving Nixa, and he looked almost as afraid as the ddraig did at returning home.\n\nOf all the drakes, the only ones who really looked excited to be arriving in Laxtal were the two Nixans, Airil and Kaz. They had been weaving through the group, trying to engage in conversation but generally finding their incessant chatter falling on deaf ears. No one was feeling talkative, and had eventually given up trying to interact with the others around noon. They had promised me they would help train my magic once we got to Laxtal as I had left Nixa before Isikian had been given the opportunity to fulfil his promise. I looked forward to having some sort of control over my wayward magic.\n\nThe beacon fires weren't lit. We flew over several pyres, which seemed to have been abandoned by their keepers. The Nixans and Nyrian dragon cast envious eyes towards the outposts. The chemicals and powders that allowed the beacon fires to be so diverse were a closely guarded secret, held by our clan for generations.\n\nDespite the lack of beacons, a scout soon came out to meet us. It was a drake I didn't recognise. They didn't even appear to be a Laxtal, and I noted Ddraig Anzig's hastily hidden concern as the drake approached us.\n\n\"Identify yourself,\" the scout barked as they came near. She was a Xital.\n\n\"I am ddraig of this clan. Who are you?\" Ddraig Anzig replied firmly.\n\n\"Ddraig Tsona is ddraig of this clan. Identify yourself or we treat you as hostile. We have you surrounded,\" the scout said. True to her words, several other drakes flew up from the ground to back up the scout.\n\nBy now Ddraig Anzig and the scout were directly in front of each other, hovering in the air as they both bared their teeth. All around us a number of drakes flew close and slowly circled us. We weren't going anywhere without the permission of the Xitals.\n\n\"I am Ddraig Anzig, son of Ddraig Astar. I am the rightful leader of this clan,\" Ddraig Anzig snarled.\n\n\"Anzig is dead. I don't know who you are but I'll let Ddraig Tsona decide your fate.\"\n\nDdraig Anzig growled again, but he allowed himself to follow the Xital scout. We all fell in line behind the ddraig, stunned at what we had just seen and heard. We had believed Ddraig Tsona could have been trusted with passing power of Laxtal back over to Ddraig Anzig, but that looked unlikely now.\n\nFlanked by over a dozen Xital drakes, we returned to the Laxtal lair as prisoners. We were not to be welcomed back as heroes.\n\nAnother Xital came out to meet us as we flew down the gorge at the entrance to the lair. \"Who are these?\" the newcomer asked. She was a large dragoness with dark copper scales.\n\n\"He claims to be Anzig,\" the scout growled.\n\nThe copper dragoness stared into Ddraig Anzig's eyes for almost a full minute before looking away. \"I'll take them to Ddraig Tsona right away,\" she said. She seemed uneasy by what she had seen in the ddraig's eyes.\n\nWe were led through the familiar tunnels of the lair, with the copper dragoness in front of us and three other Xitals behind. Along the way I saw eyes shining out from the shadows as Laxtal drakes cowered and shied from the Xitals. Whispers started to follow us down the tunnel. At least these hidden drakes recognised Ddraig Anzig for who he was, even if they were too afraid to come out and greet him.\n\nThere must have been at least one hundred Xital drakes present throughout the lair, stationed as guards to quell the Laxtals. Though they were easily outnumbered, their status as the Royal Clan had intimidated the Laxtal drakes into submission. No one came forward to offer the rightful ddraig support. I could see fear in every pair of eyes we passed. Something had to have happened for them to be so scared and subservient. I dreaded what had happened to Ellian. I should have Seen this. I should have known what to expect.\n\nThe central chamber was almost deserted. On the podium to one end was a small gathering of drakes. I focused on just the one; the largest one of the ten there. Ddraig Tsona was deep in discussion with one of his companions and didn't even look up as we emerged out from the tunnels.\n\nIt was not until we had landed and he had been interrupted by the copper dragoness that he even acknowledged our presence. He took one, quick glance over at Ddraig Anzig and hissed in shock, \"Not possible.\" His voice was full of venom and spite.\n\n\"You have a lot to answer for, Ddraig Tsona,\" Ddraig Anzig growled as he barged past our captor and approached the Xital dragon.\n\n\"And you should be dead,\" the Xital said, stepping away from his clanmates and walking around Ddraig Anzig.\n\n\"Then you were misinformed.\" I had never heard so much vitriol in Ddraig Anzig's voice before, not even when I had revealed to him I had been responsible for his father's death. Even Ddraig Tsona seemed intimidated enough to take a step back from the furious Laxtal dragon. \"George never told you what happened, did he?\"\n\n\"I d... don't understand,\" Ddraig Tsona said, but I could tell that he had been rattled. His wings had momentarily flared and he had taken another involuntary step backwards.\n\nDdraig Anzig smiled. \"Of course it's you. It's always been you, hasn't it? You started this war so that dragonkind would lose. What has George promised you? What do you gain out of the destruction of your own species?\" The ddraig's voice had risen to a booming crescendo, echoing around the chamber.\n\n\"You've got it wrong,\" Ddraig Tsona said, taking another step back.\n\n\"Power? Is that it? What more can you gain? But oh, of course. You want more than just power over dragonkind. You want a place of high status with the humans too, don't you?\" Ddraig Anzig said, causing Ddraig Tsona to back up even further. There was something strange about the Laxtal ddraig's eyes, but I couldn't place what it was that was amiss.\n\n\"Let me explain,\" Ddraig Tsona said.\n\n\"There is nothing to explain. I have been threatened by Xital drakes in my own territory. I have been treated as a prisoner,\" Ddraig Anzig said with a fierce snarl. He suddenly dropped the volume of his voice. The words came out ominously quiet, but the power, confidence and not-so veiled meaning were all the more potent. \"You are to leave now and stop interfering in my clan's business. You are to fly away and have nothing more to do with dragonkind. Live amongst the humans if you wish. I'm sure they'll be happy to have a new pet.\"\n\nDdraig Tsona started pacing around his adversary once more as his five companions started to advance on us, but they stopped just short of us. One of them glared menacingly at me. I tried to return his gaze with some confidence.\n\n\"I suppose you'll want to learn the fate of your cousin,\" Ddraig Tsona said smugly. All of his prior concern was gone as he taunted Ddraig Anzig, who had frozen.\n\n\"What have you done with Ellian,\" he said in a strained whisper.\n\n\"Oh, nothing. Yet,\" the Xital said.\n\n\"If you lay a single claw on her, it will be an act of war against Clan Laxtal. We are stronger than you think,\" Ddraig Anzig snarled. A couple of the other Xitals shifted uncomfortably. I took advantage of their confusion to take a small step forward. Like my ddraig, I was ready to fight the Xitals if it was necessary. Keita and Carlee had also stepped forward to defend the honour of Clan Laxtal. Even the Nyrian and two Nixans stepped forward. Vinzent remained in the shadows with Maznar.\n\nDdraig Tsona laughed. \"War? Do you grow tired of fighting humans that you must kill a few drakes too?\"\n\n\"We will fight anyone who is a threat to this clan,\" Ddraig Anzig growled. He dug his claws into the rock beneath his paws as he stood his ground, refusing to step back as the Xital advanced on him. They pressed snouts together as Ddraig Tsona tried to intimidate his younger foe without success.\n\nThe Xital dragon pulled away. Ddraig Anzig relaxed slightly, but was surprised as Ddraig Tsona spun back around and cuffed him across the face. Unprepared, Ddraig Anzig was powerless as the older, larger, and more experienced dragon slashed across his face twice more, drawing blood.\n\nCarlee roared and lunged at one of the other Xitals, and she was joined by Keita and Okazuni as the other Xital drakes joined the fray. I struggled to deflect the aggressive intentions of the copper dragoness as she tried to bite and claw at me.\n\nI had no time to focus on Ddraig Anzig's fight. It took all my strength to push away the dragoness and keep her snapping teeth away from my vulnerable wings. She had pushed me onto my back. All that was keeping her away from me were my outstretched legs, but I was beginning to weaken. The ivory points of her teeth snapped closer and closer.\n\nThe Xitals had numbers, but we had one of the greatest warriors ever to live. Carlee may have been old, but she overpowered three of the Xital drakes and forced them to retreat within seconds. Trickles of blood splattered down from their wounded flanks as they flew away to the tunnels. The fleeing Xitals were chased from the lair.\n\nI shrieked in agony as the copper dragoness finally found her target. Pain coursed through my wing as her teeth shredded through the thin membrane. My legs collapsed, allowing her claws access to my chest. She tore at my scales and ripped open many deep gashes as she wrenched my wing aside, snapping one of the brittle bones. I screamed and weakly tried to push her away, before she was thrown off. She screeched as Carlee snapped at her tail before she too fled, evading the veteran's attempts to pin her down.\n\nSnarls continued to reverberate through the massive chamber. I gritted my teeth and turned my head to see the two ddraigs still in combat, with Ddraig Anzig sprawled on the floor. No one dared to intervene in the fight. This was no mere scuffle. This was a fight between two ddraigs. No one was permitted to interfere in a fight for honour and power.\n\nDdraig Anzig struggled to rise. His wing was trailed uselessly along the ground, the membrane torn in several places, and he had a great gash in his right fore-shoulder staining his green scales a deep red. His legs splayed wide, he forced himself to four paws.\n\nI closed my eyes as my pain threatened to overwhelm me.\n\n\"You still haven't given up?\" a regal and proud voice said. Ddraig Tsona was shocked and surprised, although it sounded like he was also in quite a bit of pain. \"I'll give you that, you have courage. But you are also a fool. I didn't want to kill you Anzig, but if you persist in fighting, then I have no choice.\"\n\nI knew this part. I squinted my eyes open as the Xital threw himself forward, always keeping to Ddraig Anzig's wounded side. Fresh wounds were added to the Laxtal dragon's scales as blood soaked into the sand on the stony floor.\n\nDdraig Anzig stumbled on his outstretched wing and collapsed to the ground at the same time his opponent crashed into his side. The two rolled and thrashed as though caught in a maelstrom. Purely by chance, Ddraig Anzig's teeth found the neck of his foe. He bit down hard, as hard as he could, choking the life out of the gold dragon in his clutches.\n\nThe Laxtal ddraig was weakening fast though, and his adversary was able to break free of the deathgrip and fled the fight. Vinzent launched into the air and gave chase to the Xital, following him towards the surface. Ddraig Tsona had fled in fear.\n\nI closed my eyes again as Ddraig Anzig slumped back. I could hear his whimpers of pain as Carlee spoke to him. Whispers of, \"Get Kaz,\" were all that I heard the ddraig say.\n\n\"I'm not leaving you here,\" Carlee said.\n\n\"Go,\" Ddraig Anzig said, his voice strained by pain.\n\nThis time Carlee obeyed the ddraig and I heard her wingbeats slowly fade away as she flew out of the chamber. I groaned as I struggled to roll onto my side, but the pain was too great. I struggled to hold back shameful tears.\n\nMy eyes slowly opened as Ddraig Anzig struggled to his paws. I could only see his silhouette as he rose.\n\n\"Azlak?\" he whimpered.\n\nI didn't answer. I recognised this pain, but the impossibility of the situation gripped my agonised chest. I couldn't even breathe as the ddraig dragged himself closer.\n\n\"Azlak, how do you do it? How do you control it? I'm like you. I'm a Laxtal, but I have magic too. How can that be?\"\n\nThis couldn't be happening. This... this was the moment I had been waiting my whole life for, and it was Ddraig Anzig?\n\n\"It is happening though. This is real,\" the ddraig said mournfully. He gasped in pain as he tried to move his wings.\n\nI found myself completely unable to speak. He had broken into my thoughts. He had heard what I had been thinking. I saw the ddraig nod slowly in confirmation.\n\n\"How can I control it?\" he whined. I could tell he was desperate. I remembered how hard it had been to control my magic when it had first emerged, but I still had little control over it. I was not the drake to ask. We had two Nixans with us. They would be able to help the ddraig in honing his fledgling magical abilities.\n\nDdraig Anzig shook his head vigorously, only to yelp in pain at the movement. \"No, you can't,\" he said once he had recovered. \"No one can know about this. Please, this has to be secret. I don't want... I don't want...\" He bowed his head and turned away.\n\nThis time I could read the ddraig's thoughts. He didn't want to be like me, the omega of the clan. I had been shunned because of my magic. Even as the ddraig of the clan, he feared the same would happen to him.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Ddraig Anzig whispered.\n\n\"I won't tell anyone,\" I gasped, forcing the words through teeth clenched in agony as Carlee returned into the chamber. She was joined by the two Nixans and Vinzent.\n\nKaz landed by Ddraig Anzig's side and placed his paw on the wounded dragon's chest. An orange light emerged from the Nixan's paw and spread over Ddraig Anzig's body. I closed my eyes and leant my head back as I waited, gritting my teeth together as every movement and twitch of my wings lanced pain through my entire body.\n\n\"Tsona has fled,\" Carlee growled as Kaz performed his magic. \"The Xitals have all flown off with him. Okazuni and Maznar are guarding the entrance in case they return and Keita is going around the lair informing everyone what's occurred. You have done well.\"\n\n\"We have another threat to our clan now though. We need to be on our guard against Xital and the humans,\" Ddraig Anzig said. He sounded stronger now, and I could hear him getting to his paws. \"I should have killed him when I had the chance.\"\n\nA cool paw touched my scales and all my pain faded away. I could feel the gashes in my chest knit back together. There was a dull snap as my wing jerked back into position, the broken bone mending into one. I opened my eyes and thanked Kaz as he stepped away from me. He smiled as he looked down at me.\n\nCarlee had taken Ddraig Anzig away from the rest of us as she continued to give him advice and guidance on what to do from here. High above us, a few drakes were starting to fly back into the chamber. They were all Laxtal. Carlee was right; the Xitals had fled with their defeated leader. Surely they wouldn't suffer this dishonour for long. No one stood up to Clan Xital and got away with it.\n\nAn army of drakes stood on the hills surrounding the Laxtal lair. The ddraigs and haeraigs of many clans stood at its head, as well as a single human. Facing them was another army. Humans and Xital drakes stood side by side as Ddraig Tsona and the human George advanced alone on the draconic force.\n\n\"Surrender now or be destroyed,\" the gold-scaled dragon yelled.\n\nHis voice was met with snarls of derision from the reinforced Laxtal army.\n\nOf course they would be back. Now I had finally Seen Tsona's treachery. Ddraig Anzig had been right. Vinzent had been right. It was the Xital ddraig who was the traitor and was conspiring with the humans against his own species.\n\n\"Azlak? You made it back?\"\n\nI turned at the familiar voice and stared into the brown eyes of my father. He then surprised me by lowering his eyes first. He had never shown any respect to me before.\n\n\"You doubted me, father?\" I asked, already knowing what the answer would be without having to See it.\n\n\"Every second,\" my father whispered. He looked away, ashamed. \"Keita told me what you have done. I am so pleased you have proved me wrong. You have made me proud, my son.\"\n\nSlowly, awkwardly, he placed his wing around me. \"I won't deny I feared the worst when Ellian told us you'd convinced Ddraig Anzig to cross the mountains. But you have showed me an ability I did not know you possessed.\"\n\nOut of the corner of my eye I could see Saya land and approach her son, Vinzent. She did not appear quite so impressed at Vinzent than my father was with me, and she took the dragonet away to one side and appeared to scold him. Vinzent was gradually getting lower and lower as his mother's tirade continued.\n\nAmongst some of the other drakes to return to the chamber was the albino dragon Yalle. He had been Ddraig Astar's closest friend and one of his most formidable allies, despite his physical weaknesses that were a result of his albinism. Yalle's target now was Ddraig Anzig, and the albino interrupted the conversation the ddraig was having with Carlee.\n\n\"Are you even listening, Azlak?\" my father asked, breaking into my curious observations. What was it that Yalle had to say to Ddraig Anzig? Whatever it was, I could tell it was urgent. I apologised to my father and edged closer to the ddraig.\n\n\"They have Ellian,\" Yalle was saying.\n\n\"Where?\" replied Ddraig Anzig. His wings were flared in distress, ready to fly off at a moment's notice to go and help his cousin.\n\n\"Xital I believe. She only got here two days ago. We knew she was coming, and we managed to get a dragon out to warn her to stay away, but she was infuriated at how Ddraig Tsona was leading the clan. She tried to challenge him again, but she only lasted a few moments before he defeated her. A human came down here to take her away. A human, in Laxtal,\" Yalle said, shuddering in disgust. Never before had a human set foot within our lair. That was the ultimate betrayal by Tsona.\n\nDdraig Anzig's snarl was curtailed by Carlee. \"I know what you're thinking, Anzig\" the veteran dragoness said. \"You will be needed here.\" Her paw tapped the ground as she spoke. \"This is another's task this time.\"\n\n\"No. Tsona knew what he was doing by taking Ellian. He's made this my responsibility,\" Ddraig Anzig replied, quickly reducing the loudness of his response, ignoring the fact that Tsona thought him dead when Ellian had been captured. His wings were still unfurled and he tested the ground beneath his paws, getting himself ready to fly at a moment's notice.\n\n\"All the more reason to stay behind. Tsona wants you there and not here. He's trying to trap you,\" Carlee said, but I could tell the ddraig was not convinced. He was going to Xital, and no one was going to tell him otherwise. Carlee sighed as she relented. \"Then you take me with you.\"\n\nThis time it was Ddraig Anzig's turn to protest. \"No, I need you here to lead the clan.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Carlee scoffed. \"I couldn't lead this clan to save my scales. I'm going with you. I'll be of no use here.\"\n\nSaya lifted her head and looked across to the ddraig. \"Under my guidance, the clan flourished before Ellian returned,\" she said proudly.\n\n\"Your guidance?\" my father growled, taking an interest in the conversation again. He stood by my side and snarled at the dragoness. \"Funny, I don't remember that happening. I seem to recall it was all Yalle and myself.\"\n\n\"Of course you would say that,\" Saya said. She advanced on my father and stared up at him, trying to make meaningful eye contact. However, my father had a massive advantage in size and was not at all intimidated by her.\n\nThen Ddraig Anzig was standing between us, snarling at Saya. \"Enough of this. You will not be leading the clan in my absence, Saya. If Carlee is accompanying me, then the only drake I trust who is to remain behind is Azlak. Yalle and Marin will assist him,\" the ddraig said.\n\nFor the second time I was stunned by Ddraig Anzig's words. I couldn't believe he was going to be making me the leader of the clan in his stead. I had no belief in my abilities to lead. It had been hard enough leading the small group of drakes as we travelled to the human territory. Now the ddraig expected me to lead the entire clan? My legs started trembling where I stood, and feared they would give out on me, sending me crashing to the floor like felled prey. The slight dizziness in my head did not help my staying upright and dignified.\n\n\"I believe you can do it.\" I heard Ddraig Anzig's words, but I could tell he hadn't spoken. He looked into my eyes and I felt a touch against my mind. I couldn't explain how, but I knew it was the ddraig. His words eased me enough to be confident of staying upright at least.\n\nThere were a few muted protests, but they were quickly silenced by a slow, deliberate sweep of Ddraig Anzig's head. It was obvious there was nothing else to be said on the matter. Ddraig Anzig had spoken, and decreed. I was the appointed leader of Clan Laxtal until Ddraig Anzig returned from Xital.\n\nI straightened my neck and tried to make myself appear as tall as possible, a difficult feat given my father, standing right next to me, was almost twice my height. Ddraig Anzig's words had done a little to allay my fears, but I was feeling a little light-headed as I thought about what was beginning to unfold before us. I was surprised I had not Seen these events. Perhaps it meant nothing of significance was going to occur? I could only hope.\n\nDdraig Anzig rose to his paws and addressed the clan at large, which had slowly been filtering into the chamber and were now all gathered, expectantly waiting for their mighty ddraig, Ddraig Anzig to address them. Most of them showed signs of suffering. Some were injured and most looked like it had been a long while since they had eaten. This would change. Great changes were coming to Clan Laxtal. I just hoped I could deliver them.\n\nThe ddraig told the clan that we were about to fly into dangerous times. We already knew that Clan Xital had allied itself with the human armies, and together they were a dangerous foe. We had no guarantee of success, but Ddraig Anzig vowed that he would do everything he could so Clan Laxtal emerged victorious. There were a few cheers as Ddraig Anzig announced the newly formed alliance with Clan Nixa. I don't think he had to worry about being accepted by the clan as their ddraig. After what they had gone through with Tsona, they would have tolerated any Laxtal drake leading them \u2013 even me.\n\nI turned to face my father, who would be leading the clan by my side. Before leaving for the Xital council I could never have believed that this could be possible. Nor could I have believed I would be looking forward to it. I was excited by the prospect. Terrified at the same time, but thrilled that I was no longer the omega drake of the clan. I couldn't explain where the confidence had come from, but I wondered if Ddraig Anzig's revelation that he was the drake I had been looking for had anything to do with it.\n\nOnce the ddraig had finished speaking to the clan, he summoned me up to his chambers. He also demanded Carlee, Vinzent, and the two Nixans to join us, but he didn't explain the reason for it. He seemed a little nervous as he flew up to the ruling drakes' chambers behind the great firepit. Only once before had I been in those caves. There had rarely been a reason to summon me to see Ddraig Astar or any of the other drakes who helped rule the clan.\n\nDdraig Anzig led us all into the small series of caves set aside for the haeraig of the clan. They had always been his personal chambers, so it was probably habit alone that had led him in there. The walls were bare, but the floors were covered in thin rugs from the northern clans, which helped retain some of the warmth in the caves. There was evidence of recent occupation, and the ddraig growled as he readjusted some of the rugs. It appeared that the Xitals had helped themselves to the nests of the ruling drakes of Laxtal.\n\n\"You know what Ddraig Krateos said needed to be done,\" Ddraig Anzig said, looking at me as he spoke. I tried to meet his eye, but the fury I saw there was intense. He was seething at Tsona's intervention in the clan, as well as Ellian's capture. I glanced down to look at his paws, unable to meet his eyes any longer. \"Vinzent, you'll join us, and we'll take Maznar as well. If Tsona has humans with me she'll be able to help us.\"\n\nVinzent looked less than thrilled at the prospect of flying to Xital, but he didn't vocalise his complaints. Judging by the frown on Ddraig Anzig's face, he had heard the dragonet's misgivings anyway.\n\nOne of the Nixans took a tentative step forward and bowed his head. \"I wish to come too, Ddraig Anzig. I blame myself for not trying to stop Ellian leaving Nixa on her own. I would like to help rescue her,\" he said.\n\nDdraig Anzig considered the offer for a moment before he nodded his head. \"Of course you can join us, Airil. We may have need of your magic,\" he said. He turned to the Nixan's twin. \"Kaz, I hope I'm not requesting too much of you, but there is a lot of injured drakes here. Please do what you can to help them.\"\n\n\"I would be honoured to help,\" Kaz said.\n\nIn truth I knew he had little choice in the matter. He may not be of Clan Laxtal, but he was still obliged to carry out the requests of the ddraig. There weren't many ddraigs though who would so graciously request the assistance of a drake of another clan, rather than ordering them. In my mind that was something that would set Ddraig Anzig apart from other clan leaders. He had an aura of humility about him that some would consider a weakness, but would make him well liked throughout the clans.\n\n\"We should leave right away,\" Ddraig Anzig, but Carlee cut across him.\n\n\"It's evening already. We won't get anywhere tonight. We may as well rest properly before leaving in the morning,\" the dragoness said. She stared down the ddraig, who had looked like he was about to argue, but under the stern glare of his mentor, he relented.\n\n\"Yes, you're right. One night at home, then we leave at first light. Please start getting everything prepared,\" Ddraig Anzig asked the old dragoness. \"Use as many drakes to assist you, as you see fit.\" Carlee nodded, and left along with the Nixans, leaving me alone with the ddraig. He looked around the chambers, which would be so familiar to him. His eyes found mine again. \"Azlak, stay near me tonight. I want you to see how things are done. Yalle and Marin will be able to help you whenever you need it, but it would be best you know as much as you can.\"\n\nI vowed to stay close to the ddraig and pick up as much information as I could. There would be a lot I had to learn, and only a couple of hours to do it in. I knew I would never be able to know but a small fraction of what I needed to know about leading the clan. I was sure Ddraig Anzig wasn't expecting that of me, but I newly found sense of honour and pride demanded that I do the job to the best of my ability. I would become the ddraig's shadow until he had to leave for Xital.\n\n\"If you leave me for now, and I'll join you in the central chambers soon,\" the ddraig said. He had already turned away and sat facing the far wall before I had even bowed my head.\n\nThe ddraig must have thought I had already gone, but I had hesitated for just a moment.\n\nI lingered too long.\n\nI knew I would never forget Ddraig Anzig's scream of anguish."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "We returned to Xital without any disturbance. I was surprised we had made it to the lair seemingly without being detected, but we had heard or seen no one. I couldn't explain why the clan seemed so deserted, and Carlee was lost for answers too. She had never known anything like it, and nor had she ever seen evidence of a human encampment so close to a draconic lair. We had all been startled by the sight of the expansive sea of tents, but like the draconic lair, they too appeared empty. For many years, Clan Xital had made it quite clear to the other clans that no humans were to be trusted, that they were dangerous and should never be approached. Evidently that advice didn't apply to Clan Xital themselves.\n\nWe landed near the base of the great spire that marked the Xital central lair. Still no one emerged from either the towering lone mountain, nor from the numerous little crags that led down to the network of caves below our paws.\n\n\"What now?\" Carlee said in a hushed whisper. There was something eerie about the lair. I knew we had to expect a trap.\n\nVinzent wandered off, sniffing at the ground as he moved away. Maznar followed after the dragonet, her tail swishing from side to side. Airil and Carlee remained by my side as they looked around them, trying to find some sign of the Xital drakes, or at the very least, some indication of where Ellian was being held.\n\nI looked to the summit of the mountain. From this angle I couldn't see the entry into the largest natural cave known to dragonkind; that being the audience chamber of Clan Xital. I knew that through that entrance was a way into the network of tunnels that was home to the Xital drakes.\n\nBeyond the central lair were several quite independent networks of tunnels that were used by the many visiting clans. There was almost always a representative of every clan present in Xital, but now there was none. What had happened here to banish away all the visiting drakes? Clan Laxtal hadn't had a drake present in Xital since we had left after the council, so no information had come to our clan. A quick glance to the north gave me a likely answer; there lay the human encampment. It was likely that no drake would want to be anywhere near that.\n\n\"The human scent is fresh,\" Vinzent said, returning back to the group with Maznar, his nose still high in the air. \"They've been gone less than half an hour, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Then where are they?\" I said, not expecting anyone to have the answer. It felt like there were eyes boring into the back of my head, but every time I turned there was no one there. I wondered if I would be able to cast my mind out and try and use my magic to detect any of the Xitals, but I didn't want to risk it. I didn't know if I'd be able to control the magic and withdraw it when needed. I believed I had a firm grip on it at present, especially if I didn't think too hard about it.\n\n\"I think we should split up and start the search for Ellian. I will go with Vinzent and search the council chambers. The rest of you could start searching through the visiting caves,\" Carlee suggested.\n\nI nodded, pleased for the suggestion. As Carlee and Vinzent took to the air up to the council chambers, I led Airil and Maznar to the south, down to where the Laxtal chambers were situated. I doubted Ellian could have broken free from her captors, but if she had, I knew that there is where she would fly to before planning her escape from Xital entirely. It was unlikely, but it was a place to start our search.\n\nWe descended into the caves still without being approached by any resident Xital. We didn't even hear so much as a wingbeat, though now we were underground we could hear a low rumble coming from the north. It sounded like the voices of thousands of drakes, all shouting out at once.\n\nI knew right away that Ellian wasn't in the Laxtal caves. There weren't any recent scents down here, only the faint ones lingering from our last visit. No one had been in these caves since we had left for the Axinstone, a month ago.\n\nMy shoulders slumped, but I had known it couldn't possibly be that easy. With a dejected backwards glance into the small cave, we emerged out into the sunlight. The great mountain dominated the northern horizon, but our focus was now to the east, where there were a few low hills, and therefore more networks of caves. Each of the ruling clans had their own small network, while the other thirty-one clans had to cohabit in one larger group of connected caves. I was unfamiliar with these clusters of caverns, having never set paw inside them, as there had never been a need on my three prior visits. Despite being the haeraig of one of the ruling clans, not once had I been deemed important enough to be invited in for a discussion with another ddraig or haeraig.\n\nWe checked the Axaatl chambers next, which were the closest to Laxtal's to the east. Inside they were much the same as Laxtal's. They too were empty, and hadn't been used for a few weeks at least. Clan Xigax's chambers followed, and we were met with the same result again. No fresh scents lingered there either. I hadn't yet picked up any trace of Ellian's presence, but I forced myself not to become disheartened. Clan Xital's lair was the most expansive lair in all of dragonkind. It would take a long time to search every crack and crevice.\n\nI lingered for a few moments in the Xigax chambers, taking in the unusual scents I found there. They were a little fresher here, and I thought I could just detect the scent of Nataik. I wondered what else she had learnt about the humans.\n\nI sighed and flew up to chase the others, but as I returned to the sunlight and landed on the grass outside, I realised I had been left far behind. I couldn't see Maznar or Airil as they must have flown on to the Nyrian chambers already.\n\nJust as I opened my wings and prepared to fly, a shadow passed over me, dancing across the ground. I glanced up, and was startled to see an unfamiliar drake. The drake glanced down and saw me at the same moment.\n\n\"Ho, drake, are you lost?\" the dragoness called as she trimmed her wings and started wheeling back, descending to meet me. I had tensed in panic, but it seemed like the dragoness had not recognised me. She did not know that I was the dragon who had challenged and defeated her clan's ddraig, and that I had effectively declared a state of war upon this clan. To her, I was just a regular drake, an envoy of another clan.\n\n\"I'm Grazta,\" the dragoness introduced herself as. She deftly touched down just in front of me and looked me over. \"You're definitely no Xigax drake. Your first time to the lair here?\"\n\nI thought it would do me no harm to play the role she had associated me with. I ducked my head and tried to appear sheepish. \"It is, yes.\"\n\n\"Welcome then. Follow me, and I'll take you to where you need to be,\" Grazta offered. I glanced to the east, to where the Nyrian chambers were, then back at the Xital dragoness. I knew I had no choice but to follow her now. I had to hope my companions would be able to find me.\n\n\"Where is everyone?\" I asked Grazta as she kicked off into the air first.\n\nThe dragoness looked over her shoulder. \"Ddraig Tsona has gathered the clan down in the lower chambers. He suffered some sort of crisis in one of the nearby clans and called for assistance to make sure they receive justice,\" she said. I shifted awkwardly as I flew just behind her wing, but the dragoness didn't notice my discomfort.\n\n\"Only a couple of drakes are still out patrolling, just to raise the alarm if anyone approaches the lair. Lucky for you that Haeraig Ilibela wanted some scouts in the air over the lair. We're looking for Selane mostly, but found you instead. You could have been lost for hours,\" Grazta continued. She looked off to the right, and starting banking that way, flying to the north. Her course would take her just to the east of the lone mountain.\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right way?\" I asked her pointedly. The Laxtal caverns were to the west, not to the north.\n\n\"Of course,\" Grazta said with a smug laugh. \"I think I'm more familiar with the lair than you.\"\n\nI frowned and fell into line behind the dragoness. I knew she was taking me the wrong way, but I knew there would be nothing I could say that would convince her otherwise. She seemed quite adamant that she was taking me to the right place, so I decided to let her take me to wherever it was she was heading.\n\nTo my surprise, she took me to the northernmost outcrop in the lair, which I knew contained the Nixan chambers. I thanked the Xital drake as she flew off into the skies, resuming her patrol again. I couldn't imagine why she had brought me here, and not taken me to the Laxtal chambers.\n\nI looked out to the east, towards the chambers for Clan Arasa, who occupied the chambers adjacent to Clan Nixa. Airil and Maznar would come across the Nixan chambers on their way around, so I decided to rest where I was, looking to the sky to make sure no other drake surprised me. The next drake to come across my path could be Ddraig Tsona, and I did not want that. I had to hope that Grazta wouldn't alert the Xital ddraig to our presence just yet. If he knew we were here, he would immediately move to challenge me again, and this time I knew he would make sure he didn't lose.\n\nNo other drake else flew past as I waited. It had only taken a brief moment in the Nixan chambers to know that Ellian wasn't present, though I had not expected her to be there. Of all the outlying chambers, I would only have expected her to be in the Laxtal caves; I only wanted to explore the others as a precaution and hope to glean some information on what was going on within Xital. I hoped Carlee and Vinzent would find Ellian in the mountain that contained many of the extensive tunnels and caverns of the Xital clan.\n\nI became lost in my thoughts, thinking about how we'd get Ellian out once we found her. Ideally we'd be able to get away without Ddraig Tsona even knowing we had been here, but I knew that might not be possible. We would likely have to fight again, and this time he would be able to call upon the humans who were staying close by. Perhaps it was a bad idea bringing so few drakes with me, but nor would I have wanted to bring a full army at my wings. If outright war could be avoided with Xital, then I would choose that route. This was a time when dragonkind needed unity, not division.\n\nEllian was close by, I knew that. Whether or not it was a facet of my hated magic, I could sense her not too far away. She was down there, somewhere amongst the thousands of Xitals who had gathered below the surface to listen to their ddraig speak, a rally against Clan Laxtal and me. Somewhere beneath my paws was my cousin.\n\nBefore I realised what I was doing, I had started to cast my mind outwards. I began to pick up the occasional stray thought from underground. Distorted voices ran through my mind, though the words were never clear enough to understand. I gritted my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut as I tried to block out the thoughts. My tail thrashed as I struggled against the magic as it threatened to overwhelm me, but every effort I made to slow down the trickle of thoughts only increased the flow.\n\nI could barely distinguish my thoughts from the others.\n\nI planned to hunt for a meal, as I hadn't eaten in a few days, so a small deer would be good prey once the ddraig had finished speaking, but I was still focused on what he was saying. He was right, after all, Clan Laxtal had gone too far this time, and their inexperienced leader doomed them; they would be easy to overwhelm. It wouldn't take much to defeat them and add their territories to Clan Xital. No drake, no clan would be able to challenge our might again.\n\nSomeone would be along to rescue me soon. Someone had to. Surely. I placed my head in my paws, knowing that such thoughts were futile. No friendly drake even knew I was here. I was alone, and at the mercy of the treacherous ddraig. If I could escape, it would have to be my doing, but there was no way out of this cell.\n\nThis place was irking me. It was so primitive, nothing like what we had at home. Why did we have to be out here anyway? Why did we have to suck up to this drake? Why was he so important that he got to say what we could and couldn't do?\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig, there you are. Why did you come here?\"\n\nThe words pierced the alien thoughts like a claw through wing, breaking my magic's hold on my mind. Back in control, I looked up to see Airil and Maznar gliding down to meet me. It had been the Nixan who addressed me.\n\nI mumbled a quick explanation of Grazta and her leading me here, still trying to understand why she had done it. Then it occurred to me she hadn't even asked my clan's name. She had just assumed I was Nixan.\n\n\"Shall we check the other lairs?\" Airil asked, looking westward. There were two more networks to check, and though I knew we wouldn't find Ellian there, I nodded my head. Still distracted, I allowed Airil and Maznar to take to the air before I had even opened my wings. Grazta had no way of knowing about the magic I possessed. There was no possible reason she should have thought I was Nixan. So why...?\n\n\"Are you alright, Ddraig Anzig?\" Airil asked. The Nixan had circled back to fly by my wing.\n\nAhead of us, Maznar looked back. I didn't like the look in her eyes. It was a look of perception. She couldn't know could she? Unless she had invaded my dreams last night. Could she have pried into my dreams to see my secret?\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig?\" I realised I hadn't answered Airil yet, and he was still looking across at me, concern etched across his face.\n\n\"I'm alright, Airil,\" I lied, just as I had done to his brother in the Nixan lair. I knew the Nixan would not believe that. At least he didn't question it any further, but I knew he would bring it up again later.\n\nThe same dull rumbling we had heard earlier started to make itself known again. It was getting louder. Thousands of wingbeats were approaching as the Xital drakes were coming back to the surface. I panicked and angled back to the Nixan chambers. Maznar and Airil quickly banked around to follow me.\n\n\"Weren't you wanting to see the other caves first?\" Maznar asked dryly as she caught up to me.\n\n\"Our presence won't be questioned in the Nixan chambers,\" I said, hating the truth behind the statement. Airil would be in his rightful area, and Grazta had seemed to think I belonged there too. Unless Ddraig Tsona himself was coming to the surface, I believed we would be safe there.\n\nThere was a thunderous roar as many hundreds of Xital drakes poured out from near the summit of the mountain. A few came to land in the lair, though many continued flying to the east with some sort of purpose in mind. It looked an imposing army of drakes. Ddraig Tsona was not at their head. Instead it was a grey-scaled dragon leading them away. I struggled to think of which clan's territories lay to the east of Xital. If my memory served me well, it was the minor clan of Fentra. They had not achieved, nor contributed, anything of significance for dragonkind in recent memory. If Ddraig Tsona wanted to add more land to Xital, then they would meet little resistance in Fentra.\n\nThis added of urgency to our need to return to Laxtal. We needed to get back so we could start sending out emissaries to our surrounding clans. Xital had the advantage over us. Not only did they have the humans backing them, they were already swaying their neighbours to their cause. They were the Royal Clan. They would not find it difficult to influence the minds of the clans' ddraigs that bordered Xital. It would not be long until a horde of drakes descended on Laxtal. We had to be ready. We needed allies, and we were fast falling behind. We had to rescue Ellian and escape Xital before nightfall. There was no time to waste.\n\n\"That doesn't look good,\" Airil said. His eyes were also on the drakes that were still streaming out of the council chambers. As we watched, two drakes broke off from the swarm and headed right for us. I tensed, preparing to fly if we needed to make a quick escape, but I recognised the familiar sight of Carlee with Vinzent at her wing. I didn't know how they had done it, but they had infiltrated the Xital force and made their escape with them.\n\nCarlee's tail thrashed as she landed. There was a bit of blood on her paws and my eyes were drawn to a couple of cuts on Vinzent's snout. I inwardly sighed, having a good idea already at what had caused them. One day I hoped Vinzent would put aside his youthful insolence, but it was clear he still had some way to go.\n\n\"I think we've found where she's being kept,\" Carlee growled.\n\n\"Where?\" I asked, feeling hope blossom in my chest. Xital was being emptied just as we wanted to sneak in. Fortune favoured us for once.\n\nI listened with intent as Carlee explained about another network of caverns far below the surface. She had never heard of these caves before, and had a feeling they had been created recently. Drakes usually only ever used natural formations available to them, and while it wasn't unheard of for a clan to create their own lair, Xital drakes had never tarnished their claws by using anything but natural caves. Clan Nixa was one of the only clans that had manufactured their lair, but they had used magic to do so. We could, with effort, could break through solid rock, but the damage it did to our claws made the effort immense. Carlee suspected humans had helped expand the Xital lair and had developed machines and technology to help destroy rock, something Maznar was able to confirm with the veteran. Ellian was being kept in one of these caves, but it didn't seem like she was being guarded by any drakes. I didn't ask her how she had learnt this, but I trusted her implicitly. I knew every word she said was truthful.\n\n\"He's also looking for a dragoness called Selane. He seems quite worried that she's missing, but I don't know who she is,\" Carlee said.\n\nI frowned. That was the name Grazta had mentioned, but it was no concern of ours.\n\n\"Is there another way down, or do we need to go through the council chambers?\" I asked, looking up at the gash in the side of the mountain. That entry was always guarded, and though the flow of drakes coming out had ceased, we still wouldn't be able to get in undetected.\n\n\"I think there might be,\" Airil said with a laugh. He had a slightly mischievous gleam in his eyes. I remembered what his magic was. He would be able to transport us directly in, avoiding the guards in the process.\n\n\"Surely there's another way?\" Vinzent said uncertainly. His head was jerking from side-to-side, his wings slightly unfurled. \"Couldn't Airil just go straight down himself and get Ellian out?\"\n\n\"Not without knowing the way. There's too much rock down there to risk it,\" Airil said, raising his forepaw up. I noticed he was missing a toe. \"That's the price I paid for a slight misjudgement. Unless I know exactly where Ellian is being kept, I can't get to her.\"\n\nVinzent ducked his head and looked away. His paws were absently playing with the grass as he thought. I could feel his mind trying to come up with another suggestion, as well as his frustration as his realisation grew that there was no other way.\n\n\"So where can you take us?\" I asked the Nixan.\n\n\"I was here a few years ago with Ddraig Krateos. We were taken into the tunnels beyond the council chamber to speak with Haeraig Ilibela. I can still recall the layout perfectly, and I can take us down directly into one of the antechambers,\" the Nixan explained.\n\n\"What if there's someone in the chamber? What if they have altered the underground layout in some way?\" Carlee asked, raising her paw off the ground. This last question made Vinzent groan out loud and spin himself down into a tight ball, covering himself with his wings.\n\nAiril's tail wrapped around his hindleg. \"I never said it was perfect. There is always that risk, but what is the alternative?\"\n\nCarlee snorted, but didn't protest any further. I took this as an acceptance that we had no other option. Airil would teleport us into the lair, and then Carlee could guide us down to where she believed Ellian was being held. The lair would not be deserted, but hopefully enough drakes had departed that we wouldn't run into anyone once we were inside.\n\n\"You first, Ddraig Anzig?\" Airil said, reaching out with his paw and placing it on my snout.\n\nI blinked, and I was standing in a dark cavern. The only source of light came from the tunnels, around a sharp corner in the rock a few feet away. I could only just see Airil in the gloom. I looked around in shock, stunned by the sudden change in scenery.\n\n\"That was...\" Airil said, before trailing off into thought. \"No, never mind.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked, but the Nixan wasn't to be pressed into an answer.\n\n\"No, it's nothing. Just forget I said anything,\" he said, before disappearing with a whiplash-like crack, leaving me alone in the dark. What had the Nixan meant? I was sure something had disturbed or worried him, but we seemed to have appeared right where he wanted to, and what was more, the cave was deserted. I couldn't even hear the echo of a drake passing nearby.\n\nI was not alone for long, a just a few moments later Airil reappeared with Maznar. Again the Nixan frowned as he removed his paw from Maznar's snout, but this time said nothing before vanishing once again.\n\nAll I could see of the spectre was her red eyes, reminding me of the first time I had seen her, in a shroud of smoke and darkness in a dream on George's island. She snickered softly to herself. \"Do you know what I'm thinking?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, of course not,\" I replied. I tried to keep my voice calm, but a cold shiver passed down my spine and my tail twitched in response.\n\n\"Why not?\" she said. Her teeth shone in the soft light as she smiled. She knew, but before she could say anything further Airil returned with Vinzent. The Nixan stumbled as he materialised, but he was gone again in just a moment.\n\nVinzent immediately fell to his side and just lay there, cowering with his paws covering his eyes. He moaned softly until I told him to shut up. Just because we couldn't hear anyone didn't mean no one would be able to hear us. Ddraig Tsona could not know of our presence here.\n\nAiril returned for the last time with Carlee. The veteran dragoness was more composed than Vinzent, but I could tell she was a little bit rattled by the experience in the way she couldn't keep her wings still. The Nixan meanwhile had collapsed to the ground. His chest was heaving as he struggled to draw breath.\n\n\"Just... give... moment,\" he panted. He forced a few deep breaths and squeezed his eyes shut. \"Sorry. Takes a lot of effort. To move someone who isn't Nixan. Even short distances.\"\n\n\"We can't linger,\" Carlee said. She had gone to the entrance, where the cavern led out to the tunnels. She peered out in both directions before sitting down. Her whole body was quivering, eager to move.\n\nI allowed Airil a few minutes of rest before I got him back up to his paws. He still looked tired, but Carlee was right. Every moment we stayed here increased the chance of being detected. We had to move on.\n\n\"Never again, Boss. Never again,\" Vinzent whispered to me as he passed me, falling into line just behind Maznar.\n\nCarlee took the position of power at the front as she knew the way. It was my role as ddraig to take the lead as we pushed down through the tunnels, but the veteran dragoness requested I position myself at the rear, a place I had no experience of. Maznar was offering Airil support as he occasionally stumbled and almost fell, while Vinzent slinked along just in front of me. Being at the rear, I was able to check we weren't being followed.\n\nThe walls of the tunnels glistened with moisture and were coated in moss and lichen. Clinging to the ceiling were large stalactites that regularly dripped droplets of water. The floor was damp with this constant drizzle, leaving the rock slippery underpaw. Every dozen feet a bracket was embedded into the wall, each holding a lit torch. They provided plenty of light to see by, but also threw up myriads of reflections on the damp surfaces. A dull ache started building behind my eyes as they grew weary of the refracted light. As we passed by, our shadows danced a chaotic dance along the uneven walls, disappearing in front of us, only to overtake us once more as we passed by another light.\n\nI was uneasy. Not once had I heard anything, but I couldn't shake the feeling someone knew we were here. There was a pressure against my mind. It was a sensation I had never felt, but I was immediately able to detect it. Without knowing what I was doing, my mind pushed back at the touch. I felt a soundless yelp and the contact was gone.\n\nMy unseen struggle had gone unnoticed by the others and had left me lagging behind. I hurried to catch back up to Vinzent's tail just as Carlee disappeared into a side passage. This one delved sharply down and was almost completely unlit.\n\n\"This is the way, hurry,\" the veteran whispered as she paused to make sure we were all still with her.\n\nThe passage was perfectly straight; this could not be a natural formation. The walls were roughly hewn, but as I paused to place my paw on them, I could feel the marks left behind by human tools. Carlee had been correct; this part of the lair had been built by humans. I was concerned though. The smell of humans was faint, but I couldn't detect the scent of the tools and explosives they used to break apart rock. This was old, far predating the war. We had traded with humans for generations before the war had broken out, but as a rule no human had been granted access to a draconic lair. If I was right, Clan Xital had broken that law a long time ago.\n\nThe passageway came to an end, and we stepped out into a small cave. A narrow crack in the ceiling must have gone all the way to the exterior of the mountain, for a shaft of light lit the way.\n\nCarlee hissed, and it was plain to see what had disturbed her. A human-style door blocked the way. It wasn't just a simple door made from wood that had been most common in my experience, but had a small square, barred window near the top that looked just too small to squeeze through. Humans hadn't just been extending the Xital lair. It looked like they had started building their own.\n\nI flew up and peered through the gap near the top of the door. Beyond it I could see a tunnel stretching further into the darkness, of which I could see at least two offshoots. There didn't seem to be anyone present, but it reeked of humans.\n\nMaznar fumbled with the mechanism about halfway up the door. The door silently swung open. There were marks on the other side. I ran my paw over the three gouges in the wood. They were claw marks. I lifted my snout and sniffed the air. There it was. Faint amongst the human smells was a familiar one. Ellian had been here.\n\n\"Let's go,\" I said, following the tantalising scent.\n\nWe could have been in the dungeons below George's castle. Everything was almost the same. Dark corridors branched out with small rooms on either side. Each room was barred with a thick door, though some were partly open.\n\nThe noisy approach of human pawsteps echoed from up ahead. We all froze for a moment, but nothing approached us and soon the noises faded to silence. So the humans were still down here. But where?\n\nI shared a worried glance with Carlee before we moved forward again. We were so close. Ellian's scent was getting stronger with each step we took. The presence of humans bothered me, but I couldn't let anything distract me now.\n\n\"Hey, Boss,\" Vinzent called out nervously. I whipped around, ready to berate him for not keeping his voice down, but he'd placed his paw on a closed door. \"I think she's in here.\"\n\nI pushed the dragonet out the way and put my snout against the wood. He was right. Ellian's scent was much stronger here. I looked up at the locking mechanism, then back at Maznar. \"Are you able to open it?\" I asked the dragoness. I thought I heard muffled movement on the other side of the door.\n\nMaznar reached up and pulled on the metallic lever, but it didn't move. \"Locked,\" the spectre said with a hiss. \"We'll need a key to open it.\"\n\nI leapt back as a burst of heat prickled my scales just as a loud crack shattered the quietness of the tunnel. Airil had vanished, only to reappear a moment later holding on tightly to a very startled lilac dragoness, who was remarkably unharmed. Moisture sizzled under his paws, revealing some of the enormity of the power he wielded, as well as the exertion he endured each time he used his magic.\n\nAs the Nixan collapsed once more, Ellian staggered forward towards me. She placed her paw on my snout, as though not daring to believe the evidence of her eyes. \"Ziggy? You're really here?\" she whispered.\n\nI placed my wing around Ellian's shivering body, a difficult feat given her five inches of extra height over me. \"I wasn't going to abandon you here,\" I said. Maznar was assisting Airil back to his paws, while Carlee had scouted along the tunnel to check for any humans. Vinzent hovered nearby, unable to even look at Ellian.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come. Ddraig Tsona, he... Oh you should have seen what he's done,\" Ellian said. The anguish in my cousin's voice was worrying.\n\n\"I already know Ellian. I challenged him in Laxtal, and he fled like the coward he is,\" I growled, but Ellian shook her head and moaned.\n\n\"No, no, what? No Ziggy, here. There must be thousands of them, all waiting for his command,\" she said. She tried to pull free of my embrace, but I held her tighter with my wings, standing on her tail to stop her moving away. \"He showed them to me. I don't know why. Maybe to get me to see how hopeless it is for us, maybe wanting me to join him? I just don't know. We can't beat them though Ziggy, not even if we had every clan united.\"\n\n\"A few thousand humans against Clan Nixa and Clan Laxtal?\" I asked, trying to sound nonchalant to ease Ellian's worries, even though I was terrified about the prospect myself. I forced a laugh. \"They don't stand a chance.\"\n\n\"You got it then? You got the Axinstone?\" Ellian asked. She had given up trying to break free now and had placed her head on top of mine.\n\nCarlee growled to get our attention. \"I don't think this is the time or place, you two\" she said sternly, but there was a softness in her eyes that betrayed her joy at finding Ellian again. Ellian didn't share the same relationship I had with the veteran, but Carlee had been involved in Ellian's upbringing too. She had been a mentor to so many of the younger drakes in the clan.\n\nReluctantly I released Ellian from my wings and walked towards Carlee. \"How do we get out then?\" I asked her, looking back as Ellian rubbed heads first with Airil and then Maznar. She may not have known who the spectre was, but she still recognised that the dragoness had come to rescue her. She growled at Vinzent as the dragonet nervously approached her.\n\n\"Airil doesn't look capable of taking us out again,\" Carlee said. She had also looked back at the small group, but her focus was on the Nixan. He was barely able to remain standing, and certainly didn't look like he'd be able to use his magic to get us out. Airil slowly shook his head and shuffled his wings, but he had nothing to be ashamed of. His assistance had already been invaluable. He had gotten us down here; we would just have to find another way back up.\n\n\"Then we fly out. The humans must have some way of getting into the caves without passing through the lair,\" I said. There was the slightest hint of a breeze passing through the tunnels. There had to be another exit.\n\nWith some gentle encouragement and a firm nudge or two from Ellian and Maznar, Airil was able to take to wing behind Carlee and me, while Vinzent took up the position at the rear. I led the way, trying to follow the movements in the air to their source. Several times we had to turn back as I took us along tunnels that had been abandoned in construction, as they suddenly ended. Other times, we retraced our route, as I sensed the breeze growing fainter. On two occasions we could hear humans moving around and not too far away by the sound they made.\n\nFinally I could see natural light in the distance, a welcome relief from the artificial lights the humans had placed in the ceiling of the tunnels. We were so nearly there.\n\nThere were two loud clicks and I heard something whistle through the air. Something tangled around my body and wings. I fell to the ground instantly. I couldn't even brace myself before I hit the rock. I cried in pain, and I wasn't the only one. Everyone but Carlee had been caught, bound in thick nets ejected from tubes set into the walls.\n\nA trap to stop drakes escaping.\n\nCarlee tugged at my bonds as an alarm starting blaring through the tunnel. Almost immediately we heard the sound of humans trampling through the tunnels echoed all around us, the sound seemingly from nowhere, but from everywhere at the same time.\n\nThe dragoness tried everything to release me, but neither tooth nor claw had any effect on the net. Still she struggled, and she managed to free one of my wings just as the first human turned the nearest corner. In one hand he held a knife, and in the other a small black device which he held up to his mouth.\n\n\"Fly Carlee, just go!\" I yelled at the veteran, hoping she would save herself at least, but she refused. She stood over me and held her ground, wings flared as she hissed at the human.\n\n\"Get George, we have them,\" the human said, speaking into the little box in his hand.\n\nI whimpered. How could George be here?\n\n\"You'll have to get through me first,\" Carlee snarled, leaping at the human with her claws outstretched.\n\nThe human slashed at the dragoness with his knife.\n\nCarlee screamed and collapsed to the ground, holding her paws over her eyes. Blood splattered the rock wall and dripped from the human's knife. She tried to back away, but a few moments later seven other humans arrived. They all approached us cautiously before they started lifting us up. We were powerless to resist. The nets had trapped our wings and legs, and the humans were careful to stay away from the reach of our teeth. I was slung over the shoulder of one of the humans, giving me the chance to look back at the others. They were all there: Airil hadn't even had the strength to teleport himself away. Carlee had been taken with ease. They hadn't even needed a net to restrain her. She was motionless as they carried her, leaving a trail of blood behind.\n\n\"Up to the mountain cave?\" the human carrying me asked one of his companions.\n\n\"Yep. George is already waiting,\" his female companion answered.\n\nNothing else was said as the humans carried us all away from the light, retracing our wingbeats back down through the dark tunnels to the natural caves of the Xital lair. A few drakes followed us now. I could see on their faces a mixture of curiosity and fear. I allowed myself a brief moment to wonder why they would be afraid, before realising that if they were scared, we should be terrified about what was going to happen.\n\nThe humans were going to kill us. George would probably want to slay us himself.\n\nNo Xital drake followed us into the council chambers. None seemed to have the courage to set paw inside the expansive council chamber. Facing the wrong way, I couldn't see if anyone else was here, but it sounded almost completely empty.\n\nI was thrown roughly to the ground. As I landed I stole a glance up to the podium at the front of the great chamber. Three humans and a dragon stood there. Tsona moved gingerly as he walked forward and his wing was bound to his side.\n\n\"Brave Anzig, come to free his clanmate. Such a good job you've done too. You almost made it outside,\" the Xital traitor taunted. \"You would have been a good ally, Anzig. Now we're just going to have to kill you.\"\n\nMy fearless companions were thrown to the ground beside me. For a moment I caught sight of Carlee's face. The knife had slashed right through an eye. She covered her face with her blood soaked paws again, and the ghastly visage was hidden from view.\n\n\"Is this the one who stole the Dragon's Head Rune?\" one of the humans said, stepping forward. Maznar hissed as she saw him, but the human paid no attention. This had to be George. He looked like he had been carved from cold, hard stone, not from warm, living flesh.\n\n\"Unbind them,\" George said after Tsona had identified me as the thief of the Nixan artefact.\n\n\"Is that wise?\" Tsona asked in surprise.\n\nThe human grinned wolfishly. \"No fun in killing a bound captive,\" he said.\n\nOne of my captors approached. In his hand was the knife he had used to attack Carlee. It was still coated in her blood as he sliced through the net that bound me. Some of the blood wiped off on my scales.\n\nI resisted the urge to slash out at the human, something Vinzent was not able to do. A howl of pain was followed by a dull thud as the dragonet's head was slammed into the ground.\n\nSlowly I rolled over onto my paws and stood up. I didn't allow myself to show any fear. My legs stayed strong and my head was held high. I looked at the human right in the eye, but he didn't hold my stare. Instead, his eyes flicked everywhere as he looked at everything around him. He didn't appear troubled with the fact he was conceding defeat to me by looking away.\n\nGeorge waved away the other humans, who left us alone in the council chamber. Three humans and a lamed dragon against six weakened drakes. Even in a fair fight we had little chance of escaping alive. I could not see how we could survive this.\n\n\"Of course, I don't have to kill you,\" the human said. He stood close to me, looking down the almost four foot difference between us. Even at my full height, my head didn't even reach his hips. I didn't believe the human for a moment. He had every intention of killing us, and I told him such.\n\nHe laughed. \"Not just yet. You took something I want. Where is the Dragon's Head Rune?\"\n\n\"Back where it belongs. In Nixa,\" I said. He would never get it there, but to my surprise he laughed again.\n\n\"Good, I'm glad you said that.\" He looked at a small device bound to his wrist and tapped it a couple of times.\n\nTsona placed his paw on the human's leg. \"I have told you already, that place cannot be attacked,\" he said, but the human swept him aside with a kick of his foot.\n\n\"Surely you of all little drakes don't doubt me, Tsona?\" George said. His disdain for our kind was evident in his tone. He bent down slightly, and showed the dragon something on the small device; Tsona's eyes widened.\n\n\"Yes, that just might do it,\" he hissed in admiration.\n\nI caught a brief glimpse of what George had shown Tsona, but I couldn't make any sense of it. All I had seen were strange human markings. They were beyond my understanding, and the human seemed to know that as he smirked again. I was scared of what he had planned.\n\n\"So, now we have the Dragon's Head Rune, just one more question for you, drake,\" George said as Tsona backed away to stand by the side of the other humans. \"What did you do with my Nightwings?\"\n\nI glanced across at Maznar in shock. The human obviously hadn't recognised the spectre standing right in front of him. Maznar went to step forward, but she noticed my hard glare just in time. If George didn't know she was still alive, then I planned to keep it that way. We still didn't know if the humans could control her still. If they believed she was dead, then they wouldn't try to manipulate her anymore.\n\n\"I killed her,\" I said, looking back at the human. \"She attacked and I fought her off. Her body fell into the ocean.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" George said without emotion. I wasn't sure if he didn't believe me, or just didn't care for the dragoness. He reached for something at his hip. A gun. He pointed it right at me. \"If you've nothing more to say, then you've outlived your use to me.\"\n\nI backed away from the human, but the gun was aimed at me. My heart thudded.\n\n\"If you harm him...\" Ellian hissed as she moved forward and stood by my side.\n\n\"You'll what?\" George laughed. The human knew as well as I did that we couldn't hope to survive.\n\nA deafening bang erupted as two forms leapt past me.\n\n\"Carlee!\" I shrieked as I was covered in a spray of blood. The dragoness had dived in front of me and taken the bullet in her chest. She slumped to the ground and didn't move.\n\nEllian had latched on to the human. Her teeth were ripping into George's hand until he was forced to release the gun.\n\nThe other two humans grabbed hold of Ellian and wrenched her off George. One threw her to the ground, just as Maznar dived on them. The spectre tried to reach the faces of the humans, but they were able to deflect her away.\n\nThe gun fired again. Startled, I looked across to see Ellian lying on the floor, awkwardly clutching the gun with her forepaws. She struggled as she stood once more, reared up on her hindlegs. She wasn't able to raise the gun high, nor hold it still. It waved around wildly, with Ellian almost toppling a few times. She managed to fire it again and George collapsed with a scream as the bullet pierced his leg. Ellian was once more thrown to the floor.\n\n\"What are you waiting for? Fly,\" she yelled, twisting her body away from the gun, and getting to her paws; this time on all fours.\n\nMaznar and Vinzent took to the air immediately, quickly escaping the reach of the two uninjured humans, flying out of the chamber. Airil crawled over to Carlee and gently shook her. The dragoness was still breathing, but only just. She certainly couldn't fly.\n\n\"Ziggy, what are you waiting for?\" Ellian cried. The two humans were closing in on her, one circling round to her left side. Again, she struggled with the gun, trying to control her weakening body as she wrested the human weapon up from the stone. She was running out of space. She was running out of time.\n\nI pushed my mind inside Airil's. \"There was a large oak tree about a mile to the west from here. Take Carlee. Meet us there.\" The Nixan's eyes widened, transfixed on me, his mouth opening, about to say something.\n\n\"Go!\" My shout broke his trance-like state, and he looked away, down at our shattered companion. He placed his paw on Carlee's body and the both vanished.\n\nI flew at the two standing humans with a huge roar, distracting them just long enough. This gave Ellian just the time she needed. She dropped the gun as it fired a final time. There was another scream of pain. As she was knocked back by the weapon, she deftly rolled away, and kicked off from the ground with all her might. Gritting her teeth as she soared into the air.\n\nEllian flew on ahead, but I slowed for a moment I looked down to see George cradling a bloody and still Tsona in his arms.\n\nI turned away and flew out of the cavern.\n\nWe burst out into the light and sucked in the air, as though it was my first breath in a long time. The sun's warmth seemed to warm right to my bones. We needed to get away quickly. It wouldn't be long before the Xital drakes would start to pour out from the lair. We flew west, out towards the oak tree I had sent Airil and Carlee.\n\nCarlee! Did she survive? It was only a few minutes away but as I looked back, I could see that we were not being pursued. Yet.\n\nAiril was waiting for us, hiding beneath the roots of the massive tree. \"Hurry,\" he said in a voice strained with exhaustion as I landed. I looked into his eyes for an answer. Instead, he looked away, and pointed lower beneath the roots where the grass had grown through.\n\nCarlee was lying in the grass, her chest lifted and fell ever so slightly. But it was moving. She was alive. But she was weak. She was pathetically weak. Her teeth, the ones that remained, were stained red with her own blood. It oozed from her many wounds, turning the grass scarlet, and where it was already drying, to black. I lay down beside her, just enough contact for her to know I was there. She spluttered as she opened her one good eye.\n\n\"Anzig. My Anzig \u2026 you \u2026 are here. Looks like\u2026 like this is it,\" she said weakly. There was a faint hint of a smile on her mutilated face.\n\n\"No, no, you can't die,\" I said, desperately willing her to survive. I couldn't live without her. She had always been there, from the moment I had hatched. I knew it was na\u00efve to think she would outlive me, but not once had I ever thought she would die. She was a constant of Clan Laxtal. She was my constant!\n\n\"No, it's my time,\" she said, her voice pitifully weak. \"You listen to me now, Anzig.\" She coughed, the pain wracking through her frail body, red foam glistening on her lips. \"Ignore what any drake may say. You are\u2026 and always\u2026 will be, the true ddraig of Laxtal. You will be a good leader. You will defeat the humans. Do it in my honour if you need a reason.\" A cough rent through her broken body once more, the effort of a few sentences too much for her.\n\nI nodded almost to myself, unable to think of anything to say. How could I possibly say goodbye to Carlee? With a great effort, she rolled her head to one side, nuzzling against mine, lowering her already pitiful voice to barely a whisper. These words, these last words, were for me alone.\n\n\"But...\" Carlee said, her chest barely moving. Her eye glazed over as she tried to speak one last time. I kept my silence. \"You... are not...\" She struggled to draw breath. \"\u2026 not Astar's son...\"\n\n\"No...\" I breathed, as Carlee's head tipped ever so slightly pressing just a little harder against my shoulder. Her eye half-closed and her chest stopped.\n\nI slumped to the ground. Carlee was dead.\n\nAnd she had ripped apart my whole life.\n\nMy tears mingled with her blood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "Tsona's time in Laxtal had proven to be violent and disruptive, and it had been left to me to try and repair the damage caused. It had only been two days since Ddraig Anzig had left for Xital, but already I longed for his return. It would be at least a five day round trip for him though, and that was if he was able to rescue Ellian without any trouble. I had Seen nothing of him, but I had not had the time to properly focus my magic on the ddraig.\n\nAlmost every moment had been spent overseeing the recovery of the clan. It had taken Kaz most of the first day to go around the clan and heal the worst of the injuries. He had exhausted himself in the process, and had only stopped when my father had dragged him away and told him to rest. I hadn't seen Kaz since then, but I had been told he was still sleeping.\n\nTo my surprise, no one had yet protested my leadership of the clan. It was almost as though they saw me as a different dragon to the one who had left a little over a month ago. Drakes who had once taken any opportunity to belittle me now bowed their heads as I passed.\n\nThe beacon fires had been lit. A call went up, resonating around the whole lair.\n\nI had been waiting in the main chamber with my father, discussing what our next move should be. A large group of drakes had been sent out to hunt for the whole clan. Many hadn't eaten since Tsona had first come to the clan.\n\nA fearful murmur ran through the clan as more and more noticed the beacon flame. I could never remember what all the colours meant, but I knew a sparking flame was used to announce the arrival of the clan's ddraig or haeraig. This flame was purple, but without sparks.\n\nMy father was the first to react. \"Yalle, get a messenger out there to see who is coming,\" he called out to the albino dragon. It took Yalle just a few moments to find and dispatch a blue dragoness to fly out and determine whatever or whoever it was that approached the lair. There was no real urgency from the two older dragons, so I doubted any threat was expected. I could still detect a certain amount of nervousness though, matching my mood. This would be the first time the clan would be tested with me as its leader.\n\nI was taken aside by my father, away from the prying ears of the rest of the clan. \"I will understand if you're unable to do this,\" he said quietly.\n\nFor a moment my old self almost came to the fore \u2013 the scared dragon that shied away from the smallest of responsibility. But then I remembered again that Ddraig Anzig had placed his faith in me. I would not back away from that. I lifted my shoulders up and stood as tall as my diminutive frame would allow me.\n\n\"I can do this, father,\" I said. I wasn't offended that he had doubted me. I could feel hundreds of eyes on me. They would all be judging me, and I knew many of them would doubt me too, just like my father. But Ddraig Anzig had chosen me to lead the clan, and for now that was enough to keep them silent.\n\nMy father nodded his head once. \"I'll be right at your side if you need me,\" he said.\n\nI accepted my father's offer for help, but at the same time knowing that I would endeavour to do this by myself. If I wanted the respect of my clan, of my father, and of Ddraig Anzig, then I couldn't rely on others to help me through every challenge. I needed to prove myself.\n\nWhile we waited for the messenger to return, Yalle and my father gave me some advice on how to handle myself. They had told me that the purple flames meant a drake of Clan Xital was approaching. It was too soon for this drake to have anything to do with Ddraig Anzig flying to their territory. He would only just have reached Xital. They couldn't have sent someone back so soon. Yalle believed this drake was coming to try and persuade Ddraig Anzig to submit to Ddraig Tsona. They would be disappointed. Clan Laxtal was not going to allow itself to be controlled by Xital ever again, certainly not with Tsona as their ddraig.\n\nIt was another hour of nervous waiting before the messenger returned with a Xital dragoness in close company. The burnished copper dragoness glared around the chamber as she landed and raised her head. \"Where is the ddraig?\" she asked haughtily. Her eyes didn't linger on any one drake as she searched for the leader of the clan. It took me a few moments to realise that I was the drake she was seeking.\n\nI took a few tentative steps forward, moving away from my father and towards the Xital dragoness. Her eyes were immediately boring into mine. I resisted looking away. This was no haeraig or ddraig of Xital. They may be the Royal Clan, but as the chosen representative of Laxtal, I had no obligation to submit to the dragoness.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig is not here. I am Azlak, and I control the clan in his absence,\" I said, trying to keep the nervous quaver out of my voice.\n\n\"Where is he?\" the dragoness asked. Her tail thrashed from side to side as she glared down on me.\n\n\"That is none of your concern,\" I replied. I met the eyes of the much taller dragoness and refused to look away. I could see the dragoness's surprise as she was forced to glance away first. If she had expected to come to our clan and have her way, then I knew she would be mistaken. The days of Laxtal being dominated by a Xital drake had passed.\n\nThough the dragoness betrayed her displeasure by growling, she did not press me for more information on Ddraig Anzig. Instead she eased back onto her haunches and shook her wings. Her eyes stayed focused on my paws and didn't stray higher than that.\n\n\"I am Selane, the youngest daughter of Ddraig Tsona. I fled with my father three days ago, but I slipped away and turned back,\" the dragoness said. She lowered her head, dipping her eyes lower and revealing the ring of horns that ran around the top of every Xital drake's head. It was a physical trait only seen on drakes of the Royal Clan.\n\nI tilted my head to the side, intrigued by her words. She had turned back, not been sent back. \"Why did you come?\" I asked her.\n\nSelane looked away. Her claws kneaded the rock beneath her paws. She was embarrassed \u2013 ashamed by her actions. \"I have seen what my father has done, and what he has become. I do not agree with it.\" Her voice dropped down to a whisper. \"He has betrayed the draconic way, but no one will speak out against him. I came seeking Ddraig Anzig to beg for asylum amongst your clan.\"\n\n\"What caused you to turn against your father?\" I asked. It must have taken an incredible act of bravery from this young Xital dragoness to fly away from her father, the most powerful drake in existence.\n\nSelane swung her head back to search through the gathered crowd of drakes. \"There was a dragon...\" she said quietly, before turning back around to face me. Her voice grew in strength once more and her posture recovered slightly, but still she didn't look in my eye. \"I have turned my back on Xital and I will not be allowed to return. If Ddraig Anzig is not here, I must ask it of you, Azlak of Laxtal, will your clan grant me refuge?\"\n\nMy body tensed. Was this a trap from the Xital dragoness? Was she truly being honest about doubting her father? I already knew Ddraig Tsona had lied about his true intentions. The Nixans had been quite adamant that Tsona was still to be trusted, but they had been betrayed, like we had. Could I trust the word of the treacherous drake's daughter?\n\nI quickly stole a glance back at my father, who shook his head. Whether he was advising me not to offer refuge to the Xital, or that he couldn't be the one to answer, I wasn't sure. Behind him was Yalle. The albino dragon held his forepaw aloft and had clenched it tight like he intended to strike someone, though no one was even close to him. Then he relented. He nodded his head slightly as he lowered his paw back to the ground. I took this as approval. I turned to look back into the eyes of Selane; searching for something, anything.\n\n\"Selene of Xital, you are welcome to stay in Laxtal, for now, until Ddraig Anzig returns. Beyond that time, it is his decision,\" I said. I tried to inject an air of authority into my voice. To my ears it just sounded oddly false but, to my surprise, the Xital dragoness bowed her head.\n\n\"I am most grateful for your offer,\" Selane said.\n\nA single dragon stepped forward from the hundreds that had stopped to watch our exchange. None had spoken and barely any had moved until now. \"If I may, Azlak. I would take Selane under my wing, protect and watch over her until the ddraig returns,\" the brown scaled dragon asked. I knew immediately that this dragon, presenting himself before me, was the reason for Selane's defection from Xital. I still didn't know if I'd done the right thing, but I was comforted by the actions of this dragon. I couldn't place his name, but I knew I had seen him on occasion. I couldn't recall a time though we had ever spoken.\n\n\"Until Ddraig Anzig returns,\" I repeated, before turning back to Selane. \"Was there any other reason you came to Laxtal for? Is there anything at all you can tell us?\"\n\nSelane looked down into the ground and tightened her wings against her back, making herself look small. \"You must understand he is still my father. I... I don't think I could betray his secrets. Not here. Not now,\" she said.\n\n\"I understand,\" I replied. I had to admit I was a little disappointed. I would have enjoyed revealing some of Tsona's secrets to Ddraig Anzig once he returned, but I genuinely understood Selane's reluctance. No matter what my father did to me, I would be unable to betray him.\n\n\"By your leave Azlak, I would like to retire with Ravet,\" Selane said, shifting slightly closer to the dragon at her side.\n\nI allowed the two drakes to leave, and they immediately flew away to the deeper parts of the lair. With their departure, most of the other drakes lost interest and turned away, but there was one who remained fixated with my every move. I could feel the burning of his eyes from behind me. I slowly turned, and looked into his eyes. I could tell from the glare that he was not impressed with my actions, but I stood as tall as I could and attempted to face him down.\n\n\"Why did you trust her?\" my father questioned. He still hadn't turned away from me, but I wasn't going to back down.\n\n\"I did what a ddraig should do, what I thought Ddraig Anzig would do,\" I replied.\n\n\"You allowed a Xital dragoness into our clan. They are the enemy,\" my father hissed. His back arched upwards, and for a moment I thought he was about to attack.\n\nA dragon moved to stand between us, positioning himself so that my father couldn't reach me. \"Enough of this Marin,\" Yalle growled. He faced down my father, who was quick to look away from the albino dragon. \"You were quick to trust Azlak before. Has that faith gone so soon?\"\n\nI was buoyed by the support from the experienced dragon, who had long been one of Astar's most powerful friends. Few of the clan had remained behind to witness the short exchange, but those that had would surely have been swayed by the opinion of the respected albino. But it was just of one drake that mattered now, and I was relieved to see my father's aggression subside.\n\n\"I just hope the ddraig agrees with you,\" he hissed, before taking to wing and flying off without another word. His words didn't upset me too greatly. I had endured years of my father's disappointment before today. For a brief moment he had admitted he was proud of me. Though it hurt a little to see that discarded so soon, I vowed to win back his respect when Ddraig Anzig returned.\n\nSitting by the side of the albino dragon, I looked out over the remaining few drakes of the clan who still lingered. Most were out hunting or looking after the injured. But there was one drake I hadn't seen all day. \"Where is Keita?\" I asked Yalle.\n\nThe albino growled. \"She said she had some business to the south and left at dawn. She took Okazuni with her,\" he said. I could tell he was unhappy about something, but I didn't ask him what. It wasn't disappointment that I saw, like my father was with me, but more like disapproval. Did he disagree with her choice of the Nyrian as a mate?\n\nI decided to change the subject as I didn't want to know what had come between Keita and her father. \"And Kaz? Have you seen him today?\" I asked him instead.\n\nYalle's expression barely changed, and he fluttered his wings momentarily. \"I think he's still resting in the lower chambers. I can show you the way if you needed to see him,\" the albino said.\n\nI didn't know what I expected to learn from meeting up with the Nixan again; I imagined he would still be too exhausted from his efforts in healing the multitude of injured Laxtal drakes to help train my magic, or even to engage in conversation. Nonetheless, I followed Yalle down into the lower chambers of the clan, through the twisting dark and damp passageways that delved deep into the earth.\n\nWe passed by many other drakes on our way down, and without exception they all bowed their heads towards us. It was a most unsettling sensation, having so many drakes submit to my authority. It took all my willpower to keep my head up high and try to exude the confidence I didn't feel. I recognised most of the drakes, and almost without exception they had hurled abuse and insults at me just a few short weeks ago. Now they were respecting me as their leader. What had I done to deserve such an increase of power within the clan? Nothing had changed. I was still the lone Laxtal with magic... Only... I wasn't now, was I? I shared that curse with the ddraig of the clan. Was Ddraig Anzig trying to increase my standing within the clan so that when his magic was revealed, he didn't fall so far? Whatever Ddraig Anzig's attentions, I wasn't going to complain that I no longer appeared to be treated as the omega. Whether that would last when the ddraig returned to regain leadership of the clan, that was another matter entirely.\n\nYalle broke into my musings when we reached the chamber where Kaz was resting. We were down in the more deserted chambers away from the rest of the clan. These were rarely used even for visiting drakes, especially not those who had been so important to our clan. Kaz had helped heal hundreds of Laxtal drakes over the last few days, but why he had been taken to these cold and damp caves I usually used was beyond me. I glared sharply at Yalle, though I didn't know if he was responsible for this or not. He shifted his wings uncomfortably as he seemed to understand the reason for my stare.\n\n\"We can spare some caves closer to the central chambers if you'd prefer,\" he said, lowering his head in respect.\n\n\"Get some prepared immediately,\" I growled, surprising even myself with the ferocity in my voice. \"You wouldn't have allowed this if Ddraig Anzig was here. Why should it be different because I'm in charge?\"\n\n\"It was an oversight, nothing more,\" Yalle said.\n\n\"Then see to it that it gets fixed. Now.\" The albino dragon bowed his head again before retreating along the dark passageways that led to the rest of the lair.\n\nI could hear flowing water further below. Though the river that had carved out the gorge on the surface had long since dried up, down in the dark depths of the caverns, a raging torrent continued to flow. I had never explored the caverns around the underground river as they were unlit. Only once had I ventured close, but I had been frightened by the pitch darkness, and the sensation of the vast expanse that had stretched out before my unseeing eyes. Even now, the memory caused me to shudder.\n\nTo my surprise, Kaz was not asleep as I entered his cave. The Nixan was studying something on the glistening wall opposite the narrow entrance. He was so engrossed in his studies that he didn't even notice me enter.\n\nI softly called his name, but Kaz didn't turn around. His paw traced over some scratched markings in the rock. \"Have you seen these before Azlak?\" he asked, without turning. He moved his paw to the side to reveal what looked to be writing engraved into the stone, in a language I did not recognise. The words appeared to have been carved by a drake's claw, and as far as I could tell it was only two words repeated over and over. They reminded me of the stone tablets we had seen in the cave north of Kxisila, but I had never seen anything similar in Laxtal before.\n\n\"Nagyrz zavrat,\" Kaz read, tracing the words with a claw.\n\n\"What does it mean?\" I said, tilting my head to the side as I struggled to make out the words.\n\nFor the first time, Kaz turned his head to look back at me. \"It's draconic. This is the ancient draconic language,\" he said, his voice rising as his excitement grew. \"I spent some time in Clan Vatrea recently. They're trying to recover our language, the language spoken by drakes hundreds of years ago. I was keen to learn, so they taught me as much as they could.\"\n\n\"And do you know what it means?\" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.\n\nKaz turned back to the draconic words, his tongue protruding from his mouth as he thought. His eyes darted back and forth over the rock as though trying to absorb clues as to the meaning. Just when I thought he was going to give up in frustration, his eyes widened and he gasped in shock.\n\n\"Of course, that's it,\" he whispered. \"It means 'never forget'.\"\n\n\"Never forget? Never forget what though?\" I asked, running a claw along the grooved words. There were no other words engraved here to give us any answers.\n\nKaz shook his head. \"I don't know. The ddraig of Clan Vatrea, Ddraig Boruc, believes we have lost a lot of our ancient history. We know hardly anything beyond six hundred years ago, but there is evidence to suggest drakes have been in some lairs for much longer. Something terrible happened back then. Maybe that's what we were never meant to forget.\"\n\n\"But we did,\" I said. My paw fell away from the mysterious words engraved in the wall. I rarely dwelt on the past, and whilst I was intrigued by this lost history, I quickly lost interest in the mysterious draconic words. I turned and walked away, waiting for the Nixan to lose interest as well, but he still frowned in thought.\n\n\"There's nothing like this anywhere else in the lair?\" Kaz asked, finally tearing his eyes away from the writing.\n\n\"Nothing I've ever seen. The caves down here are said to be haunted,\" I replied. I sat down by the entrance to the cave. Despite being so far underground, there was quite a strong breeze that passed through the passageways. Something in the dark caverns below kept the air moving, though no Laxtal drake had ever explored them. I shuddered again at the memories of being down there once before. I had sought refuge there to escape the taunting of the clan, but there was something much more terrifying down there than mere name calling. There was a presence in the darkness. I had felt it before.\n\n\"All the same, I would like to explore\u2026\n\nThe Nixan slowly approached the great edifice. An amber glow emanated from near the top of the rocky protrusion; it was the only light other than Inilta's flame that hovered over the heads of the three dragons. Kaz, Inilta, and the small golden dragon, hesitantly crawled closer to the strange new light source.\n\n\u2026your lair and see if I can find anything new. Who knows what secrets are kept in the rock here?\"\n\nI jumped as Kaz placed his paw on my tail, his eyes bright with intrigue.\n\nI shook my head. \"It isn't my permission you need. You'll have to wait for Ddraig Anzig to return first,\" I said as a cold chill spread through my body. I glanced down to the right, where I could just about see the fissure that led down to the underground river. Surely I wouldn't follow Inilta and Kaz down into those depths?\n\nKaz caught the direction of my gaze. \"What's down there?\" he said, nosing forward and peering down into the gloom. He gasped in shock. \"Can you feel it? There's raw magic down there. Something of immense power.\"\n\n\"I can, but no one else here has ever felt it,\" I said, coming up to the Nixan's side, though I would much rather flee as far away from the underground river as I could.\n\n\"Of course they wouldn't. They wouldn't be able to feel magic like this,\" Kaz scoffed. He continued to edge further forward until the passageway dropped off sharply, falling down into the darkness at an alarming rate. His tail trembled in excitement. I knew what he was going to say from the moment he turned back to face me, his eyes gleaming in the firelight of the nearest torch.\n\n\"We should go and see what's down there,\" he said. He immediately dived forward, but I was able to leap and grab hold of his tail before he was able to disappear completely into the darkness.\n\nKaz growled as he pulled his tail from my grasp, but he didn't try to escape down to the river again. \"What's down there?\" he asked again with a small snarl.\n\n\"I don't know. Ghosts. Spirits. Evil,\" I replied. This time I wasn't able to keep the fear out of my voice. I dreaded having to go down there again, but I knew that Kaz wouldn't be deterred. \"You can't go down there in the dark. I Saw us with Inilta, so he must be coming to Laxtal soon. We should wait until he's here.\"\n\nKaz grin was wide as he asked, \"You're coming as well?\"\n\nI nodded glumly. \"I don't know what's down there, but I think it's important enough to find out. Whatever it is, it might help us defeat the humans,\" I said slowly. It didn't make me feel any better about the situation, but I was sure it was something that would help the clan in the war against the humans. After being assured that I would speak to Ddraig Anzig once he returned about delving deeper into the lower caves, Kaz allowed me to lead him back up to the main part of the lair. I was sure he would be hungry after exerting so much energy through his magic, and although our hunting grounds weren't as rich as those in Nixa, they would suit the needs of a hungry dragon well enough.\n\nThere was little activity in the central chamber. After the commotion the arrival of the Xital dragoness had dissipated, there had been nothing of interest to keep many of the Laxtal drakes present. I imagined most would have gone out hunting after so long under Ddraig Tsona's cruel reign, where they had starved. Many others would be in mourning. So many Laxtal warriors had lost their lives over the past few weeks that hundreds of drakes were left without their mates. The last thing Clan Laxtal needed was a conflict with Xital. Soon we could have marauding humans attacking from the west and drakes coming from the east. Laxtal couldn't fight this war alone.\n\nYalle was waiting for us in the central chamber. The albino lowered his head when he saw us approaching, but I couldn't help but notice the way his lips were parted in a silent snarl.\n\nSeveral drakes shyly approached as we walked across the great chamber, joining us briefly. Some offered quiet thanks to Kaz for his efforts in healing the clan, while others were just intrigued by the Nixan drake, a rare sight in Laxtal. They all dispersed as we reached Yalle, intimidated by the angry frown etched across this face. I was somewhat surprised to see my father at Yalle's side. His tail thrashed in frustration and he uttered a quiet growl as I approached. Both dragons were annoyed at me for some reason.\n\n\"I should have known,\" my father sneered, using every bit of his height to look down on me. His eyes were void of emotion, and felt as though they were boring right through me. I rolled my shoulders and tried to gain an inch. \"I should have realised you'd take the side of a Nixan over your clan.\"\n\n\"Sided with...? I never did any such thing! I objected to the way my clan has treated Kaz. Especially after all he has done to help us. That does not mean I sided with him over Laxtal,\" I snarled, but my father wasn't even listening to my protests.\n\n\"I should have known this day would come, given \u2013\"\n\n\"Marin!\" Yalle's shout was so forceful that it echoed around the whole chamber, attracting the attention of most, if not all of the small groups of drakes around. The albino turned his back to me as he squared up to my father.\n\n\"Why should I keep this fantasy up any longer?\" my father spat. He flared his wings but took a step back from the albino.\n\nYalle closed the gap between them again. \"Because now is not the time for such matters to be discussed,\" he rumbled.\n\nI barged my way between the two arguing dragons, asserting my position as the acting ddraig, and glared up at my father. \"Not the time for what? What are you keeping from me?\" I growled. My father's eyes continued to seemingly bore right through me, as though he was focusing on the chamber wall behind me. It was as if I was invisible to him. I turned to Yalle, but the albino averted his gaze. Both held their silence.\n\n\"Have it your way then,\" I snarled when it became evident neither dragon was going to speak. \"I am taking Kaz out to hunt. This dragon needs to be afforded some courtesy. Be sure to contact me if anything happens. Just remember that Ddraig Anzig appointed me to lead the clan in his absence. Not you. Not either of you,\" I spat out the last sentence, trying to enforce some of the power and status I had been afforded when made ddraig. I may only be ddraig for a short time, but I intended to behave as one.\n\nBefore giving either dragon a chance to offer a retort, I took to wing and flew out of the higher entrance from the central chambers. Kaz stayed close to my tail as other drakes swerved to avoid us. I didn't pause to consider what had just happened until there was grass beneath my paws and the open wind in my face. To think that such a short time ago my father had been proud of me, but now...\n\nA green dragon stood in front of a smaller, bronze dragon. The green dragon had bowed his head in respect. \"He is your son. Not mine.\"\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Kaz asked as he landed by my side, his eyes on the distant herd of deer.\n\nI was numb. \"I don't know Kaz. I don't think I want to know,\" I whispered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "I could not recall much of the flight back to Laxtal. Ellian had taken lead, and the others were wise enough not to talk to me. I hadn't told anyone else what Carlee's last words had been. If I was not Astar's son, then how could I be ddraig of Laxtal? It had been Carlee's secret, and now it had become mine. If that got out, I would be removed as ddraig before I could even mount a defence.\n\nThe moment we returned to the Laxtal lair I retreated to the chambers behind the great fire. I had ignored the attentions of everyone and abandoned the joyful celebrations at Ellian's return. Before I hid myself away in the ddraig's chambers, I noticed that Azlak had appeared sullen and withdrawn. For first time I wished for a human door to hide behind, but all I had to keep me away from the rest of the lair was a thin veil of silk. However, no one had followed me, and I was finally able to give in to my grief.\n\nI had no control over my actions as I hurled down any trinket or artefact that reminded me of my father. Nothing was spared my rage, not even the silver statue that smugly looked down on the scene of destruction. The dragoness crashed against the far wall and slipped behind a pile of thick rugs. I felt no remorse as I stood panting in the middle of the ddraig's chambers, surrounded by the wreckage of my father's vast collection of gold, silver, and gems. It was only then that my blind anger was sated and I was able to calm my mind. A great void had filled me, leaving me incapable of feeling any emotion. No anger, no hurt.\n\nNumbly, I pushed aside a couple of gems from beneath my paws, before curling up in the thick rugs that covered the floor. More than anything I wanted a drake to talk to, but I no longer knew which one I could turn to. Carlee had always been the drake I could go to for advice, no matter what. I had been robbed of that now. I couldn't even rely on Keita to stand by my side. She had already torn out my heart by choosing the Nyrian Okazuni over me. I whimpered and closed my eyes, holding my paws to my forehead. I had always known that one day I would become ddraig of Laxtal, following on from my father. But I had never expected it would be like this. I had lost my father, my mentor, and the dragoness I wanted to be my mate. Worst of all I had lost my identity. If I wasn't Astar's son, then who was I? And why did I have magic?\n\nI must have drifted off into sleep, for when I opened my eyes next the air was a lot cooler and could hear muted sounds coming from beyond my chambers. Morning must have broken. I shivered as I rose to my paws, as I looked around the wreckage I had caused, searching for the small firelighter I knew was in here somewhere. My father... No, Astar... had always had a firelighter in his chambers. He was one of the few in the clan who had easy access to the human technology. Everyone else made do with flint and tinder to light fires in their chambers. I found it eventually in the small alcove above the fire, next to the statue of the silver dragoness.\n\nIt didn't take long for the kindling already in the firepit to light, and the orange flames quickly warmed up the chamber. As I gazed into the flickering light, something nagged at the back of my mind. Something wasn't right. Something was different.\n\n\"Keep thinking. You'll work it out.\"\n\nI froze. I knew I was alone. Apart from the crackling of the fire and my heavy breaths, there wasn't a sound in the chamber. Yet I had clearly heard a voice that wasn't in my mind. There was a metallic ring to the voice, but definitely feminine. For some reason it sounded familiar, though I knew I had never heard it before.\n\nThough I couldn't be sure where the voice emanated from, my eyes were drawn up towards the silver statue, back in its rightful place in the small alcove over the fire. Hadn't I thrown it against the wall in my rage?\n\n\"Yes, you did. And it hurt.\"\n\nThe statue moved. Somehow this statue was talking to me. I held my head in my paws, fearing my latest plunge into insanity.\n\n\"You haven't lost your mind,\" the voice said, but her metallic tone failed to reassure me. \"I am quite real.\"\n\n\"Then what are you?\" I asked, immediately regretting my decision to encourage this creation of my failing mind. Keeping my eyes shielded by a paw, I lifted my head away from the fire and to the statue above it.\n\n\"I am a Guardian,\" the statue said. I glanced out from behind my paw. It was as though the statue was absorbing all the light in the room, magnifying it somehow, and projecting it back out into the room, as a blinding flash of silver. The searing light emitting from the statue was too much too bear. To save my burning, watering eyes, I shut them, and covered them behind a paw once more. When she next spoke, the statue seemed a lot closer. I was going mad for sure. \"I am a remnant of a long-forgotten magic, sworn to protect the leaders of dragonkind.\"\n\nI took a stumbling, three-legged step back, as I felt a movement of air on my snout. I dropped my paw from my eyes, but kept them squeezed them tightly shut. She was close. I could feel breath on my snout. \"Why have I not heard of Guardians before?\" I asked. Surely my father\u2026 Astar would have mentioned them to me, or had he deliberately withheld this secret from me also, knowing that I wasn't his son? I took another step backwards, my tail pressing against the wall behind me. I felt trapped.\n\n\"Our power isn't as great as it once was. It takes a great deal of power to talk with a non-ddraig, and ddraigs themselves are restricted by the same magic,\" the Guardian explained. Again I could feel her hot breath on my snout, meaning she had moved towards me again, but how could she be breathing? How could a statue be moving? Was she real?\n\nI could feel the conflict subsiding, and a small part of my mind was willing to accept that this Guardian was real, and that she was really talking to me. I slowly opened my eyes, already shying away from the sight I already anticipated. The statue was just a few inches from my snout; her silver, featureless eyes staring into mine. For a moment she was perfectly still, and I almost convinced myself that the statue was indeed just that; a statue, just as she had been all my life; but then she blinked. Involuntarily, I lurched backwards, rearing half up onto my hind paws and flattening myself up against the wall, convinced that any moment I would push myself into the rock.\n\nThe statue's mouth twitched with amusement as I relaxed slightly, embarrassed at my reaction, and dropped back onto all fours. Her scent was as I remembered, and other than her new positioning, she appeared no different. I gently reached out with a paw and placed it on her scales. It felt hard and unyielding like solid metal should, but at the same time warm like flesh. What suddenly occurred to me, something I hadn't ever noticed before, was a reflection. There wasn't one. Although the statue's surface was shiny, nothing reflected off the surface. I couldn't see my reflection. I was in a paw's reach, but couldn't see myself.\n\nHer serpentine body was coiled up tightly, making her seem shorter than her true size. She was wingless, and her head was a different shape than mine, with a more pronounced brow and two long tendrils emerging from either side of her snout. Though she had many scales on her back and sides, her underbelly was not scaled at all. There was no doubting that this was a dragoness though, despite her unusual appearance.\n\n\"Are you convinced I'm real now?\" she asked.\n\nI slowly nodded my head. I was willing to accept the statue was no longer a figment of my imagination, but I could still scarcely believe she was standing in front of me as though alive. \"You have the wrong dragon though. I cannot be the true ddraig of this clan,\" I whispered, putting into words the truth I could never share with any living drake.\n\nThe Guardian growled as she started to uncoil her body. She must have been twice my length at least, and she pinned me against the wall. \"When a ddraig dies I am immediately aware of their true successor. The moment Astar perished, our minds, yours and mine young Anzig, became entwined. Not until you chose to sleep within the chamber of the ddraig would I be able to reveal myself to you. No matter what secrets have been revealed to you, you were Astar's chosen haeraig. That, and with the death of Ddraig Astar, makes you the successor. You are ddraig now,\" she said.\n\n\"But I am not his son,\" I protested.\n\n\"So?\" the Guardian said, pushing her snout against mine. I recoiled from the touch of her metallic scales, turning my head only to have it press up against the wall. The pressure on the side of my snout from her pressing against it was immense, and felt any moment now, either the wall or my jaw would give way. \"It is no concern of mine young Anzig that you are not the blood son of Astar.\" Her mouth constricted as she pressed against me, causing her words to come out as a foreboding rasping, and although her breath was hot on my face her words chilled my bones. \"Your mind and my mind are now entwined, and that alone makes you ddraig of Laxtal.\"\n\n\"But the clan... they won't accept me if they know.\"\n\nThe Guardian hissed. \"They will not. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, young ddraig, that Astar kept the truth hidden from you. Your clan is not to know.\" The rasping voice seemed to intensify into a snarl as she spat out these words.\n\n\"So I live a lie?\"\n\n\"If you believe to withhold the truth is an untruth, then yes, you live untruthfully,\" the Guardian muttered with a sudden lessening of the pressure against me. She eased back, moving back a step and allowing me to ease a little from the wall. Her blank eyes seemed to be constantly fixed on me, although without actual pupils, it was hard to tell where she was looking. I was unnerved by her constant stare. \"Now young ddraig we have matters to attend. Humans are proceeding unhindered through draconic land. This intrusion into ddraggn gaeth, into our territory, is to be halted. You are to stop this, but know this Anzig; you have little time.\"\n\n\"So what do I do?\" I sighed. I knew we were already so far behind our rivals. Humans were swarming through our land, and Clan Xital was gaining considerable support from the surrounding minor clans. I knew we would have to do the same, but I couldn't see how that would be enough. The clan had already suffered so much; we wouldn't be able to hold off the humans for long.\n\nThe Guardian backed away and started pacing the chamber. Her paw clinked against the strewn gems and jewels as she walked. \"Firstly, secure the allegiance of neighbouring clans. You need to raise an army, Anzig. I believe that Ellian will be suitable for that task. I have seen her grow from a little dragonette, to what she has become now. I believe Anzig, and I feel you know too, that this dragoness is destined to become your haeraig.\"\n\nI nodded. There hadn't been any other drake I had even considered to become my haeraig. But did I want to send her away again after only just rescuing her from Xital? In my heart I knew I wouldn't be able to keep her here, but she was the only family I had left. I didn't want to lose her as well.\n\n\"And this Maznar you returned with. I find her difficult to read. I am unsure as to whether she can be trusted. Watch her Anzig; watch her closely,\" the Guardian said. The statue suddenly tensed and looked out through the thin veil that divided the ddraig's chambers from the rest of the lair. She let out a low hiss before turning to face me once more.\n\n\"A dragon approaches. Tend to them, and we will continue this conversation after it is dark and the lair is still,\" the Guardian said. The corners of her mouth curved up in a smile, just revealing the tips of her silver fangs. \"Before you leave, young ddraig, you may stop referring to me as 'statue' or 'Guardian'. You may call me Mushussu. Go now, Ddraig, go with confidence, and know this; you have my protection now.\"\n\nI blinked, and the statue was no longer standing in front of me. She sat in her alcove above the fire. It was hard to convince myself that the whole conversation hadn't been a dream, but the Guardian's smug smile still lingered on the frozen statue; that, and the aching in my jaw. I shook my head vigorously. The entire ordeal felt so surreal now it was over. I took a few steps across the chamber and placed my paws on the wall, reaching up so that my head was almost level with the statue. There was no hint of any sign that would indicate that just moments earlier this statue had been alive.\n\nA sound distracted me, and I turned to see what the statue had heard. A shadow was cast on the veil as a drake lingered beyond. They had not been there long, and I was content to let them wait. Though my conversation with the statue, or Mushussu as I now knew her as, had dulled the edge of my grief, I had no desire to be in the company of other drakes. At the same time though, I knew I would be neglecting my duty as ddraig if I remained hidden from my clan. I had hoped for a little time to myself, but they had barely afforded me a night of undisturbed rest.\n\nWith a sigh I turned away from the statue and approached the veil. I shuddered as I felt the slight touch of Azlak's mind against my own. It wasn't the seer that repulsed me, but the magic that allowed me to feel his presence. I paused, holding a paw to my head as I heard the whispered thoughts from Azlak's mind. I could feel his trepidation, and that nervousness started to sink into my own mind. My heart raced as I leapt back and my breath came in short, sharp bursts.\n\nMy head thrashed from side to side as I tried to rid myself of Azlak's thoughts and emotions, but it wasn't until I felt the touch of another's mind that I was able to calm myself. Even Mushussu's mind felt metallic against mine.\n\n\"Be calm, Anzig,\" the guardian said. Her voice resonated through my mind, blocking out the seer's whispers until I could hear them no more. The silence that filled my mind was blissful. My racing heart slowed and the rampant fear that had gripped my body receded. I took a deep breath and stepped out to meet the seer.\n\nAzlak yelped as I roughly brushed the silk veil aside, and strode out to face him. I could tell he did not know I was aware of his presence, as he felt he had approached with little noise. Coupled with his fear that I had shared, he was unsure as to whether he should disturb me.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig,\" he gasped, lowering his head almost to the ground and remaining silent.\n\n\"What is it, Azlak?\" I snapped. The seer seemed unwilling \u2013 or unable \u2013 to continue.\n\nAzlak whimpered, a hint of the earlier, insecure seer that had been the omega of the clan. I hoped this hadn't been the dragon who had been leading the clan in my absence. Before leaving to rescue Ellian, I had seen a dragon growing in confidence and stature within the clan.\n\n\"Yalle hopes that you'll join him in the central chamber soon. He says he has matters to discuss with you,\" the seer said timidly. I suppressed a groan. I had no desire to go and meet Yalle now, but I knew that my presence would soon be requested in the central chambers no matter what I wanted. The duties of ddraig would not wait. As much as it pained me, I would have to put aside my grief for the time being and meet my clan.\n\nI assured Azlak I would join them in the central chamber in due course, and the seer wasted no time in scampering away, down the tunnels. Something must have happened to strip Azlak of his newly-found confidence. I shook my head. For now it was not my concern. All I needed to concern myself with was preparation of the clan to repel the threat of humans and Clan Xital. I had already formed a few ideas, but what I really needed was the steady voice of Carlee to assist and guide me.\n\n\"You have me now,\" Mushussu said. I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw tight, fighting back the new wave of grief that threatened to overwhelm me. The Guardian was no replacement for the experienced veteran."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The albino dragon had yet to outwardly show disrespect, but had made it quite clear that he disagreed in my appointing Azlak as clan leader in my absence. At the very heart of Yalle's protests was Azlak's decision to allow a Xital drake to seek sanctuary within the lair. I had yet to see Tsona's daughter, but I had sent out a drake to find and bring her to me. I didn't know why Selane had come here, but privately, I wasn't so quick to distrust the Xital dragoness as Yalle and Marin were.\n\nAzlak's appointment was not Yalle's only concern. His malicious whispering to drakes in positions of power within the clan, which had been brought to my attention since returning, had expressed doubts over Azlak's loyalty to Laxtal. The albino had been concerned that Azlak had been showing preferential treatment towards the Nixan Kaz, an accusation which I believed to be without any substance. I had no doubt of Azlak's loyalty to the clan, and I saw no reason why he would betray his allegiance to his clan in favour of Clan Nixa. With the exception of the last month or so, no Nixan drake had shown any interest in the seer, apart from showing contempt and spouting veiled scorn and derision. I would of course speak to the seer later about the allegations Yalle had been spreading, but I knew my faith in him was justified.\n\nSoon I turned discussion away from Yalle's concerns about Azlak, and towards my plans for the future. The albino hadn't seen the massive Xital army I had, and was hesitant in accepting my word on the immediate threat the ruling clan posed to our borders. We were soon joined by Ellian, and this boosted my spirits and confidence surprisingly more than I could fathom. Unquestioningly, through loyalty and trust rather than ignorance, Ellian vocally supported my claims. It didn't take long before Yalle capitulated to the general consensus. He quickly realised that being in disagreement with the two most powerful drakes of the clan, he would quickly lose standing and respect within the clan if he persisted to argue my claims. These were no longer the days of Astar.\n\nAn informal council had begun to form, with more and more drakes joining. With less voices of dissention, the excitement within the gathering increased. A glowering Marin had joined, as had Saya and Vinzent. The Nixan twins too, with Maznar close by. Even Azlak had crept into the group as we debated the best way to move forward. I had only briefly seen the flash of Keita's wings since returning to Laxtal, since she and Okazuni had stayed away from me. I tried to push her out of my mind and keep focused on the problems at hand.\n\nEllian was suggesting quite vehemently, that we send envoys to the surrounding clans to try and secure their support. Whilst I agreed in principle with my cousin, she was leaving me in no doubt as to her desire to be one of these envoys. She wanted to take it upon herself to build an alliance with the clans. I didn't want her to go, but I knew it would be difficult \u2013 even as ddraig \u2013 to convince my cousin to remain in Laxtal. I knew she would do her utmost to ensure she was one of the chosen drakes sent to the surrounding clans.\n\nI growled and splayed my wings, before flapping them noisily, bringing an end to an argument between Yalle and Ellian over who should be sent out as well as each of them. The albino was adamant that an older, experienced drake should be tasked with the responsibility of visiting the more important clans, but Ellian disagreed with Yalle's assertions that he should be the one to be chosen for this. I narrowed my eyes and glared at my cousin, who quickly looked away. \"I don't want you going alone,\" I rumbled.\n\nEllian almost leapt into the air as her eyes brightened. \"You're letting me go?\" she asked.\n\n\"Hear this all of you present; I am declaring Ellian as haeraig of this clan.\" I looked back to Ellian. \"This is your responsibility now,\" I said. I met the eye of Saya as she hissed under her breath, quieting the dragoness's protests in an instant. I chose to ignore her for now. Word had reached my ears of her actions towards my cousin in my absence. In time I would address them but now was not the time. A withering stare from me allowed Saya to see my displeasure of her. That would do for now.\n\nEllian had bowed her head towards me. \"I thank you, Ddraig Anzig. I accept this responsibility and will do my utmost to uphold the honour of this clan,\" she said, accepting the duties I had bestowed upon her. I had never really been in any doubt: there was no other drake I would trust to be my haeraig.\n\nOne of the Nixan twins tentatively stepped forward. He lowered his head and tucked his wings tight by his side. \"I volunteer to fly with Haeraig Ellian,\" he said. \"I would give voice to Nixa's alliance with Clan Laxtal.\"\n\nI glanced across at Ellian, nodding to her, allowing her to make her first decision as haeraig. I didn't want to impose upon her a drake she had no wish to travel with. I had no cause for concern though, as she smiled widely.\n\n\"Of course I'd be happy for you to join me, Airil,\" she said, eliciting a quiet whimper from Vinzent, who turned and started to slink away. I briefly watched as Saya turned and left with her son, but did not concern myself with two malcontent drakes. Whatever had come between Vinzent and Ellian was not my business, unless it affected the running of the clan. Until either of them approached me to discuss their concerns, I would not involve myself.\n\nNo drake opposed the decision of the clan's ddraig and haeraig, and any lingering protests to Ellian being appointed the clan's senior envoy were kept silent. I could hear faint murmurs of discontent, but I couldn't be sure if it was vocal, or if I was feeling the thoughts of one of the drakes present. I resisted shaking my head to try and clear my mind and instead returned my focus to my cousin as she outlined out her plans to what remained of the council.\n\nAxaatl would be her first destination, as the clan directly to our east was by far the most powerful of our neighbours. No clans on our other borders were considered to have the influence and strength of the ruling clans. Even so, I still knew that their support could be crucial in facing down the might of Xital. They may not have the prestige and power of the ruling clans, but if they joined our cause they would swell our numbers by many thousands. The envoys simply could not fail.\n\nEllian was keen to leave immediately, such was our urgency. Airil was the only drake who would accompany her. At first I was apprehensive that she would have so little protection, but Ellian had assured me that Airil could keep her safe. I had no choice but to trust him too, as no other drake had come forward to make the journey to Axaatl with them. It seemed my drakes' confidence had been diminished in my absence.\n\nBefore leaving to prepare for her flight, she asked I order the drake chosen to be the envoy to the north divert slightly to the west, into the forests below the Sxinix Mountains. I was stunned to hear that she had found her brother living in these forests. I had vague memories of Mulner before he had left the clan following their mother's death. Ellian asked that the envoy inform Mulner where Ellian was, as she had promised to fly back to him after leaving Nixa. Obviously circumstances had prevented her from fulfilling her promise, and she worried her brother would be fearful for her safety. It only took a few moments to select two drakes from the many wishing to be the envoy to the less powerful northern clans, and send them on their way.\n\nAs the council dispersed, and we began to leave the chamber, I asked Ellian to wait for me at the top of the gorge outside the lair, before making my way to the ddraig's chambers. This time I didn't go to hide away, though I longed for the security and safety of my chambers; I knew what it was I sought, but I didn't know where I could find it.\n\n\"Looking for this?\" Mushussu said, breaking into my search. I looked up at the Guardian, sat in her alcove. In her paw was a small band of gold with a gleaming azure gem. It had been crafted by humans many generations ago, but was now a symbol of my clan's power and prestige. Ellian would need it on her journey. The Guardian nodded her head. \"Yes, Ddraig, to answer you unsaid question, yes she will face many dangers, but I sense she is ready to meet them.\"\n\n\"Can you protect her?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I can protect only the ddraig.\"\n\nI thanked her for finding the stone, before reluctantly retreating from my chambers and back into the lair. I couldn't leave my cousin waiting for long, and found her above the gorge, inspecting her wings in preparation for flight. I slipped the stone over her neck. It complemented her lilac scales perfectly, like it had been crafted for a drake of her colouration.\n\n\"With this stone you are an envoy of Laxtal. Wear it with honour. Wear it with pride,\" I said, recalling the words my father had spoken to me in such a situation.\n\nEllian trembled with excitement. \"I will. You can count on me.\"\n\nI smiled, seeing in my cousin the same thrilled drake I had been when I had first flown out with the Laxtal stone around my neck. \"Your actions reflect on me now.\" My smile turned sour as I remembered the might of the ddraig whose pawprints I followed, and those I opposed. \"I need all the help I can get.\"\n\n\"Oh Ziggy, you're too hard on yourself,\" Ellian whispered; her non-formal words weren't for Airil, but even so, I felt a fragment of her thoughts. \"Maybe Astar was right about him.\" I tensed in shock and fear. What had Astar said about me to Ellian? Does she know the truth; that he was not my father? I could not ask, for she would question how I had known her thoughts. It was all I could do to slowly nod my head.\n\n\"Fly safe, Ellian. Don't let anything happen to you,\" I whispered.\n\nShe rested her head on my shoulder. \"Airil will look after me. You can trust him.\"\n\nWith that she spread her wings and took to the air, the Nixan dragon following close behind. I sat alone at the top of the hill and watched the two drakes fly away. It wasn't long before Ellian and Airil were nothing more than two dark specks in the eastern sky. I held my wings tight against my body, shielding myself from the strong wind that was blowing down from the mountains behind me. I pawed at the ground as I looked to the north. Beyond the distant horizon lay Nixa and our hopes for defeating the human invaders.\n\nTsona had been working on building his alliances for a long time now. We couldn't know how many clans were already allied to his cause, but we needed to work hard to catch up. As Ellian disappeared from view, I felt comfort in the fact that we were now making progress; we had taken the first steps in forming an army with the western clans."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "After settling down into a steady flight, I couldn't stop glancing back towards Laxtal. Was I right in flying out to Axaatl? My heart was telling me I needed to be the one returning to my brother with the nomads. I had made a promise to Mulner that I had been forced to break because of Ddraig Krateos's assurances that Tsona could be trusted. The Nixan couldn't have been more wrong, and it burned me to think that Vinzent had been right. I had barely even set wing into Laxtal before the treacherous Xital dragon had captured me and betrayed me into the cruel hands of humans. I had lost track of time in the dungeons of Xital. I wasn't even sure how long I had been away from my brother but I knew he must be worrying about me.\n\n\"He'll be fine,\" Airil said, drifting close enough so our wingtips brushed against each other. I hoped I was able to hide the tingle of excitement that ran up from my wingtip and right through my spine. I couldn't allow Airil to know how I reacted every time he was close. He made me feel like Vinzent had made me feel, before the dragonet had split my heart in two. But even as I stole a glance over at the Nixan, I could see the corner of his mouth upturned in a small smile; I wondered if he already knew.\n\nHe reached out with his paw. \"We can get there a lot quicker,\" he said as I took hold of his paw. His smile widened, showing every one of his teeth. I knew what was coming, and that thrilled me even further. It was the closest I would ever get to experience what controlling magic felt like, and that it was something I got to share with Airil made it special to me.\n\n\"Shall we go?\" he asked.\n\nWithout hesitation, I nodded my head and tightened my grip on his paw. Then the world turned inside out. Bursts of fractured light accosted my eyes even with my eyelids squeezed shut. Fearsome shapes grew out of the shadows between the light as prickles of heat jabbed at my scales, but Airil's paw in mine was a constant source of calming energy. I knew that so long as I kept hold of his paw I would be safe, no matter what I saw. A whooping cry reached my ears, and it took me a few moments to realise that it was my voice I heard. It was my overjoyed cried that filled the void. And then, as quickly as the magic had come, sunlight warmed my wings.\n\nWith a startled gasp I opened my eyes as a strong wind buffeted my wings from a wholly unexpected direction. Unable to catch my flight in time, my right wing collided with Airil's left, both fragile membranes crumpling under the pressure.\n\nCrying out in shock and a little fear, we both spiralled down to the fast-approaching ground. I increased my grip on the Nixan's paw, trying to manoeuvre myself into a position where I could spread my wings again, and Airil tried to do the same opposite me. His hind paws scrabbled against my chest as he tried to right himself, but that movement gave me all the room I needed. I flared my wings and grabbed hold of his other forepaw. My wings and forelegs screamed in agony as they bore the full force of Airil's weight, but I refused to let go.\n\nI had done this so many times with Anzig in the past, with his wings pinned beneath my body in our mock fights, but then my flight had been controlled. This was a wild tumble through turbulent air, and as the ground got ever closer, I gritted my teeth and braced for the impact.\n\nWe were fortunate that the grass was long and springy as it absorbed most of the force from our fall. We rolled several times before coming to a rest, Airil on top of me with his legs tightly wrapped around my body. I could feel his heart hammering inside his chest, and I was sure he could feel the wild beat of mine that wasn't entirely caused by our sudden plunge from the sky.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" Airil gasped, not moving from where he lay.\n\n\"No. You?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nI tried to hold back an overjoyed giggle, but couldn't hold it for long. Soon I was rolling through the grass again with Airil, both of us whooping and laughing as the fear of our fall subsided. I was sensitive to the Nixan's every touch \u2013 the way his paws clenched at the scales of my belly and sides, the way his wings brushed against mine, and how he would lower his head next to mine and nuzzle against my cheek. I struggled to recall a moment that had filled me with so much joy before.\n\nIt couldn't last though, and after a while I reluctantly pushed Airil off me and rose to my haunches. The Nixan quickly sat by my side and, after a moment's hesitation and a furtive peek towards me, wrapped his wing around my body.\n\nTogether we looked out over the landscape that stretched out before us. It didn't look too much different from Laxtal, but a quick glance back told me we were no longer in my home. The Sxinix Mountains were no more than a faint smudge on the horizon. A gently undulating plain was spread out as far as I could see in all directions, broken only by a few rocky crags and small patches of forest. High overhead I could see five dark shapes against the clear blue sky. They were heading right for us.\n\nIt seemed we had chanced upon a Clan Axaatl patrol, for they would not have known we were coming. Axaatl drakes were typically much larger than any other, and these five were no exception. Even the smallest of the five was as large as any drake I had seen before. They must have been close to four feet in height.\n\n\"Speak,\" the largest of the five said, touching down on the grass with a deftness that defied his size. His green scales were covered in war paint.\n\n\"I am Haeraig Ellian of Laxtal, and my companion and escort is Airil of Nixa. We wish to speak with Ddraig Aranat,\" I said, taking a step forward into the shadow of the taller dragon and trying not to feel intimidated. I was a haeraig now. I needed to act it.\n\nThe Axaatl dragon grunted. \"A Nixan escort for the Laxtal haeraig? These are strange times, with strange happenings all around, but this is one of the strangest I have witnessed,\" he said. He turned back to his companions, focusing in particular on a red-scaled dragoness. Whatever guidance the dragon was seeking, he found it in the eyes of the dragoness. \"Very well, Haeraig Ellian of Laxtal, and Airil of Nixa. Come. We will take you to our ddraig.\"\n\nThe large dragon introduced his companions as we flew. He was Hyantl, commander of Axaatl's fearsome warriors. With him flew the two dragonesses Mlara and Iena, and the dragons Svetus and Fyrick.\n\nThough my mind was full of questions I never had the chance to ask them. The five drakes with their massive wingspan were able to fly much faster than we were and it was a struggle to keep pace. My wings burned with the exertion but I didn't ask for the pace to be slowed. I would not shame myself by showing any weakness. Airil was able to stay on my wing the entire time, not once leaving my side.\n\nI had never been to Axaatl before, so I didn't know how far away from the central lair we were, or even what it looked like. I imagined it would be fairly similar to Laxtal, given the similarity in terrain, and that it delved deep underground. There were no mountains anywhere nearby, so it couldn't rise up towards the clouds like Xital's towering spire. There seemed no end to our flight though, not even as the sun started to sink down towards the eastern horizon. The amber light glinted off the surface of a wide river that flowed roughly from north to south.\n\nHyantl banked to the north and followed the river upstream. The water was murky brown as it slowly flowed on, making its long journey to the far-distant ocean. Here it lazily cut through the flat, lush green terrain, which extended away from the riverbanks for nearly a mile. Trees grew tall and thick, fed by the life-giving water that was so scarce in the northern plains. Here and there I could see the gentle splash of small mammals diving into the water. The air was alive with the sound of hundreds of little birds as they flew between the trees, calling out in alarm as we passed, warning us that the fish in this part of the river were theirs to hunt.\n\nThis far from the mountains there was no sign of the advancing human threat. I could only hope that Ddraig Aranat had been paying sufficient attention to the plight of his neighbours, and acknowledge the danger to his clan if he did not act.\n\nWe followed the river for another hour, by which time the sun was almost touching the horizon. I was ready to fall from the sky. Every beat of my wings was torture, and I was no longer able to properly maintain my height. With every wing stroke I felt I was falling again. Keeping just by my side, I sensed Airil was in a similar condition, but the Axaatls \u2013 flying about ten feet in front \u2013 could seemingly keep this pace up indefinitely. I could not but admire the strength of the Axaatls. They would make formidable allies, or terrifying enemies. I hoped we were not the second envoys to visit this vast land.\n\nSuddenly, two blue-scaled dragonesses ascended effortlessly to meet us, flying from somewhere on the gentle slopes of a small hill rising from the flat terrain. I noticed the river meandering path almost completely encircled the hill, nearly creating an island within. The two newcomers ignored Airil and me, and having banked and assumed the same flight route as us, converged instead on Hyantl and the other Axaatls. One of the dragonesses, closest to the one called Hyantl, was the deepest blue in colour I have ever seen on a dragon. The glistening from her scales in the failing light of the sleeping sun was only marred by the many scars on her body. It appeared she was not afraid of a fight. She exchanged rasping whispers with Hyantl. Even though I couldn't hear what she was saying, I could detect enough venom in her tone to assume Hyantl was not receiving a friendly welcome back.\n\nHyantl nodded almost imperceptibly several times, before turning his head to address his Axtaatl companions. \"Mlara and Svetus, fly east and order Tehra to fly her army south. Fyrick and Iena, you will come with me. We're needed on the southern borders,\" Hyantl barked his orders out stiffly. I could tell he was a warrior. He turned his head to address me directly. \"Haeraig Ellian, please accompany Myvris,\" he said, nodding towards the other blue-scaled dragoness. \"She will escort you from here to our ddraig. I have other orders\" Without waiting for an acknowledgement, he dropped and banked away to the south, with his companions in pursuit. Almost at the same time, the dragons tasked with flying east also dropped and headed away from the falling sun. Airil and I were suddenly alone with Myvris and her companion.\n\nMyvris brusquely requested us to follow her as she dipped down towards the low hill. At last, it seemed our first flight in Axaatl lands was coming to an end. It was the only significant rise in the land for many miles, and on the small strip of land that led to its base, two rows of stone pillars outlined a passage leading towards a large cavern. Those closest to the cave were topped by stone plinths forming a tunnelled entrance into the side of the hill.\n\nMy landing was no graceful, but I was simply pleased to rest my aching wings at last, not caring about the bemused looks I received from Myvris. However, we immediately set off across the lush green surface towards the strange structure, not having the chance to catch our breath. Airil let out a small groan and we both exchanged tired glances, both with weak smiles, knowing we would soon be able to rest. As we passed the first, I slowed and placed a paw on the pillar. I could immediately tell these pillars had been hewn by claw and the plinths they supported were separate slabs of stone. It was hard to image how many drakes it had taken to put these plinths into place.\n\n\"They were built by Clan Sxelt. You won't find this type of rock near Axaatl either. It was all brought here from the north.\" I turned to see the other dragoness, who had landed by my side. Although her blue scales sparkled in the dying light of the evening, hers did not have the depth of colour of Myvris. \"I do not believe Hyantl introduced me. Forgive him, Haeraig Ellian, he had pressing matters to attend to,\" she said with a formal bow, \"I am Segrid. I shall have the honour of attending to you and Airil whilst you remain in Axaatl.\"\n\nI thanked Segrid for her offer of assistance, but was lost in the wonder of these pillars to pay attention to much else. From a distance they had looked like an ordinary dark grey rock, but now I was close enough to see the imperfections in the stone that gave it true beauty. Veins of silver shimmered on the surface, and specks of blue, gold, and green gleamed with a soft light. It took a great effort to tear my eyes away, and to not repeat my fascinated inspection of each pillar as we moved on toward the entrance of the hillside.\n\nWe followed Segrid and Myvris into the wide cavern mouth. Airil shivered the moment we stepped into the shadows. \"This place was built by Nixan magic,\" he whispered, looking up to the dark ceiling.\n\nMyvris bristled as she overheard the Nixan. \"Our lair has been under Axaatl control for six hundred years. It has never been Nixan, and never will be, little dragon.\"\n\nAiril shook his head. \"I can feel an ancient magic in the stone. It's old. Older than anything I've felt before, but I know I'm not mistaken,\" he said.\n\nThe Axaatl dragoness growled and turned away, refusing to respond to Airil's claims. I followed the Nixan's gaze up to the darkness above us, but couldn't see what attracted his attention. Whatever feeling he had picked up, it was something I could not see or sense. Again I felt a small pang of jealousy towards the Nixan and his amazing gift. I would give anything to be able to feel what he felt, and experience the wonder of his magic. But I knew that would never happen. Laxtal drakes couldn't possess magic. Apart from Azlak, some corner of my mind reminded me. The seer was an anomaly that Clan Nixa had never been able to explain. No other Laxtal drake had ever shown even the slightest sign of possessing magic. I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that I would never experience the thrill of wielding magic like Airil did.\n\nWhile the Laxtal lair was a wholly natural formation, the caves having been bored out by hundreds of years of water erosion from an ancient underground river, the Axaatl lair was unmistakably draconic-made. I doubted it was built by Axaatl drakes alone \u2013 it seemed it would have been too massive a task for a single clan \u2013 but at the same time I did not believe magic had carved out the extensive and expansive tunnels that burrowed deep beneath the ground, as Airil had claimed. The deeper into the lair I was taken, the more evidence I could see that this lair had been created by physical means. I paused to inspect a deep gouge in the rock, seemingly made by a claw. This was one of many I had seen already, but this one was different. This one was so large I could fit my whole paw into the cleft.\n\nI looked around the wide passage as I continued down. It must have been wide enough for nearly a dozen Axaatl drakes to stand side by side with full wingspans. I began to wonder whether this lair could have been built by drakes after all. It had clearly been built for something much larger than even the largest Axaatl drake.\n\n\"We are approaching Ddraig Aranat's chambers,\" Myvris said tersely. They were the first words she had spoken since rebutting Airil's claim that the lair was Nixan in origin.\n\nThe Axaatl ddraig had secreted himself deep within the lair, well away from the last remnant of sunlight that must be by now, below the distant horizon. As it was in Laxtal, light was provided by a series of torches held in brackets along the walls of the passageway. A slowly meandering stream of smoke, caused by the multitude of flames, drifted slowly along the ceiling heading towards the surface. Below the smoke, the air was clean, if not a little still.\n\nMyvris requested we wait outside the ddraig's chamber while she went ahead to announce our presence. We had gone as far as the passage could take us, as a flat and surprisingly smooth wall confronted us. Myvris seemingly disappeared before our eyes. I stole a quick glance at Airil, who seemed less surprised than I did. I moved over nearer to him, and understood why. From his position he had able to see that Myvris hadn't vanished by magic, but had slipped into an angled fissure off to one side of the flat wall. Even with the size, this cunning design hid the entrance to the ddraig's chambers for all but those who knew of the secret of the wall. This fissure was the only part of the lair I had seen so far that was to the scale of an Axaatl drake.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian, if I may, why are you here?\" Segrid asked as we waited for Myvris to return.\n\n\"I'm sorry Segrid, I cannot say. What I have to say is for your ddraig. I hope you understand,\" I replied, sharing a quick glance with Airil to ensure that he wasn't about to reveal the reason for our visit. I had no need to worry. Airil's mouth was firmly shut. His eyes were dark and cold, though they brightened considerably when he noticed me looking at him.\n\n\"Is it about Clan Xital?\" Segrid asked anyway, ignoring my reluctance to discuss the matter with her.\n\n\"I really can't say,\" I replied again, firmer this time. I met the eyes of the larger dragoness, and she immediately submitted to me. Her advantage in size meant nothing, as she gave way to my superior rank.\n\nI was spared from having to deflect any further questions by the return of Myvris.\n\n\"You may both now enter,\" she said, stepping aside to allow Airil and me through.\n\nThough Airil and I walked side-by-side through the fissure, the entry was tiny in comparison to the vastness of the chamber that lay beyond. It was far bigger than any single drake would need. The ceiling was formed from an almost perfect dome. Its surface was highly polished, reflecting light back into the room. To one side of this huge cavern, was a pile of rugs that Ddraig Aranat seemed to use as bedding. From the opposite wall, a small stream flowed into the cavern through a natural fracture, pooling near the centre of the living space, where it must have seeped out through the cavern floor, as although the pool was filled to just below the level of the floor, it did not overflow. Beside the pool however, stood the largest dragon I had ever seen. The blue-scaled behemoth stood at over four feet tall, and as he flared his wings in a convincing display of intimidation, I saw that his wingspan was over ten feet.\n\nDdraig Aranat lowered his head by an inch. \"Welcome to Clan Axaatl, Haeraig Ellian,\" he rumbled.\n\nI bowed my head, while Airil almost flung himself to the floor as he paid his respect to the Axaatl ddraig.\n\n\"I thank you for seeing us at such short notice, Ddraig Aranat,\" I said. I focused on his shoulder, some six inches higher than my head even as I stood as tall as I could.\n\n\"We have been expecting you, Haeraig Ellian. Not necessarily today, but we knew Laxtal would come to us before long,\" the ddraig said. He bared his teeth as he smiled. \"Your clan already has a formidable alliance with Nixa. Tell me, Haeraig, do you wish for Axaatl to join your cause also?\"\n\n\"What I wish for, is inconsequential, Ddraig Aranat. Laxtal does not approach Clan Axaatl on any personal or selfish mission. I am not here as a representative of my clan. I am here as a representative of dragonkind. Collectively we all face the greatest threat to our species since tales were first told. Only by uniting and fighting as one can we hope to survive,\" I said, my stare not wavering from Ddraig Aranat's shoulder. I needed to show him I was not intimidated by his strength, but at the same time, displaying the respect his rank deserved.\n\n\"Well spoken, Haeraig. I was told you are young and inexperienced, but you speak with a maturity beyond your years. I am not blind to the events to the south and west. I too, know of what the humans are doing, and what Ddraig Tsona has done in Laxtal. But how do you not know if Clan Xital has already approached Clan Axaatl and sought my allegiance with them?\" Ddraig Aranat asked, cocking his head to one side. \"Who is to say whether I have already sided with Clan Xital, when Ddraig Tsona has an army of humans supporting him? Why should I side with Laxtal?\"\n\nI felt a cold clench in my chest. Surely we couldn't already be too late?\n\n\"Not all humans are our enemies,\" Airil said, holding his head down to the floor, as though he was talking with it, instead of addressing the ddraig. \"Some humans rebelled, believing the slaughter of our species to be immoral and unjust. With their help and yours, mighty ddraig, we can defeat Xital. We only wish to defend ourselves against unprovoked invasion.\" Small swirls of dust were blown up by Airil's words; so close to the floor was his snout.\n\n\"So you believe yourselves to be on the side of right and good?\" Ddraig Aranat asked.\n\n\"Yes, Ddraig Aranat. Of that we are sure,\" I said immediately.\n\nDdraig Aranat snorted. \"I care not for the virtues of right nor wrong. What can Laxtal offer Clan Axaatl that Xital can not?\"\n\n\"You are free to as much of our eastern land as you wish,\" I offered. We rarely used the eastern reaches of our territory, as most of our hunting was done in the south and west. It would be no great loss to our clan if Axaatl were to expand its western borders.\n\nDdraig Aranat was not impressed with the offer. \"Tchaa, no. We have no need of more territory. We have ample space for our clan already and have no wish to expand our borders. What else can you offer?\"\n\nI had to think quickly. We needed Ddraig Aranat's support, no matter the cost to Laxtal. There had to be something our clan could offer Axaatl that Clan Xital could not. We had no great artefacts, and little substance offering strategic advantage over our neighbours, other than the quality of the drakes who lived there. Then it occurred to me, the one thing that was unique to Laxtal, and what would make an attractive proposition to a warrior like Ddraig Aranat.\n\n\"I offer Clan Laxtal's stewardship in constructing a beacon network throughout Clan Axaatl,\" I said. I chanced a glance up to the ddraig's eyes to gauge his reaction. They had widened either anger or desire; I hoped for the latter. For many, many years, the other ruling clans had been envious of the beacons that covered Laxtal. They heralded the attack of an invading force, as well as any unexpected visit from the dignitaries of other clans; they saved us from harm and embarrassment alike. Though the beacons themselves were fairly simple, it was the chemicals used to manipulate the fire that had remained a closely guarded secret for generations.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian, you offer a mighty gift indeed. If the offer is true, then I accept your terms,\" Ddraig Aranat said as I lowered my eyes back down to his shoulder. \"Never before has there been an alliance between three ruling clans. Humanity will tremble before the strategy of Laxtal, the magic of Nixa, and the brute force of Axaatl.\"\n\nInwardly I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling all the tension that had insidiously built up inside me, release all at once. I let none of this show outwardly, instead just bowing my head towards the ddraig.\n\n\"I am grateful to you, Ddraig Aranat. The army of Clan Xital grows by the day as Tsona allies with the minor clans. We cannot afford to be still and let this fight come to us. I humbly ask you to urge your neighbours to join our alliance,\" I said. I shuffled my tired wings against my back, longing to request a well-deserved rest and hand responsibility for visiting other clans to Ddraig Aranat and his clan. I knew though I could not suffer the shame of allowing that happen. I needed to fly on.\n\n\"If your clan could provide shelter for the night, we would be most grateful. Otherwise we must fly immediately on to the north.\"\n\nDdraig Aranat turned to the side, but always kept one eye on me. \"You may shelter here tonight,\" he said, before pausing in thought for a moment. \"Clan Reneza lies to the north. Our relations with them have been strained in recent years. Kyeuba, the ddraig before me, took refuge there following my defeat of him. I suspect Clan Reneza may plot to return him to power. I doubt they will provide you with any support, especially if they know you already have secured mine. I suggest flying south instead. Clan Lilisxi borders Xital. If Tsona has flown east, then you may be able to reach Lilisxi first.\"\n\n\"Lilisxi is small and weak. How could they help us?\" Airil asked.\n\n\"Tchaa. They may not be strong, but it is better that they fight with us, rather than against,\" Ddraig Aranat said. The tone of his voice forced Airil to lower himself flat to the ground.\n\n\"I thank you Ddraig Aranat for your kind and wise words. We shall fly south in the morning,\" I said, lowering my head graciously towards the Axaatl ddraig. With little left to discuss, and after Ddraig Aranat promised he'd send an envoy to Laxtal to advise Anzig of our agreement, we were dismissed to go back to Myvris and Segrid. By the time we were shown to a small guest chamber on the other side of the lair I was feeling proud with myself, for my first meaningful action as haeraig of Laxtal. I had not faced the same danger Anzig had faced in his attempt to win Nixa's support, but I had been the first drake in draconian history to arrange an alliance between three ruling clans.\n\nAiril's wing draped over me as we lay together in front of the fire that had been lit for us. We had talked for a long time, discussing our plans for where to head after Lilisxi. We eventually agreed to visit all the minor clans that dotted the land to the south of Laxtal, before sweeping around to Clan Kern, the southernmost of the ruling clans. Nixa and Axaatl could take care of the north for us.\n\nNot once did the Nixan suggest that he wanted to return home. Every time he spoke of the future, it always included me. When we did eventually stop talking and settled down to sleep, our tails were entwined and my paw was clasped in his. My last waking sight was of his beautiful yellow eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "We flew all day to reach the Lilisxi lair. Airil, having never been to the clan before, was unable to transport us there in an instant, something that I was disappointed about. Ddraig Aranat had offered us a small contingent of Axaatl drakes to act as an escort for our flight south, which I had politely rejected. At the time, I could feel Airil's discomfort, as though he felt Ddraig Aranat did not believe he was capable of such a task, but felt it quickly turn to pride as I vouched for my present escort. I had been humbled by the ddraig's offer, but I still trusted Airil to keep me safe; more so than four or five Axaatl dragons, no matter how formidable their fighting prowess was.\n\nI relied on memory to guide us to the Lilisxi lair, which I remembered as being highly unusual for a draconic lair, as it did not bury down into the rock beneath our paws. Instead it rose into the trees, with the drakes of Clan Lilisxi perching on the wooden boughs of the forest like any common bird. Without a defensible lair, the clan could never aspire to the prestige of becoming a ruling clan, but they were still arguably the most powerful clan near Laxtal's southern borders. Their ddraig, a feisty young dragon called Bakucic, had been a regular visitor to our clan when he had been haeraig. We had spoken occasionally, argued frequently, but I hoped he would now treat me with respect. I carried the Laxtal stone around my neck, so I represented my clan. I would not dishonour Anzig by bringing up fledgling disagreements, and I was confident Ddraig Bakucic would similarly act with dignity.\n\nDay was beginning to surrender to the night, but we still had not arrived, or even laid eyes on the lair, though I knew we were flying in the right direction, following the great river south. We hadn't seen any drakes, but for a few specks in the distance that had vanished before we closed. As the darkness grew, so the cold intensified. Doubts were beginning to invade my thoughts, as to whether we would indeed find shelter for the night. I had seen no sign of caves, as the landscape in this part of the territories was almost perfectly flat. In the rapidly fading light, a sudden realisation hit me; there was no forest in sight either. Where was the forest-lair of Clan Lilisxi? Soon it would be too dangerous to fly, and we had nowhere to shelter.\n\nSuddenly, Airil dipped his wings towards me and reached out towards me. I instinctively reached out for him to take my paw. Were we under attack? I quickly scanned the charcoal skies, but could see nothing. I looked back at Airil, looking for a sign to where the danger was. I was not expecting to see a smile.\n\nI had no time to react before an explosion of light obliterated my senses. An eternity forced into the smallest fraction of time as images flashed through my mind. Mountains, streams, grasslands, oceans, and forests came and went in seconds that felt like years. Forests! The Lilisxi forest erupted from the ground. It looked like it was sprouting up beneath me. Twitching, bending, writhing, being shaped by the forces of nature over eons; eons that passed by in less than a moment. Either I fell towards it, or the forest surged up past us, but we were plunging through the leaves, as bright colours started to swirl all around me.\n\nDrakes shrieked from all sides, as we materialised right in front of them. Dazed and unable to form any words of apology, I staggered away, trying to furl my wings to a body that would not keep still. Momentarily, as my senses caught up with my trembling body, I was surprised to feel the ground under my paws. I slumped down onto my haunches.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Airil said as he sauntered up to my side, obviously not affected in the slightest by his magic, \"I saw the forest on the horizon. I thought you might like to get here quickly,\" All I could muster was a smile up at him. He smiled back, and that was all we had to say on the matter. Slowly, I lifted off my haunches and looked around us.\n\nWe had materialised near the edge of a small clearing amongst tall trees. A large fire was blazing in the centre of the clearing, around which was about a dozen startled drakes. One called out to send word to the ddraig, and several drakes flew skyward. I followed their flight up to the intertwined branches of the trees above. It was hard to see in the gloom beyond the firelight, but could just make out an angular structure amongst the branches. It was in stark contrast to the sinuous trees. A soft red glow was emanating from the corner of my eyes, but no matter where I looked, it was just out of sight.\n\nOne dragoness had recovered enough from our sudden intrusion to tentatively approach us. Airil had unfurled his wings slightly, but the Lilisxi dragoness was displaying no threatening behaviour. In fact, she seemed terrified of our sudden arrival.\n\n\"You are from Laxtal?\" she asked nervously. The firelight reflected off her cobalt scales as she lowered her head reverently.\n\n\"Yes. I am Haeraig Ellian of Laxtal,\" I gasped, still struggling to regain my true voice after Airil's magic had disrupted my senses. The dragoness's eyes widened in shock as she \u2013 and every drake who had heard my words \u2013 flung themselves to the ground to pay their respect to a drake of a ruling clan. Drakes away from the clearing soon learned the presence and identity of their unexpected arrivals, as excited whispers spread through the clan, like the morning rays of the sun over the plains.\n\nI approached the fire, a little startled at how the Lilisxi drakes recoiled from my way as I approached. The warmth of the fire was invigorating, and I was grateful for it. We hadn't been in the cold airs above the vast plains of Lilisxi for long, but with the setting of the sun, the chill cooling air still lingered in the thin membranes of my wings. I sat down next to the flickering amber glow, wrapping my tail around my legs for warmth. Airil sat alongside me, and cautiously placed a paw on mine.\n\n\"Sorry again if I scared you,\" he said quietly as he stared into the fire. \"I just couldn't stay in the cold any longer.\"\n\nI rested my head against his shoulder. \"That's alright. I was surprised, that's all. Maybe just warn me next time?\" I replied, feeling his muscles relax as he was reassured by my tone. He sighed and put his wing around me as we fell into a comfortable silence, succumbing to the warmth and gentle dance of the flames. I knew Ddraig Bakucic would not keep us waiting for long. The Lilisxi ddraig would soon learn who his visitors were, and would not dare ignore us. Our clans had remained informal allies ever since our mutual war against Clan Duma. I hoped he would honour the help we gave his clan then.\n\n\"Excuse me, Haeraig?\" A small voice distracted me. An old dragoness had approached me, her head held so low that her chin brushed the short, trampled grass of the clearing as she approached. Her eyes never left my paws.\n\n\"Continue, please,\" I said when it seemed obvious the dragoness wasn't going to continue without permission.\n\n\"Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I feel that you must be warned. You are not the only one here seeking counsel from Ddraig Bakucic. Another dragoness arrived before sunset and demanded to speak with him. She's resting inside as we told her the ddraig was out hunting,\" she said, the faintest trace of pride evident in her voice.\n\n\"Who is this drake?\" I demanded, perhaps a little too harshly in my urgency.\n\n\"Haeraig Ilibela of Xital, Haeraig, Ellian.\" The poor messenger flattened herself to the ground, but I had no time for her feelings now.\n\nI hissed in dismay. I had hoped Xital would have continued their focus to the east, so this was bad news indeed if they had already turned their attentions to their western neighbours. The dragoness's words revealed something else; if Ilibela was still Xital's haeraig, then that meant I had not killed Tsona with the human's gun. Next time I vowed not to be so careless. I unleashed a growl that frightened the poor dragoness even further.\n\nThe arrival of Ddraig Bakucic emerging from near the top of one of the tallest trees surrounding the small clearing was all the poor messenger needed to turn and flee. The ddraig wasn't the largest of drakes, especially when compared to Ddraig Aranat of Axaatl, and was a couple of inches shorter than me. Even so, he held himself in a way that belied his status as a minor clan's ddraig. He was still a ddraig regardless. A space cleared for him to land directly in front of me, and he paused for me to lower my head to him before he addressed me.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian, it is good to see you again,\" he said. His voice was always light and pleasant, but from experience I knew that he was quick to anger and quicker to offend. To my cost I had learnt not to treat him as a simple dragon from a lowly clan.\n\n\"The pleasure is mine, Ddraig Bakucic,\" I said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Airil bend his forelegs to give his respects to the Lilisxi ddraig.\n\nIf Ddraig Bakucic was surprised I was accompanied by a Nixan, he didn't show it. He smiled in a manner that I recalled from our youth. \"I know why you are here, Ellian. I'm sure you have already been informed another haeraig awaits an audience with me. What do you make of Haeraig Ilibela being here?\"\n\n\"You came to see me first,\" I said quietly.\n\nDdraig Bakucic laughed. \"That is true. What makes you think I didn't come here just to chase you away so the Xitals don't think I'm double-crossing them?\" he asked.\n\n\"Because Laxtal has always protected Lilisxi and been a strong ally. What reason do you have to turn your back on us?\" I replied. I felt a flutter of nerves. I had been sure Ddraig Bakucic would quickly declare his continued allegiance to Laxtal, but now I wasn't sure it would be that easy. Would he be persuaded otherwise by the arguments from Xital?\n\nThen he smiled and laughed again, wiping away all my doubts in a moment. \"Come, Haeraig Ellian. Join me in the trees and we can discuss how Lilisxi can help you. Your companion may join us too,\" he said, before turning to the dragoness who had approached us earlier. \"Keep Haeraig Ilibela away. If she asks for, just inform her I don't want to see her.\"\n\n\"Of course, my ddraig,\" the dragoness said, smiling as she bowed her head.\n\nNothing compared to the Lilisxi lair. I had never seen trees used by drakes as a place of shelter or refuge, but somehow the drakes of Lilisxi had manipulated these twisting boughs into a safe haven, just as other clans had carved through the stone. Thick, closely-knit tendrils grew down from the upper branches of many trees, creating an almost impenetrable wall of wood, which descended to the leafy forest floor. I couldn't tell whether these were natural or not, but these walls formed narrow, yet elongated chambers for the Lilisxi drakes to inhabit. Many of the trees had hollows carved into them, and as we flew up towards the canopy, drakes occasionally peered out from within. The whole clan lived in the trees. I had to marvel at the ingenuity of Lilisxi, to be able to fashion a home such as this without any cave system nearby.\n\nGiven they couldn't light fires within the trees, I was intrigued to see masses of small red crystals embedded into the wood. They gave off a soft red glow, and as I flew close to a large cluster of them, I also felt a gentle heat that emanated from them. Airil was extremely interested in the crystals, and as soon as the three of us landed on a great bough just below the canopy of leaves, the Nixan pawed at a nearby crystal with intense curiosity.\n\n\"Ddraig, if I may? What are these?\" Airil asked.\n\nDdraig Bakucic moved along the bough with poise and confidence, something I could not yet mater. I still needed my wings slightly flared for balance as I struggled to stay perched on the bough. Some of my initial wonder for the clan was starting to diminish. This was how birds lived, not drakes.\n\n\"We do not know,\" Ddraig Bakucic said as he prised one of the crystals from its socket with a single claw. He held it up in his paw. It was smaller than one of his claws, but it gave off enough light to shine brightly, reflecting in his eyes. \"It's some sort of natural magic. You'll find them scattered throughout the forest, but for some reason Nixa never showed interest in studying them.\"\n\nThe ddraig held out the crystal towards the Nixan, who excitedly extended his paw to accept the ddraig's offer to place it within his grasp. Airil brought the crystal up to his snout and stared into it as though entranced. Small sparks of amber and larger ones of red crackled from the stone as it moved in Airil's paw. \"There is a lot of magic in these,\" the Nixan said, flicking the stone up before it vanished with a loud crack, only to reappear again on the branch, under his other paw.\n\nDdraig Bakucic seemed to show no interest and slipped past the Nixan, putting a paw on the massive trunk of the tree, next to a hollow lit from within by the same red glow. \"Shall we?\"\n\nI nodded for Airil to follow the ddraig along the bough, not trusting myself to be able to get past him without suffering the ignominy of falling. Once inside, I was surprised. I had expected the chambers to be damp and cramped, with them being inside the trunk of a tree, but I was surprised by what I saw from the entrance. The floor was flat, on which I could count the many rings of the host tree, but the walls curved up and met in the middle in a perfect dome. I could see hardly any claw marks on the walls, but they were more pronounced on the ceilings; revealing how the chambers had originally been made. But, with time and numerous visitors no doubt, the walls had become polished almost smooth from being brushed against. With the crystals providing both light and warmth, there was no need for any fur rugs scattered around for bedding, which was just as well; it was small, but it was every bit as comfortable as any Laxtal chamber.\n\n\"These are the guest chambers where you can rest tonight. But first, what are we to do with our little problem?\" Ddraig Bakucic asked, shepherding the two of us inside the chamber. Airil quickly sat down and made himself small, his wings and tail wrapped tight to his body as the Ddraig continued to speak. \"How can we hope to defeat Xital and their human allies?\"\n\n\"By overwhelming them with numbers. We need an army greater than anything dragonkind has mustered before,\" I replied with confidence.\n\nDdraig Bakucic shook his head slowly, and for quite some time before he stopped and spoke. \"I was at the council of Xital when your cousin proposed to steal the Axinstone. He seemed to believe that we could not hope to defeat the humans in battle. What has changed? Why do you think we can defeat them now?\"\n\n\"At that time, the humans still had the Axinstone. With it they were too powerful to fight. Now it's back in Nixan paws, and that power is Clan Nixa's to wield,\" I said, trying to explain as best I could what Anzig had told me. I knew there were doubts amongst my clan that Nixa could truly turn this war by themselves, but I wasn't going to let Ddraig Bakucic know that.\n\n\"So, Airil, it's down to your clan, is it?\" the Ddraig sniffed, turning to Airil.\n\nAiril immediately stiffened and uncurled his tail, which twitched nervously behind him, and dipped his head almost to the ringed floor. \"Have you ever seen a Nixan with the power of the Axinstone coursing through their veins?\" Airil asked the ddraig. When he didn't answer, the Nixan chanced raising his head slightly, looking between the both of us and revealing an excited glint in his eyes. With more confidence, he continued, \"It is an incredible sight. You can see magic leaping from every scale like lightning from a cloud. Do you really think humans could stand up to that power and hope to win?\"\n\nA low growl rumbled from the back of the ddraig's throat. \"You are confident, Airil, I give you that, but will confidence alone suffice? I do not think it will. I think we are doomed to lose, but nor can I see an alliance with Xital. No matter what they offer, it will be rejected it, even if it results in the end of Clan Lilisxi.\"\n\n\"But you will still help us?\" I asked falteringly. I shared his misgivings, but again I did not speak them. Airil had faith that his clan would be enough to turn this war around, but I too couldn't see how.\n\nDdraig Bakucic nodded. \"Of course,\" he paused to think again, scraping a claw on the wooden floor in a strange pattern, small shavings spiralling up, revealing the sharpness of the ddraig's claws. \"We have sufficient drakes to send a thousand to Laxtal. I cannot send more as I need to defend the clan's territories, but I hope you'll find the number sufficient.\"\n\nIt was more than I had hoped to receive from a minor clan, and expressed my gratitude to Ddraig Bakucic profusely, but he just bared his teeth in amusement. \"I presume you will fly to Eivas next?\" he asked.\n\nEivas was to the south-west of Lilisxi, but it didn't share a border with Laxtal as the small territory of Clan Duma lay between. Like Clan Lilisxi, they too were considered reasonably powerful for a minor clan, and would make a good ally. They would certainly be more useful than the significantly weaker Clan Duma.\n\n\"I shall detain Haeraig Ilibela for as long as I can. The longer our negotiations last, the fewer clans she can influence,\" Ddraig Bakucic said, his grin widening. \"Rest well tonight and fly at first dawn. Be comforted by the fact your Xital counterpart will not be quite so comfortable.\"\n\nAbruptly, he bowed his head to the two of us as he moved to leave the chamber, which we scrabbled to immediately return; deeper and longer, in true recognition not only of his status, but in gratitude also for his promised alliance. As he unfurled his wings, he paused as he perched on the branches outside and glanced back, first at me, then to Airil. \"Look after her, Airil, she's a good catch.\"\n\nHis raucous laugh was broken only by the sound of snapping twigs and falling leaves as he kicked off into the air. I spluttered in shock. Airil looked mortified."
            },
            {
                "title": "Nataik",
                "text": "I had been in Nixa for just over a week and it still unnerved me greatly. I knew I would never get used to the fact that magic permeated every crevice of the lair. Not that I could feel it, of course. I had to take Meadus's word for it. Ddraig Krateos's youngest son had tried to explain to me about the touch of magic, but all I felt was a slight headache that constantly irritated my temples.\n\nI longed for home. I missed the wet marshes of Xigax, but most of all I wanted the company of drakes I knew and could trust. Meadus had been a good companion over the past week, but he was still a Nixan. The clan of magic was always looking to deceive and beguile, and I knew the ddraig's son would be no different. I told him none of my secrets, and had been careful about what information I disclosed regarding the humans.\n\nWe had learnt little about the intentions of the advancing human army, and all Nixan attempts to divert and distract them had proven useless. They marched slowly but inexorably towards their target, which we knew without a doubt was the Nixan lair. Ddraig Krateos had ordered the lair to be sealed. No drake was to enter or leave without his direct permission, and hunting was to be done for the whole clan by just a few select hunters.\n\nThey tried their hardest to hide it, but the scent of fear was starting to permeate the lair. For all their talk about this being an impregnable fortress, they were certainly worrying a lot.\n\nIt was before sunrise, and the rest of the lair was still sleeping. I was waiting in my small chamber for Meadus. We had been asked by Ddraig Krateos to leave the lair early and scout the human army again to confirm their position. They had only been a couple of miles away before dusk.\n\nA few days ago, the Nixan sightseers had lost track of the army again, and reported it felt as though something had interfered with their magic. I recalled the Human-Nixans I had seen in Trevena and barely suppressed a shiver of fear. Their magic had been formidable, but even they were nothing compared to the terror of Nightwings. I had kept my knowledge of the spectre hidden from the Nixans at the request of Ddraig Anzig and Azlak. How the Nixans would react if they knew we had brought that monstrosity into their lair, I dreaded to think.\n\nI heard Meadus's wingbeats long before he reached my chambers. He was trying to fly as quiet as he could, just as he had been doing the past few days in an attempt to catch me off my guard. I closed my eyes and remained still, feigning sleep as he neared. Despite his attempts at stealth, I could easily hear him land as he kicked up a spray of dust with his wings. His claws clicked against the stone as he walked across my chamber, and I smirked inwardly. Nixans \u2013 or indeed all drakes not from Xigax \u2013 were not blessed with the gift of retractable claws that allowed us to creep with so little noise.\n\nHe was breathing in quick, shallow breaths as he tried to conceal his anticipation. I waited until I could feel his hot breath against my scales and he was just a paw's length away from me. I launched myself at him, quickly swiping away his legs and forcing him to the ground. My tail wrapped around his hindlegs, preventing him from kicking out, and within two seconds my teeth were at his throat.\n\n\"I submit,\" he cried out. His forepaws pushed uselessly at my chest as he tried to push me away.\n\n\"Too slow. Too loud,\" I said dismissively as I released him, rising to my paws and turning my back on the Nixan. There hadn't been any drake in this clan who had yet been able to give me a proper spar. It was fine having such prodigious magical skills, but the moment they got into a claw and tooth situation they all capitulated within seconds.\n\n\"I'm slowly learning,\" Meadus said as he rolled onto his paws.\n\nI huffed in derision. I had tried to teach Meadus and his brothers how to properly fight another drake, but after a week of lessons there was no sign of improvement whatsoever. Of the four, Meadus had shown the most potential, but even his was limited. Avrus, Sigel, and Pyeery had as much ability in combat as a fledgling hawk. I doubted I would ever be able to make a warrior dragon out of any of them, even if I had years to train them. I could only hope that Laxtal and Axaatl would take the brunt of the conflict in the coming war, because Nixa would collapse if it came up against direct combat. I wondered if any drake had thought to request my clan for help, and if so, would Ddraig Nunahra provide any assistance. An army of Xigax drakes was a terrifying prospect indeed.\n\nMeadus gave up trying to convince me of his fighting prowess, and instead offered to lead me up to the surface. I was not enthralled about the prospect at having to scout out the human army again, but it was better than lingering underground with nothing to do. It felt as though my wings were wasting away, being forced to lie alone in these chambers with only my thoughts to bother me.\n\nI followed Meadus up through the deserted cavern and into the twisting passageways that led to the surface. I always hated creeping through the glowing labyrinth. Meadus had told me that if I entered them without a Nixan, every path would be dark and my chances of finding my way out again would be almost impossible. Only a Nixan could light the way.\n\nIt was a dreary day and the ground was sodden after an overnight storm. The clouds hung low to the ground as they whipped across the sky, hurried along by an impatient wind from the north. I shivered momentarily, ironically longing for the warmth of the lair, but I had a job to do. I would not shame my clan by showing any weakness.\n\nWe flew off west, heading for where we had last seen the humans. I wondered how they had fared in the heavy rain. I had seen they had carried strong canvas tents that would shield them from the worst of the weather, but doubted they would be warm. It wouldn't have been as luxurious as their homes across the mountains but I doubted something as minor as the elements would cause the humans to turn tail and run for home. Their commanders would be doing everything to ensure there were no more deserters, after news reached us of about fifty of their number that had detached from the rest, near the borders of Laxtal and turned for human lands.\n\nAfter just a few minutes of flying, the human army came into view; luckily they had not moved overnight. Though we flew as low as we dared overhead, we were so high that I couldn't make out individual humans. To my eyes they were little more than a writhing black mass. Occasional shouts carried up to my ears, and from the fragments I could comprehend through the howling wind, I grew concerned. It sounded as though the humans were preparing to march once more. They were marching east on Nixa.\n\nWe doubled back, and I flew up close to Meadus to shout over the wind. \"Fly back to Nixa. Warn your father the humans are coming. Then wait for me atop of your lair to let me back in,\" I yelled.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" he shouted with a fearful glance down at the humans.\n\n\"To find out what their plans are. I won't be long.\"\n\nMeadus didn't try to stop me or convince me it was a bad idea. He simply submitted to my decision and flew back towards Nixa. I almost wished he had tried to stop me. I was terrified at the thought of flying down into the human army and I doubted my colour-change scales would keep me concealed for long.\n\nI circled around for a little while, trying to identify the command structure of the humans. It took about ten minutes, but I thought I saw a small group of humans converging on one area with apparent purpose. That had to be my best choice.\n\nPlacing trust in my scales, I dived down into the human camp. My wings were completely silent as I fell through the air. I knew the humans would never be able to hear me. My only danger lay in one of them looking up and seeing through my camouflage. No cries of alarm were raised as I landed softly behind a large tent. I was repulsed by the feeling on my paws as they sank into the wet mud, but it was nothing compared to the assault my nose was forced to endure. The reek of humanity hit me like a Xigax tail-swipe.\n\nIt didn't take long to locate the humans I had seen from the air. I was pleased to see that two of them wore the clothing associated with a high-ranking official in their army, though I couldn't recall what rank these two men held. I could never remember why some had stripes and others had stars. There were two others with them, and all four were standing, huddled around a small table. I got as close to them as I dared, just over a dozen feet away from the closest of them.\n\n\"Are you sure this will work, George?\" one of the higher-ranked men asked the only man there not in a military uniform. I almost hissed out in surprise. The tall, dark-haired human in the middle was George Symons. If he was here now, then surely he couldn't have been at his castle when we had stolen the Axinstone. The human moved with a limp, favouring his left leg. He had been injured recently.\n\nGeorge's laugh was cold. \"Why? Do the dragons scare you, Arnold?\"\n\nThis other man had to be the human Ellian had warned us about; it must be General Summers. The two men stood less than twenty feet from me had caused unimaginable hurt and suffering amongst dragonkind. Many thousands had died because of them and I longed to leap out and challenge them, but I knew I would die before I could lay a claw on them.\n\n\"It's not the dragons that scare me. It's the power they wield in the Dragon's Eye that concerns me. Why did you let them take it?\" General Summers asked.\n\nGeorge tapped his nose and smiled. \"Do you doubt me, General? Do you doubt Elryc?\"\n\nI froze. They had let us take the Axinstone? Why? What could be gained from letting Clan Nixa have their powerful artefact back? Unless... They had tampered with it somehow. I missed the answer from General Summers. George was speaking again. I forced myself to focus.\n\n\"Sergeant Allen, are the men at Dragon's Haven in position?\" George asked one of the other humans present. I didn't need to hear the sergeant's answer. They planned to attack Nixa and their refuge at Kxisila. I had heard all I needed to know. I knew what they planned, and that they involved the Axinstone somehow.\n\nQuietly, I slipped away and found a quiet spot amongst the tents so I could take to the air without being seen. I was gone before the humans even knew I had been there.\n\nI knew I would have to speak to Ddraig Krateos immediately. He had been warned about the impending attack by Meadus, but he needed to know they couldn't retreat to Kxisila if they needed to. The mystery surrounding the Axinstone would have to wait until after we had secured our safety.\n\nThe clouds were starting to disperse by the time I returned to the lair. Here and there sunlight had breached the dark barriers, shining on the five hills that made up the Nixan lair. I could see Meadus on the northernmost mound, but he didn't fly up to meet me. He appeared to be lying on his side, still and unmoving. I presumed him to be playing one of our games, pretending not to see me before trying to surprise me with his pounce.\n\nThen I saw the grass around his body was stained red.\n\nI shrieked in horror and dived so fast the wind stung my eyes. I landed roughly, jarring my hindpaw so much that I couldn't put any weight on it. Meadus didn't move when I nudged his side. I howled as waves of agony assaulted me. I was already too late. He had been shot through the neck. I held his still head against mine as guilt wracked my every nerve. I had asked him to wait for me. I was responsible for the death of Ddraig Krateos's son.\n\nSomething was nagging at the back of my mind. Something else I had failed to notice. Then my brain caught up with my nose. Overwhelming the tang of blood was the smell of something much worse. Humans had been on this hill.\n\nGently laying down Meadus's head, I looked around in fear. There were footprints everywhere, easy to spot in the wet mud. I crept up the hill a little further, where the ground had been disturbed a lot more than by humans simply walking over it. I scraped away some of the mud and felt something hard below the surface. Had Meadus seen whatever the humans had buried here? Is that why he had been killed? I didn't want to know what had resulted in his death, but I knew it could be important; I had to find out.\n\nAs the loose mud cleared away, I revealed a large metallic box covered in a mass of, what seemed like thin, brightly coloured strips of reed, or grass. The colours though, blues, white, yellows and red? These weren't reeds, or anything natural. I had seen sometime like this once before, some sort of wiring humans used to power their technology. There was a small screen with bright numbers counting down."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The hill erupted.\n\n[ Azlak ]\n\nI screamed in agony. A phantom claw had reached into my chest and was trying to rip out my heart. It came without warning, and an echoed cry told me I was not alone in my suffering. I struggled to breathe as pain and emotions racked through my body. I felt panic and fear threaten to overwhelm me, but somehow remained conscious through it all, writhing in agony on the ground; there was nothing I could do to lessen the pain.\n\nA paw touched my chest, the gentleness of it still like fire against my scales. I screamed again. Someone called my name. I tried to answer but could only yelp over and over, no words would form. I had been robbed of my voice; I had been robbed of my thoughts. Nothing existed but the agony.\n\nThen it stopped. As quickly as it had assaulted me, and I was freed from the torture. I placed a paw on my chest to feel it pulse. Whether the phantom claw had been real or not, it had not stolen my heart. But something else was missing; I felt hollow, and with every rasping breath I took, it seemed to swirl around the void inside me.\n\nWith a great effort, I forced my eyes open and tried to focus them. I blinked and saw that the whole cave was tilted over at an angle; I realised then that I was lying on my side. I had been having lessons with Kaz in one of the lower caves before the pain. We had been alone at the time, but as my mind started to clear once more, I sensed, more than saw, that at least two other drakes were now present. I groaned as I rolled over onto my belly, flexing each wing in turn, to make sure neither had been damaged in my pained thrashing. But beyond the echoes of the heart-wrenching agony and the curious sense of loss, I couldn't feel anything amiss.\n\n\"Are you alright, Azlak?\"\n\nI shook my head and looked up at the other drakes. I was somewhat surprised to see Keita and Okazuni standing there, having barely seen the two since we had returned to Laxtal. Gone, for the moment at least, was Keita's customary look of dislike towards me. I didn't trust myself to speak just yet.\n\nBehind Keita and her Nyrian mate, Kaz too was struggling to his paws. His wings were draped uselessly over the ground. \"Something terrible has just happened,\" he whimpered. We looked into each other's eyes; both aware that we had suffered the same harrowing experience, but neither of us yet understood the why, or the what. I ignored Keita and Okazuni as they asked what was going on, instead pushing past them to stand by Kaz's side, gently nudging his wings back into place.\n\n\"Have you Seen anything?\" the Nixan whispered.\n\nThere was only one thing I could think of that could cause such agony. I didn't want to alarm Kaz unnecessarily, so I cast my mind out like he had taught me, focusing on Ddraig Krateos. If I was wrong \u2013 and I hoped I was wrong \u2013 I would not be able to see anything of his future. He should be safe in the Nixan lair, where my magic could not find him. With my eyes closed, I tried to consciously activate my magic, but saw nothing other than the inside of my eyelids. I sighed in relief, maybe I had been...\n\nA bronze dragon led a force of some three hundred drakes. They flew to the mountains, seeking refuge at Kxisila. A small red dragoness flew at his side, her head bowed low in anguish. Then the gunshots came.\n\n...wrong. I froze in terror, my mouth open in shock as I opened my eyes.\n\n\"What's wrong? What did you See?\" Kaz asked urgently. He placed a paw on mine. To my side I could hear Keita and Okazuni whisper to each other.\n\nI tried to speak, but no sound came out. My breath came in short, sharp bursts.\n\nKaz moved his paw to my face. I felt the cooling touch of his magic, but there was no healing for this. \"What is it Azlak?\"\n\n\"N...Nixa,\" I managed to force out in a small voice. I paused to gasp for air again. My head was bowed, looking down to the floor. My worst fears had come to pass. \"Nixa has fallen. The survivors... They're going to be ambushed at Kxisila.\"\n\n\"What?\" This time it was not the Nixan who spoke, it had been the Nyrian. I could feel Kaz's paw trembling. I doubted he was able to vocalise anything right now. I turned my head slightly so I could see Keita. She had her wing over Okazuni.\n\n\"You must tell Ddraig Anzig. He has to know about this,\" I told her.\n\nTo my surprise she nodded her head. \"Of... Of course,\" she stammered. She took Okazuni with her, the two drakes scampering away to the upper reaches of the lair. Ddraig Anzig should be in his chambers. I knew he'd want to come and see me.\n\nKaz whimpered quietly. \"Fallen? How?\"\n\n\"I Saw something tear apart the ceiling. There was fire and rock... and death,\" I whispered, looking down at my paws. Should I have warned anyone? Could I have prevented this catastrophe? Surely Nixa had Seen this coming, there were dozens of seers in the clan. I couldn't have been the only one...\n\n\"How many survived?\" The Nixan was shaking badly now, so much so that he was barely able to stand.\n\n\"About three hundred are making the flight to Kxisila. I don't know how many will survive the ambush there,\" I said. I didn't dare close my eyes, lest I See the devastation of Nixa once more. I had no desire to witness those visions again.\n\nKaz finally collapsed to the floor, his unsteady legs unable to support his weight any longer. \"That's all?\" He covered his face in his paws, hiding the anguish in his eyes, but his voice could not. I said nothing as I lay down by his side and put my wing over his body. I felt him tremble as his body was wracked by silent tremors of emotion. He leaned into me and tentatively sought out my paw with his. There was nothing else we could say to each other to ease the pain, but just being by his side was comforting. We didn't even move as distant wing beats announced the imminent arrival of another drake landing just outside the cave entrance.\n\n\"You felt it too?\"\n\nI was a little surprised to hear it was Maznar who entered, and spoke close behind me. I tensed slightly, still hearing the spectre in her voice. I had no desire to repeat what I had Seen to Maznar, but I sensed she already knew. She walked around and lay down just in front of us. There was sadness in her eyes, the first time I had seen anything other than hatred or gleeful mischief in them. It seemed she too, sought the silent company of grieving drakes, as she said nothing else. She didn't even pull up her wing over her face like she usually did around other drakes.\n\nKaz squeezed my paw as he started to relax more. A growl, a deep rumbling noise that I felt rather than heard, came from within him. \"They won't get away with this. Nixa will never fall, not completely, not ever,\" he snarled.\n\n\"We will do all we can to assist,\" Ddraig Anzig said. His pained voice came from the archway leading out to the passages. We quickly stood to shaky paws and lowered our heads towards the ddraig. I was startled to see that he too had been racked with pain. Had he felt the death throes of the Nixan lair also?\n\n\"I thank you for your kind words of help, Ddraig Anzig,\" Kaz said, keeping his head bowed. \"It is not the Nixan way to ask for help, but I fear that now Nixa needs all that can be sought.\"\n\n\"Anything in Laxtal's power,\" Ddraig Anzig said. His eyes swept around the small chamber, before glancing back out towards the passageways. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like he was checking for any unwanted company. His paw tapped against the floor as his tail thrashed from side to side.\n\nMaznar slowly rose to her paws and approached the ddraig, who slightly unfurled his wings as the dragoness approached. She paused as she stared down at the ddraig's paws, but every one of her teeth was on show as she smiled.\n\n\"You look as though you are hurt, Ddraig Anzig,\" the dragoness said, tentatively nosing forward and touching her snout to the ddraig's foreleg.\n\nDdraig Anzig hissed and recoiled from the dragoness as though her touch had seared his scales. He scurried to the other side of the chamber, putting as much distance between himself and the spectre that the cave allowed.\n\n\"We'll send scouts out to see if there are any survivors in Nixa,\" the ddraig said as though nothing untoward had happened, his voice a monotone. His eyes were glazed and unfocused as he looked between Kaz and Maznar.\n\nThe Nixan had tensed. He looked towards me, his head tilted in confusion. I was sure he was questioning why the ddraig would have felt the agony of Nixa's destruction. I shook my head slightly. It was not my secret to reveal. The ddraig had asked for secrecy regarding his magic, and I would not betray that trust. At the same time, I was sure that it could not remain secret for long. Kaz's curiosity would only grow, and it would spread to other Nixan survivors soon enough. If there were Nixan survivors. The spectre of Maznar also seemed to know more than Ddraig Anzig would have wished.\n\n\"You know this means we are unable to defeat the humans now. Without Nixan magic, we might as well surrender now,\" Maznar said.\n\nBoth Ddraig Anzig and Kaz growled at the dragoness.\n\n\"You would deny us our revenge?\"\n\n\"There is still strength amongst dragonkind.\"\n\nThe spectre retreated from the snarling dragons, but did not apologise for her words. Instead she shrugged her shoulders in a human gesture. \"George was always going to strike hard and fast. He knew Nixa would pose the greatest threat to his expansion plans.\"\n\n\"And you think the drakes of Laxtal will not spread our wings and fight?\" Ddraig Anzig hissed. He still stayed a distance from the spectre, but circled her with his wings fully flared. Kaz and I darted out of the way, leaving nothing between the two drakes. \"We already have support from Axaatl, and Ellian has flown to Lilisxi to recruit them. We will never give in.\"\n\nMaznar was not at all intimidated by the ddraig's outburst. She held a paw in front of her face and flicked away some dirt that had caught on her scales. \"Will the other clans want to fight against the humans now they have revealed their true strength? They destroyed Nixa in a single day. A signle moment. Where amongst dragonkind can you find the strength and power to oppose that?\"\n\n\"We will find it,\" Ddraig Anzig growled.\n\n\"Where, ddraig, where do you propose we look?\" Maznar replied, showing more interest in the state of her claws than looking towards the ddraig.\n\nDdraig Anzig snarled as he turned on me. \"Azlak. Learn to harness the power in your magic. Find anything that can help us. We need to know everything that is going to happen with enough time to react. We will not get caught unprepared like Nixa. If you can See the fate of the Axinstone, tell me. We do not want it to fall into human paws so soon.\" He didn't even wait for me to bow my head before sweeping out of the chamber.\n\nKaz had brightened considerably. His head was held up and his paws were twitching with excitement now, not grief and loss. \"We should go down into the caves,\" he said.\n\nI shuddered at my memory of the power I had felt emanating from the darkness below the lair, but I shook my head. There had been another dragon with us in my visions of being down there. \"We must wait for Inilta. If he survives, we need to go down with him.\"\n\n\"If...\" Kaz said, turning his back and sitting down in the centre of the chamber. His wings drooped and his tail with tightly wrapped around his legs.\n\n\"That future hasn't ended yet, which means it still has a chance of happening. Inilta is still alive, so more of your clan could make it to Kxisila safely,\" I said. I hesitated before placing my wing around the Nixan, ignoring the quizzical glance I got from Maznar.\n\n\"So we wait for Inilta. What should we do until then?\" Kaz asked. I had no answer. Ddraig Anzig had entrusted me with a great task, but I didn't know where to begin. I had never tried to view the future without a subject before, and even then I was rarely able to decipher any useful meaning. My visions were almost always disconnected and vague. He was asking the impossible of me. Only once before had I felt the sort of focus I needed to determine the consequences of every possible action. I needed the Axinstone.\n\nMaznar paced round and round the chamber, occasionally pausing and looking like she was about to speak, before growling and continuing on her path. \"We can't win this war,\" she said eventually.\n\n\"With that attitude we have already lost,\" Kaz growled.\n\nThe spectre huffed and turned away, once more circling the chamber. \"I know these humans better than you. I know what their capabilities are, and they are far beyond anything Clan Laxtal can muster. Even if all forty-two clans combined, they would struggle against Kernow's armies, especially with George Symons controlling them,\" she said. I shrank back from the fire in her red eyes as she stopped pacing to face us. \"You have no idea what I endured in that castle. I would do anything to avoid that again, but I know we can't hope to keep our freedom. We surrender, or we die.\"\n\n\"Then I choose to die, if that's what it must be,\" Kaz snarled. He pushed aside my wing and advanced on the dragoness, pressing his snout against hers. \"I will burn like the rest of my clan before I surrender.\"\n\n\"Burn then! But do not say I didn't warn you,\" Maznar snarled, pushed the Nixan away from her. As she left the chamber, without even a backward glance, she continued, \"My place is with dragonkind. I will not fly away and give myself to George. I owe my loyalty to Ddraig Anzig, so I will die at his side if that is what he commands.\"\n\nKaz snarled at Maznar's retreating tail as she fled the chamber. \"Why do you trust her?\"\n\n\"I don't,\" I grunted.\n\nThere were still many doubts in my mind about the spectre. Her presence hung like a shadow over the future, but for good or ill I couldn't yet tell. I had not Seen her actively alter the course of events to come, but I knew she was there, manipulating and controlling from the shadows. I was still unsure as to whether she was fully free from human control.\n\nKaz sucked in his breath before slowly exhaling with a low hiss. \"She was right about one thing though. Without our magic, the humans have the advantage. They would have known that,\" he said.\n\n\"Let Ddraig Anzig worry about that for now. I'm going to hunt before I start the impossible. Did you want to join me?\" I asked, half-expecting the Nixan to decline my offer. I was sure he'd want the time on his own to grieve the loss of his home and uncountable thousands of clanmates. He surprised me by smiling and nodding his head.\n\n\"I'd love to.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "For hours I had struggled to peer into the future, trying to make some sense of what was to come. Everything was blurred, out of focus, and despite Kaz's magic soothing the worst of my headaches, I only succeeded in tiring myself further at an alarming rate. I could barely see the blue dragon right in front of me, let alone See into the future to find some hidden clue that could turn the war to our favour. My only relief was that we had mostly been left alone and undisturbed. Maznar had not returned to try to convince us further that the war was hopeless, and Ddraig Anzig had only been in the once to check on my progress. He had been politely but firmly shooed away by Kaz, who had informed the ddraig in no uncertain terms that I was not to be rushed. I was glad of the Nixan's intervention, but had been secretly horrified at how blunt he had been with the ddraig. I knew I could never dare speak to him in such harsh terms.\n\n\"You should rest for a while,\" Kaz said, placing a paw on mine.\n\nI shook my head and tried to pull away from the Nixan, but he increased the pressure on my paw. \"I promised the ddraig,\" I said. My voice was hoarse and weak, but I couldn't give in yet, not without anything to show for my efforts.\n\nKaz frowned as his bright yellow eyes bored into mine. I trembled as I tried to hold his gaze, but just as I was about to look away he relented and blinked. \"Just be careful.\"\n\nI pushed out with my tired mind once more, trying to think of something to focus on that could have an influence on the future. It was hard trying to sift through the changing futures that were a result on the destruction of Nixa. I was relieved that occasionally I Saw Isikian and Inilta in my visions, but they weren't important for the moment. I had to think away from the Nixan survivors, back towards Laxtal. There had to be something here.\n\nThe sun was setting over Laxtal, the great orange disk just visible between a low, dark bank of cloud and the horizon. Ddraig Anzig growled as he confronted Tsona. The two were alone, but the howls and snarls of other drakes could be heard coming from within the lair.\n\n\"Do not be a fool, Anzig,\" the Xital dragon said.\n\nThe sun was setting over Laxtal, the great orange disk just visible between a low, dark bank of cloud and the horizon. Ddraig Anzig growled as he confronted Tsona and his daughter, Selane. The three were alone, but general chatter of other drakes could be heard coming from the lair below.\n\n\"Is this really how it must be?\" the Xital dragon said.\n\n\"Something just changed,\" I said. I tried to get to my paws, but a burst of nausea forced me back to the ground. My head spun, and closing my eyes did nothing to alleviate the sensation.\n\n\"What did you See?\" Kaz asked. I could feel him just next to me, his snout and wings sometimes brushing against my scales. I had never really had anyone show so much care towards me before.\n\n\"I don't know, but something Selane just did has changed the future, I'm sure of it. Can you find her for me?\" I said, trying to make sense of what I had Seen. Somehow, Selane's actions would change Tsona's mind about something. Her presence above Laxtal would be crucial whenever that vision came to pass.\n\n\"I don't want to leave you alone,\" Kaz protested.\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" I assured him.\n\nI squinted my eyes open and tried to flash a smile, but I could tell Kaz wasn't convinced. He still seemed troubled by my weakness, but I knew that given a short rest I would be fine. His tail tightened around mine for a moment, before he released me again.\n\nDespite his worries, the Nixan left me to seek out the Xital dragoness. I was interested to learn what she had just been doing that had changed the future so drastically, yet at the same time hardly at all. It was rare that I was able to See a vision change like that. I had not seen nor heard anything of Selane since she had arrived in Laxtal. I presumed she had spent most of her time with Ravet, the dragon who had convinced her to turn her back on her father and clan.\n\nI had never felt so weary before. It felt as though I had used all the energy my body could create, and the rabbit I had hunted earlier no longer provided sustenance. I slumped down onto my side, and tried to keep my eyes open and stay alert for when Kaz returned, but it was increasingly difficult to do. My eyelids were heavy and as I yawned widely I decided to just close my eyes for a moment.\n\nLight flashed and swirled, creating a mesmerising mixture of colour and energy. The light emanated from nowhere, yet danced and reflected off every surface it touched. Three dragons backed away, trying to find the darkness again, but every pawstep caused the rock to radiate with new light and the aura of magic grew.\n\nA voice whispered from the depths of the magic as a shape started to grow and form into the silhouette of a human woman. Nothing else could be seen of her but for her blazing eyes of liquid gold. \"Bri'An? Are you Bri'An?\"\n\nSomeone was gently pushing me. \"Azlak, are you awake?\"\n\nI groaned and opened my eyes and immediately regretted my decision. I looked right into the fire, and the usually gentle light lanced through my head. Every scale on my body hurt. I curled up a little tighter, trying to protect my eyes from the light. Then came Kaz's soothing touch, and his magic helped alleviate the agony. It did nothing to ease the exhausted ache that had set into every muscle, but it did allow me to look around and see that Kaz had found Selane. The Xital dragoness was just a few feet away, with Ravet by her side.\n\nI was a little embarrassed for her to see me in such a vulnerable state. I clenched my jaw and forced myself to sit up, ignoring the dizziness that threatened to ground me again. With Kaz standing protectively by my side, I faced the Xital dragoness.\n\n\"Why have you summoned me here?\" she asked, inspecting the stone just above and behind my shoulder.\n\n\"I need to know what you were just doing,\" I said. She had already deferred to me by refusing to meet my eye, but I still lowered my head slightly in a show of respect. Clan Xital was the ruling clan, even if Laxtal was in conflict with them, and this dragoness was the daughter of their ddraig. She still deserved respect.\n\nSelane squirmed a little and kept her eyes anywhere but me. \"I was with Ddraig Anzig. What we discussed is for us alone.\"\n\n\"You have to tell me. Whatever happened, whatever was said, has changed the course of the future. I need to be able to guide you down the right path,\" I protested.\n\n\"Changed the future? How?\" the dragoness asked with a startled glance towards Ravet.\n\n\"That is what I'm trying to work out. You have to tell me what changed. What have you planned now that was different than before you spoke to the ddraig?\" I asked in exasperation.\n\nThe Xital dragoness growled softly and turned to Ravet. \"Should I tell him?\"\n\n\"The ddraig trusts him,\" Ravet said with a sharp flick of his tail. I could tell he didn't share the ddraig's faith.\n\nSelane pawed at the ground. \"Very well. I spoke to the ddraig about my desire to take Ravet as my mate,\" she said, staring down at the rock between her fidgeting paws.\n\n\"Oh. Sorry,\" I said, feeling like curling up in shame at prying into Selane's private affairs like that. I had not expected such an answer from her, but something more profound that would have had a more obvious effect on the future. I should have known better. It was almost only always the small, inconsequential events that could topple empires and change the course of history. At the same time though, this wasn't such a minor matter. Mating outside of clans was not forbidden, but it was certainly rare. Xital drakes in particular rarely took mates from outside their clan. I suspected this potential union between a Xital and a Laxtal drake was unique.\n\n\"I do not know how this will change the future, but it is not my intention to have a say in this war,\" Selane said, edging closer to the dragon by her side. \"I left my father because I disagreed with him, not because I want to fight him.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" I said, still holding my head low. This wasn't the revelation I had been hoping for, but it could still lead to Tsona's admission of guilt, of acceptance. There was no monumental shift, but I could still see a way forward. \"We change the future by being one. Without division of clan. Thank you, I think I see it.\"\n\nRevat placed a wing over Selane. \"Was there anything else you needed us for?\" he asked, making no attempt to keep the harsh tones from his voice. His eyes were narrowed as they bored into the top of my skull. I didn't dare look up as I silently shook my head, terrified of what I would see if I glanced towards the dragon.\n\nI waited until I had heard them leave before turning to Kaz. He opened up his wings and I wasted no time in scurrying into his comforting embrace. I buried my head in his scales as I tried to forget my embarrassment and shame. I was no stranger to causing anger and scorn in other drakes, but I had hoped those times were past. I had hoped that I had earned some respect from the drakes of Laxtal, but apparently I was mistaken. The only drakes who showed me any respect were Ddraig Anzig and Kaz.\n\nNeither of us had any desire to leave the small chamber that had been set aside for Kaz during his stay in Laxtal. I was still too exhausted to do anything but lie down and feel the gentle rise and fall of Kaz's chest, and the Nixan seemed quite content to remain where we were. I asked him about Nixa. Isikian had told me of the wonders the lair had to offer, and I hadn't had the chance to explore them. Now I never would.\n\nKaz was eager to talk about his lair, but I noticed he didn't display the same reverence for it that Isikian had. He had loved the lair, that much was obvious, but he also told me how much he appreciated the Laxtal lair. What he would miss more than anything about the Nixan lair was the sheer sense of power he felt when he flew through the massive central chamber. It was something only a Nixan drake could fully comprehend. I squirmed slightly as he said that. I had felt that same power, like fire blazing in my veins; something no Laxtal drake should ever be able to feel.\n\n\"You are my son no longer,\" a green dragon snarled. He raised his paw, ready to strike.\n\nI was a Laxtal dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "The beacon fires had been lit. Panic had threatened to overwhelm the clan before the flames had turned blue, indicating the threat was not human in origin. We had heard nothing of the human army that had ravaged Nixa, and regular messengers between the clans on our northern borders had reported no sighting of the human force. The clan had grown increasingly nervous. It looked to me to take action, but there was little I could do if we didn't know where the humans had gone. I was also waiting for Ellian to return from the south. I had heard nothing of her whereabouts since news of her gaining the support of Lilisxi. Mushussu had told me not to worry about her, but until I saw my cousin again I couldn't help but do so.\n\nThe beacon lighters had used blue flames to let the clan know that a Nixan drake was approaching the lair. Then the fires then started to spark, indicating a ddraig was coming. This led me to assume more than one Nixan was approaching. Was this the news we were waiting for? Were we about to learn the fate of Nixa? Ever since I had felt the hideous pain that had signalled the destruction of the Nixan lair, I had been desperate for information. I couldn't accept that after all we had gone through, the Axinstone could be lost so easily.\n\nLaxtal would not be caught unprepared like Nixa. Though our forces had been depleted by the ambush that had claimed the life of Astar, there were still nearly three thousand adult drakes who dwelt in the main lair. Those with combat skills had started training up anyone who was willing to learn the art. Though I longed for Carlee's or Nataik's prowess to be passed on to our recruits, Laxtal's fighting force was growing in numbers and ability by the day. Already it had been boosted greatly by the arrival of nearly one thousand drakes from Lilisxi, and almost two thousand from Axaatl, with more expected. The lair was busier than I had ever seen it.\n\nThe initial panic caused by the lit beacons soon diminished, to be replaced with nervous anticipation that spread throughout the clan. Those drakes who weren't already outside hunting and training had come up to the central chamber, waiting for my next order. They all had by now heard of the fate of the Nixan lair, but even so, whenever a drake from the clan of magic came to Laxtal, there was excitement.\n\nI sent for Azlak, hoping the seer would be able to join me before the Nixans arrived, but no one had seen the seer all day. In the four days I had asked him to See something \u2013 anything \u2013 in the future that could be of assistance to us, he had precious little to report. Other than the possible prominence of Selane's actions, he had Seen nothing of great importance. He had told me he was without the ability to See without a particular target to focus on, but that he would continue as long as his strength held out.\n\nWith a phalanx of a dozen other drakes surrounding me, including Marin and Yalle, I flew out onto the plains where I would wait for the Nixans' arrival. It was a cold morning, with thick low clouds hanging overhead. I tried not to think about the warming fires of the lair as I shielded my body from the biting wind with my wings. Dependent upon where they had first been spotted, the Nixans could only be a couple of hours from the lair at the most, and I wanted to be ready for them when they arrived. Their need could only be urgent.\n\nA rustle of impatience ran through some of the drakes, just as the wind did to the tall grasses nearby. Only Yalle continued to sit vigilantly by my side, looking up towards the grey sky, though I knew he probably couldn't see anything more than a grey blur. Some shuffled away to lie in the long grass, spreading their wings more in the hope of catching some of the absent sun's heat, as well as trying to escape the cruel wind.\n\nA few errant thoughts started to slip into my head. I began to hear and feel the frustrations of those around. Emotions that weren't my own started to bother me until I had to get away. I needed to escape before I shrieked in rage.\n\nMovement in the skies to my right caught my eye. My mind focused on the distraction as I tracked two drakes across the sky, flying up from the rivers in the south. For a moment, I wondered if these two were the Nixans approaching the lair, before realising it would be impossible, as the fires that were lit indicated the Nixans were coming from Kxisila in the north. A momentary burst of sunlight flashed off gold scales. Surely it couldn't be the seer?\n\nMy second guess was correct, as Azlak and Kaz approached, swept around overhead, before landing not too far away. They were both laughing and talking, but once they saw my glare, they quickly fell into silence. The seer sheepishly approached and lowered his head.\n\n\"I apologise, Ddraig Anzig. We were out hunting,\" he said bashfully. Immediately I didn't believe him. I refused to break into his thoughts, but I could feel his guilt pressing against my mind.\n\n\"We are expecting Ddraig Krateos. I would like you to remain on the surface with us,\" I told the two nervous dragons. They were behaving as if I had caught them in the act of something illicit.\n\n\"The ddraig's coming here?\" Kaz gasped, turning to me in shock. \"With more of the clan?\"\n\n\"We don't know yet. I haven't received word on their numbers,\" I replied.\n\nKaz turned to the seer. \"You know what this means?\" he said with some degree of excitement overwhelming his unease.\n\nAzlak's discomfort only grew. \"It doesn't mean anything just yet,\" he said, failing to even look in my direction. I growled silently. If Azlak was keeping secrets from me again then I didn't want to know. I had to trust that he was telling me everything important.\n\nThe seer slunk away with Kaz right on his tail. The two avoided Marin, who growled at his son as he momentarily came closer. I kept a close eye on them, just in case any intervention was needed, but I breathed a sigh of relief as Azlak gave his father a wide berth. I didn't know the full story of what had come between father and son, but it wasn't my place to pry. Unless the two came to physical blows, I would be able to stand off and just keep a careful watch on the situation.\n\nAnother half hour passed by in almost complete silence, and still there was nothing from the northern sky. But for a few birds and some returning Laxtal drakes, there was almost no movement at all beneath the clouds, save for the bending grass in the wind. Once again I thought of the lovely warm fires below our paws, but I had to rid such ideas out of my mind. Now was not the time. Ddraig Krateos could only be coming here in a time of great need, so I had to be there to greet him the moment he arrived.\n\nFinally a cry went out, and my attention was drawn to a growing dark smudge near the horizon. At first I thought it was just a cloud, but it soon became apparent that I was mistaken. It was a flock of drakes, maybe one hundred in number, but certainly no more. The survivors of Nixa were here. At their head was Ddraig Krateos, with Haeraig Zeena just below his right wing. Kaz cried out in anguish and spread his wings, but restrained himself at the last moment and remained on the ground.\n\nI pushed forward to the front of the group so I would be the first to great the depleted Nixans. Yalle moved up to stand by my side, though Marin stayed back.\n\n\"What are your intentions, Ddraig Anzig?\" the albino asked.\n\n\"We offer them shelter, and anything else our clan can provide,\" I replied tersely. I didn't like the fact that the albino had waited so long before raising this issue.\n\n\"Is that wise? No matter what promises they have made to us, we owe Nixa nothing,\" Yalle said. He pawed the ground as I looked up to the ragged band of Nixans as they approached. I bit down the answers that came to mind, choosing instead to remain silent and ignore the albino's words. I would not sit back and refuse aid to a clan that had already suffered so much.\n\nEven as Ddraig Krateos descended, I noticed the mighty Nixan ddraig was wounded, a trait shared by the majority of his clan. Almost every Nixan was blood-stained in some way, mostly from gashes in their flanks or bullet wounds to their wings. The ddraig landed first, wincing as he put pressure on his right foreleg. He stumbled forward before straightening his back and raising his head. The ddraig was still as proud as ever, but his eyes told the story of a mighty dragon who was but a shadow of his former self.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig, we regret if we are imposing...\"\n\n\"Ddraig Krateos,\" I interrupted, cutting short the Nixan's apology, \"You and you clan honour ours with your presence. Our lair is yours, for as long any Nixan requires sanctuary or sustenance. There is no imposition occurring here, Ddraig Krateos.\" As I bowed my head in respect, so did all the Laxtal dragons assembled.\n\nDdraig Krateos returned gesture was so low his snout touched the ground. \"Then the Clan of Nixa is forever in your debt, Ddraig Anzig of Laxtal,\" he said, looking around at the few survivors of his clan, many of whom had simply collapsed where they landed. Any still standing, those with the strength to do so, touched Laxtal soil with their snouts in respect. The formalities dispensed with, Kaz and Azlak started moving amongst the exhausted Nixans, offering their help where they could. Briefly I caught sight of Isikian and his brother amongst the crowd, but Nataik was nowhere to be found. I felt cold. What had happened to the Xigax dragoness?\n\nThere was more and more support coming from drakes returning from hunting or training flights. Laxtal, Lilisxi, and Axaatl drakes alike all abandoned their journeys back to the warmth of the lair, to offer what they could to the remnants of the Nixan clan. Many landed amongst their wounded kin, offering food and support where they could. Others indicated they would return with water and other supplies. My heart swelled with pride. This was what dragonkind should be. Ddraig Krateos slowly approached me.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig, may we talk in private?\" he asked, the weakness of his body beginning to break through into his voice.\n\n\"Of course, Ddraig Krateos, at once,\" I said, before turning to Yalle. I instructed the albino to control the tending of the Nixans and ensuring they all had an escort to personally see to their needs. No Nixan would be left unattended. He was to make sure that those who were wounded were to be taken to our healers, and those who only sought rest and shelter were provided it, in any chamber that could be spared. I knew Kaz would do all he could to help, but I was sure he couldn't do it all himself. Despite his earlier misgivings, I knew the albino wouldn't dare disobey a direct order from his ddraig. He would carry out his tasks.\n\nPausing only momentarily to see that my orders were being carried out, I took Ddraig Krateos down into the lair and towards the depths of the lair, so the sound of Yalle's rousing orders being barked out across the horde behind me. I was sure all the dragons present, regardless of kin or clan, would be working to help the Nixans. Every drake we passed pulled back into the shadows of the passageways the moment they saw us, leaving us unhindered as we flew through the main chamber and down to my chambers. The air was warm inside, though the fire was no longer lit.\n\nMushussu was grooming her silver scales as I pushed aside the veil separating the passageway from my chambers. The statue rose and bowed her head towards Ddraig Krateos.\n\n\"It is good to see you again, Mushussu,\" Ddraig Krateos said, much to my shock. I had believed that I was the only one who could see the Guardian. This misconception was in fact good news. At least it removed any lingering doubts that Mushussu had been a creation of my deluded mind. I managed a small, subtle smile to myself.\n\n\"Did Eretha survive?\" Mushussu asked the Nixan.\n\nDdraig Krateos lowered his head and looked away. His wings were wrapped tight against his body, making himself appear even smaller than his already diminutive frame. \"There was no time. My chambers were destroyed in the explosion. No Mushussu. No, I do not believe he did,\" he said.\n\n\"A Guardian is not so easily slain. There is hope yet,\" Mushussu replied. I felt the touch of the statue's mind against mine. From her thoughts I learnt all ddraigs can see every clan's Guardian in their true form. Sometimes the magic extended enough to include haeraigs, but that hadn't happened in years, as it was very much dependent upon the magical strength of the Guardian and the dragon. It is a long time since all drakes could see their Guardians. Draconic magic was waning. The loss of Nixa would only hasten that.\n\n\"Hope,\" Ddraig Krateos said dully. \"What hope have we got? We were destroyed in minutes. We had no defence.\"\n\n\"Have faith, Ddraig. We will find a way,\" I growled deep from my chest, not at the ddraig in anger towards him, but trying to reignite the fire in Ddraig Krateos's belly; to fuel his desire to fight the humans once more. He just sighed and slumped to the ground. This was not the confident and assured ddraig I had met in Nixa. He had been devastated by the loss of his lands, his lair, and most of his clan. It was understandable for him to grieve, but now was not that time. Now was the time for him to show to all dragonkind of his strength. To show them all his strength, courage and anger at what happened to his clan. If we were to defeat the invading humans, we needed all ddraigs to be strong. I knew something had to be done, but I was at a loss as to how I could restore Krateos's inner strength. I looked to Mushussu for advice, but saw she was as quiet and still as a statue once more.\n\n\"Father?\" I turned at the unexpected voice. Haeraig Zeena had nosed her way into the chamber, the translucent purple veil snagging slightly on her blunt horns. Clasped in her paw was the Axinstone. I could feel the magic heat radiating from the jagged shard of rock. The Nixan haeraig then noticed me and turned, bowing her head as she addressed me. \"Forgive me Ddraig Anzig, I only saw my father. May I enter?\"\n\nI granted my permission, grimacing as the haeraig's horns tore the veil slightly. They were old and made by human hands, and if damaged, they wouldn't be easy to replace. I wondered why, at a time like this, why I cared so much for a simple cloth? Zeena flicked the thin fabric aside and moved to her father's side. She was limping from a wound on a foreleg which cruelly emphasised her already odd gait, caused by the Axinstone in opposite forepaw. Ddraig Krateos barely acknowledged the presence of his haeraig, his daughter, even when she placed a paw on his shoulder. He did little more than move his head so one eye was looking up, unseeing, towards the ceiling.\n\n\"Are you still wallowing in pity, father?\" the haeraig asked harshly. \"Are you still blaming yourself?\" she added, but this time much more softly, just as a daughter to her ailing father would do.\n\n\"Yes. You know this was my doing. It was all my doing. I am ddraig. I am responsible.\"\n\nI took a half-step forward. I was reluctant to interfere, but my curiosity had been piqued. \"How could it have been your fault, Ddraig?\"\n\nDdraig Krateos moaned and pushed his daughter's touch away before covering his face with his wing.\n\nHaeraig Zeena pulled back. Her shoulders slumped as she hobbled away from her father, but though her eyes were focused to the floor, I could see that her spirit was not as crushed as her father's. \"There is something he's not telling me.\" The haeraig's thoughts growled her displeasure. When she spoke, this time aloud, her voice was sombre and slow.\n\n\"My brothers were all killed in the attack. My father blames himself for their deaths, as well as the thousands of other lives lost to the humans,\" she said. She sat gingerly down on sore flanks, which bared many recent wounds, but raised her head high. Pride still coursed through this haeraig's veins. She glanced up towards the statue of Mushussu in the corner, unaware of my scrutiny of her. I knew she would not be able see the Guardian as I did \u2013 shuffling slightly, as though uncomfortable in her alcove, but the haeraig nevertheless stared intently at Mushussu's silver form as though she could see her moving.\n\n\"And Nataik? Is she with you?\" I asked, hoping the Xigax dragoness had survived the attack, but I could sense immediately that she had not.\n\nThe haeraig couldn't meet my eye. \"She went out with Meadus the morning of the attack,\" she said, holding her head low. \"They had gone to scout the humans' movements. Neither returned, but Meadus's body was spotted as we fled Nixa. She could not have survived. I'm sorry.\" I whimpered in dismay. How could I explain this to the Xigax ddraig?\n\n\"It was my fault,\" Ddraig Krateos hissed, throwing aside his wing and scrambling up to his paws. He cried in pain as he placed his full weight on his injured foreleg. His daughter rushed forward to offer her support, but she was pushed away by the ddraig. He stood awkwardly on three legs, holding his injured limb to his chest. \"It is what I deserve.\" His eyes burned with a wild light.\n\n\"Ddraig, my father, do not say such things. You did not inflict this onto our clan,\" Haeraig Zeena protested with a quick flare of her wings.\n\nDdraig Krateos staggered away to the fireplace, still not putting any pressure on his right foreleg. He stood, half-turned from us staring into the hearth, where the charcoaled wood still gently smoked, the dragon seemingly searching for solace within its dying embers. Was he thinking the same of his clan? Did he think his clan was dying too? I didn't dare approach him, and nor did his daughter. We both waited, barely daring to make a sound, waiting for the ddraig to continue. When he eventually did speak, it was in little more than a cracked whisper. \"Meadus was not... he should not have been the youngest.\"\n\n\"I don't\u2026 I don't understand father. What do you mean 'not the youngest'?\" Haeraig Zeena words were as pained as her expression. The Axinstone fell to the floor, forgotten as she held her paw to her chest, oddly mimicking her father's pained posture.\n\n\"Meadus was barely one year out of the egg, when your\u2026 when your mother died. You must have been eight. I don't know if you remember her at all,\" Ddraig Krateos said, smiling gently to himself, deep in the memories of an earlier, happier time for him. Still he didn't look around, instead concentrating on the gentle wisps of smoke rising from the blackened wood, his head bowed with the weight of his perceived failure. \"At that time, I was haeraig. I had lost my mate and had four sons and a daughter to care for. My father was in poor health so I was assuming more and more of his duties as ddraig. I thought... I did what I thought was the right thing to do at...\" His words trailed off, as though wisps of smoke themselves.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Haeraig Zeena demanded. I couldn't help but gasp aloud as I felt her frustration and her horror building. Without realising, my mind reached out to touch hers. It was a roiling storm of emotion, with anger and fear writhing, snapping, and clawing for dominance. She was terrified of learning what her father had done, but at the same time, desperate for the truth. The secret could no longer remain with Ddraig Krateos any longer. I hastily withdrew from Zeena's mind, as the haeraig looked in my direction with nervous curiosity.\n\n\"As if five drakelets weren't enough, before your mother died we had one more clutch on the nest; three more eggs. I... I knew I couldn't raise eight drakes on my own, so I carried the eggs away in the middle of the night. I abandoned them and left three unhatched drakes to die in the wilderness,\" the ddraig said. He spat out the final words as though it was poison in his mouth. He choked as he suppressed a pained howl.\n\nHaeraig Zeena said nothing as she sat back on her haunches. Her eyes had widened in shock and her mouth hung open. I could see her tongue flicking off the back of her teeth as she tried to formulate some form of response.\n\nThree eggs? The words ignited a spark deep within my mind. Like the sleepy stirring of an awakened beast, a memory came alive; glowing brighter and brighter... Maznar! Manzar had told me her egg had been found with two others, abandoned in the wild. Surely not...\n\nDdraig Krateos finally looked back towards his daughter. \"I truly believed it was necessary to save the five I already had. But I was wrong. I have paid the price, and thousands have died because of me,\" he said. \"I was not worthy of becoming ddraig of Nixa.\"\n\nHaeraig Zeena found her voice at last. \"That is ridiculous, father,\" she whispered, though I could feel the thoughts she inwardly were of doubt and disgust at her father's actions. I could feel she no longer respected her father as she had once done; her thoughts turning cold and dark, just as the fire did. \"It... that was in the past. It cannot have had any bearing on the events of the last few days.\"\n\n\"How can you be sure my daughter?\" Ddraig Krateos said. He sighed and looked away from his daughter again, half raising his wing to hide behind. \"Are my usual chambers free, Ddraig Anzig?\" Ddraig Krateos addressed the depths of the hearth.\n\nI nodded pointlessly. I didn't yet trust myself to speak. How would Ddraig Krateos react to the news that one of those eggs had survived, and that his daughter, his youngest daughter, was present in this lair? The news that she had been a victim of human magic and torture for all her life, would also add to his grief and guilt. I vowed to hold my tongue, for now. The ddraig needed to grieve for the lives lost from his clan. \"That is a good idea,\" I heard Mushussu say directly into my mind.\n\nI said nothing as Ddraig Krateos turned without a word, and left for the sanctuary of the chambers set aside for the Nixan when he visited. Haeraig Zeena followed close behind, more as a confused daughter than a concerned haeraig, I feared. The moment they had passed through the torn veil, Mushussu leapt down from her alcove and circled around me so her tail almost touched her snout. \"I know what you are scheming, young ddraig,\" she said, staring into my eyes. I couldn't meet those blank orbs for long; there was nothing to focus on. Not even my reflection.\n\n\"I have to go to her. I have to know,\" I replied. I had no idea what impact it could have, but surely things would change if Maznar was Ddraig Krateos's daughter. Not only that, but I needed to get out of my chambers. I felt incredibly hot, though the fire only smouldered faintly.\n\n\"It will only bring grief to Ddraig Krateos,\" Mushussu growled.\n\nI tried to nudge past the Guardian drake, not wanting her advice, but she remained as firm and unmoving as a statue should be, refusing to let me go. I snarled and struck out repeatedly at her, but only succeeded in hurting a paw against her silver body.\n\n\"I do not entirely trust Maznar yet. If Krateos knows that she is his daughter, then he would have to bestow a position of some power on her. Are you certain she will only use that power for the good of dragonkind?\" she asked.\n\nBegrudgingly, although I didn't want her advice, Mushussu had raised a valid point, and for that alone I relented my pathetic attack on her unflinching silver scales. Could we trust Maznar, or was she Nightwings still? I sat back on my haunches and fanned my wings wide, trying to cool down as Mushussu eased away to give me a little more space. She remained standing between me and the archway out to the rest of the lair, but at least she gave me the room to move.\n\n\"I just think she deserves...\" I started to say, before something caught my eye. It had fallen amongst some of the fur rugs that coated the floor, but the Axinstone was unmistakable. The dragon's head on its surface burned brightly as I approached it.\n\n\"Be careful young ddraig,\" Mushussu said as I reached out a paw to touch the magical stone. The heat that emanated from the Axinstone tingled through the scales covering my paw. Whispers filled my mind. \"Bri'An, where are you Bri'An?\" Other voices spoke. Some I recognised; most I did not. The Axinstone faded from my sight, along with the rest of my chamber, as my vision was overtaken by flashing images of drakes; many, many drakes. Before I had a chance to identify any I saw, or even where they were, my vision had moved on to another.\n\nI tried to focus on one particular drake that kept flashing before my eyes, a large red dragon who was lying down in front of the great fire. I didn't know his name. No, what was I thinking? Earus was his name. How could I forget that? He tilted his head to the side and stared at me. \"Kyeara, are you alright?\"\n\n\"Who?\" I replied.\n\nI couldn't recall ever hearing that name before, but no... of course I had. She was my mate and had been for many years. I pawed at the ground. That shouldn't be something I could just fail to remember.\n\nThe dragoness shook her head and fluttered her wings. \"Sorry, I felt funny for a moment,\" she said. She slowly edged closer and pressed her head to mine. \"Something strange came over me. It almost felt like I was another drake for a moment.\" As my mate leant against me I briefly caught the eye of a green-scaled dragoness, Sierra, from across the other side of the chamber.\n\nI quickly looked away from the larger dragon, not wishing to confront him. I hadn't intended to meet his eyes, but he had glanced up from his mate unexpectedly. I growled before grabbing the strings of the salt bag, tightening it up with my teeth so nothing would spill. Taking the weight in my paws, I spread my wings and laboured my way up to the top of the grand chamber. My shoulders strained with the effort, but I slowly ascended up towards the surface. I couldn't take a straight route \u2013 drakes were flying in almost every direction, and I had to weave my way around them as they wouldn't move out of my way. I still needed to hurry though. If I took too long the hunters would start complaining. They needed the salt to preserve the fresh venison they had caught. Winter was coming, and our meat stores were almost empty.\n\nThe smaller passage that led out from the grand chamber was easier to fly through. I stayed right on the tail of another dragoness as she unknowingly cleared a path for me.\n\nThe salt bag knocked against a protrusion in the ground, unbalancing me. I only just caught my flight in time and avoided the humiliation of falling from the air.\n\nA dragoness bumped into me as she flew out towards the open sky. I snarled at her, but she didn't even seem to realise I was there. All her focus was on the bulging bag of salt she had gripped in her claws. I could have gone back to berate her for her inattention, but I had more important matters to deal with than a dragoness who couldn't control her burden.\n\nI looked up to the small opening beyond the unlit firepit. I shivered in anticipation. I had never been up there before, but now I had the perfect opportunity. The Nixan haeraig was up there, and I had a message that only she must hear.\n\nSlowly I walked away from my father. He was not coping with the decimation of our clan. There was nothing I could say to him that could help, so I had decided to leave him with his grief. I could only hope that he would once more, become the leader Nixa so desperately needed.\n\nI paused for a moment and put a paw against my head. There was an odd pressure there and I thought I could detect the faint scent of magic. Its touch was unfamiliar though, and there were few Nixans left alive whose particular magic I did not recognise. I shook my head. It was something I could worry about later.\n\nI felt bad for leaving Ddraig Anzig so suddenly; he had graciously opened up his clan to us when we needed it most. I was sure that with Clan Laxtal's assistance, and the power of the Axinstone which we had thankfully saved, we would...\n\nThe Axinstone! I had left it in Ddraig Anzig's chambers. I shrieked in dismay and horror. A Laxtal drake could not touch a thing of such power and hope to be unharmed. I sprinted back to the ddraig, hoping I would be able to stop him before he came into contact with it.\n\n\"Haeraig Zeena,\" a large red Laxtal dragon called out, his wings fluttering as he landed.\n\n\"Not now,\" I snarled, barging past him and knocking him from his paws before he could properly find his balance. I ignored his cry of protest. I had no time for common drakes right now.\n\nI burst unannounced into Ddraig Anzig's chambers to find that I was already too late. The ddraig was hunched over, with the Axinstone gripped tightly in his forepaws. His wings twitched fitfully, and though I couldn't see his face I knew he was in pain.\n\nA flash of silver streaked across my vision as I dived forward and shoved at the ddraig with all my strength. He was smaller than me, and I was able to push him hard enough that he was knocked back several feet. The Axinstone flew out of his paws as he smacked against the wall, a lot harder than I intended.\n\nI opened my eyes groggily. Everything hurt. My wings felt like I had flown for days without rest. My head was nothing but stabbing barbs of light; I was in agony. I couldn't even see anything but for the piercing white lights.\n\n\"Ddraig Anzig?\" Haeraig Zeena asked tentatively. A red mist started to form in the field of white. \"Are... are you alright?\"\n\n\"I saw...\" I started to say, before biting down on my tongue. What had I seen? I had been inside the mind and body of other drakes. Was this the true range of my magic? Could I really see and feel what others were experiencing? If this really was the case, then Haeraig Zeena could not know the truth. She obviously presumed that I had been injured by the Axinstone. She must believe that this is what had happened.\n\nI groaned and rolled over to my front, wishing the Nixan haeraig had been a little less forceful in pushing me away from the Axinstone. My sight was starting to clear. Haeraig Zeena was nervously standing a few feet away. She clutched the Axinstone to her chest, seemingly keeping it as far away from me as I could. \"His eyes... why were they white?\"\n\nParalysed with fear, I could do nothing as that thought echoed through my mind. Azlak's eyes turned white whenever he peered into the future.\n\n\"You said you saw something? What did you see?\" she asked in a tone that was a little harsher than she was entitled to use towards a ddraig.\n\nI still couldn't move, let alone speak. What was I going to say? She had seen my eyes turn white \u2013 surely a sign of magic. There was nothing I could say to deny that. I felt nauseous. I pushed my tongue against the inside of my teeth in an attempt to quell the feeling. Thinking it would be better to stand, I hauled myself upright and faced the Nixan. She had backed away as though in fear. Haeraig Zeena had nothing to be afraid of, not like I did.\n\n\"I...\"\n\nWe were interrupted by a large red dragon as he came bursting in unannounced. I almost whimpered with relief as the dragon ignored me and placed his paw on Haeraig Zeena's shoulder. The Nixan snarled and cuffed the dragon across the face, but he was not cowed so easily.\n\n\"Haeraig Zeena, I beg you to hear me. Isikian has requested your urgent attention,\" he said not waiting for her answer, but bowing his head to look at the Nixan's paws.\n\n\"Did he say why?\" Haeraig Zeena growled. The dragon quickly shook his head and backed away. The Nixan growled again, this time turning her ire on me. \"I think it is best if you wait here for me, Ddraig Anzig. Something isn't right here, and I want to know what.\"\n\nBefore I knew what I was saying, I found myself agreeing to the haeraig's demand. I stayed silent as I watched her leave with the Laxtal dragon, who no doubt could not believe he had heard his ddraig submit to the demands of a haeraig. I knew I would still be here when she returned, no matter how long she took.\n\nOnce they were both out of sight, I whimpered aloud, and curled up in the pile of furs in the corner; I was weak. I had succumbed to the orders of a haeraig in the presence of another Laxtal dragon. Surely that would spread, but this humiliation would be nothing compared to what I would face when Haeraig Zeena returned. What could I say to her that would allow me to hide my magic? She seemed determined to get to the truth of the matter, but I knew I had to be equally determined not allow her. More questions would be coming, and doubts cast about my ability to lead Laxtal. With Ellian away in the south, there would be no one else I could trust to rule the clan in my stead.\n\n\"You really think it will come to that?\" Mushussu asked. I didn't look up, but I could hear her metallic body move closer.\n\n\"Of course it will,\" I replied. I had no doubt in my mind. How could the Guardian not see that? Apart from the short time the clan had been held in servitude by Tsona's rule, a Laxtal drake had always ruled this clan. A Laxtal drake could not though, possess magic. My blood was pure Laxtal, but it would mean nothing if my magic became common knowledge.\n\n\"But is it?\" Mushussu whispered.\n\nI half rose to my paws before freezing in place. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nMushussu paced the chamber; I noticed for the first time she eerily cast no shadow. Her featureless silver eyes were looking elsewhere, never looking in my direction. She was more restless than I had ever seen her. Several times she started to speak, only to hiss and shake her head. I silently waited for her to reply. My paws were starting to go numb, as I sat frozen, too scared to even move, as I awaited her response.\n\nFinally the Guardian stopped, and turned her head to me, her cold lifeless orbs burning deep, deep into my very being. \"Listen to my words Ddraig Anzig. Carlee was right. Astar is not your father. Zhara was barren. She was not your mother. Where exactly your egg came from, I do not know. Astar made me swear never to search for that information in his mind, and I honoured the vow I made,\" she said quickly.\n\n\"So you're saying I am not Laxtal?\" I whispered, or did I think it? I was not sure of anything at this moment. I wrapped my tail around my legs and only with a great effort was I able to keep my head raised.\n\nMushussu shook her head. \"You may be. But of that, I am not certain. I will though, say this young dragon; you do not look like a Laxtal dragon. Your horns and tail are too short,\" she said with too much mirth in her voice for my liking.\n\nNow it was my turn to splutter and choke over my words. I had tried to ignore that fact ever since Carlee had died, but now Mushussu had said it aloud I could no longer avoid it. If Astar and Zhara were not my parents, then I had no way of knowing my true lineage. It wasn't like Azlak, who knew without a doubt that his parents were Laxtal. He knew he belonged in this clan, even if his magic did make him somewhat of an anomaly. I no longer knew where I belonged, because surely it was not here.\n\nOnce again I curled up, not wanting to see or speak to anyone. \"Just leave me alone,\" I told the Guardian. I doubted she could leave my chambers, but if she kept silent and still I could at least pretend she was not with me.\n\nCold air seeped into the chamber since Haeraig Zeena had taken away the Axinstone. Too numb with fear to light a fire, I could do nothing but shiver in the pile of rugs, which seemed to be doing their utmost to allow the chilled air in. I wasn't even sure if the cold was real or an illusion created by the absence of magic, but I was powerless to resist it. As though trying to escape the reality of my waking thoughts, I found myself slipping towards sleep, and I closed my eyes for just a moment.\n\n\"Aah, Little One. I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Ellian",
                "text": "It had been four days since Airil had fallen from the sky, writhing in agony. We had been flying low to the ground, so he was lucky he wasn't hurt in the fall, but I'd been forced to watch helplessly as he thrashed around in the grass, fighting some invisible demon. When he had finally been able to draw breath he was still unable to speak for several minutes. He sat on his haunches and wailed and shrieked in frustration up at the clouded sky. Finally, he was calmed down enough to tell me what had happened. The story he told me terrified me. I couldn't believe that Nixa could be destroyed so quickly. I had been tempted to turn and return straight to Laxtal, but Airil had convinced me to fly on. Now, more than ever, dragonkind needed unity.\n\nDdraig Corant of Clan Eivas had presented us with no issues before confirming his allegiance to Clan Laxtal's cause. He had promised us five hundred drakes to fly north and bolster my clan's growing army. We had mentioned nothing of Clan Nixa's fate, expecting that such news would cause the ddraig to reconsider his pledge. We had flown on without incident, and headed straight for the borders of Clan Kern in the south. Another of the ruling clans, I hoped that if they allied with us it would persuade the surrounding minor clans to join us.\n\nLike Laxtal, Kern was a flat land with little to break the monotony of the landscape. There were few trees, but the grass that grew here was thick, with plenty of grazing animals to hunt.\n\nI had been to the Kern lair a few times before, and though it was underground like Laxtal, the caves were quite different. Located just below the ground were long, winding tube-like caves, radiating out from a central point. When I had first come to the lair many years ago, I had been taught how the caves had been formed from ancient lava flows that had literally melted the less hardy stone as it was forced under great pressure through natural fissures branching out from the Xital mountain.\n\nAs we reached the lair, it was obvious that we had not been spotted. No dragon scout had intercepted us as we drew near, and we were able to choose our own landing point. Descending from the sky, we landed near a gaping, jagged hole in bare rock that penetrated through to the caves below. My wings ached as I folded them to my sides, grateful that my paws were now supporting my weight. Dozens of drakes were lying in the evening sun, taking in the last of the heat before night fell. None reacted to our presence, not until I roused the nearest dragoness with a not-so gentle nudge with a paw.\n\n\"What?\" she asked sleepily, before noticing the azure stone around my neck. She yelped as she leapt to her paws, while in the same movement keeping her head bowed to the ground. She stumbled and almost fell to the ground again. I had to suppress a small chuckle, so comical was her actions. But, equally, so concerning that two dragons could approach unnoticed.\n\n\"I am Haeraig Ellian of Laxtal. I need to speak to your ddraig immediately,\" I said.\n\nThe dragoness glanced through upturned eyes at Airil as he stood by my side, as her snout brushed through the lush grasses. \"Of course, Haeraig, as you command. It will be my honour to escort you to my ddraig's chambers,\" she said quickly, spreading her wings ready to fly. As I unfurled my weary wings I reminded myself that this would only be a short flight and soon would have the opportunity to rest them properly. With Airil on my tail, we took to the air, only to immediately swoop down into the lair. This initial descent, I had learned from my previous lessons, had been caused by lava fracturing to the surface; it was to be the only steep dive or climb in our journey within Kern's lair.\n\nOur guide was unerring as she took us through the wide caves. They certainly didn't appear natural, as the blackened stone was carved into an almost perfectly smooth-sided circle, but for a series of small grooves and ridges that ran horizontal along the sides. The floor, and partway up the sides, were coated in moss, fed by water that trickled down from large stalactites on the ceiling. Everything smelt damp. Unlike most underground lairs, these caves didn't dip deep underground, instead remaining almost level. There was no large central chamber, just a convergence of the winding tubes.\n\nThe ddraig's chamber was fairly close to the lair's entrance, and it was only a few minutes before the dragoness landed. She asked us to kindly wait, and she slipped through a narrow crack in the wall. Firelight flickered out through the small gap, and I could hear the voices of at least three drakes abruptly stop. There was a brief pause, before the dragoness returned with an emerald-scaled dragon who I knew not to be the ddraig of Kern.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian, we have been expecting your visit. I'm Haeraig Arath. Would you care to join me in my chambers close by?\" he rumbled with a small bow of his head. Though Kern was one of the ruling clans, they were not on equal standing with Laxtal. We were still considered to be greatly superior, and as such the Kern haeraig was required to show respect towards me. However, this was still far from the courtesy I had received in Eivas.\n\nThe haeraig led the way through to his chambers. Like the ddraig's, they were situated through a small crack in the side of the curved cave. After about ten paces, the crack widened out, forming a small chamber. Unlike the smooth, moss-laden walls of the tube caves, the chamber walls were rough and uneven. I could see claw marks in the walls where it had been created by draconic paws. It was a humble dwelling for the haeraig of a ruling clan, but Arath didn't show any embarrassment for the state of his chamber. Instead he set himself to lighting a fire in a small alcove, using a human-made gas device, ones that had become sparse in Laxtal.\n\nOnly once the fire had kindled on the stack of dry branches did Haeraig Arath turn and face us. \"I am sorry you were unable to see Ddraig Lorkan, but she is already in an important discussion,\" he said.\n\nI gasped in fear. \"Clan Xital?\" Were we already too late?\n\nHaeraig Arath dismissed my concerns as he laughed loudly. \"No, no, of course not! Xital has no business here. We have already chased away one of their emissaries. A group of nomads came to the lair a couple of weeks ago and told us everything that is happening to the north. One of the dragons, Mulner if I remember correctly, told us of Xital's treachery, and that we should have nothing to do with them.\"\n\nIt was almost impossible to hide the joy I felt at hearing news of my brother, and that he had become so active in helping the rebellion against Xital. I did wonder though, what had finally convinced him to take action.\n\n\"If I may, who is Ddraig Lorkan speaking with?\" Airil asked, lowering his head respectfully towards the Kern haeraig.\n\n\"Ddraig Boruc of Vatrea,\" Arath said, much to my surprise. Vatrea was a fairly minor clan in the distant east, and that journey would have taken many weeks. Ddraig Boruc would have needed a good reason to fly such a distance. I had never met the Vatrean ddraig, but had heard a lot of him from a few Laxtal drakes. It would be most beneficial if I was able to speak with him before we left. Judging from Airil's excited leap, he too would be keen to meet the ddraig.\n\nHaeraig Arath smiled as he looked between the two of us. All of his teeth were showing and his eyes twinkled with excitement. \"I know, I know. I can tell quite easily what you are seeking. We've known this discussion would happen for quite some time now.\"\n\n\"So will Clan Kern join us in the fight against Xital?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Of course,\" Haeraig Arath said, bowing his head. \"And what's more, we have already sent emissaries out to the nearby clans. All we lacked was your presence to confirm the terms of the alliance. If Ddraig Tsona didn't think we were serious before, he will now that four of the ruling clans have risen up against him.\"\n\nAgain, I chose not mention that the human army had already destroyed one of those ruling clans. Airil wisely also kept quiet.\n\nIf Haeraig Arath noticed any discomfort he didn't comment on it, and he continued with barely a pause. \"Ddraig Lorkan has already allowed two thousand drakes to fly north. They're preparing in anticipation of an instruction to fly to be issued, and will be able to leave tomorrow if so ordered.\"\n\n\"Your assistance is most appreciated, Haeraig Arath,\" I said, pleased that the task set for me by my ddraig had been completed. If Kern had indeed already sent emissaries to the other southern clans, then there was little left for me to do before returning to Laxtal. It had been just over a week since leaving, but I was looking forward to my triumphant return home.\n\nWe continued talking for a further half hour, determining some of the finer points of the alliance between the clans. Haeraig Arath didn't ask for much for his clan, just for some help in minor disputes that had broken out on their borders, as well as assistance in planning the carving out of a new lair towards their southern borders. I was happy to grant these requests as they seemed to be small payment for two thousand drakes and a more secure southern border.\n\nOnce we had finished our discussions, Haeraig Arath took his leave to check if his ddraig was ready to see us. I was fairly confident Haeraig Arath had discussed everything, and the ddraig would have nothing further to add.\n\n\"That went rather well,\" Airil said brightly. He placed a paw on mine. By mutual silent agreement, we hadn't discussed Ddraig Bakucic's comment back in Lilisxi, but this was the first time he had made deliberate contact with me since.\n\nAgain that flutter of nerves I felt whenever I looked into his eyes. It didn't feel like a challenge when I met his gaze, and neither of us felt obligated to look away first. It was something I had never experienced with another drake before. Even with Vinzent, every time we spoke it was as though he was challenging me to accept his opinion, his position on a matter.\n\nIt was the Nixan who broke the silence once more. \"You know, I've been thinking...\"\n\nWhat Airil had been thinking had to wait, as we were interrupted by Haeraig Arath's return. He was accompanied by two other drakes. One was an old red-scaled dragoness with scarred and tattered wings. I knew her as the Ddraig Lorkan, and I bowed my head respectfully, but it was the dragon who came in just behind her that caught my eye and piqued my interest.\n\nIf Ddraig Lorkan appeared old, then the dragon by her side was ancient. Ddraig Boruc's scales were grey, but the splotches of deeper black gave the impression that they had faded over time. He moved extremely slowly and with great care. It was his eyes though, that held the greatest indication to his venerable age. Even though they gleefully sparkled, in the brief moment I was able to hold his gaze, I could see the knowledge and memories from more years than I could even have imagined.\n\n\"Haeraig Ellian, it is a pleasure to meet you finally,\" Ddraig Lorkan said, bending a knee slightly as she bowed. \"I trust my son has informed you of all you need to know?\"\n\n\"He has, Ddraig Lorkan. We are most grateful for the terms we have been offered, and are honoured to gratefully accept them,\" I replied, dragging my gaze away from Ddraig Boruc.\n\n\"I am glad to hear it, Haeraig,\" Ddraig Lorkan said \"I apologise but I am unable to stay talk further, as much as I would wish it. I have other duties to attend. I shall seek you out and formally confirm our alliance tomorrow. Until then, my son can show you the way to the guest chambers for tonight. Ddraig Boruc, can you remember the way to your chambers?\"\n\nDdraig Boruc laughed. \"I'm not that old, Ddraig Lorkan. I can remember the way just fine,\" he said. His voice was surprisingly musical, and not at all the crackling, dried up old voice I had expected him to have.\n\nAfter Ddraig Lorkan had taken her leave, Ddraig Boruc offered to guide us towards the guest chambers instead, a task which Haeraig Arath was grateful to relinquish to him. The old dragon smiled as he led me out of the haeraig's chambers, with an excited Airil followed just behind.\n\n\"I hope you don't mind if we stay on paw,\" Ddraig Boruc said as we emerged back out into the wide caves. Neither of us offered objections, as my wings were sore from the flight here, and I imagined Airil would be similarly tired. Then Ddraig Boruc paused and surprised me by turning in front of me and bowing, bowing so low he accidently bumped his chin on the mossy ground.\n\n\"I would like to formally introduce myself. I am Ddraig Boruc of Vatrea. I doubt you remember me, but I do recognise you Haeraig Ellian. I have seen you once before, many years ago. And you,\" the ddraig said, turning his head towards Airil. \"Show me your paw. No, not that one. May I see the other one?\" Airil quickly obliged by dropping his left paw back to the mossy floor and raised his right forepaw for the old dragon to inspect. \"Of course, Airil. I thought it was you.\"\n\nAiril blinked a few times in shock. \"You remember me, Ddraig?\"\n\nDdraig Boruc chuckled as he turned started to walk slowly along the passageway, along presumably I hoped, to the guest chambers. \"My dear young dragon,\" he spoke to the empty passage in front of him, \"I may well be old, but I have quite the memory. I never forget a face, and though you share yours with your brother, I still remember when you lost a claw.\"\n\nI paced up to Ddraig Boruc's side, marvelling at his memory. I wondered what else he knew, how many memories he had, that no other drake could recall? Did he perhaps have some secret locked away, that would help us win this war? Though I wanted to ask, I felt a little intimidated in his presence. He may be a ddraig from a minor clan, but I could not imagine this dragon submitting to anyone, for any reason. I didn't know what gave me that impression, but there was something about him that seemed greater than any drake I had ever met.\n\nThe drakes of Kern certainly recognised who this ancient dragon was, as any drake that approached along the cavern floor, moved aside and paused their journey long before we reached them. All bowed their heads as Ddraig Boruc passed, whilst somewhat less attention and courtesy was afforded to Airil and I, even with the Laxtal stone hung around my neck.\n\n\"Why are you here, Ddraig Boruc?\" Airil asked.\n\nThe ddraig didn't answer immediately. His attention was momentarily captured by an orange patch of spiky moss growing on the rock as he ambled along. His head turned almost onto his back as he focused on the strange growth in the rock. Just before I felt he would tumble from his most awkward position, his eyes finally broke free, and he slowly turned his head away, back down the passage. \"I am here because I need to be here,\" he said eventually. \"That is kha'loi moss and comes from somewhere far to the south and west. It is quite, quite poisonous,\" he added, more to the empty tunnel ahead, than to his slightly bemused companions. We walked slowly beneath the lair's jagged opening to the surface; the sky overhead still held a little blue, but reds and oranges crept in, signalling nightfall. The sun's rays had long since left even the shallow depths of the entrance, and a chill lifted off the permanently damp rock. \"But soon I need to fly north. If you are returning to Laxtal tomorrow then I would like join you. Once before has dragonkind been in this much danger, and that six hundred years past.\"\n\n\"What happened then, Ddraig?\" Airil's voice was a quiet whisper, as though we were speaking about forbidden secrets.\n\nDdraig Boruc stopped abruptly. His shivered, sending a ripple long his spine; his tail tip snapping aloud as it flicked violently. He lowered and half-turned his head to Airil, squeezing his eyes tightly shut. From the grimace on his face, it was obvious he was reliving a painful memory. \"Fire. Pain. Death. The cataclysm was terrifying, and those few that did were lucky to escape it.\"\n\n\"And we face this same danger now?\" I asked.\n\n\"No. A different danger, but the threat is the same. Lose, and we face annihilation. But I do not wish to discuss such grim topics with you,\" the ddraig said, his tone changing mid-sentence. Suddenly, it was as though he had broken free from a trance. Gone was the pain in his eyes, gone the wracking within his body, only. Moving off, he raised his head to look at the pink-tinged sky before we passed beneath the stalactite-encrusted rock again.\n\nAiril cleared his throat and tried to speak to the old Vatrean a couple of times. Ddraig Boruc smiled politely as he waited for the Nixan, who eventually blurted out, \"Ddraig, Kaz told me you taught him some of our old language.\"\n\nDdraig Boruc's chest swelled in pride. \"That I did, yes. I'm the only drake who can still speak our noble tongue fluently. Ever since the cataclysm we have spoken human language and have all but forgotten our own. Only sad reminders linger on. Perhaps someday I will teach you. It pays to know draconic history.\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" I replied. I knew that we had once always spoken our own language, but I had never heard why we had stopped. It would be exciting to know more. A piece of draconic history for me to share. \"Perhaps on the flight back to Laxtal?\"\n\nDdraig Boruc's smile grew wider, until it revealed all of his teeth. \"An eager student? It has been a long while since I have had one of those from beyond my clan borders, apart from your brother, Airil.\" He unfurled his wings and held them over us. \"If you are willing to learn, I am willing to teach. Anything you ever wanted to know about our history is here,\" he said, tapping the side of his head with his wing tip.\n\n\"Just how much do you know?\" I asked in awe.\n\nDdraig Boruc's smile and eyes turned sad. \"Sometimes I think I know too much. Some memories I wish could be purged. I have paid a heavy price for this knowledge. My biggest regret was my son, Tsoren.\" He sighed and smiled wryly again, the darkness from his eyes cleared. \"But that is in the past. The past it is for old minds to worry over, not young ones. Look to the future with excitement.\"\n\nHe stopped outside a narrow gap in the side wall, formed with draconic claws. \"These are my chambers. I believe the one opposite are intended for your use. Please forgive me, I would talk longer, but I am an old dragon who needs to rest. Tomorrow I will get to know both of you a lot better,\" he said. He placed a paw on Airil's shoulder. \"I have lived long enough to know that fate and destiny have no bearing in this world. Gods and mortals speak of such thing, but none can wield it. I have though, learnt to recognise greatness amongst my fellow drakes. You both remind me of great people I have met and grown fond of.\"\n\nI bowed my head in response to the ddraig's kind words, noticing Airil do the same to my side. I didn't know what great drakes he was comparing us to, but I was flattered by his praise. We bade the ancient clan leader a good night and let him retire to recover from his long journey in peace.\n\nThough I was tempted to go and hunt, I succumbed to Airil's request to head straight into the guest chambers. My hunger could wait and my wings would be grateful for the respite. Besides, I didn't really want to be on my own without Airil.\n\nThe small cavern that had been set aside for visiting drakes was similar to the haeraig's chambers, in that it was small and roughly hewn by draconic claws. There was a small store of dry wood set aside near an alcove that had been charred black. A few thin blankets covered part of the uneven floor.\n\nAiril moved the blankets over in front of the alcove whilst I struggled to light the fire using one of the small human-made lighters. Warmth quickly permeated through the little chamber, though the smoke didn't disperse too well, due no doubt to the shallow angle of the outside passageway. Airil settled down on the blankets and held his wing out, ready for me to lie by his side. I quickly obliged, and he held me tight with both leg and wing. For a while we were content to just stare into the flickering fire, entranced by the beauty and the energy we saw in the red and amber light.\n\n\"Ellian, I've been thinking,\" Airil said, before pausing again. I could feel his head moving behind me, looking towards the chamber's exit, as though expecting an interruption. We heard nothing, but still he didn't continue straight away. His paw sought out mine and clenched it tightly. \"I know I'm not of your clan, but... I've never been happier than when I fly with you. Would... Would you consider being my mate?\"\n\n\"Do you mean that?\" I demanded. The words were harsher than I intended. My heart had started to beat wildly, but I had to be sure. Especially after the last time a dragon had asked me that question.\n\nAiril's grip tightened on my paw. \"Of course I do,\" he said, resting his snout against my cheek. \"What sort of fool would say that and not mean it?\"\n\nI laughed in relief. \"What sort of fool indeed,\" I said, not wanting to think about Vinzent anymore. That pain was behind me. I broke out of his grip so I could face him, looking into his yellow eyes. \"Yes, Airil. Of course I will.\"\n\nHe cried out in joy, pushing his snout against mine and holding me in his forelegs. He was trembling. \"I was so afraid you'd say no,\" he whispered.\n\n\"And what sort of fool would say that?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Azlak",
                "text": "Kaz had been pestering me from almost the moment the surviving Nixans had landed. Finally I had given in and sought out Inilta so we could descend into the caves below Laxtal. It would be better to get it over and done with as soon as possible. Though I knew it could well be important, some part of me didn't want to know what was down there. Just because it was powerful didn't mean it could help us.\n\nInilta was initially reluctant to leave his clan mates, especially so soon after the catastrophe that had befallen them, but at his brother's insistence he joined us. We decided not to tell Ddraig Anzig where we were going, but instead asked Isikian to inform the ddraig after we had entered the lower caves. Kaz said he didn't want to interrupt what was 'most likely an important meeting', but I was sure he was quietly afraid of being told he couldn't go.\n\n\"So, tell me. Why are we doing this again?\" Inilta asked as we flew down towards the deeper caverns of the lair.\n\n\"Finding something of immense power,\" Kaz chirped. He had taken the lead of the three of us, and I marvelled at how he could remember the way.\n\n\"And why did you need me?\" Inilta said with a snarl.\n\n\"Because Azlak Saw you down there with us. We couldn't go down there without you, that's why\" Kaz said.\n\nInilta growled and groaned at the same time. \"This again.\" Because of my visions he had already been forced to fly out into human territory and back. I doubted he was keen to follow them once more, but he didn't turn back. He stayed by my wing and flew on. I felt like he had more to say, and when he did speak again his voice cracked. \"Nataik didn't make it.\"\n\n\"What?\" I yelped. That was not something I had Seen.\n\n\"We never found her body. She must have\u2026 must\u2026 been caught in the explosion,\" Inilta spat out. His head was well below the level of his wings. \"I just\u2026 wanted you to know.\"\n\n\"I should've Seen it, Inilta.\"\n\nKaz landed as we reached the fissure that led down to the great underground river.\n\n\"No one did. Don't blame yourself for it,\" Inilta said gruffly, landing by Kaz's side. The darkness seemed to swell from the small gap, reaching out towards us. I shrank back, but Kaz nosed forwards until the blackness consumed him. Inilta followed right behind, leaving me alone. For a moment I lingered. I considered if it would be worthwhile flying back to Ddraig Anzig and telling him of Nataik's fate.\n\n\"Are you coming or what?\" Kaz's voice echoed out of the darkness. A flash of blue light sparked into life. I darted in after them. Ddraig Krateos or Haeraig Zeena would soon inform Ddraig Anzig.\n\nA tiny ball of blue flames bobbed above Inilta's head, lit our path ahead. I had never seen the caves below Laxtal illuminated before. What had just been impenetrable darkness, now became an array of colour and reflections. What ghosts would we find in this new light?\n\nWe were on a small ledge that clung to the edge of a gigantic chamber that seemed to stretch on forever. It was large enough that Inilta's flame failed to reach the far side. About fifty feet below was the surface of the river. The black water churned and frothed as it rushed over the uneven rocks. For now, I couldn't feel the eerie magical presence, but was sure it wouldn't be long before it revealed itself.\n\nKaz ran a paw along the cavern wall before calling out. His claws had traced an engraving in the rock. \"Gaxaga,\" he read out, before frowning in concentration. He hissed in frustration. \"I don't know what that means.\"\n\n\"It could mean danger,\" Inilta huffed, but he leaned over Kaz's shoulder to peer closer at the engraving. \"What language is that?\"\n\n\"It's draconic. That means these words are six hundred years old at least,\" Kaz said proudly. He slowly worked his way further down the ledge as it started to slope downwards. Other words were written into the rock every few feet, but Kaz wasn't able to identify any of them.\n\nI glanced up to the flickering ball of flame that shone along the narrow crevice we had squeezed through. Up there was warmth and comfort, and most of all, safety. I couldn't See anything specific, but I kept feeling the sensation that there was something down here that we shouldn't disturb. I couldn't be sure if we were walking into danger or not. While Inilta may have shared some of my doubts, Kaz was completely unconcerned. He had descended even further and rounded an outcrop in the wall, vanishing from sight.\n\n\"Hey, this one's different,\" Kaz called out from the darkness. Inilta moved down to join the other Nixan, and for a moment I was left without any light to see by. I yelped in terror and quickly ran down the ledge, not stopping until I ran into Inilta. The larger dragon snorted in amusement.\n\nKaz ignored both of us as he continued to study this new word. I edged around Inilta to get a better look, and right away I could also see that these symbols were different. The other words had all been weathered away by time and were almost gone, but these were cut deep. They were fresher.\n\n\"It looks like a name. Definitely not draconic,\" Kaz said, backing away half a step before reading it aloud. \"Bri'An.\"\n\nI shrieked as a pulse of white light burst out from somewhere off in the darkness, assaulting me not only with its brightness, but also a wave of pure magic. Heat tingled along my scales and I staggered to the side as I became disorientated, almost stumbling off the ledge. Only the quick-acting Kaz saved me from the dark depths below as he pulled back on my tail.\n\n\"What was that?\" I asked in horror. I shook my head and blinked several times in a vain attempt to rid my mind of the white afterimages that remained burnt into my eyes. It wasn't the white light that concerned me, but the shape it outlined. It was the shape of a human.\n\nIf either of the Nixans were startled, they did their best to hide it. Kaz just grinned. \"What we came here to find. Magic,\" he said with an excited hiss. He looked up to Inilta. \"Ready to go on?\"\n\nInilta's paws smouldered as flames started to build up around them. He took a step forward, burning away eons of dust that crackled and fizzed where his paws touched the rock. \"It was the name that triggered the magic,\" he said. I didn't like his mischievous smile, as he looked in my direction. \"Now, what was it again?\"\n\n\"Don't say it,\" I said, knowing what he was about to do.\n\nHe ignored me. \"Bri'An.\"\n\nAgain the light burst forth from the dark distance, a lot more intense, but this time it wasn't only white. There were more colours than I could have ever imagined, but in a moment it too vanished. Darkness returned to the cavern again, all but for the comparatively dim glow from Inilta's magic.\n\n\"I think that's where we need to go,\" Kaz said, nodding his head in the direction from where the light had emanated from. I didn't understand how he could still be so positive about everything. How could he still be so courageous? The display of light and magic had stripped me of my confidence. Only a token sense of pride pushed me into motion, to follow the two Nixans. That, and not wanting to be left alone with nothing but the darkness for company. I believed my fear to be greater than my pride, and was beginning to regret this journey already.\n\nOther than the sound of the river, which increased the more we descended, there was nothing else to be heard. No bats sounded their presence in the black cavern. This was a dead, ancient place. But for whoever \u2013 or whatever \u2013 had carved the name Bri'An into the wall, I wouldn't have been surprised if we were the only living things to walk this narrow ledge in centuries. We were less than one hundred feet in from the lair, but the isolation I felt down here was almost suffocating. Even the air felt heavy. Every step we took the air chilled more, and the darkness grew darker, more intense.\n\nI could feel the magic now, a constant throbbing in the back of my mind. I tried to ignore it, as I tried forgetting the darkness that seemed intent on extinguishing Inilta's light. It was there, pushing close but never quite able to touch us. But Inilta's magic was no longer the only light. A faint golden glow emerged from the darkness, the source of which was unclear. Each step we took, the glow battled with us against the black void around us. The light was almost directly in front of us.\n\nKaz bounded ahead with obvious eagerness, pausing only to inspect scratches in the rock. He found no more words carved into the wall, but that did nothing to dampen his excitement. Behind him, Inilta plodded without enthusiasm, but grim determination. He showed no fear as he followed his fellow Nixan. I scampered some distance behind, taking care not to stay out of the shadows but never confident enough to walk by the side of the Nixans.\n\nThe mysterious glow afforded us wondrous sights; high above us the rock glistened as Inilta's light mingled with it, revealing massive stalactites hanging down, each dripping with water. I had never ones so big before, as almost reached all the way down to the river below. Then something metallic caught my eye. I ran ahead and placed a paw heavily down on Inilta's tail.\n\nHe leapt into the air, pulling his tail free, as he snarled, spinning around with claws ready to strike me. \"What?\" he growled as he lowered his paw. Was he was more scared than he was letting us know?\n\n\"Up there, look,\" I said, pointing with my wing up to the metallic structure, almost completely walled in by the mass of stalactites. Shrouded in shadow, I couldn't make it out, but Inilta's eyes were sharper than mine.\n\n\"It's a torch sconce,\" the Nixan said, tilting his head to the side. \"But it's massive. I've never seen one that big before. It could hold a whole tree.\"\n\n\"Uh, you're going to want to look at this,\" Kaz said from further down the small path. For the first time his voice quavered as a touch of fear was evident. Curiosity, excitement, as well as fear, forced me forward, to see what had caught Kaz's attention. What I saw was unexpected. Carved out of the rock on the other side of the river was a giant edifice of stone, inset with metal. It looked almost like a human castle, even down to the wide bridge that crossed the deep chasm over to it. A gaping black hole served as a doorway, and must have been some thirty or forty feet high, and double that wide. On the lintel above the great doorway were a more lines of writing, burnt into the rock in reddish-gold, like lava bubbling on its surface.\n\n\"Aysh saagrax Laxtal. Kxi siletta jy tso ddraggn. Gryphon se ddren grrndala si,\" Kaz read out.\n\n\"And what does it mean?\" I asked, looking up at the burning letters in wonder. I was entranced by the way they constantly moved, while never once losing their meaning or form.\n\n\"I... I have no idea,\" Kaz admitted. Like me, the Nixan couldn't tear his eyes away from the fiery lettering, but Inilta's attention was not quite so high.\n\n\"There's someone down there,\" he said, pointing with his wing.\n\nMy eyes drifted down to where the Nixan was indicating. In the shadows at the bottom of the edifice was the shape of a human, slumped again the wall. It didn't appear to have seen us, but we all shrank back and Inilta dimmed this magic flame-ball. Still there was no movement, nothing at all to indicate the human knew we were there. We had not made any effort to hide our presence before; surely the human must have heard us?\n\nKaz crept forward again. \"Hello?\" he yelled out. His voice echoed around the vast chamber, returning back to us several times before being away sucked into the black abyss.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I hissed, pulling the Nixan back. I panicked as I looked down towards the human, expecting it to turn and face us. Still, nothing. No movement at all.\n\n\"I think the human is dead,\" Kaz said, grinning widely.\n\nInilta sniffed his displeasure, but started to move forward again. Once more the ball of fire above his head blazed brightly as his fears diminished.\n\nThe bridge that crossed the dark river was part of a stone road. I had no idea where it led to as I had not seen anything similar in Laxtal. Maybe it never surfaced, or had collapsed further down. These lands were meant to be untouched by human influence, but I could think of nothing else to explain this. Only pitch darkness met my eyes as I looked away from the mysterious structure. The road was made of a different type of stone than that of the cave. It was lighter grey in colour, and whilst it was generally smoother, I could see large grooves in the side of every slab.\n\n\"Claw marks,\" Inilta said, placing his whole paw inside just one of the grooves.\n\n\"How is that possible?\" I whispered. There was only one creature I knew of with claws that big. This place was ancient, so surely Nightwings had nothing to do with this?\n\nInilta shook his head and turned away. It was a puzzle for another time. First we needed to find the source of the magic and see if it could aid us in some way. Kaz had already crossed the bridge and was starting to sift through some of the debris there. By the look of it, a rock fall had occurred at some point, as small boulders littered the wide shelf between the bridge and doorway.\n\nNow that we were closer, I could see, but not smell, that the human was dead. It was a female that much was clear, made obvious from her garments and hair. She was lying twisted against the rock, with a small knife impaled through her clothes to where her heart would have been. On her skin were faded patterns of yellow strings of light that had been painted onto her flesh. I had never seen any human with such markings before. Her eyes stared listlessly into the darkness.\n\nI followed her dead gaze to look upon a small opening in the rock just beside the massive doorway. It appeared to lead through to a small antechamber. As Kaz and Inilta quietly talked to each other, discussing whether or not to go on or turn back, I padded across to the antechamber and poked my nose inside. The roughly hewn walls certainly weren't natural, but this chamber was marked by small chips from human tools, not from the claws of drakes or other such creatures. At first I thought the square room was empty, but then something caught my eye. Lying in the middle of the floor was a small shard of jagged rock. At first I thought the impossible; how could the Axinstone be here? Coming to my senses, I quickly realised it couldn't be the Nixan artefact.\n\nI reached out to touch the small stone and felt a pulse of magic as my paw came into contact with the rough stone. I yelped and leapt back, causing the stone to flip over, revealing a burning symbol of a leopard's head carved into the shard.\n\nKaz and Inilta came running when they heard my cry, and in just a moment they had come into the small chamber.\n\n\"Is that the...?\" Kaz asked.\n\nI tentatively picked the stone up in my paw, feeling none of the power that the Axinstone possessed. But for the slightest tingle, it was without magic. \"No, it's not the Axinstone. It doesn't have a drake's head,\" I explained, showing the two dragons the fiery leopard head that distinguished it from the Nixan artefact. This was something altogether different.\n\n\"What is it then?\" Inilta asked, gently taking the shard of rock from me, turning it over and over in his paws. He found nothing of interest and passed it back to me.\n\n\"I don't know, but there's nothing else in here,\" I said. I was almost disappointed. This small shard of rock was not the source of the waves of magic that had blinded us so, but I was convinced it had to be close by; I could still feel the pressure the unknown power was exerting on my mind. While Inilta and Kaz went back to searching the wide shelf, I sauntered back towards the mysterious body of the woman, keeping the shard of rock in my paw. There was something strange about this woman, but I couldn't place what it was.\n\nI put the rock just to one side, where I could still see it, and edged closer to the woman. A slight heat came off her. That couldn't be right. If she was dead, then why was her body warm with life? And why was there no trace of any blood around the knife embedded in her heart? Without realising what I was doing, I reached out to touch her chest.\n\n\"What are you doing Azlak?\" Kaz called out. I pulled my paw away as though shocked. In the brief contact I had with the corpse, I had felt power beyond anything I had experienced. The might of the Axinstone paled to insignificance compared to the strength of magic within this human's body.\n\n\"It's her. The human is the source,\" I called out.\n\nI only half-heard Inilta and Kaz's confused voices as my attention focused on the human. I hesitantly touched the knife. The black handle felt as though it made from heavy stone and was ice-cold to the touch. My body tensed as I prepared to do something foolish.\n\n\"Are you sure, Azlak?\" Kaz asked uncertainly.\n\n\"No,\" I replied, before pulling sharply on the knife.\n\nI fell back onto the floor as the obsidian knife came free of the human's chest. For a moment I just lay there, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The body just slumped over a bit more.\n\n\"Well that was\u2026\" Inilta started to say, before he was interrupted by a howling wind. The noise was deafening. The erupting storm was centred on the human's body; the shadows seemed to be pulled closer as swirls of light and darkness were pulled into the growing vortex.\n\nI scrambled to my paws and tried to stand up, but the strength of the magic was too strong, and I was blown over onto my side. I fell sharply onto the shard and felt it slip under my scales.\n\nAs suddenly as it began, with one last thunderclap of noise the vortex vanished. It left no trace of its presence. All was calm and still again. The only sound was the river.\n\n\"What was that?\" Inilta snarled. His wings were unfurled and he was looking back to find the ledge we had come down.\n\nI hadn't moved. This wasn't over yet. I could feel that the shard hadn't gone too deep, but was distracted by something stronger than pain. Magical energy was growing all around us.\n\nA light started to flash, just above the human's head. First it was white, but then it started to change to other colours. I shuffled back a few steps, plucking the stone from my side. Whatever it was, I wanted to keep it if I could, even if just to find out what it was. I winced slightly as it came free, but was more intrigued about what was going on in front of me.\n\nThe light grew and expanded until it filled the whole cavern. It was fierce, but never blinding or painful. The light flashed and swirled, creating a mesmerising mixture of colour and energy. I tried to find patterns, but failed. There seemed to be no source; it emanated from nowhere, yet danced off every surface it touched. I glanced back at my companions. They too were glowing and radiating with the magical energy. I was sure I was doing the same.\n\nWe all took a few more steps back. If any of us had hoped to find the darkness, we failed. Each step we took caused the rock beneath our paws to smoulder with new colours.\n\nAs the aura of magic grew and expanded, a new sound could be heard. A voice. \"Bri'An?\"\n\nA shadow moved in the light. A human form stood, arms held out wide as they took in the brilliance of the display. She seemed to be absorbing the light, feeding from it.\n\nShe screamed and fell to her knees as the last of the magic was taken into her body, leaving the cavern in almost total darkness. Her haggard breaths could be heard over noise of the river. A soft, yellow glow enveloped her body, created by the threads of light on her skin.\n\nNo one dared to speak.\n\nNo one dared to move.\n\nSlowly the human rose to her feet. \"You are not Bri'An,\" she said in a hoarse whisper. She staggered forward a few steps until she was just a few feet away. Still my paws would not respond, freezing me in place.\n\nShe stumbled down to her knees again in a fall that was half intentional. She sat back, bringing her head almost down to level with mine.\n\n\"Who... who are you?\" I asked, my voice finally returning.\n\nHer eyes stared into mine. Her blazing eyes of liquid gold.\n\n\"My name is Esperance.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Anzig",
                "text": "I was no longer lying in my chamber. I knew that before I even opened my eyes again. When I allowed myself to see again, I found I was standing in the snow atop a tall mountain, far higher than I could ever hope to fly. The snow was cold, wet, and unfamiliar beneath my paws. I had seen snow before, I had played in it during a particularly fierce winter when I had been a dragonet, but never had I seen it so deep. I had to leap just to be able to move, as I sunk in almost to my chest.\n\nTo my left was a jutting spire of rock that reached up to the sky, with a dark crevice that ran down its centre, almost splitting it in two. On my right there was a giant precipice that dropped away as far as I could see as I tentatively looked down. I was stunned to see clouds below me. Just how tall was this peak? There should not be air at this height, but I was able to breathe just fine.\n\nI knew I was here for a purpose, and I looked around for some evidence of the spectre's presence. Sure enough I found it, a shadow amongst the shadows with just her gleaming red eyes to give her away.\n\n\"Where have you brought me?\"\n\nMaznar stepped out of the shadows, moving through the snow as though it wasn't there. \"We are in mountains to the distant east of Laxtal. The human village of Vuost and the kaur city of Krrnta are somewhere down below us, beneath the clouds.\"\n\nI had seen these mountains once before. They were indeed, a long way from Laxtal, but I had never heard of the village. I hadn't known humans dwelt beyond our eastern borders. I growled softly, frustrated by the spectre. This was not what I wanted. I wished simply to lie in blissful peace and silence to try and forget my worries.\n\n\"Does this have to be now?\"\n\nMaznar snickered. \"My dear Anzig, of course it has to be now. After what you have seen and heard, surely you must be approaching the truth?\"\n\nI snarled and struck out at the snow, but the soft mush splattered easily, doing nothing to lessen my anger. \"Speak plainly, for once,\" I demanded the spectre, but she just laughed again.\n\n\"Where is the fun in that?\"\n\nI turned my back on her, but that had about as much effect as attacking the snow. This may have been my dream, but Maznar had full control over it. Sure enough, the spectre appeared in front of me again, and I cried out in terror as she became the monstrosity of Nightwings. Memories of the agony she had caused me ruptured through my body, causing me to double over in pain.\n\n\"You know who my father is,\" Nightwings roared. She launched into the sky and started to circle overhead like an eagle hunting its prey. I was conflicted, trying to both keep my eyes on her and cover my head with my wing and cower. \"Three eggs, Anzig. I told you that. One was mine.\"\n\nLike a shimmering mirage, a bronze dragon crossed in front of me. It was Ddraig Krateos, but he looked significantly younger to how I knew him. Clutched in his paws was a single off-white egg. Two others lay nearby, semi-translucent in the snow. Nightwings was showing me his dreams.\n\nDdraig Krateos rested the third beside the other two. His paw lingered as though frozen to the eggs themselves. They couldn't be far from hatching as only a few black specks blemished their surface. \"Forgive me.\" The ddraig's parting words drifted away on the wind as he spread his wings and took to the sky, passing beyond the realms of the shimmering scene Nightwings had shown me. Only the three eggs remained.\n\n\"Why are you showing me this?\" I cried out to the circling spectre. She had started to fly ever higher until she became little more than a dark blot against the sun. Her voice remained as strong and loud as though she was standing right beside me.\n\n\"Those eggs didn't die, Anzig. They were found, and they all hatched. Who do you think they are?\"\n\n\"Just tell me!\" I shrieked, but again the spectre laughed.\n\n\"Time to go, Anzig,\" the spectre sung. \"Your sister is trying to wake you.\"\n\n\"I don't have a sister,\" I screamed, leaping from my bed of furs.\n\n\"I'm sorry?\"\n\nI stared into the eyes of Haeraig Zeena, as realisation finally took hold of my mind.\n\nI had some serious explaining to do."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Avonoa 3) The Heart of Avonoa",
        "author": "H.R.B. Collotzi",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "A Name and A Blessing",
                "text": "\"You know, it's supposed to be a sign of trouble when a black dragon hatches in the middle of the day.\" Sunlight spilled across the rich blue of the female dragon's back, making the cavern dazzle. A scratching sound came from in front of her.\n\n\"I've heard that,\" the large gray dragon answered. He lay curled around a teardrop-shaped midnight-black rock. It could easily have been mistaken for a large black gem, but because of its engorged size, any dragon would know it was a fertilized dragon egg. And by the size of it, ready to hatch at any moment. \"If he's anything like you, he should pop out any minute,\" he chortled. The scratching grew louder.\n\nShe lifted her slim head off the floor. \"I didn't see you complaining when you offered me your heart,\" she teased back. \"Besides, I'm not that bad, am I?\"\n\nHe chuckled again and readjusted himself around the black egg. Its many facets caught the light and made the cavern sparkle even more. \"I've never met a dragon so inherently immune to following directions.\"\n\nShe laid her head back down. \"It's a good thing he'll have you here to teach him. You are so good with young ones.\" She sighed, \"I can't believe we're going to have our own.\"\n\nHe snorted, \"I can't believe you gave up the chance to order me about some more.\"\n\nAfter a quiet lull, the egg shook violently. \"Almost time now.\" The gray dragon stood up from his vigilant warming position. \"Ah,\" he groaned as he stretched his sinewy neck and spread his claws out to their full extent. \"You're aware that we won't have a moment's peace for a long time around here,\" he said, extending his hind legs before loping over to join the dame.\n\n\"Since when has it ever been peaceful in here?\" she growled playfully, allowing him to curl around her.\n\nThe pair lazed a while longer while watching the egg shake and rattle in its divot. Finally, when the noise built to its paramount, they raised their heads and stretched their necks to await the moment of breech.\n\n\"You know what you're going to name him?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Of course I know,\" she whispered back.\n\nNeither of them noticed the shadow appear behind them in the opening of the cave.\n\nThe egg vibrated ferociously, then shuddered to a stop. A hairline crack appeared on the left side of the point at the top and slowly spread down to the rounded bottom. Without warning the two sides burst apart, throwing egg shards in every direction. The new parents flinched at the sudden appearance of their offspring before slow smiles spread across their mouths. The dame took a breath and opened her maw, but too late.\n\n\"Dakoon,\" a voice said from the entrance of the cave.\n\nThe dame's eyes widened at the shock of hearing someone else's voice. Then the weight of what it had said dawned on her. She sprang toward the voice, loosing a torrent of flame to fill the entrance.\n\n\"HOW DARE YOU NAME MY SON!!\" she roared at the figure engulfed in flame.\n\n\"Calm yourself, Niktiya.\" The flame died down to reveal the prophetess Visi. Her dull white scales looked almost as beautiful as they had in her youth as the sunshine behind her ricocheted off them. But the light did nothing to hide her hideous, drooping eyes. \"That's what you were going to name him anyway.\" Her raspy voice filled the cavern. \"I've come to give him a name\u2014\" she turned her eyes on the new hatchling, \"and a blessing.\"\n\nNiktiya's anger faded into surprise. \"A blessing?\" she asked. \"You haven't given any hatchling a blessing for decades.\"\n\n\"Almost a century,\" the prophetess corrected her, \"but this hatchling will be special.\" She crawled toward him with a limp in her step. \"Tustan,\" she acknowledged the father without looking at him.\n\n\"Prophetess,\" he mumbled as he slunk out of her way.\n\nA rumble began in the bottom of Visi's throat. It grew in pitch as it became louder. Soon she hummed. \"This hatchling will grow to be strong and brave. Many lives, alone, will he save,\" the old dragon dame chanted. \"Black like the night and swift like his mother. Bold and smart like no other.\" The two parents watched in nervous anticipation. The wizened old dragon lifted her claw over his head. As the little dragon shuffled around in the broken remnants of his egg, the prophetess sprinkled something from her grasp onto him. She mumbled something inaudible, even for a dragon with sensitive hearing. Then, replacing her claw on the ground, she looked at the new parents with a stern gaze. \"Broken heart only when the time is right, for it shall be to end a fight. So I say so let it be, this dragon blessing all shall see.\"\n\n[ Irritations ]\n\n\"It would be easier, yes.\" Visi sat curled on the ground as Priya paced along the rocky ridge of the cliff face. The old seer dragon's drooping white scales, once brilliant, sagged over the ledge above the precipice beside her. This location would be extremely difficult for a human to attain, which made it a perfect place for dragons to meet. \"But since when has Hiro ever done anything easy?\"\n\nPriya's sharp green scales sparkled in the warm spring sunlight as she stared out over the landscape. The tip of Teardrop Sea sprawled off to the east. The Forest of Shenharah stretched on the horizon in front of them. A little Hamees village and several other human villages lay nestled somewhere amidst the trees and hills of the northern part of the Noble Kingdom they surveyed from this perch. On the south side of the mountains behind them, Kingstor Noble's great castle lay, built in the shadow of these mountains. Far in the distant north, too far for even dragon eyes to see from where Priya stood, The Great Northern Mountain reached out to scratch at the sky.\n\n\"But if I could\u2014\" Priya started again.\n\n\"No,\" Visi's gravelly voice was firm as she rose. Why did getting old have to hurt so much? The pain was an insult. \"It won't happen, so don't dwell on it. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, but don't be disappointed when it doesn't work. Now,\" the old dame asked as Priya turned to face her, \"do you remember what it looks like?\"\n\n\"Of course I do.\" The young green dragon shook her head indignantly and turned away.\n\n\"Do you remember what to say?\"\n\n\"You know I do.\"\n\n\"Don't forget to bring the praxen seeds\u2014\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"\u2014and the foolsberry the second day\u2014\"\n\nPriya nodded.\n\n\"\u2014and the signal at the exact time.\"\n\nPriya's head dipped.\n\nVisi sighed. She could see the weight on the little green dragon's shoulders. She could see the anxiety in her eyes. She stepped next to her and matched her position, sitting back on her haunches.\n\n\"If it's any help,\" she whispered, \"one way or another, it will all be over soon.\"\n\nPriya nodded again.\n\n\"You've done so well, little one,\" Visi's voice shook. \"You will kill him soon.\"\n\nThree sets of dragon claws clattered on the rocks outside of Rakgar's lair. One set was brown with an orange tinge; one, the light gray of a stormy sky; and the last, black as a starless night.\n\n\"Hiro, Tog, you go first,\" the brown dragon grumbled to the other two. \"If I set a claw in there before you, he'll think I've come without you and I'll be ash before either of you pass the entry.\"\n\n\"He's that bad, Trakillyn?\" the black dragon questioned.\n\n\"Hiro, you've no idea,\" Trakillyn answered. \"You're a favorite of his. He's kinder to you than he is to anyone else. Yet\u2014\"\n\nA deafening roar exploded from the cave along with a burst of flame, making all three dragons jerk back.\n\n\"Oh, spit in Tarsa's eye,\" Trakillyn muttered, stumbling backward. \"I think I'll just stand guard out here a minute.\" Easing back on his haunches, the long spikes on his shoulders faced the rocks to one side of the cave entrance and his nose pointed up at the magnificent mountains floating around the even more imposing Inner Mountain on which the three had landed. His tail twitched from nerves and his wide eyes likely didn't even see the clear spring sky and setting sun.\n\n\"Well, Tog,\" Hiro turned to the gray dragon with short ridges running down his spine, \"I suppose it wouldn't be wise to keep him waiting.\"\n\nHiro and Tog entered the cave together. \"He gets worse every day,\" Tog, Hiro's best friend, grumbled next to him. Tog scrubbed smoke out of his protruding eyes as an orange dame scurried out of the cave opening they had come through and took off into the air. They wondered if she was the cause of the frightening roar. \"He sent Trakillyn and Sanatab to cut down fifty oak trees,\" Tog whispered once she had gone. \"He gave no reason. He sent Makki to stack them, again with no explanation, he just ordered him. Then he forced Burrabill and Hakkil to carry the same trees into the Black Forest and leave them there. No explanation, and ordering them around like a human king. Like he has the authority.\" Their claws beat a rhythm against the stone as they walked through the cave toward Rakgar's lair. Tog lowered his voice even more in the silence, ensuring that only Hiro could hear him. \"He told Makki not to tell anyone and insisted on his wyrd. The only reason I know any of this is because I stumbled upon Makki while he was at it. And this happened in just the last sun cycle,\" Tog finished out of the corner of his maw. They approached Rakgar, their leader, and he turned to acknowledge them.\n\nHiro and Tog bobbed their heads, but Hiro spoke. \"Clear skies to you, Rakgar. You summoned us?\"\n\n\"Where is Trakillyn?\" Rakgar bellowed, making the horns and barbels jutting from his head bristle in anger. Those horns traced paths down his back and shoulders and onto the backs of his front legs. All of them seemed to spike higher with the big dragon's rage. Rakgar's head was almost as large as Hiro's body. He was a threatening figure to the entire ruck, except perhaps Hiro.\n\nHiro and Tog shared a glance. \"I asked him to stand guard,\" Hiro said. \"I thought we might not want to be disturbed.\"\n\nRakgar followed Hiro's eyes to the others surrounding them in the cave. There weren't many that chose to spend time in Rakgar's lair these days. Seeing how Rakgar was twice the size of all the larger dans, his temper was best to avoid. Only Milah and Mitashio and a faerie woman named Skorkot lingered.\n\nMilah and Mitashio, a pair of brown brothers from the same egg, had always despised Tog and Dakoon, as Hiro had formerly been known. There was no specific reason for the animosity, but it emanated from both sides. Hiro was known for being a rather good-looking dan. Since he only had two gracefully, curving horns on his head and nowhere else, some said he looked feminine. The dames, however, thought him extremely handsome.\n\nNo matter the cause of the enmity, the brothers had sought a confidence with Rakgar as soon as Hiro began disagreeing with their leader. Hiro's father Tusten, Rakgar's most trusted counselor, had died several months ago. It was then that Hiro began to disagree more often with Rakgar, so to ingratiate themselves, Milah and Mitashio had become his Yes-Dragons.\n\n\"Milah and Mitashio know of your assignment,\" Rakgar rumbled in his deep, sonorous voice. \"Did you discover anything?\"\n\n\"No, Rakgar,\" Hiro answered.\n\n\"We searched the area that I last visited with Priya, Rakgar. There's still no sign of your daughter,\" Tog said cautiously. From the random place where Tog and Priya had landed in the forest, a short distance from the Rock Clouds in which they lived, Priya had disappeared. What Tog and Hiro didn't tell Rakgar is that Princess Anna, a human princess, had appeared at that time. Anna had tricked Tog into bringing her to the Rock Clouds and they left before Priya could return. \"We found nothing more than the necklace I returned to you three sun cycles ago. I saw her tracks in the ground, but nothing more. No ash, no weapons, nothing.\"\n\n\"I've searched the area as well, Rakgar,\" Hiro supported his friend. \"She's nowhere to be found. There are no fresh tracks to follow. She must have flown away.\"\n\nSmoke drifted from Rakgar's nostrils as his spikes bristled again. Hiro and Tog shared another uneasy glance before Hiro took a step forward. \"I'm sure she's fine, Rakgar,\" Hiro edged toward the massive dragon. \"We also found no blood, or embers, or anything to indicate she's been harmed. We ranged well away from the point she disappeared to the place where\u2014\" Hiro cut himself off quickly. He'd almost said, \"where Tog found Anna.\" Instead, he finished with, \"\u2014where Tog decided to come back.\"\n\n\"We left burns and upward slashes on the trees,\" Tog quickly added to cover Hiro's slip. \"We left the signs to come home and I'm sure she'll return when she finds them.\"\n\nRakgar snorted and shot flame from his nostrils. Both Hiro and Tog flinched at the sudden threat. Rakgar's brows lifted and he straightened from his crouch, noticing their hesitation. Even Milah and Mitashio turned aside ever so slightly from their leader. All the dragons feared Rakgar's anger, but the faerie Skorkot, with silver hair pouring down her back and transparent skin pulsing with her blood, stood staring boldly at the dragons.\n\nRakgar's eyes noted the dragons' movement. \"Are you afraid of me, Hiro?\" Rakgar almost whispered, but it didn't sound like a concern.\n\nHiro couldn't meet his eyes. \"I fear your disappointment, Rakgar. I'm disappointed at Priya's continued absence as well, but\u2026\"\n\n\"But what, Hiro?\" Rakgar growled.\n\n\"Many\u2014\" Hiro shrugged, \"\u2014many say your anger is irrational.\"\n\nRakgar snorted again, but in Tog's direction this time. \"Do they?\"\n\nTog hung his head and twitched it to several different positions to avoid eye contact. With toggling eyes that could see in two different directions at once, it was an undertaking for him.\n\nWhen Rakgar's mouth started to open again, Hiro hurried forward to position himself between Tog and the leader. \"It's understandable to be upset when your daughter goes missing. I'm angry as well. And while our anger may not be rational, we can't control being upset by something like this.\"\n\nThe corner of Rakgar's lip curled in amusement. \"You think I'm upset about a wayward daughter? Well, it's not the first time she's disappointed me.\" Rakgar turned his back long enough for Hiro and Tog to share another glance, this time laced with confusion. When Rakgar settled back on the floor he waved his claw to Milah and Mitashio. \"Tell them,\" he said to the brothers.\n\nMilah stepped forward. His back straight, he looked down his triangular snout at the black and gray dragons. \"You've heard the rumors of dragons being killed on the surface?\" When Hiro and Tog nodded, he continued. \"That's only a fraction of the truth. Several dragons\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014twenty-three to be exact,\" Mitashio interjected.\n\n\"Twenty-three dragons, male and female, have been attacked by humans in the past fourteen sun cycles. Centaurs have prevented three attacks and in only four instances have any dragons been able to escape with their hides.\"\n\n\"Five from the\u2014\" Mitashio started but Milah finished, as he usually did.\n\n\"Five from the Ice Ruck up north, and they have expressed that that is an anomalously high number for them. They haven't had a clash with humans in over four centuries, and we haven't clashed in\u2026\"\n\nWhen Milah snaked his head around to look at his brother for an answer, Mitashio sat up straighter. \"Ever,\" he answered.\n\nMilah nodded and returned his condescending gaze to Hiro. \"Our ruck has lived in the Rock Clouds for over six centuries and has never had a single death from human contact until you, Hiro Tekla feira Dakoon, recklessly abandoned your home and our laws\u2014\" Milah's voice rose to a yell in an attempt to cover Hiro's voice.\n\n\"I'm a fully accepted member of this ruck\u2014\" Hiro yelled back in defense.\n\n\"You're a blood traitor slug!\" Mitashio hollered.\n\n\"You have no right to pass judgment\u2014\" Tog joined in alongside his friend.\n\n\"Go freeze in the Northern Waste!\" Milah bellowed.\n\n\"Go freeze yourself!\" Hiro howled back.\n\nBefore any of the attack postures they'd all struck could be put to use, Rakgar's roar echoed from the walls to silence them. Smoke seeped from his nose and mouth as he licked his fangs. \"This is the source of my anger,\" he growled. \"Humans are attacking dragons and dragons are attacking each other! There'll be no more of us left to fight if we don't do something about it!\" Rakgar paced across the stone floor of the lair. \"These humans no longer fear us. They think us weak. A game animal. They think it sport to hunt us.\" Back and forth across the cave Rakgar's claws beat a rhythm with his tail swaying. \"We must strike fear into their hearts. We must remind them how dangerous a dragon can be.\"\n\n\"But Rakgar,\" Hiro pulled his eyes from Milah's while Milah watched Hiro through narrowed slits, \"what can we do? If we fight back at their attacks, humans are bound to see our intelligence. If we organize or help each other in any way\u2014you've said yourself that we can't expose\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you propose, Rakgar?\" Mitashio asked.\n\n\"One strike.\" Rakgar nodded to himself. \"No more. You're right, Hiro, many strikes would cause alarm among the humans, but just one\u2026\"\n\n\"To the heart of the Noble Kingdom,\" Skorkot finally spoke. Her whisper seemed to have been waiting for this moment.\n\nRakgar stared at the wall. \"We must strike at something precious to the humans. They must fear the dragons again.\"\n\nWhen he fell silent, Hiro stepped toward the mighty gray dragon. \"Rakgar?\" he asked quietly.\n\nHearing his name, Rakgar spun to face Hiro. He rumbled in the back of his throat and his mouth parted in an evil grin. \"You will kidnap their princess.\"\n\nHiro's maw fell open and he stumbled backward.\n\n\"Wouldn't that be considered an intentional action?\" Tog asked from behind Hiro.\n\nMilah shrugged. \"Take her when she's outside the castle,\" he said, as if he kidnapped humans every day. \"It can seem random if you plan it right.\" He took a step forward. \"I'll go. If she struggles, I'll eat her in front of them and the humans will fear dragons again, to be sure.\"\n\nMilah eat Anna? \"Rakgar,\" Hiro closed his jaws and blinked back any sign of fear in his eyes. \"I've been to Kingstor Noble. I know the layout of the city and the castle. I know the behavior of the guards as well as the king and the princess.\" Suppressing his concern for the human woman, Hiro looked into Rakgar's eye. \"I have the most reason to attack them. They might even still be expecting it.\" Tog's eye closest to Hiro narrowed, but Hiro ignored it. \"I'll go.\"\n\nHiro saw Tog's head droop. Rakgar nodded. \"Yes, Hiro, you should be the one to do it. Fly in, take the princess in any way possible, and bring her back here.\"\n\n\"Here?\" Hiro's fire guttered. Here? The Rock Clouds? What was Rakgar thinking? Had he returned his mind? \"But Rakgar, the law\u2014\"\n\n\"I know the law, Hiro,\" Rakgar growled, baring his fangs.\n\nHiro searched the faces around him, but even in Tog's eyes he found no support. He rolled his shoulder and attempted to soften his heart against the woman. \"If I bring her to the Rock Clouds, we couldn't force the entire ruck to be silent while she's here. Someone would speak in front of her.\"\n\n\"And she would die for it,\" Milah hissed.\n\nHiro swallowed, blinking at the ground. \"Precisely. If a human princess dies in the Rock Clouds having been taken by a dragon, King Philip and his army will march up the mountain and rip it open with their bare hands to find her.\" He leveled his head with the others', but didn't look at any of them. \"What will happen then? Hatchlings won't stay silent in an attack. Their dames and dans will be forced to hunt down and kill every human that hears an utterance and there won't be any assurance they'll find them all. And if dragons are chasing down and killing humans, what stops the other humans from putting together rumors and truth? We can't control the outcome of an invasion of that magnitude.\" Even Milah seemed pensive. \"Perhaps if I take her somewhere else?\"\n\n\"No,\" Rakgar growled, \"an animal would take her to its home.\"\n\n\"We could return her.\" Tog's voice was only loud enough for the small party to hear, even if there had been others in the cave. When they eyed him skeptically, he continued. \"Even make it look like an escape.\"\n\n\"But someone is bound to speak in front of her,\" Milah insisted, \"Hiro said it himself. We can't control everyone.\"\n\nAfter a moment's silence, Rakgar nodded. \"I give the human woman an exemption from our law.\"\n\nSkorkot flashed the first sign of incredulity. She jerked her head so fast her hair whipped against her face. \"You give her what?\" she hissed.\n\nHiro's wasn't the only maw hanging at the words. Rakgar stood straight, his enormous claws at rest from their pacing. \"The human woman known as Princess Anna of the Noble Kingdom will be the first and only human to be granted an exemption from the Killing Law of dragons. She will be the only human in existence to hear a dragon speak and not be killed for it.\" Rakgar considered the shocked and bewildered eyes of the dragons around him, but his eyes held no warmth, no mercy; just pure, mad rage. \"When she's returned to her home, anyone she tells of dragons speaking will think her mind is gone.\"\n\nHiro gathered his wits. \"We must return her unharmed, Rakgar. Before King Philip mounts an attack.\"\n\n\"And not a scratch will be on her.\" He glared down at Hiro. \"See to it.\"\n\nHiro and Tog crawled from the spacious lair. Several dragons waited outside and one voice eagerly greeted them before they could draw a breath.\n\n\"Hiro! Tog! What's going on in there?\" Prak's nasal tones always sounded strange coming from his small, reddish-brown body that had as many fearsome spikes and horns as Rakgar's did, and twice as many running down his spine, on both sides of it. \"All Trakillyn will say is that no one should enter. Is Rakgar angry? What's wrong? Where's Priya? I'm going to ask Rakgar for an assignment too! Are you two going somewhere? Did Rakgar give you an assignment? Were you reporting to him or were you getting an assignment? Or both? Can I come too?\"\n\nWhen Hiro held up a claw to calm the younger dragon, the talking ceased. \"Yes, both, Prak. I reported to Rakgar and now he has a private assignment for me.\" Prak's mouth popped open again, but before another barrage of questions could emit, Hiro hurriedly added, \"I must go alone, Prak. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Tog cut in, \"perhaps I should go for you. You can show me where to go and maybe I can\u2014\"\n\nHiro shook his head. \"What do you fear more, my friend? That I won't return or that I will?\"\n\nTog glanced at Prak, who watched them with a mixture of fascination and calculation. When Tog finally met Hiro's eye, he shook his head. \"I fear that when you return, we'll be bound to rename you.\"\n\nHiro forced a chuckle. \"Don't fear. When I return we'll make Milah and Mitashio bow to Drakkod, the dragon god.\" Hiro bunched his body, preparing to fly away from the Inner Mountain and the Rock Clouds, but Tog clenched his leg.\n\nWith a dangerous glint in his eye, he whispered, \"Don't let that creature change you.\"\n\nHiro gently pulled Tog's claw away as he said, \"Shining days, to you, my friend. I'll return soon.\"\n\n\"Clear skies, to you, Hiro!\" Prak called after him. \"Return swift and safe!\"\n\nHiro lifted into the air, but didn't angle toward his own lair. Instead, he dipped a wing to the darkening forest beyond the Rock Clouds. Pumping his wings, he glid on a current past the other floating mountain homes of his dragon ruck.\n\nI should be sad to leave, he told himself. I should be longing for my safe, warm, human-less lair. But his eyes continued to search the horizon ahead of him.\n\n[ Secret Meeting ]\n\n\"Why don't you marry her, Torgon?\"\n\nNineteen-year-old Royal General Torgon spluttered into his drink, splashing wine down his chin and onto his plate. While he coughed and wiped his face, Anna muttered, \"Gracefully done, Philip.\"\n\nKing Philip, only sixteen upon his coronation several months ago, sat at the head of a small but luxuriously laid dinner table with his sister and Royal General. Princess Anna sat to his right as the closest person to him who could take over the kingdom in a time of need. Royal General Torgon sat on the other side of him, at Philip's left.\n\n\"Is it a bad suggestion, Anna?\" He observed Torgon\u2014avoiding both of their gazes\u2014through what he hoped were objective eyes. \"He's young, strong, loyal, top in the land with a sword, and my best friend. Not to mention, he's a brilliant strategist, knows the laws of the kingdom almost as well as I do, and he's always fair in his dealings. I've never heard a negative word spoken against him from those in his command\u2014I could go on. He's not even ugly!\" With that last remark, Torgon jerked the golden fork from his mouth, producing another fit of coughing from his bite of fish.\n\n\"Philip,\" Anna finished her own fish and balanced her fork on the edge of her plate, \"I really don't care who you marry me off to. As you said, it is my duty as a Princess of Avonoa to marry the right man for the kingdom. And whoever you choose will be the right man.\" She lifted her fork again and, although she approached the green beans with apparent ease, a loud CLINK sounded when she stabbed one with a little too much force.\n\n\"Well, Torgon,\" Philip ignored his sister's reaction, \"what do you think? You're the only man I could see on the throne should anything happen to me.\"\n\nTorgon smoothed the napkin on his leg and swallowed. \"I don't think I'm the right man for it, Philip.\"\n\n\"Of course, you are!\" Philip raised his voice. \"Haven't you been listening?\"\n\nPhilip and Anna stared at Torgon. Torgon smoothed his napkin again, picked up his fork, then set it down. \"I just don't think \u2026\" He cleared his throat. He picked up his goblet, swirled the wine in it around, but then narrowed his eyes into it with suspicion and put it down as well. \"The kingdom needs \u2026\" he started, but cleared his throat again.\n\n\"I don't think I've ever seen you so out of sorts, Torgon,\" Philip said, resuming his own meal.\n\n\"Well, you put him in the light, Philip,\" Anna added, sipping her wine. \"He probably doesn't want to marry me, but feels he can't refuse.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't he want to marry you?\" Philip mumbled between bites. \"You're pretty enough, and he would be next in line for the throne.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be next in line for the throne,\" Torgon finally spat out.\n\n\"Exactly why you would be best for the job,\" Philip waved him off.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Anna narrowed her eyes at the Royal General, \"he's in love with someone else.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" Philip dropped his fork when Torgon's chin angled away from the royal pair. \"That must be it. Well done, Anna.\"\n\nBoth Philip and Anna picked up their forks and stared at Torgon while they took their bites. A thick silence hung over the table. One of the servants behind Philip shuffled his feet. A dog barked outside in the distance.\n\nTorgon picked up his fork and knife and tried to cut into a tomato. He cut once, then twice. CLANG! He banged his knife down on the table. \"All right!\" He sat back and stared at his food without seeing it.\n\nWhen he finally looked at Philip, the young king simply said, \"Confession is not enough.\" Philip shook his head and stuffed another forkful in his mouth. He and Anna shared a conspiratorial grin.\n\nWith a sigh, Torgon resumed the methodical chopping of his food without bringing any to his lips. \"I've known her all my life, but nothing will ever come of it. My father didn't know of her before he died, and my mother insists I marry a woman of her choosing from among the wealthy.\" He paused and then grinned up at Philip. \"But I'm not the important one here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Philip asked, his brow creasing. That grin looked dangerous.\n\n\"I mean to say,\" Torgon nodded, \"that out of the three of us, perhaps you should focus on finding a queen before dabbling in our love lives.\" He waved his fork between Anna and himself before pointing at Philip. \"You are the king and you should have an heir. Young kings ought to marry quickly, Philip. Wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nAnna swiveled her head to look at Philip. \"No,\" he said. He pointed a finger at Anna, then at Torgon. \"No. I order both of you to stay out of my love life.\"\n\n\"What love life?\" Anna said, turning back to her plate. \"Maybe that's why you would see either of us wed before yourself. Maybe you don't have the backbone to face your own circumstance.\"\n\n\"I know my own circumstances better than anyone.\" He forced himself to take another bite. \"Since I currently have no prospects, I think it's important that both of you follow yours.\n\n\"And speaking of yours, would you choose this woman over Anna? And the crown?\" Philip queried. When Torgon wouldn't meet his eye, Philip's jaw dropped. \"Spit in Tarsa's eye\u2014you would.\" Anna gasped at Philip's curse. Torgon's cheeks spotted with color, but whether from the curse or the revelation, Philip wasn't sure. The king waved both reactions away. \"Who is she? Why haven't you told me about her?\"\n\nTorgon shrugged. \"I told you, she's not wealthy. She's worked in our stables all her life. We grew up together. Philip, you've seen her, after a hunt several years ago. But you wouldn't recognize her even if I could present her to you. Besides, my mother would send her away if she discovered it.\"\n\n\"Well, she has a point,\" Philip shrugged.\n\n\"One minute,\" Anna's chin jutted out, \"are you saying Torgon shouldn't marry the woman he loves just because of her status in life?\"\n\n\"We are the Noble Kingdom, Anna.\" Philip tore into a hunk of bread. \"How would it look if the Royal General married a stable girl?\"\n\n\"Noble.\" Anna sat up straighter. \"I have seen many servants and commoners commit noble deeds. I see no reason a commoner couldn't act appropriately in front of a king. I, personally, would love to meet her. You should bring her to dinner, Torgon.\"\n\n\"Anna,\" Philip set down his goblet, \"I'm sure such a meeting would make both the woman and Torgon most uncomfortable. She hasn't been trained as a noblewoman.\"\n\n\"Do you even know what it takes to be trained, Philip? 'Pick up this fork,' 'drink with this hand,' 'cross your feet at this angle'\u2026half of it could be taught in a matter of minutes; the other half no one would notice if forgotten. Even the lowliest of stations could come before a king and act respectably, with or without the proper protocol.\"\n\n\"All right, fine.\" Philip nodded slowly at first, but his enthusiasm grew. \"Tomorrow night. Bring her to dinner, Torgon. If nothing else, I would love to see the woman that surpasses Princess Anna in your opinion.\"\n\nTorgon sighed and pushed his plate away.\n\nHiro could just make out the shape of the grand edifice of Kingstor Noble against the rising sun. Well did he remember the slanted streets disguising an easier path to the castle gates. The glistening dragon-scale rooftops on the wealthier homes; the curved and pointed merlons surrounding the five towers and topping the battlements. Though meant to deter approaching dragons from landing on top of them, Hiro found them particularly intimidating from within the castle courtyard. He should know, as he had once been held prisoner inside that courtyard. From this distance, he couldn't see if the section of the castle he had destroyed in his escape had been repaired yet.\n\nAs he soared toward the castle that had once imprisoned him, he found it hard to stop doubting himself and his plan to find the human, Princess Anna.\n\nPerhaps if I just return and say I couldn't find her, he thought for the hundredth time. Perhaps I really won't be able to get to her. No! He shook his head and scratched at his shoulder. What must be done, must be done.\n\nUnfortunately, no attacks from banshees or scorrands or even a wandering faerie had distracted him from his course along the way. He had made more stops than necessary and even been slow to wake and move on every time. Yet, somehow, he arrived at Kingstor sooner than he'd expected. He had taken his time getting to the Noble Kingdom, but now renewed his determination to finish his assignment.\n\nHiro made sure to fly straight through the mountains on the south side of the pass that led to the Hamees village. He might be seen from the village, but he didn't want any other humans to think he came from the Hamees' village, or the villagers might be questioned again about dragons. That could endanger both the Hamees and him.\n\nOdd for a dragon to desire humans to be safe, Hiro thought of his plan. But the Hamees were very different. They were different from other humans as they lived a peaceful life, and they had been kind and protected Hiro when he almost died. He risked exposure by helping them, but they risked everything, including their very way of life, to protect him.\n\nOnce he was close enough to be spotted by the castle guards, Hiro lifted his tail to drop, but tilted his wing to sweep wide of the castle. The sun was fully above the horizon by now and glistened on his black scales. He pumped his wings to stay above the king's forest, between the mountains and the castle. He was too far away for any arrows or crossbows to reach him, so he floated past the castle, attempting to seem at ease.\n\nThe call of \"DRAGON!\" could be heard in every direction, echoing from each tower in turn, but Hiro drifted past without turning his head toward the sound. An animal wouldn't understand what they were saying, and this animal wasn't attacking. He was determined to make it seem as if he were just passing through.\n\nHe flew over the water behind the castle, where a branch of the Torthoth Mountains encroached against Teardrop Sea. He noted but didn't react to the call of \"DRAGON!\" echoing from the cliffs next to the water. The king must have a lookout stationed there as well.\n\nThere. That should settle a couple of different matters, Hiro thought to himself.\n\nHiro assumed that King Philip still wondered if the black dragon they had imprisoned was someday going to return and attack. Coming the route he chose, several humans had seen him, but he flew by without bothering anyone. Perhaps that alone would convince the king to ease his attacks on dragons. Also, and more importantly, Anna would know that Hiro was in the area.\n\nHiro felt the cool air over the water pulling him down, so he pressed his wings against it. Flying level with the castle towers, he couldn't see the other side of Teardrop Sea, but that was his destination. Clear skies and wispy clouds of spring afforded no coverage, so he would be forced to use the distance to circle back around.\n\nOnce he was far enough away from the castle, Hiro pumped his wings harder. He circled north, keeping the same distance between himself and Kingstor Noble, hoping no one would expect the dragon to circle back toward them from the north. He knew he could stop in the Hamees village and no one would report it, but he couldn't ask them for help. He didn't want to endanger them any further with his presence.\n\nHiro and Anna had helped the Hamees men save themselves and their village from a deadly creature just weeks ago. They thought Hiro was a secret pet of Anna's. While the idea of that irked Hiro, he had to admit to the validity of the excuse. It explained many things for the humans while the truth would put them in grave danger.\n\nWill she come? he thought for the last time. If she didn't come, he would have to think of another way to get to her.\n\nEventually Hiro flew low over the Hamees village, but he didn't stop. He heard shouts, but they were different from the guards' warning calls. They seemed\u2026joyful. He put it out of his mind and flew to the pass in the mountains connecting the Hamees village to Kingstor Noble. Hiro knew that if Anna came to find him, she would have to pass this way. He ducked into the trees before landing and scuttled behind some boulders to the side.\n\nHe curled up on the ground, enjoying the warming dirt beneath his belly. He could hear the Hamees families outside. Small humans squealed and laughed. Hiro had once taught and been taught that humans were brutal to their young. \"Beat them or eat them, whatever their fancy.\" He didn't understand until meeting the Hamees that those teachings weren't true.\n\nHe might have even tried to justify those actions, were the teachings true, because the Hamees otherwise lived so peacefully with their oaths of kindness. But some months ago Hiro had seen with his own eyes a human woman place herself between a monster of the earth and her young child. She had sacrificed herself in hopes of saving him. The young child died shortly after his mother did, but that one act brought so many things into question that Hiro had learned all his life. As he lay in his hiding place now, he listened to the humans talking and calling to each other. Increasingly, more of those teachings lay to waste in his mind.\n\nBy the time he was in place, the sun had passed its zenith. He watched the road beyond him with keen eyes. He knew he must do all these things in the daytime to put his sharp day vision to use. No human could see him from the road\u2014even with only scant spring buds on the brush\u2014but he would easily see and hear anyone approaching.\n\nHe didn't have to wait long. Hiro heard the familiar sound of shod horse hooves clattering on the road. They seemed about as unhurried as he had been when he'd flown past the castle. He listened. It was only one horse, not a carriage or wagon drawn by more. Then he realized that the sound had originated from the village.\n\nSoon enough Jarek came into view, staring intently into the trees. The man's right hand gripped the reins of his horse while the other hung at his side, covered in a brown glove. Hiro's heart twinged at the memory of Jarek's wail when Hiro had burned his hand. It had been necessary though, and the man knew it as well. Their eyes had communicated more than all his speaking with Anna had. Through one look, Jarek had told Hiro to burn the wraith\u2014the creature attacking the humans\u2014and his hand\u2014in order to kill the monster. But even with consent, Jarek's piercing scream still haunted Hiro's mind.\n\nJarek was part of the Hamees people. A people set apart from other humans. They believed differently and swore sacred oaths to live a peaceful life. Among other oaths, they swore to help others and never lie. These two oaths came in conflict when Anna first asked Jarek not to tell anyone that Hiro was in his barn, and then begged his help to harbor the dragon. Jarek had chosen to help the dragon, which surprised Hiro. From that time on, Hiro assumed the man and the Hamees were anomalies among humans.\n\nAs Jarek stared into the trees, the thought was confirmed in Hiro's mind. Jarek must have seen the dragon fly overhead and had actually come to look for it. Did he want to help? Would he try to send it away?\n\nBefore he could wonder long, Hiro heard a second set of hooves beating the ground. The second set beat faster and, upon closer inspection, Hiro could tell they came from the direction of Kingstor Noble. Jarek, who had passed Hiro's hiding place by now, heard the approaching rider as well. He shifted his horse to the side of the road to allow the hasty rider to pass, but sat up in his saddle when he saw who approached.\n\nAnna's thick purple riding cloak streamed behind her at her swift pace. Her golden hair whipped around her face when she pulled the reins tight to a halt upon seeing Jarek. The man bowed to her from the saddle.\n\n\"Princess Anna,\" Jarek tucked his left hand behind his back, \"I thought I might find you here as well.\"\n\n\"As well?\" Anna breathed from exertion, pulling alongside the man's horse. \"Who else would you find here?\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Jarek said and nodded toward the trees. \"I thought I saw him this morning over the mountains, then half the village saw him over the village just moments ago. Someone told me he dipped down into the trees here.\"\n\n\"He was also seen at the castle,\" Anna peeked into the forest too, \"but only early this morning.\"\n\nHiro flipped his tail to the side, thrashing a few bushes with tender spring leaves on them. Both humans turned toward where they heard the sound. Hiro lifted his head from the rocks and trees he hid behind, but still they searched without seeing him. So he allowed a flame to tickle his tongue and slip between his teeth.\n\nFinally Anna pointed. \"There! I see him!\" She bounced out of her saddle, threw her reins around a branch, and began picking her way through the thick brush. She stopped when she noticed that Jarek wasn't following her. \"Are you coming?\"\n\nJarek brought his gloved left hand up to his chest. Turning it over once, he said, \"No.\" He allowed it to fall onto his leg. \"You're here now. I only came to see if Hiro needed any help. I probably would have sent a message to you if you hadn't come anyway.\"\n\nAnna swayed toward the man. \"Are you angry with him, Jarek? You know he would never\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, Anna,\" Jarek nodded. His hand twitched, but remained on his leg. \"I just can't add more moments in my life that I can't explain to others.\" He lifted his face to her again and heeled his horse in the sides. \"It was nice to see you again, Princess Anna. Purity and peace guide you.\"\n\n\"And you.\" Anna returned the nod and Jarek's horse trotted away.\n\nAfter Jarek left, Anna took several minutes to complete her struggle through the bushes. When she finally reached Hiro, she planted her fists on her hips. \"You couldn't meet me half way?\"\n\n\"Someone had to watch the road for passersby,\" Hiro said. She rolled her eyes at him, but he continued. \"Besides, if someone came by, they would see us.\"\n\nThe woman's composure softened. \"You take a great risk coming here, Hiro. I wouldn't be surprised if my brother sends patrols out to hunt you down. Why would you risk that? What's going on?\"\n\nHiro scratched at the ground. \"I've come for you.\"\n\nAnna's eyes widened and her hands dropped to her sides. \"Me? What do you need of me?\"\n\nHiro squinted into the sky. \"Well\u2026I've\u2026 somewhat\u2026been ordered\u2026\"\n\n\"Out with it, dragon.\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder and met her eyes. \"I've come to kidnap you.\"\n\nAnna took a step back, but went no further. \"Kidnap me? Why? Who ordered this?\"\n\n\"Rakgar,\" Hiro said, but he also moved his head away from her. He didn't want her to feel that he would be violent about fulfilling Rakgar's command.\n\n\"Why would he want you to kidnap me?\"\n\nHiro's gaze wandered into the trees toward the Rock Clouds. \"He's angry. He claims the cause is the increasing number of attacks on dragons, but I'm certain it's more from\u2014\"\n\nHiro's voice cut off and Anna's eyes narrowed. \"From what, Hiro?\" She stepped toward the dragon. \"You know you can trust me.\"\n\n\"I believe he's angry because his daughter has been missing for months.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Anna turned toward the road, pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders.\n\nHiro wondered if she might make a run for it. \"Perhaps I could tell Rakgar that you were too well guarded and I couldn't retrieve you. I could attack the castle to have decent memories to pass to Rakgar.\"\n\nWhen the woman faced him again, her jaw was set. \"No, that lie would cause even more problems.\" She shook her head. \"You must take me with you. But you can't take me from here. I must be seen in Kingstor again so the Hamees won't be questioned.\"\n\nHiro nodded. \"Meet me by the waterfall at the edge of the castle wall on the mountains.\"\n\n\"I'll make sure my return to the castle is well known.\" Anna started back through the trees toward her waiting horse, adding over her shoulder, \"I'll be there by nightfall.\"\n\n[ Nocturnal Intrigues ]\n\n\"No one has taken the bait?\" Philip moved a pawn.\n\n\"Not yet.\" Torgon glared at the game board.\n\n\"Perhaps they don't believe you capable.\"\n\n\"Philip,\" Torgon cast him another tolerant-older-brother-type look, \"do you not trust me to start my own coup?\"\n\nPhilip threw his hands in the air. \"Not one noble has come forward to accuse you. Can I trust no one? Whose side would they be on, if not mine? At this rate, I'll have to look outside the kingdom to find Anna a husband!\"\n\n\"Don't be so dramatic.\" Torgon moved his queen to take the pawn, leaving his knight undefended. \"I believe them all to be trustworthy and utterly loyal. Many of them would make fine matches for your sister. Lord Arrys's nephew is a good man, and the one I think would be best.\"\n\n\"But how did he react when you approached him with plans to overthrow me?\"\n\nTorgon sighed watching Philip remove the defeated knight from the board. \"He told me never to speak of it again.\"\n\n\"What does that mean exactly?\"\n\n\"I think it means that he won't entertain such talk.\"\n\n\"Or it could mean that he's seeing to the plans himself.\"\n\nTorgon shook his head. \"I think you're being paranoid again.\"\n\n\"How are we supposed to know the difference?\" Philip asked, falling back into his armchair.\n\n\"I believe they're giving me the benefit of the doubt and a chance to be loyal.\" Torgon continued hovering over the board. \"If I made a bad choice, wouldn't you chastise me first then give me the chance to atone for my mistake?\"\n\nPhilip sipped his wine before answering, \"I don't have that luxury. Those in my rule must be punished according to their crime. I can't afford to grant second chances.\"\n\n\"But you do.\" Torgon shifted his eyes to Philip, but retained the same concentration. \"With a just mind and heart, you grant second chances more than you realize. I believe these men are attempting to emulate the king they love.\" Looking back down at the board, he said, \"You've been in check for three moves.\"\n\nHiro arrived in Kingstor Noble from behind the mountains overlooking the great city. With mountains to the north and west of King's Forest, Teardrop Sea to the east, and Crying River cutting across the south, Kingstor Noble was almost impenetrable\u2014at least by land. Hiro crawled over the mountains until he met the gushing waterfall at the edge of King's Forest. The large forest to the west of Kingstor was the only undefended section, thus a wall had been built dividing the king's magnificent forest and the common homes and farms on the other side. Had a human tried to cross the wall where it met the mountains, they would have been washed away by dangerous, rushing waterfalls. Even in winter, when the water froze, the falls were nearly impossible to scale\u2014unless you had claws.\n\nHiro didn't wait atop the falls. Instead he hid under some trees that had somehow grown into a cave-like form. Their trunks weaved a flawless roof with just enough room for a dragon to crawl inside. As the sun slipped beyond the horizon, the black dragon watched between the soft green growth along the branches.\n\nMany glowing creatures appeared in springtime. Nocturnal snorks began wriggling up the sides of the tree trunks, not bothering with a dragon nearby, knowing they would cause fatal effects if they were eaten. The miniscule glow of puffertongs drifted through the air toward the powerful falls. Even the forest floor brightened with old snork slime that was disturbed when the hooves of Anna's horse trotted over it toward Hiro's hiding place.\n\nShe dismounted, but didn't bother to tie her horse. When she pushed her heavy cloak aside, Hiro could see she had thick boots on her feet, leather gloves on her hands, and a bag full of supplies over one shoulder. She turned her back to Hiro and started toward the falls.\n\nWithout warning Hiro burst from the trees and covered the ground between them in a few strides. Before Anna could turn, Hiro grabbed her around the waist with one claw and sprang into the trees. She gave a startled squeak and he bumbled her slightly in his grasp. With a few springs up the steep mountainside, he came to rest at the top of the waterfall's edge.\n\n\"What was the meaning of that?\" Anna barked when Hiro sat her on a rock at the water's edge.\n\n\"I needed a memory of your capture for Rakgar,\" Hiro said with only a small grin on his lips. \"I thought it would look better if I surprised you.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him then looked out over the vista. \"Where do we go now?\"\n\n\"Back to the Rock Clouds.\"\n\nThe woman spun to face him again. \"The Rock Clouds? Is that necessary?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, yes,\" Hiro said. \"I tried to talk him out of it, but Rakgar insisted I bring you back.\"\n\n\"But your laws!\" Anna's hands flew to her throat. \"If he talks to me!\"\n\nHiro shook his head. \"Rakgar has decreed you exempt from the Killing Law. It is officially lawful for me to speak to you\u2026this time.\"\n\nHer look of confusion gave way to relief before growing into concern. \"What will he do with me?\" she whispered.\n\n\"You won't be harmed.\"\n\nShe shook her head in disbelief. \"A single human among dragons? I'll never return, will I?\"\n\n\"You will.\" Hiro's heart began to harden at the sorrow on her face. \"I give you my wyrd that no dragon will lift a claw against you and you'll be returned unmolested.\"\n\n\"Your wyrd?\"\n\n\"My wyrd, Anna.\" He offered her his open claw. \"May you strike me down if I break it.\"\n\n[ Oust ]\n\n\"Sire! I demand a private audience!\"\n\nPhilip barely had time to be startled at his office door banging open with this announcement before people began spilling through it. Two guards followed a nobleman and his servant; one of the guards stumbled and caught himself from falling as he attempted to reach the nobleman. General Torgon stepped through last, unimpeded and calm.\n\n\"My apologies, Sire.\" The staff guard who remained on his feet attempted to step in front of the nobleman. \"I explained that I would announce his Lordship, but he wouldn't wait.\"\n\nThe nobleman's servant had been clamoring to keep the second guard's hands from his master, but failed. \"It's all right.\" Philip raised a hand to calm the guards in their pursuit to extricate the man. \"I'll see him.\"\n\nThe nobleman jerked his arm free of the guard, but didn't face the king. He lifted one finger to point at the door. \"Out,\" he hissed. The man eyed everyone, even his own servant, until they all left. When only Torgon remained, the nobleman repeated the demand, directing it at the Royal General.\n\nTorgon tilted his head toward Philip. \"I'm sorry,\" Philip said, rising from his chair, \"but only the king has the right to order the Royal General.\"\n\nThe nobleman spun on his heel. Getting a good look at the man did nothing to improve Philip's first impression. Small, close-set eyes hunkered under bushy eyebrows. The man's high cheekbones might have made others consider him good-looking in his earlier years, but his slack jowls and the gray hair above his ears now emphasized his age. Philip couldn't tell if the man's lips were naturally thin, or pursed in anger.\n\n\"Sire,\" the man dipped his head, \"with all due respect, General Torgon is the subject of my interruption.\"\n\nTorgon nodded behind the man.\n\n\"Then,\" Philip resumed his seat behind his desk, \"it makes even more sense for him to stay.\"\n\nThe man's lips disappeared into his mouth altogether. He glanced at Torgon, who kept a stony face, and settled his gilded half-cloak behind him as he took a seat without it being offered.\n\n\"You'll have to remind me of your name, sir.\" Philip pushed aside the reports he had been reading. Looking up, he noticed the man had sat on the edge of his chair, back straight and hands on thighs. Every tooth the nobleman.\n\n\"Lord Dieko of Selevyn, Your Majesty. I have yet to overtake my father's, Lord Diedric's, estate in Selevyn. But I have been to court several times this past year. I was in attendance when the faeries first came to Kingstor Noble in the winter and I attended Your Majesty's coronation.\"\n\nNone of these details mattered, of course. Any noble who could prove their rights could attend court and even the coronation; although Dieko must have supplanted himself in another Kingstor noble's home to have remained in the city this long. Selevyn was two counties over and several days away as the dragon flies.\n\nBefore Philip could ask more, Dieko continued. \"I swore fealty to Your Majesty as a representative of the House of Selevyn only months ago. And I've come to uphold that oath.\" He glanced at Torgon.\n\nTorgon leaned against the wall. He didn't blink.\n\nDieko pressed his lips together again before turning back to Philip. \"I'm afraid I bear ill tidings of your Royal General's loyalties, Sire.\"\n\nPhilip leaned on one arm of his chair. His face remained a smooth mask. \"Is that so?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sire.\" Dieko's chin fell to his chest and didn't rise. \"I'm afraid Royal General Torgon has been\u2026\" Dieko glanced back up at Torgon before lifting his nose into the air. \"I accuse Royal General Torgon Ido Bragon of treason and conspiracy.\"\n\nPhilip blinked. \"Go on.\"\n\nDieko's lips disappeared again. \"General Torgon has been attempting to conspire to usurp the throne of the Noble Kingdom, Sire.\" He pointed a finger at the general. \"He told me he wanted to see someone else on the throne. He called you a 'young know-nothing' and said the kingdom would be better off without you on the throne.\"\n\nPhilip swayed his head toward Torgon. \"'Young know-nothing'?\"\n\nTorgon shrugged.\n\nPhilip turned back to Dieko. \"You heard him say this?\"\n\nIf it was possible, Dieko sat up straighter. \"I did, Sire. I'm sorry to bring to light such a horrible betrayal.\"\n\nPhilip scrunched up his face. \"'Young know-nothing'?\"\n\n\"Don't mock me,\" Torgon finally spoke as he stepped to Philip's side. \"You try to do better.\"\n\nDieko's lips finally materialized as the bottom one hung open. His eyes bulged as his finger lifted. \"You knew?\" he mumbled.\n\nGrins spread across both the king's and his general's faces. \"I'm sorry,\" Philip said, \"Lord Dieko, you've fallen victim to a rather unorthodox attempt to find loyalty among the gentlemen of my court.\" He rose from his chair to circle out in front of the lord. \"The good news is two-fold. Well, three-fold if you count Torgon's innocence.\" He nodded to his general for good measure.\n\nSettling on the edge of the front of his desk, Philip held his hands out to Dieko. \"Not only have you proven yourself to be of unfailing loyalty to your king, you've also won the hand of my sister.\"\n\n\"Your sister?\" Dieko took a breath, but then finally composed himself enough to close his mouth.\n\n\"I still don't agree with your method, Philip.\" Torgon started through the door to his office, but ducked back again to add, \"Oh, congratulations on the coming nuptials, Dieko. I wish you and Anna all the best.\"\n\n\"Anna?\" Dieko's low eyebrows reversed their drooping course on his forehead. \"Anna?\" he asked Philip.\n\n\"Yes, Anna, my sister.\" Philip nodded and walked back to his chair. \"We'll make the announcement after I inform her. I'm sure she'll want to meet you as soon as possible. Why don't you plan to come to dinner? We can tell her then.\"\n\n\"Dinner? Oh, yes, Sire,\" Dieko nodded and stood. Stepping toward the door, he swung it open, but stopped to turn back again. \"Thank you, Sire.\"\n\n\"Hiro!\" Anna called from his claw, \"I'm sorry, but I can't make it much longer.\"\n\nHiro snaked his neck down to look at her without altering his course. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nThe woman's eyes sagged and her one arm around his claw was doing little to hold her in place. \"I'm tired. I need to sleep.\"\n\n\"We've only been flying a few hours,\" he grumbled back.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I've been riding all day and I can't seem to\u2014\" her voice faltered and her legs slipped in his claw before she could right herself.\n\nHiro tilted a wing toward the ground. Circling in the dark, he couldn't see any openings in the trees. He couldn't see anything in the trees. He might land amidst banshees or lions or worse, but he dove into them anyway.\n\nAnna lolled in his claw once he landed. She didn't make any noise, so he was able to hear the thumping of several large hearts nearby. \"We can't stop here,\" he whispered to her.\n\nSNARF! Her own snort wasn't enough to wake her. Anna's eyes were closed and her mouth hung open.\n\n\"Wake up, woman!\" he whispered harshly as he threw her onto his back.\n\n\"What\u2014ouch!\"\n\n\"Quiet!\" he whispered as loud as he dared.\n\nOnce she latched on around his neck, Hiro ran. He hurtled through the trees with barely a sound.\n\n\"What is it?\" Anna whispered into the dark.\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" Hiro didn't slow. \"It sounded like large hearts beating. As big as scorrands or paquars, nothing smaller. Many of them. Perhaps more than a dozen.\"\n\n\"But scorrands and paquars wouldn't harm us unless they were provoked.\"\n\n\"And it could have been something else altogether.\"\n\nHiro's claws clacked against rock, echoing in the night. He slid to a halt when a great stone wall barred his way.\n\n\"What is it?\" Anna whispered again against his scales.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Hiro tip-taloned next to the wall. Leaves and branches covered an opening at the side. He pulled the vegetation away and stepped through.\n\nHe closed his eyes to listen. All he could hear were a few snakes and small lizards. Some birds roosting atop the walls. Insects in the crevices of the stones. No larger animals nearby.\n\nOpening his eyes, he saw the wall they had come through wrapped around to complete the outer walls of an abandoned building. A few trees grew inside the structure, extending above the missing roof. Anna sat up, wonder evident in her voice. \"Did someone dare live in the Black Forest?\"\n\n\"You're lucky they did.\" Hiro reached up to pull her from his back. \"There's nothing harmful nearby. We'll sleep here.\"\n\nHe set her out of the way, then burned a large circle in the overgrown floor. Settling down on the warm scorch marks, Hiro realized his own lethargy from the day's journey. He lifted a wing and a claw and Anna scuttled under them.\n\n[ Terrible Habits ]\n\n\"What do you mean, she can't be found?\" Philip struggled to keep his voice steady.\n\nThe guard knelt to the side of the dining table, but didn't lift his head to answer the king. Lord Dieko sat to Philip's right and Torgon sat on his left. The starter meal had been served while they waited for word of Anna's whereabouts, but the mid-meal was long overdue now.\n\n\"Did you search her chambers?\" Philip asked. \"The gardens? The library? The map rooms? The Hall of Kings?\"\n\n\"The forest?\" Torgon muttered.\n\n\"Did you question her maid?\" Philip continued, brushing past the comment.\n\n\"Yes, Majesty.\" The guard lifted his head only to lower it again. \"She claims the princess departed into the forest on a ride, but hasn't returned to her chambers yet. We'll continue our search.\"\n\nHe stood to leave, but Philip called again. \"Wait, General Torgon is right.\" Philip nodded to himself. \"Get a party together and search the forest. If she's gone out to the mountains again, she needs to learn she can't do that any longer.\"\n\nOnce the guard left, Torgon cleared his throat. \"It was only a toothy comment. She hasn't disappeared like this for weeks.\"\n\n\"No,\" Philip waved to Ruther\u2014filling in tonight for his brother Murthur as the king's personal servant\u2014to bring the food. \"You're right. If she has disappeared, she needs to be taught a lesson. If something has happened to her, we need to find her. Either way, a search party is warranted.\"\n\n\"Sire?\" Philip tried to not to jerk his head when Dieko spoke. He had entirely forgotten the man was there. \"Does the princess really disappear often? I've heard others speak of her wandering, but one can never be sure of the difference between truth and rumor.\"\n\nPhilip tried to hold himself back from digging in as the aromatic, hot food was placed in front of him. \"She did have a tendency to disappear when she first came to the Noble Kingdom, but she was improving lately, as Torgon said. I believed she had changed.\"\n\nPhilip lifted a bite of succulent meat to his mouth, but stopped when Dieko said, \"Changed from what, Sire?\"\n\nPhilip put the bite back on his plate with a sigh only partially meant for the man at his right. \"Dieko, you'll be promised to Anna soon enough, so I can be honest with you, correct?\"\n\n\"Of course, Sire.\"\n\nPhilip took a deep breath. \"Dieko, Anna was raised in the mountains, as everyone knows. Yes, she was trained as a noble during that time. But what the kingdom doesn't know is that Anna has a bad habit of disappearing. Often.\n\n\"She actually disappeared for a couple of weeks in the fall and came back looking like the bottom of a rotting log. She had a lantern with dragon fire in it and wild promises that no dragon was threatening the kingdom.\" Philip shook his head and picked up his fork again. \"I don't know what to make of her behavior anymore,\" he added before finally putting the bite into his mouth.\n\nDieko lifted his own fork. \"Perhaps marriage will temper her, Sire.\"\n\n\"Again?!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, but I'm accustomed to certain things!\"\n\nHiro roared, not caring who heard him.\n\n\"You don't have to be that way about it!\" Anna called up at him. \"It will only be for a moment.\"\n\nHe landed harder than he had yet. \"What is it this time?\"\n\n\"None of your business.\" She hopped out of his claw, but stopped to look at the dragon before moving off. \"Did you check for danger?\"\n\nHe pressed his nose to within a claw length from hers. \"I'm the danger to you, woman. Now what do you need to stop for this time?\"\n\n\"It's private.\" She moved toward some trees.\n\n\"Oh no you don't!\" He slithered between her and the trees. \"You need to stop and eat. You need to stop and rest. You need to stretch your pretty legs. You need to gather water. You need to get rocks out of your boots. You need to stop DELAYING!\" he roared. \"Tell me what it is this time or I won't stop again!\"\n\n\"If you must know,\" she side-stepped to wriggle around him, \"it's a human bodily function. You wouldn't understand.\"\n\nHe wrapped his tail around her waist and put her back in front of him. \"Try me.\"\n\nShe dropped her bag and punched her fists onto her hips. \"It's not a pleasant subject for either you or me, dragon.\"\n\n\"You've seen me cry!\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. Throwing her hands in the air, she groaned. \"Fine! You want to know. I'll tell you.\" She tapped her foot and ground her teeth some more. \"I have to\u2026I need to\u2026well\u2026chinkle.\"\n\n\"Chinkle?\" Hiro's top lip pulled back. \"What's that?\"\n\nAnna groaned again. \"I don't have time to explain!\" She pushed past his claws and dashed toward the trees.\n\n\"Then I'll watch.\"\n\nShe whirled on him with wide eyes. \"I beg your pardon!\"\n\nHiro wanted to grin at how big her eyes grew, but settled on a smirk. \"Perhaps I'll understand better if I see it.\"\n\n\"You'll do nothing of the sort!\" she barked.\n\n\"You've seen me CRY!\"\n\n\"I don't care if I watched you make an egg! You're not coming into those trees with me!\"\n\n\"Are you trying to escape?\"\n\n\"Have you lost your mind?!\"\n\nHiro shrugged a shoulder. \"This could be a ploy to try anything.\"\n\n\"How dare you!\" She shifted on her feet. \"I came with you willingly! I'm trusting you! How can you\u2026?\" She shifted again and looked at the trees. \"Fine. Watch if you must!\"\n\nHiro followed her into the trees.\n\nMoments later the dragon bolted from the trees. \"That's disgusting!!\" he roared. \"How on this green world can you do something like that?!\" He clawed at the ground. \"Disgusting! Disgusting!\"\n\nAnna stepped from the trees, adjusting her skirts. \"I told you not to watch.\"\n\n\"Ugh!\" Hiro grumbled, \"humans are disgusting!\"\n\n\"You're disgusting for insisting on watching,\" she snapped at him.\n\nHiro waved his head back and forth. \"But it's a waste product, correct? That means it's filth!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Anna said, punching her little fists on her hips, \"it's a waste product, but that doesn't mean it's as disgusting as all that.\"\n\n\"Would you eat it?\" he asked. \"Save it? Use it for something?\"\n\n\"Sometimes the more solid waste can be used to fertilize the ground to grow plants.\"\n\n\"Plants that you eat?\"\n\nAnna pinched her face to the side. \"Actually, it can only be used for non-edible plants, but it still\u2014\"\n\n\"So, there are toxins unsuitable for consumption!\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Filth!\" he barked. \"And useless filth at that!\"\n\n\"It's just a byproduct!\" Anna threw her hands in the air. \"Even dragons have that!\"\n\n\"Good clean fire! And I understand the mechanics, but that doesn't make it any less disgusting!\"\n\nAnna pointed back into the trees. \"That was mostly water anyway!\"\n\n\"Water?\" Hiro hesitated. \"Wait!\" He sat up straight. \"You never stopped to do that when we were traveling together in the fall.\"\n\n\"Oh, uh,\" Anna became very interested in adjusting her bag over her shoulder. \"Well, I, er, knew how dire the situation was\u2026I thought, um, we shouldn't stop often\u2026No one would know if I\u2026\" her voice trailed off in a whisper.\n\nHiro bent to meet her eye as she inspected the forest floor. \"What did you do?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" she hemmed again, \"you see, I didn't think anyone would notice because everything on and\u2026around me was\u2026already wet\u2026\"\n\nHiro's eyes drifted to his front claw. \"AAACKKK!\" he screamed very undragon-like, \"you chinkled in my claw!\"\n\n\"Now, really,\" Anna put her hands on her hips again, \"you never would've known\u2014\"\n\n\"AAACCCKKKK!!\" Hiro coughed up a fireball and spit it onto his claw.\n\n\"Is that really necessary\u2014\"\n\nHiro's eyes bulged at her as he scratched one claw against the other. \"Necessary? Necessary?! I've a mind to go to Kradik and have him cut it off!!\"\n\n\"Don't you think you're over\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't get it off!\" Hiro rolled on the ground spitting fire on his claw and arm while scratching at it. \"I can't get it off!!\"\n\nAnna crossed her arms at her chest. \"If you're quite done, I can't ride in your claw with it in that state.\"\n\n[ Games ]\n\nOut of courtesy Philip and Torgon included Dieko in their ritual of chess after dinner. Not feeling entirely comfortable with Dieko, Philip passed on a match with Torgon and let Dieko test himself. Dieko claimed only a minor ability with the game, but Philip watched Torgon grit his teeth against the elder nobleman. Torgon won the first round, but Dieko won the second. As they began a third game, a knock came at the door.\n\nA messenger entered, but hung his head while standing in the entryway to catch his breath. \"Dire news, Your Majesty.\" The man's eyes flickered to Dieko.\n\n\"Speak freely, man,\" Philip prompted. \"What's happened?\"\n\nHe wrung his hands, staring at the floor. \"The princess's horse returned alone, Sire. Just after the search party mounted. They traced its path all the way to the edge of the King's Forest, to the waterfall at the end of the wall.\" He continued working his jaw, but nothing more came out.\n\nDieko stood. \"Out with it, man,\" he hissed low, but the words couldn't be mistaken for anything other than a command.\n\nThe messenger looked up at Dieko, unblinking. \"There were claw marks,\" he shifted his eyes to the king, \"as big as the horse itself. They were within breathing distance of the horse's hoofprints. The guards are certain. They continue to search for any trace of the princess, but sent word back with me.\" The man bowed his head again. \"A dragon has taken the princess.\"\n\n\"Did you ever chinkle on my back?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did you ever chinkle while you slept next to me?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did you ever chinkle on Tog?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Only on me?\"\n\n\"You're special.\"\n\n\"You're disgusting.\"\n\nHiro and Anna trudged together through the trees of the Black Forest. He couldn't bring himself to pick her up again. Anna jumped over a large root. \"I've heard that some animals chinkle on things to mark them as their own.\" She shifted her eyes under long eyelashes to Hiro. \"Does that make you mine?\"\n\nHe put his nose in front of her and snorted, blowing her hair out behind her. \"Dragons can't be owned.\"\n\n\"But you claim when a dame accepts a dan's heart that she can control him,\" she said with a smile. \"So at least a dan can be owned. Else what do you call it?\"\n\n\"We call it love. What do humans call it?\"\n\n\"If it's a female marrying\u2026\" Her voice trailed off.\n\n\"Yes?\" he asked, suspecting he had hit on a sore spot.\n\n\"Never mind.\" She bit off the words and kept walking.\n\nHiro ran to catch up with a smile on his lips, but stopped when a breeze met him. \"Stop!\" he ordered her.\n\n\"Stop what?\" she asked, turning.\n\nHiro lifted his head, turning his nose into the wind. \"I smell,\" he inhaled deeply, then quickly shifted his eyes to meet hers, \"other dragons.\"\n\n\"Here?\" Anna searched the trees. \"Have they come for me?\"\n\nHiro shook his head. \"No, the scent\u2026it's not\u2026right\u2026\"\n\nAnna trailed after him as he followed the scent through the trees. \"What do you mean, 'not right'?\"\n\n\"I mean, there's something wrong with it.\" Ignoring her protests and warnings, Hiro crawled through the enormous trees toward the scent. The Black Forest spared little light from above when no leaves were on the trees, but with new growth on them, it might as well have been dusk.\n\nThe scent of dragons grew stronger as Hiro crept along, sweeping his nose from side to side. He didn't recognize the scents from anyone he knew, but he could smell the bitter tang of the Rock Clouds. Whoever had been here had come from his home. But the smell of fire\u2014the burnt, scorched, flavor of heat\u2014smelled too strong.\n\n\"It's almost as if\u2014\" Then he saw them.\n\n\"As if what?\" Anna asked, pushing past his tail.\n\nHiro threw a claw out to stop her from moving forward. \"Don't touch them.\"\n\n\"Don't touch what?\"\n\nHiro put his claw back down and stepped forward. Pointing, he showed her where light gray spots covered the ground in several places among the trees.\n\nAnna bent over to inspect one such spot. \"Ashes.\"\n\nHiro sniffed the remains. \"None of them are from the same dragon,\" he told her.\n\n\"But the piles,\" she stood up straighter, \"they're so small.\"\n\nHiro pointed out marks against the ground where the dirt had been displaced. He couldn't bring himself to speak.\n\n\"Boot prints,\" Anna whispered. \"Humans did this.\"\n\nHiro growled looking at several sets of the boot prints dancing around the scant remains. \"Rakgar was right. Humans aren't afraid of dragons any longer. They hunt us for sport and\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014gather the ashes,\" Anna finished. When Hiro crawled next to her, she pointed to the evidence. \"They made a campfire here. Probably to wait until the ashes were cool enough to transport. I can see wagon marks here and here.\" She pointed out the different tracks. \"This was no accident. It was planned.\"\n\n\"How?\" Hiro rumbled in his throat. \"How did they do this? I see no burnt or broken trees as would accompany a fight.\"\n\nScanning the area again, Anna nodded. \"You're right. There's nothing but the ash marks.\"\n\n\"No,\" Hiro whispered, glaring at the gray patches. \"No, no, no.\" He ran around the spots on the ground and skidded to a halt in front of Anna. \"They're in a circle.\"\n\nAnna's brow furrowed. \"What does it mean?\"\n\nHiro hung his head. \"They were sleeping.\"\n\n\"That's not sport,\" Anna said, shaking her own head in disbelief.\n\n\"It's slaughter.\" Hiro growled at the marks on the ground. He paced closer to one of the thin piles.\n\n\"Wait,\" Anna's head continued shaking, \"how is this even possible? Even with men surrounding them on all sides and taking shots with dragon-killer bolts, none of them would have died instantly. The bolts are powerful, but you've been struck by them and survived. The dames would have woken and fought.\"\n\n\"Does a massacre need to make sense?\" Hiro reached out to the pile in front of him. The scent was vaguely familiar. He must have at least met this dame before. He scooped a small pile of ash into his claw, trying desperately to remember what she looked like, and he hung his head. Someone needed to mourn her.\n\nPulling his claw away, he uncovered the point of an arrowhead in the dirt. His top lip curled back on its own as he let the ash fall to the ground again and he picked up the tiny piece of metal.\n\n\"Hiro!\" Anna called from the other side of the circle. She waved him over to show him another arrow embedded in the dirt.\n\n\"I found one too.\" He showed her the arrowhead in his claw. \"They didn't even use bolts.\"\n\nAnna picked up the arrow, turning it over in her hand. \"Arrows couldn't do this. We know that from experience.\"\n\n\"They were killed while sleeping before they could fight back, Anna.\" Hiro hung his head again. \"May their embers burn forever.\"\n\n\"Hiro, you don't understand,\" Anna stepped closer to him with the arrow in her hand. \"My brother is planning something. He's been locked up in private counsel with the faeries ever since I returned the last time.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea what those plans might be?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, he claims that the faeries insisted I not be included in the plans.\"\n\n\"And he doesn't trust you enough to tell you anyway.\" It wasn't really a question. Hiro knew that Philip didn't trust Anna.\n\n\"He doesn't know me well enough to trust me,\" Anna said as she hung her head and fiddled with the arrow.\n\n\"I couldn't say,\" Hiro answered, then surveyed the remains again. \"I can say that dragons are stronger than this.\"\n\nAnna rubbed the arrowhead with her thumb. Her eyes creased with worry, then narrowed as she scrubbed at it harder. \"There's something on this,\" she muttered. She reached into her bag and pulled out a water skin similar to the one she had made from a lydik stomach the last time she and Hiro were together. She trickled water over the arrow point and rubbed away the ashes. Splashing more water down the length of the arrow revealed that the arrow point was covered in a black substance.\n\nAnna continued to rub at it without the water. \"It looks like a paint or lacquer of some sort.\" Her head jerked up to meet Hiro's eyes. \"A poison maybe? But I can't think of a poison that would leave behind a black residue like this. Can you? Hiro, can you think of anything that would harm a dragon like this?\"\n\nHiro surveyed the remains, but his mind flickered to the flarote bulb. If dragons ate too much of it, it would kill them. But these dragons weren't force-fed. He shook his head at Anna. \"Dragons don't have weaknesses.\"\n\nThey decided to get some rest alongside the piles of ashes then fly the remainder of the way to the Rock Clouds in one trip. Curled up on the opposite side of where the humans had camped, Hiro could still pick up their scent.\n\nHe snorted, turning his head away from the stench. \"Do you think the humans that killed the dames ever chinkled in this area?\"\n\nAnna nuzzled under Hiro's front leg. \"Most likely.\"\n\n\"Humans are disgusting.\"\n\n\"You've told me that you sometimes vomit fire,\" Anna replied with a hint of annoyance. \"Wouldn't you consider that disgusting as well?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Hiro shrugged. \"It's fire. It devours, not desecrates.\"\n\n\"Humans vomit too.\"\n\n\"More of that nasty stuff from your insides?\"\n\nAnna sighed. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Disgusting.\"\n\nAnna's breathing slowed. Hiro could feel her chest rising higher with her inhalation and he thought she had fallen asleep. She surprised him when she spoke, and her voice caught. \"What will Rakgar do to me when we arrive?\"\n\nHis claws instinctively closed around her a little more. \"He won't harm you. I give you my wyrd.\" He forced himself to relax his claws. Why would he promise her that? What unnatural hold did this woman have upon him?\n\n\"Hiro,\" she whispered again. \"You understand that I would never condone this sort of action toward dragons, don't you? You know, if I could, I would do everything in my power to stop it.\" When he didn't answer immediately, she fussed in his claws until she could stare him in the eye. \"You know that, don't you?\"\n\nHis burning heart, deep in his chest, contracted for a moment. He dipped his chin to her. \"Yes, Anna. I know.\"\n\n[ Inception ]\n\n\"You can swallow me, but I can swallow you.\"\n\nAnna squirmed in Hiro's claw. \"You're making them much harder now, aren't you?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be fun if it was easy,\" he rumbled.\n\nAnna sighed and fidgeted some more. Finally she shouted, \"Water!\"\n\nHiro's smile faded, but it didn't disappear.\n\n\"Always old, sometimes new. Never sad, sometimes blue. Never empty, sometimes full. Never pushes, always pulls.\"\n\nHiro's smile disappeared. \"Say it again.\"\n\nAnna repeated the riddle as the pair drew closer to the Rock Clouds. The sun was just dipping over the horizon, turning the sky a soft purple and pink. The three moons of Avonoa shined their half-moon light on the tip of the towering Inner Mountain. Several glittering shapes flew into the air in the distance, but none approached them. Yet.\n\nHe asked Anna to repeat the riddle again. As he thought about it, Hiro noticed two large, dark shapes detach themselves from the bottom of the closest floating mountain. This particular mountain was so large and moved so slowly that the two dragons could have been attached to it all day. The moons glittered off their scales and Hiro hissed.\n\n\"The moons,\" he said to Anna, keeping his voice low, \"but you forgot the last line. 'What are we?' That's why I couldn't guess it.\"\n\nAnna shrugged. \"That makes it too easy. It's your turn.\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" he whispered down to her. \"They're coming.\"\n\nAnna folded herself over in his claw. Hiro tightened his grip around her waist and legs. They had abandoned her bag of supplies earlier near Centaur River when she insisted on making one last disgusting stop. She couldn't look \"too prepared,\" as Hiro had put it. They even discussed how she must look as if she had come with him against her will.\n\n\"Don't speak unless you are spoken to,\" Hiro whispered again. \"I'll do all I can to keep you safe. You have my wyrd.\"\n\nAnna leaned over away from the wind as if she'd been hanging there for the entire flight. \"I know you will,\" she whispered back.\n\nAfter several wingfalls, the two approaching dragons announced themselves with a roar. Hiro noticed the orange-tinged brown of Trakillyn's wings, but didn't recognize the other dragon. The pair hovered in front of Hiro while they searched the form of the slumped princess, then they swung to opposite sides of him to escort Hiro and his cargo back to the Rock Clouds.\n\nIn silence, they flew past The Watch perches under the slow-moving mountain. In his peripheral vision Hiro saw no fewer than five triangular heads shift in their direction. As the small group skirted the mountains and floating boulders, Hiro could hear wings take to the skies behind them. Rocks clattered as more dragons followed. Even the groan of the floating mountains eased in awe as the first human ever known to have entered the Rock Clouds arrived.\n\nTrakillyn and his companion landed to the sides of Rakgar's lair. Hiro halted in front of the opening, but hesitated before entering. He turned to Trakillyn, his jaw opening slightly to question the brown dragon, when he saw Tog crawl up behind him. When Hiro met his best friend's eye, Tog shook his head ever so slightly.\n\nInstead of speaking, Hiro dumped Anna onto the rocks in front of the lair. Her entire body shook as she blundered to her feet. Trying to soften his heart against her, Hiro shoved her toward the lair. She caught herself with a yelp, then crawled away from the dragons sitting outside and went through the dark entrance.\n\nHiro followed her, nudging her forward all the way. When they reached the dimming light of the cave beyond, Anna blinked into the dark settling around them.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Rakgar purred. Hiro could sense a touch of a grin in that voice.\n\nAs if by signal, several lights glowed in the darkness. Milah and Mitashio spat large rocks out of their mouths, the heat burning them white hot. The faerie Skorkot whispered some words into her hand and unfurled a shimmering ribbon that she wrapped around her wrist. Three more dragons in the back spat fire on a large log.\n\nRakgar stepped forward into the circle of light created. \"I see you were successful in your assignment,\" he growled, circling the woman. Her breath quickened, but she managed to put on a fairly convincing shocked face at his spoken words.\n\nHiro leaned toward the massive gray dragon and breathed the memory of Princess Anna with her back toward him at the waterfall. He concentrated on only sending the memory of snatching her from the trees and leaping into the air.\n\nWhen Rakgar blinked the memory away, Hiro spoke. \"I easily took her as she wandered about in the forest.\"\n\nRakgar gazed at Hiro while he breathed the memory into Milah's face, who in turn passed it to the others. After much too long for Hiro's comfort, Rakgar nodded and turned to Anna. \"And you, woman, do you know why you're here?\"\n\nAnna pulled her cloak tighter around her. \"No,\" she whispered, staring at the dragons around her with feigned surprise.\n\nRakgar bared his fangs at her. \"Your brother, King Philip, is attacking dragons. He sets traps. He kills in great numbers.\" Rakgar leveled his head at her. \"Does he not fear us?\"\n\n\"If you can speak, perhaps you should discuss it with him,\" Anna said, allowing her expression to rest. \"If he knew you are intelligent creatures, I'm sure he wouldn't behave in such a manner.\"\n\nRakgar rumbled in his throat. \"Humans are the monsters. Why do you think we hide from you the fact that we can speak?\"\n\nAnna's head dipped. \"If you've brought me here to convince me of your power it won't help. My brother doesn't keep my counsel.\"\n\n\"And if he did?\"\n\nAnna gazed up at the enormous dragon. She barely came up to his leg joint, but Hiro could swear he saw anger and defiance in her eyes. \"You would have nothing to fear.\"\n\nRakgar gave a guttered, hesitating roar. Hiro recognized the familiar chuckle he hadn't heard for several months. When Rakgar brought his head back to the woman in front of him, he snapped his jaws at her, but Hiro could still see the smile on his lips. \"We have nothing to fear.\"\n\n\"Then why have you brought me here?\" she asked.\n\n\"To remind your brother and all humans how dangerous a dragon can be.\"\n\nAnna glanced around the cave while Rakgar stepped away to join the other dragons surrounding her. \"Will you return me, then?\" she asked his retreating back. Hiro had never heard her sound so meek.\n\nRakgar glared at Hiro. \"Perhaps.\"\n\n\"Rakgar,\" Hiro spoke, attempting to soften his heart again, \"let every being know I've given this woman my wyrd that she wouldn't be harmed. If anything happens to her, they have broken my wyrd in my stead and their life is mine.\"\n\nRakgar lifted his top lip to reveal his fangs at Hiro. \"Why would you do that?\"\n\n\"You know she needs to go back,\" Hiro insisted. \"Unharmed.\"\n\nSnorting flame from his nostrils, Rakgar turned to Anna. He pointed one claw toward the small opening leading to Priya's lair. \"Then you will stay as my guest. Go in there and a green dragon will attend you.\"\n\n\"Priya?\" Hiro's head jolted up. \"Has Priya returned?\"\n\nRakgar watched Anna step toward the opening before swiveling his head to Hiro. \"She has.\"\n\n\"Where has she been?\" Hiro stepped toward the same opening. \"What happened? I must see her!\"\n\nBut Rakgar moved to block his way. \"I will send her to you after she's done with the woman.\"\n\nHiro watched Anna go. Before she went through the dark entrance, she glanced back at Hiro. She gave him a reassuring smile and a nod, then slipped into the darkness beyond.\n\n\"Rakgar,\" Hiro said after Anna disappeared, \"along the way here, I saw something\u2026\" He shook his head.\n\nRakgar's brows creased. \"What is it, Hiro?\"\n\n\"Ashes,\" he whispered, \"so many ashes.\" He placed his nose in front of Rakgar's and sent him the memory of the piles of ashes. He sent only the sight of it, as well as the sight of the arrow in his claw.\n\nRakgar's frown deepened as he gave the memory to Milah. Turning back to Hiro, Rakgar said, \"We know the humans have been attacking dragons.\"\n\n\"But they were killed in their sleep. Instantly. There was no sign of struggle.\" Hiro's scales lifted in anger. \"What human can even do that? I would also like to find out why Philip is gathering dragon ash.\"\n\nRakgar nodded in thought. \"Yes,\" he answered, \"you should go back to investigate. I'll send Priya to your lair and the two of you must go to the surface immediately. Discover what you can, then return.\"\n\nHiro nodded, but hesitated before leaving. His eyes flickered toward the entrance to Priya's lair. Rakgar noticed the movement. \"Don't worry, Hiro. I'll send her to you straight away.\"\n\n[ Validations ]\n\n\"An entire quiver?\" Philip asked the lieutenant standing in front of him. \"Where is it?\"\n\nThe man had presented himself in the audience hall as one of the company that had traveled north with Captain Murzod and the faeries. He was not a young man, as evidenced by the gray at his temples. But given his petite frame\u2014he was smaller than some of the maids in the palace\u2014Philip could imagine he'd be the swiftest on a horse. He had introduced himself as Jakobi.\n\nPushing aside his riding cloak, Jakobi revealed a small satchel hanging from one shoulder. \"They've enchanted it, Sire,\" he said, loosening the buckle. \"If I may. The halfway point I've come from will be used to distribute many more like these.\" He pulled an entire quiver from the small bag, something Philip knew would be impossible without majik. Jakobi handed the quiver to Philip with a small bow.\n\nThe quiver was nondescript leather, but black fletching with gilt on the edges poked out of the top. Philip pulled one free to inspect the tip. His stomach clenched when he saw the blackened arrowhead tip. An uneven smattered line circled the shaft showing where it had been dipped into the deadly substance.\n\nPhilip and Torgon shared a glance before he slid the arrow back into the quiver. \"Are there any more?\" Philip asked Jakobi.\n\nThe lieutenant shook his head. \"I'm afraid not, Sire. The rest of the small supply made has been sent to groups of soldiers setting traps for more ash.\"\n\nPhilip struggled not to grind his teeth. \"Under whose authority?\"\n\nJakobi hesitated, \"Captain Murzod and the faeries, of course, Sire. He distributed the arrows to the men then sent me to give you the quiver and this.\" He handed Philip a rolled scroll of parchment sealed with Murzod's house seal.\n\nPhilip broke it and swiftly read the messy handwriting. When he finished he thrust it at Torgon. \"Days late in his report and he presumes to anticipate my orders. They've done nothing more than set up a halfway point and they barely reached The Great Northern Mountain alive.\"\n\n\"I suppose we could be pleased that he's only days behind instead of weeks,\" Torgon answered with a frown.\n\n\"I suppose we should be pleased he's behind at all,\" Philip muttered to the floor. Remembering the lieutenant, he forced his attention back to the man. \"I'm sorry Jakobi, you must be tired. If that's all of your report, you should get some rest tonight and report back to General Tommak in the morning. You'll have to guide the next convoy with dragon ash back to Captain Murzod.\"\n\nBut Jakobi didn't turn to leave. \"Actually, Sire, there is something else I think I should mention.\" His head dipped, but his eyes reconnected to Philip's. \"My report from Captain Murzod is complete, but I came upon a slaughtered group of staff soldiers on my way to Kingstor. There were five bodies. They had bags and shovels. The bodies were lain out on the ground with the shovels on their chests and the bags over their heads.\" He dropped his eyes. \"They were surrounding a pile of dragon ash and there were centaur hoofprints everywhere. I believe the centaurs came upon the men gathering the ash and killed them for it. They laid the bodies out that way to send a message.\"\n\nPhilip exhaled slowly. \"I've been taught that centaurs believe dragon ash to be sacred.\" He nodded before turning to Torgon. \"Add a caution to the proclamation for gold in exchange for dragon ash. Let the people know they need to avoid centaurs above all else.\" Nodding to Jakobi, he added, \"It's not worth getting killed.\"\n\nHiro paced across the hard floor of his lair. In one corner, he had added a few pine boughs to sleep on. Since his stay in Jarek's barn in the fall, he felt much more comfortable lying down with something to soften the rock beneath him. But it did nothing to distract him from the conversation of the moment.\n\n\"What if we hurt her just a little?\" Prak offered. \"It might scare her enough to convince the king to leave dragons alone.\"\n\nHiro spun around in time to see Tog's eye roll. \"If we hurt her at all, the king himself would climb up here and rip out our throats,\" Tog told the smaller dragon. \"That's the problem.\"\n\n\"We shouldn't have her here at all,\" Hiro growled. \"I don't know what Rakgar is thinking making me bring her here.\"\n\n\"And allowing her to hear us speak?\" Prak echoed their thoughts. \"Even if most humans think she's gone mad from the experience, there will likely be those who believe her. That's how ideas start, with a flicker of the truth. I mean, even some dragons think we should speak to the humans, right?\" At Tog's shocked eyes, he quickly added, \"I'm not saying that's what I think, but there's got to be some semblance of truth in there somewhere. Humans may not be able to handle it right now, but they may be in the future. Maybe they could get used to the idea. Maybe they\u2014\"\n\n\"Blasphemy!\" Tog roared.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" Prak continued unabashedly, \"I'm just saying that's what some dragons think.\"\n\n\"Not all dragons can be trusted with secrets,\" a smooth voice came from the entrance. The three dragons spun to see Priya sidle through the entrance. \"As is evidenced by The Krusible.\"\n\n\"Priya!\" Prak bounced to his feet. \"Where've you been? Were you on the surface? You know, some others said you've been here all this time hiding in your lair. Were you having adventures? Did you visit the desert ruck? Did you visit the island ruck? They're much further away; I can imagine it would take a long time to get there and back. You were gone so long!\"\n\n\"No, Prak,\" she said before he could continue his questions. But she offered no explanation. Turning to Hiro she said, \"I believe you and I have an assignment to complete.\"\n\n\"Can I come too?\" The inevitable question came from the small brown dragon.\n\n\"No, Prak,\" Priya repeated, again with no explanation, although she kept her eyes on Hiro.\n\n\"Come on, Prak,\" Tog heaved himself from the ground. \"I hear Likkop and Horssina are racing each other once the moons are up.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Prak trotted to the cave entrance. \"I would bet a side of lydik that Horssina will easily take that race.\"\n\n\"No chance!\" Tog snapped back, \"Likkop has four wings!\" The pair lifted into the dark sky debating the practicality of four wings versus a bifurcated tail until they couldn't be heard any longer.\n\n\"Am I not to see Anna before I leave?\" Hiro asked through narrowed eyes.\n\nPriya tilted her triangular head. \"Do you question my care of the human?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Hiro thumped his tail. \"I'd just like to explain to her where I'm going and how long I'll be gone.\"\n\n\"She knows.\"\n\nHiro took a step toward her. \"Where've you been, Priya?\" Priya stared at him without blinking. \"Come on, I know you won't tell the likes of Prak, but you can tell me. Can't you?\"\n\nPriya turned toward the entrance as well. \"I hear you've been back to the surface while I was away.\" The starry sky made her scales and eyes sparkle.\n\n\"I'm not as afraid of it as I used to be,\" Hiro said, joining her in the entrance.\n\nShe tilted her head up to him. \"And why is that?\"\n\nHe dipped his head toward the surface drifting in the distance. \"Because I learned that it's not as terrifying as I thought.\"\n\nPriya grunted then ran down the mountain. Hiro followed, chasing her lashing tail. Just as he thought he might catch her, she jumped from the bottom edge of the mountain, catching the wind with her unfurled wings. Hiro, of course, tumbled down the slope after her to plummet into the air at the bottom before opening his wings.\n\nThe pair pressed the air back, soaring into the night. Once Hiro caught himself, a warm spring breeze allowed them to settle into a glide down the Inner Mountain and above the trees beyond. The scent of fresh new leaves on the trees felt tangy in Hiro's nose. Not the same tang of Kingstor Noble; it was a much sweeter scent there. Anna had much the same scent.\n\n\"I had unfinished business in the Desert Ruck,\" Priya said, jarring Hiro out of his thoughts.\n\nHe glanced sideways at her. \"You couldn't tell Tog that before you disappeared on him?\"\n\n\"I didn't think I needed to answer to anyone.\"\n\nHiro pressed his wings harder. \"You do realize how worried everyone has been about you?\" It wasn't really a question.\n\nPriya shifted her eyes away from him. \"I didn't know Tog cared so much.\"\n\nHiro dipped underneath her on a current to meet her eyes on the other side. \"I wasn't talking about Tog.\"\n\nShe looked away again.\n\nThey flew in silence until Hiro enflamed his courage. \"What news of Anna?\"\n\n\"The human?\" Priya glared at him.\n\nHiro's eyes drifted to the trees. \"I gave her my wyrd she wouldn't be harmed.\"\n\n\"Why would you do such a foolish thing?\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder. \"I believe it benefits the entire ruck to return her safely.\" His eyes snapped to Priya. \"She's okay, isn't she?\" When she only continued to glare at him through narrowed eyes, Hiro ground his teeth together. \"If she gets even a small scratch on her, Philip will tear through the Rock Clouds with faerie majik. Have you seen what he's done? Have you heard any of the reports? Your father's anger will seem a pleasant dream compared to Philip's wrath!\"\n\nPriya's face didn't twitch. \"The woman is perfectly well.\" After pausing she added, \"I'm well too, thanks for asking.\"\n\n\"How could a human harm you?\" Hiro asked without thinking.\n\n\"Since the moment I returned, all you seem to care about me is where I've been,\" she growled.\n\n\"I could see with my own eyes that you're well.\"\n\n\"You didn't ask if I'd been hurt. Maybe that's why it took me so long to return!\" she snapped at him.\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then why would you\u2014?\"\n\n\"You didn't ask, though, did you?\" she barked. \"No, all you seem to be concerned about is your little pet human.\"\n\n\"Priya, you know I\u2026\" He couldn't finish the thought. All his life he, Tog, and the other dans had been taught to guard their hearts. \"Don't let it break until you have no other choice,\" their dans would tell them. \"Don't let a dame steal your heart too young;\" \"don't let a dame control you unless she's good;\" \"don't allow a dame your heart unless you know she's worthy.\" On they would go, counsel and advice all leading to the same thing\u2014 \"Guard your heart.\"\n\nLore among the dans indicated that a dan's heart would only break if two things came into sync with a third. First, a dan must think about the dame. He must consider her good qualities and bad. Second, he must love her for those qualities. A dan can feel his heart harden for a dame. Most of the time, he can choose to soften his heart against her, but sometimes it's not possible. And third, the most unproven step, the dame must be present.\n\nAs Hiro flew alongside Priya, he thought about all those things. He knew she was a worthy dame. He knew he would be proud of his heart breaking for her. She was strong, smart, just, loyal, and a dozen other wonderful qualities. Thinking of these, he felt into his heart. It hardened ever so slightly, then softened once again.\n\n\"Down there,\" Priya dipped her wing and headed south, descending at a slow angle.\n\n\"That's not the site I came upon,\" Hiro said. They were easily a half-day's flight from the Black Forest attack site.\n\n\"No,\" Priya whispered, \"after you returned, Sarachi reported this one.\"\n\nHiro followed Priya into the trees. They brushed past the tender leaf shoots into a small clearing. Once his own claws were a claw length above the ground, Hiro closed his eyes. Both dragons landed with no more sound than the growing leaves.\n\nHe heard night bugs creeping over an old log, a small furry creature darting away from the newly arrived dragon threat, and several rapid beating hearts of small birds in the trees. No danger. When he opened his eyes, he saw Priya watching him.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she whispered into the stillness of the forest.\n\n\"Checking if I can hear anything nearby,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"Rakgar didn't give you this assignment because of your hearing,\" she rolled her eyes at him. \"He gave it to you because of your vision.\"\n\nHiro's feeling of guilt for not telling her his most embarrassing secret gnawed at him. All the other dragons in the ruck, with the exception of Tog, thought Hiro had the best night vision of them all due to his night-black scales. Unfortunately, his scales belied the truth. His night vision was worse than that of almost every other dragon. But he made up for it with a keen sense of smell and even keener hearing.\n\nHe noticed Priya studying the ground around them. Once he inspected it closer, he saw the same kind of gray patches he and Anna had stumbled upon in the Black Forest.\n\n\"They're laid out in the same pattern,\" he said, treading carefully between the patches.\n\n\"What pattern?\"\n\n\"They're in a circle.\" He indicated the pattern with his front claw.\n\nPriya sunk low to the ground. \"They were sleeping.\"\n\n\"Same as the ones I found.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes at him. \"You and the woman.\"\n\n\"Her name is Anna.\"\n\n\"What do I care?\"\n\nHiro reached into one of the piles of ash. \"These remains aren't so low,\" he said. \"They must have been in a hurry to leave, not to take as much as they could.\"\n\n\"Probably because they're already so close to the Rock Clouds,\" Priya shrugged.\n\nHiro pretended to scan the ground closely, but breathed in steady, deep draughts. \"No,\" he pointed to the ground when he caught the scent, \"centaurs.\"\n\n\"They interrupted,\" she said, nodding. \"Good. If only they had come sooner.\"\n\nPriya crawled around the piles snaking between them, looking for any more clues. But Hiro reached into one of the piles, scratching at the remains with his claws. \"Are you looking for something?\" she asked when she noticed what he was doing.\n\nHe didn't answer until he found what he was looking for. From the cooled embers he removed a nondescript arrow. Hiro laid it across his claws and bathed it with fire. The ash fell away as if it had been doused in water, but there remained on the point of the arrow the same black substance Anna had discovered.\n\nPriya snatched the arrow out of his claw. \"A single arrow? To kill four dames while they slept? How is this possible?\"\n\n\"A single arrow for each,\" Hiro clarified. \"But only one was necessary, I'm assuming. Anna and I found the same thing.\" He left out the part that Anna had also discovered the additional coating on the arrowhead. \"Whatever is on these arrows must be deadly poisonous to dragons.\"\n\nPriya's eyes bulged and her claw dropped the arrow. \"Dragon poison?\"\n\n\"It's the only explanation.\"\n\n\"But how? The only thing that\u2026\" she didn't finish the thought. The only thing that could harm a dragon was the flarote bulb. The small, round, reddish mushroom, named \"the burning mushroom\" for the fact that it was shaped like fire frozen in time, was the only thought in the dragons' minds.\n\nPriya shook her head. \"How could it be possible? They would have to\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014eat it,\" Hiro finished for her. \"I know. Perhaps King Philip and the faeries are planning more than we realized.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should interrogate that human while we have her.\"\n\nHiro's face whipped around to meet Priya's. \"You will not harm her.\"\n\nPriya's eyes narrowed dangerously. \"Why do you protect her so?\"\n\n\"For the good of the ruck.\"\n\n\"Liar.\" Priya straightened from her attack stance. \"I can always tell when you are lying, Hiro.\"\n\nHiro straightened from the attack stance he hadn't known he'd assumed. \"There's nothing new to learn here.\"\n\nHe turned to leave, but Priya sat back on her haunches, peering into the night sky. \"Are you a blood and ash traitor, Hiro?\"\n\nThis time Hiro growled at her before assuming the attack posture.\n\nShe twisted her head over her shoulder to look at him. \"I only ask because several others have asked me why your heart hasn't broken for me yet.\" Hiro had to fight to keep his maw from dropping open, but he couldn't stop his eyes from popping. Priya resumed her gaze at the stars. \"A majishun once told me that it would.\"\n\nShe looked beautiful in the moonlight. As straight and still as one of the trees around her. Smooth and green as the newly growing leaves. Her tail drifted across the forest floor, away from the remains of her sister-dames. Hiro reached into his heart again. Again, it tightened and compacted at the alluring sight of her. And again, the more he willed it to happen, the faster it softened and the feeling melted away. It reminded him of trying to stab a snork without its spiky shell. The slippery slime surrounding one always let a snork squirm away.\n\nHe loped toward her, his mind warring between words of comfort and words of justification, but something else jumped to his mind. \"Majishuns!\" he stopped mid-stride and met her questioning eye. \"The arrow!\"\n\nHe bounced back to the piles of ash and dug through one of them again with both claws. Priya slithered next to him. \"We need to take it to a majishun to find out what it is!\" Once he found another arrow, he held it out to Priya.\n\nShe jerked the arrow from his claw and shook it at him. \"Wait, we can't let any more faeries know about this poison.\"\n\nHe shook his head and pushed past her. Once again pretending to look at the ground, but sniffing it as he brushed past, he found the centaur scent again. \"I have no intention of visiting faeries.\"\n\n[ Empirical Conclusions ]\n\nCrawling through the forest took much longer than flying over it, especially while carrying the arrow. They avoided large and dangerous creatures. They did take turns flying overhead to rest their legs. But Hiro had to remain on the ground to lead the way during any dark hours.\n\nOnce Priya signaled from the ground for Hiro to land and he found she'd killed a meikrat\u2014part-lizard, part-mammal, and as long as Hiro's tail. They shared the meal before Priya launched into the sky and Hiro took lead again.\n\nThey came upon one herd of centaurs, but found no majishuns with them. The dragons were sent quickly on their way after suggesting such a thing. Centaurs didn't like faeries and faeries tended to use majik more than any other species. Therefore, majik wasn't looked kindly upon by the centaurs. But use it they did.\n\n\"Rylan?\" one tall, shaggy centaur with enormous front teeth answered when Hiro inquired after the only centaur majishun he knew. \"I believe he's traveling with his sister, Ashel. They stay much closer to the Noble Kingdom these days. You can find them on this side of the Torthoth Mountains. Probably just north of the Black Forest.\"\n\nAfter another day of flying, the pair of dragons landed at the edge of the Black Forest. Hiro scoured the ground with his eyes and nose, since it was just past the peak of day. But it was Priya who found the hoofprints in the dirt leading into the foreboding trees.\n\nHours later the two dragons crossed a small stream. The trees on the other side twisted at the base before snaking into the dimming sky. Black leaves hung from dark red branches sagging overhead. Hiro could smell the centaur trail and even heard a few faint heartbeats, but he couldn't imagine why they would come to this murky place. Something whistled through the leaves.\n\n\"This place feels wrong,\" Priya whispered. \"We should go around it.\"\n\nThe strange colors of the trees seemed to pull at Hiro's eyes. The sun dimmed as it set and the contorted trees and branches reaching toward the dragons made Hiro want to run. But he forced himself to continue. \"They're nearby,\" he said in a low voice. \"I don't want to miss them just because we get a strange feeling from trees.\"\n\n\"How do you know they're nearby?\" she asked, but Hiro didn't listen to the rest of her question or her argument for going around.\n\nHe heard hooves beating the ground, two pairs flanking them and one coming straight at them.\n\n\"Quiet!\" he whispered as loud as he dared to halt Priya's tirade. \"They're coming.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes into the trees around them, but said nothing. Hiro stared straight ahead until a black shadow melted through the black tree trunks. When the tall black centaur came into view Hiro released his breath.\n\n\"Vikal!\" he said with relief.\n\n\"Well met, Hiro!\" Vikal, although an imposing centaur with a scar running across his face and onto his shoulder and arm, hailed Hiro by touching his nose-bridge and clapping his hands together. \"Ashel claimed we would be seeing you soon. I think she was hoping your friend Prak would be with you.\"\n\nHiro grinned remembering how Prak had made a fool out of himself when he first met the beautiful leader of the warrior centaurs, Ashel. \"Not this time,\" he said, saluting with the three-tiered centaur greeting of touching forehead, nose-bridge, and chest. \"Instead I bring the daughter of Rakgar, Priya.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Vikal exclaimed at the sight of her, \"a dame! A true warrior comrade! And beautiful as well!\" He saluted her with a light touch to his nose-bridge and bent his neck to her.\n\n\"Well met, Vikal,\" Priya said, delivering the three-tiered salute flawlessly. \"May I meet this Ashel I've heard so much about?\"\n\nWhen Vikal turned back to go into the trees, Hiro saw two of the other four centaurs that had accompanied him to meet the visitors. One was gray with white dapples on her hind end, the other an orange-brown much redder than Ashel and her brothers. Neither centaur greeted the dragons. They watched from a distance before they turned to melt back into the trees. Hiro never saw to whom the other two sets of hooves belonged, nor did he learn how they had known he and Priya were approaching.\n\n\"What are you doing in such a place, Vikal?\" Priya asked as they followed the intimidating centaur deeper into the forest under the black and red trees. \"Why would anyone stay here?\"\n\n\"It keeps out unwanted visitors,\" Vikal glared at the disquieting trees. \"I'm sure you felt the effects of this place. We use it because the humans avoid it. We can camp here and track any humans without worry that they might stumble upon our camp. We've destroyed many of their feeble traps and in some cases the humans too.\"\n\n\"Why would you go to so much trouble to help dragons?\" Priya asked.\n\nVikal glanced at her from the corners of his eyes. \"If we don't defend our allies, then we will be forced to defend ourselves from more enemies.\"\n\nPriya nodded with a thoughtful look.\n\nThe three entered the camp to shouts of welcome from the surrounding centaurs. Hiro was afraid that Ashel and the others might not be as friendly after his last meeting with the centaurs, at which they had had to prove their loyalty. But Ashel stepped out of a branch-laden shelter and greeted both dragons with a warm smile.\n\nHer smile only added to the beauty of her face, with enormous eyes three times the size of a human's. She had woven more feathers and beads into the black, mane-like hair running down her back, and she had gone so far in ornamenting her appearance as to wrap three braids around her head, securing them with a strip of fur that hung over her ear.\n\nHer brother, Rylan, stepped out of another shelter. Smoke drifted heavily from his thatched roof and it was much larger than Ashel's. Although he still didn't smile at them\u2014Hiro had yet to see the centaur smile\u2014he seemed much more at ease than the last time they met. Rylan's hair hung around his face, loose and untamed. Hiro immediately noticed the absence of the shining silver sword from his back.\n\nOnce introductions were made, Ashel gazed up at Hiro. \"What brings you to us this time, my friend? I hope you're not in trouble again.\"\n\nHiro lifted the arrow in his claw. Holding it out, he proffered it to Rylan. \"I was hoping your brother could help us identify the substance on this arrow.\"\n\nShe shook her head in amusement as Rylan picked up the arrow. \"Why can't you just visit like a normal creature?\" She said.\n\n\"It wouldn't be interesting if he didn't bring an element of danger with him,\" Vikal said with a sly grin.\n\nWith a mischievous grin of her own toward Vikal, Ashel responded, \"Perhaps you should bring Prak to visit sometime. He would liven up the place.\" The glower she received from Vikal only made her grin spread. Hiro couldn't make sense of it.\n\n\"This might take some time, Hiro.\" Rylan seemed unaware of any conversation around him. He concentrated on the arrow in his hand. Scratching the forged metal head, he yelped when his finger slipped. Pulling the sliced finger away from the arrowhead, he watched it for a moment.\n\n\"Are you alright, Rylan?\" Ashel asked, stepping closer to him.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he answered. His brow creased, but he turned his finger to face her. \"It healed almost instantly.\"\n\nUpon closer inspection, everyone could see the droplet of blood left behind from the cut, with the healed skin underneath.\n\nAshel spun to face Hiro. \"Where did you get this arrow?\"\n\n\"Arrows like these are being used to kill dragons,\" he told her. \"This was found in the remains of a dragon that was killed while she slept.\"\n\nAshel jerked back and shook her head, \"That's impossible. You can't kill a dragon with a single arrow, or even a dozen arrows at once.\"\n\nPriya put her head closer to Ashel's. In a low voice, she said, \"We're no longer certain of that.\"\n\nRylan practically tumbled into his shelter. \"I'll get to work on this,\" he shouted over his shoulder at them.\n\nAshel's eyes blazed at Priya. \"What's going on? Humans are hunting and setting traps for dragons, then hauling away the embers. We've caught them at it. They get bolder and closer to the Rock Clouds every day. Why? What are they doing?\"\n\n\"That's what we've come to find out,\" she answered.\n\nAshel's shoulders shook, but centaurs didn't get cold easily. She waved her hand toward her little shelter. \"Please,\" she said, \"we should share details.\"\n\nThe far side of the shelter had an opening large enough for Priya and Hiro to insert their heads. The rest of their bodies lay next to each other on the ground outside. Inside, the conversation was low and grim.\n\nHiro and Priya relayed to Ashel and Vikal the reports of dead hunting parties. Some had been attacked while awake; some had been killed while asleep, like the two Hiro saw. About half of the dragons killed had been killed instantly with a single arrow.\n\n\"Rupika said she saw one of the huntresses in her group die when a single arrow pierced her hide,\" Priya told the centaurs. \"That's never been possible. Everyone assumed she missed something or her judgment was clouded in some way. I'm beginning to believe her.\"\n\n\"We haven't seen any strange black arrows,\" Ashel told her. \"In fact,\" her eyes narrowed at Vikal, \"I haven't seen any arrows. Have you?\"\n\nVikal's already grim face blackened as he shook his head. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Ashel turned her attention back to Priya, \"but the movement of the humans has grown bolder. In the beginning, just a handful of farmers or soldiers would appear to scrape up the remains of a random dragon killed in a forest.\" She glanced at Vikal. \"We could usually just scare them away. But now they come in stronger numbers. If we scare them away, they come back a day or two later.\n\n\"Soldiers are coming deeper into the Black Forest in larger groups. Some of them are avoiding the Black Forest and setting up camps in the forest next to the Rock Clouds. We decided to set up camp here and run patrols along the Torthoth Range to try to safeguard the dragons in the Rock Clouds. But we can't keep up with all of them.\"\n\n\"You've done more than your share,\" Priya answered. \"We'll have to warn all hunting parties to not go out alone and be extra vigilant to avoid any and all humans. I would suggest your group fall back under the Rock Clouds. We'll limit our hunting areas and perhaps include centaur escorts as well.\"\n\n\"We would be honored,\" Vikal nodded, \"but there's a problem with those arrows.\" Ashel and Priya turned toward him and he continued. \"Although that substance may heal us quickly, it could be a detriment if the arrow is already embedded.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Ashel's head hung as she considered the consequences.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Priya darted between the two of them. \"What's wrong with something that heals you?\"\n\nAshel scuffled her hooves. \"If a body heals with an arrow in it, either the organs it passes through will stop working properly, or\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014or if they are somehow avoided and they continue to work, then taking the arrow out could cause more damage and the body may not heal as quickly,\" Vikal finished.\n\nHiro nodded, \"So a little cut from the arrow is harmless. An arrow through the chest\u2014\"\n\nAshel sighed, \"Possibly more fatal than a regular arrow.\"\n\n\"Ashel!\" Rylan's voice outside cut through the dense silence inside. He pushed his head through the opening. Looking around at all of them, he said, \"You need to see this.\"\n\nOnce the two centaurs and two dragons had extricated themselves from the cramped hut, Rylan led them to his own shelter. The camp had gone very quiet. The outside fires had been doused or burnt down to smoldering.\n\nThe dragons pushed around to the back of Rylan's shelter where another opening was sized properly for them. But Rylan stopped Vikal before he entered through the front. \"I'm sorry, Vikal,\" he said, \"but this information must be kept within as small a group as possible.\"\n\nVikal nodded and trotted back to the dark and quiet camp.\n\nAshel's eyes blazed at her brother. \"I can make my own decisions about whom to trust, Rylan.\"\n\nHer brother pointed a finger at her. \"Not about this.\"\n\nThe four of them ducked inside the larger shelter to find it was almost as large inside as Hiro's lair. One wall was covered with hanging bags, each bag a different shape or size or color. A stone table was built next to the fire pit in the center of the large room, with a wooden table on the other side. A few pointed instruments and some dishes surrounded the dissected arrow in the middle of the wooden table.\n\nAshel looked around with tightened lips. \"You know the others get nervous when you use majik.\"\n\nRylan waved the comment away. \"The others get nervous around me because I can do majik, whether I use it or not.\"\n\nIndicating the abnormally large space for the size of enclosure, Ashel said, \"This doesn't help matters.\"\n\n\"I need the space. Besides,\" he pointed to the table in the middle, \"you need to see this.\" Once everyone was comfortably inside, Rylan loped around the edges of the enclosure and unrolled silk hangings from the top to drape the walls. When the last one dropped he faced his sister. \"Now no one will be able to hear us.\" Ashel just rolled her eyes and turned to the table.\n\n\"I knew the humans were gathering dragon ash,\" he said, picking up one of the three pieces of the arrowhead. The piece he held had been stripped of the black residue. \"So I assumed they were using it in some way to their advantage. I was able to isolate the ash, but it evaporated, leaving behind a sticky red paste.\"\n\nHe put down the piece of arrow and picked up a length of metal rod with a red substance on its tip. \"I couldn't figure out what it was until I thought about the potential healing properties.\"\n\nHe pointed to Hiro. \"Does flarote heal dragons the way it heals other animals?\"\n\nHiro glanced at Priya. He wasn't sure how much to reveal. The one and only secret the dragons still held from faeries, centaurs, and everyone else was the fact that while eating flarote would indeed heal them, eating too much flarote would kill them. Rylan now danced dangerously close to this discovery.\n\nPriya stepped forward. \"Of course it heals us like other animals. But doesn't it harm humans and centaurs? How could the substance have been flarote when your finger was healed from it?\"\n\n\"True,\" Rylan nodded, \"flarote is a deadly poison to centaurs. But I think mixing it with the dragon ash must change the composition enough to give it the opposite effect. This\u2026\" he picked up a small dish made of dragon scale. There was only a drop of red liquid in it. \"This is the condensed oils of the flarote bulb, I'm sure of it. It holds the equivalent power of forty flarote bulbs.\"\n\nPriya and Hiro jerked their heads away from it. Forty bulbs! Only half of that drop would kill both dragons and more! The centaurs noted their sudden movement.\n\nAshel eyed the dragons. \"What aren't you telling us? Why would something that heals you make you react like that?\"\n\nBoth dragons inspected the floor. Finally, Priya broke the silence. \"It is a secret we have never divulged.\"\n\n\"Priya!\" Hiro snapped at her. How could she imagine telling anyone?\n\n\"They must know, Hiro,\" she snapped back. Turning back to the centaurs, she said, \"You must swear never to tell another soul.\"\n\nThe centaurs only glanced at each other before Ashel stood up straight. \"We will never tell a soul. You may take our lives and those we tell if we break it. We both swear.\" Rylan jerked his head in agreement without a hint of hesitation.\n\nPriya bit her lip then whispered, \"If a dragon eats too much flarote, it will kill them. Yes, it heals, but too much kills. It's a delicate balance.\"\n\nRylan nodded. \"It makes sense; other herbs and elements do the same thing to centaurs, humans, and even faeries.\"\n\nHiro thought of an earlier riddle game he had played with Anna. \"You can swallow it and it can swallow you,\" he muttered to himself.\n\n\"What swallows you?\" Priya asked.\n\n\"Water\u2026\" Hiro met the eyes of the others, \"even water can be good and bad.\"\n\nShe lilted her head. \"Is that a riddle?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered. \"I remember it from playing with\u2014\" he snapped his jaw shut, blinked, then smiled to cover the hesitation, \"\u2014someone a few sun cycles ago.\"\n\nPriya narrowed her eyes at him, but said nothing.\n\n\"Riddles aside,\" Rylan interjected, \"there are so many herbs in all of Avonoa, and numerous combinations of those herbs, that no one can know if others might exist that can harm you as well. What we do know is that someone, and I think we all know who the culprit in this situation might be, has discovered a dragon poison.\"\n\nAshel crossed her arms against her chest. \"We must inform Joss.\" Her eyes shot to Priya's. \"Do we have your permission?\"\n\nPriya nodded.\n\n\"He's gathering centaurs now to help combat the human threat to the dragons\u2026\" Ashel's lips pursed in a tight line and her large eyes focused on something far away.\n\n\"He is?\" Hiro asked, but his question was passed over.\n\n\"He must be informed,\" Ashel continued, stamping one of her front hooves. \"We'll have to organize. Try to find where and how they're producing it. We'll have to send search parties into the Noble Kingdom. Strategic strikes to distract as well as dissuade\u2026\" her voice faded into mutters to herself.\n\n\"But\u2014\" Hiro started, but Rylan shook his head.\n\n\"It's no use,\" the centaur told Hiro, \"she's gone into combat mode. She'll be distracted until something more important comes up.\"\n\n\"We're fortunate to have such allies,\" Priya told him, but then turned to Hiro. \"We must get this information back to my father.\" She nodded to Rylan, \"I don't mean to be rude, but we should take our leave. Immediately.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" He trotted back to the large opening meant for the dragons, lifted the curtain for them, and followed them out. \"We'll try to send you any additional information we can discover. Until then\u2014\"\n\n\"Hiro!\" Ashel shouted behind them. She trotted up to the dragons, but cast a sidelong glance at Priya. \"A moment, please?\"\n\nHiro nodded. \"You can say anything in front of Priya.\"\n\nAshel nodded as well, but when she met his eyes they burned into him. \"Do you remember the conversation we had when we first met? About the stars?\"\n\nHiro's brow compressed. \"You warned me about the faeries and humans threatening me. You also warned me of a dangerous creature. I think I've already met that one.\"\n\nAshel shook her head. \"This is something else.\" She stepped closer and her eyes burned brighter. \"Five stars are converging. Many centaurs have conjectured on the meaning. I believe it means war. I have been watching your star, Hiro, and I've seen many things. But the most meaningful is the convergence of these five stars. They're all converging on your star, Hiro.\"\n\nHiro pulled his head away slightly. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"You\u2014\" Ashel's voice shook with what Hiro assumed to be fury, as this centaur couldn't possibly feel fear. \"You will be at the center of a war between the five kingdoms of Avonoa. You might be what they fight over or for or about, but I know you'll be at the heart of it. Hiro,\" she straightened to stare him in the eye, \"when the time comes, the centaurs will follow you.\" She glanced at Priya and back at Hiro. \"Only you.\"\n\n\"Ashel,\" Hiro leaned down to her, \"I have no intention of being in any war.\"\n\n\"No one ever does.\"\n\n[ Notions of Assurance ]\n\n\"Murzod's late again,\" Torgon grumbled, slouching through the door into the king's office. \"He's trying to set a precedent. He wants to show me that he doesn't have to answer to me.\" Instead of sitting, like usual, the Royal General paced the length of the office.\n\n\"Shouldn't we have had two reports by now?\" Philip asked. He didn't really keep up with how often the reports were supposed to arrive, but felt the lack.\n\n\"We should have had a third arriving tomorrow, but the messenger just arrived and\u2014\" Torgon threw his hands in the air. He stopped pacing. \"I don't trust him.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" Philip leaned back in his chair, \"but what can we do?\"\n\n\"I'm going up there.\"\n\nPhilip bolted from his chair. \"No, you're not!\"\n\n\"Someone has to go and no staff guard or messenger can demand straight answers.\"\n\n\"Your position is here. In Kingstor.\" Philip leaned over his desk.\n\n\"It's my duty to protect the men in my charge and this kingdom\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014and me!\" Philip shouted.\n\nTorgon shook his head. \"You don't need me here to protect you. Good men that can be trusted will remain here. Besides, you're perfectly capable of protecting yourself.\"\n\n\"You can send someone else! Tommak, or one of your captains!\" Philip's voice rose uncomfortably, but he pressed further. \"A dragon has taken my sister! We're under threat again! You can't just leave!\"\n\n\"You know I wouldn't argue with you but Murzod is going to need stern convincing of my authority.\"\n\n\"There are more pressing matters here!\"\n\nTorgon continued talking to himself, resuming his pacing, as if Philip weren't there. \"He won't take that from just anyone.\"\n\n\"Tommak is more than capable!\"\n\n\"No, I'll need to go up there and make an example of him.\"\n\n\"The journey alone is treacherous!\" Philip tried to control his voice. He couldn't lose another friend.\n\nTorgon waved the comment away. \"I'll be well provisioned.\"\n\n\"But the dragon!\" Philip insisted.\n\n\"Take an armed guard wherever you go. You can do more with that bow of yours than I would be able with my sword. If I take a smaller, faster party, we can be to the halfway point in less than a fortnight and they have much faster means of communication with the northern party.\"\n\n\"What if I need your help here?\" Philip couldn't sit there and allow his closest friend to run into the arms of danger.\n\n\"What would you need my help with that Tommak can't do?\"\n\nPhilip paused. An idea struck him, but he hesitated.\n\nNoticing the silence, Torgon turned back to the king. \"Everything will be fine. I'll be back in a month or so and\u2014\"\n\n\"Help me find a queen.\"\n\nTorgon's mouth hung open midsentence.\n\nPhilip stood up straighter. \"Anna was right. I need to focus on producing an heir. If the worst has happened to Anna, it's become even more important.\"\n\nThe corner of Torgon's mouth curled up. \"I can arrange a formal court introduction.\"\n\nPhilip flopped into his chair.\n\n\"Rakgar!\" Hiro clattered into Rakgar's lair. He and Priya had flown all night to reach the Rock Clouds. Now they had pushed past Prak and Tog and The Watch without a word. Prak and Tog and a few other dragons followed them into the spacious cave. \"We must speak to you. It's urgent!\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Rakgar pushed past Milah to meet Hiro and Priya. \"What's happened?\"\n\n\"We found the ashes, the same way\u2014\"\n\nThe faerie Skorkot stepped out from behind Milah.\n\nHiro snapped his jaw shut. Lowering himself to the floor, he bared his fangs. \"What is she doing here?\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Rakgar rumbled at him, \"how dare you treat my guest this way?\"\n\nPriya crouched beside him. \"Faeries are liars and murderers.\"\n\nSkorkot's blood visibly pulsed through her veins, making them bulge. If her skin were opaque her face would've flushed with anger. \"How dare you?\" She rose into the air with the humming of her wings.\n\n\"Skorkot, please,\" Rakgar tried to appeal to her.\n\n\"I will not listen to this abuse.\" Her silver hair fluttered about her face in the breeze from her wings. Her hands contorted into claws with her palms turned to Hiro.\n\n\"Then leave, beast,\" Hiro growled.\n\n\"Hiro!\" Rakgar leapt at the smaller dragon. With his nose inches from Hiro's, his hot breath swept over Hiro's face. \"Apologize. Now.\"\n\nHiro pried his eyes from the faerie to bore them into Rakgar. \"I'll do no such thing. And I'll not say another word in front of that monster.\"\n\n\"Nor will I,\" Priya echoed at his side.\n\nRakgar pulled his head away from Hiro. He studied Priya through narrowed slits in his eyes. Finally, he shifted his head to Skorkot. \"Skorkot, will you please give me a moment to chastise these younglings.\"\n\nHiro growled in the back of his throat.\n\nThe faerie's claws relaxed. Without a word, she flew into the passageway far in back on the opposite side of the entrance to Priya's lair. At least Hiro could be sure she wasn't down there abusing Anna.\n\nOnce she disappeared, Hiro sat up out of his attack posture. \"Prak, would you please make sure the faerie doesn't listen to our conversation?\"\n\nWhile Prak ran over to the entrance to Rakgar's private lair, he scooped up a large rock and breathed flame on it to make it glow. Setting it and himself at the entrance, Hiro knew he would be the one listening and watching.\n\n\"Have you returned your mind?\" Rakgar bellowed rounding on the pair. \"The faeries are our allies! They always have been!\"\n\n\"No longer,\" Hiro whispered.\n\nBetween the two of them, Hiro and Priya related, through both words and memories, all that had happened on the surface. They told Rakgar about finding the circle of dragon ashes, the single arrow embedded in the leftover ash, the small piles from someone collecting the ash, the visit to the centaurs, and the discovery of the dragon poison.\n\n\"It's not possible,\" Rakgar rumbled low. \"The centaurs would blame the faeries and the faeries would blame the centaurs. You can't trust them.\"\n\n\"We can't trust the centaurs, but we can trust the faeries?\"\n\n\"Skorkot is an old friend, Hiro,\" Rakgar shook his head. \"Even if a few faeries did create some evil plot\u2014which I don't believe\u2014we can still trust the faeries we know.\"\n\n\"Has she investigated any of the incidents I've reported to you?\" Hiro asked. \"Kradik's treatment of me? The wraith? Anything?\"\n\nRakgar shrugged. \"She reported everything to the Faerie Council and I'm sure they're looking into it. She hasn't investigated anything herself because she is here to advise me.\"\n\nHiro twitched his tail. \"Advise you on what?\"\n\n\"Everything. Anything. Especially what to do about that little human you're so fond of.\"\n\nPriya snorted.\n\nHiro inspected the eyes of the dragons around him. Rakgar, tall and proud. Someone he had always looked up to. Milah, he didn't care what Milah thought. Tog and Prak, good friends. One of them knew his every secret anyway. Priya, who could read him like script on a wall at most times. Other dragons were behind him, but he didn't know them, nor did he care. He froze. \"I would trust that woman before I would ever trust a faerie again.\"\n\nIf Skorkot had invisibly snuck in at that moment, the silence in the cave would have echoed her footsteps.\n\n\"You can't mean that.\" Rakgar's whisper seemed a roar. \"They tortured you.\"\n\n\"Not Anna.\" Hiro looked meaningfully into Rakgar's eyes.\n\nRakgar also pondered the faces around them. \"I see,\" he said, turning back to Hiro. He nodded to himself, crawling next to the wall. The mighty, gray dragon curled himself on the floor but then sat straight up to his fullest height. When he faced Hiro again, pure hatred burned behind his eyes. \"I will discuss circumstances with my advisors and send you word of my decision.\" Milah sat next to Rakgar and glared at Hiro with a smug expression. \"You're dismissed, Hiro Tekla.\"\n\nHiro couldn't believe it. Rakgar dismissing him like he owned the mountain! Hiro sat up as straight as he could. \"I want to see the human. I can return her now.\"\n\n\"You'll leave before I name you blood and ash traitor!\" Rakgar bellowed.\n\nHiro ran from the cave.\n\nCurled on the floor of his own cave, Hiro listened to his friends arguing over him.\n\n\"What were you thinking?!\" Tog yelled.\n\n\"He was only saying what he believed!\" Prak asserted for Hiro.\n\n\"To admit that you would trust a human?!\"\n\n\"I admit, it's a little unorthodox.\"\n\n\"Unorthodox? Prak, its blasphemy!\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Why? WHY?!\"\n\nSilence.\n\nHiro looked up when the two fell quiet. Tog's face was perplexed and Prak looked smug.\n\n\"Think about it,\" Prak pranced around almost on tip-talons. \"We can't speak to humans, but that doesn't mean we can't trust them. If one of them had a knife to us, we could resist or allow ourselves to fall into their hands. If we were hurt or injured,\" Tog and Hiro shared a glance, \"we might have to subject ourselves to them for healing. We might have no other choice. Like a pet. Or a common wild animal. Either way, is it really that bad to trust a human?\"\n\n\"The other choice is to die,\" Tog muttered. \"Any decent dragon would rather.\"\n\n\"Oh? Is it wrong to choose to live? Hiro doesn't trust faeries because he has evidence that he believes proves them to be murderers and liars. If he chooses not to trust them and chooses to avoid the danger, is that ignorance? Or blasphemy?\"\n\n\"Prak, you don't understand\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Hiro looked at Tog, \"I think he understands better than most.\"\n\nTog grumbled and turned away. As they sat in silence\u2014which was rare for Prak\u2014Priya's voice echoed outside.\n\n\"Hiro!\" she called, landing at a run inside his cave. \"How could you be so stupid?\"\n\n\"Is it stupid to speak the truth?\" Prak piped from his side.\n\n\"Here we go again,\" Tog grumbled, rolling his eyes and flopping his head on his claws.\n\n\"Is it stupid to stand up for what you believe? Is it stupid to\u2014\"\n\n\"Snap it, worm!\" Priya barked at the small brown dragon. \"I'm speaking to you, Hiro. Not your little shadow.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" he turned away, pulling his claws over his head. \"He can say things much better than I can.\"\n\nPrak sniffed. Hiro could sense the pride in it, but Priya pushed past him. \"My father has given you permission to come get the woman.\" Hiro's head whipped around. \"Ah, I see I finally have your attention.\"\n\nHiro jumped to his feet. \"Did you bring her or can I go get her now?\" He searched around Priya as if to find Anna materialized.\n\nHiro could see Priya's jaw working. Without parting her grinding teeth or taking her eyes from Hiro, she said, \"Tog, Prak, would you please give us a moment?\"\n\nTog loped out of the cave without a backward glance, but Prak hesitated. Hiro nodded to him before he finally slipped out.\n\n\"You may get her at dawn,\" Priya stated. He still wasn't sure her teeth had unclenched.\n\n\"Is that all?\"\n\n\"No.\" But she only stared at him.\n\n\"If you have something else to say, then say it. I'd like to get some sleep before I have to travel again.\" He laid his head on his claws again.\n\n\"I'll be leaving again soon. I'll be gone before you get back.\"\n\nHis head pricked up. \"Where are you going?\"\n\nPriya turned to leave. \"Does it matter? I'll be gone a long time again.\"\n\n\"Priya!\" When she stopped, he shook his head to clear it. \"I'm sorry I've disappointed you. You of all others.\"\n\nShe sighed, \"Don't believe everything that woman tells you, Hiro.\"\n\nHis brows creased. \"Anna?\"\n\n\"She's a liar.\" Priya's breathing quickened. \"She's lied to you before and she'll do it again.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\nPriya snapped her tail. \"She's human.\"\n\nAs Priya darted from the cave, Hiro inspected his heart. He should believe Priya. Her of anyone. But with its next beat, his heart softened again.\n\n[ Bait ]\n\n\"This is stupid,\" Philip grumbled, trying not to adjust the trappings around his throat. When Murthur heard of the endeavor, he brought in several maids to help choose the king's wardrobe for the formal court introductions. Murthur shooed them all out when one of them made a comment about a ball being the only proper way for the king to meet a woman.\n\nThe outfit they picked for him had so much gold stitching that Philip wasn't sure what color the material was supposed to be. \"Show off the station!\" they had insisted. Philip had immediately refused the shirt with the ruffled cuffs and neckline, but he couldn't talk Murthur out of the gilt belt and boot buckles.\n\nHe bowed and smiled as Lord Dieko (whom Torgon thought they should allow the honor) introduced another young woman. Lady Pramilla Ida Pracine gave a graceful curtsy in her blood-red gown; however, the neckline was so low that Philip had to glance away out of modesty. And when she looked up at him with a smile, he had to force one of his own. At more than twice his age and with only one eyebrow, he didn't have to wonder at her availability.\n\n\"We have more important things to worry about,\" he whispered to Torgon as she stepped down.\n\n\"I agree,\" he whispered back, \"but until a dragon attacks the castle, we get news from Anna's search party, or you allow me to follow the men I sent, this is our first priority.\"\n\nDieko next introduced Lady Ellyn, who seemed pleasant as she curtsied. She was young and her hair wasn't puffed up as tall and ridiculously as that on most of the other women he'd met that day. Her face had the same amount of color applied, but it didn't seem as overpowering. Philip was surprised that a smile at her came more easily, although no other feelings presented themselves.\n\n\"Fine,\" he whispered again, \"but when this is over I'm taking the rest of the day for target practice.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say, Sire,\" Torgon said through a smile at Lady Trikorna, \"but it will take that much longer if you don't find someone you fancy, and we'll have to do this all over again tomorrow. Just imagine,\" another smile and nod to Lady Loli\u2014who couldn't have been more than twelve\u2014 \"the moment women throughout the Noble Kingdom hear that you're meeting in court with all the eligible women, I'm sure your days will be filled with beauties like these.\"\n\nPhilip nearly groaned as Lady Ranika stepped forward and curtsied. \"Are we going to do this every day until I find someone I like?\"\n\nTorgon smiled a genuine smile at Lady Haven. \"A happy king makes for a happy kingdom.\"\n\nPhilip's forced cheeks began to ache. \"Your father said that we make our own happiness.\"\n\n\"Yes, but he was married,\" Torgon sighed. \"He got happiness all the time.\"\n\nPhilip's smile faltered.\n\nAn informal feast followed the formal court introductions. The feast hall tables were spread with crackers, cheeses, pastries, puffs, fruits, and row upon row upon row of wine goblets. Philip had to wonder whether Torgon or Murthur, or both, hoped to make him drunk so he would propose to a woman that day.\n\nHe picked up a wine goblet, but before it could touch his lips several gentlemen stepped toward him. Lord Juskin got to him first.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Juskin bowed his head, dipping the feather on top of his head into Philip's wine. \"You've just met my daughter, Lady Ellyn.\" The indicated young woman appeared out of thin air beside Philip.\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" Philip answered. She did have pretty eyes. \"Remind me what province you're from,\" he said as he took Ellyn's hand and bowed to her.\n\n\"Clearwater, Sire,\" Ellyn batted her eyes. \"Just down Crying River from Kingstor. My father and I happened to be visiting when they announced the formal court introductions for today. So I insisted on staying for them.\"\n\nShe still hadn't let go of his hand.\n\n\"I'm so glad you were able to come,\" Philip said while trying in vain to subtly extricate his fingers.\n\n\"Would you like to take a walk in the garden, Sire?\"\n\n\"Ellyn!\" Juskin whispered sharply to quiet her before anyone could overhear her impropriety.\n\nHer startled face made her eyes bulge and she finally released the king's hand at her father's admonition. \"It's alright, Lord Juskin,\" Philip nodded. \"Perhaps another time, Lady Ellyn.\" It would be just as improper for him to accept as it was for her to offer.\n\nHe turned from the pair to avoid the inevitable berating the daughter would receive for her actions. Three more lords stood behind him, waiting to push their daughters into his arms. Luckily for Philip, he was tall enough to see over all the heads of the men standing around him. Through the feathers and lace headdresses, he recognized the aged forehead on the man standing by the table.\n\nExcusing himself before he could be cornered by any of the lords, Philip made his way over to the table. \"Lord Sherped!\" he exclaimed, greeting the elderly gentleman. Months ago, a horrible wrong had been committed. Sherped had been a villager brought before Philip, who was only a prince at the time. Philip recognized the wrong and made an example of Sherped's honesty by punishing two lords and giving their lands and titles to Sherped. Philip couldn't be happier to see the older man now in a finely made coat without gilt or embroidery, as handsome and simple as the man himself.\n\n\"I'm so glad you've come! I trust the situation in your village has improved under your leadership,\" Philip said, joining him next to the table.\n\nThe older man dropped a cracker with red sauce back onto the table plate and bowed to the king. \"Yes, Sire.\" He haltingly met Philip's eye. \"The people in Carpen Stream were very happy to hear of my appointment. I also had them put forward names of people to take the other title for the area, and a good man was chosen. Everyone is very pleased.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" Philip turned to the woman standing behind the elderly gentleman's shoulder. \"Did you happen to bring someone to introduce at court today?\"\n\nWhen she stepped in front of him, Philip saw that the woman was wearing a dress made of sturdy green cloth with nothing but a bit of white lace for decoration atop her silver-gray hair.\n\n\"Name's Saryn, Your Majesty,\" the woman said with a lift of her chin. \"And I held out of the introductions, seeing as you were looking for a younger woman, Sire.\"\n\nShe looked Philip straight in the eye and Philip smiled. Saryn's piercing gaze never wavered, but she also displayed smile lines around her mouth and eyes. Her hands were rough from hard labor and her eyes as discerning as a teacher's, but he could imagine her bouncing two grandchildren on each knee.\n\nDipping his chin to her, Philip whispered, \"Only because a woman of your stature would never tolerate me.\"\n\nAt this Saryn's head tilted and her face softened. \"Why are you looking for a wife now?\"\n\n\"Saryn!\" Sherped whispered, but she shushed him.\n\n\"Everyone wants to know,\" her penetrating gaze returned to Philip. \"You're very young, you have time.\"\n\nPhilip pursed his lips. \"If I may take you into my confidence,\" Saryn's eyes widened and she tilted her head closer, \"my sister has disappeared again. If anything happened to her, I would be forced to rule the kingdom alone. If anything happened to me, Royal General Torgon would be forced to stand for me and he would dislike nothing more. Therefore, he's insisted I find a wife and produce an heir.\"\n\nSaryn punched her hands onto her hips. \"Politics.\" Sherped shook his head at the floor. \"I should have known. Men think only of politics and logic.\"\n\nPhilip spread his hands in confusion. \"Should I not look to the good of the kingdom?\"\n\n\"No, you should not.\" Saryn's response was so prompt that Philip's eyebrows shot up to his hairline.\n\n\"But that's my duty as king.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Saryn clarified, \"your duty as king means you should do what's best for the kingdom. But your duty to yourself should come first. A happy king makes a happy kingdom.\" She echoed Torgon's words before wagging a finger at him. \"I'm not saying you shouldn't find a wife. I'm saying you shouldn't have to force yourself to do it. Marry for love. Marry for happiness. All in due time.\"\n\nThat didn't help Philip prevent Torgon from charging head first into danger, but it made him grin nonetheless. \"Yes, Lady Saryn, but you're not available.\"\n\n\"Then might I make a suggestion?\" Saryn asked.\n\n\"Please, do.\" Philip noted Sherped shaking his head again.\n\nSaryn's sweet smile hid behind sparkling eyes. \"Don't look for physical beauty. Ugly personalities hide too easily behind beauty.\"\n\n[ Unexpected Punishment ]\n\nPhilip's head danced with Saryn's words as his feet worked their way around the room. He had to agree with her summation. The prettier the young lady, he sometimes found, the worse her personality. Although many didn't throw themselves at him as obviously as Lady Ellyn had, they often harbored superior attitudes and condescending opinions, and made overbearing remarks toward others.\n\nAfter finishing one such conversation, where Lady Teel insisted that her servants kneel in her presence, Philip decided to put Saryn's guidance into action. Glancing around the room, he spied a young woman picking at the pastries on one end of the food table.\n\nShe was plain-looking. Utterly plain. Her blue dress displayed little gilt and embroidery, like many others he'd seen that day. Her brown hair twisted into ringlets at the top of her head and dripped down through intricate lace. Her face had more color added to it than others, perhaps to hide more flaws. Her eyes were a little too wide and she had a large gap between her two front teeth. Philip sidled toward her.\n\nLeaning toward her as she lifted a small white pastry off the plate, he whispered, \"Are they any good?\"\n\nHer response was astounding. The young woman yelped as if he'd stuck a pin in her back end then coughed on the bit of food already in her mouth. Other guests turned to inspect the commotion. Philip tried to ignore the stares at the scene he'd created. He pounded the choking lady on the back a couple of times before handing her a goblet of wine.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said through her coughing fit, \"I didn't mean to startle you.\"\n\n\"Startle me?\" she coughed again, \"you could have at least announced your\u2014\" her voice cut off when she finally looked up at him. \"I mean, I didn't expect you to\u2026no one ever\u2026I'm so sorry.\" She coughed into a napkin again, took a sip of wine, and composed herself. \"I'm sorry,\" she said again, \"I didn't expect anyone to notice me. Least of all you.\"\n\n\"I don't recall you being introduced in court,\" he said with a formal bow.\n\nShe placed the goblet on the table and curtsied. \"I'm Lady Coralee. I've been introduced at court before. I didn't think it was necessary to do it again.\"\n\n\"But I wanted to meet all the ladies of the kingdom. That includes you.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Coralee shrugged, \"now you've met me. Again.\"\n\n\"Where are you from?\" Philip searched his mind for questions to ask.\n\n\"I'm from Trillik province, in the east.\"\n\nPhilip nodded. \"Have you been in Kingstor long?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What brought you to Kingstor?\"\n\n\"My carriage.\" Coralee snorted and giggled, which brought on more coughing. She composed herself with another sip of wine.\n\nPhilip grinned, but when he glanced in a mirrored vase sitting on the table he saw three pairs of lords with their daughters waiting behind him.\n\nCoralee peeked around his shoulder as well. \"I'm sure you have many other people to talk to, My Lord.\"\n\nPhilip stood up straighter and replied, \"Actually, I wonder if you'd mind accompanying me in the gardens?\"\n\nCoralee's jaw dropped in a very unladylike manner. Philip heard a small gasp behind him. But he turned elegantly on his heel and offered Coralee his arm. The noise in the hall dropped as, in haltingly slow motion, she wrapped one arm under his elbow.\n\nShe moved to set her goblet on the table, but Philip forestalled her. \"You might need refreshment,\" he added, thinking of her coughing fits. Arm in arm, they stepped together out of the hushed hall.\n\nOnce away from the stuffy hall, Philip gave Coralee a genuine smile at remembering the look of pride on Saryn's face and shock on Torgon's as the young couple left.\n\nFortunately, the guards they passed were much more composed as they walked through the castle hallways. Unfortunately, Philip had to search for things to say.\n\n\"Are you visiting someone in Kingstor?\" he asked, trying to renew the semblance of a conversation.\n\n\"My cousin,\" Coralee nodded.\n\nAfter a pause, Philip asked, \"Has your cousin been introduced in court?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nAnother awkward pause.\n\n\"Might I inquire your cousin's name?\" He fished for more conversation, but thought he might have an easier time of it with one of the guards.\n\n\"I'm sorry, it's Merik,\" she stuttered. \"I should've said that. I'm visiting Lady Merik and her husband, Lord Calvin.\"\n\n\"I believe I've met Lord Calvin on a\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014guard promotion, yes!\" Finally on a familiar subject, Coralee continued in detail about the guard promotion of someone in her family.\n\nHowever, Philip didn't hear a word. At that moment, a young serving woman stepped from a side hall across the way. She met his eyes and didn't look away. Usually the servants in the castle and even commoners insisted their king not look them in the eye. Their eyes locked for a moment; his filled with wonder, but hers filled with\u2026defiance\u2026anger\u2026impatience?\n\nHe had never seen her. Or maybe he had never allowed himself to swim in her sparkling, bright blue eyes before. Glossy, nearly black flyaway locks escaped the bun on her head to tickle her cheeks. Full lips pursed in a line as if the king and his guest were in her way.\n\nWhere could she be going? Philip thought. What could be so important?\n\nBut before a single thought could form into an idea in his head, the young woman spun on her heel and disappeared the way she'd come.\n\nWait! Philip cried in his head. Who is she? Where did she come from? I can't exactly go asking after a servant girl!\n\nHe shifted his attention back to young Coralee. She drifted silently next to him. Her finger tapped against his arm while she peered at the shields hanging along the wall.\n\nHe decided against feigning to have heard what she'd said. \"Will you be warm enough if we go outside?\" he asked.\n\nShe glanced down at her long sleeves. \"I should be fine,\" she answered. \"I was already getting too warm in the feast hall. I mean, not that it was too warm in there, it was perfect, but I seem to always be too warm, or warmer than most people. I don't usually need a cloak outside in the spring because I'm always so warm. My father insists that I wear a cloak outside, but I\u2014\" her mouth closed with a CLOP, then opened again. \"I'm rambling. I apologize. I should be fine.\" She turned away and sipped her wine.\n\nPhilip grinned. \"It's perfectly all right.\" Why couldn't he think of anything other than those blue eyes?\n\nThink of something else to ask her! he berated himself about the woman next to him. Where is she from? No, I know that about Coralee! She's from\u2026from\u2026those blue eyes!\n\nHe couldn't think of anything else. Philip grinned down at Coralee as they turned a corner.\n\nBLUE EYES!\n\nBAM!\n\nSPLASH!\n\nCLATTER!\n\n\"I'm so sorry, my lady!\" the young blue-eyed woman's cheeks burned red. Philip was so surprised to see her again that he didn't realize what had just happened. The servant's eyes were fixed on Coralee. When Philip heard her panting, he forced his attention back to the young woman he was escorting.\n\nCoralee's face was red too, but not from embarrassment. Her empty wine goblet teetered on the floor, the contents running down Coralee's face, neck, and chest. Some had splashed on Philip's arm and clothes, but the rest ran onto her gown, turning it a deep purple.\n\nThe serving girl's shoulders dropped when she beheld the ruined sheets she held in her arms, but she dislodged one to attempt to wipe the lady's face. \"I'm so sorry. I didn't hear you coming. I thought I would miss you if I went this way.\"\n\nCoralee's face contorted. \"Well, you didn't!\" she shouted, snatching the sheet from the servant's hand. \"Look what you've done!\" she hollered at her own dress. \"It's ruined! I had to wait a week for this material!\"\n\nGuards were starting to turn in their direction, but Philip waved them away. \"Coralee, I'm sure the dress can be saved,\" he attempted to placate her.\n\n\"No, it can't!\" she wailed louder, getting more looks from the guards. \"I'll have to burn it and wait another week to get more material!\"\n\n\"I work in the laundry,\" the servant said gently, \"if you come with me, I'm sure Mistress Kay can take the wine straight out of it.\"\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere with you!\" Coralee practically screamed, inviting heads to peek out at them from doorways, \"I wouldn't trust the laundry mistress of a castle whose servants would do something like this!\"\n\nThe blue-eyed servant's eyes flashed with anger, but Philip held his hand out to both women. \"Now, Coralee\u2014\" Why did his voice have to catch now? \"It was just an accident.\"\n\n\"Accident? ACCIDENT? This wretch attacked me on purpose! She saw us in the hallway and she was jealous! It was no accident!\" Coralee's finger flew to within inches of the servant's face, but instead of flinching away from it, her long eyelashes lowered dangerously over her brilliant blue eyes.\n\nPhilip looked down at her, waiting for a reaction. However, the young servant flashed her eyes to Philip before casting them to the floor. \"I did nothing of the sort, my lady, but I apologize for making a mess.\"\n\nAt this, Coralee folded her arms across her chest. \"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"Coralee,\" Philip tried to temper her.\n\n\"No,\" she shook her head, \"I demand she be punished.\"\n\nPhilip tried not to gape. Coralee impatiently tapped her foot. The servant girl stood with her head bowed in silence. He shook his head at the whole situation.\n\nFinally, Philip motioned for one of the guards to join them. \"Please accompany Lady Coralee to the laundry and ask Mistress Kay to help her clean up,\" he told the staff guard. Then, turning to Coralee, he indicated the young servant and said, \"I'll see to her punishment.\"\n\nCoralee stuck her nose in the air and stormed off with the guard chasing her.\n\nOnce they had turned the corner, Philip sighed. Turning around, he found the servant on her hands and knees gathering the ruined sheets from the floor. \"Come with me,\" he told her.\n\nHe spun to march down the hallway they had come from, but turned down a different hallway almost immediately. This smaller hall led past the feast hall and audience hall straight to his office. He forced himself not to check behind himself to see if she was following, or walk slower to wait for her. He used the servant hallways to avoid being seen by anyone except guards.\n\nThe last guards stood in front of his private office entrance. Not expecting him there that day, he had to wait for them to unlock and open the door. Whisking past them and inside, Philip threw himself into his chair behind his massive desk. Why hadn't he cleaned it up a little before he finished with Murthur yesterday?\n\nPursing his lips, he motioned for the young woman to sit in the chair opposite him.\n\nWhat am I supposed to do with her?! He tried to keep a calm face. I can't punish her, it was an accident!\n\nShe squirmed in the chair, still holding the stained sheets, as he scrutinized her. It helped that she kept her focus on the ground, or the walls, or the sheets.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Philip asked. Yes, that sounded innocuous.\n\n\"Tierni, Your Majesty,\" she said. She kept her voice low, but firm. He wondered if she had ever been afraid of anything in her life.\n\nBy Shurta, that's a beautiful name! Well, that was something, he thought, now what do I do? He stared at her some more. It was intimidating, right?\n\nOnce he felt the silence between them had gone on long enough, he asked, \"Do you have anything to say for yourself?\"\n\nHer eyes pierced into his. No, he thought, she has never been afraid of anything.\n\n\"Nothing that hasn't already been said, Your Majesty.\"\n\nHe could feel the sun overhead in those eyes! He desired nothing more than to sit and stare into them.\n\nOf course! Philip felt a surge of relief. But how do I say it?\n\nThe sound of shouting outside his door brought Philip out of his reverie.\n\n\"You let me in there or I'll make sure your breeches are never cleaned again!\" the muffled sound came from the servant's entrance.\n\nWhen he glanced at Tierni, she dropped her face into her hands and shook her head. He feared she might cry and he wouldn't know what to do then! So, he rose quickly to cross the room and open the door.\n\nIn the hallway stood the ever-feared Mistress Kay of the laundry, shaking her finger in the face of one of the guards. The guard had gone as far as pressing his back against the wall, but neither guard had made a move to open the door. Bravery in the face of danger.\n\nMistress Kay wore a sparkling white apron over her blue livery dress. Unlike the lesser servants that wandered the hallways in blue livery with a silver sword embroidered on the back, any master or mistress in charge of an area wore a silver sword on their left shoulder. The silver sword signified their belonging to the household of the Noble Kingdom. Her gray hair was pulled into a bun like Tierni's, but white wisps flew in several different directions instead of dangling delicately next to her face. Her cheeks were the color of the sunset, but Philip knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with embarrassment.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" she dropped a deep curtsy, \"I'm sorry to interrupt like this, but I must insist on speaking with you.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he swept to the side to allow her to enter his office. \"Come in, Mistress Kay.\"\n\nThrowing one last nasty glare at the two guards in the hallway, she stepped into the room. She immediately positioned herself next to Tierni's chair with her nose in the air and her hands on her hips.\n\nOnce the door closed, Mistress Kay opened her mouth, but at the king's glance, she closed it.\n\n\"Has the Lady Coralee been seen to?\" he asked the laundry mistress.\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty,\" Mistress Kay lifted her nose higher in the air as if the question were an insult. \"But I've come to talk to you about this one.\" She tossed her head at young Tierni sitting in the chair.\n\nPhilip swallowed, but hid his concern by seating himself behind his desk again. If Mistress Kay were this upset at the beautiful young servant, he might have to end up dismissing her. \"Would you like to say something in her defense?\" he prompted.\n\n\"Only this,\" Mistress Kay took a step toward him. \"She's got a strong attitude, this one. She's bull-headed and often thinks herself above her station. She's got a sharp tongue and rarely tempers it.\"\n\nPhilip steepled his fingers in front of his chest. \"This hardly sounds like a defense, Mistress.\"\n\n\"She's also the best laundry maid I've got.\" Mistress Kay bit her lip and glanced briefly over her shoulder to see Tierni lift her face to the older woman. \"She's a hard worker and never shirks her duties. She never asks others to do her work and she willingly takes on that of others to help. She's learned quickly in the time she's been with me and I think she has the makings of a great mistress someday. She's never had an accident like this before and I refuse to think she did anything of the sort on purpose. I hate to admit it, but\u2026I'd be lost without her.\" Mistress Kay wrung her hands. \"I even went so far as to dissuade Princess Anna from taking her as a personal maid when she came looking for one.\"\n\nInteresting, Philip thought, she's a hard worker and willing to help others, but still considers herself equal to nobles.\n\nPhilip nodded, \"I promised Lady Coralee that I would see to her punishment personally.\"\n\n\"I'll take it.\" Philip blinked, not believing what he'd just heard. Tierni half-stood from her chair, but when she began to speak Mistress Kay pushed her back to sit and kept her hand on the girl's shoulder. \"Quiet, girl,\" she told her, then turned back to the king. \"I'll take her punishment myself,\" she repeated.\n\nPhilip inhaled deeply. \"A mistress willing to take her inferior's punishment is indeed strong evidence against it. However,\" he held up a finger to forestall their questions, \"I must insist on the worst possible punishment I can think of; and you will not be allowed to take her place, but you will be included in it.\" Mistress Kay tightened her lips and he saw her hand gently squeeze Tierni's shoulder. Tierni lowered her eyes beneath her long lashes. After an intentional, tension-filled pause, Philip sat up straight. \"Mistress Kay, you will dress Tierni in the best gown in the castle that will fit her and you will force her, however strenuously you must insist\u2014\" he took another deep breath and tried to sound imposing \"\u2014to sit through an entire meal with me. I have often felt I would die of boredom, so it might be dangerous as well.\"\n\nThe two faces in front of him froze. Mistress Kay's broke first. Tilting her head, she whispered, \"Sire?\"\n\nPhilip walked to the door. \"I understand this punishment might be considered more dire than some, but I did make a promise to Lady Coralee.\" He placed his hand on the door handle, but the question he wanted to avoid came before he could open it.\n\n\"But, Your Majesty,\" Mistress Kay cleared her throat, \"wouldn't it be deceitful for the girl to dress above her station? She hasn't been trained as a noble. She wouldn't know how to act properly at a dinner with a king. Do you wish to mock her?\"\n\nPhilip turned to face her. \"We may live in the Noble Kingdom and aspire to magnify our stations in life, but my sister and I have been discussing the competence and natural nobility of the common people. I would like to hear Tierni's opinion of the matter. Mocking her would only lessen my nobility. I would never mock her.\" He could barely keep himself from wincing at the last part.\n\nCould I sound more desperate to dine with a servant? he berated himself.\n\nHe yanked the door open with more force than he had planned. \"Her punishment will take place tomorrow night and she must perform it alone,\" he announced loudly for the benefit of the guards as well.\n\nThe two women mumbled agreement, dipped curtsies, and scurried from the room. Tierni halted in front of Philip. She lifted her chin to meet his eyes for a moment\u2014a moment Philip drank in\u2014before Mistress Kay jerked her arm to pull her into the hallway.\n\nNow the only problem would be making sure Philip could act like a king with those eyes on him over dinner.\n\n[ Taking Flight ]\n\nHiro slipped into Rakgar's lair while the sky was still gray and a handful of stars continued to wink down at him. He didn't want to dodge requests from Tog or Prak to join him. Plus, he hadn't slept well. He thought about Priya for most of the night. Where she would be going? Would she remain in the Rock Clouds? Should he say goodbye to her? What would he even have to say? He hadn't come up with any answers.\n\nEven at this early hour, Rakgar slept in the large lair that was meant for him to meet with the other dragons. Hiro questioned whether he bothered to sleep in another lair anywhere else. He always wanted to be easily accessible to the ruck.\n\nHiro lingered briefly to watch him sleep, reflecting on how this dragon had practically helped his sires raise him. He knew Rakgar would always do what he believed to be best for the ruck. He would protect other dragons to his own detriment, Hiro was sure. The only reason he had made poor decisions of late must be because of that demon faerie, Skorkot.\n\nHe searched the cave around him for the faerie. No, he thought to himself, she must be sleeping in Rakgar's lair. That's why Rakgar is out here. Caring for and worrying about others will be that dan's downfall.\n\nHiro crept closer to wake the mighty gray dragon, but before he could whisper a word Rakgar leapt into the air, knocked Hiro to the ground, and stood atop him with a raised claw.\n\n\"Rakgar!\" Hiro struggled to speak with Rakgar pressing the air from his lungs. \"I've come for the human!\" Rakgar's eyes burned. If he had looked any angrier, fire might have erupted from them. Rakgar placed a claw on Hiro's neck and pressed. \"Rakgar,\" Hiro clawed at his leader's leg, \"it's morning. I came as you ordered. Please!\"\n\nThe terrifying dragon finally stepped from Hiro, but his eyes still burned with rage. \"Yes,\" Rakgar nodded, \"the human must leave.\"\n\nHiro nodded and coughed as he clambered to his feet. While he recovered, Rakgar stepped to the crevice in the wall that led to Priya's lair. He wedged his head and neck through the gap, but nothing more than a claw would fit through after that.\n\nHe yelled to Priya and the sound echoed through the cavern. When she answered, Hiro could hear anxiety in her voice. While Hiro and Rakgar waited for the woman to appear, Rakgar stepped close to Hiro.\n\n\"Don't trust her,\" he whispered. \"I know you feel honor-bound to help her, but you must remember that she is human. She will lie and manipulate you. Return her to the surface and be rid of her.\"\n\nThe advice sounded much like Priya's. The two dragons agreed on more than either of them would admit. Before Hiro could question Rakgar, Anna scrambled from the opening of Priya's lair.\n\nShe took measured steps toward Hiro while Rakgar hissed at her. Hiro forced himself to stay seated and allow her to come to him. She walked carefully with her chin high until she stood next to Hiro.\n\n\"Are you unharmed?\" Hiro asked.\n\nShe simply nodded.\n\nRakgar stalked to his previous sleeping position. \"Get her out of here before I change my mind,\" he growled.\n\nHiro turned to lope from the cave with Princess Anna following at his side. Once they stepped onto the rocky slopes of the Inner Mountain, Hiro scooped her into his claw.\n\nBounding into the sky, he muttered, \"Let's get you out of here.\"\n\nAnna clung to his leg but tried to keep her voice low as she asked, \"Aren't you worried that others will see you carrying me?\"\n\n\"I don't care,\" he growled. His heart contracted as he thought about getting the woman away from the dangers in the Rock Clouds. But the next moment it softened again, so he assumed it was because he had previously been thinking about Priya.\n\nSpringtime made the early morning air warm and pleasant. They flew toward the Black Forest until all signs of night fled. Anna lay quietly curled in a ball in Hiro's claw. He didn't dare bother her. She most likely hadn't slept well either. His suspicion was confirmed when she lolled, but quickly recovered her position.\n\n\"We have to stop for your bag,\" he told her after the third time she slipped. \"We'll rest there.\"\n\n\"Anywhere is better than in that cave.\" He felt her shiver violently. \"For the most part, I just sat in the dark by myself. When that green dragon appeared, she just glared at me. She never said a word. She just\u2026stared. I suppose it was better than staying with the big gray one. Rakgar?\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder. \"I'm not sure which of them is more dangerous.\"\n\nHiro must have pressed his wings harder than ever because Centaur River came into view not long after the sun had passed its zenith. The pair spotted the large boulder jutting over the water to mark where they hid Anna's bag of supplies.\n\nAs they tumbled to the ground Anna could hold on no longer. Her grip on Hiro's leg loosened and sent her sprawling on her belly to the forest floor before the dragon landed. She lay in silence, her feet resting on some mossy new growth. Hiro listened for danger, but since they weren't in the Black Forest yet, he didn't expect anything.\n\nOnce Hiro began to move, Anna waved a hand from where she'd landed, laying on top of a large branch. \"I'll get my bag later,\" she mumbled into the dirt.\n\n\"You won't be very comfortable there,\" Hiro said, walking over to a tree surrounded by green shoots coming up from the forest floor.\n\nAnna half-opened one eye. With a groan, she hoisted herself onto her hands and knees and crawled to follow him. Her once resplendent gown and cloak, now coated in dust and dirt, dragged across the greenery.\n\nShe laid her head on Hiro's front claw, curling her back against his soft underbelly, a position to which the two of them had become accustomed. Hiro curled his leathery wing over her. The last thing he remembered before he fell asleep was both of them heaving a sigh together.\n\n[ Trifling Tastes ]\n\n\"Sire,\" Ruther's voice made Philip realize he was pacing again. He stopped and turned to his servant. \"Is there anything I can get you? Some wine, perhaps?\"\n\n\"No, thank you, Ruther.\" He could barely keep himself from picking up his foot again. He didn't want any wine, even the watered-down version he had at meals. He wanted a clear head tonight. But even still, he motioned for his servant to come closer. \"I came too early, didn't I? I've made everyone uncomfortable.\"\n\nRuther leaned his head closer to the king. \"They certainly weren't expecting you now, Sire. Tradition dictates that you arrive last.\" The tall servant, brother of Philip's regular servant, didn't quite come up to Philip's nose. Ruther shrugged his shoulders, \"But you're here now. I think they'll understand your nerves when she arrives.\"\n\nRuther had used the extra time to make sure everything was ready for Philip's dinner with Tierni. He shifted the flowers in the centerpiece. He had a glass exchanged that he announced wasn't sturdy enough. Philip appreciated all his servants' knowledge and sensitivity.\n\nWhen the great double doors swung open, Philip jerked his head around so fast he felt a twinge of pain at the base of his skull. When Torgon walked through, he reached around to rub the sore spot. \"Oh, it's you,\" he said.\n\nTorgon's face scrunched when he saw the young king. \"Sorry to disappoint,\" he said with a questioning grin. \"Who were you expecting?\"\n\nPhilip's hand slid from his neck and he shrugged. \"I invited someone to dinner.\"\n\nTorgon stopped himself from pulling his own chair out. Normally, if Anna didn't show up (and she rarely did these days), the two young men didn't stand on ceremony and tucked themselves in as soon as they both arrived. Now Torgon stood behind his chair, formally folding both of his hands to one side of his hips. His eyebrows rose almost to meet his hairline. \"Did you, now?\" Philip rolled his eyes, but Torgon continued. \"Who is she? The older blonde? The younger redhead?\"\n\nPhilip shook his head. \"None of those.\"\n\n\"None?\" Torgon's eyes lit up. \"Then where did you meet her? Who is she? What's her name?\"\n\n\"Her name is\u2014\"\n\nPhilip was interrupted by the great double doors swinging open again. He drew in a sharp breath when she appeared. She wore a gown of deep red with pleated fabric that crossed her chest and stretched up to the edge of her shoulder. Her hair, instead of being pulled tightly to the back of her head as it had been when they met, tumbled in loose ringlets to brush her shoulders. Philip tried to banish the image of her soft shoulder against his cheek. She wore no jewelry or gilding on her gown, but her blue eyes sparkled and Philip thought her lovely face the only jewel she need ever wear. He opened his mouth to speak.\n\n\"Tierni!\" Torgon shouted before Philip could say a word. \"What are you doing here? Why are you wearing that? What are you thinking?\" He marched over to her and grabbed her arm, wrenching her toward the door.\n\nPhilip bristled at his best friend's action, then realized. \"You know her?\"\n\nTierni deftly twisted her arm free of Torgon's. In the back of Philip's mind, he took note that Torgon was strong and well-trained, but this diminutive young woman had freed herself from his grasp easier than plucking a grape.\n\n\"I was invited by the king,\" she snapped back at Torgon. She stared him in the eye without fear. \"I was instructed to wear this.\"\n\nPhilip directed his attention to Torgon. \"How do you know her?\"\n\n\"This is who you invited?\" Torgon spun on him as if he'd done something wrong. \"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\nPhilip threw his hands up in defense as Torgon advanced on him. \"I didn't know I required your permission!\" Had Torgon seen her in the halls? Had he noticed her as a servant? Did he know her from his earlier years in the army?\n\n\"Why did you invite her? Her? All the noble women and courtiers you've met, and you invite her?\" Torgon demanded, continuing his aggressive advance so far that the guards at the door gripped their sword hilts.\n\nPhilip flashed a palm at the guards to halt them. \"Torgon,\" Philip spoke slowly and clearly, \"how do you know her?\"\n\nTorgon straightened his back and tugged at his tunic to compose himself. He glanced back at Tierni, who crossed her arms at her chest and narrowed dangerous eyes at him.\n\nTurning back to Philip, Torgon set his lips so hard in anger that they almost disappeared. \"She's my sister.\"\n\nPhilip swallowed. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. His mind had gone blank.\n\nTorgon spun back to Tierni. \"And she's leaving this instant,\" he growled.\n\nHe started to grab her arm again, but she swung it away and planted it on her hip. \"I'm afraid not,\" she thrust her chin at him. \"I'm here as a punishment and I intend to be held accountable.\"\n\nTorgon's face twisted. \"Punishment?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" Philip's mouth hung agape. \"Something of a poor excuse,\" he mumbled apologetically to Torgon, \"I can explain later.\"\n\nTorgon jabbed a finger in Philip's direction. \"And you will, but,\" he spun on Tierni, \"you're not staying here. It's not your place.\"\n\nTierni jutted her chin toward her brother again. \"I was ordered by the king. Do you think yourself above the king?\"\n\nSilence throbbed through the large dining room. Philip held his breath along with the servants, the guards, and Ruther. What could he possibly say if Torgon answered \"Yes\"?\n\nTorgon's head dipped and he glanced at Philip through lowered eyes. \"No.\" When he whispered the word, Philip heard Ruther exhale. \"But,\" Torgon continued and Philip suppressed the urge to grind his teeth, \"I do feel equal to any man involved with my sister.\" Torgon's head lifted and he stared Philip in the eye. \"I'm sorry, Philip, but as the head of my household I must insist on some time to consider the situation before I can allow any involvement between the two of you.\"\n\n\"That's perfectly understandable,\" Philip nodded. Glancing to Tierni, he pleaded with his eyes for her to understand as well. However, dropping her hands to her sides, she stormed out of the room.\n\nPhilip turned his attention back to Torgon, although his mind lingered on the memory of Tierni's gown whipping around the corner. \"Torgon,\" he pleaded, \"if I had known\u2026\"\n\n\"I know,\" Torgon held up a hand to forestall the apology, \"but I think I'll take my meal elsewhere tonight.\"\n\nOnce he left the room, Philip flopped into his chair. Putting his hands over his face, he groaned.\n\nHiro awoke to the sound of snuffling in the dirt behind him. Keeping his eyes closed, he heard breathing, almost snorting. A scrape of what sounded like bone on wood. Vegetation tearing from the earth and\u2026chomping. A heartbeat. Just one. But a scent like nothing he'd ever experienced. It smelled\u2026like moonlight.\n\nHe couldn't explain it. He couldn't place it. He knew it wasn't a danger, but curiosity got the better of him.\n\nCareful not to move his claws and startle Anna, Hiro lifted his head from the ground to snake it around and face the creature. Moonlight glimmered from a long silvery mane and tail that brushed the ground. A radiant white coat magnified the light around it. Night bugs and flickers of dust shadow spun the air as if to draw the focus of every living thing around it. Four glistening hooves and a single twisted horn shimmered like thousands of majikally embellished snork trails. It seemed as though a shake of its head might call the stars from the sky above to shine down around it.\n\nHiro felt Anna sit up. She didn't make a sound as she peered over Hiro's shoulder, but she gasped when she saw it too.\n\n\"A unicorn,\" she whispered. \"They do exist!\"\n\n\"Of course they do,\" Hiro whispered back. He had seen memories of unicorns from other dragons in the ruck, but the sightings were extremely rare.\n\n\"Well, how would I know?\" she shrunk back a little. \"Faeries say that they'll only appear to dragons.\"\n\nHiro shrugged, \"Then how would they know?\"\n\n\"Why would they only appear to dragons?\" Anna mused. \"Dragons are such dangerous and ferocious creatures. Wouldn't a dragon eat a unicorn?\"\n\nBoth the unicorn and the dragon turned to look at her. Anna's eyes widened. \"A dragon would never dare eat a unicorn,\" Hiro rumbled low. \"What good would ever come from harming something so pure and majikal?\"\n\nThe unicorn dipped its head back to the sparse undergrowth.\n\nAnna pursed her lips, \"I thought you would eat anything with a heartbeat.\"\n\nHiro tilted his head to glance at her then shifted it back to the unicorn. \"We don't eat absolutely everything that crosses our path. I would never eat a\u2014\" he glanced again to see Anna watching him, \"unicorn.\"\n\n\"Have you ever eaten a faerie?\"\n\n\"No, but there are several that I might try to eat.\"\n\nHiro stretched his neck over to the unicorn. It stood idly chomping at the shoots in its mouth. Hiro reached a claw toward it. He heard Anna's breath catch moments before the shimmering creature nuzzled its snout into the pad of his claw. He stroked two talons through the thick, glistening mane before the creature bent its neck to get another mouthful of spring grass.\n\nAnna exhaled as Hiro retracted his claw. The two of them gazed at the resplendent beast. Anna draped herself across Hiro's neck. \"Would you ever eat a centaur?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" he answered, \"they're our allies.\"\n\nAnna remained silent for a moment. \"What about another dragon?\"\n\n\"Now that would be murder.\" The unicorn snuffled behind them, stepping further into the forest.\n\n\"Not a dragon from your ruck,\" she defended her theory.\n\n\"Even to hunt or attack a dragon from another ruck would be criminal. Would you hunt another human? Even a human from a different kingdom?\"\n\n\"What about the flightless type?\"\n\n\"All humans are flightless.\"\n\n\"No, I meant dragons.\"\n\nHiro turned to face her. Now she was getting to the heart of it. \"What are you asking?\"\n\n\"Would you ever hunt or eat one of those flightless dragons?\" she clarified.\n\n\"The ones that live in the marshes at the south end of Centaur River?\" She nodded. Hiro scrunched up his face. \"I'm not sure,\" he answered honestly. \"If I were extremely hungry, maybe. But a dragon is a dragon, even the flightless, non-intelligent type.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Anna stood up straight, spooking the unicorn a few steps away, \"the flightless dragons can't speak?\"\n\n\"We call them 'worms,'\" Hiro shook his head, \"and no, the gift of speech has not spread among them.\"\n\nAnna's head tipped. \"So, is it intelligence that determines your attitude toward creatures?\"\n\nHe shook his head at her. \"Unicorns don't speak either.\"\n\nShe settled onto the ground, leaning her back against Hiro. \"You don't make any sense.\"\n\nHiro settled himself around her. \"It's simple. I've heard that unicorns taste awful,\" he said with a smile. The unicorn tossed its head, shook its mane, and turned its back on them.\n\n[ A Request ]\n\n\"I've made a mess of things,\" Philip muttered. He stared into the marble eyes of his father.\n\n\"It can't be all that bad,\" said a voice from behind him. The voice belonged to Tommak. Probably the only man in Kingstor Noble to match Philip in height, Tommak stood to one side, examining a metal bust which floated above the floor at eye level and depicted another of Philip's ancestors.\n\nPhilip couldn't take his eyes away from his father's likeness. \"He lived his entire life in peace. No wars. No rogue dragons threatening his kingdom. No faeries bullying him into wars. As soon as he departs, I botch it all for him.\"\n\nHe felt Tommak step up behind him. \"Your father would be proud of the king you have become.\"\n\n\"The faeries don't respect me,\" he grumbled, feeling like the young child that had once fallen from his horse. It wasn't a terrible fall, but Tommak had been there with a kind word and a piece of candy. \"I feel I have to struggle to gain the respect of my own generals and officers. A crazy, blood-thirsty dragon is running around my kingdom intent on murdering me and\u2026my best friend is avoiding me.\"\n\n\"The faeries don't respect anyone but themselves,\" Tommak countered. \"You are, in fact, gaining the respect of your men, even though the stubborn old trolls among them will always oppose you. And the dragon's menace could have happened to anyone.\"\n\n\"You say nothing of Torgon.\"\n\nTommak sighed. \"That is a matter of the heart. When you figure that one out, let the rest of us know.\"\n\nPhilip grinned when he glanced back and saw the general's smile. \"I probably should have made you Royal General.\"\n\nTommak cast his eyes to the statue of the late king. \"Your father might have.\"\n\nAt this response, Philip turned completely to face Tommak, the smile melting from his face. \"You think I should have.\" It was not a question. No one in their right mind would turn down the position. It was the highest honor in the kingdom.\n\nTommak turned his ever-gentle eyes to Philip. \"I did not say that.\" He took a deep breath and looked again at the statue with fondness. \"Your father might have chosen me for my loyalty and long experience. But you,\" he placed one hand on Philip's shoulder, \"you needed more than a Royal General.\"\n\nPhilip's gaze dropped to the ground. \"And now I've ruined that too.\"\n\nTommak gently shook his shoulder. \"Only if you give up on it.\"\n\nBefore Philip could answer, a side door to the Hall of Kings flew open. Boots beat across the floor until Torgon swung around a double-sided portrait of an entire royal family rotating in the center of the hall. Philip's stomach roiled. The last time he had felt like this was when he made his first appearance performing audiences in his father's stead. He remembered the sweaty palms and nausea well.\n\n\"Tommak,\" Torgon nodded to the general. \"Your Majesty,\" he indicated Philip with a nod of his head.\n\n\"Royal General,\" Tommak responded before Torgon could say anything, \"I was just excusing myself.\" He faced Philip with a salute. \"Your Majesty.\"\n\nTommak scurried away before Philip could even nod in his direction, and the two young men were left standing together in the shadows of the kings.\n\n\"Philip,\" Torgon stood up straight with his hands clasped in front of him. \"I'm sorry I didn't return sooner, but I think I've found a temporary solution to our problem.\"\n\nPhilip's eyebrows pinched together, thinking only of Tierni. \"What problem is that?\"\n\n\"Captain Murzod,\" Torgon said. His matter-of-fact attitude made Philip question if his best friend actually had been avoiding him. When he nodded with understanding, Torgon continued. \"I've found another faerie who has a good idea of the spells Kradik might use to travel quickly. Although he's not willing to travel with us, he said he would be willing to use his majik to get us to the halfway point much faster.\"\n\n\"Us?\" Philip asked.\n\n\"The men I've chosen and myself,\" Torgon said.\n\nPhilip nodded. \"When will you leave?\"\n\nTorgon clasped his hands behind his back. \"Within the hour.\"\n\nPhilip nodded again, hoping the movement would hide the teeth he couldn't unclench. \"Very well,\" he finally answered. \"I'll see your group off shortly.\"\n\nTorgon jerked his head and spun on his heel. But before he had gone two paces, he stopped. Slowly he turned back to face Philip. \"You're being very good about this, Philip. Much better than I am, I'm afraid. And I'm sorry,\" Torgon continued, lowering his voice. \"I don't blame you for anything. It's just\u2014\" he scrubbed his hand through his hair, a sure sign of his frustration. \"I just don't know what to do. I mean, it's not like you're not a good guy\u2014you're like my own brother! But she's my sister. My only sister. And she's so young\u2014I never thought to even consider you and\u2014well, I couldn't, could I?\" He took a long, deep breath. \"I am still your friend and I want to prove it, so I'll give you two things.\"\n\nIntrigued, Philip tipped his head quizzically but said nothing. \"First,\" Torgon continued, \"a promise. I promise that when I return, I will give you an answer as to my feelings about your involvement with my sister. And second\u2026\" Torgon paused. His scrunched his face to one side. He cleared his throat, ran his fingers through his hair again, scratched his neck, then crossed his arms in front of his chest. Tightening his lips before he spoke, he met Philip's eyes. \"Her name is Josie.\" Then his finger swung out and came within hairs of the king's nose. \"And, so help me, if you tease me about her, I'll beat you with your own crown.\"\n\nWith that, Philip's best friend raced from the room before either of them could say treason.\n\nA large boulder jutted from the tree canopy beneath them. Curved on one side and flat on the other, it looked like a giant dagger slicing through the greenery. Almost at its peak for the day, the sun shined on the pair, lending warmth and comfort. Hiro drifted on a wind current taking him south of the massive rock as Anna called out to him.\n\n\"Hiro!\" He glanced down at her, but she stared at the boulder as if it signified something. \"I need to ask you a favor.\"\n\n\"Since when do you ask?\" he chuckled.\n\n\"This is serious,\" she held no levity in her voice, \"and it could potentially be dangerous.\"\n\n\"Just being in your presence is dangerous\u2026and disgusting,\" he answered with a grin. When she didn't say any more, he rolled his shoulder and looked down at her again. \"Do I need to land to hear this favor?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Her eyes never left the rock formation, then she pointed to it. \"Over there.\"\n\nHiro's eyes made a wide arc back into his head at the lack of information, but he tilted his wings to spiral down next to the large, pointed boulder. He dipped into the canopy of leaves. The green side of the leaves faced the sun while the gold side faced the ground, and the leaves of the Golden firs sparkled overhead when they touched down. Dapples of shimmering sunlight speckled the hytocomp beneath their feet.\n\n\"Lovely area,\" Hiro inspected the forest around them, \"but would you mind telling me why we're down here and not flying you home right now?\"\n\nAnna searched the trees as well, but said nothing. Turning in circles, she almost looked lost until she suddenly sprinted south. \"This way!\" she yelled over her shoulder.\n\nHer little legs had nothing on Hiro, so he loped after her, taking his time. As they moved along, Hiro began to wonder if Anna would ever explain their purpose here. Her legs moved swifter than he'd ever seen them go. She would falter only slightly, get her bearings, and bound into the trees again. He tried to question her, but she would silence him with a wave and continue to run.\n\nWhen she finally stopped, her face was flushed, her hairline was wet, and her breath came in gasps. Hiro stepped next to her as she leaned over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. \"Is this the favor? To watch you run through the forest? Because you don't have to ask me to do that. I'm always willing.\"\n\nShe shook her head, her chest heaving as she lifted a finger to point into the trees. \"Shampy.\"\n\nHiro spun. The scales on his claw hadn't yet grown back from the spot where the twisted little faerie shaman had tortured him. \"What? Where?\" His eyes searched the trees.\n\nAs he focused further in, he could see a small hut made of green stone. The golden leaves camouflaged the little building with shimmering light. The thatched roof reflected the same golden branches overhead.\n\n\"How did you find my summer home, dragon?\"\n\nThe gravelly voice came from above and behind him. Hiro tripped over his tail and thumped Anna to the ground with it before he could find the little faerie named Shampy.\n\n\"As graceful as ever, I see,\" she said, once he faced her. She crouched on a branch overlooking the two. Having traded her dirty blue cloth for a faded red one hadn't improved her appearance. The silvery hair on one side of her head was divided into three sections, braided, and twisted up toward the sky, like three dragon horns. The snake tattoo on the other side didn't shine as it had when they'd met before, but Hiro assumed it would only do that in dim light.\n\n\"Your summer home?\" Hiro growled at her and stared down at Anna as she picked herself from the mossy ground. \"What are we doing here? Is this your favor?\"\n\n\"Shampy,\" Anna addressed the withered old faerie, \"another shaman told me where to find you.\"\n\n\"What shaman?\" Hiro hissed.\n\n\"Never you mind,\" she shot back at him. \"I have to ask you something,\" she said to the faerie.\n\n\"Ask me something?\" Shampy sprang from the branch to the ground. Although she had been more than a dragon's length from the ground, she landed lightly on her feet without the use of her wings. She stood to her full, yet stooped, height and punched her fists on her hips. \"Favors? Incantations? Fortunes? Spells?\" Her wrinkled translucent skin shook as she stamped her feet. \"Help me with this!\" she wailed in a high pitch. \"Teach me that!\" she screamed low. \"I love him! I don't love her! My brother, mother, sister, son! My horse won't run! My cat won't mew! I need majik! They need majik! We need majik! I can't do it without majik! I need you! He needs you! She needs you! Help me! Help me! Help me! Don't you know I come here to get away from all of that?\"\n\n\"I need to speak to the dead!\" Anna shouted abruptly.\n\nShampy ceased her tirade. Her hands swung to her sides. Her eyes narrowed. \"You must be desperate to ask this.\"\n\nAnna nodded.\n\n\"And let me guess,\" Shampy stood still. More still than Hiro had ever seen her. \"You have nothing to pay for this service, and I use the term 'service' very loosely because what you ask\u2026is actually more\u2026of a curse.\"\n\n\"I'll give you whatever I can as well as ingredients for the majik, but I have nothing with me right now. I'll have to bring you something at a later time or maybe\u2026\"\n\nAnna's voice drifted off as Shampy lifted one gnarled hand. \"Peace.\" She lowered her hand and shook her head. \"Do you even understand what you're asking?\"\n\nHiro's eyes had been bouncing between the two. Now he snaked his head around to position it between the two of them. \"Do you?\" he asked Anna.\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered into his eyes. She peeked around him and told the old woman in a firmer voice, \"Yes, I do.\"\n\nShampy grinned, without lips a sickening smile to see, and waves of wrinkled muscle on her face finished the effect. \"You might know the possible consequences, but you have no idea the cost.\" The old faerie opened her wings. \"Come,\" she motioned toward the hut as she drifted toward it, \"we shall see if I can dissuade you.\"\n\nOn the opposite side of the little building they found a couple of stumps, the insides of them scooped out and smoothed over. Anna slipped comfortably into one. The remnants of a fire sputtered between the chairs. With amazing deftness for one so old, Shampy hefted a couple of trimmed branches from a nearby pile.\n\n\"Dragon,\" Shampy said, after placing the logs in front of them within the burnt remains, \"I wouldn't insult you by trying to light a fire in front of you. While you do that, I'll get us some refreshment. This is, after all, my holiday.\"\n\nAs Shampy shuffled into the hut, Hiro spit some fire on the logs. They crackled with welcome and, though they were further south now and the springtime should have warmed them, the heat from the fire was comforting.\n\nShampy scuffled back from the hut carrying two small cups of a bright blue liquid and a green sprig as long as her forearm. Around her waist was a braided rope that held a small leather satchel. She handed one of the cups to Anna, then turned and offered the sprig to Hiro. \"I was able to find some mint in my stores. Just enough for some refreshment.\"\n\nHiro curled on the ground next to Anna's seat. He wrapped his tongue around a few of the green leaves. They melted inside his mouth, but the mesmerizing flavor wasn't enough to distract him from the conversation going on in front of him.\n\n\"Now,\" Shampy said as she sighed, leaning back in her stump, \"so many questions. Where do I start?\"\n\nAnna stared silently into her drink.\n\n\"Alright,\" Shampy nodded, then took a swig from her cup. Her eyes never left the princess. She took a deep breath. \"Whom do you wish to contact in The World of Souls?\"\n\nAnna closed her eyes. \"My father.\" When Anna met Shampy's eyes again, one of the little witch's white eyebrows lifted. \"King Paudie of the Noble Kingdom,\" Anna clarified.\n\n\"He's not the king anymore,\" Shampy said. \"I'll need his base name.\"\n\n\"Paudie ido Patrick and Arllyl feira Prince and King of the Noble Kingdom.\"\n\nShampy shrugged. \"I guess that will have to do.\" She shifted in her seat and thrust her hand into the bag at her side. \"Let me start by saying, I don't know if I'm even strong enough for the spell. It usually takes a circle of at least three shaman to perform the majik, not to mention the others to\u2026\" she pulled her hand out of her bag, but kept it in a fist, holding something. \"Well, let's just say it's not a one-shaman spell!\"\n\n\"I know you can do it,\" Anna almost whispered.\n\nShampy barked a laugh. \"Your faith in my skills aside, you need to know what you're asking.\" She mumbled in faerie tongue into her fist, then cast the contents into the fire.\n\nSparks jumped into the air. The flames danced and twisted, then turned a brilliant blue. Images floated in the flame. The ancient faerie drank from her cup, gargled the gulp, then swallowed it and cleared her throat. Her eyes shone as her lids lifted higher.\n\n\"The World of Souls is protected from our world for good reason,\" the shaman growled. \"Imagine if we could commune with the souls of the dead whenever we desired. Friendships and bonds would continue as if never having been parted.\" Two people danced out of the flames, hand-in-hand, one light, one dark. \"New bonds would develop.\" Several new couples of all shapes and sizes danced and mixed in large groups. \"Meeting someone's family would include ancient relatives, none of which seem to be older than the peak of their lives.\" As she said that a young man stood before them being introduced to a young woman by another young woman. They conversed silently for a moment, then, amidst tears, he walked away arm-in-arm with the second young woman.\n\n\"With those bonds would come truth. Truth can be the great destroyer.\" Another man made of dark light appeared and whispered in a young woman's ear. She screamed a silent echo and ran away from him. \"Not a single aspect of one's life can be hidden among the dead. Murderers, liars, thieves, desecrators, all exposed.\" Several dark shapes of men and women contorted around those made of light. \"All dwell in The World of Souls alongside lovers, parents, and victims. Not only could we get many answers, but we could get too many.\" A dark woman followed a light woman before them, showing the light woman tossing in her sleep as the dark woman whispered in her ear.\n\n\"But that isn't the worst of what you ask.\" Shampy snapped her fingers and the fire split in two. \"When a soul moves between our two worlds,\" a single flame leapt from one side of the blue fire to the other, \"it leaves both worlds vulnerable. Whether the tear is made in death or by a visiting soul, there is always a rend between the two worlds.\" The single leaping flame left a long trail of fire behind it. \"Good and evil may pass back and forth to influence, shift, and even force the ways of both worlds.\" Dark souls poured through the gap of flame. \"The living could be plagued by the dead.\"\n\n\"However,\" Shampy's voice continued, \"dragon souls are the guardians of the gateway between the two worlds.\" Several dragon shapes, both light and dark, sprang up between the two sides of the fire. \"It is said that the dragons have taken it upon themselves to safeguard the passage of souls. I've personally never known a dragon to be so selfless\u2014,\" Hiro growled at her, \"but all the same, from what we know of The World of Souls, it seems to be true.\"\n\nAnna, who had watched the performance unblinking, now looked up at Shampy as the fire returned to normal. \"What does it mean? In order to summon a soul, we must force our way past the souls of dragons?\"\n\n\"Tartaku would never allow it,\" Hiro said.\n\n\"Not force our way,\" Shampy shook her head, settling back. \"There's no way to force past the soul of a dragon. No.\"\n\n\"Then what?\" Anna sat forward, spreading her hands. \"You can't tell me it's impossible, because I know that it is possible. Whether done by your majik or not, I know it is possible. What will it take? What must I do?\"\n\nShampy drained her cup, belched out loud, then pointed a dirty fingernail at Hiro. \"The only way to open the gateway between the worlds and summon the dead\u2026\" she dropped her finger and grinned, \"is through the death of a dragon.\"\n\nAnna's jaw plummeted. \"No,\" she shook her head. \"There has to be another way.\"\n\n\"Only the soul of a dragon will create a space amidst the other dragon souls in the gateway long enough for us to summon those you need to commune with.\" She grinned again. \"A dragon must die.\n\n\"As for payment, that really is moot,\" Shampy said, glaring into her empty cup. \"I don't even know if the majik will work with only me to perform the task, but I will say I consider the death of a dragon payment enough. The most difficult part will be convincing a dragon to die so you can speak with your dead father. Oh,\" she sat up straighter, \"I can't promise how much time you will have with him either. Maybe minutes, maybe only seconds, there's no way to know.\"\n\n\"Is this the favor?\" Hiro rounded on Anna. \"Are you asking me to die for you so you can speak with your father for a few seconds?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Anna shot back at him. \"I would never ask that of you! I only wanted you to come with me to see her. I'm terrified to be alone with her!\"\n\nThe pair of them looked over at the old shaman as she crossed her leg over her knee to scratch the bottom of her foot, exposing everything beneath the faded cloth she wore.\n\nAs Hiro muttered something about humans not being the only disgusting creature, Anna jumped to her feet. \"The death of a dragon!\" she proclaimed.\n\nHiro shook his head. \"Not something to look forward to.\"\n\n\"No, no, no,\" Anna shook her head at him then turned to Shampy. \"Can it be any dragon?\"\n\nShampy narrowed an eye at her. \"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to ask anyone to die for\u2014\" Hiro started, but Anna cut him off.\n\n\"Any dragon at all?\" she asked the old woman. \"Even, say, an unintelligent one?\"\n\nHiro's eyebrows dropped. \"What are you saying?\"\n\nShampy sighed, the thrill of the task erased from her face. \"Yes, I suppose an unintelligent one would work just as well.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Anna shouted.\n\n\"A worm?\" Hiro asked.\n\n\"Of course!\" Anna looked up at him. \"You said yourself that you think of flightless dragons as little more than animals. But they are still dragons! It would be like sacrificing a cow or a lion to serve our purpose.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Hiro hemmed.\n\n\"You must bring it to me alive,\" Shampy stood. \"It cannot die a moment sooner than the spell is cast.\"\n\n\"You'll do it, then?\" Anna asked her.\n\nShampy walked in a small circle. When she faced Anna again, she nodded. \"I'll do it. On the condition that I can keep the dragon from turning to ash and harvest it myself after the spell. That should be more than enough payment and compensation of ingredients.\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Anna said, then turned her small face up to his. \"Will you do it? Will you help me?\"\n\nHe rumbled in the back of his throat. \"I don't like it, Anna. Not with an intelligent dragon or a worm. I don't like it.\"\n\n\"Please, Hiro.\" She placed her hands on his shoulder. \"Please, this is important.\"\n\nHe rolled his other shoulder, shook his head, thumped his tail, and rolled his shoulder again. Looking back into her longing eyes, he said, \"Of course, I'll help you.\"\n\n[ Keeled ]\n\nIt took them two days to fly to the closest herd of flightless dragons in the south. The beasts didn't even realize Hiro and Anna were there before they snatched a young orange dragon, barely more than a fledgling, from under the unobservant noses of its sires. Hiro could easily handle the little worm and carried it back to Shampy's summer home unimpeded.\n\nWhen he pinned it to the ground with his claws in front of her hut, Shampy crossed her arms at her chest. \"Didn't go for a big one, did you? No, I suppose that would be too much work for you, wouldn't it?\" She walked around the dragon, running her hand over its legs and occasionally tapping it with her foot.\n\n\"Why do you look it over like a horse master inspecting a prize stallion?\" Anna asked. \"I thought you said it didn't matter what kind of dragon we used.\"\n\n\"It doesn't,\" Shampy said, continuing to walk the length of the dragon. When she reached its head, she pulled a handful of something from the satchel at her waist. \"I just want to know exactly what I'm getting.\" She jerked her chin as if satisfied, stepped in front of the small dragon's head, opened her hand, and blew a puff of white powder in its face. The dragon fell still.\n\nHiro knew the use of that powder intimately. That was the same powder used to imprison him at Kingstor Noble. He jerked away from the faerie, and the now-unconscious dragon, as she dusted off her hands.\n\n\"That would have been helpful in the capture,\" Anna pointed out.\n\n\"And I would've offered it, if I'd had it at the time,\" Shampy said, while she turned and stoked the fire behind her. \"But I had to contact an acquaintance of mine to request its use. No thanks to you two, I now owe a romantic dinner to an old beau\u2014Skyttel-fits, that will be a travesty!\"\n\nAnna and Hiro settled themselves on the opposite side of the fire from Shampy. It seemed she'd brought half of the interior of her home outside. Several green banners with silver markings hung from branches surrounding the area. They watched her build totems of rocks and twigs and moss that dotted the ground. Dried herbs hung in bunches tied to tree trunks and scattered in circles around the totems. Around the fire she laid several dishes of varying sizes and colors. Each contained a different specimen.\n\nHiro tried to content himself by lying on the ground behind Anna. Anna asked if she could help the old faerie, but got a hearty laugh in response. After a while she sat down on the ground next to Hiro and they tried to guess quietly what things were in the different dishes and what they might be used for.\n\nShampy paused in her work to give Anna a plate of colorful leaves and dark purple berries. \"What am I supposed to do with them?\" Anna asked, poking at the berries. \"Do I sprinkle them somewhere or stomp them or something?\"\n\n\"No,\" Shampy bent over, making her jowls fall forward, \"you eat them. That's what one usually does when offered food.\" She had also brought a plate for herself and sat in one of the chairs to eat.\n\n\"Once the incantation begins, you can't interrupt me,\" she told them with purple juice dripping down her chin. \"The dragon will wake while I kill it, but the incantation will hold it still. Say nothing. Do nothing. Don't even breathe, if you can help it, until Paudie appears. Then you can speak to him freely until he disappears.\"\n\nShampy finished eating and returned to her preparations. When she began pouring a foul-smelling liquid on the totems, Hiro nudged Anna with his snout. \"Do you want me to stay for this?\" he asked. \"I can slip away so you can have a private conversation with your father.\"\n\n\"No,\" Anna shook her head and put her plate on the ground. \"Shampy will hear everything anyway. I would prefer you to stay with me.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" Shampy shouted to them from the other side of the sleeping dragon, \"you have to be here to make the majik stronger. It might end the incantation sooner if you leave.\"\n\nHiro laid his head on his claws. \"I guess I'll stay, then.\"\n\nSoon after this conversation, the old woman rubbed a white grease over her entire body then dipped her hands in the foul-stenched stuff dripping from the totems. The grease helped conceal her muscles and tendons, almost making her skin seem opaque. Hiro wondered briefly why the faeries didn't try to dye their skin to make it opaque. He almost asked this question before the grease turned transparent as well.\n\nAnna watched in shock. She turned to Hiro and whispered, \"This must also be part of the curse. I wonder how her tattoo stays visible.\"\n\nShampy stood on the opposite side of the fire from them. \"Are you ready?\" she asked. When they both nodded, she grinned. \"And the tattoo was there before the curse took hold. I have several others that you can't see because they were applied afterward.\"\n\nShe lifted her hands into the air and began chanting. As she chanted, Hiro caught snippets of words and phrases that he understood from Faerie Tongue. She repeated \"into the fire\" several times before she put her hands in the fire and the flames licked and stuck to them. When her hands caught fire, the totems caught fire as well. With the sun falling behind the trees, the small fires lit the area surrounding them. Shadows danced as the old shaman swayed, tossing the coordinated fires to and fro. Hiro heard Paudie's base name twice.\n\nShe chanted again (something about \"into the fire\" and \"come from the flame\"), lifting each ingredient from the dishes surrounding the fire and throwing them in. Hiro caught the names of some of them in Faerie Tongue. Beetle tongues? What is that supposed to be for? Hytocomp? Doesn't that have water? Wouldn't it douse the fire? But the fire grew.\n\nShampy's hands continued to burn, but Hiro noticed that wherever she had smeared the white grease, the fire didn't spread to that part of her body. And the flames on her hands didn't burn, but only licked them over the surface.\n\nAfter all the ingredients had been added, Shampy chanted louder. Stronger. There was no hint of the gravelly, frail voice of the faerie shaman they had come to know. She stood up straight, her hands burning over her head. Her voice screamed into the sky.\n\nA knife flew into her hand. Hiro had no idea where it had come from. The edges of the long dagger shimmered with majikal light. A wind swept through the trees, fully fluttering the flags on the branches, and they didn't fall. Shampy's chanting grew louder as she turned to face the unconscious dragon on the ground behind her. All the fires surrounding them grew. The little totems burned bright and high enough to light the herbs tied halfway up the tree trunks. With a screech, Shampy plunged the dagger into the dragon's neck and dragged it down the length of its body.\n\nThe dragon's eyes flew open. It wriggled as if to stand, but it couldn't. Its jaw worked and its tongue lashed. Open, close, open, close. It blinked a few times and its entire body shuttered. It shuddered and shook as the old shaman continued screaming her chant, over and over. The dragon convulsed to the rhythm of the words. With one more loud bellow, Shampy's incantation ceased. The dragon stilled. Its chest didn't rise and fall. Its eyes glazed over and remained open.\n\nShampy shook her head. A small movement, but Hiro caught it. Anna turned to face Hiro. The obvious question on her face. Did it work?\n\nThe flags in the trees now fluttered naturally with a soft breeze. The fires settled to a gentle crackling. The entire clearing in front of the little hut quieted.\n\n\"Anna.\" All three of them spun at the sound of a man's voice. He stepped out from behind Shampy's hut. He was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a strong jaw.\n\n\"Father?\" Anna whispered.\n\nThe man stepped toward her. As Hiro watched he was reminded of the time not long ago that a woman had appeared to him, telling him to go to his friend. Having listened to her, he was able to save Tog from death. This man made no sound as he stepped across the ground and left no footprints behind him, as had the woman. Hiro knew this man was from The World of Souls.\n\n\"Anna,\" the man sighed. \"It pains me that we had so little time together in this world.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, father,\" Anna said, walking toward him. She reached out to him, but he held up a hand to stop her.\n\n\"You can't touch him, Anna,\" Shampy said from behind her. \"It's impossible.\"\n\nAnna dropped her hands to her side. \"I should have gone to you sooner.\"\n\n\"You couldn't,\" Paudie answered her, \"and you know why.\"\n\nAnna hung her head as if ashamed.\n\n\"The answers you've come for \u2026\" Paudie said, \"I can't give them to you.\"\n\nAnna shook her head at him. She opened her mouth, possibly to ask for more explanation, but he forestalled her. \"What you need to know is this: I loved your mother, as I love you. She didn't love me, but we've made amends this past while in The World of Souls. We understand each other much better now and I love both of you all the more for it.\"\n\n\"Father,\" Anna whispered with tears falling down her cheeks, \"what do I do?\"\n\n\"Remember that I love you. Despite all your questions, I promise that the only thing you need to know is that I love you,\" Paudie said as he began to fade away. \"Love will strengthen and bind us.\"\n\nWhen the apparition disappeared, Anna turned tear-stained cheeks to Shampy. \"Thank you,\" she wept.\n\n\"Don't thank me, child,\" the old shaman said, sitting down on the leg of the dead dragon. \"My spell didn't work, else your father would have appeared in the fire. He came to you of his own accord.\"\n\n[ Enemies ]\n\nThe pair spent the following night in front of Shampy's little hut. The shaman claimed she would let Anna sleep in her bed inside, but Anna refused. Hiro lay next to her and listened long into the night but he didn't hear the long, slow, deep breathing that usually accompanied her sleep.\n\nAnna sat quietly thoughtful in Hiro's claw the next day as they flew on. Shampy had provided them with food and gave Anna a large shawl that would repel water, but Anna kept it wrapped around her waist in the warm spring air.\n\nHiro decided it best not to bother her as she reflected on the things her father had shared. He knew grief could be a fickle thing, especially when those feelings are rekindled after a long absence. He would softly ask if she needed to stop and rest or eat or\u2026anything else. For the most part Anna just gazed into the distance or shook her head.\n\nAs the pair flew toward the southern border of the Noble Kingdom, Hiro spotted something odd on the horizon. Tilting his tail ever so slightly, he angled toward it.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Anna asked, shaken from her reverie.\n\n\"I'm still taking you home, but\u2026\" Hiro's voice trailed off as they approached the oddly shaped landscape he'd seen. Over a small cluster of hills set between them and the Noble Kingdom, fire smoke in small tendrils reached toward the darkening sky.\n\nAnna peered around Hiro's wrist. \"What is it?\" she asked.\n\nHiro didn't answer. He flew on as the sun dipped beyond the horizon.\n\nFinally, when stars began blinking in the dark sky, the misshapen landscape came clear into view.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Anna called up to him, \"you have to land, you can't fly over.\"\n\n\"It's dark now,\" he answered her. \"No one will see me.\"\n\n\"They'll have lookouts, Hiro,\" she insisted. \"They will see you!\"\n\nBefore reaching the bright orange speckles on the ground, Hiro settled in a tall tree overlooking the scene. He gently set Anna on a branch above him.\n\n\"It's an army,\" Anna whispered.\n\n\"An army?\" Hiro asked. He surveyed the sprawl in front of them. He could just make out grayish little domes making the land in front of them seem to bubble. Thousands of them. They stretched as far as he could see into the darkness on either side. The orange lights came from fires burning in carefully selected clearings among the gray domes.\n\n\"What are those things?\" he asked Anna.\n\n\"Tents,\" she pointed into the sea of them. \"Each one can hold up to six men.\"\n\nHiro's claw slipped on the trunk. \"Six?\" If each of those little things held six men, that meant\u2026\n\n\"Thousands,\" Anna voiced his thoughts.\n\nHiro's maw gaped. What were these men doing? There hadn't been a war involving humans in centuries!\n\n\"You know what this means, don't you, Hiro?\" Anna asked. Hiro pried his eyes away from the sight in front of them. \"These men are marching from the Honorable Kingdom. They're answering Philip's call. They're marching toward the Rock Clouds.\"\n\n\"But why would they even bother?\" Hiro pointed out again as he pumped his wings. \"Humans can't get into the Rock Clouds. Even faeries have a difficult time flying up to Rakgar's lair. The Inner Mountain is the only access they could use and we would surely keep them from climbing too high.\"\n\n\"But,\" Anna argued, \"if any humans do get to the Inner Mountain, they could shoot the dragons on the floating mountains around it. What if they only want to get to the Inner Mountain?\"\n\n\"For what purpose?\"\n\n\"Me!\" Anna threw her hands in the air. \"Have you forgotten that you kidnapped me?\"\n\nHiro shook his head. \"But I'm returning you,\" he said. \"Once you're home, Philip will call off any sort of attack, won't he?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Anna sighed, \"he doesn't tell me much. I'm sure he would if he could, but I don't know that the faeries would let him. In any case, I guess we don't have any other choice than to try.\"\n\nHiro angled far to the north as they flew. Anna insisted that Philip didn't send many patrols to the mountains anymore, but Hiro gave the Noble Kingdom army a wide course to enter, just to be sure.\n\n\"No, wait, it's been weeks,\" Anna said suddenly from his claw.\n\nHiro snapped his tail. \"It certainly seems like it.\"\n\n\"For that army to gather,\" Anna continued as if she hadn't heard him, \"and be positioned where it is now, Philip would have had to send a request to the Honorable Kingdom weeks ago.\" Anna's finger swung around in the air as if pointing to positions on a map.\n\n\"I took you just over a week ago, almost a fortnight,\" Hiro said.\n\n\"A month,\" Anna almost whispered.\n\n\"It hasn't been a month,\" Hiro pointed out.\n\n\"No, I would say we have a month at best before that army reaches the Rock Clouds,\" Anna insisted.\n\n\"If that's truly where they're going,\" Hiro added.\n\nTo his surprise, Anna nodded. \"You're right,\" she said.\n\nHiro almost lost his grip on her. He lifted her up to make sure he held the same creature in his claw. \"I'm sorry, what did you say?\"\n\nShe waved away the question. \"You're right,\" she said again, \"we need to consider all the options. They're obviously moving north from their home in the south. The request to gather and move had to have come before my abduction. They could, indeed, be headed toward the Noble Kingdom, but for what purpose?\n\n\"I don't think they would be waging war on the Noble Kingdom,\" she continued. She gazed into the dark sky without seeing it. \"The Honorable Kingdom is our closest ally. Not to mention, the king is a great friend. He would come immediately when asked, but Philip couldn't possibly have asked him so soon.\"\n\n\"So they're probably not fighting,\" Hiro conceded, \"and they're not here to help rescue you.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Anna shrugged. \"They could just be moving into the Noble Kingdom to assist or join with Noble forces awaiting Philip's orders\u2026or the faeries'.\"\n\nHiro thought of something. \"Wait, if they wanted to attack dragons, why wouldn't they attack the Desert Ruck? They're much closer to the Honorable Kingdom.\"\n\n\"Just south of it, actually; straight over the desert,\" Anna said.\n\n\"So why journey north to kill dragons?\"\n\n\"Because that seems to be where Philip is waging his war,\" Anna answered. \"Besides, it would be the best place to start. Attack the dragons in the center of Avonoa; those not killed would flee to the other rucks most likely. Then each kingdom could attack the ruck closest to them.\"\n\nHiro thought back to the meeting with the centaurs. \"The arrows, Anna,\" he groaned and she shifted in his claw to look up at him. \"If your brother equips that army with those arrows\u2026\"\n\nAnna's arm around Hiro's wrist clamped down tighter, \"The dragons won't stand a chance.\"\n\nAfter the moons had risen and followed their path across a good portion of the night sky, Anna called up to Hiro.\n\n\"I think we should set down for the night,\" she said. She kept her voice low.\n\nHiro nodded. He circled with one wing tilted toward the ground. He couldn't make out much in the darkness, but he wouldn't tell Anna. They were north of the route he had followed when he had come to \"kidnap\" the princess several days past. Directly beneath them, jagged boulders churned as if rolling around a boiling pot. Hiro angled away from the boulders to land in a thick patch of Klynn trees. As soon as his claws touched the ground, he froze.\n\n\"This is wrong,\" he whispered. He stared into the trees, but did more listening than searching with his eyes. \"We shouldn't be here.\" He heard no animal noises, big or small. But he caught a whiff of a scent he couldn't place. Something familiar\u2026but wrong.\n\nAnna had been ready to slide out of his front claw when they touched down. She was accustomed to standing still until Hiro declared it was safe, but she teetered on the edge of his talons when he spoke.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she asked. \"Is it not safe?\" She twisted her neck to peer into the trees around them as well. \"Is something out\u2014?\"\n\nShe also froze and didn't continue. Hiro had closed his eyes and was trying to place the scent in the air. When he realized she hadn't finished her sentence, he opened his eyes. Looking down at the little human, he saw her wide eyes staring behind them. He turned to follow her gaze.\n\nBehind them, in what he had assumed were boulders on the edge of the cluster of trees, were unmistakable ruins. Walls with gaping windows like vacant eyes stared back at them. Doorways like screaming mouths warned them away.\n\n\"Someone lived here,\" he whispered into the dark, but Anna jumped down from his claw and stepped up to the ruins.\n\n\"Not just anyone,\" she whispered back. She lowered herself on her heels next to an opening in the rocks. Even when she squatted, the opening that started at the ground barely came up to her nose.\n\n\"Goblins,\" Hiro hissed. Anna's shaking hand crept closer to the rock walls. Hiro searched the ruined walls for signs of life or movement. \"Anna,\" he whispered, \"we should leave. Now.\"\n\nBut she didn't move. \"Hiro,\" she whispered back, \"they could help us.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes at her. \"Have you lost your mind?\" he hissed again. \"Don't you remember the last time we met goblins?\"\n\n\"King Svorgh,\" she said, her eyes glazed, obviously remembering the cryptic messages and actions of the goblin king. \"He's powerful.\" She finally pulled her hovering fingers away from the rocks and turned to look back at the dragon. \"Even Shvika could overpower you. If they can do that, they could help us fight the humans and faeries.\"\n\n\"And who's to say they will?\" he growled, stepping closer to her. \"The last time we met them, Svorgh made us swear on each other's lives that we wouldn't tell anyone about them.\"\n\n\"But the stones they wear,\" Anna insisted, \"they wield the power of another army by themselves.\"\n\n\"But what will they ask in return?\" Hiro turned his eyes toward the ruins, but they were focused on a green dragon far away. \"If we show up asking favors, they might just kill us, assuming we had told others about them.\"\n\n\"They might not,\" Anna shook her head. \"They let us go last time.\"\n\nHiro's eyes drifted to Anna. He remembered her bound with a sword pressed to her throat by the little blue-skinned goblin with thick arms. His heart tightened at the thought. \"Nothing in their behavior makes me believe they would do the same thing twice, and I have no desire to attempt\u2014\" he emphasized the word, \"\u2014to renew that vow.\" He turned away from the ruins and tip-taloned partway back to the trees. If the goblins were anywhere nearby, he didn't want them to know that he was here too. \"I'm leaving,\" he said over his shoulder. \"Are you coming with me?\"\n\nAnna stood up, not taking her eyes off the stones in front of her, and stepped backward toward Hiro. As his eyes grew accustomed to the low light, they could both see that this collection of boulders had at one time been a small goblin village. Hiro's tongue felt dry at the musky scent of the goblins. Lichen crawled from between the stones. Many of the stones from the walls had tumbled down or been swallowed in the soft ground. He could only guess what majikal horrors lay within.\n\nOnce Anna was close enough, Hiro scooped her up and threw her onto his back. Normally he would've jumped from the ruins into the sky, but he didn't dare get closer to anything goblin-made. He turned away from the goblin village and bounded away into the trees.\n\n[ Nonconforming ]\n\n\"Snorks?\" Hiro snorted a laugh as they soared through the sky. \"Why would anyone eat snorks?\" After exhausting the subjects of the army, arrows, dragons, and faeries as they flew, Hiro had resorted to overwhelming Anna with questions about humans to keep her from worrying over past events. Riddles had begun duplicating and Anna knew almost too much about dragons already. So with Hiro feigning interest in human life, they continued their playful pettifog as he glid on the warm spring air.\n\n\"They're a delicacy in the Just Kingdom,\" Anna answered with a huff, \"although I've been taught never to accept any from a Clan Mother. I've tasted them and they're not that bad. A little on the sweet side, but quite tasty. It just depends on how you cook them.\"\n\n\"That's the problem, though, isn't it?\" Hiro pointed out. \"If a dragon were to 'cook them,' they would end up a small burnt dot. Not worth eating any more than the logs they live under.\"\n\n\"Yet you'll eat the heart of a lion.\"\n\n\"Lion hearts are very good.\"\n\n\"They're poisonous to humans.\"\n\nHiro chuckled again. \"Snorks aren't poisonous to dragons, but I still wouldn't bother eating them.\" He flew silently for a bit and then asked, \"Why can't you accept snorks from a Clan Mother?\"\n\n\"I don't remember for certain,\" she hemmed, \"but I think it has something to do with passing out and waking up glowing iridescent like the snork trails.\"\n\nHiro roared with laughter. When he could speak again, he sputtered, \"One of these days we must go to the Just Kingdom and learn the truth from those Clan Mothers.\"\n\n\"I hear they're very secretive and extremely fierce. That's how they obtain their status, practically by force,\" she told him.\n\nHiro nodded. \"Sounds much like a dragon.\"\n\nAnna hemmed, \"It does, doesn't it? Except I'm sure the Clan Mothers aren't nearly as bull-headed.\"\n\n\"Bull-headed,\" Hiro repeated slowly, feeling the word in his mouth. \"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Bull-headed?\" Anna shook her head. \"It means you, you big, stubborn bull.\"\n\nHiro looked down at the woman in his fist with a crease in his brow.\n\n\"A claxio bull,\" she clarified, \"if confronted by a wall, would knock its head against the wall trying to force it out of the way. Even if the wall were no more than a few paces wide and easily surpassed, the bull would die trying to force the thing from its path before ever taking a few steps to the side to go around it. Stupidity until death. Claxios are not very bright at all.\"\n\nHiro glared down at the woman. \"Claxios are also small, furry creatures that can't fly. A dragon is much larger and stronger. Although we could fly over it, we would more wisely knock the wall down and walk over it.\"\n\nShe crossed her arms. \"Like I said, bull-headed.\"\n\nHiro opened his mouth to explain how being able to knock the wall down had nothing to do with being stubborn, but Anna sat up straight in his fist. \"Hiro,\" she said quietly, \"I see smoke in the mountains.\" She pointed toward where they had taken the route through the mountains when they left.\n\nHiro shook his head. \"We need to land anyway,\" he whispered.\n\nAnna clung to his front leg as they spiraled downward. Hiro must have been distracted by their conversation because they were much further into the Torthoth Mountains than he had planned to be by now. Once they'd landed he swung Anna up to his back, where she wrapped her arms around his neck. Hiro tucked her legs under his wings to keep her in place and took off running up the mountain at a gallop.\n\nAnna sat away from his back rather than be bounced against it as he ran. He scanned the mountainside for danger, watching around them more than where he put his claws. He assumed the woman was keeping an eye out as well, but dragons could see much greater detail and much further than humans could. He raced for the top of the mountain before the sun could disappear behind it completely.\n\nHe bounced from boulder to boulder, his course taking them further north to avoid the wisps of smoke Anna had pointed out. The pair travelled in silence until they circled around the north side of the peak and could see the valley beyond the range.\n\nHiro stood still. The sun hovered as if within reach partway through its descent. It burned bright and at just the right angle for his sharp day vision to see something out of the ordinary.\n\n\"What is it?\" Anna whispered. \"What do you see?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Hiro hemmed, \"it looks like a road or passage of some sort.\"\n\nThe way the mountain to the south of them bulged, they still couldn't see the source of the smoke. Anna pointed this out. \"We won't be seen if you stay low,\" she told him. \"If it's a road, I can find my way home from there.\"\n\nThey were much further north of her home than Hiro dared leave her, but if someone were burning a fire nearby, they would be able to help her. He nodded and allowed an upper current to lift him to just above the treetops.\n\nClose to the trees, the air current wasn't steady enough to glide. Hiro's tail whipped around, trying to keep him on a somewhat mild course. Anna's arms strangled him as she tried to stay attached. He kept her on his back until they landed at the base of the mountain range, inside the Noble Kingdom.\n\n\"This isn't a road,\" Anna's voice dropped, \"but someone has definitely been through here.\"\n\nHiro crept closer to what he could now clearly see were the tracks of thousands of boot prints and wagon ruts in the mud. \"Many someones,\" he reasoned. From his earlier perch on the mountain he could see the separation in the trees but he couldn't make out the muddy ground.\n\nPressing his nose almost into the mud, he tried to pull apart the many scents assaulting him. \"Humans,\" he said.\n\nAnna nodded, kneeling on a clump of dry grass alongside the prints. \"Hundreds of them.\"\n\n\"Another army?\" Hiro questioned.\n\n\"Not quite that many,\" Anna answered, \"but still quite a few men.\"\n\nHiro pointed to the wagon marks. \"One group came through with wagons a long time ago. Weeks, maybe months.\" He pointed to the prints around the wagons, then the ones trampling over them. \"More came through just days ago. I can still smell their breath.\" Noting the position of the toes of their boots, he lifted his nose to face north. \"I could catch up to them.\"\n\nAnna stood up and he turned to face her. \"I won't make you take me with you, Hiro.\" She clamped her hands at her waist. \"But I would like to go. I know Philip and the faeries are planning something and I want to help you.\"\n\n\"I have no idea how dangerous this could be,\" he warned her. Yet, in his mind, he hated to leave her on a lesser-used road where it was possible that no one might venture for several days or weeks.\n\n\"It would be more dangerous for you, as a dragon.\" She took a step toward him, ignoring the squelching mud around her soft boots. \"If they see me with you, you can drop me and they'll think they rescued me. But they might still try to kill you.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" he nodded, \"I don't want to leave you here, not knowing if any help will come by.\"\n\nWithout a word, the woman ran through the mud to jump toward his back. He caught her in mid-air and lifted her the rest of the way. The pair ran through the trees in the setting sun, with Hiro keeping his nose to the ground.\n\n[ Bedeviled Pursuit ]\n\n\"Mother!\" Tierni's voice echoed off the walls, slicing the silence that met her in their family's home entry. \"Mother!\" she bellowed, planting her fists on her hips.\n\n\"Is everything alright, Miss Tierni?\"\n\nTierni spun at the sound of the voice. George. He had been with them since Tierni was a child, one of the few servants they retained. A patient, kind man and one of the only people who could deal with Tierni when she was enraged. She saw Martha disappear around the corner behind him; she cowered from anyone who sounded angry. But somehow, their presence calmed Tierni\u2026slightly.\n\n\"I need to speak to my mother,\" she seethed, pulling her cloak from her shoulders. \"Do you know where she is?\"\n\n\"I'm not positive,\" George answered, keeping his voice low and soft, \"but she might still be upstairs. Your brother was just here\u2014\"\n\nTierni didn't want to hear what her rotten troll of a brother had been doing here. This was the first chance Tierni had had to get away from work in the castle. She had fumed. She had raged to her friends in the laundry. She had received some good advice from Mistress Kay. Now that she had a respite, she had come to speak to her mother. She bounded up the stairs two at a time, ignoring George's gasp when she hiked her skirts above her knees.\n\nThey didn't have a large house, but it was comfortable and situated close enough to the palace for convenience. Most of her father's, Royal General Bragon's, fortune had been used to further Torgon's career. Money poorly spent it seemed, considering how many times he had been tested and passed but denied a promotion purportedly because of his young age. She'd since heard her parents discuss Riddig's and Murzod's vendetta against their family and it made her blood boil.\n\nRiddig was Murzod's uncle, and those two still thought Riddig should have been the Royal General rather than Bragon. Now that Torgon had surpassed Murzod in ranking and caused him to lose status, the intensity of the feud had doubled. For years Riddig foul-mouthed Bragon behind his back. Now Murzod continued the tradition with Torgon. If either Riddig or Murzod had their way, Tierni's family line would be extinct.\n\nTierni burst into the small sitting room on the second floor. \"There you are!\" Her mother's small frame was silhouetted against the soft blue curtains, but Tierni didn't give her a chance to speak before launching into a tirade. \"George said that Torgon came to see you. That's fine. Now you'll hear my side of it whether you want to hear it or not.\"\n\nShe drew herself up to her full height. \"It's bad enough that I've been stuck in the castle laundry, but when I finally get a chance to meet someone new \u2026\" She spotted a vase on the table next to her and her fingers idly circled the rim. \"I mean, I don't know whether anything would happen between the two of us. Yes, I've always admired him from a distance, since I'm not allowed anywhere near him.\" She thrust her hands behind her back to keep herself from launching the vase across the room.\n\nTurning on her heel, she paced the few steps across the room in front of her mother. \"He's a very nice young man. Father has always said so himself. I mean, really, he's Torgon's best friend!\" She pointed to a family portrait hanging over the fireplace. \"What could he possibly have against me eating dinner with the king?\"\n\n\"Tierni,\" her mother whispered.\n\n\"I know,\" Tierni waved her hand at her mother as she turned slowly to face her. \"I know, I haven't been trained as a noble, but it's not like I'm lying about my status.\" She absent-mindedly picked up a couple of books sitting on a shelf. \"The king himself insisted on inviting me to dinner! How could Torgon force me to leave like that?!\" She dropped the books with more force than she meant.\n\n\"He wouldn't even let me embarrass myself! It's not like my mistakes would reflect directly on him.\" Having made her way back across the room, she dusted at imagined bits on the fireplace mantle. \"Indirectly, maybe, but everyone at the table would know I hadn't been trained!\" Finally dropping all pretenses, she folded her arms across her chest.\n\n\"It's not fair and you know it! I'm just as smart as Torgon! I'm every bit as noble as any other noble in the kingdom, with or without training! I suspect even the king sees that!\" She ground her teeth and inspected the floor. \"How can you let him do this to me, Mother?\" She realized how long she had been rambling. \"Mother? Are you even listening to me?\"\n\nWhen Tierni met her mother's eyes she saw streaks of tears down her cheeks. Her eyes were red and swollen. She held a piece of paper in one hand and a handcloth reduced to a wad in the other. \"Your brother, Torgon, has gone.\"\n\n\"I know he's gone,\" Tierni stood still, uncomprehending, \"probably back to his plush little office in the palace.\"\n\nHer mother shook her head and sat gently in the chair beside her. She lifted the paper toward Tierni while blotting at her eyes with the spent handcloth. \"It's his directive.\"\n\nHis directive. Saying who should get all the money from the estate should the worst happen. Tierni had seen them before, from her father.\n\n\"But that doesn't mean anything,\" Tierni said. \"Father had to fill in a new one every time he left for an assignment, no matter how mundane.\" She folded her arms again and jutted her chin toward the window. \"Probably leaving to visit an exotic country with the king. He'll be sipping wine in the Just Kingdom, watching dancing girls while you worry about him.\"\n\n\"He's going to\u2026\" her voice cracked, \"\u2026 to The Great Northern Mountain, Tierni,\" her mother whispered the name, and for good reason.\n\nTierni's face snapped to her mother's. \"Isn't that\u2026?\" Her mother nodded. Tierni's jaw dropped in realization. After a moment of consideration, all anger toward her brother drained as if she'd walked muddy through a waterfall. She ran to her mother. Falling to her knees on the floor, she threw her arms around her mother's waist and buried her own sobbing face in her skirts.\n\nHe had gone. Torgon had gone to the one place from which older soldiers believed no one would ever return. Not only had he gone to the Cursed Mountain, but also straight into the arms of his own feuding enemy. Anything could happen when Torgon faced Murzod. And Tierni was certain Murzod would see to it that something did.\n\n\"We'll rest here tonight,\" Hiro said, stopping next to a clump of trees.\n\nThe path they followed stayed close to the base of the mountain. Anna had surmised in the light that the tracks they followed had to be from Noble soldiers. Most of the lines were uniform and the boots were made of the same cut and shape. They even found a discarded arrow shaft with blue fletching similar to those used by Noble soldiers.\n\n\"We haven't come very far,\" Anna said once she slid from his back. \"Are you sure we shouldn't keep going through the night?\"\n\nHiro shook his head and curled up next to a clump of hytocomp. \"We'll have to conserve our energy,\" he told her. \"The temperatures drop very low at night in the spring. I can feel the air is much cooler this far north as well. I'll have to be careful how much fire I use in the cold air.\"\n\nAnna ripped out a handful of hytocomp to fill her water skin. The plant bulged from soaking up the melting snows and quickly filled her bag. Sitting down next to the black dragon, she mumbled with a grin, \"Don't tell me dragons aren't invincible!\"\n\n\"More so than humans,\" he nudged her with his shoulder, spilling her water. He chuckled when she cursed and stood to retrieve more hytocomp. But his brow creased as she sat down again. \"Will you be warm enough with just that cloak around you?\"\n\nShe shook some excess water from her hands, splashing him in the face. \"I will be as long as I'm not wet,\" she hissed.\n\nHiro gazed into the distance. \"The further north we travel, the more snow and ice we'll find,\" he said, \"and the closer we'll get to the Ice Ruck.\"\n\nAnna fumbled the last of the hytocomp but tried to cover herself. \"Ice Ruck,\" she spluttered, \"you mean ice dragons exist too?\"\n\nHe frowned at her. \"Of course they exist.\"\n\nShe frowned too. \"But if ice dragons live in the cold, why is it so dangerous to you? Shouldn't you be able to live in the cold too?\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder. \"Ice dragons are much better acclimated to the cold. A dragon from any other ruck must travel extremely slowly to the north and gradually adjust to the temperatures. Or travel in the winter. But once ice dragons are used to the cold temperatures, they don't like to leave the cold weather. I've heard that their scales and bodies adapt so completely to the cold that they can then warm too much or too quickly if they travel to the south, and that can be dangerous for them. They don't leave their ruck often and they don't get many visitors.\"\n\nAnna settled back against his warm body. \"How do their bodies adapt?\"\n\n\"I've only heard stories,\" he shrugged. \"Some say their scales grow as thick as armor. Some say they get thinner and multiply a thousand times over. The thinner scales become so numerous that they look like feathers.\"\n\n\"Feathers?\"\n\n\"They're just stories,\" Hiro laid his head on his claw. \"I'm sure they still look like dragons. Besides, we have no reason to go discover the truth for ourselves.\"\n\nThe next night they slept in snow. Tufts of grass and plants were exposed as the snow melted through the night from Hiro's warmth and the warmth of a fire, but Hiro woke several times shivering in the dark. He woke to memories of being chained in a courtyard. He woke to memories of ice-cold pain shooting through his claws and up his arms. When he woke, he shook from the cold and couldn't go back to sleep.\n\n\"Why aren't you sleeping?\" Anna whispered in the dark.\n\n\"I thought I heard something,\" Hiro lied. \"How did you know I wasn't asleep?\"\n\n\"The snoring stopped,\" Anna said, snuggling deeper into her cloak.\n\nHiro pulled another small tree into the fire, shaking his head. \"I don't snore.\"\n\nAnna turned narrowed eyes on him. \"Are you joking?\" She propped herself up on one elbow. \"Everyone knows dragons snore. And you must be the worst one yet.\"\n\n\"Dragons most certainly do not snore.\" He laid his head on his claws to attempt to go back to sleep.\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" Anna nodded, curling back into her cloak, \"the noise must be all those walls you knock down in your sleep, then.\"\n\nThe next day the sun burned over their head but gave them little relief from the cold. Hiro growled with frustration. \"We don't seem any closer to catching up to the humans.\" He bent his head over the tracks to smell the men. Their scent was still fresh, but he thought they must be moving much faster than he realized. \"I have a much longer stride and no need to stop as often as they might. How are they remaining so far ahead of us?\"\n\n\"Majik?\" Anna suggested. \"They are working with faeries. Perhaps the faeries are helping them speed on.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Hiro said, \"but every step we take makes our journey more dangerous. I don't know how much longer we can last.\"\n\nAnna slid her hand down his neck. \"You need to eat. Maybe you'll move faster if you have more fire.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to eat up here,\" he rumbled at her. He licked his frozen claws to try to get feeling back into them. \"I haven't smelled any passing animals all day, nor did I yesterday. I won't have anything to hunt.\"\n\n\"Then we must go back,\" Anna said. \"You can't go on like this. I feel you shiver at night. I know your senses aren't working as well as they normally would.\"\n\n\"No!\" Hiro yelled. \"This is the best lead we've had to discover what is going on. We can't just abandon it.\"\n\nWhen he started moving again, Anna leaned over his neck. \"Three days,\" she whispered. \"We can give it three more days, but if we don't find anything more, we turn around. Agreed?\"\n\n\"And if I say 'No'?\" he growled at her.\n\nShe sat up straight, swaying on his back. Hiro could practically hear her hands on her hips. \"Then I'll walk back by myself and get help to collect your stubborn ashes.\"\n\n[ Yielding to a Fissure ]\n\nAfter another day-and-a-half of running through the sparsely growing trees, Hiro came to a sudden halt. Anna sat up on his back and the two of them stared in silence. In front of them, the boot prints they'd been following diverged in two directions.\n\nHiro, sniffing, first followed the prints turning to the left. They turned west into the trees and the mountains beyond. Then he wriggled backward to the point of divergence and followed the other prints to the north a few paces. He could feel the air getting colder as he watched the tracks disappear ahead of him into the frozen northern wasteland. His eyes widened as he sniffed the tracks leading north.\n\n\"Now what?\" Anna asked as the dragon slithered back to where the two tracks started. \"Which ones do we follow?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Hiro answered honestly. \"The ones moving west are still fresh. The ones moving north are less so, but there's one major difference.\"\n\n\"The tracks,\" Anna shifted from side to side comparing the boot prints.\n\n\"The tracks going west have prints leading both away from us and back toward us,\" Hiro pointed out. \"The tracks going north...\"\n\n\"\u2026only lead north,\" Anna whispered. \"No one returns from the north.\"\n\n\"If we follow them, we might not come back,\" Hiro rumbled.\n\n\"If we go west,\" Anna said, sitting up straighter, \"we risk coming to a dead end, having to double back, or heading deeper into the Courageous Kingdom without finding them. If we follow the ones to the north\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014we risk death from cold,\" Hiro finished flatly. His leg joints shook from the thought of worse cold to come.\n\n\"I think we should go west,\" Anna shifted on his back to peer toward where the tracks led. \"I'll be fine. You have more chance of finding food along the way.\"\n\n\"No,\" Hiro said, loping down the tracks heading north, \"there's another difference in the tracks.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"The ones leading north have a fresh scent of lion crossing them.\"\n\nHiro suddenly darted through stunted bushes and dwarfed trees, off the trail of the human prints. Anna clung to his back as he sprinted northeast. He slowed when he saw pines as tall as two dragons and as wide as three. He shrugged Anna from his back.\n\n\"Stay here,\" he told her, setting her on her feet by a few short trees. \"They might try to hurt you if you're with me, but they'll run past if they're fleeing an attack. Just try not to draw their attention. I'll be back.\"\n\nLions loved two things, cold and pine. Hiro could smell them beyond the pines. He could hear their hearts pounding a strong rhythm, each in harmony with the others. He didn't need to eat many. Albik lions were large. Their six strong legs had enough meat to feed Hiro's fire for several weeks. Although they were half his size, he could easily kill all of them if need be. Possibly the entire pack of eight.\n\nHe burst through the trees with a roar. The lions froze momentarily and he was able to catch one before the others hissed and scattered. When he finished his kill, he returned to Anna with blood dripping down his chin.\n\nAnna stood by the trees where he'd left her. She hadn't moved. She stared wide-eyed into the sky beyond the pines.\n\nHiro approached her cautiously. He could tell that the lions hadn't come near because he saw no lion prints in the snow around her. So why did she continue staring past Hiro with terror in her eyes?\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Hiro asked.\n\nThe woman nodded. \"We won't have to get any closer, will we?\" she whispered.\n\nHiro's brow creased. He snaked his head around to search for what mesmerized her. Beyond the pines he could see something familiar against the crystal blue sky. Several wingfalls away, but less than a day as the dragon flies, a mountain range rose to scratch the sky. He walked away from Anna to get a better view.\n\nOn the other side of the pines, a white expanse stretched before them until it met the base of the mountains. From here, with his sharp eyes, he could see movement in the mountains. The mountains themselves were covered mostly in white but Hiro could see dragons flying over and through the tips of the mountains. He could see several of them. The Northern Ice Ruck.\n\n\"No,\" he shook his head, joining Anna again. He used his claw to help her onto his back and spun around. He ran toward the track of human prints in the snow. \"There's no reason to get any closer.\"\n\nWith his belly full and his fire burning bright, Hiro galloped along the track. The stench of human men grew stronger with every step. As did the cold. Hiro's nose felt like solid ice. His tongue hung on the side of his face as he breathed hot air to warm himself.\n\n\"Hiro, please slow down,\" Anna begged.\n\n\"How can you ask that,\" he repeated, \"when you know we're finally catching up?\"\n\n\"We can't just run into them,\" she said, \"we have to take them by surprise. We have to find out what they're up to first, then decide what to do.\"\n\nHiro lessened his run to a steady trot. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"If we run into the men\u2026\" Anna's words slurred from her frozen lips, \"\u2026 don't you think it would be best for me to go in and find out what they're doing? You can't just take them all on!\"\n\nHiro stopped. \"I'm not sending you in to do anything,\" he growled.\n\n\"I'm not asking your permission,\" Anna growled back. \"What are you going to do? Slip quietly into their camp or stop someone passing by to ask a few questions?\"\n\nHiro sighed, then rolled his shoulder. \"What would you suggest we do?\"\n\n\"The sun is going down,\" she pointed out, \"you caught up to them much faster with more fire in you. I think we should rest the night and discuss our next move.\"\n\nAt least she wasn't telling him what to do, or what she was going to do. He loped away from the track toward some shorter pines. He ripped some smaller trees from the ground and dragged them into the middle of the pines.\n\n\"These should give adequate cover,\" he said, indicating the pines just over his head. He put Anna on the ground and set the tree ablaze. With the fire going, he realized just how dark the sky was getting.\n\nAnna pulled her legs to her chest with her bag in front of her. After rummaging through it, she produced a small, yellowish-brown lump. \"What I wouldn't give for some soup to go with this,\" she mumbled before tearing at it with her teeth.\n\n\"Soup?\" Hiro asked, curling on the ground next to her.\n\n\"Mmmm,\" she nodded, \"fick brof, wif cawwos as bik as me fisk.\" She held up her closed fist for emphasis, although Hiro had to decipher the rest of the statement around her mouthful of food.\n\n\"Carrots?\"\n\n\"Hmmmm,\" she closed her eyes, thinking about the hot soup. After she swallowed, she continued. \"Carrots. A purple root plant grown in fields like Jarek's.\"\n\nHiro shivered, but not from the cold. \"Eww, plants again. Don't you ever eat meat?\"\n\nAnna scrunched her face and jerked a thick strip of meat from her bag, then shoved it back in. \"Humans can't subsist on meat alone. It would kill us.\"\n\n\"Weakling,\" he taunted, but indicated the lump in her hand. \"Then what are you eating?\"\n\n\"Bread,\" she said as she took another chunk from it.\n\n\"What's bread?\"\n\n\"Mosslee wet,\" she said while chewing.\n\n\"Wet moss?\"\n\nShe shook her head with a grin and swallowed. \"Mostly wheat. Although moss is quite tasty when prepared properly. Wheat is a grain, grown\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" he interrupted, \"in a field like Jarek's.\"\n\nShe shrugged, nodded, and ripped into the bread again.\n\n\"Sounds to me like humans couldn't live long without people like Jarek,\" he said, laying his head on his claws.\n\n\"Very true.\" She waited before she put another chunk of bread in her mouth. \"I've been trying to convince people like my brother of that for some time.\"\n\n\"Perhaps if you weren't so mean all the time, people would listen to you.\"\n\n\"I'm nice to you and you still don't listen to me.\"\n\nHiro leveled his eyes to hers, \"I'm not 'people,' I'm a dragon.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she nodded, \"you're much more stubborn.\"\n\nHiro grinned. \"Do you have any ideas about what we should do when we find these humans we're looking for?\"\n\n\"Actually, I do,\" she nodded and placed the remnants of the bread back into her bag. \"I was thinking that I could wander into their camp\u2026\"\n\nHiro listened as she spelled out a plan to pretend that she had been lost or kidnapped and ask the men for help. They would willingly take her in, most likely, and making her status known, she would gain access to the highest ranking men and pump them for answers as to their mission.\n\nIt's a good plan, Hiro confessed to himself. She's not a threat by herself. Her royalty should allow her to learn all we need to know. She's smart. As smart as Priya.\n\nHe grinned at that. Priya would hate him for comparing the two of them. He could hear the dame's voice in his head.\n\nHow could you possibly compare a dragon and a human? He could even hear the dangerous growl in her voice. He could see her posturing to pounce on him. She wouldn't stand for such a demeaning idea.\n\n\"What are you grinning at?\" Anna's voice cut through his thoughts.\n\n\"I was just thinking about how similar you are to Priya,\" he answered honestly.\n\nAnna pursed her lips. \"I could never be that cruel.\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder. \"Priya's not cruel. Strict? Absolutely. But never cruel.\"\n\nAnna shook her head and turned to stare into the burning tree branches. \"You probably find her brand of cruelty entertaining.\"\n\n\"She's good for a laugh,\" he nudged her with his tail, \"just like you.\"\n\nAnna rolled her eyes at the fire. Hiro rested his head on his claws. Anna was smart. Priya was smart. Why couldn't the two get along? Anna was nicer than many dragons. Maybe Priya thought she was too nice? No, it always came down to the rules with Priya. She followed rules to everyone's detriment. Hiro had never been able to tempt her. But Anna almost enjoyed breaking rules.\n\nA thought struck Hiro as he stared into the fire beside Anna. What if Priya and Anna switched minds? He chuckled to himself.\n\nAnna was beautiful, for a human. She had soft skin and swirling yellow hair\u2014even when it was pasted to her head from rain or frozen in clumps from the cold. But her bright green eyes were the best part of her. Those eyes! They were the exact color of Priya's scales.\n\nBut as beautiful as Anna was, it was really her rebellious, curious, kind, persistent attitude that made her quite endearing. Priya's mind in Anna's body would be brilliant, no doubt, but Anna's personality in Priya's body\u2026?\n\nCRACK!\n\n[ Troth ]\n\n\"OH SPIT!\" Hiro yelled, bounding to his feet.\n\n\"I beg your pardon!\" Her eyes pierced his.\n\nThose eyes! Those beautiful eyes! He shook his head to empty the thoughts. He hadn't even realized his heart was hardening! But her soft hair\u2026skin. No! \"Oh, spit in Tarsa's eye!\" he said, stumbling backward away from her.\n\n\"What's gotten into you?\" She hugged her shoulders when he moved away, sapping his warmth from her limbs.\n\nHiro reached toward her to curl her into his arms and warm her, but froze. His eyes twitched. His claws curled and uncurled. He stared wild-eyed when he felt a hard lump wriggle up from somewhere into the deep bottom of his throat.\n\n\"Oh spit! Oh SPIT! OH SPIT!\" he murmured, squirming his tail into the trees behind him, but reaching for her at the same time. His very limbs fought against each other!\n\n\"What's wrong with you?!\" Anna stood up to follow him. \"What's going on?\"\n\nHer brow creased in concern. He marveled at how the cold reddening her cheeks made her seem cheerful. Oh, Tartaku, how he wanted to stay with her, but the lump rose further into his throat.\n\n\"Nothing's wrong,\" he coughed, and the lump wedged along his neck. He spun to search for which way to go.\n\nGet away! I have to get away from her! He tumbled horn-over-tail into the trees surrounding their little camp, desperately pushing away thoughts of the warmth and comfort beside her.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" she called at him through the branches.\n\n\"Stay here,\" he coughed as the lump reached further up his throat. \"I'll be right back!\" he choked before dashing away into the trees.\n\nHe didn't know how long he ran. The hard lump slipped into his mouth, but he kept running with his jaws clamped tight. With only a vague idea, he knew he couldn't run north; the humans were that way. He couldn't run east; the Ice Ruck was there. South would be backtracking and a waste of time; so he ran west. Into the mountains, higher and higher. He stopped when he realized the mountain beneath him was sloping around the far west side and down again. He collapsed in the snow.\n\nWake up, he barked to himself. Wake up! Open your eyes! It's not true. It's all a dream. A nightmare! It's impossible!\n\nHe rolled the lump on his tongue. He thought of the pull in his heart toward Anna. Despite her many failings. Despite her sharp words\u2014all meant in jest. Despite her frail human body\u2014more attractive every second. Despite her disgusting human habits\u2014those didn't seem so bad anymore either. This couldn't happen. It had to be impossible! But denying it didn't help. Hiro finally rolled his shoulder and opened his mouth.\n\nThe teardrop-shaped, faceted black gem fell out and dropped into the snow at his feet, making the moisture hiss into his face. Both Priya's and Anna's eyes seemed to mock him from its dark depths.\n\nHow is this possible? He stared at the smooth-cut surface of his heart. How could my heart break for a human? After all this time protecting it? After it not breaking for Priya? Oh, what will Priya say? Can I even tell her?\n\nHe stood staring at his own heart. The sun passed overhead. How many times? He couldn't be sure. All he knew was that at one point the sun glinted from one of the facets into his eye and he wished it could be strong enough to burn him to ash right there.\n\nWhat happens now? he thought, staring into the sun reflected in the heart in front of him. Anna's skin is as warm as the sun sometimes. Will I ever be able to enjoy it? Will I ever hold her and not worry about her dying because I hold her? Speak to her? Love her?\n\nI do love her, don't I? he growled at himself. Should he be mad at himself? Happy? He should be happy because his heart had finally broken. He no longer needed to protect it. It's now hers to protect. Will she? he wondered to himself.\n\nShampy! Hiro perked up thinking of the creature. A spell maybe. Could she restore my heart? He froze. Do I want her to? He thought back to several dragons he knew whose hearts had broken for undeserving heart collectors. The stories passed among dans as warnings. Those dans had tried everything to sever the ties to those dames, but in vain.\n\n\"No spell, no prayers, no amount of anger or hatred can restore your heart,\" his father Tusten had taught him. \"This is why you must make certain your heart breaks for a dame who deserves your loyalty.\"\n\nAm I a traitor? A blood and ash traitor? He sighed. Do I even deserve to turn to ash when I die? I can't tell anyone. Will anyone ever find out? Should I even tell Anna?\n\nStars sparkled on the facets of the heart. His eyes wanted to close, but he couldn't keep them from opening again to stare at the heart. He loved how Anna's eyes sparkled in the dark. The green of her eyes was so bright that sometimes he could see it in the dark.\n\nAshel told me I would be influenced by the Star of Love. Had she known? Was she warning me? He flopped onto the ground. Tog knew. He didn't trust me with her. But did he ever believe this would happen? His shoulder began to ache from rolling it so much.\n\nI'll never have hatchlings. Hiro's eyes threatened to leak. Anna and I will never be able to make this heart into an egg together. It was the greatest goal of a dan to be a father, and a good one. With Anna, Hiro would never experience that joy.\n\nCould Anna and I even live together? Will I ever see her again? She must live in Kingstor, and her brother tries to kill me every time I come near the Noble Kingdom.\n\nLying on the frozen mountain floor in the dark, Hiro felt his stomach lurch. He grew cold. How long had he been here? Was Anna okay where he had left her? He bounced to his feet at the thought of the woman then pursed his lips at his behavior. He truly was in love with that beast.\n\nOf all the creatures to love \u2026 bile rose into his throat. I used to hate humans. Not many months ago, I trained hatchlings to hate humans. I would have been better off falling in love with a unicorn! At least unicorns have beautiful manes. He thought of Anna's hair, now matted with dirt and unkempt, but he still longed to brush it against his cheek.\n\nThe other half of his heart, still in his body, pulled him toward her. He knew her exact direction. I have a feeling that even if she moved, I still might know where she was. But why? How can I love her so? She's just a human!\n\nShe's kind, he answered his own question without meaning to. She's compassionate. She can be jovial, but thoughtful. She was and is willing to help me and listen to me when no one else will. She's put herself in danger for me repeatedly. But she's also strong, willful, and won't let anyone tell her what to do.\n\nPerhaps, it finally dawned on him with a new sun overhead, perhaps I can love her without our being together. She will have to live her life. I will have to allow it. I will have to slowly and painfully figure out how to continue mine. Without her.\n\nShe's not completely unworthy, he thought. She won't abuse my heart. I know that. She won't tell others, because she'll know the severity of the consequences. I know that too. He could do nothing else but give it to her.\n\nHe shook his head and scooped up the heart from the forest floor. He turned toward the camp, but his stomach cramped. The fire in his belly guttered and threatened to disappear altogether. He didn't know what else to do, so he belched a flame to make sure his fire was indeed still there. It melted the snow in front of him and lit a few twigs on fire. When he stopped, the fire in his belly\u2014next to where the other half of his heart still remained\u2014burned as strong as ever.\n\nPerhaps this always happens after your heart breaks, he thought of his guttering fire as he started back toward Anna. But it's gone now.\n\nHe flew back to Anna, skirting the treetops with his tail. Carrying the lump of glossy black gemstone in his claw felt like he dragged the entire mountain along with him. He saw no one along the way. No humans. No dragons. It was as if the rest of the world had disappeared, and that was just as well.\n\nThe sun glowed overhead when he landed, but it still gave no warm relief. Had he been gone the whole night? He pushed through the trees.\n\nAt first he didn't see her. A pile of ashes lay within the trees with a lump of snow next to them, which he assumed was the remainder of the log to burn. But he noticed Anna's foot jutting out from underneath.\n\nHe raced to her side, growling at himself. \"Anna,\" he whispered. He set down the heart and lifted her with one claw. The other claw reached for one of the nearby trees. Nothing else within reach would burn. He tore off branches and lit them on fire as he inspected her face. Although she had thrown Shampy's water-repellant cloth over her head, her cheeks had drained of color and grown pale. Her lips had gone from pink to the same pale blue as the unforgiving sky. \"Anna?\" he whispered, curling both claws around her and setting her down close to the burning branches.\n\nHer iced lashes fluttered open. She groaned, but Hiro couldn't decipher what she said.\n\n\"Stay here,\" he said, settling her next to the fire, \"I'll get more to burn.\" Lifting into the air, he twisted in all directions. Further north he saw a large, fallen tree. He couldn't drag the entire mass to her side, but he burned off enough of it to bring back and warm them for a while.\n\nHiro didn't rest easy until Anna began to stir under his claw as they lay next to the fire. \"Hiro?\" she croaked.\n\n\"I'm here,\" he murmured. \"Are you alright?\"\n\n\"Where did you go?\" She raised a hand to her head. \"You were gone so long.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he hung his head. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"Where did you go?\" her voice dropped to a dangerously low pitch.\n\nHe rolled his shoulder. \"There was something I had to do.\"\n\nAnna grunted as she pushed herself up to sitting. Those brilliant green eyes bore into his. \"And?\"\n\n\"And what?\"\n\nShe wrapped her cloak tighter around her shoulders, but her eyes never left his. Finally she turned her head to the burning fire. \"You were gone for days.\" Her voice was low but steady.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\" She squirmed out of his grip to stand in front of the fire. \"Sorry?\" She pinched her arms together around herself and spun on the dragon. Those beautiful eyes looked like they were on fire. \"You disappear for days with no explanation and all you have to say for yourself is you're sorry?!\"\n\n\"I left you with a fire,\" he defended himself, gesturing to the burning log.\n\n\"I couldn't gather firewood on my own! The fire burned out after only a day!\" she yelled. \"Perhaps I should've gone after the humans on my own!\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" he whispered.\n\n\"And now you come back and all you have to say is that you're sorry?!\" she repeated with incredulity. Her gruff whisper hurt more than a scream.\n\nHe scratched at the ground, the black lump of his heart felt like it was stabbing into his back behind him. \"I told you, I had something to do.\"\n\n\"What, Hiro?\" She opened her hands in front of her to implore of him, but quickly pressed them back against her body. \"What was so important that you left me here on my own to die?\"\n\n\"This!\" he bellowed back. Before he could stop himself, Hiro bounded to his feet and hurled the lump of black stone at Anna's stomach. She doubled over with a loud huff of air, but caught it in both hands.\n\nShe straightened to glare at Hiro through narrowed eyes. \"How dare you?!\" she hissed. \"How dare you gather treasure while I'm trying to help you save the dragons?! How dare you pretend\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not treasure,\" he mumbled and flopped onto the ground. \"It's my heart.\"\n\nAnna froze. Her eyes dropped to the black gem in her hands. \"I don't understand,\" she said, looking at the heart. \"If you left to give it to a dame, then why would you bring it back here?\"\n\nHiro laid his head on the cold ground and covered his eyes with his front claws. He heaved a great sigh, then rolling his shoulder, he said, \"Because it broke for you.\"\n\nAnna started to laugh but stopped herself short. \"Is that even possible?\" Her tone couldn't hide her disbelief.\n\nHe pulled his claws away to peek at her. \"The evidence is in your hands.\"\n\nWithout warning, the heart bounced off his ribs. \"Hiro, stop this,\" Anna said with her fists on her hips.\n\nHe picked up the heart with his back claw and hefted it back into her belly. \"Stop what?\" he growled.\n\nAfter doubling over again from the force of the throw, Anna pursed her lips. \"Stop this pretense and tell me what you were really doing.\" She threw the heart back at his belly, this time with more force.\n\nNow Hiro stood. He picked up the heart, stepped over to the woman and, making sure he steadied her from behind with his opposite claw, punched the heart into her belly. He didn't want to hurt her, but it was somewhat embarrassing having his own heart thrown back at him.\n\n\"If you don't believe me,\" he said, returning to a seated position, \"tell me to do something.\" He sat staring at her, sitting on his hind legs like an obedient pet. The idea made his stomach turn, but he didn't move.\n\nWith her fingers wrapped around his heart, Anna tightened her mouth. \"Fine,\" she huffed. \"If you want to continue this little game, I'll play along.\" She licked her lips and looked down at the heart.\n\n\"Hiro,\" she said clearly, \"stand up.\"\n\nHiro's eyes twitched toward her. Anna's eyes widened and Hiro looked down to see that he was on his feet.\n\n\"No,\" she shook her head, \"that one was too easy.\" She looked around for inspiration. \"What can I say to make you prove this heart doesn't belong to me?\" She said it more to herself. Then her eyes lit up. With a devious grin on her face, she whispered, \"Hiro\u2026cry.\"\n\nEmotions flooded Hiro's mind and heart. His father's death. The death of several dragons. The recent disappointment and pain on Priya's face. But the foremost thought was the one that he would never be with Anna. They would live separate lives even if she did accept his heart. He would see her rarely and he would never have hatchlings. A stark thought of returning to his cold cave in The Rock Clouds utterly alone assaulted him. Several tears leaked freely from his eyes.\n\nInside the tears, Hiro saw images. He saw himself fleeing through dark woods away from Noble Guardsmen. He saw Prak, in what seemed to be a war, band alongside Ashel and several other centaurs. Then he saw Anna. A look of solemn, reluctant sorrow on her face as she stood before crowds of people within Kingstor Castle. She was dressed in blue with a long blue veil covering her face and head. A ribbon was tied to her wrist. The other end of the ribbon passed from Philip's hand to the hand of a man old enough to be her father. Philip tied it to the older man's wrist. Philip glanced up at Anna with deepest regret.\n\nAnna squeaked and fumbled the heart in her hands. It fell into the snow at her feet. As Hiro's tears ceased spilling, Anna curled her empty hands around her own shoulders. She stared at the heart in the snow. \"Hiro,\" she whispered looking down at the heart, \"you love me.\"\n\nHe didn't answer. He lay back down on the snow and sat staring into the fire beside her.\n\nAnna gingerly bent to pick up the heart. \"It's still warm,\" she said, wiping melted snow from it.\n\nHiro nodded, \"You'll always have my heart and my heat to comfort you.\"\n\n\"What do we do now?\" she whispered, still inspecting the heart.\n\nHiro shook his head. \"Nothing,\" he answered. Anna finally met his eyes. So beautiful. So tender. \"I won't ask you if you return the sentiment, because it doesn't matter. I won't ask you to love me, because it won't make a difference. I only ask two things.\"\n\nAnna took a step toward him. \"Anything.\"\n\nHe nodded his head toward her hands. \"Keep it. It won't be of use to anyone else, so you should have it.\"\n\n\"And the second?\"\n\n\"Don't tell anyone. Ever.\" Their eyes met. \"It would only bring more danger to yourself and anyone else. No one can know.\"\n\nAnna nodded and rolled the teardrop-shaped black heart into her chest. \"Hiro,\" she said, looking down at it again, \"I'm still cold.\"\n\nHiro reclined onto his side and lifted his front leg and his wing. Keeping her eyes down, Anna curled under them, the precious heart curled in her arms.\n\nWhen he felt Anna began to stir beneath his wing, Hiro lifted it slightly so as not to allow too much cold air in at once. \"Are you feeling better?\" he asked in a hushed tone.\n\nAnna sat up, pushing herself past the shelter of his wings. \"Yes,\" she answered. Pulling her cloak tight around her shoulders, she stood and walked toward the fire. She started past it but paused. Tilting her head, she asked, \"Did you keep the fire going all night?\"\n\n\"Just in case you needed it,\" he said. It was a lie. Halfway through the night, while Anna slept, he had felt the fire in his belly gutter, attempting to extinguish again. He silently lit the fire in front of them then and again once the sun came up, for the same reason. He had no idea what to make of his own waning fire and he didn't want to bother her with the problem.\n\nAnna shrugged and stepped into the trees for privacy for her human habit. While she was away Hiro realized that the thought of what she might be doing didn't bother him as much as it had before. When she came back, she sat between Hiro and the fire with her back to the dragon.\n\nPulling another chunk of meat from her bag, she took a bite. \"How far away do you think they are now?\"\n\n\"They must be several days ahead of us by now,\" Hiro answered. \"I think the faeries must be helping them move at a faster pace. That's why we haven't caught up to them yet.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should fly for a day,\" Anna said between bites, \"maybe even two.\"\n\nHiro nodded. \"I think we will.\"\n\nAnna looked over her shoulder at him. \"Just like that? No argument? No million-and-one reasons why we shouldn't possibly do as I suggest?\"\n\nHiro rolled his eyes away from her.\n\nShe sighed and turned back to the fire. \"I guess having your heart has its advantages.\"\n\nHiro took a deep breath. His fire guttered again but continued to burn. \"I said we would fly, but I didn't say in which direction.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Anna nodded her head, \"and please tell me, oh wise dragon, why we're going to leave off our pursuit of the only humans that could possibly tell us what my brother is planning against the dragons?\"\n\n\"It's too dangerous for you.\"\n\nHer chin dropped to her chest. \"Dangerous for me? What about you?\"\n\n\"I'll come back later,\" he said, but a tickle in his throat brought his attention to the fire in his middle dimming. He coughed little spits of fire and his fire grew and glowed as usual.\n\nHow often will I have to deal with this? he wondered to himself. Am I dying?\n\nWhen he stopped coughing, he saw Anna kneeling in front of him with concern on her brow. \"Are you alright?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he lied again, sitting up on his back legs. \"Are you ready to leave?\"\n\nHer eyes glanced down at her bag sitting next to her. \"You know,\" she said, allowing some mischief to enter her voice, \"I could make you tell me the truth.\"\n\nHe snatched up her bag before she could reach for it. He had felt her moving under his wings. He knew the reason the bag was a little heavier. \"We don't have time for that,\" he snapped. \"I should've had you home and been back to the Rock Clouds by now.\"\n\nShe tightened her lips and held out her hand for her bag. Once he returned it to her, she strapped it across her back. \"I agree,\" she said, once it was secure. \"We don't have time to bicker and it's too dangerous, for both of us, to go any further north right now.\" She punched her fists on her hips and glared the dragon in the eye. \"We should go investigate the other trail. The one leading into the mountains.\"\n\nHiro's eyes swung to the bag around her shoulder, \"Will you force me?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Only if I have to.\"\n\nHe rolled his shoulder and scooped her into his fist.\n\n[ Hostile Alliances ]\n\nThey reached the diverging path much sooner than Hiro thought possible. He could feel the warmer spring air while flying south and, already knowing their course, the terrain did not slow them. He flew low and close to the trees as they carefully passed the Ice Ruck. Halfway through the next day, they found the trail leading into the mountains.\n\nHiro flew north of the track without setting down. He didn't want humans to find their tracks into the mountains. Since the snow had mostly melted this far south, his previous tracks had disappeared, and he didn't want to imprint new ones.\n\n\"Smoke,\" he said, spotting it not long after they flew into the mountain range.\n\n\"I see it,\" Anna answered, keeping her voice as low as she could.\n\nThe sun, although still up, had dropped behind the trees. Hiro flew to the northern side of the smoke columns and set himself down. Not just one but two fires burned within the trees. Anna climbed cautiously from his claw and tip-toed closer. Hiro crept behind her, taking shelter behind a large stone outcrop.\n\nAnna peered around a thick pine tree. \"Can you see anything?\" she whispered without taking her eyes from the encampment.\n\nHiro stifled a growl at his inept night vision. \"No,\" he said, \"just the fires. I don't see any movement. I hear very little and all I can smell is\u2026\" he growled low.\n\n\"What?\" she whispered. \"What do you smell?\"\n\nHiro licked his fangs. \"Men,\" he lied to her again, \"human men.\" But the tangy smell of flarote almost overpowered every other scent.\n\n\"Well, we won't learn anything from this far away.\" Anna stepped around the tree almost in plain sight of the buildings, but Hiro dragged her back behind the outcrop.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he growled.\n\n\"I'm going down there,\" she growled back.\n\n\"You are not.\" He planted her on her backside next to the large boulder. \"I'll go see what I can find out.\"\n\n\"Are you crazy?\" Anna scrambled to her feet. \"You're too big! You'll be seen! I can get in close, peek in some windows, and come straight back here without anyone knowing I was there.\"\n\n\"Not if you make as much noise as you're making now.\" Hiro began to creep closer to the buildings. His eyes scanned the trees and the grounds around the buildings, but he didn't see anything. \"They don't seem to be guarding it very well,\" he said, searching the trees.\n\n\"Well, they wouldn't need to, would they?\" Anna's answer came from in front of him. Hiro jerked his head to look at her, wondering how she had gotten in front of him without his notice. \"They don't think dragons will come looking for this place, and any humans that come upon them aren't a threat.\" She shifted her gaze from the buildings back to Hiro. \"Which is exactly my point. If anyone catches me snooping, I can just say I was lost in the mountains. If you're caught snooping, they'll put guards out and wonder why a dragon would be sneaking around like a scout cat.\" She lowered her voice as Hiro's head lowered to her level. \"Scout cats are clever, but still just animals. And dragons are nowhere near that smart. At least that's what humans think.\"\n\nHiro set his mouth. \"Don't be seen,\" he forced through his clenched jaw.\n\nAs Anna flitted down the hill, Hiro realized how little sound she made. She floated over leaves and branches with the smallest of rustles, which might only have been her dress. Eventually she scooped her skirts higher up her legs as she disappeared into the encampment.\n\nHiro settled behind the outcrop. He watched and listened for any signs of movement. He saw nothing except once, when he thought he saw movement around the edges of the fire on the far side of the encampment. He heard minor movement within the shelters, but the sounds were very faint. From this distance and with the wooden barriers of the buildings' walls, he couldn't hear any breathing or heartbeats. Not even voices would have made it to his ears.\n\nEventually he hunkered behind the boulder in frustration. When he had almost decided to get up and assist Anna in her search, he heard a familiar rustle behind the rock. Peering around the edge of it, he saw Anna skimming over the sodden ground toward him.\n\nShe darted behind the rock and sank to the ground. \"It's bad.\" She shook her head as she gulped a breath. \"There's space to house dozens of men at a time. There's a cleared area on the other side that has obviously been used by perhaps a couple hundred men most recently.\"\n\n\"The men we were following.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" she continued. \"There are at least three faeries down there. Their quarters are stocked with several majikal instruments. There's dozens of men. They don't look exactly busy, more like they're waiting for something right now. But Hiro,\" she spun to face him with her hands on his claw, \"there's a building filled to the rafters with boxes. I can't be certain what's in all of those boxes, but\u2014\" she stopped and took a deep breath, \"I saw arrows, Hiro. Black-tipped arrows. If all those boxes are full of those poisoned arrows, they have enough to obliterate the Rock Cloud Ruck.\"\n\nHiro twisted his neck in the direction of the encampment as if he could see the arrows from there. \"Then we have no choice,\" he mumbled. \"I'll have to destroy it.\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Anna took a deep breath before she continued, \"I agree that it should be destroyed, but going anywhere near it would be too dangerous for you.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted to hers. \"I can't leave here without trying. Those arrows could kill every dragon I know.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she answered quickly, \"but maybe you should go get some help. Perhaps Tog will\u2014\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Tog is too far away. The Rock Clouds are days from here. I'll have to do it myself.\"\n\nHe stood to walk toward the buildings, but Anna jumped in front of him. \"Hiro, stop!\" she whispered harshly. \"You can't do this alone! If only one of those arrows gets nocked\u2014\" she couldn't finish the sentence.\n\n\"It's a risk I'll have to take,\" he growled, pushing past her.\n\n\"What about the exposure of your intelligence?\" she insisted, following him. \"A dragon comes out of nowhere and attacks the place where they're secretly storing a dragon poison? Doesn't that seem at all suspicious?\"\n\n\"That's why I'll have to kill every single human down there,\" he rumbled.\n\n\"But Hiro,\" Anna ran in front of him, pushing against his chest with her hands, \"they have you outnumbered. You can't possible take all of them without one of them getting a shot at you.\"\n\n\"Anna,\" he growled again, \"I have no choice.\"\n\n\"Then I have no choice!\" she snapped. Hiro narrowed his eyes and snaked his head to question her. She had her hand in her bag that hung at her hip. She clenched her jaw. \"Don't make me force you to get help.\"\n\n\"From whom?\" he rumbled. \"No one knows I'm here and besides, everyone is too far away to help.\"\n\nAnna's eyes lit up. \"The Ice Ruck.\"\n\nPhilip could have melted into those blue eyes and he would have been happy for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, it felt at this moment as if those very eyes would rather smother him.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tierni,\" Philip tried in vain not to stutter under her piercing gaze. \"I'm sorry to have put you in such an awkward position. I didn't realize your relationship to Torgon. Beyond the capacity of servant and king, I'm afraid we won't be able to see much of each other again.\"\n\nTierni sighed and dropped her eyes to look at her hands. Her hands hadn't moved from her lap the past few minutes sitting there in the king's office. While he attempted to keep sweat from his forehead by sheer will alone, she hadn't twitched so much as a pinky finger. Her lashes beat a slow, steady patter as he talked himself hoarse of duty, responsibility, and honor. Her lips kept a straight line of indifference as he attempted to brush past any feelings he or she might have for the other. So much so that by the time he finished, he was convinced the feelings were entirely his alone.\n\n\"Will that be all, Sire?\" she asked, her eyes still lowered.\n\nPhilip was struck with an idea that might help him glimpse what was going on in her mind. \"If you'd like, I'm sure I could find work for you in another household. A general's home, or one of the Lords' homes, perhaps.\"\n\n\"I don't think that will be necessary,\" she said, lifting her chin to stare him in the eye. \"I enjoy my work in the royal household and you and I have never crossed paths before; I don't see why we should ever cross paths again. I'll be sure to pay better attention to where I wander.\"\n\nHeaven help any man that tries to resist that gaze! Philip thought to himself.\n\nThey both stood in the same movement. \"Should I have the guards escort you back?\" he asked.\n\n\"No need.\" She swept to the door and swung it open. \"I probably know this castle better than you do.\"\n\nAs the door closed behind her, Philip decided to visit the shrine of Tartaku to beg that he see Tierni again. But that would have to come later.\n\nRight on cue, Murthur led Qialla into the office by way of the door leading from the audience hall. The capable servant must have been watching for Tierni to leave by the servant's entry, then led the faerie councilman in by the more distinguished entrance.\n\nPhilip tried to straighten his back upon the faerie's entry, but he had a difficult time shaking the memory of Tierni's eyes. \"Qialla,\" he greeted the faerie, waving a hand for him to be seated. But following his own direction as per usual, his hooded head swung only to look at the chair\u2014Philip seethed internally and imagined the faerie's disgusted sneer\u2014and he continued to stand. Outwardly Philip ignored the faerie's rudeness, as he always did. \"I trust plans are continuing as you wish.\"\n\n\"Everything is exactly on point, Your Majesty,\" Qialla said with a nod. \"We currently have about half the needed supply of poisoned arrows to attack an entire ruck. We will have the rest within the week. Soon we'll have fliers delivering the supply to everyone who needs it. It is time for you to mobilize your army. We will attack the Rock Cloud Ruck in just more than a month and wipe the\u2014\"\n\n\"So soon?\" Philip barely noticed the sound of his own teeth grinding.\n\nAfter a short pause Qialla took a small step forward. \"Yes, your army shall be at the base of the Rock Clouds in just a few short weeks. The poisoned arrows will be in every quiver of every human and faerie. We will build and majikally enhance large platforms to carry humans into the Rock Clouds. It will be a swift victory.\"\n\n\"The dragons won't stand a chance,\" Philip mumbled, looking down at his desk.\n\n\"But the rest of the species of Avonoa will.\"\n\nPhilip shook his head and closed his eyes. \"Are you sure this is the right course of action, Qialla?\"\n\n\"What are you asking me?\"\n\nNow Philip glared into the dark cowl of the faerie's cloak. Perhaps it was the disappointment and frustration over Tierni, but Philip was at his breaking point. Etiquette be damned. \"I mean to ask you if you feel in your heart that killing these animals is the right thing to do? Have you no conscience?\"\n\n\"Those animals are the most dangerous creatures in this world.\" Qialla's voice rose with every word. \"They are a blight on this land and\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Philip nodded, placing his hands on his desk, \"they're dangerous. So are scorrands, lions, banshees, worms\u2014even a unicorn could stab you with its horn!\" His voice rose to match Qialla's.\n\nQialla leaned across Philip's massive desk, \"A unicorn wouldn't hunt you down because you tried to kill it!\" he yelled.\n\n\"But to wipe out an entire species!\" Philip yelled back. \"It's merciless! Who's next, Qialla? Banshees, for feeding their young with your carcass? Scorrands, for protecting their eggs? Centaurs, for just being your enemies?! Where does it stop?!\"\n\n\"With you!\" Qialla barked back. \"It stops with you! Whether you help us or not, we're going to kill every dragon across every land! If you don't help us, the killing stops after we've destroyed every single human!\"\n\nPhilip blinked. He leaned away from the faerie. \"An alliance formed of threats is not an alliance; it's slavery.\"\n\nQialla leaned back as well. Even though Philip could spit on the top of the faerie's head, it felt as if the faerie towered over him. \"The Faerie Council doesn't care how we get your help, only that it is secured.\"\n\nPhilip tried to breath, but it came in shallow gulps. He felt his back against an implied wall. Yes, humans far outnumbered faeries, but the faeries' wings and their majik gave them more strength than any human could imagine.\n\n\"If you are quite finished complaining,\" Qialla said, \"I will tell you that the Honorable Kingdom and the Courageous Kingdom are already on their way with their armies to the Rock Clouds. If you won't help us, perhaps you would be willing to assure your fellow humans are not slaughtered by dragons.\" When Philip didn't answer, Qialla leaned toward him again, but this time he kept his voice to a low hiss. \"You will assemble and mobilize your army to the Rock Clouds. If you're too much of a coward, I will lead them there myself.\"\n\nPhilip lifted his chin as high as he could without making it look like he was accepting orders, which it felt like he was. \"They've already begun arriving from the outlying counties. We will begin the march west from Kingstor in three days.\"\n\n[ Essential Assistance ]\n\n\"They'll kill you.\"\n\nAnna pursed her lips. \"Didn't you say that Rakgar made me exempt from that rule?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Hiro sighed. \"Rakgar has no authority over the Ice Ruck. If you come with me, they'll kill you first and ask me questions afterward.\"\n\nHiro had carried Anna back to the point where the trail diverged, then followed it slightly north to the point closest to the Ice Ruck. They slipped into the trees closest to the edge of the Ice Waste separating the Ice Ruck from the humans' tracks leading north. In the sunlight he could see the mountain home of the ice dragons in the distance. It would take him less than a half day to fly there.\n\n\"Follow the trail going south,\" he told Anna. \"You should reach the faerie forest or come upon other humans soon enough.\"\n\nAnna glanced down at her bag. \"And if I make it that far? What then? If I make it home, what do I tell Philip?\"\n\n\"I've thought about that,\" Hiro nodded. \"You'll have to tell him that you escaped somehow.\"\n\n\"Escaped?\" Anna snorted. \"Escaped how?\"\n\n\"I don't know, maybe\u2026\" Hiro looked around for some inspiration then struck on an idea. \"Flarote,\" he whispered. He stared at some spring mushrooms sprouting under a thick Plasyte tree, then quickly looked back at Anna. \"Tell him you saw smoke and the dragon started acting strangely. Tell him that I dropped you and ran off. You've been trying to find your way back ever since.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Anna pressed. \"What does it mean?\"\n\nHiro rolled his shoulder. \"I smelled some flarote at the encampment. Perhaps they were just using it for their animals, but maybe you could lie and say that the scent of it drove me away. Maybe the scent of it was too strong and it confused me.\"\n\nAnna nodded. \"I suppose that could work. It's better than nothing.\"\n\nAnna scooped up her belongings. As she turned to search for a clear path through the sparse trees around them, Hiro felt the familiar gutter in his stomach. It lurched and twisted. The waning fire in his belly clenched on his stomach like a giant claw. If he waited much longer his flame would extinguish and he'd die. So, he belched a long burst of flame. Anna spun to face him with wide eyes.\n\n\"What was that?\" she asked. \"Are you alright?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he lied again. \"I just thought you might like to take some fire with you.\" He yanked one of the branches from a burnt tree and offered it to her.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes at the gift. \"I don't think I'll be able to drag that along with me. I'll have to make do with my cloak to keep me warm.\"\n\nHiro let the branch fall to the ground and stamped out the flame. \"Anna,\" he said, lowering his head to hers, \"I'll find you.\"\n\nShe nodded to him and turned toward the path without another word. After she disappeared into the brush, Hiro spread his wings. Bunching his legs under him, he vaulted into the sky.\n\nA bluish-gray dragon circled up from the snow-covered mountain in front of Hiro. The horns circling his head and running along his spine showed that the dragon was a dan, but the horns themselves swayed with movement. Curious. The gray dan looped around Hiro without removing his inspecting eyes as they both flew toward the small mountain range in front of them.\n\nEach mountain snuggled under a blanket of snow despite the rest of Avonoa thawing from warm spring air. Boulders and stunted trees covered the mountains, but Hiro could also see running stream beds and a melting waterfall. The mountains didn't float in the air like the Rock Clouds, but there were roughly the same number of peaks. Hiro wondered if as many dragons lived in this ruck as did in his.\n\nHe tried to ignore the escort until they got close enough to the mountains to see several other dragons in flight. Finally he opened his mouth. \"Was that a frozen waterfall I saw back there?\" Hiro asked casually.\n\nThe gray dragon chuckled. \"You are a floater, then.\"\n\n\"My name is Hiro Tekla of the Rock Cloud Ruck,\" he said before swinging his eyes to meet the dan's. \"I need to speak to your leader. It's urgent.\"\n\n\"Shining days, Hiro Tekla,\" the escort dipped his head. \"I am Maggoran. I will take you to Rakdar.\"\n\nHiro dropped back, allowing Maggoran to take the lead. He drifted left, further north around one of the smaller mountains. As they flew together Hiro saw six dames take flight in a triangle formation. The lead dame was ice blue, as were two others. One of the dames was yellow-green in color, one was pure white like Visi, and the last was a crystalline purple. Most of the dans he saw peeking from cave mouths or flying with hatchlings were different shades of gray. The only brown dans he saw were so pale in color that they might have been orange dames. But almost every dragon he saw had something akin to feathers in their features.\n\nFlying behind Maggoran, Hiro could see the anomaly of feather-like spikes running down his spine. They also circled around the head like plumage on one of the dames flying in formation. A fledgling flying with his sire seemed perfectly sleek at first, but gave a violent shake in mid-air and his entire body puffed out to twice its size.\n\n\"What are they?\" Hiro blurted out with enormous eyes at the fledgling's expansion.\n\nMaggoran tilted his head to see what Hiro referred to, then chuckled again. \"They're scales, of course,\" he said.\n\n\"Scales?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maggoran shook his head, sending a rippling wave down his spine. As Hiro peered closer he could see light reflected from the needle-like feathers surrounding his spikes. \"Our scales have helped us adapt to the colder environment. They're thicker, but smaller and easier to conform to our bodies. I probably have several thousand more scales than you do. They're also attached at the bottom end of each scale so they can lift away from our hides to help us cool, for when the seasons warm.\"\n\n\"Cool?\" Hiro tried to contain his shock. \"Isn't it cold here all year?\"\n\nMaggoran roared with laughter as he swooped down to a steep canyon between two mountains. The sheer cliffs on the sides of the canyon echoed his laughter. He landed in front of a cave opening with two towering stone pillars at each side. Two large dragons jumped from the rock overhead. They were both gray, but one with dark gray streaks around his head and tail stepped in front of the cave.\n\n\"What's so funny, Maggoran?\" he asked with a grin.\n\nMaggoran coughed to gain control of himself before answering. \"This floater asked if it was cold here all year.\"\n\nThe silent dragon also grinned then bounded back onto the cliff face. The gray-streaked dragon turned his smile on Hiro. \"Maggoran is young. He hasn't answered that query as many times as I have.\" His steel-gray eyes pierced Hiro. \"No, it is not always cold here.\"\n\nMaggoran took a deep breath. \"Sormano, Hiro Tekla of the Rock Cloud Ruck wishes to see Rakdar. He says it's urgent.\"\n\nSormano dipped his head. \"Come, Hiro Tekla.\" He turned and slipped into the cave behind him.\n\nAs Hiro followed, he expected the same chill inside the caves as he felt in the Rock Cloud caves. But when he crossed the threshold, he lifted his head and breathed deeply the warmth that met him. He followed Sormano's tail into the depths, expecting darkness, but was again surprised with a warm green glow.\n\nWhen his eyes adjusted to the greenish light, he saw a pale purple dragon with tufts around her head and wrapping around her shoulders and withers. Her snout was long and pointed and she stared down it at Hiro from small, angled eyes.\n\nShe sat in front of three rock spires from the tops of which issued steam. The rock at the tops of the spires gave off the green glow. Hiro glanced to his side and saw a tiered rock wall wrapping around a small chamber. Every layer of the tier was covered in succulent flarote.\n\n\"Hiro Tekla of the Rock Cloud Ruck,\" Sormano gestured from Hiro to the purple dame, \"Rakdar of the Ice Ruck.\"\n\n\"Shining days, Rakdar,\" Hiro said, dipping his head to the dame.\n\n\"Clear skies to you, my friend,\" Rakdar lowered her head in return. She waved a claw beside her in front of the farthest green rock formation. \"Please, make yourself comfortable. We haven't had a visitor from the Rock Clouds in several years.\"\n\n\"What is this place?\" Hiro couldn't stop himself from asking. He stepped toward the green rock reaching out a claw to inspect it.\n\n\"This is how the Ice Ruck survives such harsh conditions, Hiro.\" Rakdar slithered backward and to one side to make room for him in front of the glowing rocks. \"Several caves in these mountains contain this substance.\" She scratched the glowing green of the rocks and a glittering powder fell to the cave floor. \"From what we can guess, it's a natural byproduct of the steam. It keeps us warm in the harshest of temperatures and makes an ideal growing environment for flarote to keep us healthy.\"\n\n\"I often wondered what would make a dragon choose to remain in the cold,\" Hiro said with a chuckle.\n\n\"We have not just adapted to the cold, Hiro;\" she said with a grin, \"the conditions of our home sustain us. Why would we leave?\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" Sormano spoke up from the side of his leader, \"I believe you said your message was urgent?\"\n\nRakdar's head shifted from Sormano to Hiro and back again with narrowed eyes. \"Urgent?\" she asked. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"Yes, Rakdar,\" Hiro said, sitting up a little taller, \"something is very wrong.\"\n\nHe told her everything he could. He told her of the increasing numbers of dragon deaths and the traps set for them. He told her of the mounting antagonism of the Noble Kingdom against the dragons. He told her of the black-tipped arrows they'd found in the ashes of all the dragons. He gave her the memory of visiting the centaurs and discovering the dragon poison. She hissed when she blinked away the memory.\n\n\"What can we do, Hiro?\" she growled. \"What answers have you discovered?\"\n\n\"I found an encampment less than half a sun cycle's flight from here.\" As he spoke he watched anger spread across the faces of the two dragons in front of him. \"I don't believe it to be the place where they've made the poison, but it holds hundreds, possibly thousands of the poisoned arrows. They could use them at any time. They could kill hundreds of dragons without a fight.\"\n\nSormano jumped to his feet only moments before Rakdar did. \"We must destroy it!\" he barked.\n\n\"Gather every dragon that has passed the Krusible,\" she growled even louder. \"Meet at the Krusible.\"\n\nHiro scrambled to follow them out of the warm cave. Sormano bounded out first, roaring orders to the guards outside. Once Hiro stepped out of the entrance, he saw several dragons in flight and more bellowing instructions to others. Word spread so fast that by the time Hiro landed behind Rakdar at the Krusible, dozens of dragons already waited for them.\n\nAs they waited for the rest to arrive, Hiro marveled at the similarity and differences between the Ice Ruck Krusible and his own. Their Krusible testing grounds didn't stretch out of the side of the mountain like it did in the Rock Clouds, but sat at the very top of one of the tallest mountains. The brutal winds picked up with the altitude and the waning sun off to their side did nothing to warm them. Rakdar sat atop a stone at the edge of the smooth bowl-like area.\n\nMany dragons asked questions as they arrived, but Rakdar glared at them as if they shouldn't expect any answers from her. When Sormano landed next to her and nodded, she finally parted her narrow maw.\n\n\"The humans have created a dragon poison,\" her voice echoed over the Krusible above absolute silence. \"We don't know how, but an arrow tipped with a black substance has killed dragons instantly. There can only be one purpose for such a deadly creation.\" Many of the dragons in front of her growled. Some postured to pounce, others bared their fangs. \"We don't know how or where they produce it, but,\" she waved a claw at Hiro, \"Hiro Tekla of the Rock Cloud Ruck has discovered a storing area. We believe it to be the position from which they plan to distribute it for use.\"\n\nSeveral dragons belched flame into the sky at these words. Others roared. Some of the younger dragons seemed frightened, but not many. Most had fire burning in their eyes and throats.\n\nHiro couldn't help but compare the reaction of the Ice Ruck to the news of a dragon poison with the reaction he had received from his own ruck and leader. Here they sprang into action with fires ablaze! In the Rock Clouds, when Hiro had told Rakgar of the dragon poison, they ended up debating the virtues of humans versus faeries.\n\n\"There is only one problem!\" Sormano's voice shattered the angry roaring of the ruck. When they all silenced, Hiro noticed Rakdar already nodding at Sormano. \"If we attack, we run the risk of exposure. The humans might wonder why we would mount an attack on that particular area.\"\n\nMany dragons ceased their fires, looking to their leaders for guidance and decision. Rakdar nodded, \"I believe it's a risk we'll have to take.\"\n\n\"There's no risk,\" Hiro spoke to Rakdar before turning to address the ruck. \"I have information\u2014from a source I can't reveal\u2014that the humans will be told that the smell of flarote drives dragons to near insanity. It will justify an attack.\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to like you, floater,\" Sormano chuckled.\n\nRakdar sat up straight. \"Either way, we must minimize human survivors. Watchers!\" she barked over the ruck. Several dans lifted their heads. \"You'll encircle the encampment, slaughter any who try to flee. Come get the information from Hiro.\"\n\nMaggoran stepped forward. \"Tell me where to go, floater.\"\n\nHiro passed Maggoran the information of how to get to the encampment and what it looked like as he had seen it. Once he received the memory, Maggoran blinked and squinted at Hiro, but turned without question and gave the information to the other Watchers.\n\nAs the Watchers nodded to each other, they then nodded to Rakdar and lifted into the air without another word. Once they were safely away, Rakdar spoke again. \"I'll lead whomever wishes to follow. Stakkid, I want you and your huntresses in front with me.\"\n\nIt took Hiro a moment to realize that they were all staring at him. \"Hiro,\" Rakdar stretched out her wings, which looked more like feathers than scales. \"Lead the way.\"\n\n[ Obliteration ]\n\nThe Ice Ruck was definitely smaller than the Rock Cloud Ruck. Hiro swept through the icy air with Rakdar on his right flank and Sormano on his left, but only a couple dozen dragons followed behind them. It was possible that others had decided it was too risky to be involved, but Hiro wouldn't believe that. Rakdar led this ruck with ice in her heart and her eyes. Her dragons would be willing to die if she told them to, because she was willing to do the same.\n\nIn silence, the large group soared over the barren ice land between the Ice Ruck Mountains and the northernmost Torthoth range. Once in sight of the canyon containing the path to the encampment, Hiro tilted his head to Rakdar. \"The buildings are just through\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped short from a sharp snap of Rakdar's jaws just beside his wing joint. Her frozen blue eyes drilled into his when he met them. Of course. Far beyond the safety of the Ice Ruck's borders, Rakdar wouldn't tolerate any small slip. Hiro should have known better than to speak. He began to wonder about the efficacy of his own Krusible test, and about Anna's influence on him.\n\nChiding himself internally, he pressed his wings and flew further between the mountains. He could see the path below through the trees. The sun dipped behind the group, but trees towering over the buildings disguised the descending dragon shadows. A single human stood in front of one of the two fires that burned as tall as the man. He only had time for a short scream before Sormano landed, putting one claw through his chest and the other in the flames.\n\nThe dragons set to work on the buildings, tearing at them with their claws and searing them with flame. Half a dozen men erupted from one of the buildings. A few of them held swords; the rest held bows with arrows half-nocked. The closest arrow buzzed past Rakdar and two of the huntresses tore the man in half before he could scramble to obtain another arrow. The three men with swords charged Maggoran, but three huntresses stepped beside him. The four dragons raked the men aside with their claws, leaving behind only human shreds.\n\nHiro perched atop the middle and largest building, tearing at the wooden pieces holding it together, when he caught the scent. Lighter and leafier green than a human's animal-like scent, it made him whip his head around. With barely a moment to lose, Hiro tumbled horn-over-tail to the ground as a poisoned arrow whistled past him. Unfortunately, the arrow sliced the upper front leg of the gray dan behind Hiro, instantly turning him to ash.\n\nMaggoran saw the attack and bellowed before launching himself at the creature who sent the killing dart. Skorkot, her cloak's hood thrown back to face the dragons, lowered her bow but lifted her chin at the challenge. As Maggoran hurtled toward her, she reached into her robes and withdrew a puff of powder to throw into Maggoran's face moments before his fangs reached her throat. Once the powder hit the dragon, Skorkot stepped aside and let the unconscious mass flop next to her.\n\nHer black eyes swung to meet Hiro's again. But Hiro knew better than to engage her immediately. She inched closer to the building's edge. She didn't want to use the powder on Hiro. He knew her. He could tell Rakgar. He would tell Rakgar. Her finger twitched toward the corner of the building. Her eyes locked with his. Hiro knew she hoped to distract him from her fingers creeping toward the unseen edge of the building. There must be something behind it that she desperately wanted to use on the black dragon.\n\nThree other dans saw Maggoran lying on the ground. Hiro guessed that they assumed he was dead, but Hiro knew better. That powder had been used on him before. It could render a dragon unconscious in a blink, but it wasn't lethal. While the others attacked Skorkot, Hiro held back.\n\nAs anticipated, she threw handfuls of the non-lethal powder in all of their faces. When the last unconscious dragon slammed into the building wall in front of her, blocking Hiro's view, Skorkot disappeared. Hiro crawled backward from where the faerie had stood, stepping two claws into the burning fire. Wrapping his talons around a clump of embers, he scanned the trees around them, waiting.\n\nHe didn't have to wait long. The faerie shot out from behind the building straight into the sky. The poisoned arrow nocked. But Hiro couldn't move until she did first. With a scream, she dove over the building through the flames now licking the walls. Once she burst through them, Hiro rolled to the side, casting a clawful of scalding embers into the faerie's face. She screamed again as the arrow in her bow loosed harmlessly into the shadows of the trees.\n\nHiro plucked the treacherous faerie from the air and pinned her to the ground. He slowly sunk his talons into the soft flesh of her chest. Her wailing waned as a handful of dragons gathered around them. Some roared\u2014Hiro wasn't sure if their anger was directed toward him or the faerie, but he didn't care. His claw contracted around the faerie's heart.\n\nHer screaming stopped, but her eyes lifted to Hiro. With blood dripping from her lips, she whispered, \"Every dragon must die.\"\n\nHer limbs contorted, her back tried to arch, then she lay still.\n\nRakgar will see this, Hiro swore in the back of his mind. By Khurta's claws, he can't ignore it.\n\nThe screaming and moaning coming from the human men faded with the last rays of light. Rakdar and the huntresses roared over the embers of four dragons lost. Maggoran and the others lay still on the ground.\n\nA few of the other dragons nudged them with their snouts and wailed a lament. Hiro longed to relieve their suffering. He knew they thought the stunned dragons would be cursed in The World of Souls because they hadn't been burned to ash, but he didn't dare say a word. He knew the worst that could happen would be that the unconscious dragons would wake after everyone had gone and would return home later.\n\nHiro, however, continued digging through piles of charred timbers. He tore down remaining walls and burned everything he touched. The other dragons sometimes helped, but most watched. When he found a round container stuffed full of black-tipped arrows, he burnt it so hot that the metal rings around the outside glowed white. When the others saw the contents, they joined him to search for more.\n\nAltogether they found eight of the circular containers crowded in different shelters. While the outside of the containers burned normally, the black tips of the arrows continued burning longer than the arrows themselves. Once the black tips turned as red as blood, the fire finally would sputter out. Rakdar watched the small fires dwindle. Every last one.\n\nHiro found himself scratching at the bottom mudwork of one of the last buildings. There wasn't much more than scorch marks left covering the entire area. When he realized he would find nothing else, he stepped back and took a deep breath.\n\nThe faint scent of human sweat drifted to his nose on a breeze.\n\nHiro's eyes narrowed. It was definitely a human scent. Everything with a human scent should have been burnt at that point. His eyes scoured the ground, but in the darkness he couldn't see anything.\n\nHe lowered his nose to the ground. Yes, it was human. The scent was stronger further away from the rubble. Hiro walked away from the building, swinging his snout back and forth, sweeping the ground. Sormano stepped beside him. When Hiro tilted his head at the elder dragon, the question was clear in Sormano's eyes.\n\nHiro lifted his head and placed it in front of Sormano's. With a short burst of warm air, he sent the memory of Rakdar telling the Watchers to surround the encampment and slaughter any humans who tried to escape.\n\nSormano's eyes narrowed more. He cast a sharp look at Maggoran's still form on the ground. He placed his snout in front of Hiro's.\n\nSormano had seen the Watchers in the trees. He could see them surrounding the human encampment before the attack began. He could see Maggoran crouching low in the trees directly in front of where Hiro stood now. Maggoran had been on watch here.\n\nThen Hiro remembered. Maggoran had jumped out at Skorkot when she attacked Hiro. Some humans must have slipped by them.\n\n\"What happened to them?\" Sormano's voice was so quiet, Hiro was surprised he could even hear the question. Rakdar ran a very tight ruck indeed. \"Are they cursed?\"\n\nHiro shook his head. \"They will wake.\"\n\nThe scent of human tantalized Hiro's senses. \"Some of them escaped,\" he told Sormano, matching the almost silent tone. \"I can smell them.\"\n\nSormano gave Hiro the memory of Rakdar saying they must minimize survivors. He repeated the word \"minimize.\" Hiro understood. He was explaining that they might not get them all.\n\nBut Hiro knew they were more of a danger than any of these dragons understood. Any survivors would get information to Philip. Any survivors might find Anna. Any survivors might refute her stories of the dragons.\n\nHe growled to himself. He couldn't use memory to explain this to Rakdar. He searched into the trees and smelled the human scent getting stronger as he followed it. It led him past the scent of dragons around the encampment. There were definitely survivors.\n\nGalloping back into the scorched encampment, Hiro skidded to a halt in front of Rakdar. Huntresses and Watchers were spreading their wings and lifting into the sky.\n\n\"Survivors,\" he whispered as low as he could. \"I caught their scent further into the trees than the Watchers\u2014\" He cut himself off at her sharp snarl but didn't give up. \"They might make it back to other humans\u2014\" She growled louder. \"You must help me hunt them down.\"\n\nHis whisper had become louder than he realized. Rakdar roared into his face. Putting her nose in front of Hiro's, she breathed a series of memories. In each one, she roared the same word. \"ENOUGH!\"\n\nHiro cringed. Rakdar's feathers stood out on her neck and body. As beautiful as he had found her before, she was even more terrifying now. She shook out her feathery wings. Roaring, she vaulted into the sky. The rest of the ruck rose with her. Hiro watched as they melted into the thick darkness.\n\n[ Narrow Escape ]\n\nTorgon's heart pounded as he leapt through the trees. Darting behind another large boulder, he spun around to ensure the other five men with him reached the rock for safety. His heart continued to thud against his ribs and he wondered for the millionth time if his father had ever felt such fear in the face of danger.\n\nTorgon grabbed the shoulder of the last man through. \"You're sure there were no other survivors in your barracks?\" he asked again.\n\n\"No, General,\" the breathless man whispered back, \"I watched them die.\"\n\nTorgon had only arrived the day before and planned to leave the next morning to go to The Great Northern Mountain. He had been alone in his room, the only other private room besides the one the faerie had taken, when the dragons attacked the outpost. Grateful he hadn't yet undressed for the night, he'd rushed to the other buildings to help men escape or fight. He remembered watching the men being struck down and decided that a swift and quiet escape was their only option.\n\nThe attack was vicious. In his twenty years Torgon had never seen a dragon act this way. The only sightings he'd had as a child were when a dragon would occasionally fly overhead. He never saw one up close until after his father's death. Even seeing the aftermath of that attack hadn't prepared him for the brutal attack tonight.\n\n\"Where did they come from, General?\" one of the men whispered between shaky breaths. He bore the lieutenant's symbol of swords on his tunic. The rest of the men were staff guards. None of them wore a sword on their hip, which meant only he and the lieutenant could handle one.\n\n\"Why did they attack the outpost?\" another man asked. When Torgon glanced up at the man who was easily more than a decade his senior, the man trembled.\n\nThey're just as afraid as I am, Torgon realized. Despite my own fear, I'm their leader. If I show fear, they will falter.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Torgon answered, relieved his voice didn't quake. He took a deep breath. \"We need to make our way back to Kingstor. There should be a vill\u2014\"\n\nHe briefly froze, then turned to peer around the boulder. Every muscle in his body tensed. Something was out there. The men, sensing their leader's tension, froze too. In the back of his mind Torgon wondered if they were even still breathing.\n\n\"We need to move,\" he whispered, turning back to them. He pointed behind them. \"Get behind those boulders.\" He turned back to peer into the darkness. \"Now.\"\n\nHiro really couldn't begrudge Rakdar leaving. Rakdar had done what she said she would. In fact, with this act of leadership against the humans, she had done more for her ruck than Rakgar had done for his. No dragon had spoken in front of the humans, so he knew she didn't see the need to slaughter the survivors. Hiro, however, wasn't sure what they would do if they found Anna. Would they question her? Help her? His heart pulled him toward her, but his head told him she would be fine and he should go straight back to the Rock Clouds.\n\nHiro's nose swept the ground, tracking the human scent. Why couldn't he just let the woman be? Every time he thought of lifting into the air to leave, the image of Anna crumpled under the snow assaulted his mind. He couldn't leave her. He had to make sure she was safe.\n\nHe wondered if the human survivors would find her. Perhaps they had already. He certainly couldn't kill them if she was with them. Or maybe he should. Maybe he should take her back to Kingstor Noble himself. She would definitely be safer with a dragon.\n\nHe crashed through brush and trees. Stumbled over rocks. Dug his snout through mounds of melting snow. They couldn't possibly be much further ahead of him. They had no faerie with them this time to hurry them on. At least he didn't smell one.\n\nHe followed the survivors' trail as it wound sharply to one side and back. He was almost within sight of the road they had first followed north after the men. He assumed the escaped men found the road and were going to follow it back to Kingstor Noble. As he bumbled through bracken, stomping a small bush with yellowish-green buds on the tips he caught a new scent. Anna.\n\nAnna's sweet scent, much more diluted than the men's strong, salty sweat, joined the men's path. Whoever had escaped the attack, had also found Anna. The men's scent turned toward the road. Anna's scent joined theirs. Then all of them clambered back into the trees. Several dragon lengths ahead, piles of boulders huddled at the bottom of a mountain, like pieces of mountain trolls fallen from the cliff behind them. The human scent made an almost straight pathway to them.\n\nPerfect place for an ambush, Hiro told himself as he tip-taloned toward them. Perhaps I should fly over first.\n\nHe heard a whisper and turned toward the rocks, but stopped and closed his eyes. The forest was quiet. Humans having already passed would've silenced all the night animals. A few crickets chirruped warily then stopped again. He could hear a few small heartbeats of animals waiting in their burrows for the dangerous animals outside to pass. He crept along.\n\nAlthough he had barely breathed it, the men heard and obeyed Torgon's order to move. One by one, they bolted from the boulder they had huddled behind toward the larger group of rocks he indicated. He counted them off as they scurried away. Once the last one slipped behind the large rocks, he followed.\n\nHe surveyed the men again. He had his sword on his hip, two of the staff guards had staffs, and the lieutenant had a long dagger on his belt. One of the staff guards clutched three poisoned arrows in his fist. Staring at the shivering men Torgon pulled his sword free of its sheath. \"Spit in Tarsa's eye,\" he cursed. Spitting into the god of the wind's face never is a good idea, but it was the only one left for the men. Fight. Turning back to await whatever was coming for them, Torgon felt the men steel themselves behind him.\n\nHiro could hear larger hearts beating behind the boulders as he got closer. He thought he saw a head peek over the rock, but he couldn't be certain in the darkness.\n\nSo they mean to ambush me, he thought. These humans are braver than I thought. Or stupid.\n\nHe crept closer to the boulders.\n\nOne. Two. Three \u2026 Six hearts beating. They beat a quick pace, but not the flutter of fear. A steady, solid beat like the sound they made whenever he had attacked humans. These hearts were ready for a fight.\n\nHe crept closer.\n\nA breeze sighed through the trees. The scent had changed. Sweat cooled and the scent of fear lessened. The dull scent of power, strength, focus\u2026determination. Not stupid, then.\n\nHiro thought he heard a whisper. He crept closer, pausing with each step. His belly brushed the ground. His body low in an attack posture. His tail trailed behind him, swinging to steady each step.\n\nAs he paused, he thought he saw movement at the edge of his vision. He froze in place, but flicked his eyes to the side. He couldn't see anything in the darkness. The hearts continued beating steadily on the other side of the boulders, so he chanced turning his head toward the movement.\n\nIt only took a few moments. The black dragon poured like a shadow between the trees.\n\nWhy is it always that same dragon? Torgon wondered to himself. He peered between the rocks as the beast slithered in the direction the group had followed. Step for step, he covered the very ground the men had just abandoned.\n\n\"He must be following our scent.\" Torgon didn't realize he'd spoken until the dragon turned in their direction.\n\nFool! he chastised himself. Keep your head about you or you'll get these men killed!\n\nAs he snaked his long neck away from the scent trail of the men, he breathed in deeply. Anna. Her scent diverted to the side of where the men prepared their last defense. Hiro's head lifted ever so slightly as he peered into the trees and rocks where he thought he had seen the movement. Was it her? Had she run off in another direction? Away from the men?\n\nHe didn't want to risk engaging the men if her scent led somewhere else. Without another glance back at the boulders, Hiro tore into the trees where Anna's scent led. He followed it further into the trees, but the scent snaked to the north. He skidded to a halt. He was following her old scent and going in the wrong direction!\n\nStupid worm! he chided himself. The humans must have seen the road and decided to stay hidden in the forest. Their paths must have crossed, but Anna headed in the other direction long before the men came that way. Hiro adjusted his direction and ran toward where he knew the road must be, knowing he could follow it and find Anna's scent again further south.\n\nTorgon ducked his head and kept it low as the monster drew closer. He couldn't hear it. Not a sound. He waited motionless before he dared peek out again.\n\nHis eyes narrowed as he watched the dragon's head swing to the side. Its head lifted. With no more noise than a sigh, the dragon suddenly tore off away from them, deeper into the trees.\n\nTorgon released the breath he'd been holding, but continued to stare, bewildered, after the dragon.\n\n\"General,\" one of the men behind him said, \"should we retreat further? Royal General Torgon?\"\n\nThe man's urgent tone brought Torgon back to himself. \"Yes,\" he nodded, still staring after the black monster. \"Lieutenant, lead the way further south.\"\n\nAs the men behind him disappeared into the darkness, Torgon shook his head in the direction the threat had just departed. \"That dragon isn't right.\"\n\n[ Enigmas ]\n\nHe found her scent along the road. If the human men hadn't been afraid to use the road, they might have found her eventually. But Hiro found her quicker. He followed her trail as she had stumbled along the road, taking shelter under trees, scuffing her feet along the pathway, even, at times, crawling on her hands and knees.\n\nHe finally found her huddled under a huge pine tree. Lying on a bed of pine needles, her breathing was ragged and she shook from the cold.\n\n\"I couldn't find you,\" she muttered in her delirium. \"I just couldn't walk anymore.\"\n\nHiro scooped her into his front legs. Using the open space of the roadway, he lifted into the air. He didn't have to take her far to find a protected clearing where he could set down. He ripped down a tree next to them and poured his fire over it. He curled around Anna lending her his own warmth and the warmth of the fire. After just a few minutes, she stirred again.\n\nWhen she finally looked up at him, he said, \"Your hair looks like a nest of fighting younglings.\" She grinned and turned away. \"When did you eat last?\"\n\n\"It's been a few days,\" she answered. \"But I need water more than food.\"\n\n\"Why haven't you eaten some of the snow?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I did eat a little, but I couldn't take in too much without you near me. Snow is good for water, but it makes a human too cold. I can eat it now.\" She sat up but slumped back down to the ground. \"Maybe I'll get it in a few more minutes.\"\n\nHiro rolled his eyes. \"Little human,\" he whispered. He gently set Anna aside. He didn't have to go far for snow. Clumps of it lay scattered around the clearing, although none was close to the fire. He dumped a few handfuls in front of her.\n\nAs the night wore on with his warmth beside her, Anna scooped handfuls of snow into her mouth. She sat up a few times but dozed often. Hiro sat curled around her, only moving to fetch more snow after it melted.\n\nWhen morning broke, no snow remained. Anna sat up tall but didn't get to her feet. \"I have to go back, Hiro.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I know roughly where the human men are traveling. I can try to put you in their path.\"\n\nThey sat in silence. Then Anna shook her head. \"That facility couldn't have been where they made the poison. It was too small. There were too few men.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Hiro told her. \"It's a problem for dragons.\"\n\nHer stern eyes turned on him. \"And who will help you? Your own Rakgar doesn't believe the threat. He listens to the faeries.\"\n\nHiro remembered killing Skorkot. The vision of the treacherous faerie burned in his mind. \"He'll soon learn not to.\"\n\n\"But I'm the only one who has access to question Philip.\" She folded her arms across her chest. \"I think he's learning to trust me more. I'll do whatever it takes to get any information you need, but\u2026\" her voice dropped. \"How do I get it to you?\"\n\n\"You don't,\" he said, staring into the trees. \"I told you, this is not your problem.\"\n\n\"Hiro,\" her voice was so stern his head snapped to look at her, \"I'm your friend. I won't abandon you.\"\n\nThe reminder that he had abandoned her recently almost froze the fire in his belly. He turned away from her face in shame.\n\nHow things have changed, he thought to himself. My heart breaks for a human and I trust her more than I would trust my own Rakgar.\n\n\"I know,\" she said resolutely, \"you'll have to risk coming to see me regularly, perhaps once a week. I'll hang a red banner from my window if we need to meet and speak. I'm sure guards will patrol the borders of the king's lands, but there's a cliff at the base of one of the middle mountains just inside. At the bottom of the cliff is a meadow. I'm fairly certain we can meet there without interruption.\"\n\nHiro studied the ground as she spoke, only partially listening to her. I have changed, true, he considered to himself, but the world around me has not. Only my perception of it. If the world has not changed, then perhaps everything is not as I have been taught.\n\n\"Mid-day,\" she continued, \"guards wouldn't expect a dragon to wander into the king's forest at mid-day. I assume you'll be able to see a red banner hanging from my window from the mountains behind the king's forest?\"\n\n\"I could see a red ribbon tied in your hair on a clear day,\" he admitted, \"but this is too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Are you afraid to meet me?\" she asked with a raised eyebrow.\n\n\"I don't care how dangerous it is for me.\" He tilted his head down to meet her eye. \"What happens to the trust you've built with Philip if he finds out you're trying to help me?\"\n\nHer chest expanded with a deep sigh then she nodded as if coming to a decision. \"I think he feels the same way as I do.\" Hiro's chest rumbled with a chuckle. \"No, really,\" she insisted. \"I don't think he desires this hostility with the dragons any more than you or I. He's being forced into it, really. I'm almost sure of it.\"\n\n\"Either way,\" he said, \"your place is with the other humans.\"\n\n\"Will you visit me?\" she asked. When he didn't answer her, she placed both hands on his claw. \"Please,\" she pleaded, then sat up straight. \"Or do I need to use your own heart against you?\"\n\nHe growled low and soft, not threatening. \"As disgusting as you might still be,\" he finally relented, \"I'll visit you.\"\n\n[ Misinformation ]\n\n\"I think it was the flarote,\" Anna said as she reclined on her pillows. Her face had been washed in a long, hot bath, but it didn't improve her appearance. The hollows in her cheeks were more pronounced now that she had been warmed, but pink flowed through her skin again. Philip could see deep purple circles around her eyes as well. Her dress had been discarded as worse than a rag.\n\nThe healer and majishun had gone when Philip and Torgon arrived. Anna's maid, Amethyst, sat on the edge of Anna's bed, spooning soup into her mouth when she would take it. The maid's eyes were red and bloodshot. She was in almost as bad a state as her mistress.\n\nThe king and his Royal General sat in chairs at Anna's bedside. Philip felt like he was visiting his father on his deathbed again and had trouble sitting still. Except this visit could possibly hold some answers.\n\n\"Flarote?\" Philip asked, glancing at Torgon.\n\n\"After we landed in the cave, I tried to get away, but I couldn't get past the dragon to the front of the cave so I went to the back,\" Anna continued. \"I found a bulb of flarote against the wall and grabbed it, hoping I could distract the dragon with it or something. It chased me to the back and knocked me down and the bulb got squished in my hand. When the dragon reached for me again, I hit it in the nose with my fist full of the squished flarote. I smeared it all over its snout. That's when it went crazy.\"\n\n\"Crazy?\" Torgon asked with narrowed eyes. He and Philip shared another glance.\n\n\"Yes,\" Anna's eyes widened. She stared past them. \"It thrashed, bumped against the walls, and even sneezed lava! It tried to chase after me, but it acted like its body wouldn't move the way it wanted it to. I was able to run past it to get out of the cave. Once I made it outside, I ran downhill. I hid behind some trees. The dragon finally came out of the cave, but it would run, then flap its wings, then fall. It scratched at its nose a few times too. It flew off and crashed in the trees. I ran south.\" She finished with a shrug. \"It was the strangest thing I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"This could explain a lot,\" Torgon spoke from Philip's side. All eyes turned toward him. \"If the flarote made your dragon crazy enough for you to get away, then why couldn't it have caused the dragon to kill those months ago?\"\n\n\"Or cause it to attack us in the first place,\" Philip said, remembering the flarote-based poison the faeries cooked up in the rooms they held in the castle.\n\nTorgon nodded. He and Philip stared at each other. Philip assumed his friend knew they were both referring to the attack on the outpost.\n\n\"Wait,\" Anna said, \"what does flarote have to do with either of those events?\"\n\n\"Who knows?\" Torgon sat up straight with an air of indifference. \"Maybe the dragon overdosed before them, or maybe that dragon has an inborn side-effect to it. Either way, we can't be sure how it affects other dragons, but at least we know it somehow bothers the black one.\"\n\nAnna shook her head. \"I never said the dragon that captured me was black.\"\n\n\"But the black dragon was seen just a day or two before,\" Torgon said. \"I assumed\u2014\"\n\n\"It was a red dragon,\" Anna stated. She slumped into her pillows. Her maid took advantage of her silence to offer more soup. Once she swallowed, Anna added, \"she had yellow wing tips.\"\n\nMoments later, Torgon closed the door to Anna's chambers behind himself and Philip. Once the latch clicked in place, they locked eyes.\n\nTorgon broke the silence. \"You didn't tell her about the betrothal.\"\n\n\"No need to bother her with that now.\" Philip waved it aside, then turned and glared at the door as if he wanted to bash it in. \"Do you think she's lying?\" he asked in a hushed voice.\n\nTorgon shook his head. \"To what end?\"\n\nPhilip's head jerked to face him. \"That's not what I asked.\"\n\nTorgon scrubbed his hands through his hair. \"Are you asking me as a friend or as a king?\"\n\n\"Both,\" Philip answered. \"Give me two answers, if you like.\"\n\n\"As your friend, I'd like you to be able to trust your sister.\" He scuffed his boot on the floor. \"But as your Royal General\u2026\"\n\n\"There's still something we're missing,\" Philip finished for him. \"Isn't there?\"\n\nTorgon tilted his head and met Philip's eye again. \"The bit about the flarote makes a lot of sense, but\u2026it did seem somewhat\u2026rehearsed.\"\n\n\"All the poisoned arrows at the outpost were destroyed, correct?\" Philip asked.\n\nTorgon nodded. \"We made off with a handful, no more.\"\n\n\"Good,\" the young king folded his arms at his chest. \"At least the odds are improving that we won't have another attack soon.\"\n\n\"We can't be certain of it,\" Torgon added.\n\n\"Either way,\" Philip stalked off down the hall with Torgon in his wake, \"this attack on the dragons has been delayed. I intend to make the most of it.\"\n\n[ The True Enemy ]\n\nHiro's claws landed a little harder on the lip of Rakgar's cave than he intended. His temper had risen with every wingfall on his course back to the Rock Clouds. The more he thought about the faerie Skorkot and her treachery, the angrier he became.\n\nWhy couldn't Rakgar see past the faeries' lies? Why did he trust them so blindly? If Tusten had still been here, would he have listened to him? Why wouldn't he listen to Hiro in his father's stead?\n\nHe stalked into the cave, ignoring the questions from The Watch. His neck dipped down as they followed him in growing silence. His body elongated, snaking down the entrance to the large chamber beyond. Rakgar would soon understand. He had to.\n\nHe growled low when he entered the chamber where Rakgar waited. The dragons standing nearby turned at the sound. Rakgar looked up from the opposite side of the dragons grouped around him. Mitashio sat on his left. He raised one scaly eyebrow at Hiro but did nothing more. Several other dragons sat or lay curled on the stones around Rakgar but Hiro ignored them all, except two.\n\nTog rounded the group then stumbled over to Hiro a little slower than the small brown dragon ahead of him. Prak's nasal voice began with the questions.\n\n\"Hiro, where have you been? We didn't think it would take you this long! Did you run into trouble, Hiro? Are you alright? Did the humans attack you again? I knew I should have gone along with you! Did the human give you any trouble? Did it try to run away? Did you eat it? I would have eaten it! Rakgar said she was nothing but a nuisance the entire time she was here! I know it was just a short time, but any human would be trouble! Did she give you any trouble? Did you just kill her? I probably would have just killed her.\"\n\nWhen Prak took a breath, Tog interjected, \"Yes, where have you been?\"\n\nHiro ignored Prak's prattling and eyed Tog, \"Getting proof.\" He glared directly at Rakgar and shouldered past his friends.\n\nHiro could hear Prak whispering questions to Tog behind him, but he snaked his way to Rakgar.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Rakgar sat up straight. Since he sat up so much taller than Hiro, the black dragon was forced to stop directly under the large gray dragon's intimidating eye. \"Did you have any trouble with your mission?\"\n\n\"Indeed, Rakgar,\" Hiro said loud and clear for the whole chamber to hear. \"Do you want me to explain it to you now, or would you rather receive my memories?\"\n\nA choice, Hiro thought. Does he want everyone to hear this or will he try to keep it secret?\n\nRakgar's face could have been stone. Finally, he bent his neck to place his nose in front of Hiro.\n\nHiro gave him the memory of Rylan telling him of the dragon poison. Next, seeing the outpost from a distance. His time in the Ice Ruck. The anger of the Ice Ruck at the human danger. He sent that memory twice, hoping his leader would see the sense in their reaction. The memory of destroying the encampment. Last, he sent the memory of Skorkot trying to kill him with the poisoned arrow.\n\nWhen Rakgar blinked the memories away, Hiro opened his mouth to speak, but Rakgar was faster. He blew a memory into Hiro's face. It was brief. It had obviously been received from another dragon, but the message was that of Rakgar standing in front of the sender.\n\n\"Speak of this to no one. Give none this memory.\"\n\nHiro blinked. Rakgar was trying to hide the truth. Why?\n\n\"Will you still defend them?\" Hiro growled.\n\n\"Hiro,\" Rakgar barked a warning. \"Not everyone should know this.\" The massive grey dragon lowered his voice even more. \"Maybe something should be done, but we can't incite panic.\"\n\nHiro narrowed his eyes. He had never been the obedient type. \"Dragons don't panic. Did the Ice Ruck panic?\" he asked. He swung a claw at the others in the cave. \"They have a right to know who their enemies truly are!\" His voice rose with every word. He spun away from Rakgar to face the dragons in the cave. \"The faerie, Skorkot, tried to kill me! As did the faeries Kradik and Ortym. I will never trust a faerie again!\" he whipped his head to Rakgar. \"And neither should you.\"\n\nHe loped from the great cavern alone. The only sound in his wake was the clacking of his claws against the stone.\n\nPriya landed on the clifftop, stumbling slightly. Visi, as always, sat waiting. The only part of her moving was her tail, lazily lifting and flopping back to the ground.\n\n\"Well?\" the old, white dragon asked without looking at her companion.\n\nPriya settled back on her haunches. \"It happened just like you said it would.\"\n\n\"You doubted?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" the young green dragon said. \"I just\u2026hoped.\"\n\n\"Now you understand the delicate balance of the future and what we wish to accomplish.\" Visi didn't make it a question. She rarely asked questions.\n\n\"I've always understood,\" Priya said. \"I just wish there were an easier way.\"\n\nVisi sighed. \"Let me see it.\"\n\nPriya tilted her head away. \"You doubt?\"\n\nVisi lifted herself from the ground to take steady steps toward the young dame. \"Let me see it,\" she enunciated each word slowly.\n\nWithout looking at the elder dragon, Priya lifted her claw. Under her hovering talons glittered a midnight black, teardrop-shaped dragon heart."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragons 2) Bound in Black",
        "author": "Steven De Luca",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy,dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Hope and Desperation",
                "text": "[ Rumblings of Disagreement ]\n\nGaldor called the moot to order rearing up on hind legs and spreading his green wings wide in the traditional closing. He stood in the middle of the moot chamber\u2014a spacious underground cavern\u2014five dragons to each side of him. Ten dragons made up his council, a mix of the oldest and wisest in their community.\n\n\"The moot is closed,\" Galdor said. \"Let the wisdom and strength of the eleven, forever guide us.\" He folded his wings and inclined his head to the assembled members.\n\nDragons passed their leader, dipping their heads in respect as they departed. Dragons of all colours, light blue, fiery orange, bright yellow, green, bronze and even a silvery platinum. Different varieties of varying shapes and sizes, large and small, left the cavern of the moot until only one remained. Blaze the Black.\n\nGaldor marvelled at Blaze's jet black scales and the flash of white, like a bolt of lightning emblazoned upon the dragon's chest. Black dragons were rare and Blaze was the only black that made his home on the Lifting Plateau. Blaze waited until the rest of the moot departed before he spoke.\n\n\"I would talk with you, moot leader. Of sensitive matters,\" he glanced at the last few retiring dragons, \"for your ears only,\" waiting until they departed the large cavern.\n\n\"Could these matters not have been discussed before the moot ended?\" Galdor asked. This was an unusual request as Blaze was always vocal in the moot.\n\n\"Not when you hear of what I have discovered.\" The concern in his voice wasn't something Galdor was used to hearing. Blaze was always confident and sure. His hushed tone and this secretive request to speak alone, sounded serious.\n\n\"Very well. What's sensitive enough that you would keep it from our moot?\"\n\n\"Treachery,\" Blaze said. \"I fear some of our brothers and sisters of the moot plot against us.\" He glanced furtively at the exit to the cavern as if to check they weren't being overheard. \"Perhaps it may be prudent to find somewhere more private.\"\n\n\"Treachery?\" Galdor questioned. He couldn't believe it. \"Are you sure? Who would betray the moot? And why?\"\n\n\"I'm as sure as I can be, but we shouldn't discuss this here. I'll tell you all I have uncovered, but I would rather do it where there is no chance of us being overheard.\"\n\nGaldor was shocked. Blaze must be wrong. The moot were his most trusted advisors and he knew them all as friends. They were good dragons. Blaze was the only new member of the moot and had arrived at the Lifting Plateau eleven summers ago. Maybe the newest dragon to join the moot could see things he might have missed, his perspective being newer than most. A fresh pair of eyes would see things differently. Either that or he was utterly and completely mistaken.\n\n\"While I do not doubt your loyalty,\" Galdor said, \"I would ponder on your words. Let me observe our brothers and sisters now that you have alerted me. I do not wish to rush into this blind. I have known these dragons a long time and trust them all.\" He didn't want Blaze to feel he couldn't come to him with his concerns, yet his accusations were ludicrous. \"I ask you to be my eyes and ears and keep me informed of anything unusual.\" Hopefully that would keep him placated until all this blew over. \"Between us both, we should be able to monitor the situation before we jump to any conclusions and be in a better position to take action, should we need to. If we need to talk in private, we can always take a flight away from the plateau and discuss our business outside these walls.\" He felt bad humouring Blaze but it was better than confronting the moot with false accusations of treachery.\n\n\"A wise decision, moot leader,\" Blaze agreed, \"but do not wait too long, I fear if you do, all will be lost.\" The black dragon turned abruptly, head swaying from side to side as he surveyed the chamber and the surrounding tunnels, still cautious of being overheard. He took one quick glance back at Galdor and departed the cavern in a display of uncharacteristic behaviour.\n\nGaldor couldn't think why anyone would plot against him. What would be their reason? He had led the moot successfully and other than the normal rumblings of disagreement, the dragons of the Lifting Plateau were content.\n\nOr so he thought. Blaze's words were deeply disturbing. It might be something, but he doubted it was treachery. He would need to pay more attention to the comments and actions of his colony, see if there was anything he was missing. Surely, now he was aware of any possible dissention it would be easier to recognise. He still couldn't quite believe Blaze's ill tidings and hoped the black dragon was mistaken. If something was wrong his perception would have alerted him.\n\nHe was tired, caught unaware by Blaze's imagined conspiracy and reading too much into it. After a good night's sleep he would see things more clearly. He was sure he would be able to dismiss the black dragon's words and reassure him no plot existed. Still, Blaze wasn't a dragon to entertain such fantasies and it was extremely out of character for him. He was a practical and confident dragon. He wouldn't embarrass himself with information that would make him look like a fool. Was there something to his concerns?\n\nWith a heart heavier than it should have been, Galdor ambled from the moot chamber. The words of the black dragon a gnawing burden he never would have anticipated he would carry."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Weeks passed and Galdor observed his fellow dragons, searching for any traces of conspiracy or subterfuge, yet finding none. Blaze came to him regularly, catching him early in the morning or late in the evening, sharing his findings but never having the chance to elaborate before they were disturbed. The more Blaze told him, the less he believed it was true. He was beginning to think Blaze had imagined everything.\n\nGaldor looked out from the ledge he was perched on outside his sleeping cavern. The morning sun heralded a bright new day, but the idyllic sunrise was spoiled as Blaze appeared like a dark cloud, hurrying along the outer ledge of the plateau to Galdor's cavern. It was early and most dragons were still slumbering. By the way Blaze purposefully strode towards him and the fact that he was seeking him out this early, Galdor concluded the black dragon brought with him, what he believed, were more ill tidings.\n\n\"Galdor,\" the black dragon hissed, \"we need to speak.\" He turned his head, looking behind. \"In private. I have uncovered something vital. A human mage is involved!\"\n\nGaldor dreaded his furtive meetings with Blaze. The black dragon's hatred for humans was well known. It wasn't the black dragon's fault, he was only trying to help, but every time they were alone, he would have more bad news. Some other small detail about the conspiring dragons or something else about the supposed plot. He would inform him of a conversation overheard, implicating one of his trusted moot members in the conspiracy. There was never any proof; everything was conjecture and speculation, nothing ever implicated any dragon directly.\n\nEnough was enough, he needed to get to the bottom of what was going on. It was time to call the black dragon's bluff and tell him his annoying theories were fiction. Hopefully once Galdor intervened he could get Blaze to accept there was no conspiracy.\n\n\"Meet me on the southern slopes of the plateau, where the Silver River falls to the valley below,\" he told Blaze. Better to take the black away from the plateau and address this dragon to dragon. \"And let us not depart together.\" He would play along with Blaze for now. The waterfall was far enough away to be private and there were many secluded caves in the rocky cliff face where they could discuss Blaze's concerns.\n\n\"Agreed, moot leader. Your caution is wise. Leaving separately is clever.\" Blaze turned and hurried from the cavern, hesitating at the exit to look around before spreading his wings and jumping from the ledge.\n\nBlaze certainly believed something was wrong and Galdor wondered what could have upset the black dragon so much. His own perception niggled him. He was always mindful of his dragon sense and listened when it warned him something was amiss. The trouble with perception, Galdor mused, was it always more of a hunch, a sixth sense, and how you understood the message it conveyed, was open to interpretation. All dragons were influenced by it, some strongly, others ever so slightly. There was no rule as to how it worked, it just happened. As dragons said, it is what it is.\n\nSometime he wished his perception was a little more obvious. Still, when it niggled him like this, regardless of what it conveyed, he would be wise to stay alert. What made Blaze feel it was necessary to leave their home and speak in private?\n\nHe worried for his friend's sanity. Important matters were rarely discussed beyond the ears of the moot. It was strange behaviour and extremely unsettling. Galdor hoped it wasn't more about the humans again. Blaze didn't like humans. Maybe his unhealthy hate of mankind was causing him to see things that just weren't there. Blaze strongly believed dragons should take back what was theirs and destroy all the human towns and villages, driving them from the land.\n\nHundreds of years ago there had been no humans and all lands belonged to the dragons. Time passed and their numbers grew, their towns and villages always expanding. Humans settled on once empty lands, spreading through the wilderness, building and breeding, their numbers increased faster than any other species. They were like a plague, infesting the valleys and forests, always taking more.\n\nIt was a familiar story wherever dragons made their home.\n\nGaldor decided the dragons of his colony should keep to themselves. Dragons had a poor reputation as far as humans were concerned. The humans didn't realise dragon kind were intelligent and sociable creatures. The moot decided, prior to Galdor's rule, to withdraw and keep their distance and maintain the peace. Galdor saw wisdom in this and followed in the talon steps of his predecessors. Although this was the majority view of his own moot, it wasn't everyone's opinion.\n\nBlaze believed dragons shouldn't let humans populate lands that once belonged to them. Even though he was relatively new to the Lifting Plateau and had been with them for over a decade, his silver tongue often attempted to convince other dragons they should fight and take back what was lost to them.\n\nGaldor maintained the peace he had preserved for generations and there was enough land for both humans and dragons. Their continent was huge and they could live where humans could not.\n\nBlaze argued, dragons should take back what was once theirs. It was weak to let humans have the best land and the best feeding grounds. They should burn the cities of man and crush them with their superior strength. It was a grave mistake to ignore the human advance and sit idly by as their numbers continually expanded. Humans learned quickly as their race evolved and their grasp on their own magic grew stronger.\n\nGaldor maintained the peace. Dragons from the tales of men behaved in this way, not dragons from the Lifting Plateau. They would be no better than tyrants if they eradicated humans. Every race should be allowed to live and there was a whole world to explore. He wouldn't throw away thousands of years of peace and disrupt the balance his ancestors sought to maintain.\n\nHe hoped the moot still saw wisdom in his words and realised his way was best for all concerned. He needed to speak with Blaze and find out what was wrong. What exactly this so called conspiracy entailed and who he thought was involved. Surely then he could convince Blaze it wasn't real and help him see he was mistaken.\n\nGaldor ambled from the cavern, not wishing to hear what the black dragon wanted to tell him, but unable to ignore it. He would meet him as agreed, but not right away. He needed time to think on the best approach.\n\n\"Galdor,\" a voice called to him from below. It was Sapphire the Cerulean. Her blue scales were somewhere between the colour of a bright summer sky and the gemstones she was named after. She was a beauty to behold and her scales sparkled. He pushed himself from the ledge, dropping from the cave mouth to land next to the blue female.\n\n\"Sapphire,\" he greeted her, \"You are up early.\" He didn't want to get caught up in a conversation with the blue dragon and while he was hesitant to hear the latest dark foreboding from Blaze, he didn't want to put it off, either.\n\n\"As are you,\" she replied, tilting her head and making her statement a question.\n\n\"I have...\" he hesitated. He was sure he could trust Sapphire, she was one of the longest serving members of the council of the moot. Blaze never mentioned her in his whisperings or implicated her in any plots. Galdor exercised caution and hated himself for feeling this way with Sapphire, \"...something that needs my attention.\"\n\nHe leaned in close, deciding to trust her in spite of his reservations and lowered his voice, \"I have heard a rumour about a human mage causing trouble.\" Blaze had at least told him that much in his whisperings. He didn't want to tell Sapphire too much about his own suspicions, not until he was sure Blaze was wrong. He was almost sure he was, yet his responsibilities as moot leader dictated he should investigate everything thoroughly. He would be remiss in his duties if he didn't check. He would let Sapphire believe this for now. It was much better than telling her he suspected Blaze was losing his mind. He could always tell her later there was no mage, no trouble. He would deal with Blaze's issues first and if the moot needed to intervene, then he would tell them all.\n\n\"A mage? Here on the plateau?\" She raised the hard bony ridge above her left eye, quizzically.\n\n\"No, not here, but if he is stirring up trouble I will deal with it and we won't need to involve the others.\" That should reassure her temporarily. \"It will just stir up unrest and I don't want that.\" She knew how he felt about keeping to themselves and maintaining the peace. He didn't want to risk another debate about humans again. It would only add fuel to the fire Blaze favoured. The sooner he could show Blaze everything was fine, the better. This was all starting to get overly complicated.\n\n\"Please, Sapphire, keep this to yourself for now. I am handling it. I am sure it's nothing, but if there is anything actually going on, I need to know before I bring this to the moot.\"\n\n\"But what if\u2014\"\n\n\"Please, trust me and do as I ask. I'm sure there is no cause for concern, in fact I'm confident everything will be resolved shortly. I'll speak with you when I'm done and explain everything. Can I count on your discretion?\" He didn't want the moot stirred up because of Blaze's unwarranted suspicions.\n\n\"Always, moot leader. Are you sure I cannot help?\" Sapphire cocked her head in question again, as was her way.\n\n\"I am sure. Thank you, Sapphire. Your understanding and support is something I value, as I do our friendship.\" It was true, his respect for the cerulean blue was great.\n\n\"And I yours. So be it,\" she agreed, \"But,\" and she looked at him, meeting his eye, \"I expect you to come hunt with me and we can discuss it over our kills.\" Sapphire loved to hunt and she was a worthy adversary, blues were known for their competitive streak.\n\n\"I would enjoy that.\" He could think of nothing better right now. \"It has been over long since we last flew together in the hunt. I will speak with you on my return.\" She stood back as he lifted into the air, propelling himself up is a tight spiral. When he was high enough, he closed his wings tightly to his flanks. Air rushed over him as he angled downward, waiting until the last second before opening his wings and gliding towards the plateau's edge.\n\nThe sensation of flying, the freedom of the open air and exhilaration of speed, soothed him. Galdor loved the wide open skies and the thrill of the flight. He sped over the ground, gliding to the edge of the plateau, crossing over the boundary where the land ended, dropping steeply away from the flat ground where he made his home. Wings stretched wide, he waited. Warm air pushed against the thick leathery membranes of his reaching wings, the pressure of the updraft filling them like giant sails and catapulting him high into the morning sky.\n\nThe first dragons to settle on the plateau named their home aptly; the Lifting Plateau. Galdor always marvelled at the natural phenomenon as he rose effortlessly, propelled upward by strong thermal currents. The change in air pressure and the accelerating uplift temporarily eased his troubled mind. He reached the apex of his lift and beat his wings, banking steeply downward, turning in lazy circles as he surveyed the flat land below. A few airborne dragons crossed the plateau and Galdor observed a red dragon, gleaming as the rising sun caught her scales and set them alight.\n\nHe circled the perimeter of the plateau, taking his time, observing the cave mouths in the rocky slopes sweeping down from the mountains above. The lofty peaks pierced the clouds, shrouding their height, high and cool, but not cold enough for snow. Opposite the mountain slopes, on the other side of the grassy plateau, the land dropped again. Far below, the warm humid jungle sprawled off to the west. The heat from the jungle and the cold from the mountains met at the edge of the plateau, forcing the warm air upward. When a dragon flew across the divide between warm and cold, the warmer air thermals pushed up along the plateau's natural rock walls creating the lift.\n\nGaldor crossed the divide again and rose once more, like a leaf on a strong wind, effortlessly extending his wings, expending little effort. The rush of warm winds carrying him higher felt wonderful on his scales. He never tired of the sensation and today was no exception. It made him feel alive, forcing Blaze's words from his mind and giving small respite from the troubles the black dragon shared with him.\n\nSometimes dragons reflected the nature of their colour and Blaze the black certainly brought dark tidings with his stories of treachery and betrayal. Ultimately, Galdor knew he was avoiding the issue. As moot leader he would fail in his responsibilities if he didn't find out what exactly was going on and put a stop to it. Whatever it was.\n\nHe watched as a black shape far below lifted into the sky and turned towards the south. It could only be Blaze. Galdor waited as the black form grew smaller. He drifted on the thermals, spiralling in ever widening circles, not yet ready to confront his friend, but he could find no reason to put it off any longer. Reluctantly he set off in pursuit of the black dragon, casting a keen eye over the plateau, confusion and a little paranoia clouding his reasoning.\n\nBanking steeply, Galdor followed Blaze's path, leaving the Lifting Plataea behind. The ground far below levelled out and soon he was above the Silver River. He flew along its winding course as it turned and twisted, killing time rather than taking the straight route to his destination. The water beneath him reflected brightly like the metal it was named after.\n\nAs the river neared the waterfall its current grew noisy and turbulent. The land dropped away and a spray of mist hung in the air, rainbow hues glistening as the thundering roar from the falls reached his ears. It would make the perfect place to talk, the noise from the waterfall drowning out words destined for his ears alone. This whole situation with Blaze had him on edge. He shouldn't be worried if another dragon overheard their conversation. He was sure Blaze was mistaken, his claims unfounded, and his caution unnecessary. But there was still the hint of hidden doubt. What if he was wrong? Deep down his perception warned him there was something else he was missing and he would be a fool to ignore it. Their covert meeting was an unusual request and although it tugged at his subconscious, he was loathed to admit he could be wrong.\n\nFlying above the falls, Galdor enjoyed the feel of the cool mist as it coated his scales. Beads of water ran from his hide, water resistant scales repelling the moisture. Small rivulets swept out behind him as he plummeted over the edge of the waterfall and descended through the spray. He pulled up as he reached the bottom of his vertical dive, spreading his wings and gliding over the large pool at the foot of the falls, angling towards the grassy shore.\n\nBlaze perched on a rocky ledge of the cliff top, not far from the rushing water, waiting as Galdor alighted onto the riverbank. The green dragon reared up and shook his body, twisting from side to side, droplets of silver flying from his scales. When he was finished removing the excess water he hopped up from the shore and landed on the narrow ledge beside Blaze, talons scrabbling for purchase on the mossy stone.\n\n\"Is this a better place to discuss your concerns?\" Galdor asked, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the rushing waterfall.\n\n\"I suppose it will suffice,\" Blaze answered, craning his neck and looking above, checking to see if Galdor had been followed.\n\n\"There are dry caves farther down the river,\" Galdor said, \"secluded and more private,\" he added, hoping to reassure his companion.\n\n\"That sounds better,\" Blaze said, \"I will follow you there.\" Galdor wondered at Blaze's reply. He was almost never one to follow and usually took the lead. He was definitely acting strangely and Galdor grew more concerned.\n\nGaldor pivoted on the ledge and the loose scree crumbled as has talons gouged the rock face. He pushed backwards as he sailed out from the cliff face, propelling himself upwards. He turned and flew parallel with the river, glancing back as he heard the crack of Blaze's wings, the black dragon mimicking his manoeuvre.\n\nThe caves he mentioned to Blaze weren't that far away and he led the black dragon downstream for a short distance. Below his wings the ground changed from flat grasslands as the river entered a large canyon of red coloured rock. The river slowed and deepened, no longer silver now, but dark blue, almost black, shaded by the steep canyon walls. A few cave mouths were visible, dark holes against the contrast of red. Galdor set course towards them, looking back under his wing to make sure Blaze still followed. The black dragon, much like the river below, stood out against the red of the rocks, making him difficult to miss.\n\nGaldor selected one of the larger caves on the canyon wall, dipped his wings, dropping slightly before tipping them back and catching the air in huge green sails. His body propelled upward, gliding over the rock until he passed the bottom lip of the cave entrance. He closed his wings, pulling them tight into his flanks and shot inside the cave mouth, his talons churning up dust as he came to a spectacular halt on the cave floor.\n\nBlaze drifted up to the ledge and caught the outer ridge of the cave mouth with his talons, awkwardly scrabbling for purchase and attempting to close his wings and stop his forward momentum. Wings whipped the rock, cracking loudly and echoing through the cave, accompanied by claws scraping over stone. Blaze managed to fold his wings and entered the cave, coming to a halt next to Galdor. His landing was functional, but Galdor's own prowess in the air was more efficient and, the green dragon thought, much more stylish.\n\n\"Nice trick.\" Blaze commented. \"It's a tight fit for open wings.\"\n\n\"And if anyone followed us or tries to approach,\" Galdor reassured his friend, \"we'll hear them.\" He moved deeper into the cave, ducking his head and squeezing under a low part of the cave's ceiling. \"Now, tell me of this supposed treachery,\" he commanded, getting straight to the matter. He still didn't believe the black dragon and hoped this was all a misunderstanding.\n\n\"A human mage has wormed his way into our moot. He promises power, gold and silver, tempting some of our brothers and sisters. He tells of a great hoard of treasures ripe for the taking, of conquering the humans and taking what is rightfully ours.\"\n\n\"What advantage would this mage gain from dragons overthrowing humans? It doesn't make any sense. Why would he convince us to break the peace and invite defeat for his race?\"\n\n\"Why indeed. Think Galdor, he must stand to profit in some way. He tells of great wealth, perhaps he plans to profit from the unrest. I don't have the answer to why a human mage would incite war against his own kind. Who knows the minds of humans? Not dragons!\"\n\n\"You have often argued that we should overthrow mankind, why are you telling me?\" Wouldn't this be exactly what Blaze wanted? It didn't sound right.\n\n\"We don't need a human telling us what to do, we can do it ourselves should we desire it!\" Blaze spat. \"I respect your decisions, even if I don't always agree with them. You are our leader and that is how it is. We follow you because we know you have our best interests at heart.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Blaze. Before I act, I need proof of this conspiracy. I need to be sure before I take this to the moot.\" He wanted Blaze to know he would check thoroughly before making any decision. \"Do you have names or any evidence to support your accusations?\"\n\n\"I have better than that. I know where the mage is. I followed him and discovered where his lair is. I can take you there and we can confront him together. But we should do it now, as I think he is ready to start a rebellion and the opportunity of catching him unaware probably won't present itself again. And,\" Blaze purred, \"we can take his hoard of gold and silver, it would only be right after the trouble he has stirred up.\"\n\n\"A fitting punishment,\" Galdor said. \"Extracting vengeance on this upstart and taking his hoard is an appropriate course of action. If we let the mage continue unchecked, it would cause dissention and unrest, not what we want for the dragons of the Lifting Plateau.\" He would play along with Blaze and once he realised there was no mage, perhaps he would admit to himself there was no conspiracy.\n\n\"There is no time like the present, moot leader. We should fly now, stop this man before his promises and lies corrupt our kin. The decision must be yours, but show weakness now and the moot will believe his words. He is a powerful creature and I think he may have used a glamour to beguile or kin. He must be strong indeed if he has the ability to fool our brothers and sisters. He believes himself a match for the strongest of dragons.\"\n\nGaldor growled. His patience over the last few months was coming to an end. This would finish today. He only needed to play along with Blaze for a little longer. He was sure now it was all in the black dragon's mind. Even if Blaze were right, he was Galdor the Green, strong and smart. No mage, fictitious or otherwise, would dare to undermine him and challenge his authority.\n\n\"You are right, Blaze. Take me to his lair and we will end this before his plan begins.\" Galdor's tail whipped back and forth in anger. He didn't hate humans and knew only too well it was better to keep the peace between their species. He expected the mage would not be found, and even if he was real, he would be no competition. He was filled with a desire to crush this imaginary mage and even though his gold and silver didn't exist, he still felt the attraction of precious metals. He almost wished the mage and his hoard were real. Gold and silver would be a welcome payment for the inconvenience.\n\nHe turned and perched on the ledge of the cave. \"I will follow you, Blaze. Let us not waste any more time. I would see this ended today.\"\n\nBlaze leapt from the cave mouth and Galdor took off after the black dragon. His wingbeats thrashed the air as the pent up frustration coursed through his body. He didn't know where the black dragon was leading him and didn't much care, his perception hummed like an irritating insect, no help at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The land below was barren as Galdor followed Blaze in pursuit of their quarry. They travelled for an hour and the farther they flew from the Lifting Plateau, the more desolate the land became. No man or beast made their home out here in the wilderness. The trees and the plants were scarce and the lands empty of life. An ideal place for a rogue mage to hide and plot\u2014unseen by both human or dragon eyes.\n\nThe mountainous terrain they flew over was pitted with black foreboding holes, cave mouths that burrowed into the barren rock. Blaze began to descend, spiralling downward until he arrived at a large gaping cave entrance. Galdor dropped down beside his black guide, dust clouding round them both as they came to a halt.\n\n\"This is the entrance to his lair,\" Blaze said. \"The mage hides inside a labyrinth of tunnels that is difficult to navigate. I should go first and show you the way.\"\n\nGaldor pushed passed Blaze entering into the cave mouth before the black dragon. He wanted to take charge of this situation.\n\n\"This is my fight, Blaze and I will confront the mage. How difficult can it be to follow a tunnel and sniff out his lair?\" He wanted to show Blaze he was prepared to listen and act, if necessary. He peered into the dark, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. A long straight passageway led off into the heart of the mountain. Galdor could see tracks on the dusty cave floor; dragon and human! Was Blaze right? Was there more to this that he believed? Hurrying down the tunnel, he inhaled great breaths and sniffed the air. His sensitive snout picked up the unmistakable tang of magic, distant but strong. It tickled his perception, the sharp stinging tang of human magic, unpleasant and recognisable.\n\nBlaze followed and called out directions when the tunnel forked, leading them closer to their destination. Eventually the passageway opened out into a large underground cavern and Galdor stopped, surveying the darkness for any signs of a mage. He could smell him now, he was close, his scent strong in the confines of the tunnels. Surely Blaze was mistaken. It was possible the mage had nothing whatsoever to do with Blaze's stories and was here for his own reasons. Employing stealth, Galdor crept forward, his head low, ears alert for any sound that would give the mage's location away.\n\nA pale light glowed from the rear of the cavern and as he watched, Galdor saw the shadow of what could only be a man flicker across the cave ceiling. This cave appeared to lead into a smaller cavern, the archway barely large enough for a dragon to pass through. This must be the inner sanctum of the mage and this was where he would hide his treasures, perform his magic and conjure his spells. Galdor was overcome with the compulsion to act. He wasted no time. The time for caution and creeping around was over. Dragons should not have to sneak around, especially a moot leader. It was time to get some long awaited answers.\n\nHe charged across the expanse of the large cavern, his head ducked low, clawed talons gouging grooves in the cave floor as he ran. He was more used to flying at speed than running, but was able to cross the cavern floor to the inner cave in the blink of a dragon's eye. Blaze followed, but he wasn't as fast. That was fine, he didn't need Blaze's help now. It was up to him to deal with the mage and find out if Blaze's accusations held any credence. Blaze could observe and learn how a moot leader handled a human who incited rebellion amongst his dragons, if he was guilty.\n\nHe didn't slow as he approached the smaller cavern and leapt through the gap, pulling his wings tight against his body as he passed through the narrow space in the rocks. His perception alerted him to a change, like a faint memory he couldn't quite recall. Was it the proximity of the mage or something more? He cleared the archway as he pounced, like a giant cat after a tiny human mouse. The mage turned, unfazed by his spectacular entrance, and smiled at Galdor, contempt plain on his small round face. He looked beyond Galdor's head as Blaze appeared at the entrance to his underground lair.\n\nConsidering Galdor's swift appearance inside his domain, and another dragon standing guard behind him, the mage did not look at all surprised.\n\n\"Greetings Galdor the Stupid. I thought you'd be here earlier. Still better late than never.\"\n\nGaldor was astounded. This man should be trembling in fear. How dare he speak like this, with apparently no concern for the potential danger he was in. He made light of his situation and was flippant and rude. A man should always tread carefully when speaking with a dragon, especially a green. His anger flared and the heat of his dragon fire grew deep inside his chest, a rumble escaped his throat and small wisps of smoke curled from his nostrils.\n\n\"You look confused Galdor. Have you not yet realised you have been taken for a fool!\" The thrum of human magic became obvious and Galdor could feel the electricity in the air, like the anticipation after the sound of thunder, knowing the lightning would strike at any second. He looked back towards Blaze and realised the entrance to the cave he entered was changing. The edges of the rocky archway blurred and small sparks crackled and jumped. He could see Blaze through the diminishing gap as the black dragon retreated into the main cavern, withdrawing into the darkness.\n\nWhere was he going? He had said nothing after being so vocal about the mage and how they must confront him. He was... No! It couldn't be. He could see the deception in the black dragon's eyes, read his deceit. The pain of betrayal slammed him like a blow.\n\n\"I see you have finally worked it out,\" the mage sneered. \"Blaze has played his part well. There is no plot within the moot, unless it is ours.\" He side stepped and attempted to dash for the archway, which was growing smaller, too small for Galdor to pass back through.\n\n\"Your black friend led you here, tempted you with his stories and my gold. No gold or treasures for you Galdor, only confinement and death!\" The Mage sprang for the exit to the cave, attempting escape before the shrinking hole in the rock reduced anymore. Human magic filled the cave and Galdor detected the entrance was controlled by the mage, who was desperate to depart before it became too small even for him to pass through.\n\nGaldor was not about to let the man get away, emotion boiled inside him, along with the fire in his chest. The green dragon could no longer hold his rage in check and he lashed out at the mage before he could return to Blaze, who was laughing, safe on the other side of the gap. A terrible gout of flame spewed forth from wide jaws as Galdor flamed the mage, unleashing his wrath. The intense heat of the fire, fuelled by his betrayal, engulfed the doomed man as he tried to escape.\n\nHair ignited, clothes incinerated and flesh burned, blistering and blackening as skin slewed from bone like melting wax. A sickening stench filled Galdor's nostrils and his stomach churned as flame ravaged the human. Even though it was over quickly, it was a horrible way to end another life. The mage died instantly and as his life force faded, so too did the last remaining gap between the two caves.\n\nSolid rock filled the empty space and the momentum of the fleeing mage carried his dead body into the cave wall, his smoking remains slumping to the floor. The smug face of Blaze was the last thing Galdor saw before it disappeared behind the newly formed rock.\n\nGaldor roared in frustration, expelling another barrage of fire at the lifeless mage. Intense flames licked around the already charred carcass, curling up the rock and illuminating the darkness in a grotesque tableau of anger.\n\nThe mage was already dead and there was nothing more he could do other than lash out in frustration. Frantically he clawed at the wall, hoping he could break through and get to the black dragon on the other side but his efforts were futile and Blaze was beyond his reach.\n\nThe stink of burned human filled the cave and as his flames diminished, so did the light. Galdor focused himself, searching for control and peered into the darkness, his eyes growing accustomed to the ominous black.\n\nThere was nothing to see. He was alone in an empty cave with only the dead mage for company.\n\nRealisation dawned like a blinding light in the dark.\n\nHe was trapped in this cave without any visible means of escape."
            },
            {
                "title": "Outside Looking In",
                "text": "Blaze watched as Galdor rushed headlong through the portal, talons leaving furrows in the soft cave floor as he charged towards his demise. He must be able to sense the human mage, the caves stank of man odour and magic. He was so caught up in the moment and desperately close to confronting the enemy, he didn't stop to consider his fatal mistake.\n\nThe black dragon followed, slowing his pace. He wasn't foolhardy enough to get too close to either mage or dragon. Not now things were turning interesting. Hanging back on this side of the mage's passageway to who knows where, and observing Galdor's poor lack of judgement, was a much safer option. Cultivating the seeds of doubt and watching the green dragon unknowingly blunder into his trap would be entertaining\u2014as long as he kept his distance.\n\nThe mage appeared inside the smaller cave and turned and smiled at Galdor, ruining the green dragon's dramatic entrance. He was a smug human, full of confidence and clever words. He thought he was smart with his complex plans and convoluted theories. Blaze was sick of hearing him talk, his squeaky voice and superior attitude were more than he could stand. He was a necessary evil and his usefulness was nearing its end. He would learn that black dragons were smarter and so much more intelligent.\n\nAnd devious.\n\nThe stupid mage put on a good show and followed the script Blaze set out for him. If anybody knew how to get under Galdor's scales, it was him. He had spent the last few weeks setting the scene, convincing Galdor there was unrest in the moot, that a mage was inciting a rebellion with his trusted followers. Small snippets of information dropped into the conversation at the right moment, a secret meeting late at night. He played the green dragon for a fool and Galdor swallowed down his stories without chewing.\n\nThe mage grinned at Galdor, called him stupid and berated his tardiness. The green dragon stood motionless, rage twisting his usually calm demeanour, completely dumbstruck a man would speak to him in this way. Moot leaders were used to respect. Perhaps now he would see the wisdom in his words and realise humans were a scourge to be cleansed. He didn't blame Galdor entirely, the mage had that effect on him too. The moot leader expected subservience and compliance, the mage showed him disrespect and flippancy. That was sure to anger the usually calm dragon. The stupid man might think he was safe, but he wasn't. If he believed Blaze would help him and take his side against Galdor, he was sadly mistaken. It would be educational for them both... and interesting to see how this played out.\n\nBlaze had set two fools against each other, fed them their lines and given them each their motivation. All that was left to do now, was to sit back and watch as they confronted each other, both believing they held an advantage over the other. They would find out how wrong they were.\n\nGaldor's anger made itself obvious as his chest rumbled, a distant thunder deep inside heralding the oncoming dragon fire. Blaze kept to the shadows outside the magical portal, his black scales a cloak of invisibility in the darkness. He had to give the mage credit, the passageway was fashioned in such a way that it looked just like a smaller cave adjoining the larger cavern. There was no indication that it was really a gateway to some other world. It appeared to be the perfect lair for a greedy mage. He performed his magic more than adequately and Galdor hadn't detected anything was amiss. His usual snout for such matters, this time, had failed him. Galdor's snout was keenly attuned to all sorts of magic, but in his rush to catch the mage unaware, he charged through the hidden portal and crossed the threshold between worlds. Little did he suspect he was now standing in a cavern, deep underground, no longer on his own world.\n\nBlaze marvelled at the magical bridge spanning a distance he could barely imagine. It was a magic beyond his ability and the mage explained, at great length, when they conspired. He spoke to Blaze as an inferior as if his spellcasting and knowledge were too far above the black dragon's understanding. He would learn there was more to this plan than his self-proclaimed genius, even though he had done well to set this part of the trap.\n\nRealising that Blaze hadn't followed him through, Galdor turned to see where the black dragon was, just as the archway disguising the portal started to diminish. The mage berated the green dragon asking if Galdor had worked their plan out yet and the arrogant human praised the black dragon for his part in their scheme.\n\nBlaze drew farther back, the pain of betrayal in Galdor's eyes too much for him to bear. He didn't want it to be like this, but Galdor wouldn't listen to any of his ideas or suggestions. If the moot leader had taken him seriously and listened to his advice, he wouldn't be in this predicament. But Galdor knew best and he only had himself to blame. He was always ready with an answer or a reason why they should do things his way. A politician's answer. He listened to the others members of the moot when their ideas, stupid as they were, were voiced. What did Blaze have to do to be heard? What was necessary; what Galdor had forced him to do. Get rid of him.\n\nWith the moot leader out of the way, Blaze would be free to lead the Lifting Plateau to greatness. He would start anew, removing Galdor was just the first part of his grand scheme. When he was finished he would have the power he truly desired and a wealth of knowledge no dragon had ever possessed before. With his new found responsibilities he would be able to lead the colony in a manner befitting dragons.\n\nHe could have challenged for leadership of the moot and fought Galdor to the death. It was still one of the rules, barbaric as it was, that could be used to determine the moot leader. But he didn't want to risk a fight and even though he knew he could best the green, he didn't want Galdor to die that way. He didn't deserve a dishonourable death, misguided as he was, he only had the best interests of the Lifting Plateau at heart. This way, he would be gone and still have a chance of survival. It was possible he might like his new home, living out his life in a new land, on a new world. It sounded quite exciting. Perhaps Galdor would think so too, once he had time to adjust.\n\nThe mage couldn't resist telling Galdor there was no gold or treasure to be found as he sprang around the dragon and tried to exit the cave. The portal shrank, getting smaller and its edges were difficult to see, blurring like a heat haze, little sparks crackled and popped, jumping across the stone where it met its border.\n\nBlaze had to admit, the little human was agile as he attempted to get back to his own side of the passageway. The original plan was to leave Galdor on the far side. The mage, with Blaze's help, would return back through the portal to the soil of his own world, leaving the green dragon trapped, but unharmed. The man dodged to one side, Galdor obstructed his path to the shrinking portal, blocking what should have been an easy retreat. The portal was still large enough for a human to pass through, but Galdor's chances at squeezing through it had gone.\n\nBlaze laughed. The idiot mage had left it too late, spending valuable time taunting Galdor more than he was instructed. He had to show off, prove to himself he was smarter than Galdor. If he was trapped on the other side with Galdor, what was to stop him making a bargain with the green, reopening the portal and them both returning home? He should never have trusted the little human, all his planning would be ruined if...\n\nBright flame, white hot, blasted from Galdor's throat, driving away the darkness and causing Blaze to squint. Galdor's normal calm gave way to a madness, the intense wave of fire was proof of that. Usually dragon fire was orange, yellow or red. White was the flame of frustration, pent up rage and cleansing retribution.\n\nBlaze didn't need to worry about the mage any longer, Galdor solved that problem for him. The mage had been close to escaping, but not close enough. It was a harsh lesson to learn... and much too late. Blaze could appreciate its outcome. The mage, understandably, wasn't nearly as impressed by the lesson.\n\nHair ignited as the flames engulfed him, clothes and flesh burned to black. It was strangely fitting as the mage's skin changed colour to mimic the scales of his former accomplice. Unfortunately the irony was lost on the charred human body.\n\nBlaze leaned in close, peering into the closing portal, sensing the mage's death. No ordinary human would be able to withstand a flaming like that, but he was a mage and might have a spell of protection. Blaze needed to make sure. The portal snapped shut, a muted popping sound accompanied its disappearance. And the spell died along with its source, confirming the mage's demise.\n\nThe last thing Galdor saw before the portal died was his victorious opponent and soon to be leader of the moot. He hadn't been pleased, venting his anger by launching another gout of flame at the rapidly closing portal. But he was too late. The mage's spell ended abruptly and the flames failed to pass through the gap in the rock as it vanished from existence.\n\nHe stared at the solid rock wondering if Galdor appreciated his kindness at letting him live.\n\nThey had been friends and no matter their differences, he had liked the green dragon. He was sure he would be fine, he had always been lucky and often managed to fall on the right side of good fortune. Well, maybe not today, but at least he was alive.\n\nBlaze grinned to himself, happy that this part of his plan had worked out better than anticipated. Both Galdor and the bothersome\u2014but necessary\u2014mage were gone. He had planned on using the mage for a little while longer, but that didn't matter now. At least he wouldn't have to dispose of him later. His old friend had managed to help him one last time before leaving his moot leaderless. It was a favour he would gladly repay.\n\nBlaze casually wandered back through the caves. There was much to do, but now there was time. With Galdor out of the way, he was ready to fill the void."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fungi and Fishing",
                "text": "Galdor surveyed the cavern once more, prowling around its circumference examining the rock walls. It didn't matter how many times he checked, there was no way out, no exit or passageway large enough for a dragon to squeeze through. It was no different from the last dozen times he had inspected his new prison. He discovered a few narrow tunnels leading into the large chamber he was trapped in, but nothing even remotely dragon sized. He even tried digging with his claws, scraping and scratching, but the rock was solid and unyielding.\n\nThe charred smell from the dead mage had grown weaker, but he could still sense the human magic emanating from his remains. It must have been strong magic for it to still be detectable. It was a mystery to him why the magic should linger now that the mage was dead. He didn't know enough about human magic to understand why its presence remained. Human magic was different from the magic dragons called upon. The opening between this cave and the one Blaze occupied, abruptly closed when the mage's life ended. He would expect that the magic should have dissipated too.\n\nHe wasn't sure if he regretted killing the human. Taking a life\u2014even a human life\u2014was not something he enjoyed. Anger gave way to frustration and he couldn't help thinking the mage deserved nothing less for his actions. But he did regret being fooled by a man... and the treacherous black dragon that conspired against him. He may have exacted his revenge on the mage, but Blaze was out there\u2014 somewhere\u2014free to wreak havoc unchecked. Galdor didn't like to think about what Blaze would do and currently he was powerless to stop him, stuck in here.\n\nJust where was here exactly? Galdor's perception, his dragon sense, told him he was no longer on his own world. He knew this to be true, even if he didn't know how. He suspected the mage's powerful spell had opened a passageway between worlds. Probably the reason why the residual magic he sensed was so strong.\n\nNot something a dragon was familiar with and as far as he knew, not a spell his magic could recreate.\n\nHe also sensed he was deep underground. His perception was rarely wrong. He wished he had paid it more attention before leaping through the disguised passageway and acting on impulse.\n\nThe cave was cold, the air musty and undisturbed and smelled of fungus. If anything had ever visited this cave before, it had been a long time ago and hadn't bothered to stay.\n\nThere were dark mushrooms sprouting from the cave floor and Galdor snuffled in the dirt, digging a few free with his snout. They were small and he would have to eat a lot if they were to provide him any sustenance. Dragons needed meat, but if mushrooms were all that were on the menu he might as well give them a try; even though they didn't smell appetising. He gobbled a few down and instantly regretted it. The taste was revolting! Mouldy and rancid. They possessed some strange magical property he was unfamiliar with, that reacted with his own. Their potency must be extremely strong as they were tiny compared to his body size. He gagged and coughed up the mushrooms, vomiting them onto the cave floor. His head swam and his stomach roiled, cramping in agony. These would be of no help, they were poison to him.\n\nHe flopped down on to the cold floor, resting his head on outstretched front legs and assessed his predicament. No food or water. No way of escape. Nothing at all to help him. Even his magic was of little use down here in the subterranean depths. Blaze was gone, the passageway closed and there was no way home.\n\nThe conversations with Blaze, the lies he invented to create a fictitious conspiracy within the moot, all of it was a trick. He had never fully believed and should have never assumed Blaze was mistaken. How had he not seen through his subterfuge? The black dragon had spent weeks undermining his confidence, whispering in his ear about plots that didn't exist, tempting him with gold and treasure ripe for the taking. When he had seen the mage, especially after expecting no one to be there, he had reacted on instinct.\n\nIt was obvious to Galdor now. Blaze coveted his position as moot leader and wanted to rule. He had employed the mage to trap him, the only dragon that stood in his way. Galdor wondered why the mage trusted Blaze and had thrown his lot in with the black dragon. He could contemplate the reasons for ever, but he would never know for sure. It was easy to see how fully Blaze had fooled him. Cruel retrospection was as bitter as the mushrooms. The taste of the foul fungi would fade in time, unlike the memory of how he was tricked.\n\nWhat lies would Blaze tell the dragons of the Lifting Plateau? How would he explain why their moot leader was missing? Would they even suspect the black dragon at all, or follow him as blindly as he had? Blaze, he realised, was a master of deception. He was skilled in weaving a compelling tale and clever with his words. Galdor was powerless to intervene now he knew the truth, knew exactly who the real conspirator was. He couldn't help feeling a little conflicted at the satisfaction the death of the mage brought. He had probably done Blaze a favour, the mage's life expectancy was likely to be shorter than planned and Galdor had only hastened his end. Blaze wouldn't need to get rid of the human now, Galdor had unintentionally solved that problem for him.\n\nBlaze had never liked humans, always maintaining dragons should destroy them, calling them a plague against nature. Galdor should have paid more attention to the black dragon's grumblings, seen beyond the words and discovered his true colour; black like his scales, like his heart.\n\nNow he had time to reflect, there was something strange about a black dragon with a white flash on his chest. It could just be an unusual mark, but Galdor didn't know of any other dragon that had such a unique adornment on their scales. Blaze hadn't been hatched at the plateau, but joined their colony. There was nothing odd about that, but on reflection, he didn't really know much about him other that what he had shared. Now he wondered if what Blaze shared with them about his past was real or if it was more of his lies. Was the black dragon's intention always to get rid of the moot leader and take his place?\n\nGaldor breathed out a long sigh, the sound of exasperation echoing through the empty cavern. What did it matter now? Stuck here with no means to return home and stop Blaze, whatever his plans. The black dragon had arrived at the Plateau and Galdor accepted him at face value. A dragon was a dragon and shouldn't plot against his own. Black dragons were rare and perhaps they weren't the same as greens when it came to looking out for one another.\n\nAll dragons squabbled and had differences of opinion, sometimes they even fought, but actively conspiring with man, against one's brother, was unthinkable. Galdor hoped the moot would see Blaze for the black hearted, black scaled enemy he was, but hope was in short supply, especially here. With no obvious source of food or water he wouldn't be able to survive. Dragons were able to live for short periods of time without sustenance, but eventually he would wither and die.\n\nGaldor closed his eyes and drifted slowly towards sleep. He could dream of escaping this place, but... Sleep!\n\nHe could sleep! Of course he could. Not the long sleep of old dragons, dragons who had grown tired and were near the end of their life cycle. He knew the secret of the long sleep and how to enter it and, if he was clever, he could use this knowledge to extend his life. He needed time to think through his plight. This was a magic he could use to help. He wouldn't have to worry about eating and if he was lucky, in a decade or so, an opportunity for escape might present itself. It wasn't much, but it was all he had. He would not give up hope even though his future looked bleak.\n\nHe would wait.\n\nDragons were a patient lot and greens were the most patient of them all. He wouldn't lie down and die, not as long as he still drew breath.\n\nHe rose and paced the cavern until he found an earthy part of the floor, free from rocks and stone. He scraped his selected spot, raking it with his talons and loosening the compacted ground. When he was satisfied, he dropped down, pushing his bulk and shifting his weight until he made a hollow depression. If he were to sleep for any length of time, the more time he spent preparing the ground, the less uncomfortable it would be. He didn't want his magically enhanced slumber to be disturbed by a sharp rock or awkwardly placed boulder. Dragon scales were tough, one of the hardest and more resilient armours known, but if he lay down and something annoyed him, it would disturb his focus and keep him from sustaining his extended rest.\n\nHe shuffled around at bit more, making sure he was as comfortable as possible, then finally settled. His huge wings were tucked in tightly and he wrapped his tail around his body, turning his neck to complete the circle\u2014tail to snout\u2014like a cat curled up in front of a fire. He took a few huge breaths, slowly inhaling and exhaling, and drew on his magic.\n\nPushing the bitter taste of Blaze's betrayal from his mind, he focused on relaxing, clearing his mind of any distractions. He reached for his magic, not too deeply as he would have to get the amount he needed perfect. He didn't dare invoke the long sleep, as once he crossed that threshold, there would be no return. He wasn't ready to lie down and give up. He released the magic, letting it flow through his body. The warmth of the spell chased away the chill of the cavern and the glow of magic emanating from his scales, pushed back the darkness.\n\nGaldor glowed, his green scales bathed in a soft golden light that radiated from their edges, a warm wash of hazy magical light covering him entirely. His eyelids fluttered and a few small wisps of smoke drifted from his nostrils as he succumbed to a deep resting slumber. He sank below consciousness, embracing the spell that allowed him to preserve his energy and slow down his metabolic rate. He would rest and wait, without the need of sustenance. He found the balance and could remain this way for decades, even centuries, should he need to. He wouldn't give up. He would find a way forward, a way out, he only needed to wait. Just how long that wait would be he didn't know, but for now, it was enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Blaze launched himself from the cave ledge and soared out over the mountainside, leaving the maze of tunnels behind. He wouldn't need to return to the fictitious lair of the mage any time soon. Galdor was trapped on another world with no means of escape. Galdor the Gone!\n\nHe flew deeper into the desolate lands, there was one more errand to perform before returning to the Lifting Plateau. He was careful when Galdor had still been here, exercising extreme caution, but now he was free from the green dragon's rule and he could relax a little. His prize was well hidden and far away from the caves where he trapped Galdor. He reasoned the green dragon wouldn't be able to detect anything that unusual such a long distance from the mage's fictitious lair. And he didn't know if the mage would sense it either and come snooping where he didn't belong.\n\nHe flew above the valley, the Silver River cut deeply through the barren rocks, dark and slow flowing. The river travelled hundreds of miles across the land and its nature changed with the terrain. Its surface was no longer the silver that gave the river its name. The flow was slow moving and shaded by the sheer rock that bordered its shores, the steep canyon walls it cut through, cast their shade across its surface. The deep dark water appeared devoid of life, but Blaze knew what lay hidden beneath its surface.\n\nHe navigated the canyon following the twists and turns of the deep water below, until it widened. Pillars of rock, tall and straight, rose out of the water, their height level with the top of the canyon. Bands of colour, shades of red and orange, ringed the giant monoliths, marking off the millennia, mimicking the cliff walls.\n\nBlaze closed his wings and tipped his head forward, plummeting towards the river's surface, he inhaled deeply and filled his lungs. He cut the water's surface cleanly, closing his nostrils as he entered smoothly into the dark depths. The chill of the cold water cooled his scales as his body's momentum pushed him deeper below the surface.\n\nVisibility in the murky depths wasn't a problem. Dragon eyes could see in the dark, whether it be the night sky or deep water. Blaze used his tail, swishing it casually from side to side and propelling himself with little effort. He loved to swim and had chanced upon his discovery purely by accident, or so he had believed. Now he wasn't so sure.\n\nBlaze had swam in this river many times and loved to catch the giant eels that inhabited the deep waters. They were fast, but so was he. The effort of chasing them through the depths was worth the reward. He loved the taste of the eels and often came here to fish, rather than hunting on the plains.\n\nHe recalled the day last summer when he made his discovery, his memory vivid...\n\n...it was hotter than normal and he'd been flying above the river, observing the waters beneath. A shoal of giant eels breached the surface, disturbing the calm waters. One of the eels was massive, almost the length of his body and as thick as a tree trunk. Blaze targeted the eel, diving down and trying to grab it in his talons. The huge creature was strong and didn't give up without a fight. It writhed, twisting and turning as it thrashed wildly until it managed to wriggle free of his grasp. Blaze chased his prey, following it as it slipped below the surface, blood flowing from where his claws had torn the eel's leathery skin. He pursued it through the murky waters, the scent of fresh blood easy for a dragon to follow.\n\nIn an attempt to evade its chasing predator, the eel swam deeper, diving down to seek sanctuary on the dark riverbed, but it was weak from its injury and loss of blood. Blaze was closing in on his prey when a purple glow, radiating out from beneath him, caught his attention. The riverbed was bathed in a strange purple light which didn't originate from the sky above, but from below.\n\nThe eel pulled away, taking advantage of the distraction that slowed its dark pursuer, but Blaze wasn't quite ready to give up the chase. Ignoring the strong attraction from the purple glow, he put all his effort into propelling himself through the murky water, his tail stirring up the silt as it thrashed, putting him back in the chase.\n\nThe eel weaved, swimming from side to side, its motion snakelike as it rippled through the water. Even though it wasn't travelling in a straight line, Blaze was hard pushed to keep up. This was the eel's domain, a creature evolution had designed perfectly for its environment. Dragons were best suited for flight and were adept on land, but Blaze had spent many hours swimming and fishing and was no stranger to the water. He lunged forward, whipping his tail up and down in an attempt to generate more movement and pulled unfurled wings, using them like giant flippers, speeding him closer to the escaping eel.\n\nHe snapped once, narrowly missing the eel, a burst of bubbles spilling from his nostrils. He closed them quickly to avoid snorting in water, knowing that he would need to surface soon. He ignored his burning lungs as they ached for air. Putting all his power into a last desperate attempt he thrust forward once more and this time jaws clamped on slippery skin, gouging teeth biting into the eel's flesh. The water turned red and the taste of warm blood exploded inside his mouth. The eel, sensing it was close to death and unable to break free of the dragon's jaws, coiled its body around Blaze's head and neck like a constricting snake, in a desperate attempt to fight back.\n\nThe black dragon bit down harder, twisting and turning, deadly jaws locked tight, rolling in the silt of the riverbed like a huge black crocodile. The writhing limbs of a dragon and a twisting eel, added to the mix of sandy soil and blood clouded water.\n\nLungs now bursting for air, Blaze found purchase on the muddy riverbed, pushing his powerful rear legs and launching himself\u2014and the eel\u2014upwards. He rose from the river's depths, tail and wings working together to speed his assent through the dragging water.\n\nAs he rose towards the surface the purple glow caught his attention once more, shining weakly through the stirred up cloud of silt. Blaze slowed, mesmerised by the light, drawn to investigate its unknown source. He wanted to find out where the light originated from and why it compelled him to search it out.\n\nThe eel reminded him there were more important matters he needed to take care of first, its body curled and tightened, crushing his throat. Blaze swam towards the natural light of the sky, finally breaking clear from the water's pull and into the air. Water ran from his black scales, his wings whipping the river's surface as he exited, climbing upward. The giant eel added extra weight, straining his tired, oxygen starved muscles. Flying with a writhing eel, twisting and turning, altered his balance and made it harder to maintain his direction and gain height. The easy option would be to open his jaws and release the eel, but Blaze wasn't prepared to do that.\n\nHe drew in what air he could, widening his now opened nostrils and inhaling as much as the constricting coils around his throat would allow. His wingbeats steadied and stroke by stroke, he cleared the steep canyon wall. He flew out over the rocky cliff side, the water below him replaced with bright sand. He opened his jaws, relinquishing his hold on the eel and was rewarded as the pressure around his throat vanished. The eel detached itself from Blaze and fell, uncoiling as it sensed freedom. If it thought the clever ploy of strangling its attacker successful, it would learn its mistake when it landed on the barren ground below.\n\nBlaze turned, banking back to claim his meal, but the eel hadn't surrendered yet. He admired its resolve never to give up as it hit the ground with a puff of dust and instantly started wriggling towards the cliff edge. It contracted and expanded its coils, pushing across the ground, probably sensing the river below, instinct driving it on to freedom. Sand and dust stuck to its sides, mixing with the blood oozing from its wounds. If it reached the water, it knew it still had a chance of surviving.\n\nThat\u2014Blaze decided\u2014wasn't going to happen. He filled his lungs and dropped from the sky, talons outstretched. The eel reached the cliff edge and slithered, head first, out into the empty air. Gravity took over and pulled its body downward, moving faster as more of its weight slid out over the cliff edge.\n\nBlaze hit the edge of the cliff, talons closing around the tail of the eel, snatching it just before it began to fall clear. Blood spurted from the fresh puncture wounds, coating the black dragon's claws. He flapped his wings, dragging the eel back over the land. It hung lifeless in his grip now, spent after its final desperate exertion.\n\nBlaze hit the ground, crushing the eel's tail as he landed, not wanting to let go. He released the dying creature and it lay still, the only movement it was capable of now was the flapping of its gills as it struggled to breathe. Blaze gripped it below the head with his front talon, crushing its throat, satisfaction flooding through him. Just as the eel had tried to strangle him, he now had that advantage over it. He squeezed, his sharp claws burying themselves into the eel's skin, the crushing strength of his grip tearing flesh. Raising the eel up, he stared into its black eyes finding no sign of intelligence. It wasn't aware of its defeat as it hung limply from his claws.\n\nBlaze crushed its head between his jaws, enjoying the warm flesh and blood as he tore it free from its body. He devoured some of the eel, savouring its taste. It was a huge specimen and he was unable finish it all, leaving the remains of his feast for scavengers.\n\nHis thoughts returned to the purple light, deep beneath the river's surface.\n\nHe needed to bathe and clean the blood from his scales and now there was no giant eel to capture, he could focus on the strange light source. He balanced on the canyon's edge at exactly the same spot the eel had attempted its escape. Tipping his weight forward, he pushed himself out from the rock and dropped from the cliff. Head thrust forward, wings tucked to his flanks, he hit the water perfectly, slipping below the surface with minimal resistance.\n\nHe let his speed carry him down into the depths once more, gliding through the water effortlessly. The disturbed silt had settled after his underwater struggle. He neared the riverbed and was rewarded with the compelling purple light, a beacon in the darkness, calling him closer. It was difficult to see where the light source originated from as it was spread out over a large area.\n\nHe swam nearer and a few smaller eels darted from the path of the oncoming predator. Blaze had expected the shoal to have scattered after the earlier disturbance. Eels would usually seek out nooks and crannies in the rocks or go to ground on the riverbed, burying themselves in the soft silty mud. Now that he had time to observe, he wasn't the only one attracted to the compelling purple glow. There was an unusual amount of aquatic activity in the area, all just as curious.\n\nBut he wasn't another onlooker basking in the strangely lit water, he was an intelligent dragon bursting with curiosity and a compulsion to discover where the light came from... and why.\n\nTaking care not to disturb the riverbed silt, he cruised slowly along the submerged canyon wall. The purple glow intensified and he twisted his neck, looking upwards and realised why he hadn't been able to locate the light's source. An overhanging shelf jutted outward from the rock and viewing it from straight on, it looked like part of the underwater canyon wall. From the angle of Blaze's head, he could see there was a space behind the overhang, shielding the light and causing it to deflect downward rather than out. No wonder he couldn't see where it was coming from, when he was parallel with the rock its source was completely disguised.\n\nDetermined to see what was hidden behind the rock shelf, he twisted his body, turning himself upside down and swimming with his back facing the riverbed. There was a gap between the riverbed and the bottom of the overhanging rock where the light shone out. It was such a beautiful colour, its glow intoxicating and almost magical. Blaze pushed his head and neck deeper under the gap, wriggling like the eel and forcing his bulk under the rock. He swam upward towards the light, aware that he needed to make haste, only able to hold his breath for a limited time. Dragon lungs may be large, but so was the amount of oxygen they needed to breathe. Even though he was practiced at underwater swimming, he still needed to come up for air.\n\nHe examined the hidden area behind the rock shelf, knowing he would have to call off his search soon and head back up to the surface. He needed to breath and was reaching his limit when his head broke free of the water and he emerged into an underwater cave... filled with air! He pushed farther into the entrance, claws scrabbling for purchase on the rim of the opening, until he managed to pull himself inside.\n\nThe cave would have remained hidden if it wasn't for the purple glow lighting the way. It was dark this deep down in the river's depths and the light appeared brighter than it really was, exaggerated by the surrounding blackness.\n\nBlaze stood at the edge of the pool he'd used to enter the cave, water dripping from his black scales. He was amazed at this secret underwater cave and the fact that it held air, musty damp breathable air. The inside of the cave was decorated with stalagmites rising from the floor. Stalactites, like giant icicles, reached down from the ceiling to meet them. The roof was higher where he stood, sloping back toward the rear of the cave at an angle. Some of the thick trunks of the stalagmites were fixed to the bare rock floor while others rose from shallow pools. Drips rained down intermittently, dropping from the ceiling or from the pointed tips of the stalagmites. The echoing drips filled the silence with their soothing sound.\n\nAny formations Blaze had previously witnessed had been white in colour, but these ones glowed with a deep purple phosphorescence. The walls of the cave were lit by the glowing structures and their colour reflected off the pools of water, casting various shades of light blue, dark blue and purple, rippling in time to the dripping water's movement.\n\nBetween the formations, smaller alcoves had been formed where pillars had grown and thickened over the millennia. Blaze knew the cave was ancient, these formations would have taken thousands of years to develop and his perception confirmed this. He wondered if any other living creature had ever witnessed this amazing place or if he was the first intelligent being to visit here. There was something magical about the cave and it wasn't just the spectacular view. He sensed something more, just under the surface of his conscience mind, gently compelling.\n\nBlaze drank in the incredible scene he had stumbled upon, wondering why the unusual stalagmites and the stalactites glowed. He sensed an unknown magic, but it wasn't from the rock formation, they appeared to be natural in origin.\n\nHe moved away from the pool, slowly examining the inside of the cave, mesmerised by the moving reflections. The cave was larger than he expected and he squeezed between the rock formations, exploring the deep recesses behind the purple pillars.\n\nThe cave turned back on itself and Blaze navigated through the spaces between the stalactites, following the tunnel. The light grew dim but there was still enough to see by. The pull of magic was stronger here, and the deeper he explored, the stronger it became. The angle of the ceiling sloped towards the floor and Blaze had to crouch, making it harder for him to navigate the diminishing passageway.\n\nThe tunnel came to an abrupt end. A solid rock wall signalled to the black dragon he had arrived at his unknown destination.\n\nAnd Blaze came face to face with the source of the magic that had drawn him here...\n\nHe snapped back to the present, his memory of the discovery fading. A warm purple glow illuminated the depths of the riverbed, welcoming him back to the secret underwater cave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Tired Bones",
                "text": "Galdor opened his eyes and sniffed the musty air. His perception alerted him to the distress and panic invading his senses. These were emotions not solely his own. His forced open eyelids heavy with sleep and blinked a few times until they moved freely. He had slept for a long time and something disturbed his slumber, breaking the spell and forcing him into a state of wakefulness. Even through his enhanced sleep he was alerted to any change in his environment. He didn't want anyone or anything approaching undetected and catching him unawares. Groggy and a little disorientated, he focused on waking fully.\n\nThe last 23 years had passed in the blink of the Earth Mother's eye. His internal calendar was never wrong and his perception unerringly accurate. Memories came flooding back, a harsh reminder of how he was trapped and who was responsible. He cleared his head, shaking lose the cobwebs of prolonged slumber. An impressive yawn split his jaws and he inhaled loudly, displaying sharp teeth to an empty cavern.\n\nThe sensation of fear tickled his nostrils and as he became more aware of his barren surroundings, he realised he wasn't alone! Something had unintentionally woken him, its fear invading his subconscious, and he could hear movement from the far end of the empty chamber where the narrow tunnels entered.\n\nHe turned his head, slow and quiet, his curiosity peaked. He had drifted in his magically enhanced slumber, his metabolism slowed down to preserve and prolong his life, careful not to embrace the long sleep. Although he knew its secret and how to use it, the long sleep was something for old dragons. His technique was similar, but he didn't put himself fully under. He was still partially aware of his surroundings when he rested, but any change in environment, a noise or even a bright light, would register and alert him, bringing him back into a wakened state.\n\nThe scuffling sound moved closer and a low pitiful bleating echoed softly around the rocky cavern. Galdor smelled blood. Warm blood, alive and pulsing through the creature's veins, tantalising his senses. Senses starved and malnourished for over 20 years. The creature was small, Galdor could see the dark shape as he focused his eyes in the dark. As his vision adjusted, the dark shape became clearer until he identified a coat of shaggy brown hair. It was a goat. Little horns protruded from the goat's head and it even had a small beard. Galdor's belly grumbled, loud as thunder in the quiet cavern. The goat froze and hunkered down, spooked by the sound.\n\nThe hungry green dragon could now see the blood he smelled, seeping from the goat's torn and twisted front leg. How it had found its way down here was a mystery, but judging from its wound, it hadn't been able to escape. For a moment, Galdor appreciated the trapped beast's plight. Like him, it was stuck underground, lost and alone, with no means of getting home. However, unlike Galdor, this unfortunate creature was going to die today. It might be scabby and flea ridden, but to him it was a feast. He hadn't eaten for far too long and even though he was able to stave off the worst of it, hunger still gnawed his empty stomach. Sleeping though the constant gnawing was at best bearable, but it wasn't pleasant.\n\nGaldor pounced, covering the distance between himself and the goat with ease. He snapped his jaws around the defenceless beast, crushing its neck and savouring the hot blood as it splashed inside his mouth. The goat was lean and stringy and he knew it would have been tasteless and bland under any other circumstances, but today it was divine. He tore meat from bone, ripping large mouthfuls of warm flesh and savouring them. He controlled an urge to swallow it down without chewing, his stomach crying out for sustenance. With all the self-control he could muster, he slowly chewed the meat, drawing out each mouthful, relishing his first meal in over two decades. Sweet juices mixed with blood trickled from his jaws as he devoured every scrap he could. He ate everything, even consuming the skin, the part of a kill he would normally leave. That wasn't an option now, he didn't want to waste a single scrap. He couldn't afford to be fussy. When he was finished, he picked at the carcass, cleaning every tiny morsel of flesh from the bones until only a skeleton remained. He even cracked the bones open, crunching them between sharp teeth and sucking out the tasty marrow from their insides.\n\nWhen he was done, hardly anything remained of the goat. Galdor was glad it had found its way down to his cavern and hadn't laid down and died in one of the narrow tunnels. He would surely have smelled it had it been stuck somewhere beyond his reach, torturing him with its scent, close enough to smell but too far out of reach.\n\nGaldor sniffed the air and followed the scent of the goat, tracking its passage across the cavern until he discovered the tunnel it had emerged from. Pushing his snout as far as possible into the narrow tunnels, he sniffed again, hoping to smell another stray animal, lost in the darkness. He knew his surprise meal was probably a lucky accident, but he was awake now and there was no harm in checking.\n\nThe small tunnel was unyielding, there was no give or lose rock as he pushed and prodded and he thought once more about digging his way free. If the goat had entered this way\u2014had he been able to fit\u2014he was positive the tunnel would eventually take him above ground. He gave up exploring the tunnel, there were no more goats and absolutely no way he was going to get through there. He could scrape and dig for centuries and wouldn't be able to get any distance. And, he wouldn't have the energy without anything to sustain him.\n\nHe prowled the cavern, sniffing and scratching, hoping against everything he already knew, that he had missed a hidden tunnel, an undiscovered passage, anything that would provide a means to get him outside and above ground. He was only fooling himself, there was no way out.\n\nGaldor returned to his hollowed out depression, settling down next to the scant remains of the goat. Just a few small bones were all that remained of his meal, a cruel reminder there was nothing here to eat. He longed for blue skies, to feel the sun's heat on outstretched wings. To fly, to swim, to eat, anything was preferable to the depressing darkness and colourless rock of the musty cave.\n\nHe closed his eyes and embraced his magic, slipping back towards his dream state. He cursed the thought of Blaze, victorious and no doubt smug that his plan to be rid of him had worked. He couldn't shake the hatred that ran deep inside, he still had trouble believing his former friend tricked him and their friendship had been a lie.\n\nA soft scratching close to his muzzle broke his train of thought. He cracked open one eye, raising the eyelid enough to squint out. Another unexpected visitor! His lonely cavern was a hive of activity today\u2014Galdor the Popular, receiving another visitor. He caught the slightest movement as he peered out into the blackness. Crawling over one of the goat's bones was a skinny rat. It sniffed the remains then began to lick one of the broken splinters, scavenging the marrow Galdor had missed. Galdor observed the beady eyed rodent, its soulless black eyes reminding him of the final look he shared with Blaze before the portal closed.\n\nThe green dragon relaxed his jaws, ever so slowly opening them and poking his tongue out. Inch by inch his tongue slithered quietly across the floor. The rat stopped and sat up on its hind legs, its instinct for survival alerting it to danger. Galdor's tongue lashed out, striking like a viper, too fast for the rat to dodge. Curling around the scrawny rodent, Galdor tightened his grip; from viper to constrictor. The rat squealed and wriggled, attempting to bite its captor, but Galdor had a firm hold on it and it wasn't able to use its teeth to any effect. He opened the one eye fully, eyeing the rat and wondering if the smell from the dead goat had attracted the tiny creature.\n\nHunger won over curiosity and he pulled his tongue into his mouth, unravelling it from the rat and launching the rodent into his gullet. At the same time, he called forth a little of his dragon's breath, covering the writhing rat in a short burst of flame. He coughed and regurgitated the rodent, snapping it smartly between his teeth before it flew out onto the cave floor. Barbequed rat was better than raw rat, only slightly, but it was better. He crunched the charred snack and swallowed it down. It might be small, but every little helped.\n\nHow low had he fallen? Galdor the Green, once moot leader of the Lifting Plateau, respected by his peers, wise and fair, reduced to eating rats! Desperate times called for desperate actions and devouring roast rat wasn't something he was proud of. But, looking at it positively, he had food in his belly and was surprisingly content. He cleared his throat and blew out a tiny flame, expelling the remaining fire called up to cook the rat.\n\nWisps of smoke curled upwards from his nostrils, disappearing to become part of the dark as the flame faded.\n\nGaldor embraced sleep and glowed golden as his magic radiated out from between his scales, lighting up the dancing trails of smoke for an instant before fading and the cavern returned to darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "The years passed slowly and Galdor drifted along with them, with nothing to do but wait. What he was waiting for, he wasn't quite sure, but his perception told him, so he remained patient.\n\nHe awoke a second time from his hibernating slumber, groggy but fully aware of where he was and how many years had passed. Galdor was always able to understand the passage of time and how to mark it accurately. It was another ability that came easy to him, similar to his snout for sniffing out magic. He knew with unerring confidence that he had been in this cavern now for 47 lonely years, his latest nap dragging painfully for the last 24.\n\nHe stretched stiff muscles and unravelled his wings, shaking free a thick coating of dust that settled on him while he slept. He paced, first around the edges of the cavern, listening to the sound of his own breathing and nothing else. Not a single thing stirred, no goat or rat, nothing but himself. Alone.\n\nThen he covered the rest of the large cavern, moving back and forth, traversing every inch of the floor. He was thankful the area of confinement was large enough for him to move about freely. Freely; perhaps not the best word to describe his actions, he mused.\n\nThe goat's bones lay pitted and decayed. The body of the mage still stank of magic when he got close enough for it to be obvious. The smell of the unknown human magic dredged up the bitter taste of his memories from the day he was trapped, and he deliberately kept his distance from that part of the cavern.\n\nHe would prefer to sleep and let the years pass by in a state of semi-oblivion. He found it easier to deal with being only vaguely aware of his surrounding and the length of time spent being a guest at the pleasure of Blaze and his schemes.\n\nEven though it made things a little more bearable, he was conscious he must be careful not to rely on sleep as a means of escape. He also needed to be mindful of descending too deep into his enhanced slumber and slipping into the long sleep. Once his body reached that point, there was no hope of return. So, he would have to wake up every now and then as a preventative measure. Every 24 years or so was a good time to wake. It was short enough to keep him from sinking too deeply into his sleep, yet long enough for a substantial period of time to elapse. If he checked his circumstances regularly, hopefully something may have changed for the better.\n\nHunger gnawed like a rat chewing its way out from his insides and his throat was as dry as the dusty cave floor. There wasn't anything he could do at present to change the hunger or thirst, so he pushed it to the back of his mind. All he could do was return to his slumber, slow down his metabolism and hope for something to change. What that was he didn't know. He couldn't think exactly what change might help him escape his underground prison. Any possibility that offered escape, no matter how small, was worth holding on to. And, he thought, his choices were extremely limited.\n\nA seismic event might cause a movement in the rock tunnels. An earthquake might crack the walls that surrounded him, opening a fissure to the outside world. A volcanic eruption could force huge fissures through his solid prison walls or force molten magma to the surface and create a chimney to freedom. But these weren't common occurrences and he had felt no seismic activity, no rumbling except that of his starving belly.\n\nStill, stranger things had happened. Last time he awoke, he feasted on goat and consumed roast rat for seconds. Always, his thoughts returned to food, like a yellow dragon thinking only of his stomach. He hadn't counted on his previous opportunistic meal, even though it was small he would take his good fortune and remain positive. He was patient and would wait. Most greens were known for their patience and Galdor the Green was more patient than many. With perseverance and a little more luck, next time he emerged from his sleeping state, something might have changed.\n\nGaldor returned to his familiar hollow and settled down into a comfortable position. The depression now a well-worn Galdor shape, fitting him perfectly. Closing his eyes, he focused on his magic and was grateful it was in plentiful supply. Dragon magic was not unlimited and recharged itself over time, and time was in plentiful supply. If only there were some way he could employ his magic to help him escape. But dragon magic, while useful for many things, couldn't offer him a way through solid rock.\n\nHe wondered at the human magic the mage employed to manipulate the portal and the vast difference between human and dragon magic. Dragons couldn't master human magic, so whatever spell the mage cast to open the passageway, Galdor, no matter how powerful his own magic, could not.\n\nHe embraced sleep and let himself be pulled under, his last waking thought was of how different man and dragon were. And, if he were man sized, would he have been able to retrace the path of the ill-fated goat and return to the outside world?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Galdor slept for another 34 years, hardly ageing as time slowly marched forward. His breathing slowed, almost to a stop and his body relaxed in its temporary condition of stasis. He awoke out of necessity, although this time he was a little later between his periods of magical slumber. He assessed the time spent in his prison. He had been trapped here for 81 years. 81 long, unchanging years.\n\nThe cavern remained unaltered since he had last awoken. No disturbances, no unexpected goats, no earthquakes or volcanic activity. Nothing had changed to alter the solid rock walls holding him captive. He didn't even need to open his tired eyes to know this. His perception was enough to confirm it. Was there any point to rising and wandering aimlessly in the dank darkness? What would it achieve?\n\nThe empty cavern was the same as always, no way out, no different from before. No unexpected opportunity for escape presented itself. He had remained in his life preserving slumber a full decade longer than the last time, pushing the amount of time he believed he needed between wakeful periods.\n\nStaying in his sleeping hollow, too ambivalent to bother with moving or stretching, his awareness slowly manifesting from his drowsy state to become fully alert and awake. Sleeping was his only escape from his surroundings, dreaming of colours and light, food and water, conversations and debates. Living.\n\nThis was no life for a dragon, a dragon in his prime. He still had centuries to live his life, but not trapped in here. If he were free, he would live for at least another 300 years, even after his time endured underground. His magic had preserved him, but he was aware the longer he was imprisoned here, the more chance he would eventually have to succumb to the long sleep.\n\nHe didn't want to sleep for centuries, only to be able to awake for short periods of time, then be forced to return to his slumber indefinitely. And if the long sleep overcame him, that would be exactly what happened. He wanted out, he needed to be free. The torture of being trapped, helplessly and horribly trapped, with nothing to look forward to but more of the same, was beginning to wear him down. There was nothing he could do to change this, nothing but sleep away the years and hope for something\u2014anything\u2013to change.\n\nHe didn't feel like getting up and stretching, he was comfortable and didn't see the point in moving. He would only have to settle back down again, so he would just stay where he was and it would save him the time. Save time. The irony of this nearly made him laugh at himself. He had all the time he ever needed. Why would he want to save time? The constant sleep and unchanging environment were crushing his spirit, altering his mood. He needed to keep going, keep hoping and keep waiting. Stick to his resolve. Something would change, needed to change, and soon. Soon. When? In the next decade? The next century? How much longer could he stand it? How much longer could he survive without going mad?\n\nGaldor tried to shake of the haunting misery of defeat. He wouldn't give up, couldn't give up, as long as Blaze was out there, spreading his lies, deceiving his colony. There was something wrong with the black dragon, something different Galdor couldn't quite lay a claw on. He knew it wasn't just the hatred he felt for him, a dragon who was once his friend and now his adversary. He contemplated long and hard when he was in his dreaming state and was convinced. If he ever escaped this cavern, no! When he escaped, he would track down the black dragon and hold him accountable for his devious actions.\n\nGaldor's blood boiled and the heat of fire in his belly replaced his hunger. Blaze would pay. He would pay for the stolen years, for his lies and deception. Galdor would have answers, would know why Blaze had betrayed his friendship and turned against him. It couldn't just be for the position of moot leader, that wasn't even guaranteed. The dragons of the plateau would debate for years on who should replace him, they might even wait to see if he would return. Blaze would surely feed them some falsehood about where he was and why he was missing.\n\nIf he could convince the moot Galdor would never return, it would leave the vacancy of leader open. Blaze wouldn't stop until he was in charge and it was his words guiding the moot and making the decisions. Then would come the war against the humans he longed for. The suggestion he never tired of presenting. Dragon and humans were not friends, but Galdor had maintained the peace between their races. Blaze wouldn't follow his lead. Not if he were chosen as leader. Galdor was unsure why Blaze despised humans so much. Now that he had ample time to contemplate it, when he remembered his conversations with the black dragon, he had always pushed for war.\n\nGaldor sighed, his musings were nothing but idle dreams. The dragons of the moot might have waited, but that was decades ago now. Whatever happened to his moot, was buried in the past. Whatever mischief Blaze had wrought, would already be done. The black dragon's scheming was decades gone.\n\nIt probably wasn't good for his mood to guess what had happened, he had no way of knowing and he would naturally assume the worst. The more he thought about it, the more it would influence his mood and the anger and the frustration he felt could only lead to a negative disposition. Something he needed to avoid if he were to stay sane. He needed to focus on his survival, on staying calm and outlasting his captivity. Once he was free, then he would be able to address Blaze's wrongdoings.\n\nClaw and Fang! Lying here wasn't helping. Galdor stood up. If he didn't move around a little, next time he was due to wake, he might not bother and that would be bad. He needed to maintain perspective. He decided he would wake every 25 years from now on. Each time he emerged from sleep, he would rise. He spent more than enough time in his comfortable hollow. Complacency was not in his nature, he was Galdor the Green and he would win free of this prison.\n\nHe extended his wings, the wide cavern accommodating his full wingspan, and flexed them. Drafts of wind blasted dust that had remained undisturbed for decades. He turned his neck, rotating his head, clearing a stiffness he hadn't been aware of. His scales were supple and it felt good to stretch and move about. Extending his neck, he opened his jaws and roared into the darkness. The quietness of the cavern was shattered and the sound echoed from the hard stone, answering his call. It was satisfying to roar his defiance into the blackness.\n\nHe examined the bones of the long departed goat, ancient and almost decayed to dust, years of erosion breaking them down to nothing. He compared them to the mage's remains, which lay across the cavern where he had fallen. He lay unchanged, crumpled against the cave wall where he had attempted to escape through the passageway between worlds. Smugly satisfied, Galdor sniffed the blackened corpse, even after all the decades that had passed, the stench of human magic remained. The mage hadn't succumbed to the decay that had eaten away at the goat's bones. What remained of his charred flesh clung to the bones and his robes were dusty, but intact. It was as if a preservation spell similar to Galdor's sleep, was holding the body together, a constant companion accompanying him, unchanged, down through the decades.\n\nThe reminder of how he was tricked still cut deeply and he turned from the body, drawing in breaths through his nostrils to clear his snout of the unnatural smell. Human magic was acrid and offensive to him, its sharp tang the opposite of the sweet fresh smell of dragon magic.\n\nGaldor paced around the cavern, this time in an attempt to exercise his limbs. He knew if there was a way out, he would have discovered it during one of his previous hundred inspections.\n\nHe stomach cramped with pangs of hunger, another skinny goat or even a fat rat, would be a welcome luxury. He was extremely fortunate before and he didn't expect that his luck would land him another meal anytime soon. His mood was a little brighter now, having shaken off the encroaching despair, he was ready to return to his slumber, and wait. It was only a matter of time and he had all the time he needed.\n\nPatience was his ally, hope his armour and vengeance his weapon. He returned to his hollow, familiar and worn, surprisingly reassuring in the dark cavern. He would prevail, he wasn't destined to spend the remainder of his life here and he was going to escape. An opportunity would present itself. He had to believe it or he would be lost.\n\nHe turned around a few times, folding in his wings and wrapped his tail tightly round his body until it touched the end of his snout. He blew a small puff of air from his nostrils, scattering dust as he sighed and embraced his magic, sinking back into his slow slumber."
            },
            {
                "title": "Troubled Waters",
                "text": "Blaze swam deeper. He knew exactly where to find the hidden entrance to the underwater cave. His cave. He had visited it many times and loved the tranquil peace and its soothing purple light. He felt lucky to have made his accidental discovery and, not for the first time, he thanked the giant eel that initially led him to find his secret place.\n\nIt wasn't just the calming effect of his hidden treasure that put him at ease; he enjoyed the natural beauty of the cave. The mystical purple light and the subdued dripping had a certain peacefulness that focused him when he needed time to think. Today he didn't need any more time to think or plot, his plan was already progressing. Today he was ready to act.\n\nThe purple light illuminated the riverbed, its soft glow guiding the black dragon home to his underwater lair. He swam through the waters and the inhabitants of the river\u2014drawn to the mystical light\u2014scattered from the dark foreboding stranger in their midst. He located the now familiar entrance, wider now with his constant visits, making it easier for him to squeeze through. With his passage back and forth he had worn away the silt and mud, shaping a depression below the overhanging rock.\n\nBlaze entered the water filled tunnel, pushing upward into the cave, his lungs crying out for air. The depth of the dive, added to the time he spent swimming underwater to locate the entrance, made the trip a close call. His head emerged from the tunnel, bursting into the cave, gasping giant breaths of much needed air into his aching lungs.\n\nHe was glad it was a difficult journey for a few reasons. The cave was safe from interlopers discovering his secret place. Having stumbled over the entrance purely by chance the odds of someone else finding it were slim. And they would have to be an excellent swimmer to get this deep and not drown.\n\nHe crawled out of the pool, shaking himself vigorously and flicking his wings. Droplets of water shot from his body in a cascade of purple rain, catching the light from the glowing pillars. The white flash on his chest took on a purple hue, gleaming strangely in the phosphorescent brightness. The unusual marking\u2014a jagged lightning bolt on the scales of his chest\u2014wasn't a mystery to him. It was part of who he was. It identified him as different, made him unique. He knew how different he was. He was marked for greatness and when he plan came to fruition, every dragon would know it.\n\nAs far as he knew, no other dragons displayed such an obvious distinguishing feature. Yes, they were all unique in their colours, shades and hues. Two greens of exactly the same shade would look similar, but they would still be recognisable as individuals. All dragons featured many different attributes to mark their individuality. His white flash, the blaze that had given him his name, was unusual. Usually dragons had a base colour and darker and lighter shades on their scales and hide, rather than a patch or shape of an entirely different colour.\n\nHe made his way quickly through the maze of stalagmites rising from the floor. No matter how many times he visited the cave, he couldn't help marvelling at the soothing purple light. It really was a wonderful place and he was happy that it was only his to look upon. Other dragons would spoil the tranquillity he found here. He didn't want to share it as it rightly belonged to him. He discovered it and only he was worthy of it.\n\nAnd of the magical treasure hidden within its depths.\n\nHe had found the treasure, or perhaps it had found him. Had it drawn him into its secret domain and revealed the way? Led him here to make his discovery? It didn't matter. All that mattered was it was his. It belonged to him, he found it and now he would use it as he saw fit. It would change the world and grant him mastery over all the weak, misguided dragons Galdor had abandoned.\n\nEveryone would learn that Blaze the Black was the better dragon. He was smarter, wiser and more generous than Galdor and he knew dragons were the superior race of beings. He would be infinitely more powerful than any dragon that had ever existed and he would become a legend in his own lifetime.\n\nHe hurried towards the recess at the rear of the cave, twisting and turning through the giant pillars with practiced ease, his black scales glowing a deep purple as their light shone upon him.\n\nSlipping into the space where the recess started, he wondered if it was coincidence that it was hard to see, hidden as it was. The rock folded back and the cave wall appeared solid, the entrance to the rear tunnel disguised from casual inspection. Even after finding the cave, the treasure it protected was cleverly hidden. An optical illusion designed to keep the unworthy away. The unworthy. Not him.\n\nBlaze contemplated how his treasure came to be here. Who could have left it unattended? Surely whoever it was would not have wanted it to be found. But luck, or something more, revealed it to him. Perhaps it was his destiny.\n\nWhoever placed it here must have done so a long time ago and by now would either be gone, or be dead. Nobody would abandon a treasure this valuable. They would be mad just to hide it away and never utilise it to its full potential. They must be dead, it was the only reasonable explanation. Their loss was his gain and he would never make the mistake its previous owner had.\n\nSlowing as he reached the end of the smaller tunnel, he drank in the allure of the wondrous object resting on a small rock plinth before him.\n\nNestled comfortably on a hollowed out part of the plinth sat a circular globe. It was large, but no too large and would snugly fit into the palm of his claw. Sometimes, when he came to gaze upon his treasure, it appeared smaller than it was now. Blaze didn't know why it changed size, but he understood it was magical and he thought that his interaction might have something to do with the change.\n\nThe globe pulsed faintly in the ambient purple light, but it wasn't the colour of the stalagmites that lit the rest of the surroundings. The surface was a little like marble and appeared solid, with a polished glossy shine. But it could also look opaque and muted with a pastel finish rather than the shine it wore today. It resembled a celestial moon and wouldn't look out of place in the midnight sky.\n\nBlaze flicked out his tongue, tasting the magic in the air around the globe, pungent and honey sweet, heavy with the anticipation of a power beyond any magic he knew or understood. It was a fresh magic, not truly dragon magic, but he knew, perception clear, he would learn to master it.\n\nHe had already experienced its depth, carefully testing its boundaries and cautiously probing deeper into its mysteries. The secrets within the globe were immense and he had only scratched the surface of the forbidden knowledge it held. It should have been larger than the sun, and twice as bright, with the vast wealth of information it contained, but it wasn't.\n\nBlaze knew he had uncovered something special. While Galdor had been lurking around, leading the moot nowhere and avoiding issues that needed addressing, he had taken every care not to delve too far into the globe and its secrets. Galdor was a fool but he was most certainly not stupid. Well, not that stupid. He didn't want his fated green leader to unearth his secret and foil his plans before they began, so he remained cautious of too much interaction with the globe while Galdor was around.\n\nHe waited and learned to be patient but it was hard to resist the temptation of the globe and all the wonders it offered. But he knew he must\u2014or risk losing everything. And he wouldn't lose the globe or surrender it, he would have died before he let it fall into Galdor's petty claws. The former leader would have stored the globe away, too cautious to learn from the knowledge within. He took forever to make decisions. Galdor the Careful. And where had that landed him?\n\nBlaze would reap the rewards of his patience now that Galdor the Gone was no longer a threat. Galdor the Gone! It amused him every time he thought of this new name. Gone and soon to be forgotten. For good. Galdor, green, gone, good! A rumble of laughter sounded deep within his chest and he snorted a small puff of smoke, content his adversary was finally out of the way.\n\nThe globe changed. Blaze instantly aware and serious. A curl of black drifted below its surface, a wisp of smoke to match his own, but this one was alive and sentient, swirling through the globe's cloudy white insides.\n\nBlaze pushed his snout up close to the surface of the globe, sniffing deeply and inhaling the scent of magic. This was no pearl of wisdom, no fabled moonstone or orb of enlightenment. Blaze knew of them, knew of their powers and the legends surrounding these mystical artefacts. They were steeped deep in dragon culture and all dragons were taught the lore. This was something more, something greater than the most powerful pearl. It wasn't just a receptacle of knowledge or a vague predictor of some possible future.\n\nThis globe was Galdor's bane and had already shown its worth and helped him best the green dragon. It was a tool to use, a weapon Blaze would wield to free the dragons of the Lifting Plateau, returning them all to their rightful place in the world. This was a globe of destruction, a weapon of power. It was also an opportunity to improve every dragon life. No longer would dragons hide, cowering from humans and retreating into the wilderness. The time of being afraid to upset the balance was in the past.\n\nHe would teach mankind their centuries of pathetic complacency were at an end and return dragons to their rightful place.\n\nThe globe reacted to the proximity of the black dragon, the small black curl inside its misty seas, attracted to the touch of his snout, pressing against its cold smooth surface.\n\nBlaze relaxed as the globe connected with his consciousness, he was still aware of the cave and his surroundings, but he was aware of so much more. The secrets the globe shared with him were an unknown addiction, a whispering insight his perception understood, enlightening him and feeding a thirst for more than he had ever known he wanted. He knew that if he fed the globe, gave it what it needed to grow more powerful, it in turn, would feed him. With this power and knowledge at his disposal, he could do whatever he wanted. Nothing, be it dragon or man, would stop him.\n\nWhen he communed with the globe, he was close to understanding the foresight of its wisdom. He knew he needed to give it more in order for it to give him its secrets. He needed to break through the final barrier and embrace what was inside. He arrived at the threshold and now he was ready to step through. He understood how to do this and was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to gain what he desired.\n\nHis mind floated through the white swirls of ideas and ethereal wisps of knowledge stored within the globe. He could see the shapes of information circulating, feel the magic and sense the millennia of stored secrets and spells, but he couldn't quite interpret their meaning or understand their message. The knowledge teased him, just beyond his reach. He must give it more before it unlocked its secrets and enlightened him with its mystical and arcane intelligence.\n\nHe pulled away and broke contact with its surface, his snout chilled and comfortably numb, unaware of the passage of time. That was one of the strange side effects of the globe, the loss of time. Dragons were known for their accuracy when it came to counting the years. Their inherent magic could follow the passage of time unerringly, be it seconds or decades, like an internal clock. He never understood why men built devices to measure time. Dragons comprehend it instinctually. Yet more proof that they were below dragons as a species.\n\nHe grasped the globe with his front claws and sat back on his haunches, removing it from its resting place. It was the first time he had lifted it from the plinth, being content to touch and caress it before today. Anxiety hit him like a wave and a dark foreboding presence awoke. He clung to the globe, fearful that if it dropped, he would lose everything he coveted. The dread that filled him wasn't coming from the beautiful globe, as he'd first suspected. He must protect it from the presence. It didn't like him taking possession, but it would not stop him.\n\nHe curled the treasured globe in one talon, his claws wrapping protectively around it. A cage of sharp black bone locking it securely in his grasp. It sat perfectly inside his talons as if it belonged there. Nothing would stop him taking it with him. He knew it was more resilient than it looked and doubted it would break, should it be dropped, yet the urge to keep it safe from any potential danger was strong.\n\nHe left the bare plinth and traversed the stalagmite covered floor, returning to the pool and peered down into the clear water. For the first time since discovering the cave he sensed something was wrong. Apprehension stopped him entering the water. He wanted to leave and take the globe with him, but the fearful feeling of a dark presence hampered his departure.\n\nLeviathan.\n\nThe word sounded in his head! Perception informed him the globe had spoken! This was new.\n\nHis heart pounded, blood pulsing as his breath quickened. A combination of fear and something else coursed through him. Excitement.\n\nHe didn't know what was happening but he was sure it was connected to removing the globe from its resting place.\n\nIt had probably been resting there for an extremely long time and his interaction had triggered this strange reaction. He sensed the globe was fine, it hadn't become malevolent towards him for disturbing its rest. If anything, he felt it was as excited as him. The cave was still the same, serene and filled with beauty. He gazed at his surroundings, took control of his breathing, and let the peaceful purple light sooth him, as he searched for calm.\n\nHe held the globe aloft, peering through his claws at the encased treasure. A vortex of tiny black whirlpools tore through the white cloudy mists inside. The globe had never been this active before. Moving it had certainly stirred it up, but had also awoke something more, another presence. It was a hostile and vengeful force and Blaze would rather not wait around to encounter what he sensed was coming.\n\nIt was time to leave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Unexpected Visitors",
                "text": "Galdor slept. His slumber plagued with restless dreams, filled with desolation and despair. Feelings of isolation and confinement haunted his sleep, familiar and unwanted. His incarceration spanned the last 105 years. Long eventless years. He wasn't due to wake up for another year, yet something tugged at his subconscious. The niggling pulled him slowly back towards wakefulness.\n\nHe checked his internal body clock; he had only slept for 24 years and planned another year of deep sleep before he emerged. Why was his perception, his dragon sense, attempting to wake him early? When he had last been awake his mood was low. Now he felt different. He was aware of another consciousness influencing his thoughts.\n\nDarkness and hunger were his only companions, a prisoner in a world not his own; trapped in the blackness with no way out. What was changing his mood? As he became more alert, surfacing from the depths of sleep, he recalled his plight, once more reliving the difficult truth of his entrapment.\n\nThe passageways and tunnels exiting the cavern were too narrow for a dragon his size, his huge green body impossibly large, preventing him the escape he longed for. A reoccurring theme as he slept and a constant reminder of his predicament. The memory of his capture stung like a fresh wound each time he surfaced to relive. He wondered if this was part of the black dragon's cruel scheme.\n\nThe magic he needed to leave, using the way he entered, was denied to him. He was a dragon and the portal he travelled through was created by a sorcerer wielding human magic. Even if he could learn the spell, which he doubted, he wouldn't be able to employ his own dragon magic to cast it. Another subtle torture inflicted upon him, enduring his imprisonment in the knowledge it was possible to return home to his own world, unaware of the spell required to do so and unable to wield the necessary magic.\n\nHe missed the heat of the sun on his green scales, the blue sky, and the pleasure of flight. He missed fresh meat and the thrill of the hunt. All of the things that were part of everyday life were beyond his reach and he longed for them.\n\nHe remembered the fateful day of his incarceration. It was a reoccurring dream, a frequent reminder he would rather forget. But his cruel subconscious wouldn't let him, punishing him for his mistake.\n\nHis eyes snapped open, his heart pounding as it would after a fast flight or steep dive, adrenaline pushing him to an awakened state. His perception, now wakening him fully and bringing him out of his dreams and musings, drew him from the deep slumber, not quite the long sleep. That would be the final act of surrender, eventually admitting defeat after all this time. It was something he was forced to contemplate more often.\n\nBut not yet.\n\nSomething stirred above him, he could feel it. A life. There were only two previous occasions when other living creatures ventured into his cavern of confinement. A scrawny goat and a skinny rat. He had eaten them both, savouring the warm blood and living flesh, meagre morsels offering little sustenance in his barren existence.\n\nHis cavern must be far below this world's surface, buried deep under the hard unyielding granite of mountains. He reasoned that if he was closer to the surface, he would encounter more living creatures, stumbling and lost in the darkness. He had contemplated trying to dig himself out, widening the small passageways and tunnel to the surface like a giant green mole, but that had proved impossible. Even dragon talons couldn't dig through stone. A desperate act.\n\nGaldor sniffed the musty air, peering deep into the dark cave, hoping another mangy goat or even a skinny rat were visiting his demesne. Nothing. Everything was as it had been, day after day, week after week, decade after decade. Unchanging and boring. Incredibly boring.\n\nHe let his mind drift once more, thinking of goats, sheep, cattle and deer. One fat buck would be a feast for his grumbling stomach. He imagined flying low over the grassy plains, the scent of summer in his nostrils, the sweet smell of the herd, the warm blood of his prey, the\u2026\n\nA noise, distant and muffled, jerked him back into an alert state. He really needed to focus. A scraping sound, dragging and scuffling. Something was in the tunnels above him and it was coming this way, he was positive.\n\nDragon sense was seldom wrong. He had been dozing down here far too long, slipping slowly towards the eternal long sleep. He knew exactly how much time had passed, but was unable to tell if it were night or day, summer or winter, above ground. Slowly and steadily he was moving towards the inevitable last choice. Once he decided to slow his body down and embrace the long sleep, there was no return. It was what old dragons did, not a younger dragon like him. But what other choice did he have? Wither and die, his resources depleted, no food, no sun and no life worth living.\n\nThe scuffling sound was louder now, his sensitive ears picking up a distinctive pattern. He sniffed the air, the usual dank odour of stone contained a hint of something new. Something he remembered\u2014and had grown to despise.\n\nHuman.\n\nA turmoil of emotions writhed within. He hated humans. Once, long ago, he was happy to keep a respectful distance from them, avoiding any contact. After his incarceration in which a human mage was directly involved, regardless of the part played by Blaze, his opinions had undergone a change. Humans were deceitful and dishonest. Liars and tricksters. Conflict warred between a much needed change in his boring existence and confronting a human. It was decades since any visitors had come here and certainly nothing intelligent. He waited, listening intently as the dragging footsteps stopped and started, dragging and scuffling, painstakingly slow as they drew nearer. What would a human be doing down here in his cavern. His cavern, his home, it was odd that he saw it this way, when his greatest desire was to leave.\n\nGaldor retreated to the far end of the cavern, he needed to shake of the mental cobwebs, gather his wits and find out why a human would be wandering through these caves. What would possess a surface dwelling human to venture deep under the ground? Nothing good. Of that he was sure. Did the human know of Galdor's existence? Surely his perception would have alerted him to any previous visits and woken him. He would observe and deliberate, it was the clever choice. It wasn't as if he lacked the patience. He had waited here long enough, been patient all this time. Now, perhaps he would be rewarded.\n\nLet the human find him. He would be waiting. Waiting and watching. This time he would be ready, this human wouldn't catch him unaware or fool him. He had fallen foul of human magic once. Never again.\n\nA light radiated from the far wall of the cavern, blindingly bright to his eyes after a century of darkness. Galdor squeezed his eyelids tightly shut. The light probably wasn't as bright as he imagined it to be. His eyes were sensitive after their prolonged exposure to the darkness. Dragon's eyes were powerful and could easily see in the dark. The little illumination the human provided, bathed his cavern in an entirely new light, illuminating it in a way that was different to how his eyes usually saw it. Slowly he cracked open his eyelids and followed the moving figure as he\u2014it was a male\u2014trudged with no particular direction, across his floor.\n\nThe human entered deeper into the darkness of his cavern. He was holding a glowing orb in an outstretched arm, causing shadows to dance over the rocky walls. Magic radiated from the human and his light emitting orb.\n\nHuman magic.\n\nHe could smell it now, pungent and unpleasant, assaulting his nostrils. It was similar to the smell that emanated from the dead mage. It was an aroma he didn't care for and the reason he was trapped here. The stench stirred up painful memories. There were also other scents stimulating his keen olfactory senses. Mushrooms and horses. There was fungi growing in the cavern and this human stank of them. Galdor hated mushrooms. They made him sick. The smell brought back the memory of when he first arrived, snuffling through the dirt of the cavern, sniffing them out and eating them in the hope they would fill the void in his empty belly. They had not. He could still remember the feeling of light-headedness and nausea.\n\nThe foul black mushrooms contained a magic not unlike human magic. Galdor soon discovered that they didn't agree with him and suspected they were poisonous to dragons. He quickly decided he would rather starve than ever eat another foul fungi. The very thought of them made his stomach churn. Not a pleasant experience after being starved for so long.\n\nThe human was searching the cavern floor, stopping every so often when he located a mushroom. He picked the perceived treasure and deposited it into a sack he carried. He would get a surprise if he tried to eat them, or maybe humans wouldn't react in the same way. The man wasn't lost, he was here collecting the mushrooms. He also smelled of horse and Galdor wished that it wasn't just the tantalising aroma he had brought with him. A horse would be delicious, a tasty treat and a decent size too. Warm fresh horse flesh was more than he could hope for, the thought of it made him salivate.\n\nGaldor crept towards the human, crouching low to the floor, taking care to employ a stealthy approach. He knew the human couldn't see him and didn't have the eyes of a dragon, but it would be prudent to assume his ears worked well enough. If he made any noise, he would alert the human to his presence.\n\nHe focused on the small figure as he moved, stealthily closing the distance to his prey.\n\nHis prey? Was he really going to eat the man? Was he that hungry he would stoop so low as to devour a man? He probably wouldn't taste as good as the rat. He could have lived on rats if they had been plentiful. He wasn't proud, but he would take rats over a human any day. What they lacked in size, he was sure they would make up for in flavour. Humans were not appetising to him in the slightest. This one stank of human magic and black mushrooms, not a combination that appealed to his empty stomach. But in his starving state, after his years of unintentional fasting, he would try anything once.\n\nHe waited as the human crossed the cavern floor, his eyes the only thing that moved, following the man's path, the rest of his body as still as stone, patiently letting his next meal come to him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Blaze took a deep breath and dived head first into the pool. He gripped the globe tighter and pulled his talon close to his hide. He didn't want to drop it on his swim to the surface. He felt a strong desire to protect it and bring it safely out of the river. He was a more than competent swimmer and could cut through the water just as effectively holding his prize in one talon, his powerful tail and rear legs providing the required propulsion. He could also use his wings for steering and seldom relied on his forelegs, having much practice swimming to and from the underwater cavern.\n\nReaching the bottom of the water filled tunnel he scrabbled beneath the overhanging rock and into the main river. The foreboding presence stronger now he was away from the shelter of the cave. He felt uneasy as there was little protection out here in the open water. The purple light that had first attracted him to the hidden entrance was momentarily blocked as his body exited the gap and entered the river's depths.\n\nIt was dark this deep down and for a moment he assumed the night sky was responsible for the lack of light. His time spent in the cave was longer than he expected and if the sun had already set, natural daylight would no longer filter down from above. He craned his neck upward in search of the surface and the darkness vanished! Weak daylight was once again visible, filtering down from far above.\n\nSomething had blocked out the sunlight. Something huge!\n\nHe was aware of a giant black form cutting through the water above, half way between the riverbed and the surface, blocking his path to freedom.\n\nAn overwhelming wave of panic set in, an unfamiliar emotion for any dragon. The turbulent wake from the passing giant crashed into him with unexpected force, buffeting him like a leaf in a storm. He clung to the globe, fearful it would fall from his grasp and be lost to the murky waters as he fought to right himself, wrapping his other foreleg over his precious cargo, scared that he would lose it for good.\n\nBlaze understood now what the presence was, having witnessed the physical manifestation as it swept by: a Leviathan. The globe had warned him, knew it would be there and told him. These creatures were massive and more than a match for a dragon. Especially a swimming dragon caught between it and the surface.\n\nThis was the dark presence he felt, a dark and vengeful guardian come to stop him taking the mystical globe.\n\nLeviathans did not live in rivers. The river was wide and deep enough for the creature's massive size, but Leviathans were creatures of the vast oceans. At home in the depths with the whales and sea serpents, not the eels and fish of a river.\n\nThis river ran all the way to the coast, flowing through the canyon and eventually into a wide estuary spanning miles of coastland. It must have swam upriver, taking advantage of the deep water to get here. It was fitting the globe would be protected by such a creature. How could he have been so naive to believe it hadn't? Its previous owner must have enchanted the leviathan, casting a spell of protection and compulsion on the creature. The leviathan must be aware the globe had been disturbed, sensed it was moved from its secret hiding place and it was here to stop it.\n\nWhat better guardian than a massive leviathan for something so valuable. Leviathans were almost immortal and lived for millennia, were extremely fierce, excellent swimmers, highly aggressive and more dangerous than dragons.\n\nBlaze could sense it was closing in, he felt the dread as it oozed into his hide, he couldn't see it but he knew it was coming for him. He had taken the globe and now this terrifying guardian was going to make him pay.\n\nHe pivoted as fast as he was able, the water slowing his movements more than he liked. His tail flailed wildly, wings beating at the water as he manoeuvred himself back into the safety of the tunnel. He strained, twisting his neck to look out from under the overhanging rock, only to draw back as his pursuer neared, his horns scraping on the solid rock.\n\nThe leviathan swam parallel to the riverbed, its passage stirring up the mud and silt. As it cruised by the opening to the tunnel, Blaze risked a look and was confronted by a huge yellow eye staring malevolently into his own. He burst back up the tunnel, panic increased his speed, fear driving him away from the ancient predator, overwhelmed with dread.\n\nHe was a dragon and the emotions the leviathan inflicted upon him were foreign; he should never feel scared. This creature was a true predator, unfeeling and emotionless and with the magical geas imposed on it to protect the globe, it wasn't an adversary Blaze wanted to face.\n\nHe fought to stem the rising panic, still cradling the globe protectively, trying to think of his next move. He hadn't bested Galdor only to be stuck in a cave like him. No, that was not going to happen. He had come too far to let a dumb creature, an enormous, massive, dumb creature, trap him. These creatures weren't known for their intelligence, they were vicious and strong, as was their nature. And while the leviathan was bigger, they were only marginally intelligent. They were hunters and killers, but dragons were smarter. And smaller.\n\nThe inner cave led nowhere. There was only one way in and out. It was completely submerged and his initial search for an alternative entrance or exit proved that. The only way out was through the underwater passageway. His only option was to leave the way he came in. The leviathan knew he was here, he was its prey and it wasn't going to let him swim away with the globe it had been charged with protecting.\n\nHe could cower in here, waiting for it to give up, but a compulsion spell, one that had to be extremely strong to control a leviathan, wasn't going to let it forget him any time soon.\n\nHe needed a distraction. If he could sneak past the guardian and make it to the surface, it wouldn't be able to follow him once he was clear of the water. It owned the advantage down here in the river depths, but Blaze ruled the skies and he would like to see it try and fly after him.\n\nHe searched for calm, pushing his fear to the back of his mind and stared at the peaceful glowing stalagmites, drawing on their familiar presence and forcing himself to relax. As he gazed upon their soothing beauty, the dread lessened and an idea came to him. It was risky, but it was the best he could think of."
            },
            {
                "title": "Second Chances",
                "text": "Galdor observed the approaching human as he wandered across his cavern. He wasn't following any path, but he was obviously searching for something. He must have come from the surface, did not appear to be lost or injured and moved with a purpose... of sorts. He would never fully understand what motivated these tiny beings. All he did know was they were driven by many forces, wealth and power high on their list. Humans were unable to live in harmony with nature and destroyed everything they touched. If he made this man his next meal this world would be a better place.\n\nThe human turned his arm and the light from the glowing orb shone directly into Galdor's eyes. He shut them from the bright glare, exaggerated by years of darkness, remaining stationary. He moved his long neck, positioning his head away from where his eyes reflected the light. He opened his eyelids fractionally to reduce the chance of being seen, cautious he may have already alerted the human to his presence. If his visitor had spotted him, he hadn't reacted.\n\nThe light dulled and Galdor could see the human shielding the orb with his hand and peering into the darkness. He must have seen something. He held the orb high throwing its radiance farther and directing its light to where Galdor's head had been a moment before. Yes, the human had noticed something unusual in the dark and was searching for its source. Galdor did not think he would realise it was the eyes of a dragon he had glimpsed. If he realised there was a dragon lurking in the darkness, he was sure the small man would have reacted differently. He would have probably panicked and bolted back the way he had come. Instead this curious man turned towards him, waving his light around the vast cavern. The searching light was too fast to hide from and it shone directly in front of Galdor's snout before he could evade its revealing illumination.\n\nThis time the annoying interloper reacted, dropping the orb onto the sandy cave floor with a satisfying thud. Galdor was convinced beyond any doubt the human now realised he was not alone. He shared the cave with a dragon. Call it a wild guess, or perhaps it was his perception, but he believed the human expected these caves to be empty of life. The look on his ratty little face was evidence enough his perception was correct.\n\nGaldor didn't move; the game was up. Light from the fallen orb reflected on his metallic scales, bathing the surrounding stone walls in a soft green glow. The human stood frozen to the spot, his hand empty and open, just like his mouth. He was close enough for Galdor to lick him. He could taste the salty sweat in the air between them. He breathed out and the air ruffled the man's hair as he stood mesmerised, almost certainly terrified.\n\nGaldor was impressed he didn't flinch or cry out in surprise. Perhaps he was too scared. What little human wouldn't be? Stumbling across an impressive green dragon in the depths of a dark underground cavern. The noise of the man inhaling was the only sound in the silence of the cave. His eyes darted from side to side searching the darkness around Galdor. Did he expect to see other dragons? Highly unlikely. The clever little human was looking for a means of escape.\n\nBefore Galdor could take charge of the situation, the man bent down, recovering his light orb and held it aloft, shining the light along his scales. Then, instead of running as Galdor expected, he spoke.\n\n\"Greetings, magnificent dragon,\" he said. His voice thin and squeaky, not like a rat as Galdor expected, more like a timid little mouse. \"I am Alduce and I mean you no harm. I've come in search of black mushrooms and I... er... didn't mean to... you know... disturb you.\"\n\nGaldor was amazed. The man, obviously in fear of his life, actually possessed the tenacity to speak to him! This day\u2014or night\u2014he didn't know which, was turning out to be the most interesting time he had experienced over the last century... if you didn't count the goat or the rat.\n\nHe would play this out. The man wasn't going anywhere. Galdor held the advantage, the human was as trapped he was. Not because he couldn't leave but because Galdor wouldn't let him. He could easily stop him from leaving the way he came in. The man might be small and flighty, but a dragon was faster than a mere human. He stared into the tiny eyes, calling on his hypnotic powers to draw the man under his spell, but the man didn't appear to be affected. How could a man resist his dragonly glamour?\n\nHuman magic! It protected him and its power was strong. This was no mere human; he was a practitioner of magic. Human magic, foul tasting and as black as the mushrooms he searched for. Galdor tried another approach.\n\n\"Greetings, Alduce, collector of mushrooms,\" he boomed, puffing himself up. \"I am Galdor the Green,\" he paused for dramatic effect. \"It has been many years since anyone has ventured this deep into these caverns and disturbed me.\" His commanding reply stunned the man. His mouth dropped open a little wider than before and he resembled the ill-fated goat, just before Galdor ate it. But Galdor grudgingly gave the man credit as he pulled himself together and responded once more.\n\n\"It is my great honour to meet you, mighty Galdor. I'm terribly sorry I've disturbed you.\" His voice was a little steadier. Reluctantly the green dragon felt the faintest slither of admiration for the man who named himself Alduce. To remain calm in what must be a highly unusual and extremely daunting situation for him, was quite impressive. This was someone not to be underestimated. Galdor was still paying for the last time he underestimated a human and he wouldn't make the same mistake twice. His perception told him there was definitely something unique about this man but he couldn't quite put his talon on it.\n\nThe little man was clever, paying Galdor a compliment and apologising for disturbing him. A quick witted thinker. He was trying to flatter his way out of his predicament, but Galdor was smarter and wouldn't fall for his ruse. He didn't understand the intrusion was a welcome distraction and he wasn't disturbing him in the slightest. After all the years spent alone, even a conversation with a mere human was an unexpected delight, a break from the monotony of slumber.\n\nGaldor would glean some enjoyment from this man, this Alduce, before he ate him. He would test his mettle and see just what he was made of.\n\nHe sniffed at the man, moving in as close as he could without his snout touching him. The man stood his ground and didn't flinch or back off. He held his resolve. Galdor made a show of his sniffing, flaring his nostrils wide and drawing in air as noisily as he could. Then, he flashed his fangs and licked them, teasing his tongue along razor sharp teeth in an attempt to intimidate Alduce. Maybe the man wasn't smart at all, perhaps he was just stupid. Did he not realise he was one quick snap from death? Galdor could swallow him whole if he wanted, crush and grind his soft warm flesh to a bloody pulp. It was time to take a more direct approach.\n\n\"You smell of magic,\" he growled with fierce menace. \"Magic and mushrooms. I am hungry, little human. I've been trapped here a long time.\" This time Alduce did have the decency to look frightened.\n\n\"Trapped?\" Alduce questioned, sounding more curious than he looked. He omitted to mention the dragon's hunger. This human was clever, he would have to be careful with this one.\n\n\"Yessss, trapped,\" he hissed. Then reminded him, \"and hungry.\" He could smell the man's fear.\n\nGaldor moved forward threateningly, as if stalking a frightened deer, positioning his body between Alduce and the tunnel he'd emerged from, cutting off any hope of escape. He understood that feeling all too well himself. Let the human experience the despair he had felt for the last hundred years, see how he reacted to that.\n\n\"Well, perhaps I could assist you, magnificent dragon,\" Alduce said. Galdor was interested to see how Alduce would assist him. \"I could bring you some food, if you wish.\"\n\nThe man understood he was hungry. Was he was hoping to use this to bargain with? As he tempted the dragon with the promise of food, Galdor wondered what this man could deliver that would satisfy his aching belly. And just how he planned to deliver a dragon sized meal, this deep underground. He started to squirm, trying to see around Galdor to the now blocked cave mouth.\n\n\"Really?\" Galdor crooned. \"You would leave and return with something for me to eat?\" Just when he thought the man was smarter than he expected. Did he honestly believe a dragon was going to fall for such an obvious deception? Did he think so little of dragons as to believe they were such fools? \"Most kind little Alduce, most kind.\" Galdor purred, leading him on.\n\nAlduce stepped slowly towards the cave mouth, nodding convincingly. \"Yes, that's exactly what I would do, bring you back a feast, a feast fit for a... dragon, yes.\"\n\nGaldor had heard enough. It was time to give Alduce a lesson on how to treat his superiors.\n\nHe snapped, \"How stupid do you think I am?\" He thrust his neck past Alduce and turned his head back, staring directly into his face. He swayed his neck from side to side like an angry snake, once more attempting to mesmerize him. He didn't like it that he was immune to his beguiling voice. He may not have used this enchantment in a long time, but a dragon didn't lose his magical prowess or forget how to employ it. Was Alduce playing him for a fool? Pretending to be slow and dim-witted in an attempt to lull him into a false sense of security. Waiting to make his move and spring some human spell on him?\n\nAlduce had nowhere to run and Galdor's head was strategically placed, blocking his only means of escape. If he moved forward, the only place he would find himself was between his jaws.\n\n\"Maybe I shall eat you. Better to take what I have in front of me now.\" Galdor snorted, blasting another wave of hot breath over the human, feeling satisfaction when Alduce cowered a little. He would understand the hot air could easily be replaced with dragon fire, unless he was completely stupid. And if he was, it wouldn't matter one bit. It bothered him that he was unable to ensnare Alduce with his voice or hypnotise him. He wanted to test him to see if he was aware he was protected by human magic. The way he acted it was as if he was oblivious to his immunity.\n\n\"Nor are you enthralled by my voice. Your magic prevents you from falling under my hypnotic spell.\" Alduce didn't respond or divulge any of his secrets, neither confirming nor denying Galdor's suspicions.\n\nGaldor shook his head, convincing himself and reinforcing to Alduce that he wasn't going to let him go.\n\n\"No, I think if I let you leave, you would not return with food.\" Every time he was reminded of food, his stomach ached. He tried for so long to ignore the pangs of hunger, distance himself from the gnawing emptiness and had almost forgotten it. Almost.\n\nHe flicked out his tongue, imagining the taste of warm blood, even if it was human. He licked his dazzling white teeth, teeth that hadn't been used to tear flesh for far too long and spat venomous words at Alduce.\n\n\"You would return with more magic wielders, foul sorcerers and stinking mages. You would slaughter me after you cast your enchantments.\" Humans were not to be trusted. They didn't know the true nature of dragons. He shared his true name with this one. Deep down he knew he wasn't going to let him leave and it wouldn't matter.\n\n\"Very well,\" Alduce said, surprising him. The man displayed backbone, facing up to a dragon that was about to consume him. \"Eat me if you must,\" he continued, \"but know this mighty Galdor, I am your best chance at freedom, eat me now and you'll never know if I could have freed you.\"\n\nGaldor was momentarily stunned, this impudent little human was telling him, Galdor the Green, he was his best change at freedom. Impossible! After contemplating his escape for over one hundred years this impudent creature, this arrogant and disrespectful little man, thought after a few minutes he knew better than a dragon.\n\nGaldor pulled back his head, shaking it slowly from side to side like an agitated viper, eyeing Alduce as he stood waiting to accept his impending demise. It was time to end this farce. Alduce had stopped being an amusement and become an annoyance. Galdor thrust forward, his roar echoing around the cavern, jaws opening wide, ready to grind this irritating insect from existence.\n\nAlduce just stood there, his eyes shut tight and never even flinched. Galdor pulled short his killing strike, facing the man. Surely this human wouldn't be able to help him gain his freedom. It must be a ploy. Being stuck here all this time was causing Galdor to question his decisions. He was concerned he was experiencing the onset of madness. For a moment he contemplated eating this human. There was something about Alduce, something unusual, he sensed it. His perception niggled him too. Could he really help? He would never know if he killed him. There was time to explore all eventualities. Time was something he had in abundance.\n\nHe tilted his head, closely scrutinising the terrified man. There was something about him. He couldn't quite work out what it was, but it was there, just out of reach. Was this human his saviour? There was nothing to lose and everything to gain. Blind anger subsided and Galdor, once known for his good reasoning, decided to give this man a chance. He still wasn't sure why, but dragon perception was seldom wrong. He wouldn't give in to the maddening boredom and become just another irrational beast. Deep down he didn't want to eat a human. Humans looked at dragons and all they saw was a terrifying creature, bent on rampage and destruction. None had ever taken the time to learn about what a dragon really was. Perhaps if he could give the man before him a chance, he would see beyond the fire breathing monster and discover the real dragon beneath the scales.\n\nAlduce opened his eyes, surprise written over his ratty little face. He must be wondering why he wasn't dead. It was time to try a different approach. A different tact that would show the human how dragons behaved, how civilized and intelligent he was.\n\n\"You think you can free me?\" Galdor asked, hoping his words sounded friendly.\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" Alduce said, \"I am a sorcerer. I have magic at my disposal.\" Galdor wanted to believe, needed to believe. He was desperate and would give this human a chance to prove his claim. And if he betrayed his trust, like the mage before him, he would end his life.\n\n\"Before I decide on the best approach to your... our predicament, you better tell me how you came to be stuck deep underground.\" He couldn't fault Alduce for trying. He offered the man a chance and he certainly rose to the challenge.\n\n\"And, just so you know, mighty Galdor,\" Alduce continued, \"I would have returned with food for you. I intended no deception. I am a man of my word before anything else. Use your beastly magic, you will know I speak the truth!\" Galdor looked into the man's eyes and read the man's heart, as much as he could with the interference of his magic. Alduce might be bluffing, but Galdor believed, if given the opportunity, he may have returned with food, even if the man doubted it himself. This man was an enigma and Galdor liked a good puzzle. After so long alone it was good to finally have something to stimulate his mind.\n\nIt was time to be magnanimous with this strange human sorcerer.\n\n\"Very well, little sorcerer with the big heart, Galdor will tell you his tale. We will see what you can do to assist and if after that, you deceive me, you will return to being my next meal. Agreed?\" He set the terms of his proposal, leaving no room for ambiguity.\n\nAlduce didn't answer right away. He took his time contemplating the offer. \"Agreed, however, when I succeed, I shall ask a boon of you and you will grant it. These are my terms, if they are unacceptable, eat me now and be done with it.\"\n\nGaldor growled. This was his proposal and he set the terms. He felt a grudging admiration for Alduce for proposing his counter offer. He wanted a boon but it may prove to be more than he bargained for. He would play this out and let Alduce believe he had struck a better deal. He let him wait for his answer, then thrust his snout close to the man's face without touching him. He stared menacingly into Alduce's eyes, playing the part of a man eating dragon. After all, this was how humans expected dragons to behave. He didn't like it, but needed to show his resolve. It was unclear how powerful this sorcerer was and he was hard to read, his perception was not as sharp with this human.\n\n\"Agreed,\" Galdor finally said. \"But do not test my patience, I warn you. I have become a touch less tolerant since being trapped in this underground prison.\" He was beginning to have fun with this little man.\n\nAlduce expelled his breath and appeared to relax. Galdor sensed he wasn't as confident as his outward appearance suggested.\n\n\"Good. Tell me then, Galdor the Green,\" Alduce said, \"how you came to be trapped in these caverns. I am intrigued to learn your story. I admit, I'm puzzled as to how such a large creature as yourself was confined here. Especially when the actual tunnels I used to get here are so narrow. I had to squeeze through at places and I'm small compared to you.\"\n\nAlduce was inquisitive and Galdor understood he would have to relent and tell him how he had come to be trapped here. It was difficult for him to relive the pain of his story and admit to the human how he had been fooled. How he was stupid enough to fall for a ruse he should have detected. It was shameful and embarrassing, but he would tell his tale and give Alduce the knowledge he wanted. There was no reason, other than the painful memories, he shouldn't share his story. It may even help the sorcerer find him a way out. It was human magic that trapped him. It stood to reason that human magic might be the answer to his problems.\n\n\"Very well, human, listen well and do not interrupt me, green dragons do not appreciate interruptions. There will be ample time for any questions you may have after I finish.\"\n\nGaldor settled himself on the sandy cave floor, folding his wings comfortably and resting his head on outstretched front legs. He took a huge breath, swallowing his pride and by the light of the orb, he began telling his sorrowful story.\n\nHe told Alduce all about Blaze, about the lies and deception. The betrayal of a dragon he believed was a friend. Of how he had fallen foul of the human sorcerer Blaze conspired and plotted with. But he told Alduce more. He shared his past life with the man, something he never would have thought he would ever do. Perhaps, he didn't know for sure, he wanted at least one human to truly understand most dragons were not the fire breathing monsters humans thought they were. He explained about his home and his culture. How dragons lived and how they understood nature and lived in harmony with it. Of how his colony had drawn away from humans and their society, rather than fight with them. He told it all and when he started, he could hold nothing back. His passion for his colony and his role as moot leader invigorated his spirit, and his tale flooded out.\n\nAlduce interrupted from time to time and Galdor, even though he disliked the intrusions, realised it was in the man's nature. The questions he asked were relevant and he didn't mind too much. Alduce wasn't as uneducated as he first thought and Galdor understood why he asked. Galdor knew he wasn't a great story teller, yellow dragons had the gift of telling tales and enthralling their audience, but at least he was a good one.\n\nAlduce listened attentively and was genuinely interested in Galdor's plight. When he finished, the man looked saddened. Perhaps he did have some yellow blood in him after all. His story had touched the small man. While he would never understand what it was to be a dragon, to fly unhampered as the sun warmed your scales, Alduce would know the wrong Galdor suffered. Even a human could appreciate being held in a dark prison with no hope of freedom and the cruel mental torture it imposed. The withering of a free spirit, the confinement of a life that thrived on freedom. He was sure dragons and humans could at least agree on that.\n\nThere was more to share, something else he needed to make the man aware of that would help him understand fully. \"Come, Alduce,\" Galdor said. \"Come and meet the mage who trapped me here.\" The mage was part of the reason he was imprisoned here. It was his spell that tricked him from his own world and lured him here. He turned and walked into the darkness, towards where the mage's body lay. He still hated him, even though he was dead. The thought of his trap and the spell the foul sorcerer cast upon him, brought forth an agitation that was hard to control. He tried to hold it in check, but his tail swished from side to side, betraying his anger.\n\nHe craned his neck back in Alduce's direction. \"And bring your light with you, there is something I believe you should examine.\" Perhaps the sorcerer who was alive, might be able to figure out the spell of his dead counterpart.\n\nAlduce heeding his words, stood and dusted himself off, gathering up his orb and scuttled behind. He really was a bit like a two-legged rat. Nimble too, carefully avoiding his flicking tail as he hurried to catch up. Galdor led him to the edge of the cavern and stood before the body of the dead mage.\n\n\"Meet the nameless mage,\" Galdor said, a hint of humour in his voice. \"He lies where he fell, no gold or treasures did he have. Even though he was in league with Blaze, I do not think my black hearted adversary ever intended for him to survive, but instead to be trapped on this side of the portal with an angry dragon. Circumstances dictated he die with me, but had he survived and made it back through the archway to my own world, I suspect his life expectancy would have been short. He served his purpose and would have no further use to Blaze, of that I am sure. I do not know what lies he was fed or what promises were made to him. He surely must have believed it was worth the risk, meddling with our kind. He was no match for the black dragon's treachery.\" He sniffed the ancient corpse. It still reeked of human magic. The blackened body somehow preserved after all this time, dry withered skin stretched and ancient.\n\nAlduce came to stand beside him and held the orb out, examining the mage's remains. \"He looks like he's grinning,\" he said.\n\nGaldor noticed it for the first time, Alduce's observations were correct. The mummified head, with its tightly stretched skin, did indeed look like it was smiling in a deathly grimace.\n\n\"Although I doubt his thoughts were pleasant while you seared his living body to charcoal.\" Alduce added. His words, while accurate, were upsetting. He despised this mage as much as he despised Blaze. They were both responsible for trapping him.\n\n\"He deserved his fate,\" Galdor snapped, the memory of the betrayal an old wound newly opened. He glowered at the corpse and then at Alduce. \"I fought for my freedom when I realised their game. He wouldn't be this way had he not intended me harm!\" It was true, the mage only had himself to blame. The satisfaction of ending his life was little consolation.\n\n\"I'm sorry Galdor, truly I am,\" Alduce squeaked. Galdor sensed the words were spoken from the heart.\n\n\"This man made a choice to oppose you, I am only here by chance and do not intend you any harm. I gave you my word that I would do everything I could to help you.\" He pointed to the charred remains of the mage. \"You will have to excuse my comments, it's my way of dealing with a difficult situation. I don't wish to end up like the mage,\" then he quietly added, \"or in your belly.\"\n\nThe man's words held truth. He hadn't come here with the intention of harming Galdor, he didn't even know he was stuck underground. He stumbled over Galdor's cavern by accident and found himself just as trapped. He faced the little man, his face pale and tense. Galdor was projecting his rage and hate onto this human. He was still angry at events one hundred years in the past, remaining fresh in his mind. Sleeping away the years didn't diminish the pain and hurt. It was there every time he awoke. Alduce had been unfortunate enough to be a target for his displeasure. He stared at the man and started to chuckle, the sound reverberating around the cavern and breaking the tension.\n\nPuzzlement showed on Alduce's face, he appeared relieved but also confused. Galdor understood how he must feel. An angry dragon growling and threatening him one minute, chuckling the next.\n\n\"Forgive me, Alduce,\" Galdor said. \"I am not use to dealing with men.\" His predetermined opinion that all humans were evil was a result of his long incarceration. \"Seeing the mage after telling you my story has opened old wounds. I was angry at being deceived, reliving the events are unpleasant for me. You show a spirit that is worthy of a dragon and I have been rude to the only intelligent guest I have had in over a century.\" He didn't know why he felt he must explain himself to the man, but somehow it felt right.\n\n\"A century! You've been trapped in this darkness all this time?\" Alduce blurted out. \"One hundred years of imprisonment without seeing the sun. Galdor, that's terrible.\"\n\nTerrible didn't even come close but he held his feelings in check, understanding Alduce was truly sympathetic to his plight. He was right about this man, he was different from the others he had known.\n\n\"I too would be angry and bitter if our positions were reversed. There is no need for forgiveness, I was flippant because I was scared. I didn't stop to think. I didn't know. How have you survived so long? What do you... eat?\" He was a curious man, this Alduce, always asking questions. His inquisitive nature would surely get him into more trouble than he bargained for. He was asking a starving, food deprived dragon, what he ate. Galdor ignored the hunger pangs that plagued his empty stomach.\n\nHe decided he wouldn't eat Alduce. If he were to spend the rest of his existence in this miserable cave, he wouldn't unjustly punish this man. Alduce was not responsible for his predicament. Green dragons were better than that. An idea occurred to him.\n\n\"I can see we have both formed pre-conceived ideas regarding one another. I believe I have misjudged you too, Alduce. Despite my predicament, I was once a good judge of character and my stay here has undermined that. What say we start anew? A fresh beginning is what is needed here.\" He reared up and spread his wings in the traditional dragon greeting, treating Alduce as a peer and showing him respect.\n\n\"Greetings Alduce, I am Galdor the Green and I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I have been trapped in this underground cavern for over one hundred years and I am not my usual self. I'm sure you can appreciate why, after hearing my tale. I would be eternally grateful if you could help me with my plight, however, should you wish to leave, I will not stand in your way, nor will I eat you or burn you to death, like the unfortunate stinking mage,\" he snorted. There, he said it. Alduce was free to leave. Surprisingly, the little human stood, listening intently, waiting for Galdor to finish. Even the skinny rat hadn't looked as dumbstruck.\n\n\"I am able to sleep for long periods of time,\" Galdor explained, filling the silence, \"decades or longer, it's something dragons can do.\" A vague explanation would do as Alduce did not need to know dragon secrets. \"I can preserve my strength that way without the need for food, which I admit, is incredibly scarce down here. I've managed to scavenge a few meals over the years, but only when something wanders into my prison.\" It wasn't worth elaborating that he had eaten a flea ridden goat or a skinny rat and this time the inquisitive sorcerer never questioned him about it. They had found a common ground. He wouldn't tell Alduce what he had eaten and Alduce was omitting to mention food. It appeared the man was a quick study and had more sense that he had given him credit for.\n\nAlduce didn't move, staring at Galdor. \"Stinking mage?\"\n\n\"Yes, he stinks, but not of charred flesh. He stinks of a strong magic. I can smell it from his corpse even after all these years, an acrid taste, bitter and foul.\"\n\nAlduce stepped close to the ancient corpse inhaling deeply. It was a wonder the small snout holes in his face could smell anything. Galdor gave another rumbling chuckle as Alduce sniffed.\n\n\"Can humans smell magic? Tell me you can, tell me he stinks of it.\"\n\n\"No, Galdor, I smell nothing. The mage is totally free from any odour I can detect, be it magic or decay. However.\" He crouched, stretching out his hand, \"I can feel it.\" He turned to face Galdor, amazement plain on his face. \"And you are correct, it's strong!\" He was captivated with his discovery. Galdor always suspected the magic performed by the mage was powerful. The mage's body was over a century old, yet his remains lay partially intact. Compared to the bones of the goat, which were nothing but dust, it was logical to ascertain the residual strength of the human spell had kept the body preserved. If the surprised reaction of Alduce was anything to go by, he was sure his assumption was accurate.\n\nAlduce reached out apprehensively, slowly extending his arm and touching the corpse, running his tiny hand along its length. Galdor leaned in close, something was happening here, his dragon senses tingled. If Alduce discovered why the mage still radiated magic, he didn't want to miss it. He didn't dare hope, but any clue the human might discover could prove vital to his release.\n\nAlduce jumped back as if bitten, nearly swatting Galdor's snout. He pulled back instinctively and then felt foolish. The change in circumstances was making him jittery. Nervous anticipation at finding the elusive answers he sought for so long, filled his empty belly with nausea. That and being so close to the human magic, thrumming through the cavern. The magic appeared to be responding to Alduce.\n\n\"Sorry, Galdor, I didn't mean to make you jump.\" Alduce grinned. He actually grinned at him. As if a small human could scare a dragon.\n\n\"I was taken unawares by the power I feel emanating from the dead mage, \"Alduce continued, thankfully ignoring his embarrassment. \"After one hundred years any residual magic he may have held on to should long have dissipated.\" Alduce shook his hand, wafting it from side to side, keeping it away from his snout this time.\n\n\"My hand is tingling from the magic I feel, as if the body is charged, like the air before a thunder storm.\" He rubbed his hands together. \"Interesting. Very interesting,\" he murmured distantly.\n\nGaldor moved back in, studying him. He was like a different person. The pitiful man who attempted to bargain for his life was gone. Alduce was showing his true colours now he knew he was in no danger from his host. The man was thrilled at the prospect of learning something new, a scholar on the verge of an important discovery. It was obvious to Galdor there was another side to this inquisitive human. His excitement at the prospect of uncovering the mystery before them gave back Galdor something he had lost.\n\nHope.\n\n\"If he died over one hundred years ago, why is his body still whole? He should be naught but dust and bone,\" Alduce mused running his hands back over the mage's body, more confident now. He slowed as he reached the neck, rummaging in the folds of his tattered robe.\n\nA sliver glint flashed as Alduce removed something from the mage, pulling it over the remains of his head. A finely wrought chain dangled from his hand and something small twirled at its end. Alduce tugged, freeing the chain from the tangles of the tattered robe. As he removed his discovery from the body, dead one hundred years, time caught up with the intact corpse.\n\nThe body of the mage crumbled, disintegrating to dust until all that remained were ancient looking bones, pitted and stained as if they had been there for centuries. Whatever Alduce held in his hand, had kept the mage from decaying naturally.\n\n\"Strong magic,\" Galdor said into Alduce's ear, attempting to get his attention. \"That is what I have been smelling. That is the answer to why he remained whole. You have removed what preserved his remains and he perished before our eyes.\"\n\nAlduce held the chain at arm's length, a small pendant dangled down. It caught the light from the orb and Galdor was surprised to see it was fashioned in the image of a tiny dragon, superbly crafted. The metal looked clean, no tarnish or soot tainted the surface. It had withstood a dragon's flame and it hadn't blackened or melted. Strong magic. Human magic. Galdor marvelled at its beauty, the detail of the dragon was perfect. Whoever had created such a treasure and imbued it with magic was skilled in more ways than one.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like this. The metal is light and hasn't discoloured, even though the mage was engulfed in flames. There's no sign of any stain or corrosion. It must be substantially strong too, as it didn't melt.\"\n\nIt was strange that the man echoed what he had been thinking. If they had both arrived at the same conclusion, surely it must be true.\n\nAlduce gave the mage's remains one last look then asked, \"Sniff the mage now Galdor, can you still smell magic from his bones?\" He stepped back from the remains, making space.\n\nGaldor sniffed at the mage's remains, he drew in a huge breath, unable now to smell any scent of magic. He poked at the skull with his snout, nudging it to make sure. Nothing.\n\n\"I can smell no magic. It smells as it should, dead. Very old and very dead, that is all,\" he told Alduce.\n\n\"And what if you smell the pendant?\" Alduce asked. Galdor leaned in, eyeing the silver image of the dragon hanging from the chain in the sorcerer's fist and repeated his sniffing. \"Strong magic, stinks like all human magic, yes, potent and powerful.\" The mage may have been powerful, but his magic had died with him. The source of the power was the little dragon pendant. Memories flooded back. When he had been trapped, the smell of magic, this same smell, assaulted his sensitive nostrils. Galdor didn't make the connection until he sniffed the pendant, but his perception wasn't wrong. This was important, he knew this had something to do with the portal.\n\n\"Do you know what it is Alduce? I believe this might be how the portal from your world to mine was controlled. It stands to reason, powerful magic would be required for a spell of that magnitude. I remember when I flamed the mage,\" he stopped, looking from the pendant into the eyes of the man, regretfully reminding Alduce how he had killed the mage. He didn't know why, but he almost felt bad for the little man. \"That is when the portal started to shrink,\" he finished.\n\n\"You may just have something there, Galdor. I suspect the pendant is some kind of focal charm that can store magic. It certainly feels powerful, extremely powerful. If the mage was using this to assist in a bridge between our two worlds, when his life was ended, his hold on the magic would have ended and his control over it too, causing the spell to end.\" It made sense. How had he not seen this before?\n\nNow it was explained to him it all fell into place. There was more to Alduce than met the eye. He knew there was something different about this man, something special. Listening to him theorise on how the magic worked, what the mage had done and how it might be linked to the pendant, Galdor believed Alduce to be a sorcerer of incredible power and knowledge. His perception echoed his gut feeling. He just didn't know it himself yet. That was something the man needed to discover for himself, such was the way of the arcane. It wasn't a dragon's place to tell a human his magical potential. Perhaps he could convince Alduce he was endowed with the power to perform great magic. Galdor could see no harm in nudging him gently in the correct direction and lending a little encouragement.\n\n\"Alduce,\" he purred, \"do you think it would be possible, since you now possess this magical charm, that you could use it to re-open the way home for me?\" He put his own magic into his words, unsure his silver tongue would beguile Alduce, but there was no harm in trying. It wasn't necessary, Alduce was already one step ahead of him.\n\n\"Galdor, why don't we see?\" He studied the spinning pendant as he spoke. \"As my master is fond of telling me, you never know until you try!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Escape",
                "text": "Blaze set the globe down, careful to keep it away from the edge of the pool, then moved to the rear of the cave to where the thinnest columns stood. Bracing his legs, talons set wide, he gripped the rock, took a deep breath then roared. His voice echoed around the cave and he swung his tail in time to the roar, putting every piece of anger and frustration he felt into his effort.\n\nHis tail smashed into the targeted column and the force of the blow reverberated through his body. The tail of a dragon was strong and Blaze's tail was filled with muscle, honed daily through flight and all his swimming. He was rewarded with a sharp cracking sound and he drew his tail back for second strike. This time when it collided with the weakened pillar, it shattered, sending huge chunks of glowing stone scattering across the cave floor.\n\nHe waved his tail from side to side, flexing the muscles and shaking off the pain from the blow. It would be tender and bruised for a few weeks, but if his gamble worked, it would be worth it.\n\nHe collected the chucks of glowing rock, purple light bathing his black scales as he gathered up as many as he could cradle in his front claws. Making his way back to the pool he tipped the rocks into the tunnel, watching them fall through the water. They lit up the bottom of the passageway, adding to the light that shone out into the main river. He went back for a second load, scooping up the remaining fragments and adding them to the glowing pile at the bottom of the tunnel.\n\nLeaving the globe unattended\u2014it wasn't hidden but it would be safe\u2014he jumped back into the tunnel, taking a huge lungful of air before hitting the water. He pushed down to the bottom, grabbing chunks of glowing stalagmite and throwing them under the overhanging rock, out into the river.\n\nHe moved backwards and forwards along the gap, using the space between the overhang as a shield against the leviathan. He could still sense its malevolent presence and he fought off the impending dread, sure now it was a magical enhancement of the spell ensnaring it.\n\nWhen all the pieces of the shattered pillar were distributed, he swam back up the tunnel for what he hoped was the final time. The farther away he moved from the leviathan, the more the feeling of dread lessened. He pulled himself out of the pool, gasping in air and slowed his breathing, forcing himself to relax. He regretted destroying the pillar and marring the beauty of his secret lair, but it was necessary for his survival.\n\nHe wanted to leave, but he waited a few minutes more, hoping the extra time would help his plan. His breathing returned to normal and he scooped up the globe, eyeing the swirling mists inside and sensing their agitation. He would have time to examine it more fully on dry land and unlock its hidden secrets, but first he needed to escape its vengeful guardian.\n\nSecuring the globe in one talon and pulling it tightly against his chest, he dropped back into the tunnel, drawing in a mighty lungful of air before closing his nostrils. He swam to the bottom and carefully peered out under the rock, surveying the river. His plan had worked! The glowing chunks of rock lit up the riverbed, attracting shoals of fish. And the giant eels.\n\nThey swarmed around the glowing rocks, drawn by the ethereal purple light, filling the river with a horde of seething activity. There was no sign of the leviathan, although its presence could still be felt. Blaze made his move, aware his time was limited to how long he could hold his breath. He squeezed through the gap, wriggling out into the open water and swam, unprotected, directly into the midst of the writhing mass. The river's inhabitants didn't scatter as they usually did, mesmerised by the brighter than normal glow. Then the river darkened, exaggerating the glow of the rocks as the patrolling leviathan attacked, sweeping down from above and blotting out the skylight.\n\nBlaze shot out from the centre of the shoal, smaller and more agile than the huge bulk of the leviathan, his tail thrashing violently, bruises forgotten. The unstoppable leviathan crashed into the midst of the living distraction like an avalanche, huge elongated jaws crushing everything in its path. An explosion of mud and silt clouded the water, churning up the riverbed, the strong scent of fresh blood identifiable even through his tightly closed nostrils.\n\nPieces of giant eel and severed fish littered the river and Blaze used the confusion to swim for the surface. The leviathan turned, faster than Blaze would have believed possible, its huge mass pushing out waves of water and creating a vortex of swirling riptides. Blaze rode the turbulent undercurrents as they propelled him upwards, gripping the globe as he turned and twisted, attempting to control his ascent. He was sure if he dropped it, the leviathan would chase it and not him, but that wasn't an option. He would escape with his prize... or the leviathan would catch him.\n\nHe didn't deserve to die and he didn't want to let all his careful planning and hard work go to waste. He wasn't going to let a monster that relied on brute strength and sheer ignorance, beat him. He was superior to the leviathan. He had a destiny to fulfil and nothing, no matter how fast or fearful, would stand in his way.\n\nThe huge leviathan bore down on him, closing the distance. Blaze had one last move to make, but he needed to time it to perfection. He waited as the creature closed in, swimming for his life it was difficult to hold back and wait for the perfect opportunity. Panic-stricken at being devoured, adrenalin surged through his distressed body and kept him from freezing in terror.\n\nThe leviathan lunged, jaws open, ready to crush the black dragon between rows of sharp teeth. Blaze twisted and let go what he clasped in his other talon. A piece of glowing rock, exposed from the protection of the tightly curled claw, lit up the water as it dropped toward the bottom of the river. The leviathan's jaws snapped shut in the place where Blaze had been, its aim distracted by the falling piece of glowing stalagmite, as it twisted to follow its bright new prey.\n\nBlaze had managed to grab it when he swam out into the midst of the swarming mass of fish, scooping it up in his free claw and shielding it tightly, tucking it into his chest.\n\nIt was time to leave, he had no more tricks to play. The leviathan chased after the glowing rock, pursuing it down and Blaze altered his angle of escape in the opposite direction, riding the upward current created by the diving creature's huge tail. His lungs burned and his own tail throbbed, but he was still alive to feel the pain and he could taste victory.\n\nWelcoming daylight shone down from above as he neared the surface and a final surge of energy propelled him out of the river and into the beautiful air. He beat his wings for all he was worth, gaining height as the water sprayed from his body, catching the sunlight\u2014the wonderful golden sunlight\u2014and tiny rainbows shone through the misty spray, heralding his triumphant return from underwater.\n\nHe glanced down through the sparkling surface of the river, sunlight reflecting and distorting what lay beneath.\n\nThe river darkened.\n\nThe water beneath him changed from a flat even surface to a bulging, rising curve. Inside the dome of swelling water, the huge bulk of his pursuer was clearly visible. As it rose, Blaze could pick out each and every detail of its body, the swelling water magnifying the already gargantuan creature.\n\nIts huge scales a gleaming pattern of grey-green, beautiful as they caught the sunlight. Hard dorsal spikes ran from the back of its neck, decorating the spine and ending at the thick powerful tail, which propelled it upwards.\n\nThe leviathan exploded through the river's surface, launching into the air beneath the black dragon.\n\nBlaze beat the air, forcing the last of his energy into exhausted wings. This creature never gave up! He climbed, too slowly for his liking, as the leviathan's speed carried it out of the water towards him. It was too close! He couldn't gain the height he needed before it caught him. Twisting, he pivoted his entire body sideways, rather than upwards. The leviathan, its momentum carrying it straight up, was unable to correct its trajectory to match. Jaws snapped, three times in quick succession, clacking in the empty air the black dragon had vacated.\n\nRealising its prey had managed to evade it, the leviathan attempted to twist its bulk mid-air and follow, the geas compelling it, driving it relentlessly on. It massive body writhed, its tail whipping frantically as it attempted to control its pathway through the air.\n\nBlaze cleared the river, crossing over the canyons cliffs, leaving the water behind, never more grateful to see solid rock beneath his wings. Every muscle in his body throbbed\u2014he could easily collapse and sleep for a year\u2014relying on every drop of energy that remained to keep himself airborne. The leviathan roared in anger, the deafening sound echoing along the canyon walls.\n\nThe black dragon climbed higher, wings aching from exertion, tension and fear coursing through his entire body, the terrible dread forcing him on. He twisted his neck and watched as the leviathan reached its zenith, hanging momentarily, before dropping back towards the river. It struck the canyon's edge, pectoral fins flapping like undersized wings, bouncing from the rock and deflecting back at an angle. It plummeted back towards the waiting river, colliding with one of the many pillars rising from the water. Rock exploded as the leviathan's weight ploughed into the pillar, its collision destroying, in seconds, what a millennia of erosion had sculpted. Colourful chunks of red rock rained down into the water like a meteor storm, thrashing its dark surface to boiling froth, closely followed by the descending leviathan.\n\nThe creature smacked into the river's surface with an almighty crack, a sound like peeling thunder assaulted Blaze's ears, still ringing from its deafening roar. A geyser of water shot upwards, a mighty wave drenched the surrounding canyon walls, soaking the parched rock to a deeper red. The river swallowed the leviathan, a swirling vortex of frothing water filling the giant hole where its body punched into the river. A tidal wave surged out, rushing waves lashed the canyon walls as they thundered outward, churning the usually placid surface to white foam.\n\nBlaze landed on the wet cliff edge, careful to avoid the crumbling rock damaged by the impact of the leviathan. The leviathan's body sunk below the surface, unmoving as the river claimed it. The wash from the massive wave dissipated, undulating waves rippling like a spring tide, stretching in both directions along the river, eventually diminishing.\n\nThat, Blaze thought, must have hurt. The huge leviathan's body impacted the river, striking with the flat of its belly after a painful collision with the solid pillar. It must have been like hitting a second solid wall of rock; he didn't think anything could have survived that. High up on the canyon walls, the watermark remained, the only sign of the creature's passing. The pillar it had collided with was completely gone, creating an obvious gap in the familiar view.\n\nThe river's surface swirled and a small whirlpool formed, bubbles bursting as they rose from the depths. Wisps of black smoke hovered above the disturbance, escaping from the bubbles and gradually thickening. Blaze felt a warmth in his claw, reminding him of the globe still clutched tightly to his chest. Heat grew and he placed the globe on the rock, careful to keep it away from the canyon's edge. If it fell back into the river, he didn't want to go back down there to retrieve it. He'd had enough of swimming for one day.\n\nThe cloud of smoke rose, winding its way up the canyon, the earie stillness making it all the more unusual. It wove like a serpent, as if searching for something, then changed direction and headed straight towards the black dragon. The globe flared, bright even under the sunlight, attracting the smoky thread as it twisted though the air.\n\nBlaze stepped back as the globe called the smoke to it, drawing it closer. He knew he was witnessing something magical as the smoky threads circled around the globe, covering the surface in a dark swirling cloud. He could sense the globe had drawn the threads from deep below the water's surface. It pulsed, shining through the dark mist, its insides writhing like a maelstrom. The smoke exploded outward, then rushed back towards the smooth surface, passing through the outer shell and joining with the turbulent essence inside.\n\nBlaze tentatively reached out a talon, lightly resting it on the surface of the globe. A rush of elation overwhelmed his weariness as the globe settled and the swirling inside calmed. His tiredness vanished and he felt amazing. No longer was he exhausted, it was as if his near death brush with the leviathan never happened.\n\nHe had felt weak and powerless against the leviathan, ashamed a dragon would be scared and flee for his life. But now he was victorious, evading a stronger adversary and snatching the globe from its protection. He was in no doubt now that the leviathan had been compelled to guard it and was alerted when he removed the globe from its ancient resting.\n\nThe globe was his now, no longer hidden away and guarded. He had rescued it from the clutches of the leviathan. It had failed. He had won and that was what counted.\n\nThe globe returned to its dormant state, calm and peaceful. Blaze, unsure that whatever had just happened was over, closed his talons over the surface. It was now cool to the touch and he experienced strong feelings of gratitude and acceptance.\n\nWater splashed below and sharp dorsal ridges broke through the river's surface moving slowly at first then gathering speed. Blaze stared, amazed the leviathan had survived. Its huge tail swept from side to side under the water, propelling it downriver towards the great ocean.\n\nIt raised its head above the water and called out, a mournful sound, so different from the roar of rage. Blaze understood. It had lost. Lost against a better opponent, but it also lost something more, something the globe had taken.\n\nHe watched as it sank back into the river and vanished, defeated. It might have survived the fall, but he knew it wouldn't live for much longer. The globe had taken something vital from it, its essence of life. It was going home to die. The leviathan's loss was his gain. The victor claimed his reward.\n\nBlaze picked up the globe\u2014his prize\u2014and headed for the Lifting Plateau."
            },
            {
                "title": "Out of the Darkness",
                "text": "Galdor didn't know anything about Alduce's master; he sounded like a wise mentor indeed. It was possible he might be another human who might surprise him. Could this sorcerer really have the ability to help him escape? His perception tickled his senses, but it wasn't able to provide an answer.\n\nHe needed to focus and drag himself beyond the complacency of continued sleep. This was the most eventful day he had experienced in his long incarceration. Was this the day he had been waiting for? He was bursting with anticipation, this unlikely disturbance to his slumber had delivered someone to him who was willing to try and help him escape. When Alduce had first arrived, he had felt nothing but suspicion and mistrust. His perception had shown him this human was different, changing his hatred to hope. He could barely contain his excitement as he focused intently on the human.\n\nAlduce fixed his gaze on the spinning pendant, intense concentration written over his rodent like features. Galdor's scales tingled, human magic thick in the confines of the cave. He could sense a change in his surroundings, an expectant feeling, the air charged with anticipation. The unpleasant taste of human magic filled his nostrils, potent and strong. He hoped Alduce knew what he was doing. Magic this powerful, unleashed in a confined space, could be dangerous. Still, it was a risk he wanted to take, anything was better than being stuck here for eternity.\n\nLightning crackled along the cavern roof, small blue sparks building to larger arcs, spitting and jumping as they swarmed across the rock overhead. Bolts flew from the cave roof, drawn to the dragon pendant, absorbed into the unusual metal, filling it with power.\n\nGaldor exhaled, his breath whistled as he puffed in surprise, Alduce glancing at him as he held onto the chain, a corona of light enveloping the man. The lightning poured into the small dragon, filling it with more and more power. Alduce stood, bravely gripping the chain as the power intensified. Just when Galdor thought the pendant was about to explode the power blasted from it. Eight trails of lightning leapt from the metal dragon, bursting free from containment, rushing towards the far wall where the portal had been. The lightning streaked over the rock like a spider's web, spreading out in a circle, a spinning whirlpool of magical light. Eight points in the wall glowed as the lightning spread, lighting up the cavern, the blue sparks blurring into a continuous circle, faster and faster as it spun around the points fixed into the rock.\n\nGaldor examined the whirling pool of light, it grew brighter, opening from the centre. Was it possible the eight points on the wall had been deliberately set there by the mage to create the original portal? It was a mystery, yet Alduce had managed to imitate the spell and create a passageway. This time, it was the way home, the path to freedom rather than imprisonment.\n\nGaldor blinked, clearing the moisture of tears from his eyes. A great euphoria filled him as he watched the small man wield the hated human magic. Confusing emotions mixed with excitement and anticipation. This was the day he had waited so patiently for, his long ordeal almost over.\n\nThe newly created passageway expanded outwards until it reached the edge of the whirling lightning, rippling like waves on water. It slowed and calmed and the blurring cleared, the surface steady. A vision of beauty. To think he had contemplated eating Alduce! The taste of the sorcerer's unbelievable success was a thousand times better than his flesh ever would have been.\n\nGaldor was in awe, \"Alduce, you have done it!\" This little man was indeed a sorcerer worthy of his talent. \"You have restored the archway. You are truly a sorcerer of great knowledge and power. You have opened the way home for me after more than one hundred years.\" He couldn't express his gratitude enough, and any further words failed him, all he could do was stare at the gateway in wonder.\n\n\"Galdor,\" Alduce said, his voice low, \"I am but an apprentice and you pay me a great compliment for accidentally stumbling across the answer you so desperately desired.\" His modest reply only reinforced Galdor's opinion that this man was special. Of that he was positive, his perception strong about it. Alduce would be like no other human sorcerer and was destined for great things. Galdor would truly have liked to spend more time with the man and get to know him better, but the urgency of returning to his own home was too intense.\n\n\"Well then,\" he told Alduce, \"Apprentice you may be now, I can only believe when you become a master, you will be the most powerful human who ever practiced magic!\" The man had tamed the magic from an artefact he had never seen, opening a gateway to another world. This wasn't something a mere apprentice should be able to accomplish. There was no time to waste, no time to discuss this with Alduce. He needed to act.\n\n\"I would dearly love to stay and discuss the how and the why, Alduce, my rescuer, but I fear to waste another second stuck in this dank prison. I must return and see how the years and that black hearted dragon have changed the home I once knew.\"\n\nGaldor tested the portal, sliding his neck through the shimmering ring of light, nervous it would work as he hoped and still not fully believing it was real. He pulled it back through and looked Alduce in the eye, no longer was there any trace of fear, rather a sense of great wonder and respect. Something they both shared.\n\n\"You asked me a boon when we made our deal, sorcerer.\" Galdor said. \"Name it now and I will grant it.\" Whatever Alduce wished for, if it was within Galdor's power, he would give it freely.\n\nAlduce nodded, bobbling his tiny head with little conviction. \"My boon, mighty Galdor, was not to meet my end in this cave,\" he grinned. \"And remaining on the outside of your belly is reward enough for me.\"\n\nGaldor couldn't help the laughter that rumbled deep from within. When he first met Alduce, he had hated the man, another despised human, filled with poison and lies. He would never have believed after a century of confinement that a human sorcerer would make him happy enough to laugh. Let alone free him.\n\n\"I desire no more,\" Alduce continued, surprising the dragon, \"to see you gain your freedom is more than enough payment. It's not every day I'm given the opportunity to meet a dragon.\" Galdor knew the words were true and spoken from the heart. This man had a spirit worthy of reward. Any man who could rise above his prejudices and save a dragon for no reason other than helping\u2014when he thought he was going to die\u2014was more than human. And Galdor would proudly call him a friend.\n\n\"You are a humble man, Alduce, I doubt there are many among your race that would turn down such an offer. It gives me hope for the human race.\" He pulled his leg back, tucking it under his chest and bent low, bowing to the man before him and showing him the respect of an equal. An equal with the spirit of a dragon.\n\n\"I will remember this and the lesson you have taught me here today, that dragon kind and human beings can become friends.\"\n\nGaldor drew himself up on his hind legs and spread his wings, the light from the portal highlighting his green scales. The man would receive a boon, he deserved to be rewarded with more than just praise.\n\nGaldor called on his own magic and a gold light emanated from his body, bathing him in a shimmering haze. He was ready to transform, be born anew, leave his prison and start fresh. Releasing the magic, he glowed brighter and separated his skin and scales from his body. There was no pain as his outer layer shed, sliding free, as it dropped to the cave floor. New scales radiated from below the old, gleaming with all the colours of the spectrum, shimmering and pulsing like waves as they surrounded his form. The pulsing slowed and the new scales glowed brightly before settling to their natural green.\n\nHe felt reborn. The shedding was rare and not all dragons were able to renew their skin and scales. Galdor had only done this once before and it was a private, secret act. Alduce would never know how privileged he was to witness a shedding, but he did look suitably impressed.\n\n\"I leave you my hide of skin and scales,\" Galdor proudly announced. \"A sorcerer such as yourself will find many uses for it, I am sure.\" He stepped free of his former skin and leapt through the portal like a mighty green salmon in a waterfall of swirling light.\n\nHe stood on the other side, his home world, free at last. Looking back through the shimmering portal, Alduce stood, fixed to the spot, stunned and amazed. Perhaps he understood the shedding and just how lucky he was. He had been gifted a boon from a dragon, survived where others less talented would have met their demise. And he now owned a powerful magical pendant. Much better, Galdor mused, than ending up in a dragon's belly.\n\nHe pushed his head back through the hole in the cave wall, talons firmly planted on his home ground.\n\n\"Galdor the Green owes you much more than the hide he has shed and the magical necklace you hold,\" he said. \"Remember this Alduce, for I shall not forget. If you ever chance to visit this world, seek me out.\" He quickly pulled his head back through the portal and spoke from his own side.\n\n\"Quick, now, close the archway behind me,\" he called out. He didn't want anything to happen to the man, not after everything he accomplished. The unknown magic was still a concern and it wouldn't sit well with him if Alduce was hurt or injured as a result of holding the portal open.\n\nThe circle of the gateway started to diminish, drawing in on itself, closing. It grew smaller and smaller and the light began to fade. Alduce must have released his hold on the magic. He would be safe.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Galdor said to the small hole of the closing portal. He hoped the little man could hear him.\n\nThe portal closed, winking out of existence and the cave wall on Galdor's world returned to being solid rock."
            },
            {
                "title": "Manipulation and Subterfuge",
                "text": "Excerpt from the private journals of Alduce.\n\nThe Earth Mother and dragon magic.\n\nThe Earth Mother is believed to be the first ever dragon to have existed. She is regarded as something close to a deity\u2014but not worshipped as a goddess\u2014yet held in reverence. She is credited as being part of the natural order and the creator of all things. Dragons believe the origins of magic were gifted by the Earth Mother giving her magic to the land, the birthing of all dragons and the bringing of life. Similar to Mother Nature?\n\nShe is referred to and often thanked, but still remains a mystery outside true dragon perception. She is accepted and known without the need of explanation and just is, in typical dragon logic.\n\nThere are many stories that tell where she originated from and how she came to exist, depending on which colony elder tells the tale. The common belief is that long before humans walked the lands, dragons inhabited the worlds and every dragon is a distant descendant of the Earth Mother. Her magic was great, allowing her to span the galaxies, seeding the worlds she visited with her eggs, then moving on. This might be why dragon eggs are attributed to be naturally resistant to almost everything and do not need attention to incubate or hatch. And also why so much dragon lore and history follows a similar path, though the details and circumstances can differ from world to world.\n\nSome worlds are no longer home to dragons as they have died out and become extinct, fading into myth. However, if there is magic in that place, no matter how strong or weak, it is because dragons once flew the skies.\n\nDragon magic is much older than the magic employed by sorcerers, mages, magicians or any other human practitioner of the mystical arts. On worlds where magic fades, another power fills the void: science waits to be discovered and fill the vacuum. Technology and scientific discovery replace the unknown with the known and where once mystery and belief were strong, explanation and reasoning now prevail. This raises the long pondered question. Has the lack of belief in magic caused it to fade once science is discovered? Would the academic scholar of science, on a world that has lost magic, be the magician or sorcerer of that world's past age?\n\nThe lifespan of dragons long exceeds that of humans, but they are less prolific. It is the fate of most worlds that are the home of dragons, that eventually, these wonderful creatures are forced into extinction by humans. Humans on any world will eventually rise to the top of the evolutionary pile, becoming the dominant species. As humans thrive, be it magically or technologically, dragons suffer. It is an age old pattern that ultimately eliminates the dragon species, even though they are stronger both physically and magically.\n\nIt should be noted, that there are many types of magic, the two most common being dragon and human, neither of which is interchangeable.\n\nI have concluded that other worlds that are devoid of any magic at all, while they may be inhabited by man, have never known dragons in their history.\n\nSome worlds believe dragons to be mythical, creatures of legend never having truly existed, only stories and tales of fantasy, inventions of the imagination. The sad fact is, even though there may be no scientific evidence to prove their existence, dragons were once inhabitants of these worlds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon of Stone",
                "text": "Galdor hurried through the labyrinth of caves, eager to be above ground. He followed the passageways he had traversed over one hundred years ago, remembering the route he had taken. It may have been a long time ago, but his memory was as sharp as his teeth. The pathway he followed was a reminder of his stupidity, a bitter memory of how he had been tricked. Now he was leaving his captivity it was easier to bear.\n\nHe weaved through the caverns and archways, desperate to see the sky once more, but something slowed him. He stopped, his perception tingling; he was sure he had seen another dragon inside the cave mouth he just passed. Cautiously he turned round and peered into the recess he'd hurried by.\n\nIt was another dragon. It stood there in the darkness, staring away from him, completely stationary, as if it was intently studying something. Strange that it failed to notice his presence. Surely its own perception would have alerted it to the fact another dragon was close.\n\n\"Hello?\" Galdor spoke, more a question than a greeting. The other dragon never moved and there was no indication the stranger even heard his words. The smaller spikes on his neck stood up like the hackles of an angry wolf. Was this another trick? A trap set by Blaze? He would not be fooled again, not after a century of torture. He wouldn't fall foul of the black dragon's deceptions a second time. He couldn't stand to suffer imprisonment ever again.\n\n\"I am Galdor the Green, once moot leader of the Lifting Plateau. Identify yourself.\" After one hundred years, his voice hadn't lost its tone of authority, yet there was no response. Nothing! It was as if the unusually still dragon never heard him. There was something amiss, this wasn't right. He prepared his fire, drawing deep from within, ready for confrontation and prepared to defend himself. He was appalled that he should think of attacking first, but he wouldn't risk his freedom\u2014or his sanity\u2014again.\n\nThe dragon didn't move and Galdor crept closer, on full alert and waiting for a trap to spring or an attack to come. Nothing happened. He approached the mysterious dragon, vigilant for any trickery, then realised why it was still and unmoving.\n\nIt was because the dragon before him wasn't alive. It was made entirely of stone! He hadn't noticed any statues when he came here to confront his would be adversary all those years ago. It was possible he missed seeing the statue when he had last been here. It was fair to say he hadn't been his usual observant self that day, extremely distracted and only focused on one thing: the mage. Blaze managed to knock him off balance, distracting his normally keen eye with his whispering and suspicions. He couldn't blame himself for not noticing if this stone dragon was part of the shadows or not, on that fateful day.\n\nThe statue looked vaguely familiar and it had a distant sense of... something, he wasn't sure what. It was spectacularly realistic, perfectly rendered in every detail and entirely lifelike.\n\nGaldor examined the workmanship, the attention to detail was magnificent. Who would create such a work of art where no one would ever see it? Dragons weren't known for carving statues. It was a mystery that he...\n\n\"Baelross the Blue?\" This was no statue! Realisation hit him like a blow; his legs felt weak and it wasn't from his years of incarceration and starvation. This was once a real dragon, no longer made of flesh and blood. Skin and scales! No wonder the stone image appeared so authentic.\n\nWho would do this to a dragon? Why would anyone want to? Had the mage cast a conjuration on Baelross? He didn't believe it was the mage. The mage was in the other cave, waiting for him. And he never mentioned anything about turning a dragon to stone. If he was able to perform such a powerful spell, Galdor was sure that would have been easier than luring him into the portal.\n\nBlaze! This must his doing. He was the only other dragon\u2014as far as he knew\u2014that had been here before. It could only be the black dragon's evil work. What had he done? What could he have told Baelross to lure him here? And more importantly, if he was responsible for this atrocity, how had he changed a living dragon to stone? If Blaze possessed this ability prior to trapping him, it didn't make any sense he wouldn't use it. The more he thought about it, he was positive this unfortunate stone dragon hadn't been here on his previous visit.\n\nHe needed to find out what had happened in his prolonged absence. If this was any indication, he suspected it was nothing good.\n\n\"I'm sorry Baelross,\" Galdor said to the stone dragon. \"I promise you will be avenged.\"\n\nFrom deep inside the stone, Galdor could sense a tiny spark of magic. Was it possible that somewhere, locked within the solid rock, something of the blue dragon still existed? Was he crying out for help? He probed gently, reaching out with his mind and searched for signs of life, but all he could sense was cold dead stone, the wisp of magic gone. It was maybe just as well. The horror of being turned to stone and still being aware would be unbearable. He hoped Baelross wasn't trapped inside, still conscious and suffering some cruel eternal torment.\n\nGaldor would rather be dead if it were him.\n\nUnbidden, tears came and he blinked them from his eyes, saddened that the first kindred spirit he should encounter on his return home, had suffered a fate worse than his own. Dragons should never turn against their kin. To do so would be to stoop to the level of humans warring amongst themselves like animals. He checked himself. He was judging all humans with his preconceived prejudice. They weren't all like that. He owed his freedom\u2014and his life\u2014to a human. Alduce had proved to him that all men weren't bad, just as Blaze had shown him all dragons were not good.\n\nHe need to get out of these caves, they held nothing but despair and he'd had his fill.\n\nLeaving the stone dragon to the darkness, unaware of how long the former blue dragon stood his silent vigil, he rushed to escape the confines of the bleak caverns. He had spent enough time below ground to last him two lifetimes.\n\nThe air grew sweeter as he made his way to the surface. It had been far too long since he breathed in fresh air.\n\nEmerging from the cave mouth he had entered one hundred years previous, he looked up into an afternoon sky. More tears came, but this time it wasn't from sadness. The outside world was beautiful, filled with colour and light. The sun was passed its zenith but it would still be a long time before it set. He blinked a few times, clearing the tears, the bright daylight harsh upon eyes that had only seen darkness for too many years. The blue of the sky, welcome and intense. The green of his new scales vibrant and full of life. So many colours and so many emotions, so many years lost.\n\nGaldor would not shed any more tears. He choked the overwhelming emotion back. He wouldn't waste time on the past. He pushed up from the ground, his mighty wings lifting, pulling his huge body skyward. He gave silent thanks to the Earth Mother, she who seeded worlds and gave her magic to all dragons, grateful his wings still worked. He was tired and weak and hadn't wanted to contemplate what he would do if his wings hadn't carried him into the air.\n\nThe breeze wafted over his hide, fresh and clean after his confinement. The afternoon sun warmed his scales, replenishing his magic and his spirit. The pleasure of simple flight was wonderful as he beat his wings. His stomach growled, reminding him of his ravenous state. After all of this day's unusual events his mind truly had been distracted, allowing him to forget the ever present need to eat.\n\nWhen he awoke to Alduce's presence, his gnawing hunger was the first thing he felt. Now, after a century of fasting, he was able to do something about it. Goats and rats were off the menu. In the confines of his cave he would have been thankful for anything. He had even contemplated eating a human! He had reached his nadir and now, like his flight, the only way was up. He needed to feed, to hunt, to live.\n\nFirst he would fill his empty belly. He would gorge himself until his burning hunger was sated. Then he would find a lake to bathe in, wash away the stink of dust and cleanse himself in crystal clear waters. The simple pleasures of life that he had been denied for so long, would be a luxury. Once that was taken care of, he would go in search of Blaze.\n\nThere was a debt to be paid and it was time to collect."
            },
            {
                "title": "New Horizons",
                "text": "It was dark when Blaze finally arrived back at the Lifting Plateau. Most dragons would be settled down in their own private caves for the evening. If any of the plateau's residents should chance to look up, it would be less noticeable to spot his black scales against the night sky.\n\nHe decided after his encounter with the leviathan, bringing the globe home with him might not be the smartest idea at present. He circled high above the ground deliberately sweeping the land below, observing what would soon be his colony.\n\nHe longed to study his prize and learn the secrets it held, but was afraid the other dragons would sense it. It was his and he didn't want anyone to know he had it. The globe was special and gave off a magical aura that might attract some of the more inquisitive dragons. It was his and he wasn't prepared to share it. If Galdor were here he would have kept it for the moot, like a pearl of wisdom or a moonstone, hiding it away and denying it from others. Blaze knew he would have justified his actions saying it was for the good of their community. But he knew better. Galdor would deprive dragons like him the opportunity to learn and become powerful, keeping its secrets for himself. The green dragon would have felt threatened if others were smarter and stronger than he was. Only the moot leader was allowed to consult with a pearl of wisdom and the globe would have been treated the same, and that was unfair. Blaze didn't need to worry about that now. He had proved to himself he could outsmart Galdor. He was the one who would take over the moot and lead the dragons to a better way of life. Their former moot leader wouldn't be there to hold them back anymore.\n\nWhy shouldn't all dragons learn the forbidden secrets? Why were they only accessible to some and not to all? It was because weak leaders like Galdor feared competition. They were complacent in their laziness. Happy to idly sit back and watch as dragons were slowly driven from their rightful lands by humans. This world was theirs and if Galdor didn't want to defend it, the humans would multiply and spread. The time for retreating had ended, those days were passed. Now was the time for stopping the rot for good, before it set in.\n\nGaldor was gone. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau would show their true colours now they were free of the green dragon's rule. Human lives might be precious to Galdor but there were others who felt as he did. Others who would see the brilliance of his vision and could be convinced to follow his lead and know his path was the only way forward. A new dawn for dragons was on the horizon and Blaze the Black would be their saviour.\n\nHe swept up over the edge of the plateau, the strong updrafts lifting him higher into the night sky. This was his home and he wouldn't leave because the human population spread to their lands. His lands. The unique wind patterns of the plateau were exhilarating and he would miss them if they moved.\n\nGaldor was content to avoid conflict and the humans seemed to think they could take what belonged to others and there would be no consequences. They would learn that Blaze was a stronger leader and his dragons were to be feared. No more would they slowly retreat, avoiding human contact, now was the time to stand and fight. But before this happened, he needed to implement the next part of his plan.\n\nHe didn't want to leave his globe unattended in his cave when he was away from the plateau. That would be too risky. Someone might sniff it out and steal it.\n\nHe had rescued it from its underwater stronghold and now Galdor was out of the way, he needed to study it, learn its secrets, and use it to its full potential. It wasn't convenient to return it to the underwater cave each time, even though it was a safer place, beyond the reach of most. That place was too far away and he wanted to be closer to the globe.\n\nHe had made a detour on his way home and returned to the caves where he had lured Galdor. They were far enough away to be remote and were difficult to reach if you didn't fly. The globe would be safe there for now. Using his magic, he warded the cave entrance against interlopers. If anyone entered, his protection spell would alert him. He had communed with the globe and it showed him how to do this, teaching him the secret and weaving a connecting spell between them both. The bond he formed would alert him should the globe be disturbed.\n\nIt was intoxicating, discovering a new magic. The depths of the globe's secrets, wrapped inside its swirling inner mists, were infinite. A vast store of knowledge, there to be learned for a small price. For him to learn those secrets and gain access to the spells, it needed to be fed. It had gorged itself on the leviathan's life force. The creature had been huge and the globe had taken its spirit, using up its life force in order to grow stronger. It lay dormant in the underwater cavern until Blaze removed it, stirring its gargantuan protector. It was as if he had awoken it from its rest. While it rested on the plinth in the cave of the purple stalagmites, it had been quietly content.\n\nNow it was eager to be more than a swirling mystery. It hungered to grow and Blaze hungered with it.\n\nThe more it evolved, the more it revealed. All Blaze needed to do was provide it with what it desired and it would reciprocate.\n\nHe understood what it needed and it would work with him, rather than take his own life force because it knew they were alike. It had a perception, a sentient sense, all of its own and it understood him. It wasn't a charm or a vessel, it was alive.\n\nHe glided down onto the plateau, his black scales cloaking him in darkness as he descended, landing gracefully. Being a black dragon had its advantages and night flying was his speciality. It was quiet and he hoped to retire to his cave and avoid any contact with others. Now he was away from the globe, tiredness crept back over him. His battered tail throbbed and his wings ached.\n\nWhen he had escaped the leviathan he was spent, his strength gone. When the globe had consumed the life force, drawing it from the leviathan's body, it infused him with energy. The globe had known, recognised he was weakened and it provided him with the sustenance he needed.\n\nAnd it felt good. No, it felt wonderful!\n\nWith the strength of the defeated guardian coursing through him, lifting the weariness from his aching body, it refreshed him physically, chasing away the stress of the conflict and his near death encounter.\n\nHe was ashamed at being afraid when the leviathan's dread force hit him. He knew it was natural for leviathans to project a feeling of fear at their enemies and understood this was the nature of such creatures. The dread had been amplified by the spell that consumed it and drove it on, but it still annoyed him, he was a mighty dragon and shouldn't be afraid. Terror had filled him, taking over his usually calm demeanour and dragons should never have to feel like that. Dragons were the ones that should instil terror in their enemies. Now he possessed the globe, he would never give in to any weakness again, he would be the bringer of dread and any who stood against him would learn real terror.\n\n\"Blaze,\" a voice called from behind. That was the last thing he needed, someone catching him returning. He had taken care fooling Galdor into not leaving together and, as far as he was aware, the others wouldn't have seen them together before they left. Dragons came and went on the plateau, were answerable only to themselves, but Galdor was a different story. He had been their moot leader and was embroiled in everyone's business. If they associated Galdor's mysterious disappearance with him, suspecting he knew anything that he wasn't sharing, it might upset his plan to take over the moot.\n\nThe voice called out a second time. \"Blaze?\" It wasn't going to be ignored. He turned and saw its owner, a blue dragon, appearing almost as black as he was in the absence of the sun's light, bright yellow eyes peering into his own.\n\n\"Baelross,\" Blaze answered, catching himself from snapping at the blue. \"I was just retiring for the evening. I've had a long day,\" he sighed, adding a weariness to his words. \"Fishing for eels.\"\n\n\"Was Galdor with you?\" Baelross asked.\n\n\"Galdor? He doesn't swim as well as I do,\" he snorted, making light of his quip and avoiding the question.\n\n\"Have you seen him? I've been looking for him and he isn't on the plateau. He asked me to meet with him, sounded serious but he wouldn't elaborate. He told me he was investigating something and he needed my help.\"\n\n\"I spoke with him this morning,\" Blaze stalled. Had Galdor told Baelross about the mage? Had he shared their fictitious secret with the blue or any others? If the dragons knew about the supposed plot, they would be suspicious when Galdor didn't return. If the moot leader had shared Blaze's involvement, they would look to him for answers and that was going to make his plan to take Galdor's place, less likely. \"Have you tried the moot chamber? He often goes there to think.\"\n\n\"He isn't on the plateau. My perception is never wrong.\" Blaze couldn't argue with that. Baelross was known for the accuracy of his dragon sense. The perception wasn't a sense to be ignored and while most dragons didn't let it control the paths they travelled, they were aware it was a sense they should take heed of when it provided insight. He would have to be careful. If the blue dragon shared his concern with the others, months of careful planning would be ruined. He needed the dragons to support him if his plans were to succeed. \"I'm sure he'll be back soon.\" He leaned in close to Baelross, furtively glancing over his shoulder and dropping his voice. \"He told me not to say anything.\"\n\nThe blue dragon's eyes widened, \"I knew it,\" he said, unconsciously lowering his own voice. \"Something is wrong, something bad has befallen him. We should alert the rest of the moot.\" That wasn't good and Blaze didn't want this blue causing problems that could be avoided.\n\n\"Galdor doesn't want that,\" Blaze said. He needed to convince Baelross not to go blabbing to the others and stirring them up. The last thing he wanted was for them turning their search for their missing leader into some sort of crusade. They would be out scouring the lands, snooping were they didn't belong and might find his globe.\n\n\"I know where he is,\" he said to Baelross. On another world, too far for you to help him. \"I gave him my word. I wouldn't break his trust, but...\" Baelross hung on his words. He was as gullible as Galdor. Galdor the Gullible! He controlled his laughter before the blue's perception alerted him something was amiss. It wasn't a lie, he did know where Galdor was. It was surprisingly simple to fool others when they trusted you.\n\n\"But?\" Baelross insisted. All Blaze wanted to do was sleep. This annoying blue was keeping him from a well-deserved rest. It had been an extremely full day and he was tired.\n\n\"He told me to meet him tomorrow. He has asked me to help him as well. Help him with... \" Again he made a show of checking to see there wasn't anyone about. \"I think you should come too. I know he trusts you, he told me he valued your discretion. But it's probably best if you keep it to yourself, for now. I don't want him mad at me, especially when he was explicit with his instructions. You must keep this between us, it is vital. If Galdor finds out you've stirred up everyone unnecessarily, especially before he's ready, you'll have to take the blame. Agreed?\" There! That ought to force the inquisitive blue into a corner. Hopefully he would keep quiet.\n\n\"I'm not sure\u2014\" Baelross started.\n\n\"Baelross!\" Blaze retorted sharply. \"You need to listen to me. Galdor is the wisest dragon I know. He is also moot leader. Do not go against his wishes, please.\" It stuck in his throat to beg compliance from the annoying blue, but he needed to get him to stay quiet and stoking a blue's ego was a sure way to succeed. \"Look, I'm sure he will share everything with you, but you must understand, a black dragon never breaks his word.\" The blue dragon slumped his shoulders and Blaze knew he would keep their secret.\n\n\"Meet me tomorrow, south of the plateau, just after dawn. We will fly out to meet Galdor together and I'm sure he will explain everything to you. I'll vouch for you, he listens to my council. But be warned, Baelross the Blue,\" Blaze addressed him by his formal title, sounding serious. \"This is bigger than black or blue. I am trusting you not to let me down and remain loyal to Galdor.\" He leaned in close, whispering, \"And all the dragons of the Lifting Plateau.\"\n\nBaelross nodded, \"Blue dragons are loyal, your trust is well-placed, Blaze. You can count on my discretion.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Remember, just after dawn.\" Blaze headed for his cave. \"I must sleep now, it has been a tiring day.\" Adding the truth to his lies gave them more credibility. He imagined the yellow eyes burning into his hide as Baelross\u2014Baelross the Bungler\u2014watched him leave.\n\nBlaze would be asleep in a few minutes, but he doubted the blue dragon would get much rest tonight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Blaze woke from a deep restful sleep, his exhaustion from the previous day's exploits gone. His night's rest chased away the tiredness and he was ready to move forward with the next phase of his plan. Renewed strength and energy coursed through his body. It felt good to be alive.\n\nHe considered his close call with the leviathan yesterday and he shouldn't have felt this good. His tail wasn't as tender as it had been, in fact, when he flexed his muscles there was only an uncomfortable twinge, the bruising all but healed.\n\nDragons were resilient creatures and their magical nature protected them from serious injury and assisted in a speedy recovery, should they be harmed. He had smashed his tail into solid rock and expected it would take a little longer than one night's sleep for the throbbing pain to lessen. The pain was a small sacrifice to pay for escaping with the globe... and his life. The globe had shared its inner strength with him and fed off the spirit of the leviathan, draining its life force and absorbing its essence. Blaze tasted that power when he communed with the globe, feeling it replenish his tired and aching body. It gifted him a small piece of the leviathan's spirit and it had done more than replenish him.\n\nThe globe was small in size compared to a dragon and tiny when measured against the vast bulk of the leviathan. It was a mystery how such a small thing could contain so much. Blaze suspected it already held more secrets than he could imagine and it was nowhere near full. There was a deep well of knowledge, magic, and undiscovered power, and it was all there for the taking, if he could unlock it.\n\nHe reached out with his mind and could sense its presence in the caves, the bond between them intact and undisturbed. He found it comforting, knowing it remained safely where he had hidden it, waiting patiently on his return.\n\nHe stretched, flexing his wings. There was much to do today and he needed to take care of Baelross before he disrupted his plans. He hadn't counted on the blue meddling with his schedule, but if he didn't act today, he was sure Baelross would start talking. The blue dragon wouldn't be able to hold his tongue for long, it was an annoying trait of blues. If\u2014no when\u2014Baelross started blowing empty smoke about Galdor's disappearance, every dragon on the plateau would look to him for answers about Galdor's disappearance. Once Baelross informed them Galdor was missing and his conversation\u2014with the last dragon to see him\u2014things would become awkward. It was a complication he could do without.\n\nHe exited his cave into the cold of predawn, perching on his ledge. The light from the east changing the black of night to deep blue. He was hungry, but breakfast would have to wait. Leaping into the dark sky and pushing air downward as he beat his wings, he climbed, turning and pointing himself towards the thin slither of light that divided sky from ground. Leaving the plateau he flew east, dropping over the edge as he cleared its boundaries and rode the currents as they propelled him higher into the early morning sky.\n\nWinds pushed the underneath of his wing membranes, filling the huge black sails and lifting him vertically, the power of their pressure rippling his tough dragon skin. The sensation was exhilarating and he spun through the air currents tilting his wings and twisting with the invisible air. He reached the apex of the lift and banked south, setting his wings and gliding away from the plateau, casually turning full circle and observing the ground below, before correcting his course southwards again. No other dragons were up this early, which was fortunate as it allowed him to leave unnoticed.\n\nThe secrecy and the covert actions he maintained were vital for his success and he was good at remaining unseen. A dragon's sight was remarkable, even at night\u2014or in the early morning dusk before sunrise. Being a black dragon helped a little as his scales were difficult to see when the sky was dark; his dull colouring less metallic than most, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.\n\nBaelross was waiting south of the plateau and as Blaze approached, he smelled blood. The blue dragon was devouring something, the scent of it making his stomach grumble, reminding him he hadn't eaten. There was another hunger inside him, but it wouldn't be silenced with food, this new hunger he shared with the globe.\n\nBlaze dropped down beside Baelross and waited patiently while the blue dragon finished stripping the animal carcass. It was poor manners to disturb a dragon when feeding and although Blaze wanted to hurry, he allowed Baelross the courtesy of finishing his food. Let him enjoy his meal, even though he didn't know it would be his last.\n\nBaelross flicked out a forked tongue cleaning the blood from his snout. His tongue was a lighter blue than his scales and the red blood painted it purple as he worked the bloody smears from his scales.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" Blaze asked. \"And you made sure you left the plateau without being followed?\"\n\n\"I was hungry!\" Baelross answered, pure dragon logic that needed no explanation. \"I am ready now. Nobody knows I've left. I made sure. Galdor can trust my discretion. Blue dragons are more circumspect than most.\"\n\nIt was true, Baelross was painstakingly meticulous on a good day; if he said he was unseen leaving, Blaze didn't doubt it. He didn't dislike the blue and didn't want to do him harm. Dragons shouldn't fight with their own, but it was unavoidable; the blue asked too many awkward questions and he only had himself to blame. Blue dragons were naturally snouty, poking their muzzles where they didn't belong. Baelross was no exception, sticking his snout in Blaze's business when he could have been an ally. But he was also loyal. Loyal to Galdor. Even when he learned the green moot leader would never be coming back, he would support the old ways, rather than the rightful path Blaze would show them. Blaze may be black but he felt green with envy at the way other dragons mindlessly worshiped Galdor.\n\n\"Excellent. Galdor will be pleased you have been cautious,\" Blaze complimented. He needed the blue compliant for now. \"Our leader values intelligence.\" Flattering him would make this easier to accomplish. \"Come, follow me and I'll take you to him. He can explain to you himself what he has discovered.\" It was better to entice Baelross into following and laying the responsibility of an explanation with Galdor. Many dragons of the plateau were besotted with Galdor and would follow him blindly, never questioning his decisions.\n\nThere were those who, while they would miss their old leader, would embrace the change in leadership. Blaze was hopeful they were as likeminded as him, would follow his lead, and were open to his ideas. He had already had conversations with a few hopeful candidates and was confident they could be easily swayed to his way of thinking. He must move slowly, one small wingbeat at a time, winning their trust and allegiance. And ultimately their obedience.\n\nHe respected the blue dragon's loyalty, but the cause he believed in was a poor one and he had chosen the wrong dragon to follow. He would have liked to have Baelross as a trusted supporter, but knew he wouldn't be swayed to follow him, he was too set in his ways.\n\n\"Where are we going, Blaze?\"\n\n\"We are going to show you something amazing.\" It was true, what Blaze planned was so much more than amazing, it was spiritual. Baelross could interpret the we as Galdor and himself, but it was his partnership with the globe Blaze referred to. Let the blue dragon believe what he would. It wasn't his fault he didn't understand.\n\n\"Follow me!\" Blaze leapt into the air, powerful wing beats lifting him effortlessly. Baelross would have to follow if he wanted an explanation. The blue dragon hadn't come all this way, secretly met with him and taken care not to be seen leaving the plateau, only to return back now without any answers. He was too inquisitive, too snouty, to resist.\n\nBlaze had given him enough to lure him away and keep quiet, promising more. He was good at gaining the confidence of others, it was easy for him to persuade them, enticing them with the promise of something more. He wished he had been able to convince Galdor rather than exile him, but the green dragon's will was stronger than most.\n\nBlaze risked a fleeting glance behind and saw Baelross taking off and following, the morning sun catching his blue scales as he rose into the air. He pushed onward, the presence of the globe drawing him back towards the cave where it waited, its anticipation strong.\n\nThey flew across the barren lands, Blaze leading the way. He deliberately stayed ahead of Baelross, luring the blue with the promise of finding Galdor and the secrets he would reveal. He didn't like flying and talking, shouting at each other when flying side by side. It was awkward and uncouth, he was more refined than that. He was a better flier than Baelross, so the blue catching up and asking more questions wasn't an option as long as he kept pushing on.\n\nThe sun climbed higher and the morning brightened. Out here in the barren lands it was hot, and today was shaping up to be another intense one, as far as the weather was concerned. Blaze was prepared to take the next step in his interaction with the globe. The blue dragon was going to help him discover what the globe could do, he just didn't know it... yet.\n\nThe ground below changed from open desert to rocky hills, the bright sand changing to grey rock as they neared their destination. As they approached the caves where Blaze had stored the globe, the connection strengthened. His treasured prize was aware he approached and was anticipating his arrival. He stole a look at his aerial companion, conscious that if he could feel the magic emanating from the globe, Baelross would too. The blue dragon didn't show any sign he sensed anything unusual and Blaze glowed inside, content it was only him who could feel its touch.\n\nIf the blue dragon was unaware of the magic the globe possessed, there was less chance of someone else discovering it. He might even be safe bringing it back to the Lifting Plateau, but he needed to be sure. Baelross was going to help him test his theory.\n\nHe tilted his left wing and raised the right, beginning his descent, air spilling from underneath the membrane. Wind rushed over his scales, warm and dry as he dropped to towards the sun heated rocks, the shimmering heat haze blurring the ground as it rushed up to meet him.\n\nHe landed outside the warren of caves and waited for Baelross to join him. The Blue dragon dropped from the air, wings thrown back and talons outstretched as they scraped the rocky ground halting his forward motion.\n\n\"We are here,\" Blaze announced, \"but before we proceed, I would ask you something.\" Baelross folded his wings as he joined the black dragon in front of the fated cave mouth that had led Galdor to his demise. Baelross tilted his head in anticipation of Blaze's question.\n\n\"Do you feel anything different? Sense anything unusual? I think Galdor will want to know.\" He waited, letting his questions hang in the air between them.\n\nBaelross took his time before he spoke, swaying his head from side to side, tasting the air with his tongue and sniffing, nostrils snorting loudly as he drew in great breaths.\n\n\"I smell the dankness that is usual with unoccupied caves, nothing more. My perception senses... something, but it is faint and distant, almost as if it is disguised, hiding just out of reach.\"\n\nBlaze was delighted. He could feel the globe, strong and obvious. If Baelross barely sensed it and didn't know what it was, it was reasonably safe to assume others wouldn't either. It must be because the globe was rightfully his. It was connected to him alone and only he was destined to learn its secrets and share in its power.\n\n\"That is good. I'm sure Galdor will be pleased with your answers,\" he purred.\n\nBaelross looked confused. The poor blue didn't have any idea what awaited him. While this was all new to Blaze, at least he knew what the globe was capable of. He had seen how it reacted to the leviathan's threat, feeding off the huge serpentine creature. It had been dumb, acting only from pure instinct and the compulsion cast upon it.\n\nBaelross was smarter that any leviathan; he was a dragon. While he could never be as smart as Blaze, he was intelligent and knowledgeable. Surely the globe would thrive on the life force of a dragon and gain more nourishment than it had from the stupid leviathan. And if that were true, which he highly suspected, then what it shared with him would be more intoxicating than before.\n\nThere was only one way to find out. He wondered if Baelross would feel anything when the globe consumed him. He didn't want the blue to suffer, it wasn't really his fault he was misguided, that was a responsibility he would lay squarely upon Galdor. This wasn't the time for sentiment, this was the time to test his theory. He needed to make sure the blue dragon remained quiet and this way he could silence the blue, stop his meddling ways and he could also discover more about the globe.\n\n\"Blaze, what am I supposed to sense. What is it?\"\n\n\"Come, Baelross, I'll take you to Galdor and he will be able answer all your questions.\" He spun on the rocky ground, talons scraping loudly as he dived into the dark cave entrance. This time he led the way and the inquisitive blue obediently followed. It was funny how his nature differed for Galdor's. The green dragon had pushed forward, taking the lead, foolishly rushing to his fate. Baelross needed to be shown the way, content to follow, but the endgame would be the same. Blaze would be the victor.\n\nHe led the blue deep into the honeycomb of caves until they reached the cavern where the globe waited. He had set it on the floor as there was no plinth or rock to sit it on. As he approached, it reacted to his presence, filling him with a feeling of welcome anticipation. Baelross came to stand next to him, his eyes drawn to the wonder of the mysterious globe, alive and alluring.\n\n\"What is it? It's too big to be a pearl of wisdom. Is this what Galdor wanted me to see? Where is he?\" Questions, questions, always questions. Baelross could be annoying with his incessant questioning, almost as bad as a yellow. He like to think of himself as inquisitive. It was an excuse to stick his snout where it didn't belong. It was more like a compulsive snountiness, he couldn't help his nature, but no matter, it would soon be over and he would be cured of his affliction.\n\n\"I'm not sure where Galdor is. He said he would meet us here. Perhaps he is late.\" Baelross was mesmerised, hardly listening to what he was saying.\n\nThe globe held his attention, glowing faintly as the inner mists, like white threads of cloud, swirled hypnotically below its surface. Blaze knew what it wanted and what he must do.\n\n\"Why don't you examine it,\" he hissed, temptation oozing from his words. Baelross crept forward, crouching until his belly was touching the floor and his snout was level with the globe. His eyes were wide, reflecting the swirling mist at the end of his snout, vivid in the darkness.\n\nHe remained transfixed then drew back as if jolted with pain, opening his mouth to roar, but no sound escaped. Blaze could feel the globe reaching out and enveloping its prey. Baelross froze and a wisp of white slowly snaked from his open jaws. It moved like a trail of smoke on a light breeze, curling and twisting as it bridged the gap between the dragon and the globe.\n\nThe cave warmed, heat radiated out from the still form of Baelross, and Blaze tasted his essence, the life force of the blue dragon, as it filled the surrounding air. It was like the warm blood of a fresh kill, the intoxicating aroma of fresh meat, hot summer winds and cold winter frosts. It filled his mind and washed through his senses, euphoric and exhilarating.\n\nBaelross didn't find his contact with the globe as pleasant. He tried to move away, standing up. He shook, his body quivering, spasms of pain wracked though him but he couldn't move, his claws firmly planted on the floor. His scales shimmered, multi-coloured waves rippling down his flanks, torturous rainbows infused with pain, paralyzing him. His yellow eyes implored Blaze to help, but it was too late for the blue and he knew it, his perception, always extremely accurate, must have warned him he was beyond saving.\n\nThe misty white streak of life essence thickened, pouring from his mouth, drawn deep from within. A turbulent stream of coiling threads, ripping his life force from his protesting body.\n\nThe leviathan's essence had been black, but the essence that was drawn from Baelross was pure white. Blaze wondered if this was an indication of the spirit of the creature. Black essence from the dark psyche of the leviathan, white from the soul of a dragon?\n\nIt was horrifying. And beautiful. Blaze basked in the cave's atmosphere, drinking in the essence the globe fed him as it stole the life of the blue dragon. The euphoria lifted him up, sharing his mind with the globe and its swirling mists, each single thread individual yet part of something greater. Knowledge and secrets, power and strength, life and death. Eternal life for him, death to any who stood against him.\n\nJust as the leviathan's essence was extracted and absorbed, so it was with Baelross. The leviathan had survived long enough to swim away and Blaze's perception had confirmed it was going back to the ocean to die. He didn't want Baelross to end up like that and he couldn't leave him to fly off and die. He would return to the Lifting Plataea, if he was able, and tell the others what he had seen. He couldn't allow that to happen. They would blame him for killing the blue dragon and suspect he had done the same with Galdor. He had spared Galdor out of kindness, but they would see it differently.\n\nHe knew the globe understood and it provided a solution. They needn't let poor Baelross die, there was another way.\n\nThe blue dragon was stuck to the cave floor, unable to break the connection as the globe drained his essence, as still as the rock itself. As still as the rock itself! That was it. The flow of the thick white threads, ethereal and smoke-like, slowed, nearing the end of the extraction.\n\nHe focussed on the globe, exerting his will before it took everything from Baelross. The thread of essence broke with a snap, one end drawn back into the throat of the dragon, the other whipping into the globe and covering its surface. It swirled and coalesced and the globe glowed brightly, shining through the opaque cloud that coated it.\n\nBaelross drew in a huge breath, his eyes locked to Blaze's, panic-stricken. He was still alive, an empty vessel clinging to the tiny scrap of life force that kept him upright. A gift from the black dragon, even if he was too vacant to appreciate the gesture.\n\nIt started with his tail.\n\nCrackling filled the cave as the dragon's body began to change. Blue turned to grey, the colour fading from his scales. Their appearance changed too. Living flesh and blood transformed to something new. The metamorphosis crept along his tail, crackling and snapping like wet wood burning, changing the dragon as it ran along its length. Where once a living dragon had stood, now one of stone took its place.\n\nAs Blaze wanted, the globe spared the life of Baelross. He couldn't let the blue dragon leave here and return, telling what he knew. He didn't want to kill him either. He had influenced the globe and it interpreted his intent. It hadn't been a command, he doubted if he were able to issue instructions to something as powerful. Well not yet. But it did mean there was the potential for the globe to do his bidding. He quickly banished that line of thought, aware of how the globe might perceive that as a threat.\n\nThe cloudy essence surrounding the globe swirled and writhed, then thrust out from it surface, like a stone dropped into a pond, circles of white rippling out from the centre. The cave brightened, a soft white light tinged with the exact blue of Baelross, radiating from the globe's centre.\n\nThe stone dragon\u2014now Baelross the Basalt\u2014was illuminated, preserved in rock, not dead but certainly not living. A compromise he hoped the blue dragon would understand.\n\nThe globe sucked in the essence, pulling the bright life force inside and Blaze, through his connection with it, experienced a surge of pleasure and the welcome reward of power that came with it.\n\nThe Baelross problem was solved. He wouldn't be discovered down here, and even if he was, no one would know what happened to him. A dragon of stone tells no tales.\n\nHe inspected the former blue dragon, marvelling at the detail wrought in stone. Every scale was exactly how it should be, but turned into solid rock, no longer alive. There was enough magic left inside the stone dragon to preserve it indefinitely, no longer would he need to breath, eat or sleep, the perfect solution for keeping an inquisitive blue from prying.\n\nGently, he drummed his talons on the stone flanks, the hollow sound echoing into the darkness.\n\n\"Better than the fate of the leviathan, Baelross,\" he told the stone statue. \"I know you would thank me, if you could.\" He wondered if somewhere, inside the stone dragon, Baelross could sense him. Was he there, unable to speak, unable to hear? Stone deaf and completely dumb. At least he would be quiet from now on, no more annoying questions.\n\nBlaze decided he would leave the globe where it was for now. Baelross could stand watch, vigilant in his duties as a new guardian for his treasure. The previous owner of that task had failed and Blaze had found a fitting successor for the job. He would never leave his post and would obey with blind obedience. A lesson for any who opposed him or his vision.\n\n\"Farewell, guardian of granite,\" he said as he departed the cave. The connection with the globe was still there, subtle but strong. If anyone came into the caverns or approached the globe, he would know.\n\nAnd after what happened to Baelross, he no longer worried for its safety."
            },
            {
                "title": "Flame and Fury",
                "text": "Blaze tore through the sky, the anger in his belly raged, a cauldron of hate burning hotter than molten lava. His dragon flame seared through his growling insides screaming for release. He tipped his neck forward and plunged down through the clouds, a black envoy of death intent on delivering his message.\n\nThe globe had given him the ability to hold onto his flame longer than usual and intensify the heat when it was released. Normally if he breathed fire it needed to be expelled soon after it was summoned. Holding it at bay for any length of time was not only extremely uncomfortable, but could result in severe damage to his insides.\n\nA dragon's stomach, throat, and mouth were designed to handle short bursts of intense flame, but prolonged exposure to this magically induced fire was never a good idea. Blaze could call on his flame and expel it, but it wasn't inexhaustible and needed time to replenish. Holding the inner fire allowed him to increase his volume and its temperature. The longer the thick liquid flame was regurgitated, the longer he could hold the stream when he spewed it forth, resulting in more fire, more heat, and ultimately, more devastation.\n\nIt was easy to do now, the globe shared the knowledge and revealed the secret to him. It was obvious now he knew how and he wondered why he had never worked it out on his own. Now it was learned, revealed by the globe, it was simple.\n\nEmerging from the cloud cover of an overcast sky, Blaze loomed down on the vast city of humans, ready to implement the next stage of his plan. He drew on the knowledge rewarded from the globe, a gift for feeding it with the life force of Baelross. He called his magic and his scales shimmered, rippling from their beautiful black to the dull green of more common dragons. The transformation ran from snout to tail, each scale flickering through a spectrum of colours, like sunlight through rain, a rainbow of magic changing his appearance and disguising him in ordinary green. He didn't want to be recognisable should word of what happened here reach the Lifting Plateau. Everyone would know who the attacker was if the dragon witnessed was black.\n\nHis emergence from the cloud cover was acknowledged with the sound of panicked residents screaming as he dropped down over the buildings of their precious city. His hate for these puny humans burned within, ready to be vented, a justifiable necessity.\n\nOpening jaws, his pent up anger gave way to the roiling magma of fire as it spewed forth, engulfing the proud rooftops and tall steeples beneath his wings. Their manmade opulence was no match for the wrath of dragons. Roofs may provide men with shelter from the rain and wind, but there were none strong enough to protect them from Blaze the Black, bringer of justice.\n\nDragon flame washed over the ridged surfaces, elemental fire curling over thin slate and baked clay alike. A sea of rage swallowing everything in a tidal wave of voracious orange. The grey slate scorched to black and bore the brunt of his fire, the thin stone tiles impervious to the flame. They deflected the fire from the pitched roofs, deflecting it down the sides of the buildings, setting alight anything flammable. Small clumps of sticky fire\u2014the thick acidic fluid from his gullet\u2014sat and melted holes through the slate, viscous and intensely hot, it bubbled and burned through the resilient slates. Less resistant clay tiles, crackled and smashed as the heat destroyed them, dragon fire searing them to brittle ash.\n\nA wake of black smouldering clouds followed Blaze, fingers of smoke trailing in his wake as he swooped low over the rooftops, turning and twisting in the turbulent air as he sped across the city.\n\nHe beat his wings, rising higher and banked round, his left wing dipping like a rudder through water as it clove through the billowing smoke. He came in lower for a second pass, adding to the inferno that swept through the city, spitting more fire into the carnage and adding extra flames to the already burning buildings.\n\nGlass shattered, exploding in the intense heat, wood cracked and splintered as it lost its integrity to the consuming conflagration. The roar of the flames joined with his own voice as he unleashed wave upon wave of delightful fire, a dissonance of destruction.\n\nBackwards and forwards he flew, a deadly monster of legend, burning channel after channel of destruction through the human city. Smoke stung his eyes but he continued his razing of the buildings until his flame was exhausted. It was empowering to hold the fire, expanding his destructive scope. The exhilaration of this new found strength coursed through him, granting him freedom to finally teach humans the lesson they had long escaped.\n\nHe soared one last time above the city, surveying his work. His deliberate tactic to only destroy a swathe of buildings throughout the city's centre had worked perfectly. Multiple runs across the same area had resulted in a charred strip of incinerated dwellings. The surrounding fallout wasn't enough to set the whole city ablaze, even though that would be a sight worth seeing. Perhaps he would do that somewhere else when the seeds of his plan were sown. For now, he needed survivors to spread the word and let their neighbouring towns and cities know what had come to pass here.\n\nIf he killed everyone in the city, there would be no humans left to appreciate their plight. And nobody alive to blame the rampaging green dragon that attacked without provocation. The humans didn't know they were a constant source of provocation to him, but they would come to realise it. They would rue the error of their land stealing ways. This would be the first lesson in the re-education of mankind. They would learn that dragons were to be feared and respected.\n\nSmall figures scurried below, frantically throwing tiny amounts of water at the beautiful flames. If it wasn't for their sheer numbers and inexhaustible determination, he was sure the whole city would burn to the ground. Torn between wanting to see it all burn, and the knowledge that if his plan were to succeed, he would have to check his enthusiasm and settle for contentment with today's actions. It would have been nice to watch the fire consume everything, but he had still enjoyed himself. It was gratifying to be the one to finally deliver the flames.\n\nHe dropped down through the smoke towards a group of bucket wielding men, arrows from some brave souls bouncing harmlessly from his disguised green scales. Let them try to injure him with their tiny arrows, they would do no harm. He was a dragon and was superior to their primitive metal and wood. They had spirit, he conceded, and that was exactly what he needed, fighting vengeful spirit. Let them think they could fight back, it was just what he wanted.\n\nTipping his wings back he angled himself for a dive, plummeting down and thrusting out his talons at the last second, smoke billowing wildly through the disturbed air. He filled his claws with wriggling men and carried them from the ground screaming and wailing, into the hazy air above the fire.\n\nHis scales protected him from the heat of the flames but the feeble men he snatched up were not so lucky. He remained in sight of the onlookers below, circling higher above the raging inferno. Their round faces stared up at their comrades, shouting and howling, waving their arms like stupid little wings too thin to fly. It was incredible how such tiny creatures could make so much annoying noise. The ones he gripped in his claws were quiet and he didn't know if he'd crushed them to death or if they were unable to make any noise, paralyzed by fear. It wasn't everyday a dragon came into their midst and rained down fire and devastation.\n\nOnce he was directly above the flaming buildings, he opened his claws and dropped the men into the hungry flames. The audience below were quiet now, no doubt enjoying the finale to his performance.\n\nSurprisingly some of the falling humans were still alive and they wriggled and writhed as they plummeted towards the flames. They whumped into the flames creating an extremely satisfying sound, throwing up clouds of swirling embers. Deep orange sparks drifted upwards through the smoke like fiery blossoms, painting patterns of beauty across the smoky grey.\n\nBlaze loved fire, the way it danced, the colours, and the heat. It was perfect in every way. He was named for the flash of white on his chest, a blaze of light upon his dark scales. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau knew the old Blaze, but today the humans witnessed a new dragon, a rampaging phoenix. This dragon was forged in the flames of the devastation he wrought, reborn of fire and soon everyone would know his true nature.\n\nHe veered north, leaving the burning city in the hands of the humans fighting to control the raging inferno. The humans knew the dragon colony made its home at the Lifting Plateau and would observe his departure and know he returned to his kin. He maintained his northerly path, keeping below the cloud cover so the city's survivors could see which direction he flew. They would assume he was returning to the Lifting Plateau and they would lay the blame of today's attack with his colony. One guilty dragon would be good enough to condemn them all for his violent and unprovoked actions, be it a green or a black... but preferably green.\n\nHe rose into the clouds, obscuring himself from the city's watchful survivors and turned south, flying back over the city. The noxious smoke penetrated the cloud base, turning dull clouds darker, hiding him from sight. Even from this high above, nothing could disguise the vast bright stripe of fire carved through the heart of the city below. The dark clouds glowed with the light from the flames, like an unnatural sunset.\n\nHe was dirty and stained from the smoke and he smelled like a charred forest. He should bathe before he returned home. He didn't want the other dragons to smell the smoke on his scales. It may be remembered and raise questions. But, since he was already in need of a bath, it made sense not to waste the opportunity and visit a few more towns and villages, spreading a little more unrest with the human population.\n\nIt was practical reasoning and he was pleased to have an excuse to test brewing up more dragon fire from an empty stomach. His resources were depleted, but using the new method the globe taught him, he was confident he could call up enough to sack a few small towns and villages. He almost looked black again with all the soot that covered his body. Replenishing his colour changing magic, he altered the smoke blackened green scales he wore.\n\nHe drew on his own natural dragon magic and willed the illusion of a new colour to disguise his scales. He had always been proficient in using his natural magic and it came to him instinctually. He was better than most and didn't need to employ the wisdom of the globe when using familiar magic. However, his own magic came to him quicker than it once had and was easier to use. He suspected it was enhanced now he understood some of the workings of the globe.\n\nHe chose a brighter colour this time, something that would stand out and be more visible in the dull afternoon.\n\nA shimmering yellow washed over the length of his body, the apt yellow of bright fire. The clouds around him glowed brightly with the ethereal light of magic, replacing the soot darkened green dragon with a clean scaled yellow.\n\nFollowing the instructions learned from the globe, he focused on manufacturing more fire deep inside his chest. It was a little slower to come so soon after the torrent unleashed on the city, but it was still there. It should have taken a lot longer than it did and he could feel it replenishing inside. He wouldn't need as much this time, just enough for a few smaller fires.\n\nThe next few burnings were about quantity rather than quality. The quality of his new fire brewing was no longer in any doubt, as the burning city behind him could probably attest to. Although he doubted they appreciated his success as much as he did. The more small towns and villages he could add to his run today, would hopefully speed up this part of his plan.\n\nHis stomach churned in expectation and he began the process of filling it with the liquid fire once more. Dropping down through the clouds, he didn't care if anyone below noticed him now. All they would see was a yellow dragon flying south, another dragon of a different colour in the usually empty skies above human settlements. It would lend to the illusion that different dragons were abroad. One rogue dragon would be looked on as rare occurrence, but multiple dragons spreading unrest would incite the humans to panic. And once their panic subsided, it would turn to anger. An anger he believed would inevitably goad this violent species to war. And when they brought their war to the peaceful dragons of the plateau, they would have no choice but to retaliate.\n\nBlaze peered down at the cluster of ugly structures far below, marring the once unspoiled landscape. It was time to cleanse a few of them from the world, and this far south, he was spoiled for choice.\n\nThe new batch of liquid fire was ready to use and he was eager to see how it measured up to the last brewing. Swooping down from the late afternoon sky, he followed the contours of the land, flight undulating as he approached a small town. He blasted the outskirts of the building as he sped by, turning his head and decorating the structures with flames as he passed.\n\nOn the outskirts of the town, there were fields filled with cows. He flew overhead, dropped low and skimming over the ground, snatched up two fat beasts before they even noticed he was there. The rest of the heard scattered, panicked by the appearance of the huge predator. He rose from the ground, twisting his neck and ripping the head from each cow in turn, silencing their feeble lowing. He spat the heads from his mouth and was about to drop the cows when inspiration struck. He flew on to the next village, the human dwellings all too frequent now and not that far apart, as the dragon flies.\n\nThe scurrying humans ran before the oncoming dragon, terrified and screaming. Blaze released both headless cows and watched as they sailed through the air, his speed adding to their momentum. One cow hit the corner of a large building, tearing it into two halves, one part crashing through the wood of the structure, the other spinning into a group of people, the impact knocking dumb struck humans everywhere.\n\nThe second headless cow bounced once and smashed into another dwelling, bursting straight through the wall. That ought to give them something to think about. Not only did a rampaging yellow dragon steal their livestock, after decapitating it, it threw the beasts away. This could only be seen as a deliberate act of violence; he hadn't even eaten the beasts! He hoped his disrespect would further his cause and help antagonise the human population.\n\nHe flew on, leaving destruction in his wake. He still had half a belly of fire left and emptied it all on a huge structure standing alone. He had no idea what it was for, but it blazed like a beacon, a signal to all humans that fire breathing dragons had returned to their lives and they were no longer safe.\n\nContent with today's havoc, he was ready to return home. Burning and destroying was dirty work and he needed to scrub the stench of fire\u2014and human despair\u2014from his scales.\n\nThis was just the beginning and he was extremely happy with his results so far. His enhanced dragon fire worked better than he hoped. The usefulness of the globe and the secrets it held, would help him fill the void of Galdor's leadership. The moot needed new leadership and that was next on his agenda. It needed to be handled with more tact than inciting the humans. This called for some delicate manipulation, a dash of concern for missing friends, and the confidence of stepping in and offering stability for the colony.\n\nReluctantly, of course. If he played them just right, they would beg him to take over, appointing Blaze the Black as moot leader would be their idea. And once he was in charge, he would sway them all to his ideals, show them his vision, and protect them from the humans who waged war on them.\n\nHe would lead them to victory over their enemies and onto the true path to freedom. A land without man, where all dragons would be equal and reign supreme, with Blaze the most supreme of them all.\n\nHis work wasn't quite finished this evening. He must bathe and wash the grime of hard labour from his scales. Then, visit the globe and see if it was ready to share more secrets. Deep down he knew it was hungry for another spirit, another life force to feed on. The more he gave, the more he would get. It wasn't an easy decision to make, choosing who would be next, but he understood what had to be done.\n\nWith great power, great sacrifices were required. It was an unfortunate reality he would have to learn to live with. He was sure his sacrifices, and those of the others, would be worth it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hidden Agenda",
                "text": "Blaze waited in his own private chamber and tried to remain patient. At long last the dragons of the Lifting Plateau had decided to call an emergency meeting of the moot members. They argued constantly about what to do, and finally settled on a gathering that was to be more of a meeting than an actual moot.\n\nWith Galdor gone there was no moot leader to officially call the moot to order. No dragon wanted to go against their age old tradition. If there was no moot leader, no moot could be called. If no moot was called, they couldn't take official action.\n\nAt last, after going round in circles for days, the remaining council had decided on gathering unofficially for a meeting. He didn't want to be the one to suggest it, as it wouldn't help his plans if everyone thought it was his idea, so he had resigned himself to wait. And wait.\n\nSometimes his need for self-restraint was a great burden; he longed for the day, which wouldn't be far off now, when he ruled and everyone waited on his word. Subtlety was required when manipulating one's inferiors. So he waited, and eventually, the remaining moot members managed to come up with this brilliant idea all on their own.\n\nQuite honestly, he believed that if Galdor hadn't led them by the snout, nothing would ever be done. He understood the protocol and respected tradition\u2014when it was a tradition he agreed with. Because Galdor wasn't here to officiate, it had taken them almost a week of discussions and debates to decide to convene. Meetings about having a meeting! The dragons of the Lifting Plateau, when it came to tradition, were stuck in their ways.\n\nOnly Galdor was able to call the moot to order and they held off, in hope their leader would miraculously return. Blaze knew this wasn't going to happen, but sharing that knowledge with the others would put him in an awkward positon, making him look guilty. Galdor was gone and it was for the best, they would come to understand a dragon's rightful place in this world, even if they never fully knew what had befallen their former leader. Any guilt he associated with removing Galdor from their world was justifiable. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau were not destined to stagnate and become extinct at the hands of the humans.\n\nSo Blaze waited until it was obvious to them all that Galdor wouldn't be returning any time soon and they would have to decide what to do on their own.\n\nIn the moot leader's mysterious absence, the dragons were apprehensive about taking any action themselves, procrastinating continually about what was the best way to address Galdor's disappearance. Life under Galdor's rule had encouraged this weak and indecisive attitude. It wasn't until poor Baelross followed in Galdor's clawprints, they were eventually forced into doing something. It was doubly beneficial the blue was gone. The globe had prospered from the life force taken from Baelross, and his timely disappearance helped push his peers into action. Now his waiting game was at an end and the moot that wasn't really a moot, was due to commence.\n\nBlaze didn't want to arrive early and this is why he had waited a little longer, making sure all the remaining members hurried along to the moot chamber, eager to have their say. Let them squabble like hatchlings, directionless and unsure. They would realise they needed someone to take control and make the difficult decisions. Someone who knew exactly what to do in times of crisis, someone strong enough to lead them to their rightful glory. He was ready to become that someone, Blaze the Black, moot leader of the Lifting Plateau, the benevolent emperor of dragons. He would create a new history and would become the saviour of all dragon kind.\n\nHe departed his cave and casually made his way to the moot chamber, observed by the other dragons of the plateau. He stood a little taller as they watched him. They would remember this day, and how regal he looked before he was elected moot leader, when they told of his legend to their hatchlings. Dragons like a good tale and the story of Blaze and how he liberated the dragons of the Lifting Plateau would be an historic one.\n\nThe moot chamber was flanked by two red females, Scarlet and Vermillion, who stood guard when the moot was in progress. They'd taken up their usual post for today's gathering and Blaze approved of their loyalty to Galdor. The imposing pair were not only capable of keeping order and ensuring any moot was conducted without unnecessary interruption, but they were traditionalists and acted in the best interests of the colony. He was sure once he was their leader, they would be worthy soldiers in his army. If he could convince them Galdor wasn't coming home, he would be able to sway them to his way of thinking. It was a shame their scales weren't black but he needed to start somewhere and he saw potential in them both. Reds were notorious for their fiery temperament and he could exploit this to his advantage.\n\nHe nodded to both females as he entered the chamber and they tipped their sleek long heads as he passed, acknowledging his arrival. They had been waiting on the final member to arrive and as he joined the assembled dragons, they closed ranks, standing side by side, shutting off entry to anyone else.\n\nThe chamber was filled with the other eight remaining representatives, every dragon vying to be heard above the others. Galdor would have laid an egg at the commotion and scolded them all for their distinctly un-dragonlike behaviour. It was just as well the former moot leader wasn't here and Blaze was pleased he'd spared his old friend the embarrassment of seeing his beloved dragons act this way.\n\nThey remaining members of the moot council were so involved in their bickering that they failed to notice the ninth dragon enter. Blaze observed them, looking to see who of the eight, were his biggest rivals and who could be persuaded to follow him.\n\nHe knew them all and made it a priority to study them during his years at the plateau. Know your friends, but know your enemies better.\n\nEmber the Orange was engaged in a heated conversation with the ancient green, Mossbeard. Blaze was confident the orange female would jump at the chance to follow him against the humans. She was outspoken and passionate and would see wisdom in his words. Her bright orange scales were the colour of flame and it was well known orange dragons were experts when it came to producing fire. She wouldn't be anywhere near as good as he was, not now he'd learned that secret from the globe\u2014and he wouldn't be sharing that with her\u2014but she would make a good ally.\n\nOn the other talon, Mossbeard would never be convinced. Greens stuck together, scales as thick as their heads, and he was one of Galdor's strongest supporters. He was ancient and any talk of conflict would be something he opposed. He didn't have the stomach for change, even if it was for the better. No, Mossbeard was too old and set in his ways, and he was passed his prime. He might be fine for keeping records and remembering dates, but Blaze needed dragons who could contribute to his cause. The ancient green's beard was as long as his stories and just as dull. Blaze would rewrite their history and a dusty old mould beard would be obsolete in his new order.\n\nA thought occurred to him. He may have a use for the crusty old green after all. If he could ever convince Mossbeard to venture outside, he would introduce him to the wonders of the globe. A feeling of warm contentment rippled through his body and he could sense the globe, even over the distance between them, liked his idea. It was hungry and needed fed. It would be interesting to see if an older dragon, with more years under his wing than Blaze cared to count, would contribute more life force. But that, for now, was an experiment for another day.\n\nAzyrian the Bronze spoke with the platinum female, White-silver, their necks close together and it was clear there was more to their friendship. Neither, Blaze believed, would be sympathetic to his cause. Metals were aloof and thought themselves better than colours and this pair were no exception. These two could only see as far as their own desires and wouldn't pose any real challenge to his authority. If they stood in his way, he would divide and conquer. Together they were a formidable pair, apart they would be easier to deal with.\n\nFern and Chestnut listened while Sapphire told them about her last conversation with Galdor, the day he vanished.\n\n\"He told me there was a human mage, stirring up trouble,\" Sapphire revealed to them.\n\n\"A human mage?\" Fern asked. \"Surely a mage would be no match for Galdor?\" She turned to Chestnut as if to seek her approval. He was confident Sapphire and Chestnut would follow whoever led. Fern the Green was an emerald coloured female, smaller than the average sized dragon with nothing exceptional about her, and would also follow whoever led the moot.\n\nThe brown female however, wasn't known by her colour as dragons usually were, choosing to be different and was only ever referred to as Chestnut. Her reddish-brown scales had unusual tinges of black around their edges and Blaze wondered if she were to produce a clutch to him, if any of their potential offspring would hatch and keep their black birth colour.\n\n\"A mage you say?\" Blaze joined their conversation, this was a topic he could work with. \"I don't think a mage could best Galdor? He's too clever to be beaten by a human!\" Everyone on the council knew how he felt toward humans and if he took Galdor's side, they would have no cause to suspect him. \"Isn't he?\" He left the question hanging, the way he positioned it sowing doubt with the other dragons.\n\nYesper the Yellow, a bright scaled practical dragon, chipped in. \"What if the human mage has done something to him?\"\n\nPerfect; the unknowing yellow added more doubt into the mix. Yesper thought himself smarter than he actually was and he was everyone's friend, a typical yellow. The hours of listening to Yesper's endless prattling, while in turn, giving the gullible yellow cause to dislike humans, had been worth it. They had spent many an afternoon debating his theories on why it was dangerous allowing humans to progress unchecked. Something must have stuck in the empty space between the flighty yellow's horns.\n\n\"I would kill any human mage who harmed our moot leader,\" Blaze stated, making sure his voice echoed around the cave.\n\n\"How do you know Galdor has been harmed?\" Mossbeard said, now interested in their conversation.\n\n\"And what of Baelross the Blue? Does anyone know what happened to him?\" Blaze changed the subject, avoiding the question. \"Are we being secretly targeted? And who will be next? Is this human mage picking us off one by one, Sapphire?\" He deflected their attention to the cerulean blue female and all heads turned to hear her answer.\n\n\"I only spoke with Galdor,\" she said, \"and he left early. It was before he vanished. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"And you never went with him? Why did you let him go off alone?\" Blaze dropped in a few more questions, turning the focus of the assembled group towards her.\n\n\"He asked me not to say anything, I was\u2014\" Sapphire attempted to explain.\n\n\"And you didn't think that strange?\" Azyrian the Bronze asked. \"Our leader going off on his own without any support? Keeping secrets isn't like Galdor.\"\n\n\"And you never thought to share this information when Galdor didn't return?\" White-silver accused Sapphire. Blaze couldn't have planned it any better. With a few perfectly placed questions the dragons turned on Sapphire. They harangued her with accusations, blaming her for Galdor's disappearance. They even doubted her when she said she knew nothing of Baelross. It was time to step in and take advantage of their confusion before the squabbling and hissing gave way to flames. He needed to unite them to fight against the humans and get them to realise they needed a replacement for Galdor. Once he restored order and gave them direction, they would see they were better off without him.\n\n\"I propose,\" Blaze interrupted, taking charge of the mayhem, \"that we look for Galdor and Baelross rather than blaming Sapphire for something that is not of her doing.\" Surprisingly, they all shut up and listened. He was the only one making any sense, a voice of reason in the midst of his incited chaos. It gave him credibility in their eyes. He was the best choice for leadership. They just had to come to that conclusion themselves.\n\n\"Thank you, Blaze,\" Sapphire said. She came to stand next to him, firmly placing herself as his follower, but not yet aware of it.\n\n\"It is clear to me that Sapphire doesn't know any more than she has already told us. Yes, perhaps she should have shared her information earlier, but she was following Galdor's express command. I do not doubt her loyalty to the council of the moot.\" Her dark blue eyes were pools of gratitude, thankful for his support. \"I'm sure that every dragon here would have done the same.\" The moot chamber was quiet, the other dragons, either ashamed of their misplaced accusations, or waiting to hear what Blaze would say next.\n\n\"We can't fall to pieces because Galdor is lost.\" He deliberately used the word lost and thankfully he wasn't challenged.\n\n\"Sapphire is one of the longest serving dragons on the moot. I propose she stand in as temporary leader until we can decide what to do. We need somebody to lead us through these uncertain times.\"\n\n\"But she should have told us earlier about the mage,\" White-silver said. Sapphire and the platinum female often differed in their opinions. And White-silver wouldn't want to see the blue in charge. \"No offence to Sapphire, we need someone who will act when they have important information.\"\n\nThe blue dragon hissed at the slight, intended or not. \"I do not wish it anyway.\" She turned her head away from White-silver, giving the aloof platinum a taste of her own flame.\n\n\"If we don't choose soon and cannot decide on what to do, I fear the plateau will fall and along with it, our colony.\" Blaze hoped the dragons didn't question his logic on how or why he feared this, only that it provoked a hasty response. If they didn't have time to contemplate, after a wasted week of doing nothing, they would be more likely to choose a new leader today. There was a comfortable complacency in knowing someone else was responsible for making important decisions. If all they could do was bicker with each other, then that someone would have to be him. It was time to stoke the fire and make another suggestion that wouldn't be unanimously received.\n\n\"Mossbeard, you were a wise and trusted advisor to Galdor, he always listened when you had something to say.\" The dusty old green thought himself the logical choice for moot leader. \"Who would you suggest to lead the moot in Galdor's absence?\" The mossy old fool hadn't been expecting that.\n\n\"I, er, think, let me see. Fern the Green, yes. She would be an acceptable choice.\" Mossbeard said. He hadn't sounded certain as he clearly expected Blaze to suggest him for the position. While Fern was a good choice, his hesitation undermined it.\n\n\"Acceptable!\" Ember called out, \"we need better than acceptable. A moot leader needs to be competent and confident.\" Blaze had seen Ember and Mossbeard arguing when he came in, the hot tempered orange female wasn't going to side with the old green. Ember's outburst succeeded in discrediting Mossbeard and made him and his suggestion look stupid. No moot would want an indecisive leader who wasn't able to make a strong choice.\n\n\"We should vote,\" Yesper suggested, \"that is how a moot leader is properly chosen!\" Most of the assembled dragons nodded in agreement.\n\nBlaze would have liked a little more time to influence this suggested vote, but with Yesper's enthusiastic call for action, the dragons were behind the idea. There were nine dragons to choose from and Blaze concluded that after their bickering, Sapphire, Fern and Mossbeard were unlikely to be anyone's first choice.\n\nWhite-silver and Azyrian wouldn't be popular choices either, except with each other, so that left Ember, Chestnut, Yesper and himself. He would try one last gambit to reduce the odds.\n\n\"Do you have someone in mind you would nominate Yesper?\" Blaze asked. The yellow was unpredictable and Blaze hoped that he wouldn't suggest himself. Even if he did, he was sure the others wouldn't go for it. It was seen as poor etiquette to put yourself forward for the position.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Yesper replied, the wind pulled from beneath his wings. \"It is a serious business and needs careful contemplation.\" Maybe the yellow thought he was a worthy candidate and wanted to stall giving an answer, in hope of being chosen himself.\n\n\"More delays,\" Ember said, surprising him, \"while nothing is resolved!\" She usually sided with Yesper, but the animated conversation Blaze witnessed with Mossbeard earlier must have upset her. \"The only dragon here who has remained positive and has suggested anything sensible is Blaze.\" Ember tipped her head to him. \"He doesn't want to sit on his tail, waiting while others debate. I propose Blaze the Black to lead the moot until Galdor's return.\"\n\nBlaze was amazed at Ember's unplanned outburst. She wasn't the most patient dragon on the plateau and it was obvious she was tired of waiting for something to happen.\n\n\"I second Ember's proposal!\" Sapphire said, raising her tail straight up behind her, tip pointing over her head towards Blaze.\n\nEmber's tail repeated the gesture, giving him two votes, quickly followed by an arrow-headed yellow tail whipping up to be included in the count. Of course Yesper would side with the orange female, even after she had snapped at him for being indecisive. He was always eager to show he was interested in what she said, letting his desire for her influence his actions. His decision in siding with her on the vote would hopefully win him her good favour. Typical behaviour for a yellow. Their scales were too bright and their minds weren't bright enough. Another reason he disliked yellows.\n\nHe needed another two dragons to lift their tails for him and cast their vote, then he would have a majority.\n\nChestnut slowly raised her tail, tipping it forward between her horns. \"I too, will vote for Blaze,\" her yellow eyes searching the remaining dragons to see what they would do. Of all the dragons in the moot, she was the most careful. If she decided to show her support, it could only instil confidence in the undecided.\n\nMossbeard followed Chestnut's lead, lifting his green tail and adding to the growing tally. Blaze knew the old green respected Sapphire's opinion. And just as Mossbeard's respect for Chestnut influenced his decision, Fern added her tail to the count and followed his example. Blaze wasn't surprised, where Mossbeard led, Fern usually followed. All his careful planning, his choice comments in the right ear at the right time, fell neatly into place. He was delighted his scheming resulted in him taking over moot leadership, but it had been far from easy. The time and effort he'd spent with each dragon had paid off today, months and months of careful planning finally coming to fruition.\n\nAll eyes turned to White-silver and Azyrian, eager to see what they would decide. It was already over, Blaze only needed five votes and he had received six. He was ecstatic! With only one round of voting he'd secured a majority share and would be the new temporary moot leader. The last two dragons didn't even have to vote now and they knew it, but it would be interesting to see how they would react.\n\nAzyrian the Bronze raised his tail, a little slow and a little late, but he showed support and respect when he could easily have abstained. White-silver did not. She sat with her tail firmly pressed to the ground in defiance, her cold blue eyes smouldering with contempt.\n\nBlaze wasn't sure if she was angry because she desired the moot leader's position herself, or would rather it be the bronze who sat beside her. Regardless of what her reasons were, she was someone he would need to watch.\n\n\"I am flattered,\" he said, sounding humble. It was probably best not to acknowledge the platinum female's lack of support. She had shown her true colours to him today and revealed information she would have been wiser to conceal, playing along with the others. He would be ready for her, should she threaten his plans, and for now, she wouldn't upset the thrill of his victory.\n\nHe was bursting with delight but didn't want to outwardly show it. It was time for a little humility. \"I'm honoured to be chosen and will be as worthy a successor for Galdor as I can.\" He paused before continuing. \"And I will lead the moot and uphold our traditions, safeguarding the colony until Galdor returns to his rightful place.\" If he could establish he was a reluctant stand in, he was more likely to gain their support and trust. They didn't know Galdor wasn't coming back and his acknowledgement to relinquish his position, would show he wasn't hungry for the power of leadership. He would need to progress slowly with the next phase of his plan, implementing his changes gradually.\n\n\"I thank Ember for her words of confidence. We have waited long enough and should make plans on how to proceed. My first official act as moot leader,\" he deliberately omitted to include temporary, \"is to ask you all to consider my proposal on how to find Galdor and Baelross.\" Offering up a suggestion on how to move forward and begin searching for their missing companions was a good start. The positive appearance of being in control and actually doing something proactive would give the dragons more reason to trust him. Asking the moot to consider his proposal allowed them feel empowered, giving them the impression they weren't taking his orders.\n\n\"We are a moot of nine,\" he continued, highlighting the two missing dragons. \"For now,\" he added, implying they were going to find Galdor and Baelross. Let them think his positive attitude would solve the mysterious disappearances. \"It is too late for today, so tomorrow I propose we pair up and have four groups for searching. One group north, one south, one east and the other west. I ask you all to think on the best tactic to take, how to efficiently cover as much ground as you can. We are dragons and flying is in our blood. We are dragons of the moot, the wisest and most experienced dragons on the plateau. If we can't work together and find our lost brothers, then no dragon can!\" Heads nodded in agreement and even White-silver didn't look as opposed to his idea or his inspirational words.\n\n\"We are nine and if we pair up, there will be one odd dragon. Let me think on our best deployment of knowledge and resources. I believe if we take advantage of our combined skills and pair up strategically, we will get the best results.\" Maybe not the results they expected. His desired results were different from theirs.\n\n\"I will contemplate who the partners will be, and also I have an important task for the solo dragon that isn't one of the eight searchers. Go now and think about what we have achieved here today, even without Galdor's guidance, we have proved we can work together and I'm certain he would be proud of us all.\" As he spoke, he'd managed to position himself in the centre of the chamber, carefully manoeuvring without being obvious. He had one last act to perform to his willing audience, before ending the moot.\n\nRearing up slightly, Blaze stretched his hind legs to make himself taller, spreading his wings over the moot. It felt good to stand tall and make the moot leader's traditional gesture.\n\n\"The moot is now closed. Let the wisdom of the nine help guide us through this difficult time.\" He folded his wings and settled down to watch as they filtered from the chamber, each one nodding deeply and showing him respect.\n\nWhite-silver was last to leave and while she nodded to him as she passed, it was a shallow effort and barely acceptable for a dragon of his standing.\n\nThat, he noted, was something he would need to address in the near future, and he had a good idea how he was going to do it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hunting and Hiding",
                "text": "Galdor could smell wild antelope before they came into view. Dragons, especially greens, were known for their acute sense of smell. After prolonged years in the dark confines of the cave and the sensory deprivation experienced, his sense of smell developed from keen to excellent. His hearing was greatly improved too and even though his time spent underground was a torturous ordeal, these side effects were something positive.\n\nThe herd were upwind of the approaching predator and scattered, frantically kicking up clouds of dust. He wasn't surprised they were able to smell him as he was more than aware of his own pungent aroma. The sweet scent of the grassy savanna and the warm blooded antelope helped him forget the dank cavern of his imprisonment, but his nostrils still reeked with the ingrained stench. It was a foul stink of dank airless captivity; a smell he longed to be free of.\n\nThe antelope's hooves drummed as they fled from the oncoming green dragon. To Galdor's eyes, deprived of colour for so long, they were the most beautiful animals he'd seen. Stripes of red-brown, black and white covered their bodies, their natural hues spectacularly vivid in the warm, bright light of day.\n\nHis liberation from the cavern wasn't only freedom of the body. His mind had been liberated from the oppressive darkness that was slowly crushing his will to live. The monotony of never knowing night from day was gone. Freedom after incarceration made you look at life in a different way.\n\nAfter shedding his skin and gifting it to Alduce, he now believed that he was reborn twofold. His initial symbolic rebirth with the casting off of his old scales, ridding himself of the last century's torment, starting afresh with a dazzling new hide that gleamed in the sunlight.\n\nHis second rebirth was living his life once more, as every dragon should be free to do. The thrill of the hunt coursing through his tired body reinforced his weakened spirit, too long bound in cruel captivity.\n\nThe charging antelope darted and weaved, like wind over waves, changing direction in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the pursuing dragon. Galdor basked in the chase, flying low and flitting one way then pivoting the other, following a turbulent river of reddish-brown backs across the undulating grasslands.\n\nHe swooped down and thrust out talons, choosing the fattest antelope, plucking it expertly from the ground and grasping it tightly in one claw. A long time had passed since he'd last hunted and he was pleased his abilities hadn't faded. The herd was big and there were plenty of animals for the taking, but prolonged exposure to starvation made him chose the largest, fattest, and hopefully, tastiest beast.\n\nOf course it would be tasty, antelope were so much better eating than scraggly goats or tiny rats. His prize could be the stringiest and blandest antelope ever to exist and it would still be the tastiest one he'd ever caught. It wriggled wildly, hopelessly thrashing in an attempt to free itself from his deadly grip. Its efforts were in vain, this beast was going nowhere except into his stomach.\n\nOn a whim, he turned sharply and snatched another antelope in his empty claw, crushing talons tearing flesh and filling his nostrils with the scent of warm blood. Exquisite blood, its intoxicating aroma tantalising his senses, its fragrance almost driving away the smell of the cave.\n\nToday was a day for making exceptions. He never normally made a double kill. Under the circumstances he indulged himself. Was it greed? Indeed it was. None the less, he deserved it. Most warranted and welcome.\n\nThe herd trampled the grass beneath their hooves as they widened the gap between themselves and the now slowing green. He could catch them easily if he wanted; they were quick to run and quicker to forget. By the time he devoured his first two kills, they would be far enough away to think themselves safe, forgetting about the fate of their unfortunate herd mates. It was in their nature and the Earth Mother had made them prolific and plentiful. Galdor could easily catch up to the herd and snag another helping... or three.\n\nHe dipped one wing and pivoted mid-air, plummeting to the ground. One of the antelope was still wriggling, its instinct for survival strong, never stopping it from giving up. Galdor had never given up, like the pitiful antelope, he had clung to instinctual self-preservation for over a century, never losing hope that one day he would be free. It was easy to reflect, now he was flying in open skies, on how determined he was at regaining his freedom. Realistically it had been a hard battle and without Alduce's intervention he wasn't sure it was one he would have won.\n\nGaldor considered himself as practical as the next dragon. He was free now and that was all that mattered. However, he was prone to overthinking things. He couldn't help contemplating how his sanity would have fared if the wandering sorcerer hadn't stumbled into his cavern.\n\nBones crunched as he hit the ground, jolting his mind back to the present, it was a mistake to dwell on what might have been. The struggling antelope stopped moving, its fight for survival done. Galdor's stomach growled and his jaws salivated in anticipation of his first proper meal since his liberation. He tore into the fatter of his two kills, out of practice talons ripping huge chunks of warm flesh effortlessly from the beast. Dragon's claws were always sharp and he made easy work stripping flesh from the bone.\n\nThe satisfying taste of freedom was not a disappointment. Taste buds long deprived of any food at all, worked to make up for lost time. Decades of dreams fantasising about this moment, paled in comparison to the real thing. Incredible taste exploded in his mouth, tantalisingly good as he chewed and tore, eager to gorge himself and swallow mouthful after divine mouthful.\n\nHe buried his snout in the carcass submerging his nostrils in the scent of the kill, wondering if he would be too heavy to fly if he ate too much antelope. With the burning hunger that had gnawed his stomach for all those years, he might just find out. Systematically, he cleaned every scrap of meat from the first antelope, leaving only bones, hooves and horns. Blood and gore splattered his new green scales and he curled his tongue along his snout, cleaning the worst of it away, before staring on the second beast.\n\nThis time he wasn't as desperate, his initial longing to eat sated a little. He tore open the antelope enjoying this one just as much as the first, taking his time and savouring every mouthful. Succulent juices mixed with blood, oozed from its flesh and Galdor was careful not to lose one drop, catching any stray drips with his serpentine tongue. The flavour was strong and the taste one hundred times better than any goat... or rat.\n\nNow he could chose his meals and eat at any time he wished, a simple luxury denied for so long. He finished his second antelope, leaving its bones beside the first, rising into the air. A welcome feeling of strength returned to his wings, his first meal giving him sustenance after so many years of starvation. His full strength would take a while to replenish and sunlight, open skies, fresh meat, and freedom, would all help towards his recovery. It wasn't just the physical act of eating his body benefited from, but the ability to eat when he pleased. He was aware the long imprisonment weakened his body, but now his mind soared, free from any restraint.\n\nHe followed the herd, sniffing out their location easily with his enhanced sense of smell. He picked off another two antelope, then took a fifth for good measure, enjoying each one as much as the first. He could probably eat five more, he mused, and still not be too heavy to fly.\n\nHe took to the air, rising on wings that felt and acted more like they should. The simple pleasure of being able to stretch them out properly and fly without any constraint was a joy.\n\nHe was ready to accomplish the next task on his list, searching the terrain below as he flew. He appreciated the act of flying anew, once more revelling in the pleasure of soaring through the sky, beating wings made strong with the recent sustenance of food. His wings had been a long time closed. As tiring as it was, the aches brought on by today's exertion, reminded him he was free. While he was able to flex them in the confines of the cavern, true flight was the only way to exercise wings in the way they were intended.\n\nSky blue reflected brightly from the surface of a lake, catching his eye and he turned south towards it.\n\nWater.\n\nAfter years of dusty skin and a dry throat, dreams of ice cold mountain lakes were now close enough to be a reality.\n\nThe lake wasn't one he was overly familiar with, he didn't remember what its name was\u2014if he had known it before\u2014and he didn't care. It was nestled in a small valley surrounded by tall trees, deep green foliage highlighted against the blue. He could drink and bathe and all he wanted to do was to submerge himself in the waters of this wonderful oasis and wash away every last trace of the cave.\n\nHe angled himself towards the centre of the lake and peered down into the clear blue depths, making sure it was deep enough. Folding wings tightly to his sides and tipping his weight forward, he dropped from the sky like an arrow, snout pushed out in front, tail straight behind, hitting the water at an angle and cutting below the surface with hardly a splash. Cold clean water engulfed his body, invigorating his skin and scales, washing clean the memory of the cave.\n\nGaldor flicked his tail and propelled himself through the deep water, pointing back towards to the daylight of the surface. He used his wings like giant fins, pushing himself through the water like a huge fish, angling upward. He burst forth from beneath the lake's surface, water streaming from his scales and twisted, dropping back into the water with an almighty splash. Waves exploded out from his body, disturbing the lake's surface, then rushed back into the void he created, as he sank beneath them.\n\nThe cold waters cleansed his hide, washing away the blood from his feast, purifying his spirit and hydrating his life force from the drought of incarceration. He felt alive again, rejuvenated by the simplest of meals and an abundance of water. Simple pleasures once taken for granted were now bountiful gifts from the Earth Mother herself.\n\nHe swam through the lake, fish darting from his path as he entered the shallows, wading out of the lake and splashing up the stony beach. Opening his wings and shaking them in a half-hearted attempt to expel any excess lake water, the point of his tail following him like the fin of a fish as it broke the lake's surface. He lifted it free, flicking it from side to side and cast rippling arcs of water out over the lake.\n\nHe dipped his neck and lowered his head to the water, drawing in huge mouthfuls, tipped his head back, enjoying the sensation as the clear liquid ran down his throat. Cold fresh water quenched his thirst, washing away the parched years of dryness, refreshingly divine in its purity. He bent for more, greedily drinking until his stomach bloated to excess.\n\nPerception alerted him! He sensed a presence and he knew someone or something approached. He was in no fit state to confront Blaze and didn't have any idea of what was near, so he decided to do the only thing he could at present: hide!\n\nHe scrabbled off the beach and sought the cover of the surrounding forest, pushing through the trunks and taking refuge beneath the canopy of mottled green, a natural camouflage that blended with his scales. Dragons weren't known for hiding and under any other circumstances Galdor would have stood and waited for whoever approached. He knew only too well he was still in a weakened state, even though the euphoria of his new found liberty surged through him.\n\nBeing trapped and stuck in a cave without any means of escape could do strange things to your disposition, and while he detested himself for cowering cautiously out of sight, he felt it best to remain undiscovered... for now. Perhaps it was his perception guiding his decision or maybe he had been alone too long and was frightened of any confrontation.\n\nHis hatred for Blaze had eaten away at him, and like the unsated hunger, it had grown inside, always there, an unscratchable itch that needed clawing. Prudence was his ally and patience a lesson well learned. He would bide his time and regain his strength before considering his next move. Something felt wrong and he would be a fool to rush headlong into the unknown. His last reckless venture was proof enough of his previous stupidity.\n\nWhatever else Blaze was, he wasn't an adversary to be taken lightly. The devious dragon had shown his intentions were like the colour of his scales: black. Black of scales and black of heart. After his prolonged absence from the Lifting Plateau, Galdor couldn't imagine what lies Blaze had told, but there was one thing he was sure of; Blaze must have spent considerable time plotting to be rid of him and that took patience and planning. Galdor didn't think that Blaze just wanted to send him away, the black dragon had gone to considerable lengths to trick and trap him. Who would fill the void left by Galdor's disappearance? Who would step in and take charge of the moot? Who was hungry to make war on the humans? He knew the answers to his questions only too well.\n\nWith nothing to do but sleep and think for all the years spent in his cave, Galdor's conscious mind had ample time to contemplate Blaze's actions. Retrospectively, it was easy to believe he should have seen the signs, he should been able to see what Blaze was up to, but the black dragon had fooled him. If he was able to fool one dragon, there was no telling what lies had been fed to the colony. He would need to employ caution before he made the mistake of any further impetuous behaviour.\n\nPerring up through the gaps in the leaves he scanned the sky, watching and waiting. He was an expert at waiting and patience was another skill he had learned to develop and become an expert in.\n\nTwo black shapes blotted out the sky as they passed overhead: dragons! Two black dragons. He was sure it wasn't just their silhouettes against the bright blue sky\u2014his eyes weren't deceiving him. He blinked rapidly and shook his head a little, then stared back up at the dark dragons, wanting to make sure his prolonged exposure to the darkness wasn't effecting his sight. He knew he was right the first time and the shock of seeing two blacks that clearly weren't Blaze, rattled him. He would recognise his nemesis anywhere and neither black dragon overhead exhibited his tell-tale mark.\n\nBlaze was unusual and blacks were rare. He was sure that neither of the dragons passing overhead were his adversary. One hundred years was a long enough period for the duplicitous black dragon to father a clutch and beget decedents. Could these two blacks be his progeny? It was entirely possible. He assumed any offspring of the black dragon thriving here, would naturally be his enemy.\n\nHe was extremely glad of the cover provided by the trees, sheltering him from being spotted. He may have been gone for a long time and be out of practice with a lot of things, but his perception was as sharp as it had always been.\n\nHe followed the progress of the two black dragons as they passed between the gaps in the foliage, watching them shrink, the farther away they flew.\n\nGaldor knew he was south west of the Lifting Plateau and these dragons were flying north east. It was a logical assumption they were heading towards his former home. He contemplated following them back; he was eager to find out what had befallen the plateau in his absence. That could prove risky and he wasn't prepared to jeopardise his hard won freedom.\n\nHe needed to recuperate, build his strength and regain his depleted magic. He would find somewhere to shelter and observe the land. He would observe the skies and watch out for any coloured dragons. Maybe he would find his former friends and be able to question them about the events of the last one hundred years. If he could learn just what was going on, it would give him some insight into how to proceed.\n\nWhen he had slept, his dreams were filled with returning home to his own world, returning to the plateau and reclaiming his life. These hopes sustained him through his ordeal. Now he was free, things weren't as simple. Something was wrong and even though the world around him looked the same, his perception warned him otherwise.\n\nHe thought of poor Baelross and wondered how a dragon could be turned to stone. And why would someone want to do that? If this was Blaze's doing, how had the black dragon learned this magic? It was one thing to possess the ability, but entirely another to willingly commit another living creature to this torment. To transform a dragon into a statue, leaving the flicker of his life spirit deep inside, was completely evil. He hoped the blue's sentience was too far buried for him to be aware of his predicament. He couldn't imagine if it would be worse or better than the imprisonment he had suffered.\n\nHe didn't want to consider how dark the black dragon's soul had become and what other horrors he was capable of. His homecoming wasn't the glorious return he had imagined.\n\nHe emerged from the shelter of the trees, carefully scanning the skies for any signs of life. When he was sure the way was clear, he hopped up from the ground and flew above the forest canopy, keeping close to the treetops in case he needed to use them for shelter again.\n\nHe would find somewhere to hide, somewhere where food was within easy reach and there was adequate cover to obscure him from the prying eyes of what he now considered were his enemies\u2014until he learned otherwise.\n\nHis perception informed him his paranoia wasn't unjustified. He would rest and get stronger. Once he was back to his former self, once he was healthy and whole, then he would be ready to confront his darkest fear: the black dragon named Blaze."
            },
            {
                "title": "Divisions",
                "text": "\"I've spent most of the night working on a search plan,\" Blaze addressed the moot of nine. \"Mossbeard and White-silver, you will be the searchers to the south. I think you will make an excellent team. With the pragmatism of a green and the power of a platinum, I'm confident your wisdom and strength will be the perfect pairing.\" He had designs for them both and wanted them together for the next part of his plan. And a little well placed flattery wouldn't do any harm in putting them at ease.\n\n\"White-silver, your eyesight is legendary amongst the dragons of the plateau. I'm sure you will spot our missing dragons, any unusual activities or trespassing humans, should there be any in the lands to the south. Mossbeard, your knowledge of our records will help you to decide what areas are more likely to produce results. Please start your search beyond the Silver River, working across the lands and head south. Do not go into the lands inhabited by men, I don't want to lose any more dragons to their dark human magic.\" Making it appear like humans were responsible, would keep their focus away from him.\n\nThe green and platinum paired off and surprisingly didn't argue. He knew they would probably have preferred different partners and that's why he put them together. Divide and conquer.\n\n\"We will do our best,\" Mossbeard said. White-silver tipped her snout, barely acknowledging his leadership. She would know respect before this day was over.\n\n\"Ember and Yesper, I would like you to range to the north.\" The yellow male would be delighted at the pairing with the orange female. He was easily manipulated and was quickly becoming one of Blaze's loyal supporters. He would chase Ember's tail all day, finding an excuse to be with her and any reason to prove himself a worthy mate. He would view the choice of putting them together as wise and be grateful to Blaze for pairing them, following his lead without question.\n\n\"I know you have extensive knowledge of the northlands, Ember. Range as far as the snowfields, paying particular interest to the sheltered canyons and valleys. Anything could be hidden there. It is a difficult task and one I entrust to you both.\" Yesper couldn't get to Ember's side quick enough and Blaze stifled a snort of humour. The orange would have her wings full all day and no doubt set a fast pace to quell Yesper's continuous chattering. If he was paired with Ember, Blaze wouldn't have to listen to the yellow's incessant babble. Yesper didn't have the stamina of the larger orange and would push himself to keep up. That would keep those two occupied and out of the way.\n\n\"Fern and Chestnut, I would ask you to range east and search the woodlands, jungles, and greenwoods. You are both colours of the forest and have the blood of forest dragons in you. You are the best suited to this region.\"\n\nChestnut had been quick to support him at the vote and he admired her black tinged scales. He was sure he would be able to convince her of his vision for the Lifting Plateau and gain her loyalty. After that was accomplished, he was certain she would see him as a potential mate. Who wouldn't want the most powerful dragon, who was now leader of the moot, as their mate?\n\nFern was a follower, not a leader and would take her lead from the brown. And once Mossbeard was out of the way, the green female would bend to his will.\n\n\"Sapphire and Azyrian, you have the west.\" White-silver glowered at the cerulean blue female with undisguised hated. The bronze male was never far from the platinum female's side and like all metals, they stuck together in their own special groups, thinking themselves superior. Driving a blue wedge between bronze and platinum would keep her attentions diverted, making it easier for him to catch her unprepared.\n\nOn the surface all eight dragons appeared to be content enough with the search mate he'd selected for them. Blaze knew his tactical deployment would cause unrest with the majority of them, especially the dragons he wouldn't be able to win over from Galdor's former rule. If he could whittle out the troublemakers and the miscreants, he could replace them with his own supporters.\n\nImagine a ruling body of loyal dragons, unafraid of upsetting the humans, eager to take back their lands and cleanse the human plague for good. He could feel the touch of the globe, many miles distant, as the thrill of openly destroying the cities of man filled him with a righteous satisfaction.\n\nEight dragons looked to him in the silence and he snapped his attention back to the present. \"Fly out and search, dragons of the Lifting Plateau. By fang and by claw, find our lost brothers and bring them home, where they belong. Range as far as you must in daylight and return when night falls. I know most of you can see just as well in the dark, however, we stand a better chance of seeing anything unusual or out of the ordinary in the light of day. I will stay here and speak with the colony, surely there are some among us who saw or spoke to Galdor or Baelross before they went missing.\" No one challenged his decision\u2014as it should be with a moot leader\u2014accepting his instructions without question.\n\nThe bickering squabbles of yesterday were forgotten. Blaze the Black had united the moot, giving them a purpose. Someone needed to take charge and he was their best choice by far, even if they didn't realise it yet. It was something he'd always believed and now, after much planning, he was well on his way to enlightening the moot and educating the colony. Once the dragons were in line with his ideals, when they were able to see his insightful vision of what the future would be, he would be able to change the world for ever.\n\nThe globe pulled at his consciousness, reminding him of the part it played and the secrets it held. He would be rewarded with the hidden knowledge it possessed, its power and its wisdom. All he needed to do was feed its own hunger in return.\n\n\"Fly high and fly free, brothers and sisters. I know Galdor would be proud of you all.\" They stood visibly taller at the mention of their former leader. That love and respect would be his. When he was done he would have their devotion and their minds. \"It will be a long day, so when you return I want you to rest. Your wellbeing and that of the colony are my greatest concern. If there is nothing of importance to report when you arrive home, get some well-earned rest. We'll gather in the moot chamber, tomorrow at sunrise, to discuss what our next actions will be.\"\n\nThat would allow him the opportunity to carry out the next phase of his plan and no one would be any the wiser until tomorrow. Events were unfolding at a faster pace now Galdor was gone, his months of endless scheming were reaping the rewards he desired.\n\nThe four searching pairs rose into the morning sky, each setting off in their designated direction. As Mossbeard and White-silver veered off to the south he connected with the globe. His thoughts soothed its turmoil, promising it the wait was almost over. He urged it to be at peace and remain quiet, so as not to attract the attention of the southern searchers. At least not yet.\n\nHe watched until all four groups disappeared into the blue, tiny specs of dark against the bright sky. From this far away, no colours were distinguishable even to his superior dragon eyes. Black silhouettes shrank into the distance. The colony should have more black dragons, a flight of dark destroyers filling the skies and striking fear into the ground dwelling humans. The day would come when they looked upwards and saw their oncoming demise.\n\nHe would speak with the dragons of the colony, fulfilling his part of today's brilliant plan. When the searching dragons retuned, the gossips would say their new moot leader had spoken with them, earnestly inquiring about the disappearance of their missing dragons. He would be inquisitive and interested, making a show of being concerned. The Lifting Plateau would come to realise that Blaze the Black cared for them more than Galdor. They would be content under his rule and come to see the wisdom of his vision, understand it was what they unknowingly lacked under his predecessor's rule. Blaze would be a legend and he would return dragonkind to their rightful status.\n\nHe hurried to carry out his chore, knowing the quicker he spoke and played the part of dutiful leader, the quicker he could sneak away and continue with more important matters. If he was lucky, there might be some time left to fly south and burn a few more towns and villages. A little inciting encouragement would help move things along nicely. And it was fun. He was sure he could squeeze in a few fiery visits before he returned to the cave where the globe rested. As much as he enjoyed the destruction, it was part of the master plan, just as long as he was back at the cave before Mossbeard and White-silver flew overhead on their return to the Plateau.\n\nHe wanted to spend some time alone in the globe's presence before he introduced the annoying platinum and the irritating green to its wonders."
            },
            {
                "title": "Changes",
                "text": "Blaze left the burning city behind, the orange flames lit the evening sky like a second sunset. Thick clouds of smoke rose from the ruined quarter of the human made buildings, darkening the horizon. The human constructions took a long time to build, their workers systematically covering the land with their dwellings, spreading ever farther. How easy it was to set them alight, burning the timber and searing the stone, tearing down what they made in a fraction of that time.\n\nHumans would learn taking dragon land was no longer tolerated. They would know war and destruction. Annihilation would be the cost of their arrogance; a price long overdue.\n\nBlaze shimmered, the illusion of green scales faded, returning him back to his glorious black. He was thankful to the globe for sharing the secret of illusion. He only needed to remain disguised for a little longer, making sure any word of who was responsible for yet another violent attack, would not be traced back to him.\n\nThe pull of the globe filled his mind, basking in the enjoyment of his actions. It called him home, encouraging him to return to its secret resting place. It anticipated what was to come and the promise of more life force was a thrill to them both. He longed to take the globe back to the Lifting Plateau, but it was still too soon. He needed to wait until he established his dominance over the whole colony. He would win their hearts and strengthen his hold over their minds. He would show them he was a worthy successor and make them forget their previous leader and his failings. His dragons would no longer be weakened by Galdor's memory.\n\nLanding at the familiar cave mouth, he hurried inside the dark entrance, eyes adjusting to the gloomy interior. When the time was right, the globe would sit in his moot chamber, resting in a place worthy of its greatness, instead of a dusty cave floor. For now it was safe here, sitting beside the stone remains of Baelross. The inquisitive blue made a fine guardian, standing over the globe and protecting it in Blaze's absence.\n\n\"Thank you, Baelross the Basalt, stone protector and granite guardian,\" he said to the former blue dragon, whacking the solid rock of the saxified dragon affectionately with the flat of his tail. The globe lay in a sandy hollow between two stone talons, its white radiance brightening as Blaze approached. Swirling patterns rolled over its curved surface, responding to Blaze's presence, pastel blues highlighting the underside of the stony dragon above it. The song of its promised secrets a welcome distraction from the chattering squabble of the dragons he had spoken with earlier. Each one, clamouring to inform him of their thoughts regarding the disappearance of Galdor and Baelross. Not one of them knew the truth, ignorant and suspecting nothing, trusting him implicitly.\n\nHe reached out and closed his talon about the globe, sharp claws clicking on the smooth surface, hard and unyielding. The power inside flooded up through his front leg and into his whole body, washing over him like a massive wave, suffusing his spirit with invigorating energy. It welcomed him back and hungered for his next offering. It sensed his plan to deliver more life force, more living, breathing life. More energy, magic, spirit, and power. It coveted them, demanded it be fed. In return it offered knowledge and secrets beyond that of a dragon's understanding; secrets it was ready to divulge to its benefactor. It was the power he desired\u2014and needed\u2014that would help change his dreams to reality. The sacrifice was worth the reward.\n\nPerception alerted him that others approached, far enough away to be sensed and slowly getting closer. His time communing with the globe passed by so quickly. It only felt like a few minutes, but as he unfurled his talon and broke contact, he realised more than an hour had elapsed. It was disappointing he couldn't spend more time here, but once all his plans came to fruition, he could spend as long as he wanted unlocking the globe's secrets.\n\nHe tore himself away and followed the tunnels back outside, remembering the day when Galdor passed through the portal to become trapped on another world forever. The human mage had been devious in his scheme to trap Galdor, and as much as it pained him to form a temporary alliance with something he despised, it was a necessary burden he was forced to endure. The mage wasn't as smart as he believed himself to be, otherwise he would have escaped the portal, as he planned. No doubt, like all of his kind, he would have gone on to betray his deal with Blaze, had he escaped. Blaze never would have let that happen, he would never trust a human and was wise enough to know when the mage's services were no longer required. The mage's timely demise was his good fortune.\n\nThe afternoon sun had long since dropped below the horizon, the last traces of light faded from the sky. He could feel the presence of dragons, still beyond sight, but nearer now. Two dragons coming from the south, tired after a day's fruitless searching. Blaze hoped they were disheartened and exhausted after a long day's tedious searching without any results. If they were tired and worn down, they would be less likely to see through his deception until it was too late.\n\nReaching inside himself, Blaze began the summoning of his dragon flame. A deep warmth filled his chest, accompanied by pleasant grumbling. His flame came easy, a well-practiced action of late, only taking a few minutes to brew enough to dispel an impressive fiery blast.\n\nHe walked outside onto a flat piece of ground and expelled flame, directing it over a stand of small trees and bushes, igniting them instantly. The light from the fire chased back the oncoming darkness of night, creating a signal beacon for any who saw it. Blaze added a second gout of flame over the already burning shrubbery, making sure the fire was intense and obvious. There was no way Mossbeard and White-silver would be able to miss his raging signal fire.\n\nThe heat of the flames warmed his scales as the light from the fire emphasised his silhouette, making it easy for the dragons above to see his orange tinged form. Black dragons were almost invisible in the dark and he didn't want to appear suddenly and startle his potential targets into doing something unpredictable.\n\nMossbeard would be defeated without much effort. He was old and slow and passed his prime. Even if he showed some hidden courage and actually put up a fight, he wouldn't stand a chance. White-silver was a different matter. She was a metal and they were known for their toughness. She was also aggressive and confrontational and she didn't care for Blaze or his ideas. She was disrespectful and arrogant, like most metals. He believed he could best her, if it came to fighting one on one, but if Mossbeard had the opportunity to side with her, his chances would be much reduced. He could always call on his new power, gifted to him from the globe, but it was untried so far. He would prefer to test it before he relied on it in a fight. The details of his aspirations were in the careful preparation, calculations rather than risks. He didn't want to leave anything to chance, especially not after all the effort of his hard work and endless planning. Not when he was this close.\n\nA trumpeting challenge rang out from above and the voice of the platinum female split the night. \"Identify!\" she roared.\n\n\"Blaze the Black, moot leader of the Lifting Plateau,\" he responded. \"Join me on the ground.\" Turbulence from the wingbeats above fanned the fire, blowing flames and glowing embers in every direction as the two airborne dragons alighted beside him.\n\n\"Mossbeard. White-silver. I'm glad I've found you. What news?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Mossbeard said. \"Hours of endless searching. My eyes are as tired as my wings.\" He sagged, deflated in failure.\n\n\"There is unrest in the south,\" White-silver added. \"The humans are agitated. We kept out of sight, as you instructed, but my strong eyesight allowed me to see farther than Mossbeard. Something has upset them. They stir like angry hornets. The city we saw from afar was on fire.\"\n\nShe had disobeyed him. It was just like the platinum to not follow his orders. He knew she was trouble. How dare she go against his explicit wishes! He deliberately told them to keep away from the human cities. Of course the humans were angry. With his constant unprovoked attacks, the hornet's nest was ready to swarm. He swallowed down the anger that fought to rise and maintained a calm exterior. \"Well it appears you've discovered something, Mossbeard. If the humans are angry, then there is a reason. Could it not be connected to our missing brothers?\"\n\n\"Humans are humans,\" White-silver sneered. \"What they do doesn't concern us.\"\n\n\"They steal our land!\" Blaze spat, letting his mask slip. \"It concerns me, so it should concern you all.\" He immediately regretted his reaction as Mossbeard took a step back and stared at him. The platinum upstart got right under his scales with her aloof manner. She would learn respect and he was ready to teach her. She showed no reaction to his words, as if she didn't even care.\n\n\"I have found Baelross,\" He announced. That should give them pause. \"While everyone was out searching, I spoke to some dragons at the plateau. A young female red said she was friends with Baelross and he often visited these caves.\"\n\nBoth the platinum and green looked beyond Blaze to the cave mouth set in the hillside.\n\n\"Where was he? Mossbeard asked.\n\n\"Is he harmed? Has he told you what happened? Where did you find him?\" White-silver asked.\n\n\"And does he know anything about Galdor's whereabouts? Can he help us locate him?\" Mossbeard questioned.\n\n\"It is probably best if you ask him yourselves,\" Blaze said. \"He's... different now, changed from how he was before.\"\n\n\"Different? How? What has changed?\" White-silver asked. She stood alert, the spines on her neck quivered, sharp silver quills twitching with excitement, or perhaps it was agitation. It was difficult to speculate\u2014even though she let her emotions betray her\u2014the display could mean either. Her outward display conveyed weakness, much like his own outburst. Alerting those around you to your true feelings gave an advantage to any who were able to read them. It was a lesson he would remember and learn from White-silver's mistake, curbing any further emotional outbursts in the presence of others.\n\nHe would need to be careful of her, he could see she was wary. She would find out just how different Baelross was and see how arrogant and disrespectful dragons were treated under his rule.\n\n\"I'll take you to him and you can see for yourselves.\" He turned towards the caves, confident they would follow, their curiosity getting the better of them. He turned to add, \"And please, be quiet. I don't want poor Baelross unnecessarily inconvenienced,\" spotting a shared look of concerned confusion between them.\n\nHe would take them to look upon poor Baelross and they would see what awaited any dragon that opposed his will. Baelross wasn't the first to get in his way and he wouldn't be the last. As the old saying went; if you wanted dragons to hatch, their shells must be broken. He didn't want to punish them, but if they wouldn't follow his lead and support his cause, they were no use to his colony. The weak and the rebellious would be whittled out until only the strong remained. Loyal dragons who supported his vision would be awarded the honour of helping him take back what was rightfully theirs.\n\nHe entered the dark cave, eyes adjusting to the gloom as he made his way to where the stone remains of Baelross stood. The globe sang out, its voice filled with anticipation and hunger as it connected with his eager mind. He didn't want Mossbeard or White-silver to share in its beauty, it was meant for him alone. He risked a glimpse behind, checking to see if they were aware of the globe's presence, but they stumbled through the darkness, blissfully unaware of what awaited them.\n\nThe sensation grew as he neared Baelross, filling him with an unknown expectation something wonderful was about to happen. When the globe absorbed the life force from Baelross, the energy and the power it shared, resulted in a feeling of intense euphoria. A euphoria he longed to feel again.\n\nThe blue dragon loomed out of the darkness and to his amazement, Baelross was alive!\n\nBlaze jarred to a stop, the spikes on his neck quivered, battle ready, his talons scraping to a halt on the cave floor. How could this be?\n\nOn closer scrutiny, he saw Baelross hadn't reverted back to skin and scales. He was still made of stone, unmoving and silent. The globe pulsed, radiating out a wash of blue colour, bathing the stone scales. The illusion it created was completely lifelike, giving Baelross the appearance of a living blue dragon. He looked just as he was before he was turned to stone and if Blaze didn't know any better, he would have believed Baelross was normal.\n\nHis senses began to tingle and Blaze felt the globe's consciousness stir from sleepy anticipation to wakefully alert. The cave filled with a raw energy, tantalising his scales as it coursed over his body, the membranes of his wings vibrated, skin taught and sensitive as the feeling pulsed to a crescendo of intensity.\n\n\"Baelross?\" Mossbeard's voice echoed from behind. \"Thank the Earth Mother we've found you.\" The green pushed forward while White-silver stood where she was, her suspicious nature preventing her from following blindly.\n\nLight exploded from the globe, violent and white, blasting away the shadows and illuminating the cave like a bright sun. The illusion dropped and Baelross was transformed from vibrant blue to granite grey, returning to lifeless stone.\n\n\"What\u2014\" Mossbeard managed to say before the globe's light silenced him forever. Blaze half closed his eyelids, squinting in the intense light, clouds of white mist swirling through his usually black pupils, mimicking the surface of the globe. The panic Mossbeard experienced flooded his senses, his thoughts one with the old green. Where Mossbeard felt fear and uncertainty, Blaze only felt pleasure and power. He was aware of everything the green experienced, but was immune to the panic, lost in self-indulgent satisfaction and the gratification of Mossbeard's demise.\n\nWhite-silver sprang into action, leaping forward to assist the green. They may not have been the best of friends, yet she reacted on instinct, hoping to protect him from the unexpected attack.\n\nDragons should never harm other dragons. Blaze was aware of White-silver's instinctual obligation, strong in the platinum female. Lately his own views had changed. Sacrifice, however tragic, would strengthen the colony. He was the only one to see this and he must remain steadfast, detaching himself from emotion if his plans were to succeed.\n\nBlaze called on the power of the globe, tapping into its knowledge, unaware of how he was doing it, a new instinct taking over, banishing any doubt he wasn't in perfect control.\n\nA net of golden threads spread over White-silver, stopping the platinum dragon and freezing her in mid-air. The threads wrapped around her form, running over her body like golden ivy, twisting and writhing, sentient and aware, cocooning her in a glowing prison of gold.\n\nThe usually gloomy cave was alive with life and light. Platinum scales shone with gold, a metallic kaleidoscope of unrivalled beauty, painting its colours over the cave's dull interior, the dragon inside held fast, restrained and unable to assist Mossbeard. Cold blue hatred reflected in her eyes, as bright as the blinding light shining from her scales.\n\nPerception sure White-silver would remain disabled, Blaze turned his focus back to the green. Mossbeard was of no use to his new order, the stuffy old green too set in his ways. He was oblivious to the stagnation of their species, blindly following Galdor's rule without question. Even now he tried to resist, too stupid to realise he was beaten. There was no place in the colony for dragons that couldn't see the truth. No place for unbelievers who resisted his will. And definitely no place for greens who thought they knew better than a black.\n\nThe globe understood his thoughts and agreed with his assessment. Mossbeard would be able to serve them another way. He would be able to give one final sacrifice for the colony. His gift would help strengthen their cause.\n\nWhite strands of ethereal light whipped out from the globe, lashing themselves over the green's scales and binding his wings tightly to his flanks. Tentacles of wispy light, insubstantial as smoke, yet strong as steel, constrained the struggling dragon, growing as they increased in speed, faster and faster as they gained momentum, blurring into a spinning mass.\n\nBlaze could feel every fibre of light, connected through his link with the globe. As the swirling threads enveloped Mossbeard and tightened their hold, he tasted the life force, coppery and thick like the warm blood of a fresh kill. The faster the threads spun, the stronger they bound, squeezing the green dragon and contracting him, crushing his physical form and drawing out his spirit. The power of the globe stronger now, like his own. There would be no stone remains this time. No shell left as it was with Baelross. This time everything would be consumed.\n\nThe swirling light changed, slowing as the intense white started to take on the green of Mossbeard's scales. Faint at first, streaks of misty green, pastel and indistinct, thickened until it resembled a marble cloud streaked with heavy green veins, vibrant against the white. The silhouette of Mossbeard was visible through the mass of changing threads, a dark bulk at the centre of their swirling dance. Blaze could feel him hanging on, struggling to maintain his grip on life, but failing.\n\nThe globe ripped at the life force, greedily tugging at Mossbeard's will, pulling it from the dying dragon's grasp. Blaze focused on strengthening the pull, lending his will to the globe, eager to help. Together they were invincible. A tearing ripped through the cloud, devoid of sound as it separated Mossbeard from his life force. The bond was broken and the green dragon's spirit beaten.\n\nThe mist turned green and all traces of white vanished as the threads slowed to a stop and reversed direction. They picked up speed as they tugged at the life force, pulling it from Mossbeard, unravelling it and absorbing it into the swirling mists, expanding until they were bloated and full. Blaze could feel the energy and power, infused with the magic of the globe, ripe for harvesting. The temptation to take all the life force for himself only held in check by the globe's own hunger.\n\nThe whirling threads twisted and separated as the spinning increased and as they coalesced back into long winding strands, Mossbeard's form grew clearer. Fine threads drifted from his body, like vapour rising from hot stone, wisps of smoke leaching out from between his scales and joining with the thicker threads. His physical form began to diminish as the last of the threads left his body, stealing the final vestiges of life as they departed.\n\nThe green dragon grew insubstantial. Tough scales, strong talons, hard bone, all began to fade. As his body grew more translucent, it also reduced in size, shrinking as its transparency intensified.\n\nBlaze was ready.\n\nMossbeard vanished from sight, reduced into nothing, completely gone as if he never existed. The mass of threads filled with everything the green dragon was, his energy, his power, his very being, exploded outward in a blinding flash. The globe drew them in, pulling everything back inside itself, a torrent of smoky green threads rushing over its surface, joining with the swirling white within.\n\nFor the briefest moment, two points of red light winked inside the depths of the globe, dark and malevolent against the misty white exterior.\n\nThe onrush of euphoria slammed inside Blaze's mind. The intense pleasure, unlike before, more substantial and complete. He basked in the glow of the fiery energy as it filled his being. The magic and power no longer part of Mossbeard, pure and untarnished by his spirit, now it was free from his being; ready to be received into a new vessel, adding vitality, vigour and life, as it found a new home within the black dragon.\n\nThe life force from the leviathan had been old and primeval, scant intelligence filled with raw strength. It hadn't been fully absorbed. It had managed to swim back to the open sea before it gave up and faded into death.\n\nThe life force from Baelross was better, more substantial, filled with not just physical strength, it contained energy, intelligence and magic. A magic that was part of every dragon, a vital piece of their existence, the inner spirit and the true life source. Blaze understood the life force taken from the blue dragon wasn't everything he possessed. There was still a tiny part of his existence locked deep inside the stone. He didn't contain enough magic to break free, the globe had made sure he would remain inert. Somewhere in the stone body, the last remaining fragment of the blue dragon's spirit clung to life, resisting the finality of death.\n\nThat was the difference between Baelross and Mossbeard. The green dragon was utterly and completely gone. His physical form reduced to nothing, every single piece of his life force absorbed into the globe.\n\nBlaze now understood why the stone body of the blue dragon remained, why he hadn't vanished, while the green was expunged from existence.\n\nThe green tinged brightness faded as the globe\u2014and Blaze\u2014feasted on the life-source, each absorbing an equal share.\n\nThe rush passed and as Blaze returned to normal, he was aware of the platinum female, her silvery glow, entangled with golden threads, now the only source of light.\n\nA new power, fuelled with natural dragon magic, flooded through him, increasing his ability to manipulate the source within. A reservoir overflowing with a magic of endless possibilities, new and unknown. He marvelled at the platinum dragon suspended in the golden web. She was like a fly, waiting on the bidding of a far smarter spider, frozen in time, unable to struggle, held captive without hope of freedom.\n\nHe twisted his neck and flexed his wings, small sparks of light jumping from his black scales, crackling with energy, searching for release and hungry to be used.\n\nWhite-silver's eyes were wide in terror and he could only imagine the helplessness she felt at witnessing Mossbeard's sacrifice, knowing she was powerless to stop it. She wasn't so aloof now. The platinum must understand there was nowhere for her to go and her fate was sealed. There was no way to go back to how things had been, not now she knew what Blaze was capable of. She was a problem that knew his secret and was privy to the existence of the globe. She couldn't be allowed to leave and inform the moot.\n\nBlaze admired her spirit, defiant and assured. She was a talon in his hide and succeeded in getting under his scales with her attitude and disrespect. If only she was black. Perhaps then she would have been more inclined to follow him instead of her proud belief metals were superior. Pride would be her downfall, she...\n\nThe globe showed him the answer before he knew the question. It surfaced in his mind and suggested a fitting path for the platinum female. It was easy to understand the instructions it provided, learning from the knowledge it shared. He was eager to enlighten White-silver with this new found knowledge.\n\nStepping closer, he raised his head, bringing his eyes level with hers. Muscles twitched in her neck and her nostrils flared, panic showing in those cold blue eyes. Eyes, which up until now, had only shown scorn. Contempt for his lack of colour, prejudice for his beautiful black scales. He knew some other dragons thought him inferior because he remained black after hatching. That somehow he was different, strange, weaker than a colour, inferior to a metal. Did she think that now?\n\nHe wished he could show her what it was like to be black, how he struggled to be accepted. What it felt like not to be a privileged platinum. And then it came to him.\n\nThe globe's suggestion was brilliant, a perfect solution to his platinum problem, but he would add his own piece to the knowledge it provided and make it even better.\n\nHe whispered to White-silver, \"Are you comfortable in there? Do you really want to know what happened to Baelross? He stuck his snout where it didn't belong. He interfered with my plans so I turned him to stone. Just one of my many new talents.\" He rubbed his neck gently along the web of golden threads, never quite making contact with her scales, the net keeping him from touching her. She was powerless to resist his show of affection, false as it was. He teased, aware the gesture of courtship would repulse her. He knew if he attempted such an intimate display without her consent, she would have resisted. Resisted vehemently, most likely replying with flame or fang.\n\n\"And what of Galdor? Where is our glorious leader? He isn't anywhere your search would find him. Your loyalty to him is pointless, a waste of your time and talents. Are you ready for what comes next? Do you know what fate awaits you?\"\n\nHer eyes fixed to his, a spark of defiance still there, buried beneath the fear. \"I have a different role for you to play, something better than the stone of Baelross or the destruction of Mossbeard. A more industrious task. One I think you will excel at. A role more befitting of your cold demeanour. Should we try something new? Would you like to be cured of your pride?\"\n\nBlaze stepped back and opened his wings, spreading them as wide as the cave would allow. He curled them around White-silver's suspended form in a parody of the symbolic gesture performed at the moot. Gold light shone through the membranes as he encompassed her in his dark embrace. He completed the circle looking like a huge black stork shading the water's glare with its wings, while it fished.\n\nMagic coursed through his core, abundant after feasting on Mossbeard's life force. Usually his magic was limited and took time to replenish after use. Now it was plentiful and he was filled to overflowing. There was no effort involved in calling it forth, it was eager to be used. He could feel the globe urging him to use the magic, eager to experience what was about to happen. Now the globe was the one anticipating something new, aware he was going to do something it had never experience before.\n\nHe drew on the magic, filling his wings with its essence. The membranes shimmered, bones standing out as the golden glow containing White-silver intensified. The space between his wings and the platinum dragon, filled with magic, sparkling motes of gold lifting from the net and glittering in the distorted air. A heat haze like bright sun on an ocean surface, formed in the magic void, shimmering with golden flecks. Blaze poured the essence into the seething air, flooding it with his own magic, harnessing the power from the globe and the life force taken from Mossbeard.\n\nThe powerful cocktail was a new power, a mixture of potential unknown, but Blaze knew how to use it. He increased the flow, forcing it into the void. It was easy, the essence came willingly. It felt as if he were using a stomach full of dragon flame to burn a tiny insect; overkill to the extreme\u2014and he didn't care. The power was intoxicating and he let it flood through him, relishing the sensation. It bent to his will, hungry to do his bidding, the air charged and expectant like the anticipation of a thunderstorm. His whole body tingled, alive with magic. With power such as this he would rule everything! Nothing could stand against him.\n\nThe swirling motes brightened, throwing wide an intense golden light from under the giant black mushroom that was Blaze. The cave walls glittered and glowed as the pulsing golden aurora brightened and then began to fade. The cave grew darker as the light diminished, the extreme opposite of the vanished brightness. Black void filled the space under Blaze's wings. No longer were the dragons visible as darkness, blacker than the darkest night, filled the cave.\n\nThe sound of rushing wind shattered the silence and an unnatural force of power swept about them, a turbulent torrent of dark magic.\n\nWhite-silver bucked and kicked inside the constraints of the net, all of its colour now gone. The golden strands that made up the web replaced with the dark void of black essence. It swirled over her scales flickering through the platinum in a coruscating stream.\n\nBlaze stepped back, thin strands of magic flowed from his body, rising like steam from beneath his wings as it mixed with the magical essence. The dark void leached into the cocooning bubble of threads that held the platinum female, mixing with the net, flooding it with an intense blackness that made the rest of the cave appear lighter, even though it wasn't.\n\nSnakes of dark thread ran around the edges of White-silver's scales, tiny rivers of black void filling the channels, platinum highlighted with black. The animated darkness pushed into the spaces between the scales forcing its way under the dragon's armour, violating her defences. It continued to flow, filling her with the essence until it was gone.\n\nWhite-silver stopped struggling, hanging limply in the air, her scales oscillating from bright platinum to dark black. The pulsing quickened, alternating between both colours, faster and faster, a blur of silvery-grey, pearlescent and metallic as it rippled through every scale.\n\nAnd then it stopped.\n\nWhite-Silver dropped to the floor with a thud, the magical net no longer holding her captive. Her entire body now as black as Blaze's. The globe returned to normal and Blaze sensed its presence, quiet and content.\n\nThe black dragon that was once White-silver stirred, rising on unsteady legs to stand before Blaze. She stretched her wings and folded them to her flanks then tucked one leg under her chest, bowing her head low in subservience to her new master.\n\n\"You will be the first of many,\" Blaze purred. She retained the sleek grace of her former platinum body, more beautiful now than she had ever been. A black warrior that would fight unquestioningly for his cause, his creature to command, now and forever, until death.\n\nThe newly changed black dragon lifted her head, blue eyes replaced with fiery red. Dragons were magnificent creatures to behold, their eyes naturally mesmerising. The red jewels staring back at him were filled with a burning flame of intense adoration. Blaze knew in that moment she would follow wherever he led.\n\n\"You shall no longer be known by the name White-silver,\" he told her, looking into her smouldering eyes. \"She is no more. Forget what you once were and embrace your rebirth.\" There was no resistance, no answering back, she was his. Totally.\n\n\"From now on you are Darkflame and you will be my weapon.\"\n\nAs much as he was pleased with his creation, he couldn't let her accompany him back to the Lifting Plateau. At least not yet. There were more seeds of doubt to sow and more schemes to put into action. For now Darkflame would remain hidden. She would do his bidding in secret and prepare the way for what was to come.\n\n\"I have an important task for you. You will fly south, far south into human lands. I want you to burn their fields, destroy their crops, steal their cattle, terrorise villages, and wreak havoc on their towns. Do you understand?\"\n\nDarkflame growled in response.\n\n\"Can you speak?\" She growled again, unable to form any words. Blaze's perception gave him the notion it was a side effect of whatever occurred during the dark transformation. The magic he used was new to him even though the globe helped facilitate the spell, it was his doing, his idea. If she couldn't speak it meant she couldn't answer back or question his orders. He would take that as an added advantage to her transformation. One he could live with.\n\n\"As long as you understand your task. Let the humans hear you roar and learn to fear us once again. It is the only voice you need. Come.\" He walked her outside into the night. It was full dark now. When he spent time with the globe, it passed quicker than he perceived. Hours had passed although it didn't feel like it. He would have to be more aware of this in future. It wouldn't do to lose time.\n\nDarkflame shadowed him in the dark and for the first time, he realise just how difficult it was to see a black dragon at night. He was used to his own black scales and never gave it a moment's thought, but looking at Darkflame, it reminded him. Her body may blend with the darkness of the night, her eyes were a different matter. They were burning fires, red and intense, standing out it the darkness with a brightness of their own.\n\n\"Return here after seven days. Forage and rest when you need. You must not fail me. Do not get captured or slain. Humans have their own vile magic, make sure you avoid those who possess it.\n\nShe growled again. Blaze liked the sound of her reply, deep and powerful, full of threating menace for the unfortunates she would encounter.\n\n\"There is one last spell to cast before you go,\" Blaze told her. \"I don't want our black colour associated with your attacks. We need to remain uninvolved.\" Reaching for his own magic\u2014he didn't need the help of the globe for this spell now\u2014he willed the illusion of colour over Darkflame's body.\n\nShe pulsed as the colours of the spectrum altered her appearance, changing her from purple, dark then light blue, green, yellow, orange, and finally red, then back to purple.\n\n\"A temporary necessity,\" he said, \"your beautiful black scales will return in seven days. You will take on a new colour each night. Every day you continue on your mission, the humans will know a different dragon, creating the illusion of many attackers. They will see many dragons and not just one rogue. They will be convinced our species must be stopped, that we have finished with our complacent ways and risen up. They will be forced to take action against us before it is too late for them. Then we can truly begin in earnest. No more sneaking about, no more plotting and scheming. We will be within our rights to retaliate and defend ourselves, fight back. Mankind will learn the error of their arrogant ways.\"\n\nDarkflame's eyes burned with passion as she listened to his words. They were still red, untouched by the illusion of colour.\n\n\"Go now, Darkflame. Fly south and bring death and destruction to our enemies, show them your fire and flame.\"\n\nShe rose, great black wings rhythmically beating the night sky. Blaze watched as she turned south and vanished into the distance.\n\nHe returned to the cave for one last look at the globe, checking everything was as it should be. The globe rested between the stone talons of Baelross, a faint white glow emanating from within. There was no sign of recent events or that Mossbeard or White-silver had ever set claw inside the cave.\n\nMossbeard was completely gone, every scrap of life force taken until his body was reduced to nothing. He sniffed at the stone dragon, his nostrils snuffling along the cold granite scales. Baelross was stronger than the old green and the platinum. Blues were known for their strength of will. There was still the slightest spark of life inside the stone body, holding fast to what remained of his spirit. This was why he left stone remains rather than being fully taken.\n\nBlaze ran his tail along the stone, using it to feel his way along the hard surface, probing with his magic. Whatever Baelross had done, he had resisted. Blaze touched the globe and pushed his presence at the stone, attempting to penetrate its defences. Baelross and his remaining life force were too deep to touch. It was as if he could almost grasp it, only to realise his flittering spirit was just out of reach.\n\nThe globe's presence had returned to a dormant state and it was no help at all. It was in a state of resting, sated for now, no interest in the blue dragon's stony remains.\n\nBaelross was no threat and could stand in this cave for centuries. Perhaps when he was more familiar with the harvesting of the life force, he could finish with the blue dragon completely. It niggled him that something of Baelross still remained inside the stone dragon, resisting his will.\n\n\"We're not done yet, my basalt friend,\" he said. \"I know not if you can hear my words or feel my touch.\" He slapped his tail against the flank of stone with a satisfying whack. \"We have business to finish, you and I. However, it can wait. Don't go off anywhere until we're done.\" He grumbled, laughing to himself.\n\nTaking a final look at the globe, peaceful and serene in its resting place, he departed the cave. It was late and he needed to return to the plateau and get a good night's rest. Tomorrow would be an eventful day. More dragons would be missing and the moot would suffer more losses.\n\nMossbeard and White-silver wouldn't return from the south. The same south that was home to the humans who despised dragons. Would the remaining moot members conclude, perhaps humans were involved with the disappearance of their kin? Would it be too much to ask they made that leap themselves? With a few well-placed words and hints, it was entirely possible. His plans were slowly falling into place. With Darkflame taking on one of his time consuming tasks, enjoyable as it was, it should help speed things along. It never hurt to have an extra pair of wings.\n\nSoon he wouldn't need to rely on the cover of darkness and the secret skulking around. He rose into the night, a black dragon in a black sky, circled the caves once and turned north towards the Lifting Plateau."
            },
            {
                "title": "Predictable Enemies",
                "text": "Darkflame's missions continued, increasing as the weeks passed. She returned from her original venture, successful in spreading destruction and stirring up the humans, wherever she struck. Blaze instructed her not to fully destroy the towns and cities she attacked, leaving enough survivors to spread the word of rampaging dragons and their unprovoked assaults.\n\nHis campaign of destruction and terror against the humans escalated as more black recruits were converted to his cause. His instructions to them the same as those issued to Darkflame. He let them range farther south, moving into more populated areas, escalating the attacks, always under the glamour of coloured scales.\n\nThe humans began to fight back and some of his new soldiers were lost in the conflict. Human magic and projectile weapons were a particularly effective combination for knocking dragons from the sky. He had warned them not to get too close for this very reason. Humans were weaker than dragons, but they possessed their own magic and weapons. They were considerably more plentiful, and would fight back when provoked.\n\nThe newly converted blacks they managed to kill were a loss, but if they had been too stupid and too weak to survive their appointed tasks, it was probably best they were weeded out early. The strong would prevail while the weak were culled from the colony. When he came to start his new order only the strongest dragons would be worthy.\n\nThe eight remaining dragons of the moot were all gone. Ember, the orange female, hadn't understood his vision and she met with the same fate as Mossbeard, her magic and her life force consumed until she was erased from existence. The annoying Yesper was also sacrificed to the globe in the same way. Blaze thought the yellow dragon would have been a fine recruit and would follow him unquestioningly. He had even let Yesper watch as he absorbed Ember, demonstrating his power. The yellow was always eager to please, but after seeing Ember's fate the fickle yellow developed a spine. His cruel words of ignorance would not be tolerated and his life and magic were stripped from him.\n\nThe more he thought about it, Blaze decided he didn't like yellow dragons. Not only were they too bright in colour, it seemed every yellow he had ever met was annoying in one way or another. It must have something to do with their inferior pigment, he reasoned. They probably wouldn't make good black converts and were best disposed of. Every dragon had their place and for the ones that didn't fit with his plan, their contribution was a small sacrifice for the greater good. Taking another dragon's life was not something he wanted to do, but taking their life force\u2014and the feeling he experienced when he did\u2014helped make it easier.\n\nAfter introducing his new black dragons to the colony, some individuals overreacted. He used the magic of the globe to smooth the transition, employing just enough glamour over the colony to prevent anyone questioning too deeply where these new black dragons came from and why. If any were too outspoken, they would be converted themselves, or suffer the same fate as Mossbeard.\n\nOpinions were like scales, all dragons had them, but only the right ones were black. How could they not see that his way was best? They were too long under the guidance of Galdor the Soft. His tolerant ways of letting the humans take everything wasn't something his colony should be disadvantaged with. It was time to fight back and show humans who the dominant species were. No longer would dragons retreat and cower in the shadows. His scales may be black, but the human race would have no difficulty in seeing him or his vision.\n\nFern surprised him when she hissed in his face and told him she was leaving. Blaze thought that after Mossbeard's disappearance she wouldn't be able to think for herself or survive on her own. He regretted not taking her there and then, in front of what remained of their poor excuse for a moot. He should have absorbed her into the globe and shown them all he wouldn't stand for their rebellious ways or their unwillingness to see reason.\n\nThere were some things he couldn't change and Fern's timely escape, before his power was fully established, was one of them. He would trust his instincts next time and make sure he acted before any future incidents arose. The smarter dragons would see his decisions for what they were; protection of the colony. Individuals who thought they knew better than their newly appointed leader, would soon learn his way was best.\n\nAzyrian's support of Fern's decision was surprising. The aloof metal didn't appear to care much for green dragons or indeed other dragons who didn't share his metallic scales. Why he would have left with Fern was a mystery. Unfortunately Blaze couldn't know the minds of these misguided dragons. Azyrian would have made a competent soldier in his black army. If Darkflame was any indication, metals, it seemed, were the most successful of his converts. They took easily to the transformation and followed his instructions unerringly. They showed no signs of compassion towards humans and were masters of destruction. Perhaps it was their typically aloof attitude. He didn't care. They were loyal to the cause and as long as they performed their duties and did as they were told, that was all he required of them. He would do the thinking and planning, his followers would do as they were bid.\n\nThe mutiny that followed after Fern and Azyrian's departure reduced the colony's numbers. A lot of the original defectors had been captured and brought to justice. They now served in his black army, faithful now their scales were the colour of his own. The others who were still out there would be found. His loyal black dragons were relentless in their patrols, sweeping up any strays they discovered and keeping the colony safe.\n\nHe knew the rebels were hiding somewhere and they had managed to elude him... so far. Their time would come, they would be brought home to the Lifting Plateau, the true home of all the dragons of Alvanor.\n\nAt least Sapphire and Chestnut were still here. They were no longer part of the moot, Blaze had assigned them a new and more important duty, one that would prove vital to the future of all the dragons in Alvanor. They stayed within the deep cavern beneath the plateau, protected and kept safe by their black chaperones. They were not prisoners and he was sure they knew he only wanted what was best for them, and ultimately the colony.\n\nHe long suspected that Chestnut's offspring could possess the potential to be true black dragons. Her dark reddish-brown scales were tinged with black. They weren't just a darker shade of their base colour at the edges, like the scales of some females. They were actually edged with pure black. Beautiful black. If there was a possibility of her young hatching and retaining their dark scales, he could breed a race of true black dragons just like him.\n\nSapphire was another possible candidate, her dark blue scales not too far off the perfect hue of black. She was certainly a better colour than the bright reds or yellows, or the more common greens.\n\nWhen they came into season and were ready to mate, he would win their affections and clutch with them both. If their progeny were to result in black offspring, then it stood to reason he would need to be their sire. He was willing to make that sacrifice for the colony rather than settling with a life mate.\n\nBlaze was unsure if his black converts, be they male or female, would produce black dragonets. Their original colours may have some influence on how their eggs hatched. The magic used to transform them was still a mystery to him and he didn't know if it was just their skin and scales that were changed. Did the process of turning a coloured dragon black, render them infertile? As of yet the newly turned dragons were uninterested in pairing. He would have to experiment, when the time was right, and select the strongest of his new order. But there would be plenty of time for that after the humans were eradicated. After he won the war he could devote his resources to breeding natural black dragons and strengthening their species. Chestnut and Sapphire would be given the honour of birthing his new order.\n\nDarkflame entered the cavern of the moot and Blaze's dreams of an all-black colony, were put on hold. His first black convert didn't speak, she only growled, but her meaning was clear to him.\n\n\"They are coming?\"\n\nShe growled an affirmative response.\n\n\"Good, they have reacted exactly how I expected.\" Blaze watched as the globe glowed brightly from its new resting place, as if reacting to Darkflame's presence. Swirling mists of white disturbed the globe's calm surface and two dull points of glowing red light pierced its cloudy interior.\n\nIt was better to have the globe near to him and after his power was established, he'd brought it home and housed it in the moot chamber. The former moot members had no need for the chamber any longer and he had no desire to establish a new moot. His word was all that mattered now, his authority and his decisions would guide them all, the moot obsolete, no longer serving any purpose. He would lead and the dragons of the Lifting Plateau would follow. If they didn't obey his commands or his rules, they were of no use to him. They would be absorbed to feed the globe and lend strength to his own power, contributing to the colony in their own way and helping his cause.\n\n\"Let us view the enemy,\" Blaze told Darkflame. \"Show me where they are.\" He no longer needed to conceal the globe, no one would dare steal it away from him now. It deserved a place of honour, resting by his side in his new chamber, instead of secreted away with the stony blue dragon. Baelross could rest alone in the empty caves for all eternity, no longer was he needed to stand watch and guard Blaze's secret.\n\nIt was only right that he take the former moot chamber as his own. Only his most loyal blacks were allowed entry into his inner sanctum and they knew better than to enter when he wasn't home. They were given explicit instructions to guard the chamber and make sure no one entered in his absence. The globe was bonded with him and him alone, but it was better to trust no one. He was sure no other dragon would be able to take it from him, but it was better to be safe and remain cautious.\n\nHe took one last look at the globe as it's glow diminished, the two tiny points of red light faded back into its swirling mists. He was loathed to leave it, wanting to spend more time exploring its depths and unlocking its secrets. But it would have to wait until he surveyed his enemy. It was always better to commune with the globe when they absorbed a life force together. It opened itself up to his mind and was freer with its knowledge, more inclined to share, when he fed it. Perhaps later he could find a dragon that displeased him and who wasn't an asset to the colony and he could drain its magic and enjoy the euphoria it brought.\n\nDarkflame exited the cave without being instructed. Her perception to his needs and wishes was highly tuned; he liked that she was able to anticipate his wants. He had grown use to interpreting her growls and deciphering her grunts. It was pleasant enough when she was around and she never questioned him or prattled on. Perhaps she would be able to clutch black dragonets if he fathered them.\n\nThe morning was dull and cloudy as she rose from the flat top of the plateau. Blaze watched as she sailed silently into the updraft, her sleek black form lifting vertically into the air. She stretched her wings, splaying them wide to catch the thermals that rose from below.\n\nEvery dragon that lived on the plateau learned from an early age to ride the currents. It was a rite of passage for fledgling flyers, stepping off the steep ledges into oblivion and catching the updraft circulating their home.\n\nHe jumped from the plateau's edge and caught the thermals, following Darkflame. Galdor had once shared with him his passion for the plateau and the strong thermals that created the unusual, yet natural phenomenon. The former green leader was wrong about many things, but Blaze agreed with him about the beauty and wonder of the Lifting Plateau. Why would Galdor not fight for their home? If he were still in charge he would eventually let the humans drive them from what was rightfully theirs. Galdor's love for the plateau couldn't be as strong as his own, otherwise he would have agreed with Blaze's beliefs.\n\nNo matter. Galdor was gone, Blaze was in charge now. No humans would take their home or lands again.\n\nThe thermals pushed him into the sky, his wings spread wide to catch the uprush of hot air currents rising from below. With minimal effort he dipped his right wingtip and raised his left, turning slowly in pursuit of Darkflame.\n\nShe led them south until they reached the lowland plains, far beyond the river and the underwater cave where he discovered the globe and escaped the clutches of the leviathan.\n\nAfter a few hours flight the enemy came into sight.\n\nAn army of humans were assembled on the plains, their colourful makeshift shelters scattered across the grasslands, littering the ground for miles. The once empty plains were now occupied by thousands upon thousands of angry humans, come to make war on the dragon race. Their presence was a necessary sufferance and Blaze knew he would only have to tolerate them for a little longer.\n\nHis careful months of planning and his continuous assaults upon their towns and cities had paid off. The results of his campaign of terror and destruction forcing the humans to take action. Actions much like his own. He wanted a means to an end and it was almost within his grasp. The constant attacks his black converts visited on the human settlements had eventually forced them to retaliate. Ironically, they, unlike Galdor, understood that if they weren't prepared to fight for their homes, they would be wiped out. Faced with fight or flight, they chose fight. It was time for dragons to do the same.\n\nHe overtook Darkflame and signalled her to follow, leading her higher into the sky. Once they were directly above the human army, they were high enough to be well beyond the range of their weapons and magic.\n\nBlaze could see a long snake of tiny people kicking up a dusty cloud as they arrived from the south. The humans, it would appear, had mustered as many willing people as they were able to and their numbers still grew. It was obvious, just as he intended, their choices were limited. Stay in their homes and be burned or fight back. Their predictability was what he counted on. Nothing encouraged an aggressive species like more violence.\n\nHe grudgingly appreciated their compliance with his plan even though they were reacting like cornered rats. It didn't take much for them to fight against each other, unlike dragons. So when they were provoked, as was his plan, they would focus their violent nature on his innocent dragons.\n\nHis colony were unaware of his campaign, the black dragons he sent out on missions of destruction, remained a secret.\n\nWhen the shocking news broke that an army of humans was massing on the plains, only two days march from the Lifting Plateau, they would have no choice but to defend their colony. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau would not tolerate this unprovoked human invasion. He would rally them to defend their home. He would reason it was better to attack rather than let their army get too close. There were powerful magicians and sorcerers in their army, no doubt the same ones responsible for the disappearance of Galdor and all the others.\n\nBlaze spiralled at high altitude, surveying the human army and their reaction to the dragons above. They scurried like ants, tiny in size, but large in number.\n\nThis would be no easy battle, he knew their magic wielders were powerful. It would be wrong of him to underestimate their potential, especially as he knew one of their kind had been able to open a passageway between worlds. If the mage who assisted in Galdor's downfall possessed magic of such strength, others would have access to it too. Magic like that was not to be taken lightly. He would remain wary. It would be stupid and careless of him to underestimate his enemy and throw away everything he had worked for, especially when he was so close.\n\nAs if to prove his point, bolts of blue energy rose from below. The magical attacks fell short of their targets and dissipated before they could inflict any harm. A warning intended as a message\u2013a message telling him they were prepared to fight\u2013fell short. It would be no fun if they made it easy.\n\nBlaze would give them their fight and revel in their slaughter. With the might of the colony behind him, his black soldiers, and the power of the globe, he would lead them to a victory that would be legendary.\n\nHe flew around the army and turned north, Darkflame following. Even at this height he could see thousands of expectant faces turn to follow their progress.\n\nThey wouldn't have long to wait. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau would bring fire and death to the plains and would bathe in the blood of humans.\n\nHe flamed the air, spitting out a long burst of dragon fire. The bright flames offered a defiant challenge to all gathered below, a reminder they would soon taste his wrathful fire.\n\nHe circled the human host one last time, Darkflame at his flank, then flew for home."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Call to War",
                "text": "Blaze stood on the plateau and gazed out over the assembled dragons. A seething mass of heads and necks swayed as the restless colony waited. Once he had been the only black dragon, now there were just as many black heads as there were coloured.\n\nHis guards were instructed to gather every single dragon in readiness for his announcement. An undercurrent of anticipation hung over the plateau as they waited for their leader to reveal why they were gathered. Returning from his survey of the human army he decided it was time to share the next stage of his plan with them.\n\nOn his immediate return he visited the globe, spending what little free time was his, in preparation for this moment.\n\nHe flapped his wings, lifting himself onto a huge boulder and elevated himself above the expectant throng of dragons. A silence fell over the colony as he raised himself up on hind legs, spreading his wings wide in a dramatic gesture, attracting their attention.\n\n\"Dragons of the Lifting Plateau,\" he announced, his voice booming out over the assembled crowd and breaking the eerie silence. The knowledge the globe supplied, taught him how to lace his voice with magic, adding volume and authority to his words. There was also an undercurrent of persuasion but just a slight touch, keeping it at an undetectable level as some dragons might sense the glamour. It was important now, more than ever, that any decisions they came to, should not appear to be influenced.\n\n\"I know times have been difficult.\" There was a buzz of voices from the coloured dragons. He carried on, ignoring their grumblings. \"Our fallen leader, Galdor the Green, is no longer here to guide us. However, the Earth Mother and her magic have provided us with new support. Some have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of the colony and taken the black.\" That should give them something new to ponder. Let them believe the Earth Mother's magic was responsible for the mysterious arrival of his black converts.\n\nA slight murmur of discontent surfaced from the assembled dragons. Up until now the explanation of unknown black dragons joining the colony, had never been openly discussed. He was aware of some discontent and knew the colours grudgingly accepted his new recruits, afraid to openly question the new order, unaware of where the black dragons originated. He used the power of the globe to cast a glamour of compliance to keep them subdued and accept the newcomers. But he could only use so much before the more magically attuned, picked up on his spell.\n\nWith the colony depleted and the new blacks possessing a greater natural strength, they had no choice but to accept them into their midst. The number of black dragons slowly grew, as they were indoctrinated into the colony and Blaze's acceptance and trust in them ensured they remained unchallenged. It was too late for them to change their minds now. The black scales of his converts were here to stay, soldiers loyal to his cause. The colony should be grateful they had new leadership that cared enough to create and recruit new allies against their faceless enemy.\n\nFaceless until today.\n\n\"Many of our friends have vanished,\" he continued, gently using the globe's trick of persuasion, \"and there is no explanation as to where they are or what has become of them.\" No explanation he was willing to share. Let them believe he was just as much in the dark as they were. He waited, stretching out the moment allowing the silence to descend once more, holding their attention. \"Until now,\" he added after his dramatic pause.\n\nTheir murmuring grew to angrier grumbling, the colony eager to find the answers. Answers that had eluded them for too long.\n\n\"I now know what evil fate has befallen our brothers and sisters. I know who is responsible for these unwarranted attacks. Attacks on our very way of life. I know who has caused us great emotional pain and suffering.\" He waited once more, the voices of the assembled dragons rising, their anger and frustration fuelled by his theatrics and enhanced by his magical glamour. They were impatient to find out who their enemy was. They wanted answers and were ready to retaliate.\n\n\"Humans!\" Blaze called out above the angry rumblings. \"It is the humans who plot our downfall. They are responsible for our missing kin. Even now they assemble on the southern plains, gathering their strength. Their armies swell as more and more flock to join their ranks. They are confident we are weak and will not fight back.\" Their anger grew and their voices rose.\n\n\"Mages protect their numbers,\" Blaze continued, \"and are readying to lead them into battle. They have emerged from the shadows and are preparing to bring war to our home. No longer are they hiding their cruel intent from us with their secretive skulking. They are openly gathering for an assault on the plateau!\"\n\nThe colony of dragons snarled and growled, whipped into a frenzy by his words. Some argued with those closest and Blaze listened to what was said. They still didn't truly believe him and some, even now, after all his careful planning, were hesitant to take him at his word and trust he knew best. Galdor's soft ways had poisoned their natural spirit and made them weak. They were far too accepting of humans, just as their former green leader had been. This was his opportunity to restore the balance. He would change their minds and rectify their shortcomings, show them just how a dragon of the Lifting Plateau should behave. The time for clipped wings was gone.\n\nHe reared up and stretched his neck to the south and all eyes followed his gaze. \"Look to the skies!\" he cried out. A small group of dragons approached from the south, small specks at first, growing larger as they neared the plateau. The colony watched and waited as they came closer.\n\n\"I have sent forth a scouting party and have asked my most trusted advisors to determine the threat.\"\n\nBlaze had instructed Darkflame to accompany some coloured dragons and fly south. He needed to let them witness the human horde for themselves. If he was to sway them to his way of thinking, he needed coloured dragons to help prove it.\n\nFive dragons came to land on the plateau, dropping down next to the rock Blaze strategically perched upon. He glanced down at his returning subjects from his position of authority and introduced them to the assembled colony.\n\n\"You all know Sapphire the Cerulean and Chestnut.\" They were former moot members and their word would carry a lot of weight. He had allowed them their freedom to carry out his bidding. Even if they ventured out alone\u2014without his trusted escort\u2014he was sure they would have been compelled to return and share their fateful news.\n\n\"They were accompanied by our green brother, Sharp-tail,\" he continued. His tactful inclusion of coloured dragons in the scouting party would lend it credibility. \"And they were protected by Darkflame and Charcoal.\" Two of his most trusted converts.\n\nThe five newly arrived dragons, a blue, a brown, a green and two blacks, all made their way towards Blaze.\n\n\"What information have you gathered? What have your eyes witnessed? The colony are eager for answers and wish to learn the truth.\" Let them hear the words from someone other than himself. It would strengthen his argument and solidify what he had maintained all along.\n\n\"Thousands upon thousands of humans are massed on the southern plains,\" Sapphire answered, stirring more anger. Her confirmation only made the colony more agitated, the noise of angry dragons drowning out her voice.\n\n\"Please, brothers and sisters,\" Blaze called out above the cacophony of outrage, \"let Sapphire speak, listen to her message. She has travelled far to bring her grim tidings to us.\" His commanding voice, enhanced by his magic, sounded above them. It was gratifying when they quieted enough to let her continue.\n\n\"I have never seen so many humans gathered together and they are too close to the plateau for my liking.\" Her statement could not have been any better. She had seen the results of his covert attacks and recognised the impending danger.\n\n\"They reek of human magic,\" Sharp-tail added, raising his voice to be heard above the noise. \"They are prepared for war. There can be no other explanation.\" His words adding to the fury already stirred by Sapphire's.\n\nDarkflame and Charcoal moved to take flanking position on either side of Blaze's makeshift podium as if to protect their leader, sensing the colony's agitation.\n\n\"Strong magic. I can sense their spells as they prepare for attack. Powerful protection wards can only mean one thing. They are gathering for battle against us.\" Sapphire stated, reinforcing his earlier accusations. She was less rebellious now she believed his words to be true. He had told her humans were behind all their troubles. Now she saw for it herself, she delivered the message he wanted them all to believe. Perhaps now she would become his ally rather than rebel against his every word. He hoped her strong will and argumentative nature, would be placated. She would see him as their saviour and acknowledge him as her rightful leader.\n\nAn angry army of humans preparing to attack would sway many dragons to the correct decision. His decision. He had always been right and now they would see it. They must stand and fight for what was theirs. They must fight to regain all that had been stolen from them. Take back what rightfully belonged to dragons and ultimately rid the land of the human threat once and for all. What he needed to do now was convince them all that it wasn't just his idea. He drew on the power the globe provided and launched his final gambit, adding just a touch more persuasive magic to his words.\n\n\"Do you think they gather for war against our kind?\" Blaze asked, knowing their answer could only be the one he wanted everyone to hear. He wanted them to speak the words in front of the assembled colony.\n\n\"They are protected by mages who ward their numbers,\" Sharp-tail said. \"What other reason would they have for marching on the plateau?\"\n\nThe colony rumbled its agreement at the green dragon's words. Of course they were gathered for war, any dragon could see that. After his constant attacks on their homes, they had one choice left to them. They were massed and ready to fight for their very survival. A fight they were fated to lose.\n\n\"There is wisdom in what you say,\" Blaze said, pushing a little more of the globe's magic into his voice. It would be less detectable now the assembled host were agitated and it would do no harm to stoke the fires and kindle their mounting anger.\n\n\"I am finished waiting for more of our number to disappear. I am done sitting back and letting humans take our kin and our lands!\" Blaze shouted out. His words were met with a wave of growling voices.\n\n\"Are you not tired of waiting for more of your kin to suffer at the hands of this human horde?\" Blaze called out. The colony rose its voice as one in a roar of defiance.\n\nHe roared back, \"Are you ready defend what is ours and to fight for the lost spirits of all who have fallen?\"\n\nThe colony's answer was deafening.\n\n\"Then let us wait no longer,\" Blaze shouted out above their voices. \"By flame and fang, with talon and claw, let us stop these impudent upstarts and end our suffering!\"\n\nThe black dragons that were now part of the colony raised their own voices with those of their coloured kin. Some even blew flame into the air. The divide between his own dark scaled soldiers and the rest of the colony was closing. They would all be allies in the battle against humans.\n\n\"What must we do to stop this impending doom?\" Blaze called out.\n\n\"Fight back!\" roared Sharp-tail.\n\n\"Attack them now!\" Chestnut screamed, caught up in the adrenalin fuelled frenzy.\n\n\"Attack! Kill! Fight!\" The angry horde took up the chant, spurred on by their peers and the subtle glamour Blaze used to incite them.\n\n\"Let us take the fight to them. Let us attack before they realise what's happening, while we have the advantage,\" Blaze shouted. \"Ignite your fires, dragons of the Lifting Plateau. Let your vengeance burn the scourge of humanity from our lands. Rise now on wings of righteous retribution and follow me to victory!\"\n\nHe stretched his neck forward, tipping his head towards the sky and spewed forth a gout of flame. A beacon of hope for all who watched. A sign of his intent. He was answered in kind as the dragons of the Lifting Plateau returned the gesture. Their bright flames burning with the heat of their hatred. A just hatred, even though it was magically inspired. His careful planning and clever manipulation, along with the strength and knowledge shared by the globe, was finally coming to fruition.\n\n\"Rise up and fly south,\" he screamed. \"Fly with your brothers and sisters, black and coloured, visit the wrath of dragons on mankind! Fly high and fight for your freedom!\"\n\nBlaze leapt from the huge bolder pounding the air with powerful black wings. The air below him was filled with thunder as the assembled host followed him skyward. The sound of over a hundred pairs of angry dragon wings cracked and snapped as the colony rose.\n\nIt was a sight to behold and pride swelled in Blaze as he led them to battle. At last he would command their allegiance. They would see him for the glorious leader he was destined to become. He would teach them the ways of true dragons. They would rain down fiery destruction on the assembled masses of the human attack force and utterly destroy them.\n\nThere would be casualties and he knew the human magic would claim some dragon lives. Even though he would be denied using their life force for his own intent, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make. The human army would be broken and then he would be free to take back their stolen lands. His army of dragons would emerge from their conflict stronger than before, forged in battle. Those that didn't survive and fell to the human weapons and their magic would be too weak to be part of his new order. Only the strong would be worthy.\n\nBlaze gained height and sailed out over the plateau's edge on wings of black. The updraft caught his outstretched membranes and propelled him upward, the exhilaration of flight and the oncoming battle filling him with joy.\n\nHe craned his neck backwards and watched as the sky darkened, a mass of angry, battle hungry, vengeful dragons trailed in his wake. Fire rumbled in his belly and he knew there would be flame enough to share with his enemies. The globe had given him the gift of prolonged flame. His only wish was the following horde were able to match him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Now Battle Come Down",
                "text": "The human army scurried into action as the dragon host approached. They scrabbled around frantically like panicked antelope, running in every direction. The stink of fear emanated from below and Blaze was pleased his dragons struck terror into their tiny hearts. If he was a small human looking up at an opposing force of dragons, preparing for attack, he would have been terrified too. His airborne host were magnificent.\n\nBlaze felt magical barriers of protection spring hastily into life. Human magic was easy for him to detect now, after his interaction with the globe. He strongly suspected he wouldn't be able to absorb this type of magic. Dragon and human magic were nothing alike. The globe had shown him how to use dragon magic and life force, but human magic was something entirely different.\n\nHe was able to identify it when it was present and could see a hazy aura of blue surrounding the army, strong and vibrant in some places, weak and translucent in others. He would use this new ability to his advantage, an advantage he would never have had if the globe hadn't enlightened him.\n\nThe places where the barrier was thinnest were the points he would direct his attacks, his army would still need to be careful, as he knew only too well some human mages possessed power far beyond their size.\n\nHe would rely on strength of numbers and when the others attacked, he would focus his globe enhanced flame on the weakest points of the magical shield. As his dragons flamed, they would weaken the magic that held it in place and his enhanced assault should allow him to break through and destroy the mages who held it together. Hopefully.\n\nThis was all new to him, never having attempted anything like this before. His attacks on the defenceless towns and villages were unexpected. The humans didn't have time to prepare any magical defences. This time it wouldn't be as simple as appearing out of nowhere, flaming and destroying, then leaving. This was war; a confrontation with an enemy who had prepared. An enemy who were ready to fight back.\n\nNervous anticipation seeped into his resolve. What if he couldn't best the human magic? Was he leading his dragons to be slaughtered at the hands of vengeful humans? The globe reached out from its resting place in the chamber of the moot, soothing his worries. He was Blaze the Black, strong and fearless. The globe would guide him, fill him with a power no human magic could stand against. He was ready to conquer the enemies of dragonkind. Together they would crush anything that dared stand before their might.\n\nHe shook his head, clearing his mind and dispelled the doubt, hovering in mid-air as the host passed him by. \"Onward!\" He roared, encouraging his followers. A wave of heat blasted over his scales as they flew by, the fire they held already scorching the air like a hot desert wind. Blaze was glad their ire was still stoked after his rousing speech, aware they must strike at the heart of the human army before their anger cooled.\n\n\"Ready your flame,\" he called out as they sped through the air towards the enemy. \"Burn through their defences. Scorch and sear! Claw and fang! Flame and fury!\"\n\nDarkflame, never too far from his side, led them forward. Her sleek black form aglow with the flame burning from within. She was a sight to behold, her beautiful black scales all the more perfect as she glowed from the inside, stoking her flame. She peeled off from the front of the flight, tipping into a dive and headed straight towards the centre of the assembled human force. It was a manoeuvre he would have been proud to perform himself, fearless and bold.\n\nFor a second the momentum of the following dragons slowed and the host hung in the air. Blaze thought they were going to let her attack on her own and the sight of the lone black dragon filled him with a sorrow he couldn't explain. Then, as one, the host dropped from the sky, plummeting after the brave Darkflame, joining the attack.\n\nScreams of rage sounded as the dragons plummeted from the sky, their battle cry like an eruption from a thunderous volcano. Their voices howled in anger, giving way to the ignition of flame as they unleashed their fire and directed it against the humans.\n\nA ragged flurry of projectiles rose from the human host. Giant dragon sized arrows flew from their catapults and ballista. The air was charged with electricity, bolts of red and blue shot from the staffs of mages, magicians and sorcerers, towards the descending wave of dragons.\n\nDarkflame led the charge, dodging the magical attacks with ease. A huge arrow sped towards her neck and she skilfully twisted mid-dive, rolling her body and letting the arrow miss its intended target. The arrow travelled on unimpeded and plunged into the chest of a small green following her, exploding as the magically enhanced metal tip ripped through green scales, impacting with the dragon's inner flame.\n\nThe sky was ablaze with fire as his army opened their jaws as one, spewing forth their fiery anger, directing it at the sorcerous shield protecting the humans. A roar of rage accompanied by the searing voice of rushing flame, resounded through the air, like violent waves of fire crashing onto a rocky shore. Red and orange flame washed over the protective bubble of magic, rolling harmlessly across the barrier's surface. The barrier glowed blue then purple as the fire weakened its spell.\n\nElation fuelled Blaze as he dropped towards the glowing shield, identifying the deepest purple as the most vulnerable part of the protective spell. It was obvious now to his globe enhanced senses, after the barrage of dragon fire revealed it.\n\nFollowing his host, he swooped down towards the barrier and unleashed his own fire. His advantage over the other dragons were twofold. He possessed the ability to see the weaker sections of the barrier, the difference in colour easy for him to detect. He was also able to hold his flame longer\u2014allowing for more sustained bursts\u2014and it burned hotter. Aiming his flame at the weakest part of the barrier, he spewed forth the fire within. Intense flame assaulted the magical surface mixing the red of his flame with the blue of the barrier. Purple waves rolled and tumbled over its surface, scorching and weakening as they battled with the opposing force.\n\nThe sting of human magic repelled him as small lightning bolts of red tore into his unprotected belly. Blaze pulled up, pounding the air and gained altitude, adrenaline surging through his body, the sounds of battle adding to the excitement of the attack. He could sustain a few hits from the human mages without injury, but it would only take one well-placed attack to ruin all his hard earned planning.\n\nHe swung round and watched his fearless host make their second run at the barrier and followed in their wake. Some dragons fell as they were hit by magical attacks, others from the huge arrows flung from the contraptions below.\n\nBut they still came.\n\nThe bodies of the slain fell from the sky, bouncing and sliding over the barrier until they crashed to the ground beyond its influence. Pride swelled his heart, a strange mixture of sadness for his fallen kin and an overwhelming joy that they would follow him to their death. Screaming above the roar of the battle he attacked again falling on the barrier with renewed vengeance.\n\nHe focused his power, channelling everything he had drawn from the globe and pushing it down through his body and into his talons. Energy and magic sparked and crackled, writhing over shiny black claws honed with razor sharp dragon magic, destructive power in need of release.\n\nOpening huge black wings, Blaze thrust muscular rear legs forwards, black talons reaching in front of his body like a huge black eagle descending on its prey. Red bolts of magic bounced from the underside of his open wings, the humans concentrating their magic on his attack. Pain lanced through his thick hide, penetrating the strong scales and burning with foul human sorcery.\n\nSimilar attacks flashed from below, disabling weaker dragons. Blaze watched as they fell, their hearts strong but their bodies no match for the magic that disabled them. He would need to show them the way, he would give them cause to witness his strength and his bravery. There were times when a leader must lead, show his followers he was not beyond risking everything for his ideals. He was stronger than them all, the globe providing the power and the knowledge he needed to succeed.\n\nTalons stretched out, his claws splayed wide searching empty air until they met with the surface of the barrier.\n\nBlaze screamed in defiance as his unstoppable force met with the immovable shield. A screeching howl assaulted his ears as the two powers came together. Wings outstretched and held rigid for balance, he fought to keep control of his actions, skating and slithering over the barrier's surface, human magic clashing with his own and sending jolts of wild stabbing pain through every fibre of his body. His talons glowed with a silver blue energy as he dug them deeper, gouging them into the shield's surface, sliding and skidding as the opposing magic fought to repel him.\n\nHe pushed harder, forcing aching talons down, pushing deeper and deeper into the unyielding barrier, searching for a way through. His wings ached, his claws screamed in agony and his legs burned with intense pain. His scales felt as if they would be ripped from his hide as the human magic battled to overcome his desperate attack. Neither side yielded. Dragon and human magic deadlocked. He focused his will and the globe's presence lent him the strength he desired.\n\nAnd the barrier weakened... then gave.\n\nTalons tore through the magical shield and the pent up power found release, flowing freely, no longer held at bay by the human defence. The furrows his talons gouged, pierced the surface, penetrating the barrier and opening a tear. His magic ripped into the shield filling the tear as it expanded. A deafening boom was accompanied by a burning red flame as it ate into the shimmering blue barrier, destroying the last hope of every human gathered beneath it.\n\nThe dragons of the Lifting Plateau regrouped, this time dropping from the sky with the knowledge their path to the human army was now free from obstruction.\n\nThe first wave of winged attackers spewed gouts of flame into the human army, searing life and scorching resistance. Flame raged into the ranks of men engulfing everything in its path, black smoke choking the humans lucky enough to survive.\n\nThe next wave of dragons followed, tearing through the scattering army with an intense hatred born from lies and deception. Most dragons had spent their flame on the initial attack, weakening the magical barrier. Now that it was destroyed they would rely on the other weapons the Earth Mother had given them.\n\nFang and claw, talon and tooth. The strength and power that were a dragon's natural gifts were no match for a human. Dragons were powerful creatures, augmented with strong limbs, tough scales, powerful jaws and dangerous tails. Even without their magic and their flame, not many enemies could hope to stand against a dragon and survive.\n\nThere were still small groups of human magic wielders, but now there was no longer any defences for them to hide behind. Dragons had free reign to skim above the human army, raking death and destruction through the surviving ranks of men.\n\nBlaze marvelled at the human spirit. These pitiful beings were facing extinction, they had been harried for months and their homes relentlessly attacked. Their plight was near to its end, but yet they never gave up, they stood and fought. Was it a praiseworthy attribute? A commendable action? Or was it just stupidity?\n\nIf today was any measure of the credibility in fighting to the death, then it mattered not to dragons and even less to Blaze. This was the beginning of the end for the humans of this land and, if they were stupid enough to face his army, then they deserved to be wiped out completely. His retribution for all the wrongs these horrible men had wrought on his kind, and their lands, was completely justified.\n\nHe was restoring the natural balance of his land and he needn't stop there. In time his strength would grow to span continents and the humans of this world would fear all dragons, as they once had before they learned their corrupt, unclean magic.\n\nEven though his whole body ached and he longed to draw on more power and energy of the globe, he would wait. If he relied on it too much, it almost felt as if it was in command of him rather then he of it.\n\nBlaze landed next to a small group of surviving soldiers, their tiny weapons no match for a dragon. Lunging forward he snapped the first man in half, blood spraying from crushing jaws. Nets and lances flew at his hide, pikes stabbed at his flanks as he waded into their midst.\n\nA sorcerer conjuring a spell, cowered behind his comrades. Blaze pivoted, whipping his tail into the group, the black scythe a deadly weapon, cleaving human flesh and bone as it tore through his enemies.\n\nHe stomped on the survivors, crushing and rending, claws tearing furrows in the blood soaked ground, a grim reaper sowing the soil with death.\n\nAll around him similar scenes of destruction were carried out by his host. The stench of charred human flesh mixed with the sulphurous smell of expelled dragon fire, filled his nostrils. The aroma of victory.\n\nThrough the billowing smoke and hungry flames, the bodies of the dead littered the ground, human and dragon alike. There were considerably more dead men than there were dragons. The loss of dragon life regrettable, yet acceptable and necessary. There had been a time when Blaze valued all dragon life. Witnessing the death of one of their own was a sad time for all dragons, but now, the more death he saw the easier it became.\n\nHe stood in the midst of the battle listening to the moans of the wounded and dying and contemplated when it was he had lost his compassion. He had tricked Galdor because he wouldn't do what was right and wouldn't fight back. Their former leader refused to confront the humans and acted weakly, choosing the easy way out and avoiding conflict. Galdor had no stomach for war. He was stronger than Galdor ever was. He understood the harsh realisation of war was unpleasant, but unavoidable if they wished to survive.\n\nBlaze shook his head to dispel his doubt, hardening himself to the atrocities of war and pushing away his nagging conscience. It wasn't the time to stand around thinking, now was the time to seize this opportunity and fight for what he desired. These humans deserved his justice and all the unpleasantries it brought. There could be no freedom from their scourge until they were vanquished.\n\nHis mind touched the globe and renewed his resolve, promising its power and secrets, helping him focus. He knew it held more secrets than it shared with him and he was hungry to learn them all. He must carry on his path and see his vision to its end, only then would he truly master the globe and control its power absolutely.\n\nA pitiful keening caught his attention and he knew it originated from one of his own. He sprang towards the sound, peering through the hazy smoke searching for its owner.\n\nHis sharp eyes picked out the crumpled form of a dragon through the smoke, its green scales marred with the black scars of magical attacks. A thick iron tipped spear punctured the green's wing, the projectile tangled and twisted awkwardly through the vital membrane. Dragon skin was tough and could withstand most things but the combination of cold iron, fused with human magic, had won through the unfortunate green's defences. The barbed point dug into the dragon's neck, pinning him helplessly as he flailed wildly, attempting to dislodge the spear and shake lose the thin wire netting the humans used to hold him in place.\n\nBlaze could feel the human magic from the net and spear and knew the little green was rendered helpless. Even if he hadn't been wounded, he would have struggled to escape the potent combination.\n\nSoldiers danced around the fallen dragon, rushing in and stabbing at the exposed flanks with long lances, the pain of each strike as they connected with his scales causing him to keen as the magic sapped at his strength.\n\nThe slow dance of death enraged Blaze, he was angry at the humans but angrier still at the green dragon who had allowed himself to be caught and humiliated. Lunging forward he sprang to the green's defence, appearing from the cover of the shrouding smoke, black and deadly.\n\nThe soldiers with their backs to him were unaware of the new threat as they focused on tackling the green dragon. The ones facing him retreated as his savage jaws tore into their comrades. Warm blood sprayed and severed limbs flew as Blaze tore into the attackers, talons ripped and jaws crushed, reducing bodies to shredded lumps of flesh. The black dragon was a terrifying sight, claws dripping with gore, his snout drenched in human blood.\n\n\"Help me,\" the green dragon whined, eyes rolling in pain.\n\nBlaze whipped his tail forwards and coiled the python-like appendage around the spear, winding it securely around the wooden haft. He clenched his jaws tightly as the human magic jolted where his tail made contact with the weapon. Even for a dragon with his strength, the foreign magic was strong, stronger than he anticipated. His breath hissed as he inhaled through clamped teeth, bracing himself against the shock and steeling himself against the burning pain. Placing his front leg over the green's damaged wing to steady himself, he smoothly pulled the shaft free, ripping the remainder of the wing to shreds. Membrane tore beyond any chance of repair.\n\nThe green dragon howled and slumped forward into the blood soaked ground. Blaze pulled the restraining net free and threw it aside. It sizzled where dragon blood touched its fine wires.\n\nHe realised his didn't know this green's name or even recognise who he was. He was neither a trouble maker nor someone who stood out.\n\n\"Thank you, Blaze,\" the green wheezed, \"you've saved me.\" It was plain that although Blaze had managed to save him from the humans, the green wasn't long for this world.\n\nBlaze bent his neck and brought his head down, level with the green's, staring into his pale yellow eyes. \"You have made the ultimate sacrifice for your leader and the colony,\" he crooned soothingly. He felt no pity for this feeble dragon, knowing he wouldn't be missed. He was just another casualty of war.\n\n\"You are broken and near death, yet you have one more important service to perform,\" he whispered. Confusion reflected in the dragon's eyes as Blaze leaned close and fed upon his life force, pulling his energy from the fading body. He no longer needed the globe's help as he slowly drew what remained of the green's spirit, savouring the all too brief moment and wishing there was more.\n\nA gentle boost of power fed his tired limbs, filling him with a second wind and rekindling the heart of his dragon fire. He wished there was more to take as the last signs of life dwindled from the sad yellow eyes staring back at him. It was a mercy, the dying dragon was closer to death than he knew, and his passing, and the small amount of life force he surrendered, would help Blaze win this war. The usual rush of euphoria followed and Blaze enjoyed the sensation. The body of the dead dragon lay at his talons, broken and maimed. His green scales dirty with the mud and blood of his final resting place.\n\nAnger replaced the short lived rush the green dragon's life force provided. A confusing mix of emotions, caused by his death, raged for control. Blaze wanted to blame the humans; if it wasn't for them, this wouldn't be happening. Could he have saved the green? Would he have lived? No! The globe reached out from the safety of the Lifting Plateau and drove the self-doubt from his mind.\n\nBlaze reared up and spread his wings wide, roaring in defiance. He was stronger than sentiment. He was a leader and he needed to act like one. The colony depended on his guidance to survive.\n\nHe leapt into the air, smoke billowing in his wake as his wings propelled him above the battlefield. All around, dragons fought the human army and were winning. His fallen were outnumbered by the living as they clawed and bit their way to victory. Some dragons still had some flame left to call on and Blaze could feel his own, once more burning deep within his chest, spurred on by the life force from the dead green.\n\nHe swooped low, picking out pockets of human resistance and used his dragon fire to sear them from existence. He felt superior to his kin as he sensed their surprise at his sustained flame. Only a dragon of unsurpassed power could hold and use the flame for such a prolonged period. They didn't know his secret, all they needed was this demonstration of strength. They would follow him now without question. The dragons of the Lifting Plateau had been victorious in battle. Blaze the Black had proved himself as their rightful leader. Forged now in battle, his suspicions about the plotting humans witnessed by all, they were his to command.\n\nNow he could take the fight to the human cities and put an end to the threat once and for all. Now it would be easy to convince his host the human race must not be allowed to continue. Their defeat here guaranteed the majority of their fighters were already taken care of.\n\nBlaze surveyed the battlefield, allowing his presence to spur on his fighters, the taste of human blood unleashing their inner hatred. Today was a valuable lesson\u2014the discovery of the true nature of every living, breathing dragon.\n\nHe wished Galdor were here to see what a colony of dragons, united under one vision, could accomplish."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fang and Flame",
                "text": "[ New Skies ]\n\nSunburst flew across the blue sky of Galdor's world and Nightstar followed. The sorcerer, Alduce, submerged within the black dragon's mind, still marvelled at the fearsome beauty of the magnificent yellow dragon who was his constant companion.\n\nSunlight shone off Sunburst's yellow scales, reminding Nightstar of his words the first time they met. His friend still burned across the sky like a celestial fire, although one of the scales upon his chest did not reflect the sun like the others. That scale was a little less vibrant and had once been coloured black. The scale donated from his own body\u2014a living part of the black dragon\u2014in a desperate attempt to save Sunburst's life.\n\nIt worked in a way that Nightstar still didn't completely understand, sealing in his own blood and magically repairing the fatal damage wrought by the Extractor. It didn't matter to Nightstar how it worked. It just did and that was enough. Alduce, however, dedicated far too much time contemplating why.\n\nHe was a scholar and couldn't just accept it for what it was. He wasn't as bad as he had once been. Some of what he called Nightstar's dragon logic had rubbed off on him. It irritated the scholar and he said it went against his nature. Deep down in his subconscious, Nightstar could almost feel it himself. He was aware of the niggling thirst for answers, but that was all the Alduce part of their unusual bond. He was aware of it and accepted this too. It was what it was.\n\nHe had saved Sunburst's life, helped heal the dying yellow dragon and brought him back from the brink of death. It was magic, probably more dragon than human, and it accomplished more than intended. It also succeeded in repairing what was broken between them, forging their friendship anew\u2014bound in more than just blood and scales. The bond created that day resulted in the most unconventional connection between the yellow and black dragon, tying them together and impossibly mixing the blood of both human and dragon.\n\nNightstar would not exist if it hadn't been for the blood Sunburst had grudgingly given to save his life, when once he had hated his human side. Alduce the sorcerer would most likely have gone mad, unable to withstand the transformation from human to dragon. Two warring minds fighting for control of a dragon made flesh by alchemy, sorcery, and scientific experimentation. The sorcerer believed the accidental catalyst of Sunburst's blood helped his transition, stabilising his sanity and allowing two sentient minds to inhabit the bodies of both his human and dragon form.\n\nThe sorcerer within the dragon thrived on facts and logic. His experiment to transform from man to dragon was his greatest success and he understood the physical transition and how his metamorphosis worked. What was still a mystery to him was the mind that had been born from the life force, the sentient spirit, of the unhatched dragon foetus. How it merged with the flesh and allowed two living entities to share one physical form, was a bigger mystery to him than he cared to admit. This was something he had accepted and followed Nightstar's lead, accepting it for what it was, grateful for the gift it gave him.\n\nNightstar had moved forward, taking Alduce with him, putting the how's and why's of exactly how it all worked behind them both. It was complex enough and wasn't worth dwelling on, he was a dragon, Alduce was a human, it was easier to accept than explain. They lived and shared, individuals and the same, each present within the other, but somehow separate too.\n\nThe sorcerer inside him still pondered how it all was possible. He was Alduce the scholar and Nightstar understood his human need. Being a dragon and an individual spirit in his own right, afforded him the luxury of dragon logic. It is what it is.\n\nHe glanced at his own chest, a star of silver gleamed upon the black scales and if he looked carefully, one of those scales wasn't as dark as the rest. Losing himself to the moment and the memory, a physical reminder of who he was. The mark upon his man's body was even more obvious in human form. A small yellowish part of his lower chest in the shape of a dragon's scale, slightly raised and more than a bit tougher than rest of his human skin.\n\nWhen he faced forward again, Sunburst wasn't directly in front of him anymore. The yellow dragon's habit of changing course mid-flight, no doubt distracted by something on the ground if his spiralling descent was any indication, was part of what made him who he was. It was in the yellow's impulsive nature and so much the opposite of who Nightstar was, but he understood his friend entirely.\n\nTipping his neck forward, he plummeted after his companion, building speed until he was moving faster. As he streaked past the casually gliding Sunburst, he turned sideways and opened his wings wide, throwing out a buffeting wave of air that blasted the unsuspecting yellow. Sunburst flapped frantically, pushed from his path by the turbulence. Righting himself, he set his wings to his sides, diving after the speeding black dragon. Nightstar could feel the difference in the air as the yellow dragon tucked himself behind, slipstreaming in his wake. The yellow might not be as fast a flier, but he made up for any shortcomings with his smaller size and airborne agility.\n\nQuick to react to Nightstar's playful challenge of racing to land, Sunburst managed to latch on to his speedier descent. He tucked himself neatly behind and below his tail, using his substantial bulk to break the air in front. He used Nightstar as a shield, punching through the air and allowing himself to keep up. Nightstar twisted and turned and Sunburst mimicked his aerial prowess, sticking with him, unshakeable. He was competitive, but no match for the mighty Nightstar when it came to this type of flying.\n\nHe could feel the yellow dragon accelerating out from underneath him, the air moving differently across his scales, each one sensitive to the change in air flow, alerting him to Sunburst's position. He wasn't going to let his friend beat him to the ground, he would never hear the end of it should Sunburst win. He would not let him forget and constantly...\n\nThump!\n\nNightstar spiralled as Sunburst bumped his hard bony head into the softer scales where his tail joined his body. The yellow roared in pleasure as he shot away from Nightstar's wavering body as he tried to regain his downward momentum. Celestial fire his tail! Sunburst streaked ahead, a yellow comet burning towards the fast approaching ground. Nightstar used the only manoeuvre left to him, sensing the race was almost over and second place wasn't an option. Pushing himself downward with all the power he could muster, huge black wings sent him into a plunging snoutdive. Air rushed over him, sleek black scales drawing on dragon magic and charging the flow, forcing it to move faster than natural across his body.\n\nSunburst was close to landing, but Nightstar had one last advantage over the yellow, he was faster than him when it came to stopping. Waiting until the last possible second Nightstar drew alongside Sunburst as the shocked yellow spread open his wings for landing. He pushed out his own wings, sending strengthening magic through membrane and bone, forcing them wide like huge sails. A thunderous crack boomed out as they caught the air, deafening them both.\n\nDust blasted up from the ground obscuring whose claws hit the earth first as the two dragons touched down.\n\nSunburst folded his wings, turning to peer through the settling dust cloud at Nightstar.\n\n\"Ah, there you are. What took you?\" He cocked his yellow head to the side, raising the bony plates above his eyes in a comical parody of questioning human eyebrows.\n\n\"While you were looking behind, you failed to see my claws touching the ground before yours,\" Nightstar replied.\n\n\"I think not, my dust was drifting upwards to meet you, when you were still opening your wings! Surely you were tasting it from way back there.\"\n\n\"Ha! Sunburst, admit defeat when you are bested, we both know you were second, even after banging your hard head into me mid-flight. A somewhat desperate and failed attempt to slow my descent and be first.\" Nightstar wore a deadly grin, exposing his teeth, a trait of his human side that he didn't feel the need to disguise in front of his friend. Another dragon might have found one of their own mimicking human facial expressions strange, but Sunburst knew better.\n\n\"I will concede to the grinning fool beside me, this once. You've said it yourself, I am generous to a fault and yellows are known for their magnanimous disposition.\"\n\n\"And for their cheating and modesty,\" Nightstar grumbled under his breath. Sunburst, if he heard, chose to ignore it, faultlessly displaying his altruism to prove the point, Nightstar suspected. \"Why did you decide to land? Did you see something of interest?\"\n\n\"More a feeling. We've been flying over these lands now for two days and we haven't seen another dragon. Are you sure Alduce opened a gateway to Galdor's world? Is it possible we're visiting a world where no dragons exist?\"\n\nNightstar touched the sorcerer's mind and knew Alduce hadn't made a mistake. \"We are flying in Galdor's skies. We have come to the correct place. You are right though, my perception is alerting me to something too.\"\n\nNightstar had learned to trust his dragon sense, an ability that was known to all others dragons as perception. Alduce recorded this phenomenon in his Atlas of Dragons, his human explanation was as accurate as any, naming it a sixth sense, naturally inherent in all dragons. It wasn't like the other senses, more of an intuition, an inexplicable awareness of the unknown, uncannily accurate and never to be dismissed. It was stronger in some than in others and Sunburst's perception was keener than most.\n\nThe levels of how effective this was ranged from extremely perceptive to having a hunch or gut feeling. Regardless of the scale, perception, when it buzzed like an annoying insect, was definitely worth paying attention to. The human part of Alduce dealt in facts and the lack of scientific evidence was difficult for the man within the dragon's mind.\n\n\"I can feel my perception too. It is still difficult for me, as Nightstar, to fully embrace it. A result of my human side I expect,\" he admitted. \"Although it is getting easier.\"\n\n\"Come Nightstar, we have discussed this. You are a dragon, nothing less. You have proved this to me many times over. Yes, there's a difference as to how you came to be, but you are a dragon, nothing less. Let Nightstar guide you when you wear the scales and let Alduce remain a passenger. You know I respect the sorcerer, I know his soul after all and we share more than a passing acquaintance.\" He snorted, making light of his comment. Nightstar knew it was a topic Sunburst took seriously. The sharing of knowledge and blood between Alduce and the yellow dragon had been an ordeal they both endured.\n\n\"If we both feel there is a strangeness to this land,\" Sunburst continued, \"we should take heed and listen to our instincts.\"\n\n\"Wise words, as ever, my friend. It is difficult not being the scholar all the time. In matters of skin and scales, I am your willing pupil.\" Sunburst was many things but when it came to living and learning about the way of the dragon, there was no better mentor, no better guide and certainly no truer a friend.\n\nMany of the yellow dragon's peers, the dragons of the White Mountains, didn't show him the respect Nightstar believed he deserved. He saw a different side to the yellow dragon, a side he liked to keep hidden from all but Nightstar. Sunburst played the fool well and if this was how other dragons saw him, then it was them who were foolish.\n\nAfter his hero's return, rescuing the dragons of the eastern continent from captivity and certain death, Sunburst's social standing improved. The dragons of the White Mountains never found out all the secrets of their adventures and the events were shrouded in mystery, which was just as well. Sunburst's telling of the tale changed a little with each rendition, deliberately disguising the facts and exaggerating the story. Even Winterfang, the moot leader didn't know everything. The sharp-witted frost drake wasn't fooled, but he chose to let their version of the facts stand, believing it best for the colony.\n\nWinterfang admitted to Nightstar he knew only too well how smart Sunburst was, urging the black to listen when his friend spoke. It wasn't all incessant chatter as others believed and the yellow dragon's wisdom was valued by the moot leader.\n\nNightstar valued his friend's wisdom too, not only had the yellow saved his own life, but he knew the black dragon's deepest secret, guarding it as only a friend would. And he accepted him for what he was. A black dragon and human sorcerer.\n\nTheir journey had been a complicated one, filled with many obstacles. Nightstar was continually thankful they had been able to rise above their difficulties and overcome the hatred and prejudice between human and dragon. Yet another reason he appreciated the wisdom of his yellow companion and all the more reason to listen now when he sensed something was amiss.\n\n\"You are right,\" he told Sunburst, \"something isn't quite right here. This is Galdor's world, of that we are both positive.\" Sunburst nodded and Nightstar knew he understood the we he referred to was both his dragon self and Alduce the sorcerer. Separate entities, yet one as well. \"Do you think the dragons of these skies live differently from your own? Is that perhaps what we are both sensing?\"\n\n\"I don't believe it is,\" Sunburst answered. \"It is something else, something... unusual. Yes, the dragons here will be different, but they will still be dragons.\" It was the simple dragon logic Sunburst found so easy to accept. \"They will follow their own ways and customs but we are all descended from the Earth Mother.\" He blew a little snort of flame from his nostrils. He always did this when he mentioned what Alduce saw as the dragon deity. Then he looked sideways at Nightstar, \"Well, most of us are. What I mean is the dragons here, as with any place we inhabited, will follow the cycle. We will be plentiful and we will prosper, masters of the lands for millennia. As the human population expands, as they learn and develop intelligence, discover magic, then the balance always changes. Our kind will dwindle and humans will advance. It takes a long time, but it is the way of things. On all worlds.\"\n\n\"But how can you know that?\" Nightstar said. \"How can you be sure?\"\n\n\"When night comes and darkness covers the land, we know the sun will return, bringing with it new light. We know this to be true and accept it. It is the same. I just know it. Call it instinct, perception, or even your so called dragon spirit. It is the same with dragons and humans. Eventually dragons die out, become creatures of myth, just as it is on your home world. I believe that once our dragon magic no longer thrives, human magic declines and eventually becomes myth too.\"\n\n\"Insightful,\" Nightstar mused, \"almost scholarly.\" The Alduce part of his mind made a mental note to quiz Sunburst more about this when they returned home. The yellow dragon was not in the habit of speaking about the Earth Mother and often changed the subject when he was questioned.\n\n\"Call it what you will, it is a knowledge dragons are born with. I can't pretend to know what has exactly happened here in Galdor's world, but I would have expected to have encountered at least one single dragon by now.\" Sunburst observed. \"These skies are sadly lacking any life and there are no signs of habitation, dragon or otherwise.\"\n\n\"Many decades have passed since I encountered Galdor and helped him return home. It wasn't that long ago in terms of a dragon's lifespan, though. I know he was concerned about Blaze and what havoc the black dragon may have wrought in his absence. I fear whatever it was, it wasn't good.\"\n\n\"Now that,\" Sunburst hissed, \"is a dragon that sounds like he would be nothing but trouble.\"\n\nWhen Nightstar first shared Galdor's story with Sunburst, his friend developed an instant dislike to Blaze and everything he had done. He didn't blame him as he felt exactly the same. What really grated on his own nerves was that he and Blaze shared the same colour. Both black and both so very different. He worked hard to gain the reputation he'd earned with the other dragons he'd met. Being the same colour as Blaze and knowing his evil reputation, Nightstar was sensitive to the fact that all black dragons would be seen as evil, especially on this world. He would set the record straight on that score and prove to Galdor that dragons shouldn't be judged by their colour alone.\n\n\"Our first priority should be to find Galdor, while exercising discretion,\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"While I don't like skulking, I think you are right. You know Galdor better than I. Where do you think he would be?\"\n\n\"It was a long time ago and he never told me much about his world. He spoke of a place known as the Lifting Plateau. A plateau is an elevated flatland...\"\n\n\"I know what a plateau is, scholar! We yellows aren't inherently stupid.\"\n\n\"You just act it then?\" Nightstar said, still bearing his teeth in his dragon styled grin. \"I'm thinking out loud. Elevated land needs to have height. Higher ground tends to be hilly or mountainous.\"\n\nBoth dragons turned their heads towards the north where the distant grey haze of mountains met the horizon.\n\n\"North is a good direction,\" Sunburst said, \"and I prefer north to east.\" He left the rest unsaid and Nightstar understood.\n\n\"Not as warm as the south and more likely to be where we will find dragons. Alduce's studies indicate that humans are more prone to the southlands. North it is.\" It was sometimes beneficial to draw on the experience of the scholar. Nightstar also needed to remember to let the dragon make the decisions, trusting in himself and relying on his instinct. The sorcerer had learned to accept the dragon's behaviour. When in dragon form, Nightstar was in charge and any actions taken by dragons were best made by dragons\u2014and by the man, for humans.\n\n\"We should use the land as cover,\" Sunburst suggested. \"While I don't think it dragonly, we should be cautious.\"\n\nSunburst still surprised him. Dragonly? Had the yellow made that word up just to emphasise his point? Alduce could use humanly, so there was no reason why Sunburst couldn't use dragonly. It worked if you were a dragon. And cautious? Nightstar wasn't sure Sunburst even knew what being cautious entailed. The yellow dragon was prone to rushing in, headlong\u2014maybe necklong in his case\u2014throwing caution to the wind. If he was acting cautiously, then it was with good reason.\n\n\"Agreed,\" Nightstar said. Then after a pause asked, \"Sunburst?\" The yellow turned to face his friend, detecting something in the way Nightstar spoke his name like a question. \"Do you think spending time with us, or rather Alduce, in human form, is influencing your decisions?\"\n\n\"What? No, of course not, although... \" He tilted his head and drew his gums back, exposing his teeth in a hideous attempt at a human smile. \"...I do have some of your tainted blood coursing through my veins.\"\n\n\"Tainted? That blood saved your life!\"\n\nSunburst couldn't hold his strange dragon smile any longer and let it go, snorting loudly, nostrils puffing out curling wisps of smoke. His version of laughing.\n\n\"Remind me to update the atlas when we get back. I need to add another annoying trait I've discovered in yellows.\" Nightstar took on a scholarly tone, as if narrating from a book. \"While the yellow dragon is generous to a fault, their magnanimous disposition is marred by an underlying tendency towards ingratitude and unnecessary cruelty.\"\n\n\"And another thing human scholars should be aware of,\" Sunburst mimicked Nightstar's tone, \"is the yellow dragon's superior intellect and clever humour, never to be bested by the minds of inferior beings.\"\n\n\"North?\" Nightstar asked, ignoring Sunburst's impression.\n\n\"North,\" Sunburst replied as he leapt into the air, \"and see if you can keep up this time!\" He twisted his head back attempting his human grin again.\n\nNightstar rolled his eyes, a typically human reaction the black dragon managed to carry off better than his yellow counterpart. Maybe it was due to the fact his human half rested inside. Or perhaps he was better at manipulating facial expression as he knew what it was like to have a human face.\n\nAlduce made a mental note to record this when he returned to his human form. Nightstar beat his wings, taking off after Sunburst, recalling the shared memory of Alduce's former master, Caltus. Always a scholar first, the old man was fond of reminding him.\n\nHe would leave human studies to Alduce, for now, Nightstar was more concerned with dragonly matters: finding Galdor."
            },
            {
                "title": "Topaz",
                "text": "The northern mountains filled the distant horizon, bleak grey peaks shrouded beneath misty clouds. Sunburst's bright yellow scales stood out in stark contrast against the ominous backdrop. Nightstar scanned the ground below, looking for signs of dragon habitation.\n\nThey had discovered the location of the Lifting Plateau two days earlier, its impressive size and height obvious, even from a far distance. As Sunburst advised, caution was the smart option. Both his own and Sunburst's perception gave warning that all was not as expected with the dragons there. Nightstar couldn't decide exactly what was wrong, but something was most definitely amiss. The whole area felt peculiar and there was a sense of dark foreboding and corruption surrounding the plateau, tainting the natural beauty of the place. He couldn't quite place what it was, but he was learning to trust his dragon sense, even though he didn't fully understand it.\n\nSunburst's advice on perception was a little hazy and Nightstar was sure his explanation on how it actually worked was a mystery to him too and he just didn't want to admit it. The dragon part of his being tried hard to embrace it and accept it for what it was, while his human side always strived to find a deeper meaning, looking for hidden answers. Answer, quite frankly, Nightstar didn't really care for. A dragon must act as dragons do, so he followed Sunburst's example and trusted to his anomalous sixth sense.\n\nThey observed the comings and goings from the plateau from a distance, taking care to remain unseen. While they remained safely hidden and avoided any direct contact, they learned little.\n\nOne thing was clear, the creatures that lived there were not dragons in the usual sense. Their coming and goings reminded Nightstar more of a bee hive than a dragon colony. Sunburst didn't like it one bit and was adamant they shouldn't approach. He urged they scout the surrounding lands looking for clues, or perhaps a single dragon they could question without the risk of exposing themselves to the unknown.\n\nIf Sunburst wasn't keen to stick his snout into another dragon's business\u2014a trait most yellows were guilty of\u2014Nightstar would trust his friend's instincts. He knew deep down Sunburst was right as he felt it too.\n\nAfter two full days and many hours flight, keeping low and doing their best to remain out of sight, they arrived at the foothills to the sprawling mountain range. With a good distance between themselves and the Lifting Plateau, things felt more natural here. He understood Galdor's passion for his home world as it was a place of unsurpassed beauty.\n\nSunburst flicked his tail, attracting his attention and used the flat arrowed end to point like a human finger towards the ground underwing. Nightstar was quick enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of a large blue shape, unmistakably a dragon, flitting through the tree covered hillside. The blue scales were easy to spot against the earthy browns and greens.\n\nNightstar tipped his head to Sunburst acknowledging he saw the dragon too and followed him down as he dropped into a spiralling descent. There was no race this time and he was happy to follow, keeping close to Sunburst's tail and matching his speed.\n\nThe blue dragon continued on its path, apparently unaware of the strangers above. Sunburst took his time and set a course to intercept the blue, deliberately angling his path to come alongside the dragon and avoid any sudden appearance.\n\nDragons don't frighten or startle easily\u2014at least not that they'd admit too\u2014and it would be better if two strange dragons didn't suddenly appear and their behaviour be mistaken as threatening or confrontational.\n\nNightstar recalled his first encounter with Sunburst and the surprise he experienced. His situation was completely different and it was his first time encountering another dragon. Sunburst had been observing him before he noticed he had company and although he would never admit it to his friend, he almost jumped right out of his scales. The yellow hadn't been aware of his secret then, and the sorcerer within the black armour hadn't known how to react. He was excited, terrified, surprised and amazed, and was astonished he was able to find the words and speak to a real dragon.\n\nThe blue eventually caught sight of its escort and Sunburst nodded a friendly greeting. The blue nodded back and turned its head to see Nightstar following. The change in its attitude immediate, panic obvious, its dark green eyes widening before it doubled its efforts to try and outfly them.\n\n\"Wait!\" Sunburst yelled across the sky. \"We only want to speak with you.\"\n\nThe startled blue pounded its wings, wild and frantic as it stretched out a long serpentine neck in a desperate attempt to pull away. Sunburst paced the blue dragon, keeping up with it without hampering its flight. His behaviour wasn't aggressive and before too long, the blue realised it couldn't shake off the better flier. Sunburst was excellent at dodging and weaving and was able to keep up\u2014and best any dragon\u2014over a twisty, obstacle filled, terrain.\n\n\"We just want to talk,\" he shouted. \"We're looking for Galdor. Galdor the Green.\"\n\nAt the mention of Galdor's name, the blue slowed. \"You are with a black! Do you side with Blaze? Are you under his compulsion?\" The blue twisted its head back, still fearful of Nightstar and only a little less wary of Sunburst. \"You speak like you possess your own free will and are no slave of the black that accompanies you. Land and we will talk, but the black must keep his distance. Know I will fight you to the death rather than succumb to slavery!\" Without further discussion, the blue dragon dropped towards the ground and landed neatly at the edge of the thicket, positioning itself behind the outer trees, using them as protection against the two unknown dragons.\n\n\"Land in the open. You may approach, but the black cannot. If you try and attack me, trick or possess me, you will taste my fire! I'll disappear into the trees and burn everything behind me, you included.\" A low growling emanated from the blue's stomach as it prepared to call forth its flame.\n\nNightstar landed in the open, keeping his distance. He folded his wings, making a show of settling, in an attempt to put the agitated blue at ease, his demeanour as relaxed as he could make it. He didn't look like he was ready to give chase and hoped he didn't appear threatening. He was larger than the blue and it was a difficult task, as dragons were, by all outwardly appearances, fearsome looking creatures.\n\n\"This calls for a touch of yellow charm,\" Sunburst said landing bedside him. \"She's clearly not enamoured by your colour.\" He could always rely on the witty yellow stating the obvious, finding humour at his expense.\n\nShe. Nightstar realised that Sunburst was right, the blue dragon was a female. It still took him longer than a natural born to identify a dragon's gender, although it was becoming easier. He wasn't close enough to distinguish. Alduce surmised the longer he spent in dragon form, the quicker his natural abilities would develop. It was Nightstar's hope, that one day, he would react on instinct, without the human part of his thoughts getting in the way. \"I will stay back, as she bids. Try not to agitate her any more than you usually do, please. She's one step from flaming. See what information you can find out.\"\n\n\"My words are as radiant as my yellow scales! Remember?\" The yellow dragon quoted Nightstar's own words back to him, ignoring his quip. They were the words he'd spoken to the yellow dragon on the day they first met. Sunburst was right, he was a gifted speaker and words rolled from his golden tongue. While dragons were immune to their own beguiling speech\u2014unlike most humans\u2014Sunburst was endowed with what Caltus liked to call the gift of the gab. His old master said it was easier to call it that rather than saying the long winded version he sometimes like to employ; some people have a natural oratory persuasiveness, empowering them to convince the listener in favour of their point of view. Caltus liked to simplify things and on this, Nightstar agreed. And it wasn't just people who possessed this gift, yellow dragons\u2014Sunburst in particular\u2014had a certain way with words.\n\nAlthough Nightstar only knew Caltus through the memories of Alduce, he believed his old mentor would have enjoyed debating and arguing his point with Sunburst. The two were more alike than he would choose to admit, he certainly wouldn't be telling Sunburst he resembled the human; at least, not anytime soon.\n\nThe yellow dragon made his way across the gap toward the blue female, taking his time. She had gained a little of her composure and stood out from the trees now, awaiting his approach.\n\n\"That's close enough,\" she said, the rumble of fire evident in her voice. \"Tell me what you know of Galdor?\"\n\n\"I am known as Sunburst the Yellow, my scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I burn across the sky like a celestial fire,\" he introduced himself. \"I have heard the story of how a human helped Galdor escape imprisonment and freed him from the caves that held him captive for over one hundred years.\"\n\nThe blue dragon cocked her head, saying nothing, her green eyes staring at Sunburst, but continually flicking towards Nightstar, making sure she knew exactly where he was. Sunburst filled the silence with his usual mellifluousness. \"The teller of the tale, my friend, spoke highly of Galdor and we have travelled farther than you can know to seek council with him.\"\n\n\"You know of Galdor's plight. It is a secret not all dragons are aware of. How have you come by this knowledge?\"\n\n\"My friend, Nightstar the Black, is a very close... friend of Alduce the sorcerer. A human of some renown and a great friend to dragons. The man who saved Galdor and gave him back his freedom.\" The expression on the blue's face was as close to puzzlement as a dragon could get. \"My black companion is a dragon of outstanding loyalty and has risked his life and saved my hide, and that of his kin, many times over. I am curious as to why his presence troubles you.\"\n\n\"He is black! Like the father of lies. Black of scales, black of heart.\" Little sparks of flame ignited on her saliva as she spat out her reply. \"He wears the mark of Blaze upon his chest. Do not seek to beguile me with your liars tongue, it won't work! I am strong of will and won't be tricked.\"\n\n\"I assure you it is his own mark. The Night Star. It is a symbol of light, illuminating the darkness, silvery and bright. He is neither companion nor supporter of Blaze. His scales may be black but his heart is as golden as my scales. If you knew of his deeds, the great suffering he has endured, the sacrifices he has made, you would not judge him by the colour of his scales. You do him grave injustice. I am proud to call him brother.\" Nightstar was touched by the passion in Sunburst's words.\n\n\"Words, Sunburst the Yellow, can be bent by any fool for their own purpose. I have heard it from the very mouth of Blaze himself. His corruption of lies, his reign of terror, and his destruction of our ways\u2014it all began with clever words.\" She stole another glance at Nightstar. \"Why should this black be any different from the others? Why should I listen to your defence of them? Perhaps you are under their spell, compelled to trap me and turn me into one of the enemy.\"\n\n\"I know not of what you speak. We are from far distant lands and are unfamiliar with what has transpired here. Would you agree to a parley? I believe that once you speak with my friend, you will realise I speak the truth.\"\n\n\"What could a mindless drone say that would convince me otherwise?\" Her voice was filled with venom.\n\n\"The mindless drone can hear what you say,\" Nightstar called from where he waited. \"I assure you I am nothing like Blaze and I'm disappointed you see me that way.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" Sunburst said. \"He is definitely not like any other dragon you've met before, I assure you. He isn't without his faults though. Questions everything. Always looking for answers to why\u2014\"\n\n\"Sunburst! You're not helping,\" Nightstar stated. His ability to stick to the topic and not get distracted could often be annoying and Nightstar understood why others dismissed him so readily. The blue, however noted the exchange and thanks to Sunburst's comment, visibly relaxed.\n\nSunburst turned and winked one eye at Nightstar; the blue never saw the exchange. He realised his friend was using his own eccentric ways to put the nervous blue dragon at ease. Thoughts from Alduce surfaced, tinged with a wry humour, never underestimate a yellow dragon. Especially this one! His human counterpart knew Sunburst's personality well, as the yellow spent a lot of his time interacting with the man. He shouldn't be so surprised and was pleased his friend had overcome his inborn prejudices\u2014just as they both had. After all they'd been through, their respect for one another had grown, despite what they both were; man and dragon.\n\n\"Nightstar and I are not your enemies and I can assure you that we aren't under any compulsion. We have travelled here from another world and are strangers. We know this is Galdor's home world and he returned here after he was freed from his prison. What we don't know is what has befallen him or this land. Perhaps it is something you will share with us?\" Sunburst asked. \"We would gladly offer you our help and hear your tale. We passed the Lifting Plateau and could feel... a strangeness there. We avoided any contact with its inhabitants, our perception warned us something was amiss. Do you truly believe we are lying? Does your perception not tell you otherwise?\"\n\nThe blue listened to Sunburst as he smoothly guided her to a conclusion she couldn't ignore: perception. A dragon's sixth sense was seldom wrong.\n\n\"We have shared our names with you, sister blue. We would like to call you friend, but do not know your name. Would you at least do us the courtesy of telling us who we speak with? You are the first dragon of this world we have encountered. Well, the first we've felt comfortable approaching.\"\n\nThe blue rose up on hind legs and extended her neck. \"I am named Topaz the Peaceful. My blue is of winter's cold ice, pure as crystal. I once made my home on the Lifting Plateau, sadly not anymore.\"\n\n\"You are well named, friend Topaz. You are indeed a shade of ice blue I have never encountered before, and I've seen my share of cold winters. Peaceful, you say? I can see it in your demeanour.\"\n\nThe sarcasm wasn't lost on Nightstar and he wondered again if Sunburst wasn't spending far too much time with Alduce.\n\n\"I've often been told that,\" Topaz responded in kind. \"Avert!\" She turned her head and vented the fire she held in her gullet. Nightstar knew brewing dragon fire was an uncomfortable experience, especially when you held on to it. Even the severest human indigestion couldn't compare to the searing sensation of roiling flames, burning from within.\n\nTopaz releasing her fire was a promising start to her believing they told the truth. \"I have questions that need honest answers, Sunburst the Yellow. If we are to share information, I must be sure I can trust you. Both of you.\" She stared across the gap towards Nightstar. She may have released her hold on her fiery defence, but her manner was still guarded.\n\n\"Questions. Ha! You'll get along fine with Nightstar. As I was saying, he questions everything. He's known for his irritating curiosity. I have to constantly keep him right, explaining the finer\u2014\"\n\n\"If you truly know of Galdor's rescue,\" Topaz interrupted, \"you will know what it was the human who helped him was searching for?\"\n\n\"Mushrooms,\" Nightstar called out. \"Alduce was searching for the black mushrooms that are native to the caves. The apprentice sorcerer was on an errand for his master and the last thing he expected to find was a huge green dragon. They didn't get along at first, and Galdor even threatened to eat him. The brave human helped the imprisoned dragon and even though he feared for his life, they both managed to put aside their differences and work together, which resulted in Galdor's release. I hope we can follow Galdor's example and put aside our differences, Topaz the Peaceful.\"\n\n\"How do you know this? No black dragon of Blaze's army would have this information!\"\n\n\"As Sunburst explained, we are new to this land. I am no emissary of Blaze, in fact, I'm a good friend of Alduce. He has rescued more dragons than just Galdor the Green.\"\n\n\"It is true,\" Sunburst agreed, \"he played a vital part in rescuing the dragons of Eusavus on my home world of Salverta. Nightstar did too.\"\n\n\"Blaze would have his colony believe that all humans are the enemy. Galdor has a different view of men. Even before he was tricked by Blaze, he was tolerant of their ways, leaving them be. Upon his return, those of us who survived the Black Cataclysm, welcomed our rightful leader home. Your black friend doesn't appear to be one of Blaze's drones and speaks with his own voice, but you are both strangers here,\" Topaz said. \"We independent dragons no longer have a home, hiding out here in the wilds, avoiding Blaze's patrols. He hunts us down, stealing our minds, transforming us into something far bleaker than death.\"\n\nNightstar could detect the sadness in her words. Dragons were a long lived species and the finality of death was something that brought them great sadness. If Topaz believed the dragons who followed Blaze had been transformed into mindless drones, and this was worse than death, he wasn't surprised at her sorrow.\n\n\"We are sorry to hear of your plight, Topaz. A conflict between the dragons of your world saddens my heart. Please tell me if Galdor is alive. I need to know.\"\n\n\"I have said too much already. For our small colony to endure, we rely on avoiding the evils of Blaze and his followers. Strangers ignorant of our troubles, be you well intentioned or not, are a risk to our survival.\"\n\n\"We mean you no harm,\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"We would help you,\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"I do not think you can,\" Topaz said. \"We endure, we hide, and we live in secret, fearful of discovery and the terrible fate that it brings. We are beyond any help you can offer.\"\n\n\"Are you truly of Galdor's colony? You don't sound like it!\" Sunburst said. \"I've heard the tale of the green dragon trapped in a cave. When Galdor was at his lowest, even when he believed his life was over and he had all but given up hope, Alduce came along and changed everything. How can you give up hope? There must be something we can do? Take us to Galdor\u2014if you even know where he is\u2014let us speak with him. Let the green dragon speak for himself.\"\n\nTopaz glowered at Sunburst and her tongue danced like a viper as she hissed her displeasure. \"Do not presume to know what we have been through. Our brothers and sisters were taken by a black plague that twisted their minds and stained their hearts. A vile torture, the cruellest of torments no dragon should suffer.\"\n\n\"I have seen my share of evil too, Topaz. I have faced death and known the blackest despair. I have journeyed to the beyond and been brought back to life. I have watched friends die before my eyes and been powerless to do anything. Trust me when I say I know your pain.\" He looked back towards Nightstar, the passion of his words shone in his wet eyes. \"Let us help you.\"\n\nNightstar nodded his agreement to the blue female, \"At the very least, let us try,\" he said.\n\nTopaz shook her head. \"It isn't my decision. I must consult with the others. If you really want to help, I will carry your message to Galdor and let him decide. Be warned, he will not tolerate any deception. He is skilled in detecting lies and sniffing out untruths.\"\n\nSunburst shared a look with Nightstar that said more than words could; Galdor was alive.\n\n\"I know a little about his ability to sniff out a lie,\" Nightstar said. Topaz fixed her stare on him, her piercing gaze demanding an answer. \"Alduce told me,\" he added. \"He said Galdor knew when truth or lies were spoken, said he was famed for his ability to do so. Allow us the chance to meet with him and his perception will show him we speak the truth.\"\n\nSunburst raised one bony ridge above his eye, similar to a quizzical human eyebrow. It was a human expression the dragon had adopted. Nightstar could feel Alduce's amazement at the yellow dragon's actions, impersonating the sorcerer's questioning look perfectly. The black dragon was positive the time Sunburst spent with Alduce was resulting in him adopting some of the sorcerer's behaviours. He wasn't sure whether to be amused or distressed.\n\n\"Very well,\" Topaz said, missing Sunburst's human gesticulation. \"Wait here. Stay out of sight and don't get into any trouble while I'm gone.\" She glowered once more at Sunburst as if emphasising it for him alone.\n\nShe emerged from the safety of the distant treeline pacing around Nightstar and keeping her distance, her dark green eyes examining him with an uncomfortable intensity. The black dragon stood still and endured the scrutiny.\n\n\"There is something different about you Nightstar the Black, it is clear to me now. Understand, black dragons are the cause of our misery. I meant no offence earlier. I wish to survive and did not want to be consumed by the cursed plague Blaze has brought to my kin.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Topaz. I would be cautious too, after what you have told us. Your words are gratefully appreciated.\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" she grumbled, leaping into the air and stirring up the dust.\n\nSunburst came and stood beside him and they watched the blue female as she took to the air, keeping low as she flew over the forest. Her bright blue not unlike the colour of the sky. Nightstar wondered if it helped her remain undetected, lending her a natural camouflage when in flight.\n\n\"Topaz the peaceful? I wouldn't want to meet Topaz the Antagonistic,\" the yellow said. \"I can see what she meant about being like the colour of winter's cold ice.\" He gave an involuntary shiver. \"That didn't go too badly. Although I don't think she likes you much.\"\n\nNightstar didn't respond, unsure of what too badly might entail here on this world. He watched as Topaz grew distant, difficult to see against the backdrop of the sky as she grew smaller.\n\n\"Let's have a poke around while she's away,\" Sunburst suggested. \"Oh, and Nightstar?\" The black dragon pulled his gaze from the vanishing blue and looked to the yellow dragon at his side.\n\nAttempting another hideous parody of a human grin, Sunburst continued, \"I think you should do as she says and try not to get into any trouble!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Leviathan's Gullet",
                "text": "\"She's back!\" Sunburst called out, \"Topaz the Peaceful. Let's hope she's in a better mood.\" Nightstar scanned the sky, looking in the directing the yellow dragon was facing. The single blue speck that was Topaz grew in size as she neared. She returned alone.\n\nThe blue female tipped her wings to them in acknowledgement, circling a few times above their heads before beginning her descent. She was checking the surrounding area, Nightstar realised, looking for hidden enemies, cautious of an ambush and not fully trusting their story.\n\n\"Be careful not to upset her, Sunburst,\" Nightstar cautioned, \"she's still wary. See how she searches the outlying trees and undergrowth. She's checking for hidden enemies. We need to build trust with this female.\"\n\n\"I see. Females like me, Nightstar,\" Sunburst stated without boast. \"She wouldn't have returned if she didn't want to know more about us. She is naturally curious, almost like a yellow. I'm sure I can convince her we are no threat. Yellows and blues are not as distantly related as your atlas might think.\" These last words were aimed at Alduce. Conversations with Sunburst were often a three way thing.\n\nIt was as well Nightstar was able to interpret which words were meant for him and which were directed at the sorcerer. Because he was both Alduce and the dragon, he understood perfectly. The scholar within made a mental note, another example of a dragon's ability to adapt to an unusual situation. The yellow dragon was always a quick study. Sunburst only spoke to both of them when they were alone. When they were in company he never forgot their secret and was careful with his words.\n\n\"Not all dragons are as trusting you, Sunburst,\" the black dragon said, focusing on being the dragon and not the man. \"Your natural curiosity has often led to... situations... that were best avoided. Fly lightly around this one, she's still nervous.\"\n\n\"Nervous of you perhaps. Where is your sense of adventure, your dragon spirit? Don't you want to find Galdor? I will convince her we are friends. Trust me.\"\n\n\"I do, Sunburst.\" The yellow dragon was many things, but firstly he was a trusted friend. Nightstar had earned his trust and proved his friendship. It was a hard road they had travelled, their friendship forged in adversity. Both sacrificed much for the other and Nightstar trusted Sunburst with his secret, and more. \"I trust you with my life. As I trust you will now speak carefully to Topaz. Try not to get under her scales.\"\n\n\"And not all dragons are as trusting as you either, Nightstar.\" He raised the ridges above his eyes again in the now familiar parody of a human expression. Sunburst quite often took his words and turned them back on him. Nightstar found this talent both endearing and annoying. It was difficult to tell whether he was being sincere or making a joke at his expense. The expression on his yellow face showed nothing of the smug look he wore when he joked.\n\n\"I thank you for the complement, Sunburst.\" He really was getting a lot better at reading a dragon's expression.\n\nWhen Alduce first manifested into Nightstar, he was a human learning the dragon way. A man inside a dragon skin. Nightstar had come a long way since then. \"See if you can earn her trust. Use your charm and put her at ease,\" Nightstar said before Topaz neared.\n\nShe dropped into the clear ground in front of the trees she'd previously used as shelter. She kept her distance, using Sunburst as a barrier between herself and the black dragon, but was closer than before, which was surely a good sign.\n\n\"Welcome back, Topaz the Peaceful, blue as winter's ice, pure as crystal,\" Sunburst greeted her. He gave a short bow of his head, showing respect. \"What news from Galdor the Green?\"\n\n\"Galdor is well. I have talked with him at length about you both. He is curious as to why two strangers seek him out. He remembers the past. How could he not after all he endured? Alduce paid him great service and he has never forgotten the human who helped him. It is on the strength of his name alone that he has agreed to see you both.\"\n\n\"That is good to hear,\" Sunburst said. \"He will not be\u2014\"\n\n\"Be warned,\" Topaz snapped. \"Galdor is not stupid. He will not be tricked. Should your intentions be anything other than friendly you will suffer not only his wrath, but the wrath of all free dragons! By claw, fang and flame! If you attempt any treachery you will not survive against us.\"\n\n\"We intend no tricks, no treachery or duplicity, I assure you. We have arrived in your land, and it appears, into the middle of an unknown conflict of which we are ignorant. We will help if we can.\" He looked to Nightstar. \"My black scaled friend here is extremely intelligent and has a way of looking at problems through different eyes. And not without some success. I am sure when Galdor meets with him, he will see his worth as both friend and ally.\"\n\n\"Do not presume to know what Galdor thinks,\" Topaz said. \"If it were up to me, I would have left you here and never returned.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Sunburst didn't mean anything presumptuous,\" Nightstar said. \"We are both excited to meet the legendary Galdor. We are honoured he will see us, especially as there is unrest here. It is clear to us you are concerned for his safety.\" It wasn't due to Sunburst's usual lack of tact that this female was difficult. The yellow dragon was making every effort not to upset her. \"I know once we have spoken with him he will understand more about us, myself in particular. I give you my word and my oath that my intentions are not harmful and I am not part of any conflict or ruse.\" An oath between dragons was a solemn promise and was never given lightly.\n\n\"You are a strange one, Nightstar,\" Topaz said. Nightstar didn't risk looking at Sunburst. The yellow dragon wouldn't intentionally let slip just how strange he was. However, with Sunburst there was always a chance he would say something flippant or make a comment that may attract unwanted attention.\n\n\"Your oath and your word I will accept,\" Topaz said. \"My trust you must earn. We have a ways to go and I am sure you are both eager to begin the last part of your journey. I will lead. Sunburst will follow. Nightstar will stay behind Sunburst at all times.\" Her commanding tone brooked no argument from either black or yellow. \"Do not fall behind and do not crowd me. We will be flying low and keeping to cover where we can. If I drop to the ground, be ready to follow. Keep your eyes open and if you see any signs of pursuit, call out.\n\n\"I am taking you to a secret location. It is our safe haven and is unknown to Blaze and his followers. Once you have visited, you will not be granted leave unless we know we can trust you. Do you still wish to follow where I lead?\"\n\n\"We do,\" Sunburst replied, inclining his head to Nightstar.\n\n\"Sunburst speaks for us both,\" Nightstar said. \"We are ready, Topaz. Please take us to Galdor.\"\n\n\"Try to keep up,\" she called out as she sprang into the air.\n\n\"Try to keep up!\" Sunburst started, \"We... \" Nightstar shook his head at Sunburst in a distinctly un-dragonlike way.\n\n\"We will surely try our best to keep up with you, Topaz,\" the yellow dragon said, biting back his words and swallowing what he was about to say. Nightstar silently thanked his friend for holding his tongue. Topaz did not need a lecture about how much better a flier Sunburst thought he was, even though he could most likely fly the wings off the blue female. He was sure the yellow would no doubt look for a later opportunity to prove this to her.\n\nSunburst like to lead and he was surprised at the restraint his friend displayed. Perhaps the time Sunburst had spent in the company of his human counterpart, wasn't just teaching him bad habits.\n\nHe followed the yellow dragon into the air as he, in turn, shadowed their blue guide, not flying too close and maintaining an acceptable distance. He was glad Sunburst recognised the importance of her request and was happy enough to go along with her instructions for now.\n\nOriginally their trip through the Flaire portal was intended to be a journey to a new world and an opportunity to seek out Galdor. It was now turning into something more serious. The feeling they both experienced when they neared the Lifting Plateau was not pleasant. If he was to describe how it made him feel as a human, he would say it made his skin crawl. Something was wrong with this world and it was only reinforced by the way Topaz reacted, adding to his suspicions.\n\nAlduce bore a great affinity for all dragons. His experiences as Nightstar only strengthened his love for the species. He was more than a man who took the shape of a dragon. He was the spirit of Nightstar and the essence of a real dragon, even though he wasn't hatched from the shell. The blood of dragons ran through his veins, transforming him into a separate entity. He was both his own individual creature and a man.\n\nIt was difficult for the sorcerer to explain, especially as he was a scholar and took great pride in his ability to seek out the answers. Nightstar, with the help of Sunburst, was able to accept the dichotomous relationship, embracing his dragon logic without overthinking it.\n\nIf Galdor and his companions were in need of help, he would do everything in his power to assist them. Sunburst would probably have something to say on the matter, he always did. However, they shared more than blood and he would support Nightstar's decision to assist in whatever way they could and follow where he led.\n\nUntil they knew all the facts they were in the dark. He hoped after speaking with Galdor, the green dragon would be able to explain exactly what was going on. Maybe then, Nightstar, with the help of Alduce and Sunburst, could offer these dragons some help.\n\nFirst he would need to convince Galdor and gain his trust. If the green dragon was as cautious as Topaz, it would prove a difficult task. Facing Galdor and gaining his trust was something he had previous experience with. When Alduce last helped the green dragon, there was a certain amount of luck involved. Alduce didn't rely on luck anymore and the apprentice he'd once been was long gone.\n\nHe was now Nightstar the Black as well as a master sorcerer. He possessed the knowledge of all his magical studies, both human and dragon. He was able to cast spells using a mixture of both human and dragon magic, unconventionally blending and mixing them to surpass the sum of their whole. It was a magic unknown and unexplored and it shouldn't exist, but it did. And he commanded it. Like any unknown magic, it could be dangerous and required discipline. It was a power beyond that of anything previously seen by the known worlds or chronicled in any writings.\n\nIf he was unable to convince Galdor his intentions were good, well, there were other means at his disposal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Topaz led them north following the natural contours of the land. Her flight undulated, using the hills and valleys to every advantage in an effort to remain unobserved. She chose an indirect route to their secret destination, zig-zagging over the terrain, rarely flying in a straight line. She avoided leading them through open skies where possible and when it was necessary, she made haste, hurrying for the nearest shelter.\n\nThe land became more remote and as far as Nightstar was aware, there were no discernible traces of dragons to be found.\n\nAfter a short while another dragon appeared, materialising out of a dense forest to their far left. The dragon paced them perfectly, remaining ahead of Topaz. She was a small emerald green. Nightstar was pleased he was able to make the distinction, his perception identifying her as female. She used the camouflage of the trees, the green of her scales blending in with the foliage, until she chose to make herself visible.\n\nTopaz tipped her wings to their escort, signalling her presence, before they were able to call out a warning to her. She wasn't showing any outward signs of panic and it was obvious the distant addition to their group was expected.\n\nFrom his vantage point at the rear of the group, Nightstar noted Sunburst's head, swivelling between the two indigenous dragons, observing the exchange. He faced back towards Nightstar and flared the ends of his wings, rapidly flapping them up and down a few times, the dragon equivalent of a shrug.\n\nThey continued on and another dragon appeared from above, a streak of orange-brown passing diagonally in front of Topaz and taking up a flanking position on the right, directly opposite the green female. Nightstar could tell their second chaperone was a male.\n\nA whiff of charcoal and sulphur hung in the air. Both the orange-brown male and the green female were ready to flame, should they need to protect against the strangers in their midst. These dragons were far less trusting than the dragons of the White Mountains; the home of Sunburst. When Nightstar travelled to the world of Salverta and visited the continent of Aurentania\u2014the land where the White Mountains were situated\u2014his welcome had been a warm one. After proving himself in the eyes of the dragons living there, it was now his adopted home.\n\nHis experiences with these new dragons were completely different to the friendliness he had come to expect. The scholar buried deep within stored the information for his human side. Usually, Nightstar would leave thoughts that were typically human, to Alduce. As a dragon, he was concerned the species here (wherever here was, the Alduce side of him thought) appeared to be split into two opposing factions.\n\nNightstar realised, after the brief touch with his counterpart's subconscious, he didn't even know the name of Galdor's world. Alduce was eager to know what this world was called. When the sorcerer had something he wanted to know, his thoughts were more intense, reaching through the veil that was Nightstar's consciousness.\n\nThe dragon side of his being was separate from the man. Neither one fully understood how it worked, two parts of the one whole, together yet apart. Nightstar was content with how it was and accepted it; dragon logic was a lot less complicated than human. He was the dragon, Alduce was the human. He was aware of everything the man was, both manifestations different physically, yet there were two minds sharing the same body. It was what it was. Alduce still searched for a definitive answer as he just wasn't ready to stop looking for an explanation. Alduce was always a scholar at heart, it was what made him who he was.\n\nTopaz began a slow descent, setting her wings into a fixed glide, dropping into a dark chasm cleaved into the ground beneath them. The chasm looked deep and even with the advantage of viewing it directly from above, Nightstar wasn't able to see how far down into the ground it stretched.\n\nSunburst stuck to Topaz as she entered the mouth of the chasm, matching her steep dive into the ominous gap. He was too close to the blue female, barely a snout's length from the tip of her tail. Nightstar hoped he remembered her warning about crowding her. The yellow would be resentful of her comment telling them to try and keep up with her. There was one thing he was sure of and it was that no other dragon he knew, not even he himself, could best Sunburst through terrain like this. He was the master of short fast flight, quick to turn with the ability to weave his way through tight, impossible spaces. Perhaps it was his size, perfect for ultimate manoeuvrability, the optimum power to weight ratio that proved best for aerial prowess. Furthermore, he was a yellow and most yellows possessed a serious competitive streak.\n\nThe Earth Mother, Sunburst often reminded him, gifted him with the ability to outfly any dragon and the determination to prove it to any who doubted. Nightstar himself couldn't catch the nimble yellow over an obstacle strewn flight path. Anywhere Topaz led them, his friend could surely follow. He just hoped it wasn't too much to expect Sunburst to exercise a little humility and not rub the blue female's snout in the dirt. He understood their situation and Nightstar trusted him not to upset her, even though he found it difficult not to show off. As if in answer to Nightstar's thoughts, Sunburst reigned back and let the blue pull in front a little.\n\nNightstar tucked his wings close to his body and entered the chasm, his eyes adjusting to its dim interior. He quickly came to understand why Sunburst had backed off his pace. The slow curving path leading down into the depths twisted sharply before him, causing him to throw out his wings to slow his speed. Thankfully the deceptive width of the chasm mouth wasn't a true indication of its inner size. He was able to open his wings fully, allowing him to slow down, then he quickly twisted in mid-air and came to rest in a huge subterranean alcove beside Topaz and Sunburst.\n\nHe peered over the edge of the rock, mighty talons gripping the stone a little harder than necessary, adrenalin surging thorough his body. A bottomless drop fell steeply into the darkness of the chasm. With his neck extended out over the precipice, Nightstar's head was buffeted by a strong current of turbulent air. No wonder turning tightly in the space before the alcove had been difficult. The turbulent updrafts surging through the chasm added to the difficulty of navigating its hidden entrance, added to that, the walls were covered with dangerous looking rocks, sharp and ragged, like the teeth filled maw of some gargantuan monster, hungry for dragon.\n\n\"Nicely done,\" Sunburst commented. \"I wasn't sure your considerable bulk would manage such a disciplined manoeuvre.\"\n\n\"Isn't it strange,\" Nightstar retorted, his heart hammering in his chest, \"the more I practice, the better I get.\"\n\nIf any dragon flying inside the chasm misjudged the sharp turn into the alcove, it would result in a collision with the jagged rock and a fatal tumble into the dark depths. Once you were made aware of what you needed to do to navigate it safely, it would certainly be easier, but still difficult due to the unpredictable air currents.\n\nHe wondered why Topaz hadn't given them prior warning. Did she still regard them as the enemy? Was it some kind of test to prove their worthiness? Would she have cared if they plummeted to their death? It was sad to think that she cared so little for other dragons and it was further indication things were far from well.\n\n\"Practice makes perfect,\" Sunburst said, lightly mimicking Alduce.\n\n\"The Leviathan's Gullet,\" Topaz said as Nightstar drew back from the edge. \"A natural defence against uninvited guests.\"\n\nA rush of wind swept through the chasm and the two dragons that had joined them for the final leg of their flight, appeared in the space opposite the alcove. They both twisted with practiced ease, turning smartly in mid-air and landing at either end of the ledge.\n\n\"Report,\" Topaz said to the green female.\n\n\"All clear. You weren't followed. All is as it should be,\" she answered.\n\n\"No sign of bla... \" the orange-brown male looked at Nightstar, \"the enemy,\" he amended, his gaze fixed on the newcomers.\n\nThey both still held their flame in check, the sulphuric stink of unreleased dragon fire heavy in the alcove.\n\n\"Nice place,\" Sunburst said. \"Easily defended and well concealed. I can see why you would want to keep its location secret.\"\n\n\"You haven't seen the best of it,\" the orange-brown male said.\n\n\"Ryvind!\" Topaz said. \"Hold your tongue.\"\n\n\"We have allowed our guests to enter into our home, even if you disagree with Galdor's decision,\" Ryvind retorted. \"We agreed to listen to them and hear their story. Would it hurt you to show a little courtesy?\"\n\n\"Will courtesy prevent my scales from becoming black? Will it save me from the mindless torture our brothers and sisters have fallen to? I'm alive and have free will. Flame your courteous behaviour!\"\n\n\"Well said, Ryvind,\" a deep voice echoed from deep within the alcove. \"What will we become if we do not remember who we are? Understand, Topaz only has the best interests of our colony at heart. Do not judge her too harshly.\"\n\nA huge green dragon emerged from the shadows behind them\u2014Galdor the Green\u2014flanked on either side by two equally impressive dragons, one bronze, the other a deep dark red. They appeared from the darkness to stand in the alcove mouth, blocking the passageway behind them. If there was any trouble, Nightstar and Sunburst would be at a serious disadvantage, surrounded on all sides with only one means of escape, back into the Leviathan's Gullet."
            },
            {
                "title": "Introductions",
                "text": "Galdor was an imposing sight, standing taller than any of the dragons on the rocky ledge. Alduce remembered him from the cavern\u2014his first encounter with the huge green. He had looked enormous to the human and even in his dragon form, Nightstar was impressed by his size... and a little intimidated. His green scales shone as they had when he shed his scales, all those years ago, vibrant and bright. Galdor wasn't just a dragon, he was a king amongst his kind, regally majestic and spectacularly resplendent.\n\nFor all his magnificence, Galdor was no pompous monarch. He was ready to face any potential threat to his secluded colony and deal with it without hesitation. He stood ready for action, tense and alert to any danger, his followers standing alongside him. Nightstar was aware that one word from Galdor would put an end to their tentative acceptance, should he command it. But there was also a curiosity about the large green dragon, a look in his bright eyes that invited friendship, should you be worthy.\n\n\"It is my pleasure to finally meet you, Galdor the Green,\" Sunburst said, filling the uncomfortable silence, which until now, Nightstar hadn't been aware of. Once more he found himself transfixed by Galdor's appearance, unaware he was staring and glad Sunburst showed the good sense to speak.\n\nSunburst bowed low, tucking one of his forelegs beneath his bright yellow chest and paid his respects to the towering green.\n\nHe rose and said, \"I am known as Sunburst the Yellow, my scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I\u2014\"\n\n\"Burn across the sky like a celestial fire,\" Galdor finished. \"So I have heard.\"\n\n\"I see my reputation proceeds me,\" Sunburst said, only sounding slightly deflated at Galdor's interruption.\n\n\"Topaz has told me all about you,\" Galdor replied. \"Or as much as she knows.\"\n\n\"All good, I hope,\" Sunburst said, winking at the blue female. Topaz chose to ignore him.\n\n\"We will see,\" Galdor said.\n\nNightstar let Sunburst speak. His friendly demeanour and good natured way were perfect for putting everyone at ease and the yellow did have his own way with words.\n\n\"I have heard the legendary tale of your encounter with Alduce the sorcerer,\" Sunburst continued, \"and we bring you his respectful regards.\"\n\n\"Interesting, Sunburst the Yellow, very interesting indeed. My legendry encounter with Alduce is one I shall never forget. I am intrigued to learn how it is, on a world that isn't my own, you learned of this.\"\n\n\"A tale worthy of the telling. We have journeyed far and travelled in a most unconventional way, to stand here before you.\"\n\n\"I look forward to that tale, Sunburst, and you will have every opportunely to regale us with your bard's tongue.\" The yellow dragon dipped his head in acknowledgment and Nightstar was glad, this time Sunburst understood Galdor's meaning and knew when to hold his bard's tongue. He knew from his own experience Galdor desired more than clever words.\n\n\"I see you speak the truth, little yellow and can sense no evil in you. Before I listen to all you have to say, and I do believe that to be much, I would know more of your black companion. The colour of his scales gives me great concern.\"\n\nSunburst raised himself up, stretching his hind legs. \"This is Nightstar the Black. The star upon his chest, silvery and bright, chases the shadows of doubt and illuminates the darkness.\" Trust Sunburst to add his own embellishments to his introduction. \"I understand your concerns, mighty Galdor, however, know I speak the truth when I tell you Nightstar is my brother. We are bound by blood and I trust him with my life.\" He nodded to Nightstar. \"He is also friend to Alduce the sorcerer and owes the man a debt greater than your own.\" Galdor cocked his head and stared at him.\n\nAlduce had created Nightstar and he would always be thankful for to the sorcerer for giving him life. He wasn't sure he owed a debt to the man, especially as Alduce was part of him. It was time to step in and prevent Sunburst, well intentioned as he was, from complicating matters.\n\n\"Thank you Sunburst, your heartfelt words, as always, mean much to me.\" He copied the yellow's gesture and performed a respectful bow to Galdor. \"I am saddened to hear my black scales are an omen of evil in your land. After the brief explanation Topaz gave and her reaction to my presence, I can understand why you would be distrustful of me.\" He straightened, meeting Galdor's yellow eyes. \"Please believe me when I say I mean you no harm. I am no threat to you or you kin. Look into my eyes, Galdor, see if I lie. I know you can tell.\" The last few words left his mouth before he realised these were the same ones spoken by Alduce, when Galdor had confronted the man many years ago.\n\n\"I can see you are not like the other blacks we have had the misfortune to encounter. You shall answer my questions to my satisfaction and I will decide what is best for our colony. You are an enigma to me Nightstar. There is something strange about you.\"\n\n\"He gets that a lot,\" Sunburst said, then hurried to add, \"I myself said that upon our first encounter and my moot leader, Winterfang thought so too. Where we come from, blacks are rare.\"\n\n\"We have much to discuss. Do not fear, you will be treated fairly. I need to protect what little we have left. The colony comes first, before any individuals. The decisions of a former moot leader are difficult and are never made lightly. I asked Topaz to bring you here against much protest. You have only been allowed to come this far as you claim to know Alduce. The dragons that still reside at the Lifting Plateau do not know the sorcerer's name. If you are aware of his existence and his connection with my past, then I would learn of it. I'll admit, my curiosity is piqued.\" Galdor surveyed the alcove, crowded now with his five dragons, himself, Nightstar and Sunburst.\n\n\"Before we go any further, there are traditions that must be followed. As my rust coloured friend rightly pointed out, courtesies to be adhered to. Where would dragons be if we abandoned our civilised behaviour? You already know Topaz the Peaceful. Do not be fooled by her name. She will protect her kin and fight to the death, should it be required. I wish you could have met her in quieter times and known her as we did, before our dark troubles.\" Topaz inclined her head to her leader and then, to Nightstar's surprise, bowed to them both.\n\n\"I would have liked that very much,\" Sunburst said, dipping his own head towards the blue female.\n\n\"Thank you for guiding us here safely, Topaz,\" Nightstar said, \"I understand the difficulty you have with trusting us and hope we will become friends.\" Topaz remained silent.\n\n\"The green and the orange-brown who accompanied Topaz are Fern of the forest and Ryvind the Rust,\" Galdor introduced them, acknowledging both.\n\nFern bowed her head, neither friendly nor aggressive. She was similar to Galdor in shape and colour, only much smaller. Ryvind sidled his way along the alcove pushing closer until he was in front of them both, bowing deeply. \"Welcome,\" he greeted them, \"I am keen to hear your story.\"\n\n\"As are we all, Ryvind,\" Galdor said, \"and I am sure, once I have decided what we must do with our guests, you will.\"\n\n\"I like him,\" Sunburst whispered to Nightstar.\n\n\"We all like Ryvind,\" Galdor said, his voice showing emotion for the first time and rumbling in a happy laugh. \"Ryvind the Rust, easy to trust. His perception is stronger than most and it is seldom wrong.\"\n\nGaldor opened his wings, curling them round the two remaining dragons that flanked him, \"These are my self-appointed guards, Azyrian the Bronze and Garnet.\"\n\nGarnet dipped her head ever so slightly, her scales a rich shade of red, like the precious stone she was named after. Azyrian's scales gleamed like polished metal, his demeanour proud and serious. His stance was one of readiness, alert and prepared for action. He bowed, showing respect to the two visitors, his piercing gaze fixed on them, never wavering.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you both,\" Nightstar said. Sunburst stared at Garnet, drinking in her wine coloured scales, mesmerised by the red female.\n\n\"It would appear your yellow companion is taken by the beauty of the red,\" Galdor commented.\n\n\"Sunburst is often taken by many things,\" Nightstar said, bumping his head into the yellow's side in an effort stop him staring. \"He's sometimes easily distracted. Garnet, please excuse Sunburst, you bear a striking resemblance to his mate, Blood Rose.\"\n\n\"She is a red female of extreme beauty too!\" Sunburst blurted out. \"The similarity is uncanny. Forgive me, Garnet, I mean no disrespect in staring.\"\n\n\"You pay me a great complement, Sunburst,\" Garnet purred, \"Blood Rose must be a sight to behold.\" Her yellow eyes glinted with mischief as she added, \"I suspect she has her talons full with such an adventurous yellow mate.\"\n\nThe yellow of Sunburst's snout showed a tinge of red. Nightstar wasn't sure if it was the reflection from Garnet's scales or a touch of embarrassment, although suspected it was the latter by Sunburst's expression.\n\n\"He is the sire of five dragonets with her, hatched under a great aurora,\" Nightstar proudly told the assembled dragons, rescuing his friend from any further embarrassment.\n\n\"Five is a good number,\" Garnet said.\n\n\"An aurora! A fortuitous omen,\" Ryvind exclaimed.\n\n\"Your good fortune lifts our spirits, Sunburst,\" Galdor said. \"It is long since we heard such uplifting news and longer since we experienced it for ourselves.\"\n\nEven Topaz looked impressed and Nightstar was glad his yellow friend had accompanied him through the Flaire gateway. Sunburst was indeed well named, lighting the lives of others he touched like a welcome ray of summer sun. He didn't want to think of what might have happened if he travelled here by himself. A lone black confronted by strangers, would not have fared well, he suspected. Bringing his yellow companion afforded him the opportunity to speak with these new dragons and gain their trust. They accepted Sunburst because he was yellow, even though he was a stranger. He doubted he would have come this far himself. It was good to have a companion, his friend, accompany him. He understood he was always learning when it came to dragon behaviour\u2014perhaps the scholar in Alduce wasn't as far removed as he thought. Having Sunburst alongside, keeping him true, was an advantage when it came to dragonly ways.\n\n\"I would speak with our guests alone,\" Galdor announced with an air of command.\n\n\"But Galdor, we must not leave you unprotected,\" Azyrian protested. Fern pressed closer to Galdor's side, pushing into the small space of the crowded alcove and forcing him farther away from Nightstar.\n\n\"While I am ever grateful for your loyalty and protection,\" Galdor addressed his guards, \"I believe I am in no immediate danger from our guests. I will take them to the cavern of the cataract where I can question them in private. Azyrian. Garnet. You may stand watch outside if you must. Ensure we are not disturbed.\"\n\nAll five dragons stared at Galdor, as if they couldn't believe what he was asking.\n\n\"I give you my oath,\" Nightstar said, \"We wish only to be your friends and offer our help with your plight, if we are able.\"\n\n\"And only if you want it,\" Sunburst added. \"I cannot deny Nightstar's scales are black, but that is not a reason to hold it against him. He may be unusual to you and I grant you, sometimes he's unusual to me too\u2014in a good way. Give him a chance, I know you'll all be the better for knowing him.\" He winked at Nightstar. \"I understand your previous experiences with black dragons have been bad. I give you my word, as long as he breathes, Nightstar will never be an enemy to your colony.\"\n\n\"Strong words and sworn oaths,\" Galdor said. \"You give a convincing speech, Sunburst the Yellow. Let us retire to the cavern of the cataract, there are questions I would ask before I decide what to do with you both. Topaz, Ryvind and Fern, thank you for escorting our guests this far. Please excuse us.\" Galdor turned and made his way back down the dark recess.\n\n\"Nightstar. Sunburst. With me please.\" It was neither a command nor an instruction, yet there was an expectation they would follow him. He trundled his impressive bulk back along the narrow passageway, twisting and turning through the rock that took them behind the alcove.\n\nNightstar looked at Sunburst and the yellow flicked the ends of his wings in a shrug, then nodded. \"We've survived the Leviathan's Gullet,\" the yellow said, \"Now we must proceed into the belly of the beast.\"\n\nNightstar followed Galdor's swinging tail, Sunburst joining in behind, Garnet and Azyrian bringing up the rear. Green, black, yellow, red and gold dragons formed an unusual procession through the twisting cavern, the other green, blue and the rusty orange stayed behind, dismissed by their leader.\n\nGaldor didn't appear too concerned at the reduction in numbers and Nightstar decided this was a good sign. After sharing the news about Sunburst's mate and clutch, Galdor's mood was a lot more accepting. Ryvind's opinion of them must have counted for a lot too and it was obvious Galdor valued what the rust coloured dragon's perception told him. Topaz, however, wasn't so trusting. She advised Galdor against their coming here and it would be hard to convince her otherwise, her mind already made up about the unknown pair, especially when one of them was a black.\n\nThe darkness of the passageway began to lighten. Nightstar followed Galdor out of the darkness, still marvelling at the ability of the dragon's eye, adjusting from the dimly illuminated cave to the brightness they now faced. He came to a halt so abruptly it caused Sunburst to bump into him from behind.\n\n\"Why are you stopping Nightstar?\" The yellow dragon complained, \"I've bashed my snout on the hard ridges of your tail!\"\n\nNightstar was aware of the yellow dragon colliding into his stationary form, but he dismissed it completely, the vista before him taking priority.\n\nThey emerged from the tunnel into a grotto of wonder. Barren rock and dark cave replaced with an oasis of green and blue, bathed in bright sunlight. The hidden valley was sheltered from the sky above with an overhang of rock, partially shading the ground below, yet still letting in some sunlight. A magnificent waterfall cascaded down from the far end of the near subterranean valley, splitting the grotto into two completely different halves. The spray from the waterfall hung in the air, misty vapour shimmering with the colours of the rainbow. The spectrum of light reflected across the sparkling blue waters below, which in turn, reflected a rippling patchwork of watery colours up onto the rocky ceiling.\n\nFrom his position under the vast rocky celling, Nightstar couldn't see the sky above. Where the rocky outcrop ended, sunlight shone down from out of sight, providing heat and light. From this angle, Nightstar couldn't see the blue sky outside, except in the reflection of the water that divided the grotto. The river calmed as it flowed away from the waterfall, widening into a huge clear lake, dominating almost half of the vast grotto. It flowed on through the valley's centre cutting a deep path as it wound its way to the other end, where it disappeared into the dark mouth of an overhanging cave, journeying ever onwards.\n\nLush green foliage covered the sunny side of the grotto floor, small trees and shrubs thriving in the sheltered valley, sustained by the water and light from above. The whole valley was protected by the natural shelter of the surrounding rock walls, keeping the worst of the elements at bay. Beneath the rocky ceiling a desert of smooth rock curved deep into the mountainside. The patterns of the strata within the rock banded with a millennia of pastel oranges and reds. Layer upon layer made up the rock wall, line upon line of times long passed, preserved in thick bands of varying colour. It was the opposite from the other side of the river, bare of any plant life and shadowed from the sky above, but just as impressive.\n\nDragons of all colours basked on the rocky expanse and every pair of eyes were fixed on the black dragon; the stranger who entered into the safety of their secret domain.\n\nIt was only after standing and staring at the amazing landscape\u2014and the watching dragons\u2014he realised the noise from the waterfall drowned out Sunburst's impatient words.\n\n\"Move over,\" Sunburst said, \"I want to see it too! Look at that Nightstar,\" he bumped his head into the black dragon's flanks, \"a hidden land. Perfect shelter for dragons. A superb secret hiding place and beautiful too. Look at all the dragons. They don't look too happy to see you, do they? Has that waterfall rendered you deaf?\" He squeezed his way passed Nightstar's bulk, pushing in front of him for a better view. He faced Galdor. \"No wonder you wanted to keep this place secret.\"\n\n\"It is extremely well hidden,\" Galdor said. \"Almost impossible to detect, even when flying directly overhead. Because of the overhang curve of the mountain above and the rocky walls, it looks like there is no gap. An illusion that makes entry from above incredibly risky, even when you know it's there, it's difficult to see and even harder to navigate. Entry from the Leviathan's Gullet is much safer by comparison.\"\n\n\"Are there fish in the lake?\" Sunburst asked.\n\n\"There are some,\" Galdor said, \"Small and agile, not worth chasing for their size.\"\n\n\"The small ones can be tasty,\" Sunburst said. \"And I've yet to meet a fish I couldn't catch.\"\n\n\"The lake is cold, unlike the oceans warmed by the sun. The river flows through the mountain glaciers, carrying the ice and snow melt. Too cold for my tastes.\"\n\n\"We passed by the Lifting Plateau,\" Nightstar said, \"I can understand why you would miss it. This hidden valley, while not your home, is a fine place to stay until your return.\"\n\n\"It is my hope that one day we can,\" Galdor said. \"I miss it, we all do. It is sad that no free dragons inhabit our ancestral home anymore.\" He huffed out a blast of exasperated air, reinforcing his distain. \"I find it ironic I have come to reside in this grotto after escaping the prison of my underground cavern. While it isn't completely subterranean\u2014and is a much better place altogether\u2014it seems I am destined to live beneath the surface of the land. How the mighty have fallen, eh!\"\n\nHe slowly turned to face Nightstar. \"Once I sat atop the world, moot leader of the Lifting Plateau. I returned after my banishment to find it was no longer my home anymore, my world changed. He whom I once called friend took these things from me and corrupted everything. Still,\" Galdor continued, \"let us not speak of this at present, this is not what we need to discuss.\"\n\n\"We are saddened by what has befallen your lands, Galdor,\" Nightstar said, \"and we will help if we can. Does your land have a name? I would know what you call this place and the name of your home world.\"\n\n\"It is plain you have travelled far,\" said Galdor. \"I too have made such a journey, though not from choice. This land is known to the dragons that reside here as Alvanor.\"\n\n\"Land of the silver clouds?\" Nightstar asked.\n\n\"You speak the old tongue, Nightstar. You are truly an enigma. I believe you have travelled through a portal to my world and I am keen to know how you accomplished this. How is it you understand our ancient words when you are not from this world?\n\nNightstar wasn't sure if it was the star of silver, formed from the Flaire artefact emblazoned upon his chest, helped decipher the name of Galdor's land. Even after his metamorphosis, in the form of his dragon scales, the Flaire's properties allowed it to translate unknown languages to the wearer. There was also a good possibility Alduce might have read it in one of his many books, the sorcerer was extremely studious and his power of recall was impressive.\n\n\"I honestly don't know, Galdor,\" he said, telling the green the truth. \"The meaning came to me after you spoke, I understood what it meant.\" Sunburst caught his eye, aware that his answer was missing some of the facts. He was pleased his friend remained silent, even though it was obvious he wanted to comment. Nightstar had made a promise to himself (and also to Sunburst) never to intentionally tell a lie to another dragon again. He would not lie to Galdor now, but he needed to be careful what truths he revealed. His perception, his dragon's sixth sense, tingled. A mental itch rather than a warning, leaving him with the impression Galdor wouldn't be as upset as Sunburst about his unconventional origins. He didn't know why he should feel like this, or how it worked. It was one of the larger mysteries of being a dragon.\n\nSunburst never tired of telling him he must learn to embrace his perception fully and trust his inner dragon. The Alduce part of his shared consciousness knew the yellow dragon's advice was good. Nightstar would just have to prove it by going with his instincts.\n\n\"We call our world, Sull, \"Galdor continued. \"A name given by our distant cousins, many generations passed. As far as I am aware,\" he paused waiting for Nightstar to speak, then filled the silence, \"it is only a name.\"\n\n\"Thank you for sharing this with us Galdor,\" Sunburst said. \"We are honoured by the trust you show in us.\"\n\n\"You are my guests, thus far. I would be a poor host, as Ryvind tactfully reminded me, should I fail to observe common pleasantries. Especially with visitors who have travelled as far as you have.\" He observed the dragons watching them from across the dividing river, aware of their silent stares.\n\n\"I will take you to the cavern of the cataract. There are many among us who are troubled to see a black dragon deep within our last sanctuary. Every one of our number has suffered loss. Blaze the Black has corrupted our brothers and sisters, brought disharmony to our lands, and invited unwanted war between dragons and humans. You will understand their caution and perhaps it will help you bear their stares of distrust. Come, follow me.\"\n\nGaldor launched himself from the rocky ledge they perched upon, huge green wings lifting him up and into the grotto. Nightstar was touched by a moment of intense happiness, witnessing the once imprisoned dragon flying freely. Galdor the Green was truly an impressive sight and even more so in the air.\n\nSunburst scrambled after Galdor, taking flight and following him across the river, eager to keep up. Nightstar, on impulse, bowed to the assembled dragons watching from the other side of the river. He hoped his gesture would be seen as friendly and respectful. He wanted these dragons to accept him and understand he wasn't a threat, even though his scales were black. He sprang into the air and beat his wings, powering after Galdor and Sunburst.\n\nThe size of the grotto was larger than it first appeared and Nightstar craned his neck to see everything as he flew, taking in the wonders of this safe haven, aware his internal passenger was doing the same.\n\nGaldor led Sunburst towards the waterfall, weaving left and right along the path of the river below. He gained height and then abruptly dipped downward, setting huge green wings into a fixed gliding position, aiming directly at the curtain of water at the foot of the roaring falls.\n\nHe flew directly into the misty vapour, cutting through the flickering rainbows, a myriad of sparkling colours painting his glistening hide. Water bounced from his wings as he passed beneath the cascading waterfall. The rushing torrent of water swallowed him whole and he disappeared into the shimmering curtain, vanishing from sight.\n\nSunburst didn't hesitate in following Galdor into the waterfall, his yellow hide showing off the rainbow colours to more effect than Galdor's green. Nightstar wanted to know what lay beyond the downpour of the waterfall. He wasn't as confident as Sunburst to blindly rush headlong into the unknown, yet he realised the time for hesitancy wasn't today. He acted on the yellow dragon's constant encouragement of listening to his dragon side and took the plunge.\n\nHe closed his eyes as ice cold water engulfed his entire body, flying into the waterfall, copying Galdor, his tough armour of scales protecting him from the frozen chill of liquid winter. The force of the waterfall pushed down on him and he automatically increased tension to his wing membranes, adjusting the muscles and tendons to keep himself aloft. Drumming water bounced harmlessly off his body, forcing him downward, then the pressure disappeared and he lifted slightly, emerging from the downpour. He opened his eyes and barely had enough time to brace for landing, rivulets of water splashing from his back and wings.\n\nSpreading his wings wide and twisting them upwards, he deployed two huge black sails and slowed his forward momentum, talons searching for ground. His claws scrabbled at wet rock\u2014coated in weedy green slime\u2014as he fought for purchase. His weight carried him forward and he slid sideways, tail whipping out behind him and lashing from side to side in an effort to steady his onrush. He bumped down onto his tail end, bounced twice, wings and tail flailing wildly to keep balance, finally sliding to an ungainly stop between Sunburst and Galdor, legs splayed wide in an attempt to keep him from falling onto his snout.\n\nGaldor managed to maintain his composure until he looked at Sunburst. Both green and yellow no longer able to hold their laughter. Deep rumbling escaped from Galdor's throat as he tried to stifle his amusement, unable to hold it back, which set Sunburst into fits of high pitched snorting.\n\n\"I'm sorry... \" the yellow dragon huffed between snorts, small wisps of smoke curling up from his nostrils. He tried to speak again and failed, laughter roaring from his belly. Galdor joined him and added his deep growling bass to the yellow's hysteria, miserably failing to hold his own laughter at bay any longer. The sound of two highly amused dragons echoed around the cavern.\n\n\"Please forgive me, Nightstar,\" Galdor apologised, regaining a little of his usual composure. \"That isn't how I usually treat my guests.\" He struggled to stay serious and was barely containing his mirth.\n\nNightstar pushed his sprawled legs up from the cave floor in an attempt to right himself, wishing a huge hole would appear and swallow him down into the depths of the rock. The slimy coating that covered the damp surface did not provide any purchase at all and he slumped forward into a crumpled heap, setting Galdor and Sunburst into a second round of uncontrollable laughter. The laughter rang around the cavern of the cataract, loud enough to drown out the sound of the waterfall, which was considerably quieter from the inside.\n\nNightstar took care to stand, slowly this time, tentatively probing the slippery rocks with sharp talons, digging his long claws though the annoying greenery like gently probing fingers. He managed a scrabbling crab walk to safety, avoiding another embarrassing fall. When he cleared the slippery surface, he snapped his wings a few times to dispel the water, then folded them to his sides, no longer needing them to keep his balance. He managed a dignified, if somewhat late arrival, to the waiting green and yellow.\n\n\"It is long since I laughed as heartily,\" Galdor said.\n\n\"Stick with Nightstar long enough and he'll have you snorting fire!\" Sunburst said. \"He certainly keeps me entertained. I could tell you stories that would curl your claws.\"\n\n\"Please Sunburst, no more!\" Galdor snorted. \"I am ashamed to find humour at Nightstar's expense.\"\n\n\"Do not be,\" Nightstar said, a touch of amusement creeping into his own voice. \"It is good to hear you laugh. I think you need it after all we have heard. I was not expecting to crash land. I didn't actually know what to expect flying through a waterfall.\"\n\n\"One thing I have discovered when visiting Alvanor,\" Sunburst said, \"is to expect the unexpected!\" The yellow dragon sounded decidedly like Caltus, the master who had apprenticed Alduce. It was time to steer this conversation in another direction before the yellow dragon unintentionally mentioned something he shouldn't. Deep inside, the Alduce part of Nightstar stored away this observation; he would have fun reminding Sunburst of his words later and comparing the yellow dragon to his former human master.\n\n\"You are right, Nightstar,\" Galdor said. \"It is good to laugh. I thank you for your gift and extend my apologies for laughing at...\"\n\n\"... his rump busting!\" Sunburst said. \"I know. I'm cruel, but it was very funny.\"\n\n\"His mishap,\" Galdor said, attempting some diplomacy. \"I suggest we put his unfortunate incident behind...\"\n\n\"Behind?\" Sunburst asked.\n\n\"...us.\" Galdor finished, trying to ignore Sunburst and suppressing a wicked\u2014tooth filled\u2014grin that was all dragon. \"We have more serious matters to discuss. Now we are alone and have some privacy. My perception tells me there are things that are best kept between us.\"\n\nNightstar risked a quick glance at Sunburst who gave a barely noticeable shrug of his wings.\n\n\"I have a number of questions I wish to ask you both, and something I need to tell you,\" Galdor said. There was no trace of amusement now, his grin dropped and his expression was one of total seriousness. \"My questions will help me with my decision on what we must do with you and what I can do with my own situation.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Nightstar has many of his own questions,\" Sunburst said, \"It appears to be the way with you both. Questions, questions, questions.\"\n\n\"Then let us begin,\" Galdor said, \"we have much ground to cover.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Questions",
                "text": "\"As you are already aware,\" Galdor said, \"black dragons are not looked upon favourably here. Blaze has shown himself to be the enemy of all free dragons. In fact he has proved to me he is an enemy to humans as well. While I was imprisoned, he reigned down a terrible war on them, attacking their towns and cities, provoking men to fight back. He managed to destroy the peace between our races and was fixated on destroying them completely. I returned to discover his reign of destruction has almost wiped out all human life on our continent. I should have seen the signs and been more attentive when he spoke out against them.\"\n\n\"Topaz spoke a little of this when we first met and it was obvious she was not happy to see me,\" Nightstar said. \"How were you to know of the darkness festering inside him? Blaze tricked you, abused your trust, it is he who is to blame, not you.\"\n\n\"Thank you Nightstar. It is difficult for me to not accept some responsibility. Being gone so long, Blaze was free to spend all those years unchecked. I fear now, he is too powerful. Retrospectively we are always wiser after the event. Topaz informed me of her conversation with you, but there is more. Blaze has an ancient magic and has found a way to turn free minded dragons to his cause, forcing the unwilling to do his bidding. I believe some of the dragons that still remain at the Lifting Plataea are still in control of their own actions, but are afraid if they don't comply with his demands, they will be turned. Topaz told you of the mindless blacks he controls.\"\n\n\"She called it the black plague,\" Sunburst said, \"and thought Nightstar was one of his drones.\"\n\n\"She was right to be cautious. Our survival hinges on staying one step ahead of Blaze and his followers. However, I can clearly see you aren't like the others, Nightstar. I have encountered some of the black dragons Blaze controls and I can tell you are not like them at all.\" He paused then continued almost to himself. \"Or like any other dragon I have encountered. You aren't like any other dragon from this land. At first I thought it was because you travelled here from somewhere far away. Somewhere we haven't yet established. But that isn't it or I would sense the same of Sunburst. There is something different about you. Something that nags at my perception, but it isn't a warning of danger. It is most unusual. Most puzzling.\"\n\nNightstar didn't know how to answer so he kept silent. Galdor needed to talk and he would let the green dragon do so. There was a time for speaking and a time for listening; he recognised this was a time for the latter.\n\n\"We will return to that subject later as I still need answers.\" He paused, as if contemplating just what to tell them, gathering his thoughts. \"The black plague is what I wish to tell you about. It is no sickness. It is a magical corruption that changes free will into subservience. I have a unique ability to sniff out magic. Not just our own dragon magic, other types of magic too.\" He cast a quick glance at Nightstar before continuing. \"This corruption is a malevolent magic, neither dragon nor human, and is new to me. It changes normal dragons into black drones, mindlessly carrying out Blaze's orders. He is connected to it, but I suspect not in full control. I don't believe there is a cure, once they are transformed they are lost. I sensed that their very essence is taken from them and used up. Depleted and unredeemable.\"\n\n\"Their dragon spirit?\" Nightstar asked.\n\n\"Exactly! That's a perfect way to describe it Nightstar, dragon spirit,\" he emphasised the phrase. \"I think you have a grasp, an understanding, of what this magic takes from them. That might help. We will come back to that,\" he said, nodding unconsciously. \"It leaves only a husk, not a real dragon. A shell of the original individual, filled with the dark corruption. There is absolutely no reasoning with someone who has been affected. I could not talk with the changed dragons I encountered\u2014the ones that still had the ability to speak, as some could only growl\u2014they were loyal only to Blaze, extensions of his own black heart. Their essence, their dragon spirit gone, nothing remained. I tried to convince them what they do is wrong. And I have failed. I encountered dragons I suspect were once friends. Free thinking dragons that would listen to reason. I must have known these individuals and I am certain they would never have turned against me or against other dragons. They are unrecognisable after they are transformed. Violent and bent on destruction. Death, I believe, is their only release. The remaining free dragons know our situation is bad but they don't know just how terrible it really is. I cannot bring myself to tell them the severity of our predicament and shatter what little hope remains. I fear we will never return to how things were before.\"\n\nHe looked at them both, sadness written in his eyes. \"We are lost.\"\n\n\"That is disturbing news, Galdor. Is this why you have brought us to the cavern of the cataract? So you can share with us, strangers to you, what you are unwilling to tell your own dragons?\" Sunburst asked.\n\n\"In part, yes. It is easier to unburden my concerns to you. I know you are not the enemy. I have known it all along. Forgive my pretence, I wanted... no needed to talk freely, to have someone who could listen objectively to my findings. The remaining dragons are too closely involved to look at this rationally. I fear they will give up what little hope they have left if they knew the truth. I need to appear strong for their sake. I'm changed from the leader I once was before my incarceration. A century of darkness and starvation can have a lasting effect on you. The never ending loneliness, the lack of stimuli and the constant absence of daylight are too much, I think, for any creature, not just a dragon. I only ever saw two other living creatures while I was trapped there. A rat and a goat. To my shame, I ate them both. I have never shared that with anyone else.\n\n\"The helplessness and despair were too much to bear. I was ready to lie down and surrender to the long sleep. When Alduce rescued me, it was as if I had been reborn, free from the blackness of that desolate cave. When I saw the sky, it filled me with a joy so great, I never thought I could feel that happy again. When I came home, I arrived to a darkness worse than any my dank cave could ever cause.\"\n\n\"You were lost before, Galdor,\" Sunburst said, \"and with the help of a human sorcerer, you were rescued. You were close to giving up hope and you received aid from an unexpected source. Your benefactor was a man, a small human whose help provided you with a means to escape. One small man changed your situation for the better. His accidental involvement, tiny though it was, resulted in a massive change for you. You cannot see what the future holds, none of us can. Do not give up now. That one small change may be waiting for you. The one single event that could change your circumstances again. Believe me when I tell you I have also faced a great crisis. I too have experienced a doubt so deep I could see no return. Your colony still needs Galdor the Green. Alduce wrote about you, called you a mighty dragon, a force to be reckoned with, a dragon of unstoppable wrath, and a protector of justice. He said you were wise and steadfast, you would stop at nothing and never give up, no matter how bleak the future looked. I don't think he was wrong.\"\n\nSunburst used the words Alduce had written in the Atlas of Dragons and as he was apt to do, added a few embellishments of his own. He believed in Galdor and his speech was sincere. Nightstar was moved to hear the heartfelt words of Alduce, quoted back to the green dragon by his friend. He should have learned by now never to be surprised by Sunburst's eloquent words. He was too familiar with Sunburst's usual ways, quick with a joke or a clever reply, competitive and often annoying. When he spoke from the heart it always caught him off guard.\n\nGaldor had been through much, suffered alone in the dark. To eventually escape and return home to find his world corrupted and his colony in ruins was a blow he struggled to recover from. Stirred by Sunburst's optimistic view, Nightstar couldn't stand by and do nothing. He knew Alduce felt the same.\n\n\"Sunburst is right,\" Nightstar said, \"there must be something we can do to help.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Galdor mused, \"maybe there is.\"\n\n\"It seems to me that maybe, \"Sunburst said, \"is usually a way of avoiding saying no. I can see we are going to have to change that.\"\n\n\"I think it time you answered my questions,\" Galdor said, \"and perhaps there is something you can offer. A fresh perspective. Two new pairs of eyes to look upon the problem. I won't know until I learn more about you both.\"\n\n\"Ask away mighty Galdor,\" Sunburst said, \"I'm sure we can find a solution to your predicament. Nightstar, as I have already mentioned, is a dragon you can count on in times of need.\"\n\n\"Firstly, I would know how you came to be here, on my world.\"\n\n\"We travelled through a portal, a passageway much like the one Alduce opened for you when you returned home,\" Nightstar said.\n\n\"This I already know, even if you hadn't said as much. You are strangers here. You asked the names of this land, of my world. You told Topaz you travelled far to be here. What I do not know is how you came to use this passageway between worlds. I had the help of Alduce, a human sorcerer using human magic. He employed the aid of a magical device. While I am not an expert in the ways of moving between worlds, I do know it is definitely not something that is attained by dragon magic. My perception is clear on this. I know it can be done, but not how. If you travelled by this same method, how were you able to conjure a passageway? Who opened it for you and why? And what magic did they use?\"\n\n\"You are correct in your reasoning,\" Nightstar said. \"It was Alduce who fashioned the passageway for us.\"\n\nGaldor took a step back, his face a picture of amazement. Even Sunburst, who knew the truth, appeared a little surprised at Nightstar's revelation.\n\n\"When you made your claim to have known Alduce, I believed you had met him many years ago.\" Galdor said. \"I know you speak the truth, but there is something you are not telling me. You say it was he who helped you come here. How can this be? When I encountered Alduce it was many years ago. Human lives are short and fade in the blink of a dragon's eye. He is still alive?\n\n\"Indeed he is,\" Sunburst said, \"very much alive. He speaks highly of you Galdor. He shared your story with me and wanted to know what had become of the green dragon he rescued.\"\n\n\"Why would he open a passageway to this world and not come himself? I told him before we departed he was welcome here. If he ever had the chance to visit my world, I asked him to seek me out. I own him a great debt I can never repay. He should have travelled with you. I granted him a boon and he never asked anything of me. He was... is a humble man.\"\n\n\"His only boon was not to end up inside your belly. He is here in spirit, Galdor,\" Nightstar said. \"I'm sure if he could have come\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait... \" Galdor thrust his snout at the silver scales on the black dragon's chest. \"Your night star smells familiar. It stinks of human magic!\" Nightstar backed up and Galdor lunged forward inhaling deeply, huge nostrils sucking in air. \"I can taste it, human magic mixed with something else. The last time I smelled that magic was when I was trapped underground. I knew there was something different about you, Nightstar. It has been on the tip of my tongue since we met.\" He extended his forked tongue, tasting the air like a red viper. It flicked and flitted in front of Nightstar's chest almost touching the silver scales.\n\n\"Magic. Human magic, but missing something,\" Galdor said softly. \"I can't quite recall what... Mushrooms! Without the scent of mushrooms. The foul black fungi that Alduce came in search of. You smell of magic and mushrooms, I told him. Now I smell the same magic. Human magic blended with dragon magic. It isn't possible! I told you I can sniff out magic, that I'm sensitive to all kinds. Other dragons wouldn't be able to detect it, but I most certainly can. This cannot be. Yet it is. How can this be, Nightstar? Explain it to me. Now!\" His tone became threatening. \"If you have harmed Alduce\u2014\"\n\n\"He could never hurt Alduce,\" Sunburst shouted. \"It isn't possible, without the sorcerer there would be no...\" he stopped.\n\n\"Alduce is fine,\" Nightstar said. \"Look into my eyes, see if I lie! I am a dragon of my word. Use your magic, you will know I speak the truth.\"\n\nGaldor thrust his face close to Nightstar's, yellow eyes whirring hypnotically as he stared deeply inside. \"I have memories of doing this with another. You do not lie, Nightstar, but you do not tell the whole truth either. You are extremely familiar for a stranger.\"\n\nHe withdrew and shook his head from side to side in denial, as if unsure of what he had seen. \"You are an enigma, black dragon. I sense nothing wicked in you, but there is something else, something not of dragons. There is an unusual magic within you Nightstar the Black, and I would know more about it. Shall we reveal your secret?\"\n\nThe cavern of the cataract filled with Galdor's magic, the air alive with energy. Nightstar could feel invisible tendrils probing around the edges of his silver scales. Small sparks licked gently over their surface, their touch painless, yet strange. It was no invasive assault, rather a tentative exploration, more a magical reconnaissance with the sole purpose of gathering information. Nightstar could feel Galdor's presence as he skirted around the peripheral of his own magical boundaries. He was aware he could push back and resist if he wanted, but this wasn't an attack and he didn't feel threatened.\n\nThe manner in which the green dragon's magic flowed was similar to the wispy tendrils inside the pearl of knowledge when he had touched it. Instead of the sharing experience Nightstar received from the pearl, it was his own information and secrets that were available.\n\nGaldor followed the threads of his magic, tracing a path to his core, seeking knowledge and sampling the strange mix of human and dragon magic. He could sense Galdor's amazement as he carefully explored this new unknown magic, trying to understand the weird blend that should not exist, but somehow did. He was confused and intrigued, his mind eager to understand and Nightstar felt it all.\n\nGaldor reached deeper, gently probing his mind and weaving his way through the complex web until he found the centre. A bright ball of blinding white energy rotated and swirled, spinning like a small sun at the centre of its universe. Thin dark threads mixed through the cloudy substance like black veins in white marble, expanding until the energy became black and the threads where white, black and white reversed. The darkness of the black was as intense as the blinding white, the blackest black with thin white lines swirling through its midst.\n\nThe energy constantly changed, slow and gradual then instant, pulsing black then white, white then black, no discernible pattern, always moving. Through Galdor's touch, Nightstar knew he was now aware of what it was he was witnessing. Galdor had discovered what made up the unnatural blend of magic. He understood his discovery.\n\nHe felt the green dragon retreat, slowly withdrawing until his touch was no longer detectable.\n\nThe cavern came back into view and Nightstar blinked until his eyes came into focus. Galdor was still in front of him, snout close to his own. His own eyes vacant for a moment as he too returned to himself, taking a little longer than Nightstar. He stared in wonder, intense yellow eyes alive with questions he already knew the answers to.\n\n\"Show me,\" he whispered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Answers",
                "text": "Nightstar backed away putting some distance between himself and the other two dragons. His own magic crackled and popped as small sparks of energy leapt from his scales and swarmed over his wings. The air was charged with anticipation and the familiar tingle of transformation gripped his body.\n\nNightstar let go the spell holding his dragon form and released the magic. When he had first changed into a dragon, Alduce needed to hold the spell, always aware of the sorcery he manipulated to keep his dragon shape intact. He was fearful if he wasn't careful in maintaining the spell, he would unintentionally change back.\n\nAlthough there were many various ledgers, scrolls and books filled with sorcery and magic, being a sorcerer didn't come with instructions.\n\nAs Nightstar grew, a new persona emerged and his own individual dragon spirit strengthened, taking over the chore of keeping in form. No longer did the sorcerer need to hold the spell in place, fearful if he let go, his dragon's body would change back into a human. The form of the dragon remained unconsciously in place and now, no effort was required.\n\nTo change back was now the opposite of what it had once been. Rather than just releasing the spell, Nightstar was required to will the change. The dragon released his magic, relinquishing his prominence and allowed the human passenger inside to come forward. There was no conflict or struggle for control, the two halves of the one whole worked in tandem. Alduce adapted, learning from Nightstar's spirit, when in dragon form it was best the dragon persona should have control. He was still very much aware of Nightstar's experiences and emotions, present throughout. It was difficult to explain just how it felt and he would never be able to put it into words. If he wanted to explain it to someone, he would have to say it was something one must experience for themselves to understand. He didn't fully understand himself and had learned, against all his scholarly instincts, to try and accept it for what it was.\n\nNightstar's hold on the dragon released completely and his black scales glowed from beneath, white light shone from between the gaps, highlighting their borders and brightening the cavern. The magical sparks fused with the light emanating from within, wrapping the black dragon in an ethereal corona. The wavering shape of the dragon inside grew smaller and began to change, distorting like a shimmering heat haze.\n\nGaldor stood transfixed, his yellow eyes reflecting in the light of transformation, like the eyes of a cat in the dark.\n\nSlowly a new shape formed as the corona shrank, tiny in comparison to the size of Nightstar. Hard black scales faded, to be replaced by human skin tones, wings and talons changing into arms and hands, legs and feet. The magical metamorphosis finished and the air settled, leaving behind the tangy smell of ozone. Where Nightstar stood a moment before, a naked human crouched, back arched, on the cavern floor.\n\nAlduce pulled himself up from the cold rocks, fighting to keep his balance. The disorientation of transformation passed quickly, it still remained severe and unsettling, but it passed much faster than it originally had. The duration of the pain he faced\u2014each time he transformed\u2014had thankfully lessened. The extreme stress his body undertook, regardless of which form he was changing into, was unavoidable. It was still agonising, but it was a small price to pay. Continued practice helped and Alduce credited the living blood Sunburst had donated, a key factor.\n\nStanding straight, the giddiness subsided to something close to bearable and he stretched his arms, his joints cracking. He rotated his neck and flexed stiff muscles, working the tension from his human body, feeling a phantom loss of missing limbs from his dragon counterpart.\n\nHe took a tentative step towards Galdor, naked except for the small dragon amulet he wore on a chain around his neck. He ran human hands over his skin as if checking the soft flesh beneath his fingers, coming to rest on the now familiar yellow patch in the shape of a scale.\n\nChanging from dragon to human did not include clothing. Dragons knew no modesty, it was a human affliction, and with Nightstar's help, Alduce had come to ignore it.\n\n\"Greetings magnificent Galdor,\" Alduce said, performing a flourishing bow, \"I am honoured to stand before you once again. I apologise for the deception, I meant no offence. I hope you understand the necessity as to why I keep my identity hidden.\"\n\nGaldor was silent, eyes flicking from the human to the yellow dragon who had moved to take a protective stance next to the sorcerer.\n\nSunburst's body was tense, his muscles bunched, his body at the ready, like a snake preparing to strike. Alduce wasn't sure how Galdor would react and, and from Sunburst's readiness to jump to his defence, it was obvious the yellow dragon was apprehensive too. Sunburst was a smaller dragon and any well intentioned confrontation with Galdor would result in his demise. He was outsized and severely disadvantaged. The fact his yellow friend was prepared to stand by him, no matter the outcome, spoke volumes.\n\nA deep growling rumble grew from Galdor's chest like building thunder. Sunburst drew his neck back, claws spread wide for purchase, waiting. The growling rumble increased, but it wasn't the snarling displeasure of anger.\n\nGaldor's growling manifested into joyful laughter, echoing around the cavern. Small trails of smoke escaped his nostrils and huge tears ran down his face.\n\n\"By flame and by fang! Once again you have impressed me, little human,\" he teased.\n\nA great relief washed over Alduce and the tension of revealing himself to Galdor drained away. Sunburst also visibly relaxed. The green dragon had discovered who Nightstar was when he explored his magic and Alduce didn't know how he would react. Perhaps Galdor believed he owed him a debt of gratitude or perhaps he was more accepting of humans. It didn't matter, he wasn't angry and that's what counted.\n\n\"Did I not tell you, all those years ago, you would become the most powerful human to ever practice magic?\"\n\n\"I believe you may have said words to that effect,\" Alduce said, recalling how thankful Galdor had been when he opened the portal to his freedom. \"I thought it was in gratitude for my help.\"\n\n\"No. Not in gratitude. Green dragons have no need of flattery. I told you, I have a unique ability to sense all kinds of magic. Even though you were an apprentice when we first met, I could sense a great power in you.\" He cocked his head and proclaimed, \"I was correct.\"\n\nAlduce couldn't argue with Galdor's words. He wasn't being boastful. Like Sunburst, when he knew something was true and he was right, he stated it as a fact. He liked that dragons could be direct and to the point in this way and recorded this trait in his writings, giving it a name: dragon logic.\n\nGaldor brought his snout close and sniffed at the small silver dragon Alduce wore around his neck. \"You still bear the magical artefact we found on the dead mage. That's what I could smell on you, faint but present. It was a long time ago and I couldn't quite place it, possibly because it was in the guise of your silver scales. It appears you have learned to use its magic to your advantage.\"\n\n\"I have only scratched the surface of its potential. Though I hate to admit it, there is a lot I don't know about it. I haven't been able to find out much about its origins or abilities, although I am still searching for the answers. It holds great power and I am careful when I explore its uses.\"\n\n\"Cautious and clever,\" Galdor said. \"You have matured, Alduce, but you haven't lost your humility. If only Blaze could have met you, perhaps his view of humans would be different.\"\n\n\"From what we have learned of Blaze,\" Sunburst said, \"I think it unlikely. I have come to know Alduce and have grown to like him, but it was not always so.\"\n\n\"I can see you share more than the bond of friendship, Sunburst. The way you stood with Alduce, ready to fight in his defence tells me much. If a dragon is prepared to champion a human it is for good reason. I haven't known you long, but I can tell you are of strong moral character and a dragon of spirit. There is a tale for telling there, I am sure.\"\n\n\"I thank you for your kind words Galdor. When I first met the little human,\" Sunburst said, \"I was prepared to flame him. However, my strong moral character has\u2014more than once\u2014saved his soft human skin.\"\n\nAlduce groaned. No doubt he would hear the mighty Galdor's description of a certain yellow dragon, of strong moral character, time and time again.\n\nSunburst turned serious, \"It was difficult for me to accept what he was when I first found out. It took us time and much hardship before we were able to put aside our differences. How is it you can so readily accept him?\"\n\n\"I have seen inside his spirit and have touched both man and dragon,\" Galdor replied. \"It is more than enough for me to know that there is no evil intent within either. I have lived a long life Sunburst and have seen many strange things. Perhaps I make my decisions based on my experiences.\n\n\"You are powerful, Alduce. When I searched inside your magic, your strength overwhelmed me, you are stronger than anyone, be it man or dragon, I have ever met. I am glad there is no malevolence in your soul. You could have easily pushed me away, locked me out, but you chose to make yourself free to my searching, hiding nothing. I find your openness refreshing.\"\n\n\"I have learned not to keep secrets from those I trust,\" Alduce said, \"and I'm still learning.\" He shared a look with Sunburst. \"Ever the scholar, as my old master was fond of saying.\"\n\n\"You have a lot of explaining to do, Alduce. Tell me all, please. I would like you to teach me about the sorcerer, the dragon he becomes and your friendship with Sunburst. We will not be disturbed here and you can take as long as you need.\"\n\nAlduce told Galdor the Green everything. He told of his fascination with dragons, even before their chance encounter, and how it inspired him to create the Atlas of Dragons. His desire to compile the ultimate collection of all the dragon lore he could discover. This had led to the discovery of shape shifting, the regrettable theft of the unhatched egg and his transformation spell. He told of his journeys to other worlds, what he had learned of the rare Flaire metal and the artefact they found on the body of the dead mage.\n\nWhen he spoke about his time on Salverta, Sunburst's home world, the yellow dragon helped with the story. Galdor listened intently when they explained the blood sharing and their strange experiences, both taking it in turns to describe their own part in the process and how they perceived what had happened.\n\nSunburst took over when they told of the Extractor and his own captivity and Nightstar's role in his salvation.\n\nGaldor was the perfect listener saying nothing while they spoke. He never interrupted and absorbed every detail.\n\nAlduce concluded their tale with their journey through the passageway, to the world they now knew as Sull and their meeting with Topaz.\n\n\"You bound your atlas with my hide!\" he laughed. \"A fitting use of my gift. I imagine it looks rather spectacular.\"\n\n\"The magic imbued in it will protect and preserve the book much better than ordinary leather ever could.\" Alduce said.\n\n\"And your green dragon hide looks fantastic,\" Sunburst added.\n\n\"I have a few more questions, then we must return to the grotto and let the others know I have concluded you are no threat. Alduce, it would be best for all concerned if you leave the cavern of the cataract as you entered; a black dragon. We will keep your secret between us. And,\" Galdor performed his best imitation of a wolfish grin,\" I would very much like to see you transform back into Nightstar.\"\n\nEven though Alduce knew he was safe, standing next to all those teeth in his tiny human body, he found the presence of Galdor's deadly grin terrifying.\n\n\"I am curious as to how well you mimic a dragon and mask the human inside. I would smell human or dragon magic, so I know you don't use either. How is it you manage it so convincingly?\"\n\n\"You can't smell it or sense it because it isn't magic. I used science and human sorcery, magic if you will, to initially bring about the transformation. When I change now, the spell is just a catalyst. I still need the magic to start the change, but once I transform into Nightstar, the dragon takes over.\" Alduce explained. \"Nightstar is a real dragon. I am convinced that is why he is as undetectable as anything else. With the exception of Sunburst, you are the only other dragon who knows my secret. When I first changed, I learned to imitate Sunburst and the dragons of his colony. After I started to behave like a dragon, it became more natural, like I was acting on an instinctual level. The more time I spent as a dragon, the stronger Nightstar's presence became.\"\n\n\"And he managed to go undetected from our moot and our leader, Winterfang,\" Sunburst said. \"Not an easy task, believe me, that frosty old dragon sees almost everything under his snout.\"\n\n\"Do not let him hear you calling him old,\" Alduce said. \"I happen to know it is a touchy subject with him and it is disrespectful.\" Winterfang was many things, but Alduce, through Nightstar, knew he was a great leader. And fair in his judgements.\n\nSunburst dipped his head, \"Sage advice. I'll remember that.\"\n\n\"When I change into Nightstar, I'm no longer human and I transform completely into a living, breathing dragon. I am convinced the spirit from the unborn dragon is Nightstar. My own consciousness is still there, buried deep within the dragon. We have learned, Nightstar and I, to let the dragon part of our unusual partnership, take control. We share thoughts and feelings and I trust him completely. He is with me now, observing everything I do, feeling everything I feel. He is me and I am him. I wish I could explain it, but I can't. It is what it is. I have accepted it, as Nightstar has. We have learned from each other and it works for us both.\n\n\"When Sunburst gifted me three drops of his living blood, the conflict between my human side and the dragon spirit lessened. This is when his persona truly emerged and started to develop. The blood was the missing ingredient that makes our strange dichotomy work. If it wasn't for the unique chain of events that led to this, I expect I would have struggled to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of being part dragon.\"\n\n\"You are the scholar, Alduce,\" Galdor said, \"and even though your own understanding is limited to your experiences, I trust you are the only one qualified to make that conclusion. I am of a mind to agree with your summary; it is what it is!\"\n\n\"One last thing before Nightstar returns,\" Alduce said. \"The transformation has a rather annoying side effect. The metabolic rate of the transformation, coupled with the size and bulk of a dragon, leaves me utterly and completely ravenous.\"\n\nGaldor snorted. \"Ha! I have a good remedy for hungry dragons. Bring forth the black dragon, Alduce. Galdor the Green will lead him and Sunburst on the hunt.\"\n\n\"At last!\" Sunburst said. \"I love that remedy. Yellow dragons think best on a full stomach. Quick sorcerer, summon Nightstar so we can hunt. Do you have curly bucks here in Alvanor?\" he asked Galdor.\n\n\"We have many species of deer, I'm sure we'll find something to your taste.\"\n\n\"I'm sure we will,\" Alduce said. \"Deer, fish, cattle, anything with legs...\"\n\nSunburst snorted, \"Alduce, I would remind you of my strong moral character.\"\n\n\"And stronger appetite,\" the sorcerer said, stepping back putting enough distance between them to transform himself back into the black dragon.\n\nSmall sparks gathered on the rocky ceiling above his head and the amulet warmed his skin. The air was alive with the expectation of magic. Alduce didn't need to be outside for the transformation to take place and didn't need the open sky. The Flaire artefact could use natural lightning if it was available, but it could also pull the energy it needed from its surroundings. He swayed as blue-white light arced down from the rocky ceiling above, thin tendrils finding their target. A spidery web of lightning ran over his body, covering him in a bright light, illuminating the cavern.\n\nThe man inside the bright cloud of light fell forward and began to grow, his limbs stretched, forming into talons, flesh turning to scales. Small wings sprouted from his back, unfurling into huge black ones.\n\nIntense pain washed through him as he changed, blood flowed through his veins like fire as the sorcerous metamorphosis reconstructed his body, expanding and stretching, transforming human flesh and bone to dragon skin and scales.\n\nHis mouth distorted, morphing into a long angular snout and filling with sharp teeth. It opened wide and issued a muted growl somewhere between agony and satisfaction.\n\nNightstar was back.\n\nThe black dragon reared up as much as the cavern ceiling would allow and flexed his wings, stretching and snapping them, then folded them into his sides. His tail flicked from side to side and he rolled his long neck.\n\nHe was aware it was the same kind of exercise Alduce performed when he returned to being human.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Galdor said, \"it was the exact reverse of when you changed into Alduce.\" He stuck his snout in close to the silver scales on Nightstar's chest, sniffing. \"Yessss, I can sense the magic, now that I know what it is. It's faint, almost undetectable, a mix of human, dragon and the Flaire metal.\" He inhaled again, nostrils flaring, \"But it quickly fades to nothing. All I smell now is a dragon, as real as any other.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Nightstar said. \"As long as it is only you that can sniff it out. I'm pleased to know that after I change, any trace of the magic dissipates quickly. I suspect this is why other dragons, who don't have your sensitive snout for magic, are unable to detect any trace of humanity.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Ald... Nightstar, no other dragons have my unique snout. Your secret is safe with me.\"\n\nNightstar's belly growled, expressing a deep hunger.\n\n\"If you're finished all the sniffing and snorting,\" Sunburst said, \"I think it's definitely time to eat.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Time to Plan",
                "text": "\"We have no way of knowing how many natural dragons are still at the Lifting Plateau,\" Galdor said, \"and of those who remain, whether they are held captive or stay of their own free will.\"\n\n\"From what you've told us,\" Sunburst said, \"I think it would be unlikely they stay because they want to. What dragon would choose to live under constant threat of being consumed by the black plague? I suspect any survivors are held as prisoners. From what you've learned from those who escaped, the last place any dragon would want to be is with Blaze and his drones.\"\n\n\"I would like to learn more about the dragons he has changed, the means in which it was accomplished, and how he keeps them loyal,\" Nightstar said. \"Perhaps there is something we... or my friend, can do to help them. Reverse the spell or maybe the bond between master and slave can be broken.\"\n\n\"The ones who now wear the black scales are beyond any help, Nightstar.\" The sadness in Galdor's voice plain. \"Believe me, there is nothing left inside, they are empty and their spirits are gone. Some don't even have the ability to speak. They are so far beyond any help we\u2014or our friend\u2014can offer. While I share Sunburst's view that no dragons would stay with Blaze through choice, he is a master of deception. I do not know what lies they were fed. The dragons that escaped told me what they knew, but much remains a mystery. It is possible they are oblivious to my return. He convinced them the humans deserve to be eradicated and manipulated them into starting a war. What they believe and how he convinced them, be it his talent for twisting the facts or his magic, I cannot say. The remains of my old colony is stagnant, polluted by Blaze's corruption. I returned over four decades ago to learn of Blaze's fight against humanity. He waged a war on the southlands and razed the towns and cities there. Some of the dragons with me now were involved at first, when they thought their only choice was to defend themselves. Blaze convinced them the humans were to blame for my disappearance and the other dragons that vanished after I was gone. He enthralled them with a glamour. After the first attack, once the adrenalin of battle wore off, some dragons came to realise how they were manipulated. They knew the slaughter was wrong.\n\n\"They fled the colony before Blaze could stop them. They hid, staying clear of the dragons from Blaze's new order. After Alduce opened the way home for me, I was lucky enough to encounter a few of these free dragons and avoided blundering headlong into trouble. I have found myself to be much more cautious since my liberation.\"\n\n\"What magic does he wield that is strong enough to beguile a host of dragons?\" Nightstar asked. \"Dragons possess a natural magic and any conjuration would have to be powerful indeed if it could enthral so many.\"\n\n\"That is a mystery that I have long pondered, Nightstar. It is of great concern to me. There are rumours of an object of power, a secret Blaze closely guards.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea what it might be?\" Nightstar asked. The presence of Alduce became more prominent in his mind. This was something the sorcerer might have knowledge of. \"Magical artefacts can be dangerous.\" He thought of the Extractor, the enemy who had once captured Sunburst. \"I have seen how they can corrupt even the most powerful of magic wielders.\" The staff of the Extractor had once been such an artefact. Nightstar was glad it now rested at the bottom of a deep, distant ocean, safe from human hands... and perhaps dragon claws.\n\n\"Whatever it may be, it is shrouded in secrecy.\" Galdor expelled a long sigh. \"My moot was disbanded and Blaze now uses the cavern as his own chamber. No dragon is allowed entry into his private chamber and it is guarded by his black scaled converts. We have little information and what we have learned only leads to more questions. With so many unknowns, it is difficult for me to decide on the best action to take. Do we stay hidden and do nothing, remaining comparatively safe? Or do we take action and risk the lives and freedom of every dragon not under Blaze's control?\"\n\n\"We need more information,\" Sunburst said. \"We must find out if this magical talisman exists and what it is. Once we know more, we will be better equipped to deal with Blaze and stop him. We can save the dragons he holds captive. Nightstar and I have some experience in this area.\"\n\n\"I admire your enthusiasm, Sunburst, but I fear for your safety. If any natural dragons still remain at the Lifting Plateau, I would see them freed. Being held in captivity is no way for a dragon to live. This is an area I have my own experience in. Though I wish I did not. I can't help thinking, why wouldn't he inflict the black plague on them all? Are we too late to do anything useful? Have they all been changed? Is it an unnecessary risk that outweighs any reward? Through time, dragons eventually fade from existence. It saddens me to know the natural dragons of Sull are no longer free to fly through the skies. Blaze believes he is changing our fate. The irony of it is that he is only speeding it up. I truly believe he has spiralled into madness. Ultimately he must be stopped but I don't want to see any more dragons suffer.\"\n\n\"I may have an answer to one of your questions,\" Nightstar replied. \"It is highly probable Blaze keeps some natural dragons for breeding.\"\n\nSunburst and Galdor looked horrified.\n\n\"Let me explain. It is known that when some creatures are changed by magic their whole physiology becomes different. Infertility is a possible side effect of the black plague. His converts were once natural dragons. While they are many, your world isn't overrun with new black dragons, is it? His numbers must be made up from the original colony. Your skies are not crowded with dragons. Sunburst and I remarked upon this when we first arrived.\"\n\n\"What of you Nightstar? Do you think you might suffer the same affliction?\" Concern crept into Galdor's voice.\n\n\"I do not believe it is the same for me. I am a real dragon, regardless of my origins, I'm perception sure.\"\n\n\"Of that, I have no doubt,\" Sunburst quipped. \"Remind me to check with Amethyst, just to be sure!\"\n\nNightstar tilted his head at the yellow but chose not to be drawn in by his teasing. It was Sunburst who constantly reassured him his transition was more than just a change of skin and scales. Nightstar the Black was a fully functioning dragon.\n\n\"It makes sense,\" Galdor said, pulling Nightstar's thoughts back on topic. \"About the others Blaze has inflicted the plague upon, I mean. Even though it is abhorrent to think of it. It is something I never even considered. I fear my position as leader is woefully misplaced. Yet I can't sit back and do nothing, but I can't risk it either. If even one female is left at the plateau I must act, but I don't know what I can do. I cannot stand to see what remains of my colony slowly, year after year, decade after decade, fall to the black monster who calls himself a dragon.\"\n\n\"Do not doubt yourself, Galdor,\" Nightstar said, \"you were gone for a long time and were powerless to act. It is because of you there are still free dragons living here. You are the one keeping them safe, giving them hope.\"\n\n\"A hope I don't truly believe myself,\" Galdor admitted. \"I am too close to our plight and find it difficult to look at objectively. I think of Blaze and I see red. It clouds my judgement. I do not know which way to turn.\"\n\n\"We offered our help before,\" Sunburst said, \"let us try.\" The yellow dragon looked at Nightstar and this time he nodded his black head. More often than not he would scold the yellow for his impetuous behaviour. His friend was all too prone to rashly jumping in to situations without considering the consequences. Sunburst usually acted without fully thinking things through, a victim of his own impulsiveness. Today was different. Nightstar agreed. Sunburst had the right of it. They must help Galdor.\n\n\"Sunburst is correct. We need to investigate, gather information. Once we attain a clearer picture of who remains at the Lifting Plateau and what this unknown magical talisman is, then we'll be in a better position.\" He eyed the yellow dragon. \"My yellow friend has a charitable spirit and an inquisitive nature. He is a champion of all dragons, confident and without fear. He will rush headlong into danger never stopping to question his actions. They are traits I admire in him.\" It was Sunburst's turn to stare at Nightstar. \"And sometimes they make me want to roar. His sense of adventure can often get him into trouble, a lot of trouble. But I'm with him on this.\"\n\n\"You forgot my superior intellect and clever humour.\" Sunburst blew a small curl of smoke from one nostril.\n\n\"I haven't forgotten. I was just thinking how I'm going to explain this extended absence to Blood Rose.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to endanger you both. You are guests to my world,\" Galdor said.\n\n\"Relax, mighty Galdor,\" Sunburst said, \"Nightstar and I know the risk. It is just his way of looking out for me. We are both aware of the seriousness of our task. We are brothers of blood and there's no dragon I would rather have at my side.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sunburst,\" Nightstar said. \"As would I.\"\n\nThe yellow dragon winked one eye at Galdor, \"And every good adventure needs a hero. So who better to accompany him?\"\n\nGaldor nodded his head slowly, unconsciously mimicking Nightstar. \"One wing beat at a time, Sunburst. First, as you have both so rightly stated, we need to find out what's going on at the plateau. Once we know that, then we can devise a plan to defeat Blaze.\"\n\n\"When you put it like that you make it sound simple,\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Nightstar groaned, \"is ever simple when you are involved.\"\n\n\"What I do know about Blaze is you must not underestimate him. He is clever and ruthless. He plotted and schemed until he was rid of me. Not only has he exploited his own species to further his plans, he has systematically attacked and destroyed the human inhabitants of this continent in an attempt at eradicating them to the point of extinction. Over the last forty years his black host have ranged farther and farther south, attacking and burning every human building, every village and town, every city.\n\n\"We have remained hidden and observed him from afar. His host is at least three times the size of our new colony and we have no way of stopping him, but we watch. Witnessing his airborne attack would have been a frightening enough sight for a dragon. I can only image how terrifying it must have been to the humans, especially when they swooped down upon their homes and families. I also know he sends his patrols to search for the free dragons that escaped. We see them pass overhead from time to time, but we are well hidden. Every once in a while he captures one of us and converts them to the black. You have observed our ways and know why we are ever cautious. We must preserve those who remain free. I shudder to imagine what would become of this world should we all become slaves to his tyranny. All life as we know it would come to an end. There would be no more humans\u2014if any survived\u2014and no more free thinking dragons. Blaze would rule an empire of death and destruction and no living creature, be it man or dragon, could hope to stand before him.\"\n\n\"Then he must be stopped,\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"We must find the magical artefact,\" Nightstar added, \"and if possible, destroy it. If it is something that corrupts minds, then it has no place in this, or any world.\"\n\n\"It seems every course of action is fraught with danger,\" Galdor said. \"We don't know what horrors the Lifting Plateau has in store for us. How dangerous the artefact is. We risk capture, death, or worse, the black plague, if we are discovered.\"\n\n\"I will travel to the Lifting Plateau,\" Nightstar announced. \"By myself,\" he avoided eye contact with Sunburst. \"I will find out what we need to know.\"\n\nSunburst looked to Nightstar, \"No! You can't go on your own.\"\n\n\"I am black, you are not,\" Nightstar said, dragon logic the yellow couldn't argue with, \"even if we disguised the colour of your scales, you would still shine with a magic that Blaze might sniff out. We have no way of knowing what he is able to do or what powers this artefact holds.\"\n\n\"But who will watch your back? Who will be your guide? I can't stand by and do nothing while you risk everything.\"\n\n\"Sunburst,\" Galdor spoke, \"your loyalty to your friend is admirable. I know only too well how you must feel. Nightstar has the right of it. I don't like it either, but I see it is the only way.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Sunburst protested.\n\n\"Look at the dragon before you,\" Galdor cut in. \"He is Nightstar the Black. In your own words you told me you trusted him with your life and not to doubt his abilities. I have seen into your friend's heart, looked deep down into the very core of his being. You are right... and yet he is so much more. If any dragon can do this, it is Nightstar. I trust him to return to us with the information we need. I must, I have no other choice but to put my faith in him once again. He is different from the human who helped me escape, yet the same at his core. His black scales are an advantage Blaze is ignorant of. It is as he says,\" he looked at Nightstar and bowed his head. \"Not all black dragons are the enemy and I would count you as a friend, Nightstar the Black.\"\n\n\"He is a friend to all dragons,\" Sunburst said, \"who better come back, or Blaze will know a wrath no dragon from this world has ever witnessed!\"\n\n\"I do not doubt it,\" Nightstar grinned. \"I have seen your wrath and barely survived. We will call that our back up plan, should we need it.\"\n\n\"Pah!\" Sunburst snorted. \"You've think you've seen it. I was easy on you! You don't even have a primary plan yet. Back up indeed!\"\n\n\"Then let's come up with one,\" Galdor said. \"I think we need to involve a few more dragons, Nightstar. Not to infiltrate the plateau, but you will need a guide, a dragon who knows the lie of the land.\"\n\n\"And I will accompany them. Just try and stop me!\" Sunburst stated. His tone brooked no argument.\n\n\"Very well,\" Galdor said. \"Are all dragons of the White Mountains as feisty as this one, Nightstar? One day I would very much like to visit there.\"\n\n\"There are none there like Sunburst, he is one of a kind. They are strong, it is true, but they are welcoming too. The dragons of the White Mountains have a saying. You are only a stranger the first time you visit. They are a colony I am proud to be part of.\"\n\n\"As it should be,\" said Galdor. \"The Lifting Plateau was once like that. I hope we can take back what has been stolen and return to friendlier times.\"\n\n\"Then let's meet this guide and get flying,\" Sunburst flapped his wings. \"This feisty yellow is ready to rush in headlong. Whatever the plan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Sleeping Dragon",
                "text": "Topaz dropped low into the approaching valley and Sunburst followed; he was still a little too close for Nightstar's liking. The Blue female followed Galdor's request to lead them to the plateau, but she didn't like it.\n\nGaldor may doubt his abilities as leader, but the free dragons of Alvanor had no such reservations. He was still a strong leader and his colony never doubted he would liberate them from Blaze and his black army.\n\nAzyrian made up the fourth member of their group, a bronze shadow following Nightstar silently through the air. He suspected the quiet bronze didn't just accompany them due to his expert knowledge of the landscape surrounding the Lifting Plateau. His muscles flowed like molten metal beneath armoured scales, power rippling through his body.\n\nNightstar didn't have much experience with metals and was impressed by Azyrian's physical presence. While all dragons, regardless of size or colour were awe-inspiring, the big bronze reminded him of a sculptor's work of art, a masterpiece forged in metal.\n\nThere was no doubt in Nightstar's mind, Azyrian was with them in case they encountered any trouble.\n\nTopaz landed close to a small copse of dense trees, taking shelter at their edge. Nightstar understood why Galdor had chosen the short tempered blue to guide them. She was extremely cautious and knew exactly what would happen if they were discovered. She took her task seriously and made sure they all followed her instructions implicitly. Sunburst was trying hard to keep on her good side and Nightstar silently thanked his yellow companion for not upsetting her. While Sunburst didn't challenge her flying abilities on the way here, he didn't miss a wingbeat as she weaved her way through the demanding terrain.\n\nTopaz was aware of her bright blue scales and shrunk into the treeline to disguise her from any airborne patrols. Sunburst followed her lead, pushing his bright yellow body into the gaps between the tree trunks.\n\nNightstar landed in the open and made his way to where the blue and yellow dragons waited, Azyrian dropping from the sky and quickly joining them.\n\n\"This is as far as we go,\" Topaz said, eyeing Nightstar. \"To get any closer would not be wise. Are you sure you want to do this?\" Her words were less harsh than they had been when they had initially met.\n\n\"If we are to learn anything useful at all,\" Nightstar replied, \"then it must be so. I am best suited to the task.\"\n\n\"I wish you luck, black dragon,\" she said. \"It says much for your character that you are willing to help us.\" Looking into the sky above, she continued, \"Perhaps I was wrong about you. Fly high and fly free.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Topaz. I will.\"\n\n\"I am leaving,\" Topaz added, \"Sunburst, if you wish to return, you can fly back with me. Azyrian will wait in the shelter of these trees for Nightstar's return.\"\n\n\"Then I shall keep him company,\" Sunburst replied. \"I understand why it wouldn't be prudent for me to accompany him, even though I want to. I will stay with Azyrian and await his safe return. If I am unable to go with Nightstar, I should at least be here should he need my help.\"\n\n\"Your loyalty is without question, Sunburst. Your friendship with Nightstar says much for his character.\" She faced Nightstar once more. \"Understand I want only to preserve our safety. If I was blunt with you when we first met, it was not without good reason. I was not always this way.\" She spoke as if it was the last time she would see him.\n\n\"I will be back. I would like to get to know Topaz the Peaceful,\" Nightstar stressed the word, \"in less difficult times. If she will allow me the chance.\"\n\nThe blue dipped her head in a curt bow, \"I hope to see you all return safely.\" Pushing off into the air she turned her head towards Sunburst and added, \"And when we don't have Blaze to worry about, I'll show you how to ride the currents of the plateau!\" She sped off back down the valley, flying low to the undulating ground, using her practiced skill to utilise all available cover.\n\n\"She has flown stormy skies, \"Azyrian said, \"and lost many friends. We all have. We are not what we once were. These dark times are hard on us all. Especially Galdor.\"\n\n\"I see the way you stay close to him,\" Nightstar said. \"He is fortunate to have you with him. Blaze has much to answer for and we are here to help. Galdor's burdens are many. His loss of years, loss of home and of his colony. The mental anguish he suffered in the caves. The dragons lost to the black plague. Blaze tricked him and betrayed his trust. It should have been enough to break his spirit. But is has not. My perception tells me he will not give up. It is who he is.\"\n\n\"And every free dragon of Alvanor will stand with him,\" Azyrian said.\n\n\"And he knows it,\" Nightstar said, \"and that is also a burden he carries. He cannot bear to see his colony slowly destroyed. He needs to fight back, but struggles with putting dragons in danger.\"\n\n\"Shells must be broken if you want eggs to hatch,\" Azyrian said. \"What are your thoughts, Nightstar?\"\n\n\"Nightstar,\" Sunburst said, \"is going to boldly fly his big black hide into the Lifting Plateau, sniff around with that over inquisitive snout of his, find any free dragons and locate the magical artefact. Then,\" he drew the word out, \"he's going to leave with everything he needs and come straight back here, avoiding any unnecessary conflict. Simple as that!\"\n\nAzyrian cocked his head towards the yellow and Nightstar detected a twinkle of humour in the Azyrian's liquid green eyes.\"\n\n\"He has as a way with words,\" the big bronze said to Nightstar. \"It is a good plan. I particularly like the part when you come back after avoiding any conflict.\" His clipped tone was reassuring rather than abrupt. \"Be extra careful, Nightstar. Do not underestimate Blaze. You enter into the unknown. The Earth Mother knows what twisted horrors lie in wait.\"\n\n\"In and out,\" Sunburst said. \"A dark shadow in a dark place. Quick and stealthy. You will need to disguise your silver scales. Impressive as they are, now is not the time to draw attention to yourself.\"\n\n\"I have an idea about how to do that,\" Nightstar said, \"and want to test the results before I infiltrate the plateau.\"\n\nHe extended a talon and traced the edges of his silver scales with the sharp tip, stopping at the topmost point of his star. Gently at first he probed the razor sharp talon into the place where the scales overlapped, pushing harder and forcing it beneath his armour. Piercing the unprotected skin he carefully drew the sharp talon down, opening a small cut, and slid it free. A warm sensation oozed from the incision as a blend of dragon and human blood, an amalgam unique only to him, trickled down over the silver scales.\n\nThe blood spread and Nightstar used his magic to smooth it out over the scales. It crept across them like a tide covering sand, slow and with purpose, until the silver was painted with blood. The star glowed red, light emanating from within, pulsing as the magic tingled his senses, and radiated brightly before fading. The pulsing slowed and each time the brightness faded, the star grew darker. When it cycled through the phase for the final time, the silver was gone and all that remained were black scales perfectly, blended with the rest.\n\n\"Strong magic,\" Azyrian remarked. \"Quickly dissipated. You are indeed adept in the magical arts.\"\n\n\"Can you sense any residual magic, now it is done?\" Nightstar asked, changing the subject. A human lifetime and an apprenticeship of many years helped in his proficiency with the dragon magic. \"I need to ensure it can't be sniffed out by others. The caves of the Lifting Plateau are the last place I want my deception to be noticed.\"\n\nSunburst pushed his pointed snout up to Nightstar's chest and inhaled deeply. \"You look strange without it. I know where it is, yet there is no trace. Nothing magical either. It's as if it never was. What do you think, Azyrian?\"\n\nAzyrian stepped closer and mimicked Sunburst's actions. \"Nothing,\" he declared in his economic way with words. \"I smell no magic at all. A nice trick. I wonder how long it will remain and if it will it rub off accidentally?\"\n\n\"The silver should stay dark for a while,\" Nightstar said. \"I've deliberately used a small amount of magic to ensure it can't be outwardly detected, so it won't last long.\" He knew when Flaire was involved, the normal rules of any kind of magic or sorcery, didn't always apply. The Flaire artefact he wore as a human became the silver scales on Nightstar's chest, therefore he wasn't entirely sure how it would react. \"It will serve its purpose and as Sunburst says, in and out, nice and quick, no heroics.\"\n\n\"Leave any heroics to me. Good plan,\" Sunburst said. \"After all, it's what I'm good at!\" He butted his angular head into Nightstar's flank. \"Better make a move then. The sooner you're away, the sooner you'll be back. I'll stay here and look after Azyrian and we can get to know each other.\"\n\n\"I hope your ears aren't too exhausted by the time I return,\" Nightstar told Azyrian. \"Our yellow friend has a tendency towards the loquacious.\"\n\n\"It means I have a charitable spirit, an inquisitive nature, and a clever humour,\" Sunburst told Azyrian.\n\n\"And not long-winded and chatty?\" Azyrian asked Sunburst. \"I will watch over your yellow companion,\" he said to Nightstar.\n\n\"I was afraid to leave our bronze friend alone with you, but I see he will be fine.\"\n\n\"Do not worry for us Nightstar,\" Azyrian said, \"we will indeed be fine. There is ample shelter for us to remain hidden. It is you I worry about.\"\n\n\"I will be hiding too. Hiding in plain sight... hopefully. Just another black dragon amongst many, strange as it sounds. I am used to being the only dragon of my colour back home.\" It was true, he was the only black dragon at the White Mountain. His dragon home.\n\n\"Fly south from here,\" Azyrian said, \"the plateau is about an hour's flight. Fly high and fly free, friend Nightstar. Return to us safely.\"\n\n\"Be careful, brother,\" Sunburst added.\n\n\"I will.\" Nightstar rose from the valley floor and circled the copse of trees where the yellow and bronze dragons hid. He dipped his wings once in farewell then veered south for the Lifting Plateau... and the unknown."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "The natural feature of the plateau loomed ahead. Nightstar scanned the surrounding skies for company, but there was none. He had only seen a few other dragons in the distance, flying in other directions. He continued towards his goal unchallenged.\n\nIt wasn't the getting in that bothered him, it was getting back out. His plan, much to Sunburst's disapproval, would be to walk right into the caves of the plateau like he belonged there. It made sense. Who would stop him? A black dragon in a colony of black dragons. He would be a part of their elite and he needed to believe it. As long as he set off no alarms, in theory, it should be just as easy to stroll back out. Should.\n\nGaldor said Blaze used their old moot chamber as his home. If there was anything to find it would be there. They discussed the layout of the caves that ran underneath the plateau and Galdor revealed there was a maze of old passages, not as commonly used as some, that may help him approach undetected. If he stuck to the less frequently used passageways he reduced his chances of being discovered.\n\nHe also warned that drones guarded the chamber and were under instruction not to let any dragons inside, without their leader's express permission. He would tackle that particular problem once he was inside. One wing beat at a time.\n\nThe thermal updrafts from below the plateau surprised him. Their warm air currents filling his wings and pushing him skyward. It was a sensation unlike anything experienced before. Air pressure buffeted his lower body, catching outstretched wings and propelling him high above the plateau's edge. The effortless act of soaring with the rising thermals filled him with a guilty joy. He understood why the free dragons missed the Lifting Plateau. It was a natural place for dragons to make their home. No matter how many times Nightstar took to the air, there was always something there to remind him of that first flight. The scholar deep down inside the dragon mind still marvelled at the inherent instinct possessed by the dragon spirit.\n\nNightstar dropped back down through the turbulent air and flattened out his approach. There were many entrances to the underground labyrinth and, with Galdor's detailed instructions, he would find one less frequented... or hopefully not used at all.\n\nThe ground rushed up to meet him and he tilted his wings, slowing his air speed enough to hover for a split second, before gracefully touching ground. A perfect landing atop the aptly named plateau and more crucially, all performed with the minimum of noise.\n\nThe plateau was quiet and nothing disturbed the earie silence except the wind through the long grass. The soft whispering exaggerated in the absence of any other sound. The colony of the White Mountain was a place filled with the noise of dragons, the sounds of life. The Lifting Plateau, for all its serene beauty, felt like mute despair. Dragon ears were extremely good, but not even the humming drone of insects or the distant cry of bird song reached him.\n\nNightstar's muscles were tense and he held his body in a state of readiness. His stance reflected his feelings, crouched low and ready to spring into action. Skulking through the long grass he looked for a formation of craggy rocks near the eastern edge of the plateau. A landmark from Galdor's directions, he called the sleeping dragon. All the rocks looked the same as he searched for a rocky outcrop that resembled anything close to a dragon shape. Maybe it looked like a sleeping dragon from the air. Galdor hadn't thought to elaborate on... wait. There it was! As he moved stealthily towards the eastern edge, changing his angle, the formation took shape before his eyes. Three large rocks, a head, a back, and tail, aligned themselves like a syzygy of celestial bodies, revealing the rather accurate silhouette of a slumbering dragon. The rock representing the head was shaped in such a way that it even appeared to have horns.\n\nImpressive as the sight was, Nightstar couldn't help being reminded of another stone dragon. Galdor had told them of his encounter upon his returning home. At first he believed the dragon was a statue carved by some long forgotten artist. The green dragon sadly explained the stone dragon turned out to be an old friend, a blue dragon called Baelross who was once a member of his moot. He suspected, given that Baelross was in the same caves where Blaze had tricked him, the black dragon was responsible.\n\nThere was no explanation Galdor could give as to how a living dragon could be turned to stone. If Blaze was responsible for this cruelty, where would he stop? Dragons didn't usually harm their own. They had seen the aftermath of Blaze's magic enough times to know, that black dragon, followed his own path, his magic growing along with his ambitions.\n\nThe sleeping dragon perched on the rim of the plateau. Nightstar climbed onto the largest of the three rocks, atop the stony back of the beast. He pushed his neck out beyond their craggy edges and into the updraft. Wind blasted his face, rushing past his ears like waves crashing onto a storm swept beach. Eyes half closed against the blustering updraft, he fought back watery tears, squinting to locate what Galdor assured him was his best way in.\n\nA dark cave mouth was situated on the sweeping cliff face making up the steep east side of the plateau. It wasn't as obvious an entry to the caves running through the plateau and was positioned beyond casual observation. Galdor was right. You would have to know where it was to see it. Dragons leaving the plateau rode the currents of the updraft upwards and away from the secluded cave mouth. Dragons arriving usually, according to Galdor, dropped in from above. This limited the secluded cave's exposure. If you coupled that with the out-of-the-way location, it was easy to see why Galdor favoured it. While it wasn't exactly a secret, it was reasonable enough to assume dragons who were aware of it would use a more convenient entrance. The western side of the plateau was dotted with an abundance of wide, accessible caves that led down into the underground and was the most commonly used point of entry.\n\nThe eastern cave was only just wide enough for a dragon of his size to fit through and it would be a tight squeeze, which would be difficult. Add a turbulent updraft, forcing you in the opposite direction to where you needed to be, and difficult became challenging.\n\nTopaz insisted his experience with the Leviathan's Gullet would stand him in good stead. It was true, she had led them blindly into dangerous air. This time he could see his landing point and knew what to expect.\n\nLeaning into the updraft and partially opening his wings, he angled himself forward. The strong currents of air prevented him from plummeting downward. He leaned deeper into the updraft grasping the rock with the tips of his talons, his weight supported by nothing but rushing air. He knew exactly where the cave mouth was and gave one last scrabbling push from the rocky back of the sleeping dragon into nothingness.\n\nFor a second he hung suspended, the air catching in the pockets created by his half open wings. The sensation was so different from the easy flight he was used to. Violent eddies swirled out from under his wing membranes, whipping and lashing with raw power as the slipstreams they created fought to twist and turn him. By fractionally opening and closing his wing he was able to control his position, neither rising nor dropping too much. This wasn't challenging at all, this was terrifying. The jagged cliff face deflected the rushing air in all directions and at any second a slight misjudgement of angle or wing position could result in collision.\n\nHis wings ached from the strain but lending magic to strengthen them was not a good idea. If Blaze was as strong as Galdor thought, using magic this close to his lair was not the wisest choice. He didn't want to take the risk, so any use of any magic, no matter how much he wanted to use it, wasn't an option. This was all down to his flying skills.\n\nSlowly, stealing inch after inch, Nightstar crept through the air towards the cave mouth. He approached from the top, lining himself up above the apex, then closed his wings slightly and sped directly for the cave entrance. As soon as his head and neck entered into the aperture, he recognised his mistake, his front end dropping as the airflow abated, as the first half of his body passed across the rocky threshold. His tail end performed the opposite manoeuvre, lurching upward as the currents still pushed from below. Momentum carried him forward, a result of luck rather than good judgement, spinning his rear end over his head.\n\nSummersaulting tail over snout he crashed into the cave floor, disorientated and tasting dirt. He shook his head and blew gouts of dusty snot from his nostrils. It was a difficult landing and even a seasoned flier would have found it challenging. Small consolation. If Sunburst were with him he would be reminded this was the second time in as many days his aerial expertise had resulted in a crash landing. Well, Sunburst didn't need to know. Nightstar considered himself an excellent flier. He possessed strength and speed and was nearly unbeatable when it came to altitude and stamina.\n\nA niggling voice deep down in Alduce's subconscious surfaced to remind him of something the sorcerer's old mentor liked to say. Master Caltus was known for his pithy aphorisms and witty observations. You are never too smart to learn a little more or pride comes before a fall were a couple that sprang to mind. Nightstar felt the shared memory. He heard the voice of Caltus speak the words and saw the old man's kindly face. His aching rump reminded him that he didn't know as much as he thought he did when it came to flying.\n\nHis old master would surely have something profound to say if he met the black dragon his former apprentice now shared his life with.\n\nNightstar righted himself and took in his surroundings. His dramatic entry into the cave was less than quiet, but the rushing of the air as it whooshed passed the cave entrance, drowned out any sounds of his awkward landing. He hoped.\n\nThere was no sound other than the rushing air outside. The cave was dry and dusty and bore no evidence of being used recently. That was promising. He peered into the dark, eyes adjusting to the gloom. The way ahead was clear, but a feeling of foreboding filled the passageway. Something definitely wasn't quite right at the Lifting Plateau.\n\nHe set off down the dusty passage, the wisdom of master Caltus still fresh in his mind.\n\nDon't go looking for trouble, for it will find you soon enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "In and Out",
                "text": "The deeper Nightstar descended into the underground labyrinth, the darker his mood became. A creeping feeling of oppression seeped under his scales filling him with anxiety and despair. The narrow cave walls emitted a stifling claustrophobia that was difficult to ignore.\n\nHe didn't feel any magic he recognised or sense a warding spell designed to dissuade. This was something entirely new to him. And he didn't like it one bit.\n\nHe couldn't begin to imagine living with these emotions every day. Any dragons exposed to these feelings continuously, must be a sorry bunch.\n\nThe free dragons spoke of the Lifting Plateau with fond memories and he was sure it wasn't always this way. If this was Blaze's vision of how a colony should be, he could see why Galdor and his followers wanted him stopped.\n\nHe followed the dusty tunnels remembering Galdor's directions and tried to remain positive. Focus on the task.\n\nIn and out; gather the information they needed, then leave.\n\nIt was a fairly straight route and so far the path presented no obstacles. Galdor worried Blaze may have sealed off the less frequently travelled passageways or they may have been rendered inaccessible due to rock falls. It didn't look like anyone knew they even existed, which was a good thing. Unless there was a rock fall and his path came to an abrupt halt. If the dragons here didn't know of these old ways, they wouldn't know they were blocked and they wouldn't be cleared.\n\nNightstar silently thanked his luck and desperately hoped it held out. He was overthinking things and his normal pragmatic self knew it was the feelings of gloom making him think this way, almost convincing him it was pointless to even try.\n\nWhat would Sunburst say? He wondered. Thinking of his yellow friend helped him battle through the suffocating tunnels and lifted his spirits. He was always ready with a quick witted observation or a clever retort and came with his own unique view of life. Most of the time he was cheerful enough to lift the lowest of moods. Sometimes he was infuriatingly annoying. And on occasion, a force to be reckoned with. Sunburst had wanted to accompany him and now he wished the yellow was here. He knew it was risky enough on his own but right now he would have welcomed the company. The last time they had faced their dangers, it was together. It felt odd not to have him at his wing.\n\nHe could feel the presence of Alduce too, urging him forward. The thoughts in his head were clear and pleasantly calming. The sorcerer was convinced something other than the tyrannical black dragon was causing these unnatural feelings. Alduce was an authority on a number of subjects and was seldom wrong. He was like a dragon's own human sense and Nightstar valued his judgement.\n\nThe tunnels came to their first real intersection. Up until now it was a simple choice of left or right, or choose the widest tunnel. Galdor had told him to take the narrowest tunnel to the left at this junction. On a whim, he moved a little farther down the middle tunnel, which disappeared round a sharp bend, a strange curiosity enticing him onwards. He still marvelled at his exceptional vison in the dark, his dragon's eye an advantage he didn't take for granted.\n\nCraning his neck around the bend, he froze. The passageway widened and offered a view that stretched out for at least half a mile. Two silent forms sat at the far end of the tunnel where it widened out to a large circular cave. They sat unmoving, like faithful hounds set to guard their master's door. Two black dragons.\n\nNightstar knew he still had a way to go before the moot chamber and wondered what Blaze's drones were guarding down here, away from everything. He wanted to retreat back around the corner, pull his head into the safety of the tunnel where he wouldn't be seen. But he didn't. If they happened to look his way they would surely see him. There was a faint familiar scent, almost something he recognised, yet he couldn't quite place it.\n\nWhat were they guarding? It didn't make sense. They weren't keeping watch on these old tunnels, not that far away. If they were it would be much more logical to position themselves at the intersection and dragons, if anything, were creatures of logic.\n\nWhat would be worth keeping down here in the depths of the plateau's cave system? Why would you have dragons this far down?\n\nOf course! It must be where the natural dragons were held. His snout finally identified the scent.\n\nFemales. Everything falling into place.\n\nThe two black dragons sat motionless, staring off into the distance as if in a trance, and Nightstar was glad it wasn't in his direction. Their silence and lack of animation puzzled him. Was this how drones acted?\n\nGaldor was sure all traces of their past identity were wiped out when they were taken by the black plague. They were just as much prisoners as he had once been, but at least they were no longer aware of their stolen lives. Galdor had eventually escaped, there was no escape for these poor beasts other than death. Nightstar's intense curiosity\u2014which he believed was inherited from his human counterpart\u2014got the better of him. Only ever having viewed a changed black dragon from afar, he wanted a closer look.\n\nCreeping from the shelter of the bend, he slowly advanced, taking the utmost care to move as silently as possible. Every step painstakingly exaggerated as he carefully placed his talons, one after the other, in a slow motion. He knew that if the two black dragons turned around or heard the slightest sound, he would be caught. He just wanted to observe them a little closer. When would he get a better opportunity than now?\n\nHe heard Sunburst's voice in his head, reminding him not to take any risks and to be careful. He was sure these two stationary dragons were in a dormant state, appearing awake, but actually more like sleeping with their eyes open. It wasn't really that much of a risk. And he was being careful. Best not to get too close though and stick to the plan.\n\nHe studied the dragons, examining their scales. He was as close as he dared, near enough to see every detail, his excellent vision making it easy. Their scales were a duller black than his own and they lacked the pearlescent finish, devoid of the lustre of life. A painted imitation of the real thing, fashioned from dark magic. The dragons they had once been, gone forever. He could see it as well as sense it, as Galdor must have, perception true, no doubt in his mind there was no sign of their former lives.\n\nHe was never surer that Blaze must be defeated. These poor dragons were shells of what they had once been, their spirits gone. There was no free will, no life, nothing. They were less than drones. Empty vessels filled with the poison of corruption. Nothing remained of their former selves, no chance of salvation, their only hope of redemption would be with Blaze's defeat.\n\nHe questioned his own origin, searching the memories of the man he shared a mind with. He was nothing like these creatures. He was a real dragon. His birth was not from the egg, well not directly. His was from magic and all dragons possessed magic. He had a spirit, a dragon soul. The life that allowed him to grow into the dragon he was, given a second chance. Alduce still felt some guilt in using the unhatched egg. It was part of what he needed to do in order to become Nightstar. It was never malevolent, never evil, he wanted to become what he loved. He had waited a long time to find an unhatched, abandoned egg, when it would have been just as easy to take a healthy egg from the nests he had observed. His desire was to live and learn, his science and sorcery a means to an end. His transformation a creation of life, a truly magnificent discovery, that grew and thrived.\n\nThe transformations Blaze created were the opposite of everything Alduce stood for. He tore the life from living dragons, stealing their spirits, taking everything from them. They were nothing but mindless marionettes, their strings pulled by an unfeeling, uncaring puppet master.\n\nThe feeling of despair that filled the Lifting Plateau was strengthened by the mindless black converts Blaze had transformed. It oozed from their scales as if they had bathed in it, but it was more than that, they were part of it, although they weren't its source. Something else was at the heart of this, something evil.\n\nNightstar had seen enough. There was nothing here that would help him, he had learned all he needed to know from this unfortunate pair. He twisted his neck back towards the bend in the passageway, desperate to be away from these lifeless drones, only to discover it was gone!\n\nThe entranceway to the tunnel had completely vanished. It wasn't possible. If it was magic he would have detected it. He now felt far too close to the two black dragons, even though he'd only travelled a hundred feet at most from the shelter of the bend. Inch by inch he withdrew, not knowing where he would go, but never taking his eyes from the unmoving enemy.\n\nHe didn't like to think of dragons as the enemy, but these drones were not dragons anymore. They were weapons fashioned by a cruel master, commodities to be used up in advancement of his cause. They were the enemy of all natural dragons and would not stop to consider their actions, only obey without conscience. They would kill without hesitating and were a danger to all natural dragons. They must be stopped.\n\nHe needed to put some distance between himself and these foul creatures. He backed up until he hit solid rock, unaware of what was halting his retreat. He'd come far enough that he was back at the bend, his tail end pushed against the cave wall, now able to see the vanished intersection! What was happening?\n\nThe dragons remained in position, oblivious to his presence. Safely sheltered in the passageway once more, he took a second to check his surroundings. He was definitely back where he started. The intersection behind him where it should be, and the twist in the passage in front.\n\nCreeping back towards the black dragons just enough for his body to pass the corner in the passageway, he turned and looked behind himself. The cave wall in front of his eyes looked as if it went no farther. The rocky surfaces of the passage walls all blended together to form the illusion of a dead end. Even though his snout was inches from the corner, he struggled to see passageway beyond. If he didn't know it was there, he wouldn't have believed it.\n\nThe optical illusion must have prevented any dragons approaching. Anyone observing from the other side of the passage would be totally oblivious of anything beyond.\n\nThat was why there were no guards posted this far along the tunnel. Nobody knew the passageway existed past what they could see. His head spun as he stared at the rock face that wasn't real. He knew it was false, yet he couldn't see through it. His head swam a little as he focused his eyes trying to see passed the rocky mirage.\n\nHe doubted his own magic could have created a better illusion. Everything neatly blended together, from floor to ceiling, from the left to the right cave walls, conjuring the very real illusion of solid rock. The end of the passage. There was no reason to come into this tunnel and inspect it, everything you needed to see was right there in front of your eyes. The appearance of a dead end falsely setting the expectation this was as far as the tunnel went.\n\nNightstar made his way back to the intersection and stood in front of the narrow tunnel he was supposed to follow. It would be easy to get lost down here in the depths if he hadn't had Galdor to tell him which way to go. The tunnels of the Lifting Plateau were full of surprises, Galdor said, and it was best not to stray too far off track.\n\nIn and out, that was all he needed to do. Stick to the plan. He would have liked to explore these underground tunnels a little more thoroughly, but for now he would have to make do with using them to locate the moot chamber.\n\nTaking one last look behind him at the corner of the optical illusion, he wondered what other secrets lay hidden in the depths of the Lifting Plateau.\n\nHe set off once more, entering into the narrow tunnel he hoped would take him safely to his intended destination."
            },
            {
                "title": "Discovery",
                "text": "The chamber of the moot was situated directly below where Nightstar lay. After hours of creeping through abandoned tunnels and passageways he was finally where he wanted to be.\n\nGaldor had sworn him to secrecy regarding his lofty vantage point. No other dragon was aware of its existence and Galdor wanted to keep it that way.\n\nNightstar was pleased. If Galdor wanted this passageway to remain unknown, he must be thinking to a future where he would once more be hosting his moot from inside this chamber. Subconsciously, the green dragon was not as unsure as he thought he was.\n\nNightstar respected Galdor's reasoning. A moot was a private affair where leaders assembled to make decisions that would impact the colony. If dragons could observe these meetings, it would no doubt lead to rumours and gossip mongering and when it came to gossip, dragons were experts. Being a leader was never an easy job. Galdor, more than most, was aware of how his actions could be interpreted by gossips and eavesdroppers.\n\nHowever, it was now Nightstar's turn to spy on the chamber below. His secret observations were crucial if they were to learn what Blaze was hiding. He pressed his belly to the floor and took his time to creep along the narrow tunnel. The floor in front of his snout was riddled with a honeycomb of holes. Holes that were perfect for a sneaking dragon to peer through.\n\nAngling his long snout to one side and pressing his eye to one of the larger holes, he peered into the cavern below. The last time he gave way to this kind of curiosity his actions had landed him in trouble with the leader of the White Mountain moot. His own compulsion to learn secrets he wasn't ready for, had backfired. He paid the penalty for his misdeeds and came to understand his betrayal of trust. Now, irony twisted his situation and his subterfuge was for the good of others; Galdor and his colony. It filled him with the feeling of being part of something bigger. He was included by these dragons, they wanted his help.\n\nBefore he was all about himself, be it Alduce or Nightstar. He wanted to learn, to find a reason, to explain, to quantify. His journey as a dragon offered him, like the unhatched dragon, a second chance. A way to open his eyes and see life from another viewpoint. It wasn't just the transformation, the physical change. It was so much more.\n\nAlduce the human didn't realise life was passing him by until Nightstar the dragon\u2014unintentionally\u2014exposed him to a completely different perspective. His scholarly ways were still important, but they were no longer just his life. Life was for living, for friendship hard earned, for sacrifice and for love. The human inside could study the mysteries of science, but he needed the dragon to teach him how to embrace life.\n\nHe would help Galdor's dragons because it was the right thing to do. He was a dragon. It was what he must do.\n\nHe blinked and his inner eyelid flitted across his eyeball clearing away the dust from the cave floor. He bent his neck and turned his head, finding the perfect position to view what lay beneath him.\n\nFramed through the rough hole in the rock, the bulk of a huge black dragon was partly visible.\n\nIt could only be Blaze.\n\nHe lay curled on the floor, his front legs drawn underneath his body, tail wrapped around himself and coming to rest at his snout. He lay like a cat on a hearth, the white flash on his chest rose and fell, vivid against the dark scales. Air whistled through his nostrils as he slept, exaggerated in the silent confines of the moot chamber.\n\nNightstar shifted his body, turning his head around and swapped his other eye to the aperture in the rock. The change in position revealed a different part of the sleeping dragon through the limited vision of the spyhole. He starred, wide-eyed in amazement and forgetting to blink, at the sight exposed from this angle.\n\nSitting on the floor, partially obscured between the inner curve of Blaze's neck and his thick serpentine tail, nestled a huge glowing object.\n\nIt was perfectly round and appeared to be made of glass. It reminded Nightstar of the pearl of wisdom, the artefact Winterfang sometimes communed with. It was an ancient source of knowledge, forbidden to all but the oldest and most responsible dragons. A pearl of wisdom\u2014or moonstone\u2014according to Winterfang was a source of mystery and wonder. It homed many strong spells, was the keeper of great wisdom, and a source of guidance for dragons who searched its depths. It was not evil, but one must take care when consulting with it. It was an unknown magic and it was always best to be cautious when dealing with the unknown.\n\nIt was clear this giant orb wasn't a pearl. Nightstar was positive it was responsible for the feelings of misery and despair permeating the caves of the Lifting Plateau. The more he stared, the more he was mesmerized by it. It glowed with an ethereal illumination, pale light radiating out from its insides. A swirling vortex of dancing, weaving clouds raced beneath its surface. Greys and whites mixed, fading brighter then darker. As the inner light pulsed and darkened, two red pinpoints shone out, barely visible then intensely bright. Baleful eyes, hypnotically terrifying, searching for a victim.\n\nHe couldn't pull his eye from the spyhole, staring at the orb, transfixed by its swirling interior. He was drawn to its power, seduced by its hidden secrets. Alduce surfaced in Nightstar's consciousness, urging him to look away, a sense of fearful urgency prominent in the sorcerer's mind.\n\nHe wanted to break the link forming between his mind and the glowing entity below, but couldn't. He knew he must, he sensed the urgency from Alduce, could feel the pull of attraction, yet he was helpless to act.\n\nAlduce rose up from within Nightstar's mind, pushing the dragon spirit aside. He didn't need perception to warn him this was bad. The sorcerer was usually content to let Nightstar guide his dragon self and be the silent observer. A passenger on-board the dragon vessel, savouring the experiences of the ride, like a sailor welcomes the deck beneath his feet. Along for the journey rather than the helmsman.\n\nHe couldn't sit back now. He must grasp at the ship's wheel and steer Nightstar from danger.\n\nHis attempt was in vain. He couldn't stop himself, couldn't pull Nightstar's attention away from the malevolent magnetism of the glowing globe.\n\nDizzying vertigo crashed into his brain, the cave floor spun and bucked beneath his feet... his talons. He focused his mind and tried to push Nightstar away from the threat. The divide between dragon and man grew blurry as the Alduce-Nightstar amalgam slipped from consciousness.\n\nThe dragon closed his eyes and surrendered to the blackout, breaking the bond between his physical self and the huge orb below. A feeling of falling tugged at the last vestiges of his waking mind and he descended deeper into the waiting blackness.\n\nAlduce fell too. His fall steeper and faster. His mind spanned the distance between the now unconscious Nightstar and the orb, sucked down in a maelstrom of impossible darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Alduce opened his eyes and struggled to remember. Where am I? And how did I get here? His head pounded and he tried to lift it from the floor. The floor? The grey swirling substance he lay on was not a floor of any construction he was familiar with. It supported his weight, he presumed, but did he really have any weight?\n\nHe rubbed his eyes, the action a parody of the real thing. The floor that wasn't a floor moved under him. It was like looking down from above the clouds, except these clouds were a solid surface.\n\nThe clouds reminded him of flying, of soaring, of...\n\nNightstar!\n\nHe wasn't a dragon anymore, he was Alduce. Yet he wasn't. This wasn't real. He sat up and the pain in his head begged to differ.\n\nHe could feel the presence of Nightstar, distant and unresponsive. He was able to brush the dragon mind but unable to wake him. The floor swirled and he looked away, nausea and disorientation fighting for dominance.\n\n\"Welcome,\" a voice rang out from behind.\n\nAlduce spun around, searching for the voice's owner, the sudden movement causing a wave of dizziness. The area behind him was as empty. The distance obscured by clouds in all directions. He was in some kind of dream world or spirit dimension, separated from the physical realm.\n\n\"I do not often receive visitors,\" the voice spoke with a hint of cruel humour.\n\n\"Show yourself,\" Alduce said, forcing as much confidence into his words as he could. \"Or return me back to where I belong.\"\n\nA wisp of misty red vapour, transparent and thin, rose from the swirling floor. It tapered upward and formed a narrow column, expanding as it gained height, like a miniature whirlwind. It surpassed Alduce's height growing half as much again, corporeal yet without substance.\n\nThe spinning vapour thickened, darkening from red to black as it became more solid. As the whirling slowed, the vapour took shape, small tendrils and wisps filling out and moving with purpose. The rough outline of a figure coalesced from within the mist, materialising into being.\n\nHuge feet splayed out on the cloudy floor, inhuman and grotesque. Black scaly claws with talons the colour of ancient bone. The smoky vapour rushed around the feet, growing into thick muscular legs plated with small scales, each one half the length a finger. Alduce thought of the unhatched dragon and the coat of scales he had used for his metamorphosis. The scales of the creature appearing before him were of a similar size, but possessed none of the beauty.\n\nThe figure grew, torso and arms solidifying from the venomous vapour, coated in the same black scaled armour. A thick tail lashed the air as it materialised, whipping back and forth like an angry cat, disturbing the vapour, its end tapering to a pointed blade, sharp and deadly.\n\nWings rose up from behind the creature, spiked, stunted tips protruding over its heavy shoulders, similar to the wings of a bat, too small for flight.\n\nThe creature's head appeared, a swirling mass of hazy steam, hissing as it completed the last part of the ensemble. Long horns swept back from the creatures skull, yellow and stained. Spikes ran from between the horns along the top of a flat head and down the creature's back.\n\nIt was the vision of nightmares, smouldering red eyes glared out from above a pointed snout. Sharp angled cheekbones tapered back to small flat ears and it was covered from head to foot in black scales of varying size. It was a human shape, all be it three feet taller than any normal sized human, with the characteristics and features of a dragon.\n\n\"Here I am,\" the creature said, its words as sharp as its teeth. \"Cower before me, human!\" Its wings snapped out, unfurling like ancient leather and it spread its arms wide. \"Am I not a sight to behold?\" Its arms opened to expose a jagged flash of white lightning that looked as if it had been painted across its chest with a sword blade.\n\nThe creature turned in a circle, arms outstretched, as if admiring itself before a mirror.\n\nAlduce stood his ground. He suspected the creature couldn't harm him, not here in this realm, or it would already have tried. It was all bluster, but it didn't make its manifestation any less terrifying.\n\nThis was where the malevolent force originated from. It reeked of ancient arrogance, a felled god cast from favour, bloated with self-importance, used to being obeyed.\n\n\"Lost your tongue?\" it spat out the words, flicking its own blood red tongue between pointed teeth, the gesture crude and threatening.\n\nBefore Alduce could answer, its mind slammed into his head, tearing through his thoughts. He staggered, grabbing his head with both hands, struggling to remain upright. Severe pain ploughed through his already fragile mind as the creature probed deeper.\n\n\"Get out!\" Alduce screamed, forcing the creature from his thoughts and throwing up a mental barrier. He could feel it scrabble at his defences, like rats clawing inside his skull.\n\n\"A wielder of magic? Your kind are a scourge. Your defences are weak, human.\"\n\nAlduce felt the scrabbling increase, tearing at his defences. He pushed his mind forward, a mental wave crashing through the creature's attack and washing it from his mind entirely.\n\nIt was the creature's turn to stagger as it felt the full force of Alduce's counter attack. The sorcerer quickly focused, seeking calm and throwing up a defensive shield. His mind was protected behind a wall within his head, strengthened by his will, closing off his thoughts and keeping any further unwanted incursions at bay.\n\nThe creature shook its head and folded its wings, \"You have a strong will, Alduce the sorcerer.\"\n\nAlduce stared in puzzlement, wondering how it knew him.\n\n\"Yes I know your name. I saw what and who you are. You are not the only one who possesses a strong mind. My foray inside your thoughts may have been brief, but I have learned much about your life. About the black dragon you become. I am quick when it comes to searching another's mind. You revealed much of yourself before rudely kicking me out.\"\n\n\"Why have you brought me here?\" Alduce asked, changing the subject. \"And where is here?\" It concerned him that the creature had learned about Nightstar. It was loose inside his thoughts for only a few seconds. What else did it know?\n\n\"Here? This is my prison, my cell, my punishment from your kind! I have not brought you here, you fool. You have been lurking here for years and now I have finally caught you.\"\n\n\"I have no idea what you're talking about,\" Alduce said. \"I've been... elsewhere. Years? Not me.\"\n\n\"If not you then who?\" it demanded.\n\n\"I don't know! Perhaps if you tell me who you are and what this place is, I will be able to answer your questions.\" Alduce hoped he could get some information from the creature.\n\n\"You do not recognise me?\" It sounded surprised. \"You do not cower before me or feel guilt at what your kind have done to me?\n\n\"You are Blaze the Black?\" Alduce asked.\n\n\"Blaze is no longer in control. He is a means to an end. I am a prisoner inside this globe and Blaze is my hand in the outside world. He will be my salvation, my freedom. Humanity have known me by many names. I am Djinn. I am Demon. Devil. Jinni. Pazuzu and Shaytan. Your kind have many names for me. I am a God. A destroyer of worlds. Civilizations weep at my deeds and tremble before my power.\"\n\nAlduce recognised some of the names this mad creature called itself. He was sure it was mad. There was mention of demons and djinn in some of the books he had studied. They were powerful creatures, often corrupt and malevolent. They were known for their evil. They would tempt the unwitting into doing their bidding, controlling them like puppets. Blaze was this creature's puppet. He must get this information to Galdor. They weren't fighting a dragon, they were fighting a being with the power to destroy everything they knew. If this djinn was loosed upon the land, not only Alvanor would be laid to waste, Sull would become a wasteland. Every living man, dragon, animal, and plant would be consumed.\n\nThis creature was pure evil. A character of nightmares come to life. The orb was its prison and so far, it was contained. The djinn said Blaze would be his salvation, said he would be his freedom. He must be stopped before he could escape his captivity. It was planning to use the unfortunate black dragon to help him escape. Alduce had to find out how.\n\nSummoning his bravery he asked, \"If you are as powerful as you boast, how are you still held prisoner? Surely a djinn that can destroy worlds would have little trouble with a globe of glass.\"\n\nThe djinn roared. \"Impudent maggot! The wizard glass is strong, but I am stronger. It will break when I have collected enough life force. Blaze was strong willed. Yet like all dragons he was mundane and complacent. His hatred of mankind was his inner demon,\" he laughed. \"I planted the dark seed of corruption, nourished it and exploited his weakness. He was not an evil dragon, just a stupid, ambitious fool who thought he could use my power to further his cause. Little did he know it was his addiction to the power that would be his downfall.\"\n\n\"Dragons are stronger than that,\" Alduce said. Even if Blaze's hatred for humans was strong, it shouldn't have allowed the djinn to take control of him, especially if it was confined in a prison of wizard glass. Wizard glass was virtually unbreakable. If this djinn had been trapped inside a globe fashioned from the magical glass, it was for good reason.\n\n\"The wizard glass should have prevented you breaching its confines.\" There was no connection to exploit, no way to seize control of Blaze's spirit.\n\n\"Ordinarily, yes,\" the djinn grinned, \"but I am no amateur.\" The implication that Alduce was, wasn't lost on him. \"Sometimes I even impress myself.\" The djinn waved his hand in a gesture akin to a conjurer, pointing into the air and drawing a circle with his finger. Wisps of light moved from his hand to form a circle.\n\nAlduce stared through the circle, like a sailor looking through a porthole, to see a scene shimmering into focus.\n\n\"I am not without some power, even trapped in here,\" the djinn said, indicating towards the unfolding vision. \"And it's not only Alduce the sorcerer who takes what he needs from the nest of a dragon.\"\n\nThe vision became clearer. Alduce looked out on a land of greens and browns, the colours vividly shining through into the dull dream realm. Mountains filled the horizon, grey monoliths tipped with white. In the foreground a female dragon sat in the hollow of what could only be her nest. She rose and stretched, then leapt into the air, probably to search for food.\n\nThe unguarded nest was home to four eggs patterned with a blue-green marbling, every one unique. The ground shimmered a short distance from the nest and the grass, green and verdant a moment before, withered and turned black. A dark twisted form rose from the dead patch on the grass, shadowy and faint.\n\nThe dark shade reached out to the dragon's nest and extended a grasping claw furnished with long talons. It rested its claw on each egg, rubbing the shell lightly, as if testing each one. It moved back to the second egg, choosing this one against the others. It wasn't apparent why it favoured this egg, externally it was no different from the others as far as Alduce could see.\n\nIt placed its other claw on the egg and started to sweep both over the shell's surface, slowly at first then faster. The shell changed colour, darkening to a deep blue, then to black. The shade stopped, lifted its misshapen claws from the egg's surface and extended a finger. Resting the sharp talon on the surface of the shell, it looked directly through the hole at the djinn.\n\nThe djinn turned to Alduce and drew his hand across his chest in a diagonal motion, tracing the line of the jagged white flash. Its palm glowed as it brushed the scaly chest and he clenched it in a fist then threw a fork of lightning through the portal. It struck the dark shade's finger and its hand jerked, dragging the claw over the shell.\n\nAlduce looked at the djinn's chest and then through the portal at the egg. The white mark carved on the shell of the egg was an exact replica of the flash on the djinn's chest.\n\nIt drew back his arm, opened his palm and pushed it forward towards its shady accomplice. The shade mimicked the action towards the egg and the jagged flash pushed through the shell, and Alduce thought, on to the chest of the unborn dragon inside.\n\nThe djinn sighed and exhaled, his breath blew through the portal, swaying the grass as it reached the egg. The surface of the shell faded from black returning to the original marbled blue-green of its siblings. The shade wavered and dissipated as the djinn's breath washed over it.\n\nHe turned away from the portal and waved a hand, dismissing it from existence.\n\n\"Easy when you know how,\" it said. \"Not exactly what happened, but you get the idea. I gifted him my mark and my hatred for humanity. I may be stuck in here, but there are always others willing to do my bidding, scrabbling at my feet for favours. The weaker the mind, the easier the control. They know I will reward them upon my escape.\"\n\n\"The egg was Blaze before he hatched. He was marked by your touch from birth.\" Alduce understood now how the djinn was able to connect with the black dragon and manipulate him.\n\n\"I waited a long time for the opportunity,\" the djinn said, \"and I've had a lot of time to plan.\"\n\nIt jerked its head around, staring out into the cloudy landscape. \"The entity that lurks in the shadows is watching. I thought it was you, even though you denied it. You stand before me and it is out there still, just beyond my vision, yet I can sense it.\"\n\nAlduce peered out to where the djinn stared and could see nothing. The cloudy dream realm was dull and featureless as far as... a darker streak sped out from the wispy background, barely visible. He could feel a new presence as it raced towards them. If he turned his head and looked at it from the corner of his eye, he could almost make it out. Almost.\n\nThe djinn whipped round as the dark spirit rushed passed them, lashing the air where it had been. Before vanishing from sight, it spoke to Alduce. Its voice was for him alone and sounded inside his head.\n\nIts power is its weakness. The glass is the key.\n\nAlduce looked to the djinn, its ugly face an angry mask. \"I will find you!\" it shouted after the strange force, \"and when I do... \" the unfinished threat hung in the air.\n\n\"What was that?\" Alduce asked.\n\n\"An annoyance, nothing more. I am more interested in how you have come to be here.\"\n\nAlduce didn't doubt it. The djinn must realise if he could get inside its prison, it might be able to get out the same way.\n\n\"Curiosity, I expect,\" Alduce said, unsure himself. He suspected Winterfang's pearl of wisdom was created from wizard glass. Nightstar had managed to see inside the pearl, even though he was trespassing. It was filled with wisdom and knowledge. His journey through its secrets afforded him the ability to travel inside its realm. A place not unlike this dream realm. He couldn't rely on Nightstar's perception as Alduce, yet he was positive it was the same inside the globe.\n\nIt was larger and filled with the djinn's spirit, its essence, its life force. Constructed from magic, this was a cage made to hold the djinn prisoner. It was similar to the pearl of wisdom, yet different. The manufacture of the globe was something he understood. His interaction with the pearl had given his mind the ability to come here.\n\n\"I am no amateur myself,\" Alduce said. It sounded like something Sunburst might say. Thinking of the yellow dragon pulled him back to his task. He was being manipulated and felt a little too relaxed. This creature was using its magic on him. It was almost undetectable. Neither human nor dragon. He was aware he was slipping under its influence.\n\nIn and out. That was the plan.\n\nTalking to the djinn was dangerous. The more time spent inside the globe's realm, the more risk to their plan\u2014and to himself. The djinn may be mad, but it wasn't stupid. It wanted to know how he was able to enter into its prison and would exploit any information it could glean to escape. The more they conversed, the greater the chance of letting something vital slip. It was a clever creature and Alduce needed to focus on getting away from it. The longer he remained in its proximity, the more he felt compelled to listen to its words, get lost in its voice.\n\nHe now knew what he needed to do. Blaze was controlled by the djinn. It wanted out and it was gathering power. If the free dragons could destroy the globe and its contents, they would free Alvanor of Blaze, the black plague, and the corruption of the djinn. But the globe was made from wizard glass. The djinn couldn't break the glass to escape... not yet, and it was powerful. Maybe they needed to find another way to defeat it.\n\n\"You must be wondering how I came to be here?\" the djinn soothed. \"You said you were curious. I see the mystery of my plight intrigues you.\" Alduce could feel his head swim as the djinn spoke. \"I was bested by mages not of this world. They were many and they joined together to trap me. Sorcerers, magicians, mages and alchemists. Small on their own, strong together. Their prison of wizard glass was created to hold me. And hold me it has, for millennia.\"\n\nAlduce couldn't imagine the time this creature had spent trapped in its glass prison. It was small wonder it was insane and bent on a path of destruction.\n\n\"I travelled to new worlds and fed on their misery. Consumed their life force and left them barren. What right did they have to stop me? Seal me up for an eternity and dump me on this backward rock.\"\n\nHe waved a clawed hand in the air and opened another tear in the cloudy fabric surrounding them.\n\nThrough the hole in reality, Alduce watched, mesmerized by what he saw. A robed figure stepped through a portal, a portal so familiar to him it could only have been created by the power of a Flaire artefact.\n\nThe figure stepped into a cavern lit by a purple glowing light, holding the same globe that now rested beside the sleeping Blaze. Alduce rubbed his eyes and tried to look away. He knew he must, but couldn't stop himself being drawn into the vision.\n\nThe robed figure picked its way to the rear of the cavern, carefully stepping around a water filled pool. Alduce could see into the pool, its crystal clear waters disappearing into unknown depths. The figure carried the globe like a nest of wasps, fearful of the burden and ready to be rid of it. Alduce watched as he laid the globe to rest at the rear of the cavern, out of sight and hidden.\n\nThe figure returned to the portal and took a last look over its shoulder before stepping through. The portal winked from existence, not the usual shimmering he was used to seeing where it gradually faded from view. It felt as if this portal was shut down in haste, almost as if whoever closed it couldn't do it fast enough, couldn't wait to be done with it.\n\nTime accelerated and the images of the vision moved forward, faster and faster as decades, then centuries, sped past. So many years speeding past in seconds.\n\nThe dripping water formed into stalagmites and stalactites, calcite formations bathed in the beautiful purple glow. The sensation of passing time stretched out and the djinn's words whispered in his ear, closer than he liked, making his mind swim and his head dizzy.\n\n\"Millennia,\" the djinn said, \"a thousand of your lifetimes I was forced to endure. Hidden away where no eyes might see. Locked inside a glass prison with little influence on the outside world.\"\n\nAlduce couldn't move. His feet were like the stalagmites growing from the cave floor. His head pounded and his heart raced. The djinn's tactics changed. Its unsuccessful attack on his mind had failed, now it was attempting to burrow under the barrier while it distracted him with illusions. No longer trying an obvious frontal assault, it reverted to a slow creeping stealth.\n\nAlduce couldn't shore up his magical shield as the djinn infiltrated his defences. Blackness threatened to swallow his mind as probing tendrils of malevolence pushed harder to take control. He should have listened to Sunburst's advice. In and out. He was falling under the djinn's spell, isolated and alone, his mind adrift in an ocean of despair.\n\nThe djinn screamed. Alduce lifted leaden arms to his head, pain lancing through his skull. Fingers of agony tore at his brain and the djinn's wrath slammed into his mind. He could taste its raw anger as the dark spirit returned and disturbed its attempts to beguile him. He fell onto his knees as the djinn launched itself after the disappearing entity. Blackness rose up to engulf him and he struggled to hold on to his consciousness. The elusive spirit had distracted the djinn's attempts to trap his mind and succeeded in breaking its concentration. It was not happy at the interruption.\n\nHe could sense the hatred and the frustration of the djinn lingering in his mind. The elusive dark force was a constant source of annoyance to the djinn. It didn't know what it was or where it came from. It had assumed it was Alduce when it first confronted him. Alduce sensed it was even more annoyed now, believing it had finally caught the dark spirit, only to realise it couldn't be him.\n\nAlduce? A familiar voice, faint and distant, called out to him. Nightstar! The connection with the dragon's mind pushed away the foggy residue of the djinn's touch.\n\n\"NO!\" the djinn screamed as its hold on Alduce severed.\n\nCome back to me, Alduce, quickly! The mind of Nightstar merged with his own and the black dragon's strength filled him. The pain in his head subsided, the fog lifted and clarity returned.\n\nIt had taken him a long time to grow comfortable with Nightstar's consciousness, two entities sharing a single space. The djinn's influence and its beguiling words distracted his mind, making him forget about the black dragon.\n\nNow the dragon spirit was back with him, a sensation of completeness filed the void he hadn't realised was empty until Nightstar returned.\n\nAlduce threw up his mind's defences, fortifying the barrier with his unique blend of dragon and human magic. He engulfed his ethereal spirit body in the safety of his defensive shield, spreading the protective cocoon around his form and pushing it outward.\n\nThe djinn slammed into the shield forcing its mind and body against the rekindled defences. It bounced off the barrier like a wind-blown leaf.\n\n\"What are you?\" it shrieked, anger written across its cruel features.\n\n\"Leaving,\" Alduce replied and he stretched out his hand and rotated his arm in a circle in a parody of the djinn's earlier actions.\n\nThe cloudy fabric of the dream realm swirled in front of his hand to form a whirlwind vortex. The swirling mist grew and a portal manifested from its turbulent centre.\n\nFrom the opposite end of the hole in the cloudy fabric the familiar black face of Nightstar peered through. \"Hurry!\" the dragon urged.\n\nAlduce didn't need a second invitation. He stepped through the gap towards Nightstar, falling into the tunnel between realities. In his last moments of consciousness he was aware of the djinn's curses fading as the portal closed behind him.\n\nAlduce dropped the defensive spell he so desperately clung to and surrendered, letting the blackness engulf him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Nightstar's eyes flickered open. His snout lay on the floor of the cave, nostrils snorting up dust as he exhaled. The membrane on his eye closest to the floor worked to clear the gritty particles as he opened it wide.\n\nHe peered down through the hole into the moot chamber below.\n\nThe black dragon beneath him stirred, a low growl rising from a chest heaving from exertion. His eyes snapped open. Even from the limited vision of his hidden location, Nightstar could see they burned an unnatural red and were filled with hatred.\n\nHe reached into his own mind and felt the familiar passenger was back where he belonged.\n\nThe loss of not being able to feel the sorcerer's mind was a void he did not wish to experience again. The place where the mind of man and spirit of a dragon coexisted, should never be empty of either. He knew it made no sense, could not explain it, just knew he was right. Perception. It is what it is. Accepted by both entities.\n\nThe angry black dragon below, filled with the djinn's malevolent consciousness, opened its jaws and roared. The inside of the globe was a violent storm of turbulent thunderheads. Dark grey clouds roiled beneath the wizard glass, a hurricane of swirling, writhing mists pierced by two fiery points of red.\n\nThe djinn's eyes.\n\nNightstar drew back. It was time to move. After stealing one final look through the spyhole to see Blaze pacing the floor, snorting and roaring; it was definitely time to leave.\n\nHe didn't think the moot chamber's occupant knew he was here, inside the Lifting Plateau. The confrontation between Alduce and that foul creature wasn't in a physical place. From what Alduce recalled, now Nightstar could touch his mind again, the djinn wasn't aware of how the sorcerer came to be inside. The globe was a vessel to hold the djinn creature and it wasn't able to escape. Yet.\n\nOver the years it had spent in captivity it managed to reach out, beyond its glass borders, to other corruptible minds, twisting them to its will and slowly, piece by piece, setting events in motion. It was forced to be patient, cultivating its resources, gathering its strength until it could make its move. It was powerful and exploited the ill-fated Blaze to capitalise on that power. The dragon's growing magic was the key to its escape. It was only a matter of time before it gathered enough to break free.\n\nNightstar took care, slowly and stealthily retreating from his vantage point, hopeful the noise Blaze was making masked his movements. He didn't want to be anywhere near the thing that had once been a black dragon. It may look like the dragon it once was, but was far from it.\n\nThe corruption of the djinn had swallowed Blaze whole. He was just as much a victim of the black plague as the other dragons. And, Nightstar strongly believed, was beyond redemption.\n\nGaldor and the others needed to know the truth. The djinn must be stopped. If it broke free of the wizard glass, it wasn't just this world that was in danger. Alduce would think of something. His journey to the dream realm might have given him an idea of how they could beat it.\n\nThe globe was made by human sorcerers. They had managed to trap and contain the djinn before. Alduce was a sorcerer and his power and his use of magic were without question. Yes, he was only one man, but the blood of dragons flowed through his veins.\n\nNightstar backtracked through the tunnels, his mind pre-occupied with what he'd learned. Now all he wanted to do was get back to Sunburst and Azyrian, return to Galdor and inform him of what he knew. And find a way to defeat the djinn.\n\nHe could feel the urgency of his human passenger as he picked his way through the labyrinth of passageways, willing him to hurry. Alduce was concerned and when the human inside him felt like this, it was for good reason.\n\nAdrenalin fuelled his limbs as he hurried back towards the hidden exit below the sleeping dragon. He knew the stone shapes would sleep for an eternity and wished the black dragon with the white flash on his chest would do the same.\n\nIn and out, that was the plan and it was now time to employ the out part. He wanted out of these tunnels and away from the feeling of foreboding. He would feel better when the Lifting Plateau was at his tail and he could feel air beneath his wings."
            },
            {
                "title": "A Council of Colours",
                "text": "Nightstar leapt from the secluded cave mouth on the eastern cliff face. He opened his great black wings and rode the air currents up into the dusky evening sky.\n\nHe let the updraft propel him into the night air, thankful to be out of the tunnels. Away from the influence of Blaze and the djinn. He needed to fly, put some distance between himself and the caves. Alduce was shaken at his discovery and Nightstar couldn't help feeling uneasy at the sorcerer's nervousness.\n\nHe glanced out over the flat of the plateau as he rose above its edge. The dark bulk of the sleeping dragon a blurry shape on the ground below. It looked larger than before and as he passed overhead the formation shifted. A shadowy dragon shape detached itself from the rocky arrangement and rose from the grassy flatlands. An enemy lying in wait.\n\nEven in the darkening twilight he could see it was a black dragon. A drone controlled by Blaze, who in turn was controlled by the djinn. Red eyes locked with his own and Nightstar knew, without any doubt, any chance at a stealthy retreat was gone.\n\nKeeping one eye on his pursuer he pounded the air, wings beating as fast as his heart. Higher and higher he rose, pushed ever upward by the updraft that gave the Lifting Plateau its name. He climbed straight up, each wingbeat lifting him higher into the twilight sky. Faster and faster he sped, rising on the rushing thermals, effortless and exhilarating.\n\nThe drone followed him, the fading pinks and reds of the setting sun, painting its black scales in pastel hues, bright red eyes glowing in the darkness and spoiling any illusions of natural beauty.\n\nNightstar flew higher, each wingbeat lifting him closer to the stars. Each stroke of his huge black sails taking him beyond the reach of his chaser. He was Nightstar the Black, no other dragon could best him when it came to high flying. No other could climb as high as he could. He embraced the euphoria, the feeling of escaping the plateau and the sensation of pure flight.\n\nThe air thinned. His lungs screamed out for precious oxygen. He closed his eyes and drew in as much air as he could, closing his nostrils tight and savouring the stinging sensation. Cold air cleansed his body, washing away the taint of the djinn's lingering touch. His wingbeats slowed as he levelled off, the pull of gravity's fingers slipping from his scales.\n\nHe glanced below and the tiny black spec of the pursuing drone looked like a distant crow. It couldn't keep up with him. He wasn't sure if his ability to reach greater heights was due to his unusual creation, or just something he excelled at. It didn't matter, at least not to his dragon self. Nightstar accepted it without question. It is what it is, as Sunburst would say.\n\nTonight was as high as he had ever been. The clouds spread out beneath him, a sea of grey vapour sandwiched between the planet's surface and the darkness of space. He could drift forever. His night star shimmered and the disguising magic dissipated, the returning silver on his chest blending with a universe of celestial siblings. One more star in the night sky.\n\nNightstar pushed through his dreamy, oxygen starved state, leaving behind the feelings of anxiety carried from the tunnels. Being this far above the ground always filled him with a welcome serenity.\n\nHe shook his head and tipped his neck back, staring out into the unknown. Up here the unending vista of stars made him feel small and insignificant. He was loathed to leave them, yet knew he must.\n\nThe black drone was nowhere to be seen as Nightstar fell backwards from the roof of the night sky, plunging into a dive. Free falling, he plummeted straight down through the clouds, gathering speed. Air rushed over his wings as he spiralled and twisted and small trails of vapour bled from his wingtips. His elevated position in the sky and the angle of his descent put miles between himself and the Lifting Plateau.\n\nHe levelled off and fixed his wings into an effortless glide northwards, confident he was beyond pursuit, yet cautious enough to continue scanning the sky for any signs of trouble.\n\nThe black drone was long gone and Nightstar expected it had given up the chase. It hadn't seen him emerge from the hidden cave mouth below the plateau and he was only spotted when he rode the updraft. A stupid thing to do, he reflected. He should have flown downwards instead of up. He understood why the free dragons missed living at the plateau. The updraft was thrilling and it was too strong a temptation for him to resist, his actions more typical of an impulsive yellow.\n\nHe dropped a little lower in the sky, vigilantly eyeing the terrain. The drone may be gone but that was no reason to drop his defences. These were hostile skies and it would be a mistake to think otherwise.\n\nThe djinn could see through Blaze's eyes and in turn the eyes of the drones. It may be a prisoner of the wizard glass globe, but the more it learned from the outside world\u2014Galdor's world\u2014the more powerful it grew. The more knowledge it possessed, the closer it came to escaping.\n\nNightstar would be glad when he was beyond enemy territory and back with his friends. There was once a time in his life when he was content to be alone, distancing himself from potential friends and actively avoiding involvement in their lives. It was different now. He was part of something bigger and his spirit was alive. His life was complicated and dangerous, but it certainly wasn't dull.\n\nHe sped on through the night in search of the small valley, the copse of trees, and his waiting friends."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Sunburst grasped the ledge of the Leviathan's Gullet, claws scrabbling for purchase on the hard rock. He quickly shifted his weight, hopping up into the entrance chamber beside Azyrian to make space for Nightstar.\n\nThe big black twisted in the tight space, wings barely clearing the chasm walls as he landed on the ledge. He marvelled at his friend's skill in the air, making a difficult landing look easy. He remembered teasing Nightstar the first time he landed on the ledge. The black dragon only needed to try something once to be good at it. Even though the manoeuvre was familiar with them both now, it was still a tricky landing. Sunburst found it easier now than the first time Topaz tested their aerial prowess. She could be extremely irritating when it came to sharing information. He could understand that better than any dragon, being a yellow.\n\nIt was the same with Nightstar. He was keeping his snout closed about his visit to the Lifting Plateau. Sunburst sensed the anxiety in his friend and respected his silence when he enquired about his mission. He was learning incredible restraint, only asking Nightstar a dozen or so times before resigning himself to wait. Nightstar did say one thing. He was consulting his inner self. He couldn't say anything in front of Azyrian about Alduce, yet Sunburst was able to interpret his meaning.\n\nNightstar would always be a dragon to Sunburst, no matter what. He was unique not only in how he came to be, but also in the way he was able to commune with the other half of his identity. He trusted his dragon self, but would listen to his human side too. Sunburst understood why, completely. At first he learned a grudging respect for Alduce. The more time he spent with Nightstar's human counterpart, the more he came to like the human. The man grew on you. Now Alduce was his friend and he enjoyed any time spent with him. Sunburst wondered what it would be like to walk among men, as one of them, a dragon in a human disguise, the opposite of what Alduce was to Nightstar.\n\nIf Nightstar needed time to consult with Alduce's mind then it would be time well spent. Alduce was knowledgeable and was a scholar at heart. There may be some advice he could offer Nightstar that would help.\n\nNightstar was eager to return to Galdor and share his discoveries and hardly stopped for breath when he landed at the waiting place. Even Azyrian cocked his head at Nightstar's response to Sunburst's questions, recognising this wasn't Nightstar's typical behaviour. The black dragon set a pace the poor bronze struggled to keep up with, being more suited for stamina than speed. Nightstar may be master of the heights, but Sunburst was impressed by his uncharacteristic turn of speed over land. His discovery, whatever it might be, was important enough to lend a serious urgency to their return.\n\nAzyrian led them through the tunnel and into the hidden grotto. They emerged into the open area and Galdor stood waiting, Topaz and Ryvind by his side.\n\n\"I am glad of your safe return,\" the green dragon said. \"Azyrian, report.\"\n\n\"We were not seen or followed, Galdor,\" the bronze looked to Nightstar. \"Nightstar survived his foray inside the plateau and we have made all haste to return with his news.\"\n\n\"All haste!\" Sunburst said, \"We flew our wings off! Nightstar has not been himself since he returned, keeping his own silent counsel.\"\n\nGaldor cocked his head. \"My perception tells me it is important.\"\n\nSunburst would have said Nightstar looked positively pale, if black scales could appear so, but it wasn't his colour that was off. The news he carried was a burden and he would see his friend lighten his load and share it.\n\n\"Then let us retire to the cavern of the cataract, where we can discuss it.\" Galdor said. \"Ryvind, can you please find Garnet and Fern and ask them to join us? Everyone else come with me. If Nightstar has new information, perhaps we can make plans to take back what is ours. I am tired of doing nothing. It is time to act.\" His yellow eyes burned with determination.\n\nGaldor leapt into the air and Nightstar, a second behind him, was first to follow. Sunburst wondered if he was eager to get through the waterfall before the others, in case he went snout over rump again. He would keep that to himself, Nightstar's mood was serious and whatever he had to say was not to be made light of.\n\nAzyrian joined the two airborne dragons tucking his bronze bulk neatly behind Nightstar. He liked the big dragon and felt he knew him a bit better after their time spent waiting for Nightstar to return. He wasn't as surly as he pretended to be and understood Sunburst's concern for his friend when he was off on his own. He had a dry sense of humour and kept Sunburst's mind occupied, at first telling him about the dragons of Alvanor and then asking him about his own home.\n\n\"Best fall in, Sunburst the Yellow,\" Topaz said, \"I don't think we'll want to miss this. We are in esteemed company. Look!\" He followed her gaze. Both sides of the hidden grotto were lined with all the remaining free dragons. They knew Galdor was preparing for something. A silent audience stood watching, ready and waiting for their leader's words.\n\n\"I think we are going to war.\" Topaz lifted from the ground, her wings a flurry of blue as she rushed to fall in line. Like Sunburst, she sensed the change in Galdor's mood. The green sounded more like the dragon Alduce wrote of. More like the leader he had once been. He was ready to take the fight to Blaze.\n\nWar. It was a sad day when dragons fought against dragons. The dragons of the hidden grotto were desperate for change. Their suffering was as much as they could take. It was their time to make a stand. Fight for their freedom or die trying.\n\nSunburst hoped Nightstar had a plan that wasn't a backup plan. He launched himself into the air and stuck to the blue's tail. Ryvind swooped in with Fern and Garnet flanking him. Garnet dropped back behind Ryvind and Fern pivoted tightly, the small green female last to join the group.\n\nA line of eight dragons strung out across the grotto. Green, black, bronze, blue, yellow, brown\u2014russet he corrected himself, not brown\u2014red, and lastly green. A winged spectrum of serpents flying in perfect formation, snout to tail.\n\nThe steady beat of dragon wings echoed from the grotto's walls as they crossed the hidden valley. Topaz was right. They were in esteemed company. Sunburst flew with giants. His yellow chest swelled with pride to be part of their number as the silent onlookers watched from below. The hidden valley was filled with the anticipation of its residents, they sensed something momentous was happening.\n\nOne by one the dragons entered the cataract, the curtain of silvery water swallowing them whole.\n\nIcy spray bounced from his wings as Sunburst pierced the cascade, wings tensed against the downward pressure of the waterfall. He had time to blink and clear his vision before dropping to the mossy floor and sliding to a stop. He quickly skipped up onto drier rock making way for Ryvind, careful to keep his balance and catching Nightstar's eye. The black gave a slight nod and Sunburst was happy to see, this time, his friend was still upright. He was certainly a dragon that learned from his mistakes.\n\nGarnet and Fern brought up the rear and all eight dragons made their way to drier ground, shaking water from their wings, bodies dripping.\n\n\"Gather round,\" Galdor called out, raising his voice above the steady flow of the cataract. \"Nightstar, your commitment to our cause is great indeed. I speak for all the free dragons assembled here, and those outside, our thanks can never be enough. I can see you are shaken. Your bravery is without question. I know some may have seen you as another black, an enemy not to be trusted, yet you were the best one suited to infiltrate the Lifting Plateau. Your black scales have been to our advantage.\"\n\nGaldor turned to face Sunburst. \"You, as well as Nightstar deserve our thanks. You have both been caught up in a fight that is not your own.\" There was a murmur of consent from the other dragons.\n\nSunburst felt the eyes of his new friends upon him. \"Where Nightstar flies, I follow,\" he said.\n\n\"And where Sunburst flies, I follow,\" Nightstar said, looking a bit more like his usual self.\n\nSince their return to the grotto, Sunburst noticed Nightstar had regained a bit of his usual composure. He wondered if it was because he was back in the company of dragons, which he found strangely comforting considering his friend's origins. Or was it because he was away from the lifting Plateau. It was obvious to him Nightstar's time inside the plateau's underground tunnels wasn't pleasant. What was it in there that disturbed him so? Well, he would find out soon enough.\n\n\"We are gathered to hear what Nightstar has learned,\" Galdor said. \"To see if we can use his findings to rid ourselves of the black threat that strives to consume us. Nightstar, please share what you know. Help us to decide what we need to do next.\"\n\nNightstar moved into the middle of the gathered dragons and stood tall. \"I have learned many things about Blaze and pieced together what I believe is happening. Sunburst. Azyrian. I apologise for pushing you to return immediately. I should have explained a little more to you both rather than rushing back at a breakneck pace, saying nothing. I hope you will both understand why, once you hear what I have to say.\"\n\nNightstar's caught Sunburst's eye. \"I spent most of our return journey in reflection. Contemplating what I learned and piecing together my discoveries. As Sunburst knows, sometimes I can get lost deep inside myself when I need to think. I find that particular method of inner reflection beneficial.\" Sunburst knew exactly what he referred to and Nightstar's eyes shared their secret. A quick glimpse at Galdor convinced him the green dragon also understood Nightstar's meaning.\n\n\"I arrived at the Lifting Plateau unchallenged. I passed a few drones on the way there, but another black dragon was of no concern to them. It was almost too easy to fly in without being stopped. The drones are probably more concerned with dragons leaving. I was able to locate the sleeping dragon and using it as a landmark, found the entrance in the cliff face. Galdor, you were right. I don't think it has been used in a long time. It wasn't guarded, and would have remained hidden to me if I didn't know where to look. I can understand why it hasn't been used much. It was difficult to navigate into the entrance as the updrafts played havoc with my flight. They are strong! Once I was inside, I was able to follow Galdor's directions. I explored the passageways until I was deep within the heart of the tunnels. The remaining dragons not tainted by the black plague are held prisoner in the depths of the plateau's labyrinth.\"\n\nThe Alvanor dragons began to ask questions.\n\n\"Who did you see?\" Ryvind asked.\n\n\"How many survive?\" said Garnet.\n\n\"Why did you not free them?\" Topaz demanded.\n\n\"Be quiet.\" Galdor instructed them, though not too harshly. \"Let Nightstar tell his story. There will be time for questions when he is done.\" He turned back to Nightstar. \"Continue. Please.\"\n\n\"I wasn't able to see as I observed from a secluded place. I'm sorry. I realise you all have friends unaccounted for. What I do know, perception true, is where they are being held. There were only two drones guarding the entrance to their cavern. I didn't want to risk being seen. There is a foreboding presence inside the tunnels that seeps your confidence. It weakens your resolve and fills you with a despair that welcomes defeat.\"\n\nThe dragons hung on Nightstar's every word, even Galdor looked like a fledgling at a grand moot.\n\n\"If I could have, I would have attempted to free them. I still needed to find out what Blaze was up to. I was aware if I blundered headlong into an unprepared rescue attempt, I was likely to alert Blaze and his drones.\" He looked at Sunburst. \"I've had previous experience with half planned rescue attempts and was lucky before. I have learned that while luck is a welcome visitor, you can't count on it staying over long. A rescue plan is only part of what we must do.\n\n\"I managed to find the moot chamber using some old tunnels. The tunnels allowed me to get close enough to observe, but stay hidden. It's what I discovered there that concerns me. Blaze now uses the cavern as his personal chambers and he is not alone. I have found the source of his power and it is not a weapon. The black dragon is not what you think, he is as much a drone as his soldiers, yet so much more.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Galdor asked, ignoring his own instruction to keep quiet.\n\n\"Blaze is controlled by another being, a creature of extraordinary power. It uses Blaze as a vessel for its own actions. Galdor, the black dragon you knew is gone. Just as you told me the drones were beyond saving, so it is with Blaze. I suspect at first, it wasn't like this. I thought Blaze still maintained control, but over time, it slowly consumed him, stripped his mind and his spirit, his very life force, from his body. All that is left of him is an empty shell filled with the manifestation of pure evil. The entity is known by many names, some of which you may have heard. Djinn. Demon. Devil. It matters not what we call it. It is a creature of malevolent spirit. It feeds off the life force of others. It destroys everything in its path. It was trapped in a globe of wizard glass and banished to your world, hidden away where nothing should have found it. Somehow it used its power to influence the outside world and manipulate whatever it could reach. It is ancient and clever. Patient and vengeful. It seeks to escape the prison of wizard glass. It cannot take full possession of Blazes' form, not yet. The magic of the globe prevents it from taking over the dragon body completely. If it gains its freedom, it will destroy Alvanor first, then all of Sull.\"\n\nThe dragons remained silent and Sunburst wasn't sure if they believed Nightstar's words or were in shock.\n\n\"How do you know all this?\" Galdor asked. \"There is a lot of information and detail in what you say to be merely supposition.\"\n\n\"You are right. I learned more from my encounter with the djinn. I have seen inside its prison. It tried to beguile my mind. It was aware of my presence, but didn't know where I was in the physical world. It was as if I was in another place, a world not like this one, yet just as real. I was hidden in the tunnels near the moot chamber, safely out of sight, yet close enough to be drawn inside the djinn's realm. Blaze slept with the wizard glass globe tucked between his front legs. Beneath the glass the captured spirit of the djinn moved, its life force inhabiting the prison created by human practitioners of magic. At first I thought Blaze was in possession of a pearl of wisdom, the comparisons both outside and inside are similar, but it is definitely not a pearl as I know it.\"\n\n\"You have communed with a moonstone?\" Galdor voiced the surprise of all gathered.\n\n\"Winterfang, our leader at the White Mountain, has one,\" Sunburst said. He knew of Nightstar's illicit contact with the pearl. \"Nightstar was privileged enough to consult it. There was a... crisis.\" Sunburst felt bad about covering the truth. \"Nightstar's help was required. He is quite the scholar for a black. Always looking for answers.\" He was aware he was rambling. Winterfang wasn't pleased with Nightstar, but it was wind under their wings. Nightstar had accepted his punishment and Winterfang's wisdom.\n\n\"It is a tale for another day,\" Nightstar jumped in. Sunburst was grateful for the interruption. He didn't always know when to keep his jaws closed. \"My past experiences did allow me to interpret information from the globe and understand the djinn's ambition. The djinn uses its power and the life force Blaze drains from his victims. Every time it gains more life force, it grows in power. The stronger its power, the closer it gets to freedom. The wizard glass is strong, virtually unbreakable from the outside. I believe the djinn is almost ready to attempt a breach. If it is successful and manages to gain full possession of Blaze, then we will not be able to stop it. It is using the stored power stolen from the consumed life force of living dragons. The djinn has been held captive for thousands of years and its sanity is far from normal. I don't know if that's a result of its incarceration or its evil nature. Perhaps it's a combination of the two.\n\n\"I think its hatred of the humans who trapped it gave it a commonality with Blaze. Blaze the Black never stood a chance, he was marked before he hatched. Touched by the hand of a demon manipulated into doing the djinn's bidding. The white flash on his chest was demon born, a conduit planted inside him that gave the djinn a means of connection. It was his weakness the djinn used as an opening to gain its hold. It planted and exploited Blaze's hatred of humans and gained more control as it fed its thoughts and lies into the dragon's mind. I am convinced the reason Blaze trapped Galdor holds a meaning for it, a twisted sense of irony. It was trapped by man, as was Galdor. Galdor was strong enough to survive with his sanity intact because he isn't malevolent. The djinn is corrupt, a creature of evil. Its mind has festered and darkened beyond what it ever was before its capture. Its years of captivity have resulted in its loss of sanity. It is bent on revenge.\"\n\n\"I was lucky I was rescued when I was,\" Galdor said quietly. \"I can understand only too well what prolonged incarnation can do to a mind.\"\n\n\"While Blaze isn't blameless,\" Nightstar continued, \"he was used in a way that dragged him deeper into the djinn's clutches. The more he became reliant on the power, the stronger the hold the djinn took. It fed his addiction until there was nothing left of the dragon, stripping everything away until Blaze was just another mindless drone.\"\n\n\"Can it be stopped?\" Galdor asked.\n\n\"The wizard glass is timeless, designed to stop it escaping. Yet the djinn managed to find a way of influencing the world outside, a realm that should have been beyond its reach. It conjured visions of how it marked the egg before Blaze hatched. It let me see where the humans hid the globe. I watched as if I was witnessing it actually happening, so great is its power. It was always a creature of great cunning, with powers of magic its human captors were unable to comprehend. It managed to reach the outside world and manipulate it in an attempt to break free. Time was always on its side. Blaze must have discovered where the globe was hidden. Perhaps he was unable to avoid the attraction, the seeds of his fate already growing inside him. Once the djinn lured him to its resting place, Blaze would have been unable to resist. Slowly, over thousands of years it planned its escape, waiting for an opportunity like this. Once it gained a hold on Blaze it gathered more and more life force, drawing it inside the globe in an attempt to break the wizard glass. The pressure inside the globe is at a point now where it is close to breaking. It was only ever created to hold the djinn's spirit, its own life force. The more it consumes, the greater the pressure inside. It is only a matter of time before the globe's integrity gives way. It could be another hundred years, or it could be tomorrow. I'm afraid I don't know.\"\n\n\"And once it escapes?\" Garnet asked.\n\n\"If it escapes,\" Nightstar said, \"Alvanor will be consumed. If it gets out, your land will be destroyed. Every living creature will be consumed.\"\n\nSilence filled the cavern, the only sound was the rushing of the waterfall. The circle of dragons stood around Nightstar, each one contemplating the black dragon's horrifying words.\n\nSunburst felt like he was going to explode. Blaze, or the djinn who controlled the black dragon's body, must be stopped. Why wasn't anyone speaking? They could return through the Flaire gateway, escape the fate of these dragons, leave Sull behind and never return. He knew Nightstar wouldn't abandon these dragons and neither would he. This was Galdor's home. \"Then we must fight it,\" Sunburst said. \"Stop it before it gets out.\"\n\nThe dragons all turned to face him. Try as he might he was a yellow and sometimes he couldn't hold his tongue.\n\n\"Sunburst is right,\" Galdor said, \"It is time to fight or fall.\"\n\n\"Fight or fall.\" The words echoed around the cavern as Galdor's dragons repeated his words.\n\n\"Fight,\" said Nightstar.\n\nSunburst looked at him. \"Do you have a plan?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Nightstar answered, \"but you're not going to like it.\"\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" Sunburst replied."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Belly of the Beast",
                "text": "The dragons of the hidden grotto approached the Lifting Plateau, no longer content with sheltering in the secret valley. Galdor led the host, soaring upon the once familiar air currents surrounding the plateau. The landscape below, previously their home, now enemy territory.\n\nHe roared a challenge and the host answered, filling the air with angry voices. It was difficult killing the black drones they encountered on their way here, but necessary. They were the eyes and ears of Blaze\u2014not Blaze, Galdor corrected himself, the djinn. It was essential they were silenced before they could raise the alarm. It wasn't easy taking the life of another dragon and Galdor cursed Blaze, the djinn, and the humans who had brought the globe to his world.\n\nBlaze was once his friend and while he hated what he had become, he couldn't bring himself to hate the black dragon. Hatred was like a poison, infectious and all-consuming. If you gave in to the hatred it would destroy what you were, killing your spirit. He should know. He almost let it take root when he was imprisoned.\n\nThe small human had freed more than his body when he opened the gateway home. And now he was helping him again\u2014in the form of a dragon! Galdor was still amazed at Nightstar's revelation, exposing himself as Alduce. He knew when he met the apprentice sorcerer he was different. He thanked his perception for his restraint in not eating him.\n\nThere was no physical difference Galdor could see between Nightstar and any other dragon. Sunburst's acceptance was testament enough at calling Nightstar one of his own. The yellow dragon treated him like a brother and the bond between them was strong.\n\nTo change from human to dragon was a feat of great magic and it was reassuring to have Nightstar on his side. Alduce was a scholar as well as a sorcerer and the man possessed a knowledge of the arcane, from a human sorcerer's perspective. Galdor hoped he knew what he was doing. Their plan depended on it. If a yellow of Sunburst's calibre could put his trust in Nightstar, then he would too.\n\nBlack dragons swarmed from the tunnels and rose from the plateau floor. Mindless drones, Galdor reminded himself. The dragons they once were are gone, already dead. They are tools of the djinn and not our brothers and sisters, regardless of their shape. We must fight for what is rightfully ours. This battle would decide who prevailed. It was all or nothing.\n\nThe heat of dragon flame burned like an anger, the fiery gorge rising in his chest. He roared again, signalling the attack and closed his wings, shedding the uplifting currents and dropped into a dive. He could feel the turbulence in the air behind as the airborne host followed him down. They were outnumbered but they had the advantage of surprise and the high air.\n\nThey gathered speed, rushing to meet the oncoming foe. The first wave of attack, a battering ram of colour against the black defenders. The line of hurriedly assembled defending dragons wavered as his host punched into their midst. Black dragons flailed as the momentum of the coloured dragons smashed their ranks. Galdor's momentum carried him through the rising black drones, talons tore through scales, ripping wings and into flesh. His claws sparked with magic as they raked and gouged the enemy. To pierce their tough scales with talons alone was difficult, but not impossible. A little magic helped break through their defences.\n\nGaldor gripped the black drone he collided with, his talons thrust forward as the drone dropped towards the plateau, pushed backwards by the weight of his descent. Its flame roared over his head and he twisted his neck in an effort to avoid it, heat blasting over his scales. The drone hit the ground and Galdor's weight pushed down through his talons, crushing his foe. The feel of snapping bones reverberated through the crushed body as the life slipped from the limp dragon.\n\nThe noise of battle filled the grassy meadow atop the plateau. Flame spewed from the jaws of attackers and defenders alike, dragons roared and talon scraped scale. Blacks and coloureds tangled in the air above and on the ground.\n\nA dark female swung her tail and Galdor dropped his head as the bladed appendage clove through the air where his head had been. She spun to face him, red eyes ablaze with hate, black fire spitting from her jaws; Darkflame. Tales of her foul deeds came to the hidden grotto with the lucky ones who escaped the Lifting Plateau. Her reputation for enjoying death and destruction was known to them all.\n\nGaldor swayed, dodging the unnatural fire and pulled his talons free of the dead dragon beneath him. Darkflame didn't hesitate, lunging for his throat like a striking viper, black hissing spittle flew from her jaws. The corrosive acid sizzled as it splattered onto Galdor, his scales protecting him from the burning liquid, but not the pain.\n\nGaldor turned as Darkflame's fangs missed their mark and twisted his own tail in spinning arc, whipping it into her side with an almighty thud. Numbing shock travelled up his tail as it bounced off the tough black scales, pushing Darkflame off balance. As she hurried to right herself, Galdor stepped away from the corpse of the dragon he had landed on and spread his talons, feeling solid ground beneath them. Darkflame crouched low, muscles bunched ready to strike, eyes locked to his own. He adopted a crouched stance facing, her head on, ready to fight.\n\nDarkflame growled as she feigned an attack, drawing back and circling, her tail flattening the grass as it thrashed from side to side. It was too far behind her to be an immediate danger, but she was fast and Galdor would be stupid to discount it.\n\nTo his left, Topaz the Blue tore the throat from a drone, red blood clashed violently against the blue of her snout. The dying dragon's neck lolled back as blood gushed from a fatal wound. The drone tried to send one last blast of flame at Topaz, but failed, the light fading from its eyes. Topaz, finished with one combatant, leapt to Galdor's aid, lashing out and sinking her teeth into Darkflame's tail, tearing with her jaws as she pinned it with her talons. Darkflame spun to defend herself and Galdor seized the moment, leaping forward and swiping at her head with an open claw. Talon struck snout, tearing into the flesh of her lower jaw, her head whipped back and collided with Galdor's tail, this time swinging in and attacking from the opposite side. Darkflame's head bounced from the collision, her red eyes rolling, dazed and confused.\n\nGaldor prepared to finish her with the remainder of his flame, but before he could blast the flailing black, Topaz pounced, closing her jaws on the already weakened snout. She gripped Darkflame's neck with her talons and tore, wings spread wide and beating the air, pulling back.\n\nDarkflame's jaw snapped as Topaz ripped open her snout, blood spraying from the gaping wound and splatted the blue. As the defeated black enforcer of Blaze's inner circle fell, Galdor let loose his fire, engulfing Darkflame's head.\n\nGaldor had reservations when it came to taking the life of another dragon, but with Darkflame he was willing to make an exception. She was instrumental in the destruction of the human cities and responsible for the deaths of many dragons. Her reputation preceded her and she was known amongst the free dragons for her cruel nature.\n\nTopaz quickly dipped her head in a bow to Galdor then leapt to help a small green who was rolling on the ground, tangled with another black drone. He remembered when Topaz the Peaceful had been a different dragon, the peaceful female her name suggested. They were all changed. Any dragon who survived today, survived the reign of terror Blaze had brought, would be different.\n\nMore black drones were emerging from the tunnels beneath the plateau. The initial wave of defenders had taken a beating, unprepared and caught by surprise. The free dragons struck first and struck hard, pushing their advantage. Reinforcements joined the battle, swelling the black ranks, levelling the field.\n\nGaldor hoped Nightstar and his party were close to their objective. Everything hinged on the back dragon's part in their plan. If they hoped to win against greater numbers, it was imperative they distract Blaze's forces long enough for Nightstar to succeed.\n\nSilently he wished they would hurry, as he feared they wouldn't be able to hold Blaze's drones for long."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Nightstar led the way, Sunburst, Azyrian and Garnet followed closely behind. Galdor had insisted his two self-appointed guards accompany them and Nightstar was glad to have them. It would do no harm to have two dragons of their size with them and they knew the coloured dragons being held against their will. Friendly faces would eradicate the need for explaining who they were. He also didn't want to leave Sunburst on his own to rescue the captives held deep within the tunnels. He didn't doubt his friend was capable enough but having Azyrian and Garnet along would speed up their escape.\n\nIt was easier the second time he entered into the hidden cave entrance below the watchful stones of the sleeping dragon. His three companions were aware of the awkward approach and the strong currents after he explained what to look out for. Even Sunburst had followed his lead without question, aware of the trust Galdor placed in them all and their part in the plan. The yellow dragon recognised the seriousness of their mission and his usual light hearted banter was on temporary hold.\n\nThe out-of-the-way entrance was still unguarded and Nightstar was confident his original excursion had gone undetected. He was counting on Galdor's unexpected attack above ground, diverting the djinn's attention elsewhere, until he made his move.\n\nThe djinn knew who and what he was after he visited the realm within the globe's confinement. What it didn't know was where his physical body was located. If it suspected he was close by, it gave no indication, more interested in how he had come to be there and ultimately, his departure. It wanted out and no doubt wondered how the spirit form of Alduce was able to appear then disappear from its prison.\n\nWizard glass was a complex substance and the sorcerer's conscience understood its intricacies. It was designed to hold the essence of the djinn. The spells woven by the practitioners who created it\u2014be they mages, witches, sorcerers, or magicians\u2014would have tailored it to their needs. It was created specifically to hold the djinn. The more focussed the creation spell, the stronger it was against the individual it was aimed at. The Sorcerer's mind had managed to penetrate the globe's confines subconsciously, and he hoped he could use this to his advantage.\n\nNightstar's perception knew his part in the plan counted on this, trusting Alduce and his knowledge. He was a scholar, after all, and he'd lived side by side with the man's mind long enough to know when to let him decide for them both. Being separated from Alduce was strange. The sorcerer was confident he could visit the dream realm again, it was integral to their plan. Nightstar didn't have to like it and wondered, if anything happened to Alduce, how it would impact the dragon left behind. Man and dragon shared a unique bond and he would be happy if he never found the answer to that particular question.\n\nHe crept through the tunnels and followed his previous route, remembering Galdor's directions. The tunnels didn't feel as large this time around, three extra dragons making them cramped. They arrived at the first real fork. One half of the intersection led to the guarded chamber where the free dragons were held prisoner, the other\u2014eventually\u2014to the chamber where the wizard glass globe waited.\n\nHe stopped and raised his tail, signalling a halt. Cautiously he extended his neck and angled his head to peer around the corner hiding them from sight. Only one black dragon stood where previously two had been stationed. He extended his neck a little farther, making sure he was able to take in the whole corridor. The second guard was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had been called away to join the defenders above ground. It didn't matter. There was only one guard now. He would take whatever luck came their way. Facing one guard would be much easier than facing two, especially in the confines of the tunnels. The quicker Sunburst, Azyrian and Garnet freed the captives, the quicker they could escape. He would feel much better confronting the djinn if his friends were safely out of reach.\n\nNightstar backed up and slowly turned himself around to face his three accomplices, taking care to make as little sound as possible. His wings brushed the cave ceiling, the sound of falling dust like an avalanche to his ears in the silent tunnel.\n\n\"We are here,\" he whispered to Sunburst, who was next in line behind him. \"There is only one guard.\"\n\n\"Good news,\" Sunburst whispered back.\n\n\"This is where we part ways.\"\n\n\"For now, Nightstar,\" Sunburst said, his voice almost too quiet to hear. The yellow dragon turned to the bronze and red behind him and passed on the information.\n\nNightstar stepped passed all three, moving into the opposite tunnel of the intersection and allowing the others to take up their positions behind the curve of the tunnel. Sunburst made the same signal with his tail to Garnet and Azyrian, biding then to hold fast as he squeezed into the tunnel with Nightstar. He extended his neck, bringing his mouth as close to Nightstar's ear as possible.\n\n\"Make sure you both come back, brother,\" he said, quiet enough for the other two dragons not to hear his words.\n\nNightstar understood his meaning. Sunburst didn't like his plan and was against it, even when he explained it was the only way. The yellow dragon had grown fond of Alduce, even if he was hesitant to admit it to Nightstar. He didn't want to lose him either and understood he was a vital part of the black dragon he had befriended.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Nightstar replied, \"trust in the plan. You need to hurry. Help the captives, Sunburst, they need you to lead them to freedom. I remember a dragon that wouldn't leave anyone behind.\" Nightstar recalled the yellow dragon when he had been held captive by the Extractor. Tortured and near death he still put the other dragons held prisoner before himself.\n\n\"Be that dragon again, Sunburst.\"\n\n\"I'm leaving you behind,\" he said. \"Don't make me come back in and save your hide... again.\" He head-butted Nightstar affectionately on the side, turned and took up his position with Azyrian and Garnet, casting one last look at Nightstar and dipping his head in a silent nod.\n\nNightstar returned the gesture, leaving the three dragons to carry out their rescue.\n\nHis part in the plan was less straight forward.\n\nHe set off in search of the moot chamber, and the djinn, with less confidence than he liked."
            },
            {
                "title": "Confrontation",
                "text": "Sunburst emerged from the shelter of the bend, crouching low as he crept towards the black guard. The drone sat unmoving, staring at the cave wall in front of its face, as if in a trance. The djinn would be concentrating on Galdor's attack and he hoped it wouldn't be worrying about controlling a drone that wasn't defending the plateau.\n\nAs far as he understood from Nightstar's explanation, these drones were no longer alive. Their life force, their dragon spirit, was taken. All that remained was a body the djinn, through Blaze, was able to control. If it sat vacantly in pretence of guarding the captives, they would never know.\n\nGaldor spoke of this to the remaining free dragons before they left the plateau. He was conflicted about attacking and killing other dragons but understood it was the only way to defeat the djinn. They had spent time grieving for their lost and fallen companions, he said, now it was time to avenge them. Their kin were already dead and the black abominations Blaze created must be destroyed. It was the only way forward if they were to survive.\n\nSunburst was close enough to the drone now to see there was no sign of life, no movement, not even the swell of its chest as it breathed. It didn't breathe, he reminded himself, because it wasn't really alive. He was providing a mercy in destroying a vessel of the djinn.\n\nThe drone's eyes burned red as it whipped round to confront Sunburst, looking far from deceased. Malice shone from its stare as it swiped its talons at his head. Sunburst dropped low and charged, ramming his short stubby horns onto the drone's throat, knocking it off balance. He spun his tail and the heavy triple bladed fins at its tip moved in a blur of yellow. The drone buckled as the heavy blades clove into its unprotected flank, cleaving scales and penetrating flesh. Its eyes dulled as the poisoned tail blade, unique to yellows, released its paralysing toxins.\n\nAzyrian pounced from behind Sunburst and landed on the stunned drone, talons opening the wound left by Sunburst's tail. Garnet attacked from the other side of the narrow passageway and Sunburst was pushed back. She sank fangs into the drone's throat and tore, ripping into the soft flesh beneath the scales and spraying blood across the cave walls.\n\nThe drone didn't stand a chance as the red and bronze found a target for their rage. The frustration of not being able to fight back for so long, finally able to find a release, was devastating. Talons clawed and jaws tore, the two avenging dragons reaping a whirlwind of retribution.\n\nA rustling of dragon wings alerted Sunburst to movement from behind. The now unguarded cave entrance was filled with spectators, eying the grizzly scene. Coloured dragons, mostly females by their scent. A big blue hissed a warning as their eyes met, her neck spikes rising in anger, her body tense and ready to attack.\n\n\"I am known as Sunburst the Yellow.\" Sunburst told her, hoping to sound reassuring. He omitted his usual introduction in favour of a calming approach. \"I am friend to Galdor the Green, we've come to free you.\"\n\n\"We?\" the blue asked, her tone suspicious. \"Galdor? What do you know of Galdor?\n\n\"I am with Azyrian and Garnet\u2014\"\n\n\"Sapphire? Is that you?\" Garnet turned at the sound of the blue's voice. Sunburst was glad her scales were red and disguised some of the drone's blood. The same couldn't be said for Azyrian, his bronze scales splattered violently with red.\n\n\"Garnet! Yes, it's me,\" Sapphire answered, \"Chestnut's here too. How does this yellow know Galdor?\"\n\n\"Come on,\" Sunburst interrupted, \"time for explanations and reunions once we're out of here.\"\n\n\"Sunburst's right,\" Azyrian said, wiping his muzzle on the dead black's flank then flicked his tongue, licking the smeared mess from his jaws. He turned his head and spat blood from his mouth. \"We must hurry. How many of you are there?\" he asked Sapphire.\n\n\"Seventeen of us,\" she said.\n\n\"Follow Sunburst,\" Azyrian said. \"He will lead you to freedom.\" Sapphire and Chestnut looked from Azyrian to Sunburst, then at the dead drone. They didn't move.\n\n\"Now!\" Garnet urged them on, \"Quickly.\" She used her head to nudge the dazed females into moving. \"Go! Follow the yellow, he knows the way out.\"\n\nOne by one, seventeen dragons emerged from the unguarded cave where they were held captive. Sunburst led the way to freedom as the line grew longer, each dragon urged out of the cave and into the tunnel, helped along by Azyrian and Garnet. He could hear them telling the dragons, Follow the yellow, he's one of us. Sunburst knows the way. He was a yellow, not a black, but they were suspicious of a stranger. The dragons didn't know him and he was glad Azyrian and Garnet were here to vouch for him. It was understandable they would be hesitant with an unknown dragon and he chose not to take it personally. He, more than most, could appreciate how they were feeling and knew all about what it was like to lose your freedom.\n\n\"Galdor lives,\" Sunburst told Sapphire over his shoulder. These dragons needed good news and some hope. That was something he could give them. \"He fights for your freedom. He sent us here to rescue you.\"\n\nHe could hear the wonder in the voices of the freed dragons as they repeated his words. Galdor lives.\n\n\"He has asked me to take you to safety. We have a plan to defeat Blaze.\" Better to keep things simple rather than explaining about the djinn. \"Galdor wants us to take you to some caves south of here. He was very explicit in his instructions. He said he will meet us there when he can.\"\n\nAzyrian knew exactly where the caves were located. Once they were free of the tunnels, the bronze would show them the way. Nightstar wanted everyone as far away from the Lifting Plateau as possible. Sunburst thought that was a great idea, the tunnels beneath the plateau were not a place he wished to linger.\n\n\"Then lead us out of here, Sunburst the Yellow,\" Sapphire said. \"We will follow where you lead.\"\n\nSunburst picked up his pace and the following dragons scrabbled to keep up. He longed to feel the air beneath his wings and the sooner he was out of these tunnels, the better."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Alduce slipped into the globe with ease, his mind focussed on the weave of the wizard glass. The barrier was designed to hold the djinn and he was able to pass through its magical defences, knowing its construction. Being a lifelong scholar of the arcane did have its advantages. It was easier than before, passing into the dream realm without Nightstar losing consciousness.\n\nHe missed the dragon's presence and felt as if something wasn't quite right without it. The black dragon was part of him and he was part of it.\n\nIt was a strange feeling being alone. He missed the dragon's presence, exaggerated by its absence. A quiet gap in his mind where the voice of the dragon lived. It was all so much easier for him to accept, thanks to Nightstar's logic, he was used to the now comfortable feeling of Nightstar's mind, his dragon spirit.\n\nNightstar's body waited for his return in the physical world outside the globe. He wasn't far from the moot chamber and Alduce didn't think he was in any danger. The tunnels were deserted, all the drones would be busy above ground defending against Galdor's attacking force.\n\nThe surreal misty surroundings of the globe manifested from the darkness, grey and black swirling masses at the edge of his vision. His human eyes no longer possessed the ability to see in the dark, but even if they had, he didn't think he would have seen anything more.\n\nThe air felt different from his last visit, charged and angry, a thunderstorm ready to break. A shiver passed through his being and he turned, sensing something behind him. Light flared and the djinn manifested, his entrance less theatrical than before. Red smoke twisted into a whirlwind, rising from the floor as it turned to black, the djinn solidifying from the swirling vapours.\n\nAngry red eyes burned into Alduce as it spoke. \"Why do you interrupt me human? I am busy.\"\n\n\"I've come to offer you a deal,\" Alduce said.\n\n\"I don't need your deal, I am almost free. The cowering dragons have emerged from hiding and returned to their former home. Their pitiful attempt at besting my army will fail. Once I've feasted on their life force I'll have enough power to break the wizard glass.\"\n\n\"It isn't my deal. I come on behalf of Galdor the Green, rightful ruler of the Lifting Plateau.\"\n\n\"Lies!\" the djinn spat. \"Galdor is dead. He could not have escaped his dungeon.\"\n\n\"Can you not see who leads the attack?\" Alduce taunted. \"The majestic green dragon has returned to confront you and extract his vengeance.\"\n\nThe djinn froze, his glowing eyes faded to dim pinpoints of light. It remained unmoving, head tipped to one side as if listening for a distant sound. Its eyes dimmed until the light disappeared completely, remaining dark for a few seconds, then they flared brightly again, signalling its return. Alduce suspected the djinn had taken full control of a drone, looking through the host's eyes at the world above ground. The dawning realisation Alduce spoke the truth was written on its face.\n\n\"How can this be? He was sealed away for eternity. He did not possess the ability to open a passageway back to this world.\"\n\n\"He had a little help from an unexpected friend,\" Alduce said.\n\nThe djinn glowered. \"You? You are nothing. A petty conjuror who does not know his place. Ignorant of your insignificance. Leave before I consume you. I have a battle to win.\"\n\n\"It will be Galdor's victory, your defeat.\" Let the djinn underestimate him. \"That is why you lured him away, plotted to be rid of him. He is powerful enough to resist you. Strong enough to stand against Blaze, even with the power you wield through him. If Blaze dies, you lose your foothold in this world. You weren't the only one to reveal hidden secrets when you tried to probe my mind.\"\n\n\"I will be free!\" the djinn screamed, \"and any who stand against me will fall. I have spent millennia inside this accursed prison. You will not stop me. Galdor will never win. I would see this world destroyed rather than accept defeat from him.\"\n\n\"Galdor has something you don't,\" Alduce said. \"The free minds of all the dragons you were unable to catch. They fight for their home. You are just an interloper. You are not welcome wherever you go. No wonder you were banished to the globe.\"\n\n\"I tire of your words, Alduce. Remain here and when I have killed Galdor I will return and take your life force and that of Nightstar.\"\n\n\"I think not. If you were able to defeat me, you would have already done so. You can't fight both myself and Galdor at the same time. You are desperate to get back to the battle. The longer you remain here, the less control you have over the drones. I suspect they can only function without you for a short time. You might be powerful outside the constraints of the wizard glass, but you aren't free of it yet. If you are so eager to hurry back, perhaps you are afraid of a petty conjuror.\" He needed to distract the djinn and if insulting it would keep it from returning to its drones, he appeared to have hit his mark.\n\nThe djinn spun, spreading its wings like a giant bat and loomed forward to confront Alduce, whipping its tail and knocking him from his feet. \"Perhaps I will stay and teach you a lesson.\" It stomped forward, clawed feet crashing down in an effort to squash him.\n\nAlduce rolled away, narrowly avoiding the crushing blow as razor sharp talons tore across his back. Pain lanced along the scratches and Alduce was grateful they weren't deep. The pain wasn't as bad as the agony of transformation and he was acclimatised to that. If he could bear the stretching, ripping pain of the metamorphosis, he could bear the pain of the djinn's talons.\n\nIgnoring the burning claw marks he scrambled to his feet. The djinn was silent and its eyes were dimmed. Checking on the battle above ground, Alduce surmised. He didn't know how his sorcery would work in the djinn's prison, but it was the only weapon he had. Drawing from the reserves of the Flaire pendant, he reached for its latent power.\n\nInstinct took over as the magic stored within the small metal dragon coursed through him. As Nightstar, the mind of Alduce was used to the familiar natural magic that was an integral part of the black dragon. As a man, the sorcery he wielded as a human was different, raw and untamed, sharp edged, as opposed to the dull omnipresence of Nightstar's natural magic. It flowed through his being, strong and clear, healing the torn skin and filling him with power. He let the power flow from his core, pushing it into his arms and out through his hands.\n\nBright steaks of blue-white energy flew from his fingers slamming into the djinn as its eyes brightened, fully returning its presence back into its body. The energy engulfed the nightmare creature in an aura of light and it was slammed from its feet. The djinn roared as it landed on its back in a crumpled heap, its wings twisted underneath its body. It tipped its head back and roared again, lips curling back to expose yellowed fangs, saliva spraying from its mouth. The spit crackled as it punched through the writhing energy, breaking the spell, forcing the aura to dissipate.\n\nIt stared at him, eyes burning with hate as it rose, straightening out its wings as it gained its feet. Alduce let fly again, sending more bright energy at the djinn's head, but this time it shook off the blast as if it were nothing more than an annoying insect.\n\n\"I know your sorcery,\" it spat, \"and how to resist it.\" The djinn leapt forward, wings outstretched as it attacked. Alduce threw himself aside and the djinn's arm missed its target, claws slicing the air where his head had been. It missed Alduce with its open handed swing, but it followed through with the strike, slamming its wing into him, using it like a fist.\n\nAlduce gasped for breath as the wind was knocked from his lungs and wondered how, in this spirit realm, it mimicked the physical world. He knew everything he witnessed was a manifestation, an illusion of reality. He didn't really breathe inside the prison of the wizard glass, yet the laws of the outside world appeared to be the same. Realisation slammed into him just as hard as the djinn's wing. If he could breathe and feel pain in this place, then he could die!\n\nThe djinn spun and whipped its body, pivoting its wing sharply and launching Alduce like a stone from a sling. He landed on the strange cloudy floor, tumbling head over heels, disorientated and stunned as he slid to a halt. He climbed to his knees, visions of Nightstar's tumbling fall in the cavern of the cataract, swam through the dizziness. Of course! If he could act and feel in here, as he did in the physical world, he should be able to...\n\nA rush of air whistled passed his woozy head and a faint voice reached his ears and echoed inside his skull; its power is its weakness. The glass is the key. Alduce tried to focus on the dark entity as it sped away from where he was crouched on hands and knees, his eyes only seeing a blur. It was like catching movement from the corner of your eye and when you turned to look it was already gone. A near invisible spirit too fast for his vision to catch. The djinn, however, was more than aware of its return, expressing its rage and roaring into the darkness as the dark spirit flashed by. It spun, too late to catch the fast moving entity, swiping at empty air. It was the distraction Alduce needed.\n\nMemories of a lonely mountain top, a dark clear night, a sky full of bright stars, and a lightning strike, flooded into his mind.\n\nHis single mind.\n\nAlduce felt the heat from the Flaire pendant radiate across his skin even though it dangled from around his neck and wasn't touching his body. Raw energy and expectation filled the air. Lightning forked out of the darkness, grounding itself on the small metal dragon hanging from the chain.\n\nAlduce began to change.\n\nHands and knees spread out as black scales covered skin. Heat coursed through his blood like molten lava. Talons ripped from fingers and toes, gouging furrows in the ground as the limbs lengthened. Tendons and muscles stretched, the agony of a torturer's rack screamed from his mouth as they pulled and tore. Black leather wings sprouted from his arched back, unfurling and snapping like the sails of a galleon catching a storm. A balancing tail snaked out from behind, tapering to a sharp pointed end, scything the air as it lashed from side to side. Quills and spikes jutted out from a serpentine neck, horns grew from a head that stretched out to form an elongated snout. The pain of transformation subsided to a sharp memory, the metamorphosis complete.\n\nA black dragon stood ready.\n\nThe djinn stared at the newly transformed dragon towering above it. The dark spirit vanished into the black once more and Alduce was grateful for the distraction.\n\nAlduce. By himself. One mind alone.\n\nHe wore the body of Nightstar but his mind was all his own. It was only his mind that ventured inside the wizard glass, the dragon spirit along with its physical body, waited beyond, in the tunnels of the Lifting Plateau.\n\nIt was just like the first time Alduce transformed. The elation of the change, the shock of the pain... and the absence of the dragon spirit. He wore the body of the dragon like a cloak of black scales, only this time he was familiar with the shape. Confident in the change.\n\nThe first time he transformed, the sensation was new and extremely terrifying. He didn't know what to expect or how to apply any control. Now Alduce was comfortable with the dragon's form, a second skin as familiar as his own.\n\nThe form of Nightstar the Black tipped his head back and roared his challenge at the djinn. The longer he kept the creature occupied, the better Galdor's chance would be against its drones. The djinn responded, opening its arms as if welcoming the dragon into its embrace. The air shimmered around its body like the rippling heat haze from a hot summer sun. The distorted figure of the djinn began to grow, its ugly humanoid figure becoming larger until it equalled the size of the dragon.\n\n\"I will make this quick,\" it said, and rushed forward towards the waiting dragon.\n\nAlduce instinctually reached for the dragon fire and sent a wave of roiling flames at the attacking djinn. The djinn protected its eyes with its forearm as the flames curled around its head. Flames that would have ordinarily incinerated their foe, did little to slow the charging djinn. It rammed into the dragon, swinging a closed fist into its side and curling its other arm around the dragon's neck as it rained blow after blow into the dragon's flank.\n\nAlduce bucked and twisted, snapping at the djinn's free arm as it pummelled into his scales, its hand a hammer on the anvil of his body. It was fast and powerful, each punch a weakening blow. He still though of the dragon as Nightstar and relied heavily on the dragon's instincts, expecting him to take control, but this fight was his alone. The dragon spirit wasn't present and he would need to take full charge of the dragon form he wore if he were to survive.\n\nHis jaws connected with the djinn's arm, ivory teeth clamping the black scaly skin but failing to penetrate its tough armour. He twisted his head turning the blows and rolling sideways, teeth screeching as they scraped over the djinn's scales, pulling it off balance.\n\nDjinn and dragon fell in a tangle of limbs and wings. The silver star and the white lightning flash bright against their black scales as they thrashed and wrestled for an advantage.\n\nAlduce lashed his dragon's tail left and right, using the whipping momentum to separate himself from the djinn and pull back, freeing himself from its iron grip. He swung the heavy tail, ignoring the pain in his side, using it as a battering ram. It connected with the djinn and put a little more distance between them as it jumped back avoiding the full force of the swing.\n\nAlduce felt his tail was like a third arm, understanding why Sunburst boasted about his own tail and how deadly a weapon it was. This time he charged at the djinn, leaping with rear legs thrusting forward, talons outstretched. The djinn sidestepped the lunge, deflecting the attack from his upper body as talons raked across its thick bat wings, tearing the tough membrane.\n\nAlduce dipped one huge dragon wing and pivoted, thrusting his tail point into the torn wing with all the force he could muster. Membrane split as the djinn's stubby wing ripped apart, tatters of fleshy skin hanging from twisted bone. The djinn howled, more in anger than pain and retreated, tugging the shattered wing free of the dragon's tail. The barbs on the pointed tip caught the ragged wound widening the hole as it pulled free. The djinn growled as it freed itself, awkwardly folding what was left of the broken appendage behind its back. The white lightning flash across its chest began to glow and Alduce tasted the sharp tang of magic on his tongue. The djinn had thought to best the dragon with strength and failed. Now it counted on using its magic.\n\nThe djinn summoned its power, a corrupt magic unlike dragon or human magic. A power stolen from the life force of living, breathing creatures, purloined and exploited by a creature of ancient evil.\n\nAlduce was ready for the attack as the djinn's powerful spell pulled at the dragon's life force. It was easy for the sorcerer to defend, Nightstar's dragon spirit safely beyond the confines of the wizard glass. The magic the djinn relied on to draw the life force from the dragon could find nothing to latch on to. As it floundered to leach the life force from its opponent Alduce retaliated with his own power, this time calling on the unique blend of magic that was neither human nor dragon, into the expectant grasp of the djinn.\n\nThe djinn recoiled as the sorcerer's forceful attack slammed into the void waiting to feast on the dragon's life force. The unfamiliar magic surged into the djinn, foreign and totally unexpected. It relied on feeding off the dragon spirit and was hit with the full force of something it had never encountered before.\n\nAlduce felt his power sweep through the djinn's defences, straight to the core of its being. The djinn knew human sorcery and it understood dragon magic. It knew how to syphon the life force from a living being and use it to add to its strength. It had never experienced the magic Alduce now wielded and could not defend against it.\n\nThe amalgam of human sorcery and dragon magic was much greater than the sum of its parts. As far as Alduce was aware he was the only living sorcerer in possession of this highly unusual magic. It was something that should never have worked. The two distinctly different types of power were opposite forces of nature. They were so different from each other, so far apart in how they worked and how they were used. Yet the extraordinary chain of events involved in his metamorphosis and the addition of Sunburst's living blood\u2014the key ingredient\u2014resulted in a powerful force the djinn was unprepared for.\n\nAlduce probed deeper, pushing to the core of the djinn's essence, its very own life force. The dark presence of absolute evil repulsed him and he fought to maintain his identity inside the corrupt spirit of the beast he sought to best. It was an arduous journey as he travelled through the malevolent mind of the djinn, clinging to his awareness and holding on to his own self. It was a battle he had already trained for.\n\nWhen he first became the black dragon, the spirit of Nightstar grew inside his mind. He had expected to be a man who could change into a new shape, yet still remain a man at his source. As his old master often said, someone who never made a mistake never made anything. Master Caltus had many such sayings and loved to quote them to his young apprentice. Alduce had certainly made a mistake when he transformed into Nightstar and expected to be a human in dragon form. He had never been so wrong. He warred with the dragon spirit, a spirit he believed originated from the unhatched dragon egg he stole to aid his transformation. His battle against Nightstar's mind had ended when Sunburst added his blood to the equation.\n\nAlduce would never know exactly how or why it worked. Live dragon blood held a secret magic all of its own and dragons by nature, were magical creatures. One thing he was sure of was, because of the yellow dragon's unintended donation, he survived what would have eventually destroyed him.\n\nThe experience of the dragon spirit sharing his mind, his presence, his very being, prepared him against the djinn's attack. His acceptance of Nightstar's spirit gave him the knowledge he needed to keep the djinn's at bay.\n\nHe descended into the centre of the djinn's being, shielding himself from the poison of its mind. He could see how it used the stolen life force to strengthen its power and how it constantly attacked the warding spell of the wizard glass. The djinn was using the energy from the stolen life force and compelling it into the weave, slowly eroding the barrier, piece by piece. It wasn't able to use its own magic against the complex pattern of magic the creators of the ward had set in place. The wizard glass was constructed specifically to protect against the djinn's magic. Its attack was purely brute force. If it continued to use the power and channelled it into the warding spell, it would eventually destroy what had held it safely contained for millennia.\n\nAlduce could sense the desperation in the djinn's efforts, the desire to escape and exact its vengeance on any living beings that happened to be available. For century after century its mental state eroded, just as the barrier it was attempting to destroy was being eroded. The more life force it stole, the stronger its weakening power became. The more power it gathered, the stronger it attacked the wizard glass. If it kept drawing power from outside its prison and feeding it into the barrier that held it, it would break. It forced the stolen life energy into the weave of containment, cramming it in and creating a pressure that would eventually cause it to crack open, like an egg left to boil unattended. Eventually the shell would give.\n\nThis shell was ready to crack. The djinn was close to breaking free!\n\nAlduce could see it clearly now, the build-up of energy was almost at a point where it would tear a hole right through the barrier and destroy the integrity of the wizard glass completely. If the djinn's plan came to fruition, it would be free. If it escaped, Alduce didn't doubt he would not be able to stand against it.\n\nThe original creators of the wizard glass had weaved a complex spell, a shell of magical wards to house the evil being trapped within. Alduce didn't know if it was all they were capable of doing or if it was created in haste. He could understand the necessity of trapping and holding the djinn but it was only a temporary measure, even if it lasted millennia. It was time to employ a more permanent solution.\n\nThere was only one problem. He knew what he wanted to do but had no idea how to do it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Sunburst crested the rim of the plateau and the updraft carried him high over the battlefield.\n\nDragon fought against dragon and it shouldn't be so. Conflict raged within him as he watched the fighting below. He knew he was supposed to lead the following dragons to safety, yet how could he leave his new friends when they were outnumbered and talon deep in black drones?\n\nAzyrian caught up with him as he surveyed the carnage below. \"They want to fight,\" he shouted through the wind of the updraft, indicating the rescued dragons. \"They've been held against their will too long.\"\n\nSunburst could relate to their anger and frustration. He knew what it was like to be held against your will. The feeling of helplessness eroding your spirit and fuelling the need to lash out at your captors. He glanced back along the line and every dragon he led to freedom glared down at the swarming black drones. Every face eager to join the fight yet mindful of Galdor's instructions to flee to safety.\n\nSunburst looked to where the fighting was most intense. Galdor stood his ground in the midst of a sea of black. Blaze's drones flocked to the where the green made his stand. He was hopelessly outnumbered with only a few coloured dragons to aid him, a green rock floundering against the tide of a black sea.\n\nSunburst could not\u2014would not\u2014fly away and leave Galdor to be overrun.\n\n\"Flame it!\" he cursed.\n\nAzyrian met his gaze, eyes flicking to Galdor and back to Sunburst. \"We must follow his orders.\" His words conflicted with his emotions.\n\nSunburst knew the big bronze was loyal to a fault and would do exactly as his leader commanded, but now was not the time for misplaced loyalty. Now was the time to act.\n\n\"There will be no Galdor the Green to follow if we leave him to the blacks. He needs our help!\" His perception warned him if they didn't intervene, Galdor would be overrun. The green was big and Sunburst had no doubt at all he could fight, but against so many? He felt the perception with every scale on his body and knew it. \"By claw and by fang,\" he called to Azyrian, \"we are twenty strong. We must help.\"\n\nAzyrian nodded his head once. \"Flame it, Sunburst!\" he cursed, \"Nightstar was right, you are a bad influence.\" He grinned like a mad wolf, teeth splitting his snout, his chest rumbled as his inner flame boiled.\n\n\"Yeah, blame me if you need to, bronze.\" He turned his head back and roared to the others. \"Galdor needs your help! Are you strong enough to fight?\" The air reverberated and the answering roar rang in Sunburst's ears.\n\nAzyrian winked at Sunburst. \"If there's blame to be taken, we will share it, brother yellow.\"\n\nThe big bronze twisted in the air and dropped from the sky like a shining metal spear, leading the way. Nineteen dragons fell into a dive behind him as they rushed to join the battle.\n\nAzyrian smashed into the ranks of the blacks assaulting Galdor. Intense flame leapt from his open jaws, spewing orange flames into the dark mass. The black dragons were not expecting reinforcements from above.\n\nSunburst matched the bronze's example and emptied his flame into the unsuspecting enemy. He flipped forward, talons raking the air and grabbed onto the first black neck they encountered. He twisted his body, pivoting his weight while holding tight to the stunned black, whipping his tail. The momentum of the manoeuvre sent the heavily spiked tail through the air with an incredible force, colliding with its target like an avalanche.\n\nDragons were tough creatures and were notoriously well armoured; when a dragon fought against another, that advantage was lost.\n\nSunburst's tail crushed into the head of a black next to the one his talons were latched into. Bone and scales sprayed friend and foe alike, the enemy dragon died instantly from the impact, its broken body toppling to the ground. Sunburst twisted and wrenched his talons through the neck they gripped, flapping his wings and adding to the force of his attack, tearing chunks of flesh from his victim. Blood fountained from the wound, spraying his talons, but there was no dragon magic or life in it. The wounded black flailed like a fish out of water from the shock of a near fatal wound, its lifeless eyes devoid of any emotion. Intense heat caused Sunburst to turn his head as Garnet released a gout of fire, flaming what remained of the black's neck. Blood hissed and sizzled as it burned, the stink of charred flesh strong as it joined the mounting dead on the plateau floor.\n\nThe free dragons pushed into the line of blacks, desperate to rally on Galdor, flame and claw clashing with talon and tail. Colours met the wall of black, a writhing mass of limbs, necks twisting, wings beating and jaws snapping, each side clawing to gain the advantage.\n\nSunburst stood wing to wing with the liberated dragons as they fought to gain ground, trying to push their way towards Galdor. Dragons roared in anger and screamed in pain. In the confusion of the battlefield it was difficult to tell which was which. The stench of sulphur and the sting of smoke adding to the chaos.\n\nThe weight of the enemy was too much to push through and they held their ground, unmoveable. If they didn't reach Galdor soon, Sunburst feared the green dragon would be overrun.\n\nA black head thrust towards his neck, jaws snapping shut as he jumped backwards to dodge clear of the lethal attack. Surprisingly the attacking black dragon never moved forward to claim the forfeited ground. Sunburst feigned to the left, watching the eyes of his opponent before countering right. His teeth found their objective and clamped tightly around the black throat, open and exposed. Sunburst fully expecting his enemy to resist, waiting for the counter attack. His perception howled like a storm, as strong and clear as it ever had.\n\nHe knew without a doubt, Alduce battled the djinn and the creature's grip on the black drones faltered. He was sure this was why the black missed his opportunity.\n\nMuscle and jaw worked in unison, twisting and tearing as his teeth slid between scales and punctured the skin beneath. He tore at his foe's vulnerable throat, rending and tearing until his jaws pulled free and blood gushed from the deadly wound inflicted on the black.\n\nSpitting gore from his mouth he roared to his allies, \"NOW! Forward to Galdor!\" He wasn't sure if the free dragons heard him above the roar of the battle or they sensed the change in the black dragons too. It didn't matter what the reason was as long as they took advantage as the enemy hesitated.\n\nA dark blue female crashed into a dazed black as it floundered to hold its ground. A ball of twisting black and blue limbs catapulted into the black ranks and coloured dragons poured into the break in their line.\n\nAll over the battlefield black dragons slowed. Sunburst didn't know exactly what Alduce was doing, but whatever it was, it was working. He knew the risk his friend took and hoped his plan would work and he could win his battle.\n\nDragons of all colours swarmed over the flagging enemy with no mercy. The tyrant's rule was harsh and cruel, but the vengeance of the free was brutal.\n\nGaldor exploded from his surrounding attackers, tossing black bodies left and right as the fight went out of them. He spun and whirled, wings and tail throwing enemies as easily as leaves in the wind. It was a terrifying sight to witness and Sunburst was glad he was on Galdor's side.\n\nThe drones were broken and the free dragons pressed their advantage. This was a fight to the death and they knew their enemy was beyond saving. The only way to win this war was to eradicate them all.\n\nSunburst grieved for the fallen. He knew the black drones were already dead but that didn't make it any easier to destroy them. Dragons shouldn't fight dragons.\n\nHe withdrew from the final purge, allowing the free dragons to finish the fight. It was their battle and they, along with Galdor, needed to see it through to the end.\n\nFinding a clear spot near the edge of the plateau, away from the blood and scorched grass, he slumped down and waited for the killing to end."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Glass is the Key",
                "text": "Alduce probed the wards, feeling his way about the magic, searching for an opening he could use. The djinn's uncouth method of weakening the spell was to constantly bombard it with energy. The warding spell that maintained the integrity of the wizard glass was strong and he wanted to make it stronger, but that wouldn't solve the problem of all the extra energy the djinn had gathered.\n\nIf he wasn't careful and made the slightest mistake, his attempts at keeping the djinn contained could help release it. He knew what he wanted to do but couldn't see a way to penetrate the spell and bypass its protective wards.\n\nIts power is its weakness. The glass is the key. The words from the dark spirit came back to him. It took him a moment to understand the message the mysterious words it contained; and then a sudden realisation hit him.\n\nOf course!\n\nHe knew it was a huge risk. In his heart he understood it was a risk he must take to save not only the dragon population, but the entire world of Sull.\n\nIf sweat existed in the ethereal prison of the wizard glass it would have been running down his face. He waged a war on two fronts. The first against the djinn's mind, holding it at bay, the second as he weaved his own spell into the ward. While Alduce was able to penetrate its magical weavings, it wasn't easy, the ward was designed to withstand any tampering. Now he understood what he must do, his approach would be different.\n\nThe key was the glass. The excess power would be the weakness he could use.\n\nHe constructed a new weave, focussing on the wizard glass, a weave that added more than just the containment it was originally designed for. He used his own knowledge of sorcery, the unique blend of human and dragon magic, and the djinn's stolen life force. He twisted each different thread of magic around the others lacing them together, crossing them back over themselves, and tucking them into a complicated structure. The strands fought to repel each other, like opposing magnets, pushing apart when Alduce wanted them together.\n\nThe weave was dangerous and an error would result in the magic backfiring and that would be disastrous. If he made a mistake it could mean the destruction of them all. The opposing magic, coupled with the power the djinn had gathered, all reacting against each other, contained enough magical energy to potentially destroy a world.\n\nAlduce used the energy the djinn had reaped from its victims and pushed it into the new weave, winding it into the structure of the wizard glass. This time the weave would no longer be just a shell to hold the djinn's essence. He added his own design to the construction, pulling it tight through the braided weave, binding it into the spell holding the barrier in place.\n\nThe djinn pushed at his defences and Alduce sensed its anger. He kept it from accessing what it desired for so long, while he was able not only to see how it worked, but alter it.\n\nTighter and tighter he bound his design to the existing spell, each weave, each strand, each fibre dancing to his touch, a musician of magic conducting his finest symphony. The effort of reconstructing the magic and shutting out the djinn took its toll. He only needed a few more minutes to finish but he was tiring fast.\n\nAnd then the presence of the djinn disappeared.\n\nAlduce renewed his concentration. Without the distraction of the djinn trying to force its way through his defences, he doubled his efforts. The sorcerer in him took over, finishing the work as if it were second nature. Weaving and spinning, bending and shaping. He used the power to strengthen the crumbling defences, adding his own blend of magic to the mix. Just like Sunburst's blood to his own transformation, the unique magic he wielded, allowed him to take liberties with the laws of magic, changing the wizard glass to his own design. He knew his alterations would hold and do what he intended them to. A warm feeling of satisfaction, coupled with exhaustion, washed through him as he wound the final strand of magic into place and tied it off. He gently tested the spell, lightly probing the wizard glass, feeling the subtle adjustments he made. Content with his work, he opened his eyes.\n\nThe djinn was no longer facing him.\n\nWhere the man shaped demon had been, a majestic black dragon now stood. A huge black dragon with a white flash of lightning adorning his chest.\n\n\"Blaze the Black?\" Alduce asked, still in Nightstar's form.\n\n\"I am Blaze. Yes,\" the dragon's melancholy voice answered. \"Or what's left of him. I wish we were able to meet under better circumstances, Nightstar the Black. We would have had a lot to discuss.\"\n\n\"Where is the djinn?\" Nightstar looked around, anticipating some deception or trick.\n\n\"I believe you have tired it out, but only for a short time. I feel it writhing inside me. Its corruption makes me sick. What it has done, what I have become because of its influence.\"\n\n\"Can you not escape and return to your own body? Leave it behind. I have a plan to... \" Alduce stopped. Blaze was possessed by the djinn and even if he was in control just now, as he appeared to be, there was no telling when it would be able to assert its dominance over the dragon again. If he were to reveal what he had done and the djinn was privy to Blaze's memories, it would know.\n\n\"Best not tell me anything about any plan, Nightstar, I don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up.\" A weariness oozed from the black dragon's voice. Weariness and so much regret. \"I will hold on to my form for as long as I can. Hopefully it will give you enough time to do what it is you are planning. I would see an end to this. The suffering and the pain are bad enough, but knowing it was me who unleashed this evil into our world is unbearable.\"\n\n\"Is there no way\u2014\"\n\n\"NO!\" The black dragon's eyes were like hot coals, red embers burning from the inside as the djinn tried take control. Blaze tossed his head. \"Not yet,\" he murmured. When he made eye contact, Alduce could see his eyes returning to normal.\n\n\"I am too far gone,\" Blaze said. \"My punishment for my part in this. I have seen this creature's memories and know the horrors it has inflicted. It is an evil I do not wish my world to face. If it escapes, what you have seen up until now is nothing. It will destroy everything and revel in the misery, take pleasure in the destruction. It will suck the life from my world and leave it a barren wasteland. Once it has taken everything, it will move on to another world and start again. The human mages who trapped it were powerful. They were lucky to catch it inside the wizard glass. Other worlds have not been as fortunate.\"\n\nThe scholar inside Alduce wanted to know more, yet any time spent learning of the djinn's past would use up valuable time. Time they didn't have. He wanted to explain this to Blaze but couldn't risk the djinn finding out what his plan was. He could see the black dragon was beaten, struggling to maintain his grip and resist the power of the djinn's will.\n\n\"I must leave this place,\" he told his black counterpart. \"I promise you I will do everything in my power to defeat the djinn. You have my word, dragon to dragon.\" It was the most solemn oath a dragon could swear and he believed it to be true. If the djinn was able to read Blaze's thoughts he would know Alduce truly believed he was able to stop him. It might help sow the seeds of doubt.\n\n\"Another time then, brother black,\" Blaze said. \"Go do what you must. Tell the dragons of Alvanor, Blaze the Black is truly sorry for his mistakes. I cannot put into words the remorse and the regret I feel. And how stupid and selfish my actions have been. I have one final battle to fight, hopefully it will give you the time you need.\"\n\nBlaze lay down and closed his eyes and muttered, \"Earth Mother guide you.\" The black dragon slipped into a restless slumber, twitching and snorting like a dreaming dog. Small wisps of smoke drifted up from fluttering nostrils and Alduce could only imagine the inner turmoil Blaze faced holding the djinn at bay.\n\nThe dark spirit appeared, no longer flitting beyond his vision. It buzzed around the sleeping form of Blaze. It was still difficult to distinguish what it was. It moved this way and that and was still fast, yet with the presence of the djinn gone for now, it seemed less agitated.\n\nAlduce suspected he knew what the dark spirit was now, and perhaps it still had a part to play. He concentrated his will on the silver scales that formed the night star on the black dragon's chest. A small blue wisp of magical energy formed around the silver scales, then rose like smoke from a snuffed out candle. The dark spirit flitted like a hummingbird, dancing around the glowing magic, moving in and out as if testing it. It slowed, floating alongside the thread of magic and turned, winding the wispy thread around its misty body. The magic glowed brightly and then the dark spirit absorbed the energy, drawing it inside until the blue light was gone. With renewed vigour it shot off into the darkness looking a little bluer and brighter than before. Alduce sensed it was time for him to leave too.\n\nJust like the first time he attempted to transform back, he reached for his human body. There was no panic this time, only the feeling of change. He was only a man without the spirit of Nightstar, slipping back into his own vessel. The black dragon's metamorphosis to a man almost instant. There was no feeling of discomfort or pain.\n\nAlduce opened his mind and reached out for what he was missing. Nightstar.\n\nA swirling vortex of energy took shape and a portal broke the void, opening a passageway from the realm of the wizard glass prison. The irony of ease in which he was able to reach out to his counterpart and step from this realm back into the physical world, wasn't lost on him. The djinn, even with the power it possessed, would never be able to cross the boundaries put in place to contain it.\n\nThe black vortex pulled him in and carried him home. Home to the waiting body of Nightstar."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Nightstar opened his eyes. He was no longer alone. The mind of Alduce was back where it belonged. He could feel the sorcerer's presence below the surface of his consciousness. He knew what the man had encountered inside the realm beyond the physical world. He knew what he had done. There was no need to commune with the mind of Alduce for an explanation, their shared presence conveyed everything.\n\nTime was of the essence. He needed to get back to Galdor and the dragons above ground and lead them to safety. If Alduce's plan worked, they needed to be as far from the Lifting Plateau as possible.\n\nHe scurried back along the tunnels, his memory guiding him back the way they had come. Even if he hadn't been able to count on his memory, the path of clawprints left by the escaping dragons would have been easy enough to follow. He arrived back at the eastern cave entrance without encountering any resistance.\n\nPerching on the outer rim of the cave entrance, he tipped forward and spread his wings, jumping out and catching the updraft, allowing the thermals to catch his outstretched wings and propel him up over the plateau's edge.\n\nGaldor perched on the stone back of the sleeping dragon, the only living dragon remaining atop the plateau. A grim reaper of green for the lost spirits of all who were turned to black. It was as if he stood vigil for the dead, a green sentinel standing on the black stone. The symbolism of the imagery was not lost on Nightstar. He tilted his wings and angled his glide towards the waiting green.\n\nBodies of black drones and coloured dragons were scattered over the scorched grass. The black bodies outnumbered the coloured ones. As he drew close he could see Galdor's yellow eyes were filled with a deep sadness. The green moot leader knew they would have to fight and kill. The colour of the dead didn't matter to him, he grieved for them all. Every spirit gone was a loss to all dragonkind.\n\n\"I am sorry it came to this,\" Nightstar said as he came to land beside Galdor. \"It saddens me to see the death of so many dragons.\"\n\n\"It is indeed a terrible day when we must sacrifice so many. They were all dragons once, regardless of their colour.\"\n\nNightstar could feel Alduce deep inside mourning their loss too. The man understood what the loss of so many dragon spirits meant to their population. Many of the fallen would not have the chance of rebirth, their life force torn from their bodies, no longer part of the Earth Mother's cycle. There were many worlds where dragons no longer flew in their skies, only remembered as myth.\n\n\"Where is Blaze?\" Galdor asked, \"Did you kill him? Is the djinn dead?\"\n\n\"No, not quite. We don't have the time to discuss it here. Are the others...\"\n\n\"On their way to the caves as you suggested. I sent them on ahead when the fighting here was done. The resistance of the drones faltered, as if the life went out of them.\"\n\n\"I think I was able to occupy the djinn long enough for it to lose some of his influence, or maybe control, over them.\"\n\n\"Whatever you did, it turned the tide of battle. We were almost lost and then the drones just... gave up. The slaughter that followed was horrible, Nightstar. I never wanted this.\"\n\n\"None of us wanted this but it was the only way. Let's join the others,\" Nightstar said. \"The sooner we're far from here and are safely underground, the happier I'll be.\" His nerves were at breaking point, he needed to be flying. The time spent without Alduce, the knowledge of the djinn, and the plan the sorcerer had set in motion, were beginning to take their toll.\n\n\"C'mon,\" he called to Galdor, \"I'll tell you all about what happened with Blaze and the djinn as we fly. Don't spare your wings. Fly like you've never flown before!\"\n\nAs if to emphasise his words, a distant rumble of thunder rolled down over the plateau. Black thunder clouds gathered in the distance and Nightstar was thankful they weren't in the direction they were headed.\n\nHe sprang back into the air, throwing his weight over the edge of the Lifting Plateau and launched himself skyward. Turning his head, he was happy to see Galdor less than a tail length behind.\n\n\"Fly high, Nightstar the Black. Fly high and fly for freedom!\" Galdor trumpeted into the darkening sky. \"Show me how a dragon of the White Mountain flies.\"\n\n\"Make haste Galdor. Don't fall behind.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a challenge, black dragon,\" Galdor bellowed above another peal of thunder and his pounding wing beats. \"You sound like you have a little of Sunburst the Yellow in you,\" he added, lightening the ominous mood.\n\n\"More than you can know,\" Nightstar returned, grinning. He did have a piece of yellow in him and Galdor knew it."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Dark Spirit",
                "text": "Nightstar followed Galdor into the caves as they made their way deeper inside. The corridors were filled with dragons of all colours. None of them black. The survivors from the battle of the Lifting Plateau and the dragons Sunburst had helped free were all gathered here. Nightstar believed this was the best place for them to shelter and Galdor agreed.\n\nTheir losses were minimal and could have been much worse. Many of the dragons bore scars of battle. Claw, fang and flame were not kind adversaries. Nightstar believed when Alduce engaged the djinn inside the wizard glass, his power over the drones was lessened. Its focus of dealing with the sorcerer had distracted it enough for Galdor and his dragons to deal with the defending drones, despatching them quickly when they were at their weakest.\n\nAnd Blaze had helped. Nightstar needed to make sure the dragons of Alvanor were aware of how the black dragon resisted the djinn's hold, allowing all the dragons the time to retreat here.\n\nA giant black storm had taken up residence above the plateau and could be seen for many miles. The turbulent air currents clashing with the wild winds and heavy clouds was an unnatural reflection of another battle being waged far below the ground.\n\nIn the former moot chamber an inner turmoil raged. Blaze fought against the djinn and knew he could never win. Mind against mind, the dragon battled with the demon that had corrupted his spirit. There would be no reincarnation back to the egg for Blaze. This was his last stand and he was destined to lose. The storm was about to break and Blaze would break with it.\n\n\"Quickly,\" Nightstar said to Galdor, \"we still have one last thing we must do.\" Blaze couldn't hold the djinn back forever.\n\nGaldor led them on until they arrived at the cavern where the stone dragon stood. The cavern was packed with dragons and they picked their way to the statue that had once been Baelross the Blue.\n\nSunburst waited with Azyrian, the smaller yellow and the big bronze now the best of friends. Beside them, a large blue and a deep brown, both females, stood. Galdor had told Nightstar of Sapphire and Chestnut's rescue on the flight here.\n\nGarnet stood guard over the entrance to the cavern with Ryvind and Topaz and they stepped aside as Galdor hurried through.\n\n\"Nightstar has need of our help,\" Galdor addressed the dragons. \"Heed his instructions as you would my own,\" he panted, the exertion from their flight still fresh. Nightstar's heart pounded and it wasn't just from catching his own breath.\n\nHe bowed formally to the assembled dragons, dipping his head in respect.\n\n\"You have lost many friends to an evil that plots to destroy everything you know and love. It has corrupted your kin and stolen their lives. We have one chance to stop it and it is now. Lend me your voices, dragons of Alvanor and lend me your strength. Together we can defeat it for good.\"\n\nGaldor stepped forward and dipped his head towards Nightstar, \"Show us the way, Nightstar the Black. By fang and flame we are ready!\"\n\n\"Galdor, Sapphire and Garnet, to the left of the stone dragon's flank. Sunburst, Chestnut and Azyrian, to the right.\" Nightstar stood at the head.\n\n\"What about Topaz and myself?\" Ryvind asked.\n\n\"Seven is a magical number,\" Nightstar answered. \"Stand guard at the entrance and let no others wander in and disturb us. We will need to use all our magic,\" he told the other six, \"to complete what I've started.\" He leaned his head and rested it upon the stone head of Baelross.\n\n\"Each of you touch the stone.\" His voice echoed around the now silent cavern. The dragons followed Nightstar's lead, resting their heads upon the stone flanks of Baelross. \"Now do as I do,\" Nightstar said, wrapping his tail around the base of Galdor's, black curling round green. Galdor linked his tail with Sapphire, green on red. Each dragon in turn twisting their tail to the dragon next to them until finally Sunburst closed the circle linking back with Nightstar.\n\n\"Now push your magic into the stone, slow and steady.\" Six dragons released their magic as Nightstar instructed. The silver scales on the black dragon's chest began to glow, filling the Flaire wrought star with dragon magic. Brighter and brighter the silver shone as threads of magic rose like wisps of steam, drifting up along Nightstar's neck. Little ribbons of magic crept onto the surface of the stone dragon, flowing like rivers of light along the depressions between its stone scales. The light infused all seven dragons, flowing from each one to the next, tails shimmering in a bright circle surrounding them all.\n\nThe cavern grew brighter as Nightstar weaved his magic with the other six dragons, channelling their combined power. He searched for the dark spirit trapped within the djinn's prison, recalling its words, its power is its weakness. The glass is the key. The dark spirit was the final part of the spell. Alduce had paved the way and it was up to Nightstar to finish what the sorcerer started.\n\nHe closed his eyes and rode along the conduit opened by the combined dragon magic, searching for the weave Alduce had planted within the globe. He could see inside the wizard glass prison as if looking from the outside in. The fury of the djinn's spirit seethed as it lashed out against the dwindling life force of Blaze. The dying black dragon's spirit struggled to hold back the djinn, slipping a little more each time the djinn battered against its defences. For a second, Nightstar touched the mind of the corrupted black dragon. Blaze sensed Nightstar's presence and knew his job was done and dropped his defences.\n\nThe djinn roared as it smashed into the remaining mind and spirit of Blaze, shattering his defences into oblivion and sweeping him from existence. No longer held in check it attacked the new wards Alduce had weaved, pent up rage fuelling its power. It relentlessly smashed into the magical barrier again and again, each strike weakening the spell and bringing freedom closer.\n\nNightstar called out into the void, \"Baelross! Come home. Call him back,\" he told the dragons. \"Call your lost brother back to the stone!\"\n\n\"Baelross,\" six dragons chanted, \"Baelross. Baelross. Baelross!\" Filling the cavern with their voices, rising higher each time they spoke the blue dragon's name.\n\nThe dark spirit appeared above the djinn's head, buzzing around it like an angry wasp. The ethereal essence it once was, gained substance and colour. A bright blue corona pulsing with life.\n\n\"Baelross. Baelross. Baelross!\" With each chant the spirit of the blue dragon brightened.\n\n\"Come back to us!\" Nightstar called and opened the way. A small tear in the barrier pierced the ward and the light radiating from the cavern where the blue dragon's stone body stood, beamed out into the dream realm, lighting the way for Baelross.\n\nThe glowing blue spirit flew from the djinn, directly towards the rent in the barrier, passing through the gap in the globe's defences. The djinn screamed and launched itself after the disappearing blue spirit as Nightstar began to close the gap, weaving threads of golden light like a sewing needle. The fabric of the dream realm began to knit together closing the djinn's escape. It seized the tear with huge clawed hands, pulling the golden stitches apart and rending the gap wide open.\n\nNightstar tried to pull the tear closed, feeding his magic into the growing wound in the barrier. The djinn countered it with ease, using every last piece of the power it had gathered, pouring it into the gap. The giant influx of power split the tear wide open with a sound like shattering glass and the golden strands of magic vaporised.\n\nAnd Nightstar dropped his magic.\n\nThe djinn sensing victory threw itself into the growing tear, forcing itself into the gap the spirit of Baelross had passed through. And the trap Alduce set sprung closed.\n\nThe hidden spell Alduce wove into the wizard glass, activated when the djinn threw its power into the gap. There was no passage for the djinn as there had been for Baelross. Nightstar could feel the sorcerer's consciousness and sense his relief. He also detected something else, a self-satisfied feeling, and a single thought: amateur.\n\nThe power of the life force was too much for the wizard glass to hold. The more power the djinn gathered, the stronger the pressure had been on the ancient ward. It counted on that strength to break free, which was what Alduce hoped.\n\nThe wards Alduce reworked were fashioned to absorb the power the djinn released, turning it back on itself in an endless loop. The new construction of the wizard glass no longer weakened, the rearranged wards of the barrier increased the power and poured it back into the changing spell.\n\nNightstar fed the dragon magic of six dragons, adding his own magic to the mix and amplifying the power, forcing his powerful magic into an already volatile concoction. The expanding energy grew and grew, transferring his spell into the ward.\n\nThe original properties of the barrier started to change and it began to shrink. The smaller the area inside the djinn's prison realm became, the faster the tsunami of magic moved. Wave after wave coursed through the weave, each one growing in power and feeding more magic, more energy, and more pressure, into the mix.\n\nThe djinn writhed and thrashed as it tried to break free from the trap. The ever decreasing wards slowly crushed, strangling and constricting the djinn. The more it struggled and tried to use its power, the more it fed into the spell, a magical noose pulling tighter and tighter.\n\nThe djinn was unable to escape the wards holding it in place, the pressure increasing like a constrictor crushing its prey. As the energy rose to dangerous levels, Nightstar knew it was time to withdraw. With the ever increasing power cramming into the shrinking vessel, he knew it would only remain stable for a short time.\n\nThe inside of the wizard glass was like a pot of oil. The supercharged magic like the raging flames of an inferno. The hotter the flames grew, the greater the heat of the oil. The magic Nightstar poured into the warding spell was the flames. The wizard glass prison was the pot of oil. It would only hold so long before the growing pressure broke free.\n\nNightstar lifted his head from the stone head of Baelross. \"Stand away!\" he commanded.\n\nSix dragons staggered back, exhausted and drained of magic.\n\nThe stone statue of Baelross the Blue shimmered like a mirage, rippling blue waves washing over the dull grey stone.\n\n\"Move back,\" Nightstar panted, his breath hot and his voice wheezy. The six dragons dragged themselves to the edges of the cavern as Baelross began to change.\n\nStone cracked and splintered and huge chunks of debris flew from the stone dragon, turning to vapour and hissing like steam as they blasted out into the cavern. Vaporised stone filled the air and when the dust settled a blue dragon stood where the statue had been.\n\n\"Welcome back, Baelross,\" Galdor said, his voice thick with emotion.\n\nBaelross slumped to the cavern floor. \"My legs are like lumps of rock,\" he rumbled, \"think I'll lie down for a while.\" He turned his weary head to Nightstar and nodded. \"Thank you,\" he said, before laying his head on the floor and closing his eyes.\n\n\"Will he be alright?\" Sunburst asked, tentatively sniffing at the prone blue dragon.\n\n\"I think he will,\" Nightstar replied. \"He needs rest and time to recover.\"\n\n\"Legs like stone! He has a sense of humour,\" Sunburst snorted.\n\nThe ground trembled and a deep rumbling filled the cavern. The roar of a thousand hurricanes filled the air, building to an ear splitting crescendo.\n\nThe dragons fought to stay upright and Nightstar was glad Baelross wasn't standing. Dust and small rocks rained down from above and the cavern walls shook.\n\n\"I need to see,\" Nightstar said, above the roaring, and staggered from the cavern on wobbly legs.\n\n\"Come on,\" Sunburst shouted to Galdor, head-butting the green's flanks. \"If I've learned one thing about being friends with Nightstar, it's that it's never dull when he's around. We don't want to miss anything.\" He stumbled after Nightstar, fighting to keep upright as the tremors continued.\n\nNightstar fought his way along the crowded passageway, each step unsteady as the floor moved beneath him, bumping off the cave walls as he made his way outside.\n\nHe emerged from the tunnel, the skies above crowded with ominous dark clouds. Sunburst came next, standing beside him, joined by Galdor and then Azyrian.\n\nTo the north, above the Lifting Plateau, a storm of epic proportions raged. Even from this far away it was obvious something was happening. Clouds gathered above the plateau, dark foreboding shapes holding back the light. Lightning flashed through the dense storm, jagged silver streaks bright against the dark canvas of the sky. Nightstar was glad of the distance between himself and the plateau. Despite the safe distance the lightning gave him cause for concern.\n\nThe howling wind abated and the quaking ground returned to normal. A quiet stillness followed as if the wind had blown itself out. The air was heavy with anticipation, charged with expectation and electricity, tingling like the moments between the rumble of thunder and the strike of lightning. A spooky tranquillity after the raging of the wind, the absence of sound a noiseless calm.\n\nThe calm before the storm.\n\nNightstar held his breath, staring north, his eyes fixed to the stormy sky. Waiting.\n\n\"What are we\u2014\" Sunburst began to ask. Before the inquisitive yellow had time to finish his question, the sky exploded. A huge ball of white light swallowed the dark storm clouds, blasting up into the sky and lighting up the dull afternoon. It swelled like a miniature sun, painful to look at as the light intensified and then, with an almighty explosion, it blew apart. An eruption of light spread out from the centre in a huge circle as it tore across the sky.\n\nThe dragons turned their heads, averting eyes from the blinding flash. Orange flames chased the white light and Nightstar blinked away the dancing afterimage. A mountain of flame burned the sky, wave upon wave of roiling fire curling into the troposphere. The orange faded to yellow as it travelled up into the stratosphere in rippling waves.\n\nThe earie silence was shattered with the almighty crash of the explosion that followed, tearing through the air, a tornado filled with detonating magic.\n\nThe force of the explosion reached the barren lands where the dragons stood, heat blasting over them. Nightstar closed his eyes from the dust storm as a wave of pressure deafened his ears, exhaling through his snout to keep from inhaling the swirling dust. He bowed his head, sheltering from the oncoming windstorm, waiting for it to abate.\n\n\"Look!\" Sunburst called out above the howling winds.\n\nNightstar open his eyes, squinting through the dust. A huge mushroom cloud of black smoke rose up from the Lifting Plateau, swirling as it expanded, flashes of flickering flames crackling though the dense cloud. It moved and swayed, changing shape and coalesced into the smoky shape of the djinn.\n\nA horned black head emerged from the rising mushroom cloud, piercing eyes of red fire blazed hatred from a face of pure evil. A shiver ran through Nightstar's body, malevolent and cold after the heat of the explosion.\n\nThe mesmerising gaze from the smoke-formed djinn was broken as another shape appeared out of the swirling vortex. The head of a dragon rose up, jaws growing as it twisted and swirled into substance. The dragon head turned and faced the djinn, gargantuan jaws opening wide as it lunged. A black cloudy maw swallowed the djinn whole, snapping silently shut.\n\nThe cloud reformed, reverting back to a rising mushroom, slowly softening around the edges as it began to dissipate.\n\nBright flashes of colour were visible through the smoke, weaving and swirling as they ascended. Reds and yellows, blues and greens amongst the more vibrant. Nightstar stared in awe as the stolen life force of the dragons Blaze had consumed\u2014believed to be gone forever\u2014were finally freed. The colourful spirits burned brighter until each one became a blazing white star, shooting into the atmosphere. Liberated dragon spirits, returning to the cycle, as the Earth Mother intended.\n\nNightstar turned to see Sunburst shaking his head, as if he doubted witnessing the final throws of Blaze and the djinn. The silence grew as the four dragons stood an unplanned vigil, watching the smoke as it curled and faded, each one lost in their own thoughts.\n\nIt may have been minutes or hours, Nightstar didn't know how long they stood staring, until at last the silence was broken by the sounds of dragons emerging from the caves.\n\n\"Is it over?\" Galdor asked. \"It feels over. Feels... better, somehow. Clearer and cleaner, like the air after a summer storm.\"\n\n\"The djinn is gone,\" Nightstar said, \"of that I am certain. Nothing could have survived that much magical energy exploding.\"\n\n\"What's next?\" Sunburst said, raising one bony eyebrow at Nightstar in an all too human gesture.\n\n\"What indeed,\" Galdor replied.\n\n\"Well, I could do with something to eat,\" Sunburst said. \"All this excitement has made me very hungry.\"\n\n\"Eat?\" Baelross the blue appeared at Sunburst side. \"Yellow dragon, I believe that is an excellent idea. And a bath afterwards? I need to wash the stench of dust and rock from my scales.\"\n\n\"I like him,\" Sunburst said to no one in particular. \"I am known as Sunburst the Yellow,\" introducing himself to Baelross, \"my\u2014\"\n\n\"Scales are the colour of the sun. When I take flight I burn across the sky like a celestial fire,\" Galdor and Nightstar finished.\n\n\"Pah!\" Sunburst snorted.\n\nGaldor rumbled with laughter. Nightstar joined the green dragon. It felt good to laugh. Sunburst grumbled a little chuckle adding to the happy sound.\n\nBaelross looked at the three of them, a puzzled expression on his face.\n\n\"It's not that funny really,\" Sunburst attempted to explain to the blue dragon.\n\nNightstar and Galdor looked at each other and renewed their laughter, proving the yellow dragon wrong.\n\nExcerpt for the private journals of Alduce.\n\nThe Djinn.\n\nDjinn come in many forms and are known by many names and are commonly referred to as demon or devil. The longer they live the more powerful they become. They are adept in magic of their own, more akin to human magic rather than that of the dragon, yet different from both these more familiar types.\n\nWhile some djinn are content playing the role of trickster and enjoy granting wishes that usually come at a price, not all are so. Djinn have the capacity to tempt the unwittingly with promises for their own advancement and in certain cases can become extremely malevolent and corrupt. They are extremely good liars and are sparing with the truth.\n\nDjinn have the ability to influence feelings, create addictive states of wellbeing or euphoria, or terror and foreboding. They prefer to remain unseen and hide in the shadows, using their power to manipulate and corrupt. Djinn can take on many forms and use this ability to blend into their surroundings. Their victims, once under the djinn's beguiling spell, will unwillingly protect their identity without realising their actions are not of their own volition.\n\nMany cultures have their own version of the djinn and my research, while limited, has allowed me to study and learn from the records I have found, building a clearer picture of how these creatures act.\n\nI believe the djinn encountered on Galdor's world, Alvanor, saw itself as a god. It was an ancient being of incredible power and intelligence. While it most probably was always corrupt, as in their nature, this djinn appeared to have been driven mad by its need to punish its captors. Its continued incarceration, added to its inability to lash out and extract vengeance, would most likely have contributed to an already unstable mind.\n\nNote: it is unclear whether the djinn was male or female and there was no evidence to determine one way or the other what gender it was.\n\nThe djinn appeared to have been imprisoned and contained, then deposited on Alvanor, hidden out of harm's way by captors from another world, not of its origin. The power of the magic wielders who trapped it was limited, even though they were able to travel to another world. I am unsure whether dumping a creature of this power, even contained, was an irresponsible or desperate act.\n\nThe djinn was able to influence Blaze the Black, drawing him to its resting place, and used him in an attempt to free itself. It possessed enough magic, even when imprisoned, to reach out and corrupt the black dragon before he hatched.\n\nThe explosion that destroyed the Lifting Plateau and ultimately killed the djinn, was fuelled by the stored magic contained within the wizard glass globe. Simply put (although sorcery of this intensity is never simple) the magic I was able to weave into the containment spell in order to continually increase the power inside the globe, grew to such a level as to create an explosion powerful enough to end the creature.\n\nI am confident most djinn never reach anywhere near the level of power, or live as long as the specimen encountered on Alvanor. They are generally content to lurk in the background of the societies they inhabit and this one was the exception to the rule."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "Nightstar, Sunburst and Galdor made a final circle around what was left of the Lifting Plateau. Most of the plateau was gone, replaced by a huge crater. It looked as if a volcanic eruption had laid waste to the once scenic home of the dragons of Alvanor. The intensity of the exploding magic had changed the landscape forever, destroying the Lifting Plateau and the air currents that it had taken its name from.\n\nThe dragons of this land would remain at the hidden grotto and would not be returning home to the plateau. Nightstar imagined it would no longer be called the hidden grotto. There was no need to hide now Blaze and the djinn were gone.\n\nLeaving the ugly crater behind, Nightstar peeled away from the scarred land. It was time to go home.\n\nThe three dragons flew in silence for a while until Galdor pulled alongside Nightstar. The mighty green dragon took the lead, Nightstar and Sunburst following. When a regal dragon like Galdor leads, thought Nightstar, it is easy to sit back and follow.\n\nGaldor spiralled purposefully down to a clifftop where a waterfall dropped into the valley beyond. They landed on the rocky shores where the water cascaded over the edge, a misty spectrum of colours filling the spray. It reminded Nightstar of the liberated spirits. All the colours of the rainbow, he thought, but no black.\n\n\"I will leave you here,\" Galdor said, \"to carry on your own homeward journey yourselves. I have much to do. A new moot to choose. Leaders to appoint. Dragons to feed. We must build a new home, start again.\"\n\n\"And with no evil black dragon, or a life sucking djinn, I am sure Galdor the Green can handle it,\" Sunburst quipped. \"His deeds are legendary.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your confidence in me, Sunburst,\" Galdor returned. \"Yet, it is Nightstar the Black whose deeds won the day.\"\n\nNightstar bowed his head to the green dragon. \"We all played our part.\n\n\"We did,\" Sunburst said. \"Daring rescues, battles, and magical explosions. Did I not say it is never dull when Nightstar's around?\"\n\n\"Blaze also wiped out most of the humans on your continent,\" Nightstar said, his voice low. \"While I don't agree with what he did under the influence of the djinn, I don't think you will need to worry about mankind for a very long time.\" The three dragons sat in silence for a minute, the sound of the waterfall soothing and peaceful after all the violence.\n\n\"I think I have another debt,\" Galdor said, \"to our friend. Once more he has helped me. He, and you both, are welcome to return to Sull anytime you wish. I am still in awe of you both and glad to call you my friends.\"\n\n\"Our pleasure,\" Sunburst said, missing Galdor's meaning.\n\n\"It is what it is,\" Nightstar said. \"We do what we must.\"\n\n\"I have no boon to offer you this time,\" Galdor said. \"However, you are still welcome to stay and take a place of honour on our moot.\"\n\n\"I am flattered, Galdor, but we must return. The White Mountain is my home.\" He looked at Sunburst. \"And who would keep this yellow out of trouble if I stayed?\"\n\n\"Pah!\" Sunburst snorted.\n\n\"Very well,\" Galdor rumbled, humorously. \"Fly high and fly free.\" He sprang into the air, huge green wings beating down through the spray as he dropped over the waterfall's edge and out of sight.\n\n\"While it is nice to travel and see new worlds,\" Sunburst said, \"it is good to be going home.\"\n\n\"With tales of more bravery and daring rescues?\" Nightstar asked.\n\n\"It is what it is,\" Sunburst replied. \"We do what we must.\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" Nightstar sighed, \"I regret giving you one of my scales.\"\n\n\"No you don't,\" Sunburst said.\n\n\"Let's fly,\" Nightstar grinned as he dropped from the ledge, spreading his wings and following Galdor's path down through the waterfall's spray."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Heart of the Mountain",
        "author": "Snekguy",
        "genres": [
            "dragon",
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "WINGED TERROR",
                "text": "The morning mist hung low over the valley, the obscuring haze blanketing the forests and fields below, reflecting the vibrant reds and oranges of the rising sun. The shepherd shielded his eyes for a moment as he looked out over the vista, the chill wind whipping at his long beard and tugging at his cloak. He wrapped the garment around himself a little tighter, then whistled for his sheepdog, the animal coming bounding towards him from around a protrusion of jagged rocks. Her ears were pricked up, her eyes bright and attentive, her pink tongue lolling from her mouth as she raced towards her master.\n\nThe flock of sheep was making its way slowly up into the foothills in search of greener pastures, their bleating echoing across the mountain range. There were seven score and eight, he'd do another head count once they found a place to stop, just to make sure that they hadn't lost any errant lambs on the way.\n\n\"Away lass, away,\" he said with a wave of his crook. The black and white hound followed his command, running around to the right side of the herd, corralling a few ewes who had wandered from the group to inspect a patch of scruffy plants. The beasts trotted back to their fellows, their white wool blowing in the breeze. \"Good girl, come now.\"\n\nThe shepherd turned his eyes to the ground, careful to avoid any rocks that protruded from the blanket of grass and moss lest he twist an ankle. He leaned some of his weight on his crook, leading his flock higher, admiring the purple heather that broke up the sea of green and grey.\n\nHe finally emerged onto a plateau of sorts, a relatively flat area of grassland where his flock might graze. The sheep spread out under the watchful eye of the hound as the shepherd took a seat on a boulder, its cracked surface covered in patches of clinging lichen. He set his crook down and took a moment to breathe. His calves ached from the climb, and he leaned down to rub his leg, glancing up at the mountain that loomed in the distance.\n\nThe sunrise was casting its craggy face into deep shadow, picking out every detail of the rocks and cliffs. Its tall peak was capped with brilliant, white snow, sheathed in wisps of cloud. The shepherd was used to the sight, but something about it seemed oddly ominous today. It looked so cold and distant, sharp and harsh, jutting into the blue sky like an arrowhead.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes as he noticed that something else was reflecting the light. There was some kind of object on the near face, glinting as it caught the sun. Confused, he took his crook in hand and stood up, whistling for his sheepdog. The hound ran over to him, wagging her tail as she sat at his feet, the shepherd scratching her head absent-mindedly as he kept his gaze fixed on the strange object. It was drawing closer, descending the mountainside like a swooping hawk on a pair of giant wings, a long tail trailing behind it. By the time he realized that it was coming in his direction, it was too late.\n\nThe great beast was upon the flock in a flash, a gust of wind throwing the shepherd off his feet, and sending the sheep scattering like woolly tumbleweeds as the flapping of its leathery wings kicked up a hurricane. He was peppered with a hail of dirt and small stones as he frantically tried to pick himself up, retreating behind the cover of the boulder, taking his sheepdog by the scruff of her neck and dragging her with him as she whined. The ground shook beneath the monster's feet as it dropped from the sky, making a sound like a thunderclap, its long talons digging deep into the soil to leave furrows in their wake like a plow tilling a field.\n\nIts bat-like wings folded across its back as it stood tall on its four legs, as thick and as round as marble pillars. Its serpentine tail waved back and forth along the ground, cracking like a whip. Its body was covered in a layer of thick, overlapping scales that resembled a suit of shining armor, catching the light in iridescent hues of sky blue and ocean green. They tapered to a lighter beige on its underbelly, the scales there smoother and finer, like a mosaic. Powerful muscles rippled beneath its hide as it moved, it radiated such power and strength that it was almost overwhelming, a force of nature more than a simple animal. He couldn't believe its size, it must have been almost thirty feet from nose to tail, and its weight was enough to make the ground tremble.\n\nThe shepherd chanced a glance at it from his hiding place, cowering in terror even as his curiosity commanded him to peek around the rock, his dog huddling beneath him with her tail tucked between her legs as she tended to do when there was a storm.\n\nUpon its long, winding neck was a head of massive proportions, near as long as a man was tall. Four twisted horns sprouted from a mane of pointed quills on the top of its heavy skull, almost like those of a ram, but straighter and swept back. The quills ran all the way down its spine, reminding him of the flowing mane of a horse. Unlike hair, however, these were stiff and wickedly sharp. They were patterned with faded stripes in the same beige as its underside, and as he watched, they began to move. The monster eyed the scrambling sheep, the quills shaking, making an ominous rattling sound that reminded him of the hiss of an angry snake.\n\nIts scaly lips pulled back to reveal rows of pointed teeth as long as a man's finger, its eyes burning with infernal heat, like a pair of smoldering coals. With every breath, it exhaled a plume of black smoke from its nostrils, as though there was a furnace burning inside of its very body.\n\nIt sucked in an enormous breath of air, rearing back on its hind legs until it was taller than the tallest of trees, its barrel chest inflating as it filled its lungs. It lunged forward, its jaws opening as it belched a plume of orange fire. The shepherd recoiled, the heat of it singing his eyebrows even from a distance, the nearby blades of grass withering before his eyes. Above the roar of the flames, he heard his sheep bleating in agony as they burned.\n\nHe no longer dared to look, wrapping his arms around his trembling dog as if to shield her from the heat, even the rock against his back seeming to warm in the firestorm. He heard snapping jaws, along with a low, guttural growl that shook his very bones. The monster's feet made the earth shake, and then there was another gust of wind, its wings so powerful that they were able to dislodge stones and tear up plants. He could hear the debris pounding against the other side of the boulder, and he feared that it might be enough to cause a landslide. The flames were roaring now, its flapping serving as bellows, fanning the blaze.\n\nThe beast rose into the sky, and then with one last monumental flap of its enormous wings, it set off down into the valley. The shepherd watched as it flew over his head, so close that he could have reached up and touched its belly if he had been standing on the boulder, a pair of charred sheep clasped in its clawed forelimbs. Something rained down on him from above, clattering on the stone, but he was too awed by the sight to pay any attention. It banked, rising up towards the shadowy mountain from whence it had come, slowly shrinking until it was once again naught but a glimmer of reflected sunlight.\n\nThe shepherd rose to his feet unsteadily, releasing his hound, the sheepdog sticking close to her master as she whined unhappily. He rounded the boulder to see what remained of his flock, little more than charred corpses sitting atop blasted grass, the fires still smoldering amidst the blackened bones and scorched shrubs. He could smell the charred flesh, like overdone mutton. The creature must have devoured fully half of his flock, four score at least, and the rest had either been eaten whole or were too burnt to be recognized. The survivors had scattered, and he wasn't sure that even the dog could fetch them after such an ordeal.\n\nHe coughed, choking on the smoke as he gazed at his ruined livelihood, and then he spied something shiny on the ground. He stooped to pick it up, turning the object over in his hand. It was a gold coin, heavy for its size, stamped with the seal of a kingdom that he did not recognize. There were more like it, scattered about everywhere that the beast had trod. Was this what had rained down on him as it had passed overhead? Had they been lodged in its scales, perhaps?\n\nHe began to collect them, growing more frantic as he went, dropping one of the coins and cursing as it burned his hand. It must have been blasted by the flames. Before long, his pockets were overflowing. He wasn't an educated man, but he knew how to count sheep, and there was enough gold here to make up for his losses. He chanced another look at the mountain peak, but the creature was out of sight. Might that be its lair? He had herded sheep in these hills for his entire life, and he had never seen anything of the like.\n\n\"Come, lass,\" he mumbled as his dog cowered at his feet. \"We must tell the magistrate what we saw, though I doubt he'll believe aught that I say. They'd think me mad if it wasn't for these coins.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The rain lashed down on Iden's cowl as his horse trudged through the mud, its hooves slipping in the filth. The terrain was hard going and uneven, difficult to navigate for a man wearing a heavy suit of armor, and so he was glad of his steed. There were tracks here, partially washed away by the water, but still visible enough that he could make them out in the gloom. Cartwheels, horseshoes, and boots. The path was well traveled.\n\nThis valley was a nightmare, there seemed to be dark clouds hanging overhead in perpetuity, and water collected at the foot of the hills like a wash basin. It was damp, muddy, and thoroughly miserable. He adjusted his pack, his armor clanking as he made his way along, finding it difficult to see more than a few feet in front of him in the downpour. He was burdened by his tower shield, too, as well as a long pike with a pointed spearhead. The horse's ears flicked with irritation, it wasn't happy to be out in the rain any more than he was, but it kept the pace dutifully.\n\nHe finally glimpsed the warm, yellow glow of a lamp in the distance, his destination was near. The village was nestled in the hills, hard to reach on foot, and quite out of the way of the usual trade routes. The wooden buildings almost seemed to be sagging under the constant rain, the water washing off their steep, thatched roofs in great sheets. Usually, when someone of his caliber was called out to one of these remote communities, it was to deal with bandits or highwaymen. Rarer still were Orcs and other such marauding creatures. This time, however, the bounty was for a creature so seldom seen that some doubted their existence.\n\nA dragon had been sighted, and the crown had put a price on its head. The Paladins usually dealt with such matters, they had the ear of the King, but they weren't about to march an army all the way out here to deal with a beast that was snacking on sheep.\n\nA dragon slayer, Iden was not. They were creatures of legend, and their numbers had dwindled to the point that only one or two might be spotted during a lifetime. There had been no opportunities to earn such a title. But he was a hardened mercenary, and the promise of a hefty reward had gotten his attention, along with the beast's hoard.\n\nIt was said that dragons nested in a hoard of gold and jewels, riches beyond men's wildest dreams. If one could slay the creature, then they could also claim those riches for themselves. Coupled with the generous bounty, he would be able to retire early, and live out the rest of his days like a Lord. There would be no more trudging through the rain for Iden, only wine and women, until he expired on a silken sheet in the company of the best whores that money could buy.\n\nHe tugged the horse's reins as they entered the village proper, directing the beast to a line of hitching posts. They were mercifully covered by a thatched awning that would protect the animal from the elements. His boots splashed in the mud as he dismounted awkwardly, clinging to his saddle to prevent himself from slipping. Gods, it was almost like wading through a bog. What kind of bumpkin farmers might choose to live somewhere like this? His horse stamped its feet as he tied it to one of the posts, and he glanced over to make sure that the nearby trough wasn't full of scum. It seemed clean enough, and if there was one thing that these people didn't lack, it was an abundant supply of fresh water...\n\nWith his pack and his heavy tower shield slung across his back, he took the haft of his pike in hand and made his way to what he assumed was a tavern. It was late at night, or at least that was his assumption, as the stars were obscured by the clouds and mist that hung over the village. This structure was larger than most, and there were lanterns lit on the inside, the yellow glow shining through dirty windows.\n\nHe put his shoulder to the oaken door, pushing it open with some difficulty, hearing the rusted hinges creak. If he lingered here for too long, his own armor might suffer the same fate. He had to angle his pike so that it would fit through the doorway. It was twelve feet long, perfect for stabbing a dragon in the heart from a safe distance, or at least that was his thinking when he had bought it. He also had a short sword on his hip for emergencies and non-draconic adversaries, a weapon that he was far more experienced with.\n\nFinally, the roar of the downpour was silenced, replaced with the faint patter of rain on the thatched roof somewhere above. He found himself in a room lined with long, wooden dining tables, above which wooden chandeliers hung from the naked crossbeams. Their flickering candlelight cast deep shadows, joined by the dancing flames in a stone hearth, the heat of it staving off the creeping cold that had followed him through the door.\n\nIden closed it behind him, and then made his way towards a counter at the far side of the room. There were kegs of what might be mead or beer lining the shelves behind it, along with iron pots and pans that were hanging from hooks. He wouldn't say no to a meal and a drink, he had been riding for days, subsisting on jerked meat and little else. There were a couple of doors that led out of the main hall, probably leading to the kitchen and the bedrooms.\n\nAs his weight made the uneven floorboards beneath his boots creak, he noticed that there was one other occupant in the room. It was a man with a tattered hood, his face obscured beneath its shadow, save for a long beard. He was nursing a drink, sipping at a large, wooden mug. He might be a fellow traveler perhaps, or maybe just the local drunk. The stranger looked up at him as he made his way across the room, but did not speak, and Iden arrived at the counter to find it deserted.\n\nHe leaned across the polished surface, glancing to and fro as he searched for the tavern's owner, but there was nobody else in sight. He noticed a brass bell on the counter, and he decided to ring it. After a few moments, a woman emerged from one of the doors. She was short and portly, a little over middle-aged, and she was was wearing a very unflattering nightgown. It appeared that he had woken her, she was rubbing her eyes, and she gave him a less than friendly glance as she took up position behind the counter.\n\n\"What'll it be?\" she asked groggily.\n\n\"A room for the night, and a hot meal,\" Iden replied. He placed a few coins on the counter, and after biting one in her crooked teeth to ensure that it was real, the woman retreated to what must be the kitchen to prepare his food. With any luck, she wouldn't spice it with rat poison as revenge for rousing her at this hour.\n\nIden made his way back over towards the tables, leaning his pike and his shield against a nearby wall, and shrugging off his pack. It was a relief to take the load off, and he sat down on one of the benches, his plate armor making a racket. He was looking forward to being free of that too, but he'd have to wait until he was in the privacy of his room before stripping down to his gambeson and leggings.\n\nHe wasn't sporting the shining garniture of a Paladin, nor did he have a colorful surcoat adorned with heraldry. Knights had squires to dress and undress them, along with teams of blacksmiths to maintain their armor, but Iden had no such luxuries. He was a sword for hire, he worked alone, and so his garb was more suited to his purposes. He wore a heavy chain mail coat that also had a hood to protect his head, extending down to his knees. Over the top of it, he wore a partial suit of steel armor. It was lighter than a complete set and more maneuverable to boot. He had enough experience to judge which parts of his body needed the most protection. There was a battered breastplate that was pocked with dents and scrapes from prior skirmishes, along with heavy pauldrons, and a helmet that resembled an upturned bucket with a folding visor. He wore vambraces and gauntlets to protect his forearms and hands, as well as a tasset and cuisses to shield his thighs. He had been witness to the demise of more than one man who had taken a blade across the leg in combat. Lastly was a codpiece, couldn't forget about the family jewels\u2026\n\nHe flipped back his hood and removed the helmet, placing it on the table beside him with a clank, letting his mane of dark hair fall free. Even beneath the hood and the helmet, it had somehow still managed to get soaked by the rain, and he stopped just short of wringing it out like a washcloth. His chin was already stubbly, the beginnings of a beard growing due to his lack of grooming during his journey, and his grizzled face bore a few faded scars.\n\nNow he seemed to have the attention of the stranger, who was peering at him from an adjacent table. Iden made the mistake of meeting his gaze, and the man practically leapt out of his chair, his mug of mead in hand as he rushed over to take a seat opposite him.\n\n\"You're here to slay the beast, aren't you?\" the stranger asked. He pulled his hood back, revealing a weatherbeaten face from which a pair of beady, green eyes peered. His skin was tanned like old leather, he had spent most of his years laboring outdoors by the look of him.\n\n\"What's it to you, old man?\" Iden asked. He cocked an eyebrow at the stranger, beginning to wonder if he was drunk, or merely crazy.\n\n\"I've seen it!\" the stranger added, pointing to himself. \"With my own two eyes!\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Iden replied skeptically.\n\n\"Aye, t'was I who reported it to the magistrate. I was up in the foothills when I saw it, a great, winged beast that descended on my flock like a vulture. Must have been thirty or forty feet long at least, stronger'n stouter than any carthorse or ox that I ever saw. Its footsteps shook the earth, and it belched infernal fire, burned four score head of sheep into ash in the blink of an eye.\"\n\n\"And how did you survive to tell the tale?\"\n\n\"Why, I took my collie in hand and hid behind a boulder, t'was only the stone that shielded us from the fires.\"\n\nWas this drunk the source of the story? Surely the local magistrate would not have put out such a hefty bounty without any kind of proof? If Iden's time had been wasted by a crazed shepherd, then he'd give the old man more than a dragon to worry about.\n\n\"What proof do you have of this?\" he asked, and the stranger began to rummage through his pockets. After a moment, he withdrew a cupped hand. To Iden's surprise, when he opened his fingers, a handful of gold coins spilled out onto the table. One of them rolled over to him, and he caught it in his gauntleted hand, bringing it up to examine it in the wavering light of the candles. It was heavy, certainly hefty enough to be real gold, and the stamps on either side of the coin were not those of any nearby kingdoms. The language of the text was foreign, impossible to read.\n\n\"Where did a shepherd come by such a thing?\" Iden asked, turning his eyes back to the old man.\n\n\"They fell from the beast,\" he explained, gathering his coins back up. Iden handed one back to him, dropping it into the man's palm, and he stowed them back in his pocket. \"Stuck to its scales, they were, like burrs to a dog.\"\n\nThat was a significant amount of money, it must have made up for the shepherd's lost flock and then some. Had such a small fortune really rained from the back of a dragon? Iden's mouth began to water at the prospect, could it be possible that the beast's horde was so huge that it didn't even notice that it was covered in gold coins? Perhaps it rolled around in its pile of treasure like a pig in mud, and how large would such a pile have to be in order to accommodate the forty-foot monster that the shepherd was describing?\n\n\"Yes, I came here to slay the dragon,\" he finally replied.\n\n\"I guessed as much from your spear,\" the stranger said, gesturing to the pike that was resting against the wall behind him. \"That looks long enough to skewer a horse.\"\n\n\"Or a dragon,\" Iden added, and the shepherd nodded vigorously.\n\n\"It'll be a load off my mind to see that thing slain,\" the stranger continued, \"I daren't take what sheep I have left beyond the limits of the village these days. I thank the Gods for these coins, without them, I'd be destitute.\"\n\nTheir conversation was interrupted as the owner of the tavern returned to place a tray of steaming food in front of Iden. The scent of the meal rose to his nose, and he wasted no time digging in. There was a bowl of what smelled like lamb stew, a side of cornbread, and a slice of walnut cake. After spending so long on the road, a home-cooked meal was a taste of heaven. He washed it down with a long draw of mead, then thanked the owner, who just seemed relieved to be able to return to her bedroom. She placed a large, iron key on the table, then gestured to the second door towards the back of the tavern.\n\n\"Yours is the third room on the left,\" she said, then she returned to her bedroom without another word.\n\nThe old shepherd's eyes followed Iden's fork from his plate to his mouth as he ate, and he wondered why the stranger didn't simply buy his own meal, he certainly had enough coin. Perhaps he feared the retribution of the surly tavern owner. There might be more than one dragon plaguing this village.\n\n\"Where did you last see the creature?\" Iden asked, pausing to take another draw from his cup.\n\n\"Up in the foothills to the North,\" the shepherd replied, pointing in the general direction. \"But the beast resides on the mountaintop, that's where it came from, and where it returned once its deed was done.\"\n\n\"Up on the peak?\" Iden asked, and he nodded.\n\n\"When will you slay the beast?\" the man asked, waiting expectantly as Iden chewed on a slice of bread that he had soaked in stew. He swallowed ponderously before replying, spearing a floating vegetable.\n\n\"I shall set out tomorrow morning.\"\n\nBefore someone else claims the prize, he neglected to add."
            },
            {
                "title": "TAG ALONG",
                "text": "Iden breathed in the fresh air, the sun beating down on him. The wind was chilly, but above the mist that lingered down the valley, the clouds were sparse enough that he could see the azure sky. The rolling hills were a patchwork of green grasses, purple thistles, and colorful flowers that protruded between the craggy rocks. The mountains were already catching the sun in the distance, lit up in shades of orange and yellow, the atmospheric haze giving the more distant peaks a tinge of blue. He didn't need any more directions from the shepherd, he could see the mountain that the old man had described, looming over the landscape as it jutted into the air like a jagged tooth.\n\nThe going was a little difficult for a horse, the terrain was getting rockier and steeper, and he had lost sight of the beaten path hours ago. When he reached the foot of the mountain, it might be better to set the beast free. If it suffered a broken ankle up on the peak, then it would be of no use to him, might as well spare it the pain. He could buy a new one if he succeeded in his task.\n\nHe had been following a stream that flowed down from the mountain, and he decided to stop for a while, giving his horse a moment to take a drink. As he rummaged in his pack for a bite to eat, he noticed that someone was heading up the stream behind him. It was a woman wearing a colorful shawl, and in her hands was clasped some kind of golden vessel.\n\nHe watched her curiously as she drew closer, and when she looked up, she seemed surprised to see him there. She faltered for a moment, perhaps considering whether a lone woman should be interacting with a strange man out in the wilderness, then decided to approach him.\n\n\"Good morning,\" Iden said, standing up to greet her.\n\n\"Morning,\" she replied, a little hesitantly. She clutched at the object that she was carrying, it looked like a large vase cast from gold, a rare and expensive item for someone of such obviously limited means to be carrying around in the open. Her shawl was patched in places, and the hem of her long skirt was tattered, stained with the mud that caked the valley below.\n\n\"Might I ask where you're headed?\" Iden said.\n\nShe eyed his long pike and his suit of armor, looking him up and down.\n\n\"To the same place as you, I'd wager,\" she replied. Her features were still obscured beneath her shawl, and Iden couldn't get a good look at her. \"Are you here in search of the dragon, Sir Knight?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm not actually a knight. But yes, I'm here to slay the dragon.\" She didn't seem as impressed as he had anticipated, bar wenches usually swooned over a man in armor. \"What business do you have with the beast?\" he added.\n\n\"Legends say that if one brings an offering to a dragon, it will grant them mercy. It is only a matter of time before it descends upon the village, and it is my hope that this heirloom might spare my family's farm from the flames.\"\n\n\"You'll have no need to part with your heirlooms,\" Iden continued, \"I mean to claim the bounty that was placed on the dragon's head.\"\n\n\"Are you a dragon slayer by profession?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" he admitted, \"but I've seen my fair share of battles.\"\n\n\"And by what means do you intend to bring it down?\" the woman asked, \"with that long stick?\"\n\n\"This is a pike,\" Iden corrected, \"it measures twelve feet. The tip is a blade forged from tempered steel, hard and sharp enough to pierce the hide of any beast, dragon or otherwise. From behind the safety of my shield, I shall spear its heart.\"\n\n\"Well...good luck in your venture,\" the woman replied skeptically. She set off again, walking past Iden and his horse, but he called after her.\n\n\"I'd advise you to turn back, milady. The mountains are no place for a lone woman, and your offering will be in vain. I will see that.\"\n\nShe paused for a moment, then reached up to pull back her shawl. Her long, auburn hair fell about her shoulders, and as she turned to face him, he saw that she had handsome features. Her eyes were a shade of striking green, while her lily-white skin was free of any dirt or blemishes, her lips full and rosy. She was quite the beauty, a rose amongst thorns in this miserable village, with its population of surly barmaids and grizzled shepherds. He wouldn't have said no to a roll in the hay with this farmer's daughter.\n\n\"Then perhaps you would escort a lady up to the peak, Hedge Knight?\"\n\n\"I would prefer Knight Errant,\" he grumbled, \"and I don't think that's a good idea. Are you certain that you can make the climb?\"\n\n\"I could ask the same of you,\" she replied, planting her free hand on her hip as she cocked an eyebrow at him. \"Have you ever scaled a peak before? The going will be hard in that heavy armor of yours.\"\n\nShe was a feisty woman, it didn't seem like arguing with her would be a good use of his time.\n\n\"If I humor you, and you decide to turn back halfway, then I won't be able to abandon my quest in order to carry you back down.\"\n\n\"I won't be turning back,\" she replied defiantly, and he shrugged his armored shoulders.\n\n\"Very well, have it your way. Truth be told, the company will be welcome. It's a day's ride at least, and perhaps a second to reach the peak. Might I ask your name?\"\n\n\"Isabelle,\" she replied, turning about and setting off again. \"Let us not dawdle, Sir.\"\n\nIden hurried to sling his pack across his back, mounting his horse and following behind her. She got ahead of him, and he managed to catch up, walking his steed along beside her and matching pace.\n\n\"So your plan was to present the dragon with that vase?\" he asked, gesturing to it with his reins in hand. Isabelle glanced up at him and nodded her head.\n\n\"It's the most valuable thing that my family owns, it was passed down from my Great Grandmother. It's a ceremonial urn, forged from gold.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that a beast such as this can be reasoned with? What would you have done if you had found it to be as feral as a bear or a wolf?\"\n\n\"Are dragons not known to be intelligent beasts?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not to my knowledge,\" Iden replied, peering down at her through his open visor. \"This one seems to spend its days eating sheep, doesn't sound like it has much reason to me. I expect it's merely a wild animal, albeit one of impressive size and strength. If you ask me, the tales of their cunning have been exaggerated over the ages, when was the last time that a living soul even saw a dragon?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" his companion replied, \"but my Grandfather oft spoke of them. He told of a time when there were dozens of dragons in these parts, they dwelt in the mountains, and they descended to hunt the forests for game.\"\n\n\"Were there dragons in his day?\"\n\n\"No, he was telling stories that his own family had passed down to him. He said that they were magical beasts and that they could commune with mankind.\"\n\n\"Magic?\" Iden scoffed, \"I've never seen any magic.\"\n\n\"You don't believe in magic?\" Isabelle asked, hopping over a protruding rock that was covered in lichen.\n\n\"I've been in more battles than you've had hot meals, and never once have I seen anything that I could describe as magic. If people could...shoot lightning from their eyes, and raise the dead, wouldn't they have done so to safeguard their keeps? To defeat their adversaries? If they can get their hands on modern siege equipment and repeating crossbows, then why not a wizard? Are there no conjurers who take payment for their services? No, I have no cause to believe in magic.\"\n\n\"You only believe what your eyes see, then?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Iden replied confidently.\n\n\"Then what of the Gods?\"\n\n\"Well, of course there are Gods,\" he chuckled. \"Can there be a sword without a smith, or a child with no mother? Something must have made the world, and that something must be far greater than mortal men, unless you know of someone who can chisel a mountain range from a block of stone.\"\n\n\"But how can you be sure if you've never seen a God?\" Isabelle continued.\n\n\"It's just logic,\" Iden replied, growing a little tired of this line of questioning. \"Why does a farmhand concern herself with such matters? Don't you have chickens to feed, and pigs to muck out?\"\n\n\"Says the hedge knight in a suit of hand-me-down armor,\" she laughed. \"I'll have you know that I have ample time for reflection. I believe that magic is like a well, and that if too much water is drawn from it, it will eventually run dry. Perhaps there is naught but a trickle left.\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" he said dismissively.\n\n\"And what of you, Sir Knight? What about facing off against a dragon appeals to you?\"\n\n\"The reward, of course. The crown has offered fifteen hundred gold pieces for its head, not to mention the hoard of treasure that the beast might have accrued. The shepherd who first laid eyes on the thing told me that gold coins rained from its scales wherever it trod.\"\n\n\"Why would a dull beast collect coins?\" Isabelle asked.\n\n\"Magpies collect buttons and pennies, perhaps the dragon is of like mind.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "They continued on in silence for a while longer, the snorting of the horse and the whistling of the wind the only sounds that echoed through the valley. Isabelle walked along beside his steed, weaving between the rocks, and sidestepping the pointy thistles. She was a stout girl, a lifetime of farm work must have made her tough, and it had imbued her with stamina to spare. Iden was not one to violate strange women on the roads, he was no brigand, but perhaps he could woo the girl with tales of heroism and battle. She would make a fine sleeping bag warmer up on the frigid slopes of the mountain.\n\n\"So where did you come from?\" she asked as she navigated around a large boulder.\n\n\"I journeyed to your village from the South, I am accustomed to warmer climes.\"\n\n\"So you're a Southerner then? I guessed as much from your accent and your dark hair,\" she said, seeming pleased with herself. \"You traveled all the way to my little village for naught but a dragon?\"\n\n\"For more wealth than I could ever spend,\" he chuckled, \"the dragon is incidental.\"\n\n\"Have you been in a lot of wars, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, more than I care to count. That's the profession of a mercenary, to offer one's services to the highest bidder. Kings and Lords appear to command vast armies, but their conscripts usually have little to no practical experience. They are farmers and woodsmen equipped with armor and weapons of as poor a quality as their Lord can get away with. Knights are usually prissy and spoiled. They don't know the realities of war, the grime, and the filth. They have never trudged through a field of mud and spilled entrails in search of a fellow man to butcher.\"\n\n\"You paint a lovely picture,\" she scoffed, seemingly undeterred by the grisly imagery.\n\n\"Mercenaries are invaluable during a battle, they're more often than not the only attendants who have any experience, and they command an appropriate price.\"\n\n\"So how do you choose who to fight for?\" Isabelle asked. \"If there are two opposing Kings bidding for mercenaries, do you side with the one who offers the highest pay?\"\n\n\"Not...always,\" Iden replied, a touch of hesitation in his gruff voice. \"I do have some principles, after all. I wouldn't offer my services to an invading army that meant to rape and pillage their way through a kingdom, or to thieves and brigands.\"\n\n\"And how picky are you, exactly?\" Isabelle pressed. She had a mischievous glint in her green eyes, as though she enjoyed putting him on the spot.\n\n\"Picky enough to sleep soundly at night.\"\n\n\"But you've killed plenty of young men who, by your own admission, have little to no experience.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" he admitted with a shrug of his shoulders that made his armor clank. \"But that's just the way of things. I'm good at fighting, always have been. Would you have me lay down my sword and take up a life of poverty as a farmer or a laborer?\"\n\n\"The life of a farmer isn't so bad,\" she said as she skipped idly through a patch of colorful flowers, the tattered hem of her long skirt dragging behind her.\n\n\"Besides,\" Iden added, \"you'll be glad of the likes of me once I slay this dragon and free your village from its tyranny.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"And what of you?\" he asked, shifting in his saddle to get more comfortable. There was so much weight slung across his back with the shield and the laden pack. \"Have you any stories to tell? Why would such a slight girl be tasked with delivering an offering to the dragon? Have you no brothers or cousins to make the climb in your stead? Is your father an invalid?\"\n\nShe paused for a moment, considering her reply perhaps.\n\n\"The men of my family are more...martially-minded. They are happy to see the beast slain, but I have little confidence in the abilities of mortal men to overcome magical beasts with naught but their steel.\"\n\n\"And so you expect me to fail?\"\n\n\"I do not wish it, but...probably.\"\n\n\"Then I shall have to prove you wrong,\" Iden said. \"We should stop to rest soon,\" he added, changing the subject. \"My stomach is starting to rumble, and the horse needs to drink.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "They stopped beside the stream to rest for a while. The sun was higher in the sky now, it was approaching midday. The mountain was looming ever closer, the terrain growing harsher the closer they ventured. Here, the stream cascaded over the rocks in a small waterfall, the bed lined with smooth stones. Most of the grass had vanished, replaced with hardier plants that could tolerate the thin air, and soil that provided poor nourishment.\n\nIden let his horse drink from the water as he set his weapons down, taking off his helmet and placing it on a nearby rock, shaking out his mane of black hair. Isabelle watched him curiously, it was the first time that she had seen him without it on, and she was getting a good look at his face. She had commented on his dark hair because it protruded beneath his helmet, but now she could see his collection of scars too. Iden thought that it made him look rugged, none of the women that he had lain with had ever complained about it. On the contrary, they seemed to find it attractive, proof of his strength and his martial prowess.\n\nHe rummaged through his pack, pulling out a handful of small paper parcels that were tied with string. It was mostly salted meats that he had purchased from the tavern owner before setting out, along with a couple of loaves of bread. There would be no more leathery, jerked meat on this journey. Once he claimed the dragon's fortune, he could stop at a new inn every night and sample their best dishes to his heart's content.\n\nHe unwrapped one of the parcels, bringing the salted mutton to his mouth, then paused as he looked over at Isabelle. Her green eyes were fixed on his meal, and she wet her lips hungrily. She had brought no supplies of her own, all she had was her vase. Iden ignored her, taking a bite and chewing loudly as the girl began to pout.\n\n\"Some chivalrous knight you turned out to be,\" she complained, \"would you not share a bite to eat with a hungry girl?\"\n\n\"I never claimed to be a knight,\" he replied over a mouthful of meat, \"nor am I known to be chivalrous.\"\n\n\"Now is as good a time to start as any!\" Isabelle insisted, watching his parcel of mutton like a hungry dog waiting for table scraps. Iden gave in, rolling his eyes as he tore off a chunk of meat and tossed it to her. She snatched it out of the air, digging into it ravenously. Perhaps she really was a pauper.\n\n\"Don't eat it all in one go,\" he muttered, \"I'm not here to feed you for free.\"\n\n\"A man who is poor of means,\" she mumbled as she ate, \"can still be rich of soul.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well until a bank teller will take my soul as a deposit, money will have to suffice.\"\n\nWhen he was done eating a rudimentary sandwich, he filled his canteen in the stream, finding the water clean and cool. Isabelle placed her vase on the grass, then knelt by the bank, drinking from her cupped hands. She dried them on her skirt, then stretched her arms above her head, letting the wind blow her long locks of red hair. Iden took another draw, trying not to stare at her too conspicuously.\n\n\"If you succeed in slaying the dragon,\" she began, \"what will you do with the riches? Surely a dragon's hoard is more than any one man could hope to spend? Besides buying a suit of armor that actually fits you,\" she added with a chuckle.\n\nIden ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation, what answer did she expect of him?\n\n\"I intend to retire, preferably to a large country manor, where I'll live like a king until I've lost all of my teeth and my cock no longer works.\"\n\nShe laughed at that, she seemed to have a good sense of humor for a sheltered farmhand.\n\n\"You won't give any of it to charity, then? You don't want to feed the hungry, or help the poor?\"\n\n\"Why would I do that?\" Iden asked, crossing his arms as he sat on his rock. \"The poor are free to slay their own dragons if they wish. I'm risking my own life, is it not fair that I alone should reap the rewards?\"\n\n\"You believe in the Gods, but is it not written that men of great wealth seldom reach Heaven?\"\n\n\"Now you're starting to sound like a Paladin,\" Iden grumbled, taking another swig from his canteen. \"Let the Gods judge me if they so choose, I'm not afraid of death, couldn't be in my line of work.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you have more in common with this dragon that you know,\" she said, shooting him a grin. \"You both seek to brood over mountains of gold that you can never spend.\"\n\nThe girl walked over to the horse, giving its flank a pat as it drank, its tail whipping back and forth idly. She seemed to have taken a liking to the beast. Horses were not farmed for milk or meat, and so she might not have come across them very often.\n\n\"What's her name?\" she asked.\n\n\"Doesn't have one,\" Iden replied.\n\n\"You didn't name her?\" Isabelle said, looking back over her shoulder to pout at him. \"Don't worry,\" she continued, turning her attention back to the horse. \"If this brute won't give you a name, I will. Let's see...\" She looked around for a moment, perhaps seeking inspiration in the patches of flowers and the scrubby bushes that protruded from between the rocks. \"How about...Heather!\"\n\n\"It's as good a name as any, I suppose,\" Iden grumbled. \"Do you name all of your livestock?\"\n\n\"Heather is a noble steed, not mere livestock,\" Isabelle shot back. \"Isn't that right, girl?\"\n\n\"We should reach the foot of the mountain by nightfall,\" Iden said, glancing up at the ominous peak. \"Let's keep moving.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "The sun had passed behind the mountain as it began to set, casting a long, dark shadow across the valley. Iden felt as though the temperature had dropped to that of a winter's night, the cool wind now biting and harsh. Isabelle shivered beside him, rubbing her hands together beneath her tattered shawl as she lugged her heavy vase along. As unwieldy as his armor was, at least his gambeson was thick enough to insulate him against the cold to an extent.\n\nHe watched as the girl lost her footing, stumbling amidst the rocks that littered the ground. She grazed her knee, wincing as she struggled back to her feet.\n\n\"Say,\" she said, looking up at him from below. \"Might I have a turn on the horse?\"\n\n\"First you eat my food without recompense, and now you expect to ride my horse? I can't fit you behind me, there's little room to spare with my shield and my pack.\"\n\n\"Just for a little while, so that I might rest,\" she pleaded. \"My feet are blistered, and hunger has made me weary.\"\n\nShe looked so miserable down there, and he wondered again why she was so ill-prepared for this trek. What had she expected to happen? Could she really be so naive as to think that she could scale a mountain with no food, wearing a pair of farmer's boots? He gazed at her for a few moments from beneath his open visor, then he sighed in exasperation, his armor clattering as he made to dismount the horse. Her sad eyes brightened as Iden dropped heavily to the ground, and he thrust the reins into her hands with a gauntleted fist.\n\n\"Very well, but only because the exercise might warm me. And take some food from my pack. Naught but a morsel of bread, you hear? I won't have you complaining about your stomach until we make camp.\"\n\nShe scooted around behind him, and he felt her rummaging through his pack as she searched for the loaf of bread. He heard the rustling of the paper, and then she tore off a piece, chewing into it ravenously. With her meal in hand, she slipped one of her feet into a stirrup, struggling to mount the horse. Iden sighed, helping her up into the saddle. He realized that she probably didn't know how to ride, and so he took the reins from her, leading the horse along as he started on his way. The last thing he needed was both his horse and the girl vanishing into the night if the animal got spooked by something.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said sweetly, bobbing back and forth as she sat atop the horse and dug into her bread.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Iden grumbled from beneath his helmet. He was starting to wish that he had set off a day later, and that the dragon had made a meal of her. Not that she would ever have reached the peak without his help.\n\nIt was a little harder to see in the shadow of the mountain, but he was used to long marches, and he was none the worse for wear by the time they were ready to make camp. The sun had dipped below the horizon now, and the stars were twinkling in the cloudless sky, like bright beacons against the endless expanse of inky blackness.\n\n\"We should make camp here,\" he announced, the horse stamping its feet as they came to a stop. He raised a hand and helped Isabelle to dismount, then began to shrug off his shield and his pack. \"See if you can find enough dry wood to start a fire, there must be some dead bushes and shrubs around here to provide enough kindling.\"\n\nThe girl headed off to search while he unpacked his tent. He unrolled a bundle of fabric and drove a pair of sharpened poles into the ground. It was rocky here, and the earth was tough, he had to beat them with his gauntlet to drive them deep enough that they would stand upright. He draped the canvass over the top of the primitive framework, creating a wedge-shaped shelter with a flap on one end, perhaps three or four feet tall. It wasn't luxurious by any means, but it was enough to shield a prone occupant from the elements. The wind was already tearing at it, and he retrieved some metal stakes from his bag, driving them into the ground to secure the four corners. When he was sure that the structure was reasonably secure, he began to move his gear inside.\n\nThere wasn't much that he could do for the horse, but it wasn't as if there was a blizzard. The animal would be fine come morning. He secured her lead to a nearby bush, if she uprooted it in a panic for some reason, then so be it. He couldn't take her very much further anyway.\n\nBy the time he had laid out his sleeping bag, Isabelle had returned with an armful of gnarled sticks. He made a circle out of stones, and stacked them inside, striking a piece of flint into a bundle of dried plant matter. He blew on the orange ember until it sprung into flames, and then he pushed it gingerly between the twigs. Before long, the small fire was crackling, and the pair huddled around it for warmth as the flames cast dancing shadows.\n\nIsabelle shivered, and he shared his canteen with her, starting on another piece of mutton as she watched.\n\n\"Where will I sleep?\" she asked, eyeing his one-man tent apprehensively.\n\n\"I wasn't planning on having company,\" he muttered, talking with his mouth full. \"I suppose you'll have to squeeze in beside me.\"\n\n\"I can't share a tent with a strange man in the wilderness,\" she replied, \"what would my father say?\"\n\n\"Not much, I'd presume,\" Iden replied. \"He's letting you visit a dragon after all. Besides, what do you expect me to do? Should I cede my sleeping bag to you, and dig a hole for myself like a rabbit?\"\n\n\"Fair point,\" Isabelle said, stoking the crackling fire with a long branch. \"Are you...the type to take advantage of a woman in a compromising situation?\"\n\n\"What do you think?\" he scoffed, a little insulted by the insinuation.\n\n\"I think that you're a large, strong man who doesn't hesitate to take what he wants, at least where battle is concerned. A man who has been traveling alone for days or weeks, and who might have...pent up urges that he may seek to satisfy with a woman who would be powerless to resist his advances...\"\n\n\"If that's what you think, then take the horse and head back to town,\" Iden said as he gestured to the tethered beast. \"Nobody is forcing you to stay with me.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean anything by it,\" she said, her tone apologetic. \"I suppose that if you wanted to ravish me, you would have done so by now.\"\n\n\"Are you hungry?\" he asked, and she nodded. He passed her a piece of mutton and another hunk of bread, and they ate together as they stared into the smoldering embers. It was so silent in the mountains, there were no chirping birds, no buzzing insects.\n\n\"So what happens if you don't prevail against the dragon?\" Isabelle asked, glancing over at him as she gnawed on the tough bread. Her green eyes reflected the firelight from beneath the shadow of her shawl, the wind tugging at the patchwork of fabric and fanning the flames. \"Are you survived by anyone? A wife? Children?\"\n\n\"No,\" he replied tersely, washing down a mouthful of meat with a swig from his canteen.\n\n\"Why not?\" she continued, watching him expectantly.\n\n\"I'm a mercenary, starting a family is the least of my concerns right now.\"\n\n\"Isn't there anyone waiting for you back home?\"\n\n\"Home is wherever work is, I'm never in one place for very long. I sleep at a different inn each night, if I'm not camping out in the wilds, or marching with an army. I have my fill of food and women wherever I happen to be.\"\n\n\"I see, so it's like that?\" Isabelle chuckled. \"And here I was starting to think that there was a heart of gold under all that metal and brawn.\"\n\nHe realized that his cheeks were reddening, and for the first time in recent memory, he began to feel a little ashamed of himself. Tales of slaying his enemies and bedding scores of women usually earned the admiration of his comrades in arms, and the attention of loose barmaids. Isabelle was neither, and her sensibilities were quite different.\n\n\"Perhaps...I have been on the road for too long,\" he muttered. \"But if I can claim this prize, then I'll be free to settle wherever I wish. I could marry...maybe. If I could woo a noblewoman, then my children would be Lords and Ladies.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't marry for money or for status,\" Isabelle said as she finished off the last of her bread. She leaned forward to drop a few more sticks onto the campfire, giving it a prod with her branch, the wind carrying away the wisps of smoke. \"I'd wait for the right man to come along.\"\n\n\"Let me guess, you'd wait for a charming Paladin in a bejeweled raiment to sweep you off your feet? You'll be waiting a long time out here, girl.\"\n\n\"Don't call me girl,\" she complained, \"I'm not as naive as you think. True love happened for my mother and for my father, for my grandmother and my grandfather. So why not for me?\"\n\n\"I never said that it wouldn't\" Iden added, \"but you can't sit on your hands and expect something like that to happen on its own. If you want something to happen for you, then you have to make it happen. You want love? Go out and seek it. The Gods won't do it for you, and nobody else will care enough to arrange it in your stead.\"\n\nHe began to unwrap another paper parcel, tossing the string into the fire and watching it burn. This one was some kind of spiced sausage, and he reached into his pocket, pulling out a knife and slicing off one end. He picked up a twig and speared it, holding it over the fire. It didn't need to be cooked, but a little smoky flavor might do it some good.\n\n\"I've seen too many people become complacent,\" he continued, \"sitting idle because they expect fate or destiny to fulfill all of their desires in good time. Men who see themselves with a beautiful wife and gold to spare, just as soon as the stars align in their favor.\"\n\n\"Is that what you're doing?\" Isabelle asked, \"making your own fate?\"\n\n\"I'd like to think so,\" he said, taking a bite of his sausage. \"I'm not waiting for a fortune to fall into my lap, I'm going to take it for myself.\"\n\n\"And that's why you like fighting so much, because you alone hold the reins, your life is in your own hands?\"\n\n\"Getting a little philosophical here, aren't we?\" he muttered. She went quiet, no doubt realizing that it wasn't a subject of conversation that he wanted to pursue. The awkward silence was eventually broken as he rose to his feet, his armor making a racket.\n\n\"I'm about ready to turn in,\" Iden said, making for the tent. Isabelle stood too, wringing her hands together nervously, not looking forward to sharing a sleeping bag with him. He paused by the flap of his tent, holding it open with one hand as he waited for her to join him.\n\n\"You'll catch your death if you sleep out here in the open. Come on, I'm not going to bite.\"\n\nAfter another few moments of fretting, she finally gave in, approaching the tent and ducking in under the open flap. The interior was cramped, the tent was only intended to be occupied by one person, it was just enough to cover an average sized man while he lay on the ground.\n\n\"It's tiny,\" she complained, and he laughed at her disappointed expression.\n\n\"Were you expecting me to build an entire inn for you? I might be handy with an axe, but only when it comes to felling men, not trees.\"\n\nHe had already laid out the sleeping bag, little more than a tube of quilted fabric, and she tested it like a cat kneading a blanket. She sat on it, then turned to watch as Iden began to remove his armor plating. He slid off his gantlets first, placing them on the ground, and then began to remove his vambraces. Iden always struggled with his breastplate, and he reached around his sides, trying to unbuckle the belts that held the two halves together.\n\n\"I could do with a little help,\" he grumbled, \"can you lend me a hand?\"\n\n\"What do I have to do?\" Isabelle asked, shuffling closer so that she was kneeling beside him.\n\n\"Just unfasten those clasps for me...yeah, that's right. Now help me get these pauldrons off.\"\n\n\"Pauldrons?\" she repeated, not familiar with the term.\n\n\"The big metal shoulder pads,\" he explained, \"just help me pull them off. They make it hard to raise my arms above my head.\"\n\n\"Why is it so dented?\" Isabelle wondered, removing one of the heavy pauldrons and setting it aside.\n\n\"If you see a dent, that's probably where someone hit me. Before you mock me for my lack of luster, know that each of those blows could have mortally wounded me. This armor has saved my life more times than I can count.\"\n\nShe helped him to remove the heavy pieces one by one until he was eventually stripped down to his gambeson and his leggings. The gambeson was thick and padded, both to act as a cushion that would prevent his armor from chafing, and to serve as a form of protection in itself. It was relatively warm, and so he saw no reason to remove it, least of all in Isabelle's company.\n\n\"There's only one sleeping bag,\" he said, \"we'll have to share if you don't want to freeze. You're pretty small, there should be room enough for the both of us.\"\n\n\"You promise to keep your hands to yourself?\" she asked, eyeing him warily.\n\n\"Cross my heart.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" she grumbled. She slid off her boots and took off her shawl, but she kept the rest of her clothes on as she slid into the bag. She shifted uncomfortably, her face screwing up in displeasure. \"It's scratchy.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it's lined with straw for insulation,\" Iden explained. \"Don't tell me that the farmers in these parts can afford to sleep on mattresses stuffed with goose feathers?\"\n\n\"No, but ours are more comfortable than this,\" she grumbled.\n\n\"Perhaps I should skin Heather so that you might wear her pelt?\"\n\n\"No!\" Isabelle protested, giving him a horrified look.\n\n\"Relax, I'm joking,\" he laughed. \"Now scoot over, I need to get in there too.\" After a lot of shifting and shuffling, they finally managed to get into the sleeping bag together. It was a tight fit, and Iden could feel her soft, slight frame pressing up against him. She had turned her back to him, perhaps thinking it a more modest position to sleep in, but her plump rear was resting against his hip as a result. He could feel her cheeks through the fabric of her skirt, firmer than those that he was accustomed to, shaped by years of labor.\n\nHer body was probably sculpted beautifully beneath those billowing clothes, there was nothing quite like a woman who had been made hard and strong by the daily rigors of a physically demanding profession, like a stonecutter or a warrior. He had met a few female mercenaries during his travels, and he'd had the opportunity to bed one or two of them. They were aggressive and vigorous, and they possessed the stamina to keep up with him, a rare treat indeed compared to a giggling bar wench.\n\nHis instincts commanded him to throw a strong arm around her waist, and to drag her closer, to hike up her skirt and to slide his member between her smooth thighs. She was young, in the prime of her life, no more than twenty at the most. A ripe, juicy fruit waiting to be picked from the branch.\n\nPerhaps he could entice her, whisper into her ear, and promise to instruct her in the ways of lovemaking. He was a brute of a man, rugged and dangerous, his own body a veritable playground for the wandering fingers of a curious girl. He was a clear foot taller than her, his muscles like slabs of rock, his hands rough and calloused. Iden knew what women liked, if they admitted it freely or not.\n\nNo, he had given her his word.\n\nIden rolled over to face away from her, driving the urges from his mind. Isabelle wasn't like the other women that he had met during his travels, he got the feeling that she wouldn't appreciate his advances. He was getting side-tracked, he had to stay focused on his task. If he could slay the dragon, then he would have all of the women that he desired. Maybe even Isabelle, if his feats impressed her enough.\n\n\"Tomorrow, we shall begin our climb to the peak,\" he heard her mutter as the wind battered the tent above them. \"Are you still set on this course of action?\"\n\n\"I will not falter,\" he replied confidently, \"the dragon will die by my pike. And what of you? Do you still insist on accompanying me? Know that if the beast should turn its fury on you, I will not be able to guarantee your safety.\"\n\n\"I trust that the dragon will accept my offering. It is not my own life that I fear for, but yours. If you strike at the dragon with the intent to kill it, I have no doubt that it will respond in kind.\"\n\n\"Then so be it,\" Iden said, \"there is no great reward without great risk.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "\"You're setting Heather free?\" Isabelle asked, watching as he began to remove the horse's saddle. The night had been uneventful, they had both slept off their exhaustion, and then Iden had made them a modest breakfast once the sun had begun to rise. The tent and the sleeping bag had been packed away, and he had enlisted the girl's help in putting his suit of armor back on. Now they were ready to tackle the next hurdle of their journey, scaling the mountain itself.\n\n\"I can't very well have her climb a mountain,\" Iden replied as he slipped the animal's bit out of its mouth. \"She's no sturdy donkey, she'll break her legs up there on the rocks. Better to see her on her way. When I descend this mountain, it will be with enough riches to a buy a legion of horses, or I will not descend at all.\"\n\nHe gave the animal a pat on its rump, and it trotted away, heading back down towards the foothills.\n\n\"Will she be okay on her own?\" Isabelle asked, shielding her eyes against the sunrise as she watched the horse descend.\n\n\"There's water down there, and ample grass, the beast will be fine. As for us, however...\"\n\nIden turned to face the mountain, peering up at the harsh peak that towered above them, sheathed in wisps of cloud. It was not the tallest mountain that he had ever seen, but it was a day's climb or more, and at the top was the dragon's lair.\n\n\"This is your final chance to turn back,\" he said ominously, \"will you not heed my advice?\"\n\n\"I won't,\" she replied, hefting her vase in her hands.\n\n\"Then so be it, we make for the top.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"Take my hand,\" Iden said, reaching down to grip Isabelle by her slim wrist. He hauled her up and over a rocky outcrop, depositing her on the ground beside him. She fumbled with her golden vase, almost dropping it, but she caught it at the last second. He watched her exhale in relief, her breath misting in the cold.\n\nThere were patches of snow here that made the going slippery and which served to obscure some of the more dangerous rocks. There was no path, they had to make their own way, Iden driving the haft of his pike deep into the icy ground for purchase. His armor was a liability, weighing him down and making him clumsier than he needed to be, but there was no alternative. Facing the dragon without his gear would be suicidal.\n\n\"We can't be far off now,\" he panted, \"the snow did not cover more than the highest point when seen from the foothills.\"\n\n\"Hang on,\" Isabelle gasped, leaning on a nearby boulder. \"I need to rest for a moment.\"\n\nThere were so many loose rocks here, it compounded the danger. One only needed to slip, and they would be sent tumbling down the steep face. There were no plants here, no grasses or shrubs, only the occasional patch of hardy lichen that clung desperately to the rocks that protruded from the shin-deep snow.\n\n\"I don't advise that,\" Iden replied, pausing to look back at her. \"Stay still for too long, and the cold will claim you. It will make you as stiff as a statue. We must keep our blood flowing, and our muscles moving, we have to stay warm. Take deep breaths, the air is thinning.\"\n\nShe nodded, picking up the pace. As much as Iden would have liked to rest, his tent would do little against this harsh wind, and there was nary a flat surface upon which to place it. No, they couldn't stop until they reached their destination. Charging into the dragon's den while exhausted from his climb might put him at a disadvantage, but unless there was more than one cave, he would have little choice. He had fought after long marches before, he could handle it\u2026\n\nThe conversation had certainly died down since they had reached the more grueling part of their climb, neither one of them could spare the breath. The freezing wind howled, and the snow crunched beneath their feet, the hollow clanking of Iden's armor echoing.\n\n\"Up there,\" Iden said, gesturing ahead of them. There was a small cliff with a rocky outcrop that looked as though it might provide them with some modicum of shelter, massive icicles hanging over the lip. After struggling another hundred feet or so, they threw themselves beneath the rock, the structure forming a sort of shallow cave mouth. It shielded them from the buffeting wind, and Iden took the opportunity to lay his pack and his weapons down. Isabelle stumbled in after him, taking a seat on the cold floor.\n\n\"Thank the Gods,\" she sighed, \"a moment of respite.\"\n\nShe kicked off one of her boots and began to massage her foot through her thick sock.\n\n\"This is as good a place as any to make camp for the night,\" Iden said, reaching into his pack and withdrawing a bundle of sticks that were tied together with knotted string. \"It's a good job that we had the foresight to bring some firewood and kindling with us, there's nary a plant in sight up here.\"\n\nIsabelle hovered about impatiently as he stacked the broken branches and struck his flint over a handful of dry moss, cupping his hands around the fledgling embers and blowing on them. After a couple of tense minutes, the flames finally took hold, the small campfire beginning to crackle. The pair huddled around it, holding their hands as close to the fire as they dared in an attempt to warm themselves.\n\n\"Eat,\" Iden said, fishing a paper package from his bag and tossing it to her. \"You'll need your strength if we're going to face the dragon tomorrow. Just be mindful, we'll need to save enough for the return trip.\"\n\n\"That's optimistic,\" she chuckled, unwrapping her parcel and taking a bite of the salted meat within.\n\n\"At least there's an ample supply of fresh snow up here, we can melt it to refill the canteen. I'll set the tent up beside the fire, though I doubt that I'll be able to drive the stakes into this rock. We may have to make do with the sleeping bag alone.\"\n\nShe nodded, chewing laboriously.\n\n\"I wanted to discuss our tactics,\" Iden continued, \"for when we challenge the dragon tomorrow. I would have you wait outside until I am done. Do not set foot in its den until I give the all-clear, or you might be caught in the battle. I can protect myself from its fiery breath and its rending claws with my shield, and my armor, but I cannot safeguard you as well.\"\n\n\"About that,\" she began, Iden sensing an argument brewing. \"If you anger the dragon before I have a chance to present it with my offering, do you not think that it will reject it? If a party of two visited your home, and one of them attempted to murder you, would you then accept a gift from his companion?\"\n\n\"I see no reason to think that the dragon will accept your gift, regardless of its mood,\" he replied as he stoked the fire. \"It's a wild animal, you might as well try to gain the favor of a bear by offering it a pot of honey.\"\n\n\"You don't know that,\" she grumbled, tugging her golden vase a little closer to her.\n\n\"It had crossed my mind to tear that jar from your hands and to cast it off the mountain once we reached the peak,\" he admitted, \"if only to put an end to your foolishness. It might have upset you, but without your offering, you would have no reason to put yourself at risk.\"\n\n\"You brute!\" she gasped, her green eyes flashing with indignation. She clutched her vase in her arms as if to shield it from him, her lower lip beginning to tremble as she scowled at him. \"You think me so naive, but you have no idea what you're doing. You know no more about dragons than I do, and yet you presume to make decisions in my stead, as if you had some sort of authority over me. Well hear this, Hedge Knight. You have no idea what you're walking into, and tomorrow you'll be proven wrong. Then we'll see who's being foolish.\"\n\n\"Clearly, I decided against that course of action,\" he replied. \"But I still want you to wait, and if I should be slain by the beast, then go back down the mountain. Listen to reason, don't try to bargain with the thing.\"\n\n\"How about this?\" Isabelle continued, still glaring at him from across the campfire. \"I shall go in first, and you shall accompany me as my loyal guardsman. I will present my gift to the dragon, and if it should refuse, then you can have your way with the thing.\"\n\n\"And if it decides to fill the entire cave with fire at the first sight of you?\"\n\n\"Then I shall burden you no longer,\" she snapped.\n\n\"I'm only trying to keep you safe,\" he grumbled, \"it would tarnish my victory to see you reduced to a pile of ash.\"\n\nShe was a stubborn girl, fighting about it was pointless, and he was starting to regret bringing it up at all. He might have to take more drastic measures tomorrow, but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.\n\nWhen they were done eating, Iden attempted to erect the tent. As he had suspected, the rocky ground was too hard to pierce with a tent peg, he would have needed a hammer to make any headway. Instead, they laid the fabric of the tent out to act as a little extra insulation, and then set the sleeping bag down on top of it. Isabelle was still sulking, and so they drifted off to sleep in silence."
            },
            {
                "title": "LAIR OF THE BEAST",
                "text": "\"Watch out!\" Iden shouted, his boot dislodging a rock. It rolled down the steep incline towards Isabelle, picking up more loose stones as it went, until it had formed a kind of miniature rockslide. She dodged out of its path, taking cover behind a nearby boulder, the stones clattering against it as they cascaded down the mountainside.\n\n\"Careful where you step!\" she yelled back, peeking out to glare at him.\n\nThey were really far up now. Iden had seldom seen the clouds from above, they created what looked like a snow-white ocean below him that extended all the way to the horizon. The mountainside seemed to vanish into the fog, as if the peak was all that existed now. He could make out a few far-off mountains jutting above the clouds like snowy islands, but they were far away, hazy and indistinct. Above him, the sky was such a deep blue that it was bordering on black. A clear, azure sky was usually joined by the warmth of a summer's day, but the heavens were as cold as ice water up here. The wind howled, strong enough to buffet him in his suit of armor, creeping through the joints as though he had been submerged in a frozen lake.\n\n\"It has to be close,\" he said as Isabelle climbed up to meet him. He reached down to offer her his hand, the girl reacting as though she intended to refuse it for a moment before taking it. He guided her up, the both of them taking a moment to rest on a relatively flat outcrop. \"The highest point is in sight,\" he continued, glancing up at the craggy peak. \"The dragon's lair must be below that, a cave that winds deeper inside the mountain, presumably.\"\n\n\"So what, are we going to circle the peak until we find it?\" Isabelle asked. \"I can't feel my fingers, I fear that if I spend much longer up here, I will freeze in place like a statue.\"\n\n\"Something tells me that we'll not have to search for very long,\" Iden replied, pointing above them. \"Look!\"\n\nShe followed his gaze, turning to see the mouth of a cave. It looked like a giant had bored out a cavernous hole in the sheer rock face with an appropriately sized auger, leaving a deep tunnel that was sheathed in dark shadow. As they climbed up towards it, Iden noted that it was tall and wide enough that a stagecoach could have passed through it unhindered, or a dragon of the same scale that the old shepherd had described\u2026\n\nThey wasted no time, hurrying inside to escape the cold, the wind making an eerie wailing sound as it rushed down the winding passage. The walls and ceiling of the cave were rough and uneven, and their footsteps echoed like they were standing inside a grand cathedral. There was moisture everywhere, every surface seeming to glisten such that it almost seemed to have been sculpted from wet clay. There were mineral deposits that had dripped from the roof, creating long, drooping stalactites that resembled icicles. The longer ones were broken away, evidence of the dragon's passing perhaps. The floor was lined with snow that had seeped inside, along with a few loose stones here and there.\n\n\"It's so dark,\" Isabelle murmured, \"as black as pitch. How will we see once we're down there? I don't want to get lost...\"\n\n\"I came prepared,\" Iden replied, struggling to take off his pack. He knelt to fish inside it, and then withdrew a wooden stick. It was a makeshift torch, one end wrapped tightly with a bundle of cloth. Next, he pulled out a vial of oil that he had wrapped in rags to prevent it from breaking during his journey. He upended it over the fabric, soaking it with the flammable substance. He struck his trusty pieces of flint together, and after a couple of attempts, he succeeded in creating a spark. The torch flared to life, burning brightly, and he raised it above his head to illuminate their path. The shadows were driven back by the wavering light, and before them, the tunnel wound its way deep into the mountain.\n\n\"Would you do me a favor and carry my pack and torch?\" he asked, hefting his heavy tower shield in one hand. \"That way, I can be at the ready should the beast surprise us. I can't say how keen its senses are, but I doubt very much that we will happen upon it before it notices that we're here.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" she replied, taking his torch from him and stooping to lift his pack. It was heavy, but she didn't seem to struggle with it, despite her small stature. She was a farmhand through and through. Iden closed his visor, and lifted his pike, angling it forward as they began their journey deeper into the bowels of the mountain.\n\nIt wasn't long before they came across evidence of the beast. Iden stopped, prodding at the ground with the haft of his pike.\n\n\"Look,\" he began, \"see where the dragon's claws have scored the very rock beneath our feet? It must have passed through here many times.\"\n\n\"Will your armor withstand a talon that can score stone?\" Isabelle asked.\n\n\"We'll find out soon enough...\"\n\nThey proceeded on, making their way along the winding tunnel. Iden felt like he was exploring a giant rabbit warren hewn from stone, the slight incline in the passageway informing him that they were descending. This couldn't be a comfortable abode for a creature the size of a dragon. There must be a chamber in the belly of the mountain, large enough for the thing to stretch out, and spacious enough for it to store its hoard of gold...\n\n\"Oh!\" Isabelle exclaimed, Iden stopping and raising his shield.\n\n\"What is it? Do you see something?\" he asked. Visibility was not as good as it could have been with his protective visor lowered.\n\n\"There's something shiny here,\" she continued, stooping to pick something up. \"It's a gold coin! I only spotted it because it was reflecting the torchlight.\" He heard a clinking sound as she dropped it into her vase for safekeeping. \"I can have this one, right?\"\n\n\"I don't think that parting with one coin is going to bankrupt me,\" Iden muttered, \"just stay behind me.\"\n\n\"If you insist...\" The passageway finally began to widen as they ventured onward, and as they rounded a bend in the rock tunnel, the cave opened up into a vast chamber. It was just as Iden had predicted. The ceiling extended perhaps fifty feet above their heads, great, stout columns of slimy rock seeming to hold it aloft like pillars. The ground was surprisingly level save for a few scattered stalagmites, fledgling monoliths that reached towards the roof of the cave like bony fingers rising from the grave.\n\nAnd there, in the center of it all, was the dragon's treasure horde. If one were to somehow lift an entire bank vault, upending its contents onto the floor like someone pouring a drink from a jug, the result might look something akin to this. It was piled in a vast heap, two or even three times as high as a man was tall, spilling out around the surrounding columns of rock almost like a liquid. The sparkling, glittering mass was made up of what must be millions of gold and silver pieces, and there were even more extravagant treasures within the pile. Iden could make out bejeweled goblets that sported beautiful gemstones, rubies and emeralds glinting under the flickering light of the torch. There were crowns and tiaras, scabbards encrusted with precious stones, riches beyond imagining.\n\nThe dragon hadn't merely collected these trinkets in the same way that a bird might steal baubles to line its nest, the beast had been decorating its lair. Iden could see a shining suit of gilded armor that looked as though it might once have belonged to a high ranking Paladin, it was standing upright against one of the pillars, a long spear of impressive craftsmanship at its side. There was a heraldic banner sporting the colors of a house that he did not recognize, tattered and decaying, but held aloft by a golden pole that had been driven into the rock like a stake.\n\nLike a moth drawn by the light of a candle, Iden was transfixed for a moment, taking a couple of faltering steps towards the heap. Everywhere that he looked there was something new to entice him, from scattered coins to chalices forged from solid gold. How had the dragon accrued such wealth? How many merchant caravans must it have raided, how many keeps must it have plundered?\n\n\"What do you think?\" Isabelle whispered, holding the torch aloft. \"Is it everything that you imagined?\"\n\n\"And more,\" he muttered, his breath misting as it escaped the vents in his helmet. \"The dragon does not seem to be here, it might be out hunting for food. Perhaps we can stage some kind of ambush, and...hey, what are you doing?\"\n\nIsabelle marched past him, approaching the pile, and he watched as she placed her golden vase gingerly upon it. She drove it a little deeper into the mass of coins so that it would stand upright, a few of them rolling across the floor as they escaped.\n\n\"There, everything in its place,\" she said as she stood back to appraise it.\n\n\"Don't you need to present your offering to the dragon?\" Iden asked, confused. \"Or will it pick up your scent and know you that way?\"\n\nShe spun around to face him, her auburn hair and her long skirt fanning outwards with the motion, a broad smile on her face. Suddenly, there was a flash of light as a torch flared to life on the far wall of the cavern. It burned with an intense, blue heat that slowly faded into a warmer yellow, more of them following behind it. Before his eyes, a ring made up of dozens of them ignited one by one, as if an invisible person was walking between them and lighting them with a candle. They illuminated the whole cave, casting even more light on the treasure horde, but his gaze was firmly fixed on Isabelle.\n\n\"I warned you that the real fool would be revealed once we reached the dragon's lair,\" she giggled, her voice echoing off the rock walls. As he watched, her eyes began to change. The vibrant green that he had so admired shifted in hue until it was a shining amber, her round pupils becoming the vertical slits of a serpent. They seemed to glow beneath her brow, radiating an infernal heat, like balls of molten metal plucked from a forge.\n\nDark smoke billowed from the corners of her mouth as her laughter became riotous, her teeth no longer flat, but pointed like the fangs of a wolf. Her clothing caught fire, the flames engulfing the fabric as quickly as it had the torches, and in a moment the girl was sheathed in the roaring blaze. Her shawl was reduced to charred fragments, carried away by a gust of wind that made the torch that she was holding flicker, the burning remnants of her blouse and her long skirt falling away from her slim frame to expose the porcelain skin that lay beneath.\n\nEven in his fear and confusion, he could not keep his eyes from wandering. Isabelle was just as perfectly sculpted as he had imagined, her hourglass hips tapering into a slim waist, her flat belly lined with two rows of subtle muscle. Her breasts were firm and pert, wobbling softly with her cackling, full enough to make for an admirable handful. Her thighs were as smooth as glass, and between them was a tuft of hair as red as that of her head.\n\nThere was something growing across her flawless skin, however. It began at the tips of her fingers and toes, her flesh taking on an unhealthy, purple pallor. Her skin began to crack, hardening into iridescent, blue scales. They sprouted from her body, spreading rapidly until they covered her forelimbs, talons like black hooks growing from her fingers. From beneath her long hair emerged four gnarled horns, twisting and spiraling, her delicate features elongating into a snout.\n\nThere was an audible thud as a long, thick tail dropped to the ground behind her, growing ever longer as he watched. It was coated in the same shining scales in shades of blue and green, long, striped spines rising up from it like colorful knitting needles. Her body too was ballooning in scale, her stature now far greater than it had been only moments before. Eight feet, nine feet, the slight girl was now towering over him like a monster as he took refuge behind his shield.\n\nA pair of great, leathery wings unfurled from her back like those of a gargoyle, their flapping making the torches sputter. Her face was already that of a dragon, and the last vestiges of her smooth skin were soon replaced with a mosaic of beige-colored scales along the underside of her tail and her stomach, her breasts vanishing into a barrel chest. She dropped to all fours, her wicked claws sparking on the rock, her muscles expanding to support her new frame. Her reptilian maw opened to reveal rows of sharp teeth as long as his index finger, slaver drooping from her scaly lips as she pulled them back in a snarl, black smoke pouring from her nostrils like the snorting of an angry bull.\n\nStanding before him was a dragon that must have been nearly thirty feet long from nose to tail, the crest of sharp spines that ran down her back shaking to make a menacing racket that approximated the rattle of a venomous snake. The powerful legs that held her body aloft rippled with muscle beneath her shining hide, as thick around as the pillars of rock that surrounded her, her tail as girthy as a tree trunk. It dragged across the floor, sending a few errant coins scattering, her scales shifting in hue from sapphire to emerald depending on how they caught the light.\n\n\"What will you do now, Hedge Knight?\" she rumbled. Her voice was so deep that he felt it rattle his teeth, penetrating him down to the bone, the deep contralto somehow still maintaining its feminine quality despite the bestial maw that was producing it. She watched him with her fiery eyes, a head as large as his torso suspended on a weaving, serpentine neck.\n\nIsabelle had...no, there had never been an Isabelle. This dragon, this beast had been his companion the entire way, making a mockery of him. She had eaten his food, he had let her ride his horse, he had slept in the same tent as her.\n\n\"What is this?\" he demanded, aiming his pike at her from behind his shield. \"Some kind of dark magic?\"\n\n\"I was under the impression that you didn't believe in magic,\" she crooned, raising a forelimb and examining her talons in the same way that a human woman might check her fingernails for dirt. \"You believe only what your eyes tell you. So what say you now, buckethead? What do your eyes see?\"\n\n\"My enemy,\" he replied, trying to put on a stoic front despite the trembling in his hands. He angled his long pike over the top of his tower shield, ensuring that his entire body was obscured, at least as much as it could be when seen from such a high angle. He had been prepared for this, he had trained for this scenario. That Isabelle had tricked him didn't change his strategy, there was a still a dragon standing before him.\n\n\"So you still mean to slay me?\" she asked, those burning eyes scrutinizing him from beneath her scaly brow. \"You would plant your spear into the heart of a young, naive farm girl?\"\n\n\"You are no farm girl,\" he snarled.\n\n\"Oh, but I am,\" she replied with a toothy grin. \"Not moments ago, I was Isabelle. I was so youthful and radiant, did you think that I had not noticed the way that your eyes traced my figure when you thought that I wasn't paying attention? Why should my transformation change that?\"\n\n\"You're a monster,\" Iden spat, \"you've been terrorizing the people of the village down in the valley.\" \"Terrorizing?\" the great beast gasped, feigning outrage. \"So I ate a few sheep, what of it? Dragons need to feed too, you know. I paid the shepherd for his trouble, he won't be going hungry on my account.\"\n\n\"I came here to bring down a dragon, and that's what I mean to do,\" Iden continued. \"I can't leave this cave empty-handed, I've staked everything on this venture.\"\n\n\"Then it's the gold that you crave?\" she said, a tongue as long as his arm escaping her jaws to wet her scaly lips. She glanced behind her, her massive head pivoting on her sinewy neck, watching the mountain of riches shimmer in the torchlight. \"Mesmerizing, isn't it? Look at the way it catches the light, every individual coin glittering like a field of stars. What use has a dragon for wealth, you might ask? I do not live in a castle, I do not wear extravagant clothes, I do not entertain guests with revelry and excess. I have no need of guards, servants, or standing armies. Gold is my weakness, the chink in my armor. It holds a strange power over me, I lust for it, and perhaps you do too?\"\n\n\"I share no such obsession, wealth is merely a means to an end.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about that?\" she asked, amusement twisting her reptilian features into a smile. \"I saw how my collection transfixed you. For a moment, you forgot all about your task. You were on edge all the way down the tunnel, but when you caught sight of my hoard, you dropped your guard.\"\n\n\"Enough of your games, dragon,\" he shot back. \"You know all too well why I'm here, I told you as much while you shared the warmth my campfire, and ate of my food.\"\n\n\"A fun diversion,\" she chuckled, \"I get so terribly bored sometimes. I was out searching for additions to my collection, and I happened upon that lovely vase. I like to wander in human form from time to time, perusing markets and shops for trinkets. I don't mind parting with coin for an item of greater merit. On the way back to my cave, I stumbled upon you while your horse was drinking from the stream. It is fortunate that you weren't a brigand. Had you tried to rob me, or ravish me, well...\" She bared her fangs, each one as sharp as a butcher's knife, catching the light like pearls. \"You would have discovered my true nature far sooner.\"\n\nIden didn't reply, glaring at her through the slats in his visor. She rolled her eyes, loosing a sigh that was chased by a plume of black smoke.\n\n\"How woefully trite. I really thought that you might be different from the others, Iden. There are less dangerous ways to test your mettle, you know.\"\n\n\"Have at you!\" he bellowed, taking a step forward.\n\n\"Very well,\" the dragon conceded, \"have it your way then...\"\n\nShe reared back on her powerful hind legs, towering over him, as tall as a church steeple. Her chest inflated as she sucked in a gulp of air, and then she spewed it back out as a column of roiling fire. The flames engulfed him, and he took refuge behind his shield, the heat of it searing him even from within his armor. It just kept coming, the fire splashing against the rock floor, his shield beginning to glow red like an iron in a forge. He endured it, sweat starting to pour from his body as the very air around him seemed to cook. He held his breath, knowing that the heat would char his lungs from within.\n\nShe finally relented, and he peered up over his shield, watching as twin columns of smoke billowed from her nostrils.\n\n\"You were right about the shield,\" she said, \"I would have to melt the very rock beneath our feet to slag steel. But can it withstand a strike from my claws?\"\n\nHe had barely enough time to recover before she lunged at him, his tower shield ringing like a bell as she struck it. He braced himself, but she was too strong, and he was thrown to the ground. It was like taking a hit from a war hammer the size of an anvil, or a cannonball swung on a chain. His armor clattered as he rolled away from her, and his shield was thrown from his arm, the impact dazing him. When he was able to recover enough to struggle to a knee, his armor still uncomfortably hot from her fiery breath, he spied his shield resting on the cave floor a good ten feet away. It had been scored by her talons, leaving three deep furrows in the metal.\n\nHe lunged for it, but his armor made him slow, and the dragon swung her tail like a whip. It knocked the legs out from under him, sending him toppling end over end, and once again he found himself on the cave floor.\n\n\"Will you yield?\" she asked. Iden didn't reply, he scrambled to his feet again, and lunged for his shield. He heaved as he lifted it off the ground, taking up position behind it, angling his pike towards her. \"Still undeterred?\" she added, flexing her massive wings. \"So be it.\"\n\nIden loosed a war cry as he charged towards her, his pike resting atop his shield, and he threw all of his weight into a strike. He drove his weapon towards her chest like a javelin, lunging with all of his strength, aiming the bladed tip at her heart.\n\nShe batted the weapon away before it made contact with a casual wave of her scaly hand, throwing him off balance. He recovered, going in for a second strike, and once again she deflected his spear with alarming ease. Her winding tail crept up on him, tripping him, sending him crashing to the ground in a clattering heap.\n\n\"You're far too heavy,\" she muttered, watching him lean his weight on the haft of his weapon as he climbed to his feet. \"That armor is doing you no favors.\"\n\nShe wasn't wrong, he was growing exhausted, and he hadn't even landed a hit on her yet. He had been expecting to face an animal of no greater intellect than a bear or a lion, but her mind was as keen as his own. Perhaps even moreso\u2026\n\nIden cast his shield aside, gripping his pike with two hands, and charged in. If he could get close, he might be able to mitigate the advantage of her long reach. She swung one of her massive, clawed hands at him, and he heard the air whistle above his head as he ducked under the deadly blow. He stabbed at her belly with the sharp spearhead of his pike, but it glanced off her scales. They were as hard as iron. He swung the weapon in a cutting motion, the steel sparking against her hide.\n\nHe was lifted off his feet by her tail, the thick trunk of it hitting his midsection and throwing him across the cave. He came down on one of the stalagmites, his armored back slamming into the growing pillar of rock, and it shattered into pieces. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he slid to the cave floor, gasping for breath. The helmet was stifling him, obscuring his vision, and so he flung it off. As it rolled across the ground, he shook out his mane of long, dark hair, his sweat glistening in the torchlight.\n\nIsabelle, or rather the dragon, watched him with a smile on her face as he angled his spear in her direction again.\n\n\"You're so handsome when you're angry, you know,\" she chuckled. \"I was almost tempted to indulge you back in the tent. What might you have done if my slim, dainty fingers had crawled down to unfasten your belt? How might a nubile farm girl have expressed her gratitude?\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" he growled, taking up an aggressive posture as he advanced on her.\n\n\"What stamina,\" she added. \"You just keep coming, don't you?\"\n\nIden bellowed as he charged at her, sidestepping a downward strike from her tail that hit the rock floor with enough force to crack it, shaking the ground. She was inhumanly swift, but her sheer size meant that maneuvering her massive frame took time. She telegraphed her attacks, winding up in a way that was necessary for a beast of her sheer mass.\n\nShe raised a clawed hand into the air, intending to bring it down on him like a boot crushing an insect. Iden saw it coming without his obscuring visor, and rather than dodge it, he took a knee. He drove the haft of his pike into the floor, and it caught on the uneven surface, the tip pointing straight upwards. It pierced her scaly palm, the momentum of her own blow driving it deep into her flesh, dark blood gushing from the wound.\n\nThe dragon opened her mouth in a roar of pain, a cloud of smoke escaping from her throat along with it, and she pulled back in alarm. The pike had run her through, he could see the glinting tip of the weapon as it protruded from the other side of her hand. It was no mortal blow, it was scarcely larger than a nail from her perspective, but the hurt and the surprise gave her pause.\n\nHe watched as she brought her hand up to her face, gripping the thin haft with the thumb and forefinger. He didn't know whether they were feet or hands. She obviously walked on them with a four-legged, bestial gait, and yet they seemed as dexterous as those of a human.\n\nShe pulled the pike out, her fingers trembling, and then she snapped it in half like it was nothing more than a toothpick. She turned her glowing eyes towards him as she dropped back down to all fours, her scaly brow furrowing, her lips pulling back in a snarl.\n\n\"Why are humans always so eager to throw away their lives?\" she hissed. \"Just because you only live sixty or seventy years, you think it has no worth?\"\n\nIden drew his sword from its scabbard, brandishing the blade as he waited for her next move. Without the pike, he'd have no way of reaching her heart, but he wasn't done yet. He had known that this might happen, and he had faced death enough times that it no longer filled him with dread. He would give her one hell of a fight before she ended him.\n\nThe dragon turned her massive body sideways, her head swiveling to track him on her serpentine neck, and she raised her long tail off the floor as she prepared to swing it. The way that her scales refracted the light from the torches might have been beautiful under different circumstances. There must have been thousands of them, interlocking like armored plates, each one shifting in hue from blue to green depending on what angle it was viewed from. When she moved, it created mesmerizing waves of color that flowed up and down her length, almost like the wings of a butterfly. Her bulging muscles rippled beneath her hide, strong enough to propel that massive body around with surprising ease and agility.\n\nShe pulled her tail back, and then rolled her wide hips, putting her entire body into the blow. The appendage whistled as it cut through the air, and Iden had scarcely enough time to roll under it. She had been aiming for his head, and he heard it crack like a whip as it passed over him, passing by so fast that it was little more than a blue blur. It slammed into one of the many stone columns, cleaving through it as if it were no more sturdy than baked clay. With its support removed, the section above where she had smashed through it cracked and crumbled, breaking away from the ceiling and coming crashing down like a felled tree. Iden threw his arms over his head as it fell not five feet away from him, shaking the ground, showering him with fragments of broken rock that ricocheted off his armor like stones cast from a sling. The monumental column broke into pieces, dust billowing as the beast prepared another attack.\n\nShe sucked in a great lungful of air, then spewed flames in his direction, shooting a jet of roiling fire from her gaping maw. The inferno spread out in a carpet, rolling over the cave floor, rushing around the columns and stalagmites like a flood of water. The sound was terrible, half the blood-curdling roar of a giant beast, and half the whoosh of flame that filled men with a primal and instinctual fear.\n\nIden flung himself behind the fallen pillar, and not a second later, the wall of fire impacted the stone. Licking flames rose above the wall of rock, and he put his back to it, feeling the wave of heat wash over him as the very air burned. Black smoke billowed, rising to the domed ceiling where it clung like acrid storm clouds. Now was his chance. He sprang to his feet as best as he could manage in his heavy armor, using the cover of the smoke to change position, diving behind an intact column.\n\nThe dragon relented, more dark smoke rising from her open jaws and shooting from her nostrils like there was a coal furnace in her belly. Like a snake rearing up to strike, she raised her head on her flexible neck, turning it this way and that as she searched for him.\n\n\"You think you can hide from me?\" she hissed, the quills that ran down her spine rattling menacingly. \"I can hear the frenzied beating of your heart, I can smell your fear.\"\n\nHe heard the rumbling of her footsteps as she approached his column, and she rose up on her hind legs, leaning her weight on it. Her claws dug into its surface high above him as she wrapped her forelimbs around it, raining dust and crumbling fragments. When Iden looked up, he saw her head snake around the pillar of rock on her winding neck, her glowing eyes peering down at him as smog poured from her nostrils.\n\nShe struck like a cobra, her jaws opening to expose rows of serrated teeth, her maw wide enough that it could have swallowed him whole. He could see a fiery glow in the back of her throat, as though there was a furnace burning beyond the limits of her pink flesh.\n\nIden swung at her with his sword, and this time, the dragon realized that he could leverage her own momentum and weight to drive his blade deeper. She pulled back as his weapon flashed, baring her pearly teeth in a snarl. He couldn't hope to kill her with the tiny blade, but nobody enjoyed the prospect of being stabbed in the eye or in the mouth, dragon or otherwise.\n\n\"You really mean to fight to the death?\" she asked, her booming voice shaking his bones. \"What are you trying to prove, and to who? There's nobody else here besides the two of us. If you should fall in battle, who will know about it? Who will tell your story?\"\n\nShe leaned more of her weight on the pillar, and Iden heard it begin to crack, breaking away where it joined to the roof of the cave. He scrambled out of harm's way as she fell forwards, bringing the titanic column down with her, and it shattered on the ground like a glass dropped from a table. He felt like a mouse scurrying away from a cat, his armor clanking as he ran out of range of her swiping talons.\n\n\"Just cut your losses and leave,\" she continued, \"flee while you still have your life.\"\n\n\"And live out the rest of my days as a pauper?\" he shot back, skidding to a halt and turning to face her with his sword at the ready. \"No, I have but one chance to make something of myself, it's all or nothing.\"\n\nShe thundered towards him with the speed and force of an encroaching avalanche rolling down a mountainside, her jaws opening like a giant bear trap ready to snap shut on him, and he swung his sword to meet her. It was a feint, however. Rather than closing her jaws around his body, she snatched him up in her hand, so large that she could encompass him entirely. Iden bellowed in pain and surprise as she squeezed him, his steel breastplate creaking as it began to dent inwards. She had left his arms free, and so he inverted his sword so that the blade was pointing down, and began to jab at her massive fingers. The scales here were just as thick as those on the rest of her body, and his weapon did not penetrate, his steel sparking against her tough hide.\n\nHis legs dangled as she raised him high off the ground, putting them face to face.\n\n\"I could burn you to a crisp, encase you in molten slag\" she threatened. \"Or I could swallow you whole, armor and all. Yield. I will not give you another chance.\"\n\nIden raised his sword and threw it like a javelin, aiming for her eye. It missed, bouncing harmlessly off her brow, landing on the cave floor far below.\n\n\"If you will not see reason, then so be it...\"\n\nShe held him precariously over her open jaws, Iden closing his eyes and screwing up his face as he prepared for the killing bite.\n\nBut it never came.\n\nThe next thing that he knew, Iden was standing on the ground, and he opened his eyes to see the dragon's clawed hand withdrawing. He looked up at her in confusion, she was making no move to attack him. She was just sitting there like a giant dog, her tail trailing across the floor, her massive wings folded neatly across her back.\n\n\"I surrender,\" she said.\n\n\"Y-you surrender?\" Iden repeated, confusion and disbelief muddling his thoughts. She nodded her head, an oddly human gesture coming from such a gigantic creature.\n\n\"I yield, my treasure is yours.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Iden asked, narrowing his eyes at her suspiciously. He didn't know whether to feel elation, fear, or bemusement. \"You could have killed me with a single bite, why give in now?\"\n\n\"Do you still wish to claim my head?\" she asked, ignoring his question. \"Is my hoard enough to satisfy your lust for wealth, or should I lay my neck at your feet so that you might hack at it with your tiny sword?\"\n\nWas she serious? Was this some kind of elaborate ploy? She had outwitted him before, he didn't trust her as far as he could throw her, but she was no longer trying to eat him. If she had wanted to kill him, it would have been all too easy. Even while armed, he had been next to powerless against her might.\n\n\"It's...mine?\" he asked, chancing a look at the mountain of shimmering coins in disbelief.\n\n\"All of it,\" she confirmed with a shrug of her broad shoulders.\n\n\"This isn't some kind of trick? Why would you part with your collection so freely?\"\n\n\"You have my word, it's no trick. All of my gold is yours to take.\"\n\nIden turned and walked towards the pile, glancing over his shoulder to keep an eye on the dragon, ensuring that she didn't suddenly pounce on him once his back was turned. He waded into the mass of coins until it was deep enough to reach his thighs, reaching down and cupping his gauntleted hands, filling them with gold like he was drinking from a stream. He gazed at the shining treasure, letting it fall back to the heap, spotting a few errant gemstones as they caught the light.\n\n\"It's...it's really mine?\" he repeated, still unable to accept the course of events that had transpired. He had half a mind to believe that she had indeed eaten him whole and that this was some kind of afterlife.\n\n\"Truly,\" the dragon said, lying down on her belly. She crossed her forelimbs neatly as she watched him with her glowing eyes, the tip of her tail whipping back and forth idly like that of a cat. \"We dragons are bound by a magical curse to honor the bravery of true warriors. You were ready to die for your cause, and I was not. Ergo, the day is yours.\"\n\nIden climbed a little higher, his feet sinking into the mass of coins, almost like he was wading through a bog. Each footstep created a small cascade that fell down the heap behind him, there was just so much of it.\n\nHe spied a bejeweled crown, perhaps the property of some long-dead monarch, and he lifted it from the hoard to plant it atop his head. Giddy with excitement, he raised a scepter that had been forged from solid gold, inlaid with ornate decorations of silver and platinum. He draped jewel-encrusted pendants and fine necklaces about his shoulders, filling his pockets with diamond rings and handfuls of coins, losing himself in a kind of greedy frenzy. He found an antique vase and filled it with gold, pouring the coins over his head as he began to laugh riotously.\n\nIden fell to his knees, then rolled onto his back, waving his arms and legs like a boy making snow-angels in a drift. He threw handfuls of coins and glittering gemstones into the air, letting them rain down on him, bouncing off his scorched and dented armor. He was still in disbelief. Not moments ago he had faced the jaws of death, and now he had everything that his heart desired. His laughter was that of triumph, of victory, but also of relief. Did it matter why the beast had spared him?\n\n\"You look like you're enjoying yourself,\" the dragon said, Iden finally getting himself back under control. He sat up, the crown still resting atop his mop of dark hair, the mass of jewelry that was hanging about his neck clattering against his breastplate.\n\n\"Should I not be?\" he replied breathlessly, \"this is the highest achievement that I can aspire to. I will never have to subsist on jerked meat again, I'll never have to make camp in a forest during a rainstorm because I have no gold with which to pay an innkeeper. I can buy a mansion and live out the rest of my days in luxury, I'll never again have to risk life and limb for coin.\" He filled an ornate goblet with gold and gave her a mock toast. \"To the dragon, may her riches serve me well!\"\n\nHe fell back to the heap again, his laughter echoing throughout the cave.\n\n\"So tell me,\" she said, a smirk curling her lips. \"How do you intend to carry your newfound wealth back down the mountain?\"\n\n\"What?\" Iden asked, pausing his chuckling to peer at her.\n\n\"There must be a hundred tons of gold here, not to mention the other, more unwieldy items. Suits of gilded armor for men and horses alike, swords and scepters, I believe there's a solid gold throne buried in there somewhere. How do you intend to get it all back down the mountainside? Perhaps you could hire a fleet of carriages, but there's no path leading to the peak. Maybe you could pay an army of laborers who were stout enough to make the climb, but once word spread of a dragon's hoard that was guarded by a lone hedge knight, who else might come to claim it?\"\n\nIden's blood ran cold, his wide smile faltering.\n\n\"You could fill your pockets and load your pack, take all that you could carry back down the mountain. But how does one spend a jewel-encrusted crown? How does a traveler divide a golden scepter into parts of appropriate value to pay for room and board at an inn, to buy a horse, or to pay for a meal? With such immense wealth overflowing from your pockets, who could you trust? What carriage driver wouldn't lash his reins and disappear into the night with enough riches to set him up for life? What bodyguard wouldn't slay his master in his sleep, what innkeeper wouldn't conspire to rob his guest? Greed is a powerful motivator, Iden. It changes people, makes them consider courses of action that under normal circumstances, they would never even entertain. Cheating, theft, murder. For wealth such as this, it's all on the table.\"\n\nNow it was her turn to laugh, her resonating voice shaking the ground.\n\n\"You never planned this far ahead, did you? Claim the dragon's hoard, that was the only thought on your mind, and somehow everything would work out. You thought that you could solve any problem by simply throwing money at it, didn't you? But how will you transport this wealth? Where will you store it? Who can you trust?\" She rolled onto her back, waving her four legs in the air as her mocking cackling echoed off the domed ceiling. \"You have more gold than you ever dreamed, and yet you have no way to spend it!\"\n\n\"There's no magical curse, is there?\" Iden grumbled.\n\n\"Of course not, you fool! I just wanted to see the look on your face when you figured it out. Now we have no more cause to fight. You cannot defeat me, and even if you could, you cannot claim my treasure. We are at an impasse, so take my advice, and just go home.\"\n\n\"I have no home to go to!\" Iden snapped, leaping to his feet and skidding down the pile. He marched towards the dragon, who cocked her head at him in surprise, her fiery eyes wide. He stopped not a foot from her long snout, pointing an accusing finger at her to punctuate his statement. \"I'm a mercenary, I go where the fight is, and my only home is the tiny tent in my backpack. I have nowhere to go back to, and now I have no money left! I staked everything on this venture, I told you as much. I spent the last of my coin buying that horse and paying the innkeeper down in the village. That's it, I was either to win my fortune here or die trying.\"\n\n\"Why not just take another job?\" she asked, her hot breath blowing the strands of his long hair. \"Surely there's plenty of work for experienced killers such as yourself?\"\n\n\"And how long can I keep that up?\" he asked, turning to face away from her. He pulled the crown from his head and threw it back into the hoard, watching as it rolled down the slope and came to a rest on the cave floor. \"I'm not as young as I once was, I have more scars than I can count. This lifestyle takes its toll, and one of these days, I'm going to face off against someone who's faster and stronger than I am. This bounty, this treasure...it was to be my escape. Now what am I supposed to do?\"\n\n\"It was never going to work,\" she replied, her tone a little more sympathetic now. \"Even if you could slay me, you would never have been able to keep the treasure. It takes a dragon to safeguard riches like these, or a stone keep with a legion of loyal guards.\"\n\n\"I wish that you had just eaten me,\" he grumbled, \"at least that way I could have died on my own terms...\"\n\n\"Oh, you're so dramatic,\" the dragon sighed. \"Fine, you can stay here for a time, at least until you decide on what you want to do. I suppose I'm partially to blame for indulging you. I could have tried harder to turn you away before you reached the peak, but I get so bored up here, so lonely. Having someone to talk to is a rare treat for the likes of me.\"\n\n\"I can stay here? With...you?\" he asked, turning to look up at her. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nHe was still wary of her, not a few minutes ago she had been breathing fire at him and chasing him around the cave. But now she seemed almost docile, her harsh, reptilian features somehow softer and more appealing.\n\n\"You fed me, gave me shelter, let me ride your horse. I suppose I owe you the same, if nothing more. Unless you're still afraid of me?\"\n\n\"I was never afraid of you,\" he insisted, the dragon's scaly lips curling into a smirk. She reached down and brandished a long, curved talon, as large as a butcher's meat hook. She tapped it against his breastplate, ringing the dented metal.\n\n\"First thing's first, if you're going to be staying in my cave, then you're going to need a bath. I don't mean to be rude, but a dragon's sense of smell is many times more sensitive than that of a human, and I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that you've not had a change of clothes in days.\"\n\n\"You have a bath in here?\" he wondered, the dragon keeping things moving along so quickly that he didn't really have the time to properly consider her proposition.\n\n\"In a sense,\" she replied, nodding her head towards the back of the cave. He turned to look and saw more torches flare to life, their flickering light illuminating another passageway that curved out of view. \"Down there, off you go.\"\n\nShe gave him a nudge with her snout, making him stumble, and he set off walking. He skirted around the pile of treasure, looking back to see the dragon watching him, her eyes glowing in the gloom. He reached the mouth of the tunnel, he hadn't even noticed it before, it had been hidden in shadow. It was lined with torches that lit his way, the same as those that ringed the main chamber, attached to the walls with iron braces. They seemed to be magical in nature, she was able to light them at a whim. Just like when her clothing had burned away, and how she was able to spew flames from her throat, she seemed to have an innate control over fire.\n\nThe passageway was tall and wide enough to let the dragon pass, made from the same moist, slimy rock that he had seen elsewhere in the cave. Was there really a bath in here? Perhaps she meant that there was a well or an underground spring. It might even be the source of the stream that flowed down the mountain.\n\nHe entered the tunnel, following the torches as his footsteps echoed on the uneven floor. What was he doing? Was he really going to take up her offer, live with her in this cave until he worked out what he was going to do next? A sudden wave of confusion made him reel, he had no idea what was going on now. His purpose had been so clear over the last few weeks, his goal so stark in his mind. Reach the mountain, climb the mountain, slay the dragon. It couldn't have been simpler. But now, that same dragon was showing him kindness. She had pretended to be a farm girl, then she had tried to kill him, and now she was repaying the somewhat reluctant generosity that he had shown her during their ascent.\n\nWas that really her goal, or was this yet another ruse? Did she want him to leave, or didn't she? If he kept letting his mind run in circles, he'd go crazy. Better to just wait a while and see what she did next."
            },
            {
                "title": "CREATURE COMFORTS",
                "text": "Iden emerged into another large chamber, albeit somewhat smaller than the first, more torches springing to life as if they had sensed his arrival. As he had suspected, there was an underground spring here. The cave floor tapered into a large basin that was full of clear, blue water. It looked big and deep enough that the dragon should be able to at least partially submerge her massive frame in the pool. There were more columns here, the bulbous flowstone glistening with moisture, masses of stalactites drooping from the uneven ceiling above.\n\nIden glanced behind him, ensuring that the dragon wasn't spying on him, then he began to remove his armor. It was always a rather difficult prospect without help, but he eventually succeeded in getting it all off. He stripped off his gambeson and stepped out of his leggings, taking another quick look over his shoulder before removing his underwear.\n\nThe floor beneath his feet was so frigid that it almost had him hopping on the spot, but what else had he expected from a mountain cave? He inched closer to the edge of the pool, dipping a toe in, then withdrew it immediately. It was as cold as ice, how did she expect him to bathe in this?\n\nThe sound of footsteps echoed in the tunnel behind him, and Iden spun around, covering his loins with his cupped hands as he saw Isabelle standing there. She had reverted back to her human form, her smoldering eyes replaced with the familiar green, her patterned spines giving way to auburn hair. She was wearing a billowy, white blouse that exposed her shoulders, cut low enough to put her cleavage on display. She wore a black corset over the top of it that helped to push up her bust, the laces pulled taut to accentuate her hourglass figure, a flowing gown trailing on the ground behind her.\n\nThis wasn't the attire of a farm girl, she looked more like the wife of an influential Lord, or some kind of expensive courtesan. He understood now what she had meant when she had told him that she had no need of expensive clothes. She seemed to be able to conjure whatever garments suited her. The tattered shawl and the patched skirt that she had worn had merely been part of the illusion.\n\nHer eyes played up and down his naked body, drinking in the contours of his muscles, tracing the faded scars that peppered his tanned skin. She made no attempt to disguise her curiosity. For some reason, he felt a warmth growing in his cheeks. He was no stranger to the female gaze, it wasn't uncommon for his partners to lie in bed beside him after a romp, playing their fingers up and down his torso as they admired his impressive physique. Something about the way that Isabelle was looking at him made him feel oddly embarrassed, however. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was naked and shivering, while she was clothed and perfectly at ease.\n\n\"I thought that you might want a little help,\" she said, giving him a knowing smile as she strode past him. She approached the edge of the pool, her long gown dragging behind her, then she knelt to dip a finger into the water. Almost immediately, the surface of the spring began to bubble, clouds of steam rising from its disturbed surface. She was boiling it, more of her magic no doubt.\n\n\"This should be more to your liking,\" she said as she rose to her feet, turning to face him again. Iden was still stood there with his hands between his legs, hunching over a little, trying not to look as awkward as he felt. She let her eyes linger on him again, enjoying his discomfort, and then she took a seat on a nearby rock. It seemed that she intended to watch.\n\n\"Can I get some privacy?\" he asked, hobbling over to the pool and dipping his foot in. It was balmy now, she had heated the entire spring in a matter of seconds.\n\n\"Not if you want to get clean,\" she replied. She crossed her legs, letting her gown ride up a little, exposing her thighs in a way that might have seemed unintentional if Iden hadn't known better. He wasn't sure what she meant by that, but he didn't have much of a choice, and so he waded into the spring. The rocks beneath his feet were smooth, and there wasn't much debris, the warm water rising to his waist. Fortunately, the dim lighting and the rising steam gave him enough cover that he felt comfortable enough to move his hands from his groin.\n\n\"Catch,\" Isabelle said, tossing an object at Iden. He caught it in his hands, seeing that it was a block of soap. He sniffed it experimentally, noting that it smelled of lavender. She must have recovered it from a trading caravan, or perhaps the entourage of some rich and influential woman, soap was a rare commodity.\n\n\"Do you know how to use it?\" she asked.\n\n\"I've never spent my money on fancy soaps before, but yeah, I get the idea. You just wet it and rub it on your body, right?\"\n\n\"Rub it between your hands until it creates a lather,\" she explained, \"then spread it on your skin. It will help to wash off all the grime, and it should make you smell a little more appealing.\"\n\nHe chuckled at the absurdity of the situation as he began to spread the foam about his chest and under his arms. A mercenary bathing like royalty, whatever next? Was she going to cut his hair, and clean his fingernails?\n\n\"How do you like it?\" she said, resting her head in her hand as she watched him.\n\n\"Well, I'm starting to smell like a perfumed princess, but it feels pretty good to get clean. I'm more accustomed to bathing in lakes and rivers, if I have the time at all.\"\n\n\"I noticed,\" she chuckled.\n\nHe washed his stubbly face, and then threw his mop of wet hair back, running his fingers through it. As he spread the slippery lather across his stomach, he was acutely aware of Isabelle's green eyes following his hands. She was downright lecherous, it made him feel like he had been tricked into putting on a show for her. Was this just another one of her games? Why would a dragon be attracted to a mortal man, anyway? Would her preferences not include razor teeth, tough scales, and leathery wings?\n\n\"Let me know if you need to me wash your back,\" she added, covering her mouth with her hand to stifle a laugh. \"I must admit, you're quite the specimen. I thought that all your talk of womanizing might have been bluster, but I can see how the average girl might fall head over heels for a man like you. You're taller than most, broad-shouldered, with an impressive physique thanks to your...rather taxing choice of profession. Long, dark hair, rugged features, enough scars to show that you know how to handle yourself. I'll bet that when you ride into town, the local girls just salivate over you, don't they?\"\n\nIt sounded like a compliment, but somehow her assessment made Iden feel self-conscious. He was usually the one examining women, judging them by their assets, scanning a tavern in search of the prettiest girls to bed before he had to move on to his next job. She was right, of course. He was accustomed to women folding at a mere glance, their fantasies so often revolved around dark, handsome men with an air of danger about them riding into town to sweep them off their feet.\n\nBut now, it was Isabelle who was playing that role. Despite her subdued appearance, he knew her to be far larger and far stronger than any human could ever hope to be, she radiated a supreme confidence that he almost found intimidating.\n\n\"So...is Isabelle your real name?\" he asked, dodging her question.\n\n\"Real enough,\" she replied. \"Dragons have many names, and humans would stand no hope of pronouncing them.\"\n\n\"Why did you choose Isabelle? Have you used that identity before?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" she said with a shrug of her shoulders. \"There was no grand scheme, it was simply the first name that came to mind. It's a pretty name, though, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Iden muttered, leaning down to spread the lather between his legs. He could feel her eyes on him as he finished washing, and once he was done, he lay down and let himself sink a little deeper into the water. It was so warm and pleasant, the spring was just the right temperature, all of the aches and bruises that he had sustained during his short bout with the dragon seeming to melt away. He let his mane of black hair float around his head, and closed his eyes, drifting on the calm surface. It got deeper towards the center, and so he stayed close to the edge.\n\nWhen he opened them again, Isabelle was standing beside the pool. He rose to a standing position with a start, covering himself up.\n\n\"Relax,\" she chuckled, reaching out a hand. \"I just want my soap back. It's expensive, you know. If you leave it in the water, it'll dissolve.\"\n\nHe fished it out of the pool and handed it to her, Isabelle placing it on the rock floor.\n\n\"How's the water?\" she continued. \"I might join you, it's been a while since I bathed in human form.\"\n\n\"I'd prefer that you didn't,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"Iden,\" she began, her voice laced with mock concern. \"Whatever has come over you? You couldn't take your eyes off me when you thought that I was a simple farm girl, you'd sneak a look at me every chance that you got, but now you seem almost afraid of me. I gave Isabelle all of the right features, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nHe tried to ignore her as she leaned forward, letting her plump, pert breasts hang within her loose blouse. They were so tantalizingly close to spilling out of the lacy fabric, with nothing to restrain them, her cleavage cast into deep shadow by the flickering torchlight. Her long, red locks fell about her bare shoulders, the leather of her tight corset creaking as she moved.\n\n\"She's as real as she needs to be, I can assure you of that. What do you think of my handiwork?\" she asked as she brushed aside her hair to expose more of her chest. \"As a man, and a mortal at that, I'm interested in your opinion. Is her bust full and shapely enough for your liking? Are her legs not long and slender? I made her thighs strong, her rump firm and shapely. Her belly is muscled by a lifetime of labor, or at least, an imagined one. Then there are the things that you can't see. Her skin is as soft as fine silk, her flesh yielding. Will you not sample it, and give me your opinion?\"\n\n\"What exactly do you expect of me?\" Iden replied, hoping that she might write off the flush in his cheeks as a result of the steam. \"Do you mean to seduce me? If so, state your intentions openly.\"\n\nHe was not one to turn down the advances of a comely woman under normal circumstances. In fact, women were his vice, his weakness. But this was a dragon. He had seen her as she truly was, near thirty feet long, and covered in armored scales. Even in her human form, he was wary of her. The memories of her sharp claws, her fiery breath, and her flashing teeth were still fresh in his mind.\n\nIsabelle rolled her eyes and loosed a sigh, sitting down on the rock beside the pool in a decidedly unladylike manner.\n\n\"Is a little company, a little conversation too much to ask?\" she grumbled. \"Do you know how long it has been since I was able to have a conversation with someone who knew of my true nature?\"\n\nIden was a little taken aback by her sudden change in demeanor, and he shook his head.\n\n\"Tell me, how many dragons do you see flying around these days? How often are we spoken of?\"\n\n\"Rarely, if ever,\" he replied.\n\n\"I haven't laid eyes on another dragon in more than two hundred years,\" she lamented, crossing her arms over her knees as she stared vacantly into the water. \"There used to be thousands of us, back when the world was brimming with magic. Once it began to wane, the mortals started to hunt us. At first, it was for our magical properties, to take possession of our horns and scales so that they might cast spells or brew potions. Then, it was out of greed, for the wealth that we hoarded. Finally, fear motivated them. Over the generations, they forgot that we were intelligent, emotional creatures, and they began to see us as little more than feral animals to be slaughtered.\" \"You speak of a world brimming with magic,\" Iden wondered, \"what do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"You were born too late to have known of it,\" she replied, keeping her green eyes fixed on the pool. \"There was a time when magical beasts roamed the land freely, when Elves inhabited the woodlands, and when dragons soared across the skies. There were merfolk in the lakes, centaurs on the plains, and mortals lived alongside all manner of beings that have since faded into myth in the world of men. Your lives are fleeting. Over the generations, history is lost, and the truth fades into legend.\"\n\n\"What happened to them all?\" Iden asked, transfixed by her tale now. \"If there was so much magic in the world, where did it all go?\"\n\n\"The Elves were driven from their forest homes, the dragons were slain, and mortals fabricated new Gods to replace the old. Now, rather than communing with nature spirits, men worship false Gods in elaborate cathedrals. Paladins roam the land exacting their brand of justice upon whatever their leaders deem unholy, and what vestiges of the forgotten world that remain are chased away. Every magical creature that dies takes a little of the world's magic with them, and now there is all but none.\"\n\n\"I...had no idea about any of this,\" Iden muttered, not really knowing what to say. So her motivation was loneliness, she had lived in isolation for who knows how long, longer than he had been alive. The only way that she could find company was to put on a mask, in a sense, pretending to be someone that she was not in order to have fleeting encounters with humans. He felt like he should attempt to console her somehow, but he didn't know what to do, and so he just stood there in the water.\n\n\"You're the first person in an age that has seen me in my true form, and has lived to tell of it,\" she continued. \"Will you not grant me the pleasure of your company, at least until you decide what to do next?\"\n\n\"I thought you wanted me to leave?\" he asked, \"you seemed rather insistent when you were chasing me around the cave. But now, you want me to stay?\" \"We were at odds before, but now we're not,\" she explained. \"And you have nowhere else to go. You showed me hospitality, I will return the favor.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Iden replied, if only to calm her down. \"It's not like I have any other options right now.\"\n\n\"Good,\" she said, seemingly satisfied. \"Now, if you're done washing, I'll fetch you some clothes.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with mine?\" he asked.\n\n\"Besides the fact that they're filthy? You can't spend all of your time in a gambeson, you might as well wear your battle armor all day. I'll get you something clean to wear, and then you can wash your outfit later.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said with a shrug. \"Do you have anything that will fit me? I'm bigger than most.\"\n\n\"I think I can manage,\" Isabelle chuckled, rising to her feet and gesturing for him to follow her. \"Out you come.\"\n\n\"Do you have a towel for me?\"\n\n\"You won't need one,\" she replied with a wink.\n\nIden emerged from the water reluctantly, hunching over and covering his loins with his cupped hands again. The dragon never missed an opportunity to ogle him, making no attempt to disguise her peeking. The water was making him shiny, accentuating his muscles, and he began to shiver again as he left the warmth of the pool. Isabelle waved her hand, and he felt a sudden heat. It was as though he had just stepped out into the summer sun, the moisture on his skin evaporating in a puff of steam.\n\n\"D-don't burn me!\" he stammered, Isabelle cackling at him.\n\n\"Relax, you big baby. I'm just drying you off. You really are scared of magic, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I'm not scared of it,\" he grumbled, \"but I've seen you set a tower shield glowing like a hot iron with naught but your breath. Is it not reasonable to be wary of it?\"\n\n\"You'll just have to trust me,\" she replied with a smirk.\n\n\"You'll forgive me if I don't find you especially trustworthy...\"\n\n\"Keep still,\" she added, looking him up and down. \"This might frighten you.\"\n\nHe braced himself, wondering what she meant, and then his eyes were drawn to a wavering light beneath him. There were flames licking at his bare feet, sprouting from the rock itself. His first instinct was to leap clear, but he suppressed it, noting that there was no heat. How could fire be cold? He shut his eyes tightly as they crept up his body, engulfing him in a roaring inferno, like he was being burned alive on a pyre. It was such an alien sensation, to be able to touch flames without being scorched, it almost felt like soft fabric was caressing his skin.\n\nHe felt a tightness about him, as if something was constricting his chest. When he dared to open his eyes again, he found that he was clad in a set of fine clothes. There was a tunic made from crimson silk, the neck cut low, the fabric almost uncomfortably tight about his chest and upper arms. There was also a pair of black leggings that clung to his figure, similarly restrictive abound his rump, and he resisted the urge to reach down and adjust his groin. There were a pair of soft-soled shoes on his feet, and a leather belt about his waist, it had all appeared from thin air.\n\n\"Now you're looking a lot more presentable,\" Isabelle said, Iden scowling at her.\n\n\"How did...you've dressed me like some kind of...pompous Lord. This tunic is so tight that I can barely breathe!\"\n\n\"Trust me, it suits you just fine,\" she chuckled. \"Now off you go, back to the main chamber. After you, of course...\"\n\nShe followed behind him as he set off up the tunnel, his flat-soled shoes slipping on the moist stone. He felt her eyes on his back, and he looked over his shoulder to see her grinning at him. His trousers were so tight that they almost creaked, it didn't take a genius to figure out what she was admiring...\n\n\"Alright, you've dressed me like a prince, and you have me smelling like flowers. What's next, are you going to braid my hair?\"\n\n\"No, I quite like it the way it is,\" she replied as they emerged into the main chamber. The pile of gold drew Iden's gaze once again, his heart skipping as it shone in the torchlight. It cast its shimmering reflection on the domed ceiling above, almost like a pool of water reflecting the sun. There was so much wealth here, and yet he couldn't spend a single coin, it was maddening. The gold had an almost magnetic power over him, excitement welling in his belly, joined by an odd urgency that commanded him to fill his pockets and run. Isabelle almost seemed to sense it in him, taking him by the arm and steering him away from the mesmerizing sight.\n\n\"The gold isn't going anywhere,\" she said, \"we have more pressing matters to attend to. When was the last time you ate? You must be famished after our...disagreement earlier.\"\n\n\"Disagreement?\" he replied with a cynical chuckle. \"But yes, I could eat. My pack is still around here somewhere, I have plenty of meat and bread left. I should save some for the trip back down the mountain, though. Come to think of it, I had better start rationing it. With no money, I don't know when my next meal might come.\"\n\n\"I'll feed you,\" she insisted, keeping a tight hold on his arm even as he tried to pull it away from her. She had a grip like iron, she was far stronger in this form than she had initially let on. She led him over to a long table that was made from rich mahogany, the wood varnished to a brilliant sheen. The legs were shaped to resemble the paws of lions, adorned with ornate carvings. Where in the world had she come across this? He had a hard time imagining a dragon sailing through the air on its bat-like wings with a dining table clasped in its talons. It wasn't just gold and jewels that she collected then, it was items of great value, whatever those might be.\n\n\"Oh, you need a chair to sit on,\" she realized.\n\n\"I'll be fine, really,\" Iden replied. \"I eat most of my meals out in the wilds, I only have the opportunity to eat a table when I stay at an inn, which isn't all that often.\" \"Nonsense, you're my guest! Wait here for just a moment, I'll be right back.\"\n\nHe watched as she hurried over to the hoard of gold, and then his blood ran cold as she began to transform again. The strands of her auburn hair seemed to clump together until they formed a mass of patterned spines, changing in hue from red to blue, her face elongating into a snout as twisted horns sprouted from her head. Her long tail grew from beneath her gown like a giant snake emerging from beneath a curtain, her great wings unfurling. She inflated in size as the signature scales spread across her pale skin to form an armored layer, her legs thickening and widening as they bulged with muscle, her clothes straining against her body. The garments burst into flames as they tore apart, turning to ash and seeming to dissipate into the air. In mere seconds, Iden was standing in the presence of the enormous dragon once more, her sturdy limbs and her stout tail as thick around as the trunk of an old oak tree.\n\nShe plunged her claws into the pile and began to dig, shoveling aside great handfuls of treasure, the sound reminding Iden of a waterfall. It was like watching an enormous dog trying to dig up a field mouse. She finally found what she was looking for, unearthing a great, golden throne from deep within her stash. She gripped it in her jaws, lifting it with ease despite its obvious weight. The dragon marched over to him, her thunderous footsteps shaking the ground, Iden unable to stop himself from recoiling as she neared.\n\nThere was another thud as she dropped the throne into place beside the table, the dragon watching him expectantly with her burning eyes.\n\n\"There we go,\" she said, her resonating voice shaking his bones. \"I knew it was buried in there somewhere.\"\n\n\"Do I want to know where you got this?\" Iden asked, eyeing the throne somewhat warily. It was beautifully crafted, he couldn't tell if it was forged from solid gold or not, but it seemed heavy enough for that to be the case. There were two ornate armrests carved to resemble the wings of an eagle, the backrest adorned with the rays of a sun. The throne was surrounded by intricate reliefs and statues, two carvings of women clad in flowing robes standing atop pillars to either side of it, lions resting at the occupant's feet. The seat itself was cushioned by a pair of plush pillows, made from red silk and likely stuffed with down.\n\n\"I plundered my share of keeps back in the day,\" she replied. \"Don't worry, the man was a despot.\"\n\n\"If you say so...\"\n\nShe switched so casually between her human form and that of a giant dragon, it was routine to her, but he couldn't get used to the sight. He walked over to the throne and sat down on it as she watched him expectantly, shifting his weight to get comfortable.\n\n\"Is it to your liking?\" she asked.\n\n\"I mean...it's a throne,\" he replied, \"you can't get much more lavish than this.\"\n\nThat seemed to please her, and she turned to lumber away from him, her long tail dragging on the ground behind her.\n\n\"How does roast beef sound?\"\n\n\"You have roast beef here?\" he asked, his hunger temporarily overpowering his apprehension. \"Don't tell me that there's a kitchen hidden away in one your side tunnels?\"\n\n\"Not quite,\" she chuckled. \"Wait here, I'll only be a moment.\"\n\nThere was indeed another hidden tunnel that led out of the chamber, more torches bursting into flames as she neared, illuminating a winding passage that snaked out of sight. She vanished, and then reappeared a minute later, an entire cow clutched in her jaws. The dragon thundered back over to him, opening her mouth, and depositing the carcass beside the table.\n\nIden recoiled as it slapped down on the stone floor of the cave, its body shaking with the impact. Its black and white hide was covered in claw marks, its tongue lolling from its mouth as its glassy eyes stared vacantly. There was no kitchen down that passage, she must be using it store her meat. The kill still looked fresh, and its hide was somewhat damp. Perhaps she packed them with snow to stop them from spoiling.\n\n\"A whole cow?\" he asked in disbelief, looking up to see her licking the blood from her lips. \"Where did you get this?\"\n\n\"From a nearby farm. Relax, I paid the man, he won't miss it.\"\n\n\"I don't think you quite appreciate that stealing is still stealing if you take something without permission, regardless of whether you pay for it after the fact.\"\n\n\"Then should I starve instead? It's not as if he'd do business with a dragon. In the old days, I could purchase a hundred head of cattle if I wished, the herders were more than happy to treat with me. We dragons were admired and respected before we were hunted.\"\n\nShe reached down with one of her sharp claws, beginning to butcher the animal before his eyes. She split open its round body, slicing through the pink meat, its juices congealing on the floor. When her grisly task was complete, she slapped a huge sirloin steak down on the table. More cuts followed, until there was a stack of beef that must have been a foot high. It was more meat than Iden had ever seen in his life. Cuts like this sold for a pretty penny, the lower classes of society rarely got to enjoy such delicacies. The herder did not eat the cattle that he raised, of course.\n\n\"How do you like it?\" Isabelle asked, \"rare or well-done?\"\n\n\"Well-done,\" he replied. It was easy enough to guess what was coming next.\n\nShe reached down and speared one of the steaks with her claw, raising it high above the table, opening her mouth as if she intended to swallow it. Instead, a jet of flame erupted from her throat, charring the meat as she turned it over like she was rotating a spit over a campfire. The flames must have been intense indeed, because it didn't take long for her to finish, setting the roast beef on the table in front of him.\n\n\"For the life of me, I can't recall how much mortals usually eat in one sitting,\" she said as his eyes played over the meal. The meat was cooked to perfection, steam rising from its crispy exterior, the smell alone making his stomach gurgle. \"Let me know if you need more. Oh, I almost forgot...\"\n\nShe made her way to her pile once more, slowly shrinking as she went. Her tail sucked back up into her body, her wings shriveling as they folded across her back, the horns on her head receding. The rough, iridescent scales were replaced by smooth skin, her crest of sharp spines taking on the appearance of her long hair. She was nude for a moment, Iden taking the opportunity to admire the long dimple that ran down her back, and the perfect peach shape of her rump. Her clothes appeared in another rush of flame, the same outfit that she had worn earlier, with a long gown and a billowy blouse that left little to the imagination. He watched as her corset was birthed from the fires, tightening of its own accord, accentuating her wide hips.\n\nShe leaned down and plucked something from her hoard, then strode back to the table, placing the items before him with a metallic clatter. It was cutlery, a knife and a fork cast from shining silver, the handles made from what looked like mother of pearl.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said, turning them over in his hands as he examined them. She had spoken of hospitality, and she hadn't been kidding. He was clad in fine clothes, sitting on a throne, about to eat a meal fit for a king with a set of cutlery that was probably worth more than he earned from an average job. Iden was finally starting to feel a little more at ease, and Isabelle seemed to sense it, beaming as he cut into the beef.\n\nIt bled juices as he lifted a slice to his mouth, finding it perfectly succulent. He began to eat more greedily, his hunger getting the better of him. Iden was by no means a starving pauper, but to be able to eat his fill of high-quality meat was a rare opportunity, and he wanted to make the most of it.\n\n\"How is it?\" Isabelle asked, leaning on the table as she watched him. She gave him another admirable view down her loose-fitting blouse, pressing her breasts together with her upper arms, probably not by accident.\n\n\"It's great,\" he mumbled over a mouthful of beef, wiping the juice from his lips with the back of his hand. \"This is all real, right? It's not going to vanish from my belly later on?\"\n\n\"It's real\" she chuckled, \"not everything is magic.\"\n\n\"I've been thinking about the gold,\" he said, taking another bite. Isabelle's expression darkened, her brow furrowing as he continued. \"Were you lying when you said that it all belonged to me?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't call it lying, exactly,\" she replied. \"I wanted to make a point, and I wanted to resolve the conflict. Now that you know you can't claim the gold, we're no longer trying to kill each other, right? Wouldn't you say that I was successful?\"\n\n\"I thought as much,\" he grumbled. \"I was trying to think of roundabout ways that I might get the gold down the mountain, conceal it somehow, but I doubted that you'd really let me take it. I wanted to ask, why have you collected all of this treasure? If you can't spend the coin, and you have no use for things like dining tables and thrones, then what's it all for?\"\n\n\"We dragons can be...how do I put this?\" she wondered, fidgeting uncomfortably as if she was hesitating to reveal an embarrassing truth. \"We have been described as greedy. Some of us can have a bit of an ego. Before you judge us, try to understand how we see the world, what it feels like to be a dragon. We're so much larger and stronger than anything that we might encounter, we are living wells of magical energy. A dragon can raze a keep, or bring down an army under its own power. We're born with the ability to fly. Some of us see ourselves as being...above humanity, both in a literal and a philosophical sense. Humans are these tiny, scurrying creatures with fleeting lifespans, they scarcely have the time to accrue any knowledge or wisdom before they're gone.\"\n\n\"Why do I get the feeling that this is a preemptive apology?\" Iden asked, spearing another piece of roast beef with his gilded fork. \"I don't know anything about dragons, I've never met one before you, remember? You don't have to make excuses for people that I've never met.\"\n\n\"Some dragons chose to rule over mortals in the old days, they were wiser, more powerful. They saw themselves as being more worthy, deserving of...worship. I don't condone what they did, some even took slaves and concubines, but at the heart of all dragons is that same yearning. We covet things of great value, whatever they might be. Wealth, territory, political power. It's not confined to simple treasure, but that's one way that the need expresses itself. Dragons surround themselves with finery, with great works of art, with priceless relics.\"\n\nShe gazed at her pile longingly, almost wistfully, Iden cocking his head at her.\n\n\"So you like gold most of all?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh yes!\" she replied enthusiastically. \"Well, not just gold. I like to own things of great value, and different people value different things. Some dragons prefer more historical pieces. I knew dragons who would have traded away a fortune in gold to possess the sword that slew a famous king, or the journal of a world-renowned poet. Others craved influence, control, they wanted to shape history with their own claws. I like beautiful things, rare things. I like to look at them, to own them, it brings me a kind of satisfaction.\"\n\n\"I can kind of understand that,\" Iden said with a shrug. \"Plenty of humans collect art or hoard wealth. There are despots who crave power, and who will do anything to expand their reach. I've probably fought for more than a few over the years.\"\n\n\"Another factor,\" she continued, \"is just that there's not a lot for us to do. If you've been alive for seven hundred years, everything seems to blur together. Kingdoms rise and fall, seasons come and go, it grows harder and harder to become invested in the outside world. The one constant is your collection, it's something that you can always work on, always expand. That's one of the things that I like about you,\" she added, smiling at him as he paused his chewing to raise an eyebrow at her.\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You're something new, something different.\"\n\n\"I'm about as conventional as they come,\" he said, swallowing his mouthful of meat. \"Go to any war camp, and you'd find dozens like me.\"\n\n\"No, you're stranger than you know, Iden. Do you know how many hunters and fortune seekers have tried to kill me? How often I've had to uproot myself, moving from place to place because of the constant harassment? Do you know how rare it is for a mortal to see me as I truly am, and for it to not end in his death? So many men would have taken Isabelle by force on the road, a beautiful, naive girl traveling alone. They would have tried to rob her, defile her, but you didn't.\"\n\n\"Were you testing me?\" he asked, \"trying to find out if I was worth eating or not?\"\n\n\"I didn't really plan for it to happen that way,\" she admitted, \"but...perhaps a little. Fate seemed to bring us together, I wanted to see if you were someone who might provide me with some company, a good man.\"\n\n\"A good man,\" he chuckled. \"Is not defiling women on the road all it takes to be considered a good man these days? I'm not a good man, I've done bad things, hurt a lot of people.\"\n\n\"You kill for money,\" she said with a nod of her head, \"but that doesn't make you evil. You wouldn't do it if you had a choice, and isn't that what all of this has been about? You trying to find an out, as you put it?\"\n\n\"I just don't want you seeing things in me that aren't there,\" he said, \"you don't really know me.\"\n\n\"I know you better than you might think,\" she replied. \"I know that the man who helped Isabelle scale the mountain was kind, considerate, generous. You even wanted to throw her vase off the peak in order to protect her, despite the risk of upsetting her.\"\n\n\"It's not like you gave me a choice.\"\n\n\"But you did have a choice. The fact that you didn't see one proves my point.\"\n\n\"Okay, so I'm secretly a Saint,\" Iden said as he spread his arms in a gesture of exasperation. \"What's it to you? What exactly are you hoping to get out of me?\"\n\nShe didn't reply, she just gave him a smile, leaning on the table again and letting her auburn hair fall about her shoulders.\n\n\"Would you like more meat?\" she asked, noting that he had finished his steak.\n\n\"No, thank you,\" he replied as he set his cutlery down on the table. \"What I'd like now is a place to sleep, today has been...trying.\"\n\n\"You did climb a mountain, and then fight a dragon,\" Isabelle replied with a smirk.\n\n\"Is there somewhere that I can set up my tent? I don't think I can drive the stakes into this cave floor, unless you have some kind of gilded hammer in that pile somewhere.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, you're my guest!\" she exclaimed. \"I won't have you sleeping in a tiny tent.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me, you have a Lord's bed lying around here somewhere?\"\n\n\"Not, exactly...but I think I can come up with something. Wait here for a moment.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "STRANGE BEDFELLOWS",
                "text": "Iden watched as Isabelle went back and forth, creating a pile of fabric that she had sourced from all over her cave. It was comprised of silken curtains, canopies from lavish beds, and elaborately embroidered drapes. There were billowing dresses, extravagant tunics, and gowns made from the finest satin that must have once been part of some wealthy woman's wardrobe. Instead of blankets, she had assembled piles of fur coats and warm capes. These fineries alone were probably worth more than the price on her head, and here she was using them in lieu of a common sleeping bag. It looked like the most expensive rat's nest that had ever been assembled, perhaps ten feet by ten feet, deep and plush enough that he couldn't even feel the cold and the hardness of the floor beneath it.\n\n\"Will this do?\" she asked, watching as he ran his fingers through one of the fluffy animal pelts. It might be bear or maybe wolf, he wasn't quite sure, but it was the softest thing that he had ever felt.\n\n\"I'll say,\" he muttered. \"Are we going to brush our teeth with fine wine, and maybe burn some mahogany furniture for warmth, too?\"\n\n\"You want a fire? I can take care of that,\" she announced. She cupped her hands in front of her mouth like she was blowing on them to warm them in cold weather, and Iden saw a light appear. It shined through her skin, giving it a red hue, the outlines of her veins visible. She opened her fingers to show him a dancing flame that was resting in her palm, like a candle, but with no wick or fuel source in sight. It was more magic, cold fire.\n\nShe placed it on the ground beside the makeshift bed, where it continued to burn, even as it rested on the moist rock. It grew and spread until it reached the size of a roaring campfire. Despite the fact that it hadn't hurt Isabelle, he could feel the heat that was coming off it, driving away the pervasive cold of the cave.\n\n\"That wasn't quite what I meant,\" Iden said, watching the flames dance. \"But it'll do.\"\n\nHe slipped off his ridiculous shoes and sat down, sliding beneath the layers of silky fur, quickly warming as they trapped his body heat. The pile of gowns and curtains cushioned him, it was far more comfortable than he had anticipated.\n\nIden felt so out of place here, wearing these clothes, sleeping amongst this mass of expensive fabrics. The mound of treasure still caught the light from the torches, and he gazed up at the ceiling, watching the shimmering reflection. One by one, the torches faded, casting the cave into darkness save for the magical campfire that Isabelle had conjured. Only now did he realized how sore he was, his body bruised and aching. The climb had been trying, the battle with the dragon even moreso. As he began to close his eyes, he felt shuffling, opening them to see Isabelle sneaking into the makeshift bed beside him.\n\n\"Uh...what are you doing?\" he asked, and she paused with the fluffy pelts half-covering her.\n\n\"I'm going to sleep.\"\n\n\"With me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Why not? We've slept together until now, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, but that was because we had no other choice. You would have...well, you led me to believe that you would have frozen solid if you had not been able to share my tent. But now we're in your cave, there's no need to share. How do you usually sleep?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm usually in my...natural form, and I sleep atop my pile.\" It wasn't hard to imagine the great beast coiled around the mountain of treasure like a giant serpent. \"But now, I'm in my human form, so...\"\n\n\"Alright,\" he grumbled, \"I suppose we have more room that we did in my sleeping bag.\"\n\nShe lay down beside him, throwing the furry blankets over them, draping an arm about his broad chest. She stroked the soft silk of his fancy tunic with her slim fingers, seeming to enjoy the way that it clung to his figure. It was of her design, after all, he wasn't wearing it by accident.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he mumbled, looking over to see her green eyes peering back at him in the gloom. She shuffled closer, and he could feel the softness of her bust through her blouse as it pressed up against him.\n\n\"Come on, Iden,\" she whispered. \"Don't play coy. I saw the way that you looked at me during our journey up the mountain, the way that your eyes lingered on my...assets. This form is young, vigorous, beautiful. I made it so, I designed Isabelle to be pleasing, enticing...\"\n\nHer fingers roamed lower, sliding against the slick fabric of his shirt, tracing the contours of his muscled stomach. Iden considered pushing her hand away, but he felt a twinge in his loins, his body responding to her despite himself. He had been on the road for so many weeks without sight nor sound of a woman, and his need was great. Women had always been his weakness. When it came to the fairer sex, he had about as much ability to resist their charms as a drunk could resist a hearty draw from a pitcher of ale.\n\n\"You wanted Isabelle, I could feel it,\" she continued. \"But you were too much of a gentleman to act on your desires. You don't have to hide your feelings anymore, you can set them loose. The more unrestrained, the better...\"\n\nShe paused above his belt as if waiting for his permission to slide lower, batting her long lashes at him expectantly. Gods, she looked so radiant in the light of the fire. Her skin was as white as snow, her cheeks tinted pink, her lips full and rosy. Her green eyes shone like the emeralds that she hoarded in her prized collection, her mane of long hair the color of autumn leaves.\n\n\"Do dragons...like humans?\" he mumbled. \"Shouldn't you seek out a man with rough scales, and a long tail, who can breathe fire?\"\n\n\"It's been generations since I've seen another dragon,\" she replied, averting her gaze as she was temporarily lost in thought. \"Can you imagine what that's like? To go hundreds of years without so much as speaking to another of your own kind?\"\n\nHe could indeed. Iden had only gone a few weeks without enjoying the company of a woman, and he was already chomping at the bit, but it seemed a rather uncouth thing to admit in the moment.\n\n\"It must have made you very lonely,\" he said, and she nodded her head. \"But did you not seek the company of other humans?\"\n\n\"I did, on occasion, but...it's all a farce. All that I can manage are a few fleeting encounters here and there, I can never stay in one place for too long, I can never develop a real relationship with someone. When a certain amount of time has passed, they inevitably start asking questions that I can't answer. Where do you live, who are your parents, what's your profession. They can never know who I truly am. I grew tired of playing those games, it was always the same, every interaction arriving at the same conclusion.\"\n\n\"Why not take human form permanently, and live out your life amongst the mortals?\" Iden asked. \"It's not as though strangers never move from place to place, there are always new arrivals in towns and cities, people seeking to leave their old identity behind. You wouldn't have to explain anything.\"\n\n\"It would be a life of theater,\" she replied. \"I do not hide my draconic form out of shame, but out of necessity, because I will be hunted if I reveal it. I could not give up my true identity, not to mention leaving my collection unguarded,\" she added with a glance at her hoard. \"Perhaps I could pose as a newcomer to a quiet mountain village, such as the one deep in the valley, but it would surely arouse suspicion in such tightly-knit communities. I must also eat enough to sustain a dragon, regardless of my appearance. A beautiful young woman who appeared at the same time that a dragon began to terrorize the countryside? I'd be lucky not to be burned as a witch. Although I have to admit, seeing the faces of the villagers when the flames of their pyre had no effect on me would almost make it worth the trouble.\"\n\nShe pushed her face into the nape of his neck, nuzzling as her hand made slow circles on his stomach.\n\n\"Are you going to make me beg, Iden? Does my true nature intimidate you so? You don't have to be afraid of me, we could do it the way that you're no doubt accustomed to. It wouldn't be theater for me to play the role of a young woman, enraptured by your strength and masculinity, admiring your physicality as you mount me. My desire for you is real, even if this body that I have conjured is not. It's been so long since I felt the touch of a man...\"\n\nShe planted a lingering kiss on his neck, Iden's heart pounding in his ears. He would never admit it, but he was indeed afraid of her. He had seen what she truly was, thirty feet of scales and fire, possessed of magical powers far beyond his comprehension. And yet the form that she had chosen was so pleasing, so alluring, crafted for the purpose of enticing him just as a sword was forged to cut.\n\nHis resolve broke, and he reached down a hand to run his fingers through her auburn hair, stroking her warm cheek. Isabelle loosed a satisfied chuckle, her groping becoming less restrained, her slender fingers wandering across his broad chest. She tested the firmness of his muscles, then slid higher, his stubbly face scratching her palm as she returned the gesture.\n\n\"I knew that you'd come around,\" she whispered, \"there's no need to hold anything back now.\"\n\nShe snapped her fingers, and Iden was momentarily alarmed by a rush of flame, the silk tunic that she had crafted for him burning away like a sheet of paper to leave him exposed. Of course, his very clothes were a product of her magic. Did that mean that she could have undressed him any time that she wished?\n\nIsabelle slid a wandering hand down to his stomach, savoring the feeling of his iron muscles tensing beneath her palm, her covetous eyes playing across his body. He felt her trace a more recent scar, a line of pink flesh that had knitted across his belly where a foe had tried to gut him. Years out in the sun had given him a dark tan that contrasted against her own pale white. He should have noticed that, no farmhand could have kept such perfect skin while working out in the sun, there wasn't so much as a freckle on her.\n\n\"You're so stout,\" she muttered, making no attempt to conceal how much she was enjoying exploring him. \"You've lived a life of violence, a life where brute strength has kept you in one piece, every bout leaving its mark on your skin.\"\n\nShe leaned a little closer, planting a kiss on his chest, letting her soft lips linger.\n\n\"As hard as stone, what a specimen you make, Iden...\"\n\nHe flinched as he felt the warmth of her tongue, Isabelle seeming to sample his skin, one of her hands hooking around a bicep that was almost the size of her head.\n\n\"Your taste, your scent,\" she whispered. Her voice cracked on the last word, as if it was all too much for her. \"How I've pined for the warmth of a man...how I've longed to quench this thirst...\"\n\nShe grew more aggressive, Iden bucking from the pile of gowns and curtains as she cupped his growing erection in her hand through the fabric of his tight pants.\n\n\"But let's take our time,\" she added, almost as though she was trying to persuade herself rather than him. \"I want to savor this, I want to make the most of every second.\"\n\nIden felt a familiar fire rising in his belly, and this time, it had nothing to do with her magic. His fear melted away, his uncertainty fading. She was only a woman, a dragon in a woman's form perhaps, but he knew what to do with women.\n\nHe turned onto his side, dwarfing her slight frame, casting Isabelle into shadow as he put his back to the campfire. She peered up at him with an almost gleeful expression on her face, her anticipation palpable, wetting her lips as he cupped her face in his palm. Women liked his hands. They were large and rough, calloused by years of gripping leather hilts, and steel hafts. Her eyelids fluttered as he stroked her rosy cheek again, and then he brought her closer, leaning down to press his lips against hers.\n\nShe sighed through their locked lips, wasting no time on pleasantries as her tongue found his own, entwining in a passionate kiss. She tasted wonderful, it was almost like biting into a ripe fruit, her skillful flurries and strokes making his head spin. Isabelle was no stranger to a lover's embrace, it was rare to meet a woman who could match pace with him, who he didn't need to lead around like a dog on a leash. She was so greedy, rapacious, quickly abandoning any pretense of modesty or restraint.\n\nIsabelle seemed to sag into him, pressing her lithe figure up against his torso, her fingernails digging into his chest as she teased him with her artful tongue. He could feel the softness of her breasts squashing up against him through the silken fabric of her blouse, one of her thighs rising to brush against his loins, and he let his free hand roam down to her shoulder.\n\nHer skin was smoother and softer than even the lavish satin that they were lying upon, so warm in the cool air, and he couldn't help but stroke her. Her blouse exposed her neck and shoulders, and so that was where he roamed, inching closer to her bust as he met her bawdy embrace.\n\n\"Don't hold back,\" she panted, breaking off their kiss for a moment to peer up at him with her emerald eyes. \"You can be rough, there's no chance of you hurting me. Tear off my clothes, if it pleases you.\"\n\nHe slid a hand beneath the billowy fabric of her blouse, gripping it in his fist, the sound of the material ripping echoing through the cave as he tore it to ribbons. He took the two halves of her leather corset in his hands, straining to tear it open, the laces that secured it snapping. Isabelle giggled excitedly, shrugging her shoulders to help him along as he pulled her ruined top away, exposing more of her perfect skin. His hands slid down the curve of her back as he bundled her up in his arms, tugging her closer, Isabelle having to crane her neck to maintain their sordid kiss.\n\nHe rolled her over onto her back, Isabelle giggling as he threw her small frame around with ease, parting her thighs in invitation. Her pert breasts swayed with the motion, wobbling enticingly as they settled into their new position, Iden kneeling over her as his erection strained against the tight fabric of his pants.\n\n\"You're so aggressive, Iden,\" she chuckled. He was almost annoyed by how flippant she was, like the whole thing was a joke. \"Do you treat all of the girls this way, or is it just me?\"\n\nHe silenced her teasing with a kiss to her slender neck, pinching her skin between his teeth in a mock bite, feeling her spine rise off the bed as it arched towards him. She seemed to enjoy the rougher treatment, and so he continued, nibbling and kissing as he moved down towards her clavicle. He felt her fingers delve into his long hair, taking handfuls as his lips crept towards her bust.\n\nHer flesh spilled between his fingers as he took one of her breasts in his hand, kneading it greedily, feeling the hardness of her erect nipple pressing into his palm. It was a perfect handful, his digits sinking up to the first joint in her fat, as soft and as malleable as freshly baked dough. She mewled contentedly as he squeezed, Iden delighting in the way that it yielded, only to spring back to its original shape when he relented.\n\nDespite her lithe figure, her breasts were abundant, their heft giving them a teardrop shape that set his senses aflame. Her every subtle movement and tremor made them ripple like the calm surface of a lake that had been disturbed by a pebble, quivering as she rolled her hips reflexively. Isabelle clamped her thighs around him as he set upon the second, her grip surprisingly strong, the sensation of her shapely body writhing beneath his own encouraging him further.\n\nHe brought one of her hard nipples to his lips, sucking it into his mouth and playing his tongue across it, keeping up his mauling all the while. She had told him that he stood no chance of hurting her, and he believed it, he was shaping her bosom like it was wet clay. She had been flaunting her assets all day, putting them on display in her loose-fitting blouse. Now he finally had his hands on them, and he was taking full advantage, it was almost a form of retribution.\n\n\"You brute,\" she giggled, \"taking advantage of a defenseless woman...\"\n\nIden didn't want her laughing and cracking wise, he wanted her drenched in sweat, the only sounds leaving her lips the moans of carnal bliss. He decided to really put the moves on her, pinning her beneath his weight, pressing his erection between her legs as he gently chewed on her nipple. He could feel her warmth, her wetness, even through the barrier of his pants and her flowing gown. She was so ready for him, she was practically pulsing.\n\n\"Bite me a little harder,\" she muttered. He did as she asked, pinching her nipple between his lips and teeth, lashing it with his tongue. She pushed into him again, her spine rising from the silken sheets in a beautiful arch, Iden sliding a hand beneath her so that he might trace the deep dimple that ran down her back. Her skin was so impossibly smooth, like glass, or varnished wood. Could any mortal woman achieve this kind of perfection, or was it all a result of her magic?\n\nHis hand slid past her tattered blouse, sneaking below her gown and taking a handful of her rump, Isabelle loosing a delighted yelp as he dug his fingers into her springy muscle. Her rear was so soft and full that it rivaled her bust, but beneath the layer of cushiony fat was the brawn that she had boasted of, taut and firm in the most alluring of ways. She flexed as he kneaded, her thighs tightening around his waist like she was turning a thumbscrew. It reminded him of the female mercenaries that he had been fortunate enough to woo, strong and fierce. They had known what they wanted, and they hadn't been afraid to take it.\n\nHis lips left her nipple, wandering down her torso, pausing to plant a kiss by her navel. Her flat stomach was dimpled by two rows of subtle abdominal muscles, shifting beneath her skin as he passed them by. Even if he knew that it was just an illusion, her body was still that of a farm hand, toned and shaped by a lifetime of labor that had left her hard in all of the right places. His stubble seemed to tickle her, and she chuckled giddily again. Isabelle's hands were above her head now, her fingers clawing at the sheets as he lifted her off the makeshift bed, supporting her weight with a single arm beneath her pillowy rump. Her burnished thighs brushed his cheeks, the backs of her knees resting across his shoulders, her feet dangling behind her back as he held her almost upside-down.\n\n\"You're more generous than I had imagined,\" she said, her voice dripping with anticipation. \"Quite the gentleman indeed...\"\n\n\"Ladies first,\" he muttered, Isabelle chuckling lasciviously as he brought her closer. Her womanhood was just as idealized as the rest of her, her lips puffy and inviting, glistening flesh the color of a blushing cheek peeking out from between them. It was enough to set his mouth watering, and he watched as a solitary bead of her excitement escaped to roll down her cheek like a tear.\n\nIden rested his free hand on her belly as he dove in, parting her labia, and grazing her vulva with his tongue. He felt a tremor pass through her as he explored her folds and creases, like the petals of a rose coated in morning dew, her flavor driving him wild. She tasted just like a kiss, with a hint of copper, and not much else. There was the familiar musk of a woman, but also the flowery fragrance of perfumes and soaps, setting his head spinning. Was this what well-to-do women smelled like, or was this more of her magic? He even surprised himself with his enthusiasm, lapping at her slippery, fever-hot sex as she writhed in his grasp.\n\n\"Don't stop,\" she muttered, her eyes losing their focus as she lay back on the sheets. \"Go a little slower though...that's right, with the flat of your tongue. Oh, Iden, you're a natural.\"\n\nHe mouthed and licked, the blend of his saliva and her syrupy juices making their contact wonderfully slippery, strands of it linking their lips when he pulled away. He planted sucking kisses on her inner thighs and on her smooth mound, watching her opening twitch at his every touch. She was so receptive, so sensitive, her muscled belly tensing beneath his palm.\n\nShe lurched as he found her clitoris, circling the bud of flesh with his tongue, pressing his lips around it and drawing it out from beneath its protective hood. He painted it slowly, doting on her, treating this part of her anatomy like it was made of glass in contrast to his usual roughness. He was pleased to hear a comely whine escape her lips, and she brought one of her hands to her mouth, biting down on her fist as he teased her with his slow and deliberate stroking. She was practically dripping now, her loins swollen and needy, he could feel the heat that she radiated on his lips.\n\nHe had to take a moment to collect himself, his heart was pounding in his chest, and his member was straining uncomfortably against the tight fabric of his leggings. He had been so reluctant, so wary of her, but now he could only ask himself why he had denied her advances for so long. Dragon or not, she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever laid eyes on. Her body was a playground of delicate flesh and sturdy muscle, her skin softer than satin, her scent and her taste bewitching him.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" she asked, peering up at him as her green eyes reflected the glow of the campfire. \"Not having second thoughts, I hope?\"\n\nHe didn't reply. Instead, he let her fall to the pile of sheets below, the meat of her thighs and bust shaking with the impact. Her surprised expression quickly morphed into one of anticipation as he took her wide hips in his calloused hands, positioning her as he knelt between her parted legs. He took a moment to slide a hand up her thigh, massaging it, watching his fingertips sink into its velvety surface like melting butter.\n\n\"You don't beat around the bush, do you?\" Isabelle purred as he took in the curves of her prone figure from beneath his curtain of black hair. \"I must say, Iden, I find you so very...exciting when you're in this state of mind. You've become so gruff and assertive, no wonder the small-town girls that you like to court fall head over heels for you.\" Her expression turned sly, and he could have sworn that her green eyes took on a more fiery hue, if only for a second. \"But I must warn you, I will not be so easy to satisfy. Hold nothing back, I want everything that you can give me, as hard and as vigorous as you can give it.\"\n\n\"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised,\" he replied. Isabelle merely smirked at him, reaching up to run a hand across his broad chest, biting her lower lip as she felt the pounding of his heart beneath her palm.\n\n\"You won't be needing those any longer,\" she said, pointing at his leggings. There was a burst of flame as they disintegrated into ashes, leaving him nude, the magical fire no longer a surprise to him. His member was finally freed from its prison, Isabelle's eyes wandering down to examine it, the way that her lips curled into a smile telling him that she approved of what she saw. Iden was appropriately endowed for his stature, his manhood thick and vascular, throbbing in the air as she reached out to brush it with her fingers.\n\nHe flinched, baring his teeth as she weighed it in her hand, her digits scarcely able to meet around his girth. This was another tool in his arsenal when it came to courtship, his partners were never disappointed once he got them into bed. Isabelle was one of few women who had probably seen bigger. For all he knew, a male dragon's manhood might be as long as his leg.\n\nShe guided him closer, pressing his glans between her lips, the warmth and wetness sending a shiver through his body. How he had longed for this during his weeks on the road, sleeping on the cold earth in a tent, the frigid air creeping into his sleeping bag as he tried to conjure memories of past encounters.\n\nIsabelle had given him her invitation, and just as she had requested, he intended to hold nothing back. He gripped her hips and pushed forward, her eyes widening as she felt his manhood splay her open, her fingers digging into the sheets to either side of her as the head of his cock broke through.\n\nHe was greeted by a tunnel of sodden, twitching flesh that closed around him like an angry fist, her tightness making him curse under his breath. She had a small frame, and her passage was suitably narrow, her muscles massaging him in waves from beyond the limits of her silken walls. The exquisite folds and bumps of her insides were slick with a sheen of her slippery excitement, without which he doubted that their coupling would have been possible at all. Gods, she was as tight as a virgin. She was gripping him so fervently, as though her wringing muscles were trying to drag him deeper.\n\nHe inched a little further, and rather than pull away from him as some women did during the first moments of their lovemaking, he felt her thighs tighten around his waist. She crossed her legs behind his back, pulling him into her, her eyes flashing with a kind of fierce desire.\n\nHer spine arched again as he bottomed out inside her, Isabelle able to take him to the hilt, her loins conforming to his every vein and contour like a velvet glove. He could feel every contraction, every subtle movement of her hips, every flex of her muscles. She could feel each throb of blood that pulsed through his member in turn, his organ jumping and pulsing inside of her, her eyelids fluttering with every beat of his heart.\n\n\"The warmth of a man,\" she mumbled, her eyes seeming to lose their focus as she stared drunkenly at the domed ceiling above them. \"How I've missed this feeling of...fullness...\" Iden could scarcely stop himself from moving, and he began to rock his hips into her, his pace slow and heavy. Some women just lay there and took it, hardly participating at all, but Isabelle was refreshingly lively. She pushed back against him, rising to meet his thrusts, driving him harder and deeper. Her abdominal muscles moved beautifully beneath her skin as she twisted and gyrated, thrusting as though she was trying to scratch a maddening itch deep inside her, her breasts wobbling with the motion. He let one his hands roam up from its place on her hips, tracing the hourglass curve of her waist, stopping just beneath her chest.\n\nThey both began to breathe harder, a sheen of fresh sweat making their skin glisten in the firelight, their shared pleasure mounting along with their tempo. The impact of their bodies slamming together was wonderful, she could take him all the way to the base, so perfectly suited to him. The sensation of his member parting her deepest reaches had an intoxicating quality, flesh like damp satin gliding up and down his length, always in motion as it squeezed and shifted around him. He could feel every imperfection, every fold and crease of her depths, his nerves sparking like a smith's hammer hitting a hot iron. Her loins almost seemed to suck on him, drawing on his shaft like a hungry mouth when he tried to pull back, as if her very body couldn't stand the thought of them being apart.\n\nHis hands slid against her damp skin, beads of her sudor catching the light, sparkling to give the impression that her writhing form had been dusted with tiny diamonds. His own sweat poured from him, making his mop of hair damp. It wasn't just their coupling that was heating up, the campfire beside the makeshift bed seemed to sputter every time that he drove his manhood into her yielding walls, growing hotter as her ecstasy grew more intense. Iden was glad of the cool air now, it was the only thing stopping him from overheating.\n\n\"Harder,\" she snarled, that fiery hue returning to her green eyes. Her thighs tightened around his waist, squeezing him almost uncomfortably, muscles as hard as iron tensing beneath her supple layer of fat. He did his best to oblige, snarling as he planted a hand against the sheets beside her head, the impact making her jump and giggle. He changed his angle so that he might reach even deeper, his fingers digging into her hip as he put all of his strength into his thrusts.\n\nThey were rutting like beasts now, fucking in earnest, all pretense of gentle lovemaking forgotten. There was nothing cautious or exploratory about it, they were both experienced lovers, and they knew what they wanted.\n\n\"Harder, you brute,\" Isabelle hissed through gritted teeth. \"Pull my hair.\"\n\nHis fingers delved into her auburn locks, and he took a cruel handful, tugging at her scalp as he pressed her deep into the sheets. He felt her grip him more tightly, her loins narrowing around his buried member, his eyes widening and his mouth opening in a silent gasp. She was so strong, so vigorous, he would never have imagined that such a dainty girl would like it this way.\n\n\"You really can take it,\" he panted, his disbelief making her giggle mischievously.\n\n\"Did you think me a liar?\"\n\n\"No, but...this is amazing,\" he stammered. \"You're amazing.\"\n\n\"I fear that we're well beyond flattery,\" she chuckled, reaching up a hand to caress his stubbly cheek. \"Now stop playing nice, and treat me like you would one of your barmaids. I'm no Queen, I may have riches, but I hold no titles. I want to feel this...really feel it.\"\n\n\"As you command, my lady,\" he laughed. She gave him a playful punch to the bicep, smirking at him. He responded by leaning more of his weight into her, coming down like a sledgehammer, her entire body seeming to quake. He forced a lusty moan of pleasure from her lips, the sound driving him on, Isabelle starting to lose herself in the pleasure.\n\nHe pulled her hair, and she yelped in excitement, her fingernails clawing at his chest to leave red welts. Iden drew closer, pressing his body tight against hers, supporting his weight with a forearm. He was so much taller than her, her red cheeks brushing against his chest as they moved together, their combined sweat making everything wonderfully slippery. She seemed to enjoy his new proximity, wrapping her arms around him as best she could manage, her hands sliding up and down his back as she planted eager kisses on his neck. She was clawing at him like a little cat, but he enjoyed the sting of it, and her nails couldn't do him much harm.\n\nShe bit him gently, and he gave her red hair another tug, feeling her quiver beneath him. This was exactly how Iden wanted her. She was red-faced, drenched in sweat, mewling with every powerful thrust. Nothing excited him more than seeing a woman completely overcome, feeling her grip him with an almost desperate fervor, all hesitation and doubt replaced with animal lust.\n\nThere was a flare of pain as she raked her nails down his spine, the sudden sensation giving him pause for a moment. He considered saying something about it, but he didn't want to spoil the moment. Showing fragility in the heat of their rutting wouldn't do him any favors. He focused on the euphoria that was washing over him instead, his muscles burning with the exertion as he drove her into the silken bed.\n\n\"Kiss me,\" she demanded, reaching behind his head and pulling him closer with surprising strength. They locked lips, Iden not missing a beat as he kept up his pounding. Her tongue sought out his own, and they wrestled, the little moans and gasps that she let slip driving him wild. Her organ was so strong, her slick, smooth muscle roiling in his mouth. She tickled his palate, bulging his inner cheeks, her roving tongue coiling around his like a snake. Was it just his imagination, or did it somehow feel...longer? She was doing things that didn't seem possible, but it felt so good that he didn't question it.\n\nHer embrace was so deep and unrestrained, her practiced strokes sending pleasant shivers down his spine, their wet smacking audible even over the sounds of their panting breath. She gripped his hair, her sharp nails pricking his scalp, her steely thighs dragging him into her to increase their pace. She seemed to want even more than he could give her, her thirst was unquenchable.\n\nThey broke off their lurid kiss, and he felt her lips on his neck again, her tongue raking his skin as she sampled his sweat. She buried her face in his shoulder, and he flinched as he felt her bite, her teeth pricking him. Again, her nails left burning trails across his back, and it hurt enough to jolt him out of his fugue.\n\n\"Iden,\" she moaned, his member flexing inside of her as he heard her sultry plea. \"I want you on your back...\"\n\nHe didn't even have time to protest. With her legs secured firmly around his waist, she grappled him like a wrestler, inhumanly strong for her diminutive stature. She threw him off-balance, rolling him over onto the sheets next to her, Isabelle keeping him locked inside her as she moved. Before he even knew what was happening, he was staring up at her, her red hair falling about her face as her chest rose and fell rapidly. Her breasts hung enticingly, seeming somehow fuller and heavier than they had been moments ago, swaying as they settled. She took his wrists in her tiny hands, pinning them to the bed with enough force that he couldn't lift them.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he laughed, more amused than alarmed. It was hard to feel any emotion other than contentment when one was hilted inside a beautiful, eager woman.\n\n\"You're so accustomed to setting the pace,\" she whispered, his heart skipping as her lips pulled back to reveal a set of teeth that more resembled pearly fangs. \"Your partners love to be overpowered, they swoon over your chiseled muscles, the mere fact that they have to crane their necks to look you in the eye makes them wet. How would you fare if the tables were turned, I wonder? Will you indulge my curiosity?\"\n\nHer face was cast into shadow by her long fringe of hair, but beneath it, he could make out her eyes as they glowed like hot coals. The green had been replaced with a fiery amber, her pupils taking on the vertical slits of a reptile.\n\nHe hadn't been imagining things, Isabelle was...changing. Her nails had hurt so much because they had been replaced with black claws, the skin on her fingers cracking, becoming a blue mosaic of tough scales. He watched as it spread up her arm like a scaly rash, stopping just shy of her elbows. Her hands felt larger now, the fingers thicker, her palms padded and soft. The tips of her ears were pointed, taking on a blueish hue, and her stature must have increased by a solid foot since they had gotten into bed together.\n\nFrom beneath her hair, the beginnings of two gnarled horns were visible, and her previously subtle abdominal muscles had gained enough definition that they cast their own shadows on her flat stomach. They bulged from beneath her wet skin, flexing as she shifted her now considerable weight, her thighs becoming similarly thick and strong. He felt something cool and heavy slap against his leg, and while he couldn't see it, he had to assume that she was sprouting a tail.\n\nIden should have been afraid, he should have thrown her off him. But by the Gods, her body was a work of art, her loins wringing him like a farmhand milking a cow as she straddled him. He couldn't bring himself to do it, his cock was making the decisions now, as it so often did when it came to the fairer sex.\n\nShe began to rock back and forth, stirring him around inside her, clamping down on him with her steely thighs to keep him locked in place. Iden was a strong man, that went without saying, but she was so powerful that she had him completely immobilized. Her strength was disproportionate to her size. Even with her sudden growth, she was still shorter than he was, the width of her arms not even close to his.\n\nHe had been with women who wanted to be on top, of course, there was nothing unusual about that. But he had never met one who could overpower him in this way, even the strongest women were still smaller and weaker than him.\n\nIsabelle began to rise and fall on his shaft, lifting herself off him, before letting her considerable weight carry her back down again. She drove him into the sheets, her breasts bouncing with the motion, the strands of her long hair blown by her panting breath as they fell over her face. She was driving him so deep, the hot, slimy flesh of her reaches clinging to him like a second skin. The muscles that flexed and squeezed beyond them grew ever tighter, massaging him as they rolled up and down his length, as though there was a phantom hand reaching beyond the barrier of her flesh to milk him.\n\nIden was in a daze, his initial shock at being flipped over and mounted had dulled, a pleasant fog falling over his mind as her rutting sent waves of pleasure flooding through his body. Maybe it wasn't so bad to let someone else take the lead for once\u2026\n\nHe felt something curling around his legs, smooth, dry scales brushing against his skin. It was such an alien sensation, a jolt of fear disturbing his peace. It was her tail, slithering around his limbs in a lazy spiral like it was preparing to constrict him. The blue scales that coated her body were rough and rigid, almost like armor plating, but the mosaic of small scales on her beige-colored underside were almost flush enough to be mistaken for skin. The appendage was surprisingly chubby and hefty, as thick around as one of her thighs. He couldn't see how long it was from his position, but it was already large enough to encompass his legs almost completely in a cocoon of soft meat.\n\nShe tensed suddenly, muscles that felt as hard as tempered steel rising up from beneath the cushion of fat, pressing his legs tightly together. Isabelle didn't apply enough pressure to hurt him, although he got the sense that her tail could have crushed his bones to dust if she had desired it. Instead, she kept him still, binding him so that he couldn't move. Now his arms were pinned, her weight was pressing down on his hips, and his legs were completely immobilized.\n\n\"Uh...is there a reason that you-\"\n\nHis question was cut off as she came down especially hard on him, driving a grunt from his throat, her pace relentless. It felt like his hips were starting to bruise under her merciless hammering, but the familiar ache and urgency of a climax was already looming. He usually lasted much longer than this, they couldn't have been going at it for more than ten minutes. Under normal circumstances, he would simply slow the pace, or switch positions so that he might have time to cool off. But now he had no control over the speed or the severity of their lovemaking. Isabelle could wring his orgasm out of him by sheer force if she wanted to. With his limbs bound, he would have no way to stop her.\n\n\"How do you like it?\" she whispered, her face still obscured beneath her long hair. \"How does it feel to be on the receiving end of such treatment? You don't have to answer if your pride won't allow it, I can tell exactly what you're feeling from the way that your cheeks are flushed pink, the way that your manhood is jumping inside me. Oh Iden...you're so cute when you're flustered.\"\n\nHer words only made him blush more, his face burning as she chuckled wryly. People didn't refer to him as cute, there was nothing cute about a mercenary whose skin was a patchwork of faded scars, whose sheer stature struck fear into his opponents on the field of battle.\n\nHis train of thought was shattered as she began to gyrate her wide hips, making a lazy circle that drove his member into her pillowy walls in new and exciting ways. He couldn't take much more of this treatment, he was sliding towards a quick and confusing orgasm. Why did he feel this way? Why did he have butterflies in his stomach, why did her thrusting seem to drain the strength from his body? He felt so relaxed, despite his uncertainty.\n\nIden bucked, trying to rise off the sheets in an attempt to seek out more stimulation, but Isabelle did not allow it. She was too heavy to lift, his frustration making him writhe beneath her. She seemed to enjoy that, her glowing eyes playing over his body, admiring his muscles as they flexed beneath his skin, his sweat making him shine in the ever-intensifying firelight.\n\n\"I love it when you struggle,\" she cooed, her thighs clenching around him. \"You move so beautifully, you're hitting me in all the right places. Gods, it's been too long since I've been able to enjoy a man in this way...\" \"You have to slow down,\" he panted, his facade of control slipping as he felt his exposed glans grind against her luxuriant flesh. He could hardly focus his eyes, his mind ceding control to his base urges. \"I can't keep this up for much longer.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" she chuckled, delighting in his pleading. \"You're as strong as they come, and you've never explored your limits, have you? Aren't you curious to see how far I can take you? What peaks of ecstasy you might reach? I can do things that a mortal woman couldn't even conceive of.\"\n\nShe never gave him an opportunity to reply, leaning down closer to him, her long hair tickling his skin. Her puffy lips found his neck, mouthing and kissing, sending appreciative shivers sliding down his spine like icy fingers. Her breasts were larger now, somehow heavier. They had been perfect handfuls at first, but now they looked as if they would overflow from his palms, their weight resting on his as they sagged across his chest.\n\nHe flinched as he felt her teeth prick his neck, Isabelle biting him gently, teasing him with her sharp fangs.\n\n\"Oh!\" she giggled, \"did you like that? Is your neck sensitive?\"\n\nHer tongue dragged across his throat, velvet-soft and twice the length of a human's now, leaving a warm smear of saliva in its wake. She planted sucking kisses, burying her face in the nape of his neck, nibbling and pinching. He didn't know why, but something about having her bite him there made him feel oddly...vulnerable. Her teeth were so sharp, she was so dangerous, he just had to trust that she wouldn't tear into his jugular like a ravenous wolf. It wasn't a bad feeling, far from it. It made him feel like he was melting into a puddle, confusing his senses.\n\nIsabelle sat up, Iden's eyes drawn to the swaying of her ample breasts, droplets of sweat catching the light as they slid slowly down her toned midriff. They quivered with every labored breath that she took, as big as cantaloupes now. She pinned his arms above his head with one hand, now large enough to encompass both of his wrists, bringing the second to her boobs. She cupped one, weighing it, letting its fat spill between her fingers. She showed no signs of discomfort despite her rough scales and her pointed talons, the blue of her reptilian hide contrasting with the porcelain of her human skin. She pressed a pink nipple between her thumb and forefinger, shuddering contentedly at the sensation.\n\n\"You can't tear your gaze from my chest, can you?\" she asked with a grin that revealed her sharp fangs. \"Do they really hypnotize you so?\"\n\nBefore his eyes, her bust began to grow. Her breasts became heavier, their weight pressing them together more tightly, as though someone was slowly filling two sacks with grain. They became less firm as they expanded in size, changing shape, growing rounder and fuller as they slumped from her chest. This new change was accompanied by more scales, these ones of the beige variety. They sprouted from her skin in proximity to her chest, spreading across her clavicle and down between her boobs in a kind of T shape, tapering off just above her six-pack. It seemed that any increase in her size went hand in hand with the appearance of more draconic features. In naught but a few moments, her breasts were nearly as large as his head, Isabelle seeming unconcerned by their new weight.\n\nShe lifted one of them, Iden watching as her flesh cascaded over her hand like melting wax, her fingers sinking up to the knuckle. They were downright bountiful, the largest that he had ever seen on a woman, every slight movement making them wobble.\n\n\"How about now?\" she chuckled, batting her long lashes as she felt him throb inside of her. She let her breast fall, the heavy globe of fat bouncing softly, then she brought her free hand down to his face.\n\nHer claws were sharp, like black hooks, but she kept them clear of his skin as she cradled his cheek. The same rough, blue scales were present on the back of her hand, trailing up her forearm, but her palm was far softer than he would have guessed. Just like the underside of her tail, it was smooth and silky, made up of a mosaic of almost imperceptibly small scales. Her hand was weirdly chubby, padded with doughy flesh, giving her an inhumanly soft touch. As a dragon, she walked on all fours, and so perhaps it was cushioned for that purpose.\n\nIden flinched as her fingers wandered downwards, Isabelle pressing the talon on her index finger against his throat. She drew a trail down to his chest, her touch as light as a feather. It made him freeze up like a statue, he was afraid to even breathe lest her claw puncture his skin.\n\n\"That's right,\" she cooed, giving him a little shake of her hips as if to reward him for his obedience. \"Trust in me, let me show you what your body can really do...\"\n\nHe shivered as she dragged her claws across his chest, leaving stinging welts, but never drawing blood. The sensation excited him, seeming to amplify his senses, Isabelle wetting her lips with her pointed tongue as she felt him writhe between her thighs.\n\n\"For all of your strength, you can't move a muscle,\" she whispered. She dragged her tongue up his neck, pausing to chew his ear between her pointed fangs. He bucked, squirming as the lurid sounds of her nibbling and licking filled his head, but she was right. As much as he strained, as much as his muscles bulged, he had no hope of breaking free. \"Relax, and let me have you. You'll enjoy it, trust me...\"\n\nHe had always been the strongest, the largest, ever since he was a child. At age fifteen, he had already been six feet tall, dwarfing the other boys. At age eighteen, he'd had enough strength to beat any of his peers in an arm wrestling contest or a fist fight. By twenty, he was already taking coin for protection and guard work. Yet now, all of that had been robbed from him, none of it meant anything to the dragon.\n\nShe began to move again, rocking slowly back and forth, rather than rising up and down. She teased him with sudden, staccato thrusts, before sinking back into a lazy rhythm that kept him perpetually on the edge. It was like she was dancing on top of him, her exaggerated breasts shaking with her movements, her abdominal muscles shifting beneath her skin. She kept a tight hold on him all the while, his frustration at not being able to break free somehow making him all the more excited. Did he enjoy being bound like this?\n\nIsabelle took his face in her soft hand, angling it towards her so that she could watch his every expression. She threw her head back, whipping her hair out of her face, and Iden was finally able to get a good look at her. She didn't look too different from the way that she had before her sudden transformation, save for a patch of blue scales that had grown across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were yellow and fiery, her ears pointed and tinted blue.\n\nHe couldn't help but nuzzle her doughy palm as she moved atop him, he was losing himself in the pleasure, he couldn't think straight anymore. Every time that he tried to concentrate on something, his thoughts slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. She had found a delightfully slow and punishing tempo that kept taking him to the brink of orgasm, without ever quite sending him over that precipice.\n\nNo woman had ever made him feel this way before. The pleasure was duller than what he was accustomed to, coming not in harsh bursts, but radiating through him in euphoric waves. It wasn't concentrated solely in his loins, his entire body felt like the head of a penis, it was completely different from how sex usually felt for him.\n\nIsabelle slipped a thumb into his mouth, and he dodged her sharp claw with his tongue, his draconic partner seeming to enjoy the sensation. He gave in, sucking it obediently, noting the variance of texture between the different types of scale. She looked down her nose at him in a way that was somehow more covetous than condescending, radiating a kind of supreme confidence that made his belly flutter when her glowing eyes met his. She had him completely bewitched, he felt as if his very heartbeat was tied to her rhythm.\n\n\"I could keep you trapped like this for as long as I pleased,\" she said, biting her lip in her sharp teeth at the prospect. \"But that might be a little cruel for your first time.\"\n\nFirst time? He had been with dozens of women, why was she treating him like some kind of virgin, as though this was his first experience of lovemaking? She noticed his frown, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughed at him.\n\n\"You're adorable when you get angry,\" she cooed, \"just look at your red face. Alright, let's finish up, and then I'll set you loose.\"\n\nShe said it so casually, tightening her hold on him, her grip almost becoming painful. She let all of her weight rest on him, crushing him against the sheets, her hand squeezing his wrists together as her tail flexed around his legs. He gritted his teeth as she closed her fingers around his neck, letting her hand rest there, rather than applying pressure to choke him. The threat alone gave him that oddly alluring feeling of vulnerability again, knowing that she could hurt him, but trusting that she wouldn't.\n\nShe began to breathe more heavily as her pace increased, pushing him towards a crescendo, every thrust sending points of colorful light dancing before his eyes. He felt like his brain was being fried in his skull, the cave around them seeming to fade away until all that he could focus on was Isabelle. She was radiant, her smooth skin dripping with sweat, her iridescent scales shifting hue in the firelight as she moved. The soft meat of her breasts rippled, her abs flexing beneath her glistening skin, her mane of auburn hair falling about her shoulders like a red waterfall.\n\nIden gasped as his orgasm welled, it was another brand new sensation that took him by surprise. He was used to dictating the pace, going faster and harder as his climax drew nearer, finishing at the perfect moment. But now, it was Isabelle who was in control. It was so strange to have to fight back his pleasure, to have someone else impose ecstasy upon him, to make him come.\n\n\"Just...lie back...and enjoy it,\" she panted, noticing his renewed struggling. She leaned down closer, her face little more than an inch from his own, watching him intently as she pushed him higher and higher. Embarrassed, he turned away from her, but he soon felt her padded fingers on his red cheeks as she forced him to look her in the eye. It all became too much for him, his muscles seizing up as the beginnings of an orgasm surged through him.\n\nIsabelle grinned as she felt him buck beneath her, apparently surprised by his vigor, having to tighten her hold on him and readjust her position lest he succeed in escaping her control. The campfire beside their makeshift bed flared into a roaring blaze, almost as if a jet of fire was shooting from the cave floor, the orange flames taking on a blueish hue as they grew hotter.\n\nA throb of pleasure wracked his body, intense enough to make his head spin, his member flexing inside her as her pulsating walls drew out his emission with their cruel massage. She stopped moving as she felt the thick ropes of his seed splash against her tender reaches, bubbling up inside her, filling every wrinkle and crevice with their warmth. Her thighs threatened to squeeze the life out of him as her eyelids fluttered, her sharp teeth bared, a plume of dark smoke rising from her nostrils as she exhaled a comely sigh. She began to tremble, joining him in his bliss, the surging flames starting to sputter and waver along with her. Her loins grew ever tighter, her maddening contractions coming stronger and faster, the walls of muscle not affording Iden a moment of respite.\n\nWave after wave of pleasure crashed over him, every muscle in his body tingling, aching with the effort. He was exhausted in the most satisfying of ways, his consciousness ebbing as he relaxed into the damp sheets, only to be jolted back awake as a fresh spasm made him its plaything. Isabelle gasped and crooned as her velvety passage wrung him like a wet towel, intent on extracting everything that she could get from him, their heaving bodies joined as they bucked and wrestled in the light of the fire.\n\nWhen it was finally over, they collapsed together onto their nest of fabric, panting and squirming as the fading embers of their shared climax tickled them with aftershocks. Isabelle still hadn't released him, she kept her thighs and her tail tightly wrapped around him, hugging him against her body. Their sweat and fluids mingled, making their touch slippery and wet, her breasts squashing up against his chest as she clung to him almost desperately.\n\nShe finally released his hands, her iron grip leaving red welts on his wrists, almost as if he had been wearing manacles. She wrapped her arms around him, pricking him with her sharp talons, and he felt compelled to return the gesture. His hands wandered up and down the curve of her spine, her skin slick with perspiration, as silky-soft as ever. His fingers roamed down to take a handful of her plump rear, and they brushed the base of her tail. It sprouted from her body just above her rump, where her spine ended, some of the rough scales trailing a short distance up her back. He gave it an experimental prod, finding that it was just as chubby as it had initially felt, almost like a portly woman's thigh.\n\nIden shivered as he felt her lips press against his own, that tapered, winding tongue pushing its way into his mouth. It just kept coming, her slimy, undulating coils piling into his head. It was like satin that had been soaked in honey, more jolts of pleasure disturbing his afterglow as she stroked his inner cheeks, glancing the back of his throat with her invasive kiss.\n\n\"I knew you wouldn't disappoint me, Iden,\" she chuckled as she drew back to let him catch his breath. \"You're strong enough to keep up with me, resilient enough that I don't have to hold back, at least not very much. I've not felt like this since...I don't even remember.\" She pushed her face into his long hair, breathing in his scent, nuzzling contentedly. \"What's the matter?\" she giggled, \"have I robbed you of your quick wit? Poor Iden, so overcome with pleasure that he can barely speak...\"\n\n\"It will take more than that to overwhelm me,\" he grumbled, not willing to admit defeat even as he trembled in her embrace.\n\n\"That sounds like a challenge,\" she cooed, leaning in to plant a kiss on his cheek. \"You try to put on such a gruff facade, but I know that deep down, you're kind and sensitive. I've shown you my true form, have I not? So why not show me yours? There's nothing to be afraid of...\"\n\n\"I am not sensitive,\" he insisted, scowling at her as she laughed at his reaction. She finally uncoiled her tail from his legs, sensation returning to them, pins and needles tickling his toes. She let the odd appendage flop over his hip, heavy and limp, while she draped an arm about his neck and pulled him close.\n\n\"Are you warm enough?\" she asked, \"would you like more furs?\"\n\n\"I'm...fine,\" he mumbled. The heat from the fire, and from their bodies, was enough to stave off the cold. Sharing a bed with a woman was not unusual for him, although he was normally gone by morning, but something about this felt more...intimate.\n\n\"Put your arms around me,\" she whispered, shuffling closer to him. He did as she asked, Isabelle exhaling a long sigh as she nestled in his embrace. \"I've spent far too many cold nights alone, you have no idea how soothing it is to share a bed with a warm body after so long. To feel the beating of their heart, to have your breathing sync with theirs, until its hypnotic rhythm lulls you to sleep. It makes me wonder how I could ever do without it. We're not made to be alone, Iden. Not humans, and not dragons. How strange that we should seek comfort in one another when fate has made our peoples enemies.\"\n\nHe was too exhausted to formulate any kind of intelligent reply, but he soon found that she was right, his eyelids growing heavier as he listened to her steady breathing. It felt good to lie here with her like this, and he wasn't quite sure why. The sex was over and done with. At this point, he usually lost interest in whoever happened to be warming his bed that night, but something about this was different.\n\nHe fell asleep, his questions going unanswered."
            },
            {
                "title": "WARRIOR POET",
                "text": "Iden awoke the following morning with Isabelle's arm still draped across his chest, her long tail trailing over his thighs. It was heavy enough that he'd have trouble lifting it, limp save for a subtle twitching at its tapered tip, reminding him of the way that a sleeping dog's ear might flick while it was dreaming. She was clinging to him so tightly, her head resting on his shoulder, her bosom engulfing his upper arm. Her chest rose and fell softly, her breath tickling his neck and blowing the strands of her red hair.\n\nThey were glued together by stale sweat, and other, more sordid fluids. The fire had petered out at some point during the night, probably when Isabelle had fallen asleep, and the cold had crept in. He wanted to get up and take a dip in the spring, but he'd have to wake Isabelle to do it. Perhaps she was a heavy sleeper, only one way to find out...\n\nHe shrugged his shoulder and let her head slide down onto the silken sheets, moving her arm from his chest, going as slow as he could manage so as not to wake her. Once his upper body was free, he sat up, Isabelle stirring and murmuring as he pushed his hands beneath her fat tail.\n\nThe blue scales weren't quite as rough as they looked. They felt like the pebbles at the bottom of a stream bed, bumpy when taken together, but smooth individually. They were so pretty, their hue changing from blue to green depending on how they caught the light, almost like jewels in their own right. Iden couldn't help but run his hand across the appendage, stroking it, feeling its bumpy-yet-smooth texture beneath his palm.\n\nThe underside was nearly indistinguishable from skin, and when he tried to lift it, his fingers sank knuckle-deep into its layer of cushiony fat. It wasn't too heavy for him to move, but it took some effort. How was the damned thing so heavy? There was something oddly alluring about it that he couldn't quite place, it really did feel like a thick, elongated thigh in a way\u2026\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he heard Isabelle ask, his cheeks already starting to flush as he turned to see her looking up at him. She rubbed her eyes as she yawned widely, still somewhat groggy, but smirking at him all the same. It was just a tail, why did Iden feel like he had been caught doing something that he shouldn't?\n\n\"I was just about to take a dip in the pool,\" he stammered, \"I need to freshen up.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" she chuckled, pulling the furs about herself to preserve her modesty. \"You seem fascinated with my tail. Humans don't have them, I suppose. I'm curious, what do you make of it?\"\n\n\"I...don't know,\" he muttered, wondering what she expected him to say. Did dragons compliment one another's tails? Was the length, the girth, or perhaps the color a source of pride? The appendage escaped his grasp suddenly, the tip rising to give him a gentle tap on the nose, as dexterous as a finger. It behaved more like a tentacle than a tail, she had such fine control over it.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said, stretching her arms above her head. \"I suppose that you'll be wanting me to warm the water for you, and after how much you exerted yourself last night, a little breakfast might be in order. What say you to another shank of roast beef?\"\n\nAh yes, last night. The memories came flooding back to him, sordid images flashing in his mind. He could recall every sensation, every taste and scent, the feeling of her powerful body moving atop his own as she rode him into the sheets. It had felt like a dream, but he knew that it had been real. Iden had bedded a dragon. Was that something to brag about, or a secret that he should take to his grave? He wasn't quite sure. She had shaken the foundations of his world, opened his eyes to new and unexplored pleasures, taken him in a way that he hadn't known a man could be taken.\n\nEnough, he thought to himself, his brow furrowing. No more of this stammering and blushing, no more letting this woman lead him around by the nose. He wasn't some fresh-faced boy who had just tasted his first kiss, he'd had as many women as hot meals, and Isabelle was no different. She might be far stronger than he was, she might possess magical powers that awed and frightened him, but she was still just a woman. He had to assert himself, he had to get back on the horse, so to speak.\n\n\"You seemed rather taken with me,\" he replied, \"don't forget who was on their back first. When I began my climb up the mountain, I was expecting to slay a dragon, not take one to bed.\"\n\n\"Well, it looks like someone has regained enough of his faculties to crack wise,\" she said as she gave him a wry smile. \"Although I found your tongue better suited to other activities...\"\n\nIden stood, putting his back to her and stretching, feeling her eyes on his back. He searched for his clothes, intending to get dressed, but then recalled how they had burst into flames.\n\n\"Uh...could I trouble you for something to wear?\" he asked, looking back over his shoulder to see her biting her lip at him. She shook her head, barely suppressing a laugh.\n\n\"Go wait for me by the pool, I'll be there shortly. When we've had a wash, I'll make us some new clothes.\" He set off, the cave floor frigid against his bare feet. \"And remember, Iden,\" she called after him. \"Your clothes only exist as long as I will it, so keep your wits about you. If I should grow hungry for you again, there will be nothing standing between us, least of all your trousers.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The water bubbled as Isabelle dipped a toe into the spring, steam rising to the cave ceiling, Iden wasting no time as he dove in to escape the chill air of the cave. He submerged his head, shaking out his hair like a wet dog as he rose to take a breath. In the time that it had taken her to make her way down the snaking tunnel, she had reverted to an entirely human form. Her tail, her horns, and her other draconic features had all receded. She was nude, as there was no reason to conjure new clothes before she was done bathing, and he was a little disappointed to see that her enormous bust had returned to a more modest size. She was still a very fetching woman of course, and he found it hard to take his eyes off her as she stepped gracefully into the water to join him.\n\nShe sank up to her neck in the hot pool, letting her mop of auburn hair float on its surface as she relaxed, loosing a contented sigh. After a moment, she tossed him the bar of soap, Iden snatching it out of the air. He didn't need instructions this time, and he set about cleaning himself, spreading the fragrant lather across his torso as she watched him out of the corner of her eye. It was unusual for him to have two baths in a month, never mind two in the space of so many days.\n\n\"So have you decided what you're going to do yet?\" she asked, Iden pausing as he washed his underarms.\n\n\"No,\" he replied, resuming his work. \"I've not had time to give it much thought.\"\n\n\"I'll say, I've kept you rather busy,\" she said with a smile. \"You can stay here as long as you'd like, take your time. I must say that I...rather enjoyed your company last night. I was hoping that you shared the sentiment.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" he muttered, pretending to be too busy with his washing to pay her much mind. He didn't want to admit how good it had felt, she had enough leverage over him already, but he didn't want to risk insulting her either. \"It was certainly interesting, you're more of a handful than I expected.\"\n\n\"Iden, are you making puns now?\" she cooed. \"Perhaps you need more time to recover your wits, I fear that I might have dulled your silver tongue through overuse.\"\n\nHe couldn't help but chuckle at that, and she grinned at him, splashing him with water. She had a certain glow about her this morning, her playfulness was infectious. She had said that she hadn't been with a man for years, or maybe longer, if he recalled correctly. He felt relieved himself, satisfied, despite a few aches and bruises that had joined his growing collection. He wasn't sure what kind of libido dragons had, but if they were anything like humans, then her contentment might be many times greater than his own. Iden would probably be foaming at the mouth if he had to go longer than a couple of months without female company.\n\nIsabelle was skirting around the issue, but she clearly wanted him to stay longer. He had shelter, free food, and a willing host. Why should he refuse her invitation? Something nagged at him, however, a voice that kept reminding him that he had come here with a mission. Iden was a man of action, and when he set his mind on something, he didn't stop until he accomplished his goal. Humoring the dragon was just treading water, delaying the inevitable. He had to figure out a way to get his hands on her gold, or at least to leave the cave in possession of something that would make this venture even remotely worthwhile.\n\n\"I don't exactly have anywhere else to go right now,\" he said. His reply seemed to please her, and she went back to lazing in the water. Iden finished washing, and then noticed that she had floated closer to him, extending her hand for the soap. He gave it back to her, and she slunk around behind him. She was submerged up to the bridge of her nose like a crocodile lurking by the bank of a river, her long hair floating in her wake, her green eyes peering at him gleefully as he watched her curiously. She rose out of the pool, and he felt her hands on his shoulders.\n\n\"I'll do your back,\" she said, beginning to spread the foamy lather.\n\n\"I don't need you to do my...\" Iden's complaint petered out as he felt her soft hands slide across his skin, her slim fingers following the dimples that his muscles carved into his body. It was so relaxing, and he felt himself sag, sinking into the water a little deeper as she drove her thumbs into the base of his neck.\n\n\"I'm happy to have someone to pamper for once,\" she said, massaging him as she moved further down his spine. She seemed to be able to locate every knot, and every ache, making slow circles with her fingers as she applied gentle pressure. The soap made her touch slick, almost like they were coated in oil. Nobody had ever done this for him before, it felt amazing. \"I'm surrounded by riches, but I have precious little to spend it on.\"\n\nIden flinched, a wonderful wave of pleasure spreading up through him as she found a knot at the base of his spine, working it out with the heel of her hand.\n\n\"Where did you learn how to do this?\" Iden sighed, having to concentrate so that his legs didn't give out from under him.\n\n\"I've accumulated a fair bit of knowledge in my time,\" she chuckled, amused by his strong reaction. \"You should take better care of yourself, you know. You've built up all of this muscle, your body is...impressive, but you don't take proper care of it. Look at all these knots, you're putting far too much strain on your back, you'll have problems with it later in life. Maybe be a little more careful when you're lifting cannonballs and swinging war hammers.\"\n\n\"Most sellswords don't live long enough to see the consequences of their lifestyle,\" he replied, leaning back into her dexterous hands. \"I could get used to this, though...\"\n\n\"You mortals are all alike,\" she muttered. \"What does it matter if you cause problems in the future, as long as you get what you want right now? You won't be around to see the negative results of your actions anyway, it will be someone else's problem! It's because of that attitude that there's no more magic in the world, you humans can barely see an inch in front of your noses.\"\n\n\"I've survived beyond thirty,\" Iden replied. \"In my profession, that's borrowed time. My strength, my health, it's all going to get worse from here. Old age will make me slow and weak enough that my job kills me long before my declining health does. Most people rarely live beyond sixty anyway.\"\n\n\"So the next thirty years of your life have no value?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that,\" he said, shivering as her questing fingers located another knot and began to rub it. \"That's why I'm here, after all, to find a way out before some eager twenty-year-old skewers me. I want to live to a ripe old age, surrounded by an army of children, but I'm in the wrong line of work.\"\n\n\"I'll say,\" she muttered, Iden feeling her fingertips trace one of his more impressive scars. \"These wounds...some of them came so close to killing you. There's one here that must have missed your spine by scarcely an inch. If it had found its mark, you'd have lost the use of your legs.\"\n\n\"Oh, that big one?\" he asked. \"Yeah, someone tried to run me through from behind with a baselard during a melee. If he had been using anything with a longer blade, he might have gotten deeper into my armor. More proof that a gambeson is always needed, chain and plate won't do the job alone. Don't worry, I gave him more than a scar for his trouble.\" \"What were you fighting over?\" Isabelle asked.\n\n\"I scarcely recall. Something to do with a border dispute between two kingdoms I think. I remember that we won.\"\n\n\"And what happens when you lose? You can't have been on the winning side of every war that you've ever fought.\"\n\n\"Most have been successful,\" he said, feeling her brush the curtain of his wet hair aside so that she could access more of his back. \"I'm rather good at picking a winner, I have a lot of experience. If I can tell that someone's cause is futile, or that they have a good chance of failing, then I don't offer them my services.\"\n\n\"Is there enough work for you to be so picky?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" he laughed. \"Mercenaries are like morticians, they never have to roam far to find work.\"\n\nIsabelle finished up, leaving Iden with a kind of sweet ache that permeated his muscles. Maybe when he found his fortune, he'd have to hire someone to do that for him more often. He certainly felt better than he had in a while.\n\n\"Let's dry off, and then I'll make you something to eat,\" Isabelle said. He followed her out of the pool, feeling the same puff of heat as the day before as she evaporated the moisture from his skin with her magic. In a rush of swirling flames, the same outfits that they had worn earlier reappeared, Iden's tunic and leggings so tight that they could have been tailored to fit him. Isabelle wore her loose blouse and her long gown again, her leather corset tightening around her waist before his eyes, as though invisible hands were pulling the laces taut. This was all becoming so routine to him, the previously amazing magic seeming almost mundane now.\n\n\"Come,\" she said, a smile brightening her face as she set off up the tunnel. \"I'll cook something for you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Iden chewed on a hunk of meat as he looked out over the pile of gold, seated in his throne at the mahogany table once again. His meal was perfectly seared, just the way that he liked it, crisp on the outside and juicy on the inside. Isabelle was standing across from him, just watching him eat with a smile on her face. Entertaining guests was a novelty to her, she seemed to enjoy it a great deal.\n\n\"Aren't you going to join me?\" he asked. \"Don't think I've seen you eat a thing since we arrived in the cave.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't have to eat often,\" she replied. \"But when we do, we eat a lot.\"\n\n\"I see,\" he said, cutting off another piece with his gilded knife. \"That's why you swoop down and take half a flock of sheep at a time?\"\n\n\"That's right. In my true form, I weight about eight tons. It takes a lot of meat to keep me fed.\"\n\n\"Eight tons?\" Iden marveled, \"I don't even have a frame of reference for that.\"\n\n\"It's about as much as...ten or eleven cows,\" she replied.\n\n\"How do you figure that?\" he asked, gesturing at her with his fork.\n\n\"Well, the average adult cow weighs around seven hundred and fifty kilograms, and I weigh a little over eight tons. One ton is a thousand kilograms, which means that it takes ten point six cows to match my weight. Ten point seven if you want to round up.\"\n\n\"How can you have point six of a cow?\" Iden asked, frowning across the table at her.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she chuckled, \"sometimes I forget that not all humans are highly educated. It's just math. Point six is sixty percent. If you cut a cow into ten pieces, then six of those pieces together would have a value of point six cows.\"\n\n\"Schooling is for the sons of Lords and Barons, not for the likes of me,\" Iden said as he took another wet bite. \"I can count high enough to conduct business, and that's about it.\"\n\n\"As you know, we dragons are exceptionally long-lived. Only the very young haven't studied mathematics, history, and literacy. The rest of us have a lot of empty hours to fill, and study is a good way to pass the time. Many of us spent decades or even centuries as teachers and scholars. In the old days, mortals would make pilgrimages to our caves to hear our sermons, and to study in our libraries. In later times, some disguised themselves as humans and founded schools, finding solace in passing on their knowledge.\"\n\n\"I can read a fair bit,\" Iden said proudly. \"I can even sign my name on contracts and the like. Employers often like your word in writing if enough coin is changing hands.\"\n\n\"Only a fair bit?\" she asked, cocking her head at him. She wasn't mocking him, her expression was soft, sympathetic.\n\n\"Well, yeah,\" he grumbled as he turned his eyes to his meal. \"It's not like I have a lot of time to read novels and scripture.\"\n\n\"I could teach you, if you wanted,\" she said with a shrug of her shoulders that made her bosom bounce attractively in her loose-fitting blouse. \"I have a collection of rare and expensive books. It's not quite a library, but it's packed with ancient tomes. I'd relish the opportunity to teach again.\"\n\n\"What's in them?\" he asked.\n\n\"All kinds of things,\" she replied enthusiastically. \"Tales of adventure and romance, historical records from the old world, poetry and verse, magic spells and incantations. It would be a joy to introduce someone new to them. I take it that you've never read a poem?\"\n\n\"Can't say that I have. What's the appeal?\"\n\n\"Of a poem?\" she laughed. \"Poems are like...emotions put to paper. The poet composes a verse, a little like a song, but not quite the same. The form is highly artistic, he uses his intimate knowledge of language and cadence to express his thoughts and ideas. It should be compelling, evocative, imaginative. To think that some people might live out their entire lives never having heard one...\"\n\n\"Sounds a bit fancy for me,\" he replied, and she shook her head at him.\n\n\"Iden, don't sell yourself short. Just because you chose a certain line of work, that doesn't mean that you're incapable of learning or of understanding the arts and sciences. There have been great warrior poets, you know.\"\n\n\"Warrior poets?\" he asked, pausing his chewing to look up at her.\n\n\"Oh, did that catch your attention?\" Isabelle asked with a smirk. \"There were plenty of scholars and writers who were also knights or soldiers. The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know. The idea that men who take up the sword can't be emotional and creative people is a rather modern one.\"\n\n\"So what kinds of things did these warrior poets write about?\"\n\n\"The glory and horror of combat, the value of life, finding beauty in unexpected places.\"\n\n\"That kind of thing might go a little over my head,\" Iden muttered, taking another bite.\n\n\"You'll never know if you don't try,\" Isabelle replied. \"Maybe I'll find you an old book of poems from one of antiquity's famous explorers, and read you some excerpts from their writings.\"\n\nOnce Iden had finished his meal, Isabelle took his hand, guiding him out of his seat.\n\n\"I'll show you where the books are,\" she said, \"come.\"\n\nThey walked around the pile of treasure, Iden turning his head to admire the glittering heap. While he might have gotten used to the magic, he never seemed to grow accustomed to the sight of the hoard. It was always just sitting there, out in the open, seemingly unprotected. His urge was almost like hunger, his greed compelling him to fill his pockets just as a gurgling stomach compelled him to eat.\n\n\"Are you still drawn to it?\" she asked, noticing his distraction. \"Still trying to figure out a way to claim it, perhaps?\" Her tone was friendly, but it masked her true concern. She had gone to such lengths to end their conflict, and she was no doubt worried that he might try to rekindle it. Isabelle was right, he hadn't yet given up, but he wasn't about to let her know that.\n\n\"It takes strength to claim a treasure such as this,\" she added, \"but it takes far more strength to turn one's back on it. Once you accept that you cannot possess this wealth, then it will lose the power that it holds over you. How does a drunk regain control over his life, if not by first setting down his bottle?\"\n\n\"You compare my desire for wealth to a drunk's lust for liquor?\" Iden chuckled. \"The drunk has no control over his actions, there's no goal that can be achieved through drink. My goal is to better my situation, my lust for gold is a calculated one.\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" she replied with a shrug. \"But we dragons are well versed when it comes to the power of greed, you would do well to heed my advice. Ah, here we are.\"\n\nThey had reached the far wall of the main cavern, and yet more torches burst into flames, illuminating a row of wooden bookshelves. They had clearly been sourced from elsewhere, they hadn't been made for this cave. They sat awkwardly on the uneven floor, leaning against the curved wall behind him. Their shelves were packed with books and loose manuscripts, scrolls overflowing from between the dusty tomes. There were three bookshelves in all, taller than a man, each one with six shelves.\n\n\"Don't think I've ever seen this many books in one place before,\" Iden said, walking up and down the row as he appraised them. Isabelle watched him with a smile on her face. She was so eager to share her passion with him, it was endearing in a way.\n\n\"This isn't exactly the best place to store them,\" she added, \"this cave is rather damp. How I wish that I could hire laborers to build me a museum or a library as we did in the old days. I'd be happy to part with some gold if it would ensure the safekeeping of greater treasures.\"\n\n\"So these are worth money?\" Iden asked, turning to look back at her.\n\n\"Oh yes, some of them a great deal of money. One would have to find the right buyer, of course. It would have to be someone educated, an expert in ancient history and literature, most likely someone who already had his own collection. But to the right man, some of these books could be worth a fortune. They are all unique, many written by hand, there are none like them in the world.\"\n\nShe walked up to one of the shelves, brushing her fingers against the spines of the books, searching for something specific. She made her way down the line, stopping when she found what she was looking for, pulling it out along with a puff of dust. It was a truly massive tome, about the size of a buckler, its leather binding a faded crimson in color. After brushing the cover off with her hand, she turned to show Iden the title, the letters embossed in gold.\n\n\"Read it out to me,\" she demanded.\n\n\"The...life and works of...Gerard de Mercier,\" he said, Isabelle nodding her head approvingly. \"Who's that?\"\n\n\"Gerard de Mercier was a poet and songwriter, but he also fought in several wars that took place a couple of hundred years before you were born. Those kingdoms no longer exist, but his works endure in the yellowed pages of this book. As a career warrior, I thought that you might like to hear some of his prose. Shall I read some aloud to you?\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Iden said with a shrug. She led him back over to their bed beside the pile and had him sit on the sheets, while she perched a little higher up the golden slope. When he asked her why, she told him that it was a tradition for teachers and scholars to deliver their sermons from atop a podium or an elevated platform. She opened the book at its first page and began to read."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE JOURNEY",
                "text": "Iden listened to her read for what might have been hours, quickly losing track of time. The tales of this de Mercier person were amazing, even if his poetry was a little flowery for Iden's tastes. He had lived a long and fruitful life, exploring foreign lands, and fighting for noble causes rather than for coin. He was well-to-do, the heir to a noble house, and so putting food on his table was of little concern.\n\nIden had to admit that he envied the man. Not for his devotion to justice, or for his skill with a quill, but for his ability to do whatever he pleased with his time without having to worry about food or lodging. De Mercier's age was a prosperous one, far moreso than modern times. He spoke of extravagant gardens hanging from the battlements of castles, vines blooming with flowers winding their way along the stonework, forests of trees that blossomed with colorful petals. The climes were warmer back then, more suited to growing grapes, and so there were rows of carefully tended vineyards carpeting the fields for miles around the estates and manors. Wine and revelry were the order of the day, rather than beers made from the hardy wheat and barley that now occupied the farmland.\n\nWhen he had inquired about the change in climate, Isabelle had explained how it mirrored the decline in magic. The world became sicker with each drop of the divine that left it, its soils yielding fewer nutrients, its winters growing longer and colder. Such changes happened over generations, imperceptible to mortals, but it was far more apparent to a dragon.\n\nSomehow, it made Iden wistful, nostalgic for a time period that he had never known. Did those same keeps still stand, or like their builders, had they been lost to the ages? He had come across ruins in his travels, the crumbling remnants of watchtowers and walls out in the wilderness, seemingly far from anything worth defending. He had always written those off as casualties of war, rather than of age.\n\n\"Was that really how he died?\" Iden asked as Isabelle closed the book on the final chapter.\n\n\"It was,\" she replied. \"A solitary arrow struck him in the thigh, and the wound became gangrenous. Not a week later, he died in his bed. Had he been able to see a healer or a dragon, then they might have been able to cleanse the rot from his blood, but alas, such magic was a lost art by that point in time. It's not a very fitting end for a man who lived such a heroic and illustrious life, is it?\"\n\n\"It does put a bit of a damper on the story,\" Iden admitted.\n\n\"De Mercier is a fine example of a man who was at once fierce, and sensitive,\" Isabelle continued. \"He took up the sword and fought his fellow man, but he also appreciated the arts, and he sought to expand his knowledge. After hearing the story of his life, would you say that he was not brave, that his artistic pursuits diminished him in any way?\"\n\nIden thought for a moment, scratching his stubbly chin pensively.\n\n\"I would not,\" he finally replied.\n\n\"And so now you see that brains and brawn are not at odds, that even a brutish man can stop to smell a rose, or write a sonnet to express his love for a woman?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Iden admitted, a little more reluctantly this time. Isabelle laughed at his reaction, hopping deftly from her perch on the mountain of treasure and landing beside him on the sheets.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'm not going to make you write me a song. But if you wanted to learn about history or the arts, then I would be pleased to teach you. If you'd like to learn to read, or even to write better, then just let me know. I could even instruct you in calligraphy if you wanted,\" she added.\n\nShe shuffled a little closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder. It was late, Iden realized. Even without a sun by which to tell the time, he was starting to feel the onset of fatigue. Were he and Isabelle to share a bed once again? Would she subject him to another night of passion? He didn't know whether the prospect frightened or excited him.\n\n\"You're so tense tonight,\" she said, moving around behind him. \"Let me help you relax before bed...\"\n\nBefore he had time to comment, there was a flash of cold fire, the tunic that he had been wearing vanishing into a cloud of ash to leave him nude from the waist up. Isabelle wasted no time, and he felt her hands on his shoulders, beginning to rub and knead. He leaned back into her, her touch soothing him. She had noted his reaction to her massage in the pool, and she was exploiting his weakness.\n\n\"Try to relax,\" she whispered, her warm breath tickling his ear. She brushed his curtain of long hair out of the way, running her fingers down his spine. \"I want you to feel at ease here, I want you to be comfortable around me. There's nothing to fear...\"\n\nShe seemed to sense his apprehension, but it wasn't Isabelle that he was afraid of, not exactly. It was more the promise of her violent lovemaking that made his heart race.\n\n\"That feels good,\" he muttered, all of the tension draining from his body as she kneaded with her deft little hands. They felt so soft, her fingers thick and padded, her pointed nails pricking him. Wait\u2026\n\nIden opened his eyes and looked down to see a long, tapered tail snaking its way along the sheets by his feet. It seemed even larger and thicker this time, and it was still growing. The bumpy, blue scales grew larger and rougher, sharp points sprouting from their midst to become the patterned quills that she boasted in her draconic form. She pressed closer to him, and Iden felt her bust squash up against his back through the silky fabric of her blouse, her thighs cushioning him to either side like the armrests of a chair. They too were expanding in size, thickening as they emerged from beneath her gown. They grew until they must have been as long as his torso, and almost as thick, tall enough to raise his arms from their resting position as they lay atop them.\n\nThe larger they became, the deeper Iden began to sink into their sheath of fat, making him feel as though he was shrinking in her lap. Beneath it, her firm muscles bulged, but there was an inch or more of what felt like down pillows sheathed in satin. On their outer surface, the skin cracked and took on a blue hue, becoming the hard scales that he was now so accustomed to seeing. On their inner surface, however, they took on the appearance of her beige underbelly. He couldn't be sure, but to him, it felt even smoother and softer than skin.\n\nHe was pressed deeper and deeper, even the weight of his arms was enough that they sank into her yielding flesh, the meat of her thighs seeming to spill around his waist like molten metal filling a mold. Her tail was similarly round and padded, packed with enough fat that it wobbled when it moved. The sharp quills had not taken on the impressive length that they had when Isabelle was in her true form, they were shorter and finer, more like bristles.\n\nThere was the sound of tearing fabric. Apparently, Isabelle had not seen fit to let the magical flames consume her own clothes, preferring to let her expanding body tear them apart instead. Iden felt her breasts spill out of her shredded blouse, resting against his back, already larger than his own head. As her stature increased, her bosom slid up his back, until its considerable weight came to rest across his broad shoulders.\n\nThey continued to engorge, like a pair of gigantic waterskins slowly being filled with fluid, sagging down his chest and cushioning his face. The skin that covered her breasts was like that of her inner thighs, inhumanly silky as it brushed against his cheeks, covered in fine scales like the tiles in a mosaic. Their weight increased along with their abundance, giving even Iden pause for thought. His sturdy back was in no danger of buckling, not yet, but their heft made him feel as though he was carrying a milkmaid's yoke. By the time her growth ceased, each of her boobs was as voluminous as the pack that he had lugged up the mountain.\n\nIden tried to look back at her, but found that the mounds of flesh to either side of his head obscured his view. When he craned his neck to look up, however, he saw Isabelle peering back at him.\n\nHer transformation had proceeded much further this time. Looking back at him was a face somewhere between that of a human and a dragon, with a dull snout, completely covered in scales now. There was none of her human skin left in sight, it was all the delicate beige and the rough blue. Her four gnarled horns were larger, and they were nestled amidst the patterned quills that had taken the place of her hair. Her sharp teeth were covered by scaly lips, her nostrils flaring as they exhaled a puff of dark smoke.\n\nShe must be nine feet tall at least now, her neck long and slender, her fat tail adding another six or seven feet to her overall length. Iden felt an impulse to flee, but she wrapped her long arms around him, her hands now large enough to encompass his head entirely. She pulled him tight against her body, Iden finding himself almost completely enveloped by flesh and scales. Her tail coiled around the both of them possessively, her snout coming down to nuzzle his hair.\n\n\"I have other ways to relax you,\" she said, her voice so much more powerful than usual. It was lower, gruffer, but it still had the feminine inflections that so reminded him of the young woman that he had first met in the foothills.\n\nIsabelle pressed her claws against his bare chest, Iden arching his spine as she dragged them slowly down towards his belly, leaving red trails in her wake. The talons were even longer now, but she was just as careful with them, only ever applying enough pressure to tickle him. He felt her warm breath blowing his hair as one of her fingers roamed close to his belt.\n\nShe hooked the black claw into the fabric of his leggings, tearing it open, splitting the fine material with the ease of a knife through paper to free his erection. His member bobbed in the air, at full mast, the sight of it surprising even himself. Why was he so excited by this? Hard scales, sharp teeth, hooked claws. He should be terrified right now, but her body was so soft and inviting, feminine in all of the most alluring ways.\n\nShe reached down and pressed the tip of her finger against his glans, her digits almost as thick as his shaft, a pulse of pleasure making him swell. He couldn't believe how soft it was, squishy and padded, reminding him of a gambeson.\n\n\"Now lie back, and let me soothe you,\" she whispered. She closed her fist around his length, burying it entirely, letting it throb against her palm. She waited for Iden to grow impatient, watching him with a smile as he began to fidget, his resolve crumbling as her warmth permeated him. He finally thrust, bucking into her fist in search of stimulation, Isabelle taking that as evidence of his willingness.\n\nShe began to stroke, her pace torturously slow, running her scaly fingers up and down his shaft. Her scales were as smooth as glass, the gentle pressure that she applied sinking him deep into her fleshy padding. Iden gripped her forearm with one hand, as if holding on for dear life, her limb so thick that he couldn't get his fingers around it.\n\nIsabelle wasn't trying to bring him to completion, her stroking motion was too leisurely. She was merely teasing him, seeming to delight in the way that he squirmed in her grasp, unable to stop himself from trying to fuck her hand.\n\nHe shivered as something slimy and warm brushed his neck, realizing that it was her tongue. It was even longer than it had been before, leaving a smear of her saliva as she licked. She caught his ear between her puffy lips, nibbling it with her sharp teeth, the contrast between the two extremes making his head spin. It reminded him of the dripping maw of a beast, with jagged fangs designed to tear flesh, strands of saliva escaping to dribble down his neck. Yet at the same time, he felt the soft, gentle lips of a woman. They were impossibly full, so much larger than those of a human, covered in the same delicate scales as her palm. He felt a primal fear as those wicked teeth neared his neck, her hot breath washing over him, a deep rumbling in her throat resonating within him like the growl of a monster. Instead of a killing bite, she planted a sucking kiss that made his member bounce in her grasp. He didn't know what to think, what to feel.\n\n\"I'm sorry to have robbed you of your moment,\" she whispered, pausing to nibble at his ear again. \"I know that you like to be on top, you like to be in control, you love to awe your lover with your sheer physicality. But I love how you react when I take the lead, how flustered you become, your every shiver tempting me further. As a dragon, I can sense things that you humans cannot. I can hear the quickening of your pulse, I can feel the blood rushing through your veins, I can smell the arousal leaking from your very pores. Oh, how it excites me...\"\n\nHer grip on his member tightened, Iden gritting his teeth as the pressure sank him deeper into her fleshy palm. It was like fucking a silk pillow, her scaly skin was dry, but so flush that there was almost no friction.\n\n\"Dragons can see heat, you know,\" she continued. \"It's a wavelength of light, one that's invisible to humans. A warm glow seems to radiate from your body, your cheeks are burning, your member is bleeding heat into my hand like I'm holding an ingot of molten iron. If only you could see what I see, it's beautiful...\"\n\n\"W-why do you go on about such things?\" he muttered, his voice faltering as she gave him a gentle squeeze. She laughed at his question, as if the answer should be self-evident.\n\n\"Is the act of lovemaking synonymous with rutting to you?\" she asked, pausing her pumping to circle the tip of his manhood with her thumb. \"Have you never taken the time to appreciate the artistry of it? Not all encounters need be fast and brutal, the two participants racing to the finish like galloping horses. The lightest of touches can be as pleasurable as the sternest of thrusts, a gentle kiss can be as arousing as the most depraved and wanton acts. Tenderness, intimacy, the burning desire to give pleasure as well as to receive it. These are things that can bring one to new heights.\"\n\nShe resumed her stroking again, Iden sinking into her pillowy bust. He wasn't accustomed to foreplay taking this long. Even when he went down on a woman, it was more to get her ready than for the joy of it, merely a prelude to the main event. He couldn't remember the last time that someone had given him a handjob, it was such a mundane act, pedestrian. And yet the feeling of her soft fingers gliding up and down his erection had him so aroused that he could scarcely keep himself under control.\n\n\"Let's take things slow this time,\" she whispered, Iden shuddering as he felt the tip of her slimy tongue probe his ear. \"I won't allow you to climax, not until I give you permission. I'll bring you to the very brink, and then I'll back off again, over and over. I'll keep you trapped in the state of wonderful bliss that precedes the release of orgasm for longer than you ever thought possible, and when your delicious agony comes to an end, you'll experience a pleasure far greater than any that you've felt before.\"\n\n\"What do you expect of me?\" he grumbled, her sordid whispering making his head spin. \"What's the goal of this game?\"\n\n\"There's no trick,\" she replied with a chuckle, \"I merely want you to enjoy it. Is the idea that one can revel in giving pleasure without the expectation of receiving anything in return so foreign to you? You're so focused on reaching the finish line that you don't stop to appreciate the path that leads you there. I'm going to teach you to revel in that journey...\"\n\nWhat could Iden say to that? He couldn't refuse her. If even half of what she promised was true, then he didn't want to pass up the opportunity, but why had she chosen this new form? Was it simply to give her even more power over him, or for some other purpose? She hadn't had any problems wresting the reins from him during their first encounter, after all. What was her interest in him, if not simply as an outlet for her frustrations, or as a salve for her loneliness?\n\n\"Show me,\" he mumbled, and he felt her grip on him tighten.\n\nShe began to pump faster, the pleasure robbing Iden of his faculties, and he leaned into her inviting body like he was sitting in a living armchair. He pushed his face into one of her breasts, feeling it deform around his cheeks, softer than any pillow that he had ever encountered at the inns that he frequented. There was a subtle smokey scent about her that made him think of burning wood, almost like the oak or cherry that was burned in a smokehouse to cure and flavor the meat.\n\nHer stroking was so relaxing, it was almost enough to lull him to sleep, but the sparks of pleasure kept jolting him back to his senses. Isabelle was an artist with her hands, alternating her grip and speed so that he could never grow entirely accustomed to the sensation, making him writhe in her lap. She nibbled and licked at his ear all the while, pinching his neck in her teeth, her free hand roaming up and down his torso as she drew shapes on his skin with her claws. She whispered to him, little of it coherent to him in his fugue state, but what he could pick out was sordid and shameless.\n\nShe kept it up for what must have been minutes, until Iden felt the familiar pressure of an orgasm welling. Pleasure rolled over him like a tide crashing against the rocks, tied to the deft movements of her soft hand, each more powerful than the last. How could such a simple act make him feel this way? It was almost like being drunk, he couldn't concentrate, every throb of sensation scattering his thoughts to the wind.\n\n\"Are you...casting some kind of spell on me?\" he asked, his voice wavering in time with her stroking.\n\n\"No,\" she laughed, the motion making her bosom wobble around his head. \"At least not a magical one...\"\n\nShe delivered an especially cruel thrust, Iden's spine arching, his hips pushing into her silky fist. She let him fuck her hand for a few moments, watching with a satisfied smile as he tried to glean the stimulation that would send him over the edge. His climax was so close that he could taste it, and yet Isabelle's grip was loosening, the pleasure beginning to fade.\n\nIden loosed a dissatisfied sigh and sank back into her embrace, the sound of her seductive chuckling emanating from somewhere above his head.\n\n\"I did warn you of my intentions,\" she purred, letting one of her hands rest on his belly. It was tantalizingly close to his loins, his member throbbing in the air, aching and needy. \"Stop fixating on your climax, and take a moment to enjoy how you feel right now. Do you feel that sweet ache permeating your muscles? The euphoria?\"\n\n\"I feel...dizzy, drunk,\" he muttered. She dragged her claws across his chest again, and this time his senses were heightened, the dull sting of her talons sending a burst of pleasure coursing through him like a bolt of lightning. He was so much more aware of his own body now, as though his nerves had escaped the barrier of his skin, even the air itself seeming to stimulate his swollen erection.\n\nAfter letting him stew for a few moments longer, he felt her hands closing around his wrists like a pair of padded handcuffs. He tried to move them, but she was far too strong, planting them firmly atop her thighs.\n\n\"What are you doing now?\" he asked, his heart starting to race with anticipation again. She was so unpredictable, he never knew what she might do next.\n\n\"I noticed that you were admiring my tail this morning,\" she replied, leaning in to give his ear a gentle bite. \"I didn't realize that it was a source of attraction for mortals.\"\n\n\"I-it's not,\" Iden insisted, his cheeks flushing. \"I was just curious.\"\n\nHe remembered what she had said about her ability to see heat. Not only could see his face reddening, but she could sense the warmth that he put out. There was no hiding his feelings from her.\n\nHer tail caught his eye as it slithered towards him, its tapered tip winding along the sheets like the head of a snake, an instinctual pang of fear distracting him from his embarrassment. She was doing it on purpose, he could hear her stifled giggling.\n\nThe long tail rose up between his thighs, rearing back like a cobra preparing to strike, its beige underside facing him. It was tall enough to be at eye-level to him, not that it had any eyes. There was still a significant length trailing up and to his left where it connected to Isabelle's rump, vanishing behind her and out of sight. It grew steadily girthier as it neared her body, so thick around near the base that he could only just have gotten his arms around it.\n\nThe appendage brushed against his thigh as it drew closer, sending a shiver crawling up his spine, the pointed tip poising above his member as if waiting for some kind of signal.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Isabelle cooed, watching his manhood beat like a second heart. She maneuvered the tapered end closer, as delicate and as precise as a finger, wetting it with the bead of excitement that was leaking from his swollen member. The tail made lazy, teasing circles, stroking his glans with its silky underside. The sharp bristles and the rough scales were kept mercifully clear of anything sensitive.\n\nIt began to slowly wind around his shaft like a blue anaconda encircling its prey, piling its plump, chubby coils on top of him until he was entirely buried. It was surprisingly heavy, sinking him deeper into Isabelle's lap, the smooth underbelly just as soft and as inviting as her hand had been.\n\nIden had to stifle a yelp as he felt the brawn beneath the layer of buttery flesh harden, squeezing him in a vice grip. Every roll moved independently of the rest, squirming and slithering, as if his length had been buried in a sheath of liquid muscle. When they released him from their tight grasp, they seemed to wobble in place, just as her breasts did.\n\n\"How do you like it?\" Isabelle whispered, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from his own lips. \"Does it feel good?\"\n\n\"As if you needed to ask,\" Iden grumbled, struggling to get a hold of himself. \"Of course it feels good...\" \"Communication is important,\" she chuckled, giving him another squeeze. He lurched reflexively, but her hold on him was tight enough to stop him from wriggling free, her hands so large that they almost entirely encompassed his forearms between the wrist and elbow. \"Tell me if I'm being too rough,\" she added, \"my tail is very strong.\"\n\nIden recalled how the appendage had smashed through a rock pillar like it was no more sturdy than a sapling. She wasn't quite that large yet, but he could feel the strength that radiated from her. She could probably have crushed a man's life out of him with nothing more than an errant twitch. Was it even safe to have this thing so tightly wrapped around his most intimate anatomy? Probably not, but he wasn't about to tell her to back off.\n\nShe began to move, sliding her tail up and down his shaft, the coils serving as soft ribs. They spiraled around him all the while, creating another dimension of sensation, tightening and loosening seemingly at random. It was so much more complex than the simple stroking of a hand, her scales flush enough that they glided against his skin, the pressure sinking him into her fat layer. All that he could see from the outside was a pile of bumpy, iridescent scales and sharp, jutting quills. It looked so lethal, but it made him feel like he was floating on a puffy cloud.\n\n\"Would you like to release inside my coils?\" Isabelle asked, her lurid suggestion rousing him from his trance. \"Do you think that your emission might seep between them?\"\n\n\"Keep squeezing, and we can find out,\" Iden snarled.\n\n\"Ever the warrior,\" she chuckled, amused by his defiance. \"I wonder how long it will take us to drain all of that energy?\"\n\nShe released his arms, reaching up to hook a finger beneath his chin, angling his head up so that she could see his face. She peered down at him from on high, his head still nestled comfortably between her breasts, her reptilian eyes shining as though they were reflecting a roaring fire that only they could see. She drew closer on her long, flexible neck, her head already rivaling that of a horse in size. Her dull snout bumped against his nose, her scales cool against his skin, the dragon exhaling a cloud of dark smoke that stung his eyes and made them water.\n\nHer lips were so large and full, reminding him of a slice of ripe fruit, parting to reveal her rows of intimidating teeth. He would have expected a dragon's breath to smell of carrion, or something equally unpleasant, but all that he could pick up was the same smokey scent. A strand of her saliva escaped her maw to drip to his cheek, warm and wet, and he watched with wide eyes as her tongue wound out of her mouth.\n\nIden had thought that her tongue had been monstrous before, but now it was even larger. It was almost as long as his forearm, and nearly as wide, narrowing into a point at its tip. It glistened in the torchlight, slick and wet. The more draconic she became, the more bestial her mannerisms, and Iden thanked his stars that her demeanor did not change in the same way.\n\n\"Do you mean to kiss me with...that?\" he asked, his heart hammering in his chest as he watched a rope of her drool sag from her lips. She was like a wolf poised to feast on its kill, all pearly fangs, and slavering jaws. But behind her eyes was a hunger of a different kind.\n\nRather than reply, she simply pressed her lips against his, holding his chin between her thumb and forefinger as if there was any possibility that he might attempt to pull away. They were so large and fleshy, completely unsuited to embracing someone of his stature, but she made the best of it regardless. She mouthed and kissed, teasing him with titillating licks and placating strokes from her limber organ, even the merest tip of its dizzying length large enough that she could reach the back of his throat.\n\nShe was voracious, feeding him more of her length as she gauged his human limitations, her hand sliding down to rest around his neck. She licked the roof of his mouth with the flat of her tongue, using the pointed tip to tickle and stroke, her fleshy coils filling his cheeks and bulging them outwards. In the same manner that her tail was wrapped around his member, she cocooned his tongue in a prison of slimy, swirling flesh. Her bubbling saliva escaped from their joined lips, dribbling down his burning cheeks, his eyes losing their focus as she subjected him to her bawdy attentions.\n\nShe broke off with a wet smack, her tongue winding back into her mouth, Iden taking in a gasping breath as the glistening rope of drool that linked their lips broke. Isabelle left him dizzy and wanting, the kiss had dragged on so long that he was almost out of breath. Before he had a chance to recover, the squeezing of her tail intensified, her appendage undulating around his buried member.\n\nHe felt like a ship at sea, and Isabelle was the ocean, buffeting him with her crashing waves. She kept him so off-kilter that he could never get his bearings, all that he could do was cling to her like a sailor to the rigging, lest he be thrown from the deck and into the churning maelstrom.\n\n\"I can feel you getting closer,\" Isabelle cooed, \"the way that you flex and jump in my grasp. You're aching right now, aren't you? It almost hurts, but not quite. I can see the heat radiating from you, feel the blood pumping, making you swollen and sore. You're so ready...\"\n\nThey watched together as the rolls of her tail tightened and flexed, Iden's body contorting with every subtle movement, Isabelle's glowing eyes switching between the mound of coils and his red face as if trying to gauge how close he was to climaxing. Would she let it come this time, or would she deny him his relief once more?\n\nHer pace quickened, Iden able to do little more than sink into her body as the sensations grew more intense, points of light floating in his vision like motes of dust. His fingers clawed at the rough, blue scales on her upper thighs, and he pushed his face into one of her breasts as though it might somehow block out the stimulation.\n\n\"Look at you writhe,\" she murmured, her voice laden with arousal. He wasn't even sure that she was addressing him directly, she was merely talking to herself, almost as overcome by the sight of his pleasure as he was by the sensation. His body was drenched in sweat, his skin shining in the torchlight, his muscles gaining definition as he struggled in her lap. When women admired his physique, it was usually in awe of his masculinity, his physicality as Isabelle referred to it. But now, he could feel her covetous eyes drinking in every contour of his squirming body, lingering on him, appreciating him in an entirely different way. She was like a cat starved of the hunt, toying with a mouse, prolonging the chase rather than delivering the killing bite.\n\nIden felt another orgasm welling, the tormenting ache taking on a more satisfying, blissful quality as her tail continued to wring him. The muscles in his lower abdomen tensed, his toes curling, his back rising from the soft paunch of Isabelle's belly where it had been resting. He opened his mouth to loose a cry, but instead sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the folds of his draconic lover's tail tighten around the base of his manhood. It felt like someone was squeezing it tightly between their thumb and forefinger, swiftly cutting off his rising climax, a stab of discomfort replacing the swells of pleasure.\n\nHe cursed, sagging back into her embrace, Isabelle wrapping an arm around him and hugging him closer. Her breasts spilled over his shoulders in an avalanche of quivering flesh, his head buried in the depths of her warm cleavage. As her tail slowly uncoiled from his erection, she began to run her fingers through his hair, stroking him almost apologetically. His annoyance at being denied a second time quickly evaporated, pleasant chills sliding down his spine as her sharp claws pricked his scalp.\n\n\"G-Gods,\" he muttered, all of his discomfort suddenly forgotten. \"That feels...really good...\"\n\n\"Do you like that?\" she chuckled. \"You're not usually so vocal.\"\n\nIt took him a moment to be conscious of having said anything at all, Isabelle laughing again as he began to frown, embarrassed at having let the comment slip out.\n\n\"It's alright to enjoy affection,\" she said, combing his hair with her talons. Perhaps it was the euphoria that resulted from his state of heightened arousal, but just having her stroke him in that way made him feel like he would melt into a puddle. \"It doesn't make me think less of you. Showing vulnerability is a sign of strength, of confidence, not an indication of weakness. What a cruel society that teaches its men not to express their emotions, that they will be somehow demeaned by sharing their true feelings. What is there to be gained by abstaining from some of the simplest pleasures of life?\"\n\n\"A warrior should be stoic,\" Iden replied, shivering involuntarily at her soothing touch. It was so hard to make his case in this compromising position. \"There's no room for sentimentality in my line of work.\"\n\n\"And what of our friend de Mercier? Did you not pay attention to his tale? He could be as unmovable as a mountain on the battlefield, yet sensitive and introspective in his private life. He knew when to show strength, and when to let his emotions flow freely. There is a time to be stoic, Iden, but it is not while in the company of a lover.\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" he said, laughing cynically. \"None of the women that I've bedded would have been pleased to see any vulnerability from me. They expected strength, vigor, and I gave it to them in spades.\"\n\n\"Then they were not your lovers,\" Isabelle replied. \"Did any of your previous conquests make you feel as you do now?\"\n\n\"No,\" he mumbled. \"What exactly are you...\"\n\nHis voice tapered off as she massaged his scalp again.\n\n\"Are you enjoying it?\" she whispered seductively. \"Do you better appreciate the pleasures of taking things slow, of prolonging the excitement rather than rushing headlong towards a climax? We could keep this going for hours if you desired it, you know. From sunset to sunrise. You'd only grow more sensitive, more intoxicated, your body becoming more and more receptive with each passing moment until...\"\n\nHis heart hammered as he waited for the conclusion, but much like his orgasm, it never came. Instead, she smiled at him, her gaze lurid and intense. With a start, Iden realized that he was letting her play him like a fiddle again. Her resonating voice was so captivating, her touch so distracting. Just like during their first encounter, she had turned the tables on him so easily. His pride commanded him to take action.\n\nIden rose up from his reclining position, Isabelle releasing him from her grasp, seemingly surprised by his change in demeanor. She watched him curiously as he knelt between her parted thighs, then turned to face her, her head cocked like a curious dog.\n\nNow he could get a good look at her in this new form, somewhere between the familiar figure of a woman, and the strange features of a dragon. The blue scales had indeed blanketed her whole body, save for what would become her underbelly was she to complete her transformation. The off-brown scales covered her neck below the jaw, her chest, and her belly. The mosaic ran along her inner thighs, and down her long tail. He had expected her to be more serpentine in appearance, but she had not lost the wide hips and the pinched waist that he found so alluring. Now they were even wider, even fuller, the hourglass figure that Isabelle had sported in her human form even more exaggerated.\n\nHer thighs were as thick around as her torso had once been, her hips wider than the span of his shoulders. She was far more muscular now, she would have to be in order to move the weight of her new body around, and yet she had expanded in other ways too.\n\nShe had filled out, not only her breasts growing plump and heavy, but everywhere else that her fat collected. He could see the way that the round cheeks of her rump spread across the sheets where she sat, a subtle belly overhanging her waistline to give her a softness that lit a fire in him. She was an avatar of fertility, a Goddess, and her draconic features did nothing to detract from that.\n\nIden straddled her chubby tail, so thick around that it made an admirable seat, feeling Isabelle's muscles tense beneath him. He planted his hands on her thighs, feeling them sink into her flesh, and he pushed them apart as the dragoness watched from what felt like miles away.\n\nBetween her legs was nestled a pair of thick, swollen lips, coated in the same scaly skin that was present on her belly and thighs. She was drooling, strands of her clear, glistening excitement leaking from her loins like nectar from a flower. He glanced up at her face, not needing to communicate his intentions. She couldn't blush through those armored scales, but her expression betrayed her desire, twin plumes of smoke rising from her nostrils as she sighed.\n\n\"Is this an act of reciprocation, or one of rebellion?\" she asked. She brought a hand to her mouth, chewing idly on one of her sharp claws, her eyelids drooping as Iden leaned down between her legs. \"Either way, I hope that you'll take your time. Savor me, little warrior...\" Iden parted her lips with his fingers, revealing the delicate, pink flesh within. Her labia were already slippery, thick and fleshy, her mound so invitingly smooth. Her vulva dripped, the sheen of anticipation that soaked it shining in the dim light of the cave. Her anatomy was scarcely different from that of her human form, save for its size, all of her features taking on exaggerated proportions. There were still folds of what looked like pleated satin, her firm bud engorged and needy, her opening seeming to twitch in invitation.\n\nInstead of diving right in, he took a moment to admire her thighs. He slid a hand from her knee to her hip, enjoying the way that his fingers created an indent in her yielding flesh. She was so large and strong, yet she trembled just as a normal woman would, her silken scales no less sensitive than human skin.\n\nHer size still amazed him. When one imagined a nine-foot-tall person, they generally didn't picture what was necessary to hold that person aloft. Isabelle was no beanstalk, her thighs were as thick around as tree trunks, packed with muscle that dimpled her fat. There was more strength in her core than Iden could muster in his entire body, and there were no doubt bulging abs lurking beneath her plump stomach. Her flared hips were wide enough that she could have strapped a forty-pound cannonball about her belly and carried it without breaking stride.\n\nHe pressed his lips against the mosaic of her reptilian hide, mouthing and kissing her inner thigh, his tongue able to pick out the texture of her skin more easily than his fingers. He crawled slowly up towards her sex, feeling her long tail twitch and shift along with her legs. She gasped when he delivered a gentle bite where her leg joined to her hip, the sudden motion making her hanging breasts wobble.\n\nHe poised over her lips, swollen and needy, his warm breath enough to make her shiver. There was a feminine scent beneath her smoky odor that urged him onward, musky and intoxicating, his mouth beginning to water despite himself.\n\nIsabelle struggled to keep herself from bucking against his face as he dragged his tongue between her labia, tracing the delicate folds of her sex, fever-hot and slick with her nectar. There was so much of it, it had the consistency of syrup, and it clung to his chin in a sagging web as he roamed up towards her engorged clitoris. Due to her new stature, it was about the size of a marble, Iden giving it a tentative lick. Its surface was smooth and firm, Isabelle lurching at his touch, her clawed fingers piercing the sheets beneath her. The tremor made all of the soft parts of massive body shake, a sigh escaping her lips along with a plume of black smoke that rose lazily towards the domed ceiling.\n\nIden gave her a satisfied smile. Now it was her turn to appreciate the journey, as she had put it. He resumed his lapping, painting her loins with his tongue, tracing every detail of her vulva as he roamed from top to bottom. He paused to plant sucking kisses on her thighs and mound, keeping her on edge, his pace slow and doting. She seemed to enjoy it when he probed her winking opening, sliding his tongue inside her, feeling the pillowy walls of her insides narrow around him as if trying to pluck it from his head. He could feel her muscles undulating beyond her silken walls, coated in a slimy layer of her viscous juices. He intentionally skirted her sweet spot, avoiding her swollen clitoris until she could take it no longer, her wide hips bumping against his face in encouragement.\n\nHe finally relented, pressing his lips around her bud, sucking it into his mouth and out from beneath its hood of scaly skin. She loosed a rumbling growl as he swirled his tongue around it, pinching it gently between his lips, applying more pressure as he dragged the flat of his tongue across its rounded surface. Isabelle was overcome, one of her hands rushing down to delve into his hair, pressing him deeper into her loins as he polished her protrusion.\n\nHer juices escaped his lips and dangled from his chin in strands, sticking to his face, Isabelle growing more excited the longer he kept it up. He was far too aroused to care, too engrossed in what he was doing, the warm slime linking his lips to hers in thick ropes that drooped to the sheets below. She leaned back, almost prone on their makeshift bed, her fluids leaking between her cheeks and pooling on the base of her fat tail.\n\nSomehow, he felt a burning desire to please her. Whether it was because of the haze of arousal that was hanging over his brain, or because he was starting to enjoy Isabelle's company a little more than he'd like to admit, he wasn't quite sure. All he knew was that she tasted wonderful, that her every twitch and gasp was gratifying in a way that he had seldom experienced before.\n\nIsabelle began to grind her hips against his face, as if lost in a trance, Iden matching pace with her as she thrust her sopping loins against his tongue. He stood no chance of getting his arms around her thick thighs, and so he took handfuls of her soft flesh wherever he could, feeling it fill his palms like putty. He sank his fingers into her belly, taking hold of the subtle roll of fat that overhung her waistline, finding purchase lest she throw him off her with her increasingly impassioned writhing.\n\nHis other hand snuck beneath her rump, weighing one of her cheeks, finding it as warm and as soft as freshly baked dough. Her flesh spilled over his hand, engulfing it completely, Iden feeling taut muscle beneath it. Isabelle tightened her grip on his long hair, pulling it, stinging his scalp as she tried to drag him closer. He didn't mind the sensation, it was rather pleasant, and he upped his tempo in response.\n\nIden teased her with flurries of licks, and slow, tormenting kisses. She was feverishly warm, so much so that he could feel her heat on his lips when he pulled away to catch his breath. He watched her entrance twitch for a moment, a blob of her fluid seeping from the hole, and then he filled it with a pair of fingers. Immediately, he felt her passage clamp down on him like a pair of blacksmith's tongs, undulating in waves that sought to drag his digits deeper inside her. She loosed another rumbling growl, smoke billowing from her snout as she exhaled, her sharp teeth bared in what Iden knew to be a display of appreciation rather than intimidation.\n\nHer tail wriggled beneath him as if it was trying to escape, and he tightened his grip on it, holding it between his legs like he was trying to stay in the saddle of a spooked horse. It was like straddling a giant, powerful snake, her appendage strong enough to lift him off the ground. Her thighs closed around him like the walls of a canyon, pressing him tightly between them, her fat providing enough cushion that she didn't pop his head like a ripe cherry.\n\nHe began to move his fingers inside her, pressing them into her flesh, stroking her from within as her muscles fought against him. She was squeezing his digits together so intensely that it almost hurt, the suction that it created drawing on him like a mouth, his skin already soaked in her slippery essence. He couldn't tell if the texture of her tunnel was any different than that of her human form, but it was certainly stronger, her contractions coming hard and fast.\n\nIden dragged his tongue up her vulva, feeling her tighten around his fingers as it glanced her clitoris, the massive mounds of her breasts shaking as she took in a sharp breath. He sealed his lips around it, battering it with licks, circling the nub of swollen flesh as she exhaled another cloud of acrid smoke.\n\nShe was close, he could feel it in the way that she was clenching around him. Her long spine rose off the ground, the tip of her tail lashing back and forth behind him, her claws tearing into the luxurious fabrics that made up the bed and shredding them like paper.\n\nOne final stroke pushed her over the edge, her muscles seizing, every soft part of her body quivering with the effort as she began to quake. Iden was alarmed to see her exhale a jet of a flame from her mouth, temporarily lighting up the dim cave.\n\nFluid splashed his face as it was forced from her loins by her violent spasming, Iden struggling to withdraw his fingers for fear that she would crush them, trying and failing to wipe away the goo that clung to his lips as she writhed on the bed. Her tail curled into a spiral, her clawed toes digging into the sheets, her body contorting beautifully as Iden knelt between her thighs and watched her ride out the wracking pangs of her ecstasy.\n\nSlowly, gradually, she seemed to sink back into the bed. There were a few errant tremors, aftershocks making her buck into the air fruitlessly, and then she lay still. Her ample chest rose and fell softly, one of her hands sneaking down to rub her dripping loins with a padded finger, her muscles relaxing as she eased out the last shudders of her orgasm. Iden stopped just short of asking her if she was okay, he had never seen someone shoot fire when they climaxed before.\n\n\"So much for taking things slow,\" she muttered, a trail of smoke leaking from her jaws like the tobacco fumes from a pipe. It was oddly apt, like the wisps of smoke that still rose from the smoldering ruins of a house the morning after it had burned down. She propped herself up on her elbows, swaying drunkenly, her glowing eyes unfocused. She reached down and scooped a glob of her come from his cheek, watching it dangle from her claw, her tongue leaving her mouth to wet her scaly lips lasciviously.\n\nIden felt her tail begin to creep around him, trapping his arms at sides before he had a chance to react, long and thick enough that it could encompass him entirely from his chest to his belly. It squeezed the breath out of his lungs, Iden gasping as she effortlessly pulled him to his feet. What remained of his shredded leggings fell away to leave him nude, Isabelle rising to her knees and shuffling closer to him. Even while kneeling, she was at head height to him, her snout drawing closer to press into the nape of his neck.\n\nShe opened her mouth, her soft lips brushing his skin, and Iden felt her teeth press into his neck. An involuntary shiver passed through him, his legs going weak, his member still at full mast. He couldn't believe that it had taken such a short amount of time for Isabelle to completely change his reaction to having a beast's slavering jaws pressing against his vulnerable throat.\n\n\"That quick tongue of yours has gotten you into trouble once again,\" she cooed, giving him another squeeze as if to illustrate her point. \"It looks like you'll have to be restrained if my lesson in...restraint...is to continue.\"\n\nShe sat on the extravagant nest in front of him, bringing her head down on her flexible neck so that her lips were level with his erection. Iden got a good view of her four gnarled horns and the sharp bristles that had replaced her hair in the process. They began just above her brow, covering the top of her skull and trailing down her spine in a neat row.\n\nHe felt her warm breath on his glans, Isabelle glancing up at him with her fiery eyes. She pursed her lips and blew a smoke ring, Iden watching it as it made its way down his shaft, dissipating when it reached his belly. It wasn't exactly the most erotic form of foreplay, perhaps it was more of a dragon thing, but the implication had his member bobbing in the air. He remembered her tongue, how impossibly long and flexible it was. What would it feel like to have it coiled around his length?\n\nShe opened her jaws, her rows of white teeth flashing, as sharp as knives. Her saliva dripped from her scaly lips, her hands gripping his thighs. His instinct was to recoil, but she had him tightly bound, suspending him high enough that he had to stand on his toes. His apprehension was soon replaced by a surge of pleasure, however. Her tongue slithered out of her mouth, brushing the tip of his erection, like wet silk as it grazed his sensitive flesh.\n\nHe rolled his head back, her merest touch enough to make him tremble in his current state. The long organ wound its way around his shaft, slick and wet, coating him in a sheen of bubbling drool. It was so incredibly dexterous, she could probably have tied it onto a bow if she had wanted to. It crept slowly along his length until it had encompassed him entirely, the tapered tip sneaking down to lap at his balls. Even then, she had length to spare, her burning eyes gazing up at him as he looked down over the blue coils of her tail.\n\nIt felt like he was hilted inside a warm, sopping vagina, but Isabelle had far more control over her tongue than any mortal woman had over her loins. She began to squeeze and stroke, spiraling it around his length, the layer of slippery saliva making it glide against his skin. Her tail had been one thing, soft and chubby, swirling about his length as it alternated its tightness and speed to keep him on his toes. But this was even more intense, the feeling of her hot, wet muscle enclosing him making his knees go weak. It was a good job that she was holding him aloft, or he might have fallen over.\n\nHe had been worried about her sharp teeth, but as she leaned closer, he felt her lips purse around his exposed glans. They were so full and soft, sealing around the head of his cock, her scales as flush as varnished wood. She was very careful, keeping her fangs clear. She began to suck gently, applying pressure, even as her winding tongue kept up its maddening stroking. Its tip drew shapes on his balls, making him buck and flinch, his shaft swelling in her grasp. He had been hard for so long, his member was aching, sore. The soothing caress of her satin flesh was like a healing balm.\n\nHer stroking and squeezing intensified, Isabelle upping her pace, her organ squirming around him like some kind of giant eel. Strands of her saliva broke to fall to the floor below, a drooping web of it hanging from her jaw. It almost looked like melting glass, viscous and glistening. Iden wanted to reach down and grip her horns for purchase, but even if she hadn't been restraining him, it would have been a bad idea. Her quills looked sharp enough to pierce his flesh easily, it was probably safer to keep clear of them.\n\nShe drew on his tender glans with her puffy lips, her tongue glazing his shaft with warm slime, the tightness of its grip on him alternating at random. She squeezed tightly to send a jolt of ecstasy crawling up his spine, and then loosened her hold on him again, moving the thick coils of her tongue up and down his cock like he was being stroked by a hand.\n\nHis every nerve was aflame with pleasure, turning his brain to soup, there was too much stimulation for him to keep track of. His focus bounced from one sensation to the next, each one new and stark, Iden never knowing what would come next. It was rapturous, he felt like everything below his waist was melting, everything muddling together to make him squirm and thrust impotently. Another orgasm was looming, this one so promising to be so powerful, so intense that he was almost afraid of it. He didn't know if he could stand it, what it would do him. Isabelle had been so adamant that he shouldn't restrain his emotions, and yet he didn't know if he wanted her to see him in the throes of ecstasy, completely exposed and vulnerable.\n\nA groan escaped his lips as he felt her tongue withdraw, sucking back up into her mouth, her lips curling into a wry smile as she denied him his third orgasm in a row. He was going to lose his mind at this rate. He hadn't really considered the implication when she had told him that she could keep this going from sundown to sunset, but now the prospect was all too real.\n\n\"Don't fret,\" she said, sensing that his frustration was reaching its zenith. \"I have just one more thing that I want to show you...\"\n\nShe lifted her breasts from beneath, large enough that even in her scaly hands, they sagged over her palms like balls of melting wax. There was just so much flesh, wobbling and shaking as they moved, Isabelle pressing them tightly together to create cleavage deep enough that he could have thrust his arm inside it up to the shoulder. They were covered in the fine, beige scales, the rougher blue ones just barely creeping around their extremities to either side. A pair of pink nipples protruded between the scales, firm and erect.\n\nShe brought them towards him, sliding his member between them, the thick layer of saliva that still clung to his shaft making her contact slippery. She squeezed them more tightly, their sheer weight pressing down on him, her skin as soft as satin. As she pushed his pulsing member deeper inside the reaches of her warm bosom, her breasts pressed up against his hips, molding around them due to their exaggerated size. He could feel her hard nipples pressing into his skin, Isabelle beginning to slowly rock her shoulders back and forth.\n\nShe didn't have to move very much, her assets had so much mass that her slow rocking motion was enough to buffet him, the twin globes of flesh behaving almost like a liquid. Their weight would press up against him, and then they would return to their original position, almost like a pail of water that was being swung back and forth. Isabelle struggled to keep them suspended, wrapping an arm below them, and one above. She sandwiched them together as they made a seemingly intentional effort to escape her grasp, her forearms sinking deep into the wobbling flesh, so soft that there was almost no resistance.\n\nShe allowed him to thrust freely now, Iden's instincts getting the better of him, his belly clapping against her breasts and sending ripples through them as he pushed into her cleavage. Their heft made them so tight, her scaly skin pressing all around him, like two giant cushions. He had done this with other women, and even with the most endowed, he could always see the tip of his member poking up between their boobs. But now, his erection had vanished entirely, all that he could see were the two scaly mounds as they quivered with his rutting.\n\nIsabelle sensed that he was rubbing off the lubrication, and so she opened her jaws, pausing to let a mouthful of her saliva slide past her lips. The glob of drool landed wetly on her chest, Iden following it with his eyes as it vanished into her bust, its warmth soon finding his member. There was so much of it, thick and bubbly, making the depths of her bosom feel as hot and as slimy as her loins had been. She licked her lips with her tongue, glancing up at him and batting her lashes seductively.\n\n\"Go as fast as you please,\" she whispered, \"let it all out...\"\n\nWas she finally going to let him finish? As frustrated as he was, he couldn't deny the truth of what she had told him. He had never felt anything like this before, swells of pleasure were rising up through his entire body, his extremities tingling as though he had slept on them wrong. Everything seemed to be syncing up. The beating of his heart, his staggered breathing, the thrusting of his hips as they slammed into the soft pillows of Isabelle's bust. It was like a symphony where all of the instruments had been playing out of step with one another, clashing and discordant, finally coming together to compliment each other perfectly as they matched tempo to produce beautiful music.\n\nAs he thrust, he sank deeper and deeper into her cleavage, until his entire lower body was almost completely encompassed by her breasts. They didn't quite meet behind him, but they had slowly crept around his hips, spilling down his thighs. Eventually, Isabelle abandoned her attempts to handle her bosom, wrapping her arms around him instead. She pulled him tight, using her leverage to increase his pace.\n\nCaught in the loops of her tail, and Isabelle's tight hug, he could scarcely move. The smoldering embers of his arousal were igniting now, rising up inside him like a churning, roaring inferno. His cheeks burned hot, his member throbbing between her boobs, his skin dripping with sweat as his endurance was pushed to its limits. His muscles trembled, darkness creeping at the corners of his vision, his fingers and toes clenching of their own accord.\n\nEverything had built up to this, each orgasm that she had denied him had only compounded the next, and now he was finally teetering over the precipice. It was outside of his control, he couldn't decide when he wanted the exquisite torment to end, Isabelle would draw it out of him as she pleased. It was such an odd feeling, to not be in control of one's own body, and yet he felt so good that he feared he might never return to a normal state of mind again. If someone had told him that making love could feel like this, he would have laughed at them. He had thought himself so skilled in the ways of carnality, but this was something completely different, more like an opium high than mere sex.\n\nHe was roused from his stupor as Isabelle placed a gentle bite on his neck, easily able to reach it due to her stature, even while keeping his pulsing member encased in her bosom. She bit a little harder than she had before, not enough to make him bleed, but enough to leave red indents on his skin. There was something primal about having her draconic fangs pressing into his jugular, the vein pulsing against them, her wet tongue emerging to lash at his throat. He made an unbecoming sound that he had never heard himself make before, Isabelle chuckling to herself as she crawled her lips higher.\n\n\"Are you getting close?\" she cooed, pausing to brush her lips against his ear as she whispered to him. \"Your moans are so sweet...\"\n\nHer salacious whispering sent him over the edge, his heart seeming to falter, the sweet ache that had been building up inside him throughout the night taking on an unbearable quality. He gritted his teeth, but failed to stifle a pained groan, Isabelle watching gleefully as his body began to convulse. She tightened the bonds of her chubby tail, keeping him still as he bucked and rocked, thrusting desperately into her cleavage and making her breasts shake in the process.\n\nHe pumped rope after rope of his emission into her bosom, his animal lust unable to differentiate it from a fertile womb, his seed joining her warm saliva as it glued her breasts together. Every time that Iden thought himself spent, another swell of bliss rose up inside him, so acute that it bordered on painful. His muscles spasmed, his spine arching, stars dancing before his eyes as his wracked body gave her everything that it could.\n\nHis prolonged arousal had compounded every sensation, his soreness, his burning need taking him higher than he had ever been before. Instead of a short, intense climax that was confined entirely to his loins, the ecstasy spread throughout his entire body like a debilitating poison being carried by his blood. Every fresh surge of sensation was more powerful than the last, making his head spin, the brief moment of respite before the next rapturous throb of pleasure affording him just enough time to appreciate his situation before sending him reeling once again.\n\nHe could feel Isabelle's heaving bosom filling with his fluids, the thick, pearly globs creating a warm pocket around his member. It began to slide out of her cleavage, a combination of his essence and her drool running down her scaly torso, glistening strands of it drooping from her bust and waving back and forth with his thrusting.\n\nIden tried to double over as another lightning bolt of pleasure tore through him, his every nerve bound to the same unrelenting rhythm, but her spiraling tail still kept him tightly bound. He had given up trying to stifle his moans now, his hair hanging over his face in a dark curtain as he sagged forwards in the clutches of her coils, drenched in fresh sweat. He groaned, his eyelids fluttering as he gave her one last wad of his semen, the muscles in his abdomen burning from the effort. It felt like she had pulled a length of knotted rope out of him through his manhood, she had drained him completely, he couldn't believe how much she had managed to wring out of him.\n\nAs soon as the harsh pleasure began to retreat, a euphoria unlike any that he had felt before fell over him like a warm blanket. It was as though a fever had overcome him, leaving him aching and delirious, and yet he felt such wonderful relief. He closed his eyes, unable to suppress a wide smile, Isabelle watching him with a satisfied grin as he faded in and out of awareness. Time had lost all meaning, the world around him melting away until all that remained were Isabelle's glowing eyes.\n\nShe slowly pulled away, Iden flinching as an aftershock teased his still rigid erection, his eyes opening for a moment to watch as she released her bosom from her grasp. She let her breasts fall, gravity taking hold of them, the heavy mounds of flesh bouncing as they settled. Between them was a sordid mess, strings of his emission linking her boobs as they splayed apart under their own weight, more of the unspeakable fluid sloughing down her torso and making its way between her meaty thighs. She seemed almost as surprised by the quantity as he was, her eyes darting first to his seed, then back up to his face.\n\n\"So virile,\" she chuckled, reaching down to run a clawed finger through the trail of cooling fluid. It clung to her talon with the consistency of honey, linked to her scales by a long strand that broke as she pulled away. \"What say you now? Will you take things slow next time, or are you still a seeker of instant gratification?\"\n\nIden didn't reply, he could only laugh drunkenly, his post-coital bliss dulling his wits. She lowered him gently to the bed, the fat rolls of her tail uncoiling from around him. She lay him on the silken sheets beside her, Iden sinking his fingers into the luxurious fabric, somehow even softer and more pleasant than it had been before.\n\nHe rolled onto his back, still breathing hard, his skin damp with perspiration. Isabelle came crashing down beside him, her weight enough to shake the ground beneath him, lying on her side and propping herself up on an elbow as she reached across to plant a hand on his stomach. He shivered, another wave of pleasure washing over him. He was so sensitive that her merest touch excited him in this exhausted state. She slid it up to his chest, seemingly amused by his sudor, her touch slippery.\n\n\"Mortals sweat,\" she muttered, admiring his figure with her reptilian eyes. \"It never ceases to entice me.\" She brought her snout closer to him on her flexible neck, dragging her tongue across his throat, tasting the salt on his skin as his still swollen member bobbed in the air. \"I can taste things that you aren't even aware of, secretions that inspire lust, and affection. They bleed from your pores when you're excited, soaking your bodies when you make love. They make you taste...delightful...\"\n\n\"You're not going to eat me, I hope,\" Iden chuckled weakly. \"Was all of this effort for the sole purpose of seasoning me?\"\n\nShe laughed at that, Iden's eyes drawn to her bust. Gravity was mashing her breasts together as she lounged on her side, the lower one spreading out under its own weight, while the upper one compressed it from above. His eyes traced the low dip of her pinched waist, rising up into the curve of her wide hips, the meat of her thighs at the mercy of gravity just as her bosom was. Her long tail trailed off into the distance, its tip so far away that the darkness of the cave swallowed it up.\n\n\"You're quite safe,\" she replied, sliding her hand up to cup his cheek. He couldn't help but push his face into her soft palm, the dragoness stroking him with her thumb. \"Mortal meat tastes rather bad, and their hygiene usually leaves something to be desired.\"\n\nHe laughed, not certain whether she was joking or not.\n\n\"Come closer,\" she said, hooking a hand around his back and dragging him towards her. Her claws pricked his skin, but even that was an oddly pleasant sensation. He felt her fingers delve into his hair as she pressed his face between her breasts, large enough that they spilled over his shoulders too. He was about to protest, expecting to find the mess that he had left in her cleavage, but all that he encountered were dry scales. Perhaps it was her magic. He didn't question it, breathing in a lungful of her smoky scent, letting her bust engulf him. The breast below served as an admirable pillow, far softer than even the most expensive goose feather stuffing. If one were to pluck the wings of an angel and use them to fill a velvet cushion, it wouldn't have been half as opulent as this.\n\nThe second boob pressed down on him from above, quickly smothering him, Iden having to rise from her cleavage to take a breath like a whale breaching for air. He wrapped his arms around her as best he could, able to do little more than drape one about her torso, his fingertips scarcely able to reach her spine. In turn, she cradled him in her arms, enveloping him in her warm body like a living sleeping bag.\n\nIden felt all of his worries melt away. There was something about this that felt so natural, so right, his heart fluttering as her clawed fingers found his scalp and began to comb his hair. Lovemaking, not just fucking, that was the distinction. Not only had he never felt this good before, but nobody had ever treated him this way either. Isabelle exuded compassion and tenderness in ways that he would never have ascribed to a scaly, armored killing machine. For all of her teeth and horns, despite the fact that she could melt steel with her breath, he knew that she would never lay so much as a claw on him. Not now.\n\nHis own thoughts were becoming muddled, his motivations clouded. What was he doing here? What was he doing with Isabelle? He had scaled the mountain to seek out his fortune, to claim a prize, why was he letting himself be distracted? He had one goal, one mission, everything else was irrelevant.\n\nYet another part of him yearned for this, not just the carnal delights, but the warmth that followed. The affection, the closeness, the feeling of being wanted for something more than just his sword arm or his cock. Could this be a treasure of greater worth than mere gold? Could he just stay here? What would become of him? What of his aspirations of owning land, of begetting a horde of children to carry on his legacy?\n\n\"You seem distracted,\" Isabelle whispered, planting a kiss on his forehead with her scaly lips. \"What troubles you?\"\n\nHe considered sharing his doubts with her for a moment. She was wise, long-lived, no doubt learned enough to advise. But something made him bite his tongue, and he buried his face in her bosom lest his red cheeks betray his lie.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he replied, squeezing her more tightly. \"I'm just...I've never felt this way before.\"\n\nThat at least was the truth.\n\n\"You can be so loving and tender when you want to be, Iden,\" she said as she nuzzled his head. \"I knew when you showed me kindness during our ascent, that there was a gentleness to you, that there was a good man beneath all of those scars. You just needed someone to show you how to set that man free.\"\n\n\"You don't really know me,\" he muttered, \"you don't know what I've done.\"\n\n\"I'll have you know that I'm an excellent judge of character,\" she said, shifting her weight to get more comfortable. He felt her tail rise up to encircle him possessively, as though she was creating a perimeter around him. \"I've lived long enough, and I've known enough people to develop an intuition surrounding such things. As I've been trying to impress upon you, a man can at once be strong, and sensitive. Violent, and gentle. Nature has endowed you with a strong arm, and an iron will, your choice of profession was almost inevitable in these tumultuous times. But your past only defines you as long as you let it. You can choose to be something else, if that's what you want.\"\n\n\"Would you...rub my head again?\" he asked, hiding his burning face from her. Isabelle didn't laugh at him, she didn't have a witty remark prepared. She simply smiled, running her fingers through his hair, Iden letting himself melt into her inviting body as his fatigue caught up with him."
            },
            {
                "title": "CHOICES",
                "text": "The shepherd stumbled out of the tavern, closing the heavy wooden door behind him, his feet slipping in the ever-present mud. The village was overcast by dark clouds, an eerie mist clinging to the ground like a carpet. He flipped up his tattered hood to shield himself from the light drizzle, setting off home, his path lit by the yellow glow from the dirty windows of the adjacent buildings. As he stepped gingerly around a particularly deep puddle, he heard something behind him. He turned to look, squinting, his eyes unable to pierce the darkness and the fog.\n\nAs he watched, several dark shapes came into focus. It was a procession of horses, stamping their hooves in the wet dirt, their snorting accompanied by the clanking of their armored riders. He recognized them as Paladins immediately, their snow-white armor gilded with gold trim, a pair of golden eagle's wings adorning their helmets. They were clad in full suits of plate, armored from their heads to their toes, wearing white surcoats over the top of their garniture that were decorated with the symbols of their order. They wielded long spears that had small, fluttering standards tied to the haft near their glinting tips, large tower shields strapped across their backs. They had short swords, too, along with numerous pouches and satchels that might contain any manner of things. They looked like they were marching to war.\n\nThey ignored the drunken shepherd, passing him one by one, and he counted six riders in all. He called after them, the one taking up the rear halting his horse, steering it around to look back.\n\n\"Are you here to slay the beast?\" the shepherd asked.\n\n\"What do you know of the dragon?\" the Paladin called back, his voice somewhat muffled by his ornate helmet.\n\n\"T'was I who first laid eyes on it,\" the shepherd replied, trying not to sway too conspicuously lest it make his story any less credible. \"T'was I who brought it to the magistrate's attention.\"\n\nThe Paladin signaled to his comrades, and they stopped, looking back at him as he turned his horse around. The shepherd had to crane his neck to peer up at the knight as his steed trotted up beside him, the animal snorting as its rider pulled back on the reins to halt it.\n\n\"You've seen the dragon?\" the Paladin asked, his expression indiscernible through the narrow slot in his winged helmet. Up close, the shepherd could make out the golden inscriptions on his armor, the decorative trim comprised of flowing prayers and incantations. Even the steel plates that made up his gauntlets were gilded, the calligraphic passages wrapping around his fingers.\n\n\"Aye, I sighted the creature up in the foothills, where it swooped down and ate half a flock of my sheep before my very eyes. Never seen anything like it in my life, must have been fifty feet long, as heavy as a whole herd of cattle. Its footsteps shook the very ground beneath my feet. I saw it vomit a plume of flame that charred my poor sheep until their bones were blackened.\"\n\n\"We were told that the dragon resides on a mountain peak that overlooks this village,\" the Paladin continued, \"is this true?\"\n\n\"Aye, you can't miss it,\" the shepherd said as he pointed in the vague direction of the peak. \"I watched the beast soar down from the mountaintop on its great wings, and that was where it returned once its foul deed was done. A mercenary came by a few days ago, had his mind set on claiming the bounty on its head, but I've seen no sight of the man since. If you ask me, the dragon bested him.\"\n\n\"The Paladin Order will be taking charge of this situation,\" the knight replied sternly. \"Dragons are not something to be trifled with by the unprepared, they are possessed of powerful magic, so it is written in the holy scriptures. Our archivists alone possess the necessary knowledge to bring one down. If you should come across any more fortune seekers who are headed this way, turn them back. Without the magical artifacts and arcane techniques required to pacify a dragon, they will surely perish at its hands.\"\n\n\"Aye, Sir, I'll do as you ask.\"\n\nWith that, the Paladin turned about and lashed his reins, catching up with his procession.\n\n\"May the Gods be with you!\" the shepherd called after them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Iden chewed into a hunk of roasted meat, its juices dripping onto the mahogany dining table. He had awoken beside Isabelle on their nest of extravagant sheets, sore and satisfied from their romp the night before. After a quick dip in the pool to wash off the residue, she had cooked him an admirable breakfast, if roasting a cut of beef using the fiery breath of a dragon could be considered cooking. She was leaning on the table now, watching him as he ate. She had reverted back to her human form once again and was now fully clothed, perhaps assuming that he found it more pleasing.\n\nIden would never admit it to her, but he had found her smooth scales and her chubby tail more than a little alluring. At first, he had thought himself attracted to her human features in spite of the draconic ones that had begun to crop up, ignoring them as he focused his attention on her more familiar assets. Yet over time, he was starting to find things to appreciate about her more exotic traits. The silkiness of the scales on her smooth underbelly, the softness of her hands, the agility of her oversized tongue. Just thinking about it made blood begin to rush to his loins.\n\n\"I still haven't seen you eat anything yet,\" he mumbled over a mouthful of beef. \"How long do you usually go without food?\"\n\n\"I was considering going out in search of a meal today, actually,\" she replied. \"It's been about a week since I last ate my fill. I have a store of meat in the cave that I pack with snow so that it keeps, but that's more for emergencies. I prefer my kills fresh.\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll be leaving?\"\n\n\"Only for a short time,\" she said with a nod. \"I think I can trust you with the gold for a few hours while I fly out in search of something to eat, now that you know there's no hope of claiming it, and now that we have more of an...understanding.\"\n\nShe sauntered over to him, leaning down to run her slim fingers through his hair, Iden pausing his chewing as his face began to redden. She giggled at his expression, her girlish voice contrasting with the deeper contralto of her dragon form.\n\n\"I'll be back before nightfall, try not to get into any trouble.\"\n\nHe watched her as she walked across the cavern, heading for the towering pile of treasure. Her clothes burned away to leave her nude, Iden's gaze drawn to her shapely rump, her hips swaying with every step. At the base of her spine, blue discoloration appeared, her tail sprouting from her body to trail behind her on the stone floor. It thickened and grew, more of her iridescent scales spreading across her body, her skin cracking to form the hard plates. By the time her leathery wings were emerging from her back like a pair of shriveled arms, she had reached the pile, her slight frame expanding to take on the stature of her true form.\n\nNine feet, she had taken on the appearance that he had become so intimately acquainted with the night before. Fifteen feet, the base of her tail was now as thick around as her torso had once been, her posture changing as she began to lean forward. Twenty feet, she had dropped to all fours, her feminine figure morphing into a new, less familiar one. Her great wings unfurled, the quills that ran down her spine extending to their natural length, like a forest of sharp knitting needles. Her hide thickened as layers of bony scutes formed along her back, her great horns now as long as his arm, her powerful legs swelling with muscle to support her new weight.\n\nShe reached her final size, around eight tons, twenty-five feet and change. Iden was no less intimidated by her appearance, as normal as it was becoming to see her shapeshifting. She was so tall that he wouldn't even have reached her hip, her head alone was as large as he was. She radiated an animal strength that made him wary of even getting close to her, lest he be accidentally crushed underfoot, or dashed by her swinging tail. He could see the brawn beneath her scaly skin rippling when she moved, the copious fat that filled out her enormous frame shaking with each impact.\n\nThe illusion of grace and power was somewhat marred as he watched her flop down onto her pile, rolling in it like a giant dog playing in the grass. Her serpentine body wound back and forth, her wings splayed out wide, her four limbs waving in the air. The pile of gold began to collapse on the near-side, like an avalanche cascading down the face of a mountain, unearthing more treasures as it went. After a few moments of this, she righted herself, the cave floor trembling as she landed back on her feet. Iden saw that there were coins lodged between her colorful scales in places, glinting in the torchlight, a fortune's worth clinging to her like burrs to a sheep. She shook herself, dislodging some of the looser ones, sending a shower of them clattering to the ground where they bounced and rolled away.\n\nShe noticed him looking, her scaly lips pulling back to expose her teeth in a gigantic smile.\n\n\"I pay for my meals,\" she explained, Iden remembering how the shepherd that he had encountered back in the inn had told of how gold had rained from the dragon's body. She set off up the winding passage that led to the mouth of the cave, Iden watching the tip of her long tail vanish out of sight, leaving a few solitary gold pieces in her wake.\n\nHe took his time finishing off his meal, waiting a good half hour to be sure that his companion was long-gone. When he was certain that she wasn't going to come walking back down the tunnel, he rose from the gilded throne, setting his silver cutlery down on the table. It was time to set his plan into motion.\n\nIden recovered his pile of discarded clothes and armor, stripping off the magical garments that Isabelle had created for him with considerable difficulty due to their tightness. He pulled on his gambeson and leggings, struggling for a few minutes to strap on his breastplate. It didn't take long for him to be reminded of how inconvenient it was without a second pair of hands. He wondered briefly if Isabelle could sense that he was undressing, if she would have a way to know what he was about to do through some magical means. It didn't matter, he was already committed.\n\nHe finished tightening the belts on his armor, now realizing that it was considerably less comfortable than the silken outfit that Isabelle had conjured, as much as he had complained about the form-fitting garments. He retrieved his short sword, returning it to its scabbard on his belt. His pike was broken, and his tower shield would be of little use to him now, better to just leave it behind lest it slow him down.\n\nAfter ensuring that he still had some food left for the journey, and that his sleeping bag and tent were still intact, he slung his pack over his back. He turned to face the pile of gold and treasure, more riches than even a hundred men could have spent in their lifetimes. That all too familiar lust burned in his belly, greed demanding that he fill his pack with bejeweled scepters and silver goblets, his eyes drawn to the glittering hoard like moths to a flame. Just one ornate crown, just one handful of rubies\u2026\n\nNo, he tore his eyes away from the mound, focusing them on something else. He marched around the circumference of the pile, kicking coins out of his path like they were no more valuable than pebbles. The bookshelves were his new target. Isabelle had said it herself, to the right buyer, these ancient tomes were worth a fortune in their own right. A fortune enough to set Iden free from the life of a sellsword? He couldn't be sure, but what other options did he have? She was right about him not being able to transport the gold, even if he could claim it. There would be a target on his back, he could trust nobody, he would be robbed or murdered before he could spend a solitary penny.\n\nBut who would slit his throat in his sleep over musty old books? Who would rob him for what would look like worthless paper to the uninitiated? Only collectors and archivists would know the true value of his take, any brigands or innkeepers that he might meet would be wholly ignorant.\n\nHe perused the shelves, his open pack clutched in one hand, not knowing which ones to take. Some were surely more valuable than others, but how would he know? He could scarcely even read. As his eyes scanned their dusty spines, he spotted one that he recognized. It was the book that Isabelle had read aloud to him, the life and works of de Mercier, the warrior poet. Had she not said that this book was unique?\n\nIden pulled it from the shelf, dropping it into his pack, pulling more from their shelves at random. He couldn't carry them all, only enough to fill the remaining space in his bag, so he'd just have to hope that it would be enough. He couldn't spend books, of course. He would need to travel to one of the major cities where libraries and Paladin archives could be found, and he would need coin to spend along the way. Once he was done with the books, he would take a couple of pocketfuls of gold, enough to pay his way without drawing too much unwanted attention to himself.\n\nHis heart raced as he piled the tomes into his rucksack, each one accompanied by a cloud of dust. He didn't want to be anywhere near here when Isabelle returned and realized his betrayal. With any luck, he'd be long gone, and she would have no way of finding him.\n\nAn odd sensation came over him, almost like a wave of nausea. Memories of Isabelle's smiling face as she read to him from atop her pile flashed before his eyes, the scent of her auburn hair, the feeling of her clawed fingers massaging his scalp.\n\nIden shook his head, banishing the intrusive thoughts, turning his attention back to his thievery. He needed these books far more than Isabelle did. She had more treasure than she could ever make use of, simply for the pleasure of having it. She wouldn't go hungry, she wouldn't be destitute if he took just a minute share for himself. Iden would be sleeping in a drafty tent in the woods, he'd be eating stale bread and rancid meat, he would almost certainly die with his guts spilled on a battlefield if he didn't do this.\n\nYet still, that pit remained in his stomach, an ache, as though someone had just punched him in the belly. Why was this making him feel so damned...bad? He was a warrior by profession, he had killed scores of adversaries over the years, no doubt leaving grieving widows and orphaned children in his wake. So why did this feel so much worse?\n\nHe tried to ignore his conscience, throwing a couple more books into the bag, drawing it closed and slinging it over his back. As he made his way towards the exit, he knelt to grab a few handfuls of coins, stuffing his pockets and filling some of the empty pouches on his belt. He had to fight the desire to take even more, the gold really did have an almost supernatural power over him.\n\nHis boots echoed as he made his way up the winding passage that led out of the cavern, following the gold that had fallen from Isabelle's massive body like a trail of breadcrumbs. As he neared the mouth of the cave, he began to feel the cold wind on his face, carrying the scent of fresh air with it. It howled as it whipped down the passage, tugging at his clothes, already starting to chill him to the bone.\n\nThe bright sun made him shield his eyes as he emerged onto the snow-covered mountainside, his vision slowly adjusting as he tried to blink the bleariness away. It had been days since he had seen sunlight or a blue sky. The mountain range below him was sheathed in clouds, a few solitary, snowy peaks rising up through the puffy blanket here and there. Iden took in a deep breath, preparing himself for the climb down. He turned to look down the tunnel one last time, swallowing as if it might somehow dislodge the lead weight that had settled in his stomach.\n\nHis mind made up, he began to make his way down the rocky slope."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The rolling foothills extended into the distance, fog hanging low over the valley, the shadow of the mountain looming at Iden's back as he marched. The naked rock and freezing snow had been replaced with purple thistles, hardy grasses, and boulders coated in clinging moss and lichen. He was still exposed to the elements, there were no forests in sight yet, but the worst of his climb was now behind him. He had reached the foot of the mountain in good time, the sun was only just starting to dip towards the horizon. Isabelle must have returned to her cave by now, but if that was the case, then she hadn't come looking for him. Her magic didn't make her omniscient, after all. It might take her some time to figure out where he had gone, or what he had taken.\n\nHe should feel elated for having pulled off his heist, yet he couldn't shake that lingering feeling of guilt. Iden tried to ignore it, lowering his pack and fishing for his tent. The ground here was soft enough that he shouldn't have any great difficulty driving in the pegs. If Isabelle should come searching for him, then she might have a hard time seeing it from the air. It was relatively well camouflaged, and it wouldn't stand out against the terrain. Hiding from highwaymen and brigands who might rob him while he slept was just as important as concealing his sleeping spot from airborne dragons.\n\nHe had to remove a few of the books to access his gear, stacking them gingerly on a nearby rock. They didn't look too fragile, but they were certainly very old. The last thing he needed was for one them of them to fly open, disgorging its yellowed pages across the landscape like fallen leaves on the wind. As he withdrew another tome, his eyes were drawn to the calligraphic text that adorned its leather cover. His heart skipped a beat as he read off the title, it was The Life and Works of Gerard de Mercier again. He stared at it for a moment, feeling worse and worse the longer he held it, then he set it upon the pile with the title facing down so that he wouldn't have to look at it.\n\n\"Pull it together,\" he grumbled to himself, turning his attention back to his bag. He was just tired from the climb, that was all. He would feel better once he got a good night's sleep. He'd wake up the next morning refreshed, and then once he was eating a hot meal at the inn down in the village, he could put this business with the dragon behind him. He'd be a hundred miles away from the mountain in short order, and then he could just forget about it. Gods, it wasn't as if he had killed anybody...\n\nIden set up his tent, the wind whipping at it violently, then placed his sleeping bag inside. He returned the books to his pack, then began to shed his armor, crawling through the flap and closing it behind him. It did little to shut out the frigid gale, cold air creeping in under the breaks between the pegs where the tent was being lifted from the ground. Iden shuffled into his bag and wrapped it around himself tightly, his teeth chattering. It was best not to start a fire, it would certainly give him away to the dragon if she came searching for him.\n\nIt was impossible to keep his mind off the silken bed that Isabelle had fashioned from luxurious drapes and fancy gowns back in her cave, all of that wealth just thrown into a heap so that they might sleep together comfortably. He missed its softness, and what's more, he missed the warmth of her body beside him. The way that she held him close, her smoky scent, the feeling of her fingers combing his hair as she whispered to him...\n\nNever mind. When he sold the books, he could buy all of the willing wenches that he wanted. They'd be throwing themselves at him, they'd do anything that he asked. He could share his king-sized bed with a different woman every night if he so desired, he could build his own harem.\n\nYet the promise of carnal delights did not sate the feeling of loneliness that was growing within him. It felt like there was a hole in his chest, empty and gaping, like he had left some crucial part of himself up on the mountain. He tossed and turned in his sleeping bag, trying to take his mind off it, sleep eluding him as his mind ran in circles.\n\nHe was jolted back to alertness by the unmistakable sound of hooves and clanking armor rising above the howling wind. A surge of adrenaline made him sit up straight, his heart starting to pump faster, the instincts of a career soldier informing him that enemy horsemen might be nearing. There was no time to don his armor, and so he grabbed his holstered sword from its resting place beside his sleeping bag, holding it in his hand as he shuffled towards the flap and emerged into the cool evening air.\n\nStanding around his tent was a circle of mounted knights, their horses snorting, stamping their hooves in the scrubby grass. These were Paladins, there was no mistaking their gilded, white armor and their winged helmets. Iden turned to face each one of them in turn, six in all, keeping his sword at the ready without drawing it from its scabbard. He had no chance of taking on half a dozen mounted knights, but the Paladins were not brigands, quite the contrary. They ranged from insufferable do-gooders who stuck their noses in affairs that didn't concern them, to dangerous zealots who might strike a man down for using the name of one of the Gods in vain. While they didn't pose an immediate threat, they were not to be trusted\u2026\n\n\"State your business, Sirs,\" Iden demanded. He was angry at being surrounded like this, but it was wise to show a little respect. There was nothing to be gained by offending a Paladin.\n\n\"You are the mercenary that the shepherd spoke of,\" one of them said, his helmet giving his voice a tinny quality. \"We expected to find your blackened bones in the dragon's lair.\"\n\n\"The shepherd?\" Iden asked, relaxing somewhat. \"I know the man of whom you speak, he's a drunk that frequents the inn down in the village, I met him when I arrived in the valley. He spoke to you of the dragon?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" the knight replied. \"He told of a mercenary who sought to claim the bounty that the magistrate had placed on the beast's head. I am surprised to find you alive.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm flattered that the Paladins would concern themselves with the welfare of a sellsword,\" Iden muttered. \"Ever the defenders of the downtrodden, you lot. But I'm afraid that I don't require your assistance.\"\n\n\"We concern ourselves not with your safety, but with the dragon's reign of terror,\" the stranger replied tersely. \"We march on the mountain with the intent to slay it. How is it that a simple hedge knight has climbed the dragon's mountain and lived to tell of it? Don't tell me that you slew the thing single-handed?\"\n\nHe thought for a moment, trying to come up with a story that the knights would believe. They were sworn to a life of celibacy, and they didn't take kindly to fornication at the best of times, never mind with a dragon. If they even had laws that governed such subjects, the penalty would not be lenient. Did they really mean to kill Isabelle? Good fucking luck. Based on what Iden had seen during his fight with her, it would take a whole army to bring her down. These toy soldiers stood no chance.\n\n\"I never made it to the peak,\" Iden replied. \"I had every intention of facing the dragon and claiming the bounty, but I caught sight of the thing one day, and turned straight back around. It's forty feet long at least, covered in scales as tough as steel, and it breathes fire that can melt stone. I doubt that any mortal weapon can harm it. If you want my advice, it's better to turn back and leave the creature be.\"\n\n\"You made a sound decision,\" the Paladin replied, \"the likes of you would have no hope of prevailing against a dragon. The Paladins have tools and strategies for subduing magical beasts, passed down to us through the order's ancient archives. Our forebears dealt with such creatures in ages past, and we are well equipped to do the same.\"\n\n\"How's that?\" Iden asked, a hint of worry creeping into his voice. He had thought himself prepared to fight the dragon too, but Isabelle had spoken of her kind being hunted in the past, and he had no way to be sure that these Paladins didn't have some kind of weapon that could hurt her. If anyone would have access to such things, it would probably be them. Their order was centuries old, and their archivists hoarded ancient secrets like Isabelle hoarded gold.\n\n\"Dragons are possessed of supernatural powers,\" another of the knights explained, Iden turning to face him. Having to raise his head to speak to the faceless figures while they were perched atop their horses was a little unnerving. \"It is good that you came to your senses, sellsword. Had you attempted to pierce its hide with your blade, you would have found it quite impenetrable. A dragon must first be incapacitated through magical means in order to neutralize its great strength and to deny it its fiery breath. Only then can it be destroyed.\"\n\n\"There is only one weapon that can prevail against its thick armor,\" the Paladin to his left added, \"a spear whose tip was forged from the horn of a fellow dragon.\"\n\n\"And you have such a weapon in your possession?\" Iden asked incredulously. His own pike had pierced Isabelle's hand, but only while using her strength and weight as leverage. Her hide had been quite impenetrable under his own power.\n\n\"Indeed we do,\" the lead Paladin said, taking his horse by the reins and steering it towards the mountain. \"Make your way back down to the village, Mercenary, and stay out of trouble. The Gods don't look upon your profession favorably at the best of times. It would not behoove you to fall afoul of the law.\"\n\nIden suppressed his desire to talk back, watching as they began to make their way up the slope. Who did they think they were, telling him to keep his nose clean? Easy for them to say, their armor was as pristine as fresh linen, they didn't have to eat week-old bread for dinner tonight.\n\nAs he watched their horses tackle the slope, he wondered if what they had said was true. Dragons were not invulnerable. According to Isabelle, her people had been hunted almost to extinction by ancient humans. Did the Paladins really have the means to bring her down?\n\nIt didn't really matter. He didn't think it very likely, and even so, what could he do against a whole group of mounted Paladins? Iden was an accomplished fighter, but only a fool would take those odds. No, most likely Isabelle would make a meal of them as she almost had Iden. He had his bag full of loot, he was home free, better to just cut his losses and get out of here as the Paladin had suggested.\n\nIden returned to his tent, setting his sword down and climbing into his sleeping bag, the lead weight in his belly only growing heavier."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Iden awoke the next morning feeling decidedly less refreshed than he had anticipated. He rubbed his eyes groggily, rising to a sitting position, his head brushing the top of his tiny tent. For a brief, blissful moment, he forgot where he was and what he had been doing. The realization came flooding back to him, that familiar weight settling in the pit of his stomach once again. He had stayed up late into the night, sleep eluding him, thoughts of Isabelle roiling in his head.\n\nIntent on shaking off the strange cloud of dread and guilt that was hanging over him, he shuffled out of his tent, sitting by his pack and fishing inside it for one of his paper parcels. He withdrew one, unwrapping it and pulling off a piece of stale bread with considerable difficulty. It was as hard as a rock, and he chewed it dispassionately. Reasoning that the meat might have fared a little better, he opened another parcel, recoiling as the smell reached his nose. Frustrated, he hurled the package of spoiled meat into the grass, cursing under his breath as he took another labored bite of his bread.\n\nHow he missed Isabelle's perfectly cooked beef, he'd trade a whole pocketful of gold for just a morsel of it right now. The exterior had been so crispy and brown, the juices locked inside, pouring from the tender meat with every bite\u2026\n\nHis stomach growled, and he gave up on the bread, tossing it back into his bag. He'd buy a real meal down in the village, something expensive from the inn, that would sate his hunger. He wasn't more than half a day's walk away now.\n\nAs Iden donned his armor, he noticed the hoof prints in the soil around his test, remembering his encounter with the Paladins the night before. They'd probably be halfway up the mountain by now, though they might face even more difficulty than he had due to their full sets of plate armor. He turned to glance at the mountain's face, wondering where Isabelle was now, and what she was doing. Had she discovered his theft? Would she be meeting the Paladins soon? Hopefully, his betrayal and the subsequent Paladin attack didn't turn her off interacting with humans altogether\u2026\n\nWhat an ugly word, betrayal. Was that really the best way to describe what he had done? Why did it make him feel like he had swallowed a lump of iron?\n\nToo bad, the world was harsh, and life was unfair. All that mattered was survival. Still, the image of Isabelle's face when she discovered that he had made off with her treasures haunted him. She had taken such a liking to him, he had earned her trust, and then\u2026\n\n\"Enough of this,\" he muttered to himself, kneeling to pack up his tent and sleeping bag. He rolled them up into bundles of fabric, then attempted to stuff them into his bag, realizing that the stolen books were in the way. Grumbling under his breath, he began to remove them one by one, stacking them on a nearby rock. One of them slipped out of his gauntleted hand, and he leaned down to retrieve it, the red leather binding giving it away as The Life and Works of Gerard de Mercier once again.\n\nA kind of irrational anger welled up inside him, and he had to stop himself from tossing the book just as he had the spoiled meat.\n\n\"I need you more than she does,\" Iden muttered, \"what the hell do you want from me? Should I climb back up the mountain, fight off six horsemen single-handedly, and then doom myself to a life of poverty and a violent death? All to satisfy some misplaced sense of honor or loyalty? What the hell is wrong with me?\" he added, running his hand over his face. \"I'm having an argument with a damned book...\"\n\nHis eyes were drawn to the mountain again with a magnetic power, and he looked up at the snowy peak, sheathed in layers of white cloud. What was it that Isabelle had been trying to drill into him during their brief time together? That he had a choice, he could decide what kind of person he wanted to be. So what did he want to be? Did he want to remain a callous, emotionally detached mercenary, self-serving and greedy? Or did he want to be like de Mercier, strong when the situation called for it, but sensitive too? Did he want to keep telling himself that his conscience was clean because he took measures to avoid taking jobs from tyrants and slavers, or did he want to put his money on the table, and fight for a real cause? Isabelle was in danger, what if the Paladins made good on their promise to slay her? She didn't deserve that...he couldn't stand the thought of her coming to harm.\n\n\"Gods damn it all,\" he grumbled under his breath, packing his gear away and turning back towards the mountain. \"If I could just learn to keep my cock in my pants, then I wouldn't end up in these situations...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "FOUL BEAST",
                "text": "The Paladins struggled up the rocky crags, the weight of their armor and their heavy shields making their progress all the more difficult. They had tied the horses up at the base of the mountain, the climb would have only resulted in broken legs, and it had taken them almost a whole day to reach the peak. The terrain here was all jutting rocks and knee-deep snow. Perilously high falls and slippery surfaces had resulted in more than one accident, but none of their number had been injured thus far.\n\nThe Knight Commander was leading the way, leaning his weight on his spear, using the haft to probe for footholds in the snow as he navigated the hazardous mountainside. He had five Lieutenants in tow, hand-picked by their superiors for the task at hand. They were sterling fighters, their combat prowess matched only by their loyalty to the Order, their faith as strong as their sword arms.\n\nThey had risen above the cloud layer now, the sky above them a deeper azure than the Commander had ever seen before, the air growing thinner with every step.\n\n\"Have you sighted the cave yet, my Lord?\" one of the Paladins asked. He was trailing a short distance behind the leader of their party, the whistling wind tearing at his surcoat.\n\n\"It has to be here somewhere, Lieutenant\" the Commander replied. \"The reports have led us true so far, this peak is where the beast makes its perch.\"\n\n\"Commander!\" another of the Lieutenants shouted from the rear. \"To your right, I see a cave!\"\n\nThe Commander squinted through the narrow slot in his visor, spotting the telltale shadow of a cave mouth nestled amidst the rocks. He waved his men forward, the standard that was tied around the tip of his spear fluttering in the wind.\n\n\"Good eye, soldier! Keep your wits about you, according to the archivists, the dragon will be lurking somewhere deep inside the mountain.\"\n\nThey climbed their way up onto the rocky outcrop, two of the Lieutenants helping up a straggler, the Paladins readying their weapons as they inched closer to the cave. The shadowy tunnel wound deep into the rock, its curving walls preventing them from seeing what lay at the end.\n\n\"Ready the artifacts,\" the Commander ordered, raising his tower shield lest the dragon burst out at them from the darkness.\n\nThe Archivists had entrusted the team of Paladins with several ancient relics that would help them defeat the dragon. Chief among them was the long pike that one of the Lieutenants carried across his back, its haft forged from an unknown alloy using techniques that had been lost to time, the metal decorated with ornate banding patterns and mottling. The tip was carved from dragon horn, shaped into a deadly point that would be used to spear the creature's heart, delivering the killing blow once it was subdued. The weapon was priceless, and there were few like it, but its true value lay in its ability to pierce the armored scales of a dragon.\n\nNext were the tools that would deny the dragon its brute strength and its fiery breath. The Archivists had produced another relic of the ancient world from the depths of the Order's vaults, a net woven from the silk of a long-extinct breed of gigantic spider. It had to be handled with extreme caution, as it would stick to any living thing with a bond that was impossible to break through conventional means, the strands themselves too durable to cut through with even the sharpest of blades. Once it had entangled its victim, the fine mesh would begin to constrict around it, growing tighter the more the prey struggled.\n\nThe final weapon in their arsenal was the most unassuming, a simple leather-bound book. Instead of ink, its pages were marked with the blood of a frost giant, a mythical creature that was said to have inhabited the frozen North in ages long past. The spells and incantations within carried its power, the faded text imbuing the reader with the ability to command the elemental forces of snow and ice. This, they would use to silence the dragon's pyromancy long enough that the final blow could be dealt.\n\n\"Hand me the pike,\" the Commander ordered. One of the Lieutenants retrieved it from the back of his companion, passing it to his superior. The Commander weighed it in his hand, finding it to be incredibly light despite its great length, impeccably balanced. There were no living smiths who could produce weapons like these.\n\n\"Lieutenant Gregory,\" he continued, \"are you certain that you can perform the incantation that will silence the dragon's breath?\"\n\nOne of the Paladins opened the clasp on a leather holster that was sewn to his belt, withdrawing the ancient tome from its protective carrying case. He opened the cover and leafed through the yellowed pages, the wind making them flutter.\n\n\"The Archivists have instructed me well, my Lord,\" he replied. \"I am confident that I can perform the spell.\"\n\n\"Very well. Prepare the net.\"\n\nTwo more of the Paladins produced crossbows, gripping the stocks firmly between their thighs as they began to crank the levers that would wind the strings back, the limbs creaking as they bent under the pressure. When they were ready to be fired, the two men armed them with bolts. They looked like training arrows, their tips dull and weighted, rather than sharpened to a point. These arrows were not intended to pierce the hide of their adversary, but rather to carry the net over it. He watched as a third knight knelt and removed his pack, fishing out a carefully sealed parcel about the size of a dinner plate. He unwrapped it gingerly, revealing what looked like a bundle of fine silk, beads of glittering moisture clinging to the thin strands.\n\nHe lifted up the spider silk net, taking great care to only touch the loops at the corners that were intended to attach to the bolts. One would have expected the howling wind to blow the net into the bearer's face, but somehow it remained untouched by the elements, hanging in the air with an ethereal quality. The Lieutenants wielding the crossbows took up position to either side of him, and he attached the corners of the net to their bolts, the trap now ready to be sprung.\n\n\"Follow behind me,\" the Commander said, making his way deeper into the cave. \"Gregory, keep your spellbook at the ready and be swift with your incantation. You must not allow the dragon to use its breath. Alder, Rowen, strike true. If you should miss the beast, then we will not get a second chance. Loose your bolts at the first opportunity that presents itself, even a moment of hesitation could leave one of us dead. Once the dragon has been entangled, I shall close in and strike at its heart.\"\n\n\"Chances are, the dragon is already inside its cave,\" a knight to the Commander's right added. He produced a torch and lit it with two pieces of flint, holding it aloft to light their way in the darkness. \"If we should happen upon an empty lair, then we can lie in wait, and prepare an ambush for its return. Either way, we should maintain the element of surprise.\"\n\n\"Dragons are said to be wily creatures,\" the Commander said, rounding the first corner of the winding passage as his men marched behind him. The walls here looked like they were made from melted rock, the stalactites that clung to the ceiling broken off in places, as though something large had passed through. There was scoring on the stone that looked suspiciously like giant claws marks. \"They are not the dumb beasts that some might assume, so keep your wits about you. Expect trickery, deception, we don't know exactly what we might encounter down here...\"\n\nAs they continued on, following the tunnel as it snaked deep into the mountain, there was the sound of metal on metal. One of the Paladins paused to examine the ground, the Commander glancing back at him.\n\n\"Look, Knight Commander,\" he exclaimed as he knelt to pick up a coin. \"There are gold pieces strewn about the floor.\"\n\n\"The dragon surely came through here,\" another said with a nod, \"we're on the right track.\"\n\n\"Don't stop for gold,\" the Commander muttered, ushering them onward. \"Your reward will be the satisfaction of serving the Gods. The beast's hoard is destined for the Order's treasury, not your pockets.\"\n\nThere was muted laughter as they pressed onward, their footsteps echoing in the empty tunnel. It was nigh impossible to move silently while wearing armor. The Commander hoped that they would arrive to a deserted cave, so that they could plan an ambush as his brother knight had suggested, giving them more chance to take the creature unawares.\n\nAs they rounded the last bend, the Commander stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide. He heard gasps from his Paladins, one of them muffling an exclamation.\n\n\"Have your eyes ever beheld such a thing?\" Alder asked, his awe leaving him breathless. Before them was a cavern the scale of a cathedral, held up by rock pillars as thick around as the trunk of a sturdy oak, lit only by a ring of flickering torches that adorned the cave wall. The cave was impressive enough, but that wasn't the sight that had everyone so captivated.\n\nIn the center of the room was a mountain of treasure, so large that the glittering coins that made up its mass seemed no bigger than grains of sand. Bejeweled crowns and scepters glittered, precious stones reflecting the wavering firelight, riches beyond imagining just sitting out in the open. Even the Commander found himself bewitched for a moment, but his mind soon turned to his holy purpose, and he steeled his heart against the wondrous sight.\n\n\"Stay alert,\" he whispered, inching forward with the dragonhorn pike resting atop his shield. \"Do not allow yourselves to become distracted.\"\n\nThey entered the cavern proper, turning their heads this way and that, searching for any sign of the dragon. It was surely too large to hide itself, even in such an expansive cave. The shepherd that they had met down in the village and the mercenary in the foothills had given slightly different size estimates, but there was nothing approaching forty feet in here\u2026\n\nAfter a good few minutes of searching, they finally felt safe enough to let their guard down, the Commander lowering his shield and removing his stifling helmet. The Paladin that had been holding the torch set it down on the floor, the cavern was lit well enough already.\n\n\"It seems clear,\" he said, turning to appraise his surroundings one more time. \"Rowen, Alden, I want you positioned near the cavern's entrance. Aim your net right across the mouth. Gregory, behind the pillar over there, try not to draw its attention lest it attempt to interrupt your spellcasting. The rest of you, on me. It falls upon us to distract it until our comrades can do their jobs.\"\n\n\"Commander!\" Rowen shouted, pointing behind him. The Commander spun around, turning to see a short, slight woman standing on the rock beside the pile of treasure. She had auburn hair, her clothing tattered, her feet bare and caked with dirt. She looked haggard, her green eyes sunken in their sockets. Where had she come from? It was as though she had just appeared from the darkness. A hidden side tunnel, perhaps?\n\n\"It's just a girl?\" Alden asked, taking a step forwards. The Commander waved him back, bringing up his shield as the woman stared at him.\n\n\"What are you doing here, girl?\" the Commander asked suspiciously.\n\n\"The wyrm took me captive,\" she replied, \"have you come to rescue me? Will you take me back to my parents down in the village?\" A tear rolled down her cheek, and she took a step closer to the captain, her arms outstretched. \"Oh, thank you, Paladins. Thank you!\"\n\nThe Knight Commander met her with his pike, the pointed tip pressing up against her throat.\n\n\"Commander!\" Gregory exclaimed, \"what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Begin your incantation, Lieutenant Gregory,\" he replied. \"We have ourselves a dragon.\"\n\nThe young girl's face split into a wide grin, exposing rows of sharp teeth that looked far too large for her head, her green eyes taking on an amber hue as her pupils contracted into reptilian slits. There was a rush of flame that sent the Commander staggering backwards, the tattered garments that she had been wearing evaporating into a cloud of ash to leave her naked. Her pale skin was already cracking, taking on an unhealthy, blue tinge. It transformed into rough scales before his eyes, the dragon growing by inches with every second that passed. A long, heavy tail slapped on the ground, a pair of bat-like wings unfurling from her shoulders, her face elongating as long horns sprouted from her flowing hair.\n\n\"Attack!\" the Commander yelled, lunging at the beast with his pike. Even in her half-polymorphed state, she was agile enough to dodge his strike, perhaps sensing the material that it was wrought from. She swung her tail, already a good eight feet long, slamming it into his shield with the force of a war hammer. The blow sent him reeling, but he stood fast, two of his brothers rushing in to help.\n\nThey took up position at his flanks and began to jab at her with their spears, and these she didn't even care to avoid, letting their steel tips glance off her tough hide. She expanded, growing thicker and heavier, dropping to all fours as her neck elongated to take on the appearance of a giant snake. This was what had been described to them, a beast of thirty feet at least. Her shimmering scales overlapped to create an impenetrable barrier, black fumes billowing from her nostrils like smoke from a furnace, the sharp quills that ran down her spine rattling in a threat display.\n\nShe reared back on her hind legs, filling her lungs, her barrel chest inflating.\n\n\"Take cover!\" the Commander shouted, \"it means to burn us!\"\n\nThe dragon belched a stream of roaring flames, expanding before her in a cone, splashing against the rock floor almost like a liquid. The Paladins took refuge behind their shields, the heat of it making the steel glow red-hot, cooking the very air around them. It was like standing in a pyre, the Commander could feel his armor heating up, sweat pouring from his skin as black smog choked the air.\n\nThe beast finally relented, dark fumes pouring from her open jaws, pearly teeth as long as daggers on display. She stared right at the Commander with her blazing eyes, like a pair of hot coals, fierce and intense. It was as the Archivists had warned, there was intelligence behind those reptilian eyes, awareness. They had tried to set a trap for the creature without ever realizing that the trap had already been sprung.\n\nHe chanced a glance over his shoulder, seeing that Gregory had taken cover behind a pillar, leafing through his spellbook as he no doubt spoke the incantations beneath his winged helmet. Alden and Rowen were still near the entrance to the cavern, their weapons aimed. He would have to give the crossbowmen a clear shot. If that net caught one of the Paladins instead of the dragon, then the fight would be over.\n\nThe beast charged at them, her footsteps shaking the ground, swinging her clawed forelimb at the brother who was standing to the Commander's left. The man was lifted clear off his feet, the blow leaving deep grooves in his shield, sending him clattering to the ground a few feet away.\n\nShe opened her slavering jaws, bring them down towards the Commander, who blocked the bite with his tower shield. The dragon's great mouth closed around it, the serrated, backwards-curving teeth hooking around the top and bottom. The metal creaked as the pressure began to bend it, its hot breath washing over him, its winding tongue lashing at the metal. The monster tore it from his arm, shaking it like a dog with a bone, throwing it across the room where it bounced off the far wall as though it weighed no more than a toy.\n\nThanking the Gods that his adversary had not fractured his arm into a dozen pieces, the Commander struck back, his dragonhorn pike jabbing his assailant in the shoulder. It pierced the layers of blue-green scales just above where the forelimb joined the body, dark blood seeping from the wound, the dragon recoiling with a reptilian hiss of pain.\n\n\"How is it?\" the Commander yelled over the thunderclap of its massive feet. \"I'll wager that nobody has shed your blood in eons!\"\n\nThe dragon narrowed her fiery eyes at him, her lips pulling back in an eerily human smile, a tongue as long as his arm escaping to wet a pair of scaly lips.\n\n\"You aren't the first mortal to make an attempt on my life this week, Paladin.\" Her voice was a deep, booming contralto, oddly feminine. \"Nor will you fare any better than he did. Leave now, or be destroyed.\"\n\n\"It speaks?\" one of the Lieutenants whispered, disbelieving.\n\n\"Of course I speak, you fool,\" the dragon spat as she turned her massive head in the Lieutenant's direction. \"Ignorant, scurrying things, will you never leave me in peace?\"\n\n\"The Paladin Order has condemned you to die, foul beast,\" the Commander shot back. \"Your very existence is an affront to the Gods. No more will you terrorize the people of this valley!\"\n\n\"Your Gods are an affront,\" she snarled, rearing up on her hind legs. She inhaled a great gulp of air, preparing to vomit flame once more. Just then, Gregory leapt out from behind the refuge of his pillar, shouting the final words of his incantation as he pointed his gauntleted hand at the dragon. There was a flash of blue light that made the Commander avert his eyes for a moment, and when he dared to look again, the dragon was falling back to her four-legged posture. Her eyes were wide, confused. Her mouth was agape, her chest heaving like a cat that was trying to cough up a fur ball. She raised a forelimb to claw at her neck, the smoke that poured from her nostrils taking on a different quality, more like steam than coal fire. The burning torches that ringed the cave petered out abruptly, plunging them into darkness, save for the single torch that the Paladins had brought with them. They must have been magical in origin.\n\nRather than flames, from the dragon's mouth came a jet of water, a slurry of what looked like partially melted ice. The great creature gagged and coughed, turning her furious eyes back towards the Commander.\n\n\"What...did you do?\" she sputtered. \"Frost magic? How..?\"\n\n\"Now!\" the Knight Commander shouted, turning towards the Paladin to his left and leaping at him. He knocked his companion to the ground, the dragon watching them with confusion, before noticing the two crossbowmen that were aiming their weapons at her from across the cavern. They fired in unison, the gossamer net dragged through the air by the two bolts, falling over the beast like a curtain.\n\nIt clung to her wings with its sticky coating, entangling them, large enough to cover her head and most of her tail in a shimmering layer. She began to struggle, hissing like an angry snake and spewing boiling steam as she rampaged across the cavern, her powerful tail knocking over one of the stone columns and sending it toppling to the ground with a tremendous crash.\n\nThe spider silk was already constricting, growing tighter the more she tried to fight it. It trapped her wings against her back, forcing her to bend her neck towards her belly, her four flailing limbs becoming tangled. She crashed to the ground, her own momentum carrying her headlong into her pile of treasure, sending a tidal wave of coins scattering across the room. Curled up into a seizing ball, she lay still, her long body partially resting atop her hoard. She glared at them with her glowing eyes, her head upside-down relative to the ground, growling like a giant wolf as a slurry of melting ice poured from her jaws.\n\nThe Commander began to walk towards her, his companions helping the fallen Paladin to his feet. He took off his helmet, holding it under his arm as he approached, the dragon's fiery eyes meeting his. The net had worked perfectly, she was completely immobilized, hopelessly tangled in strands that were tougher than any alloy that humankind could produce. She struggled again as he neared her, sending more coins tumbling from the pile, only the last foot of her tail free of her bonds.\n\n\"Spiderfolk silk,\" she hissed, \"I would not have believed that any still existed...\"\n\nThe creature was curled up, almost in a fetal position due to the tight net, its forelimbs covering its smooth underbelly.\n\n\"Expose your heart to me, dragon,\" the Commander barked as he aimed his pike like a javelin. \"Don't make me stick you like a boar, we need not drag this out any longer than we have to.\"\n\n\"And what do you hope to achieve by this?\" she hissed, the boiling water that spewed from her mouth pooling on the rock below. \"Will you use my horns to forge more weapons, my scales to make wards, my blood for pyromancy? Or is it simply greed that motivates you?\"\n\n\"The dragons are written of in the holy scriptures,\" he replied. \"They were tyrants and despots, wielding their power to topple kingdoms, and to enslave men. You're a creature of greed, covetous and deceptive. The Gods will not suffer your kind to live.\"\n\n\"Half-truths and hearsay,\" the dragon rumbled, her voice dripping with venom. \"Very well then, spear me with that severed horn. Kill another piece of your history, fumble blindly in the dark as you descend further and further into ignorance.\"\n\nThe Commander was startled as a few of the torches that lined the walls flared to life again, their flames sputtering and weak.\n\n\"Do not delay, my Lord!\" Gregory called to him from across the cave. \"The spell cannot stifle the beast's magic for more than a few minutes longer!\"\n\n\"I'd say a prayer for your soul, dragon,\" the Commander said solemnly as he gripped the haft of his pike. \"If I thought that you had one...\"\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nThe Commander and his Paladins spun around, what little light that was cast by the torches illuminating an armored figure who was standing at the entrance to the cavern. His garniture was made from dull steel, pocked with marks and scratches, the components fitting him poorly. It was munition armor, dirty and worn through years of use. It must be the hedge knight that they had encountered in the foothills, but what was he doing here?"
            },
            {
                "title": "HEART OF GOLD",
                "text": "\"Stop!\" Iden shouted, the Paladins turning to look back at him. He had arrived just in time, one of the knights was pointing some kind of ornate spear at Isabelle, her massive body entangled in a shimmering net that looked as if it was woven from fine silk. They hadn't been exaggerating their capabilities, they had defeated the dragon handily. Her burning eyes met his, but it was hard to gauge what she was feeling.\n\nThere were two knights with crossbows standing near the entrance to the cavern, and they dropped their weapons, their gauntleted hands moving to the swords on their hips. Another Paladin was standing to one side with a book, and there were two more wielding tower shields and spears. The last one had removed his helmet, the same one who was pointing the strange looking pike at Isabelle's underbelly. He must be their leader.\n\n\"State your business,\" the one without the helmet demanded, his companions bristling. He had brown hair that was cropped short for convenience, a strong jaw, and a pair of piercing, blue eyes. His skin was tanned and leathery, and he had a prominent scar on his cheek. His shining armor fit him like a glove, and he carried himself with more confidence than his companions. Iden's instincts warned him that the knight was a seasoned warrior, not merely the son of some rich Lord who had been promoted beyond his station.\n\n\"I have business with that dragon,\" Iden replied, one hand resting on the hilt of his sheathed sword as he gestured towards Isabelle with the other. \"I'll thank you to leave it be.\"\n\nThe Paladins looked to their leader, confused, the man turning around to face the intruder. The twisted point of his pike left Isabelle's underbelly, and he planted the haft against the ground, looking Iden up and down disdainfully.\n\n\"If you seek to claim the bounty, Hedge Knight, then you've arrived too late. This creature's carcass is the property of the Paladin Order, and its hoard is bound for our treasury.\"\n\n\"Yeah...\" Iden muttered, sucking in a breath through his teeth as though he was about to deliver some bad news. He too had elected to go without a helmet. With so many adversaries, he needed all of the situational awareness that he could get. \"That's going to be a problem. This dragon is not what it appears to be, it's a person, as intelligent as you or I. Moreso than I, in fact. It...she, isn't some kind of rampaging, wild animal. That was my assumption, too. She showed me mercy and compassion, those are not the traits of an evil creature. Whatever reasons that you might have for killing her, they're not justified.\"\n\n\"Dragons deceive,\" the Paladin replied sternly. \"They change their shape to go unnoticed, to spy and to evade the righteous. They might take the form of a lost child to gain your sympathy, only to turn on you in your moment of vulnerability. They lie and manipulate, spreading corruption wherever they go, bending mortal men to their will. If this wretched creature showed you mercy, then it was merely a means to an end, they have no compassion for those who they see as being beneath them.\"\n\n\"And how do you know that?\" Iden shot back, \"have you ever had a conversation with a dragon?\"\n\n\"Because it is written in the archives, and in the scriptures,\" he explained. \"The Order's historical records go back hundreds of years, our information comes from the firsthand accounts of those who suffered under the heel of these beasts centuries ago. You are playing a dangerous game, sellsword. It is not wise to come between a Paladin and his holy purpose. Leave now, and you shall be spared.\"\n\n\"If I were you, I'd just be on my way and write this one off as a loss,\" Iden said as he gripped the hilt of his sword more tightly. \"I don't want this to come to blows.\"\n\n\"Kill this vulture,\" the Paladin muttered, waving his hand dismissively. \"I have no patience for this, we have important work to do.\"\n\nThe two knights who were posted by the entrance to the cave unsheathed their swords, Iden responding in kind, gripping the hilt with both hands as they squared off. He'd sell his own mother for a buckler right about now, but the only shield that he had brought on his expedition was the tower shield, and it wouldn't serve any purpose in a fight like this. He had hoped that he might be able to avoid a confrontation if he could convince the Paladins of Isabelle's innocence, but they might as well be deaf. Trying to dissuade a Paladin from their appointed task was like talking to a wall, though a wall was more liable to change its mind\u2026\n\nHe took up a defensive posture, his eyes darting between the two helmeted figures as they began to close in on him, their heavy armor clanking with each step. They were aggressive, overconfident, no doubt certain they would prevail against this lowly mercenary in his dented garniture. His armor was inferior to theirs, both in terms of quality and coverage. They were clad in burnished steel from head to toe, but while it gave them formidable resilience, it also made them heavy and limited their range of motion.\n\nContrary to what some might believe, duels between swordsmen were not lengthy affairs. It often took a mere handful of moves to bring down an opponent, accomplished in a few blinks of an eye. What Iden lacked in armor, he would make up for with his decades of experience, experience that he could already tell that his enemies lacked.\n\nIden gripped the blade of his sword with one gauntleted hand, shortening the effective length of his weapon, a technique known as half-swording. It would give him more leverage, and it would allow him to deliver stronger and more accurate thrusts to the less heavily armored areas of his foes. Cutting and cleaving were virtually useless when facing off against an assailant who was wearing full plate armor.\n\nThe knight to his left raised his sword above his head as high as his heavy pauldron would allow, swinging it down towards Iden's shoulder. Iden weathered the blow, his chainmail glove preventing the strike from driving the edge of his own blade into his palm, throwing the Paladin off-balance as he deflected it. Before the knight had a chance to steady himself, Iden maneuvered the point of his sword, his two-handed grip giving him exceptional control. He threw all of his strength into a thrust, the sharp edge slipping into the joint in the Paladin's armor between the helmet and the breastplate, the mail beneath providing little protection against the tapered blade.\n\nThe Paladin loosed a pained gurgle, dropping his weapon and falling to his knees, spurts of crimson blood staining his white breastplate as he made a futile attempt to stem the bleeding. The other Paladins watched in stunned silence, the expression on their leader's face changing from one of disdain, to one of concern.\n\nThe second knight loosed a war cry and charged at Iden, set on avenging his fallen brother, but he was easily side-stepped. His momentum carried him a few steps further than he had likely intended, and when he wheeled around to face his opponent, Iden was already upon him. He swung his sword like an axe, gripping the blade with both hands, striking the Paladin's helmet with the pommel. The blow rang it like a bell, knocking the knight off-kilter, and the first strike was followed by a second that was just as vicious.\n\nThe knight swung his sword at Iden's belly, but it was easily parried, leaving him wide-open. Iden stepped in, punching the Paladin with his armored fist, his neck snapping back. A helmet was of little use if the head inside of it was being rattled around like a pair of dice in a cup.\n\nDazed, the knight began to lose his balance, Iden helping him along with a savage kick to the chest that knocked him onto his back. Before he could struggle to his feet, Iden aimed the point of his sword at the slot in his visor, gripping the crossguard for leverage with one hand as he pushed the blade through it. The knight ceased his struggling abruptly, Iden planting a boot on his chest as he strained to withdraw his sword.\n\n\"Murderer!\" the leader of the Paladins bellowed, waving back the three who remained as he stepped forward. He brandished the long pike with the gnarled point, gesturing with it, Iden meeting his furious gaze. \"You dare to defy the will of the Gods? You dare to rob these righteous men of their victory? They overcame a dragon today in service of their order, only to be slain by a brigand!\"\n\n\"I told you to fuck off!\" Iden shouted back, his voice echoing through the cave. \"I'll kill the lot of you if I have to.\"\n\nHe was startled as a few of the torches that ringed the cavern came to life, casting more flickering light on the scene.\n\n\"My Lord!\" the Paladin who had the leather-bound tome clasped in his hands called out. \"The spell is wearing off, we have precious little time before the dragon regains its magic!\"\n\nSo that was it, the Paladins had somehow interfered with Isabelle's magic. That was why she hadn't simply barbecued the intruders like a choice cut of meat, and why so many of the torches were now dim.\n\n\"I'll deal with this scoundrel myself,\" the Lord said, handing off his odd pike to one of his companions and drawing his sword from its scabbard.\n\n\"Just leave,\" Iden growled, \"I'll even let you recover your dead. I've killed many a Lord in my time, this won't end well for you.\"\n\nIt was somewhat of a bluff. The younger Paladins had been inexperienced and overconfident, but this one was different. Iden could see it in the way that he carried himself, the way that he handled his sword, the way that he moved in his suit of armor. It was one thing to face off against an idiot in a fancy raiment that had never suffered so much as a scuff, but quite another to fight an experienced warrior who knew how to move and fight. If they were closely matched when it came to their sword fighting skills, then it might well be the quality of their armor that decided the outcome, and the Paladin had Iden hopelessly outmatched in that regard.\n\n\"Those were good men,\" the knight snarled, the two beginning to circle one another. \"Their souls will meet on the shores of Paradise, but yours...yours will be damned, and I will be the one who damns it.\"\n\n\"It's no fault of mine that you won't listen to reason,\" Iden snapped. \"You call me a murderer, but you're trying to kill an innocent person who has done you no wrong.\"\n\n\"That dragon may have lived a hundred human lifetimes,\" the Paladin replied. \"You have no idea what deeds it has done, nor what evil it might do in the future.\"\n\n\"So you're willing to murder people based on what they might do?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"Even if a fox had not eaten any chickens that I knew of, I would not lead it to a hen house.\"\n\nThe knight surprised him, lunging with the tip of his short sword, aiming for his throat. Iden reacted just in time, parrying the blow, the Paladin scarcely flinching. It had been a probing strike, his enemy was testing his defenses, his reflexes.\n\n\"I underestimated you once, sellsword, and it cost me the lives of two of my men. I will not make that same mistake again.\"\n\nHe took advantage of Iden's uncertainty, charging at him, throwing his weight into a powerful elbow strike. Iden blocked it, but the Paladin followed it up with a swift pommel strike to his unarmored face, collapsing his nose. The two men grappled for a moment, their armor clashing, too close together to make effective use of their swords.\n\nThe knight threw Iden back, the two of them squaring off again, the blood from his nose staining both of their breastplates. It wasn't the first time that Iden had broken it, and he fought through the pain, purple bruises already spreading beneath his eyes. He had to take the initiative. If the knight kept him on the defensive, then he would have no chance of winning. What he wouldn't have given for any other weapon than a sword right now. War hammers, maces, spears. Almost anything was better than a sword when it came to fighting someone wearing armor, but both he and the Paladin had come equipped to fight dragons, not their fellow man.\n\nHe stepped forward, gripping the Paladin's blade in his hand, pulling it up and away from him as he drove his own sword towards his unarmored underarm. The knight responded in kind, gripping Iden's blade just above the crossguard and forcing it down, bringing his knee up towards his groin. His codpiece mercifully absorbed the impact, but the strike was still enough to send him reeling. The Paladin took advantage to deliver another swift punch to his face, Iden dodging out of range, taking up a defensive stance. There was no such thing as honor in a fight for one's life, even amongst the Paladins.\n\nIden had to take control of the encounter, he wasn't as young as he once was, and he would tire before long. He charged in, locking the knight in a sword fight, their steel flashing as they parried and riposted. They danced back and forth, exchanging blows, each trying to disarm the other. Again it devolved into a brawl as the two men closed, grappling with their weapons, knees and elbows impacting metal. Iden was hit in the chest with his adversary's pommel, the impact winding him even through the armor. The Paladin tried to trip him, but Iden recovered, gripping his blade in the half-swording stance and attempting to drive the point towards his throat.\n\nHis opponent deflected the sword with his own and then leaned in to punch Iden in the face with his gauntleted fist. Iden stumbled back, dazed, trying to blink away the bleariness in his eyes as his ruined nose began to gush blood again. He moved back, the knight keeping the pressure on him, Iden scarcely able to keep up. Iden gripped his sword by the blade with both hands, swinging the weapon like a hammer, aiming for the Paladin's exposed head. Again it was deflected, the knight very nearly succeeding in disarming him.\n\nThere was just no way through that damned armor. Unlike his own, there were no breaks in it besides for the throat and the underarms, and the Paladin was skilled enough to keep those protected. He couldn't even stab the man in the foot, he was wearing sabatons.\n\nThey were both distracted as more of the torches that ringed the room burst into flames, the Paladin with the book of spells looking around nervously.\n\n\"My Lord!\" he began, their leader cutting him off impatiently.\n\n\"I know, Gregory, I know! I've almost finished with this cur. Robert, take the damned spear and finish off the dragon in my stead, we're out of time.\"\n\nIden looked past the Paladin frantically as the one who he had referred to as Robert moved towards Isabelle. It was the knight that he had passed the strange pike to before engaging Iden. He remembered what the Paladin had told him down in the foothills, that there was only one weapon capable of piercing a dragon's hide, a pike with a tip made from dragonhorn.\n\nIden felt a new surge of adrenaline course through his veins, a kind of panic overtaking him. He too was out of time, he had to finish this right now, or both he and Isabelle would meet their end in this cavern. He lunged, beating the Paladin with his sword with a series of vicious overhead blows. It did little damage, but it forced the knight to retreat, putting him on the defensive.\n\n\"Iden!\" he heard Isabelle call out to him, her voice strained as though it too was fighting against the gossamer net. There was an odd gurgling quality to her booming speech, almost like her mouth was full of water. \"This is all that I can do!\"\n\nAs he began to wonder what she meant, an orange glow caught his eye. He looked down at the blade of his sword, the steel burning steadily brighter, as though it had just been pulled from the fires of a forge. It burst into flames, startling him so much that he almost dropped it, globs of molten metal dripping to the floor below. It was so hot that he had to hold it at arm's length, but fortunately, the hilt was not heating up in the same way that the blade was. He wasn't going to be half-swording with this thing.\n\nIt was Isabelle's magic. Just as she had lit the torches, she had used her power over fire to enchant his blade.\n\nThe Paladin eyed it warily, keeping his gaze fixed on Iden as he called to his comrade.\n\n\"Gregory, do something about this!\"\n\nThe knight leafed through his book of spells frantically, his eyes scanning the pages, his expression increasingly panicked.\n\n\"What incantation?\" he yelled back. \"I don't...the archivists didn't...I only know the spell for silencing the dragon!\"\n\n\"Then cast it again! The bloody thing has almost regained its full strength!\"\n\nIden wasn't about to wait around for them to cast more of their spells, wielding his flaming sword as he lunged at the Paladin Commander. The knight blocked his blade but was showered with globs of molten metal, bonding with his armor as they cooled. None of it landed on his face, but it gave Iden an idea. He whipped his sword, spraying the Paladin with more burning flecks of metal, and he raised his arms to protect his eyes.\n\nIden darted in, slashing at his breastplate experimentally. His suspicions were confirmed, the intense heat of his blade rending the immaculate steel, leaving a blackened tear in its wake. It was going straight through, Isabelle had given him the tool that he needed to gain the upper hand.\n\nHe gave the Paladin no time to adapt, driving the burning blade straight through his thigh, the cuisse armor providing no more protection than tanned leather. Iden smelled burning flesh, the knight bellowing as he dropped to one knee, smoke rising from the wound. Iden withdrew his sword, noting that there wasn't a drop of blood. The intense heat had cauterized it.\n\nThe knight tried to rise to his feet, but faltered, falling back to the ground.\n\n\"Yield!\" Iden demanded, raising his sword as he prepared to deliver a killing blow. \"Tell your men to stand down right now!\"\n\n\"Slay the dragon before it's too late!\" the Paladin shouted. \"Carry out the mission!\"\n\nIden drove his blade into the kneeling knight's neck, burying it up to the hilt, the flaming sword passing through flesh and bone like butter. The Paladin's eyes lost their focus, a wisp of smoke rising from his mouth as his jaw hung agape, dead so quickly that he scarcely had time to react. Iden withdrew the sword, the Commander's body slumping to the ground at his feet.\n\nThe three remaining Paladins had been transfixed by the fight, but now the one who was wielding the pike turned and made for Isabelle, intent on carrying out his Commander's final order. Iden raced to intercept him, but he felt like he was in a nightmare, running in slow motion as he watched the knight raise the weapon like a javelin.\n\nIsabelle opened her mouth, her head upside-down relative to the floor, boiling water pouring between her long fangs. She spewed a plume of steam, unable to even turn her head in the direction of her assailant. The Paladin drove the pointed tip of his weapon at her chest, but her forelimb was in the way, the tight mesh trapping it tight against her body. She roared in pain as it penetrated her scales, drawing crimson blood, the knight pulling back for a second attempt.\n\nThe steam that billowed from her maw took on a darker hue, the last of the water evaporating, a fiery glow illuminating her iridescent scales and reflecting off the pile of gold that she was sprawled on top of. Whatever magic the Paladins had employed had worn off, and Isabelle vomited a cloud of flames, the fire licking across her own body as she was engulfed in the blaze. A wall of black fumes obscured her, Iden skidding to a halt as he felt the heat of it on his face, even from halfway across the chamber.\n\nRobert retreated, the flames too hot to brave, staggering away from her as he took refuge behind his tower shield. The thundering of her footsteps told Iden that she had escaped her bonds before he had even seen her, the great beast emerging from the flames, flapping her wings and waving her horned head back and forth as she threw off the last vestiges of the silvery net. Fragments of it burned as they wafted through the air, floating like embers from a campfire.\n\nShe turned her glowing, reptilian eyes towards Robert, the knight's helmet emerging to peek over his shield. Iden expected him to turn tail, but instead, he raised his dragonhorn pike and charged at her.\n\nIsabelle showed him no mercy, filling her lungs, and then thrusting her head towards him on her flexible neck. Her jaws opened wide, the fiery glow in the reaches of her throat becoming a spreading cone of flame. The knight was engulfed, his scream drowned out by the roar of the blaze, Iden able to make out his dark silhouette against the orange glare as he slowly sank to the ground. When the flames subsided, and the smoke cleared, all that was left was a suit of armor lying on the cave floor. Smoke rose from its every joint as the body inside of it cooked, the steel glowing a dull orange.\n\nTwo Paladins remained, the nearest one throwing down his spear and raising his hands in surrender. Gregory, the one with the spellbook, emerged from his hiding place behind one of the stone pillars. He drew his sword from its scabbard and threw it to the ground with a clatter, dropping his tome and following suit as he raised his hands.\n\nIden glanced at Isabelle, wondering if she might simply continue her rampage despite their surrender. Instead, she merely glared at them, twin plumes of smoke rising from her nostrils.\n\n\"Leave,\" Iden demanded, gesturing to the tunnel that led out of the cavern with his flaming sword. \"And don't come back.\"\n\nThe two remaining Paladins didn't need to be told twice, hurrying to the exit, one of them pausing briefly at the mouth of the tunnel to look back before scurrying up the dingy passageway.\n\nIden exhaled, letting his sword fall to the floor, the blade still so hot that it bent on contact with the rock. He touched his fingers against his face experimentally, wincing as a flare of pain shot through his nose. He turned to face Isabelle, seeing that she had returned to her human form. She was clad in a less provocative outfit, having foregone the loose blouse and the leather corset of her usual attire.\n\n\"You came back,\" she said, her tone neutral. It was hard for Iden to gauge whether she was relieved, or still angry with him.\n\n\"Thought I'd give the whole redemption thing a go,\" he replied, standing there stupidly with his face covered in blood. \"I brought your books back. I'm...sorry that I took them.\"\n\n\"What changed your mind?\" she asked. \"You could have been long gone by now, I wasn't expecting to see you again.\"\n\n\"I made it down to the foothills, where I met the Paladins. They told me that they were coming to kill you, and I suppose that I was right to assume that they might succeed. But besides that, I just felt...bad. The further away from you I got, the worse it became.\"\n\n\"Well-adjusted people would call that a conscience,\" she said, failing to suppress a smirk. \"I suppose I should be thanking you. If you hadn't come to my rescue, I would certainly have been killed. Those Paladins knew exactly what they were doing.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just my conscience,\" he said, Isabelle watching him curiously with her green eyes. \"I felt like I had left something behind up here, a part of myself. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed your company until it was too late.\"\n\nHe began to walk over to the bookshelves, Isabelle following behind him silently. He knelt, and opened his pack, returning the dusty tomes to their respective places. He handed the last one to Isabelle, who turned it over to examine the red leather cover.\n\n\"De Mercier,\" she muttered, clutching it against her breast protectively.\n\n\"I might never be a warrior poet,\" Iden began, \"but it's like you said. I can choose what kind of person I want to be, and I don't want to be the kind of person who steals from his friends, who betrays people's trust. Whatever money I might have gotten for these books wouldn't be worth the harm that it would do to you, and to me...\"\n\nHe slung his pack over his back and rose to his feet, Isabelle keeping her eyes on him as she cradled her book like it was a lost child.\n\n\"I suppose I'll be going now,\" he muttered, turning his gaze to the ground. \"I hate to ask you this, I really do, but may I keep a pocketful of gold? It's not out of any greed, just enough to see me to my next job. Without it, I fear that I might starve.\"\n\n\"I...suppose so,\" Isabelle replied hesitantly, \"let's call it a bodyguard's wage. I'd be dead without you, after all. But before you go...\"\n\nShe returned her book to its shelf, then turned and headed towards her pile. She rummaged for a minute or two, returning with a roll of cotton bandages. She had not conjured this fabric, it was as real as he was.\n\n\"Oh, Iden,\" she mumbled as she reached up to grip his face in her hand. She turned it to the left, then to the right, examining his broken nose and the bruises that had spread around his eyes. \"You're a mess. I'll do what I can, come with me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Iden followed Isabelle down one of the snaking passages, arriving at the spring where they had so often bathed together. She had him sit beside the pool, where she filled a jug with the clear water, pouring it over his face to wash away the drying blood. He didn't protest, gritting his teeth as she gripped his crooked nose. She snapped the cartilage back into place, a wave of pain making him recoil. She tore off two pieces of cotton, stuffing them into his nostrils to stem the fresh bleeding, and then wrapped a length of the bandage around his face.\n\n\"I have something that might help with the pain,\" she began, but Iden shook his head.\n\n\"I've had worse, my nose has been broken more times than I can count.\"\n\n\"You fought well,\" she said, staring into the shimmering pool. \"You killed those two Paladins without taking so much as a scratch, but you knew that you couldn't win, didn't you? Without my magic, you wouldn't have stood a chance against their commander, and you're experienced enough to have known that. In fact, you must have planned to meet all six of them head-on, it was a stroke of luck that you only had to fight two at once. What were you thinking?\"\n\n\"That you didn't deserve to die,\" he replied, shrugging his armored shoulders. \"I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I hadn't at least tried to help. My own life isn't worth much these days.\"\n\n\"Even though you had a rucksack full of loot, you climbed all the way back up here, and started a fight that you couldn't possibly have expected to win, just for my sake?\"\n\n\"Isabelle...you're the only person who's ever valued me for anything other than my sword arm, the only one who has ever believed that I could be more than just a killer for hire. Before I met you, I didn't even know that there was anything more to aspire to. I suppose I felt as though...if I let you die, then everything that you saw in me would die with you.\"\n\n\"Iden...\" Isabelle began, but her voice trailed off.\n\n\"I figure we're probably square now,\" he said, rising to his feet. Isabelle looked back at him as he readjusted his pack, touching his fingers against his bandages. \"I should get going, I'd like to make it down from the peak while there's still some light left. I don't fancy tackling all those loose rocks and snowdrifts in the dark.\"\n\n\"You're leaving?\" Isabelle asked, her expression still neutral.\n\n\"I'll have to seek my fortune elsewhere. You should leave too,\" he added solemnly. \"The Paladins will send a whole army to avenge their fallen brothers. Go somewhere remote, somewhere that you won't be troubled by the likes of us mortals.\"\n\nHe began to walk up the tunnel that led into the main cavern, but soon heard the sound of bare feet on rock echoing through the passage. He felt Isabelle's hand on his pauldron, and he looked back over his shoulder to see her standing behind him.\n\n\"Please don't leave,\" she said, the plea coming across more urgent than she had perhaps intended. \"I don't want you to go.\"\n\n\"But I lied to you, I stole from you,\" he replied as he turned to face her. She peered up at him with her green eyes, her lower lip trembling, a head shorter than him in her human form. \"I betrayed you.\"\n\n\"You made bad decisions, yes, but you corrected them. You hurt me, but you made amends. You made the decision to be better than you are, Iden. You're every bit the man that de Mercier was.\"\n\nHe opened his mouth to reply, but he was silenced by her kiss, Isabelle standing on her toes and hooking her slim fingers around the collar of his breastplate to reach him. It was soothing, affectionate, the strokes of her tongue slow and measured. When she pulled away, there was a smile on her face, and tears in her eyes.\n\n\"You taste of blood,\" she chuckled. \"Won't you stay here, with me? You've been so concerned with finding your fortune that you've been blind to what is right before your eyes. You can't see the forest for the trees.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked.\n\n\"You spoke of wanting to leave the life of a sellsword behind you, of siring an army of children. You said that your quest for riches was merely a means to an end. Iden,\" she continued, clutching her arm meekly as she stared at her feet. \"When I appeared to you as Isabelle, I will admit that my intentions were frivolous. I was bored, lonely, and you were a welcome diversion. But I saw something more in you, a kindness, a gentleness that I hoped to coax out of you in time. When you stole my books and fled, I thought that I had failed, that you were not the man that I had thought you to be.\"\n\nNow her gaze rose to meet his again, the emerald-green of her irises reflecting the wavering light of the torches that lined the stone walls.\n\n\"Yet that act was the greatest test of your character. When faced with the choice of taking the path of least resistance, or of acting selflessly, you chose the latter.\"\n\nShe placed a hand on his stubbly cheek, her skin smooth and soft against his.\n\n\"I haven't seen another dragon for so long that I can scarcely remember what they're like,\" she continued, a hint of bitterness creeping into her voice. \"And yet I yearn for companionship as any woman does. I pine for a family of my own, something that I thought might no longer be possible for me. What mortal man would have me, knowing what I truly am? Iden...if I'm being presumptuous, if I'm letting my imagination run wild, then tell me now. Spare me from this terrible uncertainty.\"\n\n\"We...can do that?\" he asked, his eyes wide. \"A human and a dragon can...\"\n\n\"Yes, though not in this form,\" she replied hastily. \"I would not have attempted to entrap you.\"\n\n\"Where would we live?\" he asked, \"here?\"\n\n\"We could have the estate that you spoke of, enough land that no one would bother us, our children would want for nothing. If you were with me, then we could pass as a retired sellsword and his young wife. Through you, I could simply buy my meals as I did in the old days, we could even purchase grazing land so that we might raise our own livestock. As I once told you, I'm happy to part with my gold if it means obtaining something of greater value, and what could have more value than our happiness?\"\n\n\"Even if you hadn't a single coin to your name, and there wasn't a hope of our union bearing fruit, how could I ever refuse you?\" Iden replied.\n\nTears rolled down her cheeks as he wrapped his arms around her, hugging her against his breastplate. He nestled his bandaged face in her flowing, auburn hair, lamenting that he couldn't breathe in her wonderful scent. After a few moments, he realized how uncomfortable his armor must be, releasing her from his grasp to see her beaming up at him with rosy cheeks.\n\n\"So...what do we do now?\" he asked, Isabelle wiping her eyes on her sleeve.\n\n\"It will take some time for the Paladins to return with word of their defeat, and more time still before the Order can assemble a force to seek revenge. We have a little while yet before we have to start moving, so let's relax for a few days. Once you've regained your strength, we can decide what to do next. I'm afraid that when it comes to real estate, you probably have more experience than I do.\"\n\n\"You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little...dumbfounded,\" he replied. \"Two minutes ago I had nothing, I was at rock bottom. Now I have everything that I ever wanted, and a few things that I never would have imagined.\"\n\n\"Let's get you out of that armor and into something a little more comfortable,\" she said. \"And you'll be hungry after your bout, I'll get you something to eat.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" he chuckled, \"let's just take it easy for a little while. We've both been through a lot over the last few hours. Maybe we should take a dip in the spring?\"\n\n\"That...sounds like a good idea,\" Isabelle sighed. \"Sorry, my mind is racing.\"\n\n\"Come help me remove my armor,\" Iden said. \"A little time in the water will clear both of our heads.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Iden lounged in the warm water, one arm resting on the rocky shore, the other wrapped around Isabelle as she lay her head on his shoulder. The surface began to bubble again, more steam rising towards the stalactites that clung to the domed ceiling above them, Isabelle heating it whenever the temperature began to drop too much.\n\nThe warmth soothed his aching muscles, his body was covered in bruises from his fight, and he had to be careful to keep his bandaged face from getting wet. Isabelle's long hair floated beside him, her smooth skin pressed up against his, one of her small hands resting on his thigh.\n\nHe had expected the both of them to gush about their future together, to fantasize about what might come, to make more apologies for past mistakes. Instead, they had simply enjoyed each other's company for a while, peaceful and quiet.\n\n\"Do you mind if I polymorph?\" Isabelle asked, Iden opening his eyes to look down at her. \"I should see to my wounds.\"\n\n\"O-of course,\" he mumbled, \"I had no idea that there was anything wrong.\"\n\nShe left his side, wading deeper into the pool until she was floating in the center. Iden watched as she began to change, the sight routine to him now, her pale skin cracking into blue scales. She grew, horns and wings sprouting, her long tail emerging from beneath the water to float on the surface. As she grew heavier, her displacement made the water level rise, so large now that her body created waves that lapped gently against Iden's chest when she moved.\n\nBefore long, Isabelle had returned to her true length. As he had suspected, the pool was just large and deep enough that she could submerge her massive frame. Only the sharp quills that ran down her back and her folded wings were above the surface, her head rising up like a sea serpent on her flexible neck.\n\nNow he could better see her injuries. There was a deep cut on her right shoulder, and one on her left forelimb where the dragonhorn pike had penetrated her scales. Iden had thought her impervious to damage, at least where human strength was concerned, and so it was a little jarring to see her injured. Dark blood began to seep from the wounds, fogging the water around her.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" he asked. She was large, but the quantity of blood that was entering the pool was still alarming.\n\n\"The wounds are superficial,\" she replied, craning her long neck to examine them more closely.\n\n\"Is there something I can do? Do you...need anything?\"\n\n\"Unless you're hiding a healer who specializes in dragons in your pack, I don't think there's anything that you can do. I must cauterize these, please don't be alarmed. It will hurt, and I may...vocalize.\"\n\nIden braced himself as she pursed her lips over the cut on her shoulder, a bright jet of flame shooting from her mouth, filling the wound briefly before dissipating into a wisp of smoke. Isabelle growled, a sound so deep and powerful that it made the surface of the water ripple, the scent of charred flesh reaching Iden's nose. She repeated the process with the cut on her forelimb, then sank deeper into the water, letting it soothe the burns. It seemed that she was fireproof on the outside, but not on the inside.\n\n\"So what happens to those wounds when you become human again?\" he asked. \"Do you still feel them?\"\n\n\"My mortal form is created and destroyed as I please, it is a magical construct, but my true form must be given time to heal. It would be wise to remain in this state for a short while, at least until the flesh begins to knit. Dragons heal rather slowly compared to humans, our metabolisms are sluggish.\"\n\n\"Metabolisms?\" Iden wondered.\n\n\"We are long-lived, we eat infrequently, our hearts beat only twenty or thirty times per minute. All aspects of our lives run slower than those of a mortal. I trust that you won't mind too much if I remain this way, if only for a time.\"\n\n\"Why should I mind?\" he chuckled.\n\n\"Well...I designed Isabelle to draw the male gaze, to be appealing, sensual. I would not expect you to find anything appealing about a dragon,\" she said, smoke billowing from her snout as she relaxed with her head partially submerged. \"Mortal women are soft, fleshy, dainty. They have curves and bumps, soft hair, and their skin is smooth.\"\n\n\"But you weren't always that way when we made love,\" Iden said, wading a little closer to her in the pool. She was so large that she resembled a scaly island, her reptilian eyes tracking him as he drew nearer. \"Last time, you changed your form so much that I couldn't tell what was dragon, and what was human.\"\n\n\"You did like that, didn't you?\" she chuckled.\n\n\"Maybe it's just because it's all new to me, but there's something to be said for scales, and for claws. You can do things that no mortal woman can. Your tongue, your tail, I mean...\" He started to blush, Isabelle curling her scaly lips into a smile. She couldn't see his cheeks turning red beneath his bandage, but she could sense the heat. \"Can I touch you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she purred, \"I won't bite.\"\n\nIden swam a little closer, his feet leaving the smooth rock as he entered the deepest point of the pool, approaching her flank. He reached out a hand, stroking her rough hide. He had touched her scales before, of course. Even in her half-transformed state, the blue ones had been large and rough, but now they were even bigger. Each of the armored, overlapping plates was almost as large as his hand, shaped vaguely like a backwards-facing arrowhead with a subtle ridge that ran down the center. They were like jewels, shifting hues from blue to green depending on how they caught the light. They were so hard, but oddly flexible, there was some give when he pressed down on them.\n\nHe moved his hand lower, reaching her beige underside, submerged beneath the water. These were just as flush and as fine as they had been when they had last made love, and he felt blood rushing to his loins as he remembered the feeling of her inner thighs and her scaly mound on his lips and tongue.\n\nShe was just so impossibly massive, rising up before him like a sheer wall, only the steady expansion and contraction of her chest serving as proof that she hadn't been carved from solid stone. It was overwhelming in a way, her size and strength dwarfed him. She was more like a force of nature than a living thing.\n\n\"When I told you that I couldn't conceive a child as Isabelle, I hope that you understood the implication,\" she said. He looked up to see her head rise from the water, her flexible neck maneuvering it closer, her glowing eyes peering at him expectantly as water dripped from her lower jaw.\n\n\"I hadn't thought that far ahead,\" he replied, swallowing conspicuously as she exposed her sharp fangs in a smirk. \"Do you mean to say that we have to...as you are now? Is that even...how would we...can we fit together?\"\n\n\"We can,\" she replied simply.\n\n\"Do I at least get to be on top?\"\n\nShe laughed, the motion making waves in the pool.\n\n\"I appreciate your candor, Iden, but let's recuperate a little before we attempt anything quite so...acrobatic.\"\n\nHe turned to put his back to her, resting his head on her scaly flank, letting himself float in the water. She seemed pleased that he was so at ease around her, and he had a sneaking suspicion that she had been changing her form during their romantic encounters in order to slowly acclimate him to the idea of making love to her as she truly was. He couldn't say that her attempts had not succeeded."
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON RIDER",
                "text": "Iden dragged the body up the tunnel, the pristine armor that it was still wearing clanking as it scraped against the rock. He felt the chill wind against his face, the air becoming cooler and fresher, the light of the sun bathing him as he reached the mouth of the cave. He pulled the dead Paladin out onto the outcrop, the wind whipping his hair, and placed his foot on its breastplate.\n\n\"Guess I should...say a few words,\" he mumbled. \"I didn't know you, and you didn't know me. Can't say that I'm too sorry about what happened, on account of you trying to murder me and all, but I hope you'll find peace in the afterlife. I feel like there's a lesson to be learned in all this. Maybe something to do with tolerance, or perhaps with taking advantage of numerical superiority. I wanted to leave you guys in the cave so that your friends could find you and give you a proper burial once we're gone, but...you're starting to smell, so...off you go.\"\n\nIden rolled the body off the outcrop, where it tumbled down the snowy mountainside, settling in a heap with the three others. They were already being covered in a dusting of snow, they would probably be buried before tomorrow.\n\nHe brushed himself off and retreated back into the cave, arriving at the main chamber to see Isabelle sitting beside her pile like a giant dog begging for a treat, clasping something daintily between her giant claws.\n\n\"Alright, the last of the Paladins is...gone,\" he said. \"What have you got there?\"\n\n\"This is a rare book indeed!\" she said excitedly, her spiky quills rattling with what might have been an expression of glee. \"It's difficult to determine its exact age, but it was penned sometime during the late magical period, which puts it at around four hundred years old. It's a book of spells, written in the blood of a frost giant. I'd recognize that smell anywhere, even after all these years. The magic in the blood imbues the reader with a limited form of the creature's power.\"\n\n\"That's how they were able to snuff out your magic?\"\n\n\"Cryomancy, yes,\" she replied with a nod. \"They used it to quell the flames in my belly for a time. I'm amazed that such an artifact survived all these years, what else do the Paladins have stashed deep in their vaults?\"\n\n\"What about this thing?\" Iden asked, stooping to retrieve the odd pike. It was surprisingly light, impeccably balanced, the hilt made from a decorative alloy that he didn't recognize.\n\n\"Dragonhorn,\" she said solemnly. \"One of the only things sharp enough to pierce a dragon's scales. It was sourced from one of my fallen kin. Imagine someone murdering a relative of yours, and then sharpening their femur with the intent to kill you with it, and that's about how seeing a dragonhorn weapon makes me feel. We should consider ourselves lucky that they didn't have dragonhide armor, it would have served as much more effective fireproofing.\"\n\n\"Want me to toss it?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"I would prefer that the Paladins never recover it. Just place it in the pile with the other weapons.\"\n\nHe walked over to the mound of treasure and placed the pike atop it. The neat pile had been somewhat scattered during the fight, there were coins spread throughout the entire cave. Returning them to their rightful place was going to be a real chore.\n\n\"So how are you going to move all of this stuff?\" Iden asked, appraising the mound of treasure. \"You said so yourself, there's no way to get this much treasure down the mountain.\"\n\n\"Contrary to what you might assume, this cave is not my first lair,\" she replied as she looked up from her book. \"I've moved my hoard several times over the centuries. No matter how remote my choice of abode, mortal farms and settlements always seem to encroach upon it sooner or later. It's not an easy process, and it requires locating a suitable destination first, but it can be done.\"\n\n\"So you'll need to find another mountain with a large enough cave? Then what?\"\n\n\"Then I'll box everything up in wooden crates, and make several trips back and forth. We dragons are stout creatures, we can carry a great deal of weight on the wing.\"\n\nIf she could carry a cow, then it wasn't hard to imagine her transporting its weight in loot. Even then, it was probably an arduous process. It was impossible to estimate how many tons of gold was actually in the cave, or how many trips would be required.\n\nHe stooped to investigate the weapon pile. They had stripped the Paladins of everything but their armor. As nice as it would have been to get his hands on a full set that wasn't covered in dents and scratches, walking around in what was essentially a Paladin's uniform was a bad idea. It might fool the uninitiated, but if he happened upon any real Paladins, they would see through his disguise immediately. The only way that one of their brothers would have parted with their armor was if he had killed them, and they would respond in kind.\n\nWhat he could keep, however, was one of the short swords. They were distinctive in their design, but as long as he kept it sheathed, it shouldn't draw any attention. His own sword had been slagged by Isabelle's magic, the blade remaining bent and misshapen after it had cooled. He lifted one of the swords, the shining steel glinting under the torchlight, the hilt decorated with a carving of an eagle's head. For self-professed keepers of the peace, their gear certainly was extravagant. In Iden's opinion, most of their coin would be better spent feeding the poor, rather than gilding their armor. He picked up the scabbard too, securing it about his waist. This one was nicer than his, and it had no special Paladin markings on it that might give him away.\n\n\"Be a dear and put this on the shelf with the others, would you?\" Isabelle asked. She brought her long tail up and used the tapered end to manipulate the spellbook, taking advantage of the appendage's immense reach to pass it to him. He took it, wary of her sharp quills, and made his way over to the shelves where he placed it with the rest.\n\n\"Looks like you came out on top in the end,\" he said, stepping back to appraise her collection. \"You're up two artifacts, and they're down four Paladins.\"\n\n\"I suppose that's one way of looking at things,\" she replied. \"Well, this is unusual...\"\n\nIden turned to see her digging through her pile of coins, sending great handfuls cascading down its slope. She hooked her claws around something, dragging it free and toppling it onto the cave floor. It took him a moment to realize what he was looking at. In order to escape the magical net that had bound her, Isabelle had bathed herself in flames. Her tough scales were impervious to her fiery breath, while the webbing had burned away, but she had been lying atop her treasure pile at the time. Her breath had apparently been hot enough to melt a clump of the gold coins together, resulting in what almost looked like a lumpy, golden tree trunk in both appearance and size.\n\n\"The melting point of gold is far lower than that of steel,\" she muttered, pawing at the strange sculpture. \"I suppose I'll have to smelt this into something else.\"\n\n\"It's getting pretty late,\" Iden said, stretching his arms above his head and yawning widely. \"We should probably sleep fairly soon, but all this slaying of Paladins and then dragging them around has me rather hungry.\"\n\n\"We should both eat,\" she replied with a nod of her massive head. \"I'll need the energy if I'm going to heal my wounds, and the Paladins surprised me before I could partake of the meal that I brought back after my hunt.\"\n\n\"What did you catch?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"Well...perhaps buying without express permission would be a better word for it than hunting,\" she chuckled. \"I brought back a couple of cows, their carcasses are packed with snow in my...pantry. I'll go fetch them.\"\n\nShe dropped to a four-legged posture, walking across the cavern in the direction of one of the side tunnels. Her footsteps made the ground shake beneath Iden's feet, and he watched her as she passed him, her gait reminding him of a giant horse. His head scarcely reached her shoulder, and she had so much sheer mass that it was more fitting to compare her to a building than any living thing that Iden had ever seen. The immense muscles that held her body aloft rippled and flexed just beneath the surface of her shining hide, the fat deposits on her soft underbelly and thick tail quivering with every step, and he found himself transfixed once again by the jewel-like quality of her scales.\n\nHe never quite got used to how large she was, even if her transformations were now routine. It was so much easier to get his head around a nine-foot humanoid, rather than a thirty-foot beast that had almost nothing in common with the human form, and yet Iden found her far from displeasing. There was a certain grace to her movements that made it hard to look away from her. Despite the strength that she radiated, every twitch of her tail was moderated, every step of her padded feet measured. If he were to scatter the ground with chicken eggs, he doubted that she would break a single one.\n\nShe vanished into the tunnel, reappearing a couple of minutes later with two carcasses. They looked like dairy cows, not unlike the one that she had butchered for him previously, their white hides patterned with black splotches. She had one of them clutched in her jaws, and the other was clasped against her chest with one of her forelimbs.\n\nShe hobbled into the room with a three-legged gait, releasing the livestock, letting them fall to the cave floor. They wobbled with the thunderous impact, and Iden could have sworn that he heard their bones breaking. She carried them with such ease that it was easy to forget how much they weighed.\n\nHe took up his seat at the mahogany table, shifting his weight to get comfortable in the comically elaborate throne as she butchered one of the animals for him. She sliced its flank open, using the claw on her index finger like a butcher's knife, carving him off a choice cut. She speared it on her talon, then cooked it with her breath, searing it to perfection in only a few seconds. She placed it before him with a wet slap, Iden wasting no time as he dug into it.\n\n\"This is the first time that I've seen you eat anything,\" he mused, pausing to fork another piece of roasted beef into his mouth. \"Do you cook yours?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she replied, \"I'm not a savage.\"\n\nIsabelle hooked her curved claws deep into the second cow, dragging it clear of the table, Iden watching curiously as she took a deep breath. She opened her mouth wide, shooting a jet of flame from her throat, the heat of it searing the fur from the cow's hide in the blink of an eye. The flames splashed against the rock around it, its flesh becoming charred, the skin crisping. She gave it a second, shorter blast, then stopped to appraise her cooking as it smoked. The sight reminded Iden of a pig that had been cooked over a spit, but far larger. He had seen them prepared that way once or twice during his stays at war camps, where they had been eaten communally by the soldiers.\n\nIden had expected her to cut the carcass into smaller pieces with her serrated teeth, but he was surprised to see her open her jaws wide, scooping the cow's massive rump into her mouth as though she was picking it up with a shovel. Her head was almost as long as Iden was tall, but even that was not large enough for her to get it all into her mouth at once. As he watched, her maw widened, almost as if her lower jaw was separating into two halves. Her teeth sank into its seared flesh, her jaws working to drag it deeper into her throat, the upper and lower sections moving independently of one another. When the cow was about halfway into her mouth, she raised her head off the ground, her snout pointing at the ceiling as she used her meal's weight to help take it deeper.\n\nThe muscles in her long neck began to drag it down, he could see them flexing in waves. The cow was fatter than her neck was thick, and he could make out its outline as it traveled down her gullet, soon only its head and forelegs protruding from her maw. It was like watching a snake devour a mouse, or a duck eating a morsel of bread, but on a frighteningly large scale. When she was finally able to close her jaws, the only evidence of the cow was the bulge in her long neck, the muscles still working beneath her scales. Eventually, that too vanished. It wasn't hard for Iden to imagine a stomach large enough to accommodate the animal residing somewhere inside that massive body.\n\nShe glanced over at him, and he realized that he had frozen with a forkful of meat suspended an inch from his mouth.\n\n\"That was, uh...unexpected,\" he said as she bared her teeth in a grin.\n\n\"Trust me, mortals do plenty of things that we dragons find distasteful.\"\n\nIden returned to his meal, trying not to think of the fact that he had been very close to suffering the same fate as that cow during their first meeting. Or at least, the first time that he had met Isabelle in her true form.\n\nShe lay down beside his table like an oversized cat, her forelegs crossed neatly as she watched him eat, the tip of her long tail waving back and forth idly. Iden realized that he could hear her breathing, her lungs alone must be as large as he was.\n\n\"So, where are you going to sleep?\" he asked, gesturing to the pile of curtains and gowns with his fork. \"You're a little too big to fit in the bed now.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I'll sleep... 'around' the bed,\" she replied, glancing at her pile. \"I usually sleep curled up around my treasure. It brings me a kind of peace to feel my valuables against my scales, like I've created a protective wall around them.\"\n\n\"You won't roll over and crush me in your sleep or anything, will you?\"\n\n\"You'll be quite safe,\" she replied with a chuckle.\n\n\"I have to say,\" Iden added as he finished up the last of his beef, \"you cook a great steak.\"\n\n\"That's an attractive trait in mortal pairings, isn't it?\" she asked. \"The female is expected to cook, to maintain a home. Feathering the nest, they call it.\"\n\n\"That's the way of things,\" Iden replied, rising to his feet and setting his cutlery down. \"Is it different for your people?\"\n\n\"Not terribly,\" she said, standing and walking beside him as he made his way over to the pile of sheets. She walked slowly, matching pace with his comparatively tiny legs, her head facing him on its flexible neck. \"Romance between dragons can endure lengths of time that see mountains rise, and civilizations fall, or it can be as fleeting an encounter as those that you once boasted of. In either case, the task of rearing children usually falls on the female. A dragon will lay a clutch of anywhere between six and a dozen leathery eggs, each one roughly the size of a melon. She is then tasked with keeping them warm, and eventually with feeding the hatchlings.\"\n\n\"Would you sit on the eggs like a chicken?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"Heavens, no. The eggs must be kept at a steady temperature, and the best way to achieve that is by setting fire to the nest, keeping it toasty while they develop.\"\n\n\"Sitting on eggs to keep them warm surprises you, but setting their nest on fire is routine?\" Iden chuckled as he sat down on the pile of luxurious fabrics. \"Wait...a dozen eggs?\"\n\n\"You're wondering what will happen after we consummate our union,\" she replied with a toothy grin. The pile of fine fabrics that had served as their bed was situated at the foot of the treasure horde, Isabelle planting the trunk of her massive body beside it to his left. Her long tail coiled around beneath him, so long that it rose up on his right, her long neck and her head completing the circle. He found himself nestled within a wall of scales, surrounded by Isabelle on all sides. She let her head rest on the sheets to his right, taking up as much space as her human form's entire body would have. It was her way of sleeping together in spite of their massive difference in size.\n\n\"It had crossed my mind,\" he admitted, hooking his fingers behind his head and lying back nonchalantly. \"If what you say is true, that humans and dragons can...bear fruit, then what will our offspring look like? What will they...be?\"\n\n\"Worry not, Iden,\" Isabelle replied. Her head was so near now that he could reach out and touch her scaly cheek, her eyes as large as his fist. They were stunning up close, like fire opals polished smooth, an ethereal glow emanating from somewhere beyond her reptilian pupils. She had eyelashes, he realized, although her eyelids were covered in fine scales. \"Not only would our children be healthy, but they would also be stronger and longer-lived than any human before them. Their dragon's blood would imbue them with magical abilities not dissimilar from my own. I promised you an army of children, did I not? Six, or maybe even twelve in one fell swoop should fulfill that promise.\"\n\n\"But...what would they look like?\" he asked. \"Would they be dragons or humans?\"\n\n\"A little of both. Their kind has been conceived before, in ages long past, though they were rare even then. They appeared as stout men of mortal form, their fingers clawed, their hides covered in tough scales. They were not unlike how I appeared to you last we made love, but that is their natural state, not a result of a partial polymorph.\"\n\n\"And will they be able to change their shape, as you do?\"\n\n\"So that they might mingle amongst the mortals without fear of persecution, you mean? Yes, and so too shall they have mastery over flame, they need never fear its heat.\"\n\n\"At least we won't have to worry about them burning themselves on the stove,\" Iden mumbled.\n\n\"Your children would have the potential to be great warriors, able to best even the most renowned mortals in combat, their natural attributes making them almost impervious to harm. They would also make admirable scholars, their longevity allowing them to travel the world, to record history as it happens. Their intellect and their magic would make them as demigods. A mortal could not ask for more in his offspring, no parent could be made prouder.\"\n\n\"But a dragon could ask for more,\" Iden said, his eyes turning to the sheets. \"Are you sure that you want to go through with this? I don't feel like I'm bringing very much to the table here.\"\n\n\"Oh, but you are,\" she replied with a smile. \"If I am the last of my kind as I suspect, then my only chance to bear children is through you. The circumstances of our meeting were unique, there may not be a second mortal man who has cause to cross paths with me, and fewer still kind-hearted enough that they might come to see me as more than just a monster to be destroyed. If I am not alone, then there are so few of us left that I might well spend the rest of my life searching in vain, suffering from a terrible loneliness all the while. Without you, Iden, none of this would be possible.\"\n\nHe looked up to see one of her massive wings extending, the leathery skin covering him like a canopy, sealing him within her scaly prison. The membrane was so thin as to be almost transparent, letting pass a little light from the torches beyond, illuminating a network of veins that spread out like the branches of a tree.\n\n\"Perhaps it has escaped your attention,\" she added, \"but it is not gold that I guard tonight.\"\n\n\"Are you saying that I'm your treasure?\" Iden asked, cocking an eyebrow at her.\n\n\"If you want to be blunt about it,\" she chuckled. \"Your prose will need some work yet if you mean to claim the mantle of warrior poet.\"\n\n\"My aspirations might have shifted somewhat,\" he replied. \"I'm thinking of something more along the lines of proud father of an army of children. The poetry can wait.\"\n\nIsabelle laughed, her hot breath blowing the sheets by his feet. She watched him with her smoldering eyes, their glow illuminating her face in the gloom.\n\n\"You sound eager to get started, Iden, perhaps it would be unwise to keep you waiting any longer...\"\n\nHe flinched as he was engulfed in flames, his racing heart slowing as his mind caught up with his reflexes, reminding him that her fire wouldn't harm him. His clothing burned away to leave him nude, Iden all the more aware of where her eyes were looking due to the light that they cast. She played them over his naked body as he lay on the silken sheets beside her head, her massive tongue wetting her lips.\n\n\"N-now?\" he stammered, \"I don't know if-\"\n\n\"Don't be afraid,\" she purred, the low tones of her voice seeming to resonate within his very bones. She lifted her head from the sheets, hovering over him, her long neck snaking out of sight such was its length. \"I'll be ever so gentle, I'll treat you like you're made of glass. You find my true form pleasing, isn't that right? This needn't be a rushed affair, we could take our time, enjoy one another. If that's what you want, of course.\"\n\n\"I can't even imagine how this is going to work,\" he chuckled nervously, \"so take the lead.\"\n\n\"You're willingly handing the reins to me?\" she asked, her sharp teeth flashing as she smiled down at him. \"I never thought I'd hear you ask that of me so...plainly...\" She opened her jaws as Iden watched, her long, winding tongue sliding past her lips. It was easily as long as the span of his arm, flat and wide, with a tapered tip. The pink flesh glistened with a thick layer of saliva, making its smooth surface almost reflective. Sagging strands dripped from her mouth, escaping between her pearly teeth, her hot breath washing over him.\n\nHe felt it flop against his belly, surprisingly heavy and warm, its texture akin to satin that had been drenched in honey. Her saliva was so viscous, leaving a slimy smear on his skin as she dragged it lower, the muscles in his belly tensing reflexively when it passed over them.\n\nHer silken flesh brushed the tip of his glans as her organ roamed lower, and Iden realized that he was hard despite the proximity of her razor teeth and the threat of her fiery breath. The last time that he had looked down that maw, she had been ready to swallow him whole. How their opinion of one another had changed since that fateful day.\n\nShe began to paint his shaft with her tongue, batting at his member more clumsily than he was used to. Her thick organ dragged across his inner thighs, soaking his groin in her bubbling slaver, matting his pubic hair as her dexterous muscle flopped about. Their difference in stature was now such that she was having a hard time gripping him and coiling around his shaft in the way that she had before, but Iden wasn't complaining. It almost felt like someone was dragging a warm, slimy towel over his lower body.\n\nHer lips were now too large to purse around his glans, and so she brushed them against his erection instead. They were as soft as pillows, lined with the same fine scales that were present on her underbelly. She pressed them against his thighs and his stomach as she kept up her licking, kissing him, her oversized lips linked to his skin by strands of her warm saliva. There was so much of it, clinging to him with an almost jelly-like consistency. He was momentarily alarmed to feel her teeth brush his skin, but they were smooth and unexpectedly dull, not at all as sharp as knives as he had assumed. There was no way that they would pose any danger to him unless she applied a great deal of pressure.\n\nIden lay back, surprised by how good it felt, flinching as the flat of her winding tongue dragged from his balls to the tip of his member. He reached down, his hands finding the end of her snout. She had incredible strength, even the subtle movements of her head so powerful than they could have knocked him over easily. The blue scales here were smaller than those on her back and flanks, closer to the size of small pebbles, creating a pleasant texture beneath his palms. He could feel the muscles beneath her hide moving as she breathed, her nostrils blowing warm air across his chest, each one large enough that he could have fit his fist inside it.\n\nShe began to lap slowly, dragging her tongue from the base of his member to the tip, pressing his erection against his stomach as she licked. Her rhythm was slow, her tongue wide enough that it completely covered his shaft, spilling over onto his stomach to tickle him with every glance. He wasn't sure what to do with his hands, letting them rest on her nose as her massive head rose and fell with the motion. Rather than the flurries of licks that he was accustomed to, this was more like one, continuous sensation. Her tongue was as long as his outstretched arm, and so the process of her dragging the slippery organ up his shaft took a good few seconds, its velvety surface setting every nerve alight as it scoured him.\n\nShe succeeded in gripping his member finally, folding her tongue around it like the fat coils of a snake, piling one on top of the other. It reminded him of when she had gripped his cock in her wonderfully smooth and chubby tail, her tongue was almost as large as it had been. But now, instead of cool scales, he felt feverishly hot flesh. She was able to encompass him effortlessly, Iden looking down to see the heavy coils moving as they tightened and flexed, her control over the muscle incredible. He could feel every twitch, every spasm as it slithered around him, the layer of drool that coated it gluing it to his skin and making her contact slick. She made no attempt to stem the flow of saliva, letting it droop from her lips in a sagging web, raining down on his lower body as she poised there above him. It wasn't that she was drooling profusely, no moreso than a human in the same situation at least, but her size meant that there was so much more of it.\n\nHer glowing eyes rose to meet his, a pang of pleasure coursing through him at her merest glance. Her gaze was so intense, almost predatory, her reptilian pupils dilating into larger circles like the eyes of a cat in the darkness.\n\nHer tongue was larger and clumsier than that of her prior forms, but something about its weight and strength made up for that, its silky surface gliding against his shaft as she licked him from every angle at once. In many ways, it felt like was buried to the hilt in a warm vagina, but she had far more control over her tongue than any woman did over her loins, Iden's toes curling as her damp flesh slid against his skin in maddening spirals. Much like her tail, she alternated the speed and pressure, Iden never knowing what to expect next. It was captivating, he couldn't focus on anything else, his fingers digging into her snout as she stroked.\n\nIden felt her tongue unwind from his member to leave it bobbing in the air, dripping with her saliva, her scaly lips planting kisses on his torso as she roamed higher. She reached his face, looking down her long muzzle at him as though she expected them to embrace, quickly realizing that they were far too mismatched.\n\nThey chuckled in unison, Iden reaching up to run his hand along the underside of her jaw, as there was no cheek within reach. The skin beneath it was loose and leathery, small, horn-like structures tickling his palm.\n\n\"Yeah, I don't think that will work,\" he said, the lingering euphoria from her licking still sending jolts of pleasure coursing through him as he lay beneath her on the sheets.\n\n\"Naysayer,\" she chuckled, parting her lips. Her tongue wound its way towards him, brushing against his red cheek to leave a slippery trail, poising in front of his mouth as though she expected him to meet her kiss. Her organ was too thick to have any hope of fitting. His eyes tracked a rope of her clear, glistening slaver as it broke away and fell to his chest, Isabelle's glowing eyes full of anticipation as she peered down at him.\n\nIden opened his mouth, the dragon maneuvering the very tip of her tapered tongue inside, where it met his own. If they had been mismatched before, the difference was now comical, but her gentle licks and flurries were no less measured and gentle. Her embrace was slow, doting, the barest tip of her tongue enough to fill him to capacity. Iden did his best to return her affections, her saliva dribbling down his cheeks, the metallic taste of her flesh tingling his taste buds. He reeled as she licked the roof of his mouth, sliding against his inner cheeks, pressing his tongue flat. She was a little too large for the finesse that she had displayed previously, there was no hope of her coiling her tongue around his in a spiral again, or of her deftly drawing shapes on his palate.\n\nInstead, the excitement came from the sense of strength, of power. She could have lifted him with that thing, she could have forced its length down his throat and split him apart, but she didn't. She was indeed treating him like he was made of glass, all of that brute strength restrained for his benefit, her movements so slight that they were little more than twitches from her perspective.\n\nThe warm breath from her nostrils blew his hair as she breathed, that smoky, pleasant scent filling his lungs. She smelled like the cherry wood that was sometimes burned to flavor meat, there wasn't a hint of carrion on her breath despite her recent meal.\n\nWhen she drew back to let him catch his breath, their tongues were joined by a thick rope of her saliva, large enough that smaller droplets traveled along its length to rain to his chest. It broke in short order, Iden finding himself covered in it, warm and slick. He tried to wipe the goo away, finding himself with a handful of bubbly fluid, abandoning his efforts and resigning himself to his sticky fate.\n\nIsabelle seemed amused by his reaction, her deep, resonating laughter making him shake. She glanced down at his member, watching it throb for a moment, as tall and as rigid as Iden had ever seen it. If someone had told him a week ago that he'd be as hard as a rock for a thirty-foot reptile, he would probably have knocked them out for the implication alone, yet here he was.\n\nHe watched as Isabelle's hovering head moved lower, and she began to circle his cock with her tongue, his fingers digging into the sheets as she teased him. This time, rather than attempting to wrap the slimy muscle around it, she curved the flat surface of her organ into a U-shape. It was so large that it could almost completely cover him, Iden's senses yet again assaulted by a fresh wave of unfamiliar sensations.\n\nHe couldn't help himself, reaching down and attempting to grip the edges of her tongue in his hands, finding her flesh so wet and slippery that he could scarcely find purchase. He dug his fingers into it, and Isabelle didn't complain. There was no chance of him hurting her, it seemed, he didn't have anywhere near enough strength to cause her even mild discomfort.\n\nIden held her tongue in his hands, grinding his member into the subtle groove that ran down the middle, her saliva acting as an admirable lubricant. Now that he was able to set his own pace, he held nothing back, thrusting into her slippery muscle as he wrapped it around his shaft like a sodden blanket. The corners of Isabelle's mouth curled into a smile as she watched him with her smoldering eyes, the drool from her open maw sloughing onto his thighs and dampening the fabric below.\n\nWhen she sensed that his pleasure was reaching its peak, she tore her tongue from his grasp, using it to press his member against his belly again. She applied a great deal of pressure on top of her tongue's already considerable weight, sliding its satin surface against his balls and shaft as if easing out his emission.\n\nIden couldn't hold on, reaching down to grip the end of her snout as an orgasm rocked him, overwhelming him so suddenly that it caught him off guard. His eyes widened, and he tried to stifle a whine, his member pulsing against her tongue as his ejaculate mingled with her drool. He could feel its fresh warmth on his stomach as she continued her stroking, the sensation of her slick flesh against his balls making his head spin, the pressure of her massive organ milking him as she lapped.\n\nShe kept it up for a minute longer to ensure that every drop had been wrung from him, before pulling back her monstrous tongue, its absence leaving him cold. Iden could scarcely even see his emission, the cloudy fluid diluted by her far more copious drool that pooled on his belly.\n\n\"I have to admit,\" she purred, licking her lips as she watched him pant on the bed. \"I was worried that you might have second thoughts once the moment arrived, but I see now that you're every bit as adventurous as I had hoped.\"\n\nIden lay there for a few moments longer, basking in his afterglow, staring up at the massive wing that covered them. The light from the flickering torches in the cave beyond bled through the thin membrane, and he traced the intricate network of her veins with his eyes, stretched between what resembled long and spindly fingers.\n\nHe grabbed a handful of the silken sheets, beginning to clean himself, but Isabelle's booming voice interrupted him.\n\n\"I'm afraid that might be a tad premature, assuming that you'll indulge me, of course.\"\n\nShe shifted her massive body, rolling onto her side relative to him, exposing her soft underbelly. Iden watched as she lifted one of her hind legs, her clawed toes flexing in the air, exposing what lay between them.\n\nNestled between her stout thighs were a pair of plump, pink lips, the rosy flesh contrasting sharply with the beige color of her scales. Iden shuffled towards the left side of the bed, where her midsection rose up in front of him like a sheer wall, expanding and contracting gently with her breathing. While she was lying on her side, his kneeling position put her loins at about head height to him, and he planted his hands against the smooth scales above and below it as he leaned in to get a closer look. The first thing that stood out to him was her size. Her vulva was perhaps nine or ten inches from top to bottom, the width of her splayed lips half that. He reached out tentatively, opening the thick folds of her labia with his fingers, feeling her massive frame shiver at his touch. He could make out her entrance, a hole perhaps a little smaller than his fist.\n\nJust how endowed were male dragons? Was she even going to feel anything? He felt like it might be more effective to stick his arm in there up to the elbow\u2026\n\nBesides for that, her anatomy was not unfamiliar. There were the same delicate folds that one would expect to find on an everyday woman, everything was where it was supposed to be, and she was already leaking a trail of clear fluid as her opening twitched expectantly. Iden traced her pleated flesh with his fingers, finding it hot and slimy, pulling his hand away to watch as strands of her juices clung to his fingertips. He understood what she had meant by premature now, this might get a little messy.\n\nHe jumped as he felt Isabelle's breath on his cheek, glancing to his left to see her snout hovering beside him. Her long, flexible neck meant that she could maneuver her head between her own thighs, her reptilian eyes watching him eagerly.\n\n\"It may be a little...larger than what you're accustomed to,\" she whispered, lowering her voice now that her lips were so close to his ear. \"But the same principles apply.\"\n\nThe unspoken request was easy to parse, and he leaned forward under Isabelle's watchful eye, planting a kiss on her oversized vulva. Her taste was immediately familiar, her womanly scent too, identical to her prior forms. In a way, it set him at ease, and his next kiss was more sensual. He began to mouth and lick, exploring the creases of her loins with his tongue, employing his fingers at the same time. He stroked her with his digits, running them lightly across her tender flesh, its texture as exquisite as the silken fabrics that he was kneeling on. Her body shivered, the muscles in her passage clenching, making her entrance wink.\n\nAs her excitement mounted, more of her syrupy, slimy fluids began to seep from her loins. Just like with her saliva, her size meant that there was comparatively more than there had been with her smaller forms, Iden finding that it was already wetting his face and coating his hands in a slippery glaze.\n\nIsabelle observed him all the while, her scaly eyelids fluttering with every peck and lick, her breathing growing less regular. He saw her sharp teeth emerge to bite her lower lip, sucking it into her mouth, an oddly human gesture coming from such an inhuman creature. It was so strange to be going down on what appeared from his perspective to be a wall of scales, only to have her react to it from slightly behind and to his left. His brain was playing tricks on him, insisting that it was a second person. With only the fiery glow from her eyes, and what torchlight penetrated her wing from above, her neck vanished into the gloom long before he could make out where it joined to the trunk of her body.\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered in his ear, making him shiver. Her resonating voice was so low and sultry, felt as much as it was heard, dripping with desire just as her loins were. \"Keep licking, use the flat of your tongue. Kiss me, kiss me like you want me...like that...\"\n\nHe slipped a couple of fingers inside of her as he ran his tongue across her sex, feeling the bumpy, ribbed texture of her passage, the muscles spasming as he teased her. She was far looser than she had been in her prior forms, which was to be expected, but he was surprised to feel the pillowy walls pressing around him from all sides. Her grip on his fingers wasn't tight, but she had a grip, and that alone filled him with anticipation.\n\nHe slipped in a third finger, then a fourth, stroking her with his digits. There was plenty of room to move around in there, and he was able to curl his fingers against her sopping tunnel with ease, her eyes widening as the unfamiliar sensation washed over her.\n\n\"That...feels nice,\" she muttered, the clawed toes on her padded feet curling. Her talons were larger than even those of a bear, shaped more like those of a bird of prey, no doubt capable of snatching a sheep from a field in much the same way that an eagle could snatch a fish from a lake.\n\nNow Iden could make out her clitoris, a round, shiny button of flesh about the size of a coin. In her excitement, it had engorged, swollen and tender as it protruded beneath a protective hood of skin. He slid his tongue closer, Isabelle's great body tensing as he neared it, her breath catching in her throat as he glanced it. He began to lap at it, making slow circles on its smooth surface, her heartbeat making it throb against his tongue. She shivered and crooned, visibly struggling to stop her long frame from withing and pushing him away, her taloned toes clenching.\n\nIden pursed his lips around the protrusion, drawing on it gently, painting it with all the finesse of an artist's brush. He wondered if its larger size made it more sensitive. It was certainly a possibility, judging by how strongly she was reacting to his attentions.\n\n\"Oh...Iden,\" Isabelle moaned as she brushed her snout against his cheek, nuzzling him as he kept up the pace. Her breath blew his hair, her soft lips pressing against the nape of his neck as best they could, able to encompass everything between his shoulder and his ear. He felt her tongue drag across his skin, hot and slimy, the dull points of her teeth pressing against him.\n\nIt was certainly a strange experience to have your lover muttering in your ear and mouthing at your neck as you were going down on her. She was so impossibly vast, and yet she was dancing with every stroke of his tongue just the same as any five-foot girl would. It made him feel oddly powerful.\n\nIsabelle maneuvered her head over to his right side, Iden pausing his ardent licking to glance at her, wondering what she was up to.\n\n\"Don't stop,\" she purred, \"I want to join in...\"\n\nHe watched as her tongue parted her lips, his cheeks reddening as he realized what she intended to do with it. Iden withdrew his fingers from her passage, along with a handful of her slime, a strand almost as thick as his wrist drooping from his hand and stretching obscenely as he pulled away. As he wiped it off on the sheets below, Isabelle's sinuous organ wormed its way inside her, its pink color the same as that of her flushed womanhood. His heart quickened, his member bouncing in his lap as he watched it delve deeper, inch by inch, until its entire length was buried in her passage.\n\nIsabelle moaned into her own loins, her puffy lips meeting her swollen labia in a sordid embrace, a tremor rolling from her snout to her tail as a jolt of pleasure rocked her. Her scaly cheek, if the side of her snout could be described as such, brushed against his own. She was unable to speak now, her tongue was occupied with other tasks, and so Iden focused his attention on her tender clitoris.\n\nHe lay his hands against the smooth, cool scales of her underbelly, mouthing at the protruding bud of flesh devotedly. He drew shapes on its shiny surface, sucking on it gently, scouring it with the flat of his tongue. Isabelle, meanwhile, had filled her own passage to capacity. A blend of her juices and her saliva escaped around her organ as it roiled and spiraled inside her, her pace growing ever more frantic and unrefined as her pleasure mounted. It was easy for Iden to imagine the way that it was pressing against her deepest and most sensitive reaches, curling and thrashing to hit the right spots at just the right time\u2026\n\nHe could sense that she was getting close, the heat that her body put out was intense, her breath now coming in uneven bursts. Her massive frame shook and heaved, the light that made it through the membrane of her bat-like wing wavering as the limb flexed, Iden becoming somewhat alarmed. Would she crush him in the throes of her climax? Perhaps he had better retreat to a safe distance\u2026\n\nIsabelle grunted something that sounded suspiciously like don't stop when she felt him start to slack off, and so he renewed his efforts, doting on her sensitive clitoris as though his life depended on pleasing her. She loosed an adorable yelp that was completely unbecoming of such a fearsome beast, withdrawing her tongue so quickly that Iden was splashed with a rope of her fluids, muscles in her thighs that were as large as his torso tensing as their combined efforts sent her plunging over the precipice.\n\nNow Iden saw fit to shuffle clear, Isabelle's claws digging deep furrows in the rock, her wings twitching in the air. Her long tail curled and uncurled rhythmically, much in the same way that it had when she had been a mere nine feet tall, the sound of it scraping along the floor echoing through the cave. He watched in awe as the slabs of muscle that lurked just beneath her scaly hide tensed and bunched, raw, brute strength on display that could bend steel and shatter stone.\n\nIden could almost see the waves of pleasure as they coursed down her long spine, her back arching, her tail curving into the air before slapping back down onto the rock below. Despite the throes of her ecstasy, she remained in place, resting on her side as she endured each stab of ecstasy.\n\nAfter a few more moments, her body seemed to sag, her muscles relaxing as she lay her massive head on the sheets beside him. Her eyelids fluttered, black smoke pouring from her nostrils, the flames within her perhaps reflecting those of her passion. At this point, Iden would have spooned with his partner, but that was rather difficult in his present situation. Instead, he reached over and stroked her head as one might a pet, not knowing if she could even feel the caress of his fingers through her leathery hide.\n\n\"How long has it been since I've felt such bliss as my true self?\" she wondered aloud, exhaling a satisfied sigh.\n\n\"Is it better as a human, or as a dragon?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"They both have their merits,\" she replied, one of her eyes opening to bathe him in its fiery glow. \"I've not been with a man of any kind in my dragon form since...I can scarcely remember.\"\n\n\"I assumed that we'd get straight to the point, so to speak\" Iden began. \"But we seem to have gotten rather...distracted.\"\n\n\"You're priming me as you would a woman of your own kind,\" she chuckled, watching his face begin to redden. \"It's flattering that you concern yourself with pleasuring me, despite our differences.\"\n\n\"Why should I treat you any differently?\" he asked, and she exposed her sharp teeth in a smile.\n\n\"This is why I value your company, Iden, and why I think that you will make a good sire for my brood. You will teach them strength, but also kindness, humility. They will be powerful, perhaps dangerously so. It is of the utmost importance that they learn to respect life, to feel empathy towards others, lest they become tyrannical and cruel.\"\n\n\"One of the Paladins spoke of tyrannical dragons,\" Iden said, \"and you mentioned that some of them sought to rule over humanity in the old days. You said that they saw themselves as being stronger and more intelligent than humans, more deserving of the mantle.\"\n\n\"Does it bother you?\" she asked, watching him curiously with her reptilian eyes.\n\n\"I just want to know what I'm getting into. Will our children have...dark inclinations? Will they naturally gravitate towards that kind of behavior?\"\n\n\"Goodness, no,\" Isabelle chuckled. \"Dragons are no different from humans, we are a product of our environment, of our experiences. We are, however, exceptionally powerful creatures. We possess strength enough to take on an army, our innate magical powers allow us to do things that mortals can only dream of, and our longevity results in us accruing several lifetime's worth of wisdom and experience. For those reasons, we must show great restraint when dealing with mortals. An errant flick of the tail could kill you, just as grasping a butterfly too tightly will damage its wings.\"\n\n\"So we'll get them some puppies,\" Iden replied with a shrug.\n\n\"P-puppies?\" Isabelle stammered, the eye that was facing him widening in surprise.\n\n\"Puppies are small, fragile, not unlike how dragons perceive humans to be. Pets are great for teaching children to be responsible. They'll have to feed them, clean up after them, play with them. It should teach them to be gentle with things that are smaller and weaker than they are, show them how to restrain their great strength.\"\n\n\"That's...a good idea, actually,\" Isabelle muttered. \"See? My faith in your fathering abilities was well-founded.\"\n\n\"I have always had a strong desire to procreate, I'll give you that.\"\n\nIsabelle laughed, her tone sultry.\n\n\"Rub my scales again, would you?\"\n\nHe nodded, reaching out and running a hand along her snout, roaming up to the top of her heavy skull where her sharp quills sprouted. He let his fingers wander up one of her gnarled horns, finding it dry and bumpy, ribbed like that of a ram.\n\n\"Can you feel that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she murmured, her eyes closing as she enjoyed his stroking. \"We have sensation in our horns, not dissimilar from a tooth, in fact.\"\n\nIden moved over to her quills, prodding one with his finger experimentally, avoiding their wicked points. They were surprisingly light, leading him to suspect that they might be hollow. They felt like dry reeds, although more rigid, Isabelle opening an eye to peer at him.\n\n\"I asked you to rub my scales, not to poke my quills.\"\n\n\"This is the first time that I've really been able to get a look at you up close like this,\" he said, moving down to her ear. It was pointed, shaped like a knife, covered in the same blue scales that were present on her snout. As soon as his fingertips brushed it, a shiver passed along her winding body, her eyes snapping open in alarm. Iden took it as a sign of encouragement, taking her ear in his hand, so large that it rivaled a dirk in size. It was flexible, made of cartilage like that of a human, and he began to make a slow massaging motion with his thumb. Isabelle's eyelids drooped, and he heard her exhale, her clawed feet scratching against the stone floor as her toes curled.\n\n\"Do you like that?\" he chuckled.\n\n\"Nobody has ever...yes...\"\n\n\"I suppose that with those huge talons, your people can't do this kind of thing, you'd cut each other up.\"\n\n\"Few male dragons have ever gotten this close to me, fewer mortals still. This kind of intimacy is...uncommon for us.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should make it more common.\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" she chuckled, exhaling a plume of dark smoke from her nostrils as he moved up to the tip of her pointed ear.\n\nThey lay together in silence for a while, Iden half-massaging and half-exploring her scaly head, Isabelle growing so relaxed and so quiet that he thought his stroking might have lulled her to sleep. When he pulled his hand away, intending to get some rest himself, her eye snapped open again.\n\n\"I think that's enough relaxing,\" she said, smirking at him as her head rose from its resting place on the sheets beside him. She brushed her nose against his face, nuzzling softly, her hot breath blowing the dark strands of his hair. \"There will be no children to coddle unless we make them, you know.\"\n\nIden didn't need to be asked twice. He stood up, amused that he had to walk a good few feet to reach her body, her head following him as he went as though it was hovering in the air beside him. He reached her scaly torso, running his hand along her silky underside, feeling her shiver at his touch. He walked along her prone body, running his fingers down her chest and across her belly, a gesture that would have taken seconds with a human partner requiring him to walk.\n\nHe arrived between her parted thighs, each one nearly as long as he was tall, so thick that his fingers wouldn't have met was he to wrap his arms around them. Her loins were already swollen in anticipation, drooling clear fluid, still flushed and ready from their previous encounter. If he hadn't been hard already, the feeling of Isabelle's lips pressing against his hip would have gotten him there, the dragoness kissing him as she nudged him closer.\n\n\"Don't tease me,\" she whispered, \"I've waited centuries already.\"\n\nAs he took his pulsing member in his hand, angling it towards her opening, he realized that he was a little too low to reach comfortably. Isabelle's head floated in to his left, her eyes darting between his erection and her loins, the gears in her head turning as she tried to figure out what they should do next. She came to a decision, her massive frame shifting, Iden taking a couple of steps back in mild alarm. She angled her hips downwards slightly, making up the distance, supporting her weight with one of her forelimbs.\n\nNow that he was just about level with her, Iden pressed closer, brushing his member against her vulva. Her heat was almost alarming, she was so excited, her flowing juices making her burning flesh slick and sticky. He had an audience, Isabelle was watching over his shoulder, he could feel her breath on his neck as she waited for him to make his move.\n\nHe felt a twinge of apprehension. Was she even going to feel this? She was huge, and despite Iden being rather well-endowed, he wasn't sure how much enjoyment she was really going to glean from this coupling. It had a higher purpose, of course, this was no frivolous act. Yet still, he felt oddly self-conscious as he pressed his glans against her entrance.\n\nIden was soon distracted by a searing pulse of pleasure as her wet, silken flesh wrapped around the head of his cock in greeting, closing on him almost like a fist. He couldn't help but thrust deeper, feeling the textured, bumpy walls of her passage encompass him. They were satin-soft, her pillowy insides lined with what felt like small, fleshy nodules that ran up and down his length like a hundred tiny fingers. Her tunnel was ribbed, he could feel the ring-shaped bumps of muscle as they rolled over him, squeezing him tightly.\n\nDespite her sheer size, she was so muscular that she was able to grip him firmly enough to make up for their difference in stature. He couldn't recall how it compared to her prior forms, if she was tighter or looser than she had been before. To be frank, he didn't care. There were so many new sensations assaulting him, pleasures that he had never felt before making his head spin. Her insides were just as strange and as inhuman as her outer appearance.\n\nHe began to move, slowly at first, his pace increasing as his resolve started to crumble. Those maddening nubs of flesh grazed him with every thrust, scouring up his length on the way out, and sliding back down on the way in. They were just firm enough that he could feel them, but they were soft enough that they didn't really provide any resistance or create any discomfort. Her rings of muscle dizzied him with their squeezing, wringing him in sharp spasms, like lips that were pursing tightly around his shaft.\n\n\"How does it feel?\" she whispered, Iden glancing over his shoulder to meet her sultry gaze.\n\n\"G-good,\" he mumbled, too taken with her to formulate an intelligent reply.\n\n\"You're joining the ranks of the few mortals who have mated with a dragon,\" she said, letting her puffy lips brush his ear. \"Either by choice or by obligation. To say that it was rare in ages past would be an understatement, and if I am indeed the last of my kind, then it may never happen again. Savor me, Iden. Through you, my lineage continues...\"\n\nHer tongue emerged to probe his ear, licking at his neck, her sharp teeth pressing into his skin as she nibbled at his shoulder affectionately. She seemed to be enjoying herself, at least as far as he could tell. Her massive frame rocked slowly, her movements subtle enough that she helped him drive himself deeper, rather than simply sending him toppling to the floor. The quills that ran down her spine rattled occasionally, making a hissing sound when his member parted her fleshy walls. The sound had been so intimidating before, but now it was taking on a new meaning.\n\nIden dug his fingers into her soft underbelly, finding it malleable enough that he could take handfuls of it, almost like a paunchy belly or a round rump. Her fat was delicate and yielding, his fingers sinking deep into her flesh, vanishing up to the knuckle. The mosaic of fine scales was somehow smoother than skin, more inviting, to the point that he couldn't bring himself to pull his hands away from her.\n\nHis belly slapped against her scaly underside, the pace of her rhythmic contractions increasing along with the tempo of his thrusting, the wall of fat that rose up in front of him rippling with every impact. He dug his fingers into her flesh, gripping it for purchase, Isabelle delving her snout into his hair as she watched him enter her.\n\nThe pressure was intense, the muscles beyond her fleshy walls sucking him deeper, the teasing barbs digging into his shaft as her passage clung to him like a second skin, its every contraction drawing on him with all the vigor of a greedy mouth. The copious fluids that leaked from her orifice dripped down his thighs, coating his member in a sheen of her warm juices, making him so slippery that even her seizing muscles could not maintain their hold on him for too long.\n\nThe ribs caught his glans on the way in and out, conforming to every contour of his length, as though they were trying to make a plaster mold of his member. Every time that one of them scoured his sensitive head, his eyes lost their focus, his knees going weak as it dragged across his exposed tip like a pair of sucking lips.\n\nIt was nothing like what he was used to, there was so much texture, so many conflicting sensations that his mind could scarcely keep track of them. The wet, cushiony flesh, the wicked barbs, the rings of muscle that tensed around him in a furious rhythm. It began to make him feel like he was drunk, his body swaying as she pushed back against him, her subtle thrusting growing more noticeable as she began to reciprocate more ardently.\n\nHer hips were wider than he was tall, one of her massive legs suspended in the air somewhere high above his head, the other resting on the ground beneath him and to his left. Her clawed toes flexed, the sound of her fat tail slapping on the stone floor reaching his ears, the wing that still covered him like a veiny ceiling flexing and fluttering.\n\n\"Deeper,\" she moaned, her breath tickling his ear. She was watching their coupling intently, the fiery glow from her eyes cast on her loins, making her dripping vulva glisten beautifully as it caught the dim light. Iden shivered as he felt her heavy, damp tongue flop against his shoulder, sliding up his neck and leaving a trail of warm saliva in its wake. The exertion was making him sweat now, and he remembered how she had told him that she found the taste irresistible, the dragon able to sense lustful secretions that a human was not conscious of.\n\n\"You taste so good when you're making love,\" she muttered. \"I won't give you a moment of respite, exhaust yourself, give me everything that you have...\"\n\nIden was in no mood to take a break, the feeling of her insides moving around his member was intoxicating, he couldn't have pulled out of her if he had wanted to. Tingling pleasure was spreading through his body, a warmth that went beyond that of simple friction growing within him. It was as though she was kindling a fire within his very body, blowing on the smoldering embers like a pair of bellows, fanning the growing flames as they threatened to consume him utterly.\n\nHe lurched as he felt something cool press against his rear. He turned his head, looking back over his shoulder to see that it was the tip of her long tail, its cushiony underside resting against his rump as though she was cupping his cheeks with a wandering hand. She began to apply pressure, pushing him harder and deeper, thrusting him into her with more strength than he could have mustered on his own.\n\nHer scaly snout brushed against his cheek, her eyes now turned to his face, drinking in his every wince and grimace as the depths of her seething loins seemed to tighten around him in a lurid embrace. Iden was no longer setting the pace, he was at the dragon's mercy, bound to her whims like a puppet to its strings. He felt foolish for having assumed that it might be any different, he was like a field mouse compared to her immense size and strength.\n\n\"I trust that you won't mind if I help you along a little?\" she asked. \"We dragons are accustomed to encounters that are somewhat more...violent in nature.\"\n\nIden could do little more than lean against her soft belly as she increased their tempo, his fingers digging into her velvety flesh, her massive body as immovable as a mountain. It was refreshing to not have to worry about his partner's wellbeing, to be able to use all of his strength with abandon. Not only did she enjoy it, she mandated it, she was always thirsty for more.\n\nHe wondered idly what two dragons having sex would look like. On its own, a single dragon had the strength to shatter rock like it was chalk, what would two of them abandoning all pretense of restraint look like? Did dragons cause earthquakes and flatten trees when they fucked?\n\nIt was becoming too much for Iden, he could feel an orgasm scratching at the door, the dull pleasure taking on a more urgent quality as her sodden flesh roiled around him. Her heat seemed to permeate his body to the core, reaching deep inside of him, spreading through his nervous system like a fever. He could feel his conscious mind receding, supplanted by an animal lust that drove him on, their rutting taking on a more desperate and frenzied quality.\n\nIden reached to his left and located the swollen bump of her clitoris with his fingers, wetting them with her excitement as he began to stroke. He darted his fingertips lightly across its tender surface, almost as though he was tickling her, her reaction powerful and immediate. Isabelle tightened around him, gripping him with enough force that it might have been painful had the exquisite, satin flesh of her loins not cushioned him. It felt like someone was turning a thumbscrew through a few inches of delicate, quivering meat, the growing pressure making him arch his spine.\n\nThe enticing barbs that lined her insides became even more apparent, the harsh throbs of pleasure that they subjected him to growing stronger, stark and raw in his addled mind as they raked up and down his length. Her contractions were coming thick and fast now, her powerful muscles bearing down on him in wracking waves, her ribbed passage milking him with merciless intent.\n\n\"I can feel your heart beating inside me,\" she murmured, her words jolting Iden out of his trance. She raked his throat with her tongue again, its warmth and its silken texture making his head spin. \"I'm so close. Don't falter, my love.\"\n\nHe gritted his teeth against the pleasure, doing his utmost to stave off the climax that was threatening to rend his sanity, her passage undulating around him as she too neared her peak. Muscles that were many times larger than his own body flexed and bulged beneath her iridescent hide, making her chubby underbelly quiver, her shivers of delight making the rock floor shake beneath them. It felt dangerous to be where he was, her body practically leaning on him, Iden trusting Isabelle to lose control and flatten him into a pancake. All it would take was one slip, one lapse, and yet he had no desire to flee for cover.\n\nWith one final thrust, Iden lost all semblance of control, pleasure overwhelming him like a dam breaking. The muscles in his legs and belly began to cramp, his fingers digging into her paunchy underside as he erupted inside of her. He shuddered as the gelatinous ropes of his emission splashed against her reaches, hot and thick, Isabelle's eyes widening and her jaws opening in surprise as she felt him flood her. Her long spine arched, her tail curling, her neck lifting her head into the air as she loosed a pained growl that shook Iden's bones and echoed through the cavern. Her walls gripped him with renewed ferocity, rippling as she joined him in his bliss, sucking and squeezing with such force that it made him see stars. Her loins drew more of his essence from him with their ruthless kneading, his eyes rolling back into his head, every wad of his semen that pumped into her spasming passage accompanied by a fresh jolt of ecstasy.\n\nHis mind seemed to fade, all reason leaving him, his hips moving of their own volition as he fucked his seed deeper into her roiling tunnel. Each pulse of ecstasy was more intense than the last, the brief moments of lucidity that he was afforded between them giving him just enough time to anticipate the next before it sent him reeling.\n\nIsabelle was faring no better, her massive body shaking with his every thrust, her lustrous scales shining in the dim glow of the torches as her sinewy form writhed on the rock. The muscles in her most intimate depths wrung him relentlessly, swallowing up every drop that he could give her, carrying it deeper into her womanhood as though she was drinking from him.\n\nTheir carnal pleasure reduced them to a pair of panting, heaving beasts, their bodies twitching in tandem as they rode out the final spasms of their shared climax. Iden found himself soaked in her fluids, ropes of her juices clinging to his stomach when he pulled away from her, rolling down his thighs in obscene globs and mingling with his sudor. He could scarcely stand, clinging to Isabelle's underbelly as though he might collapse if he let go, panting into the delicate mosaic of fine scales as he tried to catch his breath.\n\nIsabelle's lips suddenly sprang at him from his right, her head darting towards him on her flexible neck, her oversized tongue clumsily forcing its way into his mouth. He did his best to meet her desperate kiss, all finesse and restraint forgotten, the dragon embracing him with a wanton passion that sent aftershocks shooting down his spine like questing fingers. The pointed tip of her slimy organ wormed its way deeper, bulging his cheeks, his own tongue lashing at the invader as her saliva dripped down his chin. She pulled away with a smack, her reptilian eyes unfocused, Iden gasping as a stray tremor made her sex contract around his still buried erection.\n\nHe pulled out of her, the two of them watching as a blend of their fluids sloughed from her twitching opening, Isabelle inhaling sharply as the friction teased her still sensitive loins. Her massive body seemed to deflate, her muscles finally relaxing, her head coming to rest on the pile of silken fabric. Iden let himself fall back, joining her on the makeshift bed. He was drenched in who knows what, sticky and sore, utterly satisfied.\n\nThey lay there for a while, recovering their strength, enjoying the fading embers of their afterglow. When Iden had regained enough of his faculties, he rolled over onto his side, finding that Isabelle was watching him with her glowing eyes.\n\n\"How did I do?\" he asked, Isabelle giving him a toothy grin.\n\n\"An admirable effort for someone of your stature. We should probably repeat the process a few more times, just to make sure.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" he replied, returning her smile. \"All in the name of being thorough, of course.\"\n\nShe pressed closer, pushing her massive head into his arms as best she could manage. It was as close to spooning as they were going to get until Isabelle was able to return to her human form. He ran his hands across her scaly snout, stroking her ears, feeling her warm breath on his skin. He was covered in various bodily fluids, but she didn't seem to mind, her long frame curling up tighter as though she was trying to shield him from the outside world.\n\nHe reflected on the events of the last few days as he lay beside her, looking up at the canopy of her massive wing. He had come searching for riches, for a way out of a lifestyle that was certainly going to kill him sooner rather than later, and he had found them. Just not in the form that he had expected."
            },
            {
                "title": "FEATHERING THE NEST",
                "text": "Iden rode along the white path, his horse's hooves crunching the gravel underfoot, a mob of baying hounds following behind him. The tall, carefully-tended cypress trees that lined either side of the road cast their shadows as the rays of the setting sun bathed them, the sky painted in beautiful shades of pink and orange. There was a crossbow slung across his back, and he carried a trio of fat, fluffy rabbits over his shoulder.\n\nThe terrain here was relatively flat, the rolling fields broken up by hedgerows and patches of dense forest that made for excellent hunting. That had become Iden's passion in recent months, chasing down deer and rabbits on the estate. There was so much land that he could ride for hours before reaching the limits of the property. It was about fifteen hundred acres if memory served. There was also a sizable lake that made for great fishing on warmer days when it was too hot to go gallivanting around in the woods.\n\nAt the far end of the long road lay the manor, its walls rising high into the air, creeping ivy clinging to the weather-beaten stonework. It was a blocky building, with wide windows on the upper floor, the roof lined with crenellations that were more for decorative purposes than for actual defense. There was a large main hall with two smaller wings, the gardens that surrounded it full of flowers and shrubs. Isabelle liked to take walks through the grounds, admiring the blossoming trees and plants. It was a far cry from the windswept peaks and the dank caverns of her previous abodes.\n\nPurchasing a manor had been a surprisingly simple affair. Finding a Lord who was in financial trouble had been trivial, the man had been all too happy to abandon his obligations in exchange for a large sum of gold that would see his debts repaid.\n\nLiving in a manor had turned out to be a little more complicated than Iden had initially assumed, however. The building and its lands were only one part of the equation. About a hundred people lived and worked on the estate, described as serfs or villein, farming the fields and maintaining the property. They were not exactly servants, but rather they paid rent to their Lord, and they had obligations relating to labor and upkeep. They had their own quaint houses, their own fields that they were responsible for, their own livestock and crops. There was even a blacksmith, a mill, and a chapel. Iden had inherited a small town as much as his own private property, and as their Lord, he had obligations towards his dependents.\n\nHaving no need of the pittance that they would accrue from renting out the land, Iden and Isabelle had decided to declare the inhabitants free peasants. They would no longer pay rent, but they would continue their duties as usual, domestic work included. After all, two people could not maintain the house and the extensive demesne on their own, even if they had the necessary knowledge and experience. Iden was a career soldier, he hadn't the faintest idea of how to raise cattle, or how to till a field. Isabelle was a dragon, she was no more versed in maintaining a home than he was in pruning a rose bush, and so the peasants were of great help to them.\n\nThe presence of the tenants did complicate things somewhat. Flying in the crates of treasure had to be done in the dead of night, lest the inhabitants catch a glimpse of a dragon, but the massive manor afforded them enough privacy that they didn't have to worry too much about keeping up appearances once inside its walls. The housekeepers respected their wishes when they asked for certain areas of the estate to be off-limits, namely the extensive basement and the underground treasury where Isabelle had taken up residence. She had filled the woefully barren vaults with her hoard, while her more conventional treasures had been spread throughout the manor's many rooms. There was a real library where she could store her books, while her suits of decorative armor and her ornate weapons were displayed within the previously empty halls. It was like the whole manor was her lair, and she seemed to revel in the opportunity to show off her collection.\n\nEven if the peasants happened to stumble across something that they shouldn't, Iden doubted whether anything would come of it. He and Isabelle were very well liked, and their wards were unlikely to find another landowner who would afford them the same freedoms and respect. Iden had no desire to lord over them, so to speak. Until very recently, his life had been spent in a similar social class, he had lived through many of the same struggles that they had.\n\nHe rode into the manor's courtyard, returning his horse to its stable, and the dogs to their kennels. As he made his way up to the main door, his haul of rabbits clutched in his hand, Isabelle opened it. She was clad in a fine gown, looking the part of a Lady, an excited expression on her face.\n\n\"Iden!\" she exclaimed, \"you're just in time! Come, come!\"\n\nBefore he could ask her what was happening, she took him by the hand, dragging him into the hallway. She hurried him through the main hall, the ceiling high above them adorned with chandeliers, the walls decorated with murals and paintings that were left over from the previous owner. There was a large dining table that occupied the center of the room, the chairs ornately carved, some of Isabelle's suits of gilded armor lining the walls. Their feet echoed on the checkerboard floor as she dragged him along, entering the West wing and turning towards the stone steps that led down into the cellars.\n\nShe paused to unbolt a heavy wooden door, leading Iden into a dimly lit room with an arched stone ceiling, empty wine racks stacked against the walls. At the far end of the room was a fireplace, the hearth brimming with what looked like a pyre made from dry wood and plant matter, flickering flames licking at the dusty stonework.\n\n\"It's time!\" Isabelle whispered, practically bouncing on the spot. Iden crept closer, shielding himself from the heat, glancing into the fire to see the clutch of nine eggs. They were more elongated than he had initially assumed, not really the same shape as a chicken egg, their shells leathery and flexible rather than rigid. They had been incubating in the fire ever since Isabelle had laid them a few weeks prior. She had kept them warm with her breath, tending the fire diligently while they waited for the eggs to hatch. Apparently, the time had come.\n\nIden saw movement coming from one of the eggs, the shell shifting, like someone moving beneath a blanket. It didn't crack. Instead, it tented upwards. A tiny claw poked through the hole, which was followed by a hand, Iden's heart starting to race as he saw blue scales reflecting the glow of the flames. As excited as he was, he was also a little apprehensive. What were their children going to look like?\n\n\"Should we help them?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"No. They must be strong enough to escape the shell on their own if they are to survive,\" Isabelle replied, crouching beside him to watch the baby as it struggled against its bonds. A second tiny, clawed hand emerged to tear the shell like paper, and then a head broke free. Iden's heart swelled as he saw the features of an infant, its tuft of dark hair damp with fluid from the egg, a pair of almost imperceptibly small horns sprouting from its forehead. It had no snout, and its skin was clear, just like his own. Its eyes were still closed, and so he couldn't be sure of their color, or the shape of the pupils. Much like one of Isabelle's semi-transformed states, the blue scales were limited to its extremities, the same iridescent blues and greens that were present on its mother.\n\nIden fought the impulse to pull the infant from the hearth. He had to remind himself that it was only partially human, the flames were of no more danger to it than water was dangerous to a duck. The baby rolled out of its egg, lying on its back and jerking its limbs like a newborn that had just left the womb, a stubby tail waving back and forth. It opened its mouth and sucked in a breath, starting to cry, its little brow furrowing as its cheeks began to redden.\n\nOnly now did Isabelle see fit to lean in and pick the infant up, cradling it in her arms. There was a flash of flame as she conjured a soft blanket, swaddling the baby, bundling it up as she rocked it back and forth. The crying soon abated, the baby apparently tired from its ordeal.\n\n\"It's a girl,\" she whispered, a warm smile brightening her face as she glanced up at Iden. \"The first of our brood. Come, say hello to her.\"\n\nIden inched closer, leaning in to get a look at the baby. With her body wrapped in the blanket, the only sign that she wasn't entirely human were the stubby horns on her head.\n\n\"She's perfect,\" he said, \"I was expecting them to look...more like you.\"\n\n\"How flattering,\" Isabelle giggled. \"She has your hair, look.\"\n\n\"And your scales.\"\n\n\"Here, hold her,\" Isabelle said as she foisted the sleeping baby into his hands. He dropped his rabbits, taking the child from her as she moved back to the fireplace. \"The next one is coming!\"\n\nIden couldn't believe how light the baby was, she weighed almost nothing, her little head so small that it could rest in his calloused palm. He was almost afraid of holding her, she looked so fragile, as if he might break her by handling her in the wrong way. She yawned, exposing a mouth full of sharp teeth that were already developed. Dragons did not produce milk as far as he knew, the infants might come out of the egg ready for meat.\n\nAn odd sensation overcame him as he looked down at her, a kind of euphoria, butterflies swarming in his belly. He had only just met this tiny person, and yet he was already certain that he loved her, that he would do anything to protect her. Had he and Isabelle really created this little creature together? He felt oddly proud of himself, as though he had just completed a great work of art.\n\nThe baby slipped an arm out of her blanket, gripping his finger in her tiny hand. She was surprisingly strong for her size, her claws pricking his skin like those of a kitten. He looked over to see Isabelle pulling another baby from the hearth, as though it was being birthed from the flames. She swaddled it much like the first, passing it to Iden.\n\n\"Are they all coming?\" he asked, growing somewhat alarmed. \"Should I go fetch a basket or something?\"\n\n\"You're the one who wanted an army of children,\" she said, giving him a smirk.\n\n\"At this rate, we're going to have to build a barracks.\"\n\n\"Don't make me laugh,\" she giggled, \"you'll wake them!\"\n\nShe repeated the procedure with the third baby, Iden noting that she had gone as far as choosing different colors of fabric for each one.\n\n\"Is that one a boy, or a girl?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"Two girls and a boy so far,\" she replied, \"you already have your heir. None of the other eggs are moving, these must be the strongest of the brood. The rest will emerge when they're ready.\"\n\n\"What are we going to name them all?\" he wondered. \"Have you thought about it at all?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" she admitted, \"it always struck me as strange to name a baby the moment that it comes into the world. A name should be influenced by one's personality, one's temperament, don't you agree?\"\n\n\"There are some who believe that the name influences the personality,\" Iden said, glancing down at one of the babies. Much like the first, this one had a little tuft of hair and a pair of stunted horns on its otherwise bald head, its eyes tightly closed.\n\n\"Perhaps we should conduct an experiment,\" Isabelle said, rocking one of the babies in her arms. This one was rowdier than the first two, Iden could see its little limbs moving beneath its blanket as it struggled. \"You can name four of them, and I'll name the other five.\"\n\n\"Why do you get to name five?\" Iden asked, feigning indignation.\n\n\"We could decide who gets to name the fifth one with a contest of strength if you'd like,\" she replied with a mischievous grin.\n\n\"Four is a good, round number,\" Iden replied hastily. \"What do you think the maids will say? Will we have to keep them down here? The entire estate will want to come and take a look at them once word spreads that we've had children, the housekeepers will want to play with them. Can we trust them?\"\n\n\"That is something that I have been thinking about,\" she replied, her tone becoming more serious. \"Amongst my collection is a spellbook that was written in the blood of a Fey, creatures renowned for their illusory magic. Until such a time as I can instruct our children in polymorphing, it will prevent any of the peasants that live on our grounds from discovering their true nature. The spells will have to be performed regularly, but it should suffice.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" Iden sighed. \"We've got a good thing going here, the last thing that I want is for us to get run out by a mob now that we have...nine mouths to feed.\"\n\nShe walked over to him and kissed his cheek.\n\n\"We earned a lot of goodwill when we decided to let the tenants live here without paying rent. I'm not sure that they would run us out of our home, even if they caught a glimpse of a horn or a tail. The priest who tends to the chapel, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about.\"\n\n\"Did I ever thank you?\" Iden asked.\n\n\"For what?\" Isabelle replied, cocking her head at him curiously.\n\n\"For all of this. An estate, enough wealth that I don't have to risk my neck every day, three healthy children and counting. This is everything that I ever wanted, more than anyone but a madman could hope for.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" she replied. \"But if you hadn't come to claim my head, then I'd still be living in a dingy cave, sitting on a pile of treasure that I had absolutely no use for.\"\n\n\"You're the only person who ever saw me as more than just a sword for hire, the only person who ever believed that I could be better than I am,\" he added as he stood there with the two infants clutched in his arms.\n\n\"I didn't better you,\" Isabelle chuckled, \"you chose to better yourself. You made a decision to do the right thing, to obey your conscience, to aspire to greater ideals. That was all you, and everything that you have now is a result of that one choice, that one moment of clarity. That's all life really is,\" she continued, gazing down at the rowdy baby as it struggled against its blanket. \"A series of choices, a handful of moments is all that defines who you are. This child may have centuries of life ahead of her, but her defining moments may come down to a few scant seconds.\"\n\nIden glanced down at his newly hatched children, wondering what their lives might be like. They had the best possible start in life, as much opportunity as a person could get, and their education would be world-class with Isabelle as their tutor. If she could impart some of her wisdom, and if he could teach them restraint and humility, then he had no doubt that they would grow up to do great things.\n\n\"Maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself,\" Iden began, \"but this doesn't quite constitute an army yet. We almost have a conroi, we should probably work our way up to a battalion next.\"\n\n\"Ever the womanizer,\" Isabelle said, giving him a suggestive look. \"If I didn't know better, I might suspect that you had taken a liking to my true form.\"\n\n\"It has its merits,\" he replied with a knowing smile. \"Now, tell me which book you need to start casting the spells, and I'll go fetch it for you. Being showered with attention by the scullery maids is all part of becoming a mother, you know.\"\n\n\"Alright, but we may want to wait a few hours before we venture back upstairs. It will be hard enough explaining how I birthed nonuplets like a damned litter of kittens without having them appear two or three at a time.\"\n\nIden handed her the two babies, careful not to disturb them. She took one in her arm, and a long, blue tail emerged from beneath her gown to cradle the last one.\n\n\"It's the only book with silver lettering on the spine,\" she said, \"you can't miss it. And Iden?\"\n\nHe paused at the foot of the stone steps, turning to look back at her.\n\n\"Fatherhood suits you well.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragon Dreamer 1) Dragon Dreamer",
        "author": "J. S. Burke",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "THE CLAW OF THE STORM",
                "text": "Black clouds rolled silently overhead, devouring stars in the darkening night sky. A sudden barrage of lightning crackled above. Startled by the noise, Arak spun in the air. Again the lightning flashed! In the blinding light he clearly saw the monstrous black claw of the storm. His body shook as powerful waves of thunder rolled through him. His heart beat with the new rhythm.\n\nThe young dragon veered left, toward the weaker side of a storm. But this storm was huge. There was no escape.\n\nThunder roared as jagged spears of lightning tore open the sky, unleashing a fierce hail of ice-stones. The stones hammered Arak's golden-scaled body as he twisted and turned, trying desperately to fly above the storm. Each wing stroke was a struggle to rise against the onslaught. The hail drove him back down, battered and bruised.\n\nArak sought the edge of the storm, hoping to out-fly it. But it moved like a pack of ravenous dweer, spreading rapidly to cover any escape. He realized with frightening clarity that he might never see home again. The storm raged like a living creature. He was trapped.\n\nA swath of smaller hailstones appeared and he dove for the opening! Just as he reached the storm's edge, a huge ice-stone tore through the leathery membrane of his left wing. Air whistled through the gaping hole. Arak struggled to fly. It was like trying to breathe without lungs. Then he was beyond the grasp of the storm, falling as he flew with ragged, painful strokes.\n\nHis eyes burned from the strain as he scoured the darkness for a safe place to land. Safe? He hadn't given that a thought when he charged out to sea, abandoning his planned route, too angry to think. A distant spot of white shone faintly on the black sea. Ice!\n\nArak lurched through the sky, still falling, straining to reach the ice floe before he fell into the water. Then he would be trapped in the wintry sea, unable to launch from the water, his body cooling into an eternal sleep. He would die.\n\nThe frozen sky chilled his body, numbing the pain and tugging at his eyelids. No! He could not give in to sleep. But he let his eyes close, just for a moment, and rested his wings. Gliding unevenly, he drifted toward sleep. In the misty borders of dreamland, Arak saw his sire and dam watching from the dragon shore. They waited for him to return.\n\nArak forced his eyes open and stretched his battered wings, wincing as he reached for a stronger stroke. He pulled his gilded arms tighter against his body, streamlined to fly farther with each painful stroke of his wings. His legs and long, slender tail trailed behind.\n\nThe small sheet of ice seemed an impossible goal, as distant as a dream. The black sea grew larger, reaching for him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Time was running out. Scree gazed up through the sea with longing, her two golden eyes trying to pierce the liquid darkness above. The small octopus held her healer's bag in two tightly-coiled arms. Could she find the quithra before it was too late?\n\nScree looked back at the lively undersea celebration and her arms drooped. She was bound here by a promise. She smoothed her skin, keeping its natural red-brown color. Then she flowed slowly back to the pod, using her many arms to glide across the sea floor, moving as effortlessly as a shadow.\n\nThe New Moon Festival was filled with delightful entertainment. An eight-armed drummer, wielding thick sticks of coral, pounded an irresistible rhythm on giant clamshells. Scree tapped three arms in a complex pattern that matched the drumbeats pulsing through her boneless body. Anxious to leave, she restlessly poked holes in the sand.\n\nTempting flavors from the lavish buffet swirled around Scree, but she'd already eaten her fill of spiced crab and oysters. It was harder to ignore the huge white pearl that flashed through the water, shining like the moon, tossed and caught by a whirling octopus. She loved to dance.\n\nScree waited impatiently, curling her arms in frustration. Why must they always celebrate the new moon? It was tradition, but... couldn't they celebrate something else? Life was tied to moon cycles, and this was an important time to collect healer supplies.\n\nShe should leave now, to find the ice floe that would attract quithra. These small, colorful creatures spawned only once a year, with the new winter moon, so she needed to gather their eggs tonight. Quithra eggs were a crucial ingredient in her potent salve for aching muscles. But she could not leave before Orm's performance.\n\nAt last, Orm pulsed onto the small stage.\n\nHe settled onto a large coral head and let his eight tentacle arms hang down. Orm put three front arms together, straight, and flattened them to enlarge the living screen of his body. Vivid pictures flashed across his body screen as he shared a pod legend. Special color cells in his skin provided realistic detail. He used another arm on either side to weave words through the water.\n\nTall poles were set in the sand, arranged like rings around the full moon. The top of each pole held a container of food and small glowing creatures swarmed about them, lighting the festival. Scree could see Orm clearly by this light, and the cluster of youngsters near the stage. They were unnaturally still, mesmerized by his storytelling.\n\nScree smiled as her mate explained that there were four New Moon Festivals every year, one for each season, to celebrate the Moon. Orm told his favorite legend: the Moon and the First Octopus. He finished with a dramatic flourish.\n\nThe entire audience erupted in silent applause.\n\nBright octopus arms shot up through the gray water, with skin changed from a dull brown into neon colors. Scree waved emerald arms with lines of pure gold. Other octopi chose ruby, silver, or teal. These colorful waving arms created a fantasy fountain more brilliant than a coral reef.\n\nWhen the applause ended, Scree turned brown again and gripped her bag more firmly. She slipped from the rock, anxious to be on her way. Suddenly, a bright red arm snaked out and wrapped around one of her arms. She jerked away in surprise.\n\nOrm's whole body was scarlet. \"Why must you leave? This is the Winter Festival!\"\n\nScree stroked his arm with a soothing gesture. \"I need to find the quithra tonight, before they spawn.\" His angry color slowly faded.\n\nJust as Scree turned to leave, her good friend Tron took the stage. He looked right at her and waved an enthusiastic welcome. With an octopus sigh she settled back again, still clutching her bag. Would she be too late?\n\nScree fiddled with her healer's bag. It was a gift from a grateful patient, to replace her old, tattered kelp sack. The bag was made from cloth-of-gold, woven from the thin, wiry strands of pen shells. The golden fabric was nearly indestructible. Tiny brown shells covered the gleaming cloth, giving Scree's bag a natural, earthy appearance similar to her skin. Inside were four compartments, separated by the flexible skeletons of sea fans.\n\nThe first compartment held needles, vials filled with odd liquids, medicinal seaweeds, and pearls. The second had tightly-rolled kelp bandages and live limpets. The third held empty shell containers for collecting, sponges to clean wounds, and a sharp surgeon's knife of glittering black garnet. The last held crab claws, food for her delayed journey.\n\nTron signaled the drummers to begin. He stretched his body tall and turned chalky white. Small spikes sprouted on his eight arms as they became stiff, jointed legs. His head broadened to mimic the lumpy-flat shell of a northern king crab.\n\nTron began the dance of this huge crab. Four of his legs tapped one rhythm while the legs in-between tapped another. The drumming grew faster and he quickened the pace. The beat stopped. He smoothed his skin and flowed back to his normal red-brown, flexible shape.\n\nScree waved her arms high, turning them bright colors to show appreciation. Tron's performance was remarkable. Octopi were natural shape-shifters, able to change their shape, color and texture to mimic many different creatures. But few learned the dances of others.\n\nTron was a rare friend, since only he and Scree explored alone. He knew the feel of cold snow brushing your skin, the taste of melting ice, and the rapture of colored lights waving like seaweed in the night sky. Would Orm ever experience this?\n\nScree turned to her mate. \"I must leave now, but I'll be back soon.\"\n\n\"Please be careful.\" Orm's arms curled and uncurled with anxiety. \"It's not safe to be alone, away from the pod.\"\n\nScree sighed. It was unnatural to travel alone. Most octopi appreciated the security of a village, with its seafood farms and sturdy dens. Each spring, many thousands of octopus eggs hatched. The tiny hatchlings drifted far from home on sea currents. Few survived.\n\nOrm was a young juvenile on the return migration when a shark tore by and killed all of his comrades. Scree still saw the haunting memory in his eyes. He could not believe that anything she found was worth the terrible risk of exploring. Scree twined two arms affectionately with her mate. \"Your research can be done here, but I must leave to gather healing supplies.\"\n\nOrm handed her a large pearl. \"For luck.\"\n\n\"A black pearl... that's new. It's beautiful.\" She placed it in her bag and looked into his eyes. \"I will be careful.\" Scree flowed away into the darkness.\n\nScree pulsed through the inky dark waters toward the starlit surface, seeking rare items for her healer's bag. She also sought solitude and the magic of the stars, which shone in their full glory during the new moon. Few octopi ventured so far from home. Fewer still risked the dangers of a journey through open water, with no place to hide.\n\nScree twirled beneath the starry sky. Then she headed for a small ice floe that she'd found earlier, where a weathered branch protruded. The branch was a rare, desirable perch, likely to attract quithra.\n\nQuithra were lovely sea slugs with long oval bodies of brilliant violet and rose. A dozen fleshy yellow spikes ran down the back, and each spike ended in a blue eye dot that could see only light and dark. They sought the surface when it was time to spawn, releasing their eggs. Like many slow, vivid creatures, quithra were poisonous to eat. Their bright color served as a warning. The oily eggs tasted bitter, were slightly toxic, and had a numbing effect that was perfect for her salve.\n\nScree twined an arm around the branch, looking. There were no quithra. Was she too late? She shivered as eddies of fog from the ice blew in cold swirls across her skin. She gathered a cluster of red seaweed, useful for dressing wounds, and stowed it in her healer's bag. Then she waited, nervously changing colors, hoping for quithra.\n\nScree felt a slight change in the currents. What was it? She turned to stone, not moving, while her eyes searched the sea. Quithra! Three swam slowly toward her, using their muscular body flaps. They settled on the branch and began to spawn. Scree eagerly collected clouds of small, bright yellow eggs on her sponge. She placed the sponge securely inside a clam shell purse and added it to her bag.\n\nA golden streak seared the dark sky. A falling star! Her eyes widened as it plunged toward the small ice sheet, growing to the size of a shark. The crash shattered the night, rocking the ice and almost knocking her off her log seat. The star flopped, in a very un-starlike manner.\n\nScree had never seen anything like it.\n\nShe instantly camouflaged, changing her color to match the log perfectly. Scree could stretch about two feet across between the tips of her arms. But this frightful, alien creature must be at least eight feet long and it had gleaming sharp claws. She trembled and flowed away, matching the log as she moved, invisible.\n\nScree glanced back, ready to slip into the sea, hanging by the tip of one arm.\n\nThe creature writhed.\n\nScree stopped. It looked more dangerous than a shark, but it must have been injured in such an incredible fall. She felt the weight of her healer's bag, and the responsibility. She struggled to look beyond the deadly claws, noticing instead the crimson splashes of blood that stained the snow. Scree rippled back onto the branch."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The young dragon gasped for breath, stunned by the crash. Red-hot fire shot through his right leg. Arak struggled upright despite the searing pain, flinching as he tried to stand. He collapsed, twisting as he fell, writhing in agony.\n\n\"My first solo journey,\" he moaned.\n\nHe had reached the ice floe. But this was not the island he'd hoped to discover. Dragons needed copper supplements to survive and their mine was almost empty. Finding an island source would make him a hero. The other dragons wouldn't taunt him anymore. Instead, his wing was torn and now he'd broken his leg.\n\nArak hung his head. Karoon was right, he was just a dreamer. He hadn't even noticed the storm signs, and he had crashed on his important first solo. He would never live this down.\n\nThe pain was growing like flames and he desperately needed help. Arak automatically reached for his chest pouch. It was gone! The ice sheet was small; it could only hold a few dragons. He looked under his wings. Nothing! His eyes frantically swept the ice, probing every thin shadow. The barren ice gleamed serenely white under the stars. Empty. There was no sign of his pouch or anything else.\n\nArak trembled, shaking like the last leaf on a winter tree. He had lost everything in the storm. His missing pouch held a meal, a silver flask of spiced tea, vials of rare ground metals, a magnetic lodestone, and his precious aquamarine globe... his trance-stone. He needed his trance-stone to contact the clan for help.\n\nArak was chilled to the bone. He yearned for his own cozy shelter, which was well-stocked with blankets and hearty dragon-snacks. But he was trapped on the ice, wounded and unable to fly, with no food or warmth or healer. So he would die here, alone. A sob caught in his throat. Arak watched the sea, sparkling with reflected stars, and tried to calm his mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Still camouflaged, Scree studied the fearsome creature from the edge of the ice. It had sharp-tipped arms and a head full of sharp teeth. Only the long, slender tail seemed harmless. Unlike her eight matching arms, it had three distinctly different pairs of limbs. The huge golden fins seemed to be adapted for sky-swimming. One leg was bent at an odd angle, probably broken in the fall.\n\nScree knew several techniques for treating broken bones, despite the fact that she was boneless. Some of her earliest patients had been fish. But she didn't know how to communicate with this strange creature. How could she get its permission to help? And what did it eat? Hopefully not octopus! She shuddered at the thought.\n\nScree studied the being. It needed help, she was a healer, and she must get its attention. She took the large black pearl from her bag and rolled it to the creature's claws. The pearl gleamed like a dark rainbow against the cold white snow.\n\nThe golden head turned, following the pearl's path back to her. Its eyes grew wide.\n\nScree made the sign of a healer, bending her two front arms together into an upright triangle. This symbolized a broad, stable base of healer knowledge supporting the healing point of change.\n\nThere was no response.\n\nScree curled her arms in frustration. Then she stretched taller and concentrated on the color cells in her skin. She made a detailed picture on her body of the creature holding out its injured leg and sky-fin.\n\nThe creature stared. Then it slowly copied her picture, and a trembling sky-fin unfolded.\n\nShe was right. These injuries needed serious attention. Scree extended an arm and curled it back to herself. The creature hobbled toward her, to the edge of the ice. At least it understood that gesture!\n\nScree lost her fear as she became absorbed in her work. It held quite still while she bandaged the jagged tear in its wing, using sturdy kelp leaves held in place by limpets. These small sea snails with shell hats would hold tenaciously to any spot for a day. Then they'd be released and replaced with fresh limpets.\n\nThe creature watched with obvious interest but moved only as directed.\n\nScree felt the rough break in its leg beneath the torn scales. She cut two sturdy splints and a generous supply of gray-green kelp bandages. Then four of her rubbery arms worked together, setting and wrapping the broken bone. Her remaining four arms were spread wide for support. She added pieces of iodine-rich seaweed to protect the wound from infection.\n\nScree's eight flexible arms had additional brains to control the endless possible movements. They were tactile marvels lined with powerful, yet delicately sensitive, suckers. And each sucker had millions of sensory cells. As Scree dressed the wound she felt the shape and texture of the break, sensed micro-changes in temperature and tasted the salty-metallic injury. She gathered detailed information to better treat her unusual patient.\n\nScree sighed. Would she ever know enough? Breaks and tears were obvious problems. But with such a fall, it could have a more serious, hidden injury. Even fatal.\n\nScree admired the hard, diamond-shaped scales as she worked. Each scale was a golden gem tipped with ruby-red, covering its body in a perfect mosaic. A ridge of sharp gold scales ran down the back of its long, slender neck.\n\nShe checked the leg wrap once more, making sure it was neither too tight nor too loose. Then she knotted the bandage and trimmed it above the splints. Finished, she flowed back to rest on the submerged half of the log, with her head above the water.\n\nScree and the sky-being studied each other. Its big, aqua-blue eyes looked remarkably like Orm's, brimming with curiosity; she could almost see the myriad questions sparkling within. Only the color was different. Such familiar eyes in a strange creature seemed stranger still.\n\nThe alien bowed its head, seeming grateful.\n\nScree bobbed her head in return, wondering what that really meant. Was it hungry? She mimed eating, raising an arm repeatedly to her mouth.\n\nThe sky-being copied her mime and added a vigorous nod.\n\nScree slipped an arm into her bag and tossed the crab claws up onto the ice, one by one. Each claw landed neatly at its feet with a thunk and a spray of ice. Then she slumped back, arms hanging limp. Her skin was tinged gray with exhaustion. Her stomach was an empty cave, and she had just given the patient her entire supply of journey food.\n\nShe watched warily as it crunched through the hard shells. Long, fearsome claws extracted every last shred of meat. Then it raked through the remains, wrinkling its nose, searching hungrily. Her patient clearly needed more food. It would also need bedding against the cold ice, since she had felt warmth beneath her arms while wrapping its leg. A potion made with crushed coral would help the bones grow together. And...\n\nScree made a mental list of supplies, hoping she had enough strength to gather everything. Weary and weak with hunger, she mimed leaving and returning. Did it understand?\n\nIt gazed steadily back, a sharp-edged alien, deadly and helpless. Scree grasped her healer's bag and slid off the log. The glow of its eyes reached through the darkness, watching her as she sank into the sea.\n\nWas there a hidden injury? Would her patient be alive when she returned?"
            },
            {
                "title": "SILVER LINING",
                "text": "A wave of loneliness washed over Arak when the creature disappeared into the sea. He nervously rolled the shimmering black gem from claw to claw. What was that strange, floppy creature, with no bones or scales? Why had it helped? His stomach growled. Would it return? Too hungry and restless to sleep, he relived his disastrous journey. His first solo journey.\n\nThe glorious Winter Festival had just ended, with dragon games and a bounteous feast. Arak took the final test for his journey. He passed easily, surprising the elders with the strength of his trance-mind. The thoughts he shared mind-to-mind were crystal clear.\n\nArak remembered the frozen sand crunching beneath his claws as he stood on the shore, impatiently waiting to leave. Most dragons journeyed during the summer, but he just couldn't wait for his solo. He planned to fly south along the coast, looking for copper, of course.\n\nHe fidgeted as the clan leader droned on and on, giving him final instructions. Arak was so eager to explore that he barely listened. He knew what to do.\n\nHis sire and dam stood proudly by, and his friend Taron. The other young dragons who came to watch were probably just curious about Dreamer, the trance-freak. Zarina landed and waved a friendly greeting, zigging her claws in a jagged lightning path to wish him well. Then Karoon appeared and made a joke about Arak's safe, predictable journey course.\n\nKaroon stretched a wing toward Zarina, laughing.\n\nThat did it! Arak launched skyward and headed west, winging out to sea. He ignored the commands of the leader and the worried look of his parents. He knew the dangers. But this winter had been mild, with few storms. The clan barely had enough snow for their festival.\n\nHe tore through the sky, flying above the vast sea.\n\nWhen the dragon shore disappeared, sea and sky met in a perfect circle. As he flew, Arak remained in the center; the circle moved with him. He was alone in a private world. There was no fixed shore to judge the distance he'd flown, and no trees with lengthening shadows to mark the march of time.\n\nAbove an endless sea, beyond the touch of time, Arak flew further and further from home.\n\nArak looked down, searching the sea as he flew, determined to find a copper-filled island. That would impress the clan. He looked up and snapped his tail nervously. The sun was low in the sky. How far had he flown?\n\nHe should have turned back long ago.\n\nThen the gray-green sea exploded with color. The spectacular sunset was a parade of rainbow sky colors mirrored in a canvas of curved water scales. As the red sun melted into the sea, Arak wondered if he could capture this display in an ice sculpture. The idea grew in his mind as a storm spread silently far overhead.\n\nTotally absorbed, Arak missed the subtle shifts in temperature and pressure that herald an ice storm. Dreamer! Dragons ridiculed him for tuning out the world, lost in thought or trance. Nothing good could come of it. Arak sighed. Maybe they were right. It was particularly humiliating to be injured by a storm. Dragons knew storms. They danced with storms! Yet he'd missed the signs, and this one almost killed him.\n\nArak shivered and curled into a ball, trying to get warm. He tucked his head beneath his wing and closed his weary eyes. His mind replayed a familiar legend.\n\nThe First Dragon was born of Storm, made from the four elements of life: Fire, Water, Air, and Land. Ruby lightning blazed through the rain-drenched sky and struck the golden sand. A golden dragon-lord leapt out of the smoking crater, with bright scales edged in red. He flew as fast as the gray winds and breathed storm-fire. He danced with lightning to honor the Storm.\n\nBut the dragon-lord was lonely. So the Storm used a rare shaft of emerald lightning, the color of new spring leaves, to create a dragon-lady with gold scales edged in green. The dragons spiraled up together into the clouds and flew with the Storm.\n\nArak opened his eyes to the starlit sky. He had been careless, but he would never have met such an intriguing being if he hadn't crashed. The silver lining in his dark cloud of problems was so bright it was incandescent.\n\nPain and hunger grew as the night wore on. Arak rocked back and forth, trying to distract himself with the rhythm. Pain, Hunger, Exhaustion, and Cold: the new four elements of life, he thought, in a feeble attempt at dragon humor.\n\nArak stopped rocking and stared in disbelief.\n\nA huge sea turtle swam toward the ice, towing a long stalk of kelp. And there was the healer! Deep scratches along the turtle's side gleamed silver. How odd. Part of the turtle's shell was made from sections of large abalone shells. The turtle must have been badly injured, and the sea-being fixed it. The sturdy shell pieces fitted perfectly, held together by barnacles. This healer must be skilled.\n\nThe sea-being cut the kelp into sections and pushed them onto the ice.\n\nArak arranged the stalks and sank onto his thick bed, propping his injured leg onto extra leaves. The earthy smell of kelp brought a comfort of home. Crab claws and red seaweed landed beside him. How did it know what he needed?\n\nHe attacked the claws and then ate the seaweed, relaxing as the furry red snack began to numb his many pains. Gentle waves lapped against his ice floe with the muffled drumbeat of a dragon's lullaby. He closed his eyes and immediately sank into a deep sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "The water lightened around Orm, bringing to life a seascape of jewel-toned plants and animals. Small copper fish darted through a forest of coral branches. Bright orange starfish hunted along the reef, stalking clams hidden beneath the sand.\n\nOrm fed plankton to his carefully bred bioluminescent tunicates. These small, clear, jelly-like animals glowed in colors, and they could be attached to any surface by holding their base against it. The walls of the entrance chamber in Orm's cave were covered with tunicates. His elegant, living mosaic glowed in vibrant reds, blues and greens.\n\nOrm headed for his shellfish farm. He flowed past Scree's cave and peered in. Empty. Where was she? He flexed his many arms with restless energy. Frilly red worms, sensitive to the slightest movement, vanished into their holes in the coral. He turned in a circle, gazing into the distance. Then he looked up through the sea. Where was Scree?\n\nOrm continued on to the farm and checked the many oyster beds, calming himself with work. The oysters were healthy and growing well; they would feed the pod. Next he checked the three small groups of oysters that were fed special diets. He'd finally found a way to grow colored pearls. One experimental group had produced a few rare, black pearls. He checked another group and his arms curled in distress. These oysters were dying. Why?\n\nPuzzling the problem, Orm moved on to his abalone crop. He removed a few brightly colored pearls and smiled. He'd just succeeded in growing these exotic, organic opals. The shimmering pearls had interwoven layers of color. The pink-gold and blue-green balls were particularly stunning.\n\nOrm continued his work, often checking the seas above, searching for Scree."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Scree drifted down through the sea, too exhausted to pulse. She sank limply to the sand and collapsed in her cave, dead to the world. Watery blue-green shadows lengthened into evening. She opened her eyes just as Orm poked his head into her cave.\n\n\"You've slept all day. Where were you?\"\n\nTwining arms, Scree drew him in. \"You won't believe this.\"\n\n\"Try me.\" Orm handed Scree a large clam shell filled with succulent oysters and colorful sprigs of seaweed. \"But first, let's eat.\"\n\nThey feasted together while Orm glanced around at Scree's cave, eyeing the shelves. There were rolls of kelp bandages and a bowl filled with live limpets. Shell containers held sedative poisons, seaweed drugs, special salves and supplements. A bright red box carved from coral had sharp, hollow needles. These were made of spines from the fin of a dead lion-fish. In life, the beautiful fish could inject deadly poison through its fin.\n\nThen Scree told her story.\n\nOrm flushed gold in response to Scree's body-picture of the strange, golden creature. His arms danced with interest. \"Where did it come from? What crops do these creatures grow? What art do they make?\"\n\n\"I think it lives far to the east, on the shore. We're still learning to communicate. This being is so different from us but, when I look into its eyes, they look like yours. Only the color is different. I can almost see it thinking.\" Scree laughed. \"When we can talk properly, I believe it will ask as many questions as you do!\"\n\n\"You found a good use for that black pearl. I'd like to meet this creature. I'm in the middle of experiments and I'm having problems, but I should be finished before the full moon.\"\n\nScree frowned. \"Those shellfish farms are important to the pod. I love this food, and your pearls are a beautiful bonus. What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm experimenting with oyster diet, using trace metals. Some oysters are growing like seaweed, and I've learned how to change the color of their pearls. But one group is dying and I need to know why.\"\n\n\"Metals can be tricky. This sky-being should be healed and gone before you finish your work.\" Scree paused, considering. \"I think it may visit again,\" she added.\n\n\"We should tell Spar. He is the pod leader.\"\n\nScree's arms went rigid and her skin flushed with colors. \"I'm not ready to tell him. He didn't support my healing a stingray, even though it's a fish! And this is an alien creature. He might not approve, but it doesn't matter. I'm a healer!\"\n\n\"Spar lost the use of an arm to that stingray,\" Orm said.\n\nScree glared angrily. \"I had everything under control! The fish panicked because Spar interfered and scared it.\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"Very well, I'll say nothing. But Spar might need to know. Eventually, you should tell him.\"\n\nScree's arms relaxed back to normal. \"I know. Orm, the meal was wonderful.\"\n\n\"Someone needs to make sure that you eat.\"\n\nScree just smiled. He knew her so well! Orm was her mate and long-time companion. They mated once each year and carefully tended the eggs for a moon cycle until they hatched. Scree and Orm took turns gently stroking the hanging egg curtain, careful to oxygenate all the eggs with new seawater. There were many hundreds of eggs, but few hatchlings would survive their season of drifting on the surface. Any that grew into juveniles and migrated home would be welcomed back to the pod.\n\nScree glanced at Orm. Had any of their offspring survived? She would never know.\n\nScree grabbed seaweed samples and stuffed them into her healer bag. \"Crabs alone can't properly nourish this sky-being. It has golden scales and copper claws, so it probably needs special trace metals.\" She added a chunk of turquoise for its copper content, a clamshell for mixing, and a small sack of crushed coral.\n\nScree twined arms affectionately with Orm and left, heading back to her patient."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Three dragon-weeks had passed, Arak's wounds were healed, and it was time to leave. The dawn sky flushed with gold and rose as the sun climbed above the sea. Colors caught on the waves and brushed the clouds, surrounding his ice floe with deceptive warmth.\n\nArak grinned joyfully at Scree as he fastened the new kelp pouch securely across his chest. He inhaled the aroma of raw oysters and seaweed from the meal inside. Then he flamed a hollow of ice and collected water in his carved coral flask. The pouch, food and flask were gifts from Scree for his long flight home.\n\nArak was ready to leave, but it was surprisingly hard to say good-bye. \"How do you make skin pictures?\" he asked, instead. They communicated well now, using snow pictures, mimes, and Scree's body pictures.\n\nScree's entire body suddenly turned bright green, then blue, then pink, like an exotic flower. Arak snapped his tail up and down in amazement.\n\n\"There are many color cells in my skin, and cells that are almost like eyes. When I feel danger, I change colors to match my background.\" Scree camouflaged, perfectly matching her log seat, and then changed back to her normal red-brown. \"We learn to control this ability, to make an image of choice.\" A detailed, golden picture of Arak emerged from her skin.\n\nScree pointed to his wing. \"How was it hurt?\"\n\nArak slashed his claws like rain and lifted an ice ball. \"Storm ice tore it.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"A storm pearl.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. They were the same shape, and storm pearl was a good octopus name for an ice ball.\n\n\"Orm is interested in dragon art,\" she said.\n\n\"Kragor would love to talk with him! Our Winter Festival is full of art. Winter storms drive us into the cave, and crowding can lead to fights. Art is good way to channel all that edgy energy.\"\n\nArak stretched his claws to frame a circle larger than Scree's head. \"Dragon-ladies grow big snowflakes in the clouds. Most have patterns with animals.\" He sketched an ornate, six-pointed design into the smooth-packed snow using a sharp copper claw.\n\nScree peered at the drawing. \"Fish and sea grass,\" she said approvingly.\n\n\"Dragon-lords carve ice sculptures with facets that bend the light. This makes glowing pictures inside the ice that change with time.\" It would be so much easier to describe if he could make skin pictures as Scree did.\n\nScree tilted her head in a dragon-like gesture. \"I'd like to see them. Orm works with a different type of cold light. He breeds tiny creatures that glow and uses them to make living murals.\" Scree imaged the colorful walls of Orm's alcove. \"He wants to meet you.\"\n\nArak studied the beautiful, alien artwork. \"Let's meet here again.\"\n\n\"The next full moon would be a good time to visit.\" Scree pointed to the floe and slowly moved her arm southwest. \"The ice is drifting southwest and will be closer to my village when you return.\" Reaching up, she twined an arm around Arak's claws. \"My falling star is ready to rejoin the heavens. I'll miss you, my friend.\"\n\nArak reached for another arm, for the double clasp of friendship. He would truly miss Scree, with her easy acceptance and fascinating perspectives. She was, unexpectedly, a kindred spirit.\n\nMorning mist rose off the ice like steam from a scalding-hot mug of tea. Tonight he would enjoy the spicy flavors of that dragon drink. Arak wanted the familiar crunch of sand under his claws, the traditional aroma of roasting fish, and the freedom of wind beneath his wings. He wanted the liveliness of the clan.\n\nTaron was his best friend, like a nest-mate. Zarina listened to him, but she'd grown and now he felt awkward with her. Arak even missed his parents, despite the irritating way that they fussed over him. Why did they worry so much? He did not miss Karoon.\n\nIt would be good to see home again, though he could only imagine the painful jokes about crashing. But he'd been teased as long as he could remember. Karoon made it his mission to point out Arak's odd behavior. Sometimes, lost in thought or trance-mind, Arak completely missed a meal, unheard of for a dragon! How could you depend on a dragon so lost to the world?\n\nArak stretched his wings, loosening the muscles, and tried to shake away these memories. If he'd found copper, all would be forgiven. Instead, he'd found Scree. He didn't think the clan would be able to see her value.\n\nArak reached into his pouch and handed the lustrous black pearl to Scree. \"It's a beautiful gem.\"\n\nShe signed her refusal. \"It is a gift.\"\n\n\"It's a great treasure.\" Arak bowed his thanks and leapt into the sky.\n\nAt last! He swooped low over the water, recklessly brushing the waves with the tips of his claws. Cool wind rushed by as he soared into the sky and playfully executed a loop before leveling off. He circled once in farewell before heading for home. His ice floe became a mere speck and then disappeared from sight.\n\nIt would be a long flight over the sea, with no place to rest. But his torn wing had healed and Arak was sure he could reach the dragon shore."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE BLACK PEARL",
                "text": "Arak reached the dragon shore as evening colors drained from the sky. He collapsed onto the beach at the water's edge. Winter waves crashed over him and rolled back, dragging his limp body into the sea.\n\nHe struggled upright and staggered up the beach, digging his clawed feet into the cold, gritty sand. The wet sand gleamed like copper in the sunset. Solid land. He was home!\n\nArak savored the lingering aroma of char-grilled fish. The clan gathered every evening at the long stone table, where each dragon brought something to share. It was a mark of honor to bring a large fish or a well-spiced dish. After Scree's bland seafood, Arak could almost taste the potent dragon spices.\n\nSuddenly, his parents landed on either side. Had they been watching for him? He was buried in wings, enveloped in an endless hug. Arafine's claws gripped his own hesitantly, as if he might melt away like sea mist.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" he reassured his dam once again.\n\nThen the clan surrounded him.\n\nTaron clipped his shoulder in a friendly, dragonly way, eyes glowing with relief. \"Took your time, didn't you?\"\n\nArak grinned. \"Why hurry?\"\n\n\"Dreamer's back,\" a young dragon shouted.\n\nArak automatically ignored this insult, focusing instead on Zarina. She watched quietly from the edge of the rowdy crowd. But they'd been friends forever! Why didn't she just wing-buffet him, as usual? Her golden scales were edged in a particularly lovely shade of blue-green. Had they always been that color? He returned her smile, wondering what had changed.\n\nArak grimaced as Driana, the clan healer, worked her way through the crowd toward him. A public examination of his injuries would be the spicing on the fish! Completely humiliated, Arak held out his wing for inspection. Driana carefully felt the mended edges of the tear and looked questioningly at Arak. He quietly answered, \"My wing was torn by an ice-stone.\"\n\nShe tested the strength of his leg and gave a satisfied nod. \"These have mended well. I'd like to meet your healer.\"\n\nKaroon was listening, wearing the surly expression that he reserved for Arak. What new insults was he crafting? As Arak edged away from the group, Karoon almost knocked him down. He staggered off-balance from the shoulder charge, stumbling as he instinctively protected his newly-healed leg.\n\n\"Clumsy, as always,\" laughed Karoon, \"and too slow. Couldn't escape the deadly ice predator?\"\n\nArak smiled through gritted teeth, determined to remain calm. \"Perhaps. But a faster dragon would have missed the adventure.\"\n\n\"Where were you?\" a dragon shouted, following Arak as he tried to retreat.\n\n\"What happened?\" yelled another, bringing the noisy crowd with him.\n\nWhy must everyone speak at once? Arak had forgotten the exuberance of dragons. He looked out to sea, remembering the solitude of his ice floe. Each evening, Arak and Scree shared a silent language of gestures and pictures. The sea was his quiet companion by day.\n\nHe lived with the smell and taste of sea spray, the rhythmic sound of waves, and the remarkable colors. Sunrise waves were purple and rose. Afternoon waves shimmered like hammered gold in the slanting sunlight. Sometimes the sea sparkled like a field strewn with cut diamonds. Arak wanted to leap into the sky and return to his distant refuge.\n\n\"Arak.\"\n\nHe looked up. Arafine, his dam, handed him a large ceramic bowl. It was filled with tempting food left over from the evening communal meal. Dragon food! Arak reached in for a piece of charred fish and stopped in his tracks. The beautiful bowl was spun from blue clay with silver threads. Moonstones and aquamarines decorated the sides in a swirly pattern, like waves of the sea.\n\nThis was Arak's nest-bowl.\n\nBut it should only be used for special occasions. What was special? He looked into Arafine's eyes and saw that they were bright with unshed tears. She must have been really worried that he would not return. \"Thank you,\" he said, unable to put his deeper thoughts into words.\n\nArak flicked his tail in dismay when he noticed a cloud of steam. Soon, the rich smell of tea steeped with cinnamon bark filled the air. Each dragon brought a large ceramic mug to the fire. It was a tea ceremony to welcome him home.\n\nWhen a dragon first entered trance-mind, the clan held a tea ceremony and the youngster received a special mug inlaid with his or her trance stone. Arak's mug was a swirly blue-green set with an aquamarine gem. He bowed politely as his mug was filled first. Then he stood by the fire.\n\nA cluster of young dragons stared at him, laughing.\n\nThis was really a tea trial, not a ceremony. Why did there have to be a celebration? Now everyone would remember his crash! At least he had something truly unexpected to share. Maybe that would distract them. After the tea, Arak stood within rings of dragons to share his journey tale.\n\n\"How'd you manage to crash on your first solo?\" Karoon sneered. \"Were you lost in dreams, or just lost?\"\n\nLaughter sparked around the circles.\n\nArak cringed inside, but he'd expected this insult. \"Well, I did find my way home. And I found a new world, which is like finding a dream.\"\n\nHe talked about Scree and the undersea village. \"She makes pictures on her skin that look real, just by thinking. And Orm grows undersea crops of food.\"\n\nThe dragons shrugged their wings; this was difficult to imagine.\n\nZarina raised her wings. \"How do you sign 'thank you' to an octopus?\"\n\nArak smiled gratefully and demonstrated the simple bow. \"To bid farewell, the octopus wraps the end of an arm around your claws.\"\n\n\"Could you show us what it looks like?\" Taron asked.\n\nArak melt-carved an octopus from a clear block of ice; the curling arms gleamed like crystal. This captured her essence but not the complex colors.\n\nKragor, his sire, nodded approvingly. \"Well done. You said they make art?\"\n\n\"Orm covered the walls inside his cave with glowing patterns. He uses tiny animals that don't move and glow in colors.\"\n\nArak reached into his pouch and drew out the black pearl. It shimmered in the firelight with a captivating, iridescent luster. It was unlike any dragon gem. Dragons crowded around, golden tails snapping up and down like whips.\n\nZarina gasped. \"It looks like the shadow of a new moon! This would be perfect for our festival. Where did they mine it?\"\n\n\"Orm grows pearls in a special crop, but few are black.\"\n\nKarana, the clan leader, asked: \"Would they trade?\"\n\nArak thumped his tail with excitement. He had not considered this possibility! Trade would redeem his failed solo journey. He straightened his wings into crisp folds.\n\n\"Scree's very interested in other beings. We plan to meet again at the ice floe.\" His tail slumped to the ground. \"But Scree is the only octopus I met, and she's not the pod leader.\" Had she mentioned some disagreements with her leader? Well, it would still be good to see Scree again."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE SHARK",
                "text": "Scree playfully flicked water drops onto Orm. \"Isn't the sky beautiful?\" she asked. They were perched on the log that was stuck in Arak's ice floe, waiting for him to arrive.\n\nOrm shivered as the drops ran down his skin. \"It's interesting. But our reef has more color, and you don't need to travel to the surface through open water. I felt completely exposed, like shark bait,\" he declared.\n\nScree gazed into the distance, scanning the sky. Three specks appeared and slowly grew into golden shapes. She scooted up the branch at the edge of Arak's ice floe. \"Wait 'til you see dragon scales. That's worth the trip!\"\n\nOrm followed her gaze. \"Three? You said there'd be one.\" He curled his arms nervously.\n\nA flurry of huge wings filled the air as the fearsome trio landed. Each was easily five times their size. Scree and Orm suctioned to the branch while wind buffeted their bodies. The dragons slipped on the melting ice, comically ruining their fierce fa\u00e7ade.\n\nArak spun about, his claws scrabbling for traction. He plowed into a pile of slushy snow. He shook his body, wriggling like a dancing sea slug, and sprays of cold white frosting flew off.\n\nOrm shook with silent laughter. His eyes grew wide when the dragons stopped sliding, giving him his first clear view. One had golden scales edged in emerald green, while the other two were gold with ruby. \"What exquisite artwork! Your descriptions didn't do them justice.\"\n\n\"I knew you'd appreciate their scales,\" Scree said smugly.\n\nIntroductions were made, with Scree and Arak interpreting. Their sign language used dragon and octopus gestures, snow drawings and skin pictures.\n\nArafine bowed her head to Scree. \"Thank you for saving our son.\"\n\nScree nodded in return. \"I'm a healer. It was my pleasure to help.\"\n\nArafine opened her sack and displayed their gifts: various nuts, tea leaves and gemstones.\n\nScree made a show of handling each item. She nibbled the nuts, smiling at the subtle flavors. She felt the tea, which looked like dried seaweed but had an oddly sweet flavor. She slid an arm through the small pile of cold stones, recognizing garnet and turquoise. \"What's this?\" she asked, lifting a small, cloudy-clear, blue-green sphere.\n\n\"Aquamarine, the sea-gem,\" Arafine replied. \"It's Arak's trance-stone, which seems rather fitting now.\"\n\nArak handed Scree a clear, lumpy glass rod. \"I chose this because you love the sky.\"\n\nScree's eyes glowed. She ran her arms along the surface and peered through the solid, magically transparent shaft. \"This would be perfect in the entrance to my cave! What is it? Where's it found? Are there more?\"\n\nArak laughed with pleasure. \"I knew you'd like it! This is a lightning cast. Lightning from the sky melted a path of glass through the sand. We can make more. It's a bit risky, but fun. We fly a storm and channel lightning onto beach sand, then harvest the crystal copy of its path.\"\n\nScree offered her gifts of seaweed, oysters and pearls.\n\nArafine and Kragor stood stock-still, mesmerized by the ocean gems. There were creamy pearls, colorful abalone pearls, and another rare black pearl. Arafine lifted a handful of pearls, eyes aglow as they slipped silkily through her claws. The lustrous gemstones were made of fine crystals that broke the light into subtle, watery rainbows.\n\nAs they shared a meal, Scree asked, \"How are your healers trained?\"\n\nArafine told of long apprenticeships and skills in manipulating crystal growth, or bone re-growth. She glanced quizzically at the small, barren ice, then at Scree. \"What brought you to this ice floe?\"\n\n\"I was seeking quithra eggs to make a salve when Arak landed here.\" Scree flashed a picture of the brightly-colored creature. \"My mentor was old when she chose me, and her arms often ache. I rub in the salve to ease her pain.\"\n\nOrm watched expectantly as Arak translated his question, \"Do dragons face any dangers like sharks?\"\n\nKragor nodded. \"Dweer are smaller than us, but vicious. A pack of dweer can kill a dragon. But our real danger is running out of copper. We must find more, or all dragons will become deathly sick.\"\n\nOrm frowned, as if seeing this future. \"I grow undersea crops and I've studied metals. Seaweed can concentrate metals. I'll look for one with extra copper.\"\n\nArak translated and expressed Kragor's gratitude.\n\n\"How do dragons make fire?\" Orm asked.\n\nKragor ignited a stream of brilliant fire, melting a swath of ice.\n\nOrm's entire body flashed bright yellow-orange, mirroring the flames, as he was shocked into losing control of his color cells. He shuddered as a wave of heat washed over him. Orm struggled to regain his composure. Orange sparks dissolved back into his skin and he reverted to a mottled red-brown, his normal, inconspicuous coloring.\n\n\"I've never seen liquid sun. And you produce electricity like an eel!\" Orm stretched out an arm, reaching through the pool of warm water that Kragor had melted. The tip of his arm slid on the slick ice below.\n\n\"I've never seen an octopus sun,\" Kragor replied, laughing. \"And you make colors like nothing I've ever seen!\"\n\nKragor explained that dragons have two stomachs. During the first two years, all food goes to the first stomach and is used for rapid growth. Dragons eat oil-rich plants and fish. When their growth slows, extra oil is stored in the second stomach, along with excess carbon. To breathe fire, a dragon spits the carbon-oil mix and ignites it with sparks from a copper claw.\n\nThen Kragor sketched a picture in the dusting of snow. \"A giant with long arms washed up on the beach. It was huge, as big as five dragons. What do you know of its kind?\"\n\nOrm made a detailed squid picture against black skin. \"Giant squid live in the depths, in darkness. There's a legend that they once attacked us.\"\n\nScree smiled, amused that her careful, conservative mate was lost in conversation with a large, dangerous alien. Kragor was another Orm in dragon-form. They were both full of questions, talking non-stop. Who knew they'd have so much in common?\n\nTheir meal finished, Arafine raised her wings, commanding attention. \"We would love to use that flavorful red seaweed for snow pudding, and your black pearls would be perfect for our New Moon Festival. The clan would like to trade.\"\n\nScree straightened her many arms, automatically assuming a more formal stance. \"I think the pod would trade.\" She stiffened with concern. \"But your leader should meet with ours.\"\n\nNow she really would have to speak with Spar and he would not be pleased. The pod leader was predictably conservative, and did not approve of her working with dangerous creatures. He still blamed her for that stingray incident. Granted, the sharp barb must have been painful when it slashed through his arm. But it was Spar's fault for not trusting her, and he had completely recovered from the injury.\n\nWould Spar agree to meet with them? Scree looked up at the huge dragons, trying to see them as Spar would. They were monsters, and each sharp-tipped arm had more barbs than a stingray. Would Spar be able to see past their deadly claws and appreciate the golden opportunities?\n\nScree ran an arm over the glass lightning cast, feeling a deep hunger. She wanted more of these sturdy, transparent rods that virtually disappeared in water. They could be installed across the entrance to an octopus cave, to protect the precious egg curtain. Octopi could squeeze their fluid, boneless bodies through the glass bars, but few predators could follow. This \"glass window\" would be the perfect cross between a picture window and a predator screen. It would give Scree a secure, yet perfectly clear, view of her realm.\n\n\"Spar and our leader, Karana, should meet here before this ice melts,\" Arafine said. \"We'll leave a lodestone to help us find you, and bring a wood platform when we return.\"\n\nScree exchanged farewells with the new tradition, twining octopus arm to dragon claw. Nervously, she prepared to ask the pod leader to meet the dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "One moon passed. Spar, the leader, flatly rejected Scree's request to meet dragons. Then Orm convinced him to come.\n\nScree bobbed at the surface near the ragged, melting remains of Arak's ice floe. It had drifted right over their village. Orm, Stur, and Spar waited beside her. Spar scowled at Scree, flexing his once-injured arm. She winced and looked away.\n\nFour pairs of wings beat against the cool night sky, gleaming gold in the light of the full moon. The dragons flew in formation, towing a large raft that bounced on the waves. They reached the ice, released the ropes and landed.\n\nScree helped anchor the raft to undersea boulders. Then she flowed onto one of the comfortable log seats that protruded beneath the raft.\n\nSpar and Karana greeted each other formally, as leaders. Then he met Arak, Kragor and Arafine.\n\n\"The clan is grateful to Scree for helping Arak,\" Karana said. \"She's a skilled healer.\"\n\n\"Scree is talented,\" Spar replied grudgingly. His eyes moved from one hand to the next, and he seemed to be counting the sharp claws.\n\nKarana presented Spar with two lightning casts and a container of red-root tea. \"We would like to trade with your pod.\"\n\nScree watched nervously as Spar felt the clear rods and then hefted them, as if weighing their obvious value against the hazards of trade. He ran an arm across the tea, tasting the earthy-delicate flavors. He frowned and smiled at the same time, a decidedly odd expression. Scree could almost read his thoughts. What did they really know of dragons? Was trade a wise decision? And where would it lead?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The pearly light of a nearly full moon washed through the water. Scree pulsed toward the dragon shore, skimming the bottom in a close-knit formation with Orm, Spar, and the other octopus envoys. Together they resembled a larger, more formidable creature.\n\nSpar had finally agreed to trade, so they would meet in late spring at the dragon shore. His eyes darted in all directions as he constantly scanned for danger, never even pausing to admire a rare fish. This continual alert made Scree nervous.\n\nShe glanced up at Tara, who swam far above with a large sack of seaweed and pearls attached to her shell. The huge sea turtle, grateful for Scree's healing, had become so helpful that she was almost indispensable.\n\nA dark shadow slid across Scree.\n\nShe froze, perfecting her camouflage to match the sea floor. Her pod-mates also changed color. The large bull shark was hunting. It slowed and circled back. The pod should resemble a lumpy rock. But if they moved, it would see them.\n\nThe shark circled closer.\n\nScree could taste the metallic flavor of Orm's fear through the sea. She became a living rock, barely breathing, watching through slitted eyes. The shark swam even closer. Water pushed against her as it passed right above. She could count its sharp, jagged teeth.\n\nThen, suddenly, the shark veered off and sped away in pursuit of something else. Scree shuddered. It was Tara, splashing noisily as she tried to flee. Of course she panicked. Tara lived with the scars of the last shark attack. She had a good lead, but the streamlined shark was built for speed and it tore through the water.\n\nThe ungainly turtle was breathing hard, terrified, fins desperately churning. The gap between predator and prey was swiftly closing. This time, Tara would die.\n\nNO!!\n\nScree dropped her healer's bag and jetted to intercept the shark. She smoothed her skin and molded her flexible head into a rounded point. She straightened and merged her arms together, streaming behind her, becoming a shark-shaped torpedo. Her muscular valve pulsed water like a jet. Scree moved incredibly fast for an octopus, carefully cutting the angle to reach Tara first.\n\nOrm's eyes rounded with fear and his body shocked white. No octopus ever chased a shark! He quivered, hesitating. Then Orm dropped his sack and followed Scree, adapting his body for speed. He could not maintain this pace for long.\n\nThey converged on either side of the shark just as it reached Tara. Scree noticed Orm with surprise. He remembered the plan, and was helping despite his fears! Orm and Scree each managed to throw an arm onto the shark, suctioning to hold fast. Then they slung themselves forward through the water onto the shark's head and squirted ink into its eyes.\n\nDistracted, the shark turned to confront its new prey.\n\nTara headed for an underwater ledge and disappeared into its shadow.\n\nScree and Orm flipped away from the shark's head, avoiding the jagged, pointed teeth. They fastened many arms onto the shark's back, the only safe place to hide, and held on. The predator flew through the water, swimming in circles, seeking its lost prey. Octopus arms were strained and bruised by the force of water pulling against them. Rough, sandpaper sharkskin shredded their softer skin.\n\nAs the shark neared Tara's hiding place, Orm and Scree released suckers and tumbled off its back, slipping under the ledge to join her. The shark circled once more and then headed away in search of new prey.\n\nTara flew to the surface, starved for air.\n\nScree and Orm pulsed in a ragged pattern back to their pod. They sank to the sand, battered and exhausted.\n\nOrm's arms curled and uncurled convulsively. \"What were you thinking!?!\"\n\n\"I wasn't thinking. I only had time to react. But I had everything under control,\" she snapped back.\n\n\"Scree \u2013 that was a shark! We were barely hanging on!\"\n\n\"Well, I couldn't let it attack Tara!\"\n\nScree collapsed into a limp bundle. \"We thought this through before. Sharks are powerful, but not terribly bright. Orm - you were brave to help.\"\n\n\"No, not brave. I was paralyzed by my old memories. Then I remembered your plan. It was absurd to even contemplate such a thing. I never thought you'd try it! But I couldn't let you face the shark alone.\"\n\nOrm gradually grew calmer and twined his arms into Scree's. Then he quivered with laughter. \"An octopus chasing a shark! Who would believe it? You were right, though. A sharp wit is more powerful than sharp teeth.\"\n\nScree relaxed against him, remembering their courtship. Orm had created a night sky of glowing tunicate stars on her ceiling. They feasted together under these stars on clams from his new shellfish farms.\n\nThen Orm gave her a lovely piece of tentacle artwork. The driftwood was sanded into an abstract seascape with swells and hollows. Flavorful oils soaked the wood. Only an octopus, with tentacle arms full of multi-sensory suckers, could fully appreciate the artistry.\n\nScree had closed her eyes, running an arm along its surface, feeling the interwoven touch/taste sensations. There were overlapping layers with salty-sweet currents. A deeper hollow held the flavor of a rare seaweed.\n\nHer eyes flew open. That was a matrimonial cave! What a clever proposal. Orm was traditional, but he was also creative. He even accepted her unusual, unappreciated wander-lust and love of stars. She had extended three arms, accepting his proposal. They were mated.\n\nBut they had become even more than mates. Orm had faced his greatest fear to help her.\n\nScree glanced up as Spar, their leader, approached. He was trembling with anger. \"Scree, that was risky. I'm glad for Tara's sake that it worked, but I am responsible for the entire pod. A long journey, away from the safety of our caves, is already dangerous enough. An octopus should not seek greater danger.\"\n\nScree barely controlled an instinctive flush of anger at his censure. She held herself rigid, unable to respond appropriately. How could he be so callous, so narrow-minded? Could he never see beyond his own tentacles? She could never have abandoned Tara to that shark, and her plan had worked.\n\nScree's rigid body seemed to show a respectful stance and Spar appeared to be mollified. He turned away and signaled an end to their break.\n\nScree twirled her arms in frustration. Spar excelled at organizing and protecting the pod. But there had to be more to life than avoiding danger. Helping a friend was certainly more important, and exploring beyond the narrow confines of their village. What was life without the beauty of crystal stars, and the satisfaction of healing in new ways?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Arak flew the storm, seeking likely bolts of lightning. He caught one with his copper claws and deftly threw it into the quartz sand on the dragon shore. Extreme heat melted the sand into a glass rod, a cast of the lightning's path. The crystal rods were harvested from the sand and polished with dragon fire. Lightning casts would be prime trade items.\n\nArak and Taron worked together at the steeper shore where clan and pod would gather. They put logs firmly into the bank at different depths. These sea seats would let octopi flow up or down with the changing tides.\n\nArak built one of the eight guest houses, below low tide near the flat beach. It had a circular base, stone walls, and a narrow entrance. He intertwined long pieces of branching coral, salvaged from storm debris, to make a sturdy roof. He filled mesh bags with shallow-water clams dug from the sand and placed these nutritious treats in the undersea homes.\n\nArak tried to think of every possible comfort. The trading festival had to run smoothly because, as the main interpreter, everything was riding on his wings. This was his chance to redeem himself after crashing on his solo. He flicked his tail nervously, hoping he wouldn't fail the clan or the pod.\n\nFinally, it was the eve of the last full moon of spring. Fingers of the sea slapped the shore in a drum roll and slipped away with a sigh.\n\nArak stood in the restless surf, rustling his wings, full of nervous energy. Taron joined him and they stood together, peering out to sea, waiting.\n\n\"What have I forgotten?\" Arak asked his friend anxiously, yet again.\n\nTaron snapped his tail irritably. \"Nothing! Everything will be fine! Now relax or you'll make us both crazy.\"\n\nAt sundown, a tangle of glistening arms surfaced near the beach. Eight golden dragons on the shore welcomed eight octopus envoys from the sea. Karana greeted Spar formally, while Arak and Scree twined arm and claw in friendship.\n\n\"How was the journey?\" Arak asked.\n\n\"Rather mundane, except for the shark entertainment.\" Scree's eyes twinkled as she glanced at Orm.\n\nHe just smiled, refusing to rise to the bait.\n\nArak's eyes bulged. He was practically dying of curiosity, but a proper host would wait. \"I'd like that story, but you must be exhausted. We'll talk tomorrow.\"\n\nArms dragging, clearly weary from their long journey, Orm and Scree slipped underwater to rest in a hospitable home with a generous meal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The following dawn, Scree squirted to the surface, eager to see Arak's world for the first time. Warm air blew across her skin and unfamiliar tastes teased her sensitive suckers. A long white edge sparkled to the north. An ice floe? Why had it not melted like Arak's floe?\n\nTowering brown and green reefs lay ahead in the distance. These must be the trees Arak had tried to describe. Their size was impressive, but they were not nearly as colorful or interesting as the pod's coral reefs. A few tiny, orange creatures swam among them. Were those butterflies?\n\nArak and Arafine greeted her enthusiastically.\n\nScree stared at the ice. \"Is it always winter here?\"\n\nArak shook his head. \"That ice remains always, but in winter our whole world is covered with cold, white snow. This is spring, when trees grow new green leaves, a bit like kelp. Creatures mate and rainbow flowers appear.\" Arak gave Scree some pink and blue spring flowers. She felt the softness and tasted their delicate sweetness.\n\n\"It will soon be summer and the days will be hot. Fruits ripen and dragonlets hatch. Next comes autumn, when tree leaves turn ruby and gold like me.\" Arak stretched tall and his polished scales caught the early light. \"Then the leaves fall off the trees.\"\n\n\"Do you have seasons?\" Arafine asked, stretching and re-folding her wings.\n\n\"The sea remains cool all year, but seasons do change below the waves,\" Scree replied. \"We don't have trees that change colors, or a blanket of snow that hides the world. Changes in our world are hidden inside life. There are seasons to hatch, grow, mate, and release eggs, for all creatures.\"\n\nThat evening the clan and pod met to trade crystal and pearl treasures. Karana and Arafine rolled lustrous pearls in their claws while Kragor tried algae samples.\n\nScree ran eager arms along a crystal shaft. \"These are perfect.\" She tasted one of the numerous packages of tea and her arms twisted with delight.\n\nTrading was brisk. Scree and Arak helped translate at first, but soon the envoys could use the new language well enough to trade. Dragons and octopi worked together, making more sign-words as needed.\n\nScree sampled foods from land and sea in nightly feasts, while colorful dragon fires lit the shore. In response to questions about their home, the pod clustered together and imaged their coral reef. A rainbow fish swam realistically across Scree and then Orm, an embellishment perfected after much practice.\n\nThe dragons leaned forward and stared.\n\nScree smiled. Even Arak had never seen such an elaborate picture.\n\nScree helped Orm display oysters at different stages of growing pearls. Dragons crowded around as Orm demonstrated the culture procedure. He inserted a small shell ball into an oyster and covered it with a piece of living mantle cut from another oyster. The fleshy mantle normally grew the pearly inner surface of the shell, but now it would coat the ball with layers of pearl crystals.\n\nOrm tried to explain the effect of diet on pearl color, but the dragons were obviously lost. So he held up a polished coral branch set with a circle of pearls: white, cream, orange, peach, pink, lilac, and black. \"I can grow these colors.\"\n\nKragor thumped his tail. \"That's the perfect mine. Rocks you can grow. We still need copper and all our searches have failed.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Crops are useful. We grow seaweed that is rich in iodine, to treat wounds. I'm still searching for seaweed that concentrates copper. We looked on our way here. Could we see dragon art?\"\n\nKragor grinned. \"I'd love to show you our ice sculptures, but that's only in winter. You'll like the amber ornaments.\"\n\nArafine and several dragon-ladies brought an impressive collection to the shore. \"We grow snowflakes in the clouds and then place them on liquid pine sap,\" she explained. \"The sap takes the flake patterns and we turn the sap into stone. It's faster than growing your pearls, but less shimmery.\"\n\nOrm plucked up several ornaments. He peered through the warm, translucent stone. He felt the intricate, six-pointed patterns with his suckers and tasted the amber. One design was made of three eights of tiny dragons, another had fish, and two had creatures he couldn't identify.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Orm said. \"Is real snow this beautiful?\"\n\n\"Orm, you should join me on a northern journey to truly appreciate snow. It falls like rain, only softer and slower. But no natural snowflakes are as fanciful as these.\" Would Orm ever explore with her?\n\nThe following afternoon, Scree hovered safely below the waves with the pod, watching a storm-dark sky. Golden bodies flared brightly and disappeared as dragons tossed lightning in the storm clouds. Rainbow colors flashed in an electric display. Scree felt the rumbling thunder through the water. She slipped an arm above the wave and tasted the burnt air.\n\n\"This is stunning. Arak tried to explain the beauty of colored sky-fire, and decided it simply had to be seen. But even I think that storm-flying is too dangerous,\" Scree confided to Orm.\n\n\"So even you have limits?\" He wriggled with laughter and reached an arm to his mate.\n\nScree batted it aside in irritation, but then twined arms as she remembered the shark. He had risked all to help her.\n\nLanguage skills grew with each evening, and soon they could share simple stories. Arak raised his wings for attention. \"Tell us about the shark.\"\n\nScree looked nervously at her leader. Spar glared angrily but signed his permission, unwilling to deny a direct request from their host. Arak stiffened and flicked his tail. Scree sighed. Spar was angry and Arak was worried about diplomacy. She decided to make the best of an inky situation.\n\nScree told the tale with skillful mimes, body pictures, and shape-shifting while dragons peered over the edge in rapt attention. They were clearly impressed that two small octopi would challenge a deadly shark. Scree finished with a flourish, resumed her normal shape and color, and flowed back onto her log seat.\n\nDragons thumped their tails enthusiastically and added various octopus signs of approval. Spar wore a peculiar expression, appearing both pleased by the clan's praise and irritated by any vindication of Scree's misdeed. Arak simply looked relieved.\n\nAll too soon, the festival was over. Tara arrived, ready to help again. Arak helped Scree load the huge turtle with bags of crystal lightning, tea and spices. He carefully checked the knots.\n\nScree nodded approvingly. \"You managed this gathering very well.\"\n\n\"But I irritated your leader and our envoys didn't know the new language nearly as well as they should have,\" Arak replied, shaking his head. Sea foam clung to his scales, giving him a rather bedraggled appearance.\n\n\"Arak, nothing will ever be perfect.\" Scree pointed along the shore, where dragons and octopi still conversed. \"Look. Nobody wants to leave. Karana and Spar are planning another trading festival for next spring. That is success, and you should be proud.\"\n\nArak brushed off the foam and managed an almost-happy smile.\n\nOrm joined them, adding a sack of clams to the turtle's load. \"Now we'll have enough journey food.\" He patted the turtle on her side, where the shell had been repaired, and looked at Scree.\n\n\"I hope our shark has found new hunting grounds!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "WINTER FESTIVAL",
                "text": "Arak shivered with delight. A sea breeze blew across the field of musical ice sculptures, creating a symphony of sound. The Winter Festival was alive with music.\n\nAbstract sculptures, the size of dragonlets, glistened like oddly-melted icebergs on a sea of blue-shadowed snow. The sculptures had hollow sections with small, carefully-spaced holes. These holes caught the wind, making chords and trills that blended together in dragonly melodies.\n\nArak smiled with satisfaction as he put the finishing touches on his own ice sculpture. After three days of painstaking work, it was finished. This was a realistic sculpture of Zarina's new medicinal herb. The thick, icy vine was a hollow spiral riddled with musical holes. Three flame flowers hung from the vine, each a cluster of ice petals, clinking like chimes.\n\nArak's sculpture was very different from the irregular ice shapes on the field. Would the clan like it? Maybe, next winter, there would be a whole meadow of whistling ice flowers!\n\nArak adjusted a few holes, widening some and closing others, tuning his vine to match the other sculptures. The sound blended perfectly. Light glinted off the textured stem and delicate flowers. Well, at least Zarina would like it. Arak left to find her.\n\nKaroon strolled along the ocean edge of the festival and Arak automatically adjusted his course to avoid him. Nothing would mar this sparkling day. The mouth-watering aroma of roasting almonds drew Arak like flies to ripe fruit. He contentedly munched on a generous handful of warm, spiced nuts.\n\nA high-pitched shriek split the air.\n\nArak spun toward the piercing sound. A first-year dragonlet plummeted down the long spiral ice slide, squealing with delight. The huge slide had been melt-carved into the glacier with dragon fire. The dragonlet opened her stubby wings as she neared the end of the slide, practicing near-flight on this impressive play-scape. She landed on a pile of soft snow, scrabbled off, and began toddling up the winding groove for another flying slide.\n\nArak closed his eyes. Cold wind tore by in his memories as he relived the ecstasy of his first plunge down a Winter Festival ice slide.\n\nArak looked up. Zarina vaned her wings as she hovered, holding almost motionless, high above in the peachy-gray snow clouds. They had tussled playfully as dragonlets, and now she was a dragon-lady growing her first cloud-sculpture.\n\nArak found a bench and waited for her to finish. Kragor joined him, waiting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Four dragon-ladies clustered together companionably in the winter clouds. Zarina chose a tiny snowflake, growing inside its super-cooled sac of water. She delicately inserted the tip of a copper claw into the heart of the crystal cocoon. She would help it grow into a fantasy flake as big as a dinner plate.\n\nZarina pulsed electric energy into the center of the six-pointed crystal. Her snowflake caught new water molecules at each tip, keeping its symmetry. She briefly warmed the crystal sac to make the crystal tips grow thinner. She concentrated, carefully adding trace metals to manipulate the pattern. She controlled the crystal's growth to create a fanciful shape.\n\nAt last, the flake was finished. Zarina held a lacy network of tentacles with a head at each of the six points. Light sparkled along the crystals.\n\nDriana glanced over with a look of surprise. She stopped pulsing energy into her own cloud sculpture. \"An octopus snowflake! How original! The overlapping arms are perfect. Even as a dragonlet you had the necessary concentration. Growing snow crystals is a lot like growing crystals across a dragon's broken bone. You'll be a superb healer.\"\n\nArafine looked at Zarina's sea-flake. \"It's unique. A frozen flake is a clever way to capture a water-being.\" She tilted her head, studying her own crystal kaleidoscope. The intricate design was entirely made of dragons.\n\nKarana nodded approvingly. \"Arafine, politics and personalities are woven together much like the dragons in your snowflake. I've been clan leader for four terms and it's time to fold my wings. I'd like to sponsor you as leader.\"\n\nArafine tilted her head, considering.\n\nThe dragon-ladies spiraled down from the clouds with their crystal creations. They landed near the Arak's bench.\n\nKragor stood up and peered at Arafine's dragon snowflake. \"What exceptional detail.\"\n\nArafine beamed and twined necks with her mate.\n\nArak watched closely, then turned to compliment Zarina's octopus snowflake. \"This is truly unique.\"\n\nZarina smiled. \"I'd love to meet Scree. I'm glad she was there to help you.\"\n\nArak returned her smile, rustling his wings with a surge of energy, happily flicking the tip of his tail. He'd found the right thing to say! \"I had a lucky accident. It was a thrill to meet such a different creature who thinks like a dragon. What an interesting mind! Scree loves to explore. She even loves stars and snow.\"\n\nArak stopped. He was babbling mindlessly.\n\nZarina hesitated. \"Yes. Well, it's time to make the amber ornaments.\" She turned away, carrying her octopus snowflake on wide-spread claws.\n\nArak sighed in frustration. Why hadn't he invited Zarina to meet Scree? Her octopus design, her comment... it was the perfect opening. He decided to try again.\n\nArak followed Zarina to a large, smooth slab of limestone and watched over her shoulder. The rock had been coated with oil and spread with thin plates of melted pine sap. She put her icy creation onto a warm, liquid plate, and the cold snowflake made a perfect mould of itself as it hardened the sap. A crackling zap of electricity turned the golden sap into amber. She carefully trimmed her gem-flake with a sharp claw and held it up to the light.\n\nArak cleared his throat nervously. \"Zarina, your ornament has a beautiful pattern.\"\n\n\"Thanks. The symmetry is natural, but it was a challenge to grow curved arms.\"\n\nA huge old hemlock tree soared above them, festooned with exquisite amber ornaments to celebrate the winter solstice. Zarina snapped her wings, flew up, and hung her intricate artwork on a suitable branch. She landed back beside him.\n\n\"Have you seen the musical sculptures?\" Arak asked.\n\nZarina shook her head. \"Not yet, but I promised to collect more wild snowflakes for the air ball games. The dragonlets keep breaking their flake-balls.\"\n\n\"Could you come just for a moment? Please?\"\n\nArak eagerly led her to the field. They walked together amongst the oddly-shaped sculptures, bathed in humming notes that blended together like a chorus of tireless dragons. Arak listened closely to Zarina, trying hard to produce appropriate, perhaps even witty, responses. Lost in conversation, they quickly reached the edge.\n\nArak reared back, shocked. His perfect sculpture was a pile of glassy shards.\n\nKaroon stood nearby, expertly juggling three ice balls.\n\n\"What do you know of this?\" Arak demanded sharply. He eyed the flying balls, absolutely certain that Karoon had destroyed his sculpture.\n\nKaroon smoothly added a fourth ball to his routine. He inclined his head toward Zarina with a warm smile and an elegant bow, never losing the juggling pattern. \"Always a pleasure to see you, Za-ri-na.\" Her name rolled off his tongue like sweetened tea.\n\nKaroon turned lazily to Arak and glanced down at the shattered ice. \"It looked kind of fragile, and it didn't really fit in, did it?\" he answered noncommittally. \"Like you,\" he mouthed to Arak as Zarina turned to poke among the ruins.\n\n\"This flower chime's nice,\" she said, giving it a gentle shake. It seemed to be the only unbroken part.\n\n\"But I sculpted that healer's herb you talked about. It was a complete flame-flower vine, with three flower chimes, and the notes were perfect, and...\" Arak stopped, furious and hurt, struggling to control his emotions. He had to remain calm and mature in front of Zarina. And he would not give Karoon any more satisfaction. \"...I thought you'd like it.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Arak. I'm sure it was lovely. But the dragon-ladies are expecting my help, and I really do have to go now.\" Zarina launched into the sky.\n\nKaroon's eyes followed Zarina until she disappeared among the clouds. Then, using his foot, he prodded the ruins of Arak's sculpture. He grinned maliciously.\n\nArak flexed his claws, desperately wanting to fight, but there were stiff penalties for disturbing a festival. His nemesis was older and larger. Arak would lose and then be punished severely for striking the first blow. Even worse, his dam was responsible for discipline. It was so unfair!\n\nHe leapt into the sky and flew high, alone with his hurt, letting his fiery anger bleed into the frigid gray clouds. Three days! He'd worked on his sculpture for three days, and Zarina didn't even get to see it! Only the broken shards and his near-meltdown. He buried himself deeper in thick, swirling shadows.\n\nArak was half frozen when he landed. He vented the remnants of his rage by raking his claws through the crusty snow. Sparkling ice crystals flew up, reminding him of a wild slide-ride with Taron last winter. They had careened down a steep, icy slope onto the frozen stream, spinning dizzily, totally out of control.\n\nTaron was always ready to have fun! This could still be a terrific day. When he found his friend, Arak's eyes bulged in disbelief.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Managing the air-ball games,\" Taron replied, as if he was always so mature and helpful. The lacy \"flake-balls\" had snowflake sides that fitted together. Zarina had probably made one of them, using large wild flakes harvested in the clouds.\n\n\"That's it! You're doing great!\" Taron cried. \"Keep that ball in the air! Careful, don't let it break!\" Second-year dragonlets ran a course while keeping a fragile ball in the sky, blowing puffs of air and using carefully-aimed wing buffets. This was more exercise than game. It developed lung strength and wing agility, both essential for flying.\n\nThe dragonlets were clearly disinterested, making only half-hearted attempts to keep the ball up. Arak had to agree with them: nothing could be more boring than air-ball.\n\n\"We're going to the ice slide next,\" Taron said. \"You could help.\"\n\nThey'd love the impressive ice slide. Arak could help, but he didn't really want to watch the youngsters enjoying that incredible ride. Not when he secretly wished to join them.\n\n\"Will you be done after the slide?\" Arak asked hopefully.\n\nTaron shook his head. \"Erinite recruited me, and I promised to help until dinnertime.\"\n\nArak flicked his tail in frustration. After dinner it would be too late for anything fun.\n\nErinite arrived with her tired group from the ice slide. She greeted Arak cheerfully before affectionately rubbing heads with Taron. \"Your turn.\" She whispered something in Taron's ear. He laughed and herded his eager charges to the slide.\n\nArak mumbled a hasty farewell and stumbled away, hardly looking where he was going. Why was it so easy for Taron and Erinite to be together? And why was it so hard for him to do anything with Zarina?\n\nArak looked up and stared. A dragon-lord was being marched off to the cave. Banned from the feast! What had he done? Arak recognized the glint of copper in a large bowl, carried by the clan official. Hoarding. Copper was for everyone, but dragons got nervous when there was a shortage. Arak felt rather sorry for the culprit.\n\nBright flames lit the edge of the festival. Young dragons practiced flaming small branches sunk in the snow. An old dragon-lord, bronzed with age, explained, \"Body scales are tough, but wings can be hurt by flames. That's why we practice on snow or on the beach. If you misjudge the wind, fire can be quickly extinguished and...\"\n\n\"And this prevents accidental ground fires,\" Arak finished quietly, remembering his early lessons.\n\nAs a youngster he had delighted in breathing a torrent of fire, the bigger the better. But now he was older and had precision control. He blew a circle of flame, melting a perfect ring in a smooth patch of snow. Then he pursed his mouth and added thin wavy melt-lines to the circle, drawing an intricate octopus with fire.\n\nArak tilted his head, studied the design, and smiled. He added five more octopi to complete Zarina's snowflake.\n\nArak straightened his wings. Zarina was clearly interested in octopi, and there was something that only he could do. He would definitely invite Zarina along for his next visit to Scree. Smiling cheerfully, Arak headed for the inner-vision ice sculptures.\n\nArak reached the ring of huge ice blocks cut from the glacier. A crowd of dragons watched Kragor breathe rivers of flame onto a translucent opal-blue block, melting it into a beautiful, abstract shape.\n\nArak's smile faded. What would it be like, to be surrounded by admirers? Not that musical sculptures were ever valued as highly as inner-vision ice. But he'd worked hard on his sculpture, creating something completely new, and no one had even seen it!\n\nKragor added curved facets to the ice and stepped away, giving his sculpture a critical glance. These facets focused sunlight to create luminous internal images, like a complex star sapphire. When the sun reached the right angle in the sky, light came through a constellation of facets and a light sculpture appeared in the ice.\n\nKragor's four-dimensional artwork changed across time. Many overlapping scenes lay dormant, invisible in the solid ice. Only one image could be clearly seen at any given time. The moving sun gradually revealed each new glowing design hidden within the ice.\n\nKragor's work was clearly the best. It was as if he captured the aurora borealis and molded it into a vision.\n\n\"There you are!\" Kragor said happily to Arak. \"It's finished. Come watch the ice images with us.\"\n\nArak came inside the ring of sculptures and sat on one of the welcoming seats woven from springy branches. As the sun slowly crossed the sky, images appeared and faded in each of the fancifully carved blocks of ice. There were scenes from travels, legends and lives. Watching ice images with his parents was a poor second to the excitement of sliding down the ice path with friends. But Zarina was helping Erinite and Taron was grilling fish.\n\nArak saw himself emerge from the egg in Kragor's ice sculpture. Next he flew down an ice slide. In the afternoon sunlight, a larger Arak made his first flight.\n\nA cluster of dragons oohed and aahed over the exquisite detail. Arak rustled his wings irritably, jealous of Kragor's admirers. It didn't help that all of the ice-images were lovingly focused on Arak; he now felt small and petty as well.\n\n\"These are like watching a dream,\" Arafine sighed as an even larger Arak filled the ice, leaving on his first solo flight.\n\nArak quietly closed his eyes, shutting out the image. That flight was not exactly a dream journey! Karoon found subtle ways to remind everyone that Arak had crashed. Yes, he had met a strange alien. But he had not found copper, which was what really mattered.\n\nEveryone worried about copper. The mine was almost empty, there was still no new source, and copper was rationed. A few selfish dragons hoarded copper, which was forbidden, while others shared their copper rations with the sick and needy. When dragons suffered from copper deficiency their golden scales turned orange. Their joints became stiff and painful, making it hard to fly. The copper problem was impossible to ignore but, during a festival, dragons focused on fun.\n\n\"The feast is almost ready,\" Arafine said.\n\nArak inhaled deeply, savoring the scents. He could hardly wait. Enticing aromas of traditional spiced fish and roasted tubers permeated the air, layered with more exotic smells. He played a game of sorting the scents, identifying each individual food.\n\nThe sun sank lower, painting the sky with amethyst and indigo. The sun would not set all the way, so their festival would be beautifully dark-lit all night long. Sparkling ice frosted the thick winter blanket that covered the land. The ice reflected the sky, surrounding the clan in a liquid display of color.\n\nThe brass dinner gong rang loudly across the silent snow. Arak flew to the long stone tables, racing the other eager dragons.\n\nThe traditional main course was a thick, spicy fish stew. There were side dishes of steaming rock crab claws, stuffed clams, thick roasted tubers, sweet dried berries, salted pine nuts, and ornate platters with whorls of pale slivered nuts on fresh brown seaweed. Roasted almonds and steamed oysters were each a minor food source of copper.\n\nThe platters of sweet mashed yams were edible masterpieces, decorated with ground gemstones. Vibrant designs were made from green malachite and turquoise; each gem had some copper. The patterns were like a burst of green and blue lightning.\n\nArak filled his plate, sampling all the delights.\n\nAfter he ate, Arak scrubbed his plate with snow and stacked it on the shelf under the table. Then he chose a traditional dessert: snow pudding, a luscious treat made only for their Winter Festival. Blue-green snow, laden with algae, had a delicate floral flavor. This rare seasonal snow was mixed with fresh Sturgeon eggs.\n\nArak took a bite and his eyes lit with pleasure. The snow pudding was even more tasty than usual, laid on a bed of succulent red seaweed. Red seaweed! That rare, tasty garnish came from trade with octopi, and he had made that happen. He savored the dessert and lifted his head higher.\n\nArak fiddled with his empty bowl.\n\nTomorrow he would work with Taron and Zarina on the trance-mind exercises. He'd really looked forward to this chance to be with Zarina. But when she made the octopus snowflake he'd rambled on nervously about Scree. He totally missed her obvious interest in an invitation, and she'd given him an odd look. And then the sculpture fiasco.\n\nWhat must she think of him?"
            },
            {
                "title": "DRAGON FLAMES",
                "text": "\"My eyes are burning,\" Arafine said to Driana. It was the morning after the feast.\n\nDriana checked her eyes. \"Any other problems?\" Arafine had no appetite, unheard of for a dragon. This was neither indigestion nor injury, the most common complaints.\n\nDriana finished her tests. \"Your scent is normal, indicating no nutrient deficiencies. Wing color is good, so metal balance should be fine. Eyes are too bright, but there's no fever or nausea to indicate flu. This matches nothing I've ever seen, or heard of.\"\n\nFour more dragons came in with the same symptoms.\n\nDriana investigated the possibility of food poisoning, but they'd eaten different dishes at the festival. Every dragon had eaten the traditional snow pudding, but only a few were ill. Later that day her patients were shaking, miserable, and unable to feed. Their eyes grew even brighter. The dragons were beginning to waste away, and Driana was no closer to a diagnosis."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Arak, Taron and Zarina flew to an isolated spot to practice the trance-mind. He chose a quiet place near a limestone cliff, protected from the wind. The sheer stone wall was completely covered with tangled icicles, gleaming like a thousand crystal suns.\n\n\"Another day, another trance,\" Taron said.\n\n\"It's a useful skill,\" Arak said. He had mastered mind-to-mind communication long ago, but his friends needed practice.\n\nDragons began with simple trance-mind exercises; distance and detail improved over the years, with practice. This skill allowed the clan to stay in contact wherever they traveled. A clan official entered the trance-mind each sunrise and sunset, ready to communicate with distant dragons.\n\nArak watched Zarina secretly. They'd been friends forever, but everything was changing. She was now a dragon-lady, and could choose a mate. Most healers remained single to better concentrate on their work, but Zarina seemed interested in dragonlets. If she chose a mate, who would it be? Karoon was showing a real interest in her. He was one season older than Arak and could appear quite charming.\n\nArak shivered. He just could not stand it if she chose Karoon!\n\nHis tail drooped. He should partner with Zarina for these exercises, but he could barely talk to her sensibly with dragon-words. He might make a real fool of himself in trance. Arak shuddered at the thought. He chose Taron.\n\nZarina stood guard. \"I hear the scrabbling of dweer, but it's far off. There's no immediate threat.\"\n\nArak and Taron took out their trance stones and prepared to meditate.\n\nArak sank deeper into trance as he stilled his mind and focused into his translucent aquamarine globe. He felt peaceful, calm nothingness as he looked down on his body. His trance-mind spied the shimmer that should be Taron's. As the shimmers overlapped, he heard Taron's voice as if from a cave, deep within his mind. The inner voice was a flat monotone.\n\n<Arak, would you like to ice fish>\n\n<Yes. Would you like to partner with Zarina next?>\n\n<Why. She likes you, not me>\n\nArak nearly lost control of his trance. Was Taron teasing him? Then, unexpectedly, they were joined by a third trance-mind.\n\n<This is Karana. Come to the clinic>\n\nTheir leader's thought-message was shared with calm urgency.\n\nArak returned to his body, worried. It was against tradition to interrupt the trance-mind exercises, because it was so important to develop this skill. \"I wonder what the problem is. If there's a clinic emergency, why not just ask for Zarina, the healer-in-training?\"\n\n\"Has everyone been called?\" Taron wondered aloud. \"Who was hurt?\"\n\nThe trio flew to the dragon clinic, racing the wind. They landed near five sickly dragons, each sprawled limp on a pallet.\n\nArak shuddered in disbelief. NO!!! Arafine lay among them. He had never seen his dam so listless, and she didn't even greet him. This wasn't like her at all!\n\nZarina immediately set to work helping Driana, bathing the patients' eyes and tucking extra blankets around them. Driana explained that they weren't eating and didn't have enough energy to keep warm. She had no idea what was wrong, and they were rapidly getting worse.\n\nArak felt a growing desperation. This couldn't be happening! Driana was their healer, and she always knew what to do! He laid his head next to Arafine and whispered, \"You can't just die. I still need you.\"\n\nKragor welcomed Arak, touching foreheads.\n\nArak blinked, startled. His sire had neither groomed his wings nor polished his scales. But Kragor always took pride in his appearance. Arak was lost in a white fog of fear. There was a high buzzing sound in his head. He heard a voice, as if from a great distance.\n\n\"I'm doing everything I can but it isn't enough,\" Driana said. \"Scree has different healing and testing skills. Perhaps she could help.\"\n\nArak's mind cleared at the mention of Scree and a fragile hope blossomed. \"I can fly her here,\" he said.\n\nBut it was a long flight there and back. Would Scree risk traveling out of water? And could he manage, with the extra burden of an octopus?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Scree felt the distinctive crash of the summoning stone. Only a dragon could lift it from the raft and drop it into the sea, to strike the rock below. It was not the full moon, not a standard time for dragon visits. There must be a problem. She grabbed her bag and headed for the raft, followed closely by her apprentice, Stur. Orm joined them.\n\nThey surfaced by the raft and climbed onto log seats, looking up at Arak and Taron.\n\nScree stared. She had never seen Arak so agitated. His wings furled and unfurled, his tail flicked and his claws clicked. It was as if all the restless tides of the sea were gathered together in him.\n\n\"Scree, five dragons are seriously ill. Arafine is dying and Driana can't identify the problem. We need you!\"\n\n\"I have my healer's bag,\" Scree replied. \"Orm, would you come, too? You're a terrific investigator, and I could use your help.\"\n\nArak bowed deeply, gratitude and relief shining in his eyes. \"Time is crucial. Would you ride on my back? I've been experimenting with a safe way for you to fly. I made special capes to keep you wet and protect against the wind. I have two. I hoped you might both come.\"\n\nScree gazed up at the sunset and emerging stars. \"We could fly with the stars! It would be like riding the shark, but more interesting.\"\n\nOrm smiled with wry humor. \"I'm not sure I can handle much more excitement than that shark. But if you're willing to try, so will I.\"\n\nArak thumped his tail. He unrolled the hooded capes and dipped them into the sea. The inner lining was woven from a soft, spongy plant that held water. The outer layer was cut from leathery fish skin.\n\nScree said to Stur, \"You will be pod healer while I'm gone.\" They twined arms in friendship.\n\nScree fastened the wet cape below her head, flipped the hood over her head, and climbed onto Arak's back. The hood, with its two large eyeholes, settled over her face.\n\nOrm pulled himself up onto Taron's back and settled between the wings.\n\nBoth dragons leapt into the sky, wings beating hard. Scree fastened every suction cup firmly onto dragon scales. She flew faster than a spinning octopus in the wheel dance, surging up and down like the waves with each wing beat. The wind whipped past, pushing the cape against her body.\n\nScree looked down at the sparkling sea, but from such heights it looked endless, flat and barren. No one would guess that there was a whole world hidden below the waves. The coral reefs around her home had more color and life than a dragon forest. Everything was vibrant and beautiful, through all the seasons.\n\nMoonbeams slid across her cape. She leaned back and flipped off her hood, gazing up at the night sky. High above the misty sea, stars shone with unexpected brilliance. Scree felt that she could reach out and pluck glittering gems from the night sky.\n\nBut the sky disappeared when she sank below the waves, and only the light reached into the sea. There were no crystal stars, no flaming sunsets. Their worlds were so different that it was truly surprising how well dragons and octopi got along.\n\nThe stars began to fade in the sky. Arak was trembling and breathing hard. His wing strokes were less even. Where was the shore? Just when Scree thought Arak might crash, they made a rough landing at the clinic shore.\n\nScree slipped off his back.\n\nArak greeted his dam and received a vacant stare. Arafine's feverish eyes were as bright as dragon flames, but it was obvious that she saw nothing of this world. Arak's sire lay in an untidy heap nearby.\n\nArak turned to Scree. Their eyes met and she bowed in sympathy, adding the sign for hope.\n\nScree consulted with the head healer, Driana. Then she placed one arm on Arafine's wrist and one on Driana's, for a direct comparison of sick and healthy adult dragon-ladies. Her sensitive suckers tested for subtle differences in temperature, pulse, scent, texture, taste.\n\nScree closed her eyes, feeling every slight difference, seeking one that mattered. She turned to Orm. \"There's a difference in trace metals, but I can't pinpoint the problem. This is your specialty. You used trace metals in those oyster diet experiments. Could you try?\"\n\nOrm flowed into place and used his octopus arms to repeat Scree's comparison. He appeared frozen in complete concentration. Then his eyes widened in surprise. \"I've identified the problem! One batch of metal supplements killed my oysters. It was contaminated with thallium, a rare toxin. Arafine has thallium poisoning.\"\n\nScree's tense arms became limp seaweed. \"This poison is very dangerous, but I know how to treat it. I need big containers of the blue-green snow that has algae.\"\n\nKragor gathered enough snow to make an iceberg. He melted it with rivers of dragon-fire, filling a huge cauldron. He could not do enough to help.\n\nScree made a broth for the sick dragons. She concentrated the snow-algae and adding thick, gelatinous seaweed to the mix. She explained as she worked: \"The algae will bind with the thallium and help remove it. This seaweed will ease muscle pains.\"\n\nShe filled a bowl and motioned to Arak, who was restlessly rocking from foot to foot. \"Arak, could you heat this bowl until it steams? We take our medicine cold, but dragons need the warmth.\"\n\nArak and Kragor took turns eagerly spooning the steaming broth into Arafine.\n\nA bright green aurora borealis shimmered in the night sky, lighting the clinic. Driana brought snacks and steaming mugs of tea for all the helpers. Arak took a sip, then a longer drink. \"This is really good! What do you do that's different?\"\n\n\"It's the herbs. And the copper tea pot.\" Driana sighed. \"This pot is a reserve supply for the clan. If we don't find copper soon, I'll have to grind it for supplements.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"We'll search again soon. This time we plan to reach the far beaches.\"\n\nOrm tested the food and metal seasonings. One shaker of sea salt was mixed with ground turquoise from a new mine. It was tainted with thallium. Kragor gave a deep sigh. \"Turquoise is a poor substitute for pure copper, but we're desperate. We need every bit of copper we can find.\"\n\nOrm made a fire test, since dragons could not sense the poison. When powdered turquoise was burned, the flames showed a purple tinge if it had thallium.\n\nFour days later, Arafine regained her appetite and lost the feverish sheen in her eyes. Her muscles still ached. \"Keep drinking the broth for another moon. The symptoms should fade away,\" Scree reassured.\n\nArak's eyes gleamed. He was practically dancing with joy. He stretched and folded his wings energetically as he talked with his dam, who now clearly saw and heard. Kragor's scales were again brightly polished and he held his head high, bringing yet another tasty food dish to tempt his mate. Arafine's hollow cheeks had begun to fill out again.\n\nScree relaxed at the water's edge, watching. She flushed a cheerful green color, pleased that Arafine's recovery had healed three dragons.\n\nDriana stepped forward, bowing formally to both Orm and Scree. \"We're in your debt. What can we do for you?\"\n\nOrm gazed longingly at the distant white edge of the glacier, near the carved blocks of ice. \"Could I see the ice sculptures?\"\n\nKragor threw his head back and roared with laughter. The deep booming sound rocketed across the ice; Scree felt it ring through her body.\n\nKragor reached down to Orm, for the double clasp of friendship. \"You are a kindred spirit, and I'll gladly take you. I'd love to see your glowing mosaics someday.\"\n\nArak approached, wings crisply folded, and gave Scree a small fishing spear. \"I made this for you. Your healer skills are superb, but your teeth are unimpressive. This sharp tooth might be useful.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Scree slipped off Arak's back and looked around. Moonlit waves lapped against the logs of the new raft, which was anchored half-way between her octopus village and the dragon shore. Scree and Orm had dragon-flown to the raft to light a trial signal fire.\n\nArafine and other dragons would have died without Scree and Orm. The poisoned mine would have killed even more. Kragor and Arak were deeply grateful, and they designed this special raft so octopi could contact dragons.\n\nA ceramic bowl full of plant wax, with a stick of fatwood in the middle, was lashed to the top of a tall pole. This bowl would hold the fire. Tanned fish skin was spread below to protect the wood raft from sparks.\n\nOrm gazed up at the bowl, arms curling with concern. \"Fire that burns. I've lived in the sea all my life, and I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it. Dragon fires are beautiful, but I prefer the cold fire of my tunicates.\"\n\nScree followed his gaze and twined a comforting arm with Orm. \"I love the tunicate sky you made on my ceiling, glowing like stars in the night. But, a fire we can start. That's amazing! If we ever need the dragons, this could be useful.\"\n\nScree and Orm together pulled a long, tough rope woven from fish skin. This rubbed flint against a star-stone, making a spark that lit the fatwood wick. Dragon flames twisted and grew.\n\nScree observed carefully as Arak slipped into trance-mind to contact Zarina on the shore. That would be a useful skill.\n\nArak seemed to awaken into his body. \"They can see it! Now, dragons will stand watch at night for an octopus signal fire.\"\n\nOrm bowed formally. \"Thank you.\" He pulled another cord that dumped a bucket of sea water over the flame. The bucket was refilled and raised on a pulley.\n\nScree was silent, lost in thought. She studied the raft and pole, felt the wind against her skin, then eyed Arak's wings and the fish-skin. Everything clicked into place.\n\n\"Arak, I have an idea. We could make a tiny raft with a pole, and a fish-skin wing that can be moved. Then an octopus could fly on the water with the wind.\"\n\nArak's golden tail flicked up and down, as it often did when he was deep in thought. He looked down at Scree and snapped his wings excitedly. \"It's a novel concept, but this could work! A triangle wing might be best.\"\n\nStars shifted overhead as time flew by, and at last they had a workable skiff design. Scree flashed a picture of a shark across her body, with open jaws and impressive triangle teeth. \"If this works, octopi will have a safer way to travel.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Scree waited impatiently with Orm at the edge of the first raft. She was coiled like a spring, watching eagerly as two golden specks grew larger in the sky. She could hardly stand the suspense. Arak and Taron flew unevenly toward them, straining against tow ropes. A skiff, about the size of a dragon, bounced on the waves behind them.\n\nArak landed on the raft. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I can't wait to try water-flying.\" Scree slid off her seat and climbed aboard. The skiff had a distinctive taste/feel of oak trees, unlike the pine log raft.\n\nScree moved the skiff-wing to catch the wind, but the skiff just slipped all over the place. She struggled to turn it with no success, and was blown further from the raft. Frustrated and dejected, she dropped the skiff-wing.\n\nArak flew to the skiff, seized a rope, and pulled her back to the raft.\n\n\"I can't control it,\" Scree sighed.\n\nOrm took a closer look at the skiff. \"Scree, remember the shark? The skiff needs a fin on the bottom to catch the water. And it should be more pointed in front, like a shark's nose. A skiff needs to be half shark, half dragon to properly fly on the water.\"\n\nArak and Taron brought a new skiff during the next full moon, and Zarina came along to visit. Scree and Orm took turns with the skiff. It worked much better, but they still had trouble making it go where they wanted.\n\nZarina peered at the skiff. \"It needs another fin on the back end like a fish tail, and a handle to move the tail.\"\n\nArak thumped his tail approvingly. \"That's what it needs!\"\n\nOrm studied it again. \"If the skiff has sides, it can hold water and keep us properly wet.\"\n\n\"Third time's the charm, I hope,\" Taron said.\n\nTaron was right. The third skiff flew like a dream.\n\nScree, Orm and Stur took turns practicing beneath a silver moon. Dark rose and violet blossomed on the horizon, fading to pale blue as the sky lightened. Winged dragon shadows appeared on the raft as the sun climbed higher.\n\nAt last, Scree moored the skiff to the raft. Tired but triumphant, octopi and dragons clasped tentacle to claw and returned to their homes.\n\nArak and Taron found a new passion experimenting with skiff designs.\n\nScree and Stur studied the medicinal use of poison.\n\nOrm covered another room with glowing tunicate designs.\n\nThen, as the sun rose, their world changed forever."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE SEA BOILS",
                "text": "Arak awoke to the blackness of night before dawn and looked around uneasily. He slid off his comfortable pallet, dragging some leaves with him. He sniffed the air, finding no strange odors. He heard no dragons moving. In fact, he heard nothing at all. It was nearly springtime. Where were the crickets?\n\nHe crawled out of his small shelter, tucked beneath thick bushes at the base of a tree. It seemed a night like any other. But there were no crickets, and the air felt stiff.\n\nArak closed his eyes and turned slowly in a circle, reaching out with magnetic sight. Far out to sea, beyond the dimly lit horizon, gold sparks shot into the sky. What could that mean? Fear ran up his spine like an icy claw. He had to know. Arak focused through his gem and dove into trance. There was not even time to protect the helpless limp body he left behind.\n\nHis trance-mind flew far overseas, south of Scree's village. A huge turtle was frantically swimming away. Below the place of sparks was a circle of roiling water, bubbling like a tea kettle. An undersea volcano!\n\nArak fled back into his body. He opened his eyes and shook off the trance, running to the gathering circle before he was fully awake. He pounded the huge signal drum.\n\nDanger! Danger! Danger!\n\nIf only his signal could reach Scree! Her village was deep. Would that save the pod? There was no time to fly there. He could only warn the clan. In distant legends, when a sea mountain exploded the sea rushed inland. It would destroy the dragons.\n\nDragons crawled out of their various shelters and stumbled bleary-eyed to the circle.\n\nArak stilled the drum with a trembling hand. He stared out to sea. He could almost see the eruption, and the fearsome wall of water that would follow.\n\nThe clan muttered angrily as they woke fully.\n\n\"What's wrong? Bad dream? That's no reason to wake us,\" growled a dragon, raking his sharp claws through the sand with a menacing glare.\n\n\"Go back to sleep. It's just Dreamer,\" hissed another.\n\nArak filled his lungs and shouted, \"There is danger! The volcano will erupt and the sea will come in!\"\n\n\"What volcano?\" Their mountain was quiet, with none of the smoke or smells described in legends.\n\nArak pointed. \"Under the sea! Close your eyes and look. The sky sparkles like a storm with no clouds!\" He spoke urgently, desperate to convince them.\n\n\"That is odd. But how can you know what it means?\" asked an elder, in a calm, reasonable voice.\n\nAs if he was an addled dragonlet. Arak snapped his tail angrily, but he was afraid to tell. After years of teasing, he never spoke of the trance-mind. The clan didn't know his secret. Only he could see more than just his body or another trance-mind. Only he could truly see the danger. They called him Dreamer. How could he prove that it wasn't a dream?\n\n\"I just know,\" Arak said stubbornly. \"We must leave now.\"\n\nKarana, their leader, pulled him aside and asked quietly, \"How do you know?\"\n\nHe squirmed uneasily before replying, in a low voice, \"Below the sparks, the sea boils. The volcano lives. We just can't see it from here.\"\n\nKarana studied him in silence. \"You saw this? How?\" She searched his face. \"In trance-mind?\" She sounded incredulous.\n\nHe fumbled with his claws and nodded. \"I see more than minds. It's a bit blurry, but I see what's really there. That's why I quest. I can't prove this and I don't want to explain it to them. I'm already called the trance-freak.\"\n\nHe saw belief in her eyes. Karana nodded solemnly and turned to the crowd.\n\n\"We must leave. Go to the top of the far hill, beyond the stream. The sea should not reach us there.\" Karana assigned dragons to move the dragonlets. \"The rest of you, take what we'll need most: copper, food, water, clinic supplies. If there's time we'll make extra trips. Now load up and fly!\"\n\nArak flew to the clinic to move crucial healer supplies, hoping they wouldn't need these. Zarina was wrestling with a heavy load. \"Here, I'll take that.\" Fear lent him the strength of many dragons. He added a big stack of blankets and tied the entire load to his back, between his wings. He soared off to the hills, unloaded, and returned.\n\nIt was early dawn when Arak fastened his second load. He looked out to sea, noting the clear sky and calm, normal waves. He closed his eyes, checking again with inner sight. A powerful burst of magnetic sparks shot high into the sky. The hidden volcano had erupted! How much time did they have before the sea charged in?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The sea floor rumbled and shuddered, rousing Scree from her dreams. She automatically grabbed her healer's bag and crawled shakily from her cave, waking quickly as she surveyed the damage. A cloud of small silver fish swam erratically, unable to maintain their normal precision schooling.\n\nHer world shook again.\n\nShock-waves rushed through the water, knocking Scree head-over-tentacles. Octopi spilled out of their trembling caves, seeking the safety of the open dance floor. They were bruised and disoriented, convulsively curling their arms.\n\nScree avoided a swarm of agitated, stinging jellyfish as her eyes searched the gathering crowd. It was hard to see through the roiled, cloudy water. Orm squirted forward and grasped her arms; she could feel his intense relief through their embrace.\n\nOrm looked down at her bag. \"You're amazing! You never forget that, no matter what.\"\n\nA huge manta ray swam by with slow, uneven strokes, favoring a torn wing fin.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'll truly need it this time,\" she replied gravely.\n\nThe undersea volcano cast an eerie glow in the far distance. Red lava sparked up through the sea, turning to black grit as it showered down.\n\nSpar, the leader, flowed to the top of the nearest cave to survey the damage. A huge head of coral had shattered and, more ominously, several caves had collapsed. He addressed his pod, \"Is anyone missing?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Arak checked the sea again, as he fastened his third load. He stared. The sea was draining away from the shore! Crabs pranced frantically on the exposed rocks, and he could see the octopus guest-homes. Long strands of seaweed lay flat, pointing toward the disappearing water like accusing fingers.\n\nArak yelled, \"Fly! Now!\"\n\nMoments later the sea rushed back to the shore. Water piled together, growing into a fearsome wall many dragon-lengths tall. The noise was beyond belief.\n\nArak flew above the towering wall that raced inland, past the shoreline. It crested into a hungry wave and passed below him, faster than any dragon. Heading for their hill. He watched the water tear trees from the ground as easily as he could toss a twig. Nothing could stand against it! The huge wave slapped against their hill with more force than an iceberg hitting the sea.\n\nArak held his breath as the roiling water surged higher and higher, reaching for the exhausted clan. Would it ever stop?\n\nFinally the wave hesitated. It slid back, clawing the sides of the hill as it left, raking bushes and boulders from the ground. The powerful, greedy undertow grabbed everything in its path, dragging it into the sea. The snarling water subsided. Arak reached the hilltop and collapsed onto the ground. He wearily loosened the straps on his back and let his heavy load slide to the ground. It was over.\n\nArak stared in dismay. A new wave rose up and roared inland, scouring the land. But it did not reach the height of the first devastating wave. A third wave slashed at the base of the hill. The sea sloshed across the land several more times before retreating to its proper place.\n\nArak took a deep breath, smelling salty soil and pungent, torn leaves. The land was covered with mud and debris. Seaweed and driftwood clung to the tops of the few surviving trees. Toppled giants bobbed in the surf. The clinic tents were gone. Everything they left behind was gone.\n\nKarana sat down beside him, looking as weary as he felt, and bowed her head respectfully. \"Everyone is safe. We even had time to save what's left of our copper. Without your warning...\" She looked meaningfully at the scoured hillside and floating trees. \"Your extraordinary trance abilities are a gift to be proud of. But I won't tell.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Scree shivered with fear. Three octopi were missing. She and her apprentice, Stur, went with neighbors to check their homes.\n\nKrel was seriously wounded right beneath his head. Scree immediately bandaged the wound and gave him an herb to slow the bleeding. Meanwhile, four octopi worked together to free a young female who was pinned by a large stone. Two arms were crushed, and these would have to be amputated.\n\n\"Take them to my cave,\" Scree ordered. \"Stur, prepare the patients.\"\n\nScree trembled when they reached the last cave. It had been reduced to a pile of rubble and Tron, her life-long friend, lay beneath the rocks. She grabbed a stone and heaved it aside. Others joined her, grabbing and tossing. They worked with desperate efficiency, daring to hope that Tron lay in a protected pocket. When the last rocks were removed, Scree shuddered and flushed gray. His body was crushed.\n\nTron was dead.\n\nScree held perfectly. Unable to accept the loss, her mind wandered through living memories. She saw Tron bringing her turquoise rocks for healing. He spoke excitedly of a world with huge white crabs and clear fish, discovered on a northern trip. Tron waved a cheerful greeting at the New Moon Festival.\n\nAn arm gently touched Scree, bringing her back to the present like a jolt from an electric eel. She saw Tron's body and painful reality flooded in. Never again would she watch his perfect mimicry of the king crab dance. Never again would they discuss the inexplicable lure of faraway places. Tron had been a rare kindred spirit.\n\nScree bowed sadly to her old friend. She turned away and headed for her cave. The wounded were waiting.\n\nThe patients lay in her outer chamber. Her apprentice would have a rare opportunity to practice some special healer skills. \"Stur, give Krel a mild sedative. We can't risk more. I'd like your help repairing this tear.\"\n\nScree used a strong anesthetic on the youngster, who soon dropped into a deep sleep. \"It will be awkward for her to move on only six, but the two arms that I must amputate should regrow within a year.\" Scree sharpened her black garnet knife on a whetstone.\n\nAfter the operations, Stur crushed fragrant seaweed to fill the small room with a pleasant, relaxing taste.\n\nSpar was busy, efficiently organizing crews to repair damaged homes and clean up debris. Scree found him and, as pod healer, gave her report.\n\nA large dead fish drifted down beside them.\n\n\"It's ironic. I worried about our journey to the dragon shore, but the true danger was here, at home,\" Spar said. \"I suppose everything has its risks and benefits.\"\n\nAn active volcano was a distant legend, almost beyond memory. There had been no eruption in countless generations, but undersea volcanic vents continually warmed the water. This allowed their coral reef to grow further north in nutrient-rich waters, at latitudes that would normally be too cold.\n\nThere were no more after-shocks, so they uneasily returned to their caves. Later, the pod held a ceremony for the dead. Scree and Orm joined the line of friends behind Tron's body. Each friend imaged a special memory of him. Then they covered his body with branches of dead coral. The entire pod planted seaweed around the coral, until colorful strands covered the small new reef. Soon the sea would reclaim him.\n\nTron's name was etched in a round, dark gray volcanic rock. His rock was added to the memory wall, a long wall of dead, white coral holding a regular pattern of gray rocks.\n\nThe following day, currents brought a harsh black grit. It settled slowly, covering everything with a thick layer, like sharp, black snow. It was abrasive, irritating their sensitive skin. Worse yet, it was painful to suck in grit-laden oxygen-water.\n\nScree gave Orm a mask made from shredded kelp leaves. \"This will help.\"\n\n\"The latest fashion,\" he joked, putting it on. He turned happy-green. \"It really does help!\"\n\nScree made masks for everyone to filter out the grit.\n\nThe grit was a worse problem for the reef. Clams and scallops could spit out the grit, but tiny coral polyps could not. The coral would die beneath this dark burden.\n\nCoral was the bedrock of their world, a living rock that grew and repaired itself. It was the stable anchor in a sea of shifting sand, providing homes for myriad life-forms, including octopi. When coral died, the reef wore away and its complex, colorful world vanished with it.\n\nScree joined the pod, working through each day and into the night. They spread out, carefully dusting grit off the coral reef.\n\n\"I'm tired of lifting my arms. It feels like they're turning to lead.\" Orm gave his arms a dull gray color and let them hang in heavy loops.\n\nScree laughed. \"Mine are so cramped, they're knotting up.\" She wove all of her eight arms into an elaborate pattern of knots.\n\nOrm nodded approvingly. \"That's almost as lacy as a snowflake.\"\n\nSmiling, Scree turned snow-white. Then she unraveled, stretched each cramped arm, and continued the delicate task of dusting the coral. A very young octopus brought them much-needed snacks. After a brief break, everyone returned to work.\n\nScree dropped a pinch of food for the glowing reef fish to keep their light on target. \"These fish are so beautiful. Tron raved about the strange glowing fish of the abyss. I want to see them some day.\"\n\nAn eight-day later the black snowfall ended. Lava now seeped out slowly, no longer sparking into the sea. There was no more grit, so the corals were safe. Scree collapsed into a trembling heap of cramped, lacerated arms.\n\nAnother eight-day passed and the water still tasted of sulfur and odd salts. Fish drifted down like dead leaves, killed by the chemicals. But the sturdy clams and crabs survived. In the far distance, barely visible from her village, white plumes of steam soared to the surface like ghostly kelp.\n\nThe distant glow of the volcano became familiar, easily ignored. With homes repaired and plenty of food, the octopi relaxed.\n\n\"So many fish have died,\" Scree said sadly.\n\n\"We saved the coral reef,\" Orm said.\n\n\"But the reef looks empty without fish, like a field without butterflies.\"\n\nThe next evening, Scree passed through their quiet, twilit village. Her arms dragged after a long day treating wounded survivors. It was difficult to repair the torn wing fin on the manta ray. Tired and hungry, she didn't notice the deep, unnatural silence of the sea.\n\nA huge, dark shadow moved silently across the sands, slipping over the caves, following behind her."
            },
            {
                "title": "FORCE OF NATURE",
                "text": "Scree reached her cave and glanced back. The twilit sands had disappeared beneath a huge black shadow. The shadow grew larger, devouring the light, covering the caves like an unnatural shroud. What could it be? She shrank into her cave and froze. Her body instantly camouflaged.\n\nThe sea exploded. Long, powerful arms smashed down. Rocks and bodies flew. Two caves were torn apart by a living force of nature. Bright amber lights flashed along its monstrous arms, like lightning. It was a giant squid!\n\nThe terrifying creature captured two octopi. They struggled frantically, writhing and twisting, desperate to escape. The giant shook them until they hung limp. Then it swallowed the captives.\n\nScree watched, stunned, as the living nightmare killed.\n\nHer frozen horror changed to a burning anger. She flowed deeper into her cave and felt around, checking her stores for something to use against the squid. Scree ran arms across her shelves, feeling the bandages, boxes and odd pouches. She stopped at an unusual bottle carved from bright orange garnet, fitted with a tight stopper. This carefully stored container held blue-ringed octopus venom, a deadly nerve poison.\n\nA skilled healer knows that what can heal, can kill. The venom was useful in minute doses to sedate a patient. Larger doses brought paralysis or death.\n\nScree sucked venom into a long, hollow needle. Then she attached it to the fishing spear that Arak had given her. The shark had been scary, but this was terrifying. Anger barely overcame her terror as she moved stealthily out of her cave.\n\nThe monstrous squid suctioned its powerful tentacles onto the rocks of another cave. A violent storm of rubble erupted, and random debris replaced the orderly home. The sea felt unnaturally gritty. Scree watched in horror as a long, snaking arm plucked up another octopus and shook it senseless. Her friend disappeared into its beaked maw.\n\nTrembling with fear and anger, Scree crept ever closer to the living horror. She slid from one cave shadow to another, creeping across the sand, maintaining her camouflage. Finally she was right behind the monster. She focused her mind and stilled her quivering arms.\n\nScree jetted up and plunged her spear into the back of its huge head.\n\nThe monster spun around, but there was nothing to see. It stretched a long, probing arm behind its head, reaching for its tormentor.\n\nScree held onto her spear for dear life, plunging the needle ever deeper into her foe. She stretched her body flat, almost too thin to feel. She shifted quickly from side to side, trying to avoid the deadly arm as it searched for her.\n\nWhen would the poison take effect?\n\nA powerful swipe dislodged Scree. The monster turned, swiftly wrapping her in another arm. It pulled her closer. Its huge eyes widened as if surprised by the puny attacker.\n\nScree was paralyzed, unable to struggle. The powerful arms could easily rip her apart. She would not survive this. The prospect of unavoidable, imminent death was curiously calming. It had been a good life. She would experience what life she had left and die with dignity. Scree looked calmly, defiantly back into its enormous eyes.\n\nThe monster continued to stare at Scree, holding her still. It did not shake her. The squid seemed puzzled, perhaps unused to food fighting back quite like this. Then the poison worked. Its eyes went blank. Its arms relaxed their grip.\n\nThe squid collapsed in slow motion. Eight thick tentacle arms fell with a jarring thud and lay still, snaking among the ruins. Its huge head fell next, smashing into the reef. Two thin, longer arms fell slowly, like leaves drifting down. Then it did not move.\n\nIt was a quiet mountain with saucer eyes.\n\nOrm extracted Scree from the huge arm. \"Are you all right? What did you do?\"\n\nScree gathered her thoughts. \"I used venom... on my spear. We must bind the squid now. It's so huge. I think the paralysis may be temporary. We need lots of ropes. It's powerful.\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"It is powerful, and deadly. Why not kill the monster now?\"\n\n\"I believe the squid attacked from hunger,\" Scree said. \"Maybe because of the fish kills. It recognized me as un-prey-like before it collapsed.\"\n\nOrm stiffened his arms. \"It killed our friends. It should die.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. It's hard for me to hurt any helpless, intelligent being. And what if more giant squid come? Can we fight many at once? Maybe. But if we can communicate, we might change things.\"\n\n\"You think it can become an envoy for peace,\" Orm said slowly. \"But it's a creature of violence. What if it's a scout and escapes with news of our location? The monster could organize a final attack.\"\n\nOctopi crept out of their caves. Most watched from a distance, but a few cautiously approached the deathly still monster. Spar twined arms respectfully with Scree. \"You are fearless, and you saved us. But your plan would be disastrous for the pod.\"\n\nStur spoke up. \"Scree got the monster's attention because of her attack. It may only recognize force as an indicator of intelligence. Perhaps it can be reasoned with. But a show of force may be crucial to any communication.\"\n\nScree studied her apprentice in silent amazement. He almost never ventured an opinion.\n\nSpar looked from Stur to Scree, as if weighing the risks and possibilities. He turned to Orm. \"Could we safely implement Scree's plan?\"\n\nOrm thought in stillness. \"We need rope, as Scree said, and more dragon spears with poison. A ring of guards should work, with three groups to take turns.\"\n\nSpar turned to Stur. \"I saw you follow Scree to help. That took courage. Would you fly our skiff to the signal raft and call the dragons?\"\n\nA ceremony was held for the octopi killed in the attack, and three more stones were added to the memory wall.\n\nScree traded Orm's blue-green abalone pearls with the tiny, lethal blue-ringed octopi. They took turns spitting powerful poison into her orange garnet flask. Then Scree attached needles with venom to the dragon spears.\n\nThe giant squid looked like a mountain wrapped in ropes. Eight guards stood watch, forming a ring about the prisoner. Each guard tightly clutched a long poison spear.\n\nScree slowly approached. The squid gnashed its huge, beak-like mouth. It pumped its huge muscles, fighting the ropes yet again. The squid struggled wildly, trying to break a weak cord with sudden stress. There was hatred and anger in its eyes.\n\nScree remained calm. She made pictures across her body of the destruction in her village. She threatened the monster with her spear. It was a warning: do not attack. We have powerful defenses. Then she slowly lowered her spear to the sand. The monster's eyes followed it down. Scree offered it a huge meal of crabs and oysters. Tantalizing flavors permeated the seawater. But it just eyed her, ignoring the food and testing its bonds.\n\n\"It's starving. How can it refuse food?\" Scree wondered.\n\n\"Fear and anger can be more powerful than hunger,\" Orm replied.\n\nThe giant squid eventually accepted food and gave a name, Vorm. Gradually, communication improved. Scree used octopus skin pictures and mimes. The squid flashed lights to name things. At last, she understood his fears. Vorm was humiliated by his capture and puzzled by the food offerings. Was he being prepared for a ritual feast? She mimed an emphatic \"No.\"\n\nScree fed Vorm daily, yet he grew weaker. His limbs twitched and muscles ached.\n\n\"Vorm has symptoms of acute mercury and arsenic poisoning. How can this be?\" Scree asked.\n\n\"I think I know,\" replied Tarn, their geologist. \"My assistant was the last one killed. Tor must have seen the path of destruction and known she was next. I've sifted through the ruins of her cave. The rocks with mercury and arsenic are missing, but the other specimens are still there. Tor must have grabbed the poisonous rocks before she was taken, to retaliate beyond her passing.\" He shook his head sadly. \"She was always quick-thinking.\"\n\nScree told Vorm what had happened. \"This poisoning has progressed too far and is beyond my ability to treat.\"\n\nHe flashed a complicated pattern of brilliant red and yellow lights, a salute to a worthy opponent who defeated him in battle.\n\nAs Vorm lay dying, Scree released his bonds. He spoke of his life in the deep abyss, where adult squid led solitary lives most of the year. \"The abyss is my home. I love to surf the strong, deep currents and taste the different streams as they tangle together. It is never truly dark. Life speaks with lights.\"\n\nVorm twitched randomly, growing weaker. \"Squid gather in large pods each year to choose mates. I mated with Veera every year, but each time I had to win her with my dance. I spun and soared, flashing a rhythm of lights until she joined my dance and we moved as one. Sometimes I was challenged by another male but I never lost.\"\n\nScree thought he was finished. Then he flashed more signals. \"Veera and I traveled together for a moon after the dance. We battled the giant swordfish. Veera needed their energy for her eggs. Then we would mate and separate until the next fall.\"\n\nVorm became still. \"I will not see Veera again. This is her name-pattern.\" He flashed red lights. Scree used her red color cells to mimic the pattern, and this satisfied him. \"We do not have caves like you. We live free in the water. We are not much burdened with things. Our experiences... our memories... all that we truly own is in our mind. But Veera gave me a shell-stone that I carry with me. It was a mating gift. Give it to Veera if you meet her.\"\n\nVorm opened a large sucker on his arm and gave Scree a huge, luminous pink pearl. She stared in amazement. It was bigger than her eye and seemed to glow from within. She slipped it into her healer bag.\n\nVorm requested burial in his home waters, as was their custom. Scree watched sadly as he stilled his mind and accepted death. She helped carry Vorm's body to the edge of the undersea shelf, and released him to his home in the black abyss.\n\nScree retreated deep into her cave, seeking solitude. She almost never lost a patient. At first she hated Vorm for killing her pod-mates, but he was starving. And then she came to know him. She would miss his wild, free spirit.\n\nScree remained in her cave and saw no one. Her arms lay in limp coils. Finally, Orm approached and settled next to her. He gave her a large shell full of tender, tantalizing, well-spiced oysters. Scree wondered when she had eaten last. She picked away at the food, gradually feeling a bit better.\n\n\"I learned Vorm's language and a little of his customs. He was an intelligent, complicated being. His world is fascinating. And then he died.\" Scree curled her arms in distress.\n\nOrm twined arms with Scree. \"No one could have saved him. But he had the comfort of knowing he would be returned to the deep. You accomplished more than I thought possible, perhaps more than you realize. You succeeded in communicating with Vorm. Now we can converse with a giant squid, if necessary.\"\n\nOrm smiled and flashed an image of a tiny octopus next to Vorm. \"But with such a size difference, introductions are risky.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Arak glanced down at the waves as he flew to the pod village. Nice, normal waves. One and a half moons had passed since the sea returned to its proper place.\n\nEvery dragon remembered the great wave of destruction, but few recalled his warning. Those who did simply thought Arak had a freaky, fortunate dream. So he was still Dreamer to the rowdy young dragons. But not to his friends.\n\nArak stretched his wings and soared above his three dragon friends, who all glowed golden in the moonlight. Taron and Erinite flew side-by-side with perfectly matching wing strokes, as if they shared one mind. Zarina gazed down as she flew, watching the sparkling sea. They reached the raft together, back-winged and landed lightly.\n\nScree, Orm and Stur surfaced beside the raft.\n\nThe raft lurched, and Arak slid on the damp logs. He barely kept his balance. \"The clan's been busy. We lost much to the sea, but we've re-built the guest homes and added many more. Three eight-groups of octopi could attend the next trade festival.\"\n\nOrm nodded approval. \"Good. Many want to come. Those spears you sent were really useful. Tell Kragor that we now know much more about giant squid.\"\n\n\"Stur described the attack when he came for spears, but please tell us the whole story,\" Arak said.\n\n\"Yes!\" Taron and Erinite said, together.\n\nOrm told a tale of the squid attack, Scree's defense, and the captive squid. For a master storyteller, he was surprisingly brief. Orm kept glancing at Scree, but she added nothing to the story.\n\nArak shivered. Orm's skin pictures were the stuff of nightmares! Why did Scree try to save the monster? Wasn't the world better off without it? Giant squid seemed more dangerous than a pack of dweer!\n\nArak took a closer look at Scree. He might not understand her decision, but she looked ill. Arak worriedly turned to Zarina, but she was already watching his octopus friend.\n\nZarina sat down next to Scree, letting her legs dangle into the starlit sea. \"Scree, you used venom against Vorm in self-defense, but how do you use it to heal?\"\n\nThe question from a fellow healer seemed to rouse Scree. \"I use venom to reduce pain or put a patient to sleep. Choosing the right dose is critical. The proper amount depends on size, age, degree of injury, and type of being. Too much venom is fatal.\"\n\nZarina splashed her feet in the sparkling water. \"Could you help us determine the right dose for dragons? The trading festival is next moon, but Driana and I would like you to come early.\"\n\n\"We also want more time just to visit,\" Arak added eagerly. \"I now have four octopus capes. We could collect you in two nights and fly you to our shore.\"\n\nTaron thumped his tail enthusiastically. \"You'll be the first to see our new skiffs! These fly as fast as a diving dragon!\"\n\nErinite smiled fondly at Taron.\n\nArak looked away, desperately wanting such a smile from Zarina. But how? The surrounding sea captured his attention. The moonlit waves had a restless pattern of dark scales with gleaming silver edges.\n\nArak closed his eyes, remembering his time on the ice floe. It had become a time of peaceful, uncomplicated solitude. There were no decisions to make and no worries about what to say. There was nothing he could do wrong. There was no fear of failure, or ridicule, or rejection.\n\nZarina's voice broke through his dreaming.\n\n\"I found a new herb that might work on octopi,\" she told Scree encouragingly.\n\nOrm peered anxiously at his quiet mate. \"Scree, I think a visit would be good for us.\"\n\nScree raised her drooping head and gazed steadily at Orm. \"You're right. A visit would be nice.\" She nodded to Stur. \"I saw how much you wanted to fly last time. You should come. And Mir could be the fourth.\"\n\nStur turned to Scree with wide eyes. \"How did you know... I mean, thank you.\"\n\nArak sighed. Even the octopi had no trouble with their relationships. Then Zarina turned to him with a smile.\n\n\"Thanks for the invitation.\"\n\nArak's answering smile almost split his face. He was not going to waste this chance! Taron had advised him to ask questions and listen. \"Tell us about your new herb.\"\n\nZarina described the tiny golden flowers and how she used them to ease muscle pain. \"This even helps my patients who need more copper.\"\n\nScree moved closer. \"How does it compare to venom?\"\n\n\"Not as potent. But it's so much easier to collect flowers than venom,\" Zarina added, laughing.\n\nThe cheerful, lively discussion continued until they left. Arak flew near Zarina on their way home, trying to match his wing strokes to hers."
            },
            {
                "title": "A DANGEROUS GAME",
                "text": "Arak took a deep breath of salty sea air, trying to relax. But he could not stop worrying. First the copper problem and now this! Karoon would be impossible.\n\nArak tried to drown his worries with busywork. He reached down through the moonlit surf and grabbed a polished white rock. He jerked back as a crab with sharp claws scuttled across his foot. Then he tossed the rock onto his pile of game-stones on the beach.\n\nArafine paced back and forth nearby, wearing a path in the sand. Arak had never seen his dam so upset. But he was even more worried.\n\nIt had been hard enough when Arafine was in charge of resolving disputes. Arafine was careful not to favor her own offspring. So Arak got half the blame for every fight, even though he was only defending himself. He had finally learned to avoid Karoon, since nothing could be worse than those conflict resolution meetings. Until now. Arafine was the new clan leader. What new mischief would Karoon try?\n\nArak stepped onto the beach, dropped the game-stones into his sack, and asked Arafine, \"What's wrong?\" He wanted to add, \"You're the leader! What could you possibly be worried about?\"\n\nArafine stopped pacing. \"Copper deficiencies are already crippling some dragons. We desperately need a new copper mine. And now there's a new, unprecedented danger.\" She paused, looking out to sea.\n\n\"When the undersea volcano erupted, its fumes and odd salts killed many fish. Dragons feed heavily on fish, so this could have been a problem. Fortunately, we have great stores of dried fish, clams, nuts, tubers, and seaweed. But the fish kills are responsible for a more serious problem: starving dweer.\"\n\n\"Why should we care?\" Arak said. He'd seen a dweer once, a scaly, wingless, rust-colored beast. It was about one-third his size; only the jagged teeth were impressive.\n\nArafine replied, \"Dweer normally feed on tiny dagurs who eat sea fish. When the fish died the dagurs starved. Now there aren't enough dagurs to feed the dweer. The dweer are hungry and, despite the dangers, they have begun to hunt dragons.\"\n\nArak's head was spinning. It was like the game with black and white stones on a checkered log. One jump led to the next. But this was a dangerous game. \"Dweer were always afraid of us. What's changed?\"\n\n\"There's a clever new leader and he's uniting all the separate packs. The combined pack has many more dweer than the clan has dragons. Normally, our natural defenses would be enough. But the united dweer could challenge the dragons.\"\n\nArak straightened his wings and gave her his full attention. \"What do you plan to do about this?\"\n\nArafine snapped her tail. \"I need to change the rules and the clan won't like that. Spar doesn't realize how easy he has it. Octopi are vulnerable from the moment they hatch, and only a few survive. Most octopi appreciate a safe village and willingly accept Spar's authority.\"\n\nExcept for Scree, Arak thought. She must be part dragon.\n\n\"But dragon eggs are rare, and dragonlets are pampered from the day they hatch. Dragons are at the top of the food chain. They feel all-powerful and don't easily accept authority.\" Arafine sighed. \"Dragons are so different from octopi. It's a real challenge to manage the clan.\"\n\nArak and Arafine flew to the clan meeting. As leader, Arafine took her place in the center of the circle. She proposed several defense measures but most were rejected.\n\nThe following evening, Arak again took his place in the clan circle. The central fire had no festive blue-green flames, just the traditional orange and yellow from burning logs. Another meeting and even the fire was serious.\n\nArafine raised her wings and the clan grew silent. Her voice was strong and persuasive. \"The dweer pose a serious threat. We need to be prepared. There must be at least three dragons in any group, to protect against ambush. There should be no solo journeys. Perimeter guards would be useful. And we must triple the guard on our dragonlets.\"\n\n\"We need our time alone. Dweer are small and they can't fly or flame. Why should we be afraid? We are dragons!\" challenged a young dragon-lord.\n\n\"Dweer are wily and tireless hunters, and they outnumber us,\" Arafine responded. \"Also...\"\n\nKarana, their former leader, suddenly landed inside the circle. \"A dragonlet is missing from the cr\u00e8che. She may be in danger.\"\n\nArafine assigned four dragons to search.\n\nArak was proud to be chosen. He left immediately with Kragor, Taron and Rikor. They flew swiftly to the cr\u00e8che. Then they separated into pairs and headed downhill in the two most likely directions.\n\nA dragonlet screamed! Arak tore through the skies. Her piercing, frantic cries made his scales crawl. He cleared the trees and found her in a meadow. She was completely surrounded. There was nowhere to flee. The dweer held their positions, quivering with anticipation. The leader signaled and the pack attacked as one, racing to their meal.\n\nArak and Kragor reached the dragonlet just as the eager predators closed in. Three dweer clamped their jaws on her legs, slightly hampered by the tough dragon hide. She reared back. Another dove for the softer skin of her exposed belly.\n\nArak flamed the closest dweer while Kragor grabbed Dorali's wings with his claws, desperately attempting to lift her above the fray. Arak smelled an awful mix of dragon blood and the stench of burned dweer. He grasped Dorali's tail and together they lifted the bloody dragonlet off the battleground.\n\nHungry dweer ripped slices from her body before she rose beyond their range. Kragor's claws tore holes in her wings as they flew, but there was no other option. Dorali was too young to fly, and they could not fight so many dweer.\n\nTorn and bleeding, Dorali hung limp from four sets of claws. Arak pushed beyond his limits to carry such a burden. His long, trembling wings grabbed the air with ragged strokes. Arak and Kragor landed at the clinic, setting down carefully despite their exhaustion.\n\nArak slumped to the ground while Driana extracted Kragor's claws from the dragonlet's wings.\n\n\"Get Scree,\" Driana told Arak. \"Ask her to bring her bag and the venom. We need all the help we can get.\"\n\nArak heaved upright and headed for the shore to signal Scree from her guest home.\n\n\"Taron,\" Driana called out as he landed. \"Fill this kettle with water and boil it.\"\n\nDorali began to moan just as Scree arrived, bringing the requested items and her abundant supply of kelp bandages.\n\n\"I can sedate her while we put her back together,\" Scree offered.\n\nDriana nodded. \"That would be helpful.\"\n\nZarina unwound the rolls of bandages. Driana held the wound edges together with her claws. Scree's many arms worked efficiently to wind bandages around Dorali's gaping wounds. She always included pieces of iodine-rich seaweed to prevent infection.\n\nArak lay limp on the sand, watching the healers as they worked on Dorali. Scree had used those odd bits of seaweed when she fixed his injuries. His gaze shifted to Zarina. She looked intensely energized and worn out at the same time.\n\n\"Taron, they must be getting tired, and I still feel like a flopping fish. Could you get some red root drinks and snacks?\"\n\nZarina flashed a grateful smile to Arak and continued her work.\n\nNews of the attack traveled lightning fast and all the dragons were eager to help, quickly assembling food. Taron soon returned with another dragon, each carrying a huge basket. But the healers ignored the food and continued their work. They had reached a critical point and were completely absorbed, oblivious to the tantalizing aromas that swirled around them.\n\nDorali was soon completely covered in bandages.\n\nScree checked her pulse. \"She'll wake before moonrise, and then need painkillers. What do you use?\"\n\n\"We have several, but the most potent is brewed from flame flowers. That would be my choice, with such extensive injuries,\" Driana replied. \"Then she'll need warm fish broth with lots of rosemary, onions and garlic, to help cleanse the blood.\"\n\nArak approached. \"If you've done all you can, you should feed.\"\n\nDriana looked up, finally noticing a world beyond her patient. \"I think I am hungry,\" she said, surprised. \"Thank you all for your help rescuing Dorali. Scree, this was a real challenge. We really needed you.\"\n\nScree looked Driana straight in the eyes and bowed. \"I was honored to help, my friend.\"\n\nSilence descended as they fed.\n\nZarina worriedly tucked more blankets around the sedated dragonlet. Then she asked the question everyone was afraid to ask. \"Will she live?\"\n\nDriana studied their young patient silently. \"I hope so. We've done all we can, for now. She's young, still growing. That will help.\"\n\nArak carried the teapot to Zarina and noted her limp wings. She looked even more exhausted than he felt. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nZarina held out her mug while Arak poured. She took a sip, tried to smile, and sighed. \"I was the youngest dragonlet ever chosen to be trained as healer, and I love my work. But this is so intense! Even with three of us working on Dorali, I'm drained. How can I possibly handle being clan healer? And a healer works most of her life, seeking one trainee to replace her.\"\n\nShe lowered her voice. \"Healing is Driana's life. She has no mate. But I'm not sure what I want. I might like a dragonlet of my own someday.\"\n\nArak put a comforting wing around Zarina. Then he sharpened his claws in the sand, considering. Was it possible to be both a healer and mated? His thoughts turned to Scree. She had a mate.\n\nArak asked Scree, \"What's it like to be a pod healer?\"\n\n\"Octopi are sturdy, so healers are seldom over-worked. Arm cuts and torn suckers are the most common problem. I just wrap them in kelp bandages with lots of iodine-rich seaweed, and they'll usually heal themselves.\"\n\nScree stretched her arms. \"I like being a healer. It gives me an excuse to go off on my own to find medicinal supplies. Most octopi had enough solitude during the two years before they found the pod. But I still need the freedom to explore alone.\"\n\nDriana joined them. \"A dragon healer has less freedom. We can't leave on long journeys because we're needed too often, but I plan to change that. Zarina and I should train several healers. We could take turns, and work together on serious injuries or with many sick dragons.\"\n\nZarina stared wide-eyed at her mentor, who returned a knowing smile.\n\nArak grinned at Zarina as he refilled her mug. \"That must be a relief.\"\n\nShe took a long drink of tea and a true smile spread across her face. \"I've been so worried. I feel as though I've been under a crushing boulder, and it just turned to snow and melted away.\"\n\nThe following evening, Arak settled near the crackling fire and waited for the meeting to begin. Most of the clan members were present, whispering quietly, as solemn as the gray smoke.\n\nDorali's dam jumped up, wings snapping, glaring at Arafine. \"How could you let this happen?\"\n\nArafine moved forward to speak, but the former leader raised her wings high and took command.\n\nKarana spoke with an icy edge to her voice. \"Dorali is still alive because Arafine insisted on continual trance-mind watches. We are fortunate for her foresight. She asked for greater measures but few saw the need.\" Karana paused, looking from dragon to dragon. Many looked away from her sharp gaze.\n\nArafine rustled her wings and her eyes flashed angry sparks.\n\nArak blinked in surprise. Karana's interfering support actually undermined Arafine's authority as new leader.\n\nArafine swept her wings up and reclaimed her command. \"Thank you, Karana. We do need more measures to protect against the dweer.\" She turned to the angry dragon. \"Dorali should recover. She was fortunate to have three healers to attend her.\" Arafine paused. \"I should have tripled the guard on dragonlets but I sought consensus, as is our way.\"\n\nArafine turned in a slow circle, meeting the eyes of each clan member. \"The real problem is the dweer. Are there any objections to my proposals?\"\n\nArak was not surprised when the new rules passed, unanimously.\n\nKaroon cried loudly, \"Destroy the dweer!\"\n\n\"Karoon is right! Finish it now!\"\n\nMany young dragon-lords took up the cry.\n\nArafine waited for the furor to die down. \"I, too, am angered by the attack on Dorali. However, I'm not sure we could, or should, destroy the dweer. They naturally control the dagur population and may have other uses. But this new leader has changed them. The dweer must learn to fear us again.\"\n\nKaroon demanded, \"Attack now!\"\n\nArafine raised her wings for silence. \"We need more information first. How can we organize an attack so that no dragon is injured? If any are wounded, or killed, the cost is too high.\"\n\n\"There is always risk. To do nothing is risky,\" Karoon countered, now sounding calm and reasonable. Arak knew that voice. Karoon had used it in their conflict sessions, cleverly deflecting blame.\n\nArafine gave Karoon a stern look. \"We will take the time we need to develop a plan that minimizes risk.\" There was steel in her voice.\n\nArak flicked his tail and smiled. It was a real pleasure to see his dam stand firm in the face of Karoon's demands.\n\nZarina said, \"The venom that Scree has can sedate or kill any creature. She used it on the giant squid. We could trade for venom and use it on fishing spears to attack the dweer.\"\n\nArafine nodded. \"That's good, and it keeps our flame for back-up. We should use a venom dose that's safe for dragons, to protect against bad throws.\"\n\nArak spoke up. \"Dweer silently surround their prey and attack at the same time on a signal.\"\n\n\"A surprise attack. That would help.\" Arafine turned to Rikor. \"You have a gift for strategy. I need a battle plan that leaves a third of the dweer alive, for their natural roles. But we must kill their leader.\"\n\nKaroon jumped to his feet, eyes flashing. \"Why leave any dweer alive? Our world would be fine without them!\"\n\n\"Karoon, you speak out of turn. But consider this. It is easier to kill than to restore life. We know little of the dweer, mostly the negatives. Dweer hunt the dagur, which are normally so abundant that they could over-run this land. What would take the place of the dweer? If we're not careful, we might solve one problem while creating new problems we cannot yet imagine.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Scree was half asleep, tasting the air with her arms. Mingled odors of kelp bandages, torn flesh and brewed sedative permeated the dragon clinic. She opened her eyes and automatically reached over, checking the dragonlet. Dorali was still alive. Scree felt such intense relief that it was almost painful. She had spent the night next to her, checking often, unwilling to lose another patient.\n\nAfter that night, Dorali improved daily. Her wounds were healing well, and a numbing flame flower brew took away the pain. But she still lay curled on her side, wings limp. There was no sparkle in her eyes and she barely responded to questions.\n\nScree looked worriedly at Driana, who snapped her tail in frustration. \"I prefer a nuisance to a shadow. Zarina, do you have any suggestions on how to reach Dorali?\"\n\n\"A storyteller could help, and she'd love your unusual pictures, Scree.\" Zarina stretched her wings, stared, and gave a startled cry. \"Dorali's a rising two-year! She wants to fly. Is that still possible?\"\n\nDriana answered carefully. \"Her wings have many holes and tears from Kragor's claws. He saved her life with his quick thinking and I know he hated inflicting more damage. The wings should heal, though more slowly than her body. But, eventually, she should have proper dragon wings and learn to fly.\"\n\n\"She needs to know, to have that dream alive.\"\n\nEveryone could see the spark ignite in Dorali's eyes when she learned that she would still be able to fly.\n\nZarina tilted her head, considering. \"Scree, this is a challenge even for us, and Driana's an expert. How in blue lightning did you learn to heal dragons?\"\n\nScree gave a wry smile. \"Maybe I was bored?\"\n\nScree shifted to a more comfortable position. \"I was young, barely an adult, when I became the pod healer. I'd already mastered octopus healing, so I moved on to fish. This seemed reasonable since fish are honored in our legends. And bones are so fascinating. We don't have any. I learned new ways to communicate. I changed the shape of my body and copied the movements of fish. I watched carefully until I understood their language of postures, wriggles, and touch.\"\n\nScree noticed that Orm was watching, too.\n\n\"I studied cleaner stations, where fish hold still while smaller fish or shrimp remove parasites. I learned to direct the movements of a fish by touching certain spots in its mouth with a thin stick. I could calm a fish by stroking the sensitive lateral line scales along its sides.\"\n\nScree slipped off her log seat into the stream and became a fish. She molded her head to a point, merging her arms behind. She bent four arms to mimic the top, bottom, and side fins of a fish. Four more arms made the rest of the body and tail fin. A pattern of gray fish scales covered her, and a mouth groove appeared at the tip of her head. Scree demonstrated typical fish movements. Then she flowed back to her seat.\n\nZarina wore a stunned expression. \"You really looked like a fish.\"\n\n\"What I become, I can understand. At first I healed small, colorful reef fish. Then I found a stingray with a badly torn wing fin. I tried my usual approach and it seemed to accept my offer. It followed me to an open area near the pod. Spar saw the fish and his arms went rigid. He charged toward us and ordered me to send the stingray away, immediately.\"\n\nScree's arms stiffened automatically at this memory.\n\n\"When Spar charged, the injured fish panicked and fled toward the pod. Spar waved his arms to scare it away and was stung. This would not have happened if he had trusted me, and given the stingray the space it needed. I don't think Spar will ever understand.\"\n\nScree relaxed her arms, letting them trail in the water. \"I found a turtle with serious injuries from a shark attack. She was desperately ill and readily accepted my help. I repaired Tara's shell and learned new ways to heal. I understood the role of nutrition, and Orm taught me more about trace metals from his experiments. So I was prepared when Arak crashed, even though I'd never seen a dragon.\"\n\n\"You were born to heal,\" Driana said. \"And it took courage to face a dragon.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"Actually, I was terrified. I wanted to flee. But I couldn't let the golden creature suffer when I knew I could help.\"\n\nOrm flowed onto a seat next to Scree. \"I never heard the whole story about the stingray. Now I understand why you didn't want to tell Spar about Arak.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Spar is a good leader. But sometimes he sees only what he expects to see. He sees danger, not opportunity.\"\n\nZarina finished rolling up a bandage, tied it off, and put it in a supply box. \"Perhaps friendship with dragons will widen his eyes.\"\n\n\"The sight of a dragon would widen any eyes,\" Orm said, and they all laughed.\n\nA five-day later, Dorali wore fewer bandages. Scree watched as Zarina developed a new skill of encouraging scales to grow across wounds. She pulsed the barest amount of energy through her claws at just the right frequency.\n\nDriana nodded approval. \"That's more complicated than helping bones grow together. I hope these skills won't be needed when the dragons fight the dweer.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Dark, spiky shapes moved against the blood-red sunrise. The best marks-dragons were armed, assembled and waiting. Arak made his way to the front of the dragons just as the scouts landed in a flurry of wings, reporting the dweer location in a large meadow.\n\nArak edged closer, waiting for Rikor's orders.\n\n\"We'll approach from downwind, encircle the pack, and attack from the sky. The dweer leader is our most important target. He's larger, darker, and the pack obeys his signals.\" Rikor looked from dragon to dragon. \"Attack on my signal, use your spears wisely, and make clean kills.\" He pumped his fist, snapped his wings wide and shot into the sky.\n\nArak followed in a heartbeat, barely able to see through the surge of pumping wings and swirling dust. The sky cleared as they rose higher. A roil of emotions churned in his gut: excitement, fear, worry, doubt.\n\nArak caught a thermal and settled into his own flight path, thinking. The relatively thin, scaly hides of the dweer should be easily pierced by a fishing spear. Each spear point was coated with just enough venom to put a dragon to sleep, but this amount would quickly kill a dweer. So suffering should be minimal. Few dragons were concerned with dweer suffering, but this mattered greatly to Scree.\n\nArak had wondered if she would provide the venom. Although Scree understood defense, she much preferred diplomacy over this brutal plan. \"Civilized creatures should seek civilized solutions to conflicts,\" she said. Arafine had replied that this danger was too great. Dragons would only kill enough dweer to reduce the threat, and venom would kill without pain. Scree reluctantly agreed to help.\n\nAll too soon the lush meadow lay below, and sweet scents of sun-warmed grasses washed over Arak. It seemed far too lovely for a battlefield.\n\nRikor gave the signal to attack. The dragons surged forward, staying safely above the range of a leaping dweer.\n\nBelow, a dark, brawny dweer snapped its head around. They were spotted. The dweer leader gave a high-pitched howl and two short, low grunts. The pack responded instantly, retreating toward their narrow underground warrens.\n\nSpear after spear rained down harmlessly from the sky. Few dweer were hit. They ran jagged, twisting paths, presenting difficult targets. Many were escaping into their warrens.\n\nArak had speared sturgeon while standing on the river bank, and he'd practiced throwing spears at moving targets while flying. But it became painfully clear that even throwing spears at a dragged skin could not compare with the challenge of trying to hit a motivated, fleeing dweer.\n\nArak saw Karoon dip from the sky and hover momentarily as he quickly threw a spear. He nicked his target and the dweer vanished into thicker cover. He chose another dweer and threw more carefully. The beast jerked and pitched forward as the spear hit home.\n\nKaroon grinned and brayed his success.\n\nArak hovered, uncertain. These creatures were nothing like the sturgeons that dragons routinely hunted. Dweer were swift, wily, and undeniably intelligent. His eyes swept the meadow. Targets were disappearing at a rapid rate. If he didn't hurry, they'd all be gone before he even tried. Still, he took the time to carefully select a likely target.\n\nArak chose a lone dweer that had darted from the thin, scraggly brush, far from their caves. That one should be easy to get. He readied his spear, considering both the wind and the dweer path, and threw slightly ahead of his moving target.\n\nThe dweer fell, arched its back, and became as still as ice. It would never run again.\n\nArak snapped his tail with pride. Then, as he hovered above the carcass, his wings shook. He had never killed except for food. His brief joy vanished as swiftly as the sun slipping behind dark clouds. But he'd accepted this task and grimly chose another target.\n\nArak spotted a dweer lurking in the brush. He flew lower and flushed it from hiding, following from above as it ran a fairly predictable course. Again he aimed ahead. His second target jerked sideways and sprawled in the grass.\n\nKaroon swerved in front of Arak, hurling his third and last spear. He missed. Karoon stormed away, clipping Arak's wing just as he was regaining his balance.\n\nArak tumbled down. An angry dweer leapt high. Wickedly sharp teeth scraped his belly, drawing blood. Shocked, he fell further. The dweer caught his wing. Jerked from the sky, he smashed onto the dweer. They were both winded.\n\nArak rolled off the dweer and thrust his spear into it. The dweer faltered and fell.\n\nA new dweer joined the attack and sprang for his throat. Arak reared back. He gripped the spear that he'd recovered and thrust it into the dweer. It stumbled back.\n\nA third came from behind and clamped powerful jaws on his leg. Pain tore through Arak's leg as he tried to twist away from the dweer. But this one held fast. Arak arched his long neck and breathed flames. The dweer flinched and held on. He flamed again and the dweer loosened its grip. Arak kicked free.\n\nA fourth dweer sprang from the bushes. He was a magnet for angry dweer! Arak leapt clumsily into the sky, barely in time. But his wings beat off-kilter and he couldn't catch the wind. The dweer raked him with razor claws. Desperately, Arak willed his wings to work together. He found his balance and swooped higher.\n\nArak looked down from safety. Blood trickled across his belly and his leg throbbed with pain. Despite these injuries, he felt no anger toward the dweer. They were only defending themselves. But Karoon was another matter.\n\nThe dweer leader zigged from behind a boulder. He was still alive. Three dragons pursued. Spears flew but only one struck the target, and it was a glancing blow. The leader was skilled at running an unpredictable pattern, veering rapidly left or right. He dove into a crevice.\n\nThe tunnel entrance was too small for dragons, and dweer had long ago learned the limits of dragon flame. Along with the leader, the survivors had gone to ground.\n\nTwo piercing whistles split the air. The dragons stowed any unused spears and flew to Rikor. The battle was over.\n\nIt was an eerie sight, a meadow full of dweer seemingly asleep in unnatural positions. Arak landed between two dead dweer. Fat black flies already crawled over the stiff, gaunt carcasses. Blank eyes stared at him, accusingly. He turned away. His injuries ached fiercely but he would soon recover. These dweer would not.\n\nArak stopped the bleeding with herbs from his pack and wrapped his ankle for support. He'd learned a few useful tricks from Zarina.\n\nKaroon landed. His gaze slid slowly from Arak's injured chest to his foot. He grinned. \"Clumsy again? Too slow for a dweer?\"\n\nAnother insult, on top of years of insults. Arak snapped back, \"There were four. And I was on the ground, thanks to your wing-clipping.\" Arak flexed his claws, measuring his opponent. He'd grown and was now almost as big as Karoon. He was injured, but anger would give him strength. He'd just fought four dweer, alone. He could fight one dragon.\n\nKaroon looked surprised. Then his eyes turned battle-bright and he flared his wings. He crouched and snarled.\n\nArak tracked his opponent as they began circling. He searched for an opening, ready to spring.\n\n\"Recover the spears,\" Rikor ordered. \"All must be accounted for. Dweer might find a way to use these against us. Meet back here.\"\n\nRikor's voice was a murmur, lost in the raging sea of anger that filled Arak's head.\n\n\"Arak! Karoon!\"\n\nThe whip-like voice broke through Arak's battle-lust. He stopped circling.\n\n\"We came to fight dweer. Now collect the spears.\"\n\nArak turned to obey.\n\n\"Arak, those spear markers were a good idea,\" Rikor added, giving him a friendly shoulder clout.\n\nArak bowed his thanks, unable to speak. The chance to fight back had slipped away. Next time, nothing would stop him. Following orders, he pulled a spear from a dweer. Then he smiled with satisfaction. Adding red leather ribbons to the spears really was a good idea, since they were easy to spot.\n\nArak returned to base with Rikor. Arafine studied Arak's injuries but, mercifully, said nothing.\n\n\"The dweer made difficult targets and most escaped to their underground tunnels. But our injuries were minor and all spears were recovered. It seems that battles are easier to plan than to execute,\" Rikor reported.\n\nArafine nodded agreement. \"Plans seldom unfold as expected.\"\n\n\"Sad but true. The dweer leader seems very intelligent, so he'll probably avoid us now. It could even prove useful that he survived,\" Rikor said.\n\nThe following day, Arak flew over the battlefield with Kragor and Rikor. The dead bodies had all disappeared. The meadow was empty, as if nothing had ever happened. They landed and searched among the bushes, finding bloodstains but nothing else.\n\nRikor shrugged his wings, baffled. \"I expected torn carcasses, some shark-like cannibalism. How much has prejudice influenced our knowledge of the dweer?\"\n\n\"The dweer are too bold, but they're starving. If they had not attacked Dorali, I might pity them,\" Kragor replied.\n\nArak was silent. Starvation had forced the dweer into this unusual conflict with the clan. But their leader was clever, and his quick response had countered much of their planning. Did he have a name? What did they know of dweer customs? Was Scree right?\n\nThe old, uneasy truce between dweer and dragon returned. The battle was considered a success, but Arak found the slaughter disturbing. He remembered the dragonlet Scree helped save, using the venom as an anesthetic. She'd found a better use for the venom.\n\nArak found Scree at the dragon clinic, talking with Driana. He waited while they discussed a treatment plan for Dorali. This talk of bandages and soothing creams contrasted oddly with his memories of the battle. He sat on the shore with his feet in the surf, studying the placid waves, remembering dangerous storm surges. The life-like sea seemed to be breathing, shifting in and sucking away. It could be gentle or deadly. Like a dragon. Or a dweer?\n\nDriana left and Arak asked Scree, \"Why did you save the giant squid?\"\n\nScree settled herself on a closer seat and gave him her full attention. \"It was helpless, desperately hungry, and seemed intelligent. I could not bring myself to kill it. Also, I could learn more about Vorm and his kind if we conversed, and it never hurts to learn.\" She gave a rueful smile. \"It was not a popular view. Why do you ask?\"\n\nArak was still for a moment, gathering his thoughts. \"My dreams are invaded by a field of dead dweer. The battle was not what I expected, and now I question our judgment. I wonder if we could have found another way.\"\n\nScree nodded approvingly. \"Viewpoint is everything. You can only see what you are prepared to see. Force can be necessary in dealing with a powerful enemy like the giant squid. But communication is always the key.\"\n\nShe broke off, watching a leaf swirl in the surf. Arak followed her gaze. The leaf found another current and whirled away behind a bend in the shore.\n\nScree smiled. \"Who knows where that leaf will go? Who knows where a thought will lead?\" There was a faraway look in her eyes. \"Change is seldom easy. But the ripples from a single stone can cross the sea.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "LEGENDS",
                "text": "Arak stepped into the sea, sinking his claws into the cool, wet sand. Froth eddied about his ankles. He stood next to Kragor in the surf, waiting. Orm relaxed nearby, his arms drifting back and forth with the waves like kelp leaves.\n\nThe first full moon of spring lit the waves. What had Scree said? Ripples of change? That was happening now. Octopi would soon arrive for the second trading festival. This was a bright spot for the clan, a vacation of sorts from their frantic search for copper.\n\nKragor said to Orm, \"Show me your garden.\"\n\nOrm flashed a detailed image across his skin. The seafloor outside his cave was paved with white clam shells and smooth gray stones, in a geometric design of overlapping waves. A living border continued this pattern. Interlocking circles of purple sea fans were filled with gold and purple-green seaweeds.\n\n\"Your garden is truly artistic,\" Kragor said.\n\nArak smiled; that was Kragor's highest praise. He flicked his tongue, automatically cleaning the cloudy spots of dried sea spray off his bright scales. The salt whetted his appetite for the evening feast.\n\nThat night, Arak lit one of the huge fires by the shore while octopi arranged themselves on the log sea seats. Making a great fire was an art. Salt-soaked pinecones were frequently tossed in, accenting the orange flames with tongues of blue-green fire. He added ground metals for rainbow flames and used special woods and oils to scent the fire.\n\nSmoke flavored the air. Roasting nuts, tubers, crab claws and fish added tantalizing aromas, while small, colorful ears of wild corn exploded into puffy treats. Food was plentiful, and spiced red-root tea flowed freely.\n\nAll was well, except for the looming copper disaster.\n\nSearch teams had found no new mines. Dragon claws grew weaker and scales lost their sparkle. Strange aches and pains invaded their bodies.\n\nZarina had told him the horrors to come, if no more copper was found: their scales would fade to a dull orange, muscles would cramp and wither away, and flying would become impossible. Arak shook the terrible images from his mind. Tonight he would simply enjoy the festival.\n\nArafine raised her wings for silence. \"It's time for storytelling.\"\n\n\"Tell us the story of the ice dragons!\" begged a dragonlet.\n\n\"Yes!\" said another.\n\n\"We want to hear the legend!\"\n\nArak thumped his tail. This was his favorite legend! And it was perfect for the new sign language, which used gestures from both dragons and octopi. There was a certain pride in using new expressions. Dragons spoke of changing your colors when considering a new idea. Octopi bent two arms like folded wings to give in and accept that the other being was right. Storytelling was more complex and beautiful.\n\nKragor stepped forward. He swept his wings upwards and all voices stilled.\n\n\"This is the legend of the ice dragons,\" Kragor said, in a deep, dramatic voice. He wove sign language between his gestures. \"Long ago, our world was white. The sun was dim and often hidden by snowstorms. Ice covered the land.\"\n\nKragor pointed a wing toward the ice edge, which was ghostly white in the pale moonlight.\n\n\"The ice dragons had large, snowy wings. Their scales were white moonstones edged with glittering diamonds. They were made from snowy moonbeams and icy starlight. Ice dragons were huge, with twice my wingspan.\"\n\nKragor flexed his wings to their fullest. Arak joined him, wing-to-wing, to show the immense size.\n\n\"They lived on the ice and dove into the sea for fish. These dragons did not use fire or talk mind-to-mind. But they did play catch with lightning, as we do. And ice dragons could fly further and higher than we can, far above the storms. Then the world changed. The sun became hotter and the ice began to melt. Glacier edges moved in from the sea and golden beaches were seen for the first time.\"\n\nKragor paused dramatically, his eyes sweeping over the beach. \"Their white world had color. Some dragons moved off the ice to see the new sand. The sun caught these ice dragons and turned them to gold.\"\n\nKragor gathered a clawfull of sand and held it high, letting it sift through his claws. The sand and his scales gleamed golden in the firelight.\n\n\"Other dragons stayed on the ice. They worked together, rolling huge rocks to the edge of the ice. They pushed the boulders off, building an immense wall to protect the ice from the sun. But the sun was too strong. Most of the ice is now gone and the ice dragons are gone. Some say they died with the ice. But stories passed down beyond memory claim that they flew very high and found a new land of ice, where they still live.\"\n\nKragor bowed to his audience.\n\nDragons enthusiastically thumped their tails and octopi turned exotic colors to applaud. There were copper arms with blue swirls, pink arms with green diamonds, violet arms with yellow dots, and more. Octopi also used their arms to sign words of praise.\n\nScree flashed gold to catch Kragor's attention. \"No one has seen the ice dragons since?\"\n\n\"No. But a jumbled wall of gray boulders can still be seen far to the south. The solid bedrock in that region is different, pink with black specks. Something moved those huge gray rocks.\"\n\nOrm asked, \"Why didn't the ice dragons use fire?\"\n\n\"I don't think they knew they could,\" Kragor replied. \"Also, there was little to burn, and they liked raw fish. Flying is as natural to us as water-pulsing is to you, but fire was a discovery.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Another legend tells of a dragon who enjoyed making sparks with his claws. He could even start fire in dry grass. One day he spit oil into a rock hollow and lit a fire with his sparks. Then he learned to spit an oil stream and light it. He taught all the dragons. Our flames could make hot tea and roasted nuts. And now we had a new weapon. Dagur and dweer had moved into our area, and dweer can be deadly.\"\n\nKragor bowed once more and moved back to his place by the fire.\n\nArafine raised her wings. \"Who should be next?\"\n\nZarina stood up. \"We want an octopus legend!\"\n\nThere were cries and gestures of encouragement. What would a pod legend be like?\n\nOrm rippled off his seat, grasping a small, sturdy sack made from the flexible purple skeletons of sea fans. He climbed the damp log ramp to a curved, water-filled platform. It was shallow, a few feet above the beach, and visible to everyone. He raised two arms high and a profound silence settled over the clan.\n\n\"This is the legend of Sorm, the first octopus.\" Orm spoke like a dancer, with eloquent gestures.\n\nAdults translated quietly for the youngest dragons.\n\n\"Our mother, the Moon, ruled the seas and created the tides. But she was lonely. She wanted a child. So she gathered rich mud from the bottom of the sea and formed a round head like the moon. Then she made two arms for each of her four moon phases.\"\n\nOrm closed his eyes. His head turned white like a full moon. He twisted each pair of arms together, until they seemed like four. Then he lifted his arms high and unraveled the pairs into eight octopus arms.\n\n\"She showered her child with moonlight, and his arms danced with life! But he could not see. So she gave him eyes.\"\n\nOrm opened his eyes.\n\n\"When he saw his beautiful mother, he bowed before her. The Moon was pleased and gave him more ways to know her world. He could taste subtle flavors and feel the most delicate touch. He could feel-hear the beating sounds in the sea. His mind could remember and imagine. She named him Sorm.\n\n\"'What must I do?' he asked.\n\n\"'You must prove yourself by performing four tasks, one for each of my phases. Then you will be worthy to be called my child and I will give you a home in the sea,' the Moon replied.\n\n\"Sorm's first task was to find a shell that swims. He searched the sea. There were clams that hopped, conchs that crawled, and oysters that couldn't move at all. Finally he saw a flock of scallops, using their two shells like wings, flying in spurts through the water. The Moon was pleased, and shell-food became our first food.\"\n\nOrm used his arms to fly the scallop shells.\n\n\"The second task was to find a ball of sky living in the sea. Sorm pulsed to the surface and caught pieces of sky in his suckers, dragging them under. They tasted and felt like nothing. Sorm released them, watching as silver bubbles flew to the surface like living creatures.\n\n\"He rose again, filling all his suckers with sky. This time he was held at the surface, floating. Sorm released the sky. Now he had a clue. Still, Sorm searched long before he found sky living inside seaweed floats. Seaweed became our second food.\n\n\"The third task was more difficult: 'Create my image on your skin and of your skin, to show you are my child.' Sorm made dyes but they quickly faded, and were not truly of his skin. He could change his skin colors to match almost anything, but it happened without thought. Then he made a dark circle on white sand and concentrated when his body naturally made a circle. He tried and tried, until he could make the full moon circle at any time. The Moon approved, and Sorm learned a new way to communicate.\"\n\nOrm imaged a simple moon circle on his body, turning so all could see.\n\n\"The fourth and last task was the most difficult: 'Find the most beautiful stone.' It seemed easy, for there were many lovely stones in the sea. But the Moon lived in the sky.\n\n\"Sorm searched far and wide for a stone that would please her. Red coral was a living jewel the color of a sunset sky. Black garnet was a rare, glittering gem like a star-studded sky. Coral agate looked like a storm cloud, with lightning colors running through its lumpy white surface. Sorm trembled with excitement when he found a white marble ball in a sea-flooded cave. It looked just like the full Moon. But it was dull.\"\n\nOrm raised four arms. He held a branch of polished red coral, sparkling black garnet, colorful coral agate and a white cave pearl. These exotic, rarely-seen stones caught the eye. Orm loved this legend and had decided as a young octopus to find each stone.\n\n\"Almost two years had passed. Sorm yearned to complete his task, to earn his place in his mother's heart and in the sea. He was tired of traveling. He wanted a home. But he was afraid to bring the wrong stone. No stone seemed quite perfect enough for the Moon.\n\n\"As Sorm pulsed through the water, searching, a flash of silver caught his eye. A fish thrashed, struggling desperately, its fin caught in the seam of a large oyster shell. 'Help me!'\n\n\"Sorm grabbed the shell and pried it apart, just a little. The fish swam free. But it did not leave, even though it feared the octopus. 'You saved me. I am in your debt. How can I help you?' asked the fish.\n\n\"'I must find the most beautiful stone for the Moon,' Sorm replied.\n\n\"'Open this shell, and you will find what you seek,' said the grateful fish.\n\n\"Sorm opened the oyster and found a large, round, gleaming white pearl. This was the perfect stone! It looked just like the Moon. Sorm gave her the pearl.\n\n\"'You are indeed the child of my heart,' the Moon said, and gave him a beautiful cave in the sea.\"\n\nOrm illustrated the legend with vivid scenes that moved across his body. Dragon eyes glittered in the firelight, and there was not a sound to be heard.\n\n\"Because the fish helped, octopi do not eat fish. And even today, all newly-hatched octopi must prove themselves. They leave home and live a dangerous life on the waves for almost two years before they return. Survivors are welcomed home, just as Sorm was. Octopi celebrate our mother with the New Moon Festival. We feast, to remind her to grow full and bright again. We dance with pearls to celebrate her beauty.\"\n\nOrm lifted a huge white pearl above his rapt audience as he ended the story. It shone like white fire against his red-brown skin. Then he danced with the pearl. It slid down one flexible arm and was flipped to the next, caught and flung in a pattern. Orm had practiced in the air, since a pearl moved differently underwater.\n\nThe fire crackled. All eyes were fixed on Orm. He tossed the ball incredibly high, whirling like a top beneath it. He caught the pearl, paused, and bowed.\n\nArafine spoke into the silence. \"That was exceptional, Orm.\"\n\nThe dragons thumped their tails. Octopi wove their colorful arms in exuberant patterns to show their pride. Orm bowed again in all directions and flowed down the ramp, returning to his shore seat.\n\n\"Now we'll let the fires burn down, but stay as long as you wish,\" Arafine said.\n\nPod and clan relaxed under the stars, chatting companionably into the night. Finally, tired octopi bid good night to drowsy dragons and drifted down to their undersea caves.\n\nThe following evening, trading began in earnest. Intriguing new items were given as gifts, with hopes for future trade. Arafine handed Spar a sack of dried fish swim bladders. \"These floats will lighten the loads that the pod tows home.\"\n\nSpar gave Arafine a large packet of brown seaweed. \"Boil this to thicken those magnificent dragon sauces.\" He reached into his sack and held out another bag filled with rare, perfect shells. \"And these are to decorate nest bowls.\"\n\nArafine snapped her tail with delight as she rifled through the bright red, purple, and orange scallop shells.\n\nArak bargained with Orm and Scree, who wanted the eight new skiffs for the pod. These had a new design, and could really fly! He traded the skiffs for pearls, venom and dried seaweed.\n\nKragor gave Orm a box carved from the heart of yellow pine, a sturdy, dense wood that could withstand the sea. It was filled with a fungus that glowed yellow, to light the skiff masts at night so the pod could stay together. Orm twirled his arms excitedly. \"This is great! The journey home is long, and I fear Scree has plans to travel even further.\"\n\nKragor asked eagerly, \"Did you bring the tunicates?\"\n\nOrm hefted a mesh bag that glowed from within. \"These should be enough for a good pattern. I'll help you place them.\"\n\nTogether they created a tunicate tapestry below low tide. Kragor poked his head under the sea to enjoy the full effect of bright colors glowing in the dark.\n\nArak admired the sea garden, which was truly beautiful. Even more remarkable was the friendship between his sire and Orm. They could be nest-mates."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "That night, Orm helped Scree rig the new skiffs. Eight pod members climbed aboard, eager to skiff-fly. They would also learn to navigate by the stars.\n\n\"I thought the tunicate sky I made for your cave would be the end of my star studies,\" Orm said.\n\n\"It was an excellent start,\" Scree replied. She pointed to the skiff-fliers, who were busy practicing their skills. \"Look how well they're doing.\"\n\nStur dropped his paddle overboard and circled to pick it up, a test to prove mastery of wing and winds. Mir swooped by in her skiff and stealthily grabbed the paddle. Stur looked alarmed when he couldn't find it. Mir wriggled with silent laughter and tossed him the missing paddle.\n\n\"Well enough to tease each other,\" Orm acknowledged. \"But do they know enough for a safe trip home?\"\n\nScree's eyes twinkled. \"At least we'll be safe from sharks.\" She fidgeted nervously. \"Orm, we now have eight skiffs, plus one to leave at the raft. That's enough for a small pod to explore. We could travel as far as dragons, maybe farther. Just think what we might find!\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"We found a shark on our first journey here. What will we find next?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "STORM PEARLS",
                "text": "Thunder rumbled through the dawn sky, on and on, like a symphony of dragon drummers. Arak slumbered on in his cozy shelter until a violent wind rattled the branches. He flinched in his sleep, startled awake, and stretched the sleep out of his body. He poked his head outside, filling his lungs with the cool, tasty air.\n\nThe storm finished with a shower of small ice-stones that bounced on the ground like over-active crickets. Arak collected several. He cut an ice-stone in half and studied the glassy rings. The ice ball was made from layers of lighter and darker ice.\n\nIt was like a fantastic pearl that Orm grew, when he changed the oyster's diet again and again. The pearl color changed with each diet change. Orm cut the pearl in half to show its rings of white, pink, violet and peach.\n\nPearls and ice-stones both grew in layers: one in the sea, one in the sky. Scree was right. Ice-stones were storm pearls.\n\nThese storm pearls were unusually round, like tiny trance-stones. Arak stared into a cold crystal ball while questions crowded into his mind. How did trance-stones work? Why did each dragon use only one type of trance-stone? Could other stones work?\n\nArak grabbed a heavy bag, tucked away in a corner of his shelter. It held his collection of gemstone globes. He removed two and set them on the sand: turquoise and amethyst. Why had he never tried to use them as trance-stones?\n\nArak glanced at the protected cove, where the octopus guests would remain for another ten-day. He fiddled with his bag, thinking. Could an octopus communicate with a dragon using trance-mind? Could he keep in touch with his friends while they journeyed across the sea? Maybe they'd find an island filled with copper!\n\nArak had to know. But he was already called the Trance-Freak. His early, unexpected mind journeys had set him apart, and not in a good way.\n\nWhen Arak was a dragonlet, he was often caught in a long trance. His mind was far away, questing. Once, other young dragons built a prison of heavy ice blocks around his still body. He returned to his body and awoke, numbed by the cold, alone in a cloudy-dim place. Arak thought he must have died. He struggled desperately to push his way out of the ice cage, scared and bruised and humiliated. He ran to his dam, still shaking, feeling rejected and hurt.\n\n\"Why?\" he cried in anguish.\n\nArafine had wrapped her wings tightly around Arak, holding him in a warm, safe cocoon. She rocked her young son as gently as a summer breeze. \"Because you have a gift,\" she said softly, \"and they cannot understand.\"\n\n\"You entered the trance-mind with no training, before you could fly. Your empty body just lay there for hours.\" Arafine trembled. \"I thought I would lose you. I still don't know how you found your way back. It frightened the other dragonlets.\"\n\nShe looked into his eyes. \"You must learn to ignore or avoid them. You see the world in new ways, and that is good. Accept yourself. The seal of approval that truly matters is your own.\"\n\nShe was right. Dragons didn't stretch their wings very often. They didn't question what was or consider what might be. The clan would think his experiments a waste of time, useless dreams. But what was wrong with being a dreamer? He just needed a safe, private place to experiment.\n\nArak grasped his sack, looked out to sea, and launched into the sky. Below, thin, scraggly bushes clung to a jumble of offshore rocks. This barely qualified as an islet, but it would do. He landed and tossed a few sharp stones aside, clearing a smoother patch. Then he settled on the ground and cleared his mind.\n\nArak focused on a crystal ball of clear, pale amethyst. He stared into the globe until it seemed to shimmer, glowing from within. Suddenly he was looking down on his body from above. Trance-mind! He focused back into the orb and returned to his body.\n\nHe reached for turquoise, cleared his mind, and focused. Turquoise did not work. Next he tried a cloudy moonstone ball with flickering blue lights. Success! Arak worked his way through the stones. He tried one after another, experimenting, oblivious to all else.\n\nAfter he tried all the stones, Arak flew to the glacier. He harvested a chunk of clear ice and made a globe using dragon-fire. He meditated. Ice worked as a trance-stone. But an ice-stone made him crash!\n\nArak shuddered at that awful memory. His injuries from the crash were bad, but losing his trance-stone was even worse. Without the stone, he could not contact his clan for help. He expected a miserable death. Then Scree appeared.\n\nWhat if no one had come? Would he have tried using ice for a trance-stone? Dragons believed that only one stone worked for each dragon. But many clear or cloudy stones worked for him, even storm pearls. The clan also thought only dragons could trance-mind. Was this wrong, too? Could he mind-speak with Scree?\n\nA powerful wave of excitement grew inside him.\n\nArak flew to the shore and found Scree resting on a log seat, arms trailing loose in the gentle surf. He crouched at the edge of the sea and asked his question: \"How did you calm your mind when you fought the squid?\"\n\n\"I focused on a mental image, the bright star. I took deep, slow pulses of oxygen-water. I existed in the moment, letting go of the past and future. It's a skill I learned to focus on difficult healings.\"\n\nArak's inner wave of excitement became a towering tsunami. \"Your mind-calm technique is the first step of the trance-mind!\"\n\nScree turned bright apple-green. \"Are you thinking octopi could do this?\"\n\n\"I hope so. We think ice dragons couldn't talk mind-to-mind because they hadn't discovered this ability, just as they couldn't make fire. Maybe there was greater need for both when the dweer came. But the ability was always there, and it just needed training. Octopi might have this ability.\" The thought flashed through Arak's mind that dragons might owe the dweer more than they realized. Fire and trance-mind had changed the dragon world.\n\n\"I think Orm and Stur would want to try this. The trance-mind could be really helpful when we're skiff-flying.\"\n\nArak nodded agreement. \"And perhaps you and I could communicate. Let's meet at the stream beyond the clinic. It's shaded by trees and hidden by bushes, so we can experiment in private. It's easier to learn without spectators.\"\n\nThe next afternoon, Arak sat on the stream bank with his sack of small gemstone balls. They were normally used to play a dragon game of marbles. Scree, Orm, and Stur each held a crystal ball in a coiled arm.\n\n\"To enter the mind-calm, focus on the mid-point of the ball,\" Arak said. \"Put your mind into the sphere. When your consciousness leaves your body, it can only communicate with another trance-mind. Send a mind-picture. That should be easy for you, after concentrating to make your body-pictures.\"\n\nThe sky darkened into night as they tried the different stones. Stars blossomed overhead. Arak gave up on the transparent stones that worked for him, so they tried opaque orbs: black garnet, red jasper, turquoise and purple jade. But nothing worked.\n\nStur's arms drooped. \"Perhaps we just don't have trance-mind ability.\"\n\nOrm plucked three lustrous white pearls from his pouch. \"We haven't tried pearls yet. You may need clarity, but what if we're drawn in by a shimmer?\"\n\nEach octopus concentrated on this new stone.\n\nScree's eyes glazed over and she slumped around her seat. Arak watched in tense silence.\n\nScree opened her eyes. Her entire body turned dragon-gold. \"I looked down on myself! Just for a moment. What a strange feeling!\"\n\nArak thumped his tail. \"This can work!\"\n\nThe following day, as the sun sank, Arak watched over a trio of limp bodies. Scree opened her eyes and her skin pulsed with colors. She seemed as excited as a dragonlet on an ice-slide. \"We did it!\"\n\nArak grinned. \"I knew you could!\"\n\nOrm and Stur simply smiled, quietly relieved that this had worked. They had all exchanged thoughts.\n\nThe group practiced each day from afternoon to sunset. At the end of the fifth day, after Orm and Stur had left, Scree motioned to Arak. \"Would you try the trance-mind with me?\"\n\nArak nodded eagerly. He had worked hard, learning to form pictures in his own trance-mind, hoping this new ability would allow him to communicate with octopi. He entered the trance-mind and watched as a pale shimmer emerged from Scree. A night sky with glowing tunicate stars came unbidden to Arak. She had shared! He sent an image of Zarina's octopus snowflake. Then they each returned from trance.\n\nScree flashed a rapid rainbow of brilliant colors, one after another: ruby-red, topaz, emerald, turquoise, and amethyst.\n\nArak just grinned. He couldn't have said it better himself. He grabbed his silver flask, cooling in the stream, and poured two mugs of red-root tea. The rich, woodsy flavor was perfect for a celebration.\n\nScree sipped her drink. \"We're charting new waters. This will really help when we're skiff-flying new waters!\"\n\nShe lifted her mug to Arak. \"To friends.\"\n\nArak raised his mug. \"To kindred spirits.\"\n\nHe took another drink in a silent toast to an ice-stone, his storm pearl. So much had happened because of a storm pearl. His crash was a dark black cloud, but every cloud has a silver lining.\n\nHe would never have met Scree if he hadn't crashed. There would be no exotic trading festivals, no Orm to identify Arafine's mysterious illness, and no Scree to heal her. The devastating loss of his trance-stone had also driven him to experiment, finding success beyond the limits of clan beliefs.\n\nThere were layers within layers of silver linings amidst the cloudy gray rings of his storm pearl.\n\n\"We'll look for an island for your copper search,\" Scree said. \"And now, you'll know what we find before we get back!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Arak rustled his wings nervously. He dreaded the coming storm dance, and not because he feared lightning. He'd tossed bolts with Taron for many seasons and made more lightning casts than any other dragon. He loved flying storms. But this time Arak would be expected to choose a dragon-lady partner, and the only one he wanted had several suitors.\n\nClouds towered into the sky and darkened, but wind was minimal. It would be a perfect storm.\n\nMost of the clan had already chosen partners. By tradition, the mated pairs flew up into the clouds first, wingtips barely touching as they spiraled higher. Then other couples formed and joined them. Taron and Erinite, without a hint of hesitation, leapt gracefully together into the sky. Arak felt a rare pang of jealousy toward his good friend.\n\nArak checked the vials of metal powders in his pouch. Five were used for artistic displays, to color the lightning red, orange, yellow, blue or purple. These rainbow colors burned in the clouds, more beautiful than an aurora borealis.\n\nBut dragons did not paint with green sky-fire.\n\nArak had one precious vial of chromium powder. The bright, red-orange metal would change a lightning bolt to vivid green. This special bolt was only made for a dragon-lady. She could accept or toss it aside. If she accepted, they were mated for life.\n\nLightning began to spark in the clouds.\n\nArak fiddled with the chromium vial's stopper. He polished his scales once more. Then, wings held rigid to control his tremors, he walked toward Zarina. She was still on the ground.\n\nArak suffered unexpected agonies when Karoon landed right beside her. Arak's rival puffed up his chest, extended his gleaming claws, and smiled suavely. Clearly Karoon expected her to be his partner. Arak held his breath. Then Zarina shook her head and turned away. Karoon snapped his wings angrily and flew off. Arak breathed again. But was she waiting for him? Or someone else?\n\nAnother dragon-lord landed beside her, shining and confident.\n\nThis must be her partner. Arak couldn't watch. He turned blindly away and stumbled into the sky, pelted by rain, seeking the oblivion of dark, distant clouds."
            },
            {
                "title": "BUTTERFLIES",
                "text": "Scree watched pairs of young octopi twirling through the water above the newly raked sand. They had changed their arm skin to bright colors: orange, teal, yellow, red-violet, and more. They reminded her of butterflies, in a dance of color as unique as the dragon-flake. The swirling octopus arms matched the drumming pulse of pounded shells, and they sparkled.\n\nScree looked more closely at the youngsters. How could they sparkle? \"Shell bands! They shine like dragon-scales,\" she said to Orm. \"This new fashion is really quite beautiful.\"\n\nOrm's apprentice, Mir, spun up into the sea. Her arms wrapped into a tight spiral. Then she spiraled slowly down, arms stretched wide, gleaming like a fantasy creature. Pearly discs of abalone shell were tied along each arm. The shell discs made a continuous, flexible line of silvery-blue that flashed brightly, accenting her movements.\n\nScree's eyes glowed as she watched the dancers. She wove her arms in a sinuous pattern that matched the beat, and she could barely restrain herself from twirling. But Orm lay completely relaxed on the sand. He'd soon be busy training three more helpers to tend the shellfish farms, which had tripled in size to accommodate trade and travel needs.\n\n\"The dancers have added more twirling to show off the armbands.\" Scree looked at Orm hopefully. \"We could join them.\"\n\nOrm shook his head, an automatic dragon-like gesture for no. \"I'll wait for the circle dance. But the armbands are beautiful. Abalone shells are as lovely as pearls, and bigger. I wonder if dragons would like them, and trade?\"\n\nA change in drum beat invited adults to join in the traditional, whirling circle dance.\n\nScree wove her way through the clusters of purple sea fans that edged the dance floor. This level field of sand had been cleared for dancing in a time before memory. She and Orm twined arms, becoming part of a huge circle. Three arms were behind each octopus, serving as anchor. Three arms were ahead, to twirl the dancers.\n\nEight dancers took their places inside the circle. They faced the outer ring. Each dancer gripped three arms with an octopus of the big outer circle. On the beat, they were flung to the next pod-mate in the circle. The dancers quickly released their former hold and grabbed three new arms. Boom. They were flung again, releasing and grabbing arms.\n\nBoom-boom-boom. The beat grew faster. Dancers were flung again and again, twirling about the inside of the circle, spinning like tops. The drumming changed. Dancers melted into the outer circle and eight new octopi took their places.\n\nScree loved the flying sensation as she was whirled about, twirling in circles within the big ring. She released three arms and quickly grabbed three more.\n\nThe dance ended and Scree leaned happily against Orm. \"I wish we could do that every day!\"\n\n\"But this makes it more special,\" Orm said.\n\nA group of older juveniles played a game of Mimic. One octopus shape-shifted and color-changed to become the most unusual creature he or she had seen. The others had to copy it perfectly. Scree watched as an octopus changed into a blue lobster, and the other octopi matched him. The seven lobsters looked real. It felt strange seeing them transform back into octopi.\n\n\"Let's check out that play-scape,\" Scree said. \"The pod used eight trees of kelp-weed! My arms were cramping up from knotting stalks and leaves.\"\n\nTiny octopi chased each other through the elaborate play-scape. They squirted through a maze of rings and tunnels, rapidly changing directions, sometimes camouflaging to confuse the \"it\" octopus.\n\n\"That's a worthy game. Excellent practice for escaping from sharks,\" Orm said approvingly.\n\n\"Or for catching them,\" Scree replied, with a teasing look. \"Orm, I've been thinking about giant squid. We need a better plan. I found shattered coral heads on a not-too-distant reef. Squid must have broken them to reach the lobsters below. They have moved beyond their old range, and I think we'll meet them again.\"\n\nOrm blanched. \"Giant squid. We must tell Spar.\"\n\nShe nodded agreement. \"And Arak. He might have some good ideas.\"\n\nScree began tasting the feast through the water. Clams and crab claws were dressed with pounded seaweeds, releasing a tide of flavors. Sweet, succulent abalone meat was a rare treat, available because several large abalone shells had been harvested to make the dancers' shimmering armbands.\n\nDragon spices seasoned many dishes. Ground peppercorn was worked into the oyster meat, while cinnamon bark flavored a meaty salad of mussels and scallops. Scree loved best the mashed red-root tea, which octopi found curiously relaxing and stimulating.\n\nThe music stopped, followed by three strong beats that were felt by all. Scree and Orm headed for the low stone tables, which were made from hundreds of small rocks. The tables were covered with giant clamshell bowls full of food. Octopi gathered in lines, circling around the sumptuous buffet. Each octopus filled a large clam plate, and small circles of friends settled onto the sand.\n\nScree, Orm and their apprentices discussed their new crop of rare, medicinal seaweed. A large reef fish swam into view, with curved gray scales that were edged in pure gold. The fish glimmered like a sunlit stream with overlapping ripples.\n\n\"Orm, look.\" Scree pointed at the fish as it swept past them. \"Those fish scales ripple just like the clinic stream where we practiced the trance-mind. Imagine that, learning a whole new way to communicate.\" She absently drew a design in the smooth sand. It was the octopus snowflake that Arak had shared mind-to-mind with her. \"The clan hosted a terrific trading festival. I miss the dragon-fires and storytelling.\"\n\n\"But it's good to be home, and our own festival is exceptional. Trading with dragons is changing what we eat, how we travel, even how we accessorize. Octopus arms gleam like dragon wings when they're covered with abalone,\" Orm said.\n\nScree took a closer look at her mate. \"You're enjoying the changes!\"\n\n\"Of course. Change can be good.\" Orm smiled. \"And it's really spiced up our food. But I still have concerns about the skiff voyage. There are even bigger sharks than the one that attacked Tara. Also giant squid and fierce storms. Huge waves are barely noticed down here, but they could crush a small skiff.\"\n\nScree sighed. Why couldn't Orm just relax and enjoy this opportunity? \"We can handle sharks. Giant squid are dangerous wherever they are, and they're just as likely to come here. As to storms, we could always pulse home. After all, we do live in the sea.\"\n\nOrm stared into the distance. \"That would be a long, hazardous journey through unfamiliar territory.\"\n\n\"Arak would say you're 'feeling butterflies.' Don't you want to come?\" Scree asked wistfully.\n\nOrm twined arms with his mate. \"Yes, but we should be prepared.\"\n\nScree pulled him into a closer embrace. \"We are,\" she said, reassuringly. \"And I'm teaching trance-mind to the rest of our skiff-mates. That could be useful, too.\"\n\nScree tilted her head back, watching a purple-and-pink sea dancer. The colorful creature twisted through the water overhead, like a butterfly she'd seen onshore. She finished her meal and scrubbed her shell-plate clean with sand.\n\nScree smiled with satisfaction as Spar distributed bartered items to eager octopi. Trading had changed the pod. Travel was now acceptable, in groups.\n\nThe skiffs, tied securely to the raft above, were the best barter of all. She could hardly wait for their journey! They could discover new reefs with powerful healing plants. Arak hoped to find a copper-filled island. There would be exotic sea life and glorious nights beneath the stars.\n\nOrm was just borrowing problems with his worries."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Scree boarded the first of eight skiffs on a mild spring evening. She raised the skiff-wing, caught the wind, and flew the sea. The wind held steady and strong. Scree trailed an arm in the water, feeling the unique taste and temperature of the currents. She flew as fast as a dragon, her eyes shining with pleasure.\n\nScree chased a glorious sunset and traveled on through the night, following the stars. The fungus-coated mast of her skiff glowed yellow in the darkness, like a ghost tree. Her small fleet looked like a wandering forest, slipping across the water, heading southwest.\n\nA few hours past dawn, Scree raised a square, yellow signal flag. She dropped the skiff-wing and veered to a collision course with her pod-mates, slowing to a stop as they met. They fastened their skiffs into one large raft. Scree was ready to socialize after a night of skiff-flying alone. Later, during the heat of the day, they would sleep.\n\nA swarm of large jellyfish drifted past, pulsing their cloudy-white umbrellas. Several mid-sized turtles swam among them, feasting on the mindless creatures. \"I wonder how Tara is,\" Scree mused, nibbling on salty seaweed from her cache of journey food.\n\n\"She'll return when her shell needs to be enlarged,\" Orm replied, relaxing in the shade as he ate fresh clams.\n\nA patch of sparkling water brushed against Orm's skiff and he leaned over the edge to investigate. A cluster of small, round balls twirled by, covered with iridescent rainbows. Comb-jellies. Rows of clear, glassy hairs broke the sunlight into colors.\n\n\"Scree, look! These creatures are exquisite!\" Orm covered his body with rapidly changing flashes of color as he tried to mimic the comb-jellies.\n\nScree laughed with delight. \"You look like a frantic, fractured rainbow!\"\n\nOrm cloaked himself in one large, solid, arching rainbow. \"Is this more dignified?\"\n\nThat evening, Scree flew her skiff before the cool night wind. A school of silvery-blue fish launched into the sky and glided through the air like dragons, before splashing back to the water. Scree felt the sea again and tasted bitter tree tannins. She turned green with excitement, eagerly scanning the starlit horizon for land. Nothing was visible.\n\nThere was still no sight of land after two more nights of travel.\n\nIn the morning, as the sun rose, pale gray clouds filled the sky. They slowly turned a hypnotic shade of deep rose. Scree studied the vivid display with a worried frown. She had learned many weather signs from Arak, and a red morning sky often meant that a powerful storm was coming.\n\nScree signaled the pod to merge together and rest during the day. Tomorrow they would head for home. She tied her skiff next to Orm's and slipped an arm into the sea, tasting the distinctive land-water. Scree looked longingly toward the unseen shore.\n\nOrm followed her gaze. \"It would take a big river to change the sea so far from shore, and a large land to hold such a river.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Arak and I shared trance-thoughts, and he's excited. This land must be bigger than an island, so there's a better chance of finding copper. I wish we could keep going and reach the shore.\"\n\nShe sighed wistfully. \"It's the border between land and sea. Just imagine the beautiful reefs.\"\n\n\"All borders are interesting, full of change and possibilities,\" Orm said. \"We skiff-fly along a border. The sea supports us, but the sky-wind moves us. Sea and sky, land and sea.\"\n\n\"Clan and pod,\" Scree chimed in, with a twinkle in her eyes.\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Orm agreed. \"I want to see this new shore. We should travel again.\"\n\nHer eyes grew wide. \"I never thought you'd want to travel to faraway places.\"\n\nOrm smiled back, his eyes bright with amusement. \"Really? Well, at first, I came along to help you chase sharks. But the journey itself is more captivating than I could have ever imagined.\"\n\nScree rested through the afternoon as the sun slipped lower on the horizon. Near sunset she raised the yellow triangle flag, signaling the pod to turn back. She felt an odd tang in the moist air, a prickly flavor/touch like bottled lightning. The storm was near.\n\nScree kept a watchful eye on the sky as they headed for home. She hoped the storm would not find them."
            },
            {
                "title": "HIGH SEAS",
                "text": "Arak landed on the dragon shore. Spring flowers perfumed the air and crickets sang merrily. It felt good to be back after dragon-weeks of searching from shore to shore for copper. He flicked his tail with concern at the unhealthy orange color of a dragon. Their mine was almost empty, and the remaining ore was often poisoned with thallium. What would become of the clan?\n\nKragor's tail dragged. He looked ill, weighed down by the bad news that he must report. \"Arafine, we reached the southern beaches. We found no copper, and there's nothing left to search.\"\n\nArak stepped forward. \"There are other options. I've kept in touch with Scree. She found signs of a large new land beyond the sea, with big rivers. She tasted fresh land-water in the sea, but had to turn back before reaching it. We could find this land and search for copper.\"\n\n\"That's too far for us to fly,\" Kragor objected. His eyes grew wide. \"How did you even reach them by mind?\"\n\n\"I've extended my trance-mind range,\" Arak said, matter-of-factly. Then his words tumbled out like a river.\n\n\"Yes, it is far away. We need a skiff. Taron and I designed a skiff that will hold five dragons. We built a small model to experiment. The deck is above the water to keep us dry. The belly must be weighted or it tips over. We would fill the belly with worthless rocks here to make the skiff stable, and replace these rocks with copper from across the sea.\"\n\nArak paused to catch his breath. \"We could travel with the pod when they set out again in two moons. Octopi know the currents and they could help us navigate. Scree can find her way home just by tasting the water with a trailing tentacle.\"\n\nKragor and Arafine regarded him silently, eyes opened wide in amazement. They must doubt him. Was he Dreamer even to them? \"It's not just a silly dream! This could work!\"\n\n\"No, it's not silly,\" Arafine replied in a calming voice.\n\nKragor looked Arak squarely in the eye. Dragon-lord to dragon-lord. \"Who would you choose to crew your skiff? You seem to have thought of everything else.\"\n\n\"Skiff crew?\" Arak was thrown off by their quick acceptance. He focused on Kragor's question. \"Taron and myself, because we know the skiff. Rikor, to help organize the trip. And you, for your experience hunting copper.\"\n\nKragor gave a slow, satisfied smile. \"I'd like that.\"\n\n\"And the fifth crew member?\" Arafine prodded.\n\nArak clicked his claws together, considering. \"We would benefit from the perspectives of a dragon-lady.\"\n\n\"What about Driana or Zarina? A healer could be useful,\" Arafine suggested.\n\nZarina. She had been rather cool to Arak ever since the storm dances. But why? At least she hadn't chosen a mate, yet. If only he had the courage to choose Zarina for the crew! But that would mean almost two moons of traveling together. He would make mistakes and probably drive her away forever.\n\nArak bottled up his feelings once more. \"Driana would be a good choice.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "A large crew of dragons worked busily on the skiff, which was nearly finished. Arak fastened the last plank to the deck. Spring flowers were gone, summer was near, and the copper mine was almost empty. But soon they would find a new land to search.\n\n\"Hope this works,\" an old dragon said. \"The copper rations just aren't enough. My joints hurt.\"\n\n\"It's a poor gamble,\" Karoon grumbled. \"Surely there's more copper in our own land! Searching at home would be closer, safer, faster and easier.\"\n\n\"We've searched,\" Kragor responded shortly. \"Look around you. There are orange dragons everywhere. We must search elsewhere.\"\n\nArak nodded in silent agreement. Oysters had been added to their regular menu as a lesser source of copper and it still wasn't enough. Summer was upon them and their need was urgent.\n\nBut the dragon-skiff was perfect. Smooth wooden planks met seamlessly to create a strong skiff with clean lines. A tall mast reached high into the sky. Huge, silvery-white wings were stitched from fish skins and safely furled. Arak's eyes glowed with pride.\n\nA new concern crept into Arak's thoughts. This was his idea. The hopes of the clan now rested on his wings. He also felt responsible for the crew. They would travel far from shore, too far to fly home. Storms at sea could be unpredictable, and there were giant squid. He slumped with the weight of new worries.\n\nArak studied the sparkling sea, brimming with possibilities. He snapped his tail. There were always risks. But there must be copper somewhere, and this was their best chance to find it.\n\n\"Here,\" said Kragor, handing him another basket of dried fish.\n\nArak stowed it with the tubers, seaweed, nuts, spices, tea leaves, water, fishing spears, venom, and extra wood and rope for skiff repairs. \"We have plenty of supplies. I spoke with Scree in trance. We'll meet the octopi at the first raft.\"\n\nKragor nodded. \"We leave tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I'll see you at dawn,\" Arak replied. Then he headed for the nesting shore.\n\nArak flew through a golden spear, smiling as the light splashed over him. He headed for another. These bright shafts of light pierced the clouds that were gathering for a summer storm.\n\nArak landed on the shore near Zarina; he just had to see her before he left. They touched foreheads. \"I'll be waiting for you in trance every evening,\" he said, wishing he could say more. But she was with the nesting dragons. Could he tell her how he felt, if she was alone?\n\nArak greeted the other dragons. He gazed curiously at the beautiful nests. It was a clan tradition to make a protective ceramic bowl for a dragon egg.\n\nSuddenly, cold rain pelted down.\n\nArak joined the small group beneath a huge weather-shade canopy. The shelter was made from large fish skins that were sewn together and suspended on long poles.\n\n\"This is comfortably dry,\" he commented.\n\n\"And our precious eggs are protected,\" Erinite replied. She heated her ceramic nest bowl with a whiff of dragon-fire. Then she carefully turned the large egg, which was nestled in fine white sand. Her artistic nest was an unusual green-blue, made of clay from a distant river. The frothy rim design was covered with tiny white seed pearls.\n\nArak pointed to the rim. \"Now I know why Taron wanted so many small pearls. This looks like frozen sea foam. Your whole nest seems to celebrate the sea!\"\n\nErinite laughed. \"Pearls are the new gemstone, ever since you met Scree. And I like the meaning. Because a pearl grows slowly, in layers, it should encourage deep understanding in our dragonlet.\"\n\nArak crouched down near Arafine's egg, wondering what his sibling would be like. A swirled pattern of reddish-brown spots covered the large, creamy egg. The nest bowl was made of red clay spun with shimmering gold threads. A large cut ruby sparkled below each gilded rim fold. The nest had a stunning design with a traditional clan stone.\n\nArak looked into the proud, worried eyes of his dam. \"Rubies and gold. For Kragor?\" He put a comforting wing about Arafine. \"Don't worry, we'll be back almost before you know we've left.\"\n\nDawn came early. Kragor, Taron, Rikor, and Driana joined him on deck. Arak leaned against the railing, gazing at the dock as they prepared to leave. He felt so energized that he could light a cloud!\n\nArak fastened his eyes on Zarina as she waved farewell from the dock. She would be his trance partner during the voyage, having practiced daily to learn to communicate over the distance. Why? Did she like him? Or was this just an interesting challenge?\n\nThe crew cast off and headed west. Waves grew larger as they flew, and their skiff rocked and leapt like a wild creature. Arak and Taron laughed at each other as they skipped bent-legged down the deck, veering from side to side as the skiff pitched in the waves. The salty spray tasted of adventure and freedom.\n\n\"Stand here!\" Arak cried. The boat rolled from left to right and tilted from bow to stern, moving constantly. But while he stood in this one magical spot, he remained still; everything moved around him. It felt like being in the calm eye of a storm.\n\nArak gave his spot to Taron. He stood in the stillness, flicked his tail and grinned. Kragor, Rikor, and Driana each took a turn experiencing the still-spot.\n\nThe waves stretched longer as they flew further from shore. \"This is perfect! The sea's calm and the wind's holding steady. I'll lash the tiller so we can eat together,\" Arak said.\n\nWould their luck hold?\n\nAt sunset, Arak entered trance-mind. All the crew had extended their communication range, but Arak's long-distance thoughts were still the clearest. Zarina stood trance-watch on the shore. She was the only other dragon who could easily reach across this distance.\n\n<How is the journey> (Zarina)\n\n<The skiff is making good time. All is well> (Arak)\n\nArak quickly ended their trance-talk, since the journey must continue. The night sky was a black sea that sparkled. \"Time to steer by the stars,\" he said.\n\n\"May the star-fires guard us as they guard the ancestors,\" Taron replied.\n\nAccording to dragon-lore, the stars were fires. Endless generations of ancestors lived in the cold, distant after-home of the night sky. Warmed by their eternal fires, they looked down upon their past world and future dragons.\n\nArak studied the tiny dragon-fires that lit the dark sky. He looked due north and found the still fire amidst the moving sparkles. This star was a constant beacon that did not move in the sky. It was an amazing, dependable guide to steer by.\n\n\"The wind's shifting,\" Arak said as he moved the tiller. Kragor adjusted the skiff-wing.\n\nLater, a new pattern of stars lit the night sky. \"These are your stars,\" Arak said. Taron and Rikor took charge of the skiff.\n\nArak curled up in a sheltered place in the bow. He was soothed by the motion of the flying skiff, the drumming of waves slapping against the hull, and the crisp smell of sea air. He slept soundly until Taron woke him shortly before sunrise.\n\nArak steered the skiff past the octopus signal raft at dawn. He snapped his tail happily. \"We'll be there before the sun sets.\"\n\nIn late afternoon, Arak spotted the first log raft above the octopus village. He adjusted the skiff-wing and came about, heading into the wind, skillfully slowing to a standstill as they docked.\n\nOctopi boiled up to the raft, eager to see the dragon skiff and meet the dragons. They were fairly fluent in the new sign language, but few had met a dragon. They wanted an opportunity to practice their skills.\n\nSpar welcomed Arak and Taron with the less formal greeting of old friends. \"You two really improved the pod skiffs,\" he signed approvingly.\n\nTaron grinned. \"Our new design is much faster.\"\n\n\"And there's a harness to lift octopi onto the dragon-skiff, so we can visit,\" Arak said.\n\nClan and pod shared a relaxed meal, with dragons on the raft and octopi on the log seats that protruded at sea-level. Arak nodded with satisfaction. Octopi flew underwater, dragons flew in the sky. Now they would fly together on the waves, along the border between sea and sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "A ten-day into their journey, Arak guided the dragon-skiff over long, smooth waves. He was riding the sea, flying without wings. Warm afternoon sunlight slanted through the rigging, casting web-like shadows on the polished wood deck.\n\nA few white clouds began to form in the sky. Would it storm? They could use the fresh rainwater.\n\nScree stretched and curled each of her many arms, relaxing as she floated in a large tub of seawater on the dragon-skiff. She imaged a light sequence on her skin. \"This is the pattern for 'welcome'. It's much brighter on a squid, when they flash red and yellow lights.\"\n\nArak frowned, concentrating hard as he drew the light sequence on fish-skins. \"This light-language is complicated.\"\n\n\"It was hard to learn Vorm's language. Lights are so different from body movements and gestures. Vorm spoke of life in the dark abyss. Light means everything there, like guiding stars in an eternal night sky.\"\n\nArak inhaled the pungent aroma of oil-berry ink, which blended curiously with smells of dried fish and the sea. \"We should use larger skins and make really clear pattern signs. We might need these if we meet a giant squid.\" He flexed his wings for balance as the skiff rocked. \"Could you show me what Vorm looked like, in trance-mind pictures?\"\n\nScree removed the pearl that she carried in an arm sucker, always ready for use as a trance-stone. She focused and slipped into trance.\n\nArak concentrated on his aquamarine globe. Then he was seeing through Scree's eyes as a monstrous squid tore apart her undersea village. Long, snaking tentacles crashed through the water. Homes were reduced to rubble. Two octopi were plucked up, shaken senseless and devoured. Then a third.\n\nSuddenly, Scree plunged a spear into the beast and the nightmare collapsed. Vorm lay like a mountain across the sand, with long tentacles. Later, he flashed a \"welcome\" pattern of lights with a poetic rhythm. Finally, Vorm said \"farewell\" with dimming lights.\n\nArak returned to his body.\n\n\"You were braver than I realized,\" he said, shaken.\n\n\"It was your gift-spear and the venom that made my attack possible. But, even after what he did to our pod, I could not have killed Vorm. He was desperately hungry.\" Scree looked out to sea. \"Vorm was truly of this world. He loved the currents of the sea more than we could ever love a possession. He was vibrant, wild, alive. I feared him, but I miss him.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"I didn't really understand why you cared for Vorm after his attack. But what he did was natural, not vicious. Life requires death; we kill fish to survive. And the light language is beautiful.\"\n\nScree lapsed into stillness.\n\nArak stretched his cramped arms and flexed his claws. New clouds were springing up in the sky like mushrooms after a rain. Perhaps they would grow into rain clouds. Their supply of fresh water was low and the air was hot. Some cooling rain would be welcome, if it was a mild storm. Then Arak was lost in thought, watching the rhythm of the waves.\n\nLarge rafts of yellow-brown seaweed drifted by, catching along the side of the skiff before moving on. Arak netted a cluster and dropped it into a tub of seawater. Tiny round floats grew among the small, leathery leaves. He picked it up, looking for roots. It seemed to have no beginning and no end. The mass felt crunchy and springy in his claws.\n\nArak shook the seaweed and snapped his tail in surprise. Two miniature fish and a crab tumbled out. Then he shook out a shrimp. He stared at the creatures as they sought cover in the water.\n\n\"Taron, come and see this!\"\n\nThe fish, shrimp and crab all had mottled brown-and-yellow patterns. They matched the seaweed. A small filefish flexed the tiny file on its head, prepared to do battle. The crab found a scrap of seaweed that had fallen into the tub and scrambled aboard, blending perfectly. The sea-dragon fish curled its long tail and rippled the small fin on its back.\n\nTaron pointed. \"How strange. This fish looks like a piece of seaweed with eyes.\" The tiny sea-dragon had long, leaf-shaped skin flaps over its entire body.\n\n\"It looks like that fish near the dragon-shore,\" Arak said. \"But our fish doesn't have skin like sea grass.\"\n\nKragor picked up a piece of seaweed and studied it. \"These are the sky-floats from the legend of Sorm! Remember? From the spring festival stories? Orm has to see this!\"\n\nThe pod skiffs were tied to the dragon skiff while everyone rested through the heat of the day. Kragor lifted his friend aboard and settled him in a tub. Orm carefully removed a small piece of the new plant. He felt the springy seaweed and broke a float open underwater, releasing a ball of sky. Orm flushed bright green with excitement. \"The legendary sea-sky.\"\n\nScree observed from her adjacent basin. \"A whole world lives in here. They must spend their entire lives in a seaweed raft, to match like this. We should release them so they can stay with their kind.\"\n\n\"You're right. But I wish I could show them to the dragons back home.\" Arak put the seaweed in the net, added all the creatures, and waited as they burrowed in. He dropped the entire mass overboard, onto another seaweed raft.\n\n\"You can show them with your mind pictures,\" Scree reminded. \"Yours are quite vivid now, like living dreams.\"\n\nArak gratefully accepted a steaming mug of red-root tea from Driana. He glanced up as a brighter patch of light slid across the deck. Golden spears of light punctured a thick, snowy blanket of clouds. It would definitely rain.\n\nA thundering wave of water hit the skiff. The giant manta ray leapt a dragon-length out of the sea before crashing down again. A wall of water rose around it. The dragon-skiff reacted like a storm-blown tree, pitching to and fro while everyone grabbed for support. The huge fish leapt four more times and then sank out of sight.\n\nKragor held on tight to the railing as the sea grew calm.\n\n\"I wonder why it did that.\"\n\n\"I wonder how it did that!\" Orm said. \"Imagine an octopus leaping out of the water.\"\n\nKragor roared with laughter at this unlikely image.\n\nOrm finished his tea and bid farewell. While boarding his skiff, he tasted earthy land-water in the sea and signaled his discovery.\n\nArak thumped his tail with excitement. They were nearing the new land! The golden glow of the sun was muted by clouds as it sank lower in the sky. It was time to cast off and fly the seas, following the stars by night. The sea was calm, with long gentle swells, and the skiffs flew easily through the fading light.\n\nIt began to rain. Cold, silvery drops pelted the gray-green water, and each drop splashed back as a ring of silver droplets. The sea looked like a field of yellow-flowers gone to seed, with fragile silvery balls made of parachute seeds.\n\nArak admired the field of seaflowers. Octopi must enjoy this rain, too, when the cold drops struck sensitive arms and slid across their skin. Rain was not felt below the waves, in the uniform embrace of the sea.\n\nArak reached out with his magnetic sight to feel the coming storm. It would not be a dangerous ice storm. But the wind blew from more quadrants here than at home, and there was such an expanse of sea to feed the storm that he could not judge its strength. The magnetic lines sparkled more than usual, so there would be lightning.\n\nMaybe it would be a short, sweet summer storm. He instructed the crew to tie everything down, just in case. Arak raised a square red warning flag for the octopi: Be prepared for storm. His tail flicked nervously. Could the skiff withstand a strong storm?\n\nThe clouds grew darker and darker.\n\nSuddenly, the rainfall intensified into a true storm. Winds grabbed at the skiff-wings and seawaters leapt aboard. Lightning crackled across the sky, followed by deafening claps of thunder. Arak tied himself to the skiff, ready to pull himself back if washed overboard. The others followed his example. Each being had a sharp knife strapped to an arm in case the rope tangled.\n\nArak reefed the skiff-wings to shorten them as the wind grew stronger. He furled his own wings, too. It felt unnatural to keep his wings so tightly folded against his back, but he did not want to be blown overboard. He constantly adjusted the skiff-wing, fighting both wind and wave.\n\nThe waves grew larger, with treacherously deep troughs. Arak fought to head diagonally into the huge waves, his muscles straining until they burned. The skiff would flip and sink if it was caught broad-side. He thudded across gray hills in a jarring, uneven rhythm that knocked him off his feet again and again. He struggled upright each time, bruised, never releasing the skiff-wing ropes. The cold, relentless rain chilled him to the bone.\n\nArak took turns with Taron, the only other dragon who could skiff-fly in a storm. But the break was never long enough. Arak's arms were on fire, his body was frozen, and his mind was a fog of exhaustion.\n\nBlack clouds covered the moon and stars. There was utter darkness between the long, jagged lightning strikes that burned through the sky. With each blinding flash he could see the small pod skiffs wrestling mightily with wind and waves. They were falling behind. Then the rain poured down in cold gray sheets. In the next brilliant flash he saw only rain. Arak felt numb inside.\n\nThe skiffs had disappeared.\n\nThe storm continued through the night, and they flew alone in a curtain of rain.\n\nA gray dawn came and the rain stopped, but the waves were fierce. Arak flew through the following day beneath dark clouds, battling walls of gray-green water that threatened to swamp or overturn the skiff. This was a true test of his skiff-flying prowess.\n\nClouds covered the sky. The dark gray day became a black night as they out-ran the storm. Arak's whole body trembled with exhaustion from fighting wind and waves, constantly adjusting the skiff-wings. With calmer seas, he could at last loosen the lines and rest.\n\nHe was too tired to eat.\n\nSuddenly, the clouds shifted and stars lit the darkness. Arak snapped his tail. The star clusters were not where they should be. \"We're too far south! How far off-course are we?\" He scanned the empty sea. \"Where are the pod skiffs?\"\n\nKragor followed his gaze, eyes wide with alarm. He flexed his wings wide and snapped them, flying straight up into the sky. He hovered at the top of the tall mast, vaning his wings as he blew a thin stream of dragon-fire onto the candle wick. The large, wax-filled bowl immediately caught fire, making a yellow star against the night sky.\n\nArak looked up hopefully at the beacon. Surely such a bright signal would attract the missing octopi."
            },
            {
                "title": "BORN OF STORM",
                "text": "Arak breathed a sigh of relief. The fierce storm was over. He waited through the night, listening and watching for the missing octopi. Battered pod skiffs trickled in. Before dawn there were seven, including Scree's skiff that was already tied to the stern.\n\nOrm was missing.\n\nArak flicked his tail worriedly. Where was Orm? Dawn bloomed, with a cheerful golden sky that did not reflect his mood. He doused the signal fire, which was useless by day.\n\nArak slipped into trance and traveled far, searching the sea for Orm. Although his trance-sight was blurry, he could easily see a pod-skiff. His mind wove back and forth above the sea, seeking. But he found no skiff. He came out of trance and squinted into the rising sun.\n\n\"It's light enough to search,\" Kragor said, staring out to sea.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" Arak replied. Trance-sight was too blurry to see a few boards from a shattered skiff. It was time to fly.\n\nArak and Kragor flew a search pattern, traveling far from the dragon-skiff. They followed a reverse journey, seeking skiff debris or any sign of Orm. The day wore on, bleak and colorless in Arak's weary mind. His wings ached and he began to tremble. Growing increasingly desperate, he climbed higher in the sky, scanning the huge expanse of sea. But all he saw was the eternal sea. Spent, he and Kragor returned to the skiff.\n\n\"Where did you search?\" Rikor asked.\n\n\"East. Maybe a current caught him. Try further south.\"\n\nRikor and Taron left to search.\n\nArak rested through the day, utterly exhausted. His muscles screamed from days of abuse. His mind had a hollow ache from too much questing and too much sorrow. He lay in the hot sun, which warmed his body but not his soul. He smelled roasted fish but had no appetite.\n\nThe searchers returned as the sun was setting, weary and worried, with no news to share. Scree entered the trance-mind and sought her mate. Her desolate eyes and grayed color clearly showed that there were no answering thoughts.\n\nA large tree branch drifted past. Driana flew high into the coral-colored sky. \"Land!\" she cried.\n\nArak looked landward and sighed. The joy of success was marred by the agony of loss. He desperately wanted to wait, still hoping Orm would appear. But they needed to replace crucial supplies that were lost in the storm, and they must search for copper. He turned to Scree. \"I'm truly sorry, but we can wait no longer.\"\n\nScree curled her arms in distress and nodded agreement.\n\nThe skiffs headed due west, reaching land just past sunrise. Scents of sun-warmed trees and foreign flowers blew around them, bringing memories of home. Arak anchored in a deep, protected cove. After dragon-weeks on the restless sea, sliding up and down waves, the stillness was a shock to his system. He felt disoriented, stumbling as he tried to walk across a deck that did not move.\n\nArak, Taron and Scree remained onboard to guard the skiff and watch for Orm. Octopi slipped undersea to explore. Three dragons flew ashore, ready to search from dawn to dusk for copper.\n\nArak spoke with Kragor every sunset, in trance. The explorers found pale blue turquoise in several streams, but no dark turquoise or copper nuggets. He could feel Kragor's bone-deep sorrow when he asked about Orm.\n\nArak came out of trance and drummed his claws nervously on the skiff railing, making an odd pattern in the dried salt. Three whole days of searching, and Kragor's group had found no hint of copper. He looked down at Scree as she once again came out of trance. Her eyes held an anguished look.\n\n\"Arak, Orm should have contacted me by now. He must be badly injured, or... dead.\"\n\n\"What about lost? That was quite a storm, and we're far off-course.\" Arak did not wish to consider a world without his brilliant, patient, quirkily humorous friend.\n\n\"No. I... ,\" Scree began. She suddenly froze.\n\nA weathered board drifted into view, bearing a mottled, battered burden.\n\nScree bleached white and pointed. \"Orm!\"\n\nArak was instantly aloft. He hovered a second, remembering the injured dragonlet. His sharp claws would puncture Orm. He grasped the sodden board with his talons, struggling to lift both the board and Orm. Then he gently slipped the limp body into an octopus tub.\n\nScree reached across to her mate. He had a nasty gash across the back of his neck. One arm was half-missing, tied off with a rope, and the sensitive suckers on another arm were shredded. Scree ran her arm over Orm's lacerated neck, sensing, and trembled. \"He's alive, but just barely. His pulse is very weak and he's in deep shock.\"\n\nArak handed Scree her healer bag, which had been lashed to the skiff for safe-keeping.\n\nScree crushed some red algae, rubbed it along Orm's neck, and dropped the rest into his tub. She massaged the base of Orm's neck and around the base of each arm, squeezing to help the flow of blood. She worked with an even rhythm, tirelessly, completely absorbed in her efforts.\n\nArak watched silently, daring to hope. If anyone could save Orm, it was Scree. He finally wrenched his gaze away from Orm and glanced toward shore. \"Kragor needs to know.\" He took the trance-stone from his pouch and prepared to contact his sire.\n\nTaron shaded his eyes against the slanting rays of sunset. \"Look!\" Fading light glinted off three golden spots in the sky.\n\nArak shook his head, bemused. \"What amazing timing. Those two are truly connected.\"\n\nKragor landed and his eyes grew wide. \"Am I dreaming?\" His gaze swept the unreal scene. \"He'll be all right?\" He hesitantly reached out to touch Orm, but pulled his arm back. He shifted from foot to foot, full of nervous energy, eyes glued on his friend.\n\n\"I think so,\" Arak said, flicking his tail worriedly.\n\nDriana fed Scree a nourishing meal while she worked without pause, continuing her impressive eight-armed circulation massage. Scree ate what was given without recognition, oblivious to all but Orm.\n\nArak turned to Driana. \"Scree won't stop until Orm responds, but her arms are starting to droop. She needs help. I'm calling Stur.\" He banged two rocks together underwater with the signal for the healer apprentice: two quick hits, a pause, another hit. Stur came quickly and was lifted aboard into the third octopus tub.\n\n\"Can you do this circulation massage?\" Driana asked Stur.\n\nHe watched closely. \"Yes, and Scree is wearing out. I'll take over.\"\n\n\"No. I can do this,\" Scree insisted.\n\nStur touched her arm gently. \"No. You're exhausted and your arms are beginning to cramp.\"\n\nScree searched his eyes and then nodded acceptance. Stur positioned his arms and Scree slipped hers off. He resumed her steady rhythm, continuing the massage that was Orm's only hope.\n\nTwo hours later, Orm's eyes fluttered open.\n\nKragor closed his eyes and went limp with relief, collapsing onto the deck. He had watched in tense silence for hours, unable to help and unwilling to leave.\n\nScree twined arms with Orm and looked deeply into his eyes. \"Don't you ever do this again!\"\n\n\"What? Don't get dragged across a reef? Or don't find my way home to you?\"\n\n\"Orm,\" Scree replied, \"always, always find your way home to me.\" They gazed at each other in a world apart.\n\nArak turned away, seeing too clearly what he wanted with Zarina. He asked Kragor, \"Can I see what you've found?\"\n\nKragor dug a clawfull of pale blue nuggets from his sack. \"Low-quality turquoise, but there's some copper in this. We'll keep hunting. We caught a few big fish, too.\"\n\nArak hid his disappointment. Kragor's blue rocks were as light as a winter sky, so there couldn't be much copper. \"We still have time to search,\" he said, trying to sound optimistic. The clan needed real copper.\n\nArak smelled the mingled aromas of spiced tea, crispy tubers, herbed greens, grilled fish, and a sweet-sour onion-berry sauce. There was even a tantalizing dessert of dried berries stewed with sweet-weed. He glanced at Orm and smiled. His friend was alive, and this was worth a celebration.\n\nArak leaned back against the railing, watching moon shadows slide across the deck while he ate one of the best meals of his life. Happiness flavored his food better than any spices. But there was one thing he simply had to know.\n\n\"Orm, how did you find us?\"\n\n\"I followed the red-root trail.\"\n\nDriana put down her mug. \"The what?\"\n\nScree shook with silent laughter. \"When the storm struck, I feared the pod skiffs would be lost or destroyed. Whether lost or skiff-less, my pod-mates might survive. But we were off-course, and octopi would need a distinct trail to find us. We were drinking red-root tea, with its unique dragon taste, and the stash was out. So, I dribbled red-root into the sea as we skiff-flew, to flavor the water and attract lost octopi. I'm afraid I've depleted your supply.\"\n\nKragor laughed, deeply and joyously. \"I could not possibly imagine a better use for red root! Orm, welcome back! What happened to you?\"\n\n\"I skimmed across leaping walls of water, seeking a safe passage. Suddenly, huge waves crashed into me from three sides. My skiff flipped over and was slammed into a reef. I was swept out, still tied to the rope. The skiff and I were dragged across sharp coral before I could cut myself free. I scavenged a skiff-board and floated, barely conscious, following the taste-trail.\"\n\nArak grinned, imagining a trail of tea. Now, if he could just find a copper trail! He stared into the dark forest beyond the moonlit shore. Tomorrow he would help with the search, and he was determined to find something better than that pale, almost worthless, rock."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Three long gray shadows rippled across the sandy beach, turning bright gold when the dragons flew over a large tide pool. Perfect reflections of Arak, Kragor and Rikor flew through the still water. They soared inland above the trees, seeking a good place to search for copper.\n\nKragor signaled and they landed in a clearing by a promising stream. \"Look for turquoise or malachite,\" he reminded. Trace amounts of copper made the blue-green colors of these rocks, so they were indicators of possible copper veins.\n\nArak walked beside the stream, peering through the clear water, picking up rocks. Water served as a tireless miner, forever digging rocks from the banks. Mud and small stones were carried away by the current, but heavy metals like gold and copper sank to the bottom and stayed.\n\nArak flicked his tail irritably, tossing the rocks back. Nothing! Not even pale turquoise! His eyes were drawn to the dense forest that crowded close to the stream, dark and mysterious. Odd creatures scurried up huge tree trunks and leapt between branches. Silence fell where they passed. Nothing challenged the dragons.\n\n\"We'll try another stream,\" Kragor said.\n\nThey searched until sunset, seeking signs of the elusive copper. Then, still dragging empty sacks, they made camp. Tired and discouraged, Arak ate cold spiced fish and dried berries.\n\nRikor dumped a load of deadwood near the fire. \"We haven't found copper, but there's no shortage of wood. I'll stand first watch.\"\n\nThe fragrant smoke brought a comforting scent of home. Wearily, Arak drifted off to sleep. He woke for third watch and quietly gathered supplies for breakfast. A hearty morning meal should give energy for a longer search.\n\nRikor woke at dawn, sniffing the air hungrily. He filled his bowl with steaming stew from the pot. \"What's in this? Besides the cinnamon I smell?\"\n\n\"Ground nuts, dried berries, and slivered roots from those fuzz-tail plants. They're everywhere,\" Arak replied.\n\nKragor tasted the stew. \"Excellent. I was getting tired of fish.\"\n\nThey flew south and walked a new stream, searching. Soon each dragon had filled a sack with pale turquoise nuggets. It felt good to finally find something. But this was not copper, nor the real promise of a copper mine.\n\n\"Look!\" Rikor reached for a large golden nugget, shining brightly among the dull gravel.\n\n\"They're beautiful,\" Arak agreed. \"But not what we need.\" He tucked them away, with vague thoughts of making something for Zarina. Then he gathered more turquoise.\n\nKragor called a halt. They flew back to camp, deposited the bags of turquoise and headed for the next stream. The dragons searched stream after stream, sometimes finding pale turquoise but never any copper.\n\nAt dusk, Arak slipped into trance. He found Zarina's shimmer; she was waiting. Their trance-minds merged.\n\n<We found lots of pale turquoise, which may help, but no copper> (Arak)\n\n<You found the land. I'm sure you'll find copper> (Zarina)\n\nHer comforting reply warmed Arak more than a steaming mug of hot tea.\n\nArak stayed in trance. He quested, his mind flying across the land, searching for a more promising area to hunt copper. Although his unique trance-sight was blurry, one thing was clear: this was not a good area for copper.\n\nArak slept uneasily and woke just before dawn. He flew very high above his questing region. There was a long stretch of curving coastline, a moss-like carpet of miniature trees, and thin silver ribbons of water. It was a bit like a map of the dragonlet world. And this area was not like the region around their copper mine back home.\n\nThey needed to change their search plans. But would the other dragons listen to him?\n\nTwo nights later Arak was back on the skiff, eating a fine dinner, drumming his claws nervously. He looked from dragon to dragon, trying to gather their attention. \"I flew high to survey the land. Everything here looks much the same, with no obvious change in dominant rock type or formations. So we're likely to keep finding the same pale turquoise. We should raise anchor, sail along the coast, and start searching again in a new area. Then we'll have a better chance of finding copper.\"\n\nRikor shook his head. \"We should complete the search here. It's best to be thorough. And this place has everything we need to re-stock the skiff: wood, fresh water, and food.\"\n\nDriana nodded enthusiastically. \"Huge red fish, potent herbs, and tasty tubers. We'll eat well on the trip home!\"\n\nKragor tilted his head, considering. \"Arak, you have a point. But we'd risk finding nothing at all if we move to another search site.\"\n\nArak gave his friend a \"help me\" look, but Taron just shrugged his wings.\n\n\"Our skiff is safe here. We might not find another good place to anchor.\"\n\nArak's tail slumped. They weren't willing to try another area, because they did not truly understand risk and reward. He was so tired of finding pale, pathetic turquoise. The clan would not be impressed.\n\nArak gazed into the mysterious, neglected forest and straightened his wings. He would seek other treasures. If they weren't likely to find copper, Arak was determined to at least find something special. He turned to Kragor. \"Then we'll stay. But two dragons can search the streams just as well as three. Tomorrow I'll search the forest.\"\n\nWhen the sun rose, Arak entered the forest alone. He stood in a cool, dark pool of shadow, listening, surrounded by odd rustlings and earthy scents. Huge, soaring trees made perpetual twilight on the forest floor. He breathed in the almost-familiar smells, trying to identify them, finding trees and flowers much like the ones back home.\n\nArak found a new type of mushroom that was creamy and hollow, with a delicate aroma. He ate the smallest sliver, testing. He smiled, savoring a delectable flavor that perfectly matched its smell. Then he waited, flicking his tail nervously. Mushrooms could be fatal.\n\nTime passed, and he felt no dangerous numbing or tingling to indicate poison. He eagerly finished the mushroom. This would be a welcome treat! He hunted near rotting logs, gathering enough to fill three sacks.\n\nA beam of light fell through a hole in the dense forest canopy, marking a path to the sky. He rose carefully through the small opening, wings tight, twisting up to the sun. Arak flew above the solid forest, skimming a vast sea of green swells, searching. He found a meadow that was bright with flowers and orange butterflies.\n\nArak basked in the warmth of pure sunlight, sniffing the fragrant air. He followed some fuzzy yellow-and-black insects back to a large, noisy tree. What was that strange, sweet smell? He reached into the hole, ignoring a horde of angry insects. The honey he found was liquid sunshine with a taste sweeter than red-berries.\n\nArak licked the golden sweetness off his sticky claws. He could never have imagined this treasure! He gathered honeycombs and flew back to the skiff, landing on the deck next to Orm.\n\n\"I'm healed. I want to explore,\" Orm pleaded to Scree.\n\nScree flushed red with exasperation and concern. \"You almost died and you're still weak as a jellyfish. But if you weren't in this tub, you'd push yourself 'til you dropped.\"\n\nArak grinned, delighted that his friend felt well enough to argue. But Orm really should rest. Arak handed him a leathery leaf spread with honey. \"Here, try this.\"\n\nOrm tasted the golden treasure and wove his tattered arms enthusiastically while Arak studied him. A dragon would have died from such injuries. \"Orm, you're amazing. You'll soon be as good as new. Even your arm will grow back. Dragons can repair a broken leg but we can't re-grow a lost limb.\"\n\nOrm finished his tasty treat. \"That's normal for us. What's really amazing is this honey. Still no copper?\"\n\nArak turned empty claws to his friend. \"Just pale turquoise, a poor copper substitute. Better than nothing, I suppose.\"\n\nOrm twirled two arms in his thinking pattern. \"I've never found the right seaweed to grow a copper crop for dragons, but there are new plants here.\"\n\nArak sat taller. \"You've talked about this before. But how does it work?\"\n\n\"All plants concentrate metals. Your almonds have boron, onions have selenium, and several seaweeds have iodine. We just need to find a plant that concentrates copper.\"\n\nArak frowned. \"Would these plants grow the same metals in our seas at home?\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Seawater contains all metals, everywhere. The plant chooses what it wants. If seaweed concentrates copper here, it will also grow copper back home.\"\n\nArak exchanged a knowing smile with Scree: a project was the perfect way to distract Orm. And if he found a copper plant, that would be great for the clan and a success for this voyage.\n\nThe next day, Arak studied the pile of seaweeds near Orm. The pod had collected an amazing variety: several leafy brown seaweeds, crunchy white seaweed stalks that looked like coral, a feathery red rope, a frilly purple plant, and seaweed with tiny green cups on delicate stems.\n\nOrm chose another, comparing it with a pure copper nugget. He slumped in his tub. \"I love the variety, but none of these will work.\" Wearily, he plucked up a piece of frilly, blue-green seaweed with purple streaks. He frowned in concentration as he tested it. Then he flushed green with delight. \"This is it! It's rich in copper!\"\n\nArak snapped his tail. \"That's terrific! And just in time. We'll leave for home when the moon is full, in three sunsets.\" But Orm's reef was much deeper than this one. Would the copper-weed grow at home?\n\nIt was rather late when Arak sank into trance, but Zarina was waiting.\n\n<Orm found his copper-weed> (Arak)\n\n<That's great news. Have you found anything new> (Zarina)\n\n<Some beans I call cocoa. You'll like the hot drink. I've also found new herbs for your healing> (Arak)\n\n<I'd love something new. Routine is boring. It makes the day last forever. Adventure must quicken the pace of life> (Zarina)\n\n<You've become a philosopher> (Arak)\n\n<Perhaps boredom is at the root of all philosophy> (Zarina)\n\nArak looked forward to this time more than he cared to admit. He loved to hear Zarina in his mind, sharing thoughts.\n\nThree days later, Arak stowed the last of the coiled rope on the skiff. He checked the barrels of water, collected from cold streams. Herbs and salted redfish fillets were still drying on racks. Zarina would love the healing herbs.\n\nTaron helped tie down the cartons of dried seaweed, berries, onions, carrots, and tubers. \"Driana was right. We'll eat well.\"\n\nArak sighed. \"But we failed to find copper. How much will pale turquoise help the suffering dragons?\"\n\nTaron shrugged. \"It will help. And you found delicious new world treats: creamy mushrooms, honey-roasted nuts and cocoa. Those beans make an amazing hot drink.\"\n\n\"I hope the copper crop grows well on a new reef,\" Arak said. A mesh sack filled with copper-weed was attached to each pod skiff, beneath the sea.\n\nSilvery skiff-wings billowed into fullness as they caught the summer breeze. Arak glided out of the harbor, past a cluster of man-of-war. The iridescent, lilac balls sparkled like glass in the afternoon sunlight. Waves grew larger and shoreline trees shrank, growing smaller and smaller until they looked like moss.\n\nArak grinned when the skiff yawed around a wave, like a fish seeking its own way home. \"It feels good to ride the waves again.\"\n\n\"And taste the salty spray,\" Taron added.\n\nArak sobered when the shore disappeared completely and the circle of sea closed in. There was a long, dangerous journey ahead. \"But the sea is beautiful,\" he said softly.\n\nA spectacular sunset was mirrored in the sea, with colors that ran through a rainbow of reds, corals, gold, and into the indigos of dusk. Clouds of tiny plankton flashed green when disturbed, marking their path. These glowing green trails followed the skiffs into the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Kelp fronds appeared on the waves and blinked out of existence as the skiff pitched down into a trough. Arak's eyes grew wide when he crested the next wave. Those were tree tops. He breathed deep, filling his lungs, savoring the faint scent of sun-warmed grasses. Land! Home, and Zarina. She was his contact, his anchor, the dragon he spoke to every evening. He willed the wind to strengthen as the waves flew beneath his feet.\n\nThe dragon shore grew steadily before Arak's eyes, sweeter than a river of honey. \"We're home!\" He turned the till, skillfully guiding the dragon-skiff to a soft landing at the wharf.\n\n\"It's been two moons since we left,\" Taron said, eyeing the shore hungrily. \"My dragonlet will hatch soon.\" He tied the skiff securely to poles. The skiff would rise and fall with the tide, so he left slack in the rope.\n\nIt was late summer, but golden wings filled the sky like autumn leaves. The clan descended on the skiff. Arak shuddered at the unhealthy orange color of some dragons. They really needed copper. Orm's new seaweed showed promise, but it would be awhile before any could be harvested for copper.\n\nEager claws hefted the sacks of turquoise ballast. There was a small sample bag for each dragon with honey-roasted nuts.\n\nA group of young dragon-lords gathered on the dock, muttering angrily.\n\n\"We worked from sunrise to sunset, day after day, building the skiff and gathering supplies. And this is all you've got? White turquoise?\"\n\n\"We expected more than a lousy snack and cheap turquoise!\"\n\nArak ground his teeth. \"The turquoise is pale blue, but there's a lot of it. Try the food before you criticize it. And the next voyage should bring copper.\"\n\n\"What next voyage? Why should anyone help again?\"\n\nBut one dragon did try the honey-roasted nuts, and soon the entire mob was distracted by this sticky-sweet snack.\n\nArak turned away. He re-checked the skiff, testing knots and stowing a few forgotten items. Then he stretched his wings and leapt ashore to join Taron and Kragor.\n\nArak stumbled when he tried to walk on land. A still surface felt unnatural.\n\nThe skiff had been in constant motion. For dragon-weeks he had walked with the sea, his knees loosely bent. As the skiff pitched from side to side he automatically veered left and then right. Arak matched the movements of the restless sea. He anticipated the rising deck with a raised foot. Now, he lifted a foot and nothing moved to meet it. He almost fell.\n\nTaron laughed as he staggered onshore. \"A hatchling walks better.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should fly,\" Arak said.\n\nThey flew to the sandy shore and landed near the nests.\n\nKragor immediately twined necks with his mate, so tightly that they were one.\n\nTaron wrapped his wings around Erinite. Then he listened to their egg, and his beaming smile rivaled the bright moon.\n\n\"Welcome back, Arak,\" Zarina said. They touched foreheads.\n\nArak flicked his tail. Why such a formal greeting? Did she miss him at all? Karoon, of course, was close by.\n\nArak fingered a metal band in his pouch. He'd made the bright gold armband for Zarina during the long journey home. It was set with rare green garnets; the zigzag pattern of sparkling gems looked like emerald lightning. Would she want such a gift from him? They'd spoken almost every evening, but no emotion showed in trance-speech. Maybe he should wait a bit, to see how she felt about him. If he could tell.\n\nArak studied the artistic nest bowls. What was it like to build such a nest, following clan traditions? A dragon egg must hatch in a nest that combines land, water, fire and air. The First Dragon was born of these four elements, and all dragons since were born within them. A ceramic bowl was made of clay, softened by water, and hardened by fire and air to create an ancient magic that nurtured dragonlets, and a functional nest that held life-giving heat.\n\nTwo days later, Arak joined the clan gathering to witness the hatching of dragons. He took his place in the traditional loose, cloud-like circle of dragons about the nests. A continuous low thunder rolled from the large dragon drum, with an occasional crackling burst of lightning from metal plates crashing together. Dragons were born of storm.\n\nErinite's egg cracked first. \"It's a dragon-lord!\"\n\nThe piteous cries were surprisingly strong. Taron held a bowl of raw sturgeon roe, with a strong, fishy aroma. He eagerly fed the small, shining black eggs to his ravenous dragonlet.\n\n\"He has your appetite,\" Erinite joked to her mate.\n\nKragor stretched a long wing about his mate and pulled her close. \"Arafine, your nest bowl is positively splendid.\"\n\n\"Just like your scales. I chose the colors to match you, and rubies are said to make leaders.\" Their egg cracked in half and a miniature dragon-lady stepped out, unrolling her long neck and looking about imperiously.\n\nKragor crouched down for a closer look. \"Well, the rubies were a good choice. She certainly looks like a leader.\"\n\nArak could see that his sire was already besotted with his beautiful new sister. It was miraculous to witness a dull, oval egg deliver a vibrant, shimmering dragon.\n\nZarina automatically checked the health of the hatchlings, and Arak sighed. She was always the healer. Now that so many dragons were sick, due to the copper crisis, she was usually at the clinic.\n\nArak fingered the arm band uncertainly. Zarina's life was filled with healing. Did she even want a mate? And did she want him?"
            },
            {
                "title": "SQUID SIGN",
                "text": "The full autumn moon lent a pearly-gray glow to the sands. Scree waited at the edge of the village, curling her arms with worry. Dragons grew sicker by the day. Orm experimented with fertilizers, but the copper-weed barely survived. They must find copper on their next voyage.\n\nScree entered a light, calming trance and straightened the worry out of her arms. This was a time for celebrations. What would be would be. And then she'd fix it.\n\nMoonlight faded away. Scree's arms began to dance with anticipation. Early dawn reached through the sea, bringing color to the gray reef.\n\nA group of small octopi landed on the sand beside Scree and politely presented themselves, weaving their tiny arms to sign a greeting. The surviving octopi hatchlings had finally completed their instinctive migration home. They looked about, as curious as young dragonlets.\n\nOne juvenile seemed to be asking about giant squid. He stretched long like a squid and signed \"big\". The pod needed to know. And Arak. Scree would learn more after the feast.\n\n\"I wonder if any of them were born of our eggs,\" Scree said to Orm as he joined her. \"A dragon would know.\"\n\n\"Of course. That's because dragons raise their own juveniles from the egg.\" Orm welcomed the first of the newcomers. They were perfect miniature octopi, each smaller than his head.\n\n\"I thought I might like that, if we only had one egg,\" Scree said. \"Then I met Taron's dragonlet. He was so needy! I'd rather start with juveniles who can manage their own basic needs. Still, it seems harsh that so many of our hatchlings must die.\"\n\nOrm twined arms with his mate. \"It is sad. But these youngsters belong to us all. I remember feeling shy and uncertain, wondering what would happen next.\"\n\nScree gazed affectionately at Orm. \"You've done well.\" She greeted another group. \"I like to be here early to welcome them home. They've had a long journey.\"\n\nThese tiny octopi had struggled for survival since hatching, seeking food and avoiding predators. For each survivor, hundreds had perished. It was a brutal, lonely period in their lives. As they grew large enough to migrate home, the juveniles sometimes met other returning survivors. They banded together, growing in numbers, still vulnerable to attack. Now they were home and few would ever travel alone again.\n\nScree's eyes widened as another cluster of juveniles settled onto the sand. Another group! Why were there so many? \"I wonder if the volcano had something to do with the amazing numbers. They keep coming!\"\n\nOrm looked puzzled. \"The volcano? It's been almost two years since it erupted. You're right! These would be from eggs that hatched about two years ago, and...\"\n\n\"The fish kills,\" they said together.\n\n\"The eruption killed fish, making hungry dweer attack dragons and a hungry squid attack us. But I never considered this possibility. With fewer fish to eat the octopi hatchlings, many more survived,\" Orm said.\n\n\"And then grew into juveniles as they migrated home. Everything is truly connected. Change one thing and you change the world.\" Scree laughed. \"This should be interesting.\"\n\nSpar's entire village turned out to welcome their newest members. As wave after wave of juveniles landed, the older members curled their arms in agitation. There had never been so many newcomers! Octopi lived in small, private caves that offered protection and a haven of solitude. Soon their caves would be crowded.\n\nStur said to Spar, \"There are many natural caves under the second raft. We could start a new pod there.\"\n\nSpar considered briefly. \"Stur, that's an excellent idea. And you will lead the new pod.\"\n\nStur's eyes bulged with surprise. Then he smiled. \"You're a master at delegating.\"\n\nSpar chuckled. \"It's the most important skill a leader can have.\"\n\nScree grabbed Orm's arm. \"This new village could be perfect! It's less deep than here, more like the reef where we found copper-weed, so that crop might grow better. The dragons really need it.\" She turned dragon-gold and covered herself with scales. \"The clan will be closer.\" She soared up and flipped back in a perfect arc, landing beside Orm. \"And it will be interesting!\"\n\nOrm was less enthusiastic. \"My farms and research are doing well here. It would take so much effort to start over. A Healer's bag is much more portable. But I'll think about this.\"\n\nSeveral newcomers began flexing their tiny arms in agitation. They were copying the stress gestures of established pod members. Spar moved into the open space between the two groups of octopi.\n\nSpar addressed the juveniles first. He lifted two front arms straight up and twined them together: \"Be welcome to our pod.\" He gestured to a long table covered with seafood. \"Eat.\"\n\nThe youngsters squirted eagerly toward the feast. As they crowded together, eating a meal symbolic of acceptance, their tiny arms relaxed. Abundant food was an unknown luxury, but acceptance into the relative safety of the village was an even greater treasure.\n\nScree tasted the spiced seafood through the water. \"They won't expect those dragon spices.\"\n\n\"I expect them now.\" Orm twined arms with Scree. \"Change can be good. We'll both move.\"\n\nSpar turned to the older members. \"We've been blessed with more newcomers than we expected. Each member must accept at least two. As they grow we'll need more caves, and there are many below the signal raft. Two moons from now, half our pod will move there. Stur will be the new pod leader, and I'll remain here.\"\n\nA school of small fish appeared. Everyone watched the living river of silver as it swirled past, sparkling with random flashes as fish scales caught the light.\n\nSpar continued. \"This is a rare opportunity! We'll gain a new village, and each juvenile is a treasure of unknown potential. These youngsters were born of our eggs, and they have returned to us. Now, let's join them in the welcome feast!\"\n\nAfter the feast, adults and newcomers moved to the open dancing field. Some members simply chose two healthy-looking juveniles, content to rear whatever personality developed. Others sought specific traits. The youngsters melted away with their adult sponsors. Most pairs would develop a fondness for each other that lasted a lifetime. The bond between juvenile and adult octopus was often as close as that between dragon and dragonlet.\n\nScree surveyed the newcomers and found seven who gave better answers to her questions. She tested them with special games, seeking a quick mind and creativity. Then she headed for Stur and Spar with all seven youngsters in tow.\n\n\"Stur, you'll need a deputy leader and an assistant, and these two test well,\" Scree said.\n\nStur smiled fondly at Scree, his own mentor, the one who had chosen and cared for him. \"Clearly, you know how to choose well,\" he joked, accepting the youngsters.\n\nScree turned to Spar. \"And these are a good choice for you.\"\n\nSpar twined arms with the tiny octopi, accepting and reassuring them. \"I do need leader trainees, but why must you always surprise me?\"\n\n\"To keep you on all eight toes.\" Scree turned dragon-gold and stretched tall, merrily tapping the tips of her \"dragon-feet\" arms on the sand. Then her color changed to a sober brown. \"We need new leaders who are as steady as you. Squid are on the move.\"\n\nA flurry of activity distracted Spar as youngsters were chosen.\n\nScree flowed slowly to her cave, still watching the choosing ground, matching the pace of her three small charges. A knot of juveniles remained on the open sand, not yet chosen, some nervously clutching the arms of journey-mates. Eight pod members rippled forward, together, and claimed them.\n\nScree had seen Spar ask these easy-going adults to wait until the end and work together, so that no youngster would face the uncertainty of being chosen last. Their leader wanted the new pod-mates to begin village life with dignity. Spar had hatched from a good egg.\n\nSpar caught up with Scree. \"What did you learn about squid?\"\n\n\"They've discovered the juvenile migrations. Apparently giant squid are the new sharks, feasting on youngsters. And not so far away, either. I plan to track them down.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "CAVE PEARL",
                "text": "Sharp, icy snow bit into Arak's face. Dark clouds covered the mid-day sun as the rising storm howled. He needed to seek shelter. Instead, he stretched his wings and flew aloft one last time, feeling a reckless urge to challenge the wild wind.\n\nArak tumbled and twisted, rising above the storm. He straightened his body and surfed through the air, cupping his wings to catch the currents. It was glorious. This must be how squid felt in a strong sea current. Squid were deadly, but they knew how to enjoy life.\n\nThe storm grew and reached higher, nearly breaking his wings. He shortened them and carefully twisted his way down. Then he landed, folded his wings and bid the sky farewell.\n\nArak entered the dragon cave.\n\nThe close, shadowed spaces and dank, earthy odors almost overwhelmed him. He had lost the freedom of flight, but the shelter was undeniably beautiful. Rust, tan and white stone flowed across the floor. The cave was formed by water moving through limestone, carrying some stone away and depositing other. It was a living work of art, growing slowly over thousands of years.\n\nGlow-worms covered the ceiling like stars in the night sky. These small worms lit the cave with a soft, yellow-green glow that gleamed off the water-slick rock. Arak loved best the tall stone columns that splashed down from the ceiling, like eternally frozen waterfalls.\n\nA clear stream ran through the main chamber, connecting a series of quiet pools before it disappeared into a hole in the floor. Arak tapped the edge of the large central pool. A blind fish turned and swam slowly toward him, feeling its way with long, sensitive tendrils.\n\n\"Here you go,\" Arak said, tossing it a shrimp. The large fish snapped it up and wriggled with delight. It circled, clearly expecting more. This rare cave dweller was as white as the full moon, as white as an ice dragon.\n\nZarina glanced up from her work. \"Last, as always,\" she said, sounding amused.\n\nArak walked carefully on the damp, slippery floor. \"I prefer the outdoors. And the storm was perfect for squid-surfing.\"\n\n\"What?\" Zarina gave him her full attention.\n\n\"Surfing the top of the storm, like this.\" Arak stretched tall and cupped his wings. \"It's a wild ride. I felt like a squid caught in a strong sea current.\"\n\n\"Sounds dangerous, like the squid.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. I love their greeting.\" The wind howled, driving snow past the entrance. Arak noticed the sharp contrast between storm and cave. \"Coming inside is like stepping back into fall. It's always the same coolness in here. This thick rock is like a blanket; it works almost as well as the sea.\"\n\n\"So the sea is an octopus blanket. Well, these are for the clan. Help me spread the blankets.\"\n\nArak lifted a heavy stack. \"Can't have too many.\" He remembered the fall warning signs: tree buds were thicker and the small brown dramurts were unusually plump, ready for a long hibernation. It would be a harsh winter. But the dragon cave was well-stocked with food, firewood and supplies.\n\nArak nodded. \"Good workmanship. You made these yourself.\"\n\n\"How could you tell?\"\n\n\"The flame-flower pattern. Have you found any new herbs for the clinic?\"\n\nZarina shook her head. \"I've been too busy, between the clinic and the blankets.\"\n\nArak grimaced. \"I've been cutting fish into strips and salting them.\"\n\n\"Better that then skiff-flying,\" a dragon-lord growled, moving closer. \"Wasting our time and supplies, giving us false hope. We should search here!\"\n\n\"You can't expect instant success,\" Zarina protested.\n\nThe dragon turned to her and sneered, \"Why not? He sounded so certain. We worked hard to make that ugly skiff. Useless dreamer.\"\n\nArak snapped his teeth angrily and stepped forward at the words \"ugly skiff\" and \"dreamer\". He stretched his wings wide and flexed his claws, ready to fight. He'd had all the insults he could handle. His eyes blazed. Nothing could make him back down.\n\nThe other dragon spread his wings, bared his teeth and hissed menacingly.\n\nArak crouched, ready to leap, eager to finally fight back.\n\nZarina grabbed his arm. \"No!\"\n\nArak trembled with battle-rage and easily shook her off. Then he saw the pleading look in her eyes. He took a deep breath. A fight inside the cave could hurt others.\n\n\"Hiding behind a dragon-lady?\"\n\nArak ground his teeth. This new insult was hard to take. \"No. Zarina's right, this is not the place.\" He stepped back. \"I'd fight outside, but our healers don't need any more dragons to patch up. And it doesn't really matter what you think. It matters what we find.\"\n\nArak turned away and walked deeper into the cave.\n\nThe blizzard soon filled the entrance with snow, blocking what little light there was. Arak carried load after load of firewood to the largest chamber, growing calmer as he worked. He and Taron built a big, crackling fire beneath a natural chimney hole in the cave. Most smoke escaped, but a pleasant woodsy aroma filled the chamber.\n\nZarina sat down on a natural limestone bench near the fire, waiting for the evening entertainment. Arak walked toward her just as Karoon strode forward and sat down beside her. He flicked his tail with frustration and turned away, but Zarina caught his eye and waved him forward. Arak sat on the other side of her.\n\n\"Thank you for backing down,\" she whispered.\n\n\"You were right.\" A fight would solve nothing, but only Zarina could have stopped him. His challenger had no idea how hard he and his skiff-mates had searched, or the dangers they faced. The clan desperately needed copper and, somehow, he would find it.\n\nDriana walked to the other side of the fire, to the open floor between the fire and the wall. This cave wall was smooth and white, made of very fine, glittering crystals. It was a perfect background for shadows.\n\n\"This is the best part of being cave-bound,\" Arak said quietly to Zarina. He studiously ignored Karoon.\n\nDriana raised her wings for attention. Then she used the firelight to make shadow-stories, creating elaborate vistas from the new world. She used claws, feet, even carefully positioned wings and a coiled tail. Dark and light wove together in life-like patterns. The dragon audience leaned forward, eager for stories of this distant land. Driana finished with the bee-tree and Arak's discovery of honey.\n\nThere were angry mutterings about copper amidst the applause.\n\nArak strode to the stage behind the fire. He faced his challenger, who was sitting right in the front row with a group of surly young dragon-lords. They were all drumming sharp claws on the bench and rolling their eyes in the most disrespectful way possible.\n\nArak took a deep breath and looked beyond the angry dragons to Zarina. He raised his wings.\n\n\"Dragons dance in thunderstorms. We seek shelter from ice-storms. This is the story of our sea storm.\" He swept his wings up to recreate the terrifying walls of living seawater. Shadow waves towered and crashed on the wall. A tiny dragon-skiff, made from his clawed fist, slid between towering waves.\n\nArak dropped a clawfull of sulfur powder into the fire at a crucial moment to mimic the explosive lightning. Boom! Boom! The dragons reared back, caught in the realism. The storm ended with Orm missing.\n\nThe surly dragons were sitting quietly erect, watching. Arak wanted to shout, \"No. We weren't just sipping tea!\" He sat back down, a bit closer to Zarina.\n\n\"That was quite a storm,\" Karoon said.\n\nArak could only nod, speechless with surprise. Was that a compliment? More likely, Karoon was just being polite in front of Zarina. Clever.\n\nThe next day, Arak sat alone on a cold cave bench, polishing his scales. He looked up and caught Zarina's eye as she walked by. \"I'm beginning to appreciate what you said about boredom. Some adventure would quicken the pace of life.\"\n\nZarina laughed. \"Stop polishing. You already reflect all the light in this cave. Let's play a game of stones.\"\n\nThe game room was in the next chamber. The stone benches were worn smooth by generations of dragons. These seats surrounded raised tables that were full of puzzles and games. A welcoming fire in the hearth gave an orange glow to the walls, and wavering black shadows. Arak smelled pine-scented smoke, roasted almonds, and earthy-damp limestone.\n\nDragons young and old chatted as they grew puzzle sculptures, jumped stones, or tried to out-guess an elaborate marble maze.\n\n\"Yesss! I win!\" a dragon hissed, punching the air with his fist as he caught a ruby marble. An elderly dragon-lord nodded, and then dropped three bright gemstone marbles into the huge maze. The colorful balls clattered along rails of silver wire, dropping through holes, following unpredictable paths. Dragons bet on where each marble would exit the maze.\n\nArak stopped at a table with a pile of puzzle bags. Each bag held many tens of carved onyx pieces, to make a shiny black sculpture. This was a challenge, since the bags held no guiding pictures. Would the lumpy black pieces connect to make a life-like dragon, a sturgeon fish, or a crab?\n\nArak studied a partly assembled sculpture. \"Definitely a fish.\" He added two edge pieces. Then he glanced at a nearby table and stared.\n\n\"Puzzles are a useful distraction\", Zarina said, picking through a jumble of black pieces between two sculptures. \"Someone mixed these puzzle bags together. Now it's a real challenge!\" She added a few more pieces. \"Dragonlets start with simple flat ones. Assembling a sculpture helps us think in three dimensions, and that's useful when we fly.\" Zarina grinned triumphantly as she added the final wing piece to a gleaming black dragon.\n\nArak continued to stare at a detailed map of their land. The map was a dragons-eye view, neatly painted on a slab of white marble, with black lines for rivers. He noted the location of their copper mine and the curve of the coastline. He saw a flat dragonlet puzzle and something clicked. An idea sparked and then blazed like a lightning storm. This would really improve his copper plan!\n\n\"Arak, have you heard anything I said?\" Zarina asked."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Arak crawled upstream through a dark, narrow, water-filled cave tunnel. He sipped foul air from the top of the ceiling. His body barely fit and he shivered beneath the frigid, black water. Soon he would grow too large for the tunnel. This was his last chance to search. If he didn't find copper, he might find a rare cave pearl for Orm's legend-stone collection.\n\nArak sputtered as he inhaled, choking on water. Then he found a small, precious pocket of stale air. Pointed, creamy-brown stalactites were barely visible in the pale glow of his fungus-staff. These cave teeth bit into his shins and gnawed at his tightly-folded wings, as if he was traveling through the mouth of a monstrous creature.\n\nHe had traveled since sun-up and his body was numb. His head hit a rock sill. Arak sucked air from a ceiling pocket. He filled his lungs. Then he dipped beneath the sill and squirmed through a long, airless water-way. The tunnel went on and on, completely filled with water. His lungs were bursting with need!\n\nArak thought he might drown here, alone, deep in the hidden passages of the cave.\n\nSuddenly, the cramped tunnel met a large chamber. Arak lunged forward. He filled his lungs with the cool, wet air. He took another deep breath. Air had never tasted so good!\n\nArak reached into his chest pouch. He poured a sack of raw nuts into a rocky hollow and flamed. Then he slowly chewed the toasted almonds, savoring both the rich flavor and the warmth.\n\nThin beams of light fell from a few open shafts in the cave. The ceiling was a wonderland covered by rock straws; a shivering drop of water clung to each hollow tip. Arak lit a torch and the ceiling glittered like the dew-filled web of an impossible spider. So, this legendary place was real.\n\nArak had followed the cave's stream to its source because there might be copper. Nobody searched in such a difficult place, and no dragon had been here in generations. He had a search plan for the next skiff journey, but it would be far better to find copper now. He stretched his cold, cramped wings and flexed his claws. Then he climbed the smooth, water-slick limestone slope.\n\nArak looked diligently for signs of copper, checking first for greenish streaks in the flowstone. He explored small chambers and squeezed into tight, short tunnels. Nothing. In every way, this was a dead end. He flicked his tail in frustration and turned to leave.\n\nArak stopped and stared. A lacy veil of water splashed into a pool, echoing softly in the stone chamber. This was the pool of legends. Huge white marbles spun lazily beneath lime-rich drops of water. The pearls grew slowly with the cave, through generations of dragons, and few dragons ever saw one. He grasped a large, white sphere and stowed it in his pouch.\n\nOrm would love the cave pearl!\n\nArak shook off his feelings of failure. Now he knew that the new land was their last best hope for copper. And he would find it, using his plan.\n\nArak gathered his courage. Then he plunged back into the cold, treacherous, water-filled tunnel. His hands and feet quickly became numb as he crawled along, disoriented, trying to breathe. He must return to the clan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Arak took a seat near the fire, still shivering, waiting for the evening entertainment. Zarina brought him a steaming mug of tea and another blanket. \"I thought you had more sense,\" she whispered sternly.\n\n\"I had to know,\" Arak replied quietly.\n\nErinite rose and walked to the fire, carrying a short wooden rod with holes. \"Taron took a break from his endless skiff-carving to make this for me.\" She gave a teasing smile to her mate and put the simple flute to her mouth.\n\nNotes as crisp as a breaking icicle blended with the wavering sounds of winter waves cascading against the shore. These melodies were like ice-sculpture music. Then, adding a trill of rapid notes, she wove in the pattern of dragon-song. Taron joined her on a traditional dragon drum.\n\nArak sat still. This new, exotic blend of sound filled the cave like fragrant smoke. All the dragons were still, eyes gleaming in the firelight, listening. Arak smiled. Friendship with silent, underwater beings had sparked a series of inventions, and now there was a new type of music.\n\nWhat would be next?\n\nThe storm finally broke during the night, as a dark new moon rose above a sea of snow. The silence felt alien after days of tearing, icy winds. Arak moved quietly to the entrance. Points of light from a trillion stars were reflected in the icy crust, sparkling across the snow with surprising brilliance. He stood alone, drinking in the bright, unearthly beauty.\n\nThe following dawn, he left the cave and entered a changed world. A thick blanket of snow hid rocks and bushes. Everything was clean and perfect.\n\nArak helped Kragor slide a huge block of ice to the sculpture circle. Then he worked on the benches.\n\n\"Arak!\" Taron called. \"Help us finish the ice slide.\"\n\n\"I was beginning to wonder if we'd have a Winter Festival this year,\" Arak said. He breathed flame along the lower part of the slide, melting the ice smooth. Taron worked near the top, finishing the steps.\n\nArak looked up and his eyes glowed. Zarina was in the clouds, hovering, holding still in the wind as she sculpted her snowflake. He fingered the gold armband, still in his pouch. Maybe after the next sea voyage...\n\nHe looked nervously out to sea. Squid were on the move. A giant squid was as large as the dragon-skiff, and could easily sink it. Scree worried about attacks and wanted to meet with squid to end the danger. Arak flicked his tail with concern. And the clan thought he was the dreamer! What if they met these giant squid on their voyage? He needed a solid plan to protect his skiff and his friend.\n\nArak sniffed the air, sorting the scents from the coming feast. The aromas blended together like perfect notes.\n\nTaron flew down from the top of the slide. He landed beside Arak and cheerfully clouted him on the back. \"There are some terrific new foods from our voyage!\"\n\nArak nodded agreement. \"But I wish we'd found copper.\"\n\n\"How's the copper-weed?\" Taron asked, hopefully.\n\n\"Scree said it's not growing well.\"\n\nAn older dragon with orange scales tried to stretch his wings. He crumpled them back and hobbled on, unable to fly. Arak looked guiltily at his own golden scales. Young dragons were warned to keep their copper rations, to stay healthy.\n\nTaron saw the dragon and shuddered. \"He's been shorting himself, giving away his rations. We do need to find copper. But today, for the festival, let's just enjoy ourselves.\"\n\nThe cloud artists landed and carefully displayed their artwork on stretched claws. Zarina's crystal creation sparkled with a pattern of giant squid.\n\nArak took a closer look. \"Terrific detail. I can almost see the squid-lights.\"\n\nZarina gave a satisfied smile. \"Scree shared a mental image. I wanted the contrast of a powerful creature captured in a fragile flake.\"\n\nArak flicked his tail. If only it was that easy.\n\nZarina turned her snowflake to amber and hung it on the winter solstice tree. Then she, Arak and Taron joined Erinite within the circle of ice sculptures.\n\nArak studied Kragor's sculpture of their sea voyage. Visions appeared on the flickering sea inside the ice and vanished as the sun moved across the sky. As always, these images were extraordinary. But Kragor's sea moved. Three wave images surged, crested and crashed repeatedly. This was a new skill.\n\n\"You've out-done yourself,\" Arak told his sire, for once without a trace of jealousy. Art was Kragor's passion, and he was an amazing sculptor. Arak no longer felt a need to compare himself to his talented parents. He had his own passion for sea journeys and new languages. He could skiff-fly through a storm, trance-mind across the sea and read squid-lights. If he could just find copper, all would be well.\n\nThe sun sank lower and a man-of-war cluster appeared in the ice. It shimmered realistically on Kragor's sea. Arafine gasped. \"That's just like my snowflake ornament! We still think alike.\" She twined necks enthusiastically with her mate.\n\nArak glanced at Zarina. She knew his fascination with squid. Did her squid-flake mean anything special?\n\nTaron grinned happily as the dinner gong rang. \"Smell that? It's New World foods.\"\n\n\"The clan saved most of it for this important meal,\" Arak said. \"Zarina, I can't wait to try your new chocolate treats.\"\n\nOne long, stone table was covered with dishes of hot food: fish stew, grilled fish, smoked fish, honey-roasted almonds, salted pecans, crispy tubers, baked yams, sliced carrot crisps, steamed oysters with seaweed, hot cocoa, tea, and more. This table was warmed periodically by dragon-fire.\n\nAnother stone table was filled with cold dishes: fish eggs, fish rolls, spiced cherry clams, dilled pickles, dried berry compote, chocolate, the traditional snow pudding, and more delectable desserts.\n\nArak added a fillet of the tasty, red-fleshed fish to his plate, remembering the new world stream. That icy water was thick with huge red fish, leaping upstream. He grabbed a handful of honey-roasted nuts, savoring the smoky-sweet smell, feeling the warmth of the bright meadow where he found honey. He filled his mug with steaming hot cocoa and was back on the skiff, riding the waves, watching morning mist rise off the sea.\n\nErinite's eyes glazed over as she popped another chocolate-covered almond into her mouth. \"Zarina, how did you create this chocolate? It's positively addictive.\"\n\nZarina ate a square of minty chocolate and sighed agreement. \"Most of my experiments are not this tasty. I love the strong, deep flavor of Arak's hot cocoa. I wanted to make something sweet and chewy with the flavor of those beans.\" She smiled up at Arak. \"Honey and cocoa beans are worth their weight in pearls.\"\n\nArak remembered the orange dragon. Pearls, maybe, he thought sadly. But these treats are not worth their weight in copper.\n\nThe following day, the wind picked up and the sky was overcast. Arak grabbed some fish rolls that were left over from the feast. \"Taron, let's fly before the next winter storm drives us back into the cave.\"\n\n\"The meadow should be interesting,\" Taron said, as they both launched into the sky.\n\nArak skimmed just above the treetops, his toes cracking the ice from a few small, glassy twigs. \"That flute of yours was inspired.\"\n\n\"It was really inspired by Erinite. She misses the ice music in the spring. I was working on our skiffs and thought, why not carve a music sculpture from wood? That wouldn't melt!\"\n\n\"We mainly carve ice and stone,\" Arak said. \"When did trees start growing here?\"\n\nTaron grinned. \"I'm just glad they did. Our skiff wouldn't be the same without wood!\"\n\nThe forest below was replaced by a white meadow with a twisting silver ribbon. They landed near the frozen stream, crunching through the icy snow. Arak made rings of frozen smoke with his breath. \"Maybe we can catch some fish. This dried stuff's getting old.\"\n\nBubbles flowed under the thin ice, sometimes catching on thickened glassy swirls. A gray fish drifted slowly by in the dark water, barely visible beneath the reflecting ice. Arak smashed through the brittle surface and grasped the fish in his claws. He tossed it up onto the snow, where it flopped and grew still. Taron caught the next fish, and soon they had five-plus-three.\n\nThey walked upstream, throwing icicle spears at imaginary targets.\n\nArak stopped in his tracks. Six dweer were drinking from the stream. They lifted their snouts and snarled menacingly, displaying sharp, jagged teeth. All were gaunt and some had been flamed.\n\nArak knew he should fly away. Instead, he studied the starving beasts and remembered the well-stocked dragon cave. Scenes flashed through his mind: Dorali surrounded by a pack of dweer. A wounded dragonlet hidden by bandages. A field of dead dweer, frozen in unnatural positions.\n\nScree's words came unbidden to his mind. Even after what he did to our pod, I could not kill Vorm. He was desperately hungry.\n\nArak remembered his reply. I had not really understood why you cared for Vorm, after his attack. But what he did was natural, not vicious; life requires death.\n\nTaron backed away. His eyes followed everything in the tense, uncertain silence. \"Why don't we just fly off?\"\n\nArak remained silent. His eyes were unfocused and he was as still as ice. At last, he picked up the sack of fish he'd dropped. He looked at Taron and instinctively signed his plan, still caught in his memories of Scree.\n\nTaron lashed his tail sideways with surprise but nodded assent.\n\nArak took six fish from the sacks and placed them by the stream. He made the dragon sign for peace, folding his wings and crossing his front claws. Then he and Taron flew to a safe distance.\n\nThe dweer stared at them, backs still arched for battle. Fish smells filled the air. The dweer wrinkled their scaly noses and began to salivate. But they held still.\n\n\"They remember our spears and think the fish are poisoned,\" Taron said.\n\nArak grabbed a fish. \"Help me show that they're safe.\"\n\nThey took a bite from each fish. Arak and Taron placed them back on the snow bank and flew off, turning to watch from a safe distance.\n\nThe pack crossed the stream and sniffed the fish. Satisfied, each dweer grabbed a fish and moved apart, tearing into the flesh like the starving creatures they were.\n\n\"I would not have thought to try that,\" Taron said, as they landed back at the cave. \"But Scree would be proud.\"\n\n\"Scree says that change has to start somewhere. We slaughtered the dweer. It wasn't really a battle because they couldn't fight back. They're still hungry because there aren't enough dagur to feed them. If dweer catch fish, maybe they won't attack dragons.\"\n\nTaron grinned cheerfully. \"At least we still have one fish each. But maybe we should only tell Arafine about the dweer. I'm not sure the clan would understand.\"\n\nArak looked Taron in the eyes. \"Few would understand. I'm lucky to have you for a friend.\"\n\nTantalizing aromas swirled from the cave. \"We're both lucky,\" Taron said. \"I hope those tubers taste as good as they smell!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "DANGEROUS DREAMS",
                "text": "A full moon lit the busy undersea village. Scree carefully detached glowing tunicate \"stars\" from the night sky in her cave, storing them in woven baskets. Orm would re-position his gift on her new ceiling. Then she filled sacks with her healer supplies.\n\nAs Scree packed her possessions, she recalled what Vorm had said. \"We do not have caves like you. We live free in the water, and are not much burdened with things.\"\n\nHer pile of belongings was now as tall as her cave. Scree pondered the wisdom of squid. What would it be like to have no possessions? Nothing to own or be owned by, surfing the sea.\n\nKrees, Scrim and Tor rolled across the sand, trying to pin each other in a playful game.\n\n\"Do you still have your pearls?\" Scree asked her youngsters. She had given them each a large white pearl for the New Moon Festival.\n\nThey stopped tumbling, straightened up, and nodded solemnly.\n\nThen Krees slapped Tor on his head. \"You're it.\" She scampered away and the chase was on.\n\nScree smiled at their antics. She put her healer bag on the pile and went limp. Her arms lay in loose, random coils like seaweed washed ashore.\n\n\"Our experiences... our memories... all that we truly own is in our mind,\" Vorm had said. What a clean, tidy life. The temptation to simply abandon her mountain of possessions was surprisingly strong. But she needed her healer supplies.\n\nScree suddenly turned happy-green. Soon she would surf the sea, traveling far across the world, like squid. Dragons and octopi would journey together again. They might even see a swordfish! That huge, silver fish was a pod legend.\n\nOrm poked his head in. \"Are you ready?\"\n\nScree grinned. \"Always.\"\n\nShe rolled Vorm's huge pink pearl between two arms. This time they would explore further north, traveling through prime squid territory. Scree remembered Vorm's terrifying attack, but her eyes softened as she recalled their conversations. It was his dying wish to return the pearl to Veera. And she must meet with squid to protect the pod."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "One moon later, Scree surveyed her new home with pleasure. It was below the second raft, much closer to shore. The water was less deep, so more light reached the sand and the plants flourished. Rings of tall, colorful seaweed made an elegant garden that hid her cave from predators.\n\nHer healing supplies were properly stored. The glowing tunicate stars were back on her ceiling. And, this village was within the reach of dragons.\n\nScree jetted to the raft and greeted Arak.\n\nHe grabbed a rock and flew down, using the stone anchor to speed his descent. Arak hovered above the sand, weightless in the water, and did a backwards flip. \"So this is what it feels like to live under the sea.\" He followed Scree to her cave and peered inside at the glowing stars.\n\n\"What do you think?\" she signed.\n\n\"Beautiful. It's a perfect night sky.\" Arak began to quiver and his eyes bulged. \"Pod language is perfect for an airless world,\" he said. \"But I'm not.\" He dropped the rock weight, shot to the surface, and climbed back onto the wood raft.\n\nScree followed, bringing a sack of seaweed. \"The light is perfect here. Copper-weed grows in lush clusters. It's not copper, but I hope this helps.\"\n\nArak reached down and grabbed the large sack with both hands. He thumped his tail with enthusiasm. \"We can really use this! There are so many sick dragons. We must find copper on our next voyage.\"\n\nScree nodded agreement. \"We need to plan our squid excursion.\"\n\n\"We should scout for them during the next full moon,\" Arak said.\n\nScree drifted down to the sand. She was caught by the light current and pulled from side to side as she pulsed, moving in a pattern with the dancing water. Unlike their original village, the movements of the sea were felt here. But they were deep enough that storm waves barely affected them.\n\n\"Scree,\" Orm said, with a harried smile.\n\n\"How can I help?\"\n\nOrm gave her a large container of gooey oyster spat. \"Spread this onto that boulder.\" He turned to direct another octopus. \"Spread those clams evenly. We need to grow enough food for our next journey.\" He told a third helper, \"These oysters are ready to culture black pearls.\"\n\nScree covered the boulder with oyster spat. The teensy oysters would soon fasten onto the rock and grow large. She glanced at her three fosterlings, who worked diligently nearby. \"I've chosen well,\" she told them, smiling her praise. They twirled their tiny arms happily and continued seeding oysters to grow pearls.\n\n\"This was a good move,\" Orm told Scree happily. \"Everything's growing well. The copper-weed needed this light. And the shellfish farms really benefit from these waves. They're flourishing.\"\n\nScree noticed that his arms were drooping. \"Orm, you should rest. I'll take your youngsters. There's a pod problem and Stur asked me to look after his. Eight juveniles. I'll have my own pod!\"\n\nWith Orm and Stur so busy, Scree watched their young octopi every day. Basic gestures were inborn, but most language and customs had to be learned. She taught the traditional pod language, skills, and more. Soon they could greet her in squid, dragon, turtle, or fish. Scree grinned. One did not need to be a pod leader to change a pod.\n\nScree's arms jerked as she felt the crash of the summoning stone. That should be Kragor. She and Orm squirted through the water to meet him at the signal raft above their village.\n\nKragor grasped a rock, plunged into the sea, and followed them. He poked his head into Orm's cave and looked about. A glowing tapestry of red, green and blue tunicates covered the walls. \"This is amazing!\" he signed. Then he ran out of air and shot back to the surface.\n\nKragor dove again for another look at Orm's masterpiece. He exhaled slightly, releasing a stream of silvery bubbles that rose to the ceiling of the cave. The bubbles bumped together and popped, growing into a small, silver lake of air. The undersea air-lake had a mirror finish that caught the light. Kragor pointed and smiled.\n\nOrm followed his gaze. \"It's an underwater sky, like the legend of Sorm and his quest for sea-sky.\"\n\nKragor nodded. \"Remember those glorious sunsets from our voyage, when the sky was reflected in the sea?\"\n\n\"We were surrounded by color. It was like traveling inside a rainbow ball,\" Orm replied, his eyes bright with the memories.\n\n\"Sea and sky mix in interesting ways, like octopi and dragons,\" Scree added, laughing.\n\nKragor grinned. \"Definitely!\" He bowed farewell and flew back to the surface, leaving behind a trail of tiny bubbles.\n\nScree said to Orm, \"I need you to take the pod of youngsters for the next few days.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nScree gave him a bright, mischievous smile. \"I'll be hunting giant squid with Arak.\"\n\nOrm blanched. \"Whatever for? They're the hunters.\"\n\n\"It's time to change that. We need to know what they're up to.\"\n\n\"Scree, are you sure you weren't hatched by a dragon?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Arak recognized the fearless light in Scree's eyes when they discussed giant squid. She wanted to confront them, and they could meet these deadly creatures during their next voyage. His new plan to find copper was not enough. Squid could destroy his skiff along with any copper he found.\n\nArak softened an empty honeycomb on a fire-warmed stone. He formed the wax into balls, putting the final touches on his own secret squid plan. Then he flew to the shore to check on festival preparations.\n\nArak landed just as Taron waded ashore, cold water sleeting off his scales like rain.\n\nTaron pulled a long piece of seaweed off his ankle and announced triumphantly, \"I finished the last octopus home!\" His teeth were chattering.\n\nArak grinned. \"Well done!\" He eyed his shivering friend with concern and flamed a large pile of driftwood, which burst into a cheerful fire. Then he handed Taron three large, spiced fish rolls. \"It's nippy tonight, and working in cold water really sucks the energy out of a dragon. Let's eat while you warm up by the fire.\"\n\nArak tossed two salt-soaked pinecones into the blaze, adding blue-green flames of celebration. He smiled with satisfaction. \"We have enough caves for most of the pod. And a hoard of lightning casts, floats, tea, spices, glowing fungus lights, and skiffs to trade. Everything's ready!\"\n\nWinter stars winked overhead, and a cold wind blew. Taron moved closer to the fire. \"We'll be leaving right after this festival. But it's so early, not even spring.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Our second voyage. We're truly desperate for copper.\"\n\nAt moonrise, Arak and a host of dragons welcomed the octopi to their shore.\n\nTrading began immediately. The pod arranged their items on the shore: sharp fish-fin needles, rare shells, pearls, colorful seaweed and vials of venom.\n\nScree gave Driana a large sack of copper-weed. \"This is a gift. I hope it helps those sickly orange dragons.\"\n\n\"It will!\" Driana eagerly plucked up five precious vials of venom, replacing each with a lightning cast. \"With so many hurt dragons, I really need this venom. It's a stronger sedative than fire-weed.\"\n\nScree signed her satisfaction. \"These lightning casts will protect our caves. The blue-ringed octopi were surprised by my interest in their venom. Now they're decorating their gardens with our pearls.\"\n\nArak showed a new pod skiff to a knot of octopi. \"We improved the design, and there's a fish-skin shade over the stern. We also added a large container of red-root tea, for emergency sea trails. We can retro-fit your skiffs.\"\n\nArak bargained good-naturedly with Orm. He agreed to add these improvements to the skiffs, in exchange for a sack of pearls and a pot of oyster spat. Kragor wanted the spat to grow oysters near the shore, as food. Arak thought this was an excuse to spend more time in the sea near his glowing tunicate garden.\n\nKragor took a huge cave pearl from his pouch and, grinning, he handed it to Orm. \"Here, for your collection.\"\n\nOrm turned it about, staring in awe at the rare pearl. \"I've never seen a cave pearl so big and so perfect. It's just like the Moon legend.\"\n\nKragor beamed with pleasure.\n\nArak smiled quietly. He had traded that cave pearl for Kragor's cave light balls, to use in his secret squid plan.\n\nOn the last night of the festival, dragons and octopi feasted on gourmet foods around a crackling dragon fire. The colored flames cast cheerful shadows.\n\nArafine raised her wings and conversations ceased. \"We all love the foods from our first voyage, especially chocolate. Orm says it's a great source of iron. Now, Zarina will share her invention of our newest treat.\"\n\nTwo small sacks of roasted cocoa beans were passed around. Dragons inhaled the aroma and octopi felt the flavors. Zarina described her early attempts at mixing plant oils, honey, and powdered beans. She brought bite-sized samples of her latest creations: a chocolate bar made with ground nuts, and \"chocolate snowballs\" covered with delicate white seeds. Clan and pod cheerfully munched away on the treats.\n\nArafine led the applause. \"That was a delicious story.\"\n\nZarina sat back down next to Arak in a quiet, shadow-lit zone beyond the fire.\n\nArak finished his chocolate snowball. \"These would be perfect for the Winter Festival. How did you dream them up?\" The fire crackled as a new log burst into flames with a bright shower of sparks.\n\nZarina smiled, but she flicked her tail worriedly. \"I'm always at the clinic now, with so many sick and hurt dragons. My experiments are a great distraction for my patients, and they love eating my 'failures'.\"\n\nArak touched her shoulder reassuringly. \"We should find copper on this next trip. We've planned much more time to explore.\"\n\nArafine raised her wings again. \"Arak has a legend to share.\"\n\nArak picked up a sack and stepped forward. Dragons settled back with rustling wings while octopi shifted on their seats. The fire crackled noisily into the silence, as Arak faced many pairs of glowing eyes.\n\nArak took out a large opal sphere and held it aloft, sparkling in the firelight. \"This is a fire opal. It's rare, so not all have seen one.\" He reached into his pouch for five smaller opals. \"Pass these around and experience the mystery.\" The opals were passed, with hushed exclamations at the hidden fire. Arak waited to recover the pieces. Then he raised his wings high, gathering their attention.\n\n\"The Moon and the Sun were in love, but they could not be together. The Sun was hot and came out during the day. The Moon was cool and came out at night.\"\n\nArak picked up a large globe of cool white marble in one hand and a ball of fiery orange carnelian in the other. He held them high, far apart.\n\n\"Once, the Moon decided to wait. As night ended she hid low in the sky. She was pale white, unseen against the white ice. She watched the fiery sunrise, awed by its beauty. As the Sun rose in the sky, the Moon rose after him.\"\n\nArak moved the spheres to follow the story.\n\n\"The Moon covered the Sun, holding him to her. The world saw the sky turn dark, as if night came early. The golden ridge scales of the Sun shone around her and this light was too bright to look upon. They were happy. But the Moon burned and the Sun grew cool. They could not stay together. Sadly, they moved apart. As they separated, a child of their joining fell from the sky. An opal was born, a cloudy moon with sunfire inside.\"\n\nArak held the moon and sun balls high, overlapped. He moved the spheres apart, letting the hidden fire opal drop to the sand, sparkling as it fell. \"It is as rare as their love.\"\n\nArak found himself gazing at Zarina as he finished.\n\nClan and pod enthusiastically showed their appreciation. Arak bowed and returned to his seat near Zarina.\n\n\"That was lovely,\" she whispered.\n\nArafine raised her wings for attention. \"Scree has offered to share a legend that no other octopus or dragon has ever heard.\" Murmurs and motions of surprise rose from both land and sea sides of the fire.\n\nScree rippled quietly up the ramp to the shallow, water-filled platform. She raised two arms and silence fell over pod and clan. \"This is the legend of Teera, the first squid. Vorm told me the story before he died.\"\n\n\"The Sun looked down upon the Sea. She was still and calm. No warm or cool streams moved through her. There was no life.\"\n\nScree paused, holding still in the relative silence, letting them imagine this lifeless world.\n\n\"The Sun wanted more. He cast a huge pink pearl into the cold depths of the Sea. The pearl was a warm and living stone. It warmed and changed the water. Currents flowed from the pearl. They were long, winding and strong.\"\n\nScree lifted Veera's pink pearl up high, turning so all could see. The lustrous surface winked with reflected sparks from the fire. The crowd whispered softly. Few had seen this rare pearl from the abyss, far larger than any from their realm.\n\n\"The Sun shone its red light on the Sea. The currents became solid arms. They were as flexible as a stream of the Sea, and moved like the flowing flames around the Sun. The arms captured the Sun's light, sparkling with red and yellow. The pearl became a head, and two golden eyes flamed bright upon it.\n\n\"The Sun was pleased and named her Teera. She was a true child of the Sea and Sun, with arms like currents and flames. Her skin was dark and changing like the Sea. Her eyes and arms had golden lights like the Sun. She lived in the darkness of the Sea, in the abyss. But Teera spoke with the light of her father, the Sun. Life spoke with lights in the dark, secret places of the Sea. Currents flowed and twisted. The Sea had movement and life.\n\n\"Even today, squid live in the depths with their mother, the Sea. They surf her deep, strong currents. But when it is time to make new life, they rise to the surface and greet their father, the Sun. They feast on the swordfish, his gift. When new squid hatch they are pink, like the pearl, but they grow red like the setting Sun as they mature.\"\n\nScree bowed into the stillness. As if released, dragons vigorously flexed their wings and thumped their tails. Octopi flashed gold with appreciation and wove words of praise. Gold matched the dragons. It was now the accepted color for applause and questions at Trading Festivals. Several octopi added the diamond edges and texture of dragon scales.\n\nScree looked her surprise when Spar lifted two golden arms high and signed, \"I never thought that they'd have legends.\"\n\n\"Squid are dangerous, but civilized in their own way. Their language is truly beautiful, with flashing patterns of red and yellow lights, and their words have poetic meanings.\" Scree made a series of bright spots on two raised arms. \"This means 'greetings' or 'welcome', but it has a longer meaning: 'May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.' The literal translation is a window into another world, a different way of living and thinking.\"\n\n\"Do they make art?\" Kragor asked.\n\n\"They tell stories and dance. They glow brightly through life. But they have no solid homes or possessions. There is no place for art. Giant squid mostly live alone. The Sea is their home, and it is everywhere. Vorm could not understand why a creature would seek the limits of a home that is tied to one place, or how anyone could be homeless. Home is where you are.\"\n\nThere were no more questions, so Scree returned to her log seat in the sea.\n\nArafine raised her wings for attention. \"It's late, so we'll let the fire die out. Tomorrow, clan and pod will begin our second journey together. Honey and chocolate are delicious, and the copper crop is doing well under Orm's care.\" She bowed to him while dragons thumped their tails. \"Let's wish this new voyage success.\"\n\nScree motioned to Arak. \"Your opal has red and yellow flashes like squid lights.\"\n\n\"It does, doesn't it?\" Arak placed the large fire opal securely in his chest pouch.\n\n\"We'll be traveling through squid territory,\" Scree reminded.\n\nArak nodded. \"I'll bring plenty of fishing spears and you'll have the venom. We have skins painted with squid lights.\"\n\nZarina flicked her tail worriedly. \"You really think you'll find giant squid?\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"It's possible, but not likely. It's a big sea. We'll spend more time on land hunting copper.\"\n\nZarina grinned. \"Don't forget chocolate!\" She stretched her wings and pulled back, wincing in pain.\n\nArak stepped closer and saw for the first time an unhealthy orange tinge to her scales, almost masked by the amber firelight. He gripped her arms and stared fiercely into her eyes. \"Don't short yourself, Zarina! I will find copper.\"\n\nShe gazed steadily back, making no effort to escape his grasp. \"Arak...\"\n\nWhatever she might have said was lost when a young dragon with a network of scars landed right beside them. \"Karoon broke his leg and you're best with that injury. He's at the clinic.\"\n\nArak released Zarina. She turned away and wrapped her wings affectionately around the messenger. \"Tell Driana I'll be right there.\"\n\nAfter the youngster left, Arak said, \"She's the dragonlet attacked by dweer. She can fly. That's terrific! I haven't seen her around.\"\n\n\"Dorali is painfully aware of her scars. She spends most of her time at the clinic, helping, learning like a sponge.\"\n\nArak smiled at the image. \"Sponges learn?\"\n\nZarina snapped her tail irritably. \"Dorali absorbs knowledge like a sponge soaks up water. She'll be a great healer, and having her around is almost like having my own dragonlet. Have a safe voyage!\" She twined tentacle to claw with Scree and Orm. Then she touched foreheads with Arak, gave him a dazzling smile, and flew away.\n\nArak kicked the sand. This was just great. He was leaving, while his rival would be under Zarina's care. And was she even interested in a mate? The clinic was her home, and it seemed that Dorali satisfied Zarina's dragonlet interest. But worse, she was shorting herself, probably giving her patients part of her copper rations.\n\nHe kicked the sand again.\n\nArak looked up. Scree was watching him. He took a deep, calming breath. \"Let's discuss the squid. What do you know of the abyss?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "The following dawn, Arak cast off from the dock. The skiffs flew due west, skipping across a calm sea before steady, moderate winds. Salt flavored the air and grew in crystal patterns on the mast.\n\nArak signaled the pod at noon. He furled the skiff-wing, slowing as the skiffs merged together into a raft. It was time to rest.\n\nKragor welcomed Orm aboard with a question. \"How would you define art?\"\n\n\"Art can be realistic or abstract, but it should be well-balanced. It must be pleasing to the eye or ear.\"\n\nArak finished coiling a long rope and stowed it safely. \"What about taste? Zarina's chocolate snowballs are incredible.\"\n\nOrm sighed and covered his body with puffed snowballs. \"True. I made a sculpture that combines touch and taste.\" He described the special carving he'd made for Scree.\n\nKragor nodded. \"Dragons can't appreciate texture the way an octopus can. But we can sense the crisp, shifting folds of the magnetic field. It's like seeing and feeling combined. We follow magnetic lines to find our way.\"\n\nThe sound of clinking mugs announced that it was time for tea. Driana filled her kettle with water. She added a clawfull of fragrant red-root tea, a stick of cinnamon, a sprinkling of nutmeg and a pinch of herbs. Then she breathed bright, hot flames onto the sturdy iron kettle. The old copper kettle had been ground up for supplements.\n\nOrm stared into the flames. Arak closed his eyes to better focus on the delectable and reassuringly home-like scent of spiced tea.\n\nOrm turned to Arak. \"You can see magnetic lines? How does that work?\"\n\nArak reached into his pouch. \"I can show you the idea. See how the clear light breaks into colors when it goes through this crystal?\" He held his quartz prism at the perfect angle, and a bright rainbow appeared on the skiff-wing. \"Colors are hidden inside the light. This crystal lets us see them. The magnetic field flows around the world, and a dragon's inner eye can see it.\"\n\nOrm made a playful rainbow appear on his skin. \"How do you use this invisible field for art?\"\n\nKragor held his hands like wings. \"I once made a sculpture with carved lodestones, a mobile. I could close my eyes and see/feel the bright shadows in the magnetic field.\" His hands flexed and swooped. \"My silver-gray ice dragon moved with the wind.\"\n\nOrm decorated his body with silvery dragons that flew in spiral patterns. \"I wish I could see that. I wonder what senses exist in other beings? What would their art be like?\"\n\nRikor joined the discussion just as Driana brought them steaming mugs of tea. He took a long drink and smiled. \"I call it art if I like it, and Driana has perfected the art of brewing red root tea.\"\n\nArak accepted a mug, laughing at Rikor's pithy definition of art.\n\nTen days later they spied land. Arak flew so high that he disappeared into the sky. He rocketed back and landed, shivering from the thin, frigid air. He wore a satisfied smile. \"Travel further north, to the next bay,\" he ordered.\n\nThey anchored in the bay.\n\nArak, Rikor and Driana flew ashore to search for copper. Huge black trees towered above them, covered by the pale green fuzz of opening buds. Ice was melting, streams were swollen, and smells of waking spring filled the air. They landed by a promising stream. There were fist-sized geodes, like tiny caves filled with sparkling quartz crystals. But there was no sign of copper. The next two streams held colorful agates in shades he had never seen in a rock, but still no copper.\n\n\"These agates are stunning,\" Driana said, pocketing a few. She broke one open to see the rainbow-colored rings. \"They're like Orm's special layer pearl, only brighter.\"\n\nArak dropped another useless clawfull of stones. He flexed his weary claws and snapped his tail irritably. \"There should be copper.\" What if his theory was wrong? He remembered Zarina's amber scales and shuddered. He would find copper even if he had to search a thousand streams!\n\nSlanting afternoon sunlight gilded the trees, glowing through glassy green leaves. Fanciful shadows shifted across the thick moss that carpeted the ground. This always seemed a magical time of day, when anything was possible. But it was late and Arak was too tired to scout again. \"Here's a good clearing for our camp. We'll try again tomorrow.\"\n\nAt early dawn the dragon trio broke camp. They flew high to scout from above and chose a new, more promising site. Lacy ferns clung to the banks of the stream. Their deep, blue-green color meant abundant minerals in the soil, and possibly copper.\n\nArak concentrated all his senses on his quest. He listened for the faint rippling of hidden streams. He felt for shifts in the magnetic field. He sniffed the air and tasted the water to detect any faint tang of copper. He scrutinized the banks and grabbed rocks from the stream bed, hunting greenish stones. After years of searching, Arak found copper.\n\n\"Rikor! Driana!\"\n\nThey flew over to him.\n\n\"Copper!\" Driana shouted, grabbing rocks from the stream and stuffing them into her bag.\n\nRikor thumped his tail. \"And dark turquoise. Terrific!\"\n\nArak moved on, concentrating, seeking the rich copper source. A cold spring burbled up through layers of rock and flowed into the stream. This water smelled faintly of copper. Arak dug into the stream bank and found no copper, but the scent was stronger. He saw the magnetic lines within the spring. He felt the current stretching far back, deep into the hill.\n\nArak followed the underground spring-stream into the hills, sensing the magnetic lines that snaked unpredictably beneath the ground. His legs began to shake. It was hard work, constantly skirting trees and leaping over brambles. The invisible, flowing lines were as twisted and slippery as an octopus' arms.\n\nArak felt a sun of energy and parted a tangle of vines.\n\nCool, dank air with a distinctive tang seeped out of the cave. Lumpy green walls stretched back into darkness. He struck off a knob of rock. It gleamed like the most glorious sunrise. Copper! Arak snapped his wings and leapt into the sky. He spiraled higher, twirling with joy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Arak landed on deck, flexing his wings for balance as he slid on the damp wood. He dug a clawfull of nuggets from his pouch. \"Copper!\"\n\nKragor hefted one of the heavy, greenish rocks and scratched it with a claw. It gleamed with pure copper. He thumped his tail. \"Ruby-gold. Excellent quality! How did you find a source so quickly?\"\n\n\"You know that game where we see who can fly the highest?\"\n\n\"It's a favorite among young dragon-lords,\" Kragor said.\n\n\"It shows skill, endurance, and can impress the dragon-ladies,\" Rikor added, smiling at Driana.\n\nShe returned a sunny smile. \"We expect it.\"\n\nArak juggled three copper nuggets. \"It also shows an interesting view, like a map. The shore back home is almost the reverse of this shoreline. I thought about dragon puzzles and how pieces fit together. Our copper mines are near the shore where it bends out, and the matching shore here bends in.\"\n\nKragor nodded approvingly. \"Puzzle piece shorelines. What a brilliant idea.\"\n\n\"So we searched that area first. There's plenty of quartz and agate near the bay. We looked further inland and found a stream full of turquoise and copper nuggets. There's a cave back in the hills with sea-green walls that gleam when scratched, the source. This should be a great copper mine!\"\n\nThey celebrated with a feast. At night, strange glowing creatures rose from the depths. Three snake-like fish appeared with sharp, curved fangs and flashing pink lights. These black viper-fish chased a school of small copper fish covered in tiny blue lights. It was a window into the deep abyss, a world of night and light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Arak felt the roll of the waves with satisfaction. They were five days into their return voyage, laden with honey and chocolate. But best of all, their hold was heavily weighted. It was completely filled with priceless ballast: copper nuggets and dark blue turquoise. There was enough to satisfy the clan through many dragon-hatchings.\n\nWaves leapt brightly on the sea as if dancing to their success. Now, if they could just avoid storms. And giant squid. This was their mating season, when the monsters rose from the abyss.\n\nScree rested in a tub on the dragon-skiff. There was a far-off look in her eyes as she rolled Vorm's huge pink pearl between two arms. Arak eyed the pearl nervously. He knew what Scree must be thinking. How could she want to meet giant squid?\n\n\"It's late afternoon. Time to gather,\" Arak said. He raised a signal flag. Then he loosed the skiff-wing, using the tiller to turn as they slowed. The pod skiffs clustered together, forming one large raft near the big skiff.\n\n\"Scree, is this correct?\" Arak asked. Two large fish skins with patterns of red and yellow dots lay drying on the deck. He dipped his brush into red paint, finishing the last of three light patterns for Vorm's name.\n\nA large school of fish appeared, roiling the water. They were as lively and noisy as a boiling kettle of tea, leaping and churning frantically.\n\nThen the sea erupted. A massive silver swordfish leapt gracefully from the sea, shedding a curtain of silver drops. It was nearly as long as the dragon skiff. The swordfish fell back into the sea with a thundering splash, ringed by walls of water.\n\nScree turned bright green and her eyes were huge. \"A swordfish! Just like the legends!\"\n\nThe swordfish tore through the school of bait fish, feeding on prey that was numbed by its sharp sword. Again and again the vibrant, metallic creature plowed through the ball of fish until few were left.\n\nThe huge fish flew into the sky again.\n\nSuddenly, two clusters of coppery-brown snakes burst from the sea and grabbed for the swordfish. It desperately arced and twisted, ripping free from one of the giant squid. Dark wounds appeared on the side of the fish.\n\nScree shuddered. \"No!\"\n\nThe second squid was barely clinging to its prey, holding on by just two tentacles. The great fish rose and then fell on the squid, bashing it with all its might. But still the squid held on.\n\nThe swordfish leapt again, spiraling, trying to dislodge the heavy predator. The fish turned, slicing into the squid's head with its long, sharp bill. The gash narrowly missed a huge golden eye. The squid quivered and flushed gray. But it did not let go.\n\nThe fish leapt skyward once more, hampered by its burden. Dark stains ran down its side. Another tentacle fastened onto the gleaming scales. As the fish slowed, the first giant squid caught up. It flung a net of tentacles around the swordfish, dragging it under. The sea was eerily calm, as if the fierce battle had never taken place.\n\nScree sighed. \"I know it's natural. I know the squid need this food. But it's hard to see such a beautiful creature killed.\"\n\n\"That was a huge fish. But those giant squid are as big as our skiff! Living nightmares!\" Arak grabbed his paintbrush. \"Let's finish these signs.\"\n\nSuddenly, the silvery-clear water darkened to mud as an island rose beside them. The dragon-skiff rocked wildly. Dragons grabbed for anything solid to hold onto. Then, as the sea began to calm, a monstrous tentacle slipped over the side and shook the skiff violently.\n\nArak glanced at Scree. She had suctioned onto her tub, which was anchored to the deck. She flattened her body, camouflaged, and disappeared. A realistic pattern of tub boards ran through her body. Scree's color cells perfectly matched her surroundings.\n\nScree was invisible. Arak envied her talent, since this would be a great time to disappear. He held tight to the rigging as the skiff continued to pitch wildly.\n\nRandom items that had not been tied down flew overboard. Thank goodness the hold was so heavily weighted with rocks! The heavy ballast and deep keel gave the dragon skiff great stability and kept it from flipping over.\n\nBut the skiff could still be ripped apart. Nothing could withstand those powerful arms. This was Arak's nightmare made real. Octopi would be picked off and eaten. The precious load of copper would be lost. And the clan, including Zarina, would weaken and die.\n\nArak's body felt numb, but his mind was flying. The squid was even bigger than Scree's mind-images of Vorm! Was it simply curious? It had never seen a skiff. Was this how it tested something new, or was it an attack? Was there a difference?\n\nThe other dragons snapped their wings in surprise and fear. Then Arak grabbed a spear. This was his plan. He leapt into the sky and hovered beyond tentacle range, his spear point aimed directly at the giant squid. The other dragons quickly followed his lead.\n\nFearsome, flying dragons must be a new sight for the squid. Afternoon sunlight gleamed off sharp copper claws, and the long spear points were as deadly as shark's teeth.\n\nA huge, golden saucer eye emerged from the water and tracked the dragons. The squid released the skiff, which slowly resumed the gentler movements of the waves. But it did not leave.\n\nFour dragons remained aloft. They threatened with their spears, circling beyond attack range but within the squid's field of vision.\n\nArak landed on the deck. The monstrous eye followed Arak and stared unblinking at him. This was the perfect opportunity to communicate with the squid. It respected the power of the spears and had just killed a huge fish, more food than it could possibly need. It might be their only chance.\n\nScree changed from camouflage to a solid, noticeable brown. She reached for the greeting skins and handed them to Arak. He held up the first skin, then the second and third in the light pattern sequence.\n\nThe squid's eye widened and its skin flushed red.\n\nScree grabbed two more skins, the ones with Veera's name pattern. \"Try these.\"\n\nArak felt equal parts of fear and hope. This could work. He held up the signs, one after the other. The monstrous eye blinked as if truly surprised. The squid flashed a return greeting, Vorm's name pattern, and what appeared to be a question.\n\nScree flushed with excitement. \"She gave Vorm's name. I need more words!\" Scree rippled up the side of the skiff, hung three arms over the edge, scrunched them together, and made light pattern sequences. Then she took the huge pink pearl, attached it to a long shaft, and offered her gift.\n\nThe squid removed the pink pearl and held it high in the fading light. She turned both eyes toward Scree and flashed a rapid, complicated sequence of yellow and red lights along her body. Scree blinked and shook her head. The patterns flashed too quickly to follow.\n\nKragor landed. \"You gave it the pearl! Why do you think it's Veera?\"\n\n\"She, not it,\" Scree corrected. \"Vorm's mate. The only close relationship between squid is with a mate. Through many years, when squid gathered to mate, Vorm won Veera. Only Veera would ask about Vorm. She definitely recognized that pearl and responded to her name-sign.\"\n\nArak took the fire opal from his pouch, attached it to a spear shaft, and extended it to the squid.\n\nVeera held the precious orb high, studying its random inner flames.\n\nArak knew that the flashing red sparks of light held no real pattern, no words. But the opal was as lovely as the pink pearl and probably new to Veera's realm. It was a unique gift that celebrated the language of the abyss.\n\nVeera flashed another pattern of lights, more slowly.\n\nThat must be the squid thanks/acceptance pattern.\n\nScree imaged the squid greetings/welcome: \"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\" Then she wove her arms in the octopus sign for \"welcome\".\n\nVeera's golden eyes remained fixed on Scree. She moved her two front tentacles to copy the sign. The squid flashed more patterns and Scree responded. Then Veera jetted away to her new mate, who had surfaced with the dead fish and was watching from a distance. They flashed lights and dove deep.\n\nScree slipped back down onto the wet deck and climbed into the tub. She twined a tentacle with Arak's claws. \"You acted quickly. And our language skins worked!\"\n\nArak thumped his tail with relief. \"Those giant squid appeared like a sea storm and vanished like a dangerous dream.\"\n\nKragor collapsed on the sodden deck. \"That monster was more fearsome than I could have imagined.\"\n\nOrm was lifted onto the skiff and he slid into a tub. \"Introductions are too risky. I hope we've seen the last of them!\"\n\nScree flashed red and yellow spots all along her body. \"What? No more festive squid-lights?\" She turned a sober brown. \"We're lucky it was Veera. I fulfilled Vorm's last request. She was too surprised about his pearl to press the attack. And we communicated. That's a start, but nothing has been resolved. I'm still worried about our villages.\"\n\nArak picked up a broken mug and righted the teapot. \"We certainly can't afford to lose the pod villages to an attack, or the copper-weed crop. What did Veera say?\"\n\nScree slipped an arm over the side of her tub and tasted the tea washing across the deck. \"It was hard to follow the light-language, but I think she called you 'yellow sky swimmers'.\"\n\n\"I caught some of that. Maybe we'll become part of a squid legend. I'm glad she didn't stay for tea!\" Arak flexed his wings for balance as the skiff rocked in a random swell. He gave Scree a searching look. \"But what did Veera say at the end?\"\n\nScree glanced sideways at Orm and nervously curled her arms. \"She invited me to visit her realm.\"\n\nOrm froze. His arms were stiff with concern. \"And you politely declined?\"\n\n\"It's a rare opportunity. How could I refuse? This skiff is at risk and all the copper. Both pods are at risk. It all started with the volcano that killed fish. Squid traveled further, hunting new food. They found the juvenile octopus migrations and will follow our young to our villages. Recently and in legend, giant squid attacked us in our homes. Must we cower and wait? We have never met them in their territory. This is the only way to end the threat, to make peace between our realms. And think what we could learn! Squid are masters of sea currents. They travel the world!\"\n\nKragor flicked his tail rapidly. \"This skiff, the pod villages and our copper-weed are all at risk. But what can one octopus accomplish? You would travel alone to an unknown place, surrounded by deadly creatures many times your size. Consider the danger!\"\n\nArak crouched down to look Scree in the eye. \"You do realize that this is not a sane venture? Even a dragon would think twice before such a journey.\"\n\n\"I've thought more than twice. But the potential benefits outweigh the risks,\" Scree replied firmly.\n\nArak nodded. Scree understood risk and reward. But he wished there was another way.\n\nOrm gave a resigned sigh. \"Scree, your love of adventure may overwhelm a rational fear of these deadly monsters. But you do know the squid better than anyone else, and perhaps this could work. When do you leave?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning. And...\"\n\n\"Can I help?\" Orm asked.\n\nScree twined arms with her mate. \"I was going to ask.\" She smiled at the surprise in his eyes. Then she straightened her arms and looked around. \"This is dangerous but it must be done. I need your help, all of you.\"\n\nArak squared his wings and stepped forward. \"I thought this might happen, and I have a plan...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE DARK ABYSS",
                "text": "The following dawn, flaming gold clouds filled the sky. Scree waited on deck, ready to leave, holding no healer's bag. It felt as if she was missing an arm.\n\nOrm's eyes widened with surprise. \"Why not take your bag?\"\n\n\"Squid are self-reliant. They don't burden themselves with stuff. Hoarders are seen as mindless gatherers, like lobsters that surround their dens with shiny rocks. A squid would only carry something as small as a single pearl. I must appear as a squid to be received as an equal. And I must be fearless.\"\n\n\"Well, if anyone can do that, it's you. But I'm glad you agree that bravery alone is not enough.\" Orm was careful not to touch the tips of her arms.\n\nScree felt Orm's concern through their farewell embrace, but he remained quietly supportive. \"Thank you, Orm, for understanding. You are my mate, and I will return to you.\"\n\nScree twined tentacle to claw with each dragon, last with Arak. He leaned down and touched foreheads, in a dragon-to-dragon manner. \"I'll be waiting in the sky when you return,\" he said. His quiet belief warmed her more than a whole pot of red root tea.\n\nScree slipped down into the sea. She waited alone, holding only a short kelp rope.\n\nThe dragon-skiff rocked violently as a giant squid appeared. Veera flashed light spots to give her greeting, and Scree flashed color spots on her skin in response. Veera grabbed the end of Scree's rope. Scree gave one final wave before she was jerked beneath the waves.\n\nThe watery green light disappeared as Scree flew down through the sea. Blackness closed in and rows of jagged blue lights appeared. The glow of squid-light showed a school of small fish. With identical glowing patterns, these fish could easily find each other. This eternally dark realm was truly a world of light!\n\nScree finally touched down on flat, soft sand. She was surrounded by an odd kelp forest of swirling trees with flashing branches. Squid! It was still their season of gathering.\n\nVeera flashed a brilliant light pattern and the forest grew still. She introduced Scree as \"one-who-knew-Vorm\". The squid asked questions and Veera repeated them slowly. Then Veera repeated Scree's skin-pattern replies, flashing brightly so all could see.\n\n\"Where do you live?\"\n\n\"Below the yellow sky-swimmers, above the black abyss, in the realm of green light,\" Scree answered, as poetically vague as possible. Successful negotiations were not guaranteed, and she would not lead this fearsome horde to her village. Scree mentioned her dragon friends to subtly remind Veera of this powerful octopus ally.\n\nThe sand shuddered beneath forceful blows as two long, thick tentacles smashed down on either side of Scree. She looked up into golden eyes larger than her head. The monster gnashed its sharp beak, with loud snapping and grinding sounds. The menacing vibrations ran through her body like the barbs of stingrays.\n\nVeera's mate spoke with bright red lights: \"How could a snack like you defeat Vorm? I challenge you.\"\n\nThe huge eyes stared into Scree. She did not need Veera to re-play the flashing lights. His message was clear. She was gripped by vivid memories of Vorm's attack, wrapped in powerful tentacles, expecting a gruesome death. These eyes were the same: intense, arrogant and angry.\n\nScree pushed beyond her fear. \"I won like this.\"\n\nShe slapped an arm with a hidden needle onto each of the monstrous, threatening tentacles. The giant squid blinked. His hulking body convulsed. Both arms became numb, then seemingly dead. The secret venom was potent!\n\nScree quickly removed two small, wax-covered balls from her suckers. She scratched the surface to expose the sodium metal. Then she tossed the balls high into the water. They burned with a blinding, explosive light as the silvery metal reacted with water. Bright light was a fearsome weapon in the dark abyss.\n\nThe forest of squid retreated. The challenger withdrew, dragging his useless arms.\n\nScree flexed her arms. She turned in a slow circle, staring confidently at each squid while she quivered inside. She still had six more venom balls and six sodium light balls. But she hoped she would not need them.\n\nScree's friends had worked through the night to prepare her secret defenses: wax balls with poison or light. Each wax ball fit perfectly into a sucker, hidden near the tip of an arm. Poison balls were made from sharp, hollow fish fin spines filled with venom, fitted into wax. Light balls were sodium metal covered with wax.\n\nThe venom and blindingly bright lights were unexpected weapons. The giant squid moved away from her. Only Veera stayed. Scree tasted fear through the water, an odd metallic flavor. Her show of force made her the equal of any squid. But she wanted a deeper, stronger relationship with mutual respect and understanding.\n\nScree said to Veera, \"Your mate will recover. I chose not to kill. Vorm and I became friends because we had more to offer each other alive.\"\n\nScree emptied two eights of huge pearls from her middle suckers and presented them to Veera. Pearls were rare unless grown as a crop, so this cache must seem an extraordinary gift.\n\nVeera warily accepted the gifts, clearly wondering what other unexpected resources Scree might possess. She stared at the shimmering stones, rolling them in a long tentacle.\n\nScree bowed respectfully to Veera and straightened her arms in a formal stance. \"These shell-stones are a gift from our realm to yours. The black ones celebrate the dark abyss. The red-and-gold abalone stones remind us of your beautiful light language. You live free on the currents, but these can be easily carried with you, as friends-of-octopi.\"\n\nVeera focused intently on Scree, and her huge body quivered. What was the squid thinking? Scree wished she understood their body language.\n\n\"You are the first creature to learn our noble language, even though you lack our lights. It took courage to visit our realm,\" Veera said. But two of her tentacles gouged deep, angry furrows in the sand.\n\nVeera did not seem pleased. Scree tried flattery. \"Vorm spoke eloquently of your dances. Might I see one?\"\n\nVeera did not respond.\n\nVeera's mate jetted forward, twirled once, and flashed lights. \"I'm Tarm. There's more to you than it seems.\" He flexed a long tentacle. \"My arms can feel again. Veera and I will dance.\"\n\nTarm spun and soared, flashing a rhythm of lights. Veera hesitated and then moved slowly forward to join his dance. They twirled side-by-side in tight, glowing circles, moving ever closer until they almost touched. Their arms meshed perfectly as they spun. Yellow lights flared at the tips and flowed upwards in unison. Red lights flashed another pattern, like drum beats.\n\nTarm and Veera swirled faster and faster until their lights blended together. Rings of spun light made one huge, glowing ball; they moved inside this. When they stopped, their long tentacles wrapped around each other in graceful curves.\n\nEntranced, Scree automatically turned the brilliant dragon-gold that signaled appreciation. Then she spoke with the bright color spots of squid language: \"Your dance was beyond beautiful.\"\n\nTarm released Veera and approached Scree. \"Do octopi have dances?\"\n\n\"We have several, but only one that is performed alone: the pearl dance.\"\n\nScree removed a large white pearl from a sucker. She spun, swiftly flipping the pearl from arm to arm in graceful arcs. Then she quickened the pace. She had practiced to match the speed of squid, and soon the pearl was a blur. Her audience began flashing yellow lights in unison, to better see her dance. When Scree finished, they flashed the red lights of approval.\n\nTarm asked, \"Would you join us for a feast?\"\n\nScree smiled with pleasure, since this was a universal sign of acceptance. But still Veera said nothing.\n\nGiant clams were brought forth, along with piles of crabs and fish. Although Scree had eaten well before leaving the surface, she was famished. The travels, Tarm's challenge, her dance, and the bitterly cold water all sapped her energy. Scree carefully followed their lead and tried everything, except for the fish.\n\nEmpty shells and fish skeletons were tossed aside, adding to the piles of litter that rimmed the gathering area. Hordes of small, ghostly white crabs boiled out of burrows and began cleaning the fish skeletons. The food scraps also attracted an incredible variety of glowing scavengers.\n\nScree feasted her eyes on the exotic life of the abyss. Most of the fish were black, and their shapes were amazing. The brilliant colors of the reef were found mainly in the beautiful lights of these colorless creatures.\n\nTarm settled his huge bulk onto the sand beside Scree. He flashed his lights slowly so that she could follow the words. \"You danced well,\"\n\n\"Thanks. You and Veera were amazing. Have you traveled far?\"\n\n\"I've surfed beneath the ice at both ends of the sea. The currents taste sweet under the melting mountains, and there are schools of small red shrimp as bright as sunset clouds. Huge white crabs patrol the sands.\" Tarm paused, as if considering something. \"I've seen sky-swimmers before.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"I was hunting ice fish, far to the north. They're big and cloudy-clear, like ice. When one of the fish jumped out of the water, a white creature grabbed it and swam back into the sky.\"\n\n\"Was it bigger than the yellow sky-swimmers?\"\n\n\"Yes, much bigger.\"\n\nScree turned bright green with excitement. \"This is good news.\" An ice dragon! They were creatures of legend.\n\nMore squid visited Scree, and she was beginning to feel comfortable within this circle of giants. But Veera flushed odd colors and flashed her lights randomly. Why did she behave so strangely? What did she want? Scree tried to be polite and focus on her visitors, but she was worried.\n\nNothing was truly resolved.\n\nScree pulled her thoughts back to her visitor. This squid was describing a place where warm bubbles rose from the deep sea floor. \"The sand is as yellow as our lights. The currents taste odd, like water from a tiny volcano that never sleeps. There are big clam-like treats that grow on stalks, as long and thick as your arms.\"\n\nAn old, graying squid approached and spoke of an undersea cave. \"It's huge, big enough to hold me. There are sparkling white crystals as long as my arms, from wall to wall, like a maze.\"\n\nScree almost lost herself in the stories. But she again saw Veera, lurking in the darker shadows beyond her visitors. Scree could almost feel the crushing weight from the miles of frigid water that separated her from the safety of her floating cave. She swallowed her rising fear.\n\nA very young squid told of his northern adventure. \"I tasted melting ice in the seawater. It was the time when ice leaves the land and returns to the sea. So I stretched my arms long and straight, close together. And I waited. There was a tearing shock. An ice mountain hit the sea. I rode the thunder-wave! It was faster than the fastest currents of the abyss!\" He flashed an intense pattern of red lights.\n\n\"What a great ride! Did you ever catch another thunder-wave?\"\n\nVeera slid into view. Scree curled her arms. What did she want?\n\nThe young squid said, \"Yes. The next time I felt the ice tear apart, I made myself into a ball.\" He demonstrated, bending long arms up over his head and twining the tips. Huge golden eyes peered out through his sturdy cage of arms. He unwound and continued the story.\n\n\"When the ice mountain crashed, the wave rolled me along the top of the sea. I moved so fast that I bounced on the water, and it felt hard. Everything blurred. It was great!\"\n\nThe giant squid were surprisingly playful and eager to share their experiences. Scree wished she could travel to all of their adventure places.\n\nAt last, Veera joined her.\n\n\"Tarm is an interesting traveler. He sees life fully,\" Scree said, complimenting Veera's mate.\n\nVeera flashed lights of agreement while she dug long, powerful tentacles through the sand. The trenches were angry slashes deep enough to swallow Scree. Then Veera pulled herself tall, looming large. She towered over Scree. Twenty octopi tip-to-tip would not be this big!\n\nSuddenly, Veera turned gray. She spoke with blinding lights: \"What happened to Vorm?\"\n\nHer angry light-message was almost as bright as the sodium lights. Scree could not reply. She fought a powerful urge to flee. Would Veera risk Scree's poison, in the throes of her fierce rage?\n\nVeera repeated her demand, with words as bright as lightning. \"WHAT HAPPENED TO VORM?\"\n\nScree forced herself to answer. \"Vorm attacked me and I stopped him. He recovered. But Vorm was poisoned from eating my friend Tor. We became friends as he was dying. Vorm gave me the pink shell-stone, to return to you.\"\n\nVeera moved even closer. Her massive bulk could squash Scree flatter than an oyster. \"What did you do with his body?\" Veera was watching carefully for the answer. Clearly it mattered.\n\nScree felt the poison-balls hidden in her suckers. If Veera gave in to her rage, would this be enough? \"I helped my pod carry him to the edge. We released Vorm to the abyss. That was his wish.\"\n\nVeera's color shocked back to its normal dark red-brown. \"You honored our ways, even after his attack?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Scree finally relaxed her arms. She felt like a limp jellyfish inside.\n\n\"You are strange, but you understand honor. I will tell the squid what you did for Vorm. You are worthy of his friendship. His shell-stone is now yours.\"\n\nVeera snaked a long tentacle to Scree, who formally accepted the huge pink pearl.\n\n\"Do you know what this represents?\"\n\n\"It's like the stone that made Teera, the first squid. That's a beautiful legend of life and lights.\"\n\nVeera's eyes widened, clearly surprised by Scree's understanding. \"I gave Vorm this legend-stone when we first chose each other as mates. You sought peace between octopus and squid. You had the courage to face us, alone, in the abyss. This shell-stone is given back to you in peace. You are a friend-of-squid.\"\n\n\"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever,\" Scree replied, using the traditional squid salutation.\n\nVeera settled next to Scree and answered questions about life in the abyss. Time flew by. At last, Scree stretched her cold, stiff arms. \"I've truly enjoyed this visit. But my friends await my return, and I must leave.\"\n\nVeera nodded understanding. \"Will you miss the dark abyss?\"\n\n\"The abyss is not truly dark. Life speaks with lights.\" Scree smiled as she quoted Vorm. \"I'll never forget your beautiful dance. Thank you for the legend-stone.\"\n\nVeera offered to tow her home, but Scree declined. She pulsed upwards, gaining speed as she rose. Soon she was flying up through the sea even faster than Veera had jetted down. Scree looked back. The squid were still watching, flashing bright lights that lit their wide-open saucer eyes. She caught one word: fast. They must be surprised by her speed.\n\nScree grinned with sheer delight as she rocketed toward the surface. There were four air bladders fastened below, where her arms met. They compressed to nothing in the abyss, so they didn't interfere with dancing. But when she rose through the water, the air expanded and they pulled her along, flying ever faster. If things had gone badly, this was her escape plan. She moved faster than a hunting squid!\n\nNow, would the lodestone work? It was late, and Orm would be worried."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Crystal lights blossomed in the night sky. Scree was late. Arak vaned his long wings as he flew search circles over the sea, trying to pick up her signal. It was well past sundown, their planned rendezvous. Had she survived her meeting with the horde of fearsome creatures? Even one giant squid was enough to make his toes curl.\n\nThe moon grew brighter as he flew, seeking the signal. Where was Scree?\n\nArak felt a minor shift in the magnetic field and veered west. The signal grew stronger. It must be the powerful magnetic lodestone that was attached to Scree. He was as sensitive to this force as octopi were to subtle tastes in sea currents. He could have sensed the lodestone many tens of dragon-lengths away. He pumped his wings, speeding to the source.\n\nScree shot up through the water and into the sky like a flying fish. She fell back to the sea and bobbed up and down with the waves, floating on the air bladders.\n\nArak shuddered as a powerful wave of relief tore through him. He twirled in the sky with fierce joy. She had survived!\n\nHe dropped a small kelp raft onto the sea, hovering while Scree dragged herself aboard and collapsed. Her body was gray and she seemed almost too drained to move. What had happened in the abyss? He grasped the tow-line and flew swiftly back to the dragon-skiff. The moon lit her face as she jolted across the waves. Scree's eyes were fastened on her beloved stars. She must have wondered if she would ever see them again.\n\nThey reached the skiff and Scree clung to the raft as Arak lifted it onto the deck. She slid into a tub, unrolled an arm, and held up the huge pink pearl. \"Success! Our villages and the copper crops should be safe!\"\n\nArak stared. Veera's pearl was as large as the icy storm pearl that caused him to crash and meet Scree. But this lustrous gift from the squid represented peace. Arak stood tall, with crisply folded wings. They'd all worked together and Scree had succeeded in this dangerous mission.\n\nOrm flashed an unrestrained rainbow of vivid colors. He embraced Scree tightly, twining arms while careful of the toxic tips. \"You became the peace envoy. And you did return!\"\n\nScree gazed into his eyes. \"Orm, I will always return to you.\" She gave him a dazzling smile. \"The sodium balls you and Kragor made were perfect. They were spectacular in the dark abyss.\"\n\nOrm smiled back. He did not let go of Scree. \"We developed those balls as emergency lights for working in wet caves. I never expected to use them on squid.\"\n\nKragor nodded to Arak. \"Very clever. I wondered why you were so interested in the light balls.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"If life speaks with light in the abyss, then sodium screams. We had everything else we needed.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"Arak, you even brought wax balls for the poison needles. I did need them. And the air bladders. I was too tired to pulse all the way back up. It's much easier to fly.\"\n\nThey shared a huge celebration meal. Scree lost her deathly gray color as she devoured clams and crab claws. She finished feeding and looked down with surprise at her mountain of empty shells. \"I was hungrier than I knew. And this warm water feels so good! The abyss was as cold as ice.\"\n\nOrm leaned forward eagerly. \"What happened in the abyss?\"\n\n\"I finally saw deepwater glowfish. I could not have dreamed up so many strange shapes! Some catch other fish by using a light they dangle in front of their mouth.\" Scree flashed fantastic pictures across her body. \"I never saw such wicked teeth! It's a good thing the fish are so small. Most have blue lights on their bellies, like our reef glowfish.\"\n\nOrm rolled his eyes. \"No. The squid! What happened with the squid?\"\n\nAll eyes were glued on Scree as she told her story.\n\nKragor shook his head in dismay. \"How did you find the courage to face so many squid, all alone?\"\n\n\"But I wasn't alone. I was filled with creative defenses from friends. With all of you helping, how could I fail? We're a perfect team. Kragor and Orm designed the sodium balls. Taron, Rikor and Driana helped make poison balls. Arak, your plan for the abyss worked beautifully!\"\n\nArak straightened his wings with pride.\n\nScree grinned and covered her body in white dragon scales. \"A squid saw an ice-dragon far to the north.\"\n\nArak snapped his tail excitedly. \"I grew up with those legends, and always thought a trip north would be interesting. I even designed ice-armor for the dragon-skiff.\"\n\n\"Next summer might be an excellent time to hunt legends,\" Scree said slyly, her arms dancing. She peered at her mate, who was as still as an iceberg. \"Orm, what are you thinking?\"\n\nOrm sighed. Then his eyes brightened. \"Scree, we all helped with the first skiff and then with your secret defenses. We are a perfect team.\" His eyes fixed on the distant horizon. \"I just hope our next voyage has less excitement than squid visits!\"\n\nArak followed Orm's gaze to the endless edge, where sea and sky met. He still traveled within a circle of sea and sky, but now he was also within a circle of friends. Arak surveyed his skiff with pride. The huge, silvery-white skiff-wing strained against the wind, gleaming like a flying ice-dragon in the moonlight. He flexed his wings, eagerly anticipating their northern journey.\n\nScree twirled beneath the stars. She studied the dark, mysterious border where starlight disappeared. What lay beyond? Her eyes gleamed. \"I still enjoy traveling alone. But it's even better to explore as a team!\"\n\nShe flashed squid-light patterns in a private message for Arak, since only he could read them. \"You've come a long way from the ice floe, my friend. A dragon who can manage giant squid can do anything.\" A bolt of green lightning flew across her body and she smiled.\n\nSo Scree knew. Arak felt the golden armband in his pouch and smiled back."
            },
            {
                "title": "GREEN LIGHTNING",
                "text": "Lightning sparked in the clouds as the clan gathered for the storm dances. Arak nervously checked the vials of metal powder in his pouch that were used to paint sky-fire. One held chromium, a bright orange-red like the tips of dragon-lord scales. It would change a lightning bolt to a vivid green color like the tips of Zarina's golden scales. This special bolt was only for a dragon-lady, to accept or toss aside. If she accepted, they were mated for life.\n\nTaron and Erinite flew gracefully up, wingtips barely touching as they spiraled higher. By custom, mated pairs were first to fly into the clouds. Then other couples formed and joined them.\n\nZarina was still on the ground, with Karoon and another preening suitor on either side of her. But she had not chosen.\n\nZarina was all things bright and beautiful, lightning come to life. She was also clever, talented, and had always accepted him as he was. She was the only dragon-lady that Arak had ever wanted.\n\nHe polished his scales once more. Then he approached, struggling to hold his voice steady. \"Will you partner with me?\"\n\nShe tilted her shapely head. A rare shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds and ran across her bright golden scales. Zarina was so lovely that Arak's heart almost stopped.\n\nShe smiled. \"Yes.\"\n\nArak and Zarina leapt into the sky, flying higher and higher until they were above most of the lightning. Arak caught a small practice bolt and tossed it back and forth with Zarina before releasing it to the clouds. Then he flipped over and caught another lightning bolt between his legs, seeking to impress her. Not to be out-done, she furled her wings, twirled swiftly, and caught his throw.\n\nClouds all around were lit from within, glowing in colors like dragon-fires on the beach.\n\nArak and Zarina spiraled about each other, moving with the storm, concentrating to keep an exact distance between them like the experienced partners. They exchanged a rapid volley of lightning catches, challenging their skill with reckless abandon. The energy of the storm, the fireworks, and the dance surged through them.\n\nA spectacular barrage of colored sky-fire lit Zarina; she glowed in rainbow hues. Arak ached with desire. He wanted Zarina to be his forever.\n\nArak trembled as he withdrew the special vial from his pouch. He had listened to her worries about becoming a healer. She had helped with his skiff designs, always confident that he would succeed. They were good friends. But were they more? Zarina had other suitors. She could still reject his proposal to be mated. They were so high up in the clouds, who would know if she refused? He would. She glowed like a rare golden pearl in the storm clouds, and in his heart. There was no other dragon-lady for him. He hesitated. But he had to try.\n\nArak caught a new bolt of lightning and twirled it rapidly on his copper claws. He poured in the red powder. A deep green color infused the glowing bolt. He saw her eyes widen. His heart beat faster.\n\nArak tossed the emerald lightning to Zarina."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "\"Catch!\" Arak cried, tossing the skiff rope to Taron. They tied the dragon skiff securely to the dock.\n\nThis was their third voyage. Arak left right after the storm dance, urged to travel while the good weather held. After years of rationing and painful sickness, the clan just couldn't have too much copper.\n\n\"Welcome back, Arak!\" Karoon shouted, clouting him roughly on the shoulder. No one called him Dreamer now. More dragons swarmed aboard, cheering loudly, eager to help unload the precious copper.\n\nArak blinked in surprise at the dragons' healthy golden scales. The bitter orange color was gone. \"Taron, look! What a difference the copper has made in just twelve dragon-weeks.\"\n\nTaron laughed. \"Not just in dragon color, but in their attitude. I'm ready to stay home for a while.\"\n\nArak nodded agreement. \"Can you take charge here?\"\n\nHe flew to the shore and found Zarina, warming her nest bowl with dragon-fire. She looked up and smiled. She was like the summer sun, warming him with a glance.\n\nArak twined necks tightly with his mate. Then he stepped back from the nest, drinking in the view like a thirsty dragon. They had exchanged mental pictures each evening during his long voyage, but she tantalizingly withheld images of her nest. He could only see that when he returned.\n\nArak studied Zarina's nest bowl, which was pale gray with a rim of ceramic lace. That lacy wave pattern must have been carved through wet clay before she hardened her bowl. Ten large black pearls gleamed around the top of the bowl. The large, speckled egg was nestled safely in a thick bed of clean white sand.\n\n\"I see you found a good use for those pearls I gave you.\"\n\n\"The best,\" she replied smugly, leaning against him. \"You got back just in time. Listen, you can hear the dragon within.\"\n\nArak leaned down and listened carefully to the egg. \"I wouldn't miss this hatching for anything.\" Then he stood tall and reached into his chest pouch. \"Here, for my favorite storm dancer.\"\n\nThe bright gold armband was set with rare green garnets in a zigzag pattern, like emerald lightning. The gems glittered more brightly than diamonds. Zarina snapped her wings with pleasure. \"I've never seen anything like this!\" She slipped the band onto her upper left arm and squeezed the soft gold to tighten it.\n\n\"Orm described the gleaming abalone bands that pod dancers wear. Scree gave me a chunk of green garnet and I had gold nuggets. I wanted to make you something special.\"\n\nZarina cocked her head. \"You made this on your first voyage, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And then you waited. You took your time, but now you're mine.\"\n\nArak beamed and wrapped his long, golden wings about his mate, enfolding her in a tight embrace. \"Yes, I am yours.\"\n\nZarina gave a sly smile and handed him a crystal ball, as clear as ice. \"Here, for my favorite dragon dreamer.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"Everything worth doing starts with a dream.\"\n\nHe held the trance-stone and felt a delicate carving, like winter frost. He took a closer look. A dragon wrapped from front to back around the ball, with its head and tail almost touching. Long dragon wings curled from side to side.\n\nArak locked eyes with Zarina. \"It's an ice dragon!\"\n\nShe grinned back. \"And another dream.\"\n\nIce dragons. These legendary dragons still lived, and Zarina understood his need to find them. Arak gazed at her with such warmth that he could melt an iceberg."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Axtara Banking and Finance",
        "author": "Marx Florschutz",
        "genres": [
            "dragons",
            "fantasy",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "banking",
            "commerce",
            "young adult"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Leaving the Nest",
                "text": "And to think this is all there is. Axtara shook her head as she looked around the space she had once called her bedroom. Technically, it was still hers, but only for a few minutes more. As soon as she'd finished clearing the last of her possessions out of it, it would no longer be so. I once thought this room was so large as to be spacious.\n\nShe'd been a lot younger then, barely a dragon whelp a few years from her egg. She flexed her wings slightly in amusement as she looked down at her old bed, the frayed cushion on the floor long since gone flat, worn from over a decade's weight of growing scales pressing down on it each night. Now she could barely curl up on it without her tail and forepaws hanging over the edges.\n\nStill, it smelled like home. Far more than the room she'd rented from her uncle for the last few years. Axtara brought her head down, breathing in the faint scent of old, faded padding and smiling as memories flowed back.\n\nIt was so big once. All of it was. How strange to think about. Now her childhood room felt as cramped as the lodgings her uncle had provided. Well, perhaps not quite that small, but small enough.\n\nShe pulled her head away from the old cushion, trying to ignore the pang of familiarity in her chest at seeing it lying alone on the stone floor. The walls around it were bare, what possessions she'd owned as a youngling now packed and stowed in her luggage or in one of the crates she'd already sent ahead. The shelves were empty, save for a few knickknacks or stray papers that hadn't been worth taking.\n\nThere would be a new cushion at her new home. She'd placed the order herself, exchanged the proper funds. It would be waiting for her when she arrived.\n\nA tingle of excitement rushed through her scales, starting with her wings and rushing down to the tips of claws and tail. A home of my very own! A wide grin split her face as she sat back on her haunches, looking down at the empty remains of her old room. My own! Her own home, with decorative wood, insulated floors, skylights... She'd spent months poring over designs from some of the best architects she'd been able to afford, calling in every favor she'd accumulated while working at her uncle's bank.\n\nAnother excited rush swept through her. A home of my very own. Running my own bank. Ooh, I can't wait! She fanned her wings slightly, the tip of her tail doing rapid, back-and-forth happy flips. My very own!\n\nShe took another look around the empty room, smirking slightly as her eyes fixed on the small mirror set in one wall, its silvery surface slightly warped. She still remembered when her father had presented her with it as a hatchday gift. She'd spent hours preening herself in front of it, despite some of the distortions in the glass making it difficult to see the true sheen of her green scales.\n\n\"Axtara?\" She turned her head as she heard her mother call her name. \"Are you almost done?\"\n\n\"Nearly, mother,\" she replied, turning her attention back to the room. \"Just taking a final look.\"\n\nHer mother poked her head into the room, scales so deep a violet they were almost black, and smiled. \"It does look rather empty. It'll be emptier still once you've left.\"\n\n\"Mother...\" She tucked her wings and tail close against her sides as she turned. \"If we're counting me, then it's practically full. You can't even fit in here with me.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" came another, deeper voice. Her father, from somewhere down the hall. \"That room is big enough for two. Your mother and I fit in there with you when you were a whelp, remember?\"\n\n\"Barely,\" her mother countered, glancing back down the hall with an amused shake of her wings. \"As I recall, one of us was only half into the room.\"\n\nAxtara smiled as she turned her attention away from her mother and took a last look around the room. Scattered papers and the occasional bauble lay accounted for and discarded, but the shelves had been cleared of every book. Her writing area had been cleaned out, her tools and ink carefully stowed inside her luggage. The room was simply... empty.\n\nEven through the excitement, it felt a little strange. Leaving for her uncle's hadn't been nearly so final. Then again, that temporary residence had always been her uncle's, and her home home. Now she was truly leaving, leaving her parent's cave and making it on her own.\n\n\"Anyway, Axtara\u2014\" her mother began, but Axtara cut her off with a shake of her head.\n\n\"I'm done, mother,\" she said, turning away from her final look and smiling. The nervous tingles were back, a bubbly feeling deep in her gut matched by the giddy quiver rushing through her scales. \"Everything's packed.\" Just as well, too. There was no hourglass left in the room for her to glance at, but she felt certain that a glance at the clock in the main room would show her that she would need to take wing soon if she wanted to stick to her schedule and catch her train.\n\n\"Oh, it is.\" It wasn't hard to detect the hint of sadness to her mother's voice. Not that she didn't understand. She felt a bit melancholy as well, despite her excitement. Her mother pulled back slightly, one set of claws coming up to rest on her chest. \"It never gets any easier.\"\n\nAxtara gave her mother a sheepish grin, like she'd been caught swiping meat pies from the kitchen. \"Mother... it had to happen eventually. You made it through Finix and Ryax leaving home. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"True.\" Her mother, at least, was rational. She'd seen some human parents grow positively horrifying when their children left, turning into sopping, bawling messes. \"But they at least stayed within the borders of the nation, Axtara. To start, anyway. You're flying about as far away from here as one can fly, short of traveling into the great unknown.\"\n\nShe almost sighed. And then there's this again. \"Mother, Elnacier is not the end of the world.\"\n\n\"It's far enough away it might as well be,\" her mother said quickly. \"Are you sure you have to go so far? There are plenty of closer places where you could go to\u2014\"\n\n\"Mother, please.\" Axtara sat back on her hind legs, resting her forepaws on her mother's shoulders. She was old enough now that she and her mother were almost the same height. \"Elnacier is the best choice. Yes, it's far in the west, but it's a new kingdom, acknowledged when I was still a whelp. Its rulers haven't even ruled for a generation yet.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" her mother countered. \"It's new. Young. The Bad Days for them aren't as far behind as they are out here. Why, they might not even accept someone who isn't human, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Mother, I've done my research. Yes, I'll be the only dragon for hundreds of miles. But that's why it's such an opportunity. Elnacier is young, undeveloped. It's brimming with natural resources of all varieties.\"\n\n\"Exactly. It's the middle of nowhere.\"\n\nAxtara held back a groan, settling for a slight twitch of her tail. \"For now, mother. For now. There are riches aplenty to be had there. And by opening the first bank they'll ever have, I'll be the one that helps facilitate that growth. I'll be, to use that human expression uncle likes, 'in on the ground floor.' There when it starts.\"\n\n\"I... I know, Axtara.\" Her mother sat back, half in and half out of the doorway. \"I just... It's so far, and you're so young, and you worked so hard for Byanast making all of that money only to spend it on a lai\u2014home you haven't even seen.\" Her slip into the older terms, from the Bad Days, didn't pass by unnoticed.\n\n\"Oh mother.\" Axtara stepped forward again, wrapping her forelegs and wings both around her in a hug and resting her head on her shoulder. \"I'll be fine. I earned that money working with uncle so that I could strike out on my own. And my home will be lovely, I've made sure of it. You could even come visit once I'm settled in, in a few months.\"\n\n\"You'll see, I'll be fine.\" She pulled back slightly, looking into her mother's eyes. \"You weren't much older than I was when you set out on your own.\"\n\n\"I set out with your father,\" her mother chided, pulling back slightly. \"And we didn't go nearly as far.\"\n\n\"Iya...\" The heavy tread of her father came padding down the stone, and a moment later his pale-blue scales swept into view. \"That was almost a hundred years ago. Times were different then. That was then, this is now.\" He swept up behind Axtara's mother, resting a wing across her back. \"Axtara is breaking new ground. We should be proud of her.\"\n\n\"I am proud of you, my little hatchling,\" she said, her eyes looking right into Axtara's. Then she smiled, soft and serene. \"I just...\" She moved forward, wrapping Axtara in a hug rather than the other way around. \"I just worry. I'm your mother. I love you, and want only the best for you.\"\n\n\"So do I.\" Her father had to squeeze to try and get his limbs through the doorway, but he did his best, one massive sweeping wing covering both her and her mother. \"And I think what you're doing is amazing, little egg. You go be the best banker for Elnacier that you can.\" His wing tightened for just a moment, the strength and gentleness behind it clear, and then her father was pulling back, blinking away tears.\n\n\"Besides,\" he said as her mother pulled away as well, eyes similarly damp. \"We really don't have much space in this old cave. I was afraid I was going to have to insist anyway.\"\n\n\"Tsavoy!\" her mother chided, though there was a lack of real fire to the words. Her mother knew her father's teasing tone as well as anyone in the family.\n\n\"No, no, she's a growing dragoness,\" her father continued. \"Why, she didn't even have room for her hoard.\"\n\n\"Father...\" Axtara said, tilting her head to one side. \"I kept it in a bank.\" Most of it, anyway.\n\n\"No, there's simply no room at all. Besides, I've already got ideas for how to use the space you're freeing up.\"\n\n\"Tsavoy...\"\n\n\"Like maybe a nice room where I can stretch out after work...\"\n\nAxtara let out a scoff and shook her head. Not with your wingspan father. He was definitely teasing her.\n\n\"Or we could get it ready for the next egg to come along.\" And now he was teasing her mother.\n\n\"Tsavoy...\"\n\n\"What? Axtara will be gone, the room will be empty. We can make a nice dinner from the larder, then go back to our room\u2014\"\n\n\"Father!\" Axtara pulled back. \"If your aim is to drive me away before we share a final lunch together, then by all means continue. But I would prefer that you did not.\"\n\n\"I concur,\" her mother said. \"That's a discussion for another time. After Axtara\u2014\" Her voice hitched slightly, a small tremor running through her wings. \"\u2014has left. It's hardly an appropriate topic for lunch.\"\n\nBoth of them turned, already moving for the larder. It was definitely time for lunch. One last meal before she left for her new home on the far side of the continent.\n\nShe picked up her luggage, settling the strap across her shoulders. She would place it with its sibling by the door, and soon begin the long flight to the nearest railway station.\n\nShe took one last look around her childhood nest, from the faded cushion on the floor to the empty shelves on the walls. Well, this is it. I'm setting out for my own home, and my own bank.\n\nMother will see, she thought as she stepped out of the room, head held high. It'll be just fine.\n\nNo, it'll be better than fine. It'll be great."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "She was almost giddy with excitement by the time she and her father landed at the rail station. A few people looked up as they descended on the large landing platform, conveying expressions of mild interest at the arrival but soon turning their focus back to their own affairs. Axtara paused for a moment, stretching her wings and working the kinks out after a flight of several hours. Her father merely gave his a flap and then folded them at his sides, far too accustomed a distance flier to need much in the way of a good stretch after such a relatively short flight. He made his way off of the platform, her luggage cradled carefully on his back between his wings, while she worked her flight muscles, stretching them carefully.\n\nThe motion did catch the attention of a few younger beings in the crowd, and she couldn't help but smile slightly while spreading her wings further apart. They were one of her nicer attributes. Slender but strong. Perfect for a young dragoness.\n\nStill, she had a train to catch. The thought almost made her giddy with excitement, and she practically bounced off of the platform, easing her way into the sparse crowd alongside her father.\n\n\"Well,\" her father said with a smile. \"I don't think I've seen you this excited since you were a hatchling.\"\n\n\"Really?\" She let a shiver run down her body, from the base of her two horns to the tip of her tail. \"Not even when I left for uncle's bank?\"\n\n\"Not even then,\" her father said, shaking his head but still smiling down at her. \"Actually, you were equal parts scared and excited from what I recall. So eager to go, but at the same time so apprehensive about leaving the nest.\"\n\n\"Father, I was not. Was I?\"\n\nHer father let out a chuckle as he turned for the loading platform. \"I seem to recall a young face at the window of the train watching her mother and father with a quivering lower lip. And that she waved goodbye the whole time I flew alongside the train to see her off.\"\n\n\"Very well, father, I see your point.\"\n\nHe laughed again, then wrapped his wing lightly around her and tugged her close. \"Nothing to be ashamed of, Axtara. You'll see for yourself one day when you have hatchlings of your own.\"\n\n\"That's a long way from now, father,\" she replied, though she did lean into his side slightly.\n\n\"Especially where you're headed,\" he said. \"So far from home.\"\n\nShe gave him an amused glance. \"Don't try to talk me out of it, father. You won't.\"\n\nHe let out another laugh. \"I wouldn't dream of it, Axtara. Not for all the gold and riches in the world. Because seeing you succeed?\" He slowed, turning his head until he was looking right at her. \"That is one of the truest riches there is.\" He bent his head down, leaning it into hers until their horns touched. \"I will miss you, as will your mother. But all things move on, and it is time for you to spread your wings at last.\"\n\nThe station seemed to fade somewhat as she leaned into another embrace. \"Thank you, father.\"\n\n\"Your mother and I are very proud of you, Axtara, and the beautiful young dragoness you've become.\" He pulled his head back slightly, his eyes looking right into hers, deep and full of the wisdom of a century. \"You're going to be on your own now, far away.\"\n\n\"Father...\" She remembered this talk. He'd given it to her before.\n\n\"Hear me out,\" he said, smiling. \"We're very proud of you. You're driven, capable, determined... But you're also honest, stalwart, and kind. Your mind is as sharp as any claw, and, of course, quite beautiful.\"\n\n\"Father...\" It wasn't quite the same talk as before, but it was similar.\n\n\"Only a moment more, Axtara. All I ask is that you never forget all you've accomplished, nor how you've reached where you are. Now that you're taking wing on your own in pursuit of your dreams, there may be times when you're tempted to discard who you are to make your dreams come closer.\" He pulled back slightly, his eyes still looking right into hers.\n\n\"Don't. Stay true to yourself, to what you've learned. If you step away from who you are, you'll only find yourself further from your dream in the end.\"\n\nHe pulled away, his wing leaving her back. \"There, that's all I had to say. That wasn't so bad, was it?\"\n\n\"No father,\" she said, wrapping her own wings and forelegs around him in another, quicker hug. \"It wasn't. And I won't forget.\"\n\nA shrill whistle echoed in three short, quick bursts from the loading platform. The three-minute warning. She needed to board and make her way to her cabin. She tightened her hug.\n\n\"I'll write every week,\" she said, blinking away tears. \"For you and mother. I promise. Even if they take a while to reach you.\"\n\n\"We'll read every one,\" her father answered, his forelegs setting across her shoulders as he gave her a final squeeze. \"I promise. We might even visit.\"\n\nShe let out an almost choked laugh. \"Might?\"\n\n\"Well, you know your mother. But...\" He began to pull back, and she reluctantly stepped away, breaking their embrace. \"You'd best be going. Don't want to miss your train. My little Axtara, off on her own.\"\n\n\"I know, you're going to miss me,\" she said, giving him a smile.\n\n\"Well, right up until we replace you with a new egg,\" her father said with a wink.\n\n\"Fa-ther!\"\n\n\"Now come on, let's get you aboard. Your new home awaits!\"\n\nMinutes later, secure in her cabin, the train slowly chugging out of the station and away from the edge of the city, she watched as a familiar figure flew past the train in the sky, waggling his wings from one side the other in a final farewell before turning and arcing off into the sky toward home.\n\nToward her old home. A smile on her muzzle, she wiped a bit of moistness from her eyes, and then, as her father flew out of sight, turned her gaze westward.\n\nHer dream was waiting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Home Under the Hill",
                "text": "Well, Axtara thought as she flew through the clear sky. Elnacier may be remote, but it looks incredible. She'd passed into the murky gray area between it and the nearest \"civilized\" kingdom an hour or so earlier. Murky and grey in the legal sense, or perhaps on a discolored map. In person however, it was...\n\nBreathtaking. And not just because of the scents, though those were indeed amazing. She kept taking deep breaths whenever she got the chance, the rich scents of pine and mountain air flooding her nostrils with a sharp, cool twinge. There were deeper scents buried beneath as well, rich and earthy. Or musky with game, a scent that made her thoughts turn to a fresh roast and her tired wings beg for a break.\n\nBut she was almost there, now. Just keep going. She beat her wings again, rising slightly through the air. The clear sky gave her a perfect view of the mountainous countryside she was currently flying over. Down below, she could see winding paths poking through titanic evergreens and pine, twisting like snakes across the countryside. Some were old and overgrown, but there was one that was cleared and well-kept. And if her eyesight was any judge at the altitude she was currently flying, fairly new as well.\n\nWhich made sense. It was the main\u2014and only\u2014road that led to the capital of the Kingdom of Elnacier at the moment. As well as to several other small towns that occupied the frontier past the center of the kingdom.\n\nWell, not center, Axtara thought as she adjusted her course slightly. More like... an umbrella of some kind. Or maybe a jellyfish. Only with one tendril. I think? Having never actually seen a jellyfish, it was hard to say. But she had seen pictures of the strange creatures before.\n\nLikely not a perfect comparison, then. But close enough. She'd already passed over a small hamlet that, according to her maps, was called \"Frederickstown.\" Unsurprisingly \"Frederick's town\" on older copies, and in both instances it used the term \"town\" with a great degree of latitude given its size, but...\n\nThe road was the easiest landmark to follow from the air and, while she had a compass, it was much easier to simply locate something on the ground and use it as a guide. Especially now that there was only one official \"road\" for her to follow.\n\nAnother gust of wind soared past her, carrying with it an array of scents, sharp and rich. Her stomach growled in response to one of them, and again she was reminded of how long she'd been flying.\n\nYou can eat and rest when you get to your house, she thought, powering ahead. Your house, with a fully-stocked larder, and space to stretch your wings, and... The smile on her face grew despite her fatigue. Better to wait when you're so close, rather than spend an hour or two in the dirt after catching and cooking something to eat.\n\nStill, the temptation to take a break, even a short one, was high. Her muscles ached in a way she hadn't felt since she was young, the result of days filled with flying and little else over thousands of miles. In the old days, the distance would have easily been twice that, but she'd been able to book passage on one of the new \"steam engines\" that ran on rails to cross much of the central nations. Passage on a canal boat, though slow, had saved her another few hundred.\n\nBut then she'd reached the frontier states. Or duchies. Or whatever else they chose to call themselves. And the truest benefits of civilization had ground to a halt, leaving her no other choices than to walk, hire a wagon, or fly.\n\nAnd if you have wings... Axtara thought with another hard downbeat. Why not?\n\nOr I guess magic, but... Magic studies had never really been her strong point. Her older brother's yes, but not her own. The magic of an abacus and a neatly arranged ledger was far more appealing than the mental gymnastics her brother had leapt through just to be able to turn the lamps on and off.\n\nAnd hiring wizards is expensive. There wouldn't be any of those in the Kingdom of Elnacier anytime soon. Not unless one of them wanted to get very far away from what was considered civilization.\n\nVery, very far, Axtara thought as she went into a steady glide, glancing down below to confirm she was still following the lone road as it wound through the pines. The numbers were a lot smaller when they were just spaces on a map. Her smile faded somewhat. I should have seen the irony there, given my job.\n\nSatisfied that she was still on course, she let herself take another long, lazy gaze at the mountainous country around her. The road she was following wound its way through a long, wide valley between two small mountains. Not flat, but certainly wide. If her reading of the map was accurate, once it rounded the mountain to her left, there would only be a few dozen more miles to cover before she arrived at Elnacier itself. The capital \"city\" of the kingdom.\n\nFrom there, the main road would branch out in several directions, running to both the coast and most of the other nearby settlements. Well, towns. As the residents saw them. But they were definitely settlements.\n\nFor now. With a stable hand over things, and the many abundant resources around her, it was only a matter of time. And the first one to provide banking services that isn't the king will be in a very good position. Her smile blossomed again, a small squeal of excitement almost leaking out of her throat. And that'll be me!\n\nShe was starting to smell a new scent now, layered in with the sharp pines and evergreens of the forest-covered mountains and the rich, deep earth. A subtle scent that teased at her nostrils and brought to mind memories of a trip to see her older sister.\n\nOcean. She was close enough now to Elnacier to smell the sea that lay beyond it. Quite a few miles beyond it, but as high as she was, the faint scent of salt was still reaching her.\n\nA brief bit of bare stone caught her eye as she continued on over the forest. The remains of a tower, long since crumbled. Ruins from the long-vanished Ancient people that had once ruled huge swaths of the continent.\n\nOr something like that anyway. Historians suspected that where Elnacier now stood there had once been a large city of some kind, because there were apparently old ruins all over the mountains. But until recently, no one had really concerned themselves with them.\n\nThankfully, there had not been any ruins encountered in the construction of her new home. Which... She looked ahead. Should be coming into view soon. There was one more low mountain\u2014more a hill, really\u2014and then she would, if she remembered her map correctly, be able to see Elnacier.\n\nShe clenched and relaxed her forepaws, whipping the tip of her tail back and forth with excitement despite the slight shimmy it put into her flight. I'm almost there! Almost!\n\nSure enough, she could smell faint twinges of woodsmoke now, and as she drew nearer and nearer, she could see small clearings in the woods with faint hazes above them. Outlying farms, or maybe hunters, or tanners, or... Who knew! I'm on the edge of civilization!\n\nThis time she did let out a small squeal of excitement, unable to contain it as ahead of her, the distant horizon took on a grey shade. Not the grey of a storm, but the grey of ocean clouds meeting an endless sea.\n\nShe was close. Very close.\n\nAbout time too. I feel like I could sleep for a whole day.\n\nShe could clearly make out farms and farmland now. Breaks in the trees, growing more and more frequent as she followed the main road. Some were set near it, others a bit further away.\n\nEventually, the road joined up with a small river, both meeting and moving through the middle of the valley. She recognized the river from her map. Once it met with the road, she was close. Extremely close. In fact, I might be able to see\u2014 There it is!\n\nAhead of her, almost a smudge even with her sharp vision, but growing clearer by the second was Elnacier. The city. Or... decently sized, maybe smallish, town.\n\nBut there it was. There was no mistaking the rolling hills around it, smoother than the more rugged terrain of the nearby mountains. Nor the river that cut through its southern edge. Or the decently sized manor on the north side. Or was it a castle now? Some merchant had built it a few decades back according to what the locals had told her agents, intending to make it a summer home amidst the wilds. They'd lasted a little over a year before abandoning it, and the edifice had remained unoccupied until Adrick Elnacier had declared himself king and moved in.\n\nAdrick. She rolled the name around in her mind. Not exactly a kingly name... But then, from what my sources told me he's not exactly the kingly type. Trying, but certainly far less regal than some of the ancient families in the central nations.\n\nBut kings had to start somewhere. Or magistrates. Or nobles. Or merchants. Or bankers. She smiled again. So, can I see...? Her eyes narrowed.\n\nNo, not yet. She wasn't near enough to make out the faint directions she'd been given to her new home. It was on the east side of Elnacier, beneath a hill in an old cave that had been suitably altered and hollowed out before being furnished in an appropriate manner. There were too many trees and too much distance yet to be able to spot it.\n\nBut she could see Elnacier. It was... smaller... than she'd expected. And spread out. Without much regard for pattern or layout, as far as she could tell from her distance. Likely because it had sprung up without any sense of direction.\n\nShe could feel the strain growing on her wings. It was a good thing that she was so close. As it was, she would probably feel the effects of her long journey for a day or two to come.\n\nShe was flying over farmland now, dogs barking beneath her. She caught sight of a few pointing fingers, and some wide-eyed expressions.\n\nWhen was the last time any of these people saw a dragon? she wondered as she passed over another field, her shadow flitting across the treetops. Or have any of them ever?\n\nThat could make first meetings with them a little... tense. She gave her head a quick shake. I'll just have to read them carefully, and remember to be as respectful as possible.\n\nShe was getting closer now. The farms and houses were closer together, the forest less thick and showing signs of human presence, especially along the flatter ground. Her eyes could pick out more detail across the town of Elnacier too. It didn't feel right calling it a \"city.\" Not when it looked like she could fly from one end to the other in mere moments.\n\nShe pulled her eyes away from the old structures, instead peering at the rugged hills to the east of the town and trying not to flex her claws with excitement. One of them, though she wasn't sure which yet, was hers.\n\nAbout time, too. Her wings felt like they wanted to fall off. She spared another glance at the large stone manor. Should I fly on and introduce myself? It would be the polite thing to do. But at the same time, her wings ached, and she was tired from the tips of her horns to the tip of her tail.\n\nI probably stink as well, she thought, twisting her head back and looking over her long, slender body. Even flying, she could see where her green scales were dusty and dull, her coloration closer to the pines she was flying over than the vivid shade it would be when properly cared for.\n\nSo... no. She couldn't visit. It wouldn't do to appear in the court of the king with her scales dirty and dusty, her body stinking from days of constant flight, and her mind half-fogged with fatigue.\n\nWell, maybe a quarter fogged. It had been a long journey. Part of her simply wanted to land, eat, and curl up for the rest of the day.\n\nThe hills were closer now. Her agent had done his best to describe what they would look like from the air, but being a human himself, had only been able to give her estimates. Still, it was near the foot of the mountain, with a stream nearby for her cistern. And the front of the home itself was set into a sharp hill, with an open clearing around it...\n\nExcept I see three openings in the trees, Axtara thought as the hills drew closer. She'd angled away from the main road now, finally breaking from her long-held course. A slow glide, gently bleeding away her altitude, was also easier on the wings. Just a little bit closer and...Nope. The first clearing was simply that: an empty glade filled with brush and\u2014her stomach rumbled slightly\u2014a herd of deer, grazing.\n\nShe shoved the hunger aside. You can eat when you reach your new house, she told herself. The larder should be fully stocked.\n\nAnd if it wasn't, then the people she'd made contracts with would quickly learn that it wasn't wise to try and cheat a banker.\n\nShe was lower now, barely a hundred feet above the treetops. The second clearing was like the first, full of brush and what looked like a large number of berry bushes of some kind. But the third...\n\nThat's it! She let out an exuberant \"Yes!\" as she spotted the simple cleared path, the creek on one side... and most importantly of all, the large door set square in the front side of the rocky hill. Her door. To her house.\n\nShe voiced an excited squeal and threw her wings back, going into a steep dive and laughing the whole way. The clearing rushed up at her, and it was only in the last moments that she unfurled her wings wide, beating them in great gusts to slow her descent.\n\nThen she was touching down, her claws settling on smooth gravel with a faint crunch of shifting rock, her heart pounding even as she folded her tired wings against her sides. Directly in front of her were wide glass windows\u2014the glass imported at great expense from the central kingdoms\u2014and a large, warm wooden door.\n\nHer door. Her windows.\n\nMy home, she thought, staring at the front door with wide eyes. My very own home. All mine. She could feel her breath coming in shorter, quicker gasps, and not just because she was tired from her flight. This is it. This is it!\n\nFor a moment she simply stood there, basking in it. It wasn't quite how she'd pictured it in her head, and even though she'd constantly admonished herself that it naturally wouldn't be exactly as she imagined it, it was still somewhat interesting to see what the differences were.\n\nShe'd been picturing trees atop it, for one. Even though she'd known that there wouldn't be, that the architect she'd hired had said as much, and she'd even had to pay for the removal of the trees and stumps that had found purchase on the rock, just so that they wouldn't continue to grow and run the risk of bringing her roof down.\n\nShe'd expected more bare stone across the front as well. Instead, the space around her doorframe and windows was home to quite a bit more wood than she'd expected. Though the garden boxes beneath each windowsill were just what she'd been hoping for, if empty. She'd fill them later.\n\nThe door was a different shade of wood than she'd imagined too. Much darker, with streaks of red in it. The lock was sturdy and large, as was the handle. Perfect for a dragon of her size. Both were made of steel, durable and tough against both wear and tear and any would-be thieves. Polished, they stood out against the wood like beacon lights on a mountaintop.\n\nShe liked it.\n\nThe biggest difference from the image in her mind, however, was the conspicuously empty spot above and to the right of the door. There, a metal signpost was anchored in the rock. Anchored, but empty, lacking any reason for its existence.\n\nYet. Axtara smiled as she saw the empty hooks. She'd requested that the builders not put the sign up, since they'd be finishing before she arrived, and instead leave it just inside the door. It wouldn't do for prospective customers to arrive before she did, after all.\n\nBut with that thought she could already see the front room she'd asked for through the window. And looking was not enough.\n\nShe felt her wings quiver\u2014with exhaustion or excitement, she wasn't really sure\u2014as she reached for her chest-satchel, undoing the bronze clasps and hunting for something with her talons. She found it almost immediately, unsurprising considering that she'd been looking at it longingly just that morning when she'd devoured her breakfast. A heavy metal key that matched the bright, silvery coloration of the lock on her front door.\n\nFighting back a nervous swallow, key in her claws, she stepped forward. Up onto the large stone front porch. Up to the wide, heavy, wooden door. She took a quick, furtive breath, and then slid the key into the lock.\n\nThere was a heavy thunk as she twisted it, and then, breath caught in her throat, she reached out and lifted the handle, hearing an answering click from deep within as it gave.\n\nThe door swung outward on silent hinges. For a moment Axtara stood in complete silence, gaze sweeping across the inside of her home... and then with a shout of joy she bolted past the door, laughing and spinning in a circle as she took in the whole front area.\n\nIt was homey. It was roomy. It was colorful in all the right ways. It was perfect.\n\nIt was hers.\n\nShe came to an excited stop, laughing and carefully shucking her luggage from her back and chest. This is it! She turned her head in every direction, trying to take it all in at once. This is mine! My home! My bank! It was almost too much.\n\nShe slowed, folding her wings back against her sides with an excited tremor. It was even better than she'd imagined. The builders she'd hired had captured all the details perfectly. The wooden moldings around the edge of the room, evocative of her uncle's bank, were both ideal recreations but also just slightly different, the details taken from what histories she could find of design and tradition in Elnacier. The rest of the room was furnished lightly to look comforting and warm, with what she'd been assured were comfortable wooden chairs and a large sheepskin throw in the middle of the floor that had required the lives of several sheep. The floor itself was made of richly-colored wood\u2014no self-respecting dragon lived on cold stone anymore if they could help it, and when the snows came the stone would indeed be cold\u2014which had been polished to a fine sheen.\n\nOh yes, she thought as she caught sight of herself in the polish of the boards. The builders did quite a good job.\n\nThe entry, of course, was only half of the front room. The space she was standing in was roughly oval in shape, determined mostly by the contours of the stone the cave had been formed out of. A few feet in front of her, the walls narrowed slightly, the floor rising in several small steps to\u2014 \"My office.\" She said the words aloud as she moved up the steps, claws clicking against the wood. \"It's... perfect.\" Just like I imagined it. Her desk was large, with plenty of space for her to lie down at work if she so desired. Indeed, the dyed sheepskin behind it was for exactly that purpose. The desk extended into the wall, with a number of cubbies and shelves for her ledgers and writing implements. She could work facing the wall, or work looking over the desk at a client. Either gave her plenty of space to lay and stretch her wings and tail\u2014unlike her desk at her uncle's bank, which had been barely large enough for her to sit at, much less lie comfortably.\n\nSpace was a premium, she thought, turning her eyes upward toward the large skylights that lit the room. The glass was thick and layered, a pricey approach, but one that would allow it to keep its warmth in the winter.\n\n\"Speaking of which...\" She stepped away from the desk, down into the entry room once more and past her luggage before shutting the door with a neat click. Then she opened it. Shut it. Opened it again. Shut it. Once more with a faint giggle of laughter in the back of her throat.\n\nAll mine.\n\nThe entryway was still well-lit when she turned back around, as was her desk, but she could already see that once the evening arrived the light would dim, and she would be forced to light the lamps set along the walls.\n\nNot that it would be any great matter. They were enchanted\u2014another feature of her new home that had come at a high but worthwhile cost. Rather than running on oils or fats, they ran on magic. How, she didn't quite know. But they were able to produce light for hours on end without so much as a glimmer of heat. Or the more odorous question of airing out that came from traditional lamps.\n\nAll the hallmarks of civilization, Axtara thought as she took a final look around the entry room and her work station. Fresh! New! Invigorating! Her claws itched to dig into her luggage, to bring out the few ledgers she'd brought with her rather than shipping, and just go to work at her desk.\n\nBut... hunger won out. And she was filthy from traveling. Pushing away the urge to go to work at her beautiful new desk, she instead stepped past it, past its matching alcove on the other side where she could store files, past the small moneybox there for on-wing expenditures and loans, and toward another large, wide door at the back of the room, one that slid to the side rather than swung on hinges.\n\nIt was also, she noted, carved in with a stylized relief of a dragon with its wings spread. For a moment she stared at it, slightly confused. \"I suppose...\" she said aloud. \"I did ask them to carve it with something nice.\" And it does look very nice. The carving was careful but precise, and the entire thing had been smoothed and polished until it glowed. It was simply...\n\nHer shoulders began to shake, and then she let out a laugh. \"Did they know?\" she asked the door, stepping up to its surface. \"Or did they just think that a dragon would be an appropriate emblem for a bank?\" Her architect had known, as had a few of her builders, but had the carver?\n\nNo wonder her builder had assured her that it was even better than she'd dreamed. He'd either planned it, or found it hilarious.\n\n\"But tipping my wings the other way...\" she said, tilting her head. \"It is quite good.\" And it certainly wasn't wrong.\n\nStill, she was more interested in what lay behind it. Especially as she was hungry. And thirsty. And tired. The door slid to one side with a soft rumble, revealing the first of many rooms behind it, rooms that weren't designed for public approval, but only for her own. Rooms like a bathroom, with a vast tub she could heat with her own flame or with a furnace. Or her kitchen, with its fully stocked larder. Or...\n\n\"A pile of shipping crates, right in the middle of my hallway,\" she said as she saw the obstruction ahead of her, stretching from one side of the hall to the other. I guess my directions were rather specific. At least there would be plenty of wood to start the furnace with for her bath. And assure that her nest would be nice and toasty once she'd cleaned up.\n\nAnd my toiletries are in one of those crates, she thought, looking at them with a faint pang of dismay. One of them. Unless I want to use what's left of those in my luggage.\n\nShe shook her head. Not too much of a problem. \"I'll need the wood anyway.\" And while she was tired, unpacking one or two of the crates would be a good way to check out the rest of her home and see what it was like.\n\nHer home. Her smile widened. \"My home,\" she said, the words sounding like gold as they filled the air. Her tail lashed behind her, snapping back and forth in a quick display of joy and pleasure.\n\nHer home. It didn't just sound right. It sounded better than right.\n\nDigging her claws into the seam at the top of one of the crates, she went to work."
            },
            {
                "title": "Come Out and Bank",
                "text": "\"Dragon!\"\n\nAxtara let out a sigh as the cry echoed faintly from outside her door, looking up from her desk and fighting the urge to drag one claw down the side of the lovingly polished wood. Not again.\n\n\"Come out and...\" The words trailed off, not nearly loud enough to be heard through the thick wooden door or the multiple panes of glass in her front windows. But the last one rang out loud and clear. \"\u2014beast!\"\n\nAxtara closed her eyes for a moment, pushing down the urge to growl and instead letting her frustration out with a quick lash of her tail \"What is with these peasants?\" There they were, through the glass, standing in the middle of the clearing in front of her home, wielding a\u2014well, she wasn't really sure what it was\u2014in one hand. A soldier who was extremely down on his luck\u2014or that had perhaps missed every day of his training\u2014would have been hard-pressed to call it a sword. Or an ax, though it somewhat resembled both.\n\nIt might have begun life as a frying pan at some point, Axtara thought, narrowing her eyes as the figure standing in the clearing swung it once more. There was definitely an edge to it. A rough one, to be sure, but an edge all the same.\n\nOther than that, and what looked a bit like a knife at their waist, the figure appeared unarmed. They were barely even armored. There was a heavy leather vest thrown over their chest, yes, and what looked like leather scraps bound along their arms and legs, but nothing tough.\n\n\"Come out, beast!\"\n\nAxtata's eyes narrowed. I am not a \"beast.\" Normally, the barb would have stung slightly, but failed to slip between her scales. However, as this was the third peasant to arrive spouting insults in the last two days, and the second that morning...\n\nMaybe mother was\u2014No! She cut the thought off with a shake of her head. No. No. It's just... a misunderstanding. Elnacier wasn't a large kingdom by any means, but that didn't mean that it was effectively without a population. Or statistical outliers. There had been the day she'd arrived, the day after, which she'd spent most of unpacking, and then there was today. Technically her third day.\n\nBut the first \"challenger\" hadn't arrived until mid-day through the second day. Not that he'd been much of a challenger. In fact, she still wasn't sure if he'd intended to be a client or not. He'd wandered up, stinking strongly of cheap spirits, and shouted... something. She'd barely heard it, and certainly not understood it, as slurred as it was. But since he'd been standing in the clearing she'd poked her head out her door to inquire as to what he needed\u2014for all she'd guessed, her home had been built in his private drinking spot\u2014and then watched as the man had turned tail and run, throwing his clay bottle at her but failing to even reach her porch.\n\nSo much the better, as she suspected the foul odor leaking from the clay container when she'd disposed of it indicated the liquid would have left quite a stain on any of the wood it had come into contact with. She'd disposed of the offending item carefully, and with one paw shielding her nostrils from the burn.\n\nAt the time, she'd simply written it off as a random happenstance, or perhaps a drunk come to see the newest resident of Elnacier. But then the second challenger had called for her to come out before hurling a stone at her with a sling. It had flown true enough, bouncing off of her chest scales with a thwap the moment she'd opened the door, not penetrating but definitely stinging and... Well, her roar had seen the man fleeing down the road as fast as his hairy legs could carry him.\n\nAnd now this. A peasant dressed in padded leather that a city guard would have been embarrassed to be seen in, swinging a weapon of questionable identity, standing in front of her home hurling insults. Not something that she wished to bring up with the king during their first meeting.\n\nThough she hadn't yet received a reply to her missive requesting an audience. She'd written the letter first thing on her second day\u2014well, as soon as she'd found the proper paper befitting a message to royalty among her things, that is\u2014and put it in the courier box beside her door. To her delight, sometime during the day it had vanished, likely when she was in her home proper unpacking her things and settling in. So her message had gone out. However, as of yet there had been no reply, and no sign of the courier.\n\nUnless this one is the local courier, Axtara thought, running her eyes once more over the figure still shouting at her door, though their voice appeared to be giving out slightly. But I doubt it. For starters, they certainly didn't look like a courier. A pouch to carry messages in was at the very least expected, and she couldn't see any sign of such a thing.\n\nNor much else, really. The figure's clothes were simple and straightforward, an old-fashioned tunic bound by a belt rather than the more modern fashion found in the core of civilization.\n\nAnd his... ax? She watched as the figure swung it again, mouth opening wide as he shouted up at the sky. Yes, I'll call it an ax. If only to avoid giving offense to swords everywhere.\n\n\"Come out and face me, beast!\"\n\nAxtara let out a small huff of air and shook her head in annoyance. The peasant's repeated insults were... annoying. But I've been called worse. There had been one rich noble at her uncle's bank that had continually referred to her as \"the lizard.\" Yet refused to do her business with anyone else, as none of the other clerks had, to the noble's own words, \"shown the same skill with money.\"\n\nAnd to be fair, the woman had called her uncle \"the owner\" rather than by his proper name, and even her own servants by their titles or job rather than their names. So she hadn't been singling Axtara out. It had merely been rude. And rankling.\n\nBut at the same time, the noblewoman had possessed a very large amount of money for her uncle's bank to deal in, and that responsibility had been on her. And it did pay for this house, Axtara thought with a quick glance at her front room, pride welling in her chest.\n\nThat, and it didn't appear that her visitor had seen her yet. They were merely shouting insults at the front of her home. Not exactly thrilling... but it could be far worse. She was turning her head away, bringing her focus back to the ledgers on her desk when a flash of movement caught her eye. They'd bent over, picking up something from... the ground? And now he was tossing it up and\u2014\n\nAxtara let out a startled shriek as the rock the man had tossed pinged off of his ax\u2014which had definitely been a misshapen frying pan at one point\u2014only to bounce off of her beautiful front door with an abrupt click.\n\nThe only thing that kept her from bolting toward the front door as quickly as possible was the fact that she knew doing so could cause her new, expensive wooden floors damage. As it was, the sight of the man bending down to pick up another stone was almost enough for her to forget it or the harm she'd bring on the sheepskin rugs.\n\nAlmost. By the time she reached the door, one paw up to shove it open, there had already been a sharp clunk as whatever missile the peasant had found struck home. Biting back a snarl, she flung the door open, head twisting around the side to take in the two marks left in its once-smooth surface.\n\n\"Aha! Fell beast, I have\u2014\"\n\nFire rolled through her veins, a raw fury she'd not experienced in some time. The man's voice cut off as she locked her gaze with his.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing!?\" It wasn't so much a shout as it was a bellow, but the figure took a step back, eyes going wide as she spread her wings and reared up. \"That is my door you're chucking stones at! My door!\" She bared her teeth as she landed on all fours once more, her eyes narrowed. \"Insults are one thing, but when you\u2014\"\n\nShe snapped her head back as the man hurled his axe at her, the lopsided weapon not so much spinning through the air as sauntering with a slight limp. She batted it away with one limb, the weapon failing to penetrate her scales but still hitting hard enough she could feel the impact run up her foreleg. And worse, it left a long scratch across her carefully polished scales.\n\nThe peasant, meanwhile, was already running as fast as he could down the road, arms pumping like hammers. Rage seemed to coalesce in the back of her throat, flame burning to be released in a gout of magic fury alongside her snarl...\n\nAnd then she swallowed it back, releasing instead a soft shout of wordless anger that echoed down the path after her assailant as he vanished around the first bend. She took her frustration out on his weapon instead, scooping it from the ground and hurling it with all her might in the direction of the nearby stream. It passed it by easily, flying much further from her grasp than it had from her attacker.\n\nShe didn't bother to watch it land, instead turning back to the door, chest hot with anger that had no outlet. Even from where she was standing she could see the two marks left in her door, one small, one decently large. Discolored splotches bright against the wood-stain. The larger impact had even been enough to dent the wood.\n\nThe hot feeling in her chest was cooling now, cooling to a hard, aching lump. She ran a set of claws down the door, feeling the slight depression.\n\n\"Three days,\" she said, her voice sounding slightly forced to her own ears. \"Just three days.\" She'd been prepared for a certain amount of depreciation, and factored that into her costs. Nothing stayed perfect forever, after all. Especially where the public was concerned.\n\nBut that was incidental damage. Wear and tear. A peasant tracking mud across her floor and rugs. Not deliberate damages.\n\nAxtara took a long, slow breath, and pulled her claws away. There's no avoiding it. While the damage is light, fixing it would be costly, especially here, and I was attacked with... well, a weapon. Had I been human that could have been extremely dangerous!\n\nShe would have to bring the matter up with the king, now. She had broken no laws, nor incited any violence. And yet stones had been thrown at her home, and an axe raked along her foreleg.\n\nThe worst of it was, she didn't have to guess at why, either. The man's shouts of \"Fell beast!\" had made it quite clear what he thought of her.\n\nThe ache in her chest was mixing with a sinking feeling now, the kind of sensation one got when they were halfway through a long flight and saw a titan of a storm about to sweep down on them with no warning. True, three visitors was hardly any indicative of the population of Elnacier as a whole, but...\n\nShe turned her eyes up toward the sign, proudly hanging to the side and above her door. Carefully carved on it was her name, and then below that, a declaration of her business: Banking and Finance.\n\nDo they not see the sign? To be fair, she'd only put it up a few hours earlier that morning, when she was sure that her front room was ready for any and all prospective clients. But it had been plainly visible. Maybe her visitor hadn't cared? Perhaps he simply hated dragons?\n\nOr he can't read. The thought was out of spite, but she had to admit that there was likely a bit of truth to it. Elnacier didn't even have a printing press within its borders; she'd had to ship all her stationery from the nearest province. For all I know, the only books in the kingdom not in my shelves are on the shelves of a rich merchant or in the king's personal library, if he even has one.\n\nShe let out another sigh, the fury in her chest slowly deflating with it. The ache, however, stayed, fresh and painful. At the scratch on her scales which she could already see simply wouldn't buff out, and at the marks in her otherwise perfect, brand new door.\n\nMaybe... it was time to go down to the town square proper. Check with the courier to see if there had been a reply from the king to her request for an audience yet, maybe see if there was a small market of some kind where she could purchase a few herbs or even greens, since her larder hadn't been stocked with many of those. And she had coin. Elnacier, like many small nations, simply used the coinage of their neighbors without an official currency of its own. Though perhaps one day...\n\nShe shook her head again and gave the door a sad glance before moving back inside, shutting it behind her with a faint click. Yes, a trip down to the town. Check with the courier, and give folks a chance to interact with me in a way that doesn't involve throwing a misshapen ax at my head.\n\nThat should help clear things up for everyone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "When Axtara had been a mere hatchling, she'd once snuck into a meeting between her father and an important foreign diplomat who wanted to secure his services for a lucrative messenger contract. The meeting had been very formal, very posh, with the diplomat and their attaches dining at her parent's home while discussing the exact nature of the job and the requirements associated with it. At the time she hadn't understood, only seeing an important dinner that none were invited to attend but her father.\n\nHowever, she very acutely recalled the absolute silence that had prevailed upon the room, along with the stares, when she had crept inside and accidentally toppled an entire stack of fine porcelain plates. It was a sensation that had gone unmatched for the rest of her life.\n\nUntil now, at least.\n\nIt was like a spell had fallen over the town, drowning out all voices. She hadn't even flown in, choosing instead to walk along the road from her home to the main road and then up into the town itself.\n\nAnd as she'd neared Elnacier, the rumble of conversation from the main square had risen in volume, swelled... and then gone silent seconds before she'd come into view of the square. Almost dead silent.\n\nThe people were still there. Most of them, anyway. But they weren't bothering to hide the fear on their faces. Those that were looking at her, anyway. Many appeared to be pretending to ignore her entirely, though they were still as silent as everyone else. They weren't even whispering.\n\nThey smelled though. And not in a pleasant way. Most of them had bathed recently, at least, since she could smell the soap. But beneath it... sweat and fear.\n\nThey were afraid of her. Terrified, even, if the nervous tremors she could see a few experiencing weren't the result of some malady or another.\n\nAt least they haven't come to a complete stop, Axtara thought as she made her way up the street. As she drew closer she could see some hurry their business, making their exchanges and then rushing away as though they had somewhere to be.\n\nMother was right. It's like the Bad Days. Or as close to it as she'd ever been.\n\nNo! She caught herself just before she shook her head. It can't be that bad. After all, they hadn't run yet, and mother, father, uncle, and her older brother all had told her about the Bad Days, even the dying end of them. People then hadn't gone silent or walked away swiftly when a dragon had entered a village. They'd run screaming. Or gathered up weapons and prepared for battle.\n\nHere they're just... staring. Impolite and unnerving, sure. But not outwardly or dangerously hostile.\n\nStill, the attention combined with the silence made her feel like a hatchling once more, and she had to fight to keep her wings still at her sides. Her tail she could let move freely\u2014none of them were likely well-versed in draconic body-language anyway\u2014but her expression and her wings needed to be kept still. Her smile needed to be with lips only, no glimpse of her sharp teeth to make anyone more nervous than they already were.\n\nJust look normal, relaxed and composed at the same time. Like an afternoon off from the bank. Though there she'd not been the only dragon in the city, and the citizens had seen her as one of them, if a little larger and scaled. Here, however...\n\nHead up, Axtara, she reminded herself as she walked down the street, trying to make her movements as casual as possible. She could feel the weight of dozens of eyes on her, even from those that were trying not to look. Just act normal.\n\nThankfully, her inquiries about the town had given her a good idea of where everything was. The home of the courier service was right on the main road, according to what she'd been told, and was beneath\u2014There! A sign hung out from the front of a large building, bearing the image of a quill and crate. A stable of decent size was attached to the side, likely for horses and a carriage or two. According to what her agents had told her, the service had been one of the first things the king had ordered built once he'd established the kingdom, forging links to neighboring states. Even before he'd begun work on the roads.\n\nFirst stop. She slowed as she neared the office, eyeing the door and quickly gauging its size relative to her own. It would be a tight squeeze, entirely undignified at best. The stable likely had its own way inside, but if the townsfolk were already alarmed by her presence, the horses would most likely be much worse.\n\nInstead she came to a stop outside the door. It was a simple thing, made of solid wood. Small panes of badly warped glass made up a single large window next to it, enough to let light in but not enough to make out more than the vaguest of shapes on the other side. Beneath it was a courier's drop box. Empty, at the moment.\n\nStill, the door was sturdy enough when she knocked on it, the impact of her knuckles echoing through the interior of the building. There was a moment's wait, and then a slurred voice called out from inside. \"It's open.\"\n\nSunspots. With luck, their voice was slurred because they were otherwise occupied, ill, or holding a strong accent.\n\nStill, though she wouldn't fit through the door, she could at least speak through it. The carved handle was small to her talons, but she grasped it easily enough and swung the door inward\u2014noting as she did the large number of eyes locked on her from nearby.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm unable to enter,\" she said, choosing her words carefully. \"If I could trouble you to meet me at the door?\"\n\n\"A'right.\" The slur was still evident in the man's words. \"Just give me a moment miss.\" She took advantage of the wait to take a quick look inside the shop. It wasn't much, mostly bare wood. A small bench sat beneath the window by the collection box, probably for customers to use while they waited. A wall that would have been waist-high on a human\u2014up to the bottom part of her chest\u2014divided the front of the room from the courier's space. Beyond it were rows of shelves, workbenches, and boards of all sizes and shapes. For crating up large shipments, like the ones she'd had delivered to her home. Light was provided by a large number of oil lamps\u2014not magic, she could smell the oil in the air and see the stains in the wood above each one from what little smoke they did create.\n\n\"Just minute, miss,\" the voice came again, still a little slurred. From the far back, she saw a wisp of grey hair poke above one of workbenches, followed by a wrinkled, bony frame. \"You must be new to our city, since I know all the voices around here but I can't place...\" His voice trailed off as he turned toward the door, eyes going wide.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, watching as the man's face grew pale. \"I am new. Just arrived a few days ago, in fact.\"\n\nThe man wasn't moving toward her. Instead, his face had gone grey. There was a fluttery sensation in her gut, like she'd lost altitude and was on the verge of spinning out of control.\n\n\"I just wanted to see if there were any messages for me,\" she continued when the man didn't speak any further. In fact, he was barely moving, eyes locked on her with a sort of slack-jawed astonishment. \"I had a missive picked up yesterday for the king. From the new home on the edge of Elnacier?\"\n\nAt that the old man seemed to find his voice. \"In the woods? East of town? That new one?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" She nodded quickly, only for the man to take a step back. \"I just wanted to know if there had been a reply yet.\"\n\n\"Um...\" The old man's slur had vanished, replaced by a weak stammer. \"No-no. Not yet. We only took the message up to the king's manor this morning. A reply might come tomorrow, or the day after.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" A little disappointing, but then... Uncle had warned her that life outside of the empires often moved at a slower pace. \"Very well then. I will check back tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No need!\" That answer had come quickly enough. \"We'll be sure to deliver it. Tell your master we'll bring it along as soon as we get it.\" He was moving toward the front of the shop now, surprisingly quickly given how slowly he'd been moving moments earlier.\n\n\"My what?\"\n\n\"Got to close up now for lunch. Good day!\"\n\nAxtara snatched her head back as the door slammed in her face, just barely missing the tip of her muzzle. A brush-off then. Far from the rudest she'd ever experienced, but not exactly friendly either.\n\nVery well. She turned away from the courier's business, looking back up the street. At least I can buy\u2014\n\nThe street was empty, doors shut, shutters latched. What street-side shops had been open just minutes before were closed, wares withdrawn and doors tight. In the brief moments her head had been inside the store, everyone had gone.\n\n\"Or... not,\" she said to no one in particular. She took a quick look up and down the street, then with a sigh spread her wings and took to the sky with a quick push from her hindquarters. There was, after all, no point in walking back.\n\nThe sooner I meet with the king, the better, she thought as she flew back to her new home, the fluttery feeling in her stomach growing stronger with each wingbeat.\n\nIf I even can."
            },
            {
                "title": "Balance the Ledger",
                "text": "The fluttery feeling in her chest was only worse the next morning when she woke, chasing away vivid dreams of doors slamming in her muzzle, followed by faceless guards arriving in droves to close her bank and seize her hoard. Not that Elnacier could have afforded anywhere near the legions of soldiers she'd seen in her dreams, or even a tenth.\n\nLogic doesn't matter where nightmares and dreams are concerned, Axtara thought as she adjusted her cushion back into place and then, just to put her mind a bit more at ease, checked on her hoard.\n\nOr rather, what was left of her hoard after purchasing her new home and everything that had come with it. She'd nearly wiped out her savings, with only a bare thousand bars left to her name. Still a vast fortune by the standards of Elnacier, and enough to last her...\n\nShe paused. How long will this last me if I don't bring in any new business? She'd done the math several times already, but each of those projections had been before she'd arrived and actually walked through the town.\n\nAnd had half the townsfolk vanish the moment I turned my head, she thought, staring down at the tiny pressed bars of silver and gold. I suppose if the skies stay cloudy I could always hunt to restock my larder. That would at least save some of my food budget. Her home wasn't really set up to function as a butcher's shop, nor as a smokehouse, but she could manage at least one of the two if needed.\n\nThat would only work in the summer months, however, she thought as she pulled her attention away from her savings and left her bedroom. When winter comes, I'll be reliant either on what I can store or what I can buy. Assuming anyone will sell to me.\n\nShe shook her head, claws clicking against bare wood as she made her way to her water closet for her morning ablutions. Of course, if I simply offer an increase over the asking price, then I'm sure to find a seller. Not a great plan in the long run. While any species could overcome fear in the name of, as her uncle had put it, a 'steal of a deal,' it wasn't exactly the best move from a long-term perspective.\n\nWorse, a seller could grow used to it and begin to count on it, driving both an artificial price for a good and adopting a dubious economic stance. Simply offering to pay a butcher here double would only throw the rest of the local economy into a tailspin over time, she thought as she began cleaning her scales, paying close attention to the scratch on her left foreleg. Not to mention rapidly deplete my own finances. Not the best approach, though it would work in a pinch if needed. Maybe short term then, to get the public to warm to her.\n\nAnd assuming I can't get an audience with the king that clears this all up. She set her scale pick down, switching to a hog hair brush and running it down her left foreleg.\n\nThere had been something said the day before that kept running through her head, however. The old man running the courier's office had told her to \"tell her master\" that a return message would be delivered as soon as they had it.\n\nShe ran the words over in her mind. Surely he was confused... wasn't he? After all, her venture was her own, with no other name on the paperwork she had sent ahead. But then if he knew that, the other likely explanation was... something straight from the heart of the Bad Days. Back when most races had believed dragons to be an affront against the Creator, a creation or servant of the unnamed demons that warred against good. A common claim had been that a dragon nearby served a dark master, and if the master was destroyed, so would be its dragon.\n\nUtter nonsense, Axtara thought as she switched limbs, brushing her right foreleg. Dragons are just as much a creation of the Great Creator as any other being. And the demons? She let out a scoff. They live in our hearts. Why take the form of an obvious evil when a subtle one is so much more effective? Why use fire and flame to lay waste to a kingdom when a ruler or a noble with a sick heart can do so much more?\n\nIt was a view that the core of the empires had shifted toward after the Bad Days had ended. Some historians were already calling it \"The Enlightenment\" as long-held prejudices between the various species broke down.\n\nBut if those values haven't made it out here... Well, it could turn out poorly. Elnacier had only a single church. If its leaders were still teaching that dragons were servants of evil...\n\nThere'd be no turning the public in my favor. She twisted, bringing the brush across her back and hind legs, pausing only to knock dust and dirt from its bristles. The fluttery feeling was growing worse. Even if the king supported me, if the local populace believed me to be a tool of evil...\n\nWell, the result was clear. Even the king would turn his favor away from her if that happened. Few kings would risk the populace turning against him over a matter of religion, and especially not for a potential rival of financial power.\n\nNot that she wanted to rival the king. One of the reasons she wished to meet with the king was to explain that very fact. As well that she didn't desire to become the kingdom's own bank with backing of the crown either. Some kingdoms had tried that, and there were definite... problems... that resulted.\n\nI just want to bank for the people here and watch our fortunes grow. Which wouldn't happen if they all thought she was evil.\n\nShe moved on to her tail, brushing it down quickly, and then swapped the stiff-bristled brush out for a softer one to run across her wings. Or maybe it was just an old speciesist who doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks, she thought. You're beating your wings and stirring up a cloud of dust over nothing.\n\nBut then... there was the way the town had reacted to her. Maybe they'd never seen a dragon before. Or maybe they'd only had a negative run-in with one.\n\nBut no, she'd checked the history there. Elnacier had never had any reported dragon problems, even during the Bad Days. Making me the first they've probably ever seen outside of a picture, she thought as she set the brush down. For a moment she considered a layer of scale polish, but then decided against it.\n\nIt is most likely I won't be going anywhere until I receive an invitation from the king. And while I would like to look my best for any potential customers...\n\nShe sighed. After yesterday, I'm not certain how many I'll see. Her morning routine finished, she left her bathroom behind and headed for the kitchen. She wasn't hungry, but perhaps a bit of tea would help settle her nerves.\n\nShe would need to rework her estimates, see exactly how far her finances could stretch if she only was able to bank for a small number of individuals. While seeing increased expenditures. Working out several months of figures would at least take her an hour or two.\n\nAt least it'll keep me in practice, she thought as she found her teakettle, filled it, and set it atop her stove. Then, with a quick glance nearby to make sure she hadn't left anything flammable nearby, she pursed her lips and bathed the teapot in a thick jet of flame. It took a few breaths, but by her third the teakettle had begun to emit a shrill, piercing shriek.\n\nA few minutes later, a warm cup of tea cradled carefully in her claws, she made her way to her desk and went to work."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Usually, when she sat down to work figures, she found it to be a soothing, calming experience she could lose herself in. Especially with a hot cup of cherry tea nearby to sip from.\n\nToday, however... it simply wasn't quite enough to still the constant lightness in her gut. As she ran her calculations, the minutes disappearing in the continual click-and-clack of an abacus and the scratching scribble of figures across some low-grade calculation paper, the churning lightness in her gut seemed only to grow. Like a distant whirlwind on the horizon, about to touch down but still not quite there.\n\nShe was halfway through her calculations when something hit the side of her house, barely missing one of the windows. She jerked upright, her talon skittering across the page and leaving an ugly smear of ink across her careful calculations. Not that it concerned her at the moment. A streak of wasted ink on low-grade paper was a pittance compared to the sight of yet another figure standing in her clearing... loading a sling and bringing it up over their head for another throw!\n\nMy windows! She cleared her desk in a single leap, running across the entryway with her wings half-spread, rushing for the door as the figure in the window began to whirl their sling above their head.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing!?\" The shout was almost a roar, bursting free of her throat as she swung the front door open, practically exploding out onto the porch with her wings spread wide. The figure let out a loud yelp, half losing their grip on their sling and sending their next missile arcing into the woods. \"Well!?\" She reared back, drawing herself up to her full height, wings spread.\n\nFor a moment the figure\u2014a young human male, it appeared\u2014went completely still, his eyes wide and panicked. Then he spun on one heel, dropping his sling as he ran screaming incoherently down the road. He was, for his size, impressively fast, vanishing around the nearest bend in seconds.\n\nLeaving her alone in the clearing with her wings spread. She folded them back in, her breaths coming short and quick. The fluttery feeling in her chest was worse now, almost as if her visitor's second stone had struck her square on rather than flying off into the forest.\n\nWith a jerk she turned and began looking over the front of her home. It didn't take her long to find the result of her attacker's handiwork. Not a dent from a stone, but a smear of yolk and shell.\n\nAn egg? She gave the mess beneath her window a tentative sniff. A fresh egg? She pulled her head back, looking out into the forest in the direction the other missile had flown, but couldn't spot where it had gone.\n\nAn egg? Again the thought rolled through her mind. He was hurling eggs at my home? She watched as a runny bit of whites slithered down the front siding. Eggs?\n\nShe let out a sigh, her whole body sagging. What a wonderful beginning to your bank. No one in town wants to speak with you, they all might think you're evil, and now one of their youths has thrown an egg at your porch.\n\nPart of her wanted to suggest that perhaps it was something the youth did to everyone, that they were simply a wayward child with few manners. But that part of her couldn't speak very loudly. Not with the events of the last two days so fresh in her mind.\n\nShe watched as a blob of yolk made it all the way to the stone porch, spreading out in a widening, quivering pool of wet gold. Cool as the climate was, it would stain if she left it for long, another blemish on her new home. With a sigh, she turned and went back inside, heading for the kitchen to find something to wash it away with, tail almost dragging on the floor.\n\nHer tea had gone cold by the time she'd come back to it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"Hmmm...\" Axtara tapped her claw against the side of her desk, staring down at the array of figures she'd scrawled again and again. \"And if I take that expense out?\" Her abacus let out an assortment of clicks as she redid her math, arriving at a new number which she quickly scrawled beneath the others along her paper.\n\nNone of them were good numbers. Looking at the best of the worst she could face, assuming she could scare up\u2014a term that didn't quite feel right considering her position so far\u2014even a little business, she could live for at least six years and a few months. Tightly, to be sure. But the money would eventually run out.\n\nWith no business at all... She had only three years. Inevitably, no matter how she ran the numbers, the costs of simply existing and taxes did her in.\n\nThere was a cut-off, of course. She'd already calculated it. If she could bring in just four bars a month in income, she'd be neutral. Balanced on the edge of a knife, but with her hoard to fall back on, it was workable.\n\nShe just needed to find enough work to bring in four bars a month. It was a substantial sum. But if she could provide the boost that Elnacier needed...\n\nShe wiped the ink from her claw, staring down at the figures. \"Just four bars.\" Not too difficult to acquire. In theory. A bar was a decent sum, but Elnacier's economy could support it. Easily, from what her agents had learned about the local resources.\n\n\"So how to make four bars?\" Loans were the easiest method. Loan a few bars out to a local, then recoup with interest when they returned their payments. Do that with enough regularity, and she'd have an income of four bars a month. Especially if she could convince some of the local businesses to make investments into expanding or improving their current operations.\n\nThe local lumber operation would be a good start for that. Not only was it mentioned in the notes she'd received from her agents, but even the brief glimpse she'd gotten of it flying home the day prior had confirmed every word. An old mill, driven by a single waterwheel along the river. If Elnacier was to expand, it would need lumber in abundance. Fishing, homebuilding, mining... All of it required everything from beams to boards.\n\nThe pine is good for shipping too, Axtara thought, her mind shifting from the figures on the paper to figures in the future. Export. But for that to happen, they'll need to produce enough first.\n\nThe real trick would be getting the owner of the mill to understand that. If they were a forward-thinking individual, they'd see the opportunities in front of them immediately. If they weren't... She frowned and tapped her claws against the desk once more.\n\nMaybe I could take a short flight down to the coast? To the fishing villages there? There were opportunities for expansion all across Elnacier, but a fisherman looking to build a newer, more modern boat would need both a loan and quite a bit of lumber, which would be evidence to the owner of the mill that perhaps it was time to expand.\n\nIt was possible. It would require convincing several individuals, she thought, idly dipping her claw in ink and sketching out the chain next to her figures. First a simple drawing of a lumber mill, with an arrow pointing at a rough sketch of a boat. But if I could get the demand coming in, enough to show the mill owner that there was a strong reason to expand and overhaul his mill\u2014\n\nA heavy thud echoed through the room, cutting off her thoughts as neatly and as cleanly as a pair of scissors snipping a thread. She jerked up, eyes locking first on the door and then on the front windows. Her insides plummeted.\n\nThere was another figure standing out in the clearing before her home. They were wearing armor\u2014not makeshift, but actual armor, padded leather and metal. And their hands were\u2014\n\nShe was over the desk for the second time that day before she'd even realized it, her mind drawing a connection between the crossbow in her new visitor's hands and the sound of an impact against her door just seconds before. She reached the door and shoved it open, practically spilling out of her home and across the porch.\n\n\"Dra\u2014\" Her home's attacker had barely begun to shout across the clearing before she cut them off with a yell of her own, rage and fury exploding out of her mouth with such volume it almost felt like a physical force.\n\n\"What are you doing!?\" Axtara rounded, her jaw dropping and then clenching as she saw the crossbow bolt sticking out of the front of her door. She seized it in her claws and pulled, the wooden bolt coming free with a faint squeak. It felt as though she'd pulled it from her own flesh. She spun, facing the figure once more.\n\n\"Do you just go around shooting arrows into people's doors!?\" She brandished the bolt, waving it in the air. \"What? For fun? Is that how you greet newcomers to Elnacier? Was that on the brochure and I somehow missed it?\" It was like a dam had burst somewhere inside of her, the words rolling and rushing out in a torrent. \"Come to Elnacier? Be shunned by the community? Take part in our wonderful welcoming tradition of having rocks, eggs, and then arrows thrown at your door!?\" The missile in her claws let out a sharp crack as she crushed it. She barely noticed.\n\n\"Are you going to shoot them at my sign next?\" She sat back, waving a wing at the object in question. \"It's brand new! Cost me a full two bars! And there are no arrow holes in it yet! Is that what you're going to do?\" The momentary fury in her chest had already gone cold, crushed into a small dark lump that made her limbs feel leaden.\n\nShe stared down at her visitor through wet eyes. \"Well? What are you waiting for? Go ahead and shoot it! While you're at it, why not take out a window? Nothing says 'welcome to our kingdom like shooting \u2014'\" Her voice choked, cutting her off, and she shook her head, blinking away tears, the anger flaring once more.\n\n\"You know what? No. Get out!\" Her last word came out as a strangled shout. \"Get out! I paid for this house! I bought this land! With bars I earned working with my own claws! I refuse to let some... barbarian put holes in it! So get out, or I'll... I'll...\" It was hard to think of what she wanted to do, of what would be a sufficient threat. \"I'll set you on fire!\" She jerked forward, spreading her wings and glaring down at the human through hot, angry tears. \"So get out!\" She shook her head. \"Or maybe my mother was right, and you all are still stuck in the Bad Days like a bunch of barbarians.\"\n\nShe tossed the shattered arrow aside, turning away before it even hit the dirt. Though she half expected another to bounce off her scales as she moved back through the door, none did. Nor did one crash against the door as she closed it, or punch through the window, or strike the side of the house.\n\nGood. They were probably already running back down the trail, fleeing from the \"wrath\" of a \"beast.\" She waited a moment longer, half looking back through the window and waiting for a heavy thud, but none came. They were gone.\n\nOnly then did she curl up on the floor behind her desk, head under her wing, anger melting through her shaking body, and let her tears flow freely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Accounting for Errors",
                "text": "Barely minutes had passed before there was a loud knock at the door. Not the heavy thud of another arrow, but an actual cascade of taps, the kind made by a living creature.\n\nShe wanted to ignore it. In her mind, the absolute highs of the prior few days had just clashed with the painful lows, including the moments of minutes before, a perfect combination for a storm of emotions. One she was still somewhat riding through, her flight shaky.\n\nThe knock came again, echoing through the front room. It really was an impressive sound, perfectly audible even as she curled tighter around herself to try and push it out. \"The perfect front door,\" the maker had told her. \"You'll always know when someone is there.\"\n\nAt the time, that hadn't seemed like a downside. Now, however... Again the sound rang through the room, this time with more urgency behind it.\n\nWhoever it was, they weren't giving up. She pulled her head out from beneath her wing, letting out a careful breath before speaking. \"We're closed.\"\n\nShe wasn't sure how loud she'd said it. But it didn't matter. She stuffed her head back under her wing. I'll just... wait for them to go away. And then I'll figure out how to get out of this mess.\n\nThe knocking came again, ringing through the room. Unless they don't get the message. She lifted her head once more. \"We're closed!\" Just enough force that it had to have been heard through the front door.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nAxtara cocked her head to the side. The voice had belonged to a woman.\n\n\"Look, can you open the door?\" the voice continued. It was somewhat high, and almost a little reedy, though it was hard to say for certain through the door. \"Please?\"\n\nAxtara took another deep breath and let it hiss out through her teeth. Mother did raise me to be polite. On the other wing... \"If you're simply going to throw something in my face, can we compromise and skip to the fleeing instead? I promise to\u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" There was a brief moment of what sounded like frustrated mumbling she couldn't make out. \"Look, I just... Can you open the door please?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" She rose, flapping her wings once and then settling them against her sides. Her muzzle and cheeks she simply wiped with her foreleg. She didn't feel like doing anything better to improve her appearance. \"But if you lie, I will set you on fire.\" She still wasn't sure how true her threat was, but hopefully whoever was on the other side of the door couldn't tell that.\n\nShe did notice through the window that the figure with the crossbow had left. Good, she thought as she made her way across the room. May they feel all the guilt they can for shooting my new door with a\u2014 She opened the front door and pulled up short in surprise.\n\nThere, standing on the porch, was the assailant with the crossbow. Except that the crossbow was no longer in their\u2014or rather, her\u2014hands, instead resting nearby on the ground. Along with a wide assortment of knives and a sword of some kind.\n\nAnd a helmet, which was why Axtara could now see the face of the woman standing before her, hands spread in a gesture of peace but a nervous look on her face all the same. A young face, though it could be hard to tell with humans sometimes. Almost buried beneath a crop of bushy brown hair that had clearly been stuffed under a helmet just minutes earlier. And bright eyes that looked... guilty.\n\n\"I...\" The woman swallowed, clearly nervous. \"I am terribly sorry for my behavior earlier. I think\u2014I believe that there's been a very unfortunate mistake.\"\n\n\"A mistake?\" The word came out almost a growl. \"You fired a crossbow bolt into my door.\"\n\nThe woman paled slightly, but didn't step back. Even though Axtara could smell the fear on her. She had courage, whoever she was.\n\n\"That's part of it,\" the woman said, wincing slightly as she spoke. \"Your door?\"\n\n\"What?\" Axtara pulled back slightly, spreading her wings in annoyance, some of her anger coming back. \"Yes. My door. My sign.\" She waved a wing at it. \"My home.\"\n\n\"So...\" The woman looked at the sign and then back down. \"Then you're Axtara?\"\n\n\"Since I hatched,\" Axtara replied, narrowing her eyes as she looked down at the human. \"Why? Who did you think I was?\" Had there been another dragon at one time in Elnacier? Had her agents just missed it? Was that why everyone was so unfriendly? \"Axtara the Studious, if you must have my full name and title.\"\n\n\"Oh... Oh no...\" The woman was looking more alarmed by the moment as she brought her hands up to cover part of her face. \"Oh this is bad.\"\n\n\"I would have used that to describe the arrow in my door.\"\n\n\"Oh father is going to murder me, I just know it. He'll never let me out of the manor again.\"\n\nManor? \"Wait,\" Axtara said, lifting a claw. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name is... Mia Elnacier,\" the woman said, giving Axtara a look that was equal parts embarrassment and nervousness. \"Daughter of King Adrick Elnacier.\"\n\nWhat anger had resurfaced vanished under a flood of icy shock. Oh storms of my ancestors. I just threatened the daughter of the king. She remembered the princess' name from her agents' reports. There were three of them, though she wasn't sure which of them Mia was. But she definitely remembered the name. And no one in such a small kingdom would dare go about impersonating one of the king's daughters.\n\nAnd I just shouted at her for shooting an arrow into my door. Which even if it was awful... she was the daughter of the king.\n\nThe only consolation at the moment she could find was that the princess looked almost as panicked as she felt. Maybe she could use the opening.\n\nThe princess beat her to it. \"Oh Creator,\" she said. \"Oh this is bad. You're Axtara.\" It wasn't a question, but there did seem to be an undercurrent of hope to it, as if maybe she weren't.\n\nThere would be no such answer. \"Of course I am.\" The words were out of Axtara's mouth in snap, before she'd even stopped to consider that she was speaking to royalty. \"Er, your highne\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh stuff it,\" the princess said, waving one hand with a shake of her head. \"I fired a crossbow bolt into your door. If that doesn't give you lee to be upset with me, then you're not hu\u2014\" She caught herself. \"Well, not a rational, thinking being at any rate.\" She shook her head again. \"Oh, this is such a mess. Any other day I would be thrilled, but...\" She let out a long, exasperated groan. \"I am in so much trouble.\"\n\nA faint glimmer was beginning to glow in the back of Axtara's mind. \"Who did you think I was, your highness?\"\n\n\"Just call me Mia,\" the princess said, rolling her eyes and folding her arms across her breastplate. \"Everyone else does, At least, when I can get them to. Anyway, I thought you were...\" She winced again, casting an embarrassed look upwards. \"The summoned dragon of the wizard Axtara? The one who may have been planning to take over my father's kingdom?\"\n\nAxtara sat stunned. Several seconds passed before she could find the right word to answer with. \"What?\"\n\n\"The wizard Axtara?\" The princess' face was flush with embarrassment. \"The one who\u2014?\"\n\n\"No, I heard you,\" Axtara said, sitting back and shuffling her wings. \"I just don't understand you. I'm no wizard. I'm not even skilled with magic. Unless you count breathing fire or flying, but any dragon can do that. How\u2014? Why\u2014?\"\n\nShe caught herself, settled her wings and looked down at the princess. \"Clearly there's been a miscommunication somewhere, your highness. If I could just\u2014\"\n\n\"I already told you, stuff the formalities,\" the princess said, cutting Axtara with a wave of her hand and a scowl. Then her expression softened. \"Call me Mia. But if anyone should be apologizing for anything here, it should be me. Again, I put a crossbow bolt in your door. Nice job, by the way, snapping that. That was actually pretty impressive.\"\n\n\"I... Well... thank you, Prin\u2014Ah, Mia?\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\"\n\nAn awkward silence descended as both of them stared at one another. Axtara felt her tail twitch as she looked down at the princess, and noted that while the young woman was standing still, the fingers of her hand were drumming the side of her leg.\n\nWizard? They thought I was a wizard? A human wizard? Or some species not a dragon at any rate. How did that happen?\n\nThere was one very simple, straightforward way to find out. She peered down at the princess before her once more. \"Princess Mia,\" she began. \"I think that it would be most beneficial for the two of us if we laid out one another's views of what exactly is going on here.\"\n\n\"I think I agree.\"\n\n\"May I invite you in for a cup of cherry tea?\"\n\nThe princess opened her mouth but then shut it again. \"You really are telling the truth? There is no wizard?\"\n\n\"Not in my home, nor anywhere near it, princess.\"\n\n\"On your honor before the Creator?\"\n\nIt wasn't a light oath. Axtara lifted her head slightly. \"On my honor before the Creator,\" she intoned. \"Now, do you promise not to try and shoot me with a crossbow while I serve you tea?\"\n\nThe princess winced slightly. \"I suppose I deserve that. Yes. I promise.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Axtara stepped back, her heart pounding. \"If it would please the princess\u2014\"\n\n\"Mia.\"\n\nShe nodded and spread one wing, stepping to the side with a wave of her claws. \"Then if it would please you, Mia, welcome to my home.\" The princess stepped over the doorway, into the front room, eyes alert as she took it in. Then she let out a low whistle.\n\n\"Wow. Those builders weren't kidding. This place is posh.\"\n\n\"Well, it was intended to be my personal residence,\" Axtara said, folding her wing. She left the door open. With luck, it would let the princess be more at ease given her recent expectations. And the day was warm enough. She moved up toward her desk and motioned with one wing toward the two chairs sitting across from it. \"And I must admit I do enjoy a certain level of comfort.\" Or rather really wanted it, I suppose. \"In addition, I must admit there's a purpose to it. It wouldn't do to have prospective clients come to do business, only to be met with austerity. They might have concerns about my ability to procure the finances they need.\"\n\nShe stepped behind her desk, carefully and quickly gathering her notes and shuffling them to one side. Then, with a touch to a lever on her side of the desk, she lowered the sloped surface and leveled it out, bringing it down to a height that was more suited for a human visitor.\n\nThe princess' eyes widened. \"That's impressive. I've never seen a desk do that before.\"\n\n\"Well, it wasn't cheap,\" Axtara said, setting the lever once more and locking the desk in its new configuration. \"But it was worth every bar. My uncle had a few of them in his bank, and they were absolutely worth the time.\"\n\n\"Your uncle's bank?\" the princess asked as she picked a chair and sat down.\n\n\"Yes. In Helmson. The capital of the Delarian kingdom. I worked for him for over a decade, both as a wings-in-the-sky\u2014sorry, hands-on, to use the human expression\u2014experience, and to save money for my own venture one day.\" Axtara plucked up her teacup. \"I'll be right back with some fresh tea.\"\n\nShe wanted to feel relaxed as she moved back into her home proper, wanted to let loose a sigh as she pulled out the other half of her new tea set, carefully setting up everything atop a silver platter. But the nervous questions in the back of her mind refused to rest. She pursed her lips, a sustained burst of flame roasting the bottom of the kettle until it began to whistle.\n\n\"Did you already have a teakettle on?\" Princess Mia called from the front room. \"Did I fire an arrow at your door while you were having tea?\" There was a definite undercurrent to the princess' words that said someone would have found the event highly inappropriate.\n\n\"Not quite,\" Axtara replied, setting the kettle carefully in the middle of the tray and carrying it out to the front room. \"I was having tea, yes, but...\" She fanned her wings slightly, drawing the princess' focus to them for just a moment as she set the tea set down. \"Dragon.\"\n\n\"You breathed fire.\" There was no mistaking the awe in the young woman's voice.\n\n\"I did,\" Axtara replied, delicately plucking up a human-sized teacup and saucer and presenting them to the princess. \"It does have its advantages from time to time.\"\n\nBoth their cups full, she sat down and motioned with one claw toward the collection of teas on both sides of the platter. \"Each is labeled,\" she said. \"Please, prin\u2014\" She caught herself as the princess lifted one eyebrow, giving her what was a stare worthy of any noble. \"\u2014Mia. Enjoy. Though I'm afraid I don't have any milk at the moment, so some brews may be a bit potent.\"\n\n\"No matter,\" Mia replied, picking up a teaspoon and selecting one of the teas on display. \"Now then, while this steeps... Since you're not here as the servant of a wizard who may be planning to take over my father's kingdom, perhaps you could tell me why you are here? And had such an ornate and, if I'm honest, impressively extravagant home built? I don't think we've got a single pane of glass as crisp as the ones I've seen here, and you've got them built into your roof.\"\n\n\"Well, first, thank you,\" Axtara said, setting the leaves from her earlier tea back into her cup. \"I wanted something that combined historical dragon architecture with a less hard design, something that kept the look but also melded it with the warmer style of Delarian nobility and even what little I could find of architectural design here in Elnacier... But that's not exactly answering the question you asked, your\u2014Mia.\"\n\nShe didn't miss the way the princess' head nodded slightly at the use of her name. Very well then. If she is to insist. I will use it.\n\n\"Anyway, I will tell you why I am here, though I do hope you'll regale me with how my name somehow became attached to that of a wizard planning to overthrow the kingdom.\"\n\n\"Possibly overthrow,\" Mia cut in.\n\n\"Possibly overthrow,\" Axtara corrected. \"But I'm not. Nor is there any wizard. I built this home, and came here, to do exactly what the sign out front says: provide banking and financial services for any and all in the kingdom that wish it.\" She took a sip of her tea. It was weak. Too early. \"But that's all. Hence why I found myself more than a little distraught when a few of my new neighbors took it upon themselves to throw rocks or eggs at my new home.\"\n\n\"But...\" The princess seemed taken aback. \"Why here?\"\n\n\"Elnacier? Because your home is abundant with great natural resources, from lumber to meat to ores. However, being such a young, recently established kingdom, one that was, if you'll pardon the term, effectively wild and barbarous before your father\u2014\"\n\n\"It's still pretty barbaric,\" Mia said.\n\n\"On that I'd have to agree, at least in part,\" Axtara said. \"Someone did shoot an arrow into my door earlier today.\"\n\n\"Crossbow bolt.\"\n\n\"Either way, it was unfriendly.\" She smiled, and to her surprise, the princess let out a laugh.\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Mia replied, her accent thickening till the 'e' was almost buried. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"Well, what I'm getting at is that there's vast opportunity for growth if Elnacier plans to grow to a proper kingdom. If I arrive to finance that growth, then I stand to be one of those beings that reaps the rewards. Loans, financial advice, investments\u2014\"\n\n\"That's the one that's got Uncle Fen so worked up,\" Mia cut in, setting down her teacup.\n\n\"Uncle who?\"\n\n\"My father's best friend. Ever since their adventuring days,\" Mia said. \"He's not really my uncle. He's just been around so long that my sisters and I just started calling him that. Anyway, after father drove out the fell and founded the kingdom, he gave Uncle Fen\u2014Fendall Derin's his full name\u2014the position of minister of finances. He manages the kingdom's money. Since he always did it when they were adventuring anyway.\"\n\n\"But Uncle Fen was worried that these 'investments' were a way to erode father's power base. To buy the people out and turn them against...\" Her words trailed off as Axtara couldn't keep the aghast look from her face. \"I'm guessing by your expression that's not true?\"\n\n\"Far from it!\" Axtara shook her head. \"Take over a kingdom? Never!\" She let a shiver run through her. \"I don't want to rule a kingdom. I want to run a bank. I wouldn't know the first thing about running a kingdom.\"\n\n\"But you do know money.\"\n\n\"Yes, but... knowing how to care for money and running a kingdom are two very different things.\"\n\n\"Unless you were the minister of finance,\" Mia pointed out. \"Uncle Fen did bring that\u2014\"\n\n\"Absolutely not!\" Axtara said, Mia's eyes widening as she cut her off. \"If I were to do that, my bank would be synonymous with the crown. Do you know what happens to nations that do that?\" She waited for Mia to shake her head.\n\n\"They wind up in terrible economic storms,\" Axtara said, speaking quickly. \"A bank that backs the crown enters a scenario where neither can appear weak no matter what or the entire nation appears to be at risk. So what happens when trouble arises?\" She paused and gave Mia a pointed look.\n\n\"They lie, don't they,\" Mia said, her tone carrying a note of flat distaste.\n\n\"Exactly. And then that builds until things come crashing down. Well-reasoned, by the way.\"\n\nMia shrugged. \"My tutor's fairly thorough, and father says I have a good knack for running things. That and it's not hard to guess what a coward would do.\"\n\n\"I...\" Axtara cocked her head to one side. \"Well put. And correct. But no, I have no desire to merge my banking with the finances of the crown. Your uncle's job is secure.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Mia said, nodding. \"Mind if I ask you a personal question?\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\n\"How old are you?\"\n\nAxtara blinked. \"You want to know my age?\"\n\nMia nodded again. \"Dragons age differently, don't they? So how old are you, and how old is that in human years?\"\n\n\"I, uh... Why do you ask?\"\n\nMia smiled. \"Because while you're a lot better at it, you talk like me at one of our fancy diplomatic parties.\"\n\nAxtara opened her jaws but then shut them again. \"Fine,\" she admitted after a moment. \"I'm twenty-six years of age. Which would make me about nineteen or twenty years of age by human standards.\"\n\n\"Hah!\" Mia set down her cut of tea a little too sharply, and Axtara had to hide a wince as the fine porcelain let out a sharp cling. \"I knew it. Same here. Well, in human years. We call them summers out here, though. I've just begun my nineteenth.\"\n\n\"And you've not been married yet?\" The query slipped free and into the air before she'd even thought of it, even as the princess suddenly scowled.\n\n\"Oh, don't tell me you're going to start on that. I know what the rumors are about us out here. We're not entirely uncivilized wildsmen, you know.\"\n\nAxtara stammered, quickly pushing out an apology. \"My apologies, I assumed\u2014\"\n\nMia's expression suddenly switched to a smug smile. \"Too easy.\"\n\nShe'd been had, Axtara realized as the princess continued to smile up at her. Played like a set of pipes. The princess had baited her into being overly apologetic, catching her in her own demeanor of serving a customer. \"Yes, I see what I did there.\"\n\n\"You can relax, Axtara,\" the princess said, sitting back and stirring her tea with a spoon. \"Think of it this way: I'm not here to be a customer. Not right now, in any case. Nor am I here to be a princess. Not officially, anyway.\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"In fact,\" Mia said, leaning forward. \"Since we're about the same age, I'd really rather you just consider this a visit from a possible friend. Or better yet, a neighbor, since friendships usually don't start with someone showing up with a crossbow and knives.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara didn't miss the way the princess' eyebrows lifted as she caught the tone to her voice. \"Maybe not here...\"\n\n\"There are places where a friendship starts with a threat of violence?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"Not anywhere close to here,\" Axtara said. \"And I've never been there, only spoken with merchants who did business there. But across the Scented Ocean, southeast of the empires. The kingdoms on the far side are divided by large, rocky deserts.\"\n\n\"I've heard of them from my tutors,\" Mia said, nodding before taking another sip of her tea.\n\n\"Well, with the hardships there being what they are, negotiations and introductions are done from a position of strength. So you bare your teeth\u2014like this,\" she said, pulling her lips back in a snarl and exposing her own. \"Then you insult them with a statement of power, something that declares how capable you are, while showing something to back that up. For example, you speak about how the one you're greeting will die like...\" She paused. \"There's some large, non-sapient form of lizard that they have there. Something like that, dead beneath your blades, while showing the knives you used to kill it or flourishing the skin.\"\n\n\"Then once you've sufficiently stated your position of strength, the other individual does as well. Basically, you're sort of posturing before you get to know one another. It seems strange but...\" She shrugged. \"Father told me some dragons used to breathe fire when they saw one another as a form of greeting, though that language is long-gone nowadays.\"\n\n\"So in other words,\" Mia said, setting her tea down. More gently this time. \"You're saying that even though I showed up at your house clearly looking for a fight, in some places that'd be perfectly fine, and you'd be friends with them afterwards?\"\n\n\"According to what I know from merchants that dealt with them, yes,\" Axtara said. \"In fact, it'd be considered an insult to the other party not to.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Mia said, her expression brightening slightly. \"Can we say I was just trying that out, then? At least, if my father asks?\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Hold,\" Mia said. \"Look, if it helps, I feel really bad that I didn't bother getting to know more about what was going on. But all the townsfolk have been talking about how this place had to be a lair for a wizard of some kind, given all the money and magic going into it, and then they started talking about the dragon, and with the old myths being what they are...\" She brought one hand up and rubbed at the back of her neck, a sheepish look on her face.\n\n\"Then my uncle and father started being worried, and well...\" She shrugged. \"I put on my armor, borrowed some of the nicer weapons in the armory, and... fired a crossbow bolt into your door. I didn't even bother to ask if someone hadn't gotten something wrong along the way.\" She grimaced. \"Not a great move.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Axtara began. \"Not a very well thought-out one, perhaps. And I'll admit I'm not happy about the newest hole in my door.\"\n\nMia grimaced again. \"Look, if I can be perfectly forward with you, I'm sorry.\" She spread her hands wide, a gesture similar to the one used across the empires to imply peace. \"I made a horrible first impression, and I know that. Father's going to be furious when he finds out.\"\n\n\"But...\" She shook her head, hair fanning out around her, and then looked up, right at Axtara. \"I'm sorry. About all of it. From the misunderstanding to me making a stubborn ass out of myself.\"\n\nShe must have reacted with surprise, because the princess let out a faint chuckle. \"Yes, mother wouldn't approve of me saying that, but that's what I did. And then you let me in for tea, and...\" She shook her head again. \"Look, what I'm trying to say is that I feel horrible. Not just as a member of the royal family, but just as me. I shouldn't have come with a crossbow at all. And no one should have come throwing rocks at you. That's... There's no excuse for that. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Worse, we're kind of close to the same age,\" she continued. \"So that makes me feel doubly guilty because I know I'd be upset if someone came and fired a crossbow at my front door.\"\n\n\"Something tells me you'd shoot back,\" Axtara said, keeping her tone as dry as possible. The princess merely shrugged.\n\n\"Father was an adventurer. Mother might not entirely approve, but she married him, and we don't have the money to keep all three of us under constant guard anyway.\"\n\nInteresting, the analytical part of Axtara's mind noted. An excuse, or can the king truly not afford it?\n\n\"But despite that, I feel like my family has wronged you.\" She shook her head. \"Scratch it, we have wronged you, and I'm sorry. You came to be a boon to our small kingdom, and we tried to drive you out. For that, Lady Axtara, I sincerely apologize.\" There was a slight regal tone to her voice now, and a sense of poise.\n\nJust like she accused me of doing a few minutes ago, she thought as Princess Mia bowed her head slightly.\n\n\"And believe me,\" the princess continued. \"As soon as I return home today, I'll be speaking with my father about it.\"\n\nAxtara blinked. \"Even though you've stated your father will be displeased with your actions?\"\n\nMia shrugged, the mask of poise slipping slightly. \"What kind of person would I be if I couldn't own up to my mistakes? Or ruler if I wouldn't accept responsibility for those I ruled?\"\n\nAxtara let her surprise show on her face. \"You're more humble than most nobility I've met. Uncle always said that it was the mark of a good ruler. I think he was right.\"\n\n\"Well... thanks,\" Mia said, offering her a small smile and taking another, less lady-like sip of her tea. \"But it's also the right thing to do. I'm really sorry that this happened.\"\n\n\"I may not be entirely blameless, Prin\u2014I mean, Mia,\" Axtara said, shuffling her wings before folding them against her sides. \"I suspect that if I go over all of my correspondence with your uncle and my builders, I would find that not once did I mention that I was, in fact, a dragon. That might have made things a bit less...\"\n\n\"Confused.\"\n\n\"To put it mildly, yes.\" She took a long sip of her tea. \"But... my uncle did always say that starting any business was a perilous venture, and that nothing would go quite as planned.\" She let out a short chuckle. \"He told me to keep that in mind when assessing loans for other's businesses. And here I am, forgetting it completely when I start my own.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well...\" Mia threw her cup back, draining the rest of her tea. \"Maybe you made some mistakes, sure. It was nothing I\u2014or Elnacier\u2014didn't make worse. But it is something that we can fix.\"\n\n\"We?\" Axtara cocked one eyebrow. \"You did hear what I said about a bank backing the crown, didn't you?\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about that,\" Mia said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. \"I'm talking about fixing this. This mistake. Both our mistakes\u2014though personally, I think mine was worse. Look,\" the princess said, leaning forward on the desktop. \"Most of the blame is with us, the kingdom. Yeah sure, you might have forgotten to mention a few things, but we're the ones that treated you poorly even when you tried to fix it. I mean... I made you cry. You just came here to open a bank and give our people advice.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just you,\" Axtara said, shaking her head slightly. \"It was...\"\n\n\"My kingdom\u2014sort of\u2014my responsibility,\" Mia shot back. \"Also, let's not forget that I'm sitting in your front room drinking tea in my armor.\"\n\n\"It's nice armor,\" Axtara said quickly. \"I mean it.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Mia said, a quick smile flitting across her face. \"It was a gift from my mother, which might not seem strange to you now, but once you meet her...\"\n\n\"Meet her?\" A slight quiver of thrilled surprise ran down Axtara's tail.\n\n\"Of course meet her,\" Mia said, leaning forward once more, a conspiratorial smile on her face. \"Look, what's that term you use when you take those weird finance books and... put them away or start over?\"\n\n\"Wiping the ledger?\"\n\n\"That's it!\" Mia said, snapping her fingers. \"Look, what if you and I wipe the ledger. I'll go home tonight, and explain to my father what's really going on. That'll ease his and Uncle Fen's minds a bit. Then tomorrow, I'll come back here and you and I can go down into Elnacier for... I don't know, we'll make an excuse. But if we do that, and my father makes it known that you're a banker and financial advisor, then that should help shift the opinion the other way. No wizard, no backing of the crown. Just a newcomer like any of us. Save that you can fly.\" Axtara cocked her head slightly at the faint wistfulness in the princess' final words. \"Anyway, that'll 'balance things' a bit, I think. Especially if afterwards, or perhaps later this week, my family invites you to a royal dinner.\"\n\nAxtara pulled back slightly. \"You'd do all that? Really, you could just tell your father and\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey,\" the princess said, cutting her off. \"You're our subject now, right? You paid your taxes?\"\n\nAxtara felt her wings spread slightly at the question. \"Of course I did\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mia interrupted once more. \"Uncle Fen said as much. Well, sort of. Point is, you paid them. That makes you subject to us, but as father always says, that makes your welfare our responsibility. My responsibility. So if I can help fix this, then I should.\"\n\n\"That's very noble of you, your highness.\" It felt... nice, hearing the words from the woman. Even if actions spoke louder than words... These are the nicest words I've heard since I arrived.\n\n\"Well, in addition, it would allow us both to get to know one another better,\" Mia said. \"Mother has lamented the fact that there aren't any nobles around for a 'young lady such as myself' to spend time with. Most in the village that are of my age spend much of their time working their family businesses or have already married, as is the old custom. It would be nice to have... a friend. Someone my age\u2014sort of\u2014and of the same gender.\"\n\n\"Not exactly the same species,\" Axtara pointed out.\n\nMia shrugged. \"Does that matter?\"\n\n\"Well... no, not to me.\"\n\n\"Well good,\" Mia answered with a smile. \"That and you do have some fantastic tea. I would love to have more right now, actually, but...\" She pushed her chair back and stood. \"At the moment, I need to speak with my father. Urgently. Still, if I could return around second bell tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Second bell?\" Axtara shook her head. \"I'm not sure when that is. I have a clock\u2014\"\n\n\"You have a clock?\" Mia froze, one hand on the back of her seat. \"And it works?\"\n\n\"Well, I presume so,\" Axtara said quickly. \"It's new. I haven't actually set it up yet, since I'm not actually sure what the local time is, so.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have to see\u2014\" The princess took a step forward, around the side of the desk, eyes alight, but then stopped. \"Later. I'll have to see it later. If that's all right with you.\"\n\nAxtara shrugged. \"I see no reason why you shouldn't. I was actually thinking of setting it up in this room. I thought it would be convenient for clients to see what time it was, and that the ticking might be soothing.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Mia said, a single finger tapping her chin thoughtfully. \"But they might find it distracting as well. As far as I'm aware, my family owns the only clock in town. Or rather, owned. But it's a wreck: It was part of the manor when my father arrived, and in terrible disrepair. It runs, but it doesn't really keep time. Not according to any of our hourglasses, anyway, unless they're all wrong too. Mostly it's just for show.\"\n\n\"Anyway, most people here use candles or a sundial,\" she continued even as she turned toward the door. Axtara moved around the desk, coming up alongside as they crossed the room. \"The only exceptions are the lumber mill and the church. Both use a water clock. The priest at the church then rings the bells every three hours starting with the morning bell when he arises.\"\n\n\"The church has bells?\"\n\n\"From when Elnacier was simply a wildland where the fell could swarm at any time, or any number of other dangers. The church was made of stone, to protect the people.\"\n\n\"So when the priest rises, that would be the first bell?\" Axtara said, coming to a stop by the door. Mia gave her a nod. \"So the second, then, would be at... when does he arise?\"\n\n\"According to him, the morning bell is at the sixth hour past the change. And he checks it with a sundial to make sure of his accuracy.\"\n\n\"So three hours to mid-day?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mia said with a nod. \"I'll leave hopefully before the second bells sound, and show you around the city. You should plan on buying something, though.\"\n\n\"There are a few things I would like to buy.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" Mia gave her a quick up-and-down look. \"Do you have any... formal wear? Of any kind? I would wear it if you do. I'll wear something nice as well. For one, it'll be a clear sign to the people that you're just as much a person as they are. And two,\" she said with a faint smirk. \"Even if father is furious enough to try and prevent me from going, the idea of me going out in a dress like a proper young lady will be more than enough for mother to change his mind. Besides, it's kind of fun to dress up and walk about the city from time to time.\"\n\nShe tugged the door open, stepping out with a faint creak of armor. \"And it's definitely more fitting attire for drinking tea than this,\" she said, rapping her knuckles against her breastplate.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Axtara said, sticking her head out of the door as the princess began to gather her array of weapons. \"At least in my bank, anyway. I'm sure it functions quite well for its intended purpose, however.\"\n\n\"It does,\" Mia said. \"Little tight in a few places though. Mother ordered it for me before I'd stopped growing. Still, it's good enough.\" She slipped the crossbow around her shoulders, hanging it against her back. \"Still, time to go tell father and Uncle Fen that they can stop fretting like a pair of old chickens in the henhouse.\"\n\n\"Are you walking?\"\n\n\"My horse is tethered around the bend.\"\n\n\"Well then, I will see you after the second bell. But Princess Mia? Thank you. For hearing me out.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Lady Axtara. See you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow.\"\n\nAxtara pulled her head back inside and shut the door. Through one of the windows, she could see the princess moving down across the clearing and back down the road.\n\nIf she's a princess... some faint part of her mind suggested. But she ignored it. Mia had come prepared to fight, not to fool. And few in the kingdom would have armor as she had worn outside of the royal household. Or dare impersonate a member of the royal family with such aplomb.\n\nNot to mention a few of her agents had mentioned the king's family, in both name and age. It was almost certainly her.\n\nWhich means if she speaks truly, Axtara thought as the princess moved past the first bend in the road. Things might not be so bad after all.\n\nShe still felt the faint shake deep inside from the attack on her door, and despite the princess' words, part of her still hurt. Part of her still felt that her mother had been right.\n\nBut more of her hoped that her mother had been wrong. Maybe things will be all right after all.\n\nShe turned and went back into her home, eyeing the tea set and praying she was right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Raising Capital",
                "text": "Axtara paused, her claw held carefully in the air as the distant sound of bells echoed through the clearing, several clear notes that flowed like a golden glow.\n\nTheir priest should be proud, she thought, lowering her claw away from her easel and turning to look down the road that led to the town. I've certainly heard far worse-sounding bells. It lacked the grace of dozens of overlapping tones that some of the larger choral halls and bell towers she'd heard before had held, but what the notes lacked in volume they made up for with their gentle tones. The craftsmanship of those bells must be skilled indeed.\n\nThere was no sign yet of the princess coming around the bend. Or any other figure for that matter. But she'd said that she would arrive soon after the bells. Which could mean any minute now, Axtara thought, pulling her focus back to the sheet of bronze sitting atop her easel. So I should probably ready myself.\n\nIn just a moment, she thought, lifting her claw once more and carefully scratching away some of the wax atop the bronze sheet. One line became two, then three, and four before at last she pulled her claw away, taking in her work so far and comparing it to the subject in front of her.\n\nNot bad, she thought, smiling as she compared the lines of her new home to those she'd etched into the wax. There were still plenty to put in place, of course, and the trickiest would be the fine detail around the windows. Maybe I should have waited until I'd planted flowers in the boxes.\n\nBut then that would involve waiting for them to bloom. And it wasn't as if she couldn't just envision it and sketch them into the metal anyway. Something... bushy, maybe? She lowered her claw and scratched another faint line into the wax, exposing more of the bright, almost orange bronze.\n\nDefinitely flowers, she thought, lowering her claw and comparing the image in the metal so far to the reality before her. It'll make it look much more lively. Mother and Father don't need to see exactly what my home is currently, but rather what it will be.\n\nIt would be a project to finish another time, however. For the moment, I need to gather my things, make ready, and\u2014\n\n\"Axtara!\"\n\nAxtara turned and looked back down the road toward Elnacier. A figure that could only be Princess Mia had just appeared around the bend, riding sidesaddle atop a large chestnut horse that looked more akin to a warhorse or a draft animal than the kind of steed a noble would have normally been seated on. She was flanked by two additional figures also on horseback, bulky ones wearing armor that looked more functional than decorative.\n\nBoth, she noted, were wearing full helms, and had far more serious expressions than the princess they were clearly guarding.\n\n\"Princess Mia,\" Axtara said, turning and offering a bow as the party neared. \"Welcome.\" Her eyes flicked to the guards as she rose. Both, she noted, were armed with pistols and muskets. There was no mistaking the message the armament sent: They didn't trust her, and they were both prepared to act. \"So I suspect you guessed right about your father's reaction?\"\n\nMia let out a laugh even as her horse slowed, the animal clearly not keen on approaching a predator near its own size. \"Oh, he was furious. Not the angriest I've ever seen him, but he was definitely mad. Still, he did listen.\" She slid down from her saddle, landing on the ground and smoothing her skirts with a quick hand. \"He's still wary, but he agreed that perhaps he and Uncle Fen had leapt without looking.\"\n\n\"In any case,\" she said, turning and gesturing toward the two guards behind her. \"Father did insist I bring my guards with me. This is Olsker and Mathri.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you.\" Axtara gave the pair another bow. One lesson she'd learned, and learned well, from her uncle's bank was that if you treated the servants or guards with the same respect you gave the noble\u2014or close to it\u2014while it could and did irk some, won the same respect given back from those guards and servants. Which in the long run, often tended to be as or even more valuable than the opinion of a single noble.\n\n\"Nice... to meet you... as well?\" one of the guards said as she rose again. She smiled. Lips only, rather than show any teeth. The princess let out a not-so-covert cough, and the guard straightened. \"Yes, it's nice to meet you... ma'am?\"\n\n\"Really?\" The other guard cocked an eyebrow at their counterpart, then looked right at Axtara and nodded in her direction. \"We're pleased to meet you, Lady Axtara. Ignore Olsker's stammering. We still have to coach him when he meets the king.\"\n\n\"It's fine,\" she said, waving a pair of claws and noting that all three of their mounts took a nervous step backward. A far cry from the horses around the empire who'd been trained to be comfortable around dragons. \"I understand I'm the first dragon that many of you have seen this far to the west. It is understandable that there'd be some confusion upon meeting me for the first time.\"\n\n\"So, what are you... drawing?\" Mia asked, peering past Axtara and looking at the sheet of bronze on her easel. \"Scratching?\"\n\n\"Etching,\" Axtara said. \"It's the art of scratching lines into a piece of wax-coated metal and then later using an acid to burn those lines further into the metal to make a picture. You can either fill those lines with ink and make a print, or just let them dry and have the metal as a piece of art.\"\n\n\"And you've got the tools to do that?\"\n\n\"Most of the etching, yes,\" Axtara said, giving Mia a smile and holding up a single claw. \"But as for the printing of it, no. I'll send it to my family when the metal is complete, and let them decide what to do with it.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Mia said, cocking her head to one side. \"Can you do portraits?\"\n\n\"Ah... not well, I'm afraid. I'm decent, but I'm still better with still scenes or objects than I am with living things.\"\n\n\"Drat.\"\n\n\"Still, maybe someday if I continue to practice.\" Axtara took a step forward, gathering the easel in her claws. \"My bags are just inside the door, along with my shawl, if you'll grant me a moment.\"\n\nShe squinted for a moment as she moved to the door, the bronze sheet on her easel catching the shining sun and briefly becoming a bright beacon in her eyes. That was one of the tricks to etching metal, especially on such a bright day. Though it wasn't that warm despite the clear blue sky and beaming sun. More of a cold, fall sunshine, though it was still late summer.\n\nShe set the easel inside the door\u2014there was a chance she'd be able to work on it more later\u2014and slung her bags around her shoulders so that they rested in the center of her chest. Her shawl followed, though less what she'd named it than a colorful length of cloth, almost narrow enough to be a scarf, that she could drape over her shoulders and around the base of her wings. It took a moment to get it properly placed, but once it was, she gave herself an admiring nod as the blue stood out against her emerald scales.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" she said, stepping out of the door and drawing its key from her bag. She didn't miss the questioning glances that the guard, and even Mia, gave her as the mechanism let out a heavy click.\n\n\"I'm a banker,\" she said, slipping the key into her bags once more. \"My vault is another matter, but there's no reason to let the temptation be so straightforward simply to encourage someone to poke around my home.\"\n\n\"Couldn't they break a window?\" one of the guards asked.\n\n\"They could, but that's still a more declarative effort than walking in an open door,\" she answered. \"But there's the other side of the matter to consider too.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Mia asked as she climbed astride her horse. The animal shied away slightly as Axtara stepped up to it, only for the princess to pat the side of its neck and coax it back into place.\n\n\"As a banker, people need to believe that their money is safe with you,\" Axtara said, looking up at the princess astride her mount. \"So if they saw me leaving without taking any protective measures over my home, they might think that their money is as lightly protected as my home. Even though it will be safe in my vault, the view they have behind it may damage their faith in my bank.\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought about it that way,\" Mia said as they began moving down the road. \"So it's a bit like the guard my father employs. We've never been at war with another kingdom or faced too much of a problem, but it assures the people that we are ready for the problem if it did happen. We're already protecting them.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"My uncle explained it to me with a similar comparison of the city guard. People will do business where they trust that their business is safe.\"\n\n\"That, or hire mercenaries,\" one of the guards said.\n\nMia laughed. \"You'd know, Mathri.\"\n\n\"Of course I would. I used to be one.\" It sounded as though the latter comment had been more for her benefit than Mia's, and Axtara turned her head to see the guard looking at her. He seemed more at ease than he had been at first. \"I prefer the more permanent position, myself. The pay isn't as good, but then I get to keep my remaining fingers.\" He held up a hand, showing an empty gap where one of his digits had been.\n\n\"Don't be too impressed,\" Mia said, rolling her eyes as Axtara turned back toward her. \"He lost that finger chopping firewood when he was our age.\"\n\n\"Hey! I'll have you know, it was wood for the commander's tent, and the commander was at the front. Still technically counted as combat.\" Then, in a more jovial tone. \"That's why I got paid so well for it.\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" Mia said as they rounded the bend in the road, their path winding downward through the thick forest. \"Olsker and Mathri won't be with us for long if we stop by the square. They're technically your escort.\"\n\nFor my protection or yours? Axtara wondered, glancing back at the pair. Again, neither had reached for their muskets, but they were clearly on display.\n\nThen again, you're being paranoid. How many guards in the city carried muskets? No small number. And, as she watched, and perhaps as if reminded by the princess' words, the pair urged their horses forward, passing both her and Mia by and taking up a lead position, rather than at their backs.\n\n\"Escort to where?\" she asked Mia.\n\n\"That's the part I'm not as fond of,\" Mia said. \"Mother convinced father to let me come and spend time with you, but even she was wary of the idea without at least meeting you first.\"\n\n\"So we're to meet with your mother?\" Axtara asked, her stomach giving a sudden flutter.\n\n\"Yep!\" Mia said with a grin. \"In the city, not at the house. She'll meet us there, introduce herself, and then head back to the manor with Olsker and Mathri.\"\n\n\"I see.\" That's not so bad.\n\n\"But she may invite you to dinner to meet with my father and make a formal introduction.\"\n\nThe fluttering, weightless sensation in her gut came back with a sudden drop that made her want to spread her wings. Relax, she told herself. You've met with nobles before. Not kings and queens\u2014uncle always took those\u2014but nobles. And this is a small kingdom. They're just like... really important nobles.\n\nHer momentary panic must have shown on her face, because Mia gave her a chagrined look. \"Yeah, sorry to spring it on you without warning. I was going to say something when we arrived, but then I got distracted by the metal thing\u2014\"\n\n\"Etching.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that. Sorry, I let my mind wander, and forgot to even ask you if it was all right.\"\n\n\"It's fine.\" Axtara gave her a smile. \"After all, I wrote asking for an audience.\" I just assumed I'd have a bit more warning. I would have worn a different shawl. And perhaps some jewelry.\n\n\"Yeah, father's not happy about that either,\" Mia said.\n\n\"What? Why?\" The fluttery feeling in her insides felt like she'd jumped off of a cliff, and Mia's horse shied to one side as her wings tried to reflexively spread.\n\n\"Oh! No!\" Mia said, surprise and then embarrassment on her face. \"No, I didn't mean at you.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She pulled her wings back in. \"Then who?\"\n\n\"The couriers,\" Mia said, a pained look on her face. \"Apparently, before I'd even left to come visit you yesterday, father had already penned a message to be taken to your home as soon as possible. The courier was under specific instructions to do so immediately and then wait for your reply. But he didn't. None of them did.\"\n\n\"None of them?\"\n\n\"That old codger has a couple of apprentices working for him,\" Mia said, nodding. \"Two, I think. He was father's... well, not squire, but similar, back when he was an adventurer.\"\n\n\"Valet?\" Axtara offered.\n\n\"That works,\" Mia said with a nod and a smile. \"Anyway, when father founded the kingdom, he asked him what he wanted to do as a reward for all his service. He took the courier job and has been running it ever since.\"\n\n\"'Running' and mention of that old coot don't belong in the same sentence,\" one of the guards cut in. \"Even before he got old.\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" Mia said, stressing the word but not disputing the guard's claim. \"Father found out from me that you'd never received his response, and when he asked Old Vern about it, Vern made an excuse about it raining.\" She let out a sigh and shook her head.\n\n\"It wasn't raining yesterday.\"\n\n\"Only in Vern's head,\" Mia said. \"By which I mean the old coward wasn't brave enough to deliver the response, or any of his apprentices. Father gave them a pretty impressive tongue-lashing, since their lack of effort is part of the reason this misunderstanding grew to what it is in the first place.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She settled her wings back in against her sides, the plummeting sensation fading once more. \"Well, that's good.\"\n\n\"And he was already planning to extend to you an invitation to dinner. Or rather, to the wizard he thought you were.\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"I'm going to have to deal with that reaction from the citizenry a lot, aren't I? I mean, that I'm not a user of magic?\"\n\n\"You're not?\" One of the guards\u2014Mathri\u2014twisted in his saddle to look back at her, his mount shying slightly to the side before he nudged it back on course with his knees. \"But you're a dragon.\"\n\n\"And you're a human,\" she countered. \"All the wizards I've ever known have been humans. Can't you do magic?\" Mia let out a loud laugh as the guard's expression shifted to confusion.\n\n\"Well... no,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, neither can I,\" she replied. \"Save that which comes naturally, such as breathing fire and flying. But past that?\" She shook her head. \"I'm no more a wizard than the princess. Or you.\"\n\n\"Eh, looked at it, got bored,\" Mia said, shrugging. \"Not my thing. But getting back to the topic at hand, father was thinking a dinner would be a fine way to welcome you to the kingdom as well as see what sort of... well, man you were.\" She smirked as she stressed the word, and shot Axtara a wink.\n\n\"Well, while a dinner would be nice, I'm afraid he'd be most disappointed on two counts,\" Axtara said, drawing her head and up and taking a brief moment to put her claws to her chest like an orator. Mia let out a snort, and she grinned. \"Still, one of the first rules my uncle taught me about business was 'never turn down free food without a really good reason.' It won't quite be how I expected to make my first impression, but as impressions go, being fed sounds quite nice compared to waiting in a stuffy hall.\"\n\n\"Our hall isn't stuffy,\" Mia said quickly, her expression suddenly flat and serious. Then she grinned again. \"It's too drafty.\"\n\nAxtara let out a snort. \"So should I wear a thicker shawl, then?\"\n\n\"Is that what that is?\" Mia asked, cocking her head to the side. \"I thought it was a scarf.\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" Axtara said, tilting her head back and relaxing her wings slightly. \"I've been saying that for years! It's just a thicker scarf. But no, someone called it a shawl for dragons, and now it's a shawl. Ugh!\"\n\nMia let out a laugh as the trees around them began to thin. \"Hey, I understand. Mother told me a few years ago that she'd ordered some petticoats from the empires for me, and I was so excited. Then they showed up, and they weren't coats at all. They were undergarments. Fancy ones.\" She let out a scoff. \"Someone out there is tricking young, impressionable ladies. I mean, 'coat' is right in the name!\"\n\n\"Ugh,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"You know what's even worse? There are scarves for dragons. They're wider, and thicker, and longer. But why they didn't just call those winter scarves, and these summer scarves, I don't know.\"\n\n\"That said,\" she added, tilting her head and looking down at the swath of blue across her shoulders. \"I do like the color. And given that I don't need clothing, having options at all is nice.\"\n\n\"That's a fair point,\" Mia said with a nod. \"I can't imagine it would be easy to fit you with a dress. Or petticoats.\"\n\n\"I actually have seen a few dragons try. But they're less dresses and more loose, flowing robes. They're not cheap, either.\"\n\n\"Petticoats too?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"Thankfully, no. At least, not that I've heard of. The advantage,\" she said, spreading one wing, \"of scales.\"\n\nMia let out a laugh, but then she slowed her mount, leaning over slightly, one hand held up. \"Not to be indelicate, but may I...?\"\n\n\"You may,\" Axtara replied with a quick nod of her head. She slowly extended the wing between them, its leading edge toward the princess. She felt a light touch along the limb. \"You're far from the first to ask, and you did so politely.\"\n\n\"It's... warm?\" Mia sounded surprised.\n\n\"You thought I would be cold? Like a snake?\" She shook her head and let out a laugh, pulling the wing away. \"We're not cold-blooded. Didn't you ever hear the old stories? 'The blood of a dragon runs hot?'\"\n\n\"I thought that was just an expression,\" Mia said, looking at her palm before clasping her fingers around the reins once more. \"A figure of speech.\"\n\n\"It wasn't.\"\n\n\"So then... what happens when you get warm?\" Mia asked. \"Dogs pant, sheep and people sweat.\"\n\n\"We sweat,\" Axtara said, lifting one eyebrow as she looked at Mia. \"Sort of an indelicate question, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I'm curious,\" Mia said, shrugging in a manner that would have had the high ladies of the empires turning up their noses. \"And anything but delicate.\"\n\nOne of her guards let out a sudden cough that sounded suspiciously like \"putting-it-lightly.\"\n\n\"What was that, Olsker?\"\n\n\"Nothing, your highness,\" the guard said quickly. \"Just swallowed a bug. That's all.\"\n\n\"Sure you did,\" Mia muttered, fixing the back of the guard's head with a flat stare. Axtara let out a snort of amusement.\n\n\"So, Mia,\" she asked, pulling the princess' focus away. \"What do you normally do when not escorting young dragonesses around Elnacier or challenging them to battle outside their front door?\"\n\nOlsker let out another cough, this one suspiciously sounding like \"get-into-trouble.\"\n\n\"Was that another bug, Olsker?\"\n\n\"No, your highness,\" Olsker replied, coughing again, though there was no real weight to it. \"That was a spider. On my saddle, miss. You know I hate spiders.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh...\" Mia said, giving the back of the man's head a stern, almost matronly look. Then with a shake she shrugged and turned her gaze back toward Axtara.\n\n\"Mostly? Tend to the manor. Those are my current duties, anyway. Father's got me working with the gardeners and the kitchens, learning how to manage both. Says it's good practice for leading no matter where I end up, even if that's just here. Though I believe mother pressured him into it. I no longer need tutoring, but mother insists I help my siblings, and it is good practice. Mostly, I think they'd like to see me pursuing matters of marriage but...\" She shrugged again. \"We are a long way from any eligible bachelors. The few that have come have been more interested in subsuming our kingdom than marrying me, and father didn't work so hard to found Elnacier simply for me to throw it away.\"\n\n\"You could always hire a dragon,\" Axtara suggested.\n\nMia's eyes widened. \"People really do that? Hire a dragon to kidnap a princess?\"\n\n\"Or a prince. Or a noble. Or even a rich merchant,\" Axtara said. \"But yes. They do. And it's less a kidnapping and more of a private, publicized vacation.\"\n\n\"Where they battle the dragon to the death?\"\n\n\"To the death?\" She rustled her wings. \"Sky and storms of course not. The Bad Days are gone. It's a business venture. The one paying for the service decides what the challenge will be.\"\n\n\"Oh. Really?\"\n\n\"Yes. Some do go for the traditional 'defeat a dragon in single combat,' of course, but many others come up with their own challenges.\" She paused for a moment, trying to recall some of the odder challenges that had spread among the nobility. \"One noble known for their appetite made the challenge a cooking contest, of all things. In order to win the challenge, the woman had to cook a several course meal that both he and the dragon found exceptional.\"\n\n\"You're fibbing.\"\n\n\"I am not,\" Axtara said, stopping for a moment and pulling herself up, claws over her chest. \"May I never fly again.\"\n\n\"Did... anyone ever win?\" Mia was giving her a gaze of intense curiosity. And a little amazement. So, Axtara noted, were the guards.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, grinning. One of the horses shied to the side. \"It took a few months, during which I seem to recall the dragon almost defaulted on the contract. Apparently their cooking wasn't up to the noble's standards either. Even when he brought in his own staff.\"\n\n\"The noble? Or the dragon?\"\n\n\"The noble. Anyway, it took a few months, but a woman from across the Scented Ocean showed up and cooked them both a five-course meal that he pronounced the winner.\"\n\n\"So she married him?\"\n\nShe let out a snort. \"That's what he thought. Made the announcement and everything, only to discover that her family was far wealthier than his... and that he was marrying her.\"\n\n\"What's the difference?\" Mathri asked.\n\n\"Politics,\" she replied. \"And he had to move. Quite the scandal, but once he heard her terms...\"\n\n\"Which were?\"\n\n\"Back out of the engagement and my family sinks your fleet.\" She grinned again.\n\n\"That sounds... serious,\" Mia said, her eyes wide. \"And barbaric.\"\n\n\"To be fair,\" Axtara replied. \"It wasn't the dragon's fault. The noble didn't read the marriage contract before signing it. His mind was on his food.\" She shrugged, fanning her wings slightly. \"Rumor among the nobles when I left was that he'd almost doubled in size since he married, so I suppose he's happy and well-fed, just like he wanted.\"\n\nMia let out a snort which quickly grew into a chuckle, and then laughter. \"Mother has said that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.\"\n\n\"Well, in that... I think it was a baron. But in his case,\" Axtara said, still grinning. \"Your mother is right.\"\n\n\"Any other strange\u2014or rather, different\u2014challenges that you know of?\" Mia asked. \"I've heard of the practice, but I honestly thought it was just a story of some kind.\"\n\n\"Well, back a few decades ago\u2014right around the time I was born, I think\u2014there was a mercenary commander's daughter who hired a dragon to test potential suitors at the game Stakes.\"\n\n\"Oh, father loves that one,\" Mia said. \"He plays it with the guards all the time. You?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"I'm not good at it at all.\"\n\n\"I'm decent,\" Mia said, shrugging once again. \"Father still beats me. Anyway, what happened? Did she find her suitor?\"\n\n\"In a manner of speaking,\" Axtara said. \"She practiced with the dragon every night, playing Stakes. Eventually, he beat her, and um... She married him.\"\n\n\"What!?\" Mia jerked the reins, bringing her horse up short even as she spun around. \"A woman marrying a... A dragon? How does that even work?\"\n\n\"Quite well, at least to go by the story. It was\u2014is?\u2014a long and happy mar\u2014\"\n\n\"Not that!\" Mia said, waving one hand. \"The... other thing.\" She glanced at her guards, and then spoke in a lowered voice. \"You know... Intercourse? Because if he's... you know, big, and a dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"Princess!\" Axtara could feel her face flushing. The sight must have shocked the princess as well, because her eyes went wide.\n\n\"You're blushing!\"\n\n\"Of course I am. Dragons blush. It's a thing we do, especially over such indelicate conversation!\"\n\n\"Aren't you curious?\" Mia asked, her tone taking on a teasing quality. \"I mean, I'm sure you know how it works between two humans, and between two dragons, but what about a dragon and a human?\" Both her hands came up, gesturing. \"I mean, the weight difference alone\u2014\"\n\n\"Magic!\" Axtara managed to gasp, fanning her wings once more, and this time not with humor. \"She could turn into a dragon, and he into a human. And that's all I know.\"\n\n\"Really? I've heard of magic doing that, but...\" Mia took her reins back and gave them a little flick, their forward path resuming once more. \"You don't suppose they ever\u2014?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said quickly. Maybe too quickly. \"No I do not.\"\n\n\"Well, suit yourself,\" Mia said, smirking slightly. For a brief moment, a worry that she would be soon meeting with the king and queen for a less courteous reason crossed her mind.\n\nBut no, Mia had said she was indelicate in a few ways. Perhaps that was merely one of them.\n\n\"Well, what about you?\" Mia asked, her sudden question cutting across Axtara's thoughts. It took her a moment to gather them.\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes, you! Axtara the Studious! How'd you get the title? Are all dragons given them? Do you have any sisters or brothers? Why banking? You know, you?\"\n\nAxtara blinked at the rapid barrage of questions, running over them in her mind before replying. \"Dragons are given their title either by their parents or those around them. They're not always complimentary either, though sometimes what is seen as insulting by some can become a mark of pride among others. Tergerath the Shrew, for example, was so-called by those who tried to drive him out of his lair during the Bad Days. His lair was a labyrinth, and often rather than fight he'd simply retreat into it, using his small stature to his advantage. He took the title as a mark of pride, because he didn't want to fight and would rather have been left alone.\"\n\n\"As for my title,\" she said, smiling. \"It was bestowed upon me by my parents when I was nine years of age and I kept trying to encourage my tutor to stay past the appointed lessons for more learning.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mia asked, one eyebrow shooting up.\n\n\"Of course,\" she replied, smiling at the princess. \"Knowledge is the gateway to a larger world, and it's such an amazing one. I would try to bribe extra lessons out of her, or get her to show me something else from her books. Eventually, she settled for leaving me with a few of her books that other students weren't using, and I would pore over them.\" Her smile widened as she remembered the long hours she'd spent at the front of her parent's lair, reading under the light of the sun. She could almost feel the heat shining down on her scales.\n\n\"Anyway, my parents began making jokes about how I would become a scholar, because I was studying so much, so they began calling me Axtara the Studious, and... I liked it.\"\n\n\"So do you like all subjects?\" Mia asked. \"Or just a few.\"\n\n\"History is interesting, but specifically the parts of it related to my two favorite subjects: Math and finances. Language is decent, but not my favorite topic. Science was interesting to learn about, but not to be involved in. Geography was perhaps my weakest area of study. Though I do like a good map.\"\n\n\"And you liked the arts, I'll wager.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Axtara said, nodding. Ahead of them the road began to slant upward ever so slightly. Was it around the next bend that would reveal Elnacier, or the bend after? She couldn't remember. \"You?\"\n\n\"Arts is enjoyable enough, I suppose. Mother hoped I would have talents as a painter, but it simply wasn't to be. I'm passable at needlework, however. And weaving. I'm better at leatherworking.\"\n\n\"Leatherworking?\"\n\nNow it was Mia's turn to smile. \"Yup. I've done some tanning as well. Mother despises it when that happens. Says it takes days for the smell to fade.\"\n\nAxtara's nose wrinkled at the thought of working in a tannery. Just the tanners she'd dealt with at the bank had carried the acrid stink with them. Working directly with it...\n\n\"Though being better at it doesn't mean I'm as good as our actual tanner. I'm nowhere close. I just enjoy working with it.\"\n\n\"Do you like working with your hands then?\" Axtara asked. \"The physical, rather than the mental exertions?\"\n\nMia appeared to think for a moment before replying. \"I suppose so. I'll admit that I actually found geography quite thrilling... But to me, it's because I can go to those places. Writing a letter or calculating numbers really isn't exciting to me unless there's a reason behind it.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"Well, I find them quite invigorating, even if there doesn't appear to be a specific purpose about it. You bring all these numbers together and they do interesting things. And often strange things that can then be used to calculate something in the real world. Or shift a balance of power. All because of numbers in a ledger.\"\n\n\"Shift a balance of power?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"Probably not the best way to put it,\" she admitted, giving the princess an embarrassed grin. \"Perhaps a better comparison would have been the axle of a millstone. Comparatively, it is a small thing. But so much only happens because the axle is there. Likewise with math: It may not seem like much, but the world around us can be explained by those numbers. In turn, if those numbers are accurately recorded and the equations with them carried out, we can replicate something and perhaps learn about it.\"\n\n\"Huh. And here I thought it was just to tell you how much you could spend.\"\n\n\"Well, that too,\" Axtara said with a chuckle. The trees ahead of them were definitely clearing now, and she could smell a faint, crunchy odor in the slight breeze. Bread. A baker. I wonder if they have pastries?\n\n\"As far as siblings, I have one older brother and one older sister. My sister is the eldest, then my brother, and then myself.\n\n\"Ooh, what's it like having a brother?\" Mia asked. \"I've only got my younger sisters.\"\n\nAxtara offered her a shrug. \"I suppose I would say it was like having a brother.\"\n\n\"That doesn't tell me anything at all.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not sure what you're hoping for. He was loud and rambunctious at play, but then so was I,\" she said. \"He went on to study magic, though. I believe he's apprenticed to an alchemist at the moment, learning about potions and the elements.\"\n\nMia nodded, showing a glimmer of interest at the word \"magic\" but not speaking, and so she moved on to the final question. \"As for why I decided to devote my life to banking, it seemed the natural thing to do... Though I'm not the first dragon to come to that conclusion.\"\n\n\"Dragons and wealth do seem to go hand-in-hand in the stories,\" Mia said.\n\n\"Or claw-in-claw,\" Axtara said with another grin. Ahead of them the edge of the treeline was coming into view, the road moving out of the forest and into the outskirts of Elnacier. \"But yes, I'm not the first to make such a distinction. My decision was born more out of a love of ledgers and accounting than a lust for gold. Though a chance to get fabulously wealthy\u2014or at least significantly\u2014doesn't hurt. But I enjoy making investments multiply and tracking the growth and movement of finances. It's magic of its own to be able to sit down with a collection of numbers and then inform someone exactly how much profit their company has made in the last year, or whether or not they'll be able to keep doing business with another market changing, or anything like that.\"\n\n\"It sounds... complicated.\"\n\n\"Isn't running a kingdom?\"\n\n\"A fair point,\" Mia said, nodding as they moved out of the trees at last, the scent of pine fading slightly, subsumed but not quite overwhelmed by the scent of human habitation as Elnacier itself began to form up around them. Loosely spaced home and farm plots began to grow closer together, replaced by homes that belonged to merchants or those with jobs that didn't involve crops.\n\n\"Mother should be at the square,\" Mia said as they turned onto the main, central road. It wasn't straight\u2014whoever had founded the town clearly hadn't been thinking about that\u2014but instead meandered back and forth like a lazy river. The smell from the bakery grew stronger, as did an array of other, subtler scents, but mixed with them all was the scent of people packed in close proximity.\n\nAnd a few... less savory scents. When the wind shifted. Elnacier didn't quite embrace, or perhaps hadn't heard of, modern sanitation methods.\n\nThe town itself was fairly active, though Axtara didn't miss the way that activity slowed when curious eyes looked upon their party and saw her walking next to the princess. A few even openly glared.\n\n\"So, Lady Axtara,\" Mia said, her use of the formality catching Axtara off-guard. \"Did I hear correctly that you are in the possession of some fine pieces of jewelry to wear alongside your shawl? Perhaps you could wear some to the dinner with father tomorrow.\"\n\nIt only took a fraction of a second for her mind to catch up. The princess was speaking to her as a noble would another noble or a lady of great importance. So that the people see her treating me as a noble, and not a beast.\n\n\"Why, of course I do,\" she said, offering the princess a careful smile.\n\n'Old number three,' her uncle had called the expression. 'Polite. Congenial. Pleasant.'\n\n\"Though,\" she continued, fanning her wings slightly. \"Choosing which to wear will be a challenge. I have several pieces I'm very fond of.\" Not that many, but enough.\n\n\"Ooh, you must come for dinner more than once. It simply wouldn't do for a lady of your standing and resources not to be able to show off more than one piece.\"\n\n\"Quite right. It wouldn't do at all.\" She caught sight of a few of the townsfolk's jaws dropping as she spoke with the princess. Others simple stared with wide eyes... but a few took on thoughtful looks shortly thereafter before nodding, their minds switching over to this new happenstance with apparent ease.\n\n\"Or,\" she continued, \"perhaps I could invite you to my own home for a meal? The furnishings are exquisite.\" That was no exaggeration, either. I paid good money for those. \"I regret to say that I haven't acquired the services of a good chef yet\u2014\" Not that I plan to. \"\u2014but I'm sure I could find someone on short notice to prepare a meal fit for the royal family.\"\n\n\"That sounds delightful,\" Princess Mia said as the road ahead of them widened, opening up to the central square at last. \"I will suggest it to father.\"\n\nWait, is she serious? The air the princess was putting on made it hard to tell, as did her calm, collected look.\n\nThen she winked, and Axtara gave her a grin. So... maybe?\n\nThe town square was more of a green, an open field with hard-packed open dirt paths winding across it. Here and there semi-permanent-looking booths had been set up, the same vendors she'd seen the other day that had so quickly turned tail and closed down. At the moment most of them were open, wares or materials on display. None of the owners were paying her any attention yet\u2014some of them weren't even present. The majority of the green seemed entirely occupied with a speaking figure wearing a shimmering blue gown of silk.\n\n\"Oh, she got out the blue dress,\" Mia said quietly, dismounting. \"She's taking this seriously.\"\n\nIt was the only warning Axtara got before their party seemed to catch the queen's attention. She smiled and spread her hands, the crowd quieting immediately and parting before her.\n\nOkay, uncle trained you for this, Axtara thought. Keep your wings steady. Don't let them quiver. Head back, neck upright. Regal, but not haughty. Tail moving in gentle, easy motions. Not fast, not motionless. Claws still.\n\nShe did the best she could as they moved across the green, though she couldn't help but let a few shivers of nervousness roll down her tail. As they neared the queen, Mia slowed, and Axtara followed her lead, coming to a stop as the two guards continued on.\n\n\"My queen,\" Olsker said, bringing his horse to a halt before her and clasping one fist across his chest as he bowed his head. \"May we present to you Lady Axtara the Studious, from distant lands.\"\n\nThe queen nodded. \"Thank you, captain.\" Then her focus shifted, and Axtara felt her pulse quicken. The end of her tail flicked again, against her will.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" the queen said.\n\nJust stay calm, Axtara thought. Her name had sounded like an invitation to come forward, and so she did, eyes carefully watching the queen to see if she'd made a misstep.\n\nCome on, uncle trained you for this. He just... never let you do it. Still, full royalty wasn't too far from nobility. And she had done that.\n\nShe bowed, head low and one set of claws on her chest. Her wings she carefully extended, not to their full width, but halfway and likewise held low. \"Your majesty,\" she said. Is there some sort of honorific I should be offering? She fell back on a basic, but straightforward one. \"It is an honor to meet you.\"\n\nThe queen blinked, the motion subtle but clear. Was she shocked? Surprised? Did I offend her in some way? She could feel her tail lashing once more, the tip vibrating with increasing speed as\u2014\n\nThen the queen smiled. \"A more formal greeting I've not experienced in some time. You may rise, Lady Axtara.\" She let out a short chuckle. \"We're not quite as formal here in Elnacier, though such respect is welcome to see. I understand that there have been some misconceptions about your arrival here in our kingdom.\"\n\nI'll say. \"There were, your majesty. It would seem that many were caught by surprise by my... shall we say lack of human form while sharing a human-like nature?\"\n\nThe queen let out a laugh this time. \"Well said. And well spoken. Where do you hail from?\"\n\n\"The Kingdom of Delaria, your majesty.\" Axtara bowed her head again, though only slightly. \"May I ask where you hail from?\"\n\n\"Nuveria,\" the queen said, still smiling. \"You likely passed through it on the way here. Are the fields still as golden as I remember?\"\n\n\"They are, my queen,\" she said, smiling. Mia's mother being from Nuveria explained the slight lilt to her accent as well, no longer as musical as someone from the kingdom, but clearly coming from there. \"The flight across your homelands was wonderful indeed.\"\n\nAt that the queen's smile grew, and Axtara could see her resemblance to Mia. It was in the eyes and cheekbones, as well as the shoulders. Mia's hair and nose were decidedly different, however, the queen's hair light, long and straight where Mia's was dark and bushy.\n\n\"I can only imagine,\" Queen Elnacier said, her smile growing somewhat wistful. \"Just walking those golden fields was a wonderful experience. Flying over them, I imagine, would be beyond expression.\" Then the wistfulness faded. \"But each kingdom comes with its own strengths. The fields here may not glimmer with golden stalks of wheat, but there is not a kingdom known that has pine that could rival Elnacier.\"\n\n\"In any case,\" the queen continued. \"I'm afraid I do need to be getting back to the manor and seeing to my duties, but it was wonderful to meet with you, Lady Axtara. I expect I'll see you at dinner tomorrow night?\"\n\n\"It would be my pleasure, you highness.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Is there anything in particular you would like to see served? I'm afraid I'm not exactly current on traditional dragon cooking.\"\n\n\"I'm omnivorous, your highness, so anything will do. And the myths and legends of my species eating gold and gems are just that. But if you would be kind enough to grant me a request, I do prefer to have a bit of meat with each meal if possible.\"\n\nQueen Elnacier nodded. \"I believe our chef is up to the challenge. I should see if he can prepare some Elnacier goat for you. Have you ever had any?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"No, your majesty, I have not.\"\n\n\"Then I will most certainly have to see what you make of it, Lady Axtara. For now, I bid you farewell. Enjoy your morning. Mia?\" The queen looked past her, back at the princess. \"Don't forget that you promised to take your sister riding this afternoon.\"\n\n\"I won't, mother,\" Mia replied.\n\n\"Excellent.\" Queen Elnacier turned, looking out over the still quite present crowd. \"And I won't forget what we talked about, Firron. I'll mention your issues with your neighbor to my husband, and we'll see if we can help you two reach a reasonable agreement.\"\n\nThen she turned, the blue silk of her dress swirling around her. \"Captain Olsker, if you would be so kind as to escort me back to the manor.\"\n\n\"Of course, your majesty.\" The procession moved off, the crowd breaking up before the queen had even left the square and leaving Axtara standing there with Mia next to her. Mia's horse had departed with the guards.\n\n\"Your mother is quite nice.\"\n\nMia chuckled. \"Don't let her fool you. If you make her angry, she's made of steel.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Mia said quickly, nodding as Axtara looked down at her. \"That's how father met her, actually. Or she caught father's eye, rather. He was in Nuveria looking for someone to help him rule, and made an embarrassing mistake while speaking before a few members of the nobility. Accidentally, and he apologized, but it wasn't enough for some of them. An offended noblewoman used her station to publicly humiliate father. Mother was a noblewoman's daughter at the time and had seen the whole thing. She berated her associate for their actions so completely they apologized and stormed out. Father said he knew right then and there, watching her chew into one of the nobles in his defense that if he couldn't find a way to be her husband, the kingdom would collapse when he died.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Father's an old adventurer,\" Mia said, shaking her head. \"He's prone to exaggeration. But he's right about mother's ferocity. She's kind, but that isn't a weakness. So... I think that went pretty well.\"\n\n\"I do too,\" Axtara said, watching as the queen and her escort left the square, disappearing between the houses and businesses. \"Riding with your sister?\"\n\n\"Abathine,\" Mia said. \"She loves it. Mother has me go with her just in case. The forest here is fairly safe, but that's not the same thing as entirely without risk. Means I'll have to change out of this first, too,\" she said, one hand tugging at her dress. \"It's a little too nice for real riding.\" She let go of her skirts and looked up at Axtara once more. \"So... where do you need to go first?\"\n\n\"Well...\" She took a faint sniff at the air. \"I do need to see that courier... What was his name?\"\n\n\"Vern.\"\n\n\"Yes, Vern. I need to speak with him and get the message your father sent to me. As well as see about setting up a more regular message service.\"\n\n\"Not something most expect out of Vern.\"\n\n\"Still, I should try. I also need to purchase some greens. I have spices, and I do enjoy meat, but I'm not without tastes.\"\n\n\"Well, you're in the right place for that.\"\n\n\"But first,\" she said, sniffing again and then turned, tucking her tail close so that she didn't sweep Mia's legs out from under her with it. You only make that mistake once or twice before you learn. \"First I cannot stop smelling that wonderful bread. And unless things here are more different than I ever anticipated,\" she said, pointing a claw at a warm-looking storefront. \"That is a bakery.\"\n\n\"It's the baker's shop, but I suppose that's mostly the same thing,\" Mia said.\n\n\"Do they make any pastries?\"\n\n\"Maybe? We could check. They do make some sweet rolls with honey, if that's what you were wondering. But they're not cheap.\"\n\n\"Well then let us start there,\" Axtara said, pointing a wing at the shop and noting the way the nearby crowd watched. A few still looked skeptical, but more simply looked curious.\n\nWell, spreading a little money around never hurts, she thought, moving toward the bakery. Plus, I could use something to settle my stomach after all that. The nervousness was all but gone, now. \"A few sweet rolls, then we'll talk with Vern. But while we do that, I must ask, where do you ride? Are there trails?\"\n\n\"Game trails,\" Mia said. \"But we mostly stick to the roads. See, Abi is a good rider, but not so great with directions...\"\n\nMia continued talking about her younger sisters as they entered the bakery, Axtara purchasing several sweet rolls for the two of them. They were, she decided as they ate, Mia still talking, worth every coin."
            },
            {
                "title": "New Accounts",
                "text": "Come on... Axtara held up one of the bejeweled nets in her claws, eyeing its reflection in her mirror. You must make a decision, and soon. If she waited too much longer, there was a chance she'd be less than early for her dinner with the king and his family.\n\nAnd that absolutely, under no circumstances, was a thing that she could allow to happen. To say nothing of being late.\n\nShe let her claws drop, her reflection sagging. \"Ugh! Why is this so hard!?\" The rest of her ensemble had been easy. She'd bathed and polished her scales until they gleamed almost like the gemstones their emerald color resembled. She'd selected her finest silk shawls to weave around her shoulders and wing-joints, as well as similar silks to wrap around her ankles and wrists. The almost transparent blue complemented the emerald of her scales. All that was left was...\n\nJewelry, she thought, sitting on her haunches once more and lifting the two pieces she was trying to choose between. One was a splendid pendant and necklace combination that sat around her long neck and featured several rubies. The other was the mesh net of gold and silver links she held in claws that would rest on her head around her horns, leaving a large sapphire to sit just above and between her eyes.\n\nShe couldn't do both. That would simply be too much, and could be seen socially as competing with the king and queen, especially as she wasn't sure how much wealth they possessed. She was leaving behind her rings and decorative claw jewelry as well for a similar reason. One piece, and one only.\n\nAgain she set the mesh net atop her head, carefully sliding it into place and eyeing herself in the mirror. Too much sapphire? The stone on her brow did match the color of the silks she was wearing, but... She set it aside and held up the ruby pendant, eyeing the way it sat against her chest.\n\nThat provides a nice contrast to both my scales and the blues, she thought. Behind her through the glass of the mirror she could see her tail lashing back and forth in long, irritated strokes. She'd need to make a choice, and soon. The dinner was to be held at the fifth bell, and if her clock\u2014which she had gotten set up and ticking away the night before\u2014was accurate, that was less than a half-hour away.\n\n\"Ruby?\" she asked quietly, holding the pendant up to her chest once more. \"Or sapphire?\"\n\nOr maybe that's the wrong thing to focus on, she thought, holding the pendant back up and eyeing the gold links rather than the ruby. Granted, gold went with everything but...\n\n\"Hmm...\" She lowered the pendant and set the headpiece between her horns once more, again eyeing the metals that made it rather than the gem it was showing off.\n\n\"Headpiece,\" she said with a nod, her decision made. \"The silver blends better with the blue.\" The pure gold of the pendant was far more attention grabbing. And while she did have a silver one that was studded with garnet, it was of lesser craft than the headpiece she was currently wearing.\n\nShe set the pendant aside, eyeing herself in the mirror and tugging at the side of her headpiece to make sure it was properly in place. Small clasps, all but impossible to manipulate without skillful uses of the tips of her claws, snapped into place with faint clicks, securing the mesh links around the base of her horns.\n\n\"There!\" She gave her reflection a smile, tilting and twisting her head to view the piece from a variety of angles. \"Elegant and beautiful.\" Her smile widened, showing teeth, and for a moment she paused.\n\nProbably shouldn't do that at the dinner, she thought, eyeing her teeth. It may disturb the servers. She bared her teeth, eyeing each of them one by one in the mirror and checking to see if there were any bits of lunch left between them. Even if she likely would keep her teeth concealed outside of taking a bite, it wouldn't do to arrive with food stuck somewhere between them.\n\nAt least she had mint. She'd purchased a whole clump of it the day before in Elnacier with Mia. Ostensibly for tea, but it was wonderful for masking any sort of questionable breath. She'd often kept some at the ready at her uncle's bank just for that purpose.\n\nSatisfied that her teeth were clean, she stepped back from the large mirror, taking in her full body and checking to make sure that she hadn't forgotten anything.\n\nScales are polished. Claws cleaned. She turned her head, checking over the silk wraps and making sure they were wrapped almost perfectly, as was the style. True symmetry had fallen out of favor several years earlier. Now the fashion was to have them almost matching, but not quite. To show that you'd done it yourself or something. Her uncle had thought both concepts ridiculous.\n\nShe'd kind of enjoyed it. If nothing else, it had made putting on the wraps a bit easier.\n\nShawl's in place. Wraps almost matching but not quite. All that's left is... She straightened, her tail coming to a frozen stop. My bag. Where is my nice bag?\n\nShe turned away from her mirror, eyes darting over her large sleeping cushion. It wasn't there, either. Did I not get it out? No, I did, I'm certain of it. She could remember withdrawing it from her closet and...\n\nI set it on my desk. In the front room. She relaxed, her wings settling. Good. Okay. So now I just need to put this back...\n\nCarefully picking up the pendant, she moved across her bedroom, toward the massive vault door set against the far wall. It was easily as tall as she was, and just as wide. It had been one of the most expensive items in her home by far, not because of its construction\u2014though it was incredibly durable\u2014but because of the enchantments set upon it. Her own scales were held in an enchanted pocket on the inside of the door, the magic connecting them to the large handle across the front. Anyone else who grasped it would find it firmly immovable. But when she attempted to open it...\n\nThere was a heavy thunk as the lock gave way, the safe door swinging aside at her touch. The interior of the safe sunk deep into the hill, stretching almost as far back as she was long from snout to tail and set in solid stone. Magic lights flickered into being as she poked her head in, illuminating her hoard at the far end of the safe, as well as row after row of small numbered boxes along both walls.\n\nHer own possessions were in the ones labeled \"001\" through \"010.\" She opened the third box, sliding it out on smooth rails\u2014again, something that hadn't been cheap\u2014and carefully set the ruby pendant inside it next to several other necklaces. Then, drawer closed once more, she backed out of the vault.\n\nBut not without a quick look at her hoard in the back of the safe. The neatly stacked rows of gold bars glimmered under the shimmering magic lights. Her hoard. Or what was left of it. More than a decade's working at her uncle's bank, working as hard as she could to afford her own start at things.\n\nAnd hopefully, after today she'd be able to start adding to it slightly. She'd had one prospective customer that morning\u2014One! Even if they'd turned away in disappointment after learning that she didn't simply give money away when asked, it was still far better than hurling stones at her door.\n\nFar better, she thought, shutting the safe with another heavy thunk and walking out of her bedroom. And it was the start of something. She'd spoken to a few people around the town the day before while carrying out her business and making purchases, making sure that each one of them knew who she was and exactly what it was she did. Focusing, of course, on loans and bank accounts.\n\nThough some of that might have flown above a few heads, she thought as she reached the front room and checked the clock. The constant tick of gears was just at the right volume. And I have just over twenty minutes before the fifth bell. If the clock is running accurately compared to the local water clock. She eyed the filigreed hands for a moment, watching as the larger hand ticked over another minute, and then collected her bag. It was her only formal bag, a shade of dyed green that matched her scales. A quick pull of the drawstring let her check that her few things were inside: Mint, some coinage should the need arise, some spare toiletries\u2014one never knew\u2014a vial of ink, some paper, her house key, and an abacus. Satisfied, she tugged it closed and slung the bag across her chest.\n\nThe flight to the manor was relatively short, and she kept her wingbeats steady and slow, gliding whenever possible in order to keep her exertions light. The last thing she wanted to do was arrive at the king's dinner in a sweat.\n\nIt was a pleasant flight. The sun was still fairly high in the sky, the air cool and crisp across her scales, and every wingbeat brought a fresh, sharp scent of pine rushing past her. Part of her was tempted to make it more of a flight of fancy, to drop into a dive and let her clawtips brush against the tops of the trees, but... that carried with it the risk of her wraps snagging or tearing.\n\nI really need to get out of my cave and give my wings a good stretch, she thought, putting herself into a slight bank and adjusting her course for the front grounds of the manor. With the business of unpacking to take care of, and dealing with her visitors, there simply hadn't been time to get a real, long, satisfying flight in. Maybe see some of the mountains around here. Or examine some of the ruins perhaps.\n\nShe adjusted her wings, descending through the sky toward the Elnacier Manor and aiming for the path just outside the front gate, since she had neglected to ask if it would have been polite to land on the grounds themselves.\n\nWell, she thought as the foot of the mountain neared. Front arch, anyway. It looked both new and ancient at the same time, and likely was, given some of the ruins around. It wouldn't have been a stretch to assume that the original builders of the manor had erected both it and the grounds atop some structure left by the ancients. A stone wall rose on both sides, circling the front and back of the entire manor. The rear opened in another arch, leading across an open space and then into the woods.\n\nIt was actually quite nice-looking, at least from the air. The grounds were clean and well-cared for, with what looked like several gardens for herbs and food as needed. Parallel ruts in the ground led past the side to a stable around the back, likely where horse and carriage were kept.\n\nThe manor itself was impressive by the standards she'd seen thus far in the kingdom, an edifice of at least two stories built from large slabs of grey carved stone and massive, dark worked timber. Actually, it shares quite a resemblance to some of the hunting lodges among the Delarian nobility. Interesting. Here and there she could spy bits of the structure that didn't quite fit in with the rest, small places that had needed repairs performed without the benefit of the original builders, or modern modifications added. But standing before it, it was not hard to see why the king had claimed the manor as his own.\n\nSomeone framed in one of the upper windows spotted her and waved, ducking out of sight as soon as she'd waved back. It hadn't looked like Mia. One of her younger sisters maybe.\n\nThe pathway was coming up quickly now, and she widened her wingspan, dragging against the air and then beating quickly as she came in for a landing. The landing kicked up a small bit of dust, but there wasn't much she could do about that, save hope that it didn't get on any of her silks.\n\nSomeone was already moving across the grounds toward the arched entrance, and she folded her wings as she moved to meet the unfamiliar figure. They were clad in what was probably a servant's liveries, though she didn't recognize the design or cut, and were somewhat portly, at least enough that they were slightly out of breath by the time they reached the gate.\n\nSlightly old, too, judging by the thin wisps of hair shrouding the man's head like bits of stormcloud. He let out a heaving gasp as he stopped at the gate, one hand supporting himself on the ancient stones, and then straightened, still breathing hard but doing his best to put on a formal appearance.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" he said, pausing to take a breath. \"King Elnacier bids you welcome to his home.\" Another breath. \"My apologies for my appearances, I wasn't quite expecting you to arrive so suddenly, we\u2014We usually have a bit more notice when someone starts up the path from the city.\"\n\nShe turned her head slightly, realization dawning. The entire road down to the town of Elnacier was in clear view from where she was standing and clearly in view to the rest of the manor. She could see the entire town laid out before her, almost like a low-level flight. No wonder the king had chosen the manor as his home.\n\nShe could also immediately see why the... majordomo? Gardener? She wasn't really certain, but she could now see why he'd been so surprised. He'd likely expected her to come up the road and have plenty of advance notice of her arrival.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, turning back to look at the man, who was still breathing fairly hard, though not as heavily as he had been a moment ago. \"It is an honor to be here. And I feel I must apologize, good sir, for not arriving in the normal manner and giving you more of an advance notice.\"\n\nThe man waved a hand. \"It's no... trouble. Wife says I need the exercise. She'd be out here to greet you herself, but...\"\n\nThere was a brief flash of panic. The portly man standing in front of her wasn't the king, was he? She squashed the thought like an errant error. No, of course not. There was little resemblance between him and Princess Mia.\n\n\"My wife and I are the majordomos, you see,\" he continued, catching his breath at last, though his cheeks were still a little flushed. \"She's still handling some of the preparation for dinner.\"\n\nAs were you I think, Axtara thought as she spotted a smudge of flour along one of the man's sleeves.\n\n\"In any case, if it would please my lady, welcome to the home of King Elnacier,\" the majordomo said, offering a bow. \"My name is Lowell, and my wife's name is Lilly. If you have any need, please don't hesitate to ask, and we will do our best to accommodate you.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, dipping her head at him. \"Then I must ask, am I to be announced immediately?\"\n\nThe majordomo opened his mouth, only to be cut off as a loud shout of \"Axtara!\" echoed across the manor grounds, Princess Mia rushing out of the front doors and making her way down the path as quickly as her dress would allow. \"You're here!\"\n\nMia, Axtara noted, was not nearly so out-of-breath as the majordomo had been when she arrived at the arch, a wide grin stretching across her face.\n\n\"I've got this, Lowell,\" Mia said, barely glancing at the man before looking up at Axtara. \"My sister saw you come in. How was the flight?\"\n\n\"It was pleasant,\" Axtara answered, before bowing. \"Thank you for inviting me to your home, princess.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, though you should really be thanking my father. And again, it's just Mia.\"\n\n\"I will thank your father and the earliest opportunity, your highness,\" Axtara continued, grinning. \"And as this is a formal dinner, I must insist on using your full title. In respect of your station, of course.\"\n\nMia's eyes narrowed, but there wasn't any malice to her gaze. Not in the faint smile on her lips. \"Is that so, Lady Axtara?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Axtara said quickly, trying to keep her grin from growing too wide as she saw the confused look on the majordomo's face. \"I simply couldn't bear to not to be most respectful and gracious to my host.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mia said, a grin of her own appearing on her face. \"We'll see how long that lasts when you meet my younger sisters. By the way, is that a sapphire on your headpiece?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"It's lovely. As are the silks. Dragon high fashion?\"\n\n\"Of course. Your dress is lovely as well.\" Axtara nodded her head at Mia and her smooth, dark green gown.\n\n\"Thank you. Dinner's not quite ready yet, so would you like to see the grounds before\u2014\"\n\n\"Dragooooon!\" Axtara would have pulled back in surprise had the tone of the sudden shout not been so young and joyous. A small girl was running across the grounds from the front door as quickly as her legs could carry her, trailing white ribbons from her hair in her wake. \"Dragon!\"\n\n\"And there it is,\" Mia said. \"Lowell?\"\n\n\"On it.\" The majordomo stepped into the young girl's path, sweeping her up in his arms. \"Princess Atavir, you're going to ruin your gown.\" The young girl's head popped over the man's shoulder, bright eyes looking right at Axtara.\n\n\"Dragon!\" she said again, her eyes wide. \"Dragon!\"\n\n\"That is the Lady Axtara,\" Lowell said, turning and holding the young princess. Though how young she was she couldn't say. It was hard to tell with human children. \"She's a guest.\"\n\n\"Dragon! Ax-ta-rah Dragon!\" the little girl said, her arms reaching out.\n\nMia, meanwhile, had a smug smile on her face. \"Lady Axtara, this is Princess Atavir, my youngest sister. She is almost three summers of age.\"\n\n\"A pleasure to meet you, young princess,\" Axtara said, bowing her head at the new arrival, who seemed to be trying to free herself from the arms of the majordomo. Another woman was coming down the path now, clad in similar livery to Lowell. Her gaze was fixed on the young princess... though Axtara didn't miss the glances she kept throwing her way. Nervous ones.\n\n\"There she is,\" the woman said, holding out her hands as she neared and taking the young princess back from the majordomo. \"For one so young she runs so fast.\" Only then did she turn and offer a bow. \"Lady Axtara. Welcome to the Elnacier Manor. As you can see, you are currently the subject of Ati's fascination.\"\n\n\"Wanna see the dragon!\" Princess Ativir said, still reaching.\n\n\"You've seen Lady Axtara,\" the woman said. \"Now we need to go continue getting ready for dinner.\"\n\n\"Wanna pet dragon.\"\n\n\"No.\" The woman shot Axtara an apologetic look. \"Lady Axtara is a guest of your mother and father. We do not pet guests.\"\n\n\"Wanna pet her,\" the princess said, this time with more force.\n\n\"Here it comes,\" Mia said, shooting Axtara a knowing look and crossing her arms.\n\n\"We need to go get ready for dinner,\" the woman said, starting back up the path.\n\n\"Wanna pet!\" the princess shouted, her small scream carrying out across the garden as the woman holding her picked up speed. \"Wanna pet! Pet! Pet! Pet!\" She was still chanting and shouting as she was carried out of sight into the manor, her tear-streaked face the last glimpse of her they caught.\n\nLowell turned immediately, a fearful look on his face. \"Lady Axtara, I must apologi\u2014\"\n\nAxtara cut him off with a gentle wave of her claws. \"No need, sir. I have experienced plenty of human children before. Royalty, noble, or commoner, they all tend to act exactly as one would expect for their age.\"\n\n\"And beside that,\" she said as another figure swept out of the doorway, clad in a red dress of a similar cut to Mia's. \"Being interested in me is better than being terrified of me.\"\n\n\"You say that now,\" Mia said, smirking as the second figure approached. \"But wait until dinner.\"\n\nThe newcomer, Axtara noted, stopped just shy of the archway, her wide eyes looking up at Axtara and mouth open in a silent 'o' before she seemed to come to her senses and offer a curtsy. \"Lady Axtara,\" she said. There was no mistaking who she could be.\n\n\"Princess Abathine,\" Axtara said, bowing. \"A pleasure to make your\u2014\"\n\n\"Can I ride you?\"\n\nHer thoughts stumbled, her wings spreading slightly as she tried to parse the young woman's words. \"Can you what?\"\n\n\"Princess Abathi\u2014\" Lowell began, only for his indignation to be cut off by a loud laugh from Mia.\n\n\"There!\" Mia said, walking up alongside Axtara and grinning at her. \"I knew if Ati didn't knock you for a loop, Abi would. And no,\" she said, spinning around in a swirl of skirts to look at her sister. \"You can't ride her. What kind of question is that?\"\n\n\"But she can fly,\" Abathine said, gesturing at Axtara as if that explained everything.\n\n\"She's also wearing silk and a guest here for dinner,\" Mia retorted. \"If we had a rich merchant from mother's homeland visiting, would you ask to ride him too?\"\n\nAbathine let out a sudden snort. \"Maybe if he were good loo\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Mia said, cutting her off with a stern glare. \"Just no.\"\n\nMajordomo Lowell, on the other hand, was much less constrained in his response, his mortified expression agape with horror. \"Princess Abathine! You\u2014!\" He turned. \"My apologizes, Lady Axtara, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Lowell, why don't you take my sister back inside and maybe let mother know what she was up to?\" Mia suggested. \"I'll show Axtara around the grounds and to dinner once it's ready.\"\n\n\"Ah...\" Lowell appeared at a loss for words. \"Very well, your highness,\" he said quickly, turning and putting on what Axtara guessed was as calm a look as he could manage. Which wasn't very. \"Princess Abathine...\"\n\n\"I was just joking,\" Abathine said as the majordomo led her away by one arm. \"About the merchant thing, I mean. It's just, she can fly. I'd give anything to fly.\"\n\n\"Then apply yourself to your studies and become a wizard,\" Lowell said as he guided the princess into the manor. He was still admonishing her when they both vanished through the front doors.\n\nSilence descended over the grounds.\n\n\"Well,\" Mia said, turning. \"I did warn you that we're a little... less refined, didn't I?\" She shrugged. \"Mother tries, but father doesn't help. He attempts to, but there's no forgetting he was a wandering sword before he became king. Uncle Fen too.\"\n\n\"Well, if it helps,\" Axtara said, looking down at her. \"It's not the first time someone's asked to ride me.\"\n\n\"In the 'soaring through the air sense,' or...?\"\n\n\"Both,\" she said, ruffling her wings slightly. \"Though your sister clearly meant the former. At least in my case.\"\n\nMia let out an exasperated groan. \"I apologize for that, too. She's been... Well... Since about a year ago\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I know,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"I remember being around her age. Flushing every time I saw a drake. Or feeling my scales get hot every time I thought about one, or...\" She shuddered. \"Those were a rough few years.\"\n\n\"I'm with you there,\" Mia said, moving toward the archway at last. Axtara stepped after and up alongside her. \"Bleeding for the first time, or seeing a shirtless woodcutter and feeling my ears burn, or just all the growing and...\" She shook her head and then looked up. \"Is it as bad for dragons as humans? Those years, I mean?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Axtara said. \"But I would not enjoy experiencing them again. The awkward stumbling, the misshapen growth...\"\n\n\"Misshapen?\"\n\n\"I wasn't always this slender, you know,\" Axtara said. \"Father said he thought my front legs were going to outgrow my back.\"\n\n\"Oh the growth spurts,\" Mia said, shaking her head and letting out a groan. \"They were horrible. Suddenly none of my clothes fit anymore. It was horrible. And I kept tripping over things!\" She shook her head. \"Not the most wonderful of summers.\"\n\n\"But enough about that,\" she said, smiling. \"My sisters' uncouth behavior aside, welcome to my home.\" She spread her arms wide, gesturing at the grounds. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"It's a nice home,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"Who keeps the grounds?\"\n\n\"Widow Davs,\" Mia said. \"It was her and her husband, but he died a few winters ago. She has an apprentice. Father hired them both soon after the mansion was repaired, when he realized that he really hated gardening.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Axtara said, blinking and pulling her gaze away from a decorative shrub of some kind. \"You mean your father tried to...?\"\n\nMia let out a short laugh. \"Apparently so. He thought after years of being a sell-sword, running a garden would be a nice change of pace. Then it turned out that not only did he hate it, he had no idea what he was doing. He ended up asking for help and got the Davs.\"\n\n\"How does he pay them? Or her, now?\"\n\nMia rolled her eyes. \"Shelter and food, mostly. But he did give them a stipend. Not sure exactly how much. So there would be something to invest in your bank.\"\n\n\"No shame in admitting that's what I was thinking,\" Axtara answered with a grin. \"I am here on official business, after all. But she does lovely work.\" She ran her eyes back down the rows of carefully sculpted bushes and tended flowerbeds. \"Do they look different from the air?\"\n\n\"From the air?\"\n\n\"Or above,\" she added quickly. \"Some gardens out in the empires will follow patterns and shapes that, when seen from a higher story or the air, form an image, or a symbol, usually that of the house.\"\n\n\"You know...\" Mia said, sticking her tongue out of one side of her lips as she thought. \"I don't know. I've never looked.\"\n\n\"Do you have a house symbol?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Mia replied. \"I've got the pricks in my fingertips to prove it, needlepointing our sigil into fabric over and over again.\"\n\n\"Not a fan of needlepoint?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mia said, shaking her head. \"Not in the slightest. Which is a shame, because mother loves it. She always wanted to sit with me when I was younger and show me how to do it while carrying on a conversation. Back in her homeland it was what women just did, day to day. If they were talking, they'd get out their needlepoint and work while they talked. Just to have something to do with their hands. Business? Same thing. If you stopped and were in polite society, the needlepoint came out.\"\n\n\"The core empires are like that with their teas,\" Axtara said, ruffling her wings. \"Some of them carry little teapots and tables with them everywhere, or have servants do it if they're rich enough. Having a conversation in the middle of the street? Out the teapots and table come, and they have tea right there, like proper ladies of high society.\"\n\n\"Don't misunderstand,\" she said, stepping over to a bed of yellow roses and taking a faint sniff of their pleasant aroma. \"I enjoy tea. You've seen my collection. But every moment? They would stop to meet someone in the street, and one of them would procure a teapot and a canteen, and the next thing you know they're having tea!\"\n\n\"How would they heat the pot?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"Magic. Most of the time. Believe me, wizards did great business there selling spells that would heat the teapot when activated.\"\n\n\"Sounds expensive.\"\n\n\"Absolutely. But nobles and merchants had the money. And if you couldn't afford one, you could always heat water at home and keep it insulated. Or start a small fire.\"\n\n\"In the middle of the street?\"\n\n\"What?\" Axtara looked down at Mia in surprise. \"Oh, no no. Not at all. Well, maybe. There were a few that tried, if I can recall the stories I heard correctly, but they were simply hearsay. There were little corner places you could retire to that would brew tea for you if you couldn't.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Mia said, nodding and moving for another row on the grounds. Axtara followed her. \"That makes more sense.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, it was the same as the needlepoint. Any social gathering, for business or pleasure, brought out the tea.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mia said, stopping by another bed of roses and taking a sniff. \"That does sound... wait a moment.\"\n\nThere it is, Axtara thought. Her parents had much the same reaction.\n\n\"Does that include banking?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"It did.\"\n\n\"And so you'd be drinking tea constantly.\"\n\n\"I was.\"\n\n\"All of the noble ladies would be drinking tea constantly.\"\n\n\"They were.\"\n\n\"Oh stars,\" Mia said, looking up at her. \"The middens.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Some say that the modern sewers so many cities are building are because of the tea habits. All I know is that I was glad my uncle's business had access to them.\"\n\n\"Sewers?\"\n\n\"To sweep away waste with water. Rather than a latrine or a bucket?\"\n\n\"I've heard of such a thing, but never seen any.\"\n\n\"It is rather new. But supposedly, so the story goes it was because of the tea habit that the sewers came about. To keep the cities from flooding in the... um... leavings, of the nobles.\"\n\n\"You can say they would have drowned in their own piss,\" Mia said, smirking. \"It's just me.\"\n\n\"Well, in either case, the legend is probably only that, as the habit does not predate most of the old sewers, or so I've been told.\"\n\nMia shrugged. \"Either way, I'd take tea over needlepoint. No offense but like I said, I was never very grand at it.\"\n\n\"If I were to choose...\" Axtara said. \"If I were to take the needlepoint, I'm not sure how I would do it with my claws. I would have an easy out.\" Mia stuck out her tongue, and she returned the expression with a grin. From inside the manor there came a faint ringing sound, light and clear enough to echo across the grounds. From the look on Mia's face, there was only one thing it could be. \"Dinner?\"\n\nMia nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"A moment, please,\" Axtara said, sitting back on her haunches and checking to make sure her silks hadn't come loose during her short flight or in observing the grounds. Satisfied that they were all still in place, and that none of them had picked up any errant dirt she could get rid of, she opened her bag, carefully pulling out the small bundle of mint she'd placed in it earlier.\n\n\"Mint,\" she said as Mia gave her a curious look. With her claws it was an easy task to snip a piece free and toss it between her jaws. The rest of the bundle, rolled up once more, went back into the bag. She chewed for a moment, the cool taste spilling over her tongue, and then swallowed.\n\n\"Does that change the taste of the food?\" Mia asked as she turned and began moving for the manor's front doors.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not unless I take it directly beforehand. It's a trick my uncle taught me. Dragon breath can be... unsettling. To some.\"\n\nMia shrugged. \"Doesn't smell any worse than my own. But I understand. Good impressions.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" The doors ahead of them loomed, and Axtara slowed. \"Is there an entryway, or...\"\n\n\"There is,\" Mia replied with a quick nod. \"And a cloakroom. You'll pass by both and a hallway before entering the main hall, which is where we'll be having dinner. It's as tall as the roof there,\" she said, pointing. \"So you should have plenty of room.\"\n\n\"If you wait at the entrance to the main hall,\" Mia said as she pulled the front doors open. \"Lowell will announce\u2014 And here he is!\" The majordomo was standing by the doors, likely having just been caught coming to find them. \"I'll see you at the dinner!\" Mia darted ahead, turning down a hallway and disappearing from view.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" Lowell said, bowing formally once more. \"May I take your bag?\"\n\nShe nodded, slipping the bag's strap over her head and passing the bag carefully to him. It looked out-of-place in the man's hands, but he took it carefully.\n\n\"Wait here, if you would please,\" he said, carrying the bag into the small cloakroom.\n\nShe took advantage of the wait to get a better look at the manor around her. The tall windows beside the door let in a decent enough amount of light, enough for her to see the woodworking around her. The walls were, of course, made of stone, though they had been covered in both wood and tapestries. Both, she noted, looked new, as did many of the stones in the wall.\n\nThe floor beneath her was stone as well, as far as she could tell. A large, woven rug, plain in color and appearance, had been thrown over it. When winter comes this place must bear a chill, she thought as she looked down at it.\n\nThe ceiling above her, however, was wood. She could see the heavy beams clearly. Lamps affixed between them let out a pleasant glow while also adding a faint aroma to the room.\n\nShe took a faint sniff. Scented oils. Ones that had been carefully treated to not carry the usual stink of lamp oil. But... She took a second, longer sniff. Not regularly. A luxury just for guests, then.\n\n\"Right this way, Lady Axtara,\" Lowell said, returning from the cloakroom and motioning toward a set of large doors at the far end of the room, past the hall Mia had vanished down.\n\nShe followed, still digesting the scents of the room. There was a familiar scent that was probably Mia's family, or Mia herself. There was also a thicker, almost bitter scent that permeated almost everything. Smoke from the lamp oils.\n\nBut she could smell other things as well, especially as they neared the doors to the main hall. Rich, deep, spiced scents. Meat that made her stomach quiver with hunger.\n\nThe queen said something about Elnacier goat. Is that what I'm smelling?\n\nLowell came to a stop in front of the doors. \"If you'll just wait here, ma'am,\" he said, one hand on the wood. \"I'll announce you.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Think nothing of it, my lady.\" His hands pressed one of the doors open a tiny amount, the faint sound of chatter behind it swelling, and he slipped through. The door shut again behind him, leaving only the faint scents that had slipped through it and the murmur of conversation through it. A moment later a louder clamor slipped over it. The majordomo's voice.\n\nThe door must be quite thick and well-fitted, she thought, eyeing the wood. Or enchanted. Someone had taken the time to carve the wood, filling it with images and pictures. Pictures of a man in armor, backed by another, standing against a horde of what looked like wolves on one part of the door, slaying them on another.\n\nThe founding of Elnacier? She followed the carvings around the door, watching as the two figures fought and ventured into peril. One of them must be Mia's father. The other her uncle. But which is\u2014?\n\nThe door moved, and she jerked back, suddenly aware of how close to the wood she'd leaned. This time both opened, cracking open ever so slightly and letting more of the rich smells through.\n\nAlong with silence. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. She was about to eat dinner with royalty.\n\nCalm, she told herself. You can do this. And you've already met most of them. You'll be just fine. She resisted the urge to dig her claws into the rug as the majordomo began to speak, his voice ringing out through the hall.\n\n\"Presenting the Lady Axtara the Studious, a dragoness of the core kingdoms!\" Lowell's voice seemed to echo around her.\n\nShe took a deep breath. You can do this. Just relax, and enjoy a dinner.\n\nLowell threw the doors wide open, and she walked in."
            },
            {
                "title": "Social Currency",
                "text": "Axtara stepped into the main hall, her head held back, neck carefully bent in an elegant curve, and her wings held carefully at her sides. The hall was...\n\nWell, if she were honest, she'd been in far grander. Most high-class banquet halls were fairly similar. There was the long wooden table dominating the center of the room, made of a dark, sturdy wood, probably constructed in place after the hall had been built, and piled with food. There were the grand, sweeping beams overhead, supporting a high roof as well as several large chandeliers that were alight with warm lamps. Proper chairs along both sides of the table, save a clear gap where she suspected she was supposed to sit.\n\nWhere the differences lay was in the details. The food was mostly unfamiliar, if delicious-smelling. The chandeliers overhead were made of antlers, not bronze or silver. The walls were covered in tapestries, thick ones that looked like large fluffy blankets. The floor beneath her claws was covered in animal-skin rugs, the thick fur pleasant against her feet. The chairs were high-backed, an old style not practiced among the nobility for at least several decades.\n\nAnd, now that she was looking closer, there weren't as many of the chairs as she'd expected. There were a number of plain wooden benches as well.\n\nHer eyes slid to the head of the table, only for another surprise to greet her. Rather than one seat as she would have expected, or as would have been normal in most banquet halls, there were two. Two seats of equal size backed by a grand fireplace that was lit only by glowing embers.\n\nShe came to a stop, and the figures in both seats rose. One of them was Queen Elnacier. The other was a man she'd never met, but there was little reason to guess as to who he was.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" the man said, his voice filling the hall. There was a rough, seasoned quality to it, like it had been spiced with pepper. \"I am King Adrick Elnacier, and I bid you welcome to our kingdom and our table. It has been some time since it was graced by a merchant such as yourself, much less one who has become one of our subjects.\"\n\nTechnically, I'm not a merchant, Axtara thought. I'm a banker. There was little to be gained by addressing the issue, however, and she simply bowed her head. \"Thank you, your highness.\"\n\nThe king smiled. \"Please,\" he said, waving his hand at an empty space in the seating that had clearly been left for her. \"Sit, so that we may thank the Creator for this meal, dig in, and speak with one another.\"\n\nShe nodded again and moved toward the spot he'd indicated, between two individuals she didn't recognize. Mia, she noted, was sitting directly across from her, and the princess gave her a grin. Neither of them were quite at the head of the table, but they weren't far from it either.\n\nSo far, so good, Axtara thought as she took her place. Someone had thoughtfully provided her spot with folded, thick-furred woolskin to rest on. The king nodded as she sat down, and then turned to the person on his right.\n\n\"Varakis, if you would offer thanks, please.\"\n\nThe woman sitting to the right of the king nodded, and Axtara's felt her eyes widen slightly. The woman was wearing the livery of a servant.\n\nIn fact, she noted as the various individuals around the table bowed their heads, the only ones sitting at the table that looked like nobility were the king, his family, and a long-haired figure that was probably Mia's Uncle Fen. The rest of the people sitting at the table were clad in livery like the majordomo. Or in uniform tunics that, once she saw two familiar-looking faces, she recognized as that of the royal guard. Even Lowell himself was sitting down at the foot of the table, next to a long-haired woman in similar garb that was almost certainly his aforementioned wife.\n\n\"Great Creator.\" Axtara bowed her head quickly as the prayer began. \"We are blessed this day to dine in the halls of the leader we have been given, blessed to dine on wonderful food that our hands have prepared. We are blessed with the presence of a guest, one of thy children, who has graced us with her presence despite our slights against her. We hope that as we eat together tonight, we will be able to make amends and enjoy the company she may bring us. We thank thee for our families, and for our homes with their sturdy walls that keep us safe, and for the blessing of our rulers. We ask that our kingdom continue to be protected, and all those within its walls, from those that are aged to those who have just made this their home, and ask that we may always be blessed with that which we find ourselves in need of. To thy glory, oh Creator, amen.\"\n\nAxtara blinked in surprise even as she uttered \"Amen\" along with the rest of the hall, glancing at the king and queen and then Mia to see if there was any surprise or disdain at the frank manner in which the prayer had been given. Apparently there were still differences between the halls she knew and the one she was now in.\n\n\"Thank you, Varakis,\" the king said, nodding at the woman who had offered the prayer. Then he clapped his hands together with a grin. \"Well then, let us eat!\"\n\nThe hall surged with activity, hands grasping and reaching for the food that lined the center of the table as Axtara looked on in shock. It was more like a family dinner than a noble supper.\n\nThe queen must have seen her confusion, as she leaned forward, looking right at her. \"You may find we're a little less formal, here, Axtara. It was a shock to me as well when I first came here, but I've grown to appreciate both the reasoning behind it and the more approachable atmosphere of our dinners. Now,\" she said, pointing with a utensil. \"You simply must try the Elnacier goat I told you about.\"\n\nAxtara had hardly moved before the man sitting to her left had cut a large chunk out of the roast before them and dropped it on her plate. \"Here you are, your ladyship,\" he said. \"Finest roast you'll have in Elnacier.\"\n\n\"If it wasn't, we wouldn't keep you in our kitchens,\" Mia said, giving the man a grin. He merely shrugged and carved off another piece of the roast for himself, though his eyes were still fixed on Axtara's plate. As were a number of others, she realized. Waiting for her to take a bite.\n\nVery well. She used her claws to tear a piece from the meat and toss it between her jaws. Warm juices exploded across her tongue as she bit down.\n\n\"This...\" she said as soon as she had swallowed. \"Is excellent.\" The flavor was deep, the spices only a layer atop it that complemented the whole. It was soft, just chewy enough to savor, but not enough to be an annoyance. \"Most excellent.\"\n\n\"Why thank you, your ladyship,\" the cook said. \"More?\"\n\n\"If you would please,\" she said, fighting to keep her tail still behind her. The queen hadn't exaggerated in the slightest. That, or their cook was truly incredible. \"You wouldn't by chance be open to additional work, would you?\"\n\n\"Hold!\" the king's voice rang across the hall, full of good humor rather than any seriousness. In fact, the king himself was standing, his plate half-laden with cheese and what looked like sausages. \"You are welcome to dwell in my kingdom, Lady Axtara, and even to offer your services as a banker... but if you steal the master of my kitchens, I'll triple your taxes!\" he said suddenly. \"Yes, see if I don't! On my word as king!\"\n\nBetween the smile on Mia's face, the queen's faint snort of laughter, and the looks on the rest of the dinner-party's faces, the jest was very clear. Axtara turned to look at the cook sitting next to her, who was holding a carefully neutral expression, and then took a bite out of the meat of her plate.\n\n\"It might be worth it,\" she said, glancing back at the king just in time to see him let out a laugh of his own.\n\n\"All right, all right,\" he said, grabbing another wedge of cheese and then sitting down. \"That's as close as we need to get to official business right now. For now, let us feast!\" The last word came out with a roar, and then the king and then the hall devolved into the eating, everyone digging into their plates with relish.\n\nThe next minute passed in silence, save for the clinking of knives against the plates and the sound of people eating. Occasionally someone asked someone sitting near them to pass something, but for the most part all were silent as they ate. Only once the king had finished his first plate did he let out a satisfied sigh and, as he reached for another portion, turn in Axtara's direction.\n\n\"So,\" he said as he picked up another sausage. \"Lady Axtara. I really must apologize for the confusion that occurred when you arrived. We had no idea that you were... Well, a dragon.\"\n\n\"The fault is mine, your highness,\" she said. \"I was the one who never gave myself any identity past that of a name. I should have foreseen that\u2014\"\n\n\"I am glad you didn't!\" The king's proclamation cut her off, as well as drew a few eyes from the rest of the table. \"If you had, it only would have meant that you expected our kingdom to treat you differently based on the fact that you are a dragon. The fact that we did is to our shame and embarrassment, and you have my official apologies for the way you were treated by some of my subjects.\"\n\nAxtara didn't miss the way the corner of the queen's mouth turned upward slightly. It appeared that someone had perhaps coached the king beforehand, and was happy with his performance.\n\n\"Your apology is accepted, your highness.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" The king sat down once more. \"If I can ever make up for the way this kingdom has treated you...\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I only ask that they treat me as they would any other citizen of Elnacier.\"\n\n\"Don't tell old Morris that,\" one of the servants piped up. \"He and his wife have been looking for wives for their sons for several years now.\"\n\nA wave of laughter rolled down the table, and Axtara did her best to go along with it, though she had to wonder how serious the comment was.\n\n\"If I may ask,\" the king continued as soon as the laughter had subsided. \"Are you married?\"\n\n\"No, your highness,\" she said, shaking her head. \"Nor engaged in such as of yet.\" Her answer seemed to satisfy him, and he nodded.\n\n\"Very well. But a lady's business is her own business, so let's talk about your other business.\" He let out a chuckle at his play on words. \"You're a banker.\"\n\n\"I am, your highness.\"\n\n\"Have you much experience with banking?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I worked under my uncle, Byanast the Quick. He runs one of the largest bank chains in Delaria. I studied under him for over ten years.\"\n\n\"Then why come here?\" The question hadn't come from the king, but rather from the long-haired man sitting near Mia who was the only one other than the royal family dressed in formal wear. He gave her a faint smile as her focus turned to him.\n\n\"You are Fendall Derin, I presume?\" Axtara said as the man's eyes met her own. \"The minister of finance?\"\n\n\"That would be me, yes.\" His attentive gaze hadn't let up, so she took the moment to eye him in return. Like the king, it was clear that he'd once been an adventurer. A long scar covered the back of one hand, another smaller one crossing his cheek. His hands looked tough, like they were used to labor. \"Why Elnacier?\"\n\n\"Why not Elnacier?\" she replied. \"You're a young kingdom, fresh in an untapped land. There are vast amounts of resources here that simply haven't been explored.\" She gave him a smile, unable to keep her tail from lashing behind her with a sense of satisfaction. \"I sent financial agents. They were most thorough.\"\n\nInterestingly enough, Fendall seemed put-off by her answer somehow, frowning ever so slightly as he sank back. Of course, she thought. He's worried about his job. But how...? Oh!\n\n\"I suppose it would be more accurate to call them 'surveyors,'\" she said, turning to look at the king. \"They looked at local resources, such as the wonderful pine forests, talked with the fishermen on the coast. That sort of thing. And I know what sort of demand the markets in the kingdoms have for those sorts of resources, and others besides, which is more than enough for this kingdom to make a profit off of them.\"\n\n\"So you intend to found and fund these businesses?\" Fendall asked.\n\n\"What? No.\" She shook her head. \"I'm no woodcutter. Or even a manager. I merely want to run my bank and be content. But what I provide to those that live in this kingdom is a chance to gain those resources on their own. If I may put forth a scenario or two as an example, King Elnacier?\"\n\nThe king shrugged. \"You may.\"\n\n\"If the local woodcutter were to, say, suffer an accident. Say a storm destroyed his lumber mill. How would he rebuild? What would the kingdom do for wood?\"\n\n\"I suppose that the crown would need to bear the burden. After all, Craglily and his family are my subjects. And our kingdom does need the wood he provides.\"\n\n\"But that in turn places more of a burden upon the kingdom,\" Axtara continued, glancing around the table and noticing that several others were now watching her. \"And what if your woodcutter wanted to modernize his equipment and his mill, to make use of the latest tools and materials? Or even fix up what he has? Endeavors in that manner are not cheap. Which means unless the crown were to sponsor him, or some other rich noble, he may never get the chance. Furthermore, if a noble did move in and sponsor them, the woodcutters would then be beholden to them, effectively owned.\"\n\n\"And that's different from what you bring?\" Fendall asked, speaking through a mouth full of cheese.\n\n\"It is.\" She paused for a moment, pouring a drink of what smelled like lightly-spiced wine into a mug almost too small for her. She waited until she had taken a sip to continue. \"See, when a noble or a merchant establishes a transaction like that, they're taking ownership of the enterprise. They own it.\"\n\n\"What I do instead, and most banks, is loaning. I give the business owner\u2014or would-be\u2014the money they need. But I do not want a hand in the business. I merely want my money back, with interest on top to make the loss of that money worth my time.\"\n\n\"What if they can't pay you back?\" one of the servants asked. \"What then?\"\n\n\"It depends on the contract,\" Axtara said, shrugging as she looked out over the rest of the table. \"In some cases, the contract may stipulate their goods be sold off until I am paid the money I am owed. Or an additional loan may be added onto the first, with a greater interest rate.\"\n\n\"The point is that I profit by using my money to aid others in profiting, but without concerning myself with their enterprises, past determining whether or not they can afford to pay back what they owe. I can also help others determine how to best put their money to good use, and offer standard banking services, of course.\"\n\n\"And you're confident that our kingdom will be able to support you in this manner?\" Fendall asked.\n\n\"I wouldn't have moved here if I were not,\" Axtara replied, giving him a smile and trying not to let her nervousness show.\n\n\"Well, I hope you won't be too distraught if nothing comes of it,\" Fendall said with a good-natured smile. \"Though Elnacier is a wonderful place, the margins here are tight.\"\n\n\"Fen...\" The king's tone sounded warning.\n\n\"Adrick, she must know,\" Fendall continued, giving the king a pleading look. Axtara felt a faint shiver run down her spine as he turned to look back toward her. \"This kingdom is young and new, but also operates on the barest of margins. Much of the trade here is still actual trade. We have no dedicated currency, for example.\"\n\n\"That is fine,\" Axtara said. \"You still honor the currency of the empires, and so shall I. In time, more funds will circulate. And before anyone asks, I have no interest in backing a currency introduced by the crown, though I would support it insofar as it had value.\"\n\n\"Personally, I'm not certain this kingdom will prove able to support your efforts financially,\" Fendall continued. \"Again, we are not wealthy. If I may ask, what currencies do you expect to be paid in? Wood? Craglily only pays us twelve bars a year in taxes, and much of that is in material which we redistribute or firewood.\"\n\nA few laughs echoed around the table, though they cut off abruptly as the queen spoke. \"That's enough, Fendall. I'll not have you alarm our guest.\"\n\n\"Your majesty,\" Axtara said, bowing her head. You've been before much more critical and curious crowds than this. Those crowds just hadn't influenced her entire future. If the kingdom's financial minister didn't have faith in her at all, or worse suggested to the people to avoid her... \"If I may, I believe I can answer Minister Fendall's concerns.\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\n\"Minister,\" she said, turning back toward him. \"This kingdom may be poor now\u2014though its hospitality tonight is certainly not\u2014but the kind of services I bring will help it grow and leave that behind. For example, what would happen if your woodcutter were to borrow money from me with which to modernize his equipment by ordering new tools from the empires?\"\n\n\"I would say our smithy would be most put out,\" Fendall said with a chuckle.\n\n\"How so?\" she countered. Good thing I already thought of this. \"New tools will need to be cared for. The need for his services will still be there. But by ordering new tools, your woodcutter could cut wood quicker and with greater efficiency.\"\n\n\"Thus leading to a surplus of wood.\"\n\n\"And if your fishermen wanted to replace a boat? Or if someone wanted to build a new home? Or fix the one they had? At the very least, he could find someone in the empires to buy that wood, who would pay for it with coin. Coin that they would then pay taxes on, and coin that they could then pay their loan and interest with. Greater efficiency could mean fewer hours of labor as well, so they could produce even more wood. Maybe that wood is used by several fishermen banding together on a single boat.\"\n\n\"The point is, it allows for growth,\" she finished. \"Or even just saving what money one has in a safe place.\"\n\n\"With you,\" Fendall said.\n\nAt that she shrugged, trying to look at ease. \"Who else better to trust with your money?\"\n\n\"Well I, for one,\" King Elnacier said, \"do not see the harm in trying. Come Fendall, we've been friends for years, and you did once tell me that an infusion of wealth would be something that would help our kingdom grow. I'm not convinced myself that it will work, but in saying that I mean no offense,\" he said, looking at Axtara. \"I'm not the best with money myself. With your credentials and experience, I'm sure you know better than I, and I cannot think of what harm could come of it\u2014\"\n\n\"I can,\" Fendall said.\n\n\"Really Fendall, enough of the worries.\" King Elnacier gave the minister a wide grin. \"Set aside your dour fears for an evening. As long as she obeys the law and does not engage in dishonest or unwelcome behavior with our subjects...\"\n\n\"And as long as she pays the taxes she owes,\" Fendall said. \"But it is your call, Adrick.\"\n\n\"I say we give her the chance. After all, we already let her build her home here, and Mia tells me it's quite impressive. Do you really have a clock?\"\n\nAxtara smiled. \"I do, your highness.\"\n\n\"I realize that this is a long shot, but by chance are you familiar with the inner workings of such devices?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not, highness,\" she said, shaking her head.\n\nThe king nodded, apparently not surprised. \"A pity. Ours was left here by the original builder of this home. We did our best to restore it to working condition but...\" He shrugged. \"I was a sellsword, not a clockmaker.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mia said, piping up suddenly. \"Perhaps if Axtara's bank begins to help with the kingdom a watchmaker will come.\" She gave Axtara a quick wink.\n\n\"Oh for\u2014\" Fendall began, but then the queen cut him off.\n\n\"That's quite astute,\" she said, carefully holding a piece of sausage at the end of her own knife. \"I, for one, would welcome that old clock working at last instead of going off at random hours.\"\n\n\"I agree, your majesty.\" This time it was one of the servants speaking, but shy of the formal address, there was no sign that her suddenly speaking up was out of the ordinary. Like Mia and many of the townsfolk, there was a thickness to her accent, like mud draped across the vowels. \"I'll admit it is nice and all, but it would be much nicer if it actually functioned as a working clock.\"\n\n\"I don't mind the noise,\" another servant said. \"The ticking is at least pretty regular. It adds a nice ambiance to the hall.\"\n\n\"Ambiance yes, but worthwhile timekeeping no,\" said a third, looking down at the end of the table. \"How many minutes does it lose or gain every bell?\"\n\nThe majordomo's wife answered. \"Nearly a half an hour. Sometimes more. I'll admit, I still wonder why we keep winding it.\"\n\n\"I like it,\" the king said with a shrug. \"It may not work, but I agree with Winnel. I like the sound.\"\n\nThe queen turned her eyes toward Axtara once more. \"I don't suppose you'd like to trade, would you?\"\n\n\"I... am afraid not, your majesty,\" she said. \"Unless you really wish\u2014\"\n\n\"No no,\" the king said quickly, waving a juice-stained knife blade in her direction. \"None of that now. When I became king, it was to do the just thing.\"\n\n\"What my husband is saying,\" the queen said, giving him a quick smile, \"is that he refuses to be a king that does not respect his subjects and their belongings.\"\n\n\"I worked for kings like that,\" he continued. \"I have no desire to be such a disreputable\u2014\" He paused for a moment as his wife gave him a pointed look. \"\u2014ruler,\" he finished. \"But enough of such a dour topic.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" the queen said, turning her attention to one of the servants and Mia's younger sister. \"How was the ride today, Delia?\"\n\nIt was as if some sort of signal had been given. Mia's younger sister and one of the servants began talking with the king and queen about their ride, while Fendall began making conversation with one of the servants across from him. Other conversations erupted, filling the hall with the sounds of pleasant chatter. It was more like one of her uncle's dinners for the employees of his bank than what she would have expected from royalty.\n\nIt was, however, an excellent chance to spear some of the nearest sausage links and add them to her plate. Along with cheeses, what looked like roasted nuts of some kind, and some bread with some sort of softer cheese, if her nose was deciphering the scent properly. She was partway through using her claws to tear open the loaf she'd selected when she caught wind of her name.\n\n\"Sorry?\" she asked, turning to see who it was that had spoken with her. It was one of the women wearing a servant uniform, sitting a few spots down from Mia\u2014who, Axtara noted, was engaged in keeping her youngest sister occupied. \"I'm afraid I only caught my name.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" the woman said, cheeks reddening slightly. \"I was simply surprised that you were taking bread. Can you... eat bread?\"\n\nAh, that kind of question. \"Yes,\" she said, smiling but being careful not to let her teeth show. \"Like humans, dragons are omnivorous. Capable of eating a varied diet,\" she added quickly. \"I enjoy a good bread myself. Comparatively, we need more dense foods like cheese, fats, or meats in our diets, but that doesn't mean we cannot enjoy other foods.\"\n\n\"Like sweet rolls,\" Mia cut in. \"She may be Maren's new best customer.\"\n\n\"I'm a dragon,\" Axtara said, resting one set of claws just in front of her chest. \"A sweet roll that is sized for you is far smaller than a sweet roll sized for me. And the honey on it was exquisite.\"\n\n\"They are good sweet rolls,\" one of the guards said. \"I try to stop by and get a small one whenever I'm sent down to Elnacier. They're not cheap, but they are good.\"\n\nFrom there the conversation drifted wherever it wanted to go. Occasionally she was plied with a question about her plans as a banker or how her job worked, questions she was all too happy to answer. Anything to win over a few more clients, she thought, eagerly taking another bite out of a piece of bread with soft cheese when there was a lull in the questions. There were nuts of some kind in the cheese that were simply divine when mixed with the creamy texture. She would definitely need to acquire some for her own larders.\n\nInevitably, however, the conversation shifted away from her business and into questions of a more personal nature. Though, she noted, not without the watchful eyes of the queen carefully panning over any that asked, clearly as a reminder to be polite.\n\n\"So,\" one of the guards asked. Olsker, if she was remembering his name properly. \"What is it like to fly?\"\n\nAxtara had to smile at that. It was far from the first time someone had asked her about it. \"Wonderful,\" she said, leaning back slightly so that her wings wouldn't brush against anyone when she spread them doing so. It felt good to stretch them out. Plus, seeing the awed look on everyone's faces didn't hurt. \"When I'm up in the sky, it just feels right,\" she said. \"It's almost as good as working an abacus or balancing some sums.\"\n\n\"Like riding?\" Princess Abathine asked.\n\n\"I couldn't honestly answer,\" she replied, folding her wings in once more against her sides. \"There haven't been many horses that could bear me after I was ten summers or so of age.\"\n\nAt that answer the young princess' eyes went wide. \"I hadn't thought of that. But...\" She cocked her head to one side. \"Couldn't you just use your magic to make yourself a human and ride?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"I'm no wizard. I prefer mathematical equations to those of magic. There are dragons that can do that, and it would be unique, I'm sure, but it lies outside my skill set. However, you could answer the question yourself.\"\n\n\"I could? Wait...\"\n\n\"Study and learn to use magic,\" Axtara said with a slight grin. \"There are wizards that fly.\"\n\n\"That'd be the day,\" one of the guards said, grinning. \"Princess Abathine, the master wizard! It'd be quite nice, actually.\"\n\n\"Ehh, I don't know,\" Abathine said, frowning slightly. \"That sounds like a lot of work.\"\n\n\"But you could learn how to fly,\" Mia said, grinning as well. \"Maybe you could give one of your horses wings?\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" another servant said as Abathine's eyes went wide. \"That sounds like high-level magic. I don't take care of them all day so that you can turn one of them into a magic experiment.\"\n\n\"But a flying horse...\" the princess said, a thoughtful look on her face.\n\n\"Sounds like a lot of work,\" the queen said, injecting herself into the conversation. \"After all, how do wings work? You would need to learn. Bird wings and dragon wings are different, for example. What sort of wings would you give a horse?\"\n\nAxtara didn't miss the not-so-subtle look the queen was giving her. \"Oh yes,\" she said, leaning back and spreading one of her wings out so that all in attendance could see it. Lamplight from the wall glimmered through the membrane. \"See the bones here and here?\" She turned her nose at them. \"Not quite a bird's wing, nor a bat's.\" She gave it a slight flip, stirring a breeze and making the lamps flicker slightly, then folded it back in. \"You would have to know all the bones, and where the muscles are, and which muscles do what.\" Maybe. Sort of. She wasn't quite sure how complicated it was, but surely changing one's form couldn't be easy.\n\n\"See?\" Mia added. \"If you want to do that, you could, but you'd need to start studying tomorrow so that\u2014\"\n\n\"Okay, okay, I get it,\" Abathine groused. \"It would be a lot of studying, which is time I could spend riding or learning something else. I understand. But with that, the idea is tempting.\"\n\nThe conversation moved on, shifting over the more down-to-earth topics like the local crops and livestock and developments around the kingdom. Axtara listened, politely reacting where applicable but letting herself take notes as the topic wound from place to place like a woodland road. She wasn't sure if any of it would be useful in the weeks ahead... but it couldn't hurt. One never knows where one might find their next client. Her uncle had been most insistent about that with all his bankers. Keeping an open mind had been one his strictest rules.\n\n'After all,' he'd said, the words as clear in her mind as if he'd just spoken them. 'One must open one's wings to fly.'\n\nEventually, however, the conversation slowed as the heavy, rich food took its toll. It was at this point that the king took command of the conversation, drawing the hall in with what was clearly a bit of practice and regaling them with a tale from his adventuring days. One that he'd told before, Axtara gathered from the looks of the audience, but that still served to entertain.\n\nAnd educate, unless she missed her guess, given that it was about how King Elnacier, Fendall, and the rest of their band had cleared a whole den of fell wolves not a day after arriving in the town. It was a harrowing tale even knowing that there was a positive ending at the conclusion, given that all the names the king offered were people sitting at the very table. Even Fendall gave a slight bow and a laugh when the king told them of how the man had skewered three fell wolves with a single thrust of his spear... only to be unable to get the spear back out.\n\nBut eventually, the king declared the dinner a success, thanked everyone in attendance, Axtara included, and then excused himself from the hall to deal with some \"personal business\" that, from the look his wife gave him, was the king's most courteous method of saying he needed to attend to ablutions. Fendall excused himself a moment later. For the evening, from his words.\n\nAnd then the dinner seemed officially over, the various members grabbing plates and platters to clean up. Axtara lifted her own, unsure of what to do, when the woman she'd identified as the majordomo's wife arrived at her side.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" she said. \"My name is Devine. Please, leave your plate for one of us to handle. If you are ready to depart at this time, I will escort you to the gate.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Axtara set the plate back down on the table, where it was whisked away by one of the other servants. The guards had already vanished, as had Mia and her sisters. Dinner did appear to be over completely. Though it would have been nice to say goodnight to Mia and her sisters. Even the little one that seems to think I'm a pet. She turned to thank the queen for her meal, only to find that the queen too had vanished.\n\nA flutter of worry rippled through her. I didn't offend anyone, did I? Perhaps Devine would offer some clue if she had. She followed the majordomo out to the front doors, only for the guide to come to a stop as the queen materialized around the doorway, holding Axtara's bag in her hands.\n\n\"Devine, you may tend to the house,\" she said, smiling as she held out Axtara's bag for her. \"I'll see Lady Axtara out myself.\" Devine bowed and turned away almost immediately, leaving the two of them alone at the entrance. Again the queen smiled, a sort of curious half-smile that Axtara had seen on the nobility at her uncle's bank whenever they were particularly pleased.\n\nThen it faded. \"My apologies, Lady Axtara,\" the queen said, motioning toward the front of the house and walking in the same direction. Axtara moved quickly to follow. \"I didn't give you a chance to say goodnight to my daughter, nor to thank her for inviting you to the dinner. I expect that you'll wish me to thank her for you?\"\n\nShe almost choked. \"If you would, your highness. I would be most grateful.\"\n\nThe queen smiled again, her steps silent against the floor as they moved toward the front doors and away from the bustle of the main hall. \"I will,\" she said. \"It is the least I could do since I sent her to make sure her sister got to bed.\"\n\nAxtara couldn't help but cock one eyebrow at the statement. The queen didn't miss it either, her smile growing.\n\n\"I wanted to speak with you woman to woman,\" she said as they neared the door. \"Or if you prefer, woman to dragoness.\" The front doors opened with a faint squeak, the queen leading out down the front steps into the grounds. \"I have a request of you, if that's all right.\"\n\nA request? Axtara made her way down the steps after the queen, the faint flutter of worry returning again. \"My queen, it's not regarding my bank, is it? I'm afraid it would not be wise for me to become the bank of the crown.\"\n\n\"Not what I was going to ask,\" the queen said, smiling against the deepening twilight as they moved through the grounds. \"No, instead I was going to ask you about my daughter.\"\n\n\"Your daughter? Princess Mia?\"\n\nThe queen nodded, her pace slowing as they moved through the roses. \"Yes. I have a request of you. But before I make it, I must ask...\" The queen came to a stop, turning to face Axtara directly. \"She said that you were of similar ages. Is that correct?\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Yes, your highness. By the standards of a human, I would be about twenty summers of age.\"\n\n\"Good. Now, despite my daughter's forthrightness in accosting you in your own home, I was hoping that you could perhaps, Lady Axtara... be her friend?\"\n\nAxtara pulled back in surprise. \"Your highness?\"\n\n\"I know,\" the queen said, nodding with a look of desperation on her face. \"She came to attack you. And yes, she is human, but you are the closest this kingdom has to a noble woman of her age\u2014of any age, really, save myself and her sisters. I know it is a strange request, and perhaps overstepping some bounds of social propriety, but despite her most unladylike introduction, I was hoping that you...\" The queen's voice trailed off, a concerned look on her features. \"Lady Axtara, are you all right?\"\n\nAt that Axtara let the snort she'd been holding back escape, glad the dim light meant the queen likely couldn't see the embarrassed flush to her scales. \"I am fine, your highness,\" she said quickly, trying to keep from laughing. \"I just... You needn't have asked. Your daughter has been a wonderful visitor to my home.\"\n\n\"Even when she showed up with a crossbow and put a hole in your door?\" It was impossible to miss the dry tone to the queen's voice.\n\n\"Well, I'll admit the introduction was a little rocky,\" Axtara admitted. \"But my queen, it is all a matter of perspective. Your daughter\u2014Mia\u2014was so determined to do what was best for your kingdom, she was prepared to do battle with me. In her own way an inspiring figure, one could say.\"\n\n\"That... is true,\" the queen admitted, nodding.\n\n\"Now, I was upset about for a time,\" Axtara admitted. \"But... it was just a door. It was bound to suffer damage at some point. And I would rather have a hole in my door than not have a chance to establish a friendship with Princess Mia. With or without your request, your highness. If I may speak bluntly, I have not possessed many friends of my age either. When I was young, there were not many dragons around to know save my parents, and working at my uncle's bank I was just another employee.\"\n\n\"So then, you're amiable to my daughter's visits?\" the queen asked, a note of hope in her voice and in her eyes. There was definitely a resemblance to Mia.\n\n\"Yes, your highness.\" Axtara gave the queen a bow. \"I would be delighted to honor my home with the visits of the princess.\"\n\n\"She said you have tea.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't suppose you do needlepoint, but...\"\n\nAxtara shook her head.\n\nThe queen nodded. \"Very well. If it isn't too much, could you at least teach my daughter the proper ways of tea while you're socializing? She's never been much for the art, but it's hard to get good tea out here.\"\n\n\"I will do my best, your highness.\"\n\n\"Very well. Thank you, Lady Axtara. It will do my mind a great deal of good to see her in the company of a young lady\u2014dragoness\u2014her own age.\" A brief sadness flitted across the queen's face. \"Not that I don't love my husband and our kingdom, but it has come with sacrifices. I am glad to hear that you have enjoyed my daughter's company. Very glad indeed.\"\n\nThe queen turned, moving across the darkened garden once more. The light of the sun had almost completely faded, replaced instead by the light of one of the moons. \"Do you need a light to find your way home by?\"\n\nThe question caught Axtara off-guard, and it took her a moment to formulate a reply. \"Thank you, but no, your highness. There is enough light from the moons to allow me a safe flight home. If I can fly after that feast. My belly almost feels as though it should be touching the ground.\" She waited for a hint of laughter. The queen let out a light chuckle, and she relaxed.\n\n\"Yes, my husband does appreciate a good meal,\" she said. \"And he can cook decently well himself. He made that sausage. A little unusual for a king, but...\" She shrugged. \"Elnacier is its own kingdom, with its own traditions. And now, its first noble.\" The queen came to a stop as the gate neared. \"Good night, Lady Axtara. And... thank you. For listening to my proposal. Even if it seems my fears were unfounded, I'm grateful to have had the chance to let you know what it means to me.\"\n\n\"Your highness,\" Axtara said, stopping just shy of the archway and looking at the queen. \"If I may speak freely?\"\n\n\"You may.\"\n\n\"Please, for my own sake, do not let your opinion of me or my bank be swayed by my friendship with your daughter. I would not want you to grant me undue advantage or favor simply because your\u2014because Mia is a capable young lady in her own right. Nor would I want her to think that I had only befriended her because you requested it.\"\n\nThankfully, the queen nodded almost immediately. \"Very astute. And well said. Very well. I will speak to her myself and make sure that she knows I only meant to encourage what already seems to have sprung into being. And I will do my best to see to it that I don't grant you undue favor, Lady Axtara.\" The queen paused, silent for a moment but still appearing as if she had more to say. After a few moments, it came.\n\n\"You have demonstrated no small amount of integrity and courage, Axtara. If you hold true to such things, I think our kingdom will be all the better for it.\" She gave a gentle nod. \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, your highness,\" Axtara said, bowing and spreading her wings. The queen turned and began to walk away through the gardens, leaving her alone at the gate. She stayed lowered for a few moments, then as soon as she was sure the queen had departed, turned and left the grounds.\n\nMoments later, she spread her wings and took to the air, the heavy, warm weight in her belly trying to pull her back down with every wingbeat. She flew toward the town for a minute, then settled into a long, lazy glide back toward her home, and her bed.\n\nAll in all, it had been a most successful, if strange, night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Friendly Finance",
                "text": "It had been three days since the dinner, and business had indeed picked up. Not to the degree of traffic her uncle's bank had experienced. Nor to quite the number of visitors she would have liked. But it was a start. Even if some of them had only come to \"see the dragon,\" not at all interested in the services she was offering.\n\nNot yet, anyway. That was the thought she'd consoled herself with as they'd stared at her with wide eyes, some looking as though they'd wanted to bolt, others as though they wanted to pet her. Some had when she'd moved to speak, fleeing if not in a panic, then in a close approximation of one.\n\nOthers however, larger in number, had stayed, wide-eyed as she'd spoken. And explained to them that if they were curious, she was more than willing to give them an explanation of her business and some rudimentary financial advice.\n\nAfter all, why not? Considering she had a captive audience, it was a way of making use of the time. Granted, a good number of those that had come to stare at her had been young\u2014children or teens, reminding her of the first few times she had begged her parents to let her go see a \"hooman.\" But there was a chance they'd sit there thinking over what she'd talked about, from savings to loans, and one day arrive with a few coins in hand to start their own financial journey.\n\nStill, eventually she'd run out of impromptu financial presentations and instead decided to work on her etching, since if she had no current customers and was going to be gawked at, it would be worth observing in return... Though not at her crowd. The sight of a dragon using her claw to do something to a sheet of metal had driven away some of them, but a few had even been more curious, and she'd not only finished her etching of the front of her home over the next two days, but had a brief yet spirited conversation with the local blacksmith's apprentice, who found the art fascinating. She'd briefly wondered after he left if she was going to receive a visit from the blacksmith next, asking her about the apprentice's new hobby.\n\nBut the curious folks that came by hadn't been the highlights of her days. The new clients, or at least prospective clients, for the most part, had consumed her attention. She'd welcomed them into her home as carefully and politely as possible, served them tea, and done her best to see to their needs.\n\nNot that it had been easy work in most cases. Such as the one currently sitting before her, a thoughtful look on his face as he ran his hands once more through his thinning hair. Which he only did, she'd quickly noted, whenever he seemed unsure of himself.\n\nHe had run his hands through his hair a lot during their conversation thus far. At least he'd complimented her tea.\n\n\"So...\" Craglily said, his hands coming away from his head at last. \"You're... selling money, then?\"\n\nAxtara paused for only a moment, holding her momentary surprise from her face. \"That's one way to look at it, yes,\" she said, taking a small sip of her own cup of tea. Orange, and one of her favorites, both sharp and flavorful. \"In a sense, the money I give you is the 'product,' and you pay me back for it at a later date or over time.\"\n\n\"Sort of like when I take Freyold wood at the start of fall, and he pays me back in the spring,\" Craglily said, nodding.\n\n\"Yes, like that. Only instead of wood, my product is money.\" She smiled. The man's unique way of looking at her services was impressive in its own way, though it had taken him some explanation to arrive at the conclusion. As uncle said, uneducated does not equal unintelligent. And it was certainly better than his first attempt, where he'd tried to compare interest to the taxes he paid the king.\n\n\"But I know Freyold is good for it,\" Craglily said, his forehead furrowing in thick lines. \"Because I've known him for years. You don't know me at all. I might not be able to pay you back.\"\n\n\"That is indeed part of the risk I take when giving a loan,\" she replied, setting her cup down atop her desk. \"That's why before I simply give someone a loan, I'll make an examination of their finances. For example, if you wished to borrow a thousand bars\u2014\"\n\n\"A thousand?\" Craglily interjected, his eyes going wide with shock. \"I\u2014\"\n\n\"It's just an example,\" Axtara said quickly, fanning her wings slightly as a distraction. The motion worked, drawing Craglily's eyes and tugging his thoughts away from what to him was a fortune. \"But say you asked for it all the same.\"\n\n\"Do you actually have that much money?\"\n\nShe smiled, and this time she did show a glimmer of teeth. Just enough to remind Craglily of what she was, and not just who. \"It's merely a hypothetical. An imaginary thought exercise,\" she added as she saw his brow furrow again at the word.\n\n\"So,\" she continued, leaning her head forward slightly. \"Say you came to me and asked to borrow a thousand bars. I would want to see evidence that you could pay back such a sum once borrowed. I would want to know how much money you made a year, how much you spent, how much you paid in taxes to the king, how much you saved. So that I, in turn, could determine how much you could afford to pay back without suffering undue financial strain.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, smiling again\u2014without teeth this time\u2014and nodding. \"It would do me no good to grant you a loan with such a high repayment cost that it ruined you. Even if I took back what was left of what I'd loaned you, I'd still lose money. My best interest is to find you a loan that you can, in time, pay back, with its accompanying interest. Pay for, in other words.\"\n\n\"Well, that's nice,\" Craglily said.\n\n\"And in both our best interests,\" Axtara added, pausing to take another sip of her tea. \"But that's why I would want to examine your own finances. Any records you may have, plans you've made to spend the money I loan you.\"\n\n\"Why would you need tha\u2014?\" Craglily caught himself. \"Wait, I think I get it. If I'm going to buy new saws, like you suggested earlier, then that means I can cut wood with fewer delays, and that means I might be able to sell more wood. Which means I could make more money, which means I could pay you faster.\"\n\n\"Very astute,\" she said, nodding and dipping her head slightly. \"That is exactly correct. If I know what you plan to do with the money I 'sell' you, and how much it stands to change your financial situation, I can in turn modify how much I sell to you for.\" She paused for a moment, thinking. \"Can you think of someone in Elnacier who isn't quite a reputable as... was it Freyold?\"\n\n\"Yeah, Freyold's reliable,\" Craglily said. \"I said that.\"\n\n\"But is there someone who wants wood who's less reliable in paying for it?\"\n\n\"Oh!\" The man's eyes lit up, even as he ran a hand through his hair again. \"Yeah, old Micker. He always tries to swindle me on my pay.\"\n\nShe filed the name away in the back of her head, though it wasn't familiar. \"So, when he asks for wood.\"\n\n\"I make him pay first.\"\n\n\"What if he wanted a large order? Like Freyold.\"\n\nCraglily let out a short laugh. \"I wouldn't sell it to 'im. Not without an oath before the king promising payment.\"\n\n\"And you'd charge him more, wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Craglily's eyes lit up. \"Oh.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" She took another sip of her tea. \"If someone seems a substantial risk, I may offer to 'sell' them a much lesser amount of money, and for far more in return.\" She smiled. \"So now, Mister Craglily, do you understand what it is that I do now?\"\n\nThe man nodded. \"I think I do. Thank you for explaining it to me, Lady Axtara. I know I'm not the best with money and the like, but you make it sound fairly simple.\"\n\nAnything but, Axtara thought, but kept it to herself. Instead she simply smiled as Craglily took a swig of his tea. \"So then,\" she said as he swallowed. \"Now that you understand what it is I do, would you be interested in 'purchasing' some additional funds?\" Craglily set the cup down a little more harshly than she would have liked, but she caught her flinch before it made its way to her face.\n\n\"Well,\" he said. \"I'll admit it does sound nice. Me and the family could use some new saws, made of better metal maybe, or new axes.\"\n\n\"Maybe even enchanted.\" She couldn't resist slipping in the suggestion, and to her delight Craglily nodded.\n\n\"Yeah. It would cost more, but we'd not need to sharpen 'em as much. Or maybe we could rebuild the mill, too, if we got up enough headway. But...\" He looked up at her, and she knew what he was going to say before he said it. \"I'm not sure we'd have enough of a need for it. We might not be able to pay you back.\"\n\n\"I may be able to help with that,\" she said, trying not to show teeth as she smiled. She was so close! She could feel it. \"You're not the only one in the kingdom I plan to offer loans to. More than a few people, I expect, will need wood before long.\"\n\n\"You expect,\" Craglily said. \"But yer not sure.\"\n\nThankfully, I've dealt with far more cautious nobles before, Axtara though, folding her claws. \"Of course not. Which is why I would advise against requesting too much of a loan at once. And if you would prefer to err on the side of caution, I would advise taking a longer period to 'pay' me back. It would cost you more at the end, but less from month to month.\" She brought her wings in close to her sides, a good visual signal she'd found most humans saw similarly to squaring their shoulders. \"So, what do you think?\"\n\n\"I think... I need to talk to my son, Waterlily,\" Craglily said. Axtara could feel her grasp of success sliding through her claws, at least until he spoke again.\n\n\"You see,\" he said, running a hand through his hair and leaning forward. \"I honestly don't have much of a head for all this stuff, though you did a right nice job explaining it. But asking about what we'd need, or what we'd be able to afford?\" He shook his head. \"I couldn't give you an answer right now.\"\n\nA surge of hope rushed through her like a breaking wave.\n\n\"But I like what you said, my lady,\" Craglily continued, oblivious to the way her tail was lashing back and forth behind the shelter of her desk. \"I'll sit down and have a talk with my boy and see what he thinks we might need.\"\n\nIt wasn't definite. But it was close.\n\n\"He's the one who manages the family finances, and will be taking over the mill once I'm done with it. So he's the one who would be best to let the decision rest with.\"\n\nIt was better than a no. A maybe... That I can work with.\n\n\"Very well, then, Mister Craglily\u2014\" she began, rising and giving him another smile.\n\n\"Please, your ladyship, just call me Crag,\" Craglily\u2014Crag\u2014said, rising from his seat and holding out his hand. Then he paused, eyes widening and looking down at his hand in shock, but before he could retract it she reached out with her claws, her palm meeting his. Reflexively, his grip tightened, and they shook.\n\n\"Very well, Crag,\" she said before letting go of his hand and rising to see him to the door. \"If you would like, I could come by in a day or two and speak with your son directly. Would that be all right?\" She had to force her tail and wings to still as she waited for a response. Please say yes! Please! If he didn't, it'd be far too easy for him to simply be too busy to come back for days or weeks. But if he said yes...\n\nCraglily paused by the door, nodding slowly. \"That could work.\"\n\nYes! Keep the smile straight! Don't look too eager!\n\n\"We've got a job to do tomorrow, but just in case we can't talk then, we'd need the next day. So maybe three days from now?\" He looked up at her.\n\n\"I could do that,\" she said, nodding and forcing herself to keep the motion steady and polite. \"Or rather, I will do that. Three days. Around mid-day?\"\n\nCraglily nodded. \"That sounds perfect, my lady. Thank you.\" He gave her a brief, somewhat aborted bow.\n\n\"You're most welcome,\" she said. \"Speak with your son, and I'll see you in three days.\" Craglily gave her a final nod, and then walked out the door and down the road.\n\nShe waited, watching from the windows until he was out of sight around the bend, before spinning around, wings and tail fully extended. \"Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes!\"\n\nHe was going to go for it. She felt it. He wanted a loan. A good one! And she was going to provide it! From her bank!\n\n\"Yes!\" The shout came out again, almost a purring croon of satisfaction. Then she tucked her wings back in, folding them against her sides and forcing herself to relax. But still she let it slip past her lips one final time. \"Yes.\"\n\nHer tail was still lashing behind her, almost quivering. She let it as she turned back to her desk and began carefully collecting Craglily's small tea cup for cleaning. It was only half empty.\n\nPoor man. Probably felt guilty at sharing my nice tea. She carried the small tea set carefully back into her kitchen for cleaning\u2014a delicate task with her claws, but thankfully one made easier by an enchanted washing cloth. An expensive purchase\u2014some would have said extravagant\u2014but a savings over time.\n\nEspecially in not replacing broken teacups and saucers, she thought as she pumped a rush of water over the set and carefully arranged it next to her sink to dry.\n\nShe was still smiling. Almost grinning as she stared down at the teacup. I'm going to meet with Craglily's son and talk about a loan!\n\nThat was the catch. Talk about it. Just talk. There was no guarantee yet. There was a chance that the son would balk at the price, or that the mill was in worse shape than Craglily had hinted.\n\nThough in that latter case, that could potentially mean an even larger loan with a longer-term payment.\n\nNot that it means my work is done, Axtara thought, moving back toward her desk. I'll need to come forearmed with a number of options. Which meant she'd need to have all the numbers in her head, as well as at least one contract on claw in case Craglily's son decided to sign right then and there.\n\nWhich, she reflected as she sat down at her desk, means that I should find out if either of them can read, or anyone in their household. And if not, I'd need to find someone they trust that could. She frowned. The priest perhaps. Those following the path of the Great Creator know how to read.\n\nGranted, it was possible that he would decline. So I'll need to speak with him first, she thought, taking a sip of her cup of tea and staring down at her desk. Perhaps tomorrow. For right now, I need to\u2014\n\nA knock at the door shook her from her thoughts, and she jerked her eyes upright. Another visitor? Today is a good day indeed!\n\nShe set her cup of tea down quickly, swallowing and then calling out. \"It's open! You can come right in!\" There was a click as the handle turned, and she tucked her wings in close, pulling them up against her sides and drawing herself up in a carefully calculated, slightly regal but friendly-looking position. \"Welcome to the Bank of Axtara,\" she said as the door began to open. \"What can I help you with to\u2014Oh! Hello Mia!\"\n\n\"Hello Axtara,\" the princess said as she stepped around the door. She was clad once more in her riding leathers. \"I waved at you when I was riding up, but you were looking at your desk. I passed Craglily on the way here. Did it go poorly?\"\n\nThere was, Axtara noted, a genuine tone of concern to Mia's voice, and she shook her head. \"No, not at all,\" she said, letting her smile spring back into place. \"No, he wishes me to meet with his son in three days to discuss a loan. A substantial loan, I hope.\" She gestured to the teapot as Mia took the seat Craglily had so recently vacated. \"It may be my first! Tea?\"\n\n\"Yes please,\" Mia said, accepting a small saucer and teacup as Axtara passed them to her. \"And congratulations, Axtara. It isn't surprising that Craglily would be one of the first. He's been complaining about how rundown his mill is as long as I've been alive. And I know his son, Waterlily. He's a good man, and intent on making the mill better. He won't say no.\" She sipped at her tea and her eyes lit up. \"Axtara, what is this?\"\n\nAxtara smiled, and not just at Mia's assurance that Craglily was even more interested in her loan than he'd let on. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"I've never tasted anything like it!\" Mia said, starting down at her cup and then taking another quick sip. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"An eastern fruit called an 'orange.'\"\n\n\"Like the color?\"\n\n\"That's where the name for the color comes from, I believe,\" Axtara replied, pausing to take another sip of her own cup. \"But they have a wonderful flavor. If you can get them.\" She took another sip, noting that Mia's cup was already half empty as she did so, and then gave Mia a smile. \"So princess, is all well at the manor?\"\n\n\"Well enough. Father and mother have both spoken highly of you since your visit, I hope you know. Father in particular was quite pleased. He worries, you see. He tries to hide it, but he knows that there's more to simply being a king than having declared himself one. For all he's done for this kingdom, it has struggled. He sees your arrival and interest in Elnacier as a fortuitous sign that things may be changing at last.\"\n\n\"Well, after my meeting with Craglily, I'm inclined to believe he may be right!\" Axtara felt her wings extend slightly, and then let them. Mia wasn't a client, she was... a friend. \"Speaking of which, his son is named Waterlily? Like the plant?\"\n\n\"Most people just call him 'Wat,'\" Mia said with a slight smirk. \"But yes, it is. And he's well aware it would likely be a woman's name in the central kingdoms.\"\n\n\"Was it his mother's choice, or his fathers? I'm merely curious,\" she added before taking a sip of her tea.\n\n\"Both, actually,\" Mia replied. \"As I understand it, their family has been named after the river plants for generations.\"\n\n\"They've been here that long?\" she asked.\n\nMia nodded. \"Quite long. Craglily's ancestors were some of the first to arrive here, as I understand it. In fact, most of the families here are that way. They toughed out the fell and the dangers of the wilds, and they're not about to leave. The ones that did, did so long ago.\"\n\nAxtara frowned. \"I hope that doesn't mean they'll find my coming obtrusive.\"\n\n\"Truthfully?\" Mia said before downing the rest of her tea and letting out a satisfied sigh before continuing. \"Truthfully, I must find more of that tea. Or some of that fruit. But in answer to your question,\" she said, setting her teacup down with a dainty clink. \"They're more likely to be bothered that you're a dragon than they are by the idea of you loaning money. Though,\" she added with a thoughtful look on her face, \"dragons' reputation of hoarding money could be helpful in that scenario.\"\n\nAxtara grinned, pleased to see that Mia didn't shy away from the view of her teeth. \"Actually, my uncle used that quite a bit when managing his bank. More than one noble bought into the idea that a dragon would defend a hoard of treasure above all else.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Mia said, her voice dragging out as if she wasn't certain she wanted to ask. \"Would they?\"\n\n\"Well of course they would,\" Axtara replied, shifting slightly and giving the princess a smug look. \"Wouldn't you fight to defend your home and property?\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Axtara continued, speaking before Mia could reply. \"I know you would. The hole in my door from an arrow\u2014\"\n\n\"Crossbow bolt.\"\n\n\"\u2014proves that.\" Axtara took another sip of her tea, smiling over the rim of the teacup at her guest.\n\n\"Fine, that is a very fair point,\" Mia said when she'd recovered her voice. Her ears were flushed slightly. \"And I'm still sorry I shot your door.\"\n\nAxtara shrugged as she set her cup down. \"What's done is done. You showed more courage than any other visitor in those early days. What's more, now I have a story I can terrify my parents with.\"\n\nMia pulled back slightly. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Axtara said, grinning as she leaned forward and moved her claws through the air, as if composing a letter. \"Dear mother and father. I've already made a friend here in Elnacier. She's the daughter of the king and she tried to shoot me with a crossbow when we met. Love, your daughter Axtara.\" Mia let out a snort.\n\n\"Addendum,\" Axtara added, her claws flourishing as if she were adding a post-script. \"Will write more next week if I'm still alive. They're having me over for dinner.\"\n\n\"Please tell me your letter was more detailed than that,\" Mia said, her expression somewhere between amusement and a horrified grimace.\n\n\"Of course it was,\" Axtara said, Mia's expression melting into one of amused relief. \"I actually didn't mention the bit about the arro\u2014crossbow bolt. Though I did mention that we'd become friends.\"\n\n\"Well thank the Creator for that,\" Mia said, looking a bit more relieved than Axtara had expected. \"I really am sorry about that.\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"What's done is done. Why dwell on a past we can't change when a future that is malleable lies before us?\"\n\nMia nodded but cocked her head slightly. \"That sounds like something one of my tutors would say. Not that I'm not happy to agree, but...?\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"You're probably right. I learned it from one of my tutors. One of the sayings of the philosopher-poet Mydian. Or close to it, anyway.\"\n\n\"Close enough for me,\" Mia said, sitting back slightly and peering down at her teacup.\n\n\"More tea?\" Axtara asked, lifting the kettle.\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Mia replied, a bit of her stately bearing coming back. It seemed to come and go, Axtara noted as she poured another cup. As soon as it was full Mia blew on it, a small wisp of steam drifting away, and then took another sip.\n\n\"You know, I might be able to write my uncle and have some oranges sent here,\" Axtara said. \"Before the fall truly sets in.\"\n\n\"If you do, let me know,\" Mia said almost immediately. \"I've never had anything like it.\"\n\n\"They make candied ones as well,\" Axtara added, watching as Mia's eyebrows rose. \"Though they're no less costly.\"\n\n\"That sounds incredible.\" Mia took another sip of the tea and then frowned. \"So... is this what young ladies of our age do when having tea? My mother was most excited to hear I was going to be visiting you. She even overlooked my attire.\"\n\n\"And your guard?\" Axtara nodded in the direction of the window and the empty clearing beyond it.\n\nMia shook her head. \"They turned back down the road. And they only came with me because neither of my sisters was out. But the horses are a bit nervous about coming so near your home now that they know you're here, I believe. They're unused to you. They'll come, but they grow tense. Agitated. No offense meant, of course.\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"None taken. Perhaps at a later date, if you'd like, I could come to your stables and maybe acclimate them to my presence?\"\n\n\"It's an idea. I could ask the groom.\" Mia took another sip of her tea.\n\n\"As to what 'having tea' is like, I expect your mother was thinking of the more traditional, formal form of tea,\" Axtara said. \"Something like she would have experienced between the ladies of the court where she grew up. This right here is more a shared drink between friends.\"\n\n\"What's the other one like?\" Mia asked. \"Aside from more formal?\"\n\n\"More political,\" Axtara said quickly, her tail twitching behind her. \"Or about social maneuvering. Uncle made sure I made it to more than a few. They were... not to my preference.\"\n\n\"So a bunch of proper ladies sitting around discussing nobles, social circles, and political maneuvering?\"\n\n\"And the news,\" Axtara added.\n\n\"Well,\" Mia began, pausing to take another sip of her tea before continuing. \"One of Machill's cows gave birth to a calf last night. Early, as I understand it. And I hear rumor that one of the miller's sons is courting a young woman from Seaside.\" She shrugged. \"Not exactly the stuff legends are made of.\"\n\n\"Or scandalous talk for afternoon tea,\" Axtara said with a nod. \"Though interesting in its own way.\" Is the practice of a dowry still held to here? she wondered. It couldn't hurt to find out. Also... \"Seaside?\"\n\n\"One of the villages on the coast,\" Mia elaborated. Though not, Axtara noted, to such a degree that she set down her cup of tea.\n\nEven if her decorum and poise isn't sound, she seems quite taken with the tea. Perhaps a gift of it, in the future, would be prudent.\n\n\"I know,\" Mia continued. \"It's not exactly the most clever name. Seaside is the more northern of the southern villages. About a day's walk from here, or a few hours by carriage. And few of its siblings are any more imaginative.\"\n\n\"I knew of Seaside,\" Axtara said. \"As well as 'Shoreline' and 'Easy Bay.' Those three were in the reports my agents gathered. Though I will agree that they're not particularly clever names.\"\n\n\"Elnacier used to be 'Riverside,'\" Mia said, shaking her head and gazing up at the ceiling for a moment. \"Truly we are an imaginative people.\"\n\n\"Don't feel too bad,\" Axtara said, grinning as Mia's gaze returned. \"I'll have you know that 'Helmson' is exactly as it sounds. It means 'The City of Helm's Son.' Helm being the father of the founder of the Delarian Empire.\"\n\n\"You jest.\"\n\n\"I do not. On my own egg.\" Axtara set her teacup down and held a set of claws to her chest, spreading her wings behind her head. \"Besides, I have no reason to jest with you. It's something found in any history of Delaria. Put a bit more eloquently yes, but no different than your father naming this kingdom after his own surname.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose when you put it that way,\" Mia said, setting her teacup down. It was, Axtara noted, empty once more. \"Still, you must admit that 'Easy Bay' is a fairly simple name.\"\n\n\"Depends on how it was determined,\" Axtara said, tapping her chin with a claw. \"Are the folk of the town, shall we say... loosely moral?\"\n\nMia's sudden snort was a surprise, mostly in its intensity. \"I'll admit to having heard more off-color jokes of that nature than my mother would care to know,\" Mia said. \"But no. I believe it has to do with the sheltered nature of the bay. I know it's considered one of the best places to winter a ship across this whole coast.\"\n\n\"I see. That may be useful information.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mia leaned forward. \"How?\"\n\n\"Recall that I am meeting with Waterlily about their mill, correct.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Well, one of Craglily's concerns, one which needed no voice, was the danger that he take such a loan, invest it in his mill, and then not have a demand for that wood.\"\n\n\"Reasonable,\" Mia said with a nod. Then she held up a hand. \"So then, let me see... The natural course of action would be to confirm for Craglily that there would be a demand for increased wood...\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Well reasoned.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Mia said with a chuckle. \"But you've spoken of this before. At the dinner, for example.\"\n\nAxtara paused. \"That much is true.\"\n\n\"But you seized on Easy Bay,\" Mia said, a shrewd look of concentration sliding across her face. \"So why there? Don't!\" she added quickly, cutting Axtara off before she could open her jaws. \"It was something I said. Something to do with wintering... Oh! Of course! The ships!\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Yes. To be more precise, there must be some sort of work done on those ships over the winter. I'm not a sailor or fisherman myself, but I do know that ships require constant maintenance, and often a yearly checking of some kind, usually done during a slow season. For that matter, there may be a small harbor or maybe even a shipyard there... Or at least a logical place for one,\" she added when Mia shook her head.\n\n\"That does sound astute,\" the princess said.\n\n\"As well, I must admit, somewhat in line with a proper sharing of tea,\" Axtara said, leaning forward slightly. \"How would I get to Easy Bay? I'd actually planned on asking you about Shoreline, since my agents mentioned it was such a heavy fishing village, but now that I know what Easy Bay is named for...\"\n\n\"Easy Bay is easy\u2014\" Mia paused and let out a little chuckle. \"Sorry. It's easy to find. Just follow the road next to the river until it splits off.\"\n\n\"The bay doesn't meet the river?\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't. Most of the townsfolk said it used to, but about a hundred years ago it shifted. It comes out to the south of Easy Bay. Still, it's not too far away. Only about another few miles by horseback. Which, I guess means you'd see it if you were flying.\"\n\n\"Well, that is how I plan to travel.\" Axtara spread her wings for a brief moment, letting their tips press against the walls. \"After all, word that the new banker is a dragon has likely spread to the outlying villages and towns by now. I know how gossip loves to travel. Though even with that in mind, I think I shall land on the outskirts if possible and walk into town, rather than land in the village square. And I will,\" she added with a quick grin, \"be keeping my eye out for any crossbows.\"\n\n\"You're not going to let me live that down, are you?\"\n\n\"Publically? It never happened, as far as I am concerned,\" Axtara said, shooting her friend a smile. \"In private...\" She grinned again. \"No. Of course not.\"\n\n\"Oh by the fell,\" Mia said, throwing her hands up. \"Why couldn't you have sneezed and set fire to one of my father's tapestries or something at the dinner party? Then I'd at least have something to get back at you with.\"\n\n\"It would be poor sporting of me to make it that easy,\" Axtara said, rising slightly. \"More tea?\"\n\n\"Please, even if it means I have to stop in the woods on the way home,\" Mia said, leaning forward and holding out her cup. \"And don't worry. You'll slip up eventually. Then I'll have something to bother you with.\"\n\nShe couldn't resist. \"You mean besides the hole in my door?\"\n\n\"It's quieter and less noticeable than the one in front of me right now.\"\n\n\"Oooh,\" Axtara said as she poured. \"See how quick on the trigger you are?\"\n\n\"And a great shot,\" Mia said as she took her tea back. \"I managed to hit the broad side of your house.\"\n\nAxtara snorted and almost dropped her teakettle.\n\n\"So,\" Mia said once she had leaned back and taken another sip of her tea. Axtara topped off her own cup. \"Are there any other villages you wanted to know about?\"\n\n\"Not at the moment,\" Axtara replied. \"I've thought about a few other approaches, but I think the best thing I can do to drive my business forward is through other businesses in the area. There's quite a bit to start with in Elnacier before I branch out, but Easy Bay is a good starting point to lay the groundwork for pushing out. So I'll begin there.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Mia said, taking another sip of her already half-gone tea. \"Well then, if you don't mind entertaining my company a bit longer, there is something that's been on my mind since the other day that I wanted to ask you about.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" From when?\n\n\"Yes,\" Mia continued, leaning forward and hunching slightly, as if she was worried someone might overhear. \"From before the dinner.\"\n\nBefore? Maybe something about her sister? \"Go on.\" Then even as Mia began to speak, memory surged through her, another part of the conversation coming to light.\n\n\"Well, I've been wondering about it ever since that night.\" Mia's eyes darted down to the cup in her hands. \"When I was fourteen summers of age, I couldn't keep my eyes off the guards' arms when they exercised. And then before the dinner you mentioned something like that, and now I just have to know.\" She looked up, her eyes meeting Axtara's in an embarrassed grin.\n\n\"What do dragons find attractive in each other? Claw size? Teeth? Wingspan? It's been bothering me for days now!\"\n\nAxtara's laugh rang through the room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fiduciary Flights",
                "text": "All right, Axtara thought as she stepped out of her front door, taking care to close and lock it behind her. Let's get this trip underway.\n\nHer visit from Mia the day before had gone on for a fair bit of time before Mia had noticed the passing of the hours and quickly excused herself. Not a moment too soon either, as not mere minutes after her departure, the sky that had over the course of their conversation shifted from clear blue to clouded grey had begun to weep, and then to pour. A deluge that had lasted through the night.\n\nAnd through most of this morning, Axtara thought, glad for the waterproof covering on her satchel as she moved away from the front of her home. The air was still damp with moisture despite the noonday sun breaking through the thick clouds, and though her own body could handle the elements, and even fly in rain, if needed\u2014though it would be far from comfortable\u2014the contents of her satchel could be damaged by them.\n\nShe reached the rough middle of the clearing and spread her wings, letting out a faint sigh of relief as she felt the limbs stretch and pop. I didn't fly at all yesterday, she thought. Or the day before. She crouched low, arching her back and rolling a second stretch from the tips of her claws all the way back to her tail.\n\nOh yes! A tingle ran through her, so intense she shivered. I'm not letting myself languish this long without flying again. As comfortable and well-made as her desk was, she couldn't live behind it. It felt good to limber up.\n\nAnd... I did kind of move here so that I would have more open sky. Helmson had been an incredible city, full of culture and history... but it had also been full of laws, one of which had been that no dragon was allowed to fly over it\u2014or even near it. She'd had to stretch her wings indoors or on retreats outside the city above the orchards and farmland.\n\nThat, and learn to eat a lot less at those fancy parties.\n\nShe took a quick look around the clearing and stretched her head from one side to the other, her neck bending and flexing with a satisfying rush. There will be far fewer fancy parties here, I suspect. And, if Mia's love of oranges held true, quite a bit more tea.\n\nShe crouched, settling back slightly on her haunches, wings stretching forward... and leapt, pushing away from the earth and thrusting her wings down in one mighty, massive beat. The ground fell away beneath her, wings beating as she rose into the air, gusts rolling away from her across the clearing as she worked to gain altitude.\n\nThe cool air cut across her scales as she cleared the treetops, rising into the clouded sky, climbing higher and higher. The opening in the trees that was her home shrunk, first to something the size of her satchel, and then the size of one of her forepaws. Only then did she level out, easing off and settling into a more comfortable steady beat and glide that would keep her at a roughly constant altitude.\n\nOkay. She twisted her head, looking around and behind herself as her wings beat out a steady rhythm. I need to follow the river. Right... there! She could just make out the break in the trees, a steady line that wound through the forest in the direction of Elnacier.\n\nThat's it, she thought, twisting in the air and letting herself drop a little to pick up speed, swooping over toward a small lake. And now I just need to follow it west.\n\nToward the ocean. And the village of Easy Bay. A carriage ride of a few hours, according to Princess Mia.\n\nBut a much shorter flight, Axtara thought with a smile. Already she was nearing, and then passing, the southern edge of Elnacier. Not that it will be that short. A few hours ride by carriage was likely to still be an hour or so by wing. But after the last few days... The exercise is welcome.\n\nAs was the fresh air. The rains had left it moist, but no less scented with pine and earth, the smells flowing through her nostrils with every breath. She increased her pace slightly, relished the feel of the winds slipping over her scales and across her back. It was almost enough to make her want to do a roll, or perhaps a loop, something fun after so many days of work, but...\n\nNot with so many eyes on me. Not so close to Elnacier. Once the town was out of sight and the farm homesteads beneath her farther and fewer between, then she could indulge in a little fun.\n\nShe settled for a shallow dive instead, shedding only a third of her height to pick up speed and then rise into a nice, even climb. That alone was enough to make her claws clench with slight excitement.\n\nNo creature without wings could ever understand how wonderful it feels to fly, Axtara thought. You simply have to experience it. Even Mia, the day before, had finally conceded defeat, a number of proposed analogies for the feeling having one by one fallen to the wayside.\n\nMia had, of course, noted that while she didn't have wings, her sister had raised a good point about Axtara being capable of perhaps sharing the experience.\n\nAxtara's response had been just to shake her head and laugh. The phrase \"get your own wings\" had been said more than once, followed by good-natured laughter. Once she'd suggested that she'd consider it if Mia's younger sister could procure a large horse for Axtara to ride in turn, perhaps as part of a trade.\n\nTo which Mia had quickly pointed out that after the dinner a few days earlier, Princess Abathine actually had been seen pouring over what few books concerning magic the manor's study held. So perhaps Axtara's words had struck her more than anyone had realized.\n\nOr perhaps she'd grow bored of it in a few days, and little would come of it at all save perhaps a little gain of knowledge. At her age, either result was possible.\n\nEither way, Mia had noted, if Abathine had found a new goal in life, there was a chance that she'd wind up making good on Axtara's challenge if she heard it. Or, at least, trying to.\n\nOf course at that point the conversation had wandered into all the ways either of them could think of that Abathine attempting such could go dreadfully wrong, some amusing, and some that would have been genuinely unsettling had they both not been laughing so hard. Axtara's suggestion that the spell would go wrong and create a giant horse that couldn't stop moving... while only moving as quick as a snail had gotten a good snort out of Mia. An invisible horse had been suggested as well, terrorizing the kingdom's carrot farmers as it ate through their crops and snuck from farm to farm.\n\nAxtara's response that if Abathine grew capable enough to do such magic to a horse she could likely just turn herself into something with wings and fly for herself, thus going back to her original answer, had turned on her completely when Mia had pointed out that Abi could also at that point just turn her horse into a dragon. Maybe one with a long, muscular tail and firm forelegs...\n\nI never should have answered that question, Axtara thought, her expression going momentarily flat. She just didn't get it.\n\nAt least, however, Mia had understood how awkward her jest had been when Axtara had turned it on her, describing the horse as a muscular, unclothed man...\n\nWhat goes around comes around, she thought, her flat expression becoming a smirk. Mia's response on how creepy it would be as it would still have the mind of a horse had been followed by a sudden \"Oh\" showing that the connection had been made.\n\nThe conversation had drifted a bit after then. Mia had talked about some of her favorite hunting spots, and how she was excited for the fall season to fully arrive, which was when her father generally found more time to go out with hunting parties from the village. And then Axtara had asked her to explain what she'd meant by \"hunting party\" and found it to be pretty much what it had sounded like, save that the king himself went with them, along with a number of members of the manor household, and that the resulting meat was split between all parties based on the number of people that came along.\n\nWhatever financial troubles this kingdom has had, they're not because of Mia's father, Axtara mused. Not when he goes hunting like that. In many other kingdoms, a royal hunting party meant that the royal family took most if not all of what was caught, and it was usually an excuse for nobility to try and look good before the king by bringing down the greatest catch. Here, the party would hunt for a few days, split the spoils, and even send a surplus to those homes that needed it.\n\nIt was a party in some ways, according to Mia. With fires and meat and lots of celebrating the coming of winter and the end of the harvests.\n\nThe princess had also extended an invitation to Axtara to join them. She'd been quite surprised at the revelation that Axtara had never really hunted much.\n\nBesides, dragons don't hunt like people. Though Mia had been quick to suggest that an aerial spotter would be quite valuable to the hunt. Or even her other senses.\n\nThankfully, the hunting parties were a few weeks away, at the end of the harvest season. Plenty of time to think about it.\n\nAnd, truth be told, it would be nice to fill her larder herself with row after row of smoked venison. Or perhaps some of the sausage she'd been fed at dinner.\n\nThat was delicious, Axtara thought with a grin. And until I have enough money coming in, earning my food through a little effort may not be a bad idea.\n\nShe had, at least, remembered to ask Mia before she'd gone about whether or not most of the townsfolk could read. To her delight, it appeared a number of them could. By order of Mia's father, no less. Each family had to send at least one member to learn to read from the priest, or pay a stiff fine.\n\nAnd it had worked. Rather than pay, the people in the village had complied, each home sending someone to learn to read from the priest once a week. It wasn't a formal schooling, but it was good enough.\n\nIt won't matter in the other villages though, Axtara thought as she adjusted her course. The scent of the nearby ocean was getting stronger now, and she could just see the grey horizon off in the distance, a change from the darker green of the pines. She was getting closer.\n\nHopefully, there will be at least one person who can read in each village, but...\n\nBeneath her there was a flash of movement. People pointing at her, distant cries of surprise and shock reaching her ears as she flew over one of the homes of the few that dared live far from any of the villages. There was a skull of some kind affixed to a post outside their door, near the road.\n\nCharming. Probably a bear skull. Or maybe a wolf. From a fell creature, possibly. She continued on, not pausing to see if their shouts were those of fear or excitement.\n\nSlowly, gradually, she let a bit of a meandering wander come into her flight, twitching her wings and tail first one way, and then another until she was swinging back and forth through the air with each wingbeat. Then, at the peak of her swing, she rolled, tucking her wings in close for just a moment after a sharp downwards thrust and sending herself into a tight, dropping spiral.\n\n\"Wooo!\" She couldn't help but let out a shout as she dropped, earth and sky spinning around her again and again until she extended the tips of her wings and straightened out once more, the world righting around her, sky below and\u2014\n\nOops. She flicked her wingtips, spinning a little further and righting herself so that the sky was above her, and the ground below. I'm out of practice. She widened her wingspan, stretching her wings out with each beat and climbing back to gain the altitude she'd dropped. But I do have plenty of time right now, and I'm still following the river, so...\n\nBy the time the ocean had swallowed the horizon and the main road broke away from the river, both bending in different directions, she was almost short of breath. And perhaps a little dizzy. But it had been worth it. Flying for the sheer joy of it was nice.\n\nBut now I need to work, Axtara thought, slowing as she watched the road split, breaking from itself just as it had the river. I need to follow that one, she thought, pointing a claw at the southernmost of the two forks below her. Though I suppose it is rather obvious since it's the one pointed at that long island.\n\nThe island was part of what made the bay such a good spot, apparently. Long and rugged, it took most of the fury of the winter storms, while the bay behind it, sheltered between the hills, was left in relative peace.\n\nSo if that's the island... she thought, glancing at the long, low shape out in the water. Which of those hills is Easy Bay in? She still couldn't quite make out the full bay, not as low as she'd gotten during her fun, though there was a noticeable dip in the treetops far ahead of her.\n\nIt was also a little more difficult than before to see the road beneath her, and she pressed herself up through the air, lifting to try and get a clearer picture. Enough flying for fun, she thought as her eyes followed the road once more. It was still visible, just... old, a lot of trees around it partially covering it.\n\nNarrower too, she thought as she gained altitude. Hopefully there's space outside of town for me to land in. The last thing she wanted to do was land right in the center of the village square and cause a panic.\n\nShe could see the bay now that she'd gained altitude, a break in the trees taken up by an expanse of dark blue. The scent of salt water was almost as sharp and biting as the scent of pine so close to the shore. She continued working her way upward, gaining altitude and gradually bringing the bay into view.\n\nIt wasn't hard to see why it had been settled. The water was fairly calm and flat, and she could see a number of small fishing boats spread across it. At the head was what had to be the town of Easy Bay itself: A cluster of fairly wide-spread buildings, most of which were built close to the water's edge. A single dock jutted out into the water like a long tail, stretching out far enough that the low tide still left most of it afloat. At the other end was what looked like the largest building in the town, a long, low, wide structure that seemed to have a dock of some sort at one end with a wagon\u2014\n\nOf course, Axtara thought as she settled into a glide. It's where they clean the fish and get them ready to go to the other towns. There must be an ice-house nearby or in that building so that the fish can\u2014\n\nThe wind shifted slightly, carrying with it a new scent, one that made her salivate. Smoked fish. It didn't take her eyes long to spot the source of the smell\u2014almost half the homes she could see, from the ones along the waterfront to the ones further back toward the trees, had some sort of small hut behind them, most emitting smoke.\n\nIn fact, a few weren't that small at all, once she got a better look. I'm pretty sure that one's bigger than the home it's next to, she thought, narrowing her eyes at a particularly large smokehouse on the edge of town.\n\nMaybe I should ask about buying some. It wouldn't be a bad idea, not with how rich the scent was. In addition, it could be a possible opportunity: smoked fish, if it was anything like the smoked meats she'd had in the past, was more than simply a batch of fish and some smoke. It took special cuts of wood, spices, salt...\n\nWell, it doesn't need any of those, she thought as the town neared. At least, I don't think so. But it is recommended for taste.\n\nNow... she held her wings out straight, going into a steady, slow glide. Where to land?\n\nThere were definitely cleared spaces around the town, small greens near each home. But they were obvious garden plots, or in a few cases occupied by tethered goats.\n\nDon't want to land in someone's garden. She twitched her tail, adjusting her course ever so slightly and aiming for the edge of town. Where's that road gotten to?\n\nIt took her a moment to spot it. Even close to the edge of the village, a lot of the trees were large and ancient, save on one side where a number of mossy stumps showed where the village had beaten back the forest, probably for building material or firewood.\n\nUnfortunately, there were a number of sheep grazing there as well. The last thing I want to do is cause a bunch of animals to panic upon my arrival. Which meant that the clearing was out, so...\n\nSomewhere along the road it is. Taking off she could do from the beach, out over the water. Arriving that way, however, wouldn't have the same impact as walking up the road. Her eyes scanned over the forest, looking for the clearest break in the treetops above the road, and with a twitch of her wings she angled herself toward it.\n\nThe landing was... not nearly as smooth as she would have preferred. At least there was no one around to see that, she thought, brushing a stray branch from one wing and glancing up at the opening in the canopy. I really thought that drop was going to be shorter.\n\nStill, the only thing that had been wounded was her pride. She brought up her claws, sweeping away a patch of moss that had gotten stuck to one horn. And maybe a few scratches on my scales. Hopefully the townsfolk wouldn't notice.\n\nMoss trailing from her tail, however... that they would notice. She snapped it to one side, flinging the moss back into the brush around the edge of the road. Likely there would be a traveler later who would see the huge depression on one side of the road and wonder what had caused it but...\n\nAs long as I'm gone before then. Axtara gave her head a final shake, running her claws over her horns to make sure that nothing was left, casting aside a final twig that had lodged behind them. Ugh. Maybe next time I can land on their dock. That'd certainly be a lot easier.\n\nSatisfied that she'd cleaned herself to a reasonable appearance, she gave her satchel a check of its own and began making her way down the road. Thankfully, the mossy ground had at least kept her from getting mud all across her scales.\n\nHad that happened, I might as well have gone home. There'd be no way to make a good impression with my scales coated in mud.\n\nAs it was, the road beneath her wasn't exactly clean. I should definitely wash my claws as soon as I return. Or before shaking anyone's hand.\n\nThe road ahead of her was straightening now, the edge of the village coming into view. Not that it was much to look at. Homes, from the look of them. Heavy-set things made from thick cuts of wood.\n\nFor the winter storms, Axtara thought as she passed the first by. What few windows she could see were small and thick, so thick that she couldn't see much of what lay behind them.\n\nA front door opened as she passed, a large, stocky-looking woman giving Axtara a wide-eyed, almost suspicious look as she walked past.\n\n\"Afternoon,\" Axtara said, nodding. The woman didn't react other than to continue with her stare. It wasn't entirely hostile... but then it certainly wasn't welcoming either.\n\nShe could still feel the woman's eyes on her neck as she made her way down the street, until at long last she gave a backwards glance and the woman looked away, walking around the side of her home and out of sight.\n\nAs she moved further into the village, more eyes met hers, each of them as suspicious as the last, and none of them friendly. Her nods and statements of \"Hello\" were met with deadpan stares. Again, nothing hostile, but certainly nothing that could be construed as friendly.\n\nEspecially once the whispering started in her wake, two women coming together and speaking just loud enough that she could hear, but not loud enough that she could make out exactly what they were talking about.\n\nThough it wasn't hard to guess.\n\nWorse, there didn't appear to be a town center. Unlike Elnacier, which had an easily identifiable central square, Easy Bay just seemed to have streets, with no central focus whatsoever.\n\nWell, maybe except the building by the dock, Axtara thought, eyeing the large warehouse. Even though it was still some ways away she could hear noise coming from it. And I think that's a church beside it. It was hard to tell now that she was down on the ground, but it did look like a church of some kind.\n\nMaybe.\n\nBetter than nothing. She made her way toward it, ignoring the frantic bleats of a trio of goats that had noticed her presence and run to the other side of their pen as she passed. A priest should be able to at least point me in the right direction.\n\nTo her delight, it was a church. A small one, and from the look of it a little \"local\" but a church nonetheless. Maybe a meeting hall as well, she thought as she came to a stop in front of the door and curled her claws to knock. It's long enough.\n\n\"You won't find anyone there, beast.\" The words cut her off before she could knock, and she turned to see a rough-looking man in oiled leathers striding toward her at the head of a small group of people. Not exactly friendly-looking people, either.\n\nShe took a moment to compose herself, sucking in a quick breath as she turned to meet the group and putting on a calm smile. Wings calm and at your sides. \"Hello,\" she said as the group neared. \"My name is Axtara\u2014\"\n\n\"So we hear, beast,\" the leader of the group said, cutting her off as he came to a stop. \"Now what do you want?\"\n\n\"Might I ask your name?\"\n\nThe man scowled. \"You can ask, but I don't have to answer. In fact,\" he said, half-turning his head toward the people behind him. \"None of us have to.\"\n\nInteresting. She let her eyes run over the man, followed by the people behind him. Fish scales, dried slime, and that smell... He was a fisherman, or at least someone who worked with fish. As were, from the look, those behind him.\n\nShe brought her eyes back to their leader. He'd crossed his arms now, giving every instance of looking obstinate and stubborn. Determined to waste her time. Maybe even drive her out.\n\nShe switched tactics. \"Then what business is it of yours?\"\n\nThe man's forehead went flush with creases. \"What do you mean, beast?\" There was a drawn out lilt to his speech, some words coming quick, others slow.\n\nOh yes, I've dealt with people like you before. \"If you don't have a name, then you're clearly not who I'm looking to speak with,\" Axtara said tilting her head back slightly. \"It's hard to do business with nameless people.\"\n\nSomeone in the back of the group let out a chuckle, and the man's scowl deepened.\n\n\"We know what your business is, beast.\" The tone he put on the word made her want to flinch. \"And we know we don't want any of it.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you don't want a loan of three thousand Dalarian bars at an interest rate of two-point-five percent over the next ten summers?\" Axtara said, taking a deliberate step forward. \"Or perhaps a ten bar loan with twenty-percent interest over the next year?\"\n\n\"I...\" The man shook his head. \"You're here to steal our money. To hoard it, like a greedy dragon.\"\n\n\"Well.\" She sat back, fanning her wings slightly and noting that several in the man's group stepped back. \"That doesn't sound like a very sound plan. I loan you bars, to steal coins... and then vanish into my home, which is within riding distance of the king's manor. Oh yes, exchanging coins for bars. I'd daresay you'd come off on the better end of that exchange. It'd be the very height of a criminal enterprise.\" She gave the man an exaggerated frown, and then turned her eyes to the rest of the group. \"There wouldn't happen to be anyone here who would be interested in taking this seriously, would there? Rather than simply trying to push me out of town with brutish, old-fashioned insults?\"\n\nAt that the man's face lit up, anger brushing aside his embarrassment. \"Now see here you\u2014\"\n\n\"Adarak!\"\n\nThe man stopped as if he'd been struck, one hand raised halfway to a fist. Though whether or not he'd intended to use it, Axtara wasn't certain.\n\nEither way, it had not been a wise move. A sentiment that seemed to be shared by the man coming down the street toward them now, clad in oiled leathers of his own, though his were cleaner.\n\n\"Adarak.\" The newcomer spoke again, his boots thumping against the road as he neared the band of men. \"I thought you knew better than to buy into tavern talk and loose lips.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Worse, I see your hand is raised,\" the newcomer continued, coming to a stop a few feet away. \"You had best think long and hard before finishing what you just set out to start. I'd hate to tell you that your boat is no longer welcome at my dock. Or that you're no longer welcome to clean your catch in my fish house.\" Adarak lowered his hand.\n\nThe newcomer looked at the rest of the group. \"That goes for all of you. You know better than to buy into half the gossip that goes around here. Now unless you're interested in hearing what the lady has to say, I'd advise finding yourself some business elsewhere.\"\n\nMuttering and growling, the group dispersed. Mostly. Two stayed, and the newcomer gave them a slight shake of his head. \"No trouble?\"\n\n\"No trouble,\" one of them said, shaking his head. \"Adarak's got the sense of a sheep's backside. Once the lady started talking, that much was obvious. But I'd like to hear what she has to say.\"\n\n\"If that's all right with you, lady?\" The newcomer turned to look at her, and she nodded.\n\n\"It is,\" she said. \"Are you the... mayor? Of Easy Bay?\" Or perhaps the priest?\n\n\"Not really, but close enough,\" the man replied. \"We don't really have a mayor. Or a priest at the moment, for that matter.\" Like Adarak and the others, he had an accent, though thicker, so much that it almost felt like every instance of a 't' was wrapped in mud in addition to his vowels. \"But I'm the owner of the dock. And the fish house. That gives me a lot of weight in a town like this.\" Then he shook his head. \"Where are my manners? Myallis Dockson, at your service lady.\"\n\n\"Axtara the Studious,\" Axtara said, inclining her head slightly. \"Your building would have been the second I'd have looked to after the church, Sir Dockson.\" She cocked her head to one side. \"It may be rude of me to ask, but your name\u2014?\"\n\n\"After the dock, yes,\" Dockson said. \"My father built it and, well...\" He shrugged. \"Now everyone knows me by it.\"\n\n\"I'm not pulling you away from your duties then, am I?\"\n\nDockson shook his head, then paused. \"Well, sort of. From the fish house. But that's a job that's mostly keeping watch on things. I just saw Adarak and his cohorts leave in a hurry after someone came running in shouting about a dragon and thought that I should check to see what was so important that he'd leave his catch behind half-cleaned.\"\n\n\"So,\" Dockson said, glancing up and down the street. \"If you'd like, Lady Axtara, we can move to the dock. Unless you have some specific business in Easy Bay you were looking after?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"Not as such, no. In truth, I am here mostly to gather information.\"\n\nDockson nodded, then turned and motioned with one arm up the street. \"Shall we, then?\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Axtara gave him a polite nod and started down the street, taking care to keep her wings close and her tail still as Dockson walked beside her, the other two fishermen following.\n\n\"Right then,\" Dockson said. \"I've heard the rumors. More of them circling in the water than sharks.\" He gave her a sideways glance. \"Though I think a number of them are deadwood just by your demeanor. But...\" He turned his focus back forward as they neared the dock. \"I think I'd just rather hear from your own lips why you're here, seeing as half of what I've heard is only fit for sweeping out the gunnels.\"\n\n\"Well...\" she began, continuing once Dockson gave her an expectant look. \"To put it simply, I am a banker. I've opened Elnacier's first private bank.\"\n\n\"Private?\" The question came from one of the two fishermen following them, rather than Dockson. \"Like, by invitation only?\"\n\n\"Ah, no,\" she said quickly, twisting her neck so that she could look at him. \"It means that I am unaffiliated with the king and the kingdom outside of having their approval to run my business. My money is not the crown's, and I am not backed by the king. My bank operates independently.\"\n\n\"Oh. But the king's all right with that?\"\n\n\"He is,\" Axtara said, smiling. No teeth! \"In fact, I had dinner with him last week, and he was quite interested to see what sort of opportunities I could provide for the kingdom.\"\n\n\"What brings you to Easy Bay, then?\" Dockson asked, and she turned her gaze back to him. Beneath her the ground changed to heavy, worn wooden planks as they moved out onto the dock.\n\n\"I'm here to gather information, as I said.\" Axtara slowed, Dockson following her lead. They were beside the large fish house now, the scent almost overpowering and the dock extending out in front of them. \"Specifically, I am here to see what sort of demand Easy Bay has for lumber, and if the supply were to increase, if Easy Bay would make use of it.\"\n\n\"Lumber?\" Dockson rolled one shoulder, an unfamiliar gesture. \"You must be talking with Craglily and Wat then. They asking you to sell their wood for them?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, shaking her head. \"They are considering expanding their mill. I took it upon myself to fly here to see what sort of demand for their services would exist if that were the case.\"\n\n\"More lumber?\"\n\n\"Yes. And firewood. And whatever else there was a demand for, related to their mill. Though I must confess, I was half-expecting a small boatyard of some kind. You know, for fixing boats?\"\n\n\"Oh, we don't have anything like that,\" one of the fishermen said. \"We just pull our boats up on the shore and go to work.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Well, there's one avenue out. For now, at least. \"What about other needs? Such as the smokehouses?\"\n\n\"We get the wood for that ourselves,\" the other fisherman answered. \"I mean, I guess we do kind of trade off so one of us has the job for a really big haul, but there's not much point to someone coming here from the capital.\"\n\n\"I'll admit that we do send out for Craglily's services regularly,\" Dockson said, adding to the fishermen's voices. \"Shipments of boards for use on our boats, or to shore up the dock. But you're saying he'd have more of it?\"\n\n\"Likely at a lower price,\" she said, nodding. \"Thought that's up to him. He's interested in expanding and modernizing the mill. Which would mean he'd be able to produce a wider variety of lumber, as well as much more of it. However, he has expressed concern that there wouldn't be enough demand for it.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know about that,\" Dockson said, his gaze turning toward the dock that was his namesake. \"My father built this dock years ago, but it's old. It could use some fixing. Maybe even some lengthening.\"\n\nOne of the fisherman let out a sound that was halfway between a snort and a scoff. \"Gunnelwash. It's fine. It's always been fine.\"\n\n\"No, that's gunnelwash,\" Dockson fired back. \"Unless you've forgotten how part of the dock sank last winter. The wood's old, holding onto too much water. The logs underneath it are rotting. Just last season we had to cut the tip loose. And don't even get me started on the anchor.\"\n\n\"So then...\" Axtara said before the fisherman could reply. \"The dock?\"\n\n\"It could use a lot of work,\" Dockson said. \"It's needed it for years really. Problem is, everyone uses it. I'm not saying it's going to sink tomorrow, but there's a lot of it that could use fixing. Drag bits of it up onto shore, replace some of the logs...\" He nodded. \"All right, it'd be a lot of work, but it's better than waiting until the dock breaks free, sinks, or gets swept away in some winter storm. And in all honesty, if Craglily were to have more lumber for sale, well... I think we'd use it. Though if you're looking for a more immediate need, the next time you're talking with the king let him know that the bridge between here and Elnacier is about half-gone. Thing was never meant to last as long as it did. If Craglily wants to send a load of lumber this way, he's going to want to make sure that bridge can take it.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" one of the fishermen said. The one who'd disagreed about the dock, but he was nodding now. \"I think the dock's fine myself, but it ain't my business. But the bridge? We send fish out over that.\" The man's accent was so thick that \"over\" came out like \"oar.\" \"And it's getting creakier every year.\"\n\n\"Who maintains the bridge?\" Axtara asked.\n\n\"It's the king's road,\" the other fisherman said. \"So it's the king's bridge.\"\n\n\"I should mention that to Craglily next I see him,\" Axtara said, tapping her chin with a single claw and then quickly pulling it away once she recalled how dirty it was. Hopefully it hadn't left a mark. \"That's certainly a job that would call for lumber.\"\n\n\"If the king consents to it,\" the other fisherman said. \"But he should. If the road goes out, he won't be getting any more fish from here.\"\n\n\"Speaking of fish,\" Axtara said, shifting her focus slightly. \"What does Easy Bay do with most of its fish? Do you send any outside of Elnacier?\"\n\n\"Outside?\" the second fisherman said. \"I don't. A few people do. Just dried or smoked fish, though.\"\n\n\"Most of what we catch is for here in Elnacier,\" Dockson added. \"What we ship out is just extra.\"\n\n\"I see. Would sending your fish out to the wider world be something you'd be interested in? After all, there are varieties of fish here on the western edge of the continent unlike anything back in the kingdoms.\"\n\n\"They's just fish,\" one of the fisherman said. \"What looney would want fish from all the way out here?\"\n\n\"Someone who's never eaten fish from here, perhaps?\" Axtara said. \"I may not be an expert, but I do know that different fish have different flavors. Certainly you catch different fish for different dishes.\"\n\n\"Well, yes,\" the man admitted. \"But fish is fish in the end.\" Then he shook his head. \"Whatever you're suggesting, I don't want a part of it. Just leave me be. And get that bridge fixed.\"\n\n\"That's not...\" Axtara began, but let the words die off as the fisherman turned and walked away, followed by the other.\n\n\"Don't take it personally, Lady Axtara,\" Dockson said. \"You have to realize that you represent something they're not familiar with or comfortable with.\"\n\n\"Change?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Most of them have lived their entire lives here. Easy Bay, Shoreline... Born here, and nothing has ever been any different, save when King Elnacier got rid of the fell and made himself king. For most, that was change enough. Sure, he made the road better, got rid of the fell, rebuilt the bridge... But he charges taxes.\"\n\n\"I gather that's not been that popular?\"\n\nDockson shrugged. \"He's not bad, but that depends on who you ask. Me? I pay in coin, but some folk pay in fish, or in some other trade. Point is, things changed, and for a lot of people that change disrupted things.\" He stepped to the side of the dock, pointing at an old structure up at the top of the hill. \"You see that?\"\n\n\"The old building? Yes.\" Probably far better than you do. She didn't voice the thought.\n\n\"Used to be a mill,\" Dockson said, dropping his hand. \"Wasn't much, but it did the job. Folk around here couldn't grow too much grain, but they did their best. Mill ground it up, and that was that.\"\n\n\"Then the king destroyed the fell and went about making us a proper kingdom,\" Dockson continued, turning back to face her. \"And the mill shut down. Now everyone gets their flour from Elnacier.\"\n\n\"Point is, it changed,\" Dockson continued. \"Sure, the flour might be a better quality now, but the mill is gone.\"\n\n\"And people are worried that my presence is a sign of more change?\"\n\n\"You know that it is,\" Dockson said. \"I've heard the rumors, my lady. You're bringing the modern world to Elnacier. Mines, use of our 'resources.' To fill your own coffers. I know,\" he said, holding up a hand. \"That's an uneven telling of events. But that's the rumors swirling around the community. You're here to bring unfamiliar tides. You happening to be a dragon is, I think, just one more reason for most people to distrust you. No offense intended. I know things are different now, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she said, shaking her head. \"It took Elnacier some time to grow used to me.\" Not that they entirely have. They're simply more curious now than fearful. \"But for the former, the fear of change... They do understand that it will come one way or another, don't they?\"\n\nDockson shrugged. \"Some do, some don't. Some don't want to. Some turn to petty fear, like that oaf Adarak, while others are likely to be dismissive.\"\n\nI see. \"And you?\" Axtara asked, looking the man in the eyes.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind seeing my dock fixed. And maybe expanded. I'm not certain I'd need to enlist your services in order to do it, but it would be a lot of lumber I couldn't get from anyone but Craglily, unless I want to open a mill myself. Which I don't.\"\n\n\"But other than that, I don't see myself in any need of your services, Lady Axtara.\"\n\n\"That is fine.\" The words were easy to say, though keeping her expression neutral was a bit harder. \"I will mention to Craglily the concerns about the bridge, as well as your thoughts regarding your dock. Though, if I may, could I ask another question.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Dockson said. At least he was polite.\n\n\"If you were to repair and expand your dock, would it be for larger ships?\"\n\nDockson pursed his lips, clearly thinking before offering his answer. \"I think it would be wise to do so, personally.\"\n\n\"But there exists no means to build ships here,\" Axtara followed. \"No shipyard.\"\n\n\"We can build our boats on the beach,\" Dockson said with a smile. \"That's where we've built them before. Or ships from other places could come here, maybe.\"\n\n\"That sounds a lot like change.\"\n\nDockson shrugged. \"The world is always changing, Lady Axtara. You know that. I know that. Seasons change. The shoreline changes. Rivers change their course. That doesn't mean I should dive in headfirst, but change comes, just as inevitably as the passing of the days. If that change lets me fix my dock, well... Then I will take advantage of that to fix my dock. That said, I'm not certain I would require any of the services you offer in any case.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. It wasn't hard to see the polite refusal for what it was. \"Very well then, Mr. Dockson. Now, you said that you were not a mayor?\"\n\n\"I'm more of a village leader,\" Dockson said. \"But officially, no one's in charge. We're too small and too busy for that.\"\n\n\"So then if I wished to send a message to someone in a position of authority, I would address it to you.\"\n\n\"I... am not in charge. Not really. I just own the docks.\" He stamped a foot for emphasis, the wood shaking.\n\n\"Which, as you said, makes you important,\" Axtara followed up. \"Just confirming for the next time I come to visit Easy Bay, or if I need to send a message.\"\n\n\"Why would you need\u2014?\" Dockson caught himself, but it was already too late.\n\n\"Like you said.\" Axtara gave him a grin. \"Change comes one way or another. I may need to speak with someone here again. Not today, or next week, or even next month... But someday.\"\n\nDockson, to his credit, thought for a moment and then nodded. \"True enough, Lady Axtara. I just wouldn't expect that day to come quite so soon. Change comes, but it also takes time.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"That is true. I cannot expect people to overcome their fear of change quickly. But there is still a chance you'll hear from me in the months or seasons to come.\"\n\n\"So you truly plan to see this all the way through?\"\n\n\"For better or worse, Dockson, my home is here now. And I would much rather it be for the better. For all of us.\" She nodded, then stepped slightly back, checking her surroundings. \"Thank you most graciously for your time, and I wish you best of luck with the repairs to your dock.\" She spread her wings slightly, testing the air, and then tucked them close once more. Up on pilings the way this part of the dock is, and with the tide out...\n\n\"Well, best of luck to you, Lady Axtara,\" Dockson said, eyeing her gaze and then stepping to one side, back up against the fish house. \"Safe flights?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dockson.\" She drew herself back, legs coiling, and then surged forward, springing across the dock and over the edge, wings snapping out to their full extension and catching the air immediately. A quick downward thrust, and she was flying across the beach, arcing out over the bay and then into the sky. She gave the dock a final look as she flew past\u2014it was in poor repair, as were a few of the boats moored against it\u2014and then climbed into the sky, up and over the city.\n\nA few minutes later, she was back on her way to Elnacier, following the road and river once more, deep in thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Checking the Books",
                "text": "\"Lady Axtara!\" the man shouted as Axtara brought herself in for a landing. He waved his arms, clearly trying to make sure that he had her attention. \"Over here!\"\n\nShe nodded at the man as she tucked her wings in close, one paw coming to her satchel to make sure it hadn't been shaken loose during the landing. \"I see you,\" she called. \"Give me a moment.\" She lifted a hindpaw, shaking free some of the mud that had clung to it on landing. It hadn't yet rained that day, only the night prior, but the road clearly hadn't dried all the way. Hopefully Craglily and Waterlily didn't mind.\n\nThe last bit of mud gone, she set her hind leg down once more\u2014away from the muddy hole she'd mistakenly landed in\u2014and turned her focus back toward the approaching figure. They were walking quickly across the open lot between the road and the lumber mill, clearly heading straight for her. But they weren't familiar. It wasn't Craglily, nor was there much resemblance to him in the man's face... not that she was always a good judge of such things with other sapients.\n\nStill, he was clearly coming to her, so she folded her wings patiently against her back and took a moment to look over the mill. It wasn't much, all said and done. A single waterwheel spun with the flow of the river, and two men were grappling with a large log they'd floated down the river, working it up a wooden chute and into the mill itself.\n\nThe mill itself was completely open. She could see the massive blade working its way up and down, two other workers guiding part of a log carefully past it, cutting it in half. There was a small pile of boards and split ends at the other side.\n\n\"Got an order,\" the man said, slowing as he approached her. \"Out in Overhill. Some boards and some firewood.\"\n\nAxtara cocked her head to one side. \"Should I come back another time?\"\n\n\"What?\" The man shook his head. \"Oh no, of course not. Wat's waiting for you at the house over there.\" He jerked his thumb in the direction of a decently sized building on the other side of the lot. \"He just said to send you over as soon as you arrived.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said, nodding. \"Thank you. Will I be meeting with him and Craglily or\u2014?\"\n\nBut the man was already shaking his head. \"Craglily's up the river a bit, felling another tree. But Wat's here. We can handle this job on our own. It's just going to take a while with the\u2014\"\n\nA loud squawk rolled across the clearing as the blade cutting the log caught against the wood, the noise loud enough that Axtara grimaced.\n\n\"Yeah, that,\" the man said, shaking his head. \"Blasted blade was old when I was a boy.\" He turned, already cupping his hands around his mouth. \"Hey! I said to go slow! If we break the mill, we don't get paid today!\" Then he was striding across the yard, his focus clearly back on his crew. \"Pull it back, you two! And watch the blade!\"\n\nWith another loud shriek of metal-on-wood, the blade went back into motion, the shuddering of the waterwheel ceasing and becoming smooth once more.\n\nWell, Axtara thought as she began making her own way across the yard. I can see why Craglily would be interested in upgrading. This design was old when my father was in his egg!\n\nNot that someone\u2014or perhaps several someones\u2014hadn't tried to modernize here and there. The chute from the river looked newer than the rest of the structure, as did some of the runners by the blade.\n\nBut most of it simply looked old. Half the roof was covered in moss, and the beams holding it up were so dark with age they almost appeared to have been dunked in pitch. At some point they probably had been. The wood was simply so old and covered in lichen and other growths that it was almost impossible to tell.\n\nBut if they're supplying wood to most of the kingdom, no wonder they've never really had time or the ability to really upgrade it. She could see a pile of odds and ends behind the raised stone platform of the mill, bits and pieces that had been cut off and would likely be sold for firewood. The scent of pine and sawdust was so intense it almost overwhelmed all others\u2014even the river.\n\nBut they've definitely built themselves a good-sized home out of it, she thought as she came to a stop at the front door. It wasn't on par with the king's manor, but as far as homes she'd seen in Elnacier, it was easily one of the largest. Old, too. And... Maybe a little run-down, she thought as she lifted her claws to knock.\n\nAnd small in spacing, she noted as the sound of her claws rapping against the door echoed through the home. Quite small. She eyed the small door with trepidation. That's going to be a tight fit.\n\nThere was a soft clunk of wood as the simple latch lifted, and a moment later the door opened to reveal a man who looked reminiscent of Craglily, though with more hair and a narrower face. Waterlily, then. He smiled as he saw her, though she didn't miss the way it almost didn't quite reach his eyes. \"Lady Axtara!\" He offered a small, somewhat sloppy bow. \"I bid you welcome to my home and our lumbermill.\"\n\n\"The pleasure is all mine,\" she answered quickly. \"And no need to be quite so formal. I'm not nobility.\"\n\n\"You are close enough to it for me, Lady Axtara,\" Waterlily said, coming out of his bow with only a little more grace than he'd gone into it. Then he held out a hand. A rough, calloused hand, she noted, skin toughened by years of labor.\n\n\"Well then, Sir Waterlily,\" Axtara said as she took his hand in her foreclaws. \"Thank you for\u2014\"\n\n\"Just 'Wat,' Lady Axtara,\" he said quickly, almost tugging his hand back. \"It's what most everyone calls me.\"\n\n\"Very well, Wat.\" She pulled her head back slightly, using the motion to disguise a quick sniff with her nostrils. Beneath the scent of the home and the mill, there was a faint, sour smell: Fear. He was afraid of her. Not to an alarming degree, but it gave context to the faint look of unease buried beneath his polite smile.\n\nHe probably grew up hearing tales of dragons kidnapping people, killing, or worse eating their victims. Or maybe he'd just never dealt with a sapient not of his own species. One with claws, wings, and the ability to breathe fire.\n\nVery well. I've dealt with nervous clients before. And since he insisted on his preferred name...\n\n\"I must ask the same courtesy,\" she said. \"You may call me 'simply Axtara.'\"\n\n\"Very well, La\u2014I mean, Axtara.\"\n\n\"No no,\" she said, shaking her head. Wat's eyes widened in confusion. \"I said 'simply Axtara.'\"\n\n\"I...? Sorry?\"\n\n\"You should have said 'I mean, simply Axtara.'\"\n\nShe waited for a moment, watching as confusion rolled across his face. Then, just as the look reached its peak, she spoke again.\n\n\"Wat, relax. I'm a banker. A merchant.\" She sat back on her haunches, resting one set of claws against her chest. \"Just Axtara is fine. You simply looked so nervous I couldn't help myself.\" She gave him an easy smile, the kind without a hint of teeth to it and slight forward cock of her head that had usually worked to calm nervous merchants.\n\nAnd apparently works on lumberjacks, she thought as Wat let out a laugh. A nervous laugh, yes, but sort of in the way that an oven would let out heat if the door was open. A moment later he laughed again, the sound a bit more genuine, and he nodded.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, his voice sounding slightly smoother. \"Then Axtara it is. Can you, uh\u2014\" His eyes flicked to the doorframe and then back to her. \"Can you come in?\"\n\nClearly it wasn't the question he'd meant to ask at first, but it was more honest for the change. \"Maybe,\" she said, eyeing the doorway herself and then the dark, narrow hallway behind it. \"There aren't any changes of direction along the way, are there?\"\n\n\"Ah, well...\" The nervousness was back again.\n\n\"Wat, it's fine,\" she said, smiling again. \"This is one situation where it's all right to admit that a lady may be a bit large. Not directly,\" she added quickly. \"But you've inferred it well enough. How about this? Can you bring your records out here? Are they transportable?\"\n\n\"I... Yes I could, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Axtara.\"\n\n\"Axtara. If you don't mind being outside, without a desk...\" He let the words trail off, and it almost made her want to sigh.\n\n\"Oh just get a crate or something,\" she said, shaking her head and letting her tail lash a little. \"I'm not a delicate flower, Wat. I'm no stranger to getting a bit dirty in the pursuit of labor. And it is a pleasant day out. Unless it rains, I see no problem with the arrangement.\"\n\n\"I... Very well.\" He gave her a quick nod. \"If you'll just wait here...\" He turned and darted back down the hall, into the depths of the house.\n\nStill nervous, Axtara thought, letting out a sigh as soon as she was fairly sure he wouldn't hear it. Oh well.\n\nPart of her simply wanted to mention offbeat that she was probably several years his junior. But at the same time... I did that before and that backfired horridly. Nothing I said after that mattered. I was \"too young.\" Ugh. At least most humans couldn't gauge the age of a dragon well at all. She'd seen what had happened with other clerks at her uncle's bank who'd visibly been younger than their contemporaries. Some had been directly targeted by merchants and nobles looking to bully their way into a better deal.\n\nUncle always put his claws down when that happened, she thought. And I may need to do the same someday.\n\nThen again, it was hard to argue with an unhappy dragon.\n\nShe turned her gaze back to the lumber mill, watching as the five workers continued feeding a chunk of a log through the blade. The constant up and down motion of the blade made an almost pleasant low rasping noise as it cut. Save for the occasional squeak as it threatened to jam.\n\nWatching it for a moment gave her another glimpse into how old the mill was. She could see the blade starting and stopping in short jerks, faint stumbles in what should have been smooth, rhythmic cuts. Worse, it was a single blade.\n\nNo wonder it takes them so long to get boards done. They're making a single cut at a time. She didn't know too much about mills, but she knew enough to know that most modern mills had multiple blades.\n\nAnd they're guiding the wood through by hand. Well, with prods. Rather than the mill itself doing the work. No wonder Craglily would like to renovate it. He'd practically be building a new mill.\n\nAnd that would be expensive. Probably almost as much as her house.\n\nIt would be a very large loan. And a large gamble. But if it paid off...\n\nA thud from the house drew her attention back. Wat was coming down the hall, arms laden with a heavy-looking wooden crate.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, stopping by the door and setting the crate down between them in the dirt. It was full of ink-stained parchment. \"I'll go get a bigger crate we can set these on, or...\" He paused, his gaze slipping to the mill. \"Actually, La\u2014 Axtara.\" He pointed at the mill. \"What if I were to place a rough board across two sawhorses? Would that work?\"\n\n\"That is an excellent idea,\" she said, following his finger and noting the rather large board he'd pointed out. \"I have a smooth writing surface in my satchel if I need to take notes; it doesn't matter if the board is rough or not.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Wat said, nervousness fading as he jumped into what was clearly his element. \"Let me grab someone to\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh no need,\" Axtara said, turning and following him as he stepped toward the back of the mill. \"I can help with the board. Let them work.\"\n\n\"Ah, well... very well.\" Wat didn't look entirely at ease with the idea, but he didn't move to stop her as she followed him across the yard toward the mill. He moved with purpose, heading for a stack of rough-hewn boards stacked under the roof of the mill. Several sawhorses sat nearby, the wood so old and dark she wouldn't have been surprised to learn that at one point they'd held as much moss as the roof.\n\n\"How old is the mill?\" she asked as they neared the structure, and as Wat turned back to look at her, she gestured toward the structure with her claws. \"I'm not a...\" Her words ground to a halt as she searched for the right word. \"Lumberjack?\"\n\n\"Sawyer,\" Wat corrected, no malice in his tone.\n\n\"Sawyer,\" she continued. \"But the mill appears, well... I've not seen that much moss on a roof before.\" They were close to the backside of the mill, now, near the pile of cast-offs. The scent of sawdust filled the air, though there was less of it around than she'd expected. I wonder what they do with the majority of it?\n\nAnother question for after she'd finished her current line of inquiry, perhaps.\n\n\"The last time the roof was replaced was...\" Wat slowed for a second, face screwing up in concentration. \"Well, not since I've been born, certainly.\" He shook his head. \"So at least thirty-five summers. Maybe more. I've replaced bits and pieces of it, and every few summers we put pitch on it to keep it from rotting, but...\" He shook his head again. \"It is in sorry shape. But then, that's why you're here.\" He came to a stop by the sawhorses and swept two of them under one arm. Thin as he was, he was clearly used to the work.\n\n\"If you're willing, La\u2014I mean, Axtara,\" Wat said, motioning with his free hand toward a short, wide board.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, reaching to pluck the board up, but stopping as Wat grabbed the one end with his free hand. \"I can manage it.\"\n\n\"It's no trouble.\"\n\nShe shrugged, carefully sliding her claws beneath one end of the thick, rough plank, and noting once more how calloused Wat's hands had been. Small surprise, she thought as they lifted. If the mill cuts as roughly as this, he'd need hands tough as gloves. As it was, her scales were likely to bear a few splinters stuck among them.\n\n\"Do you do smoother cuts of wood?\" she asked as they moved back across the yard, toward the front door of Wat's home.\n\n\"Of course,\" Wat said, tilting his head in the direction of the side of the house. \"Over there.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said as she turned to look. Part of what she'd assumed was the house looked to be a woodworking shop with two large, open doors visible from the mill. She could see tools on display inside, likely for further shaping the rough planks. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"It's fine, L\u2014 Axtara,\" Wat said as he came to a stop. \"You need to understand our operation so that you can accurately assess where we currently are, so that you'll better understand what we'd like to change.\" He set the sawhorses down, one after another, then looked back at her.\n\n\"So ask away,\" he said, guiding her into setting the board down atop the two sawhorses. It wasn't her desk, but it would do. \"The more you know, the better chance I have of modernizing this mill.\"\n\nAxtara pulled her head back slightly even as she reached for her satchel. \"You sound as though you've already made up your mind about upgrading your mill.\"\n\nFor once, Wat's nervousness all but vanished, his expression instead becoming flat. \"Can you blame me?\" he asked. \"You have only been here but a few minutes and you asked me how old my family mill was, and I said it was older than I am. And I am not young. When word came to me that you were a banker, a woman of finance, I already knew what needed to be done.\" Wat bent and lifted the crate he'd brought out from the ground, setting it atop one end of the plank \"desk\" they'd made. \"Even if we cannot afford an expansion, at the very least the mill itself must be rebuilt.\" As if to punctuate his words, the steady sawing of the blade became an ear-piercing shriek as it caught again, the men shouting at one another as they backed the log off.\n\n\"Very well,\" Axtara said as soon as the saw had settled into its rhythm once more. \"I see your point, I believe. You'd at least like to afford a renovation.\"\n\n\"And some new equipment,\" Wat added, nodding as he began pulling papers and parchment out of the crate and spreading them on the plank. Thankfully there wasn't any wind to scatter them away. \"New axes, new saws, new pulleys... Most of what we have is old. Cared for, but old.\"\n\n\"But if I can be honest with you\u2014and I should,\" he added quickly. \"I would much rather expand the mill, even if that's a process that takes several years.\"\n\nCurious. He seems far more sure about this than his father was. \"May I ask why you're so committed to the idea, even before we've discussed the cost?\"\n\n\"Simple,\" Wat said, still pulling out parchments and papers. \"People want more wood.\"\n\n\"They do?\" Axtara asked. \"Your father didn't mention that. And I don't think my arrival has changed that much yet.\"\n\nWat smirked. \"Your arrival has been impactful, but no, that's not what I'm talking about. Nor what you spoke with my father about, I would expect. My father has a head for logging and woodwork, but not for business.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"He did say that you were the one to talk to about the business side of things. That you 'had the head for it,' if my memory serves.\"\n\n\"I shall have to thank my father for the compliment, then,\" Wat said. \"And without sounding as though I have too full an opinion of myself, my father is right. That's why I know that people want more wood.\"\n\n\"Here,\" he said, setting down another stack of parchment and then grabbing several from the stacks he'd laid out. She still wasn't sure what order they were in, or even if there was an order at all. But Wat seemed to know which was which. \"Take a look at these,\" Wat continued, laying out several sheets of parchment and paper before her.\n\nShe stared down at the line of papers, noting the scrawled figures across each one. They were clearly... budgets. If she used the term loosely. \"I apologize,\" she said after a moment, her eyes darting over the scrawled numbers. Tact! Remember tact! \"But I'm unfamiliar with your accounting system. You may need to guide me through it until I'm familiar with what I'm looking for.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Wat pulled back slightly, eyes wide. \"Right! Sorry. I'm used to just being the only one that ever looks at these, really. I know it's not whatever you're used to\u2014\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" Axtara said as Wat walked around the end of the \"desk,\" coming to a stop by the side. \"As long as you can point me in the right direction.\" And I can make a few notes of my own, she thought, pulling out a spare sheet of paper and a bottle of ink out of her satchel.\n\n\"Right, well this is pretty straightforward,\" Wat said, tapping the leftmost piece of parchment. A few numbers were scrawled on it. \"This is one of the earlier records we have, from back when King Elnacier first became king and started taxing everyone. Da put me in charge of keeping track of where the money went since I had a head for it. Anyway, this number right here,\" he said, his finger tapping a scrawled, faded figure. \"That's the one that's important here.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Axtara said, noting the number. \"What does it represent?\"\n\n\"The amount we paid to hired hands that year,\" Wat answered. \"Now, look at this number, several summers later.\" He tapped a different sheet of parchment. \"And then this one.\"\n\n\"They're growing,\" Axtara noted.\n\n\"They are,\" Wat replied. \"Slowly, but surely. Elnacier is growing. That's what my father doesn't recognize. The growth is small, but steady. Sometimes it jumps, sometimes it shrinks, but\u2014\"\n\n\"On the whole, it's on the rise,\" Axtara said, nodding. She could already do the math in her head. \"Not by a large amount, but you're steadily doing more work each year, on average.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are,\" Wat agreed. \"It's gradual, but it's happening. Families grow, and their children have demands for wood of their own. New farms have expanded. There are more people, even with those that leave to seek their fortunes in the civilized world. Every year we work a little more, spend a little more. Make a little more too,\" he added quickly, looking up at her. \"And we can always find another hand to work for pay, but...\"\n\n\"You're still using the same old equipment,\" Axtara finished. \"Limiting what you can do except spend more hours and time.\" She glanced once more at the old mill. \"When was the mill built?\"\n\n\"It was built by my great-grandfather,\" Wat said. \"And yes, you see the problem. Here\u2014\" He tapped at another sheet of parchment. \"Here's what we spent on hired labor last year.\"\n\n\"That is no small number.\"\n\n\"No,\" Wat agreed. \"It isn't. Worse, if you compare it to... a moment please, La\u2014Ah, here!\" His finger stabbed down at another number. \"This, right here, is the total amount of bars we brought in. I believe last year we actually lost money despite selling a little more wood. So if my numbers are correct...?\" He gave her an expectant look.\n\n\"I would need to run a full set of calculations to be sure,\" Axtara ventured. \"But off-claw they look accurate.\"\n\n\"Well, if they're correct, then we're at a point where we're losing bars. Demand for wood slowly rises, but we lack the tools and equipment to meet that demand adequately.\"\n\n\"Which means either lost revenue as your profit margin shrinks, or lost business if someone else decides not to ask you for wood as the wait or the price grows too long.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Wat said, nodding. \"Don't misunderstand, Lady Axtara\u2014\" The nervousness was back, but not, she thought, because of her. \"\u2014we're not in danger of finding ourselves out of business, but\u2014\"\n\n\"No no,\" she said quickly, giving her head a shake and offering a small smile, the kind that said she understood and sympathized with the client's trouble. \"I understand. You're a forward-thinking man of business, Wat. You want to see the mill, and all the people you supply wood to, happy with what you provide, but you realize you cannot simply continue to hire extra laborers for which you have no tools as demand grows. Or,\" she added as the mill behind them let out another loud squawk. \"Continue to use a mill made to create lumber for a population half the size of what Elnacier has become.\"\n\n\"Maybe not half,\" Wat said, though he still nodded. \"But yes, that seems accurate enough.\"\n\n\"Very well then.\" Axtara sat up slightly, tucking her wings tightly against her sides. \"Why don't you start by walking me through some of your general finances for the last few years, just so we can establish a baseline of what business has been like. Once that's done, we can talk about your plans for the future, and what sort of options you'd have for loans of different value, as well as what you may plan to use them for.\"\n\nShe smiled as Wat gave her a surprised look. \"I have done this sort of thing before,\" she said with another smile\u2014No teeth! \"So, why don't we get to work? Could you start by giving me a general overview of your recordkeeping here?\" She tapped one of the pieces of parchment with a clawtip.\n\n\"Of course, of course!\" Wat spoke quickly, and with almost no pause picked up one of the pieces of parchment and began walking her through the various figures scrawled on it, along with why he felt each number was worth keeping watch over. Axtara dipped one claw into her ink, taking notes as needed on her paper as she followed the man's process for keeping track of the mill's accounting.\n\nI have to admit, she thought as the day stretched on. For someone with little-to-no formal training, Wat has done quite well keeping a good account of his records. She took a moment to check her own notes as Wat's wife called for his attention from the woodworking addition to the house. That addition, she could tell, was something Wat wanted to change. Not that his hints had been subtle. But it was of tertiary concern behind getting new tools and equipment and overhauling the mill.\n\nWat returned, whatever question his wife had about the order answered, and they continued to pore over his records. Lunch came and went, the constant sawing of the mill holding for a time as the sawyers paused to eat, resuming once they were done. Third bells rang out from Elnacier. And yet... the mill's finances took shape.\n\nAt last Axtara sat back, flipping excess ink from a talon as she looked down at the summary she'd calculated. Her abacus sat nearby, finally still after several hours of constant checking, adding, and subtracting.\n\nAll in all... For all his scattered, self-made system of organization, Axtara thought as she looked down at her calculations, Wat has done a commendable job keeping track of the costs of running his family's mill.\n\nAnd there's no harm in voicing that, either. Letting a client know that their work was valued not only made them feel grateful, it made for smoother dealings. After all, who wouldn't want to know that their hard work was appreciated?\n\n\"Well?\" Wat asked as she looked over at him. He'd given up following her work a good quarter of an hour earlier, merely waiting for her to finish her calculations.\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara began, shifting her weight slightly, claws digging into the rock, soil, and sawdust beneath her paws. \"I believe I should begin with words of commendation. You've done a fine job in keeping track of your family's interests over the last several decades.\"\n\n\"I have?\" Though there was a question in his voice, she didn't miss the way his eyes lit up, or the way his back straightened slightly.\n\n\"You have,\" she confirmed. \"You've been thorough, you've kept track of the most important values, and you've given me what I needed in order to do my job.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\nShe could hear the hope in his voice. \"Waterlily, I think your commitment to your records, as well as the stability of those records, is more than enough to show that you'd be a suitable candidate for a loan.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank the Creator!\" Wat said, sinking back slightly, but smiling. \"One never knows.\"\n\n\"Well, you've been studious in your record-keeping, and I of all dragons respect that,\" Axtara replied, giving him a grin of her own\u2014though subdued, with only the barest flashing of her teeth. \"But better yet, your records verify what you said about the demand for wood growing over time and the expenditures you've been facing. Though I did have one small question.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" The smiled faded slightly from Wat's face. \"About what?\"\n\n\"Nothing overly concerning,\" she said quickly. Downplay it. \"I just wanted to verify that the numbers you've recorded for the king's taxes the last three summers, ah, here, here, and here, were accurate.\"\n\n\"Well of course they are,\" Wat answered, even before he'd glanced at them. Though he did look at each one and nod, she noted. Then he looked up at her. \"Why wouldn't they be?\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" she said quickly, holding up a set of claws and giving them a small wave as she resettled her wings. \"I didn't mean to insinuate that... Rather, I'm still not quite familiar with the king's tax here, so I wanted to double-check that I was reading those numbers properly so that my own calculations with regards to loans would be accurate.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" Wat said, nodding. \"Well yeah, that's what we paid. Doesn't change much from year to year.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She sat back slightly, making a note in her mind of the fact. And that Wat had recorded having paid fifteen bars' worth of taxes for each of the last three years, when Fendall had claimed, during the dinner at the manor, that they paid twelve.\n\nThen again, twelve is a dozen, and an easy, simple number for someone to jump to rather than fifteen. And it's very possible he jumped to that number in lieu of the actual value out of respect for their privacy. After all, he didn't appear to think much of my plans.\n\n\"Well then,\" she said, shoving the thought from her mind. \"With that out of the way, I have good news for you: you have options, just as you'd hoped.\"\n\n\"Options?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, nodding. \"Your records show that you're financially stable, and have a regular income that's easily measurable. As well as rising. Even if that rate doesn't increase in the next few years, it's a decent rise.\"\n\n\"In other words, your finances and situation show you capable of taking on a rather large loan,\" she continued. \"Depending on costs, quite possibly one large enough to rebuild your mill. But, if you want my advice, I wouldn't do that just yet.\"\n\nThe slight twitch that ran across Wat's face showed his surprise before he'd even spoken. \"You wouldn't? But why not?\"\n\n\"Well, for one, do you know how much it would cost you to rebuild your mill?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And neither do I,\" she said quickly. \"Also, when would be the best season to rebuild your mill?\"\n\n\"Probably during the winter,\" Wat said, nodding. \"It'd be cold, but demand would be the lowest, so we wouldn't be putting anyone out.\"\n\n\"And we're still not quite into fall yet,\" Axtara said with a nod. \"So borrowing the money to do so today wouldn't be of much purpose. You'd simply be paying interest on money you hadn't used yet.\"\n\n\"However,\" she added with a smile. I love this part. \"As you pointed out, you could also use new tools and equipment, and you wanted to expand or perhaps rebuild the woodworking part of the operation. And you could order the tools, and pay for them, without shutting down the mill.\"\n\n\"And once I had new tools,\" Wat said, face lighting up with recognition as he followed the flight she was charting out. \"Our production would increase enough that we could use the mill to make boards for a new woodworking building.\"\n\n\"Maybe even as a pre-built portion of your future new mill,\" Axtara added. \"You could even buy a new blade for the current mill to help it along, and then use that blade when you built the new mill.\"\n\n\"Better yet,\" she continued, fanning her wings slightly. \"While you may not have a firm number yet with regards to the cost of upgrading and rebuilding the mill, I would be willing to wager that you do have a cost in mind, or perhaps even an exact value, for the new tools and equipment you'd like to acquire.\" She gave Wat another smile. \"Would I win that wager?\"\n\n\"You would, Lady Axtara,\" Wat said with a nod. \"Cost fluctuates a little, but I've already made inquiries in Nuveria, gotten some prices. Enchanted axes aren't cheap, but they'll last a lot longer and cut a lot cleaner. Same with the tools. Didn't think I'd have enough for an enchanted mill blade, though.\" The look of hope on his face said that despite his words, he clearly saw an opening for such a venture now, and intended to act on it.\n\nAxtara let her smile widen slightly as she reached for her satchel. \"So, taken all together, what would such a set of purchases cost you?\"\n\n\"Well, give me a mere moment to think,\" Wat said, snapping his fingers. \"We'd want to replace all the axes, and enchanted she told me that they'd come out at about a bar apiece. Plus I don't need to replace all the tools, just the most-used ones. New mill saw...\" The man's voice grew quieter as he stared down at the \"desk,\" mumbled numbers and names blending together as he ran through what he needed to purchase.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said after a moment, nodding to himself and then looking up. \"I think fifty bars would be perfect.\"\n\nFifty bars! It wasn't the largest loan she'd ever handled, not by a long flight. But it was the largest sum she'd discussed with anyone in Elnacier yet. \"You're certain?\" she asked as her claw-tips sorted through her satchel.\n\nWat nodded. \"New axes, twelve of 'em, at a bar apiece. New mauls and wedges, that's another six bars. Plus some new enchanted woodworking tools, that'll cost about ten bars. Throw in two more just for odds and ends, that's an even thirty bars. Saws\u2014enchanted\u2014and new pulleys... Well,\" he said with a shrug, \"the pulleys aren't much, but the saws are. Say another six, eight bars easy. Then the mill blade, enchanted, that'll be about twelve bars.\"\n\n\"So yes,\" he said, looking her in the eyes and setting his hands on his hips. \"Fifty bars. What little extra there will be in there will cover the cost of shipping it all out here, and maybe hiring a few extra hands to get a head start on the fall rush.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Axtara nodded. It does add up. \"Your reasoning is sound. Now, what about your income? Currently, your mill generates around fifteen bars of actual profit a year, according to your records.\" Most of which is spent on food for your family.\n\n\"And most of that is spent, yes,\" Wat said, nodding. \"New tools and equipment will allow us to earn a little more. Though,\" he added quickly, \"not much more than a few bars a year at best if little else changes around Elnacier. We'll simply be paying for less work.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Axtara said, pulling the small fold of papers she'd been searching for from her satchel and setting it atop the wooden plank. \"So, here is what I would propose, and I've brought a few sample contracts for you to look at.\" She undid the binding around the papers and spread them with a practiced twist of her claws. \"A loan of fifty bars, payable back with twenty-percent return over a period of ten summers. That would mean a yearly payment of six bars, payable at a rate of your choosing, totaling sixty bars by the end of those ten summers.\"\n\n\"That'd leave us with only nine bars a year...\" Wat began, \"but we'd be making more wood and could pay less for hired hands. Hold on, let me...\" He reached out and pulled over not one of her sample contracts but his most recent yearly records.\n\nCome on... Come on... you can afford it! It was time to sweeten the deal.\n\n\"In addition,\" Axtara said, pausing until she was certain that she had his attention. \"My loans come with a season of payment forgiveness, as well as a reduction to the final rate if payments are made early.\"\n\n\"Payment forgiveness?\"\n\n\"A leniency period in case of emergency,\" Axtara answered, fanning her wings again slightly. In the city, payment forgiveness was reserved for those who had proven how trustworthy they were, but so far from civilization? What would Wat do? Run with a loan of bars that was roughly equal to the total amount of business he saw each year? And to where? \"Say that someone was injured, or there was an unexpected expense that crippled your finances for a time. Payment forgiveness is a leniency offering, giving you a grace period to miss half a payment in a given year.\"\n\n\"So three bars, instead of six bars?\"\n\n\"Yes. Bearing in mind,\" she added quickly, \"that the other three bars must be paid at a later date. It would effectively allow you to extend your contract by a period of half a year, in exchange for not paying during the leniency period.\"\n\n\"What about in the event of a truly devastating disaster, like a fire? Something that requires a longer period of time.\"\n\n\"We rework your loan,\" she said quickly. \"Extend the payment period, lower payments... but you would end up paying more in the long run, to compensate. But I would do my best to find a solution that would allow you to continue to return what you owe at some time.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Wat said, nodding. \"What about the other thing you mentioned? The reduction?\"\n\nAxtara smiled, her tail lashing slightly and carving little trails in the sawdust behind her. \"Well, let us say that you had an unexpected windfall. A large order that paid well, perhaps. And you decided to use this windfall to pay more than your expected yearly payment. I would count that extra as twice its value toward my return on the loan, for up to half the return's value.\"\n\n\"In other words,\" she continued, \"The loan is for fifty bars, but you'll pay me in total sixty. If you were to pay me eight bars in the first year, rather than six, than I would consider those extra two bars as paying toward the ten I earn as a return, but as four bars, not two. But only to the value of half the return; any other payments in excess would simply reduce the amount you owed. In other words, even if you were to pay me the full return on the loan a season from now, I would still make five bars profit, the cost of the loan being ten percent.\"\n\n\"I... think I follow you,\" Wat said. Then he nodded. \"So if I pay more than the six bars a year, I'll owe you five less bars by the end.\"\n\n\"Correct. And only if you pay in amounts of at least half a bar. Not simply a few coins over and hoping to reduce the loan that way.\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Wat said, setting his record down again and instead reaching for the sample contracts she'd brought. She'd made sure that the one she was speaking of was on top, and he looked over it before looking up at her. \"And this contract would be legally binding in the Kingdom of Elnacier?\"\n\n\"As well as recognized by the core kingdoms and banks there,\" Axtara answered. \"So if, for example, you were to move to Delaria, one of the banks there would take over the contract on my behalf.\" In essence. It was a lot more complicated than that. But he didn't need to know that. Most clients didn't. What they needed to know was that yes, they were bound at their word to pay the funds back.\n\n\"And if I can't pay for some reason?\"\n\nAxtara bit back a sigh. It's a fair question.\n\nMost people just didn't like the answer.\n\n\"Then the contract binds you to make restitution in some other way, usually by the sale of property to pay the debt. For example, if something happened and you refused to pay the debt or renegotiate new terms, than I would be within my right, as the bank and holder of the loan, to see assets of yours, such as your mill or tools, sold to pay the remainder, or as much of it as could be met.\"\n\nWat's eyes narrowed. \"And if I ran out of things to sell? What then?\"\n\nIt wasn't hard to guess where his line of thought was going. \"Then I lose money,\" she replied. \"I don't sell people. Nor do I kidnap maidens. But I won't ask the king to throw you into servitude at my benefit. I've simply lost money, and will need to keep that in mind when making future deals.\"\n\nWat seemed, if not completely encouraged by her answer, at least satisfied enough to nod. \"And what about a year or two from now, if I decide to get another loan to cover the cost of a new lumber mill?\"\n\n\"We can draw up another contract then,\" she replied quickly. \"And there are options there for your payments as well, such as deferring them until this loan is paid first. At a small addition to the return of the new loan, of course.\"\n\nWat nodded but didn't say anything, still looking down at the sample contract she'd brought. She let him. There was nothing to do now but wait. Wait and hope. Hope that something would come of the last few hours' worth of work and discussion.\n\nSix bars a year wasn't much. Not in the long run. But it was a start. And it would take the edge off of her current income of... nothing.\n\nPlease... Please take this offer. It's a good offer! Please please please\u2014\n\n\"Okay.\" Wat's voice called a stop to her thoughts as swiftly as if she'd stopped flying and plummeted from the air. \"We have a deal. How does this work?\"\n\nYES! It took a considerable amount of focus to keep her wings from spreading wide, and to limit the squeal of joy she wanted to let loose to a wide smile instead.\n\n\"Excellent!\" The enthusiasm in her voice, on the other wing, she could let out. \"I'll draw up the contract tonight, and you can come over first thing tomorrow morning and sign it.\"\n\n\"At which point, you'll just hand me fifty bars?\" Wat asked.\n\n\"If you'd like,\" she answered, taking the sample contract back from him. \"Or, if you'd prefer, you can take a letter of credit, or several, to send to your suppliers, for the amounts they require. They'll be able to take that letter to their banks, which will in turn contact me via a professional courier to transport the money.\"\n\n\"So... I don't even have to take the money.\"\n\n\"No.\" It was hard to keep a straight face with her heart thundering in her chest. \"You can even, if you wish, open an account at the bank for me to put your loan in, and withdraw funds as needed, or with letters of credit. Or a combination of any of those.\"\n\n\"Well... I'll think on that. But the loan?\" Wat nodded. \"We'll do it. Fifty bars. I'll be by tomorrow morning after first bell.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" First bells... that's early. I'll absolutely need to draw the contract up tonight! \"I'll be waiting for you. You can sign the contract and receive your funds how you choose then.\" She held out one pair of claws.\n\n\"Sounds good!\" Waterlily gave her a wide smile and took her claws in his hand, giving them a shake. \"Thank you for doing business with me, Lady Axtara. If you ever need wood...\"\n\nShe let her smile widen. \"You'll be the first to know, Wat.\"\n\nThe next few minutes were almost a blur. Wat gathered his papers, and she hers, and then after a farewell, she took flight, soaring into the sky and out over the forest.\n\nShe let herself fly for almost a minute before letting out a squeal of joy. \"Yes!\" The cry echoed across the treetops. I have a loan! My first one!\n\nAll she had to do now was draw up the contract and give Wat the bars. Oh, I can't wait to write a letter home to mother and father and let them know! And uncle! They'll all be so proud! She threw herself into a quick loop, another shriek of joy echoing across Elnacier.\n\nAnd Mia! She twisted, changing directions. I've got to let Mia know! She could already see the manor, and most of Elnacier. And maybe get another sweet roll.\n\nThen I can get to work, and draw up that contract!\n\nHer whoop of joy echoed across the town as she soared by overhead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Leveraging Interest",
                "text": "Three days had passed since she'd spent her afternoon at Wat's mill. Three wonderful, busy, work-filled days.\n\nNot entirely work-filled. There had been ample time for her to visit with Mia more than once. And to take care of other affairs as she settled into her home, such as placing a promised order for firewood with Waterlily. After he'd signed the contract, and she'd handed over ten of the promised fifty bars. He'd taken several letters of credit for half of the remainder, with a guarantee that he would return for letters for the rest as soon as he'd determined which seller he was buying from.\n\nIt had been all she could do to keep herself from letting out an undignified squeak of glee as she'd passed over the letters. Official letters. With her letterhead upon them. Signifying that they were of her bank.\n\nGranted, the banks or moneylenders that received them likely wouldn't recognize her name. Or the letterhead. Not yet.\n\nBut they'd see the seal at the bottom of each one. A magical mark made by a stamp given out only to those with the proper connections and backing. They wouldn't know her name, but the mark would prove her letter genuine. As would their later correspondence.\n\nWhich reminds me... Axtara made a mental note as she returned to the front room of her home, where she'd left her latest client. I need to go have a word with that courier... What was it again? Vern?\n\n\"Very well,\" she said, shoving the thought from her mind as she came back to the newest client sitting in front of her desk. \"Your money has been deposited, and the record has been made. If you'll just give me a moment, I'll hand you a receipt for your deposit and a summary of the totals in your account, as well as the papers identifying your ownership of the account.\"\n\n\"Papers?\" The woman spoke up. \"Wouldn't those be easier to steal than our money?\"\n\nThat was why, the woman had said, she and her husband wanted the account. To keep their meager savings of a few bars safe.\n\n\"They would be,\" Axtara confirmed. \"But they don't grant ownership of the account. They're merely a record. Only you and your husband have ownership of the account, and I know who you are. Plus, there are the security measures I brought up.\"\n\nThe woman, Yalis Devant, nodded. \"So it's just to remind us?\"\n\n\"And for your own records,\" Axtara said as she settled behind her desk once more and smiled. \"Which, if you aren't keeping any, I would encourage.\" There was a ledger open on the desk, a new column now set aside for the Devant's account. A single, solitary number was scrawled at the top. A small number, to be sure, but a number all the same. And it was flanked to the left by three others. Three more accounts that she was now responsible for.\n\nIt was wonderful.\n\nShe finished writing out the receipt on a small piece of cheap paper, then cut it free with a quick slice of her claws and passed it over to Yalis Devant.\n\n\"Here you are,\" she said as the woman took the receipt. \"Again, for your own records.\"\n\n\"What if...\" Yalis began with a nervous hitch to her voice. \"What if we don't have any records?\"\n\nAxtara gave her another smile. \"Nothing to be ashamed about. Just keep the receipt so that you know how much money you have in your account. When you come to make a withdrawal or deposit additional funds, I'll give you a new receipt then, so you'll still know how much you and your husband have in your account.\"\n\n\"And we can come and get our money at any time?\" Yalis asked for what had to be the third time. \"All of it, if needs be?\"\n\n\"All of it,\" Axtara confirmed, again for what had to be the third time. \"Yet I must stress that even if you did so tomorrow, the fee for opening the account would not be refunded.\" It wasn't much of a fee, but there had to be a line somewhere. I need to make money, not just hold it. \"And I won't allow anyone but you to access the account. So please do not send the tax collectors to my bank to pay your taxes. I won't be able to give them any. You'll have to come yourself and withdraw the funds.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Yalis stood, her receipt and the papers establishing the account in her hands. \"Do I need to do anything else?\"\n\n\"Just have a good day,\" Axtara said, smiling and catching herself before she could bare her teeth in a grin at the last second. \"And thank you for your business!\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lady Axtara.\" The words were almost squeaked out as Yalis backed up and then almost fled through the door in her hurry to leave the room.\n\nShe didn't even touch her tea, Axtara thought with a slight pang of disappointment as she watched the woman rush down the road. The cup was sitting undisturbed where she'd placed it on Yalis' side of the desk. And it was a good jasmine blend too.\n\nAh well, at least she had the fortitude to open an account. A small one, to be sure, but an account all the same. Certainly better than nothing.\n\nHer smile widened as she looked down at the open ledger. That's four, she thought, a tingle of excitement rushing down her spine to the tip of her tail. Four accounts! In just three days!\n\nAll it had taken, it appeared, was securing a loan with someone the community trusted and knew. Such as Waterlily's family. He'd arrived the day after their meeting, as planned, and signed his contract. Taken his money. That had been all the business she'd seen that day. The day following, however...\n\nShe smiled again and poured herself a fresh cup of tea. The day following, she'd had no fewer than five curious clients show up. Two had left without much fanfare, disappointed that she wasn't simply giving out money to anyone who asked. She'd even made a mental note to refuse the second if she ever came back, given how many of her answers were shifty or outright suspicious.\n\nBut the third had showed up with several bars in a sack, and less than an hour later, they had walked out, the first official holder of an account at her bank.\n\nThe fourth client had been a young couple, curious about a loan of their own to purchase a large wagon and a team of horses in order to start up an official shipping business, something more regular and specific than just the kingdom's mail courier or a few citizens with a couple of spare wagons and half a day to spend. And while she hadn't given them a loan or even promised one, she had taken the time to both explain how such a loan would work, and then what sort of assurances and records she would need to see from the young couple before she simply handed over a collection of bars. They had parted on good terms, with the couple promising that she would see them again.\n\nI hope I do, Axtara thought as she carefully blew on the ink, making sure it was dry before closing the ledger and sliding it into its chosen place beside her desk. For one, an official shipping company would make my work much easier. Not just because it would mean money would be circulating, but it would be hard for some not to see a shipping wagon and immediately think of what they could use such a service for. And once they did... Well, that's industry in action.\n\nThe last client of the day had been like the third: Interested in opening a bank account, and with money in their pockets. Not even a full quarter-bar worth, mind, but money all the same. She'd been more than happy to open an account for them, regardless of their young age. If a youth of barely ten summers understood the value of a bank enough to open an account at their age, then they deserved to have one. At a reduced starting fee, no less.\n\nAnd now two more accounts have joined as of today, she thought as she took a satisfying sip of her tea. It was no longer hot, merely lukewarm, but she didn't mind. At the moment it could have been cold and she wouldn't have minded. Sure, it's just barely over five bars, but this isn't a prosperous kingdom.\n\nYet. Her smile widened. There was an old tale her uncle had loved, about a dragon whelp too young to fly who had climbed a mountain with the belief that they would be able to soar once they had reached the top. Alone and amid mockery, they had struggled up the mountain's surface, until they had reached the very top and spread their young wings... only to be thrown back against the mountain's peak by winds far too powerful for them to fly in.\n\nBut in being thrown back, they had knocked free a single pebble, which began to bounce down the mountainside, kicking up other stones, rocks, and boulders. The whelp had tumbled after them, thrown their wings wide, and discovered that while they couldn't yet fly, they could glide. After the cascading barrage of stones, which had built into an avalanche that tumbled down the mountainside until it crushed a passing noble's caravan, scattering the guards and leaving their entire fortune unguarded. Delivering wealth and a meal to the young whelp, who was now rich.\n\nThe meal had been the horses, her uncle had assured her over the unhappy glares from her parents. Naturally it had been the horses.\n\nRight, uncle, she thought with a shake of her head as she finished her tea. It was clearly the horses. Nevermind the death. Or that the story came from long before the end of the Bad Days.\n\nStill, for its notable faults, one meaning of the tale was clear. Sometimes we have to try, and fail. But in failing, we may strike off a chain of success we never could have dreamed of.\n\nGranted, the goal was not to fail with her bank. But she didn't have to in order to have kicked a few pebbles over the edge. And if those pebbles roll fast and far enough... And don't kill anyone...\n\nShe rose and collected the teapot as well as the cups of tea, setting them on their tray and returning to her kitchen. She took a moment to wash and clean both cups and their saucers, and then a few moments more to make use of her bathroom. Too much tea.\n\nHer private moments taken care of, it was time to figure out what to do next. There may still be some curious parties looking to make use of the bank, she thought as she walked back into the front room and took a seat behind her desk. But the day is growing a bit long. And... there was something I was just thinking I needed to do, wasn't there? A quick glance at her clock showed that there was still an hour and a half to go until the fifth and evening bell. But she'd had few callers so late in the day save perhaps Mia and her sister Abathine. The latter of which had only passed by on a ride with her escort, rather than making an official visit.\n\nSo then, what was it I was thinking I needed to do? She ran her eyes across her desk. Something that was... Oh! Of course!\n\nThere was a folded envelope sitting in one corner. My letter home! She hadn't placed it in the courier box because... She frowned.\n\nBecause that lazy courier and I need to have a word, she thought, shuffling her wings as she swept the letter off the desk and into her claws. The last letter she'd attempted to send out had languished in her box for two days before being picked up. I know we're not in the core kingdoms, but there really must be some sort of regularity.\n\nThe last thing I want to do is pay someone else to do that old courier's job and prove those suspicions about me being here simply to take over everyone's businesses true. The letter went into her satchel, which she secured around her chest. She took another quick look around the room, just to make sure that she hadn't left something out of place, and then headed out.\n\nIt was a pleasant enough day for flying. The air had a cool, early-fall chill to it, but nothing that was too disruptive yet. She wound her path over the road rather than heading directly for Elnacier, on the odd chance that someone was coming up the road to meet with her, but no one appeared.\n\nThat suited her just fine at the moment. Let more word spread from the people I've done business with already. Surely there would be a spike of interest once Waterlily had his new axes and tools. Money is one thing, but seeing a new, shiny enchanted axe, or getting your wood order early because of it...\n\nPebbles down a mountainside. But at the moment, she had a rolling stone of her own to kick over.\n\nShe landed just outside of town, bringing herself down in a nice, even glide that didn't kick up too much dust. Someone waved from a nearby farm field, and she returned the motion.\n\nHopefully it had been a friendly wave. If not, well... It never hurts to be courteous.\n\nShe was growing more familiar with Elnacier with each passing day. Not that there was a lot of it to grow familiar with, but even so, she was learning to recognize what there was and where she walked in relation to it. There was really only the one main road and the village square, with everything else built around it or on one of the side roads, like branches poking out of a trunk.\n\nThe courier office was on one of those branches, close to the trunk, and a minor turn off of the main road. The front door stole her focus for a moment, and she shifted her wings slightly as she eyed the narrow passage. How to have a talk with this \"Vern\" when I don't fit through the front entrance?\n\nI could just poke my head in like last time, she thought. Quite undignified, leaving my hindquarters out in the street for all to stare at. And I cannot simply just stand here and speak from the street, or he'll shut the door in my snout the same way he did last time the moment he hears something he doesn't like.\n\nShe frowned. There has to be another way to do this. She bent her neck, sliding her head to one side and peering into the open doors of the attached stable. Well, more like a stable and storage, she noted, her eyes catching sight of a stack of crates of varying sizes, piled almost as tall as she was. The ones on the bottom of the stack looked as though they hadn't been moved in years, their bases sunk into the stable's dirt floor.\n\nI hope whatever's in those doesn't mind getting a little wet, or was packed for it, she thought with another frown. Packages that didn't make their payments perhaps?\n\nStill, there was something else she had noticed about the stable. It was empty, with not a horse in sight, nor the scent of one. There was definitely at least a donkey in residence, but the scent wasn't fresh, so it wasn't there at the moment. Then again, I don't see any sign of a wagon either, Axtara thought, stepping away from the office's front door and closer to that of the stable. Though those definitely look like tracks on the ground. So there must be one.\n\nIt made sense. A proper courier for the kingdom would need a wagon. Probably a small, two-seat affair given how much of the kingdom's trade and business was handled internally, but useful enough for shipments of mail to the other villages or the occasional trip past the kingdom's borders.\n\nWell, it would be demeaning to speak with this Vern inside the stable... but that's better than not speaking at all. She took a few steps inside, folding her wings and waiting as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light.\n\nThere must not be much crime here if they're leaving the doors open and their cargo unattended like that. The boxes above the bottom layer looked much newer and more recent. Maybe the bottom layers are empty and sacrificial?\n\nShe could hear noise coming through the wall, the sounds of someone moving around and hammering. Perhaps putting a new crate together? Or just jostling someone's packages rather loudly.\n\nHowever, to her delight the door joining the two structures wasn't just one, but two. And wide at that. Her eyes caught sight of several tracks in the hard-packed dirt and she nodded. So they can back their cart up. But if a simple cart could fit, then so could she.\n\nExcellent. She drew herself up, putting on a careful look of sophistication, one she'd borrowed from some of the more cold nobles of Helmson but never really perfected. Her uncle had always told her that it was both because she was too nice and because it wasn't that useful of an expression anyway. With a pinch of annoyance\u2014quite real\u2014on top, however...\n\nHer shoulders set and her wings resting just raised so that they would frame her head, she reached out and knocked on the heavy set of doors. The sound echoed across the interior of the office, briefly drowning out the activity inside.\n\n\"That came from the stable doors.\" The first voice sounded young, on the verge of cracking. One of the proprietor's apprentices, then? Or workers, or whatever one called them?\n\n\"Shamic's here with his shipment early, then,\" came a familiar, slurred voice. \"Go offer him a hand, would you? I've got this.\"\n\n\"Yes sir.\" There was a light clatter, as if someone had set something down, and then a scuffle of feet across wood that moved toward the door. Axtara waited, pulling her head back and resettling her position just in time for a scrawny, young figure to push both doors open from the middle.\n\n\"Evening mister... mister...\" The youth's voice trailed off as he looked up at Axtara, his eyes widening with surprise. To his credit, he didn't shout in alarm or back away. Instead he simply stood there, stared for a moment, and then turned his head toward the back of the office.\n\n\"Master Vern? Someone wishes to speak with you.\"\n\nIf not for the carefully calculating expression she was holding, she would have smiled. The youth had a good grasp of when to pass over a prospective client to someone else. Or perhaps, to borrow the human expression, \"shove them in front of the wagon.\"\n\nThere was a clatter from the back of the office. \"Very well, who is it?\" The voice shifted, moving closer. \"If it's Miss Hilltwoer again, then your letter from your sister is coming, and it will arrive whenever she sends...\" The man stepped into view, eyes widening slightly. \"It,\" he finished, his already aged glower deepening. \"You. The dragon living in the old cave.\"\n\n\"Lady Axtara the Studious,\" she replied, giving her tail a disdainful flick. \"And you are Vern, the manager of this courier service.\"\n\n\"Edwarn Vern,\" the old man said, and she didn't miss the way his eyes flicked to the doors, as if deciding whether or not he could slam them in her face. Nor the way the youth had moved back out of Vern's sight, but where he could still watch.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Vern asked, the question coming out almost slurred into one word, like it was a single, low-energy response rather than an actual sentence.\n\nIt made her want to grit her teeth. Mia did warn me he was old and rude.\n\n\"What I want, Mr. Vern,\" she said, making sure she elocuted in such a way as to put her teeth ever so slightly on display. \"Is to talk about your courier services.\" She brought one set of claws up slowly and reached into her satchel. \"I have here a letter which needs to be sent out,\" she said, procuring the envelope to be sent to her parents. \"As well as another letter,\" she said, procuring a second envelope, \"that sat in my box for two days without pickup.\"\n\n\"We get to your box when we get to it,\" Vern said, his voice almost a grunt. \"Elnacier's not a busy place.\"\n\n\"I wonder,\" Axtara said, narrowing her eyes and fixing him with a glare. \"And would that be because it is, or because it suits someone else's design that it be so?\" She didn't miss the way his eyes narrowed slightly as he caught her barb.\n\n\"While we're on the topic,\" she said, fanning herself slightly with the pair of envelopes. \"I wish to express concern regarding mail or missives coming the other way. If I receive a message from someone, I wish to receive it that day, not at when it's most convenient. We wouldn't want a repeat of my late invitation to meet with the king.\"\n\nThat had struck a nerve. Vern's already sour expression darkened. \"Look, your ladyship,\" he said, reaching out and snatching her two letters and then almost immediately setting them on a counter by the door. \"Elnacier's a quiet little kingdom. People get their mail when they get it. Sometimes there's a lot of mail out in Overhill, so everyone in Overhill gets their mail that day. Sometimes it's Seaside. You get your mail when you get it, just like everyone else.\"\n\n\"Late, apparently,\" Axtara replied, letting just a little bit of her irritation show in her face, but refusing to dig her claws into the earthen floor. \"Vern, I am a banker. It is vital that messages sent to me arrive as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"Not much we can do,\" Vern said, stepping back away from the doors with a shake of his head. \"We can't give you special treatment. You'll get your mail just like everyone else. That's how it works. If you don't like it, you'll have to find another courier service.\"\n\n\"You...\" She was tempted to let out a little spurt of flame at him. Just enough to get his attention. But that wouldn't do anything but antagonize him further. But there's got to be something else I can... Her eyes slipped to the young boy standing just in eyesight, watching the exchange.\n\n\"Well then, if that's how it's going to be,\" she said, drawing herself up once more.\n\n\"It is,\" Vern said. \"Now, you got anything else to send?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said with a brisk shake of her head. Then she stepped forward, into the office, ignoring Vern's squawk of protest.\n\n\"You can't\u2014!\"\n\n\"You there,\" she said, nodding in the direction of the youth and ignoring Vern's protests. \"What's your name?\"\n\nTo his credit, the boy didn't shy away. Instead he snapped to attention. \"Wilfor, ma'am.\"\n\n\"And you work here as a courier?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\" The answer was so fast it was almost a single word. He'd learned something from his employer at least.\n\n\"How would you like to earn a little extra money?\" she asked.\n\n\"Now see here\u2014\" Vern began.\n\n\"What?\" she asked, twisting to look right at the old man. \"Didn't you just suggest that I ask someone else? The boy is a courier of the kingdom, is he not?\"\n\n\"He works for me,\" Vern said, scowling.\n\n\"And so he will continue to,\" she replied. \"I'm simply offering him an expanded service on top.\" She turned her focus back toward Wilfor.\n\n\"Wilfor,\" she said. \"How would you like to earn a whole coin for yourself?\"\n\n\"What would I have to do, miss?\" Clearly, the boy could see an opportunity in front of him. Maybe Vern had taught him more than he'd realized.\n\n\"Simple,\" she said. \"All you, or anyone at this office, really, needs to do is ensure that my box is checked at least three times each week. Every other day. And when a new piece of mail arrives for me, letter, package, or otherwise, that it is delivered immediately, with no delays.\"\n\n\"If you do that\u2014check my box three times a week, and deliver me my mail as soon as it arrives\u2014I will pay whoever brings me my mail a whole Delarian coin.\"\n\nThe boy's eyes went wide. \"A whole\u2014?\"\n\n\"You cannot do that!\" Vern's voice cut through the youth's question. \"He works for me!\"\n\n\"I'm offering a coin to any who deliver me my mail the day it arrives,\" Axtara said, turning to look at him. \"As long as my box is regularly checked, and I do not find that they split my mail up to try and cheat me out of coin, or don't deliver my mail late. That will include you as well, Vern, if you so desire. I'm not trying to take your employee away. I'm merely offering a reward for furthering the business. Open to all who wish to take advantage of it.\"\n\n\"He can't accept it,\" Vern said, scowling, his eyes flicking to the boy. \"I won't let him. He works for me, and for the king.\"\n\n\"Then he can do it as soon as he's not busy,\" she countered, giving her tail another disdainful flick. \"Surely he doesn't work for you all day. And then he would be free to keep the coin for himself, rather than share it with your service.\"\n\n\"In fact,\" she said, giving Vern a grin that did include teeth. \"If he were to suggest to others around Elnacier that he could carry their parcels around immediately for just a small fee, or even a weekly fee\u2014\"\n\n\"Now wait just\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014he could likely find quite a few people that would pay for a prompt message delivery, wouldn't you say?\" she asked, turning her attention back toward Wilfor. The youth had a look of confusion on his face, but with hints of understanding, like he was starting to see what she was describing. \"Sure, it might send a negative message about your work here, but as you've said, you refuse to take\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, all right! I concede you damnable reptile!\" Vern's shout echoed through the store, and she turned to lift one ridged brow at him.\n\n\"There's no cause for insults,\" she said as if she were merely commenting on the weather. \"But I'm glad to see that you agree with my proposal. So, one coin then?\" Wilfor was already nodding.\n\n\"One coin,\" Vern groused, his jaw working like he was chewing rocks. \"And don't go spreading this around.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course not. I'm a banker. I'm familiar with the concept of propriety.\" Though I doubt young Wilfor is. You shouldn't be worrying about me. \"Just don't let me hear that you've confiscated the coin I give them.\"\n\n\"Perish the thought,\" Vern said, his tone so dry she honestly wasn't sure if it was meant to be sarcastic or not.\n\nShe settled for simply not acknowledging it. \"Very well then. And you have my letters, so it would seem that my business here is concluded. Have a good day then, Mr. Vern, Wilfor.\" She gave each of them a nod, then carefully turned in a narrow circle, twisting so tightly she could have bit her own tail. Wilfor let out a little gasp from behind her, and she had to hold back a smile.\n\nI may be larger than the average human, but I am quite flexible. She paused only long enough to shut the doors behind her with a light thump, smiled, and walked out back into the street.\n\nMaybe there was time for a honey roll on account of her success."
            },
            {
                "title": "Growing Accounts",
                "text": "And then if I add that right there to this... The abacus clicked under her claws, the small glass beads leaping back and forth as she brought the two numbers together. All right, she thought, checking the result and carefully noting the number with a few light drags of her claw across the paper. Now that total compared to the one they thought they had...\n\nThe two numbers were different. Not by a substantial amount, but more than enough to be considered a serious error. And one that compounds over time, Axtara thought, looking over the previous numbers she'd double-checked.\n\nIf they want to go into business for themselves, they'd better learn to be better with their numbers. Once more glass beads clicked, blending with the ticking of her clock into the gentle symphony of work well done as she took the latest number and added it to the total she'd accrued from several other corrections. Or hire someone to do it on their behalf.\n\nThe result was far afield from the total number she'd worked based on the couple's own completed calculations. And subtracting the one from the other showed...\n\nA difference of less than a bar. Well, they are both pretty young. And they did say they weren't very good at farming. The couple's numbers supported that, at least. From the look of it, they were getting more out of their small herd of goats than they were out of their crops.\n\nAnd they're overpaying their tax to the king as well, she thought as she glanced at the number the couple had scrawled on the parchment. Just under two bars paid each year, with some variance, but they've overestimated their earnings. By her own calculations the amount wouldn't have been much less, but it would have still been less.\n\nThat's a rather high tax rate for so little gain, Axtara thought as she circled a few of the numbers and then wiped her claw on a rag. The lumber mill was the same, though.\n\nInteresting. For a kingdom that was only barely staying aloft financially, the few records she'd seen certainly did seem to suggest that the problem didn't lie with its income. Of course, I am only seeing the outliers, she thought as she rose from her spot behind the desk, stretching and brushing the tips of her wings against the walls. The people who are forward enough with their capital to take risks. Therefore, they would be the ones with the most capital to pay in tax, right?\n\nOr, she conceded as she settled down before her desk once more. Maybe Fendall is just poor with money. It had happened to more than one kingdom, and more than one business. Just because he handled their finances when he and the king were adventurers together doesn't mean that he knows how to best run a kingdom.\n\nNot that I want to be the one to bring that up, she thought, dipping her claw back into her inkwell and pulling out a new sheet of scratch paper to copy all her completed figures down onto. Especially on such flimsy, limited evidence. Of which there is none. Just a few instances of what look like high taxes paid, but by citizens who contribute quite a bit to the economy of the kingdom.\n\nWell, she thought as her clawtip traced lines across the paper, marking down her calculations as well as a few of the originals and the difference between them for comparison. Mostly high contributors.\n\nIt was really only the yearly budgets of the lumber mill and this couple. No one else had come forward with their own financial records yet. Most didn't even have records, opting instead to simply send a portion of whatever they made each day or week to the king via the courier.\n\nSimple and effective, sure, but trying to keep track of anything under such a system... She shook her head, then blew gently on the paper, drying her ink. I suspect Fendall keeps track of such tax income.\n\nThen again, maybe he didn't, and that would certainly explain why the king was facing money woes.\n\nAnd again, it's something I shouldn't concern myself with, she thought with another shake of her head. It's the king's business, and my business is my business. So I should keep my thoughts focused on making my business\u2014Oh! Another visitor!\n\nThere was a figure walking down the road toward her home. Tall, lean, clad in simple clothing. A new savings account, perhaps? They didn't look familiar, but there were plenty of faces in Elnacier, to say nothing of the surrounding countryside, that she didn't know.\n\nStill, they were clearly coming to see her. Axtara turned her gaze back to her calculations, hurrying her copying along, her claw making swift, rapid movements. In the end it was a little sloppy, but it was for her own perusal rather than showing to anyone else. It could be sloppy if it had to. As long as it wasn't so sloppy she misread it.\n\nShe'd finished and had time enough for the ink to dry, her claw long-since wiped clean, by the time her new visitor had stepped before her front door. She waited as he vanished from sight, and then a few moments later a loud, heavy knock echoed through her front room.\n\n\"Come in!\" There was a moment's pause, and then the door opened with a heavy thunk. Her visitor stepped in, a slight chill following in his wake as the cooler outside air rushed to replace the much warmer air of her home. Thankfully, he was polite enough to close the door behind him.\n\n\"Welcome to my bank,\" Axtara said, rising from behind her desk and noting the way the man barely reacted to her presence. Either he already knew who she was and what to expect, or he was one of those rare individuals who was simply as firm in his footing as a statue. \"My name is Axtara. What can I help you with?\"\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" the man said, offering her a bow. \"My name is Mord. I'm the town doctor. Or perhaps apothecary would be more apt.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mord,\" she said, inclining her head to show thanks at his bow. His profession likely explained his behavior. Or, at least, helped in it. \"Please, take a seat.\" She gestured toward one of the chairs sitting before her desk. \"Now, what can I do for you today?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mord said, his words coming out in a way that made them feel slow but sure, like he'd measured each syllable in a cup before letting it slip past his lips. \"I understand that you're in the business of letting people borrow money.\"\n\n\"I am,\" she said, nodding slightly. \"Might I assume that you are interested in such a thing?\"\n\n\"You may,\" he said with a nod.\n\nEasily the most formal customer I've had, Axtara mused, though she kept the thought to herself. \"Well then, loans are no simple matter. You are aware of how they work?\"\n\n\"I spoke with Wat the other day,\" Mord said with a slow nod. \"One of his children is sick, and he needed herbs. He explained it to me. You would give me a portion of money, and I would pay it back, plus a little more to compensate you for your trouble, over a period of time. Correct?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She inclined her head once more. \"I can see that I owe Wat a word of thanks for so well explaining it.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mord said, a smile cracking his features and bringing some warmth to them. A good change after the earlier formality. \"He was rather excited about the whole affair. He's wanted to purchase new equipment for a long time. He was more than willing to tell me all about it while I made some medicinal tea for his son to drink.\"\n\n\"Did he explain to you how the value may be different based on how long you take to pay it back, or on the amount you wish to receive?\"\n\n\"He did,\" Mord said, nodding. \"But I don't actually plan to ask for a large amount. Just enough to afford something that has long been out of my grasp, and maybe some extra firewood to keep it alive.\"\n\nShe perked at his answer. \"Alive?\"\n\nThis time Mord grinned. \"It's a plant. You're from the core kingdoms. Have you ever heard of almerac balm?\"\n\n\"Oh! Of course I have.\"\n\nMord nodded. \"Good. Medicinal balm, excellent for cuts and abrasions, guards against infection. Which, as you can imagine, we have all of in large supply here. The balm itself is fairly costly. I do have a supply on hand, however, I long ago decided I would be much better off\u2014as well as most of the people in Elnacier\u2014if I could simply purchase an almerac bush and harvest the balm myself.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a good idea, as long as you could keep it alive,\" Axtara said, tapping her chin with a claw. \"I'm not a horticulturalist, but almerac bushes are from dry, warmer climates.\" Then she nodded. \"Hence the extra firewood.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mord said, his smile growing. \"To be purely honest, however, it's not my taking care of the plant that's the primary concern. It's the cost of getting it here.\"\n\nOh.\n\n\"Almerac bushes aren't terribly expensive, nor is cultivating them. At least, so I'm told,\" Mord admitted with a shrug. \"But getting one here alive is a very different matter. Either I'd need to pay someone to bring it every step of the way, or have detailed instructions given to dedicated shippers who would carry them out to the letter to make sure the plants didn't perish along the way.\"\n\n\"All of which adds up to make an already valuable, if somewhat common, bush, much more expensive.\" Axtara settled herself more deeply behind her desk, bringing her head closer to the man's eye-level. \"You could capitalize on that by ordering a number of the bushes, rather than just one.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mord said. \"But if I can't keep them alive and in good health, it does little good how many I order. And if I can keep them in good health, I can bud more on my own. Though I'll need more space for that.\"\n\n\"So then, if I've put the pieces together properly,\" she said, a swelling feeling building in her chest. Keep your voice level and calm. Don't get too excited. \"You want to take out a loan in order to pay for an almerac bush\u2014several almerac bushes,\" she corrected quickly. \"Mostly because of the high cost of having them transported this far. Do you have any particular shipping company or service in mind? Have they provided you with estimates?\"\n\n\"Um...\" The man's face flushed slightly. \"Nothing recent, Lady Axtara. No.\"\n\n\"Just Axtara, please, Mord.\"\n\n\"Very well. But no.\" He shook his head. \"The last I inquired was more than two summers past. So I'm sure my information would be long out of date by now.\"\n\n\"I see.\" A pity. And I didn't order anything under such special conditions when I had my belongings brought here. \"Well, do you perhaps remember what it would have cost? I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to give you an exact value without more information, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Fifteen bars.\"\n\nShe blinked, catching her wings before they could fully extend and pulling them back in. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Fifteen bars,\" Mord repeated. \"That's the number I was given.\"\n\n\"Fifteen...\" She snapped her mouth shut.\n\n\"Hence why I came to see you once I'd spoken with Wat. I don't charge much for my services, and it didn't feel fair to ask everyone else to pay a heavy price when they got sick\u2014\"\n\n\"Mister Mord,\" she said, cutting him off with a shake of her head. \"Transport of an almerac bush should not cost you fifteen bars.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, putting a bit of fire into her voice. \"It should not. This desk?\" She tapped her claws against the wood of her desk. \"Shipping it here cost me five bars. That included the installation. The new axes Wat is ordering are enchanted, yet only a bar apiece, roughly.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said again. \"I'm afraid that the price you were given was either from someone who didn't want your business, or simply wanted to take advantage of someone they saw as a 'country rube.'\"\n\n\"But,\" she said, turning to her side, away from Mord's shocked and unhappy expression, and opening one of the drawers on her desk. \"I believe I can help you in that regard.\"\n\n\"Here we are,\" she said, her claws finding a particular slip of paper and teasing it out of the drawer. \"The addresses of the shipping companies I contracted to transport my belongings here to Elnacier.\" A piece of low-grade paper for calculations found itself removed from its cubby and set next to the list. \"Some of these are for larger shipments than what you would be needing for a few plants, so there's no need to contact them, but these other companies...\" Ink trailed under the tip of her claw as she copied names and addresses over.\n\n\"You'll simply need to contact one of these and put them in connection with whomever you would have purchased the almerac bush from, or pay them a little extra to find a seller,\" she continued, both her claw and the tip of her tail making fast, rapid movements for entirely different reasons. Thankfully, the doctor could only see the movement that mattered. \"Quite honestly, I would not be surprised to find that you're able to see a set of almerac bushes shipped here for less than a bar. Two at most.\" She finished copying the addresses over, wiping her claw on her cleaning cloth to clear the leftover ink from its tip and blowing gently on the paper to help it dry. \"And that should be something you're more than capable of paying on your own with a bit of time. If not, well...\" She shrugged. \"My bank is always open to you.\"\n\nSatisfied that the ink was mostly dry, she slid the piece of paper across the desk toward Mord, who was staring at it with obvious surprise.\n\n\"My lady,\" he began, his voice starting a little weak but quickly switching back to his former, more determined tone. \"A thousand thanks. This is most\u2014\"\n\nShe cut him off with a wave of her claws. \"Think nothing of it, Mord. And please, just Axtara. We're in my bank, there's not such need for formality here. And if nothing else, consider it a favor. I'm sure there will come a time when I myself am under the weather, and could perhaps use an herbal broth or medicine of some kind, and I'll be glad to be dealing with someone who's already had a positive interaction with me.\"\n\n\"But the cost of\u2014\"\n\nAgain she cut him off. \"What? Paper? I order by the bulk, Mord. I'm a banker. I'm expected to go through plenty of it. Besides,\" she said, leaning forward and tapping the sheet of paper before him. \"This is merely low-grade paper, used for calculations or making notes such as this one. If you need paper to send a letter by, I could provide that as well.\"\n\n\"And all you ask is that I remember your bank in the future?\" Mord asked, a knowing look on his face.\n\n\"You understand perfectly,\" she said, nodding and pulling her claws back. \"Perhaps you decide to order more plants, and need more than a bar or two. Or perhaps you decide to build a greenhouse, and desire a loan to make the payment for all the glass you'd need to have shipped out here.\" She shrugged again, opening and refolding her wings at the same time to add some weight to the act. \"Or not. There's nothing against merely being a friendly neighbor.\"\n\nMord's smile, which had slowly replaced the look of shock on his face as she had kept speaking, grew wider. \"Well... thank you.\" He reached out and took the slip of paper. \"Thank you very much, Axtara. I will keep you in mind if I find I need additional funds. And thank you,\" he said again, looking up at her. \"For being honest. You could have just said nothing and loaned me the fifteen bars.\"\n\nAxtara let out a scoff, shaking her head and drawing back. \"And let someone take advantage of you? I think not. I am a banker. It is in my best interest to see money used well, whether you are officially one of my clients or not. Better that than wasted on some frivolous attempt at barely-legal thievery.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mord said, a curious expression on his face. She almost could have called it wonder. \"Thank you. All the more.\" He rose, folding the slip of paper she'd given him with reverence. \"You've given me some of the best news I've heard this week. Thank you.\" He turned as if to step away, then paused halfway through the motion and looked back.\n\n\"I suppose this may seem an odd question if you are not, but... are you a follower of the church?\"\n\n\"Which one?\" She rose from behind her desk, taking care to make the motion gradual and smooth. Less alarming. \"There aren't many dragon prophets, if I'm perfectly honest. So I tend to go right back to the root of it. The Great Creator. Right to the source.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Mord nodded. \"Well, we have that in common. You're more than welcome to come participate during one of our worship meetings at the church. If it helps, I'm not as enamored with some of the different interpretations out there myself, but we always have the words to fall back on. Just... I hadn't seen you there.\"\n\n\"And I would be kind of noticeable,\" Axtara added with a light chuckle.\n\n\"Yes, well...\" Mord said. \"What you said about being a friendly neighbor got me thinking. You're more than welcome to join us.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the invitation, Mord,\" she said, inclining her head slightly. \"It is most welcome.\"\n\n\"Yes, well...\" He looked around, apparently at a loss for words. \"Thank you again, Lady Axtara.\" She didn't bother to correct him. \"I'll just be going now to write a letter.\"\n\n\"Good luck. Let me know if you need anything.\"\n\nThe man nodded, and a moment later her front door opened and shut with another solid thump, the doctor appearing through the windows and walking at a brisk pace down the road.\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara said, her words echoing through the now empty front room. \"That was unexpected.\" She shook her head. Someone was really trying to take advantage of him, she thought as she eyed the clock face, checking the time.\n\nIt would have been far from the first time someone had tried such, and probably not a first for Elnacier. Which, she thought as she noted the time and moved for her kitchen, would be a marker stone of progress, would it not?\n\nAnd if Mord had suspected the truth and been testing her, then she'd handled the situation well enough. He'd been quite impressed with the information she'd offered him, to say nothing of the slip of paper. Or at least, had appeared so.\n\nEither way I wouldn't change my action even if his motives had been dishonest, she thought with a smile. Better to do what I could, be honest, and make father proud. Stick to myself.\n\nThere wasn't much to do in the kitchen. Just some minor cleaning of cups from a few of her earlier visitors that day. She was done with the job in minutes, back in her front room eyeing the clock.\n\nI suppose I could visit Mia earlier than planned. She took a quick look around the front room, eyeing the dirt that had been tracked across her floor. Or... I could clean. It wasn't the most glamorous work, but a clean business was a good sign. At least, for the type of business she was engaged in.\n\nCleaning is a good way to pass the time, too, she thought as she carefully swept her front room, checking each corner and moving her furniture and rugs out of the way. Before long there was a small pile of dust and dirt in the center of the room, and she swept it into a dustpan with a smile. Much better. A moment later\u2014and a bit of a chill; the air outside was nippy\u2014she'd dumped the mess outside, well away from her door where it wouldn't simply be tracked back in.\n\nThere, that looks better. She took a look around the clean room with a swell of satisfaction, then began moving the furniture back.\n\nShe was just adjusting the last chair when there was a knock from her door behind her. Not a heavy knock. In fact, it was almost timid. Certainly not the kind of knock one simply called out a reply of \"come in\" to in response. More than likely they'd simply panic, or worse, leave.\n\nShe turned, tucking her wings tight against her body and lowering her head ever so slightly with a smile. A quick glance at the clock told her there was still a little time before she needed to leave to meet with Mia. Long enough to do a quick consultation, at least. Assuming that was what the individual or individuals\u2014she hadn't seen\u2014wanted.\n\n\"Yes?\" she asked, opening her front door and poking her head out of it. There was a youth standing there on her threshold, a bit thin and gangly, though it was hard to tell through his heavy clothing. There was something about him that looked familiar... but not enough that she could place him.\n\n\"Lady Axtara?\" The youth's voice was a little shaky, but firm. He was holding something clutched in his hands, and he shoved it toward her. A small leather bag. \"A letter for you. Came in with the carriage a half-hour ago.\"\n\n\"A letter?\" For a moment she paused, confused. \"A\u2014Oh!\" The youth's features leapt up at her, the resemblance now obvious. \"Are you Wilfor's older brother?\"\n\n\"Yes, your ladyship. Folks call me Davor.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, young Davor,\" she said, bowing her head slightly. In truth, it felt almost awkward, as he couldn't have been more than five or six years her junior by human terms.\n\nThen again, he likely didn't know enough dragons to guess at her age. There was a chance he was thinking of her as an aged matron.\n\nThe thought rankled her somewhat.\n\n\"Now please,\" she said, opening the door wider and gesturing with one set of claws. \"Come in. It's cold today, and I'll not have you wait outside my door while I find you your payment. It'd be rude.\"\n\nAt her urging, the boy stepped in without comment, pausing only to stamp his feet and shake some of the dirt free. An appreciated gesture, as she'd just swept.\n\n\"Fell deeds,\" he said, stalling in front of her rug as he shut the door. \"You must be richer than the king!\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" she said sincerely as she moved past him. She didn't miss the way he shied to one side away from her. Still a little skittish. \"But I've worked very hard to own this home.\"\n\n\"I thought it'd just be a hole in the hill,\" he admitted after a moment, still clutching the leather bag to his chest. His eyes were wide with amazement, refusing to stay still as he took in her desk, the rugs, the chairs, her clock...\n\n\"Well of course not,\" she replied, opening a drawer on her desk and withdrawing a single Delarian dim. \"Would you live in such if you had a choice?\"\n\n\"Uh... I suppose not, your ladyship.\" The expression on his face said he wasn't sure if it was the right answer or not. \"But my home would never be this nice. You've got magic lamps!\"\n\nShe shook her head, fanning her wings slightly for effect. \"Never say never, Davor.\" She held out the Delarian dim. \"I came to Elnacier because it's a place of potential. There's much room for it to grow. You may very well one day have a home as nice as mine. It could all start with this coin.\" She tossed the dim through the air, the dull metal arcing into the boy's waiting hand.\n\n\"You just have to have the vision to see it. Now, my letters?\"\n\n\"Just one, your ladyship.\" Davor tried to bow and pocket the coin in the same motion, almost stumbling. Then he flipped the top of his bag open and pulled out a single envelope, passing it to her. The paper was poor, cheaper than anything she would have used on her own, and smelled musty. \"It's local.\" In fact, it didn't even appear to be an envelope, but rather a single, carefully folded slip of paper, sealed with a bit of wax.\n\n\"Local?\" She looked up.\n\nDavor nodded. \"Yes, your ladyship. From Overhill.\" He pointed at the scrawled name\u2014Elden Moon\u2014and city on the end of the folded paper. At the other end was the address of the intended recipient.\n\nAxtara, the address read. Banking dragon. Elnacier.\n\nBetter than nothing. And from Overhill? Curious. She stared down at the letter in her claws a moment longer before looking up. \"Thank you, Davor.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, your ladyship!\" He gave her another awkward bow, and then backed into her door, his head colliding with the wood and eliciting a resounding thunk.\n\n\"I'm fine!\" He had pushed the door open before she could even say anything and slipped through it, shutting it behind him and almost racing down the road toward Elnacier. Only, she noticed, to stop halfway there and pull what she assumed was the Delarian dim out of his pocket and examine it.\n\nAll right, so he's still a bit skittish around non-humans, she thought. Still, he was polite if nervous. Now... who from Overhill would be sending me a letter?\n\nShe moved over to her desk, one clawtip slicing through the cheap, crusty seal and exposing the inside of the folded paper, which she spread out on her desk.\n\nTo the Lady Axtara, the letter began. I have recently herd word that you have arived in Elnacier to open a bank, an institution that is in the busyness of lending money.\n\nNot bad so far, though the spelling errors were a bit grievous. Nothing bad enough to keep the intent from being clear, however. Though the handwriting was a little rough.\n\nAs the king has seen fit to let you stey within these lands, it would be\u2014the next word had been scrawled out\u2014foolish of me to not ask about barrowing a sum of money from you for the purposes of expanding my farm.\n\nI have sent this letter to inkwhyre after that fact, it continued. My farm has been in my family for generations, but I believe it can be sumthing better. I wish to add a large greenhouse to it in order to grow crops that are not suted to the climate here. If this would be sumthing that your bank could provide services for, please reply by mail or come to speek with me in person. I am Elden Moon of Overhill.\n\nThank you for your consideration.\n\nThe grin that had continued to widen as she'd read through the letter reached peak size, and she let out a loud \"Whoop!\" as she threw her head back.\n\n\"Would I give you a loan? A fourth-generation farmer interested in adding a greenhouse to expand your crops?\" She pushed herself up from her desk with a laugh. \"A greenhouse?\"\n\nShe could see it in her mind. Wood by the wagon-load. Glass, shipped in from nearby kingdoms. Labor.\n\nAnd then production. A farmer with crops no one else could match. A captive, local market. Which would put them at a premium price, one that would see a strong offering.\n\nWhich in turn would either inspire other farmers to expand their own markets, coming to her for more loans. Or the first would stay exclusive and profitable.\n\nEither way, if her would-be client had a stable financial history, a loan for such a venture could be a very good idea.\n\nCould, she reminded herself as she eyed the letter once more. It could just as well be a bad idea. I'll need to ask careful questions.\n\nShe could meet with the farmer in a few days' time. Send a letter back on the morrow, asking them to collect what records they had, and then show up a few days later. Flying to Overhill would be worth the time.\n\nAnd speaking of flying... she turned her eyes toward the clock. I'll need to get flying immediately if I'm going to be on time to meet with Mia!\n\nShe gathered her things, took a final look down at the letter on her desk, and then rushed out the door, locking it behind her. A minute later, she was soaring through the sky on her way to Elnacier."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stable Funds",
                "text": "\"And then he ran?\" Princess Mia put her hand over her mouth as she laughed. \"Oh, Davor.\"\n\n\"Halfway,\" Axtara added, giving the princess a grin and sipping at her tea. \"He stopped halfway to make sure that the coin I'd given him was real, and then kept going.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Mia said, shaking her head. \"Check the money, then run. I'll have to tease the poor lad about it the next time I see him.\" She reached out and picked up her sandwich, taking a bite that could only be considered dainty, Axtara reflected, if one perhaps regularly ate with sellswords. Then again, given the former occupation of Mia's father...\n\n\"How old is Davor?\" Axtara asked, leaning forward to take a bite of her own sandwich. It was goat. And it was delicious.\n\n\"Only a five or six summers less than me,\" Mia answered. \"Just old enough to start staring when he thinks no one's looking.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Yes, that age. \"An awkward time.\"\n\n\"Quite,\" Mia agreed. \"And of course, just when he thinks he's not looking everyone is. He certainly gets teased about it.\" She paused for a moment, her eyes looking at Axtara. \"Though I suppose that won't be a worry for you.\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"No, most likely not.\"\n\nThey were sharing tea in one of the side rooms of the manor, one that looked to have been at one point intended to be a drawing room, or perhaps some other place to socially gather. Currently, it had become a small dining room. One that, from Mia's own presence at it, seemed to be for whoever needed it, rather than for members of the manor staff. They'd started drinking tea outside, only for the tea to quickly grow cold on account of the weather. And despite Mia's suggestion, Axtara had not been about to breathe fire on the kettle or their cups to heat them up. That required material that was ready for it. The king and queen's fine\u2014if old\u2014tea set was not on that list.\n\nSo they'd adjourned to the interior of the mansion, away from the chill outside for the time being. And somewhere along the way, they had acquired a pair of sandwiches for the two of them. Tea had transformed into a late lunch. Or perhaps an early dinner.\n\nAt least, Axtara mused, in Mia's case. While the sandwich she'd been served was larger, it was still a bit light to be considered a full meal for a being of her size.\n\nWhich is fine, she noted. I can eat a small snack later if I'm feeling peckish.\n\n\"What's a dim, anyway?\" Mia asked, setting her sandwich down.\n\n\"A Delarian dim? It's the smallest form of currency minted there. It's made of bronze, so quite often it's dull in coloration after trading so many hands. Ergo, a dim.\"\n\n\"How much would it be worth compared to, say... Nuverian coinage?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"Compared to a Nuverian coin?\" Axtara say back on her haunches, tongue probing at a piece of goat stuck between her teeth while she thought it over. \"Well,\" she ventured after a moment. \"My information would be a month or so out of date, as I haven't kept up with the most current exchange rates.\"\n\n\"You haven't?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. For starters, the differing value between the coins doesn't change very often. In addition, it often doesn't matter unless you're dealing in a large amount of coinage. If you were to bring me a Delarian dim and ask for change in Nuvarian coinage, I would pass you a single bead, and that would be the end of it.\"\n\n\"So it's the equivalent of a bead?\"\n\n\"For the purpose of making change for a single coin? Yes. If you were to come in with a hundred of them, however, I would need to give you somewhere around, oh, a hundred and thirty-seven beads to be equivalent. Or ten dims for fourteen beads.\"\n\n\"So... hold,\" Mia said, lifting up her palm and starting down at her plate. \"So a single dim is technically worth one... and thirty-seven hundredths beads? So a bead and almost a half a bead?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said, nodding and then taking a moment to steal another bite from her sandwich.\n\n\"So you paid him pretty well.\"\n\n\"I did,\" Axtara said as soon as she had swallowed. \"Even if here, most would consider a bead the same as a dim.\"\n\n\"So to you, then, did you overpay him?\"\n\nAxtara shrugged. \"Only a little. It's not much different from what I would tip the courier children back in Helmson, though, so I was already prepared to pay it. Budgeted for it, even.\"\n\n\"Bleh,\" Mia said, cupping her head between her hands. \"That's one reason I'm really glad we have Uncle Fen to deal with most of this. I can do it, but I don't enjoy it. If we didn't have him...\"\n\n\"You'll still have to know this sort of thing to go over the broader strokes.\"\n\n\"Ugh, don't remind me.\" Mia sank back dramatically in her seat, staring up at the beams. Then she snapped back up. \"So, what was the letter?\"\n\n\"Right, the letter!\" Axtara grinned and pulled herself up to her full height, her wings behind her. \"It was from a farmer in Overhill, asking for a loan for a new greenhouse.\"\n\n\"You jest?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Axtara said, grin widening. \"I'll send them a reply tonight, asking them to gather their records, and then fly over in a few days.\"\n\n\"So how many is that now? Four loans?\"\n\n\"One actual loan and two prospective loans. The doctor I simply advised to come back if he actually needed one. Which he may, or may not.\"\n\nMia, Axtara noted, was almost done with her sandwich. She took a larger bite of her own to catch up.\n\n\"Still, that's very good, isn't it?\"\n\nAxtara swallowed. \"It is,\" she said with a grin. \"A few more successful loans like the one I made to Waterlily, and I'll be in a position where I'm making money rather than simply spending it.\"\n\n\"Back on your path toward the money you had before you bought your home?\"\n\n\"Back on that flight?\" Axtara asked with a laugh. \"No, it will take some time before I'm that wealthy again. A decade perhaps. Maybe more. And there is still plenty that could go wrong during that time. I won't be able to glide. I'll have to keep beating my wings.\" She wolfed down another bite of her sandwich, closing the gap between the two of them.\n\n\"You gambled a lot on coming here,\" Mia said, her voice slightly softer.\n\nAxtara shook her head, swallowing. \"Not a gamble.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"It wasn't a gamble. It was a risk, yes, but not a gamble.\"\n\n\"What's the difference?\"\n\nAxtara took another bite, using the pause as she chewed to formulate a response. \"A gamble is something that is pure chance. Like a game of dice. Once you've entered the game, you have no real choice or influence over the outcome. Well, short of cheating. But the dice\u2014assuming no one else is cheating\u2014are completely independent of anything you do. Nothing you do matters, you either succeed or fail. No matter how hard you work, wish, or beg, the chance will always be the same. That's a gamble. Nothing you do influences it.\"\n\n\"A risk, on the other wing, is something that you can influence. The odds may be against you, but unlike a gamble where you have no control over the outcome, your efforts and exertions do matter, if perhaps only in a small amount. It is still more than none, however, as one would have with gambling.\"\n\n\"My coming here, for example,\" she continued. \"A risk. Elnacier is\u2014no offense meant\u2014quite literally the very edge of civilization. Compared to the core empires, you're behind the times in your industrial infrastructure, your economy... Well, everything. Again, no offense meant.\"\n\nMia shrugged. \"It's not exactly untrue.\"\n\n\"Well, that makes Elnacier a risk, financially speaking. I spent a lot of money to establish a home here well above the standard for the region. It means that the costs of my home were great compared to what one would reasonably expect based on the economy of the region.\"\n\n\"Like this manor,\" Mia said.\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Yes, exactly. However, unlike the builder of this manor, my goal is to expand the economy of Elnacier by using my remaining funds to facilitate growth. The risk being whether I succeed or fail. If I succeed\u2014something I can influence by working harder to encourage people to take advantage of the opportunity my financial services offer\u2014then Elnacier will grow and improve, its standard rising. If I fail\u2014through sloth, being unable to convince those in Elnacier to use my services, or even by performing poorly at doing my due diligence and giving out bad loans\u2014then Elnacier doesn't expand, my expenditures exceed my income, and I fail.\"\n\n\"Point being,\" she finished. \"My efforts have a say in the ending result, whatever it may be. Therefore, it is not a gamble. It's a risk. One that may be perhaps weighted against me, but...\" She shrugged. \"I believe in what I know about Elnacier. There is opportunity here. People just need to be given the means to reach for it.\"\n\n\"Or know it's there in the first place,\" Mia added, her eyes fixed on her plate. \"When you put it like that, you make me feel as though perhaps we haven't done enough for our people.\"\n\n\"What?\" Axtara pulled back, dropping her sandwich. \"Mia, you take that back right now. Your father is the reason this kingdom exists as a kingdom recognized by others. It has a mail service because your father and mother use the taxes they gather to pay for that stubborn old goat Vern and his apprentices. You have roads and bridges because your father spent the coin to maintain them and in some cases establish them as something more than a dirt track through the woods. Your family has encouraged the priest to teach the families here to read and write, something that was likely less than common before.\"\n\n\"Don't feel as though your family has done nothing for their people,\" she continued. \"Your father is the whole reason Elnacier exists. But do you want to know something else? Something my uncle taught me?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nAxtara paused, looking around the room to make sure there were no others, servants or otherwise, listening in. But the doors were shut. The look was mostly for effect, but her uncle had done the same thing, and it had made his lesson memorable.\n\n\"Kings,\" she said, extending her head across the table and speaking in a low voice. \"Are still mortals.\"\n\n\"What?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"You might say it as, 'they're still human,'\" Axtara said, pulling back and picking up the last bit of her sandwich at last. \"We're just people doing the best we can. Kings included. Some are better or worse at it, but in the end we're all mortal.\"\n\n\"Well, when you put it that way...\" Mia said. \"I suppose I feel a bit better about it. You're right, father and mother have done a lot.\"\n\n\"They have,\" Axtara said, gulping down the last of her sandwich. \"And they did so without overextending themselves and breaking the kingdom.\"\n\n\"That sounds like something mother has told me about. Rushing beyond your means?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes. For example, this kingdom has good mineral deposits inland, suitable for mining. Perhaps your father could have decided to push the kingdom heavily in that direction, spent his money aggressively in pushing farmers and fisherman to lay down their plows and fishhooks in favor of picks and shovels. And perhaps succeeded, but in the process spent far more money than the kingdom could recover in time. What would have happened then? Why, Elnacier would have collapsed, once again without a ruler or a government.\"\n\nMia nodded. \"A fair point. Be happy for what we've done, not overly critical of what we haven't unless we really chose to simply do nothing.\" Her own sandwich, Axtara noted, had already vanished. She wasn't sure which of them had finished first. \"But I, for one, am glad you chose to take a risk here, Axtara.\"\n\n\"Me too.\" There was still some of her tea left, and she took another sip. It was a local blend, with an almost fruity taste to it. A berry of some kind, perhaps. \"But enough of business-related matters. How is your family doing? How's Princess Abathine?\"\n\nMia let out a laugh. \"Still reading what few books we have on magic. You may have genuinely given her a new hobby, Axtara. Though as of this week the pressure of being inside finally got to her. She's been riding a bit more and reading a bit less. Nevertheless, she's still reading.\"\n\n\"Has she found any success yet?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mia said with a shake of her head, hair almost bouncing. \"Should she have?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of, but then again my knowledge of the subject is sorely limited,\" Axtara admitted.\n\n\"Isn't your brother a wizard?\"\n\n\"Ryax?\" She shook her head. \"He's a practitioner of magic, and studies it, but I don't believe he's officially recognized as a wizard yet.\"\n\n\"Could that be because he's a dragon, and most wizards are human? It is an organizational thing, correct?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" she answered. \"Of a sorts, at least. I don't know the details myself. But I suppose it's entirely possible that he's skilled enough to be a wizard, just not a recipient of the title itself.\" She shrugged. \"I honestly don't know the details.\"\n\n\"What's he like?\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mia said, leaning forward with a mischievous grin. \"You know about my crazy siblings, and my parents. I want to hear about yours.\"\n\n\"Your siblings aren't crazy.\"\n\n\"One wants to spend every moment of her day riding horses and has gone completely boy crazy. The other is three, thinks it's a grand game to run around naked with the staff chasing her, and still has issues with knowing how a midden works.\"\n\n\"Well, if they're both crazy, where does that leave you?\"\n\n\"A princess sitting having lunch with a dragon,\" Mia said with a grin.\n\n\"Fair point.\" Axtara nodded. \"So, my brother?\"\n\n\"If it's not prying or anything.\"\n\n\"Not at all. My brother Ryax, he's... Well, I believe I told you he was a rambunctious older brother, though he was quite a few years older than me. He mellowed a bit after he started studying magic seriously.\"\n\n\"How'd he get into that?\"\n\n\"He started experimenting with his fire, actually,\" Axtara said, pausing to take another sip of tea. \"Seeing if he could blow it in rings, things like that. Set fire to our home more than once through letting it get out of control. Our fire is magic, you see, but there are physical components to it as well, such as the shape of our lips when we breathe flame. My brother got curious about using both that and our innate magic to push his flame further. From there, he began borrowing books on magic, and, well, found that he truly loved the study of it.\"\n\n\"Does he have a title like yours?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Ryax the Dedicated. He pursued his studies with great diligence. When he left home, it was to study under a wizard.\"\n\n\"So he's an apprentice?\"\n\n\"Oddly enough, no,\" Axtara said, and then shook her head. \"He studied under that wizard for several years, then apprenticed himself to another wizard. By the time his masters caught on that he was moving from wizard to wizard to study from them as a group rather than individually, he had studied under four or five of them, I think.\" She took a final sip of her tea, the cup now empty.\n\nSomething Mia had apparently been waiting for. She stood. \"While we talk, are you up for a walk? There's a wonderful overlook behind the manor. It's a bit of a walk, but not too far.\"\n\n\"That sounds delightful.\"\n\n\"Well, we do have to take care of our dishes first,\" Mia said. 'If you carry them, I'll wash.\"\n\n\"Couldn't the servants do that?\"\n\n\"They could,\" Mia said with a shrug and a smile. \"But I can do it myself without harm, so why not?\"\n\n\"A good attitude to have in a ruler,\" Axtara replied, reaching out and collecting Mia's dish and placing it atop her own. The two cups followed, and then the whole arrangement went back onto the tray that still held the kettle.\n\n\"So what does he do now?\" Mia asked as she led the way out of the room, talking over her shoulder as they moved through the manor toward the kitchen.\n\nIt was tricky to navigate the narrower halls that were clearly made for humans, especially while carrying the tray with one set of claws, but Axtara managed. \"Last my family heard from him,\" she answered, \"He was studying under an alchemist. Hendle, I believe. In the southern kingdoms, near Sicaria. Not quite a wizard, but magic is involved somehow. He'd only just arrived when he sent the letter. That was a few months ago. He was still looking for a more permanent room to stay in, at the time.\"\n\n\"He hadn't yet found a room, but was already apprenticed?\" They stepped into the kitchen, several members of the staff looking up from their work and nodding or offering polite greetings. They moved out of the princess's way, Axtara noted, but voiced not a single word of protest as she stepped up to the sink and motioned for Axtara to pass her the tray. \"Did he sleep outdoors? He must travel quite a bit.\"\n\nAxtara nodded, glancing around her to make certain her larger frame wasn't too much in the way of the staff and tucking her tail around her feet. \"Yes, he does,\" she confirmed. \"All over the kingdoms, looking for unique magic, studying it, figuring out how it works.\"\n\n\"What's he like in person?\"\n\n\"Actually,\" she answered with a bit of a smile. \"Somewhat focused. He's quite a bit calmer than he used to be, less rambunctious. Unless you get him talking about his research. He loves sharing it with everyone. Sometimes he forgets that those around him don't understand half the terms.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't call him a bookworm though. Or 'wyrm.'\" She made little quote marks in the air with her claws, and Mia gave her an odd look. One of the staff laughed first, and only then did Mia's expression switch to one of understanding.\n\n\"Clever.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Anyway, while he's dedicated to his research, he does a lot of it traveling, so he's a much better distance flier than I am. He's fun to talk to. I mean\u2014\" She shrugged. \"He's my brother, so I love him to death even when he's being an idiot.\"\n\n\"Sounds familiar,\" Mia said, low enough Axtara wasn't sure if she was supposed to have heard it or not.\n\n\"Maybe he'll come and visit now that I have a home of my own,\" she continued. \"After all, one of the things he does enjoy studying is the magic left in some of the ancient ruins.\"\n\n\"He does?\" Mia asked, pumping more water into the sink and rinsing the cups. \"They have magic?\"\n\n\"In spots. He's got a whole theory about it and how it might be connected to the fell. Ask him about it,\" she said with a roll of her eyes. \"He'll go on about it for days. Believe me.\"\n\n\"What about your older sister? Fenix?\"\n\n\"Finix,\" Axtara corrected. \"She's much older than both of us, so I only knew her as an adult.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Dragons are long-lived. My parents waited until after she'd left to have other children.\"\n\nMia nodded as she set the now-clean dishes by the sink. One of the staff whisked them away with a word of thanks. \"Right.\"\n\n\"Anyway, she works out on the eastern side of the empires, in Rietillia, managing an orchard she owns.\"\n\nMia came to an abrupt halt, so sudden that Axtara almost crashed into her. \"An orchard?\" Several other members of the staff seemed just as surprised.\n\n\"Yes, an orchard. Apples, cherries, and some nuts I can't recall the name of. Plus a small grove of peaches, mostly for her own benefit. She sends wonderful jams on my hatching-day, or just as occasional gifts.\"\n\n\"She manages fruit orchards?\" It was hard not to hear the incredulity in Mia's voice.\n\nAxtara just smiled. \"Of course. She always was one for horticulture. Or so my parents told me. She took a job on a large farm, moved into caring for their fruit trees, and gradually earned enough to purchase an orchard from an old farmer that was tired and done with it.\"\n\n\"I just... I have a hard time picturing that,\" Mia said, finally resuming her path out of the kitchen. \"What's her title?\"\n\n\"Gentle.\"\n\n\"Really? Finix the Gentle?\"\n\n\"On my own egg. She works with plants all day. What would you expect?\"\n\n\"Finix the Green?\"\n\nThey moved out of the kitchen. Likely, Axtara expected, to the disappointment of the staff that had been listening in. \"Why would we call her 'the Green?'\"\n\n\"Well, she's your sister, isn't she?\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Well... you're green.\"\n\nAxtara came to a halt, her wings almost spreading painfully into the tight hallway walls as a startled laugh bolted from her throat. \"Of course I'm green. That's my scale color. You don't think\u2014? That my parents and my brother, or my sister...?\" The look on Mia's face said it all.\n\n\"You do, don't you?\" Axtara threw her head back and laughed. \"That's not how it works at all.\"\n\n\"Well, I wouldn't know that!\" Mia said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. \"You're the first dragon I've ever met, and it's not like any of the books we have here talk about it much or are very accurate, so I just assumed\u2014\"\n\n\"Mia,\" Axtara said, lifting one set of claws and cutting her off before what was starting to sound like a half-frantic rambling apology got started. \"It's fine. It's just funny. I didn't\u2014I mean I never thought someone would ever...\" She shook her head and folded her wings back in. \"Well, it was really funny. But no, my sister isn't green. I'm the only one with green scales in my family.\"\n\n\"So then...?\"\n\n\"My father is a light blue, like the sky before a sunrise. And my mother is a deep violet, so deep it almost appears black in some light.\" They began to move forward again, out of the hall and through several wide, somewhat chilly rooms, a large set of familiar double-doors that led to the back of the manor in front of them. Axtara paused while Mia grabbed a warm-looking coat.\n\n\"Finix isn't green, but an almost coppery pink. She looks gorgeous. I'm honestly quite surprised she's not settled herself in a relationship yet. She's certainly seen her fair share of suitors. To hear her tell it, of course,\" she added quickly.\n\nThe outside air had cooled further with the setting sun, but not so much as to be uncomfortable. Not to her scales, at least. Still, there was no denying that there was a sharpness to it.\n\n\"What about your brother?\"\n\n\"He's the closest to father and mother,\" Axtara said as she followed Mia out onto the rear grounds, pausing to shut the double-doors behind her. There was a sharp smell of woodsmoke in the air, though from what she wasn't sure. \"I have a bit of a lighter coloration to my scales in a few places, but that's as close as I get to my father. My sister has the light shade and a bit of purple. But my brother is a darker blue, like the ocean on an overcast day.\"\n\n\"Sounds quite fetching.\"\n\n\"Careful, Mia,\" Axtara said as they neared the end of the grounds, Mia heading out into the forest behind the manor without hesitation. \"He is still unattached.\"\n\nMia let out a loud laugh. \"No thank you,\" she said, glancing back at her and shaking her head. \"I prefer men of my species. No offense meant to your brother.\"\n\n\"None taken. I think his answer would be of a similar nature. He'd much prefer an attractive dragoness.\"\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\nAxtara gave Mia a grin as the princess once again glanced back at her. \"Not falling for it. I learned my lesson last time.\"\n\n\"Can't blame a lady for trying.\"\n\n\"Oh, I most certainly can,\" Axtara said with a laugh. \"As I said, I learned my lesson last time. But speaking of families,\" she said, ducking beneath a particularly low branch. \"I'm somewhat surprised that we didn't run into yours this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Not too surprising,\" Mia replied, clamoring up a large rock in their path. Which explained her choice of attire. \"Father's out in Easy Bay.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Axtara waited until Mia had moved out of the way before crouching and springing up atop the boulder in a single bound. \"What for?\"\n\n\"The usual,\" Mia said as their path bent upward, steepening. \"Checking in on things. Seeing what needs to be done. Apparently the bridge there is starting to rot, and it may need shoring up to make it through the winter. So he needs to make a decision about that. Which means he and Uncle Fen will be debating the cost over the next few days and whether or not the kingdom can afford it.\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" Mia continued, following the path upward. \"That's where father is. Abi is out riding, probably will be until dark. Mother took Ati down to the village square for the afternoon. So really, it was just the two of us in the manor.\"\n\n\"What about your uncle?\" The rock poking through the mossy ground ahead of them looked odd, and it took Axtara a second of staring at it to realize that it was because it wasn't just rock, but carved stone. Ruins. And Mia was leading them up a well-worn path through the middle of them.\n\n\"Oh, Uncle Fen? He doesn't actually live in the manor. He's got his own cabin out behind it.\" Mia stopped, turning and looking through the trees before shaking her head. \"We can't see it from here, but we might be able to from the top.\"\n\n\"Is he married?\"\n\n\"Uncle? No. I'm not sure why. Father always encouraged it, and even mother has offered to arrange for him to meet with nice noblewomen from Nuveria, but he's always declined. When I was younger I thought little of it, but now that I'm older it is a bit strange.\"\n\n\"Maybe his interests lie with other men?\"\n\nMia let out a laugh. \"That isn't it. Trust me. Not if half the stories my father tells that my mother doesn't know I've heard are true.\" She shook her head as the path ahead of them grew steeper as well as more rigid, less organic. Moss-covered ruins.\n\n\"No, father doesn't get it either,\" Mia continued as the path ahead of them suddenly steepened. She reached out with her hands, clambering up the slope. Which, Axtara noted, was less a slope and more like an old, fallen stone wall that had been slowly subsumed.\n\n\"Father said Fen was always interested in the young ladies wherever they traveled. Something about settling down and becoming father's minister of finance took that away. I often wonder if father almost feels guilty about giving Uncle Fen the position. Like it took too much of what he was.\" Mia reached the top and stopped, turning to wait.\n\nAxtara's claws found firm grip against the stones, and she rose swiftly after the princess. Either these stones are a lot larger and deeper than they look, she thought as she pulled herself up. Or I'm a lot better at this than I thought.\n\nBut not a single stone had shifted beneath her claws by the time she reached the top, and on a whim she reached out and tugged against one. It didn't even quiver.\n\n\"I tried digging one up once,\" Mia said as Axtara looked back at her. \"When I was about seven or eight summers. I finally gave up. They're big. And they're heavy.\"\n\n\"Are there more of them around?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. They're all over the place. Occasionally the farmers will find some in a field somewhere. They just go around them. It's not worth the trouble. Whoever the ancients were, they did a lot of stonecutting.\"\n\n\"My brother says they were very fond of cement too,\" Axtara said, taking a quick look around. \"It's a sort of material the ancients used to bond things and make structures. They use something like it in the east. What is this?\" she asked, changing the topic as she looked at where Mia had led her.\n\n\"By my best guess, it's all that's left of some old ancient building,\" Mia said with a wave of her hand. \"A foundation. But it has a great view.\"\n\nIt did look like a foundation, now that she was standing atop it. The ground around them, while mossy and covered in dirt, was far too level to be natural, jutting out of the mountainside in a way that was obviously made by someone with tools, rather than nature. The broken, decaying stone walls gracing the sides, while crumbling and uneven, marked the boundaries of where stone was being reclaimed by nature. She could clearly see the path she and Mia had followed up, wrapping around the side of the ruin and then climbing up through a gap in the old wall.\n\nBut it was the \"front\" of the foundation, the bit that jutted out from the mountain, that Mia was walking toward now, and as Axtara's eyes followed, she could see why. The last few rises they'd made had brought them almost above the treetops, and though the view wasn't entirely perfect, it was open.\n\nAnd all of Elnacier was spread before them.\n\n\"Well, you can't see it from up here,\" Mia said as Axtara stepped forward. \"But uncle's cabin is right over there.\" She pointed at a clump of trees near the backside of the manor.\n\n\"I can see a wisp of smoke,\" Axtara said. \"I would assume that's from his home.\"\n\n\"Most likely. He likes it warm,\" Mia said, dropping her arm. \"Anyway, this is one of my favorite places to climb up to when I'm looking for something to do. It's not that long a hike, and the view is well worth it. Maybe not as good a view as flying, but...\"\n\n\"It's nice to have a view like this without beating my wings for it once in a while,\" Axtara said, dropping to her belly in the soft moss and letting her foreclaws hang over the edge of the foundation. \"How'd you find this?\"\n\n\"Well, I probably wasn't the first, but I found it when I was a kid,\" Mia said, hanging her legs over the edge as she took a seat next to her. \"I can't remember quite how I did. The guards probably pointed me toward it. Or Uncle Fen. Maybe even father. I don't quite remember. But I've liked it, and I've come back ever since.\"\n\n\"It is a nice view,\" Axtara agreed, stretching her wings and looking out over the city. They were just high enough that she could make out people walking on some of the streets. \"It would seem the ancients had the same idea the builders of the manor did. They just went a bit further up.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Mia said, leaning back on her arms. \"But there are actually a lot of ruins around here. So maybe it's more just luck. Either way, it's still a fantastic view. When I was young I'd come up here just to watch the kingdom function sometimes.\"\n\n\"What about now?\"\n\n\"Now that I'm not a little girl anymore? Well, I still like the view, but it's also a reminder to me.\" Mia leaned forward, spreading her arms out in the direction of Elnacier. \"This is my father's kingdom. Everything down there? I'll be responsible for it one day. Or if not it, maybe someone else's kingdom. Or an estate that's just as large, I suppose, depending on how any marriage goes.\"\n\nShe leaned back again, resting on her arms with a sigh. \"See, the finances, and the budgets, and the mathematics, and the books... That's all the stuff I'm not very fond of. But this?\" She nodded at the town spread out below them. \"This is what I'm fond of. Seeing what my father made. I wasn't born, obviously, before my father took over the kingdom, but enough of the townsfolk have told me about it. It wasn't anything like it is today.\"\n\n\"These people can work and play and trade because my father and my mother do their job,\" Mia continued. \"I come up here to remind myself of that. It's the reward, seeing them going about their lives, living and working and playing. That's the reward for all the work my father and mother did. That's what I study for.\"\n\nThe princess stopped talking, and for a moment they both just sat there, watching the town move, dozens of little pieces all coming together in a whole.\n\n\"You know,\" Axtara said after a moment. \"I think that's very wise.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Sometimes it feels silly, but...\"\n\n\"No.\" She shook her head. \"I've worked with a lot of nobles, Mia. The good ones are the ones that don't lose track of what they're doing or why. For some of them, granted, it is all about the money. However successful they may be, they find themselves in uncertain winds as soon as that success fails them even for a moment.\"\n\n\"The good ones, though. The ones who watch out for those people that they're responsible for, be they servants, staff, subjects, or employees... those are the ones who are remembered. When success fails them, they find that those they're responsible for trust them because they never forgot who they were.\"\n\n\"So maybe you hate the math and the budgeting.\" She shrugged. \"But you're wise enough to look ahead to what it accomplishes and keep that in mind.\"\n\nAgain they both went quiet. Somewhere off in the forest, a bird of some kind called, its cry echoing through the trees. A squirrel chittered. Below them, life in Elnacier rolled on.\n\nFinally, Mia spoke. \"Thank you, Axtara. That was nice to hear.\"\n\n\"What are friends for if not for reminding us how good we already are and what we can accomplish?\"\n\n\"Yes, well... I'm still going to tease you about long, muscular tails\u2014\"\n\n\"I take it back, you're a horrible ruler.\"\n\n\"\u2014with firm, muscular forelegs and a broad, wide chest...\" Mia continued, her grin widening.\n\n\"Oh push off before I shove you off the edge,\" Axtara retorted, rolling her eyes and giving Mia a light push to the shoulder.\n\n\"Oh? Treason and rebellion, then? I'll see you hanged.\"\n\nAxtara couldn't contain the snort that burst out of her nostrils. \"I'm a dragon. I'll just fly.\"\n\n\"Then the rebellion will continue?\" Mia asked, her words slightly shaky.\n\n\"As long as you keep bringing it up,\" Axtara said with a smirk.\n\n\"Then to the rebellion, long may it\u2014! Hey, watch it!\" Mia ducked beneath Axtara's tail, and then both of them began to laugh, the sound echoing off the ruins around them and out across the mountainside."
            },
            {
                "title": "Up and Down",
                "text": "\"So you see,\" Axtara said, sliding the two slips of paper across the desk toward the young couple on the other side. \"Your figures are substantially off from my own. You've been overestimating the amount of money you've earned each year.\" She could see from the glum expressions on the pair's faces that they weren't enjoying the news.\n\nAnd it's only going to get worse. \"You've been overpaying your taxes as a result as well,\" she said, one claw shifting position to tap the two related sums. \"Not by any excessive amount, but still by enough to raise significant doubts as to your ability to repay a loan.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't that just mean we'd probably overpay you?\" It was the young husband that had spoken, a hopeful look on his face.\n\n\"No, it doesn't work like that,\" Axtara said, holding back a sigh. \"I keep meticulous records. Any amount you overpaid would simply be put towards reducing your long-term debt to me.\"\n\n\"But that would be... good, wouldn't it?\" This time it was the wife that spoke up.\n\n\"No, because without proper financing on your side, who is to say that accidentally overpaying me wouldn't ruin you when the next payment to someone else came due? Perhaps the king's tax would be due, and you would find you were too short of funds to pay for it? Or something simpler, like food?\" She shook her head. \"No, that sort of lack of fiscal responsibility and care is not a sign in your favor.\"\n\n\"But... We already found a buyer for our land.\"\n\nAxtara froze. \"You what?\"\n\n\"We already made an arrangement with Amora Lents. After this winter, our fields are hers.\"\n\nOh no.\n\n\"We get to keep the house, so we have somewhere to rest when we're in Elnacier.\"\n\nAxtara wanted to curl up beneath her desk and tune the pair out. Who were they again? This was the second time meeting with them, but she still couldn't recall their names. Ulner? Allner? It was something like that.\n\n\"But she told us she'd give us twelve beads a month for the next three years, plus ten percent of whatever she grew on those fields\u2014\"\n\nWhich may be nothing if she has any inclination whatsoever to cheat you, Axtara thought.\n\n\"\u2014so we'll have a small harvest to ourselves, and we've already found someone else who'll take the goats in exchange for cheese over the next\u2014\"\n\n\"The goats were your most profitable resource!\" Axtara said at last, the words breaking free in a sudden sigh. \"By far.\"\n\n\"Well... maybe... but...\" The pair looked at one another. The husband spoke first.\n\n\"But we don't like farming.\"\n\nThink of your nice, wooden floors, and how ugly they'd look with scratches in them, Axtara thought, gazing up at the ceiling. \"Be that as it may,\" she said, fighting back the urge to sigh again and turning to look down at the couple sitting across from her desk. \"It was a form of income you two understood. Do you know anything about shipping? Rates between various kingdoms? Packing orders?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said when neither of the two offered an answer. \"You don't. And you weren't even truly aware of how much money you truly had or made.\"\n\n\"Now that's\u2014\"\n\n\"Furthermore,\" she said, cutting the pair off. \"You went ahead and agreed to sell your farm, and your only source of income, without knowledge of whether or not you would receive a loan from my bank. With that in mind, I'm afraid I do not see either of you as being of sound financial status or positioning, and will not be issuing either of you a loan.\"\n\nThe seconds ticked past as the pair digested what she'd just told them. \"But...\" the woman finally said, her words sputtering over the ticking of the clock. \"We already went and\u2014\"\n\n\"Sold your farm?\" Axtara asked, a trace of annoyance in her voice.\n\n\"Yes!\" The woman leaned forward. \"We were told you were good for that money!\"\n\nAxtara narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. \"Not, I think, by me. The whole point of a loan is that a bank only gives them to people who can show they are capable of handling the responsibility. Making mistakes on the financial records you provided me with\u2014which I will now return,\" she added, sliding the stack of parchment across the desk to them. \"Is one thing. But making deals to rid yourselves of your farm and livelihood before getting a proper answer from me?\" She shook her head again. \"Very irresponsible, and not the kind of patrons my bank will loan money to. I'm afraid the answer is no.\"\n\n\"You... You can't do this.\" The man's shock was already switching over to anger, she could see it.\n\nClassic unhappy individual, unhappy because they cannot be a customer, she thought as he began to rise. But after uncle's bank...\n\n\"You can't do\u2014!\"\n\n\"Do what?\" Axtara asked, rising and looking down at the man, stunning him where he stood. \"Refuse to simply give you my money? I can and I will. And if you refuse in turn to leave, I'll throw you out and summon the guard.\"\n\nThe spread of her wings, combined with the tone in her voice, had the desired effect. The man sank back, a look on his face that she'd seen before. The look of dreams meeting the harsh cruelty of life.\n\nShe sat back down. \"Now, I know it might seem like that's the end of it, but despite my refusal to grant you a loan, you're not completely out of luck.\"\n\n\"You mean\u2014?\"\n\n\"Not that I am going to give you the money. Not now, nor at any point in the future under current circumstances. But you could always go back to this... Lents, was it? Simply ask to cancel your deal before it began.\"\n\nThe looks on the pair's faces told her what they thought of that idea.\n\n\"Or...\" she said, and both of them perked up. \"You change your deal. Get more money out of it. Get what you can up front, the rest sent by courier to wherever you move.\"\n\n\"Move!?\"\n\n\"Let me finish, or this free advice session ends,\" she said sternly. \"Yes, move. To Nuveria, or better yet, further than that. To someplace with a shipping company one or both of you could find jobs working for.\"\n\n\"But we don't want to work for someone. We want to own our own.\"\n\n\"And yet,\" Axtara said, her voice as dry as she could make it, \"you know nothing about running such an endeavor on your own. Now, you can still go ahead with your plans as they are currently and see about making them work. Perhaps you will. But that could very possibly end in failure. My advice would be to work for a year or so at a real shipping company, somewhere east. Then, with that knowledge in hand, come back and try to open one here with what money you've saved.\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, at this time, I'm unable to offer any further advice,\" she said quickly, cutting them off. \"And I actually have an appointment to get to in Overhill. So if there won't be anything else...?\"\n\nThe couple said their farewells, though strained, and left. Only then did Axtara let out a loud sigh.\n\n\"Well, that was wonderful. So much for that loan.\" She'd been unsteady about the whole thing, but there had still been a chance of the couple getting it until they'd told her what they'd done.\n\nAbsolutely terrible sense of financial planning there, she thought, stepping over to the desk and collecting the tea she'd served. It was still warm. Thankfully, some presence of mind had been with her to prepare one of the cheaper blends.\n\nProspective loan number two falls through, she thought as she cleaned up. It wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. There was already Wat's. And the potential loan in Overhill, which she was flying to next to discuss.\n\nHopefully. She hadn't received a response to her reply, but she had given a day when she could arrive by wing, so with luck the \"Elden Moon\" that had sent her the letter would be both ready for her arrival and ready to discuss business.\n\nShe gathered her satchel, checking its contents to make sure that she was prepped with the proper tools\u2014abacus, ink, spare paper, and sample contracts\u2014before throwing it around her neck. A minute later, her door was locked behind her and she was soaring into the cloudy mid-day sky.\n\nA mid-day sky that smells like rain, she thought, climbing upwards with each beat of her wings. She twisted her head this way and that, looking around her, and spotted what she'd feared toward the coast: Rain, and plenty of it. With luck, the clouds would have done their worst by the time they reached Elnacier, but if not...\n\nWell, I am flying inland. Overhill was northeast of the capital, along a split from the road she'd followed to Elnacier upon her arrival. And one of the larger farming districts in the kingdom. At least, from what her agents had told her. It made sense, then, that one of them would be looking to add a greenhouse to their production.\n\nThe winds shifted as she climbed, carrying with them the scent of more rain and damp earth. Good thing my satchel is waterproof. And if the rain was too heavy, she could always try to fly above the clouds. As low as they looked, it wouldn't be a problem.\n\nNot until I wanted to know where I was, anyway. Flying above the clouds could put one miles off course if they weren't careful. Her own father had warned her of that often enough, and he flew with a small compass just in case.\n\nSomething you didn't grab, Axtara thought, recalling her own as the forest slid by beneath her. And you can't navigate with an abacus.\n\nThen again, you really don't have to worry about getting lost unless it's really dark. And if it's so bad that you can't fly, you can just land and walk home. Though it'd be a long walk... Maybe curl up somewhere and tough it out.\n\nAt least the rain had brought with it warmth, as opposed to the chill that had haunted the last few days. A wet warmth, likely to vanish once one was beneath the cold rains, but still warmer than the cold, empty skies of the prior days.\n\nShe let her thoughts wander as she flew, wings pumping to keep her aloft in the grey sky. With luck and perhaps a bit of a blessing from the Creator, she'd be able to secure another loan with this farmer. And another loan would be good. Even with her loan to Waterlily and the lumber mill accounting for new income... Expenditures are still higher.\n\nAnother loan would change that. And a third would be better still. Or a fourth. The doctor, Mord, hadn't needed a loan, or at least she'd not heard back from him, though it had only been a few days. But I don't expect he'll need one.\n\nWhich means I need to find other sources of income. Or they need to find me.\n\nOr, she thought, ducking her head to make sure she was still properly following the road through the trees. I need to stop worrying about it. These things take time.\n\nAfter almost an hour, the trees on the horizon abruptly stopped, opening into clearings of brown and gold. Overhill, according to what Mia had told her, was built around a central rise that had initially attracted people to the region. But it was also to the west of a truly steep peak, something that gave it slightly less rain than the hills around it. Or so the locals claimed. Whether it was true or not, no one knew, but they'd set about clearing the land and sowing seeds, and in doing so had become the largest source of grain and other crops in Elnacier.\n\nOne of the closest things the kingdom has to an industrial center, Axtara thought as more details began to come into view. Or rather, an agricultural one. The titular hill the town was built on was easy to spot. Several windmills rose from it above the surrounding countryside, lazily circling in the breeze. Unlike Elnacier or Easy Bay, Overhill appeared much more spread out, with long, winding roads and plenty of space between its buildings.\n\nStill... A long, low snake wound around the buildings, poking up here and there at the base of the hill. She could see others further out, or at the edges of farmland.\n\nWalls. From when the fell were a serious problem. And the church near the peak of the hill looked to be made of sturdy stone, just like the one in Elnacier.\n\nWhere did they get the stone for those? Or for the manor? I haven't seen a quarry anywhere. But there had been one somewhere in the kingdom... Right?\n\nShouts rose from the ground as she flew over the outlying farms. She'd been noticed. At least none of the cries sounded angry. More just like words of warning, letting their neighbors know, maybe.\n\nAnd... I have no idea where to find this Elden Moon, Axtara thought, slowing her pace until she was almost hanging in the air above the road and looking in all directions. From the air, the sprawling fields of Overhill all looked mostly the same.\n\nWhich meant... it was time to land and ask for directions. Which at least won't be too difficult. Not with the number of people that had noticed her.\n\nAnother quick look around gave her a good place to land: A wide bit of road between two fields with a wagon to one side being loaded by a farmer. She settled into a steady glide, spiraling down until she could land a good distance away from the trio of fieldhands. All of which had noticed her and were watching, at least until a barked command from somewhere in the field called them back to their duty.\n\nStill, one of them stayed in the wagon, giving her furtive glances as she walked up. A young girl, from the look of her, though she wasn't about to guess how young.\n\nBe polite, Axtara thought, the girl's glances coming with more and more frequency as the distance between them shrank. And concise. There was definitely a look of worry to the young girl's face now.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Axtara said, coming to a stop still some distance from the wagon. \"I\u2014\"\n\nWith a shriek the girl jumped from the back of the wagon and ran into the field, vanishing between the tall rows of... whatever it was they were harvesting.\n\nPeppers? She took a quick sniff in the direction of the wagon back. The bushels sitting in it certainly smelled like they were full of peppers, but not any variety that she was familiar with.\n\nShe could hear the girl shouting at someone inside the field. A moment later the other two she'd seen when coming in for her landing shoved their way out of the rows, tools held in their hands and unfriendly looks on their faces.\n\nStay calm. The pair stopped at the edge of the road, glaring at her as she stared back at them. Family, maybe?\n\n\"What's all this?\" An older gentleman stepped out of the rows, the cloudy look on his face almost hidden by his beard. His eyes locked onto her, and he took a step forward out into the road. \"What's the meaning of coming over here and scaring my daughter?\"\n\n\"My apologies,\" Axtara said, bowing her head slightly. \"I only wished to ask for directions.\"\n\nThe man's eyes narrowed. \"And what business do you have in Overhill, beast?\"\n\nShe caught herself before she could frown. For a moment she almost considered leaving to ask someone else, as there was a chance her meeting could start rumors but... I'm hard to miss. Word will spread fast anyway. \"I'm here to speak with Elden Moon,\" she said, keeping her voice calm, level, and friendly. \"They had some financial business they wished to discuss with me. Could you direct me to their farm, if it wouldn't be too much trouble?\"\n\n\"The Moon's farm?\" The man's eyes narrowed again, so tight together now it almost looked like they were shut. For a second or two the man said nothing, as if he was sizing her up or trying to decide whether or not to tell her. Eventually they widened again, though still narrow, and he nodded. At the motion the two youths standing on either side of him seemed to relax a little.\n\nA little.\n\n\"Well,\" the man said at last. \"You're on the wrong side of town.\" Like the fisherman in Easy Bay, he had a thick accent that made each word sound like he was pushing it through mud. \"The Moon's farm is on the east side of town.\" He gestured with one hand and then pointed. \"There're three mills up on the hill. You want the farm that's straight towards the rising sun from the mill on the east side of the hill.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said, nodding her head in thanks. A flash of movement from behind the three farmers caught her eyes: The young girl spying on her from behind one of the plants. \"Is it a long walk, or...?\"\n\n\"About two miles, maybe more,\" the man said, a suspicious look still in his eyes.\n\nWalking that would take some time. Flying would be much quicker.\n\nShe nodded. \"Thank you for your help. Good luck with your harvest.\" The man's eyes narrowed as she wished him luck, but other than that he gave no response.\n\nStill a bit suspicious, she thought, crouching and spreading her wings. The two youths tensed once more... and then she sprang up into the air, beating her wings and climbing quickly away from the group. She glanced back after a moment to see all three of them watching her go.\n\nDefinitely still suspicious of me. Hopefully not enough to be dishonest about my directions. It was easy enough to spot the three mills atop the hill and head for them, flying low over the fields.\n\nAnd if they had been dishonest and given her false directions... Well, hopefully whoever I speak with next is a bit more forthcoming.\n\nShe pumped her wings, climbing a bit higher as the fields beneath her began to grow smaller, interspaced more frequently with buildings. Buildings that were often large, she noted. Maybe even larger than anything in Elnacier.\n\nShe climbed again, ignoring the looks and shouts her low flyby was causing as she flew over the town. I think this place might actually be more populated than Elnacier. It was harder to tell, as spread out as the town was, but at the same time... She eyed a structure as she flew past. The sign identified it as a large inn. That place had at least three stories to it. And the stable next to it... that could hold a dozen horses and half as many wagons easily.\n\nThat has to have been one of the largest inns in the whole kingdom, she thought as she passed the structure by. I wonder if one of my agents stayed there?\n\nThe hill ahead of her neared, and for a moment she entertained the question of whether or not her bank should have perhaps been in Overhill rather than the capital. No, she thought after a moment with a shake of her head. For starters, the center of the city is fairly occupied, and I'd have to be much further than my home is from Elnacier, given all the fields around it.\n\nBesides, she thought as she adjusted her altitude, giving the windmills a wide berth. While it might be larger and more busy, the meaning of being established in the capital is much more important.\n\nThat, and if the run-in with that farmer was any indication, I wouldn't have had any warmer a reception here than there, and I likely wouldn't have met Mia or been given an introduction to the king in the same manner.\n\nStill, if I could open a branch office... She was near the stone church now, at the peak of the hill, and she could see a wide village green that was clustered with shops and stalls, all doing brisk business. As well as a lot of curious eyes looking her way as she flew past. And a few pointing fingers.\n\nShe gave them what she hoped was a friendly looking wave and then brought her focus back forward, eyeing the easternmost windmill and the farms and fields beyond it. A branch office would be a good idea, she thought as she picked out several buildings that could be the Moon farm. Maybe once I've made enough money, I could look into opening one here.\n\nIt would take a lot of money to do so, however. Definitely an idea for the future.\n\nShe slowed into a gentle glide as the collection of buildings she'd pointed herself at neared, and then flapped her wings a few times, slowing further to a near stall. A group of people were hard at work loading a wagon by what was very likely a barn\u2014or maybe a storage silo of some kind. She wasn't sure. But there was a clear path worn in the open ground between the fields that led straight there, and she brought herself down in the middle of it, the thrust from her wings pushing the crops back on either side and making them whisper as the wind rushed through them.\n\nThe group of workers near the wagon had definitely noticed her, though the stares stopped once they noticed her looking. More than a few sideways glances came her way as she walked over toward the workers, but even when she stopped a short distance from the wagon, the workers didn't cease loading barrels of... something... atop the wagon in a steady rhythm. Her nostrils twitched. Whatever was in the barrels, it reeked of foulness.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" one of the workers called, signaling to their compatriots to pause for a moment and turning to look at her.\n\n\"I hope so. I was looking for Elden Moon? Is this Moon Farms?\"\n\nThe woman atop the wagon smiled. \"We don't call it that, but it is. You're that dragon from Elnacier, aren't you? The banker?\"\n\n\"I am.\" She bowed her head slightly. \"Axtara the Studious.\"\n\n\"Glen,\" the woman said. \"No title. Not for me. Anyway, you're here to see grammaw about the greenhouse, right?\" She turned, pointing down the \"road\" toward one of the other buildings, a large, long one that almost looked like the pictures of ancient festival halls Axtara could recall seeing in history books. \"She's in the main house. Just knock at the door and she'll find you. She's been waiting for you to show up.\"\n\n\"Oh! I hope I haven't kept her waiting long.\"\n\nThe woman shook her head, dirty hair sliding from one shoulder to the other. \"It's all she's got to do these days is wait. Don't fret about it.\" Then she turned away, signaling to the workers below the wagon to shove the next barrel up.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Axtara called. The woman\u2014Glen\u2014gave a lazy wave with one hand, but otherwise didn't react, already focused back on her task.\n\nI wonder what was in those barrels? The scent wouldn't leave her nostrils, not even when she blew a careful, quiet breath out through them. I've not smelled something that cloyingly pungent since the time uncle treated that dignitary to that dish of fermented fish. They'd left the windows of his office open for two weeks afterwards to try and drive the scent out. It had lingered like clouds after a summer storm.\n\nThe smell finally faded as she reached the long farmhouse Glen had directed her toward, and she let out a quiet snort of relief. Part of her wanted to make it one of the first questions she asked of Elden Moon, but...\n\nLet the client guide the non-business conversation. Let them talk about what makes them happy. Not only would it give you clues as to what sort of services you could potentially offer them, it also made them feel more at ease.\n\nThe path led her right up to a large front door in the side of the massive farm home, and she took a deep breath as she came to a stop in front of it.\n\nWings folded. Tail still. Claws clean? The last one was rather difficult, and she gave her foreclaws a quick wipe on some nearby moss before setting them on the stone stoop. Better.\n\nShe took another deep breath, then lifted one set of claws and knocked, the sound echoing through the interior of the home.\n\nAnd now... I wait.\n\nThe seconds stretched on. Behind her, there was a faint thump as another barrel was loaded atop the wagon. More time passed.\n\nFinally, she lifted her claws to knock again, only to pause as a faint thudding noise echoed from somewhere inside. After a moment it repeated itself, in a sort of staggered rhythm she couldn't identify.\n\nIt was, however, getting louder, and she lowered her claws. A few moments later the sound came to a stop in front of the door, and a moment later the wooden latch lifted, the door swinging outward to reveal an aged, stout-looking woman with graying hair and\u2014\n\nShe's missing a leg, Axtara realized, sourcing the odd double-thud she'd heard as the woman had neared the door. One of the two sounds had come from the walking stick she was leaning on. The other, heavier tread could have only come from the wooden leg she was sporting from the knee down.\n\nThe woman's eyes were bright and alert, however, dancing up and down as they took Axtara in. The smile she was sporting widened, showing off a few missing teeth in the process. \"The Lady Axtara, I presume?\" she asked. Her voice had a strong core to it, firm with iron. Almost like the woman was a weathered oak, old but tough.\n\n\"I am her,\" Axtara replied, nodding her head almost to the point of a bow. \"You are Elden Moon?\"\n\n\"Indeed I am, dearie.\" The woman's eyes almost seemed to sparkle as she spoke. Her accent, like a lot of citizens of the kingdom, was thick, but there was a lightness to it that belied her apparent age. Almost like... foamed cream atop a thick butter. \"You're here about that greenhouse.\"\n\nAgain Axtara nodded. \"I am.\"\n\n\"Well...\" The woman's smile widened. \"Then come on in, and don't mind the tight fit. It opens up soon enough.\" She turned, gesturing with her walking stick down a short hallway festooned with coat hooks toward a wider, well-lit opening at the end. \"I'm Elden Moon, as you might've guessed. And yes,\" she said, turning with that same odd little double-thud. \"Elden's my name, not a title just cause I've seen a few dozen summers go past.\" She let out a chuckle at her own joke. \"Shut the door behind you, if you could. The cold bothers my joints a bit more than it used to these days.\"\n\nAxtara tucked her wings tightly against her body and crouched, following the old woman inside. Snagging the door with the tip of her tail wasn't easy, but she managed to tug it shut before worming her way forward and out of the small entryway. Into a much larger, grander hall that was almost as large as the one in the king's manor.\n\n\"My apologies,\" Elden said as Axtara unfolded her wings. \"When my great-grandfather built the place, I don't think he expected dragons to be on the list of visitors. But...\" she shrugged. \"Times change. Sure as the seasons.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said, taking a look around the large hall, noting the large, heavy wood table in the middle of it and the crackling fireplace on one end. \"They do.\"\n\n\"You'd understand that more than most, being a dragon and all,\" Elden said, making her way across the hall toward the fireplace. A number of chairs were set around it, plush and worn, but likely quite comfortable. There was, Axtara noticed, a conspicuous gap in the chairs, and someone had set up a small table nearby, though there was nothing on it.\n\n\"Well, come on, girl,\" Elden said, pausing and motioning once more with her walking stick. \"We left the gap in the chairs just for you. If it's not enough you can just push some over. The chairs'll take it.\" She resumed her trek forward, but instead of stopping by the seats passed them by, walking up to the stone fireplace instead and then whacking the end of her stick against it.\n\n\"There,\" she said, turning and moving back across the floor towards one of the more well-worn chairs, still smiling. \"That'll bring the grandkids running. Go on, go on, take a seat. Might as well be comfortable while we're discussing business.\"\n\nA moment later the sound of running footsteps echoed out of a doorway near the fireplace, and a moment later a young boy ran in, sliding to a halt as he saw Axtara and staring with wide eyes.\n\n\"It's impolite to stare, Spruce.\" Elden's voice caught the boy's attention like a whip. \"Especially at a lady. Now, be a dear and go fetch us some of that bread you've been baking. And some jam, butter, and honey. Does that sound all right to you, dear?\"\n\nIt took Axtara a second to register that the question had been directed at her. \"It sounds lovely,\" she said after a moment. \"Is the jam from your farm?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" Elden answered with a smug smile while the young boy ran out of the room. \"My family has been in Elnacier since long before it was Elnacier. We were one of the first to arrive. Been farming ever since. Some of us, anyway.\" She settled in her seat, her walking stick resting across her legs. \"Now I run it like my parents did before me. Plus, I can't get around as easy anymore since... well, you probably guessed.\" Her wooden foot made a clunking noise as she tapped it with her stick.\n\n\"So,\" the woman said, leaning back. \"I got your letter. Seemed simple enough to guess that you'd be along shortly.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"Never keep a client waiting.\"\n\n\"A good saying to have,\" Elden agreed. \"Works for farmers too. Crops don't care how busy you are. They need planting when they need planting. Goats need milking. You keep a client waiting, you might lose 'em.\"\n\n\"Succinctly put.\" Axtara shifted slightly, taking care not to scratch the wooden floor with her claws as she turned to face the woman. \"Shall we get down to business right away?\"\n\nTo her surprise, the woman shook her head. \"Nope. Not yet. You can't keep a client waiting, but I sure can keep you waiting until we've had a bite to eat. I don't think you'll complain either, not once you've had a taste of our jam.\"\n\nIf she's trying to butter me up to give her a better loan... Well, it wouldn't be a bad start. The flight over had left her with a bit of an appetite.\n\n\"You must be hungry after your flight here,\" Elden said, almost as if she'd read her mind. \"I know I would be! Besides, I find discussion of finances always goes better with a little food. Makes it more palatable. So,\" the old woman continued without missing a beat. \"How have you found Elnacier so far? Hospitable, I hope?\"\n\n\"The king has been very welcoming,\" Axtara said. Barring some early misunderstandings.\n\n\"I see. And the citizens?\"\n\nBe diplomatic. \"They're not so different from those in the core kingdoms.\"\n\nAt that Elden let out a snort. \"You mean some're nice, and some are bigots. No need to hold back on me, dearie. I remember the old days. More 'an happy to put 'em behind, but they happened. Some people here...\" She shook her head, though the smile stayed. \"They won't forget so easily, even if they never met a dragon before in their life.\" She shook her head again, the smile fading slightly. \"And some don't seem to want to forget.\"\n\nThe last bit came out quieter, and Axtara frowned slightly before catching herself. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nElden waved a hand. \"Later. We can discuss that later.\" There was a clatter as the boy from earlier returned, bumping a wooden tray covered in warm bread and several jars against the doorway. Elden's smile returned, and she beckoned the youth over.\n\n\"Here we are,\" she said as he set the tray down. \"Kept fresh and warm by the oven?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"Well done, Spruce.\" Elden picked up a bread knife from the tray. \"And you even brought the apple jam. Lovely.\"\n\n\"It's your favorite,\" Spruce answered.\n\nElden nodded again. \"Indeed it is. And that's why you're one of my favorite grandsons. Now,\" she said, setting the edge of the knife to the end of a loaf and holding it there. \"You know where I keep my records, don't you?\"\n\nSpruce nodded. \"Yes ma'am. Want me to get them?\" His eyes, Axtara noticed, kept sliding over to look at her, and then snapping back to Elden, over and over again.\n\n\"Yes,\" Elden said, and Spruce gave her a quick nod before running off again.\n\nEmphasis on running, Axtara thought as the sound of the boy's pounding feet echoed after him.\n\n\"Good child,\" Elden said, sawing the knife back and forth at last. Steam poured out of the cut, bringing with it the fresh, warm smell of bread. \"Good with cooking and baking. Not so good at knowing when not to stare. Good thing he works in the kitchen. Now then, heel or just a normal slice?\"\n\nIt took Axtara a second to catch up to the woman's question. \"Normal slice, if you please.\"\n\n\"Oh good,\" Elden said with a grin that was missing a few teeth. \"Because I like the heel and wasn't about to give it to you anyway, loan or not.\" There was a sparkle to her eye when she said it, a sparkle that said she'd spoken in jest, but also that she was completely serious.\n\n\"Now,\" Elden said, glancing at the glass jars as the heel fell to the tray. \"We've got butter, a little bit of honey, and three kinds of jam. Apple, Pear, and...\" She picked up the last jar, staring at it slightly. \"Wildberry. Help yourself.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Axtara said as the woman cut another slice and passed it to her on the blade of the knife. Thankfully, the loaf was fairly large. Either Elden or her grandchild had planned ahead. She reached for it, then paused. \"If it's not too much to ask, could I possibly wash my claws first?\"\n\n\"Pardon?\" Elden asked, but then let out a small gasp of surprise. \"Oh, of course, you had to walk up.\" She frowned. \"My apologies, Lady Axtara. It seems I've gone and forgotten like a fool that you would have wanted to wash your ha\u2014paws?\"\n\n\"Paws or claws is fine.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Elden said, setting the slice of bread back down on the tray. \"Spruce is getting my books, so...\" She looked down at her lap, then threw her walking stick at the doorway the boy had come through. It hit the frame with a clatter and bounced through.\n\nA moment later a different youth poked her head around the door, around the same age as Spruce or perhaps a little younger. It was hard to tell, as long as their hair was. \"Yes, grammaw?\"\n\n\"Fetch a wet washing cloth for our guest, Emilia. I forgot to. And my walking stick, if you please.\"\n\n\"Yes grammaw.\" They vanished from view, and a moment later returned with a damp cloth and the walking stick in question.\n\n\"Here you go, your ladyness,\" they said, looking up at Axtara with wide eyes and holding the cloth out with one hand.\n\n\"Thank you.\" The cloth was cool to the touch against her scales, but wet, and that was what mattered. Getting the dirt and mud off of her palms would be more than enough.\n\n\"This here's Emilia,\" Elden said. \"One of my granddaughters. Thank you, dearie,\" she said as she took the walking stick back.\n\nAxtara finished wiping her claws and handed the cloth back. \"And how old are you, Emilia?\" she asked. The girl's eyes widened as she addressed her.\n\n\"Well?\" Elden said as the girl's mouth opened and closed silently. \"You can answer her.\"\n\nThe girl shot the elderly woman a look. \"But... Addel said she'd eat me.\"\n\nThere were frowns and stern looks, Axtara noted even as she fought to keep her own expression calm, but few could manage a perfect blend of the two like an older woman. And given the look on Elden's face, she'd had plenty of practice.\n\n\"Emilia,\" Elden said, her tone cracking like a whip. \"One, Addel is a fool. If that girl had two wits to rub together she'd be twice as rich as the rest of her fool family put together. But even without she'd still be smarter than you for believing it!\" She hadn't quite risen from her chair, but the way she'd leaned forward certainly seemed to have the same effect.\n\n\"Now, Emilia, apologize to our guest.\" There was no mistaking the tone of commanding steel in Elden's tone.\n\n\"Sorry, uh...\"\n\n\"Lady Axtara.\"\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" Emilia repeated.\n\nThe pronunciation was a little mangled, but still clear. Axtara nodded. \"Apology accepted.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Elden said, still glaring at Emilia. \"Now go tell your mother what you did, and tell her you're to weed the old field until supper. Understood?\"\n\n\"Yes grammaw.\"\n\n\"Good. Now get!\" The child almost jumped in her haste to get out of the room. Elden let out a sigh and leaned back in her chair.\n\n\"I'm sorry about that, Lady Axtara,\" she said quietly. \"Emilia's a good girl, but she's young yet. Still believes what fools gossip about like bleating sheep.\"\n\n\"I'm not offended,\" Axtara said, choosing her words carefully. \"Children do things that often embarrass those with a wider view. I was a hatchling once myself. Besides, I've had much worse said against me before.\"\n\n\"Well, it's still not a good way to conduct good business. Or start a good business relationship.\"\n\n\"It's...\" Axtara paused as Elden looked up. \"Well, it's not fine. Thank you for correcting her. But I knew when I came out here that prejudice would be something I would run into.\" Even if I didn't know it would be exactly as bad as it was before Mia.\n\n\"Doesn't mean I'll let my fool family participate in it,\" Elden said quickly, settling her walking stick across her lap once more and then reaching out and opening one of the jars. \"Or help those rumors that've been floating around.\"\n\nA shiver ran through her scales. \"Rumors?\"\n\nElden let out a sigh. \"I wanted to bring it up more delicately than this, your ladyship, and perhaps after we'd discussed business, but... Some fools aren't happy to see you in Elnacier.\"\n\n\"I'm aware,\" Axtara replied. \"There have been more than just unkind words hurled at me. People here aren't as familiar with my kind.\"\n\n\"It's not just that,\" Elden said quickly, and Axtara felt her wings twitch in surprise. \"It'd be the same\u2014well, maybe not the same, but close to it\u2014if you were human. You're an outsider, Lady Axtara. They may not be able to articulate it, but to a lot of the folk here, you represent change.\"\n\n\"Now, I'm not saying we're all backwards Pardellian Orders who'll kick the future out,\" Elden continued, leaning forward and picking up Axtara's slice of bread. \"Butter? Honey?\" she asked, pointing.\n\n\"Pear jam? Or apple?\"\n\n\"Both are good choices, dearie,\" Elden said. \"Pear first, since you said it first. Anyway,\" she continued as she began spreading the thick jam across the top of the slice, the sweet scent tickling Axtara's nostrils. \"We're not that bad, but at the same time, somehow you've become fixed in the minds of a lot of folk around here. A lot of rumor floating around, not a lot of it good. People gossiping at bars, letting their drink get the better of their common sense. It's not dying off either,\" she said as she finished covering the top of the slice and passed it over. \"Usually, new folk'll come to Elnacier, rare as that is, and they'll be talk for a while, but then it'll pass on. People get bored, move on to talking about the next new thing.\"\n\n\"You though,\" she said, picking up the heel slice and putting a hefty dollop of butter on it. \"People are still talking about you. Which is to be expected, in a way. You are, to put in bluntly, the first dragon any of us can remember in these parts. But some of these rumors...\"\n\nElden was giving her an opening. \"What sort of rumors?\" Axtara asked, still holding the slice of bread in front of her. It was making her salivate, but at the moment what Elden was saying seemed more important.\n\n\"Well, as I said dearie, we're not big fans of change out here,\" Elden answered, looking down at her slice of bread as the butter melted. \"We're tough, and we've lived like this a long time. Some people don't see how it can be any better, and the very idea that it could be, well, that just up and stings their pride. We saw it when Elnacier became king. Sure, he'd driven out the fell with that sword of his, and we were grateful for that. But we sure weren't sure what we thought about having a king, except that a lot of us didn't like it because it was new and different.\"\n\n\"But then... he fixed the roads, and some people came around. Taxed us, but spent the tax building bridges over the rivers, and setting up the courier service. People griped even as they enjoyed the new things he brought, simply because they're stubborn and prideful, but eventually they accepted it.\"\n\n\"But you,\" Elden said, glancing up at her even as she picked up the spoon in the honey jar and began drizzling the thick, golden liquid over her bread. \"You're new. You're not human, which to some matters quite a bit, since they can't stop living in the past, but even then...\" She shook her head. \"It's no surprise that the rumors have been churning and rolling like a herd of sheep backed into a corner, but it should have quieted by now.\"\n\nElden paused and took a bite of her bread. Axtara followed her example, a rich, sweet taste bursting across her tongue as she bit off half the slice.\n\n\"Ooh... This is good.\" She needed no acting to let her pleasure show. \"And it's your jam, correct?\"\n\n\"It is. We put in a whole orchard of the things about four years ago,\" Elden said with a smile. \"Hoping that once they mature we can start selling a lot of it.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara said, pausing to bite, chew, and swallow the other half of her slice. \"Sign me up for a jar, please. Maybe a few.\"\n\nElden smiled. \"Glad you like it.\" The old woman took another bite of her own slice, chewed it, and swallowed. \"But before we lose ourselves like chickens to...\" Her words trailed off as the sound of bare feet slapping over boards returned, Spruce running into the room with a leather-bound volume held in his arms.\n\n\"My word,\" Axtara said as Spruce handed it to his grandmother and then ran off. To where she wasn't sure. She couldn't pull her eyes away from the leather-bound item in Elden's lap. \"Is that a ledger?\"\n\nElden smiled. \"Surprised? Once Elnacier said he was king, I knew it would be a matter of time before he taxed us. And if I wanted to be able to keep track of those taxes, I figured I'd do things the proper way. Paid quite a lot to a trader for this old ledger\u2014\" she rapped the surface with her knuckles, \"\u2014but it's been worth every penny. And I think it'll make things a lot easier for both of us when it comes to my loan.\"\n\n\"That it will,\" Axtara said, catching herself and pulling back slightly. \"I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am that you have an actual ledger you've kept track of your finances with.\" And if she has a ledger, I don't doubt that she knows how to use it. She eyed the leather, trying to gauge which style it was in. Delarian? Okasin? She got it from a trader, so where might they have gotten it? All were different once you opened them up, the columns and numbers in slightly different places, but once you knew how to read them and what each place stood for, each style gave its secrets.\n\n\"Well, I can see your excitement. Assuming that's what your tail is twitching for. No need to feel self-conscious, it's nice to see someone appreciate this old thing. But before we open it, we need more bread. And a discussion of what I'm looking for. Plus,\" she said, cutting Axtara off before she could say anything. \"I need to finish my warning.\"\n\n\"Warning?\"\n\nElden nodded. \"I may have a roundabout way of getting to it, dearie, but my point was this: These rumors are clinging to the public like manure to a boot. By the fell, even my own fool granddaughter is repeating some of them. We're prideful and stubborn. But we're not that fool stubborn. Someone's spreading lies about you, Lady Axtara. I know it. These fool rumors have persisted far too long, with too much stubbornness and no proof, to simply be the work of idle minds and mouths. They should have quieted weeks ago, but they're circling still in the bars and in the back alleys, like wolves circling a lone deer. I don't know who's behind it, but someone doesn't like you.\"\n\nAxtara leaned back slightly, thinking for a moment before speaking. \"Do you believe it could cause trouble for me?\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Elden said, reaching out and cutting another slice of bread. \"Another?\"\n\n\"Yes please.\"\n\n\"You've won over the king and queen,\" Elden said as she began cutting another slice. \"In the eyes of many, that carries weight. If you're asking if I think that a horde of idiots with less sense than sheep will be banging at your door with pitchforks and torches, no. But could rumor hurt your business? Yes it could. And you know that. Enough to ruin you?\" She shrugged. \"I don't know. Maybe so, maybe not. But I feel as though someone's certainly trying. The rumors continue to spread.\"\n\n\"I did have an outspoken altercation in Easy Bay not long ago,\" Axtara said, thinking back to the angry band of fisherman that had tried to run her out of town. \"It didn't turn violent, but it was close, and they seemed quite angry.\"\n\n\"Well, that's just Easy Bay,\" Elden said with a scoff. \"Ever met a fisherman, dearie? Stubborn, bull-headed folk, and as a farmer that's saying something. But these rumors couldn't have helped.\"\n\n\"What are they saying, if you don't mind my asking? Apple, please,\" she added when Elden pointed at the jam jars with an expectant look.\n\n\"Nothing special or particularly intelligent, as fool rumor tends to be,\" Elden said, covering both slices with a healthy layer of the apple jam. \"The more wild accusations are that you're here to take over the kingdom or feast on our children. But the more rational ones, the ones that whisper from the bars and in the crowds, are that you're here to trap us all in ruinous debts, to take away our farms and make us slaves. Or that you don't have the money you claim to have to pay other's debts for, and are simply seeking to entrap them for your own gain.\"\n\n\"That... doesn't even make sense,\" Axtara said, shaking her head as Elden passed her one of the slices. \"And yes, I know that's how rumor works; it only must be plausible, but at best, that sounds highly suspect.\"\n\n\"And yet it keeps circling.\"\n\n\"Hmm...\" She took a bite, the apple jam no less sweet but also thicker, sticking to the bread even as she chewed. She took the time to think, waiting until she'd swallowed to voice her thoughts. \"Perhaps someone else was preparing to open a bank as I was, or become a moneylender, but I arrived first. But...\" She gave her wings a small shake. \"There were moneylenders here. Not professionally, but as good neighbors. One of my agents mentioned that.\"\n\n\"It's true. At least for Overhill,\" Elden confirmed, nodding. \"None of them had the resources you have, but you have put them out slightly. Perhaps they bear a grievance.\"\n\n\"Maybe one of them was starting to see growth, only for my arrival to put it to an unwelcome end,\" Axtara mused, tapping her chin with her claws and then taking another bite of her bread.\n\n\"Could be,\" Elden answered. \"But I don't know. But I felt you should be informed. Now,\" she added quickly. \"It isn't all bad. There are good things being said about you as well. Word has it you told the doctor in Elnacier that his supplier was overcharging him for his shipments and you gave him a list of several other suppliers he could reach.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Axtara admitted, \"but it's close enough to the truth.\"\n\n\"Well, I figured I'd warn you dearie, all the same. Actions speak louder than words, and you flew out here to meet me, so my own opinion of you says you're good enough, and you're too smart to be putting your bars somewhere you can't reach them\u2014and not because you're a dragon.\" Elden gave her a grin. \"Because you're intelligent! You've got drive. Like my son!\"\n\n\"Your son?\"\n\nElden nodded. \"The greenhouse was his idea. Voiced it a few years ago, and we've been working ourselves trying to figure it out ever since. A good leader listens to the ideas around her. That's how our farm's survived as long as it has. He's got vision, and he's got smarts.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" Elden added as she set the ledger atop the small table, pushing the tray back. But not too far, Axtara noticed. She clearly wanted it within reach. \"I'd hate to see small-minded fools drive you away and ruin my family's chances of getting this greenhouse at last.\"\n\n\"Well then,\" Axtara said, settling herself slightly. \"I thank you for the warning. I'll keep my image in mind over the next few weeks. Perhaps I can do more to combat these rumors. In the meantime, why don't you tell me about this greenhouse and what you need for it?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Long-Term Relationships",
                "text": "\"Thirty-six sets of triple-paned glass?\" Axtara asked, staring down at Elden in shock. \"Enchanted triple-paned glass? I don't mean it as a slight, Elden, but you are aware of the cost of such glass, are you not?\" It was... ambitious. Almost audacious. Certainly outrageous. \"I have such panes in the roof of my home, and I can assure you that they were not cheap. Each one cost me almost twelve bars.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Elden said. \"However, if I'm correct, the cost of such mostly stems from the enchantments, does it not?\"\n\n\"It does,\" Axtara confirmed. \"However, without the enchantments, the glass won't retain heat quite as well, especially once it becomes cold. Nor will it be as durable.\"\n\n\"But you know then, how much less it would cost.\"\n\n\"Less than a quarter,\" Axtara answered. \"Enchantments are expensive. But it will cost you more to ship that glass out here. Without the enchantments, the glass will be much more likely to break, and therefore will need special care shipping. And also without those enchantments, they won't hold heat nearly as well.\"\n\n\"True,\" Elden said, cutting herself another slice of bread and buttering it. The bread had long since gone cool as they'd discussed finances and what Elden expected for the greenhouse, but they'd still eaten more than half the loaf between them. \"But one of my granddaughters had an idea about that.\"\n\n\"And you listen to ideas,\" Axtara said, smiling.\n\n\"And you listen.\" Elden replied with a wink and a grin. \"But yes, I do. You're familiar with heating walls?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I am not.\"\n\n\"We have them in some of the fields,\" Elden said. \"Though not many. Good brick is hard to come by here, and stone bound with mortar doesn't work as well. But they're simply a hollow wall, the inside filled with channels that a fire can be lit in. The smoke and heat flow upwards along the length of the wall, warming it, and we plant those fruit trees that need more warmth during certain seasons along the wall.\"\n\n\"My granddaughter,\" Elden continued, \"has suggested that we build a heating wall inside the greenhouse. A low one. And that we heat it with a boiler of some kind, and fill the heating wall with pipe and water hot from the flames.\"\n\n\"Heating the greenhouse from the inside... but with the smoke kept outside,\" Axtara said, nodding. \"It seems sound.\"\n\n\"My thoughts exactly,\" Elden said. \"She's smart as a whip, that girl. Her mother and father think she may be worth hiring a tutor for, for more than just the standard numbers and letters. She's got a mind for machines.\"\n\n\"There's a great market for those these days,\" Axtara said, her mind briefly leaping to the trains that thundered across the core kingdoms. So new, and yet they had already brought so much change. \"Now, back to price, a boiler of some kind wouldn't be cheap.\"\n\n\"But it would be cheaper than the enchantments, all said and done. I've asked.\"\n\n\"That doesn't surprise me.\" Axtara reached out and picked up the knife, carefully cutting another slice of bread for herself. \"You've done a lot of your work.\"\n\n\"That's why we're one of the best farms in Elnacier,\" Elden said with a laugh. \"And soon we'll be even better. A greenhouse will give us a lot of options.\"\n\n\"Well, your finances are in commendable order.\" Even if a few things were a little misspelled, the numbers were solid. She'd even done a few customary checks herself. Elden's grasp on financial matters was firm. \"Though, before we discuss loan possibilities, I did wish to ask about something.\"\n\n\"Ask away,\" Elden said as Axtara drizzled a spoonful of honey over her bread. \"What do you need to know?\"\n\n\"Those tax numbers,\" Axtara said, pausing for a moment to lick honey off of one of her claws. Normally she would have wiped it on a cloth, but as Elden had seen no issue with licking her fingers earlier... \"I presume that they're accurate, but are they normal for everyone around here?\"\n\n\"Well of course they're accurate. And yes, that's what everyone around here pays. The tax is kept fairly simple; neither King Elnacier or his minister of finance feel like overcomplicating it I suppose. Why?\"\n\n\"It just...\" Axtara paused and took a bite of her bread, stalling as she struggled to find a way to voice her thoughts.\n\n\"Don't hold back now, dearie,\" Elden said. \"If you're worried we won't be able to make your payments and the taxes both, say it.\"\n\nAxtara swallowed. \"It's not that. It just seems rather high.\"\n\nElden shrugged. \"The king maintains the roads. I'll admit I've oft wondered what he does with the taxes he collects, as it's a substantial amount, but he does provide a lot of services for the kingdom, many of which I'm not familiar with the cost of. Plus, he's a king. He's entitled to a little wealth, is he not?\"\n\nNod. Keep it natural. \"Of course,\" Axtara said. \"I was merely curious.\" And this is what? The third tax I've seen of this amount. It's no great fortune by the standards of the kingdoms, but surely the king can't be spending that much. How is it that the kingdom's struggled so?\n\nShe pushed the thought out of her head. She could worry about it later. \"I was merely curious. I'm not intimately familiar with the kingdom yet. However, I don't think it should impact your ability to make good on your loan, but then that depends on how much you wished to borrow, and how swiftly you wanted to return that money.\"\n\n\"Ah, to the meat and bones of the issue,\" Elden replied, sliding forward slightly in her chair with a grin. \"Well then. Based on the designs and size of the greenhouse, that would be thirty-six sets of triple-pane glass, enchanted, at a little under twelve bars apiece.\"\n\n\"That's four-hundred and thirty-two bars,\" Axtara said. Speaking the number aloud sent a rush of ice across her scales. Almost half of what was left in her vault.\n\n\"Yes, a bit outrageous, I think we can both agree. Now, unenchanted, I believe the number I was given was much lower. I believe I was quoted around three bars apiece, all said and done. Only one-hundred bars.\"\n\n\"Much more reasonable.\" If still more than a tenth of my vault. \"But the transport cost will be higher.\"\n\n\"And we may need to order a few extras in case one or two doesn't make the journey,\" Elden added. \"Say... forty. A nice even number. Which would put us at... one-hundred and twenty bars.\"\n\n\"Plus labor. And shipping.\"\n\n\"Family for the first,\" Elden said with a grin. \"But a boiler, and the pipe... My granddaughter seems to think that it would cost us at least fifty bars.\"\n\n\"Fifty bars?\" Axtara gave her a look of surprise. \"That seems high.\"\n\n\"You think it would be less?\" Elden asked.\n\n\"Give me a moment, but yes,\" Axtara said, casting her mind back. How much did I pay for the piping that was installed in my home? It had been expensive\u2014the idea of running water in one's home wasn't exactly new, just uncommon. But using metal to do so? Most still used wood. Hollowed out trees. Or treated bark. Some used stone, carefully arrayed, like a sewer in miniature.\n\nBut pipe\u2014metal pipe\u2014wasn't exactly cost intensive. Not to the degree of fifty bars. There weren't many places to acquire it, but whatever process such places used to make it didn't come at too high a cost.\n\n\"How much pipe do you think you will need?\" Axtara asked, her focus coming back to Elden.\n\n\"Well, based on the design we had, and size of the panes of glass, we'd need at least thirty-two feet of pipe to run the length,\" Elden said. \"But a few more to account for the boiler being outside. Short again to have space along the wall for someone to pass it by without leaving the greenhouse.\"\n\n\"But,\" the old woman added quickly. \"The water would need to come back, so it'd have to have an equal length going the other way. So say, just to offer us some flexibility, ninety feet of pipe.\"\n\n\"The length of each section also affects the price,\" Axtara added, remembering how the individual she'd hired to construct her home had shown her the differences. \"The longer a single piece of pipe is, the more you pay for it.\"\n\n\"Sounds reasonable enough,\" Elden mused, pausing and cutting herself another slice of bread. \"But the cost can't be that much greater for a single piece over two of the same length, can it?\"\n\n\"I think...\" There had been a number that the builder had given her. A percentage. \"I believe for the length I was working with it was around twenty-percent higher. But that may vary,\" she added quickly. \"I'm not sure why the longer pieces cost more.\"\n\n\"It might be harder to make.\"\n\n\"That would be logical,\" Axtara agreed. \"And transport. However, the builder did point out to me that one can cut a metal pipe with the proper tools, and therefore making smaller pieces from larger ones is not difficult to do. The pieces of pipe used in my home were ten feet each in length.\"\n\n\"That's a convenient number.\"\n\n\"Especially for shipping,\" Axtara added. \"And they cost me... one moment.\" She pulled her head back slightly, tapping at the floor with her claws as she searched around inside her mind for the price of each section of pipe.\"\n\n\"One bar per ten foot section of pipe,\" she said at last. \"Yes, that sounds correct.\"\n\n\"Not cheap,\" Elden commented.\n\n\"Only in comparison to the glass,\" Axtara countered. \"And still well below what you'd suggested at fifty bars. If you needed ninety feet of pipe, that's only nine bars.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the boiler.\"\n\n\"You could use an old stove. Or a new one. A stove would only cost you a bar or two. Maybe three if you needed a large one.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't hold heat very well,\" Elden countered. \"But we could make it work. Use an old metal tub to heat the water with. A boiler can't be cheap.\"\n\nAxtara nodded. \"I wouldn't know the cost of such a thing myself. But they are new, and sure to be quite expensive. You would be better off using an old stove. That would cost you maybe a few bars, but would be far cheaper than a boiler. I'm not certain you'd need one, anyway.\"\n\nElden nodded. \"Well, I could always throw my granddaughter at it with a budget for scrap metal and see what she could create. \"\n\n\"That sounds like a much better use of your money, personally,\" Axtara said, noting that she was still holding a slice of bread with jam. It'd gone forgotten during the discussion. She took a bite and chewed quietly for a moment. \"A new stove, I imagine, wouldn't set you back much at all from the local smith.\"\n\n\"A few bars,\" Elden said with a shrug. \"More than you'd expect, I'd imagine, but remember we're on the edges of civilization out here. Metal has to be brought in; there aren't any mines around here making ingots.\"\n\n\"There should be,\" Axtara replied quickly, grinning and then taking a bit of her bread, chewing as Elden gave her a calculating look.\n\n\"You know dearie,\" the old woman said after a moment. \"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were hinting that someone around here should look into mining, and perhaps setting up a smelter. Would that just be because they'd need to acquire a loan from you in order to do so, or because there actually are good sources of iron in Elnacier?\"\n\nAxtara waited until she'd swallowed before answering. \"I will only say,\" she stated, keeping her voice fairly neutral but letting just a hint of smugness roll into it. Uncle had taught her the technique. Done well, it made people think. \"That I did a quite thorough investigation of Elnacier and its resources\u2014sapient, mineral, and agricultural, among other things\u2014before I arrived. And while those reports were in the strictest confidence, mine were not the only eyes that set upon them. I am quite confident of what Elnacier could become. Whether its citizens take those fruits in hand, or others from distant kingdoms, well...\" She shrugged and finished the slice of bread, swallowing before finishing her statement. \"That's up to them.\"\n\nThen she grinned. \"See, I can start rumors too.\"\n\nElden, however, wasn't smiling. Instead she had a stern, contemplative look on her face. \"Not all rumors are equal, Lady Axtara,\" she said after a moment. \"In fact, I could almost ask if someone listening to such a rumor as the one you lay at my feet would be supportive or in contrast to those other rumors that already swirl around you.\"\n\nShe weighed her words carefully before answering. \"I would suggest that it would support some of them, and disparage the others. But they would not tarnish my reputation.\"\n\nElden's eyes narrowed. \"Clever. Your words may be as sharp as your teeth, young lady. But if so, then why would you simply not tell me or others about such up front?\"\n\nAxtara smiled. An easy answer. \"Simple,\" she said, giving her wings a slight flap and settling them against her sides for presence. \"Being in possession of such information, if I were to give it out freely and offer it to the first that came along, with money from my own bank, would hardly be any different from simply opening a mine, or an ironworks, or any other business all on my own. I would have provided the information, and I would have chosen who to give it to.\"\n\n\"But,\" Axtara said, idly twisting her claws in front of her. \"If rumor were simply to reach those with the ambition and drive to put forth their own efforts, then I'm only providing a service to aid them in achieving their own successes. Any mine or ironworks or other form of enterprise that they entered into would be solely their own. I would have no claim or influence over it past any funds I was owed as a bank.\"\n\nElden regarded her for a moment longer, her expression cool, but then she nodded. \"You know,\" she said almost matter-of-factly. \"Suddenly I worry about whoever is spreading those rumors about you. They may think they're tangling with a kitten, but they may soon find they're tugging at the tail of a dragon.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara replied, unable to keep a grin off of her face at the expression. \"I do, in fact, happen to be a dragon.\"\n\n\"Something they may have forgotten.\" Elden leaned forward in her chair. \"Or rather, they may be thinking of the wrong type of dragon.\"\n\nThere was something to the old woman's words, to the way she was looking right at her with a piercing gaze. What is it?\n\nThen in a flash, she understood, her eyes widening in surprise. \"You were testing me, weren't you?\" she asked. \"Putting the price of pipe and heating at fifty bars. You already knew roughly what it would cost.\"\n\nElden smiled, though it was a warm smile, rather than cold. \"Of course I was, dearie. My family has been planning this greenhouse for three years. A loan from you was simply a fortuitous possibility that would enable us to build it in one go rather than over several years. But, with the rumors out there swirling about...\"\n\n\"You baited me.\"\n\n\"Do you disagree with my actions?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, they were just and understandable. It pricks at my pride, but in the position I've put myself in, I must live up to the strength of my scales or be a poor banker indeed. So then, I assume that you already know that you want a loan somewhere in the realm of a hundred and twenty-five bars?\"\n\n\"We cannot forget the transport costs.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Axtara said, trying not to let her embarrassment show. \"Let me think. My own shipping was\u2014\"\n\nElden cut her off with a wave of her hand. \"Don't worry about it, dearie. You've already proven you're interested in dealing with us honestly. We've got the shipping costs worked out. Another fifteen bars if we ship it all as close together as possible. A hundred and forty bars, even. There's some variance in those numbers, of course, but what's extra we will simply use to pay back into the loan at an earlier date, or to account for unexpected incidents, like an accident or unexpected expense in construction. So then, Lady Axtara, what sort of rate would you offer us?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara said, trying not to let her eagerness show too much. I passed her test! \"There are a few options we could go for, and I've brought examples of each. The most important question is how quickly you wish to pay back the loan. For example...\" she said, fanning a small selection of sample contracts. \"If you wish to pay it off over five years, then my return will only be ten percent. You will, over five years, pay me back the one-hundred and forty bars, and then fourteen more bars besides. That would be a payment of two and a half bars per month. A total of, after five years, one-hundred and fifty-four bars.\"\n\n\"Now, if you pay over a longer period, say ten years, my return becomes twenty percent. A total of one-hundred and sixty bars, but a monthly payment of a little below one and a half bars.\" It was risky doing the math in her head, but she was fairly certain she'd gotten it correct.\n\n\"Now, if you wished to extend this to fifteen years, it rises by fifteen percent for a return of thirty-five percent.\" She paused for a moment, running over the numbers in her head. \"Which would be... a hundred and eighty-nine bars to be repaid, at one bar a month for one hundred and eighty-one months. The last month would simply be change.\"\n\n\"As always,\" she added, setting the sample contracts on the table before Elden. \"Each of my contracts comes with a season of payment forgiveness, allowing you to miss half a payment in a given year, and a reduction rate for early payments that will allow you to pay back less in exchange for paying more than your required payment. Which we can discuss the details of based on which payment you prefer.\"\n\n\"So,\" she asked, grinning as a little shiver ran down her shoulders and into her tail. Come on... take a contract! \"What would you like to do?\"\n\nElden Moon smiled, and Axtara's heart began to pound. \"I think, Lady Axtara, that I would like to have another slice of bread... and then sign a contract. I think ten years would be appropriate, wouldn't you?\"\n\nAxtara smiled. \"I think that sounds like a fine idea.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "It was raining on the flight back, but she didn't care. Cold and wet didn't matter at the moment. Both were eclipsed by the heat pumping from her chest. What mattered was the waterproof satchel lying against her chest and the freshly-inked and signed contract resting inside it, a contract loan for a hundred and sixty bars, paid back in one and a half bar increments every month.\n\nFor ten years. Combined with the loan she already had, that meant she was now bringing in two bars a month.\n\nHalfway to neutral! Halfway! And in just a few weeks as well. If Elden Moon told others about her loan\u2014and there was no doubt in her mind that the woman would\u2014as well as passed along the insight that there may be more to Elnacier than most thought of... well.\n\nIn another month's time I could be earning exactly what I need. Four bars a month. Or better yet... She twitched her wings to the side, going into a sudden roll and letting loose a peal of laughter as she spun through the sky. Five bars a month! Six! Who knows! The sky is the limit!\n\nGranted, that would require making a few more loans. And I've used roughly twenty-percent of my base capital already.\n\nThere's bound to be someone out there that needs a shorter loan for a more immediate return with time. She beat her wings against the rain, the drops hitting her scales like sheets, and then went into another roll, laughing the whole way.\n\nTwo bars a month! Two whole bars! She threw her head back and laughed, the rain sleeting over her face and neck like it was doing its best to wash away the worries of the last few weeks.\n\nI should celebrate. She turned her focus downward once more, checking to make sure she was still following the road. The sky was getting darker as evening neared, but not so much that she couldn't make out the thin gap in the trees as it wound back and forth toward home.\n\nHome. It really did feel like it. Not just her home, but home. A place where she could meet new people looking for a loan. A place to sleep. A place to store the jar of pear jam Elden Moon had given her in celebration of their contract.\n\nA place to host friends.\n\nHer smile widened as she powered through the wind and rain. Elnacier should be in view soon. Then what? Tomorrow was the standard day of rest recognized by the kingdom, or as close to it as a kingdom that was largely based in agriculture could have. And I was invited to come to the church.\n\nIt couldn't hurt, and the gesture had been made in good faith and kindness, as far as she could tell. It could be interesting to see what their services here are like. Yes, why shouldn't I go? It would be nice to see what her neighbors were like, and even outside of her job, gain an area of social contact.\n\nEven if none of them ever become clients, that's not really the point, she thought, checking for the road once more and adjusting her course. The point is to worship. And learn who my neighbors are. What they're like. Make some more friends.\n\nThough Mia was doing more than adequately thus far. I should see if she would like to have tea again. Perhaps share some bread and jam? Her eyes slipped the satchel on her chest. The straps were soaked through, but the satchel itself was still dry, water rolling off its surface almost as cleanly as from her scales.\n\nOr... I could just stop by now. It wouldn't be much of a detour. And I would like to share the news with someone!\n\nTwo bars a month. Two whole bars!\n\nShe could almost feel them in her claws. Halfway there.\n\nLight began to flicker on the horizon, Elnacier slowly coming into view as she flew on through the storm. Yes, she thought. I'll swing by the manor and let Mia know the good news first. Mostly because she felt like it would burst from her chest if she held it in any longer.\n\nShe threw herself into one more spiraling spin and then, wings starting to ache from the more aggressive use, leveled, the rain washing over her and cooling her muscles before they could generate too much heat. Now that she could see Elnacier, she no longer needed to follow the road, and she veered away from it, cutting across the mountainous forests straight toward the town. Her wingbeats brought her the faint scent of wood smoke, and she peered down to see a small home through a gap in the trees as she swept past.\n\nWhy do they live farther from the town itself? Axtara wondered. Is it because they no longer need to fear the fell? Or did their home exist before then? And if so, why?\n\nThe house was behind her now, and after a moment, she smirked. Of course, they could just as well ask the same question of you. Your home is outside Elnacier. Not nearly so far, but still...\n\nShe shifted her course as the lights ahead of her grew clearer, flickering through the falling rain. Here and there she could see crosswinds cutting through the air, whipping the shimmering sheets in sudden, abrupt directions before quieting.\n\nNot exactly the best weather to be flying in. Still, it could be worse. And I've flown in worse. She glanced once more at her satchel, checking to make sure she'd truly sealed it against the elements, but it appeared snug.\n\nAt least it isn't thundering. Flying during a lightning storm was a... unique experience. And not one that she wanted to repeat. Her father had assured her time and time again that lightning would not make a target of a dragon mid-flight, but... A shudder ran down her body, twisting her tail and tweaking her course.\n\nI've seen what happens to trees struck by lightning, she thought, images of broken, splintered wood leaping into her mind. I have no desire to see how much sturdier I am.\n\nAnd yet, there were sapients that did. She could remember one of her uncle's last clients before she'd left his bank, a group of like-minded researchers who actually believed that they could capture a bolt of lightning from the sky in a bottle. Like something out of a hatchling's stories. An artifact of the ancients, or a story about a clever wizard.\n\nMaybe they'd succeed. In fact, they likely would. They or someone else. Few were the limits, it seemed, where science and determination met. Her uncle had told her a cautionary tale once of how he'd mocked the men that had built the trains. How man, machine, and magic coming together to move such a mighty machine merely with water had seemed ridiculous... Until he'd seen it for himself.\n\n'If I'd been smarter,' he'd told her. 'I would have looked deeper and seen their vision for what it was. And I would have been there \"on the ground floor,\" as they say, when they succeeded and began sending their machines all across the kingdoms.'\n\n'Of course,' he'd added. 'Had that happened, perhaps I wouldn't have become a banker, but a railroad magnate. But tipping my wings the other way, the Bad Days had barely ended at that time. Perhaps I merely would have flown into troubled skies and found myself grounded.'\n\nShe smiled. If he had become a railway magnate, perhaps I never would have learned to become a banker. Or come to Elnacier.\n\nMaybe now he'll end up a lightning magnate. Or whatever that would be. Or whatever the lightning would be used for; she hadn't really been able to decipher that from what she'd heard. I suppose it would make an interesting alternative to cannons.\n\nPerhaps one day I'll find out. She adjusted her course once more, Elnacier almost beneath her. I'll land a bit down the road from the manor, she thought as she tilted her body to one side, going into a long, lazy bank over the edge of the town. The majordomo said that they do prefer a little warning when someone comes calling, and this visit is unplanned. Though I hope Mia won't mind.\n\nShe twisted around a column of woodsmoke, catching the faintest scent of baking bread mixed in with it. Do I have bread at home? I had... No... I ate that.\n\nShe was still wondering as she came in to land on the road up to the manor, the gusts from her wings scattering rain and creating small waves across the various puddles on the ground. I'm glad I chose to forgo any fancy wear today. Mud oozed across her claws as she touched down, squeezing up through the gaps in her digits and over the top of her paws. If this rain didn't soak them, the mud would have ruined them. She pulled one foot free with a loud slurp, watching as the pouring rain began to fill in the new depression she'd left in the mud.\n\nQuite definitely glad I didn't wear anything. Each drop of rain on her raised paws carved a little crater in the mud clinging to it, watering it down and washing it away. I should have just flown home. But...\n\nToo late now. She set her paw down, tugging a rear foot free with another slurp. Slowly she started up the muddy road, eyes hunting for the parts of it that looked the least muddied.\n\nAt least I'm not the only one who's used it since the rain began, she thought, noting a line of hoofprints running down the road. Coming or going, she couldn't say. But if a horse could make it through the muck... So can I.\n\nThough not without a little discomfort, she noted as one foot almost slipped, her claws digging through the mud to cling against rock. She could see a few places where the horse had almost slipped as well.\n\nUnlucky for the horse, it doesn't have claws. Or... she thought, glancing up the slope. Wings.\n\nA quick glance over her shoulders showed that there was no one nearby, and she spread her wings, crouching as low as she dared in the muck without getting it all over her belly.\n\nAnd... jump! Her wings snapped down as she pulled free of the mud, launching her up and into a half glide, enough to skip over a good section of the road before the hill rose up, and she was forced to land again.\n\nI've not done that in a while. A smirk worked its way across her face as she eyed the rest of the road up to the front of the manor. It's not exactly dignified, but... who would be around to see it anyway? The arch over the front of the grounds was within easy walking distance now, and the muddiest bit of the road seemed to be behind her. Someone had taken the time to make the path near the manor more stone than dirt, though where they'd gotten it, like the stones that made up some of the manor, were a mystery.\n\nMia probably knows, she thought as she neared the front of the grounds. Or really any member of the staff.\n\nThe manor was well-lit against the encroaching twilight, and as she looked the front doors opened, a hooded figure stepping out with a lantern in one hand. They gave her a wave, and she lifted a wing in response.\n\nLikely the majordomo, she thought, stopping by the front archway and looking at the figure. Come to greet me. Well, decorum must be obser\u2014\n\nOr not. The figure had made their way away from the door, but was clearly waving at her to move toward them. I suppose when the weather is as unwelcome as this...\n\nIn fact, it did seem as if it had begun raining harder. She could hardly hold up a muddy paw without it almost being washed clean under the deluge falling from above.\n\n\"Lady Axtara!\" The majordomo's voice rang out as he neared, holding his lantern high as he waved. \"We were surprised to see you coming! Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"I'm fine... Lowell, was it?\"\n\nThe man nodded. \"Yes, lady, it is.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Well Lowell, I am well. I was merely returning from a successful business venture and thought I would come share the good news with Princess Mia. I hadn't counted on...\" She let out a small laugh as she lifted one set of claws. \"So much mud.\"\n\n\"Well please, come in, come in,\" Lowell said, waving her toward where he'd left the doors partially open. \"Get out of the rain. We have towels you can clean the mud from your feet with\u2014\"\n\n\"It's no worry, Lowell,\" she said quickly, following him across the lawn. \"I just wished to share my good news with the princess\u2014\"\n\n\"And if she doesn't invite you to stay for dinner to get out of this storm,\" Lowell said, glancing back at her, \"then I am king. Besides,\" he added, a sudden gust of wind making his cloak flap around him. She could see the rain starting the shift now, sleeting sideways in the new winds. \"It's only going to get worse out here.\"\n\n\"Then I should make my time here as quick as possible,\" she said as they reached the front door. \"In order to reach home before it gets any worse.\"\n\n\"I see,\" the majordomo replied, holding the doors open for her, the wind making the lamps inside the entryway flicker. She washed her claws as best she was able in the rain sluicing down from the roof before stepping into the entryway. Lowell followed her a moment longer, shutting the doors behind him.\n\n\"Very well then,\" he said, stepping past her and opening a small cabinet to pass her several towels. \"I shall inform the princess of your arrival. And then prepare the guest room.\"\n\n\"Guest\u2014\" Axtara caught herself. \"I'm not going to have much of a choice, am I?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lowell said, his face a calm mask that didn't quite reach the amused look in his eyes as he hung up his cloak. \"Not really.\"\n\nThen he vanished, and she busied herself drying her claws and checking her scales for mud. While she'd been able to wash most of it off, most had not been all. Worse, she could see a veritable ring of water forming around her on the floor\u2014including atop the rug.\n\nOh dear. I hope I don't\u2014\n\n\"Hello, Lady Axtara.\"\n\nThe voice wasn't Mia's, though it was close. It was older, more dignified. The queen was standing in the doorway, looking at her with an odd sort of half-smile.\n\n\"Your majesty,\" Axtara said, dropping the towel and bowing. \"My apologies for not sending a message ahead. I\u2014\"\n\n\"It's fine, Axtara,\" the queen said, holding up a hand. \"The formality is appreciated, but not necessary. It's a storm out there. We're more than happy to shelter you within our walls.\"\n\n\"Ah, well... I'm afraid I'm dripping all over the rug. I apologize.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Mia's mother said. \"I detest that rug. That's why it's in the entryway. It was a wedding gift from my aunt, and I'm half convinced it was out of spite for the time I told her as a child that her hair looked like a horse's backside.\"\n\n\"Well...\" Axtara said, glancing down at the now-wet rug. It did look fairly worn. \"Then I will not, your highness.\"\n\n\"Good,\" the queen replied. \"You keep toweling off. I'll go tell Mia that you're here and wish to speak with her. You are staying for dinner, are you not?\"\n\nLowell was not jesting. \"I would be honored, your highness.\"\n\n\"Good,\" the queen said with a smile. \"It will be less formal this time, I must warn you, but it will be no less warm. And I expect you'll be fine with our guest quarters to wait out the storm? It will only get worse until it blows over.\"\n\n\"Yes, your highness.\"\n\n\"You can relax, Axtara,\" the queen said, still smiling. \"Politeness never hurts, but as a guest in my home we may forgo some of the formalities. Just for an evening. Will your room need anything?\"\n\n\"I may not fit in the bed, your highness.\"\n\nThe queen cocked her head to one side.\n\n\"I'm sorry...\" Axtara stammered. \"I'm just... I do not quite know what to call you instead.\" I... I don't even know if I know her name. Surely Mia has mentioned it!? She could feel her tail twitching behind her, her wings starting to shift. She's Queen Elnacier... wife of King Adrick Elnacier, and...!?\n\n\"You can just call me 'Majesty,' Axtara,\" the queen said, her words stopping the runaway thoughts.\n\n\"Your majesty?\" she asked, puzzled.\n\nTo her surprise, the queen shook her head, a smile on her face as if she were laughing at some hidden joke. \"No, just 'Majesty.'\"\n\n\"Majesty?\" It felt... strange, to say the title without its honorific. \"But, if I may be forward, why?\"\n\nThere was no mistaking the slight chuckle the queen failed to hide. \"Because that is my name, Axtara. Majesty. My father's idea of a joke, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Axtara said, pulling back slightly. \"So at the dinner, when King Elnacier would call you 'Majesty,' or when I met you in the square...?\"\n\n\"That's my name,\" the queen said, and shrugged suddenly, the motion reminding Axtara quite a bit of Mia. \"I was born Majesty Altenyvia. Now Majesty Elnacier, by marriage.\" The queen paused for a moment. \"You didn't know, did you?\"\n\n\"I...\" Her scales felt hot and flushed. \"I did not,\" she admitted. \"I saw 'Majesty' on my reports and\u2014\"\n\n\"Say no more,\" the queen said, shaking her head slightly. \"My father would be thrilled to hear that it led to another confused meeting.\" She paused for a moment, then spoke again. \"You may, for this evening, refer to me by my name. Politeness over formality. Now, Axtara, do you have any requirements we must know about for your room?\"\n\n\"The bed might be too small? I'm afraid I don't actually own a bed of my own. A cushion on a floor is more traditional, and more comfortable, but if a bed is large and sturdy enough, it may work.\"\n\n\"I will see if it appears suitable,\" the queen\u2014Majesty\u2014replied. \"You just continue to dry off. If you need more towels, don't hesitate to call for someone. I'm sure we have more. Mia will be along before long.\"\n\n\"Thank you... your Majesty.\"\n\nThe queen smiled. \"Decent wordplay, but you'll have to be more original than that to catch me by surprise. Now, towel off. I'll see that your room is satisfactory.\" With that, she turned and strode away.\n\nShould I have told her that it was a slip of the tongue, and I just went with it? Axtara wondered as she continued to rub over her scales, setting one soaked item of cloth aside and picking up the next. I wasn't trying to be clever.\n\nMajesty. She could see the name in her reports now. And she could also remember herself simply skimming past it and assuming that it was a formal reference to the queen.\n\nWho names their child Majesty? Clearly her father, as she said, but why? Was it high hopes? A joke? Did they lose a bet?\n\nThen again, she thought, setting aside a second cloth\u2014this one damp rather than soaked through\u2014and picking up a third, twisting in a most unladylike manner as she wiped it over her back. She did become a queen. Perhaps her father's high hopes were not misplaced.\n\nShe could hear someone coming. Someone... young.\n\n\"Dragon! Dragon!\"\n\nThat sounds familiar, Axtara thought, untwisting herself and giving her wings a quick flick. They were still damp, but no longer dripping. Simply keeping them a little spread would help them dry. A moment later, two familiar figures appeared around the nearest doorway, one of them holding the other. The smaller figure, the one being held, immediately stretched her arms towards Axtara.\n\n\"Dragon! Dragon!\" The youngest princess' fingers opened and closed with every syllable.\n\n\"No, Ati, that's Axtara,\" Mia said, shifting her younger sister in her arms as the young girl began to kick with excitement. \"Axtara.\" She said it again, drawing the word out.\n\n\"Ax-ta-rah!\" Atavir\u2014if she was remembering the princess' name properly\u2014immediately repeated with a giggle. \"Wanna pet Ax-ta-rah!\"\n\n\"One again, she's not a pet, Ati, she's a guest,\" Mia said, frowning at her sister and then looking up at Axtara. \"Hello Axtara. Did your meeting in Overhill go well?\"\n\n\"It did,\" Axtara answered, for the moment ignoring the younger princess' squirming to get to her. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"Well, you flew here rather than heading straight home despite the storm,\" Mia said, grinning as she shifted the bundle of energy in her arms. \"Ati, stop. She's a friend. Anyway, for that, it must have been good... or so bad you needed to talk about it.\"\n\n\"It's the first,\" Axtara said with a smile. \"And yes, I did want to tell you about it. You're my friend.\"\n\nA friend dealing with a bouncing, heavy, energetic younger sister, she noted as the youngest princess let out another cry of \"I wanna pet Ax-ta-rah.\"\n\nAxtara leaned forward, the young princess shrinking back only slightly as the object of her interest neared. \"Princess Ativar,\" she said, smiling as the girl's eyes went wide. \"I would not like to be petted. But I would be all right with a hug. Would you like to give me a hug?\" Still wide-eyed, the little girl nodded.\n\n\"Well, I would enjoy a hug,\" Axtara continued, pulling her head back. \"I'm a little big for it, but...\"\n\nMia set the young princess down. The girl took three quick steps, then slowed.\n\n\"Here.\" Axtara moved her right foreleg forward. \"Hug?\" The princess took a few more slow, cautious steps, glancing back at Mia before lunging forward and wrapping her arms around the limb with an excited squeal.\n\n\"She's gonna either ask to see your wings next, or for R-I-D-E-S,\" Mia said, shaking her head slightly as Ativar let out an excited giggle. \"So, what was the news? You got the loan?\"\n\n\"I made the loan!\" Axtara said, almost letting out an excited squeal of her own. Ativar let out an excited shriek as Axtara stepped forward, carrying the girl along atop her foreclaws so that she could give Mia an excited hug with her other foreleg. \"A big one!\"\n\n\"How big!\" Mia asked as she wrapped her arms around Axtara's neck. \"And what for? Congratulations!\"\n\n\"Fairly big. About a hundred and fifty bars.\" Mia's eyes widened. \"I'll be writing up letters of credit for their order as soon as I can.\"\n\n\"That's amazing! Ati, no.\" Mia let go of Axtara, stepping back and then bending down to try and catch her sister, who was attempting to climb up Axtara's foreleg.\n\n\"It's fine,\" Axtara said as the princess slipped back down with a giggle. \"She's doing no harm there.\"\n\n\"Well, all right,\" Mia said, though there was a look to her eyes that said \"If you're sure?\" \"Can you say what the loan was for?\"\n\n\"A greenhouse. No need for secrecy that I know of. I gather most who live there have heard of the project, since I was told they'd been working on it for several years.\" For a moment she considered mentioning the \"test\" that Elden Moon had given her, but decided that there was no need. That can stay between myself and Elden Moon.\n\n\"A greenhouse? For keeping crops warm?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" On her limb, Ativar slid down once more with a peal of laughter. \"So they can grow crops not acclimated for here.\"\n\n\"Like oranges?\" There was no mistaking the hope in Mia's voice.\n\n\"I suppose. Maybe. I don't know.\"\n\n\"You should suggest it to them. Or maybe I could! I could make an official visit\u2014\"\n\n\"Wouldn't that be an abuse of your standing as princess?\"\n\nMia paused, then frowned. \"I suppose so. You'll suggest it though, won't you?\"\n\n\"I could,\" Axtara said with a smile. \"I can't guarantee anything, though. They may have plans of their own. Or it may not work. Besides, I can always order more orange tea. And I'm not out yet. Though if you keep making it the only tea you drink when you visit, I will be, and long before I get any to replace it.\"\n\n\"Oh fine,\" Mia said, blowing a stray strand of hair out of her face. \"I'll try some of the others next time. It's just so good. Anyway, are you dry?\"\n\n\"I could stand to sit by a fire for a moment, but otherwise yes,\" Axtara answered.\n\n\"Well, dinner's soon, and you're staying, so we may as well go there.\" Mia bent to pick up Ativar, and Axtara shook her head.\n\n\"Leave her,\" she said, looking down at the excited princess, who had managed to make it to her elbow this time before slipping and sliding back down to her claws, excitedly stamping her feet atop Axtara's paw. \"She'll be fine there as I walk.\" She took a step forward, in the direction of the main hall, and was rewarded with a sudden tight grip around her foreleg, as well as an excited, delighted shriek at the movement. \"The main hall?\"\n\n\"Likely so,\" Mia replied. \"Since you'll be joining us.\" She started forward and Axtara followed, excited laughs and cries coming from her foreleg with every step. \"We were planning to eat in one of the small rooms, but I don't think there'd be room enough for all of us now.\"\n\n\"Do you usually eat in the smaller rooms?\" Axtara asked as Mia threw open the doors to the main hall. It wasn't quite identical to the last time they'd seen it, lacking some of the chairs and one of the longer tables, but it was still well lit, and there was a fire going in the fireplace. Mia, thankfully, headed toward it.\n\n\"Not always,\" Mia said. \"But father and Uncle Fen are both gone for a few days, along with some of the staff. So we're not quite so many.\"\n\n\"You father and your uncle? Where did they go?\" Axtara asked, lifting her foreleg a little higher, much to Ativar's delight.\n\n\"Father and some of the staff went hunting. I almost went with him, but I had a few duties here I hadn't quite completed yet, so mother wouldn't let me go. Given the storm, I don't mind too much. Father will love it, though. He always does, even if he's wet, cold, and miserable.\" She said the words with a smile, no malice in her tone. Almost enough that it was plausible that she too would enjoy being out in the same conditions, as long as she was hunting.\n\n\"Uncle Fen didn't go with him, though,\" Mia continued, taking a seat near the fire. \"He's out on a tax run. Early. He wouldn't say why. Probably getting ready to pay for that bridge we need to rebuild.\"\n\n\"Do you know when he'll be back?\" Axtara asked, settling on her belly. Ativar let out a quiet \"aww\" as her perch tilted and then ceased being something she could climb, but quickly changed her tune once she realized Axtara's shoulder was now within possible reach. And let out a happy gasp of amazement as Axtara spread her wings.\n\n\"Helping them dry,\" Axtara said, nodding in the direction of the fire as Mia gave her a curious look. \"So, your uncle?\"\n\nMia shrugged. \"A few days perhaps. Maybe a week. Depends on how many people he visits, how many taxes he gathers, and what form they're in. Why?\"\n\n\"I wanted to ask him about some taxes, actually,\" Axtara said. \"But it'll keep until he returns.\" The warmth of her fire felt good on her wings, and she stretched them a little further, soaking in the heat.\n\n\"Worried you missed something?\" Mia asked. Ativar made it almost to the shoulder and then lost her grip with a laugh.\n\n\"No,\" Axtara said. \"I just wanted to ask about something for a few of my clients.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Mia said, taking the hint for what it was. \"So, two loans now?\"\n\n\"Two,\" Axtara said, grinning with pride as she began to speak. \"And with luck and some more hard work, more to come.\"\n\n\"So,\" Mia said, smiling. \"How'd it go down? Did you have to convince them?\"\n\n\"Her,\" Axtara said. \"And yes, there was a little convincing.\" She continued to speak as Mia's younger sister played with her claws and while the rain and wind beat against the roof of the hall, a constant, steady, lashing drum to their conversation. They continued to talk as the dinner arrived, stories mixing with the rest of the king's house and moving away from her bank, but always rolling, always flowing.\n\nIt felt like home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Uneasy Bonds",
                "text": "The next week passed so quickly it might as well have been traveled by train. Her overnight stay at the king's manor had gone well, if run a little late into the night as she and Mia had talked for several hours over several games of Stakes. Each of which Mia had roundly won. It had been enough that Axtara had run a little behind the following day, flying through the broken storm to her home and quickly turning about to head back to the local church so that she could join their services.\n\nShe'd still been late, but only to the first. As old and small as the church was, it seemed, there were two services each rest day. And, to her surprise, they hosted a wide range of beliefs, even in the same meeting. Unusual... but likely what needed to be done for such a place to band together. Important elements sacred to each were respected and carried out, and though none of them matched her own particular traditions exactly, she'd been welcomed all the same. Occasionally grudgingly, but welcomed still.\n\nThe next day had brought even more work, as had the days following. Letters of credit to be delivered to the Moons. Several new individuals who wished to open savings accounts. Two letters inquiring about loans. A third letter telling her she was a demon spawn and should leave the kingdom for good.\n\nThat one she roasted with her own flame, just for good measure.\n\nInterest had continued to increase steadily over the next few days. Nothing like what she'd seen at her uncle's bank, but still more than she'd seen so far. It seemed that word was spreading, slowly but surely, the kingdom reacting to her presence. By halfway through the week, she'd met with over a dozen individuals interested in opening a savings account and opened about half that number, the others curious but not sold on the idea. Two had been downright confused, seemingly convinced by rumor that money placed her in vault would no longer be taxed by the king. She'd swiftly corrected their misconceptions.\n\nShe'd entered into two more loan agreements as well, both for much smaller amounts than what Waterlily or Elden Moon had taken, but nothing to ignore either. A few coins each month was still a few coins. And enough of them would make a bar.\n\nMia found time to come for tea a few times as well, and they'd shared the jam Elden Moon had given Axtara atop bread from the local bakery. The full harvest season was accelerating, however, leaving Mia with more responsibilities around the kingdom as everyone grew busier and busier preparing for the latter part of the fall season and the coming winter.\n\nThe air grew colder too, the leaves on what few trees bore them growing soft and golden. The first frost, some of her clients assured her, was not far off. For some, it was a good sign, as they'd soon be able to plant their winter wheat. For others, it was a sign of impending work, of clearing the fields for good and preparing them for the winter and the coming year.\n\nOne of those preparations gave her another loan as one farmer ordered a bushel of seeds from somewhere in the core kingdoms. A exotic type of plant that they hoped would thrive, one they'd only read about in books the local priest used to teach writing.\n\nThe assurance that she could pay Axtara back for the bar or so she'd borrowed over the next year had given her the nudge she needed to take the leap of faith. Even if the bushel of seeds amounted to failure, the crop performing below hoped-for expectations in some way, she was more than financially capable of paying back a single bar over the course of a year. And if the crop proved a success, she'd be able to pay it off all the sooner.\n\nCoin by coin, she was moving closer to her goal of four bars a month. With each click and clack of the beads on her abacus whizzing back and forth, with each piece of low-grade paper she scrawled equations on and then discarded, and each potential client she met with, her goal came closer. First, four bars. And then?\n\nProfit. Every bar past four was a bar she could save, a bar she could reinvest, or a bar she could use to expand.\n\nAfter her discussion with Elden Moon, she adopted a new strategy once the sun had gone down. Twice during the week, first as an experiment and at the end of the week as an extension of introducing herself to Elnacier, she'd gone to the local inn, a gathering place of sorts where a number of people from the town congregated to talk and maybe share a drink or two. Whether or not it turned a profit, she wasn't sure, but it was still open all the same.\n\nThen again, given how the kingdom operated, there was a chance Elnacier himself financed the inn as he did the courier service. A communal gathering hall. There were stranger things.\n\nEither way, the first night she'd taken her etching material with her and made her way through the front door, unsure of what to expect. The room had quieted as she'd entered, right up until Waterlily had greeted her by name and with a wave. While he hadn't asked her to join his table, his welcome greeting had shattered the frigid silence that had settled over the crowd, and outside of finding her own place to sit and sketch, seemed to be a signal to the crowd to treat her as one of their own.\n\nWhich had meant questions. Questions about business, questions about banking, even questions about taxes of all things. Apparently, Fendall's tax collection that year was earlier than expected for most of the citizens, many of whom were now wondering if he'd make another round during the customary time after winter, or if they were going to sneak through the winter tax free, only for Fendall to come calling the next season.\n\nOr maybe, she'd thought, my arrival got things turning that needed tax revenue immediately. She kept the thought to herself, however, rather than add it to the rumor mill already churning. Letting people know that it was possible her arrival had kicked off the early tax spree so that the kingdom could prepare itself for a business influx, even as a theory, wasn't a rumor she wanted a claw in spreading.\n\nThe dates had lined up though, a thought that had stuck with her as she'd returned home, examined more financial records through the week, and even gone back to socialize a bit more on other nights. Her second evening at the inn was more social than the first\u2014though thankfully not on the same topics as before. The crowd, while not entirely warmed to her, was more open to discussing local goings-on with her. It was only polite social interaction, but it was still something.\n\nHitting the inn at least once a week was an ideal plan, at least for the time being. The more interaction the people of Elnacier had with her, the more they'd come to see her as, if not one of their own, then close to it.\n\nEven the one individual she'd spotted there that she was fairly certain she'd last seen wielding a frying pan battered into an axe. Both at the inn, and at the church the next day.\n\nBoth times they'd kept their distance. Which was fine as far as she was concerned. Besides, there had been more important news she'd garnered at the service.\n\nFendall has returned to Elnacier, Axtara thought, her claws making rapid clicks as she ran through another set of calculations on her abacus. Returned from his latest tax collection. He'd driven right past the church as everyone was leaving the service, in a hurry from the look of it, heading back to the manor. Even Mia, who had attended the service with her family, couldn't explain it.\n\nShe noted the figures she was working on, checking them against the numbers she'd been given during her meeting with another potential client. Not many numbers, she thought, making a few annotations to what she'd copied down. But in a place like this, sometimes I suppose close enough is enough to get by.\n\nExcept where the taxes were concerned... and once more her mind slipped to Fendall. I've seen at least six or seven different accounts of how much is given in taxes here now, in addition to my own. How can this kingdom have the issues with money it does with the taxes being what they are? Surely not everyone but those who have spoken with me is too poor to matt\u2014\n\nWait, which numbers am I supposed to be adding again? Axtara stared down at the column she'd been inking, suddenly confused. These two can't\u2014There. She let out a sigh. I was supposed to subtract those numbers, not add them together.\n\nA novice mistake. And her second of the day. She let out another sigh as she retraced her steps, scrawled out several lines of numbers, and reset her abacus. Once more the steady click of glass beads echoed through her front room as she started from her first mistake.\n\nIt just doesn't add up, she thought as she began working through the calculations once more. Mia's father told me they barely make enough as is. And yes, they do run quite a few services for the kingdom, the courier service and keeping the roads up to date being the largest. And the bridges.\n\nAdd that. Carry the four...\n\nBut why do the tax collection now? I suppose they want to get that bridge finished before the full harvest season, but even then could it really be putting them that close to their edge of their budget? The kingdom has to save for events like that, right? Most kingdoms do.\n\nThen again, there was that comment Mia's father made about this kingdom running close to the edge. But with the numbers I've seen here...\n\nNumbers I've seen here... Her mind caught up with what she'd been scratching, and with an angry growl she put a slash of ink through her latest number.\n\nYou did it again, she thought, wiping her talon clean. You were supposed to be doing the numbers, and instead you got thinking about different numbers. Numbers for a kingdom you wouldn't dare be a backer of.\n\nSo why can't I stop thinking about them? Am I greedy? A poor banker?\n\nOr is it just because they're not adding up in my head and I can't stop thinking about it?\n\nShe leaned back, pulling her eyes away from her latest bout of mistaken calculations and checking her clock. A few hours past mid-day. Maybe I should take a break. Clear my head.\n\nStretching each leg one after another, followed by her wings, she rose from behind the desk and padded back into her kitchen, eyeing the teakettle sitting atop her stove before deciding to leave it as it was.\n\nThough if I did want tea, it wouldn't hurt to start an actual fire. The days were getting colder with the change in season, and as insulated as her new home was... without any source of heat save herself it wasn't going to stay too warm once the weather truly became frosty. And while she could live in such cold, it wasn't fun.\n\n\"And I suppose my clients would complain. Hiking up through the snow only to be just as cold indoors as out...\"\n\nActually, I should wonder about that. Majesty used that rug she hated for those who arrived wet or muddy. Should I have towels on hand for those that... \"And I'm distracting myself again,\" she said, shaking her head. Not that towels weren't a bad idea, but...\n\n\"You should be thinking about your clients,\" she said aloud. But there was an unspoken thought tailing right behind it. And my clients live in a kingdom where the numbers seem off.\n\nProbably just because you've not seen them. It's a big kingdom. For the number of people that live in it, anyway. And not all the taxes are in coin. There are plenty in wood, food, fur, leather, or trade. As is normal for a small place. And while people would just as willingly work for grain sometimes as coin, it would make balancing a budget a bit more complex.\n\nStill, most of the financial records I've seen are for people who have coin to spare. Maybe that has something to do with it?\n\nShe scowled. I shouldn't be thinking about this at all. And yet...\n\n\"And yet I cannot get it out of my head,\" she said with a groan, sagging slightly. She moved back into the front room, staring down at the numbers on the vellum her new potential client had given her. They didn't want much, just some coin to pay for the labor of building a new chimney on their home as soon as the next spring started.\n\nThere, dutifully scratched into the vellum, was the value of the taxes the family had paid after the previous harvest season had concluded. It wasn't much. A half a bar, maybe. They didn't have much to start with.\n\nBut it was the meaning behind the number that bothered her. Even if every household in Elnacier was only paying half a bar in taxes, that's still at least... What? Two hundred homes? Maybe three-hundred? That's a hundred or more bars just from Elnacier.\n\nNot a large amount. But there are other towns as well. And that's assuming half a bar. Plenty of people are paying more than half a bar each year. Making that tax income even higher... And why am I thinking about this?\n\nShe let out a sigh. Because it doesn't add up in your head, and you know it. Even if the whole kingdom were only paying a half a bar annually, and each town were half the size again of Elnacier, that'd still be over four hundred bars annually.\n\nGranted, each member of the staff at the manor has to be paid, and that would put a decent dent in that number, but... Wood for the manor's fires comes from taxes. Food as well...\n\nBut I can live off of four bars a month, and I'm a dragon! Axtara pulled her eyes away from the parchment she'd been given, back to the clock on the wall, the pendulum swinging back and forth. My dietary needs are a bit higher than a single member of the staff.\n\nAnd I need to think about something else now. She forced herself to lie down at her desk again, to start the calculations over for a third time. Her claw made a faint scratching noise across the paper, her abacus hummed... Until she found her mind wandering once more, subtracting two numbers instead of adding them and ending up with a negative total.\n\n\"Oh in the\u2014\" She pulled her head back, letting out a growl at her own behavior. You simply cannot let this go, can you? \"The kingdom's account is not your own to balance, Axtara,\" she said aloud, thankful that in the privacy of her own home there was no one around to hear her chide herself. The last thing I need now is a rumor that I'm touched in the mind.\n\n\"Though I may as well be, as much as this question has seized on me,\" she added, giving her newest bungled numbers an accusatory stare. The cloth she used to wipe ink from her talons sat next to it, a highlight to her mistakes.\n\nI need to clear my head. Unfortunately, there was really only one way she could see herself doing that. I need to speak with Mia's uncle and get some reassurance.\n\nIt felt... wrong. Almost like she was doubting Mia and her family. But the numbers just don't make sense. Not from what I saw when I was getting ready to move to Elnacier.\n\nShe gathered her satchel quickly, stuck up the small sign in her window that said she was temporarily out on business and would return soon. Hopefully no one would come trudging up the road, see that she was out, and see themselves home.\n\nBut I have to know. She checked her satchel, making sure that she had everything she usually traveled with, capped the inkwell on her desk, and headed out the door. Cool fall air wrapped around her, probing at her scales like hungry beasts.\n\nElnacier is poor, but why? It shouldn't be! She leapt into the cold sky, the air hissing over her scales as she powered toward Elnacier. The taxes\u2014\n\nShe shook her head. Stop thinking about it. You're flying to see Fendall, and he'll have an answer of some kind.\n\nStill, it was hard to shake the lingering doubt and frustration that had goaded her this far. Elnacier's poverty felt out of place. Self-inflicted.\n\nDon't fly ahead of yourself, she cautioned. You're seeing the taxes in coin from those that can afford it, not those that trade in goods.\n\nStill a good amount of coin, however, some part of her suggested. She lashed her tail in annoyance at the thought.\n\nFendall will have answers. He's been in charge of the kingdom's finances ever since it was founded. He'll put a stop to this dumb mystery.\n\nShe tried to wipe the scowl from her face as Elnacier neared, but it wasn't easy. And the last thing she wanted was for someone to think the scowl was for them. Most of it was for her.\n\nShe soared over the city, a few folks looking up as her shadow passed by, but some not even bothering anymore. I suppose that's as good a sign as any that I'm beginning to fit in here, at least as far as the locals see it. One even waved, and she responded with a customary tip of the wings, sliding slightly in the sky.\n\nThen the city was gone, and she was flying up past the road to the manor, her course taking her toward the side, around the manor grounds. With luck, any staff that saw her would note that she wasn't directing her flight toward the house, and therefore wouldn't come to the door expecting her to arrive.\n\nWith luck. It couldn't be helped, however, not with the path to Fendall's home winding along the side of the grounds before vanishing between the trees. Tall pines that were definitely too close together to comfortably fly through. She dropped into a steady glide, aiming for the point just before the worn road vanished into the trees.\n\nI hope he's home. She had to beat her wings the last few feet, slowing herself as the ground neared. Plant life swirled and shifted in response to her arrival, giving way as her claws touched earth. If he is not, I expect this question will continue to haunt me.\n\nOr perhaps not, she thought, shooting a backwards glance at the manor before starting down the road to Fendall's home. It wasn't the most well-maintained road, less a proper conveyance and more a worn trail through the forest, ruts worn by a decade or more of a wagon's passage between the trees. Here and there were signs that someone had made the passage a bit easier to pass through\u2014an old, worn nub of a root that still bore the marks of an ax where it had been chopped off and dug out so that it wouldn't bar passage to a wagon's wheels, or stubs of old, low-hanging branches that had long been broken away, leaving exposed wood that had since gone black with age.\n\nOne of Axtara's forepaws slipped, her wings spreading reflexively as it sank deep into one of the wagon ruts. She pulled it out, glancing down at the deep rut and then eyeing the mossy track next to it.\n\nDeep ruts, she thought. Whatever wagon comes through here, it is carrying heavy loads.\n\nThen again, that made sense. If Fendall is in charge of the kingdom's finances... She slowed, her head pulling up as an idea occurred to her. Surely he doesn't keep all the taxes he collects in his home, does he?\n\nThen again, where would it be kept? I have no idea, she thought as she moved through the trees. From ahead she could smell woodsmoke. Hopefully it meant Fendall was home. I suppose anyone who was thinking of robbing the kingdom would happen to assume that the funds were kept in the manor the king dwelled in. And didn't Mia say that her father gave Fendall his position because he'd always managed the money while they'd been adventurers?\n\nMaybe there's more to that idea than I thought. Ahead of her a small cabin came into view between the trees, a steep-roofed edifice that almost blended in with the woods around it. Smoke twisted lazily from a stone chimney, winding through pine branches that had grown over and above the house itself. There were only a few windows, and a small front door atop a small wooden porch, but she could see light glimmering through the windows. Someone had lit lamps.\n\nThe wagon tracks, meanwhile, bent past the front of the cabin, coming to a stop under a nearby shelter with its walls open to the elements. There was no sign of a horse, though she could smell faint traces of one.\n\nThe manor has a stable, with staff to take care of them, Axtara thought as she eyed the wagon. And it's not too much of a walk, I suppose.\n\nShe stepped forward into the clearing, heading for the front door. Around her, the forest almost seemed silent, like it was waiting for her to make a move.\n\nI suppose if he likes his privacy, such a dwelling would be preferable. The wooden porch before the door let out a faint, wet creak as she stepped on it, and she glanced down. The boards were wet and slick, but they looked thick enough.\n\nBreaking through someone's porch would be perhaps one of the worst possible first meetings. Short perhaps of accidentally breathing fire on them while saying hello. But while the porch creaked once she'd placed both her forelimbs upon it, it didn't break, and she took a deep breath as she checked for signs of a knocker or bell.\n\nThere was none. Simply a dull, wooden door, aged and dirty. Forming a fist with one set of claws, she reached out and gave it a polite knock.\n\nNothing. She waited, counting away the seconds and glancing toward one of the small windows for any sign of the light flickering more than a lamp normally would, or perhaps a face peering out at her.\n\nShe saw neither. The seconds ticked on, a silent countdown in her head. She waited until she reached twenty, then lifted her claws and knocked again.\n\nThis time there was a response. \"Yes!\" someone shouted from inside the cabin. \"I'm coming, I'm coming.\" There was a faint thump from inside, as if someone had shoved a bit of furniture aside. A moment later she heard footsteps nearing the door, and then it was yanked open with a sudden abruptness.\n\n\"Yes?\" Fendall said, already speaking. \"What is...?\" His eyes met hers, and his voice trailed off into silence.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said after a few seconds, his already harried looking expression taking on a sour tone. \"You. What do you want?\"\n\n\"Minister\u2014\" She had to think quickly to recall his last name. \"\u2014Derin.\" Hopefully he hadn't noticed the slight pause. \"I was wondering if I could speak to you about the taxes.\"\n\nFendall's sour expression didn't fade, one hand still on the door latch. \"What's to talk about? You're paid up through the year. You're good. Go home.\"\n\n\"No no no,\" she said quickly as he began to shut the door. \"I'm not here about my taxes. I'm here to ask about the kingdom's taxes.\"\n\nFendall's sour look deepened, moving toward an actual scowl. \"Why? What business is it of yours?\"\n\n\"Because part of my due diligence with my bank when giving out a loan is looking at the financial state of potential clients,\" Axtara said, watching as Fendall's scowl deepened. \"And I was wondering if perhaps you might\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not going to tell you who's paid their tax to the king and who's not,\" Fendall said. He was definitely scowling now. \"That's between them and the king.\"\n\n\"I'm not trying to get that information from you, minister,\" she said quickly. \"And if I've offended or upset you in some form, I apologize.\" She inclined her head slightly as a measure of respect. \"My clients have been as helpful as they can, but some of the numbers I've been working with have been, to put it politely, curious.\"\n\n\"Not my problem,\" Fendall replied, still scowling. Apparently her apology and appeasement had accomplished little, if anything at all. \"You're the banker, and they're your clients.\"\n\n\"Yes well,\" she said before he could turn once more. \"Be that as it may, Waterlily\u2014\"\n\n\"Has paid his taxes on time, has as long as we've been a kingdom like a good citizen should,\" Fendall said, cutting her off. \"And I don't appreciate you coming here to try and insinuate otherwise.\"\n\nShe jerked back. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"You heard me,\" the minister replied. \"I don't appreciate you coming here trying to make trouble. Especially for someone like Craglily.\" Fendall took a step forward, into the doorway. \"He's a good man. Works hard, pays his taxes every year, on time. He doesn't need someone like you trying to cheat him.\"\n\n\"I'm not\u2014\" she began, even as she felt a fire of indignation rise within her chest.\n\n\"Save it!\" Fendall snapped, cutting her off. \"I warned you when you arrived, Axtara, that this kingdom wouldn't have what you sought. And now you're desperate enough to get it that you're coming to try and find out how hard you can squeeze those that owe you, to show your true colors. I suppose those rumors are true after all\u2014\"\n\n\"Minister Derin!\" Her roar snapped him back as the fire building in her chest surged. Both literally and metaphorically. \"How dare you speak to me in such a manner? I have nothing but the best interests of my clients in mind. To accuse me of such simply because I come to you with questions about the kingdom's finances, worse to slander my name based off of nothing but rumor and conjecture\u2014\"\n\n\"You're a dragon!\" Fendall shouted back. \"Money is what matters to you, not people! And I refuse to give you any information you can use to squeeze more out of them than you already have!\"\n\n\"I have not squeezed a single coin from the people of this kingdom!\" She could see heat shimmering from her jaws now, rippling in the air as her innate magic surged. \"I merely wanted to ask why the numbers you gave at the king's dinner were different from the numbers Wat gave me!\"\n\nFor a brief moment, the mask of anger on Fendall's face slipped, replaced by another expression she couldn't quite quantify, as it seemed almost a mix of several indecipherable moods.\n\nThen the anger was back, the minister narrowing his eyes as he looked up at her. \"I don't know. Maybe he's lying to you in order to get a better loan. Or maybe I pulled the number I gave you from my own backside, and it's about worth as much as the contents of my muckhouse!\"\n\n\"Either way,\" Fendall continued without pause. \"It's not my place to simply tell you everything you want to know about the taxes in this kingdom. Others' taxes are their own business. You want to know about them, then ask them, but don't expect me to do your job.\" He stepped back, still glaring up at her. \"Good day. Don't make me summon the guards.\"\n\nThe front door slammed shut with enough force that the windows shook, the lights behind them glimmering through the glass. Axtara stepped back, heat pouring from her nostrils as she let out a tight, controlled breath.\n\nThat arrogant, stuck up, bigoted\u2014! She let out a long, low growl, narrowing her eyes at the front of the cabin.\n\nI could let out a nice, slow, steady burst of flame, she thought, eying the porch. The wood's wet, but that wouldn't save it. And... you've faced much ruder people at your uncle's bank.\n\nBut that had been different. Even when those insults had been spoken to her, they'd still been against her uncle's bank in the end. She'd been able to distance them.\n\nHere, they'd been aimed at her, and her alone.\n\nShe spun, baring her teeth as she stalked away through the woods, following the path. The heat in her chest\u2014both fire and feeling\u2014begged to be let free, though how she wasn't quite sure.\n\nShe just knew it wouldn't be good for her image at all to be seen doing so in the back grounds of the king's manor. The moment the branches above her began to thin she sprang into the air, pumping her wings hard to gain altitude.\n\nOnly once she was aloft, cutting through the air as she flew back toward her home, did she let some of that heat escape, a growl leaking past her lips along with wisps of flame.\n\nHow dare he!? Axtara thought. I have been nothing but congenial to him and to everyone in this kingdom! I only wanted to ask why the numbers for the taxes seemed so odd!\n\nAnd... she thought after a moment. I suppose I have my answer. He gave me a fake number. He made it up because it was private, and as a minister of finance for the kingdom he knew it wasn't appropriate to share.\n\nShe scowled, a few more wisps of flame leaking past her lips. That still doesn't excuse his unprofessional demeanor. The nerve of him leaping to such conclusions and then chastising me for them without a shred of proof.\n\nShe was far enough away now, and the day was still early enough that no one would see the light from her flames. She exhaled spewing fire into the air in a hot, burning spray where it could dissipate harmlessly. As soon as her breath was spent she inhaled and breathed out again, looping herself to one side so that she didn't accidentally fly through her own flames. They wouldn't hurt her, but her satchel was another matter.\n\nHer second burst spent, she panted slightly, catching her breath. Letting the two bursts of flame free had helped her feel a little better, but Fendall's thoughtless comments still stung.\n\nWell, she thought as she angled her flight toward her home. At least now I'll be able to focus on checking that budget to see...\n\nHer home came into view ahead of her, and her thoughts trailed off. Someone was standing in front of the door.\n\nAfter I help this client, she thought, angling her wings for speed and rushing down toward the clearing. The figure turned as she began to bleed speed, eyes and mouth going wide as they watched her wings fan and then beat against her momentum.\n\nShe recognized the figure as she landed. Small of stature, young... It was one of the boys from the courier service. The younger of the pair, the one who'd been there the day she'd made her deal.\n\n\"My apologies,\" she said as the youth came rushing down the road at her, eyes wide. \"I was out dealing with... some business. You have a letter for me?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" the boy said, skidding to a halt in front of her and giving her an awkward bow. \"Two, actually. One all the way from the kingdoms!\"\n\nShe smiled down at him, only remembering to cover her teeth when the boy flinched. \"Wonderful news,\" she said, opening her satchel and reaching in for a coin. \"And much needed. Thank you for bringing them to me, ah...?\"\n\n\"They're right here, ma'am,\" the boy said, missing the hint of her hunting for his name and instead proudly pulling an envelope and a bit of folded parchment, both sealed with wax, from a satchel of his own. \"Here you are.\" He held them up.\n\n\"And here you are,\" Axtara replied, dropping a coin into his hand as she took the letters.\n\nThe youth looked down at his palm. \"Just one?\"\n\n\"That was the deal,\" she said, looking down at him. \"One coin per delivery. Not per letter.\"\n\n\"Oh. Right. Goodbye ma'am.\"\n\n\"Goodbye. And thank you.\" But the youth was already running around her and down the road, back towards Elnacier.\n\nWell, Axtara thought, turning her attention back to her new letters. He's got his coin. Let me see who has\u2014Oh! She recognized the writing on the envelope, as well as the seal, the flames still roaring in her chest sweeping away under a wave of excitement. A letter from mother and father! I must read it immediately! She started for the door, glancing at the other message as she went. I must\u2014\n\nShe paused, then came to a stop. The other letter was from Elden Moon. And written on the front, beneath Axtara's name, was a single word: Urgent.\n\nElden wouldn't exaggerate... So I suppose... She slipped her claw beneath the wax seal, breaking it and unfolding the bit of parchment.\n\nHer eyes skimmed over the message, her heart sinking. It was short and brief, but she could feel a gnawing hole in her gut as soon as she read it.\n\nCome as soon as possible, the letter read. Urgent financial development.\n\nIt had simply been signed \"Elden Moon.\"\n\nI could make it to Overhill by evening, Axtara thought, glancing up at the sky. Then her eyes slipped down to her parent's letter.\n\nIt will keep. I don't want to lose that loan. She slipped her parent's letter into her satchel and headed for the front door with a sigh. A minute later, a hastily swallowed chunk of meat in her stomach, she took the sky again, turning towards Overhill, worry trailing in her wake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Hidden Figures",
                "text": "It wasn't quite evening by the time she arrived in Overhill, the urgency of Elden's message having lent Axtara's flight swiftness, but it was drawing close. The sun had neared the western edge of the sky, not yet enough to start tinting it with hints of vivid color, but close enough that it would easily be dark by the time she returned to Elnacier.\n\nWith these clouds, flying after dark could be... difficult, Axtara thought as she flew over the outer edges of Overhill. Already she could see the changes from her last visit; entire fields harvested, their crops gathered into small clumps in the fields or gone entirely, vanished into a barn somewhere. Some fields were still being harvested, and she caught sight of a few people looking up as she passed overhead, watching before going back to tending to whatever harvest there was left.\n\nHalf the town must be out in those fields, Axtara thought as she angled toward the city's central hill, aiming for the middle of the three windmills. All, she noted, seemed to be bustling with activity. Wheat? Or does that need to dry further before it is ground into flour? Can they just send it right to mill?\n\nThen again, it couldn't be the only crop the townsfolk had that could be processed at a mill. Right?\n\nShe shook her head. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I suppose if it's ever important, I'll ask.\n\nStill, there was activity around the mills, and plenty of it. But as she traced the path of one wagon train with her eyes, she could see that it came not from a field, but from a large, long barn. A barn with an almost equal amount of traffic heading in the other end.\n\nTaking the previous harvest to grind at the mill, while bringing in the last of the season? It looked right, but only as an educated guess.\n\nAt the very least, however, it was keeping her mind off of speculating what could be behind Elden's message. Any time her mind slipped to the parchment she'd received, she could feel her heart rate begin to rise, along with her fire.\n\nCome as soon as possible. Urgent financial development.\n\nFirst my meeting with Fendall sours further, and now this, she thought as she climbed over the central hill, making sure to give the windmills plenty of space. A wise decision, given the number of nervous looks the people below were giving her as she got close to them.\n\nProbably wondering if I'm going to set them alight with my flame, thanks to those rumors. Rumors which it seemed Fendall had completely and wholeheartedly chosen to believe in.\n\nAnd he was nothing like that at the dinner, Axtara thought as she spotted the familiar looking Moon farmhouse. He questioned me, but he wasn't hostile. Was he merely hiding his suspicions to be polite?\n\nI should write uncle. The air swirled around her as she came in for a landing next to the Moon's large farmhouse. He faced more than his share of difficulties with his bank, especially in the early years after the Bad Days ended. Perhaps he could share some advice.\n\nOr at the very least aid me in putting my mind at ease, Axtara thought as she walked up to the door she'd used before. He worked through the struggles of opening his bank. Maybe he has words that will help me bear the discomfort.\n\nShe lifted her claws and knocked, the sound ringing out across the open yard and mixing with the distant sounds of farmers shouting and working. I knew that not everyone would accept me, but Fendall...\n\nHis words had hurt, even though she knew they weren't true in the slightest. I only went to see him because of the strangeness of the records I've been seeing.\n\nCould he have been right? Could everyone be claiming more taxes than they've paid? She shook her head and knocked again. What would they gain? Having more money than claimed so that they could pay their debts with greater ease, I suppose?\n\nWouldn't it be easier simply to lie about one's income at that point, rather than lie about the tax one paid to the king? It just wouldn't make sense to lie about how much you paid in taxes.\n\nShe was about to knock again, claws lifted in the air, when the sound of running feet caught her attention. From around the corner of the house came a young boy covered in filth, almost more dirt and mud than child.\n\n\"You're the Lady Axtara, aren't you?\" they asked as they slid to a halt. Axtara opened her mouth to reply, but before she could the boy was speaking again. \"Grammaw is on 'er way. She said to give 'er a minute or two.\" He paused again, but spoke up once more before Axtara could say anything. \"Can you really breathe fire?\"\n\nShe waited for a moment to see if he was going to speak again before replying. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Wow...\" The child's mouth opened and closed in a perfect circle. \"Can I see?\"\n\n\"You want me to breathe fire...\" she began.\n\nA nod. \"Yes!\"\n\n\"...next to a wooden farmhouse...\"\n\n\"Well...\"\n\n\"...and a bunch of flammable fields?\"\n\nAnother pause. \"Yes?\"\n\nWell, at least they're honest, Axtara thought, looking down at the child, who was staring up at her with what she assumed was a hopeful, wide-eyed look. It was hard to tell under all the muck. The eyes were really all she could see.\n\n\"Neel!\" Elden's voice was distant, carried on the wind, but it was unmistakably the matriarchs. \"Don't you dare run off!\"\n\n\"Excuse me, lady,\" the youth said quickly, their wide-eyes switching from wonder to the panic of a youth caught in dawdling. \"Gramma wants me back helping the harvest.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Axtara said, letting faint licks of flame spill out around her lips. The youth's eyes went even wider as they rose from their bow, their jaw dropping as they caught sight of the fire. Axtara lifted one scaled brow, winked, and then pursed her lips letting a tiny jet of flame out into the open air, only a few inches in length but more than enough to elicit a stunned gasp from the child.\n\n\"Neel!\" Elden's voice echoed again, with more volume, and the boy spun, rushing back the way they had came.\n\n\"Coming!\" they cried. Axtara let the flame vanish as they darted around the corner of the home, feet slapping against the ground. It hadn't hurt, though it definitely hadn't been what the boy had asked for or imagined.\n\nBut magic is magic. And breathing a giant ball of fire, as tempting as it sounded to release the knot of stress building in her insides, really would be a poor idea at the moment.\n\nShe heard Elden's approach long before the older woman arrived, and met her halfway, walking around the side of the home just in time to see her coming across one of the more recently harvested fields, hobbling along with her walking stick at a determined pace. There was another woman behind her, not nearly so old as Elden, but old enough to not have been considered a youth for some years. Like Elden, her body was lean and corded, painted by years of hard labor.\n\nThat would make a good etching, Axtara thought as the pair stepped out of the field, Elden waving her walking stick in greeting. On bronze, the two of them coming out of a field of wheat after a long day...\n\nShe filed the thought away as Elden neared. An idea for later, assuming Elden's news isn't that the loan is in peril, and she's going to contest the contract and just stop thinking already!\n\nInstead, she inclined her head, slowing to a stop as they neared one another. \"Elden,\" she said. \"I came as soon as I got your message.\"\n\n\"I figured you would,\" Elden said. \"And I apologize for the deception.\"\n\nWhat? \"Deception?\"\n\n\"I may not be entirely familiar with dragon expressions, but you look pretty worried to me, Axtara,\" Elden said. \"I am sorry to cause you worry, but I needed to speak with you.\"\n\n\"So... this isn't about the loan? Or your financial situation?\"\n\n\"No,\" Elden said with a quick shake of her head. \"And again, I apologize for causing you undue worry. But I needed to send you a message that would bring you to speak with me with urgency. It seemed the best choice.\"\n\n\"I... I'm sorry, but...\" Be polite. \"I'm afraid I don't understand.\"\n\nElden smiled. \"I learned something you needed to know. Something I didn't dare write in a message. Not with our courier service. So I needed something that, if it were read, wouldn't arise any ire.\"\n\n\"I...\" Subterfuge? \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"You will,\" Elden said, her face falling. \"You recall the rumors we spoke of? Well, I asked my family to keep their ears to the ground. See what they could find out.\" She motioned toward the woman standing at her side. \"This is my daughter by marriage, Hylda. And she... well, she found the source of your rumors. At least around here anyway.\"\n\n\"You did? Already?\" And this was important enough that you wouldn't write it in a message, and forced me to fly down here in a panic?\n\nHylda nodded. \"I did.\" Her accent was thick, like the fishermen from Easy Bay. \"It wasn't hard. They were in Overhill just a few days ago. Came to the pub, started talking in a corner. Didn't make a grand announcement, just... talked. Then started talking about you. Once they had an audience of quiet listeners.\"\n\n\"And once she told me,\" Elden replied. \"I knew I had to send word to you as quickly as possible. And considering how the message was going to travel to you, I decided to engage in a little subterfuge.\"\n\nThe nervous pit had returned to her insides. \"Why?\" Axtara asked. \"Who was it?\"\n\n\"Hylda?\" Elden turned to look at the woman. \"You were the one who listened.\"\n\n\"I did,\" Hylda said. \"Two nights, in two different places. And always they talked about you. I asked someone else, and they said he did the same at the places they visited. Always, you came up.\"\n\n\"You've made an enemy, Axtara,\" Elden said, scowling. \"No different than a jealous housewife gossiping rumor and lies about her neighbor as I see it, but you've made an enemy nonetheless.\"\n\n\"But who?\" She had to hold her question back to keep it from being a shout. \"Who? And why?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Hylda shrugged. \"I can't answer that for you. You would likely know better than I, Lady Axtara. But everyone knows who it is. Minister Fendall Derin, the tax collector.\"\n\nThe earth seemed to drop away beneath Axtara's feet. \"Fendall?\" How? Why? \"But... I... Why?\"\n\n\"Now you see what I needed to speak with you urgently but couldn't send word by a message,\" Elden said, her face stony. \"Minister Derin is well known around the kingdom, and the message I sent you would most likely have returned to Elnacier aboard his wagon. Since he knew we were dealing with you\u2014said as much when he came by, though he chose not to speak his vile rumors here, the coward\u2014\" She spat on the ground. \"I decided not to chance that he wouldn't see a message from me to you and take it upon himself to read it. Especially if he had orders from the king or queen\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Axtara said, shaking her head. \"I do not believe he did. You were right to bring this to my attention. Thank you. I understand now.\" The shock hadn't quite faded, but it was starting to make more sense. At least the who, not the why. That she still didn't understand. I made it quite clear\u2014at least so I believed\u2014that I had no interest in his job! Did he simply not believe me? \"I spoke with him today, before flying here, and he was incredibly rude, yet I couldn't fathom why, as I simply asked him a few questions about...\"\n\nHer words trailed off, thoughts inside her mind sliding into place as smoothly and soundly as the glass beads of her abacus when she completed a calculation. \"I know why,\" she said, pulling her head back in surprise. Then shock. Then anger. \"I know why,\" she said again, a faint growl underlining her words. Elden and Hylda's eyes had both widened at the sudden shift in her voice, and she forced it down.\n\n\"At least, I believe I know why,\" she said, looking down at the pair. And tugging her claws out of the earth where they'd dug in. Her wings she left spread for the moment. \"I only need to speak with someone as soon as I can.\" She bowed her head, bending slightly. \"Thank you, Elden and Hylda, for bringing this to my attention. If I'm right...\" She left the latter half of her sentence unsaid, stepping away and then hurtling herself into the air with as much force as she could manage, beating hard to climb into the sky.\n\nI don't want to be right, she thought as she turned for Elnacier, her wings powering up and down. I don't. But if I am...\n\nShe could feel the flames of anger burning in her chest. Then Fendall Derin will see exactly what it means to cross a dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "The sun had set by the time she landed in the village green of Elnacier, the sky lit only by the faintest inklings of twilight and the rising moon. Her wings ached, the wind having picked up on her return flight, and in the direction opposite the one she'd been flying.\n\nBut the heat in her chest was still simmering. I just need to speak to one man.\n\nThe courier's office was closed, but there was still a light from behind the windows, and insofar as she'd been able to learn from the town, Vern lived in the office, in a tiny room in the back.\n\nGood. She moved past the front door, instead throwing open the door to the stable on the side. It looked much the same as it had the last time, right down to the aged wooden crates sunken into the ground to one side. There was a wagon in the middle of the space, unloaded, and a donkey in a stall that let out a loud cry of fear as it caught her scent.\n\nShe didn't care. She ignored its frantic haws as she stepped into the space, heading straight for the double doors that led to the office. The pounding of her claws against the door mixed with the panicked stamping of the donkey's hooves, creating a racket that would have been sure to seize Vern's attention even had she not been shouting.\n\n\"Vern! I need to speak with you! Now!\" She continued pounding the door, refusing to let up for even a moment until at last she heard a reply from inside.\n\n\"All right, all right! I'm coming, I'm coming! What's so blasted\u2014?\" The door opened and Vern stopped speaking as he saw her.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said. \"You.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She bared her teeth, feeling a slight thrill as the man's eyes widened in surprise. \"Me.\"\n\nShe stepped forward, into the office, Vern stumbling back before her with an increasing look of alarm on his face. \"I'll scream,\" he began. \"I mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Quiet Vern. I don't want to eat you.\" She paused, tempted to add an \"If I don't have to\" to the end of her statement. But there wasn't any need.\n\n\"I have a question, Vern. A very simple one. And I need you to answer it for me. Truthfully.\" She crouched slightly, baring her teeth again, and the man let out a whimper. \"Understood.\"\n\n\"I... Whatever it was, I didn't do it. We've delivered everything as it's arrived, I swear! I\u2014\"\n\n\"Not about that,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"About your budget.\"\n\nEven his fear and shock couldn't hide the sudden look of confusion that swept across his face. \"Budget?\"\n\n\"How much does this courier service cost the king each year?\"\n\n\"I... what? Why?\"\n\n\"Just how much does it cost, Vern. It's extremely important that you tell me. Now.\"\n\n\"I... um...\" There was definitely more confusion on his face than fear now. \"Well, the two boys earn about three bars apiece by year's end,\" he said. \"And I'm paid twice that.\"\n\n\"Twelve bars,\" she said, nodding. \"And the infrastructure?\" He gave her a confused look. \"The wagon? The donkey? The materials?\"\n\n\"The donkey is fed by agreement, so I don't know,\" the man said quickly. \"But she's just a donkey. Maybe four bars a year? Five? I don't know. The wagon is paid for, it just needs maintenance. Materials are as needed, maybe a few bars?\"\n\n\"So twenty bars, perhaps? Maybe thirty at most?\"\n\n\"Thirty bars sounds sufficient, yes.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. Thirty bars. Even if it were more than that, Elnacier at its lowest would be generating three times that amount.\n\nShe took a deep breath, then looked at Vern, who still looked panicked. \"Thank you, Vern. You've been very helpful. I apologize for the rudeness of my calling so late. I'll make up for it the next time I visit. You have my word.\"\n\nLeaving the stunned Vern still standing in the middle of his office, she twisted herself around and saw herself out, shutting the door behind her. The donkey was still panicking as she slipped out the stable doors.\n\nThirty bars. Thirty bars. She could feel the heat shimmering out of her jaws. She wanted to take to the sky and deal with the problem immediately but...\n\nIt's not enough. Not quite yet. Vern's declaration had been good support of her thoughts, but not quite enough.\n\nBut I can think of one more man to talk to, she thought, leaping from the village green and into the dark sky. Her wings ached with each beat, the winds fighting against her as she flew along the river, the tips of the pines threatening to scratch against her belly.\n\nBut still the fire burned, and she flew onward, following the river until she spotted a familiar mill in the moonlight. She tucked her wings tight, landing with such speed that it almost hurt\u2014but not quite.\n\nIt certainly made a loud noise, however. Loud enough that the front door of the nearby home had opened before she had reached it, a familiar figure letting out a cry of surprise as the light from inside his home spilled over her.\n\n\"Lady Axtara! Are you all right? Is something the matter?\"\n\n\"I'm fine Waterlily,\" she said, waving a claw. \"I just needed to ask you an urgent question. An extremely urgent question.\"\n\nWat's mouth and eyes were wide with surprise, but to his credit he merely nodded. \"Ask away, my lady.\"\n\n\"The bridge that's being replaced or rebuilt, near Easy Bay. What will such a project cost?\"\n\n\"That bridge?\" Her question seemed to have driven him to further confusion but to his credit he thought for a moment and then offered his answer. \"Well, the total cost, all said and done, with labor and materials... fifty bars or so. We never quite know until we finish.\"\n\n\"And how many bridges are there like it in the kingdom?\"\n\n\"In Elnacier? Probably... eight or nine, I would think.\"\n\n\"Did the king build them?\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\n\"How often do they need to be replaced?\"\n\nWat paused for a moment. \"Maybe every ten summers. We do good work, so they last a while.\"\n\n\"And how did the king pay for them originally?\"\n\n\"Well, some were already there. He just paid for the men to rebuild them. But he did it by promising tax exemptions for a year, or by spending the gold he'd earned adventuring.\" Wat's look of concern deepened. \"Why? Is the kingdom short of money again? Are they looking to you?\"\n\n\"What? No,\" she said with a swift shake of her head. \"In fact, I don't think it ever was.\"\n\n\"What? Lady Axtara\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you, Wat,\" she said, dipping her head. \"You've been most helpful.\" She didn't even wait to hear his reply, spinning and launching herself into the night sky, winging for Elnacier.\n\nFendall wasn't worried about his position or my bank. Or rather, he was, she thought as she flew. With the wind, thankfully enough, making her flight swift. In less than a minute she was nearing the manor road, landing right before the grounds' archway. But not because he thought I wanted his position.\n\nHe was worried I would figure out what he's been doing. For decades.\n\nHow? Why?\n\nThe front doors of the manor opened as she neared, bright light spilling across the grounds. \"Lady Axtara?\" It was one of the servants, silhouetted against the light. Who she wasn't certain. \"Is everything all\u2014?\"\n\n\"I need to speak to the king or queen. Both, if possible. Immediately.\"\n\nThe servant nodded. \"Yes, your ladyship. What should I tell them?\"\n\n\"That it's a matter of grave importance concerning their kingdom.\"\n\nThe servant looked worried but nodded. \"Please wait in the entryway.\" Then they bolted.\n\nI suppose I was looking a bit ferocious, Axtara thought as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. Especially with all this mud. Her rapid landing at the mill hadn't done her scales any favors: her lower body and especially claws were covered in splatters of the stuff.\n\nI'll need a nice long bath after this is over. Whatever this becomes. I'll make my case to the king and queen, I suppose, and then\u2014\n\n\"Axtara? What are you doing here?\" Axtara looked up as Mia stepped into the room, her hair half done-up. \"Is something wrong? Why are you covered in mud?\"\n\n\"I...\" What do I say? \"I'm here to speak with your parents.\"\n\n\"Were you attacked?\" Mia took a quick step toward her. \"Are you hurt? Who was\u2014?\"\n\nAxtara shook her head. \"Not directly, no. But... Your parents will be here in a moment. I needed to speak with them as quickly as I could once I found out.\"\n\n\"Found what out?\" Mia asked, her worried expression taking on a look of suspicion. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"I...\"\n\nThe sound of running footsteps\u2014more than one set\u2014saved her from needing to make a reply, as a moment later the servant returned at a run, came to a halt, and very quickly stated \"King and Queen Elnacier.\" Not a second later the pair ran into the room, the king with less grace than his wife. He did, however, have a sword belted at his waist.\n\n\"Lady Axtara,\" the king said as she bowed. \"What is it? Is it fell?\"\n\nFell? Why would\u2014?\n\nMud. Clear signs of distress. Of course. He may have driven out the fell, but they must arise from time to time like in most other places. \"No, your highness,\" she said, still bowing. \"It is not the fell, but a threat of a far more human nature.\"\n\n\"Rise, Axtara,\" Queen Elnacier said. \"Were you attacked?\"\n\n\"Not directly,\" Axtara said, lifting her head out of her bow and making eye contact with the rulers. Mia, she noticed, had moved off to one side. \"I believe I have uncovered a conspiracy of fraud, not against me, but against the crown.\"\n\nThe king and queen exchanged looks, but neither dismissed her outright. \"Explain,\" the king said. She tried to ignore the way his hand was still resting on the hilt of his sword.\n\n\"Since I have arrived in Elnacier, I've been haunted by a single question,\" she began. \"Every indicator I received from my agents said that Elnacier should be far wealthier than it was. Yet it wasn't. You may recall that during my welcome dinner, it was brought up that the kingdom's finances were almost always stretched thin.\"\n\n\"I do recall, yes,\" the king said. \"And they always have been.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath, looking him right in the eyes. \"No, your highness, they have not.\"\n\nThe king frowned, but didn't laugh or immediately move to see her dismissed. Neither did the queen, or even Mia.\n\n\"Your highnesses, as a banker, one of my jobs is to investigate the financial situations of those who come looking for a loan. To that end, over the past few weeks I have looked at the financial histories of many in this kingdom, and discovered that all of them were paying a steady tax. However, when I took those values and added them together, the number I ended up at was far above what the kingdom would need to be considered 'stretched thin.'\"\n\nThe king's frown had deepened, but he didn't motion for her to stop. She pressed on.\n\n\"In addition, I found myself beset by rumor. Fearmongering slipping out of bars and communal halls that I was a cheat or a criminal, a thief that couldn't be trusted with such information. Several clients of mine\u2014who I shall not name in the interest of their safety\u2014tested me accordingly, offering me deals shamelessly in my favor to see if I truly would cheat them. When I refused and instead offered a fair deal, one of them became concerned about the source of the rumors, and tracked down the individual responsible for spreading them across the kingdom.\"\n\n\"I had already attempted to figure out why my numbers were wrong, and earlier today was rudely refused.\" Mia's eyes went wide. She'd figured out who Axtara was speaking of. \"Upon finding out where the rumor had come from, and upon speaking to a few other members of the kingdom, I finally reached an answer, your highnesses.\"\n\nShe took another quick breath, steeling herself. \"The reason none of the numbers added up is the same reason the number Minister Fendall Derin gave as the amount Craglily paid in taxes didn't match up with what Craglily himself recorded.\"\n\nThe king's expression had darkened now. The queen merely looked concerned.\n\n\"Your highness, I believe Minister Fendall Derin has been skimming from the kingdom, perhaps for decades. He collects the taxes, then takes as much as a third or more off the top to keep for himself.\"\n\n\"Outrageous.\" The king's statement was quiet but laced with steel.\n\n\"Your highness,\" she said quickly, bowing her head slightly. \"The clients I spoke with confirmed that Fendall Derin was the source of the rumors against me. He was spreading them wherever he could. What's more, his motive is clear: The longer I remained in Elnacier and the more people with whom I spoke, the greater chance that I, as a keeper of records, would notice the discrepancies. That the numbers didn't add up. Elnacier itself produces easily over a hundred bars a year in tax revenue, at least as the citizens pay. More than enough to pay the costs of running the courier service the kingdom employs.\"\n\n\"But the bridges,\" the king said, raising one hand. \"The roads! This manor!\"\n\n\"There are five other villages to collect taxes from,\" Axtara replied. \"Numbers are merely numbers, your highness. Elnacier's income appears far above its expenses, and yet it remains poor. The numbers Minister Derin offered do not work with the numbers given by the kingdom's own inhabitants. Two and two make four. For you to be receiving two at the end of that exchange, the other two must go somewhere.\"\n\nFor a moment the room was silent, though the royal family had put a voice to their expressions, she was sure it would have been deafening. Both Mia and King Elnacier seemed disbelieving, almost angry. The queen's expression, meanwhile, was inscrutable.\n\nFinally, the king spoke. \"Lady Axtara, Fendall Derin has been one of my closest friends for my entire life. Like a brother!\" He took a step forward, one hand still on the hilt of his sword. \"That you would suggest that he commit such\u2014\"\n\n\"Adrick.\"\n\nThe king froze midstep at the queen's word, both he and Mia turning to look at her. \"Yes, Majesty?\"\n\n\"Lady Axtara's words, while troublesome, ring true.\"\n\n\"You\u2014?\"\n\n\"Hear me out, Adrick,\" the queen said softly. \"You've always said you trusted me to temper your rule. Set aside your emotions for a moment.\"\n\nThe king let out a long, exhaled breath. \"Very well. You believe Lady Axtara to be correct?\"\n\n\"I'm uncertain,\" the queen said. \"But from what she says, she certainly believes her words to be true. And she has nothing to gain from otherwise making such a claim, save our own interest. She has already stated quite emphatically that she does not wish to have Fendall's position or serve in similar.\"\n\n\"But what's more,\" the queen continued. \"Think about how Fendall has always treated the finances of our kingdom. When I first arrived, I offered to assist. Do you remember what he said?\"\n\n\"He asked you to leave it be,\" the kind said slowly. \"Told you it would be beneath you.\"\n\n\"He made sure that the records I saw were concerned with this manor, or with specific individuals. Never once would I see the records of the kingdom, and there was an excuse at the ready if I ever asked. Nor have you ever seen them.\"\n\n\"Well... no,\" the king admitted. \"I gave the job to Fen.\"\n\n\"A job he has carried out for decades, yet entirely without oversight,\" Majesty responded. \"Always with an answer at the ready. You trusted him as you had when you were adventurers, asking only if you could afford something.\"\n\n\"But...\" The king shook his head. \"He is my brother, Majesty. In battle, if not in blood.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying that we should take Lady Axtara's accusations as truth,\" Majesty replied. \"They are,\" she said with a quick glance in Axtara's direction, \"quite severe.\"\n\nMia, Axtara noted, seemed torn, her expression caught somewhere between disbelief and anger, though at who she couldn't say. Most likely me. I did just accuse her uncle of treason against the crown.\n\nOur friendship might be over, right or not. She tried to push the thought from her mind, turning her focus back toward the king and queen. But if this is true...I have to see the right thing done.\n\n\"However, severe or not, we cannot simply dismiss them because we have trusted Fen for years,\" the queen continued. \"If Axtara is wrong, there is still the slander against her name to discuss, provided she can procure witnesses.\" The glance that slid in Axtara's direction was clear and open.\n\n\"I would imagine so, your highness,\" she said, bowing her head once more. \"These rumors were spread far and wide across the villages of the kingdom. I would not need to be present in order for you to find the source from which they stemmed.\"\n\nThe queen frowned, her lips pressed together in a thin line, then turned back toward the king. \"You see, Adrick?\"\n\nThe king nodded. \"Unless she has bribed most of the kingdom, we would soon find out the truth. And you,\" he said, looking right at Axtara, \"have not shown yourself to be foolish in the slightest. If this were a scheme, you would be wise enough to see how it would come apart the moment we picked at the seams.\"\n\n\"This does not mean that I accept your accusations as true,\" the king continued, almost too quickly. \"But...\" He let out a long sigh, some of the anger bleeding from his face. \"You would know that such accusations without truth behind them would destroy you and your bank. From what I've heard of you from my daughter... That is not something you would do.\"\n\n\"No, your highness,\" she said, bowing her head again.\n\n\"Very well then.\" King Adrick cleared his throat, but his hand had fallen from the hilt of his sword. \"Thank the Creator that there's an easy way to divvy the deer.\" Confusion must have showed in her expression, because he quickly added to his words. \"Determine where the truth lies,\" he said. \"We can go to Fen's cabin right now. Not to discuss the rumors\u2014we can deal with that later. But to ask to see proof of the kingdom's finances. I admit,\" he said, shaking his head. \"With what you've said, Majesty, and what you've come speaking of, Lady Axtara, I am inclined to wonder myself.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Majesty said. \"Let us all go. Mia\u2014\"\n\n\"I want to go,\" Mia said quickly, her eyes darting to Axtara. \"He's my uncle.\" There was still a look of hurt to her expression. Maybe even betrayal.\n\nI'm sorry, Mia.\n\n\"Very well,\" the queen said. \"I'll summon the guard\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" King Elnacier said, his hand once again on the hilt of his sword. \"Fen has been my trusted friend for years. I won't march up to his home with guards. Ready them, but don't summon them. And,\" he said, glancing at each of them in turn, \"do so quietly. I don't want to start rumors of my own.\"\n\nA few minutes later, once the royal family had been properly attired and whispered instructions given to the manor guard, Axtara found herself trailing the two rulers and Mia across the grounds through the deepening night.\n\nMia hadn't said a word. Nor had she even made eye contact.\n\nIt hurt. Like claws digging at Axtara's heart.\n\nAt least the king and queen trust me enough to come with them to speak to Fendall, she thought as they entered the forest, the world growing even darker around them, the light from the king and queen's lanterns the only real source of illumination as they followed the deep ruts to Fendall's home. Few would trust a dragon at their back in such a situation. If they suspected I was against them...\n\nBut then again, they might not have thought of it that way. She wasn't sure which thought was more comforting, that they trusted her enough to let her follow them, or that they perhaps hadn't thought of her as anything but human.\n\nAhead, Fendall's cabin loomed out of the darkness, its small windows bright with inner light. The faint hiss of wind rushing through the pines around them was a faint background to the sound of their steps squelching through the mud atop the path.\n\nA faint whinny echoed through the trees. A horse was tethered by the front door, already tacked and at the ready. Off to another village to sully my good name? Axtara wondered. She hadn't smelled it until they came close, though the wind wasn't in her favor. Still, it meant that the horse was fresh, rather than tired and sweaty. She'd barely brought her eyes back from the animal when the front door to the home was thrown wide open, crashing against the wall of the cabin with a loud bang, Fendall Derin striding out with the cabin light at his back and freezing as he locked eyes on them.\n\nThe king and queen froze as well, and it wasn't hard to see why. Fendall was dressed for travel, a heavy coat over his shoulders, a pack on his back, a sword belted at his side.\n\nAnd in his hands, a heavy-duty, handheld thundercannon, a short but broad-barreled rifle that could even blow a hole through a dragon's scales.\n\nFor a moment the two parties were silent, but then Fendall broke the silence.\n\n\"Well...\" he said, lifting the rifle and pointing its gaping barrel right at them. \"Damn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Cashing Out",
                "text": "\"Fendall...\" The king was the first to speak, the shock in his voice mirrored by the look of betrayal on his face. And on the faces of both the queen and Mia. \"You...\" If there was a question, or even a phrase at the end of it, it wasn't in evidence. The king, it appeared, was at a loss for words.\n\nFendall, however, wasn't. \"To the side everyone.\" He spoke clearly, motioning with the barrel of the gun toward the side of the clearing, away from where his horse was tethered. \"You know what this thing will do if you make me fire it. Not even the lizard will be able to walk away from it.\"\n\nAxtara wanted to bare her teeth at the insult, or roar and let out a gout of flame. But her eyes were fixed on the barrel of the man's gun, unable to move away. At such range, a single shot could badly wound or even kill the king and queen. Or Mia. Even me.\n\n\"Fendall,\" King Elnacier began again, lifting both hands to show that they were away from his sword. \"Plea\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Fendall said, and a sudden lack of motion from the queen finally pulled Axtara's focus away from the thundercannon, if only for the barest moment.\n\n\"Drop it,\" Fendall, said, the gun still held steady. \"You too, Adrick. Your lanterns. On the ground. Drop them or I will shoot.\"\n\n\"Everything Axtara suspected was true, wasn't it?\" Majesty asked, her tone colder than ice.\n\n\"Drop the lanterns,\" Fendall replied. \"Or I shoot.\" For a moment the two parties stared at one another, but then the two lanterns dropped to the ground, bouncing against the moss and flickering slightly but not going out.\n\n\"Good,\" Fendall said. \"Now, to the side. Come on!\" The last words came out as a sudden shout, Mia flinching back slightly.\n\n\"Do as he says.\" The king moved first, slowly stepping off to the left and away from the lanterns. The queen followed his lead, as did Mia, and then Axtara felt Fendell's eyes fix on her.\n\n\"You too beast,\" he said, glaring at her. \"Or I shoot.\" Heart pounding in her chest, she stepped to the side as well, moving around the edge of the clearing.\n\n\"So it was true,\" Majesty prompted again. \"You've been stealing from the kingdom.\"\n\n\"I'd hoped you wouldn't find out until after I had gone,\" Fendell said, slowly stepping down the front steps of his cottage, keeping his gun trained on them with each heavy thump of his boots. \"But yes.\"\n\n\"Why?\" The anguish in the king's voice was almost physical. \"Fen, why?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Fendall stopped at the bottom of the steps, one boot in the mud, the other still resting on the wood. \"You really have to ask, Adrick?\"\n\n\"I made you the minister of finan\u2014\"\n\n\"I never wanted to be a minister!\" Fendall's shout seemed to hit the king like an almost physical slap. \"I never wanted to come out here to stay in this miserable little backwater! We were adventurers, Adrick! We came here to get rich! And then we wiped out the fell here, made ourselves known, and what do you do? What do you do?\"\n\nHe stepped off the steps fully, thundercannon still trained on them. \"You go and declare yourself king.\" The word came out like it pained Fendall. \"You took all that gold we earned and declared it the kingdom's. Didn't even ask if that was what I wanted to do, oh no. You got it into your head to be king, and that I'd be perfectly happy being the minister of finance in this dull, decrepit little nowhere rather than spending my riches like a lord in civilization.\"\n\n\"You... You could have turned it down,\" King Elnacier said, his voice subdued. \"You didn't have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Take it?\" Fendall said, letting out a snort. \"You mean turn down the people's new king? Who'd just saved them from the fell? I wouldn't have made it out alive. No, I had to watch as the money we had earned together was spent by you on this kingdom. So no,\" he said, stepping slowly back until he was next to the horse. Without lowering his weapon, he slid his pack from his back and set it across the saddle. \"I decided to get what I could out of it.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Adrick,\" he said, his eyes never leaving the king as he secured the bag with one hand. \"You may think this a betrayal, and in truth it is, but you stabbed me in the back first.\" Slowly, with one hand, Fendall undid the horse's lead line from the porch, the other keeping his weapon steady the entire time.\n\n\"You coward.\" Fendall froze for a moment as Mia's accusation echoed through the clearing, but then his fingers continued to work the lead line. Axtara could feel her heart thundering in her chest, her wings shivering with fear as the princess spoke again. \"You could have spoken to my father anytime. Told him you wanted to leave.\"\n\n\"Leave, yes,\" Fendall said, lifting himself into the saddle, the gun still held steady. \"With the gold I'd earned? No. But fate has a way of making things work out.\"\n\n\"How much?\" It was Majesty who asked this time. \"How much have you stolen from this kingdom?\" Her eyes must have flicked at the backpack tied atop the saddle, because Fendall let out a laugh.\n\n\"You think it's in this pack, your majesty?\" he asked. \"Don't be ridiculous. I've been skimming and accruing bars since before Adrick married you. Shipping them out to banks in the core kingdoms one by one. Even if, by some fate of chance, you did stop me from fleeing tonight, you'd still never get it back. You've no way of forcing me to tell you where I sent it, and we all know that neither of you have the stomach to have me tortured.\"\n\n\"We could try,\" Majesty replied.\n\n\"You could,\" Fendall admitted, the gun still steadily trained. \"But again, that's assuming you manage to catch me. I've had years to plan this, your highness. Originally, the plan was to simply retire in a summer or so and just leave for the kingdoms. Make sure an 'accident' took care of what records there were, and set up a convenient explanation for why the kingdom's income would rise after I left. No one would ever have been the wiser.\"\n\n\"And then you showed up,\" he said. His eyes flicked toward Axtara, and she felt her wings tremble.\n\nIf he pulls that trigger...\n\n\"I mean, would it have been so difficult for you to just go anywhere else?\" Fendall asked. \"But no. You had to come here and put all my hard work at risk.\"\n\nWait... \"That's why you were collecting the taxes early this year,\" Axtara said. \"The moment I arrived, it was only a matter of time. So you spread rumors against me, right from the beginning.\"\n\n\"From the moment I heard a banker was coming,\" Fendall admitted. \"Didn't expect little Mia to go out and try and do battle with you though.\"\n\n\"Don't call me that.\" Mia's voice was terse. \"Don't.\"\n\n\"For what it's worth, Mia,\" Fendall said. \"You really should blame the dragon for this. If she hadn't come here, none of you ever would have known about this.\"\n\n\"The words of a coward,\" Mia shot back. \"As if us not knowing about this would have meant that it didn't happen. You betrayed us. Axtara hasn't.\"\n\nFendall shrugged, taking the reins in one hand. \"Give her time. After all, she's a dragon. Speaking of which.\" His eyes slipped back toward Axtara, this time taking on a cruel, hard quality. \"I do believe the only one who would be capable of running me down at this point would be you, beast. So...\" Axtara felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as the barrel of his gun seemed to swell\u2014\n\n\"Pull that trigger,\" Mia said as the gun barrel twitched, \"and you won't get a second shot. We'll run you down where you stand.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" King Elnacier added. \"You have one shot, Fendall. And while I may not have the stomach for torture, you know I will execute a murderer.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" The gun barrel twitched again. \"You make a good point. But since I don't feel like waiting here all night, stuck at an impasse, perhaps we'll try something else.\" His eyes slipped to Mia. \"Princess Mia, if you would be so kind as to walk over here. Right here,\" he said, pointing at the front shoulder of his horse.\n\n\"Or what?\"\n\n\"Or I start shooting and we see who lives and dies,\" Fendall said, his voice hard. \"Hard as it may be for you to believe, I'd prefer to go with the option where we all part ways with as little violence as possible. None, if that's an option.\"\n\nHe's taking her! Axtara realized as Mia began to step forward moving slowly for Fendall's horse. As a hostage! Already she could see how it would play out. Fendall would take Mia as collateral, using her as leverage until he'd reached the edge of the kingdom.\n\nIf anyone followed him or disputed it\u2014\n\n\"No,\" she said, and Mia paused.\n\nFendall's eyes flicked toward her. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"No,\" she repeated, ever attentive of the thundercannon's gaping maw as it slid back in her direction. \"There's no need.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Really,\" she said, nodding and doing her best to keep calm, though it was hard to hide the shiver in her wings, or the trembling of her tail. \"There's no need to take Mia. Or shoot anyone. Just go. You have my word that you won't be followed. Not by me, at least. I will not fly, nor send pursuit.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" The barrel of his weapon didn't drop, but Fendall at least appeared to be considering her words. \"And what guarantee of your words do I have?\"\n\nStay calm. Stay cool. Just think of him like another client. \"As much as you campaigned against my reputation, you know that I deal honestly. I give you my word that I will not pursue you in any way during your flight from this kingdom.\"\n\n\"Your word?\"\n\nShe could almost hear her father's words in her head. Stay true to yourself. \"On my honor before the Creator.\"\n\nFendall's lips pursed. \"Well... that's an interesting deal. You'll just let me go?\"\n\n\"As long as you leave now, and take no one with you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nFor a moment she didn't respond, the question catching her by surprise. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Fendall asked again, eyes narrowing past the barrel of the thundercanon. \"What's in it for you? Why make such a promise?\"\n\n\"I...\" It took her a moment to find the words. \"Because in a way, you're right.\"\n\n\"What?\" Majesty's voice was so dry it could have consumed a rainstorm.\n\n\"The only reason any of us are here right now, being threatened by you, Minister Derin, is because of my and your actions both. You chose to steal from the kingdom, your reasons your own, but the only reason you would need to take Mia in your flight is because I came here and chose to share my suspicions with the king and queen. And because you fear I, or others, may follow you.\"\n\n\"Just you,\" Fendall said quietly. \"I already took care of everything else. Nothing deadly,\" he noted, his eyes flicking to the king for just a brief moment. \"But enough that there won't be any reasonable pursuit until I'm long past the borders of the kingdom.\"\n\n\"Just me then,\" Axtara said with a nod. \"You fear me following after you, so you take Mia as\u2014\" The word hostage didn't feel quite right... \"\u2014collateral that I won't do anything. So I'm telling you now, I won't. Just leave Mia here and depart in peace.\"\n\n\"As for the why,\" she said, pulling her gaze away from the barrel of the thundercannon just long enough to glance at the back of Mia's head. \"Because she's my friend. She's flown in treacherous winds for me already. I can do the same for her by, well, not flying after you. On my honor.\"\n\nFendall appeared to weigh her words for a moment before responding. \"Impressive loyalty, beast. And to think I'd once thought that perhaps I'd be able to convince you to work with me instead of against me.\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\nFendall nodded. \"So, your word that you won't follow me.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"No pursuit. No stealthy flying up above the clouds.\"\n\nAxtara slowly, carefully, sat back on her haunches in the wet moss and mud and lifted one set of claws. \"I swear it, Minister Derin. I will not. Just leave freely.\"\n\nAgain Fendall seemed to weigh her words, but then he nodded. \"Very well.\" Relief crashed through her in a wave that felt like an ice bath after a long flight. \"I accept your terms, then. Mia stays. On your word that I go with no pursuit.\"\n\nFendall's focus slipped to the king and queen. \"Is that acceptable to you, Adrick? Majesty?\"\n\n\"Fen...\" The king's voice was almost a growl. \"Go. But do not ever expect to come back.\"\n\n\"I don't.\" Fendall took a step to the side, taking care to always keep the barrel of his thundercannon trained on them as he moved aside his horse. Slowly, carefully, he lifted himself into the saddle, his gun never wavering. \"For what it's worth, Adrick\u2014\"\n\n\"Your words are worth nothing,\" Majesty hissed.\n\nFendall shrugged, settling into his saddle. \"Even so, I am sorry.\"\n\n\"Spare us,\" the king replied. \"Not sorry enough.\"\n\nFendall shrugged again, taking the reins in one hand and then, and long last, letting the firing mechanism of the thundercannon down with a gentle click. The barrel wavered, then dropped, the minister sliding in into a sheath aside his saddle with a quick, easy motion. Axtara felt herself sag slightly with relief.\n\nOh finally. He's not going to shoot us. He's just going to leave, and everything will be fine, and\u2014\n\nFendall let out a faint laugh, snapping her thoughts back.\n\n\"You know, lizard,\" he said, looking right at her. \"I was halfway convinced when I made to lower my weapon you'd try to leap at me. Maybe you really did mean what you said. Maybe you are that trustworthy. But...\"\n\nHis other hand leapt up, holding not the reins, but a pistol drawn from somewhere within his jacket. \"I guess I don't really trust you that much.\"\n\nA thunderous report filled the clearing, a bright brilliant flash bursting from the front of the pistol in time with an incredible, searing pain that clawed its way across Axtara's chest. She felt her breath catch as Fendall whirled, snapping the reins down and spurring his horse forward. She watched him go, vanishing into the darkness between the trees, one set of claws idly coming up to her chest. They came away wet with blood.\n\nSomeone was shouting. Mia. She turned to look down at her, but couldn't make out the words over the buzzing in her head. The pain from her chest was radiating out now, her forelegs trembling.\n\nOnce more she looked down at her bloody claws, and then in disbelief to the wound on her chest. Her scales were marred by running blood and rivulets of torn flesh. Her flesh.\n\nHe shot me. She tried to speak, only for her voice to fail her. The king and queen were in front of her now, the king ripping away part of his shirt and shoving it up against her injury, prompting a fresh stab of pain, one that made her howl and jerk back.\n\nHe was shouting something as he pressed forward, but she couldn't make out the words for some reason. All she could think of was the pain. Then Mia was next to him, her own jacket in her hands as she too pressed forward, mouth open in a shout, though the words were just a buzz against the ringing in Axtara's skull.\n\nShe tried to extend her wings, but that only made the pain worse, and her breath caught in her throat once more as the edges of her vision wavered.\n\nSomeone caught one of her wings, and she tried to yank it away out of reflex, only to let out another cry of pain as the motion drove spikes into her chest.\n\n\"Enough!\" Someone grasped one of her horns, yanking her head down hard, the king's eyes filling her vision. It had been him. He'd grabbed her horns.\n\n\"Axtara!\" he shouted, so close she could have counted his teeth. Idly, the thought somehow making it past the burning pain in her chest, she noted that she could see several that had been replaced. \"You need to stop thrashing about! You're making it worse!\"\n\nThrashing about? I've been shot! I haven't been thrashing!\n\n\"You need to hold yourself still while we staunch the bleeding, understood Axtara? Majesty has gone for aid, but if we don't stop the bleeding it could be much worse. It's going to hurt. Do you understand?\"\n\nShe worked her tongue, but still the words wouldn't come. It was as if she'd lost the ability to speak.\n\n\"Now,\" the king continued. \"I'm going to let go, and then work to stop the bleeding. It's going to hurt, but I need you to be strong and not move. Dig your claws into the earth if you must, but don't thrash about, understood? Nod if you understand.\"\n\nThat she could do. The king's hands released her horns, and she nodded, noting that his hands were red and bloody. I'm going to need to clean my horns. When had the king even been injured?\n\nIt's your blood, she realized as the king lifted Mia's jacket and looked right at her. Then he stepped forward.\n\nA howl escaped her lips as the pain in her chest erupted anew, and then someone grabbed her horns again, pulling her head down and holding it tightly as she clawed at the ground.\n\n\"Axtara stop!\" It was Mia. Mia was holding her head. \"I know it hurts, but stop trying to pull back!\"\n\n\"It hurts!\" At long last the words burst forth from her throat, the word around her wavering as tears filled her eyes.\n\n\"I know it hurts,\" Mia said, still holding her horns. \"But you've got to hold still or you'll make it worse. Mother's gone to get the doctor. She'll be back soon, but father needs to stop the bleeding\u2014\" Another wave of pain clawed its way through her body and she must have stiffened, because Mia's grip tightened.\n\n\"That's it,\" Mia said. \"You're doing good. Just hold still. Father's going to have to hold it until the doctor arrives. Just hold still.\"\n\n\"It hurts.\"\n\n\"I know, Axtara, I know.\" Mia said. \"Just stay calm and hold still.\"\n\nThe pain was less, now, though it still hurt. A clawing throb, rather than the red rush of pain she'd felt earlier.\n\n\"Have you ever been hurt like this before?\" Mia asked. \"Break a wing, maybe?\"\n\n\"No,\" Axtara said, trying to shake her head, but Mia's grip only tightened.\n\n\"Don't move, just talk. You've never been injured before?\"\n\n\"No. I've sprained a wing a few times, but\u2014\" She sucked in a breath as a fresh wave of pain rolled out of her chest. \"Nothing worse.\"\n\n\"I broke my arm once,\" Mia said. \"Cut myself sparring a few times as well. It hurts.\"\n\n\"All right.\" It was the king's voice, loud and clear. \"It's mostly stopped. But I want you, Axtara, to lie down and roll onto your side. Your left side. Can you do that? Nice and slow?\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" She made the mistake of shifting her wing, another wave of pain rolling across the front half of her body. \"Yes,\" she said quickly. \"I can do that.\"\n\n\"Slowly.\"\n\n\"Yes. Slowly. Mia, help guide her down.\"\n\n\"On the ground?\"\n\n\"On the moss. It'll be fine.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Mia's fingers left her horns, freeing her head once more, and Axtara had to catch herself as she sagged.\n\nWhen did my head get so heavy? It wasn't hard at all to lie down, Mia and the king's hands catching her side and guiding her to the earth. She tucked her wing under her rather than risk the pain of stretching it out, pressing it into the mossy ground as she rolled atop it.\n\n\"Good,\" the king said. \"Very good. Majesty should be back any minute now with the doctor. Bleeding's mostly stopped.\"\n\n\"Is she going to be all right?\" Mia asked. It was hard to focus on her words when the damp moss felt so cool and welcoming against her face.\n\n\"I don't know.\" The king's words sounded almost hollow. Or maybe that was just the pain talking. \"I pray so. We should keep her warm, though. Mia, get inside Fen's cabin and find any blankets you can. I'll get some wood. Axtara?\"\n\nShe lifted her head slightly, looking at the king. \"Yes?\" Had her voice always sounded so weak?\n\n\"Help is going to be here shortly. You don't seem to be having trouble breathing\u2014\"\n\n\"It hurts.\"\n\n\"You were shot in the chest,\" the king said. \"I'd imagine so. If it stops hurting, start worrying. Now, I need you to stay awake while Mia and I get some things. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"I...\"\n\n\"You need to stay awake, Axtara. You can't honor your loans if you fall asleep.\"\n\n\"All right.\" That doesn't make any sense.\n\n\"Good.\" Both the king and Mia moved away and out of sight, Mia into Fendall's home, the king around the corner of the building. Both were back in moments, Mia with an armload of blankets, the king with wood. Within a few minutes, Axtara found herself mostly covered with thick wool, a small fire starting and burning nearby and warming her cold claws.\n\n\"Adrick!\" The cry came from the woods a moment before the queen rushed out into the firelight, trailed by the doctor's familiar face.\n\nMord, Axtara thought as she saw the man's shocked expression rest on her. What a funny name.\n\n\"Here,\" the man said, rushing over to her side without hesitation and opening his satchel. \"Take this.\" He pulled a large clump of something leafy and green and passed it to Mia. \"She needs to chew on it and suck on the juices. All of it; she can't overdose.\"\n\n\"Axtara?\" Mia was beside her again already. \"You need to chew this and swallow the juice, all right?\" A hand helped her raise her head, and a moment later something thick, leafy, and bitter was shoved across her tongue.\n\n\"There you go,\" Mia said as she chewed. \"Now just swallow the juice.\"\n\nIt tasted awful, but she did as instructed, her stomach flipping as the bitter substance hit it.\n\n\"Keep at it,\" Mia said. \"If you need a drink, just let me know.\"\n\nAxtara swallowed again, but was getting difficult to focus. At least the pain was fading. All sensation was, along with the clearing itself.\n\n\"There we go,\" she heard Mord say as the world around her began to go dark. \"That didn't take as much as I'd thought. Now, let's get a good look at this wound...\"\n\nIt was the last thing she heard as the clearing, and everyone in it, faded into nothingness, and she slept."
            },
            {
                "title": "Collecting",
                "text": "\"Ow.\" Axtara's exclamation was quiet, but not unnoticed. Across the room Mia's head snapped up, away from the book the princess had been reading. Or maybe pretending to read. Axtara wouldn't have put it past her.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\nAxtara held back a sigh. She's just worried for you. \"I'm fine,\" she said, trying to keep her tone as neutral as possible. \"I just moved my wing, that's all.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Mia said, but there was an entire book's worth of unspoken words in her expression. \"Well, if you need anything\u2014\"\n\n\"Mia, I'm fine,\" Axtara said, unable to keep a little bit of exasperation from sliding into her voice. \"Really. I just moved my wing and aggravated it. That's all.\" She glanced down at the bandages wrapped around her chest. \"Mord said it would be sore.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mia said, setting her book down and rising. \"I just\u2014I... Ugh.\" The princess threw her hands up. \"I don't mean to dote over you like a mother hen, I just\u2014\"\n\n\"Feel a little responsible?\" Axtara suggested.\n\n\"Yes!\" The word exploded out of Mia almost like a storm. \"Uncle Fen did this to you! And why? Because you came to tell us that he was stealing from the kingdom! And because you could fly! And because you stood up for me! And... I don't know.\" She shrank back, dropping into her chair. \"I just... feel...\"\n\n\"Guilty?\" Axtara suggested, one set of claws almost coming up to scratch at the bandage on her chest. At the last moment she caught herself. Nope. Mord had already unhappily reprimanded her for destroying one set of bandages, and the manor staff had threatened to cover her clawtips with cloth rags if she did it again. As if she were a fresh-from-her-egg hatchling.\n\n\"I... suppose?\" Mia replied, looking down at her book rather than up and meeting her eyes. \"Perhaps a little?\"\n\n\"Well...\" Her first reaction was to tell her not to be, but then that wouldn't work, would it? Nothing's ever quite so simple. \"I can understand that.\"\n\n\"Oh don't be so diplomatic, Axtara,\" Mia said, giving her a frown. \"That wasn't what you wanted to say.\"\n\n\"How'd you know?\"\n\n\"You always shift your voice slightly when you're being diplomatic. That doesn't mean you're not telling the truth, but it's probably not what you wanted to say.\"\n\nCaught, Axtara thought, her jaw partway open. She shut it with a quick snap. \"Very well, guilty as accused.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Mia said, giving her a flat look. \"So what did you want to say?\"\n\n\"Honestly? Don't.\" The answer rolled out quickly, like waters breaking free of a dam. \"As in 'don't feel guilty.' I've got the entire manor staff for that, and don't think you can tell me you haven't noticed the way they've been gliding on uneasy winds around me the last few days.\"\n\n\"But more than that,\" she continued, \"you shouldn't feel guilty simply because you shouldn't. Fendall Derin is the one who shot me, not you. And I did what I did not because I wanted to get shot, or because I wanted you to feel guilty. I did it because you're my friend and it was the right thing to do.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" she added quickly. \"If we're going to bring up feeling guilt over someone or something being shot full of holes, we're going to have to go all the way back to my front door...\" She grinned at the expression of shock that erupted over Mia's face. \"And to be honest, that hurt more.\"\n\n\"Liar,\" Mia said, folding her arms and glancing away, but unable to conceal her grin. \"How long are you going to keep bringing that up?\"\n\n\"Until it stops being a winning hand, I think,\" Axtara said, slowly climbing to her feet and ignoring the tightness in her chest. \"But truly, Mia, don't feel guilty. Your family has done more than enough for me over the last few days, and I did what I did because you're my friend.\" She paused for a moment. \"Feel better?\"\n\n\"A little,\" Mia said, looking up at her. \"Out of curiosity, what were you going to say before I asked you to stop being so diplomatic?\"\n\n\"Oh, just something about how your family has more than made up for it, the blame didn't lie with you. The same but less...\"\n\n\"Heartfelt?\"\n\n\"Well, I was going to say direct, but yes, that does sound true.\" She looked down at Mia and smiled. \"Thank you for catching that. It's a habit I shouldn't slip into with my friends.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry about it,\" Mia said, grinning. \"If you do it too much I'll just put another crossbow bolt in your front door to remind you why we're friends.\" Surprise must have shown on Axtara's face, because Mia let out a laugh. \"Well look at that. You're right, it does work!\"\n\n\"Oh now that's unfair,\" Axtara countered, though her words were light. \"It's my door. You're not supposed to be able to use that.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Mia said, cocking her head to one side. \"It was your door, but my bolt. I think I've got some claim to it.\" She let out another laugh, and Axtara joined in, though she was careful to keep her mirth from becoming too pronounced. That, she had discovered, led to pain.\n\n\"So,\" Mia said, stepping up next to her. \"Ready to stretch your legs?\"\n\n\"Yes please,\" Axtara answered, unable to keep the relief out of her voice. \"Your reading room is lovely, but I could use a change of scenery. And I believe you could as well. How long were you on that same page in your book?\"\n\n\"At least a quarter of an hour,\" Mia admitted as they both began to move with slow, measured steps toward the exit. \"You?\"\n\n\"I think I fell asleep with my eyes open,\" Axtara admitted, increasing her pace slightly as the tight knot in her chest loosened. \"If not, it certainly felt like it.\"\n\n\"We could have always played another game of Stakes,\" Mia said, stepping ahead and opening the door for her.\n\n\"Oh?\" Axtara let out a scoff. \"Five victories in a row wasn't enough for you?\" She slowed as the portal neared, carefully tucking her wings in close and trying to hide a wince as the motion sent a sharp spike of pain through her chest.\n\n\"Wings?\"\n\nApparently she hadn't hidden it well enough. \"Yes,\" she said with a nod. \"I certainly won't be flying anywhere today.\" Her wings tucked at her sides, she stepped into the hall.\n\n\"Where to?\" Mia asked, shutting the door behind her and then stepping up alongside her.\n\n\"The grounds, I think,\" Axtara said, peering down at her bandaged chest once more. \"I think I'd like a chance to stretch my wings a little. Not flying,\" she added. \"Exercises.\"\n\nMia nodded. \"Mord did say it would help.\"\n\n\"I expect he's right. A walk around the grounds would feel nice as well.\" She glanced up and down the hall. \"Is that left or...?\"\n\n\"Left,\" Mia confirmed, and Axtara turned, moving down the wide hall. \"The back entrance is closer. Are you still feeling tired?\"\n\n\"A little,\" Axtara admitted. The first day after her injury she'd barely awoken to eat and relieve herself before falling asleep once more. Her behavior had alarmed some of the staff, but not Mia's father, who'd correctly surmised the source of her fatigue. \"But not as tired as I was the first day. Or yesterday.\"\n\n\"You know, that's probably why you lost some of those games,\" Mia said. \"I know I don't play as well when I'm half asleep.\"\n\nAxtara smiled. \"No Mia, that most definitely wasn't it. Were you asleep, you still could have beaten me.\"\n\nMia shrugged as the hallway came to an abrupt right angle, leaving behind the windows of the eastern side and cutting deeper into the manor. \"But you're still a little tired, then?\"\n\n\"A little,\" Axtara answered as she carefully navigated the corner. \"I'll likely sleep a bit more soundly tonight, but that should be the last of it.\"\n\n\"And that's good, right?\"\n\n\"As I understand it, yes,\" she answered. \"If I'm no longer tired, it means my body's magic has done its work assisting the healing and fighting off infection. \"\n\n\"I wish I could do that.\"\n\n\"You can do that,\" Axtara replied, shooting the princess a glance. \"Yours just lacks innate magic. But if you were wounded, you'd be tired, most assuredly.\"\n\nAhead of them one of the doors into the hall opened, a member of the manor staff darting out. They let out a gasp as they saw Axtara and then bowed low, holding until she had passed.\n\n\"I wish they'd stop doing that,\" Axtara whispered to Mia. \"It's embarrassing.\"\n\n\"You'd better just get used to it,\" came Mia's reply. \"You walked into the forest to confront a criminal now on the run from the kingdom and came out with a bullet wound in the chest for defending the royal family. You couldn't impress them more right now if you flew.\"\n\n\"I can already fly.\"\n\n\"Figure of speech, Axtara. You know what I meant.\"\n\n\"Do I?\" Axtara gave her friend a wink as the rear doors neared. \"Anyway, I do hope it settles down soon. I'm already tired of it.\"\n\n\"I would not count on it if I were you,\" Mia said as another door opened, another servant walking out and immediately falling into a deep bow as they saw her. \"Not for a good couple of weeks, anyway,\" Mia finished as she reached the front door and held it open.\n\n\"All the more reason to get back to my own home as soon as possible,\" Axtara said, carefully moving through the doorway so she didn't bump her wing-joints against the frame. \"Not that I'm not both grateful and appreciative of your hospitality, but\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I understand,\" Mia said, shutting the doors behind them. \"You'd rather be in your own home.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said, stopping on the steps and looking out over the rear grounds. \"Not that this isn't nice, but...\" She took a deep breath, sucking in the crisp scent of pines and assorted greenery. \"I mean, quite nice.\"\n\n\"But it's not home,\" Mia said, nodding as she followed Axtara down the steps. \"I understand. I'm the same way when mother takes me to visit family in Nuveria. It's nice, even for all the hospitality, but it isn't the manor.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Axtara said, stopping at the bottom of the steps and digging her claws into the gravel path. Where had they even found so much gravel?\n\nWho cares? It feels nice right now. Mia, she noted, simply gave her a moment to sit and enjoy the sensation of the crushed stone between her claws. It would mean cleaning them later, but at the moment...\n\nA faint breeze stirred, carrying with it a rich array of scents. It made her want to stretch her wings, but mindful of her chest she opted instead to stretch out her neck, lifting her head as high as she could.\n\n\"Missing flying?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"I do. It's not too bad, though. Helmson had rules about flying above the city, so sometimes a week or more would pass before I could go flying. I'll make do until I've healed enough.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Mia stepped up alongside her. \"So... where do you want to go first?\"\n\n\"This way,\" Axtara said, stepping to her left and following a branch in the gravel path. \"Just a loop for now. See how it feels.\" The tightness in her chest was still there, but with each step the knots felt a little looser. Certainly better than it had the day before.\n\nIt would scar, Mord had told her the day prior. There was no way around it, save perhaps hiring an expensive healer who dealt in magic. Even then, it would be healing the scars, not preventing them. She would be forever marked by Fendall's attack.\n\nIn truth, that hurt almost as much as the knowledge that she'd been shot had. She'd always taken great care of her scales and appearance. And now, through no ill intent of her own, her chest would bear several patchy marks that would mar the otherwise smooth emerald scales.\n\nThen again, maybe they wouldn't be that noticeable. Or I could cover them with a bit of paint.\n\nStill, it stung that her smooth scales would likely forever bear the mark of Fendall's cowardice.\n\nThen again, father has scars, and he still won mother's heart. She has a few as well, from the Bad Days. Maybe it wouldn't be too distract\u2014\n\n\"Haggling?\"\n\nMia's question jolted her from her thoughts, and she turned. \"Pardon?\"\n\n\"Haggling?\" Mia asked again. \"It's a phrase from Nuveria. I think it stems from merchants asking people what they were thinking when looking at something for sale, but now it's just a way to ask what someone is thinking.\"\n\n\"Ah. That makes sense.\" She turned her gaze over to the forest, eyeing the thick trees and finding her attention drawn in the direction of Fendall's cabin. \"I was just thinking about how the injury is healing.\"\n\n\"Is it feeling better today?\"\n\n\"Definitely better,\" she said, tugging her eyes away from the path. \"It's still a little stiff, but I can feel it loosening up as I move. In fact...\" She increased her pace slightly, then slowed. \"That doesn't hurt. It did yesterday. In fact, depending on how I feel after this walk, I may consider walking home.\"\n\n\"Well, that's good to hear,\" Mia said, easily keeping pace. \"But are you sure you wouldn't like us to send a servant with you? Just to assist you for a short time?\"\n\n\"Actually, that does sound appealing.\" Just trying to get clean when her forelegs were restricted was an exercise in futility. \"I'll think about it.\"\n\n\"Now then,\" she said, changing the subject. \"Has your father determined what sort of mess Minister\u2014I mean former Minister\u2014Derin left the kingdom in?\"\n\nMia grimaced. \"I don't know all the details, but I've gathered it's not good. Fendall left us with nothing, and he collected most of the taxes\u2014whatever he could turn into coin\u2014early this year. We found his records too. He stole thousands of bars over the years, all of it shipped out to other kingdoms. Making it through the winter this season without collecting taxes again is going to mean cutting a lot of things short. Plus, now we don't have a minister of finance to keep track of everything, so that's something else to add to things.\"\n\n\"I might be able to recommend a few individuals you could contact in the kingdoms,\" Axtara said. \"I don't know if they would accept, but they are financially sound individuals who know their way around a budget.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Axtara.\" I'll mention your offer to them.\"\n\n\"I'd offer my own services, but...\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mia replied. \"You have to be somewhat impartial.\"\n\n\"And I could offer you a loan for the winter,\" Axtara continued with a nod. \"But it would need to be very specifically worded and designed, because\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mia said, cutting her off. \"You don't want to be the sole source of backing for the kingdom. Or appear to be such. Or in a position where you could claim the kingdom.\"\n\n\"Or have it thrust upon me by a poorly-written contract,\" Axtara said as they finished their first loop of the grounds. \"I have no desire to rule a kingdom.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you technically just give it right back?\" Mia asked.\n\nAxtara shrugged. \"You are a monarchy, so I suppose so. You have a rule of law, however, so it would still be a headache for all involved.\"\n\n\"On the bright side, however,\" she said, glancing down at Mia. \"If you can weather the winter, next year you'll have far more than you ever thought you had. Even if you were to lower taxes.\"\n\n\"That is something that has come up,\" Mia said. \"The whole manor knows it. I wouldn't be surprised if half the kingdom's heard the rumor by now. If we can make it through the winter, we won't be poor for some time.\"\n\nThey walked in silence for a time after that, circling the grounds and occasionally cutting through some of the more tended-to parts of the garden. It was nice to simply be outside and moving, even if the knots in her chest never quite went away. Still, after a time she could feel fatigue setting in, and she turned for the rear doors once more.\n\n\"Eleven times around the grounds,\" Mia said as she held the door open. \"That's pretty good.\"\n\n\"Good enough to get home?\" Axtara asked, pausing inside the door to wipe her claws on a towel that had been left for exactly that purpose.\n\n\"Probably not. Unless you'd like to take at least two stops along the way.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not,\" Axtara said, letting out a sigh as she set the towel back down and then carefully wiped her hindpaws on it. \"Back to the reading room until Mord arrives, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I'd come keep you company,\" Mia said. \"But\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. You do have your own obligations to take care of.\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll come see you when Mord arrives.\" Mia darted past her, opening the door to the reading room. \"Get some rest.\"\n\n\"I will. Thanks Mia.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\" There was a faint click as the door shut... and then she was alone.\n\nAt first she tried to sleep, curled up on the mass of cushions and blankets the manor staff had provided, but it wouldn't come. She was tired, but not tired enough to drift off into a slumber. Just enough to be tired, she thought, staring at the collection of bookshelves across the room from her.\n\nI guess I could work on something. Like drafting a letter home to... Ugh. Her tail twitched. How am I to explain this? \"Dear mother and father, I've been shot, but it's okay?\" She shook her head and let out a heavy breath. Father would be here in days ready to cook the kingdom, and the only reason he'd beat mother here is because he's the better flier.\n\nShe let out another huff of air, watching as it kicked back a corner of a blanket that had been folded over. At least it didn't hurt to exhale hard anymore. Or lie on her belly.\n\nHow will I tell them? Maybe I should start with how wonderful it was to hear from them. Which it had been. In pain once she'd awakened, she'd at least had their letter to read through to help take her mind off of things. Just talk about how nice it was to hear from them, and how I have loans... and maybe never mention being wounded at all. Save the story for \"never\" or if they ask about the scars.\n\nShe frowned slightly. Maybe I can hide them with paint when the time comes and they won't\u2014What am I saying? Of course they'll notice! She pushed herself up and looked down at the bandages on her chest. Mord said there were five wounds?\n\nWhich, he'd claimed, had been lucky. The musket ball Fendall had tried to shoot her with had been improperly cast and broken apart when it had been fired. At least, that was what Mord had told her after she'd woken up. He'd also shown her the fragments it had broken into, and explained to her that had the ball not come apart, the injury would have been much worse, if less spread out across her chest. As it was the shot had torn several muscles, which was why moving her wings made her chest hurt, but had it not done that...\n\nThe shot would have done a lot more than puncture my scales and tear up some muscle. It would have hit organs.\n\nIt could have killed me.\n\nHer tail twitched again, a tremor of fear running through her whole body. May Fendall Derin get what he deserves.\n\nThere was a knock at the door, and Axtara looked over just in time to hear Mord speak. \"Lady Axtara? Are you awake?\"\n\n\"I am, Mord. Please come in.\" There was a click as the latch on the door lifted, and Mord stepped into the reading room, a smile on his face. \"Excuse me for not rising to greet you, but...\"\n\nMord shook his head. \"You've only made that joke every time I've seen you, Lady Axtara. How are you feeling? I understand you had a walk around the grounds about an hour ago?\"\n\nShe blinked. Was it that long ago? \"It certainly didn't feel like an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Recovering from being shot will do that to you,\" Mord said, setting his bag by her foreleg. \"How's the chest feel after all that exercise?\"\n\n\"Sore, but less tight.\"\n\n\"Good. Let's take these bandages off then, shall we, and have a good look at things.\"\n\nThe next few minutes were less awkward if only because it was the third time Mord had come to check on her, and her bandages were no longer stained red when he pulled them off.\n\n\"Stitches look like they're setting nicely,\" Mord said, eyeing the wounds. They were puffy and swollen lines across her chest, the edges ragged. A few of her scales had even gone grey, ready to fall out. \"Some shedding... I think that's supposed to happen.\"\n\n\"It is,\" she confirmed. \"I've cut myself before. Nothing this bad, but...\"\n\n\"Good. If it's not alarming to you, it's not alarming to me.\"\n\n\"Plenty about this is alarming, personally.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to hear that,\" Mord said, looking up at her and giving her a warm smile. \"I'd have to wonder what sort of business your bank regularly saw if being shot wasn't cause for alarm.\"\n\n\"That's fair,\" Axtara said as the doctor began carefully probing at her wounds. \"And yes, a reasonable assumption to make.\"\n\n\"Well, unfortunately, assumptions are a little bit of what I'm going off of here,\" Mord said, pausing as his touch prompted a sharp hiss from her. \"Still tender?\"\n\n\"Very,\" she said, nodding.\n\n\"Well, I think that's to be expected. The inflammation is mostly gone, but I still worry that it will show signs of infection. I cleaned it as best I could, but as I said, assumption is what I'm working off of here. No offense to you, Lady Axtara,\" he said with a frown as he leaned it close, peering at one of her wounds. \"But I've never actually treated a dragon before. If not for the number and variety of farm animals and I've had to stitch back together over the years, I'd have been at a loss. Not that I'm comparing you to a dumb animal, you understand, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she said, bowing her head slightly. \"You're used to working with humans.\"\n\n\"Well, yes?\" He pulled back, looking up at her. \"Rather, most of what I study, and the books I have, deal with human injury. It seems that with you living here, I should likely invest in a medical book on dragon physiology. Though I rather hope you don't experience this level of injury again.\"\n\n\"As do I,\" Axtara agreed. \"If it helps, I'd be willing to pay for such a book. Seeing as it would be solely in my own interest.\"\n\n\"I may very well take you up on that offer,\" Mord said as he began to slide her bandages back into place. \"But from what I can see, while you are still injured, it does appear that you are on the road to recovery.\" He gave the bandages a final tug and then stepped back. \"Now, let's see how the muscles are healing. If you could bring your right foreleg up very slowly, like I am with my arm, to here... Good. Hold it. Now let it down. Now the left.\"\n\nThe next half an hour passed slowly as Mord walked her through several stretches to see how her recovery had improved, checking her range of motion and a few times carefully placing a hand on her chest to see how her muscles were moving. At last, however, he let her lie back down, exhausted.\n\n\"Well, the good news is that you're making a fast recovery, and I don't doubt it will be full,\" he said as she laid there. \"As far as the pain it causes you to spread and move your wings, as some of your flight muscles reach all the way to your chest, that's simply going to be something that your body deals with for a while.\"\n\n\"However,\" he added, gathering his things. \"This does mean that you'll need to take great care to exercise and stretch all your limbs daily as this injury recovers. If you don't, stiffness may set in and impede your ability to fly, if not completely prevent it. And I can see from the look on your face that either would be unthinkable.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said. \"It would.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Mord said, nodding. \"So you won't object to doing those exercises we just performed once a day at least through the next week? You're a quick healer, so I may decide to have you perform them more often.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"I will not. Object, I mean.\"\n\n\"Good. Normally I wouldn't push this quite so fast, but you seem to be healing at a rather speedy rate, which does fall in line with what I've heard about dragons. Now, you might be thinking this day is over, but there's one more thing I'd like to do.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mord said, smiling. \"I'd like us to go on a little walk. I know you went on one around the grounds earlier, but I'd like us to walk down to Elnacier and then back. The elevation change will be good for your forelegs. Don't worry,\" he added quickly. \"If you're tired out when we reach the bottom, you can rest until you're ready to resume the journey back up the hill. Do you think you could manage that?\"\n\nShe thought for a moment, glancing down at her chest before replying. \"If I were perhaps given a stop along the way, I believe I could.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Mord lifted his satchel and slung it over his shoulder. \"Well then, I'll let the king and queen know. Would you like me to walk with you back up to the manor afterwards, or...?\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Axtara said, pushing herself up and ignoring the faint twinge of protest from her chest. \"I'll manage. I shall meet you by the front doors.\" Mord nodded and excused himself from the room.\n\nWhen she arrived at the front entryway, however, she found not only Mord waiting for her, but the king and queen as well, alongside one of the youths from the courier office. Mia arrived a few moments later, as Axtara was at the depths of her bow.\n\n\"Lady Axtara.\" Majesty was the first to speak. \"Mord has made it known to us that you are going to be walking down to Elnacier. Would you mind terribly if my husband and I joined you? There appears to be some business at Vern's that we're needed for. But not urgently, correct?\" she asked, turning to the boy.\n\n\"No, your highness,\" he said quickly. \"Vern just said to ask you both to come down and speak with him, but not to hurry.\"\n\n\"And he wouldn't say what it was?\" King Elnacier asked. Judging by Majesty's reaction, it wasn't the first time either.\n\n\"No, your highness. He just told me to make sure that if you could at all come, that you came, your highnesses.\"\n\n\"Vague,\" Elnacier replied. \"But intriguing.\"\n\n\"Or alarming,\" Majesty countered. \"After Fen, the last thing I wish to hear is someone else we trusted pleading for mercy while admitting to some sort of wrongdoing.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't\u2014!\" the youth started before catching himself. \"I mean, your highness, he would never. Vern's lazy, yes, but he's not dishonest.\"\n\n\"Unless you count laziness as dishonesty, but I don't,\" the king added. \"I'm the one who told him to take it easy anyway.\" He took a quick look around at the gathered assemblage. \"We're just waiting on\u2014Ah, there you two are,\" he said as the two guards walked up. \"Perfect timing. Lady Axtara, would you mind traveling with us?\"\n\n\"It would be my pleasure,\" she answered, bowing.\n\n\"And stop with the bowing already,\" the king added. \"You're injured.\"\n\n\"Ah... of course. But yes, as long as you don't mind keeping a slow pace.\"\n\nThe king shook his head. \"We're going on foot anyway. No sense getting the horses out for just a short walk.\" He took another look around. \"Mia? You're coming as well?\"\n\n\"Devine is watching Aba and Ati,\" Mia said quickly, pulling a cloak around her shoulders. \"And I'm curious.\"\n\n\"Very well then,\" the king said with a nod. \"Let's be off then. At the Lady Axtara's pace.\"\n\nHad I appeared before myself a month ago, in a flash of magic... Axtara thought as she trod through the manor grounds and down the road toward Elnacier. And told myself that in a month, I would set the pace for a king and queen, I'd have laughed at myself. And yet... Well, it is only because of the injury, isn't it?\n\nShe took a look around at the group, all talking one with another, and gave a mental shake of her head. No... not it's not. The king and queen would walk with me even if I weren't injured because... Well, that's who they are. Royal, but respectful. They're good rulers. Even as she watched, the king was talking with the youth from the courier's office, asking him about his family. Majesty, meanwhile, was talking with Mord in quiet tones they likely thought she couldn't hear, since it was about her recovery. Mia was walking with the guards, though from the look of it she'd be coming to talk with her soon.\n\nThey'd do it even without my injury, because they're good rulers.\n\n\"So,\" Mia said, stepping up beside her at last. \"More exercise?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said in reply. \"I suppose as a benefit I'll get to see what this business with Vern is all about, perhaps collect my mail.\"\n\n\"Have you written your family back yet?\"\n\n\"No,\" Axtara replied. \"And before you say anything, I have the perfect excuse. All of my things are at my house.\"\n\n\"Beside the ones in your satchel.\"\n\n\"Shush, you.\"\n\nInevitably, she did have to stop once along the way and give herself a minute to rest, her limbs tired. But the king and queen waited patiently, as if it wasn't a worry at all, and eventually they were able to resume their trek.\n\nAt least it hasn't rained in a day or so, Axtara thought as the Elnacier green neared. If it were wet and cold and muddy out, I'd be miserable.\n\nCorrection, she noted. I'd have refused to come.\n\nAs it was, she let out a sigh of relief as she lowered herself to the green amid a host of stares from nearby townsfolk, taking care to keep her bandages from touching the grass. Her muscles, short of the knots in her chest, didn't feel tired. Rather her whole body felt fatigued, as if she'd flown to the coast and back.\n\n\"How do you feel?\" Mia asked.\n\n\"Tired,\" she answered. \"Though I've promised myself that once I get up, I'll go find a honey-bun at the bakery.\"\n\n\"That's good motivation,\" Mord said, stepping up alongside her and, with a warning nod, touching a bare hand to her chest. \"No hotter than before. Good. No aches?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Just the soreness around my chest, as usual.\"\n\n\"Well then, Axtara,\" the king said. \"We'll leave you to rest then\u2014\"\n\n\"Actually, your highness, I would like to see if I have any mail,\" she said quickly. \"If that's all right with you?\"\n\nThe king smiled. \"I believe we can wait a few minutes, if that is enough for you.\" She nodded, and he moved away, walking up to one of the booths in the crowd and addressing the proprietors. She caught fragments of the conversation, snippets of an explanation of her condition from the sound of it.\n\nControlling rumor. Likely been a lot of that in the last few days. Tale of Fen's abrupt flight from the kingdom had to have spread swiftly, and even if the royal family had made an official announcement it was likely that rumor would swirl in its wake anyway.\n\nMia, meanwhile, had vanished while she'd been speaking with the king. She twisted her head, trying to catch sight of her across the square, but couldn't pick out the princess's cloak anywhere among the crowd.\n\n\"She said she'd be back in a moment,\" Mord said, adjusting his satchel. \"Anyway, Lady Axtara, I presume you will still be at the king's manor tomorrow?\"\n\n\"I believe I will be accepting their hospitality for another night yet,\" she confirmed. \"I can't imagine walking back to my home in my current state.\" Not without immediately slipping into a sleep that could last a week or more.\n\n\"Well then, I have other patients to attend to, but I shall call upon you tomorrow to see how you've improved.\" He gave her a polite nod with his head. \"Good day and good health, Lady Axtara.\"\n\n\"Good day to you as well, Mord.\"\n\nShe shut her eyes for a moment, closing out the bustle around her and the wandering eyes of a few townsfolk. Just rest for a minute, go to the courier office, rest again there, and then walk back to the manor. Maybe with two rests. Or three\u2014\n\nA warm, sweet scent caught at her nose, and she took a quick sniff, her eyes popping open. Honey-buns! She turned her head, following the scent, to see Mia coming through the crowd, a large honeyed pastry held carefully in her hands.\n\n\"Here,\" she said as she neared, smiling and holding out the sticky bun. Axtara wiped one set of claws against the grass, trying to make them as clean as possible before accepting the sweet treat. \"A honey bun did sound like a good idea, and well, it seemed like the least I could do.\" The princess spread her skirts as she sat down next to Axtara on the grass.\n\n\"Thank you\u2014\" Axtara managed to get out before taking a large bite.\n\nMia just smiled again. \"And don't worry about affording it. That was a gift.\"\n\n\"Did you get one?\" Axtara asked as soon as she had swallowed.\n\nMia shook her head. \"No. I'm all right without one today. But when I mentioned it was for you, they were happy to just give it to me.\"\n\n\"Mmph.\" She couldn't say much more with her mouth full of pastry. Not without being impolite. But really, there wasn't much to say. Mia just kept smiling, letting her enjoy her snack.\n\n\"Delicious,\" Axtara said at last, licking the remaining honey from her claws. \"Thank you, Mia.\"\n\n\"As I said, you're welcome, Axtara,\" Mia said, standing and then giving her a careful hug. \"You can return the favor later with orange tea.\"\n\n\"Not a box of candied oranges?\" Axtara asked, turning and giving the princess a grin. \"I suppose orange tea\u2014\"\n\n\"Candied oranges,\" Mia said quickly, cutting her off but still smiling. \"I'm a princess. I can change my answer.\"\n\n\"Well, when I make it home and write my uncle...\" She rose, Mia stepping back slightly to give her space. The muscles in her chest were less knotted after the walk, but still sore. \"Anyway, I believe I have rested well enough now, if your parents are ready.\"\n\nThe king and queen were otherwise occupied, but after taking a minute or two to close off their conversations, they once again moved as a group down toward the courier station, the youth\u2014Axtara still couldn't recall his name\u2014running ahead to warn Vern that they were all arriving.\n\n\"I hope it isn't bad news,\" Mia confided quietly as they moved down the street. \"Father and mother have put on a good face, but they're both worried to the point of losing sleep about how many of the services they'll need to withdraw to make it through the next year. They can lay off some of the manor staff, but that just means they would need to find new incomes as well.\"\n\n\"I understand that once the year is over, the next tax season will be a bountiful one, provided we can find someone trustworthy to carry it out,\" Mia continued. \"And Uncle Fen did leave all his records behind, so we have some insight as to what system the people are used to, but...\" She shook her head. \"It's making it through that year, and this winter, without disrupting things too greatly. People are used to the courier coming by. And no one wants to hear that your rulers are paying people in food or wood. It's something we can do, but...\"\n\n\"It doesn't look respectable to other nations or your people,\" Axtara agreed with a nod. \"Especially when you were exchanging coin on a larger scale before.\"\n\n\"I suppose on the bright side,\" Mia continued, \"once we determine exactly how much Uncle Fen was skimming, we can adjust the tax to compensate so that the kingdom isn't quite so stretched and the people are paying less. Though that might mean less business for you,\" she said, glancing in Axtara's direction. \"Sorry.\"\n\nAxtara smiled. \"You may express surprise, Mia, the members of this kingdom having more money is better for me, not worse.\"\n\n\"Won't they have a lessened need for loans?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"One would think, but in fact, no. As the central kingdoms have learned, the more money the people have, the more willing they are to take risks. The more they're willing to do. If you double the income of a peasant, they don't hoard all that money. They save some of it, yes, but again for that a bank is your wisest choice. Then they elevate their standards of living. And what was once out of reach suddenly seems in reach. So, for example,\" she said as the courier office came into view, \"where before they might have taken on a loan of a lower value over a shorter period, letting someone be more confident in their income extends that confidence into taking on a larger loan over a longer period, as they're more sure of being able to pay it off.\"\n\n\"It's becoming apparent that one of the gravest mistakes those in power can make,\" she finished as they came to a stop, \"is in squeezing those beneath them until they just barely survive. Give them room to grow, and they will.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Mia said as the king and queen walked up to the front of the office. \"It feels like it would be the other way around, but that explanation does seem insightful. Is this something you learned from your uncle?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, but he's not the one who's noted it,\" Axtara answered. \"A merchant by the name of Trivast Dontalli theorized the concept, tested it, and wrote a controversial treatise on the results. That inspired a few more, and well...\" The front door opened, Vern stepping out and bowing before the king and queen. \"I can tell you about it later.\"\n\nMia nodded as Vern spoke. \"Your royal highnesses, thank you for gracing my humble shop with your\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh shove it Vern,\" the king said, though there was only mirth in his voice, not malice. \"You and I go way back. Bowing and referring to our titles is enough for me. What's so important. You're not...\" His voice dropped slightly. \"There's not trouble, is there?\"\n\n\"Well, not exactly, my lord,\" Vern said, shrugging his old shoulders and looking almost like a small, weathered wood carving next to the king. \"But there might be, especially once word gets out.\"\n\n\"About what?\" While the king's tone had been fairly lighthearted, the queen's was more direct.\n\n\"Well, if it's all the same with you, I'd best just show you, your highnesses,\" Vern said, waving a hand at the entrance to the stables. As he did so they opened from the inside, the boy that had come to fetch the king and queen pushing them open.\n\nAxtara saw Vern's eyes dart in her direction. \"And you might want to leave that one outside,\" he said, nodding in her direction. \"This is for your eyes only, I think.\"\n\n\"The Lady Axtara has proven herself a valued member of this kingdom,\" Queen Elnacier countered, and this time there was no mistaking the icy tone to her words. \"We will be the judge of that.\"\n\nVern just shrugged. \"Your call, your highness.\" He motioned toward the now-open stable doors. \"This way.\"\n\nAs a group they moved into the stables, Axtara staying to the back of the group and lifting her head to look up over everyone. It looked... Much as I remember it, she thought, eyeing the wagon in the center of the stable, the stall on one side with a somewhat alarmed equine occupant... even the old, sunken-into-the-soil crates on the far side.\n\nExcept... they weren't identical. Much of the pile had been cleared off. No longer a towering stack of old wood, the bottom layer now sat alone, the crates once on top no longer in evidence.\n\n\"Your highnesses,\" Vern said, stopping near the old crates and turning to look at the king and queen. \"Many years ago, not long after you gave me this job, Fendall came to me with some money and asked me to ship it out of the kingdom for safekeeping. Said it was his savings as minister of finance, gave me the name of the banks he wanted it sent to. Told me to keep it quiet, because it was his savings and he didn't want anyone to know.\"\n\n\"So I did,\" Vern said. \"I carefully crated it up and sent it out. And then few weeks later he came by and did it again. And again. And again. And since we didn't have that many wagons going out of the kingdom in those days, it really didn't make sense to package it all up at once.\"\n\n\"But then he stopped, and the crate wasn't full yet, so I waited\u2014\"\n\n\"In other words,\" the king said, \"you were being your usual lazy self.\"\n\n\"I'm old,\" Vern said. \"But yes, I waited until the next year. And all that time he was giving me this money. But it was adding up, quickly. So I asked him about it, and he confessed that it was the kingdom's, and that he wanted it kept safe.\"\n\nSwirling storms. Axtara's eyes snapped the crates. Is he saying what I think he is?\n\n\"And I figured, well, what better way to keep all that money safe then just pretend it was being sent out like Fendall had asked?\" Vern continued. \"Anytime he'd ask I'd nod and say I'd sent it on. But none of it ever really did. I always meant to send it out, but it was expensive, Fendall hadn't paid for it, and it didn't seem right to use the king's coin to pay for it. Fendall had told me to keep quiet so... I did.\"\n\nHe did! Axtara thought, counting the crates. There were at least a dozen of them in total. He did!\n\n\"So, to translate through your good slant,\" the king said, eyes wide. \"You're saying Fendall tried to ship all the money he stole out of the kingdom through you... and you still have most of it because, let's face it, you're lazy?\"\n\n\"Well, my king, I wouldn't say lazy,\" Vern said. \"I simply questioned the use of sending so many\u2014\"\n\n\"Vern, if you weren't one of my husband's friends, I'd have had you stripped of your position for sloth seasons ago,\" Majesty said. \"Though if I understand you correctly, you're saying that thanks to your laziness, the kingdom's money\u2014everything that Fendall thought he stole\u2014is here?\"\n\n\"Well, not all of it, your highness,\" Vern said. \"I did send some of it once. But as the years went on, well... Yes. I am. On account of my laziness.\" He gave the queen a grin. \"Good thing you didn't have me replaced, is it not, your highness?\"\n\n\"Almost all of it?\" The king stepped forward. \"Right here? In these crates?\"\n\nVern nodded. \"Yes, your highness. I know I'm supposed to do my job and all...\" Axtara didn't miss the quick look of satisfaction he gave the queen. \"But I'm old, and a crate full of money, well... it's heavy. And since Fendall never once sent out any messages inquiring about it\u2014\"\n\n\"He couldn't have,\" Axtara said before she could stop herself.\n\n\"What?\" Vern glared at her. \"You got something to say?\"\n\n\"Yes. He couldn't have sent anything out because it would have risked his entire operation.\" Mia and the king both gave her questioning looks, so she continued. \"Had his activities been legitimate, he would have. But they weren't. And if he'd sent any message, there'd have been too great a chance of someone on the other end contacting you, King Elnacier, about it directly.\"\n\n\"Couldn't he have used a coded message?\" the king asked. \"Or claimed my authority?\"\n\n\"Likely not,\" Axtara said, shaking her head. \"That would require bringing someone else in. Or potentially involving you if he kept them in the dark. Too many questions. Likely he thought it would be simpler to just send the money where he wanted it to go, perhaps along with a later note to then forward it somewhere else. Or perhaps not. As long as he could reach wherever he sent the funds and have them withdrawn before anyone realized what had happened.\"\n\n\"So he kept it as quiet as possible,\" King Elnacier said as he turned. \"And because of that, never knew you weren't sending it along?\"\n\nVern just shrugged. \"Your highness, it's not my place to say how it happened. But what I can say is...\" He took a step back, wrapped his fingers under the edge of one lid, and tugged. With a faint squeak, the top lifted. \"Most of the money Fendall thinks is waiting for him back in the kingdoms is, in fact, right here.\"\n\nThe king and queen both took a step forward, and Axtara heard one of them let out a gasp. \"There... there must be a thousand bars in here.\"\n\n\"More than that, your highnesses,\" Vern said with a grin. \"And it's all yours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Futures",
                "text": "The knock at her door wasn't unexpected, and Axtara looked up from her desk with a smile. \"Come in!\" she called, stretching her wings slightly and reaching to wipe the ink from her claw. \"It's open!\"\n\nA moment later the door opened, letting in a heavily bundled Princess Mia along with a sharp, cold rush of air that faded as soon as the door was safely shut behind her. \"Good afternoon, Axtara,\" Mia said, unraveling a scarf from around her neck. \"How have you been?\"\n\n\"Warm and comfortable and busy,\" Axtara said, finishing wiping the ink from her talon and watching as snow fell from Mia's coat. In much thicker clumps than the soft drifts she could see through her front window. \"Is that a new scarf?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" the princess replied, removing her heavy coat and hanging it by the door. \"A gift from my aunt.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Axtara stood, leveled her desk, and turned for her kitchen, sliding the door aside to grab the tray of tea that had been waiting there, along with a small, simple box crowned with a bow. \"You have family visiting once more?\"\n\n\"Yes, we do,\" Mia said, her words almost a groan. \"Amazing how they've come to visit us now that the kingdom has money. Though the scarf is nice. Very soft and warm.\"\n\n\"Ulterior motives or not,\" Axtara admitted as she ducked back into the front room. \"I'd imagine with all the snow recently it will be quite appreciated.\"\n\n\"That is certainly true,\" Mia admitted. She was still standing by the door, kicking snow from her boots and patting it from her pant-legs. \"I do appreciate the gift.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said as she set the tray down, her eyes straying from Mia to the tightly wrapped bag sitting on the ground next to her, and then to the deepening snows outside. Carefully, slowly, she took a faint sniff.\n\nNo horse. \"Did you walk here?\"\n\n\"I did!\" Mia said with a red-cheeked grin. \"Nice. Peaceful. Quiet. A bit of a getaway. Meant I had to leave a bit earlier than usual, but...\"\n\n\"It also means that if the snow continues to fall, what little of my path I'd managed to clear will be buried completely.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" There was an undercurrent to Mia's tone that suggested nothing Axtara was saying was new or unconsidered to her. \"Then I suppose if it continues to fall, I would be forced to either press through some of the deepest snows seen since I was a babe, or... impress upon you for the hospitality of a spare bed.\"\n\n\"Your aunt is driving you to madness isn't she?\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely,\" Mia said, her calm expression breaking at last. \"All she wants to do is sit around and sew and teach me to be a proper lady and suggest the hands of nobles in Nuveria I could marry and never stop talking about them and... Gah!\" She finished kicking the snow from her legs at last and rose, grabbing a nearby and provided towel to mop at the melting snow. \"I had to get out. Axtara, the only way I was able to convince her to not invite herself along was by walking. Yes, it worked in my favor but... Agh!\" Mia let out a loud huff of air, tossing the towel to one side, then crouched and began undoing the leather thongs around her boots.\n\n\"So what I'm hearing is that if you just happen to need to wait until the morrow for the weather to clear...\"\n\n\"I will count each and every minute as a relief, and offer a prayer of thanks to the Creator for the blessing,\" Mia said, peeling one of her boots away from her foot. The second followed a moment later. Both went into a small bin Axtara had added by the door on her advice just for that purpose. \"I'd have asked in advance,\" she continued, standing, \"but\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" Axtara said. \"After all, I believe you let me spend four days at the manor after I was shot, sleeping in your reading room.\" She couldn't help but glance down at her chest as she spoke. In the months since the incident had passed, her wounds had healed\u2014and cleanly\u2014but as predicted she had not come away unmarked. Mia and others had assured her that the five scars left by the attack were too small for most to notice, but she always felt as though the lighter patches in her coloration were evident to anyone that looked.\n\n\"Oh,\" Mia said, stepping across the front room and pausing to tangle her toes in the thick pelt of the rug. \"So what you're saying is that I should have shot myself to get away? Don't tempt me.\"\n\n\"It really is that bad?\" Axtara asked, seating herself behind the desk-turned-table once more.\n\n\"No,\" Mia said. \"And she's my mother's sister, so it's clear mother delights in having her around. It just... She has very firm opinions and ideas of how princesses should act. I had to wear a dress over my pants to sneak out of the manor without her knowing and\u2014\" She paused as Axtara failed to hold back a faint snicker. \"Oh fine, I suppose it's funny.\"\n\n\"What did you do with the dress once you were out of her sight?\" Axtara asked, lifting the teapot in one claw and very carefully breathing a jet of flame at its base to make sure it was warm.\n\n\"Slipped it over my head and passed it off to one of the staff who knows exactly what to do with it,\" Mia said, her smile turning smug. Then her focus shifted to the teapot and the two cups on the tray. \"What's the flavor today? Orange?\" She leaned forward, peering into one of the cups only, as Axtara knew, to see that it was empty.\n\n\"Not quite,\" Axtara said. \"In fact, it's not even tea. That box there, on the tray?\"\n\n\"Yes I\u2014\" Mia stopped, her eyes going wide as she looked up at her. \"No!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Axtara said with a grin. \"They arrived two days ago.\"\n\n\"And you didn't tell me?\" Mia asked, looking down at the box in reverent awe.\n\n\"I wanted it to be a surprise,\" Axtara said. \"Besides, there's more in there than just candied oranges. Go ahead. Open it.\"\n\nWith almost reverent grace Mia reached out and undid the bow around the small box. \"I've never seen a box like this,\" she said as she pulled the bow away. \"What is it made of?\"\n\n\"Some sort of thin-pressed wood sheets from across the southeast oceans,\" Axtara said. \"I don't know the exact details, but\u2014\"\n\n\"It's very pretty.\"\n\n\"Yes it is.\"\n\nMia lifted the sides, the top of the box sliding off and revealing its contents. \"Those,\" she said, looking down at an array of round, crystalized slices with wide eyes, \"have to be candied oranges!\"\n\n\"They are,\" Axtara said as Mia set the top aside. \"But that's not all there is in there.\" She reached out with a single claw, pointing at a small collection of dark brown bits sitting in one part of the box. \"You see those?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Take one and put it in your cup, then crush it with your spoon.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Mia reached out with one hand, but then paused. \"Is it all right to touch it? I don't see a spoon.\"\n\n\"I...\" Her eyes darted down to the tray. Spoons. I forgot spoons. \"Yes, but you'll need a spoon to crush it. One moment.\" She set the teakettle down and rose, ducking into the kitchen and returning a moment later with two spoons held carefully in one paw. Mia was just dropping the dark bit into her cup with a faint clink as Axtara sat down. She passed the smaller of the two spoons, Mia taking it and pressing it down against the bottom of her cup.\n\nThere was a faint crunch as the bit broke apart, and Axtara grinned as she saw the look of puzzlement on Mia's face.\n\n\"Won't this get into the drink?\" she asked, looking up at her as she added three of the small bits to her own larger cup. \"This can't be tea.\"\n\n\"It isn't,\" Axtarta said, trying\u2014unsuccessfully\u2014to hide her grin. \"But it's very good. Got it crushed?\" Mia nodded. \"Then I'll pour.\" Carefully, she took the teapot and began pouring a thin stream of water into the princess' cup, circling it ever so slightly as she did so.\n\n\"It looks like mud,\" Mia said as Axtara finished pouring. \"You're sure this isn't a joke of some kind?\"\n\n\"On my egg it is not,\" Axtara said, crushing the nodules in her own cup and then pouring the steaming water over them. \"Before you drink it, you should stir it with your spoon to make sure it's wholly dissolved.\"\n\nIt was hard to hold back a laugh at the suspicious expression on Mia's face, but she managed. It almost appeared that the only reason the princess was trusting her so far was because Axtara was also mixing her own drink together. \"Take a sniff,\" Axtara suggested, motioning toward the princess' cup. Her heightened sense of smell could already pick up the rich aroma steaming from her own cup, but Mia...\n\nThe princess bent down slightly, sniffing, and then her eyes went wide. \"Oh, that smells wonderful. Axtara, what is this?\"\n\n\"Take a sip,\" Axtara suggested, lifting her own cup and taking a deep sniff of the scent rolling off of it before taking a sip. Rich, sweet deliciousness rolled across her tongue. From across the desk, she heard Mia let out a gasp.\n\n\"Axtara,\" Mia said, staring down at her cup with wide eyes. \"This is... incredible! I've never tasted anything like it before!\"\n\n\"I didn't think so,\" Axtara said, grinning at her friend across her own cup. \"It's very new. From across the southeast ocean, like the oranges. It's called 'chocolate.'\"\n\n\"Chocolate,\" Mia repeated, her eyes fixed on her drink. \"It's amazing. So rich... but almost bitter. And sweet at the same time!\"\n\nAxtara's grin widened. \"I thought you'd like it. I'll admit I was worried my uncle wasn't going to be able to acquire any, but it seems the merchants selling it have begun touting it as a 'winter drink,' so there was a supply of it this late in the season.\"\n\n\"What is it made out of?\" Mia asked before taking another sip.\n\n\"A bean, as I understand it.\"\n\n\"A bean? Like from a plant?\"\n\n\"So I'm told, yes. The cocoa bean.\"\n\nMia gave her cup another curious look. \"Well, I must congratulate someone's forward thinking. I've always seen beans as something stewed with a side of meat, not as a drink.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that's how it started,\" Axtara suggested, pausing to take another sip of her drink. \"But then someone took notice of the broth. I don't know. What I do know is that it's one of the best things I've ever tasted.\"\n\n\"I agree. In fact, I am not certain the candied orange slices will be able to hold up to this.\" Mia took another sip from her cup. \"This may be the most delectable thing I've ever tasted.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Axtara said, setting her cup down and plucking a piece of candied orange up in her talons. \"Don't say that until you've tried one.\" She bit down, sweet, sugary citrus blending with the aftertaste of chocolate.\n\n\"True,\" Mia said, setting her cup down\u2014it was half-gone, Axtara noted\u2014and picking up a slice of candied orange. \"And I do like orange...\" She took a bite.\n\n\"Oh, that is good. It's everything I'd ever dreamed and hoped it would be. So tangy!\"\n\n\"I'm glad you like it,\" Axtara said, smiling. \"The box is yours. What we don't finish, you can take home.\"\n\nMia's eyes went wide, so clearly shocked she spoke without swallowing. \"You mean\u2014?\" A pause as she swallowed, a faint embarrassed flush on her face. \"You mean it? Axtara, I couldn't\u2014\"\n\n\"I had my uncle send me two,\" she admitted, smiling. \"This one's yours. Consider it a late gift of harvest thanks.\" And for everything you've done for me as a friend.\n\n\"Axtara... thank you. Truly.\" Mia took another sip of her chocolate drink. \"Of course,\" she said as soon as she'd set the cup back down. \"Now I have been put in a rather unenviable position.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" More chocolate spilled across Axtara's tongue, rich and bitter and sweet. Delightful.\n\n\"Yes,\" Mia said with a grin of her own. \"Do I tell my mother, father, and sisters? Or do I keep this to myself?\"\n\n\"I notice you didn't mention your aunt.\"\n\nMia let out a laugh. \"No, I did not. And with good cause, too, talking to me as if I should be scandalized that I'm unmarried as of yet. I'm a modern princess, there's no need for me to be married by my fourteenth year anymore. Not in civilized society.\"\n\n\"When was your aunt married?\"\n\n\"This aunt?\" Mia set down her cup. \"When she was fifteen. That's only a few summers younger than I am. And it's not as though our kingdom is looking for tight political alliances at the moment. Not that my aunt believes that with our fortunes turning. I fully expect that she'll return to Nuveria and frantically start looking for a potential husband to send here without a single thought to my or my family's thoughts on the matter.\"\n\n\"Eugh.\" A shudder ran down Axtara's back, between her wings and rushing all the way to the tip of her tail. \"I'm quite glad that dragons don't have any history of participating in such, from my perspective, strange courtship rituals.\"\n\n\"None at all?\" Mia asked. \"How do you find someone, then?\"\n\nAxtara shrugged and selected another slice of candied orange. \"We just do,\" she said. \"We keep our eyes open, or maybe travel a bit, and find someone we can love. At least, to hear how we've romanticized it.\"\n\n\"Sounds difficult\u2014not that I'm saying it's a poor idea, mind,\" Mia added quickly. \"But then again, you do live for a very long time. And I suppose it's not too different from how we do it, just... I may have far fewer options.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" Axtara said as soon as she finished eating the slice. \"Marriages for love happen among the nobility in the core kingdoms. Not as much as the plays and stories would have you believe, but they do happen. And, of course, you could always silence your aunt by hiring a dragon.\"\n\n\"Oh no.\" Mia shook her head. \"I'm not that worried by it. Not yet. A matchmaker like that can wait.\" She paused and took another sip of her chocolate. \"So then, this may be changing the subject, but how is business?\"\n\n\"Booming!\" Axtara couldn't hide her grin, nor the sudden swell of elation deep inside her. \"I'd say that you should see what I've been working on, but that would involve showing you finances that are between myself and my clients. So I'll have to settle for telling you.\"\n\n\"Please do,\" Mia said, upending her cup and then frowning about it. \"While I help myself to another slice of orange and more of this chocolate.\"\n\nAxtara grinned. \"I knew you'd like it. Anyway, I suppose the best way to put it is that Dontalli has proven herself correct once more. With all the tax money your father has been returning to the people, and the pronouncement that the tax rate will be reduced, business across the kingdom is booming. Craglily?\" She waited for Mia's nod before continuing. \"He came back and expanded his original loan. He's rebuilding the entire mill as soon as the thaw hits. Spending the money your father returned on building it up bigger and better than ever. And Easy Bay?\" She let out a giggle of excitement. \"Another loan! Two of them! They're rebuilding the docks, and one gentleman wants to build what he calls a 'haul' for bringing the boats out of the water and working on them.\"\n\n\"So business is doing well.\"\n\n\"So well!\" She let out another giggle despite herself, her tail tip flicking in loops behind her. \"I'd almost be broke if not for the large amount of people suddenly paying for my services\u2014as well as finding themselves with the money to do so. I've opened forty-nine accounts in the last four weeks, Mia. Forty-nine!\" She spread her wings, pulling up slightly and striking a regal pose.\n\n\"I never dreamed it would be so quick, or so fruitful, but...\" She waggled her wings slightly, still grinning, as Mia let out a laugh. \"I'm rich!\"\n\n\"Sort of rich,\" Mia corrected. \"Isn't most of the coin in your vault your clients?\"\n\n\"It is,\" Axtara said, folding her wings once more and settling. \"I don't refer to that. But they pay me for its safekeeping. And if needed\u2014Well, it's complicated. Suffice it to say that I am, as of next month, earning twice what I would need to live here in loan payments alone.\" She let out a satisfied sigh. \"So... all is well. Things worked out. I'll admit I was worried that they wouldn't but... They did.\"\n\n\"Have you heard from your parents?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"They're glad to hear that my bank is doing well. And no, I haven't told them about what happened with Fen. The shooting bit of it, anyway.\" She tapped the scars on her chest with her claws. \"I may just not mention it until they ask, truthfully.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't do that.\"\n\n\"What, not tell them?\" Axtara looked up, away from her chest, to see Mia shaking her head.\n\n\"Not that. The way you touch your claws to your chest whenever you bring up Fendall. And look at it. It's not as bad as you think, Axtara. Really.\"\n\n\"I... Thank you.\" She lowered her claws.\n\n\"Hey, what are friends for?\" Mia asked, smiling. \"So, any other news from home?\"\n\n\"I received a letter from my brother this week that said he's considering visiting the kingdom sometime soon.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mia asked, an orange slice halfway to her mouth. \"Your older brother? Ry\u2014 Um...?\"\n\n\"Ryax,\" Axtara answered. \"Ryax the Dedicated. He said he'd like to investigate some of the ruins around here, look for ancient traces of old magic.\"\n\n\"When can we expect him?\"\n\n\"Not for some time. For him, soon may mean 'in another year.' And I don't think he'd want to come during the winter. Not as thick as those snows are.\" She nodded her head in the direction of the window. The snows were only growing thicker, massive fat flakes falling from the sky and drifting on slow but steady winds.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Mia said, her tone flat. \"I do think that the weather seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I'm afraid that without a horse or other assistance, it'd be much safer for me to not risk the journey home.\"\n\n\"Imagine that,\" Axtara said, grinning as her friend turned away from the window. \"You're stuck here until it clears, I suppose. It could take all night.\"\n\n\"It could,\" Mia said. \"Fortunately, I came prepared.\"\n\n\"Most fortuitous.\"\n\n\"I thought so, yes. And since we're discussing it...\" Mia stood and moved over to her bag by the door, throwing back the oilskin and rummaging around in it. \"I did manage to bring... This!\"\n\n\"Stakes?\" Axtara asked as Mia darted back across the room.\n\n\"Stakes!\" she confirmed with a grin. \"I know it's not your favorite, but with the weather outside as it is...\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Axtara said, shaking her head. \"It's fine. You'll likely win... but I'll do my best to have fun anyway. Go ahead, set it up.\"\n\n\"Right now?\"\n\n\"Of course. There's no time like right now.\"\n\n\"Very well!\" The wooden travel set clacked against the desk, Mia's fingers flying as she unfolded and assembled the board.\n\n\"And while you do that,\" Axtara continued, rising. \"I'll get us some actual food.\"\n\n\"Candied orange slices don't count?\"\n\n\"Not yet, sadly. But I believe I have some cuts of bacon and some bread,\" she said, smiling. \"I'll be right back.\" She turned and headed into the kitchen, the faint sound of clicking and clacking wooden pieces echoing after her.\n\nMy kitchen, Axtara thought as she took a quick look around at the space. My bank. My home.\n\nMy dream.\n\nThere, over her sink, was an etching she'd made a few years ago. She hadn't been sure where to put it when it had arrived a few weeks earlier, but now where it was just felt right. A portrait of her parents, made by her own claw. Both of them were smiling at her.\n\nThey'd held their pose for an hour while she'd etched. It'd been a gift for them, but now...\n\n\"So you'll always have something of ours,\" the letter had said. She smiled. Scrawled on the back had been a simpler note.\n\n\"Stay true to yourself.\"\n\n\"I am, father,\" she said quietly, reaching out and resting her claws lightly on the etching. \"And it's working pretty well.\"\n\nSnacks in claw, she took a final look around the kitchen, just as Mia's voice echoed from the front room. \"All right, Axtara, it's up!\"\n\n\"Coming!\" Another look around her kitchen. Her rooms.\n\nMy dream, she thought. My home. My bank. And...\n\nSmiling, her head held high, she turned toward the front room. My friend.\n\nShe was home."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Best",
        "author": "Oridian",
        "genres": [
            "magic",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Bending down, Mason made one last adjustment to the summoning circle. He flipped through his documents one last time, then he adjusted his sorcerer's robes and took a deep breath.\n\n\"Kurzadakathan! Accursed Destroyer, Twisted Fiend, Being of Nightmare and Deceit! From the Otherworldly Plane, I thus invoke thee!\"\n\nCalled by Mason's words, something unnatural took form in the middle of his summoning circle. Strange many-sided geometric shapes appeared in the ground, and the distinct smell of lightning filled the air as a monstrous abomination burrowed out of the dirt, pulling itself up using eight long limbs with too many joints. Once fully summoned, Kurzadakathan resembled a horrible cross between spider and slimy octopus, with a huge gaping mouth right in the middle of its body filled countless worm-like tentacles that wiggled and squirmed.\n\n\"WHO DARES SUMMON ME?! DIE!\" Kurzadakathan leapt forward but was stopped by the invisible barrier at the edge of the summoning circle. It reached out its legs and pounded the circle in all directions, but it was confined entirely within the small dome of magic. Realizing that it could not escape, the demon screamed with rage and madness. \"GRRAAAAAEEEEAAAAA!\"\n\nThe deafening sound would have driven a lesser man to soil his pants, but Mason had come prepared. The sorcerer had already placed down a nullifying spell to dampen noise and protect his ears. This spell would also keep the sound from travelling too far, not that there would even be many other people this far from the nearest town. They were in the middle of the forest, so none but wild beasts would be here.\n\nKurzadakathan was still screaming--its jaws opened wider and wider as the sound got louder and louder. Eventually its maw was spread so wide that it had turned inside out and resembled a ball of wriggling pink tentacles pointing in all directions, but still it continued to scream. \"AAAAAAAEAAAAAAAAAAEAA!\"\n\nMason walked back to his chair and sat down. He had set up a small folding table next to the summoning circle. \"Are you done?\"\n\n\"AAAA--\" The demon suddenly halted its scream. It an abrupt twist of motion, it reverted back to spider form and turned all eight eyes towards Mason. \"Oh, it's you. You should have said something earlier.\" There was another twist of motion and then inside the circle there was a tall man with jet-black hair and a clipped goatee, dressed in a well-tailored suit. He would not have looked out of place in a gathering of human aristocrats and nobles.\n\nWith one further twist of motion, Kurzadakathan created a chair (made from black wood) inside his circle and sat down on it. \"Mason! You're the only master sorcerer who uses my full name--it's usually only the apprentices who bother. If I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have bothered with the smoke and the tentacles and all that. So...how have you been?\"\n\nMason didn't answer the demon's question. One of the most basic rules of sorcery was to never give anything for free--especially not the most valuable currency of all, information. It took a lot of strength for a demon to turn itself into something so closely resembling a human, and only the most powerful of demons could act with intelligence and rational thought. Kurzadakathan might have been acting friendly, but it would be a fatal mistake to treat a summoning as a casual event.\n\nHowever despite the dangers, Mason was a master sorcerer and this wasn't the first time he was treating with this particular demon. He slid the paper across the table, just far enough that the edge of the sheet extended into the summoning circle. \"This is the contract.\"\n\nKurzadakathan used the tips of his slim fingers to pull the paper closer. His eyes darted across the sheet quickly, then he flipped it over and read the other side. \"My, my, my. What curious games are you playing, I wonder? Why do you want something like this?\" he mused, stroking his goatee with his other hand.\n\nMason stuck strictly to business. \"I will charge the circle with four morts of energy, in exchange for you creating the exact item I have specified. That is the contract. Take it or leave it.\"\n\nKurzadakathan chuckled softly; a hissing, almost sensual sound. \"Hehe. No bargaining? But I so love bargaining. What about if we set the price at...say...three and a half morts of energy? Does that sound good to you? The only catch is you have to tell me what you want this artefact for. What a great deal. Hmm?\"\n\nMason shook his head firmly. \"No. No bargaining. Take the deal or I will banish you and try another demon.\"\n\n\"So direct! Haha... But I accept.\" Kurzadakathan snapped his fingers and a pen made from gold suddenly appeared in his hand. He turned the paper over to sign, but then he paused. \"Oh, Mason! You were so thorough with your contract that you forgot the most important part--the end! There is no space for either of us to sign.\"\n\nFor the first time, Mason smiled. To most normal people, his grin would have looked equally menacing as anything the demon had done so far. \"Don't be ridiculous. That's not the contract, that's just the executive summary.\" Reaching down to the briefcase beside him, Mason took out a stack of papers that was as thick as three of his fingers put together. The whole table shuddered as he dropped the documentation on it. \"This is the contract. I recommend you read through the terms and conditions to ensure you fully understand them before you sign. Failure to read documentation is not considered a valid excuse for errors in contract execution, and is considered an adequate reason for immediate termination of contract to your full disadvantage.\"\n\nKurzadakathan took the thick stack of papers and hesitantly flipped through them. \"Oh my gods, I've forgotten how good you were at this...\"\n\nWorking with demons was all about being detail orientated and focused on the tiny things. Rushed contracts and vague terminology were a quick trip towards having your soul stolen, or worse, releasing a demon into the natural world, so good sorcery required the ability to read dense and highly technical documents all day. Mason was one of the best for one simple reason--he loved technicalities and tedium.\n\nHowever, even though summoning was legal, what he planned to do next was not. But there was a plan, and it was full of detail.\n\nThree hours later, Kurzadakathan was softly muttering to himself as he read through the contract. \"Henceforth...shall be valid for a limited-time period as defined in section 7 subsection 9a, limitations of validity...notwithstanding Majestic Force limitations such as divine intervention by class 5 entities including but not limited to old gods... Failure to meet design specifications shall lead to immediate reversal of contract, unequivocally and absolutely resulting in...\"\n\nMeanwhile, Mason was calmly working a different document, editing the contractual framework for another sorcerer who had paid him to help check his work. Most of Mason's work was helping out other sorcerers who weren't as good with avoiding loopholes or closing technicalities. But for the few demonic contracts which he was planning to personally sign--putting his own soul or worse, his professional standards at risk--Mason made sure he covered every single possibility. He had specified exactly what he was paying Kurzadakathan and exactly how the artefact he was receiving would work in every imaginable use case.\n\nDemons could not break contracts, but they could bend them if the terminology was ambiguous or the specifications were incomplete. Ask for a gold coin, for example, and you might get a gold coin the size of a single atom. Or if you said that you wanted a big gold coin, the demon might create a huge slab of gold which fell on your head and killed you. But if you asked for a gold coin that was the exact size, shape, and material composition of a standard unit of gold currency currently in use by the Imperial Treasury of the Marlander Empire which was indistinguishable from a genuine coin in any and all ways and which was to appear motionless on the ground in the summoning circle within no more than 5 seconds after the signing of the contract, then perhaps you might get what you wanted. Not that Mason was asking for anything so simple--the artefact he required would be powerful indeed.\n\nFinally Kurzadakathan sighed and slapped the thick sheaf of papers against his face. \"Alright, I'm done. I'll sign it! Let's get this over with. The summoning circle is growing stuffy.\" The demon took his pen and scribbled Kurzadakathan on the last page of the contract. He slid the contract out of the summoning circle and onto the table, but Mason pushed it back in.\n\n\"You also need to sign on pages 19, 37, 61, and 142.\"\n\nKurzadakathan did as he was asked, but not without complaining. \"Damn you to the accursed realm, Mason! Why did you have to be a sorcerer? You take the fun out of being summoned.\"\n\nWhen Kurzadakathan was done, Mason took the paperwork and checked that the demon had signed everything correctly. He flipped through the papers to check that nothing was missing or misplaced, and then finally he put his own signature on the paper.\n\n\"It is done!\" Kurzadakathan got to his feet and took a deep breath, raising his arms as he pulled energy from the summoning circle. His body glowed faintly as he absorbed the power, revealing lines and shadows under his skin with moved like snakes. \"I received your payment, Mason Tolovius, and in return I grant you this artefact as specified! Our transaction is closed, master sorcerer.\"\n\nAs Mason watched, the demon grew brighter and brighter until the entire summoning circle was a blazing sphere of light that was too brilliant to gaze at, and then there was an echoing thunderclap which brought darkness.\n\nWhen Mason opened his eyes again he was alone in the forest. Kurzadakathan had returned to the otherworldly plane, leaving the summoning circle empty and inert, but remaining in the middle of the circle was a large white crystal the size of Mason's palm.\n\nThe sorcerer slowly stepped forward and picked up the crystal, then he allowed himself the luxury of a smile. The plan was well underway.\n\nAfter tidying up his paperwork and otherwise preparing himself, Mason sat on his chair again and used a special triggering spell to activate the crystal. \"Morphus!\" Instantly he could feel arcane power begin to flow from the gemstone, making his hand clench down as his muscles tightened involuntarily. His body suddenly felt like it was burning, but not from the baking heat of a summer afternoon.\n\nAll as planned, all as expected, all part of Mason's grand plan. The sorcerer showed no signs of surprise as his flesh started to distort, his bones and muscles stretching and altering. He had even specified how long this process would take, and added caveats regarding pain (specified using units of pain as defined in appendix 5).\n\nHis arms shortened and pulled back towards his chest, while his fingers grew stubbier and less dextrous. His nails lengthened and extended into claws, while his hair melted into his head. Smooth plates exploded out all over his body, covering his skin with hard scales which felt surprisingly sensitive to the touch of air. His legs shortened but grew thicker, stretching out his clothing.\n\nMason stumbled to his feet, falling out of his chair and collapsing onto the forest floor. This was one part he had forgotten to plan for. He hurriedly kicked off his boots and tugged off his pants and tunic, moving as fast as he could, but still there was a ripping sound from his undergarments as a long, slender tail grew from his rear. His neck lengthened, as did his face, extending forwards into a pointed snout. A pair of smooth horns shot up from his head pointing backwards. The transformation seemed to briefly pause here, but then the most important part occurred--there was an intense itching pressure on his back, and then Mason felt a new pair of limbs burst from his shoulder blades. He now had wings.\n\nAs the transformation drew to a finish, the crystal tumbled from his paw (which had formally been a hand) and landed on the forest floor. Mason took deep breaths as he slowly got used to his new body. Everything felt different and unexpected, but it didn't take too much for him to get used to his new form. This was also another thing he had specified--the crystal was to transform him, but he needed to use his transformed body right away without having to spend days or weeks learning motor control.\n\nHe had once been a human sorcerer, but Mason was now a dragon with scales of pale grey.\n\n\"Wow, I'm a dragon. Whoa... Okay? Okay. I can still talk. Follow the plan. I just stick with the plan...\" Surprisingly enough, Mason's voice sounded most the same as it had before, albeit with a subtle resonance that he could feel in his chest. Although his nose-to-tail length was much longer than his human height, and his wingspan was far greater than his arms could have reached, his dragon body was overall slightly thinner and far more slender than his human body had been.\n\nAt first he awkwardly tried to walk on his two hindlegs, before quickly realizing that it was far easier if he used all four legs. The drake slowly trotted around the clearing, and then when he felt ready he spread his wings and leapt into the air to test out his new form.\n\nThe sudden sensation was breathtaking. Mason was above the forest, flying low and fast and seeing everything. The air rushed past his scales and it was so easy to just flap his wings and fly. Mason wondered what he looked like from afar, and suddenly he felt naked and exposed without his clothes. But of course a real dragon would never wear clothes, and on such a warm summer's day there was no chance he'd feel even the slightest chill from his lack of clothing. Looking over to the west, Mason could see a distant mountain range which marked the border between the Marlander Empire and the neighbouring country of Akosta.\n\nMason was a Marlander citizen, but he had never been particularly patriotic. In his educated opinion, the empire was a tyrannical regime seeking to conquer and subjugate nearby countries to grow its territory. The only consolation was that the emperor was openly transparent about his intentions to dominate the world and bring it all under his glorious heel, and the Marlander population seemed mostly content with this vicious expansionism as long as they remained prosperous and safe.\n\nUntil just recently, the much smaller neighbouring state of Akosta had chosen to ignore Marlander conquests and their campaigns of dominion. The two countries had strong trade and similar cultures, so there was little to argue about.\n\nBut then suddenly, just a few weeks ago, Akostan leadership had announced that their spies had discovered messages from the Marlander high emperor to his counsellors, discussing preparations for an eventual invasion of Akosta to add it to the lands of the empire. Whether these accusations were true or not (and the educated guess was that they obviously were), the emperor had pointed out that this announcement proved that Akosta had spies within the Marlander Empire, which therefore necessitated aggressive countermeasures. An embargo had been declared on many goods, cutting off trade between both nations.\n\nThis was when Mason had come up with his plan--he would smuggle contraband across the border using a technique no one would suspect, one which would allow him to bypass border security and all their checkpoints. Embargoes hurt the populations on both sides, but they were very profitable for smugglers.\n\nHis plan would go something like this:\n\nStep one--summon a demon and obtain a transformation crystal.\n\nStep two--transform into a dragon.\n\nStep three--fly across the border and deliver Marlander goods as to the embargoed Akostans, for which they would pay good coin.\n\nStep four--fly back to the Marlander Empire, bringing back Akostan luxuries which were also in high demand due to the embargo.\n\nStep five--transform back into a human and sell all the smuggled goods, making lots of money.\n\nPlan complete!\n\nDragons were intelligent beasts, but they were rare and cared little for the affairs of humans. No one would be suspicious of a drake who just happened to cross between the borders, because no one would suspect that this dragon had the mind and cunning of a human.\n\nMason flapped his wings as he came in for landing back at the forest clearing. In his normal human body he was a master sorcerer, but he doubted this draconic form was so skilled with magic. So as part of his contract with Kurzadakathan, Mason had specified that the crystal could be used twice--the first use would turn him into a dragon, and once he touched it the second time it would automatically turn him back into his previous human form.\n\nMason carefully walked over to the equipment he had left in the forest clearing. He took a small leather pouch and used it to pick up the crystal, then he left this pouch below his folding table. Part of him felt uneasy at the idea of leaving this crucial artefact behind, but he really had no choice. The embargo was enforced by more than words and threats; it was defended by an immensely powerful area spell which detected all enchanted artefacts passing out of the Marlander Empire and into Akosta. His smuggling itinerary specifically avoided enchanted objects which could trigger this spell, but this also meant he had to leave behind the transformation crystal--that special artefact which would return his humanity.\n\nTo mitigate this risk, Mason had already placed down a repulsive spell in the clearing to dissuade anyone from investigating his belongings while he was away. Furthermore, he was already so far into the wilderness that there would almost certainly be no one here besides him.\n\nMason put this worry out of his mind so he could continue with his plan. He walked over to where he had stashed a large backpack filled with various items, including refined telanium ingots, Greengrass salt, and other valuable but lightweight things which the Marlander Empire now denied to Akosta. Though his backpack had been made for a human to use, not a dragon, he had no problems with wearing the pouch in front of his chest. Dragons weren't really very big creatures, all things considered.\n\nMason nodded, pleased with himself, and then he leapt into the air and flew for the border. It was a lovely summer afternoon, and his plan was going precisely as expected.\n\nThe dragon soared through the open air on wings spread wide. The late afternoon sun was warming the mountains she was flying lazily over, creating strong thermals which pushed her up into the sky with nary a wing beat.\n\nIzagor was her name, and her flight had neither destination nor aim. As she flew, she simply rode the wind to see where it would take her. It was a good day to fly, and the simple pleasure of air sweeping under her wings was sufficient justification for her to take to the skies.\n\nThe summer sun caused rushing winds to blow from high in the mountains down towards the forested plains of the valleys below. Izagor was vaguely aware that the mountainous terrain was the territory of a human nation, while the forested plains were the territory of another different nation, but she cared little for the arbitrary borders drawn by the humans. She knew these facts in the same manner she knew that plants were green so they could absorb sunlight, or there were deep sea creatures under the ocean, or there were stars in space--she had the information, but it didn't affect her at all. There was nothing stopping her from flying wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She was above it all.\n\nAs she was enjoying her flight, a flicker of motion in the distance suddenly caught her attention. It was not on the ground, but in the air--could it be? It was!\n\nAnother dragon!\n\nWhat a pleasant surprise. Izagor changed her heading and started beating her wings to match her course with this new dragon who was flying from the plains and heading towards the mountains.\n\nHer race was not as social as the humans were, so living a solitary life was especially common amongst younger dragons who had yet to take a mate. Izagor had no plans to settle down anytime soon--travelling and roaming was just too much fun, and there was so much of the world she had yet to see and explore. Nevertheless it had been many weeks since she had last seen one of her own kind, so she curiously flew over to say hello.\n\nAs she got within intercept distance, Izagor saw that the other dragon was a male, and he had scales of pale grey with an underbelly of white. The drake appeared to be about the same age as her, and he seemed healthy enough; his wingbeats were steady and smooth as he flew to wherever he was headed. Some sort of leather harness was wrapped around his chest, which might have been the craftsmanship of humans--how interesting!\n\nIzagor let out a cheerful squawk just to let him know that her intentions were friendly, and she rocked her wings from side-to-side in a wave. \"Skr-yah!\"\n\nThis, Mason decided, is not according to plan.\n\nThe afternoon sky was free of turbulence and his flight to Akosta had been largely uneventful for the first hour, right until the very moment a wild dragon had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and started heading towards him.\n\nMason had not anticipated such a scenario. Dragons were rare creatures, so he hadn't thought about what he would do if he somehow encountered an actual wild dragon. This wild dragon had scales of a reddish-brown like the colour of oak wood, with pale splotches on its side which looked like spots. Now it was flying along beside him and making squawking noises.\n\nMason had no idea what he was going to do. He didn't know what this dragon wanted, so he just tried his best to ignore it and hoped that it would get the message--go away!\n\nIzagor felt her neck crest drooping sadly as the grey-scaled drake refused to acknowledge her presence. They were flying too fast to talk--their high airspeed meant the wind would drown out more subtle conversation, so all she could do was try to draw his attention with squawks, chirps, and repeated waving her wings by rocking her flight pattern left and right.\n\nShe never got any response. In her travels Izagor had encountered grumpy elder dragons who roared at her to leave their territory and tried to snap at her tail, but this was even further than that--it was like she was invisible to this drake! Even if he was in a rush to go somewhere, he could at least just let out a quick squawk in reply. It was beyond rude to ignore someone like this.\n\nIzagor let out one last warble, hoping that the drake would finally respond, but still he remained silent. He didn't even rock his wings--the most basic of draconic gestures. Izagor let out an irritated sigh, then she rolled over sharply and pulled away. The acceleration tugged hard on her body as she rapidly turned, until she had reversed her course so that she was heading in the exact opposite direction. Fine! She got the message. Her presence clearly was unwelcome, so she would gladly leave this antisocial drake to go on his way alone.\n\nMason breathed a sigh of relief as the reddish-brown dragon finally gave up and stopped harassing him. He watched the wild dragon as they turned away and headed in the opposite direction, much to his delight. Mason continued to glance back over the next ten minutes or so, but the wild dragon continued on their course away from him.\n\n\"Good riddance!\" Mason muttered, but his words were snatched away by the wind. He continued flying towards the Akostan border, heading for the mountain cave where he would stash his Marlander contraband and swap out his pack for a different pack of smuggled goods to bring back home.\n\nThe plan was back on track.\n\nIzagor was feeling more and more dejected as kept flying. It must have been at least five weeks since she had last seen another dragon, but now this grey-scaled drake had completely shunned her for no apparent reason. Had she offended him in some way? Did he find her presence repulsive? Or was her appearance so objectionable that he did not even want to even look at her?\n\nIzagor growled and snapped her jaws as her sadness flashed over into anger. \"Jerk!\" she exclaimed, yelling the words into the wind. What sort of rude person couldn't even take the effort to rock their wings and respond to someone?\n\nIt didn't matter. She couldn't care less about some idiot drake. Izagor kept flying, but now it felt like her pleasant afternoon flight had been soured by this confusing encounter. Soaring on thermals and taking in the scenery just didn't seem to bring the same joy as before--Izagor felt a sudden stab of loneliness, and she wished she were many leagues away, back in her clan's home territory surrounded by friends and family.\n\nSliding her wings into a dive position, she spiralled down through the air, only straightening out her flight at the last moment to avoid hitting the trees. She had left the mountains now, and was clearly flying over forested terrain. Perhaps she could find a lake and take a swim.\n\nSomething down in a forest clearing caught her eye briefly. Izagor looped around to retrace her flightpath, and sure enough there was a strange marking on the forest floor, looking like a series of geometric shapes and patterns drawn in a burnt and blackened circle. This was mildly interesting, so she descended into the clearing and landed to take a closer look.\n\nOnce she had dropped out of the air and furled her wings up, Izagor realized that there were several other things in this forest clearing--human belongings? Was this a campsite? Trotting over, she went to take a looksee. There was what appeared to be a portable table and chair placed right next to the circle burnt into the ground. A set of human clothes was on the table, as well as an empty document briefcase.\n\nIzagor nosed at the clothing--it must have been placed here very recently, since there was no evidence of exposure to the elements. Inspecting the burnt circular mark revealed it to be summoning circle, for consorting with demons. All dragons were naturally able to use magic even without training, but as a rule they did not dabble in the otherworldly plane--humans, on the other paw, had no such common sense.\n\nIzagor idly speculated that a sorcerer had come out here to summon a demon, but maybe they had done something wrong which allowed the demon to attack and drag them back to the otherworldly plane. That would explain why there were all these things out here but no trace of the person who much have so recently brought them. This hypothesis also explained why there was clothing on the table--perhaps the sorcerer had tried to summon a demon to fulfil some perverse sexual desire.\n\nThere was also some sort of weak spell gently poking her scales. From what she could sense of the magic, Izagor suspected that the spell would cause humans to feel an instinctive desire to avoid this place, but as a dragon her magical blood rendered her immune. She didn't feel a need to be cautious--there were very few spells which could affect magical creatures such as dragons.\n\nAs she walked around the clearing, Izagor spotted something else lying on the ground--a leather satchel was leaning against one of the table legs. The satchel was now lying open on the ground, and a large white crystal was resting on the forest floor.\n\nThat's pretty. The gemstone was glinting in the late afternoon sunlight, almost like it was calling to her. Izagor crouched down and sniffed at the crystal. The moment it touched her nose, everything changed.\n\nLightning exploded out from the point of contact, running towards the ends of her wings and the tip of her tail. Izagor collapsed to the ground with a scream as her whole body began to convulse and twitch. Everything felt wrong as immensely powerful magic started to ravage her flesh, stretching out her forelegs into arms, while her hindlegs extended and grew closer together as her tail got shorter and shorter.\n\nThere was no place on her body left untouched by the transformation. Her scales shrank down until they had disappeared, leaving behind raw pink skin which seemed utterly inadequate to protect her from the elements. Her muzzle was pressed backwards and into her face, and her teeth shifted around and jostled as they too were changed. Her tail kept shrinking further and further until it had disappeared entirely. Her crest dropped against her neck and merged with it, and in its place came long brown fur which sprouted from the top of her head.\n\nIzagor had no idea what was happening to her. She could see changes occurring on the outside of her body, and she could only guess at what terrible things were going on to her insides. The worst part of all was when her wings started to shrink. She had always been proud of her wings, proud of how graceful they looked and how they could draw the attention of drakes when she chose to show them off, but now her flight muscles were cramping horribly, compressing her wings impossibly tight against her back. Not her wings--anything but her wings!\n\nThis was finally too much to bear--without having to cast a spell, the magic that ran in her blood instinctually fought back against the power emanating from that cursed white crystal. The transformation halted for a brief second, then intensity gave way to pain as the crystal's magic overwhelmed her. Izagor collapsed on the ground senseless; her strength gone and her body feeling unnatural and weak. The world faded into sweet darkness.\n\nMason was on the lookout as he flew back to the forest clearing. His journey across the border and back had gone mostly as planned, with the one exception of that reddish-brown wild dragon that had harassed him earlier. Now the sorcerer carefully watched the skies around him in case the wild dragon showed up again, but he made it back to the clearing without seeing any trace of the creature.\n\nFeeling pleased with himself, Mason used a forepaw to pat the pouch strapped to his chest--he would be making good coin from this endeavour! There were few pleasures in the world like a careful plan perfectly executed. But just as he came in for landing, his heart turned to ice. There was someone else in the clearing!\n\nIt looked like...a woman? The stranger had long brown hair that covered the upper part of her back. She was lying right next to his table, on her front with her legs and arms awkwardly sprawled out, and head twisted to the side.\n\nMason was so shocked that he stumbled as he landed. Although he manged to skip forwards and avoid falling, he froze in position, not knowing what to do. They were so far from the nearest town! What was this woman doing all the way out here? He hesitantly approached to get a better look.\n\nIt was definitely a woman. She appeared to be unconscious--but why? And how has this woman even gotten here? The repulsive spells he had put on the place ought to have created a strong, dreading sensation that this was a place to avoid. Mason felt his tail swishing from left to right in nervousness. Perhaps this woman had somehow ignored his spells and walked closer until the magic had overwhelmed her and caused her to faint? This would conveniently explain why she was asleep.\n\nHowever, it would not explain why she was naked.\n\nMason let out a soft mewling whimper as he tried to come to grips with the situation. He could still come up with a plan if he could just understand what had happened here. Maybe this woman was a nudist on a summer hike in the forest (did people actually do that?), and she had come across his summoning circle then fainted after exposure to his repulsive spells? Did that make sense?\n\nNo, that didn't make sense. But then again, nothing made sense about this scenario.\n\nMason slowly approached the unconscious woman, moving as quietly as he could. He could at least confirm that the woman was alive and not a corpse--her chest was moving slowly as she breathed in and out, but her eyes were closed. Yes, it was definitely a woman; and yes, she was definitely naked. Mason felt a surge of embarrassment and he averted his eyes from the woman's exposed form, but he could not avoid noticing that she was pretty. Her limbs were lean but muscled, and her hair was like a curtain of reddish-brown.\n\nAfter another minute spent anxiously doing nothing, Mason had come up with a new plan. He needed to turn himself back into a human, hide away his pouch full of contraband, and then he could wake this strange naked woman and ask her what she was doing here. There was nothing inherently illegal about summoning--Mason was an accredited sorcerer registered with the Guild of Magicians--and the belongings left in the clearing did not give any indication that this was a smuggling operation. So this woman, whoever she was, would have no reason to suspect him of any wrongdoing.\n\nMason unbuckled the pack of smuggled goods from his chest and slid it under the table, and then he picked up his satchel. When he saw that it was empty, he frantically turned over the bag and searched through it for a few panicked seconds before he realized that the crystal was lying on the ground, almost in reach of the mysterious naked woman.\n\nMason bent down and grabbed the crystal with a forepaw, breathing another deep (but silent) sigh of relief. For a moment he had been terrified by the thought of forever remaining a dragon, but there was nothing to worry about! His contract with the demon had even included protections against such a rare event as someone else touching his artefact. Mason had specified that after the crystal had been activated the first time to turn him into a dragon, it would not have any effect when picked up by another human. The only thing it could do was if he touched it again--it would change him from a dragon into a human being.\n\nThen Mason realized that nothing was happening, and all his calm shattered. He grasped the crystal more firmly with both forepaws, and even tried rubbing it against his chest and muzzle, but all to no avail.\n\n\"No, no, no! NO!\" It wasn't changing him back! How could a magical artefact created by demonic power not work?! His contract had been perfect! Yet the crystal had somehow gone inert as if its power had already been used. Was it something to do with this mystery woman? Well obviously she must be the cause of it--these two events could not be coincidences! But how? Was she a powerful magician who had somehow interfered with the crystal? Or a rival sorcerer intent on blackmailing him?\n\nRight as Mason was thinking about her, the naked woman suddenly stirred. Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing irises of the same reddish-brown colour as her hair. His voice must have woken her, but Mason hardly cared if she saw him now. He had to change back--he couldn't be stuck as a dragon forever! He had to fix this!\n\nIzagor slowly blinked her eyes open. She had been in a strange nightmare, but now she came back to reality where things were...wrong. Reality was the nightmare. She couldn't feel her wings or her tail, and all four of her limbs felt strangely proportioned. Her neck was far too short, so raising her head was a challenge. At first her vision was blurry and indistinct, but as things cleared she realized she was lying on the forest floor. The sight of her body was immensely disorientating.\n\nHer forelegs had turned into lanky arms, and her forepaws had become hands with five dextrous fingers. Izagor ran her hands over her body, taking in the shocking sensation of smooth sensitive flesh where there should been scales. Her muzzle was completely gone, as was the crest fin that usually ran down her neck from the top of her head. The fur sprouting from her head kept irritatingly getting in the way of her face, and she had to brush it aside. Her long slender tail had been replaced by a curvy pair of buttocks which looked ridiculous, and there was fat in the most abnormal of locations--forming two strange lumps on her chest that felt even more sensitive than anywhere else. It was so...so different. She was in a body that got everything wrong.\n\nThen she glanced upwards, and sitting right in front of her was that same grey-scaled drake who had rudely ignored her before. Seeing him again made Izagor so angry she forgot to be scared or worried. \"You!\" she spat. Her voice sounded crisper than usual, lacking the rumbly harmonics of a dragon's voice.\n\nThe drake stumbled backwards, apparently taken by surprise from her sudden intensity. He tripped over a tree root and landed on his side with wings half open.\n\n\"You!\" Izagor tried to walk after the drake, but her body's proportions were off and she tumbled to the ground too. Even though her forelimbs were longer than before, her hindlimbs had stretched to an even greater length, and it felt difficult to use them in unison. The dirt felt painful against her palms, as if they weren't meant to be pressed hard against the ground. \"Did you do this? What do you do to me?! Is this some sort of joke?\"\n\nMason scrambled to his four feet and hurriedly backed away from the mysterious naked woman who was now proving to also be angry and crazy. Something about how she looked clicked in his head, and a horrible realization dawned on him. There was an alternate explanation for this scenario--one which seemed unlikely, yet far more probable than an insane masochistic nudist just happening to stumble upon his summoning circle. This woman's reddish-brown hair was of a colour he had seen before--the exact same shade as the scales of that wild dragon he had encountered just a few hours ago. Oh no, she couldn't actually be...?\n\nHis contract with Kurzadakathan had been almost flawless, but Mason realized now that all his dense specifications might still have had one tiny ambiguity. The mistake seemed so obscure that Kurzadakathan probably hadn't deliberately tried to bend the contract; who could have known this might happen?\n\nAfter being triggered the first time, Mason's transformation crystal was required to immediately transform him from dragon back into his normal human body when he touched it a second time, but nowhere had he specified that this transformation must apply only to him. It had to transform the dragon who touched it into a human--but he failed to specify that this dragon must be him, and him alone.\n\nAnd that was exactly what had happened. A wild dragon had stumbled upon his summoning circle, found the crystal, and accidentally been transformed into a human--a naked and very angry woman.\n\nThis was very, very not according to plan."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "\"Ok I think I know... Makes sense, but I didn't consider... Just...just hold on for a minute here!\" sputtered the grey-scaled drake, as Izagor got to her feet and advanced on him. Her new body was clearly designed to be bipedal, not quadrupedal, and somehow it was easier to balance on two limbs instead of four.\n\nShe wanted to growl, but the noise sounded more like a hiss and it wasn't anywhere near as threatening as she had hoped. \"Rrrss! How did you turn me into this thing? Are you working with the humans? What did they pay you? I'll kill you for this!\" Anger was running hot through Izagor's veins. She wanted to bite the drake's neck to throttle and shake him, but her mouth couldn't open wide enough for this to work. Instead she settled for using her hands to grab him by the horns. Despite looking thin and weak, her upper limbs now had excellent reach and surprisingly good grip strength. \"You will turn me back, or I swear on my ancestors that I shall do everything within my power to make you regret the day you were hatched!\"\n\n\"Waaaait!\" cried the drake as she shook his head. \"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! Calm down please! This was an accident! Just let me explain!\"\n\nMason gasped as the woman (but she wasn't really a woman, she was a dragon) finally stopped shaking his head. She didn't let go of her firm grim on his horns, and his snout was pointed right at her exposed chest--in another situation he might have found this erotic, but now it was just terrifying. Though Mason had never ever imagined such a scenario, he now realized that it was entirely possible for one very angry, very determined, but completely naked woman to successfully intimidate and terrify a dragon, if that dragon was him.\n\n\"You had better have a very good explanation,\" snarled the angry, determined, naked woman.\n\n\"It was an honest mistake! I genuinely didn't intend for this to happen! You...you were a dragon, right? The dragon that I saw flying earlier?\"\n\nThe woman pulled his horns painfully and leaned closer so she could glare at him eye to eye. \"Yes, I was. I was a dragon, I am a dragon, and I will be turned back into a dragon. Are we clear on that?\"\n\n\"Yes! Crystal clear!\"\n\n\"Excellent. Now explain to me how and why you turned me into this disgusting human form. And while you're at it, explain why you completely ignored me earlier. I have never been treated so rudely in my life.\"\n\n\"I wasn't trying to ignore you! Ok, actually I was, but that was just because I didn't know what to do! I was just trying to fly to Akosta and back as quickly as possible.\" Mason swallowed nervously. \"Could...could you please let go of my horns? You're hurting my skull!\"\n\nIn response, the woman just tightened her grip and pulled his horns a bit more. Mason hadn't seen anyone so angry in a long time. \"I said explain! EXPLAIN! This is the work of some human magician, isn't it? What sort of dragon are you, working with the humans to sell out one of you own race to them? Have you no honour?\"\n\n\"I'm not any sort of dragon, and I'm not working with humans! I am a human! My name is Mason Tolovius; I'm a sorcerer! I summoned a demon and had it create a transformation crystal which could turn me into a dragon and back! It was only supposed to affect me, but I think the crystal must have worked on you instead. I'm really sorry about this!\"\n\nIzagor was so surprised by this explanation that she forgot to be angry. She released the drake's horns and took a few steps back. \"You're...not a dragon? You're a human? But you look so...\" She had been about to say \"good\", but Izagor decided she wasn't going to say anything which might remotely sound like a compliment. \"Why would you do something like this?\"\n\nThe drake, this 'Mason Tolovius', looked uneasy under her intense gaze. \"I had a plan and a good reason for transforming myself into a dragon. The plan was to fly to Akosta carrying this harness full of, uh, stuff.\" Izagor got the feeling he had been about to say something else, but she didn't press for further details. \"Then I would fly back and change myself back into a human, except that I'm guessing you touched my crystal first so it changed you into a human. That's where my plan went wrong, and how we both ended up with the wrong bodies.\"\n\nIzagor nodded slowly. Mason's explanation made sense--he was just some idiot human sorcerer who had tried to change himself into a dragon for some stupid human reason, and now she had gotten caught up in his idiocy. \"So turn us back. Make the crystal work again and undo this.\"\n\n\"I would if I could, but that's just not possible--whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down!\" Mason hurriedly backed away when Izagor bared her teeth and advanced on him. \"The crystal only works twice--one transformation from human to dragon, and one transformation from dragon to human. After that it's just a worthless lump of mineral.\"\n\n\"Then just make a new crystal! Summon that demon again and fix this!\" Izagor demanded.\n\n\"Summoning isn't simple! I would need to draw up a new circle to summon the demon again and...and I would need to rewrite the contract again from my master copy, which is...uh...it's not here.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Izagor hissed.\n\n\"I left it at home...\"\n\n\"Where?!\" Izagor thundered.\n\nMason hurriedly pointed a forepaw towards the south. \"I don't live so close to the Akostan border; I live further into the empire, closer to the ocean. I'll need to go to the nearby town and take one of the trains headed south. The journey will take about half a day, so if you could just wait here for a few days I'll be right back--\"\n\nIzagor laughed at this incredulous suggestion. \"Hahahaha, no. You think I'm letting you out of my sight? What guarantee do I have that I'll ever see you again?\"\n\n\"I give you my full assurance that I will be back! But if you insist, I suppose you could come along with me and we do the summoning back at my house. I'll even pay for a ticket on the express train so that we can ride quickly and take the overnight express...um...\" Mason's voice trailed off as he realized that this plan wouldn't work. \"No, wait. I'm a dragon--they'll never let me on board. So if I can't ride the train, what are we to do? I suppose I could always walk all the way, but that might take quite a bit longer...\"\n\nIzagor wanted to slap Mason's side with her tail, but she didn't have a tail anymore, so she settled for shaking her head. \"Walking? As a dragon?\"\n\nMason didn't get it. His tail was swishing from side to side as he tried to come up with a better idea. \"How else would I get home? Perhaps I might be able to find a horse carriage driver who could be persuaded to allow me to ride in his carriage for enough coin...\"\n\n\"Or...you could just fly?\" Izagor suggested.\n\nMason's tail went still. \"Oh. Yes, I could do that. Right! That sounds like a better plan. I'll just fly us back to my house, and then I'll summon Kurzadakathan again, and then we'll get a new crystal which turns us back to our normal forms. Yes, I like that plan. Is this acceptable to you?\"\n\nIzagor could see no better alternative, so she agreed. \"I don't think we have a choice, so let's do it. We can't be stuck like this forever. Since I can't fly, I guess I have to climb onto your back?\"\n\n\"Yes, but let me just...\" Mason trotted over to the table and put his harness back on--it was just a simple series of leather belts which went around his neck and his forelimbs, carefully avoiding his wings but allowing him to carry a pouch on his chest without using his paws. \"I had this harness made to carry my goods. You can use it to hold on when you're sitting on my back.\" Izagor approached and reached out her hands, but Mason looked uncomfortable. He lowered his gaze so he was only looking at her feet. \"Could you...clothe yourself? This is indecent.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nThe drake turned towards the table and pointed at the set of clothes there. He seemed to be making a deliberate effort to ensure sure he did not look at her, just as he had ignored her earlier while they were both dragons and in flight. \"You need to wear clothes. Humans wear clothes.\"\n\nIzagor had long known that humans wore cloth or fabric garments to cover themselves, but she had never understood the reason for this. \"What's the point?\" She glanced down at her own body, taking in the sight of her chest, torso, and lanky legs. \"Do you find me ugly? Is this body unpleasant by human standards?\"\n\nMason was obviously very embarrassed. His eyes flicked up as he looked over her whole body, then he hurriedly dropped his gaze to only stare at her feet again. \"No, it's not unpleasant to look at; quite the opposite, which is why you need to wear these clothes. It's just how things are! There are certain...parts of anatomy which should only be exposed in private situations, not in public. Please just put on those clothes. Those are supposed to be my clothes, but I think they should fit you alright. At least it's better than wandering around naked. I'll give you some privacy.\" He turned away and sat down with his back facing towards her.\n\nIzagor still thought this didn't make much sense, but presumably Mason knew more about acting human than she did. \"Very well, if you insist...\" She took the clothing from the table and tried to figure out how it all worked. The most obvious piece of equipment was a pair of thick leather things made in an L-shape; clearly these were shaped to go over her feet, so she put these on first.\n\nWithout looking at her, Mason spoke again. \"So what's your name? I already told you my name is Mason Tolovius, but you never introduced yourself.\"\n\n\"Izagor.\"\n\n\"Just Izagor? No surname?\"\n\n\"What's a surname?\" Izagor looked over all the rest of the clothing--why were there were so many different pieces?\n\n\"Never mind, I'll just call you Izagor then. Or is Izzy alright?\"\n\n\"Don't call me Izzy. My friends call me Izzy.\" Now that the smaller pieces of clothing were settled, Izagor moved on to the larger things. There was a big T-shaped garment which was probably meant to go over her upper body, so she pulled that on. It took some trial and error for her to figure out how the buttons worked, but she soon got the hang of it. Even though her body was now all wrong, her human hands were much more dexterous than her paws had even been.\n\n\"Izagor, then.\" Mason was quiet for a while before he spoke again. \"Are you done yet? It's been a few minutes.\"\n\nIzagor was busy pulling a second T-shaped garment over her first one, except this second garment was white and had no buttons down the front. Instead it was just one large piece which made it more confusing to equip. Her head kept going into the wrong hole. \"No, I'm not done. Don't you rush me, human! It's your fault we're in this mess in the first place.\"\n\n\"Sorry. Although...you were the one who touched my crystal, so this is partially your fault too.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure! I'm sorry for being curious! How was I to know that a human sorcerer was just going to leave a demonic artefact lying around unattended, or that it would turn me into this thing? I'm hideous now.\" Izagor was trying to put on one more piece of clothing--an inverted-U shaped loop of thick fabric which was probably supposed to go over her legs. The leather things over her feet made this difficult, but eventually she managed to push her feet through after some stretching and tugging on the fabric.\n\nMason was still looking away from her, but the tip of his tail twitched. \"You're not hideous. It's kind of strange how pretty you are, actually. I would have expected the crystal to make you look more...draconic.\"\n\n\"Why? You look exactly like a normal dragon.\" Izagor picked up a pair of stretchy, white-coloured, one-ended tubes. Did these go over her head? But they came in pair, so they were probably meant to go over her limbs. She pulled one over each hand. She was mostly done now, although she realized there was one last piece of square clothing made from grey fabric. It had with two holes on one side and one hole on one side. \"I'm mostly done now. I think. Where's this supposed to go?\"\n\nMason turned around to look at her, and what he saw made his eyes go wide. His jaw dropped open.\n\nHuman or dragon, Izagor knew how to interpret this universal expression of shock. \"Did I do something wrong?\"\n\nMason hardly even knew where to begin. \"Uh...you...uhh...that's... First off--why are you wearing my socks over your hands?\"\n\n\"You mean these white fabric things? I don't know. Where else do they go?\" Izagor pulled the socks of her hands.\n\n\"You're supposed to wear them over your feet.\"\n\n\"Ok, so they're feet covers? Do they go under or over the leather feet covers?\"\n\n\"Under. The leather feet covers are called boots, and the fabric things are called socks.\"\n\nIzagor sat down on the ground and pulled off the boots. She slid the socks over her feet, then she put the boots back on. \"Like this?\"\n\n\"You're wearing the socks backwards, but I guess it doesn't matter. You're supposed to tighten the bootlaces and tie them up. Just try to pull on the laces to make them more comfortable.\"\n\nIzagor did as he asked, but this made things more uncomfortable. \"No, now it's crushing my hindpaws! I don't like them like that.\" She pulled on the boots until they were nice and loose, just like before, then she tucked the laces into the boots so they weren't dangling out.\n\nMason sighed. He gestured at the rest of her. \"You're wearing my undershirt backwards, and over my shirt.\"\n\nIzagor tugged off the undershirt, but she stopped before taking of the shirt. It had taken her a few minutes to do up all the buttons, especially because she had gotten them misaligned at first. She didn't want to go through all that effort again. \"Why does a human need two pieces of clothing covering their upper half anyway?\"\n\n\"That's just how things are.\"\n\n\"Well that's dumb. I don't need two layers of fabric over my top. One is enough.\" Izagor dropped the undershirt onto the table, and Mason decided it wasn't worth the effort to persuade her to wear it. Hopefully they wouldn't need to speak or interact with anyone else on the journey home, because wearing just one shirt left the outlines of her chest rather...visible.\n\nPicking up the last piece of square clothing, Izagor waved it at Mason. \"So what's this thing? You haven't explained where it's supposed to go.\"\n\n\"That is underwear. You're supposed to wear it over your legs, but under the pants.\"\n\n\"What, you mean like here? Is it supposed to cover my genital slit?\" Izagor pulled down her pants, suddenly exposing her crotch. Mason hurriedly averted his eyes out of instinct, even though it was quite obvious that Izagor had no shame. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see her using a hand to poke at her own anatomy. \"Hey, how come there's fur down here? I thought humans were hairless except for their heads?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, that's not true--we have hair in other places too, like under our armpits. Now please pull your pants back up.\"\n\nThankfully Izagor complied, pulling her pants back up and carefully doing up the button. She then reached a hand through the collar of the shirt, and started feeling around her armpits. \"Huh...you're right--there's hair under here too. Weird. What's up with that?\" She pulled her hand out and sniffed her fingers.\n\nMason was very grateful that dragons could not blush, or he would have turned completely red by this point. \"I don't know. Now get on my back and let's go.\" He lowered himself to his belly, and Izagor climbed over his shoulders so that she was sitting on his back, with her legs around his neck. \"I hope I can do this. I don't actually know if I'm strong enough to carry you,\" he admitted.\n\n\"What? Sure you are. I've hunted and carried prey animals which were far bigger than a human,\" Izagor replied. \"Come on, let's go! The sooner we get to your home, the sooner we can turn back to normal. Up, Mason! Fly!\"\n\nMason spread his wings wide, and then he leapt into the sky. They flew together--the dragon who was actually a human, and the human who was actually a dragon.\n\nIzagor felt her breath catch as Mason leapt into the air. She had been flying all her life, yet it was different now that she was in this new body which could not fly. Instead of clutching her hands around the leather harness, she raised her arms so she could feel the air rushing by and pretend she still had wings.\n\n\"Yah!\" Instinctively she called out, but her human body could only make an exhilarated yell which did not sound as majestic as a roar. She felt a natural desire to jump off Mason's shoulders and spread her own wings, but that would only result in injury or death--for now, she had to be satisfied with relying on this drake who wasn't a drake to carry her in the skies.\n\nIt didn't take long for Izagor to start criticising Mason's flying. \"Hey! How come you're climbing at best angle of climb? Why not use best rate of climb?\"\n\n\"What? I have no idea what you just said,\" he replied.\n\n\"You're going too slow. Since you've already passed the trees, just speed up. The way you're flying now is good for gaining as much altitude as possible over distance, but not for gaining as much altitude as possible over time.\"\n\n\"I...uh...ok...\" Mason wasn't sure what Izagor was talking about, but he did as she asked. Doubtless she knew more about flying than he did. Turning until the sun was to his right side, he flew south towards the ocean.\n\nIzagor would occasionally give advice or tips on how to fly more efficiently, such as by recognizing thermals so he could climb without beating his wings. She almost never sounded impatient or even frustrated--instead, it sounded like she just enjoyed flying so much that she couldn't help but share her knowledge and skill. Mason found himself entering a state of relaxed calm, listening to her words and learning how to use his wings properly.\n\nIt was nice to have someone to talk to as they spent the afternoon flying through the air, covering great distance as they headed deeper into the Marlander Empire. Towns and villages were interspersed in the forest down below; the buildings and people looked like toys from so high above. As he flew, Mason stayed on course by matching his flight path with the train tracks far below, retracing the course he had taken to come out here to the border of the empire.\n\nAfter some time, Izagor could feel her skin becoming tight and prickly in the cool high altitude air despite the warmth of summer. It felt like human skin hardly provided any insulation compared to dragon scales, so perhaps it would have been a better idea if she had worn that undershirt after all. Without this possibility, she bent lower so her chest was pressed up against Mason's neck, allowing her some protection from the cold oncoming air.\n\nTheir conversation continued as they kept flying--instead of just talking about flight, Izagor started asking about the places they were flying over. Travel had always been one of her favourite activities, although she was more interested in beautiful scenery and spectacular vistas rather than human construction and architecture.\n\nMason was happy to share what he knew. Whatever questions she had, he would answer to the best of his knowledge. He told Izagor about the Marlander Empire and its tyrannical emperor, he talked about the cities and diplomacy, and then things started to turn more personal. He started telling her about his job and what he did as a sorcerer, and about his own life.\n\nIzagor didn't approve of treating with demons, especially after what had just happened to them both, but she had to admit being fascinated by all that Mason could tell her. He talked about the academies of magic and learning where he had studied ancient texts and learned from wizened old wizards. He gave her stories of all the things he did on a normal day, creating demonic contracts and assisting other sorcerers with their own contracts.\n\nWithout even realizing what he was doing, Mason accidentally let slip the reason why he'd gone to all this trouble in the first place--that he had begun to dabble with smuggling things across the border. He swallowed nervously as he realized he didn't have a plan; he had just been talking because, to his surprise, he enjoyed conversing with Izagor.\n\nYet she didn't seem upset or even surprised by his less-than-legal activities. She seemed to find it amusing that he had created something as serious as a demonic contract just to carry a pouch of valuables over an arbitrary line which marked the limits between two governments. She laughed and smiled for these were all just the silly, mundane affairs of everyday humans--things which dragons cared little for as they flew above all.\n\nIzagor was having far more fun than she would admit to anyone, even to herself. Mason was a strange conundrum--he looked like a drake, but his mind and beliefs were that of a human. And yet despite the fact their races stayed so separate, the things he said resounded in her as she realized they had more in common than she would ever have imagined. How strange that this human sorcerer might be so easy to speak with.\n\nIn turn Izagor began telling him about her own life and history--with her words she painted a picture of the towering mountain cliffs were she had hatched, where her clan, her family, and her friends were waiting for her when she finally got tired of roaming the world. She told him how they would fly over the highest mountains to ride the winds, or how they would soar to the coast and dive into the ocean to fish. She spoke about their stories and their legends--the tale of The Mountain That Could Fly, or the myth of The Dragon Who Flew Over The Sun--simple fables which she had heard as a tiny little hatchling.\n\nTime flew by as they shared conversation and enjoyed each other's presence. The forested wilderness far below eventually gave way to buildings and paved roads as they entered the more urbanized areas of the Marlander Empire.\n\nPrompted by a question from Izagor, Mason talked about the massive clockwork trains which rolled from city to city and town to town wherever there was track--he told her about how they had revolutionized the empire by allowing people and goods to move freely from one place to another, powered by tremendous metal springs wound up with so much energy that they could explode if mishandled. Industry and economy boomed thanks to these marvels of clockwork engineering, and people from all parts of the empire could travel far and free.\n\nIzagor was intrigued. Freedom was something she took for granted, and it had never occurred to her that humans could not simply fly wherever they wished. Instead they were bound down to towns and homes and jobs, whereas dragons flew wherever they wanted and roamed as far as they dared. At her prompting, Mason flew slightly lower and diverted off course to go follow one of the many trains which ran across the empire. He slowed down and matched its speed, and Izagor watched with awe as the train powered its way across the countryside like a huge mechanical worm. Perhaps some of the train passengers might have spotted the dragon flying overhead, but Mason didn't care. It was worth it to see the expression of wonder and awe on Izagor's face.\n\nTheir flight, pleasant as it was, eventually had to end. The sun was setting and Mason was not confident that he could continue flying while it was dark. They were no more than an hour and a half from his home town, Klosk Harbour, but his wings were getting increasingly tired from all this activity.\n\n\"I don't think we're going to make it home by today,\" Mason admitted. \"If I'm not wrong that's the township of Cinderfell over there. I could try to follow the train tracks all the way to Klosk Harbour, but it's getting a bit too dark. If I accidentally make a bad turn and follow the wrong track, we could end up lost in the darkness.\"\n\nIzagor patted the side of his neck. \"Alright. We don't need to risk it. Land and let's try to find somewhere to rest for the night. We continue our journey tomorrow.\"\n\nMason changed heading so he was flying directly towards Cinderfell. \"I'll land just outside the town. You can go inside and try to find accommodation--I'll give you some coin to rent a room from an inn or something.\"\n\n\"And what about you?\"\n\n\"I'll sleep out here in the hills, where people won't see me.\"\n\nIzagor laughed, and Mason realized that he was increasingly enjoying the melodious sound of her voice. \"Alone? Out in the hills? There's no shelter or anything--no caves to sleep in, and not even a tree to take cover under. Why don't we both go find a room in one of these inns?\"\n\nMason halted his descent and flew in a large circle instead of approaching the town. \"But I'm...I'm a dragon. I can't just walk in through the front door and ask for a room! Dragons aren't a common sight in the empire.\"\n\nIzagor scratched at her clothing, which was beginning to itch against her skin. \"Then don't. I'll walk in through the front door and ask for a room, and then I'll go to the room and open a window to sneak you in. They won't even know you're there--what's there for them to complain about?\"\n\n\"Are you sure you're up to it? What if they realize that you're actually a dragon in a human body?\"\n\nIzagor waved away his doubts. \"It'll be fine! Maybe I don't know everything about your society and culture, but how hard can it be to pass off as human? Let's do it.\" She looked over the town of Cinderfell and squinted at the many buildings. It was increasingly becoming dark, and it was getting harder to see. \"Do you know which of these buildings is an inn? Let's land on the roof.\"\n\n\"The roof? I thought we were landing outside town?\" Mason asked.\n\n\"Why? Do you want to walk further?\"\n\n\"No, but I should avoid being seen...\"\n\n\"The sun's already set, so I don't think people will be watching. But if you want to stay out of sight, just land somewhere dark where there aren't so many of those magical lanterns--how about over there?\"\n\nIn the fading light, Mason could only just barely see where Izagor was pointing. She was gesturing towards a darkened alleyway between two office buildings which had closed for the night. This part of town seemed deserted, so he flew towards it.\n\nLanding was a rougher affair than either of them expected. Mason was used to touching down with only his own weight, and Izagor's added mass made him land heavily. He stumbled once and let out a grunt, but his main concern was not himself. \"Oof! Are you alright?\"\n\nIzagor patted his neck. \"I'm fine.\" She tried to slide off Mason's back, but her legs collapsed and she dropped to the ground. \"Oh! It's harder to walk than I remembered. My legs feel so tired--I think riding you was more tiring that it would have been to fly on my own strength.\" Izagor pushed herself to a squat, then a standing position, and she brushed of some dirt which had gotten onto her clothes. \"Alright, now let's go find somewhere to spend the night...\"\n\nIzagor stared up at a large sign which read, \"Imperial Hotel Cinderfell\", and she smiled. \"This looks like a good place. What do you think?\"\n\nMason poked his head out from one of the bushes that was lining the side of the road. \"Oh yes. I've stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Klosk Harbour and their service was quite good. A bit on the expensive side, but that's fine.\" He reached down for the pouch still strapped to his chest and took out a smaller pouch filled with gold coins minted with the Marlander seal on one side and the emperor's face on the other side. \"I don't think they'll ask for full payment up front, but here's some money in case they require a deposit.\"\n\nIzagor took the coin pouch and stared at the lumps of metal within. \"Ok. So I just...give this to the person at the desk?\"\n\nMason nodded. \"Just walk in and go to the front desk. Talk to the receptionist there and ask to rent a room for a single night. If he requests a deposit, pay him with those coins. Otherwise he'll give you a key and show you up to the room. Once you're there, wait till he leaves and then come to the window and wave me in. I'll...I'll climb up somehow.\"\n\nIzagor looked at the hotel thoughtfully. The building was well lit and was five storeys tall, and a restaurant was visible at the side--she had admittedly been most attracted to the smell of the food. But the building's exterior was smooth and free of pipes or ledges, aside from a series of balconies, which might make for a difficult climb for Mason. \"I'm not sure there are many good pathways to climb up,\" Izagor said.\n\n\"Yes, I'll figure that part out. Just go rent a room and signal to me from the window, and then I'll get up there. Somehow.\" Mason ducked back into the bush as a horse carriage came trotting down the street, but it didn't stop at the hotel and kept going past them. \"Good luck!\"\n\nIzagor passed the coin pouch between her left and right hand repeatedly. \"Right. Ok.\" She walked down the street and turned towards the hotel's entrance. \"I've fought a sea serpent, I've flown over the world's highest mountain...I can do this,\" she murmured to herself.\n\nAs she approached the glass front door, a man wearing neat black and white clothing frowned at her with a disbelieving look. He seemed to have hair coming from his chin for some reason, which Izagor found amusing. When she kept walking towards him, the doorman pulled the door open for her and beckoned her in with a bow, gesturing with hands covered in white gloves.\n\nIzagor walked through the entrance...and froze. The inside of the hotel was all bright and clean--filled with warm lighting, tasteful artwork on the walls, and a soft carpet underfoot. Izagor wanted to take off her boots so she could feel the carpet with her feet, but instead she settled for kneeling down and rubbing a hand against the carpet. \"So soft...\" She bent even lower and rubbed her cheek against the velvety carpet.\n\nThe man who had opened the door for her was watching through the glass, and now he looked like he was wondering if he should have denied her entry. Izagor jumped to her feet and walked away before he could change his mind. She strolled up towards the large desk (the front desk, presumably) where there was another man wearing the exact same attire as the doorman.\n\nAs the receptionist looked up, his eyes went wide in a shocked expression that was becoming increasingly familiar. Izagor could see that he was looking over her with an incredulous face; Mason had said there was nothing wrong with her body and she looked like a normal human, so there must have been something wrong with her attire. Were all humans so obsessed about clothing that people would stare at you for wearing the wrong type? The clothes she was wearing (Mason's clothes) were only a little bit dirty from the few hours spent flying.\n\n\"Salutations,\" Izagor began by saying. She raised her arms and was about to rock them left and right in a wing salute, but then she realized that humans might not understand this gesture. She dropped her arms and just smiled instead.\n\n\"Good...evening! How...might I be of service to you?\" asked receptionist, speaking slowly and frowning in a confused manner.\n\n\"Thank you for the offer, but I do not need you to service me. What I need is a room. To stay in. For tonight. Thank you!\" Izagor tried smiling again.\n\nThe receptionist nodded and took out a piece of paper from a tray. \"Certainly, ma'am. Now if you would be so kind as to give me your name?\"\n\n\"My name is Izagor.\"\n\nThe receptionist wrote this down. \"Full name, please?\" he prompted further, looking up from his paper.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I need your full name for our recordkeeping purposes. May I know your family name?\"\n\nIzagor paused and pondered what she would do. Her full name was Izagor the Brown (or Izagor the Reddish-Brown if you wanted to be very formal), but this sounded a bit too much like a dragon name and not a human name. Also the man had asked for a family name--perhaps he was asking for her clan's name? Or the name of her parents? But those wouldn't sound like human names either. After a few seconds of quick thinking, Izagor decided that the safest bet was to just use the one human family name she already knew--Mason's. \"Uh...Tolovius. My name is Izagor...Tolovius. Yes...\"\n\n\"Of course. Excellent. Now, Ms Tolovius, we have several rooms currently vacant, including single, double, twin, triple, and suite. Which of these would you be interested in?\" The receptionist picked up a flyer and showed it to her.\n\nIzagor knew how to read and write draconic runes, but she had no experience with human written text--she couldn't understand any of the words written on the flyer. She just pointed a finger at one of the pictures which showed a room with a pair of beds, but then she realized that this might look suspicious if she was supposed to be alone, so she switched to the picture which showed one large bed. \"Yes. This...this one.\"\n\n\"The double bedroom--excellent choice. Breakfast tomorrow is complimentary. Give the time of year, these are our standard rates here on a per night basis.\" The receptionist took out a separate piece of paper with more writing, but Izagor couldn't read it anyway, so she just stared blankly and nodded.\n\n\"Yes... Wait! Which way is the room? I need a room with windows facing...um...\" Izagor suddenly realized that in becoming a human, she had lost one of her most basic instincts--dragons had internal compasses which helped them fly, but now her natural sense of cardinal direction was gone. Mason would be looking out for her to signal from one of the rooms on the hotel's front face, but she didn't actually know what direction this was. Instead she just pointed a finger over her shoulder. \"That way. The windows need to be that way.\"\n\nThe receptionist took this request in stride. \"I believe that can be arranged...yes, we have a room available facing the front street on level three. However, for new guests who have not stayed with us before, our establishment requires a deposit of two gold faces which will be refunded on checkout, minus fees.\"\n\n\"I have this...\" Izagor opened the coin pouch and poured out all its contents onto the desk, forming a small pile of gold.\n\nThe receptionist raised an eyebrow. From the dozen or so coins, he slid two into a metal strongbox on the desk. \"Very good, ma'am. Now if you could just sign here on this form, please.\"\n\nIzagor took the offered pen, held it in her clenched fist, and scrawled randomly at the spot indicated. She normally used the tip of her tail as an ink brush if she needed to write, but her tail currently didn't exist so this would have to do. After some consideration, she put down the pen and began pushing her scattered coins back into the coin pouch.\n\nThe receptionist kept his face neutral. \"All settled then. Your room is already made up and prepared. Do you also require dinner? Our restaurant will remain open for two more hours.\"\n\n\"Yes! Although first I wish to see the room, so I may inspect the windows and the balcony, and stare out of them at the sky. Please. Thank you.\" Izagor smiled again as the receptionist got to his feet and led her away. In her opinion, she had handled things very well.\n\nThe receptionist adjusted his collar and mentally added this encounter to the long list of strange and unusual guests he had handled. \"Foreigners...\" he muttered under his breath. \"Ahem! This way please.\"\n\nAbout half an hour later, Mason finally landed on the balcony where he had seen Izagor standing and waving to him. It had taken him longer than expected to find somewhere dark to take off so he could fly to the hotel room without getting spotted, but now he was here...and the room was empty. Had he gotten the wrong room? But the lights were all on, and the place appeared to have been recently cleaned. \"Hello?\" he called.\n\n\"Mason? In here!\" came the muffled reply from the bathroom.\n\nMason poked his head into the bathroom and found that Izagor was staring at herself in the mirror. \"Izagor...what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Call me Izzy.\" Izagor was tilting her head to peer at her face from various angles, and she ran a hand over the freckles which covered her cheeks. \"Look at this! That human in the mirror is...me. I'm so weird. As a dragon I did had a few spots, but they were on my side, not my snout. And now there's all this...hair. It keeps getting in the way of my face.\"\n\nMason found himself likewise captivated by his own appearance--he had never actually gotten a chance to see his own reflection, and now it was fascinating to see how much he had changed. His mouth and nose had stretched into a pointed muzzle, but his face was surprisingly still capable of rudimentary expression. He could still smile or frown, conveying some level of emotion. Two short white horns sprouted from the rear of his skull pointing backwards, and there was some sort of finned crest that ran from the top of his head down his neck. As he watched, his crest rose slightly; Mason found this amusing, which only made his crest rise up even further. He reached up to try and pat it down, but it kept springing up. The feeling was oddly pleasant. \"This is very weird.\"\n\nIzagor bared her lips and stared at her teeth. \"So weird. Being human isn't as horrible as I first imagined, but I can't wait to change back to normal. Good thing we'll make it to your home town tomorrow, or we would have to teach each other how to use our bodies.\" Noticing Mason's current focus, her lips pulled back into a toothy grin \"I see you've discovered your crest--don't play with it too much or it'll fall off.\"\n\nMason snatched his paw away, and he felt his crest drooping from that thought. \"Really?\"\n\n\"No. That's just a myth told to fledglings because they like to play with their crest when it first grows in.\" Izagor reached out her hand and gently stroked Mason's crest, which made it perk back up involuntarily. \"Can you tell why?\" Tiptoeing and leaning towards him, she licked the sensitive membrane.\n\nMason moaned softly as a tingle ran down his back, and the sensation seemed to echo into a warm pleasure in his underbelly. \"Oh...! Uh, wait...\"\n\nSuddenly he felt very embarrassed, but Izagor seemed amused by his vocal reaction. \"You like that, don't you? Haha, too easy. That's not the only place fledglings discover they like to play with...\"\n\n\"Shall--shall we get dinner?\" Mason suggested, trying to change the topic. \"I'm rather hungry.\"\n\n\"Yes! Good idea. I am hungry too.\" Izagor agreed; her face lighting up at the thought of sating her appetite. \"How do we get food? Are there nearby hunting grounds, or does the food come prepared by the hotel?\"\n\n\"You can go to the restaurant downstairs and order some food from there. Bring some back for me too--since I can't be seen, I'll just wait here and maybe take a shower.\"\n\n\"Ok! I'll be back soon.\" Izagor left the room to go get dinner, leaving Mason alone.\n\nMason tried to take a shower.\n\nThe soapy suds and warm water still felt just as pleasant against his scales as they might have against his skin, but he soon discovered that even the hotel room's larger than average bathroom wasn't quite enough space for a dragon to take a proper bath. He could curl his tail around his legs, but washing his wings proved to be quite troublesome--there was only enough space for him to unfurl one wing at a time, so he had to stand outside the shower stall and stick his wing inside. This let to water bouncing off the flight surface and splashing everywhere.\n\nOther than his wings, he could wash the rest of his body just fine, and Mason took this time alone to make a proper examination of his anatomy. His tail was unexpectedly dextrous, and he could actually use it to grab and pick up objects if he concentrated. He also discovered that his claws could retract into his forepaws, like a cat. One particular part of his body was even more unusual--under his tail and between his legs, his groin was strangely featureless other than a narrow slit which looked almost feminine. Mason didn't know if this was a normal trait for a male dragon or if the transformation had somehow altered him into a female, but he had no plans to clarify this with Izagor.\n\nTurning off the water, he stepped out of the shower and started using towels to dry himself. His bath must have taken longer than he realized, for suddenly there was a loud crashing sound from the door which made him jump. It sounded like there had been an attempt to kick the door open, but who would kick a door before simply trying the doorknob?\n\nThe room door began to click and shudder as someone tried to open it--someone who clearly had very little experience using doorknobs. The door swung open seconds later, revealing a brown-haired woman carrying a large plate with food piled on top. Izagor was grinning widely, and her mouth and hands were stained with various sauces. \"Did you know they just let you eat as much food as you want? It's called a buffet, apparently, and it doesn't make any sense. How do they pay for it all? Anyway I brought some for you.\"\n\nMason relaxed as the door swung shut behind Izagor, ensuring that no passing guests or hotel staff would notice there was a dragon in the room. \"I feel like I'm starving. Thanks.\" He trotted over as Izagor put the plate down on the table. \"Did you bring a fork and spoon?\"\n\nIzagor tilted her head. \"A what and what?\"\n\n\"Fork and spoon. Metal utensils you use to eat the food so that your hands don't get dirty,\" Mason explained, gesturing with his paws.\n\n\"Or so that's what those were for. Why not just use your paws to eat?\" Izagor stuck out her tongue and licked her fingers. \"Do humans not do this? Maybe that was why everyone in the food room was staring at me. Whoops. They also stared at me when I took all this food upstairs, but they didn't say anything.\"\n\nMason could easily visualize Izagor openly flouting social conventions inside the restaurant, much to the horror or amusement of the other guests and the wait staff--it was surprising she had even passed the dress code. He sat down beside the table and began eating. There were various kinds of meat and vegetables, and lots of bread and pastries. \"Mm. This is madness--I'm a dragon who's snuck into a hotel, except you're the dragon who snuck into a hotel.\"\n\nIzagor snatched a morsel from Mason's plate. \"You see what happens when you mess around with sorcery? If you hadn't tried to make a deal with that demon, we would both be in our normal bodies right now. I would still have my wings, and you would still have your...hands or whatever it is you like about your human body.\"\n\nMason took a bite from a baked potato. \"I thought you said you were an adventure-seeking traveller? Surely this counts as an adventure.\"\n\n\"I'm not complaining. If you hadn't been messing around with sorcery, we would never have met. And just look at this...\" Izagor stopped licking her fingers and wriggled them instead. \"I have fingers. Hahaha. They're so manipulative! I can poke things. It's actually kind of fun to be human. You all just go around eating buffets and riding trains and doing silly human things.\" She walked over to the room's sole bed and sprawled out on the large mattress. \"This is so soft!\"\n\n\"I'm glad you see the benefits of being human. And I have to admit that being a dragon has a certain...liberty to it, what with the flying. It's fun.\" Even as he ate the food, Mason was feeling contemplative. \"Honestly, that might be why I even bothered with this whole smuggling nonsense in the first place. Because I don't... I'm not trying to brag, but sorcerers make good gold--it wasn't a shortage of cash which drove me to try all this...this transforming myself to fly across the border. I just wanted to do something more exciting with my life. You know what I mean?\" Mason glanced over to the bed, and what he saw made him cough and sputter.\n\n\"Don't eat so fast that you're choking yourself!\" Izagor said. She didn't seem to realize the source of Mason's sudden distress, which was the fact that she was unbuttoning her shirt.\n\nAfter a few more coughs, Mason managed to recover. \"Izagor, what are you doing?\"\n\n\"You can call my Izzy.\" Izagor raised her head off the bed to stare at him. \"I'm just taking off all these clothes. They are very restrictive.\" She shrugged off her shirt and tossed it over the side of the bed, leaving her upper body completely exposed.\n\nMason was almost completely speechless. He was trying not to stare, and failing. \"But...\"\n\n\"You said humans need to wear clothes in public, but this room isn't a public space. So I'm taking them off.\" After kicking off her boots and socks, Izagor pulled off her pants and tossed all the clothing onto the floor. \"This feels so much better.\" After so many hours, it felt like a delightful relief to have her skin no longer constricted by the garments. She rolled around on the bed, enjoying the sensation of air and soft clean fabric against her nude body.\n\nMason dropped his gaze so he was staring at the plate, and he busied himself with finishing off the food. Whatever he had been saying before had now completely slipped his mind. \"Uh... Anyway, it should just be a short flight tomorrow. My house isn't directly at Klosk Harbour; it's a short distance away from the town.\"\n\nAt the moment, Izagor was distracted by the bedside table. There was a control knob embedded in the furniture, and rotating this knob changed the brightness of the pair of oil lamps hung in the ceiling, apparently by controlling the amount of oil being sent from a central pipeline. She was finding it tremendous fun to mess around with the lights and make them flicker--even at the lowest setting the lamps still had small flames and didn't go completely out. Dragons didn't have much interest in architecture, but the few structures they did construct would have been lit by magical crystals instead of oil lamps. \"Look at this! That is so fun. Hehe. What were you saying? Oh right. Is your sorcerer's tower on the beachfront?\"\n\nHaving just about finished his food, Mason went to go wash his paws in the bathroom sink. \"I don't have a tower. Not counting the Royal Academy of Magic where there's one big shared tower, only the richest sorcerers can afford their own towers. I just live in a house, but it is within a short distance of the coast, yes.\"\n\n\"Lovely. Maybe I'll go for a swim after I've gotten my normal body back. Not that I resent being a human. You seem like a pretty decent person, and all our conversation as we were flying was very interesting.\" Izagor stopped playing with the lights and lay back on the bed. \"It's been a long and...unusual day. We should get some rest.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" Mason sat down on all fours, lying on the carpeted floor. \"I'll sleep here. You can take the bed.\"\n\n\"What? Why don't we both take the bed? It's a big bed.\" Izagor shifted to the side and patted the mattress beside her. \"I can't take up all this space even if I wanted to. There's no reason to let all this nice softness go to waste. Since you're paying for this bed, you might as well use it.\" She reached down and tugged Mason's tail.\n\nBecause she wasn't human, Mason assumed that Izagor didn't know that two humans of opposite genders usually wouldn't share a bed unless they were married--this was a simple matter of modesty and protecting honour, but explaining these complex social concepts seemed like it would take a lot of effort. And although Izagor resembled a naked woman, she was actually a dragon, so Mason mentally shrugged and climbed onto the bed beside her. \"Alright, fine. It is a big bed...\"\n\nBack in his human body Mason's habit was to sleep on his back, so he flipped over into the more comfortable position he was used to. He had to partially unfurl his wings so he wasn't crushing them. \"Good night Izagor.\"\n\n\"Good night Mason.\" Izagor dimmed the room's lights. She snuggled up beside Mason and used one of his wings as a blanket, enjoying the somewhat familiar feeling of warm scales rubbing against her exposed skin. It felt good--when was the last time she'd met another dragon, let alone gotten the chance to touch them at such close range? It had been more than a year since she had enjoyed physical intimacy with other.\n\nIzagor could remember that last experience clearly--she had fantasized back to it many times, as she relieved her pent-up tension with her own tongue or paws during her time spent alone roaming the world. Her last partner had been a drake with scales of muted copper, and she'd met him as they both flew over a mountain range just within the outskirts of her clan's territory. The copper drake had been young, eager, and proud; not so different from her. As they flew past each other and exchanged names, he had roared a challenge--first to fly to the peak of the range's highest mountain would win. The winner would get...well they hadn't bothered to clarify that part, but Izagor had gladly accepted the challenge. They'd sprinted up the mountain side, riding thermals and furiously beating their wings to gain altitude--it was a joy to climb so high and so fast, racing to reach the top of the world.\n\nSince this was her home territory, Izagor knew the winds and where the updrafts would form; she had taken the lead, but at the last moment she'd slowed down just enough so that the drake could pull ahead of her and be the first to land. It was only polite to allow him the illusion he had bested her, and his thrill and excitement had been contagious. Before either of them realized what was happening, they were tussling and playing like hatchlings on the snowy mountain top. Then suddenly Izagor had gotten the bold idea to lick the copper drake's neck crest, and he'd licked hers in retaliation, and then the licking had become something else. It had been delightfully sensual as their bodies slid and rubbed against each other as they shared pleasure at the very top of the world. Her wings had kicked up snow as she beat them against the ground, lost in the trawls of ecstasy as she roared out in sweet orgasmic release...\n\nIzagor suddenly snapped back to reality where she was not currently a dragon, but her arousal was undeniable. All her recollecting had left her feeling warm and restless. She gently pushed aside Mason's wing, and cool air swept against her skin. The space between her legs had gone all sensitive, as had the lumps of fat on her chest, but pressing her body against Mason's side helped sooth this itch ever so slightly. It was conflicting to think that she was actually cuddling up beside a human and feeling this way, but her body cared little for this fact--it felt like she was resting against a young healthy drake, and in every way except his mind, Mason was a young healthy drake. She found his body attractive, and in all their hours spent talking together, Izagor had come to like Mason--human or not, he was intelligent and meticulous, yet also curious and complex. All this flying across human territory had forged a certain comradery between the two of them, and it had simply been fun talking with him. They could just chat so easily; it was like they had somehow connected and understood each other on a deeper level.\n\nIf he had been a dragon like her there would have been no issue, but now Izagor felt conflicted and nervous. What did Mason think of her? Did he enjoy their time together as she did, or would he rather be rid of her as quickly as possible? What would happen after tomorrow, once they had changed back to their usual forms? Even if he did enjoy her company, was the fact they were of different species simply an insurmountable barrier? Did he feel that desire which she did?\n\nIzagor wanted to ask, but now she found herself lost for words. The room was dark and dim with just enough light that she could make out Mason's form. His eyes were closed and it was impossible to know whether he was awake or fully asleep. Ever so gently, Izagor moved her hand and let it rest lightly against his chest. The scale plates felt smooth and regular as she slowly slid her hand, moving lower, and lower, and lower. All the while she watched to see if he would react, but Mason's eyes remained closed and his face expressionless.\n\nHer hand moved until finally it bumped against something warm and rigid. Izagor turned her head to stare at Mason's underbelly, where his phallus had sprung out of his genital slit and was proudly jutting upwards. It looked exactly like how a drake's penis should look like--a long tapered rod of smooth scale-less flesh with a series of soft ridges, narrowing to a point, but with a small flaring ridge a short distance behind the head. The tip was wet with a tiny bead of natural lubricant, as were some of the ridges near the base where it protruded from the slit which normally kept it contained.\n\nNot quite daring to think about what she was doing, Izagor let her grip slide onto this sensitive reproductive organ. It felt warm and slightly squishy under her touch, with a layer of soft skin and flesh running over a rigid core of blood-engorged tissue. Was Mason reacting to her touch and her close presence, or was this just an involuntary reflex caused by some dream state? Izagor glanced back up to Mason.\n\nHis eyes were wide open and he was staring at her. Not a dream state, then.\n\nIzagor swallowed nervously. \"Oh! You're awake...\"\n\nMason nodded slowly. \"I am. What...what are you doing?\" His tail was twitching and his neck crest was raised, but it was unclear which emotion this was from--confusion, amusement, arousal, shock, or some combination of the above.\n\n\"I was just...ah...hmm...you know, that's actually an excellent question.\" Izagor bit her lip, but she didn't let go of the phallus she was holding. \"You remember what I said earlier about us having to teach each other how to use our bodies? Are you open to a little...uh...exploration?\"\n\nMason said nothing for a while, and the silence dragged on for a moment as he considered her offer. Perhaps he was going through the same thought process which Izagor had worked through--wondering about whether it was improper to be attracted to a someone who was not actually a member of your own species, even if they were in the body of one. Eventually he broke out into a grin, and he moved a forepaw to touch her side. \"Sure, why not? If...if that's what you want, I mean...\"\n\nThat was all that needed to be said. Izagor leaned into the contact, enjoying the sensation as Mason gently caressed her skin. She began to stroke his length up and down, using the newfound dexterity of her hands to spread the natural lubricant the gently dripped from his tip and his slit. She worked her fingers around all his ridges, quickly coating them with slick fluid and making him thrill as she focused on the most sensitive parts of his anatomy. \"Yes, right there...\" he moaned.\n\nThen when she felt they were both ready, Izagor pushed herself upwards and straddled Mason's body, resting her knees on the bed just below his wings. She placed her hands on his chest to maintain her balance, then she began to slide back and forth, rubbing her genitals against his. Mason wasn't actually penetrating her yet, but she could feel pleasure beginning to well up in her body as she humped his rigid length. She moved her hands from his chest to his wings, holding the leading edge like a handle to help her move her body.\n\nMason reached up with his paws, but instead of grabbing her hips in a tight mating hold, he began to massage and touch her chest. Did humans consider their mammary glands an erogenous zone? Izagor didn't know what Mason was doing, but the contact sent to spark her arousal even further. She knew that drakes were very sensitive right on their penile ridges, and Mason was definitely beginning to buck and squirm under her continued motions. Each ridge set off a small pulse of pleasure as they rubbed against her vulva.\n\nEventually the desire became too much to deny--Izagor halted her humping and moved upwards, pulling her hips away from Mason's underbelly and his phallus. He let out a soft grunt of disappointment which changed into a pleasured moan as she sat back down and his tip entered her. \"Aww...oh! Yes...\"\n\nThat was it--they had done the deed. He was inside her, and they were mating.\n\n\"Izzy, this feels extremely pleasant,\" Mason murmured, his gaze half-glazed over.\n\n\"My thoughts exactly,\" Izagor agreed. She continued to lower herself slowly, gradually taking more and more of Mason's erection into her. His phallus felt warm and wonderful inside her, filling her up in a delightfully satisfying way as each ridge slipped in and sent tingles running through her body. Izagor kept going until Mason had fully hilted himself inside her, then she resumed her humping motions from before, rocking forwards and backwards to stimulate them both.\n\nThe pleasure was undeniable, and the sensations coming from her groin felt largely similar to those Izagor had enjoyed whilst being a dragon, despite being in a human body. It was the periphery which was different--she had no wings to spread, but her skin was all sensitive and Mason was touching her chest and rear in a distinctly sexual way. Normally Izagor would have entwined her tail with her mating partner's but now she had no tail and Mason's tail curled around her leg. There was a certain amount of exoticness that came with savouring sex through a body that was so different from her usual.\n\nMason suddenly blinked and swallowed nervously, as if he had only just realized what was happening. \"What...what are we doing? I'm a human and you're a dragon, except that now I'm a dragon and you're a human... And we're...\"\n\n\"Shut up and worry about it later.\" Izagor leaned forwards, bringing her head closer to Mason's. She had been meaning to lick his crest, but Mason surprised her by touching his muzzle against her mouth in a kiss--such a gesture was not unheard of amongst dragons, and she opened her lips and let her tongue dart against his. A human tongue was so much shorter than a dragon's, so his tongue seemed to fill up her mouth as she tasted him and he tasted her. \"Mason!\" she gasped. The pleasure was building steadily inside her, rising like a gradual tide which she knew was coming. Her release was imminent unless they slowed or stopped, but neither of them wanted to do any such thing.\n\nIzagor used a hand to rub and caress Mason's crest, patting his head and stroking his neck. A dragon's crest was made of the same sensitive membrane which made up the flight surfaces of their wings, and it was highly sensitive to the touch, to the point of being an erogenous zone. Mason's eyes rolled back in his head and his tongue dangled out the side of his mouth as Izagor rubbed his crest, even as she kept moving her hips in rhythmic motions over his phallus. \"I think...I'm going to...\" Mason muttered, sounding almost surprised.\n\nOn her part, Izagor was in no position to reply. She was lost in the warmth and pressure and the slick smooth friction of their coupling. Finally a tidal wave of sensation hit and swept over her whole body, exploding out from her core in repeated bursts of overwhelming satisfaction. \"Ah...\" She gasped softly and collapsed against Mason, her hips dropping flat against his underbelly and forcing him as deep as possible, while she bowed over and her hands clenched down on his wing and his neck. Her muscles clenched up repeatedly, squeezing down on Mason's phallus with shuddering, squeezing patterns. Again and again her orgasm kept going.\n\nEven as pleasure blew away all conscious thought, she could hear Mason repeating her name over and over. \"Izagor, Iza... Izzy...Izzy...! Izzy!\" His hips jerked upwards, driving him just the tiniest bit deeper than before as he obeyed simple biological imperative, and she could feel his ridges all trying to flare out as he too enjoyed the end result of their coupling. Mason let out a groan as he poured himself into her depths, his body emptying out glands and vesicles to fill her with his seed.\n\nIt was a brief eternity of pleasure for them both. Izagor felt her orgasm wind down first, and soon after Mason relaxed under her and dropped his head back against the bed. She pulled herself off his slowly deflating phallus which was retreating back into his genital slit now that its job had been thoroughly accomplished. The air was rich with the smell of sex and sweat. A mixture of their bodily fluids stained both their groins, especially Mason's, but both dragon and human collapsed against each other and held the other close. Neither of them moved to clean themselves up or do anything other than snuggle. The mind-numbing intensity of what had just happened had left them both too drained.\n\nNo words were passed. Responsibility and being rational could just...wait till tomorrow. Soon enough, they fell asleep in each other's arms.\n\nThe next morning brought with it unpleasant stickiness and awkward thoughts. Mason awoke before the sun rose; he rarely slept too deeply, and waking up early was his usual daily routine. What with him being a dragon, it was probably best if they washed up and prepared to leave before the sun rose.\n\nIzagor was curled up into a ball and sleeping on the opposite side of the bed--even the simply act of looking at her made Mason feel uncertain and confused. He hopped off the bed and went to the bathroom to wash himself up. He went into the shower and let the water blast him clean. The reduced dexterity of his paws caused some trouble when he tried to grab a toothbrush, but eventually he got himself all cleaned up. All the while he was thinking through what had happened the previous night, replaying the memory in his mind and trying to analyse it.\n\nWhat had they done? He wasn't a virgin who had never before tasted intimacy, yet none of his previous experiences compared to what he had felt with Izagor. The intensity, the passion, and even those delightfully pleasured sounds she had made--he wanted more of it, but she was a dragon! She was a dragon with the body of an attractive human female, but still a dragon nonetheless! He'd just bedded a dragon, and it had been the best damn sex of his life. He didn't know how to feel about it or what he really wanted.\n\nBy the time Mason was done, he found Izagor awake as well and standing by the window, peeking through the curtains at the darkened street outside. He wanted to say something to her, but the words just didn't come to him. Izagor stayed just as quiet; they both exchanged minor pleasantries and quickly discussed their plan for the day, but no words were passed about what had transpired between them. In silent, unspoken agreement, they both would need to take some time to think about what they'd done.\n\nIzagor washed herself up, then she'd reluctantly pulled on Mason's clothes (which were somewhat dirty) and went downstairs to pay for the hotel room. The hotel receptionist was already sitting at the front desk, looking far more ready to face the day than she was. \"Good morning. Is everything alright?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Yes...I'm just...wondering if I should regret some things I've done...\" Izagor paid the hotel's fee and returned the key, then she headed back upstairs.\n\nMason opened the door to let her in. They opened the window and stepped out onto the balcony. Mason was wearing the leather harness from yesterday's smuggling trip, and Izagor climbed onto his back. As the sky started to glow with the light of dawn, they took to the skies for home.\n\nThey didn't talk much over the course of the hour-long flight, yet this silence felt natural and easy. Neither Izagor nor Mason tried to force a conversation; instead, they watched the rolling hills pass below them as they sky slowly came alight.\n\nFor Mason at least, it was very different seeing the landscape from above compared to seeing it from ground level. He was in a familiar region now, being so close to home, and soon his house came into view. His home was in a small forest running along the coastline, connected via a dirt road to the nearby town of Klosk Harbour. It was just a simple cottage located a few hundred meters inland from the ocean, but this was where he had lived for the past few years. \"Home again,\" he said, as he landed in the garden which was overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers.\n\n\"So this is where your territory.\" Izagor slid off his back. \"Do you live alone?\"\n\n\"Yes. I sometimes stay in the in the Royal Academy of Magic when I'm working on more complicated projects with other sorcerers, but this is where I go to relax at the end of the week.\" Mason walked up to the front door and took out his key from the harness he was wearing.\n\nIzagor turned around slowly, taking in the quiet atmosphere created by the forested trees around them, and the wind blowing in from the coast. \"This is nice. I can smell the ocean. You have a nice house.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I bought it cheap just a few years ago; I've been thinking of renovating or even rebuilding the place, actually. I have a plan all drawn up, but I just haven't gotten the time.\" Unlocking the door, Mason strolled into his home and beckoned Izagor in. The sun was already rising, producing enough brightness that he didn't bother to light a lantern. \"Welcome to my humble home. Sorry that it's a bit of a mess, but I wasn't expecting a guest. This is the main room, bedroom over there, kitchen there, and my study is there.\"\n\nIzagor walked into the living room and looked around briefly. The place smelled of paper and wood, and it seemed quite tidy and minimalistic, almost to the point of looking barren. \"Alright, so...how do we do this? How do we change back?\"\n\n\"It's a simple plan. I'll summon the demon Kurzadakathan again and have him make a new transformation crystal. Come to my study--I do all my work there. I have a summoning circle in there too.\"\n\nMason headed into one of the adjacent rooms--the room was split into two. On one side was a desk covered with stacks of paperwork and various writing implements, while the other side was completely empty except for a couple of large concentric circles marked on the floor. Izagor sat on the cushioned chair behind the desk, while Mason picked up a thick stack of documents. \"This is one of the copies I made of that transformation spell. I...uh...can't exactly hold a pen with these paws, but since the contract has already been written that doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"What should I do? I can't read those things,\" Izagor said.\n\n\"You don't need to do anything; I've done this many times before. Just sit back and watch the show.\" Walking to the other side of the room, Mason pointed a paw towards the two concentric circles on the ground. \"The inner circle is the actual summoning circle which will create a portal to the otherworldly plane, while also acting as a defensive barrier which will contain the demon if it tries to act in a hostile manner. The outer circle is a separate enchantment which obscures the demon from seeing anything else in the room. It's not truly necessary, but it's extra security. I like to take that precaution just to make doubly sure the demon doesn't get to see any other contracts it's not supposed to.\" He took a deep breath, expecting it to be one of his last spent in this draconic body. \"Are you ready? I'm going to summon Kurzadakathan.\"\n\nNow that the moment was almost upon them, Izagor found herself even more conflicted than ever. Of course she wanted to go back to being a dragon, but at the same time she felt like she would miss her human body, and she would very much miss Mason when she flew off. \"I...I'm ready. Let's change back.\"\n\nMason nodded solemnly. He glanced to a poster stuck to the wall, which contained the standard list of instructions for summoning a demon--he had memorized how things worked until he could do it with eyes closed, but looking to his list helped him get into the mood. Though he had summoned demons countless times before, he had never done it as a dragon, and the flow of magic through his body felt subtly different from usual.\n\nThe sorcerer stepped into the perimeter of the outer circle. He sat down on his haunches and raised a forepaw to point at the inner circle. \"Kurzadakathan! Accursed Destroyer, Twisted Fiend, Being of Nightmare and Deceit! From the Otherworldly Plane, I thus invoke thee.\"\n\nIzagor held her breath as Mason said the ritual words. She leaned forward over the desk, anxious to see what the summoning would look like...but nothing happened.\n\n\"Hm. Did I say that wrong? Uh... Kurzadakathan, I thus invoke thee!\" Mason repeated, but still there was nothing, so he tried again using an ancient magical language which was preferred by certain sorcerers (mostly the elitist snobs). \"Kurzadakathan. Kurzadakathan. Kurzadakathan. Vanokepo cica tella delliriz simat cica. Kurzadakathan. Vigta.\"\n\nBut still nothing. Mason's neck crest drooped flat and he turned to Izagor. \"This...this isn't working for some reason.\"\n\n\"Is it me? Should I step outside...?\" Izagor suggested, wondering if her presence was interfering with summoning spell or perhaps Mason's focus.\n\n\"No, it can't be you. Usually I get it right on the first time, but after six calls? Something else is wrong. The circle isn't even glowing. There's no energy transfer at all.\" Mason tilted his head. \"Can't be the summoning circle, and it can't be that the otherworldly plane is suddenly closed for business. Even the local overworld flux can't interfere with a summoning circle of this classification. So it must be something with my magic? But I...oh I get it. I think I understand.\"\n\n\"What's the problem?\"\n\n\"The summoning circle is calibrated for my body as a human. It won't respond to my magic while I'm a dragon. The problem is obvious when you consider the dimensional differential equations--they won't sum to zero.\" Mason shook his head. \"It's a bit of a paradox--I can't use my circle until I transform back, but I can't transform back until I use my circle.\"\n\n\"So what do we do?\"\n\n\"Let me just think about this. Maybe I could modify the circle and recalibrate it? But that would require fully recalculating the wavefunctions since the general solutions are no longer approximately valid.\"\n\nDragons used magic intuitively by channelling their willpower to focus the power that ran through their blood; in comparison, humans used verbal spells, special hand gestures, and some even used wands or staffs to access the realm of the arcane. Therefore, Izagor wasn't sure what Mason was talking about. \"And...can you do that?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's not impossible, it's just the sort of thing which the academy would devote an entire research project to. If I had ten weeks and a couple of graduate assistants helping me, then sure I could recalculate this summoning circle to work for a dragon. But that's far too long. There has to be a simpler way.\" After some consideration, Mason realized the simplest way forward. \"You have to do it. You've got a human body, so the circle will accept your power.\"\n\nIzagor wondered if she had misheard. \"What? Me? I'm not a sorcerer! I can't do it.\"\n\n\"You can. All you need to do is say the same words I did, then talk to the demon and get it to carry out the contract. The two main challenges in sorcery are drawing the summoning circle and preparing a proper contract that is rigorous and unbreakable--I've already done both for you.\"\n\nThis sudden idea--that she would need to be the one casting the spell--made Izagor uneasy. \"Are you serious? You want me to summon a demon and deal with it? That's human magic!\"\n\nMason nodded. He walked over to the desk and put the contract down. \"Exactly. You're a human right now, but I'm not. I'm completely serious about this. Summoning is much easier than you think. I'll be right here outside the outer circle--you'll be able to see me, but the demon won't. The only catch is that the contract has to be written by you for it to be valid, so you'll need to copy my documentation onto fresh pieces of paper.\"\n\n\"Mason, I can't read human runes or script!\"\n\n\"But you can write, yes? Then just use your natural language--dragon speak or whatever. The demon will understand it as long as you do. I'll read off this contract and explain to you everything so you can write it down.\"\n\nLooking over the thick sheaf of paper, Izagor wasn't convinced. \"All this? That would take us days, if not weeks to transcribe and copy all that over.\"\n\nMason took one single sheet of paper from the top of the stack. \"Alright, maybe you could just copy over the executive summary. I've summed up all the important parts of the contract, and there's a minor clause here which requires new contracts to follow previous similar contracts if ambiguity is involved. Here, take this pen. I'll just read out the summary to you, and you pen down the words. We can do this.\"\n\nWorking together, they started copying over the demonic contract. Izagor had to write slowly, moving the pen in deliberate strokes as she grasped it with her dextrous but untrained hand. Speaking calmly and slowly, Mason went over the whole contract with her, explaining what it did, as well as the requirements and failsafes it included. It took them almost a whole hour just to copy over the two paged document, translating human written language into the flowy characters of draconic script. Looking back over the contract she had just created, Izagor felt that her writing was ugly but still barely readable--draconic characters were meant to be written with smooth strokes of the tail, not by a pen clutched in the hand of a near-illiterate human.\n\nMason had her read out the contract and explain to him what it did, just to be sure she had done the copying correctly, then he nodded and gestured for her to step into the outer circle. \"I think that'll be sufficient. Let's try this again. I'll be right here beside you just outside the circle--the demon won't hear or see me, but you can. I'll talk you through the process.\"\n\nIzagor stared at the contract she was holding, then she turned to Mason. \"What do I do?\"\n\n\"Summon the demon, then order it to carry out the contract. It might try to threaten you or coerce you, but stay firm and ignore it until it agrees to carry the contract. Once the contract is signed, the demon will draw some energy from the circle, create the crystal, and return to the otherworldly plane. At no point should you offer it information or promises of any kind--just insist that you want this contract carried out.\"\n\n\"Ok, ok.\" Izagor crossed her hands and steeled herself. She stepped into the outer circle. \"I can do this. Let's do this! What was the spell supposed to be?\"\n\n\"Raise your hand towards the inner circle,\" Mason said.\n\nIzagor raised her hand, and suddenly a surge of magic rushed out of her body. The circle began to glow, with the inscriptions written into it beginning to shimmer and shift. \"Is that normal?\"\n\nMason remained outside both circles. \"It's normal. That's the summoning circle energizing by taking some of your magic so it can create the defensive wards which will contain the demon. Now when you're ready, just say the demon's name--Kurzadakathan. Pronounced as ker-zah-dah-kah-than.\"\n\n\"Kurzadakathan,\" Izagor said, and instantly the summoning circle flashed in response. Tiny motes of light appeared inside the circle, floating around like dust.\n\nMason nodded his approval. \"You've done it. The demon is coming. Just remember what I told you--no new deals, no bargaining, just the contract exactly as written.\"\n\nThe light flecks began to spin and swirl as if caught in a whirlpool--they coalesced and collapsed into a sphere in the centre which glowed like a miniature sun. Beams of energy shot out from this glowing sphere, spinning round and round like a lighthouse sweeping across the room. Izagor found the sight beautiful yet otherworldly.\n\nSuddenly the sphere of light became a sphere of flesh--Kurzadakathan took the appearance of a gigantic, horrible-looking, bloodshot eyeball which floated in the air. The beams of light swept together into a single particle beam focused directly on Izagor, tracing her movements even as she tried to avoid it. The summoning circle stopped the beam before it touched her. \"Is that supposed to happen?\"\n\nMason didn't even blink. \"It's normal.\"\n\n\"Ok...\"\n\n\"He's trying to kill you. Typical demon behaviour.\"\n\n\"What?\" Before Izagor could clarify further, the giant eyeball stopped firing the particle beam and rolled itself passive-aggressively. Then abruptly everything went dark and there was a figure in the middle of the inner circle, sitting on the floor with legs crossed--Kurzadakathan the demon.\n\nCompared to the spectacular display of light, Izagor found the demon almost underwhelming--it looked almost like an ordinary human in every aspect, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants that were completely black. \"A new voice calls me, and I answer.\" Kurzadakathan looked up and stared at Izagor. \"I don't believe we've had the pleasure of meeting. Your summoning circle is most impressive. What is your name, mighty sorceress?\"\n\nMason spoke quickly before Izagor could say anything. \"Don't answer that. Demons can instantly discern the names of mortals--he's testing you to see how much you know about summoning and how cooperative you're going to be. Just order him to sign the contract. Let the edge of the paper pass into the inner circle.\"\n\nIzagor felt incredibly unnerved by this whole activity, but Mason's advice helped calm her down--she didn't turn to look at him, but knowing he was standing right behind her gave her strength. She raised her hand, holding up the demonic contract she had written. \"I have a contract for you to sign.\"\n\nKurzadakathan smiled, but the gesture showed a few too many teeth. \"I see that, Izagor the Brown, I see that. Come let me take a closer look.\" The demon took the paper from her and peered over it. \"My, what strange handwriting you have. This is the language of...dragons...? Yes, dragons. What an interesting choice. Many sorcerers like to use the ancient language of magic, but writing a contract using the language of dragons is not something I see very often. Ah, and I see what this contract is for! I see why you wrote it so--it is only fitting that you would learn the writing of dragons if you want to turn yourself into one.\" The demon flipped over the paper and read the other page. \"Why would you want to turn yourself into a dragon?\"\n\n\"Don't answer that either. You can threaten to banish Kurzadakathan if he doesn't want to sign the contract,\" Mason said.\n\n\"I'm not telling you that. Sign the contract or I'll banish you,\" Izagor told the demon.\n\nKurzadakathan was still sitting on the floor, cross legged. He tilted his head in amusement. \"Will you really? So impatient! I'll sign if that's what you want. I see you've specified a payment of...four morts of energy from the circle. How boring! I can get energy from anyone. Why don't we trade in information? Surely you know that information is far more valuable commodity. Would you like a free sampling?\"\n\nIzagor crossed her arms and tried to look insistent. She didn't know exactly what a 'mort' was, but Mason had said earlier that it was just a unit of magical energy. \"I'm not telling you anything. The contract says four morts, so...so that's what it's going to be.\"\n\n\"Really? Is that what you want?\" Kurzadakathan snapped his fingers and suddenly a pen appeared in his hand. He placed the contract down on the floor and put his pen on the line, but he didn't sign it just yet. He started twirling the pen around his fingers, then suddenly he pulled back his hand but the pen remained in place, spinning in the air. \"That's not what I see in you, though. Your soul is so complex--I see many things in it, things which even you may not know. I can see that this particular contract is of particular, personal, importance to you, not merely some hired work done for gold or favour. But yet I also see something else--your desire is conflicted. What do you really want?\"\n\nNeither Izagor nor Mason said anything, and the demon smiled again. \"Young sorceress, I can see insecurity in you. You don't like your body as it is, so you wish to change it because you think it will be better if you alter yourself into another form. Yet...you have other desires too. You are attracted to someone, and you worry that in changing your form you might lose any chance of him being attracted back to you. Am I reading you right?\"\n\nIt took all of Izagor's effort to keep her face still, and not to glance behind her to see Mason's expression. \"The contract...says...it says you can take some energy from the circle. That is the payment.\"\n\n\"That's what it says, but that's not what you want. No, you don't just want a transformation crystal; you also want information on whether to use it. I could tell you what you want to know--does your acquaintance like you for who you are, or for what you are? Will you be happier using this crystal, or not? Is your body that important to you, or is love?\"\n\nIrritation suddenly flashed across Izagor's mind. Who was this twisted creature from the otherworldly plane to lecture her on how she would live her life? It was patronizing beyond belief for Kurzadakathan to act as if he could understand what she truly wanted better than she herself could. \"I said: sign the contract or I'll banish you and try again with some other demon that doesn't talk so much!\"\n\n\"Deny it if you want, but know that you are only lying to yourself.\" Kurzadakathan shrugged his shoulders. \"So be it. We can do it your way, boss lady.\" He snatched his pen out of the air and scribbled his name on the signature line and slid the contract back out of the summoning circle. He offered his pen to Izagor, but Mason spoke up quickly.\n\n\"Don't take that. Don't even touch it. Just use your own pen.\"\n\nIzagor used the pen she'd written the contract with and signed on her own line.\n\nMason breathed a silent sigh of relief. It seemed that he and Izagor had some serious things to discuss with each other, but only once the demon had held up his end of the deal. \"That should be it. Kurzadakathan will create the crystal and then return to the otherworldly plane. Hand him the contract and we should be done here.\"\n\n\"I must say--this is a very detailed contract. Very efficient, but so detailed. Few sorcerers are so meticulous.\" Still sitting on the floor cross-legged, Kurzadakathan took back the contract from Izagor. \"I had a contract just like this one only a few days ago...or was that a few years? Time is such a mortal concept. But now it's time to hold up my end of the deal. First, my payment...\" The summoning circle flashed with energy as the demon pulled energy from it. \"And then your half.\" Kurzadakathan clasped his hands together and crushed up the contract into a paper ball. When he unfolded it, a pale white crystal tumbled out and bounced onto the floor. \"There you have it. This is what you wanted, isn't it?\"\n\nIzagor saw that the crystal looked just like the one which had transformed her into a human, but before she could relax, Mason drew in a sharp gasp of breath. \"Something's not right,\" he realized, \"the demon should have been banished once the contract is completed.\"\n\nKurzadakathan was still sitting inside the summoning circle. \"No,\" continued the demon, \"actually this crystal is not what you wanted, but it's what you asked for. Or to be more precise, it's what you thought you asked for. You had such a good contract, but you forgot one basic thing. So basic I could hardly even believe it when I first read your contract. Do you want to know what it is? Here, watch me repeat this trick--take a closer look.\" The demon crumpled up the contract and created a second crystal, identical to the first. The summoning circle flashed again. \"Still no clue, you clever sorceress? Pay more attention. Let me show it to you again.\" The scrunched-up ball of paper collapsed into a tiny glowing pin-prick of light, and the summoning circle flashed as Kurzadakathan created a third crystal, appearing out of thin air and landing on the floor.\n\n\"What are you doing? Stop that. The contract said one crystal.\" Izagor was no expert on summoning, but even she could realize that something had gone very wrong. The summoning circle was flashing continuously as Kurzadakathan created more and more crystals, forming a small pile on the floor.\n\nMason felt his skin (his scales) grow cold. An uncontrolled summoning was the sort of thing every sorcerer had to be prepared for, but which they all hoped would never happen. \"No, no, no. Our contract was wrong somehow. Get out of there, Izagor!\" He scrambled to the side of the room, where a crossbow was hanging from the wall. In the event that a summoning went wrong, the weapon could be used to perform an emergency banishment--the crossbow was loaded with a bolt cast from an alloy of telanium and silver. The projectile would have no special effect if fired at humans or other mortals (beyond the standard effect of inflicting high-speed penetrative ballistic trauma), yet even the slightest touch of this metal would instantly banish a being of the otherworld.\n\n\"The contract said one crystal, but the contract never said it could only be done once. Perhaps you should pay more attention to such technicalities in the future. In another life, perhaps.\" Each time a new crystal was created, the summoning circle flicked as four morts of energy was drawn from it--slowly weakening the defensive wards every time. Although originally completely transparent, the half-dome which formed the summoning circle was beginning to grow cloudy as it ran out of power to sustain itself. Now it looked like Kurzadakathan was sitting behind milky glass, creating more and more crystals.\n\nMason's paws were unwieldly as he held the crossbow, and he had to awkwardly balance on his hindlegs. It was hard for him to work his fingers into the trigger mechanism, and even harder for him to properly aim. \"The demon's breaking free! Get out of the circle now!\" When Mason tried to pull back the charging handle, the weapon slipped out of his grip and tumbled to the floor. \"Izzy!\"\n\nSuddenly realizing the danger, Izagor tried to step backwards out of the outer circle, but Kurzadakathan was faster. In a motion that was inhumanly smooth, he twisted to his feet and slammed his clenched fist against the barrier of the summoning circle. The spell shattered with a tremendous rumble, shaking the whole house as a crack appeared in the floor and splitting the summoning circle into two. Mason had been trying to pick up the crossbow, but he dropped it once again as the floor shook. Izagor also stumbled and dropped into a half crouch, but Kurzadakathan stood upright and unshaken.\n\n\"Contract complete,\" snarled the demon. He opened his fist and gestured. A flash of white light flew from palm and sent Izagor flying back across the room. She crashed against the wall and tumbled to the ground, and the world went dark.\n\nOut of complete blackness came an explosion of meaningless colour, swirling around in lines and strange patterns. Izagor's eyes were open and she could perceive shapes and colours, yet somehow she couldn't actually see anything. A huge swatch of light blue colour took up most of her vision, but it took a few long seconds for her to realize that she was staring at the open sky. More objects started to resolve themselves--green and brown lines turned into trees, and a moving mass of grey turned into a drake who was leaning over and shaking her body. \"Oh, no, no, no... Izagor? Izagor, can you hear me? Please, please don't be dead.\"\n\n\"I'm not dead. Are you dead?\" Izagor murmured. She glanced around and realized that she was lying on the forest floor. She could smell the sea breeze again, but strange rumbling noises were coming from somewhere nearby. \"Mason? What? How...?\"\n\nMason let his forehead rest against her shoulder. \"Thank the emperor. I thought you were gone for sure. I think...I think you stopped breathing for a moment when Kurzadakathan hit you with that death spell. It should have stopped your heart instantly.\"\n\n\"Only a fool would try to kill a dragon with magic. We're mortal, but still creatures of magic. It's like trying to drown a fish.\" Izagor glanced down and remember that she wasn't actually a dragon at the moment. A stinging, tingling sensation was running through her whole body from the magic that had tried to kill her, but perhaps some innate part of her still remembered that she was a dragon and not a human. \"Did the summoning go wrong?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Generally, the demon shouldn't be allowed to try and murder the sorcerer. Sorry. I must have forgotten a clause relating to the demonic contract termination, and that allowed Kurzadakathan to break the summoning circle. It's a rookie mistake.\"\n\nIzagor patted Mason's neck. \"It's ok. It might also have been my bad writing. To be honest, I half-expected something like this to happen.\"\n\n\"Regardless of how it happened, I should have... I had a plan even for a failed summoning. There was a plan. I always have a plan for everything...\" Mason shook his head--a failed summoning was highly dangerous, but also very embarrassing for a sorcerer of his experience. \"I had a crossbow made using a telanium alloy which banishes demons on contact. It was supposed to be my backup plan in the unlikely event that a demon breaks free, but these paws are too... I couldn't aim. Then when you got blasted I just...ran. I threw you over my back and ran out here as fast as I could. We're out in the forest, just a short distance from my house.\"\n\n\"We're both alive and uninjured. It could be worse,\" Izagor said, trying to sound optimistic. \"What's that noise?\"\n\nMason turned to stare into the forest where repeated booming noises were coming from; the closest sound Izagor could match it with was stones being smashed against each other. \"Kurzadakathan has, ah, he's broken completely free of the summoning circle. He appears to be in the process of demolishing my house.\" Mason chuckled quietly, but there was little humour in his tone. \"Hmm. At least he's focused on my property and not the nearby town. Once the guild hears about this, I'll probably have my sorcery licence revoked for allowing such a dangerous demon to escape.\"\n\n\"Well we can't have that, can we?\" Izagor got to her feet and brushed herself off. \"So what's the plan now? You always have a plan, right?\"\n\n\"There is no plan.\" Mason shook his head. \"Or at least, it won't be my plan anymore. I'll fly over to the town and contact the local Magician's Guild office. They'll dispatch a hunter-killer team to handle Kurzadakathan.\"\n\n\"Why do we need to rely on them? Why do we just banish that demon ourselves? We can do it.\"\n\nMason looked uneasy, but he didn't immediately refuse this plan. \"Trying to fight a demon is dangerous.\"\n\n\"A bit dangerous, maybe, but you also said you would lose your licence if this heard about it, so it seems to me the solution is we banish that demon before anyone from your Magician's Guild realizes what's happening. Simple enough.\"\n\n\"There's nothing simple about banishing a freed demon. The guild rules are that they will overlook minor demons escaping if the sorcerer acts quickly and banishes them right away, but this is not minor. Kurzadakathan is not some imp or low-level creature; we are talking about a seriously powerful demon--\"\n\n\"Who has tried to kill me once, and failed,\" Izagor pointed out.\n\n\"All the more reason to not give him a second chance.\"\n\n\"Alright, how about this--let's go back to your house and see if we can grab that banishing crossbow you were talking about. If it's too dangerous we'll back off, but at least we can see if there's a chance we handle this situation on our own. We summoned the demon, so we should be the ones who banished it. Does that sound like a good plan to you?\"\n\n\"I don't know...\" Mason said, but this didn't sound like a refusal.\n\n\"Alright, let's do it. We can get some...uh...assessment of the situation. Reconnaissance. Here's the plan! Get the crossbow, banish the demon, save your house. Onwards!\" Izagor started creeping back towards Mason's house, moving sneakily (or at least, trying) from tree to tree. Mason shook his head, but he followed after her regardless.\n\nAs they came to the forest clearing, it quickly became obvious that one part of the plan had already failed--Mason's house was in ruins, having been quickly reduced to rubble by Kurzadakathan. The demon was still in a vaguely humanoid form, although now its whole body was wrapped in fire and it stood more than thrice as tall as a normal human, rising up out of the building like a flaming giant.\n\nHiding behind a tree trunk, Mason and Izagor got to watch as Kurzadakathan punched and kicked the remaining walls of the house with lumbering brutish rage; not content with merely knocking apart the structure, but apparently intent on reducing the whole place to dust. \"There's not much house left to save,\" Izagor muttered.\n\n\"At least he's so focused on demolishing my house that he hasn't noticed us.\" Mason spoke too soon, for right at that instant the demon grabbed something out of the rubble and flung it in their direction.\n\n\"Watch out!\" yelled Izagor. She and Mason both scrambled out of the way as a stony chunk of wall crashed into the bush they'd been hiding behind.\n\nMason darted behind a tree for cover, but when he glanced around he realized that Izagor had run in a different direction. \"Izagor! Let's back off!\" He hurried pulled back his head as another piece of rubble impacted against his tree, shaking it.\n\nIzagor did not back off. \"It's okay, we can do this! Mason, I need you to breathe fire and keep that demon distracted!\"\n\n\"What?! How? I can't breathe fire!\"\n\n\"Are you an ice dragon then? Just breathe something at him!\"\n\n\"I'm not an ice dragon either! I'm human, remember? I don't know how to breathe anything!\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Izagor brushed her hair away from her face as she considered this. \"When this is all over and we've banished that demon, remind me to teach you.\"\n\n\"Banished the...? I thought the plan was to play it safe?\" yelled Mason.\n\n\"Change of plans! Just keep him distracted.\" Izagor leapt out from behind her tree and darted from point to point, quickly sprinting around the forest clearing to try and circle Mason's house.\n\nKurzadakathan was bellowing out barely-coherent curses as he flung bits of rock and rubble at Mason, but it appeared that the demon's focus was entirely on the dragon. \"He's got a good throwing arm,\" Mason muttered to himself. Leaves and branches pelted him from above as the tree took impact after impact, until finally it could take no more and began to topple over slowly. Mason hurriedly sprinted to try and find some new cover; he dodged left and right as Kurzadakathan continued to toss debris in his direction. With a tremendous crash, the falling tree landed on the forest floor.\n\nIzagor had circled around the clearing by now. Kurzadakathan was facing away from her and still busy with Mason, so she sprinted into the remains of Mason's house and searched for the room where they'd done the summoning. \"Come on, come on...\" It was hard to tell rooms apart with most of the house demolished, but backtracking through the path of the demon's destruction led Izagor back to the original point where Kurzadakathan had first been summoned.\n\nFinally she spotted the glint of metal on the floor--she hurriedly pushed away rubble to uncover the crossbow...which was snapped in two pieces. The telanium bolt was nowhere to be seen, and the crossbow itself was an unusable wreck. Izagor dropped the broken weapon. \"So much for that plan...\"\n\nSuddenly she heard Mason yell. \"Izzy!!\"\n\nIt appeared the Mason was having difficulty with holding Kurzadakathan's attention. Izagor hurriedly ducked away as a floor lamp came spinning through the air to crash into where she'd just been standing. She had to vault and climb over the debris as she scrambled to get out of the house, but Kurzadakathan started chasing after her, taking wide steps and making loud roaring noises as he kicked his way through the rubble.\n\n\"This might have been a bad idea...\" Izagor muttered. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Kurzadakathan was almost on top of her. The demon raised two giant fists wrapped in fire and swung them down towards her. But just before the blow connected, Kurzadakathan suddenly stumbled forwards and missed.\n\nMason had come running up from behind the demon, carrying a large tree branch in his jaws with which he had just smacked the back of the demon's knees. The leaves on the tree branch immediately smouldered and began to catch fire on contact with Kurzadakathan's burning body; Mason tossed aside the branch and dashed forward towards Izagor while the demon was still trying to recover. \"This isn't working! Let's leave!\"\n\n\"Good plan.\" Izagor hurriedly climbed onto Mason's back, clutching onto the harness which he was still wearing. The drake leapt up into the air and spread his wings. Flapping as hard as he could, Mason desperately tried to gain altitude and leave the forest clearing. He was focused on flying, but he did spare one brief second to glance behind and see what Kurzadakathan was doing--the demon was angrily chasing after them with both arms raised, but even in its massive form it couldn't catch up to a flying dragon.\n\n\"Uh, Mason...the demon's picking something up...\" Izagor warned. Mason had almost made it over the tree line, where the forest would shield them from anything else Kurzadakathan threw, but suddenly Izagor screamed and pulled on the harness. \"Watch-out-watch-out-watch-out! Tuuuurn!\"\n\nWithout looking back, Mason instantly rolled sharply towards the left. A huge object came flying through the air, only narrowly missing him. Then they were past the treeline and out of Kurzadakathan's sight. The last projectile crashed back onto the ground some distance away, with paperwork appearing to explode out of the impact site. \"I think that's my desk! He threw my desk at me!\" Mason exclaimed. \"Are you alright?\"\n\n\"Are you talking to your desk? How does it talk back?\" asked Izagor.\n\nMason almost laughed aloud. \"I'm not talking to my desk; I'm talking to you, obviously. Are you alright?\"\n\n\"Ah! Right...I just...thought that maybe desk been enchanted with sorcery or something. Like maybe you had a pet demon secretary inside it that does your paperwork? Is that a thing?\"\n\n\"That's not a thing.\"\n\n\"Oh, ok.\" Izagor adjusted her position so that she was riding Mason more comfortably. \"I'm alright--a few new scratches, a few new bruises, but nothing serious. Are you alright?\"\n\n\"I'm not injured. Physically, that is,\" Mason confirmed. \"Mentally I might be slightly traumatized, and I'm now seriously considering a change in careers. I don't think I like sorcery anymore. Let the Magician's Guild handle that demon--I don't care if they suspend my licence.\"\n\nIzagor let a sigh and slumped forward, resting against Mason's neck. \"If that crossbow hadn't been broken, I bet we could have banished that demon. Oh well. Plan failed, but at least we tried...\"\n\n\"We tried,\" Mason agreed. He turned and flew towards the nearby town of Klosk Harbour, but then he changed course and flew down towards where his desk had landed. \"Actually, now that you mention it... I might just have another plan.\"\n\nPushing herself back into a sitting position, Izagor glanced backwards to check if Kurzadakathan was still following them, but from the sound of it the demon had gone back to pulverising Mason's house. \"Oh? You have a plan?\"\n\nMason flared his wings as he came in for landing right next to his desk. The desk was burnt from where Kurzadakathan had held it, and badly dented from the impact with the ground. \"If I remember correctly, my desk should have a backup to my backup...\" He trotted over to the desk and started pulling open drawers. Izagor slid off his back and also helped him search.\n\n\"What are we looking for?\"\n\n\"That crossbow was actually a new replacement I just bought a few months ago. Before that, I had a different weapon--also made from telanium-silver alloy, capable of instantly banishing demons on contact...\"\n\nIzagor found something buried in the dirt, which looked like it might have been attached to the bottom of the desk--a large hammer. \"Is this it?\" The hammer had a plain wooden handle that was about as long as her leg, but the blunt head was made from iridescent metal.\n\nMason stopped his search and nodded. \"Yes. That's it.\"\n\nIzagor clenched her hand around the hammer's handle, wondering how she would get close enough to swing it at the demon. \"I'm all for trying to banish that demon ourselves, but how would this work? This hammer is too heavy to throw, and we can't engage at range like we could with a crossbow. That demon is coated in magical fire, so if I get close I'll end up scorched.\"\n\nMason opened and closed his mouth a few times, debating what to say. Finally he said, \"Do you trust me?\"\n\nIzagor nodded. \"Heck yeah! What's the plan?\"\n\nMason still looked hesitant. \"The safe play would be to go to town and call for a fast-response demon slayer team.\"\n\n\"That would be the safe play. But if that was your only plan you'd have flown us straight to town, not landed here,\" Izagor pointed out.\n\n\"I...do have a new plan,\" Mason admitted. \"It could probably work, but it's dangerous. It's definitely not as safe as running away and calling for help, so I don't really like this new plan. You should talk me out of it and say that we ought to play it safe.\"\n\nIzagor made a few experimental swings of the hammer to get used to its weight. \"I should, but just tell me your new plan anyway.\"\n\nMason told her his new plan.\n\nIzagor smiled. She raised the hammer and let it rest over her shoulder. \"I like this plan.\"\n\nKurzadakathan was having the time of his life. It had been far too long since he had last been granted free roam in the mortal realm, not that time meant the same thing to demons as it did to the fool sorcerers who tried to summon them.\n\nAt the thought of the latest fool who had incorrectly wrote a contract with him, Kurzadakathan felt rage bubbling through the very core of his being--that insolent sorceress, Izagor! Such a pathetic, despicable lifeform! Abusing her contract to break free of the summoning circle had been wonderfully pleasing, and killing her had given him such grand satisfaction as he returned balance between the two realms. Since he was now roaming through the mortal realm, it was only fair that there ought to also be one less sorceress wandering around. Kurzadakathan was now pounding away at the remains of the building which had failed to contain him. He intended to keep going until the entire structure was nothing but dust and ash.\n\nIn some strange twist of fate, that foolish incompetent sorceress had somehow created an immensely strong summoning circle that had almost managed to contain him. Even as he had smashed through the defensive spells, the circle had reversed his power and almost banished him right there and then. He was now in a greatly weakened state--his current body was large and threatening, but it had nothing but brute strength, along with a basic cloak of fire for defence. It was infuriating that he had been unable to kill the two other mortals who had come across him--some random human and a random dragon--but Kurzadakathan was sure that soon enough he would recover enough strength to take a more deadly form. Soon he would march for that miserable human town he could sense nearby, and turn that to ash as well. Soon...\n\nBut not too soon, for first he had to finish destroying this house. Everything had to be destroyed, so as to restore the universe to its chaotic state of primordial perfection.\n\nOut of nowhere, a tree branch dropped out of the sky and struck his head. Kurzadakathan reacted with rage, bending down to slam punches on the insolent branch until it had been reduced to cinders. Then he looked up and saw where the branch had come from--a dragon was rapidly flying away from him, but he disappeared past the treeline before Kurzadakathan could throw something back.\n\nWith infinite patience, Kurzadakathan tried to resume his demolition of the house, but less than a minute later another branch dropped onto his head. This time such an act could not be ignored; Kurzadakathan swatted the branch away and charged towards the dragon. He left the forest clearing, chasing after the dragon even as it turned tail and tried to fly away. The fires that surrounded the demon set the closest trees on fire, and he angrily batted aside any other trees which got in his way.\n\nA human being (or other sentient creature) might have wondered why a dragon would fly so low and so slow instead of climbing high where the demon could not possibly touch it, but Kurzadakathan did not think in such a manner. Close...so close. He was quickly catching up towards the dragon, and Kurzadakathan reached his hands up to grab it out of the sky and crush the life out of it.\n\nJust when he thought he could grab the dragon, the forest vanished and Kurzadakathan found himself running over sand, then suddenly there was seawater around his legs. The ocean hissed and bubbled around his lower limbs, quenching the fires around his lower body, but Kurzadakathan was solely focused on that irritating dragon. The dragon was flying out further to sea as if trying to bait him, but the demon decided that enough was enough. Raising two hands, he channelled magical power and created a huge swath of flame that he flung towards the dragon. The grey-scaled dragon barely managed to dodge this attack, but Kurzadakathan threw another fireball, then another, and then another. The dragon hurriedly kept changing its flight path to dodge, but it could not remain evasive forever.\n\nKurzadakathan was so focused on the dragon that he failed to notice a small figure pop her head up from the ocean, where she had been hiding behind a nearby rock cluster, and raise a long hammer made from metal which glinted.\n\nWithout much ado, Izagor slowly waded through the water until she was right behind Kurzadakathan's legs, which were now all cooled down from the sea water. She raised the banishing hammer and swung it with all her might against the demon's kneecap. Instantly an electric jolt ran down her hands, making her drop the hammer, but the weapon stayed frozen and embedded in Kurzadakathan's body. \"That's for...uh...trying to kill me! Ha!\" she spat.\n\nThe demon let out a high-pitched scream as it began to collapse, imploding towards the point of contact where the telanium-silver alloy had touched it. The flames on its upper body went out, and its limbs started to shrivel and wither even as the demon folded inwards. The hammer's head had vanished, replaced by sphere of blinding light--for one brief instant this brilliance outshone then sun, and then all of a sudden there was darkness and quiet.\n\nKurzadakathan was gone, and Izagor found herself standing in the ocean all alone. All that was left of the hammer was its handle, floating over the sea; the weapon's head had vanished along with the demon it had just banished. Izagor picked up the hammer (which was now just a stick) and stared at it, then she let out a soft laugh. \"Haha...I didn't actually expect that to work.\"\n\nMason landed on the beach as Izagor strolled out of the ocean. He sat down on his haunches. \"You did it!\"\n\n\"We did it,\" Izagor corrected. She sat down on the beach, leaning back against Mason's side. It was almost midday, and the ocean was glinting beautifully in the sun. All of a sudden it was just a warm summer's day. She took a deep breath of the salty air as the sea breeze ruffled her hair. \"First I got to be a human, then I also got to be a sorceress, and now I get to be a demon hunter. This is the adventure that keeps on giving.\"\n\nMason was almost lost for words, but he definitely agreed with this sentiment. \"We just banished a demon! This is one hell of an adventure! It's...it's almost over, though. We've still got one last thing to do.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"To change back, of course.\" Mason nodded back towards the forest, where there was a trail which led back to his house. This small trail was normally marked only by a series of wooden signposts, but Kurzadakathan's rampage through the forest had left a trail of fallen trees. \"Before he broke out of the summoning circle, Kurzadakathan did complete the contract. We've got a whole bunch of transformation crystals to change us back to usual.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. That. Let's go do that, just give me a moment. These clothes are sticking to my skin. What's the point of clothing if it just absorbs water? Why not make clothes that are waterproof?\" Izagor wondered.\n\nMason was no longer surprised when Izagor began to pull of her soaked clothing. \"Don't ask me, I'm not a fashion designer. Should I bother mentioning that wet clothes or not, this is still not one of those situations where nudity is socially acceptable?\"\n\n\"I'm immune to your judging, Mason.\" Izagor kicked off the last of her wet clothing, and she got to her feet. \"Alright, let's go back to your house. We can...let's transform back.\"\n\nMason picked up Izagor's wet clothes (which were actually his wet clothes), but he had to toss them onto his back and balance them between his wings. He led the way back to his home. \"I miss having hands...\"\n\nA drake who was not a drake and a woman who was not a woman sat together in the ruins of a destroyed house. In between them, a small pile of white crystals sat on the floor.\n\n\"Fifteen. Fifteen crystals made by that demon,\" Mason said, after counting them all. \"But we only need one. You take one crystal and activate the spell--that'll turn you back to a dragon. Then I'll take that crystal and activate it a second time to transform myself back into a human.\"\n\nWith far more trepidation then she would have ever imagined, Izagor picked up one of the transformation crystals. The short walk back to Mason's house had given her time to calm down after the adrenaline rush from banishing Kurzadakathan, and now she was feeling indecisive again. \"Alright...\"\n\n\"As per the contract, the activation keyword is morphus.\" Mason nodded calmly. \"Just hold the crystal and say the word when you're ready.\"\n\nIzagor stared at the crystal she was holding, but she didn't say the word just yet. \"So, Mason, what...what are you going to do? After we change back to normal, that is.\"\n\n\"Good question. I don't really have a plan for that. I've been meaning to have my house renovated, but now that it's been completely demolished I'll have to get it rebuilt. I do have the funds for that, fortunately. But I don't think I'll stick with professional sorcery; at the very least I need to take a hiatus from all this demonic stuff for a while. And you, Izagor?\" Mason glanced away, and his neck crest drooped. \"I suppose you'll just...fly off and keep travelling the world.\"\n\n\"I am. The open sky calls, and I miss the feeling of air under my wings. Although...\" Izagor crossed her arms nervously. Her next words were said so softly that Mason wasn't quite sure if he had misheard her. \"Mason, you could...come with me. If you wanted...\"\n\n\"What did you say?\"\n\nIzagor snapped her gaze up. \"I said you could come with me! I wouldn't mind a travel companion.\" She gestured to the pile of transformation crystals. \"Look at all these crystals--think about what we could do with them! After we change back to our normal selves, I could carry you on my back and we could go see the world together. Or we could both be dragons--we could fly wherever we wanted, and I could teach you how to soar. I could take you back to my clan's mountain range so you could see my home and fly over the tallest mountains. Or we could both stay as humans and...and go see all the marvels of your empire! All your buildings and technology and clockwork--I want to ride a train.\"\n\n\"Izzy...\" Mason began to say, but Izagor kept talking. She was babbling now out of nervousness.\n\n\"Unless...unless you don't want to do all that. I just thought that maybe...after everything that's happened, I felt like we had some...a shared experience. Like a connection between us.\"\n\n\"A connection?\"\n\n\"I don't know! We've just had an adventure together, and I thought...it was fun and dangerous and exciting and new. I don't know if you felt that way too, but I...I like you, Mason. It's nice to talk with you. You're interesting with all your human ideals and opinions, and I just thought that maybe you might like me back... But if you don't like me, then I completely understand. I'll just...I'll fly off and we'll never see each other again. And you can go back to your mundane human things, being a sorcerer and all that; if that's what you want. But it's your choice, so let me know your answer. Make it quick and simple--Mason, will you fly with me? Yes or no.\"\n\nMason's neck crest had perked up. \"Izagor, I...\"\n\nIzagor shushed him before he could say anything more. \"Shh, don't...don't say anything yet. Just think about it for a moment. Don't turn me down right away.\" Grabbing the transformation crystal, she spat out the activation word. \"Morphus!\"\n\nThe transformation began to take effect immediately. Magic poured out of the crystal and into her hand, and Izagor could feel her whole body begin to shift and twist. It was the reverse of what had happened to her before--instead of pain, she felt relief as her usual form began to take shape. Scales erupted out of her skin, returning her usual sense of touch and sensation. Hair fell off her head in clumps, vanishing into dust before it touched the ground.\n\nIzagor dropped down into a crouch as her arms and legs shortened, but then her tail extended out of her rear; how she had missed having a tail! She flicked her tail and heard the air swish around her limb. And when her wings stretched out of her back, she couldn't help but gasp in relief as she flapped her wings and felt the air move around her. It hadn't been an actively unpleasant experience to be human, but things just felt more right now that her usual draconic form was returned.\n\nAs the transformation began to wind down, Izagor felt the crystal slip out of her paw. She looked over her whole body, taking in the reassuring sight of things as they ought to be. Her reddish-brown scales were back, as were the light coloured splotches on her side. Izagor reached up and touched her face, feeling her neck crest and her usual pointed snout. Standing up, she realized she was back to walking on four limbs instead of two; she did a quick twirl to test her legs.\n\n\"Wow. Watching a transformation is quite a sight, even though I've done it myself.\" Mason had a shocked expression on his face as he looked over Izagor's new body (or her old body, rather). \"Izagor, you're...a dragon! Haha, of course you are.\"\n\n\"I am.\" Being back in her usual body made her feel more comfortable and confident, but Izagor was still waiting for Mason's answer. Her tail curled around her legs. \"Now, about my offer?\" she asked. Izagor fluttered her wings, then she folded them neatly onto her back and sat back on her haunches. Impulsively she suddenly reversed this action, unfurling her wings to show them off--she had always been proud of her wings, and drakes liked a dragoness with a slender tail and good wings. Then again, Mason was a human who probably wasn't attracted to the conventional draconic ideals of beauty. Honestly, he would probably just reject her...\n\nMason nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nIzagor let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. \"Yes? So that means...\"\n\n\"That means I'll fly with you.\" Mason opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if struggling to find the words he was looking for. \"I'll...I'll fly beside you, or ride on your back, or whatever it takes because for everything you said, I agree. Perhaps I'm insane for thinking this way about a dragon, but Izagor you are incredible. It would be a great pleasure to travel with you.\"\n\nIzagor laughed, then she walked over and hugged Mason. The mechanics of this gesture were different from how Mason was used to it--Izagor pressed her chest against his and flipped her wings forward to wrap halfway around his body, then she let her neck entwine with his. She said nothing, but the level of sudden physical contact said enough about her happiness.\n\nMason tried to return the hug, but he wasn't quite sure where he was supposed to put his wings. The partially-used transformation crystal was still sitting on the floor, out of reach. \"I do need to transform back into a human first.\"\n\nIzagor didn't let go. If anything, she tightened her hold and started gently nuzzling under Mason's chin. \"Do you really? Why don't we just...fly off right now into the blue?\"\n\n\"Because I need to go to town and arrange for my house to be rebuilt, then I need to write to both the Magician's Guild and the Royal Academy of Magic to tell them I'm going on hiatus from my sorcery. Then I'll need to pack all these crystals up, and we should probably search my house for the gold I keep stored here, as well as some clothes for travel and whenever we decide to roam as humans...\"\n\n\"Mm. How responsible...\" Izagor turned around and started rubbing her side against Mason's, savouring all the warm physical contact as she brushed her back against his underbelly. Any drake--even a human who didn't quite have every natural dragon instinct--could understand this particular offer.\n\nIn response Mason unfurled his own wing and grabbed Izagor, holding her still against his side. \"Do tell--are you teasing me on purpose?\" he growled, his voice a soft rumble that made a shudder run down Izagor's back.\n\n\"I thought that was obvious.\" After all the excitement and danger of fighting Kurzadakathan, not all of the adrenaline had faded away. Izagor pulled herself free and took a few steps away, then she bent down her forelegs and straightened her hinds. She waved her tail from left to right, and a quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that Mason's gaze was locked on her rump. Finally she raised her tail invitingly, sweeping it out of the way to give him an enticing look at her underbelly. \"I was just thinking--before you transform back, maybe we should have a little fun since we're the same species. You can test out your equipment as it was meant to be used. Interested?\"\n\n\"Surprisingly enough, I think I am.\" Mason moved forwards and placed a forepaw on Izagor's rear. \"Izzy, you damn dragon. Look what you've done. I'm a human and I'm supposed to be attracted to women, but now you've got me thinking all these deviant things about you.\" Following base instinct, he started licking and sniffing at her slit, taking in her scent and smell.\n\nIzagor let her tail slide between Mason's legs until the tip of her appendage reached his underbelly, where it quickly became obvious that he was becoming just as aroused as she was. She coiled her tail around his the tip of his growing erection, teasing and lightly squeezing it to coax it out further. \"That's funny. I don't recall you making any complaints last night when we were doing this...\"\n\n\"That was different. You were a human woman then, and there was nothing wrong with me getting aroused,\" Mason muttered, in between licks. He didn't sound displeased at all.\n\n\"From a certain point of view--mff!\" Izagor gasped as Mason suddenly slipped his tongue inside her slit, using his oral musculature to explore her insides. \"I said, from...from a certain...point of view, what we're doing now is less deviant than what we did last night, because now we're just two creatures of the same species satisfying each other's needs. Last night that was bestiality since I was a human and you were a dragon. But now we're both dragons, so this is just going to be normal sex.\"\n\nBy now Izagor was feeling quite ready for things to escalate a little further. She wasn't looking for a prolonged, slow courtship--right now what she wanted was a good quick pounding. She uncoiled her tail from around Mason's phallus. The drake took a few steps forward so he could mount her, resting his chest against her back and clutching his forepaws around her for balance. There were a few moments of eager, budding anticipation as his length kept poking her haunches, until finally his tip found her genital slit and he lined himself up.\n\nInstead of pushing himself in, Mason let only the very tip of his erection touch Izagor's slit. \"You know, I see your point, but it depends on whether you consider a person as a certain species based on their original body or their current body. If we take it to be based on original body, then what we're doing now is equally deviant as what we did yesterday since I'm always a human and you're always a dragon. However, that's not the case if we consider personhood based on current body. Yesterday you had a human body when we had sex, so arguably it wasn't deviant if I was attracted to you. It's normal for me to be attracted to other humans.\"\n\n\"Uh, no, I disagree. You just said it yourself--if yesterday you were thinking of me as a human because I had a human body, then that means that you should have been thinking of yourself as a dragon because you had a dragon body. Therefore you already were having deviant thoughts, haha.\" Izagor tried to grind her body backwards, but Mason held her still. \"Nngggh. Are you going to mount me or what? Philosophy is interesting, but it's not what I want right now...\"\n\nMason leaned forwards and gently licked Izagor's neck crest, making her shudder. \"It is really interesting to talk to you,\" he murmured in a soft voice. Then in one smooth motion Mason thrust forward, plunging his phallus into Izagor's slit. Both of them moaned in pleasure at the sudden exquisite sensation of sensitive flesh sliding against flesh. \"Ah, wow. You're warm,\" Mason murmured.\n\nIzagor pushed backwards, delighting in the wonderfully warm organ that was pushed into her and filling her up. \"Yes... Take me.\" From his position on top of her, Mason had far more control over the speed and depth of their coupling--for Izagor, there was something deeply arousing about surrendering control in this manner.\n\nFor his part, Mason was almost shocked by how quickly he'd embraced such simple, animalistic action. He was rutting Izagor with quick, efficient strokes which sent steady pleasure running through his whole body. Without thinking about it he found himself unfurling his wings and wrapping them around the slender, brown-scaled dragon who was crouched beneath him, holding her in a firm embrace. Remembering what Izagor had done to him last night, Mason now imitated those same gestures to excite her draconic body--even as he thrust into her, he started licking and gently nibbling on her neck crest. \"Mine... You're mine,\" he growled, his mind clouded with lust and desire. He wanted her--he wanted not just her body, not just his own pleasure, but her.\n\nIzagor coiled her tail with Mason's, and she rocked her body with his to enhance the motion of his thrusts. She felt herself slipping closer and closer to her release, pushed rapidly towards orgasm by the deeply intimate feeling of another dragon (Mason!) mating with her. Her moans choked off into a drawn-out gasp, then an all-out roar as she hit her first peak. \"Raahhh!\" Wonderful pleasure washed across her body, and her muscles reacted automatically--her tail pulled against Mason's and briefly prevented him from pulling out, even as her slit clenched down on his length repeatedly. Her claws drew grooves in the ground as she pawed at the floor. It felt unbelievable wonderful to have Mason mounting her and to feel his length pressing at sensitive spots deep inside her body. Waves of pleasure swept over her body, and Izagor gasped.\n\nAs her pleasure began to wind down, Izagor felt her body relax slightly, and Mason began to pick up his pace again as he built his own pleasure up towards orgasm. Izagor found herself making incoherent noises now--halfway between a moan, a laugh, and even a purr. \"Haha, hmmrr, nrr.... Yes... Mason, I want you to...to fill me up with your seed. Put an egg inside me...\"\n\nAbruptly and with deliberate force of will, Mason halted his thrusts. With his phallus just barely into Izagor, he forced himself to supress his lust and reengage some intellect. \"Wait, is that actually something which could happen?\"\n\nThe sudden stop in sensation made Izagor snap her eyes open. \"Huh? Did I say something wrong?\"\n\n\"Should we be taking precautions?\" Mason asked. \"Is there actually a chance that of you becoming pregnant if I take this experience to its conclusion?\"\n\n\"Huh! Good question, actually.\" Izagor flapped her wings to get some air moving and to cool them both off--it was a warm summer day, and things were really heating up between them. \"That's another conundrum for us to worry about--theoretically, can we actually somehow produce an egg between the two of us? What happens if you get me gravid then I transform into a human? Will the child be a human, or a dragon? Hm...\"\n\n\"Izagor, I really like you, but I am not quite ready for that level of commitment and responsibility,\" Mason said. \"I can pull out and just...finish myself off with a hand.\"\n\n\"Oh, well that's not a concern right now. You can't put an egg inside right now because I'm not in heat anyway. Don't worry about eggs, I was just trying to...uh...talk sexy. I guess that remark slipped out. Go ahead and shoot inside me.\" Izagor began rocking herself back and forth, encouraging Mason to pick up the motion again. \"You know you want to...\" She began nuzzling and licking the underside of his neck.\n\n\"Whether or not I want to, I'm not going to have much choice if you keep doing that.\" Through it all, Mason's phallus had remained fully rigid and desperate from contact, and now he gladly slid himself back into Izagor's warm, wet depths. He had almost hit his own peak from Izagor orgasming and shuddering against him. No more than half a minute later, the pleasure building up in his underbelly became overwhelming.\n\nMason pushed forward and shoved himself as deep as he could go, pulling Izagor against him as the ridges on his phallus flared out to lock her against him. He moaned out her name, but unlike her, he didn't roar. \"Izzy...\" His snout scrunched up into a grimace and his neck crest rose as far as it could. For a few wonderful seconds it was just warmth and wetness and that snug friction everywhere around his most sensitive organ, then Mason jerked as blinding pleasure wiped away all his conscious thought. Nothing mattered at all except holding Izagor close and feeling his penis twitch inside her, delivering his seed deep inside her. With each twitch he would feel his pleasure spiking, as he poured a fresh spurt of his semen into her slit.\n\nAs his orgasm slowed, and finally ended, Mason opened his eyes. Lost in the trawls of pleasure, he had thrown his wings open and knocked aside what was left of the furniture that still remained inside his summoning room in the demolished ruins of his house. Still holding Izagor, still with his partially erect phallus penetrating inside her, Mason suddenly began to laugh. It started as a giggle, then quickly escalated into a series of chuckles which he couldn't control. \"Mm. Heh. Hehe. Hahaha!\"\n\nIzagor snorted in amusement. \"What's so funny?\"\n\nMason barely managed to control himself. He tried to explain. \"It's just so funny. You, me, haha...us! We're dragons! And we just...fucked!\" Whispering this last word as if it was something he didn't want to say too loud, Mason broke out into even more hysterical laughter. \"Hahaha... Imagine if...just imagine if someone happened to hear the demon as he was demolishing my house...and...and they came to investigate! But instead of a demon, they...they find two dragons sitting in...in the middle of my destroyed house, and the dragons are just fucking each other! Ahahahaha!\" Mason was laughing so hard he tumbled off Izagor's back and landed on the ground. \"Without clothes! We aren't wearing clothes either!\"\n\nThis just made Izagor laugh as well. \"Hehehe. Clothes? You silly human! But you're not quite a human, and you're not quite a dragon either. Silly Mason.\" She curled up against Mason and started licking his snout, using her tongue to clean his scales as dragons did with their friends. Or with their mates.\n\nMason finally managed to control his laughter. The whole situation was completely ridiculous, but it would have been a lie to say that what had just happened might have been the most intense experience he'd ever had. He licked Izagor on her snout just to acknowledge and return her affectionate gesture, then he rolled to his feet and walked over to where Izagor had dropped the transformation crystal.\n\nIzagor sat up and watched him carefully. \"Going back to normal?\" she asked. A grin spread across her muzzle.\n\nMason grinned back at her. \"There's no going back to normal, even if I have my human body again. Not after I've met you, you crazy dragon, you.\" He picked up the transformation crystal, and magical power rushed into his body."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Mason Tolovius, master magician, lowered his notebook and looked over each of the three senior apprentices seated at the circular table in front of him. Each of the three had a different reaction--Alex looked away as if trying to avoid attention, while Samuel and Jane met his gaze with more confidence. Yet the willingness to make eye contact said nothing about how competent a learner really was, and the only way to know that was by debate, discussion, and assessment.\n\n\"I've read your thesis drafts. All good starts, but more work is needed. As you all should be aware if you've done your preparation for today, your theses are all on closely related topics, which is why we are having this group discussion.\" Mason pointed towards one of the apprentices. \"Samuel! In your thesis, you proposed that elementalization is an inherent property of magic itself, not a limitation in a magician's abilities?\"\n\nThe apprentice in question nodded. \"Yes, sir! My thesis presents an elementalization framework based on the studies done by Lord Hammerton involving his experimentation with demonic summoning, as first inspired by older writings by Jularis the Magnificent.\"\n\n\"Very good. Just as you wrote in the summary.\" Mason gestured to another apprentice. \"Jane, provide a possible counterargument.\"\n\nJane hurriedly flipped through her own notes. \"I... It's... Certain experiments following up from the Hammerton Trials have called his results into question. My thesis follows the work of Kimor Azaris in proposing potential explanations involving biological limitations of magicians.\"\n\nSamuel responded quickly. \"Kimor Azaris? Those experiments do show a strong inherent limitation in a magician's versatility, but that doesn't necessarily address the root idea about elementalism. Fundamentally, the concept could be interpreted...\"\n\nAs the students started to discuss their theses, Mason played his part as teacher. He started bouncing their ideas around, making them alternate between questioning each other's proposals and defending their own against criticism. However once the students had gotten their debate properly started, they kept going without Mason needing to prompt them much.\n\nMason smiled faintly to himself. This particular topic was easily one of the most abstract and difficult amongst all the various thesis topics which senior apprentices were allowed to select from, yet these three had chosen to challenge themselves. Magic was rare enough amongst the general population that anyone who showed talent would be trained, yet those who truly aimed for mastery would find the process competitive and trying. Many years back, Mason himself had been a senior apprentice just like these three seated at the table in front of him. And now he was back at the Royal Academy of Magic, not as a student but as a master magician and mentor. A teaching role had never appealed to him while he was younger, but now it felt like something he exceled at.\n\nFinally there was one particular idea which made Mason cut into the apprentices' discussion. \"Hold on a moment. What was that you said?\"\n\nJane paused, unsure if it was good or bad that one of her comments had attracted Mason's scrutiny. \"Professor? I was just saying that the older writings by Jularis the Magnificent might not be considered reliable. The author isn't exactly accredited with the guild, is she?\"\n\n\"The Magician's Guild does not officially recognize the achievements of a vast pool of learned minds, purely because they are dwarfs, elves, mer, centaurian, or indeed, anything other than human. And yet we find reference to the advancements of the other sapient species in so much of what we must study.\" Mason kept his face neutral as he spoke. Officially he was only supposed to be teaching the guild's beliefs, but here his personal ideals threatened to intrude. \"Jularis the Magnificent was a brilliant thinker, and her being a dragon should not distract us from considering her ideas purely on their own merit.\"\n\nSamuel nodded happily. \"Thank you, professor! I was just thinking exactly that as I was writing my thesis.\"\n\n\"But don't give too much credit to her writings as inspiration for your thesis. The Board of Arcane Academics will like your work much more if you only mention Lord Hammerton,\" Mason added. Though his face remained calm, inwardly he felt a tinge of frustration at the general state of the world.\n\nIt was the most basic of concepts--people liked to visualize the world as being divided into groups, and they much preferred people who they saw as belonging to the same group as themselves. It wasn't even a purely human weakness. Mason had visited dwarfs in their desert fortresses, centaurs in their jungle cities, and dragons in their mountainous eyries, and always this same belief prevailed--that one's own species was fundamentally superior to all others--which made cooperation and communal advancement that much slower for all.\n\nAs the students continued their lively debate, there was suddenly a knock on the room door. Mason and the three senior apprentices were currently in a discussion room in the Royal Academy's library, and the walls were enchanted to prevent sound from escaping. Mason raised an eyebrow as another professor peeked in through the window which opened to the corridor. \"Let me see what he wants. You three carry on.\"\n\nMason stood up from the table, allowing the students to keep discussing their ideas. He left the discussion room and stepped out into the corridor. \"Mason! So sorry to interrupt. I see you were helping some apprentices with their theses,\" said the other professor, looking apologetic.\n\nMason smiled warmly. \"Timothy, always a pleasure to speak with you. What do you need? Do you have some more demonic contracts for me to vet?\"\n\n\"Yes please, if you're not too busy. Just some routine contracts, and sorcery is your specialty.\" Timothy smiled widely and held up a sheaf of papers. \"I already owe you a favour, so we might as well make it double. The day you ever decide that you need me to make a golem for you, you'll get the best golem this academy has ever seen.\"\n\nMason chuckled and took the offered paperwork. \"I'd be glad to help you. Making golems is such tough physical work, whereas checking demonic contracts is just reading. I do enjoy the work.\"\n\n\"To each their own. My expertise is in building, not reading,\" Timothy noted. \"How's your wife, by the way? I didn't see either of you the other day, when all the teaching staff went out for dinner together.\"\n\nMason made a non-committal shrug of his shoulders. He strolled over to the other side of the corridor, where large glass windows let him look out over the academy's training field. There wasn't much to see outside, as it was past sundown and snowing heavily. \"Oh, Izagor left the capital last week. She's off visiting relatives and won't be back for a few weeks.\"\n\n\"I see. Somewhere nearby?\" Timothy asked.\n\n\"No, not so close. In the...\" Mason paused as he thought about how to explain it. \"Her family lives in the distant reaches. I doubt you'll have heard of the name of the place. It's very far south-east, quite remote, and outside of the empire, actually. I suppose it's fairly obvious based on her complexion and mannerisms that Izagor wasn't born a Marlander citizen like us.\"\n\nTimothy frowned slightly. \"Is it safe for her to be travelling alone? I know the train lines are usually well protected, but recently there's been all this news about bandits or those... those Akostan rebel groups causing unrest.\"\n\nMason knew that he should have kept a straight face, but couldn't help but chuckle. \"Hah. I would pity any bandits who tried to rob my wife.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. She's a magician too, of course.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Izagor isn't technically guild-accredited as a mage, but she's certainly competent in her own way. I did offer to go with her to visit her family, but my students need my help too, and Izagor was certain of her ability to take care of herself,\" Mason said.\n\nTimothy nodded understandingly. \"There's always a balance to be made. Work is important, but so are friends and family.\" He clapped Mason's shoulder in a friendly manner. At just past three decades of age, Mason was one of the younger professors at the Royal Academy of Magic, whereas Timothy was much older and almost double his age, but the two had quickly become good friends. \"Well, here's hoping she has an uneventful journey! When she gets back, you two really must come over for dinner. Perhaps mid-next week?\"\n\n\"I'd be glad to accept your hospitality.\"\n\n\"Fantastic. Now one last thing--I saw your recommendations for journeyman postings, but I've heard from the arch wizard that guild quotas are being changed...\"\n\nAs the conversation moved on to another topic, Mason's mind still lingered on thoughts of his wife. She had only been gone for a few days, yet already he missed talking and spending time with her. Throughout any normal day at the academy, Mason would have been subconsciously gathering a list of interesting topics or new developments to tell Izagor when he got home and saw her again, just as she would be eager to tell him about what had happened with her day. Now she was gone, and loneliness felt worse than even in the times years ago before they'd met. This wasn't something Mason had been worried about when they'd been discussing Izagor's plans to visit her relatives, but now he was coming to really feel her absence. Izagor's presence had completed him in a way which he hadn't fully comprehended.\n\nSuddenly a loud, repeated ringing of a bell snapped Mason's attention back to the present. \"Bong, bong, bong!\" At first Mason thought it was just the academy's bell tower sounding off another hour passed, but then multiple bells started to sound in unison, forming an overlapping cacophony. \"Bong! Ding! Cling! Dong-ding!\"\n\nThe bells were designed to be heard throughout the academy, and they were clearly audible despite the bell tower being above an entirely different building. Even the heavy snowfall did not supress that loud sound, nor did the quieting enchantments in the library's walls.\n\nMason's fellow professor, Timothy, paused mid-sentence. \"What? That's the general alarm! Don't tell me some student let a demon out of a summoning circle again,\" he muttered.\n\n\"I've reviewed the demonic contracts for all authorized research projects--there shouldn't be any active summoning right now, unless someone's been doing unauthorized work behind my back. Could the alarm be for a fire? I heard that Professor Daltez was testing a new batch of alchemical agents today, preparing for the upcoming term,\" Mason suggested.\n\n\"No, no. I spoke to Daltez's assistant just after lunch, and she said that their experiments were finished in the morning. Even if they had other tests, I don't think they would continue working up till now. It's well past sundown already,\" Timothy replied.\n\nThe Royal Academy of Magic was a place of great power where magicians of all levels of experience came to study and research, and that came with the opportunity for many things to go wrong. Over the past year Mason had heard the general alarm sounded for a variety of reasons including miscast fireballs setting the training field on fire, broken summoning circles with rogue demons (thrice, in separate events), and even a very agitated sphinx getting loose from its cage in the zoology department.\n\nHowever, the timing of the alarm was unusual. Normally any sort of incident would occur during the daylight hours, when the academy was bustling with activity. Instead, it was now past sundown and most classes and research work ought to have stopped. Students and staff alike would mostly have returned to their accommodation, be that in the academy's hostel or residences in the nearby city.\n\nThe three senior apprentices stepped out of the discussion room, their debate now ended by the alarm. \"Sir? What's going on?\" asked Alex.\n\nMason glanced over the apprentices--they were all merely a decade younger than him and barely past the threshold for adulthood, yet now they looked to him as if he had all the answers. \"I don't know. Some sort of incident, I imagine.\"\n\n\"Don't you worry. Probably just a false alarm,\" Timothy said. Turning around sharply, he briskly walked down the corridor. \"Come, Mason! To the operations room. You three apprentices, make yourselves scarce.\"\n\n\"We'll have to continue our discussion on your theses some other day.\" Mason hurriedly re-entered the discussion room and swept all his notes into his satchel bag, which he grabbed along with his winter coat. Just before following after Timothy, he also paused to address the apprentices. \"Pack up your notes quickly and head back to the hostel. If you see anything that looks like a fire, an escaped monster, or an open portal to the otherworldly plane, then stay well away and alert a staff member!\"\n\nThis had a mixed response--Alex and Jane nodded, but Samuel was holding his staff and had an excited glint in his eyes. \"But sir, what if you need our help? If there's a demon loose, we could help you fight it!\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. Get back to the hostel and don't go looking for trouble.\" Mason ran hurriedly after Timothy, catching up to his fellow master magician after a brief sprint.\n\n\"You shouldn't have mentioned demons or monsters to the students. That just makes them want to get involved in the excitement--typical adolescent heroics,\" Timothy told him as they continued walking. \"But it is probably a false alarm. Nothing for us or them to get all excited about.\"\n\n\"Let's hope so,\" Mason agreed. He started pulling on his coat as they walked. Coats, cloaks, and the more classic robes were the standard attire of most magicians, usually emblazoned with the symbol of the Magician's guild on the shoulder, chest, or back. But at this time of year, anyone, magician or not, would be wearing a coat if they planned to go outside in the cold.\n\nThe library was mostly deserted as they moved through the building. Beyond it just being past sundown, it was the middle of winter and between term sessions. Most of the young apprentices weren't even in the academy at the moment, except for the senior apprentices working on their final projects and theses.\n\nWhen Mason and Timothy exited the library's front doors, they were greeted by the sight of a stream of bright magic shooting up from the academy's bell tower. Like a continual lightning bolt which rose from the ground, the magic climbed upwards and then spread out in all directions, smearing into a shimmering, translucent dome which encompassed the dozen buildings making up the Royal Academy of Magic.\n\n\"They've raised the shields!\" Mason noted. He could see his own breath clouding as he exhaled in the winter air, and he pulled his coat tighter around himself. A heavy layer of snow covered everything nearby, dampening all sound except for that cacophonous ring of the alarm bells. Finally the alarm bells finally fell silent, leaving behind a deafening silence.\n\n\"I think this is just the standard procedure now, to raise the shields whenever the alarms sound. We had some policy changes ever since that sphinx broke out and went to terrorize the city. The local governor was quite upset.\" Timothy's voice was controlled, though he no longer looked as calm. The older professor had his hand in the pocket of his coat, holding onto his wand even if he hadn't drawn it out yet. \"It could still be a false alarm,\" he added.\n\n\"Could be,\" Mason agreed.\n\nStepping down the library's front stairs, the ground was covered with a thick layer of snow turning everything white, but the heavy snowfall had been abruptly halted. The academy's shields were a simple but effective security measure--once the spells had been triggered they would prevent anything except light from passing in or out, thus containing any monster, demonic entity, or other possible threat from escaping out of the academy and into the wild, or worse, towards the nearby city.\n\nBut in isolating the academy, the shields had also blocked off the weather, cutting off the wind and leaving the chilly night air feeling totally still. The Royal Academy of Magic was eerily quiet as the two professors walked from building to building, crossing the short distance to the bell tower. Mason could hear the snow crunching beneath their boots as they walked down the road.\n\nLocated near the centre of the Royal Academy of Magic, the bell tower rose up from a large rectangular building--the administrative hall. Just like all the other buildings making up the academy, enchanted lanterns were used to illuminate both the inside and outside of the building. If not for these lanterns, it would have been difficult to see anything at all, for there was no starlight or moonlight tonight. Mason could see snow building up outside, forming layers against the magical shields which would occasionally slide off but would never pass through.\n\nClimbing down a flight of stairs to the administrative hall's basement, they reached the academy's operations room. The room was busy but not packed, and Mason saw about a dozen other staff members. Most of them were cleaners or technicians, and the few who appeared to be actual magicians looked mostly to be just research assistants who had been monitoring overnight projects.\n\nMarking the centre of the operations room was an immense bipyramidal crystal about twice as tall as a person. This glowing, cyan-coloured crystal floated in the air, suspended by metal chains which shined brightly even in the indoor lighting. Crystals like this were located in every academy building, serving as anchor points for the tracking spells which monitored magic throughout the campus.\n\nStanding by the side of this crystal was a golem. Tall, blocky, and made entirely of whitish stone, the golem was covered in glowing etched lines which might have looked like aesthetic decoration to an uneducated observer, but which any magician could instantly tell were magical runes. The power trapped in these runes was what kept the golem animated, and the extreme complexity in the runes was what imbued this golem with the moderate level of intelligence needed to work in the operations room.\n\nAs head of the academy's Department of Animated Construction, Timothy was the master magician who had built many similar golems which roamed the academy as security or brute force labour. He immediately began addressing the golem. \"Golem, what's going on? Report.\"\n\nThe golem had no mouth, but it spoke with a voice that was almost identical to its creator. At other times Mason would find it amusing that it sounded like Timothy was talking to himself, but the situation now was more serious. \"General alarm. Security incident detected. Shield protocol enacted.\"\n\n\"Well I can see that! Golem, elaborate on the root cause of this security incident,\" Timothy continued.\n\nThe golem replied in its flat, impassive voice. \"Sensor array reading out of bounds. Unidentified magical source--\"\n\n\"Golem, shut up,\" snapped a thin woman walking over from the other side of the ops room. She was wearing a magician's coat just like Mason and Timothy, and she gestured to the two professors. \"Fess up! Is one of you two responsible for this?\"\n\nMason bowed his head politely. \"Arch Wizard Lanus, good evening. What exactly is going on? We were just in the library with some apprentices when the alarm bells went off.\"\n\nArch Wizard Lanus was the head of the whole academy, and her competence with magic was only rivalled by her competence with management. Sometimes Mason wondered if Lanus' frizzled hair was the result of her work with lightning magic, or if she just liked it that way. Her current expression was stonier than the golem's. \"Viga lamntrin,\" muttered the arch wizard. With the wave of her hand, a miniature illusionary version of the whole academy appeared out of tiny air, fitting neatly on her palm.\n\n\"Germina lox academy.\" In a smooth motion, Lanus drew her wand from her coat and tossed it towards the centre of the room. The wand shot towards the tracking crystal with unnatural speed, weaving between furniture and staff members. It abruptly stopped just before it would have contacted the massive gemstone's facets, and a burst of magic leapt from the crystal and into the length of enchanted wood. The wand then shot away again, returning towards Lanus' outstretched hand.\n\nWith an impatient gesture, the arch wizard combined the two spells together, adding a series of diagrams over the miniature model of the academy. \"Just a few minutes ago, one of the building sensor crystals detected some sort of magical presence in an out-of-bounds area. On the rooftop of that building here.\"\n\nMason looked closer at the miniature. \"That's... the Department of Sorcery building.\"\n\n\"Indeed! Mason, that's your home department. Please tell me you people haven't let a demon loose again.\" Lanus passed the miniature model of the academy to Mason, tossing the magical construct like a ball.\n\nWhereas many magicians liked to use wands or staffs, Mason was a purist who used only his hands to direct his power. He clenched and unclenched his fists to shake off the winter cold, then he spun the miniature model around to examine it closely. \"We shouldn't have any active projects running overnight. Hmm. Yes, it looks like there was a magical presence detected on the roof, but none of the summoning circles inside the building seem to have been breached.\"\n\n\"Is it possible for a demon to have broken out of a summoning circle in such a way that the alarm enchantments aren't set off? Aren't our defences supposed to be better than that?\" Lanus asked.\n\n\"It's possible, yes, but very unusual. Our summoning circles are top-of-the-line. No, this isn't really what we'd expect to see if a demon escaped, especially a powerful one.\" Mason rotated the model and modified the spell so that only the one building was present. \"Do we have any other abnormalities detected after the first one?\"\n\n\"No. I've been bouncing searching spells of the shields, but there's no sign of anything out of the ordinary. The sensors on all the other buildings also report nothing. If there's a demon or monster that got loose from inside the sorcery department, it must have come to the roof, then fled back inside after tripping the spells.\"\n\nMason was quiet for a moment as he pondered the possibilities. \"Looking at the data we have, I'd say the most likely explanation is a false alarm. Maybe snow buildup from the blizzard is messing up one of the boundary sensors.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? And what if reality doesn't follow the 'most likely explanation'? What if there really is a powerful demon roaming around inside the Department of Sorcery?\" Lanus countered.\n\nMason closed his fist, dispelling the magical model of the academy. \"Then we go in and search the place. I'm a sorcerer, and this is sorcery. If a demon has really broken out, it's my job to handle the banishment.\"\n\nLanus clapped her hands, applauding in the especially encouraging way she usually reserved for young magicians first learning to use their power. \"Splendid suggestion! I was about to order you two to do exactly that, but it's much better when you volunteer.\"\n\n\"Wait, me too? I'm not a sorcerer. Neither demon summoning nor banishing is my field,\" Timothy said, sounding reluctant.\n\n\"You're still a master magician. You can handle it.\" Moving to the side of the room, Lanus picked up a short sword out of a collection of weapons laid out on a table. \"Do you both have telanium-silver on you?\" She unsheathed the sword to check its blade, then attached it to her belt.\n\nMason nodded. As any magician knew, telanium-silver was a special alloy with a variety of uses related to magic--most notably, contact with the metal would instantly banish demonic entities, sending them back to the otherworld plane from which they originated from. And as one of the academy's master sorcerers, Mason had many a dramatic experience with junior sorcerers not quite making their summoning circles up to specification. Reaching into his satchel bag, Mason drew out a telescopic baton made from telanium-silver and flicked it open.\n\nTimothy took out his own wand, which was a different design from Lanus' and was made of telanium-silver alloy instead of enchanted wood. \"Is that... Is this dangerous? This is just a false alarm, right? There isn't really a powerful demon in there, right?\"\n\nMason made a few waves with his baton, getting used to the solid weight of the weapon. \"Don't worry. It's probably nothing to worry about, and there's probably nothing unusual there at all,\" he said, and he even believed it himself."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The Department of Sorcery had stone golems surrounding every entrance, barricading the building with their blocky bodies. Besides the academy's security force, Mason also found the three students he'd been having a discussion with earlier. \"I told you three to return to the hostel!\"\n\n\"Yes sir, but you also told us to report if we found anything abnormal, and all the security golems are clustering here!\" replied Samuel, gesturing to the building with his staff.\n\n\"Students of yours?\" Lanus asked.\n\n\"Senior apprentices who were working on their theses,\" Mason explained.\n\n\"I see. You three wait outside while we search the building.\" Lanus said to the students. She then turned to speak with one of the other staff members who had followed them over. \"If we're not back out here in half an hour, contact the Magician's Guild and have them dispatch a response team.\"\n\nLanus strode forward into the Department of Sorcery, and golems, staff, and students alike stepped aside to let the arch wizard pass. Mason followed after her, along with a rather more hesitant Timothy, whose gaze lingered on the golems as if wishing that his creations could accompany them in. \"Why don't we just send in the golems instead of risking our own skins?\" he suggested.\n\n\"Because golems can be commandeered. If there is an escaped demon, we are not running the chance that it can acquire a few golem minions,\" Arch Wizard Lanus replied.\n\n\"What? No... Golems are hard to reprogram, even for master magicians and especially for some demon! They have lots of security layers written into their runes,\" Timothy said, but he didn't press the matter further.\n\nMason tried to reassure his colleague. \"It's probably a false alarm. There's probably nothing at all here.\"\n\n\"I will believe that when we've finished searching this building. Let's check the summoning circles first,\" Lanus ordered.\n\nThe Department of Sorcery building was one of the oldest buildings in the Royal Academy of Magic, and it's architecture lacked some of the flair which came with more modern designs--tall, pointy wizard's towers were in fashion, but this building was just a large, pragmatic, two-storied brick cuboid covered in white and black paint tones.\n\nEntering the building, Mason turned aside and spun a series of wall mounted knobs which would control the internal lighting. Small enclosed oil lamps hung from the ceiling, all fuelled by a central pipeline. By turning the knobs, Mason increased the flow of oil until the lamps were casting a steady illumination to light up the corridors. He kicked some snow off his boots, though he kept his winter coat on. This lighting system could also provide heat, but the air was still very chilly because unlike the library and the bell tower, this building hadn't been occupied so late at night.\n\nThe corridors were easily familiar to him. Mason was one of the few master sorcerers working in the academy, and this was the Department of Sorcery after all. During term time, he would spend many hours every day teaching and training students in these very classrooms. Leading the way forwards, he began the search.\n\nOpening the first classroom, Mason looked around and raised his hand. Tendrils of magical power flowed down his arm and into his palm as he murmured a spell. \"Germina lox!\" Light flashed from his hand, along with an invisible pulse of magic. The searching spell bounced around the walls of the darkened classroom, but there was nothing to be found. \"Nothing here.\"\n\nAs they moved through the first level, each of the three master magicians would cast a searching spell to check every room they passed by. One by one they checked all the classrooms, but each held nothing but chairs, tables, document cabinets, and other uninteresting furniture.\n\nIt was a different matter when they reached the summoning circle rooms. There were twelve separate rooms containing plenty of open space, and right in the middle of each room was a large summoning circle for magicians to use for sorcery.\n\nEach summoning circle resembled a series of concentric rings on the ground, with each ring containing dozens of intricate runes to store and focus magical energy. These were the cornerstones of sorcery, through which demons could be summoned--be that by students summoning basic entities to learn the craft, or by more experienced sorcerers working on projects which required more powerful demons bound with contracts.\n\nA searching spell would be pointless because of how much magical power was already contained in the summoning circles. Out of the twelve summoning circles, nine were inactive and dark, whereas the remaining three were powered up and had defensive enchantments active.\n\nMason grabbed a clipboard which hung from the wall and flipped through the documentation for the summoning circles. Then he began meticulously inspecting each individual circle, looking for any damage or defect in the circular, runic enchantments. First he inspected the inactive circles, but they were cold and quiet as expected. If something had escaped from the otherworldly plane, it would have been through the active circles instead.\n\nEach of the active circles was protected by an opaque dome of magic rising up from the runes on the ground, resembling swirling dark clouds of smoke which formed a flat barrier. These were a clear indication of the security enchantments which prevented anything unwanted from escaping the otherworldly plane--they were rather similar to those shielding enchantments which had now put the whole academy on lockdown, albeit at a different scale entirely.\n\nMason placed his hand on the dome of the first active circle and murmured a spell to turn the dome clear, but this merely revealed that the summoning circle was empty. \"Venatare. No, it's empty.\"\n\nThe second active circle was also empty when he checked it. However, Mason felt a distinct tingle when he touched the last circle--there was something inside, even if he couldn't yet see into the summoning circle--and that made him hesitate.\n\nTimothy was right behind him, holding onto his wand with a tight grip. \"What's wrong? Is... is something wrong?\" asked the older professor.\n\nMason shrugged casually. \"There's something in here. Venatare!\"\n\nThe black swirling smoke which represented the summoning circle's security enchantments faded away and the circle instantly lost its opacity, revealing a small, twisted creature inside.\n\n\"Ahh!\" Timothy exclaimed, jumping backwards in surprise.\n\nUnlike his colleague, Mason was undisturbed. He peered closer at the circle, looking in at the demonic entity--it resembled a ball of wriggling tentacles which squirmed and trembled unnaturally, moving quickly around the inner limits of the summoning circle. \"It's just an imp. Harmless.\"\n\n\"I know, I know. I was just startled. This whole situation is giving me the creeps,\" Timothy replied.\n\nMason stared at the imp, knowing that the summoning circle's security enchantments were still effective even if they'd gone invisible. Imps were the most common sort of demonic entity, and they were harmless except in extreme numbers. They could be considered the rats of the otherworld plane, and were generally used either as practice summoning by junior apprentices, or as a minor source of demonic magic for experiments. Whichever the case had been, there was nothing unusual about finding an imp in a summoning circle.\n\nCrouching down, Mason placed his palm on the edge of the summoning circle. \"Exaliant mosi nox,\" he murmured, and the circle's runes all glowed as he charged it with a small burst of magical power. The imp vanished in a flash of light, banished from the summoning circle at Mason's command. The circle went dark again as Mason stood up. \"No. Nothing here. All summoning circles are intact and undamaged.\"\n\nLanus was one step behind him, double-checking every circle with her own magic. She swung the short sword she was holding, and the blade was forcefully repelled by the summoning circle's boundary spells. \"So no escaped demons then,\" concluded the arch wizard.\n\nTimothy visibly relaxed on hearing this statement. \"Oh, marvellous! Marvellous. What a relief. There's nothing to be worried about, then. It was just a false alarm.\" He broke into a relieved smile, but the other two master magicians remained more stoic.\n\n\"Not until we've checked the whole building,\" Lanus said.\n\n\"Let's check the upper level then,\" Mason said. He led them towards the stairwell, though he increasingly suspected that it was definitely a false alarm after all.\n\nWhereas the first level had held classrooms and summoning circles, the second level of the building was filled by more classrooms as well as staff offices. There was a large open area filled by cubicle desks, with individual private offices running down the sides.\n\n\"Germina lox.\" Raising his hand, Mason threw a searching spell across all the cubicles. Echoes of magical power bounced back to him from numerous things--spell tomes, minor enchanted objects, even the miniscule tinge of living energy from a potted plant, but there was nothing more than that. Certainly not the much larger trace of magic associated with a demon or another magician. \"Nothing,\" he declared.\n\n\"Spread out. Check all the offices. Open the locks if you have to,\" Lanus ordered.\n\nMason went to the far end of the open area, taking the offices on the opposing side while his two fellow master magicians worked on the closer offices. In succession, Mason opened each office door and used a searching spell on each room. When he came across a door which was locked, it took him about half a minute of using a breaching spell to pick the lock. The locks were simple mechanical devices easily bypassed by magic, but many also had security enchantments which would detect his forced entry and send an alert to the academy's operations room. But the staff there would know that they were checking the building already, of course, and know not to be concerned.\n\nAlready Mason knew what he would find--nothing. Summoning circles were how sorcerers interacted with the otherworldly plane, and the department's summoning circles being undamaged meant that there was no escaped demon. Even if somehow a demonic entity or some monstrous beast had genuinely been detected by that alert earlier, it wouldn't have picked a lock to hide itself in an office. Demons were otherworldly creatures--if they escaped, they would not steal or hide away, but go on deadly, destructive rampages. Nevertheless it paid to be sure, so he continued checking, as did the other two magicians.\n\nHalfway through checking the offices, there came a door which was a bit more rigorously locked than the others. Instead of using that same lock-picking spell as before, Mason switched his baton from one hand to the other, and then he reached into his coat and took out a key. This wasn't just any office, this was his office.\n\nOn opening the door, Mason was greeted by a familiar sight. Inside this darkened room, the furniture, the plaques on the walls, even the stacks of paperwork covering his desk--all of it was familiar. When not teaching classes or tutoring students, Mason spent much of his work time in this office, reviewing demonic contracts created by students or other sorcerers.\n\nTendrils of wispy, glowing power surrounded his arm as Mason prepared to use his searching spell once again. \"Germina lox.\" Even as he spoke the words, Mason immediately visualized exactly what he would sense. There would be minor echoes of power from all the various magical objects he kept here--including the bookshelf filled with spell tomes, a small amulet in his drawer, and the half dozen enchanted crystals he kept in a safe under his desk.\n\nInstead his searching spell gave a very different response. His office was faintly lit only by light from the corridor, but somewhere in that darkness was a clear source of active magic which reflected back his spell. As echoes continued bouncing back, Mason deduced the location of this magic to be something approximately human-sized, hiding behind his paperwork-covered desk.\n\nMason remained motionless for a few seconds as he pondered this unexpected development. Then he used his foot to push the office door shut, making sure he was quiet enough that he wouldn't alert the two other master magicians searching outside. With his baton held ready and magic still wreathing his fingers, Mason reached over to the room's light controls and spun the knob mounted in the wall. Initially the ceiling lights had been incredibly dim, with tiny pilot flames barely visible inside the oil lamps, but they flared to life as Mason spun the control knob and increased the oil flow.\n\nThis new illumination revealed an odd sight. Sitting behind Mason's desk was a dragon, with scales of reddish-brown similar in colour to the oak which made up the desk. The dragon had been resting her head on the table, though she jerked upright and squinted as the lights brightened.\n\nDragon and sorcerer stared at each other, and for a movement neither spoke. The dragon was the one who finally broke the silence. \"Hi. So... I've got some explaining to do.\"\n\nMason let the magic dissipate from his hand, then he collapsed his baton and slipped it back into his satchel bag. \"Mm. I suppose you do,\" he said to Izagor, his wife."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Izagor shivered slightly as she stood up on all fours. Though she could breathe fire, that had been no help against the winter blizzard she'd just flown through.\n\nBut when Mason had come through the door, dressed in the elegant coat of a magician and with magical power at his very fingertips, that sight of him had warmed her soul and her body in a way which nothing else had over the past week or so. Her crest fin perked up, and she shuddered in a way which had nothing to do with the cold.\n\n\"What are you doing back here? Shouldn't you be halfway across the empire by now?\" Mason asked.\n\nBefore Mason could say anything else, Izagor bounded over the desk and charged him. A dragon was proportioned very differently than a human--quadrupedal not bipedal, longer yet skinnier too, with wings and tail and more--but overall not too different in size. Izagor pressed her head against Mason's chest, delighting in his very presence. She'd missed his voice, his calm words, his intelligence, the touch of his hands, and just everything about him.\n\n\"Mason... mmrrr...\" A deep, rumbling sound of pleasure found its way out of her chest, sounding rather like a deeper version of a cat's purr. Sweeping a wing open, Izagor tried to hug Mason. Though she sat back on her haunches, this was still a bit of an awkward motion, but she hardly cared.\n\nIzagor could feel Mason's hands against her scales as he returned her hug. He made a confused, slightly amused noise. \"Hah. Ok! Yes, Izzy, I missed you too. But could you please explain what you're doing in my office? What happened to visiting your family?\" Mason pulled away slightly, and he gestured over her body. \"And why are you like that?\"\n\nShuffling her wings on her back, Izagor grinned. She straightened her forelegs and curled her neck into an elegant S. \"Oh, you don't like me when I look like this?\"\n\n\"You know I do, but that isn't the concern here.\" Mason walked over and pulled his satchel bag off his shoulder, dropping it into his office chair. \"I've told you before--you have to enter the academy on foot, and as a human. We have sensors, and you set off the magical detectors on the roof by flying here! The arch wizard thought there was an escaped demon or something when the alarms went off.\"\n\nIzagor nodded her head, and her crest fin drooped apologetically. \"Sorry. I wouldn't have flown in if I had a choice, but... there's a problem.\"\n\n\"What? Did you run out of transformation crystals?\" Mason bent down behind his desk. With quick, well-practiced movements he spun the tumbler of the safe until the door swung open. Then from within the safe he took out a large white crystal about the size of his palm, wrapped in a layer of cloth. \"Here.\"\n\n\"No!\" Izagor recoiled slightly as Mason extended the crystal to her. \"I can't. Or I shouldn't.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Mason asked, his brow furrowing in confusion.\n\n\"It's... complicated. Very complicated.\" The small white crystal felt like it was drawing in Izagor's gaze, but she kept her eyes locked on Mason. That crystal was a special artefact created by a demon under one of Mason's sorcery contracts, and it was capable of performing a truly remarkable feat. Contained within that gemstone's facets was a huge dose of magical power, constrained into an impossibly complex spell which could transform a person's very form--from dragon to human, or human to dragon.\n\nFor so many years the two of them had been together--journeying through the human realms, or exploring the world by wing--getting to know each other as friends, lovers, and more. Though it had been unusual at first, Izagor now felt like she knew her human form just as well as she knew her natural form. But now she was scared to do that transformation she had done so many times before. \"We... we really need to talk. There's a problem.\"\n\nMason nodded, accepting this without question. \"How urgent is this? Lanus and Timothy are searching the other offices and I need to lead them away. I'm not sure how they'll react if they discover you're actually a dragon. It probably won't end well.\"\n\n\"The problem isn't urgent. Actually it is urgent, but not that urgent. Sorry for causing trouble with the alarm,\" Izagor replied.\n\n\"Ok, don't worry. Stay here and keep quiet. I'll be back after I've persuaded them that it was just a false alarm.\" Mason held Izagor's chin with his hand, and she tilted her head to lean into his touch. She knew how Mason thought--his mind worked in a logical, goal orientated manner, and he always seemed able to come up with a plan for any problem or situation.\n\nWith one final glance at her, Mason turned to leave. Without a further word he shut off the lights, unlocked the door, and then he left--going to navigate the infinitely complex world of human interaction and society. What a wonderful world it was, but neither dragon clans nor human societies trusted each other, and so their races almost always stayed apart.\n\nIzagor padded quietly over to the door and pressed her ear against the wood to listen. Outside, she could hear Mason speaking with his colleagues.\n\nGiven Mason's job as a master sorcery and teacher, he and Izagor lived in an apartment over in the academy's hostel which was slightly larger than the rooms used by apprentices. Through the course of living here over the past few years, Izagor had even gotten to meet a few of Mason's students or fellow master magicians. Of course, these people didn't know she was a dragon. They just knew her as Mason's socially inept wife--a personality trait which they would unfailingly attribute to her being a foreigner (because her features were just ever so slightly different from theirs). Izagor never ceased to find it amusing how humans never suspected she was actually a dragon, no matter how many social gaffes she made. Even master magicians never seemed to consider the limits of magical power, and how it could literally transform someone.\n\n\"Ah, there you are!\" came a woman's voice, which Izagor guessed belonged to the arch wizard. Izagor had previously met Arch Wizard Lanus, and she rather liked the woman. Despite being human, Mason's boss exhibited an immense level of competence, along with an arrogant, total self-confidence which Izagor more commonly associated with elder dragons (and certain cats). \"Did you find something in there?\"\n\n\"No. This is my office and I just got a bit side-tracked. Did you two find anything?\" Mason said, his voice sounding muffled through the door.\n\n\"Nothing. Though we still have a few more offices to search.\"\n\n\"Very well. I'll check the roof too, but it does look like a false alarm.\"\n\nIzagor felt her crest fin perking up in amusement. It had taken her so long to begin to understand the countless subtleties of human communication, and even after a decade spent frolicking through the human realms, she was always learning new nuances about etiquette or behaviour. But Mason was the one human she could really understand, and she could hear the slight discomfort in his vocal tone--it was subtle, but Izagor could tell that Mason was worried about her presence here. He didn't understand why she had cancelled her trip south to visit her family, and he didn't understand why she had come back to the academy in her natural form instead of transforming to human. But he waited patiently and without demand, knowing that she would explain when the time came.\n\nMoving away from the door, Izagor trotted over to go sit behind Mason's desk again. She sniffed longingly at his satchel, catching that faint scent of her lover, and then settled down to wait for his return."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"Bong!\" Around a quarter of an hour later, a single chime emanated from the academy's bell tower. Pushing herself upright, Izagor turned to stare out the window. Mason's office window was facing the centre of the Royal Academy of Magic, so the bell tower was just in view. As Izagor watched, those arcing bolts of magic which had been shooting from the top of the bell tower dissipated into darkness, as the academy's defensive shields shut down.\n\nA thick flurry of snow abruptly dropped from where the shields had been holding it up in a layer, blanketing down all across the academy grounds. The window shuddered from the gust of wind created by this sudden motion, and Izagor leaned her head away from the glass. When she looked again, the blizzard had resumed and innumerable snowflakes were spiralling down from the sky above.\n\nRight about at that moment, the office door clicked unlocked and Mason entered. \"Everything is settled,\" he announced, after closing the door behind him. \"We finished up our search of the building and found nothing, so the arch wizard agreed that it was just a false alarm. By the way, you left footprints (pawprints?) on the roof where you landed. I had to sweep those away before Timothy or Lanus noticed.\"\n\nIzagor nodded her head slowly. \"So they don't suspect that I'm here?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Mason pulled off his heavy winter coat and hung it on a hook behind the closed office door. \"Brr, it's cold.\" He spun up the knob controlling the ceiling oil lamps, filling the room with more light and heat. Mason walked over to the window and drew the curtains, then he sat down in his office chair and stared at Izagor. \"So... explain? Why are you back here, why are you not visiting your family, and why can't you change to human form?\"\n\n\"Eehhh...\" Izagor made a long, uncertain noise, and she shifted her weight between her paws. She had been anticipating this moment through the past few days as she'd been flying back, yet that did nothing to abate her nervousness. \"Do you remember last week, the last thing we did together before I flew off?\"\n\nMason nodded. \"We had a nice breakfast together, then said goodbye. You flew off to go visit your family and I stayed here to keep teaching.\"\n\n\"No, no, I mean before that--in the morning after waking up?\" Izagor said. \"Because...um... Remember how I was in heat for the week before that, but then I said that my heat was over, so it was okay if we had a bit of fun together before I left? Eh... apparently I don't know my body as well as I thought I did.\"\n\nIt took a few seconds for Mason to process this information. When he did, his eyes went wide. \"You mean that...? You and I, we... we actually...?\"\n\nIzagor's tail tip flicked from side to side. \"Possibly? Not that I've ever had the experience of being gravid before, but... I think I might be gravid.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Mason asked.\n\n\"I think so. Every year my heat cycle follows a regular pattern where it gets more intense over the week before fading back to normal, but this time it was different. I thought my heat had ended that morning before I flew off--the day that we mated--but then the next day I was getting all flushed and bothered again.\" Izagor flapped her wings, moving the air around her. Even though the oil lamps weren't turned to their highest setting, it increasingly felt like the room was too warm as a result of her heightened body temperature. \"So we might have an egg or two on the way.\"\n\nLeaning back in his chair, Mason ran his fingers through his hair. A series of emotions swept across his face--surprise, joy, curiosity, anxiousness, and more. \"Wow. Wow! I didn't think that was possible. I thought that since you're a dragon and I'm a human, this sort of thing shouldn't be possible.\"\n\n\"Why not? The transformation spell is real. You changed into a dragon and gave me a good hard pounding that day,\" Izagor replied, grinning slyly.\n\n\"It's more complex than that.\" Mason snatched up the transformation crystal from the table and gestured with it excitedly. \"These crystals transform us, but they only affect the body. They can make a physical change, but there's an inner component to a person--the magic, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it. I was born a human, so a part of me remains human even if I take a draconic body. The same is true with you, even when you change into a woman.\"\n\n\"And yet we always knew that something like this might happen, which is why we took precautions whenever I was in heat, or whenever we were both humans,\" Izagor countered.\n\n\"That's true. Clearly it must be possible if it's happened.\" Mason's voice trailed off, and he carefully put the crystal back down on the table. He slumped back into his chair again. \"What are we going to do?\" he asked hesitantly.\n\n\"I'd hoped you would have a plan and would tell me,\" Izagor replied. \"But I've been thinking about this and I see several options.\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" Mason said.\n\n\"Option one is we just go back to the way things were. There are certain herbs which supress heat and would stop an egg from developing. The academy's botany department here would probably have them, and that would mean I wouldn't need to lay an egg.\" Izagor couldn't meet Mason's gaze as she said this. Jumping to her feet, she began pacing around his office.\n\n\"Option two is similar. No need for any herbs or medicine, we just smash the egg after I lay it. Back when I was growing up among my clan, that sort of thing did happen, usually because females got careless while in heat. So we could just smash our egg on a rock and throw it away. We wouldn't need to build a nest and keep it warm, or eventually watch the egg hatch. And we... we wouldn't need to raise a little hatchling--a tiny version of us, flapping his wings or chasing her own tail. Scampering about and... and waking us up in the middle of the night, crying loudly for food and love... None of that.\"\n\nCrossing his arms, Mason leaned back in his chair. \"Is that what you want?\" he asked quietly.\n\nIzagor was also quiet for a long moment, then she finally stopped pacing and met Mason's gaze. \"No. I don't want to smash the egg. Option three is we keep the egg (or eggs), and we keep all the responsibilities that come with it. I don't know if I'm ready for those responsibilities, but I can definitely tell you I don't think I could bring myself to smash an egg--our own egg.\"\n\nMason nodded, his face completely serious. \"Ok, I agree with that. So we're going to be parents then.\" He said it in such a calm, obvious manner that contrasted sharply with the panicked emotions Izagor was feeling.\n\nIzagor drew a sharp breath, and she bounced up and down on her forepaws nervously. \"Ohh! It's so serious when you say it like that! Am we ready for all that adulthood? What if we mess something up? What if something goes wrong when I lay the egg? What if it ends up having a cracked shell, or the hatchling has a defect when it hatches and it dies? Will it even be a hatchling? That's why I'm worried about transforming! What happens if I transform to a human now? Will I still be gravid? Humans don't lay eggs, do they? I remember we visited that hospital once and there were babies, but no eggs. Uggh, that's so weeeird!\"\n\nMason chuckled, and Izagor found herself laughing along. \"Haha, relax. No, humans don't lay eggs. I'm not exactly sure what the transformation spell would do to you, but we don't need to find out. Honestly, I'm not too worried about the biology. The transformation spell works physically, which means that our child should just be a normal dragon since we were both dragons during the conception. Hybridization isn't a thing...probably?\"\n\nIzagor began pacing again. \"I don't know! I know how dragons reproduce, but you aren't a dragon, yet you changed yourself into a dragon enough that it works too? I love you, but I don't know what to do...\" Pausing mid-stride, Izagor turned to face Mason. \"You're going to have to mount me again, by the way, if we're keeping this egg.\"\n\nMason raised an eyebrow, a uniquely human gesture that Izagor had never managed to pull off properly. \"What?\"\n\n\"Sex. You need to sex me. A drake's seed helps a dragoness to form the yolk and shell of their egg.\" Izagor used the tip of her tail to point towards the whitish transformation crystal sitting on Mason's desk, then she turned around and raised her rump towards him. \"Transform and let's get to it.\"\n\n\"Is that actually a thing, or are you just making that up because you're feeling horny?\" Mason replied.\n\n\"Hmmmr... I'm not joking. That's what my clan elders told me back when they explained to me how things worked. Mates have to mate if they want eggs.\" Izagor trotted over to Mason and put a paw on his crotch possessively. \"By the sky spirits, I've missed you...\"\n\nStill sitting his chair, Mason chuckled and casually began undoing the buttons of his shirt. \"I've missed you too. My life is so lonely without you here, even when I'm surrounded by my colleagues and students.\" Leaning over, he gently kissed Izagor on her snout, and the dragoness' crest fin perked all the way up.\n\n\"Ohhhhh, yes,\" Izagor hummed. She returned the gesture by licking Mason's face. Kissing was a much easier practice when they were both human or both dragon, because otherwise someone's tongue would be much longer than the other's, yet at this point neither of them really cared.\n\nEven after this short, week-and-a-half long period of not seeing each other, Izagor felt like she was desperate for intimacy. Her heat was making it worse--as her body ran through the process of making an egg, her natural instincts told her to seek out her mate and partner. And yet knowing why she had such instincts did nothing to dampen her emotions. Izagor climbed over Mason even as he was sitting in his chair, and she pressed herself against his still-clothed body. \"I want you--\"\n\nSuddenly there was a sharp knock on the office door, and both sorcerer and dragon froze up. \"Damn it. Who's that now?\" Mason muttered quietly. He hurriedly leapt to his feet and buttoned his shirt up again. \"Hide, hide.\"\n\nIzagor looked from side to side, wondering what to do. She could have jumped out the window, but there was a blizzard going on and she wasn't that committed to keeping her secret. Instead she settled for hurriedly scrambling under Mason's desk and out of sight from the doorway. She had to tuck in her wings tight and coil her tail around her paws to fit, but she made it.\n\nFrom her place under the desk, Izagor heard Mason stand up to go unlock the door. \"Oh, Arch Wizard Lanus! Hello. What are you doing here?\" he asked.\n\n\"I could ask you the same thing. It's the off-term season and you're still doing work in your office? It's night already. Get some rest,\" came the reply.\n\n\"I was just... just catching up on paperwork,\" Mason replied, and Izagor could imagine how awkward her mate looked at this moment. Mason had a tendency towards being a workaholic, something which she had learned even in the first few days they'd met, all those years ago. \"Since I came over here to check out that false alarm, I decided to just do some work while I'm here. My office is quite comfortable.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" Lanus said. Izagor heard footsteps, then the faint sound of the arch wizard sitting down in the chair opposite Mason's desk. \"This whole false alarm mess is unfortunate. I've ordered the operations team to stand down the alert system, and maintenance will check out the sensors first thing tomorrow.\"\n\nStill squeezed under the desk, Izagor watched quietly as Mason came around and sat back down in his own chair. His face gave away nothing, with not even a stray glance down at her to reveal there was a dragon hiding so close. \"It seems we have a false alarm every month.\"\n\n\"Better for us to have false alarms than having an escaped demon or a rogue basilisk break out and go terrorize the city. I remember the days before we had sensor or shields--the academy was rather infamous back in those old days. It was great for recruiting excitable young magicians, but not for getting funding from the mayor.\" A short pause, then, \"But as for the Department of Sorcery, I don't like that you keep summoning circles active overnight without anyone monitoring them.\"\n\n\"It's standard practice and as per guild recommendations. Only low-level entities are allowed, with the enchantments checked every day. And even if we wanted monitoring at all times, we don't have that many technicians at the moment.\"\n\n\"Standard guild practice, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes. Modern summoning circles are inherently failsafe. Even when broken, their enchantments are designed to discharge their energy in a way which will banish most entities safely in a controlled...\"\n\nEven as Mason continued to converse with his boss, Izagor gently snaked her tail over towards Mason and curled her tail tip around his ankle. This was probably a bad idea, but it also provided a source of amusement for her.\n\n\"Well, I defer to your expertise in this field. You've been a master sorcerer for at least a decade, even before you joined the academy?\" Lanus asked.\n\n\"That is correct,\" Mason replied.\n\n\"Have you heard that Vic is planning to retire soon? The Department of Sorcery will need a new head, and you're first in line for that job. Did you know that? You're one of our best sorcerers. It's hard to find magicians who are highly competent in their craft, yet also talented at teaching it to apprentices, and also good enough with people to manage a department.\"\n\nMason hesitated before replying, possibly because he was surprised by this praise, but possibly also because Izagor had pulled up one of his pant legs and started to gently gnaw on his leg as he sat behind his desk. \"I have heard that rumour. It would be an honour to have such responsibility, but I do think there other sorcerers in this department who easily exceed my skills.\"\n\n\"How humble of you. But if I and the other senior academy leaders decided that you were the best fit to take charge of this department, would you accept?\"\n\n\"Well, I must say there are... other considerations. I would have to think about it. Much as I enjoy sorcery and using magic in general, I have priorities in my life beyond just that.\" Right as Mason was saying this, Izagor was sliding her tail up so the appendage lightly brushed against Mason's crotch. His foot gently moved and stepped down on her tail, pushing it away before this motion could continue.\n\n\"Hmm. Nothing is decided yet. If it does turn out to be you who is chosen as head of sorcery, we will speak again in due course and you can make your decision then. There are still quite a few weeks before the next term begins... A few weeks before the apprentices return to their studies. Think about it and consider your options.\" There was the sound of the chair sliding back against the carpeted floor. \"That's all then. Good night, Mason.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Good night, arch wizard.\" Mason got to his feet and went to see Lanus out of his office. A few seconds later, Izagor heard the door swing shut, followed by the click of the lock. \"Ok, she's gone now. Tonight really has been full of surprises,\" Mason said.\n\nIzagor slid herself out from under the desk and hopped onto Mason's now vacant office chair. She plopped herself down and had to sit sideways because of her tail, but she still grinned at Mason, her crest fin perking up. \"Look at you! Your boss just all but confirmed that you're getting a promotion, and you're going to become a father! That's so adult. Do you feel old yet?\"\n\n\"Older than I used to be, certainly.\" Mason walked over and leaned against his desk, half-standing and half-sitting. \"But you're older than me, so if I feel old you should too,\" he added, using a single finger to tap Izagor on her nose.\n\nIzagor playfully snapped at his finger. \"You're right! Where did the days of our youth go? Remember that trip we took to the Julbanus Federation, flying all across the country to visit all the interesting places? Where we just went wherever and did whatever we wanted?\"\n\n\"Mm. I also recall you getting tired out by headwinds after the first couple of days, and so we stopped flying and transformed into human to take a train instead,\" Mason replied. \"Now life is bit more...mundane. No more adventuring all across the world, just a steady job and responsibilities.\"\n\n\"Funny you should mention mundane. After I've laid our egg, and when our child finally hatches, I think our life will be quite the adventure once again.\" Izagor unfurled her wings from her back, but she nervously wrapped them around herself like a blanket. \"We...can't raise a hatchling here, can we? Not that I have anything against human society in general, but there would be quite a few questions to answer if we suddenly had to explain why we're raising a dragon hatchling. Assuming it's a hatchling. It should be a hatchling.\"\n\nMason shrugged. \"We'll figure it out together. We always do. Just take things one step at a time.\"\n\n\"Good idea! What were we doing before your boss so rudely interrupted us with her giving you a promotion?\" Izagor used her tail to push against the floor, making the office chair she was sitting on spin around and around. When it finally came to a stop, she was facing away from Mason. Izagor swished her tail from side to side, then she swung it up and held it out of the way, giving Mason a good (and hopefully seductive) look at her underbelly. \"So, do you see anything you like--aahh!\"\n\nIzagor's shift in posture had altered her balance, and she let out a panicked squeak as the chair started to topple over. She hurriedly threw her wings open and flapped them sharply to try and stabilize herself; at the same time, she stretched her tail out and coiled its tip around the closest thing she could grab, which turned out to be Mason's waist.\n\nRegardless of her efforts, Izagor and the chair toppled to the ground, and she pulled Mason down along with her. They ended up in a tangled heap, lying against the carpet. Izagor was quiet for a moment, then she burst out into giggles. \"Heheheh...\"\n\n\"I sure hope Arch Wizard Lanus has left the building, else she would wonder what I'm doing up here locked in my office, knocking over my chair and talking to myself,\" Mason said, though Izagor could see he was smiling.\n\nReaching out her paw, Izagor played with Mason's hair, patting him on the head even as they both remained lying down on the carpet. \"Why do you always call her Arch Wizard Lanus? It's such a formal way to talk, always calling people by their title.\"\n\n\"I'm a very stiff, formal sort of person, as you well know,\" Mason replied. He rolled over and sat up, only for Izagor to leap over and pounce on him. She pushed Mason down and sat over his body, snuggling against him and wrapping her tail around his leg.\n\n\"Hnnng... I'd like a stiff part of you right now...\" Izagor muttered. She nosed at Mason's neck, and used one of her forepaws to gently tug at his shirt buttons. \"Why are you still wearing your clothes?\"\n\nMason chuckled. \"Because we're in my office? Do you really want to do this in my office, the same place where I tutor my students and where I grade test papers?\"\n\n\"Why not? It just you, me, and no one else. Remove your clothing or have it removed!\" Izagor declared, patting Mason's chest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "With deliberate, teasing slowness, Mason unbuttoned his shirt one button at a time. Almost universally, the best moments of his life had been spent with Izagor, and who was he to deny his wife what she wanted? Certainly it would have been a lie to say that he wasn't just as attracted to her in return.\n\nWith his shirt fully unbuttoned, Mason shrugged out of his shirt and left it lying open on the ground behind him. With an equally casual motion he wriggled out of his pants, pushing them down to his knees. Unfortunately he was still wearing his boots, which made fully removing his pants a bit of a challenge. \"Move. Let me take off my boots.\" He pushed at Izagor, trying to get her to lift her weight off him, but she didn't budge.\n\n\"Nah. I've flew for days for this! I braved a blizzard to be with you...\" Izagor curled her tail forward and slipped the tip into Mason's underwear, yanking it down with a quick motion that led to the sound of ripping fabric. With his boots still on, his pants just ended up scrunched around his calves, yet somehow this made him feel even more naked then if he'd been wearing nothing at all. With the majority of his body now exposed, Mason could intimately feel the texture of Izagor's scales pressing against his skin--like smooth, flat, rigid plates that felt warm to the touch. And there was one spot in particular which felt all the more warm, pressed up against his crotch. \"It's so annoying to be in heat,\" Izagor muttered. \"And it's far, far worse when I'm alone.\"\n\nIzagor started to move, half-hugging and half humping against him. Mason was already partially erect, and this motion quickly had him fully ready. The carpet felt scratchy against his back, but Mason easily ignored the surroundings. Slowly he slid his hands down, tracing the outline of Izagor's slender, aerodynamic body and feeling the smooth, warm texture of her scales.\n\nThere was something deeply intimate about feeling Izagor pressed up against him, pinning him down with her weight. She wasn't crushing him. Dragons were fairly similar in size to humans, and they were all hollow bones and thin, air-catching wing membranes. Mason let his hands wander--one hand moved downwards towards Izagor's underbelly, sliding towards that soft point right between her hindlegs where the lines of her scales met in a neat cleft. Izagor's genital slit felt warm and slightly wet as he gently slid his fingers across it--inhuman, but so familiar to him.\n\nMason moved his other hand behind Izagor's neck, and he started casually playing with her crest fin. That delicate structure was made from the same sort of membranes which made up her wings, and it was highly sensitive even to slight disturbances in airflow. Physically touching it made a shudder run down Izagor's back, and she inhaled sharply. Her crest perked up in response, as if it was eager to be touched even more. From his own experiences with transforming himself into a dragon, Mason knew just how good it felt for a dragon to have their crest played with--gently, of course, and at the appropriate moment by the right person, yet it was undoubtedly an erogenous zone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"Hmggrrngghh...\" Izagor made an incoherent pleased sound, and she opened her jaws to playfully nibble on Mason's shoulder. Her whole body felt warm and tingly and happy, with lustful desire clouding all her thoughts. She could have drawn this experience out. She could have asked Mason to keep using his fingers to play with her, or asked him to use his mouth, or asked him to do whatever she wanted because he would have listened. But she had been waiting for days, and she wasn't going to wait another second.\n\nIzagor moved her hindlegs so she was crouching properly over Mason. She snaked her tail forward and coiled its tip around the base of Mason's manhood, dextrously gripping him by his reproductive organ. Then she shifted her hips to line her body up with his, and without any further ado she lowered herself down and let him spear up into her. Soft yet hard, delightfully warm and filling--Izagor took her time savouring that very first penetrative stroke. Holding the one she loved close, coupling together in this basal manner. There was no possible greater intimacy.\n\nNo more talking, no more thinking, just feeling and living in the moment. For all the many times they'd done this before, making love felt all the more intimate and sensual as they were so well acquainted with each other's bodies and what got both of them off. Izagor fanned out her wings and mantled them around Mason's body as she clutched him close and thrust against his supine form. She could feel lust burning through her body. Part of it was from her heat, but a good portion of her current arousal was just from being pent up and deprived of sexual release over the past few days. Oh, how she had missed this.\n\nIt didn't take her more than a few brief minutes to hit her first climax. Tension built up inside her as each stroke grew more pleasurable than the last, until finally Izagor could take it no more. \"Ah...\" Gasping softly, she slammed her hips down and hugged Mason as close as she possibly could. Blissful, overwhelming pleasure blew every coherent thought out of her head, and her muscles trembled and clenched involuntarily.\n\nMason stroked her neck and her crest fin, and he leaned in to kiss the side of her snout. For a few seconds Izagor rode those wonderful sensations that echoed through her body, then the pleasure faded to a more manageable level, still leaving her heavily aroused and ready for more.\n\nAnd she got more. Izagor kept moving, humping her body against Mason's and panting softly as she continued coupling with her mate. No more than a minute after Izagor had reached her first climax, Mason tensed up and Izagor heard his breath catch. \"Izzy, slow down or else...\" he warned her.\n\nIzagor gently nipped on Mason's shoulder. \"No.\"\n\n\"If you don't, I'm going to--\"\n\n\"Damn right you are,\" Izagor hissed, and she kept going.\n\nMason's hips bucked upwards, thrusting deeper into her, and he shuddered as pleasure fired through his body, forcing him to spend his seed into her. A human's semen had no effect whatsoever in a dragon, yet Izagor found herself deeply aroused by that knowledge that her mate was releasing his essence inside her. It was hard to describe exactly what she felt in that moment--lust and love, fuelled by their shared sense of understanding, of trust, and of intimacy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Mason raised a hand to wipe some sweat from his brow. Despite it being the middle of winter, Izagor's body felt warm as she pressed against him. Yet though her scales felt warm to the touch, that hardly compared to the intense, slippery wet heat of her insides as she clutched him in the most intimate manner possible.\n\nHolding onto Izagor's forelegs, Mason gently rolled them both over so they were lying side by side. Again he could feel the carpet scratching at his naked skin, but that didn't really matter. As a younger man in the times before he'd met Izagor, Mason had been more easily embarrassed and more awkward in general, but she'd changed him. Not a literal change, for the transformation crystals had been one of Mason's own side projects, but Izagor's carefree personality had seared away some of his nervousness and his self-consciousness.\n\nMason spent another satisfied moment beside Izagor, clutching her close as they both lay on the floor. Kicking off his boots, he finally removed his pants entirely, then his socks too. And then he was fully naked.\n\nIzagor made a soft, growling, happy noise. \"Hggrrrr... Ready for round two?\" she asked.\n\n\"I think that we deserve a round two, yes, after all our days apart.\" Despite the fact he'd just spent himself, Mason was certainly eager to do it again. He remained almost fully erect still, but instead he got to his feet and strolled over to his desk. \"Not like this, though.\"\n\nIzagor also rolled to her feet, though she turned away so that her rear was facing Mason. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure his gaze was still locked on her, she crouched down on her forelegs and stood tall on her hindlegs, raising her tail out of the way in a pose which was unquestionably inviting. \"I'm ready for you.\"\n\nMason snatched up the transformation crystal from his desk and held it firmly with one hand. \"Morphus,\" he murmured, and powerful magical energies burst from the crystal, jolting up his arm to spread across his body. Though this process was well familiar to them both, it still felt intensely shocking for Mason as he started to change.\n\nWith each step he took towards Izagor, his body grew less human. His proportions shifted as bones and muscles altered themselves. His hair dropped from his head before vanishing into nothing, and Mason could feel scales erupting over his skin, covering his body with smooth flat plates which were still surprisingly sensitive to the touch of air. With one step he was walking on two legs, then in another he was walking on four. In the next step he had two broad wings pushing out of his shoulder blades, creating a gust of wind that sent paperwork flying as Mason flapped his wings once before furling them onto his back.\n\nHis hearing grew slightly muted, yet the sensitivity of his scales let him feel the air all around him. His vision enhanced and everything seemed to snap more sharply into focus as his eyes were altered. The next time Mason blinked, he felt the subtle, hardly noticeable delay that came from blinking with a double layered eyelid.\n\nThe senses of dragons weren't quite the same as humans--Mason could feel a curious sensation of directionality as his draconic form had an internal compass, something which humans lacked. Smell was one thing that should have stayed the same, but Mason's nostrils flared as his new body picked up a delightful scent in the air which made his head spin. It was the scent of fertility, of arousal, of a female dragoness in heat who needed him to satisfy her. That scent was made all the more enticing by a familiar, unique component that he could recognize in a heartbeat--this wasn't any mere woman, any mere dragoness--this was Izagor, and he loved her.\n\nEven as the transformation was still finishing up, and while his tail was still growing out to full length, Mason climbed atop Izagor, letting his chest rest against her back. He paused for a moment, taking in the feel of his body. Everything about his body was changed, yet nothing had really changed at all--he was going to mate with his wife just as he had before. His phallus brushed against her underbelly, leaving a trail of wetness on her scales before he finally managed to get things lined up.\n\n\"Mmmrr. Nice.\" Izagor curled her head back, and she licked at Mason's snout affectionately. \"Now breed me.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Mason took another deep breath, enjoying the delightfully arousing scent that clung to Izagor. His tip met her genital slit, then ever so gently he pushed forward, spearing into her with his reproductive organ. It was so wonderfully, absolutely pleasurable than Mason was surprised he didn't climax right there and then. \"I'll breed you. I'll fill you up, and we'll make an egg together.\"\n\nSlowly he began to rock back and forth, savouring the sensation as he held Izagor close and mated with her. Izagor moved her hips too, shifting her body against his to enhance every stroke.\n\nThe raw physical sensuality was intoxicating, but that wasn't really what got Mason so aroused. Deep down, Izagor made him feel safe, made him feel understood, and made him feel loved, and those emotions then spilled over into sexual desire. The mutual bond they shared was what truly linked them, and that was why Mason had long ago lost any sense of unease over the truth of his wife's species.\n\nPowered by these transformation crystals, Izagor could (and often would) change her own form to that of a human, but Mason's affection was entirely independent of how his wife looked at the moment. Dragon or human, she acted the same way regardless.\n\nDid it matter if her current draconic form had no hair, no breasts, and walked on four legs? Mason's conventional ideas about beauty had long ago been loosened. Izagor's body felt sleekly curved as he held onto her, lean but powerful muscles tensing just under her scales as she braced herself against his repeated thrusts. He couldn't resist her. He didn't want to.\n\nMason could feel Izagor shuddering, her body going tense and rigid as she swept past another orgasmic peak. Her quiet moans was undeniably exciting, making his own lust quickly climb towards a climax. Mason contemplated slowing down and trying to resist his own arousal. But neither of them really wanted to slow down.\n\nThere soon came a specific instant where Mason felt his arousal hit a tipping point--the pleasure coursing through his body threatened to become overwhelming, and Mason knew that he had to stop or he would inevitably release. He didn't stop.\n\nWith clear, deliberant intent, Mason continued to rock his hips and thrust his length into Izagor's depths. This wasn't some unexpected climax that took him by surprise, nor was this a case where the pleasure running through his body overrode his better judgement--this was an active choice to keep going and embrace every bit of responsibility that would eventually result.\n\n\"Izzy...\" Mason clutched Izagor close and he gently nibbled on her crest fin--an affectionate gesture that was so familiar that he just did it without even thinking. He flapped his wings down, wrapping them around Izagor's body to get as much physical contact as possible even while his thrusts grew deep and urgent. The engorged, sensitive flesh of his reproductive organ stiffened even further and held that way for a slow, wonderful moment, then it throbbed hard.\n\nPleasure exploded through Mason's body, concentrated right in his underbelly but blasting out to his extremities and lighting up every nerve in his system. Mason jerked repeatedly, his eyes tightly shut and his snout scrawled up as bliss ran through him with such intensity that it was impossible to contain. His mind was completely overridden, temporarily sent spinning in circles as automatic reflexes seized control. His tail twitched to a rhythmic beat, flagging up and down as muscles further up in his underbelly also contracted and relaxed, squeezing internal glands and vesicles to pump out all his seed. Each twitch of his phallus sent a fresh spurt of semen deep into Izagor, deep into her fertile depths were it would take hold.\n\nPerhaps it was an effect of Izagor's smell and those sex pheromones which were clouding Mason's mind, or perhaps it was simply the knowledge that he was fulfilling a fundamental biological goal, but he could hardly believe just how good it felt. Mason couldn't think, but it felt so wonderfully right to be hold Izagor close, emptying himself into her and fulfilling the most primal of desires.\n\nFinally, after an eternity which had just been a brief fraction of a minute, that pleasurable high slowly faded away and left behind a blanketing sensation of satisfaction and affection. Mason panted softly as he gradually recovered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Izagor was making a pleased rumbling noise from her chest. \"Hmmmrrrr... That was good,\" she said.\n\n\"So good. So very good.\" Mason spent another few seconds atop his mate, then he slowly shifted his weight off her and fully onto his own hindlegs. His phallus slid out of her slit, and a strand of bodily fluid briefly connected their reproductive organs. Slowly his mind was reengaging, his intellect spinning back into action to figure out what needed to happen next. \"So we're going to be parents then... Lots of preparations to be made.\"\n\n\"Mm hmm.\" Izagor casually stretched herself, and Mason heard several pops as she twisted her back from side to side. She spun herself around in a circle, then lay down on her side and patted the area right behind her. Mason got the hint, and he walked over and lay down right next to her.\n\nSnuggling back against him, Izagor nodded happily and entwined their tails together. \"I feel fatter already, almost as if the egg (or eggs) have already begun growing inside me. Ooh, that's going to be so weird having to lay. Scary.\"\n\nEven as he gently spooned against his mate, Mason was already starting to make plans. \"Let's assume that our child is just going to be a normal dragon hatchling, because we were both in dragon form when conception occurred. So it doesn't really make sense for us to stay here anymore, does it?\"\n\n\"Hmm. I suppose we could both go live with my clanmates down in the southeast? Some of them have been nagging at me for years to stop roaming about and settle down,\" Izagor replied.\n\n\"If it was just you and me, I would be entirely alright with us roaming and exploring the world all away from society, but I don't think that's a good way to raise a child. Both dragons and humans are social species, after all. It takes a community,\" Mason said. He rolled to his feet and went back over to his table. He stared at the transformation crystal there, which could return him to his normal form with just a touch.\n\nStill sprawled out on the floor, Izagor turned her head to keep looking at Mason. \"Alright, so we could raise our offspring amongst my clan's home territory? It's a nice big mountain range--lots of open space, fresh air, plenty of other dragons of all ages. I'm alright with this, but that would mean you would have to live there properly, Mason. You wouldn't be just visiting for a few days, but fully committing to living amongst my clan as a dragon.\"\n\n\"I could do it! You're living as a human right now, so surely I could learn to live as a dragon amongst your people,\" Mason countered. He snatched up the transformation crystal from the table, and once again magical power began to alter his form. Inversely to what had happened just a while before, his body started to lose draconic traits in favour of human ones.\n\nIzagor watched her mate change. \"Haha, this is going to be such an adventure!\" She grinned at him, remembering the one time he had visited her clan before. \"To be honest with you, love... I think some of my clanmates thought you were so very weird last time you visited. And that's without them even having the faintest idea that you're a human. We can't tell them, of course.\"\n\nAs his transformation wound down, Mason stood fully upright and went over to pull on his clothes again. \"Even if we don't tell them about me actually being a human, would they... accept us?\" he asked. \"If we go to your clan's territory, and just... show up out of nowhere with you all gravid, would they accept us and help us?\"\n\nIzagor nodded. \"Definitely! Dragons change clans all the time, and joining a clan because you're taking a mate is an entirely normal thing to do. We'll need to come up with some exciting history for you--maybe you're from some mysterious, far-off clan, but by my great wiles and my mastery of seduction, I have enticed you to join our clan!\" The dragoness rolled onto her back and giggled, kicking her legs up into the air. \"Heheh! This is going to be great. I hope. Hopefully we don't mess this up. I hope we're good parents.\"\n\n\"Eh. What's the worst that can happen?\" Mason laced up his boots, then he walked over to the door and snatched up his coat, which completed the process of donning his clothing. \"Shall we head back to the academy hostel? I'll cast an illusion spell over you so that you'll be hard to see through the snowfall unless someone else gets close. The arch wizard said that the alarms will be stood down, so for tonight at least there won't be a concern about your presence being detected.\"\n\nIzagor got to her feet and trotted over towards Mason. \"Let's go home.\" She gently nuzzled his side with her snout, then she dropped to her belly. \"Climb onto my back and cast your illusion spell over us both. I'll fly us over to the hostel.\"\n\nMason looked out the closed window--the snowstorm was coming down heavily, and visibility was very low. \"Are you sure you want to fly in this weather?\"\n\n\"It'll be faster than walking. We'll be less cold this way.\"\n\n\"Alright.\" Mason shut off his office's lights and grabbed his satchel, then he carefully swung his leg up to mount Izagor's back, riding right between her shoulder blades with his legs going just in front of her wings. \"I suppose this sort of thing will become impossible for you once you're pregnant, because of the egg weighing you down.\"\n\n\"I didn't even think about that, but you're right! I've heard from my older clanmates that carrying an egg inside you is very inconvenient. Makes flying pretty much impossible, supposedly.\" Izagor pushed herself upright. She took a moment to get used to Mason's weight, then she curled her tail around and tried to unlock the window's latch. \"Good thing I'll only have to worry about that for a week or two. Grah... Can you help me get that latch?\"\n\n\"Sure. I'll conceal us too. Viga!\" Mason muttered, using a simple illusion spell to shroud them both and make them partially invisible from a distance. Such spellwork would hardly stand up to any close scrutiny, but at night in a snowstorm, it was unlikely they would come across anyone else wandering around the academy grounds. Mason reached over to unlock the window latch, but then something Izagor had said stuck in his mind. \"Uh, what do you mean by a week or two?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just, you know--being gravid. I'm glad I won't have to carry our egg inside me for too long, and I can lay it out next week or so,\" Izagor replied casually.\n\n\"Wait, what?\" Mason had been pushing open the window, letting in a cold gust of snowy wind, but he stopped and hurriedly pulled the window shut again. Clearly there were some information here which had not been adequately communicated. \"Hold on now, hold on. A week? Seriously?\"\n\nIzagor slowly nodded. \"Yes? Why do you sound so surprised?\"\n\n\"Because... humans have to pregnant for nine months, but you're saying that you... you're going to lay an egg next week?\" Mason asked.\n\n\"Nine months? That seems like an awfully long time to have something growing inside you.\" Izagor lazily patted a paw against her underbelly. \"Female dragons can produce their eggs one week after being bred. Which is hardly surprising because being in heat is my body already doing a lot of the hard work in preparation for making an egg, and the one week afterwards is just when the proper process starts after conception. Once the egg is laid, it'll take anywhere from three-quarters to five quarters of a year for the hatchling to develop, depending on how big the egg is.\"\n\n\"Still, one week is really fast!\"\n\n\"Chickens can lay eggs in a day. Not that I'm comparing myself to a chicken, but the point stands,\" Izagor replied.\n\nStill sitting atop the dragoness, Mason ran his hand through his hair. He had been mentally coming up with a list of things that would need to be done, but this sudden revelation changed the time frame. \"Ok, I don't question biology, but we don't have anything prepared yet! In one week's time we'll need to be ready to handle an egg?\"\n\n\"We'll have to prepare a nice little nest for the egg. Nothing fancy, just someplace to keep it safe and warm. Taking care of an egg isn't that hard,\" Izagor replied. \"I hope,\" she added after a moment.\n\nMason was torn between an excited grin and a nervous frown. \"Ok, right. No problem. We've always figured things out in the end, so this time won't be any different.\" He unlatched the window and pushed it partially ajar.\n\nIzagor used her snout to push the window the rest of the way open, and then she carefully hopped through and onto the thin ledge just outside. A freezing wind blew all around them, and snowflakes spun down from the sky in spiralling patterns. Carefully she used her tail to push the window shut again, then she leaned back and prepared to spring from the ledge. \"I'll fly us back to the hostel real fast! Ready?\"\n\nMason clutched onto her back, his hands going around her neck. \"I'm holding on. Take us home.\"\n\nIzagor took a deep breath of the winter air, then she leapt into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "After about half a minute of repeated knocking, a librarian came to open the locked front doors. \"Professor? You're very early. The library normally doesn't open for another hour.\"\n\nMason glanced around--admittedly it was rather early in the morning, with the sun barely even risen. \"Ah, yes. Hello. Sorry to bother you, but I'm in a bit of a rush. I just need to borrow some books. It's urgent.\"\n\n\"Um... Normally we're strict on opening times, but you are a professor, and if it's urgent I guess I could make an exception.\" The librarian stepped back and let Mason into the library. \"We're still sweeping the floors and getting the archive in order, but you can go ahead and borrow your books if you want.\"\n\n\"Fantastic! Fantastic. Thank you!\" Mason hurried into the library, then he paused and turned back to the librarian. \"Sorry to bother you again, but where is the archive for the Department of Zoology?\"\n\n\"Zoology is in this wing, right over that side there.\" The librarian pointed to the far side of the library's large open space, filled with innumerable bookshelves. \"Anything topic in particular?\"\n\n\"Dragons. I need books on dragons, especially on their society and biology,\" Mason said. \"Just for a little research project,\" he added after a few seconds.\n\n\"Of course. Dragons would be shelves 36 and 37, I believe,\" said the librarian. \"Just come find me a gain once you have the books you want. Good luck with your project, professor.\"\n\nMason smiled and nodded at the librarian. \"Thank you. This project will be... quite something different from usual.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Chronicles of the Belador World 5) Treoir Dragon Chronicles, Book 5",
        "author": "Dianna Love",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Daegan's dragon rampaged inside him. Ruadh wanted blood.\n\n\"What will it be, dragon? Make a choice,\" Joavan shouted over the roar of a storm hammering the cliffs of Spain's northern coast towering above them. The Faetheen lifted his hand where the grimoire volume Daegan and Casidhe had risked their lives to retrieve floated above his palm. \"This box ... or the woman?\"\n\nAs if Daegan could turn his back on Casidhe and leave her imprisoned in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb?\n\nPain ripped up his insides and muscles across his chest expanded, pushing him closer to shifting. He crouched, feeling the bones in his face crack as his mouth pulled out of shape. \"How can ya expect me to be choosin' between a woman's life and the future of all other livin' beins'? I shall not turn my back on a woman who has risked much to save others, but neither shall I give up that box.\"\n\nJoavan leaned forward, eyes glittering. \"I could leave now and never care about the consequences to your world. You should have presented saving the woman as something you wanted when I came to offer you aid to escape imprisonment.\"\n\nDaegan flexed his fingers, wanting his claws around the Faetheen's throat. Holding back from shifting into his dragon physically ached.\n\n<We win all battles with Fae,> Ruadh declared telepathically.\n\nDaegan's power boiled, anxious for a target. <Yes!>\n\n<Boss? Are we gonna shift and throw down with this guy?> Tristan asked telepathically.\n\nDaegan glanced at his second-in-command standing on a boulder next to him. Soaked pale-brown hair flattened against his head, jaw stiff with anger, and just as ready to jump in.\n\nRuadh spoke again, but only to Daegan. <No battle is too great if you do not lose what you fight for.>\n\nThat stopped Daegan's mad thoughts as fast as flying into a wall.\n\nWhat would he lose?\n\nCasidhe. His people, innocent humans, everything he'd fought to protect. What was he thinking to shift and attack Joavan? He hadn't been thinking. Daegan shoved a hand through his wet hair and gripped the back of his neck, breathing for a moment before lowering his arm.\n\nHe sent a silent message to Tristan. <No. I cannot gain the box or save Casidhe by attackin' Joavan.>\n\nDaegan forced his body to pull back from the edge of shifting. Muscles tightened and twisted back into shape. He grunted with the strain.\n\nWind howled around the cloaking protecting them from the sea where dark had fallen.\n\nRuadh normally voted for complete destruction of an enemy and would kill this Faetheen if Daegan gave the order. But his dragon knew him as well as Daegan knew Ruadh. This had been a rare time when his dragon had been the one to caution him to be sure of his next step.\n\nDaegan had never lost his ability to think clearly in the midst of a battle. But Casidhe lived in his every thought. Nothing would soothe him until he yanked her from T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and into the safety of his arms. Call him selfish, but Daegan's insides ached with the need to save Casidhe above all.\n\nHe could not make the mistake of allowing an enemy or a dangerous ally to know how important she felt to him. If he did, Casidhe would become a bargaining chip to be used against him by every adversary once he freed her from Queen Maeve's clutches.\n\nIf he freed her.\n\nNot if. He would find a way.\n\nEvery minute Casidhe spent in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and out of his reach clawed at his need to protect her.\n\nFar better to convince this narrow-minded, half-blood Fae of her importance for stopping the Imortiks. Daegan could not save her if he did not win this battle, but neither would he forsake his people or the humans.\n\nHe told Ruadh, <Ya are correct and stopped me from makin' a bad mistake. I must find a way to renegotiate my deal with the Faetheen.>\n\nDaegan could not deny the importance of the liquid solution Joavan had brought from a healer to prevent a coating spewed on him by satyrs from hardening over his body. If not for the Faetheen's help, he would be dead by now.\n\nSucking in his pride to deal with Joavan, Daegan said, \"I do not take savin' my life lightly. I only ask ya to work with me so that we may both succeed.\" It took all Daegan's effort to ignore the arrogant pose Joavan struck.\n\nHis dragon roared, angry with Joavan and wanting to turn the Faetheen into ashes.\n\nThat was the dragon Daegan had known and loved his whole life.\n\nJoavan had claimed his people would be safe if he went back and took the bronze grimoire box with him to his hidden world.\n\nDaegan doubted that as truth.\n\nHe could not allow the grimoire to disappear with Joavan. Without all three grimoires, no one could force Imortiks behind a death wall again.\n\nTristan sent a new telepathic message to Daegan. <Want me to poke at Joavan to see if we can make him reveal a weakness?>\n\nThe Imortik venom in Daegan's body still drove spikes of pain through his head at unexpected moments, and right now, that spike felt thick as his fist. He was thankful to have Tristan and his dragon with him.\n\n<It cannot hurt,> Daegan replied silently to Tristan. <If Joavan were so confident about disappearin' with the box, he would have done so by now. He clearly needs help, but I believe the stubborn fool is determined to make me choose because I left the lockdown cell before he returned.>\n\n<Understood, boss.> Clearing his throat, Tristan called out, \"How can you expect us to retrieve some necklace when we're trying to protect the future of the world for all of us?\"\n\nJoavan's face distorted into major pissed. \"Some necklace? The Cearcall na S\u00ecorraidheachd is not a trinket! It bears the Talamh An Asraon diamond valued above all by my people. I must have that to protect them.\"\n\nTristan lifted his hands, palms out. \"Hey, chill. I'm just trying to understand why we can't get the woman now, which will make it easier for us to focus all of our attention on what you want. Then once Daegan gets your amulet and you hand over that box, all of us can go about our business. Why do you want to fight about this when we could solve one problem quickly?\"\n\nWhile Tristan drew Joavan's attention for a moment, Daegan took that opportunity to sort through the few conversations he'd had with Joavan. As he did, an idea began to form, but he'd only get one chance to try it.\n\n\"Hey, boss. Incoming,\" Tristan muttered, looking over his shoulder to the east.\n\nDaegan glanced around at the sound of a large helicopter approaching. Far away, a bright beam shined down along the coast. They were hunting his red dragon. If the machine stayed on course, it would fly right over them.\n\nJoavan flashed a look in the same direction and shouted, \"They can see nothing in this cloaking.\"\n\nTurning back to face the ignorant fool, Daegan argued, \"The humans shall notice how the water is flowin' around the cloakin's invisible barrier and breakin' against a wall they cannot see. A jet dropped an explosive device on my dragon earlier while we were underwater right before I returned here.\"\n\nTristan's eyes popped at that. \"You okay?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Daegan slashed his gaze back at Joavan. \"They may do the same here if they find somethin' unusual. I say we teleport up on the mountain where no one is searchin' for a dragon.\"\n\nJoavan had a moment of indecision while the helicopter noise grew louder. \"I will drop the cloaking. You will teleport all of us. Do not leave my sight or I am gone.\"\n\nDaegan's teleporting could not be trusted with the venom interfering. Rubbing his pounding forehead, he quietly asked Tristan, \"You up for this?\"\n\n\"Oh, hell, yeah. I'll take you up then I'll come and grab him.\"\n\nDaegan hesitated, worried Joavan would vanish if they left first.\n\nWater suddenly crashed over the rocks, soaking the three of them. Joavan shouted, \"What are you waiting for? The helicopter will be here in less than a minute.\"\n\nTristan said, \"Hang on, boss.\"\n\nDaegan spun away in a blur of teleporting. When his eyes focused again, he stood fifty feet from where Tristan had hidden Casidhe's backpack.\n\nTristan blinked into view then out of sight again. In ten seconds, Tristan reappeared with Joavan shouting.\n\n\"We were supposed to teleport together!\" The Faetheen shoved dripping hair off his face. \"Do you not care about this?\" Joavan lifted his open hand where Daegan's grimoire box floated majikally above it.\n\nThe helicopter continued searching the coastline, but far enough away now it was no threat.\n\nDaegan replied in a hard voice, \"We took a risk huntin' a place to land first or ya might have been dumped on the side of the mountain. Ya would have accused me of doin' so to knock the box from your hands.\" But the fact that Joavan had waited for Tristan's return, reinforced Daegan's budding idea. \"I have made a decision.\"\n\n\"Finally. I was not staying any longer,\" Joavan warned.\n\n\"I understand and I wish to make good on my agreement to help you.\" Daegan felt Tristan's eyes on him, but he trusted Tristan to follow his lead. He did not want to be distracted by telepathy.\n\nAllowing a victorious smile to curve his lips, Joavan asked, \"Did you choose this box over the woman?\"\n\n\"No.\" Daegan crossed his arms and spoke with confidence born of hope. \"I have realized that if ya know how to rescue her from T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb then another Fae, who is an ally of the Beladors, could do so just as easily. I only need a moment to send for the Fae woman. Once she comes here and receives the details, she can take care of savin' the woman. Then we are free to search for the amulet.\"\n\n\"What? No!\" Joavan shouted. He clamped his lips shut.\n\nIt didn't matter.\n\nJoavan had confirmed Daegan's belief that this Faetheen would not want a strange Fae involved. Not after Joavan's people had run from the Fae. Also, as a half-Fae and half-druid being, Joavan might fear going up against a more powerful pure-blood Fae.\n\nEspecially if he had never fought one.\n\n\"Wait. What am I thinking?\" Joavan shook his head and sounded relieved when he spouted, \"You must know you should never ask a Fae for a favor.\"\n\n\"I do know this, but 'tis not askin' for a favor if one is owed.\" Daegan walked away toward a high point where he could watch airplanes fly across the vast sea.\n\n\"Stop!\" Joavan stepped toward him.\n\n\"Stop what?\" Daegan asked innocently. \"We need to get movin' so that I can find your amulet and take that box to my people. We waste time.\"\n\nInhaling deeply through his nose, Joavan stood there stiff as a board. He exhaled slowly. \"Do not call a Fae here. My people are at risk until I find the amulet. A Fae might try to enter our world while I am not there to protect them.\"\n\nDaegan glanced past Joavan to Tristan who lifted an eyebrow and nodded in respect. While Daegan appreciated the show of support, this idea had not worked yet.\n\nNot until Casidhe stood here free of Queen Maeve.\n\nHolding his arms out in supplication, Daegan gave an exasperated reply. \"I have a way to save the woman and fulfill my agreement to ya, Joavan. If ya do not care for my idea, what do ya propose?\"\n\nLifting his chin, Joavan said, \"I will show I am the bigger person and save the woman, but once she is free, we leave to find the amulet. No more arguments.\"\n\nThrobbing eased in Daegan's head. He'd allowed the Faetheen to save face and hopefully rescue Casidhe, too. \"What is your plan for gettin' in and out of T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb?\"\n\nJoavan frowned, tapping his chin. \"This box will be safer if I put it away before saving the woman.\"\n\n\"I want to know where that box is every minute,\" Daegan demanded.\n\n\"Do not judge me so poorly when I have been the one to uphold my end of our deal,\" Joavan lashed out. \"When I returned to your cell, I had planned to make a formal agreement, which would have saved us these issues. If we agree now on the specific terms, I will place a spell for the box to reappear as soon as you have fulfilled your part.\"\n\nAfter giving that offer consideration, Daegan nodded, but not because he trusted Joavan. Daegan added, \"Or the box shall appear if ya fail to fulfill your part.\"\n\nFrowning, Joavan stared at Daegan, taking his time to decide. \"I intend to do what I say, so that will be fine.\"\n\nTristan asked, \"Do you need someone to hold the box while you two execute this plan?\"\n\n\"Hardly,\" Joavan snapped. \"You are not an objective party.\" He bent his knees and dropped down as he lowered his palm to the ground. Using his other hand, he pushed invisible energy at the box until it slid onto the grass. When he straightened again, he told Daegan, \"You stand on the other side of the box.\"\n\nDaegan complied.\n\nJoavan cupped his hands above the box. \"I offer Daegan, dragon king of Treoir, my aid to facilitate the rescue of ... \" Joavan paused and gave Daegan a pointed look.\n\n\"Casidhe Luigsech, a historical researcher,\" Daegan supplied.\n\nJoavan continued, \"Casidhe Luigsech, a historical researcher, from where she is imprisoned in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb. Once she is safe, Daegan agrees to then retrieve the amulet known as <Cearcall na S\u00ecorraidheachd,> or Circle of Eternity. As soon as the dragon king of Treoir completes this task, he will receive the Immortuos Grimoire volume beneath my cupped hands. Should he fail to take the amulet from the druid who stole the treasure, the Immortuos Grimoire volume is forever forfeited.\"\n\nWhen Joavan paused, Daegan gave him a narrowed-eyed look. \"You do not clarify which druid.\"\n\n\"I prefer not to mention his name.\" Holding his cupped hands in place above the bronze box, Joavan added, \"To fulfill Daegan's part of this agreement, he must take the amulet from only one druid I lead us to as soon as we leave this location. Does that satisfy your concern?\"\n\nDaegan nodded. \"Go on. Add the rest.\"\n\nActing put upon, Joavan added in a half-hearted voice that suggested his words were ridiculous, \"Should I, Joavan of the Faetheen, fail to uphold my end of the agreement, the dragon king of Treoir will receive the Immortuos Grimoire volume to do with as he wishes.\" Joavan closed his hands as if wrapping them around a ball. He lifted his fingers to his lips and whispered. When he finished and opened his hands, gold, silver, and red sparkles bounced between both curved palms.\n\nHe said, \"Open your hands, palms facing up, and place them side by side, Daegan.\"\n\nDaegan hated to be touched by anyone's majik, but he'd survived the satyr coating and had a feeling he'd face worse before finding all the volumes. He opened his hands.\n\nJoavan poured the flickering sparkles onto Daegan's palms. He could feel nothing from the sparkles.\n\n\"Close your hands once, then open them and pour the spell onto the box,\" Joavan instructed. \"That will bind the two of us and the box into one agreement.\"\n\nDaegan opened his hands.\n\nNow blue, silver, and gold, the sparkles dusted down over the box.\n\nThe grimoire vanished.\n\nBlood drained from Daegan's face, leaving him lightheaded. \"Where is it?\"\n\nJoavan backed up. \"Do not shout at me. The box is hidden from both of us until our agreement is satisfied. I cannot call it to me. You cannot call it to you. It is safe. Do you not worry about Imortiks being drawn to that box while we travel?\"\n\nThe Faetheen sounded so reasonable Daegan had to take a leap of faith just to move ahead. \"In that case, how good is your plan for pullin' Luigsech out of T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb?\"\n\nJoavan cupped his jaw with his fingers as a sour look twisted his lips. \"It is an excellent plan ... but I'm sure you know plans are always perfect until they meet the enemy.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Casidhe slouched against the elbow she'd propped on the heavy wooden table in the T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb library. Turning another page to read with bloodshot eyes, she couldn't stay on task. At home, she'd lived for days lost in reading. The books stacked on the table around her now felt like a yoke closing slowly over her neck.\n\nEven that was not as bad as being cast aside.\n\nWhy had Daegan made her feel wanted only to turn his back on her?\n\nA tear slid down her cheek and landed in a fat splat on the page she'd had open too long. How could she damage a written artifact this way? She jumped up and used her shirttail to carefully dry the wet spot. Finished saving the page, she sagged to her chair and propped her elbows on the table to support her aching head.\n\nWhat had she ever done to deserve landing in a realm with a crazy queen? Abandoned by a man she'd started to trust. A man who had sent her heart cartwheeling.\n\nShe wiped her eyes with her sleeve and sat up straight. No more tears for Daegan. Just accept the truth. That gobshite had used her to gain the grimoire volume and now he was done with her.\n\nShe'd believed him when he said he needed all three grimoires. She'd believed that kiss. She'd believed they had a future of some sort.\n\n<Stop it,> she shouted inside her head.\n\nBlinking her dry eyes to focus, she sucked in a long breath and carefully turned another fragile parchment page. The material crackled as it moved in a book so old majik probably held it together.\n\nThat wouldn't be farfetched either.\n\nShe couldn't imagine any material in this library defying Queen Maeve by daring to disintegrate, especially pages older than dragons still alive today.\n\nHer gaze tripped over to the glass of water that continued to refill when she drank the level down. A half-eaten tray of cheese, meats, and fruit hadn't automatically replenished.\n\nHer eyelids drooped. She'd love to put her head down and catch a nap.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" a brittle female voice snapped in the quiet space.\n\nCasidhe jumped at the sharp words echoing through the cavernous library.\n\nQueen Maeve stood to her left at the end of the table in all her outrageous appearance. A striking beauty from a distance, but up close her eyes were dead and mean, her crazy hair changed color on a whim, currently a mix of silver and reddish gold, which fit just fine with a gown the color of blood, if blood sparkled.\n\nThere stood the reason Casidhe couldn't catch a nap, not with an insane queen zapping in and out of here. \"My eyes are blurry. I was trying to\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not care about your whiny excuses. I asked what you were doing. How close are you to locating a grimoire volume?\" Queen Maeve actually floated at the end of the table.\n\nHours ago, when Casidhe first entered T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb, everywhere she looked had overwhelmed her. After living on the edge of panic for so many hours, exhaustion had beat the nerves out of her.\n\nNot to mention having her hopes for being saved crushed by a dragon shifter that had duped her.\n\nShe just wanted to curl up somewhere to sleep and nurse her wounded heart.\n\nWhen Queen Maeve left earlier to face Daegan in that Tribunal meeting, Daegan knew for sure the queen held Casidhe prisoner. Had he asked if she was healthy or injured? No. Had he offered something in exchange for her freedom? No.\n\nHe hadn't even tried. That cut the deepest and said the most.\n\nHe'd merely argued that anything Casidhe and Queen Maeve found belonged to him.\n\nShe'd only mattered to him as long as she could help him hunt the damn grimoire.\n\nHow could he just forsake her on that mountain?\n\nHad she meant anything to him at all? Even if he didn't want her for any other reason, surely he could use her skills. Maybe he only needed one grimoire volume unless every single thing he'd said were lies.\n\n\"Are. You. Listening?\" Queen Maeve snarled.\n\nTwisting to face that woman, Casidhe let out a long sigh. \"Yes, I'm listenin'. I need material from around the time the original grimoire was created.\" She decided to test the crazy queen. \"I'm thinkin' it would be when the first red dragon lived.\"\n\nHate permeated the beautiful face of this vicious queen. \"How can you be interested in that lizard after he turned his back on you?\"\n\n<Just shove that knife deeper, bitch.> Casidhe kept that thought to herself and put up a strong front. \"I don't give a rat's ass about any red dragon and definitely not the one alive today. I am lookin' for material from a specific period of time, which is why I referenced the first red dragon. If your books don't go that far back, no problem.\"\n\nQueen Maeve shot up into the air, paused, and floated from left to right, pointing a long black fingernail at the spines of different books. When she'd drifted ten feet over, she crooked her finger in a \"come here\" indication.\n\nA wide burgundy-colored book slid out.\n\nNo, not a book, but a wooden chest with tarnished metal adornments at the corners.\n\nCasidhe's pulse jumped at the possibility Queen Maeve actually had a book from the time of the original red dragon.\n\n<Why?> her conscience argued.\n\nShe didn't have the energy to carry on a debate with her mouthy conscience. Information was power in her world. She had to survive to help Fenella. The best way to survive here would be by making herself irreplaceable. No one else could come close to deciphering the information in those ancient books.\n\nWhen the queen floated back down, she waved a hand in a sweeping move at the stack of books on the table.\n\nThe books shifted quietly down the long table. Pages on the book in front of Casidhe flipped closed, followed by the cover, then that book joined the others.\n\nDust floated about after all that movement.\n\nShe sneezed and heard no \"gesundheit.\" No surprise there.\n\nWith the table surface now clear, Queen Maeve opened her hands and the chest floated down to land in front of Casidhe. The queen uttered a short blast of sounds under her breath. She could be speaking words in some language, but Casidhe didn't recognize them.\n\nWide as her shoulders and a foot tall, the chest turned to face her, then the latch snicked open. The lid continued rolling away from her to reveal a stack of papyrus scrolls, which some scholars called rolls.\n\nCasidhe closed her eyes and inhaled the earthy scent of history from thousands of years ago penned by scribes. If not for being in a dangerous realm, she would stay here for as long as the queen allowed her to research.\n\nBut her window of safety would run out soon. Her stomach twisted with anxiety over what would happen at that point.\n\nThe queen had been popping in more often.\n\nCasidhe lifted her gaze to Queen Maeve. \"I'll start on this immediately.\"\n\nA taunting smile lifted on Queen Maeve's evil face. \"You really think you are capable of deciphering those rolls?\"\n\nWarning signals went off in Casidhe's head. She hedged, \"I won't know for sure until I review them, but I am pretty good at ancient languages.\"\n\nLeaning forward, Queen Maeve dropped both hands on the wood surface. Her smile widened. \"I doubt you have ever seen a text like you are about to read. This language belonged to a supernatural being long gone from this world. I captured six translators. All human squires. The last one had been the only one who could translate parts of it.\" She straightened to her full height again. \"If you read any one of those rolls entirely, I will consider freeing you if we are able to locate a grimoire with that information.\"\n\nNo other words could have rattled Casidhe from her sleepy doldrums and lifted her hope until she realized the queen had said we.\n\nShe glanced at the stack of six rolls darkened to a mocha-coffee color by age and curled her fingers. She couldn't wait to get going. Not that she would hand someone like Queen Maeve a volume of the Immortuos Grimoire, but she might have a better chance of escaping if she left T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb to hunt for a volume. Knowing this queen, she'd probably be locked in a cage the whole time.\n\nIt didn't matter. If she found anything the least bit useful, she'd talk it up to convince Queen Maeve for a chance to return to the human realm.\n\nThat plan had holes. Still, better to have a plan with holes than no plan at all.\n\nIt wasn't as if Daegan cared if she lived.\n\nHer throat tightened, but she would not waste one damned tear on that cold-hearted shifter. She'd been a fool to care about him at all.\n\n\"If you cannot read any of it,\" Queen Maeve continued, \"you will disappoint me, which would be unfortunate as I am not one to offer second chances.\"\n\nCasidhe gulped. She got that message no problem.\n\nFailure equaled death.\n\nQueen Maeve snapped her fingers. An hourglass appeared, floating in the air. She twirled a finger in a circular motion. The glass flipped over and sand began running.\n\nReally fast.\n\nThe queen warned, \"You have until the sand runs out to show me your value.\"\n\nMouth open, Casidhe stared at the spot Queen Maeve vacated in the next second.\n\nThere couldn't be thirty minutes in that hourglass.\n\nLess every second she wasted.\n\nHer hands shook as she reached for the first scroll from the chest and placed it on the table. She carefully unrolled the papyrus and cringed. The roll was so brittle it might break.\n\nIf she damaged any of these, she might as well cut her own throat and save herself from being tortured.\n\nTranslating had a way of settling her nerves by focusing on something she could accomplish. As she scanned the strange markings, Casidhe understood why Queen Maeve had found the idea of her reading this text humorous.\n\nRubbing her hands on her jeans, Casidhe lifted two fingers as if saluting then lowered them to move across the text on the manuscript.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nWhat? Where was her power?\n\nShe glanced around, worried the queen would be hovering above her, but no. She was still alone.\n\nCasidhe glanced at the hourglass emptying too quickly and tried not to panic.\n\nShe placed her left hand on the left edge of the roll to steady herself and moved the two fingers over the text again.\n\nGolden letters began to lift and reshape into words she could read.\n\nShe jerked her left hand up in a fist pump of excitement and ... the gold letters disappeared.\n\nWhat? That made no sense.\n\nOpening her left hand, she carefully placed those fingers back on the end of the roll and the golden letters lifted once more. That was new and something to keep in mind.\n\nThe strange symbols had been scripted in lines parallel with the top and bottom edges and eighteen inches wide. She raced over each column, reading as quickly as she could.\n\nNothing in this mentioned the grimoire.\n\nThe scribe wrote about the era leading up to a conflict between humans and nonhumans. Huh, she hadn't thought about how the same thing happened long ago just as chaos erupted now in America with nonhumans being exposed.\n\nRolling up the left end of the scroll and moving it in that direction, she revealed two more columns of text.\n\nThe scribe began writing about the dragons. Earth dragons, ice dragons, and the red dragon, but not Daegan. Long before he and Herrick had been born.\n\nThere were other dragons, too. Some very old.\n\nShe stopped at one part, not believing what she read.\n\nThe dragon families had been allies for centuries and the duty of keeping peace had fallen to the red dragon, which no one could defeat.\n\nThat echoed Daegan's words.\n\nShe read on. There had not been just a simple agreement. The kings of every dragon clan created a document and each king took a blood oath to uphold their alliance. The most powerful dragon shifter of each house also swore their part in protecting peace.\n\nThey wanted their families, plus their nonhuman and human clans to thrive and live free of fear.\n\nWith all the dragon families supporting the alliance, the benefits had been amazing. Every clan raced in to fight alongside another clan in times of trouble.\n\nTalk about significant peace talks.\n\nNo one would start a war with another dragon house when they were all willing to fight together against invaders like marauding Vikings.\n\nShe sat back, feeling smacked between the eyes.\n\nShe'd been taught Daegan had started a war to wipe out all of the dragon families. Based upon what she'd just read, no dragon shifter would break his blood oath.\n\nThe consequences of such a move would band all the other clans together to attack that one dragon shifter, his king, and his clan.\n\nEven the infamous red dragon might not have survived a joint attack. Of course, the first red dragon had been born of a dragon shifter and dragon-blood mate.\n\nDaegan had come from an unknown goddess and his dragon-blood father.\n\nHerrick's family had possessed five dragon shifters in their house alone.\n\nWhy had the dragon clans battled each other during the Dragani War when it sounded as if the families had lived in peace for a long time? The history she'd been taught presented Daegan as the worst kind of villain.\n\nA tiny noise snapped her out of research mode.\n\nCathbad stood on the other side of the table."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Casidhe jumped up.\n\nLifting a finger quickly to his lips, Cathbad indicated for her to be quiet. Then he waved her around the table to him.\n\nShould she call out for Queen Maeve?\n\nOr go with Cathbad?\n\nHow was either of those a good choice?\n\nShe glanced at the hourglass with a thimble of sand left.\n\nCathbad looked up and his face erupted with worry. He teleported around the table and appeared next to her.\n\nCasidhe backed up. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Hush or we won't get out of here. Give me your hand.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I don't have time to argue. Give me your damn hand.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nCathbad looked as if he'd go ballistic any minute. He whisper-shouted, \"What is wrong with you?\"\n\nShe hissed back, \"I'm tired of everyone yankin' me around.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Queen Maeve screamed from ten feet off the ground.\n\nCathbad grabbed Casidhe's arm and the world turned somersaults. She screamed, tumbling wildly as they teleported.\n\nThen all the chaos in her head stopped at once.\n\n\"Casidhe!\"\n\nHer hearing muffled the word as if she had a head cold. She wrapped her arms around her chest where she knelt on grass barely visible in the darkness. The air smelled fresh and wind cooled her hot skin, but she might throw up from disorientation.\n\nRain dinged the top of her head and wind whistled, slapping hair against her face. She croaked out, \"What?\"\n\nSomeone lifted her to her feet and hugged her. \"Ya are safe.\"\n\nWas that Daegan's voice?\n\nSure felt like his big body holding her.\n\nLifting her gaze, she ignored the worry etched in his face and backed out of his arms.\n\nHe stared at her in surprise.\n\nDid he really think she was so easy?\n\nShe slapped him with a loud crack. \"How could you leave me there? How could you ... wait a minute.\" She grabbed her head. \"And now you're workin' with Cathbad? You bastard!\"\n\nJust as her hearing cleared to pick up the sounds of birds in the trees behind Daegan, everything muted again. No water or wind touched her. \"Did you cloak me? Let me out of here.\"\n\nDaegan rubbed his cheek. \"Ya have a hell of a punch for such a wee lass.\"\n\nHer heart trembled at hearing him call her a lass again.\n\nNo. She would not be charmed by him this time. \"You think I'm jokin'? I hate you.\" Those words hurt to say, but she'd pushed him out of the space he'd been taking up in her heart and mind.\n\nDaegan wiped water off his face and ran his hands over his hair, letting out a big sigh. \"'Tis clear ya have somethin' to get off your chest. Say it.\"\n\n\"You bet I do, buster.\" She jammed her hands on her hips and leaned forward. \"I sat here and waited for you.\"\n\n\"I know. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut. Up. I'm talkin'.\" She caught a breath and continued. \"I climbed out of that hidin' hole all night lookin' for you. At daylight, I stepped out and ran into Queen Maeve who teleported me out of here.\" Her eyes burned with anger and hurt. She clenched them shut, wishing for her sword. Her eyes flew open. \"Where's my backpack?\"\n\n\"We have it nearby. 'Tis safe.\"\n\n\"You left it out there with Cathbad?\" she screeched.\n\nHe covered his ears. \"If ya would give me a chance to\u2014\"\n\n\"No. You had a chance in the Tribunal and blew it.\"\n\nHis expression shifted from pained and contrite to confused. \"What is this ya speak of?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" She nodded and stepped around, not caring if she bumped into his stupid cloaking. Too dark to see much around her. \"Queen Maeve told me when she came back how you were only concerned with gainin' possession of whatever she had me find out about the grimoire.\"\n\n\"'Tis not what I said,\" he argued in stern words.\n\nShe whipped around to face him. \"Easy to say now.\"\n\nDaegan's eyes darkened to pewter and his pupils elongated.\n\nAh, hell. Would she finally see the red dragon?\n\nWould it be the last thing she saw before his dragon turned her into ashes?\n\nDaegan's voice sounded more dragon than human. \"I made a deal with the Tribunal that may cost me somethin' I have never allowed to be traded just to force them to call in Queen Maeve. I informed the Tribunal she had kidnapped ya to find the grimoire, when I knew full well she intended to use ya to capture me. That did not matter. I was comin' for ya one way or another, but I had hoped to force her to hand ya over in the Tribunal to free ya sooner. Once the deities realized what she was up to with huntin' the grimoire, she vanished.\"\n\nWhy did it sound like truth when he explained his side of what happened? Her damn heart and conscience teamed up against her demanding to hear him out.\n\nHe looked away and ran a hand over his mouth, muttering to himself. When his gaze lasered back to her, his eyes had calmed down to human-looking again and held a warmth she missed. \"Casidhe, I would not have left ya here if I had thought I would not return.\" Pain and disappointment rippled through his words. \"The satyrs spewed a coatin' on me that started turnin' hard. I could not escape the human military who caught me on the cliffs. I could not teleport or send a telepathic message. If I could have, I would have sent my people for ya.\"\n\nShould she believe him? \"How did you escape?\"\n\n\"'Tis a bit of a story, but I had help from someone known as a Faetheen, whose people gave me a salve to stop the coatin' from killin' me.\"\n\nShe couldn't prevent her hard swallow at hearing Daegan had been close to dying. She might be pissed, but the idea of this world with no Daegan hurt in a way she couldn't explain.\n\nContinuing, he explained, \"My people found where I was bein' held. They negotiated my release. My power has been damaged by Imortik attacks so I could not teleport. 'Tis why I had Tristan take us to the oracle's mountain. As soon as I was free, Tristan and I came here first to find ya. When we went to where ya left the backpack, I knew immediately Queen Maeve had been here. I believe she has her scryin' wall workin' again and watched us. I am sorry she took ya, lass.\"\n\nShe exhaled a trembling breath. She'd been alone here all night after that heart-stopping kiss, then captured and threatened. Every part of her wanted to believe him and stop hauling around this anger.\n\nWould she be a fool to believe him?\n\nHe stepped forward. \"I would not lie to ya, lass. Nor would I ever leave ya somewhere, not even T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb.\" He put his hands on her shoulders. \"I would have gone there to trade myself for ya if I had no other way to save ya.\"\n\nWarmth soaked into her skin. Her heart flipped all about in a happy celebration. She wanted to touch him and feel his warmth up against her skin, to have him use his hands to help her forget the terror of being trapped in another realm.\n\nBelieve him or not?\n\nIf she got this wrong, she'd never forgive herself. Daegan had either just told the truth or he'd set her up for a bigger emotional crash.\n\nShe still had questions he'd failed to answer. \"But why are you workin' with Cathbad?\"\n\nDaegan smiled and his handsome face went up a hundred notches in appeal. \"'Twas not Cathbad, lass. A Faetheen glamoured Tristan to look like the druid.\"\n\nThinking back on the few seconds she'd faced off with the druid in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb, she realized what had seemed odd. \"He didn't sound like Cathbad.\"\n\n\"'Twas no time to fix his speech. We told Tristan to say as little as possible since the queen might hear.\"\n\nHer shoulders relaxed with the weight of betrayal lifted and her heart sighed. When she looked up at Daegan, his gaze locked with hers.\n\nThose silver eyes held a longing that rivaled hers.\n\nHe muttered, \"I cannot wait another second.\" Then he lowered his head and kissed her.\n\nHis mouth swept over hers like a gentle wave, then it crashed harder at the end. She clutched his shoulders, holding him close, determined to keep his body tight aginst hers. Energy built in her middle and fed to her limbs. When it reached her fingers, she felt a snap of electricity.\n\nHe lifted his head. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"Our powers seem to be talkin'.\" She smiled.\n\n\"Let them.\" His big hand cupped her face and his mouth lit a fire in her womb, sending a raging wake-up call to her hormones.\n\nShe had never felt this pull from another man, definitely not that idiot from college who claimed her body heated up too much during sex. Wasn't that the point? To get hot?\n\nShe'd bet every book in her precious library Daegan wouldn't make that complaint.\n\nHis hands gripped her carefully, but he was not letting her go. His every move reassured her he had meant what he said and would have found her no matter where she went.\n\nShe needed to be wanted and missed. She needed to be important to someone.\n\nNot just someone. To Daegan.\n\nShe'd been lonely for so long she'd chastised herself for being attracted to the first man to care about her in a while. More like forever. But this didn't feel like desperation to leap at a sexy man who happened to be convenient.\n\nThis was passion.\n\nThis was real.\n\nShe wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling him closer. He lifted her off the ground, holding her with an arm around her waist. His other hand raced along her face and shoulders, touching her with care as if she were his whole world right then.\n\nShe'd never been that important to any man.\n\nShe'd fought for what little space she could find in Herrick's family.\n\nSomething told her this might be a once-in-a-lifetime man.\n\nDragging her fingers through his wild hair, she wrapped her legs around his waist, hugging up against a very turned-on dragon shifter.\n\nHe shuddered and moved his hand to her bottom, holding her against him.\n\nHis kiss had pushed away the world. Nothing mattered but this moment. When he slowed, he pecked kisses on her forehead then her cheek. She ran her fingers over his chin where a beard had shown up.\n\nDaegan leaned his forehead down to touch hers. \"I was destroyed with worry for your safety. Ya trusted me and I could not come to ya or send someone. I died a hundred times in that cell thinkin' I would never see ya again to know ya were safe. I would never hold ya again.\"\n\nFor a normally tight-lipped dragon shifter, Daegan shocked her by sharing those feelings.\n\nWas this moment just as unusual for him? \"I should never have doubted you, Daegan.\"\n\n\"'Tis easy to do when stuck in a realm where ya have no idea escape is possible, lass.\"\n\nEven after she'd yelled at him and abused his handsome face, he forgave her that easily.\n\nShe allowed her arms to drape loosely on his shoulders with her hands clasped behind his neck so she could lift her head. \"Still, I will not be so quick to give up hope again.\"\n\nHe didn't speak for a long second, then vowed, \"As long as I have breath in my body, I shall not break a promise to ya, lass. It pains me to let ya go, but I must fulfill an agreement to the Faetheen who has helped me twice now.\"\n\nLifting her head, she studied his tense face. \"What do you have to do?\"\n\n\"His people lost an important amulet. He needs a dragon shifter to take it from the thief. Once I have fulfilled my part of our deal, I shall come for ya. Then we must hand the scepter to the oracle. I may need help with the grimoire again. Until I come for ya, I am sendin' ya somewhere safe.\"\n\nHuffing out a long breath, she scratched her head. \"When will you understand that you can't dictate what I do?\"\n\nHis eyes darkened again, but in irritation this time. \"I am not tellin' ya what to do, but protectin' ya.\"\n\nAncient hardheaded man. She squirmed around. \"Let me down. I can't talk to you when you've got a log shoved between my legs.\" She'd said that in a teasing tone. Had she embarrassed the arrogant dragon?\n\nHe leaned in and whispered, \"'Tis only a log because of your sweet scent.\" His eyes twinkled, but he knew he'd one-upped her.\n\nScore a point for Daegan.\n\nLowering her to the ground, he groused, \"Ya make it difficult for me to drop the cloakin' while my jeans are taut.\"\n\n\"As if that's my fault?\" She tossed him a saucy look.\n\nHe shrugged. \"'Tis your fault, but I forgive ya. Does not change that we are stuck in here until I can walk out.\"\n\nShe stared up at the muted sky then back at him. \"Think of somethin' else.\"\n\n\"Not possible with ya so close.\"\n\nMore points for Daegan. He'd managed to make her feel sexy when she had to look like a witch and had never been proficient at flirting. She hit on the perfect idea. \"Why don't you think about usin' that log on Queen Maeve?\"\n\nHis face lost all joking. \"'Tis not funny. In fact, 'tis a disgustin' thought.\"\n\n\"Aaand ... you're all calm again,\" she said with a pointed look at his crotch. \"You can thank me now.\"\n\nHe leaned close to her ear. \"I prefer to make ya pay for a vision I cannot burn from my mind.\" Then he kissed her cheek and nipped at her ear.\n\nThankfully, her body did not show the effect that sexy dragon shifter had on her when he dropped the cloaking. Not unless someone could see her hard nipples.\n\nJets flying along the coast came into view, then storm clouds and trees close by sharpened again when Daegan revealed their presence.\n\n\"Hi, Casidhe.\"\n\nAt the sound of Tristan's voice, she turned to her right where the northern coast of Spain overlooked the ocean. A man, who she guessed to be the Faetheen, stood next to Tristan.\n\n\"Thanks for getting me out of T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb, Tristan.\" She added a smile, then glanced at the very attractive male beside him. \"Thank you, too.\"\n\nTristan chuckled. \"Glad you didn't hit me with something when I surprised you.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I really thought you were Cathbad. I was too rattled to realize you didn't have his Irish accent.\"\n\n\"You have a lovely laugh. I am Joavan,\" the stranger said, walking over and picking up her hand to lift to his lips.\n\nLike an idiot, she just stood there in shock.\n\nHe got shoved aside before his mouth had a chance to kiss her skin. Daegan snarled, \"Do not touch her.\"\n\nRecovering from his sidestep, Joavan glared at Daegan. \"She appreciates what I did where you do not.\"\n\n\"'Tis 'cause I do not want ya kissin' my hand either.\"\n\nJoavan made a hacking noise. \"You are in no danger of that ever happening.\"\n\nShe cocked her head to give Daegan a what-the-hell look over that move, but her silly heart found his covetous action endearing. She didn't know exactly where she stood with Daegan, but he clearly would not tolerate another man touching her.\n\nFair enough. She'd turn evil if another woman touched him.\n\nDaegan then placed a possessive hand on Casidhe's shoulder, which drew a surprised look from Tristan.\n\nClearly not caring one bit, Daegan asked Tristan, \"Do ya still have the room in your friend's hotel?\"\n\n\"Yes. It's a perpetual deal.\"\n\n\"'Tis safe?\"\n\nScratching his chin, Tristan nodded. \"I'm the only one who can teleport in and I'm pretty sure scrying can't see inside that room. I can make sure she has everything she needs.\"\n\n\"What?\" Casidhe ducked away from Daegan's hand and wheeled on him. \"Are you really makin' plans for me without askin' what I think? Again?\"\n\nDaegan made a noise that came out part exasperation and part exhaustion. On a closer look, she noticed the deep lines around his eyes and mouth, but she could not let him get away with his high-handed approach every time.\n\n\"Did I not just tell ya I wish for ya to be somewhere safe while I go to make good on my word with Joavan? 'Tis a nice place from what Tristan has shared. Ya would be comfortable.\" After grumbling a moment, Daegan added, \"I only need a day to do this, lass.\"\n\nJoavan's mouth opened. \"One day? I do not know how quick this will be.\"\n\n\"Quiet!\" Daegan ordered. \"'Tis not your conversation.\" When he spoke to Casidhe, his voice softened. \"I want ya to go to Tristan's place. I shall come to ya as soon as I have fulfilled my commitment. I am askin' ya, not tellin' ya.\"\n\nHe had a way of needling under her skin when he became contrite, something she doubted many witnessed with Daegan. \"I will go under one condition.\"\n\nDaegan covered his eyes and muttered, \"What now?\"\n\n\"Hey. Don't be an ass about this when I'm meetin' you halfway,\" she chastised him. \"I'm not askin' for the moon. I will wait if I can go to wherever Fenella's phone is when you return.\"\n\nLowering his hand, Daegan gave her a smile filled with understanding. \"I promise to make this happen.\"\n\n\"O-kay, we are finally in agreement.\" She slashed a look at Tristan. \"Are you my ride?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nCasidhe spun around, looking in the direction of the dark spot where she and Daegan had hidden in the woods. \"Where's my backpack?\"\n\n\"Stand by.\" Tristan vanished for five seconds and reappeared holding her backpack out to her.\n\n\"Thanks.\" She took it from him and slid her hand in the backside far enough to touch the hilt of her sword. Still there.\n\nDaegan watched her. \"All is as ya left the pack.\"\n\nThat meant the scepter and books were inside, confirmed by the weight. She gave him a quick nod, then slipped her arms through the straps and latched everything until the pack settled properly.\n\nA rumbling growl came from Daegan.\n\nShe jerked her head up. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"Nothin' to be concerned over.\" Daegan had a hard head when it came to something he wouldn't share. \"Take care of the pack. We still have a debt to pay, but ya shall be taken to Fenella's phone first.\"\n\nShe gripped a strap on the backpack, wanting to talk to him more about how they were going to deliver the scepter to the oracle. Now was not the time or place with that Joavan guy listening.\n\n\"We'll figure it out,\" she offered, hoping to ease his worry. Shifting her attention to Tristan, she lifted her eyebrows in question.\n\nTristan told Daegan, \"May need a few minutes to make sure everything is set after we get there, boss.\"\n\n\"'Tis fine.\"\n\nCasidhe stepped over next to Tristan who grinned at her. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" As teleporting started, she glanced at Daegan. His dark eyes stayed with her until the last second as teleporting distorted her world."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Pulsating vibrations dragged Renata from sleep again.\n\nShe gritted her teeth when a sharp throb raced through her, slithering across her skin and stabbing hot pokers into her mind.\n\nHer body trembled and shuddered more every day as the Imortik entity inside her kept clawing for a better hold on her body and mind.\n\nHer fingers tingled. Sometimes numbness started in the tips and climbed to her wrists, searing every inch of the way beneath her skin.\n\nToday was different. No numbness. Just that steady pulsation of heat shooting through her, then cold freezing her when the heat receded.\n\nSweat ran down her face, into her eyes, then dripped off her forehead. Splat. Splat. Splat.\n\nHer body had been draped over a wide strap hooked to chains running down from the ceiling. Did that help the monsters gain control faster? She couldn't make her legs or arms move.\n\nHow was Roberto? She stuffed her mind with any memory of him every second that still belonged to her. His heart would be crushed if she did not return.\n\nWould he ever know the truth?\n\nTears trickled out her eyes and joined the sweat.\n\nSplat. Splat. Splat.\n\nHer body shuddered hard. She groaned, doing her best to stay quiet. Don't draw attention around monsters. Sniffing, she smelled the other bodies. Whenever she could catch sight of the others, some moved a little and some never did.\n\nAll the bodies glowed at different levels of bright yellow.\n\nOne person started shouting yesterday. Or had that been today? She didn't know. When she'd looked, the man's glow had tripled until she thought he'd swallowed the sun.\n\nThe master had him taken down from the sling, then he compelled the man to do as he said. At least it looked like compelling. She didn't know much about how all this worked.\n\nThe fully converted Imortik had walked away with a dead gaze.\n\nShe lifted her eyelids just enough to peek, cautious to not make eye contact with the master. He was not here based on what little she could see and the lack of noise. That one complained and shouted all the time, always angry at someone he'd made a deal with and now regretted it.\n\nHe had episodes where he howled and jumped around, pulling at his long brown hair then he'd scream in agony. He'd rip out chunks until his scalp bled. When his teeth chattered, he forced out words that sounded majikal. Must have worked.\n\nWithin moments, he'd stop jerking around, fall to his knees, and wail like a little boy who had just skinned his knee.\n\nShe smiled every time. Sympathy must be reserved for decent humans and nonhumans, not a crazed monster. Her tangled hair hanging hid her face from the sides, but she never smiled very long, just enough to feed her soul a cookie.\n\nHer eyes rolled up. No, no, no. She'd seen that happen to the guy who was taken down. She shook her head to jar her brain.\n\nSplat. Splat. Splat.\n\nStupid Imortik master suffered seizures from the Imortik steadily taking over his body. Based on something he said once, she believed he'd been an Imortik for more than two weeks. She hoped it was not two weeks for her yet.\n\nThe master and his partner talked as if they had a plan to return the master back to his original state, whatever that had been.\n\nTimmon, the Imortik Master. Who had he been before this?\n\nAnd why did it sound as if he'd done this to himself on purpose? Who would willingly become an Imortik?\n\nDuring his occasional conversations with a partner, Timmon lamented a rash decision that must have sounded exciting when laid out by an insidious manipulator. <Become a master today and rule the world tomorrow, just sign here.>\n\nThe partner only visited in hologram. He clearly did not trust Timmon to not shove an Imortik inside him just to equal the playing field.\n\nWho was his partner?\n\nWas he a man, woman, or it? The last time sounded male, but it had sounded female before that.\n\nIf she knew anything about the partner's identity, she'd send that name telepathically to all the Beladors.\n\nOf course, if she could do that, she'd send out an SOS to her people. Once a Belador heard her, they would find her. Her people would use any resource to save her, Devon, and others captured. What had happened to Devon? Her heart whimpered when she thought about him and Roberto. She had to stop allowing emotions to affect her.\n\nEmotion had played a role in pushing others to concede life to the Imortiks quicker.\n\nShe fought to stay strong, even if only in tiny moments.\n\nNone of her telepathic messages had gone out. They stayed in her head, but she kept sending them anyhow.\n\nJust in case.\n\nThree words that breathed life into her hope.\n\n<Calling Beladors,> she started and paused to take a breath even though she shouldn't need it for telepathy. Sometimes simply thinking drained her. She continued with the same mantra she sent every day.\n\n<This is Renata. Tell Trey, Daegan, anyone who is looking for me.> Slow inhale and exhale. <The master moved us to a...>\n\nHer mind struggled to pull the words together.\n\n<Moved us to a building. Warehouse maybe. Old metal walls. Tall. Windows at top, some cracked. Smells like...> Another breath. <Engine oil and gasoline, solvents. Humans. Sun rises in front and sets in back. Quiet outside. Always silent unless...>\n\n\"Where are you?\" the Imortik master shouted.\n\nRenata didn't flinch. The Imortik master knew exactly where she was, where everyone was in this building.\n\n\"Stop calling me all the time!\" the partner's voice boomed. Yesterday that voice sounded like a woman. Today it had a manly baritone again. Why keep changing it? Did these two worry any Beladors might get word out?\n\nThey should worry.\n\nShe would not stop trying to reach Trey.\n\nTimmon whined, \"The seizures are worse! Make it stop.\"\n\n\"I can't do that in hologram form.\"\n\n\"You hide behind that. You compelled me to not say your name. You're using me!\" Timmon started crying. \"I can't do this. You're stronger. You should do this.\"\n\n\"If you could do my job, I would take your place, but you can't. Just the fact that you can't handle an Imortik proves that.\"\n\nRenata blew gently to move hair from her eyes, trying to see the being in hologram form. Too blurry.\n\n\"I can't do this for another week,\" Timmon whimpered. \"I want my body back. I hate this thing inside me.\"\n\nSee? Another opportunity to smile. Renata hoped whatever lived inside Timmon was ten times worse than what she fought, but seriously doubted it.\n\n\"Stop acting like a child,\" the partner ordered.\n\nLots of sniffling followed, then Timmon said, \"I have an idea how to move up our timeline.\"\n\n\"I'm all ears, Timmon.\"\n\n\"You could take some of the ones close to completing the transformation and start a major battle. Force the Beladors, warlocks, everyone to move faster and produce the grimoire volumes.\"\n\nQuiet permeated the building until the partner released a loud sigh. \"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Timmon screamed.\n\n\"That screws the timeline for us to open the death wall all the way and might cause nonhumans to join forces. That's the last thing we want. Instead of sucking it up for one more measly week, you'd be stuck that way for months, maybe longer. Want that?\"\n\n\"No.\" Timmon's glum word came out so low Renata would not have heard him without her Belador hearing. He muttered, \"You're safe. You come here as a hologram and leave me to do all the dirty work.\"\n\n\"As if I'm not out there facing just as much as you? I have more powerful people after me. You would not fare well in my position.\"\n\nTimmon made a derogatory sound. \"I'm not just dealing with nonhumans when I'm outside this building. There's a group of humans out there with weapons that can obliterate me.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen. You're a demigod, Timmon. Act like one.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Timmon shouted.\n\nThat man had two levels. Yelling and whimpering. But Renata had a new piece of information. Demigod, huh? That just meant he was more dangerous than she'd thought.\n\n\"What do you mean you can't?\" the partner scowled.\n\n\"You miscalculated. This thing is eating my body.\"\n\nSounding compassionate for the first time, the partner said, \"I hate this for you. I've been working on a plan, too. Give me a chance to put it into motion and maybe motivate everyone to find the damn volumes faster.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about doing?\"\n\n\"Stir up more chaos. That's working right now. Humans are taking up arms against nonhumans. Queen Maeve has someone in her realm actively hunting the grimoire. That fucking dragon shifter has the resources to locate a volume. He hasn't been in Atlanta for too many days now. He wouldn't leave his Beladors to face all this insanity alone unless he was getting close to finding a grimoire. That chump thinks he'll use it to stop our Imortiks.\"\n\nTimmon whispered, \"I don't want to face that bastard again.\"\n\n\"You sent the dragon running last time. You made him expose the nonhumans. You bested him,\" his partner praised.\n\n\"It wasn't easy. If an Imortik takes over that dragon's body, we are doomed. There's no way I could stop him once the Imortik rules his mind and dragon.\"\n\n\"We are not going to let that happen. The rift is opening in other places, but not as wide as ours. Daegan will likely kill those Imortiks, but you injected venom into his body. Yours is a strong venom. Just with that, he's not going to be one hundred percent, but if he's popped with more, he'll be even easier to handle. That's all we need to manage him.\"\n\nRenata's face crumpled. She swallowed the cry wanting to rip out of her throat. Not Daegan. The Beladors needed him.\n\nShe needed him.\n\nHe'd said he'd come for her.\n\nShe believed him. That kept her going.\n\nThe partner continued trying to appease Timmon. \"Give me some time to work behind the scenes. Don't panic if I can't show up the minute you call. I'm not going to be handy every minute. Keep in mind, the more humans we turn into Imortiks will divide the Belador attention between stopping Imortiks and protecting their own people. This will work. We just have to stick to the plan.\"\n\nTimmon shuffled around, whining, \"What about all these demons? They convert quickly, sometimes in one day, but I can't control that many at one time. I had to kill some.\"\n\n\"I've had to kill a few, too,\" the partner admitted. \"To be honest, I have no idea who's behind the demons but that's a bonus for us. Like you said, the demons change into full Imortiks fast. More bodies for our army.\"\n\nHer arms trembled. She had to stay strong and not give in to the scream of fear climbing her throat.\n\nIt was getting harder and harder to stay focused. A voice whispered through her mind. She choked on her fear, eyes watering as she tried to stay silent. Desperate, she asked in her mind, <Are you a Belador?>\n\nNot a word.\n\n<Please!> The silence filled her with more terror. Was she going crazy before the Imortik took over her body? She listened for a bit then drifted off until Timmon's voice yanked her eyes open.\n\n\"You need to get this done in two days,\" he demanded.\n\n\"Or what?\" His partner dropped that demand with the crash of an anvil hitting the cement floor.\n\n\"Or I'll call in a power to save me,\" Timmon threatened. \"I am not doing this alone any longer.\"\n\n\"Don't call her.\" Timmon's partner issued the warning in a low tone. Words intended to not be ignored. \"Trust me on this. One mistake and we will never be free of her.\"\n\nTimmon grumbled, \"I won't call her. Just get this crap moving. I'm exhausted battling with myself. This miserable Imortik is doing its best to push me out and break free.\"\n\n\"Do not allow that to happen!\"\n\n\"You think I don't know that?\" Timmon screamed. \"You have no idea what I'm going through!\"\n\n\"My life isn't perfect either. Hasn't been for a long time. Let's do this and no one will ever deny us anything again. Turn more Imortiks and get them ready to battle.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" Timmon mumbled, dragging his feet as he moved around. Then he tensed and spoke in a voice an octave higher than his. \"Rise, Imortiks, and take your place.\"\n\nTortured human voices moaned then began screaming.\n\n<Poor Timmon. He needs our help.> Renata froze at the high-pitched voice so clear in her mind. Not a Belador. She struggled against the bindings holding her and yelled, \"Noooo!\"\n\n<We will help Timmon when the time comes,> the voice assured her with utter confidence. <Together we are strong, Renata.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Daegan stared at the spot where Casidhe had stood only seconds ago.\n\nHe missed her already.\n\nHis conscience climbed up to ask what he was doing with her. He'd never doubted his decisions, but this didn't even feel like a decision when his head couldn't keep up with his body. How could he explain how his body ached the minute she was out of his sight?\n\nHer energy connected with his. That was the only way he could explain the strange buzzing that happened whenever they touched. What power did she possess?\n\nHis power was drawn to her as much as his body wanted hers.\n\nCould she be of dragon blood?\n\nIf so, no one would know better than her. She was a squire of a dragon family. She had the ability to trace any ancestral lineage. He could not keep trying to convince himself that she could be a mate.\n\nBut if that was the case, could he keep encouraging her affections? Easier said than done. He longed to be with Casidhe in a way he'd never wanted another woman.\n\nHe trusted Tristan without question, but ... Daegan couldn't shake the feeling that she was his to protect.\n\n\"What is going on with you two?\" Joavan asked.\n\nDaegan had forgotten the Faetheen. He shot a warning glance at Joavan, who should stop annoying him. \"What is your plan once Tristan returns?\"\n\nAccepting he'd been shut down, Joavan replied, \"We must teleport as close as possible to the location. Then you will cloak us.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Why what, dragon? Teleporting or cloaking?\"\n\n\"Both. Why do ya need me to do those things? Ya can move around as easily as we do and ya proved ya have cloakin'.\"\n\nJoavan grumbled, \"If I travel between worlds in my normal way to reach this druid, he would know as soon as I appeared and attack me before I could stop him. As for cloaking, he would sense my cloaking as well.\"\n\nDaegan found his explanations weak. Why would a druid be so easily alerted to Joavan's cloaking and not Daegan's?\n\nThis Faetheen held back too many details.\n\nTristan reappeared holding a bag of something succulent smelling. \"Brought you some food, boss. Figured you haven't had time to stop. I also explained about how this guy made you choose between her and the grimoire so she'd know what we're dealing with.\"\n\nJoavan scowled at him. Tristan smirked.\n\nDaegan's stomach grumbled again. His dragon needed a more substantial meal, but this was more than either of them had had in a while. \"Thank ya.\" He took the sack and opened a wrapped hamburger, something he had grown to enjoy.\n\nTristan added, \"Casidhe insisted I not leave without bringing something back for you.\"\n\nJoavan glanced between them. \"Did you not think of me?\"\n\nCrossing his arms, Tristan turned to the Faetheen. \"Why would I? You said you pop in and out of here from your home realm. Does no one feed you there?\"\n\nDevouring the hefty hamburger, Daegan smiled, mouth too full to speak.\n\n\"You keep saying we waste time,\" Joavan complained to Daegan. \"I am ready.\"\n\nTristan gave a quick look at where Daegan was with this meal and replied, \"Well, I'm not ready. I'm handling the teleporting. I can't do that blind. Where are we going?\"\n\n\"I will tell you\u2014\"\n\nLifting a hand, Tristan cut him off. \"Stop. You can't expect us to help you if you're going to keep us in the dark the whole time.\"\n\nTristan's energy pulsed out hard with that reply, surprising Daegan.\n\nFinishing his last bite, Daegan didn't interfere. He had not felt a rush of power like this from his second-in-command before now. Tristan continued to surprise him in the best of ways.\n\nJoavan sulked in angry silence, then his gaze drifted to Daegan. \"Does he speak for you, dragon?\"\n\n\"He does when necessary. He is my second-in-command above all my forces. Ya would do well to respect his position if ya wish for me to gain the amulet.\"\n\nTristan's hard demeanor never changed.\n\nPride surged in Daegan at seeing the young man begin to believe in himself as much as Daegan's faith in him.\n\nNot happy one bit, Joavan admitted, \"We go to a remote location on an island. We must arrive far enough away to not alert the thief, then move in close until we can corner him. He will not have the amulet out in the open.\"\n\nTristan asked, \"You say he's a druid. How powerful a druid? What are we going up against?\"\n\n\"Very powerful. He has used majik to slow his aging. He will appear as someone around sixty, but he has lived for as long as this dragon shifter.\"\n\nDaegan went on immediate alert. \"What is his name?\"\n\n\"Ainvar.\"\n\n\"I have never heard of him.\" Daegan couldn't decide if he should feel relieved it was not someone of Cathbad's level or concerned this druid could be worse.\n\n\"Few have known his name. Even less have met him.\" Joavan paused, staring off for a bit, then his arrogance returned. \"It has taken a great deal of work to figure out where he hides on that island. I will tell you more, but we must go now.\"\n\nFinished with the meal, Daegan wadded up the bag and opened a palm where he called up a flame to burn the paper until tiny ashes floated to the ground.\n\nHe would not have thought so small a meal would give his stomach relief, but it did. Even Ruadh had quieted. \"Where is the island ya speak of?\"\n\n\"Do you know the Shetland Islands north of Scotland?\"\n\nTristan piped up. \"Of course, we do.\" Then he spoke telepathically to Daegan. <Scotland today is the north end of the big island east of Ireland we call the United Kingdom.>\n\nDaegan replied the same way. <'Tis the land of the Britons, or it was in my time.> He spoke out loud to Joavan. \"Is he hidden on that island?\"\n\n\"He created the <Caisteal Taibhse> over a thousand years ago.\"\n\n\"Cash what?\"\n\nJoavan pronounced the words again. \"That is Gaelic Scottish for Ghost Castle. The inhabitants avoid that area. They believe it to be cursed. They claim the castle is not seen for months at a time, then on a moonlit night, the translucent shape of a mighty structure wavers into view. They blame all missing cattle and sheep on it as well as young women who disappear. Locals believe the women were taken for a sacrifice by an ogre who lives there.\"\n\n\"Is that all?\" Tristan asked sarcastically.\n\nDaegan reminded Joavan of their agreement. \"Ya are certain this druid has the amulet? I am only committed to deal with the first druid ya point to as the thief.\"\n\n\"I am sure.\"\n\nTristan had an uncomfortable expression on his face. \"We need a specific image of the location for teleporting.\"\n\nJoavan held up a finger, asking for silence. He held a palm out and in the next moment a holographic image of a desolate looking land appeared vertically on his palm.\n\nDaegan eyed the image. \"Ya believe a castle is going to just appear there?\"\n\n\"No. That is where we will arrive, which allows us the ability to sneak up on the druid. There is a partial moon this evening, enough to see the castle.\"\n\n\"What if the castle does not appear?\" Daegan had not agreed to sit on an island for days.\n\n\"It will.\" Joavan closed his hand and the image disappeared. \"This is why I was willing to heal you. I have a small window of time.\"\n\nTristan asked Daegan telepathically, <Do we trust this guy?>\n\n<No, but he has no reason to heal me only to walk me into a trap. He could have stood by as I died in the cell.>\n\n<You have a point.> Tristan spoke out loud. \"Everyone ready?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Joavan edged closer to Tristan yet stayed an arm's length away.\n\n\"You have to put your hand on my shoulder, Joavan.\"\n\n\"Why?\" The Faetheen angled his head to look at Daegan. \"He does not.\"\n\n\"That's because Daegan is driving this train and I have no intention of explaining how that works. If you want to go with us, you have to put your hand on one of our shoulders.\"\n\nJoavan gripped Tristan's shoulder, clearly not willing to touch Daegan.\n\nSending a last telepathic message, Daegan told Tristan, <I have the place Joavan showed us in my mind. We shall link again, then teleport.>\n\n<Okay, boss.> Daegan generated power and linked to Tristan, then pushed the image into Tristan's mind.\n\nTristan mouthed the word, <Wow.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Waiting on dark to fall this far north of the equator had squeezed the last of Daegan's patience to nothing. Joavan called this barren land Shetland Islands. Daegan recalled flying over these islands long ago, thinking little about them back then. Being in the midst of summer meant lands in this part of the world managed on extremely long and tepid darkness for more than half the day.\n\nCold bit at the exposed skin on his face, neck, and ears, which bothered him little since his dragon generated heat. Squatting down on Daegan's right, Tristan had said little else since teleporting to this barren land far from any village. His wind-burnt face and red nose barely protruded from the hooded buffalo-fur cloak Daegan had provided in addition to a thick wool shirt, leather pants, and rugged boots.\n\nDaegan wore similar clothing in solidarity with Tristan.\n\nIf they were hiking or battling, the air would not be so cold, but sitting for hours allowed the chill to seep into a being's bones.\n\nTristan's bright green gaze met Daegan's, but he spoke over his shoulder to the Faetheen crouched behind them. \"How much longer before we see the Ghost Castle?\"\n\n\"It must be dark enough for the moonlight to shine on the structure.\" Joavan tightened the bulky gray scarf around his neck with glove-covered hands. By making a quick stop in his world, he'd acquired his own outfit of a coat made from the pelt of a black bear. The cloak fell to his knees above black leather pants, thick boots, and a black skull cap of soft leather. He looked ridiculous, but Daegan didn't care if he showed up naked as long as they got this task done tonight.\n\nHe owed a debt for his life and saving his dragon from dying. Once that debt was paid, he hoped to never see this Faetheen again.\n\n\"So there is definitely a building here,\" Tristan pushed, sounding just as out of patience. \"Not just a mirage, right?\"\n\nMirage? Daegan frowned at yet another strange word he assumed must mean some majikal vision.\n\nWind buffeted all three of them, blasting sand everywhere. Joavan slapped his hand over his eyes, squinting. \"Yes. The building will not seem real from where we view it. Once we are inside, you will touch stone and see the actual castle.\"\n\n\"And you believe we can just teleport in?\" Tristan's terse voice gave away his lack of belief.\n\nJoavan once again dodged a direct answer. \"We must enter from above.\"\n\nDaegan ground his back teeth every time that Faetheen sidestepped the truth.\n\nTristan quipped to Daegan, \"Is he talking about the battlements?\"\n\nDaegan smiled at the memory from days ago of visiting the castle where he'd once lived and tutoring Tristan on terms from his life thousands of centuries ago. \"Yes. More important 'tis a chance to encounter guards in that area. Ya are certain there are none, Joavan?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, yes. Do you two always ask questions so many times?\"\n\nSmirking, Tristan said, \"Only when we don't trust what we've been told.\"\n\nDaegan grinned.\n\n\"I have no idea how you two get anything done with so little faith,\" Joavan groused. \"No men guard the top of the structure. This druid has no need for the type of protection lesser nonhumans would utilize.\"\n\nTristan twisted to look back at where the Faetheen had taken a warm position behind where Daegan and Tristan's bodies blocked the wind. \"Did you just insult us? I only have a gryphon, but he's the freakin' red dragon.\"\n\nDaegan's dragon rumbled a deep, threatening sound in support of Tristan's words.\n\n\"I did not mean to insult anyone,\" Joavan quickly let everyone know. \"I am anxious to find this druid and make him pay.\"\n\nThe underlying feeling of being tricked raised its head again. Daegan's sharp tone could cut through steel. \"Make him pay in what way?\"\n\nJoavan went mute.\n\n\"I have never killed without reason, Joavan. Do not expect that or ya shall be disappointed.\"\n\n\"I did not ask you to kill anyone,\" the Faetheen muttered.\n\n\"Then we are in agreement,\" Daegan declared, shutting down any more talk of vengeance.\n\nAgain, misgivings about what Joavan had not told Daegan pushed at him. His dragon spoke silently. <Fae hides much truth. We fly into deadly storm blind.>\n\nDaegan sent back, <I agree, but I have no way to argue without seein' the trouble.>\n\n<You did not agree to keep Fae alive. We protect ours.> Ruadh always put their survival, and now Tristan's, above anything else when going into a potential conflict. Regardless of what Joavan claimed, Daegan had never known a powerful being to leave himself exposed with no additional guards.\n\nDaegan would not turn his back on Joavan unless the man forced him to walk away. Should harm come to him and Tristan, Daegan would feel no guilt over turning Ruadh loose on the Faetheen.\n\nNight finally settled across the area, though this dark gray was not as black as deep night in Atlanta.\n\nA cloud drifted across the moon.\n\nDaegan sensed tension from Tristan as they all prepared for the moon to shine down on the barren land. Moonlight peeked out from the cloud, dancing across a still-empty landscape.\n\nDaegan's stomach dropped when nothing came into view. \"'Tis not here,\" he complained.\n\n\"Wait,\" Joavan whispered sharply.\n\nTristan curled his ungloved fingers. Puffs of white clouds appeared with each slow exhale.\n\n\"There,\" Joavan murmured in a relieved voice.\n\nDaegan blinked and squinted as a castle began to waver into view. Though it resembled his da's and other castles from his past, this one was not as large.\n\nSounds whistled through the air. Soft howls.\n\nWhat could be making that noise?\n\nThe moon vanished behind a cloud again, blocking the light and hiding the castle's translucent shape.\n\nJoavan said, \"It is time to go.\"\n\n\"Teleport?\" Tristan asked.\n\n\"No. We need to move closer on foot so you can see the castle better during the next lighting.\"\n\nPushing up to go first, Joavan ran hunched over for thirty or forty feet at a time, pausing behind a boulder or wall of rock that jutted out.\n\nDaegan followed with Tristan beside him. He did not understand Jovan's reasoning. Why should they run closer when they could teleport?\n\nOnce Joavan had covered over two hundred yards, he waved Daegan and Tristan behind a large pile of rocks where he dropped to his knees breathing hard.\n\nDaegan squatted, searching for any indication of the castle.\n\nTristan asked, \"Is it always so cold here in the summer?\"\n\n\"Not this bad,\" Joavan admitted. \"This is the only area so frigid now because of the druid. The unusual drop in temperature supports keeping locals afraid to come here.\"\n\nA string of clouds passed by the moon until light glowed continuously again.\n\nThe castle image returned and wavered. The name Ghost Castle fit what he saw.\n\nJoavan put a hand on Tristan's shoulder. \"Now we teleport.\"\n\nDaegan wanted to push the Faetheen again for more details, but the suspicious being would have shared more by now if he intended to do so.\n\nTristan's bright green eyes turned on Daegan. \"You ready to go, boss?\"\n\nJoavan tensed at that question but said nothing while he stared holes into Daegan.\n\n\"Yes.\" Daegan focused hard as soon as the teleporting started. He could not risk coming out of the disorientation slowly. As soon as his feet touched the battlements, he blinked hard to clear his vision and prepared to meet the enemy.\n\nNo one greeted them.\n\nHe had been expecting Joavan to have lied just to keep moving toward the amulet.\n\nDaegan would not apologize.\n\nHe still had a feeling Joavan held back something important. \"Where to now?\"\n\nJoavan should be happy at their progress, but his eyes filled with concern. He hissed, \"Be quiet.\" He kept looking around nervous as a mouse in a cage with a cat. Did he expect to see those guards he'd sworn did not exist?\n\nA hideous screech sounded from far away.\n\nTristan froze, eyes moving from side to side.\n\nJoavan's face lost color. \"They are here.\"\n\nA giant beast flew up from the side of the castle and over their heads.\n\nIt blasted fire down across the empty land.\n\nDaegan shouted, \"'Tis a wyvern. Largest I have ever seen.\" He tossed his cloak aside, shoved off his boots, and called up Ruadh. His dragon forced a fast change, breaking bones and stretching muscles. Beside him, Tristan had shed clothes just as quickly and unleashed his gryphon. Though not as tall as Ruadh, the gryphon grew and expanded to a formidable size. Translucent scales covered gray skin from the eagle-shaped head down to the body of a lion with huge wings.\n\nRuadh opened his jaws and blasted fire fifty feet in the air, warning the wyvern. Tristan's gryphon bellowed just as loud.\n\nBefore flying off, Ruadh swung his giant head around to face a shaking Joavan. Daegan spoke through his dragon. \"Do not dare leave this spot.\"\n\nRuadh took two steps away and leaped into the air.\n\nTristan's gryphon followed, flapping hard to keep pace.\n\nThe wyvern made a big turn and leveled out, flying right at them. Similar to a dragon, this beast had only two legs and Daegan had never seen one with eyes the color of hot embers. Nor had he encountered a wyvern as large as his dragon.\n\nA second wyvern screamed from behind them.\n\nTristan spoke in Daegan's mind. <I'll take the second one. I'll let you know if I need help.>\n\nRuadh swung his big neck to look at the second wyvern.\n\nA bit smaller than the one they faced, but still larger than Tristan's gryphon and blowing fire, too. That was just as unusual.\n\nSwinging his head back to the oncoming battle, Ruadh flapped his wings with powerful strokes and made loud huffing sounds. Daegan's dragon was not tired.\n\nThat was a furious sound Ruadh often made right before ripping into an opponent.\n\nThe wyvern coming for them blasted fire.\n\nThe distance shortened with every fierce flap of wings.\n\nHeat reached Ruadh's head.\n\nDaegan's dragon would not flinch.\n\nRuadh opened his jaws and unloaded a storm of fire at the wyvern, knocking the beast straight up in the air and over on its side. They had not flown high, so the wyvern landed hard on the unyielding ground, bouncing and rolling until it slid to a stop. One wing remained outstretched and the other bent under its body.\n\nThat was simple enough.\n\n<Well done, Ruadh.> The only thing his dragon said before banking around hard was, <Gryphon.>\n\nA fist squeezed Daegan's heart at what he saw.\n\nHalfway to the castle, the second wyvern had Tristan's gryphon on the ground with blood flying.\n\nDaegan called to Tristan. <We are comin'. Can ya get up?>\n\nTristan didn't answer.\n\nRuadh flew harder, straining every muscle and roaring at the wyvern pinning Tristan's gryphon.\n\nThat wyvern rolled to the side with wings tucked before Ruadh came close enough to torch the beast.\n\nAs they flew past at a blazing speed, Tristan lay there in human form, blood everywhere and not moving.\n\nDaegan told his dragon, <We must land to see that Tristan is not dead.>\n\nRuadh released a fifty-foot explosion of fire and fury, fought to turn in a tight circle, then fanned his wings and shuddered to a hard stop close to Tristan.\n\nDaegan called again telepathically to Tristan.\n\nNo response.\n\n<Let me have the human body, Ruadh.> His dragon argued, <One wyvern lives.>\n\n<We shall shift back immediately if that one returns.> Daegan changed to his human form, but the shift had been rough. No matter how hard Ruadh fought to make it fast, they still had Imortik venom in this body.\n\nDaegan dropped down to Tristan. The minute he touched Tristan's chest, his second sat up fast, eyes wild, and yelled, \"It's a trick! The wyverns have majik.\"\n\nIn the silence, more than one set of wings flapped a rapid pace heading toward them.\n\nTwo beasts were coming in fast."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Daegan shouted, \"Are ya injured, Tristan?\"\n\n\"No.\" Tristan stood up and pointed. \"The one I fought stabbed me with a claw. Something majikal. I couldn't move or send you a message. Then it covered me with blood. If we fight them, I bet they both have that crap in their claws.\"\n\nRuadh demanded, <Shift or die.>\n\nThe wyverns had reached them and hovered above their heads, flapping slowly now and making deep cawing sounds.\n\nNaked against the cold, Tristan whispered, \"Think they're holding us in place for someone else or something worse?\" His teeth chattered.\n\n\"Possibly.\" Standing naked as well, Daegan couldn't feel his lower extremity, but he also could not expend energy clothing them. \"If we shift together or separately\u2014\"\n\nTristan finished, \"They'll c-c-catch us in a vulnerable position e-e-either way.\"\n\nRuadh pushed energy through Daegan's body for heat, but he stopped his dragon. <We must save our power, Ruadh.>\n\nDaegan hurried to find a way out of this, but his gut said Ruadh was right. They had to shift. Putting on clothes would also inhibit another shift.\n\nA loud sound boomed from the castle.\n\nYet another wyvern leaped from the wobbling image of the castle.\n\nTristan huffed out a blast of white air. \"Shit. That m-m-monster looks like the granddaddy of-f-f these things. These two are holding us ... \" He couldn't get the words out.\n\n\"For their alpha,\" Daegan finished. His teeth chattered now, too. Ice coated his eyes. Like Tristan, he used a hand to shield his groin area.\n\n\"R-r-right.\"\n\nIf not for the Imortik venom, Daegan could shift fast enough to attack those two above them. But without that blast of power, he would sacrifice his dragon.\n\nTristan's skin turned blue. \"I'm outta ideas, boss.\" His voice became sluggish and thick. \"Think it might be time for your ace in the hole?\"\n\n\"My what?\"\n\nSwinging a desperate look to Daegan with frost forming on his eyebrows and lips, Tristan uttered, \"Your mother.\"\n\nIf Daegan died here, he could save no one.\n\nBut call in a new unknown powerful player? Even he had no idea how his mother would react. He might bring death more rapidly.\n\nThe wyverns above them dropped to the ground on each side of Daegan and Tristan, blocking any escape.\n\nRuadh roared. <Teleport both. Change both.>\n\nDaegan asked Tristan, \"Can you teleport?\"\n\n\"No. I tried.\"\n\nThe monster wyvern flapped slowly. Each swipe of its wide wings swirled snow dust and brought it closer.\n\nOne of the wyverns guarding them puffed a short blast of fire when it cawed a loud happy sound to the approaching beast.\n\nRuadh roared to break free and kill them. <Imposters!>\n\nThat's when Daegan realized his dragon was correct. These were not dragons, but beings altered by majik. In his time, a wyvern would never attack a dragon.\n\nThese two had majik in their claws, but they didn't have Ruadh's ability.\n\nDeagan's dragon only needed the power they'd had since birth.\n\nRuadh had said, <Change both.> Daegan now understood what his dragon was raging about. He told Tristan, \"Link with me and turn to face the wyvern behind us so we're back-to-back.\"\n\nNo hesitation from Tristan. Daegan felt Tristan's power reach out fast for his.\n\nDaegan blasted all the force of his power back at Tristan who groaned.\n\n\"We shift as one,\" Daegan ordered. \"Now!\"\n\nRuadh needed no encouragement to force the fastest shift Daegan could recall in some time. The energy to do so came from joining with Tristan's healthier body.\n\nTristan made a pained sound amidst the loud popping of bones, but their beasts both stood in seconds.\n\nThe startled wyverns guarding them flapped backward a couple steps.\n\nThat was the moment Daegan and Tristan needed.\n\nRuadh reared back and blasted nonstop fire at the wyvern they faced.\n\nFrom the side, Daegan saw Tristan's gryphon mimic Ruadh. His gryphon torched his wyvern with more fire than Daegan had seen from the gryphon before.\n\nBoth wyverns screamed in pain and fell over in burning piles.\n\nA roar of anguish reached Daegan just before the giant wyvern bore down on Ruadh, who had leaped around to face the threat. Tristan's gryphon took advantage of the fast attack by ducking beneath a stream of fire coming their way. As the wyvern flew over, Tristan's gryphon leaped up, hitting the back half of the monster wyvern.\n\nThat sent the beast off-balance, beating its wings to stay upright.\n\nRuadh leaped into the air, flew straight up fast, then arced down.\n\nTristan's gryphon stood and made vicious sounds, wings out, beak open, prepared for the wyvern attack.\n\nDaegan called to Tristan. <Do not move or attack. Wait for us.>\n\n<Okay, boss.> To Tristan's credit, he did not even look up and kept his gryphon in a threatening stance.\n\nRuadh's roar jerked the wyvern's head around, twisting its neck to look up. Daegan's dragon wanted the enemy to know who brought death to end its days.\n\nWhen the wyvern leaped into the air, Ruadh could have burned him, but his dragon flew into battle, claws out.\n\nDaegan would not deny Ruadh his chance to vent rage and battle one-on-one.\n\nThe wyvern tried to catch Ruadh's neck. His dragon had no soft spot. The large beak slid off Ruadh's scales, then the wyvern broke loose.\n\nIt fought to fly higher. This one was wiser than the smaller wyverns still smoldering on the ground.\n\nThis one climbed and climbed, then turned to head down and catch Ruadh still flying up. It thought to shift all that weight downward fast and drive Daegan's dragon into the ground.\n\nThat might have worked if Ruadh had not fought other dragons from the time Daegan first shifted. All of those dragons had tried many strategic battle moves on his. And lost.\n\nRuadh showed his cunning by flapping even faster, flying upward to catch the wyvern by surprise. Claws out, Ruadh latched onto the wyvern wings, stealing its ability to maneuver. Still, the wyvern found places to rip open with sharp claws.\n\nBut Ruadh possessed a second set of claws and slashed the wyvern's underside, shredding the soft tissue until the beast stopped biting Ruadh.\n\nWhen the body hung heavy in Ruadh's claws, dragging them to the ground, Daegan's dragon released the wyvern and flapped slowly away to remain airborne.\n\nThey watched as the big body slammed hard, shaking the ground.\n\nTristan came into Daegan's mind. <You both okay?>\n\n<Yes. Shift back.>\n\n<Will do, but I need clothes and boots, boss.> Ruadh landed immediately and gave him the human body. Daegan bled from a few wounds, but the time Ruadh had spent flying gently after the battle allowed his dragon to heal the major wounds. Daegan could tolerate the rest.\n\nHe clothed Tristan then himself, surprised when he managed to cover both of them so quickly this time. But he still felt the hum of Tristan's energy mixed with his and running through his body.\n\nTristan ran his hands over his hair, knocking water crystals out. \"Da-yam! That was one hell of a power punch.\"\n\n\"I agree. With the Imortik venom still in my body, Ruadh and I could not have shifted so quickly had we not linked.\"\n\n\"I've never shifted that fast or had that much fire come out of my gryphon. Good thinking, boss.\"\n\n\"'Twas Ruadh's idea.\"\n\n\"No shit?\" Tristan gave him an amazed look. \"Tell Ruadh, I'll be his wingman any time he wants.\"\n\nDaegan frowned. \"Wingman?\"\n\nTristan laughed. \"It's like being your dragon's personal second-in-command.\"\n\nRuadh made a warm rumbling noise Daegan loved to hear and feel the few times it had happened. He told Tristan, \"Ruadh is honored by your offer.\"\n\n\"Awesome.\" Looking around, Tristan said, \"These two aren't dead, but they won't fly any time soon. That big one hasn't moved yet.\"\n\n\"I doubt that one is dead either as 'tis not a natural being. I believe the druid took wyverns and cooked them into these creatures with a load of majik.\" Daegan turned to face where the castle should be. \"'Tis time to unlink from ya. We shall save that move in case we need it again.\"\n\nTristan grunted at the change. \"What now?\"\n\n\"Now, I find a Faetheen and choke the truth from him.\" Daegan lifted a fist in the air. He lowered it and watched until the castle came into view again. \"Ready to teleport?\"\n\n\"Hell, yes.\" Tristan grinned."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Evalle sat on her knees next to Adrianna behind two fallen trees. She felt something on her arm and brushed at it frantically. She should be glad the demons had been emerging from this wooded area west of Atlanta where there were fewer humans, but if one more crawly thing landed on her, she was pulling out her spelled dagger to smash it.\n\nTurning a wry smile on her, Adrianna shook her head. Blond hair slicked back in a ponytail and no makeup, she still looked runway ready. \"You kill demons two at a time, race into any danger to protect your people and humans, but a tiny critter gives you a cardio workout?\"\n\nEvalle straightened the special sunglasses that hid her glowing eyes the color of a baby lizard, which would give away their location this time of night. She muttered under her breath and swatted something on her neck. \"I hate the great outdoors. Give me city backstreets in the darkest night any time. This place has too many critters with too many legs.\"\n\n\"What's wrong, ladies?\" Isak Nyght's voice rumbled quietly in their comm gear.\n\nBefore her witch friend could bust her, Evalle said, \"Nothing, Isak. Anything over your way?\"\n\nIsak led a badass bunch of human black ops team with incredible toys, some of which could take down nonhumans. The first time Evalle met Isak, they were both after the same demon. He took an interest in pursuing her, but Storm had laid claim to her heart. Isak hadn't been all that interested when he found out she was not human.\n\n\"Nothing to report. In fact, it feels too quiet,\" he replied. \"My men just dropped off Reese and Casper near your area. They're approaching from the south. Be ready.\"\n\n\"We're on it,\" Evalle replied.\n\nA long sigh filled her ear with the tiny comm unit. \"You should say copy that, so we know exactly what you mean.\"\n\nShe pulled her lips back and pretended she had Isak's throat in her hands shaking him.\n\nAdrianna snorted a laugh, then crab-walked over to a huge oak tree where she stood, stretching her neck and shoulders.\n\nEvalle's super hearing picked up the sound of approaching footsteps. She turned to Adrianna who immediately lowered her hands, ready to cover their backs.\n\nReese emerged first, lifting a hand to wave.\n\nEvalle lifted her chin in acknowledgment.\n\nCasper and Reese dropped to their knees next to Evalle. Reese looked right at home in this setting with short boots, a black T-shirt, and jeans that Evalle had picked up from Reese's apartment. She'd shoved her auburn hair out of the way with a green headband.\n\nCasper always had the look of a cowboy just off the range regardless if he wore jeans with chaps or a tuxedo. He had an easy smile until someone crossed him and enough muscle to back it up. He pulled out a comm unit and handed it to Reese.\n\nShe frowned and kept her hands to herself. \"I suck at using that stuff.\"\n\n\"We need to be able to talk to you, cupcake,\" Casper pressed, still offering the set.\n\nReese made a pfft sound. \"Okay, but if I lose your toy, I don't want to have to buy it.\"\n\nAs she stuck the part in her ear, Isak's voice came through everyone's comm. \"Then don't lose it. I had these communication devices made special for our nonhuman partners so we don't blow out anyone's ears.\"\n\nShe made a face at no one and stuck her tongue out. \"Okay, okay. They're expensive.\"\n\nEvalle felt the need to share what a headache Isak could be. \"He wants radio talk, Reese.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Reese changed her tone to sound like a trucker yammering on a radio. \"Ten four, good buddy.\"\n\nIsak grumbled something about it being impossible to teach them proper radio dialogue.\n\nLaughing, Evalle covered her mouth to keep quiet, but she'd take this ragtag group of unprofessional supernatural fighters any day. She reached up and touched a button on her comm, serious again. \"Okay, he's off our circuit right now.\"\n\nReese's eyebrows lifted. \"You mean you can dial him out whenever you want?\"\n\n\"Yep, but we need to be in touch. Isak brought the firepower today.\"\n\n\"He brings it every day,\" Adrianna added, joining the group. \"Hi, Casper. Haven't seen you in a while.\"\n\n\"Ah, hell, I was out west helpin' with a little ol' troll problem,\" he drawled in the southern accent he dialed up when he needed it.\n\nEvalle gave one of her favorite Belador allies a fist bump. \"Good to have you back, cowboy.\"\n\nHe winked, the rogue. She gave him a you-know-better look, but Casper was all talk with her. He'd never seriously try to poach another man's woman. She'd known him for a while, long enough to realize he could flip the switch on that Texas drawl to sound like someone else if that's what the mission called for. He also shared his body with a highland warrior from the fifteenth century after lightning struck him while at an old castle in Scotland.\n\nReese had been grinning at them, but her eyes widened and her smile flattened. \"Heads up, everyone. I have energy waking up inside me.\"\n\n\"Comm going wide again.\" Evalle touched hers and informed Isak of what Reese had said.\n\n\"Can she give us an idea of direction?\" Isak asked.\n\nAll business now, Reese said, \"If we came in from the south, then I'm sensing demon energy northwest of me. I'd call it ten o'clock from our position.\"\n\n\"Copy that,\" Isak replied. \"We'll head your way and find a closer backup point.\"\n\nEvalle's jaw dropped at how Reese nailed the direction of potential demons. When Reese smirked, Evalle remembered what she needed to find out. \"Uh, did you get in touch with Quinn?\"\n\n\"Nope. He'll find me when he slows down for a minute.\" She shook her head at Evalle, as in don't go there.\n\nEvalle hated this moment. She hunted demons by herself and with Storm just fine, but the responsibility of other people had her on edge. She'd never realized how much pressure Tzader had carried when he'd been the North American Belador Maistir and then when Quinn took over.\n\nShe would never fill their shoes.\n\nThe job of keeping Quinn's woman safe might kill her, but Evalle would not allow a demon to drain Reese of her energy. \"Okay, listen up, team. Reese and I will take that side.\" She swept her hand from eight-to-ten o'clock. \"Adrianna and Casper, you watch our backs, because Isak and his team should be coming from over there, around three-to-five o'clock.\"\n\n\"Look at you talking operational and all,\" Adrianna teased.\n\n\"Don't push it, witch.\" Evalle checked her spelled dagger sitting in the sheath right where it should be. She used to never think twice about it, but this whole interim Maistir gig was making her paranoid she'd slip up and someone would die. She had to keep Reese safe even if the woman was a fearless demon killer, which only added to her stress.\n\nWhere the hell was Quinn?\n\nReese should be his problem.\n\nEvalle resorted to hand signals since she had no Beladors in this group. She'd sent a Belador with Isak just in case they lost electronic communication and she had to reach out telepathically.\n\nAs she moved to her left, Reese followed close behind and whispered, \"Where do you think the demons are coming from?\"\n\n\"Not sure, but a Belador team took down two demons in separate places little over a mile from here.\"\n\n\"Did Storm track them?\"\n\nEvalle's Skinwalker mate and new husband was known for his ability to track nonhumans as well as natural beings. She shook her head and kept easing around. \"Storm is with another team in the city hunting demons there, so Adrianna and I tracked the two taken down in this area. Isak's intel indicates there's a well around here. I'm sort of wondering if they're being pulled out of that hole.\"\n\n\"Not to discount your theory, Evalle, but demons don't just come up out of the ground. Some being creates them.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Evalle scowled, dropping behind cover at a new spot. What the hell? She was winging this crap.\n\n\"Not criticizing you. I know you've killed your share of them.\" Reese quieted and knelt next to Evalle. \"Just saying I've met more demons than most. They come in all shapes and sizes, but finding the origin isn't impossible.\"\n\n\"No insult taken.\" Evalle stretched her neck then to search around them. At the odd silence, she flashed a look at Reese, noting the tight pull of her mouth. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"We're close.\" Reese stared hard straight ahead of them and nodded. \"There.\"\n\nThat's when Evalle squinted, realizing the dark area she'd scanned past a moment ago was actually a deep fifty-yard ally through the trees and about fifteen feet wide. She couldn't wrap her head around weather and time creating that tunnel. Thick brush and vines grew up each side.\n\nNothing natural about any of that.\n\nWhat had caused a tunnel to form out here in the woods?\n\nThe first demon to appear far back in the dark tunnel had bright red eyes and ivory fangs. She could handle that without too much trouble. It probably went a buck-eighty in weight. Its head swung from side to side, exposing a single horn sticking out the back like a bone ponytail. His skin was dark as a walnut with orange patches.\n\n\"We can take him,\" Evalle murmured.\n\n\"He's not the only problem,\" Reese said on a long exhale.\n\nEvalle swung her head to Reese whose face had lost a shade of color. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nIsak called into Evalle's ear, \"Give me a sit rep!\"\n\n\"What?\" Evalle hated this radio mumbo jumbo.\n\nReese explained, \"Situation report. I learned the lingo from listening to Navy SEALs at night when I hunted demons in San Diego.\" She told Isak, \"We're in the ten-to-eight position. One tango coming, but I'm pretty sure we have more on the way. Many more.\"\n\nSnapping her attention back to the tunnel, Evalle's skin chilled at the small demon army marching out of the black hole at the back of the tunnel.\n\nTwo of them had to go over ten feet. Shit.\n\nIsak said, \"Moving around to intercept.\"\n\nReese pulled the earpiece out and shoved it in her pocket.\n\n\"What are you doing, Reese?\"\n\n\"I'm not getting blood on his gadget and someone talking in my ear will distract me. You should back up about twenty feet to catch anything I miss.\" Reese stood and started rolling one hand around the other one.\n\n\"Oh, hell no.\" Evalle lifted her hands to use kinetic power. She took in Reese making an invisible ball of glowing dough. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Trying to make smaller energy balls. I used too much last time and would have been attacked if you and Adrianna hadn't shown up.\"\n\nAs if waving a bloody steak at a hungry wolf, the first demon zeroed in on Reese.\n\n\"Move away,\" she ordered Evalle.\n\nEvalle had no time to argue something she wasn't going to do. \"Shut up.\"\n\n\"Is this about me and Quinn?\" Reese slashed a quick look of annoyance at Evalle.\n\n\"Yes, dammit. You, Quinn, and the baby. So, either get out of here or shut up and kill demons. I am not leaving you here alone and that's about me facing my best friend.\"\n\nThree demons started running. Two more had finally caught the scent of Reese's demon energy and picked up their pace. The last one was larger and lumbered along.\n\nWhen the first demon screeched and launched itself at Evalle, she shoved her hands up and smacked it with a kinetic blast.\n\nThat one went flying over the heads of the next two and slammed into the pack behind them.\n\nReese said, \"Clear the wall. I'm ready.\"\n\nEvalle dropped the kinetic barrier.\n\nReese side-armed a throw at the demon on the right coming at her. Her strike burst a hole in the demon, which exploded into flames before the body turned to ash.\n\nEvalle yanked out her spelled blade, jumped up on the rock they stood behind, then went airborne, shoving her free hand down to employ kinetics to flip her in the air. She landed behind the demon still heading for Reese. In two steps, she shoved her dagger through the top neck bone and the skull.\n\nThe demon's head flopped to the side.\n\nShe yanked the blade out and finished the cut.\n\n\"Watch your back,\" Reese called out.\n\nEvalle spun, flipping the dagger to a better handhold as she did. Four demons were coming like a spooked herd of buffalo.\n\nReese appeared next to her, hands balling again.\n\n\"Get back, Reese.\"\n\n\"No. We've got this.\"\n\nEvalle pushed up a kinetic wall, stopping the next two demons to reach them. The majority of that bunch were running so close, they all slammed into each other, falling back. Then one jumped up and attacked another demon, ripping a horn off its head.\n\n\"Hey, that'll work,\" Evalle said, feeling positive about all this for the first time.\n\n\"Drop the shield when I tell you, Evalle.\"\n\n\"Are you nuts?\" Evalle ignored Reese and kept shoving the kinetic wall as she headed into the tunnel.\n\nDemons ran into each other, beating the field of energy they couldn't see and gnashing at each other. One clawed the face off another one.\n\nReese ran up beside her. \"I need the wall down so I can throw a strike.\"\n\nThat sounded like an exceptionally bad idea. Evalle kept forcing her wall forward. \"No, Reese. You don't know how many you can take out at one time, do you?\"\n\n\"A lot more if you'll drop the damn wall.\"\n\n\"Okay, fine. Ready?\" Evalle pressed the demons deeper into the dark hole.\n\n\"Now!\" Reese shouted.\n\nWhen the invisible barrier ten feet in front of them vanished, piled up demons fell forward.\n\nReese rolled a fire ball of energy like a pro bowler.\n\nThe power struck the first two and flashed across their bodies. They screamed and burst into flames that jumped across the pack with the demons so tight. In a matter of seconds, the fire turned all of them into ash.\n\nReese lifted her fingers in the shape of a pretend gun and blew at the tip of her index finger.\n\n\"You're a bucket of laughs right now.\" Evalle would make Quinn pay for not being here to deal with his baby momma if he dared to question why she'd pulled down a kinetic field protecting Reese.\n\n\"Lighten up, Evalle. It's bound to get worse before it gets better.\"\n\n\"That's just what I want to hear.\" Taking the lead, Evalle walked over the piles of ashes that stirred beneath her feet. She'd lived her life in the night and didn't fear the dark, but a buzz racing over her skin warned she headed into an unfamiliar danger.\n\nReese whispered in a cautious voice, \"Uh, we need to go slow. My internal power pack is generating energy. We're getting close to demons again.\"\n\nThe tunnel turned to the right and ambient light sifting from a partial moon through the trees gave Evalle a moment of relief. At least she'd be able to see what they faced and possibly have more room to function.\n\nIsak's voice floated softly into her ear. \"Where are you, Evalle? We don't see you where I expected.\"\n\nShe explained quickly about the demons they took down and how she'd gone about seventy yards and they were now turning in the direction he had been before. \"Back track and meet us there.\"\n\n\"Copy that.\"\n\nReese snagged the back of Evalle's shirt.\n\nEvalle stopped. \"What?\"\n\n\"This energy is acting different. Almost like it's going haywire. I don't know what that means.\"\n\n\"Just stay behind me, Reese. I know you don't like being sidelined, but I'm responsible for this entire team and I need you to work with me.\"\n\n\"I hear ya. Keep going. I'll be right here.\"\n\nLifting her hands to activate another kinetic wall ahead of them, Evalle eased out of the tunnel and into the semi-lit area filled with waist-high fog. That was odd. She hadn't seen fog any other place out here since arriving.\n\nWere they close to some river?\n\nEven so, wasn't it too hot for a fog or mist? She took in everything from one side to the other. Nothing. She continued going forward until both of them were out of the dark tunnel.\n\nSomething, or someone, had sent demons into that tunnel.\n\nWhile standing in one spot, she turned in a circle and spoke softly. \"Keep your back to mine so we can cover all sides.\"\n\nReese spoke softly. \"I'm on it.\"\n\nLight brightened the fog to the right of the tunnel opening.\n\nAs if pumping air into a deflated body, a demon began to rise out of the mist and kept going until it stood ten feet tall. Two spiked horns stuck out from mangled black hair covering a fat head. Its eyes were wide and narrow as if it could only squint, but a red glow seeped out the opening. That one had no neck and a chest as wide as a car hood.\n\n\"We got a big one.\" Evalle called up more power and enlarged her kinetic field to keep it from jumping over the wall. That was assuming this one couldn't leap tall buildings in a single bound.\n\nStepping over to stand beside Evalle, Reese began rolling her hands around again. \"I can pull up enough energy to take one down.\"\n\n\"We should wait on Isak and his team.\"\n\n\"This fog makes me wonder if they can find us. They should have been here by now.\"\n\nShit. Evalle couldn't argue her point. In fact, neither Isak nor Adrianna had said a word through the comm unit since Evalle and Reese stepped into this heavy mist.\n\nMonster demon started for them and the mist parted as if ordered. Giant hands tipped in claws as long as her fingers hung from massive arms.\n\n\"I'm ready, Evalle.\" Reese's ball of energy glowed in a crackling fireball.\n\nEvalle's heart slammed her chest. She could not let this thing get to Reese or her unborn baby. \"I will give you five seconds then the kinetic wall goes back up.\"\n\n\"That's not long enough. I need time to choose the best moment to strike.\"\n\n\"That's all you're getting!\" Evalle snarled.\n\n\"If you raise the wall too soon, the fire will hit us.\"\n\nRaising balled fists, the demon let out a hideous shriek.\n\n\"Now, dammit!\" Reese yelled.\n\nEvalle slammed her hands toward the ground, yanking her kinetic power down. No fireball shot from her sidekick to the demon. \"Reese?\"\n\nMore spinning of hands.\n\nThe demon ran at them with heavy steps that shook the ground.\n\n\"Reese!\"\n\nEvalle's sidekick stepped forward as the monster closed to six feet away and grinned, showing off its jagged fangs."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Evalle cursed and called up her spelled dagger.\n\nReese spun more power as the demon came in hot and went airborne to tackle her. At the last second, she shoved that fiery ball of energy at its chest and dove to the side, dodging sharp claws.\n\nBut the demon slapped a hand backward at her. Then flames engulfed the massive form right before it hit the ground and plowed up dirt.\n\nSilence followed suddenly when everything stilled.\n\nReleasing a pent-up breath, Evalle shook her head. How had Tzader and Quinn handled the role of Maistir without losing their minds?\n\nReese let out a yelp of pain and grabbed her arm.\n\n\"Let me see.\" Evalle stayed where she was and kept an eye on the burning demon still flipping around and making odd noises.\n\nWhen Reese reached Evalle, she turned to the side and uncovered her upper arm. The claw had dragged a deep slash six inches long.\n\n\"Hell, Reese. That's bad, but it could have been far worse if the demon had gotten more than a single claw on you. Keep watch while I bind this.\" Evalle used her dagger to cut the bottom of her cotton shirt and ripped a strip she used to wrap the wound mainly to pull the skin together. Blood still oozed from the cut. Reese should be able to heal this.\n\nThe writhing demon burned bright and fast, leaving a big pile of ashes. A stench smelling like sewage hung in the air.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Reese croaked out, holding her arm again.\n\nEvalle spoke into her comm unit. \"Isak? Adrianna? Anyone on our team hear me?\"\n\nNot one person replied.\n\n\"I hear you.\"\n\nEvalle jerked around at a man's voice coming from the direction where the demon had appeared. She groaned. \"Who the hell is that?\"\n\nGrimacing in pain, Reese whispered, \"I don't know, but my energy became normal when the demon appeared. Now it's all jacked again. He must be the reason.\"\n\nNot the most encouraging news.\n\nLifting her kinetic field into place once more, Evalle worried she'd used too much power and her wall might fail. Speaking out of the side of her mouth, she asked, \"Have you got any more mojo?\"\n\n\"No. That demon was so large, I wasn't sure I had enough to throw it and have the same result. That's why I had to hit him with it when he was close.\"\n\nFog moved around the man now silhouetted with a bright glow at his back. He might be an inch or two over six feet. When he moved forward, the fog swirled around him like a pet anxious for attention. The mist glowed as it came into contact with him, illuminating the alabaster skin on his face. Not white like a human, but white as cadaver bones. His shoulder-length hair and eyebrows were silver, but his eyes were a dark blue, almost black. He had peach-colored thin lips as if someone had used a crayon on a black and white photo to give it color.\n\nHe only had eyes for Reese.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Evalle called out, kinetic shield in place.\n\n\"I am I-zubrrali.\"\n\nEvalle shrugged in Reese's direction. \"Not ringing a bell for me. What about you?\"\n\n\"Nope.\" Reese raised her voice. \"Your reputation must not precede you. We've never heard of you.\"\n\nHe smiled, a weird looking expression as if he had to affect it. His voice held awe. \"I did not believe it was true, but there you stand.\"\n\nThat smooth, yet creepy, voice lifted hairs on Evalle's arms. His tone could lull a prey into believing he was the most reasonable person around as he lifted a blade to slit your throat.\n\nReese quipped, \"Let me guess. You're a demon maker and you found out I've been breaking your toys. You should keep your distance. I'm not in a good mood after that last piece of shit scratched me.\"\n\nEvalle murmured an atta-girl at Reese while keeping her attention locked on whatever being they faced as he walked slowly toward them. He showed no concern of ending up injured.\n\nFine by Evalle. She wouldn't hesitate to do the injuring.\n\nHe stopped his advance thirty feet out and put his hands in the pockets of his silver slacks. He wore a matching tunic with a mandarin collar. The loose material reminded her of silk. If he weren't so strange looking, he might be attractive in a creepy way.\n\n\"Is it true?\" he asked Reese, still ignoring Evalle.\n\n\"Is what true, dickhead?\"\n\n\"That you are pregnant.\"\n\nSomething just changed in this game. Evalle risked a quick glance at Reese who had stalled with a dumbfounded look covering her face.\n\nA flash of power erupted on the far left behind him.\n\nI-zubrrali turned casually at what sounded like Isak's demon blasters shooting into the fog.\n\nWhy would Isak take that risk to shoot blindly when she and Reese were in here?\n\n\"Who. Are. You?\" Reese demanded in a shaky voice.\n\nHe turned to her, cocked his head, and grinned. \"You should ask Ketche.\" Then he vanished along with the mist.\n\nReese released her arm and her jaw dropped.\n\nThe sound of male voices shouting as they headed in from the left surprised Evalle. She'd expected Isak to enter from the right. \"Here comes the calvary, Reese. Is the comm working now, Isak?\"\n\n\"That shooting wasn't us. Get out of there, Evalle!\" Isak shouted.\n\nSix armed men stalked into the now clear area with weapons lifted in Evalle and Reese's direction.\n\nEvalle yelled, \"Look out!\" as they fired.\n\nShe dove to the left and Reese leaped the other way.\n\nThose blasters sounded like the ones Isak's men used to decimate demons.\n\nSpinning back to her feet, Evalle shoved up a kinetic wall, stopping the second round of fire. \"Stop, you idiots!\"\n\n\"Shut up, nonhuman.\"\n\nShe knew where she stood. Something to kill as easily as a demon.\n\nReese's jaw muscles flexed with gritting her teeth. She lifted her bad arm and started balling up energy, but not much.\n\nPower struck Evalle's kinetic field, driving her back a step. \"You don't have power and we can't harm a human, Reese.\"\n\n\"I'm going to try to hit their weapons.\"\n\nIsak's voice rang out in Evalle's comm. \"Fire!\"\n\nBullets rattled the air ahead of the Nyght team emerging from the forest on her right. His men were shooting the unknown humans attacking.\n\n\"No!\" Evalle yelled for everyone with a comm unit. \"They're humans.\"\n\nMen on the left jerked backward, falling in a pile and shouting in pain. The weapons dropped from their hands as if their muscles didn't work.\n\nShe shut down her kinetic shield. \"Don't kill them, Isak!\"\n\nReese muttered, \"What a shit show.\"\n\nIsak barged into the clearing and shouted, \"Everyone stand down.\"\n\n\"Little freaking late for that,\" Evalle complained, walking over to meet him.\n\n\"They're not dead, Evalle. Those were rubber bullets. Swapping ammo delayed us, but we couldn't use the stun charge on our demon blasters. That might have given some of these men a heart attack.\"\n\nShe watched the attackers in question as two of them struggled to their feet. One held an arm against his chest and the other one limped.\n\n\"If the bullets weren't real, why do they look hurt?\" she asked softly.\n\nIsak snorted. \"Rubber bullets hurt like a mother and sometimes break bones. We intentionally avoided center mass. We aimed for their limbs.\" He lifted his voice in the direction of the two men standing. \"Who's in charge?\"\n\n\"I am,\" the first man with sandy-blond hair and beard answered. Probably in his thirties and definitely fit, he wore a dark-blue uniform and black boots. No insignias, nothing to identify this team.\n\nIsak lowered his handgun, which looked as if it belonged in a science fiction movie. \"I'm Isak Nyght of Nyght Armory. Identify yourself.\"\n\n\"Pass.\"\n\nAdrianna and Casper came running into the scene, stopping short. Evalle angled her head in Isak's direction to indicate he had the floor.\n\nAdrianna nodded.\n\n\"Why can't you reveal who you work for?\" Isak asked, his tone wrapped in suspicion.\n\n\"Because they follow my orders,\" a new man replied as he emerged from behind what Evalle assumed were his soldiers. He walked past all of them, not even pausing to check on their injuries. But he did take a position standing between his men and Isak. Beefy and taller than Isak, who towered over the rest of the men present, the stranger had dark wavy hair, short on the sides, and teak-brown skin. His nose and mouth reminded Evalle of someone Hawaiian or Polynesian. Samoan? Maybe.\n\nHe wore dark pants and a light-blue collared shirt tucked in. Everything natural in appearance, but he reeked of power.\n\nShe had no way to let Isak know, but one look at Adrianna's narrowed gaze told Evalle her witch friend knew and stood ready to protect their team.\n\nIsak repeated his original question. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I am Palaki and these are my men you have harmed.\"\n\nIsak had so much swagger he even spoke with it. \"They were shooting at these two women.\"\n\nThe sandy-blond-haired guy said, \"We killed two demons that came out of a fog right here. It disappeared by the time we stepped in and found those nonhumans.\"\n\nIsak asked, \"How did you determine they were nonhumans?\"\n\nEvalle smirked at the strange soldier.\n\nHe stalled a second then pointed at Evalle. \"That one used her powers.\"\n\n\"Not until you tried to kill us,\" she countered, glad she'd worn her sunglasses today or her bright green eyes would have marked her immediately.\n\nScoffing, Isak said, \"Who trained this bunch? They shot at two women they assumed were nonhumans.\" Not giving any of them a chance to come up with more excuses, Isak directed his words at Palaki. \"Regardless of what brought your men here, I stepped in to prevent them from killing these women.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHair stood on Evalle's neck and arms at the cold question. \"Why would you try to kill us when we did nothing to you?\"\n\nPalaki shifted his cool gray gaze at her. \"Because neither of you are human. You have no place in this world.\"\n\nShe gave him a nasty smile in return. \"Oh, really? In that case, neither do you. In fact, just what exactly are you?\"\n\nIsak flicked a tiny glance her way but showed no reaction.\n\nPalaki had no words to return. It was as if he thought animals were barking at him.\n\nReese snarled, \"We were out here killing demons. What were your men out here to do?\"\n\n\"Kill any nonhuman,\" Palaki answered without a care.\n\nAdrianna stepped forward. \"You're what? One of Queen Maeve's Scath Force warlocks? Or some crazy demigod who wants to rule the world alone?\"\n\n\"I am a wizard who should not be tested.\" That gray gaze iced over. He shifted it to Isak. \"You are human. Why are you helping these beings?\"\n\nEvalle watched Adrianna's reaction to his answer. Isak and Adrianna had been an item until Isak's mother was captured by preternaturals. He'd been so rattled by her kidnapping, he walked away from all of his nonhuman friends. Now he wanted back in, but Isak had hurt Adrianna deeply and she'd shut her heart to him.\n\nOffering a smile that carried a warning, Isak said, \"My men and I are partners with the supernaturals protecting humans. We don't kill indiscriminately, not even humans who attack a being without reason.\"\n\nPalaki remained still as if thinking. \"This is the only warning you and your partners will receive. I am tired of the damage caused by reckless nonhumans. Now one has released Imortiks. I intend to rid the world of nonhuman problems.\"\n\nEvalle interjected, \"That would be great if you worked with us and didn't attack our people. You're a hypocrite and have no more value than any other nonhuman standing here. We're not monsters like those demons. I'm a Belador\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what you are, Alterant.\"\n\nAs if he could insult her? She'd been insulted and beaten down by the best, starting with family as a child. She'd risen out of every flame thrown at her to be where she stood today.\n\n\"Yes, I am an Alterant gryphon of the Beladors.\" She enjoyed the flicker of surprise in Palaki's face when she added gryphon. He didn't know as much as he thought. \"I'm also the Maistir over North America right now.\"\n\nStill hard for her to say that with a straight face.\n\n\"Damn right,\" echoed around her team, giving Evalle a shot of support she appreciated.\n\nShe would not let up. \"Beladors have been protecting humans for thousands of years. Where were you and your human team all that time? Oh, wait, let me guess. Sitting on the sidelines until you got your feathers ruffled.\"\n\nPalaki developed a tick at his eye. \"I have watched from afar, not interfering with the human world. Your presence alone has altered this world.\"\n\n\"For the good,\" Isak stated firmly. \"If your men draw down on any of our people, human and nonhuman partners, without reason, they should be prepared for more than rubber bullets next time.\"\n\nPalaki countered, \"You should consider yourself warned that being human will not protect you if you stand with nonhumans.\" With that, he turned to his men and started issuing directions to help the ones still down. He must have used majik, because even the worst one injured got to his feet and walked away.\n\nAdrianna stepped over to Reese. \"Do you need help healing?\"\n\n\"No, thanks. The wound is already closing up. I just needed some time for my energy to burn off the crap from that demon.\"\n\nEvalle swiped sweat off her face and told Isak, \"They're gonna be a problem. We'll have to up the size of our teams just to watch our own backs.\"\n\n\"I know. I'll add another team to work on keeping Palaki and his people under surveillance. I need to know anything your people can tell me about him. Hopefully, we'll have enough resources between us to send your people support when we have a tip Palaki's men are headed your way.\" He twisted, looking over at Adrianna and Reese.\n\nMostly Adrianna.\n\nEvalle felt bad for Isak, but she also wanted to smack him for hurting Adrianna. \"Okay, team, let's pack up and get out of here.\"\n\nCasper had been standing to the side with arms crossed over his chest. \"What about the demons?\"\n\nEvalle murmured, \"We know where they're coming from.\"\n\n\"What?\" Adrianna and Isak asked together. Their gazes danced back and forth at each other while trying not to connect.\n\nReese frowned at Evalle.\n\nIn the stilted silence, Isak ordered his men to head back to their vehicles.\n\nEvalle hated this Maistir gig more by the minute, but she had a duty just like everyone else. Quinn needed her help. He'd taken a load off of her by insuring Beladors and their allies patrolling this part of the country were as safe as possible. Until he could return to full Maistir duties, she had to buck up and do her part.\n\nThat meant not blurting out she knew the source producing demons before talking to Reese first.\n\nIsak would call that a debrief.\n\nPoor Reese had so much on her as it was and a new load of mental turmoil just trying to figure out who that weird guy was and how he knew her.\n\nEvalle owned up to her mistake. \"Sorry, Reese, sometimes shit comes out of my mouth.\"\n\n\"Not your fault, Evalle. I just need some time to process all of this.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Adrianna asked, stepping over to them.\n\nReese growled like a bear in hibernation being awakened. \"I think I know who is creating demons.\"\n\nEyebrows shooting up, Evalle asked, \"You do? Who is that being?\"\n\n\"Pretty sure it's my father.\"\n\nEvalle's stomach squeezed into a ball and dropped. \"Reese!\"\n\nEveryone stopped talking and stared.\n\nReese looked up slowly, face pale with rage. \"I will kill him. Don't get in my way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Brittle cold wind buffeted Daegan and Tristan while they waited for the moon to illuminate the castle again.\n\nDaegan had suspected Joavan hid details, but the slippery Faetheen had set them up. His father had warned him to avoid the Fae, any type of Fae, but the supernatural world did not always allow for simple choices.\n\n\"I don't see it, boss.\" Tristan shoved the fur hood off his head. His skin had color again.\n\nDaegan should leave, but he did not want Joavan showing up when he least needed that headache and he couldn't risk losing the grimoire box.\n\nNo, he would find Joavan and settle this now.\n\nThe translucent castle shape waved into view.\n\nDaegan nodded. \"Teleport us, Tristan.\"\n\nIn seconds, Daegan's boots stood upon the hard floor of the battlement once again. He swung around, checking for any unexpected attack.\n\nTristan arrived at the same time and twisted to search as well. He paused and stared out at the dark landscape they'd just left. \"See what I'm seeing?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Daegan had noticed the missing wyverns immediately. He also noticed what was missing from where they stood.\n\nNo Faetheen waited.\n\nDaegan roared, \"Joavan!\"\n\nThe Faetheen appeared. \"What?\" he hissed. \"Do you have to yell?\"\n\n\"Where were ya?\" The battle Daegan had just survived deepened his voice into a rough guttural sound intended to warn any who crossed him.\n\nJoavan lost his snippy attitude. \"I was close by.\"\n\n\"I told ya not to move from that spot.\"\n\nSounding impatient and irritable, Joavan looked away then back. \"Why are you upset? I would only have gotten in the way. I was very close, on the other side of the veil between our worlds.\" He huffed out a grumbling sound. \"I do not fight dragons and wyverns. That's why you are here.\"\n\nFinally, a sliver of the truth from this being.\n\nTristan stepped up beside Daegan, just as bruised and cut, but his second remained silent.\n\nShaking his head, Daegan told Joavan, \"No. I am here to retrieve an amulet. Ya said nothin' about any flyin' beasts.\"\n\n\"I had no doubt you would be powerful enough to handle yourself against any obstacle.\"\n\nThe miserable cur had known the whole time that Daegan and Tristan would face fierce threats. \"I could leave now and owe ya nothin', Joavan.\"\n\nThe Faetheen's eyes flared with anger but fear too. \"You would be breaking your word,\" he argued in a weak tone, which admitted fault as much as his actions.\n\n\"Ya lied to me outright when I asked ya about guards. In our world, that breaks a deal. Had I lost Tristan, ya would be takin' your last breath.\"\n\nTense silence dropped hard between them.\n\nJoavan held his hands up with palms out. He dropped his head once in agreement. \"You are right. I should have told you there was a chance, only a chance, we would run into some barrier.\"\n\n\"'Twas Tristan and I, who fought those beasts, not ya. Why would ya hold back information and put us in danger?\"\n\n\"This won't sound good, but it's the truth. I feared you would not come at all.\"\n\nTristan blew out a stream of air and ran his fingers through his hair. \"What's so important about this amulet to risk our lives? And don't give us the crap you've been spewing.\"\n\nDaegan sent a silent message to Tristan. <'Tis the right question. I had been willin' to do my part and repay him for savin' my life, but I shall not continue without good reason.>\n\nJoavan's frown of despair said he knew he was caught and had no chance of going one step farther without coming clean. Jaw muscles flexed in his cheek. \"Our people are all Fae with mixed blood, outcasts. But it is possible to be a pariah among even them. I am my mother's bastard child. I should not be allowed to enter the Faetheen world, but when she agreed to mate with the king she would only do so if he claimed me as part of his court. I had to work to earn my place, which is right below his two blood sons by my mother. I overheard my half-brothers plotting to kill the king and take over. I could tell no one. Who would accept my word? I would have humiliated my mother.\"\n\nTristan's face revealed no change from the stony expression he'd held since Joavan returned. He glanced at Daegan then back at Joavan. His second understood the power of silence to force another to keep talking until the truth tumbled out by accident.\n\nWith a quick look at Daegan and Tristan, Joavan seemed disappointed no one commented. \"Though younger than me, my half-brothers enjoy their resemblance to the king and hate me. They hate whenever I'm included in a discussion or decision. I began watching my back two years ago when I started experiencing accidents. I know they were behind it, but they used the subtle attacks to claim I was not capable of the position I'd been given. I had no idea they were setting me up for something far worse. The amulet was stolen on my watch.\"\n\n\"You were the only person guarding it at the time?\" Tristan inquired.\n\n\"Not exactly. I was in charge of the guards who protect the king and queen as well as the amulet. The night the amulet went missing, I received a message my sister was ill. When I arrived, she could barely speak, and my mother was not there for her only daughter. I called for healers and sent word to the queen. The amulet was stolen while I was gone. The guards on duty had been killed. My half-brothers accused me of being an accomplice to the thief, claiming I might even have poisoned my sister. They told their father he was wrong to trust me, that I intended to claim the kingdom, maybe kill the king and queen. I could not be at my sister's burial. I have ways to enter and leave, but I wish to clear my name.\"\n\nJoavan took a moment, staring in the distance. \"No one will come near me and I am unable to reach my mother.\" His smile had a bitter twist. \"I have been given a deadline to return the amulet.\"\n\n\"What is this deadline?\"\n\nShaking his head, Joavan said, \"I will not give you more ammunition to use against me. I will only say the time frame is not long and narrowing by the day. If I fail to return the amulet in that time and prove my innocence, the window of moving between this world and mine will close and I will be stuck here for a year, if not forever.\"\n\n\"'Tis not so bad in this world. Ya might have fewer enemies,\" Daegan pointed out.\n\nJoavan huffed out a derisive laugh. \"I am able to survive during a short wait to return to my world again as a respected member, but if I fail to deliver the amulet, the king will officially cast me out. My power will no longer be tethered to my home realm. Without that, I will slowly weaken and be at the mercy of my enemies as I wither.\"\n\nDaegan had wanted to strangle Joavan, but without Tristan's aid here and others back home, Daegan could be in a similar situation.\n\nStill, that did not pardon Joavan's reckless actions by withholding pertinent information.\n\nTristan crossed his arms and waited on Daegan's decision.\n\nJoavan watched both of them for a bloated moment. He shook his head as if disappointed. \"I have told you the truth. All you have to do is teleport away and I will end up in this world with no support. I cannot regain the amulet on my own.\"\n\nTristan asked Daegan telepathically, <What do you think, boss?>\n\n<To be honest, I wish to rattle Joavan's bones, but I also want to pay my debt. What about ya?> A mild smirk touched Tristan's lips. <I'm in for whatever you want to do.>\n\nJoavan had flicked his gaze from Daegan to Tristan and back to Daegan, perhaps realizing they spoke mind-to-mind.\n\nDrawing in a slow icy breath, Daegan said, \"Here is my offer. Lie to me again, even a lie by omission, and we shall leave ya to face any consequences alone.\"\n\nJoavan nodded. \"The truth only.\"\n\n\"Do ya expect any more barriers, as ya call them?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Before you yell at me, I did think something would come out when we arrived, but I had no idea it would be wyverns. Ainvar knows we are here by now. I do not expect him to open a door and invite us in at this point.\"\n\n\"Just how do we get to the druid?\" Tristan eyed the Faetheen as one would an annoying bug. \"We aren't teleporting somewhere we have no visual on.\"\n\nJoavan smoothed the damp hair away from his face. \"No teleporting at this point. We have to enter over there.\" He pointed at the middle of the area where Daegan saw no door, but he waited for Joavan to explain further.\n\n\"There is a door. Once we enter, we take stairs down to find him.\"\n\nThe lack of an obvious entrance still bothered Daegan. \"Have ya been in this place before?\"\n\n\"No. I found this through a dream-weaver fairy.\"\n\nTristan scrunched up his face. \"A what?\"\n\n\"They are small beings with unusual powers.\"\n\n\"I've heard of fairies, just not of dream-weavers.\"\n\nInhaling a slow and deep breath, Joavan blew out a white cloud ruffled with frustration. \"I can explain those later. For now, I will tell you what I know of locating Ainvar here.\"\n\nDaegan had not finished. \"Ya have two hours to take us to the druid or expect to continue alone.\"\n\nThe desire to shriek at Daegan came to life on the Faetheen's face. \"Then we best get moving.\" Joavan walked away to the center of the area where they stood.\n\nTristan shrugged and followed.\n\nDaegan kept watch over their backs until he reached where Joavan bent down and placed both hands on the ground. The Faetheen stayed that way for a full minute as he whispered frantically.\n\nA line formed around his hands three-foot square, which began to take dimensional shape as a hatch or trapdoor. Wood planks joined together, framed in heavy metal around the edge. Two half-round holes large enough for hands appeared on opposite sides.\n\nJoavan cupped the holes, grasping the hatch and lifting with a grunt.\n\nDaegan took the wooden covering from him and set it aside.\n\nIn the gaping hole now exposed, wide stairs in a circular pattern appeared and descended into darkness.\n\nStepping back, Joavan pointed down. \"I told you I knew how to enter.\"\n\n\"'Tis good. Ya shall go first.\"\n\nJoavan's jaw dropped. \"Me? I am not the power here.\"\n\n\"We shall be close by, just as ya were while we fought wyverns.\"\n\nMumbling curses to himself, Joavan stepped down, placing his foot carefully and testing his weight. He kept his hands on each side of the opening until he had dropped too far to maintain any grasp.\n\nTristan cupped his jaw, staring down. \"Should we put that lid back in place?\"\n\n\"No. I have a feelin' no wyvern type of beast shall follow us. If somethin' else appears in there, we should have the same advantage and disadvantage. Ya go next but stop if Joavan disappears at any point.\"\n\n\"Got it.\" Tristan lowered his body down and began taking the steps.\n\nWith one last look around, he saw no flying beasts or other threats. If the druid had more traps or defenses in place, Daegan hoped his words to Tristan would not be proven wrong."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Daegan kept Joavan's head in view as the Faetheen continued to descend the endless circular stairs. The dank smell seemed natural, as if this structure had been on the Shetland Islands for as long as Joavan claimed.\n\nWhat kind of majik could maintain the ghostly look from outside?\n\nTristan asked, \"What if these steps never end, Joavan?\"\n\n\"There will be an end.\"\n\nDaegan couldn't put much faith in the Faetheen's confidence. What if some deadly surprise waited once they were deep inside here? Could Tristan teleport the two of them out?\n\nAt that point, Joavan would be on his own.\n\nA noise came from Joavan.\n\n\"What is he sayin', Tristan?\"\n\nSpeaking over his shoulder, Tristan replied softly. \"Something like 'found it,' but I can't be sure.\"\n\n\"I have located another passage,\" Joavan clarified in a short-tempered reply.\n\nOr had that been fear boosting the tension in his voice?\n\nJoavan pushed against a wall and a section gave way.\n\nLight flowed into the stairwell.\n\nAs soon as Joavan passed through the opening, Tristan stepped down quickly and paused, facing out at the new space.\n\nDaegan closed the distance to him. \"What do ya see?\"\n\n\"Nothing but an empty room. My gut says it is not empty. Joavan's waiting about ten feet away. What do you want to do, boss?\"\n\n\"We must stay close. I fear the moment ya pass through the door, a wall may form to trap us.\"\n\n\"That could definitely happen.\"\n\nDaegan could not remain here, but he hated the unknown they would leap into. \"When I say go, jump. I shall be right behind ya.\"\n\nTristan nodded.\n\n\"Go.\"\n\nDaegan and Tristan went through so close one might have been a shadow of the other.\n\nThe opening to the stairway solidified, just as Daegan had suspected, but he and Tristan had passed through safely.\n\nHe'd had it with druids harming his second-in-command.\n\nThe large area had an uninspiring grayness to it from floor to walls. Light flowed down from above, though Daegan saw no windows. Nothing made a sound besides their combined breathing.\n\n\"What now, Joavan?\" Daegan murmured.\n\n\"We wait.\"\n\nTristan growled at the untrustworthy Faetheen.\n\nEnergy pooled into the room, circling the three of them. Daegan considered sending Tristan out, but his second had made it clear he wanted to be right here.\n\nJust as Daegan respected Tristan's decision regarding the other Alterant gryphons wanting to fight alongside Beladors in the human world, he could not ask Tristan to leave now.\n\nBeneath Daegan's feet, the gray stone floor changed to a polished white marble with black and gold veins. The marble spread out beneath Joavan and Tristan and moved toward the walls of the cylindrical room. Where were the sharp angles Daegan had seen outside this castle?\n\nFour detailed sculptures of a huge hand and arm formed in stone stuck out of the wall. Each hand clutched the base of an elegant black hammered-steel torch as long as Daegan's leg.\n\nWhen the marble finished spreading and touched the base of the continual wall, large cuts of brown-and-black stone began stacking along that base. The stones continued piling to the ceiling.\n\nDaegan tilted his head back.\n\nStone blocks climbed over fifty feet above his head, but he never saw an actual ceiling. Just darkness where he'd seen light earlier.\n\nThe torch glow failed to reach any higher.\n\nHe dropped his head back down, studying every movement in the room as a hawk would any blade of grass disturbed in an open field.\n\nBetween him and the far wall across the hundred-foot-wide space, a hole opened in the marble floor from the wall to a third of the way back, revealing a black pit five feet deep in the void.\n\nFlames burst up head-high above the marble then settled down into a vibrant pile of glowing red coals. Every chunk larger than Daegan's head.\n\nFifteen feet above the searing pit, a thick dais floated twice the width of Daegan's arms from fingertip to fingertip and clear as glass.\n\nA man appeared there. Not quite six feet tall with long light-brown hair and unnaturally smooth olive skin, as if he'd sanded away every tiny wrinkle. Not even a beautiful goddess had skin that flawless.\n\nHis too-perfect face reminded Daegan of mannequins he'd seen in store windows. Another thing of this era Tristan had explained.\n\nWhere Daegan had found Joavan too pretty to be a warrior, this druid did not feel natural at all.\n\nUntil he stared into eyes that had seen many centuries. There might be no wrinkles around the druid's pale sea-green eyes, but that gaze did not boast of robust health.\n\nStill, those eyes were familiar.\n\nThis deadly being had devised a way to emulate immortality if he'd lived as long as Joavan indicated.\n\nWhat amount of majik had that taken?\n\nGarwyli had lived far longer than he would have normally if he'd spent his entire life outside Treoir realm.\n\nBut this castle was no realm.\n\nAinvar wore a regal robe of black with sparkling clear jewels woven into the material so that firelight gave the cloak life with any movement. He held a white staff in one hand with a glass orb on top. The glass held a black adder with red eyes curled inside. Its tongue flicked out once.\n\nLifting his staff, Ainvar demanded, \"How dare you enter my castle and harm my guards?\"\n\nNothing in the druid's whiny speech indicated his background, though based upon the designs on his clothing and his name, Daegan surmised he faced a Celtic druid.\n\nDaegan replied, \"We were told ya had no guards.\"\n\n\"I do not care what you have been told. You were not invited to visit my castle.\"\n\nFlames from the pit shot high, putting a sharp point on his words.\n\nJoavan jumped in. \"I am here for the amulet, Ainvar. How could you take the power of Talamh Dearmadta?\"\n\nAinvar's mouth twisted into a wry smirk. \"To come here and accuse me of such means you are an even greater fool than I remember. I have no amulet.\"\n\n\"Liar!\" Joavan shouted on the edge of hysteria.\n\nDaegan growled the rough sound of his dragon.\n\nTristan leaned over to look past Daegan at Joavan. \"We went through all that for this crap?\"\n\nJoavan's eyes bulged. Any minute his head might explode. He shot a dismissive look at Tristan and turned on Ainvar again. \"Admit it. You stole the stone to kill the king.\"\n\nAppearing unconcerned, Ainvar frowned with indifference. \"Why would I do such a thing when I have a place of my own? Unlike you, I choose not to live under his miserly rule.\"\n\nJoavan's hands opened and closed nervously. His panic became a living thing, filling the air. \"I must have that amulet back. You have put me in an untenable position. You know what I face!\"\n\nAinvar tossed an uncaring shrug at Joavan. \"You have wasted your time coming here. You have no proof I have this stone you claim.\"\n\nDaegan told Joavan, \"I do not see how ya plan to solve this argument. I see no amulet around the druid's neck or in his hand. If he took it, he could have hidden it in a thousand places.\"\n\nJoavan's body vibrated with fury and underlying terror. His aqua eyes were wild when he whipped around to face Daegan. \"Do not go anywhere. I must have the amulet. I told you I needed a dragon and you agreed to take the amulet from him.\"\n\n\"What?\" Ainvar roared. He lifted his staff and shook it. \"You brought a dragon here to kill me?\"\n\nJoavan waved his hands around and shouted at Ainvar. \"What did you expect me to do when you stole that jewel on my watch? You knew what you were doing, the trouble you would cause me.\" He paused and added in a shaking voice, \"You made my sister sick. She died.\"\n\n\"I am not guilty of those accusations, you little bastard.\" Ainvar's mouth opened to reveal the sharp teeth of a beast. \"I will not allow you to sully my name this way.\"\n\nDaegan couldn't believe this mess. He had pushed himself just to do this out of honor. He owed Joavan for the cleansing solvent, but this debt could not remain open-ended.\n\nTristan gave Joavan a worried glance and took a step away. \"Dude. Calm down before your head explodes. You might have the wrong guy.\"\n\n\"No!\" Joavan shouted. \"I will kill anyone who thinks to convince me Ainvar is not at fault.\"\n\nDaegan snarled, \"'Tis enough! Threaten my second again and it shall be your last words.\"\n\n\"I am done with all of you,\" Ainvar called out then started wailing, like something gone crazy. His body lifted off the dais.\n\nThe pit below him fired up with flames roaring.\n\nAinvar pointed his staff at a torch. The hand and arm in the wall broke free, moving from side to side. A nine-foot-tall ogre attached to that arm stepped through the wall to stand on one side of Daegan's group. The torch burst with power and changed into a sword fit for that monster.\n\nThree more times Ainvar pointed at torches, bringing three more ogres to life. Big heads for thick bodies. Wide jaws with long fangs and each one had steel-plating for armor covering it from chest to thighs.\n\nAll four surrounded them, not making a move.\n\n\"Well, fuck,\" Tristan muttered.\n\nSpinning the tip of his staff in a circular motion, Ainvar continued speaking in a strange language.\n\nDaegan said to Joavan, \"We are leaving. Yet again, ya did not tell me all the truth.\"\n\nJoavan latched onto Daegan's shirt and yanked. \"You must stay!\"\n\nDaegan slapped his hand away. \"Our agreement is over.\" He turned to Tristan as a massive steel chain net fell over all three of them.\n\n\"Tristan, teleport now!\"\n\n\"I'm trying, boss. Not working.\"\n\nDaegan roared.\n\nThe glass dais exploded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Reese scrubbed the filth of fighting demons off her skin, thankful for the place Storm had people make inhabitable last night. That man had some serious business power besides being a Skinwalker.\n\nEvalle had hit the jackpot with him.\n\nNot because of the buildings he owned and what had to be a pretty solid bank account, but because he lived only to have her as his mate. His number one priority was Evalle's happiness.\n\nAnd her mate's happiness was Evalle's top priority.\n\nEvery woman should be so lucky.\n\nShe didn't envy Evalle's relationship. Seeing anyone so happy lifted her heart, but it always reminded her of what she'd never have. If she didn't carry a demonic power inside of her, she could have a happy life with Quinn.\n\nShe'd asked Evalle to pass along the number of Reese's new mobile phone to Trey, the Belador who coordinated their team communications by telepathy.\n\nHe'd give that number to Quinn for sure.\n\nBut surprisingly, she hadn't heard a peep out of Quinn, which hurt even though she'd told him to stay away. She wanted him safe.\n\nStill, a phone call would be nice.\n\nThat was entirely insane. Why would any man want to be with her when she told him to stay away, but longed to be with him? In fact, she'd like to have an all-nighter with him. One that involved no sleeping.\n\nBeing pregnant drove her crazy thinking about sex.\n\nIronic that sex would be at the top of her mind when that's what got her in this jam.\n\nShe dried off her body and felt a little thickening in her middle. Really? She turned sideways to the mirror to see if she really had a baby bump coming on.\n\nThere it was, a tiny rise.\n\nHappiness flooded her. \"Hi, Junior,\" she cooed and rubbed her belly gently. Heat flared under her hand. She grinned until she lifted her gaze to the mirror.\n\n\"Crap. You look like hell.\" She grabbed a brush to untangle her wet hair and changed hands. The wound had healed over, but she still had a sore spot on her arm. She brushed her hair so it would dry less feral looking and used cream all over her body.\n\nEvalle might have helped in supplying creams and other female items for this apartment, but Reese had Storm to thank most of all.\n\nHe had people who had people doing things for him.\n\nShe walked out of the simple bathroom Storm had apologized for, which she reprimanded him over. She didn't need anything fancy, just somewhere to live until ...\n\nGrief hit her unexpectedly and a tear slipped out. She cupped her stomach, drew a couple breaths, and shoved the darkness away.\n\nShe and Junior were going to have one hell of a ride until the time came to deliver. She'd save her grief for when she had nothing else to hold.\n\nWalking into the main part of her studio apartment created in a single-story building once used as a machine shop, she smiled at the king-size bed with a tall headboard against the far wall. That would have been plenty, but it came with matching end tables, a low chest of drawers, and an armoire. All of it beautifully refinished mahogany.\n\nStorm must have an affinity for fine antiques.\n\nNo windows in the room for security.\n\nShe still couldn't believe how much his people had done in one night. She had a complete kitchen with a stainless-steel refrigerator, gas stove, dishwasher, and double sink. Dishes, utensils, anything she needed to be self-sufficient, plus the freezer in her refrigerator had been stocked.\n\nBut the four-seater table with high-back chairs and a vase with blue flowers gave it the feel of home as much as the braided wool rugs.\n\nShe'd rather have those than something more upscale.\n\nAfter putting on underwear and one of the oversized T-shirts she'd requested for sleepwear, she headed to make a cup of tea.\n\nI-zubrrali.\n\nShe now knew the name of the person who first destroyed her mother's life, then hers. What exactly was I-zubrrali? He had to be more than someone with majik to produce that many demons and of all types.\n\nShe'd known sorcerer's and powerful warlocks who could create demons, but even they kept to creating less than three types of demons.\n\nHad that bastard come to Atlanta because he'd heard about her? All those demons were killing people because of her. That didn't even count the demons being turned into Imortiks and succumbing within a day.\n\nShe had to stop him to protect others.\n\nHer stomach heated. She patted her belly. \"I know, Junior. We're gonna do it together.\"\n\nBut she'd finally realized her energy hadn't just been wonky. I-zubrrali had latched onto her power. What would happen next time? Would she be able to kill the being that created her?\n\nOr would he harm her baby?\n\nHer fingers tightened on the cannister with tea bags. It started shaking. She put it down and leaned on the counter, struggling to breathe. Her dreams were so simple.\n\nShe wanted to live.\n\nShe wanted to hold her baby.\n\nShe wanted Quinn to be with her when she did.\n\nGripping the counter, her arms shook. She had asked nothing of life, but to just live it in peace.\n\nPounding on the door jerked her up and around.\n\n\"Reese.\" Quinn spoke her name in a calm tone, but that meant nothing. He had to be furious with her.\n\nShe covered her face. One more painful conversation to go.\n\n\"Reese, open the door.\"\n\nShould she let him in or have this conversation through the door? If she opened it, she didn't have the power to keep her hands off him. What message would that send?\n\nHe would not let her out to hunt demons.\n\nQuinn would stand here forever to protect her.\n\nDeep inside, she wanted that so much, but she knew her destiny and her fate. She would not drag Quinn through it all.\n\nHe knocked again. \"Open the door, Reese. Now.\" He sounded civilized, but she heard the savage edge under his words.\n\nShe walked over to the door and leaned her forehead on it. \"Can we just talk here?\"\n\n\"No. You owe me to open this door. I would rather not damage it after all Storm went through to have a solid steel door installed.\"\n\nQuinn had been talking to someone to know that much.\n\nTime to grow a pair of lady balls and face him.\n\nShe undid the double latching system and whispered the word Storm had given her to open the ward for sixty seconds if she needed to let someone in.\n\nAs soon as she pulled the door open, Quinn blasted in. He hooked his hands under her arms and pulled her to him, then kicked the door shut.\n\nHis mouth owned her the minute their lips touched. She gripped his shoulders. Her heart thumped at a happy pace, feeling alive again. She wrapped her legs around him and kissed him back, giving her all to this moment.\n\nQuinn paused, breathing hard as if he'd just fought twenty demons. His body trembled.\n\nShe understood. He struggled with bone-deep fear ... for her. She'd never seen him so vulnerable, not even when he'd told her he loved her and wanted the baby.\n\nQuinn grabbed a breath. \"I'm not going to ask you why you didn't tell me you were back. I'm only going to tell you one thing.\"\n\nReese could barely speak. \"What?\"\n\nHe lifted wounded eyes to her. \"I want you.\" He inhaled deeply, scenting her. \"I want you with every part of my being. I need you. I'm willing to be with you on your terms, just don't...\" His voice broke. \"Don't push me away.\"\n\nShe needed him more than her next breath. How could she say anything but, \"Okay.\"\n\nHe kissed her again, deeper, but more slowly. His large hands cupped her bottom, then he walked until her back met a wall. With her pinned in place, he pushed her panties aside and dragged a finger through her damp heat.\n\nGiving in meant no more pushing him away.\n\nAs if she would stop him now? \"More,\" she demanded.\n\nHer panties ripped and fell away. His kiss deepened and turned feral. This was a side Quinn kept in check. She moved her hips and urged him on. He pushed a finger inside, driving her insane.\n\nShe could look at this man and be ready.\n\nLong fingers stroked her.\n\nShe arched, so close, so ready, so right fucking now ready! Then he pushed her over the edge into oblivion and drained her body of the stress and anxiety she'd had for company.\n\nWhen she kept saying his name, he rained gentle kisses down her neck. He wouldn't let up on that finger, drawing out every aftershock.\n\nHis other hand massaged her extra-plump breasts.\n\nShe shook with relief.\n\nCupping his neck, she pulled his mouth back to her lips and kissed the man whose touch burned to her core.\n\nShe slumped against him. \"That all you got?\" she mumbled.\n\n\"Only you would challenge me when you can't stand on your own.\"\n\n\"Standing is overrated.\"\n\nHe sprinkled kisses along her shoulder. \"Hold on, sweetheart.\"\n\nThe sound of his voice roughened by need brought her hellion hormones back to life. She wrapped her arms around his neck.\n\nA magician couldn't have matched Quinn's ability to shuck off all his clothes from the waist down. She bit his neck and licked it.\n\nHe pushed up against her heat and her muscles decided to come back to life. She moaned, \"Please don't stop there.\"\n\n\"No chance.\" With her still against the wall, he used his hands to tease her breasts until she could barely take it. The girls had been on edge for days, begging for attention.\n\nQuinn slid inside her, but not all the way.\n\nShe dug her nails into his shoulders. \"Yes, yes, yes.\"\n\nHe whispered all the ways he wanted to have her as he went deeper with every push. She wanted to stay right here, joined with him where nothing mattered but his warm body and gifted fingers.\n\nHe rubbed both nipples at once, pressing harder with each move. She kissed him, loving him, showing him everything she felt inside.\n\nHe started moving faster and she met his rhythm.\n\n\"I need you, Quinn. Need all of you,\" she pleaded, hanging on tight, wanting everything he could give her. Her orgasm ripped through her. She clamped her muscles tight.\n\nQuinn's incredible control snapped. He slammed into her, pushing her to another height, then he called out her name in a roar with his release.\n\nHer legs dropped from where she'd been locked around him. He caught her legs, holding her up.\n\nQuinn would always be there to catch her.\n\nHe would always be her safe port in any storm.\n\nShe rubbed her cheek against his damp one. Her future might suck, but this right here was all she needed at this minute. She'd face every minute and every day as it came to her and not whine about the future, not with this man at her side.\n\nHe turned his head. His lips brushed her temple. \"I've missed you. I crave being with you. I can't breathe when you're not near. I love you and never want to let go.\"\n\nThat broke the damn of emotion she'd been holding back to keep herself intact since finding out she was pregnant.\n\nShe cried hard against his shoulder, her entire body shaking.\n\nHe backed away from the wall, holding her against his chest. Then he kicked his shoes off and settled on the bed where he rubbed her back until she calmed to only sniffling. Reaching over to the nightstand, he snagged a handful of tissues and handed them to her.\n\nWiping the worst of her breakdown away, she blew her nose. How sexy was that?\n\nHe laughed and put her tissues aside, then helped her sit up. \"I tried to do what you asked, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, I came back and screwed it up,\" she admitted.\n\n\"No.\" He brushed his fingers over her face, pushing away loose hairs. An endearing smile lifted his lips. \"It wouldn't have mattered if you came back or not. I was saying I tried to do the honorable thing and respect your wish that I stay away, but I started putting people in place as soon as I could so I would be free to find you.\"\n\n\"That wouldn't have been possible.\" She kissed him and pulled back to see his face.\n\nHe gave her the look of confidence she admired about him. This man believed he could do anything. \"To get you back, I intended to call in every favor owed to me in the human and supernatural world, and I have compiled a lot of favors in all my years.\"\n\nThere was the man every woman should have. A protector who would never stop until those he loved were safe. A man whose love had to be earned and valued for the incredible gift it was.\n\nShe'd never love another man. Ever. Quinn was it for her.\n\nBut she still feared him being close. \"I need you safe.\"\n\n\"I will be, and you as well. I command an army of Beladors. We have a dragon and powerful allies. We will overcome the Imortiks.\"\n\nShe'd like to believe that, but she had serious doubts only because the Imortiks were gaining power and now her damned father was helping them by producing demons.\n\nBut she would not ruin the moment with her negative thinking. That didn't mean she couldn't set guidelines. \"Before we do this, I have terms.\"\n\n\"Of course you do.\" But he'd uttered that in a light tone with no malice.\n\nSniffling one last time, she lifted her chin. \"I want to hunt demons. I'm the best one for locating them before they spread out to eat a human or be turned into an Imortik. Plus, we found their maker today.\"\n\n\"So I heard.\" No smile and all grim.\n\n\"I don't want to talk about him right now, though,\" she admitted.\n\n\"As long as you fill me in before I leave here, I won't ask for more this minute.\"\n\nShe wanted to laugh at her trying to negotiate with the master of negotiation. \"Agreed. Just know that I'm not suicidal to go off on my own. I love this baby and ... \" She swallowed, determined to not be a weepy woman. Her voice thinned. \"I want to love this baby every minute possible. I'm not thinking about the birth, only a life right now. If that bothers you\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I want to share this time with you.\" He leaned in, kissing her lips then her forehead. \"But I also want to be with you when you give birth, no matter what happens.\" His Adam's apple rode up and down hard. His eyes glistened. \"I want to be there for you and for our baby.\"\n\nShe swiped a tear off her face and whispered, \"For our son. It's a boy.\"\n\nHe looked like he may break, but not her powerful Quinn. He seemed to know that she needed his strength now more than ever.\n\nRunning his thumbs over her cheeks, he said, \"Let's name him.\"\n\nDammit. More tears. She only cried with her babies. After another round of tissues, she nodded. \"I've been calling him Junior, because I want to have good memories of this baby. We do need a name.\"\n\n\"Horatio.\" Quinn said that with a straight face.\n\n\"What? No!\" Her fighting side rose up and stomped away her squall fest.\n\nHe laughed and pulled her to him. \"We will find a name.\"\n\nThe sexy, crazy man was just jerking her chain. If he could rise to the occasion and show a positive face in her moment of darkness, she could step up too. Gifting him with a smile that she hoped showed how much she loved him, she reached down and grabbed hold of his attention.\n\nQuinn jerked and muttered a curse under his breath.\n\nShe grinned like the devil she was being.\n\nHe asked in a sex-roughened voice, \"Give a man a heads-up next time, sweetheart.\"\n\n\"How about if I just give you some head ... period.\"\n\n\"You do have great ideas, but I should shower first.\"\n\nShe stroked him. \"This place has a big shower.\"\n\n\"I am indebted to Storm for all he has done for you, but if you want anything, no matter what it is, I would like to take care of it.\"\n\nPausing her hand, she quirked her eyebrow. \"I don't need anything else except ... you.\"\n\nHe kissed her soundly. \"I would stay in a hut without electricity or running water to be with you.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Let's not get crazy here, babe. I'm all about air conditioning and indoor plumbing.\"\n\nBy the end of the shower, she felt energized. How that could happen after more sex made no sense.\n\nQuinn had dried off and was dressing again when he stopped all motion.\n\nShe knew that look. Somebody called him telepathically.\n\nWhen his movements resumed, he sat at one of the dining chairs to put on his shoes. Then he surprised her by admitting, \"Evalle just called. One of the teams think they've found a large demon nest northeast of the city.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" She waited to give him any more response until he dared to keep her back from helping Evalle. Reese pulled on her jeans, boots, and a lightweight shirt, preparing for the argument about to ensue. She loved this man without question, but he had agreed with her terms.\n\nQuinn stood and offered her his hand. \"Ready?\"\n\nShe beamed with pride over him backing what he said with actions. \"Yes, and so is Icarus.\"\n\n\"That's a nonstarter name.\" He gave her an appalled look she laughed at, then he pulled her to him and kissed her sweetly. He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as if releasing tension. \"I am terrified to take you out there, but I love you and want to be the person you need right now more than the person I think you need. I trust your judgement to tell me when you can't do this. Until then, I will be there fighting alongside you and ... Eckard.\"\n\nShe poked him, drawing a laugh from Quinn. When he quieted, she got up close and warned, \"I love you, too, but our child will never have a name that sounds like a defunct drugstore.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Fed up with everyone, Daegan shifted into his dragon.\n\nThe chain net expanded and grew with Ruadh's body.\n\nAinvar's stone ogres started shouting and raising their fire swords, waiting on the druid's order.\n\nAinvar had landed on the marble between the net and the fire pit.\n\nRuadh opened his jaws and blasted fire, blowing a hole in the chain net large enough to walk through without bending over. Daegan's dragon continued blasting fire in long streams as it turned from side to side. He extended a wing over Tristan for protection, but not Joavan.\n\nDaegan had no problem with his dragon's decision.\n\nJoavan screamed and backed up to the dragon, hiding his face from the fire storm.\n\nAinvar shouted and called up one majikal weapon after another. He sent a battery of swords flying at Daegan's dragon while the ogres waited. They would probably be the second wave of attack.\n\nTristan stepped forward and shoved up a kinetic blast between Ruadh and the swords from the druid. The weapons hit the invisible wall and bounced back at Ainvar who ran from side to side, dodging them.\n\nThe druid tried dousing Ruadh with a wall of water dropped from above.\n\nDaegan's dragon blew the water back up in the air and held it there churning and bubbling with the power of his fire.\n\nThe druid ordered his ogres to attack.\n\nRuadh angled the water to the side and closed his jaws, allowing the water to spread out as it fell.\n\nBoiling water covered Ainvar's ogres. They dropped their swords and ran around out of control, yelling as their stone skin turned red as raw meat. Daegan had not expected that.\n\nWhen Ruadh finished destroying the center of the net all the way around, the rest of it clanged as it fell to the floor.\n\nRuadh flipped the last part off his spiked head.\n\nHe turned on Ainvar who shouted a series of strange words.\n\nThe ogres bodies became stone again and they returned to the walls, which sucked in their bodies, leaving four arms and hands. The fire swords they clutched returned to torches.\n\nTalking with Ruadh's voice, Daegan said, \"I am done with ya two arguin'. Settle this now.\"\n\nAinvar recovered himself to speak with power. \"There is nothing to settle. He lies.\"\n\nJoavan jumped away from where he'd been hiding. His eyebrows were singed and his clothes in tatters. \"No! I need the amulet. He has it!\"\n\nAinvar turned toward Joavan and lifted his hands, clearly going on attack.\n\nJoavan jumped into battle mode, raising his hands.\n\nIn his dragon's voice, Daegan shouted, \"If anyone attacks anyone, my dragon shall burn ya both and devour your ashes. He would not eat ya, because neither of ya are a worthy meal.\"\n\nAinvar tossed his hands up. \"I cannot produce what I do not possess. How much simpler can I explain? You break into my home and damage my security, then expect me to accept your accusations.\" He shot an angry glare at Joavan. \"You are the worst son I ever had.\"\n\n\"You are a horrible father. I did not ask to carry your blood. Now you put me in a position of being cast out of my home.\"\n\n\"You should not have joined the king's court. You would not be in this position.\"\n\nDaegan asked for his human body back. When he shifted, he clothed himself in furs and leathers of his youth. \"Have I had to go through all of this for a bloody family squabble?\"\n\n\"This is no squabble,\" Joavan shouted. \"The amulet is all to my people.\"\n\nAinvar scoffed. \"They are not your people. They're a bunch of misfits and you happen to find a place at the top of a mixed-blood pack. You act as if you lived with the Fae. You have made a huge mistake. I do not have the amulet.\"\n\nJoavan finally spoke in a calm tone. \"Then you will die.\"\n\nTristan let off a long stream of air that ended in a disgusted sound. \"What the hell do we do now, boss?\"\n\nDaegan held his hand up before Joavan or Ainvar could say another word. \"We solve this now. Before ya start firin' questions at me, be silent while I solve this problem.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nTurning his head slowly, Daegan walked over and shoved his face an inch from Joavan's. \"I can prove the truth. If ya do not remain silent until I tell ya to speak again, I shall leave ya to face Ainvar and his wyverns.\"\n\nJoavan nodded, lips pressed tight.\n\nSwinging away from Joavan, Daegan told Tristan, \"Keep an eye on these two while I call to someone.\"\n\n\"Will do.\"\n\nAinvar's face almost developed a wrinkle from worry.\n\n\"What, Ainvar?\" Daegan asked.\n\n\"Do you plan to use telepathy?\"\n\n\"I do. What of it?\"\n\nThe druid sighed heavily. \"A moment.\" He lifted his hands and whispered words for a while.\n\nThe air suddenly crackled and sparked.\n\n\"Go ahead,\" Ainvar grumbled.\n\nHe must have had a ward preventing telepathic communication, which had possibly interfered with teleporting. Daegan hoped that meant Tristan could now teleport out.\n\nDaegan crossed his arms and stepped back to allow the father and son pain in his backside to remain in view. He called to Garwyli telepathically. <I need your help, druid.>\n\n<What ya be needin'?>\n\n<I have a dispute between a part-blood Fae called a Faetheen and a druid, who happens to be his father. I need a way to solve a dispute.> Daegan explained about the amulet and where Joavan lived. <Can ya come here? I can send Tristan to teleport ya.>\n\n<Where are ya?>\n\n<Shetland Islands near Scotland.> Garwyli said nothing for a moment. When he did speak, he surprised Daegan. <I shall come in hologram. I wish for my physical body to remain here at Treoir.>\n\nAn inkling of worry trickled down Daegan's spine. After what he'd seen of Garwyli earlier at Treoir, he had deep concerns for the old druid. Tzader had traveled in hologram from time to time simply to stay close to Brina, because he'd had no way to enter the castle back then without dying. That had been thanks to Macha, a heartless goddess.\n\nBut this felt unusual for Garwyli.\n\nWould the druid be able to wield any power should such be needed? Brina and Tzader had possessed that ability while in hologram. Perhaps Garwyli could as well.\n\nIn fact, now that Daegan thought it through, he should have suggested the holographic travel as the safest way to have Garwyli intervene.\n\nBut when Daegan had a moment, he would find out exactly what was going on with his dear old friend.\n\nHe told Garwyli, <Thank ya. That would be most helpful. Once I leave here, I intend to have satisfied a debt I must pay.>\n\n<Very well, dragon. Give me a moment before we appear.> When Garwyli appeared, Lanna stood beside him.\n\nAinvar blinked and blinked again. \"You still live?\"\n\nGarwyli stood with his hickory cane. \"Aye and no greater a surprise that ya do as well. How is it ya have not aged, Ainvar? Yar skin is smooth as marble. Does not appear natural.\"\n\n\"As if any of us are natural?\" Ainvar smiled with a sly look. \"Who are you, little girl? A sacrifice?\"\n\nTristan shouted, \"Shut your perverted mouth.\"\n\nDaegan ordered, \"Direct your questions at me, Ainvar. Understood?\"\n\nLifting a delicate hand to gain everyone's attention, Lanna said, \"Yes, I am a girl, but I am no child. Do not speak down to me again. Is not wise to test me.\"\n\nAinvar's ego wouldn't let him back away from that challenge. He called up his energy, which ran around him, growing into a cloud of black and orange crystals.\n\nLanna looked at Garwyli who only nodded once, no expression.\n\nLacing her fingers together in front of her as if listening politely to someone while not moving another muscle, Lanna's power flooded the room and shoved Ainvar off his feet.\n\nHe landed on his backend, flapping his arms wildly and making indignant noises.\n\nDaegan even took a step back, amazed at what she could do while not physically present.\n\nTristan grunted as if he'd taken a hit to his chest. He turned around. \"Where's Joavan?\"\n\n\"I am here, dammit.\" The Faetheen climbed off the pile of chain net where he'd been blown.\n\nTaking in everyone, Lanna said, \"I am Garwyli's student. That is small example of the many things he teaches me.\"\n\nTristan chuckled and winked at her.\n\nJoavan came limping back. \"What is this thing you brought to put on a show?\"\n\nDaegan turned on him and caught the Faetheen by his throat, lifting him off the ground with one hand that trembled from anger. \"If ya or Ainvar say one more disrespectful word to her or Garwyli, this meetin' is over. When I say over, I mean my dragon's fire shall be the last thing ya see in this life. I am tired of dealin' with ya and your father.\"\n\nJoavan's face turned red from lack of air.\n\nDaegan dropped him.\n\nThe Faetheen landed lightly and rubbed his throat, muttering, \"I do not claim him as father.\"\n\n\"I do not care. We are on the verge of solvin' the question of your bloody amulet if ya two can behave like honorable men.\"\n\nJoavan quietly stepped past Daegan to stand alone, but not far from the circle of Tristan, Ainvar, Garwyli, and Lanna.\n\nWhen Daegan stepped back into the group, he asked Garwyli, \"Do ya and Lanna have a way to sort out this problem?\"\n\nLanna's eyes sparkled happily with being included.\n\nDaegan would have to take some time with her when he returned to Treoir. He had been underestimating this young woman, but he didn't believe anyone else knew much more about her power than he did.\n\nMaybe not even her cousin, Quinn.\n\nGarwyli knew exactly what being he trained, which was why he'd brought her. Treoir's druid said, \"'Tis simple. Everyone must tell the truth. Ta assure that does happen, each of the two arguin' must produce somethin' they do not wish ta lose.\" His wrinkled gaze turned to Ainvar. \"Ya know what I speak of, Ainvar, correct?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Ya agree with this method?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What about me and what I think?\" Joavan complained.\n\nGarwyli angled his head in the Faetheen's direction. \"From what I understand, the dragon king has listened ta all ya have said and ended up without a solution. Do ya have a better idea than what I am suggestin'?\"\n\nFace covered in angry lines. Joavan huffed out, \"No. Let's just do this.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Garwyli announced, \"Ya each place somethin' of great value on the table.\"\n\nTristan asked, \"What table, Garwyli?\"\n\n\"The one Ainvar shall call up.\"\n\nPuffing out his chest for the benefit of Garwyli, Ainvar lifted his hands and used his power to deliver a beautifully detailed dark wood table six feet long.\n\nDaegan wanted to laugh for the first time. That old druid from Treoir was using Ainvar's ego to make him burn power unnecessarily.\n\nGarwyli tilted his head toward the table. \"Nicely done, Ainvar.\"\n\n\"Was simple.\"\n\n\"What will ya put upon the table, Ainvar?\"\n\nJoavan stared at Ainvar, who had a moment of hesitation before he pulled out a dubh knife.\n\nDaegan asked, \"What is the value of the knife?\"\n\nSmiling, Joavan jumped into share, \"That knife can kill Ainvar.\"\n\n\"Very good.\" Daegan turned to Joavan. \"Ya must match the level of that knife in value.\"\n\nAinvar crossed his arms, sliding his hands into deep sleeves. \"How will ya match mine, Joavan?\"\n\nA vein on the Faetheen's temple jumped. He reached inside his jacket and unclipped a pin, which he placed on the table reluctantly. Lifting his hand away slowly, he crossed his arms.\n\nNeither of them was happy.\n\nThat made Daegan very happy, because it meant they both had skin in this game.\n\nWhen Ainvar's gaze dropped to the pin, his lips parted. His voice filled with awe. \"Is that ... your mother's?\"\n\n\"Yes, but you will not win it.\"\n\nGarwyli reiterated the details of the dispute exactly as Daegan had explained it. Then he asked, \"Do ya both agree 'tis correct?\"\n\nJoavan and Ainvar said, \"Yes.\"\n\nGarwyli held his translucent hand over the table. The knife and pin slid together, meeting in the middle.\n\nDaegan noted how both Joavan and Ainvar tensed.\n\nHe didn't believe one over the other, especially after Joavan had withheld information time and again.\n\nSuch as being Ainvar's son.\n\nStill holding his hand in place, Garwyli began speaking in a commanding tone that belied his age. \"Should the owner of the knife or the owner of the pin speak untruthfully, the item of the one who lied shall go ta the victor. Specifically, if Ainvar lies, his knife shall go ta Joavan, and if Joavan lies, his pin shall go ta Ainvar.\"\n\nThe Faetheen nipped at his fisted knuckles nervously.\n\nAinvar stood calm, his strange eyes fixed on the knife and pin.\n\nGarwyli asked, \"What is in question ta be decided here?\"\n\nJoavan pulled himself up and spoke as someone of authority now that he'd calmed down. \"The Cearcall na S\u00ecorraidheachd was stolen forty-eight days ago and must be returned to protect my home world. Our king and queen are in danger until this is returned. My sister became very sick with a mysterious ailment. I was called to her bed, leaving other guards on watch over the amulet. It is never left alone. Dead guards were found in a pool of blood. Ainvar had been seen in the area even though he was cast out of Talamh Dearmadta over a year ago. I believe he stole the amulet, but he claims he does not have it.\"\n\nGarwyli turned to Ainvar. \"Do ya have the amulet?\"\n\n\"No. If I had the amulet, I would use it to kill that miserable king, but never the queen.\"\n\n\"Why not the queen?\" Daegan asked.\n\n\"She is my mother,\" Joavan interjected dryly.\n\n\"She was my mate first,\" Ainvar countered with bitterness.\n\nSo that explained a bit more about the conflict here. Daegan arched an eyebrow in Garwyli's direction.\n\nThe old guy sighed.\n\nJoavan's gaze jumped from Daegan to Garwyli. \"I have not lied. Neither have I accused Ainvar of killing my sister, but\u2014\"\n\n\"What, Joavan? Do not accuse me of such.\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" Daegan ordered and the torches quivered. He'd shown far more patience than someone such as Joavan deserved, but he fought nonhumans in all places. He did not care for the Faetheen, but would prefer to not leave here as enemies. He had enough of those. \"I am sorry for your loss, Joavan, but we must settle this about the amulet.\"\n\nShrugging, Ainvar shook his head. \"I have not lied.\"\n\nGarwyli asked, \"Do ya know where the amulet is, Ainvar?\"\n\nDaegan would have thought Garwyli tossed a wet cat on Ainvar when the castle druid shouted, \"That was not the question. I have answered. We are done.\"\n\nThankful to have a druid like Garwyli and not Ainvar, Daegan demanded, \"Where is the Talamh An Asraon diamond? Ya play with words.\"\n\nAinvar produced his staff, which had been missing until now, and lifted it in Garwyli's direction.\n\nGarwyli snarled and raised his free hand.\n\nLanna whipped around and moved in front of Garwyli, shoving a hand up. \"Do. Not. Dare.\"\n\nDaegan rushed backward as he called up Ruadh.\n\nAinvar held his staff pointed squarely at Lanna.\n\nTristan threw a kinetic blast at the druid's staff, but the power bounced off.\n\nWith Ainvar distracted by Tristan, Ruadh lowered his head quicky with jaws open and closed them around both druid and staff. His dragon lifted all of it off the ground.\n\nAinvar screamed and whacked the inside of Ruadh's mouth with the stick then he started calling out something that could be a spell.\n\nDaegan spoke to Tristan telepathically, telling him what to say.\n\n\"Listen up, Ainvar and Joavan,\" Tristan shouted. \"Daegan said produce the amulet or die. He's fed up with both of you.\"\n\nJoavan held his hands up in surrender, fear shaking his words. \"I will stand by whatever Daegan decides.\"\n\nAinvar whined, \"I will produce the gem. Free me from this beast.\"\n\nDaegan told Ruadh, <Put the druid on the ground, but keep him locked inside your jaws.>\n\nRuadh lowered his big head until Ainvar's booted feet touched the marble.\n\nAinvar sounded as if he yelled in a tunnel. \"Let me out!\"\n\nDaegan continued sending his messages through Tristan who told Ainvar, \"Hand over the amulet or my dragon shall bite you in half.\"\n\nShrieking wildly, Ainvar's skinny arm shoved out between two large fangs. He gibbered a chant in a panicked voice. Nothing appeared on his palm. After a moment of silence, he tried again but slower, calling out a string of strange words in a trembling, but clear voice.\n\nA dazzling necklace with a giant blue diamond hanging from the center appeared on his palm.\n\nRuadh raised a claw and snagged the necklace from Ainvar, then opened his jaws.\n\nAinvar scrambled away like a frightened crab, wiping his face over and over. His skin had gone chalk white and wrinkles began to line his face, which was covered in dragon saliva.\n\nPower rushed through the room.\n\nDaegan stood in human form and dressed again. He held the necklace with the rare diamond in his hand.\n\nJoavan let out a deep whoosh of air. \"Thank goodness.\"\n\nWhen the Faetheen started toward Daegan, Ainvar said, \"You will need that to close the rift and put the Imortiks behind the death wall, dragon. Hand it over to Joavan and you will never see it again.\"\n\nJoavan froze. \"No. That is not true.\"\n\nSending a look Garwyli's way, Daegan asked, \"Does he speak the truth?\"\n\nHeaving an unhappy sigh, Garwyli admitted, \"I do not know everythin' about the Immortuos Grimoire or the Imortiks yet.\"\n\nUnbelievable. Daegan had no reason to believe either Joavan or Ainvar.\n\nTristan suggested, \"Want me to grab Storm, boss?\"\n\nLanna brightened. \"Yes. Storm will do this.\"\n\nDaegan nodded.\n\nWhen Tristan disappeared, Ainvar and Joavan started shouting at each other.\n\nIf Tristan hadn't returned so quickly, Daegan might have released Ruadh one more time. But he needed to conserve their energy until he cleared the venom from his system.\n\nStorm appeared next to Tristan and swung a vicious look at the two people he didn't know, Ainvar and Joavan. \"What the hell is going on? You pulled me away from battling beside my mate.\"\n\nDaegan cut to the heart of the matter. \"Thank ya for comin'. I shall make this as fast as I am able.\" He ordered Ainvar, \"Repeat what ya just said about the amulet and the Imortiks.\"\n\nAinvar spilled it out word for word.\n\nStorm snapped, \"Truth.\"\n\nHell, now what was Daegan going to do?\n\n\"That is mine, Daegan,\" Joavan broached in a firm voice. \"We have a deal.\"\n\nDaegan could not give in to Joavan so easily. \"I need this to close the rift and put the Imortiks back. Do you plan to bring the amulet to me when the time comes?\"\n\n\"That was not our agreement.\"\n\n\"Then let's make a new deal for the return of the amulet after I finish closing the rift.\"\n\n\"No. I'm taking it now!\" Joavan took a step as Tristan moved to stand beside Daegan.\n\nStorm stepped up on the other side.\n\nClosing his fingers around the amulet, Daegan said, \"I give my word to return it after the Imortik death wall is closed. 'Tis more than ya would do.\"\n\nJoavan raised his fist, shaking them. \"You broke our deal.\"\n\n\"I have not.\" Daegan had begun to realize he had a chance to flip this agreement on Joavan, which would only be fair after the Faetheen had lied time and again to him and Tristan. \"If ya think back on every word we both spoke, ya said I had to retrieve the amulet. Ya never said I had to hand it over to ya.\"\n\nAinvar chuckled. \"This is quite interesting. Make Joavan admit he has lied to you about everything. He cares nothing for the king who hates him. Joavan wants the amulet so he can rule Talamh Dearmadta.\"\n\n\"That's not true.\"\n\nBut Daegan heard a crack of guilt in the Faetheen's voice. Glancing at Storm, Joavan backed away. \"Not true. I want to save the king.\"\n\nStorm drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. \"Lie\"\n\n\"Who are you to declare truth or lie?\" Joavan turned on Storm, who flashed red demon eyes at him.\n\nDaegan had to settle this. \"We could stand here for days provin' over and over again how Storm is a natural walkin' lie detector, but I know he is. He does not have time to waste any more than I do. I fulfilled my part of the deal. Ya owe me the grimoire box.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAinvar belly laughed. \"That's precious, Joavan. Go ahead and break your word, Fae-theen. See how that turns out.\"\n\nCocking his chin at Ainvar, Joavan stated, \"It is not up to me. We made an agreement. The box will go to him if he fulfilled his part or to me if he did not. I say he did not.\"\n\n\"Lying again,\" Storm declared.\n\n\"Damn you. Stop talking,\" Joavan yelled.\n\nDaegan sliced a look at Storm whose only reaction was a bored sigh.\n\nGarwyli spoke up. \"If that be so, Joavan, then prove Daegan did not uphold his end of the deal by statin' the specific words he gave ya ta claim the box.\"\n\nDaegan held his breath. He was pretty sure about what had been said, but he did not want to lose the grimoire box by having forgotten one important word.\n\nStanding there in a ball of anger, Joavan lowered his voice to a dangerous tone. \"I do not have those words. He knew the whole point of this was to return the amulet to Talamh Dearmadta. You make a grave mistake, dragon.\"\n\n\"I have given my word to return the amulet once the death wall is sealed with all Imortiks behind it, Joavan. Do not make this worse than it is.\" Daegan stood firm.\n\n\"I cannot wait that long and survive.\"\n\n\"Lie,\" Ainvar murmured.\n\nStorm said, \"Yes.\"\n\n\"You are such a jerk, Joavan,\" Tristan groused. \"We're all trying to save everyone in this world and all you care about is you.\"\n\nAinvar mused aloud, \"Ah. You do not know the Faetheen. They do not worry about others, only themselves.\"\n\n\"You will pay, too, father.\" Joavan just kept issuing threats.\n\nDaegan told Tristan, \"Take Storm back to Evalle. This has gone much longer than I expected.\" As soon as those two vanished, Daegan turned to Garwyli and Lanna still in hologram. \"Thank ya for comin'. I shall visit later and discuss more.\"\n\n\"As ya wish, Daegan. Ya have only ta call when ya need us.\"\n\nLanna lost her bright-eyed look now replaced with worry as she watched Garwyli.\n\nDaegan would catch her away from the old druid on his next visit to Treoir.\n\nWith those two gone, Daegan asked Ainvar, \"How does this gem stop the Imortiks and close the death wall?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't you like to know?\" Ainvar vanished, but without his knife.\n\nFury wafted from Joavan with every step he took forward and snatched the knife up then the pin. With a balled fist and tight muscles protruding from his neck, he warned, \"Ainvar is not your friend. He will not help you! Not the way I have. By tricking me with turning words around, you have lost a powerful ally and gained a deadly enemy. Believe me when I tell you I will get that amulet back before any death wall is closed. For failing to do right by me, I will help none of you stop Imortiks.\"\n\nDaegan's fury topped everything. This Faetheen had lied to him, walked them into a trap, and now thought to threaten him? \"Joavan\u2014\"\n\nThe Faetheen disappeared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Ainvar stepped from where he'd hidden in his castle, close enough to observe the dragon shifter and Joavan argue before Daegan's number two man returned everyone vanished.\n\nThat dung beetle, Joavan.\n\nAinvar would never forgive himself for having bred that one.\n\nHe called up power to hide the translucent castle image even in moonlight. Let the locals think it had disappeared. None would risk coming to this area for another year or two.\n\nMaybe not at all.\n\nHe'd chosen this spot to create the Ghost Castle, as the locals called it, for a reason. He had buried a sorcerer here back when no one could traverse this land.\n\nThe power came from having buried the female sorcerer alive.\n\nJoavan had just cost him the amulet, for which Joavan would pay with his life. Did he think Ainvar would spare his own child's life? Stupid son. Ainvar could have more children if he chose, but based on that one mistake, another child would not happen for a century or more.\n\nWalking quickly, he crossed the marble now covering the entire floor of the antechamber. As he strode, he reached inside his robe and ran his fingers along the black opals strung on a chain of twisted rhodium links.\n\nPower hummed through his fingers and into his body.\n\nWaving a hand ahead of him, an arched passage opened in the curved wall and resealed after he stepped through. He'd created the antechamber just for unexpected visitors. Joavan must feel smug about bypassing the wyverns then finding a way inside.\n\nAinvar had prepared for such an occurrence hundreds of years ago, but he had not expected a dragon tonight. Having just returned from a visit to America again, he'd shown up at the castle just in time.\n\nHad he not been present, that dragon might have killed one of his wyverns.\n\nAinvar gripped his staff hard. The glass ball at the top vibrated with energy and the adder came to life, hissing. He eased his hold and ran a loving hand over the glass. \"You are not needed yet, Tabia. Rest.\"\n\nThe adder curled tight again, becoming still.\n\nWaving his staff from one side of him to the other, a room with crystals arranged in a circular wall two feet high and forty feet in diameter appeared on a floor of malachite. The wall had one small opening for entering the circle.\n\nAs he passed through, an altar rose from the center, pausing at the same height as the crystal wall.\n\nHundreds of candles in all shapes formed along the top of the crystal wall, flaming all at the same time. Stepping to one end of the altar, he lit a sage incense, then did the same at the opposite end.\n\nWith several deep inhales, he felt his body relaxing.\n\nLifting his staff and free hand, he called out, \"Lady Of The Dark.\"\n\nSlowly, she appeared in an ethereal form of a serpent as tall as Ainvar and with a woman's head shielded by a hood of golden skin similar to a cobra's flare. Eyes closed, she said nothing, moving from side to side in a trance-like state.\n\n\"Are you not glad to see me?\" he asked with a smile.\n\nGreen-gold eyes opened with black reptilian irises. \"What do you wish?\"\n\n\"You did not answer my question, sweet one.\"\n\nShe spoke as if dead. \"You call for me. I come to you. My happiness has never been part of our arrangement. Only that I provide information.\"\n\nHe grumbled, \"I ask so little of you. When was the last time we spoke? Ten, maybe eleven years ago?\"\n\nShe said nothing, just continued to move back and forth.\n\n\"What have you been doing to stay busy?\" he asked, taking a dig at her.\n\n\"Your amusement carries a sickness.\"\n\nShaking his head in frustration, he said, \"I have spent time in North America recently.\"\n\n\"This I know.\"\n\nHe added, \"I could not be more pleased with the Imortik activity in progress.\"\n\n\"What of the humans who suffer?\"\n\nWaving off her comment, he said, \"The ones that matter to you will be safe. Imortiks are escaping in a steady stream from the rift. I need to make plans for the big day when the wall comes down.\"\n\nHer steady gaze offered no reaction. \"You no longer have the amulet,\" she pointed out, once again showing him her knowledge.\n\n\"I know where it is and will be until that moment. As long as the dragon king of Treoir has it in his possession, that miserable son of mine will not get his hands on it.\" Ainvar chuckled at his quick decision to expose the value of the amulet regarding Imortiks.\n\nA true stroke of brilliance on his part.\n\nBut then, only a few druids had managed to live as long as he had. Garwyli lived because he remained in a protective realm.\n\nUnfortunately, Cathbad had returned from the dead, the cur.\n\nThat pushed him back to what he would ask next. \"While in North America, I discovered Cathbad still lives. I must find Cathbad and I don't mean at this moment. I need to know where he will be most often or at a specific time and place. Also, does he still possess the book Before Ainvar.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes and turned her head up while weaving back and forth in a mesmerizing motion. Her golden hood enlarged to twice its size. Her lips opened and she blew out a thin stream of reddish-gold fog.\n\nWhen she stopped, the fog took on the shape of Cathbad's face.\n\nCathbad's head rotated to show his profile.\n\nShe lowered her chin until the top of her head was at the same level as the top of his, then she pushed her head into the smoky outline of his.\n\nWhen she did, his eyes became solid and his eyes blinked.\n\nShe stayed that way for what seemed a half hour but had probably only been ten minutes when she withdrew her head.\n\nCathbad's smoky image vanished.\n\nHer hood shrunk back to the usual size as she turned to face Ainvar. \"Cathbad has a cavern in the Himalayan Mountains.\"\n\nAinvar fought to hold his patience. \"I will never find that without more specifics. Even if I could, I do not wish to go traipsing across thousands of miles of mountains.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes, swayed a little, then opened her eyes. \"Cathbad calls in dark druids for a meeting. If you are alerted, you will find him there.\"\n\n\"That bastard!\" Ainvar shook his fist, his voice booming against the walls. \"Does he think to unseat me as Sean\u00f3ir?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"He better not,\" Ainvar muttered.\n\nHer lips lifted a tiny bit at the corners, but she never smiled. \"Cathbad believes he is Sean\u00f3ir by default as no one believes you still live.\"\n\nThe audacity of that druid after Ainvar had helped him and Queen Maeve fake their deaths. Of course, Ainvar had offered his aid only to get those two out of the way. He'd thought with a little luck they'd never returned.\n\nCatching her expression, he cast a furious glare at the halfling he'd saved from death along with her children long ago. He warned, \"Take care you do not find joy in anything that angers me. I still hold the future of your children and their descendants in my grasp.\"\n\nHer face became stoic again. \"I take joy in nothing.\"\n\n\"You would also do well to improve your attitude when we meet again as we will be speaking often now. In fact, I would prefer you not come to me as a serpent. It's distracting.\"\n\n\"Then call me by my name next time, Ainvar.\"\n\nHe had the oracle exactly where he wanted her and smirked. \"This I can do. See how agreeable I am, Zeelindar?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Brynhild limped faster, holding her iced-over broken arm to her chest so it didn't flop around. So many dogs howling. How close were they?\n\nShe could fight off dogs, no matter how many, but not that weapon used to knock her dragon from the sky. Plowing through thickets, she finally reached a place where the undergrowth was not so deep. But she quickly found out why when she rushed into an opening and stopped short of falling into a river.\n\nBelow her, a raging river battered every rock in its way, dragging limbs larger than her body that dared to fall in.\n\nShe'd been herded to a spot with no exit.\n\nThe dogs were getting louder with each beat of her heart banging inside her chest.\n\nIf she shifted into her dragon, she'd have to rebreak her limb, but that would be better than dying. The sound of human machines flying overhead killed that idea. They would attack her dragon with the same weapons, or greater ones.\n\nWith no time to waste, she decided on the river, then looked to the right to see if it spilled into a calm pool.\n\nIn a short distance, the river disappeared over a waterfall.\n\nHer dragon rumbled, wanting to be freed.\n\nThe dogs closed in.\n\nUnwilling to sacrifice her dragon, she jumped, landing hard in the water then tumbling over and around with her arm covered in ice dragging her down.\n\nShe'd had seconds before going over the waterfall, curled in a ball, and hoping against all odds she would not be smashed to pieces. The world fell away beneath her. She kept the scream inside as she dropped like a dead body into the churning water, spinning viciously. She kept turning, trying to find the surface. Don't panic. She chose a direction and started kicking her legs hard, hoping she was right. Her lungs screamed in pain. She broke the surface, gasping for air, and fighting to keep her arm still partially iced from dragging her under again. The water finally calmed. She rolled to her back to float and a strained laugh of relief broke free.\n\nShe had survived a waterfall in her human form. No one would catch her.\n\nShe turned in time to crash into a huge boulder that knocked her out.\n\nThe cold water brought her back as she sank again.\n\nForcing her legs to drive her upward again, she watched where she headed this time. Dizziness turned everything around her into multiple images.\n\nShe blinked while swimming with one arm and kept kicking, angling toward the bank.\n\nThe water moved peacefully and a gentle current pushed her along. When she made it close enough to the bank, she dropped her legs and stood in waist-deep water. The fierce river had tried its best to kill her. She dragged her exhausted body to the bank and fell on her face, heaving deep breaths. Soaked hair covered her face. Her head began throbbing.\n\nWhen she could think clearly, she struggled to sit up. Shoving all that hair out of the way with one hand had her thinking about using her power to deal with her hair.\n\nNo, she could not waste energy on an insignificant annoyance.\n\nLifting fingers on her good hand, she touched her temple where a lump had risen. \"Ouch. Do not be stupid,\" she scolded herself.\n\nHer dragon made more noise, much louder this time, rocking her insides.\n\nShe whispered, \"I do not know if I can hide us as a dragon.\"\n\n<Shift and heal,> floated through her mind.\n\nIf only it would be so simple. She could tolerate the pain better than putting her dragon at risk with no way to fly. She could endure the throbbing in her arm a little longer. She told her dragon, <Be patient. I will find place for us to rest and shift away from enemies.>\n\nHer trip down the waterfall had damaged the ice splint she'd put around her arm. As the last of the ice melted away, the bone had begun to heal straight. She left it alone, but every move sent agonizing pain from her wrist to her shoulder.\n\nShe took a step. Her left foot burned with pain.\n\nShe looked down to see it angled the wrong way and groaned. Calling up her dragon's healing energy, she remained still until she could put weight on it.\n\nFor all the water she'd just battled through, she had no way to take any with her to drink later. Limping forward, she had no idea where she headed and just hoped she was not circling back to the hunters.\n\nSome hours later, she found an old building by almost walking into it in the dark. Many boards were missing. It smelled of horses and filth. Uncaring, she collapsed on the dirt and passed out.\n\nSomething crawled on her face.\n\nShe blinked awake, squinting against daylight seeping in through many more holes than she'd realized last night. She reached up to capture what tickled her skin, pulled back a small spider, and dropped it on the ground.\n\nWater. She needed to drink water but saw none in here.\n\nOnce she could get to her feet, she almost fell again. That foot would not support her much farther. But her broken arm had healed.\n\nShe murmured to her dragon, <I am sorry.> Leaning against a wall for support, she bent her knee to allow her a firm hold on her foot. Breathing in and out fast several times, she wrenched the foot back into position with a loud crack and wailed in pain.\n\nHer dragon roared inside her, slamming her ribs.\n\nTears streamed down her face. She only allowed tears when alone. No one would ever see her weak.\n\nSniffling and breathing hard, she said, \"Yes. It is time.\" She rolled over on the knee and leg she could put weight on and called up her dragon.\n\nShe'd only thought the foot was painful.\n\nHer poor dragon struggled to break free during the longest shift she'd ever suffered through. Skarde had once told her how he and Herrick had experienced difficult shifts after being badly damaged in battles.\n\nShe'd scoffed at him that she would not ever have difficulty with her power.\n\nWhere was Skarde today to taunt her for being a fool?\n\nEven Herrick, who she had never been as close to as Skarde, would be a welcome sight.\n\nWhen her dragon finished shifting, she stood on legs struggling to carry their weight.\n\nShe had stayed human to minimize the repair and because her dragon could not straighten a bone. After thanking her dragon for pulling them through the shift, she could feel energy pushing through the huge body from head to tail.\n\nHer dragon would heal much faster with food.\n\nEating cows had gotten them attacked.\n\nIt was up to her to take care of them once her dragon could heal as much as possible.\n\nAn hour later, her dragon carefully flapped each wing and shifted weight to the damaged limbs. She smiled to herself and sent telepathically, <I have always said you were superior among all of the ice dragons. I will do better watching out for us. Let me have body and find place to rest.>\n\nThe change back to her human form was slow, but not as tormenting this time. She walked barefoot across the dirt floor of the building.\n\nIck. She hated dirty feet.\n\nTime for clothes. She called pants and a simple shirt from the pictures Cathbad had shown her. She still wanted to kill that druid, but these clothes made more sense to move around in the human world. Searching the building, she found an old trough that held a shallow amount of rainwater. Not the cleanest water, but first she drank her fill by ignoring the taste, then washed her feet and covered them in something humans called sneakers.\n\nShe saw nothing sneaky about them, but they did feel comfortable.\n\nWhich way now?\n\nWith no idea of where in the world she'd slept, she struck out in the opposite direction from which she'd arrived last night. Her body functioned, but after trudging a while, her stomach growled, and she couldn't draw enough saliva to spit.\n\nThe sound of a quack caught her attention. Then another. She turned in that direction, using her new footwear to sneak through the woods. A short walk brought her to a pretty pond with ducks floating around making happy noises.\n\nDropping to her knees, she leaned over to cup water and stopped at the sight of her face and hair.\n\nHad Medusa been this scary?\n\nWith no idea of who she might meet, she manually twisted her hair into a tight knot at the top of her head. Not attractive, but better than being seen as a monster. She drank water to appease her growling stomach, then peeled out of her clothes to wash in the pond.\n\nA bath could do wonders for the soul.\n\nDressed again, she felt better and picked up her pace. Her foot complained, but it worked correctly.\n\nShe crossed gentle hills and found her way through pockets of trees to emerge from a dense forest. In front of her, a large pasture came into view. It was connected to another field where a white house stood on the far side of what appeared to be a garden.\n\nAn old man walked behind a metal structure pulled by a horse similar to field workers of her time growing up. The horse was thick and strong.\n\nHer dragon perked up, sending her one word. <Food.>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Casidhe glanced at the digital clock in the kitchen again. Just after midnight. How much longer before Daegan returned? The air around her felt empty without him. She hadn't known him only a few days ago and now she couldn't keep him out of her mind.\n\nThat man could kiss the socks off a woman.\n\nBut they wouldn't have time for any kisses. As soon as he returned, she had to go find Fenella.\n\nDaegan had promised to share everything his people had on Fenella's phone. She expected to teleport to the location of her friend's phone.\n\nIf it circulated, Fenella had to be safe, right?\n\nThat was only if her friend still possessed the device.\n\nBut if that were the case, Fenella would have called.\n\nCasidhe wanted to scream. No matter how many ways she tried to convince herself Fenella was safe, logic blew up every argument. Fenella would have contacted her by now if she weren't in danger.\n\nDaegan would help her save Fenella. That was the only reason Casidhe agreed to wait. He would not let her down.\n\nShe dumped the used tea bag into the trash and carried the warm mug to the living room of Tristan's hotel room.\n\nWho kept a private hotel room? Before he finished introducing her to the man in charge of arranging for her to stay here, who was a troll wearing a human glamour, Tristan had rushed around to make sure she had food and understood how to get anything else she needed.\n\nShe'd gotten a quick glimpse of The Georgian Hotel when he walked her down to the front entrance and showed her emergency exits.\n\nThen he asked her to please not leave the room or he couldn't guarantee her safety.\n\nEven with all the uncertainty in her life, she enjoyed a little thrill every time she glanced out the window of the second-floor room. She actually stood in America. Right outside her window glowed the marquee lights of the famous Fox Theater in the city of Atlanta. She'd read up on that theater in one of the magazines he had delivered to her room.\n\nPeople walked around, living normal lives.\n\nShe longed to experience normal. Not that she didn't appreciate her power to translate. She loved her connection to the preternatural world, but envied people with simpler lives.\n\nEnvy was an ugly color.\n\nNow wasn't the time to be a Negative Nancy. She wasn't stranded on a mountain all alone. Tristan swore his good friend would keep her safe.\n\nA troll watched over her.\n\nLife continued to get stranger by the day.\n\nShe placed her tea on the end table and sat on the sofa next to where she'd dropped her backpack. The books in her pack were spread around on the sofa and end table. But nothing in those books held her attention at the moment as much as what she'd discovered in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb.\n\nEither some of the information she'd been taught about the ice dragons and Daegan's red dragon had been wrong or the book from Queen Maeve's library had been deeply flawed.\n\nHer instinct about books worried her.\n\nShe had more faith in those old texts than what someone told her, or she had until this conflict of faith. Why would the squire families have given her wrong information, though?\n\nThat twit queen would lie to Casidhe in a flash, and had, but ancient books generally documented what actually happened. Whenever in doubt, she had always hunted down a second confirmation, such as another book with corroborating text.\n\nOr a valid source, like Professor Redmond, would confirm or discredit whatever she had a question on. Maybe the professor would speak to her again if she ever made it back to Galway.\n\nHer home seemed so far away. An ocean away.\n\nThe top of the scepter poked out of the backpack.\n\nCasidhe had read pretty much everything in this place. She normally enjoyed hours of reading, but she needed to get moving and do something productive.\n\nHer mind wouldn't stop asking the same question over and over. When would Daegan show up?\n\nShe touched the plump bird on top of the scepter, tapping her fingers against the cool gold as she thought.\n\nThose last few seconds with Zeelindar, the oracle, kept playing through her mind.\n\nDid they have a deadline for delivering this treasure to her? How would she know? When Casidhe asked how to alert Zeelindar when they found the scepter, the oracle had said, \"I will know.\"\n\nThose were the last words Casidhe heard before a power spun her and Daegan to that mountain in Spain.\n\nClearly, Zeelindar did not know everything or she'd have sent word to deliver the scepter by now, right?\n\nGripping the short staff, Casidhe lifted it from the pack and leaned back against the sofa. She mused aloud, \"How do we gain the oracle's attention? Do we say, here ya go, Zeelindar? Or should Daegan and I climb that mountain again?\"\n\nUgh. That was one memory she did not want to replay or repeat.\n\nDaegan had been amazing. She would never have made it to the oracle the first time without him preventing her from freaking out over clinging to the side of a sheer drop-off.\n\nAnyone would have had heart palpitations over that.\n\nHe'd gone through so much to reach the oracle, then battled satyrs to gain the scepter and grimoire box only to have his life threatened by the coating. He'd come for her on the mountain and fought to bring her out of T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb.\n\nGiven all that, her conscience weighed heavy as an elephant sitting on her shoulders.\n\nShe'd accepted the worst about Daegan without question and from someone as unreliable as Queen Maeve. That put a dent in Casidhe's confidence when it came to trusting her decisions. She'd jumped to the wrong conclusion before gaining the truth.\n\nMaybe she should have given Daegan more credit and not believed an evil being who had imprisoned him for thousands of years. Sadly, in that moment, everything the crazy queen said confirmed Casidhe's deepest fears.\n\nShe'd expected to be let down. She expected the enemy of her family to play on her emotions and use her. Why? Probably due to Herrick being less than excited about her last visit, but she couldn't blame this on him.\n\nShe'd suffered bouts of guilt over allowing Daegan to kiss her and slide inside her heart.\n\nHad she been blaming Daegan for making her care about him?\n\nPretty screwed up.\n\nYears of loneliness had affected her more than she'd been willing to admit. Daegan's touch had been so much more than anyone in the past. His kiss had shaken her and challenged all she'd believed. She'd been trying to avoid admitting she was failing Herrick by befriending Daegan.\n\nThen she failed Daegan by misjudging him.\n\nWhere did she go from here?\n\nThe more time she spent around Daegan, the more she wanted to stay around him. What was the possibility of that even happening?\n\nIt didn't matter. She had to do a better job of being fair with Daegan and not judging him against a history she'd been taught that might not be entirely correct.\n\nSo much to think about and no one to talk to and help her figure out how to move forward. She needed Fenella, her best friend.\n\nIt would be nice to have her own phone back in hand.\n\nTristan said he'd pick up her phone from the techs and bring it to her when he returned, but he'd had to rush back to support Daegan.\n\nRaising the scepter to hold in front of her, she asked, \"Where are you, Zeelindar, oracle of the mountain, and keeper of all knowledge? I have the king's scepter and it was no easy task to bring this back to the human world.\" Call her insane, but it felt good to talk about what she and Daegan had been through.\n\n\"We did survive Hadrianna's world, although satyrs chased Daegan out and spit something nasty on him. He\u2014\"\n\nEnergy spun up in the middle of the room between Casidhe and a recliner on the other side of the narrow coffee table. The shimmering miniature tornado grew to Daegan's height and began to fill in with colors, then a translucent form took shape.\n\nZeelindar stood there. Not so much a hologram as appearing ethereal.\n\n\"Why have you called for me?\" the oracle asked.\n\n\"Did I do that?\" Casidhe squeaked, sitting forward. The oracle had not threatened her in any way, but everything about Zeelindar scared the bejesus out of her.\n\n\"Yes. You disturb the rhythm of the universe when you make a request. You may not think your words are heard, but they do land at someone's ear. You asked where I was and here I am.\"\n\nThis put new meaning on being careful what you put out to the universe.\n\nCasidhe cleared her throat. \"Uhm, we found your scepter.\"\n\n\"So I see.\"\n\nThe oracle's tone pretty much called Casidhe Queen Of The Obvious. She lifted the scepter. \"Here.\"\n\n\"I cannot take the scepter with me when I travel in astral projection. What of the grimoire box?\"\n\nWhy would the oracle ask about the box after they managed to save the scepter? Frowning, because it irritated her that after all Daegan had been through that Joavan had him out facing another threat. \"We could have gotten out with just the scepter, but the minute we touched the grimoire, all hell broke loose. Satyrs chased us until Daegan found a way to break out. They\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not want every detail, just an answer.\"\n\nWhat a crabby person. \"Okay then, here's the short version. We found it, lost it, and now a Fae type of person has the box.\" Shouldn't this oracle know all that?\n\nZeelindar's calm presence changed in a snap. The air around her turned dark as a storm and her golden eyes swirled with black then they changed to a fiery orange with white irises. \"You lost the grimoire volume?\" She didn't shout but the room trembled.\n\nWas this woman, oracle, whatever criticizing her and Daegan after all they'd been through? What investment did she have in the grimoire box?\n\nCasidhe dropped the scepter on the sofa, stood, and jabbed fists at her hips. \"You must want the long version. We were lucky to survive and get out of that place with both the scepter and the box. Satyrs chased Daegan to the cliffs. They spewed some kind of coating on him that started hardening and almost killed him. He's out there right now risking his neck to repay a Faetheen who helped clean off the coating and who also grabbed the box after Daegan was captured.\"\n\nHeart pounding out of control, Casidhe would not let this oracle rail at her after all Daegan had suffered.\n\nThe dark swirling energy continued. Hmm. She might need to dial back her anger.\n\nCasidhe tried for peace by not yelling at the oracle. \"Uhm, so, Daegan will return with the grimoire box.\" She sure as hell hoped so and moved ahead to get attention away from the box. \"What do you want us to do with the scepter?\"\n\nSlowly, the dark air lightened until she could see the oracle again and not just those scary eyes.\n\nZeelindar lifted a finger on each hand to her temples.\n\nHad Casidhe given her a migraine?\n\nThe oracle began whispering something.\n\nBlowing out a stream of air, Casidhe sat again and dropped her hands to the sofa. The oracle had the power to blow up her hotel room. Tristan would not be happy to find out someone came to Casidhe here, but in fairness to security, the oracle had not entered in person.\n\nCasidhe pulled her hands to her lap and entwined her fingers. She'd just sit hear quietly until Zeelindar either had more to say or forgot she existed.\n\nPreferably the latter.\n\nWhen Zeelindar lowered her hands, her eyes returned to what Casidhe had come to realize as her normal look of gold swirling with black. \"You two must be together to deliver the scepter.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Casidhe regretted opening her mouth the minute that popped out. What happened to not drawing unwanted attention?\n\nIgnoring the question as if it had been a gnat flying around, Zeelindar said, \"When you are together and possess both the grimoire and scepter, you will receive my message. Do not reach out to me again.\"\n\nEnergy spiraled up once more, then it shrunk until no larger than a candle flame and blinked out of sight.\n\nCasidhe fell back, body exhausted as if she'd just run a marathon around the perimeter of this hotel. That woman would drain a nuclear plant.\n\nShe looked over at her now-cold tea. She needed sleep more than she needed caffeine. Staying awake while she waited might get her into more trouble, plus she'd need to be rested for wherever tracking Fenella's phone would take her.\n\nGetting up, she stuffed the scepter into her backpack, but left the books piled around. She carried the pack still hiding her sword to the bedroom. She hated to wrinkle a bed so perfectly set up with a million decorative pillows she'd never get back in the correct order, but her body begged to crash there.\n\nSomeone with more decorating taste than her had mixed aqua-blue, tan, and white colors in a way that would fit for a man or a woman.\n\nShe placed her backpack next to one of the nightstands then carefully tossed the decorations into a pile beside the bed and left only pillows for sleeping.\n\nAfter shedding all her clothes except a T-shirt and panties, she closed the bedroom door to prevent any embarrassing mishap and pulled the heavy drapes together. Tristan wouldn't come in here without knocking. He'd shown her nothing but respect.\n\nShe stretched out between the sheets, muscles happy to be on a soft bed, but her brain wouldn't shut up.\n\nWhat was happening to Daegan right now?\n\nWhat would happen when she saw him again? Would he kiss her again? Should she let him if they were parting ways once they delivered the scepter?\n\nHer eyelids drooped. She yawned.\n\nNo more kissing.\n\nShe had to stop making bad decisions.\n\nGetting involved with Daegan topped that list.\n\nSleep pulled at her.\n\nBut she wanted ... one more kiss."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Daegan and Tristan arrived at the same moment on the mountain in Spain. He'd linked their powers again to preserve Tristan's as much as he could.\n\nHe stood in knee-high grass growing in land still dark, but close to sunrise. \"I have no idea if returnin' here shall matter, but I wish to go to the spot where we last stood with Joavan.\"\n\n\"That jerk should have set it up for the box to reappear wherever you were,\" Tristan griped. He looked out from the area they'd chosen to shield them from popping into view should a human happen by.\n\nTristan pointed uphill. \"Weren't we over there?\"\n\n\"I believe ya are correct. We shall walk.\"\n\n\"I'm good to teleport us, boss.\"\n\n\"Save your power. Ya do not know when ya may need it.\" Daegan led the way in a hurry. When he reached the next rise, he stopped and looked around.\n\nTristan studied the spot. \"Yep, this looks familiar from the few times I've been here.\"\n\n\"Damn.\" Daegan rubbed his head that kept a dull pain. He had been going for many hours and battled, plus shifted often. The strain and Imortik venom were beating him up inside. He'd return to Treoir soon and rest there, but not seeing the box had drained what drive he'd had left.\n\nDisgust filled him. \"That bloody Faetheen.\"\n\nTristan asked, \"How can we find the box?\"\n\n\"We should not have to do so based on the words Joavan and I spoke.\" Daegan scratched the back of his neck while he stared at the spot where he felt certain he'd last seen the box.\n\nWhat would make that box appear?\n\nWith nothing to lose, he said, \"If ya are here, grimoire box, show yourself as I have fulfilled my part of the agreement with Joavan.\"\n\nTristan smiled, looking amused. \"Maybe that will ... oh, shit.\"\n\nA glimmering rectangle shape took form, becoming solid until the grimoire box appeared on the ground.\n\nDaegan had not thought that would work since Joavan had failed to share any directions on how to retrieve the box. But in all honesty, he had also failed to pin the Faetheen down on details. He would take care not to make that mistake again.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Tristan asked. \"It's right there.\"\n\n\"The Imortik venom inside me recognized the box last time. I could not shift, teleport, or call out telepathically. I experienced a burning sensation from hand to arm and 'twas only for a few minutes while runnin'. I am thinkin' of the best way to transport that box without harmin' either of us.\"\n\n\"Okay, that had to be why Joavan floated it above his hand.\" Tristan snapped his fingers. \"I've got an idea.\"\n\nDaegan nodded, sure he had the same thought. \"We use kinetics to carry it.\"\n\n\"Right. But we still have to put it somewhere safe for the time being. Where would that be?\"\n\nRelieved at the box appearing, Daegan could now think calmly. \"I must ask Garwyli if it would be safe at Treoir and not threaten anyone there. If we take it to Atlanta, I fear the box might call to Imortiks.\" Daegan telepathically said, <I have a question, Garwyli.>\n\n<What be it, dragon?> came right back.\n\n<I have recovered the grimoire box and need a place to keep it safe until time to use its power for stoppin' the Imortiks. I do not want to risk hidin' it in the human world. Would this box be a danger to anyone in Treoir?> After a pause, Garwyli said, <I have a place ta store the box. Send Tristan ta where ya and I met last time. He and Lanna will know where I hide the volume then Tristan will report back ta ya. I see no problem havin' the volume in this realm as there are no Imortiks here.>\n\n<Very well. I shall send Tristan to ya.> Finished with Garwyli, Daegan spoke out loud. \"Carry the box to Garwyli. In fact, teleport directly into the first room of his area. Do not show the box to anyone else. I shall wait here.\"\n\n\"You got it, boss.\" Tristan turned to the box and looked confused on how to get it in the air.\n\nDaegan pointed fingers at each side of the bronze box and used kinetics to lift it. Once he had the box high enough, Tristan slipped a palm beneath it and generated kinetic power to float the box.\n\n\"Joavan's got nothing on us,\" Tristan quipped. \"Be right back.\"\n\nWhen he disappeared, Daegan found a place to sit down and draw his knees up. He crossed his arms and propped them on his knees then dropped his head down.\n\nIt seemed he'd just rested a moment when he heard, \"Boss!\"\n\nDaegan yanked his head up.\n\n\"You good? I didn't mean to be gone so long but it took a bit to put the box away.\"\n\nDaegan got to his feet. \"I am fine.\"\n\n\"That may be, but you look rode hard and put up wet.\"\n\nWhen Daegan cocked an eyebrow at that, Tristan said, \"You look wiped out, exhausted, ready to crash.\"\n\n\"I will rest once I check on Casidhe and make good on sending her with ya to Fenella's phone.\"\n\nTristan twisted his neck one way then the other as if loosening muscles. \"I have a bad feeling about that.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Last I heard, our tech people had located the phone, but it was moving around one small area.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"They say no calls have been made on it to Casidhe the entire time we've had her phone in our possession. It's as if someone has the phone but isn't using it.\"\n\n\"Why would that be strange?\"\n\nTristan chuckled. \"You've never had a mobile phone. Today's world loves their phones to text or make calls on all day long. There's something odd about the lack of activity with that phone even though it seems to move around.\"\n\n\"I should go with you and Casidhe when you take her.\"\n\n\"Nope. I'm doing that on my own while you rest, see Brina, the babies if they're born, whatever. It won't take me long to teleport Casidhe and I won't allow her to walk into danger.\"\n\nHad anyone else suggested that, Daegan would have shut them down immediately, but not this man. Tristan would protect Casidhe with his life just as Daegan would and Tristan made valid points.\n\nDaegan had to eat and rest so he could hunt the second grimoire volume. It had to be in Atlanta, but he had no way to pinpoint where.\n\nThat meant the oracle had been correct when she said he'd be back to see her again. When they handed over the scepter, he would ask for how to find the second grimoire.\n\nThen he would find out who was behind the Imortik attack on VIPER. Could the Imortik master have two volumes now?\n\nA frightening thought.\n\n\"I agree with ya about goin' to Treoir, Tristan. Still, I need time to see Casidhe before the two of ya depart.\"\n\n\"You'll have plenty of time. I have to get the phone from our people and I promised Quinn I would check in whenever I was in town to keep him up on what we're doing, plus take his report to you.\"\n\n\"That would be excellent.\"\n\nTristan didn't waste time teleporting.\n\nDaegan felt off-balance as he appeared in a strange room. A nicely furnished room empty of any living being. Fear flooded his thoughts. \"Where is she?\" He couldn't hide the panic in his voice after she had vanished so many times. Power gathered around, preparing to attack a threat.\n\n\"She's here, boss,\" Tristan said quietly as he appeared. \"Bedroom door is closed. She's probably sleeping.\"\n\nRelief almost took him to his knees. \"I trusted ya had her safe, but ...\"\n\n\"But you've been through hell for days and need a break. Why don't you shower and catch some rest while I'm gone? Shouldn't take more than an hour.\"\n\n\"Do ya think to fool me so easily?\"\n\nTristan chuckled. \"Not really. I was hoping you'd surprise me and agree.\" He smiled with compassion. \"You're not gonna save or lose the world in an hour. The minute you return to Treoir, everyone is going to need your attention.\"\n\nWiping his mouth with a hand, Daegan gave in. \"Very well. Do not allow me more than an hour. I want your word.\"\n\n\"You have it. I will always do whatever you ask,\" Tristan said in a solemn voice, which gave Daegan a twinge of guilt for having questioned him.\n\n\"Go on. I shall be here.\" Daegan tried to sound more lighthearted than he felt.\n\n\"Shower is in the bedroom.\" Tristan looked as if he wanted to say something else but disappeared instead.\n\nDaegan stared at the door, torn between rushing in to be with Casidhe again and holding himself back from acting so rash.\n\nShaking off the thoughts he was too tired to sort out, he quietly opened the door, exposing the dark room. His eyes adjusted to locate the bed where he identified the sound of delicate snores.\n\nPoor lass had to be just as tired as him.\n\nHe crossed quietly to the large bathroom with a standing shower. Daegan had taken showers in Quinn's special building in downtown Atlanta set up just for the Beladors. Another modern convenience he appreciated. While he scrubbed his body, he envisioned walking into the bedroom to find her awake, hair tousled, and with a sleepy smile on her face.\n\nThe way she'd look if she'd just had sex.\n\nHe groaned. One thought of her turned him hard.\n\nIn spite of how she'd joked with him on the mountain, the lass would likely take offense or fear him if he left the bathroom in this condition and startled her.\n\nTwisting the handles, he endured an icy shower. That ruined the relaxing hot one from just before, but he could now manage his body by the time he dried off. He called up a pair of shorts made of soft material.\n\nWhen he turned off the bathroom light and opened the door into the bedroom, Casidhe still slept soundly.\n\nHe longed to be near her and struggled with the notion of walking out to rest on the furniture he'd seen in the other room.\n\nHis body would hang off both ends of the longest piece.\n\nThe bed she slept on swallowed her small form. He could stand here and debate or he could give in to his need to rest close to her.\n\nWalking over to the bed, he smiled at her curled up in the middle with her back to him. The lass had taken over half of the bed, but he had enough room on this side. He first moved her backpack to a corner where it would be out of reach.\n\nIf his little termagant became riled, she went for her sword.\n\nHe slipped between the sheets and turned on his side toward her while maintaining a proper distance. Every deep breath drew in her natural scent and soothed his battered soul. He touched her reddish blond hair, so silky between his fingers.\n\nThey had met under the worst of conditions. Much as he still harbored anger at Joavan, the Faetheen had helped with rescuing her from Queen Maeve.\n\nDaegan would have given anything in that moment to save her. Joavan should not have lied to him. In spite of how the Faetheen acted, Daegan would return the amulet once the Imortiks were behind the death wall.\n\nPerhaps they still had a chance to be allies.\n\nIf that did not happen, an amulet would save no one. The being who had teleported into the vault in VIPER headquarters would be difficult to stop.\n\nThe steady sound of Casidhe breathing and sleeping close enough for him to protect loosened Daegan's chest muscles. He rolled over on his back and put his hands behind his head. He'd slept that way for many years during battle with his fingers near the hilt of his sword.\n\nDaegan dropped off, falling into deep sleep for a short while until he realized a warm arm was draped across his chest. His heart caught up with his observation and started beating fast.\n\nCasidhe had rolled over at some point and hugged her body against his. He pulled his arms down, placing one carefully around her back.\n\nHer full breasts pressed against his skin, heating his blood.\n\nShe snuggled closer and rubbed against him. His discipline would not hold up against her sweet assault. He wanted to lift her soft lips to his and taste her.\n\nHe wanted her. Simple as that.\n\nBut to take her and possibly not see her again would be an insult. Just the idea of being apart from her sent waves of longing through him to wrap her up and spirit her away to Treoir.\n\nHe could do nothing until he found out what power she carried and if he survived the venom from his first Imortik attack.\n\nStill, at the moment, he would trade much for a simple kiss.\n\nShe moved her leg up onto his body, brushing her knee over his hard erection. He sucked in a sharp breath.\n\nHe could think of few tortures so difficult to survive as having Casidhe's warm body this close and not touching her everywhere. Not driving into her heat and making her his.\n\nHe found the edge of her shirt. He slid his hand beneath the material and ran his fingers gently over the smooth skin on her back.\n\nShe moaned and wiggled around, forcing him to bite back a curse.\n\nThen her warm lips pressed against his skin pecking kisses.\n\nHe grinned. The termagant was awake. She moved again and he lost his smile. \"Careful, lass. 'Tis only so much a man can endure.\"\n\nIn reply, she kissed him more and crawled up on top of him.\n\nClasping her hips, he held her still before he lost all hope for control.\n\nSoft lights from the streets outside dusted her skin in the dark room and touched her sultry look.\n\nThe vixen ran her hands from his chest to stomach and moved her heat against him, as if he were not already hard as a battering ram. Hair tousled from sleep and full lips curved in an easy smile, this lass possessed a beauty all her own.\n\nShe ran her tongue over her lips. \"Hi there.\"\n\nDrawing a finger along the shape of her cheek and chin, he said, \"I missed ya.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Her eyes brightened at his admission.\n\nHow could she doubt his words when she sat upon the proof? But he missed her, not just her body. He feared once they made love he would be done for, unable to walk a step away from her.\n\nAnother reason he could not cross a line right now.\n\nHis life would not be his own until the world was free of Imortiks. He would not have Casidhe living in fear for her life any more than the others he protected.\n\nOne of her perfect eyebrows lifted. \"Are you not ... interested?\"\n\nHis heart pounded like a fist hammering on a locked door of a building on fire. \"Ya have to ask if I want ya?\"\n\nShe lifted a shoulder in answer, surprising him with her show of vulnerability.\n\n\"Lass, I want ya more than I can put in words, but I cannot have ya.\"\n\nHer eyebrows dropped low and she sounded hurt. \"What?\"\n\nBrushing his knuckles along her smooth cheek, he smiled. \"Ya are beautiful and I would be humbled for ya to share your body with me, but a man who cares for ya does not accept what ya offer without serious intentions. If once I finish all I must accomplish, ya still want to give this a try, I am more than willin'. But ya have to know it would change everythin'.\"\n\nThey stared at each other for heavy seconds.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" She cocked her head and nibbled on her lip.\n\n\"I would not treat ya so casually as a woman to never see again. I would only touch ya if ya were mine to keep.\"\n\nSitting up, her face struggled with confusion and something else Daegan couldn't identify.\n\nClearing her throat, she scrubbed her hands over her face. \"While I do not offer myself to just anyone, I am not holdin' you to marriage or anythin' like that. This is not two thousand years ago. I've been with one other man, but only one.\"\n\nDaegan's blood churned. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Oh, Daegan, it was back in college and a mistake. We did not spend much time together. He complained about sex. I disappointed him.\" She drew circles on his chest.\n\n\"He was doin' it wrong,\" Daegan replied dryly.\n\nShe lowered her gaze to his chest and murmured, \"I might disappoint you.\"\n\n\"Not possible.\"\n\nEyes the color of an endless sky lifted to his and flickered with disbelief. Then she jabbed his chest with her finger. \"How can you possibly know?\"\n\nHe caught her finger and held her gaze while his heart thudded at having her this close. He slowly pulled her finger into his mouth and sucked it.\n\nHer lips parted and her eyes widened.\n\nGiving her finger a lick, his eyes held hers captive and his chest rumbled. \"'Tis not my first time either, lass. If a man knows what to do, the woman shall enjoy the mating immensely. That was no man but a boy ya met.\"\n\nHer smile could wake the sun. \"Now I really want to do this with you.\"\n\n\"When I know we can be together for more than one night, I shall show ya all that ya have been denied.\"\n\n\"Cocky. I like that about you, dragon.\"\n\nMouthy wench. \"I like ya. I like how I feel around ya. 'Tis the first time since escapin' from T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb I see a glimpse of the future I want.\"\n\nHer eyes glistened, then she blinked the tears away before they could fall. \"I wish you wanted to take us on a test ride right now,\" she muttered and moved around as if getting comfortable.\n\nHe hissed. \"Lass! Take care.\"\n\nEasing down to cross her arms on his chest and prop her chin on her arms, she said, \"I have spent a lot of time alone. No man has interested me the way you do. With all we've been through, I don't know when this opportunity will happen again.\" She stared down for a few seconds then lifted her gaze to him. \"I have denied myself so much for so long I thought to ... I want to let go for once.\"\n\n\"I know what ya say and to give in would be so easy, but then I would be livin' with my guilt if this Imortik problem kept me from returnin' to ya.\" Daegan swallowed his disappointment, but he could not do this for the very reasons he stated. He brushed his hand over her hair. \"I vow to ya if once this is over and I am free to live my life, nothin' shall stop me from comin' to find out if ya are still willin'.\"\n\nHer eyebrows drew tight. \"I will be ... if someone else doesn't come along.\"\n\nHe flipped her on her back so fast she gasped. Bracing himself on his forearms, he breathed hard in and out, fighting the struggle to keep his hands from her. \"I am tryin' to say I shall not treat ya as a loose woman. I care for ya, lass. I want so much more with ya. If another man touches ya, he shall forfeit that hand.\"\n\nPushing up on her elbows, she whispered, \"You aren't a Renaissance Man, you're an original. I was only teasin'.\" She lifted up and kissed him.\n\nHe held his control in a strangle grip. His arms shook from wanting to pull her to him and do so much more, but he kissed her, moving his mouth over hers and enjoying her sweet taste. She hooked her arms over his shoulders, rubbing that body against him. His deprived groin would never be the same.\n\nSitting up, he lifted her with him. She locked her legs around his hips and sat back on his knees. His hands found their way under her shirt to hold her full breasts.\n\nHe caressed her nipples, feeling the hard tips form.\n\nShe made a needy sound that sent heat zinging through his groin.\n\nHis energy spun up, reaching for hers. Their energies hummed all around them. He had no idea why that was happening.\n\nHer fingers clutched his neck and hair. \"I don't want you fightin' Imortiks.\"\n\nKissing her a long time, he eased apart. \"I shall be fine as long as I know ya are safe. Ya must promise me to not take chances.\" Leaning forward, he kissed her cheek. \"Ya are someone I never thought to have in my life. I shall find a way for us to be together.\"\n\nShe held his face to hers. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Aye.'Tis hard to imagine livin' without ya, lass.\"\n\nHer face softened and her eyes misted. The longer he stared at her, the more difficult he found it to move away from this woman who had stolen his heart, but he had to leave soon. He kissed her again. \"We should dress. I fear Tristan returns soon.\"\n\n\"I need a shower.\"\n\nHe stood up and lifted her to her feet, watching her all the way to the shower. When the water came on, he could think of nothing except how much he wanted to run his soapy hands over her body.\n\nIf he did not find something new to think on, he would be unable to wear jeans. But he was never using the image with Queen Maeve that Casidhe had suggested on the mountain.\n\nHe'd cut off his own member before being forced to service that crazy being.\n\nBy the time Casidhe dried off, dressed, and stepped from the shower, he'd donned jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and boots.\n\nCasidhe headed out of the room, speaking over her shoulder. \"I'm going to make some tea for us.\"\n\nDaegan had seen the lasses drink tea in Treoir. He was not much for the brew, but if it made Casidhe happy he would drink whatever she made for him.\n\nTristan's voice came into Daegan's mind. <I'm teleporting into the hotel room in five minutes.>\n\n<I shall be waiting for ya.> Daegan should go with Tristan and Casidhe. That should not take long then he would teleport to Treoir once he and Tristan found a safe place for Casidhe to stay.\n\nAs he walked out to meet Casidhe in the kitchen, Tzader called him telepathically. <Brina has been in labor for a while, but the healer says our babies are coming. Brina asked that you be here. Can you do that, Daegan?>\n\n<Yes. Tristan is arriving any minute. I shall come immediately.> He felt a surge of happiness and disappointment.\n\nHe could not pass up the chance to be there when the babes were born, but that meant he could not join Tristan and Casidhe.\n\nShe walked out of the kitchen just as Tristan appeared in the large room. \"Whoa. Scared me to death, Tristan. Glad to see you, but you should be careful poppin' in unannounced.\" Her guilty gaze jumped to Daegan.\n\n\"Tristan called to me a few minutes ago to inform me he would be teleportin' in,\" Daegan explained.\n\n\"Oh. That's fine.\" She smiled at Tristan. \"Want some tea?\"\n\n\"Thanks, but I have to teleport Daegan first, then I'll be right back to get you.\"\n\nHer lips parted with hurt. \"Where are you goin'?\"\n\nDaegan did not want to leave her this way. \"Give me a moment, Tristan.\"\n\n\"No problem, boss.\"\n\nWalking over to Casidhe, Daegan gently turned her toward the kitchen. She walked ahead of him then stopped and spun around with her arms crossed.\n\nHe cupped her shoulders. \"I had hoped to go with ya and Tristan to find Fenella's phone, but I am needed for somethin' urgent in Treoir Realm. I do not want ya waitin' any longer. Ya have been patient and 'tis time ya went to the place my people located your friend's phone.\"\n\nShe uncrossed her arms and frowned. \"I understand.\"\n\nPlacing his palm on her cheek, he leaned down and kissed her. \"I shall see ya as soon as I am free again. Tristan shall take ya wherever ya need to go and contact me immediately if ya run into trouble. I trust him with my life. 'Tis the only one I would trust with yours.\"\n\nNodding, she said, \"I'll be fine. Hurry back.\" She lifted up and kissed him. \"Go. Do whatever you need to and be safe.\"\n\n\"No harm comes to me in my family's realm.\"\n\nIf that was so, why did he have a strong misgiving about going there?\n\nOr was it about leaving her?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Cathbad teleported into the Tribunal realm, ready to go on the attack first. If not, these deities would destroy him within minutes with one simple question.\n\nThe surly trickster god, Loki, glared down from the dais where he stood beside stalwart Justitia and Hermes, who never seemed to play much of a role here. This trio of powerful beings had been here often lately when VIPER had other deities willing to play judge, jury, and executioner.\n\nThis place needed new blood.\n\nCathbad pushed power into his voice. \"I have somethin' I wish to make clear before ya start in on me with your questions.\"\n\n\"We do not allow anyone to qualify when or how we ask questions,\" Loki shot back. Energy boiled in a blue glow around him, but without disturbing his custom-tailored suit, shiny shoes, and perfectly styled black hair.\n\nSomeone had enraged that one recently for him to pop off so quickly when Loki generally liked to play with his prey.\n\nEven Justitia had a pissy twist to her lips.\n\nWhile Hermes plunked his lyre and stared off at nothing, Justitia spoke up. \"We do have questions and little patience.\"\n\nCathbad powered up his attitude, showing no weakness. Never let Loki scent blood. \"I am here to respond just as I said I would be. I merely wish to sort out a confusion to save us all time.\"\n\n\"How admirable of you, Cathbad. Quinn of the Beladors showed the same concern for our time.\" Loki's tone soured. \"Forgive me if I find all this deference for inconveniencing us a bit suspicious.\"\n\nThe longer they bantered, the more this would disintegrate. Cathbad jumped ahead, getting to the meat of what he had to say. \"When ya call me in to discuss a situation, I am always lumped together with Queen Maeve. While I did reincarnate with her, we have parted ways. I do not wish to be held responsible for her actions. 'Tis the only point I wished to make.\"\n\nHermes turned a surprised expression on Cathbad.\n\nAngling around, Justitia lifted her chin in Loki's direction with eyes covered with a white cloth. Justice with impartiality, blind to wealth, status, or power. She whispered something to Loki, who kept his gaze on Cathbad, but nodded.\n\nMusic started up again.\n\nCathbad ignored the looney musical god, wishing he could cloak Hermes along with his annoying instrument just to enjoy some quiet.\n\n\"How can we know you are not involved with Queen Maeve, Cathbad?\" Loki hadn't questioned Cathbad's words since no one dared to lie in a Tribunal. Regardless of power, lying in this realm would turn a being a bright red and death would follow not far behind. Loki had just poked around to find out Cathbad's game.\n\n\"'Tis simple if ya think about what I have done in recent months.\"\n\nThat drew frowns on all three of them.\n\nNow that Cathbad had their attention, he kept going. \"I have been comin' here and playin' peacemaker every time Queen Maeve stirred up trouble. I brought Quinn's child back from T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and helped VIPER allies take down Veronika after Queen Maeve had sent someone to aid that witch in escapin' VIPER lockdown.\" They should be kissing his feet for preventing that particular witch to run loose. She'd planned to use Witchlock on the world, supernaturals included, had Adrianna not yanked the power from her during a battle.\n\nCathbad kept going, unwilling to give up his chance to speak. \"I was not informed about Queen Maeve's machinations nor was I involved in her stupid plans. That action alone on my part caused a great fracture in our relationship. I left for a while to think about how to move forward. 'Tis why I was not with the queen when ya called to me and why I wish to stay clear of her. We have met a couple times since then, none of which have ended well.\"\n\nJustitia lifted her free hand that did not hold the scales of justice. \"Are you aware of Queen Maeve hunting the Immortuos Grimoire?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I only just discovered that durin' a recent visit.\"\n\n\"Are you helping her?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. That was another bad row we had.\" Cathbad affected a pained expression. \"Ya have witnessed when she loses control. I promise ya, 'tis far worse when she is in her own realm. No one can stop her when she goes on a rampage.\"\n\nLoki stepped away, staring off to his right, then turned around, walking with his hands behind his back. He paused to meet Cathbad's gaze. \"You are saying you did not help her capture someone to hunt the grimoire?\"\n\nAh. Now Cathbad understood the underlying friction. What had that crazy queen done now? \"I do not even know who she captured. Who is it?\"\n\n\"Casidhe Luigsech.\"\n\nUnbelievable. Queen Maeve had found Casidhe?\n\nCathbad would deal with that later. With everyone watching, he shifted his face into a shocked expression. \"Did she now? 'Tis news to me. I had no idea of that kidnappin'.\"\n\nWith the no-lying consequence, he didn't have to sound believable, but he had. He'd been so busy hunting Brynhild, he had not spent time trying to find Casidhe.\n\nThe oversight had worked in his favor.\n\nLoki crossed his arms and lifted a finger to his chin.\n\nJustitia no longer frowned. Her lips softened but stopped short of smiling.\n\nThe idiot on her other side never even paused from strumming a tune meant to be heard alone.\n\nCathbad wanted to keep the attention on Queen Maeve and not allow the two with a mind up there to ask him pertinent questions about hunting the grimoire himself. He asked, \"Are ya sayin' Queen Maeve has found one of the grimoire volumes?\"\n\n\"No.\" A small word from Loki spoken with emphasis. \"Do you know who Casidhe Luigsech is?\"\n\nJust as Cathbad had feared, the two of these three paying attention would zero in on specifics that could hang him. \"Aye. While gone on my sabbatical, I visited the mound of Newgrange in County Meath. I heard Daegan of Treoir had been to see a woman who is an ancestral research specialist in Galway, Ireland. I assumed he hunted information on his family, but this sounds as if he also hunts the grimoire.\"\n\nThere was no tie between Cathbad's visit to the great mound and Daegan visiting Casidhe, but every word had been true. He'd presented the information in a simple way to allow this audience to make the connection he intended.\n\nWhen no one spoke up, Cathbad returned to circling the discussion so that he disengaged himself from Casidhe in their eyes. \"I have my differences with Daegan, but I doubt he looks for the grimoires to use them to rule Imortiks. Queen Maeve is another story.\"\n\nJustitia frowned. What had her upset?\n\nQueen Maeve should be the obvious answer.\n\nCathbad had to continue to distance himself from her for his own survival.\n\nHe continued to bring his tone down to polite and understanding to prevent those on the dais from becoming overly defensive. \"As ya can see, this is why I wanted to clear up any confusion about me bein' joined with Queen Maeve. I tire of cleanin' up her problems. I ask as we go forward ya accept that I am only responsible for my actions. Do ya have any more questions?\"\n\n\"Only one,\" Loki said. \"Do you think Luigsech can locate any of the grimoire volumes?\"\n\nTaking his time as if he had to give the possibility serious consideration when he knew the truth, Cathbad pinched his lip a moment. \"'Tis possible. If Daegan found her and Queen Maeve found her, that makes me believe Luigsech may know things no one else does.\"\n\n\"Daegan claims a second dragon is pretending to be his red dragon flying around Europe burning lands. What do you say?\" Justitia had given Cathbad no warning before unloading that dangerous question.\n\nLoki had been half listening as if deliberating on something, but her question snapped his attention to the discussion.\n\nCathbad didn't ponder on this one. He frowned and dropped his jaw, then closed his mouth. \"Daegan believes more than one dragon lives today? Ya must be jokin'.\"\n\nLoki speared him with a long stare. \"We have not been in a joking mood for a while.\"\n\nSighing loud enough to make an impression, Cathbad said, \"Daegan may not be huntin' the grimoire after all. He may have somethin' else in mind. Such a story is ... bizarre. Never in history since his birth has there been another red dragon. We all know about his mother bein' a goddess, just not her identity. I have never heard of a second red dragon bein' born. Hard to accept such a claim today by Daegan.\"\n\n\"Just because Daegan believes something does not make it true,\" Hermes interjected. Loki and Justitia must no longer be shocked when that nitwit spoke. Neither one showed a reaction.\n\n\"'Tis correct.\" Cathbad had never expected support from that corner.\n\n\"I have nothing more at this time,\" Loki said, sounding very much like he wished to end the meeting.\n\nAs Cathbad had stood here talking about the dragon imposter, he realized his priorities had changed.\n\nHe had to locate Brynhild and take her out of sight. If these three ever found out he'd kept a dragon alive for two thousand years and glamoured her recently to pose as the red dragon, he'd face a worse consequence than lying in a Tribunal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Daegan appeared on the grounds leading up to Treoir castle where guards were positioned to protect the castle from any attack.\n\nThey protected the next generation of Treoirs.\n\nHis skin pebbled with thrill over a moment he'd thought never to witness.\n\nArriving at the same moment, Tristan stepped up next to Daegan. \"Are you set, boss?\"\n\n\"Yes. I shall be here for as long as possible. Brina asked that I be present for the birth of the babes and she is in labor.\"\n\n\"I'd stay if I could but give Brina and Tzader my best. I'll check in on them when I return.\"\n\n\"I shall do so, Tristan. I want ya to remain with Casidhe until she is somewhere safe. I do not wish for her to return to her home, but I expect her to fight ya on where she chooses to go.\"\n\n\"I won't leave her until I know she'll be safe.\"\n\nDaegan put a hand on Tristan's shoulder. \"I have no doubt. Your head is clearer than mine when it comes to her.\" He didn't mind admitting that to his second-in-command.\n\n\"We all have an Achilles heel about someone, boss.\" Tristan didn't smile when he added, \"She may be yours just as long as she doesn't put you at risk.\"\n\nThe warning wasn't lost on Daegan. He merely nodded, unable to say anything when he had no idea what to do about Casidhe. He had gone farther than he'd intended with her, but he could not find the strength to walk away from her.\n\nTristan snapped his fingers. \"By the way, before I came to get you, I teleported Petrina and Bernie here. They'd just finished their patrol.\" He chuckled. \"They were whipped but excited about being a part of the team. I haven't seen Petrina that happy in a long time.\"\n\nDaegan waited as Tristan seemed to gather his thoughts.\n\n\"I haven't done my best by our gryphons, boss. I know they understand when I have to be gone, but as soon as we figure out this Imortik thing, I'm going to start spending more time there to work out how to give them a better life. They've been waiting to be told what to do for so long, it will be nice to get their perspective and turn them into a better functioning unit but happy people, too.\"\n\n\"'Tis a wise plan, Tristan. Please tell them I shall visit soon as well so I can let them know how important they are to me. I, too, often think we keep them safe here, but they are not children to be told to stay home.\" Daegan noticed more guards filling in around the castle. \"Time must be nearin' the birthin'. Go on and take Casidhe to the place of Fenella's phone. I trust ya without question to keep her safe.\"\n\n\"You bet, boss.\"\n\nAs Tristan disappeared, Daegan suffered a moment of wishing to be the one to watch over Casidhe just as much as he wanted to be here for Brina and the babes.\n\nHe meant what he said about trusting Tristan to do anything he could.\n\nMentally giving himself a shove, Daegan hurried up the steps to the castle. He entered then turned right at the wide hallway, moving quickly. At Garwyli's quarters, the door swung open as he lifted his knuckles to tap.\n\nLanna stood there smiling. \"Is time for babies. I am excited.\" When Daegan stepped back, she took off walking in long strides on her short legs.\n\nGarwyli stepped out behind her with his twisted hickory cane. \"I told her ta wait until they call us, but she jumped up and said the babes were comin'. She has a powerful sense about her.\"\n\nDaegan wanted to run after Lanna, but offered, \"Would ya like to teleport, druid?\" His power increased while on Treoir to aid short teleporting.\n\n\"Aye, dragon. I know ya be just as anxious as that young lass.\"\n\nSmiling, Daegan teleported them to the sitting area in Tzader and Brina's suite at the far end of the castle. They arrived just as Lanna rushed in.\n\nShe stumbled. \"I must learn to teleport.\" Then she glanced around at the empty room. \"Where are friends?\"\n\nDaegan explained, \"In my time, only the closest friends and family were present. Most of those are fightin' Imortiks in the human realm. Brina and Tzader will be pleased to see us.\"\n\nLanna had started backing away. \"Me? I am not important.\"\n\nSighing, Daegan pointed to a comfortable sofa. \"Yes, ya are. Have a seat.\"\n\nWhen she took the spot he'd indicated, he chose one of the larger chairs for himself. Garwyli tottered over to an identical chair on the opposite side of the sofa, which swallowed his frail body.\n\nDaegan had grown a deep affection for the old druid, thinking to have him for many more years. The possibility of losing him at all, but sooner than expected, was too painful to think on with no idea how to save him.\n\nLanna had clasped her hands on her lap, but nerves had her fingers moving around.\n\n\"What are ya two workin' on today?\" Daegan asked, hoping to lessen the anxiety in the air.\n\nAnd why did they have anxiety? Did Lanna and Garwyli think the birthing would be difficult?\n\nLanna stopped twiddling her fingers and looked to the old druid, who nodded at her.\n\nDaegan respected the relationship those two had and that the young woman deferred to Garwyli for when to share her training.\n\nSitting up, Lanna brushed her blond curls with black tips away from her face. \"Garwyli has great patience. He teaches me basic things when I wish to do big things.\" She smiled at the druid, who chuckled. \"He dangles giant carrot to make me work hard. I want to learn to teleport but must understand smaller parts of majik first.\"\n\nDaegan sat back. \"Teleportin' is nice. Have ya tried it before on your own?\"\n\n\"Yes, I move from one room to second room in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb.\"\n\nDaegan leaned forward with his hands on his knees. \"What were ya doin' there?\"\n\n\"I traveled with Evalle and Tristan to T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb when they try to save gryphons Queen Maeve compelled to attack Treoir.\"\n\n\"They took ya to T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb?\" Daegan found that hard to accept. He'd only heard bits and pieces of that attack.\n\n\"Not exactly. I hide in cloaking and stand close to them.\"\n\nGarwyli lifted a bushy white eyebrow at Daegan as if to say, \"See what I must try ta tame?\"\n\nLanna paused. \"Why do we not hear Brina?\"\n\nGarwyli lifted a hand, stalling more questions from Lanna. \"She asked that I ward the room ta prevent any noise she made.\"\n\n\"'Tis a natural noise, druid,\" Daegan said, not happy anyone would stifle his niece.\n\n\"She said it had been too long since a babe was born here and did not wish any of us thinkin' she was dyin'.\"\n\nNow Daegan worried along with Lanna about the quiet. What if Brina did have a problem? She would need their most powerful in the room. Daegan started to call telepathically to Tzader when Tzader opened the door and stepped out.\n\nHis dark skin had lightened two shades.\n\nDaegan's heart hit the floor. He stood. \"Tell me.\"\n\nGripping his head, Tzader said, \"It was one hell of a battle, but we have two children.\" A tear ran down one cheek.\n\nLanna jumped up grinning and clapping lightly. \"I am so happy for you both. When can we see babies and Brina?\"\n\nGood thing Lanna could talk. Daegan had lost the ability and his eyes burned.\n\nGarwyli made it to his feet. \"Congratulations to you both. Do ya wish ta remove the sound ward?\"\n\nWiping his face with his forearm, Tzader sniffled. \"Yes, Garwyli. Thank you. They have strong lungs.\" He laughed a tired sound.\n\nAt that moment one of the babes showed off those strong lungs.\n\nEveryone in the sitting room laughed.\n\nBeyond Tzader, Daegan could see two women bustling around in Brina's bed chamber. One was a Belador healer and midwife who had been brought to Treoir just for this birth.\n\nDaegan dashed away dampness on his cheeks. His father would be proud of his descendants and those of the Belador warriors who had served him. Daegan gave the bitter-sweet thought a moment, then pushed away any sadness.\n\nTreoir had new life.\n\nGarwyli said, \"Do ya feel the new power?\"\n\nTingling rushed across Daegan's skin. His dragon rumbled quietly, but energy spread through his body. The Imortik venom still burned through his blood, but he had a fresh burst of power to combat the poison and possibly return to teleporting anywhere soon.\n\nTzader held his arms out. \"Damn. I haven't even thought about what bringing in new Treoir lives in the realm would do to our power, to all the Belador power.\"\n\nLooking from face to face, Lanna asked, \"How much new power?\"\n\nWhy did she sound so anxious?\n\nDaegan said, \"Not huge, but every Belador will enjoy a small surge as a gift shared by all from these births.\"\n\nShe smiled as if that answered her question, but Daegan picked up a sadness about her. He would ask her more later.\n\nTzader turned around and softly called out, \"Ready, love?\" Then he stepped aside. \"I present our family.\"\n\nDaegan strode immediately to the door and entered. He smelled all the natural scents of having given birth that might bother others.\n\nNot him.\n\nHe hoped this would happen again and again. Walking quietly over to Brina, he knelt next to the bed.\n\nPale from her exertion, she gave him a watery smile. \"Look, Uncle. We have a family, because ya saved us from Macha and other threats. I can never tell ya how much I love ya, but every day these two take a new step I believe ya shall see it.\"\n\nA rush of love flooded Daegan. His heart swelled with so much happiness it almost hurt for him to feel part of a family again. These beautiful babes would be the future he'd never thought would happen.\n\nHe cleared his throat, but emotion still made it difficult to speak. \"I love ya just as much, Niece. I vow to protect your babes, ya, and Tzader with my life for as long as I am here.\"\n\nTzader walked up and took one of the babies. When Daegan stood, Tzader handed him the tiny bundle. \"This one is a boy.\"\n\nHands trembling, Daegan took the infant wrapped in one of the blankets he'd seen Brina working on when she would be still. He held the tiny child and inhaled deeply.\n\nThis was the reason for every battle he fought. So that his family and the families of Beladors, allies, and humans could live in peace to raise their children.\n\nTzader picked up the other twin and handed that child to Garwyli who said, \"I thank ya for the honor, Tzader, but my old arms may fail me. Would ya allow Lanna ta hold her?\"\n\n\"Of course, but I never said this was a girl.\"\n\nThe old druid smiled beneath that pile of white beard.\n\nLanna stepped up and accepted the baby with reverent quiet so unlike the constantly chattering young woman. \"She is beautiful. Both are incredible.\"\n\n\"Thank ya, Lanna,\" Brina said, then moved around in the bed to get comfortable. Tzader was there in an instant to help her. Brina announced, \"We have named them. Daegan holds Ronan.\"\n\nDaegan tore his gaze from the boy. His voice came out in a whisper. \"'Tis my da's first name.\"\n\n\"We know,\" Tzader said, taking Brina's hand in his. \"We're naming our girl Caoimhe after Brina's great-and-then-some grandmother.\"\n\nDaegan's eyes burned again. So unbefitting a warrior, but he would not deny his honest emotions. His voice trembled. \"Jennyver's middle name.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Brina smiled with pride. \"Garwyli has been teachin' Lanna to read the Treoir chronicles. She found your sister's full name.\"\n\n\"I would have told ya,\" Daegan admonished with a smile.\n\n\"Would not have been much of a surprise then, would it?\" Brina beamed like the cat that caught the canary.\n\nHolding his words until his voice would not embarrass him, Daegan said, \"Ya do your ancestors a great honor. Ya have blessed this castle with lovely bairns, but ya have blessed me with a gift of the best way to honor my family long gone. I shall hold this day dear forever.\"\n\nBefore long, Tzader announced Brina needed rest and to feed the babes, ushering everyone out.\n\nAt the door, Daegan turned to him. \"I shall be gone a lot until this Imortik trouble is handled. After that, I hope to be around to dote on the bairns. Try not to worry. Ya take care of your family and allow me to take care of the rest.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Daegan. I would be at your side if Brina and the babies did not come first above all for me.\"\n\n\"As it should be, Tzader. Do not feel any guilt. We all have duties. If we are all successful, we shall have peace again.\"\n\nWith that, Daegan caught up to Garwyli and Lanna walking back to the druid's quarters.\n\nAt Garwyli's door, Lanna said, \"I would like some air. Do you have something for me to practice now?\"\n\nWaving her off, Garwyli continued in the room. \"Go on. I need some time ta study the chronicles.\"\n\nShe closed the door and put a finger to her lips then pointed for Daegan to head for the front of the castle. At the doors, she continued outside and down the steps, smiling at the sound of guards cheering. She waved to them.\n\nDaegan paused to announce, \"Tzader shall be out soon to tell ya more, but he and Brina have two beautiful bairns. Ya should be very proud of your queen and king.\"\n\nMore cheering. Daegan's chest filled with happiness. The last week had been hellish. He'd almost lost Devon and others, who were still not safe, but Daegan was not finished yet either.\n\nOf all the bad in this world, that moment with Brina's babes reminded him of how much more good filled this world than bad. He had to find a way to save humans, his people, and all others willing to support peace.\n\nLanna never slowed down, treading quickly across the open field covered in grass to the trees a far piece away.\n\nHe'd thought she wanted to talk. Maybe she only wanted air and exercise after all.\n\nWhen she finally turned to face him, she lifted a serious expression he rarely saw on this one. \"We must speak. Too many ears around castle.\"\n\nHe understood. \"'Tis good to step away. I wished to ask ya why ya came with Garwyli to the castle where ya met Ainvar. Do not take that to mean I did not appreciate your presence, but ... is somethin' wrong with the old druid?\" Daegan hoped his fears would be unfounded. Much as Tristan had become a close friend, Daegan found himself going to Garwyli as an advisor, who filled the place once held by his father.\n\nThe young often needed the older ones more than the older ones needed the youth.\n\n\"You do not insult me. Garwyli is aging.\"\n\n\"I can see such, but 'tis a natural result of bein' here so long. We are fortunate to have him. If he trains ya to aid him, I find that wonderful.\"\n\n\"You do not understand, Daegan. He trains me to ... \" She closed her eyes and pinched her nose, struggling to finish her words.\n\nDaegan sensed a maturity in her recently he'd not noticed before. Whatever she tried to tell him had to be the reason.\n\nLowering her hand, Lanna lifted her chin in a strong pose. \"Garwyli trains me to take his place.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Is true. I do not share his confidence on this. He said if I need to talk to someone you are best one. Others must not know all he trains me to do.\" Her mouth closed in a tight line.\n\n\"What is wrong, Lanna?\"\n\n\"He says his body is tired and his power is weakening. He claims I am the one he has waited for to take his place as druid.\" Her voice broke at the end.\n\nDaegan cupped his forehead, wishing for different words. If Garwyli believed what he told Lanna, no wonder he brought her with him to face Ainvar. This young woman carried far more power than anyone had realized.\n\nNot true. They all had recognized her power, but not to the depth that Garwyli had comprehended. Caron, the Fae who helped Daegan's team the day he escaped T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and had taken it on herself to train Lanna a little at first, had to have known as well.\n\nHe wanted to be happy for Lanna, but his heart hurt at the idea of losing Garwyli. Selfish on his part. The old druid had stayed in this realm for many generations. He might be tired, but ... Daegan did not want to lose even one of his people.\n\nHe asked Lanna, \"What does he need from me?\"\n\n\"I am the one he needs. I train hard, but I need more time before ...\"\n\nDaegan lifted his hands in surrender. \"Tell me ya do not speak of his death comin' soon.\"\n\n\"I do not have vision of him. Not yet. I only know what I feel. His power is like leak in bucket. Water seeps out. One day, if no new water, bucket will be dry.\"\n\nNow Daegan understood her reaction earlier. \"'Tis why ya asked if everyone would receive new energy from the births.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nDaegan had no idea how to help, but he would find a way to do something. \"What ya are sayin' is Garwyli fears ya may not be trained in time for his passin'?\"\n\nThat had been hard to ask.\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Yes, but is not all.\"\n\nWhat could be worse? \"I do not understand, Lanna.\"\n\n\"I must be ready to help close death wall.\"\n\nDaegan started shaking his head. \"I do not want ya anywhere around that wall when the time comes, Lanna.\"\n\nShe shook her head back at him just as vigorously. \"Is not your decision, Daegan. You will have choice. I go to help with wall or Garwyli must be there.\" She held up a hand, stalling his argument. \"If Garwyli leaves Treoir realm at any time, he will die immediately. Being here is only place he can live longer. You need me, but I must know more before I am without him.\"\n\nThe pleading in her voice told Daegan she would do anything to keep her mentor and it had little to do with her majik education. Lanna had become very attached to Garwyli.\n\nUnderstandable. Daegan did not want to lose the old druid either. Once he found more grimoire volumes, he'd intended to sit with Garwyli and have the druid teach him the next steps to take.\n\nHe would have to trust Garwyli's choice in Lanna, but he would need some demonstrations of her ability first. She'd shown her power at Ainvar's castle, but to close the death wall while trying to shove Imortiks inside would be a far greater challenge. Daegan could not face taking her close to this deadly risk without knowing for sure the power she wielded would protect her if he could not.\n\nAs if Daegan had agreed to the plan, Lanna continued explaining, \"Garwyli say we must have at least me, you, another dragon, and a very, very powerful deity.\"\n\nAnother dragon? Had it been this difficult to close the wall the last time? Probably since all three dragon shifter families joined with powerful deities to stop the first Imortiks.\n\n\"I shall have to think on the dragon, but I would like to believe we can find a deity to coerce into helpin' us.\"\n\nShe corrected him. \"Not just any powerful being. Specific one.\"\n\nDisgusted at the possibility of Macha or Queen Maeve being called in, Daegan asked, \"Which one?\"\n\nLanna frowned. \"Garwyli say I will know when time comes.\"\n\nDaegan needed time himself to think on all of this, but he noticed Lanna's sadness. Was that about something more? \"I am worried about Garwyli, too, but is anythin' else wrong, Lanna?\"\n\nShe immediately stuck a phony smile in place. \"No.\"\n\nHe would not push her to say more when the young woman was taking on so much responsibility. \"I feel sure between myself and Tzader, we can help with Garwyli.\"\n\n\"Please do not repeat my words to anyone. I tell you only because I am sure you will not speak to Garwyli of this. He did not forbid me from sharing with you, but we must protect his confidence. We owe him much and that is small.\"\n\n\"I understand and shall always respect his wishes. Ya may trust me to hold your confidence. Feel free to seek me out when ya need anythin'.\" Daegan wished to draw away all her sadness, but he knew from experience that difficult times made them all appreciate the good times even more.\n\nSo many things had happened to remind him of all he'd once lost and all he now had. It sent his thoughts to the dragon in his dungeon.\n\nDaegan had to see Skarde before leaving Treoir. He felt guilty over Skarde not knowing his sister, Brynhild, lived. Daegan had just enjoyed the best moment of his life with the babies. He knew how Skarde felt after being imprisoned for two millennia.\n\nLanna said, \"Do not go to dragon.\"\n\nCocking his head at her, he asked, \"Did ya just read my mind?\"\n\n\"No. I have visions. More since staying here and working with Garwyli.\" She paused and stared unfocused for a moment, then cut her eyes at him. \"I must speak of one more thing. I have visions of ring I do not understand.\"\n\nHearing her speak of Jennyver's ring again lifted fine hairs on Daegan's neck. \"What confuses ya?\"\n\n\"I told you Luigsech woman will help you find other half of ring, but I have vision of ring very still, then vibrating. Why?\"\n\nCrossing his arms, Daegan told her what he knew. \"As I understood it, my sisters were given rings with a natural break for separatin' a ring into two halves. If they were kidnapped, they would leave one half at the spot from where they were taken. The other half would vibrate, growin' stronger as it neared the half the kidnapped sister kept in her possession. We were to use the half left behind to track either sister if they were taken against their will.\"\n\n\"Do you have part of ring?\"\n\nHe reached into a pocket and dug out the half of Jennyver's ring he'd bonded to his body with majik so he would not lose it during a shift. He handed Lanna the ring.\n\nShe stared at the carved metal. \"This is half I see in first vision. In new vision, this jumps around.\"\n\nWas she telling him the ring would react if it came close to the other half? That he would find his sister? If he recalled correctly, his sister would have to be alive for that to happen.\n\nBut with no other half calling to this one, he might eventually only find bones.\n\nClosing her hands around the ring, Lanna shut her eyes. Her lips moved with silent words. After a minute, she opened her eyes and her hand, giving the ring back to Daegan.\n\nHe smiled and shoved it in his pocket.\n\n\"The ring will talk to me now,\" she declared. \"I will understand more.\"\n\nWhat should he say to that? \"Thank ya for anythin' ya can share, Lanna. I must see to a something before I leave again unless ya need anythin' else.\"\n\nReleasing a delicate sigh, she told him, \"Dragon hates you.\"\n\nNow he understood why she'd said not to go to Skarde. \"I know. 'Tis because someone convinced his family I started the Dragani War before he was captured. He knows as little of that time as I do. I wish to give him a reason to talk and start convincin' him I am not his enemy.\"\n\n\"Garwyli teaches me I do not know everything. I must not assume to make anyone else's decisions. Be safe, Daegan.\" She headed back to the castle.\n\nHe tried to shake off the ominous tone of Lanna's words.\n\nHer power could not be questioned, but Garwyli had her training so much he might be overwhelming the young woman.\n\nFacing the castle, Daegan flexed his arms and back. Time to test his power, which should be strong enough to face that dragon now.\n\nHe teleported to the dungeon where Skarde's dragon slept."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Casidhe lifted her arms to steady herself as the teleporting ended on a hill covered in wildflowers. Still, she liked traveling that way.\n\n\"Looks like our people picked a good place for me to teleport in unnoticed.\" Tristan stood calmly, seeming unbothered by that trip. He wore her backpack. She'd offered to carry it and he'd given her one of those not-happening looks that reminded her of Daegan. Many of his considerate and protective actions reminded her of Daegan's.\n\nTristan's gaze moved constantly from side to side.\n\nShe searched the long hill flowing down to a road and drank in the fresh air coming off the ocean. She didn't know how his people had determined this place would allow them to arrive unseen, but it had worked.\n\nShe waited for Tristan to move. \"What are you lookin' for, Tristan?\"\n\nHis gaze paused on her. \"Just keeping watch.\"\n\nThat sounded as though he expected danger. \"You think there are Imortiks here in Scotland?\" That thought turned her stomach.\n\n\"They could be anywhere a rift opens. Probably not any here since our people would have reported them, but I'm also watching out for Cathbad. Let's try to make this a quick trip if possible, okay?\"\n\n\"It should not take long to walk to the village and find the location if you can track it on your phone.\"\n\n\"I can.\"\n\nTristan had returned her phone fully charged right before they teleported. Casidhe had immediately checked for any missed call from Fenella. None. She'd thought about calling the number again, but what was the point when they were about to find Fenella's phone?\n\nAs they walked down the hill, she toyed with the delicate earrings Fenella had given her. Wearing the jewelry had kept her friend close to her.\n\nKeeping up with Tristan's long strides, she attempted small talk. \"I envy your ability to teleport. I can't believe I was in America a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't envy how I received that power.\" He gave her a polite smile but returned to surveying the area.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe must have noticed how many extra steps she took to keep pace and slowed down for her. \"I was locked inside an invisible spelled cage in South America. It kept me imprisoned, but any other supernatural and wild animal could enter. I had to constantly fight to survive.\"\n\nShe stopped. \"What? Who did that to you?\"\n\nHe turned to her. \"Technically it was someone I call a friend now, but the goddess Macha had been behind the whole thing. It's a long story, but some immortal warriors coming to kill Beladors broke me out by giving me a witch highball with their blood in it. I'm not immortal though, just to be clear.\"\n\nHer jaw dropped. \"You're not a Belador?\"\n\n\"I am, but it's been a long journey reaching the point where I'm now proud to be one.\" He waved her to keep walking. \"Anyhow, I ended up with the ability to teleport. It's gotten stronger recently, which has been good.\"\n\nShe didn't push him to talk any more. It seemed to distract Tristan. He took keeping her safe to heart. She wouldn't make his job any more difficult.\n\nThey'd left the hotel room so quickly, she hadn't had a chance to tell Daegan about the oracle coming to see her, but she'd share all that when she saw him again.\n\nHer heart did a happy twirl just thinking about him and that he would come to her as soon as he was free again. Short of dying, Daegan would not break his word.\n\nShe knew that now.\n\nTristan used his phone to navigate the old roads, some made with cobblestones. He did an impressive job of never appearing lost while turning time and again, pausing at a narrow passage on his left, which was more alley than street. Casidhe followed him, taking note of the doors to homes in this alleyway. She smiled at the few people milling around outside visiting and one man walking with a bag of groceries.\n\nTristan made yet another turn that took him to a small courtyard in front of a single home with no one outside. Tristan turned to her. \"This is it.\"\n\nShe stared at the door. How long had she been demanding to be brought here? Her feet wouldn't move. \"Your people are sure Fenella's phone is here, right?\"\n\n\"They are. I saw the tracking myself. Her phone is in this location and never moves any farther than a hundred yards from this spot, always ending up here in the evenings.\" His gaze traveled over the structure, the brightly-colored flowers in pots, but not back to her.\n\nShe had a case of nerves. Why?\n\nCasidhe repeated, \"The phone moves around.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And you said no one has made any calls at all on it.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nSomething did not make sense, but she couldn't put her finger on it. This was not complicated. Someone had Fenella's phone. It might have been found if Fenella had lost it on the run or it could have been stolen.\n\nEither way, she had to leave here with her friend's phone so she'd have a starting point for hunting Fenella.\n\nNow was not the time to get cold feet. She'd been so excited to reach her friend, she hadn't thought about the moment of confronting whoever had Fenella's phone.\n\nShe finally realized what really bothered her.\n\nWhy would Daegan allow her to go to a stranger's home to confront someone over a lost or stolen phone? Why was Tristan standing back and not stepping in to inquire about the phone first?\n\nWringing her hands, she looked at the door then back to Tristan. \"What is it I don't know about all of this?\"\n\nHe stared over her head and sighed. \"We discovered all we could. Our people have detected no danger here. I wouldn't allow you to walk up there alone if I thought there was any risk. You did not want us to interfere, so we haven't.\" Lowering his face to hers, he said, \"Go on, Casidhe. Knock on the door. I'm right here.\"\n\nTired of mysteries. Tired of waiting and just plain tired, she walked over and rapped her knuckles on the wooden door.\n\n\"Comin',\" someone called from inside.\n\nThe door cracked open to reveal Fenella with a half-eaten scone in one hand. Her friend's jaw dropped. She tried to close the door.\n\nCasidhe broke free of her shock and shoved her boot in to block the door.\n\n\"I can explain, Cas!\" Fenella shrieked.\n\nAll at once, Casidhe took in this impossible image of Fenella casually having a scone while she'd battled to find her.\n\nCasidhe shoved the door open.\n\nFenella stumbled back, fear blowing across her face.\n\nA gruff-looking man with graying red hair and standing a head taller than Fenella asked, \"Fen? Ya need me?\"\n\n\"No.\" Fenella pushed him back inside. She stepped out and closed the door, leaning back against it.\n\nHeart pounding in her chest, Casidhe shook her head. Scotland. Fenella's home. Everythin came into focus with blinding speed. Casidhe had waited and worried for so long. Now, she struggled to breathe past the pain racking her. Fenella had never been in danger.\n\nThis was the moment Casidhe had anticipated hugging her friend and dancing around to celebrate that they both had survived. Not trying to process a betrayal her mind could not understand.\n\nCasidhe's heart whimpered. How many times had she though for sure if Fenella was safe that she would call?\n\n\"I'm sorry, Cas.\"\n\nThose three words shoved a knife through all Casidhe had believed about her friend and her life.\n\n\"Why, Fenella? I have gone through things you can't imagine and made deals that put my life in constant danger to find you while you sat here eatin' scones.\" Casidhe tried to sort it all out in her dazed mind, but there was no understanding this. She demanded, \"Who are these people?\"\n\n\"Family. The MacConnaughs.\"\n\nFamily. That word ripped a hole through Casidhe's heart, shredding her. \"The MacConnaughs, you say? Your family is supposed to be Connell, but that name traces back to MacConnaugh, doesn't it?\"\n\nFenella gave a short nod, her gaze wary.\n\nDid Fenella realize how this looked from Casidhe's perspective?\n\nDid it even matter?\n\nCasidhe had thought she and Fenella were family. Emotion stuck in her throat. She wanted to shout obscenities and cry at the same time.\n\nWhen Fenella looked over Casidhe's shoulder with a suspicious glance, Casidhe followed her gaze.\n\nTristan had stepped fifteen feet away and stood with his back to them, watching the area and giving her privacy. Casidhe turned back. \"I am shielding my power, which should allow us privacy.\"\n\n\"But who is he?\" Fenella dared to ask in a suspicious voice.\n\nCold anger filled Casidhe. \"That's my friend.\"\n\nFenella's mouth rounded in surprise.\n\nCasidhe would tell her nothing more. Being humiliated this way by the person she'd believed to be more than a best friend crushed her soul. \"Just tell me why, Fenella? Why would you do this to me?\"\n\nCrossing her arms, Fenella lifted her chin, showing the strong woman she often hid with her bubbly personality. \"I received a message the night I left ya to go pick up goats. 'Twas from ... him.\" She glanced at Tristan again then came back to Casidhe. \"He said to leave at once and call no one on the phone. Not even ya. Said it was too dangerous for either of us.\"\n\nCasidhe wrapped her arms around her stomach and bent at the waist.\n\nHerrick. Every word slashed her into smaller pieces.\n\nTristan called over, \"You okay, Casidhe?\"\n\nShe'd never be okay again, but she straightened up and found her backbone. She nodded. \"Yes, thank you.\"\n\nCasidhe looked up at the clear sky, because she could not meet the eyes of someone who had deceived her love and trust. The person she'd considered a sister only to find out Casidhe had been nothing more than part of a job.\n\nPinning Fenella with a look meant to warn her not to lie, Casidhe said, \"Why did he not send a note to me?\"\n\n\"I doona know. The seer told him of danger.\" Fenella couldn't meet Casidhe's gaze. \"I never meant to hurt ya, Cas,\" Fenella whispered, her voice breaking. \"I have been told what to do and what to say all my life, treated the same as ya.\"\n\n\"No!\" Casidhe snapped, sizzling anger spreading through her body. \"Not the same as me. You were kept safe and treated as the family you are.\"\n\nCasidhe had been nothing more than a tool, because Herrick did not send her a message of warning. He had not tried to keep her safe.\n\nAnd Fenella had known the truth the whole time.\n\nThe only direction Casidhe had received from Herrick since day one was to study everything about dragon history she could get her hands on, go to college to broaden her knowledge for historical research, and go to Galway to live while maintaining minimal contact with the family. He'd given her a duty and she'd taken it seriously.\n\nShe had dedicated her life to hunting for Skarde, because Herrick had obsessed about finding his brother.\n\nFamily. She swallowed hard and it hurt. She'd never been family and never would be.\n\nJust an orphan brought in to be his trained monkey and sacrificial hunter, because he'd done nothing to protect her from recent threats.\n\nOnly Daegan and Tristan had.\n\nHer friends. New friends. Real friends.\n\nFenella's hard shell ruptured. She burst into tears. \"I doona know what be happenin'. I was warned to stay away from ... the homestead, or the advisor would have me locked up. I only did as told.\"\n\nThe homestead was Herrick's castle and the advisor his seer.\n\nIntegrity forced Casidhe to keep Herrick's life confidential even now. Not for him, but for herself. Fenella and the others might not have honor, but she did.\n\nCasidhe took a step back and huffed an angry laugh. \"You expect sympathy from me? Really? You grew up in the bosom of family while I fought for every inch of my tiny spot. You sat here, perfectly content even as you knew I'd be racin' to find you and keep you safe.\"\n\nThe magnitude of this betrayal threatened to fold her in half. Her knees wobbled and her chest ached as if she'd been stabbed repeatedly.\n\nSomething she'd missed until now struck her.\n\nShe pinned Fenella with a furious gaze and kept her hands clenched in fists. \"I just realized why you go by the name Connell. It's not your real name, is it? I was never told when that name changed to a more modern one.\"\n\nFenella looked away and said nothing.\n\n\"Dammit, Fenella.\" Heartbreak pummeled her hushed voice. \"I was sent here with a real squire name while you were given an alias. He did that to protect you. I was clearly bait for...\"\n\nFenella's eyes flashed with horror that Casidhe would finish her sentence. It was so clear now. Herrick had sent Casidhe as bait for the red dragon and it had worked.\n\nWhen Casidhe said nothing else, Fenella's face softened then crumbled. Her eyes filled with remorse and her lip trembled. \"I didn't agree with any of it. I loved\u2014\" She sniffled. \"I love ya.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Casidhe ordered, backing away. \"Just don't.\"\n\nLove. What was that? She thought she'd found it with Herrick's group even though she'd had to dig what she clung to as love out from under everything he'd piled on her.\n\nShe'd thought she was doing all this for her family.\n\nShe wasn't even a Luigsech.\n\nHer hands shook from anger and misery.\n\nShe was done with Fenella. There were no more words to say, but this was not over. She didn't trust Fenella to give her the correct time of day much less any truth about Herrick.\n\nStill, she would try once more.\n\n\"A last question, Fenella, and do not think to lie,\" Casidhe said in a dead voice. \"Do you know my true identity?\"\n\nLeaning against a wall of stacked stone, Fenella wiped her eyes and cheeks. She pulled a small cloth from a pocket.\n\nCasidhe had always teased her about being part magician, pulling whatever she needed from a pocket.\n\nMaybe she could find Casidhe a new heart in there.\n\n\"No. He told no one.\"\n\nOf course, he kept it secret. Casidhe was nothing more than a gifted reader he'd probably spent tons of money hunting.\n\nShe reached up, fumbling to unhook both earrings. She dropped them on the ground then turned away and walked to Tristan.\n\nFenella cried out, \"Cas! Please!\"\n\nTristan glanced at Casidhe with worry etched in his face. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Yes. Let's leave from here and go to the ancestral centre. She's the only one who will see us, and I don't care.\"\n\nHe teleported her away from Fenella calling her name.\n\nWhen they reappeared in the centre, Casidhe still shook from hurt and the greatest disappointment she'd suffered. She'd last been here only a few days ago. Felt like an eternity since then. Smelling her precious library did nothing to ease her pain.\n\nThis had been her sanctuary forever.\n\nHer happy place.\n\nOne big lie. Just like her life.\n\n\"Are you sure you're okay, Casidhe?\" Tristan asked again gently.\n\nShe stilled and looked up into Tristan's eyes. He would let her cry on his shoulder.\n\nBut if she broke now, she might never pull herself together. Sniffling, she stepped over to the desk and grabbed a wad of tissues to blow her nose. She would not have a full-blown meltdown in front of Tristan. He'd done enough for her.\n\nClearing her throat, she pulled her shoulders back. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nHe lifted an eyebrow to challenge her lie.\n\nHeaving an exhausted sigh, she admitted, \"I have badgered everyone to find Fenella. I've lived in a state of panic that I would never see her again. All she had to do was make one phone call. One stinkin' phone call. You do that much for a stranger. We've known each other longer than many people have been married. I never suspected what feels like an unforgiveable betrayal at all. Not from her.\"\n\n\"Sucks to be lied to by anyone, but even worse when it's someone you care about.\"\n\nTrue, but Tristan didn't know the half of it.\n\nHerrick had done far worse than lie to her, he'd used her to lure in the red dragon. He might be thrilled to know how well his plan had worked except for her caring about Daegan.\n\nShe'd been unwittingly playing her part in his scheme perfectly.\n\n\"I'll take my pack.\" She lifted the backpack from Tristan and lowered it to the floor. \"Thank you, Tristan. Please tell your people I appreciate them findin' her. I won't need anythin' else right now. Thank you for totin' me to Scotland.\"\n\nTristan stuck his hands on his hips in a stubborn pose. \"Daegan is concerned about you going to your cottage or staying here where someone like Cathbad could get to you.\"\n\n\"I must keep my library safe.\" Safe from Cathbad for one, but there were others. She waited for him to argue.\n\n\"Does that mean you plan to leave it here?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hell. No. This place does not belong to me. It belongs to ... Fenella's people.\" If only she felt as confident as that had sounded. She couldn't walk away with no idea if this would all be here when she returned. Even so, the idea of moving hundreds of rare books, scrolls, and other research material brought her another step lower emotionally.\n\n\"Then let's do this,\" he said, sounding encouraging.\n\n\"Do what?\" She cringed. That had come out somewhere between glum and sullen when he'd been nothing but nice.\n\nHe grinned with his arms open wide. \"I'm the best moving company you're ever going to find.\"\n\n\"You're goin' to help me move all this?\"\n\n\"Sure. If you have a place to put your shelves, I can teleport a couple at a time with the books on them.\" He stepped away from her to survey the rear area filled with her books. \"I could probably move more at one time, but some might get bounced around. I don't want to risk damaging any of your books.\"\n\nShe couldn't believe what he was offering. After the heartbreaking meeting with Fenella, Casidhe had been ready to wallow in her hurt.\n\nNo time for a pity party when she was being offered a way to save her treasures.\n\nWhere could she put her books?\n\nNot any of the squire houses associated with Herrick, that was for sure.\n\nShe racked her brain, but in the end had to admit she'd been so isolated and dependent upon Fenella and Herrick's choices, she had no backup plan.\n\nNowhere to take her books besides Herrick's castle.\n\nThat was definitely not happening.\n\nHe might have an explanation that would repair the damage she suffered, but she couldn't come up with a reason she'd accept right now. Thanks to her trust in Herrick, she had no cottage of her own, no place for her precious books, nothing.\n\nShe nibbled on her short fingernails, hating what she had to admit. \"I'll have to stay here in the centre for now. I have no safe place to put my library, Tristan.\"\n\nHe walked around then stopped. \"I have an idea of a good place to store them until you have a new location, but ...\"\n\nShe lowered her hand and turned to Tristan. Hope fluttered in her chest. \"But what?\"\n\n\"I have to gain permission first, which I feel certain I'll receive, but you wouldn't be able to go with me when I delivered the books.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I would put the books in the Treoir realm. Our Belador queen just gave birth so Daegan will not allow anyone unauthorized to enter that realm, especially with the Imortik threat.\"\n\nCasidhe stopped listening to anything else after he said the queen had just given birth. What the ever-lovin' hell?\n\nDaegan had kissed her. And more. She was going to be sick.\n\n\"Casidhe? You don't look so good.\"\n\nHer eyes burned and she choked out her words. \"That bastard's mate just gave birth and he ... kissed me?\" She would not admit more.\n\nTristan's dumbfounded expression just pissed her off more. Was that lack of morality the norm with Beladors and Treoirs?\n\n\"Oh, shit,\" he muttered.\n\n\"I was thinkin' somethin' a bit stronger.\" She crossed her arms to keep from knocking things over. This day sucked beyond all belief.\n\nTristan gave her a crooked grin.\n\nSteam might come out of her ears any minute. \"You think that's funny? Have you men no honor?\"\n\nHe held up a hand and tried to wipe the smile from his face. \"Brina is our Belador queen\u2014\"\n\nAh, great. Now Casidhe knew the name of the woman she'd played an unintentional role in hurting.\n\n\"\u2014and Tzader is our Belador king. Daegan is more of a patriarchal dragon king who watches over Treoir and the Beladors. Brina is not having Daegan's children.\"\n\nHer lips moved to talk, but only one word slipped out. \"Oh.\" Why did she keep defaulting to the worst about Daegan?\n\nBecause a lifetime of being trained to distrust Herrick's enemy would take some undoing and being betrayed by the only people she had trusted her entire life had done a number on her head. From now on, she would judge everyone based on how they treated her regardless of what Herrick and his squire families had told her.\n\nAll that knowledge. How much of it had really been true?\n\nShe could never dismiss the conflicting dragon history she'd found in Queen Maeve's library, especially not now.\n\nWhen Casidhe had time to think harder on all this, she'd likely realize more emotional damage.\n\nThe new Casidhe started right now. She'd still make mistakes, but they would be her mistakes.\n\n\"Just to be clear, Casidhe, there is no more honorable man, human or supernatural, in this world than Daegan.\" Tristan's quiet words were loaded with respect for the dragon shifter he admired.\n\n\"I hear what you're sayin', Tristan. I need some time to rest and sort out things in my mind, but I won't have that time until these books are safe.\"\n\n\"As I was saying, the one place these books would be safe is Treoir realm. I realize trust is a bitter taste right now based on what happened with Fenella, but Daegan would protect your books, as would I, and either one of us would deliver them whenever you asked. No supernatural would dare to enter that realm even if they knew how to find it.\"\n\nCould she do this? Could she trust people she'd known less than a week?\n\nShe'd trusted an entire clan for most of her life.\n\nSee how that turned out? She'd always questioned why it was so hard to fit in and feel at home with Herrick. She'd worked every minute to make herself worthy, but she'd never had a chance.\n\nOne look at Tristan's sincere expression and his steady gaze warmed her soul and gave her faith.\n\nIn comparison, she'd never had to prove herself to Daegan and his people. They'd accepted her and valued her ability, then protected her. She had no words for how good it felt to not be alone to figure out her next step.\n\nShe had nowhere to take her library. What would happen to her library if Herrick figured out that a Belador had helped her find Fenella, which exposed his deceit? He'd become angry and might take everything out of here, especially if she and Fenella were no longer working at the ancestral centre.\n\nCasidhe had spent ten years building this library and a reputation.\n\nThe losses kept piling up.\n\nShould she send her books to a realm she couldn't enter?\n\nIf Daegan had wanted her library, he could have teleported it all away at any time. In fact, Daegan and Tristan had shown her more compassion in a week than a family of people she'd spent her life around.\n\nShe wouldn't be mobile as long as this library remained exposed to every person who could teleport in or break down the door.\n\nSquaring her shoulders, she lifted her clear gaze to Tristan. \"If my books go to Treoir, then for some reason I can't find you or Daegan, how would I get them back?\"\n\n\"All you'd have to do is contact a guy in Atlanta known as Trey McCree. I'll give you his phone number. He can reach any of us from Daegan down to the newest Belador. But I'm pretty sure you'll be hearing from Daegan once he finishes his business at home and sees the new babies.\"\n\nDrawing a deep breath, she couldn't stall any longer. \"Okay, please move my books to Treoir.\"\n\n\"Stand by for a moment while I find out where they go.\" Tristan's gaze lost focus, just staring at nothing. He nodded his head slightly as if listening to someone, then glanced at her. \"Our druid has a huge space in the castle. He said he'd happily open an area for your books. No one enters his rooms without permission. He's a great old guy.\" Tristan stepped into the back area.\n\nCasidhe followed him. \"What do you need from me?\"\n\n\"If I take two bookcases at a time, will the order matter?\"\n\n\"No. I suggest you take out all the middle ones first, then we can see how the cases around the walls are anchored.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\"\n\nTristan held his arms out and turned his hands as if he were cupping the sides of something. When he lifted his hands, one of her heavy cases elevated a few inches telekinetically, then followed Tristan's movements to end up in front of the case that had been beside it.\n\nTristan and the first load of her books vanished.\n\nShe grabbed two books from the closest shelf and hugged them to her chest, starting to hyperventilate. Was this separation anxiety? How did women ever let go of a child the first time if it scared Casidhe this much to watch her books disappear?\n\nShe calmed her breathing. Time to make changes, starting with trusting Daegan and Tristan. Nodding to herself, she put the books back and patted them. She could do this.\n\nIt took a half hour of Tristan teleporting back and forth, plus figuring out how to disengage the cases around the walls. Two had been anchored, which required a screwdriver.\n\nMajik had limits on occasion.\n\nWhen the back had been cleared of all books, Tristan returned the last time and pulled out his mobile phone. He opened his photos. \"This is the picture I took of your books in Treoir. I'm sending it to you.\" He tapped a couple things and her phone dinged.\n\nShe opened the photo. \"Thank you.\" How had he known she'd need something to reassure her the books were safe?\n\n\"Now we have to find a place for you to stay,\" Tristan pointed out. \"I'll take you to your cottage then ... a hotel?\"\n\n\"I have a hotel in Galway I had intended to stay in while gettin' my cottage fixed. And before you warn me about movin' back into the cottage, I'm not doin' it right now. I've got a lot on my plate for the next week or two.\"\n\n\"That's good.\" He looked at his watch. \"You ready?\"\n\n\"Yes. I spent the time while you were teleportin' to clear out my desk. I've got what I need in my backpack.\" She'd never considered the possibility of being fired and having to clean out her desk, but that's how this felt.\n\nWho would she be after today?\n\nPoor Tristan had been teleporting everywhere for her. She had to do something nice for him when she could figure out what.\n\nAt the cottage, she scratched her head, stalling for time to figure out what she could let go. She couldn't move all of her possessions out.\n\nWhile she forced herself to select the things that had to go, Tristan asked, \"You know dragon shifter history, right?\"\n\nShe laughed sadly to herself, picking up a picture of her and Fenella she put back down. \"I know what I've been taught and what I've read.\"\n\n\"What about the ice dragons? Didn't they have a big family?\"\n\nShe had reached for her small cache of jewelry and stopped. Why would he be asking about ice dragons? She had plenty of bones to pick with Herrick, but she would not share anything that put his clan in harm. She was not that person.\n\nTristan's steps from the hall stopped at the door to her bedroom.\n\nLifting a bracelet, she did her best to sound casual about the ice dragons. \"I know a good deal about them. Five dragon-shifter children. All died in the Dragani War. Such a shame.\"\n\n\"What if any of them survived? No one thought Daegan survived and he was in a realm all this time. Isn't there a chance one of them might have also landed in a realm?\"\n\nWords of Herrick's seer tumbled through Casidhe's mind. The seer had a vision of Skarde traveling between two great clouds, which could have been realms.\n\nFolding clothes to stuff in a tote bag, she shrugged. \"It was pretty amazing that Daegan lived this long, but where else would another dragon be? I don't even know how many realms are out there.\"\n\n\"Quite a few. We rescued one of our Beladors who had been kidnapped and imprisoned in a realm with other flying creatures. She's an Alterant gryphon like me.\"\n\nCasidhe stood upright and angled her head at him. \"What other flyin' creatures?\"\n\n\"I remember wyverns, gargoyles, hard to say how many different ones were captured, but the person in charge came from when Daegan's father King Gruffyn had lived.\"\n\nCold foreboding shivered over her skin. She'd heard nothing about this. \"Who was that man?\"\n\nTristan scratched his chin, looking up as he thought. \"Like the king's accountant or something.\"\n\n\"A steward?\"\n\nHe snapped his fingers. \"That's what they called him. Anyhow, he cut some deal with a god King Gruffyn's people were not supposed to worship and landed in that realm. Sounded like a bad joke where he had asked to live forever and the god stuck him in a realm.\" Looking around, Tristan asked, \"Is there anything not involving your personal belongings that I can pack?\"\n\nShe gave him a smile of appreciation. \"No. I'm almost done. I'm not takin' much.\" As she continued pulling together clothes, she couldn't let go of what Tristan had said.\n\nDid Daegan know about an ice dragon? Skarde had vanished when he went to the Treoir castle after the ice dragon clan had been attacked, killing their sisters. Herrick believed King Gruffyn had done something with his brother.\n\nWhat if the steward had figured out how to capture Skarde?\n\nWhat if Daegan had brought Skarde out of another realm?\n\nLot of what ifs, none of which were very credible.\n\nShe needed more information, which she wouldn't get until she spoke to Daegan again, but she had one question for Tristan.\n\nBefore she could ask, Tristan offered her consolation. \"I'm sorry about your friend. I could tell you were shaken by finding her safe and with her phone when she hadn't tried to reach you.\"\n\nShook up? More like devastated, but Tristan was being polite to allow her some dignity. He had no idea how deep that wound ran.\n\nShe maintained her fake smile, but her flat tone couldn't be fixed. \"I'm disappointed in ... Fenella and her people, but I'll live.\"\n\nHe said nothing, but what could anyone say?\n\nLifting the tote bag straps to her shoulder, she took a last look around. \"That's all I'm goin' to drag with me right now.\"\n\n\"I'll carry the backpack,\" Tristan offered.\n\nShe didn't blink an eye. \"Sure, thanks.\"\n\nAs Tristan prepared to teleport to a place near her hotel, she asked, \"If an ice dragon had survived all these centuries, do you think Daegan could find that dragon shifter for a family? I'm askin' because in this day and age with supernaturals comin' out, I may be asked to hunt ancestors of a dragon family.\"\n\n\"If another dragon shifter survived, Daegan would be the first one told with our international resources.\"\n\nShe didn't feel the thrill of getting close to finding something she'd hunted for many years. Not now. This time she asked for her benefit. She worked for herself starting this minute.\n\n\"What would Daegan want in return if he could help a dragon family find a livin' dragon shifter?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Tristan lifted a shoulder. \"If it was a friendly situation, Daegan would help for free when he's not trying to stop Imortiks. He would protect any dragon shifter living today.\"\n\n\"Why? The ice dragons were his enemy.\"\n\nTristan studied her.\n\nShe did her best not to squirm.\n\nHe said, \"Daegan tried to protect every dragon clan and hold the peace back when they all lived. He was doing his best to figure out who had been pretending to be his red dragon and pit his allies against him when Queen Maeve captured him. His entire life back then was about protecting the clans and keeping peace.\"\n\nConflicting information warred in her mind. \"You believe that even without having lived back then?\"\n\n\"Yes. I trust Daegan with my life and would give up mine to keep him safe. I trust him that much.\"\n\nShe'd have to untangle truth from possibility from downright lies to understand what really happened long ago. She couldn't do that until she sent Tristan on his way so she could plan her next move.\n\nShe wouldn't have the help of squire families to travel this time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Brynhild woke up and quickly looked around. Where was she this time?\n\nHay. Lots of hay. She crawled across the pile she'd been laying on and grabbed hold of a post and pulled herself up.\n\nA horse neighed.\n\nThat's right. She'd decided to talk to the farmer instead of allowing her dragon to eat the man's horse.\n\n<Hungry,> her dragon's voice rumbled through her mind.\n\n\"I know,\" she muttered, running her fingers through her hair. \"I am sorry. We will find food.\" She had to do something about this mess piled on her head. She no longer had the luxury of using energy to deal with her hair.\n\nThe pants and long-sleeved cotton shirt the farmer gave her early this morning were wrinkled, but not dirty. He'd wanted to know what happened to her.\n\nShe'd said, \"I am not from this country. Someone kidnap me, but I escape. Have walked far.\" That explained her messy look and injured arm, but the broken bone had healed last night.\n\nExtending her arm, she felt a pinch of pain. Not bad, though.\n\nThat was why she suffered fixing a break immediately. After being battered around in the water and losing her first attempt at repairing her arm, she'd feared having to do it all over. She'd been fortunate the arm had healed straight.\n\nSomeone pounded on the barn door. Had to be the farmer. Josue. He looked old as the land she stood upon.\n\nShe grabbed her hair in a thick wad and twisted it into a knot on her way to the door.\n\nWhen she pulled the thick wooden door open, Josue held a steaming mug in gnarled hands. He offered it to her. \"Caf\u00e9?\"\n\nShe accepted the warm mug of black liquid and sipped it, scrunching up her nose. \"Taste bad.\"\n\n\"I am not so good as wife with cooking. Best I make.\"\n\nHe had a strange sound to his words. That must be how locals in France spoke English. He reminded her of an old blacksmith who had also been a widower. She'd enjoyed watching the man create tools and weapons in her father's forge long ago.\n\nThat had to be the reason she softened her words to this man.\n\n\"Is not bad, Josue. Just ... different.\" She added a smile, something she rarely shared these days. Her life had little to be happy about. No family. No friends. No idea what it took to get around in this world and keep her dragon safe. Cloaking only did so much.\n\n\"You want see police?\"\n\nHe'd tried to get her to talk to the police earlier when she'd limped across his field. She'd shaken her head and said she preferred to not expose herself and allow her pursuers to find out she'd survived.\n\nJosue had grunted his understanding, then clothed and fed her.\n\nShe could not let her dragon eat his only horse. The horse neighed again at that moment. Her dragon grumbled heavily.\n\nJosue backed up and stared at her chest.\n\n\"I am sorry. Stomach makes noise, but I am fine.\"\n\nHis wrinkled forehead creased with suspicion.\n\nNow was as good a time as any to leave. \"Thank you for food, clothes, and sleep.\" She stepped out of the building with him backing up to give her room.\n\nSunshine warmed her skin. \"What time here?\"\n\n\"Morning. Not yet noon. What about danger?\" he asked, concerned about her leaving again.\n\n\"I will be fine. I go to next village.\"\n\n\"Mantes-la-Jolie?\"\n\nShe had no idea what he had said, but assumed he'd spoken the name of a village. \"Yes. That one.\"\n\nWaving her forward, he hobbled around the barn and walked to the road. She kept up with him. At the dirt road, he pointed to the right and gave her directions.\n\nJust to get away, she nodded, but had no idea what he had said.\n\nHe dug in his pocket and pulled out several folded pieces of colorful paper. He held out his hand for her to take it.\n\nShe stared at the paper, trying to determine if she should take it.\n\n\"Argent.\" He made a motion of handing the paper to invisible people. \"For food.\"\n\nThis was the man's form of payment. She took the folded bills, not sure how to feel about someone giving her money for no reason. She'd lived well as a revered dragon shifter in her father's kingdom, never wanting for a thing.\n\nShe'd been nothing but alone, angry, and confused in this world. She'd spent last night plotting multiple deaths.\n\nBut this man with so few possessions, who toiled the land by hand, had a generous heart to share with a stranger.\n\nShe gave him a bow as she would an ally to her father. When she lifted up, she found him surprised. Then he bowed to her.\n\nA laugh bubbled out of her.\n\nHe grinned, showing off all three of his teeth. \"Go safe.\"\n\nShe waved and struck out down the road, feeling more at peace than she had since discovering she'd outlived her entire family. Anger only drained her. She would put more effort into finding her way in this new life and not fighting everyone.\n\nOnly those she needed to kill.\n\nAfter she had walked a few miles, she left the road in search of a place to shift into her dragon with no one watching, then cloaked them.\n\nThis time, as her dragon flew around, they searched for a much larger farm with thousands of cows in different sections. What she needed was a section with cows roaming free. When she located that, she had her dragon land in the pasture and sit very still.\n\nThey waited for maybe an hour before a cow wandered close enough to extend her cloaking around the cow. Her dragon blew a coating of ice over the cow.\n\nThe beast mooed then stood perfectly still.\n\nWith the closest building two pastures away, her dragon ate quickly while Brynhild kept them hidden.\n\nNow that her dragon was full, their healing intensified.\n\nShe nudged her dragon to fly again.\n\nSoaring through the blue sky would never get old to her, but now she had to dodge those human flying machines. When she saw what she believed to be the village the farmer had pointed her toward, her dragon slowed. She would not call this a village. Too large and developed.\n\nShe found a spot to land and shift into her human form. With her energy restored, she clothed herself with nicer pants than the farmer had given her and a shirt of soft material, both pieces she'd seen other women wear. No shoes with tiny spiked heels this time. She had never been small and needed no additional height.\n\nShe chose the flexible sneakers again. If only she had time to go back and take her hoard out of that cavern, but Cathbad couldn't be trusted not to set a trap for her. She had nowhere to hide it yet either.\n\nFirst, she would figure out how to fit into the human world like any other woman, then she'd come up with a plan for outwitting that druid.\n\nOne that included cutting off his head.\n\nThinking of painful ways to kill him relaxed her.\n\nShe walked around for a while and paused at times, sensing someone watching her. If Cathbad were here, he would show himself soon. His ego would not allow him to hide from her.\n\nBy the end of the day, she'd seen a magnificent cathedral, restaurants, businesses, and observed many women. Men who smiled at those women did not show her the same interest.\n\nThey stepped away as if she had leprosy.\n\nShe had been a sought-after female in her world. A well-regarded dragon shifter. Favored daughter of her father, even if her two sisters did not agree.\n\nA wave of hurt and loneliness washed over her. She would never see her sisters or brothers again.\n\nShe had not one friend in this world.\n\nHer sisters would have figured out how to dress and act in this world faster than her. She would never have admitted that back then, but they lived for clothes, parties, and to be chosen as a mate.\n\nBrynhild had not wanted Daegan as a mate, but he had not allowed her the chance to save face by her rejecting him first.\n\nThe bastard.\n\nWhen another man hurried past her, Brynhild paused to think and decided to make the first change in her new life. She backtracked to a place where she'd noticed women entering earlier with long hair then walking out with a whole new appearance. She could hide among humans with the right hair and clothes.\n\nAfter a confusing discussion with the woman in charge about the paper she carried, the woman took one slip of paper and handed Brynhild back more paper. She washed Brynhild's ratty hair and massaged her head then tried to brush out the tangles.\n\nBrynhild held up a hand for her to stop.\n\nShe dug through several magazines from a nearby table and flipped pages quickly. When she stopped, she stabbed her finger at the image of short hair as blond as hers.\n\nThe woman's eyes widened. \"You want your hair that short?\"\n\n\"Yes. Do this.\"\n\nShe thought the woman would refuse her request at first, but an hour later, Brynhild walked out of the shop feeling ten pounds lighter. She could do this on her own with majik next time.\n\nThe woman offered to apply makeup and Brynhild turned her down. She only needed to hide her face from those around her when she used majik to add kohl to her eyes and color to her lips.\n\nWith all that done, she walked the streets, taking in so many strange things. Everything had changed in thousands of years. Even the tantalizing smell of food had her wanting to eat in spite of having fed her dragon. She found herself studying every detail of people she encountered just as she would an enemy.\n\nNow men turned their heads for another look when she passed, but she ignored them and their odd need to whistle. She was no dog to rush over to a man.\n\nShe took a seat at a small table under a covering outside a restaurant late in the day. Many people ate outside on the street.\n\nThat sensation of being watched rippled down her spine.\n\nHer dragon slept but would rise in an instant.\n\nShe endured another conversation about the paper money from a server, who waved off the money. Did that mean she would eat and drink for free or pay later? If the paper was not enough it would be the server's fault. She'd tried to show him what she had to offer.\n\nPeople moved along the walkways, laughing and carrying small boxes the size of their hands they spoke into.\n\nMen took their time giving her long looks as they sauntered around.\n\nOne had caught her eye, but he continued on.\n\nHow did women and men join in this time? She might not understand the world today, but she still knew what her body enjoyed. Unlike her sisters, she had not been excited about marriage. She would never let Daegan know he'd saved her by turning down her father's marriage proposal.\n\nIf he'd had any honor, he would have waited for her to turn him down.\n\nShe'd watched her brothers and preferred the freedom men of her time had possessed. In fact, she found it encouraging to see women today living life on their own terms. She'd enjoyed her share of men and booted them out of her bed the next morning if they made any sound of wanting a mate to stay home and have children.\n\nNo one would stop her from fighting battles, the one place she felt alive.\n\nWind ruffled her short hair. See? Another freedom.\n\nNo woman in her time had worn short hair unless they were being punished. She smiled over her new look. She would find her way and become a power to be respected and feared in today's world.\n\nShe'd been sitting there enjoying her wine and meal of thin ham and cheese on succulent bread for a while. The sun would give up soon and disappear. A pleasant breeze fluffed up napkins and sent crumbs to the ground for birds ready to peck.\n\nA man sitting on the far side of the outdoor dining area caught her attention. Even with him sitting, she could tell he would be tall. She liked a man she could meet eye to eye when standing. His short hair and his narrowed gaze gave him a daring look, but his pants and jacket were modest. What an interesting conflict in appearance.\n\nHe caught her watching him and smiled.\n\nShe lifted an eyebrow at him. Was this how men and women joined up by meeting at a place to eat? He lifted her spirits and woke the woman inside who missed being in the arms of a competent lover.\n\nShe would not go to him. She sat back, lifting the wine glass to her lips and swallowed slowly.\n\nHis smile slowly vanished, replaced by a look of hunger. His throat moved with a quick swallow as if she'd surprised him.\n\nMen should not know a woman's every secret.\n\nThey must earn those hidden parts a woman revealed and not until she found the man worthy. Brynhild kept her smile hidden but studied him boldly. She was no shrinking woman who had been coddled. She liked a challenge.\n\nThey stared at each other for another ten minutes.\n\nShe wanted him out of the shadows so she could see his face better. In the past, she had been excellent at reading a man's intent by his eyes.\n\nShe ignored him to eat the last of her food and finish her wine. Would he follow her once she left?\n\nWhen the server returned, she handed printed paper used as coins to him. He stared at the paper in disbelief. She prepared for some conflict over payment, but the sexy stranger appeared next to her table. He spoke rapidly in what she assumed to be the local language, taking back her paper in exchange for paper he handed the server.\n\nShe expected a problem, but the server cleared the table, thanked her, and vanished.\n\n\"May I sit?\" the man asked in the most proper tone.\n\n\"Yes. Was paper wrong?\"\n\nHe sat across from her, taking up all the space around him just by the force of his presence. He had a handsome face and smiling eyes. \"You did nothing wrong, dove. You offered a much larger bill than required for the cost of this meal. I take it you are not from France.\"\n\nShe shook her head. Why would he call her dove?\n\n\"I intervened to keep the young man honest.\"\n\nThe server returned with two glasses of wine and placed one in front of Brynhild.\n\nShe lifted her hand to stop him. \"I did not order.\"\n\n\"I did, dove. I would like to get to know you.\" He lifted his glass as the server left. \"Cheers.\"\n\nShe lifted hers. \"What is this cheers?\"\n\n\"It's something we say when we touch glasses. It means the same as a wish for health and happiness.\"\n\nClicking her glass with his, she took a long swallow.\n\nHis eyes never left her neck. Up close they had some blue mixed in with whiskey colors.\n\nShe enjoyed a smug moment of being in control again for the first time since waking in that cavern. Cathbad did not stand over her, lecturing her as if she were an idiot. She'd warned him she was no child and he should not test a warrior dragon shifter.\n\nOver the next two hours, she and the stranger drank lots and lots of wine. Brynhild had always been able to hold her mead with the men of her time, but she did experience a pleasant lightheaded sensation.\n\nNot ready to end her best day ever since waking in this world, she considered one more glass of wine. Perhaps this human would become a favorite toy for a day or two while she learned many things from him.\n\n\"We are done here,\" he announced, placing paper on the table.\n\nHer heart dropped. He thought to walk away from her now?\n\n\"Don't look so sad, dove. It's getting too busy here. I'd like to go somewhere more private.\" His eyes offered intriguing things in this private place.\n\n\"Why?\" She was not being coy, just curious. Coy was for young maidens.\n\nHe paused, looking out over the city. \"I have been alone a long time and have had a few encounters with women who amused me, but you ... \" His intense gaze returned to hers. \"I have never met one so sure of herself. You don't amuse me. You fascinate me. This place has become too loud for a private conversation.\"\n\n\"Where would we go?\" She sat back. This would be the first step in him earning more from her.\n\nHis lips tilted with a humble smile. \"I am not the best with words for wooing a woman. For that reason, I speak my mind and accept whatever you say. I wish to invite you to have a glass of wine on the balcony of my hotel not far from here. You will have a gorgeous view of the city at night.\" He stood and offered her his hand.\n\nShe hesitated a moment and caught the pain of embarrassment flash through his gaze, then she took his hand.\n\nHe smiled, drawing her to him as they stood eye to eye. Placing the back of his hand on her cheek, he whispered, \"I doubt any view will match the one I have right now. I know that may sound like phony line you have heard from many men, but I am sincere. I fear you walking away to find someone more worthy.\"\n\nThis man understood her.\n\nHeat coiled in her womb at his light touch.\n\nShe had missed this mating dance with men. She wanted the stranger and would have him.\n\n\"Show me this balcony,\" she ordered in a husky voice. \"I wish to see ... more.\"\n\nHe sighed, sounding happy she'd accepted. Walking her down the street, he turned at a street she had not seen, then he continued, taking another turn. When he angled off the walkway to a covered entrance to a building, a man dressed in a formal black outfit opened the glass door and gave them a nod.\n\nThe world swirled around her from the wine. She could burn off the lightheaded feeling if she changed into her dragon, but why? She could handle a human without any help should he think to lead her into a trap.\n\nThey passed through a palace-like place with people behind a counter making tapping sounds when not speaking to strangers standing on the other side. The cool air did not feel natural. Her soft shoes were silent crossing the marble. He pushed a button and walked her into a box that began rising.\n\nWhat was this thing they rode in? She did not ask and embarrass herself. She could learn more on her own.\n\nOr from this man if tonight turned out as she hoped.\n\n\"I love this city.\" He lifted her hand in his and kissed her knuckles. \"I hope I have the chance to show you more.\"\n\nShe allowed him to lure her to him with his pretty words but did not want to make any promises.\n\nHe lived in rooms just as stunning as downstairs with thick rugs, soft-looking sitting furniture, and lots of glass for walls. Walking to the glass wall, he pushed one part aside, leading her to his balcony. The view had not been overstated. Lights sparkled across the city spread out before them. She could see the huge cathedral she passed on the street from here.\n\nHe called it Notre Dame while telling her about the city as they walked. The man sounded as if he had the information about surviving in this world she needed.\n\nShe might stay right here in this city for a while, learn all she could, then find a place to store her treasures.\n\nShe might even end up with a friend if he did not disappoint her.\n\nAfter enjoying another glass of wine while he pointed out interesting spots to visit, he took both glasses and put them aside.\n\nWhen he turned back, his hazel-blue eyes twinkled. \"I have not enjoyed myself so much in so long. I thank you for such an evening.\"\n\nYet again, she wondered if this meant he would go no farther. If so, modern human men would be a great disappointment. She had been willing to hold back her dragon energy and not burn this one when they mated, but she might burn him for leading her on and quitting.\n\nHe cupped her chin and leaned in to kiss her but paused before their lips touched.\n\nHe waited for her permission?\n\nA man from her time would have known by now he had permission. Tired of dancing around the whole point of this, she leaned in, kissing him.\n\nHis arms went around her back, pulling her closer. Strong muscles rippled beneath his shirt. He hid his physique beneath the simple clothes.\n\nShe ran her tongue inside his mouth. He smiled, kissing her back.\n\nNow he understood.\n\nShe grabbed each side of his shirt and ripped the buttons off.\n\n\"It's going to be like that, huh?\" he asked with a lift of his eyebrows.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I am hungry.\"\n\n\"Oh, dove, so am I.\" He kissed her with authority this time and she shivered. His hands pushed up beneath her blouse and touched her breasts. She wore nothing under these garments, because she had not reached that point in her studies.\n\nAlso, because her breasts expected freedom, too.\n\nHis thumbs brushed over her nipples. \"You are exceptional.\"\n\nShe shivered at his touch. Finally, a man who appreciated her, one who had skill with his hands. She ran her greedy fingers up and down his chest. He had the build of a warrior, not the soft men she'd seen so often while walking around the city.\n\nShe ached for this one to be between her legs, to feel all of him. Running one hand down, she cupped his hard length.\n\nHe bit her lip lightly and groaned. His tongue played with hers, moving in and out, driving her into a frenzy. He unzipped her pants and the material pooled at her ankles. She stepped out. His fingers brushed back and forth through her heat.\n\nShe clenched hard and demanded, \"More.\"\n\nHe stroked her and pushed inside, teasing her to reach for her release. She clutched his shoulders, going up on her toes, and moving with him. \"Yes, much more.\"\n\nHe grabbed her at the waist and picked her up, nibbling on her nipple.\n\n\"Hurry,\" she demanded as he carried her into the room.\n\nLowering her feet to the soft floor covering, he spun her around and bent her over the tall back of the long seating piece.\n\nYes. This was what she wanted. She enjoyed the anticipation of what he would do and stretched her arms out. Her fingers gripped the hard shape beneath the cushions to keep her from going all the way over.\n\nSpreading her legs, he reached around and cupped a breast. His other hand slid in from beneath to draw a finger through her damp heat at a pace that sent tremors through her.\n\nAfter so many years, she could not remember past matings.\n\nThis felt vulnerable and exciting at the same time.\n\nHe whispered, \"I need you, but I want you ready.\"\n\n\"I am ready.\" Had she yelled that?\n\n\"Not yet. Close.\" His fingers between her legs changed rhythm, pushing two inside of her. He taunted her nipples, driving her mad. Her body came apart. She shook with a release that kept going. He would not stop until she slumped.\n\nHe caught her around the waist, pulling her back to his chest and kissed her ear. \"Now, you're ready, dove.\"\n\nShe smiled, still enjoying the aftermath. \"That was ... exceptional.\"\n\nHe chuckled then scooped her up and carried her to the front of the long seating where he dropped her onto thick cushions. She did like the new furnishings in today's world. So much softer than those of her time.\n\n\"What is this furniture?\" she asked, sounding very at ease. Being in control had that effect on her.\n\n\"An over-stuffed sofa. You are truly the most enticing woman I have ever met.\" He removed clothes as he spoke, revealing a staff she took her time admiring.\n\n\"I like this.\" She stroked a hungry glance to his chest and lower.\n\n\"The sofa?\" he asked with a teasing lilt to his voice.\n\n\"Yes.\" Her gaze lingered on his manhood standing proudly. \"Like everything I see.\"\n\nHe dropped down, knees on each side of her hips. Lifting a hand, he brushed hair from her eyes. \"I just realized what a cad I am. I should have asked this long ago, but what is your name?\"\n\n\"Names are not important.\" She had not cared what he called himself while trying to decide if she would have him. Names were words, a value only to shallow people.\n\nHe didn't say anything, just leaned down to thoroughly kiss one breast then the other. \"Your name is important. I want to savor this memory in case we have only tonight.\"\n\nShe twisted his hair between her fingers, feeling her body hunger for his again. This time, she would have him begging for more. \"I am Brynhild.\"\n\n\"That's lovely,\" he murmured, kissing her chin, then her neck and pausing at her breasts to lift his head. \"I am called Joavan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "\"I never thought I'd say I'm tired of killing demons, but I'm done for tonight.\" Evalle leaned against the foundation holding up a bazillion-story high-rise building in Buckhead. Looking up to count the floors would hurt her neck.\n\nAdrianna looked no better than her, which was saying something about that woman. Shoving wet blond hairs off her forehead, the witch ran her hands to her ponytail she tightened, then she let her arms dangle. Probably from fatigue.\n\nLooking in each direction down Peachtree Street, Evalle huffed out a tired laugh. \"I have never seen this road in any part of Atlanta without traffic this close to business hours starting.\"\n\n\"Fighting demons in front of humans will do that. That one bunch didn't even stick around to film it.\"\n\nEvalle pulled out her phone and found a text from Storm. He worried when she was out so close to daylight. She'd normally be home by now, but not this week. She replied she'd be home soon. Before shoving it into her back pocket, she noted the phone had only two percent charge left. She could charge it in Adrianna's car.\n\nStretching her stiff muscles, Evalle felt torn over using Reese to help them. \"I know Quinn doesn't want Reese out in this mess, but we almost found that demon maker again. Looks like Quinn and Reese have reached some agreement. I don't like putting her at risk either, but she seems determined to find and deal with that I-zubrrali.\"\n\n\"True. Do you really think that's her father?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Adrianna, but Reese seems to think so. I thought I had the worst sperm donor in the universe. She may have me beat.\"\n\nAdrianna stifled a yawn. \"Let's head to my car.\"\n\n\"If I have enough power left, I'll call Storm now. If not, I need a quick charge from your car.\"\n\n\"You know he's probably cooking dinner and pouring wine, ready to make you forget all your pains. Why call him out when I can drop you on my way?\"\n\n\"I'm dirty as hell.\" Evalle brushed at her BDU shirt that had so many tears the khaki-colored material hardly covered her.\n\nAdrianna waved off her concern. \"That's what detailers get paid to clean up. Don't knock them out of work.\"\n\n\"Since you put it that way, glad to donate to the economy.\" Evalle lifted away from the wall. They walked to the parking deck a block away where Adrianna's sexy ride waited on the top level.\n\nA pickup truck pulled out before they entered, surprising Evalle that anyone was still in the parking decks after all the commotion on the street ten minutes ago. Humans normally scattered when a supernatural battle started. At least, humans not with a black ops team hunting her kind.\n\nWhen they reached the top level, Evalle sensed a vibration in the air and lifted a hand for her friend to stop. \"You feel that?\"\n\n\"No, what was it?\" Adrianna unclipped her keys from her belt.\n\n\"Weird buzzing.\" Evalle started moving again, but slowly, and looked around.\n\nAdrianna continued to her sleek Lamborghini, pressing buttons on her keychain to make the engine crank before she got within thirty feet.\n\nA bright-yellow body climbed over the four-foot-tall wall that prevented cars from driving off the parking deck.\n\n\"Adrianna,\" Evalle said quietly.\n\nAlready backing up, Adrianna killed the engine to her car and said, \"I see him.\"\n\n<Kill her,> screamed in Evalle's mind. She grabbed her head. \"Shit. It's a Belador-Imortik. He yelled in my head.\"\n\n<Help me, Evalle. Help me,> moaned over and over. The Belador-Imortik dropped to his knees, shaking his head back and forth. He knew her, but she didn't know him.\n\n\"I can't kill him, Adrianna.\"\n\n\"I know, but we have to be careful not to let the Imortik that has him grab us. Remember how the Imortik jumped from the troll to Devon's body before the troll tossed him off that building?\"\n\n\"I know. We need help,\" Evalle decided.\n\n\"Much as I know you hate to deal with Sen, that's the only way we're going to save this Belador. Do you know his name?\"\n\n\"No. Give me a second.\" Evalle called out telepathically, <What's your name, Belador?>\n\nThe guy lifted his head and crazed glowing eyes stared at her. A demonic voice growled out loud, \"Do not talk to him. He is mine.\"\n\nEvalle had no time to waste. \"You watch him while I make the call to Trey to get dickhead here.\" Because of Trey being mobbed with telepathic calls, she opened her phone and typed a fast SOS text.\n\nTrey sent back, <I'm on it.> Then her screen went blank.\n\nSen could find anyone he wanted in this city just by giving him a name.\n\nThe Belador-Imortik stood again and started forward.\n\nEvalle shoved up a kinetic wall between them.\n\nAdrianna said, \"I might be able to stun him with a small shot of Witchlock, but I can't be sure what it will do with any Imortik.\"\n\n\"Let's leave that as a last option.\" Evalle braced her feet as the man ran forward and slammed her wall, shaking her arms with his power. When he fell back on the pavement, the guy grabbed his head, crying telepathically. <I don't want to die. I have a wife and baby.>\n\nEvalle repeated that to Adrianna then called out loud, \"We're gonna save you from the Imortik. Just hang strong.\"\n\nThe guy lifted insane Imortik eyes to her again. \"The master will kill you.\"\n\n\"Bring it!\" she shouted back and slammed each boot down to release the blades around the sides of her heels. She might have to cut him a little, but she'd find a way to knock him down until Sen got here to take that Belador to VIPER.\n\nDaegan had made a deal with the Tribunal.\n\nThey couldn't kill anyone until Daegan said so unless he failed to deliver the person behind releasing Imortiks to them. Too complicated for her. All she cared about was saving this guy right now.\n\nEnergy flushed all around her. \"Sen's here.\" She glanced to her right at six-and-a-half-feet of misery and called out, \"We've got him pinned down and just need you to transport him to VIPER.\"\n\nSen curled up his lip. \"I should have known better than to come here. I don't have room or time for your crap.\"\n\n\"Then make room!\" Evalle snapped back. Sen had always hated her for some unknown reason, but she would not allow him to make another Belador pay for his attitude toward her. \"Aren't you a demigod? Doesn't that fall under your job description?\"\n\nThe Belador-Imortik jumped up and slammed the kinetic wall again. Her arms shook.\n\nAdrianna shouted, \"Come on, Sen. Deal with this.\"\n\n\"You should have said so right away.\" He flicked a finger at the man and power lit up the yellow figure in a bright glow. He fell backward and stopped moving.\n\n\"What the fuck!\" Evalle yelled and ran over and knelt next to the smoldering body. She lifted the guy's charred head. \"You killed him, you bastard! He had a wife and kid.\"\n\n\"The witch said to deal with it. You don't like the results, be more specific.\"\n\nEvalle hugged the guy, murmuring, \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nAdrianna launched into Sen. \"You really don't care what the hell you do to any living being, do you?\"\n\n\"Why would it matter to you, witch?\"\n\nPlacing the man back on the ground, Evalle turned to see Sen's arms crossed over his thick chest and blue eyes glowing. \"Did you do that just because you hate me so much, Sen?\"\n\n\"That's exactly why,\" he bragged with a smirk. \"Look at the upside. I'll probably have room for the next one you people try to pawn off on me.\"\n\nEvalle fisted her hands. \"Daegan is not going to accept this.\"\n\nAdrianna shoved her hands on her hips. \"We're all sick of your shit. We're trying to stop Imortiks, but not kill all of our own while doing it. I could have knocked him out without killing him.\"\n\nSen rounded on her, voice deepening. \"If that's so, why didn't you?\"\n\nAdrianna got a wild look in her eyes, one that should not be on a witch who controlled Witchlock. She spoke in a low voice chock full of menace. \"Maybe I should give you a demonstration of how that would work.\"\n\nEvalle felt a wave of energy blast past her. \"Uh, Adrianna, we don't need a demonstration.\" If her friend lost her cool with Witchlock, she might take out a couple city blocks. And Evalle.\n\n\"Shut the fuck up, Alterant,\" Sen snapped at her. To Adrianna he said, \"Let's be clear. I don't give a fuck what body an Imortik jumps into. I've been told to kill Imortiks. End of discussion.\"\n\nAs Adrianna walked toward him, her signature control crumbled with each angry step. \"You're a disgusting being.\"\n\n\"Do something, witch. I would love it.\"\n\nShe opened her hand and energy spun in a white glow the size of a baseball.\n\n\"Adrianna, we're good,\" Evalle said, trying to take the tension down a notch. A flicker of light outlined the eastern horizon. Daylight was coming and Evalle had to get out of there. First, she needed to call in someone to take care of this Belador's body. She couldn't do anything until those two powerful beings calmed the hell down.\n\n\"No, we're not good, Evalle. He just murdered a Belador and thinks it's funny.\"\n\nEvalle took a step toward Adrianna. She hated what Sen had done, but Daegan would have to deal with VIPER's liaison.\n\nSen's gazed dropped to Adrianna's spinning ball of Witchlock energy. He had enough survival sense to back up.\n\nPower burst all around them in a bright glow.\n\n\"I hope like hell that's Daegan,\" Evalle muttered, but turned to face a being she'd never seen before. He had blue-black hair that did not fit with the chalky skin. His thin lips belonged on a chicken with the missing chin.\n\nThose swirling white eyes with red centers were the problem. That gaze screamed of power.\n\nEnergy hovered in a dark cloud around his copper-colored robe marked with black symbols all down the center.\n\nThe Adrianna vs Sen dustup paused with them two steps apart.\n\nSen amped up his nasty tone. \"Who the fuck are you? I've had it with bullshit today.\"\n\n\"How dare you kill Imortiks!\" the supernatural shouted.\n\nThe entire parking deck shook and rolled as if they stood at the epicenter of a 5.0 earthquake.\n\nEvalle danced around to keep her footing.\n\nAdrianna closed her hand and executed her own sideways two-step.\n\nPointing at the dead Belador-Imortik, the new being bellowed in a craggy voice, \"You shall pay for showing off to your girlfriend.\"\n\n\"My what?\" Sen's jaw dropped.\n\nAdrianna looked at the guy as if he'd called her a sleezy crackhead.\n\nEvalle glanced at the horizon, lightening by the second. They had to move this along before her time ran out.\n\nAs if talking to a child, Sen said, \"There is no more room at the inn, dumbass. I've been told to kill Imortiks when I see fit.\"\n\nThe copper-robed being lifted his hands high and roared. Then he flicked one hand at Sen and the other at Adrianna.\n\nThey both disappeared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Casidhe pedaled her ass off on the bicycle she'd rented. She'd exited Galway quickly and hurried through the countryside to the small village of the ancestral centre once Tristan left her hotel.\n\nShe'd feigned exhaustion, which wasn't hard to do when she needed a good night's rest. But that was the key to sending him back to Daegan before she grabbed her backpack and took off.\n\nOnce she reached her village, she didn't stop until she turned off the main road and weaved her way to the side door at the rear of the building.\n\nThis one normally stayed bolted from the inside, but she'd unlocked it while Tristan had been teleporting her books to Treoir. She still had momentary panic when she thought about her library not even being in this world.\n\nPropping the bike against the wall, she looked around. No one came back here very often and not so close to dark. She opened the door, walked the bike inside to prop out of the way, then bolted the door again.\n\nThanks to Cathbad, the door to the once-secret tunnel still flopped open. Adjusting her backpack, she stepped into the tunnel with her LED light in hand and pulled the door shut behind her. With the latch broken, it swung open.\n\nHer abs had a workout while she made the long walk to the hollowed-out-tree exit. But she would not leave that way and risk anyone following.\n\nBesides, she'd have to cross a lot of fields to get anywhere. She'd scouted the tunnel years ago and found another way out, but it would be some work just getting that part open.\n\nFirst, she had to clean out the tree storage.\n\nShe kept only a few things here, one being the screwed-up looking ring Herrick had given her to protect. What importance did this ring hold? It didn't even seem to be complete, as if the ring had been one of those puzzle rings that had to be put together.\n\nShe'd convinced herself for ten years that he'd given her something precious to show her how much he cared.\n\nNow she looked at everything with suspicion and clear eyes.\n\nShe lifted the black velvet pouch holding the ring. This jewelry had a story and she'd bet it was connected to the red dragon in some way. While she now tried to keep an open mind when it came to things concerning Daegan such as the Dragani War, she fully intended to filter every word Herrick said from here on out.\n\nEvery time she recalled finding Fenella hiding safely with her family, Casidhe felt a punch to her stomach.\n\nNo stranger could ever hurt her any more than those she'd believed to be family.\n\nClutching the bag, she had so many questions. She'd searched for the history of this ring but had found nothing.\n\nHerrick knew the history and sent it with her for a reason, not as a gift.\n\nShe was not cherished. She was not family.\n\nShe'd worn the odd ring on a chain around her neck during her college days to prevent it being stolen from her dorm, but she always worried she might lose the ring if her chain broke without her noticing. To be honest, she had never understood the value of what appeared to be a partial ring as if it had been made in two parts joined all the way around and one side broken off. Turning up the velvet bag, the silver links of the chain pooled in her hand along with the ring piece.\n\nShe hooked the clasp behind her neck and dropped it all inside her shirt.\n\nHerrick had a lot of explaining to do.\n\nWith a last look to insure she left nothing she'd worry about, Casidhe backtracked a third of the way down the tunnel. She'd found this offshoot by accident many years ago while curious about everything to do with the centre. She'd felt a wisp of air while pausing here before she got into shape to walk that distance bent over. Not as easy as it might seem.\n\nRunning her hands over the rough stone now, she moved a foot at a time to her right.\n\nWhen she couldn't find the indentation to use as a handle, she started to move her hands faster, trying not to panic.\n\nIf Daegan went to her hotel and discovered she'd left, he'd hunt her. Tristan had said Daegan might be a day or two taking care of issues in Atlanta, but she didn't think he realized the vow Daegan had made to her in Tristan's hotel room.\n\nHer heart clutched sharply at not leaving him a note to keep him from worrying, but she couldn't risk it. Daegan had ways to find her. Nothing she said would convince him to stay put where he'd be safe and she really had no idea how to explain what she was doing. She could only hope to reach a squire house and get word to Herrick. She'd wait a day, which would expose if Daegan came for her right away. He would not sit back and watch.\n\nNot now.\n\nHe'd knock down any doors between them. If he did, she'd convince him to leave. He would do as she asked as long as she came back to explain herself.\n\nBy day two, she would take off to reach Herrick's land.\n\nHerrick would not expose himself if Daegan followed her, which would prevent those two meeting. If Herrick did not meet her in the canyon, she would walk to the warded castle and wait until night to slip through the ward. That should keep those two from a bloodbath.\n\nAsking him to not follow her would be like asking a giant tree not to fall after a tornado ripped the roots out of the ground.\n\nShe'd dug out Fenella's cash jar at the centre while waiting on Tristan going back and forth to Treoir. It was only fair. Casidhe had taken only what she needed to travel fast and left the rest.\n\nShe had been conditioned to believe all money came from Herrick and all money she earned belonged to him. Fair enough. He could pay for this trip.\n\nWith some luck, Casidhe would return to the hotel before Daegan mounted a search for her.\n\nThat would be a very fast turnaround, but she had no intention of staying at Herrick's castle once she got her questions answered.\n\nHer fingers dipped into a hole in the rocks and clutched a familiar feeling metal.\n\nThat had been the easy part. Removing the covering not so simple.\n\nAfter a lot of grunting, swearing, and sweating, she managed to pull the rocks away and open the metal shield enough to push her backpack in. Then she squeezed her body through.\n\nDragging the cover back in place was probably a futile effort, but it might slow down someone if they followed her. She'd sent Cathbad's book along with the other ones she'd been carrying to Treoir with Tristan by hiding those among the other volumes.\n\nThat seemed to be the best way to keep that evil druid off her trail, but who knew? If Queen Maeve had not discovered what Cathbad had been up to, he would have the benefit of her scrying wall Daegan talked about.\n\nCasidhe sat in the dark, heaving breaths and wiping sweat from her face.\n\nKnowing it was too small for him, Daegan would come down this tunnel to find her.\n\nHe'd scent her and use his force to open the wall to this offshoot even if she'd tried to hide it. She had to get moving. Regardless of what Tristan had said, she'd been around Daegan enough to expect him to teleport in today to check on her.\n\nShe had to escape everyone and travel to Herrick without any other dragon shifter or supernatural following.\n\nThat would end in a bloodbath.\n\nIf not for that, she'd have asked Tristan to teleport her close to Herrick's castle.\n\nHefting the backpack into place, she killed half a bottle of water, stowed the rest, and lifted her LED light. This tunnel had not seen activity in a long time. She'd taken a long, dirty day to find her way to the end just to be sure it provided another exit point.\n\nThat had been ten years ago.\n\nShe hoped the boots with her jeans stuffed in the top meant staying dry. She recalled one low spot with water to her ankles. She wore layers of a tank top, short-sleeved cotton shirt, and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. The temperature remained moderate down here, but she'd need clothes where she was going and could only pack so much.\n\nIn the first seventy yards, she perspired heavily in spite of the cool air and moving slowly. She should reach the exit in another fifty or sixty yards, but the ground had begun to slope down.\n\nThat should mean the ground would begin to rise soon.\n\nShe splashed into water.\n\nNo problem. She shined her LED down only to find black liquid. She took another step and it dropped an inch. Not so bad, but if this became any deeper, her nice clean socks and jeans would be wet and dirty. Roots had grown through the opening and followed the wall. Not too surprising after a century, but she hoped roots had not caved in some of the tunnel.\n\nFifteen slow steps ahead, her boot dropped into a hole, sending her into waist-deep water before she could pull the other foot around.\n\n\"Dammit!\" She moved the left boot forward and found the other side of the caved-in spot.\n\n\"No problem. Stay calm and pull hard,\" she whispered to herself when she was anything but calm.\n\nShe leaned forward and yanked her right boot but couldn't move it. Her heart thudded so loud in her ears she expected to hear an echo.\n\nHad mud sucked her boot down?\n\nShe wiggled her toes, trying to pull her foot from the boot. If that happened, she'd still have to figure out how to free her shoe. It felt like her boot was trapped under something. She ran her light around the walls and found lines of roots on the right side running down into the water.\n\n\"Come on!\" she shouted. \"Give me a break.\"\n\nThat might have been the wrong thing to shout at the universe. If she broke a leg, she wouldn't get out of here.\n\nShe kept working her foot back and forth, lifting up, and in different directions to back out of whatever had her caught. Best she could figure, her foot had slipped through an opening between two roots.\n\nThis was not working. Maybe she could chop the root off. She reached over her shoulder, grabbed her sword by the hilt, and yanked.\n\nThe blade would not come out of the sheath.\n\nAfter three more hard yanks, she dropped her head. That sword was ridiculous. Dragging in a deep breath, she rasped out, \"I need help, Lann an Cheartais.\"\n\nShe tried again.\n\nThe sword wouldn't budge.\n\nHer mobile phone would not work down here.\n\nWhat if Daegan didn't come to check on her for a day or two? Or couldn't find her?\n\nShe yelled at the top of her lungs, \"Stop screwin' with me! I have had it.\"\n\nLight shined from behind her.\n\nShe lifted a trembling hand over her shoulder and curled her fingers around the hilt. \"Please, Lann an Cheartais.\"\n\nThe sword slid free, its glow tossing off light as she pulled it over her shoulder. Staring at the weapon, Casidhe said, \"I just want to cut some roots. I don't want to lose a foot in the process or cut myself and bleed to death.\"\n\nShe jabbed the blade tip down in the water."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Daegan teleported into the dungeon under Treoir castle, suffering a moment of guilt over having not told Skarde about Brynhild. If the ice dragon before him had not rocked the castle so much he disturbed Brina close to her birthing, he might have.\n\nFar back inside the dark cave, Daegan had created a lair for Skarde's dragon. The ice dragon rose and stared down his scaly snout at Daegan with fury seething.\n\nDaegan said, \"I have good news for ya. Brynhild lives.\"\n\nThe ice dragon's eyes opened more, then pinched almost closed again.\n\nSkarde's dragon slapped his tail against the walls of the cavern, making the whole place shake. Eyes flaming with cold-blue anger glared at him.\n\n\"I warn ya one time only, Skarde, to not shake the castle or carry on as an overgrown bairn. I come to ya in good faith to share news I would think to please ya.\" Daegan waited as Skarde's dragon looked away then back at Daegan with doubt replacing anger. But hope lived in those eyes as well. \"Ya do not believe me? I have no reason to lie. My dragon fought hers. Ya are not the only one who suffered for thousands of years in another realm. I was imprisoned in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb the same time.\"\n\nA flicker of surprise moved through the ice-blue dragon eyes.\n\n\"'Tis true,\" Daegan continued, determined to take this small opening and widen it. \"I went to T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb to see my sister, who Queen Maeve claimed had become very ill. 'Twas a trick. Queen Maeve caught me in her realm where she held the most power and had a beast attack me. I shifted into my dragon. A great mistake in hindsight. She was ready and placed a spell on my dragon, forcin' it into the shape of a throne. 'Tis where I spent all these centuries.\"\n\nSkarde sent no words telepathically to communicate, but his dragon's tail had stopped moving around as if agitated.\n\nDaegan waited for something, anything from Skarde to confirm he accepted what he'd heard, but no. Releasing a frustrated blast of air, Daegan asked, \"How can ya not believe your sister lives? Ya were trapped in the Scamall realm as a young man and would still be there had I not teleported ya here. Ya do remember Cathbad the Druid, do ya not?\n\nNo reply, but the slight lift of the ice dragon's head could be a yes.\n\nRuadh spoke in Daegan's mind. <Ice dragon is not ally. Sees us as enemy.>\n\nDaegan understood his dragon's words, but Ruadh did not care about coaxing someone to act logically or behave with honor. His dragon only cared about saving Daegan and his people when it came to other dragons. But Daegan had once been the glue that held every dragon family together as allies.\n\nHe wanted that for the few dragon shifters still living.\n\nHe continued to educate Skarde on what had happened in his absence from this world. \"Cathbad and Queen Maeve did somethin' majikal to fake their deaths long ago and slumber for thousands of years. They recently were awakened or reincarnated, but they live today. I have heard different versions, but I was there when they both appeared again for the first time before I escaped. I tell ya this so ya shall know how Brynhild can be here just as we are.\"\n\nDaegan kept a close watch on Skarde's dragon's every move. As he'd talked about Cathbad, the ice dragon seemed to show interest.\n\nHe continued, \"I do not know everythin' about what happened to Brynhild as she was in no mood to talk with me the one time we met. What I do know is Cathbad recently captured my second-in-command of our forces. The druid took my man to a cavern where he'd been keepin' Brynhild hidden inside a ward.\"\n\nThe dragon eyes staring at Daegan glowed bright with anger. Good. Maybe he was getting through to this hardheaded dragon shifter.\n\nDaegan added, \"My man helped Brynhild escape, though she almost killed him.\"\n\nThe ice dragon smiled.\n\nDaegan shook his head at how hard he had to work to get this dragon to accept he and his people were helping Skarde and his sibling. \"From what I was told, Cathbad had placed Brynhild's dragon in a frozen pond inside that cavern for two thousand years. She has endured bein' imprisoned somewhere just as we had to endure bein' trapped in realms not of our choosin'.\"\n\nStill not a word from Skarde when he could speak mind-to-mind even if his voice might not work.\n\nDaegan might be fighting a no-win battle. If so, he'd have to figure a way to take Skarde out of this dungeon so his dragon could fly. Leaving a dragon locked away like this went against everything Daegan believed in.\n\nBut he could not risk allowing Skarde to fly around Treoir if the man was not willing to talk to him. So little to ask.\n\n\"What must it take for ya to realize there are few of us around, Skarde? I am doin' all I can to protect those still livin'. I allowed my dragon to be injured just to avoid killin' Brynhild's dragon. I shall not keep puttin' my people and dragon at risk if ya are not goin' to step up and work with me.\"\n\nSkarde's dragon turned away.\n\nStubborn bastard.\n\nSpeaking telepathically this time, Daegan shouted, <Dammit, at least talk to me. Brynhild spoke to me and it cost her nothin'.>\n\nSilence and more silence.\n\nDaegan scowled. \"I shall return, but do not expect me soon.\" He made a move to leave.\n\n<Wait.> The single harsh sound whispered through Daegan's mind. Skarde's rough voice would make sense for someone who had not spoken to another being in thousands of years, even telepathically.\n\nWith arms loose at his sides, Daegan waited, but the ice dragon spoke no words out loud. \"Ya test my patience, Skarde. Ya should recall I have none with an enemy. I have shown ya all I can in hopes we can once again be allies. I do not like to leave ya here, but I cannot trust ya around my people if ya do not at least talk.\"\n\nDaegan had said enough. He crossed his arms and returned a flat stare.\n\n<I will talk,> flowed into his mind in a painful raspy sound.\n\nStill, Daegan held his tongue. He had to see a sincere effort before he took another step in Skarde's direction physically or verbally.\n\nThe ice dragon lifted one leg after another as he stepped from the lair at the back of the dungeon, moving its large body forward. Blue reptilian eyes blue as ice chips never moved from staring at Daegan. The dragon's breath blew out in white puffs.\n\nDaegan stood ready if Skarde made an aggressive move.\n\nHe'd warned this dragon shifter once already to not attack him again. When Skarde buried Daegan in ice one time, Daegan had called up his red dragon's hot energy and melted it. He'd left the ice dragon sitting in a lake of water while it slowly drained over several days as a reminder.\n\n<What do you want, red dragon?> Skarde asked when his dragon paused in moving around.\n\nSpeaking out loud, Daegan said, \"I wish to speak to ya in human form, man to man.\"\n\nAfter a tense moment, the ice dragon's head swayed from side to side in an agitated motion more so than denying Daegan.\n\nCould Skarde still shift into human form?\n\nWhite foggy puffs blew out from the dragon's snout, flaring again and again.\n\nIn a soothing tone, Daegan said, \"Shiftin' to human may seem impossible at first, but ya can do it. When I escaped T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb and broke the curse on my dragon, I had help from my people. At that moment, I wanted freedom more than anythin' and called up my human form with no problem. I do not believe ya shall become stuck between forms, if that troubles ya.\"\n\nSkarde's dragon lifted his head and stared over Daegan's head for a long time.\n\nDaegan waited, not rushing the dragon shifter. Hope sat like a lonely stone in his chest.\n\nEnergy stirred around the ice dragon. Power built and swirled until it blurred the lines of Skarde's dragon. Bones cracked with loud pops.\n\nDaegan grimaced. Slow shifts were painful.\n\nThe silver-blue dragon began to shrink still slowly at first, then all at once the cloud of energy expanded and disappeared, leaving a man standing in its place.\n\nSeeing Skarde as a man just younger than Daegan took him back so many years. His heart pounded at facing someone alive from his past.\n\nHe'd been too shocked about Brynhild to feel this rush of excitement, but there stood a living part of his history. Naked and too thin, Skarde still looked the same as Daegan recalled with his scruffy blond beard, white-blond hair, and deep-blue eyes always full of suspicion. There stood someone whose family had been allies of Daegan and his father.\n\nEmotion flooded his mind and senses. Daegan cleared his throat. \"Hello, Skarde.\"\n\nSkarde licked his lips, which were dry and cracked, then opened his mouth. \"I do not understand ... this.\" The words sounded as if he'd swallowed broken glass.\n\n\"I shall explain all I can. I have had some time here and people giving me aid to adjust. I offer the same aid for ya.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nDaegan sighed with disappointment. \"Brynhild believes I started the Dragani War. I did not. I was on my way to see your father to join forces so we could figure out who was behind pittin' dragon clans against each other. I told ya I went to see my sister in T\u00c5\u03bcr Medb first and ... my life ended there. I never saw my da or anyone else alive again, until now.\"\n\n\"Your red dragon ... \" Skarde drew a couple breaths and his words so much like Brynhild's with a Nordic influence, but in a deeper voice, came out. \"Dragon seen burning our lands, killing our people.\"\n\nHolding back his frustration, Daegan asked, \"Did ya see my dragon with your own eyes?\"\n\n\"Reports.\"\n\n\"Someone was tryin' to make a dragon appear to be red like mine. In fact, Cathbad used majik on Brynhild without her permission to give her the ability to blow short blasts of fire when he took her from the cavern. He even glamoured her dragon to look red. I am thinkin' he could have been behind the Dragani War as he lived when we did.\"\n\nThat clearly confused Skarde, who grimaced. \"Where is Brynhild?\"\n\n\"I do not know. She fought me and flew away. I did not want to fight your sister. Instead, I stayed back to help my man who had been injured.\"\n\nAfter a few more long seconds, Skarde asked, \"Do you have family?\"\n\n\"I have my father's descendants here in Treoir but lost everyone else from my past.\" Daegan would not share how the ring in his pocket had begun to move around and vibrate at times. Neither of the ice dragon siblings would care if Jennyver lived.\n\nQueen Maeve had gloated when his other sister living with the evil queen died. Daegan did not doubt that death.\n\nSkarde stood perfectly still with a sad look in his eyes. Perhaps he did recall how their families had all been friends at one time.\n\nDaegan asked, \"Do ya need me to clothe ya?\"\n\nLifting an eyebrow at Daegan, Skarde asked, \"Why?\"\n\n\"I cannot take ya outside around my people if you cannot clothe yourself when ya shift to human. There are families about.\"\n\n\"You would take me out of here?\" Skarde asked with the awe of a dying man finding out he would live.\n\n\"Aye. 'Tis been most important to me. I only waited for ya to talk to me. I need your word ya shall not harm any of mine.\"\n\nSkarde licked at his lips, frowning. \"Why would I harm an innocent?\"\n\nWhy indeed. Daegan took this as a positive sign. \"I do not believe ya would and hope ya do not believe I would now or would have all those centuries ago.\"\n\n\"How many?\"\n\nDaegan angled his head with confusion. \"How many what?\"\n\n\"Centuries.\"\n\n\"Two millennia.\"\n\nColor washed from Skarde's face. \"No.\"\n\n\"'Tis true. 'Tis also true that ya, I, and Brynhild live today. I shall help ya find your sister.\"\n\nNodding as if having a conversation with himself, Skarde said, \"I would like to leave.\" His face showed the strain of clothing himself in leather pants. He left his feet bare and wore no shirt, but Daegan said nothing.\n\nHe had to give a man room for pride.\n\nIn the next moment, Daegan teleported Skarde to the center of the wide lawn leading to the castle.\n\nSkarde took in the castle, the guards, and a group of mothers and children of Belador families brought to this realm to protect. The women appeared to be entertaining the children in the shade of old trees.\n\n\"I see little difference,\" Skarde muttered.\n\n\"Treoir has changed some inside the castle, but nothing like changes in the world of humans. Do ya wish to allow your dragon to fly? The exercise would be good. When we return, I would like for ya to share a meal with me and allow me to introduce ya to some of the others.\" Daegan would not expose Brina and the babies to anyone, but he'd like Tzader's impression of Skarde, as well as Lanna's and Garwyli's.\n\n\"Yes. I believe I can shift again much faster.\"\n\nGiving Skarde a quick nod, Daegan explained, \"I shall teleport us to a mountain top to give your dragon a high place to fly from.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nSighing at the effort this took, Daegan did not want Skarde shutting down again. \"I do ask that ya talk to me as we fly.\"\n\nSkarde nodded.\n\nRuadh rumbled heavily. <Not ally.>\n\nDaegan sent back, <Give him a chance. To be alone so long is difficult for anyone. Skarde has no family or army here. He would be foolish to attack us.>\n\nRuadh quieted, but Daegan still sensed his dragon's misgivings.\n\nHe enjoyed a stronger press of power in Treoir and teleported the two of them to a high mountain he'd visited multiple times.\n\nWhen the ice dragon shifter appeared again, he shook his head as if to clear it, then looked around, ready and alert.\n\nShucking off his pants, Skarde shifted to his dragon.\n\nDaegan had been ready and shifted quickly into Ruadh, then lifted off to be flying first. Once Skarde changed, his dragon took a couple hops and leaped from the mountain, flying perfectly.\n\nSeeing that did not surprise Daegan. Skarde had been in dragon form when Daegan rescued him from the Scamall realm. No reason for his dragon to have any difficulty here.\n\nDaegan started the telepathic conversation. <'Tis nice to find two people from my life before being captured, Skarde. I am willin' to help ya and Brynhild settle in this new world if ya work with me.>\n\n<I have nothing to offer the red dragon.> Trying not to take offense at Skarde's tone, Daegan said, <Ya have much to offer. Supernaturals are bein' exposed to humans in this new world. Peace has never been more important.>\n\nThe ice dragon flew too close to Ruadh, who roared and maintained his position, knocking Skarde's dragon back.\n\nSkarde yelled, <What are you doing?>\n\nDaegan grumbled to Ruadh, <I do not want conflict when the ice dragon flies too close. I am tryin' to gain an ally.>\n\n<Ice dragon aggressive.> Daegan would always take Ruadh's side, but he wished for a chance to build a bridge with Skarde. <No dragon would handle what we went through, certainly not Skarde's. Can ya try to do this for now, Ruadh? I would appreciate your help.>\n\n<I fly. I fight. You talk.> That was pure Ruadh.\n\nDaegan followed as Skarde's dragon angled one way then the next, likely testing his wing strength. He told Skarde, <Your dragon must be more careful to not fly into mine. If he cannot manage here, he will bang into tall buildings in the modern human world.> Not that Daegan planned to take Skarde out of Treoir any time.\n\n<My dragon is excellent in air.> Daegan dismissed Skarde's defensive tone. His dragon flew with the red dragon, known as the most powerful in their time.\n\nStill was.\n\nLeaving Ruadh to keep pace with the ice dragon, Daegan shifted back to explaining more about the new world. <Ya shall not have to worry about the human world yet. Ya are safe here.>\n\nThe only sound that followed was that of the wind rushing across Ruadh's wings.\n\nAfter a long silence, Skarde asked, <Do you intend to keep me here?>\n\n<At the moment, monsters known as Imortiks are escaping from a rift into the human world. They take over bodies and have taken over Belador bodies. Treoir is the safest place for a dragon for now,> was all Daegan would say.\n\nRuadh banked hard to the right, following the ice dragon.\n\nDaegan gave up talking. It would be easier once he sat across from Skarde sharing a meal.\n\nThey flew in silence until Skarde's dragon noticed the Alterant-gryphon village where some of the members gathered as if discussing something.\n\n<Where did you find a clan of gryphons, Daegan?> Surprised at the question, Daegan replied, <'Tis a long story I wish to share when we take a meal.>\n\nAs the dragons flew closer, some of the Alterants stared up in surprise at seeing them.\n\nDaegan spotted Tristan with his sister, Petrina. Tristan glanced up for only a moment and returned to what he was discussing. He probably listened to reports from gryphons having experienced their first patrol duties in Atlanta. Petrina talked with her hands flapping around.\n\nTristan had to be proud of his sister. She would have everyone down there ready for duty in no time.\n\nOne of the gryphons took flight, drawing Daegan's attention. He told Ruadh, <Keep an eye on that gryphon. I do not want it close to\u2014>\n\nSkarde's dragon folded his wings, dropping fast.\n\nRuadh whipped around to follow, but the ice dragon had a jump on them.\n\nDaegan yelled, <Stop, Skarde! Do not touch anyone unless ya wish to die.>\n\n<I am dead, Daegan. Brynhild does not live. My brothers do not live. None of my family lives and the woman I loved is dead. But you have everything.> Ruadh folded his wings too close to the ground.\n\nDaegan yelled telepathically, <Gryphons, shift now! Fly out of the village.>\n\nTwo shifted immediately into gryphons.\n\nTristan jerked his head up. Petrina dragged her gryphon friend, Bernie, who looked shocked senseless and stumbled in her wake.\n\nSkarde's dragon blasted a load of ice at the gryphons heavy enough to crush humans.\n\nRuadh opened his wings, ending his fall painfully, and blew short blasts of fire at Skarde. Any more might pass Skarde and kill the gryphons below. Daegan's dragon pummeled Skarde's dragon with strike after strike until the ice dragon made a hellish cry and flapped wildly.\n\nRuadh flew down close and hooked giant claws in the ice dragon's neck and flapped powerful wings hard, yanking Skarde's dragon off course from the gryphon village. As soon as they cleared the village, Ruadh stopped flapping and dropped his full weight on Skarde's dragon now falling fast toward towering trees.\n\nDaegan warned, <Take care not to break your bones, Ruadh.>\n\nHis furious dragon said nothing. At the last moment, Ruadh released Skarde's dragon and shoved off, sending the ice dragon body crashing into trees and breaking limbs. The sheared-off sharp top of one tree impaled a wing.\n\nArching up and flying fast, Ruadh blew out a stream of fire fifty feet in the air and roared at his victory. He banked around and flew toward the village. From a distance, piles of frozen rubble and collapsed cabins dotted the normally tidy area. Most of the gryphons had shifted back to human form and were frantically digging through razor-sharp piles of ice.\n\nRuadh said, <I told you.>\n\n<Ya were correct,> Daegan conceded then swept a gaze over all the gryphons as he took head count. He stared at the village with a sinking feeling.\n\nWhere was ... ?\n\nDaegan shouted, <TRISTAN!>"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Ultimate Dragon Saga 1) Dragoncharm",
        "author": "Graham Edwards",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2003Before man, there was magic.\n\n\u2003And where there was magic\n\n\u2003There were dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "South Point",
                "text": "[ Prologue ]\n\nA flat beach of rock lit by the distant stars.\n\nOn the beach a maze of boulders, each awaiting the morning tide. Each boulder was unique, a character in a crowd, and one was a dragon.\n\nWelkin sat among his rocks and contemplated the dim stars, these days a blurred patchwork where once they had shone sharp and bright; to the old dragon the stars were growing more insubstantial year by year.\n\n'Ah,' said Welkin to the waves, 'but there was more magic in the world then.' He chuckled. 'And perhaps my eyes are growing old.'\n\nStretching rough dragon wings, he shifted a knob of driftwood away from the curve of his tail and settled more comfortably into his stone platter. Yellowed claws rested easily in the grooves they had worn over the years, and the rounded sides of what had become known as Welkin's Hollow embraced him as an old friend. The night sea nestled beneath a cool and distant horizon and the only sound was the waves lapping gently on the sloping shelf of the shore.\n\nOld and at peace, Welkin dozed, then woke, then dozed again, waiting for the night dragons to fly.\n\nA dragon many years his junior paused high on the cliff edge, momentarily confused by the puzzle of rocks laid out below... until one of the rocks coughed. His goal located, the youngster headed down.\n\nWelkin stirred, glancing up as a clattering commotion descended the cliff. A shower of clay and sharp stones pattered around him as the young dragon scrambled down the shallow gully splitting the cliff face in two; the intruder's eager panting was raucous over the lap of the ocean, and his legs and flimsy wings danced and scuddered on the loose scree.\n\n'Welkin!' he was calling. 'Excuse... oops!'\n\nThe youngster caught his right wingtip in a mound of dried seaweed and tumbled off balance, turning head over haunches until the cloud of debris that had accompanied his descent delivered him unceremoniously at Welkin's side.\n\n'Wel ...' was as far as he got before he realised that he was quite winded. He collapsed into a fit of coughing. Welkin grinned.\n\n'Well what, young Wood?' he said, pleased with the sound of the syllables as they mingled with the sea's soft wash. 'Take your time now, son, though I think I have guessed the news you bring so... spectacularly.'\n\nWood ducked as a further avalanche of pebbles scattered about them, then turned his young face up to the craggy features of the old dragon. Welkin's eyes danced beneath the enclosing bony ridges sweeping back along his head to become a pair of chipped and twisted horns. He smiled, grey scales flexing and pulling back from the skin around his mouth.\n\n'It's Clarion, sir. She's... Welkin, you've got a son!'\n\nWelkin closed his old dragon eyes as he took in the news for which he had waited so long.\n\nA son! At last, a son!\n\nA storm of memories rolled through the old dragon's mind. His whole life in a breath. Swift infancy; the moment of release when he had first flew free into the world; years of study and training to join the Charmed at Covamere; his failure there, and the sombre return home. Of it all, it was the failure that had clung. Failure in life, in love, old age sweeping him away like a flash flood... and then Clarion. Just when his life had seemed over \u2014 when all had seemed failure \u2014 she had come.\n\nClarion had arrived in South Point without drama one sudden autumn, old like Welkin, her past a story she would tell to none but him. Instantly friends, they had gradually found love as tender as that of the young couples who flew their courtships around them. They had become inseparable.\n\nAnd now the egg that Clarion had borne, that all who scoffed had called sterile, ancient, impossible, that egg was hatched and Welkin's life at last had meaning.\n\nIf lives can turn on a moment, he thought, this moment is mine.\n\nComfortable, old and elated, Welkin listened to the sea caressing the shore, conscious of the rhythm of the world as it turned through the sky, carrying him and Wood and all dragons towards some distant, future light.\n\n'Um, sir?'\n\nWood prodded Welkin's wrinkled, grey flank.\n\n'Don't fall asleep, sir. Don't you want to see him?'\n\nWelkin opened an eye and regarded the eager youngster.\n\n'Clarion will call me when she is ready. Have patience.'\n\nWood hopped from one rock to another, handling his infant wings clumsily, flight as yet an ineffectual flurry. He poked Welkin again, frustrated as the old dragon settled himself still further into his nest of stone.\n\n'I'd never seen a hatching before,' he said. 'It was all very slimy.'\n\n'Ssh, young Wood,' murmured Welkin. 'Come and sit by me.'\n\nWood hopped up and squatted by his elder's warm flank, absently curling his tail over his neck to brush lazily against his cheek.\n\n'You are right to be excited, Wood.'\n\nWood gazed at Welkin wide-eyed, his young face characteristically serious. Welkin had often wondered what inner turmoil lent his infant features such adult expressions of concern. No doubt Wood still mourned his mother, but was there something deeper? The youngster's face was smooth, its scales still tight and glossy, but beneath...?\n\nA thought stole unbidden into Welkin's mind: My son and this one will be friends.\n\n'Young Wood,' he said. 'Every year on this night I come here to my hollow. Do you see where my claws have worn the rock? We are comfortable together, the rock and I.' He paused. 'Have you ever seen a night dragon?'\n\n'One or two,' replied Wood, his gaze fixed intently on Welkin. 'My father says they're falling stars.'\n\n'Well, perhaps. Whatever they may truly be, they appear in the night sky throughout the year, one here, two there. But there is one night. young Wood, when there are not one, not two, but ten thousand!'\n\nWelkin drew him even closer. The youngster was agog.\n\n'They are the night dragons, flying high and fast over our world, too high for us ever to reach them. And as they fly they breathe a fire so hot that we see it as a white trail across the sky. They fly high and remote, these cousins of ours, and they are dragons we shall never in our lives meet; but still they fly, one here, two there. They fly.'\n\n'They fly,' Wood echoed.\n\n'Every year there comes a single night,' Welkin continued, 'when the night dragons gather in great celebration. Thousands meet; they turn and swoop; they come together for the purest expression of life their souls can make \u2014 they fly. And as they fly, they breathe fire in the sky. That night is tonight, young Wood, tonight!'\n\nAs Welkin finished speaking a star seemed to shoot across the speckled blackness of the heavens.\n\n'A night dragon,' Wood breathed in awe.\n\nAnd there they sat on that summer night, two dragons from the opposite ends of life, as the sky above them grew alive with threads of fire. Wood gazed at them, transfixed, torn in his belief. His heart flew upwards with Welkin's to the night dragons, but there was a voice in his mind, just one, and it was his father's. A voice that spoke of rocks falling through the sky, sensible words scorning this glimpse of incandescent magic. Young as he was, Wood knew the world had room for only one truth at a time. Yet there was magic in the air that night, and truth seemed suddenly a fragile thing.\n\nWood woke as the dawn began to pale the eastern sky. Beside him Welkin was breathing hoarsely, the tip of his bony tail flicking restlessly among the pebbles Wood had dislodged in his tumble down the cliff.\n\nCareful not to disturb the old dragon, Wood crept from his side and made his way back up the gully. When he reached the cliff-top he glanced back down to the shore.\n\nWelkin was a dark stone on a flat grey beach. The grass around Wood's claws was washed with the day's early gold, but down on the shore there was no colour. Wood could just hear Welkin's guttural breaths rasping in time with the lapping waves; the old dragon seemed at one with the sea. Wood shivered and headed for home.\n\nThe sun rose further, lighting Welkin's face. A shadow danced across his back. Opening his eyes Welkin saw a hornless female eclipsing the sunlight as she alighted before him. In her mouth she carried a tiny, brown bundle of wings.\n\n'I'm so tired, Clarion,' Welkin sighed.\n\n'I know, my darling,' she replied. She placed her fragile load at his feet. 'Your son.'\n\nWelkin's regarded the small, folded shape. His eyes filled with gentle tears. He reached forward and moved the baby dragon's crumpled wings away from its face. Shut tight the night before, the infant's eyes were now open and curious. Welkin wonder if he had seen the night dragons too.\n\n'His eyes are watery, like mine.'\n\n'I had to bring him, before ...'\n\n'He must be named.' Welkin stretched awkwardly. 'Last night I was so comfortable, but this morning ...' He coughed, his ribs pressing painfully against his thin flesh. The air was thin and damp, and seemed to have no taste.\n\n'Hush, Welkin.'\n\nWelkin touched his wrinkled muzzle to the hatchling's brow.\n\n'The world is turning, little one,' he whispered. 'Ordinal says great change is coming. The Charmed know it, only too well.' He coughed again, and then again. His son stared at him, his tiny body still and calm.\n\n'My son,' Welkin continued, although it seemed now that it was only his voice that was present, while the rest of him drifted into the distant dawn. 'My son, seek the Charmed. They know the paths, and will show you them. Perhaps even Ordinal knows the way to the future. And yet, and yet ...'\n\nHe grew weaker, less coherent. He saw his son now as if from a huge distance, from the cliff-top to the shore, or perhaps from above the stars. With an immense effort he stretched a claw across the chasm to touch the infant dragon's face. With a jolt their gazes locked and Welkin found himself staring deep into his son's jet black eyes.\n\nFor that frozen instant, that endless age, Welkin saw in those eyes magic and nature, pain and suffering and inexpressible joy; he saw battle and birth, tasted anger and love; he felt the world shedding its skin.\n\nBeyond it all and within it all he saw a great pathway of terrible complexity, a labyrinth both strange and familiar whose ending was shrouded in mist. On that pathway was his son, lost and alone, surrounded by dark turns and grasping shadows.\n\nIn distant fog something moved with the power of the stars.\n\nWelkin's lips breathed out...\n\n'Fortune. Your name is Fortune.'\n\n...and at last, in peace, Welkin died.\n\nClarion wept silently, drawing her son close as she covered Welkin's body with her grizzled wing. There they lay, one dead, one new born, one between, as the sun turned the beach to gold, pouring colour down from the sky to drive away the grey.\n\nFar out to sea, the tide turned. As the last of the stars deferred to the light, a single night dragon flew clear upwards from behind the horizon, cutting a line of pure white through the cold morning air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Wood",
                "text": "Any young dragon basking on the grassy seaward slopes of South Point, too lazy to fly anywhere, might easily find his thoughts taking flight instead. He might gather his wandering mind and launch it out towards the smell of the salt and the sound of the breaking waves, wings of thought pushed skyward by the updraughts mounting the cliff edge. He might then, in his mind, turn a spiral in the sky and look down to see his own earthbound body pinned to the grass below.\n\nAny young dragon might soar above himself so, cupping imaginary winds with imaginary wings, his mind performing the complex manoeuvres his inexperienced body has not yet mastered.\n\nNot so a young dragon called Wood.\n\nWhere his fellow dragons lay relaxed, Wood lay tense.\n\nAmid a field of contentment, Wood was perfect, knotted frustration.\n\nWood had woken early, restless for no reason he could identify; perhaps a storm was building. Yet outside the nest the morning was like crystal. South Point was just visible through the holes in the screen of branches that stood beside his bed, the fractured view somehow minute in its detail. It was mid-summer, and yet winter felt close enough to smell.\n\nThrough this odd clarity of air Wood scanned the dragon settlement. His family nest, cold and lonely now that his mother was gone, sat on top of the high ridge of chalk that defined South Point's northern boundary. To left and right, he could see the agglomeration of timber nests and linking structures that made up the settlement's primary living area. No dragons were moving yet through the wide thoroughfares between nests. South Point was still asleep.\n\nBeyond this great strip of habitation, the land descended gently into a wooded valley, then rose again more steeply as the chalk downs met the towering cliffs of the southernmost tip of the island of Torr. In the middle of the downs, a naked crescent of durable granite broke through the grass to form a curved dam, behind which lay a small reservoir formed by run-off from the cliff slopes, known as the Sink. From the edge of the Sink an aqueduct ran \u2014 the greatest work of dragon architect Tongue. Striking out north, the aqueduct soared over the densely wooded dale before splitting into a network of narrow waterways that served most of the dragon settlement.\n\nSouth of the Sink were the broad slopes of the clifftop, and beyond those the sea and the sky and distant places which Wood had no plan ever to see. Cold places, far away.\n\nWood pressed his muzzle to the screen and peered through its weave. The jumbled timber of dragon nests had never looked so precise. Cloud shadows poured over the landscape like running water. The crazing of frost-cracks on the bare granite of the Sink dam was finely delineated and the world was sharp as a dragon's claw.\n\n'Wood!'\n\nThe voice shattered the stillness. Wood's father, named Barker for the deafening power of his lungs, was calling him. Lately his words had been few, but they were always loud.\n\nWood could remember a time when his father had been a talkative dragon, a warm, spark-eyed dragon happy to speak long into the night about the world, about dragons, about nature and magic, hunting and love. A true father.\n\nThen the year of storms had come. First Wood's mother Eleken had been snatched from the sky by winter-wild sea. Later Welkin, to whom Wood had turned as to an uncle when his father had shut himself away in his own storm of grief, had died quietly beside the same sea that had drowned his mother. The sea, whether at peace or storm, was no longer to be trusted. Terrible grief had followed, and worse than grief \u2014 silence.\n\nTo begin with they had argued. In between the talkative Barker and the silent one there had been an argumentative Barker, a dragon ready to throw his anger at any convenient target \u2014 with Wood the most convenient of all. Wood's natural response had been to fight back.\n\n'If only you'd been the daughter that Eleken wanted!'\n\n'You should never have let my mother go fishing that day!'\n\n'It was your disobedience that drove Eleken to madness!'\n\n'It was your obsession with Shatter that drove my mother away!'\n\nBlame, always blame. The endless, titanic arguments left them both drained, and so eventually they fell into silence, father and son sharing their nest in haunted emptiness. Barker took to vanishing every night to the sanctuary of his meetings with Shatter and the others, where he could fill his mind with other matter and other blames. Wood brooded alone in the nest, blaming his father for not understanding, blaming his mother for dying.\n\nEight years passed, during which neither dragon helped the other to heal.\n\n'Wood!'\n\nBarker stormed in, pulled Wood away from the screen and poked at his flank. The scales there were chipped and a red graze glared from the soft skin of Wood's belly. 'I have forbidden you to fly! Either you obey me or ...'\n\n'Or what? What do you care what I do anyway!'\n\nWood lunged past his father and out into the transparent day. As his backward glance met Barker's angry gaze, there was the briefest of pauses \u2014 filled with the familiar silence, of course \u2014 before Wood swept away, stumbling along the path that would lead him through the wood to the cliff. There were tears in his eyes. Naturally, he assumed they were tears of rage.\n\nWhen he reached the clifftop, he threw himself in fury to the ground and remained there for the rest of the day, knowing his father would assume he had gone to one of the nearby gullies to practise flying. Wood refused to give him the pleasure of being right.\n\nAs the day lengthened around him, the chill of the morning was banished by a hot, heavy wind sweeping in from the sea, and the air around Wood became as clammy as his own heart. Other youngsters came to bask on the grassy slopes. Later they began to drift back to their homes \u2014 their warm, friendly homes.\n\nPresently Wood was alone. As clouds built around him he slept the shallow sleep of the uneasy.\n\nWhen he awoke, the sun was low in the sky and cloaked in scales of mist. The air was close and damp. If anything, the evening was hotter than the afternoon had been.\n\n'Fortune,' he muttered under his breath.\n\nHe began tramping back towards the settlement, keeping his head low as he skirted the Sink.\n\nThough remote from the main living area, the Sink was nevertheless the centre of South Point. It was attractive both for the sweep of grassland flanking its southern rim, where most dragons went to drink, and for the dozens of cracks and hollows hidden in the dry northern side of the dam wall. Here were secret places where dragons were prone to meet. Wood knew that Barker would be in one of those hollows with Shatter and his cronies, perhaps grumbling about the youth of today, more likely debating more pressing matters of dragon politics. Wood was anxious to avoid them.\n\nBehind him the sun was yielding to a blackness not entirely night: thunderclouds were swelling, top-heavy shadows hulking in the greater shadow of the sky. Voices carried through the sultry air, voices from beneath the dam. Voices raised in passion.\n\nWood crouched, listened, but he could hear little. Phrases slipped past him on the hot evening air...\n\n'... by surprise ...'\n\n'... time has come ...'\n\n'... they smashed the eggs ...'\n\nAnd his father's unmistakable rumble:\n\n'... the Charmed.'\n\nMore plotting, thought Wood. He cares more about battling charmed dragons than he does about me.\n\nWood was well aware of the depth of hatred felt towards the Charmed by many of South Point's natural dragons, among them his father. He did not fully understand why the Charmed were so reviled. Having never seen a charmed dragon \u2014 few did these days \u2014 he was not convinced they even existed. Mythical and mysterious beings they were, figures from a more colourful age, mere characters in old stories told for the amusement of gullible young dragons.\n\nYet only the day before, two broken eggs had been found near the entrance to the Charmed caverns. Natural eggs.\n\nBeside them: a single dragon scale that appeared to be made of gold.\n\nAccording to the legends, charmed dragons had inhabited South Point \u2014 and indeed much of Torr \u2014 for far longer than the Naturals who now prospered there in their rude nests. While younger than the trolls, charmed dragons were among the oldest of the charmed creatures who had flocked into the world when it was new. Back then, the skies had been filled with gold and silver as thousands of these ancient, winged knights had moved through the sunlight in search of new homes in the burgeoning land. Creation had clung to the world like the first fall of dew and everything had seemed possible. The time of the great migrations had been a golden age.\n\nOnce they had filled the skies and the lands, the charmed dragons sought new frontiers, and so they ventured underground. Here at last they found their true destiny, or so they believed, for only beneath the earth could the power of charm be properly focused. Only underground could the mind be truly concentrated on magic, far from the tiresome distractions of night and day, sunlight and storm.\n\nSo it was that the great Charmed cavern systems were established, where dragons refined their magic until it gained unparallelled beauty, unheard-of complexity. The laws passed by their parliament were rigid, and their morals were strict, and their magic was good. Among all the creatures of charm they were the most revered.\n\nIt was into this world of dragon knights that the Naturals gradually began to trickle. The first few Naturals who settled at South Point accepted the leadership of the Charmed readily enough. Powerful but gentle, charmed dragons cared for the land, and the Naturals worshipped them, for a time.\n\nBut as the years passed, the numbers of natural dragons grew, and those magical days melted into history. The Charmed of South Point retreated to their caverns in the west beyond the wood and the Naturals, great now in number, began to speak ill of their reclusive neighbours.\n\nBefore long, groups of subversive Naturals were making plans to attack the Charmed. Yet, for all their meetings and all their talk, none ever found the courage to take action. Though clearly in decline, the Charmed still managed to retain the one thread they needed to maintain control over the community: fear of the incredible powers they possessed. As young natural dragons grew to adulthood, so fear of charm grew within them. Over the years, it was this fear that held back Naturals from striking the final blow.\n\nBut the fear was waning. Charmed dragons no longer travelled either in or out of the entrance to the caverns, and to young dragons like Wood those stories of the magical past were just stories.\n\nBarker belonged to a group of militant Naturals led by a dragon called Shatter. Wood had often followed his father as he crept from the nest at night, eavesdropping on the gang's secret conversations. Their debates covered subjects far and wide, but in the end talk always came back to one thing: how they hated the Charmed.\n\nThis evening's meeting \u2014 if the fragments of conversation Wood had caught were anything to go by \u2014 was no different to any of the countless meetings he had spied upon before. Yet, despite the oppressive heat, Wood felt suddenly chilled. But why? He had overheard so little. Why did he feel so much to be wrong?\n\n'... by surprise ...'\n\n'... time has come ...'\n\n'... Volence cannot go on ...'\n\nBehind him the storm loomed. Looking across the darkening treetops, Wood felt about to be swallowed by darkness and spat into a world of shadow and fear. Thunderheads smothered the evening sky and the gathering wind whispered to him that the world was about to change. His world. Perhaps the whole world.\n\nLooking down, Wood saw his foreclaws clenched proud of the wing membranes they supported. Sandy soil spread between their tips, defying his clutch. With an enormous effort of will he relaxed his muscles and hurried westwards towards South Point's old quarter, where many of the first natural settlers had made their homes.\n\nEntering the old quarter only intensified Wood's sense of foreboding. Here was an ancient forest laid flat \u2014 whole trees were stacked to form great, oval nests, their branches woven into screens, their trunks bored out for food caches \u2014 nest upon nest. Many were abandoned; scrub and fungus thrived in the remains, the deeper parts of which had long since decayed to mush. The smell was foul.\n\nShatter means to do something. Maybe even tonight. Oh, why must things change?\n\nFor Wood, the concept of change was a monstrous one; all the change he had ever known had been for the worse. So he began to run, fleeing the voices, the Sink, the storm.\n\nAs he hastened through the old quarter's broken corridors Wood became aware of its inhabitants. Hunched figures lurked just visible through slits in the walls, their grey, bark-like hides barely distinguishable from the coarse timbers that surrounded them. Those who still lived here refused steadfastly to permit clearance of the ancient site; thus it had become a kind of ghetto. Most of the dragons who lived on the chalk ridge agreed it was only a matter of time before the last of the old ones died and the entire quarter could be levelled. Until then it lingered.\n\nDragons coughed and shifted in their ancient beds, the wood cracked and sighed, sounds merging in staccato harmony. Wood darted between the mighty nests, wishing he could fly well enough to reach the meeting place from the air.\n\nWith a growl, the storm rolled closer. Wood ran faster, stumbling now in his panic.\n\nCan't fly in a storm!\n\nThrusting twigs thrashed at his flanks, the pain helping to suppress his growing terror. A dragon well practised in denying his emotions, Wood banished the fear to some interior place where it might trouble him no longer.\n\nJust when it seemed the maze would go on forever he tumbled around a last corner, brushed past a last curtain of branches and there before him, seated comfortably against the rock wall that marked the western perimeter of South Point, cleaning his back teeth with a claw, was a dragon. Wood skidded to a halt, gasping for breath, legs flustered, tail sore from battering around the endless turns of the maze of nests.\n\nThe last rays of the dying sun cast a low shaft of light across the otherwise gloomy rock wall in front of him, and the light caught the features of the dragon sitting there. Young scales shone, a long snout lifted and with a grunt Wood dismissed the thought that this dragon was beautiful.\n\n'Hello, Wood,' said Fortune. 'What kept you?'"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Guide",
                "text": "It was Fortune who had come up with the idea of mounting a secret expedition to see the caverns of the Charmed.\n\nHe and Wood had been lazing in late summer sunshine, watching the older dragons practising low hunting dives over the flat plain north of the settlement. The sun glittered off horns and spines as their tan forms arrowed in on the lightning-struck tree that was the target in this traditional sport. A successful flight meant contact with the blacked stump, with a telltale flake of charcoal beneath the claw as proof. Neither Fortune nor Wood was yet old enough to compete, although Wood practised relentlessly on the nursery slopes, eager for his first taste of that charred and immobile quarry.\n\nThree years older than Fortune, Wood had seen twelve summers and was now virtually of age; indeed he was closer in age to the youths rehearsing their hunting dives than he was to his younger friend. Where Fortune watched the aerobatics with only passing interest, Wood was crouched forward, wings raised and trembling in the breeze, impatient to be up there with the other dragons.\n\nGrowing bored with the flying display, Fortune sprawled back on the grass, his own unpractised wings folded at his sides. Unlike Wood he felt no need to exercise them. When it was time to fly, he would fly. His mother called him 'my economical dragon.' It was a name he liked.\n\nFortune's economy showed in so many ways: his lightness of step; his easy smile; his unhurried approach to so much of his life. He recognised these qualities in himself and put them down to his mother. She loved him dearly and yet actively encouraged his independence. Had he grown up with a father he might, he fancied, have grown up more like his peers \u2014 competitive and brash. As it was, he was little concerned with the male rivalry that dominated the lives of most of his peers.\n\nFortune's independence \u2014 what his mother called his 'economy' \u2014 also made him something of a loner. This did not bother him. He was content to meander through the northern meadows, dreaming of times to come, and especially of times past. The times in which his father had lived.\n\nHis mother, Clarion, spoke often of his father. Fortune listened eagerly as she told stories of Welkin's humour, his easy good nature and sometimes his loneliness. But the tales seemed always too brief, always too ready to slide off into other stories, other realms. While she was telling them, his mother's eye would never quite meet his own; it seemed to Fortune that his father was not merely dead, but elusive too.\n\nHe escapes me, Fortune would think, and the hole in his heart, a hole the precise shape of a dragon, would grow a little larger.\n\nHe put his mother's reticence down to simple sadness, and perhaps that was all it was. These days she seemed to yearn to be gone from South Point, gone to some distant place, and perhaps to talk of her mate was to tie herself back here somehow.\n\nBut there was something else. Whenever Clarion's tales slipped away from Welkin it seemed to Fortune that they slipped towards charm. To the Charmed, specifically. His father and the Charmed? Why would one remind her of the other?\n\nWhenever Fortune questioned his mother on this subject she would fall silent. It was impossible to press her on the issue; Fortune could only wait for the next tale and hope that a little more of Welkin might be revealed to him then.\n\nAs for Wood, Fortune had often thought of him a little like a cousin, close in some ways and yet distant in so many others. Their paths had crossed frequently throughout their lives but only in this last year had they actually become friends. Why Wood had taken to him in the first place, Fortune was not entirely sure. Perhaps it had something to do with Wood's sense of being tied to South Point: while Fortune spoke always of flight and adventure and leaving the nest, Wood swore he would never do such a thing. Perhaps he found enough adventure simply by listening to Fortune's dreams.\n\nOn Fortune's part the impetus for the friendship was simple enough: Wood was the only dragon close to his age who had known Welkin.\n\nEven though Wood could tell him no more about his father than did his mother Clarion, Fortune could sense the bond they had shared: it shone from Wood's eyes like a charm. When he was with Wood, sometimes his father felt very near.\n\nTheir friendship solidified, Fortune and Wood laughed and explored and argued together. Grew up together. Fortune dreamed up ever more adventurous schemes; Wood tagged reluctantly along until he found himself actually enjoying them. The days they spent together were full and fine, but just lately it had seemed to Fortune that those days might soon be coming to an end. Could it be that growing up also meant growing apart?\n\nIt showed in little things. Fortune recognised the signs and accepted them in his own economical way, for he saw no reason why he and Wood should not agree to differ on any number of issues and yet still remain close. Wood seemed oblivious to the growing rift, but when he finally did see what was happening, Fortune feared his friend would see things differently. That was the only difference between them that caused Fortune concern.\n\nWe must always be friends, he would tell himself, wherever we are in the world, whatever our circumstances.\n\n'I've been thinking,' Fortune said.\n\n'Oh yes?' replied Wood, his eyes fixed on a young female dragon swooping down through a cloud of males towards the charred tree stump. Her name, Fortune knew, was Caprice, and Wood had been watching her for a while.\n\n'We should explore the tunnels, you know, the ones near the old quarter.'\n\nWood grunted. 'The caverns of the Charmed? Are you crazy?'\n\n'Just think of the stories we'll be able to tell when we get back.' Fortune nodded towards the object of Wood's attention. 'She'd be impressed, that's for sure.'\n\nWood turned to him and grinned, something he hardly ever did. 'You think so?'\n\nFortune suppressed a smile of his own. 'I'm sure of it.'\n\nCheers rang out as Caprice scored a direct hit on the stump, then performed a celebratory somersault in the sunlit sky.\n\n'All right,' said Wood. 'Why not?'\n\nIt was settled as easily as that.\n\nLater that evening, they had parted company and made their way back to their separate nests. Feeling peckish, Fortune detoured into the wooded valley lying between the settlement and the Sink. Few dragons hunted among the trees \u2014 too many clutching branches eager to rip a clumsy wing \u2014 but at this time of day there was a good chance of catching a rabbit in the meadow at the woodland's edge.\n\nFortune spotted a dozen of them almost immediately. Creeping low through the long grass, he was almost close enough to pounce when his claws came down on a dry twig. The twig snapped and the rabbits bolted. Fortune leaped after nearest one, his wings unfurling instinctively as he turned his jump into a long, easy glide.\n\nThe rabbit sped over a low hillock and cut left into the trees. His hind legs scrabbling just above the grass, Fortune crested the hillock. There he saw something that made him flatten his wings against the air and alight on top of the hillock with a sudden thud. Ahead, a shape had been cut from the disc of the setting sun: a creature poised on a second hillock just a few wingspans away. It was a dragon, of course, but it looked odd.\n\nNot natural.\n\nHeart pounding, Fortune craned his neck this way and that in a futile attempt to make out some detail in the oddly-shaped silhouette. Then the dragon spoke, its voice low and fast and compelling.\n\n'The world is turning,' it said. It hesitated. Then, all in one breath, it blurted, 'Meet me by the cleft in the west wall on the edge of the old quarter just after sundown on the night of the next full moon. I'll guide you in. Don't be late. And come alone.'\n\nThe dragon moved aside, forcing Fortune to squint into a sudden flash of sunlight.\n\n'Who are you?' he cried. 'What's your name?'\n\n'Call me Cumber,' replied the dragon.\n\nStrange wings opened. Shadows danced for an instant against the orange light. Tears sprang to Fortune's dazzled eyes, and when he blinked them away he saw that the strange creature had vanished.\n\nAnd Fortune knew that he had seen a charmed dragon.\n\nHe roamed the outskirts of the woods until long after darkness fell. In all that time, his heartbeat did not slow. But the dragon did not return.\n\nIt can't be a coincidence, he thought. It can't be.\n\nThe cleft in the west wall. One of the few known entrances to the caverns of the Charmed. A place where no Natural dared to venture. The very place that he and Wood had just agreed to go.\n\nFortune closed his eyes, sensing the narrowness of the valley around him. Hidden unseen at its far end was the wall, the cleft. It was calling him, pulling him, he could feel it. He was moving, speeding through the trees, darkening clouds boiling away in his wake as some hidden force sucked him towards the waiting tunnels.\n\nHe opened his eyes and the illusion faded. Yet he still felt as though he were moving.\n\nNot me. The world.\n\nThe world, moving towards him.\n\nThe world, turning.\n\nThree days later, the full moon rose into a night sky filled with storm clouds. Lightning speared the sea, edging towards the land. In South Point, most natural dragons huddled in their nests, wings tightly furled.\n\nAnd yet, despite the storm, there was one dragon in the air that night. A dragon to whom flight was less a task for the body than for the mind, less an effort than a thought.\n\nHer name was Ordinal, and she was Charmed.\n\nHad any of South Point's natural dragons thought to look skywards, they would not have seen her. Through the use of charm, she had made herself no more than a shadow on the wind. Wielding more of her magic, she had also conjured the ability to perceive more than just the visible world. Tonight, Ordinal had tuned her eyes to see emotions.\n\nFlexing her narrow wings, she swooped low over the settlement. From the countless nests below rose innumerable beams that might almost have been light, but were really the thoughts and feelings of the dragons who lived below. One particularly powerful beam emanated from the Sink. It glowed dully red: a shaft of anger. Many dragons had gathered there, and Ordinal knew they were preparing for battle.\n\nShivering, she turned her attention from that ominous light and flew higher so as to catch the whole settlement in her subtle gaze.\n\nLights twinkled in the nests beneath her: the scattered glows of argument, of love, of hope, of the numberless emotions that filled the wings of life. A vast field of stars spread wide for her eyes alone, and each star a natural dragon.\n\nOnce those lights would all have been Charmed, she thought. Not now.\n\nOrdinal had lived through the golden age of the charmed dragons, lived it for many centuries, but now it was over and she found herself sad. Yet she would not be bitter.\n\nBut, oh, it was hard!\n\nTurning her gaze west, she was dismayed to see a second red shaft rising into the sky. This one emanated from deep underground. In the caverns of the Charmed too, dragons were raging.\n\nThis night may be the end of it all. Oh, Mantle, is there any way our plans can succeed?\n\nYet somewhere, in some hidden corner of her heart, Ordinal allowed herself to hope.\n\nThe storm met the headland. Lightning shattered the space between land and sky, the sound of thunder pulling Ordinal from her reverie as the two realms were joined by a brilliant web. Rain poured down. The sky was becoming dangerous even for her. Flying back to the caverns to rejoin her kin, an immense sadness filled her heart.\n\nAs she passed over the nests of the old quarter, she shed her cloaking charm and forced the spark of hope to kindle. Her second sight keen, she searched.\n\nThere!\n\nThe clouds parted and silver light blanched her hide. Her moon-shadow rippled over the skeletal framework of nests. The wind rose, causing her wings to shake, and there below her flared a sudden burst of the private light that she alone could see. The explosion struck Ordinal an almost physical blow. She bucked in its sudden blast, the storm winds briefly forgotten as its pulse swept through her and streaked out and upwards towards the moon, towards the stars, leaving her trembling in its wake.\n\nFor an instant the storm halted, the distant lightning checked by invisible powers. Then the clouds closed about the moon once more and the rain redoubled its strength.\n\nOrdinal flew on, her heart thundering, a place deep within her branded by the light she had just seen, for she knew exactly what she had just witnessed. It was the very event she had for so long struggled to engineer.\n\nIn the old quarter on this darkest of nights, something had happened that, from a landscape of utter despair, had fired a searing bolt of pure hope into the sky.\n\nSomewhere below, the dragons on whom the future depended had met.\n\nWood huddled beneath the slumped eaves of an ancient nest. Rain hammered down, adding to his sense of impatience.\n\n'I don't see why we have to wait for this so-called guide,' he grumbled. 'You didn't mention him before.'\n\n'I didn't know about him before,' Fortune replied. He was standing out in the rain, wings furled, looking up at the towering rock wall.\n\n'Admit it \u2014 you were worried that if you told me I wouldn't turn up.'\n\nFortune shrugged. 'Things change.'\n\nAbove them the clouds moved as silent and invisible as deep sea creatures, an occasional flash of lightning whitening their undersides but somehow failing to illuminate their greater mass. Then suddenly a rift appeared and there was the moon, full and brilliant. Silhouetted against its round light was a dark shape, slowly traversing.\n\nWood stepped out into the rain, amazed. It had to be a dragon \u2014 the sky belonged to no other creature. But to fly in a storm! He looked closer. There was something odd about the shape of the dragon's wings.\n\nThe moonlight dimmed for an instant as the dragon's shadow slipped directly across them, then faded as the clouds bit deep once more. An eyeblink later, the dragon was gone.\n\nThe rain thundered on Wood's unprotected head.\n\n'Getting soaked now,' he grumbled, raising his wings to shield his head. Momentarily blind after the brief show of moonlight, he blinked and looked across to where Fortune was crouched. He gasped.\n\nThey were no longer alone.\n\nA third dragon stood before Fortune. Resigned to staying wet, Wood stomped over to them, still angry that Fortune had made new plans without first consulting him.\n\n'Well, I suppose you'd better introduce me,' he announced gruffly, snorting as rain trickled down his muzzle and into his nostrils.\n\n'Wood,' replied Fortune, 'meet Cumber.'\n\nWood, along with Fortune and all of their natural kin, possessed a brown-scaled body with a long, tapering tail. His wings were light, tough membranes stretched across his forelimbs from wrist to waist, while his rear legs were short and muscular. It was the way of things for all natural creatures \u2014 bar the grubs and fish \u2014 to have this entirely sensible number of limbs: four legs for the rabbit, two legs and two arms for the bear, two legs and two wings for the dragon.\n\nIt was different for the Charmed. What else did the old stories tell if not that the Charmed wielded mighty powers, powers with which they changed their bodies, powers with which they reshaped both themselves and the world in which they lived?\n\nWood's head reeled as he stared with a stupid, open mouth at Cumber.\n\nDragon? It was surely a monster, defying nature itself as it squatted heavily on its four legs but with a pair of wings tucked also at its side! Something deep inside Wood was sickened by this six-limbed slander on the natural order, and though on the surface he remained icy calm, inside he was as revolted as he would have been had he met a flying rabbit or a fish with fur. As far as he was concerned, things were either right or wrong... and Cumber was definitely wrong.\n\nThere was more. Where natural hides were dull, Cumber's shone like gold. Horns were meant to be rough and strong, but Cumber's were hopelessly thin. Wood's own wings, like Fortune's, were massive flight surfaces rooted with powerful muscles, and yet here was a charmed dragon with wings like golden leaves, too tiny to be anything but vain decoration.\n\nTo top it all, this monster was actually smiling at him.\n\nNo, not smiling, grinning!\n\nAnd so Wood stared, silent, at this gaudy metallic thing around which the rain seemed to hesitate as though repelled.\n\nRepelled. That's exactly how I feel!\n\nOn the other hand, Fortune thought that Cumber was quite the most wonderful dragon he had ever seen.\n\n'They colour their scales,' he told Wood eagerly. 'The old stories are true, all of them. Cumber's gold, but he could just as easily be green or red. They can change the shape of their bodies at will ...'\n\n'Not quite \"at will\" to be truthful,' corrected Cumber. 'Actually, you see, it takes a lot of practise.'\n\n'I'll bet,' murmured Wood.\n\n'How do you do?' said Cumber, bobbing his head. 'You're the second Natural I've met face to face so I should be getting used to it although I daresay I'll never understand how you manage with all that flapping and why you should want to live in the open air quite defeats me ...'\n\n'Cumber never pauses for breath, by the way,' interrupted Fortune with a delighted grin. 'Isn't he splendid?'\n\nThey both stared expectantly at Wood, awaiting his reply. Although all he wanted to do was spit his revulsion into the dirt and grind it away, curiosity proved his master and he said, 'You're a Charmed.'\n\n'I'm a dragon. So, now we've met, what are we all waiting for? Let's go!'\n\nWithout further ceremony, Cumber marched off. Fortune scurried after him, leaving a sulky Wood with no choice but to bring up the rear. Cumber led them along a narrow track which hugged the base of the rock wall until they reached a large tunnel entrance, partly obscured by a great sweep of ivy.\n\n'This will be where you were planning to enter the caverns of the Charmed.' It was a statement, not a question.\n\n'Well, yes ...' began Fortune.\n\n'Wrong, of course, because you see this entrance is just a decoy \u2014 the real entrance is over here. No Natural could ever find it.'\n\nCumber moved one of his absurdly small, gold wings aside and there, behind it, was a second entrance that had not been there before.\n\n'How did you...?' Wood stammered.\n\n'I'm a Charmed.'\n\nCumber ducked his head into the tunnel, then abruptly withdrew it.\n\n'What's the matter?' asked Fortune.\n\n'My mistake,' Cumber replied. 'That one's wrong too.'\n\nChattering to himself he trotted off into the rain, his legs throwing themselves in all directions as if driven by some manic engine inside his skinny body.\n\nRaindrops continued to shatter on the ground as the two Naturals watched Cumber sniffing and prodding at the rock. By now they had left the nests of the old quarter behind; even the distant woods were no longer visible through the downpour. Only the oppressive storm and the sheer, uncompromising rock wall existed, and it seemed to Fortune that they were trapped between the two, exposed and defenceless before powers they could not control. He watched Cumber search and hoped that this strange, charmed dragon was the friend he seemed to be.\n\nWood huddled next to him and shivered.\n\n'Guide!' he spat. 'Where did you find that freak?'\n\n'He's not a freak,' retorted Fortune. 'He's a Charmed. They're all like that, he says \u2014 sort of. They change themselves. It's all to do with tradition and honour. Isn't it fantastic?'\n\nWood was unimpressed.\n\n'You're even beginning to talk like him. I thought this was our expedition.'\n\n'It still is. But Cumber knows ways, routes. And besides ...' Although no spy could possibly have overheard him over the deafening sound of the rainstorm, Fortune glanced suspiciously over his shoulder and huddled forward. 'I think something's going to happen tonight. Here, in the caverns.'\n\n'What do you mean?' said Wood, feigning a surprise he did not feel.\n\n'Haven't you sensed it? Haven't you heard the rumours?'\n\nWood could not bring himself to tell of what he had overheard at the Sink. 'What rumours?'\n\nA flurry of legs appeared through a curtain of water.\n\n'Are you two coming or not?' Cumber danced excitedly on the spot, his tiny, gold wings flapped comically at his sides. 'Come on, come on. Sentries will be posted soon if they're not already since there's no doubt tonight will be one to remember. Look, here's the entrance!'\n\n'But that's the tunnel Wood and I were going to use in the first place,' said Fortune as Cumber gestured grandly towards a familiar, overgrown hole in the rock.\n\n'Ah, yes,' came Cumber's embarrassed reply. 'It appears they have made it real, although why such a thing should be done I cannot imagine since it means that any Natural could just walk in and ...'\n\n'Are we going in or what?' cried an exasperated Wood. 'Because I'm getting soaked!'\n\n'Mmm,' responded Cumber, staring at the opening with obvious concern. 'It is strange, but I suppose we have no choice. Come on.'\n\nAs they entered, it seemed to Fortune that the tunnel widened a little to accommodate them. From somewhere in its throat came a faint, dry gasp of sound, perhaps a whisper of wind, perhaps a dragon moving unseen, deep in the underworld of the Charmed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Underground",
                "text": "The Sink dam loomed like a giant of myth over the natural dragons huddled in its shadow. Tiny whirlwinds spun around its sheer rock face, lifting sand high into the air. A fine wet spray hung like a shroud over the assembly as the baying wind peeled water from the reservoir. Moonlight was spare, stolen by the gathering clouds. The air felt thick, tasted hot. The storm was nearly here.\n\nArchitect Tongue spoke first, reminding those listening of the great heritage of the Charmed, acknowledging the Naturals' desire for justice but condemning violence. However, respected as he was, even he could not stem the deep and swelling hatred that built as the night wore on.\n\n'You would defend them!' jeered Tumely, a hot-headed young dragon more than ready for a fight, and more representative of the group as a whole than the venerable Tongue. 'Those infant-killers helped you build your waterways, so it's said.'\n\n'That is true,' Tongue agreed. 'As for crimes you refer to \u2014 the alleged crimes \u2014 if the Charmed have indeed turned to infanticide, they must be made to pay.'\n\nMore voice joined the debate. The night stretched out. Tempers flared, only to subside. Then, finally, Shatter stepped forward.\n\n'You might think I hate the Charmed,' he rumbled, 'but that is not the case. They are old. They are weak. They have none of the strength we fear. They have no power over us any longer. I do not hate them. I pity them!'\n\nHe scanned the crowd as he told his skillful lies, as always an immense presence, as always the eye of the storm. Shatter seemed to have no age; he simply was. His heavily-plated back glistened dark with rain, while his red eyes glinted bright with resolve.\n\nDragons stared back at him. He knew their names \u2014 there was Peal, and that was Tongue, whom they all called Great Tongue... but Shatter cared little for names. His concern was the power of the mob. And in turn his own power over them.\n\n'Yes, I pity them!' he thundered, his voice battering through the wind. 'They are ancient. Their day has gone. Our day is now!'\n\nA chorus of 'aye's rippled through the circle of the audience. These were the words they wanted to hear. But still something held them back.\n\nTheir fear of the Charmed is strong, thought Shatter. Very well.\n\nHe breathed in deep, the claws of his hind legs clenched tight as if on some invisible prey. He shifted his wings to ensure that the object he had concealed beneath them remained hidden.\n\nIt was almost time.\n\nShatter had emerged into the world fully grown from a cave in the far eastern cliffs of South Point. His parents had kept him trapped in their tiny, crazed world for all his growing years, during which time Shatter had known only the press of the rock and the loveless silence of the two dragons who gave him food, but no love.\n\nThat first day outside had been a day of revelation. The slitted eye of the cave entrance had birthed him into the shocking expanse beyond. His own eyes, burning red beneath the unexpected sun, had turned instinctively back towards the cavern that had been his egg. Confused, in pain, he swayed on the beach, fearful of the brilliant space around him yet curious to explore it. His parents \u2014 whom he now knew to have been his gaolers \u2014 moved like restless shadows in the depths of the cave and, as his aching eyes touched them, he discovered hatred.\n\nHis first act as a denizen of the big world had been to kill them.\n\nHis father, a huge bull of a dragon, had not died easily. It took several days before the old, mad warrior breathed his last, crushed beneath the landslide Shatter had contrived.\n\nAs for his simple-minded mother, Shatter simply ripped her to pieces.\n\nHe did not consider these acts to be wrong. Why? Because the dragons he killed had not been real. Only the rock was real, the dark, enclosing rock. The rock, and Shatter, who came from the rock.\n\nThe discovery that an entire dragon community existed only a short flight away was almost too much for the young Shatter to bear. Yet he was intrigued. He acquired by stealthy observation a grasp of the dragon language that had always been denied him. Slowly he incorporated the existence of these natural dragons into his distorted perceptions, and after many years he made the crucial move from hidden cave to dark, sombre nest: a tall brooding structure of his own creation tucked away on the eastern perimeter of South Point.\n\nNatural dragons, he decided eventually, were harmless. Garrulous and dependent, natural dragons lived only for the joy (a strange word to Shatter) of hunting and mating, and paid no attention to the rock beneath their scaly feet. The rock, and Shatter, were not threatened by them.\n\nThe Charmed were another matter.\n\nConstant return visits to the cave in the cliffs reassured Shatter that the rocks that had borne him were still there, still real. But these Charmed, they lived in caves, too. They also knew the rock.\n\nThis disturbed Shatter. Surely only he was worthy of the rock's embrace? The Charmed were an infestation, their unnatural powers an affront.\n\nThen the idea dawned on him that the empty-headed Naturals might in fact be a gift, a resource thrown up on the surface of the world especially for his use. A weapon to use against the Charmed.\n\nIt was not hard to find sympathetic support for his campaign. The Naturals were growing tired of the once-proud leaders who had abandoned them. Tithes were no longer paid; ceremonies and rituals were no longer held; the Charmed no longer showed any interest in their Natural cousins. They never even came above ground any more.\n\nSome dragons were beginning to doubt they even existed.\n\nBut Shatter knew they were down there somewhere. The rocks told him so. Then there were the disturbances: the nest of an outspoken anti-Charmed protester might unexpectedly catch fire; an especially troublesome dragons might disappear altogether. And what of the strange lights that had begun recently to flicker in the vicinity of the one known cavern entrance?\n\nIt was into this atmosphere of unease that Shatter introduced his own arguments for change, and he found to his astonishment that he was listened to. As he reached his middle years, Shatter discovered that these strange, social dragons seemed oddly attracted to him. Some called him The Loner, but they used other words to describe him too: charismatic, or even handsome.\n\nDragons listened to him. Dragons clung to him. Dragons welcomed his ideas and took him into their lives. Soon Shatter had become a leader of sorts, and the thrill of control was intoxicating. He knew in his cold heart that none of these other dragons was real, but that had ceased to matter. After all, was not the entire world outside the cave just a passing thought inside his own solitary mind?\n\nThe night before the storm, Shatter had a dream in which he climbed a mountain. At its peak, he discovered a great boulder perched on a cairn of small stones. These stones he gradually removed. Each time he took one away, the boulder settled imperceptibly towards the precipice.\n\nShatter knew his own mind better than he knew the unreal world around him. The meaning of the dream was clear. The boulder was revolt, and the cairn was the Naturals' fear of the Charmed. Remove the stones and the rock would fall. In the aftermath, one dragon would rise, wings spread like mighty clouds, sole guardian of the rock and of all dragons who crawled before him.\n\nShatter supposed he might be powerful enough to defeat the Charmed alone. But enlisting these other creatures, these apparent dragons, was a choice he had long ago made. He enjoyed his dominion over them. Like the boulder in his dream, it had an elegance.\n\nBy the time he gathered his forces at the Sink, only a few stones remained in the cairn. The boulder was teetering, almost ready to fall.\n\nAlmost.\n\nThe day before the meeting, Shatter stole two eggs from a careless young mother and carried them in secret to the entrance of the Charmed caverns. There, in full view of the watching stars but unseen by dragon, Shatter had crushed the eggs into the ground. Beside the remains he placed with infinite care a treasure he had stumbled over many years earlier, half buried in the marsh near the shoreside cave, his first home.\n\nTwo golden scales.\n\nAs an afterthought, he took back one of the golden scales, keeping it for himself.\n\nSurveying the awful scene, Shatter felt proud of what he had done.\n\nShatter stared over the heads of the watching dragons and caressed the secret hidden beneath his claws.\n\n'My friends,' he bellowed, 'the Charmed have failed to keep their promises. Nothing of their leadership remains, nothing of their honour, their wisdom. Nothing of their charm. They have no magic now. If they did, would they resort to THIS?'\n\nPulling back his wings, Shatter held aloft a single fragment of white eggshell. Its edges were pale and ragged. On its surface, clearly visible even in the failing moonlight, were stains of dried blood and gore.\n\nIn his other claw he held up the second golden dragon scale.\n\nA tremendous roar erupted from the crowd. As the rain began to fall, Shatter prepared to speak his final words.\n\nBut he had no need for them. Thunder chewed the sky and suddenly dragons were moving, clawing, whipping themselves into motion, clambering past and even over each other in their frenzy. Individuals were lost in the greater organism that was the mob, a great writhing beast that surged down the slope from the dam wall and crashed its way along the perimeter of the woods towards the entrance of the caverns of the Charmed, an entrance that up until this very night had been nothing but a decoy, but which now for some reason real. The mob's voice was a mass of voices, its wing a mass of wings; it moved and surged and thrust its way from the turbulent shadow of the dam and out into the night.\n\nShatter slipped back into the darkness as the mob swept past him. Nameless faces rushed through his field of vision. His eyes blurred and the dragons became rocks, a living landslide demolishing all before it. The thunder mixed its bass with the bellowing of the crowd and Shatter rejoiced. The boulder rocked forward and then pitched itself unerringly on to the slopes below. Behind Shatter's red eyes, an avalanche consumed the world.\n\nCumber went first, and Fortune followed. Entering the caverns of the Charmed, the young natural dragon felt himself passing out of the familiar world and into one wholly unknown. His senses reported blurred images, distorted sounds, unlikely smells. He hesitated, disturbed.\n\n'Move up \u2014 I'm getting drenched out here!'\n\nWood shoved him forward. Then Cumber was back, materialising from the darkness of the tunnel ahead.\n\n'We must be quiet from hereon in,' he whispered. He glared over Fortune's shoulder at Wood. 'Although something tells me not all of us are capable of it. I imagine you'll be uneasy in the tunnels, being Naturals, although why you should I can't imagine, after all, at least the storm won't be bothering us any more.'\n\nThey set off, but when Fortune glanced back he saw Wood squatting doggedly in the entrance.\n\n'Come on, Wood,' he urged.\n\n'Not until you tell me exactly what's going on,' came the retort.\n\n'But you know. It's what we planned \u2014 we're going to explore the caverns.'\n\nWood was not convinced. Ignoring Cumber, who was beginning to pace restlessly to and fro in the rock corridor ahead, he half spoke, half whispered to Fortune.\n\n'What we planned was to dodge in, watch them do whatever it is they do in there, then get out quick. We never reckoned on a guide.' He spat out this last word with some venom, but Cumber chose to ignore it. 'And after what happened with the eggs ...'\n\nCumber inhaled sharply, and was about to speak when Fortune announced, 'I don't believe a charmed dragon was responsible for that.'\n\n'I'm glad to hear you say that,' said Cumber. 'We don't make a habit of slaughtering infant dragons outside our own caves.'\n\n'Where do you do it then?' Wood sneered.\n\nCumber was about to turn on him when Fortune intervened once more.\n\n'Listen to me, Wood. We made our plans for this expedition lightly but we've been overtaken by events. Cumber, whatever his reasons, has chosen to join us and for one I'm glad he has. We need his knowledge of the cave system and of the Charmed. And we need you too, Wood. We may need your strength. Something's going to happen tonight. I know it. You know it. Please stay with us. If you won't do it for Cumber, then do it for me.'\n\nFortune's words touched Wood in a way that quite shamed him, for in them he heard something of Welkin. He had been so afraid recently that their friendship was coming to an end, that Fortune would go off on some great adventure and never return, leaving plain old Wood to live out the rest his days in South Point.\n\nBut now, in Fortune's eyes, Wood saw a light that he had never noticed before. It was not the fiery light that sometimes sparked between dragons at sport in the sky, but a light that seemed to come from the soul: the love of a friend.\n\nEmbarrassed, uncertain how to respond, he sought refuge from the intensity of Fortune's gaze. Instead he found Cumber's, and in doing so he felt suddenly exposed. He felt naked to this offensive, six-limbed creature and he did not like it one bit.\n\nIn his confusion, he failed to see that Cumber's gaze upon him was wholly sympathetic.\n\n'Well,' he said gruffly, 'come on then, if we're going.'\n\nThe tunnels were frightening to the two Naturals. An eerie suggestion of light enabled them to see where they were going, but only just. Even the maze of the old quarter was nothing compared to this. The ceiling pressed down on them; it felt as if the sky had fallen in. They felt clumsy in the confined space and with good reason \u2014 their wings were large and ungainly, and their claws, elbows and long, branching fingers snagged on every turn of the narrow corridors. Their normal widestretched gait, no handicap in the open air, now hampered them to the point of distraction and even Wood began grudgingly to envy Cumber's narrow, small-winged physique.\n\nBoth Naturals were experiencing a new sensation: claustrophobia.\n\n'Take care,' whispered Cumber from ahead, 'it's narrow along here.'\n\n'It's narrow everywhere,' snapped Wood.\n\nThe darkness swallowed his voice and Fortune groaned as the rough ceiling clubbed against his head yet again. Pulling his wing-arms and membranes as tight against his chest as possible, he shuffled awkwardly through an invisible chicane and came up short against a solid rock wall.\n\n'This way,' came a muffled call from his right.\n\nGingerly Fortune crept to the side. The tunnel underwent a series of sharp turns, all of which caught him and the eternally grumbling Wood quite by surprise, until the final twist doubled them back into a small chamber where they could suddenly see again.\n\nThe cave, which was nearly full with only the three of them in it, was flooded with a strange, slightly pink light, the source of which floated seemingly unsupported near the low ceiling. Fortune stared rapt at the flickering fire \u2014 to him it looked like a slice of rainbow.\n\n'Magic?' he asked cautiously.\n\nCumber nodded, then pointed out the exits.\n\n'These two we must not use, the one we have travelled leads only to the surface, but the fourth, this one here, well, we shouldn't really use it but I don't think there's much option.'\n\nWood approached the fourth and narrowest slot and peered in. 'Great. Another black hole,' he grunted. 'What is this place anyway?'\n\n'Guardroom,' replied Cumber.\n\n'Why that tunnel?' asked Fortune. 'You don't seem very sure about it.'\n\nCumber was hopping nervously again. 'It's forbidden, but the other two will be guarded, you see \u2014 even now. This one is the only clear route to the Great Chamber so if we want to get further we have to take it, although I'm not so sure that ...'\n\n'This guardroom's deserted,' Wood butted in impatiently. 'Do those other tunnels go to this Great Chamber as well?'\n\n'All tunnels go to the Great Chamber.'\n\n'Then what are we waiting for?' said Wood, lunging for the nearer of the two larger tunnels.\n\n'STOP!'\n\nFortune's heartbeat stopped and restarted twice over before he realised the awesome voice that had stopped Wood dead and temporarily frozen his own blood had issued from Cumber's scrawny throat. In that voice, the two innocent Naturals heard undertones of a world of which they had neither knowledge nor experience; they heard the harmonies of magic, the voice of bewitching command.\n\nWith a single word, Cumber had charmed them both to a standstill.\n\n'You would not survive an encounter with a guard of the Charmed,' he explained, his voice still echoing with strange sub-vocals.\n\nSo it was that Wood found himself compelled to follow Fortune, who had himself followed Cumber into the narrowest of the three tunnels, squashing his clumsy, natural body into the blackness. Twice now the charmed dragon had made Wood feel foolish. He would not let it happen a third time.\n\nWhere the larger surface corridor had been rough, with broken walls and floors, this tunnel was smooth-sided and almost round in section. Cumber explained that there were easier routes a dragon could take to the Great Chamber, but that tonight this one-time water course was the safest.\n\n'You said it was forbidden,' whispered Fortune. 'Why?'\n\n'You'll understand when you see the Great Chamber,' Cumber replied unhelpfully.\n\nThe troop fell into silence until the end of the tunnel drew into sight, a pale circle now visible, now invisible to Wood as it was alternately revealed and eclipsed by his companions' shifting forms. A tree's length short of the opening, Cumber stopped.\n\n'The Great Chamber, I presume?' said Wood.\n\nHe saw their guide's silhouette nod affirmation against the disc of light. The play of shapes brought to mind another silhouette, another disc \u2014 the strange dragon he had seen earlier.\n\n'Were you flying tonight?' he demanded.\n\nCumber snorted. 'In a storm? I may be Charmed, but I'm not mad!'\n\n'Well, some dragon was.'\n\nNow Cumber was interested. 'Really? What did you see, Wood?'\n\nThe stocky Natural said nothing.\n\n'What did you see? You must tell me!'\n\nCumber's voice quivered dangerously, magical undertones hovering behind his words. Wood ground his teeth in fury as he felt the vast potential of the control this dragon might wield over him.\n\n'Oh, all right,' he said at last. 'I saw a dragon, that's all, just before we met you. It flew in front of the moon. It looked... weird. Even weirder than you.'\n\n'Ordinal,' breathed Cumber, ignoring the gibe. 'If Ordinal is flying then the time has truly come.'\n\nAll of this, of course, was new to Fortune.\n\n'Ordinal?' he said. Had that name cropped up in his mother's tales of the Charmed? He thought it had.\n\n'I think,' said Cumber, beginning to move forward again, 'that we had best enter the Great Chamber. Follow me.'\n\nWaving them low, he led them on to a narrow ledge. Fortune stepped out eagerly, tense with anticipation, his breath motionless in his throat.\n\nThe Great Chamber that his mother, Clarion, had conjured for him in those childhood stories had been vast, flooded with magical light, resounding with the heavy wingbeats of the knightly charmed dragons. At one end of the huge cave sat the mighty Council of the Charmed: wise, good, passing sage judgement on great matters of state.\n\nThis Great Chamber was a place in utter ruin.\n\nTo be sure, the cavern was huge. Shining stone walls plunged down and away from the ledge, gradually curving outwards in complex folds to form a glistening floor that sprawled far, far below. The ceiling flared close to their heads, its surface coarse with suspended fronds of rock reflecting the pink light of the rainbow charm floating in the chamber's centre.\n\nBut apart from this one, baleful light source there was little to illuminate the Great Chamber. To Fortune it felt filled with ghosts. It felt dead.\n\nThe far wall rose less steeply, much of it sculpted with loose boulders that had been released by some ancient collapse. As Fortune gazed at them, it dawned on him what those boulders had once been.\n\n'Those rocks,' he whispered to Cumber, 'are they...?'\n\n'The Council Seats? Yes \u2014 twenty-four hollows in twenty-four boulders, each one a seat for a Council member, although they've toppled now, every one. If you look there, above them all, you'll see that only the High Seat remains in place.'\n\nWood snorted in disgust at Cumber's wistful yet reverent tone. Fortune ignored him, edging forward with Cumber towards the lip of the ledge. Both dragons were quite unaware of the hard and angry look that had filled Wood's eyes, and of the way his gaze flickered from the broken seats to Cumber and then back into the cavern again.\n\nPeering past the hazy glow of the floating rainbow, Fortune could just make out a single great monolith rising from amid the Council Seats, seemingly the only structure still intact amid the debris of this once-proud chamber. His viewpoint was such that the scintillating colours of the magical light all but obscured its peak, but there at the top a shadowy form was just visible.\n\n'Is that Volence?' he asked, his voice trembling a little.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Hmph!' sniffed Wood, his unfriendly gaze fixed firmly now on Cumber.\n\nIf the Leader of the Charmed was still alive, where were the rest of the Council? Fortune was about to ask when a distant rumbling echoed through the cavern. The three young dragons froze.\n\n'It's really happening,' said Cumber, disbelieving. 'The mob must have been right behind us, but they've come straight through the guardroom and not followed our way up here. Why have they been admitted?' His eyes rose to the ceiling in a gesture of helplessness. 'Well, we should be safe enough up here on the forbidden ledge, but be warned: we must not be seen. I don't know what they'll do when they find out... perhaps nothing, although I fear the worst, and I suppose they might ...'\n\nWood wheeled around, turning on Cumber and pinning his apparently frail body up against the cavern wall. 'Now look, freak! I've been soaked, squashed, ignored, insulted... I don't care for you, and I don't care for your so-called charm. As far as I'm concerned you've got none! Answers, that's what I want from you, not these ramblings about mobs and magic! What's going on?'\n\nFortune tried to pull him back but Wood stood his ground, stopping his friend short with a wild glare. Fortune reeled, unnerved by the fury in Wood's eye.\n\n'Why is this ledge forbidden?' Wood ranted. 'What will happen if we're found here? Why are we here at all? And where's this so-called Council of yours? Great Volence? Where are all these dragons he's supposed to lead?'\n\nWood was breathing heavily now, his anger releasing itself in short bursts. His grip on Cumber was powerful, but the charmed dragon flicked his head so and turned his shoulders thus and suddenly he was standing free on the opposite side of the ledge, leaving Wood grasping hopelessly at empty air. Bright eyes fixed on his surprised adversary, Cumber spoke rapidly.\n\n'This ledge and the tunnel we have come down are forbidden because they create a vantage point within the Chamber higher than the top of the High Seat, and since no dragon is above the Leader, only the Leader may use them. The reason we are here is that whatever happens here tonight must be witnessed, and believe me, Wood, you will be safer up here than you would be anywhere else in the Great Chamber.'\n\nThe muffled sounds of scratching claws and booming voices grew louder, clearer, closer.\n\n'Safer?' Wood was pacing on the ledge. 'Why should we feel safe at all in the company of dragons who steal eggs and break them? A charmed scale was found! Your kind are not knights \u2014 they're murderers!'\n\nFortune looked on aghast as his oldest friend fought with his newest. Mixed with his dismay was disappointment. More than that: it felt like despair. His vision of the Great Chamber had been shattered. Here, where light should have blazed in glory, there were only shadows. This was nothing but a dead cavern made from broken dreams.\n\nA tear left his eye and fell to the distant floor.\n\nWaves of sound from the tunnel doubled and redoubled in strength, bouncing off high stone pillars and twists of rock.\n\nDragons came.\n\nThe mob burst chanting and calling into the Great Chamber, flailing with wing and stamping with claw, filling the cavern with war cries. Fortune froze, horrified. Wood and Cumber stopped shouting at each other and stared in disbelief at the crowd of dragons surging over the floor below. Tails whipped, wings lashed, and the jarring voice of the mob exploded into the lifeless air, a deafening vent of anger and uprising, a furious demand for justice.\n\nIn the feeble light of the huge cavern's failing magic, the voice of death."
            },
            {
                "title": "In the Great Chamber",
                "text": "As the natural dragons poured into the Great Chamber, all Cumber could think about was Ordinal.\n\nHaving not seen his mentor for many days, he had begun to believe she had left South Point altogether \u2014 although Wood's claim that he had seen a charmed dragon flying in the storm suggested otherwise.\n\nThey had last met in Ordinal's cavern, an almost spherical cavity set deep inside the cliffs, the inner walls of which were cratered with thousands of irregular holes. Two rivers entered at one side, joined, then exited via a precipitous tunnel leading to the waterfall by which the icy waters emptied themselves into the sea.\n\nSummoned by the old dragon who had already taught him so much about the world, Cumber had raced to meet her, eager to learn more. He felt honoured to be invited to her inner sanctum \u2014 a sacred place he had never been allowed to enter before. But no sooner had he burst in than Ordinal silenced him with an upraised wing and an expression of ultimate gravity.\n\n'The world is turning,' she said, before lowering her head and uttering a deep, heartfelt sigh.\n\n'What?' Cumber masked his puzzlement with a show of curiosity. 'Tell me what that means.'\n\n'All things are changing. Even the bones of trolls are on the move.'\n\n'Trolls? Here? I thought they were long dead.'\n\n'They are.' Raising her head again, Ordinal gave him a small, sad smile. 'Cumber \u2014 what do you think this place is?'\n\nCumber looked around, his confusion growing. 'It's, well, it's your cavern, Ordinal. Isn't it?'\n\n'So I like to call it. What would you say if I told you it was also a troll burial chamber?'\n\nCumber watched in fascination as Ordinal dipped a claw into one of the many holes perforating the cavern walls. With a scraping sound, she withdrew a curved grey blade that Cumber thought at first was made of polished grey stone, until he saw that it was in fact...\n\n'A bone!'\n\n'The trolls were charmed, as you well know,' said Ordinal, turning the strange bone over in her claws. 'In those old days, all creatures were charmed, of course. Born as they were from rock, the trolls returned their bones to rock after death. This is one of the places they used to perform their rituals. Come. See for yourself.'\n\nPeering into the nearest hole, Cumber saw yet more bones piled within. But when he tried to pull one free, he found that it had fused into the rock, bone and stone somehow melted together.\n\n'Charm?' he said.\n\n'Naturally.' Ordinal smiled at the old joke and slid the troll bone back into the wall.\n\nCumber tried to imagine how it must have been, back when the trolls had walked the land. He could almost picture the scene as one of those legendary giants pressed the skull of its dead companion into the fabric of the rock, slipping the two solid materials into one another with a subtlety of charm that belied the troll's oafish appearance. Returning its dead friend to the heart of the world.\n\n'Do the bones just stay here then, forever?'\n\n'Yes. At least, that has always been our belief. But it seems the future will prey on them like everything else. As I said, Cumber, the world is turning.'\n\nCumber shook his head. 'I don't understand.'\n\n'You will. Now, there is something you must do for me. Time is short, and you will understand very little of what I am about to tell you. But you must heed me all the same. Will you do that, Cumber? Will you listen, and be silent, and obey my command?'\n\nCumber's spine had turned cold. Ordinal had never spoken to him like this before and he did not like it one bit. 'Of course.'\n\n'South Point is doomed.'\n\n'What?! What's going to...?'\n\n'Did I not tell you to be silent?'\n\nCumber hung his head. 'Yes, Ordinal.'\n\n'My vision is keen in more directions than one, and this is what I have seen: when the moon next rises full, South Point will fall.'\n\nCumber could not help himself. 'Is... is there anything we can do?'\n\n'For South Point? Nothing. Forces are at work greater than any dragon, Charmed or otherwise, can hope to understand.'\n\n'But then ...'\n\n'South Point is lost, but there may yet be hope for dragons elsewhere. Halcyon is the key. Whatever happens here, he must be told of it. He must know. Whatever events unfold, however terrible, they must be witnessed, and news of them must be taken south, to the citadel of Covamere. To Halcyon.'\n\n'It's the plague, isn't it?' Cumber blurted. 'They say the Charmed are going mad all across the world, and that nothing can stop it. That's what's happening to us, Ordinal, isn't it?'\n\nThe old dragon looked away. 'Plague. War. It does not matter. All that matters is that news reaches Halcyon. He alone holds our hope.'\n\nAll the excitement Cumber had felt upon entering Ordinal's secret chamber had utterly drained away. Now he just felt scared and small. 'Is that what you wanted to tell me? That you're going to Covamere to see Halcyon?'\n\n'No, Cumber. You are. You are the one who must carry the message. You, and the natural dragon who will be your companion.'\n\nCumber was beginning to feel dizzy. 'Natural dragon?'\n\nOrdinal nodded. 'All must be represented, Cumber. Despite our differences, we are all dragons.'\n\n'A Natural at Covamere?'\n\n'It has happened before.'\n\nThe rest of the conversation passed in a blur. Ordinal repeated herself over and over again: find the natural dragon called Fortune, witness with him the fall of South Point, travel in secret to Covamere and seek out Halcyon, who might yet put all to rights. The more the instructions whirled round in Cumber's head, the less sense they seemed to make, yet the more imperative they became.\n\nAt last, when the words were used up and all that remained were two tired dragons sitting quietly in the burial chamber of the trolls, one feeling far too young and the other looking far too old, Cumber said, 'Even if I can find this Fortune, how will I convince him to come with me?'\n\nOrdinal closed her old, wrinkled eyes. 'Tell him that the world is turning. Somewhere, deep inside, I believe he will understand.'\n\nThe natural dragons spread out across the floor of the Great Chamber, gazing in open wonder at its vast interior. Wood clung to the ledge, his heart in his mouth, thrilled to see such a display of Natural force in this bastion of the Charmed. Here was an army to wage on a grand scale the war he himself had been fighting with Cumber just a few breaths before. An army that would not leave before Charmed blood had been shed upon these ancient stones.\n\nAs the mob filled the cavern, two massive Naturals took up station at each of the four entrance passages; the rest milled restlessly, packed across the floor wing to wing. The shouting gradually reduced itself to a gentle murmuring, then the murmuring became uneasy as dragons began to register the fact that Shatter, their leader, was not there.\n\nTaking advantage of the lull, Cumber hissed at Fortune and Wood, and eventually succeeded in attracting their attention.\n\n'Listen to me,' he began, but almost immediately Fortune tried to interrupt. Cumber raised a wing and hushed him down. 'No, please, just listen. I have a lot to say and I must say it all at once, before that lot down there really start to make trouble.'\n\nWood kept his eyes fixed firmly on Cumber's. Both he and Fortune were frowning. Below, the muttering of the mob was building again as several dragons called out unanswered to Shatter.\n\n'There isn't much time,' Cumber went on, 'and there is far too much for me to say, but I'll try all the same. As you know, I am a charmed dragon just like those you know from legend \u2014 at least as I understand your legends to be \u2014 and we live by charm, that is to say, by magic, by ways you can never understand or experience. Once your kind and mine lived in harmony \u2014 there were even those of your kind who aspired to become Charmed like us \u2014 but no longer. Natural dragons have lost all respect for the Charmed way. And now, to make matters worse, we Charmed have grown sick. Once there were two thousand charmed dragons living here in these caverns but in recent times our number has halved. At the same time, those in power here saw how you dull, invading Naturals thrived and despite themselves they grew bitter.'\n\n'Scared more like,' growled Wood.\n\nSome kind of argument had broken out in the chamber below. At length, two burly male dragons were despatched down the main entrance tunnel.\n\n'Hold fast, dragons,' called an anonymous voice from the throng. 'Shatter won't let us down.'\n\n'Sickness? But what brought it?' asked Fortune. 'Why are the Charmed in decline?'\n\nCumber shifted his weight uncomfortably. Although he knew they were invisible up here in the shadows, he felt exposed and uneasy. 'Forces are at work greater than any dragon, Charmed or otherwise, can hope to understand.' Cumber shivered. Coming out of his mouth, Ordinal's words sounded thin and false.\n\n'You say your numbers halved,' said Fortune, 'but even a thousand Charmed is still more than, what, seven hundred Naturals here at South Point. You still outnumber us. Why don't you ever come out? There doesn't need to be fighting, not if you come out and talk with Naturals again. Perhaps it won't be like it was but ...'\n\n'Fortune,' interrupted Cumber, 'you're right when you say it won't be like it was, because you see it can't be. There were a thousand charmed dragons here, quite recently, but now... now there are far fewer.'\n\n'A thousand, a few hundred \u2014 however many you are ...'\n\n'Fortune, we are all but wiped out.'\n\n'Twenty-four Council Members,' responded Fortune doggedly as though reciting a list learned by rote, 'and the Leader the twenty-fifth. Below them the fifty administrators and then ...'\n\n'Seven,' said Cumber, his face expressionless. 'We are seven now.'\n\nFortune's heart was aching, and he knew why. All those years he had spent listening to his mother's tales of his father's life, he had failed to appreciate what was staring him in the face.\n\nThe stories always changed, he realised. They started out being about him, but they always ended up being about the others. About the charmed.\n\nAnd that, of course, had always been her purpose, the hidden clue she had woven into everything she said, but which for some reason she had been unable to speak out loud.\n\nTo know my father, I must know the Charmed.\n\nNo wonder he had been so eager to come down here. Without knowing it, this journey into the caverns of the Charmed had been the first beat of his wings on a quest to find his father. But now it seemed that the quest had failed before he had even taken to the air.\n\nIf the Charmed were truly gone, then his father was gone too, lost to him forever.\n\n'What has happened here?' he whispered to himself, turning his back on the mob, turning away from the dim and motionless shape of the dragon leader Volence still crouched on top of his stark pinnacle of rock. He stared into the tunnel through which they had come. It was as black as the hole in his heart.\n\nWith a roar, the dragon scouts returned into the Great Chamber. 'Shatter is nowhere to be found!' the first shouted furiously. 'The Charmed have taken him!'\n\n'The tunnels seemed different,' added his comrade with a touch of panic in his voice. 'Like it was further to the surface. We weren't sure of the way.'\n\nThe familiar voice of Tongue boomed out from the crush of bodies. 'Our so-called leader has abandoned us, as I predicted. So, brothers and sisters, now that we are here, let us put our anger aside and simply talk with the Charmed, if we can.'\n\nFortune turned back to Cumber.\n\n'There are only seven of you left?' he said.\n\nCumber sighed the sigh of a dragon charged with too great a task. How could he go on with this? Why had Ordinal chosen him of all dragons?\n\nBecause there was none other left.\n\n'How many natural dragons are down there, do you think, Cumber?' Wood murmured. 'Seventy? Seven hundred if you count those outside? And you are seven? Poor odds, Cumber, poor odds!'\n\n'Poor odds indeed, Wood!' snapped Cumber. 'But not in the favour of Naturals, I can assure you. Oh, they are many, of course, and we are few, but believe me, the Charmed will fight with terrible powers, charm the like of which you would hope never to see in your life!'\n\n'Seven against seventy?' scoffed Wood. 'Against seven hundred?'\n\n'Neither I nor Ordinal will fight, so you might say the numbers of the Charmed are not seven but five. However \u2014' Cumber pressed on regardless as Wood rolled his head in disbelief, '\u2014 those five could destroy seven hundred natural dragons as easily as you yourself might crush a line of insects. Believe me when I say that, Wood, for it is true!'\n\n'We'll take some of you with us.' Wood's eyes had grown hot and confused.\n\n'Have a care before you commit yourself. Charmed dragons will die in such a battle, yes, but the point is that all dragons will die. Wood, this battle is going to happen, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. When it happens it will destroy the entire dragon population of South Point, Charmed and Natural alike. There will be no victors; there may not even be survivors!'\n\nExcept us, I hope! But only if they accept my words, only if they believe me!\n\n'Listen to me closely now, both of you, closer than you have ever listened to anything before,' Cumber went on, heedless of the cacophony rising now from the army of Naturals. A few were beginning to leave, but whether they sought to confront the Charmed or simply return to the surface was not clear. 'South Point is lost. Simple, awful... but true. Every dragon here is doomed. And the coming battle is just part of a great war which could wipe all dragons from the face of the world.'\n\nHurriedly he told them the story Ordinal had told him to tell. The plague of madness that had first reduced the numbers of the Charmed, then finally all but decimated them. Disease, hysteria \u2014 whatever it was it swept through the Charmed population like a forest fire. Dragons grew stupid, dragons grew paranoid, dragons fought with their friends and murdered their families. The blood ran thick in the caverns of the Charmed and the mad dragons laughed as they waded through it.\n\nCumber's father, then his mother had slipped into insanity and finally both had died in one of the many lethal scuffles which were forever breaking out in the labyrinthine tunnels and caverns. His friends, his family, all were consumed by the madness which had descended upon the South Point Charmed. Ordinal it was who had protected him through these terrible times, who had gathered the distraught Cumber in her wings and talked him back to a world of reason.\n\nThe Council had swiftly collapsed, its members too claimed by the plague, although Cumber, ever astute, noted that it had been in decline for many years before the arrival of the madness, as though the plague were an indication of some breaking point which had at last been reached.\n\nA breaking point or, perhaps, a turning point.\n\nBoth Fortune and Wood stared at him wide-eyed as he spoke, but how much of this they were taking in he could not judge.\n\nI can scarcely take it in myself.\n\n'But there may be hope.' He spoke rapidly as the unrest in the chamber below rose to a fever. Something would happen very soon now, some spark which would start the fire. He had to be quick. 'South across the sea lies ancient Covamere, once the world capital of all dragon affairs. There presides great Halcyon, Dragon Supreme, and though even his power is diminished still he might stop the war. But only if he is brought the news.'\n\nCumber took a great gulp of air, then concluded:\n\n'It is our task to observe and remember what happens here tonight. Then we must race the tide of war across the world to bring the news to Halcyon. If we come to him as one, Charmed and Natural together, and tell of the horror of the destruction of South Point, then he may intercede.'\n\nBefore either Fortune or Wood could respond, a voice exploded through the Great Chamber, a voice of such colossal power that at first the watching youngsters thought it must be a voice of charm. But no, it was the voice of a Natural, one whom Wood recognised instantly.\n\n'VOLENCE!' Barker bellowed like an earthquake, and by the time he had called the name a second and a third time the Great Chamber had fallen utterly silent.\n\n'Father,' whispered Wood.\n\nDragons parted as Barker shouldered his way roughly to the foot of the High Seat, the great stone monolith dominating the far end of the cavern. He pointed his wing at its peak and there was a collective gasp as the Naturals suddenly saw what none had noticed before: Volence, Charmed Leader of South Point, was here in their presence.\n\nThe Charmed premier was curled at the top of the pinnacle of rock, craggy, bronze, motionless. Light reflected from the pair of large, metallic wings he had folded around himself as if to shut out the world.\n\n'VOLENCE!' thundered Barker again, then, when his cries elicited no response, he turned back to the mob and shouted, 'Why do you hold back? I'm no good with words. Not like Shatter. But I feel what we all feel. If Shatter is taken, we must fight for him. The time for talk is over. It's time for action!' Once more he filled his mighty lungs and the Great Chamber reverberated with the sound of his battle cry. 'ATTACK!'\n\nEyes lifted with Barker as he leaped up the sheer face of the High Seat, powerful wings battering the air, half-flying, half-climbing up the precipitous tower until finally he reached the summit and perched there, his spread wings spread wide over the hunched form of Volence whom, they could all now see, he dwarfed.\n\nWood alone saw the small frown that flashed across his father's face before he drew back his wings.\n\n'DEATH TO THE CHARMED!'\n\nWith a massive blow Barker struck Volence from the tower.\n\nBelow, dragons surged forward, hungry for the kill... but Volence did not fall.\n\nInstead, as Barker struggled to regain his balance, Volence's body exploded with a soundless concussion. A cloud of metallic dust flew outwards, glittering and sparkling as it slowly drifted upwards to settle on the ceiling of the Great Chamber. The shining dust clung there, a wondrous, weightless veil.\n\n'Volence was already dead!' gasped Fortune.\n\nCumber merely shook his head and said, 'That's done it.'\n\nBarker clung awkwardly to the Leader's empty perch, looking suddenly exposed and defenceless. His fellow rebels retreated from the base of the tower.\n\nA gust of icy wind swept through the chamber, scattering Volence's remains and sending them dancing through the air towards the three young spies cowering on the hidden ledge; before the glittering dust reached them it had dissolved into nothing. With a sharp crack a section of rock behind the Council seats snapped aside to reveal a dragon looming \u2014 glimmering \u2014 in the darkness beyond.\n\n'Volence is dead,' announced the dragon, stepping into the light. 'But I am not.'\n\nCumber's heart lurched. Sublime relief swept through him to see Ordinal alive, magnificent. Old though she was, she gleamed. Metallic blues and greens shimmered beneath her skin and the scales on her back and tail were scarlet. A fronded crest ran down her spine and merged into her wings, and as she opened her mouth to speak again fire glowed deep in her throat. Against the drab, muscular bodies of the natural dragons Ordinal's slender frame flashed like a jewel among coals. The Naturals knew this and they were afraid.\n\n'Hey, freak!' yelled one, braver than the rest. 'Pretty colours don't cut it in a fight!' A chuckle rose from the joker's neighbours.\n\nOrdinal cocked her head, just a fraction. Immediately blood began gushing from the nose of the dragon who had insulted her. He screamed in panic and lashed out at his fellows, spraying blood in their astonished faces as they backed away in horror.\n\nOrdinal blinked and the jet of blood stopped as quickly as it had begun. The dragon dabbed at his muzzle tenderly, suddenly embarrassed.\n\n'I have no wish for blood to be shed,' Ordinal said in a steady, penetrating tone, 'but do not doubt that I will defend myself.'\n\nOn the ledge Cumber grasped Wood's elbow with his claws and whispered, 'Take note, Wood, of the power of charm. Bloody noses are just the beginning.'\n\nMeanwhile, Fortune was still trying to take in everything that Cumber had told them. Was his quest really over after all? All his young life he had dreamed of adventure but now it was being offered to him he found that he was terrified.\n\nOrdinal was speaking again.\n\n'I urge you to leave peacefully.' she said. 'No harm will come to you if you go now, but if you stay ...'\n\n'We will stay!' bellowed Barker from his perch. 'The murder of our young will be avenged!'\n\nOrdinal glared up at him with cold appraisal.\n\n'Consider where you stand before you speak of vengeance, dragon,' she intoned. 'The greatest of our leaders have occupied that seat. Are you as great as they?'\n\n'Your great leaders are turned to dust!' spat Barker. 'Give us the charmed dragon who took our eggs.'\n\n'No Charmed took those eggs.'\n\nOrdinal's flat statement begged no argument, and though her voice was almost drowned by Barker's, her words echoed around the Great Chamber long after his had died away.\n\nMeanwhile, Wood had crept forward to cling to the edge of the rock pulpit, tendons corded on his limbs, wing membranes rippling, eager for action.\n\nIn the arena the two dragons faced each other, Barker and Ordinal. Natural and Charmed.\n\nThe mob was hushed.\n\n'Murderer!' bellowed Barker.\n\nHe launched himself from the High Seat, thick wings drinking great draughts of air as he hurled himself down at the old charmed dragon. All his pain surfaced then as he attacked and for an instant he saw not Ordinal but Eleken, his own, beautiful Eleken, drowning offshore in a terrible summer storm. As if he had summoned it the distant cracking of thunder signalled that the storm outside had mustered enough power to punch its way into even these ancient depths.\n\nOrdinal stepped lightly to one side and opened her jaws wide.\n\nA shaft of fire sprang from her mouth. Wood saw his father's wings enveloped in an orange flame that seemed to flow about his body like running water. Light pierced holes in Barker's wing membranes as the fire consumed him and his cries of pain filled the Great Chamber with a sound more terrible than even the thunder that had begun to infiltrate from the storm above.\n\n'Father!'\n\nWith a cry of anguish Wood leaped from the ledge and spread his wings into the air. His target was no burnt tree stump now but his father's killer, it was the force which had taken his mother from him, it was the cold-blooded taker of unhatched life... it was the terrible, terrible Charmed.\n\nFor the first time in his life his course of action was clear to him. All of his frustrations and indecisions were swept away by the rush of air across his skin and blood through his veins. His father was dying and the solution was simple.\n\nAttack!\n\nThe mob was surging into action. Dragons scrambled up the tiered rock benches towards Ordinal, dragons took to the wing, dragons clustered around the fallen Barker, trying to smother the flames that were feeding on him.\n\nDown into the bedlam swept Wood, cutting through the air with the confidence in flight he had long hoped to achieve. He had but one target now: Ordinal.\n\nThe old charmed dragon looked up as he swooped on her and her mouth opened again. He flinched, expecting a gush of fire, but she simply closed her eyes and lowered her head. Before Wood could reach her the natural dragons had swarmed over her surrendered body and were tearing it to pieces. Glistening scales flashed in the air, flashing to flame and glowing dust. Thunder boomed louder down the tunnels but it could not mask the dreadful sounds of death.\n\nFortune looked on horrified as Wood vanished into the frenzy. For him too the future was now a cold certainty. Appalled by the actions of his natural kin he turned to Cumber for support, and only just grabbed his companion in time to prevent the young charmed dragon from hurling himself off the ledge after Wood.\n\n'They killed her! They killed her!' Cumber was howling, his eyes red and wild. Tiny licks of flame lanced from the corners of his mouth, and Fortune flinched.\n\nHe's a monster! Like the rest of them!\n\nAs quickly as the fear had come over Fortune it left him and he held on, grappling and hauling Cumber back from the edge.\n\n'Let me go!' Cumber screamed. Fortune lowered his horns and butted him against the far wall hard enough to knock the wind from him. Cumber sprawled there gasping for breath.\n\n'It's started.' His gaze cleared. 'We have to get out of here, Fortune. We have to get out now!'\n\nFortune risked another look below. Already the marauding Naturals were dispersing into the tunnels in search of the rest of the Charmed. If they found their way up to the ledge, both he and Cumber would be killed without hesitation.\n\nWood was nowhere to be seen.\n\n'Where to, Cumber?' But his charmed companion had drifted away again. Fortune shook him. 'Where to?'\n\n'The guardroom. Back to the guardroom.'\n\nFortune shoved Cumber back into the tunnel and pummelled him along without ceremony. Before long, Cumber tired of this treatment and decided that propelling himself was a better proposition.\n\n'Where to from the guardroom? Back to the surface?' Fortune jabbed Cumber in the rump.\n\n'Excuse me, but do you think you could cut out all this roughness, which isn't entirely necessary in my opinion; you Naturals are all the same, you know,' came the grumble from over Cumber's shoulder.\n\nFortune allowed himself a grim smile.\n\nThey emerged breathless into the guardroom with an unexpected splash: mercifully empty of dragons the compact cave was now half full of water. Storm floods had breached the surface tunnel and were pouring into the caverns. The water crashed about their breastbones, whirling around and around before exiting through the two passages that led down to the lower levels.\n\n'Well, that settles that,' said Fortune unhappily, looking at the now-submerged tunnel by which they had entered earlier. 'We can't get to the surface that way. Now where?'\n\n'Down.'\n\nFortune looked doubtfully at the two waterlogged tunnels. Water splashed into his mouth and he spat it out with a grimace.\n\n'I knew you were going to say that,' he muttered.\n\nBefore they could move a strange sound invaded the cave. It came from the tunnel on the left. To Fortune it sounded like the rumble of a great fire, yet somehow it seemed... alive.\n\nCumber knew exactly what it was.\n\n'Oh no, they've opened the Realm,' he moaned. 'This is exactly what I feared. The remaining five Charmed have come out of hiding and joined battle with your friends.'\n\n'They're not my friends,' retorted Fortune.\n\n'My apologies. Greater forces are at work than dragons ...'\n\n'... can hope to comprehend, yes, yes, I know all that. But what are you talking about, Cumber? What's the Realm?'\n\n'No time! I'll tell you about it another day \u2014 if we see another day. Come on!'\n\nAs they slipped the tunnel on the right, the rainbow light floating in the centre of the guardroom flickered out, its magic spent. The chamber was dark now, lit only occasionally by a clawtip of lightning probing its way through the waters from the surface, more frequently by the darker colours of magic that were beginning to blow in on subtle winds from the bowels of the caverns of the Charmed.\n\nThe battle was already raging in those underground passageways, a hidden battle, the details of which would remain hidden forever but the effects of which would soon light up the world as they now lit that one, tiny cave.\n\nAs Fortune and Cumber fled the battle, so the battle pursued them.\n\nAs Cumber had told, so it began."
            },
            {
                "title": "Flight",
                "text": "Fortune followed Cumber in his headlong rush through the underground caverns, and into steadily mounting chaos. When the way ahead was blocked \u2014 sometimes by skirmishing dragons, sometimes by dragon bodies stacked ten or even twenty high \u2014 they doubled back. They ran from rockfalls that might have been triggered by the storm raging outside, or by the noise of the battle, or by magic infused in the rock itself. Perhaps it was all three. Thunder assailed them at every breath. Cries of agony rang in their ears. The air stank of charm.\n\nEvery turn revealed a new obstacle, a new horror. They crept through the shadows while a charmed dragon held ten Naturals at bay with a jet of fire. In one half-flooded chamber they splashed past a natural dragon who had been turned to stone, a look of puzzlement etched incongruously on her face; in another they found a dragon turned to ice. This latter victim was melting before them into the slowly rising waters and Fortune thought he saw tears in the dragon's dissolving eyes.\n\nAll the time, Fortune hoped they might run into Wood. He was desperate to confront his oldest friend, berate him, plead with him to rejoin them. But in his heart he knew that Wood must either be dead or else buried in the thick of the battle. Either way he was quite lost to them.\n\nGradually, as they progressed further underground, the sounds of battle faded. Soon all Fortune could hear was the rush of water about their claws. The flood was growing stronger, and as they raced deeper it soon threatened to wash them both along with it.\n\nFive against seventy! Fortune thought as he followed Cumber round yet another blind corner. Fire charm! The Realm!\n\nFortune's fear now was less for their own safety than for the fates of those above ground. His mother, Clarion, old and frail, lived alone in a nest a little apart from the main settlement. He hoped desperately that she was far enough away from the fighting to be safe, and that she might flee inland if threatened, perhaps even to the mountains of Torr island's western peninsula, for it was said by some that there were still dragons there.\n\nAs they paused to catch breath, Fortune panted, 'My mother... she lives on the other side of South Point. Do you think...?'\n\nCumber seemed not to hear him. Fortune remembered what had happened to Ordinal, and wondered what it must be like to see a loved one torn to pieces.\n\n'Not all Naturals are brutes,' he offered lamely, touching Cumber's shoulder.\n\nCumber stared at him, curious. Fortune now wondered how it felt to witness your whole race reduced to madness and persecution.\n\n'All right,' he said. 'Look, where are we going?'\n\nBy way of reply, Cumber ushered him into a narrow slit that broke the wall ahead. A roaring came from the blackness and after a short wade through the constricting space they emerged into a spherical cave that was almost completely awash.\n\n'Ordinal's chamber,' said Cumber dully.\n\nThe two incoming rivers, bloated by storm water, were gushing into the cave in torrents. A whirlpool spun in the middle of the lake that was inexorably filling the chamber. The exit hole was out of sight, drowned beneath the new water level, a level that was rising even as they watched. A rainbow charm cast a pale light over the bubbling water, a light that dipped and bobbed as the magic that powered it struggled to stay alive.\n\nThe noise was deafening.\n\nFortune strained to see over the roaring water, to locate some other exit, then saw that Cumber had frozen and was staring open-mouthed at the roof of the chamber.\n\nA monster stared back down.\n\nIts silvery body clung to the broken ceiling, claws biting deep into the bone-filled cavities cut from the rock. A shiny scale dropped from its back and was swept away by the foam; a single wing twitched miserably, its twin a bloody stump.\n\nA charmed dragon, mortally wounded.\n\n'Pander,' breathed Cumber.\n\nThe dragon slowly uncoiled his neck. Fortune flinched as he saw that Pander's eyes were empty sockets \u2014 yet they seemed to stare at him. Cumber remained motionless at his side.\n\nPander opened his mouth. The air around his jaws rippled with heat but no flame emerged. He hissed wretchedly, 'Help me, Cumber!'\n\nThe broken dragon scrabbled across the ceiling in defiance of gravity, chipped claws tapping out a nightmare rhythm as they alternately gripped and released the rock. A terrible leer broke his face while blood ran from his eye sockets into the lake.\n\nCumber still did not move.\n\n'Your skin, Cumber.' The words forced themselves through the guttering fire in Pander's throat. He gained strength suddenly. Something rippled beneath his hide like a worm under soil and he covered the remaining distance to the watching pair in the blink of an eye.\n\n'Cumber!' cried Fortune. 'Do something!'\n\nBut Cumber was standing like a stone in the rising water even though it beat against his chest. His eyes had filmed over. His skin began to ripple in waves that matched those on the back of the wounded dragon. A red glow shimmered in Pander's empty eye sockets, and underneath his torn skin; as Pander glowed so Cumber grew dull.\n\n'Stop it!' howled Fortune, baring his teeth at the evil creature. He was powerless; whatever this monster was doing to Cumber was utterly beyond his understanding.\n\nHis shout carried through the chamber and its service tunnels, and he heard a gruff voice call from the far end of the entrance passage.\n\n'Down here,' it growled, the words followed at once by the sounds of several dragons on the move.\n\nPander started in fear and let out a wail of infinite sorrow.\n\n'This way!' shouted Fortune over his shoulder. Then coiling his limbs he reared back and butted Cumber into the water. The icy torrent instantly brought the young Charmed to his senses and he started thrashing to stay afloat.\n\nPander's light died and for an instant Fortune felt sorry for him. Then he jumped and the coldness of the water struck all breath from him. It snorted up his nostrils and into his ears and the powerful current tore him away. Half drowning, floundering beside Cumber as the raging flood waters dragged them both towards the whirlpool, Fortune caught only glimpses of the fight that ensued. Bobbing briefly above the waves he saw a Natural dissolve like salt. Through a film of angry water he saw Pander's legs chewed away. He sank and rose again to see another Natural peeled like a fruit, but screaming still.\n\nThis he saw, and worse. Then, as he surfaced for the final time before being sucked down into the submerged tunnel, he saw Pander in pieces, and four Naturals dead around him.\n\nA fifth Natural stood panting over the carnage, blood trickling from a dozen wounds. A young dragon, stocky and proud.\n\nWood!\n\nFortune tried to call his name but the waves closed over his mouth and the world was eclipsed.\n\nA current gripped him in the underground river. Instinctively he tried to open his wings, a young dragon who had never flown more than a hesitant tree's length trying to glide through white water. His breath tightened in his lungs, his head felt starved and light, the pounding of blood filled his ears. He opened his eyes into the liquid storm \u2014 and there was light ahead, the dullest of glows. It slipped behind him and then it was ahead again. Fortune realised that the light was stationary and it was he who was doing the tumbling.\n\nNot stationary. It was approaching, or rather he was approaching it.\n\nThe light of death, he thought.\n\nThe last bubbles of breath were snatched away. With a strangled cry Fortune opened his mouth to fill his lungs with what he knew would be a killing blow of ice water... and instead inhaled the sweetest air he could ever have hoped to taste. The river exploded around him into a million droplets of spray, hurling him clear as it was blasted out into the night air.\n\nHis wings, already partly unfurled, peeled open with a will all their own and lifted him free. Some ancient imperative to live gave him the knowledge of flight his experience had so far failed to provide and he flapped harder, turning in the air to look back at what had so nearly been his grave.\n\nHalf the cliff was gone.\n\nWhere once had hung a waterfall there now stretched an arc of flood water firing out from the broken land in a mighty jet of spray. Rubble was piled in the sea beneath it; it looked like an ocean in flight.\n\nBefore he knew it Fortune had been flying for hundreds of wingbeats. His mind caught up with his body and his wings faltered. As he floundered a shadow passed over him and Cumber was at his side, casually making only one wingbeat to his three.\n\n'So you're flying! Don't worry about it, don't think about it, just do it!'\n\nFortune was about to reply when he realised that they were surrounded by light, a light that reflected off the undersides of the storm clouds and illuminated the night with a fierce orange glow.\n\nSouth Point was on fire.\n\nTogether they rode the wind and flew nearer. The rain had all but stopped now but Fortune sensed that even the earlier downpour could not have tamed this fire. Timbers buried deep and dry, untouched by the storm, had been set ferociously alight. South Point's great ridge of nests was a line of flame stretching as far as they could see; the woodland was an inferno.\n\nThe old quarter was burning with flames as big as oaks and within it tortured shapes curled and charred: the bodies of the elder Naturals, indistinguishable in death as in life from their timber homes.\n\nFortune followed Cumber through the hot air rising in vicious eddies from the burning nests. Cumber seemed to be exercising some kind of protective charm that repelled the sparks and embers leaping endlessly into their path. Yet despite the enormity of the destruction below him Fortune found himself dwelling on the nightmare encounter in Ordinal's cave.\n\n'That dragon in the chamber, what did he want?' he gasped.\n\n'It's really very simple, because you see Pander wanted me!'\n\nThey were flying over Tongue's mighty aqueduct now; as they passed above it a jet of fire raced along its length. The timber structure exploded in splinters and the two dragons wove to the side as a huge cloud of steam and smoke enveloped them.\n\n'He was so badly wounded,' Cumber went on. 'His only chance of escape, well, of survival at all, was to take over the body of another charmed dragon. That's a rather special charm, by the way.'\n\n'I don't doubt it,' replied Fortune, repulsed. 'But what would have happened to you?'\n\n'I would have entered his dying body and perished. Pander was one of the five dragons left, insane like the others. Look below, Fortune, and witness what damage just a few charmed dragons can do.'\n\nThey were flying over the Sink now, or what remained of it. The great granite cup which had held South Point's drinking water for ages past was utterly smashed, a mountain of rubble through which the water had already drained away to join the swollen rivers flooding the caverns.\n\nWhen he saw the Sink destroyed Fortune finally knew that South Point had died.\n\nThe fires burned high and hard, illuminating the end of his world, but it seemed to Fortune that as the flames consumed they also cleansed, erasing the hatred that had fuelled them. The storm was moving inland now, its power spent, and a strange and unexpected peace was falling over the ruins.\n\nCumber saw Ordinal's prophecy laid out before him, as clear in its truth as a drop of dew. South Point was no longer a place for dragons.\n\nHalcyon must know of this. We must succeed, he urged himself. We must reach him!\n\n'Covamere lies south over the sea,' he called to Fortune, who was beginning to drift north, following the storm.\n\n'My mother ...' Fortune protested.\n\n'We have no time \u2014 no time!'\n\nFortune did not reply but flew doggedly north, growing smaller in Cumber's vision.\n\nCumber hovered uncertainly. Between them they had lost more than any dragon deserved, and they were young, scarcely grown. Now Fortune feared for his own mother and Cumber was in danger of being left without his one friend and companion.\n\nWhat was he to do?\n\nThe flames crawled dying among the dead.\n\nNeither Fortune nor Cumber had seen survivors but survivors there were. Few and weak, but alive, and they came slowly together amid the muddy remains of the Sink.\n\n'My children,' whispered Shatter to the six dragons crouched before him. 'If only I could have shared in your triumph.'\n\nHe limped badly and was caked in blood. His whole demeanour spoke of a dragon who had fought to the very brink of death and barely clawed his way back.\n\nThe illusion was faultless.\n\nLittle of the blood was his own and none was the result of combat. His only genuine wound, a cut to his left hind leg, was superficial and self-inflicted. His pained hobbling belied its falseness and the tales he wove convinced his onlookers of his valour in battle.\n\nHe had in truth seen out much of the fighting in hiding in a secret cavity below the Sink wall. When the Sink was destroyed he suffered a few minor scrapes and bruises but otherwise emerged unharmed. By then the battle was all but over.\n\nWithin the safety of the rock he had even found time to sleep. The granite of the tiny cave soothed him, it lulled him, and in its cold embrace he dreamed again of the boulder, which had now grown to become a deadfall the size of a mountain, poised above the land upon a single claw of stone and ready to fall, awaiting only the one dragon who would recognise its power and send it tumbling to destruction. The end result of such a fall? Why, the ultimate extermination of the Charmed, of course \u2014 not just the Charmed of South Point, but of the world.\n\nIn Shatter's dream the deadfall was proud and mighty and awaiting only his arrival. He saw it vividly, in agonising detail: behind it a mountain, behind that the low winter sun, all around it ice.\n\nAnd he saw that it, like him, was real.\n\nHe thought: It lies south of here!\n\nStirring from his reverie, Shatter allowed his gaze to alight on each of the survivors in turn. They had told him their names but those he would soon forget; to him they were just dragons. Poon, a heavy, slow-witted dragon whose hide was charred and cracked; Torque and... Tumely? \u2014 brothers who had fought side by side and between them reduced a charmed dragon to dust; the fourth, whose name had already slipped away, a sharp-eyed thief who had stolen his way through the fighting, avoiding the battle much as Shatter had done.\n\nThese four would be loyal to him, he knew, and the fifth too: Barker. Barker's body was burned almost beyond recognition, his wings crumpled autumn leaves, his face terribly scarred, but somehow he had survived to report to his beloved leader. Now he looked up at Shatter with complete and uncompromising loyalty.\n\nThe sixth dragon was Wood.\n\nHe stood foursquare beside his father. His body bore numerous cuts and bruises lending it a weather-beaten appearance years older than the young dragon who looked out from within. Of the six he was the only dragon in whose eye Shatter observed a spark of independence.\n\nWood, thought Shatter, for some reason the name brighter in his mind's eye. I must watch this one.\n\n'Our community has suffered devastating loss,' he said, his words well-planned and carefully spoken. These weak, ghost-dragons would not understand his need to find the deadfall. He needed to keep his instructions simple. 'Each of us has lost loved ones, and it is the Charmed who are responsible. It is the Charmed who must pay. Therefore we will form the core of a conquering army. We will seek out the Charmed in every corner of the world. And we will destroy them.'\n\nBut even as he spoke he saw that these dragons were beyond his rhetoric. They needed sleep. Better to leave them to recover.\n\n'Brothers,' he said, feigning the same weariness he saw in them, 'we are brave warriors all. Let us sleep, for tonight we have rid South Point of evil. Soon our energies will be renewed and we shall begin our travels. We will bring peace to a world without the Charmed.'\n\nHis thoughts came back to Wood as the bone-weary warriors settled gladly to sleep. The young dragon was not yet fully grown but his wide shoulders and broad muzzle promised a formidable adult to come. Shatter decided then that at the first hint of mutiny he would kill Wood. Until such a time, however, his obvious talent for combat might prove a valuable asset.\n\nAnd so Shatter settled back with his cohorts to sleep through what little remained of the night. They curled up in the open air, the storm over now, the wind fresh and gentle. Stars showed again in the south, unveiled by the passing clouds.\n\nShatter gazed about him: all around was devastation. Thinking back to the eggs he had sacrificed, he savoured the way in which that tiny act of violence had been magnified into such spectacular carnage.\n\nDeath was his bedfellow that night and he believed that as long as he showed it his loyalty he would live forever.\n\nWood was with his father again and that was good. Shatter, he knew, was quite mad and very dangerous... but that was a problem for tomorrow.\n\nSomething nagged at him though, denying him sleep. In the caverns, after his troop had fought to the death with the wounded dragon in that waterlogged cave, he had glanced across to where the river was sucking itself into a whirlpool.\n\nWhat had he seen?\n\nA dragon floundering in the torrent? A familiar face straining to breathe above the waves before being dragged under?\n\nFortune? Or had it been his own mother's ghost, drowning again before his eyes?\n\nHe shook his head, unable to deal with the possibilities. Better to forget, better to stay with his father. They had rediscovered the bonds of family at last and nothing in the world would see Wood lose them again. Too much loss, he thought. And so a young dragon older than his years banished doubt to the hidden corners of his heart and held his poor father close. Of the seven he was the last to fall asleep.\n\nWhen the Charmed are wiped from the world, he thought as he drifted into sleep, then my father and I will know peace.\n\nFor the moment, at least. he believed it.\n\nCumber found Fortune squatting beside a pile of blackened ash some distance from the main settlement. The young Natural did not look up as Cumber landed at his side.\n\n'My home,' he explained, indicating the debris that had once been a dragon's nest.\n\n'I know,' replied Cumber.\n\n'She's not here; there's no body.'\n\n'She could be anywhere. We could search but ...' Cumber's voice trailed away. The smoking desert South Point had become was eloquent enough.\n\n'She's alive.' Fortune gazed at Cumber, eyes filled with tears. 'I can feel it.'\n\nHis certainty impressed Cumber. Such conviction was unusual in a Natural. Flickering embers cast strange reflections in Fortune's eyes and, just for an instant, Cumber wondered just who had chosen whom for this great journey.\n\n'Ordinal told me something,' he said at last. 'She told it to me over and over again, and I never really understood what she meant, but now I think perhaps I'm beginning to.'\n\n'What did she tell you?'\n\n'She said, \"The world is turning.\"'\n\nFortune frowned, puzzled, as though hearing some distant sound. A gust of wind blew past them, gathering up the remains of his mother's nest and carrying them off into the night. He opened his mouth as if he were about to reply, then closed it again and simply nodded.\n\n'Come on then,' he said. 'Let's go.'\n\nAnd as simply as that they were on their way, two dragons launching themselves upwards once more to fly back across the smouldering nests of South Point, out over the cliffs and across the sea.\n\nTowards Covamere; towards Halcyon.\n\nOrange light clung to them as they traversed the battlefield, turning Fortune's dull brown hide to a deep red and sparkling off Cumber's dusty gold scales with a thousand tiny flames. Glowing wreckage popped and sparkled in the smoking remains of South Point and it seemed to Fortune that there was great colour in the devastation below them, that the orange and the red of the fires against the blackness of the debris spoke of life against death, of light against dark and of hope against despair.\n\nThe heat baked them again as they flew deliberately low over the battlefield, searching in vain for survivors, then as they passed out over the cliffs the air cooled suddenly with a great blast of wind from the sea. Their own inner fires fuelled with purpose they quickly left the remains of South Point behind and soon became specks against the night sky, specks which dwindled and then vanished."
            },
            {
                "title": "PART TWO",
                "text": "[ Aether's Cross ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "Gossamer",
                "text": "Aether's Cross was a place with more than one history.\n\nThe first history told how a huge ravine had been cut through the Low Mountains by a mighty troll lord many ages past to afford a route from the great Injured Mountains of the south (whence all trolls came) to the northern seas and thence to their final sanctuary, the cold land of Chaemen. Giant Aether had scooped out the channel over many days, it was said, in a time when nature was a mere rumour and other, older powers held sway. The rock that Aether excavated step by laborious step he crushed to powder in his craggy hands and blew away to the north, where it eventually formed the fine, grey beaches of the Heartland's northern coast. It was charm that Aether wielded, and over that charm he had awesome control.\n\nThrough the ravine that Aether had carved there journeyed trolls. They were tireless travellers, those ancient wayfarers, and thanks to Aether's Cross and a thousand passes like it they moved over the world and became its masters.\n\nBut aeons were brief in those ancient times, and even then the world was beginning to turn. As the mountains from which they had been born were worn away by the passing of years so were the trolls too worn away. To frigid Chaemen they fled, abandoning the fire that had once filled their veins. Behind them they left only bones and the scars that marked their work upon the land. Scars like the Cross. In their place other travellers came and went, and then the dragons came, and soon the dragons settled and the citadel of Aether's Cross was reborn.\n\nThus did the charmed dragons of Aether's Cross tell its history.\n\nThe stories told by the natural dragons were different.\n\nThe Naturals told not of a troll but of a tremendous river that had carved its way through the soft rock of the Cross over the course of countless years, opening a channel through the mountains. Weather, not trolls, had broken open the fissures and caves, and some even claimed that a massive river of ice had once rolled down from the north to smooth the lower reaches of the canyon. These were dragons unconvinced by stories of troll and fire but seduced instead by different heroes: storm and flood, weather and time.\n\nNeither story could be proven and so both lived on.\n\nSimply put, Aether's Cross was a wide place in the deep, narrow gorge splitting the Low Mountains from north to south. Contrary to the promise of their name, the mountains were in fact steep and treacherous \u2014 and very high \u2014 and even dragons found passage through the gorge preferable to struggling on the wing through the cold and rarefied air above the peaks.\n\nThis wide, safe place, this welcome broadening of the snakelike slot of the ravine, was home to a dragon community divided somewhat like that of South Point, for here too there existed the domain of the Natural and the domain of the Charmed. But whereas South Point had always enjoyed at least some interaction between the two domains, at Aether's Cross they were \u2014 and always had been \u2014 quite separate.\n\nThe charmed dragons inhabited the network of tunnels cut by their ancestors from the rock of the ravine's east wall. The wall was sheer and uninviting, scarred by melt-water cascades, the countless cracks and ridges of the rock, and the seven black holes by which the Charmed entered and exited the cave system. In the manner of many of their kin across the world, the charmed dragons of Aether's Cross were reclusive, and they took little notice of their neighbours, the natural dragons of the west wall.\n\nThis other wall sloped gently into a series of flat terraces, and it was on these terraces that the Naturals had settled, building for themselves a tight community of interlocking nests. As the nests relied upon each other for support so did the dragons; the Naturals of the Cross were close and loyal, well aware of the vulnerability of their perch on this great, grey cliff and as committed to the welfare of the community as a whole as to that of their own individual families and selves.\n\nIn the earliest times, when all dragons were Charmed, the Cross had been a single Charmed colony, a welcome waystation for all travellers who crossed the Heartland. Here the noble Charmed of old had held court in their golden age, before the coming of the Naturals.\n\nThe invasion had been subtle. Strange dragons would arrive, plain and dull, to settle among the rocks of the west cliff. Charmed eggs began bearing infants with the same dullness, the same deformities. To raise them in magic proved difficult and eventually impossible, and these charmless youngsters were banished in ever increasing numbers to their kin on the opposite cliff. The Naturals accepted them without judgement, raising them as their own, and soon the Natural population had grown large and the Charmed were few.\n\nThe world was turning. And, like the Charmed of South Point, the Charmed of the Cross understood it was turning away from them.\n\nThey retreated to the depths of the tunnels that honeycombed the eastern ramparts of the treacherous canyon and for a long time, in the calm, simple way of all dragons of the Cross, they stoically faced the horrifying prospect of extinction. But then, as the years stretched by, a strange madness began to creep through the tunnels, and whether it was a disease or a product of their suppressed fears no dragon could say. Underground, once-noble knights became paranoid and aggressive, while outside the thriving Naturals all but forgot their elusive neighbours. Underground, tensions mounted, as a growing swell of Charmed opinion said that it was the Naturals who had brought the madness to the Cross, that these interlopers, these cripples without magic were to blame for the destruction of their glorious heritage.\n\nThat the only way they could turn their path back to the destiny they deserved was to destroy the Naturals once and for all.\n\nThe river that ran through the Cross \u2014 named Aether for the troll who may or may not have released it \u2014 was high and angry with snow-melt. From the sheer mountain face which rose high above the torrent, waterfalls large and small cascaded into the depths, loud and shining drapes on walls of grey stone.\n\nHigher up, above the spray and the constant roaring, was the west cliff that held the nests and paths and landing platforms of an entire Natural community; opposite rose the east showing only empty entrances to seemingly abandoned tunnels: black sockets in a vertical wall that looked more like bone than rock. Where the west side danced with life, the east seemed quite dead.\n\nFor the Naturals, Aether's Cross was an inhospitable place. Plant life and cover were scarce; the north wind slicing through the ravine moved unchecked across the tight nests of the western terraces. Food was almost exclusively fish, plucked perilously from the mountain torrent far below by the highly trained fisher dragons who rightly enjoyed great status in the close-knit community. The cliff itself was unstable and landslides would often damage or even destroy nests \u2014 occasionally killing their occupants.\n\nA hostile place then, and yet the natural dragons remained. A few departed each year \u2014 those dragons too old or too fearful for the Cross \u2014 but the majority stayed. The air was fresh and clear and rich with the scent of the mountain and the spray of the river; to some dragons the Cross itself seemed alive.\n\nAnd even the perils themselves were good, for had they not created a dragon community superior to any other in health, resourcefulness and closeness of spirit? Was this not truly a community that coped and cared? That loved?\n\nFor the natural dragons loyal to the Cross this was the only home; this was truly the centre of the world.\n\nGossamer had never hidden the fact that she was interested in charm. Many of her friends still teased her with the infant nickname they had given her: Gossamagic. It was a silly joke but it had stuck. As a natural dragon, Gossamer was expected to shun charm, but as she grew so did her obsession. She was haunted by a recurring dream in which she flew across the canyon and into one of the seven tunnel entrances. She would search in the darkness for what seemed like days and find nothing. And then she would wake, tantalised and frustrated.\n\nAn unspoken taboo prevented all the natural dragons of Aether's Cross from making such a flight. Most dragons were not interested, of course, but a few, especially the youngsters and especially Gossamer, found that those gaping black holes held a talismanic attraction. They would watch the openings as though hypnotised, waiting and watching for a glimpse of what might lie within: charmed dragons.\n\nAnd so had been born the pastime known as holewatching.\n\nEvening was a favourite time, after lessons and before supper, when the sun had sunk low and the sky was expanding towards darkness. They would line up along one of the many stony terraces of the west cliff, and sit, and stare. Regular \u2014 if not champion \u2014 hole-watchers were Gossamer and her younger brother Brace.\n\nThat they were brother and sister was a fact not easily deduced. Brace maintained that he was 'well-built' but in truth he was fat. His mother delighted in telling her friends what a large hatchling he had been and seemed determined, by incessant feeding, to prove what a large adult he could therefore become. By contrast Gossamer was as slender and light as her name. Brace loved and envied her in equal measure, for while he would have fought to the death to protect his sister, he wished that he shared her easy grace. It was Brace on whom their mother doted but he suspected that her deeper affections were reserved for her daughter alone.\n\nAs for Gossamer, she loved her younger brother with simple directness. If any dragon were kin to the pure mountain air which tumbled into the Cross from the peaks above, that dragon was Gossamer. Swift of wing, she possessed a hide uncommonly colourful for a Natural, her back and wings being patterned with ochres and reds, earth colours that were unlike the garish extravagances of the Charmed yet were striking in their own way.\n\nThat summer evening, in the dying light, she shone.\n\nSquatting in her favourite holewatching spot, Gossamer gazed down over the precipice at one of the numerous waterfalls spouting out over the river hidden far below in the mist. Silver forms darted back and forth in the spray: water sprites at play, daring each other in the airborne stream. She recognised Ant and Gnoll among them, for although she could not exactly speak their language she at least knew some faces and names, and it seemed to her that these little creatures understood most of what she said to them. Her encounters with them were always brief and frustrating however, since they were so tiny and moved so fast that she could barely follow their actions, let alone hear their high-pitched, whistling voices.\n\nCharmed you may be, she thought, but why do you have to be such fidgets?\n\nThe charms of the sprites, like those of their fellow earth creatures, were gentle. They could swim without breathing, sing to the rocks and weave curative spells. The magic they knew was earth magic, kind and cool, very different to the magic of charmed dragons.\n\nThe charm of fire.\n\n'There are four different kinds of charm,' Gossamer's mother had once told a rapt audience of infants during a teaching period. Gossamer had listened in fascination; Brace had snored quietly. 'However, those four are really only two. The first three are earth, air and water, all of which are really earth. Earth magic is the charm of the land, the charm of giants and sprites and nymphs and all those creatures whose hearts are rooted in the circle of the seasons. It is strong and gentle, and rarely does harm.\n\n'The fourth charm is fire. This is the magic of our cousins, the charmed dragons. It is different because while it can be used for good, unlike earth magic it can also do terrible wrongs. And unlike earth magic it is not of this world; fire charm is the magic of the Realm.'\n\n'What's the Realm?' asked Gossamer.\n\nAll the small dragons waited patiently for their teacher to answer. All except Brace, who simply complained it was late, very late. To Gossamer's disappointment, their mother closed the lesson by smiling and saying it was a subject for another day.\n\nLater, in their home nest, Gossamer asked her mother, 'Are dragons the only creatures who can use fire charms?'\n\n'There were others once,' came the reply, 'but it seems they are all gone now. The trolls were the first, it is said, for they were born of fire and so were killed by the coming of the ice. I fancy there were others before even them, but they were not of this world.'\n\n'Were they from the Realm, then?' hazarded Gossamer. Her mother waited, clearly knowing what was coming next. Gossamer took this as an encouraging sign and promptly asked, 'So what is the Realm?'\n\n'So many questions,' her mother sighed. 'You're more inquisitive than your brother is, that much I know. The Realm? Well, none of us can know what it is \u2014 Naturals, I mean. The best that I can say is that it's a place, a place that we can't get to but charmed dragons can. And it's the place where the fire is.'\n\n'The fire that makes the fire charm?'\n\n'I think so, yes.'\n\nAnd with a vague shake of her head she had left Gossamer to wonder who those other ancient wielders of fire charm might have been, and what sort of a place this Realm might be.\n\nSince that day, thoughts of the lesson had filled her young life and so her obsession with holewatching had grown. The more she watched, the more she thought she saw. Was that a flash of gold in one of the tunnel entrances on the east cliff? Was that a flicker of silver? The merest hint of Charmed activity was guaranteed to fix her to her perch for a whole day. In contrast Brace would quickly become bored. He stayed only because Gossamer stayed. Gossamer could wait for days in order to see the tiniest of motions in the gloom, proof perhaps that charmed dragons did still live within the earth.\n\nRecently, on a misty day when the air had been cold and the river turbulent, Gossamer had for a moment believed she could see a creature, pale and ghostlike, a long-limbed, female dragon with pure white wings, sheer as a spider's web, and young, perhaps only a little older than Gossamer's ten years.\n\n'I could fly across,' she had whispered to herself, 'and we could talk and play together, and we could each find out the other's name!'\n\nBut the mist thinned and her new friend vanished into the blackness of the tunnel, not a charmed dragon after all but simply a phantom.\n\nYet still Gossamer dreamed of the day when Charmed and Natural might fly together. Her secret dream.\n\nThat same summer, on another evening, Gossamer was watching the shadows flee up the east cliff, trailing dusk behind them. The water sprites had vanished upstream like salmon and night was collecting in the depths of the canyon. Brace fidgeted beside her. 'I'm hungry,' he moaned.\n\n'You're bored,' corrected Gossamer. 'You only think you're hungry because you're bored.'\n\n'Let's go home.'\n\n'Just a little while longer. We might see something.'\n\n'Hah! If we see something I'll ...'\n\nBrace broke off as he looked up into the sky. Where the sky plunged into the darkness of the east, the mountain seemed to have grown an extra peak.\n\nAs they watched, part of the east cliff detached itself from the paler, ragged summit and dropped down towards them, a shadow made solid, slicing through the twilight, a chunk of night falling on them from the sky. At the last moment, the apparition veered aside and alighted soundlessly on the ledge outside the largest of the Charmed tunnels. And Gossamer realised that it was a dragon.\n\nOnly with the greatest difficulty could she make out its shape. It had massive wings and seemed to have too many legs. Like a spider. Yet it was beautiful.\n\nA head like a claw flexed and turned their way. The dragon looked across at them with featureless yellow eyes, the only points of colour on a form as black as midnight. Gossamer shrank back against the rock and glanced at Brace. He was transfixed, terrified. She heard the newcomer's breath, smooth and deep, and felt it suck the heat from her like a sheet of ice.\n\nWhen she looked back, the black dragon had turned to enter the tunnel. For a brief moment it held its wings wide against the rock face and it looked for all the world as though it were the tunnel. Then those awesome wings folded themselves away and the dragon vanished into the mountain.\n\nGossamer, realising that she had been holding her breath, sucked in air with a gasp. Her heart slowed its pounding and she gathered Brace to her. They were both trembling, but Gossamer was forced to smile as she observed her brother struggling to put up a brave front.\n\n'Was that...?' he blurted.\n\n'A charmed dragon? Yes.'\n\n'It was...' he stammered, 'it was... big!'\n\n'They don't all look like that.' Gossamer replied. 'There's no need to be frightened.'\n\nBut they could all look like that if they wanted too, she thought. Charmed dragons can look any way they want to. Even like that: frightening yet... wonderful!\n\n'I'm not frightened,' blustered Brace. 'They're just dragons after all. I'm not afraid of them.'\n\nGossamer slapped him playfully.\n\n'You'll protect me, won't you, Brace?'\n\n'Of course!'\n\nAs Brace puffed out his chest and marched off back towards home, but even as Gossamer acknowledged the warmth of her love for her brother an icicle stabbed into her heart.\n\nWho was that dragon? A stranger, a traveller Charmed coming here? Why?\n\nGossamer left her perch and wandered back along the winding shallow trench towards the complex structure of woven branches that was her home. The starlight was dim, the world a mass of shadows within shadows. It seemed to Gossamer that all detail had fled the world leaving instead mere approximations of things. Dragons moved within her vision but they were rough-hewn and clumsy, like shapes pressed crudely from clay and not yet given names. The wind had died, stilling the air.\n\nThe settlement seemed curiously dull. Almost unreal.\n\nLike it's turning to stone.\n\nSuddenly, Gossamer was convinced that something dreadful was going to happen, something she could not articulate, some horror of which dragons must be told. But not tonight. Her fear was too great to be spoken in the night. Her heart thumping with the same, dull vagueness she sensed in the world outside she resolved to voice her fears to her parents as soon as the morning sun rose.\n\nBut before morning came, fire blew from the seven tunnels of the Charmed, turning night to day, and the Naturals of Aether's Cross knew the horror that had descended upon them all.\n\nThey knew that the Black Dragon had come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Heartland",
                "text": "It was mid-morning, the sea below them was vast and Fortune's body ached. Already the events of the previous night seemed remote and unreal.\n\nWhat a strange pair we make, he thought.\n\nNatural and Charmed, dragons both, they were as different from each other as day and night. Where Fortune's body was lithe and streamlined, Cumber's was angular and awkward; where Fortune's wings were massive, built for power, Cumber's seemed impossibly small; where Fortune flew with his body, Cumber flew with his mind.\n\nCumber told his new friend of the magic he had had to learn in order to change his body to the traditional Charmed shape.\n\n'We learn to grow new legs and move our wings on to our backs,' he explained. 'Later we bring metal to our skins and scales \u2014 the range of colours is endless.'\n\n'So if it wasn't for the charm you'd look like me?'\n\n'Pretty much, but you see this is all part of what's going on. Once upon a time a charmed dragon was born a charmed dragon. Lately we've had to struggle to maintain our forms. And charm is less powerful now, you see \u2014 we have to work harder to make the simplest magic function.'\n\n'Magic still made a sorry mess of South Point.'\n\n'It's easy to destroy with charm, especially fire charm, but constructive magic grows harder day by day, and soon it may be impossible. Even the Realm is shrinking, or so Ordinal said.'\n\n'Why are these changes happening?'\n\nCumber frowned. 'Ordinal once said, \"The world is shedding its skin.\" Perhaps charmed dragons are the skin.'\n\n'Very enlightening. So what exactly is this Realm?'\n\n'I'm not the dragon to ask.' There was pain in Cumber voice. Silence followed broken only by the swoosh of air through their wings. Fortune resisted the urge to press the point.\n\nPresently a thin line of grey appeared, balanced on the blue horizon: a beach, its promise of landfall giving new strength to aching muscles. It drew near with agonising slowness. The closer it came the more it seemed to Fortune that South Point no longer existed.\n\nLater that day they lay together on the lower slopes of a shallow, sparsely-wooded river valley. Fortune's muscles were tightening up as he rested and he began to resign himself to spending the night there.\n\n'We shan't be travelling any further today,' he said. His spirits felt light and he could not understand why. Cumber was sprawled on his side gazing up at clouds racing past in a deep blue sky. A wind had risen since they had landed and Fortune hoped there would not be another storm.\n\n'What's this place called?' he asked. 'Is it another island like Torr?'\n\n'Well,' replied Cumber, 'the local name I don't know but Ordinal used to refer to it as the Heartland. It's big \u2014 much bigger than Torr \u2014 a continent we must cross in order to reach Covamere. Not an easy journey, you realise.'\n\n'How far?'\n\n'Maybe eight or nine days of good flying, if the winds are favourable, but the land around Covamere is barren and cold, so it's said. We're lucky to be travelling in the summer.'\n\nAs if to contradict him the wind whipped the surrounding trees until a flurry of leaves scattered past them and danced off down the valley.\n\n'Autumn's coming,' commented Fortune. 'Anyway, we should find some food before nightfall.'\n\nCumber yawned and stretched. 'Which would you rather do? Hunt or make camp?'\n\n'Do they have rabbits in the Heartland?'\n\n'Rabbits and much more,' replied Cumber inscrutably. 'Race you. I'll have a shelter built before you've got a sniff of dinner.'\n\nWith that he bounded into the undergrowth, leaving Fortune to rouse his weary body and scout up the hillside in search of prey.\n\nThe valley was gently curved and bounded at one end by a conspicuously large hill. Having acknowledged the hills shape as somehow strange, Fortune paid the view little real attention and concentrated instead on trying to pick up a scent.\n\nThe air was different here. On the valley slopes of South Point, beneath the scent of rabbit and heather, had been the ever-present mix of salt and dragon, the characteristic aroma that seeped from the settlement like perfume. It was a smell, barely noticed it was so familiar, that Fortune missed terribly now as he crouched on this foreign hillside breathing in air with no taint of dragon to lend it life.\n\nNo life, he thought, trying to summon his grief.\n\nBut all he could smell was empty woodland, all he could see was green hills \u2014 his memories of the battle remained obstinately misty and far away.\n\nWhere is my pain?\n\nA flash of brown fur raced through his vision and he leaped after it with the instinctive reflex of a hunter, his mind gratefully filled with the thought of food.\n\nA short while later he had caught five rabbits. Five will do for tonight, he thought as he loped down the hill, his stomach gurgling with anticipation. Rounding a bend in the track leading back to the riverside, he stopped, then slipped behind a bush to observe the scene on the bank.\n\nCumber had built a stack of timber on an open patch of ground and was standing before it, head cocked. Without warning, he spread his jaws and spat a ball of yellow flame deep into the woodpile. The branches jumped and popped as the fire swarmed and presently the whole mound was burning, sending sparks skywards and cloaking Cumber in a shroud of smoke.\n\nFor an instant, Fortune thought Cumber quite the most alien creature he had ever seen, but the moment swiftly passed and he was just Cumber again, a young dragon stood before a bonfire. Fortune emerged from behind his bush feeling a little foolish and trotted down to where his friend was waiting.\n\n'Why the fire?' he asked as he proudly laid his catches on the ground.\n\n'If you're travelling with me, Fortune, you'll learn the pleasures of cooked meat!'\n\nFortune watched fascinated as Cumber lifted the first rabbit with his teeth and, with a flick of his head, tossed it into the air. When he caught it again it was skinned. With a 'plop' its pelt dropped at Fortune's claws.\n\n'Cooking charm,' Cumber explained. 'One of the first you learn. Of course, throwing them about's a bit extravagant but then that's what cooking is all about if you ask me.'\n\nPresently all five rabbits had been skinned and staked over the fire. Amazed, Fortune inhaled for the first time in his life the aroma of cooking meat and decided that while charm might be alien, it certainly made things smell good.\n\n'Do you always do this \u2014 burn your food, I mean?'\n\n'Usually,' replied Cumber. 'I think you'll approve.'\n\nFortune did. The texture and flavour of the meat was so exquisite that it was all he could do not to devour his portions whole. But Cumber convinced him to eat slowly and savour the taste and Fortune reluctantly agreed that it was worth it. They ate well, meat washed down with fresh river water, and when they were full they lay comfortably on the soft grass at the water's edge.\n\nNight fell, ushering chill air into the valley, and now Fortune recognised the true virtue of fire for, although his kind regarded flames with superstitious awe, their warmth brought him the comfort he needed.\n\nCumber had built two nests \u2014 a shallow, open dish for Fortune and an enclosing shell for himself \u2014 but for the moment they lay together by the fire, unable to sleep. They began to talk about South Point, trying to conjure up the world they had lost, but that world proved elusive. Both found themselves unable to focus their minds on that terrible night. Memories blurred and slipped aside, and they became easily side-tracked. Conversation turned instead to the subject of their quest. Fortune wondered why Cumber had chosen him for a companion.\n\n'It wasn't really my doing,' confessed Cumber. 'Ordinal told me to go to a certain spot on a certain day and wait for the first dragon I saw, and that dragon was you. I was to bring you to the Great Chamber on the night of the full moon and, well, the rest you know. I was surprised when two of you turned up but... well, Wood clearly wasn't supposed to come with us after all, as it turned out.'\n\n'But how did she know I'd be there? And why me at all?'\n\n'Ordinal could see things other dragons, even other charmed dragons, could not see. I think she could even see a little of the future.'\n\n'Did she tell you anything about the Heartland?'\n\n'She said it was stronger in magic than our own tiny island. That's why Covamere is still our ultimate goal \u2014 the decay hasn't reached it yet, or so she believed.'\n\nInsects buzzed in the chill night and Fortune shivered.\n\n'Do you mean there will be more charmed dragons here?' he asked nervously. His innate trust of the Charmed had suffered severe blows of late.\n\n'Undoubtedly. And other charmed ones too.'\n\nCumber yawned and began to amble up to his cocoon but Fortune was not to be left hanging.\n\n'What do you mean, \"other charmed ones\"?'\n\n'You must have heard at least some of the old legends,' said Cumber, stifling another yawn. 'Back home on Torr, most of those legends stopped being true a long time ago. But things are different here in the Heartland. Over here, magic is still very much alive. Probably. That's what I think, or rather what I hope.'\n\nAnd having thus thoroughly frustrated Fortune he disappeared into his makeshift wooden cave.\n\nFortune cast a final look around the valley. He noted again the hill, barely visible in the starlight. It seemed different somehow. Was that contour different? Had that treeline altered? He shook his head wearily and collapsed into his nest.\n\n'The land doesn't move,' he mumbled to himself, and then sleep claimed him.\n\nIt was the middle of the night when Cumber shook him awake.\n\n'Wha...?' Fortune started to say before a gold wing slapped him quiet.\n\n'Ssh!'\n\nA mist had settled and the moon had risen, and Cumber's body looked insubstantial in the eerie light. Wiping bleary eyes, Fortune reluctantly followed him down to the river.\n\n'This had better be worth it,' he grumbled.\n\n'Oh, it is,' smiled Cumber. 'You remember what I said, you know, about other charmed ones?'\n\n'Oh, that. Yes, and while I'm about it, why...?'\n\n'Hush. And look.'\n\nCumber pointed up the valley.\n\nThe hill was gone.\n\nFortune blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. The valley seemed twice as long as it had been, ending in a line of distant mountains almost invisible in the hazy night. His strange hill had utterly vanished.\n\n'A charmed hill?' he gasped.\n\n'In a way.'\n\nThe ground beneath them vibrated suddenly, sending up a deep pulse which drummed at their teeth. Ripples disturbed the surface of the river and the trees trembled in sympathy.\n\n'Come on,' whispered Cumber, leading Fortune up the hillside.\n\nThe night was cold, the dragons' moon-shadows long and faint as they crept past the belt of trees halfway up the incline.\n\n'What's happening?' Fortune asked.\n\n'I don't really know. I'm only guessing. It's just that Ordinal told me a little about this sort of thing. Earth magic she called it. There's nothing like it on Torr now but over here ...'\n\nAnother shock rumbled through the ground. The leaf litter gave way to rough grass and the dragons left the trees behind, approaching the heath at the crest of the ridge that flanked the valley.\n\n'Keep low,' warned Cumber.\n\n'Is it dangerous?'\n\nAnother powerful thump, properly audible this time. A thin layer of soil leaped from the ground and settled again.\n\nThey crouched together just below the brow of the hill.\n\nThe thudding noise came at regular intervals. Wavering just above the broken ridge was the pale disc of the moon, casting what to Fortune seemed a magical glow over the landscape. Moonbeams flickered in the haze like frozen flames.\n\nThe ridge dropped from their vision as they crawled their way to the very top. Beyond was another valley, a flat river plain stretched taut beneath them; the ghosts of far hills floated in the mist. The moon, ringed with a shining aura, looked upon them like a vast eye.\n\nIn the centre of the long-dried plain stood a huge, pale-skinned creature. Ten trees high it stood, as near as Fortune could judge, trunk-like legs planted firm in the haze, feet obscured, massive shoulders straining as it bent down to lift a great rock from the pile of boulders next to it.\n\nFortune wondered what Wood would have made of this charmed colossus. Cumber, despite his bizarre appearance, was at least recognisably dragon, but this giant of the earth, balanced precariously on its hind legs, its skin naked but for the mane of brown hair which ran from its head down its spine, this was quite different. Its face, flat like the moon, grimaced as it hefted the rock on to its shoulder.\n\nWith a prodigious effort the gleaming giant hurled the boulder up into the sky. The dragons watched agape as the granite slab, itself larger than ten dragons without any doubt, turned end over end with ponderous ease and finally came to earth with a crashing thud that they both recognised as the source of the vibrations.\n\nAround the giant, in a broad quarter-circle, similar boulders lay embedded in the ground and it was clear that by the time the monster had completed its task a complete ring of stones would have been created. A massive paw wiped a brow like a cliff face and sweat rained into the mist.\n\n'What's it doing?' Fortune asked.\n\nCumber rolled his eyes. Fortune's endless questions simultaneously flattered him and made him feel inadequate; none of Ordinal's training had prepared him for this role of oracle. But, at the same time, Charmed pride obliged him to keep up appearances.\n\n'It's, er, throwing rocks in a circle,' he explained.\n\nThe giant lifted its head as though listening. Mist silently embraced the two spies as they shrank into the heather.\n\n'Do you think it heard us?'\n\nCumber weighed up pride and honesty and decided that, on balance, the latter was by far an easier path to tread.\n\n'To be frank, Fortune, although I hate to admit it, I know less about earth giants' ears than I do about earth giants themselves. The only thing I can judge for certain is where it's come from.'\n\n'The hill!' exclaimed Fortune, suddenly inspired.\n\n'Fortune, it is the hill.'\n\nAnd that was when the shock truly hit Fortune.\n\nA month earlier, his days had drifted by in a dreamy, adolescent haze, his thoughts blown on the wind. He had been journeying with his eyes closed through a world of harsh and unseen light.\n\nMeeting Cumber had allowed the first chinks of that light in, but it was in the Great Chamber that Fortune's eyes had been opened fully... and brutally.\n\nMany of the tales his mother had told him about the ancient Charmed revolved around a great knight known as Destater. He was a dragon born for the sky; legend told how he had hatched from somewhere high above the clouds, his new-born body learning to fly within three beats of its wings. He never touched the ground thereafter, and refused ever to die. A permanent member of the Charmed Council, he attended every meeting, hovering over his seat with lazy beats of his vast, silver wings.\n\nFew dragons were greater than Destater, immortal so long as he refused to touch the earth, wise beyond limit.\n\nWhen Fortune had first entered the Great Chamber on the night of the battle one of the many things he had expected to see was Destater. But there had been no such dragon.\n\nThat same night he had seen Volence turned to dust, his friend Wood transformed into a fighting demon, familiar dragons torn apart by dark magic. His birthplace was burned, his whole life wiped clean in an instant, dragon Fortune reduced to a blank statue. Choose a feeling, he thought, and stamp it on my face.\n\nDestater is dead, he thought. He has touched the earth. Perhaps he never lived at all.\n\nMy father is dead, he thought, and I never knew him.\n\nMy mother is gone, but I will find her.\n\nBut that last irrational certainty was a seed blown in a storm. The battle returned to Fortune then in all its horror. As each giant stone thumped down on to the river plain a new memory triggered itself.\n\nThump!\n\nWood screamed, 'Father!' and hurled himself into a writhing mass of spines and teeth that looked more like a distorted, many-limbed monster than the group of doomed, clamouring dragons it was.\n\nThump!\n\nA headless charmed dragon, neck pumping blood and flame, danced like a tornado in an underground chasm while its slayers fought to hold it down.\n\nTHUMP!\n\nFortune's home burned furiously and he wept at last, crying for all those dragons he had known and lost, for all the dreams this harsh-lit reality had destroyed.\n\nFortune's tears a catalyst, Cumber's grief surfaced too.\n\nAnd so Fortune and Cumber held each other at last, weeping for their collective loss, for their dead. Shock banished, they gave in to their sorrow. Yet slowly, as the dreadful memories unravelled themselves, so the dragons' resolve grew and they became strong within, light dawning inside them even as the moon set, casting a web of darkness across the world.\n\nUnder cover of that darkness their sobs gradually subsided and they drifted into deep, dreamless sleep.\n\nIts night's work complete, the giant slapped its dusty paws together with a sound like thunder and plodded back into its valley. By the time dawn stretched an exploratory claw into the sky it had already settled itself down and closed the lakes of its eyes.\n\nThe transformation was as subtle as a fall of dew \u2014 like a reflection caught in a pool of water a ripple passed across its sleeping form and it became again Fortune's hill, its thigh riddled with rabbit warrens, its hair a dense patch of thicket. Its breathing halted and, for another day at least, it was the land.\n\nAs daylight stroked the two dragons they awoke with slow ease, to find themselves still in the heather where they had hidden beneath the moon. Cumber recalled the ancient Charmed word for 'morning', which really meant 'beginning'.\n\nWell, he decided, today certainly feels like a beginning, sure enough.\n\nTogether they ambled down the hill towards the camp, intending to clear it away and begin their first day of travel into the Heartland. Halfway down they stopped short, surprised by the sight of a dragon rummaging through the smouldering remains of the camp fire.\n\nThe stranger watched as they resumed their approach. He was a charmed dragon, that much was clear. His body was a plain, metallic green and relatively unadorned, but the real splendour was in his wings: much larger than Cumber's, they were supremely ornate, delicately patterned with a mosaic of coloured scales which shimmered in the fresh sunlight.\n\n'I hope he's friendly,' whispered Fortune to Cumber as they swaggered down towards the stranger with a confidence neither one of them felt. Fortune's caution was fuelled by uncomfortable memories of Pander, the roofwalking beast who had tried to suck the life from Cumber.\n\nThe air was tense as they drew together. We were three for a while before, thought Cumber, but that was not meant to be.\n\nThe stranger nodded slowly as they halted on the opposite side of the embers of the camp fire. Then he frowned, screwed up his face and assumed an expression of extreme discomfort. The moment dragged itself out; Fortune and Cumber looked on agog as this jewel-winged creature balanced in front of them as if poised for some dreadful outburst.\n\n'Aaaat-shoo!'\n\nThe almighty sneeze simultaneously rocked the stranger back on his haunches and scattered charcoal over Fortune. Praise be, he thought, that charmed dragons don't sneeze fire as well!\n\n'Sorry about that,' said the stranger. 'Sucked up too much smoke. Never did go in for that fire business. Scoff.'\n\n'I'm sorry?' said Fortune.\n\n'No, I'm sorry. And I'm Scoff,' repeated the dragon. 'My name,' he explained.\n\n'Oh, I see.' Cumber was relieved that the dragon at least seemed amicable enough. 'I'm Cumber and this is my good friend, Fortune.'\n\n'Pleasure. You're not from these parts.'\n\nScoff, as they would discover, was a dragon who liked to get straight to the point.\n\n'We're from Torr, over the sea,' explained Cumber, gesturing vaguely behind him with a wing that felt suddenly inadequate in the shadow of Scoff's splendid sails.\n\n'Right.' Scoff nodded as though the answer were acceptable but of no particular interest. 'Well, you don't seem mad. Where are you going?'\n\n'Who says we're going anywhere?' responded Fortune, still cautious.\n\n'If they're not crazy they're suspicious,' muttered Scoff under his breath. 'Temporary camp,' he went on, indicating their makeshift nests. 'Bags under the eyes. You're travelling. Am I wrong?'\n\nCumber found himself warming to this dragon. Although age was difficult to judge with the Charmed he guessed Scoff to be somewhat older than himself or Fortune. Maybe they might benefit from his experience at this early stage of their journey.\n\nFortune too could not help but like Scoff, despite his natural caution. There was something friendly in the wrinkles around his eyes, something inherently trustworthy in the easy line of his broad mouth. Nevertheless, this was the Heartland, where things were not always what they seemed.\n\n'... breath of fresh air,' Scoff was saying, pacing up and down the river bank. 'Mad they are, every last one. Glad to be shot of the lot of 'em, that's me. I'll say again, where are you going?'\n\n'South,' said Fortune, reluctant to give too much away despite Scoff's easy charm.\n\n'Hmm. Not much there. I'd head north. Have to pass through the Cross to go south.'\n\n'The Cross?'\n\n'Aether's Cross. Don't you know anything?'\n\n'Is that where you're from, Aether's Cross?' ventured Cumber.\n\n'Was from. All mad now. Head north.'\n\nFortune was beginning to wonder if Scoff was not a little mad himself when Cumber spoke again.\n\n'We have to reach Covamere.'\n\nScoff's eyes widened and his pacing ceased.\n\n'Covamere, eh? Well, now, there's a journey and more. Over and beyond the Low Mountains, no less. What's in Covamere for a pair like you?'\n\nFortune nudged Cumber in an effort to prevent him from blurting out their story, but once the words started to flow he found it impossible not to join in. The tale seemed almost to tell itself, and as it was told its weight left their backs like melting snow. Scoff listened carefully and spoke only when the words ran out.\n\n'Quite a tale,' he agreed. 'Like I thought \u2014 madness everywhere. All Charmed mad. We're the lucky ones, Comber, you and I ...'\n\n'That's Cumber, actually.'\n\n'Whatever. At least our minds are still our own.'\n\nScoff looked over at Fortune and added, 'You'd better watch yourself. Naturals aren't popular round here. Take my advice, both of you \u2014 head back north. Go as far as the ice for all I care but forget Covamere. If Halcyon's still alive he's mad as the rest of 'em.'\n\n'Scoff, you say there's madness here ...' began Cumber, hoping desperately that it not be true, that here in the Heartland the disease had not taken hold.\n\n'What happened at your South Point,' interrupted Scoff, 'is happening at the Cross. Magic's weak, Charmed are mad, Naturals are taken captive. Same thing.'\n\nCumber groaned at the news.\n\n'Even here,' he said. 'Even here.'\n\n'Eh?' said Scoff, losing his train of thought.\n\n'It's become a race then,' said Cumber. 'I thought we'd beaten it out of South Point, you see, but it's reached the Heartland already \u2014 it's spreading like a plague.'\n\n'What're you babbling about?' grumbled Scoff, but Cumber was turning away from him to address Fortune.\n\n'Our quest is a race against time and the awful thing is that I've always known it \u2014 you see, whatever it is that's setting dragon against dragon, that force has been travelling fast, much faster than I thought. And faster than us. Ordinal said, \"The stone has been cast into the water and you must race the ripples to the shore,\" and she was right. Fortune, we have no time to waste!'\n\nCumber spread his golden wings and leaped into the waiting air.\n\n'Hold on!' cried Scoff as Fortune too unfolded his wings. 'Don't go through the Cross. Go around at least. More days to your journey but ...'\n\n'We don't have days!' Cumber shouted, angrily wheeling over Scoff's upturned head. Fortune beat his way strenuously into the air beside him.\n\n'Listen to me,' called Scoff as they rose away from him. 'Go north, go home!'\n\n'We have no home,' retorted Cumber. 'Come on, Fortune, let's leave this, this pessimist to his madness!'\n\nAs they circled up from the camp site Fortune wondered if, to Cumber, the word 'pessimist' might have been the most dreadful insult imaginable. After all, who but an optimist of the highest order would race a tide of insanity across the world to seek a dragon who perhaps no longer even existed, if indeed he ever had?\n\nHave faith, Fortune, have faith, his mother's voice echoed.\n\nScoff had one last gambit to keep them there, and it almost worked.\n\n'Don't ignore me like the other one did!' he shouted.\n\nFortune fanned his wings forward and managed to hover clumsily over the charmed dragon, the effort pulling angrily at the muscles of his back and breast; perhaps one day he would learn to fly properly.\n\n'What other one?' he demanded, his spine tingling.\n\n'Old dragon,' responded Scoff at once. 'Female. Natural, like you. Ignored me. Don't think she even saw me. Went south too, like you.'\n\nCumber saw Fortune's hesitation and called to him desperately.\n\n'You can't know it's her, Fortune. It could have been any dragon.'\n\nFortune hovered there for a moment more, looking down at Scoff. Then he peeled away to the south and led Cumber off towards the mountains.\n\n'All the more reason for me to go this way too, now,' he muttered between clenched teeth.\n\nEven as they left him by the riverside Scoff cried after them, a tiny gem of a dragon set in the lush green valley. 'Keep to the west wall! Avoid the tunnels! The Black ...!'\n\nBut the rest was lost as Scoff, the smouldering fire and empty nests fell behind them and vanished.\n\nAhead, the jagged silhouette of the Low Mountains squatted on the horizon, a wall of rock cut through by a vertical slash that could only be Aether's Cross, and Fortune wondered if, like the hill, those distant mountains concealed a secret identity.\n\nWhat magic might reveal itself were he to blink, and then open his eyes only to find the mountains gone?"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Cross",
                "text": "Had Scoff stayed beside the river for the rest of the day he would almost certainly have encountered the other group of dragons flying south towards Aether's Cross. Had their paths crossed, Scoff may sooner have found the strength he needed to play his part in the struggle; but perhaps other matters would then have turned out differently too, and not necessarily for the better.\n\nHe watched the space Fortune and Cumber had left in the sky for a long time after they had vanished. Finally, as the sun rose high, he turned and carefully cleared away the remains of the fire and the makeshift nests.\n\n'Youngsters!' he grumbled as he flicked sand over the last of the ashes with one of his glorious, multicoloured wings. 'Don't know the first thing about journey-making!'\n\nScoff took to the air and flew up over the same ridge that Fortune and Cumber had scaled the night before. Cresting the rise, he paid little attention to the newly-formed stone circle on the plain beyond, taking instead a direct line north until a short time later he reached the small, unremarkable cave in which he had been camped for the last two nights. Into the cramped space he slipped and there he lay for the rest of the day, compressing charm into the wounds on his legs. He dozed and woke and dozed again. Night fell.\n\nScoff had to admit that in recent years he had become lazy. Posted to Aether's Cross by Halcyon many years earlier, he had performed his duties well enough at first, receiving with good grace the envoy dragons who flew up from Covamere on a regular basis. He would entertain the envoys, deliver his report on the affairs of the Cross, then despatch the visitors on their way. The news brought by the envoys would be his to distribute throughout the caverns of the Cross.\n\nDragons were always glad to see Scoff; as Halcyon's ambassador, he was generally liked and respected by the Charmed of the Cross and he in turn liked them. He felt comfortable there. And that, he had to admit, was the root of the problem: he became too comfortable. Relaxed in his easy routine, he ignored the growing rumours of plague. Even when dragons began pointing out to him that the flow of Covamere envoys had slowed to a crawl, Scoff would simply smile and say that they would be here soon.\n\nEven when dragons at the Cross started to talk about the extinction of their kind, and about rebelling against the Naturals, whom they blamed for all that was wrong with the world, Scoff kept his head down and his thoughts elsewhere. Even if they were true, what could a simple dragon such as Scoff do about such things? Nothing, of course. Better not to worry that mountain rivers once brimming with water sprites were now almost barren, that hornless unicorns now roamed the great plains of the south, that charmed dragons seemed to be going the same way as the trolls.\n\nBetter to stay comfortable.\n\nBut then the Black Dragon came and the fire poured from the tunnels and the rumblings became rage.\n\nWhen he eventually realised what was happening Scoff was angry that his repose should have been disturbed. But when he saw the first of the Naturals dragged screaming into the caverns his outrage \u2014 to his later shame \u2014 turned to fear. Suddenly terrified of his Charmed kin, especially this terrifying Black Dragon, unable to make a stand (for how could one dragon make a stand against a whole army?) he fled north. He charmed his way through a brief scuffle with one of the more alert guards posted to prevent the escape of the Naturals and finally hid away in this tiny, anonymous cave.\n\nThree nights had passed since then, and Scoff's fear had finally turned to outrage.\n\nThey have gone mad! All of them! To take the Naturals prisoner \u2014 what has possessed them?\n\nThey were beyond help, of course, all of them. Besides, Scoff was just one dragon, and they were an army commanded by a dragon of such power as he had never seen. What could he possibly do?\n\nI'll go north again tomorrow, he decided. Or perhaps I'll be comfortable here.\n\nClinging to this uncertainty, Scoff drifted into a shallow, troubled sleep.\n\nFortune and Cumber reached the foothills of the Low Mountains early during their second day of travel, unaware, like Scoff, that another group of dragons was following in their path. They had paused in their journey only briefly to eat and drink, and had slept the previous night beside a quiet lake surrounded by fir trees. They had met no other dragons since leaving Scoff, although they had occasionally sighted a circle or part-circle of boulders embedded in the ground: more evidence of giants at work. Since they were no obvious threat, the two young dragons had paid them little attention.\n\nThe air cooled noticeably as they flew higher. All of a sudden the Low Mountains did not look so low and their confident plan to avoid the pass at Aether's Cross and simply fly right over the peaks collapsed with frightening ease. The mountains looked solid and deadly in their sparkling armour of ice and snow. Deadly, too, in the bitter cold they promised. They marched across the dragons' path with massive authority, meeting sea mist in the far west and rising ominously in the east to meet the ghostly, half-seen giants which Cumber identified as the great mountains of the Spine.\n\n'Be thankful we're not headed there,' he said with a shiver. 'Even Ordinal never ventured along the Spine. It's said that if you follow them east and then north, you'll reach the crest of the world. These so-called Low Mountains high enough for me.'\n\n'And cold,' added Fortune. 'Can't you use your magic?'\n\n'Hmm, well, I suppose I might be able to contain us in a ball of warm air for a while but I couldn't keep it up because what you Naturals don't seem to understand is that charm takes energy, you see, and it would inhibit my flight charm so we'd be slowed down too, and then there's ...'\n\n'Okay, okay. Just asking. Well, Aether's Cross it is, then.'\n\nThey picked up the line of a broad river that thundered in a mighty cataract from the great gash of the mountain pass. The ominous entrance to the ravine defied them to penetrate its depths, and it was with trepidation that they battled their way through the crashing spray and finally passed up into the lower reaches of the Cross.\n\nSheer rock walls dwarfed the dragons. They felt belittled under the majestic gaze of the grey mountains. The gorge twisted its way south, the river rising below them and growing narrower as they gradually approached its source. The ragged walls closed in and they began to fly in single file.\n\nThe sun flashed briefly overhead, high and harsh in the thread of sky trapped between the ice at the canyon's remote crown, painting tiny dragon shadows on the water far, far below. The air felt thin and cold despite the midday sun and Fortune's muscles protested at the extra effort he needed to buoy his body in the rarefied atmosphere.\n\nWhat had Scoff said as they parted? Keep west? Well, west was a wall of rock to their right, east its twin to their left \u2014 there was nothing to choose between the two.\n\nDid you fly this way, mother?\n\nThe noon sun disappeared from the gap of sky above them and the temperature dropped sharply. Ahead was a tight turn, the way forward concealed by a jagged corner of rock, and a new chill joined the tingle of coldness in Fortune's spine: fear.\n\nThe walls clamped even tighter as the two dragons negotiated what turned out to be a sharp double bend in the ravine. Far below them the river churned and hammered its way through rapids, the snake shape mirrored in the slit of sky high over their heads.\n\nFortune's left wingtip grazed the canyon wall as, mesmerised by the awesome scale of the geography, he drifted too far from the safe, central course. Scree scattered from a narrow ledge and tumbled down into the water, the splashes quite lost in the boiling foam, and he juddered back to the middle.\n\n'Steady!' called Cumber, seeing Fortune's near-miss. 'There's no room for error in here, that's for certain.'\n\n'I was going to try flying higher!' shouted Fortune over the crash of the river. 'But it gets even narrower up there. And I'm not sure my wings would hold the air, it's so thin.'\n\n'You'd be surprised how high a dragon can fly.'\n\n'I hope I never have to find out.'\n\nThe gorge squeezed them tight until it seemed they could go on no further. Ahead was a featureless grey chicane that they entered in fear for their lives. The river raced hungrily below; the sky watched, impassive, above; they disappeared from each other's line of sight and were, for a breath or two, in limbo.\n\nThen rock lips peeled apart and spat the dragons out. Behind them the passage they had just traversed shrank to a mere crack in a steep cliff opening out into the comparatively wide gorge through which they now flew. In truth it was barely as wide as the initial stages of the pass back at the junction of foothill and mountain but to the two young adventurers it was literally a breath of fresh air.\n\nFortune laughed with relief while Cumber swooped drunkenly behind him. We need to rest, he thought, appalled by his own fatigue. He angled towards the western heights and away from Cumber, who was virtually looping the loop in delight. Rest and gather our thoughts.\n\n'Nests!' cried Cumber, banking swiftly above Fortune's head, his slipstream buffeting the young Natural as he swept past.\n\nSure enough there on the west cliff, clinging to the ragged rock face like limpets, were nests. The nests of the natural dragons of Aether's Cross.\n\nAnd they were empty. All of them.\n\nIt took Fortune several passes before he was able to alight next to Cumber on the tiny ledge his friend had chosen. While Cumber had wielded a flight charm to aid his landing Fortune had to battle with the treacherous draughts and eddies whipping around the canyon wall, and it was with growing respect for the denizens of the Cross \u2014 wherever they may have been \u2014 that he finally managed the tricky stall and lunge necessary to touch down on the outcrop.\n\nThere they clung panting, recovering their composure as they surveyed what had once been a thriving dragon settlement. The west cliff sloped back at a steep angle, boasting a vast network of cracks and ledges on which dragons had woven the fabric of a community. Nests sprawled over the side of the gorge in every direction, the brushwood from which they were constructed light and economical. But an aura of threat seemed to hover over them. They looked scruffy and unkempt, as though they had been abandoned suddenly. Though there was no evidence of violence, no bodies, no signs of war or fire, Fortune and Cumber agreed that they needed to stay alert.\n\nAcross the canyon the opposite cliff was much steeper \u2014 almost vertical in fact \u2014 and flawed by a single ledge that described a meandering line along its face. Immediately above this ledge were spaced seven holes of varying size, all roughly circular, all uncompromisingly black... dangerous cyclops' eyes staring blindly. The entrances to the caverns of the Charmed.\n\nWhat happened here? Fortune wondered.\n\n'We shouldn't stay here too long,' said Cumber. 'I mean, Scoff did warn us and it feels... it feels creepy.' He eyed Fortune and added, 'Whatever happened here, we can't do anything about it. Fortune, we have to keep moving. We can't afford to interfere.'\n\nCan he read my mind? thought Fortune. Can he?\n\n'And no,' continued Cumber, 'I can't read your mind if that's what you're thinking. You want to investigate \u2014 it's obvious by the look on your face. All right, so you're curious about what's happened here, well, so am I, but unlike you I don't believe we can do anything about it.'\n\n'What makes you think I...?'\n\n'You want proof that these Naturals are safe because you don't want to believe that all Charmed are evil. Well, I can tell you here and now that they're not all evil... just insane.'\n\nIt was with bitterness that Cumber intoned these last words and Fortune saw briefly the depth of his friend's despair. He realised that the sinister tunnel entrances must surely be beckoning to Cumber. After all, for him they represented home.\n\nFortune looked again at the deserted nests. Something terrible had happened here, he knew it. And also...\n\n'And I know you think your mother might be here,' continued Cumber more gently, 'but there's nothing we can do.'\n\nFortune shuddered, for it seemed that Cumber could follow his thoughts more clearly than he could himself. 'Scoff said that Naturals had been taken captive here,' he said. 'If she came this way she might have been taken too; we might be taken.'\n\n'All the more reason to fly straight through.'\n\n'But what if the Natural really are prisoners here?'\n\n'Then that is what we will tell Halcyon so that he can decide what to do. Unless of course you're thinking of flying straight into those tunnels and coming back out again with a wingful of dragons you've rescued from the clutches of the evil Charmed, among them your mother?'\n\nFortune could only sigh.\n\n'I just thought there might be more to all this than just flying south and telling our tale to this Halcyon of yours. Can't we be more than just messengers? Can't we do something to help, just for one dragon? Instead of running away all the time?'\n\n'But this is for all dragons, Fortune! If you want adventure you'll have to pick some other companion because that's not what I'm here for, oh no \u2014 I'm here to do what Ordinal told me to do, and I'm afraid that \"adventure\" \u2014 which I can see from the look in your eyes means \"danger\" \u2014 is the last thing I want to have to deal with. Fighting every dragon we meet and freeing prisoners is not my idea of carrying out our mission in the most efficient way possible, in fact I might even go so far as to say that... '\n\n'Shut up!'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Shut up, Cumber, and listen.'\n\nCumber closed his mouth with a clack, his nerves instantly tingling, but he could hear nothing over the din of the river. 'What?' he hissed. 'You'll be seeing ghosts next.'\n\n'I thought I did,' whispered Fortune. 'Over there, on the other side of the canyon, near the tunnels.'\n\nCumber peered through the haze, tuning his tired senses as he probed for magic in the air.\n\n'There's a lot of charm in that cliff,' he murmured. 'Makes it hard to... wait!' He scented the air then shook his head. 'Just ghosts!' he proclaimed loudly, turning back to Fortune. 'Now, are you coming with me?'\n\nFortune stared at his companion, then looked back at the tunnel entrances. The air moved like a heat haze in front of them.\n\nGhosts?\n\n'No,' he replied carefully. 'There's something we must do here.'\n\n'Oh, Fortune!' exclaimed Cumber. 'And what precisely would that be, do you think?'\n\n'I don't know! I just know there's something. Cumber, there hasn't been a battle here, you can see that. The natural dragons have just disappeared. Why?'\n\n'I don't know and I don't care! All I know, Fortune, and you would be as well to remember this, is that we've got to get to Covamere before we're captured ourselves, and the longer we stay here the more likely that is! Now come on!'\n\n'No,' said Fortune quietly as Cumber opened his wings and ventured to the edge of the terrace.\n\nThey gazed hard at each other, each testing the other. But the argument was never resolved for it was at that moment that the sky burst open.\n\nThe air boiled as four charmed dragons leaped from behind cloaks of dimness and into visibility. Their rutted, metallic hides glittered with the blue sparks of the flight charms keeping them aloft; their wingbeats were utterly silent. They crashed on to Fortune and Cumber with the ferocity of a firestorm.\n\nPolished talons grabbed Fortune as Cumber struggled to break away, spitting orange fire at his attackers until one of them knocked him unconscious with a blow of its heavy wing.\n\nThe charms employed by the approaching dragons to render themselves invisible to their unsuspecting prey flickered in and out of existence as if forgotten by their makers. Thus Fortune caught only glimpses of his captors: a half-cloaked talon, the far cliff dimly visible through its hazy form; a pair of forelimbs, viciously serrated, along their whole length; a malevolent red eye.\n\nThen he was scooped up and flying, or rather being flown, across the gorge. Broken shards of charm cascaded from the dragons who had so brutally seized them, gradually revealing their true shapes, although even those seemed to melt and shift before his eyes. Spines stretched and fangs bent and he heard a name hissed across the rushing wind:\n\n'Brutace!'\n\nA single tunnel swallowed them all. As the dragons passed from light to dark an outcrop of rock struck Fortune a heavy blow on the side of his head. In the darkness he saw a sudden explosion of light and then the world slipped away.\n\nThe sun had moved mere fraction of its arc across the sky before a second, ragged band of dragons flew unchallenged through the Cross. Into the wide place they swept before proceeding on into the southern pass, their wings taking them swiftly and efficiently past the remains of the Naturals' nests without slowing, without noticing the strangeness of the nests' abandonment.\n\nShatter it was who set the pace, while behind him flew Torque and Tumely. Wood brought up the rear, urging and reassuring his father who slapped his burnt and broken wings in agonising rhythm, determined yet to follow the dragon he still idolised. The sixth dragon had abandoned the group not longer after making landfall.\n\nThrough the Cross they passed, ignorant of the drama that had unfolded there scant breaths before. Except perhaps Wood who, as he entered the narrow gap of the southern pass, muttered Fortune's name, unsure of what had brought his friend to mind.\n\nBut Fortune was surely dead, killed in the battle of South Point if not drowned in its hidden caves.\n\nFortune, too, thought himself dead. Blackness engulfed him. Dimly glowing circles turned lazily somewhere behind his eyes.\n\nYou are travelling.\n\nThe voice was in his mind but it was not his own.\n\nThere is a place where lost dragons can be found.\n\nVision flowered, watery and distorted. The circles became spirals, complex patterns spinning about each other in an endless parade, a vortex completing another turn, a world revolving.\n\nThe images coalesced to form a single shape: a ring made up of tiny, irregular dots. He was floating above a ring of islands in the sea. At their centre was a reef. Fortune floated higher, taking the whole scene within his gaze.\n\nThis place has always been here. The voice was that of his mother. It is called Haven. You can be safe here. Here the lost are found...\n\nThe voice drifted away. A new sound, a steady drumming, took its place. He drifted higher above the ring of islands with the reef at its centre until they had vanished into the black ocean.\n\nThe drumming grew unbearably loud, hammering at the void in which he floated, and Fortune recognised it for what it was.\n\nWingbeats.\n\nThe stroke of wings greater than the world, the beat of some mighty dragon carving its way through the void itself. The beat of doom.\n\nFortune's view expanded still further until the ocean was a shadow in a vast, yellow eye. The eye blinked slowly, tears tumbling about its lids as they closed, opened, and a new voice resounded in the jaundiced light.\n\nI know you are there, Natural, it said.\n\nIt can't see me, thought Fortune, repressing panic. It wants me but it can't see me.\n\nThe eye exploded towards him, its fruitless search abandoned in a storm of rage.\n\nA tantrum, thought Fortune.\n\nDragons were hurled past him, natural and charmed alike. Their limbs tore and dissolved, their wings ripped and burned, their faces screamed and shattered. Dragons pleaded for help as they writhed past in agony but Fortune closed his mind against the vision, for to reach out would be to expose himself to the enemy.\n\nHe can smell me, but he can't see me!\n\nWith a supreme effort he turned in a strange sideways direction and fled the carnage.\n\nA soothing glow appeared. Colours flashed across his vision and he returned to the world he knew.\n\nThe rainbow hovered just out of reach. A charm, shining in the air like those in the caverns at South Point, the coloured light it radiated glancing off the walls of the cave...\n\nCave?\n\n'Cumber!' he cried, sitting up then instantly regretting it as a spear of pain thrust its way through his head. Groaning, he flopped back on to the cold, hard floor.\n\n'Ssh,' came a female voice. 'Don't try to move.'\n\nMother?\n\nFortune turned his head to see a young Natural looking anxiously down at him, her face painted with worry.\n\n'Hello,' she said. 'I'm Gossamer.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Mad Dragons",
                "text": "Cumber opened his eyes to see a parade of teeth.\n\nThe teeth were yellow, looked very sharp and framed a smile that all but split in two the face of the charmed dragon who wore it. Hot, stale breath washed over him and Cumber sneezed heavily. A lazy claw cuffed him over the head with astonishing force, reawakening the pain from the heavy blow he had already received while being carried into the tunnels.\n\n'All right, Snot,' the dragon rumbled, 'who are you?'\n\n'Cum ...' said Cumber then, thinking better of revealing his true name, began again. 'Cummion.'\n\n'Think I'll call you \"Snot\" anyway.'\n\nThe dragon turned clumsily away and lunged at a line of shadowy shapes on the cave wall behind him. Cumber could just make out... something, hanging there... but what they were he could not guess. His vision was blurred.\n\nCumber had managed to identify the shapes as being brown and round when a crunching sound came from the dragon's jaws. He turned back, smiling even more extravagantly, champing indelicately on the object he had snatched from the wall. Fur and bones danced between his teeth as he gulped back what Cumber now understood to be one of several thousand dead rats suspended by their tails all around the small cave.\n\nA food store, he thought, trying to gather his wits. The smiling dragon belched in his face.\n\n'You're thinking you're in the pantry,' said the dragon, picking chunks of rat flesh from between his teeth. 'Too right, Snot. Food's what we keep down here and you'll do just as well as the rats when you've been, ah, tenderised! There's not enough of you for four, mind. I think I'll have you all to myself.'\n\nCumber shrank back against the wall as the foul-breathed dragon loomed over him, claws extended to grasp his body. A tiny eyeball clung to the tip of one of his yellow fangs. Cumber prepared to bolt for an exit he had not yet even located.\n\n'Hex!' bellowed a new voice. 'Guard duty, prison level. NOW!'\n\nThe effect on Hex was startling. Dorsal spines cringed against his back, eyes dulled and his mouth shut with a snap. He retreated instantly, head bowed, shuffling sideways out of the cave and skirting respectfully around the dark, gleaming dragon who had entered so quietly behind him.\n\n'Just teasing the little one, Brutace. Just a joke, just a tease.'\n\n'Shut up, Hex,' intoned Brutace. 'Now get out of here before I string you up by the tail along with all the other rats.'\n\n'Yes, Brutace. Sorry, Brutace.'\n\nHex lunged out into the tunnel beyond the exit, eyes fixed on the floor until he was out of Brutace's sight, whereupon he glanced back and flashed Cumber a dangerous look. Then he was gone.\n\nCumber thought fast. I may not be a Natural but I was caught with one. Still, they haven't killed me yet.\n\n'Speak!' barked Brutace.\n\nBut Cumber needed to think. There was a good chance that Fortune was still alive, held captive here in the Charmed caverns along with the other Naturals. And where had Hex just been sent?\n\nThe prison level.\n\nCumber's task was clear enough: find Fortune and escape. But how?\n\n'Have you lost your tongue?' Brutace asked in a voice filled with menace.\n\nCumber licked his lips. Brutace was overwhelming, surely a chieftain here, perhaps even some kind of warlord. How could he, Cumber, possibly outwit such a dragon?\n\nWell, I can try!\n\n'My lord,' he began, bowing his head enough to suggest the traditional acknowledgement of a charmed dragon meeting a superior, but not so much as to suggest that Brutace was all that superior. 'My master will be most pleased with the way you have handled this situation.'\n\nAnd he realised that, however unwittingly, he had said exactly the right thing. Before he could even begin to spin out his lie of how he had been sent here to test the defences of Aether's Cross, Brutace's jaw was already dropping wide with astonishment.\n\n'The Master? He has sent you?'\n\nAlthough he no longer felt entirely in control of the conversation Cumber decided to improvise upon his bluff.\n\n'The Master has sent me,' he agreed, wondering who 'the Master' might be. 'The dragon who was with me is not a Natural, but a charmed dragon in disguise ...'\n\nAnd so he proceeded to spin his tale, filling it with oblique references to this unknown 'Master'. Fear masked Brutace's face to begin with, although as he let Cumber ramble on that was replaced in part by suspicion. That he was afraid of 'the Master' was obvious but Cumber soon realised that it would take more than clever words to convince Brutace of the veracity of his story.\n\nWhen Cumber had finished his tale, Brutace nodded thoughtfully, scrutinising his captive storyteller with a keen gaze. Don't shiver, thought Cumber as he stared back.\n\nBut it was not easy. Brutace stood solidly before him, a coil of muscle studded with bony blades. His tough hide was silver-grey, shining beneath the glow of the cave's floating light charm. Unlike Cumber's his wings were large and thick, glittering with stored flight charm. The wide face that topped a long, sinuous neck was coated with backward-facing spines. It was quite without expression.\n\nHere is a dragon of power, thought Cumber. Here is a dragon of war.\n\n'An interesting story,' said Brutace at length. 'If it is true, then your friend will be freed. You have earned your own freedom for now but only within the confines of these caves. If you attempt to leave or to free your friend you will both die. I have much to do now. Tomorrow night you will prove your story. If you cannot... then I will kill you both.'\n\nHe spun his massive bulk out of the cave with oily grace and slipped away into the gloom of the tunnel.\n\nCumber began to shake uncontrollably, shock and relief seizing his muscles. Rats swung around him like rotten fruits as he flopped against the hard wall, quite exhausted. Little by little the tremors abated and he began to consider Brutace's parting words.\n\n'Tomorrow night,' the charmed commander had said. Cumber glanced at the floating charm which, like those in South Point, seemed also to be a time-telling device; if he was not mistaken, the blue fringe around the otherwise pink globe indicated that it was nearly midnight.\n\nI have less than a day, then.\n\nBrutace had at least confirmed that Fortune was still alive \u2014 presumably imprisoned somewhere within the cave system. And what had Hex said? 'There's not enough of you for four ...' So, the Charmed garrison here was small.\n\nEven so, two against four. Poor odds, but perhaps if they had surprise on their side...\n\nCumber laughed despite himself, a dry chuckle. Fighting dragons and freeing prisoners? It seemed that Fortune had dragged him into an adventure after all.\n\nIf I fail to get us out we're both dead.\n\nThe only cloud obscuring Cumber's otherwise clear view of their predicament was his memory of Brutace's initial look of terror when he had innocently referred to 'the Master'.\n\nSuch a look of terror on a dragon as powerful as the fearsome Brutace?\n\nWho \u2014 or what \u2014 was the Master?\n\n'It all started the night we saw the Black Dragon,' Gossamer said. 'He \u2014 I suppose it was a he \u2014 dropped out of the sky. He was terrifying... but he was beautiful too, somehow...' She frowned, a little puzzled it seemed as she remembered the contradiction of that moment: the dragon's darkness, his lack of form, his strange, ethereal beauty. 'I could almost have believed he was a saviour. Instead he ravaged the Cross.'\n\nFortune listened aghast as Gossamer described the sudden flames which had jetted from the seven tunnels later that night. The bursts of fire had been short and intense, extending over halfway across the canyon although never quite touching the nests of the Naturals. Not for Aether's Cross the conflagration of South Point. Something that was, in its way, worse.\n\nCharmed dragons had poured forth in the wake of the fire and fallen upon their natural neighbours. They had singled out the young, strong Naturals and bound them with cords made from liquid flame, before transporting them limp across the ravine and into the tunnels. Only when dawn had finally begun to threaten the night were the infants and elderly taken. Among them Gossamer and Brace.\n\n'We watched them take our family and friends,' sobbed Gossamer, breaking down. 'I'm s-sorry, F-Fortune. This is the first time I've spoken of it. The first time I've actually admitted to myself what happened here ...'\n\nAs she spoke Fortune found himself swallowed by her eyes. Even though he was entirely captivated by the terrible tale she had to tell, absorbing every detail of it, he felt oddly distanced from it too. His focus was less on the story than on the storyteller. On Gossamer.\n\nAre these the feelings Wood tried to tell me of?\n\nFortune recalled a rare moment of poetry in Wood. They had been lazing together on the practise slopes of South Point; the young males had finished their jousting in the low skies and now it was the turn of the females to swoop over the burnt tree stump. First to fly, as always, was Caprice, who for many moons had been the centre of Wood's attention. Unlike her competitors, who tended to swoop in dramatic dives from which they pulled out only at the last possible moment, she would instead hover over the stump, motionless but for the steady, languid beats of her wings holding her in position. Then she would pluck delicately at the target with an outstretched claw, hold her proud head high aloft and drift away as if on a breeze.\n\n'What a wonder she is,' Wood had said.\n\nAs far as Fortune was concerned, Caprice was just a show-off. But now, listening to Gossamer, he thought he understood something of how Wood might have felt.\n\n'It's all right,' he said Fortune, draping his wing awkwardly around her. She pressed close to him, hitching in her breath in great gulps until gradually the tears subsided.\n\n'I'm okay,' she sniffed. 'I can't even remember how long ago it happened \u2014 I can't keep track of the time down here.'\n\n'When did all this happen? Was it many days ago?'\n\n'Not many. Five or six maybe.'\n\nFortune expected her to pull away from him as she recovered her composure but she did not. Instead she nuzzled closer into his flank and continued her story.\n\n'Brace and I were hiding by then, of course. There aren't any proper caves on our side of the Cross, just a few hollows and scrapes. We were huddled at the back of one of the deeper ones, just waiting to be captured. The Charmed were patrolling everywhere. Then suddenly these two charmed dragons were gliding towards us. They were h-h-huge.'\n\n'You don't have to tell me,' said Fortune.\n\n'It's all right. I want to. The charmed dragons landed right in front of us, and they were about to grab us when Thant jumped in front of them. He must have been hiding too.'\n\n'Thant?'\n\n'A very old dragon, so tottery on his wings he can barely fly. Anyway, the first Charmed grabbed me, and the second one \u2014 who was about to go for Brace \u2014 grabbed Thant instead.' She shivered. 'Brace went mad.'\n\n'Because they'd taken you?'\n\n'No \u2014 because they hadn't taken him. Don't you see? He was already angry that they hadn't considered him worth picking off in the first wave, and when they chose Thant over him, well ...'\n\n'Your brother wanted to be caught?'\n\n'Of course not. But he didn't want to be overlooked. So he rushed at them, shouting and screaming. But he was too late. They already had me and Thant in the air. As they flew away, one of them said to the other, \"We'll pick up fatty later.\"' A tear trickled down Gossamer's scaly cheek. 'Brace flew after us, but he couldn't keep up. He looked so angry... and so crushed. I suppose they must have taken him shortly afterwards.'\n\nShe stopped, as though a chapter of her tale were over. Fortune breathed in her silence.\n\n'This Black Dragon,' he said at length. 'Did you see him again?'\n\n'No. But I knew he was controlling the Charmed. Charmed dragons are not bad dragons, Fortune, but if a bad dragon takes control of them then terrible things will happen. Have happened.'\n\nFortune nodded. He had already told Gossamer briefly of the fall of South Point. He had also told her about Cumber and their mission to reach Covamere. It did not even occur to him that he might have blabbed secret information. Being here with Gossamer, sharing stories with her, seemed the most natural thing in the world. Seemed, in fact, meant to be.\n\n'We'd better move away from the wall,' said Gossamer suddenly. She raised herself from his side with a graceful, fluid movement. 'They'll be sending the water through soon.'\n\nBemused, Fortune followed her to the other side of the small cave that was their cell. A small patch of rock in the ceiling glowed, casting a flat light over the milky-white walls, which were uncannily smooth. Seamless in fact. No way in, and no way out.\n\n'How did we get in here?' asked Fortune, amazed as for the first time he realised the impossibility of their predicament. 'How can we even breathe?'\n\n'Oh, that's charm,' replied Gossamer airily. 'Either there's a hole in the wall which we can't see, disguised by earth charm or some such magic, or else there isn't really an entrance and they just push us through as needed.'\n\nShe spoke so authoritatively that Fortune could not help but smile.\n\n'You seem to know a lot about charm.'\n\n'I'm interested.'\n\n'So am I.'\n\nThey shared a glance.\n\n'Where I come from,' stammered Fortune, wondering why his tongue felt so helpless in his mouth, 'there's very little magic. I've always wanted to know more about it. Here in the Heartland it all seems more real. It's as if legends are springing to life before my eyes.'\n\n'Charm is a wonder,' agreed Gossamer. 'You should meet Ant.'\n\n'Ant?' asked Fortune suspiciously, his heart sinking a little. 'Oh, I suppose he's a friend of yours.'\n\nShe regarded him with a puzzled expression, then chuckled. 'Oh, Fortune! Ant's not a dragon. He's a sprite!'\n\nFortune ducked his head, embarrassed. 'A sprite? Then I suppose he must be ...'\n\nBut he got no further. As if in response to this talk of charm the cave seemed somehow to tense around them. A brilliant point of light stabbed from the far wall and expanded into a network of lines and spirals. From the web of light a crackling sound emerged; the air thickened with the smell of lightning. The web solidified with a great, wounded crack and for the briefest of intervals Fortune was looking through the rock wall and into a corridor beyond.\n\nThen everything snapped shut, as though the rock were just a pattern etched into the weave of some greater fabric which had been folded briefly out of sight.\n\nExcept now the wall was punctured in two places, one high and one low, with a channel formed between. A narrow stream trickled between the two new holes.\n\n'That happens twice a day, as near as I can judge,' said Gossamer. 'Drinking water!'\n\n'Race you!' cried Fortune.\n\nTheir worries temporarily forgotten, they scrambled over each other to get to the fall of crystal water playing gently against the milky-white wall of their cell.\n\nCumber left the smelly foodstore with its festoons of rats and ventured into the corridor. The rock walls were quite unlike anything Cumber was used to. Familiar shale and granite were absent here, replaced by white limestone, its surfaces translucent as frozen milk beneath the glow of the floating light charms.\n\nBrutace was nowhere to be seen; nor was there any sign of the sly Hex.\n\nCautiously he made his way down the wide, winding tunnel. Gradually the light grew brighter until, after a sharp turn to the left, he found himself at the entrance to another cave.\n\nInside, dark against the pale walls, two dragons were locked in a furious tug of war, their metallic grey jaws hauling on opposite halves of the object of their desire \u2014 a single rat. The two dragons differed in appearance so greatly as to be comical: where the one was running distinctly to fat the other was skinny to the point of emaciation. And yet, despite his vast weight advantage, the larger of them was having enormous difficulty even standing his ground, let alone winning the rat from his opponent's jaws.\n\nBlue sparks showered from the thin dragon's back as he spent charm frantically, locking his wiry body into immobility; the fat dragon seemed to be relying entirely on brute force. The rat was remarkably durable.\n\nCumber cleared his throat and both dragons rolled their eyes towards him, mute surprise distracting them from their contest. Thin jaws relaxed before fat ones and the larger dragon somersaulted backwards, propelled entirely by his own bulk into a nest of dry branches which scattered like autumn leaves.\n\nSilence.\n\nThen the thin dragon started cackling with laughter. As he laughed stray magic rippled out from his body and lifted dust from the floor in tiny whirlwinds.\n\nThe rat dangled lifeless between the fat dragon's teeth. Realising his triumph, he threw his head back and gulped it down whole. A satisfied smile broke across his cavernous mouth.\n\n'Hahaha!' The thin dragon continued to laugh, then the grin that split his skeletal face suddenly disappeared, exchanged instantly for a dangerous snarl.\n\n'Could kill him, Rite,' he said, 'but Brutace says not. What do you say, Cummion?'\n\nThis last question was directed at Cumber and it was several blinks before he remembered the false name he had given to Hex. Knowledge that his deceit was working at least in part restored his confidence and he puffed out his chest in a show of confidence. Eyeing the battle spurs and razor scales that decorated the bodies of this strange pair, he recognised them at last as two of the four dragons who had attacked him and Fortune the previous day.\n\nThe fat dragon sat mute, frowning in his nest of broken branches, staring intently at the floor as if trying to solve some unfathomable problem. He was motionless but for the tip of his heavy tail, which described precise circles in the air behind him. When he made as if to speak, the thin one's expression switched again from aggression back to glee.\n\n'Brutace says not to tell him anything,' he rasped. 'Well, Rite, you shouldn't tell him that Brutace says not to tell, should you? Fat rat! Fat rat! Hahaahaha!'\n\nWhen Scoff said they were mad he meant it.\n\nCumber sighed inwardly. This so-called disease that had rendered the Charmed of South Point slow and bitter had turned these dragons into dribbling idiots.\n\nAs if to prove his point, fat Rite began slowly to blow bubbles.\n\nCumber looked at these two dragons and for a moment felt sorry for them. Then he took a deep breath and said, 'Well, dragons, are you hungry?'\n\nSuddenly docile, they stared at him. And so he taught them to cook.\n\nThat they had never learned such elementary charm astonished him but the enthusiasm with which they tore into the steaming rat flesh he had grilled over a gentle fire was proof enough of their ignorance. Before long they had filled their bellies and even the thin dragon, whose name was Stition, was showing a remarkable paunch on his otherwise scrawny frame.\n\nFor his part Cumber ate enough of the foul-tasting meat to fuel his stomach, for it had been a whole day and more since his last meal. During the meal he learned that Hex was on guard duty all day while Brutace scoured a far flank of the colony to check for any last Naturals hidden there. But, try as he might, he could not persuade Stition to divulge Fortune's whereabouts.\n\nFull with rat meat, Stition and Rite fell asleep, leaving Cumber marginally the wiser and free to explore the rest of the cave system.\n\nLeaving Rite and Stition to their slumber, he continued along the corridor until he reached another, much bigger cave. One wide tunnel led straight and slightly upwards. The freshness of the air wafting down it told Cumber that this was the way back to the surface.\n\nTwo smaller tunnels led deeper into the mountain.\n\nTaking the first of these, Cumber found that it led to a Great Chamber much larger than that of South Point \u2014 but just as deserted. Here the Council Seats were still intact, yet still it felt cold and broken; Cumber did not linger there. Leaving this dead end to its gloom and desolation, he returned instead to the junction cave.\n\nHe scented the air down the other, smaller tunnel. Natural dragons! He could smell them. This had to be the way to the prison cells. Fortune would be there, somewhere. So would Hex.\n\nI could go back to Rite and Stition, kill them now while they're sleeping, he thought suddenly. Then I can go down to the prison, kill Hex, and rescue Fortune and the other Naturals, and then...\n\n...then Brutace would return to find the captured dragons freed and ready to face him. An army of dragons.\n\nOf natural dragons...\n\nDragons who would almost certainly kill the first Charmed they laid eyes upon, even if it were the very dragon who had set them free. Fortune, as a fellow Natural, might convince them to let Cumber live but which cell held Fortune? None of the four guards had let that secret slip and without that knowledge Cumber would as likely open a cell on a murderous vigilante as on his dearest friend.\n\nBut he knew this logic concealed a deeper truth: he could not kill another dragon in cold blood. Perhaps not at all.\n\nSome adventurer!\n\nEscape was the thing. Before he could even think of rescuing Fortune he must had to a way out of the caverns.\n\nExcited by the thought of greeting the open air again, Cumber trotted up the wide, straight way that led, he hoped, to the outside world. It was only then that he discovered the true complexity of the cave system of Aether's Cross.\n\nThe seven entrances that led to the tunnels inside the Cross existed for one purpose only: confusion. Aether's Cross was a strategically placed settlement on what had once been one of the greatest journeyways in the Heartland, and it was defended with care.\n\nIts first gambit was to make no one entrance superior to any other. For that reason, there was no such thing as a main route into the caverns. Immediately inside each of the seven cave mouths, the tunnel split into two, then each of those into two again, and again and again until each entrance had spawned sixteen passageways. The tunnels rose and fell, twisted and deceived so that all sense of direction would quickly be lost. As a deterrent to entry it was unparallelled.\n\nHaving confidently travelled the single inner tunnel to the point where it met this writhing maze, Cumber swiftly became bogged down by the outer system's complexity. Even after an age of exploring he managed to locate only three of the seven exits, only to find two of them blocked by invisible walls of charm. Now, as he neared the third exit, he sensed no such magical barrier.\n\nStill, it would pay to be careful.\n\nHe crept forward hesitantly towards the narrow triangle of light that beckoned him outside, nerves armed against the slightest hint of danger, wings and limbs clenched tight to his sides where they pulsed with the beating of his heart.\n\nThe air here was still and heavy, as though the very rock were stagnant. A smell like marsh gas reached his nostrils.\n\nThis is wrong.\n\nAnd indeed it was. This close to one of the exits there should have been an appreciable draught. This high in the mountains it should have been cold too.\n\nThe air was motionless.\n\nThe air was hot.\n\nCumber thought he knew why.\n\nReaching cautiously in front of him he probed the air with a tentative claw. Nothing happened.\n\n'It's there somewhere,' he muttered under his breath and slithered forward cautiously. Now his claws encountered a slight resistance, a sponginess in the air. The rank, marshy smell was stronger, turning his stomach over. He closed his nostrils against it and pushed one outstretched claw gently forwards.\n\nFor an instant the odour disappeared utterly and the air was clear and true, as though whatever force was generating the smell had momentarily turned its attention elsewhere. Then it returned, redoubled... and took shape.\n\nCumber, his reflexes charged to capacity, had already snatched his claw away and was leaping back down the corridor away from the daylight when the floor ahead began to flex and bubble like the waters of an angry lake. Great, swelling globes heaved upwards from the vibrating rock, glowing with a terrible, internal light, and as he scrambled even further away they started to rupture. Dark, half-seen shapes struggled within, eager to escape the yellow light that imprisoned them.\n\nBut then a kind of a sigh swept down the tunnel. The huge bubbles of rock, which dwarfed the fleeing Cumber, paused in their moment of birth... and subsided, the cracks that had begun to craze their glistening surfaces closing over.\n\nAs Cumber retreated still further they sagged reluctantly back, until they finally flattened back down to become again the smooth white floor on to which, had he not been so cautious, he would innocently have walked.\n\nThe sigh faded away, the breath of a frustrated monster.\n\nCumber hitched in a great breath of his own and leaned heavily against the tunnel wall.\n\nBrutace had sealed the system against escape.\n\nCumber considered those curious bubbles of rock as he made his way back down the main tunnel. Fire charm he had seen before but this was different \u2014 more alive.\n\nThis is the Heartland, he thought. Magic is stronger here. To defeat it I must take on the Realm. For the first time in my life I must become a true wielder of fire charm!\n\nWhat had been inside those bubbles?\n\nParched, yellow shadows moving in broken light!\n\nHe was definitely out of his depth. Escape was a different proposition now. Even if he did manage to release Fortune before tonight, how would they breach the charms guarding the exits? He supposed he might be able to set up a countering charm to combat the defences but would it be strong enough?\n\nIt will have to be.\n\nYet he still had no idea exactly where Fortune was being held.\n\nCumber hurried back towards the deep system, terribly anxious now. Reaching the junction cave he heard distant snores and decided to check on Rite and Stition. They were just as he had left them, sprawled on the floor of the otherwise empty cave. Frustrated, Cumber the shimmering limestone interior for any clue, any lever he might use to set a plan moving.\n\nBlank walls. Sleeping guards. A narrow channel set halfway up the far wall to carry drinking water through the chamber.\n\nNothing.\n\nThe chattering water sparked Cumber's thirst. Crossing to the channel, he splashed his snout into the water and drank gratefully, glad to get rid of the cloying, marshy smell still clinging to his nostrils. The coldness of the water was refreshing, its taste clean and pure.\n\nIn mid-gulp, he saw something that made him catch his breath.\n\nTiny, silver shapes were darting about beneath the surface of the water. Cumber squinted, struggling to focus on the small, glistening forms.\n\nMinute creatures they were, each barely the size of a tadpole, each bearing a silver fishtail and a slender body with mobile, finned arms and crowned with a delicate, pointed head. Silver hair framed them like auras of light.\n\nThe water sprites regarded Cumber with calm, intelligent eyes.\n\nFascinated, he watched them dance their underwater ballet. He had heard of such creatures, of course, but the Heartland had granted him his first sight of them. He was overwhelmed by their pristine beauty.\n\nWater ran indelicately out of his nostrils as he gazed upon them enraptured.\n\n'... em... ba...'\n\nThe high, sweet voice pierced the air.\n\n'Em... ba...'\n\nCumber bent close to the laughing water, trying to separate the splash of the wavelets from the strange words of the sprites. One of them broke surface briefly, fighting against the water tension like a dragon caught in a downdraught.\n\n'K... em... ba' it whispered in its loudest cry.\n\nK... em... ba. Kemba.\n\nCumber?\n\n'Yes,' said Cumber at once. The sprites turned and rolled, fighting the current.\n\n'K... em... ba... go.'\n\nGo. Go where?\n\n'... go... wa... teh... ful.'\n\nWaterfall?\n\nA wave swept through the water, tumbling the sprites in its wake. They struggled to hold their position as they were tossed roughly around.\n\n'... rok...' came a faint cry, then suddenly the water stopped flowing and the sprites were sucked away down the length of the channel. Cumber stumbled after them but could only watch as the last of the icy water drained into a black cleft in the wall.\n\nDrinking time was over.\n\nCumber's heart pounded in his chest. At last he had a clue, a goal. The message was from Fortune, of that he had not the slightest doubt. His goal was a waterfall \u2014 find that and he would find his friend.\n\nColours pulsed through the overhead rainbow as the afternoon sped on. Stition and Rite slept alone in the white-walled cave.\n\nDeep in the tunnels of Aether's Cross, Cumber performed his first serious act of charm."
            },
            {
                "title": "Fire Charm",
                "text": "Cumber stood in the large junction chamber where the main corridor divided into three \u2014 a place he had dubbed the Switchcave \u2014 and considered the difficult escape route, the only way out of the system short of excavating a mountain's worth of solid limestone. A charmed dragon could do that, of course, given a year or two...\n\nBehind him the dust was still settling in the left-side of the three deep tunnels, fallout from the havoc he had just wreaked down there. As Rite and Stition had slept he had brought down the roof in the entrance to their cave, trapping them inside. As far as he could tell they had not even woken up.\n\nThat'll keep them quiet for a while at least.\n\nBrutace, Rite had informed him earlier, was touring the canyon today in a last search for Naturals, and would not be back until sundown.\n\nWhich left Hex.\n\nThe right-side tunnel beckoned, the way to the prison level, down which lay Hex and, Cumber hoped, Fortune.\n\nIf only I can find this waterfall.\n\nNo sound of water emerged from the tunnel, nor any hint of life. It was brightly lit by floating charms but curved gradually away to the right so that he could see only three or four tree-lengths into its depths. And so Cumber stood in the Switchcave, trying to prepare himself for what he knew must lie before him. He shook himself, but the motion failed to dislodge the odd itching sensation that had started in his head.\n\nThe itching had begun when he had brought down the tunnel ceiling to imprisoned the sleeping guards. To achieve this feat he had used a simple earth charm of the kind he had always practised. But while doing so, for the first time in his life, he had been aware of something new. It began as a stinging at the base of his skull, then became a buzz he could barely hear yet which insisted on being heard. The buzz became an itch that worried away at him even as he brought down the rock, and it plagued him still as he gazed now into the prison tunnel. And Cumber knew exactly what it was.\n\nIt was the call of the Realm.\n\nEarth charm. Fire charm. Charmed dragons practised both. Earth charm was gentle and easy, and the only kind of magic that Cumber had so far wielded. The fire he could spit from his mouth was simply a kind of lightning, a heating of the air and a concentration of natural elements into unnatural forms.\n\nFire charm was very, very different. Even as a dragon who yearned to understand the world, to comprehend the detail of things, to analyse and ponder, Cumber feared it.\n\nHe feared the Realm even more.\n\n'The Realm is the source of the fire,' Ordinal had once told him. 'Another world beyond our own. As a charmed dragon you have the power to use it, but unless you are wary the Realm will not hesitate to use you. Its powers, once unleashed, are not easily controlled.'\n\nThat had been enough for Cumber. On that day he had resolved to avoid the Realm altogether. Fire charm was not for the likes of him. The magic of the earth was enough.\n\nCumber stepped from the Switchcave into the gradual curve of the deep prison tunnel, his heart swollen with fear.\n\nIn triggering the rockfall, Cumber had without realising it crushed several of the charm webs used by Brutace and his guards to control the various services to the prison cells. Networks of charm impressed into a section of the tunnel wall operated most of the automatic systems that had been woven through the prison; Cumber had inadvertently wrecked at least half of them, with the result that many of the prisoners were now in danger of their lives.\n\nThe ragged hole through which water exited Fortune and Gossamer's cell was growing steadily smaller, its perimeter vibrating as it shrank. The two dragons watched with dawning horror as it continued to pinch shut... then was gone.\n\nOnly one hole now violated the cell, and through it was pouring a constant stream of cold water. This hole showed no sign of shrinking, and the stream it was disgorging had nowhere to go. Water splashed around Fortune's claws; already the entire floor of the cell was flooded.\n\nFortune had been drowsy from the pain of his bruised head but he suddenly felt very alert.\n\n'I think we're in trouble,' he said.\n\nWater rose through the prison. Walls shuddered randomly, betraying the sudden weakness of a system breaking down as the charm that bound them began to withdraw. But the walls did not break. Inside each of the many cells, dragons fought for their lives, each unaware of their neighbours' plight. For some there was no more air to breathe; many had lost all light; one cell had collapsed to half its original size and was shrinking.\n\nBrace's cell was small and had flooded quickly. He swam near the ceiling now, his head pressed up against the rock as the water rose higher and higher. Within a few breaths he would drown.\n\nSo cold!\n\nHope had left him but his anger remained. The Charmed had placed him here to die and it seemed now that that was what would happen. They had ignored him, taken ancient Thant instead and only returned at the end; one of the last Naturals to be captured, he was still furious.\n\n'If I ever get out of here,' he spluttered, throwing his words like blows against the ceiling as though they might somehow breach the rock, 'no dragon will ever overlook me again!'\n\nMingled with his anger was his guilt.\n\nI let them take Gossamer. She is my sister, and I should have protected her!\n\nThe water pressed him up against the white rock ceiling. One of his horns sliced into the light charm that was bobbing on the waves and it expired, leaving him in total blackness. Higher rose the icy water and with it rose his panic. He thrashed frantically and only when reason stilled his wings again did he realised that the coldness had now completely enveloped him. If he inhaled now he would be taking the last, liquid breath of his life.\n\nDespite his anger, despite his guilt, something inside Brace decided that he was not quite ready for death yet. He held his wings tight against him and flicked the tips outwards so as to thrust himself down into the water. Opening his eyes he searched for some means of escape.\n\n'I'm scared, Fortune,' said Gossamer, her voice trembling.\n\n'You know something?' confessed Fortune. 'So am I.'\n\nThey clung to each other, sharing warmth in the icy liquid. It seemed to Fortune that the looming threat of death had sharpened his mind \u2014 no, his heart \u2014 like a claw. His choices were so narrow now that only the truest of them had any reality and the truest of them was this \u2014 that wished life for Gossamer more than he did for himself.\n\nTo Gossamer it seemed that the warmth they clung to in the freezing water was greater than a merely physical heat. There was something more between them than could possibly be generated by the natural world \u2014 some kind of subtle magic, perhaps the nearest a natural creature could come to knowing the wonder of charm.\n\nThey say that once upon a time there were Naturals who became Charmed, she thought. Is it possible, even for dragons like us? Or was that only ever a story, a dream for another age?\n\nThe tunnel slowly curved, always to the right, descending gradually in a deep spiral. The walls were smooth and white with a milky that made them look wet; yet, when he touched them, he found they were quite dry. The place was utterly quiet but for the click-click of his claws upon the floor.\n\nIf there was a waterfall down here, surely I would hear it.\n\nSomething else concerned Cumber: the smell of natural dragon was completely gone. He had found not a single prison cell, nor any evidence that dragons were down here at all, though he knew there must be, hidden beneath a layer of charm he could not even detect. The light charms bobbed inscrutably and the walls they illuminated were bare.\n\nWhere is Hex?\n\nAs he thought of his adversary he felt again that strange itching sensation, more insistent now and quite impossible to ignore.\n\n'Very well,' he muttered. 'If I can't ignore it then at least I can show it who's the boss.'\n\nHe stopped, listened carefully for a moment to check that no dragon was approaching around the corner and then sat back on his haunches.\n\nFire charm. But where to begin?\n\n'The only safe way to the Realm,' Ordinal had once explained, 'is from within yourself. You form the gateway, you open it, you control it. It must all happen inside your mind. If you do not do it this way you will be consumed. It is not difficult but it is dangerous; accuracy is needed. As for how you open the gate, well, that is up to you. I myself imagine a claw in my mind, a claw that can rip and then mend in the blink of an eye. The membrane between our world and the Realm is fragile but it will obey you \u2014 if you make it clear from the outset that you are capable of the level of control that is necessary.'\n\nCumber thought back over Ordinal's words, thought very hard. At the time they had merely confused him but now it was different; now he could feel the Realm close by. As he focused his thoughts fully on it a vision opened up in his head.\n\nA skin, a bulging, rippling, steaming skin stretching away from him in every direction. It was livid red, stained and soiled in some places and glowing with brilliant and unbearably sweet colours in others. This world-sized sac writhed with the life it contained \u2014 no, not life, charm. Shapes pressed against it from inside, contorting its outer surface into forms mostly unrecognisable, occasionally horribly familiar; some were like gigantic deformed heads; many bore teeth; all seemed desperate to escape.\n\nThe membrane between this world and the Realm, thought Cumber, his mouth dry. All I have to do is break it.\n\nIn his mind he created a claw.\n\nHe concentrated intently, seeing the claw, shaping it before his mind's eye. It was long and black and sharp as winter and with infinite care he pushed it forward until it touched the undulating surface of the membrane.\n\nAt once the shapes beneath swarmed to the point of contact. The writhing became a hurricane of motion, a terrible snapping orgy that lunged at the tip of his imaginary claw, the trapped charms working together with but one intent: to impale the skin of the Realm on the weapon of this interloper and release their powers into the real world. The membrane buckled and stretched, pink lines of stress gathering about the point where Cumber's claw was pressing deeper and deeper into its thickness. Another fraction of a breath and the skin would rip open and release its clamouring contents.\n\nCumber withdrew the claw, dissolving it and destroying whatever tenuous existence it had possessed. A great shudder shook the Realm across its entire rolling surface and the shapes within subsided as if they understood that this particular chance had passed. They moved still, however, a background dance. Ready for the next time.\n\nDrawing a deep, cold breath Cumber turned his mind away from the unreal spectacle of the Realm and fixed his eyes back on the corridor sweeping away from him into the pale and milky distance. His pace steady and deliberate, he moved off again in search of both friend and foe.\n\nThe bolt of lightning vaporised the water instantly, creating a storm of bubbles that exploded through the hole suddenly torn in the wall. Brace experienced a vast, gasping rush, a release of pressure so fast as to create its own shock wave through the sudden air. He felt an impact that was less a splash than an explosion. The cell wall collapsed, dumping its load of liquid and dragon into the tunnel outside, fire still flickering across the surface of the water and flashing it to steam before it could run away into the secret channels in the rock.\n\nBrace coughed mightily, expelling a watery cloud from his lungs. With a prodigious effort he heaved himself up on to his wings and then collapsed again on to the fast-drying floor.\n\nSomething hard and metallic clicked out a monotonous rhythm on the wall behind him. Brace an extravagant yawn. Jaws creaked and a voice said, 'Got some water trouble, have we? Still \u2014 at least you're a fat one!'\n\nBrace whirled round. Before him was the very dragon who had rejected him in favour of Thant, the one who had called him fat. Still gasping for breath, he narrowed his eyes and coiled his body back on his haunches, at which the charmed dragon let out an almighty laugh.\n\n'Oh, stay there, little rat!' he commanded.\n\nCasually the charmed dragon cocked his head back and spat a tiny ball of fire into what remained of the puddle of water evaporating from around Brace's body. The liquid turned brilliant orange and snapped into a coil of light that crossed over Brace's back, trapping his wings against his sides and pinning him helplessly to the floor.\n\nHex smiled. Tiny sparks leaped between his yellow teeth. Fire roiled in his throat and his smile widened immeasurably until it filled Brace's entire vision, and whether his attacker had simply leaned close or had used charm to turn his mouth into this wide, gaping maw Brace could not tell, for he had fainted dead away.\n\nFrom around a distant corner Cumber heard a rumbling splash and saw a flicker of light.\n\nHe crouched and slunk along the tunnel, towards the disturbance. Reaching a pile of rubble he pressed himself against it and craned his neck cautiously up and over the top. The Realm still scratched at the inside of his head.\n\nBeyond the scattered boulders lay a plump natural dragon, apparently unconscious and clearly trapped by some kind of charm. Over him loomed Hex. Somewhere in the core of his mind, Cumber was aware that the Realm had recently been breached, but he tried to concentrate on what was before his eyes.\n\nHex thrust his right foreleg out towards his prisoner. Blue light rippled over it like a living spider's web and it doubled its length in the time it took Cumber to take a breath. Bones stretched and warped, claws fused together, tendons plaited themselves into a single strand, anatomy dancing in the brutal clutch of fire charm. Sparks and sweat dripped from the end of the horribly changed limb.\n\nNow Hex lurched towards the Natural, moving awkwardly on three legs. The fourth had become a giant, lashing tongue, its underside set with vicious spines \u2014 a fat, purple serpent reaching out for its prey with strange delicacy. He raised it high above his head, paused it there briefly and finally brought it lashing down in a blow obvious intended to decapitate his helpless victim.\n\nCumber's mind filled with the Realm. Without thought, he recreated the imaginary claw with which he had previously tested its defences and drew a great slash across its surface. The sides of the wound peeled apart \u2014 they boiled and writhed \u2014 and he reached in.\n\nHe grasped fire. He grasped ice. In the fraction of an eyeblink it took him to find what he was looking for Cumber touched a million forces, a million living charms clambering over each other in their attempts to gain purchase into the real world. His claw groped in the brilliant darkness for its single goal while his mind prevented the invasion of the world by a flood of chaotic magic.\n\nThere!\n\nHis claw locked on to the charm he sought and wrenched it, dripping with creation, into this world. An instant later, at the insistence of his mind, the gash in the membrane of the Realm snapped shut, and when Hex's writhing limb lashed out towards the Natural it struck instead the sheet of blue Realm fire Cumber had thrown into its path. The fire, a vertical mosaic of tiny, individual flames, each burning from apparent nothingness with almost volcanic heat, solidified instantly, slicing the limb neatly from its owner and charring the cut end with awesome precision. Hex screeched as the sheet of fire collapsed over him, slamming the stump of his mutilated limb against his chest and ripping his wings apart as it gathered him bodily into the air.\n\nThe charm, now a bulging sack of fire with a dragon inside it, hung trembling in the air as Cumber emerged from behind the rocks that had concealed him. Hex glared at him through pain and flame. To the side the Natural was hunched in oblivion, the lifeless worm of Hex's severed limb draped across his neck.\n\nCumber turned his head and the fire plunged sideways into the rock of the tunnel wall. Hex cried out as though from a great distance, then his voice was cut off abruptly as dead stone enveloped him.\n\nStillness.\n\nDelicately he probed the interface between the world and the Realm: it was shut tight, scarless. Its work was done.\n\nShaking, both horrified and ecstatic at what he had managed to do, Cumber bent over the young dragon whom Hex had been about to kill and willed the binding orange charm to release him. It did so, sliding into the floor and vanishing away into the Realm as if it had never existed; Cumber scarcely recognised that he had cut a tiny slit in the Realm membrane to achieve this.\n\nBut the magic was not over. The corridor wall swelled, and a gigantic, grossly elongated dragon's foreleg forced its way out. It seemed made of rock; Cumber could see hot, white magma coursing within it like shining blood and its outer skin cracked and split as it twisted towards him. Stone talons closed painfully around his neck and dragged him across the floor. The wall sped towards him and all his triumph gave way to the horror as he understood that Hex was still alive.\n\nSuddenly everything was overlapping, interlocking. Cumber sensed massive charm at work as Hex fought to regain a clawhold in the real world. White stone filled his vision and his claws squealed across the floor as Hex hauled him towards and finally into the wall.\n\nBefore he even knew it Cumber had opened a way into the Realm again. This time it was different \u2014 instead of pulling magic out he pushed himself in. Charms lunged at him, jealous of his hold on the real world, desperate to escape their prison, but he pushed them back.\n\nHex's hold was weaker here in the Realm and Cumber suddenly realised that the dragon was dying. This attack was a final act, a death-rattle. With an easy twist of his body he slipped free of Hex's grip and slithered away through the Realm. Hex followed sluggishly, batting hopelessly at Cumber's ghostly form as it danced away through spaces in the rock which did not exist. Hex floundered in a Realm that had suddenly become his enemy, and which sucked every vestige of magic from him before ejected him back into the real world.\n\nBack into the rock.\n\nThe rock enveloped him, stilling his heart, locking his blood forever in his veins and freezing his mind into a lifeless cast of hatred. Hex became stone and would taste the air no more until the mountains had worn down to expose the echo of his corpse, many aeons hence.\n\nAn instant later Cumber reawakened the solidity of his body and dropped lightly into the corridor, the air he occupied feeling curiously thin and insubstantial. He felt powerful, as though he had aged without tiring, grown more aware without learning. The Realm scratched restlessly at the edges of his mind, eager for its charm to be summoned once more.\n\nNot yet, thought Cumber. Nor ever again, had I the choice.\n\nHe turned his attention back to the dragon he had rescued and who was stirring now. Behind the fallen dragon was a great, jagged hole in the corridor wall, evidently the means Hex had used to break this prisoner out of his cell, only to attack him.\n\nAt least now Cumber knew why he had not found any cells along the way: they were hidden behind the walls, the entrances created solely by the use of charm.\n\nAs soon as Brace awoke he started to scream.\n\nCumber stumbled backwards. What new enemy had come? Then, following the gaze of the plump young dragon, he saw an odd, twisted shadow on the milky white wall of the tunnel. Except no, the shadow was beneath the wall; Cumber was seeing inside the rock. The shadow was Hex, locked into the mountain. The expression on the charmed dragon's face was one of utter agony.\n\nCumber shuddered and stepped away. His eyes widened. He took another step back.\n\nThe rock formation in which Hex was trapped was a towering edifice of limestone, a mass of sculptured deposits moulded into tubes and globes and long, running channels that shone with creamy translucency. Here was a memory of water, its ancient passage, a column of lime more beautiful than anything Cumber had ever seen.\n\nA waterfall made of stone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Race to the Light",
                "text": "Brutace rushed at the entrance tunnels, iron wings pumping the air hard.\n\nUrgency had fallen upon him this afternoon. His sweep of the Cross, as he had hoped, had proved fruitless. No natural dragons remained now, of that he was certain, and no new dragons had dared to shelter in the deserted ruins of the colony. The settlement of natural dragons at Aether's Cross had been completely extinguished.\n\nBut these visitors \u2014 the Charmed and the Natural \u2014 were a strange pair indeed. Brutace did not for one moment believe the story of the charmed one \u2014 Cummion, was it, if that was his real name? \u2014 but the young dragon had mentioned the Master, and any mention of the Black Dragon filled Brutace with caution.\n\nBrutace was cold and unimaginative; in fact these were the qualities on which he specifically prided himself, for while he had seen many of the other charmed dragons of Aether's Cross degenerate into madness, he himself had remained strong and alert. And when the Master had arrived Brutace had been the first to support his desire to conquer the Naturals, the undoubted cause of Charmed decline.\n\nExactly one hundred dragons had been gathered in the Great Chamber that night, of whom barely half were wholly sane. The rest were as paranoid as they were crazy; suspicious glances abounded and the air was thick with tension. Aether's Cross had no Leader now, old Wast having died in delirium a moon or more before; no dragon had taken her place.\n\nThe Master's arrival had been heralded several days earlier by wiry, ivory-scaled dragon who called himself Insiss. His affect on the Charmed community had been odd, for while all those who encountered this lieutenant swore that he was not to be trusted, they nevertheless believed every word he said.\n\n'When my Master comes, he will give you the purpose you seek,' Insiss had crooned in his soft, sly voice, and not one dragon there had understood the true wit of the Black Dragon in sending so dubious a herald, for in mistrusting Insiss the dragons of Aether's Cross became strangely prepared for receiving a dragon they could trust.\n\nIt was into this throng of suspicious, hopeful, divided dragons that the Black Dragon had swept. He entered their midst through the Realm, the blinding light that blazed behind him throwing his monstrous form into an even greater shadow. Without exception the dragons in the Great Chamber had gasped, astonished, as the Black Dragon had placed himself on the empty Leader's Dais and proclaimed himself their new Master. As he continued to speak, the listening dragons realised that this formidable newcomer was promising them exactly what they craved: unity, common purpose, and the promise of action against the natural dragons towards whom they had grown so bitter.\n\n'This night,' the Black Dragon had intoned after laying out his terrible plan. 'No other will suffice.'\n\nThe attack had been launched before the night was out, and in that single devastating sweep the Naturals had been conquered.\n\nHad Brutace had his way, 'conquered' would have meant 'destroyed'. Yet the Black Dragon had decreed that the Naturals should not be killed but imprisoned. Privately Brutace thought this madness of a whole new order, but it seemed that the Master's word was law. Brutace could only assume that some greater strategy would see to the Naturals' ultimate destruction. Until then, confident in his own strength and respectful of his new master's authority, he was content to be chief gaoler of Aether's Cross.\n\nThe Master had flown south two nights later, taking with him the vast majority of the Charmed population and leaving Brutace with three miserable dragons under his command \u2014 Hex, Stition and Rite. During the following days, all three of his underlings had drifted further into insanity, so that only Hex was even partly reliable now. Brutace was unconcerned. The Master had promised him a place high in his command chain when eventually he was summoned to his new citadel in the south.\n\nI shall have to kill those three soon, mused Brutace as he swooped towards the cavern entrances. I can survive on my own until the Master sends new orders.\n\nBut these new dragons, these two travellers, they smelled of trouble. Brutace could deal with them easily enough, miserable youngsters that they were, but still there was something about them, something that made him... afraid?\n\nSuddenly the air felt cold. Something was wrong. A scent of death was seeping from the tunnel mouths. Brutace flexed his claws in sudden fury. Lethal spines sprang from his back and his wings sharpened with barbed charm.\n\nUrgent now, his anger growing, he dived into the darkness of the caverns.\n\n'A waterfall made of stone!' whispered Cumber. 'And I might have strolled right past it!'\n\nHe turned his back on the glossy edifice \u2014 his foray through the Realm had already revealed to him that there were no cells on that side of the tunnel \u2014 and probed into the rock on the opposite wall. It was hard work: the web of charm which had been laced through the rock was dense and complex. Furthermore something seemed to be dulling his charmed senses. A cell was there behind the wall, to be sure, but how deep was it, and why was his perception of it so blurred? His inner vision rippled, as though he were seeing everything...\n\n'Underwater!'\n\nCumber cast a panic-stricken glance at the rubble strewn around the entrance to the cell of the dragon he had saved from Hex's vile charm. The young Natural was picking himself up and staring at Cumber with undisguised malice. Also fear, which at least prevented him from launching an attack.\n\nCumber had no time for him. In his mind he meshed the signals he was receiving from the drowned cell with details picked up from the debris in the corridor. Quicker than thought, he used charm to analyse faults in the rock, the thickness of the wall between cell and tunnel, the viscosity of the water filling the cell. His calculations done, he hurled a bolt of charm at the wall of the tunnel, using raw magic to cut a cylinder of limestone out of the rock and eject it far into the waiting Realm, where it was instantly consumed. Even as the Realm chewed on the morsel he had thrown it, Cumber drew shut the wound he had made in its skin.\n\nEach time it gets easier, he thought. I wish that it wouldn't.\n\nFor an instant the scene was frozen in time: a cylindrical hole pierced the rock to the exact depth of the cell; beyond it a wall of water hung poised and ready for release. Then the natural world caught up with the charm Cumber had unleashed upon it and the water gushed out of the cell, pouring over Cumber and Brace and splashing off down the sloping floor into the depths of the mountain. Riding on the flood came foam and fragments of rock; behind came two dragons, cold and bedraggled but gasping for joy as they realised that they were still alive.\n\n'Cumber!' shouted Fortune as he crashed into his friend. The two of them rolled over together and came up against the stone waterfall with a great thud. They spluttered and coughed, and then laughed and butted heads. Around them the waters receded and they looked back at the hole Cumber had made in the wall. 'I bet that's the first time you've ever spun a charm like that!' exclaimed Fortune with gusto.\n\nThey laughed again and embraced, whirling around in the water, only gradually drawing breath, panting and gasping in disbelief that they should finally be back together.\n\n'Not quite,' was Cumber's breathless reply.\n\nFortune frowned. Something about his friend had changed.\n\nHe can get us out, he thought with sudden conviction.\n\n'Cumber? Are you all right?'\n\n'I'll tell you later, because right now we have to ...'\n\n'Brace!'\n\n'Gossamer!'\n\nFortune and Cumber turned to see a second reunion as Gossamer ran into her trembling brother and embraced him so hard that his eyes bulged and his short legs were lifted off the floor. The two Naturals spun around in a whirlwind dance, eventually staggering to a halt in front of the others, breathless and ecstatic.\n\n'Fortune!' gasped Gossamer. 'He's all right. My brother, he's... oh, is this...?'\n\n'This is Cumber,' confirmed Fortune, watching Brace closely. Given the suspicious look the young Natural was aiming at Cumber, it was clear he had no love for the Charmed \u2014 not this particular Charmed nor any of their race. Meanwhile Cumber, apparently oblivious to Brace's animosity, was trying to hurry them all away up the corridor.\n\n'Introductions will have to wait,' the young Charmed said. 'If you'll please just keep moving in this direction we can find out who we all are as we go along. But we have to hurry, we have to keep moving. Please hurry, everyone, there isn't any time to waste.'\n\nHis excitement was infectious and before they knew it Fortune and Gossamer were being bustled along ahead of him. It was only when they heard Brace's call that they paused and looked back.\n\n'We're not going without the others!' he cried. He had not moved from the waterfall.\n\nCumber, Fortune and Gossamer came to a halt.\n\n'He's right,' said Gossamer at once. 'What was I thinking? Our parents, our friends... Fortune, didn't you say your mother might be here?'\n\nAt this Cumber threw Fortune a quizzical glance but his friend shook his head. Later, the gesture seemed to say, don't worry about me.\n\nBut Cumber was worried. Brace was right. They could not just abandon these poor prisoners to their fate.\n\nSighing, he bent his head and pressed his brow against the tunnel wall. The network of charm was too complex for him to absorb in a such a short time, so he did the only thing he could think of: he shut down the entire failing system. At the same time he found a charm in the Realm that punched several million tiny holes through the walls all around them, not enough to weaken the rock but sufficient, he hoped, to admit air into the cells.\n\n'Listen to me,' he barked as he whirled around. 'I've stopped the flooding and your friends have got air. That's all I can do for now, although I'm sure you would dearly love me to free them. But you must believe me when I say there is no time \u2014 if we stay here now I might get a few out but Brutace is coming, I can feel it, and we'll all be trapped like rats when he gets here. Believe me, it wouldn't matter how many were free by then \u2014 he would still kill us all. Mind you, I'm sure a lot of your friends would lynch me on sight, bearing in mind what the Charmed have done to them.'\n\n'Frightened, are you?' taunted Brace.\n\n'Brace!' hissed Gossamer. 'He could be right. Fortune said ...'\n\n'And this is Fortune, is it?' responded her brother, glaring at Fortune.\n\n'In answer to your question,' persisted Cumber, 'yes, I am scared. And so should you be \u2014 scared of Brutace, and what he will do to you if he has you cornered down here, because I'm quite sure it will be worse than anything Hex could have thought up.'\n\nHe finished by gesturing angrily at the shadow in the waterfall. Fortune and Gossamer both frowned, then inhaled sharply as they realised they were looking at the agonised face of a dragon who had been somehow frozen inside rock.\n\n'What...?' began Fortune, only to have Cumber interrupt him.\n\n'I'll tell you about that later too. Now come on, we have to get out, there's no time to lose!'\n\n'Story of our lives,' shrugged Fortune. He looked into Gossamer's eyes and found trust there. It gave him the courage he needed. 'Cumber's right. If we get out now we might stand a chance of freeing the others later. They'll be safe for a while \u2014 it's us this Brutace will want first. Gossamer?'\n\nShe closed her eyes and nodded.\n\n'Brace?' demanded Cumber.\n\nThe plump young dragon shifted from one wing to the other. Finally, with the greatest of effort, he said in a sullen voice, 'I'll come with you, Gossamer, if only to protect you from these two creeps. But I'll come back \u2014 I swear it!'\n\n'Your bad manners make me wish I hadn't saved your life,' retorted Cumber with obvious ill-humour, 'let alone been lumbered with you as a travelling companion!'\n\n'Cumber, if you want us out of here now I suggest you stop bickering and start showing us the way!' snapped Gossamer.\n\nCumber stepped back a couple of paces and shook his head as though he had been slapped. Gossamer glared at him. Grumbling quietly he scuttled off up the corridor at a pace the three Naturals found difficult to match. Fortune smiled to himself, delighted to be back in Cumber's company despite the obvious peril they were in. Hoping to win over Gossamer's brother, he turned to share his smile but Brace, who was loping along at the rear, showed only a sullen scowl.\n\nAt the entrance to the Switchcave, Cumber turned to face Gossamer and Brace. He pitched his voice low. 'I'm Charmed but I'm your friend, believe me,' he said with some urgency. 'We have only one adversary now but he's far stronger than the four of us put together, stronger than all the Naturals down here for that matter.'\n\n'What about the other guards?' asked Fortune.\n\n'There were only three others. I killed Hex,' explained Cumber, surprised at the lack of emotion he felt when he acknowledged the fact. 'The other two \u2014 Stition and Rite \u2014 are asleep in their guardroom and I've barricaded them in. I think Brutace will go to them first and probably spend time trying to get in \u2014 at least, that's my hope. That should place him behind us while we make our escape past ...' He broke off.\n\n'Past what?' said Fortune. 'Cumber?'\n\n'Nothing. I'll deal with it when we get there.'\n\nGossamer heard the doubt in his voice. Why, he's just a dragon, she thought.\n\n'How did you find us?' she asked.\n\n'The sprites told me,' Cumber answered. 'Was it you who gave them the message?'\n\nGossamer shook her head.\n\n'No, there was no message. We saw sprites in the drinking water, just briefly, but then they were gone. They can't have been there for more than a few moments.'\n\n'Well, they obviously understood what it was they'd seen. They gave me enough of a clue to find you.'\n\n'Too bad about all the others,' put in Brace angrily.\n\n'We've been through all that,' retorted Cumber, 'and I don't like it any more than you do, believe me. Now, be quiet everybody. I need to determine exactly where Brutace is.'\n\nHe signalled his companions to remain in the corridor while he ventured out into the Switchcave. A dry breeze blowing from the wide surface tunnel carried the scent of flowers incongruously into the otherwise lifeless chamber. Pale walls shone beneath the glowing charm embedded in the low ceiling.\n\nAll was still.\n\nThe tunnel that had brought them up from the prison level was silent and empty.\n\nThe other two tunnels leading back into the mountain were black holes.\n\nDarkness shrouded the depths of the surface tunnel.\n\n'I think ...' began Cumber, and then the breeze became a blast of air pressing with sudden fury into the Switchcave.\n\nSkittering back beneath the low ceiling of the prison tunnel, Cumber forced his fellow dragons back against the wall. The scent of flowers was mingled now with the stench of sweat and fire. What had been simple air pressure became a blast of wind, then a gale, howling through the cave. Echoes tumbled over themselves in a reverberating crescendo.\n\nThe four fugitives shrank back into the shadows as the oncoming force gathered itself into a single wedge of dust-choked air that swept past them with a dizzying, consuming roar and Brutace erupted into the chamber. Heat pulsed, the threat of firestorm.\n\nIn an instant he was gone again, a hurricane passing, vanishing into the tunnel that led to the guardroom. The vision of that instant would remain with them all for the rest of their lives: Brutace was flying. His huge wings were fully spread. thrashing in blind rage, and where they should have struck the inhibiting walls and ceiling the blue fire that sheathed them was crushing the rock to powder. In his path he left the surface tunnel hot and scarred, great waves of rock scooped out of its walls in smoking testament to his passage.\n\nAnd \u2014 though he could not possibly have known it yet \u2014 there was imprinted on his face the sure knowledge that his prisoners had escaped.\n\nThe only thing that saved Cumber, Fortune, Gossamer and Brace was the blindness of Brutace's rage. He flashed through the chamber without even seeing them.\n\n'Come on!' hissed Cumber.\n\nAs one they fled their hiding place and half-ran, half-flew up the broad exit tunnel, now even broader in the aftermath of Brutace's incredible flight through air and rock. Cumber flew ahead while behind him hurried Fortune and Gossamer. Between leaps and flurries Fortune somehow found time to marvel at the rich reds and ochres that patterned Gossamer's wings.\n\nBrace brought up the rear, sick to be fleeing, terrified beyond measure.\n\nDaylight floated at the limits of their vision, a promise of escape far ahead. All around them the tunnel walls sagged, scarred and torn in Brutace's wake. Cracks split the floor like grinning mouths. The rock groaned and shook as the mountains pressed down on it from above.\n\nFor the Naturals it was a perilous passage, for where Cumber was able to steer a safe central course through the wrecked tunnel, balanced as he was on a cushion of flight charm, they could not properly spread their wings and were forced instead to scramble and lunge, relishing the occasional glide and cursing the constant knocks they received from the jagged remains of the tunnel walls. The light brightened slowly ahead. Too slowly.\n\nFrom behind them came a roar.\n\nAt last they reached the maze. Here their enemy's brutal passage worked to their advantage, for rather than traverse the complex turns of the protecting labyrinth, Brutace had simply plunged through it, carving a new tunnel for himself as though the rock were but a sea sponge. This new passageway stretched out before them, its heat baking their skins.\n\nAhead floated a splinter of daylight.\n\nCumber glanced back at his lagging companions, listening hard to the deafening howls of rage approaching them rapidly from behind. Against those howls he gauged the distance to the daylight.\n\nThe comparison was not good.\n\nHe stopped abruptly, hovering on the charm with not a single beat of his wings. His colleagues blundered up behind him, forced to perch painfully on the still-glowing rock as Cumber held his wings wide to block their passage.\n\n'What the...?' blurted Brace, landing awkwardly on a smoking outcrop. Hot wind pressed at their rear.\n\n'Down there!' ordered Cumber, indicating a side tunnel. Then to Fortune he said, 'First right, first left, second left, first left, first left. Wait at the turn before the exit. Do not under any circumstances try to go out without me. Repeat!'\n\nFortune repeated this word for word. Cumber had grown since they had argued among the abandoned nests of Aether's Cross and he did not even think of challenging his friend's commands.\n\n'But we can see the light,' protested Gossamer, pointing ahead.\n\n'We must trust him,' responded Fortune, bundling her and Brace into the side tunnel. 'Have a care,' he added to Cumber.\n\nCumber nodded silently \u2014 and vanished.\n\nFortune shook his head. Cumber had clearly realised some new potential. The idea that his friend might be as powerful as any of the charmed dragons he had seen yet filled him with a kind of dread. Then his own words returned to him:\n\nWe must trust him.\n\nBlue light swelled in the passageway and for the second time Fortune shrank back as Brutace thundered past. This time the Charmed commander flew more slowly, deliberately and with infinitely more threat. He was sniffing the air in great draughts and Fortune could only hope that the smoke given off by the charm-torn rock was enough to mask the scent of their fear. Into the ruptured maze they retreated, silent as night.\n\nThe tunnels were narrow and blessedly cool. Fortune led the way, following Cumber's directions precisely until the daylight grew from a glow into a brilliance that filled the air.\n\n'We mustn't go out yet,' cautioned Fortune, pausing at what was surely the final turn in the corridor, but Brace, overcome by the prospect of escape, rushed impetuously past him. Gossamer lunged after her brother and barely missed grabbing his tail with her outstretched claws.\n\n'No!' she cried.\n\nThe blinding light bled around Brace's disappearing form.\n\n'It's all right, Gossamer!' came Brace's shout from around the corner. 'There's nothing to be ...'\n\nHis words were cut off by an unearthly groaning sound that Cumber would have recognised only too well. A stagnant smell enveloped Fortune and Gossamer as they hurried round the corner, terrified of what they might be about to see.\n\nSpreadeagled, silhouetted against a triangle of sunlight bright enough to make their eyes water, Brace hung whimpering in a web of fire, while all about him the rock bubbled with sickly yellow light.\n\n'Help me!' he screamed.\n\nCumber pulled himself into the Realm, steeling himself against attack as he flew through a nightmare of clamouring charm, before emerging at the far end of the tunnel Brutace had carved, just short of the exit.\n\nWith his new-found mastery over fire charm, he de-activated the guard charm.\n\nHere the weapon had been ice: any dragon trying to pass would have been flash-frozen and then consumed by the tooth-lined mouth the corridor would have become. A countering charm plucked from the Realm reversed the freezing effect and rendered the guard charm quite inert.\n\nHis most feared obstacle destroyed, Cumber flew out into the open sky.\n\n'Have a care, Cumber,' he muttered to himself. 'Overconfidence could kill you yet.'\n\nThen, as he flapped his way clear of the cliffs, he heard Brace cry out from the adjacent tunnel entrance.\n\n'Help me!'\n\nDamnation \u2014 must I always be rescuing that one?\n\nBefore Cumber could turn, Brutace reared up in front of him.\n\nThe huge dragon's flailing claws clutched at Cumber's left wing and found it, ripping great tears down the delicate membrane. Cumber howled in agony as his blood splashed into the air, a rain of golden mercury. He wheeled in the air, charm heating his body unbearably as he fought to regain control.\n\nBrutace's claws bit deeper. Cumber whirled to face his opponent, who seemed all tooth and spine, and delivered a devastating blast of Realm fire into his face. Lilac flame lit the canyon with a brightness that outshone the sun and Brutace relinquished his grip, allowing Cumber to flee upwards.\n\nBut even as the fire dissipated, Brutace's snarl reappeared through its vestiges. Wings pounding, the powerful dragon ascended towards his weakened opponent, charm showering sparks from his legs as claws lengthened, teeth sharpened. His neck bloated and grew rows of vicious, serrated hooks. Cumber watched aghast as Brutace changed shape before his eyes.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye Cumber saw movement in the tunnel from which Brace's shout had come. Light flashed there and a rumbling shook the cliff face; a guard charm had been activated.\n\nCumber pulled in his wings and arrowed his body down towards the yellow glow now flickering in the tunnel mouth. Brutace veered too, intercepting Cumber just short of the ledge and falling upon him with mouth agape. Flames bubbled in his throat in hungry expectation.\n\nThis time Cumber was ready. He opened a realm portal that sucked the fire into harmless oblivion.\n\nGrowling with rage, Brutace crashed into Cumber and wrapped his wings around him, clamping Cumber's own wings against his flanks. Now it was only Brutace's flight charm keeping them both aloft. Cumber clamped his jaws down on Brutace's wingtips, and together they tumbled away from the ledge in a strange, windblown dance, neither one relinquishing his grip on the other, a ball of shining leathery skin within which two dragons battled for their lives. Tumbling in the air, their struggle was totally hidden by Brutace's enormous wings, which enclosed them both like an eggshell. Occasional flashes of light illuminated those wings from within, veins standing in a dark network against glowing, orange skin.\n\nInside the tunnel entrance Brace had fallen unconscious. The web of light that trapped him was closed tight about his neck; the flesh around his throat raged purple. Every so often his body twitched as great concussions shook the whole tunnel.\n\nGossamer watched helpless as a bubble of rock swelled on the floor and burst open with a wet gasp, squirting yellow light on to her brother's inert form and revealing its terrible contents. Countless spidery creatures, transparent as water, fangs sweating venom, swarmed from their breeding ground and spread a living floor across the tunnel. Their bodies began to join, merging into each other as if to commence the creation of some greater beast, the form of which she could not begin to conceive.\n\nShe looked on in horror.\n\nShadows crossed the bright slot of sky beyond Brace's motionless form, the blazing light of charm dulling the sun as Brutace intercepted Cumber just beyond the ledge outside. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this \u2014 and yet she felt that she had foreseen this at the very moment she and Brace had witnessed the coming of the Black Dragon.\n\nAre we so weak that charm will always defeat us? she thought. Is there nothing we can do?\n\nShe thought of the sprites but their magic was of the water and the earth. She thought of her love for her brother but that could not rescue him now. She thought of the Black Dragon and felt numb.\n\nIn the fraction of time it took her to think these things, Fortune moved.\n\nThe unburst bubbles of rock were subsiding now, as though the first one to unleash its cargo had won some unearthly race and forced its competitors into submission. The crystal spiders it had disgorged \u2014 thousands of them \u2014 were assembling themselves into a larger creature, the outline of which remained indistinct, rippling with yellow sparks and pulsing with deadly life.\n\nAs the defeated bubbles retreated, the extent of the damage they and the Realm-spiders had caused to the tunnel was finally revealed. Cracks crazed the floor and walls; the curved ceiling was raining rock and as Fortune looked towards the ledge outside he saw huge chunks of the cliff face peel away from the tunnel mouth and plunge towards the river below. As the tunnel mouth widened, sunlight lanced in with fat, dusty beams. Above them, the mountain began to creak.\n\nYet Fortune felt calm.\n\nAs if in a dream he watched the spiders coalesce into a vast, chitinous mass. Teeth clambered over each other in its emerging mouth, a continual battle for supremacy. But even as this monstrosity closed in on the motionless Brace, Fortune began to suspect a new truth about it.\n\nEven as it was being spawned it was losing its magic.\n\nIt was created of charm but it was not itself charmed. The more it grew the further it emerged into this world from whatever world had bred it, and therefore the less true magic it held.\n\nEvery spark which flew from it was a loss of power; it shed charm like sweat; with every movement it grew less magical. More real.\n\nAnd I am real too!\n\nHe did not stop to consider his reasoning. Instinct would not withstand analysis, that he knew. But perhaps he had discovered a crucial truth about the power of charm \u2014 and its weakness.\n\nIf he was right...\n\nWith a howl of fearful hope he launched himself not at the monster but upwards towards the crumbling ceiling. The giant, blurred spider-beast turned towards him with a sluggishness that betrayed its stupidity. Fortune tucked his head in at the last possible moment and felt pain blossom across his back as he slammed into the teetering ceiling. A sharp crack told him he had shattered one or more of his spinal plates. No matter. The creature grunted its confusion.\n\nHis course took him ricocheting straight into the web that held Brace but by now the collision had started the whole tunnel collapsing. The web's individual strands of light broke and clutched at him, but their touch was feeble; it felt to Fortune as if some other force were pulling them away. He grabbed Brace with his hind legs and held him close to his body as they fell back towards the floor.\n\nAnd straight towards the gaping maw of the waiting beast.\n\n'Get out!' Fortune yelled to Gossamer, who had frozen in terror. As he shouted he swept his tail and shattered the monster's face. It broke into pieces, each piece turning instantly into a spidery shard that melted away as it hurtled through the air.\n\nThe ceiling transformed itself into a hail of rock as the cliff above them continued to collapse. Fortune kicked away from the now-headless monster, his wings straining to keep himself and Brace aloft in the confined space, his claws scraping more spiders loose from the creature's slippery hide and to their deaths. Muscles protesting, Brace weighing heavy in his embrace, he dodged his way through the raining boulders towards the light.\n\nGossamer!\n\nHe threw a look behind. She was just visible, scrambling over the remains of the monster, which were now consuming themselves amid the strands of the magical web, vanishing from this world in a series of tiny explosions. Dropping the unconscious Brace on the ledge outside he turned and swooped back through the falling debris until he swung around behind her, whereupon he began pummelling her towards the exit.\n\n'Fortune, I can't...' she gasped.\n\n'You must! Look, we're nearly there!'\n\nA curtain of rock fell just behind them and with a last, desperate shove Fortune ejected Gossamer outside, following her barely in time as the whole corridor succumbed to the weight of the mountain and closed its one, blind eye forever.\n\nDust exploded past them and the ledge beneath their claws shook, threatening to give way. Deep, deafening concussions resounded through the rock as the six neighbouring tunnels slammed shut. The impacts juddered through their bones. It felt as though the entire gorge would break apart but somehow the ledge, though now sloping dangerously, continued to support their weight.\n\nThe cloud of dust billowed out over the gorge, filling the air and darkening the sky, and gradually the shaking began to die away. Fortune scanned the distance below, seeking out... there they were!\n\nHis heart stopped. The dust obscured all detail but the large grey dragon could only be Brutace, and the slumped golden one could only be Cumber, held limp in the air by some invisible magic. Wings wide, Brutace hovered, clearly considering a fitting end for his helpless prey. Slowly, he began to change shape, until his entire body resembled a set of gigantic jaws.\n\nBrutace meant the kill to be spectacular.\n\nBut even as those enormous jaws opened wide, ready for the kill, the dust cloud rippled.\n\nFortune watched in confusion, his sense of being in a dream stronger now than ever, as a dark shape arrowed down from above. The dust parted in eerie silence, and then the shape was gone again, swallowed by the clouds below.\n\nIn its wake it left salvation.\n\nBrutace's changed body broke into two neatly sliced halves. His mighty wings beat the air feebly, once, twice, then faltered and folded. Blood rained down into the roiling dust.\n\nFortune's heart leaped, but his triumph was short-lived. As Brutace perished so did his magic, and as he fell so did Cumber fell. For an instant his wings unfurled, and Fortune thought his friend must have woken; but it was only the pressure of the air moving them apart. They fluttered once, twice, and then the dust had consumed them too.\n\nCumber was gone.\n\nThey lay on the ledge, waiting for the dust cloud to settle. Gossamer held her unconscious brother and Fortune in turn held her. Tears would not flow.\n\nWhat had happened? What had killed Brutace?\n\nHow can I go on without Cumber?\n\nA shadow flashed across the limits of Fortune's vision. He glanced about. Nothing.\n\nThen he heard a voice.\n\n'Bloody heavy... for a skinny runt,' it was saying. The words were punctuated by grunts and pants. 'Warned you... didn't I? Should've gone... back home. Covamere... indeed!'\n\nThrough a veil of parting dust rose Scoff, holding Cumber firmly in his grip as his rainbow wings beat the air with hard, determined thrusts.\n\nCumber woke then and looked around bewildered as Scoff placed him with unexpected delicacy on the ledge beside Fortune, before alighting himself and folding away his colourful wings.\n\n'This is the east wall,' said Scoff. 'I said keep to the west wall. Youngsters! Pah! Never listen. I suppose I'll have to show you the way myself.'\n\nHe wrinkled his nose uncomfortably.\n\n'What is it about you two,' he began, 'that always makes me want to... aat-shooo!?'\n\nDust and fear fled from Scoff's titanic sneeze. It woke Brace. He and his sister looked on in amazement as Fortune and Cumber exchanged a look and began laughing in great, bellowing waves, for they had survived, and in strength they had grown, and also in number.\n\nNow they were five."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Message",
                "text": "The bones of the Plated Mountain groaned in protest as a new mood twisted their ancient marrow. As it had done so long before the Plated Mountain was beginning to move.\n\nCocooned within the mountain, Mantle moved too.\n\nOf all the Injured Mountains only this one, the greatest of them all, moved still. Sudden tremors shook old wounds even though the land was tired and nearly spent of its fire. Cracks gaped, closed again. An earthquake.\n\nAs the tremors shook the Plated Mountain, shock waves travelled outwards into the world. Mantle saw them and was pleased.\n\nAt last he had a messenger.\n\nFor such an earthquake he had waited long and now he harnessed to it his message. As the waves of energy spread, he steered them north. In the path of the shock wave the land trembled. Lakes dampened the vibrations, down gullies they accelerated, Mantle's will directing them north, ever north.\n\nHis seismic messenger reached the southernmost tip of the Low Mountains and plunged underground, deep rock shaking in its path. Narrow the shock wave was now and focused, its target the gorge, the canyon.\n\nThe Cross.\n\nThe day following their escape was a day of tranquillity. Numb with shock, the five dragons had struggled across to the west cliff and collapsed there among the abandoned nests. The dust from the collapsed tunnels had gradually settled into the depths of the canyon to be carried away by the river. A great peace descended in its place. The dragons slept long and woke late and first to wake were Fortune and Gossamer. They stole away together into the late morning light, Gossamer leading her new companion to her favourite place \u2014 her hole-watching perch.\n\nThey sat there together gazing across the ravine at the scarred and broken east wall where once the tunnels had been. They shivered, for it was cold. Far below in the clean, clear air the river was just visible, the constant spray disturbed and thinned by a sudden north wind. Strangely, its waters looked brown and sluggish.\n\n'I think those are leaves,' exclaimed Gossamer as they craned their necks downwards in an effort to make out what had turned the waters to mud. 'Autumn leaves.'\n\n'But summer's not over,' whispered Fortune.\n\nThe two dragons exchanged a glance and shivered again, this time not just with the cold. The wind blew past them and in it they felt the promise of ice and snow and a long, long winter.\n\n'I'm glad you got us out,' said Gossamer after a while.\n\n'I know this sounds crazy but... I think we were meant to find you.' Fortune hesitated. 'I think I was meant to find you.'\n\nShe did not reply but simply rose without a word, nuzzling softly at his neck as she did so. He smiled at her and leaned forward, then started back in surprise as she took to the air, the draught from her wings forcing the cold morning air into his upturned face.\n\nHigh she flew, lifting herself up towards the slit of sky capping the gorge of the Cross, the subtle earth colours of her wings glowing against the pale grey rock as she curved through the sky. She hovered, swooped, air buzzing as she swept low over Fortune's head.\n\nHe snatched playfully at her then launched himself up in pursuit. She filled his vision as they danced between the two opposing cliff walls and up towards the sky again.\n\nGossamer's tail brushed his face and a bank of wispy cloud rolled into view, drifting lazily down into the ravine from the sky above. Fortune lunged at her but she was gone. Puzzled, he flew on, searching in vain until finally she broke free of the concealing cloud and butted his chest with her head, only to swerve away and vanish again. Fortune laughed.\n\nNow she was a distant mote, dark red against the pale cliff. Vapour streamed from her wingtips as she dived in the thin air then looped close over Fortune's head. Laughing out loud he finally took her lead and tipped on to his back to follow her in her dive towards the leaf-clogged river. They pulled out of the dive a claw's width above the brown water, speeding low over the water before gaining altitude again, their wings brushing, darting and weaving in perfect unison, each one's move the other's reply, every turn a harmony, every wingbeat a duet.\n\nCloser still they flew and faster. Fortune's head grew light. He was no longer aware of the cliffs around him, nor even of the air which held them. He was aware only of Gossamer's ochre body flashing in and out of sight, of the perfect wind as she darted by, of the smell of her. Closer yet they flew until at last he embraced her and held them both. His heart pounded but his body suddenly had the strength of ten, a thousand. It seemed that with his wings he might lift the world itself and that Gossamer was but a breath in comparison.\n\nOne dragon watched them vanish into the clouds.\n\nDevoted to his sister, Brace watched stone-faced with jealousy as Gossamer shared the heavens with this interloper, this Fortune. He closed his eyes to await their return, but he did not sleep.\n\nBy the time Fortune and Gossamer returned to the west cliff their companions were awake and deep in debate. At least, Scoff and Cumber were speaking \u2014 Brace was sulking some way off, picking through the ruins of the Natural nests as though searching for something. They landed somewhat sheepishly next to their Charmed companions. Scoff greeted them with a quick nod.\n\n'Found something interesting,' the charmed dragon announced, flexing his colourful wings. 'Caves might not be destroyed.'\n\nFortune gestured across the canyon to the opposite cliff. 'But... it all collapsed!'\n\n'Might be intact,' repeated Scoff. 'Might be, mind you. Can't be certain.'\n\n'But how?' asked Fortune.\n\n'Charm,' replied Cumber with uncharacteristic brevity. His face was hard and he seemed distracted. Fortune wondered if something of Scoff's terseness was rubbing off on his friend.\n\n'Look,' Fortune said, exasperated, 'if there's something we can do to help those dragons you've got to tell us.'\n\nBrace bounded up and perched upon a nearby outcrop, his claws clenched deep into the soft rock. It was quite obvious that he had been listening all along.\n\n'If they're alive,' he said to Fortune, 'then we've got to help them. And we've got to do it now, while we've got the advantage over these Charmed monsters.'\n\nScoff and Cumber both glared at the young Natural. Brace flinched but held his ground.\n\n'I'll forget I heard that,' Cumber intoned with quiet threat. Fortune frowned: there was definitely something wrong with his friend. Was he still recovering from the fight with Brutace?\n\nThroughout this debate Gossamer had listened without comment.\n\n'Scoff, Cumber,' she said now, 'just tell us what you know. Then we can discuss whether or not there's anything we can do about it.'\n\nCumber, seeming to respond to the softness of her voice, released a great sigh. 'Scoff and I have probed into the mountainside and there's still charm in there \u2014 a lot of charm. It's possible there's enough charm locked around the prison cells to have protected them from the collapse of the cliff.'\n\n'But won't they all starve, or suffocate?' questioned Gossamer.\n\n'Maybe not,' said Scoff. 'Charm may create a stasis. Or may not. Hard to say.'\n\n'Hard to say!' exclaimed Brace. 'Then find out! Can we save them or can't we?'\n\nNeither of the charmed dragons responded.\n\n'We can afford to spend a few more days here, can't we?' suggested Fortune. He could not understand Cumber's melancholy mood. His friend, normally so garrulous, had become a silent, sullen ghost of his former self.\n\n'We don't have days, Fortune, and well you know it!' Cumber cried. So much for melancholy \u2014 in the blink of an eye his mood had turned to rage. 'We have to go! We have to get to Covamere, as we always planned. Nothing has changed that!'\n\n'I know, but ...'\n\n'But nothing! We go! Now!'\n\nNow Fortune was growing angry, for was this not the same argument in which he and Cumber had been embroiled when Brutace and his dragons had first pounced upon them days before? Had they come through so much only to go round in circles again?\n\nAnd what of the poor Naturals \u2014 hundreds of them perhaps \u2014 trapped inside the rock of the east cliff? If there was any possibility they were still alive then surely rescue was their first priority.\n\nBut we need charm to get them out.\n\nFortune took a deep breath and tried to calm his anger. He thought about South Point, about everything he and Cumber had been through so far together. And wondered what might yet be to come.\n\nMaybe Cumber's right. Maybe there really isn't time.\n\nSouth Point destroyed. Aether's Cross ravaged.\n\nThe Black Dragon.\n\nThe world, turning.\n\nHe looked at the faces of his companions.\n\nCumber, his expression blank and cold, and suddenly incomprehensible.\n\nScoff, inscrutable, shrewd, and clearly in agreement with Cumber. Could he be swayed?\n\nBrace. His jealousy of Fortune was plain to see, but so was his depth of feeling for his kin. He would surely do anything to see these poor dragons freed from their prison of stone.\n\nAnd Gossamer, who had entered his life so swiftly and, it seemed, so completely. What did she really want?\n\nThe faces stared back, all looking to Fortune for an answer.\n\nGo or stay?\n\n'I ...' he began.\n\nAnd then Mantle's message came crashing into their midst.\n\nA deep, metallic groan issued from the very bowels of the mountain and the ledge beneath them trembled for the final time. With blinding speed a network of cracks exploded from the cavern entrances and across the cliff face. High above, sheets of rock peeled away, turning end over end as they fell in a deadly aerial dance. The land writhed. The air filled with broken rock and falling debris, and the sky above began to shrink.\n\nAs the cliffs began to close around them, the five dragons opened their wings and flew.\n\nSlowly at first, then unbelievably fast, the slot through which Fortune and Cumber had entered the gorge closed up. No escape that way. Fortune turned south and the others fled with him. The walls of the Cross clamped shut in their wake, gnawing like hungry jaws at their tails.\n\nLand and sky merged together. Were the rocks filling the air, or were they flying through holes in the mountain? Fortune could not tell. Is something guiding us? The thought flashed through his mind but he had no time to consider it. The narrow gash of the Cross's southern exit loomed ten tree-lengths away, five...\n\nThey sped through the pass with scant breaths to spare. Behind them the gorge finally closed, punching a great blast of air that sent them crashing and rolling through the air. There was a slam... and Aether's Cross was gone.\n\nIt was gone.\n\n'Well!' shouted Scoff over the colossal noise. 'That settles it. We couldn't get them out now even if we wanted to!'\n\n'South, then,' murmured Fortune. 'We continue south.'\n\n'We have no choice,' Gossamer agreed, flying close enough by his side for him to hear her every breath, and she was right: the decision was made.\n\nThey flew on. The silence that held them was broken only once more in that long, sullen flight out of the mountains, and that was by Brace.\n\n'They're alive,' he said suddenly, then added more quietly. 'You'll all be free again. Someday I'll return, I swear.'\n\nThey flew south.\n\nTowards Covamere.\n\nThe Plated Mountain was still again, its power spent for now. Deep inside its ancient shell, Mantle rested. He had sent his message, and now they were coming. There was nothing more to do but wait.\n\nSleep rose. Mantle closed his eyes and contemplated the great secret that lay hidden beneath his chamber."
            },
            {
                "title": "Into the Mountain",
                "text": "[ The Black Dragon ]\n\nA single peak stood proud and high among the Injured Mountains.\n\nHere it was that the trolls were born, erupting from the primal fire that had torn the land in those most ancient times. The flat plains of the southern Heartland had first trembled, then shattered, as raw charm had burst through from deep underground, searing the air and lifting a new mountain range into the world. Again and again these mountains had spewed forth their fire; with each new eruption more rock had hardened across their ever-rising peaks.\n\nWith each new eruption a troll had been born.\n\nBlack they were, like the rock that spawned them, slow of thought yet mighty beyond measure. And they were charmed.\n\nLike the liquid stone that crawled through their veins, they spread across the land, carving it into shapes that suited their single-minded purpose: to travel. For the trolls were restless wayfarers, and over the course of an aeon they journeyed far and wide until the whole world was their domain. Until there was nowhere left for them to go.\n\nThen it was that they returned to the mountains that had given them life, powerless to resist the instinct that drew them together again, and pitched them ultimately against each other in a series of titanic battles. During those long and dreadful years they unleashed fire charm the like of which the world had never seen, breaking the mountains and so giving them the name by which they would be known ever after: the Injured Mountains.\n\nThose few trolls who survived retreated into the north and were seen no more. Of the mountain peaks, one alone remained standing. Isolated, it was the one barren alp from which no troll had ever been spawned. The lava it had once thrown out had long since solidified into towers and spires and coated its slopes with frozen rivers of rock, rivers which over the years grew flat and ragged until they resembled scales laid across a dragon's back. Plated it was and hence its name \u2014 the Plated Mountain.\n\nThen dragons came.\n\nThe passing of the trolls a mere legend for their storytellers, the charmed dragons were attracted to the mountain for many reasons: the wealth of tunnels and caverns which lay beneath it; the lushness of the evergreen forest which girdled its conical form. Here it was that they built Covamere.\n\nA huge puzzle of caverns and chambers, open areas and roofed passages, Covamere swiftly became the capital of the growing dragon world. A complex government established itself \u2014 the Great Council \u2014 whose envoys kept dragons in touch the world over, whose laws kept the peace for many, many centuries.\n\nMost of the members of the Great Council claimed to have been among the first dragons in the world. Their enormous age and wisdom could not be doubted, but only one of their number was truly believed to be so ancient: Halcyon, Leader of the Great Council. Ever respected, always obeyed, Halcyon was the guardian of hidden knowledge, for he alone knew the secret of what lay below the Plated Mountain.\n\nHe alone knew the truth behind the turning of the world.\n\nAs the centuries passed and the time of change drew near, Halcyon retreated into his caves. Only there would he be able to work the charm he knew he must. His retreat was necessary, vital to achieve the total concentration needed, but it left him \u2014 for the first time in his long and magnificent rule \u2014 vulnerable to attack.\n\nIt was then that a dragon came with the power to exploit his weakness.\n\nThe Black Dragon.\n\nFor all his great age, Halcyon owed his continued position as Leader to one thing: he was the only charmed dragon ever to survive the challenge of the Maze of Covamere. The Maze lay beneath the Plated Mountain, and because of it Covamere was the spiritual as well as the administrative centre of the dragon world. Few dragons knew what actually lay beyond the threshold of the Maze, but all dragons had their own ideas...\n\nThere, the Realm meets our world...\n\nThere, our world meets all worlds...\n\nThere, with in the Maze, resides the power of the stars...\n\nHalcyon would not speak of what he had witnessed in the mysterious depths of the Maze and so its secrets were kept. But for many young dragons, curiosity proved too much, and so there was a steady stream of ambitious dragons bold enough to challenge their venerable Leader. Such challenges were accepted with due respect, for the constitution of Covamere stated that any dragon had the right to attempt to unseat Halcyon. Indeed, a strictly regulated academy had been established which schooled and prepared such dragons for their one attempt at the challenge of the Maze.\n\nWhen their time came, each graduate was invited to enter the Maze. If that dragon emerged unscarred \u2014 as Halcyon himself had done ages past \u2014 they would be accepted as Leader of the Great Council, and Halcyon would step down.\n\nMany dragons had tried, yet in all those years no charmed dragon had ever succeeded. And in the Maze of Covamere, failure meant death.\n\nExcept once. Dragons spoke for many years about the day when not one but two dragons had returned from the Maze. But the circumstances were so unusual, so bizarre, that neither of the emerging dragons could possibly be accepted as Leader.\n\nThe first had emerged to be held in the deepest respect, although he could never lead; the second had emerged into shame and ridicule. Neither of the two dragons had remained in Covamere and so Halcyon had reigned on.\n\nThis great tale was told for many years, but Covamere was full of tales and so eventually it became lost, buried in the many great stories of Halcyon's glorious history. Lost and buried beneath the Plated Mountain.\n\nA mote of black moved in the dawning sky above the Plated Mountain. High over the northern slopes this mote, this dragon, flew. The rays of the rising sun struck his wings and were trapped beneath their skin, heating the flesh until heat became fire and fire became charm. The charm filled the dragon's body with a glow all its own, a black light that scintillated at the limits of vision and seemed to make this dragon a creature lit not in this world, not by this sun, but by some other, internal flame. A dragon black to many eyes yet rich with something dark and deep.\n\nThis mote: the Black Dragon. Wraith. Called by his legions 'The Master'.\n\nSince conquering Covamere, Wraith had taken many such solitary flights over the Plated Mountain. It was familiar to him, for here he had flown as a young dragon a hundred or more years before, and now that he had returned to the flying grounds of his distant youth he felt the strengthening of old ambitions, old desires. Old memories.\n\nThen his colour had not been black. As a lean, tawny youth he had soared high above his peers in the academy of the Maze of Covamere, and of all the candidates of his generation it was Wraith, they said, who had the strength and the wit to conquer the Maze. When the day had come for his trial, even Halcyon seemed to recognise his potential, wishing him fortune as he passed beyond the portal and into the hidden spaces beneath the Plated Mountain. Wraith had entered the maze, and he had returned alive. He had survived the challenge.\n\nBut there was no glory in his success.\n\nFor Wraith was the second of the two dragons who had entered the Maze on that fateful day. The only reason he survived was because he was rescued by the first.\n\nEven now, as he stroked the air above that same mountain, he recalled with vivid pain the horror of his failure, the numbing humiliation of his rescue by the dragon who had followed him in. That dragon's name he never learned, for Wraith had fled Covamere the very same night while his saviour had been exalted by the very dragons who had once supported Wraith in his quest.\n\nBut though Wraith never knew his rescuer's name, their was plenty he was unable to forget: the dragon's face; the set of his wings; the scent of him.\n\nAnd something else. In that dreadful moment when, deep in the Maze, silent jaws of charm had closed around Wraith and begun to tear him apart \u2014 in that moment when a dragon had appeared from nowhere and dragged him to safety \u2014 one thing had focused Wraith's mind. Something strange, the very thing that meant Wraith's saviour could never become Leader of the Charmed.\n\nThe dragon had been a Natural.\n\nMuch had changed in the world since then, and it seemed to Wraith upon his return to Covamere that the flow of time itself had stretched, that those hundred years had become a thousand or even a million. Charm had begun to fail and now the ring of forest around the mountain was full of natural dragons.\n\nThe world was changing, and Wraith had changed. During those years he had radically altered his appearance. His wings had grown dark with the infinite colours he had layered into them, deep red joining his original tawny colour, then gold and moon blue and evergreen and the orange of the deepest fire... year after year, each new camouflage absorbed into the one before until at last he held all possible colours inside him and their total was a dazzling, priceless black.\n\nHowever, there was one thing that had not changed: Wraith's ambition. Here he was outside the Maze once more, the only dragon ever to be given a second chance. This time he would not fail.\n\nHe flew high and fast through the mountain dawn, gazing down at familiar Covamere \u2014 a Covamere that was now his. In exile he had assembled a mobile army, recruiting over many years and from many lands. With the help of his lieutenant, Insiss, he had sharpened the army's claws until he had surrounded himself with a mighty engine of destruction, so loyal that it was virtually an extension of his own body. When word reached him that Halcyon had retreated into the Plated Mountain, he knew the time had come.\n\nThe attack on Covamere had been devastating. Wraith's legions had completely crushed Halcyon's pitifully neglected defences. When dragons learned that Wraith was poised to take on the Maze itself, the majority of Halcyon's routed army changed allegiance and pledged their loyalty to the Black Dragon. Having captured Covamere, Wraith immediately started recruiting fresh warriors from the outlying regions. Meanwhile, Insiss managed the rebuilding of those parts of the citadel destroyed during the battle.\n\nNow that work was done. Wraith had returned, and Covamere was glorious again. The time had come to launch his final assault on whatever defences Halcyon was still hiding behind. Now, before the moon grew full again.\n\nBefore the world turns.\n\nOnly one thorn remained in his flank: those few wretched dragons still in Covamere who remained loyal to Halcyon. What did they call themselves? Wraith's Hardship? An absurd name. If Insiss had his way, they would be executed, every one.\n\n'They grow in strength every day, Master,' Insiss had told Wraith only this morning. 'You cannot ignore them forever. You should kill them while you have the chance.'\n\n'I do not kill,' Wraith had reminded his ivory-scaled lieutenant. 'I prevail.'\n\nAll the same, did he dare launch his attack on Halcyon while this so-called Wraith's Hardship laughed in his face?\n\nWas death the only way, after all?\n\nSunlight struck Wraith's body as dawn painted the mountain below. He gazed into the lines of force hidden in the land, sensing their convergence, and his convergence with them. History was drawing to a point and that point was here beneath the Plated Mountain. This time he would prevail. This time Wraith would be the one to emerge triumphant.\n\nThe mountain shook.\n\nThe earthquake was slight, barely a tremor. The northern slope of the Plated Mountain shook, just once, crazing the ice on its upper reaches into a random patchwork of lines and angles. A single, enormous crack sprinted down from the summit and vanished into the forest that girdled the surrounding foothills.\n\nSound followed. The concussion crashed in Wraith's ears, then gradually died to a distant rumble, fleeing north. Wraith tracked its progress with unnaturally acute ears, squinting far into the distance as it faded into far-off silence.\n\nThat was no ordinary earthquake.\n\nSomething about the receding tremor \u2014 its taste, perhaps \u2014 made Wraith believe that the tremor was being directed on its journey north. Directed by a dragon.\n\nHalcyon?\n\nIt was an obvious thought but Wraith dismissed it. The magic did not smell right.\n\nMantle? Are you still alive?\n\nIf so, here was another foe of old to be dealt with at last: the Keeper of the Maze himself.\n\nThe ground shuddered for the final time. Maintaining his height, Wraith watched curiously as a new clearing opened up in the forest below him. Tremendous cracking and splintering sounds filtered up through the clear sky as a circle of mature pine trees turned instantly to dust. A cloud grew above the widening arena, obscuring the view.\n\nInterested, Wraith flew down into the rising dust. Despite Mantle's efforts to contain its power, the Maze had occasionally been known to leak charm out into the world. Thus great tracts of the forest remained unexplored, and tales of those dragons who had strayed into the forbidden zones were lurid and horrifying. Dragons spoke in quavering voices of winged creatures robed in liquid metal floating through the trees; of spaces where the air itself appeared to be alive; of black teeth firing up through the soil and snapping at the trees, releasing red blood from the severed trunks.\n\nWraith emerged from the dust cloud to find himself flying low across the new clearing. The space was huge, bounded by trees and high cliffs, accessible only from the air. Like a prison. The ground was still. The Black Dragon's charmed senses told him that the Maze was too. Yet the charm it had for some unknown reason ejected into the world remained.\n\nIn the middle of the clearing were hundreds of blue, flickering globes, each about twice the size of a dragon, each floating a little above the ground and anchored to it by a thin, fiery tendril. Hot ribbons of charm leaped between them, racing from one side of the cluster to the other with the speed of lightning.\n\nSpheres of charm, Wraith pondered. Ancient charm, the oldest I have ever encountered. How interesting.\n\nAs he flew above the glowing spheres, it seemed that here might be an answer to his most pressing problem. He smiled, then spread his great, black wings and soared off into the brightening sky, a new and splendid plan building itself inside his head."
            },
            {
                "title": "Realmshock",
                "text": "They flew hard out of the Low Mountains. Even when they emerged on to the wide southern plains of the Heartland they kept up their speed up; the landscape below them was featureless and drab and there was nothing else for them to do but fly.\n\nThe first three days of the journey followed the same tedious pattern of hard flight during the day and deep, exhausted sleep at night. Camps were makeshift and uncomfortable but there were no complaints; they were so tired. Food was scarce and gathered largely by Scoff, who seemed to have a knack for seeking out well-stocked rabbit burrows or rivers full of fish. He also cooked for the others \u2014 although Brace insisted on taking his food raw \u2014 since Cumber showed little interest in eating food, much less preparing it.\n\nThe party became divided. Fortune and Gossamer flew together, as did Scoff and Cumber, leaving Brace the odd one out. Worse, only Fortune and Gossamer seemed to be communicating with each other. Scoff and Cumber, while keeping physically close, stayed largely silent. Brace, in self-imposed isolation, had scarcely a word to say to anyone.\n\nOn the morning of the fourth day the ill-humour and mounting tension was finally released.\n\nThey had spent the night camped on the shores of a great inland sea; Scoff said it was called Heldwater.\n\n'Old water,' he added with characteristic brevity. 'Good night.'\n\nFortune was pleased to see that most of the leaves here were still green. Thus far on their journey, autumn oranges had dominated, even thought it was still only late summer. It was with lighter hearts that the dragons had landed here among the lush foliage of the lakeside woodland. Great, gnarled oaks reached out to dwarf the shy willows leaning over the water's edge. Even the soil smelled fragrant. It was a beautiful, warming place.\n\nUntil morning.\n\nBrace it was who woke first into the new, damp light. He stared bleary-eyed around the camp, and had stumbled most of the way to the water before he fully took in what had happened to his surroundings. For as he bent down to drink he finally noticed that his claws were completely covered by leaves. Dead, brown leaves.\n\nHe snapped his head up, quite awake now.\n\nEvery tree had lost its leaves. Bare-branched they stood except for a few hardy conifers away in the distance; all about their roots the leaves were piled, dead and brown. Brace moved his claws through them, but they were too damp to rustle. There was no glory of autumn red or yellow in them \u2014 they were just brown. Dead and brown.\n\nThe sight struck Brace as so sad, so pitiful, that it was as much as he could do not to burst into tears where he stood. The whole journey had been one long, dismal flight over a dead landscape. It was as though some evil, spiralling down-draught were dragging them all down into some dreadful abyss. He sniffled, and might yet have wept had he not heard someone shuffling towards him through the blanket of fallen leaves. He turned to face his sister, and his face set hard.\n\n'Oh, Brace!' exclaimed Gossamer. 'What is happening to the world?'\n\nBrace softened his expression a little when he saw the depth of Gossamer's distress but still could not bring himself to reach out to her. Instead they stood awkwardly at an uncomfortable distance, shivering in the damp air.\n\n'Charm's to blame!' he blurted. 'You'll see.'\n\nGossamer sighed and moved past him to drink from the gently lapping water. He watched her as she did so, and nearly reached out a wing to touch her, but she stood back from the water again before he could do so and the moment passed. Gossamer turned back to face him, and he squirmed beneath her appraising gaze.\n\n'I know you don't like Fortune, Brace,' she said softly. 'But that's only because you won't let yourself get to know him.'\n\n'I don't know what you're talking about,' Brace retorted.\n\n'He saved your life. And mine.'\n\nBut I should have been the one to save your life, Brace thought, then said aloud, 'That doesn't mean I have to like him.'\n\n'As for the others ...'\n\n'They're Charmed! You know what they did to us!'\n\n'Not these dragons.' whispered Gossamer sadly. 'Come on, eat with us this morning at least.'\n\n'I'll stay here a while,' he replied, turning his back on her and staring out across the misty water. She touched him gently on the flank and moved away to where Fortune was stirring, her worry for her brother compounded by the devastation around her, the endless expanse of dead, damp leaves that had fallen all in a single night.\n\nWinter's coming, she thought with a shiver. Coming faster than it should. But why?\n\nShe shuffled back through the mounds of leaves to where Fortune was waking, while all around her the stripped trees raised their empty branches to the sky as if echoing her question.\n\nFortune nuzzled her as she reached his side.\n\n'It's just like the leaves in the river,' he commented sadly, pointing at the devastation. Gossamer nodded her reply. 'I was thinking,' he went on. 'Would you still have come with me if you'd had a choice?'\n\nGossamer looked at him in surprise. 'That's a very direct question for so early in the morning.'\n\n'Well, would you?'\n\nGossamer tipped her head to a coy angle and narrowed her eyes. 'I'll have to think about it.'\n\n'You ...!' exclaimed Fortune. He threw his wings about her body, rolling them both over and over through the blanket of leaves until they came to a breathless halt just short of the lakeside. In the distance Brace turned his back in disgust and wandered off into the trees in search of breakfast.\n\nMeanwhile Fortune and Gossamer lay together giggling, whispering nonsense.\n\n'Sorry to break in,' Scoff rumbled. 'Need to talk.'\n\nThe two young Naturals clumsily untangled themselves from each other, fully aware of Scoff's discreet inspection of the distant landscape and also of the wry smile on his wrinkled face.\n\n'Autumn's come,' Scoff observed as they finished brushing themselves clean of the damp and clinging leaves. 'Winter next. Soon. Need to talk.'\n\n'So you said,' acknowledged Fortune. 'What did you want to talk about?'\n\n'I think it's high time we all talked,' Gossamer added.\n\nScoff nodded his head in agreement.\n\n'We three can start it,' he said. 'Your brother, though \u2014' he gestured towards the trees where Brace was rummaging through the litter of leaves '\u2014 still very angry. And Cumber ...'\n\n'What about Cumber?' asked Fortune at once. His fears about Cumber's well-being had not eased at all during the course of the journey so far, indeed they had grown worse. His friend, affected in some way Fortune did not understand by the events at Aether's Cross, had become slowly more and more introverted. His expression remained blank, his eyes dull; he had none of his normal vivacity.\n\nIt's as though autumn has come to poor Cumber too, thought Fortune gloomily.\n\n'Tried to help Cumber,' Scoff continued Scoff, his voice breaking back into Fortune's thoughts with a jolt. 'Couldn't. Maybe you can.'\n\n'But what's wrong with him?' blurted Fortune, then a dreadful thought went through his head.\n\nOh no! Oh, please, no, don't let it be that!\n\n'Please don't tell me he's...?'\n\n'The madness?' said Scoff. 'No. Not that. But a hard thing, in its way.'\n\n'What then?' Gossamer pleaded. 'What's wrong with him?'\n\nScoff sighed heavily and squatted down, inviting his companions to do the same.\n\n'Simple really,' he began. 'This is something all charmed dragons experience. I did. We all do. We call it Realmshock.'\n\n'The Realm!' whispered Gossamer.\n\n'Is this the same Realm that Cumber talked about?' demanded Fortune. 'Because if it is then I want to know exactly what it is. Please, Scoff, if we're going to help Cumber then you have to share some of your secrets with us.'\n\nAnd so Scoff told Fortune and Gossamer about the world beyond this world where fire charm was forged. He told them about his own experiences of the Realm, of its powers of good as well as evil, and of the way it was alive. And he told of Realmshock.\n\n'It hit me hard,' he said, his eyes misty with memory. 'Took many days to come to terms with it. Like Cumber. Frightening, you see \u2014 the power, the responsibility for the power. Misuse it, you could destroy the world.'\n\n'No exaggeration?' quavered Gossamer. Scoff shook his head silently.\n\n'None. Most dragons get through Realmshock. A few don't \u2014 they go mad. Cumber will be all right. Better with your help. He needs you, Fortune. More than me, I think.'\n\nFortune smiled sadly and felt Gossamer's wingtip brushing against his face; with surprise he found there were tears on his cheek.\n\n'Go to your friend.' She pointed to the distant break in the trees where Scoff and Cumber had spent the night. The young Charmed lay there still, curled up against the cold, his gold scales decked with dew and glistening in the damp air.\n\nFortune shivered, for although the early sun was beginning to burn its way through the thin mist still he felt chilled. Shaking the last of the leaves from his wings he trudged up the gentle slope to where Cumber lay not asleep, as Fortune discovered, but awake and watching his friend's approach with dull, disinterested eyes. Unsure of what to say, Fortune loitered for a moment, watching his breath clouding about him. Finally he summoned the courage to speak.\n\n'We were worried about you,' he offered lamely.\n\n'No need,' came Cumber's brisk reply. The charmed dragon promptly closed his eyes. Fortune glanced back down the slope towards the lakeside where the others were waiting and watching. Brace, he saw, had emerged from the woods and was stood a little to the side of the other two, looking alternately towards Gossamer and then up the hill to where he himself stood before Cumber.\n\nWhat can I say to him?\n\n'I understand what you've gone through,' he began, only to be cut off by his charmed companion's sudden cry.\n\n'Understand?' Cumber rose to his feet in a fast, fluid move, the suddenness of the motion scattering leaves to every side. Fortune took a couple of steps back as Cumber marched angrily towards him, droplets of dew cascading down the scales of his back. Blue trails of charm snaked over his flanks, vaporising the water. His eyes were wide and mad.\n\nHe really has gone insane! thought Fortune, horrified. Just like all the others. The madness has taken him! Scoff was wrong!\n\n'Understand?' repeated Cumber, his voice like thunder. 'How can you possibly understand, Natural? How can you understand what I've seen, what I've experienced? Do you understand what the fire is? Do you understand this?!'\n\nFortune leaped to the side as Cumber spread his jaws wide and breathed out a jet of fire. At the limits of his hearing he seemed to hear a tremendous ripping sound. The ground trembled and lightning raced through the soil around Cumber's claws. Fire exploded all around him.\n\nHe was about to take to the air when he heard Scoff's cry: 'Stand your ground! All of you \u2014 don't move!'\n\nTerrified, yet fascinated too, Fortune forced himself to remain where he was.\n\nCumber did not move either. He was standing with his legs planted firm and wide and his neck angled low so that the fire streaming from his mouth poured straight into the ground, where it seemed to vanish. But all around him the flames were breaking free again. Plumes of blue fire charm burst from the soil, all the way down the slope to the water's edge, running even as far as the woods, and wherever the charm appeared it turned the fallen leaves to cinders. Only where the dragons stood did the ground remain cold; everywhere else it boiled.\n\nThe Naturals looked on astonished; Scoff's face was grim. Cumber's expression turned to agony as he poured out the charm. The mist thickened as the dew boiled away from the leaves, then became smoke as the leaves themselves charred. Soon the damp blanket had become a thin, black skin that swiftly began to fragment and scatter before a growing breeze from the north.\n\nPresently the fire grew thin in Cumber's throat and his legs began to tremble. Then, without further warning, they buckled altogether, the flames subsided and he tumbled on to his side, rolling a tree's length or more down the slope until he crashed against an old oak stump. There he lay inert as his friends rushed over to tend to him, their flailing wings beating down the coarse veil of ash and mist.\n\nBrace watched through the clearing air, still at a distance, still unable to participate in the group. Uncertain of his role here, he squatted by the water and contemplated the feelings that drove him on \u2014 and those which held him back.\n\nNo dragon will overlook me again, he was thinking. And the Charmed will pay for what they did to the Cross.\n\nHe watched closely as his sister leaned over Cumber's prone body, aware that her presence here prevented him from doing what he really yearned to do: abandon the group altogether and strike out on his own. There had to be dragons here \u2014 natural dragons \u2014 who had as much reason as he to hate the Charmed.\n\nBut he could not leave his sister alone with a pair of firebreathing monsters, let alone their Natural friend.\n\nShe'll come to her senses soon enough, he told himself. Then we can both make our stand against the Charmed. And maybe some day go back to the Cross.\n\nSome day.\n\nMaybe.\n\nAfter three more weary days of hard travel the dragons finally came within sight of their destination. While the others set up camp, Fortune detached himself from the group to sit alone on a mound of jagged, black rock, with nothing before him but the wasteland of the Injured Mountains and the brooding, threatening shadow of the Plated Mountain. Heldwater was far behind them now. The way ahead looked bleak.\n\nDuring the flight, Cumber had continued to keep his distance from the others, but Fortune had sensed a change in him all the same. Following his show of firebreathing on the shores of the lake, he had become calmer, although no less withdrawn.\n\nSitting there alone, Fortune realised that he missed Cumber very badly indeed.\n\nI miss Wood too, he mourned.\n\nTaking one final look at the bleak sea of rock stretching before him, he turned back towards the camp. He could just make out three bodies nestled in the hollow of porous rock: there Gossamer and Scoff, with Brace off to the side...\n\nWhere's Cumber?\n\nWithout disturbing the others, Fortune clambered to the top of a low peak and scanned the desolate landscape.\n\nBehind: the sandy grey of the desert that had dominated the final day of flight across the Heartland. Water had been scarce there and they had been glad to reach the broken foothills of the Injured Mountains where streams flowed once more.\n\nAhead: the Plated Mountain.\n\nCumber was nowhere to be seen.\n\nFortune scanned the horizon. Finally he spotted a flash of gold, just visible in the low dawn light. Cumber was too distant for Fortune to be able to make out what he was doing, but the air around him seemed to be shimmering, as though a heat haze were distorting the view.\n\nDon't tell me he's using fire charm again, thought Fortune with a heavy heart as he leaped into the air. His wings ached terribly from the arduous flight and he could almost hear his muscles creaking as he glided to where his friend was perched. He alighted quietly behind him, and was about to speak when it occurred to him that Cumber might not have heard him arrive. He peered over the wing of the young charmed dragon, and gasped at what he saw.\n\nFloating in the air before Cumber was a dragon. A fraction of its true size, it was contained within a globe of air the size of a pumpkin, the perimeter of which was defined by a glistening skin of sparks. As Cumber moved his head so the charm moved with him. The dragon inside it \u2014 a large warrior Charmed \u2014 was standing to attention. It looked pale and flat as though it were some tremendous distance away, which of course it was. The dragon was evidently quite unaware that it was being observed.\n\n'It's a magnifying charm.' Cumber's voice startled Fortune, all the more so after the days of silence. 'You see, I was beginning to wonder if we shouldn't be a little more careful as we approach the mountain and Covamere, and so I've been observing the outposts a little, and I must say I'm beginning to wonder if everything is as it's supposed to be down here in the south, because all the dragons I've seen look more like the sort of dragon we encountered at Aether's Cross rather than the sort Halcyon would want on his guard duties, although I suppose if ...'\n\n'Cumber!'\n\nCumber blinked and dragged his attention with obvious reluctance away from his magical sphere of air. 'What?'\n\nBut Fortune could only grin like a fool, for there in front of him was Cumber \u2014 the real Cumber, not the grim dragon of the previous days. His heart bounded in his chest.\n\n'Cumber, I ...'\n\n'Don't tell me,' Cumber interrupted, raising a wing to silence his friend. 'I know I've behaved abominably and you deserve an explanation, although I imagine Scoff's told you more or less what's been going on in my head because he went through it too, in his day \u2014 in fact, I suppose it's something every charmed dragon experiences sooner or ...'\n\n'Cumber!' cried Fortune, laughing now for it seemed that Cumber was determined to make up for six days' worth of silence all in one go. 'It's all right, I underst... no, I'm sorry \u2014 I don't understand what you've been going through, not fully at least, but I do understand that it's been bad. If there's anything I can do ...'\n\n'It's all right, my friend,' replied Cumber, dissolving the magnifying charm and turning to his friend with a wistful smile. 'It's enough that you didn't give up on me.'\n\n'Do you want to talk about it?'\n\nCumber shook his head. 'I have killed. Fire charm works on a dragon's soul. Fortune, it stains it somehow... oh, I can't explain.'\n\n'It was either you or Hex.'\n\n'I know. But the Realm has a bitter taste. It can do wonderful things too, but in these times it is so hard to make good magic, so hard ...'\n\nCumber smiled again, a sad, knowing smile, and it was then that Fortune knew that his friend was going to be all right.\n\nBut there's something else, isn't there?\n\n'What aren't you telling me, Cumber?' He draped a hesitant wing across his friend's back. Cumber pulled away.\n\n'I'll always be here to help you, Cumber,' pressed Fortune. 'Remember that next time you need a dragon. But we've got to be straight with each other, especially now, now that we're here, in sight of the Plated Mountain.'\n\nCumber peered over Fortune's shoulder towards the camp, craning his neck in an exaggerated fashion.\n\n'The others are waking up,' he said, his attempts at diversion so transparent as to make Fortune smile.\n\n'Cumber, you're infuriating! Whatever it is, just spit it out.'\n\n'Oh, well, yes, all right then.' Cumber began pacing about on the rock outcrop. 'But it's nothing really.'\n\n'I'll be the judge of that.'\n\n'All right. The thing is, I don't think Ordinal was entirely honest with me.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'Well, when she laid out the details of the quest, you know, observe the fall of South Point \u2014 which she had foreseen \u2014 and then race the madness to reach Halcyon first and inform him of the danger... well, there was something she wasn't telling me. And it's the same thing I'm not telling you.'\n\n'But what is it?'\n\n'I don't know \u2014 she never told me!'\n\n'Oh, Cumber!'\n\n'But,' Cumber added, his tone more serious now, 'I have wondered for a long time what it might have been, and now that we are near our destination I am beginning to get a sense of it. Not its true shape but, you might say, its colour.'\n\n'Cumber, what are you talking...? Wait, did you say \"colour\"?'\n\nCumber nodded.\n\n'Something else that Ordinal had foreseen, but which she didn't tell you about?'\n\nCumber nodded again.\n\n'Something bad?'\n\nThis time Cumber did not nod, but merely stared at his friend. Then, at exactly the same time, they both said:\n\n'The Black Dragon.'\n\nFortune inhaled sharply, his heart clenching in his chest, remembering the horror with which Gossamer had told him of that strange visitor to Aether's Cross, feeling that same horror himself.\n\n'But how could Ordinal have known about him?' he said.\n\n'I don't know,' replied Cumber. 'I don't even know for certain that's what it is. But I'm convinced she knew more about what's going on than she told me.'\n\nFortune stared at the vast hulking shadow of the Plated Mountain, dread seeping into his bones. The cold air, the ravaged landscape, the empty sky \u2014 he felt certain that something was desperately wrong here. Something had beaten them here \u2014 if not the Charmed madness then something equally as terrible.\n\n'Do you think he's here? The Black Dragon?' he said.\n\n'I'm sure of it,' Cumber answered. 'His wings are spread between us and the mountain. But mark this, Fortune, our quest remains unchanged: we have to reach Covamere and speak to Halcyon, because that is what Ordinal wanted from us, and that is what I for one am going to do!'\n\nCumber looked proud, indomitable. He recognised how formidable his firebreathing friend had become since Aether's Cross, and he gave thanks that he had the young Charmed as an ally and not as an enemy. As Wood had surely done the instant he had leaped from the forbidden ledge, Cumber had at last come of age.\n\nWhich just leaves me, Fortune thought a little mournfully.\n\n'If any dragon can lead us to Halcyon, it's you, Cumber,' he proclaimed. Then he turned into the wind and thrust himself into the air, too late to see the shadow of doubt that fell across the face of his friend."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Eve of the New",
                "text": "Any dragons lost in the heart of Covamere would have proclaimed it a fussy, over-developed labyrinth, filled with screens and towers, tunnels and tracks, bridges and hollows and huge, open arenas. Built and rebuilt over the ages, Covamere had no true foundation, only a chaos of levels and sub-levels that took a dragon first high then low in his tortuous passage across the city. Even Wraith's recent reconstruction had failed to bring it to order.\n\nAnd yet...\n\nIf those dragons were to take to the air instead, they might see Covamere differently. Instead of its individual scales, they might begin to discern the shape of its body.\n\nSeen from above, Covamere was a great fang, its roots lost in the surrounding forest but its tip clearly visible as it narrowed to a point one quarter of the way up the western slope of the Plated Mountain. All Covamere conformed to the thrust of this single tooth, this inexorable direction that led the eye up to the place where, once upon a time, all dragons had dreamed of journeying at least once in their lives.\n\nThe Portal. A ragged tear in the rock. A gash framed with black stone teeth.\n\nThe way into the Plated Mountain.\n\nIn truth, it was only one of seven entrances to the underground caverns of Covamere. The other lesser ways were spaced equally around the mountain, all of them inconspicuous and rarely used, mere accessories to the Portal. Beyond its rock-lined entrance lay the deepest chambers known to dragon, within which the first stirrings of the Maze could be felt. Beyond them? Only the Maze knew.\n\nThe moon slashed a thin crescent across the sunset sky. Soon it would not be there at all, having closed its one eye on the world once more.\n\nUnable to rest, Wraith made a long, slow flight over the forest near Covamere's western border. Here the trees were thick and green, and yet almost empty of life. Landing in a clearing, he began wandering through the barren space, imagining the creatures that once had lived there.\n\nLittle life now, he pondered. Even less charm.\n\nIn the golden times, the dragons of Covamere had kept herds of zirafae here. These elegant charmed creatures, their long, thin limbs braced by the gentle magic filling their veins, had wandered among the trees, passing through the fabric of the trunks where gaps between were too narrow even for them, scaring the hamadryads from the boughs with their soft hooting song.\n\nUpon returning to Covamere, Wraith had found the zirafae gone, and whether they had finally fled their herdmasters, or died away into extinction, or changed into something new, he could not judge, nor could any dragons tell him; they had simply vanished.\n\nAnd their charm? Had that vanished too, or changed to something new?\n\nChanged, or turned?\n\nWas all charm leaving the world?\n\n'No,' whispered Wraith, 'for where I see charm fail in the world I see it grown within me. Charm is not failing; if it seems to leak from the world that is because it leaks into me.'\n\nHe smiled a thin, moonlike smile. If the zirafae were gone he would recreate them. It was within his power.\n\nHe absorbed the morning sunlight greedily, and as a little magic left the world, a little more entered Wraith.\n\n'... lost dragon!' a voice cried behind him.\n\nStartled, Wraith whirled around to see a small, wiry dragon behind him, floating a claw's width above the ground.\n\nInsiss!\n\n'What did you say?' Wraith growled.\n\n'The last dragon, my lord,' responded his lieutenant at once. His ivory scales flashed in the sunlight. 'I was notifying you of the deployment. That dragon,' he explained, pointing out a lashing tail at a dragon flying up the mountain towards the Portal, 'is the last one.'\n\n'The last one?'\n\n'Of the deployment, my lord,' repeated Insiss, adopting the trace of a sneer.\n\n'You would do well to show me a little more respect, Insiss,' rumbled Wraith. 'Walk with me a while. We will speak of the attack.'\n\nInsiss floated in Wraith's shadow like a snowflake in a thunderstorm. It was he who had built and maintained his master's reputation during his recent absence. He had joined Wraith perhaps halfway through his campaign, appearing at his side one night in some far eastern land filled with white deserts. A dragon of the desert, Insiss had immediately proved his worth by betraying those few dragons in Wraith's ranks who spoke ill of their leader, and also by suggesting many subtle ways by which the Black Dragon might strengthen his hold upon his troops.\n\nHe had spread exaggerated rumours of Wraith's powers. He had shaped his own reputation as a dragon who was ruthless in his treatment of traitors. Tiny by comparison to his great master, his sun-bleached scales hugged a bony frame, while his narrow, guarded face concealed a sharp wit. Like his master, Insiss was a dragon to be feared.\n\nHis intellect explained his confidence in the presence of his master. He could manipulate Wraith with ease, the ease of long years of practice. It was not that Wraith was not quick, it was just that Insiss was quicker. And he was a game-player. Though he had never made Wraith look a fool, he often came close... very close.\n\nInsiss believed that much of Wraith's authority was due to his great size: the Black Dragon was huge. His body was largely unadorned, except for the wide carapace sprouting from the back of his long, tapering head. This armoured shell protected his back and neck when he was in flight and created a black crown that turned with his gaze when he was at rest. His wings were immense, glittering with hidden metals and stored charm. Wraith was clearly capable of flight either with or without magic; he preferred to use both.\n\nBut what really set Wraith apart was his power over the Realm.\n\nMost dragons entered the Realm only when they needed to, considering it too dangerous to remain in that otherworld for anything but the briefest of times. Not so Wraith.\n\nHe was in the Realm all the time.\n\nTo achieve this remarkable feat he had chosen to grow two additional limbs. These extra arms extended out from the base of his sinuous neck. Each bony appendage bent twice at a smoothly-contoured joint and ended... nowhere.\n\nOr rather, ended in the Realm.\n\nWraith had managed to make solid the imaginary claws used by most charmed dragons to break the Realm membrane. As his extra limbs left this world, fading from the view of ordinary eyes, so they reappeared in the seething pit that was the source of all fire charm. The power needed to maintain the integrity of this junction between the worlds was colossal.\n\nThat is what makes him a monster, thought Insiss.\n\n'Tell me of the deployment,' Wraith commanded.\n\n'As you wish, my lord,' Insiss replied. 'As you know, the majority of our troops now await you at the Portal. Ten dragons only have been despatched to each of the lesser portals, and I feel ...'\n\n'Ten? That is too many.'\n\n'My lord?'\n\n'Halcyon will not see them as escape routes. They are of no consequence. I need all my strength here, where it matters. Two dragons at each of the lesser portals will suffice. See to it.'\n\n'As you wish, my lord.'\n\nWraith pondered this decision for a moment, then added, 'See to it that they are strong dragons, Insiss. You know the sort I like.'\n\n'Of course, my lord.'\n\nThey moved through the trees together, wings folded, until they reached the rubble wall marking Covamere's western perimeter. Dragons pulled away from this formidable pair as they marched inside the citadel. At intervals, Wraith stopped to inspect troops or to brief officers, but nothing impeded his inexorable progress towards the Portal approach. Ahead of him, dragons were frantic, busy with preparation and eager to impress; in his wake they sat back exhausted and exchanged pensive smiles. All knew that they were ready at last, as prepared as they would ever be for the greatest dragon offensive of all time.\n\nI am fortunate among dragons, Wraith mused as he paused to look back over the span of a mighty bridge of rock, for I have a second chance. It was for this moment that I was allowed to survive the Maze once. I shall now claim my rightful victory!\n\nThe approach to the Portal was wide enough for ten or more dragons to march abreast up its steep slope. Wraith, his wings spread almost to their limit, filled it from one side to the other, forcing Insiss to coast behind him, supported on his constant cushion of charm. The path steepened towards a crest of rock, so that only afternoon sky was visible ahead as they ascended. When they reached the crest, the pathway levelled out, opening up a spectacular view of the soaring blackness of the Portal framed by the grey wedge of the Plated Mountain.\n\nA junior officer scurried nervously up and whispered something to Insiss. The ivory dragon nodded briefly and then, motioning to the officer to wait, addressed himself to Wraith.\n\n'My lord. It is reported that the last of Wraith's Hardship has been rounded up. Nine dragons in all are now captive in the Round Arena. Your judgement upon them?'\n\n'The same as their treacherous comrades,' murmured Wraith, gazing at the Portal. 'There is room in my prison for them all.'\n\n'My lord,' said Insiss hesitantly, 'is that wise? There is so much we do not yet know. Much could be learned from these dragons.'\n\n'Nothing that is not known already, Insiss,' growled Wraith, eyeing his lieutenant balefully.\n\nThe officer squirmed at Insiss's side, obviously uncomfortable to be present at such a high-level exchange.\n\n'But my lord, Halcyon has sealed the Portal against attack.'\n\n'You tell me what I already know. His charm is strong, but barricades can be brought down.'\n\n'Yes, but what lies behind them? We do not know. Where is Halcyon hiding? We do not know. What forces does he still command? We do not know.'\n\n'Your suggestion, Insiss?'\n\n'Read their minds, my lord.'\n\nDamn you, Insiss! This time you go too far!\n\nWraith's alleged ability to read a dragon's mind was one of the more powerful weapons in his own arsenal of fear. It was, of course, Insiss who had spread the false rumour of this unheard-of power, and now few of Wraith's dragons doubted that their commander could, at will, determine their thoughts and their loyalties and deal with them accordingly. Instant trial, and instant sentence. A terrifying weapon.\n\nIn fact \u2014 and this even Insiss did not suspect \u2014 Wraith did possess a fragment of this legendary talent, the full manifestation of which was now entirely lost to the world. Wraith could not read a mind as such, but he could steal some of the thoughts of a dying dragon. At the point of death, when a dragon's spirit leaves its body and undertakes the next, great journey, something of its mind is laid open to any creature with the wit and speed to pounce.\n\nWraith, with his constant access to the Realm, was such a creature.\n\nAs Insiss goaded him before the embarrassed officer, Wraith wondered if he should not simply kill his lieutenant here and now and steal his thoughts, so that he might understand the true nature of this scrawny dragon who thought himself smarter than his master.\n\n'Listen to me, Insiss,' he intoned. 'These traitors are useless to us. I already know more than you or any dragon can conceive. And I know you, Insiss; I know you better than you guess. Consider that. Insiss, as you leave my presence now; consider it very carefully indeed.'\n\n'Then kill them, my lord,' Insiss replied. But the Black Dragon would not be pushed.\n\n'I do not kill, Insiss. I prevail. Go.'\n\n'As you wish.'\n\nInsiss spun around angrily, ushering the trembling officer down the slope before him. Wraith ignored them.\n\nNew moon, he was thinking. New age.\n\nAs his body sucked at the failing sunlight he opened his wings to the darkness of the Portal, their membranes sensing the massive barriers of charm that Halcyon had built inside the gaping entranceway. The magic woven there felt very old. Very strong.\n\nHalcyon's age is over, Wraith scolded himself, swiftly banishing any traces of doubt from his mind. The new age approaches.\n\nWith the ghost of a smile he tossed a filament of raw charm out into the air. It burst with colour and formed the shape of a zirafa. Wraith watched with satisfaction as the long-limbed creature galloped elegantly into the darkness of the Portal.\n\nYou too shall be renewed, thought Wraith. You and others shall live again; the past shall return.\n\nA lick of fire sliced through the shadows as his magic met that of Halcyon. The image of the zirafa vanished abruptly.\n\nThe sun vanished and night claimed Covamere. Wraith, black in the darkness, did not sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Forest",
                "text": "They agreed to walk the remaining distance to the Plated Mountain. This would slow them up considerably, but Cumber had spied out too many sentry posts in the distant hills for them to risk approach from the air.\n\n'It's not far now anyway,' Cumber said. 'We'll be safe enough once we reach the cover of the forest and from there it's only a short jump on to Covamere.'\n\nThe terrain was harsh and progress was slow, not least because Cumber insisted on keeping low behind whatever broken cover they could find. They did better by night, in the safety of the shadows cast by the waning moon. On the morning of the second day, they descended into the final river valley beyond which towered the steadily rising slopes of the Plated Mountain.\n\nOn the lower stretches of this valley, the rugged black rock gave way to areas of smoother, dusty ground separated by groves of broad-leaved shrubs. Movement here was easier, and the dragons' morale steadily improved as the sanctuary of the forest drew near. When Scoff discovered that the shrubs bore elongated fruits with green skins and a soft, sweet core, spirits rose even more. By midday they had crossed the river that struggled through the dusty vale and soon they were ascending, stealthily now, into the foothills of the Plated Mountain.\n\nWhile Brace pushed excitedly ahead, and Scoff and Cumber marched deep in conversation, Fortune and Gossamer dropped to the back of the group. Fortune scuffed the ground as they walked, kicking up black dust and tiny flakes of pumice. A melancholy cloud had settled over his heart.\n\n'What's wrong?' asked Gossamer at last.\n\nFor a while Fortune said nothing. Gossamer waited patiently, gazing past him at the mountain looming ahead. It ached with magic. She could sense the charm pouring off it: a life-force that swam through the rock just as sprites swam through water. To her Natural senses, the charm was the faintest of smells, the merest hint of the power it truly held, but it was there, all around her, calling her.\n\n'It's calling me, Gossamer,' said Fortune, and somehow she was not surprised that his thoughts seemed to mirror hers precisely. She threw her wings wide and hugged him.\n\n'What was that for?' laughed Fortune when they finally parted.\n\n'I don't want to lose you,' Gossamer answered.\n\n'You're not going to lose me.' But even as he spoke, a current of cold air came rolling down the mountain and enveloped them. They shivered in the sudden draught and held each other close. Winter air, despite the season.\n\n'It's just a breeze,' Fortune went on. but the icy wind \u2014 not just a wind, it seemed, but a voice \u2014 grew stronger. Their companions continued ahead unaware.\n\nFortune braced himself against the cold. An image of Wood came into his mind: Wood diving from the ledge and vanishing into a sea of flashing teeth; Wood carried along by the war against the Charmed; Wood lost to him.\n\nCold and loss, whispered the Plated Mountain, these will be yours again if you proceed further.\n\nFortune held Gossamer tight as the breath of the mountain thundered past them, freezing their hearts.\n\nThe mountain speaking? Or something else?\n\n'Let us pass!' he cried defiantly.\n\nThe wind faltered, then died, although as it evaporated Fortune fancied he heard the voice become a chuckle and finally a dark, empty sigh. In his mind that sigh went on for the rest of the day.\n\nHe turned his gaze on Gossamer.\n\n'Yes,' she said, nodding. Fortune frowned, not understanding. 'A few days ago you asked me if I would have come with you anyway. That's my answer: yes. Even if Aether's Cross still existed I would still be here, with you. The first time I took a breath in your presence I left my home. I've been with you ever since. I think... I think I want to be with you always.'\n\nIn the warmth after the cold they were close and tender, and for that instant nothing existed but the two of them.\n\n'We've had so little time together,' said Fortune.\n\n'You speak as though we have little left,' Gossamer replied.\n\n'That's not how it's going to be. We're going to have all the time in the world.'\n\n'I hope so.' With a shiver, Gossamer glanced up the mountainside towards the snow-covered peak. 'I truly do.'\n\n'Come on, you two!' called Scoff from high above them. 'Time for that later!'\n\nTheir hearts bound tight together, yet weighing heavy all the same, they began again a climb that had become suddenly arduous and full of dark premonition. The Plated Mountain sat like a predatory beast, quiet and cold, as they mounted its back.\n\nWhen they finally entered the pine forest, the dragons met with a surprise: all around them were signs of dragon. Natural dragon. Old nests sheltered in the lee of the larger rocks, while swathes of trees had been cleared for camp sites.\n\n'Temporary nests,' explained Scoff. 'Not much food. Nomad dragons, always on the move.'\n\n'Naturals live here!' gasped Fortune.\n\n'I thought this was a Charmed place,' said Brace excitedly.\n\nThey entered a clearing where the sun filtered through the canopy of needles, throwing a patchwork of light and shade over the forest floor. The ground was hard, the soil black and coarse, thin over the omnipresent porous rock. Life was hard here, especially for natural creatures; here the Heartland supported only with reluctance those lacking in charm.\n\n'Charmed dragons did live here once,' confirmed Cumber, nodding at Fortune and Gossamer as they finally caught up again, 'but natural dragons have taken over their territories, even here.'\n\nBrace's eyes were shining as he rummaged around in the abandoned camp.\n\n'Maybe we'll meet up with them,' he said.\n\n'They're probably watching us already,' responded Fortune, eyeing with some suspicion the deeper belts of forest where foliage hugged elaborate waves of rock, creating gullies and canyons big enough to hide a whole army. Feeling vulnerable, he added abruptly, 'Come on, I want to be out of this forest before nightfall.'\n\nThe terrain grew steeper, and the paucity of wildlife meant that there were few trails through the forest. Progress slowed as the dragons toiled ever upwards. For Cumber and Scoff it was manageable, but for the wing-bound natural dragons the going became very difficult. Sharp pumice threatened constantly to tear delicate wing membranes, as did the outreaching limbs of the trees.\n\n'Naturals? It all looks very un-natural to me,' grumbled Scoff to Cumber as their companions fell further behind.\n\n'We must be nearly through it,' panted Fortune, suddenly jealous of the way his charmed friends' four-legged gait allowed them to tuck their wings safely away. Already the sun was going down. The murky forest unnerved him; it smelt cold.\n\n'We should rest,' Gossamer said. 'We're all so tired.'\n\n'We ought to press on,' said Fortune pensively. 'What do you think, Cumber? There's no telling what ...'\n\nSomething rustled behind them. The dragons held themselves still, their nerves stretched taut. In the dimness, nothing moved.\n\n'Come out where we can see you!' called Brace. 'We're not afraid!'\n\n'Speak for yourself,' muttered Scoff.\n\n'Ssh!' warned Gossamer.\n\nFortune peered into the twilight. Slate grey trunks soared into a glowering sky. The air was still and pregnant.\n\n'Where are you?' Brace cried.\n\nFortune was just about to warn him against calling out further when something scuttled sideways between two of the trees and was instantly absorbed into the darkness of the foliage. Faint and broken voices whispered close on the breeze.\n\nEven bolder now, Brace stepped forward and was about to shout again when a hoarse whisper broke the silence.\n\n'For the Mountain's sake, young dragon, keep quiet!'\n\nShadows transformed themselves into the shapes of two dragons. It was clear they were Naturals, but their wings were stubbier than those of the South Point dragons, obviously adapted to the forest environment. Both were old and wrinkled, with chipped horns and missing scales.\n\n'Come over here quickly,' urged the larger of the two, beckoning with a stained claw.\n\n'Why?' responded Brace.\n\nThe dragon rolled his eyes at his female companion.\n\n'Look around you, young imp,' he said impatiently.\n\nDoing just that, Fortune and the others were surprised to find that they had strayed into a ring of small stones, hardly more than pebbles, spaced meticulously in their hundreds to form a large circle on the ground.\n\n'You ain't in no danger,' said the female dragon, her tone warm and accommodating. 'But we don't want to offend no-one now, do we? Come along now, all of you \u2014 strange ones as well if they must.'\n\nFortune hesitated, nerves tingling, and watched apprehensively as Gossamer smiled and step out of the circle. Taking care not to disturb any of the stones, she stepped over the stones and into the gloomy clearing beyond. One by one the others followed.\n\n'I'm Tillery and this is my mate, Loom,' said the female dragon when they met beneath the shadows of the trees.\n\nFortune introduced himself and his companions as dragons journeying through the region after the river that had served their home settlement had run dry, a story by which the forest-dwellers were clearly unconvinced, casting as they did suspicious looks at Cumber and Scoff. However they remained genial enough and took the weary travellers a short distance into the darkening forest to a small camp, where roughly-woven screens of branches sectioned off a clearing into several private areas. Snores drifted up from behind most of the screens, and as they entered the camp the two elderly Naturals urged their guests to make as little noise as possible.\n\n'You're welcome to stay a day, two at most,' whispered Tillery, addressing Fortune directly. Then she looked pointedly at Cumber and Scoff and added, 'After that you'll no doubt be on your way.'\n\n'You're very kind,' replied Fortune. 'We'll be little trouble, I assure you. But tell me, why did you urge us out of that ring of stones? Who might we have offended?'\n\n'Them as built it,' replied Loom unhelpfully.\n\n'Best not to ask too much,' added Tillery, winking in a most unenlightening way.\n\n'Stay out of their way ...'\n\n'... and they'll stay out of yours.'\n\nFortune caught Gossamer's eye, and knew she was remembering his description of the giant circles he and Cumber had seen on their arrival in the Heartland. But this circle was so much smaller...\n\n'Sprites, perhaps?' she ventured to the group in general.\n\n'Perhaps,' allowed Loom with a shrug.\n\n'We have food, if you would like to eat,' said Tillery.\n\n'This is fascinating,' whispered Cumber to Fortune. 'These are Naturals living right next to the very centre of Charmed affairs and yet they have absolutely no interest in charm.'\n\nNo, thought Fortune. It's not that they have no interest. They're actively disinterested in charm.\n\nWhen Fortune caught up with the others, Scoff was already living up to his name and tucking into a mound of dried meat he had found. The others joined him and the feast began. As they ate, Loom and Tillery explained a little about their small band of dragons, which numbered twenty and had just reached the end of a strenuous migration from a distant part of the forest.\n\n'Four days without sleep, we've travelled,' explained Tillery with a proud sigh. 'No wonder most of us 'ave been asleep all day! Wanderers we are, the lot of us \u2014 it's not a bad life, as lives go.'\n\nConversation on both sides continued in polite fashion until eventually, as the night finally settled on the woods, Loom cleared his throat and asked Fortune if they really intended to continue up the mountain.\n\n'Is there any reason why we shouldn't?' Fortune replied.\n\nLoom and Tillery exchanged a look and tutted to themselves.\n\n'Go back to the river, I should,' advised Loom. 'You'll not get far higher up, I'll tell you that much.'\n\n'Why not?' asked Brace.\n\n'Too rough,' replied Loom quickly.\n\n'Too steep,' added Tillery.\n\n'No food.'\n\n'Very cold. Not a place for dragons.'\n\n'But there are dragons up there,' countered Fortune.\n\nTillery rolled her eyes at Loom in what was becoming a familiar gesture. Fortune had to suppress a smile: despite their irritating evasiveness he could not help but like these two old dragons.\n\n'Always impetuous, the young. Take our advice and ...'\n\n'We want to go on,' interrupted Fortune briskly. 'If you think we shouldn't, tell us why.'\n\nThe faces of their hosts, dark and shadowed in what little starlight penetrated the forest, grew both suspicious and wary.\n\n'There's been terrible stories lately. Terrible!' Tillery blurted suddenly.\n\n'What stories?'\n\nBut Tillery just shook her head.\n\n'It's dangerous up there,' said Loom, making a great show of shuffling himself and his mate off towards their sleeping area. 'Dragons like us might go up the mountain but none'll come back. We'll be sleeping now. You'll be gone in the morning, I daresay.'\n\nWhen they had disappeared, Cumber spoke.\n\n'Few Naturals have ever been allowed to enter Covamere,' he said. 'Should the Black Dragon be there already, it will be a more dangerous place than any Natural has ever ...'\n\nHe stopped, aware suddenly of the strange, internal itch that was the Realm. The itch was dark, like the night around them.\n\nThe Black Dragon's wing is darker even than this, Cumber thought with a shiver.\n\n'What should we do, Cumber?' whispered Fortune, hugging Gossamer close to him.\n\n'Well, I suggest a scouting trip straight away, tonight. It's new moon. Darkness is on our side.'\n\n'But why right now?' groaned Gossamer. 'I'm so tired already.'\n\n'If we wait until tomorrow night we'll have lost a whole day, so tonight it is. But we won't all go \u2014 only Scoff and I need go for the moment, since being Charmed we'll be more likely to talk our way out of any trouble and there's always ...'\n\n'I'm coming too,' interrupted Fortune. He felt Gossamer flinch beside him, and could not look at her. Behind her, Brace sneered.\n\n'Well ...' Cumber switched his gaze between Fortune and the clearly unhappy Gossamer. 'I'm not sure that... I mean, I don't know if ...'\n\n'Cumber, I'm going with you,' repeated Fortune. 'I started this journey with you and I'm going to finish it with you. It's as much my quest as it is yours.'\n\n'But it's only a scouting trip,' suggested Cumber. 'There's really no need to ...'\n\n'There's every need. I'm coming, and that's final.'\n\n'But you're too conspicuous.'\n\n'You can disguise me. I imagine you can do that. Scoff? You can work a charm to disguise me?'\n\n'Of course,' rumbled Scoff.\n\n'Then that's settled.'\n\nOnly now, with the decision made, did Fortune turn to Gossamer. He saw there were tears on her face.\n\n'We shan't be apart for long,' he soothed, only half-believing it himself. 'We'll find out where Halcyon is and how best to get to him, then come back and make proper plans. Don't worry \u2014 I'll be back before you know it.' He broke off, surprised to find tears in his own eyes.\n\nShe stared back at him with a terrible intensity.\n\n'Brace,' Fortune went on. He was finding it surprisingly difficult to speak. 'You must take care of your sister. Will you do that for me?'\n\n'It's not you I'll do it for,' Brace growled. Eyes lowered, he forced his way past Fortune to a distant corner of the camp where he curled up against a heap of pine needles.\n\n'Well, all right then,' Cumber sighed, 'if you really are determined to come with us, Fortune, then you must come. Are you ready?'\n\n'Give me a moment,' Fortune replied.\n\nCumber harrumphed. 'Well, do you want to come or not?'\n\n'Give them a moment,' murmured Scoff, drawing the young charmed dragon away, and leaving Fortune and Gossamer alone together.\n\nFortune stood in the dark, head bowed. A fragment of a dream had floated in the front of his mind: stone circles rotated in space; a mountain opened like an eye; a yellow-eyed shadow searched for him through the labyrinthine of a gigantic egg; the stars turned imperceptibly, like islands in a vast, lost sea.\n\n'Haven,' he whispered.\n\n'What?' said Gossamer, frowning.\n\n'It's a place, I think. Have you heard of it?'\n\nWhen she shook her head, he told her of his dream about a circle of islands in a distant sea, his mother's voice telling him that this was Haven, a place where he could be safe.\n\n'Gossamer, you must promise me this,' he said. 'If we're ever parted, meet me there. Let Haven be our place, our sanctuary. Our safety.'\n\n'But ...'\n\n'I know it's ridiculous!' Fortune grasped her tight, his eyes suddenly wild. 'I don't even know where Haven is, let alone if it exists at all. Just promise me, Gossamer, promise me you'll go there if... if you should ever be lost!'\n\nScared by his intensity, Gossamer nodded shakily.\n\n'I promise.' Regaining her composure, she found a miraculous smile. 'I'll be there. Wherever it may be, I'll be there.'\n\nThe trees, black against the starlit heavens, towered over them. In the heights of the pine giants, dryads whispered each other to sleep; to the natural dragons below their voices were but the stirrings of the midnight breeze.\n\n'Anyway, we'll only be gone a day,' Fortune said. 'I'll be back tomorrow night, the next morning at the latest.'\n\nHe smiled, but now it was she who could not meet his eye.\n\n'Just go,' she whispered. 'And stay safe.'\n\n'There are two ways we can disguise you,' Cumber explained.\n\n'First is to force-grow your body,' elaborated Scoff. 'Make you look like us. Painful though. Tiring for us too. Not recommended.'\n\n'A cloaking charm is a better idea,' concluded Cumber. 'We can make you, well, not invisible as such, but... you remember how Brutace and his thugs appeared when they first attacked us at Aether's Cross? When they just appeared out of the air?'\n\nOnly half-listening, Fortune watched Gossamer as she crossed the clearing towards where her brother lay. His heart was heavy.\n\n'Fortune? Are you listening to any of this?'\n\n'Sorry, Cumber, yes, I am.' Fortune forced himself to focus. 'Brutace and the others. Well, they were sort of... vague. Whenever I tried to look at them, my eyes just sort of slipped away. It was like trying to grasp a fish.'\n\n'That's exactly it!' cried Cumber triumphantly. 'Just like trying to grasp a slippery fish. Every time you think you've got a hold, it just wriggles its tail and slips through your claws. We'll make you slip through their claws, Fortune, you'll see!'\n\nAs the three dragons fell deep into discussion, Gossamer cast a mournful glance at them over her shoulder. Fortune would be true to his word, but the thought of their parting tore at her heart and for a brief, agonising breath she wished that she had never met him.\n\nBut then she saw him laugh and clap Cumber on the flank, and saw his easy smile.\n\nAs she joined her brother, tears were coursing down her face.\n\nIt seemed no time at all before they were clear of the pine trees and climbing the steep approach slopes towards Covamere itself. Behind and below them the forest sprawled; above, the Plated Mountain revealed itself in a series of tantalising glimpses as they moved alternately down into gullies and up on to stony ridges.\n\nThe rock possessed an extraordinary range of colours here above the treeline. Despite the dimness of the starlight, bands of red and yellow gleamed, then gave way to blue-grey and even green rock before the black pumice finally reasserted itself and the landscape resumed its former drabness.\n\nThe stars turned about the world, and the three dragons continued on.\n\nTheir plan was necessarily simple: they would proceed with caution until they made contact with a charmed dragon. If they encountered a large group they would retreat, hopefully without being seen, and try a new route. Their objective was to find a dragon alone, perhaps a bored sentry \u2014 some dragon they could pump for as much information as possible without arousing suspicion.\n\nAfter a while, Cumber and Scoff began to generate between them the complex charm that would be needed to divert suspicious eyes away from Fortune. His presence had to become a blank, a hole into which no dragon would even think of looking. For his part Fortune was quite unaware that the spell was being cast. He had expected a tingling sensation, or else one of those eerie glows or crackles of magic; but there was nothing.\n\nPresently Cumber informed him that, although not strictly invisible, he was now vague enough not to be seen by any dragon, charmed or otherwise, other than himself or Scoff. Fortune thought that Cumber was getting carried away with fancy words \u2014 if no dragon could see him then he was effectively invisible and that was that.\n\n'Up to a point, yes,' agreed Cumber, 'but our charm works on the mind of the observer, not on your body. The word \"invisible\" is convenient, but you must remember that it's only dragons who can't see you. To all other creatures you are still entirely visible, so you see, if you make any kind of disturbance you may give yourself away.'\n\n'Don't take chances,' summarised Scoff. 'Act cautious. We'll get you through.'\n\nA fragment of rock broke loose under one of Fortune's claws and clattered away down the mountainside, kicking up dust as it fell. The tenuous nature of his invisibility became strikingly clear: he was invisible but his trail was not.\n\nSpires lifted above the next ridge, dark against the dull yellow glow of open fires.\n\n'Covamere!' breathed Cumber.\n\nThey scrambled over the ridge and on to a wide plateau. Their view of Covamere was partly obscured by a massive cliff rising from its far perimeter. Nevertheless, the citadel was close.\n\nThey began making their way across the plateau. Black soil ran smooth and flat all the way up to the roots of the cliff. The cliff curved outwards as it rose, creating a vast overhang of solid lava that erupted out of the ground in shocking defiance of its own immense mass. A deep cleft split the cliff face vertically down its centre. A path led across the plateau to the base of this crack. Claws retracted, padding silently along the path behind his friends, Fortune suddenly felt very exposed.\n\nThere was no shelter here, and the ground fell away into ominous blackness on three of the plateau's four sides. The place was silent and heavy.\n\nWhen they were halfway to the cliff, movement broke the darkness in the cleft. Two dragons lumbered slowly into the scant starlight, heavy war machines hard with armour and moving with confident ease to greet the intruders.\n\nWell, thought Fortune to himself, I hope this cloaking charm works."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Breaching of the Portal",
                "text": "Nineteen charmed dragons lay in the shadow of a pair of impossibly large wings, corpses every one. The wings beat a slow, heavy rhythm, holding Wraith aloft above his sacrifices and allowing him to scrutinise their sad remains, sniff their wounds. Here he opened a belly, there he broke a skull, in his endless search for enlightenment.\n\nYet still it was not enough.\n\n'Bring me another, Insiss!' Wraith thundered.\n\n'But, my lord,' replied Insiss, 'your troops are restless. They fear ...'\n\n'They fear me, Insiss. As should you.'\n\n'As you wish, my lord.'\n\nLowering his head in deference, Insiss flew from beneath the vast, overhanging cowl of the Portal and into the starlight beyond. Once outside, he glided slowly among through the ranks of dragon warriors standing to attention there. No dragon was able to meet his eye. In the sky above, the new moon was a starless circle and the night looked anything but new. Instead, everything looked very, very old.\n\nTaking the opportunity to gather his thoughts, Insiss admitted reluctantly that he no longer felt comfortable in the presence of his master. The Black Dragon had changed \u2014 was changing still. Once confident in his abilities to steer Wraith's thoughts \u2014 and yes, even to manipulate him \u2014 Insiss was beginning to understand that he did not know the Black Dragon at all.\n\nCalculating, concerned, he continued his search for the next volunteer.\n\nWraith remained beneath the Portal's dark roof. Folding his wings, he alighted with casual grace on the mound of corpses. Wielding charm, he created a pool of mercury in the air above him. He looked up, contemplating his reflection in the inverted mirror of the silvery fluid's surface: his deep, dark hide; his eight spidery limbs.\n\nYou are beautiful, he thought.\n\nHe flexed his tail and opened his wings again, admiring the dull light spilled by his stored flight charm into the droplets of oil that beaded their membranes. His fleshless forearms stretched as he watched himself massage the oil into his leathery skin. He could feel Halcyon's ancient charm moving like a spice through the air around him, and its scent was intoxicating: such formidable magic, such a worthy opponent.\n\nSuch a glorious triumph.\n\nAltering the angle of the quicksilver mirror, he used it to spy on Insiss as he moved among the waiting troops. Dragons parted like water as the ivory-scaled lieutenant cut a path through their midst; heads bowed as he passed. Finally Insiss made his choice, picking out a single, proud individual, a dragon abandoned to his by neighbours who pulled suddenly away from his side. Under the intense, hypnotic stare of the lieutenant, the luckless creature followed obediently up the slope to where Wraith was waiting. The rest of the crowd relaxed visibly.\n\nThis must be the one, thought Wraith with a minute stab of concern. It would not do to kill too many loyal followers.\n\nDissolving the mirror, he opened his skeletal Realm forearms to welcome his next pathfinder.\n\nTo Fortune's relief, the two sentries trudged across the plateau towards them with no sense of urgency whatsoever.\n\n'These two look dead on their feet,' whispered Cumber.\n\n'Probably been on duty too long,' Scoff agreed.\n\nAs if to confirm their suspicions, both sentries yawned simultaneously, before stopping and slumping down on their haunches.\n\n'Over the cliff and join the rest if you're new,' said the larger one. His coarse hide would have been a brilliant turquoise had it not been dirty and ill-kempt. The two dragons regarded Cumber and Scoff with little obvious interest; clearly they had no idea Fortune was standing quietly to one side, watching and listening.\n\n'Could we rest here for a stretch?' panted Scoff, making a great show of stretching his neck and working his lungs. 'That's quite a climb.'\n\n'Suit yourselves,' replied the smaller sentry, a silver creature with ragged claws. 'Training camp's just the other side of the cliff but if you want to rest, well, suit yourselves.' He gave the impression he did not much care what they did.\n\n'Not much training going on now,' mumbled Turquoise to nobody in particular.\n\n'You've left it a bit late, to be honest,' commented his partner.\n\n'Story of my life,' laughed Scoff, warming to his role. 'Been on duty long?'\n\n'Don't we know it!' replied Turquoise bitterly.\n\nCumber held his tongue and let Scoff's banter put the two guards at their ease. He was more interested in the overhanging cliff, and in particular the cleft running virtually its full height. The crack was mostly narrow, but it widened towards the bottom, and the opening it made there seemed somehow more than just a cave.\n\nIt's too dark to be real, thought Cumber with a shiver. There's charm at work there. Ancient charm.\n\n'Do you mind if we grab a bit of shelter?' he ventured, moving as though to step past the guards and towards the cliff. Towards the cleft.\n\nAt once, the silver guard blocked his path.\n\n'The Master wouldn't like that,' he drawled. Cumber stopped and glanced at Scoff.\n\n'Fair enough,' grunted Scoff. 'Guess we'll learn his ways when we join up.'\n\n'Likely as not.'\n\nAncient charm!\n\n'Halcyon won't be getting out this way then,' said Cumber, acting on a sudden hunch.\n\n'Hah!' laughed Turquoise. 'Too right. Wraith's got him holed up for sure.'\n\nWraith! So that's his name! thought Fortune, his heart racing. Although he remained at a distance, he could hear the exchange on the plateau clearly; the night air was crisp and cold.\n\n'Sooner Halcyon's dealt with the better,' said Scoff, smoothly picking up on Cumber's line of enquiry.\n\n'Don't know about that,' replied Silver, his voice suddenly a little harder, his eyes suddenly a little brighter. 'We just follow orders. Where've you two come from anyway?'\n\n'We're from Point's Cross,' added Cumber hurriedly. 'We heard what was happening and came to join up.'\n\n'Heard what \u2014 from who?' asked Silver. He nodded to Turquoise, who circled behind Cumber and Scoff with slow, menacing steps. Spikes flicked out from the sentries' flanks, hissing a warning to the intruders. Silver grinned without humour.\n\n'I think you'd better answer some questions,' he said. 'We've not seen dragons quite like you before. Maybe Wraith will be interested in you after all.'\n\nFortune watched helplessly as the two dragons closed in on his friends. It was plain they were considerably more alert than they had first appeared, having out-bluffed Cumber and Scoff with ease and only now revealing their true colours.\n\nKnowing that's no help, he thought desperately. But what could he possibly do to help?\n\n'Hey, you!' he shouted. 'Over here!'\n\nInside the entrance to the Portal, a large cave proceeded directly back into the mountain for roughly ten tree lengths, whereupon it stopped dead in a smooth stone wall. Obviously artificial, the wall bore neither crack nor crevice to betray the way through to the deeper routes it guarded.\n\nHalcyon was somewhere behind it.\n\nBefore he could even approach the wall, Wraith had to negotiate the invisible labyrinth of charm that Halcyon had set beneath the Portal's protective cowl of rock. Nineteen dragons he had sent into that maze, each aware of the route and fate of the previous one. Each had gained a little more ground than his predecessor, but ultimately each had been cut down by an unknown force: charm, but of a kind even Wraith could not identify.\n\nNineteen dragons dead. Well, there were more where they had come from.\n\nHaving despatched Insiss, Wraith turned his baleful gaze on the dragon who had 'volunteered'.\n\n'Your name is... Lapse?' he said.\n\nThe unfortunate dragon nodded dumbly. How the Master knew his name he did not dare guess.\n\n'Come.'\n\nBy a subtle vocalising charm, Wraith's words boomed out of the Portal to be heard by the rest of the army assembled in the night outside. His conversation was therefore an address, a speech in which he spoke of sacrifice and honour and the great victory to come, and as he spoke all those dragons listening \u2014 including Lapse \u2014 believed him. More than that \u2014 they loved him.\n\n'Loyal Lapse,' Wraith concluded, 'learn from me now the routes taken by your brave comrades, so that you may be the first to breach the mighty Portal.'\n\nA cheer echoed outside as Wraith described in detail the previous safe courses trodden by the nineteen dead dragons. They cheered, yes, but it was a cheer much quieter than those they had raised when the first dragons had been sent in.\n\nWraith hoped desperately that this twentieth pathfinder would finally solve the riddle of the Portal. Yet beneath that hope seethed anger that he, mighty Wraith, should be confounded by a charm set by senile Halcyon. Beneath the anger stirred something else: Wraith's nascent fear of the Maze itself, that he might never breach it.\n\nHis eyes bulging with terror, Lapse passed out from beneath Wraith's wings and into the rich darkness of the Portal. Though none of the dragons outside could see within, a hush fell over the waiting troops.\n\nLapse stepped over a line of grooves that had been scored into the porous rock floor: the marks left when the bodies of his predecessors had been dragged back from the scene of his death, presumably by some charm of Wraith's. As he proceeded, the Black Dragon's instructions told him where to turn on the otherwise featureless floor. At times he doubled back on himself; at others he travelled straight, then moved in a tight circle. All the time, his inherent charm-sense gave him warning of countless magical triggers set invisibly in the air and in the rock, but it was hard to fix on their precise positions. Some blurring charm of Halcyon's, he supposed. No wonder even great Wraith needed pathfinders.\n\nNow Lapse was approaching a pool of sticky blood that had congealed before it had been able to soak into the spongy rock. Trails of gore led back towards the spot where Wraith perched on the mound of dead dragons. Lapse felt a long way from anywhere.\n\nHe had reached the blood of the nineteenth dragon. Here the trail ended. Here his work began.\n\nAs Fortune's cry echoed around the arena, Cumber and Scoff exchanged a horrified glance.\n\nThe silver sentry flung his head round, staring straight at where Fortune stood on the other side of the plateau. A frown distorted his brow as he struggled to make out what he thought he saw there in the darkness.\n\nTurquoise hesitated, clearly confused.\n\nWith a great bellow, Scoff lowered his head and barrelled into Silver, striking the guard low in the chest, knocking the wind from him and tumbling him on to his back. Silver's head struck a sharp rock outcrop and he dropped limp, his eyelids flickering briefly as he fell unconscious. Scoff hovered over him, suspicious \u2014 Silver's armour was heavy, particularly around his head and neck, and he wanted to be sure the dragon was truly out cold.\n\nTurquoise backed away, eyes narrowed, as Cumber advanced towards him. Blue fire snaked across the sentry's back as he raised a store of fire charm in his body; it writhed down his limbs and lanced out of them, solidifying into enormous claws.\n\nCumber crouched low, seeking an opportunity. Turquoise coiled himself, ready to pounce, then abruptly started clawing at his head, a look of surprise splashed across his face. Cumber, as one of the creators of the invisibility charm, could clearly see what Turquoise could not: Fortune, circling around the bemused sentry, lashing at him with his long, muscular tail.\n\nWhile Turquoise was distracted, Cumber let loose a thick bolt of Realm fire into his body; it crashed into the sentry's chest, stunning him instantly. His body dropped prone on top of Silver's with a dull thud.\n\nFortune dropped from the sky and landed neatly between his two charmed companions. Cumber and Scoff looked at each other, shrugged, and dissolved the cloaking charm, returning Fortune to the visible world.\n\n'No need for that any more,' said Cumber, a wry smile on his face. 'Well done, Fortune.'\n\n'Foolish,' grumbled Scoff, still casting a watchful gaze over the unconscious guards. 'Clever, though.'\n\n'I think that was a compliment, Fortune.'\n\nCumber's smile suddenly vanished.\n\n'What's the matter?' said Fortune.\n\n'I don't know. But I think we're about to find out.'\n\nCumber towards the crack in the cliff. A crimson glow was building inside the cave \u2014 or was it a tunnel? As they watched, it grew in intensity and began to pulsate. A shower of pebbles dislodged itself from the cliff high above and scattered around them.\n\nThe ground started to shake.\n\n'Go on, dragon,' said Wraith. 'You will be rewarded.'\n\nThe rear wall of the Portal loomed close. It was featureless, but there had to be a tunnel here somewhere.\n\nLapse could feel charm buzzing high in the air to his right. Turning left, he took six decisive steps diagonally towards the wall.\n\nSafe!\n\nHe paused and gently sniffed at the air. The charm was stronger here, easier to locate. Lapse wove his way through a series of spirals to find himself a mere wing's length from the wall.\n\nA white patch stained the floor just in front of him. The air above it positively crackled with charm. As he studied the stain, he saw a vague outline of... something. Something beneath the surface of the floor? Inside the rock?\n\n'Master?' he quavered.\n\n'Go on!' commanded Wraith.\n\nSteeling himself, Lapse stepped on to the white stain. The floor folded beneath him, and with a guttural scream he was ripped from this world and sucked into a more distant realm \u2014 perhaps the Realm, perhaps another. As he passed over the boundary, his mind dissolved and he knew no more.\n\nLapse did not live long enough to see the result of his work, but Wraith did, and in doing so he rejoiced. Even as he snatched from Lapse's dying mind the precise details of the course he had trodden, he understood that the knowledge was redundant. The twentieth pathfinder had broken the labyrinth.\n\nA massive charge of crimson fire bolted through the cave, feeding back into the countless guardian charms and destroying them in a dizzying series of implosions. Sparks rained past Wraith and out into the open air where his awestruck troops cowered and prayed that this was not their Master's wrath they were witnessing, but his triumph.\n\nThe fire spread out into the sky, consumed itself, and vanished with a crack of concentrated thunder.\n\nHalcyon's blockade had been destroyed.\n\nThe Portal was open.\n\nThe crimson glow built inside the cave before finally launching a colossal jet of fire out into the arena. Fortune, Cumber and Scoff cowered beneath it. The flames dispersed as quickly as they had been formed, but the earthquake accompanying it grew stronger. The ground shook, and a thousand cracks radiated out from the great cleft in the cliff.\n\n'Run for the tunnel!' cried Cumber.\n\nAs one, they scrambled into the cleft just as a huge slice of rock sheared away from the cliff and smashed on the ground behind them. An eerie silence followed the tremendous impact, broken only by the rattle of pebbles clattering down from the huge gash that now disfigured the upper part of the cliff face. Somewhere beneath the rubble lay Silver and Turquoise. Inside the cleft, a tunnel yawned.\n\nA way into the mountain had opened.\n\nIn one of the mountain's secret chambers, Halcyon waited, and watched, and wondered.\n\nHe was a dragon who had lived long and seen much. But was that not a destiny he had brought upon himself, long years ago, when he had first conquered the Maze? Since then, no dragon had succeeded in taking his place, and so his future had been sealed.\n\nHe was Halcyon, the dragon whose fate it was to set the Turning on its course.\n\nHe rested now \u2014 as much as he could ever truly rest \u2014 wandering in the system of small, spare caves buried deep in the heart of the Plated Mountain. An unremarkable dragon he was in many ways, his papery scales withered and dull. Sometimes it seemed that he had always been at rest here, immovable, rusting for aeons. Halcyon, Leader of the Charmed \u2014 and was that title not redundant now? Did it have any meaning now that the world in the throes of such great change?\n\nAs the mountain shook, opened secret eyes into the burst of charm suddenly pouring through its foundations. The Black Dragon had breached the portal. Well, so be it. Halcyon prayed that the remaining defences would delay the Black Dragon long enough for all that he had prepared for to fall into place.\n\nLong enough for the world to turn.\n\nHalcyon closed his eyes. There was nothing to do now but wait. Perhaps sleep. And to wonder.\n\nThe lesser portals will now be open too, he thought as his mind drifted. Will any dragon dare to brave them?\n\nThe rear wall of the Portal was split from top to bottom, forming an entrance wide enough to take three dragons walking abreast. Wraith approached it rejoicing, feeling with satisfaction the emptiness of the air around him.\n\nReaching the place where Lapse had perished, he stopped and stared down at the floor.\n\nAt the moment of death, Lapse had seen a flash of white exploding from the ground. Savouring the thoughts he had stolen from the doomed dragon, Wraith watched this event over and over again, worrying at it, trying to puzzle it out. It was charm, of course, but it had such a strange flavour. Almost like... troll?\n\nIt was clear to Wraith that the charm had been a trigger. When trodden upon, it had demolished the entire defensive labyrinth, opening the way into the mountain. But why would Halcyon have placed such a self-destructive oddity into his blockade?\n\nThis was too easy, Wraith decided grimly. Halcyon evidently hoped to lull invaders into complacency, encouraging them to march straight through the broken Portal and into... what?\n\nWraith cast his charm-sense into the tunnel revealed beyond the wall, and perceived an immense web of powerful magic staring straight back at him. He had breached the Portal only to reveal unknown layers of charm barricaded beyond. Charm yet more potent than any he had so far faced. Despite all his efforts, Halcyon had thwarted him once more. The Black Dragon would not conquer the mountain tonight, nor even tomorrow night; there were more defences here than he had ever anticipated.\n\n'I grow impatient, Halcyon,' he growled with growing rage. 'You will pay dearly for this.'\n\nHe stormed out of the Portal and back into the night, bellowing summons to all his commanders. He needed all the gathered charm-sense of his best dragons to map this new magic so that it could be systematically taken apart. Dragons jumped to action as Wraith thundered among them, barking orders and striking down those he deemed too slow to respond. Yet all obeyed, for their love and their fear of him were total.\n\nI will take any route now, large or small, Wraith thought. Halcyon will be conquered!\n\nDragons swarmed to his command, and the night seethed with glowing chains of magic as Wraith's team of charm-sensitives began to probe the mystery of Halcyon's new-found traps. Meanwhile, squads began making their way to the six lesser portals.\n\nAny route.\n\nThree hundred dragons were sent on a flight over the forest, for a different purpose altogether. These dragons flew with grim determination, shocked by the orders Wraith had given them, for the ruthlessness of the Black Dragon's latest strategy revealed the true depth of their master's wrath.\n\nThey flew low over the trees, gathering fire in their throats."
            },
            {
                "title": "Separation",
                "text": "'Was it a fire charm?' asked Fortune, blinking away the after-image of the dazzling flash.\n\n'Of course,' Cumber replied. 'But there's something I don't quite understand. Scoff, do you feel it?'\n\nScoff nodded. 'Gone now. Whatever it was. Retreated.'\n\n'What is? What's retreated?' Fortune could not hide his curiosity.\n\n'A massive charm was guarding this entrance,' explained Cumber. 'I could sense it as soon as we came up on to this plateau.'\n\n'I'd've said troll,' put in Scoff gruffly. 'If I didn't know better.'\n\n'Hmm. Well, whatever it was, something's broken it. Someone else is trying to get inside the mountain, that's the only explanation, and that someone has beaten us to it.'\n\n'Wraith,' breathed Fortune.\n\n'Without doubt,' agreed Cumber. 'But at least he's saved us a task. He'll probably send more troops to cover this exit now that he's breached the guardian charm, but at least we've got a clear run in.'\n\n'As long as there's no more magic waiting for us inside.' Fortune thought fast. 'Scoff, you must go back to the others \u2014 make sure they're safe. If Wraith really has got past Halcyon's defences he'll probably press home his attack. It might be some time before Cumber and I are able to get back out again.'\n\n'If you get out at all,' warned Scoff.\n\n'Never mind that. It's our task to reach Halcyon, and if he's inside the mountain then it's inside the mountain we'll go!'\n\n'You're mad to go in there.'\n\n'I know. Will you help the others?'\n\nScoff lowered his head, then raised it again. 'Of course. I'll see them to safety. Where will we meet again?'\n\n'Gossamer knows,' responded Fortune quietly, prompting a puzzled look from Cumber.\n\nScoff was struck by the intensity of the glance that the two friends shared. Friends with me too, he thought proudly, feeling a little foolish at the surge of emotion that accompanied this realisation. For too many years he had buried himself away at Aether's Cross, turning his back on the duties he had once sworn to do. Now he was back. Halcyon needed him, but more than that: dragons needed him.\n\nThe night air filled with a rhythmic, beating roar: the sound of many dragons on the wing.\n\n'Not much time,' said Scoff. 'Get in there. And good luck. Hope my eyes see you again, my friends. That I hope.'\n\n'All speed to you, Scoff,' said Fortune, slapping him on the flank.\n\n'Look after those wings,' added Cumber.\n\nBy way of reply, Scoff spread his rainbow wings and leaped into the air, flying low and fast over the edge of the plateau before finally dropping out of sight.\n\nFortune turned to face the blackness of the tunnel. He felt strange, just as he had earlier, when he and Gossamer had been caught up in that bitter, winter wind. It was as if the Plated Mountain were waiting for him. Speaking to him.\n\nHalcyon is inside, he reminded himself. Perhaps it's his voice that I hear.\n\nBut there was something else. Something that moved with more power than a mere dragon.\n\nThe power of the stars!\n\n'Father!' he whispered, too quietly for Cumber to hear.\n\n'Well,' said Cumber, leading the way into the tunnel, 'it looks like it's just you and me again, Fortune, adventurers to the end.'\n\nTogether they entered the darkness.\n\n'It's just the beginning, Cumber,' murmured Fortune. 'Just the beginning.'\n\nThe flash of crimson was brief and bright, and more than enough to wake most of the nomad Naturals sleeping in their makeshift camp. As the blood-red glow dissipated, the sound of its fury thumped through the trees. The dragons roused themselves swiftly and gazed up the mountain slopes towards distant Covamere, whence the light had come.\n\nGossamer woke to find her brother poised beside her, his wings spread as if to protect her from whatever danger might be descending towards them. He was trembling all over.\n\nIt was that pose, that promise of protection, that Gossamer was to remember much later, when that long night of the new moon had finally passed. Looking at Brace, she found herself astonished at the transformation she saw in him. Though still solidly-built he was much leaner than he had been before, and his wings had hardened into tough and serviceable engines of flight. He seemed taller, stronger, and his hide, even in the scant starlight, seemed to possess a new lustre of health.\n\nWhy, she thought with pleasure, the journey has made a dragon of him.\n\n'If only mother could see you now,' she said.\n\n'Did you see that?' Brace responded, waggling his wing at the mountain. 'That was magic, no doubt about it! Something's happening up there.'\n\n'That's as maybe, young dragon,' came the quavering voice of Tillery, 'but such things are best left alone by the likes of us. We're going, and sooner than soon \u2014 sooner than now, in fact.'\n\nGossamer watched the red light dying behind the towering trees and could only worry for the safety of Fortune, Cumber and Scoff. Had they been caught up in the explosion. With all her heart, she hoped not.\n\n'What should we do, Brace?' she asked.\n\nIt was, she realised, the first time she had turned to her brother for guidance in this way, and the moment was not lost on either of them. But before Brace could answer, the night sky grew darker still as a flock of dragons appeared above the trees. As the dragons descended upon the camp, the two youngsters huddled together, their terror mounting.\n\n'There's something very strange going on here.' Cumber paused, allowing his words to echo away down the sloping tunnel. 'Something very strange indeed!'\n\nHe frowned at Fortune, who stood at his side with a blank and dreamy expression.\n\nThe tunnel had admitted them readily enough. Aware of the charmed dragons flying towards them out of Covamere, they had marched resolutely into the blackness in the hope that there might at least be some delay before they were followed, or that the tunnels might prove confusing enough that they could lose themselves swiftly.\n\nBut no dragons followed them.\n\nPuzzled, Cumber allowed his charm-sense to percolate out into the surrounding tunnel system. They were surrounded by magic \u2014 a network of defensive charms \u2014 and yet the space immediately around them was entirely clear.\n\n'What's bothering you?' murmured Fortune, clearly distracted by something beyond Cumber's awareness.\n\n'I'll tell you what's bothering me,' responded Cumber in a state of considerable distress, 'something's letting us through, that's what's bothering me. There's magic ahead of us and there's magic behind us, but wherever we walk, it disappears, as if we were in some kind of bubble. Something's protecting us, and I don't know what it is.'\n\n'Halcyon?' suggested Fortune, shaking himself from his reverie. 'Anyway, what difference does it make? We're here now, so we might as well go on.'\n\nCumber exhaled noisily, an exasperated sigh. 'Naturals! You find yourself at the centre of an inexplicable, nonsensical, magical phenomenon and what do they say? They ask what difference it makes! Well, if I had my way we'd stop right here and think very carefully about what all this means.'\n\n'Shut up, Cumber, and follow me,' said Fortune, not unkindly. 'We've got a long way to go yet, and not much time.'\n\n'Oh, all right, I'm coming. But be careful.'\n\nOn they marched, through the black, craggy depths where the only illumination was the thin, floating light-charm that Cumber was generating and which bobbed just ahead of them, turning the rough, porous rock into an ever-changing gallery of shadows. The air was icy and still; all was silent.\n\nThe tunnel offered them no changes of direction; it simply took them into the mountain, down below the ground. There were no forks and no turns. No choices. None of which bothered Fortune, for the very straightness of the route seemed to be exactly what he had always hoped for: a direct line to Halcyon himself, to the end of the quest.\n\nBut what of the quest? Had it not become just a tasteless joke? They had come here to tell Halcyon about South Point, only to find that Wraith had beaten them to it. The Black Dragon had brought conflict to the Plated Mountain; their own, small story was as nothing compared to what was unfolding all around them.\n\nAnd anyway, I'm just a Natural, Fortune thought mournfully. What can a dragon like me possibly hope to do, here in this world of charm?\n\n'They're Naturals!' exclaimed Brace as the dragons dropped swiftly into the clearing.\n\nThey were five, not at all the army they had first appeared when their large wings had first blocked out the stars. They descended into the clearing with silent precision.\n\n'Who are they, do you think?' came a nervous whisper at Gossamer's flank.\n\nGossamer turned to see a young female dragon crouched behind her, peering tentatively over her wings at the activity. The newcomer was small and slight, with large, excited eyes.\n\n'I don't know,' Gossamer replied. 'Who are you?'\n\n'I'm Velvet, and I'm very pleased to meet you,' came the immediate answer, accompanied by a nervous bobbing of the head and an inquisitive craning of the neck. 'I don't like the look of them myself. What do you think?'\n\n'I don't know,' repeated Gossamer. 'Let's wait and see, shall we?'\n\nVelvet flashed a grin at Gossamer and then frowned as she watched the five strange dragons alight on the ground before them.\n\n'Who's in charge here?' one of the intruders shouted. At once Loom stepped forward.\n\n'We're all of us equal,' he said, 'but you can address yourselves to me. What do you want with us? Speak swiftly, since we're moving out.'\n\nNo dragon listened more closely than Brace to what the stranger said next.\n\n'You are right to be moving out, all of you. You must leave this place, and leave it now. But think of this before you go: even now an army of the Charmed is descending on the forest. Whatever their purpose, you can be sure it bodes ill for natural dragons. So you have a choice: either go blindly and find yourselves overtaken by the Charmed and their evil magic, or come with us. We can promise you a place of safety and a chance to strike back against a common enemy.'\n\nDuring this speech, Brace edged gradually towards the newcomers. Belatedly, Gossamer realised how far apart they now were. She was about to call to him when Velvet tugged at her wing.\n\n'Do you think they're the enemy?' she hissed.\n\n'Who? These dragons?' replied Gossamer, her eyes fixed on her brother. Perhaps he had not changed as much as she had thought.\n\n'No, silly! The Charmed, of course. I don't think they are, even if you do.' Gossamer looked down at her new companion in surprise.\n\nLoom was speaking again, interrogating the dragon about where this so-called place of safety was, and what evidence he had that the Charmed were coming.\n\n'You will not need evidence soon, old fool!' snapped the dragon angrily. 'You will be evidence!'\n\n'I'll come,' said Brace in a small voice. Clearing his throat, he spoke louder. 'I'll come! And I think all of you should as well. These dragons are right \u2014 it's time for us to make a stand against the Charmed before they destroy us once and for all!'\n\n'Brace, no!' cried Gossamer, running forward. Velvet scrambled after her, surprised by the sudden movement but unwilling to let her new friend stray too far from her side.\n\n'Wait for me, please,' she called. 'I haven't even asked you your name yet!'\n\n'Gossamer!'\n\nFor the second time that night, the sky burst into flame.\n\nFortune was finding it almost impossible to concentrate. Although his senses told him that the tunnel was proceeding ahead in a straight line, nevertheless he found his vision blurring and his balance wavering, as though the air were thickening and the jagged floor were twisting and turning beneath his claws.\n\nHe could feel the charm closing in around them. He was about to ask Cumber if it was normal for a Natural to sense magic in this way when the charm seemed suddenly to yawn open again. Fortune could almost see fields of energy peeling apart to admit them, and then closing again behind to seal their escape route.\n\nWho, or what, is letting us through?\n\nFortune did not know, nor could he guess, but he was sure that soon he would know. This conviction built inside his heart, filling the hole that existed there until it took on a shape he could not see, but which he knew immediately.\n\nThe shape of the hole in his heart.\n\nThe shape of his father.\n\nAhead, through tear-filled eyes, he seemed to see the tunnel divided into two, a sudden fork offering an impossible choice. The rock undulated beneath his claws, the two tunnels merging into one and then back to two. As the floor shook, the walls rotated; the ceiling rippled. In every direction the magic bore down upon him, hungry.\n\nFather?\n\n'Cumber. Which way do we...?'\n\nGlancing back, Fortune saw that his friend was no longer there.\n\nIt's all very well for you, Cumber thought uncharitably, as he observed Fortune's apparently easy progress along the tunnel You know nothing about the Maze, even less about Halcyon, and certainly very little about charm. It's just all one big adventure to you.\n\nDespite his growing fear, Cumber found himself envying his friend's innocence. Fortune would never be forced to experience the horrors of the Realm, nor the awesome responsibility it brought upon those dragons who used it. Here, deep inside the Plated Mountain, the Realm was so close Cumber could almost see it, almost smell it, almost touch it.\n\nIt's not a trap \u2014 Halcyon wouldn't lead us into a trap!\n\nBut what if it was not Halcyon who was doing the leading?\n\nAhead, Fortune's tail had disappeared into the blackness. Cumber increased his speed, but his attention had wandered so far that he did not notice a sharp ridge of rock running the width of the tunnel. He struck it painfully with both of his front legs and tumbled forward, thumping his head against the wall. Light flashed inside his eyes.\n\nHe was unconscious for only a fraction of a breath, but it was enough. When he came to again, Fortune had vanished.\n\n'Fortune!' he shouted, pitching himself forward again. 'Fortune, come back! Wait for me!'\n\nThe trees on the south side of the clearing ignited in the great wave of fire rushing through the forest. Natural dragons screamed as they burned. Those remaining sprang desperately into the air, thrashing their wings against the smoke and ash already filling the night sky with orange clouds and coils of drifting embers. Out of the path of the flames they struggled, flying first up and then away from the mountain, and they did not stop, nor even slow, as the fires continued to rage below them.\n\n'Come on!' shouted Gossamer to Velvet as they flew with the others over the roaring flames. The fire below them was white and frantic. 'Keep up with me \u2014 we can't afford to get left behind!'\n\n'I'm trying,' panted Velvet, hauling her way through the searing air.\n\nGossamer could see Brace ahead, lagging behind the main group and casting frequent backward glances to make certain his sister and her companion were all right.\n\n'We don't have to go with them, you know,' spluttered Velvet as she battled gamely along at Gossamer's side.\n\n'I'm not going with them,' Gossamer replied. 'I'm going with Brace.'\n\nBut the fire had other ideas.\n\nAhead of them loomed a ridge lined with trees as yet untouched by the fire. The main group had already passed over it and now Gossamer and Velvet were forced to climb above the currents of air that were whipping towards them from the far side. Relieved to get ahead of the fire \u2014 if only briefly \u2014 they glanced down to see the pines reaching up towards them from the black rock as though desperate to be rescued from the flames.\n\n'Hurry,' urged Gossamer. 'We mustn't let them out of our sight.'\n\nThe fire rose up in front of them. Having rushed around the ridge, it was now swarming up the opposite slope, accelerating skywards with blinding speed. Gossamer and Velvet found themselves confronted by an enormous wall of white flames. It careered towards them, hot and hungry.\n\nThe two dragons screamed with a single voice and skidded their wings against the boiling air, turning abruptly back upon themselves. Back across the blazing forest they flew, desperate now to find a space to land. Far to their left, battalions of charmed dragons were sweeping low over the trees in broad, wing-like formations, spraying Realm fire from their jaws.\n\nIn their wake the forest burned.\n\nFortune waited in the darkness, straining his ears to hear the click-click of Cumber's claws. But he heard nothing.\n\nHis head had cleared again, but not before he had seen something \u2014 something that had called to him like a dream long-forgotten, a vision of a story he had once been told. If only he could remember... But the vision had slipped away before he could grasp it, and Fortune had returned abruptly to the real world.\n\nAt length he grew impatient and started to walk back in the direction he had come. He had not gone more than ten paces before he felt the air thicken around him and he could walk no further. An invisible barrier was pressing him back and the more he struggled against it the more rigid it became. For a few more breaths he tried to force a way through, eventually giving up to sit on the rocky floor, panting from the exertion.\n\n'Cumber!' he called, but there was no reply.\n\nHe was alone.\n\nIt dawned on him that he could still see, despite the absence of Cumber and his floating light charm. There was a faint glow in the depths of the tunnels, far, far, ahead, a pale blue light that flickered as though it came from some dying flame. Fortune hurried down the nearest tunnel in pursuit of its source.\n\nUnlike its predecessor, this tunnel was wild. It dipped, it turned, it narrowed and writhed and widened and twisted, yet always the light was flickering ahead, teasing Fortune as it led him deeper and deeper into the mountain. Time seemed first to slow, then stop; all that mattered was the rock around him, and the light ahead.\n\nThe tunnel widened unexpectedly into a broad cavern. Could this be Halcyon's audience chamber? But no, the tunnel forged on again at the far side of the cave, the blue light flashing invitingly just around the next corner.\n\nFortune's thoughts ran sharp and clear as he ran through the dimly-lit tunnels, and it occurred to him that he could no longer sense the magic around him in the way he had earlier.\n\nHave I passed through Halcyon's defences at last? Am I close to the centre of the mountain?\n\nA small pile of boulders rose up to block the way, but Fortune forced a way through. Directly ahead, the tunnel shrank to a narrow vertical slot. The light beyond it was blinding.\n\nIt was hot here, hot and bright. Heat baked his skin.\n\nFortune rushed at the light, into it.\n\nFlames roared before his watering eyes. The air stank of burning wood.\n\n'No!' he howled, looking around in dismay.\n\nHe had emerged on to a sloping ledge overhanging the forest. All around him, flames thundered skywards. He spun back to the tunnel that had just spat him out on to the side of the mountain.\n\nBut there was no tunnel there, just a blank wall of rock.\n\nAbove him, the stars twinkled, seeming very far away.\n\nBut I haven't finished yet! What about the quest? What about Halcyon?!\n\nOut of the corner of his eye he saw a dark shadow silhouetted against the white of the flames. Another dragon, huddled at the far end of the ledge.\n\nSomething rumbled and the cliff shook. Looking up, Fortune saw the night sky obliterated by a mass of flame and debris as a section of cliff laden with burning vegetation broke free and fell towards him. He felt the heat of its approach baking his folded wings, blistering the skin around his eyes and mouth. It was too late to move. Dropping into a crouch, he prepared himself for the end.\n\nThe other dragon moved.\n\nSudden magic snatched at Cumber. His body tingled as he was hauled into the Realm. Trapped beast-spirits howled and clawed at him as he swept past them, lancing magic towards his vague and hurtling form. The trip was virtually instantaneous, but no less disturbing for that.\n\nThen, suddenly, he was standing wide-eyed in a large, spherical cavity so like Ordinal's cave at South Point that it took his breath away. Before him was hunched an old dragon, small and slight. He was black.\n\nThe Black Dragon!\n\nBut, of course, it was not. Scales like burned bark clung to the dragon's body as if in fear of sliding off. Here was not the terrible, ebony beauty of the Master but the shadow of great, great age. Humour and wisdom, not rage and ambition, vied for control of the sparkle in his eyes; behind them Cumber thought he detected a massive sadness.\n\nAs Cumber looked closer he saw that this black dragon's scales hugged a skin that was oddly translucent. Veins and muscles, and even bones, seemed to be visible beneath it. Cumber shivered.\n\nA blue glow enveloped a disc-shaped charm embedded in the floor, throwing deep shadows into an expression Cumber took to be a smile of welcome. As if he had read his visitor's thoughts, the dragon nodded his head.\n\n'Welcome, Cumber,' he said. He moved across the polished floor with a slow grace that reminded Cumber of Fortune's easy, economical gait. 'I am Mantle. Now, where should I begin?'\n\nSomething compelled Brace to look back at the very instant the fireball exploded over the ridge. He saw Gossamer and Velvet as mere specks set against the distant pall of smoke, before a mountain of flame erupted into their path with appalling ferocity.\n\nIn the time it took to take a breath, Gossamer was gone.\n\nUnable to speak, Brace sliced his wings into the torrent of hot air behind him, whipping his whole body around to face this latest devastation. The burning wind thrust at him as he hovered in the blazing air, eyes streaming in despair.\n\nThen he was joined by a dragon who swooped down from high above and matched Brace's wingbeats beside him. It was the leader of the group of dragons, the one who had urged them to fight the Charmed.\n\n'My sister!' sobbed Brace.\n\n'It is a terrible thing to see your family burn,' responded the dragon. He spoke as though he knew \u2014 really knew. 'But there is something you can do about it, if you come with us.'\n\n'Revenge?' asked Brace. 'Is that what you mean?'\n\n'If you like.'\n\nAs they sped away from the burning forest together, the Natural leader asked, 'Do you have any other companions?'\n\n'No,' Brace replied after a moment's consideration. 'It was just me and my sister. Just me, now. My name is Brace.'\n\n'All right. Keep up, we've a long way to go.'\n\n'What's your name?'\n\n'Call me Wood.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Old Dragons",
                "text": "'But what about Fortune?' insisted Cumber, standing his ground despite Mantle's best efforts to draw him closer to the blue light emanating from the floor in the centre of the cave. Like Ordinal's cave, this was clearly a troll burial chamber, and the ancient bones stared down at them in patient silence.\n\n'Oh, very well,' grumbled the old dragon. He scratched irritably at his flank with one tattered wing and lowered one horny eyebrow. 'Your friend, Fortune, is safe enough. Or at least he has left the tunnels safely enough \u2014 what happens to him thereafter is out of my control, I'm afraid.'\n\n'So we were being controlled?' Much as Cumber had warmed to this wizened old dragon, he felt determined to root out all the answers he could. Had they not travelled half the world to reach this place, and were they not entitled to some sort of explanation? 'But what about Halcyon? What's all this got to do with you? Who are you?'\n\nMantle sighed heavily.\n\n'Dear me,' he exclaimed. 'Are you the best Ordinal could come up with?'\n\nCumber blinked. He opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap. He blinked again.\n\n'I hope you're less foolish than you look,' Mantle added.\n\nCumber blinked again, then managed to say in a small voice, 'You knew Ordinal?'\n\nMantle raised his head and tutted, swinging his weathered horns from side to side.\n\n'Well of course I did, young Cumber, and a fine dragon she was too. Never met her, of course, but we shared the same sense of humour.' He turned away and bustled across the cave.\n\nOrdinal? Sense of humour?\n\nCumber stepped gingerly past the disc of blue light. Mantle was busying himself with some kind of dark, orb-like structure set into the wall. To the side of this orb, a great troll's bone lay half-buried in the rock, its surface rich grey and pitted with tiny holes. In the blue light it looked curiously alive, as though at any moment it might start to move.\n\n'You never met her?' Cumber prompted. 'You knew her and yet you never met her?'\n\n'Of course. There were ten of us then. Still, times change.' The ghost of a smile crept across Mantle's face.\n\nCumber forced himself to suppress his growing temper.\n\n'Could you please,' he said wearily, 'just tell me what is going on?'\n\n'Nothing would give me greater pleasure,' beamed Mantle. 'But first, let me show you something.'\n\nHalcyon probed the mountain. Wraith, as he had predicted, had broken through the Portal with ease. Five barriers of charm still remained, formidable every one, but none of them was invincible, not to a dragon like Wraith. One by one, the Black Dragon would breach them all. All that mattered now was how long it took him to do so.\n\nWell, that is all my defences ever were, Halcyon thought. A play for time.\n\nThere was one other factor that might slow Wraith: his fear that Halcyon had an army of dragons waiting inside the mountain, ready to repel intruders when the last wall of charm fell. This was Halcyon's final and most dangerous gambit.\n\nFor only he and Mantle now remained.\n\nOf course, there is also the Sleeper. What that will do should it ever awake is beyond even my power to foresee \u2014 or control.\n\nHalcyon probed further, easing his mind out of the mountain altogether. What he perceived filled him with sadness.\n\nThe ring of forest was all but gone, burned away by all-consuming Realm fire. Ash and smouldering charcoal covered the black rock of the mountain slopes. A few small stretches of woodland remained, those specifically ordered by Wraith to be left untouched, but for the most part the forest was gone, cleansed with brutal efficiency.\n\nNo chance of escape that way now, thought Halcyon. No cover for any dragon, especially one as old and slow as me.\n\nNot that escape had ever been part of his plan.\n\nIn the light of the rising sun, Wraith was inspecting the devastation. Halcyon allowed his consciousness to drift close, sensing the Black Dragon's feelings of triumph, which were curiously sharpened by anger. He was surprised to find fear there too, but of what he could not be sure.\n\nWhat will you do next, I wonder?\n\nTurning his back on the burned forest, Wraith flew swiftly into the Portal, where he consulted the commander of the charm-sensitive dragons who were hard at work mapping the first layer of magic Halcyon had constructed behind the hole in the wall. Most of the investigators agreed that there were at least four layers, but probably no more than six.\n\n'It will take at least a day to neutralise each layer,' sighed the commander, clearly exhausted. 'Maybe more.'\n\n'One day each,' Wraith responded. 'No more.'\n\nHere was the source of Wraith's anger, then: that it should take so long to break Halcyon's defences. Yet underneath, Halcyon sensed the Black Dragon's brimming confidence.\n\nHe knows I have nowhere to go.\n\nThe Black Dragon's anger deepened momentarily as he thought about Insiss. His ivory-scaled lieutenant had disappeared just before dawn, abandoning his post and leaving Wraith to deal directly with his lesser commanders.\n\nSo, Halcyon thought, they are not as loyal to you as you would like to think.\n\nAs Wraith began barking out orders, Halcyon sensed the fear still bubbling inside his heart. The fear tasted dark and dank, like something dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant lake. Something forgotten. Something lost.\n\nWhat are you afraid of, Black Dragon?\n\n'It's moving!' exclaimed Cumber after he had observed the bone for a space of time. The movement was almost imperceptible, but undeniably there.\n\n'Moving it is,' agreed Mantle, squinting at the bone. 'Like the rest of them. Like many things these days.'\n\n'But what's making it happen?'\n\n'Ah,' replied Mantle. 'Now there's the question. Care to guess?'\n\n'Well,' began Cumber, 'it's a troll's bone, that much we know. It's old, and it's moving of its own accord back into the rock. Um ...'\n\n'Well done. You have just stated the obvious. But you asked why.'\n\n'All right then. Why?'\n\n'I don't know,' beamed Mantle with infuriating glee. Seeing his guest's crestfallen expression, he went on, 'I don't mean to be flippant with you, young Cumber. I can't tell you why this phenomenon is happening, but I may be able to shed light on other matters. Did Ordinal ever tell you that the world was turning?'\n\n'Well, yes, but ...'\n\n'But you never understood what she meant? All right, then I'll tell you \u2014 leastways, I'll tell you as much as I know, for it may be that you'll discover truths that even I've not yet come across.\n\n'The world is turning, Cumber. Take these bones, for instance. They have lain here long years, dead and still, but now they have started to move. They are slipping deeper into the rock, burying themselves beyond reach so that they might never be found again. But there is more, for as they move they are also growing older; their past is changing. It is turning.'\n\n'I don't understand.'\n\n'These bones,' continued Mantle with growing excitement, 'are changing from trolls' bones into something else altogether, into the bones of creatures our world has never known. But which the new world will have known. The trolls were thousands of years old, but these creatures will be older still \u2014 many millions, perhaps.'\n\nCumber shook his head dumbly, trying to imagine what creatures could possibly have existed that were older and stranger than the trolls.\n\nThe world is turning, he thought with wonder.\n\n'You see,' Mantle went on, 'the trolls were charmed. In old times, when our world was new-born, all creatures were charmed. The, just a few generations ago, natural creatures started to appear, and those Charmed who knew the signs saw that the world had started to turn, to turn towards a new course, to turn towards the future, away from charm.'\n\n'So the charm is dying? Is that why magic is harder than it used to be, and why the trolls died out, and why charmed dragons are going mad and...?'\n\n'It's hard to see the whys of everything,' cautioned Mantle, staring hard into the blue light emanating from the middle of floor.\n\n'I see,' said Cumber. 'I think I actually see!'\n\n'No, you don't!' growled Mantle, suddenly angry. Cumber took a shocked step backwards. 'You don't see at all! But you will, I'll make sure of that!'\n\nCumber was backing towards the recessed disc of light. He stopped just short of it, glancing nervously back over his shoulder into its blue-white glow. Mantle loomed over him, leering.\n\nThen the old dragon relaxed again.\n\n'Oh,' he sighed, 'perhaps it's all very simple, in the end. When the world turns, everything changes. The last Turning saw the birth of charm and the next Turning \u2014 this Turning \u2014 will see ...'\n\n'... its death?' quavered Cumber.\n\n'Perhaps. It doesn't necessarily happen like that, but... perhaps. Probably. But the important thing for you and I to understand is that there is always \u2014 always \u2014 a way for disaster to be averted. It just has to be found.'\n\n'There's a way to save the magic?'\n\n'Save the magic?' exclaimed Mantle as though the idea were ludicrous. 'Young Cumber, if the magic were all that needed to be saved then we might consider ourselves fortunate. The world begins the process of turning of its own accord, by some cosmic reflex we cannot know, but it cannot complete the action on its own. Only by positive intervention can it be made to turn true.'\n\n'What happens if the world doesn't turn true?'\n\n'It will be destroyed.'\n\n'But... isn't there anything we can do?'\n\n'Well, before I tell you about that, I want to show you this.'\n\n'An illuminated floor?' replied Cumber. 'It's very... nice.'\n\n'Don't jest! What sort of a job did Ordinal do on you then, young Cumber, if she didn't teach you to show respect in the presence of your elders?'\n\n'Oh, all right, but tell me what you want from me. I need to find Fortune \u2014 I've got to see if he's all right.'\n\n'Who? Oh, your friend. Yes, well, there'll be time enough for all that I'm sure, but first ...'\n\nAs Mantle moved, Cumber felt the Realm pressing against the back of his skull. He slammed his mind shut, suddenly conscious of the tiny leaks of charm that he emitted constantly from his own reservoirs of magic. The Realm chattered and smoked with invisible hunger.\n\nMantle reached over to the orb in the wall and pressed his right wingtip against it. Tiny bolts of lightning stabbed outwards from it like quills. Some of them struck Mantle, and where they did so his charcoal scales glowed orange.\n\nThe blue light opened like an eye, revealing a flickering chasm of immeasurable depth. The light twisted somehow, draping itself over the upper reaches of the pit to send claws of blue fire down into the void. Cumber gasped and gripped the edge tightly, vertigo threatening to tug him down into the darkness.\n\nBehind his mind, the Realm moaned and tried to push him in.\n\nCumber tried to look away and found he could not. The chasm hypnotised him, called to him, pulled at him as the Realm pushed. He was falling, falling...\n\n'Steady, Cumber!' laughed Mantle, grasping the young dragon's haunches and hauling him back from the drop. 'Let's keep a respectable distance, shall we?'\n\nCumber could hear the light thundering into the chasm. He felt pain in his head as the Realm tried to tear its way through him to reach whatever it was that lay below.\n\nBut you know what lies below, don't you, Cumber? he thought.\n\n'Is that...?' The words were like fire in his throat.\n\n'... what you think it is?' Mantle concluded for him. 'Yes. What you are observing is the only way into the greatest challenge any dragon can ever face. This is the entrance to the Maze of Covamere.'\n\nCumber dragged his eyes away from the brilliant blue light to stare Mantle in the face. The movement was agony.\n\n'Then you ...' he whispered.\n\n'I am the Keeper of the Maze.'\n\nMantle touched the orb again and the hole in the floor slammed instantly shut. There was no sound, but Cumber felt his ears thump as both the Maze and the Realm retreated to their own, strange resting places.\n\nHe dropped to the floor, shaking.\n\n'Don't worry.' Mantle folded a wing over him. 'You don't need to go in there. But there is something you can do for me. For the world. I must tell you now and I must tell you quickly, for it is nearly time for you to go.'\n\nBending his head low, Mantle gave Cumber his instructions.\n\nHalcyon could judge little from Cumber's reaction to the Maze. Most dragons reacted like that at first; it was only successive encounters which proved their mettle \u2014 or their lack of it.\n\nBut then Mantle had been right about one thing \u2014 no dragon would need to enter the Maze ever again \u2014 except one.\n\nNow that Mantle was finally instructing the young dragon in what to do, Halcyon withdrew his consciousness back into himself. Shortly, Mantle would return Cumber to the outside, using charm borrowed from the Old Earth Dwellers. The young dragon's given task was a simple one, but no less important for that.\n\nAnother strand in the weave.\n\nBut would any of them live to see the whole pattern? Halcyon suspected not.\n\nThe Sleeper might see that much, should it ever awaken. But if it does, all that Mantle and Ordinal and I have planned may come to nought.\n\nHalcyon bent his head. He was massively, incurably tired. He hoped there would soon be an end to it all.\n\nTurning to the nearest rock wall, he entered the escape route prepared for him by the Dwellers, one of the few routes in and out of the mountain that Wraith would never find.\n\nThis way is too subtle for his eyes, he thought with satisfaction as he rose up through the substance of the mountain, slipping his old dragon body through subtle cavities formed from gentle, living charm.\n\nCharm not of fire but of the earth. Well, it makes a change for Halcyon!\n\nHe hoped that Mantle would waiting for him there when he arrived to greet the Dwellers. Together, they would seek the answers that had so far eluded them. Time was short. Perhaps the stones would bring them the insight they so desperately needed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Summit",
                "text": "Earth charm differs from fire charm in many ways. It is weaker, certainly, but it is also kinder. Where fire charm confronts, earth charm complements; where fire charm stimulates, earth charm soothes. The magic of the fire can all too easily bring death, but the magic of the earth knows only life.\n\nThis both Halcyon and Mantle knew, and their hope was that somehow the life-bearing magic of the earth could be brought to bear upon the Turning, so that the new course of the world. But the hope was a slim one, and one in which neither dragon had much conviction.\n\nWeak magic. Earth charm is so fragile that even the cycle of time affects its power. Longest and shortest days stretch and compress its influence. It is at its most potent during the magic hours of dawn and dusk, when light and dark are distracted by their opposites and scant room is left between into which the sheerest, gentlest spells may be slipped.\n\nWeak magic; fragile charm.\n\nBut beautiful.\n\nThe first light of dawn crept slowly towards the summit of the Plated Mountain.\n\nA rugged cone for most of its prodigious height, the mountain levelled off at its peak to form a flattened plain. From here the view was unparallelled. To the north, black foothills blended into pale desert and the distant, distant green of the Heartland. To the south, the black rock stretched further, the wasteland of the Injured Mountains laid open in all its terrible beauty. To the east lay inland seas and the pale jags of the Ice Peaks, while to the west, beyond formidable cliffs, was the wide ocean.\n\nAll of these things an observer might see, might taste, might inhale, from the top of the mountain; all these things held their splendours like gems woven into the fabric of the land.\n\nYet now, even though the world was there, far away and fair, in the dim glow of the threatening dawn the Plated Mountain looked cold and dead. Dying fires sparkled hopelessly in the ashes of the forest. Smoke wreaths trailed in endless loops. The silence was like the edge of death.\n\nThe summit was bare and white, the black rock concealed beneath the ever-present ice. The air was thin and subtle; the sky was cold.\n\nClouds gathered in the dark sky, obliterating the remaining stars and racing the sun towards the day. And yet, there was a light. Not quite the dawn, not yet, but a magical light that chased in circles around the summit, pulsing weakly beneath the ice before melting into the rock below. The lights flickered, then disappeared, but the circle they had defined remained, for where each point of light had glowed a small stone rose up, each no more than a pebble, each a different colour and each generating its own tiny reflections to form a mosaic of crimsons and ochres and cobalts that fled from the mountain like a shattered rainbow.\n\nSoundlessly the stone circle raised itself from the ice. When it had settled into place, the dragons rose up within it.\n\nThis was a journey Mantle rarely made, but it was one which always humbled him, so in awe was he of those who made it possible. The earth charm generated by them was weak, but they wielded it with accuracy and care. By comparison, Mantle's own use of charm felt crude and brutal.\n\nAs he emerged into the thin air at the top of the mountain, Mantle reflected on his encounter with Cumber. The youngster had been terrified by the Maze, but then that was only to be expected. Mantle had communicated his instructions clearly, and felt confident that Cumber would carry out the required tasks with all diligence.\n\nSo what is the problem?\n\nTry as he might, Mantle could not work out why he felt so uneasy. He regretted preventing the Natural from entering the mountain \u2014 it might have been interesting to meet Cumber's travelling companion. But sending two dragons had never been part of the plan \u2014 what in all the world had possessed Ordinal to do it? Besides, only charmed dragons were capable of performing the necessary tasks: namely himself, Halcyon and, in Ordinal's absence, Cumber.\n\nAnd Wraith, of course. We cannot forget his part in all of this.\n\nLike Halcyon, Mantle remembered Wraith from the old days. He remembered vividly the moment when two dragons had emerged from the Maze \u2014 after all, that fateful day had been his first as Keeper of the Maze. His calm handling of the situation \u2014 his instant dismissal of the young Wraith, and the careful quarantine he had imposed upon the Natural \u2014 had brought him much praise and respect, ultimately assuring him his place on the Secret Council.\n\nTen of them there had been on that Council. Dragons of great wisdom, and great age, blessed with secret knowledge and sworn to great tasks. Their leader had been Halcyon, and Mantle had enjoyed greatly the melding of minds he had shared with him and the others: Ordinal, Foreth, Reciter, Archan...\n\nBut years had passed, and one by one the dragons of the Secret Council had died, or at least faded from contact. Now that dear Ordinal was gone, only he and Halcyon remained. Were he less modest, Mantle might have admitted to himself that it was he who had sustained Halcyon over recent years, giving him the strength he needed to go on in the face of rising doom.\n\nMantle shook himself. No matter that only two of them remained. They were here, now, Mantle and Halcyon, having slipped under Wraith's lightning gaze, their bodies flowing like enchanted water up through curious spaces in the mountain to emerge here at the summit, here inside the occasional ring of stones, the ring that was focused into reality only when the powers needed to sustain it could truly be justified.\n\nOnly when councils needed to be called.\n\nOr when worlds needed to turn.\n\nThus were two charmed dragons lifted through the ice and deposited softly upon its skin. There they stood, patiently awaiting the arrival of their hosts, the Old Earth Dwellers, the Makers of the Ring, the Gentle Ones.\n\nThe two dragons huddled close, each sharing other's warmth in the bitterness of the mountain air. Mantle held his body taut, supporting most of Halcyon's weight as he had supported his spirit over the long, desolate years of decline. Too old they were now, both of them, but Mantle felt proud that he at least had retained something of his old fire. Halcyon was tired. His magic lingered, but its old fire was gone.\n\nYet he is still in control of so much charm, Mantle reminded himself. Even now he is refining the defences, misleading Wraith, protecting the Maze.\n\nBut for how long could he keep it up?\n\nThe ice sheet vibrated. Mantle felt Halcyon shift his weight away so as to support himself again. Glancing sideways, he saw something like a sparkle in the ancient Leader's watery eyes.\n\nAbove them the sky was filling with great sheets of cloud, but here on the summit all was still. Nothing disturbed the silence. Then the ice trembled again and a splinter of light raced from the centre of the circle to one of the perimeter stones. The stone absorbed the faint glow and began slowly to grow, and as the light raced on around the circle so its fellow stones grew, elongating silently up towards the massing clouds until they towered over the dragons. Like watching sentinels, the slender stones crowded into the ring of ice, thickening, watching...\n\nThe ice at the centre of the circle parted, and Mantle held his breath as the faeries emerged, their bodies crystallising before him like captured snow.\n\nEthereal beings, the faeries were no more substantial than the air itself. But very occasionally, always at their hundred-year council, occasionally at other extraordinary times, they made themselves real, briefly assembling physical bodies to house and represent their spiritual selves.\n\nThis was such an extraordinary time.\n\nMany years had passed since Mantle had last seen the faeries, and he had forgotten how beautiful they were. He gasped, drawing in the frigid air with sudden surprise as he looked upon the Old Earth Dwellers.\n\nThirteen they were, tall and slender with intricate features and long, expressive limbs. The earth charm from which they had formed their temporary bodies glowed within them, and held them close to yet clear of the ice, so that they floated. Large eyes gazed from thin, pointed faces and gossamer wings which were not wings but spectacular reservoirs of earth charm surged like dew-soaked cobwebs from their shoulders.\n\nAs the faeries floated towards the dragons, the ice wafted tiny crystals after their dancing forms, as though the land had released them only reluctantly and wanted them back, so much did it love them.\n\nMantle knew how much effort it had taken the faeries to bring her not just him and Halcyon, but also themselves.\n\nBut can they help us?\n\n'Greetings to you,' he said softly, fearful that even the sound of his voice might blow these fragile beings away.\n\n'You are most welcome here, Mantle,' replied the lead faery, her voice a fragrant whisper. She clasped her slim hands against her breast and tilted her head to one side. A charming smile illuminated her mournful face. 'And you too, Halcyon.'\n\n'He is not strong,' said Mantle, indicating his companion with a nod. 'I will speak for us both, if I may.'\n\n'We understand,' said the faery. 'Halcyon spends much power even as we speak, this much I can sense. The black one is powerful, and even Halcyon's fire is enough only to slow him. Nothing can stop him, it seems.'\n\n'It seems,' Mantle agreed.\n\nHalcyon closed his eyes, content to let Mantle speak. Even here he could feel Wraith's dragons probing at the mountain defences, slowly beginning to unravel the magic he had woven into the rocks and the tunnels. Still as he seemed, he was constantly at work, unwinding charm here, rebuilding it there, constantly upgrading, constantly confusing. For how much longer he could maintain his vigil he was not certain, nor to what ultimate purpose; he knew only that he must.\n\n'The Black Dragon cannot be stopped,' he whispered. 'But he can be slowed. The Maze must be protected until the moon is full again. After that ...'\n\nThe lead faery's companions assembled into a perfect semi-circle behind her. Mantle noted that their bodies were more transparent than hers, and that their eyes were tight shut. They would not participate in the discussion, he knew, for they were here only to support their leader. Their magic would combine to give her the energy she needed to communicate on this earthly plane, and no doubt they would contribute to her thoughts with their own too, supporting her in spirit as well as in charm and body.\n\n'We have little time before dawn,' began the faery, 'but then there is perhaps little to be said.'\n\n'Perhaps,' agreed Mantle. 'Can you help us?'\n\nThe faery sighed. Her breath condensed before her, and it was with unexpected joy that she watched the vapour roll away into the night.\n\n'Such beauty in the physical world,' she exclaimed, her voice like sunlight in the darkness. Then she caught Mantle's eye and half-raised her hand to her mouth. 'Such a thing for a Dweller to say.'\n\n'Changes?' asked Mantle gently.\n\n'Changes,' nodded the faery. 'Not only into the world of dragons is this new nature intruding.'\n\nHer expression proud and infinitely sad, she lifted her chin and opened her arms wide, exposing her whole body to Mantle's gaze. Her own distress was reflected in his dragon eyes as he saw the new shapes that were growing beneath her skin: the hard bone pressing out against the pale flesh; the rude skull distorting the fluid contours of her head. The natural creature building itself inside her ethereal form.\n\n'Each time we make ourselves real it becomes a little stronger.' She sketched her hand down her body. 'These new bodies weigh heavy on our spirits; we cannot for much longer maintain our charm. There are new faeries in the world now, Mantle, natural faeries, and they are not our friends.'\n\n'I only hope you do not fight them as we fight our cousins,' replied Mantle, dismayed but not surprised by this news. But the faery shook her head.\n\n'They will fear us, I think,' she said softly. 'And envy us. And we? We will fade. All things fade, in time.'\n\n'Will you become natural yourself?' asked Mantle as kindly as he could manage. The new skeleton was horribly apparent beneath the faery's subtle skin \u2014 beneath all the skins of them all. She shook her head.\n\n'I shall not be corporeal again,' she said. 'Nor these, my brethren. Mantle, you are witness to the last council of our clan. Ethereal we shall remain for ever more, for to take on bodies again will be to commit ourselves to this physical plane. As spirits we may not be immortal, but we are at least free. And we have our charm, at least for a time.'\n\n'For a time.' Mantle took a deep breath. 'But we are here tonight for a purpose, and since you have spoken of charm I feel I must speak of it myself. I ask as fire to earth, as coarse to fine, as bringer of death to bringer of life. The world is turning. As wielders of fire, dragons work so that the world may turn true, for the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Is there anything you can do to aid us in this task?'\n\nA shaft of pale light opened across the underside of the looming clouds, turning the blue-black to brown and then to gold. Deep in the ice the dawn light reflected back into the eyes of the faery.\n\n'Please,' Mantle urged. 'What have we overlooked?'\n\nThe faery closed her luminous eyes, then opened them again and said, 'Our friends across the world have performed many acts that you may consider foolish. Yet even the smallest of these may yet be of help when histories are balanced as delicately as they are tonight.'\n\n'What acts? What do you mean?'\n\n'They have made circles. Heed them, for when the world turns, it will turn about them. Do not underestimate the power of the earth, Mantle, nor the power of the stones. You have already sent another to work with the stones of the mountain \u2014 that is good. But do not dismiss this new force, this nature, for all things will have their parts to play before the moon is full again. All things. As for help, you already know we have none to give. It is the turn of the dragons now, Mantle, for our time is long past, as will yours be some day. Take your turn well; it is how you will be remembered, if any are left to remember you.'\n\nAlready the sunlight was washing through the ice and brightening the sky. The faeries looked thin and broken, as though they were dissolving.\n\n'Don't go,' said Mantle. 'There is so much more I want to ask.'\n\n'We must return,' whispered the faery. 'Come with us now, or you will be missed.'\n\nMantle felt the earth charm pulling him down and away from the dazzling sky and the bitter air. Or perhaps it was not the magic pulling him down, but the heaviness of his heart.\n\nLooking up, he saw the clouds peel open. Silvery, acidic, sharp as the winter they heralded, snowflakes cascaded out of the sky and soon covered the shrinking, vanishing stones. The faeries and the dragons merged back into the frozen ground and the new snow cast a blankness over the place of their retreat, while across the mountain the final fires died, and the ashes turned white, and for a moment all creatures stopped and looked to the skies. Even though the summer had barely ended, the skies told a different tale. Too soon, winter had come to the world, and no creature, charmed or natural, could say whether spring would ever be seen again."
            },
            {
                "title": "PART FOUR",
                "text": "[ Winter ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "Awakenings",
                "text": "Once it had a name.\n\nOnce it had many things: the companionship of its deathless brethren, the citadel they had carved for themselves then abandoned. Once, but no more. Now, it simply slept.\n\nOld memories submerged themselves in its dreams. Worlds \u2014 this one and others \u2014 were spawned from primal light, and the Sleeper watched their births with a fascination that could not last.\n\nEternity is a long time to have lived, and many worlds live and die in that immeasurable time. Fascination gives way to boredom, and eventually despair. The despair of the deathless, that they must see everything before they themselves can die. If they can ever die.\n\nThe Sleeper had lived forever, and would live forever, and when this knowledge had finally numbed its every nerve, clogged its every thought, it had chosen the only course of action left open to it, the same course of action long ago chosen by its five undying brethren as they had each in turn reached the final understanding that eternity erodes. And that the only way to deal with that awful knowledge is to turn away.\n\nYet, even in its sleep, the Sleeper could not escape the curse of its deathless state, for eternity intruded even into its dreams. Worlds lived and died, worlds congealed and crumbled.\n\nWorlds turned.\n\nIn its dreams, the Sleeper felt its spirit fill and refill its body. Many bodies it had used, yet always a new one was ready at the point of death, ready for the weary, aching soul to be transferred into its new and sickeningly vital flesh. The Sleeper had spent long millennia searching for the sadistic god responsible for this endless reincarnation. It had a plan for any supreme being it might find, and that plan had very little to do with a quick death.\n\nThrough the individual life spans of its successive bodies \u2014 each identical to the previous in its lack of sex, its mastery of charm, its sheer resilience \u2014 it had travelled far across many worlds, yet in all that time the Sleeper had found no gods to blame, no devils to punish.\n\nIt dreamed of those travels now, of all the failures, as it slept in its shallow reservoir of charm beneath the mountain. The Sleeper had finally lifted its barriers against the world, and buried itself beneath the nightmare of its existence. Aeons had passed, and the magical reservoir had strengthened as charm had gripped the world more fully, shaping its course through the stars.\n\nAs the magic had grown, so too had the Maze. Unconcerned, the Sleeper had dreamed on.\n\nHowever, recently the charm had begun to move, sluggish at first, then at breathtaking speed as dragons had manipulated it. One dragon in particular had been strong enough to draw magic from the skin of the Maze itself, putting it to work building defensive barriers in the solid rock of the Plated Mountain.\n\nAround the Sleeper, that charm now flowed like lightning, and the lightning had a taste \u2014 the taste of dragon who commanded it.\n\nHalcyon.\n\nHalcyon burned like a beacon in the dreams of the Sleeper, for he had done what no dragon had ever dared. He had funnelled his magic into the very place where the Sleeper lay. Like a lens, the sleeping immortal was now amplifying Halcyon's stolen magic, casting it out through the mountain in wild and fabulous configurations. This amplified charm Halcyon then trapped again for use in his defensive structures, layering his creations with the ancient, sleeping magic that Wraith and his front line could sense, but not locate.\n\nThus did Halcyon magic flow, only to be dismantled, piece by piece, by Wraith's team of charm-sensitive dragons. Halcyon's one hope in all of this was that the Sleeper would never wake. And all the while, hidden inside the torrent of charm, the Sleeper dreamed.\n\nUntil...\n\nDeep inside the Plated Mountain, silver eyes opened as lids that had been closed for aeons moved silently apart. Surrounded by magic, bound in by the dragon charm that had been woven around it in some pitiful attempt to guard the mountain against attack, it opened its eyes.\n\nDeep underground, at the threshold of the Maze, the basilisk awoke.\n\nA moving shadow cast darkness over Fortune's closed eyes. Dull fire burned down his left side. Shadow flickered to light, then back to shadow.\n\nFortune opened his eyes.\n\nA dragon was hovering over him: male, huge, a dark silhouette against a blinding white sky. Fortune was relieved to see he was a Natural.\n\n'Feeling better?' the dragon asked in a deep voice. 'Stay here \u2014 I'll get you some water.'\n\nHe swooped out of Fortune's vision, returning swiftly with a huge, waxy leaf held bunched in his jaws.\n\n'Gently now,' he rumbled, carefully releasing his load of water into Fortune's mouth. 'Only leaf for far around, I reckon. Drink slowly.'\n\nFortune drank, the water as cold in his throat as the light in his eyes. The other dragon perched on the ledge at his side. He was truly enormous, with bright eyes half-hidden between gnarled brows. His hide was dark, but as Fortune watched it began slowly to turn white. His heart turned over. It was a charmed dragon after all! Then he looked again, and saw that snow was falling. Falling hard.\n\n'My name's Tallow,' said the dragon slowly, shrugging snowflakes from his muscular shoulders. 'I'm glad you've recovered. You'll be well enough now.'\n\nHe spoke with enormous certainty, as if an idea once spoken became truth, and Fortune liked him instantly.\n\n'Where am I? How long have I...?'\n\nTallow hushed him with another mouthful of icy water.\n\n'I'll answer your questions presently. Just relax and let your body come round. What's your name?'\n\n'Cumber!' cried Fortune suddenly, his mind switching suddenly to a new train of thought.\n\nTallow pondered this.\n\n'That's an odd name for a natural dragon,' he suggested, glancing uncertainly at the blank cliff face behind them.\n\n'What? No, I'm sorry, my name's Fortune. My friend's name is Cumber. Have you seen him?'\n\n'I saw only you.' Again a glance at the cliff.\n\n'Oh.'\n\nFortune appraised Tallow in the silence that followed. He was a big dragon by any standards, fully twice Fortune's size yet well-proportioned and lean. Bright, intelligent eyes shone from his broad face and his wings, a deep, nutty brown like the rest of his body, looked powerful and well-kept. Yet, even as Fortune took all this in, Tallow was gradually disappearing beneath the skin of snow forming across his body.\n\nFormidable but friendly, he decided.\n\nGingerly, Fortune raised his head, wincing at the sudden pain that lanced down his flank. Snow crumbled from his back and fell at his side.\n\n'Don't move for a while,' said Tallow. 'A day's rest should see you fit enough to fly.'\n\nFortune flexed the muscles in his chest and wings, wincing at the tightness in his shoulders.\n\n'You'll be right enough,' Tallow assured him. 'You'll have a scar down your left flank and your left wing's lost some flight surface. You're probably not as pretty as you were, but you'll do.' He smiled, an expression that Fortune imagined might be a rare visitor to that earnest, honest face.\n\nHe suddenly felt very tired, and very sad.\n\n'I saw you come out of the mountain,' Tallow blurted suddenly, then looked down, embarrassed. 'It's all right,' he went on hurriedly, 'it's just... I'd keep it to yourself if I were you. A dragon might get the wrong idea.'\n\n'You mean a natural dragon might get the wrong idea?' suggested Fortune.\n\n'Something like that,' mumbled Tallow. 'It's up to you, of course, but most Naturals have no love for the Charmed, and you don't want to be telling them you came out of their mountain.' He shrugged. 'Me, I don't fret one way or the other.'\n\nFortune sighed, torn between the desire to like this great rock of a dragon and a numbing exhaustion that seemed to be creeping through his every pore. It was very cold.\n\n'They're just dragons, Tallow,' he sighed.\n\n'It's not me you have to convince, Fortune,' Tallow replied.\n\n'Who says I have to convince any dragon?'\n\n'Well, you know best.'\n\n'It shouldn't be winter,' said Fortune forlornly after a silence. 'Do you think I could have some more water?'\n\nThe big dragon spread his wings, shaking the snow from them with an easy flicking motion and soaring away into the storm of white flakes. Despite his size he was graceful in flight, making even the short journey down to the nearby pond seem effortless.\n\nFortune flopped back, exhausted. Beside him was piled the great mass of vegetation that had fallen blazing upon him as he had emerged from the cliff... from a tunnel which was no longer there. The foliage was now just a heap of ash and charcoal, swiftly vanishing beneath a drift of snow. He shuddered at the thought of what might have happened had not Tallow come to his rescue.\n\nDid he block its fall or simply drag me out from underneath it?\n\nIt didn't matter. Tallow had saved his life, and right now he was exactly the sort of dragon Fortune needed around, strong and resourceful.\n\nBecause all my strength has gone.\n\nTears came, hot and sudden, as he gave in to the shock of all he had lost, all he had worked for. Hot water trailed down his face, melting the crystals of ice that had formed around his mouth and cheeks.\n\nHe was alone, his quest had failed, and for all he knew his friends were dead.\n\nThe devastated forest reminded him of the razing of South Point, except this was surely a thousand times worse. He could not imagine how many Naturals must have perished in the flames, nor could he conceive what evil plan of Wraith's could have demanded such a purge.\n\nHe didn't kill dragons at Aether's Cross, Fortune told himself with weak hope. Maybe his purpose here was different too.\n\nBut unlike Tallow, whose easy-going attitude towards the Charmed was surely untypical, any other Naturals who had escaped would surely be baying for blood, hungry for revenge, and what dragon could blame them?\n\nThe war would continue.\n\n'But that doesn't make it right,' Fortune muttered under his breath.\n\nHe was surprised to find that his tears were already drying, despite the terrible ache he felt within, his grief at losing his companions.\n\nI will find you again, he thought. Never mind that my quest here has failed, I will find you.\n\nBut he was going to need help.\n\n'You say I'll be fit to fly tonight?' demanded Fortune when Tallow returned bearing fresh water.\n\nThe big dragon nodded slowly, narrowing his eyes with curiosity.\n\n'Where will the natural dragons go now that the forest is destroyed?' Fortune asked.\n\nTallow's brow rolled down into a maze of creases. Fortune suspected he was pondering not so much the answer itself, as whether or not to reveal it.\n\n'So be it,' replied the big dragon at length, his voice strangely tight. 'I'll take you to where they have gone. But first we must get off this ledge. This snow will kill us if we remain. There's a cave down there, near the water. That'll protect us until tonight. It's only a short glide. You should manage it well enough.'\n\n'What are, we waiting for?' Fortune cautiously extended his wings, grimacing at the stiffness he felt at their roots. 'Lead the way, Tallow.'\n\n'It's what I do best,' said the big dragon with a broad smile.\n\nThe snow filled the day. Inside the cave, the two Naturals were safe enough from Charmed patrols, but Tallow ventured out periodically to observe the elaborate patterns made in the sky by Wraith's dragons. Drifts piled up at the entrance to their hideaway, but they would be gone before there was any danger of being blocked in. Even out of the wind the temperature was desperately low, and Fortune, who should have been resting, took to pacing up and down the length of the cave in order to keep warm.\n\n'They're filling the sky,' commented Tallow as he returned from another sighting trip. 'It'll be hard to slip past them. Night's the only way. If we're lucky the snow will keep up.'\n\n'If we're lucky?'\n\n'Yes,' responded Tallow, his face straight. 'With a name like yours, how can we be anything else?'\n\nThe day dragged on. Fortune told Tallow a little of his quest, but although he liked the big dragon he found himself reluctant to reveal too much. Safe as he felt in the cave, he had the strange sensation that something unseen was prowling behind him, whispering at his back, or biting at his tail and fleeing before he could turn. Something in the mountain.\n\nTallow did not seem to notice Fortune's unease, or if he did then he did not mind. Though slow of speech, he proved himself an able storyteller as Fortune quizzed him on his own background, and what life had been like for the natural dragons who lived here in the forests of the Plated Mountain.\n\n'It was an adventure,' was Tallow's summation. 'A dragon's life was one big journey with no start and no finish \u2014 other than the obvious ones, of course.'\n\n'You would just travel round and round the mountain?' Fortune asked.\n\nTallow nodded, and talked on.\n\nThough Fortune did not know it, Tallow was not usually so talkative, let alone so eloquent. But he had reached a turning in his life, like so many dragons that night. All he had left were memories. He needed to find the words to share those memories before they faded the smallest amount. But it was not easy.\n\n'We make a new camp every season. Move on, and by the time you come round the land is fresh again. It's a big forest -' Tallow hesitated, but did not stumble '-I mean, it was a big forest. And a good life. When there were four of us ...' This time his hesitation was long and the bleakness in his eyes was deep. 'There's just two of us now. Just Volley and me.'\n\n'What happened?' asked Fortune softly, and Tallow told him.\n\nFor years, for as long as they could both remember, Tallow and Volley had been one half of a foursome, a group of young male dragons revelling in the freedom their nomadic existence offered, their lives one long adventure. But three had always looked up to one. To Weft. Weft it was who had the ideas; the adventure was always his. He was not really a leader, it was just that things happened when Weft was around.\n\n'He was a fine dragon,' sighed Tallow with a melancholy smile. 'I miss him.'\n\nWeft's enthusiasm had known no bounds. He was a dragon who would fly in a storm for the thrill of it, accept any dare no matter how dangerous. Together with the youngest member of the group, Piper, they had explored much of the forest, but Weft was always eager to see more, and eventually he had been swept away by a bold idea. They would explore one of the forbidden belts.\n\n'Forbidden belts?' interrupted Fortune, for although he could guess where the story was leading he felt gripped by it. Had he not been tempted to explore forbidden realms back home in South Point? Had not his own curiosity taken him underground into the caverns of the Charmed, and finally brought him here, on his own great adventure? Already he felt he knew this dragon called Weft, and he liked him.\n\n'Parts of the forest marked off by the Charmed,' explained Tallow. 'No dragon knows why \u2014 they're just forbidden. But there were always stories, you know, the sort that you tell youngsters at night when you want to scare them.'\n\n'I know the sort you mean,' smiled Fortune. 'I've heard a few in my time.'\n\n'Hmm,' replied Tallow, breaking his thoughts for a few breaths so as to appraise his young companion. 'I believe you might tell a few of your own, Fortune.'\n\nHe went on with his tale.\n\nAt the boundary points of the forbidden belts the Charmed had carved red claw-marks into the trees. Tallow warned Weft not to go beyond them, but Weft had grinned and said, 'Don't worry, Tallow my friend. We'll be in and out in a couple of blinks. Now, who's coming?'\n\nVolley had shuffled over to where Tallow stood resolute but young Piper \u2014 whom they all called Pipsqueak \u2014 had allowed himself to be led past the red slashes and into the forbidden belt. Pipsqueak had looked nervously back at the others.\n\nAt first all seemed well. Pipsqueak had smiled and waved at his friends, and Tallow and Volley had waved back, urging them to be quick.\n\nThen Weft had stopped, and said in a loud, clear voice, 'I think we should go back now, Piper.'\n\nThey were the last words he spoke.\n\n'It was all so sudden.' Tallow's deep voice shook with the memory. 'They turned, and were walking out again \u2014 they were actually walking back out \u2014 when... when the ground just opened up, like a mouth, and there was this... light. It shot upwards like a geyser \u2014 I saw one of those once, on the other side of the mountain. It... oh, it took the flesh off their bones. Their skeletons dropped into the hole and it snapped shut again. Just like that, so quick ...'\n\nHe sighed, a long, breaking sound.\n\n'That was ten years ago,' Tallow whispered, 'but you don't forget, do you?'\n\nLife went on for Tallow and Volley, but things were never the same. The adventure had come to an end. The memory of their friends' deaths had crushed their spirits.\n\nUntil the day the forest burned.\n\nFor a long time things had been changing here on the Plated Mountain. Dragons once content with their endless circuits of the forest now spoke about breaking free of old routines, of journeying to other places. Yet more dragons talked about how they should stand up to the Charmed. After all, was this not their land too? And some, inevitably, spoke of war.\n\nThe latter Tallow and Volley had ignored, for they did not really believe that war could ever happen. But the talk of exodus, of freedom from the mountain which for years had held them prisoner without them even realising it... now there was an adventure even Weft had never dreamed of.\n\nTo leave their homeland and journey across the world!\n\nBut could they do it without Weft? The urge to travel was strong in both of them, but equally strong was the urge to follow. Neither one of them was a leader, and the years of doubt following the deaths of Weft and Piper had sapped their confidence. So, while they spoke of escape, they did nothing about it.\n\nThen, less than a moon before Wraith's Charmed razed the forest, natural dragons actually began to leave. Their destination was an ancient and deserted troll fortress to the north of the mountain, a place free of the forest yet still close to Covamere. Dragons were gathering there, it was said, dragons from across the world.\n\nNatural dragons.\n\nTallow and Volley believed that this could mean only one thing: that these dragons were preparing for war on the Charmed. The thought repelled them. Yet, after considerable discussion, they decided they would journey to the Fortress regardless, in the hope that this might be the first beat of the wing on the greater flight they both hoped some day to take: the journey around the whole world. The Fortress would be a convenient way-station from which they would soon strike out.\n\nSoon. Not tomorrow, but perhaps the day after that...\n\nBoth dragons knew secretly that it was Tallow who would make the final decision on when they should leave, but the decision kept being postponed. Either the weather was not right \u2014 which was unheard-of for Tallow, a dragon who could fly anywhere in any conditions \u2014 or there were things more immediate to be done.\n\nThey had been on the verge of leaving twice, and the third time was the night of the new moon, the night Wraith had broken through the Portal.\n\n'Perhaps the decision is made for us now,' Volley had suggested, struggling to hold back his tears as they looked out on the burning forest, which had once been their home.\n\nTallow had remained strangely silent, as though listening to an inner voice. In truth he heard nothing. All the same, something had called to him. Before Volley could react, Tallow had leapt into the air and flown towards the fire.\n\n'I flew straight to this spot,' said Tallow as though he were challenging Fortune to deny it. 'I don't know why \u2014 it's not a place I know well. But when I got here, I saw... I saw ...'\n\n'Me?'\n\n'You.' The big dragon sighed, his breath a billowing cloud of vapour in the confines of the cave. 'You were coming out of the mountain. There was no time to think \u2014 I just bundled you out of the way of those falling trees. Then the tunnel you'd come out of... well, it wasn't there any more.'\n\n'You saved my life,' said Fortune gravely, touching his companion lightly on the wing. 'You say you felt drawn here?' he went on. He was curious, for the sensation Tallow had described seemed familiar. 'What do you feel now?'\n\nTallow rewarded his question with a slow smile, brilliant as sunrise.\n\n'Like I've been asleep for far too long. And I've just woken up.'\n\nOutside the cave, the evening gloom had turned the falling snow to a deep blue mosaic. The two dragons could see little activity in the sky but both knew that Wraith's patrols were still up there, surveying the land they had exposed with their strange charmed senses. Visibility for their own natural eyes was appalling; they could see only three or four tree-lengths into the darkness, and it was getting worse.\n\n'It's time for us to go,' announced Tallow suddenly, lifting his great body on to his wing-arms with one fluid movement. 'If you feel fit enough, that is.'\n\n'I feel fit enough, but look at the weather! We'll never get anywhere in this. And what about the Charmed?'\n\n'A little extra cover is just what we need. As for the patrols: they follow a pattern \u2014 a complex one, but a pattern all the same.'\n\n'How can you know that?'\n\nWithout answering, Tallow scooped him up with one massive wing and pushed him gently out into the snow. Spreading his wings reluctantly, shivering at the cold air rolling off the snowdrifts, Fortune gazed out at the blank wall of the dusk.\n\n'Well,' he sighed, 'if you're sure you know where you're going.'\n\n'Fortune,' replied Tallow opening his enormous wings grandly, 'there aren't many things I'm good at, but there's one thing I'm great at.'\n\n'And what's that?' chuckled Fortune, an unexpected wave of emotion warming him just enough to fire his muscles into action.\n\n'Flying!'\n\nThe basilisk possessed many levels of awareness. While its inner core remained asleep, when Halcyon's flood of magic reached a certain level of power, an army of external senses awoke, ready to act.\n\nThese senses: like none a natural creature could ever comprehend, each with its own intelligence, each living like a parasite on the skin of the greater being \u2014 the basilisk itself. If the basilisk thrived, the senses thrived; if it died, they died. Yet their duality was such that they were the basilisk in as many ways as they were not, and so they too shared its yearning for oblivion, its ultimate death-wish.\n\nAwakened, hungry for information, the senses sucked at the magic roaring past them, extrapolating from it an image of a world they had not experienced for millennia... charm... dragon charm... no troll... little fire... the world turns!\n\nSo, now things were clearer. The basilisk had been disturbed at a crucial moment in the life of this world. Yet it had already seen many Turnings; surely there was nothing special about this one.\n\nThe senses, having dredged information from across the entire world in the time it would have taken most natural creatures to blink, were about to close their own parasitic eyes and lower the basilisk back into the totality of sleep, when something made them pause.\n\nThese dragons.\n\nDragons had been in the world for only the briefest of times when the basilisk had first gone to sleep. At the time, it had paid them little attention. In some small way it considered them brethren, for they too had the ability to wield fire charm. Had history unravelled in a different way, they might have found a way to share that power together. But history, for its own reasons, had chosen to keep their two species apart, and now, as the basilisk drifted towards wakefulness, they had become the lords of the world, and creatures of rare influence.\n\nA tornado whirled through the basilisk's sleeping mind, a wind that carried dragon voices and dragon scents and dragon thoughts and dragon hearts. The basilisk drank dragon for the merest fraction of an instant, and in that tiny slice of time it absorbed the news that would soon cause it to stretch its time-locked limbs and rise once more into the world.\n\nThis Turning is different.\n\nThis was the truth of it, shocking and new. The world was turning, and this time there was a very real possibility that it would not turn true.\n\nIf that happened, the world would die.\n\nAnd if the world died, perhaps the basilisk would too.\n\nInterested now, floating gradually up from the borderlands of sleep, the basilisk directed its senses deeper into the mountain in which its body was entombed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ring of Stone",
                "text": "To sleep in the open that night was surely madness, yet that was just what Gossamer and Velvet were eventually compelled to do. As they flew back towards the mountain, they saw the fires that had consumed the forest already beginning to gutter. Exhausted, the fates of their companions uncertain, they sank lower and lower over the dying flames until at last they could fly no more. They touched down in a field of ash, the last remnant of the fire retreating from them into the night. If they were seen by Wraith's dragons then they were ignored \u2014 two natural females were perhaps not considered to be a threat. But, even if they had been challenged, they would have had neither the strength nor the desire to resist. As it was, they simply curled up where they lay and fell fast asleep.\n\nThe new day brought a sliver of dawn light, quickly consumed by icy, grey clouds that overwhelmed the mountain and all that surrounded it. It was the cold that awoke the two young dragons, not the meagre, colourless light that struggled through the clouds from far above. They woke suddenly, shrugging off the thin layer of snow that had already turned their bodies into part of the landscape. Had they slept on, they would perhaps have become imprisoned there, lulled into deeper and deeper sleep by the sinuous frost, their bodies revealed only when the thaw finally came. If it ever did come.\n\nEach of them read these thoughts in her companion's eyes and they huddled close, sharing their warmth. The snow continued to fall, as indeed it would all day, and already their bodies were white again.\n\n'We can't stay here,' announced Gossamer, tilting her face away from the wind. Flakes of snow coated her lips and tongue as she spoke.\n\n'I don't know anywhere that's safe any more,' replied Velvet. 'I don't even know where those dragons were taking us.'\n\n'Do you recognise where we are?'\n\nVelvet looked around with pained, jerky motions, spitting out the snow forcing its way between her lips.\n\n'Don't know. Not far from where we started, I should think. Covamere's over there to the south.' Her voice trailed away as she gazed over the field of ash. 'What have they done?' she wailed at last. 'Where am I to go now? What am I to do?'\n\nGossamer had no answers, of course. All she could do was hug Velvet close and let her cry as the enormity of what had happened to her homeland struck its blows against her young heart. The only home this dragon had known had been destroyed in a single night, and Gossamer could think of no words with which to console her.\n\n'Velvet,' she said at last, 'welcome to the clan.'\n\n'Th-the clan?' Velvet managed to say, confused enough for her flow of tears to pause.\n\n'You and me. We've both lost so much that there's nothing left behind us. So, do you know what we do?'\n\n'No,' snivelled Velvet.\n\n'We don't look back. We look forward!'\n\nGossamer's resolve sounded false and unconvincing, to her at least. Yet Velvet brightened visibly.\n\n'You know,' she sniffed, 'you're right, Gossamer. We're still alive. That has to count for something. Trees will grow again, and we're still alive! Let's look forward together, Gossamer, you and me!'\n\nSomething in Velvet's voice cheered Gossamer. Despite the blizzard, despite her own despair, Velvet's resilient innocence was drawing her back from the brink, back into a world where a dragon might shape her own future even as it unfurled. A world where winter might yet turn to spring.\n\n'Come on,' she said. 'Let's find ourselves some shelter before we're snowed in.'\n\nBut, as she prepared to move off, Velvet grabbed her. 'Hold on! Look where we are! Look where we landed!'\n\nGossamer looked around. All she could see was white snow, whipped by the strengthening wind.\n\n'I don't see anything,' she said.\n\n'Look down, look down!'\n\nGossamer looked down, and she saw.\n\n'Stones!' exclaimed Velvet, hopping up and down on the spot.\n\nGossamer bent to examine the humps of snow spread around them in a wide circle. Blowing the fine flakes away from one of them, she revealed a small pebble lying on the ground.\n\n'This is the stone circle we were in when Loom and Tillery found us,' she said slowly. 'I'm sure of it, even with the trees gone. The lie of the land is the same. I've been here before.'\n\n'Do you think this means something, Gossamer?' Velvet seemed to be growing more excited with each breath she took. The snow flurried around her, joining her dance.\n\n'I don't know.'\n\nGossamer hurried around the circle, brushing snow away from the stones until she had uncovered twenty or more. Although the snow quickly recoated them, it seemed to her that it was not settling as quickly here as it was elsewhere.\n\nShe crouched down, pressing her muzzle against the ground. Charm was at work here, of that she was certain. Magic like that of the sprites she had so liked to watch back at Aether's Cross.\n\nBack home, she thought with a stab of pain.\n\nAs she lifted her muzzle, the ground within the circle seemed to sink a little, as though some invisible giant had trodden upon the ground. The snow creaked as it was crushed, its surface flattening visibly while the two young dragons watched in amazement.\n\nSomething rose from the centre of the circle.\n\nThe snow cracked as some invisible force pressed the emerging form up from below. Sudden gold flashed behind the storm of white flakes and a creature unfolded itself from the cocoon of charm that had protected it on its journey here from deep inside the mountain.\n\nFrom the middle of the ring of stones, into the blizzard, beneath the gaze of Gossamer and Velvet, borne on the subtle charm of the faeries, rose Cumber.\n\nHe gasped as the freezing air invaded his lungs, then flapped his small wings with absurd frenzy as though by shaking them hard enough he might prevent the snow from landing on them again. Blinking and sneezing, coughing clouds of vapour into the wind, he stumbled towards the perimeter of the circle, where he suddenly stopped short.\n\n'Who are you?' he exclaimed, spotting Velvet on the far side of the circle.\n\nThe young Natural goggled at him.\n\n'Cumber!' shouted Gossamer.\n\nThe instant Cumber turned she bowled him off his four feet. They ploughed through the snow together and came to a halt right in front of Velvet, who looked down on them both with a puzzled grin.\n\n'I'm Velvet,' she announced as Gossamer and Cumber clambered to their feet. 'And you're the very first charmed dragon I've met. You do look a little peculiar, I suppose, but if you're a friend of Gossamer then you're a friend of mine.'\n\n'Well, thank you, er ...' spluttered Cumber.\n\n'Velvet!' She rolled her eyes. 'Really, Gossamer, are all your friends so forgetful?'\n\n'Don't mind her.' Gossamer's laugh broke off. Her gaze locked with Cumber's and their smiles vanished. 'Where's Fortune?'\n\n'We were separated,' Cumber replied. 'I haven't seen him since we went into the mountain.'\n\n'Into the mountain?' breathed Velvet in awe.\n\n'But it was only supposed to be a scouting trip!' exclaimed Gossamer. 'You promised, you both promised!'\n\nCumber frowned. 'Didn't Scoff explain?'\n\n'I haven't seen Scoff since he left with you.'\n\nA long and telling silence followed, during which Velvet managed to keep diplomatically quiet.\n\n'We had no choice,' muttered Cumber. 'We had to go in. Wraith's dragons were right on our tails.'\n\nGossamer let out her breath slowly.\n\n'It's all right, Cumber,' she said at last. 'I understand \u2014 I understood when you left, I think, it's just... I didn't want to believe it.'\n\n'You're sure you didn't see Scoff?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\nAnother long silence, during which Gossamer began to cry silent tears.\n\n'Fortune is safe, Gossamer,' said Cumber suddenly, touching her flank with his wing.\n\n'How can you know that?' she sniffed. Velvet pressed against her other flank, her presence warming and reassuring.\n\n'Mantle told me,' answered Cumber with pride.\n\nGossamer fixed him with a look that burned through the tears. 'Who's Mantle? Cumber, tell me everything that happened, from the beginning.'\n\nBrace flew through the night, keeping pace with Wood and the rest of the fleeing Naturals, their wings slicing through air like fragmented ice, sharp and cold. As dawn's first light bled into the sky above the eastern horizon, they finally came within sight of the Fortress.\n\nIt was like a wave of rock, curving up and out of the surrounding foothills like an ocean breaker frozen just before striking the shore. Beneath its ragged leading edge was a long, low cavern, dark and mysterious. It was towards this cavern that Wood was leading the dragons refugees.\n\nDespite its grandeur, it was not the Fortress itself that caught Brace's attention. Instead, he found himself captivated by the great pinnacle of pale grey stone that stood directly in front of the wave of rock. This spire was slender and slightly curved, like a dragon's claw.\n\nBut the real wonder was what was perched on its flattened tip.\n\nOn top of the claw, balanced impossibly against the wind and the pull of the land, was an enormous boulder. Beneath its exquisite cap of snow, the boulder waited, poised, its massive bulk filled with the threat of imminent collapse, its rough sides banded deep green and hard blue and fiery red, as though it had been sliced from many mountains and reassembled here for some unknowable purpose.\n\n'It's called the Deadfall,' said Wood as they passed beneath its defiant shadow, and when he heard the name, Brace for some reason flinched.\n\nWood lead them steadfastly past the tower, his indomitable strokes forging a way through the storm towards the approaching shelter of the wave crest. Brace followed with growing enthusiasm, excited by the prospect of what might lie ahead. For the first time since his ordeal at Aether's Cross, his thoughts were running clear, and although the loss of his sister hurt his heart, it was with hope and vigour that he flew with his new comrades beneath the overhanging roof of the Fortress.\n\nOnce they were inside, Wood disappeared almost immediately, leaving Brace and the others under the command of a burly dragon called Torrent. Having led them deep into the cavern, Torrent marshaled them down a wide corridor of rock, at the end of which a team of dragons took them aside individually and questioned them at length. Brace lied fluently, omitting from his story all mention of Fortune, and especially of Cumber and Scoff. What he did not conceal was his hatred of the Charmed; in fact he revelled in it, inventing exaggerated stories of his experiences during the purge of Aether's Cross. Determined to be noticed here in this stronghold of the Naturals, he pitched his voice loud, hoping to be overheard. Hoping to be remembered.\n\nWhether it worked or not he could not tell, for in the end he was simply cleared for entry \u2014 as indeed were all the dragons of his intake. Some suspicious part of him doubted the validity of the clearing procedure, guessing that these dragons would have taken any Natural who turned up at their claws. But he pushed his doubts aside, preferring instead to believe that he had passed some essential test of resolve and initiative.\n\nThe light in the cavern was cool and muted, filtered as it was by the cascade of snow outside. The walls were bone-pale, like the Deadfall tower that loomed outside, and in stark contrast to the black rock that characterised the rest of the surrounding terrain. The floor ascended towards the rear of the cavern in a series of smooth terraces that curved up to either side like ribs. These met the back wall at a sharp point from which the ceiling exploded out in a great, soaring vault, its surface studded with hanging strands of rock. White-walled and vast, the Fortress surrounded the dragons like the shell of a gigantic egg, its promise of protection reassuring, its permanence undeniable, its purpose being shaped even now by the army of natural dragons that filled it.\n\nThe new recruits were assigned to a training camp situated in the furthest corner of the Fortress. As Brace and his comrades flew there, they passed over terraces swarming with dragons. Brace goggled; never had he seen so many of his kin. There were surely thousands of Naturals here. As he would learn over the next few days, many of them were refugees from the devastated forest, but just as many were travellers from across the world, journeying here in pursuit of the rumour of a Natural army.\n\nThe noise was deafening.\n\nReaching the camp, Brace found himself a hollow and settled himself to sleep. After all that had happened, and the long flight here, he was exhausted. Yet sleep eluded him. All around him, dragons were chattering, and all of them seemed to be talking about one thing. One dragon.\n\nShatter.\n\nWood had mentioned this name to Brace only once, in passing, shortly before they had reached the Fortress. Now, everybody seemed to be talking about him. Listening, Brace swiftly learned that it was Shatter was the dragon in charge, a warrior lord who had journeyed from far in the north to lead natural dragons to victory and freedom. Shatter had already defeated the Charmed once, it was said \u2014 who better to defeat them again? Shatter and those who followed him would be the ones to inherit the new world, the world without the Charmed.\n\nBrace listened to the legend as it grew around him, thrilled by the whispered reports of Shatter's exploits. Enthralled, he found himself hungry for the same action Shatter was said to have seen \u2014 indeed, to have initiated. Here was a dragon to adore!\n\n'So where exactly did Shatter come from?' he asked a nearby dragon who seemed to know more than most. The answer astonished him.\n\n'Some little island called Torr,' the dragon replied. 'South Point, they say \u2014 that was the name of the place where he conquered the Charmed. It'll go down in history too, mark my words.'\n\nSouth Point!\n\nNow Brace was grateful that he had been so cautious about mentioning Fortune and Cumber. If they had shared their home with this Shatter and his cronies, then... but what? Surely it meant nothing. And yet, something about this revelation bothered Brace, though he could not decide what.\n\nSo Shatter shares his birthplace with my lost companions. Knowledge like this could make a dragon valuable \u2014 could make me valuable.\n\nBrace pondered this for the rest of the day as Torrent and the other commanders began to drill him and his fellow dragons in the art of warfare. Even as when collapsed again into his makeshift nest, exhausted from forced flights and marches, still he wondered what he might make of this secret, if there were indeed anything to be made of it at all.\n\nFortune and Cumber, he mused just before sleep finally claimed him. I wonder if they ever met this Shatter, or what they would do if they met him now. Perhaps I shall never know.\n\nOutside the Fortress, the white day had turned to a sullen blue dusk. Still the snow fell.\n\n'Look!' cried Velvet. Frozen, exasperated, fascinated by Cumber's story yet irritated by its erratic narrative, she had finally had enough. 'Are we going to get out of here or what? I don't know about you two but my wings are just about frozen to my sides and if we don't get moving right now we'll never move again.'\n\n'Well,' replied Cumber with a frown, 'I suppose I had just about got to the end. After Mantle said it was time for me to go, he just sort of closed his eyes, and the floor melted away and the faery charm brought me here and, and, well, here I am.'\n\n'Excellent,' pronounced Velvet, 'now come on \u2014 I've thought of somewhere we can go for shelter until this storm dies down.'\n\nShe stamped off into the blizzard, rattling her wings free of snow and ice and sniffing loudly.\n\n'I shouldn't be surprised if we've all caught some terrible chill,' she called back over her shoulder.\n\n'Gossamer,' said Cumber. 'Are you coming?' She was staring into the ring of stones, now all but unrecognisable beneath the drifts of snow. 'Gossamer. What's wrong?'\n\n'You haven't finished, Cumber,' she replied, her voice strangely distant. It sounded as if she was emerging from a dream. 'What else is there?'\n\n'What do you mean?' Cumber replied. In the distance, shrouded by the billowing snow, Velvet clapped her wings impatiently.\n\n'What are you waiting for!' she shouted.\n\n'What else did Mantle tell you?' pressed Gossamer.\n\n'What?' Cumber was confused. He felt cold and tired. His head was fuzzy. The earth magic had left him drained, not to mention the trip into the mountain in the first place, and losing Fortune, and the encounter with Mantle... 'I'm sorry, Gossamer, but I am rather weary, and I don't really see what ...'\n\n'Never mind that. There's something. I know there is.'\n\n'I don't know what you're talking about.' By now, Cumber was ready to curl up on the spot and the weather be damned.\n\nGossamer closed her eyes and said, slowly and patiently, 'You don't mean to tell me Mantle brought you all the way here just to tell you that the world is turning \u2014 whatever that's supposed to mean.'\n\n'I told you what it means.'\n\n'Cumber \u2014 what did he want from you? What did he ask you to do?'\n\nCumber wobbled his head uncertainly, began to say, 'I don't underst-' then grinned broadly as he finally remembered. 'Of course!' he cried triumphantly. 'I knew there was something I'd forgotten!'\n\nHe bounced forward in glee and ran a little dance in the snow. Velvet, still fidgeting in the distance, giggled but Gossamer merely graced him with a caustic smile.\n\n'Cumber?' she growled.\n\n'Hmm? Yes?'\n\n'What did he ask you to do?'\n\nAt this, Cumber leaped into the centre of the ring of stones and swept his short tail around in a tight circle, scattering snow into the air to join the rest of the flurry. Cracking sparks between his teeth, he exhaled a great draught of hot air \u2014 not fire but simple heat \u2014 around the perimeter of the ring, melting the snow that had covered the stones. Velvet watched agog; Gossamer looked on with growing excitement.\n\n'We can do something, can't we?' she exclaimed.\n\n'Oh yes,' answered Cumber with a smile.\n\n'Something to help Fortune?'\n\nAt this, Cumber's smile faltered. 'That's not what it's meant for but... well, I think perhaps... yes, I think we might just help him. Don't ask me how, but we might.'\n\n'That's all I need to know,' said Gossamer. 'Now \u2014 show me what we have to do.'\n\nCumber stood as high as he could on his short legs and puffed out his chest. Surveying the ring of stones with a proud and regal air, he proclaimed, 'We break the circles, dragons, that's what we do!'\n\nTurning the heat of his breath to a lance of fire, he proceeded to blast the stones out into the blizzard. With just a few burning breaths, he reduced the ring of stones to a crude circle of steaming slush.\n\nCumber felt the change at once. Gossamer felt it too. As the circle disintegrated, so too did its charm, as if the faeries who had made it had never existed at all.\n\n'Do we have to do it to all of them?' whispered Gossamer.\n\n'Every circle in the forest and on the mountain must be destroyed,' confirmed Cumber.\n\n'But... how many are there? And where are they all?'\n\nAt this Cumber faltered.\n\n'Er, oh, well, you see...' he stuttered, his confidence evaporating.\n\n'I know,' announced Velvet, trotting up through the snow. 'Now come on, before we turn to snow ourselves!'\n\n'You know where all the rings of stone are?' demanded Cumber.\n\n'Of course. This is my home, you know. Now come on!'\n\nThis time they came.\n\nBehind them the snow fell hard into the place where once the stones had held their power, erasing that place of charm from the world. If the thaw ever did come, no creature would know what power had once been stored there.\n\nAs they flew low through the cold air, Gossamer kept an image of Fortune warm in her heart, hoping desperately that these curious acts of destruction they had been commanded to perform might somehow bring him back to her again. How that could possibly be, she could not imagine, for powerful though her intuition had become here on this mountain of charm, still it was not enough to answer the question that had settled unbidden into her heart.\n\nHow can I save Fortune from the fire?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Hidden Scent",
                "text": "That night \u2014 the first night after the Portal was breached, the night when under cover of the blizzard Fortune and Tallow made their first flight towards the Fortress, when Brace slept exhausted after an intensive afternoon of military training, when Cumber, Gossamer and Velvet slept in the lee of the two great rocks known locally as the Twins, when dragons both natural and charmed turned in on themselves, away from the snow, away from the unwelcome breath of winter and contemplated their own dreaming hearts \u2014 that night, Wraith's dragons broke through the next layer of Halcyon's defensive magic.\n\nThere was no glory in the event, no splendour. No fire lit the stormy night sky, nor did any charm lance through the air, nor thunder disturb the silent snow.\n\nBut dragons died all the same.\n\nWraith knew of the breach the instant it happened. The soundless, invisible concussion echoed through the Realm, where it was detected by his ever-present arms. Bones flexed at the end of those skeletal limbs, unseen in this world, folding the ripples of magic as they skated past. Bones that sensed something new.\n\nWraith pondered this latest discovery. It was charm of some ancient kind, yet not troll \u2014 the strange magic that held all Halcyon's defence network together. Wraith had no idea what it was, and no wonder, for he had never before encountered the scent of basilisk.\n\n'My lord,' said a voice behind him. It was not Insiss but one of Wraith's lesser commanders. No dragon had reported seeing Insiss since his disappearance the previous day. Wraith was not concerned.\n\nI have relied on others too much, he had decided. Especially Insiss. What use to me is power if I do not use it directly?\n\n'You have broken the next layer of charm,' he responded, his voice deep and authoritative.\n\n'My lord sees much,' said the dragon commander.\n\n'Well, your report, please.'\n\nThe commander coughed nervously and glanced up towards the mountain. Nothing was visible beyond the spires of Covamere, yet Wraith gained the impression that this dragon was afraid.\n\n'My lord, we have discharged the first of five barriers, but at a terrible cost.' He broke off with a gulp.\n\n'Speak slowly, dragon,' commanded Wraith. 'Tell me what you saw.'\n\n'Yes, my lord.' The commander took a deep breath. 'We had been working well. The front ranks stood back when they agreed the time was right \u2014 I myself was in the third rank, at the rear. We assigned one dragon to each of the ten triggers we had uncovered, and they set them off in the sequence we had calculated to be correct.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'And it worked, my lord. The barrier just crumbled, revealing the next layer of charm beyond, just as we had predicted.'\n\n'But?'\n\nThe commander glanced behind him, as though he feared something might be watching them. He lowered his voice. 'There is something else in there, my lord. Something channelling the magic. After a moment's pause, the banished charm came back, and with such venom! We saw nothing; we heard nothing; even our charm-sense felt very little. But when we looked again half our number was gone.'\n\n'Gone?'\n\n'Dead, my lord. Dismembered.'\n\nWraith stood motionless in the tumbling snow, recalling the taste of the charm he had sensed in the Realm. Could it be that there was another adversary waiting for him inside the mountain? Some dragon other than Halcyon?\n\nOr maybe not a dragon at all?\n\n'So be it,' Wraith rumbled. 'The dragons who died will be replaced. You will continue your work, and breach the second layer by tomorrow night. This changes nothing \u2014 do you understand me, dragon?'\n\n'But, my lord ...'\n\n'Listen to me!' Wraith's voice thundered in the night. 'I shall defeat Halcyon. I shall prevail. Do you doubt it?'\n\n'N-no, my lord.'\n\nIndeed the cowering commander, like all his fellow dragons, had no doubt that Wraith was in some way chosen, that the Black Dragon was supreme. Invincible, many said.\n\n'Believe it, dragon! And as you believe it, consider this: would you rather prove your allegiance to the Black Dragon, or be punished by him when he finally takes his place at the heart of the Maze of Covamere? That punishment you cannot conceive, dragon. Do not test it.'\n\n'My lord, we are already at work,' stuttered the poor commander, bowing hurriedly out of his lord's presence and braving again the unknown power of the mountain where, perhaps, a hidden beast awaited him.\n\nBut then, he wondered briefly, could there be any worse monster than the one he had just left?\n\nWraith did not watch the commander leave. He was confident the orders would be carried out to his satisfaction. Despite the wintry cold, blood pumped hot through his veins, filled with charm and fire. Had Halcyon somehow managed to prepare one last trick for him? The notion thrilled him, for what did it prove if not that Halcyon was scared? That wizened old dragon had resorted to glamours and gimmicks in a vain attempt to repel the dragon who would surely succeed him.\n\nFor long years Wraith had planned his final confrontation with Halcyon. It was simple: they would meet, and Halcyon would either bow or die.\n\nHowever, it seemed the old dragon was prepared to put up a fight.\n\nIn the snow and the dark, Wraith decided that nothing would please him more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Flying Lesson",
                "text": "A dragon balanced on a wedge of cool air between darkening clouds and the blue dusk of the ground. Snow fell around him, but its touch was soft now, its flakes spare and calm. A breath of air stirred the dragon's wings, and through their forced motion he detected its intentions. As the gust came he rose with it, flying free, supremely aware of the junction between his body and the sky, new apprentice to the mastery of flight.\n\nFor the whole day Fortune had been in the air, and what a day it had been.\n\nTallow's towering confidence had given Fortune the courage to strike out from the Plated Mountain into the jaws of the blizzard. Yet his wings had quickly grown heavy with snow, and he had soon succumbed to panic.\n\n'Tallow! My wings \u2014 the snow! We have to stop!'\n\n'Many untruths are spoken about the cold!' Tallow had answered, forging on. 'Shake your wings periodically \u2014 they will ice up less slowly each time. Flying warms them. They will not freeze.'\n\nNor had they. Leading him on, Tallow continued to beat his wings on and on, up and down, their great, steady strokes mesmerising Fortune and drawing him on through the wind. Life became a closed circle of wingbeats repeating endlessly inside an eternal cloud of snow. At one point, Fortune convinced himself that they had become trapped inside a whirlwind and were simply flying round and round over the same spot again and again and again...\n\nBut then, miraculously, Fortune realised they had left the blizzard behind. As the sky lightened, the wind dropped and the air relaxed about them. The ground returned, a pale and featureless blur some incalculable distance below, and with it the faint horizon, a reminder of the distant world surrounding them still. With the sky bright grey and the falling snow a gentle cascade, the two dragons at last alighted in the shelter of a shallow cave. Fortune assumed they would spend the daylight hours here, hiding from Wraith's patrols.\n\nInstead, they spent the day in the air. And it was glorious.\n\nWhen they first arrived at the cave, Tallow announced with billowing breath, 'That went very well. We're where we should be, at least.'\n\n'Where we should be?' exclaimed Fortune. 'Where exactly is here, then? We could be anywhere after a night like that. I can't even tell what side of the mountain we're on, let alone which way we need to go next.'\n\n'But you are not a local, Fortune,' replied Tallow with a small grin.\n\n'Well, forgive me,' said Fortune, bowing low. 'Which blob of snow do we head for then, oh local dragon? This one, or perhaps that one?'\n\nFortune's sarcasm was good-natured \u2014 he could feel no anger against good-hearted Tallow. He doubted any dragon could have navigated accurately through such a storm, yet he trusted that Tallow could to read the surroundings well enough to set them back on course and bring them eventually to their destination.\n\n'We fly the way we have been going all along,' said Tallow, pointing a confident wing towards distant snow-covered hills.\n\n'All along?' Fortune said incredulously. 'I don't believe it. Even if we were on the right track for this Fortress of yours, it would be pure chance.'\n\n'No chance,' responded Tallow gravely. 'Only skill.'\n\n'Oh, come on,' laughed Fortune. 'Really, which way is it?'\n\n'Really this way, Fortune,' repeated Tallow without a trace of humour in his voice. 'I do not joke about such things. Such things make me the dragon I am.'\n\nFortune held Tallow's gaze for a breath or two, then burst out laughing. The laughter erupted as if it had been imprisoned for far too long, and with its release he felt some great cleansing process sweep through his body. The unrelenting tug of the mountain, which he had felt throughout the long flight through the blizzard, faded. A calmness descended on him that seemed somehow to embrace the loss of Gossamer and his friends, the long-ago death of his father, his ongoing search for his mother. All the missing parts of him were suddenly there, and he felt wholly himself again.\n\nMy quest has failed, but there are other quests.\n\nHe looked at Tallow's earnest frown, and burst out laughing again.\n\n'Oh, I'm sorry, Tallow,' he chuckled. 'I'm not laughing at you, my friend. Well, perhaps I am, in a way. It's just that you look so... so relaxed. Here we are in the middle of nowhere and you're just not bothered at all.'\n\nTallow rewarded him with a broad smile, although a little of his frown remained.\n\n'You do not believe me, Fortune,' he said slowly, tilting his head to one side.\n\n'It's not that I don't ...'\n\n'No, you are right to doubt. It is a long time since I have had to prove myself, but I am happy to do so for you, Fortune. You of all dragons, I think, need this proof.'\n\n'What proof?'\n\n'Fly to that ridge.' With the trace of a grin, Tallow indicated a ridge of snow in the middle-distance. 'Don't ask why, just do it. And count your wingbeats.'\n\nPuzzled, Fortune obliged, flapping his way to the waiting ridge, alighting, and returning at more or less the same pace. When he returned he announced the tally.\n\n'Sixty-eight strokes there, seventy-nine strokes back.'\n\n'Agreed. Now watch me.' Tallow opened his massive wings with a flourish. 'Count wingbeats.'\n\nSaying no more, he gained the air with three powerful strokes and set off towards the ridge. As instructed, Fortune watched him closely, counting the steady rhythm of his flight. Even before Tallow reached the turning point, Fortune had noted the regularity of those wingbeats and the unchanging angle his big companion's wings made against the clouds. A few breaths later Tallow landed on the ridge, a small dragon shape almost lost in the bare, white landscape. He called back to Fortune, 'How many?'\n\n'Forty-seven strokes!' cried Fortune.\n\n'Agreed! Now count again!'\n\nTallow flew back with the same easy grace, finally dropping lightly on to the snow at Fortune's side.\n\n'How many?' he repeated.\n\n'The same,' replied Fortune, impressed. 'Forty-seven. The rhythm, the power of each wingbeat \u2014 it's exactly the same, all the time.'\n\n'That is the first part of good navigation,' said Tallow, 'and the first lesson of good flying. A dragon whose rhythm is good knows exactly how far he has travelled each time he beats his wings. Counting beats gives you distances, Fortune, lets you know where you are.'\n\n'But what about direction? What about wind?' Fortune was gripped. For him, flight had always been just a reflex action. He had learned it in a hurry the night South Point had burned, and never considered it to be anything more than a useful means of transporting himself about the world.\n\nBut Tallow had refined flight to an exquisite degree. Fortune looked again at the big dragon's muscles: they were not only large but also well-formed, shaped by constant and considered practice. His wings were big, but also efficient. Here was a dragon truly tuned for a life the air.\n\nThe more questions Tallow answered, the more leaped into Fortune's head.\n\n'Direction is difficult,' the big dragon explained. 'Wind is a factor, of course, but many things can help a dragon through the sky: the stars, the pull of the ground, simple landmarks and the lines that run between them.'\n\n'But when you can't even see, like last night?'\n\n'Then a dragon relies entirely on his body. It can be done, Fortune. I have proved it before and can do so again.'\n\n'What about when you fly high and the air gets thin? What about when you get tired \u2014 doesn't your wingbeat get erratic? And changing height? And what about...?'\n\n'Fortune!' exclaimed Tallow. 'I set out to show you a truth, not teach you my life's work.'\n\nFortune stopped abruptly. Though he no longer felt its pull, he could sense the mountain looming behind him. Ahead lay the Fortress, which they would reach all too soon.\n\nThere is only today, then, he decided.\n\n'Teach me, Tallow!' he said. 'Teach me all you know!'\n\nThe big dragon narrowed his eyes and pondered this for what felt to Fortune like an eternity.\n\n'Took me a lifetime,' he answered at last. 'And I'm still learning, even now.'\n\n'The basics, then.'\n\n'We must get to the Fortress tonight,' warned Tallow. 'No dragon is safe at large now. And something will happen there tonight that I think you will want to see.'\n\nFortune looked up at the grey sky, brightening visibly as the new day gripped the world.\n\n'Well, let's get started!'\n\nThus had the two dragons spent the day flying above the landscape of winter. All was white, reformed and unrecognisable. The sky beckoned, its dome an infinite chamber, a vast emptiness on which a dragon might lose his past and his future and become a being only of the present, alone in flight.\n\nAlone in the empty sky, Fortune mused. That's what dragons are. We are the only creatures who fly.\n\nHis thoughts scattered as Tallow dived past him, his sudden wake disrupting Fortune's own easy glide. A broad smile lit up the big dragon's face. He swooped back and forth above Fortune, casting a critical eye over his pupil's attempts to regain his composure.\n\n'Never trust an airstream!' he announced, then took several deep breaths. 'The winter is beautiful from up here!'\n\nFortune had to agree. Below, snow had coated the world with its own inert magic. The blue-grey light filtering through the clouds cast a pale aura across the landscape, making it seem to glow from within.\n\nAt the limits of their vision, in the opposite direction to the Plated Mountain, was the pale mound on the horizon which Tallow insisted was the Fortress, although how he could tell at this distance Fortune had no idea.\n\n'We should go there now,' urged Tallow, nodding towards the far-off mound.\n\n'Soon,' promised Fortune. 'Oh, I could stay up here forever.'\n\nThroughout the extended flying lesson, the dragons had landed only twice, seeking the shelter of the cave in order to evade the gaze of distant dragon patrols. When the sky was clear again, they had gulped down some of the fruits growing near the cave entrance, and returned to the air. All the rest of that day they had flown, sharing the wind, and learning together.\n\nFortune proved himself a keen and able student, willing to admit his own mistakes and work hard to correct them. While it would be many years before he could even begin to understand the subtlety of Tallow's navigational skills, he still managed to learn the rudiments of wing control and the regulation of his rather erratic flight rhythm.\n\nWhat he enjoyed most were the aerobatics.\n\nTallow began with Fortune's body, explaining anatomy and aerodynamics. He explained how most of a dragon's bones were hollow, how the retracting blades of cartilage at the leading edges of his wings, when deployed, would greatly reduce a dragon's stalling speed, allowing slow and complex manoeuvres; these were particularly useful when landing on precarious ledges. He explained how Fortune's deep breastbone was really a keel on to which were anchored his most powerful flight muscles.\n\n'How do you know all this?' Fortune marvelled. Some of this information seemed oddly familiar to him, like a scent remembered from infancy, yet Tallow articulated it so precisely and simply that Fortune was swept away by its sheer elegance.\n\n'Flight is symmetry,' Tallow explained. 'This I have had to learn through experience. You're lucky \u2014 you've got me!'\n\nSo Fortune flew, and in flying he felt utterly alive.\n\n'I suppose flight was my response to forest life,' Tallow said later. Fortune noted how much more animated he was up here than on the ground. His voice was still slow and thoughtful, but flying appeared to bring out an expressive tone that Fortune had not heard the big dragon use before. 'Most forest dragons are tied to the ground, introverted. Their wings grow short; they shamble. But my element was always the sky. Can you imagine, Fortune, life without flight? The sky was not meant to be empty.'\n\nTallow spoke again of his friends, of Volley and of course poor Piper. And Weft.\n\n'If Volley were here he would sing!' he laughed. 'If Weft were here ...'\n\n'But he isn't,' said Fortune gently.\n\n'No,' agreed Tallow. 'But you are, Fortune. You are.'\n\nThe day turned around them, and the world turned beneath them. In the afternoon light they swooped and soared, and as dusk approached they glided and spun, until at last the lesson drew to a close. Reluctant though both of them were to end such a perfect day, time was pressing.\n\n'You've taught me well, Tallow,' said Fortune, bobbing close to his friend on a rising shaft of air. 'Thank you.'\n\n'You wanted to learn.'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'In fact, a dragon might say you needed to learn. There is a reason you need to fly.'\n\n'What do you mean by that?'\n\nTallow regarded him with large, solemn eyes. 'I don't know, Fortune. I don't know.'\n\nAs they flew towards the Fortress, Fortune was astonished to find that he was not tired from the day's exertions.\n\n'That's because you flew well,' explained Tallow. 'A dragon uses less energy when he flies well.'\n\n'You haven't told me much about this place. How many dragons are there?'\n\nTallow pondered this for a few breaths, during which time Fortune found his attention more and more drawn towards the dragon stronghold clinging to the horizon ahead. It had taken the appearance of a great hump of rock slashed down its centre by a single vertical line, wider at the top than at the base.\n\nIt looks like an eye, he thought with a shiver, remembering a dream he had not thought of for some time.\n\n'I would guess,' replied Tallow slowly, 'that there are two thousand dragons there. No more than three.'\n\n'Three thousand?' Fortune's wings faltered. 'I had no idea there were so many dragons in the world!'\n\n'It's quite an army,' agreed Tallow. 'The Charmed will be challenged, that much is certain.'\n\n'Tell me about them. What sort of dragons are they?'\n\n'Many come from the forest \u2014 even more since the fire. As many still from elsewhere, especially from the north.'\n\nFortune wondered if he should tell Tallow that he too came from the north. But already his companion was speaking again.\n\n'Dragons have been living at the Fortress for many years, but only recently have they become united. The Fortress is a big place, with many separate communities. Many Naturals still fear it, for they say it was once a place of the trolls. But it is a safe place, a stronghold. Most important, it is a place the Charmed never go.'\n\n'Why not?'\n\nTallow shrugged, the gesture sending ripples down his wings. Fortune noted that he adjusted his rhythm automatically to deal with the tiny motion.\n\n'I cannot say. You know the Charmed better than I.'\n\n'Then what has made the natural dragons band together? Why now?'\n\n'There have been disturbances at Covamere. Lights, sounds. Dragons say the Charmed are growing restless; some say that they are making an army against Naturals. Dragons feel vulnerable in the forest, so close to Covamere, but they feel angry too, for the forest belongs to them as much as to the Charmed. Forest dragons have been fleeing to the Fortress for several moons now. Then came the dragons from the north.'\n\nFortune swallowed. 'What dragons?'\n\nDarkness was almost upon them now, and the sky a purple canopy of cloud. The air was very cold. Fortune felt a curious doubling sensation, as though he knew what Tallow's words were going to be even before he opened his mouth.\n\n'The one they call Shatter,' Tallow replied."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Rally",
                "text": "The mighty crags of the Plated Mountain lay hidden under overwhelming snow, with only the bleakest of them standing proud and black above the blanket of white. Grey cloud shrouded its summit and shadowed its root. White was the land and, as far as any dragon could guess, so was the whole world.\n\nCharmed dragons flew a complex lattice in the sullen sky. Their purpose was to prevent Halcyon, or any of his followers, from escaping the mountain by secret means. With the forest destroyed, this should have been easy, but the coming of the snow had blurred the special senses these patrolling Charmed employed. The snow tricked the eye and dampened even the probings of charm, and so it was possible for careful dragons to evade the network, to slip between the claws of the patrols, to trace their own secret paths across the mountain.\n\nCumber looked out over the field of snow, taking time to enjoy the meagre warmth of the rising sun. Since coming to the mountain, he had been surprised to find himself beginning to take pleasure in such things.\n\nThe low light rolled over the drifts like a wave on the shore, leaving behind it a fine patterning of orange crest and blue trough, and creeping slowly towards the little cave in which the three dragons rested. Velvet it was who had led them there, an uncomfortable but welcome shelter.\n\nCumber sighed, remembering friends and teachers, and contemplating the task he had sworn to undertake.\n\nThis day would be the second since Cumber had emerged from the faery ring. The work had gone well so far. Velvet had proven herself well able to find the faery rings despite the disorientating snow. Once located, they proved easy enough to neutralise \u2014 only a single stone needed to be displaced for the earth charm they contained to be dispersed.\n\nWhy had Mantle sent Cumber on this curious errand? Each of the three dragons had his or her own, secret ideas on the matter. But none knew for certain.\n\nA dark arrow flashed across the sky.\n\n'Dragon!' Cumber muttered.\n\nHe hurried back to Gossamer and Velvet in the cave, from where they all watched fearfully as the charmed dragon swooped low, arching its neck as it scanned the drifts for suspicious marks. What had drawn it here they could not guess, for the cave was surely invisible from the air, but here it was.\n\n'It's coming back for another look,' whispered Velvet, huddling close against Cumber as the patrolling dragon glided slowly past, this time in the opposite direction. They all squinted into the early light, desperate to see if they had left any prints in the snow that might betray them.\n\nThe dragon landed. They held their collective breath.\n\nFurling her wings, the patrol dragon hopped clumsily through the snow towards the cave. Her scales were white, her wings long and slender; had she not been wearing such a stern expression, Cumber might have considered her beautiful.\n\n'We could overpower her, the three of us,' suggested Velvet. Cumber jumped, for her mouth was right next to his ear. He could feel her body heat against him, and surprised himself by not pulling away.\n\nVelvet responded by nudging him. Cumber fascinated her, a charmed dragon who contradicted everything she had been told about their kind. Cumber was no monster. He was good. He made her laugh.\n\n'Don't be foolish,' Cumber whispered back. 'She'd soon be missed, and besides, she's stronger than she looks.'\n\nIndeed, the nearer the dragon came the more formidable she appeared. Those slender wings were barbed and strengthened with glistening rods of charm, living webs that made the almost transparent membranes glow with stored energy. Her eyes glinted like cold, hard jewels.\n\nCumber glanced around the cave but saw only what he already knew \u2014 there was no other way out.\n\nI could always escape through the Realm, he thought with a shudder. But I would have to leave my friends behind.\n\nThe dragon was almost close enough to smell.\n\n'Solice!'\n\nThe voice boomed out of the sky. The three trapped dragons peered up into the brightness and saw there a second Charmed, beating his wings hard against the wintry sky.\n\n'Solice!' the newcomer repeated. 'What are you playing at all the way out here? We should have finished this quarter already!'\n\nSolice stared resolutely towards the darkness of the cave, her eyes narrowed and unreadable.\n\n'I thought I saw something,' she murmured in a low voice that carried with uncanny strength across the ice.\n\n'Oh, you're always seeing something,' grumbled her partner impatiently. 'Come on, I need a break. We haven't eaten all night!'\n\nSolice stood there for a breath or two, then shook her head. 'Oh, very well.'\n\nWith a flourish, Solice opened her wings. Flashes of light chased across their membranes and without moving them she rose majestically off the ground. Gossamer and Velvet watched open-mouthed.\n\n'She's just showing off,' grumbled Cumber. 'What a waste of magic!'\n\n'Can you do that?' asked Velvet eagerly as the two charmed dragons flew away into the tumbling snow.\n\n'Of course, or at least, I could if I wanted to,' acknowledged Cumber briskly, 'but there are far more useful things a dragon can use charm on if you ask me, far more useful things.'\n\n'Like what?'\n\n'Well,' replied Cumber, looking pensively at the tracks Solice had left in the snow, 'there's this for a start.'\n\nHe stepped cautiously outside. His friends followed, Velvet with an excited spring to her step, Gossamer with the slightest of smiles at her young companion's eagerness to please Cumber.\n\n'Stand here.' Cumber pointed to an arbitrary spot in the snow. 'I should have done this yesterday, but I didn't think of it and anyway it's only today that I've begun to understand how much power there really is around here. The snow disguises it, but it's there all the same, in the ground, under the ground, even in the air \u2014 it's there.'\n\n'Excuse me,' Velvet piped up, a little bashful now that Cumber had taken charge. 'What's there?'\n\n'Charm,' replied Cumber.\n\n'Magic,' elaborated Gossamer.\n\n'Oh, that,' said Velvet.\n\n'This whole mountain is filled with it, you see,' Cumber went on, his voice rising as he became more animated, 'and that means the sort of charm that's so difficult to perform back in the Heartland \u2014 and even harder on Torr and beyond \u2014 well, here it's more effective. A lot more. Why, I could make magic here I could never have dreamed of back at South Point. I'm only just beginning to see what possibilities there are here, you see, because to do such things ...'\n\n'Cumber,' said Gossamer patiently, 'what exactly are you going to do?'\n\n'Ah, I thought you'd come to that. Well, if you don't object, I'd like to do this.'\n\nSo saying, Cumber closed his eyes and hunched his back.\n\nAround his claws the snow crackled and melted away, and between his scales there flared sudden fire, darting through the gold like thousands of tiny tongues. Through gold they sprang... but they retreated into white.\n\nCumber had changed colour.\n\n'Gosh!' exclaimed Velvet. 'That's incredible!'\n\n'So, Cumber,' smiled Gossamer, walking slowly around him. 'Do you want to do me first or Velvet?'\n\n'What?' Velvet cried.\n\n'Oh, I hope you didn't think I was going to just ...' stuttered Cumber, suddenly embarrassed. 'I mean, I was going to ask first if I could... you see, I do think it would be for the best \u2014 camouflage and everything \u2014 although I'll quite understand if you don't want to.'\n\n'Cumber!'\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'Just get on with it!'\n\n'Oh, er, very well. Velvet?'\n\nVelvet, for once, could find no words, so simply nodded her head. Gossamer, seeing that her young friend was trembling a little, supported her with a motherly wing.\n\n'Don't worry, my dear,' she said. 'If you don't like the way you look, I'm sure Cumber will be more than happy to change you back again. You never know,' she added in a whisper, 'he might prefer you in white!'\n\nBefore Velvet could respond to this, she felt a warm tingle spreading itself through her body, starting from the tip of her snout and speeding back to the end of her tail.\n\n'Tell me when it's over!' she cried, pinching her eyes shut.\n\n'It already is,' Cumber replied. 'The white dragons \u2014 that's us. Maybe now we really can give the Black Dragon something to think about. What do you think, Gossamer?'\n\nGossamer looked down at her new scales. They shone in the pale light, sheer and beautiful. Velvet's shone too, gleaming with a radiance that was somehow beyond mere whiteness. Gossamer shivered, a trace of fear invading her heart, despite her thrill at this unexpected transformation.\n\nIf a dragon can change colour, what other changes might be made in the world? she thought suddenly. What warm futures might we carve from the cold snow?\n\nVelvet surprised Gossamer by saying, 'I like my new coat, Cumber. Thank you! I want to stay like this forever! Now come on, you two \u2014 there's work to be done.'\n\nWith genial groans and light hearts, Cumber and Gossamer joined Velvet in the air, and together the three white dragons set off towards the next ring of stones. Soon the day that had begun with fear took on a new and optimistic air. As they laboured, working their way around the mountain from one ring to the next, the gleam of their new hides wore off, leaving a plain yet more effective whiteness in its place.\n\n'That's the left-over charm falling away,' explained Cumber. 'The colour will stay forever \u2014 or until it's changed again \u2014 but the magic always fades, sooner or later.'\n\nThat night they slept long and deep in a shallow cave that Velvet discovered high amid the eastern foothills.\n\n'Stay close now,' Tallow warned as they flew in close formation into the jaws of the Fortress. 'And leave the talking to me.'\n\n'I will,' responded Fortune. 'I would no more put your life at risk than I would any of my good friends.'\n\nTallow allowed himself a smile.\n\n'Don't forget,' he added, 'dragons here know little of the Charmed. Most despise them. The Black Dragon's name is not generally known, nor are any of the secrets you carry with you. Be discreet, Fortune, or you will put us both in danger.'\n\nFrom the flutter of the snow outside they swept into the massive bubble of air held captive beneath the soaring wave of rock. As they entered, Fortune gasped. Tallow had been right \u2014 there were thousands of dragons here!\n\nThey filled the terraces and slopes of the Fortress floor, clustered in a huge, straggling audience that spread itself in a rough half-circle centred about a stony outcrop near the back of the colossal chamber. The heat rising from their bodies was enough to make eddies in the cold night air. With his new sensitivity, Fortune felt himself adjusting his wings automatically to the changing density of this subtle updraught. With the warmth there rose a great blur of conversation. The voice of the army.\n\n'So many dragons,' Fortune whispered in awe. 'Can they all despise the Charmed so much?'\n\n'That you will find out soon enough,' muttered Tallow. 'Let's find Volley.'\n\nFortune followed as the big dragon led them lower and lower, skimming across the crowd in a tightening spiral with wings spread wide and flat. If any dragon could find another in such a gathering, it was Tallow. As Tallow searched, Fortune found himself captivated by the raised knuckle of stone towards which all the watching dragons were looking.\n\n'He's not at his usual spot,' grumbled Tallow.\n\nAs he spoke, Fortune saw in the corner of his eye a pair of burly sentries lift themselves briskly into the air to their left. They stroked their way across to the circling dragons and called them to a halt. The four of them hovered together, Fortune and Tallow staying close while the sentries took station on their flanks.\n\n'And what are you two playing at?' the first sentry drawled. Big and bony, he had a casual air that was more kindly than threatening. His acid-green companion, by contrast, was looked sharp and wary.\n\n'Exactly, Torrent,' the second guard agreed. 'They should be on the ground. It's an insult to Shatter, that's what it is, trying to steal the attention like this. I've a good mind to report them both.'\n\n'All right, Mulch,' drawled Torrent. 'That's enough. You're Tallow, aren't you?'\n\n'I am,' Tallow rumbled.\n\n'Hmm. I don't know your friend. Is he new?'\n\n'I was new yesterday, sir,' piped Fortune with exaggerated enthusiasm. 'Tallow was just showing me around and I'm afraid I've made him a bit late. We were just looking for somewhere to land. I'm terribly sorry \u2014 it's all my fault. I'm just so keen to hear the speech, you see, and it's made me quite giddy!'\n\nFortune broke off, wincing at what was spewing from his mouth. He was supposed to let Tallow do the talking. Then, to his great relief, he saw Torrent and Mulch nod to each other and relax their shoulders.\n\n'See any other dragons out there?' Mulch asked, clearly still suspicious. 'Perhaps you had reason to be flying outside on such a cold night, eh, Tallow? Perhaps your loyalties don't stretch as far as you might have us believe?'\n\nFortune's puzzled glance at Tallow was genuine enough, but Mulch picked up on it at once.\n\n'And don't pretend you don't know what I mean, you little runt!' he snapped.\n\n'Come on, Mulch,' yawned Torrent. 'Give it a rest, why don't you? They're up to no harm.'\n\n'They could still be traitors,' Mulch hissed.\n\n'Tallow's no fool. And this youngster's no Flighter, anyone can see that. Let them land, and let's get back to our places. You don't want to be caught up here when Shatter starts his speech.'\n\nMulch considered this for a moment.\n\n'Go on then,' he said at last. 'And don't let us catch you like this again. Shatter might tolerate dragons like you but that's no reason we should!'\n\n'What was all that about?' asked Fortune as the two sentries glided away.\n\nHis words were almost drowned by a sudden gasp from the crowd. It began at the front, nearest the stone knuckle, and rushed back through the throng like a wave, jerking dragon after dragon into alertness.\n\n'This is not the time or place,' cried Tallow over the sudden clamour. 'Follow me down and I'll explain later. Ah, there's Volley!'\n\nAt the very moment Fortune and Tallow joined the rally inside the Fortress, Wraith's pathfinders penetrated the second of Halcyon's walls of charm.\n\nThe breaching happened in silence, just like the one of the previous night. This time, however, to the great relief of the Charmed who released the final levers of magic, there was no loss of life. The barrier \u2014 an undulating ribbon of charm flexing in and out of the rock like a huge, flattened serpent \u2014 simply melted into the floor like snow in spring.\n\nWith Wraith visibly excited by this latest triumph \u2014 and with their own odds of survival significantly improved \u2014 it was with renewed enthusiasm that the elite squadron of charm-sensitives bent to the next layer.\n\nThis layer of charm was as invisible as the first had been, broadcasting precious few clues as to what triggers might have been set into its mysterious surface. The only thing facing the line of investigators was a smooth wall of stone crazed with fine etchings.\n\nWith a collective sigh, and a set of grim glances exchanged, the pathfinders went back to work. Once more, Wraith had granted them a single day in which to solve the riddle. With this and two further barriers yet to come, each hoped secretly that in three days' time he or she would at least be still alive.\n\nTallow shouldered his way through the pressing crowd to a large, tan-coloured dragon who awaited them with obvious delight. Fortune guessed this was Volley, for although he was not as big as his friend, nor as dark in colour, he carried himself in exactly the same way as Tallow. To see them together was to see two dragons who had spent a near lifetime together, and who were as relaxed in each other's company as it was possible to be.\n\n'Tallow!' exclaimed Volley warmly, slapping his friend's flank. 'Don't you fly off on me like that again! I was beginning to worry about you, old fellow!'\n\nHis voice was a rich and marvellous baritone, and Fortune remembered Tallow remarking that he liked to sing. He hoped he might hear that voice put to good use one day.\n\n'Well,' replied Tallow, his own voice slow and deep, 'I couldn't let a bit of fire and ice get in my way, now could I?'\n\nVolley grinned, the expression sitting more comfortably on his broad face than it did on Tallow's. Fortune decided that this dragon was one who set out to enjoy life's pleasures, preferring not to dwell on any matter that demanded too much thought.\n\n'And who might this young dragon be?' Volley enquired, bending down to Fortune's level. Although Fortune was almost full-grown, he felt dwarfed in the company of these two dragons. But safe too, he decided.\n\n'This is Fortune,' said Tallow with uncharacteristic haste. 'I think he might keep us here for a while longer yet.'\n\nVolley raised one eyebrow at his friend, leaving Fortune to wonder quite what information had just been exchanged. Before he could pursue it, another buzz ran through the crowd, cut short as almost every dragon present suddenly sucked in his or her breath.\n\nA dragon had appeared on the knuckle of rock. When the silence was total, he spoke.\n\n'Welcome,' said the dragon. 'I am Shatter, and I welcome you all to my Fortress.'\n\nEven though Wood listened closely to the speech, Shatter's word left him unmoved.\n\nI've heard it all before, he thought listlessly as Shatter boomed on about glory, and revenge, and victory, and justice. Try as he might, he could not summon any enthusiasm for the idea of going to war against the Charmed.\n\nAnd yet, was this not what he wanted? Was this not the moment he had made inevitable when he made his choice in the Great Chamber at South Point, when he dived into the midst of the fighting, targeting Ordinal, screaming to his father? Was this not the future into which he had at that instant flown? His mind told him it was, but what did his heart say?\n\nHis heart did not know, for it was still tied up with his father. Poor, burned Barker, who was now nearly blind and unable to fly without terrible pain, and yet who had crossed the world rather than abandon Shatter. Loyal to the last, Barker still adored his leader. And Wood adored his father.\n\nThat's the real reason I'm here, he told himself. That, and nothing else.\n\nAfter their safe passage through the Low Mountains at Aether's Cross, the journey here to the Fortress had been arduous. Shatter had set a cruel pace, urging his small band on at great speed, flying by both night and day and stopping only for the shortest of breaks. Had it not been for Barker's stubbornness, his determination to stick with his master, Wood would have abandoned them after the first day.\n\nThey arrived among the Injured Mountains one full day after Mantle's messenger earthquake had closed the ravine of Aether's Cross, setting Fortune and his companions on their own journey south. Shatter, his red eyes constantly roving, flew over the landscape as though he owned it, until the Fortress loomed on the horizon. They made straight for it.\n\nShatter's reaction to the place was odd, for while the others were awe-struck by the sheer scale of the cavern, and in particular by the astonishing, gravity-defying boulder perched on its tower outside the entrance, Shatter himself seemed to regard it as nothing more than what he had expected.\n\nBarker went so far as to ask Shatter why this was so. When Shatter replied, his voice was curt and disinterested.\n\n'The Deadfall has existed for a long time inside me, dragon,' he said. 'There is no surprise for me here.'\n\nTo Wood's surprise, they found dragons already living inside, and more gathering there daily. And so it was only a matter of time before Shatter did again what he had done at South Point, appointing himself rouser of rebels, condemner of the Charmed.\n\nLeader of dragons.\n\nIt happened with astonishing speed. Growing numbers of Naturals listened eagerly to his speeches, and word soon spread that here, at last, was a dragon who had seen real action against the Charmed and who could lead them to victory. Small rallies spawned exploratory flights into the forest, many of which Wood participated in if only to keep his mind off the awful prospect of a lifetime under Shatter's rule. He hated Shatter, he had decided, almost as much as he hated the Charmed.\n\nAnd now here he was, listening to yet another of Shatter's rallying speeches, and feeling nothing.\n\nExcept that was not quite true. Wood gradually recognised that he did feel something after all. The rage he had felt when he had tried to rescue his father from Ordinal's flames returned to him, hot and vital. It was a welcome reminder of the dreadful harm a charmed dragon was capable of inflicting upon an innocent Natural.\n\nBut my father was the one who attacked her!\n\nNo \u2014 he would not accept that. Better to believe that his father must be avenged. If that meant Shatter must be supported, so be it. If that meant war, then war there would be.\n\nOh Fortune, if only you were here now. Then I could show you what a terrible mistake you made, how you chose the wrong path. Shatter will succeed, the Charmed will be destroyed, and you will have chosen the wrong side.\n\nSavouring the anger that had fuelled him for so long, Wood wandered around the side of the knuckle of stone and looked out across the crowd. Here, hidden in the shadow cast by the faint snow-light outside, he was able to observe the army without himself being seen. He felt safe here, cocooned and anonymous among thousands of his own kind. His own family broken and torn, he had adopted this as a surrogate. Here were wings big enough for him to hide beneath; here was a sympathetic flank in which he could bury his face and forget all that he had seen.\n\nHere, for a while, was escape.\n\nFaces stared back from the throng, gazing up past Wood towards the top of the rock where Shatter paced still, hurling his words out like projectiles. Wood could see the awe on those faces, the respect, the love. He knew that look \u2014 it was the look his father reserved for Shatter.\n\nIf only he would look at me that way, he thought.\n\n'Standard fare,' commented Volley dryly as Shatter spoke on into the night. 'Although have you noticed he's getting on to specific tactics now? He'll make his move very soon, I reckon. Still, we'd have more fun listening in on the Flight if you ask me.'\n\nFortune nudged Tallow's shoulder. 'Come on,' he whispered, 'you can't keep avoiding the subject all night. What's this \"Flight\" you keep talking about?'\n\nThe big dragon's eyes met Volley's. The two dragons seemed to breathe as one, and Volley frowned slightly, then they both looked down at Fortune.\n\n'Very well,' began Tallow gravely, 'we'll tell you.'\n\n'It's very simple, Tallow,' put in Volley. 'Don't drag it out.'\n\n'I won't. But I think we should be interested in Fortune's thoughts on the matter.'\n\n'Oh, really, Tallow. Don't you think you're building this up to be ...'\n\n'Weft would have been interested,' Tallow said.\n\nVolley shut his mouth with a snap. 'Go on,' he murmured, regarding Fortune with new interest.\n\nOnce more, Fortune felt disconcerted that information had passed him by without his fully understanding what was going on.\n\nAnd yet, maybe I'm beginning to see a pattern.\n\n'Not all dragons here agree with Shatter's ideas,' Tallow began, 'especially when it comes to fighting the Charmed \u2014 or fighting at all, for that matter. The problem is what to do about it. They've talked a lot, but so far they haven't decided anything very much, except what to call themselves.'\n\n'Rebels!' exclaimed Fortune. 'So tell me, Tallow, Volley \u2014 are you dragons of the Flight?'\n\n'Us?' exclaimed Volley. 'You must be joking! We're out of here altogether after tonight, or didn't he tell you?'\n\nFortune turned to his big friend. 'Tallow?'\n\n'That was our plan,' Tallow agreed. 'But as I said, I'm interested to hear what you've got to say, Fortune, in the light of what I've just told you.'\n\nAgain that shared look between the two dragons. This time, Fortune sensed that Tallow was holding Volley back from saying more. All at once, he felt like the subject in some unfathomable test.\n\n'I think,' he replied slowly, 'that I would like to meet these dragons of the Flight myself.'\n\nTallow flashed a look of triumph at his friend. Volley simply shrugged, but Fortune saw that the response had been to his liking.\n\n'Will you take me?' Fortune asked. 'Shall we go now?'\n\nTallow shook his head. 'It would not do to walk out on Shatter while he speaks. That would be too conspicuous, even for three dragons who plan to join with the Flight.'\n\n'Who said anything about joining them?' put in Volley.\n\n'Tomorrow night,' suggested Tallow, hushing his friend with a flap of his enormous wing. 'Besides, you might care to listen to Shatter a little longer.'\n\n'I think I've heard enough from him for a lifetime,' muttered Fortune.\n\nOn his platform of rock, Shatter spoke louder yet.\n\nShatter's timing could not have been more perfect. The dragons he had rallied together were trained and ready for action. More than that, they knew in their hearts that they were living through what was surely the last age of charm. This night, and those that followed, would mark in history the beginning of the new world. The natural world.\n\nAfter rousing his audience with an impassioned call to battle, Shatter went on to define his campaign in detail, revealing the extensive knowledge his scouts had gained of the mountain territory, and even of Covamere itself. Indeed, he left no doubt that Covamere was their ultimate target, nor did any dragon doubt Shatter's had the ability to lead them to victory within its walls.\n\nBy the time Shatter stopped speaking, his voice was rough and broken. Yet it was with vigour that he left his platform, and with excitement that dragons retired that night, for now each squadron had been given a specific part to play in the greater campaign. More than inspired, these dragons felt needed. Needed by the war, needed by Shatter.\n\nFor a dragon roaming the borderlands of insanity, and who believed that no other dragon than himself was even real, it was an astonishing feat.\n\nAs the crowd broke up, Tallow and Volley invited Fortune to share the limited comfort of their scrape. It was as they were strolling casually back towards the eastern edge of the cavern \u2014 there had been enough flying that day even for Tallow \u2014 that the night presented to him its final surprise.\n\nThe dragon stood a little way ahead, poised on a low ridge of pale rock. He was staring back towards the platform from which Shatter had delivered his speech. In the scant light he appeared nondescript, and Fortune would have paid him no attention. But, as they passed, something made him look again.\n\nStopping short, his heart in his throat, Fortune grabbed the stranger by the wing and pulled him round.\n\n'Hey ...!' the dragon exclaimed.\n\nHe lashed his tail, and made as if to attack Fortune, only to stop short. Then their eyes met, and they recognised each other at last."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragons in the Snow",
                "text": "Higher and higher they went, up and around the mountain.\n\nThey encountered a lot of patrols to begin with, and more than once they were forced to freeze in the open, flattening their white scales against the snow and trusting their new camouflage to protect them against the keen eyes of the Charmed. And so, although the stone rings were relatively easy to find, and even easier to demolish, the need for constant vigilance made their work endlessly demanding.\n\nAs evening approached, the dragons collapsed together in the shelter of a deep cleft of rock largely free of ice and snow, Panting hard in the thin air, they looked out with satisfaction across the lower slopes, now cleansed of faery charm.\n\nDespite their success, the mood was melancholy, and at first they said little to each other. Then, as shared warmth slowly relaxed their bodies, Gossamer announced:\n\n'I'm going up the slope a little way. I'll be back soon. I just need to be alone for a while.'\n\nBefore either of her companions could protest she was gone. Cumber started up after her but Velvet pulled him back.\n\n'Leave her for a bit,' she said.\n\n'But she shouldn't be on her own.'\n\n'She'll be all right. She's missing Fortune, that's what her trouble is, any dragon can see that.'\n\n'Really? I didn't see it.'\n\n'Never mind.' Velvet shuffled closer.\n\n'Does she love him, do you think?' mused Cumber. 'I never really thought about things like that until I came here, to the mountain, I mean, but you see, this place is the place I always dreamed of coming to when I was small, and so to actually be here is like being in a dream. Only it's real.'\n\n'So do you believe dreams can come true?'\n\n'Well, I suppose this one has, but then it's turned out so different to what I actually expected that it's not like it's my dream at all \u2014 it's as though I've fallen into another dragon's dream altogether, if you see what I mean.'\n\n'Not really,' murmured Velvet.\n\n'You see,' Cumber went on, 'there is just so much here for a young charmed dragon like me. There's the charm itself of course, enough for a lifetime, but there's the history too, and the quest and all its strange twists and turns \u2014 and this task of ours here on the mountain. Now there's a puzzle!'\n\n'Mmm.'\n\nVelvet had snuggled close now. Cumber's scales were warm and resilient. She listened as he talked on about charm, only half-understanding yet wholly thrilled that she, Velvet of the forest, should be sharing so much with this dragon of magic.\n\nHe's not a charmed dragon, she thought cosily. He's just Cumber. And he's mine.\n\nThe thought was a shocking one, for it drove against everything she had been taught. A Natural and a Charmed together? Nonsense! Such a thing could never be. A dragon should stick to her own kind and leave well enough alone of things she did not understand.\n\nBut Velvet, despite her occasionally timid air, was nothing if not an independent dragon, and all she knew at this instant was that her closeness to Cumber was good and warm and special. She was comfortable enough against him to close her eyes and let his voice and his heartbeat lull her towards sleep. And comfortable enough to dream of the possibility of love, yes, even between charmed and natural.\n\nCumber's voice interrupted her drifting thoughts.\n\n'I said, how many more are there, do you think?' From the exasperated tone in his voice it was apparent that he had been asking the question for some time.\n\n'Oh, oh, I'm sorry,' yawned Velvet, reluctant to leave her dreams but anxious to please. 'How many more what?'\n\n'Rings, of course, my dear. Stone rings. How many more?'\n\nDear! He called me dear!\n\n'Oh, well, let me think. There was a rhyme once, if only I could remember it ...'\n\nShe frowned and tapped her claws. Deep memories from infancy slowly rose to the surface and at last she remembered. Reciting in a low chant, she spoke the old verse as she had learned it many years before:\n\n\u2003'Seven guard the trees\n\n\u2003In the greatest of rings.\n\n\u2003Five on the towers\n\n\u2003Of the dragon kings.\n\n\u2003Three close by\n\n\u2003Where the high water sings.\n\n\u2003And one without end\n\n\u2003Which the fire will send\n\n\u2003When the mountain stings.'\n\nCumber gaped at Velvet as if he had only just realised she was were there. He was suddenly conscious of the proximity of her body to his.\n\n'That is fascinating!' he exclaimed excitedly, the verse she had spoken whirling through his mind with sufficient velocity to sweep away any notion he might have been developing simply to lie there with her. 'But what does it mean, I wonder? \"The greatest of rings\"! What's that, I wonder.'\n\nVelvet sighed. Cumber's inability to relax for more than a few breaths was frustrating, yet it was exactly what made him so appealing. As he fidgeted next to her, she leaned back a little on one wing and said, 'Well, it's the forest, of course.'\n\n'The forest?' Cumber frowned. Then it dawned on him. 'Oh, I see. Yes, of course. All right, well, we've already found those \u2014 seven stone rings concealed inside the greater ring of the forest, except the forest is gone now. Still, I suppose that made them easier to find. Now, let's see ...'\n\nVelvet groaned as Cumber sprang to his feet and began marching up and down the length of the cleft, muttering to himself.\n\n'Five rings... what was the next bit, Velvet?'\n\n'\"Five on the towers of the dragon kings.\"' Velvet resigned herself at last to the task. 'We found those today. \"The towers of the dragon kings\" is probably just a fancy name for those weird rocks that were nearby.'\n\nCumber nodded with growing enthusiasm. They had indeed found and dismantled five rings of stone today, all within a short flight of each other and overlooked by a crown of rocky spires that burst clear of the snow like the claws of a monster locked into stasis at the instant of its birth from the mountain.\n\n'So that leaves the three near the water and the one... where was it?'\n\n'The rhyme doesn't say,' admitted Velvet. 'But you're right \u2014 we've already broken twelve rings, which means there are only four left. And I've got a good idea where we might find the \"high water\" the rhyme speaks of.'\n\n'You have? Where! You must tell me!' Cumber flashed a glance out across the darkening mountainside. 'Is it far?'\n\n'Far enough not to go there today,' laughed Velvet. 'Oh, Cumber! Can't you just come and sit with me for a while?'\n\n'Hmm? Yes, in a while. Your rhyme made me think of something but it's gone again. Stay there \u2014 I won't be long.'\n\nHe hurried out into the low afternoon light, leaving Velvet wistful and alone in the shelter. Presently Gossamer returned and huddled up close to her young companion.\n\n'Did you tell him?' she asked. Velvet could see the marks of tears dried on to her white cheeks.\n\n'Tell him what?'\n\n'That you love him.'\n\nVelvet did not reply, but as they pressed their bodies close together and stared out at the sky, watching the cloud turn first blue, then red, then finally a rich purple, she wondered why, if her feelings were so obvious to Gossamer, she could not make sense of them herself, much less express them to Cumber.\n\nPerhaps he, like Gossamer, would see them too, and so she would not have to explain.\n\nThe sun went down, and they slept.\n\n'Fortune!'\n\n'Brace!'\n\nFortune stared at Brace's wing, which he held tight in his claws. Brace, who had been mesmerised for a breath or two, shook himself free of Fortune's grip and took a step back. He glared at Fortune, but for now Fortune did not register his sullen expression, so overjoyed was he by the chance encounter.\n\n'Brace!' he repeated. 'You're all right! I never thought I'd see you again.' He looked around, half-expecting to see his other companions appear from the night. 'The others \u2014 are they all right? Where's Gossamer?'\n\n'There's just me, Fortune. All right? Only me.'\n\nBrace's voice cut briskly through Fortune's, and had he been listening more closely Fortune might have understood what a cry from the heart that admission was. But by then his own fear had risen up, clouding his thoughts.\n\n'What do you mean?' he snapped. 'Where's Gossamer? I told you to take care of her, Brace \u2014 you could have done that much, surely?'\n\nHe knew his words were cruel and he felt ashamed, but he could not help himself. His anger at finding Brace alone without his sister \u2014 nor any other of his friends \u2014 came swift and clean, and for the moment it seemed easier to hurl it at Brace than to face up to the truth.\n\n'We were parted in the fire,' Brace retorted, obviously unimpressed with Fortune's wrath. 'I did all I could, Fortune. Where were you?'\n\nThe words stung, and Fortune felt momentarily sorry for what he had said. But then he thought again of Gossamer and his heart swelled with fear and rage. Looking at Brace, he saw the shape of her face mirrored in that of her brother, saw a reflection in his eyes of the light in hers; saw the promise of her. But it was a promise Brace could not keep.\n\n'You never really loved her!' Fortune's anger flooded out in a torrent of words that later, as he looked back in shame, he could not even remember. Even as he ranted at Brace his heart heard what he was saying and pleaded with him to stop, yet some terrible engine inside him continued to spew it out. 'You're responsible if anything's happened to her, Brace! Your protection is worth nothing. You're worth nothing, Brace, do you hear me?! Nothing!'\n\nHe paused, his eyes red and misted, panting. At a discreet distance, Tallow and Volley were mumbling to each other in an undertone.\n\nThey must be wondering who they've taken up with here, thought Fortune, and the thought was like a fresh wind blowing through his head. Briefly he saw Brace as he really was \u2014 a young, proud, frightened dragon, lost in a land of which he had little understanding, searching for a way to rebuild the life he had seen collapse about him. Closing his eyes, Fortune lowered his head.\n\nBut then, just as he was seeking for the words he needed to begin his apology, he remembered his other friends. He looked up again.\n\n'You're really the only one?' he demanded. 'What about Cumber? What about Scoff? Scoff was coming straight back to you. What happened to him?'\n\n'We never saw him,' Brace snapped back, clearly fed up with Fortune's barrage. 'Both your charmed friends could be dead as far as I'm concerned, Fortune, and so could you! I don't care. Now just leave me alone!'\n\nCumber \u2014 what happened to you? And Scoff! Where are you, my rainbow-winged friend?\n\nBefore Fortune could go on, Brace forced his way past and disappeared into the gloom of the cavern, leaving Fortune with his two new friends and a heart filled with the painful spaces left by his old ones.\n\nTry though he did, he could not believe they were dead. Not Cumber, not Scoff. Please not Gossamer. They were simply... gone.\n\nSo, it seemed, was Brace.\n\nRejoining Tallow and Volley, Fortune began a halting and awkward apology for his behaviour. They waved him silent, reassuring him that he had no need to explain. Fortune was grateful for their understanding and discretion, but the shame did not leave him, for even if they could forgive him he could not forgive himself. Worst of all was the unwelcome idea that Gossamer, wherever she was, might somehow have sensed his anger, for in attacking Brace had he not also been attacking her?\n\nIt was at that moment, at last, that he the full effects of his day in the air. He had flown long and hard, and had stood alert for half the night listening to the rhetoric of Shatter. The temperature in the cavern was dropping rapidly, and it seemed to Fortune that the weight of the entire world had dropped with casual ease on to his shoulders.\n\nFeeling lost and alone, stranded on a pathway of doubts and regrets, Fortune plodded on behind his companions, wishing that sleep would claim him now. But even when they did reach the scrape, and when Tallow and Volley had curled themselves around and settled quickly into a gentle rhythm of snores and grunts, still sleep eluded him, leaving him alone with his thoughts.\n\nThe weight pressed down with ferocious power, and by the time his eyes began finally to droop and his mind to wander he had grown confused, so that it did not seem to be the weight of the world at all, but rather the weight of a huge boulder poised on top of a great tower of pale rock. Around the boulder, dragons swarmed.\n\nGossamer clambered slowly up the steep incline, unable to see much ahead due to a large, overhanging crag of rock. Behind her, the sky was dimming rapidly towards night. Above the crag, a sliver of white light flared against the brightening stars \u2014 a night dragon, parting the heavens on some unimaginable quest of its own.\n\nSetting the caution of the day aside, Gossamer spread her wings and flew boldly up to perch on top of the crag, digging her claws into the ice to secure her hold upon the slippery surface.\n\nShe surveyed the land below. Was this the view she had sought? With the mountain at her back, she gazed straight ahead, due east, into the twilight. Nothing there but rock and snow. She looked right.\n\nMore fields of snow. Rocky bulges thrusting forth. The dim horizon nearly invisible now as night hunched over the mountain. Nothing remarkable.\n\nTo her left, then \u2014 due north.\n\nThe same: the snow-covered mountain and the distant world beyond.\n\nExcept it seemed to Gossamer that she did see something different.\n\nNo. I'm not seeing it. I'm sensing it.\n\nTilting her head and half-closing her eyes, she blinked into the flickering snow, trying to make out what it was she thought she saw.\n\nA network of faint lines laid over the landscape? Or rather under the landscape? They shimmered at the periphery of her vision, clearest at the corner of her eye and practically invisible wherever she looked most intently. How real they were she could not judge, but there was definitely something there.\n\nAs she stared, she began to discern a pattern. The lines were arranged in concentric rings around the mountain, their broad arcs receding into the furthest distance. What she was sensing had to be some kind of charm, for she had sometimes detected similar lines in the form of auras about the bodies of the water sprites back in Aether's Cross. Those tiny filigrees of magic had shone with pale colours, cloaking the darting sprites with radiant cloaks. These lines were different.\n\nThey are bigger.\n\nGossamer laughed out loud at her own understatement. The laugh broke the spell under which she had fallen, and as she widened her eyes again the lines began to fade. Before they vanished entirely, she identified one final piece of the pattern: within the concentric rings there were anomalies \u2014 strange shadows cast on the net like bruises on the skin of a fruit. Before the lines disappeared altogether, she managed to locate ten such bruises, spaced in a regular circle perhaps a day or two's flying time out from the mountain.\n\nThings spaced around the mountain, just like the stones in the rings we are working so hard to destroy.\n\nThe puzzle was too great. Darkness was near, and her head was beginning to ache, and so she hopped back over the edge of the crag to return to her friends. As she did so, she found herself thinking of Fortune. She smiled \u2014 was that not the real reason she had come up here in the first place?\n\nRemembering him brought not the pain she might have expected, but an overwhelming sense of tranquillity, for it seemed to her that this evening, now, he was with her. She glanced north again, not knowing that the point in the darkness towards which she gazed was the very place where Fortune was.\n\nHe's alive!\n\nThe revelation blasted through her like a hot wind. On its tail came fiery tears. They blazed down her cheeks and fell into the snow, which melted beneath them. Sudden belief came to her, that everything that mattered to her was out there for her to reclaim \u2014 the magic, the fear... and Fortune. In the meantime, Fortune waited, and the land waited, and Gossamer could only look out and weep, knowing in her heart that some final task still remained for her, one that would take all her strength and probably more, a mission even Cumber could not explain.\n\nNorth she looked, and long she wept, but in the end she was not sad, for as she returned to the shelter she sensed that time was closing in upon them all. The world would turn. And the turning was nearly here.\n\n'Why am I being shown these things?' she whispered to herself. 'Surely it is Cumber who will see this task through. Surely, in the end, the world must turn about charm. In all of this, what strength can nature truly have?'\n\nCumber too was looking north, although he enjoyed none of Gossamer's revelatory excitement.\n\n'I'm in the wrong place,' he said grimly as he gazed out into the empty night. 'I don't know where I should be, but I'm in the wrong place.'\n\nFour rings remained to be dealt with, and Cumber felt confident they would be dismantled tomorrow. But then what? And would it really take three of them to do the job?\n\n'But Mantle told me,' he scolded himself, uncomfortable with the direction his thoughts were leading him. 'I have to see it through, or else ...'\n\nOr else what?\n\nHe sighed heavily and thought about Velvet instead. A strange young dragon, that one, but fascinating nonetheless. If only there was time to get know her a little better.\n\nThe cloudy sky was showing clear patches for the first time in days, and Cumber looked up to see stars shining in the breaks. It seemed to him that their light was falling everywhere but here, that the whole world was illuminated by starlight except for this particular spot on this particular mountain.\n\nI'm in the wrong place!\n\n'All right,' he groaned. 'Where do you think you ought to be instead, Cumber, hmm? Tell me that!'\n\nI don't know. Just... not here.\n\nAbove, a night dragon streaked across the sky with all the surety of a creature certain of its path and of the events it must influence.\n\nUncertain, restless, Cumber paced uneasily back to where his friends already lay asleep. Squeezing himself into their warmth, he eventually drifted into restless dreams about lost dragons and forgotten quests.\n\nOutside, the snow stopped falling.\n\nBrace dwelt long on his terrible encounter with Fortune. In the end, he was surprised to discover that he had cause to thank Fortune for at least one of the cruel things he had said.\n\n'You're worth nothing!'\n\nFortune's words had struck at the heart of Brace's frustration. Shatter's words had inspired him, of course; no dragon had listened to the oration more intently than Brace. Yet still he felt unimportant, still he felt the need to prove himself. Until he could remedy this, Brace believed that no other dragon would be able to recognise his true worth.\n\nI'll show them. I'll show them all!\n\nInstead of sleeping that night, Brace made himself a plan. Somewhere out there, his challenge awaited him. When he had risen to it, when at last he flew triumphant, dragons like Shatter and Fortune would be forced to look at him and say:\n\n'There goes Brace \u2014 a dragon of worth!'\n\nPerhaps even Gossamer, wherever she was, would say proudly:\n\n'There goes Brace. He's my brother, you know.'\n\nCreeping past the sleeping dragons around him, Brace launched himself out into the snow-filled sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Flight",
                "text": "Rejuvenated by the sight of a clear sky, the white dragons positively leaped up the steep slopes, following Velvet's directions towards the place she believed to be the 'high water' of which the rhyme spoke: a broad tarn high on the southern reaches of the Plated Mountain. They reached it around noon, and under the midday sun they located the first of the rings of stone \u2014 a tiny circle of no more than twenty pebbles located on a little island near the centre of the open water. This they successfully broke up, and by sundown the remaining two rings had also been dismantled.\n\nWhich left only one.\n\nThere were fish in the tarn, which Cumber caught deftly by means of a charm he did not even try to explain to his companions. Velvet watched in open adoration as he roasted the fish over an open fire, and gasped in delight when she tasted the rich flavour created by the smoky flames.\n\n'It would be worth getting caught for this!' she exclaimed, tucking into a third portion with obvious relish. 'Oh, Cumber, you're so clever!'\n\n'They're pulling back the patrols,' responded Cumber distantly. 'Wraith is getting ready for his final assault. We won't be spotted now.'\n\nGossamer eyed him suspiciously. 'What's wrong, Cumber? I thought you'd be curious about this last ring? Time's running short, can't you feel it?'\n\n'It is, Gossamer. Very short.'\n\nBut Cumber would be drawn no further. Only later, after sunset, did Gossamer manage to coax him into a proper conversation. While Velvet lay peacefully asleep, they crouched near the remaining embers of the fire. The dying flames turned their pale hides golden, causing Cumber to glance wistfully down at the scales on his flanks.\n\n'Getting bored with being white?' smiled Gossamer. But there was something infinitely sad in Cumber's expression. She thought she knew what it was.\n\n'I can't see it through,' he blurted. 'I know I'm failing Mantle but... I can't do it, Gossamer. I shouldn't be here at all \u2014 I should be ...'\n\n'Where?'\n\nCumber exhaled slowly. 'I don't know. Just not here.'\n\n'Then where?' pressed Gossamer gently. 'With Fortune? With Mantle? With Wraith?'\n\n'Don't joke about it \u2014 I'm serious.'\n\n'So am I.' Gossamer pulled herself closer to her Charmed companion. 'Look, Cumber, you're trying to tell me that you need to leave, to let the two of us complete the task that Mantle originally set for you. Well, I'm here to tell you it's okay. The task will get done. No dragon knows the mountain better than Velvet, and as for me ...'\n\nShe faltered and Cumber, for once, picked up on the hesitation.\n\n'Yes, Gossamer? You what?'\n\n'You said you shouldn't be here. Well, as strongly as you feel that, I feel that I should.' She glanced to the north, a gesture that was becoming as automatic as blinking or breathing. 'I'm waiting for something, Cumber. I need to be here when it comes.'\n\n'Me too,' Cumber echoed. 'It's just that I need to be somewhere else.'\n\nAnd so the decision was made. After that, there seemed to be nothing more to say, and so they simply sat together for a while, watching the fire die and the stars track slowly through the black sky.\n\nThen, deep in the mountain beneath them, the thunder started.\n\nThe ground trembled, powdery snow dancing beneath their claws, and the air hummed. With a yelp, Velvet awoke and scampered over to her friends.\n\n'What is it?' she cried, clutching Cumber in terror.\n\nAs she spoke, the rumbling died away.\n\nGossamer and Cumber exchanged a glance.\n\n'Wraith,' they said in unison.\n\nThe next morning they parted. Velvet surprised Cumber by crashing against him again when he thought that all the goodbyes had been said.\n\n'Oh, please take care of yourself, dear Cumber!' she cried, wrapping her wings completely around him. 'I couldn't go on if I thought something was going to happen to you. All through yesterday I knew you were planning something but I didn't dare ask what, or even think about it. Please come back to me soon, please, promise you will!'\n\nWith difficulty and not a little embarrassment, Cumber extricated himself from her grip and backed away, fending her off with his short white wings.\n\n'Of course I'll take care, my dear \u2014 and of course you must too, you see, I mean... well, just make sure you look after each other, and whatever you do, find that last ring and break it up like we did the others. You promise that and I'll promise to be careful.'\n\n'We promise!' said Velvet through her tears. Snuffling, she drew one wing across her face and then suddenly pushed him away. 'Go on! Let's get this over with, at least.'\n\n'I hope we'll all be together again soon!' called Cumber over his shoulder as he trudged uncertainly off into the snow.\n\n'Goodbye, Cumber,' whispered Gossamer, standing and watching as yet another of her companions disappeared into the landscape. At last, when Cumber could be seen no more, she turned to face Velvet.\n\n'Any ideas?' she said with a half-smile.\n\nVelvet frowned, then bounded up to her and exclaimed, 'I just know we'll see him again, and your Fortune, of course! As for ideas, oh yes, I've got plenty, but I'm not really sure about any of them. Still, there's only really one direction we can go from here, isn't there?'\n\n'And where's that?' laughed Gossamer, Velvet's instant change of mood infecting her with a new lightness of spirit.\n\n'Up!'\n\nFortune spent the day after Shatter's rally observing the tremendous activity going on in the Fortress, as Shatter's dragons prepared for war. With the formidable Tallow and Volley as his guardians, he was left alone by the squadron commanders. Tallow fielded a few unwelcome questions from time to time, but otherwise Fortune was allowed to wander with his companions more or less where he pleased, and this he did.\n\n'There's so much to take in!' he gasped as a battalion of five hundred Naturals hovered in perfect formation above one of the terraces towards the middle of the Fortress, the draught from their wings a veritable gale.\n\n'Shatter's here at the right time,' remarked Volley. 'These dragons are itching for a fight \u2014 have been for years. There'll be songs about these times, you mark my words.'\n\n'And you'll be there to sing them, I suppose?' laughed Fortune.\n\nTallow smiled without humour. The display of military force was impressive, but he did not have to like it. He watched Fortune closely as he bantered with Volley, recognising that the young dragon's laughter was entirely artificial. He recalled the venom Fortune had spat at Brace the previous night, and briefly questioned his own judgement in choosing to follow this stranger who had flown so suddenly out of the mountain and into his life.\n\nBut then Fortune caught his eye, and the glance they exchanged was full of understanding.\n\nMy laughter may be false, Fortune seemed to say, his eyes boring into Tallow's, but I am not! Bear with me, Tallow, please.\n\nCasting his doubts aside, Tallow followed his friends for the rest of the day as they toured the great vault of the Fortress, assessing the army's strengths (many) and its weaknesses (few), gleaning from other dragons details of some of the strategies that were planned for the imminent attack on Covamere, absorbing, learning, preparing.\n\nBut what are we preparing for? Tallow wondered.\n\nWhen night came, they flew out to meet the dragons of the Flight.\n\nFollowing Tallow and Volley out from beneath the overhanging wave of rock, Fortune experienced a thrill of anticipation. His wings felt strong and new, and with Tallow's training helping him through the cold air he felt able to take on any dragons whom Shatter \u2014 or Wraith for that matter \u2014 might have cared to throw at him.\n\nThe Flight met openly, in a meeting place well-known to the Fortress dragons. Sometimes Shatter posted dragons to report on what they discussed, but tonight, with all the activity inside the stronghold, there were no patrols to be seen.\n\n'They're usually to be found down here,' called Volley softly as they flew up and over the Fortress roof. The great wave of stone rolled past beneath their wings, pale and hard in the faint starlight. Ahead, Fortune could just make out a cluster of shapes hovering in the darkness which could only have been the dragons of the Flight.\n\nBefore they reached the meeting place, sudden light splashed across the rock beneath them, carving its surface into a maze of cracks, each with its own brilliant leading edge and black, streaking shadow. They gasped, turning into the glare to seek its source. Even as they looked the light died, but all three of them saw the place from which it had come: a spot low on the western slopes of the Plated Mountain.\n\nCovamere! thought Volley and Tallow.\n\nWraith! thought Fortune.\n\nThen the rumbling came, a deep tremor that rattled the air around their wings and reverberated in the rock beneath them, a sound that went on for many long breaths and only slowly faded into the cool silence of the night. Even as the rumbling died in Fortune's ears, some part of it seemed to tug at him. Again, the pull of the mountain.\n\nLooking ahead to the dragons who awaited their arrival, Fortune put his doubts aside, and opened his heart and mind to the here and the now. He was anxious to learn just what dragons these were who openly defied their mad master.\n\n'Greetings,' cried a loud voice from some indeterminate place within the flock. 'We've been waiting for you.'\n\nThe Flight comprised some forty dragons, split more or evenly between male and female. They gathered here most nights for fellowship and mutual support, for many of them were assigned to the most active of Shatter's squads, and by the end of each day felt desperate to release the anger they felt about what was happening here.\n\n'Why don't you just fly off?' suggested Volley, ever the practical dragon. 'If you hate it that much, why not just up and go? That's what we were planning to do,' he added, eyeing Tallow meaningfully.\n\n'Ah,' sighed the dragon who had first spoken to them, a middle-aged female called Werth. Although she was not the leader \u2014 for the Flight had no leader, nor even internal hierarchy of any kind \u2014 she seemed to speak for the group as a whole. 'We meet here at night because we care, and it is because we care that we cannot leave. If we stay we might make a difference. If we go we will have achieved nothing.'\n\n'Very noble,' said Volley. 'Damn foolish, though, if you ask me.'\n\n'I didn't,' replied Werth. 'What do your friends say?'\n\n'Admirable,' said Tallow after a pause. 'But in truth you are achieving nothing.'\n\n'We share our dissatisfaction,' called a dragon from the main group.\n\n'Ideas spread,' said another. 'Our numbers are growing.'\n\n'But too slowly,' said Tallow. 'Shatter will attack before many more days are out. Then dragons will begin to die.'\n\nThere was general agreement with this, then Werth piped up again, this time directing her words at Fortune.\n\n'You haven't said much, young dragon. What do you think of all this?'\n\nFortune pondered for a moment. 'You said you'd been waiting for us. What did you mean?'\n\nAnother stirring in the crowd, then Werth answered.\n\n'Well,' she said hesitantly. 'It's strange \u2014 when we came here tonight, no dragon wanted to say much at first. Then, when we did get talking we all agreed that it had been, well, an odd sort of day.'\n\n'That's right,' put in yet another dragon. 'Very odd!'\n\n'Thank you, Kale,' muttered Werth. 'If I could continue? Where was I? Yes \u2014 an odd day. Anyway, when we went through our usual roll-call it appeared that we were three dragons short on last night.'\n\n'Sleet, Whittle and Dredge,' prompted Kale again. 'Good riddance to all three.'\n\n'Well,' said Werth, 'there it is. All I'm saying is that, earlier today, three dragons left us. And now... well, here you three come along.'\n\nWerth beamed at the newcomers, while behind her the rest of the Flight, all beating their wings against the night air with a steady communal rhythm, offered grunts of welcome and suspicion.\n\nBut mostly welcome, noted Fortune with surprise.\n\n'How do you know who we are?' he asked. 'We could have been sent by Shatter. Shouldn't you be more cautious?'\n\n'Oh, nonsense!' exclaimed Werth. 'We know Tallow and Volley have no love for Shatter.'\n\nTallow and Volley grunted non-committally at this, although both seemed pleased that their reputation had preceded them. Werth threw them a smile, but it was Fortune who held her keen gaze.\n\n'But you,' she continued. 'Hmm, you're a little different, aren't you?'\n\n'And there's the light,' came a voice from behind her. 'Don't forget the light!'\n\n'I was coming to that,' tutted Werth. 'You see,' she explained, approaching Fortune more closely now, 'there was that light, you see \u2014 when you came over the ridge just now. And the rumbling. It happened... it was just when you appeared.'\n\nFor the first time, Werth seemed at a loss for words. Before any dragon could offer her the support she clearly needed, Fortune said slowly, 'That was charm. Magic. From the Plated Mountain.'\n\nA hush descended.\n\n'Wraith is trying to penetrate the mountain,' Fortune went on. 'Great changes are coming to the world, changes of which we could all be a part. Even Shatter and his dragons are a part of it. Even me. And perhaps even you.'\n\nThe hush extended into a long silence. Through the steady rush of air beneath beating dragon wings, Werth let out a long, whistling sigh.\n\n'Well!' she said. 'It looks like you might be the one we were waiting for after all. Tell me, young dragon, what's your name?'\n\n'Fortune.'\n\n'Well, I suppose that will have to do.'\n\nAt Werth's invitation, Fortune told his story to the Flighters. All who listened did so intently, including Tallow and Volley, for neither of them had heard the entire tale before.\n\n'So you see,' concluded Fortune, 'that's why Cumber and I, Charmed and Natural, came to Halcyon in the first place. It was the only way to stop this conflict from sweeping through the world.'\n\n'Like the fire swept through the forest,' murmured Volley.\n\n'Only it didn't work!' called Kale.\n\n'No,' Fortune admitted, 'it didn't. Something pulled me out of the mountain before I was able to reach Halcyon. I've lost my companions and I've failed in my quest. I don't really know what I can do, but... but ...'\n\n'But what, Fortune?' asked Tallow kindly, his gentle rumble a sudden comfort.\n\n'But,' Fortune continued, breathing deep and looking out over his audience, 'I will say this \u2014 the Charmed are not evil. I know you believe this in your hearts. It is only fear and prejudice that have caused this divide. There is good and bad in each race.'\n\nThe more Fortune spoke, the stronger his voice became. With it came confidence, and a slow, inner light.\n\n'Listen to me, dragons of the Flight, as you have never listened before. Between them, Shatter and Wraith have brought the dragon world to a critical place in its history. A turning point. Up on the mountain, Wraith is fighting to destroy all that the Charmed have ever built. His ultimate ambition I cannot guess, but I know he will not stop until he has achieved it.\n\n'Then there's Shatter, fighting to destroy Wraith and everything he and his charmed dragons stand for. It's madness, all of it, the same madness I've seen destroy entire dragon communities. So I ask you, what will come of this war if not the complete destruction of the entire dragon world? Given the terrible power of fire charm, and the dreadful ambitions of dragons like Wraith and Shatter, might it not mean of the whole world itself?'\n\n'You speak knowledgeably of this magic,' came a wary voice from the crowd. 'And you seem to know many things \u2014 until you came no Natural even knew the name of the Black Dragon, yet you speak it as though you had met him.'\n\n'I have not met him,' replied Fortune at once, 'nor do I ever wish to. But yes, I do know something of charm. And if every Natural here knew what I know, then we would be some way to making a real difference in the world.'\n\nThis last remark brought a chorus of approval that quite overwhelmed Fortune. Without realising it, he had spoken half the night away, conducting his own impromptu rally in the cold night air above the Fortress. Tallow and Volley, he noticed, had gradually taken up position among the Flighters, while he himself had now hovered high and alone, looking down on his audience.\n\nWhat is happening? he wondered. Surely I'm not here to lead these dragons?\n\n'What must we do, Fortune?' Werth asked. 'Tell us and we will listen. The words you speak are good words. All we need now are actions to go with them.'\n\nFortune considered this for some time. It seemed to him that the speech he had delivered had not come entirely from his own mouth. He felt devoid of the inspiration that had kept his words flowing. The initial thrill of holding so many dragons in his spell was losing its grip upon him, and he felt suddenly very young, and very small.\n\nWhat can I possibly do for these dragons, against such overwhelming odds?\n\nTo Fortune's relief, Tallow spotted his mounting distress and slipped smoothly through the air to his side, where he spun elegantly around to face the Flight.\n\n'If I may make a suggestion?' he boomed.\n\n'Of... of course,' replied Fortune gratefully.\n\n'It's a lot to take in,' said Tallow slowly and carefully. 'Tonight is too soon for important decisions to be taken.'\n\nThank you, Tallow!\n\n'Yes,' agreed Fortune, taking up his friend's lead. 'I suggest we all use tomorrow as day of observation and, where possible, further recruitment to the Flight. Think about what I've said, and about all the questions you still want to ask. Let's meet here again tomorrow night; then we can decide what is to be done.' Here he paused and frowned. 'But tomorrow night we must decide. Time is running too fast to delay any further.'\n\nThe Flight broke up then, each dragon flying off to his or her own place of rest. As she left, Werth said to Tallow, 'Look after him well, this youngster. There's more to him than meets the eye.'\n\n'I will,' Tallow rumbled in reply. 'Be sure of it.'\n\nFortune watched the dragons disperse until only he, Tallow and Volley remained. Far in the east, dawn was promising a new day and he yawned wide. He felt drained, but worse than that he felt dissatisfied. Although excited by the events of the night, and by the prospect of new allies and new challenges, at the same time he felt curiously empty.\n\nThere are too many holes in my heart, he thought sadly. Once it was only my father that I missed; now there are so many dragons. When will I ever be healed?\n\nAs though hearing his thoughts, Tallow nudged him and murmured, 'This night is a great one in your life, Fortune, though you may not think so now. Ride on the coming storm, do not fight it, and perhaps it will soon bring you to the place you really want to be.'\n\nAs they flew back to the shelter of the Fortress, Fortune noted the long shadow cast by the Deadfall tower in the low rays of the rising sun. It lay across the distant snowfields like a felled giant, or perhaps a magical claw pointing... where?\n\nThe place I really want to be. But where is that?\n\nThey flew beneath the tower's shadow and the day began.\n\nIn the eternal night of the mountain deeps, the basilisk stirred in its sleep, a sleep that ebbed from it now like a tide of worlds from a shore of stars. Ordinary light and sound infiltrated its greater senses as tiny claws scratched at the mesh of which its own, brutal magic was an integral part. Colour invaded its dreams \u2014 black and red and gold \u2014 and with the colour came shapes.\n\nDragon shapes, small and fragile, scurrying through time in their desperate, mortal race.\n\nThe mountain, as deep as it was high.\n\nA claw, and a boulder, and a broken ring set into white snow.\n\nOn the threshold of awareness, the basilisk began to growl."
            },
            {
                "title": "Deadfall and Light",
                "text": "Fortune knew he was risking death by waiting here, but he found little fear in the threat. Here, of all places, he was beginning to feel right.\n\nI am meshing with the workings of the world, he thought dreamily, then laughed out loud.\n\n'You fool, Fortune,' he chuckled.\n\nAbove him a night dragon soared, swiftly followed by a group of others. Their threads of fire started high in the north and streaked southwards behind the Plated Mountain, which loomed sharp and high in the middle distance.\n\nOnly starlight illuminated the mountain, for there was no moon. This last observation sent a chill through Fortune \u2014 the moon's crescent should have been clearly visible on such a fine, clear night. But it was not.\n\nThe moon had disappeared.\n\nTime is not just short \u2014 it's wrong!\n\nAs he waited for the Flight to come, Fortune studied the land that lay between mountain and the forbidden place where he was perched. Although covered in snow, terrain clearly demonstrated a certain subtle sculpturing. It looked to Fortune like a great, frozen pool of water into which the mountain had long ago been dropped. Waves rippled out from the centre, rings around the mountain, radiating towards the outlying hills.\n\nLooking closer, Fortune saw that the Fortress lay directly on the crest of one of those ripples, a wave of stone upon the frozen pond.\n\nThen there was rock on which he now sat. The Deadfall.\n\nFortune did not know what had drawn him here tonight. He had needed somewhere to be alone, but why here, at the topmost point of the huge boulder that was poised on top of the Deadfall tower. If one of Shatter's dragons found him here, in the place Shatter himself considered most holy, he would be killed instantly.\n\nAnd yet he was not afraid.\n\nThe giant rock squatted beneath him, perched impossibly on the slender spire of pale stone erupting from the snow in front of the Fortress mouth. Reason said that the slightest breath of wind would send it tumbling to the ground, and yet the layers of dirt and vegetation packed around the boulder's based proved that it had rested there for many, many years.\n\nTonight, Fortune rested too, while above him the night dragons played.\n\nWerth had come to him early that day, muttering that she could not stay long, and that they should not be seen together.\n\n'I came to tell you something,' she announced in hushed tones. 'Something I didn't want to say last night, not with the others around.'\n\nExhausted by the strange pressures of the previous day and the effort of speaking so long to the Flight, Fortune had slept deeply, and now he felt considerably more refreshed. The new day was cold and clean, and as yet the Fortress had not woken; the air beneath the overhanging roof was quiet. Looking up at that roof, Fortune found wonder in the encrusted icicles that had formed there, the frozen remains of the breath of three thousand dragons.\n\n'What is it, Werth?' he yawned, moving away from the corner where Tallow and Volley still slept peacefully.\n\nWerth fretted, tapping her wingtips together. Fortune noted that her eyes were kind and motherly. At length she sighed.\n\n'Well, no doubt I could be doing you wrong by telling you this, and then again maybe it's something you already know.'\n\n'Just tell me,' Fortune smiled.\n\n'All right. There's other dragons of South Point here apart from Shatter.'\n\nIf Fortune had not felt alert before then he certainly did so now. His eyes widened and his breathing accelerated. The cold air bit at his throat and chest but he paid it no heed.\n\n'Go on,' he said.\n\n'There's Shatter, of course, but you said last night that you knew him only by reputation, and that I believe. There are a few others \u2014 one of them an adviser to Shatter, though a sorrier specimen of a dragon you could scarcely wish to find anywhere. He's badly burned, you see, set on fire by a charmed dragon, they say.'\n\n'Barker!' blurted Fortune, unable to stop himself.\n\n'Ah, then you do know him.'\n\n'He is not a bad dragon,' said Fortune sadly, 'but I think Shatter has seduced him into thinking his way is right. Yes, I know him \u2014 I was there when he was burned. His son was my friend.'\n\nWerth took a deep breath.\n\n'There is far more to you than even I had guessed, Fortune. There when he was burned, eh? Well, my next piece of news will mean as much to you if not more. This Barker is tended by a younger dragon \u2014 one about your age, in fact, or maybe a little older. It is said that he is his son.'\n\n'Wood?' asked Fortune faintly.\n\n'Yes, that's his name.' Werth appraised him. 'What will you do? Both these dragons stay close to Shatter, and I believe that both would betray the Flight as soon as take a breath. You understand I must say this to you, Fortune. I must do what is right, but I must also protect the dragons for whom I care.'\n\nFortune pulled himself out of the confused thoughts that were gradually claiming him.\n\n'Of course I understand, Werth. I would do nothing to compromise the Flight, believe me. Thank you for telling me this, but as for what I shall do about I... oh, I just don't know.'\n\nAs she turned to go, Werth placed a motherly wing upon Fortune's own. 'We will see you tonight, as we agreed?'\n\n'Yes, Werth, I'll be there. But tell me, did you see any others from South Point? An older dragon, perhaps. A female?'\n\nWerth shook her head. 'This Wood and Barker had two companions, I believe. Both male, just common rogues. The army has swallowed them up, and good riddance, I should say.'\n\nAs Werth made her way off into the waking Fortress, Fortune bowed his head. Wood was here, and his mother was not.\n\nWerth said that Wood stayed close to Shatter. That should make him easy enough to find.\n\nOnly one question remained.\n\nDo I want to?\n\nFortune pondered this question as he roamed with Tallow and Volley among the excited dragons of Shatter's army. All around them dragons were flying, clashing in mock-conflict, deep in discussion, scratching maps on the dusty floor or arguing tactics and strategies.\n\nWhat would we say to each other? he thought, turning the problem over and over in his head. We were already growing apart at South Point. Now it will be even worse.\n\nThen there was the Flight. If Wood learned about Fortune's allegiances, he might very well bring Shatter's full wrath to bear upon the rebels. It was this sure knowledge that brought him to his decision: there would be no reunion. It felt like cowardice, yet Fortune knew it was right both for his own safety and for that of his new friends.\n\nIf only Wood and I could have met somewhere else, somewhere far away from the world, some place where only we would matter.\n\nBut, of course, such places did not exist.\n\nAfter reaching his decision, Fortune took his leave of Tallow and Volley. He gave the excuse that he wanted to explore parts of the Fortress he had not yet seen, and that he could cover more ground alone. His friends did not believe this for a moment, but let him go all the same, acknowledging his obvious need to be alone.\n\n'There's more to that young dragon than meets the eye,' said Volley as they watched him depart.\n\n'Still want to fly away, Volley? Still want to see the world? We could go today, if you wanted.'\n\nVolley considered this for a moment.\n\n'Well, Tallow, my old friend,' he said at last, 'it seems to me that there's quite a lot of world right here. Maybe we should stick around, just for a bit longer, what do you say?'\n\n'I think that's just what Weft would have done.'\n\nLate in the afternoon, when he was just beginning to think about flying out to await the other dragons of the Flight, Fortune found himself flying through the rear section of the Fortress, where the roof curved low towards the ground, the rib-like structures that supported it standing proud as the low sunlight caught their contours. Here was Shatter's headquarters, a tight and ordered system of caves and constructed walls in which he held his councils and took his decisions. Guard dragons soared, scanning both ground and air; this was not a place for a dragon without proper business to be caught.\n\nYet here he loitered all the same, flying a few low passes over the headquarters in the hope of... of what? He could not really say, for even had he seen Wood down there he surely would not have stopped to greet him, nor even called down from the air.\n\nAfter three such flights he retreated, turning his back on Shatter and flying swiftly out towards the sunset, not looking back.\n\nAnd now here he sat, as he had sat all evening, on top of Shatter's forbidden Deadfall. Night had fallen, the night dragons flew and soon the Flight would come.\n\nSoon.\n\nBut not just yet.\n\nTrying to set aside the fears and hopes that danced in his heart, Fortune stared across the snow-covered wastes towards the Plated Mountain. He could feel it pulling at him, a terrible engine of force that seemed to suck at the roots of his soul, and yet which also seemed to sing to him. The mountain was more than just a presence on the horizon \u2014 it was here with him.\n\nHigh in the darkness, the night dragons flew faster, splintering so that the sky became ablaze with their light.\n\nAnd the mountain pulled.\n\nBeneath Fortune's claws, the boulder began to tremble.\n\n'Fortune!' The voice floated through the cold air. Tallow coasted up to where he sat clinging to the rock and hovered at his side. 'What are you doing here? For the sky's sake get off this rock. If you're found here ...'\n\n'No,' replied Fortune. 'I think you're the one who needs to get clear. Gather the Flight at a safe distance and... and watch, Tallow. Just watch.'\n\n'What are you...?'\n\nIf Tallow did not complete his words it was no wonder, for a sudden light fell upon Fortune then \u2014 a powerful, glorious, terrifying light that seemed to have as its source so many things: the mountain, the boulder, the very snow on the ground... and Fortune's eyes.\n\n'It's all right, Tallow,' said Fortune, his voice entirely normal despite the fiery glow suddenly surrounding his body. 'I'm still here. I'm not sure what's happening, but I think it's going to be all right.'\n\nShocked and speechless, Tallow back-tracked hastily through the air and called to the rest of the Flighters, who were waiting just above the mouth of the Fortress.\n\n'To me!' he boomed. 'And go no closer!'\n\nThe light narrowed, became focused, and in doing so revealed its true source: the Plated Mountain, now a dark wedge of distant rock bisected by a horizontal slit of light. As the dragons watched, astonished, the light began to pulse, sending shock waves of energy through the ground powerful enough to lift the snow and shake the air. The light narrowed further to become a slender beam. Its target was clear. It was aimed straight at the Deadfall.\n\nFortune opened his wings and leaped into the air.\n\nWith one, final pulse, the light exploded from the mountain and struck the Deadfall boulder at its very centre. Terrifying energies filled Fortune's body, sending the fire coursing out from between his scales. He glowed from within, emitting a strange inner light that blended with that of the stars and the dancing night dragons.\n\nFragments of fire illuminated the boulder beneath him, overpowering the light from the mountain, burrowing into the Deadfall's icy skin like worms into soil. Now the Deadfall too was aglow. The stars dimmed as a light exploded from the dragon-dwarfing boulder, turning the ice instantly into angry jets of steam that arched out into the air before condensing anew to form a fog of tiny crystals suspended all around the frightened dragons of the Flight.\n\nThrough the fog flew Fortune.\n\nVapour spiralled from his wingtips as he skimmed the surface of the Deadfall, then accelerated upwards into a sheer climb with which he left behind the rock, the Flight, the Fortress and \u2014 it seemed to him for a moment \u2014 the whole world. Impulses that were not his own worked his wings as the wintry land receded beneath him. Cold air burned his lungs as he played the sky, and his head grew light in the thinning air. When he was as high as the summit of the Plated Mountain itself, he paused, held on air taut and fragile as a spider's web. Below him the world revolved, starlit and magical.\n\nLights danced inside Fortune's eyes as he laboured in the tenuous air. The cold seized his whole body like winter. Frost crackled across his scales with every beat of his ice-heavy wings.\n\nHis mind expanded.\n\nFar below him, the Deadfall rock glowed with a light that was neither real nor unreal, natural or charmed. Nevertheless, it glowed. Although Fortune did not know it, it was the glow of the Maze.\n\nFar in front of him, on the slope of the Plated Mountain where Covamere was built, a second glow blossomed, sending red veins bleeding into the surrounding snow. A bitter wind howled upwards from the Deadfall, passed through Fortune and then, as if redirected by his body, sped out towards the mountain. This wind reached far-off Covamere and returned, doubled in strength, to strike Fortune afresh.\n\nFortune swivelled on the two opposing winds.\n\nEqually distant but suddenly there in Fortune's heightened awareness was a third point of light. This one sprang into existence near the mountain's peak, a shaft of yellow light that launched itself up into the night sky like a glorious blade of golden grass, and which sent its own piercing wind back across the snow and into the maelstrom which was building around the fragile, flying dragon.\n\nFortune wrestled the gale into submission and rode it with both the skills Tallow had taught him, and with a greater skill, the source of which he did not dare to imagine.\n\nA fourth light birthed.\n\nHe saw it reflected in a cascade of ice crystals breaking from one of his horns: a bright blue flame burning not on the mountain, but deep inside it. As he turned to face it, it sent its own storm into his path, an angry wind hot with the stench of death. This too Fortune marshaled into submission, until he felt all the winds bucking beneath him, slaves to his new mastery of the sky.\n\nThey're alive, he thought, looking to the various lights in turn.\n\n'They're all still alive!' he cried exultantly.\n\nThe air bunched beneath his wings. As he hovered there, Fortune felt he might beat it in any direction he chose. By steering the winds he might drag the world on to any course he desired. He breathed in the storm and felt his heart pound its energy through his body. As he had when Tallow had taught him the glory of flight he felt alive, except this time he felt the presence of the world too, and it was alive with him.\n\n'They're alive!' he cried again.\n\nThe winds gathered beneath him in one final, momentous gust. Fortune expanded his throbbing wings until it seemed his chest would be ripped open. His scales warped and slid over each other as his back bunched itself and then, with one immense thrust, he directed all the winds, all his hope, all the light and all the air he had gathered from across the land and sea... down!\n\nThe ball of energy struck the Deadfall. The dragons of the Flight, reduced to the size of dust motes by the scale of the colossal explosion, fled the scene to cower under the protective overhang of the Fortress. From his high vantage, Fortune saw a pattern emerge from the snow.\n\nThe Deadfall shuddered and the land moved. Crusts of ice splintered, mixing with shattering rock as the Deadfall tower bent in massive judders at two points along its length. Abruptly the winds stopped and the magical lights winked out of existence. Only the still, faint starlight remained; the night dragons were nowhere to be seen.\n\nFortune gasped, hovering in air now calm and clear after the storm, watching pieces of the land fold themselves into new and unexpected shapes.\n\nThe huge spire of rock on which the Deadfall sat twisted violently about its joints. Four new towers burst from beneath the snow to take their places at its side. They drew together, closing up to support the shuddering boulder. Together, the cluster of five spires was easily twice the size of Shatter's entire fortress.\n\nThe base of the cluster shook, sloughing off its coat of snow and ice. Then it too bent like the Deadfall tower and with a subtle, animal motion tipped the mighty boulder itself off its perch to fall tumbling into the narrow valley below.\n\nThe distant mountain shook.\n\nSnowdrifts exploded as the Deadfall rumbled through them, white clouds billowing into the freezing air only to fall anew, coating the watching land far and wide. On and on the boulder rolled, cutting a vast swathe through the whiteness until it reached the next crest where the slope turned against it. After a brief climb it slowed, stopped, then tipped over upon itself, rolling back along the path it had just cut until it finally came to rest at the foot of the valley in a shimmering cloud of snow and pulverised rock that only gradually began to settle around it.\n\nLike thunder, the noise of its passage reverberated for what seemed like eternity; even when the echoes had died, Fortune heard them yet in the sky around him.\n\nShaking his head, numbed and awestruck, Fortune flew higher, staring down at the changed shape of the land.\n\nAround the Plated Mountain lay a troll. Its form was quite distinct, but it was so huge that only from this extreme elevation was it possible to make it out. Fortune saw that the low hills surrounding the mountain were not hills at all but the troll's wasted body.\n\nLike the earth giant, he thought, it is both land and troll.\n\nThe troll's head was either lost or buried from sight, but the curve of its spine was clearly visible in the hills. The nearby ridges and valleys betrayed its flattened ribs, while the moving cluster of spires from which the Deadfall had tumbled was clearly an outstretched hand. Fortune could not guess at what the true, living shape of the troll had once been, but what he could see made him feel small and utterly insignificant in the face of such vast and ancient power.\n\nThe troll was dying, or dead already, but with its last effort it had tipped the boulder it had held aloft for so many years, causing it to fall and join its fellows on the ground.\n\nFor this was the other pattern Fortune now saw: a ring of regularly spaced boulders that, with the addition of the Deadfall, now encircled the mountain entirely.\n\nLike the earth giant he and Cumber had watched that night so long ago, this creature of legend had laboured to create a circle of stones, tiring at the end of its momentous task so that the ring had remained unmade until tonight.\n\nUntil Fortune had intervened \u2014 or until something had intervened through him.\n\nHis wings faltered. His head felt light. The events of the night were already growing hazy in his memory. The troll's dead fingers stood motionless below him, evidence as undeniable as the great scar in the snow leading to the fallen boulder, but the idea seemed suddenly impossible \u2014 a natural dragon pushing a dying troll to complete some unfathomable task? Nonsense!\n\nAnd yet...\n\nThe clouds swarmed over the stars and Fortune made ready to drop once more down to earth. Before beginning his descent he paused, cupping the air, as the fading starlight glinted off the scales of another dragon. The newcomer, labouring hard in the high, thin air, was close enough for Fortune to hear his breathing as a series of hoarse, frightened grunts. His shape was natural, his body stocky.\n\n'Wood?' murmured Fortune. Then he recognised him. 'Brace!'\n\nAs he called out, Brace looked up, agony contorting his face. Then the young Natural seemed just to give up: he folded his wings and tumbled towards the ground, out of control.\n\nFortune tucked his own wings close and whipped himself into a crashing dive that carried him directly below Brace's plummeting form. They collided, the impact winding them both but jolting Brace back to sensibility so that he opened his wings again. Together they glided down to a clumsy landing in the snowfield, within the five towers of rock that had once been the fingers of a troll.\n\n'I'm sorry,' Brace wept. 'I'm so sorry. Help me, Fortune. Forgive me.'\n\nFortune wrapped his wings tight around the youngster's frozen, trembling form. 'It's all right, Brace,' he said. 'It's all right. I'm sorry too. I should never have said the things I said. I'm sorry.'\n\nThe stone towers stood guard around them as they warmed each other in the cold, the miracle of their second, sudden reunion banishing the winter from their hearts.\n\n'Anything you want, Fortune, I'll do for you,' Brace said. 'I want to join the Flight. I want to join you. I'll never let you down again.'\n\nFortune heard the conviction in his words and, for an instant, saw the light of Gossamer's love in her brother's eyes. Tears rolled down his cheeks and crystallised in the cold.\n\n'Everything's all right, Brace,' he said. 'They're all right, all of them. Now, why don't you tell me what's happened?'"
            },
            {
                "title": "After the Fall",
                "text": "Shatter woke suddenly from a dream in which a thousand burning rocks fell from the sky, filling the air with light.\n\nOpening his eyes, he saw that the light was real \u2014 a cold, brilliant glare that brought temporary day to his Fortress. It flickered and flashed, a weird lightning that constantly renewed itself with fresh energy. A terrible rumbling shook the bones in Shatter's tensed body.\n\nHe could taste magic.\n\nForcing his way roughly between the two guards standing astonished at the entrance to his quarters, Shatter reached the platform beyond in time to witness the awesome event taking place in the valley outside. The Deadfall boulder, displaced by some force he could not conceive, was falling. It thundered through the snow, surrounded by an unnatural blue aura, shaking the ground and crazing the air with its momentous passage. He watched as it slowed and stopped. Cold rage filled his empty heart.\n\nCharm has come!\n\nMagic had reached into his Fortress and plucked his Deadfall from its perch. The fallen boulder was clear evidence that some dragon had betrayed him. That dragon would know Shatter's wrath before the night was ended.\n\nThe two guards backed nervously away as Shatter began to mutter to himself. Unwise dragons called him mad but the guards, being wise, retreated and kept their silence, awaiting their master's command.\n\n'Betrayed,' growled Shatter hoarsely. 'No dragon to be trusted. Charm reaches even here. Seduced. Betrayed! But I won't fall. I'm no rock. This is my war, my land. I won't fall!'\n\nThe guards flinched as he turned on them.\n\n'Fetch my lieutenants,' he rumbled, his red eyes blank unfocused. 'The war is upon us. This is the signal!'\n\nFor Shatter the world around him had always been a mere extension of the world inside his own mind. Outside, as inside, the only true being was he, the only true dragon himself. Only Shatter existed.\n\nNow that his power had grown. he had managed to shape this admittedly fictional outside world into an image of his own making. He had found this Fortress, recruited this army; this world he had shaped to be truly his own, unreal though it certainly was. Part of that shaping had involved boring an escape tunnel that led from his private chambers to the low foothills behind the Fortress. After the tunnel was completed, he had personally slain the four dragons who had excavated it, so that he alone now knew of its existence.\n\nPowerful as he was, Shatter saw no reason to take risks.\n\nHe remembered little of the past now. The journey here from South Point was a vagueness of wing and breath, and his coming to power over these dragons had been so inevitable that it was unworthy of memory. Shatter had moved into a dark world of the now and the near-future.\n\nA world dominated by his Deadfall.\n\nFor this was Shatter's warped and hopeless strategy: that his army would draw the Charmed out of the mountain and back to the Fortress, where he, Shatter, would be waiting, ready to roll the Deadfall on to their unsuspecting heads. The Deadfall \u2014 the world-breaking boulder he had always imagined. A rock built to fall, to crush his enemies out of the reality into which they had, unwelcome, started to insinuate themselves. Charmed, Natural, all would be crushed in the end, but then that was right, for from the beginning it was only Shatter himself who had ever really existed.\n\nBut now his plan lay in ruins. The Deadfall itself had betrayed him. The primary defence of his Fortress, now stinking of charm, had revealed itself as the traitor it was, shaking his world both outside and in, taunting him with its unruly motion, its flagrant denial of his command. The very world he had created had ceased to obey him and so now it had become an irritation, a distraction. An itch.\n\nAnd the time had come for Shatter to scratch.\n\nCharm has overturned the Deadfall.\n\nWell, then, the Charmed would die.\n\nFor the Charmed to have known of the Deadfall, a Natural must have betrayed its existence.\n\nTherefore, the Naturals would die also.\n\nThe land itself has changed under the collapse of the Deadfall.\n\nHe would destroy the land. And when all this was done, only Shatter, the one, true dragon, would remain.\n\nAfter a lifetime hovering on the brink of insanity, Shatter flew finally into the abyss.\n\nUnaware that they were being observed, Fortune coaxed Brace's story from him.\n\n'I thought I was being clever,' the youngster began, trembling. 'My first plan was to infiltrate the Flight and betray them to Shatter. It was just after we'd argued, you and me, and I wanted to prove myself.'\n\n'Oh, Brace,' sighed Fortune, full of regret. Then he considered what Brace had said. 'That was your first plan? Did something happen to change your mind?'\n\n'Yes. Before I got very far, I stumbled over these three dragons whispering just outside the Fortress mouth. I knew they were Flighters \u2014 I'd seen them around. They were huddled together, talking about how they were going to fly off to Covamere and betray Shatter to the Charmed. I was about to report them, but then I thought maybe I could tag along. I suppose I had some idea about talking them out of it, or even fighting them down. I suppose I thought it was my chance to be a hero.'\n\nBrace was breathing in heavy, juddering breaths. Vapour solidified in tiny pellets before his frightened face.\n\n'Their leader was a dragon called Sleet. He's a bad dragon, Fortune. Was, I should say. At first, I thought he was just a typical Flight dragon, you know, just trying to stir up trouble for Shatter, but soon I realised he was out to stir up anything. Still, I managed to convince them I could help, and they let me join them.'\n\n'Tell me what happened,' said Fortune.\n\n'We ran into trouble almost straight away \u2014 the Charmed are everywhere on the mountain now. Two of them pounced on us when we were barely halfway to Covamere. Only Sleet and I got away.' Brace was shaking from head to tail. 'I don't know how we escaped. We landed near a camp, the one the Charmed had come from. There were still some trees there that had survived the fire. They gave us cover.'\n\nHere he paused, clearly unwilling to go on, great shudders raking his body.\n\n'A camp?' prompted Fortune, hardening his heart with difficulty in the face of Brace's obvious distress.\n\n'This isn't going to be easy for you to hear, Fortune.'\n\nFortune's blood turned to ice water.\n\n'It was a prison camp. It was a clearing surrounded by trees, like I said. They had cages of fire, like globes hanging in the air. They were covered in flickering blue flames and there were dragons trapped inside every one. Charmed dragons, Fortune their own kind. Some had been mutilated. Sleet couldn't look but I did. Some had no legs. Some just had great scars on their bodies, or their eyes put out. And then I... I recognised something, lying in a corner, just forgotten in a corner.'\n\nAnother shuddering breath. Ice crystals fragmenting the air.\n\n'What did you see, Brace? Tell me!'\n\n'Wings,' blurted Brace. 'A pair of dragon's wings.'\n\nFortune shivered. For a dragon to lose his wings was like nothing he could conceive. A wingless dragon was a cripple, an outcast, worse than dead. A dragon would sooner lose his eyes, his tail. Anything but his wings.\n\n'A charmed dragon might grow them back,' he ventured cautiously.\n\n'Perhaps,' replied Brace without conviction.\n\n'But what was it you recognised?' urged Fortune.\n\n'The wings were red and blue and gold and every colour you could imagine. Like a rainbow. They were Scoff's wings, Fortune. They were Scoff's wings!'\n\nBrace spilled this out, his chest heaving, his face a mask of horror as he saw again the terrible scene, but Fortune felt only numb. The strange exhilaration he had just experienced in the storm of charm surrounding the Deadfall now fled like a sudden ebb tide.\n\nScoff! Dear, brave Scoff, who had once saved them all by slaying Brutace, and who had further risked his life to help bring them to Covamere. Crippled by his own kind.\n\n'Was he...?'\n\n'He was alive,' said Brace, hitching in his breath in great gulps. 'In a cage, like the others. I couldn't even get close. There were hundreds of cages, Fortune. Hundreds. And it was then that I finally understood.'\n\n'Understood what?'\n\n'That they're just the same as us.'\n\n'What did you do?' said Fortune, at last understanding Brace's remarkable transformation from sullen adolescent to rational adult.\n\n'I started crying. What else could I do? I couldn't help myself. It came over me so suddenly I couldn't take it in. I realised how unbearable I'd been, how cruel. How evil.'\n\n'No, Brace,' replied Fortune, 'not evil.'\n\n'Well, I was ashamed and I cried. I'm sorry, Fortune \u2014 I was so wrong, and now Gossamer's gone and I didn't take care of her and, and ...'\n\nFortune let Brace weep long and hard, holding him and rocking him in the snow, a nugget of warmth held close in the troll's dead embrace.\n\nSomewhere, at the periphery of the circle of towers, their hidden observer watched, and waited.\n\n'You must tell me the rest, Brace,' said Fortune at length. 'Tell me what happened to Sleet, and how you got back here.'\n\n'Well,' Brace began, sniffling and brushing at the icy tears crusted on his face, 'I don't know how long I crouched there feeling sorry for myself, but when I looked back into the camp I saw Sleet surrounded by four Charmed. They looked, you know, like Brutace \u2014 big, savage.'\n\nFortune nodded. He remembered Brutace only too well.\n\n'Sleet's voice only just carried up to where I was, but I heard him telling them about Shatter and the Fortress. Then, when he'd finished, he just stood there as if he expected them to thank him.'\n\n'What did they do?'\n\n'They cut him in half.'\n\nFortune found it hard to mourn for Sleet, but he shuddered nonetheless.\n\n'I just fled,' Brace concluded. 'All the way back I was convinced I was being followed. Every breath I waited for the fire to knock me out of the sky, but I made it. I made it.'\n\nHe was visibly more relaxed now, much of the horror of what he had seen purged in the telling of his story. Fortune saw a new confidence in Brace's eyes as he sensed for the first time a certainty of his role in the greater story in which they were all of them inextricably caught up.\n\nFortune pondered momentarily on a memory, chewing it like a forgotten fragment of food: the inner light that had felled the Deadfall.\n\nThat was the greater story.\n\nThe memory of light flared across his inner eye and he heard again the groans of the dying troll, the thunder of the rolling Deadfall. He saw again the dragons of the Flight scatter like seeds on the wind.\n\nThe Flight! Tallow!\n\nHe looked anxiously around, a sudden, cold gale freezing the easy flow of memory, seeking out his friends, and found himself looking straight into the eyes of their silent observer.\n\nThe spy uncoiled his stout, muscular frame from behind the troll's outermost finger and stalked into the lee of its palm, every step a quiet threat.\n\n'Wood?' breathed Fortune. Though he knew the shell of his friend, he did not recognise the spirit that drove it.\n\n'Give me the traitor,' said Wood.\n\nSeeing the emptiness in Wood's eyes, Fortune tensed his muscles for the attack he knew must surely come. At the same time, he felt his heart break.\n\n'I do not want to fight you, Wood,' he said. 'But, I beg you, do not cross me. Not here, not now.'\n\n'It's not you I want,' Wood replied, his approach slow and relentless. 'Just give me the traitor.'\n\nBrace stood, shaking, and was about to speak when Fortune silenced him.\n\n'Go behind that rock.' When Brace protested, Fortune added, 'You are a dragon of the Flight now, Brace, and as such you will obey me. Now go!'\n\nThe unexpected authority in Fortune's voice caused Wood to falter. Brace retreated with some reluctance, watching with wide eyes and pounding heart as Fortune and Wood faced each other in the cradle of the troll's hand.\n\n'If you have a quarrel with Brace,' continued Fortune in the same, commanding tone, 'then you argue with me.' Then he relented. 'Wood, it's me. How much fury can you have for me?'\n\nA cruel smile appeared on Wood's face.\n\n'Can this be the dear, sweet Fortune I remember of old? I can't believe ...'\n\nWood faltered. The dragon in front of him was not the dragon her remembered from South Point at all. Everything about this dragon was Fortune, but somehow more. Once-brown scales now glowed with a deep, rich, coppery lustre; young muscles were now firm beneath belly-skin and flank; fine, delicate features had become more than handsome. Had become beautiful.\n\nAn inner light filled Fortune's eyes with unbounded radiance.\n\nWood recalled an old memory of Fortune: the young dragon caught in a beam of late sunlight in South Point's old sector, his face aglow, the future captured in his smile.\n\n'You shouldn't have flown over Shatter's quarters like that,' he grunted. 'I saw you clear enough, and it was quite a shock, I can tell you. I thought you were dead. Drowned.'\n\n'So it was you I saw in Ordinal's cave!' exclaimed Fortune, taking a step towards his old friend.\n\n'Just give me the traitor.' Wood's anger was all but gone now. 'He must be brought before Shatter, so he can explain how he has betrayed us all.'\n\n'Brace stays with me.'\n\n'He comes with me.' Wood grimaced as old conflicts swelled in his heart. He did with them as he always had done \u2014 he pressed them down to where they would not trouble him.\n\nHe set his wings wide in the snow, a fighting stance.\n\nBrace watched agog as the two dragons circled each other, low, dark shapes on a field of starlit snow, a cluster of stone towers erupting from the ground in an arc around them, blue shadows slicing across the distant mountain behind. The wind sloughed snow from the surrounding drifts and tossed a layer of white powder across the arena.\n\nWood sprang.\n\nAnticipating the move, emitting an agonised cry as he accepted that he must fight his oldest friend, Fortune slipped neatly to his left, kicking snow into Wood's face. Wood struck a bank of packed ice and floundered, struggling to regain his balance.\n\nIt was with a murderous expression then that Wood turned to face Fortune.\n\n'You're behind all of this,' he growled. 'If you hadn't led us into those caverns none of this would have happened!'\n\nFortune shook his head, ferociously searching his mind for the words that might yet turn Wood back to his side, back to his heart. But Wood sprang again, and this time Fortune failed to react so quickly. Wood powered straight into his outstretched wing, crushing it painfully against the base of one of the troll's fingers. Small bones snapped. They grappled together, falling together into the snow.\n\n'You and your Charmed friends!' growled Wood. 'Why don't you ever learn?'\n\nWood battled as though possessed, and it soon dawned on Fortune that he was fighting for his life. His neck choked tight by Wood's coiled tail, he thrashed in the snow, each breath burning like fire. As his world grew misty, he made a desperate lunge and clamped his mouth hard across the back of Wood's neck. Tough scales resisted his bite but his adversary grunted in pain. Claws scrabbling, Fortune raked at Wood's belly with his legs and gradually prised himself free of his tail.\n\nWings spread, Fortune leaped straight up into the air, striking out with his legs as he did so and drawing a deep cut across the underside of Wood's jaw, where the scales were soft. Hovering in the cold wind, Fortune watched as his opponent clambered free of the snow and spread his own wings wide, ready for the leap he never made.\n\nWood's upturned face registered first shock, then anger and finally fear.\n\nThe air shivered and suddenly Tallow was hovering at Fortune's right wing. Volley swooped in from the left, and then all the dragons of the Flight were there, fifty or more of them, crowding the tiny slice of sky held between the troll's outstretched fingers.\n\nAt the sight of them all, Wood's courage finally failed him. He backed away through the snow, his pace increasing as his fear and sullen anger grew.\n\nThen Fortune offered him what he thought was a final chance, but to Wood was the final insult.\n\n'Join us, Wood,' he said. 'Please. We'll accept you, if you'll accept us.'\n\nBut Wood could only curse an incoherent reply as the shadows claimed him. He vanished from the arena, his thoughts a storm of shame. Within that storm, the winds blew first one way then the other as Wood was buffeted by loyalties both new and old. One idea alone cut through, however, deciding his next course of action.\n\nShatter will know of this. He will know of it all.\n\n'Did he hear us talking, do you think?' Brace called, his voice thin and broken in the growing wind. Snow flurries moved like ghosts, paling his body against the white ground.\n\n'Every word,' replied Fortune. He turned to address the Flight. 'Shatter is betrayed. But worse, Wood will tell Shatter of the betrayal and of the Flight's part in it, through the actions of Sleet. The time is here at last, my friends. This is truly the eve of the battle. Our intention was to use tonight to plan, but there is no time now. Perhaps it is better that way. Go now and speak the truth of the Flight to every dragon you can find. Do as your hearts tell you. Recruit. Convince. Our purpose is not to fight, but only to speak the truth. If enough dragons choose to listen, we may yet turn the tide.'\n\nFortune's brisk speech made, the dragons of the Flight flew off both roused and chilled. They were the seed of doubt Fortune hoped to plant in Shatter's ranks. The seed of truth.\n\nInto the darkness Fortune cast them, and he could only pray that the harvest would be good.\n\nOnly Tallow and Volley stayed. Initially wary of Brace, they accepted him once Fortune had related his story.\n\n'If you trust him then so do we,' was Tallow's grave response. Yet again Fortune was shaken by the big dragon's capacity for unconditional loyalty.\n\nThis one is a good dragon, he thought. Let him live through this.\n\n'We'll wait a while so that Brace can rest,' he said. 'Then we must get out of here before Shatter comes.'\n\n'We could go after Wood,' suggested Tallow. 'Catch him before he gets to Shatter.'\n\n'No.' Fortune regarded the trail of destruction left by the Deadfall. 'It won't make any difference. Shatter's mind works differently to ours \u2014 believe me, he knows already that he is betrayed. Time is short, in any case.'\n\n'So where are we going?' asked Brace.\n\nFortune gazed keenly into the distance, but did not reply.\n\nAngry and humiliated, Wood rushed for support to the one dragon he despised above all others, yet whose sheer power he could not deny. He hated Shatter, and many times had pleaded with his father to flee with him. Each time Barker, frail and scarred, would say, 'I know Shatter seems cruel sometimes, but he fights for the truth, so that Naturals may live by their own rules, not those of the Charmed. These are his scars I bear, son, not my own. I'll never leave him.'\n\nYet Wood reminded himself, as he raced through the fortress towards Shatter's quarters, that he and Shatter were not so different, for did they both not hate the Charmed? It was this thought that hurried him forward in his blind anger, the notion that he might yet bring down the might of Shatter on the Flight, on Brace and Fortune, on all those dragons who believed in the Charmed way. Could they not see how wrong they were? Were they not ashamed?\n\nOr could it be that I'm the one who is wrong?\n\nAs he drew near to Shatters quarters, an aggressive young sentry barred Wood's way with outstretched claws.\n\n'Can't go up there,' the dragon intoned. 'Big meeting. No interruptions.'\n\nWood tried to force his way past, but the sharpness of the other dragon's claws and the tension in his powerful limbs warned him off. He took a deep breath and said, 'But I must go up there! I have important news for Shatter!'\n\n'No interruptions,' the sentry repeated bluntly. 'No exceptions.'\n\nFrustrated, Wood stamped the snow and stretched his neck in an attempt to see up the sloping channel that led to the platform above. Faint voices floated down the ramp and he strained to catch the words.\n\n'With respect,' one voice was saying, 'I see no evidence that our position here has been compromised.'\n\n'Believe it!' came a rumble that was unmistakably Shatter's. 'I am betrayed.'\n\n'I must go up there,' Wood repeated. 'Shatter must hear me.'\n\n'No exceptions,' growled the guard, his muscles stiffening, his claws slipping from their sheaths.\n\nShatter grew more and more impatient as the argument on the platform went on. At last he bellowed, 'We attack! I decree it, and so will it be!'\n\n'You are wrong, Shatter.'\n\nWood recognised this new voice at once. It was Barker's. He held himself utterly still, his every muscle straining towards the sound of his father's voice as if the tension might bring him closer.\n\n'If we attack, we will all die,' continued Barker calmly. 'We are well defended here \u2014 that's why we are here. You have given us all of this, Shatter. Why would you take it away?'\n\nBreaths were held. All dragons knew Barker \u2014 crippled, burned Barker \u2014 to be Shatter's most loyal follower. Was he truly disagreeing with his master?\n\n'We attack!' Shatter repeated, as if he had not heard Barker's words.\n\n'Forgive me, but I cannot agree!' Wood's father retorted. 'Shatter, I have followed you across the world because I believe in your crusade. We must wipe out the vile Charmed for what they have done to our kind. I myself lost my own dear Eleken to a storm brought on by their treacherous magic ...'\n\nA loud, scraping noise masked Barker's words momentarily, but Wood was only partly aware of it.\n\nHe believes the Charmed killed my mother. But that's not true. It was a storm, just a storm.\n\nAn image of Fortune flew into his head and he banished it. The Charmed were evil.\n\nAll the same, his father was wrong.\n\n'... to attack now would be folly.' Barker was gabbling now, his words tumbling over one another. 'You would see us all die, Shatter, Charmed and Natural alike. This battle will be death to all dragons, to all ...'\n\nAgain his voice was cut off, but this time Wood heard a more unsettling sound \u2014 a sharp, slicing hiss, a stifled groan, a heavy thump.\n\nSilence.\n\nThe sentry stared uneasily up the ramp.\n\nSeizing the opportunity, Wood sprang past the distracted guard and raced up the walled channel, his claws showering splinters of frost into the air. A terrible anticipation crawled under his scales. White ice flashed past his eyes as he surged up on to the platform. As the ground levelled out it turned pink. Then red.\n\nAn arc of twenty dragons, fear shadowing their features.\n\nHis father's body, prone in a lake of freezing blood.\n\nShatter, his claws buried deep in the dead dragon's neck, his eyes red and soulless.\n\nRed death. For Wood, the end of all hope.\n\n'Father!' he howled, hurling himself at Shatter with the reckless fury of a dragon to whom life no longer matters.\n\nA nearby dragon stepped forward to prevent the attack but Wood lashed out viciously with his sharp tail, catching the other high on the head and shattering bone. The dragon fell unconscious, one eye filling with blood. The others held back, more cautious.\n\nHis blood still hot from the fight with Fortune, Wood turned to face his father's killer.\n\nShatter struck out with bloodied claws and knocked Wood to the ground. Winded, the young dragon found himself lying face to face with his father's lifeless body.\n\nDeath had already filmed Barker's sightless eyes; blood hung in his gaping mouth. Wood felt nothing. He jumped up and whirled to face Shatter.\n\nA series of stunning blows forced him back to the edge of the platform. The other dragons, reluctant to intervene, shuffled back to give the combatants room. Shatter paused, eyeing his opponent.\n\n'Traitor!' he roared.\n\n'No.' Wood's jaw ached. Several of his teeth felt loose. His mind had dulled. Did he care about dying or not? He was not sure. 'Not me \u2014 the Flight. You were right, you are betrayed, but not me, not ...'\n\n'You!' Shatter howled, beating the air with his wings. 'You are my betrayer! Like your father. Traitors both of you!'\n\n'No!' Wood looked around the circle of dragons but found no support. His senses began to sharpen again as they dropped their gaze to the ice, relief daring to show on their faces as they saw that Shatter had selected the dragon he would blame.\n\nWood looked desperately back at Shatter himself, into those frozen, red eyes... and he saw that Shatter had gone. His body remained, but some greater part of him had retreated forever into whatever interior darkness served as his reality.\n\nAnd yet, even though Wood understood that Shatter was now more dangerous than ever, a strange calmness filled his veins.\n\n'My father was right,' he warned, addressing the dragons in the semicircle around him. He backed away until his claws clutched at the very edge of the platform. 'Shatter will kill you all. He's gone beyond his promises now. He won't rest until you're all dead.'\n\nShatter began to laugh.\n\nWood poised himself on the lip of the platform, his wings raised.\n\n'You killed my father, Shatter. For that you will pay. As for you others \u2014 you may stand a chance. If you can find it.'\n\nShatter's commanders watched, puzzled by these parting words, as Wood threw himself into the air. He flew high and fast, hugging the underside of the great rock canopy so as to lose himself in the matrix of crevices there. Shatter's laughter followed him, filling the passages and corridors, the caves and tunnels, the paths and corners, filling every pore of the Fortress, casting its shadow of insanity and fear across the hearts of three thousand natural dragons for whom, up until now, Shatter had been the single, warm light in a world turned dark and cold.\n\nIn between the waves of laughter, behind the thrall of Shatter, moved the dragons of the Flight, and in their movement they began the impossible task of averting a war."
            },
            {
                "title": "Illumination",
                "text": "No dragon would ever know for certain where the light had come from that finally toppled the Deadfall from its age-long perch.\n\nOne creature did know, however, because it was part of the fabric of the ancient world from which that magical light had come. It stirred now, this creature of old, this basilisk, memories spurting through its wakening veins. Trollbirth, the shaping of the land, the oceans condensing from a living fog. That world ending and another in its place. Cycles. The rise of giants, the rise of mountains and the powdering of both to sand. The coming of dragons.\n\nAlone in the maelstrom of Halcyon's magic, the basilisk sensed the gathering of the forces of time about the mountain, it perceived the way events were beginning to lock together. It knew the futility of the efforts these pitiful dragons were making to direct the course of the turning world, for it had seen every Turning since the beginning. Such was the nightmare of infinity.\n\nAnd yet, there was something about this particular Turning that had fired awake every sense in the basilisk's body. Something that made it dare to hope.\n\nWhy hope? Because this time, the Maze of Covamere was waking too. The basilisk knew this because the Maze had just sent a bolt of hot, blue charm across the snow wastes to the north, aimed directly at a natural dragon stronghold formed from the remains of a dying troll. Under the influence of that charm, a boulder had fallen, and a great ring of stones had been completed.\n\nFor some reason, the Maze had chosen to direct its charm through the wings of a dragon.\n\nThe basilisk's urge to wake fully was overwhelming now. Weak despite its strength, stiff despite its suppleness, it poured charm into the core of its body, flushing away the fatigue of aeons. Careful not to disturb the flow of Halcyon's magic around it, the basilisk stretched its limbs and opened its mind, and in doing so it discovered a remarkable thing.\n\nFor the first time in an age of ages it was curious.\n\nMaze. Charm. The turning of the world.\n\nAnd dragons. What part were these flimsy flying creatures destined to play in this oldest of games?\n\nWraith too had seen the light of the Maze, at the very same instant his tiring warriors had broken through the penultimate barrier of magic which Halcyon had erected against him.\n\nThey had been deep in the rock, far below the level of the Portal and beyond the reach of even the brightest sunlight, let alone the dim starlight by which they now laboured. They were dragons exhausted, dragons disillusioned, dragons beginning to doubt their leader and mourn their fate. Though they knew the end was in sight, they were also terrified. What terrible charm might Halcyon have in store for them, here, so close to the end?\n\nThe third layer had collapsed without drama the previous night, and now it appeared the fourth would be overcome at any moment. So confident was Wraith of this that he had stationed himself at the head of the excavation, just inside the Portal, to oversee the final stages of the operation. Tomorrow night, the mountain will fall and Halcyon with it. The Black Dragon would take on the Maze itself, and then all dragons would know once and for all that he was truly destined to be their leader.\n\nDid Wraith know that many of his dragons prayed that, having entered the Maze, the Black Dragon would not return. It did not matter. Wraith would survive. Wraith would prevail.\n\nWhen the dragons on the front line finally took apart the fourth layer of charm, they were relieved to find no hidden traps awaiting them, nor any terrible destructive magic. However, as the last fragments of the barrier dissolved, a cloud of red charm erupted from the cracked wall of rock that was revealed. As the magic swirled, Wraith's dragons backed away nervously, afraid at what might be about to spring at them from the mist.\n\nBut there was only light \u2014 a brilliant, red light that exploded past them and fled for the surface; those dragons who spoke about it afterwards said it was like being bathed in blood.\n\nThe light reached the Portal and struck Wraith head-on. He opened his wings instinctively, absorbing its power in an instant, although some witnesses swore later that it had taken him utterly by surprise.\n\nSwiftly, jerkily, as though his body were under the control of another, Wraith swivelled his neck to face north. Then he opened his great mouth wide to expose his dreadful fangs and spat the light out towards the horizon, where it flashed through the night and snow to join a distant, white flare that had appeared in the distance.\n\nOn and out boiled the light, seemingly sucked from Wraith by whatever magic it was drawing it north. On its journey it was joined by a second light, a golden glow that came from high on the mountain, and a third, blue flash from somewhere within it. The lights met, expanding until on that distant spot there was another mighty flash... and then all was gone.\n\nAll that day, Gossamer and Velvet had wandered the mountain, searching without success for the last stone circle. As the air became cold and raw around them, breathing became a battle with the elements. Sometimes it seemed that they were not moving higher, but that the mountain was shrinking beneath them. On they laboured, and in all that time they saw no sign of dragon, nor indeed any living creature, much less anything resembling a ring of stones.\n\n'What did your rhyme say?' panted Gossamer as they called a halt. '\" One without end\"? Well, this journey certainly seems endless.'\n\nThey collapsed together against a bank of hard ice. At this great altitude, the snow and ice were a permanent part of the scenery, and they were exhausted. They flew intermittently, but in air this thin that too was exhausting work, so they were reduced to switching between the two. They had travelled a great distance, but still they seemed no nearer to their goal.\n\n'We can't go on today,' said Velvet, huddling close to Gossamer. 'Oh, I wish I was more help to you, Gossamer, I really do.'\n\n'It's not your fault we can't find it. We'll rest here tonight. It's as good a place as any. Maybe tomorrow we'll hit upon the answer.'\n\nNeeding no more encouragement than that, Velvet snuggled closer and within a few short breaths was fast asleep.\n\nLater, when the sun had gone down, Gossamer eased herself away from her young companion and took a few steps out across the ice to look down the mountain slopes. She was worried about Velvet, for despite her buoyant nature she was weaker physically than Gossamer \u2014 and she was also pining for Cumber.\n\nWe must find the final ring of stones tomorrow. But we need help, and who can help us here?\n\nShe gazed down over the snow and rock, wondering where Cumber was amid that great wilderness. She gazed west towards Covamere, hidden somewhere behind the curve of the mountain, waiting.\n\nIs that where you've gone, Cumber? To Covamere, where you always thought the end of your quest would be?\n\nShe looked north and thought of Fortune, just as she had only two nights before, before Cumber had left them.\n\n'Fortune. Where is that haven you talked about?'\n\nLater still, when she had slept for a while near the warmth of Velvet's body, she awoke again to see lines of light cutting through the sky above. Lying back on the ice, she watched the night dragons carve their shapes upon the heavens and again she thought of...\n\n'Fortune!'\n\nShe spoke his name aloud like a call to action, a stab of excitement in the night. Leaping up, she rushed to the spot where she had earlier looked out over the land, straining her eyes to see in the dim starlight. The mountain felt poised beneath her claws, coiled, ready to leap. The air stank of charm.\n\nLight came.\n\nShe received it in rapture, spreading her wings wide in welcome as it broke over her body like a wave, crashing through her senses, tracing its way first into her veins then out through her pores and into the millions of crevices in the icy ground beneath her claws, where it exploded beneath her, filling her with light, with radiance.\n\nWith Fortune.\n\nGolden now, searing and ecstatic, the beam of light flew from her into the north, joining now with other beams \u2014 one red, one blue \u2014 to meet again the white fire that was burning in the far distance.\n\nThe golden light died.\n\nDrained, rejoicing, laughing and crying tears that themselves seemed to glow with internal flames, Gossamer rushed back to where Velvet sat rubbing her eyes, mouth agape at what she had just seen.\n\n'What was that?' she asked, dumbfounded.\n\n'Fortune!' Gossamer's voice was like the light itself in her throat, and his name was like the fire in the sky.\n\n'Fortune? Your Fortune?'\n\n'The same. And you know what? I know where we have to go!'\n\nVelvet shook her head and shivered. This was too much \u2014 interrupted sleep, bitter cold, and now a mad companion.\n\n'You do?' she said doubtfully.\n\n'It's so simple. You said it yourself when we set out earlier.'\n\n'I did?'\n\n'Yes! We have to go up. But not like we've been doing so far, just gradually working our way. We've got to go all the way to the top! The summit of the mountain. That's where it will be.'\n\n'Are you sure?'\n\n'I'm sure.'\n\nVelvet sighed and managed the briefest of smiles. 'Can I get at least a little more sleep first?'"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Maze of Covamere",
                "text": "[ The Prison ]\n\nFour dragons approached the Plated Mountain through an ocean of fog. If dawn had come they did not know it, for their world had contracted to a grey blur. Brace groaned as the clouds of shifting vapour grew denser, and visibility dropped almost to nothing.\n\n'Worried, little one?' laughed Volley good-naturedly. 'Don't be \u2014 you couldn't pick a better set of dragons to be lost with.'\n\nTallow's strong, measured wingbeats led them on through the thickening fog. Dragon shapes diminished to dragon shadows and soon vanished altogether, so that only their voices kept them together.\n\n'I'd sing but I fear that would drive the rest of you away,' joked Volley, although a quaver in his voice betrayed the tension he felt.\n\n'On the contrary,' said Fortune. 'Tallow's wings may gauge our course, but we'll lose each other if we don't do something. Sing out, Volley. I've been promised your voice ever since I met you \u2014 now I'd like to hear it.'\n\nAfter a brief, half-hearted protest, Volley began to sing an old, mountain song, deep and haunting. Its melody lingered in the cold air like a trail of smoke, weaving into the mists its mournful tale of betrayal and lost love. On they flew, invisible to each other now, but bound together Volley's song, and when pathfinder Tallow heard the words grow faint in his ears he would call out gently, bringing the minstrel back on course.\n\nThus did the four friends fly on. Their destination was Covamere, where they would attempt to bring the word of the Flight to the dragons of the mountain. But as time went on, Fortune wondered if there might not be a better way to broker peace with the Charmed.\n\n'Brace!' he called. 'Where exactly was it that you saw Scoff?'\n\nBy some unspoken command the party halted, hovering in grey space as Brace struggled to remember the location of the Charmed prison camp. Tallow and Volley tried to help with suggestions based on their knowledge of the forest. But Brace could not recall enough about the place, and Fortune reluctantly concluded that they would never be able to find it.\n\n'Why would you go to this Charmed prison?' enquired Tallow doubtfully.\n\n'Scoff must be freed,' replied Fortune simply.\n\n'Fortune,' said Tallow in his deep, steady voice, the sense and reason he emanated moving in almost visible waves through the fog, 'we would never come away alive. Those Charmed monsters are ...'\n\n'Are dragons!' barked Fortune. 'You don't know charm, Tallow. It's not the evil you think.'\n\n'I saw it slaughter Weft and Piper!' Tallow retorted. 'If that's not evil I don't know what is!' His anger dissipated as soon as it had flared. 'I'm sorry, Fortune. We are the Flight now \u2014 I should have known better.'\n\n'No, Tallow, I'm to blame,' responded Fortune at once. 'There is evil in charm, just as there is evil in nature, and you are right to fear it. We should all be afraid.' He hesitated. 'It's just that Brace and I owe Scoff a great debt of gratitude.'\n\n'We seek no explanation,' interrupted Volley.\n\n'That's exactly why you deserve one. Scoff saved our lives \u2014 Brace's and mine. Without his intervention, Brutace would have killed Cumber, Gossamer, all of us. Our mission would have been over when it had barely begun.'\n\n'You are in this dragon's debt,' said Tallow.\n\n'Yes, but it's more than that. Think about this prison camp, and then think about us. We are the Flight, the crack in Shatter's scale. Well, Scoff and his charmed companions may be the crack in Wraith's. We must try to free them. They will die in the coming battle if we don't, trapped as they are. Don't you see? They are the Flight too. They are Charmed, but they could be our allies. In any case, they are our kin. They are dragons!'\n\nA stab of wind pierced the fog, and for a breath or two Fortune could make out his friends, just visible in the dank greyness of the fog. He looked from one to the other, dragons of dark cloud in a heavy sky, and was struck by the dreadful conviction that one of them was soon to die.\n\nThen, as the mist closed around them once more, Brace's voice rang out, strong and resolute.\n\n'We approached the camp from the west, I remember that much. There was a high spur of rock to the left \u2014 no, the right. I can see it now \u2014 it looked like a pine cone, all ridged. We crossed a stream, no, two streams, both running from west to east. The camp was in a dip just beyond the second stream.'\n\nTallow and Volley questioned Brace further, then conferred for a moment.\n\n'Bottom end of Whare Vale,' said Volley at last.\n\n'No doubt about it,' agreed Tallow. 'Quite a coincidence, don't you think?'\n\n'What do you mean?' Fortune asked. 'How far away is this place?'\n\n'That's the thing,' replied Tallow. He took a deep breath. 'About two hundred wingspans. Straight down.'\n\nScoff's whole world had been reduced to a net of blue fire.\n\nThe fire clung to him, sparks writhing as he shifted his position uncomfortably in the spherical cage of charm that kept him trapped here along with the rest of the traitor dragons of Wraith's army.\n\nWhy doesn't he kill us? he thought for the thousandth time.\n\nHe had wondered the same about the natural dragons of Aether's Cross. Why had Wraith taken so much trouble to create a jail for the Naturals? Why had he not killed them? Was conquest not his goal?\n\nQuestions, only questions, with no hope of answers.\n\nThe stumps of his once-proud wings itched terribly. Even though he had managed to suppress the pain with an anaesthetic charm, the moment of amputation had been agonising. He remembered it now with a dreadful shudder, the guards holding him down, drawing fire from the Realm with which they had severed his wings. Even now, the wings lay within his vision, dull and brittle, poking out of the snow like fallen leaves.\n\nScoff's capture had come scant breaths after he had left Fortune and Cumber at the cliff. He had never reached Gossamer. A squad of warrior dragons had hustled him off to Covamere where he had been questioned by a sneering, ivory-scaled dragon called Insiss.\n\n'You are a stranger here,' Insiss had drawled. 'What is more, you were found leaving the site of a most unusual incident.'\n\nWraith's slippery lieutenant was referring to the landslide that had killed the two guard dragons outside the minor portal through which Fortune and Cumber had entered the mountain. Scoff's presence there had been enough to ensure his arrest, but it was clear to Scoff that Insiss was already growing bored with the interrogation. All he had to do was concoct some plausible tale, pledge his allegiance to Wraith, and met into the huge army he saw massing all around him. Just a few clever words, and he would be free.\n\nTo his later shame, Scoff considered doing just that. But then he thought of his companions, and of how Fortune had trusted him to keep Gossamer safe. He remembered the long journey across the Heartland, during which he had seen Cumber survive the storm of Realmshock to emerge older and wiser on the other side. He thought of his companions \u2014 no, his friends.\n\nHe thought of Halcyon.\n\nMany years before, Scoff had lived here in Covamere. Young and naive, he had joined the ranks of Halcyon's envoys and been assigned to Aether's Cross. His first posting, and his last. Only now did he see that he had joined up near the end of Halcyon's regime, and so all he had seen of the once-great system of government had been its slow decay. Thus had he grown bored and disillusioned and self-centred.\n\nNow here he was again in Covamere. Back in Halcyon's domain.\n\n'Dragon!' he announced, standing up square to scrawny Insiss and half-opening his glorious wings. 'Dragon! You are speaking to one of the appointed representatives of Halcyon, Leader of Dragons and Ruler of Covamere. Ambassador Scoff I am, and from Halcyon alone will I take my commands. Your authority I do not accept. You have no power here. My service belongs to Halcyon and Halcyon alone, that is my pledge. You may do with me what you will, but I should warn you that there is only one true Leader.'\n\n'Indeed,' replied Insiss icily, a thin smile drawing itself across his face. 'There is, as you state, only one true Leader. That is, of course, our lord Wraith, the Black Dragon, Master of Covamere, soon to be the Taker of the Maze. Your loyalty to the venerable Halcyon is noted and you will be dealt with accordingly. Guards!'\n\nWithout further ceremony, Insiss summoned four hefty guard dragons who led Scoff away, their orders unspoken but evidently understood. Scoff did not struggle.\n\n'Think carefully, dragon,' he called back. 'Consider which side you wish to be on. The Black Dragon will fail. Where will that leave you?'\n\nFive days ago that had been. Upon arriving at the jail, Scoff had estimated the number of prisoners to be around three hundred, possibly more. And the numbers were still growing.\n\nWhispered conversations between the prisoners had strengthened the bond between them all, and Scoff had soon learned their collective name: Wraith's Hardship. Scoff, as one of the more widely-travelled of the dragon captives, was in constant demand for his stories, of which everyone's favourite was the Battle of Aether's Cross, where he had beheaded Brutace in the smoky aftermath of his friends' flight through the tunnels. In his tales, Scoff spoke with affection of his friends, Charmed and Natural alike, and his fellow prisoners listened to them all with silent admiration, because Scoff had lived the dream they all shared. The dream of Charmed and Natural flying side by side, dragon kin in a world without conflict.\n\nOn the fifth day, the thickest fog Scoff had ever seen billowed into the prison camp from the surrounding trees. The air tasted damp, still retaining the bitter scent of charcoal that rose from the rest of the burned forest.\n\nThe fog sealed the gap between ground and sky, then lifted, rising above the dragons as though repelled by a bubble of air. Spare tendrils crept occasionally into the camp, but otherwise the air immediately around them remained perfectly clear. Isolated thus on every side by a sheer white wall, and capped by a ceiling of solid cloud, the prison cages sparkled like gems in a seam of crystal, cut off from the rest of the mountain, a solitary world where, suddenly, anything might happen.\n\nGlancing around, Scoff saw his fellow prisoners stirring restlessly. Nervous guards paced, clearly unsettled by this strange phenomenon. As the tension gradually built, Scoff wondered what charm it might be that was holding back the fog. Whatever it was, it was strange and ancient, just like the charm from which the cages were made. But what had made it? Perhaps a battle had been fought here aeons before. Perhaps the Maze itself had once broken the surface here. Perhaps \u2014 and here was a thought that made him shudder \u2014 perhaps this whole complex was part of the Maze's very structure.\n\nWhatever their origin, the efficiency of the fiery globes as prison cells was beyond doubt. Like a one-way valve, each cell's outer membrane would admit any living creature passing through it from outside to inside, but would refuse all attempts at exit thereafter. Inert matter such as food or waste could pass freely in either direction, but an imprisoned dragon trying to leave the cell would be rewarded only by a flash of light, agonising pain, and a blocking force as solid as a wall of rock.\n\nOnce inside, a dragon was trapped forever.\n\nIn this way the prison camp was unique, for charmed creatures are notoriously difficult to hold captive. Indeed, Scoff's first instinct had been to open an escape route into the Realm by which he might flee to another part of the forest. But the Realm had not been there. The truth was both simple and shocking: inside the cells, charm had no power. Charmed dragons were merely dragons, stripped of their magic and their pride. And their liberty.\n\nWhare Vale was a prison indeed.\n\nIt was Scoff who saw them first: four dragons descending from the ceiling of cloud with the cold precision of expert fliers. He saw the surprise on their faces, surprise that might at first have been that of dragons who have explored eternity to find a single, lonely world at its heart, but was, Scoff realised, only shock at emerging from the fog into unexpectedly clear air.\n\nThe dragons were Naturals, balanced on massive, muscled wings. Scoff found no surprise in the fact that at their head was Fortune. Brace he recognised too, although the youngster looked leaner and harder than he remembered. The others he did not know, but their size and grace impressed him at once, especially the larger one who flew close to Fortune and beat the air as though he owned the sky.\n\nThe dragons descended, unseen by the eight warrior dragons huddled together near the entrance to the vale, their scales shimmering in the eerie blue light cast by the hundreds of floating globes laid out behind them. Sparks from the cages illuminated the belly of the fog like lightning, turning it blue, a shroud of smooth colour.\n\nOne by one, the other prisoners began to spot the newcomers. Faces lit up with hope, only to fall into disappointment. What could four Naturals do against fire charm? Groans rang out, and the guards looked round, alerted. Two of them took immediately to the air, their intention clear: to force the Naturals down.\n\nScoff watched, his heart thudding. Fortune barked a command to his three companions, who all vanished at once into the fog. Simultaneously, the air above the cages thickened with charm. Who was wielding it? Scoff could not tell.\n\nFortune held his station as the two warriors flew confidently towards him, staring them out with an arrogance that was obviously meant to enrage them. Just before the guards reached him, the big Natural plummeted from the cloud above and struck with unerring aim at their heads. Scoff was astonished to see that the Natural's eyes were tightly closed. His wings dealt both guards a crippling blow to the base of the neck, and they dropped from the sky in a tangle of wings and limbs, crashing together into the remains of a thicket wrecked by fire. One dragon twitched and turned, his underbelly pierced by spears of volcanic rock and broken tree trunk. Blood pooled around them both, black in the cold, blue light.\n\nThe remaining six guards stood frozen, open-mouthed. Then, one after the other, they tilted their gazes up to where Fortune and his giant companion were hovering.\n\nOf the other two Naturals there was no sign."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ancient Charm",
                "text": "'You're a marvel, Tallow,' Fortune said as the first two guard dragons hit the ground.\n\n'There's something else here besides me,' Tallow muttered. 'I'm not this good. And it was not my intention to kill them.'\n\n'That's as may be,' responded Fortune. 'But there is some kind of magic here helping you, we cannot rely on it. It has motives of its own.'\n\nFor the moment at least, the remaining guards seemed panicked, indecisive. But they would surely jump to action soon enough, and what then? With the advantage of surprise lost, what could four Naturals do against six Charmed?\n\nBut there were hundreds of potential allies here. What if they could be freed?\n\n'Brace! Volley!' Fortune bellowed. 'Go to Scoff!'\n\nEvery dragon in the camp heard his cry. Fortune's gamble was that the guards would not know the names of individual prisoners, and indeed they did not react, perhaps assuming that he had sent his friends to sanctuary elsewhere.\n\nHowever, Fortune's cry did serve to rouse the guards from their stupor. Turning their backs on the caged dragons, focusing their attention entirely on Fortune and Tallow, they began creeping forward as a single unit, their bodies generating charm in crackling patterns of light and shadow.\n\nBehind them, Brace and Volley dropped silently out of the fog and on to the ground. They moved swiftly between the glowing cages, whispering, questioning, seeking.\n\nFortune was about to suggest to Tallow that they gain some time by retreating back into the cloud when one of the guards arched his neck and spat a long tongue of flame up towards them. The two Naturals avoided it with ease, but before Tallow could remark on its poor aim they saw that its purpose had been something more subtle.\n\nThe flame shot past them, but when it met the fog bank it splashed across it, spreading over the underside of the mist to form a glowing, white-hot net that expanded to enclose the entire perimeter of the camp. Fortune cautiously approached the pulsating charm, but was beaten back by its heat. Now they were prisoners too.\n\nHowever, when he glanced down, Fortune saw that the advancing guards were now five. The one who had cast the net had stopped and hunched into a ball, his back curled over to present only armour and spike to the sky. Maintaining the barrier of charm was clearly taking all his energies.\n\nFive against four, thought Fortune grimly. Well, that's a little better.\n\nThe net began to contract.\n\nFortune looked up to see the fire descending towards his back. Together, with the skin of flame forcing them ever lower, he and Tallow slowly descended towards the waiting gang. Despite Tallow's calm, strong presence, Fortune felt desperation starting to gnaw at him.\n\nWe can't die now, not here, not like this!\n\nBut down they were pulled, and even though they flew completely around the ever-contracting web they found not a single gap through which they might escape into the open sky.\n\n'That way! That way!' urged a caged dragon, sending Brace and Volley scrambling down a short run of cages. At the end of the line, Brace pulled up short.\n\n'Scoff!' he exclaimed.\n\nTears welled in Brace's eyes. The charmed dragon crouched inside the flickering globe of fire was thin and tired, and without his beautiful rainbow wings he looked quite the saddest and most dejected dragon Brace could have imagined. And yet, on seeing the two Naturals, Scoff beamed.\n\n'Glad you came,' he said. 'Now for the tricky part.'\n\nThe guards grinned up at Fortune and Tallow. They were no longer angry, just amused. The web had stopped shrinking; now it extended to just beyond the perimeter of the cages, but no further. Fortune and Tallow hovered at an altitude no higher than a modest oak tree. Silence reigned, broken occasionally by the crackle of charm.\n\nTallow's features were set rigid, his muscles were tense; he was ready to fight. But Fortune felt calm again. It was as if he could see things, sense things he had no right to be aware of.\n\nThe waiting guards, for instance \u2014 they seemed curiously insubstantial, like bony relics with fog for flesh.\n\nThe ground looked pale and watery. Something lay beneath it, far beneath it. Some kind of pattern. A complex of lines, crossing, dividing, spreading, erupting into a network more complex than a mountainful of spider's webs, vibrating with life and solid, real, somehow more real than the rest of the world combined. It tasted of nature, it tasted of charm.\n\nIt was the Maze.\n\nFortune saw it, or its shadow, although he did not know what it was. Yet something about it was devastatingly familiar, as though he had been here before. Dazzling in its mystery, the Maze showed a fragment of itself to Fortune, and he knew instinctively that here was the power that had worked through him to knock the Deadfall from its tower.\n\nBefore Fortune could even contemplate what he might do next, Brace leaped up from between two of the fire-cages. His sudden appearance took the guards completely by surprise, as he skimmed over their heads and swooped up to where Fortune and Tallow were hovering.\n\nA moment frozen in time.\n\n'The charm is yours,' Brace said. 'For Gossamer.'\n\nTurning on a wing, he dived straight towards the guards, crying out in a deep, sure voice:\n\n'The charm is ours!'\n\nFour of the warriors scattered but the fifth, more levelheaded than the rest, spread his wings and wrestled Brace from the sky. They fell to the ground, the charmed dragon lashing his tail around Brace's neck and spreading his jaws wide for the kill. Eager to make a show of his power in front of these presumptuous Naturals, he raised his muzzle to the sky and belched fire high in a clean gout of yellow light. His jaws doubled in length and spears of bone sliced out through his cheeks, sharpening as they grew into deadly blades. His tongue transformed into a flame, a white lance in the yellow pyre his mouth had become; his teeth lengthened, thickened, grew deep serrations; his lips curled away out of sight.\n\nAll skull, all fang, this charmed monster bent its neck to turn its fire on Brace.\n\nThe guard's over-confidence gave Tallow all the time he needed. Simultaneously awed and revolted by the warrior's boastful display, Tallow dived down from Fortune's side and drove his jaws hard into the belly of the extrovert who, quite engrossed in his performance, did not even see his attacker coming. His chest and underbelly shredded, the charmed dragon died instantly.\n\nBut his charm did not.\n\nRealm fire exploded in all directions, throwing Brace clear and tossing Tallow unconscious to the ground. Charm continued to boil from the empty space where the dragon had stood, sending feelers out to weave strange patterns in the air. Fortune watched agog as the flames twitched and bulged. It looked to him as if countless distorted creatures were inside the fire trying to get out. The flames turned red, then green, then brilliant blue, the glow expanding across the clearing until, just as bright claws began to slice through from the Realm, one of the dead guard's companions sprang forward and fired a charge of pure white light into its midst.\n\nThunder closed the breach between this world and the Realm.\n\nIn that instant, Fortune saw the pathway between the two.\n\nA moment without time.\n\nLooking up, Fortune saw the stars, visible despite the fog.\n\nLooking down, Fortune saw the Maze, laid out in appalling splendour despite the solid ground that separated them.\n\nReaching out, Fortune opened a gateway into the Realm.\n\n[ The act was not entirely his own. He could feel something guiding him, giving him the strength of charm his natural body lacked. Nevertheless, it worked ]\n\nThe Realm backed away, as though it feared his presence. Indescribable beasts slithered through Fortune's mind even as he floated through theirs. Outside the real world, the Realm admitted but did not welcome this charmless alien intruder. Everywhere it shrank from his touch, his look even, as he drifted through, searching for, searching for...\n\nThere. A point of light floating somewhere ahead, and yet not ahead. Somewhere else.\n\nFortune spread his wings and passed through the Realm to somewhere beyond.\n\nHe was inside the light now. The light was all around him. He and it hung suspended in the gap between the Realm and the real world. Both worlds, both realms, were in the thrall of the light, this dazzling bead poised like a drop of dew on its own spider's web.\n\nThe web was the Maze.\n\nIt spread in every direction that was real and many that were not. The light, the world, the Realm, all were dewdrops on the web of the Maze, the fabric on which everything rested. The Maze opened its pores to Fortune, beckoning, inviting, pulsing with life, throbbing with death. Its labyrinthine form transcended time and space. It breathed like a living thing, although it was much more than that. It was old long before time had begun to move.\n\nFortune drifted inside the light, feeling himself vanish into insignificance, aware of the immensity of creation around him, aware of the fragility of his natural dragon spirit in this storm-tossed ocean of charm.\n\nHe turned in a strange direction he could not define, and the light vanished.\n\nHe was hovering over the prison camp again. What had just happened? Where had he been? He thought he knew at least part of the answer.\n\nThe Maze. I've seen the Maze.\n\nSomething about the prison had changed. Everything was illuminated now by a brilliant white light. Fortune looked in vain for its source, before finally realising that he himself was the light.\n\nLooking down, he saw charmed dragons in cages, blue spheres of fire turned dark and spectral by the brilliance of his own radiant body. He stroked the air and the cages folded slowly, reluctantly, into the enveloping ground. The earth hissed and buckled as the magic sank into it. Four hundred charmed dragons dropped lightly to the ground and looked up at their saviour \u2014 their natural saviour \u2014 with puzzled wonder. Where the cages had been only a criss-cross of scars remained.\n\nAt once an immense fatigue descended on Fortune, invading his body just as he had invaded the Realm. Was I really there? he wondered vaguely as his body tumbled gently into a shallow drift of snow.\n\nCharmed dragons crowded around him, peering with concern at this strange dragon who appeared to be a Natural yet who had wielded sufficient magic to banish the ancient charm. Their faces swelled in his vision, strangers he had travelled half the world to meet yet for whom he could find no words. Blood crashed in his head and blackness hovered at the corner of his eye.\n\n'Fortune!' cried a familiar voice. The crowd parted as a dragon shouldered his way to the front. 'Fortune!'\n\nThe dragon's face filled Fortune's narrowing vision as welcome darkness closed in around him. The net of charm vanished at last as the guard responsible was overpowered along with his four remaining companions. The fog, held at bay for so long, descended. With it came blackness. The last thing Fortune saw before he fainted was a single dragon face bearing an expression torn between joy and concern.\n\n'Scoff,' he said weakly.\n\nFortune dreamed. No charm now, just a dream full of reality, solid. Natural.\n\nDragons over the sea. The air fresh and salt, the wind invigorating. Waves reaching up for daring wings, clouds racing for the sun. Brightness, clarity.\n\nA chain of islands in a wide circle, a reef at the centre. Lush, green-fronded trees and white sand. Ocean the colour of turquoise.\n\nVoices in the flawless air, voices he knew, his mother's and Gossamer's, even Wood's, their words passing him like fugitives, rushing. 'The world is turning,' they whispered together. 'It begins here,' the voices chanted, 'It ends here.' Countless voices of dragons he did not know. The voices of the Flight, of the Hardship. With the rhythm of the chanting came a throbbing that Fortune knew to be the wingbeats of the Black Dragon.\n\nThe words twisted away, interchanging, fluid in the sunfilled sky, and Fortune was alone. The light was not the sun but came from somewhere beneath his feet. The realisation brought inexplicable terror. He blinked and saw that he was inside a labyrinth both strange and familiar, one whose ending was shrouded in mist. With an immense effort, he stretched a claw across the chasm to touch the mysterious wall of the pathway he was on, lost and alone, surrounded by dark turns and grasping shadows. With a jolt, Fortune's eyes found other eyes and their gazes locked. The eyes were jet black, just like his own, and for that frozen instant, that endless age, Fortune knew that his father, Welkin, stood beside him. In that moment, he felt the world shedding its skin. Ahead, in the distant fog, something moved with the power of the stars.\n\nFortune saw the stars above him and felt immense joy. But his happiness died as dark wingbeats invaded the silence.\n\nHe awoke to find he had been unconscious for only a few breaths. Scoff still leaned over him, joined now by Fortune's Natural friends \u2014 Tallow, Volley and Brace. They crowded in, their expressions of worry earnest enough to make Fortune laugh. Nonplussed at first, his friends quickly began to smile, and then to laugh themselves, until at last even the confused throng of Charmed in the background was joining in. Through the snow and the fog the laughter rang, healing wounds and lifting spirits, and it was many long moments before it started finally to die away again. By that time, Fortune had forgotten the dream almost completely.\n\nSmiling at Tallow, he said, 'Remind me never to get on your wrong side.'\n\nThe big dragon grinned. 'It was not just me, Fortune, as you well know.'\n\n'No,' agreed Fortune. 'Volley, you did well too. And you, Brace.'\n\nAt mention of his name, the young dragon stepped forward to embrace Fortune, as though eager to confirm that they were indeed both still alive.\n\n'You are a hero,' concluded Fortune as they parted again. 'Your bravery saved us all.'\n\n'And you saved us, Fortune!' exclaimed Scoff, unable to contain himself any longer. 'Makes us equal!'\n\nFortune's heart expanded as Scoff leaned over to pat his head in a somewhat fatherly way. How he had missed this dragon! Then he caught sight of the rough scars on Scoff's back, only just beginning to heal over, and cold horror sent his joy into sudden retreat.\n\n'Oh, that!' said Scoff grimly in response to Fortune's glance. 'Well, flight's possible without wings. I am Charmed, after all. They'll grow back.'\n\nAstonishingly, Scoff did not sound bitter. Fortune felt he had gained a flash of insight into what Scoff had once been like, in his heyday as an envoy of Halcyon.\n\n'It's good to see you again, Scoff,' he said.\n\n'Likewise.'\n\nFortune's eyes glazed as Scoff helped him up.\n\n'Charm taken it out of you, eh?' Scoff continued, his eyes beginning to twinkle a little now. 'Not for your sort, that business. What were you playing at?'\n\nFortune managed a smile. 'Subtle as ever, Scoff. To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure what happened. I remember seeing... oh, it was some kind of light. And there was a web, like a maze of lines hidden beneath the mountain.'\n\nHis friends stood hushed as he battled to remember, and the tension among the charmed dragons who were gathered close around this small group was stretched palpably tight.\n\n'Maze?' prompted Scoff.\n\n'Something like that. I don't really know, Scoff, but whatever it was it saw fit to work its magic through me. It's not the first time it's happened. Strange. But the main thing is you're all free. That's all that matters.'\n\nThere was a buzz of conversation as Fortune shrugged away these momentous events.\n\n'Thinks the Maze is working through him!' exclaimed Scoff. 'Always thought there was something odd about you, Fortune. Now I know it!'\n\n'Then what I saw \u2014 it does exist?'\n\n'The Maze of Covamere,' Scoff announced solemnly. 'It exists.'\n\nFortune let out a deep breath.\n\n'Are you all right, Fortune?' put in Tallow with some concern for. While he did not fully understand what was going on, he was aware that his friend had been through a great ordeal. But Fortune, despite his obvious fatigue, flashed him a disarming grin.\n\n'I'm all right, Tallow. Most of me is ready to drop but inside... well, I'm ready now. We're near to the real quest at last, I think. I can feel it. We're near to the heart of it all.'\n\n'Well then,' pronounced Scoff. 'What's the plan?'\n\n'Plan?' came Fortune's reply. 'What makes you think we need a plan?'\n\nThey talked. Some of the charmed dragons set fires in the snow using unburned timber from the surrounding trees, the flames bringing welcome warmth and keeping the fog at bay. One of the first things Fortune learned was the name of this group of charmed dragons.\n\n'Wraith's Hardship,' he smiled. 'I like that! And you are all loyal to Halcyon?'\n\n'We are his,' replied Scoff, clearly speaking for all the Charmed there assembled. 'Some are ambassadors, like me. Some are warriors, like Spar here. Or servants and officers. But we are Halcyon's dragons, all of us.'\n\n'It was to speak to Halcyon that I first came here,' mused Fortune. 'I wonder if I shall ever meet him. I think perhaps the real reason for us all being here is something altogether different. The Maze, Scoff, tell me about it.'\n\n'There's much to say,' began Scoff. 'The Charmed fear it. The Maze is many things.'\n\n'Too much to tell now?' Scoff nodded. 'All right, we'll leave it there for now. But tell me, is Wraith afraid of this Maze?'\n\n'Most dragons are.'\n\n'Hmm.'\n\nFortune had no desire to press Scoff on a subject that seemed to distress both him and his Charmed companions. The rest would come later, of that he was sure. Right now, he needed to know more about this Hardship, and about Wraith's army. He turned the gnarled old dragon whom Scoff had identified as Spar.\n\n'How many dragons does Wraith command?' he asked.\n\nSpar considered this for a moment. 'Fifteen hundred,' he growled at last, in a cracked, deep voice. 'Give or take.'\n\n'And they're all now with Wraith in Covamere?'\n\n'I believe so.'\n\n'And are they all his long-term supporters?'\n\n'Yes. But that may not make them loyal. Many dragons doubt Wraith as much as we do. The difference is they know him better. That means they fear him more.'\n\n'So Wraith's army may be weaker than the numbers suggest?' said Fortune.\n\n'Yes,' Spar replied.\n\nTallow cleared his throat, the rumble of his breath drawing all attention to him. He stood tall and confident, his great wings twitching impatiently, evidently hungry for more action.\n\n'What of Shatter?' he said. 'The Black Dragon may command fifteen hundred dragons, but Shatter has over three thousand. An army of Naturals,' he added, for the benefit of those Charmed to whom this was news.\n\n'Not many Charmed left in the world,' commented Scoff with uncharacteristic sadness.\n\n'Plenty at Covamere, though,' said Fortune. 'Don't be fooled by numbers, Tallow. The Charmed of South Point were outnumbered tenfold and look what happened there.'\n\n'Didn't have Wraith's Hardship at South Point,' Scoff put in.\n\nTallow coughed again. Fortune smiled to himself as he saw the new light in his big friend's eye. Tallow was doing something Weft would have been proud of, and he knew it.\n\n'Shatter's attack is imminent,' Tallow continued. 'The Flight is working even now to undermine his authority, but I fear it is already too late to prevent the coming battle. We can hope only to lessen its impact.'\n\n'A river cannot be stopped, but it may be diverted,' murmured Fortune in a voice so low that only Brace, who stood close beside him, heard.\n\n'I don't understand what we can do here,' Brace whispered, 'but I know one thing \u2014 there's dragons on the mountain more important to me than any army.'\n\nScoff interrupted their exchange with an impatient cry. 'We need plans! Time moves fast, though the fog hides it.'\n\n'No, Scoff. No plans.'\n\nFortune's quiet voice cut through the drifting fog, reaching out to every dragon ear. He sensed that the point of decision had been reached, that debate was of no further use. Here before him was Wraith's Hardship, and yet it seemed to him that he saw only the dragons of the Flight, to whom he had already denied his leadership. He saw hope and resolve and trust etched into every face and knew that he must reject them all.\n\n'No plans,' he repeated heavily. 'No leaders. We must all decide individually, or none must decide at all. Tallow is right: the battle is coming. You knew what you wanted to do long before I came to the mountain \u2014 subvert Wraith. Very well, go and do it. I have done all I can for you; you must let me complete my quest.' He paused, then added, 'Winter has come to the world. Let your task be to bring the winter to an end. I cannot tell you the way; you must find it for yourselves.'\n\nWith Fortune's brief speech ended, the debate broke up. Dragons puzzled, dragons argued, and soon dragons began to cluster into groups. Before long, these groups had become squads and dragons were exchanging farewells and lifting into the fog on unknown missions into the darkness. Unspoken though most of the decisions were, all set their course for a common destination: Covamere.\n\n'They're good dragons,' said Scoff as Fortune watched the charmed dragons slowly disperse into the gloom. The fires they had set were dying now and the fog was rolling in again. All seemed damp and barren.\n\n'Wraith's Hardship,' Fortune replied. 'It's a good name. Well, they don't need me to lead them, nor any dragon for that matter. They know what they have to do.'\n\nHe thought of the curious clarity of vision that had come to him when he had destroyed the cages in the clearing. Yet now he could see so little. Such a contrast, like the difference between life and death, the world and the Realm.\n\nNature and charm.\n\nOut of the fog came Tallow, Volley and Brace. With Scoff and Fortune, their little band numbered five. The Hardship had finally gone, and now they were alone here.\n\n'Will Shatter's army be able to find Covamere in this weather?' Fortune wondered.\n\n'He will find it,' responded Tallow. 'Nothing will stop him now.'\n\nBrace was hopping impatiently at the edge of the group.\n\n'What are we to do?' he asked, flapping his wings enthusiastically. 'Are we going to Covamere too?'\n\n'Not quite,' replied Fortune enigmatically. 'Not just yet, at any rate.'\n\n'Plans, Fortune?' quipped Scoff with a broad grin. 'Not like you.'\n\n'No, Scoff. Not plans. Destinations!'"
            },
            {
                "title": "The Attack",
                "text": "Not only had the fog enveloped the mountain, but it had also descended upon the Fortress. For charmed dragons, the weather was merely an inconvenience \u2014 a haze through which sixth and seventh senses might penetrate with relative ease. However, for the Natural army it came as a devastating blow.\n\nDragons primed for attack, dragons ready to give their lives for Shatter, dragons ready to wipe magic from the world, all despaired when the fog rolled in. Dragons stood at the mouth of the Fortress, looked out into the grey nothingness and howled their frustration; some even wept. Surely now the attack was impossible, surely now they would have to wait.\n\nThe day moved on and there was no word from Shatter. Dragons grew dejected, and it was now that the whisperings began. Small groups of dragons began flying through the ranks, spreading rumour of Shatter's madness \u2014 something that was suspected by most already. More strangely, they brought news about a certain kind of charmed dragon awaiting them in Covamere.\n\n'They too are dragons,' the whispering dragons said. 'They too follow a leader who has over-stretched his wings. They may not be our enemies. It is possible that they are our friends.'\n\nThe rumours spread, and for every twenty dragons who rejected them at least one listened.\n\nIn this way, the Flighters sowed seeds of doubts throughout the ranks of Shatter's army. They did not curse the fog but blessed it, for perhaps this change in the weather would bring enough time to set the minds and hearts of all these dragons on a new and peaceful course. Perhaps they were naive in their thinking, but even Shatter would have agreed that the smallest of pebbles may start the greatest of landslides.\n\nBefore the day reached noon, however, Shatter emerged from his self-imposed retreated and called a council of war. It was a hasty affair during which his chief commanders were given one simple instruction.\n\n'Follow me,' Shatter grated, his red eyes burning through the fog. 'We attack.'\n\nHis commanders, the memory of Barker's death still fresh in their minds, agreed at once, and set about gathering every available dragon at the mouth of the Fortress. The strategy was simple: they would fly through the fog to Covamere, where they would attack the Charmed on their own territory. Shatter himself would lead the way.\n\nThe news burned through the army like a forest fire, and it was all the commanders could do to prevent a stampede for the cavern entrance. Soon three thousand angry dragons stood poised on the huge rock ledge, the largest Natural army ever assembled.\n\nTo the head of this army flew Shatter, his red eyes piercing the fog like beacons. One by one, dragons launched themselves after him, wave upon wave, squadron after squadron soaring off into the fog, each group hanging on the tail of the one before, commanders calling through the murk to maintain formations, wings thumping against the sky like a multitude of heartbeats, breaths clouding, voices cheering at one moment, yet at the next calling for silence and secrecy. Out they flew and south, these natural dragons, and leading them on was the dragon who had never before led from the front, the coward who had always pushed from behind then retreated to safety.\n\nShatter's senses were wildly distorted now, and his mind roamed far beyond the confines of sanity. Yet somehow he found his way unerring through the fog. Perhaps he had in his raving discovered some small taint of magic. Perhaps in his red eyes there was some new and secret colour that enabled him to navigate through the all-enveloping fog.\n\nOr perhaps it was simple luck which carried Shatter and his army on towards Covamere.\n\nCumber flew fast and low, dodging through the maze of snow-laden tree stumps that curled around the mountain. He sprayed charm ahead of himself, drinking in the magical echoes that told him where the hidden world was inside the obscuring fog. He tried to judge the time but could not; all he knew was that time was short. Some part of him wondered if it might have stopped altogether.\n\nAn echo to his left indicated an outlying sentry post; so, he was nearing Covamere. A high ridge shielded him from probing charm as he swept past, a silent wind in the broken forest of grey.\n\nAfter parting from Gossamer and Velvet, Cumber had wandered on the mountain for some time, concentrating his attention on avoiding the few remaining Charmed patrols. Then, some time in the night, he had seen the light in the north, and the three answering lights from the mountain: red from Covamere, gold from near the summit and blue from somewhere inside. From the Maze, he now believed.\n\nIn that instant, he had understood exactly what he needed to do.\n\n'Guides!' he had exclaimed into the night. 'Gossamer needs Velvet. And Fortune needs me!'\n\nIt was so simple. Ordinal's quest remained true. He and Fortune still had to enter the mountain, although Cumber no longer knew why. He suspected now that their final goal was not Halcyon at all, but something quite different.\n\nMantle will know, he thought with certainty. I can find his cave again and it's there that I must lead Fortune now. Now that the time is right.\n\nMaking the decision was one thing. Achieved his goal was quite another. Not only did Cumber suspect that all the entrances to the mountain were now heavily guarded, but he had not the slightest idea where Fortune was. Nor could he even be sure his friend was alive at all, whatever Gossamer might have protested to the contrary.\n\n'Well, I can't do anything about whether Fortune comes or not,' he muttered to himself as the new day approached. 'All I can do is make sure I'm waiting for him when he gets there.'\n\nBut where, exactly, was 'there'?\n\nIn the end, that proved simple too. If it was Cumber's job to guide Fortune into the mountain, then logically he would have to use a route he had already travelled.\n\n'Back to the tunnel,' he said, surprised that the answer was so obvious. 'We went in that way before, and so we shall again.'\n\nAnd so Cumber had his goal: to return to the lesser portal through which he and Fortune had first gained access to the mountain tunnels. Once he was there, perhaps everything else would fall into place.\n\nNo sooner did Cumber set off than the fog closed in around him. He moved slowly, the need to use his charm-sense tiring him more than he had anticipated. His course brought him round in a broad spiral to the borders of Covamere, here he stopped, exhausted. Focusing his mind despite his exhaustion, he projected charm into the fog, pulling images from the land where no images existed.\n\nThe forest belt was a trail of debris below. Covamere was an intricate construction of rock and timber sprawling snow-swept in the dank air. Dragons heaved in the citadel's narrow passageways. The sounds they made filtered in dull waves up the mountainside.\n\nResting enabled Cumber to quell his sudden panic. 'The tunnel first,' he reminded himself. 'Then I'll worry about Fortune.'\n\nSomething rumbled deep in the ground beneath him. A heavy swelling of charm surged, then receded. Cumber gulped.\n\nThe Maze is shifting!\n\nHe calculated swiftly. In order to reach the plateau where the tunnel entrance was located he would have to pass through or at least close to Covamere. He could go round, but time pressed so heavily now that the thought of unnecessary delay filled him with terror. Still, there seemed to be a lot of confused activity in the citadel. Perhaps he could sneak through unnoticed.\n\nBalancing on his small white wings, Cumber flew casually down to a group of three wooden towers with frosted turrets, a back entrance at the high eastern perimeter of the settlement. Huge fires pressed back the fog, allowing the sentries to view the terrain with a little more ease. The guards seemed distracted, and admitted him without a word. As he passed into the broad yard beyond, a group of ten warrior dragons lumbered up to the gate and took up posts there.\n\n'Naturals!' he heard one of them grumble.\n\nHe sighed with silent relief \u2014 these dragons evidently had more on their minds than checking every charmed dragon who wandered in and out of the settlement.\n\nCovamere was filled with bustling dragons. Cumber did his best to match their busy mood as he travelled through the vast complex. Fires blazed at every corner, keeping the air relatively clear. All the dragons he saw were obviously intent on some task or other. Most of them, he noted with growing concern, were very heavily armoured. Indeed, virtually every dragon he saw was a warrior. Spikes and claws were long and dangerous, and most bore the sheen of recent force-growth.\n\nHe moved cautiously around a large arena, catching occasional glimpses of the activity within through the radial passages leading up the shallow slope on which it was built. The local flow of dragons led inexorably into the wide, open space and by now Cumber was having to push against the pressure of bodies trying to force him up the wide channels. The ground was smooth and black, solid lava worn flat by the passage of countless dragons over the years. In contrast, the walls and tunnel structures loomed high and rough, some of them natural upthrusts of once-molten rock, others deliberate constructions, all sharp and possessed of a certain primitive elegance.\n\nThis place is so old.\n\nHis thoughts scattered as a crush of bodies gathered him up and propelled him sideways towards a gaping passage. Just when he thought the pressure was too great and he was sure to be dragged into the arena it suddenly lessened, then dropped to a mere trickle. A few solitary dragons scurried anxiously past him and then he was alone in the corridor.\n\nAcutely aware that he should take this opportunity to cross the settlement and escape down the mountain to the plateau, Cumber hesitated, curious to know what was going on. As he did so, the rumbling of voices dropped to a whisper, then a hush, and the crowd of dragons he could see through the radial passage all turned their heads skywards.\n\nCumber looked up, and for the first time saw Wraith.\n\nA monster had invaded the sky. Black against brooding cloud, Wraith clenched massive wings on the air and descended majestically into the arena. His head, long and sharp, swept the crowd with a gaze intense as Realm fire. Skeletal limbs twitched and jerked, their ends disappearing into invisibility, their spiny contours flashing with charm. Cumber shrank warily into the shadows, afraid that the Black Dragon would see him hiding in the corners of his kingdom.\n\nWings flexing with sinuous grace, Wraith dropped like a great airborne spider, descending out of Cumber's view behind the high, spiked wall protecting the crowd. Excitement swelled, a buzz of anticipation. Cumber waited, gripped.\n\nThe air began to thunder.\n\nAt first Cumber thought that Wraith was building some kind of spell. Then he realised that the charm was coming from underground, from somewhere deep inside the mountain. He backed away, puzzled, for the magic tasted at once old and powerful, yet oddly restrained. He remembered the rumble he had felt in the ground earlier. Charm was moving beneath Covamere, old charm, but it was not ready to show itself. Waiting, it warned.\n\nIn the crowd, dragons murmured, puzzled like Cumber.\n\nThe rumbling slowly ceased... and yet something remained. Something was wrong, Cumber decided. Something Wraith had not planned. He turned and fled, presentiments of danger firing him into action. The rumble of charm had stopped; what was building now was a rumble of nature.\n\nThe rumble of dragons!\n\nCumber skidded round a corner and spread his wings, intending to complete his escape in the air. But the air had become a vast mat of natural dragons flying in a dense flock above Covamere, the fog merely a series of grey chinks in the patchwork of their wings. The corridor he was trapped in resounded with their battle cries and the draught of their passage whipped the snow in angry flurries.\n\nThe Naturals were attacking Covamere.\n\nDarting into a side alley, Cumber found welcome shelter in a network of tunnels carved into the rock. Still, this was not a place in which to be cornered. He darted through the ice-coated channels, charmed senses leading him down in the direction of the plateau. Outside, fire charm began to blast as the battle was joined.\n\nWhere the Natural army had come from Cumber could not guess, knowing as he did nothing of Shatter or the Fortress. But the attack itself did not surprise him. Was this not more proof of Ordinal's prediction that dragon would fight dragon until none were left on the face of the world? Dragon destroying dragon and a world without magic. The idea bit deep into Cumber's heart and he emerged from the tunnels in fury. His anger undoubtedly saved his life.\n\nEight or nine Naturals blocked his path, turning on Cumber as soon as they registered his presence.\n\nFurious with the world, with all dragons who fought, with his own need to fight to survive, Cumber sprang into their midst and ripped a crude opening into the Realm. What he dragged out was neither fire, nor monster, but form.\n\nRealm wind sucked snow from the surrounding passage, a wide thoroughfare studded with side tunnels, building it into a shell of ice that contracted about Cumber like a second skin. Thick in section as a pine trunk, it was hard as rock yet flexible as a dragon's tail. Encased in this strange armour, Cumber battered his way through the bemused dragons, neither harming them nor allowing them to harm him. They struck and bit at the weird, glassy creation sweeping past them, but their blows raised only chips of ice swiftly healed, and the armour's slippery curves afforded no purchase for their claws.\n\nHeld in this mobile cocoon, Cumber spent his anger on the huge energies he needed to maintain the integrity of the protective charm. Once clear, he vanished down the maze of corridors beyond the tunnel exit from which he had burst, leaving the Naturals confused, amazed and quite unhurt. As soon as he was out of sight, he dissolved the web of energy holding the ice against his body and returned it to the Realm.\n\nHot and trembling with the exertion, Cumber hurried on through the settlement, close now to the lower perimeter, anxious to leave the battle behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Time",
                "text": "Like a boulder in a stream, like the forgotten basilisk waiting in its river of charm, the Plated Mountain sat motionless while time itself flowed around it in a never-ending torrent.\n\nThe current of time had flowed long across the world, meeting many obstacles in the course of its meanderings, all of which had sooner or later been broken free from their roots or else worn away to dust, to nothing. But the mountain was different. Wrapped up in the fabric of the Turning, it was solid. Time flowed up to it, broke, and passed on unable to exert even a fraction of its massive power upon this mighty obstacle.\n\nFor the dragons swarming on the Plated Mountain, time now moved either erratically or else not at all, and the outside world was no longer of any concern, if it even existed.\n\nThe world was beginning to turn.\n\nWeaker than he dared to consider, Halcyon stood at the threshold of his secret chamber and stared at the wall. Around him was the black rock of the mountain, smoothed by magic, soaring into a dizzying spiral of sculptured lava whose heights were lost in a haze of countless floating light charms. This place was an old conceit. Halcyon ignored its glory now, lost instead in contemplation of the dragons moving beyond the scale-thin barrier of stone that protected him still. A barrier made almost impenetrable by the river of charm Halcyon had poured into it.\n\nAlmost.\n\nBeyond the barrier, Wraith's dragons continued to labour. Very soon they would be through. Halcyon sighed, and the brittle sound fled up into the roof where it was lost in the haze of light.\n\nSoon enough, he thought despondently. Time is everything.\n\nHalcyon knew that on the mountain outside the battle had already begun, and that time was drawing its many strands together to bear upon the great blockage that lay in its inexorable path. The world wanted to turn with something close to desperation, and yet the time was still not yet right.\n\nHalcyon thought of Mantle, of Wraith, of the countless dragons who even now were playing their own small parts in the turning. But above all he thought of time.\n\nWraith must break through at exactly the right moment. He cannot enter the Maze too soon.\n\nTime was all that was left for Halcyon now, for he knew already what the future held for himself. To his surprise, he was unafraid. In fact, he felt relieved that it would soon be all over, one way or another. Time had finally caught up with him, and as it raced towards him like a hungry predator, Halcyon turned to embrace it with his wings held wide.\n\nHe was ready at last.\n\nAfter an arduous climb interspersed with short flights through the thin, cold air, Gossamer and Velvet reached the mountain peak. A rugged place this, white and wild, a flattened cone of ice broken in places by jags of black rock and scatterings of rubble. A roughly circular plain, open on all sides to the horizon over a low rock wall. An arena on top of the world.\n\nExhausted, they rested for a while in the shadow of a short spire of lava, contemplating the ring of stones that dominated the mountain summit. Small these stones were, seemingly unremarkable yet clearly imbued with great power. Gossamer could feel it: earth charm, the charm of the sprites and the mountain, of the giants and the faeries. She felt humbled in its presence, for it reminded her of the strength and beauty of that which was slowly leaking from the world.\n\nWhat sort of world will this be when all the charm has gone? she wondered with dreadful foreboding. Can anything ever take its place?\n\nWhat could the future possibly hold for a world without magic?\n\nSo it was with humility and regret that she took the few short steps up to the nearest pebble, and with sadness that she lowered her snout and nudged it out of line. A tiny movement, but one of terrible importance, for as that one small stone settled into the ice, Gossamer felt the magic flee the circle and evaporate into the wintry air.\n\nGone!\n\nVelvet wisely kept her distance, sensing her companion's distress. She managed a wan smile as Gossamer paced heavily past her, and watched in silence as her friend wandered up to the highest point of the low ridge encircling the plain of ice. But Velvet could not long contain herself for long.\n\n'Well?' she cried, breathlessly joining Gossamer on top of the ridge.\n\n'It's done,' Gossamer sighed.\n\n'Then we can go? We've finished our work here?'\n\n'I don't know, Velvet. Let's stay here a little longer, just to see.'\n\nAnd so they stayed, and the fog came and with it the night, and suddenly it seemed that they had nowhere to go. Above them were only the stars, too far away ever to be reached, while below them the land had been obliterated.\n\n'No moon,' said Gossamer presently.\n\nThe two dragons gazed down on the fog. Night spread beyond the mountain, yet somehow did not seem to touch it; it was as though the night stopped short of its slopes, afraid to breach some invisible barrier. Grey and dim in the starlight, the fog moved with slow, heaving waves, occasional ripples disturbing its surface and sending wisps of vapour in long, reaching claws that turned over and over before gradually descending again into the back of the beast that had spawned them. Showing nothing, hiding all, the fog surrounded the lower half of the mountain in a massive blanket from which the upper slopes thrust like an island from a calm, grey sea.\n\nAlthough the battle was already raging in Covamere below, there was no sign of dragon either above or within its folds.\n\n'It looks so peaceful,' whispered Gossamer, looking down into the bank of cloud.\n\n'It looks cold and damp to me,' Velvet replied with a shudder. 'You don't want to go down there, do you?'\n\nGossamer shook her head. 'We'll stay here for a while longer. At least until the fog's cleared. Then we might stand a chance of finding the others again.'\n\n'Oh yes!' exclaimed Velvet. 'I'm looking forward to that more than anything. Do you think Cumber will be all right? Oh, and Fortune of course.'\n\nGossamer shrugged. Although she shared Velvet's yearning to leave these cold slopes and find again the warmth of other dragons, she felt that their task here had been too easy, that their work here was not yet done.\n\nAll the circles are broken, she thought restlessly. But why? What was it all for?\n\nNo light from the outside world reached into Halcyon's chamber. All the same, he knew when the sky began to change. The light charms spiralling up into the glare wavered and bobbed as the distant heavens lurched.\n\nHalcyon scented through the final barrier of charm. The dragons beyond had retreated, their task incomplete, no doubt summoned to join the battle.\n\nNow Wraith will come, he thought grimly. And with relief.\n\nAbove him, the stars shifted.\n\n'Look!' exclaimed Velvet, waggling her wings frantically. 'Look, Gossamer! The sky's moving!'\n\nOpen-mouthed, they both stared up at the stars, they alone witnesses to the spectacle. The Eye, the single brilliant star about which all the others turned, remained as immobile as it had across the aeons, but its countless neighbours were all undergoing a strange transformation. A wave rippled through the blackness of space, leaving stars dimmed and repositioned in its wake. From north to south it swept, gathering star after star in its relentless passage until familiar patterns were broken.\n\nWhat remained was a sky changed, a sky alien to the two dragons who gazed up into its secret depths. They trembled, afraid.\n\nLight burst upon them.\n\nThe moon, absent from the sky for days uncounted, returned from the timeless limbo that had claimed it, exploding into view with a flash of energy that sent tiny sparks racing through the field of ice covering the flat mountain peak. What power had taken it from time's influence? No dragon would ever know. But, wherever it had been, the moon returned full, a bright, blue-white orb ringed with crystals of white that danced in the air and created a glowing, shimmering halo. Cold and dispassionate, it looked down on the two dragons, casting its icy rays across the summit.\n\nAcross the stones.\n\nMoonbeams flickered, caressing the ice. Muffled sounds rose up from deep underground. Gossamer and Velvet watched the light pouring down from above, following its path with their gaze until they too looked upon the ring of stones.\n\nNoise again, a faint crackling. The ice shook.\n\nMoonlight bleached the arena.\n\nOne by one, the stones began to grow. Just as they had in the presence of Mantle and Halcyon, they grew, only this time they did not stop until they dwarfed the two frightened dragons who stared in awe at their ever-growing forms. Up they lurched like lumbering giants, shaking off ice in great tumbling flakes, rocking from side to side as they reached towards the reborn moon that drew them skywards, and only gradually did they slow and eventually stop, settling a fraction back into the cracked ice with reluctant groans, black and broken shapes that stretched and twisted as though some inner spirit in each was still trying to reach for the stars.\n\nDumbfounded, Gossamer and Velvet looked from moon to stone then back to moon again, and even if they did not understand what power had brought about this strange happening, a single exchanged glance confirmed one thing: their task here on the summit of the Plated Mountain was not over. Not at all.\n\nIt had only just begun.\n\nWraith could sense how thin the barrier was. Yet the charm that shored it up was charm of such devastating power that even he was daunted by it. He tapped at the stone delicately with his bony Realm-arms, but it did not yield. Solid as eternity, fluid as time, the charm flowed in every direction through this fragile rock barrier, the only thing now separating him from Halcyon and the inner chambers of the Plated Mountain.\n\nFrom the Maze.\n\nA short while before, Wraith had received reports warning of the imminent attack of the Natural army. The sentries from Whare Vale, too dismissive of Sleet's original story to consider it worth warning Covamere, had returned in terror after fleeing the breakout at the prison. Shatter's army, they claimed, had launched a surprise offensive against the prison and they had been forced to retreat against overwhelming odds. Even now, they said, the army was behind them. Covamere must be prepared, they said, and Shatter defeated.\n\nWraith had detected their lies, but he did not doubt that this army of natural dragons existed. He at once called an assembly in one of the principal arenas of Covamere, an assembly by which he planned to rouse his army to readiness for war and simultaneously prepare the way for his own triumphant entry into the mountain, and the Maze.\n\nIt was here that the Black Dragon made his first serious error of judgement.\n\nWraith did not believe that mere Naturals would be able to find their way here through the fog. No, they would wait until visibility had improved before they attacked, thus giving him time to organise defences. So it was with leisurely grace that he descended into the arena on a cushion of charm. He drank in the moment, savouring the sight of the upturned faces. Dragons \u2014 his dragons, ready for his command.\n\nA command he never gave, for no sooner had Wraith landed than the Naturals attacked.\n\nWave after wave of them flooded into the arena, natural dragons breaking out of the fog in an endless flow of body and wing and claw. Many hundreds of Charmed died in that first attack, the Naturals' advantages of surprise and massive numbers far outweighing the superior fighting power of their charmed adversaries. Retaliation began soon, but not soon enough for Wraith's liking; already too many Charmed lay dead or dying, for the crush of the crowd only exacerbated the terrible situation into which he had led his army. With the Naturals crashing on to their heads from above, the charmed dragons found themselves not in an arena but in a trap, unable to rally quickly enough to fend off the first, devastating assault.\n\nBut rally they did at last, and Wraith's confidence was restored as he saw his dragons lifting one by one into the grey air. The light of charm began to slice through the fog, boiling the vapour and cutting through flesh. Now it was the Naturals who were trapped, penned in by the sheer weight of their own numbers, unable to turn quickly enough to avoid the lances of fire charm now being launched into their midst. Blood and bone began to rain down, scattering over the broken bodies already lying piled in the arena, and soon the sky was alive with flame.\n\nFirst blood to the Naturals, but second and third to the Charmed. Wraith did not wait around to see the rest.\n\n'Fight, my dragons!' he roared, his voice resounding through sky and soil, through world and Realm. All dragons heard his words, for they echoed like no thunder that had ever been heard before. 'Fight and you shall prevail!'\n\nAs Wraith bellowed, a shaft of clear air opened in the fog, exposing the night sky through the resulting gap. Dark at first, the sky suddenly flared blue, and there was the moon. Then the fog closed in again and Wraith took his cue.\n\n'The moon returns to us and it is full!' he rumbled. 'The time of prophecy is here! Fight for your lives and for your leader, for when I return to you the Maze of Covamere will be mine. Charm will prevail, dragons!'\n\nWith those words, he slashed his way into the Realm, disappearing from the view of those few dragons left alive in the arena, while above and beyond the place he had left empty the battle raged. Magic filled the bank of fog with lightning, fire pulsing in the gloom like a hidden heartbeat.\n\nDragon fought dragon at the turning of the world, and Wraith fled inside the mountain towards his own, secret fate. The battle left behind, he travelled swiftly down the passage that his pathfinders had opened for him. Finding them loitering uncertainly at the final barrier, he dismissed them at once, assigning them to various battalions which even they knew they had no hope of finding amid the chaos. It was some measure of their fear of the Black Dragon that they fled his presence, choosing instead the battle outside.\n\nAnd now here he stood, waiting in the dark, feeling the charm that Halcyon had laid before him, scenting at the challenge, savouring already the glory that would soon be his.\n\nBefore him rose a smooth, black wall of solid lava, polished and made perfect by the flow of magic across its surface. The passage it blocked was narrow but very high, more a slot than a tunnel.\n\nClosing his eyes, Wraith sent his sight out into the Realm.\n\nTiny monsters wriggled beneath his gaze in this other world, but he was their master. Multi-legged, many-brained, they struggled in his embrace until finally they succumbed to his influence. Bloodless and cold they lay limp in the clutches of his strange, distorted claws as he drew them through into this world.\n\nHe crushed the Realm-things until white juices flowed from their diamond bodies. Flinging the juices high against the wall, he watched intently as the droplets shattered on the rock. As they fragmented, they met the charm that was set there and boiled to vapour instantly, but in the patterns of the steam Wraith saw things he had not detected before: shapes, weaves, cracks.\n\nWeaknesses!\n\nEyes fixed, wings opened, Wraith elevated himself two trees high until he was hovering close to a slightly paler spot on the wall. Here he sprayed a little more of the Realm juice, noting with satisfaction the way it shuddered before vaporising. Closing his yellow eyes and extending his skeletal forearms deep into the Realm, Wraith thrust talons of magic into the space behind the wall and then pulled them back towards him, puncturing the barrier of charm from the opposite side and sending the unleashed energies spraying out into the chamber beyond.\n\nAt once he felt an answering thrust from another dragon \u2014 Halcyon! \u2014 who managed to divert the torrent of charm harmlessly into some waiting void far off in the Realm. With a tremendous groan and a flicker of deep orange flame, the river of charm embedded itself into that other world, leaving only the rock itself between the Black Dragon and his prey.\n\nLowering his head, Wraith broke open the wall with a single, gentle tap. With his jaws gaping, he bit into the remaining fragments of rock, tearing them apart and spitting them out into the spiralling cave that awaited him. He surged forwards and grasped the lip of the hole he had made in the wall.\n\nThere below him, looking up with old, tired eyes, was the hunched form of Halcyon. Brown and feeble, he was surely no match for the great conqueror who had finally emerged to confront him. Wraith's eyes flashed, his mouth opened again with hungry expectation.\n\nSomething moved below. Glancing down, Wraith saw a flash of white as a third dragon forced his way through the bottom part of the wall of rock, bursting through immediately in front of Halcyon and floating before the old dragon's tired gaze. Bobbing a scale's width above the ground, the dragon turned his thin, bleached face up towards where Wraith was perched.\n\nIt was Insiss.\n\nWraith drew in a breath, tasting the remains of the charm from which Halcyon's barrier had been constructed. The flavour was odd, the same as that which had danced at the limits of his senses ever since he had started this invasion of the mountain. Old. Powerful. Awake. Not dragon.\n\nHe looked past Halcyon and Insiss. The chamber stretched away into the distance, lowering as it turned towards the deeper tunnels leading to the centre of the mountain and the entrance to the Maze. Wraith sensed massive powers building there, but for the moment his attention was captivated by something much nearer.\n\nNear the bottom of the illuminated spiral chimney was a crack in the wall. Light wriggled there, chasing up and down, back and forth. Light and movement. As Wraith watched, the crack widened into a hole. Something moved within, something with blank silver eyes and a long, sinuous tail. Something ancient and reptilian, whose breath was like a shadow and whose gaze could kill. Something that had slept and which was now awake.\n\nMoving slowly into the light of its own making, outstaring the Black Dragon and ignoring all else, came the basilisk."
            },
            {
                "title": "Confrontation",
                "text": "Beneath the high, spiral roof of Halcyon's chamber, all was still. Chill air clenched tight between the pressure of the winter without, and the charm of the Maze within. A held breath in the throat of a motionless beast.\n\nInsiss spoke first.\n\n'My lord!' he cried, aiming his words cunningly so that it was not clear whether he was addressing Wraith or Halcyon. 'I am here to do your bidding, whatever it may be. My counsel is yours. Ask and I shall serve.'\n\nHis slippery words vanished without echo, as if the rock had sucked them away in contempt. Insiss inhaled sharply, glancing first to Wraith, next to Halcyon, finally to the still form of the basilisk, perched high on the wall above. Wraith and Halcyon ignored him; they had eyes only for each other. Insiss cowered slightly, cowed by the intensity of their shared gaze. Some part of him sensed that something was being made here. The future?\n\nWhatever it is, I will be a part of it! Insiss resolved.\n\nThe air stirred as Halcyon tipped his bony head a little to one side. This small gesture seemed to unnerve Wraith, who retreated a little beneath his wings.\n\n'Who do you think you are, dragon?' Wraith boomed from his own perch opposite the basilisk. 'Do you believe you can withstand me? Do you believe that any will prevail but the Black Dragon?'\n\nSaying nothing, Halcyon dared to smile.\n\n'Are you afraid to reply, dragon?' roared Wraith, enraged now. 'Do you dare to mock me?' Restraining his anger, he presented a thin smile of his own. 'Or perhaps you wish to challenge me as I challenge you. Is that it, dragon? Do you truly believe a creature as feeble as you can defy the might of the Black Dragon?'\n\nTaking a deep breath, Wraith spread his terrible claws outwards. Flame flashed between them, chasing back along their bones and up the hard tendons of his neck to emerge through his mouth in a broad jet of orange fire.\n\n'I accept your challenge, Halcyon!' he thundered through the hiss of the fire. 'Choose your moment of your challenge well, for it will be your last!'\n\nThe fire died away and his words, like those of Insiss, were absorbed into the rock. The basilisk watched implacably from the opposite wall, its silver eyes blank and unreadable, its body pale and indistinct, its breath a lethal cloud about its blunt and ancient face.\n\nHalcyon continued to smile.\n\nInsiss flicked a glance at Halcyon. If these two dragons were indeed to battle, Wraith would surely win. In which case, Insiss needed to repair the damage he had inflicted on their already fragile relationship. He had long anticipated this confrontation, and so long ago had decided that he would be present at it. That was real reason he had left Wraith's side \u2014 not to abandon the Black Dragon, but to gain the independence he needed to bring himself to this place, this moment. This turning point.\n\nWhoever survives this will be my new master.\n\nBut which dragon would it be?\n\n'Lost dragon.'\n\nThe words drifted through the cold air like smoke, floating up to where Wraith was poised high on the rock wall. When they reached his ear, his yellow eyes opened wide in fury.\n\n'Lost dragon,' Halcyon repeated. 'That is what you are. I knew you when your colour was not black, before you took on all the weight that you call charm, but which is only shame. I knew you when you came to this chamber, and passed beyond these tunnels and into the heart of the mountain. I saw you enter the Maze, and I saw the Maze spit you back out. I saw you lost, and saved. I know you, Black Dragon. I know your past, and perhaps a little of your future. How much can you really say you know of me?'\n\nHalcyon's voice was pitched low, but his words came out strong. Wraith spat back his reply.\n\n'I know that you are old, Halcyon. I know that your time is past, and mine is here. I can see all of your future, Halcyon, for it is short. It starts and ends here. Your only choice is the manner of your downfall.'\n\nHalcyon rubbed his shoulder with an outstretched claw. 'Would you not rather come down here, lost dragon?' He winced slightly. 'We could talk more easily.'\n\nWraith laughed. 'Tired? In pain? No, I will stay here a little longer, for it is you who are lost. I know my place here. It is a pity you do not.'\n\n'Pain?!' roared Halcyon, his voice suddenly expanding with terrifying power. Ice crackled on the walls as his voice boomed out, and Insiss cowered. 'What do you know of pain, lost dragon? Do you think to be leader is to know anything but pain? Whenever a dragon dies, I too die too. Whenever pain is felt, it is felt by me. All dragons come to me, and all dragons are me. Even now I feel the war that you have brought to my lands, even now the pain is mine. Is this what you want, lost dragon, all this pain?!'\n\nHalcyon whipped back his tattered wings and reared up on his legs, exposing his breast to Wraith, and it seemed to the Black Dragon that the battle was brought before him, for his vision filled up with blood and his ears with screams and his nostrils with the scent of death. Fangs cracked and scales shattered, wings folded and claws sliced, and all this happened within the spread of Halcyon's wings. The chamber was bathed in a deathly red light, a light that sprang from Halcyon's breast, his heart, and Wraith saw that the words Halcyon had spoken were true, that to be leader was to share the pain of one's subjects ten thousand times over. He shuddered, horrified by this awful display. Yet was it not also inspiring?\n\nIs the counterpoint of pain not the glory? Shall I as leader not know the ecstasy as well as the agony?\n\nNow Wraith spread his wings, unfurling their great, black sails until they seemed to fill all of the space beneath the roof. The red light pounded against them and was sucked away by them, pulled into Wraith's own body even as it left Halcyon's, shedding droplets of magic on to the floor, the wall, and even the upturned face of Insiss, as Wraith took on the very pain that Halcyon was trying to use against him.\n\nInsiss looked on amazed, at Halcyon pouring out the horror of the carnage above ground, at Wraith drinking it in like pure spring water, revelling in the nightmare. And yet, of the two dragons, suddenly it was Halcyon who had the real strength. There was something in his eyes, his stance. His charm. Something indomitable.\n\nVery well.\n\nInsiss slipped round to stand beside Halcyon, his mind made up at last. It was a dangerous gamble, to choose his patron before the outcome of the contest was clear. And yet he was willing to take the chance. After all, was life not simply a huge and lethal game in which only those who dared to risk all could truly be said to have won?\n\nThrough the red glare, Wraith saw Insiss move silently to Halcyon's side, and knew at once that he had been betrayed. The realisation brought him cold pleasure, for now he had good reason to dispose of Insiss too.\n\nAt last Halcyon ceased his demonstration, folding his wings away and sagging back on to his haunches.\n\n'Insiss!' Wraith called with soft menace. 'I see that your choice is made. Very well, I accept your decision.' He paused. 'Now accept mine.'\n\nLunging with his claws, the Black Dragon tore a chunk of lava from the wall and hurled it down towards his former lieutenant. Insiss ducked the projectile with ease, but as it struck the floor it exploded into countless tiny shards, each one of which immediately sprang up from the ground towards his face. Halcyon watched impassively as the minute fragments embedded themselves into Insiss's head. Insiss jerked once before slumping dead to the floor, what remained of his head a mass of bloody pulp.\n\n'Enough!' Wraith cried before the deadly swarm of rock shards could go to work on the corpse. With a flourish of his wings, he banished the charm into the Realm from which it had come.\n\n'And now?' prompted Halcyon.\n\n'What is your choice, dragon?' replied Wraith. 'Is it to be pain, or something worse?'\n\nHe dropped silently from his perch and alighted in front of Halcyon. Above them both, the basilisk blinked, leaning out over the precipice to which it clung, better to observe the events unfolding in the chamber below. Reflected in its featureless eyes were the twin forms of Wraith and Halcyon, facing each other in this ancient chamber.\n\nBeyond them all, the Maze began to churn.\n\nNo sooner had the summit stones undergone their strange transformation than the dragon appeared, crawling painfully over the lip of a distant ridge and slumping down at the edge of the stone circle. Gossamer and Velvet looked on uncertainly as the dragon struggled into the shadow of one of the highest stones and collapsed there. He lay motionless in the snow, so still that Gossamer wondered if he was dead.\n\n'Who is it?' whispered Velvet fearfully.\n\n'I don't know,' Gossamer replied. 'But we must find out.'\n\nThe circular plain of the summit stretched before them, the white snow dull despite the moonlight. All seemed dead, yet Gossamer was convinced that there was still charm here.\n\nWhatever my work here may be, she thought suddenly, I cannot do it without charm.\n\nBlue shadows shivered off the stranger as he shifted his weight. So he was still alive. A deep groan issued forth, cut short by a sharp intake of breath, then silence fell again. A deeper shadow began to spread beneath him.\n\n'He's bleeding,' hissed Gossamer, starting forward.\n\n'But it might be ...' began Velvet.\n\n'If it was Fortune, I would help him. If it was Cumber, wouldn't you?' Regretting the sharpness of her tone, Gossamer added more gently, 'I'll be careful.'\n\nSpreading her earth-red wings in the cold air, Gossamer flew to the opposite side of the ring of stones, coming to ground a wingspan short of the hunched dragon. As she passed over the centre of the circle, the ground seemed to hum slightly, as though acknowledging her presence. She felt the heat of charm there.\n\nBut not for me.\n\nAnother thought came to her.\n\nNot yet.\n\nThe dragon was a strong, young male with a dull coat and pale underbelly. Dark eyes glowered at her from the shadow of the stone against which he slumped. He moved, grunted, and at last Gossamer saw his misfortune: the dragon's left wing was all but destroyed. It stuck forward crazily from his flank, blood caking the entire span of its delicate membrane; the edges were torn and raw. Halfway along the wing's length, the supporting bones were broken clean in two, white splinters piercing the skin and glinting horrifically in the moonlight.\n\nCrippled, clearly in dreadful pain, the crippled dragon reached his good wing towards Gossamer.\n\n'Leave now,\" he whispered. 'He'll kill you. Get away while you can.'\n\n'You're hurt,' Gossamer replied, leaning forward towards him, but he shrank back, wincing.\n\n'Get away! You can't defeat him. No dragon can. He'll follow you and he'll kill you!'\n\n'Who? Who did this to you?'\n\n'It's too late,' came the dragon's reply, his voice sounding suddenly tired. His eyes widened.\n\nAir brushed Gossamer's neck. Snow crunched behind her.\n\nHeart thumping, she whirled around to see Velvet landing heavily in the snow behind her.\n\n'I felt like I was being watched,' Velvet blurted. 'What's happening? Who is he? Gossamer, I'm scared!'\n\n'Listen to me,' said the stranger, his voice now urgent. 'He's still around here somewhere. I thought I could escape but he followed me. He found me. He did this to me.' He half-lifted the remains of his wing. 'Just go. He's mad. He won't spare you.'\n\n'Who?!' cried Gossamer in frustration.\n\nThe stranger blinked at her. 'Shatter, of course.'\n\nIf he had been expecting a response then he was disappointed. The two females stared blankly back at him. He began to laugh.\n\n'I wish Fortune were here,' he said to himself. 'He'd find it funny. And that friend of his ...'\n\n'Fortune?!' Gossamer was utterly confused by this dragon's ability to make no sense whatsoever.\n\nBut then, as her shock subsided, she found herself looking more closely at his face. She had never met this dragon before, nevertheless there was something familiar about him. Something in his voice, the look in his eye.\n\nThen she had it.\n\n'You're Wood,' she said softly.\n\nThe dragon's jaw dropped open.\n\n'Who... who are you?'\n\n'It is Wood, isn't it?' Gossamer reached out her wing to touch his face.\n\nWood nodded dumbly, then looked hard at her. He smiled weakly and managed another chuckle.\n\n'Well, well.' He coughed, spitting flecks of blood on to the snow. 'So, do you love him, then?'\n\nGossamer looked away bashfully, at once chilled by Wood's injuries and warmed by the instant rapport they seemed to share. If only they could have met earlier. She looked back to find him scrutinising her face closely.\n\n'Do you have a brother?' he asked.\n\nGossamer nodded. 'His name is Brace. But how...?'\n\n'He's alive. At least, he was when I last saw him, although that was several days ago.'\n\nGossamer's eyes filled up with tears. Her chest felt tight and full. For a few breaths, Velvet had to hold her up.\n\n'Fortune too,' Wood went, although now his eyes were spilling tears of their own.\n\n'Fortune?' said Gossamer, her voice choking as she spoke his name. 'He's all right?'\n\nWood shook his head violently, not in denial, but simply because he could not bring himself to speak further about the friend he had lost. The movement pulled at his injured wing, and he cried out in pain.\n\n'Oh, my dear,' said Gossamer, 'you're so hurt. We must help you.'\n\nWood shifted in his agony. His blood continued to spread out across the ice, yet it did not freeze. Instead, the ice began to melt and run with it, trickling across the ground and creating widening pools of water. Heat was rising from somewhere deep underground.\n\n'It's too late for me,' Wood whispered.\n\nThe basilisk observed the confrontation between the two charmed dragons with growing fascination. Above all, it was captivated by Wraith. This black-scaled dragon seemed somehow more real than any other dragon the basilisk had encountered in its long, long life. Indeed, Wraith was more solid than a dragon had any right to be. Wraith loomed.\n\nMoreover, Wraith's presence here had begun to spark a memory in the basilisk, a memory that had lain dormant for aeons, and which now beginning to rise from sleep, just as the basilisk had risen. The memory was a ghostly, fleeting thing. The basilisk tried to seize it, see it, but it was elusive, and slipped from his grasp.\n\nSomething about this dragon makes me think of shadows. But why?\n\nTo its utter astonishment, the basilisk discovered that it was afraid.\n\nTheir eyes \u2014 Wraith's hard and yellow, Halcyon's brown and watery \u2014 remained locked together. For what might have been a few breaths, or a dozen millennia, the two dragons stood motionless, each waiting for the other to make his move.\n\nAs the basilisk watched, fighting to keep its broad and timeless perception focused on this one, tiny scene, it saw that the dragons were moving after all. With agonising slowness, Wraith was advancing, gradually forcing Halcyon back across the floor of the chamber. At last, Halcyon's tail met the back wall, where it coiled and flattened. Only now did Wraith halt, his breathing shallow, his head held high and steady.\n\nA pause, then a hiss of air.\n\n'Yield,' murmured Wraith.\n\nStaring down at the ruined body of Insiss, Halcyon shook his head.\n\n'Yield!' repeated Wraith, louder now. 'Or die.'\n\nAgain Halcyon, shook his head.\n\n'Refuse and you will die!' Wraith's voice cracked a little, and his body shook. Halcyon looked up.\n\n'I do not refuse,' he said softly. 'So do not pretend you offer me a choice.'\n\nConfused, growing more angry with every breath he took, Wraith reared up on his hind legs and raised his quivering Realm claws above Halcyon's head, which the old dragon offered up to him as if in sacrifice.\n\n'Yield!' he roared. Lightning cracked between his claws.\n\n'Remember this at the end, lost dragon,' Halcyon replied. 'If you wish to prevail, you must give it up. On that truth, everything will turn. Remember it, if you call yourself dragon.'\n\nEnraged and quite bewildered by the ravings of this senile dragon, Wraith swung his claws down. Instead of slicing into the old dragon's body, they embraced him, lifting him clear of the ground. Holding Halcyon close to his breast, the Black Dragon whirled to face the watching basilisk.\n\nThe two dragons vanished.\n\nThe basilisk knew where the dragons had gone. With casual ease, the ancient immortal tracked their progress through the Realm, even to the point where it predicted the moment at which they would re-enter this world.\n\nThey appeared with a crash, Halcyon still hugged tight against the Black Dragon's heaving chest. Except now there was no flesh within his skin.\n\nFilling his lungs, Wraith issued forth a roar that was heard even by the dragons who fought above ground. The sound surpassed any definition of word, or even voice. It was a bellow of triumph and terror, of power and magic, the triumphant cry of a lost dragon who believed he had found himself again. As it gradually died away, Wraith opened his claws and let Halcyon's empty skin drop to the ground. Scales scattered like dull autumn leaves across the black lava.\n\nThe basilisk moved, disappointed by the spectacle. So, one dragon had killed the other, and the victor had deluded himself that his power had increased. It was an old story, and a depressing one. The basilisk watched wearily as the Black Dragon made for the tunnel that would take him to the Maze, and moved to stop him. If this Turning was to destroy the world \u2014 and the doomstruck basilisk with it \u2014 it would not do to let a dragon interfere. Especially now, at this most critical of junctures.\n\nLashing its powerful tail, the basilisk slithered from its perch, racing into the tunnel ahead of Wraith. It would erect barricades behind it, using charm more powerful than anything Halcyon had constructed. Charm that no dragon could defy. And then?\n\nI will wait for the world to complete its turn unmeddled with by dragons. When that happens all will fall, and I will know peace at last.\n\n'What are you?'\n\nWraith's voice was deep, curious. There was no reason for the basilisk to stop at its sound, and yet it did. Something compelled it. A memory, or the ghost of one.\n\nSlowly, the basilisk turned to face the dragon. Unwilling to resort to such a crude means of communication as speech, it exhaled its deadly breath and blinked its lethal eyes. To its surprise, the dragon showed no fear.\n\nFresh from his triumph over Halcyon, Wraith gazed with fascination upon this strange creature. It was small, this creature, no bigger than an infant dragon, unmistakably reptilian. Creamy scales covered a narrow, twisted body, which bore only two visible limbs \u2014 long articulate forearms with sensitive fingers and many joints. The rear half of its body narrowed into a muscular tail. Its head was broad and bony, its mouth partly obscured by the cloud of vapour that seemed to hang permanently around it.\n\n[ When he saw its silver eyes, Wraith finally understood what it was that he was facing ]\n\n'Basilisk!' he hissed, pulling his gaze instantly away from those lethal orbs. 'Are you alone? Where are your kin? Or are you the last of the six? Yes, you are, I sense it.'\n\nThe basilisk did not reply. Its body continued to shake, as if it were trying to move, but could not.\n\nWraith's mind filled up with the stories he knew of this most ancient of creatures. They lived forever, it was said, yet forever sought their own doom. There was one tale in particular, however, that lodged in his thoughts.\n\nThe Bringer of Shadow will come. When it does, it will build its own charm without need of earth or Realm. This done, it will own the power to turn the world in any direction it chooses.\n\n'Do you know of the legend?' Wraith intoned.\n\nHe took a step towards the diminutive creature, his wings spread and his yellow eyes blazing. Hot blood coursed through him. He was almighty here. Having defeated Halcyon, had had though that only the Maze remained. Yet here was something else, something new. A new triumph to be had, and a new way to prevail.\n\nThe basilisk lashed its tail frantically. Its claws dug into the rock. Its eyes spat sparks. Fear baked from its pale body, its silver eyes. Wraith took another step forward, feeling drawn now, feeling compelled. The legend spoke of union, a marriage of power beyond any the world had known before. Fear came to him then, that he had wandered from his path and into...\n\nBut it was too late to pull back. Charm boiled out of the air, spinning them closer together, dragon and basilisk. They floundered as though caught in a whirlpool, drawing closer and closer until their bodies finally touched, yielded, merged. Where dragon scale met basilisk flesh, living meat bubbled up, then new skin snapped around it as the two creatures slowly began to fuse into one. Both were now struggling to escape, but it was already too late. Whatever ancient curse had predicted this congress was stronger than even these two mighty beasts, and they had no choice but to succumb to its influence.\n\nWraith howled with pain as the basilisk's thrashing body plunged into his own. Soon only the basilisk's lashing tail remained, protruding from Wraith's flank like an angry snake. There was no witness to this fateful conjunction, for both Halcyon and Insiss were dead. Only the Maze knew of it and, in its strange and thoughtless way, it too began to know fear."
            },
            {
                "title": "Closing In",
                "text": "Some way behind Shatter's army flew a small group of dragons, some natural, some charmed. They made their way around the mountain as though the dense fog were but a wisp of cloud, as well they might for at their head they had Tallow, navigator supreme. Volley's song held them together as they sped through a darkness which was no longer merely night \u2014 not a mournful mountain tune but an anthem of resolve. Its chorus soared with them and filled them all with hope.\n\n'We're drawing near,' called Tallow. 'Perhaps you should keep it down, Volley.'\n\n'No,' replied Fortune at once. 'Let him sing. The time for hiding is past. We fly, now, Flight and Hardship together. Let no dragon doubt our purpose.'\n\nSo on they flew, at a punishing pace, and on Volley sang. The terrain raced past unseen beneath them.\n\n'We're nearly at the cliff!' shouted Tallow over the noise of the rushing air. Snow exploded beneath their wings as they swooped low over a hidden ridge. Beyond, the fog billowed, thinner now. It was clear why: great fires were blazing in Covamere, only a short flight to the west, and the heat from the flames was driving back the mist. As they watched, the dragons saw lightning arc up from the ground to pierce the filthy sky.\n\nAs the fog parted, the landscape locked into a shape that Fortune recognised. For him and Scoff this was a place of ill omen \u2014 the very arena in which they had been separated from each other.\n\nIt seems so long ago, Fortune thought.\n\nNothing had changed here. The overhanging cliff still reached out over the plateau, a great, vertical crack bisecting its face and half-concealing the entrance of the lesser portal. In the centre of the plateau rose a snow-covered mound of rocks.\n\nI suppose those poor, crushed dragons are still under there.\n\nFortune shivered. The place filled him with a dread he had not anticipated. In the distance, the sounds of the battle rolled in on cold wind. The cliff loomed, large and threatening.\n\nThen, between the sheets of cloud boiling above their heads, there came a glimpse of the dark sky above. Tiny points of light pierced the veil and with them came a rich, blue glow.\n\n'The moon!' exclaimed Brace.\n\nSure enough, the full moon hung high over their heads, and though they saw it only fleetingly through the churning fog, the sight of it took their breath away. Huge and unexpected after it had vanished from the sky so many days before, it had returned, impossibly full, unbearably bright and ringed with a halo of white crystal that stared blankly down at them from the unattainable heavens. Ominous it was, and thrilling, and all five of the flying dragons halted in the air and gazed up at it in rapture, hardly daring to believe it was there, not wanting to consider what events \u2014 terrible or wonderful \u2014 its return might herald.\n\nFor Tallow and Volley, plain-thinking dragons of sky and forest, to see the moon again was simply good, for it surely marked a strengthening of the natural order. For Brace and Scoff, both of whom had witnessed horrors at closer quarters, its presence was both mysterious and frightening.\n\nFortune saw something different again: an impartial eye looking down upon them just as it must surely look down on Wraith, on Shatter, on Gossamer... An eye with no sense of good or evil, right or wrong, nature or charm, but one that simply observed.\n\nIt is down to us, he thought. We are all that is left.\n\nThe thought filled him with bleak fear, and at that instant he wanted to do nothing else but turn around and flee. He dropped suddenly from the cloudy air, landing on the snow with a thud and turning to stare at the entrance to the portal.\n\nThere, in the tunnel, he saw Wraith.\n\nThe great, spidery dragon-monster scrabbled towards him, limbs thrashing, wings slicing the air, fangs bared beneath wild, yellow eyes... and then the apparition was gone.\n\nFortune staggered back as snow flurried around him. Concern grew on the faces of his descending friends as he glanced up at them, panic-stricken.\n\n'I can't do it,' he mumbled, stumbling on the slippery ground.\n\n'You can!'\n\nThe cry came from the top of the cairn of fallen rocks. Dragon necks turned to face that way. Fortune looked up at the figure stood there, set against the flickering moon with an artful sense of timing and composition. A dragon. A charmed dragon.\n\n'CUMBER!'\n\nFortune bounded up the slope with a sudden, glorious rush of energy, leaving big Tallow peering quizzically past him at this strange, scrawny visitor.\n\nWhite scales flickered as Cumber spread his wings wide to embrace his friend. Fortune bowled him clean head over haunches in his joy and they tumbled together down the other side of the mound and out of sight of their comrades, snow exploding in their wake. Landing in a heap, they fussed and pummelled like infants until at last, their initial excitement abated, they strode together over the rock pile and into a second reunion during which Cumber wept for Scoff's wings, and Brace for the first time embraced the young Charmed as a true friend.\n\nThe darkness that had been welling in Fortune's breast burst in an agony of joy at his friend's safe return, leaving exhaustion but also adding new light and hope for, as they had begun the story so too would they end it \u2014 friends together.\n\n'Where's Gossamer?' he had asked in his first frenzy.\n\n'She's all right,' Cumber had replied. 'She's near. You'll be with her again soon.'\n\nLight and hope. An end to the winter. Perhaps, a voice warned, which was neither that of Gossamer nor his mother.\n\n'Your wings!' Fortune exclaimed, staring at Cumber. 'Your scales!'\n\n'Do you like it? I had my doubts as to its effectiveness as camouflage, of course, but then I always say that if you don't try a thing out then you'll never know if it will succeed, although having said that ...'\n\n'You'd blend in if you didn't talk so much!' said Brace and they all laughed together again.\n\nA titanic explosion sent a fireball high into the sky over Covamere. They all turned their heads towards it.\n\n'Dragons are dying,' rumbled Tallow. 'There is work to be done.'\n\n'Tallow's right,' agreed Scoff, his face suddenly serious. 'Is this where we part again, Fortune?'\n\nFortune looked around at the faces staring at him and noticed, not for the first time, that he seemed to be at the centre of the group.\n\n'I'm afraid so,' he said. 'Cumber? We have been this way before. Do you care to try it again?'\n\n'I'd like to see a dragon try and stop me!' came Cumber's eager reply.\n\nCumber's response raised a chuckle, but it was weak and short-lived. As the fire lit up the sky again, the division was quickly agreed: Fortune and Cumber would resume their quest, journeying for a second time into the mountain in search of Halcyon, while Tallow, Volley and Scoff would continue on to Covamere in an attempt to seek out the rest of the Flight and the Hardship.\n\n'Brace?' prompted Fortune, for he alone stood apart from the group. 'What do you want to do? You can decide \u2014 any of us would be proud to have you at our side.'\n\nBrace hung his head, embarrassed.\n\n'It has taken me a long time to find my place in all of this,' he said at length. 'When I saw poor Scoff here in that awful prison \u2014 well, that's when I made up my mind. The conflict has to end, and there's only one place where we can make that happen \u2014 in the heart of the battle. I will go with Scoff.'\n\n'Well said, young dragon,' Scoff murmured.\n\n'Good luck, then,' said Fortune, staring hard at Brace and seeing with pleasure that the youngster was more than capable of holding his gaze.\n\n'Good luck to you, Fortune.'\n\nWith that they parted, Fortune and Cumber standing close together as their comrades lifted into the sky and turned towards the strengthening wind. Fog rushed past them, fragmenting to reveal more and more of the night sky. When the others had vanished, the two friends turned in unison towards the waiting portal.\n\n'Are you ready?' said Fortune.\n\nOn the mountain summit, a dragon looked out from between two close-set stones. His breath came short and cold. His eyes were hard and red. He was still the dragon he had always been. Just.\n\nShatter's memory worked sporadically now. He was still able to piece together recent events, but only with great effort. He remembered leading his army through the fog to Covamere. But how had he achieved that? Something must have guided him. His own greatness, he supposed. Then had come the attack. The instant it had started, Shatter had fled to the rear of the advancing column, flying flying higher and higher until the fog dropped away beneath him and the air was thin and the mountain narrowed to a peak.\n\nNow, here he was at the mountain top, a retreat better than any he had known before. No boulder here to fall, but what of that? Here he would stay, safe and alone, without this troublesome world intruding upon his tortured senses.\n\nExcept that another dragon had intercepted him here. Barker's son, the dangerous one. Had Shatter not already killed this dragon? Or had that been another? Shatter's insanity was now a maelstrom, a whirlpool of doubt where only one speck of certainty remained.\n\nI! I remain! I exist! Nothing else!\n\nStill, he felt compelled to avoid the war he had precipitated, for although he knew the outside world was only a product of his own mind, still it threatened him. This was the paradox that distressed him the most: even though he was alone, he felt vulnerable nonetheless.\n\nShatter had met Wood just short of the summit and attacked him without hesitation. The youngster's wing had broken easily, and Shatter would have finished the job had he not heard the voices of the two females drifting over the ridge. Crumbling confidence had combined with chinks in his scaly armour, holding him back while Wood had crawled to the sanctuary their presence seemed to offer.\n\nHe watched as the females tended to the wounded Wood, and as he watched it all became so simple. Once, he had worked to destroy the Charmed. Later, at the Fortress, Shatter had come to understand that all creation needed to be destroyed \u2014 charm, nature, dragon, even the land itself.\n\nNow, at last, he saw his destiny clearly. The world \u2014 this dizzying, false world \u2014 had contracted around Shatter until it comprised only this mountain top, this ring of stones, these three dragons, and him. All else was void, but they were real, just as he was real, and only in their destruction would Shatter find true salvation and ultimate triumph. This was his goal; it was to this confrontation that his whole life been directed.\n\nIn a world shaped by his own insanity, Shatter still believed that he was lord of all, and it was this unshakable belief that made him dangerous. Perhaps invincible.\n\n'Which one?' said Cumber.\n\nThey stood in a low, broad cave, faced with a choice of three tunnel entrances. Neither of them recognised this chamber; indeed, they had travelled only a short distance into the main passageway from the entrance before they had reluctantly agreed that the tunnel system had changed since they had been here last.\n\n'I think the Maze may move things around,' said Cumber mournfully.\n\n'This \"Maze\" again,' groaned Fortune. 'Will I ever find out what it is?'\n\n'Probably sooner than you think. I think this time it wants us here. I think it wants to draw us in \u2014 can't you feel it?'\n\nFortune closed his eyes and sniffed the air. 'I don't know,' he said uncertainly.\n\n'Perhaps it doesn't matter which path we take,' said Cumber suddenly. 'If the Maze does want to guide us, then it doesn't matter, don't you see? If we're really meant to be here then we can go any way we want!'\n\n'Some maze,' grumbled Fortune, following Cumber into the middle tunnel, 'if all paths lead to the same place.'\n\nThey trudged on. The tunnels were wide and rough-hewn, cut from the same black rock as the rest of the whole mountain. As they journeyed, it became hotter.\n\n'Did she miss me?' blurted Fortune abruptly.\n\nCumber groaned. 'Does a dragon fly? Fortune, you were made for each other, can't you see that?'\n\n'And she was all right when you left her on the mountain?'\n\n'Like I told you before \u2014 Gossamer and Velvet are high on the mountain, far from the battle, which means they're safe.\"\n\n'I hope so. They're just two Naturals, with all this charm around.'\n\nCumber frowned. \"Hmm. Fortune, tell me again about that falling rock, and what happened at the prison. Do you really think you wielded charm?'\n\nFortune sighed, and repeated what he had told Cumber not long after they had been reunited. 'I don't know if I was actually using charm, or if it was just working through me. Either way, it knocked that boulder of its perch, and freed Scoff and the others.'\n\n'Something working through you?' Cumber pressed.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Like what?'\n\nFortune shrugged. 'I don't know. But I think it might have been this Maze you keep talking about.'\n\nCumber shook his head. 'Fortune, you are a master of the understatement. If you knew the import of what you're suggesting, well. I just don't know... I mean, do you realise what this could mean, because I certainly don't think we can possibly ...'\n\nFortune laughed. 'Stop blustering, Cumber,' he chuckled. 'No, of course I understan \u2014 I'm only a Natural.'\n\n'Hmm, yes, of course you are.'\n\nCumber seemed to float away then on a cloud of internal thoughts. Fortune studied his distant expression with a wry smile.\n\n'How I've missed you, Cumber,' he said at last. 'I can't tell you how glad I am we're travelling this last path together.'\n\n'What? Oh, well, don't then, because you ought to save your energy for walking \u2014 and whatever may come later on.'\n\nFortune nodded, and obeyed, walking on behind Cumber even though every step drained more precious energy from his tired body. His claws dragged; his vision blurred; the mountain around him throbbed against his skull; the air grew hot and stifling, making him giddy. He stumbled, and as Cumber helped him up he heard a rasping noise which he only gradually realised was the sound of his own breath in his throat. Swallowing hard, he staggered on.\n\n'Talk to me, Cumber,' he croaked. 'Guide me.'\n\nAnd so Cumber told him about Velvet, whom Fortune had never met. He spoke about how she could match him in conversation word for word, about her indomitable enthusiasm and fierce loyalty. As Cumber spoke of her, his voice softened.\n\n'Why, Cumber,' Fortune smiled. 'A dragon might almost think you felt some affection for this Velvet.'\n\n'Oh, well... hmm... you should probably keep quiet and save your breath, Fortune. We've a long way to go, I've no doubt about that.'\n\nAs they moved on through the Plated Mountain's deep, black tunnels, the sounds of distant battle filtered through to their ears, but they were remote and muffled; they felt protected here.\n\n'If the world were a hurricane,' muttered Fortune, 'this place would be its eye.'\n\n'The world is a hurricane, Fortune. That's exactly what the Turning is.'\n\n'Tell me about Mantle again.'\n\nAs Cumber talked again, the tide of fatigue rose again and Fortune found himself clinging to his friend's voice as though to a piece of driftwood, even though he could not really make out the words. All sounds were merging together; he could no longer distinguish the thunder of battle from the humming in his own head. Even though the tunnels were now unbearably hot, he started to shiver.\n\n'Something wants me,' he mumbled, 'but I'm not sure I want to go.'\n\nCumber eyed him uncertainly, but before he could speak again the tunnel pulled them round in a tight curve and the noises of war grew abruptly louder, reaching a crescendo as they passed into an especially narrow section of passage. Heavy blows pummelled the walls here; flakes showered from the ceiling. For a breath or two, it seemed that some mighty charm was about to break through.\n\nBut it did not. They proceeded still deeper, the noise died, and a new silence slipped in to take its place, calming and reassuring. The humming in Fortune's head lessened too, and he found himself able to concentrate on Cumber's words again.\n\n'... a lot like Ordinal,' he was saying, 'and an impressive dragon in his own way. It was Mantle who spurred us on when we were in danger of lingering at Aether's Cross, you see, or so he told me. In fact, I hope that it's Mantle we find at the end of this tunnel, because I think Halcyon has gone beyond needing other dragons now. Mantle knows what's happening, you see, Fortune. Trolls' bones moving, charm moving, moving away from the world and the Realm, and it's all to do with the Maze \u2014 I saw the entrance to that place in Mantle's chamber, you know \u2014 so if we're here to do anything at all it's to find a way to save the charm before it's destroyed forever, although I don't think even Mantle really knows how that can be achieved, or even if it's possible at all ...'\n\nOn he spoke, filling in gaps between the facts he had already shared with his natural friend, speaking about the Turning, about the leaking of magic from the world, about the rings of stone he and Gossamer and Velvet had systematically demolished... and about how little he really understood.\n\n'If charm dies,' he said, 'the cycle will end and the world will cease to turn \u2014 will cease to be. That's what Mantle told me, and I suppose that's really all he told me when you sum it up. The world is dying. And it has to be saved.'\n\n'But how?' Fortune was staring hard into the gloom of the tunnel ahead. Was there light?\n\nCumber sighed. 'I think Mantle and Halcyon have a plan, but I also think they have no real confidence in it. I was a part of that plan, breaking the stone circles with Gossamer and Velvet, but... well, I think something came along that they hadn't expected.' Here he paused.\n\n'What?'\n\nCumber presented him with a sly grin. 'You, Fortune.'\n\nThey traversed another narrow space and emerged suddenly into the light Fortune had spied.\n\n'Mantle's chamber,' said Cumber. 'But... oh ...'\n\nThe cave had disintegrated. A monstrous glare filled it, driven by a dazzling beam of colourless light that punched its way up from the hole in the floor and turned the blackness of the rock to bland milk. All that remained of the floor was a broken ledge encircling the shaft of light. The holes in the walls were empty; the trolls' bones had vanished, every one.\n\nOne third of the way round the ledge was a dark mound. At first, both dragons took it to be a pile of cinders, but it was not. It was a dragon.\n\nA black dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Healing",
                "text": "Gossamer and Velvet listened while Wood gave them a brief account of Shatter and his rise to supremacy. More painful for them all was his confession that he had fought with Fortune.\n\n'We were growing apart even at South Point,' he said. 'But that's no excuse. I never wanted us to grow this far apart. I wish I could see him again.'\n\nGossamer wanted to press Wood, to know more about him and Fortune and their life together in South Point, but this was neither the time nor the place. Instead, she found herself growing angry at the unspeakable destruction these two dragons \u2014 Shatter and Wraith \u2014 had brought upon the world, the exiles they had imposed, the deaths in which they had rejoiced. Looking at the sadness in Wood's eyes, she mourned just as much all the friendships these troubled times had ripped asunder.\n\nAt last Wood concluded his story. Gossamer appraised him, her eyes burning.\n\n'So, what now?' she demanded, her anger and grief spilling into her words.\n\nWood blinked. 'Didn't you hear me? Shatter's still up here, somewhere. You have to leave me here and save yourselves.'\n\n'He killed your father. He did this to you,'\n\nBut Wood only shook his head, immensely tired. 'My anger is spent.'\n\n'But mine is not!' snapped Gossamer. 'Hear me, Wood \u2014 we're not leaving. If we go, Fortune dies, do you understand?' The statement spilled out of her mouth before she knew it.\n\nHow can that be true? And how can I know it?\n\nNone of that mattered. It was true, and that was all.\n\n'What do you mean?' said Wood.\n\n'Never mind! Give me your wing!'\n\nBy now Gossamer was furious. Her anger was far-reaching, but mostly it centred on the notion that one dragon could have reduced another to this pitiable state. Reluctantly Wood lurched forward, wincing as the remains of his broken wing caught on the standing stone. Together, with Velvet and Gossamer both supporting the crippled Wood, they struggled from the shelter of the circle's perimeter and into the open space it contained.\n\n'Too exposed,' grunted Wood. 'He'll see us for sure.'\n\n'Let him!' Gossamer's rage was a heat building inside her.\n\n'Something's changed,' whispered Velvet, who up to now had remained uncharacteristically quiet. Sure enough, it had.\n\nThe circle of stones had expanded, so that now it seemed they were crossing a vast plain. At the same time, the boulders defining its edge had swelled to truly massive proportions. And they were moving, shifting with subtle motion, changing shape so that bones and skulls seemed to press against their outer surfaces from the inside. They seemed alive yet dead, aware yet unconscious. Observers, but not participants.\n\nJudges, perhaps.\n\nThe three dragons moved in a painful cluster across the new landscape, Wood protesting, Velvet resuming her customary chatter in an attempt to keep up his spirits. Gossamer plodded on with grim determination.\n\nHer goal?\n\nThe centre of the ring, simply.\n\nOnce there?\n\nShe did not know. But something told her that they needed Wood if they were to succeed in their task tonight. And she knew, though it frightened her to contemplate it, that they needed Shatter too.\n\nThe summit stretched before them. The ring's centre was a shallow cone raised slightly above its surroundings. The ground was hot. The snow covering it was beginning to vaporise, chattering upwards in sudden gouts of steam. Their trail was stained red with Wood's blood.\n\n'Keep him awake!' ordered Gossamer to Velvet as Wood started to lapse into unconsciousness.\n\nA huge cloud of steam exploded in front of her face. As it cleared, she saw a dragon step out from between two of the enormous, brooding boulders on the far side of the ring. He paced towards them, his eyes burning red.\n\nThe air between them clenched, and then contracted.\n\n'He's near!' Gossamer cried. 'He's here!'\n\nShatter stopped, frowning at her shout, and at once they seemed to travel. The summit snapped shut, locking into place, shrinking back to its true dimensions.\n\nShatter gazed at her, curious, suddenly only a wing's reach away.\n\nGossamer looked down at her claws. They were standing on top of a small mound in the very centre of the ring. Though the circle had returned to its normal size, the stones at its perimeter were still giants, huge and twisted. All around them the ground steamed, vapour swirling up and out of its seams in a violent dance. It gathered around Shatter, then swept past him into space, leaving him dark and menacing.\n\n'Who's first?' Shatter said hungrily. Yet, behind the cold anger of his glare, Gossamer thought she saw something else. She thought it might be desperation.\n\n'You are,' she replied. She turned her back on him.\n\nReaching out to where Wood lay, only half-conscious, Gossamer closed her eyes and spoke a chant which up until this very instant she had quite forgotten. A sprite chant it was, old and weak, but a charm nonetheless. Magic.\n\nA mighty tremor shook the ground, as though some underground beast had turned over in its sleep. The snow had all but vanished now and the ground was black as the sky. Power filled Gossamer's wings as she folded them gently across Wood's broken body. Velvet gaped, amazed and afraid.\n\nGossamer bent low, her entire spirit embracing the injured Wood. She felt charm \u2014 earth charm \u2014 stirring in her, beginning to flow. She did not care where it had come from. She cared only that it came and that it worked, and that she could help direct it on its healing course.\n\nShatter lunged, knocking Velvet to one side and then whirling to confront Gossamer. She lay still over Wood, her wings covering him, her heart beating a slow, heavy rhythm as it pulsed life through them both.\n\nShatter hesitated. This female is strong. And she is real!\n\nGossamer turned to face him, her face calm. A sad smile passed briefly over her features as she lifted her wings away from Wood, leaving the young dragon sprawled before Shatter's claws. His body was twisted; his injured wing was concealed beneath him.\n\nNow it was Shatter's turn to smile. The moment of hesitation had passed and now his prey was ready to fall. He closed in, leering, saliva steaming in his mouth, red fire dancing in his eyes and turning the world to the colour of blood. Teeth parting, he bent down towards the sacrifice that the pitiful, ignorant female had made ready for him.\n\n'Mantle!' shouted Cumber, heedless of his own safety.\n\nThe old dragon was surely dead, but he had to be certain. He leaped towards the pile of black scales, eyes wide. Close behind him came Fortune, concerned as much for his friend's safety in this inhospitable place as for the welfare of a dragon he had never met. The light from the hole in the floor flickered, hot and humid like the breath of a waking monster.\n\nThe mound of scales shifted, extending a wrinkled neck and opening small yet twinkling eyes. Cumber and Fortune stopped in their tracks.\n\n'Wraith,' Mantle murmured. 'He was here, but he is... more.'\n\n'Don't speak,' urged Cumber. 'We must get you out of here.'\n\nMantle protested as vigorously as his sad condition allowed.\n\n'I must speak,' he began, then he saw Fortune for the first time. He looked quizzically at Cumber. 'A Natural? Here?'\n\n'This is Fortune,' Cumber replied.\n\nFortune said nothing, only observed the exchange between these two charmed dragons. Something was lurking behind Mantle's cautious disapproval, something which set his heart racing.\n\n'Hmm.' Mantle closed his eyes briefly. 'Does this Fortune know of the Turning?'\n\n'He does,' responded Cumber, casting a nervous glance back at his friend.\n\n'Then let him tell me of it.'\n\nFortune stepped forward carefully, aware that if he took a wrong step, he would plunge into the abyss of light that had swallowed most of the floor.\n\n'There is a cycle,' he began slowly. 'It's like a cycle of seasons. Charm has had its summer, but now winter has come. The next summer will belong to nature, and then its winter will come. And so on: charm, nature, charm, nature, turning endlessly about each other.' He paused. 'But that's not all there is to it. That's what happens when the world turns, but it can't turn on its own. Every time a winter comes there is the threat of death for both charm and nature, for the whole cycle, the whole world. Every time a winter comes that ultimate death must be averted. A way must be found now to stop the world from turning too far, otherwise the winter will never end. All will be lost: nature, charm, the Realm, the world, perhaps even the very fabric which holds them all together. An eternal winter that we cannot conceive because, if it comes, we will no longer exist.'\n\nFortune broke off. Mantle appraised him with cold, hard eyes.\n\n'And the Maze?' he demanded.\n\n'I think,' said Fortune hesitantly, 'I think the Maze is the heart of charm, perhaps even the heart of the world. When the world turns this time, it will turn about the Maze, and the Maze alone has the power that's needed to avert the eternal winter.'\n\n'Impressive.' Mantle flicked a glance at Cumber, who was listening to Fortune with his mouth hanging open. 'But?'\n\nFortune frowned into the light. 'There's a problem. If the Maze is the heart of charm \u2014 if in fact it is charm \u2014 then it must sacrifice itself so that nature prevails and the world turns true. If it wants to live again tomorrow, it must die today. It knows this, and that makes it unpredictable. And very dangerous.'\n\n'Excellent!'\n\n'Fortune!' Cumber exclaimed. 'I never knew you knew all that! I never knew it! How do you know it? How do you know it's true?'\n\n'I don't,' answered Fortune with a faint smile. 'But it tastes true, don't you think?'\n\nCumber had to admit that it did.\n\n'Which brings us neatly around to Wraith,' announced Mantle. The injured dragon was hunched over in obvious pain, but his voice was stronger now, and more purposeful. 'As you have no doubt guessed, the Black Dragon attacked me, then forced his way into the Maze. He is in there now, even as we dally here.' He nodded into the depths of the light-filled chasm. 'Halcyon and I anticipated this, and made provision for it, but now... now I wonder if we were not wrong all along.'\n\nHe looked at Fortune.\n\n'There are precedents for everything. All that happens has happened before \u2014 the Turning, the fall of charm... and yes, even the presence of a natural dragon in the chamber of the Keeper of the Maze of Covamere.'\n\nCumber eyes grew wide. Fortune felt his heart stop, felt the shape of the hole that had always existed there like a wound that would never be healed. He remembered his dream at the prison camp.\n\n'Many years ago, a Natural entered the Maze,' explained Mantle. 'Despite failing the challenge, he emerged unscathed. He also rescued a charmed dragon who was lost in the void. A legend was made that day \u2014 although it has since faded in the telling. Years passed, and the two dragons left Covamere behind. Now, one of them has returned.'\n\n'Wraith?' interjected Cumber excitedly.\n\nMantle nodded. 'Wraith was the lost dragon.'\n\n'And the other? The Natural?'\n\n'That name I think Fortune knows,' Mantle replied softly.\n\n'Welkin,' Fortune murmured with tears in his eyes. 'My father.'\n\n'Indeed,' Mantle breathed. 'This changes everything.'\n\n'You met him?' quavered Fortune.\n\n'Yes, I was proud to meet him. Your father was a great dragon.'\n\nFortune wiped his eyes and looked down into the chasm.\n\n'Then if it wasn't for my father, Wraith would not be here.'\n\n'Yet Wraith was our last hope,' responded Mantle, 'mine and Halcyon's. There is a task to be done within the Maze of Covamere and it seemed to us that there was only one dragon capable of completing it. But now there is another.'\n\n'Excuse me!' Cumber exploded. 'Are you suggesting that Fortune should go in there? Because if you are then you're looking at one dragon who'll ...'\n\n'Who'll do what?' Fortune grabbed Cumber's wings. 'If my father was here, that's one thing. If Wraith is here, that's another. If I'm to go in there, that's something else entirely. You can't decide for me. Nor can Mantle. Only I can choose.'\n\nHe held the amazed Cumber tight for a few breaths more before embracing him hard. Pulling away again, he turned back to Mantle.\n\n'The decision is a hard one,' the old dragon said.\n\n'What are you going to do?' said Cumber.\n\nFortune listened to the beating of his heart.\n\n'Mantle,' he said, 'I think you should go with Cumber. He will see you to safety. But... I have a feeling we will meet again.'\n\nWith a dazzling smile, Fortune turned into the light. He paused briefly, flicking his eyes around the narrow ledge that encircled the entrance to the Maze. Its rocky edge was beginning to crumble, turning to powder as the Maze tugged at it from far below; the whole cave was trembling.\n\n'I can see the way in,' he said, blinking into the glare. 'But I don't know the way out.' He threw a dazzling smile at Cumber. 'Find it for me, my friend.'\n\nTucking his wings tight against his flanks, Fortune leaped into the chasm. The air crashed. The light shrank, folded in impossible directions, then blinked out. The floor was whole again.\n\nOne way in, one way out.\n\nThe Maze of Covamere was sealed.\n\nFor Wood, time had slowed to a miraculous crawl.\n\nHe had watched his life's blood drain into the snow as he was carried across the summit, and watched the snow turn to air as the ground boiled away. A young, female voice had hammered at him relentlessly, preventing his escape into unconsciousness and possibly beyond. Now he just wanted to sleep. In his dreams his mother would be alive, and she would love his father, and he would know his dear friend Fortune, and sit with Welkin his hollow on the rocky beach, and together they would watch the night dragons play in the sky. In his dreams the world would be still and safe. In his dreams he would be content.\n\nWood thought the dreams had come when behind the closed lids of his eyes he suddenly saw a picture. It moved with a semblance of reality but it was coarse and dark, as though seen through stone. How could a dragon see through stone?\n\nFortune was in the picture. He was drowning, just as Wood had thought him drowned in Ordinal's cave, except this time he was drowning in rock, rock made alive, liquid rock that battered and crushed him at every turn. Fortune's jaws were white, as though something were lighting them up from within. He screamed in agony. Light flared from Fortune's eyes. His head was tilted back, directing the light straight upwards. Somehow Wood understood that up was safe, up was escape, yet something was preventing Fortune from fleeing in that direction. A wall? A web? Fortune howled in pain, and the liquefied rock splashed across Wood, burning his injured wing, jolting him awake...\n\nWood flung open his eyes to see Shatter, the mad dragon, the murderer of his father, reaching over him with his jaws agape. His body came back to him all in a rush, his tiredness fled and he drew up his wings. Both of them.\n\nWhole again, healed, Wood's wings caught the air and pulled him aside as Shatter lunged. Wood's body was strong and he struck down easily as his enemy sprawled before him. Wood's teeth struck sparks off the heavy scales at the base of Shatter's neck, and he kicked backwards off his flank, snapping one of Shatter's horns in two and cutting a deep, bloody groove across the big dragon's exposed side.\n\nWood flew out in a broad circle while Shatter gathered his wits and then sped back towards the mound. Head lowered, horns tilted, Wood struck Shatter hard in the throat as the mad dragon lifted his head to sight his foe. The momentum lifted Shatter clean off the ground and flung him halfway across the ring of stones. He struck the ground hard, blood spraying from a dozen wounds.\n\nWings pounding, Wood turned again and bore in, striking low, this time tossing Shatter high towards the waiting rocks. The wounded dragon fell limp, dazed and apparently unaware of his surroundings. The stones stood, protecting their boundary, watching the duel. Waiting.\n\nOnce more Wood thundered around, flying wide, far outside the circle. He wheeled about the summit as though he owned the whole mountain, yet his aim was fixed firmly on the one target filling his vision. It came to him then, as he soared in the moonlight, that where he had once sworn revenge upon the Charmed, now all his venom, all his fury was being thrust at a natural dragon. It was a revelation. He wished Fortune could see him now. He wished Fortune was flying with him. He wished he could find a way, somehow, to explain.\n\nWood entered the circle low between two twisted boulders, thumping the air hard as he sped across the arena, ready to deal the final death blow.\n\nOnly Gossamer saw the spark of red surfacing in Shatter's eyes.\n\n'Wood!' she cried desperately. 'Leave him! He's ...!'\n\nThe young dragon's slipstream swept aside her warning. The distance between Wood and Shatter halved, quartered.\n\nAt the last moment, Wood thought he heard Fortune's voice cry a warning to him, but he could not be sure.\n\nHe barely had time to see Shatter rock back on his haunches and raise deadly, bloodstained claws before he struck. Shatter's talons tore out his throat even as Wood's jaws bored their way through broken ribs and clamped on the mad dragon's heart. Gossamer watched, her breath frozen, as the two dragons careered in their fatal embrace across the rest of the circle to the far perimeter, where they crashed against the tallest, narrowest boulder in the ring of guardian stones.\n\nThey fell to the ground together and lay there motionless.\n\nA mighty groan issued from the standing stone. Then, gradually, it pulled shallow, root-like spurs from the ground and tipped over, falling outwards with a rumble and a rush of air until it hit the rock floor with a great concussion. Tiny pebbles and splinters of stone cascaded around it for a time and then all was calm. Gossamer and Velvet ran to where the warring males lay inert. Shatter was dead, his body snapped almost in two by the force of Wood's final blow.\n\nWood eyed them from the bloody remains, his breath a damp gurgle in the ruins of his throat. 'Now you know what you have to do,' he whispered, his eyes dull lenses in the pale moonlight.\n\nGossamer looked through her tears at the fallen stone and nodded. Yes, now she knew.\n\n'I think... I think I'll lie here for a while,' said Wood with a crooked smile. 'Time you two did some work.'\n\n'But we must look after you first,' began Gossamer.\n\nVelvet stepped up to her and whispered, 'He's right, Gossamer. We should go to work. Now.'\n\nAs if to reinforce what Velvet had said, the ground trembled behind them. Glancing round, they saw a narrow crack race to the far side of the ring. Colourless, angry light filtered up from the crevice, staining the air with its heat.\n\n'Tell Fortune I'm sorry,' croaked Wood.\n\nGossamer stared at him for a long, held breath, then forced a smile across her agonised face.\n\n'Tell him yourself!'\n\nWood nodded weakly and drifted into what may have been sleep.\n\nReluctantly, knowing in their hearts that there was nothing more they could for him, Gossamer and Velvet turned to the last ring of stones and made ready to save Fortune."
            },
            {
                "title": "Injured Mountain",
                "text": "Tunnel of light.\n\nSheer and brilliant walls streaking to infinity. Tunnels dividing, dividing again, turning and separating, looping, stretching, multiplying, multiplying...\n\nThe Maze of Covamere.\n\nFortune crawled through tunnels within tunnels within tunnels. Wind tore at him from every direction, distances crushed him with their immensity, time laughed and fled towards eternity. The Maze was... The Maze was.\n\nWith an effort that nearly broke his back, Fortune turned his head in an attempt take in the spectacle of the labyrinth through which he was making his slow, painful way. He was in a some kind of tunnel, he thought, except it was a tunnel not of rock but of light \u2014 a glowing tube that flexed with a life of its own. The brilliant walls throbbed with energy. The air \u2014 was it air? \u2014 was hot and dry. Ahead and behind the tunnel divided into innumerable other, identical tunnels, so that with every step he took Fortune had to decide. Which way? This or that? Here? There? The choices were impossible, the prospect of escape from this overwhelming system of tubes and channels even less likely than that of success in reaching its centre.\n\nIs the centre truly where I need to go? Which way is it, when there are so many ways?\n\nLost and alone, trapped by a maze in which all directions were false, Fortune cried out for help. But no help came and he could only crawl on, head bowed, heart cast down, hope gone.\n\nThe battle of Covamere was raging when the storm reared and pounced on the Plated Mountain.\n\nDragons fought on beneath its shadow, knowing that this storm was not one of mere cloud and thunder. Clouds boiled from the cracks and ravines that were starting to open up in every exposed mountain slope, sucking up the brutal magic of the warring Charmed and hurling it back down tenfold. Shafts of lightning dragged behind them greater shafts of charm, striking and splitting the earth further with titanic blows. The ground shook beneath the onslaught and slowly, inexorably, the mountain began to crumble.\n\nOn the ground, the fighting was fierce and relentless. Since descending into the arena, the Naturals had now lost the advantage of surprise and scattered, grouping and regrouping as the Charmed chased them steadily through Covamere and up the mountain.\n\nWith the unearthly storm pressing down hard, no dragon dared to fly. Where once there had been fog, there was now hot rain and exploding ash; the sky was no longer a place for dragon who cared to live.\n\nAnd so the battle went on. Charmed died under the weight of countless Natural attackers. Naturals perished by the score as a single charmed dragon fired a bolt of fire charm into their midst. Magic seared the darkness; the Realm seethed at the limits of vision as it poured its nightmare power into the world. A flash of lightning froze a tableau of natural dragons quartered by a slicing claw of charm; frenzied Naturals fed from a pile of Charmed corpses. The mountain shook as dreadful energies began to rip it from within.\n\nYet through it all wove dragons with a greater purpose. Through the mayhem, resolute and strong-hearted, the dragons of the Flight and the Hardship forged their way, dying like the rest but also begging, crying out for an end to the slaughter. But the storm lowered further, squeezing the dragons ever tighter in its embrace with the breaking land and the message of peace was barely heard. The fighting continued at an ever faster pace.\n\nCumber and Mantle were blown from the collapsing tunnel like two leaves on a winter wind. They fell together against the cairn, scrabbling across the plateau to avoid both the falling rocks and cracks that were opening in the ground. The air scorched them; thunder roared in their ears; the light of battle flashed close by.\n\nNo sooner had Fortune entered the Maze than Mantle's chamber had started to cave in. Cumber's and Mantle's desperate flight through the gyrating tunnel had been a nightmare of landslides and slicing rocks and choking, burning soot, but escape they had, miraculously. Mantle's wounds had been less severe than Cumber had first thought, and even he had managed to negotiate that murderous passageway without sustaining more than a few knocks and bruises.\n\nNow they struggled together across the shaking ground, heads lowered against the hot rain and tumbling ash, desiring only to be away from this hell.\n\nBut where to go?\n\nFortune had asked Cumber to find him a way out. But what had he meant?\n\n'Up!' shouted Mantle over the cacophony.\n\n'What?! Through that?' Cumber pointed into the whirling, flashing cloud hanging above them.\n\n'Where you left your friends!' Mantle cried. 'There is work still to be done!'\n\nOn the mountain summit, high above the storm, Gossamer and Velvet laboured as they had never laboured before. Periodically Gossamer glanced back at Wood. The young dragon was still barely alive, but the sound of his breathing was so tortured, so laboured, that she held little hope for him.\n\nArcs of both lightning and charm were reaching up from the broiling cloud bank below, vaporising the ice on the summit approaches and occasionally earthing on the standing stones themselves. Velvet regarded these great discharges with dread, Gossamer with a combination of suspicion and awe.\n\n'I'm tired, Gossamer,' gasped Velvet, pausing to lean heavily against one of the stones. 'Can't we rest?'\n\n'No, dear,' came Gossamer's reply. 'We have no time. Shut your eyes and keep moving. We can do this.'\n\nTogether they had felled half of the stones in the circle by pushing them over bodily so that they collapsed outwards, pointing away from the centre. Half the stones remained standing; both dragons were exhausted.\n\n'I still don't understand why we're doing it.'\n\n'To save Fortune. Don't ask me how. I just know that we must.'\n\nWith a groan, Velvet wedged her upper body against the coarse surface of the rock poised above them. Gossamer flew to its peak and, grasping the top, leaned outwards on stretched wings so as to tip it off balance. Crystals of ice and rock shattered at its root and with a thick, tearing sound it rolled out of the ground and thumped on to its side.\n\nThe two dragons stood, their chests heaving, surveying their work.\n\n'They fall easily,' said Velvet between breaths. 'But there's so many of them!'\n\n'Come on,' panted Gossamer. 'Each time we drop one there's one less.'\n\nThey moved to the next stone in the circle and bent again to their strange task.\n\nQuite unaware of the storm that was sinking its fangs into the mountain \u2014 unaware of anything but the endless elaborations of the Maze's tunnels \u2014 Fortune pressed on, his throat dry and raw. There was no sound here \u2014 even the constant wind was silent \u2014 but his own heartbeat thumped in his head. Hopelessly disorientating, each stretch of tunnel was identical, each fork in the passage looked the same as the last. How could a dragon know where to go?\n\nDragons floated before him, Gossamer's face most vivid among those of all his friends. And there was...\n\n'Wood!'\n\nIt was Wood indeed, but his body was twisted and broken. All the dragons Fortune had ever loved were here, his father included, his old, kind face clear now in Fortune's deluded vision where it had never been in his waking mind. But which dragon did he need? Of them all, it was Gossamer's face that dominated his blurred vision. Yet he knew she was not what he needed, not here, not now. Reluctantly, feeling his heart tear, he pushed her into the background.\n\nA dragon appeared bearing fresh, white scales. Cumber? His familiar face wove before Fortune's streaming eyes. His mouth was moving.\n\n'What? What are you saying, Cumber?'\n\nThe words were faint, broken by the wind.\n\n'... which way you go ...'\n\n'What, Cumber?'\n\nFortune strained as he had never strained before. On these words all depended.\n\n'... doesn't... matter ...'\n\nThe wind stopped abruptly. Silence, with not even the beat of his heart to be heard.\n\nFinally, Fortune understood.\n\nA glorious smile of relief crashed across his face, and the tunnel walls exploded into space as the labyrinth unwound about him. Coils of light whipped away in all directions, shrinking into the deep darkness that held the complexity of the maze in its cold embrace. Space, and void, and simplicity at last.\n\n'It doesn't matter which way you go!' shouted Fortune ecstatically. 'All paths lead the same way in the end!'\n\nFloating free, he looked down past his own wings to see the glowing network of tunnels in which he had been trapped. It was spread out beneath him, a spider's web big enough to snare dragons.\n\nAnd I have escaped it!\n\nA whispering voice warned Fortune that had escaped only a maze. Not the Maze. Yet this knowledge did not diminish his excitement, for suddenly he was flying over... everything. The glowing maze was dimming, melting into the landscape spread below him. Here was the whole world opened out flat like the skin of a fruit, vast and wondrous. As he flew over its undulating contours, Fortune had the disconcerting impression that as well as looking down he was also looking up, seeing oceans turned to mountain ranges, mountains become craters. Across the world he soared, passing continents he had never heard of, let alone seen, awed by the scale of creation, moved by the beauty of creation.\n\nThere was a great ocean, there a desert, there a mountain. The Plated Mountain! Fortune sped towards it. Points of light blazed up its mountain slopes and he knew in an instant that each point of light was a dragon.\n\nHe faltered, shocked. Across the whole world he had seen no other lights. In a rush, he understood that all the dragons were here, now. And the lights were winking out inexorably, one by one. Wherever he looked, another dragon died.\n\nThen he had passed the mountain in a blur of speed, heading over broken land and out to sea, and in the water he spotted some small thing that briefly pierced his mind. But too soon that was gone as well, and Fortune recognised that he was no longer controlling his own movement. He thrashed his wings, trying frantically to turn back so that he might help the countless dragons dying on the Plated Mountain. But something pulled him on relentlessly, forcing him to give in to whatever force was directing him towards his final goal.\n\nHe looked up and saw the Realm.\n\nIt crouched over the world, but where the world was great and bright the Realm was a small, bleak stone. It pulsated like an angry sore, reaching out tendrils of shadow that brushed the speeding world and immediately shrank back as though scalded. Fire belched from the cracks that ruined its surface, revealing to Fortune hideous creatures that his mind refused to see, lumbering through the flames in endless torture.\n\nBelow him the world, above him the Realm.\n\nFortune turned from both to face onrushing darkness.\n\n'The battle's moving upslope,' said Tallow, his keen ears finding detail amid the overwhelming bombardment of sound. 'I suppose we should follow ...'\n\nHe called his small group of dragons to a halt, suddenly unsure of what they should do.\n\nIt had been a short, cruel flight from the lesser portal where they had left Fortune and Cumber, and they had not needed Tallow's skills to find their way; they had needed only to follow the light and noise of war.\n\nBut although they saw much devastation on the way to Covamere \u2014 dwellings overturned, burned corpses and severed limbs scattered heedlessly across ruined ground \u2014 they saw few dragons living. The centre of the fighting, it seemed, had moved on.\n\nThey came to ground in the remains of the very arena where Cumber had observed Wraith meet his troops \u2014 indeed the very place where the battle had started.\n\n'Such a terrible waste,' gasped Brace, casting a horrified eye over the killing field. Dragons both natural and charmed lay heaped in the smoke and snow, fog crawling around them as though preying upon the dead.\n\n'No sign of Wraith's Hardship,' said Scoff.\n\n'Nor the Flight,' added Volley.\n\nThe ground beneath them heaved and twisted, hot air belching up through fresh rips in its surface. A sudden movement caught Tallow's eye \u2014 a flicker of life in a passageway to their left. Bunching together, they approached with caution. All was dark as Tallow scanned the corridor, the flash of rain blurring what little vision he had in the murk. Lightning scored the sky and reached into the narrow space to reveal three dragons watching them furtively.\n\nShadows scattered across the ground and walls and the lightning doubled its strength to send a tapestry of light over the confrontation.\n\n'We are the Flight and the Hardship,' intoned the three dragons as one, although there was a disconsolate air to their words. 'You must join us. Please. It is the only way.'\n\n'How many are you?' replied Scoff at once, heartened by what he had heard.\n\n'As you see \u2014 three,' came the cautious reply.\n\n'Now you're seven,' said Brace.\n\n'Tallow?' exclaimed one of the Naturals.\n\nIt was Volley who recognised her. 'Werth!'\n\nIndeed it was. Werth, who had inspired and bullied the Flight before Fortune had come, and who now stood with charred scale and battered horn in the ruins of Covamere. Despite her obvious exhaustion, she raised a dazzling smile.\n\n'This is Lumny,' she said proudly, 'and this is Duce. I recruited them! They're with me now, but so many others are dead.'\n\n'How did you get here?' said Tallow. 'How many...?'\n\n'No time for that!' Werth snapped back. 'We must take our word to the battle. It's Fortune's word and it's a good word. We can stop the fighting. If we believe it we can do it.'\n\nAs she spoke, the scorching rain seemed to ease a little and the clouds lifted a fraction, as though the storm had sensed their mutiny.\n\n'Dragons are moving up the mountain,' said Duce, the charmed dragon, confirming what Tallow had already deduced. He indicated a side passage with a ragged, yellow wing. 'This way will take us out of Covamere, towards the battle.'\n\n'Then let's go!' cried Brace, leading the way.\n\nThe thunder came down again, and then the thunder was in the ground, lifting and ripping it, tearing it open in enormous, jagged swathes. Lightning poured from underground, firing its bolts upwards into the cloud and melting the rock from which it was born.\n\nThe ground on which the seven dragons were standing danced and then collapsed altogether as a tide of liquid fire surged high into the air. The subterranean heat that had once created the Injured Mountains had risen again, shattering the base of the Plated Mountain and sending tendrils of fire snaking up its slopes towards the summit. In just a few short breaths, the fire swallowed the passage, the arena flanking it and, with titanic gulps, the whole of Covamere.\n\nGossamer sensed the storm had turned quiet. Only three stones remained standing. A short distance from where they stood, Wood groaned and turned over sluggishly.\n\n'What's the matter?' asked Velvet with a quavering voice.\n\n'I don't know,' Gossamer replied, 'but it's not good.'\n\nThunder struck the mountain deep at its heart and suddenly the clouds were lit from behind by a huge, red glow. The light filled and then surpassed the cloud, racing towards the three dragons like a growing sun until it disappeared briefly, only to emerge through the ground, splitting in two the circular plateau of the summit and filling the widening gap between the two halves with boiling, molten rock.\n\nThe blast threw Gossamer and Velvet apart. Gossamer cried out in desperation as she saw Velvet crash to the ground on the opposite side of the great crack that had opened up between them. Wood too was on the other side.\n\nTwo of the three remaining stones fell instantly, the sound of their collapse overwhelmed by the thunderous roar of the boiling rock. The last stone tilted backwards a little then stopped, staying stubbornly upright, locked solid above Velvet's motionless body.\n\nGossamer peered into the glare, dodging the sparks and embers exploding from the ever-widening lake of fire. Each breath she waited the further away the opposite shore receded.\n\nThe world and the Realm were mere specks in the void. As he watched them recede, Fortune detected a shared motion that opened his eyes to a new pattern in the darkness. He saw that World and Realm turned together, locked in a circular embrace that sent out faint rings through the void in they both tumbled. This void was not featureless but etched with a pattern so fine that its radiating lines might have been spun from a whisper. The pattern formed a network, a gigantic, incomprehensible structure which casually, as if in passing, held the world and Realm \u2014 and how many countless other worlds and Realms? \u2014 in their rightful places.\n\nIt was vast. It was the fabric of everything that was real and much that was not. It was the Maze.\n\nFortune drank in the awesome spectacle, aware that the Maze did not really look like this, that this web was merely his own mind's way of interpreting a structure he could not possibly comprehend.\n\nThe Maze does not lie inside the mountain at all. Everything lies inside the Maze.\n\nThe strands of the web grew dense at one particular point, and with a rush of fear and excitement Fortune realised that it was towards this place that he was falling. As his speed increased, he saw that at the centre of the coiled strands was a hard, tight nugget of light, a glowing orb that expanded rapidly until it filled his vision, growing enormous until he felt sure it would devour him like the beast it surely was. He closed his eyes tight but it was no good; even through his closed lids he saw it looming. The heart of the Maze.\n\nAs Fortune braced himself for the impact, the orb opened petals at once vast and delicate, world-sized vanes ribbed with bands of light, each with the power to swat a star. He passed through and they closed behind him, and Fortune knew that just as the Maze was sealed from the world so its heart was sealed upon him now.\n\nThe light whirled, and he whirled with it. Blackness descended."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Seed of Charm",
                "text": "An eyeblink later, Fortune awoke.\n\nHis claws gripped solid ground, or at least a semblance of it. The ground glowed, pale veins pressing up from beneath taut skin. He looked up. The floor he was standing on curved upwards into walls and a domed ceiling. He was inside a sphere. It was white and radiant, woven from individual strands of light, woven in fact from the very fabric of the Maze. A prison? Or a safe place?\n\nThe heart of the Maze.\n\nIt was cold in here. Fortune thought there was sickness here too. Disease. The bubble shuddered as though some great fever had infected its weave. Sometimes the shudder was a convulsion that threatened to throw Fortune up into the empty space which the bubble contained; he clung tight to its interior skin and resisted the motion.\n\nThis is why charmed dragons turned mad, he thought with a flash of revelation. This is where the sickness began.\n\nFortune thought he could see something floating at the very centre of the heart, too bright to see properly. As he struggled to make it out, another shape appeared from behind it. Something black and huge with wings unfolded like thunderclouds. Something moving down towards Fortune with oily precision. A black dragon. Wraith.\n\nIt was more than Wraith. Its body contained a dragon heart, but the blood pumping through it was pure basilisk. Dragon flesh embraced basilisk bone. Yet, within the merged whole, the two individuals remained distinct.\n\nWraith could feel the tug of the basilisk's thoughts like a barb in his mind. It was tempting to give in to them, to embrace the power of this most ancient being, but there was a bleakness about them that Wraith found utterly repulsive. This wretched creature wanted to die!\n\nThe basilisk's yearning for self-destruction was quite alien to Wraith. While did not yearn for immortality \u2014 the basilisk's twisted mind was warning enough against that false dream \u2014 the Black Dragon yearned even less for suicide.\n\nI will not be defeated. However glorious the end. I will prevail!\n\nAnd so Wraith held on to that part of him which was dragon, while the rest of him sucked up basilisk magic and basilisk cunning, taking from this ancient creature that seemed content to give of itself and take nothing in return. A quiet parasite, it squatted within his dragon body, neither threatening nor pleading, simply existing. Waiting.\n\nWraith had negotiated the Maze before, and so it was with comparative ease that he found his way to its heart. Once here, however, he had grown uneasy. The last time he had attempted this prize, he had failed. What had he done wrong? Perhaps the basilisk knew.\n\nWraith was sifting cautiously through the basilisk's memories for clues as to how he should proceed, when a scent came to him on an impossible breeze. He sniffed, and then smiled in anticipation. This was the scent he had tracked across the world, and which had eluded him until this very moment. The scent he had long ago learned to hate.\n\n'See, basilisk,' he whispered. 'The Natural comes.'\n\nWraith closed his eyes.\n\nFortune watched, tired but alert, as Wraith dropped slowly to the skin of the bubble, the outer membrane of the heart of the Maze.\n\nHe could see clearly through the thin, cold air contained within the heart. He could hear its massive pumping. He waited, conserving what little energy his body had left, and took the opportunity to observe closely the Black Dragon, this titan who had brought war to the world.\n\nThe Black Dragon's eyes were hidden by confident lids \u2014 clearly Wraith felt secure in here, secure enough not to need his vision. His wings were huge sails possessed of terrible beauty, marbled with veins of copper and gold. They were not black at all, but full of colours more rich than Fortune had ever imagined. Wraith's body was a long, glossy skeleton joined with the sparest of flesh. Two pairs of clawed legs were tucked beneath his taut belly while a monstrous third pair reached up along his neck like shafts of bone grafted from a corpse. Their ends faded into transparency, lost in the magic they wielded. His neck was long and narrow, his head sharp and beautiful.\n\n'Natural,' breathed Wraith as he alighted scarcely two wingspans away. His eyes remained closed. 'We are together again.'\n\nHis nostrils moved, scenting the air. Fortune frowned. There was something about this dragon \u2014 a strangeness about his already strange shape. Something on his flank? Fortune could not quite make it out, but it seemed to him that something white was wriggling there.\n\n'Natural,' breathed Wraith again. This time it sounded like a curse. Steam gathered about his pointed muzzle and drifted out into the heart. Fire gleamed deep within his throat. Then, with a sudden smile, he said, 'How would you help me this time?'\n\nWhen Fortune offered no reply, Wraith began pacing to and fro, his claws sending tiny sparks into the web wherever they pierced it. Then he stopped, and finally opened his eyes.\n\n'Welkin! Face me for the last time!' Wraith stopped, blinking stupidly. 'You're not Welkin.'\n\nNow it was Wraith's turn to frown. Slowly his composure returned and he sniffed again the cold air of the Maze's heart.\n\n'Smells like Welkin,' he mused. 'Doesn't look like Welkin. Well, well.'\n\n'I am Welkin's son,' responded Fortune in a brave, false voice. 'And I have his power,' he added, hoping that his words might have some meaning.\n\nBut Wraith only laughed. 'His power? He had no power, little dragon.'\n\nSomething turned over in Fortune's mind and suddenly he was angry. 'He had the power to save you, lost dragon!' he snapped. Wraith recoiled as if he had been struck, and struck hard.\n\n'What do you know, Natural?' he demanded, his eyes like dead, yellow jewels.\n\n'I know you, Wraith,' replied Fortune at once, balancing on the danger as he probed Wraith's fears. 'I know you failed the first time you were here, just as you are bound to fail now. Look at you. You can't even tell me apart from my father.'\n\nThough he tried to ignore the taunt, Wraith's fury was obvious. Something pulsated between his wings like a second heart. Fortune could not make out its shape. Something inside him?\n\n'You have your father's clever tongue.' Wraith lowered his head dangerously. 'Perhaps you have his stupid faith too. Do you know why you are here?'\n\n'To save the world.'\n\nAs he said the words, Fortune felt almost bound to laugh. He forced himself to look closely again at Wraith, at the sharpness of his many claws, at the vain gloss of his carapace, at the evil in his eye. Evil? Yes, there was no doubt about it, yet Fortune saw something else too, something that made him almost pity this mighty beast.\n\nWraith turned slightly, and Fortune spotted a white tail projecting from his flank.\n\nThere is something inside him!\n\n'As I thought,' said Wraith. 'You are as stupid as the rest of them. The world cannot be saved, little dragon. But it can be owned!' He gestured upwards at the vague shape poised above them at the centre of the heart. 'There hangs the power to own the world. That is why you are here now, so that we may determine which of us is worthy of that power.'\n\nWraith's yellow eyes boiled.\n\n'However, we both know that only one dragon is worthy, and it isn't you, Welkin's son!'\n\n'Fortune,' came the calm response. 'My name is Fortune.'\n\nThe Plated Mountain shook from the massive blow it had been struck from deep underground. Ice sublimed, flashing to vapour as molten rock seethed out into air, and new clouds joined the storm as the mountain's winter coat boiled away in the blink of an eye.\n\nCovamere was utterly consumed in the first pulse of the eruption and from the glowing pit where once it had stood a network of fiery channels sprinted up the mountainside, biting and separating as it went until a wedge of blazing lava had all but split the mountain in two. The split widened and slowly, with imperceptible ease, the mountain began to open.\n\nOverhead the storm continued to rage, except now it was not the fire of charm erupting to meet it but the fire of the volcano.\n\nDragons scattered in the face of the unfolding land. The battle disintegrated into an untidy brawl, and then was forgotten altogether as each dragon fled for individual sanctuary. In one breath Charmed grappled with Natural, and in the next they rushed headlong side by side, urging each other on through the conflagration. In the briefest of times all the rhetoric of Shatter and Wraith was abandoned, as anger turned to fear. United at last, at what was surely the end of the world, dragons fled the dying mountain.\n\nThe fires raged; the sound took dragons beyond deafness into a punishing realm of pain. The flame and the thunder crushed dragons between them. And yet, defying the conflagration, a dragon flew who knew where to go \u2014 Tallow. Behind him flew the Flight and the Hardship, a blunt wedge of dragons both charmed and natural forging a path through the airborne debris, moving slowly upslope, beating a way forward and upward, always upward. As seven they had set out, flinging themselves into the unfriendly skies while Covamere had erupted beneath them; now they flew with numbers doubled, trebled, and growing still.\n\nAs they flew they sang. Led by Volley's voice, they bellowed, their song filling what few gaps the storm had left for rational sound to be heard. But heard it was, and as they battled past there were dragons on the ground who saw them \u2014 now white, now black as the fire and lightning played around them \u2014 a force to stand against the deadly elements. A force of nature and of charm. A force of dragons.\n\nGossamer lurched in a sudden updraught of scalding air. Her wings ached, her skin was blistered and tears flooded from her eyes, dropping away like rain until they flashed into steam and were gone.\n\nShe was hovering over the shore of the lava lake bisecting what remained of the summit. It heaved and bubbled but, for now at least, it seemed to have stopped growing.\n\nOn the opposite shore lay Velvet, unconscious if not dead, the last standing stone leaning over her threateningly, its flanks and her body splashed red in the glow of the fire only wingspans away.\n\nMost of the rest of the summit had vanished, consumed by the fire.\n\nOf Wood there was no sign.\n\nThe air between Gossamer and the opposite shore was ablaze with sparks, embers and burning missiles belched up by the lava; even here she was having to dodge the onslaught. She flew higher, seeking a quiet spot, a way through, higher and higher until she was thirty, forty, fifty trees above the summit.\n\nHere the air was ghostly and her wings could barely grip it. Below, the mountain was a dark mass ringed with pulsating storm clouds and split across the middle by a band of fire. As Gossamer watched, the band widened and spat flame towards her; it looked like a vast eye sending its lightning gaze out into the world.\n\nSurely no troll was ever this big?\n\nShaken by the thought, Gossamer gathered her resolve and dived back down, tucking in her wings to swoop down towards Velvet and the last standing stone, dodging the fire spewing forth from the mountain. The air grew thicker and hotter once more and the lake split wider. Molten rock spat orange beads across her path and she ducked sideways, landing a short distance from Velvet, but even as she touched down on the heaving rock the shore suddenly buckled. A shock wave struck the leaning stone, tipping its root up into the air and throwing it down towards the ground.\n\nIt fell inwards. The wrong way. Beneath its falling shadow lay Velvet, helpless.\n\n'No!' cried Gossamer.\n\nA vibration coursed through the heart of the Maze, knocking both dragons off balance. Gradually the bubble's skin settled again, although it was still rocked by occasional concussions. The light dimmed. A grey tint began to percolate through the air.\n\nFortune stared up at the centre of the heart. Now that it was darker, he could finally see what it was that hung there.\n\nThe lines of force, or power, or whatever they were, had entwined themselves about this one, central anomaly. Fortune sensed movement in them, as though power were surging along the converging strands to be delivered into this point of focus, beads of light pulsing along the carriageways that spiralled up to meet at this centre.\n\nAll the power of the Maze was flowing in to gather at this one, tiny spot in the very centre of its own heart.\n\nThe thing occupying this special place was now clearly visible. It was a humble thing \u2014 a small, grey husk, barely half the size of Fortune's head. It neither shone nor spun, neither pulsed nor spoke. It looked old, and dead, and utterly inconsequential.\n\nAnd yet Fortune knew it was the reason he was here, the reason he had journeyed into the mountain, the reason he had been imprisoned at Aether's Cross, seen his homeland destroyed, met Cumber, found Gossamer. It was the reason the world was turning. The reason for it all. And, somehow, the solution to it all.\n\nFortune stared hard, and as he stared he felt drawn towards this thing. Dull and lifeless as it was, it captured his attention totally; its very greyness seemed seductive, its very inertness an attraction. With a start, he realised that it was beautiful. It beckoned him.\n\nHe snapped his eyes away, suddenly dizzy, only to find Wraith observing him as closely as he had been observing the eerie, grey husk.\n\n'So, you want it, too,' said the Black Dragon.\n\nIn the time it took him to take another breath Fortune finally understood, just how powerful Wraith really was, and the realisation terrified him. This dragon had ravaged the world!\n\nAll the fear and fatigue that had dragged at him earlier flooded back and he fell to the floor, shaking. Wraith watched without emotion.\n\n'Little Natural,' he said coldly. 'You are pitiful.'\n\nFortune was furious with himself for showing his weakness. He stared at the weave of the floor, concentrating on calming his frantic breathing, willing his heart to slow.\n\n'I suppose your father did not tell you what it is?' Wraith went on. 'Well, I shall complete your education, little dragon. What you see up there is the centre of the Maze. It has a name \u2014 the Seed of Charm, it is called \u2014 but I prefer to call it what it truly is, which is the Seed of Power. The dragon who owns that seed will see it bear the greatest fruit of all. That dragon will be leader of all \u2014 not only all dragons but all worlds.'\n\nThe Seed of Charm?\n\nHe knew instinctively that Wraith spoke the truth. But Wraith was also mistaken. The Seed of Power? That did not sound right to Fortune. That did not sound right at all. Like the strange white tail writhing on Wraith's flank, something in that thought was very wrong.\n\nSlowly, painfully Fortune brought his shaking body under control and looked back up at Wraith. The Seed drew his eyes, and as he looked on it again he felt the tiredness drain completely away. The sight of it refreshed him more completely than he had ever known before, and again, soundlessly, it beckoned.\n\nWraith eyed him. Challenged him. Without a word Fortune opened his wings and stroked his way up towards the floating Seed. Wraith watched with avid interest.\n\nAs he drew near, Fortune expected heat, or a barrier \u2014 some force he would have to cross in order to reach the drab, oval husk. But nothing hindered him. He approached until he floated a wing's length from it, whereupon he paused and narrowed his eyes, suspicious yet attracted. It beckoned. As he reached out his neck, the Seed took on a gentle lustre and its opaque shell became slightly, almost imperceptibly transparent. Faces flitted inside, dragons he loved. They beckoned him in: Cumber, Gossamer, Wood, Scoff, Tallow and so many others, they welcomed him. His father, Welkin. His mother, Clarion.\n\nCome to me, and you will find your mother again, whispered the Seed. Come to me, and know your father at last.\n\nFortune knew it was seducing him, deceiving him, but he could not help himself. It was so beautiful, so full of love and promises it would surely keep. He felt its energy fill him until it poured out of his eyes, his ears, the ends of his claws. He felt its power pump into him like the lifeblood of a star, soaking him in its warmth and glory. He felt himself expand to fill the infinite space it occupied. He felt its past inside his own memories, and saw that within its lifeless, grey exterior it held command over the world, over all worlds, and over their turning.\n\nThis, now, was the centre of everything. Reaching out his neck, Fortune took the Seed gently into his jaws. Light crackled quietly across his scales as he was enfolded with charm. The faces of the dragons vanished. Opaque again, the Seed gave a single, minute shrug as it cast off its connections with the million strands of the web and settled gently into Fortune's mouth.\n\nThe severed tendrils of light that had joined the Seed to the fabric of the Maze began to shrivel and decay, curling up like grass in the sun and whipping backwards towards the skin of the bubble from which they had originally sprung.\n\nFortune descended slowly to where Wraith stood waiting. His outstretched claws contacted the trembling skin surface and a jolt of sudden power shook his body, rattling his teeth. The Seed lay quietly between his jaws.\n\n'So you have it, little dragon,' said Wraith.\n\nFortune head was whirling. I have it! The Seed, the Power!\n\nHe knew \u2014 he knew in his very soul \u2014 that he could strike Wraith down here and now, that he could strike down the world for that matter, and still the Seed would feed him the power to strike down a million more Wraiths, a million more worlds.\n\n'You may hold it,' said Wraith, 'but you do not own it, little dragon. No Natural can ever own the Seed. Your father knew this at the end, and that is why he failed.'\n\nFortune barely heard Wraith's words, so enraptured was he by the clarity of the strength brought to him by the Seed. It was like sunlight in his veins, like the cleanest air he had ever tasted, the sweetest water. Every breath he took carried him into the future that the Seed was offering him, a future where he had the Power, where he could rule whatever dragon or world he pleased.\n\nYou do not own it.\n\nThat was what Wraith had said. Fortune cast the dreams aside. Wraith was so near to the truth. So near, yet so fatally far.\n\nGreedy, he thought with an internal smile that cast shadows across the Seed's promise of light and filled him simultaneously with a burning sensation that was equal parts grief and hope.\n\nAnother thought came to him.\n\nHow can I give it up?\n\nHe breathed again.\n\nI must give it up!\n\nWith agonising slowness, Fortune drew his concentration to bear fully on Wraith. In doing so, he had to draw his attention away from the Seed. It was hard, almost impossible.\n\nI can be yours forever, the Seed whispered, flexing between his jaws. Its rough surface grew smooth and warm. The voice it spoke with was Gossamer's.\n\nIn that instant, Fortune knew what he had to do.\n\n'Yield to me, Natural!' snarled Wraith.\n\nFortune remembered how easy it had been to pluck the Seed from its place at the centre of the heart.\n\nGoing in is easy, he thought. It's the coming out that's hard.\n\nHe raised his head and the Seed screamed.\n\nBattling against the torrent of burning, freezing, slashing energy tearing through his mind and across his body, Fortune leaned into what seemed like a tornado. Flakes of fire thrashed his scales and shredded his limbs. He could hear nothing but an all-invading howl.\n\nSomehow, with some strength he never imagined he possessed, he ignored all of it and placed the Seed of Charm gently, almost tenderly, into Wraith's waiting jaws.\n\nThe instant Wraith closed his mouth about the Seed, the wind stopped and silence fell. Shaking uncontrollably, Fortune sank back to the ground. He looked down, expecting to see his body bloodied and mutilated. Not a scratch marked him. But there was more than that. He no longer felt exhausted; his mind was clear and working fast. More than he had in what seemed an aeon, he felt alive!\n\nThe strands of the web continued to whip through the air above them, burning backwards towards their roots in the skin of the heart. What would happen when they reached it Fortune did not dare imagine. In the flashing light they cast he saw again the shape on Wraith's flank. It had spread like a lump beneath the scales, a tumour spreading sent pale, bulging veins into his dark body. He was repulsed.\n\nWraith arched his neck, his eyes blazing with a new intensity.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Fortune.\n\n'Sorry? You dare to be sorry?'\n\nWraith lifted his head high, the Seed of Charm held tight in his jaws as he drank in its power. He spoke from his mind but the words were clear and cold.\n\n'At last it is mine! As are you, little dragon! As are you!'\n\nHe advanced on Fortune, charm cascading from his body like floodwater, his claws ripping great slashes through the trembling skin of the heart, his eyes filled with hate.\n\nAs the standing stone fell, a spur of rock sprang out of the fire and into its path, deflecting it by the tiniest amount.\n\nNot enough!\n\nBut it did slow the stone's descent. Gossamer scrambled under the falling mass and bundled Velvet safely out of the way. A scant breath later the stone crashed to the ground in an explosion of sparks and shards of rock.\n\nFacing the wrong way.\n\nAmid the roar of quaking rock and spitting lava, Velvet opened her eyes and found Gossamer's anxious gaze.\n\n'How many more to go? Are we nearly done?'\n\nGossamer hugged her and wondered how they could possibly swing that last, massive rock around to face out of the ring like all the others.\n\nSo many of the others have already been consumed by the fire, she thought desperately. Does it even matter any more?\n\nBut she knew that it had to be done. Fortune's life depended on it.\n\nFortune backed away.\n\n'You think I will kill you, Natural?' laughed Wraith. 'I will not. The Maze will see to that, after I leave. A fitting end, do you not think?'\n\n'When you leave?' responded Fortune.\n\n'To leave is hard,' agreed Wraith. 'The Seed will guide me. There is no way out for you, Natural!'\n\nHe flicked his head and the Seed changed shape. A grey needle extruded from its dull surface, extending out as far as the web-like membrane of the bubble to which they both dung. On and through it continued, whereupon Wraith whipped his head round, cutting a perfect gash big enough for ten dragons to fly through.\n\nThe needle retracted, absorbed back into the Seed without a sound. A wind howled in through the gash, hot and dry. Beyond, a distant rumbling was building.\n\n'This is my triumph!' Wraith bellowed. 'For this will I truly be worshipped.'\n\nHe bent to the gash, then stopped and turned back to face Fortune. The vengeful smile he displayed, despite the bulk of the Seed in his mouth, turned Fortune's heart to ice.\n\nFortune could see no escape. He would surely have had no hope of defeating Wraith under normal conditions, let alone a Wraith with the power of the Seed of Charm at his disposal. He stood his ground, not daring even to breathe.\n\n'Goodbye, Welkin's son,' growled Wraith as he loomed over the Natural, and there was, Fortune thought, a trace of sadness in his voice.\n\nWraith must have seen some reflection in Fortune's eye, or else his own charmed senses or those of the Seed betrayed the newcomer to him. Whatever the reason, he whirled round at the instant a third dragon flew into the heart of the Maze, entering through the very escape route that Wraith had just opened.\n\nThere could have been no dragon whom Fortune least expected to see here at the heart of charm than Wood."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Turning of the World",
                "text": "It was Wood, but it was a perfect Wood.\n\nFortune looked past Wraith at the astonishing sight of his friend of so many years, so many arguments, so much heartache, flying into the heart of the Maze to join him in this final confrontation.\n\nWraith flashed his gaze between the two of them, suspicious that some trickery was unfolding.\n\n'What is this?' he growled ominously.\n\n'I have come for my friend,' said Wood in a quiet, rational voice. Fortune almost laughed aloud; it all seemed so normal.\n\n'And who will come for you, Natural?' retorted Wraith.\n\n'You will have to kill us both if you wish to leave,' said Wood, flying gracefully around the Black Dragon to land at Fortune's side. 'Hello, Fortune,' he added nonchalantly.\n\nFortune opened his mouth but no words emerged. He touched Wood's wing to make sure he was really here, that it was not a trick of Wraith's.\n\nBut how would I really know?\n\nWood glanced sideways at his friend. 'I wish Welkin were here,' he said, and his eyes were brimming with tears. 'I saw the night dragons along the way. They're real, Fortune, they're real!'\n\nFor the briefest of intervals Wraith was not there; the heart, nor the Maze itself, was not there. All that existed was a pair of natural dragons sharing a dream of their youth come true. Together they could almost feel the warm grass of South Point curling up between their claws, taste the salt in the air, feel the freedom of the wind inside their wings. Wordless apologies crossed over and again between them as at last, at this final, great turning point, with all the world poised above them and ready to fall, they were finally, truly reunited.\n\n'I've missed you,' said Fortune through his tears.\n\n'I'm glad I came,' Wood replied.\n\nWood's journey here had been swift.\n\nHe had drifted in and out of unconsciousness while Gossamer and Velvet had proceeded with their strange labour, but when the eruptions had started he had felt his life finally beginning to slip away from him. His last memory from the mountain top was of the ground on which he lay entwined with Shatter's broken corpse turning first red, then white, only to be swallowed by a yawning emptiness that had consumed him completely.\n\nHe remembered only fragments after that. A flight across a web of light, gradually approaching a brighter glow defaced by a long, open wound. Propelled by some unknown force, he had passed through that gash in reality and emerged here, his body whole again, his spirit soaring, his mind more calm than it had ever been before.\n\nFor the first time, Wood felt he was truly himself, and he rejoiced. He had no idea what he was here for, or how he could possible help Fortune against this monster, but here he was and here would he stay.\n\nHe was Wood, and no dragon could take that from him again.\n\nWraith could not move. The eyes of these two Naturals pinned him to the spot. In the one whose name was Fortune, he saw the undeniable echo Welkin. This was to be expected, for they were kin. But this other dragon, this newcomer \u2014 Welkin was somehow present in his eyes too. The old natural \u2014 Wraith's one-time saviour and lifelong adversary \u2014 was there as a sparkle, a ripple of humour, a glint of imagination.\n\nA shudder ran down Wraith's body. Did Welkin have such power that he could live on in all natural dragons?\n\nHe had no power!\n\nThe rational part of Wraith's mind tried to bring his thoughts under control, but other juices were working in him now. Wraith's blood was mixed intimately with that of the inscrutable basilisk, and now the Seed of Charm was pouring its sap into his system too. Wraith, unlike Wood, had never been so detached from his own identity.\n\nWhy did you bother to take prisoners? whispered the basilisk. You should have killed them all while you had the chance.\n\n'But what dragons would there be to rule otherwise?' Wraith replied aloud. He saw puzzlement cross the faces of Fortune and Wood and grew angry. 'Fear me still, Naturals!' He took a step nearer, stopped when he saw them stand their ground.\n\nNo prisoners, taunted the basilisk. Only death is worthy of a true conqueror.\n\n'There would be no world left!' pleaded Wraith, his jaws still clamped fanatically on the Seed. 'What leader can rule without his subjects? You wish only death \u2014 at least my promise is for life!'\n\nTo prevail is not to live, have you not learned that yet?\n\nWraith felt his spirit being sucked up into the tornado of energy which the basilisk and the Seed were generating between them, and there was nothing he could do about it. Piece by piece, thought by thought, he was being eroded. 'I will stop this!' he bellowed.\n\nHe jumped forward, the two bony Realm claws extending to clutch at Fortune's throat, their honed edges flashing in the ever-changing light of the decaying heart. Light crackled at their faded tips, magic growing.\n\nScreaming, Wraith pounced.\n\nFortune would never have moved in time.\n\nWood leaped squarely into Wraith's path and took the blow full on his chest. Wraith's flailing claws lifted the Natural high and hurled him across the diameter of the heart. Dissolving strands of the web lashed at Wood as he tumbled, lacerating his body.\n\nBarely aware of what had happened, Fortune sidestepped Wraith's charging body, forcing the Black Dragon to change direction sharply. Wraith flung his head around, balanced on the very lip of the gash he had opened in the skin of the heart. The basilisk's tail whipped at Wraith's flank, cutting into the black scales and drawing rich, dark blood. Wraith balanced there, struggling as though weighed down by a heavy load. Perhaps he was. The Seed, as Fortune already knew, was heavier than life itself.\n\nWraith's yellow eyes bulged, flickering to silver and back again, his teeth clenching on the Seed until they drew sparks across its surface. For an age he held himself teetering there, staring incredulously into Fortune's gaze. Then, as if moving in resin, he began slowly to drop through the gash, out of the heart, out into the rumbling void that the Maze had become.\n\nHis expression twisted in agony, but still he held the Seed of Charm fast in his jaws. He reached out wordlessly towards Fortune, but whatever force was pulling him out was relentless. Wraith's legs, his body, his wings and finally the two terrible claws of charm disappeared from view. The rumbling stopped.\n\nFortune rushed to the edge of the gash and looked out.\n\nThere was Wraith, falling slowly out into the void. All around him the web of the Maze was unravelling with ferocious speed, a network of deadly white strands whipping against a sullen emptiness made suddenly visible behind them. The Maze writhed; it spun. It was tearing itself apart.\n\nThe rumbling started again, accompanied now by a ripping sound that grew until it became a scream. The gash widened, running right around the circumference of the heart until it met at the opposite side and the entire sphere began to separate.\n\nLooking round, Fortune saw that Wood had returned to his side, his body whole and unmarked.\n\n'How...?' Fortune stammered.\n\n'I don't know,' his friend replied. 'But I do know the blow would have killed you.'\n\nThe remains of the heart disintegrated beneath their claws and they kicked off into the void. Below them, Wraith swam laboriously through the sickly, flashing light, grasping frantically at the tendrils of web that the Maze offered to him, flinching as they slashed at him.\n\n'Hear me, Wraith!' shouted Fortune as he too tumbled through space. 'The Seed of Charm it may be, but it does not have the power you seek. It never did. There's only one dragon who can take it out of the Maze, Wraith, and it isn't you!'\n\nThe Black Dragon looked exactly like a spider now, but a spider caught in its own web.\n\n'I had to let them live!' he cried, his voice a dust mote in the storm whipping around him. 'How else could I have ruled? I would have been lost!'\n\nHuge energies boiled as the web closed its coils around his struggling form. Wraith's wings and claws struck out at the clutching tendrils but gradually they overwhelmed him, sucking him in, wrapping him into their embrace. Tighter and tighter they bound him until, for a flash of time, all the destructive power of the Maze was pouring through them and into the body of Wraith, the Master, the Black Dragon. Now he was the heart.\n\nThere was a brief, silent concussion, then an enormous, burning flame that flung the strands of the web apart again. Where Wraith had been, a mosaic of glistening particles tore through empty space to be blown into infinity by the storm blasting through the collapsing, dying Maze. A long, lingering scream pursued those shards on their billion journeys. It did not die away, simply faded as it moved beyond the void. So lonely. Lost dragon.\n\nThe Seed remained, grey and shabby against the scintillating backdrop of the fallen Maze, drifting slowly towards Fortune and Wood, free of the heart that had confined it for so long, waiting for a saviour.\n\nWaiting for a guide.\n\nTallow and Werth led the Flight and the Hardship over the brow of the summit and into the maelstrom that the mountain peak had become.\n\nScores of dragons had died on the journey up the slopes, most during the passage through the storm clouds where lightning had torn its way through their ranks with terrible precision. Barely one hundred dragons survived to reach the clearer air above the storm. Beneath them, the volcano pitched and juddered and filled the sky with fire and ash.\n\nTallow scarcely had time to register the colossal loss of life before he was faced with the sight of the fallen ring of stones, the lake of fire, and the struggle of the two young females to turn an immense boulder surely a hundred times their combined weight \u2014 for what purpose he could not imagine. He arrowed the column of dragons towards them and then, incredibly, a voice pierced the raging air.\n\n'Velvet!' it cried, and there, swooping in over the cracked central plain came Cumber. At his flank flew a wrinkled, black dragon who looked older than time itself and yet who flew with the grace of youth. The two groups, one large and one small, converged upon the one remaining stone, crying out names and greetings and prayers as the mountain tried to blast them from the sky.\n\n'Cumber!' shouted Brace. To Cumber's amazement, he flew straight to the young charmed dragon's side and butted him his horns. 'Am I pleased to see you!'\n\n'Are you?' replied Cumber, surprised.\n\n'I am! Now, where's Fortune?'\n\nThe direction of Cumber's glance said it all, but he explained all the same. 'Down there.' A look of determination spread across his face. 'Which is why we're up here! Come on!'\n\nTo their right the lava pit boiled; to their left what remained of the ground still supported six felled stones. Five were splayed out flat in the arc of a perfect circle. The sixth was not.\n\nVelvet and Gossamer were struggling in vain to swing the rogue stone around to face out of the circle along with its companions. Although the stone was obviously far too heavy for them to shift, they were pouring all their energy into the effort. Cumber was touched and, despite the hazardous conditions, it was with gentle good humour that he alighted on the ground beside the stone. The other dragons remained airborne, awaiting his instructions, for he alone seemed to know what needed to be done.\n\n'Velvet,' he said with quiet affection. 'I've been so worried for you.'\n\n'Never mind that,' she chirped. 'We need some help.'\n\nHer face was so tired and so filthy, yet her eyes were so bright that Cumber could not help but smile back at her. The warmth of their shared smile spread to the exhausted Gossamer and they all three embraced briefly before Cumber turned and shouted up to the circling dragons.\n\n'What are you waiting for?' he yelled. 'Let's get this stone moved!'\n\nThey coasted up to the Seed. It seemed subdued now, as if some great task had been achieved, which of course it had.\n\nFortune suspected there were more and possibly greater tasks to come. He turned to Wood.\n\n'I have to leave now,' he said.\n\nWood nodded. 'I don't think I can come with you,' he replied sadly.\n\nFortune eyed the Seed of Charm, then reached out with his wing and gathered it towards him.\n\n'You could go anywhere with this,' he offered.\n\nWood shook his head with a smile. 'I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you.'\n\n'Are you really here, Wood? Is it really you?'\n\nThe Maze was breaking apart all around them and Fortune felt his heart breaking along with it. Wood had saved his life, and now there was nothing he could do for his friend in return.\n\n'I wish Welkin were here,' said Wood suddenly. 'And Clarion too. They both ought to be here, to see the night dragons.'\n\nAs he spoke a shower of light fell behind him. Whether it was a rain of distant night dragons or a shower of sparks from the web of the Maze, Fortune could not tell, but it was beautiful whichever it truly was.\n\n'Maybe there's a way you could come with me.'\n\nWood silenced him with an upraised wing. 'I think the time has come for me to go. We never did get to see the Charmed do their sacrificial dances, did we?'\n\n'Even if we had, you'd have hated every minute of it,' replied Fortune, his eyes moist. He felt desperately sad but his heart told him that the moment was right. Their stories had turned and managed, however briefly, to touch again at the last, and now they both had to depart. The Maze crashed close by, the sound echoing across eternity.\n\n'Goodbye,' said Wood, turning to where the trail of the night dragons shone. 'I'm glad they're real.'\n\n'Goodbye, Wood.'\n\nFortune watched, his heart splitting as his friend spread his wings and moved slowly off into the void. Though the Maze thrust fire and charm at him as he went, the energies seemed to slip past him as though he were invulnerable which perhaps, now at last, he was. Away flew Wood, never vanishing, only growing smaller until Fortune's mere dragon eyes could no longer find him.\n\nIt was a long time before Fortune turned to take up the Seed of Charm again and even when he did so it lay quiet in his jaws, as though respectful of the heartful of grief this young, natural dragon now carried within himself.\n\nIt was so simple, the secret of the Maze of Covamere: a dragon, having taken up the Seed of Charm, must give it up again before trying to leave.\n\nThis secret the basilisk had always known, but few dragons seemed ever to understand its subtlety.\n\nOne such dragon flew before the basilisk now \u2014 a natural creature of all things, daring to hold the Seed itself in its feeble jaws. However, the dramas of dragons were below the concern of the basilisk, and it eyed Fortune only briefly, fleetingly interested when the dragon spied it and registered first confusion, then horror. It floated on.\n\nSome remote part of the basilisk had wondered if the brief symbiosis it had shared with Wraith might have rendered it mortal at last, but that shred of hope had been dashed when Wraith had finally been destroyed. The rebirth had been agonising not just because of the pain it had inflicted, but because it had reminded the basilisk that after an eternity of life, and an eternity of seeking death, an immortal creature might still be resurrected. As Wraith's body had disintegrated, so that of the basilisk had reformed itself so that now, in this strange limbo between world and Realm, between all worlds, through the tatters of the Maze, it lived on.\n\nThe basilisk approached the remains of the heart of the Maze. Here it stopped and turned, lowering itself briefly to involve itself in the tiny, insignificant reality of the dragon. It searched for, and found, a word.\n\nFortune watched the basilisk turn towards him, ignorant of what it was yet in awe of its presence.\n\nGO!\n\nThe word blew through Fortune's head. He obeyed instantly.\n\nThe basilisk swung back to the pieces of the heart. Without hesitating, it opened a mouth as wide as the cosmos, a silver eye as broad as the void, and fell upon the heart of the Maze like a predator falling upon on creation.\n\nCollapsing still, the Maze wrenched free every connection with reality it had ever forged and spun its final, dying web about its attacker, ripping away its last, straggling junctions with the world and the Realm.\n\nIt was in that instant that magic left the world.\n\nFortune fled.\n\nHe sped away from the ball of raw, bleeding energy the Maze had become and searched in vain for some route back to his world. The Seed felt light in his mouth, seemingly devoid of power; he could gain no assistance from it now.\n\nThe remnants of the Maze \u2014 along with whatever it was the basilisk had become \u2014 shrank to a point of light, and then both were gone. Alone in the one, true void, Fortune floundered lost in a maze from which there was no means of escape.\n\nLightning bolted from the distant storm, sending jagged streamers into the lake of fire. Hot boulders showered across the decimated remains of the mountain top. Charmed dragons fell from the sky, every one of them feeling the final, impossible wrench as the Maze was severed from the world. The Realm fled and inside every Charmed the magic began to die. Wings shaped for ornament rather than flight collapsed in the thin air, casting their owners to the heaving, boiling ground.\n\nOnly Cumber guessed what had happened and he rallied the terrified dragons to his side.\n\n'These are the death throes of the Maze!' he shouted over the deafening contractions splitting the land all around them. 'The death throes of charm itself. Have courage, dragons \u2014 use charm while you can or we will never leave this mountain!'\n\nHe turned his face up to the sky, so calm a vista in comparison to the landscape to which they clung. In his mind he watched the threads of charm leaving the world, a billion contacts, a billion sparks of magic vanishing into the inconceivable distances between the worlds.\n\nThe death of charm. It is happening!\n\nHe snatched at a fleeing thread where once he had opened whole routes through to the Realm. The magic wriggled, slippery and elusive in his grasp, but at last he fixed it and filled his muscles with its power. His wings swelled, growing wide and sleek like a Natural's. The charm died.\n\n'Use it while you can!' he warned. 'It won't last!'\n\nThe charmed dragons of Wraith's Hardship worked desperate magic on themselves in those last few echoes of the Maze. As the world lost its charm so did they, and it was with the keenest urgency that they repaired themselves ready for the new world that was to come.\n\nThen a horrifying thought suddenly occurred to Cumber. 'Scoff!' he howled, searching the sky in vain for his friend.\n\nHe has no wings at all!\n\nHe saw only confusion, dragons flailing, charm sputtering fitfully, pathetically in the moonlight. No Scoff.\n\n'Come on!' cried Gossamer, impatient despite the obvious distress of her Charmed comrades. 'There isn't much time!'\n\nThe stone had locked solid, refusing to budge.\n\nFortune tumbled in the emptiness, the Seed in his mouth, seeking out a direction he could not remember. The Maze had gone; the Realm had gone. Only blackness remained. The world was nowhere to be seen.\n\nQuelling his panic, Fortune closed his eyes and focused his thoughts on the Seed. Beneath his inner gaze it was still hot and powerful. It cast reflections of ideas into his mind, whispers, seductions...\n\nPower...\n\nBut not for me.\n\n...escape...\n\nYes!\n\n...to hide...\n\n...to wait...\n\n...to turn again...\n\nTo turn.\n\nFortune aimed all his trust inwards, turning towards the Seed and opening himself fully to it. If you guide me now, he thought, I will not betray you. This is the way I will guide you.\n\nThe seed trembled, and suddenly Fortune was travelling, moving fast through the new emptiness of the void, speeding with the rush of centuries on his face and a point of light planted in the centre of his vision. The point became a dot, then expanded to show a disc and a curve and a broad belt of shadow beneath the light, and suddenly he was over the world and under the world, as he had been when first he had entered the Maze. It was exhilarating and exhausting and utterly terrifying.\n\nApproaching, always approaching, he tensed himself, for he knew that where the Maze had let him out of the world before, there was no Maze now to let him back in. One way in, no way out.\n\nThe scream of the world was loud in his ears as he fell down towards it and up from beneath it. There was no way through. There was no escape.\n\n'Push!'\n\nCumber directed a group of dragons on one side of the fallen stone while Tallow urged on those on the other. 'Can't you work your charm on this rock?' grunted Brace as he pushed shoulder to shoulder with Cumber.\n\n'It's brute force now, I'm afraid,' Cumber grunted between short, heavy breaths. Lava fountained around them as, slowly and painfully, the giant boulder began to swing around towards its correct position.\n\nGossamer flitted back and forth overhead for only she knew, by some deep intuition, where the stone must be. 'Hurry!' she cried, her face distraught in the cruel light of the ocean of fire. 'Please hurry!'\n\nLandscapes slipped past, territories laid out flat beneath Fortune's gaze. At the same time he was inside everything, flashing through underworlds and inner spaces. The world turned beneath him and above him in all its splendour, and as it turned he saw it realigning its parts, recreating itself in new shapes, according to new laws. The world was turning, and Fortune was witness to it all.\n\nAhead \u2014 if there could have been such a direction in this unearthly dimension \u2014 was a growing patch of light. Orange it pulsed, slowly expanding until it filled Fortune's vision, a vast lake of fire shaped like a pinched oval and flickering with sparks of light.\n\nIt looked like an eye. It was the way out. It was closed.\n\nToo slowly the stone turned.\n\nWith a troll's groan the mountain shifted. Its entire southern half began to collapse in on itself, launching a great cloud of ash and flame high into the sky. The eruption split the storm and with a sudden, cataclysmic outburst the lightning slashed its last claws into the night. As the ash spread so it dampened the storm. Thunder died; rain turned to hot mud; lightning fell dark.\n\nMoonlight and lava light joined blue and orange to send brilliant beams playing across the dragons straining at the mighty rock on what was now a tiny island of solid ground. It was only half-turned, sideways to the circumference of the broken ring.\n\nThe lava sea surrounding them bulged like a swollen eye, its oval shape pinched at either end by what was left of the mountain's northern ramparts. As its bubbling surface rose, the island shuddered and tipped, throwing many dragons hard against the side of the boulder, but many more away from it entirely.\n\nDragons took to the air as the ground betrayed them at last, great splits rending its surface until it was a network of steaming, splitting vents. The stone tilted. threatening to return to its starting point.\n\n'No!' cried Gossamer and Cumber, their voices one.\n\nOut of control. Fortune raced towards the eye poised deadly before him. The eye belched fire across his wings; it was like an ocean of living, breathing land. Troll's blood. He twisted desperately, seeking a new direction, seeking to escape the fate towards which he fell at horrific speed. Now the eye was greater than his vision \u2014 it was his whole world.\n\nThe Seed lay quiet in his jaws, helping him no longer.\n\nThen, a starburst of clarity.\n\nGossamer! Help me!\n\nFortune!\n\nGossamer felt him draw near, she sensed his closeness, the incredible speed of his approach.\n\n'Now!' she shouted into the moon.\n\nFor a breath, a heartbeat, all was still.\n\nHere, here.\n\nHere the world turned.\n\nThe island tilted once more.\n\nGossamer dived through the scattered dragons towards it.\n\nA shaft of rock ripped through the lava sea and struck the last fallen stone which, with an unearthly moan, scraped across the rippling ground, rotating, turning.\n\nGossamer approached the turning stone, contacted it, pressed herself against its moving form. Only slightly did she deflect its path, so tiny was her strength in comparison to its massive momentum, but deflect it she did, and she knew instantly that she had moved it from a fraction of wrongness on to the one, true course that it needed, that she needed. That Fortune needed.\n\nEvery dragon there sensed the truth of this final course, and every dragon felt the final, enormous silence as the stone locked finally into place, as everything locked into place, as all the stone rings, all the circuits of the world were joined.\n\nSince its creation, the summit ring had waited for this final configuration and now, though much of its circumference had been devoured by the lava, its place and its purpose were fixed. Much of its power was lost with its lost stones; perhaps what remained would be enough. The lesser circles on the mountain were gone forever; now only the summit ring and its giant sibling \u2014 the huge ring encircling the entire mountain, of which the Deadfall was just one tiny part \u2014 existed, their power and precision combining to focus the draining magic into one point of growing light.\n\nAll the dragons of the Flight and the Hardship lifted high into the air above the sea of fire that was rising beneath them. That was opening. Gossamer stared in wonder as the orange lava peeled back, revealing a perfect, dark circle at its centre, a pupil in an eye of fire. She watched, breathless, as a dewdrop of light came into focus in the middle of that circle.\n\nClaws of fire reached out as Fortune sped through a tunnel of flame. The eye loomed, the eye was everything, orange death everywhere he looked. It reached out to destroy him.\n\nAnd then it opened.\n\nLight blossomed, a tiny, fragile light. The moon.\n\nDragons against the moon.\n\nFortune blinked, the eye of fire blinked and he was through, revealed again to the world, flying strong and true towards a sky flecked with brilliant stars and held firm by a moon full and bright. Against that moon flew dragons, backlit blue and glowing orange with the reflections of the flame.\n\nAlready the eye had closed.\n\nFortune's cry of fear turned to a cry of exultation as he burst out into the world again, jaws still tight on the Seed of Charm, wings lifting him out of the lava that had slammed shut the instant he had breached it.\n\nOne blink sooner, or one blink later, he thought deliriously. The world turns on the blink of an eye.\n\nThe lava met itself and exploded, launching molten rock up into his path, but he powered through unhurt, using the rising heat to dance a joyous course up towards his waiting friends.\n\nHe had escaped the Maze with the Seed of Charm in his jaws.\n\nJoy and friends and at the end of the tunnel the hope of peace and warmth and an end to the long, long winter.\n\nA shadow flew, thin and hard before the moon's disc. A dragon, a charmed dragon, swooped in from nowhere, blocking Fortune's path and separating him from his friends. A black dragon! Fortune felt a scream swelling inside him, before recognising who this old, black dragon was.\n\nMantle, he thought, projecting his thoughts out to a dragon he knew would hear them. I might have known you'd be here."
            },
            {
                "title": "Night Dragon Guide",
                "text": "Fortune reviewed his headlong escape from the dying Maze and found the memories tiring and infinitely heavy. The Seed throbbed in his mouth, a dead weight that seemed to be striving to pull him back down into the maelstrom the mountain had become. Exhausted, he just wanted it all to end. Hot air buffeted his outstretched wings. The sky tasted sharp and hostile and his gaze darted in every direction, restless yet desperate for rest. For escape.\n\n'You've already escaped, young Fortune,' said Mantle with a chuckle. 'You made it. You're here.'\n\nFortune tried to project his thoughts again and failed. He was painfully aware of the absurd size of the Seed jammed between his jaws and preventing him from speaking. He felt ridiculous.\n\nAnd yet he was not ready to let it go again. Not yet.\n\nNot ever?\n\nMantle narrowed his eyes. 'You have one last thing to do, Fortune, and it may be the most difficult thing of all. But before that,' he added quickly as Fortune again strained at his locked throat in a vain attempt to reply, 'you must listen to me, and listen well. The world has turned at last, Fortune, like a great boulder. It has fallen and it is already too late to divert it from its course, for any creature trying to stand in its path would be crushed to oblivion. This is the way of things, Fortune, the natural way, and the charmed way.'\n\nMantle bobbed on a sudden current of air, then went on.\n\n'Charm? Well, its time is done, for now. As it falls so nature will rise. But mark this, Fortune, for some day this knowledge will undoubtedly save you \u2014 charm lingers. It lingers, Fortune, a sliver here, a spell there. You may think the death of charm is a final one, but its ghost will haunt the world until its flesh is made quick once more. Imagine a shore strewn with rock-pools left by a retreating tide: many will evaporate but just as many will remain deep, deep enough to survive until the tide returns. Some of them will sleep, a few will be content just to remember, but some of those pools will grow bitter. Beware the abandoned magic, Fortune; it would yet see all dragons destroyed. Now, the Seed, give it to me.'\n\nFortune blinked, astonished. Mantle's voice grew stern and forbidding.\n\n'It is what its name promises, Fortune. It is the only hope for the future rebirth of charm, and hence for the future of the whole world. It must be planted, and that is something you cannot do.'\n\nMantle's words burned as if igniting the air between them. Fortune's mind writhed in agony, yet he knew that he must pass the Seed over. And yet, and yet...\n\nA fraction of a beast had gained a clawhold inside him and now it barked a dire warning. It promised terror and eternal torture for the betrayer of the Seed. It threatened Fortune, it tried to seduce him, it pleaded with him not to give up his prize.\n\nFortune's will shrank in the devastating presence of the basilisk.\n\nStill it survived, still it yearned for oblivion, still it sought a way for the world \u2014 and perhaps therefore its own eternal, unbearable life \u2014 to be brought to an end.\n\nFortune's jaws tightened, slaves to an impulse not his own, and a crack raced across the dull, grey surface of the Seed. Light spilled out, trembling with fear, scintillating with rage. For the first time, in the murk of the whirlpool his thoughts had become, Fortune understood that the Seed was fragile. If he closed his jaws he would crush it like an egg.\n\nMantle saw the conflict, saw the young Natural pulled further and further away from him. Fortune's eyes closed, then opened again silver, and Mantle found himself staring into the face of the basilisk.\n\nHe recognised it at once \u2014 after all, had he not stood over it once, many years ago, pleading with Halcyon not to weave it into the mountain defences? It had been asleep then, and Halcyon had been confident that he could draw upon its powers without ever waking it. Mantle had not been so sure. Now he knew he had been right. As the basilisk's breath billowed around Fortune's bobbing head, tainting the air he was breathing, Mantle he sensed that here, now, was the moment of his own turning. Would it crush him as it rolled? If it did, it would crush the world too. Fortune was battling, that much he could see. But he was losing.\n\n'You wish to destroy the world, beast,' said Mantle, 'but know that you would still live on. That is your fate. In one form or another, you will prevail. Let the world live. It is beneath you.'\n\nFortune's eyes bulged as if a new volcano were building inside of him. His face contorted, in every sense he hovered, airborne, trapped between desires.\n\nMantle shut his eyes again, and inside he wept, for he knew they were bound to lose.\n\nGossamer watched the motionless drama playing itself out below.\n\nFortune and the black dragon were tiny shapes set hard against livid, crimson fire. Already the summit had consumed itself, what remained of the ring of stones swallowed by a final surge of lava, and now a pall of ash rose to devour its remains, blotting out the fire in its black folds. Perhaps to devour them all.\n\nShe yearned to cry out, to dive down and embrace Fortune again, but she knew she could not, should not.\n\nBut...\n\nSomething was terribly wrong. Gossamer's heart, thundering in the presence of the dragon from whom she had been separated for so long, skipped beat after beat. She looked down into Fortune's face and, despite the distance, into his eyes. What she saw there horrified her, because it was not Fortune. It was not even dragon.\n\n'Give me the Seed,' said Mantle.\n\nThe basilisk exhaled. Fortune's jaws clenched and the Seed cracked further.\n\n'If you hear me at all, Fortune,' repeated Mantle, now without hope, 'give me the Seed.'\n\nCharm moved among them despite the turned world, knotting itself about the two dragons in taut threads. Much of it was the charm of the basilisk, infinitely weak yet devastatingly accurate, but some of it came from Mantle \u2014 spare, captured magic he had been weaving about himself in preparation for a journey he was now convinced he would never make. Charm sparked, charm flashed; for a brief time, charm lived.\n\nInto the knot of charm flew Gossamer, the magic of the earth guiding her, the language of the sprites whispering a course through treacherous currents of magic. She threw out her wings and reached a dead halt between Fortune and Mantle as they faced each other in the hot sky. The ash cloud licked at the three dragons, hungry.\n\nFor a long, painful breath they hovered together, riding the waves of heat thumping off the cloud below. Then, so gently, her neck extended, Gossamer nuzzled at Fortune's flank, then touched the tip of his muzzle with hers. Words came to her and she spoke them, clear and strong.\n\n'Defeat it, Fortune. It is so weak, so sad. You've done it all now. This part is so easy.'\n\nShe reached out and tipped her head to the side. With a delicate touch she stretched her jaws wide around Fortune's. Slowly she clasped the Seed, steadying it with her tongue as she did so.\n\nFor a single shared breath they held the Seed of Charm together. Fortune felt the burden lift. Just as he had been launched from the maw of the volcano, so now he leaped free of the basilisk's old, withered clutch. In that instant, he found himself again and returned with violent joy to the now, to the here. To Gossamer.\n\nFortune relaxed his jaws and watched as with a single, elegant motion Gossamer lifted the Seed from his grasp and placed it into Mantle's waiting claws.\n\nIt was so easy.\n\nThe cloud boiled up around them and then retreated, and when it retreated the basilisk had gone.\n\n'Gone,' said Mantle, voicing their collective thought, 'but not forgotten. It will never forget. It too is abandoned charm now, Fortune. Be wary.'\n\nThough the lightning of the storm was swamped now by the looming ash, new static flashed inside the blue, moonlit clouds. One particularly powerful flash sent Fortune reeling, as though he had been slammed back into his body from some tremendous distance.\n\nGossamer steadied him with her wing. He lurched in the air beside her, grinning stupidly. She gave him a soft, quizzical frown, then grinned herself, but before either of them could speak Mantle broke in again.\n\n'Time enough has been wasted,' he said. 'Tell Cumber this for me, Fortune: tell him he made a difference. It's important to him.'\n\n'I will,' replied Fortune, his grin subsiding.\n\n'And you, Mantle?' asked Gossamer.\n\n'Now it's my turn to make a difference,' responded Mantle with a dazzling smile. 'Now I am the guide!'\n\nFortune was about to go to him when Gossamer glided in front of him to block his way.\n\n'Goodbye, Mantle,' she said.\n\n'You're right to rush me,' chuckled Mantle. 'Old dragons have a tendency to talk too much and I've a long journey ahead of me.'\n\n'Where are you going?' Fortune asked.\n\n'Best you don't know. Best no dragon knows. The Seed will take me there.'\n\n'Will you come back?'\n\n'Goodbye,' said Mantle firmly. 'And good luck.'\n\n'You too,' replied Gossamer and Fortune together.\n\nThe old dragon turned his wings and rose speedily up into the night sky. Up he flew and further still until he was a minute speck against the moon.\n\nThen the Seed grew hot and white and a light burned brighter than the moon, brighter even than the sun, a blazing star spinning and catching and racing across the sky in a soaring arc that began in this world and ended no dragon knew where. The trail it left glittered long and sharp, drifting behind and beyond the stars as Mantle, new dragon of the night, guided the Seed of Charm to its place of rest. Its place of waiting. Its haven.\n\nNow, at last, Fortune turned to Gossamer. Above them their dragon companions lingered, but for now only the two of them mattered. For a long time they hovered together in the hot, thin air, heads close, breath mingling, eyes closed in rapture. All the time they had spent apart retreated into memory and a new future expanded before them, one filled with brilliant clarity and the sound of hope.\n\nFortune opened his eyes.\n\n'The sound of the sea!' he blurted.\n\nSure enough, there it was: the rhythmic wash of wave upon shore, light and lilting and aching of home. But where was home? Fortune looked down into the swirling ash cloud and seemed to see an ocean. Islands rotated about a fragile reef and a voice \u2014 his mother's \u2014 whispered a single word. Haven.\n\n'Haven,' echoed Fortune. 'Home.'\n\n'Can you take us there?' murmured Gossamer.\n\n'I don't know,' he replied. He looked more closely at her, and with widening eyes exclaimed, 'You're white!'\n\n'It's a long story!' Gossamer laughed.\n\nThey embraced, a clumsy, airborne flurry that raised a cheer from their friends who were spiralling down to take them up into their wings, and then the cheer came again and the sound of the sea grew stronger, beating and rushing until it became the sound of wings and there below them, rising from the billowing ash, came a dragon borne on huge and colourful sails that pressed down the air with vigour and pride.\n\nIt was Scoff.\n\n'Made an entrance once before,' he grunted as he struggled into the warm and welcoming flock. 'Might as well do it again.'\n\nCheers and laughter, and wonder that their friend had found enough magic to grow such splendid wings in the midst of such disaster. Up they all flew, Flight and Hardship, dragons all, into air so sheer it scarcely existed. But air mattered not, only dragons mattered now and the sky belonged to them. Moonlight played on a field of moving wings and Fortune moved to the head of the column and struck out west, for he alone knew where they were supposed to go.\n\nHe alone could guide them home.\n\nWinds blew in through the night, pressing the ash cloud down over the land and forcing it west towards the sea. The Plated Mountain fell beneath the shadow of the cloud, its dignity protected as it was split and sundered by inner turmoil. Its roaring was muffled by the shroud of ash.\n\nFor tens of days the ash lingered, brooding over the remnants of the trolls' birthplace. Then finally it lifted, carried high around the world to turn sunsets blood red for years to come. When the ash settled the land was grey with its fallout instead of white with snow. No new snow fell there for a very long time.\n\nLong before the ash finally left, the dragons were gone, flying away on the same night the mountain died and the Maze of Covamere lost its grip on the world, and like the snow they stayed away.\n\nOne creature remained, however, floating on a shard of charm in a world that had abandoned magic, pale and infinitely sad. Through eternity it had grown but now it shrank, living still yet without the heart to endure any season but the final winter which these frail, absurd dragons had succeeded in averting.\n\nAt the moment of its awakening, Wraith had brought new power to the basilisk, and when that dragon had died it had consumed the collapsing Maze, in the hope of bringing an end to all creation. Almost too late, it had seen that the heart of the Turning had not been the Maze at all but the Seed of Charm, but in the end even that knowledge had not been enough. The dragon called Mantle had been right: even had the basilisk succeeded in destroying the Seed and thus the world, still it would have survived. Eternity was its doom.\n\nThe basilisk struck out across the wasteland of its existence, while inside it the remains of the Maze slowly dissolved. Away from the mountain, from the Heartland, from the world itself it sped, moving up past the moon until it was gone from the place that had been its home for so long. Time yawned ahead and the basilisk needed a place to sleep. This time forever."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Empty Sky",
                "text": "The wind carried them on, filling their wings and making light of the effort it took to work their exhausted bodies. For a whole day and night the sea shimmered beneath them, blue and brilliant, rolling past with a calm which itself brought calm to the spirits of the dragons who travelled far above it. Occasionally they saw white foam and dark shadow as mighty creatures breached the surface, travelling too, but otherwise they journeyed alone in the empty sky. None of them had flown this way before and so the way ahead was a mystery, but all trusted the one dragon who led them on with the promise he swore he would keep \u2014 to lead them to a new home.\n\nDespite their hope, they flew in silence. Although their bodies were buoyed by the wind, their hearts were cast down; only Fortune's determination kept their heads raised, and their wings moving. Yet, despite all that they had lost, they dared to hope that somewhere ahead was a place where they might live in peace.\n\nA broken band of green and gold appeared on the horizon. None spoke at first, but as they neared land some dragons began to remark on the tranquillity of the air and the warm, sympathetic breeze that carried them on. Slowly the islands grew larger. Fortune watched them approach, unsurprised.\n\nHe had seen this place before. Then, the Maze had been around him and the world had been flattened like an opened fruit. These islands had slipped beneath him almost unseen, so captivated had he been by the spectacle around him. But he had seen them nonetheless, floating in the serene blue of the ocean, a perfect chain in a perfect sea.\n\nHaven.\n\nReefs rose from the waves, mosaics of coral splintered with a thousand colours and caressed by loops of foam. The beaches rose into lush green forests and then fell again into golden sand. Island after island after island, each unique, each beautiful, each a tiny link in the circular chain that was the archipelago of Haven.\n\nOne hundred islands or more curving into the haze, and above them a straggling group of tired dragons falling gratefully from the sky, choosing a beach at random, coming to rest at last on the fine gold of the sand. Waves chasing up the shore, sunlight in the trees.\n\nHaven.\n\nFortune and Gossamer watched as their friends and comrades landed on the first island, then flew on together a little further until they reached the centre of the circle, where they found a broad coral reef with no proper land of its own.\n\nMuch of the reef lay secretly beneath the water but parts of it rose clear and it was on one of these delicate structures that they alighted and lay together and talked and found that their fears were gone and their love for each other was strong. Into the night they talked and laughed and shared this precious new time. Perhaps that night, soothed by the rhythms of the ocean and the steady breath of the wind, they even sensed the meaning of the turning of the world. And if as the time passed that feeling did too, then at least they were able to remember its strength, that it might be with them again in the future.\n\n'The sea is my friend,' murmured Fortune, nestling against her in the perfect, starlit night. 'I hope I never have to leave it again.'\n\nA night dragon raced the dawn and Fortune thought about Wood, who at the last had seen the night dragons and known that they were real, just as Welkin had said. Then too, he thought of his father.\n\nHaving claimed the reef as their own, they left it next morning with comfortable reluctance to revisit the others on what turned out to be the largest of the islands in the circular chain. They found a patchy welcoming party stretched lazily on the island's grassy eastern slopes. The morning was cold but with a promise of early sunshine; the winter had not merely passed \u2014 it had fled.\n\nCumber was first to greet them. Like the other Charmed who had survived the eruption of the Plated Mountain, he was different, a leaner, large-winged dragon \u2014 changes forced by the retreat of charm from the world. Magic was hard to find now, even harder to wield, and many of the charmed dragons had given up trying. One thing Cumber had retained, however, was his white camouflage.\n\n'There wasn't time to change it,' he said mournfully. 'I do miss my gold.'\n\n'Never mind,' laughed Fortune. 'Every dragon will know you and Gossamer and Velvet, whether you like it or not!'\n\nIt occurred to him that the hundred or so dragons who had escaped the wrath of Shatter, of Wraith, and of the Maze itself, were all now Naturals. The constant companionship Cumber now enjoyed with Velvet only served to exemplify this fact. One was Natural, the other ex-Charmed. Both were dragons.\n\n'You two suit each other,' smiled Fortune, when he finally managed to grab a moment of privacy with his old friend.\n\n'Oh, yes,' replied Cumber, embarrassed. 'Well, you know she's terribly good company, and I suppose we do get along quite well really, and I suppose the more time we spend together the more we find we have in common, despite our different backgrounds and, well ...'\n\n'So you love her then?'\n\nBut at that Cumber would only smile bashfully and twist his claws in the grass, leaving Fortune to guess at what he already knew.\n\nThe day began as a day of meetings and reunions, then of storytelling and finally, as night drew in, of celebration and feast. Tales whirled around the banquet of fish and fruit as dragons who had flown tired and wordless to Haven finally woke up again to their friends and to the future.\n\n'... when Shatter first spoke to us I knew he was trouble. Mark my words \u2014 that dragon was rotten to the core ...'\n\n'... then Scoff, he came out of nowhere. Took his head right off ...'\n\n'... so much sadness. So many deaths ...'\n\n'... sorry? For the Black Dragon? Believe me, no fate was too terrible for that monster ...'\n\nOn through the night they shared their tales, and perhaps it was only fair that the stories became larger and more exaggerated as stars turned overhead, as horrors grew alongside triumphs, and confusions served only to heighten the dramas. Fortune told and heard and laughed and cried along with his friends, and in doing so it seemed he told and heard the entire story a thousand times.\n\nHe alone related the story of Wood in the Maze of Covamere.\n\n'Wood was a hero,' Gossamer said. 'He saved me and Velvet, and by killing Shatter he saved you, Fortune. But it can't have been him. He must have died there on the mountain \u2014 no dragon could have survived it.'\n\n'Maybe not,' Fortune replied, 'but I saw him all the same. In that world and in this, he saved my life. He truly made a difference.'\n\n'We all made a difference,' Cumber said proudly, and then Tallow and Scoff bowled into their little group and them away into the party to hear some other tale told yet taller and richer than before.\n\nThe night swept on and the throng of dragons broke up into smaller and smaller groups. With stomachs filled and legends exhausted, sleep began slowly to steal across the island.\n\nAs dawn rose, Fortune and Gossamer, nestled together in a quiet hollow, were met by Brace, Scoff, Volley, Tallow and Werth. Fortune noticed with a wry smile that Werth seemed to be becoming inseparable from the big navigator. At once he and Gossamer knew that they were leaving, and they embraced their friends warmly before a word was said.\n\n'They're still alive,' blurted Brace, clearly uncomfortable with the emotion of the occasion.\n\n'Maybe,' added Scoff with gentle caution.\n\n'The dragons of Aether's Cross.' Fortune nodded. 'Could they have survived?'\n\nScoff shook his head. 'Don't know. Wraith worked hard to keep them alive. Maybe.'\n\n'Wraith wanted slaves,' said Brace bitterly.\n\nFortune considered for a moment. 'I think Wraith just wanted dragons to follow him. What good is a sovereign without his subjects?'\n\nIt was clear from Brace's expression that he did not care what the Black Dragon had wanted.\n\n'I believe that Mantle sent the earthquake which destroyed Aether's Cross,' said Gossamer firmly. 'He would not have killed so many dragons, even with the stakes as high as they were.'\n\n'I believe that too,' stated Fortune with conviction. Gossamer held his wing tight. 'Those dragons \u2014 and I hope your parents are among them \u2014 are alive, I'm sure of it. But is there enough charm left in the world to get them out?'\n\n'Who knows?' replied Brace sadly. 'But we must try.' Then he looked at Gossamer and smiled the smile of a devoted brother. 'I promised to protect you, but I think Fortune has taken up that promise now. I made another promise too, Gossamer \u2014 that I would save the rest of my family. That promise no dragon can take from me. Wish me luck.'\n\n'No need for luck,' interjected Werth, nudging Tallow. 'We've got the greatest navigator in the world!'\n\n'Navigation doesn't conquer magic,' replied Tallow. 'But it will be an adventure, that's for certain.'\n\n'We're going for Weft,' explained Volley to Fortune, who smiled through the puzzlement of Brace and the others and nodded.\n\n'I understand,' he said.\n\n'I don't,' commented Scoff. 'But Tallow's right. Don't need luck.'\n\n'No?' laughed Fortune.\n\n'No. Need an army!'\n\nSo it was in laughter that they parted, and it was with hope that Gossamer watched her brother lead his companions up into the blue and out towards the rising sun.\n\nCumber and Velvet joined them then, and as they watched the retreating dragons dwindle into the brilliant haze, it was Velvet who spoke to the empty skies the question they had all asked themselves, but which none had dared to share.\n\n'Does the Turning stop here?'\n\nWatching Brace and his band depart, Fortune remembered again that all these dragons were like him now. Charmed dragon had turned to natural dragon, but would the turning go on? The question frightened him because, deep inside, he believed that it might. This in turn led to yet another question \u2014 one for which he had no answer.\n\n'What will become of us?' said Gossamer, almost giving voice to his thoughts.\n\nFortune thought about this long and hard, before voicing a question that was more true, though he could not yet know it.\n\n'No,' he corrected. 'What will we become?'\n\nHe gazed, searching, into the high, empty sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "A beach of coral, lit by distant stars.\n\nOn the coral a dragon, motionless, straddling the gap that separates dream from reality, alone between a brace of worlds. There Fortune lay, dozing, waiting, remembering.\n\nThey had found the abandoned nest high on the central reef just a few days after arriving at Haven. Fortune and Gossamer felt an immediate affinity with this coral island, for here they felt in touch with the deeper places of the world, places that might be reached through the countless pores of the reef, the reef itself a structure, a maze even, extending down into the ocean and ending they could not guess where.\n\nIt was on the reef that they had found the nest, and upon seeing it Fortune had wept.\n\nHe had seen its shape before \u2014 indeed he had known it since his birth. It was a shape from far away, from Torr, from South Point. From home. Only one dragon could have built this nest, the dragon who had first whispered the name of Haven to Fortune in a distant dream. Clarion.\n\nThey had searched in vain for her. The nest showed signs of recent occupation, but neither the reef nor the surrounding islands showed any sign of his mother. She had moved on, Fortune believed. She would return, he hoped.\n\nNow time had moved on. The moon had spun three times through its cycle and returned again to fullness. Wavelets stirred the foam, although no breeze blew and the stars glistened like frost. The night was warm, and somewhere in the heart of the reef Gossamer began to feel the heat of new life glowing against her flank.\n\nFortune drifted in and out of sleep as the stars moved in their heavenly round. Later, he could not have said whether he had passed more of the night in dream or in reality, nor whether in wakefulness or sleep he had lifted his eyes to see the falling star.\n\nAt first he thought it an ordinary night dragon cutting a shining arc through the darkness. Then, when it was directly above him, it stopped and grew large and larger still, until it finally began to descend. Soon it floated before him, and as he gazed into the blinding whiteness he saw the dragon who floated inside the glowing aura, the stranger with a familiar face bound up in a halo of flawless light.\n\n'Father,' he breathed.\n\n'My son,' Welkin replied.\n\nThe second star raced in low over the sea, lifting a trail of silver ripples from the water as it approached the reef and then halted before him, framed with the same aura that embraced old, smiling Welkin.\n\n'Go to her, Fortune,' said Clarion from inside the second star. Her voice was as clear as spring. 'The time belongs to you now, for a little while at least.'\n\n'Don't go,' Fortune pleaded.\n\nBut already the two dragons were accelerating upwards, joining to form a single point of light that fused and then expanded briefly to fill the heavens, before shrinking to a barely perceptible glimmer.\n\nAnd then the light flared one last time, and Fortune watched a single star ride the sky on a trail of fire, vanishing beyond the darkness, perhaps going to the places where Mantle had gone, perhaps beyond even those. Perhaps it would never stop.\n\nFortune woke then, or perhaps he fell asleep, and as he did so a distant, joyful cry shook him free of whatever magic it was that had held him in its spell. Opening his wings, he kicked off from the shore, hugged the air and flew inland to answer the call of his new-born infant."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Age of Legend",
        "author": "L. J. Davies",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "DragonFire"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "World of Shadow",
                "text": "[ Valcador ]\n\nGhostly whispers and faint voices drifted on an invisible wind that snaked its way through the chilling void surrounding me. Like the buzzing of a million meddlesome insects, it darted and dove through the lucid air, occasionally echoing from non-existent walls, ricocheting with a chime akin to shattering glass.\n\n\"You left us,\" it called, a combined tone of heartbreak, malevolence and spitefulness. \"You left us to die in the cataclysm!\" it sounded again, its tenor rising into an angry, almost terrified cry.\n\nAs if sensing the change, the world about me shook violently. Its spectral features rattled like an avalanche of falling rocks, before the distant voice boomed out through the darkness one last time, ripping at my scales like sharp shards of ice.\n\n\"You left us all to this world of shadow \u2013 you failed!\"\n\nThe world flashed into existence in an instant and my mind wavered. A chilling haze coated everything, and the sensation of unimaginable isolation felt all too familiar. Like a lazy beast slipping from its slumber, the shimmering lines of reality lethargically sorted themselves, finally falling into place. However, this plane of existence was just another extension of the twisted and constant nightmares that plagued my uneasy sleep every night.\n\nDreams were nothing new to me, nor were nightmares, but unfortunately, these days they were one in the same. They seemed more like lost memories of things I'd never experienced, stirring from dusty old crypts within the ancient temples of my mind. Like a long-forgotten part of me was waking up and stepping into the light, only to be horrified by what it found.\n\nThe vision that captured my attention was no exception, neither was the ghostly situation that had preceded it, nor that which had come before in this never-ending cycle of torture. All I could do was accept that I was trapped in this place, watching an impossible heaven of starlight, bathing a vast expanse of black rock and twisted pillars stretching up toward the abyssal night. On the horizon before me, the great sphere of blue and green, which was once my home, rose like the sun, but the glow pouring across its surface was not that of sunlight.\n\nI shied away, protecting myself from the flaming world. Yet even over such an impossible distance; its allure beckoned me, like a moth to a malevolent pyre. I took a step forward, paws quivering as they touched cold stone. After a few steps, something began to radiate through the glow, a distant sound carried upon a wind that defied the laws of this airless realm. Though it was not the only thing to grab my attention.\n\nStretching out before me, the vast plane fell away, forming a great cliff. Its rough surface was dotted with crumbling pillars and shattered domes, ancient ruins growing from the rock like a vertical extension of its unending surface. Furthest away, and far below, I could see a vast ocean, an army of waves marching toward their inevitable destruction on the jagged rocks. The only shift in the dull hue came from the raging firelight of the great sphere as it rose higher over the ocean's stormy horizon.\n\n\"You held the fate of us all.\" The echo of a distant voice whipped past me.\n\nIn the same instant, I saw a spectral swarm of dust carried on the haunting breeze. It was mostly formless, and yet for a split second, it forged itself into the unmistakable form of a dragon. I recognised the ethereal image. I hated it more than I cared to admit, and as its fleeting eyes glanced into mine, I felt nothing but cold emptiness.\n\n\"You failed!\" the voice barked, reverberating off the cliffs before fading away.\n\n\"No, wait!\" I called, reaching out after it. \"I tried... I did everything... I couldn't...\"\n\nA loud rumble cut off my words as loose rock under my paws gave way, sending me crashing down the cliff in a flurry of dust and flailing wings. Pain flared as I floundered through rocks and ruins, and after what felt like an eternity of falling, I slammed into a crumbling wall at the cliff's base. Lifting my head, I found water battering rocks on either side of me, showering me with freezing spray.\n\nWincing at the sting in my battered limbs, I rose tentatively to my paws, pausing as I looked toward the end of a long extension of rock jutting out into the rough waters. Silhouetted at its end, against the burning fire of the distant world, was a dragon. The rock's long shadow shrouded me, drawing my view to the softly glowing runes etched into the surrounding stone. They depicted dragons clad in regal armour, diving down upon droves of demonic foes, talons and bladed wings glowing with magical fire.\n\nMy eyes wandered slowly along the cracked mural, until I found myself moving reluctantly toward the lone figure, pausing when I was only a few paw-steps from their tail. Etched into the ruined stone directly behind them was the glowing symbol of a flaming pyre. The symbol flashed, and in the same instant, I felt a warm sensation wash over me. It was like a wave of inviting heat from a campfire, or the blissful kiss of sunlight on a warm summer's day. As the sensation passed, I heard one word echo through my mind.\n\n\"Seraphine.\"\n\nThat voice, it's like every other here... I feel like I should know it, like I've heard it before! I thought, faintly recognising the regal, feminine tone.\n\n\"I see the time has come, we have waited too long,\" the dragoness before me announced, her majestic voice as fiery as the burning horizon looming above her.\n\nConfusion ignited in me and I stepped back, eyes narrowing.\n\nThis is just another trick, something from my mind's dark past I don't need to know about.\n\n\"Time for what?\" I snapped bluntly.\n\nRaising her head, she revealed rows of refined armour covering the back of her neck.\n\n\"Age's twilight draws near. Skies of dragonfire rise upon the horizon,\" she began, but before I could even consider her words, she turned and her eyes blazed with white fire. \"The time has come to fulfil your destiny.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "With a sudden jolt, my eyes burst open and I shot back into reality. Parts of the soft bed of moss and seaweed I'd made into a nest at the top of the wooden beams forming my current home scattering as my wings fluttered. Around me was the creaking wreck of a decaying long boat, similar to those I'd once known back in the village. A long, narrow frame with a lone mast, it bore a vaguely draconic head at its bow, still visible despite the icicles clinging to it.\n\nWater flooded most of the interior space, seeping in through the damaged hull, leaving the upper deck the last bastion of dryness. Although the flames had reduced to an almost invisible flicker, a small fire within a rusted bowl hung from a wooden beam to my left, illuminating the watery darkness.\n\nJust another stupid dream. I inwardly muttered, pressing a forepaw to my aching skull.\n\nIn the encroaching gloom and beyond the decrepit walls of the ship, I could hear the calm washing of waves on the shore, occasionally punctuated by the whistle of the wind or the clatter of falling ice from the roof of the huge cavern.\n\nThe salty scent of the sea radiated through the place, the briny mix allowing barnacles and seaweed to thrive in the damp darkness below me. I took a long breath and fought not to gag. The uneasy shaking in my paws fading as I stretched them out over the moss.\n\nIs a decent night's sleep really too much to ask for?\n\nI peered down into the icy water, to the faint reflection of a white-scaled dragon. Almost identical to the images in my dreams, it gazed back with the same sickened expression I wore.\n\nOn a small wooden crate beside the watery image, sat a pile of golden plates. It was hard to think of them as anything more than scrap, and for the most part, the arcane armour was just that to me.\n\nNevertheless, as I shifted to expose more of my reflection, I saw the one thing setting me apart from the pristine illusion that cursed my conscience every night.\n\nA deep cut ran across the right side of my face and down over my shoulder like a gangrenous wound. It had long since healed into a dry and rigid scar, its surface resembling dark obsidian cutting into my scales as it flickered with a faint, purple glow. I wasn't used to having such grievous scars \u2013 the fact that my body normally healed from every wound I sustained had made me complacent.\n\nIt had taken the corrupted claws of a god to mark me with a lasting blemish. I was almost glad of it, it made me feel somewhat normal, even if mortality terrified me.\n\nAs I contemplated, something shifted in the air about me, and the dull pain in my scars spiked. Wincing under the sudden flare, I looked up, my horns rattling a set of rusty hooks tied to the ceiling. A draconic shadow loomed above me like a lazy feline lounging upon a tree branch, its tail coiled like a dark serpent over one of the frosty beams.\n\nMordrakk, the being that had once watched over all that existed, now gazed upon it with nothing but hatred and spite. His glowing eyes and fiery chest were a testament to his burning rage as he studied me intently. I averted my eyes from the recurring hallucination as he shifted; I'd neither the energy nor the patience to deal with him right now.\n\nBesides, it's not like he's real. No matter what he says, he's just in my head.\n\nMy attempted ignorance didn't stop him from slowly uncoiling his tail, snaking down the boat's crooked skeleton in a cloak of shadow, stopping when his eyes met mine.\n\n\"Your visions \u2013 they worsen, do they not?\" he asked curiously, before pausing as if knowing the answer. \"The minds that have seen eternity are cast adrift within you, after all.\"\n\nThe fact clearly irritated him, dark claws clutching the damp wood in mild frustration, causing flakes of frosty dust to shake free.\n\n\"That still doesn't change what any of you did, or my opinion,\" I responded, the dryness of my throat rattling my words.\n\nThe illusion lifted his head, his flaming eyes scouring every detail with more precision than any natural being could muster.\n\n\"And tell me, what is that?\" he asked, his spiny tail twitching in anticipation.\n\nI felt a shiver run through me, and for a moment, the wind beyond my shelter grew restless, before falling completely silent.\n\n\"That you were all wrong from the beginning,\" I challenged.\n\nHis muzzle curled into a twisted smile.\n\n\"And I'm not going back,\" I added, locking eyes with him.\n\nHis grin soon became a scowl and he coiled back, claws loosening from his perch.\n\n\"What will you do then?\" he pressed.\n\nI glanced about, as if searching for an answer among the icy wood and scraps of shellfish scattered amidst the ship's ancient cargo. I knew at the back of my mind that there was an answer, one that had sustained my fragile will for all this time.\n\nNo, don't think about it! Live in the moment, don't look ahead! With no intention of entertaining the illusion any longer, I stood up and glanced at the weak light outside.\n\nThis was Valcador, home of the orkin, and while I'd been here, I'd raided their camps and foundries in a hope it would make a difference to the war. In the past few days I'd learned my actions had culminated in a meeting between Valcador's war masters, not that I'd found it too difficult to hunt them down one by one.\n\nStill, taking them all out at once will be far simpler. I reasoned, scraping my claws on the wood.\n\nPurging the foul beasts from the land was the very least a being with my power could do.\n\nBut it's all I can do if I want to keep the world safe. The only way I could really justify that to myself was knowing I would wipe all the orkin out in the end. After Taldran, it's all they deserve.\n\nPeering outside, I could only guess as to what time it was, although I'd little care anymore. In the months I'd hidden out here, I'd honed my mind in on one thing, managing to block out any distractions. Assuring myself that I didn't need to go back to Dardien and potentially doom the universe if I did.\n\nMore like take Mordrakk back to Dardien and the one thing he really wants from me.\n\nShaking that idea off, I moved down over the piles of crates littering the ship's interior toward a breach in the hull. As I did, something amidst the sound of crashing water caught my attention. Beyond the hole there was a light flap of what sounded like feathered wings, followed by another almost bird-like caw, before silence fell once more.\n\nPlease tell me it's not more of those stupid ice buzzards?\n\nAlmost as if looking for a belittling expression, I glanced up to the wooden beams. Mordrakk's shadowy illusion was gone, leaving only a hint of pain in my scars.\n\nMaybe it is just the wind then? At the very least it could be food?\n\nOn instinct, I leapt toward the opening, my posture falling into a low prowl. My claws splashed lightly in the water as the shards of my golden armour levitated into place around me. The arcane attire responded to my mental command like a wing of elite soldiers, turning my reflection from a white dragon, to that of a dangerous ethereal warrior.\n\nMordrakk's hallucination appeared alongside my reflection, his glowing eyes overlaying my own as he waited patiently, while I emerged onto the grey gravel beach that had formed along the rim of the flooded ice cavern. The world was almost dark, save for rare sun beams and the glimmer of light from the flames within the wreck.\n\nAt first, I looked to the empty noise traps I'd erected, formed from several seashells and rope, something I'd learned from Tarwin years ago. My attention then switched to the narrow, cliffside pathway, the only way to reach my hiding place from the frozen caves that ran under the whole of Valcador; the path was clear.\n\nNo, I was sure I heard something!\n\nA second flickering finally caught my attention. It was an unnatural movement almost like fire casting a strange glow from behind me, and I turned to see its majestic source perched on the crooked frame of the boat's fallen mast.\n\nA phoenix sat with its wings folded, its fiery plumage coursing like a mosaic of liquid flame. Its longer tail feathers were alight with the same celestial fire, as were those on its impressive head crest, the tips of which turned to a beautiful shade of shimmering purple and blue. Its eyes were like rubies, set alight with the fire of a thousand stars, and its sharp beak looked as if it were formed from the same magnificent gem.\n\nI'd never seen one this close before, and even from here, I could feel its blissful warmth. Its claws clung to the frozen wood without igniting it, betraying its fiery facade as sparks spat from its ruffled pinions.\n\nIt's beautiful, almost too majestic for a dark place like this.\n\nIt tilted its head with a light caw, watching me closely. I mirrored its curious expression \u2013 I knew this couldn't be a coincidence, I was sure I'd seen this bird before. I'd a nagging sensation that it had been following me since I'd first glimpsed it on the mountainside of Taldran.\n\n\"What do you want?\" I asked casually, an inquisitive look remaining on my face as I studied its bejewelled eyes.\n\nIt rose tall and I was sure if it had been beside me, we'd have been eye to eye. The only response it offered was a light coo, ruffling its feathers with a flicker of dancing embers.\n\nGreat, I'm speaking to a bird. I grumbled to myself, before turning away and marching up the path. I don't have time for all of this nonsense.\n\nThe phoenix squawked disapprovingly, as if insulted by my abrupt departure. As I glanced back, I could have sworn I saw it shaking its head; its expression slipping to one of disappointment.\n\nIt's just a bird, what does it know? My mind reassured.\n\nEven so, as it took off and flew through a vast archway leading out over the frozen sea, I couldn't help but wonder if my conscience was wrong.\n\nHow many other things have I underestimated in my life? I shook that idea off too as I passed through several gaping holes to come upon the maze of yawning caverns.\n\nDespite the ice and snow above, smoking towers of dark blizarium flanked exposed pools of bubbling lava, the ice fire spires that made Valcador famous. Ancient ruins surrounded the smouldering peaks, most of which were destroyed by the constant shifting of the volcanic landscape. The once smooth marble structures were the only hint that the mighty highkin kingdom had ever stood here. Now it was hard to find any that were intact or not defiled by their corrupted descendants.\n\nThe foul and crudely erected formations of chimneys, blackened wood, and rough metal spikes, which were the orkins' attempts at architecture, were everywhere. As I passed through several more volcanic craters, I could see them built up about the larger spires. Some bridged the gaping melt holes or descended down into the bubbling lava, to utilise its intense heat in the creation of new weapons and armour. In such places, I avoided drawing any attention from the orkin workers or their enslaved lesser races. As much as I hated the idea of leaving them to continue their crude work, I'd no time for the subservient runts.\n\nEventually, the tunnels came closer to the surface, breaking through shallow cracks, where I could see the snowy wasteland outside. Huge cliffs and volcanic ridges towered above sprawling orkin edifices, stretching out as far as I could see. A light fall of white flakes disturbed the otherwise featureless grey sky, and the sound of bubbling lava came up from a small, molten stream flowing alongside me, its heat ensuring that the tunnel would never freeze over.\n\nI'd memorised most of the subterranean passageways, knowing that several led to the surface, and occasionally used them to identify my position. It wasn't safe to travel across the vast glacial plains for too long. The few times I dared to traverse the exposed wasteland, I saw nothing but vast snowfields stretching up toward rocky ridges, occasionally broken by sparse patches of dead trees and towering ice cliffs.\n\nIt's not what I can see that worries me. I thought peeking up to get my bearings. It's what can see me.\n\nDespite my mind's nagging caution, I flew out toward one of the cliffs, swiftly disappearing into another set of tunnels the moment I landed. The new maze ran deep into the ice, taking me further inland. Another gust of chilling wind gnawed through the frozen holes, carrying the scent of smoke, fire and the call of that solitary bird. Switching my attention to a small crevice, I caught a glimpse of the phoenix's glistening feathers as it disappeared into a patch of trees.\n\nIt's following me, no doubt! My lack of understanding spiked my curiosity again, and despite my instincts telling me otherwise, I scrambled back to the surface to get a better look.\n\nThe bird was long gone; however, a far more ominous sight stole my attention \u2013 the reason I was out here. A monolithic spire of crudely forged wood and black metal rose high into the grey sky like a dark mountain, its peak circled by flocks of hungry carrion. Great gashes and tall spines marred its walls, while their surfaces flickered with the red light of its fiery interior.\n\nI sank down back into the shallow tunnels, observing the layers of heavily garrisoned battlements, bulwarks and towers ascending from its vast, jagged foundation.\n\nThat has to be Ice Fire Citadel. My eyes carefully scoured every detail of its corrupted surface, eventually falling to where the base of the mighty fortress dropped away into the depths of a great cavern.\n\nGood, there has to be an easy way in down there. Utilising more tunnels, I tentatively crept forward to peer over the edge, my claws digging at the ice as I slid onto a small ledge.\n\nLava filled the bottom of the cavern, and a foul, volcanic scent polluted the air, as if the earth itself was furious at having to bear the structure. A fiery red glow illuminated the weak scaffolding, and crude bridges hung over the lava moat. Creeping steadily around the cavern's rim, my eyes fixed on a stone bridge leading from the maze of tunnels into the fortress's interior.\n\nThat's my way in!\n\n\"Still feel like running?\" Mordrakk's dark voiced hissed mockingly as he flickered into existence within my ice-bound reflection.\n\nHe grinned wickedly, pawing at the snow-filled passageway with a foreclaw.\n\n\"I wonder how long you can linger here and watch this unfold?\" he added, peering at the fortress's towering walls. \"You cannot deny your destiny forever \u2013 is this not a clear example of the truth of which I have spoken?\" he goaded, waving a wing ahead. \"They will destroy each other before the end.\"\n\nI glanced down at my paws, watching light drifts of snow settle over the golden plates.\n\n\"You don't want me to go back so I can stop them from killing one another, you only care about yourself,\" I hissed, the notion of doing nothing amplifying my guilt.\n\nHis eyes narrowed, and for a moment, I saw a glimpse of frustration in his expression.\n\n\"Then go, be the elusive hero you are so content with being. What is your plan? Charge into the citadel and destroy it all?\" he suggested patronisingly.\n\n\"That's what you'd have me do!\" I barked.\n\n\"I would merely have you fulfil your purpose, and if you truly cared, you wouldn't hesitate to do so,\" he scowled.\n\nI glanced away, casting my eyes down toward the lava-filled depths. I'd abandoned my friends, family and my home, knowing that if I returned, he'd use me to destroy everything.\n\nHiding out here is the only way to guarantee their safety, I can't listen to him.\n\n\"So if you are to continue to entertain these pointless pursuits, what will you do?\" he persisted.\n\nI shook my head and grinned.\n\n\"I'll improvise.\"\n\nWith that, I leapt down onto the bridge and crept into the fortress's interior. Down in the bowels of the monstrous keep, unnatural extensions of twisted rock, metal and scorched wood covered the ice. Frames of crudely erected spikes and flaming braziers spanned the shallow ravines and subterranean magma rivers. What was once a highkin ruin formed the fortress's innermost foundations. A plethora of bones and rusted cages hanging from rattling chains, decorating the once magnificent architecture.\n\nMordrakk's image lingered in the ice beside me, a new, maniacal grin upon his muzzle. Not that he had time to lecture me before the solid metal interior of the orkin structure replaced his icy home.\n\n\"This is a bold move, I'll admit. Spending such a prolonged time so close to anything this grand is new for you,\" his disembodied voice echoed through the grim halls.\n\nThe idea that he knew something I didn't was more than a little unsettling. I ruffled my wings in frustration as I turned sharply and came upon an opening in the corridor. The sound of industry echoed from the bowels of the next chamber, hammers rang out as they struck hard steel, and hot metal hissed in the smoky air. Cautiously, I peered out to see that the opening led out onto a long balcony spanning the chamber's circumference.\n\nAn army of orkin covered the floor, bearing the brass-coloured mark of a skull upon their rough armour. Hordes of them were busy slaving away in the construction of brutal weapons, savage armour and all kinds of other crude tools of war. Vast sprawls of wooden walkways, lava foundries and churning mechanisms ground tirelessly under the direction of slave masters. Cages held chimera and manticores, thrashing and clawing at their captors. While goblins and other foul creatures toiled underfoot.\n\nThere's more down here than there was in Taldran! The sight drew out a new wave of dread.\n\nThe fact that my enemies had such numbers and resources wasn't something I could ignore, and as I turned to look away, my eyes fell upon yet more hope-sapping visions. Monstrous ogres hauled great carriages of scrap toward a mountain of metal, while more workers constructed the frameworks for mighty cannons upon the backs of trolls trapped within deep pits. Most terrifying of all was the sight of a serpentine creature looming over it all.\n\nThe gigantic shape was silhouetted against the far wall; I'd no idea what it was, but it was huge. A heavy clatter of chains and searing flashes of vibrant green fire accompanied its powerful thrashing, causing the whole chamber to shudder under the wake of its fury.\n\nAfter all this time, there's still creatures I don't know about? Sometimes I almost wished it could stay that way.\n\n\"This is nothing but a monument to my childrens' flawed ambition. A testament to the fragility of freedom,\" Mordrakk muttered, with a hint of spiteful rage.\n\nIn a burst of frustration, and with little care of giving away my position, I stomped an armoured claw on the soot-smothered floor. As much as I wished for him to shut up, it was a futile gesture. Nevertheless, his illusion failed to meet my gaze, nothing but flickering embers and hue of the smouldering forges danced in his place as the sound of my exertion was drowned out by that of industry.\n\n\"I don't support any of you,\" I declared firmly, before continuing along the walkway, moving further into the fortress.\n\nEven with no reflective walls from which to materialise, I could still hear his pensive tone swirling within my mind, mixing with those of others I'd once known, all accusing me of abandoning them to the wrath of what I'd just seen.\n\nKeep looking forward! I focused on the ascending corridors ahead until the sounds of a commotion gave me paused.\n\nFollowing the shape of the tower, the outermost frame of the pathway curved slightly. Unable to see what was around the corner, I fell into a slow prowl. There were several locked crates, cages and weapon racks lying against the wall to my left, while the stomping of twisted, metal-clad feet beat their tune on the ramparts above.\n\n\"Tell me, why come here? You don't care for them and yet you drag yourself across this frozen wasteland with the frail belief that the petty things you are doing will somehow help them,\" Mordrakk accused.\n\nWith my armoured gauntlets tapping against the crudely-formed metal floor, I fought the urge to lash out at him.\n\n\"I wouldn't expect you to understand,\" I muttered, glancing up at another set of stairs leading further up into the tower.\n\n\"You say that I don't know love and compassion. That was not always true,\" he countered. \"It was such weakness that led the universe into chaos. I loved my children dearly, but in the end, they stood between me and my duty. Now you would allow such distractions to come between you and yours?\"\n\nI took to the stairs, stalking swiftly up toward the door at their far end. While I moved, I forged my thoughts into an answer.\n\n\"That's why I came back \u2013 this place stands between me and my duty.\"\n\nAs I pressed low beside the door I peered out to see what appeared to be a large opening, what I assumed was some form of balcony or landing platform high on the side of the tower. Snow wafted in through the opening, as did the gruff sound of orkin voices.\n\n\"You have no duty, you betrayed your responsibility and chose to linger here, believing that your actions are enough. Yet every time you see these corrupt mortal-kind, you know that the world will tear itself apart around you,\" Mordrakk persisted.\n\n\"If you're so great and powerful, fulfil your own plans. I'll never do what you tell me,\" I replied rebelliously.\n\nHis image flashed to life within the flames of a brazier beside the stairs. The flicker of his eyes sending a sharp surge of pain through my scars.\n\n\"You would do well to watch your thoughts, lest you fall back to them,\" he warned as I struggled not to collapse under the sudden onset of agony.\n\nI clenched my teeth and flinched, my wounds pulsing as I stumbled forward.\n\nNo, he can't win! My wings rustled as the dull throbs clawed at my body.\n\nBut he was right, I'd been the one to herald the shadow, and like so many before me, I'd failed to prevent it.\n\nNo, without the amulet, he can't do anything!\n\n\"You know you can't keep your weakness out forever. This paltry control you sustain, it is nothing compared to my will,\" he pressed.\n\n\"Well, I've lasted this long, so... don't count on it,\" I countered aloud, defying his flaming form.\n\n\"Such a time is nothing in comparison to how long I have waited. I know my time will come, it is inevitable,\" he assured, flickering away with a hint of laughter.\n\nI watched the settling flame until his image vanished, and felt a sickness churning in my gut as his words played in my mind.\n\n\"I count on nothing, and I am sure I will see your true character before the end,\" he growled confidently, before slipping back into the deepest, darkest parts of my mind.\n\nI narrowed my eyes, unable to accept that \u2013 as always \u2013 he was somehow manipulating me. No matter what I did or where I went, he was there, always one step ahead.\n\nNo, I'm the one in control, not him! He's stuck materialising in fire and reflections, he has no power over me! I inwardly hissed as I swatted a paw at the flames.\n\n\"Come on, the bosses is here and they's not goanna be pleased if we's slips up,\" a grisly tone cracked, instantly re-engaging my instincts, especially at the word 'bosses'.\n\n\"Shut it, you's runt!\" another angry voice demanded, its words broken by grunts and snarls as if it were only a few generations away from being a wild beast.\n\nMeanwhile, I glanced cautiously out into the courtyard balcony. The foul smell of the fortress's interior, mixed with the acrid scent of smoke from outside as light snow danced across my vision. Fighting not to heave at the fetid stench, I saw ice and wind whipped at the exposed area, protected by a rail of spiked metal, adorned with skulls and dancing torch flame.\n\nA pair of orkin stood across from the doorway, next to the grizzly rail. One of them was significantly larger; his pale hide warped and twisted into rough stone, more so than the smaller runt beside him. One arm melded with an axe, while the other blended with a set of rusted knives, forming four bladed fingers. Large stone spikes rose from his back, resembling the roots of a tree, each one adorned with metal plates, chains and bones.\n\nThe smaller of the two still maintained the dexterity of fingers on both arms, the dark stone that marred his pale hide only consuming his legs, shoulders and half of his scarred face. He still had some hair, though the shaggy mess was far from the gracious, flowing-silver strands his race had once possessed. Despite his lack of fused weapons and armour, he bore a set of sharp, rusted metal plates and a large hammer was slung across his spiny back.\n\nThen I can only assume they're guarding what I'm here for. I concluded, glancing up to see the tallest spire of the citadel looming above.\n\nNext to them, the blue blood of a bloated and gutted grey corpse covered a table. Besides that, sat a bucket of small bones, picked clean, and as I looked closer, I focused on a stairway leading to the upper levels of the tower's spire. Bearing crude spears and completely covered in rusty armour, another pair patrolled an upper balcony beside the stair's top.\n\nIf the warlords are meeting anywhere, it'll surely be up there. I guessed.\n\n\"I's don't see whys we's don'ts just set traps out in the tunnels. I'm hungry and I's say we go out there and eats that rat. Saves us the trouble of waitin' round here,\" the smaller orkin suggested impatiently.\n\nAs I peered over the snowy area, my eyes fell upon some empty cages, identical to those I'd seen dragons locked up in; they even bore the same enchanted masks that prevented elementals from blasting their way out.\n\nIf I didn't know better, I'd say they were looking for a dragon, maybe even me? I thought with a huff \u2013 not that I'd give them the chance to lock me up.\n\n\"You's know perfectly wells whys we don'ts. We's waitin' here. The bosses ordered us to, says we's get a reward when we's done,\" the larger brute retorted, turning back to the smaller creature, only to have him snort in his face.\n\n\"Well, I's sick of waitin' about for the bosses, we's should be marchin' out with the rest of the boys, not here waitin' for the demons' games. Besides, I's sick of stinkin' roblin meat, it's alls we's had in weeks!\" the smaller creature snapped angrily, taking his hammer and banging it hard against the table, splattering what I assumed was a roblin corpse into a bloody, blue paste.\n\n\"Come on, you's knows you's want some nice, tender flesh. Good and fresh, there's still some left in the pens, we's need some better meat,\" the smaller, rattier looking creature taunted, nattering his sharp teeth together as his larger companion growled. \"Come on. We's shouldn't even be here; let the bosses talk, let 'em all stays up there dealing with demons. I's want some meat!\" he continued, waving a grizzly hand toward the tower.\n\nI paused, homing in on what he was saying about 'demons.'\n\nThey don't use that term very often, maybe things are worse than I thought?\n\nHis disgruntled words also confirmed that the tower's peak was where I needed to go, and I quickly began formulating a plan to get there. As I considered my options, the larger orkin snorted and raised his bladed fingers.\n\n\"You's watch your mouth, maggot. If the Brazen Warlord hears, you's goanna be dinner next. An' I ain't facing his wrath because of some worm with a loose tongue,\" he declared aggressively, forcing the smaller creature to squirm backwards.\n\nThe armoured orkin standing higher on the ramparts above did nothing; in fact, they seemed eager to see something unfold as they snorted a laugh.\n\n\"The warlords don'ts have to know. You know yous wants some good, succulent meat!\" The smaller creature persisted, and the larger paused.\n\nThe Brazen Warlord is here too? As I thought, the bulkier orkin threatened my whole plan when he concluded his contemplation with a huff.\n\n\"Fine, go gets a fresh fillet, and I's only wants the manticore's meat, no stinkin' chimera hide,\" he exclaimed to the smaller creature, who eagerly nodded.\n\nA moment later, he swept the bloodied surface of the table clean as his smaller companion moved in my direction. I coiled myself low to the floor, ready to pounce, the arcane blades along my wing edges ready to spark into life at a moment's notice. My teeth and claws were set, as was the blade on the tip of my tail.\n\nWith my eyes locked firmly on the door, the sound of heavy boots came closer, my armour segments tightening in preparation for combat. Just then, a sharp, fiery call from outside distracted all of us, sparing the approaching creature's life for a few seconds longer. The orkin stopped and turned as I peered out to see all eyes were now looking at the spiked rails.\n\nPerched there, was the phoenix. Its bright orange feathers shimmered in the dim sunlight, and its sharp-red eyes stared at the orkin, before glancing at my hiding place for a moment. For that brief instant, I was afraid it would give me away, but the weak-minded orkin failed to notice.\n\nWhat is it doing? They'll kill it? I'd no idea why it was here or why it was following me; all I knew was that the fortress was no place for such a beautiful creature.\n\n\"What's that?\" muttered the larger creature by the chopping table, and even the guards on the stairs stepped forward.\n\n\"It's a fire hawk,\" one declared, a slight grin parting his stone lips.\n\n\"I's bets it tastes better than some dry, old manticore meat,\" the other added, as they stalked closer to the bird.\n\nThe phoenix peered at them curiously, waiting until the very last moment until opening its beak and dowsing them in a plume of fire. The flames seared the cold air as it flew up to dive over the edge of the tower. Pained cries met my ears as one orkin flailed, while the remaining brute looked more eager to take the bird's head off.\n\nI seized the momentary distraction, and with the full force of my coiled legs and bladed wings, I leapt out toward the smallest of the creatures. Instantly sinking my burning talons deep into his pale hide, scorching the withered flesh into black ash. The runt gave a painful howl, thrashing violently as he tried to bat me off with several wild swings of his hammer. His futile retaliation did nothing to spare him, as I sliced off his right arm with one sweep of my wing, leaving a cauterised stump.\n\nHe gave another animalistic cry as he staggered forward, swiping at me with his left. I bit down hard on the back of his neck and twisted firmly, snapping his spine with one swift crack. He fell against the snow, twitching violently, as with another fearsome growl, the larger orkin appeared above me.\n\n\"It's the demon! Kills the demon, brings me its head!\" another called out, making my renowned reputation known to all.\n\nAs well as the angry brute beside me, several guards charged down from the tower. Without hesitation, the closest slammed into my side, stone body striking with the force of a rockslide. My armour tightened, absorbing most of the impact as I was sent skidding across the cracked stone, claws melting a steaming trail through the snow as I steadied myself.\n\nHe charged again and a chorus of hungry roars and fearsome insults followed as I lowered myself against the ground, my wings spread and tail coiled, before launching like a bolt of golden lightning at his head. The brute flailed wildly, his bladed limbs swiping at my back as I fought to maintain my grip. The more he struggled, the deeper my white-hot claw blades sank, searing flesh and melting rock. He screamed as I cut across the back of his knees with my magical tail blade. Until, with a twist of my molten claws, a loud crack and a shower of rocky splinters, he was gone.\n\nHis body fell to the ground. I'd no remorse \u2013 all orkin were just acceptable tallies upon the dark canvas of my mind. Cutting a bloody swathe through the others, I took special care not to allow any to escape and potentially warn their brethren. Mordrakk's molten reckoning confirmed nine in total, adding the number to the numerous others for which I no longer cared.\n\nAs I reached the top, I made my way to the roof. One final door sat between me and the spire's interior. I paused for a moment, the wind whipping at my scales and snow biting at my wings. I could hear a deep chorus from the depths of the fortress, a thousand voices chanting at once. I ignored it and raised a forepaw to the door, melting away its crude lock with one strike. Suddenly, something else caught my attention \u2013 perched on another spiked rail, the phoenix stared at me.\n\nOur eyes met for the briefest of moments, and with a light coo it took off again, the feathers of its wings glowing with fire as it flapped toward the high ridges further inland.\n\nWhat does it really want? I'm about to break the orkin, cut the head off the snake? Is that not enough?\n\nI watched as it disappeared into the smoke-strewn blizzard, before switching my attention back to the door.\n\nWhat does it matter, it's the best I can do if I want to keep the world safe?\n\nThe shabby metal door swung open, and I crept into a dim corridor. It continued straight ahead, before turning sharply toward a set of stairs leading out onto a series of wooden walkways hanging high above a larger chamber. A succession of glowing torches cast orkin shadows, as at last, I realised I'd found my targets."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ebon Wings",
                "text": "Weaving among a series of hanging chains, I made my way out onto a walkway. More cages and open crates full of munitions littered the floor, while flaming caldrons and swaying pens hung either side of me. I'd learned to be wary of the large, spiked-metal spheres that often accompanied orkin artillery, for their violently explosive tendencies.\n\nI'd also seen enough of the foul and loathsome beasts in Valcador to identify the cages' inhabitants. Most were manticores, their scarred and pestilent hides as putrid as their orkin masters, as were their chitinous tails, each one wielding a venomous bulb and a sharp stinger at its tip. As fearsome as they were, these ones were smaller than those I'd seen elsewhere.\n\nSo long as I don't get stuck dealing with a flock of manticore riders, I'll be fine.\n\nI crept onto the foremost of the beams, pressing myself close to the blackened material. From the higher rafters I could see the faint image of my mind's avatar watching, his glowing eyes judging patiently, as if waiting for some inevitable slip up. I ignored his devious smirk, focusing on the chamber below instead. The far wall was completely open to the snowy sky, forming a huge entrance through which the orkins' winged mounts could enter.\n\nIt also exposed the chamber to a very long drop into the ice canyons far below, where I could just about see the endless expanse of foundries spanning the keep's far side. More barrels of black powder, together with defensive cannons, greeted the tower's visitors as they loomed either side of the spiked breach like brutish guards.\n\n\"Don't forget what you promised me, Brother. I'd hate for something unfortunate to befall you, should you not,\" a sly, grisly voice growled, accompanied by the rattling of armour and a distasteful grunt from its recipient.\n\n\"You's do wells to watch your mouth, Maragoth. I's gives you's what you's owed when I's done, and don'ts threatens me's neither!\" another, immediately recognisable voice responded.\n\nI looked directly below me to see two warlords engaged in crass conversation. The smaller of the two sat atop a gigantic, maroon-furred manticore, exceeding the ferocity and power of those locked up around me tenfold. Its charismatic rider sat with more nobility than most, despite the dark stone completely corrupting his body. Trophy-bones adorned his spines and long chains covered his back, as did a scruffy hide cloak. His horned face had elongated into a large, fanged muzzle, hidden beneath a dragon skull that he wore as an extension of his crude armour. One of his clawed arms bore a great axe, and it took me a moment to identify the hulk of dark metal that had replaced his left; the limb was some kind of miniature cannon.\n\nThat must be Maragoth? I'd heard less about the lord of Shadow Fen, the second of the orkin realms after Valcador.\n\nA spark of deep hatred cut short my observations, for the orkin warlord whom he addressed was less of a mystery.\n\nIf any carried the title of Brazen Warlord, it was Balgore. He and his wyvern were both heavily scarred and battered, their wounds crudely hidden under grafted and dulled golden armour. The material appeared worryingly familiar, and in all this time, I'd never considered the fact he could have survived Taldran.\n\nThat's etherium gold? How in the creators' name did he get that?\n\nAs imperfect as his advanced apparel was, I concluded that if the centurion we'd awoken from under the city had eventually fallen, as Apollo had suggested, Balgore and his rabble would surely have made use of all the free resources.\n\nThat's not good, as far as I know no mortal weapons can even cut through that stuff! I thought, my very immortal claws twitching restlessly. I have to stop him while I can.\n\n\"Don't lecture me, Brother, you'd be dead long ago if not for me. Remember, I was the one to grant you all of this, and there are plenty more who would take it from you,\" Maragoth retorted, gesturing to the shadowed walls about them.\n\nBalgore snorted while his mount gave a hiss and rattled its spiny frill. Meanwhile, the lord of Shadow Fen grunted, yanking the reigns of his manticore toward a long wooden table, taking his place beside several more warlords. It wasn't hard to imagine they would tear each other apart at the chance to inherit each other's titles, a fact on which I was all too eager to capitalise.\n\nEven so, Balgore put their loyalties to the test with a firm grunt as he forced his wyvern forward. I watched carefully as he began to bellow demands, claws and wings ready to rip them to pieces as soon as the perfect opportunity presented itself. I had them all exactly where I needed them, and yet something felt wrong \u2013 they weren't as animalistic or aggressive as I'd come to expect.\n\nIt's as though they're on edge. And not in the way they usually are, all wanting to back stab each other.\n\nMy intuition was confirmed when a sharp hiss cut through the tension and something slithered from the darkness.\n\n\"It is good to see that you can at least be civilised when you wish,\" a feminine voice purred, her words seeping out like dripping venom.\n\nWhen I saw the black dragoness uncoil from the shadows like a spectre, I cursed my perception. Her body bore the faintest hint of once being a cloudy grey, as did her streamline features and smooth horns.\n\nAs she dribbled to the floor like liquid gloom, my eagerness to kill the orkin diminished, and the urge to retreat into the cover of the tunnels became overwhelmingly strong.\n\nShe's an ebon wing, what in the creators' name is she doing here?\n\nThe new breed of dragon had once been no different from those I knew. Mordrakk's will and the work of his demonic servants had corrupted them, twisting them into shadowy fiends bent on hatred. One of them in particular held a firm grip over my conscience, the very first dragon I'd seen fall to the dark lure of oblivion.\n\nLet's hope he's not here too. Ebon wings I can deal with, just not him, not again.\n\nIt seemed the first dark-scale was not alone, and moments later, another emerged from the shadows, taking his place alongside the first. His pristine scales shimmered like dark stars in the light of the orkin torches, retaining a hint of their former sky-blue lustre as well as the tattered sail that had once adorned the tip of his tail. Furthermore, with the exception of Balgore and Maragoth, all of the orkin appeared wary of the intrusion.\n\n\"But you would all do very well to remember who it is that truly allows you to survive,\" the female ebon wing pressed, as if mildly offended.\n\n\"Do not offer them such liberties, Omisha, they know little more than battle and savagery,\" the dragon beside her added.\n\n\"Spares me's your words, wyrms. I's in charge of these boys, not you's,\" Balgore challenged, prompting a narrowing of the dragonesse's eyes.\n\n\"And does the Great Master not control you all?\" she asked, as if daring him to voice any answer other than 'yes'.\n\nHe shifted uneasily, anger and rage boiling inside him, before the threat of something far greater than himself forced him to back down.\n\n\"I trust your army stands ready?\" the male asked, passing his satisfied companion a smug glance.\n\n\"The horde is ready, I's just hopes you's wyrms keeps to your end of our bargain,\" he grunted, and the dragonesse's smirk only grew.\n\n\"The Great Master does not lie. As promised, with the exception of Dardien, all of the lands north of Mordrin will be yours,\" she confirmed.\n\n\"Good, so longs as the hanging city burns, I's don't care,\" Balgore declared.\n\n\"Of course,\" the dragon assured him with a low bow.\n\nBalgore's wicked grin grew as he turned to his warlords.\n\n\"Go, get to your hordes, we's leaving,\" he instructed.\n\nAll responded immediately, directing their various winged steeds to the balcony and taking to the air. Balgore was the last orkin to leave, glaring at the ebon wings with a hint of mistrust.\n\n\"You's better not think of stabbing me's in the back, or it's gonna be your heads on my wall,\" he warned.\n\nIt wasn't hard to miss the arrogant twitch in the ebon wings' glowing purple eyes, as if their wicked facades could shatter like glass.\n\n\"On the contrary, this should be a good way to test your faith in the Great Master, should it not?\" another voice stated bluntly.\n\nIt came as the sound of beating wings heralded a third ebon dragon's arrival on the balcony, his claws tapping on the floor like obsidian daggers. His tattered wings blew snow aside as they folded to reveal deep scars of glowing purple across his face, and ragged burns slicing his scales.\n\nNo, not him, not here! I inwardly cursed myself for sitting idle while most of the orkin moved on. I should have just dropped down and killed them all the moment I saw them!\n\n\"And then what? You'd have been captured by those who you did not see?\" my mind's dark avatar commented as he nodded to the third ebon wing.\n\nThe whole building seemed to tremble at his touch, and I really had to fight to keep my composure. His black scales shimmered with a hint of blood-red, while a layer of sleek-black armour, similar to that of orkin hide but smoother and more regal, covered his toned body. Several plates shifted silently as a blade-tipped tail coiled behind him, ready to strike like a manticore's sting.\n\nMore armour shifted around his scarred chest, revealing ebon plates encasing chipped red gems. A grafted mask covered the left side of his face, forged and moulded into what remained of his mangled skull as it glowed with fiery-red runes.\n\nThe same dark metal wrapped around his lower jaw and fangs before curling up about his broken horns, leaving nothing more than a ball of purple flame within his gaping left eye socket. Most chilling of all was his right foreleg, or lack thereof. An arcane pillar of black metal replaced scales, muscle and bone, forming an artificial limb that radiated more purple cinders.\n\nPyro. I could see my avatar smile wickedly as my mind smouldered with trepidation.\n\nMy former friend's fellow ebon wings bowed upon his approach. While Balgore merely glared at him with as much distaste as he did the others.\n\n\"So you's finally come to sees me yourself?\" the warlord mocked.\n\n\"Why, are you not satisfied with any other?\" Pyro mused, his once proud voice twisted and cruel, yet Balgore didn't answer.\n\n\"Sceptre,\" continued Pyro. \"See that everything is in order,\" he commanded, and the male ebon wing nodded before flying away. \"And you, Omisha, are to escort our friend here,\" he ordered, and the black dragoness responded with an eager bow.\n\n\"I's don't need some wyrm at my's side,\" Balgore protested, but Pyro's cold eyes demanded he listen.\n\n\"Think of it as a way to ensure you do as the Great Master decrees; I'd hate for you to make a mistake.\"\n\nBalgore grunted but said nothing more.\n\n\"What about our guest?\" Omisha asked deviously, and Pyro turned, inspecting his metal foreclaw.\n\n\"All in good time, sister,\" he purred, shifting each of his sharp talons like knife blades.\n\nWhat are they talking about, surely they don't know...?\n\nMy heart almost stopped as the dark image in my mind looked at me smugly and I sprung up.\n\nI have to go now! I never should have come here!\n\nIn the very same moment, I was wrenched from my perch by a set of impossibly-cold talons and dragged away in a plume of shadow. Before I knew it, my assailant threw me to the floor and swooped back into the rafters with a dreadful shriek. There was a bolt of pain and a hard metallic thud as I hit the cold stone, clattering to a halt. Fortunately, my armour absorbed most of the impact. Unfortunately, I now lay right before a set of black claws.\n\n\"Hello, Blaze,\" Pyro announced casually, glaring down his mutilated muzzle at me.\n\nI bolted back, wings flaring as my arcane weaponry flashed to life like fiery lightning. He was unfazed; in fact, he even looked amused.\n\n\"Did you really think you could hide forever?\" he cooed, levelling his glowing eyes with mine.\n\n\"No, but if you took any longer to find me, I may have started to believe it,\" I countered swiftly.\n\nPurple flames snorted from his muzzle; even as I could sense him twitch with frustration.\n\n\"I'll admit, you are a tricky one, and yet it is your foolish pursuit of revenge that betrays you,\" he mused, a somewhat proud expression forming upon his scarred muzzle as he glanced about at the tower.\n\nBeside him Balgore rumbled a low growl, watching me with the same vengeful scorn.\n\n\"You's caused my boys a lot of trouble, demon,\" he snorted, his wyvern hissing in agreement.\n\nI didn't even spare him a glance as I assessed my surroundings for any means of escape. Mentally cursing my poor observations when I saw the shadowy vulpomancer that had snatched me stalking across the beams above.\n\nCurse them and their tricks!\n\nAll the while Pyro perused the snowy world outside like it was a crop ripe for harvest. I stepped forward, carefully tracking his every movement as I challenged.\n\n\"I thought you were above dealing with such lowly things?\"\n\nBoth of his accomplices seemed slightly concerned by that statement, and it was no secret to me that pride was one of their greatest weaknesses. My former friend snorted, his teeth flashing beneath his mask.\n\n\"I do what my master demands, whereas you are simply a means to an end,\" he retorted sharply.\n\n\"Am I really the one who's a means to an end?\"\n\nHe gave no verbal response; instead, with one unnaturally swift sweep of his metal paw, he swatted me to the floor.\n\n\"I'm done with this futile endeavour. I will have a future greater than any wyrm in Dardien could have offered me. I'm the leader of the first unbound ebon wings since the days of Lamia herself,\" he boasted proudly, motioning to Balgore and Omisha for them to leave.\n\n\"Go, show this pathetic hatchling your might,\" he commanded.\n\nBalgore growled, forcing his wyvern over to the edge of the tower. Lifting his mighty golden hammer high as he bellowed.\n\n\"To war!\"\n\nHis deep voice echoed from the walls of the tower and out through the frozen wasteland. The mighty boom of a drum and a great horn bellowed like thunder in response.\n\nMeanwhile, Pyro lifted me up in his talons, throwing me like a rag to the edge of the balcony before following with one beat of his wings and pinning me there. I looked down into the great ravine, at the enormous gates of the orkin citadel opening with a symphony of painful squeals and metallic groans. The bitter wind carried the din of orkin voices, all chanting as the weight of their warped stone feet trundled across the ice. Hundreds upon thousands of armed and armoured monsters marched forward from the mighty fortress's flaming depths. The blazing lights of their torches and brazen banners becoming more apparent as they turned the canyon into a fiery river of stone bodies, sharp spines and rusted metal.\n\nTowering beasts marched among them, from hulking trolls carrying monstrous cannons on their hunched backs, to savage chimera thrashing at their goblin tormentors from within wicked cages. Large humanoid ogres, with pale, scarred and putrid skin, wielded huge hammers or clubs, wearing nothing more than tattered loincloths beneath the weight of their swollen stomachs.\n\nSmall, ratty, pale and scrawny goblins, clad in spiked armour with no more than shards of scrap as weapons swarmed between feet like a living carpet. All the while winged horrors, manticores, chimera, as well as swarms of carnivorous bats and birds flew above like a great cloud of terror.\n\nIt was the vast engine of war set on destroying everything, cities, fortresses and my home. The tension that had been building in the world had finally broken, just as Mordrakk told me it would.\n\nHe's not right, I can stop it. Here and now, I have to do something!\n\nWith another loud roar, Balgore raised his hammer once more, forcing the mighty war chant to grow in volume as his wyvern lifted its head high to unleash a bone chilling bellow of its own. With a forceful beat of its tattered wings his mount took to the air, blasting the chamber with a gust of wind as it swooped down over the vast army, followed closely by Omisha.\n\n\"Did you really think I wouldn't expect you to come here? You're nothing if not predictable,\" Pyro pronounced triumphantly, pressing my head to the floor. \"You know the truth, and yet you still think you can run?\" he added through gritted fangs.\n\n\"Then finish it now, I'm right here,\" I growled, kicking up with my rear paws, forcing him to release his grip.\n\n\"Oh, I'm not here to kill you, as simple as that may be. I just need you to lead me home,\" he explained cryptically as purple light escaped from his smiling muzzle.\n\n\"I'm pretty sure your master's been aware of where I've been all along,\" I added as I made a dash for the sky.\n\nPyro lunged at me with unnatural speed, metal talons swiping at my wings.\n\nIn an instant, I pulled them to my sides and my leap became a frantic spin as his strike sent me sprawling across the floor. In the same moment, I saw him looming overhead, and I kicked out, sending him sprawling into a rack of weaponry with a symphony of clatters and bangs. I staggered to my paws as he shook off his fall with a snort, his tail sweeping my legs out from under me before I knew it. Flames and an angry hiss seared from his nostrils as he darted over, only for me to coil and lash out with my wing blades.\n\n\"I tire of this game; you will do as the Great Master commands!\" he declared as he parried my strike with his own, his dark weaponry scraping against the magical light in a shower of arcane sparks.\n\n\"If you think your pathetic creators will save you now, you're mistaken,\" he growled, slamming his metal claw into my back.\n\nWith all of my strength I spun, digging my talons into the metal, forcing myself back against his limb.\n\n\"I'm not counting on any gods to save me,\" I declared, throwing him off as I twisted his foreleg round in such a way that would have surely broken it were it still organic.\n\nEven so, he was far from beaten, and I jumped to dodge his open muzzle, drawing my bladed tail across his forelimbs while attempting to blast flames in his face. In the same moment, he caught me around the neck with his serrated talons. I choked on fire, while the only thing preventing him from slitting my throat was my armour as it resisted the force of his grip.\n\n\"Look at you, you're nothing but a flawed relic of a false pantheon,\" he hissed, claws tightening. \"You know, I should thank you really. You lacked the stomach to kill me when you had the chance, and now I have become more powerful than any Dardien lacky!\" he boasted.\n\nBeating his wings, he lifted into the air, throwing me across the room with a flick of his metal claw. I slammed into the floor with a thud, my armour rattling as I slid to a halt beside a pile of orkin munitions.\n\n\"Ssstop toying with him, finisssh thissss as the massster demandsss,\" the vulpomancer hissed, spreading its tattered wings and swooping down onto a pile of crates.\n\nPyro scowled down his gnarled muzzle at me, while my insides still burned from the backfired flames.\n\n\"Still trying to be the hero?\" he growled scornfully.\n\n\"I'm not a hero,\" I declared as I lifted myself to my paws, twirling to face the piles of explosives and volatile powder.\n\nWith a quick thrust, white flames snorted from my muzzle and ignited a trail of flammable dust. In a pyrotechnic shower of sparks and dancing embers, the munitions exploded. With an angry hiss, the taunting vulpomancer leapt into the air, vanishing in a cloud of shadow. Meanwhile, the explosion cast both Pyro and I aside. But I was ready, and charged with all of the strength I could muster, slamming into his forelegs horns first, throwing him into the air.\n\nI didn't slow, leaping from the rim of the balcony; spreading my wings as the harsh wind sent me into a wild spin. For a moment, I was able to steady myself, then an ear-rending boom tore apart the structure behind me. There was a burst of light as the side of the tower exploded, the chain reaction sending an avalanche of rubble down onto the ramparts.\n\nThe shockwave tore past me, casting me into another uncontrollable spiral. I beat my wings in a desperate effort to right myself as the dark sky and the icy cliffs flashed before my eyes in a blur. When I thought it couldn't get any worse, the sound of beating wings filled the air and a ferocious pair of black talons ripped me from the sky.\n\n\"You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?\" Pyro hissed, slashing at me with all four claws.\n\nHis wings flared, pulling up from the advancing orkin legions, while I flapped like a rag in a blizzard. Instinctively, I opened my muzzle to unleash a torrent of flames, forcing him to release me. The moment I was free, I beat my wings, the icy landscape rushing by mere meters blow me as the echoes of the explosion faded into the distance.\n\nAn endless sea of snow and ice sped by, broken only by scattered pools of glowing lava and spires of smouldering rock. Swerving to avoid most of them, I revelled in the chance to fly so wildly again. However, months of confinement in the narrow tunnels had dampened my aerial skills, and I found myself skimming more than a few sharp edges, making me thankful for my armour.\n\nAs I weaved around a stack of spires, Pyro's shadow appeared above me, surging downward like a bolt of pure darkness. His claws wrapped about my sides, instantly trying to immobilise my wings.\n\n\"See how much better I could have been for them? How great a leader I am compared to you? I wouldn't be so blind as to abandon them like a coward!\" he roared over the howl of the wind as we scraped against pillars of volcanic rock.\n\nBeating my wings harder, I pushed myself up against his underside, using the brief moment of freedom to spin round and face him.\n\n\"You did more than abandon them!\" I retorted, lashing at his face with my foreclaws.\n\nThe metal of his helmet softened under the heat, but in the same instant, he struck out with his metal limb, seizing my neck. Gripping with a clench as cold as death, pain radiated through me, amplified by the scars along my side.\n\n\"I secured my place within the new world order so I may extend such a blessing to others of my choosing!\" he declared, pulling up and dragging me into the sky with him.\n\n\"Are you sure you didn't do it for yourself?\" I replied, kicking at his underside.\n\n\"You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? Be the glorious idol they all think you are?\" he growled.\n\n\"Then do it, kill me! Or would your master fail to appreciate that?\" I countered, pushing my tail's glowing blade into his back in an explosion of sparks.\n\nHe roared in pain, purple flames gushing from the wound as fire surged through his bared fangs. Even so, he still possessed guile enough to throw me toward the volcanic glacier, and in the harsh wind my efforts to steady myself were in vain. I struck a mound of snow, smashing through several drifts, before tumbling into a volcanic pit of molten rock and smouldering stone. Lava had boiled up through the ice and rapidly cooled in the freezing air, creating a hostile well of fire and ash like an arena around me.\n\nTowering pinnacles lined its rim, oozing gooey magma across the terraces of twisted rock and bubbling pools, as I finally bounced over a small stream of molten stone and rolled to a halt at the edge of a deep fissure at the pit's far edge.\n\nSmoke filled my lungs and my scars coursed with dark magic, causing my wounded limbs to contort and twist. Pyro's silhouette flashed by, gleaming lesions the only thing to distinguish him from the shroud of volcanic smoke. Weakened, I clambered to the edge of the pit, peering down into the fissure's icy depths, before slumping lazily on a bank of soft snow.\n\nNo, there's no time for rest! He's not going to stop, he'll never stop!\n\nTrue to my fears, Pyro circled like a vulture, before finally settling down in front of me. My armour tightened in preparation for a strike and with a firm swipe, he threw me unceremoniously across the snow.\n\n\"I know what you are \u2013 you're not a legend, you're no saviour. You're the one thing preventing our true master's return, preventing the universe's freedom from this chaos and disorder!\" he hollered, striking again.\n\nI staggered down a shallow bank at the edge of another deep fissure, leaving me inches away from plummeting into the icy underworld.\n\n\"I know what is in your mind, and it is nothing compared to the true might of the Great Master. You're nothing but a weak imposter!\" Pyro went on, sneering through the streams of smoke escaping his bared fangs.\n\nPressing one claw to my neck, he drew the other across my body, dragging it upwards and tearing my wing.\n\nI wonder if he can kill me \u2013 he's certainly not the first to try, or to fail.\n\nAll the while I could hear Mordrakk's stones grinding in my mind as I looked up at the belief in my foe's baleful eyes. I wondered if he knew this was futile, that I couldn't die by his claws.\n\nThrough my blurred vision, I stared past him toward the clouded heavens, spying a lance of firelight streaking across the sky, accompanied by a fierce cry.\n\nThat glow, it can't be?\n\nThe phoenix slammed into the disfigured side of Pyro's masked face talons first. He howled and reared up, as the bird's serrated claws gouged at his missing eye. Beating his wings, he struggled backwards, his efforts merely encouraging the phoenix's feathers to burn even brighter.\n\nThe moment his grip loosened, I gasped for breath and staggered to my paws. I'd no idea what was going on, and I didn't have time to question as my opposition was forced, thrashing and cursing, back toward the magma pits. I turned to the cliff edge and bolted, beating my wings the best I could in an effort to fly. It wasn't enough and the next thing I knew I was tumbling into the frozen underbelly of Valcador, slamming against ice and stone before hitting the cold surface with another heavy thud.\n\nFreezing water flowed lightly across my scales as it poured down from the plains, and peering up through the murky gloom, I could see the cliff top silhouetted against the faded glow of lava and bursts of purple flame. The phoenix's feathers glowed like the sun as the mighty creature retreated into the smoke, before panting and battered, Pyro appeared at the cliff edge. His eye scoured the gloom, and I felt my chest throb as my heart beat faster.\n\nNevertheless, I crawled to the shelter of a small overhang, watching his blurred shadow against the opposite wall until, with an angry roar, he swiped at the snowy rim.\n\n\"You can't run forever, Blaze! The age of the Great Master will come regardless!\" he warned. \"Maybe then you'll finally come out and face the world like a real dragon!\" he added with a menacing hiss, before spreading his tattered wings and disappearing into the darkening sky.\n\nAfraid that he was just toying with me, I remained hidden for some time. Before I let out a long sigh, a stream of vapour escaping my muzzle as I slumped. A bed of smooth pebbles lay under me as my armour loosened and slowly fell away.\n\nThings are getting worse. I can't stay here. One day he'll actually manage to catch me or find a way to activate his plans without me.\n\nI dreaded to think, dismissing the countless horrible scenarios my mind presented.\n\nThat's if the orkin don't bury Dardien first. My mind quipped.\n\nWith a painful wince and a weary groan, I rolled onto my front and lifted to my paws, knowing that ultimately, the waterlogged pit was not where I needed \u2013 or wanted \u2013 to be, especially when I looked toward an icy boulder opposite. The familiar sight of my mind's dark avatar, with his coiled tail and folded wings, scowled at me with brooding menace.\n\nHe held a pair of stones in his forepaws, and with three slow strikes, beat them against one another. Yet before the fourth could ring out, the oblivion of unconsciousness stole me away and he vanished from my sight, as did the forsaken image of the frozen cave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"It seems your efforts are wasted.\"\n\nMy eyes flashed open to gaze upon the frozen cave, only now the world felt dark and lifeless. The air itself was like a viscous soup, slowing my movements. Reality seemed to flicker and wane, as if it were a veil pulled loosely over my eyes. Ahead, I could see the dark serpent sitting upon an icy rock, yet all feelings of weakness had left me and my armour was gone.\n\nIt's just another dream, how could I expect anything else?\n\n\"I could say the same about your efforts,\" I responded.\n\n\"You could say that it does not matter,\" he continued, waving a dismissive foreclaw as the darkness below the dreary image crawled through the veil of reality like the tendrils of some great sea beast.\n\n\"It doesn't, but that doesn't mean I'll do what you ask of me,\" I reasoned, not daring to look at him.\n\nHe contemplated his response, raising a foreclaw to his muzzle.\n\n\"Isn't the reason you stay here to ensure the safety of those you failed to protect?\" he taunted.\n\nMy lack of a response raised his interest, seemingly confirming his suspicions.\n\n\"You're afraid, I know \u2013 I can feel it,\" he stated, snaking deliberately down from his perch and stalking toward me like a predator would its injured prey.\n\n\"Death and pain, they are not your fears. You're afraid of failure, because after so long, and so many attempts, you know you cannot win,\" he taunted, drawing out his words as if spoken to a child.\n\n\"You could stop me. There is no point in hiding that fact, because I know you will not. You are too afraid that in the end, you'll be alone, left for eternity to live with the fact that you failed. That when all is finished and the last star has faded, you will hear nothing but their screams cast upon my new creation!\"\n\nI swept a claw back through his shadowed form, even though I knew such an action was futile. He simply faded and laughed mockingly.\n\n\"Another example of how pitiful you really are,\" he scoffed, his disembodied voice flowing about me like water.\n\n\"If I'm so pointless, then so are you!\" I called out to nowhere in particular.\n\nThen something that Pyro had mentioned took its place at the forefront of my mind.\n\n'You're nothing but a weak imposter.'\n\n\"I don't think you're as all-powerful as you say you are.\"\n\nThere was a brief flutter as the illusion rematerialized before me, water parting at his paws as if fearing to meet his dark hide.\n\n\"What did he mean?\" I pressed, feeling great satisfaction in the fact that I was the one pressuring him for change. \"Surely, if you were in charge, you wouldn't have Pyro speaking ill of you like that.\"\n\nHe stepped backwards, sly expression fading as he hissed spouts of flame.\n\n\"It matters not,\" he retorted haughtily.\n\nHis manipulative nature turned to anger; he would stop at nothing to make anyone who spoke down to him suffer, and he didn't disappoint me when my scars began to burn.\n\nHe's hiding something... He's not who he says he is, not entirely.\n\nMy thoughts waned as a wave of pain lanced through me, threads of agony seeping deep into my body like the digging roots of penetrating weeds. Gritting my teeth, I staggered, but didn't take my eyes off him.\n\n\"I never wished for it to come to this,\" he proclaimed, raising a foreclaw and bringing it down over my eyes with one swift strike, severing my connection to the dreary dreamscape, plunging me into darkness once more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Consciousness found me as reality drifted back into place. My eyes reluctantly flickered open, affording me a brief glimpse of my surroundings. It looked like another icy cave, much the same as any I'd lingered in for the past few months. The only notable observation was that it was different from that in which unconsciousness had claimed me. It was larger, and through the cover of my eyelids, I could still perceive a light source. I could only assume the river had washed me downstream. Opening my eyes, I could see there was a large gap in the ice, allowing the waterway to flow out over a cliff and into the snowy depths of a thick pine forest outside.\n\nDim sunlight illuminated the world beyond, allowing me to surmise I'd been unconscious for the night at least. The healed feeling, which had replaced the strained agony in my limbs, also supported my assumption as I tested each leg with a slow shift. After a few moments confirming my recovery, I stood up, the shards of armour still clinging to my scales shifting, while those that had fallen away resumed their position.\n\nI glanced around, trying to get my bearings, first to the back of the cave where the river snaked off under the ice to be joined by other streams running down from melt holes in the walls. Piles of logs and fallen trees covered the ground around me, and I could only assume the river had washed them out from deeper within the frozen labyrinth.\n\nBetter be glad the water's not as formidable as it evidently can be, some of those logs are huge!\n\nMy instinct also told me there was even more reason to assume it had no problem washing me away from Pyro's ebon wings and their orkin lackeys.\n\nWhat is it with me and escaping down rivers? I wondered as I rolled my aching shoulders.\n\nMoments later, another sound quickly caught my attention, and my senses prickled as my instincts sharpened instantly \u2013 the sound was a gentle, unmistakable coo, and as I turned, I saw the phoenix perched on top of a crooked tree branch. It had the same curious look I'd seen in its eyes before. I checked my surroundings for any other disturbances, and when none presented themselves, I turned away from the bird.\n\nI don't have time for this! I've no idea where I am, or what to do!\n\n\"It's not wise to turn your tail upon a hawk of Red-Fire,\" a strange, kooky and vaguely familiar voice suddenly chimed, followed by a light snigger.\n\nI know that voice? It can't be? I spun round to face the last dragon I ever expected.\n\n\"You!\"\n\nConfusion completely consumed my mind as the grinning face of the withered, old earth dragon greeted me. Many of the Cartographer's aged features were hidden under a tattered hood and robe. I could barely see his horns, folded wings, scarred scales and clouded eyes. The only things I could really make out were his paws, spiked tail and horn-tipped muzzle. He held a wooden staff in the small fingers of his right wing; it looked like a piece of driftwood, and yet the twisted stub that was its upper end emitted a faint green glow.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is he doing here, of all dragons?\n\nThe crazy, old dragon I'd met in Dardien's archives gave a disgruntled snort of disapproval.\n\n\"You know, for one who spends so much time tracking their prey, you would do well to cover your own paw prints,\" he grumbled, the second of his two personalities snickering as I glanced down at my paws.\n\nI shifted with a hint of shame, sending ripples through the water as the Cartographer nodded to the phoenix. Ruffling its feathers and puffing up its chest, it ignited a small pile of twigs. The old dragon moved toward the blossoming fire, placing a larger log on the juvenile flames. The sudden warmth broke my stupor, and I shook my head as I moved closer.\n\n\"What in the creators' name are you doing here?\" I asked, while he fanned the fire with a wing.\n\nHe paused, and with a simple wave of his staff, nudged me aside to retrieve more wood. He moved with far more agility than his withered look suggested, bringing my judgment into question.\n\nIs anyone I know really who they say they are?\n\n\"Who else were you expecting?\" he asked somewhat sourly, leaning his staff between two crooked branches.\n\nMy mind raced. Maybe Pyro, some ebon wings? orkin perhaps... Just not him!\n\n\"He didn't look like he was expecting anyone, especially not one from Dardien,\" the second of his personalities added with a laugh, only to be cut off by a slap from the former.\n\nMy eyes darted about, looking for something that would suggest this was a dream. Meanwhile, he looked at me as if he could see so many things I could not, as if I was the strange one!\n\nNo, this is real, he's really here? But if he was in Dardien after I left...? My mind raced and questions surged forward.\n\n\"In Dardien, what happened? Aries closed off the city and we...\"\n\nHe silenced my jabbering with a wave of his forepaw, his second personality giving a tiresome sigh.\n\n\"We thought we warned you of the Sovereign's tendencies?\" he asked.\n\n\"A lying snake, unworthy of his place, an insult to the great line of Goldfire,\" his second personality hissed scornfully.\n\nSeemingly insulted by the mention of Aries' name, he wrapped a forepaw around his muzzle. Recalling the last time we met, I tried to humour his bickering, knowing it was the best way to get answers.\n\nMaybe if he'd been a little clearer about what he meant, I could have avoided most of this.\n\n\"What happened after the attack on the celebration?\" I asked again.\n\nHe released his grip, stopped his muttering, and with his tail still twitching, his first personality continued.\n\n\"You fled with the aid of the princess, did you not?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Vulkaine's doing, we presume \u2013 he always did like you. We all did,\" he added with a smile.\n\nThat feeling's hardly mutual. I inwardly grumbled.\n\nMy opinion on the Elders was no better than those I associated with the creators. All they wanted was for me to fulfil their agendas, although I didn't yet know what constituted the Elders' agenda. The Cartographer's look changed and any hope faded briefly from his eyes.\n\n\"Things in Dardien haven't been good since that night,\" he explained. \"The Sovereign tried to accuse the Elders of treason. He suggested that you were an imposter and a danger to the city. Many disagreed, however; fear drove most to see things differently,\" he confessed sadly, glancing at the fiery bird perched beside him.\n\nI felt a new knot tighten in my stomach. I knew I didn't belong there with them, no more than I'd belonged with Tarwin, but to think I'd caused all of that. I glanced back at the old dragon as his second voice muttered angrily about Aries being a vile worm.\n\n\"And Zephyra, what did she do?\" I asked, dreading a reality in which the princess was among those to betray me.\n\nThe Cartographer smiled at the mention of her name.\n\n\"It would seem that the legends have not been completely forgotten,\" he answered with a widening grin.\n\n\"Upon the twilight of ages, the skies will break to bring forth the Fallen Star of scornful wrath and eternal hate,\" his second voice began to chant.\n\nHopeful about his response, I ignored his muttering. Don't think about that stupid legend, I know it's just a ruse.\n\n\"No, the princess did not hide while her father's madness gripped the city; it would seem that you inspired her,\" he explained admirably. \"Not a bad dragoness to save, we might add, and the day she realised how dire things were, her entire order followed, joining with a good proportion of the others who followed the Elders over Aries.\"\n\nThere was a hint of hope in his tone, as if he'd been waiting to say such a thing for a very long time. Glancing to his staff, he took it in his wing fingers once again.\n\n\"The New Order follows her lead now, and they are the best hope of stopping the Brazen Horde,\" he added, glancing back with a knowing stare. \"Yet they will soon face an enemy known to none.\"\n\nI glanced away shamefully. No, an enemy known to me. The one I failed to stop.\n\n\"You know, don't you?\" he accused. \"You've seen them. The curse of the ebon wing has not been seen for almost seven centuries \u2013 their presence among the demon horde is a dire sign indeed.\"\n\nHe stared into the fire, and I swore his gaze caused the flames to shiver into unnatural images of beating wings and flame-spewing dragons. All that flashed through my mind was my battle against Pyro at Ilivar, the sight of his scarred face and his torn limb. I shied away, disturbing the flames with a beat of my wings, casting the image into a frenzied spiral of smoke and embers.\n\n\"I can't go back,\" I declared, my eyes not daring meet his.\n\nHe frowned, but didn't pull his gaze away from the settling flames.\n\n\"You are the guardian, will of the creators, if you will not stop this, no one will,\" he stated, as if rehearsed.\n\n\"Cometh then one of unnatural blood, born to one of the nine great races of our legacy. For when darkness falls, and the most ancient of shadows is reborn, cometh the last great Guardian to whom we are solely sworn, descendant of shadow, light, life and death, their loss will transcendent,\" his second voice continued relentlessly as he leaned forward, holding himself up with his staff.\n\nI shook my head, trying to block out the guilt as I fought back the confusion.\n\nIt's all too fast, too sudden! It's been so long; I can't go back!\n\nHis knowing look told me that both he and the Elders had always known more about me than they cared to share.\n\n\"No! I failed to stop this; I've repeatedly failed. Obviously, whatever they intended me to be wasn't enough,\" I hissed.\n\nHe paused and shook his head.\n\n\"Our victories are measured in failures as much as in successes. It is, however; our will to carry on which defines us,\" he advised.\n\nReluctantly, I sank back down, fighting the urge to cower beneath my wings. As guilt welled up inside, the repressed feelings of the months hidden away broke free, searching desperately for any excuse to discourage my return home.\n\n\"Then I've failed,\" I admitted, bowing my head. \"And I don't want to fail again.\"\n\nThe silence lasted no more than a heartbeat, before the old dragon started laughing. It wasn't the rebellious snigger of his second voice, he was actually chuckling as he added.\n\n\"We have seen failure, we have seen heroes fall, but that day we first met you, we saw the determination in your eyes.\" His laughter paused as he shook his head. \"We had no doubt of who you were then, so why have you lost the will to go so far for those you hold dear?\"\n\n\"The day we met, in the archive?\" I questioned.\n\nI wasn't doing that for anyone other than myself?\n\nHe laughed again, shaking his head.\n\n\"Oh no, we mean the day we saw you fly into a tree,\" he corrected quickly and my confusion dispersed in an instant.\n\n\"You! You were the one who brought me to Dardien?\" I stuttered in surprise, and he nodded.\n\n\"We admit it was the most surprised we'd seen the Elders in an age, and as for the little blue dragoness the healers left you with, well she too, was just as shocked,\" he explained.\n\nI felt my heart ignite and then fall into a depressing ache as the memory of the day I'd met Risha came back to me.\n\n\"I'm sure she was,\" I admitted.\n\nHe seemed to notice the effect his words had on me and pointed his staff at the empty socket in my armour, the wooden tip glowing brightly for a moment, forcing the golden metal to do the same. I shifted away as he pointed to the spot where the first good feeling I'd had in months had sparked \u2013 a warm heart, burning like dragonfire.\n\n\"We doubt a god could truly know such emotion, their omnipotent nature makes them blind to such things, their immortality far too distracting to truly understand the struggles of mortal kind,\" he explained with another jab at my chest.\n\nI staggered back beyond his reach as he continued.\n\n\"That is where you differ, and whether it is fate, destiny or purpose, intended or accidental, you are who you are,\" he proposed, pulling back his staff. \"And you are not one who would sit back and allow the world to die, we might add.\"\n\nI glanced about nervously, my mind torn.\n\nHe's just like Mordrakk only... My thoughts came to a halt. I want to listen to him.\n\n\"Mighty fires of starlight will stand against the darkest dawn, and upon blades of crackling fire, corrupt blood will be drawn. When starry skies of longest night are gazed upon in times of greatest doubt and direst fear, age's twilight grows ever near,\" his second voice continued to mutter to itself.\n\n\"If I go back, he'll get the amulet, he'll kill everyone,\" I whimpered.\n\n\"Upon that new dawn, the most magnificent light will bless such skies, as stars clash upon dying age's coming night. When golden spires become awash with dragonfire, all will know of their last great saviour. So will end the reign of our grand creator,\" he rambled on until, with a hard slap of his muzzle, he silenced himself.\n\n\"Tell me, Guardian, how long have you lived?\" his former voice enquired.\n\n\"Barely fifteen winters \u2013 no, I\u2013I mean seasons. I don't really know which anymore.\"\n\nHe pulled back his staff, leaning it against his wing and locked his eyes with mine.\n\n\"And in all that time, who was it that chose to do what was right? Who felt, who cared, who lived, ate, drank and flew?\" he asked, firmly nudging my wings with his barbed tail.\n\nThe reality of his words slowly gripped me, and Mordrakk's dark voice was nowhere to disagree.\n\n\"It wasn't the darkness that first drove you to Ilivar, nor did you run when faced with the power of the Great Master,\" he added, glancing down at my chest. \"There is who we are told to be, and then there is who we choose to be, and we do not make that decision with our minds,\" he told me sincerely as he reached to tap my chest plate again.\n\nI made no effort to avoid him as I thought about that. Just like Vulkaine said, I never really did any of that because I was told to.\n\n\"The choice we must make is whether to stand for what we love or let fear and darkness take us,\" he added simply.\n\nWith the thoughts spinning in my mind, I knew what I should do; in fact, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and what was going to keep my friends safe.\n\n\"When golden spires become awash with dragonfire, all will know of their last great saviour. So will end the reign of our grand creator,\" his second voice repeated the rhythmic conclusion of my legend.\n\n\"Wait, you called me 'Guardian'? How do you know about all that? How do you know about any of this?\" I asked, and raising himself from his sedentary position he answered.\n\n\"You did not think everyone had forgotten about the ages that existed before those of legend?\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" I pressed.\n\nHe gave a deep sigh, his second voice falling completely silent.\n\n\"That is a very long tale, one for another time,\" he replied, glancing up at the phoenix.\n\nA wave of frustration fell over me, a million internal voices demanding I should know, especially after the lengths they'd gone to, to deceive me.\n\n\"And what of the fight, the orkin and Mordrakk? I can't defeat them all, regardless of where I am or what you say,\" I stated.\n\n\"There is a gathering of all wings still loyal to the old alliance upon the ruined overlook of Midnight Watch, be they of leather or feather. It is a five-day flight from here,\" he stated matter-of-factly. \"Zephyra's army stands ready to intercept the Brazen Horde within a month,\" he explained, turning back to me.\n\n\"But even if Balgore is defeated, what about Mordrakk?\" I pressed, but he merely shook his head.\n\n\"You're not as powerless as you think. For it was you who forced the Great Master's hand both times at Ilivar. You've already proven to him you're not so easily set aside. He is still weak, he will bide his time, you must use that.\"\n\nBut I didn't defeat Mordrakk at Ilivar? I noted, only to consider. True, but I didn't exactly let him get his way either, the Ether is still closed to him.\n\n\"You will make your choice and we will meet you on the sixth day from now,\" he added as he turned to leave and I shook off my confusion, bolting after him.\n\n\"Wait, what about you, where are you going?\" I asked.\n\nHe paused, glancing back, not at me, but at the warm glow of the phoenix radiating from above, while the fiery bird neatly preened its feathers.\n\n\"Oh, you do not need us to show the way. Though we guess we are not the only one who has been searching for you.\"\n\nThat idea made me both cautiously optimistic and fearful all at once as the old dragon added.\n\n\"As we are sure you have surmised, the ebon wings know of your escape too, they'll be hunting for you.\"\n\nI paused on the snow-covered gravel, cold water lapping over my paws, unsure of what to say as he turned toward the snowy forest.\n\n\"We will take our leave, Guardian. Trust that our Eyes will always keep you safe,\" he added, and the flaming bird behind me cooed in response.\n\nI turned to see the phoenix straightening and flaring its feathers; it even nodded.\n\nDid he call his phoenix 'Eyes'?\n\nThe Cartographer was more mystical than I imagined, a thought that was justified when I looked back to see that he'd vanished. Meanwhile, the glow of the phoenix shifted as the majestic bird flapped its wings and took to the sky, its flight illuminating the tips of snowy pine trees.\n\n\"So, what will you do?\" Mordrakk questioned.\n\nI looked up to see his illusion coiled upon a frost-encrusted mound.\n\n\"I know what you'd ask of me, but you're not him, are you? Not entirely,\" I challenged, approaching slowly.\n\nI expected my scars to erupt with pain, but as I stopped at the base of the mound, I felt nothing but the fury in his eyes bearing down on me.\n\n\"You are not completely like him, and if what you tell me is true, you are as much a part of the creators as you are of me.\" I surmised.\n\nHe growled, and flames spat from his bared teeth.\n\n\"You may think that such an accusation will keep you safe, but know this, Guardian; I will stop at nothing to see the glory of my creation restored, and I will let no one stand before me, not even those traitorous aspects of myself,\" he threatened, with a fearsome inflection.\n\n\"So, you are different?\" I muttered as a new realisation slowly dawned over me.\n\nHe's not entirely like the Mordrakk that I faced at Ilivar.\n\nMy thoughts died as a sharp blade of pain rippled through my scars.\n\n\"You may think what you wish of me, but do not make the mistake of thinking we are equal,\" he finished, and with a gust of wind, he faded away, as did my pain.\n\nI staggered back and looked about as my mind fell upon one thing, a break in his mental assault and the motivation I'd been so desperately looking for.\n\nI have to go back."
            },
            {
                "title": "Long Road Home",
                "text": "With the phoenix's guidance, it wasn't long before I found a vantage point above the snowy forest. The vast ice fields of Valcador rose up at my back, the smoke from the bastions of orkin industry and volcanic pits darkening the sky. Before me lay the vast forest of Shadow Fen, and to the east rose the western foothills of the great Storm Mountains.\n\nIf I kept following their edge to the south, it will lead me toward Dardien. Around the heart of orkin territory.\n\nI didn't really know much about the cursed forests of Shadow Fen, but what little I did know told that after centuries of vile magic the trees had been corrupted into a vast, twisted thicket of barbs, thorns and rot. I could see the endless wall of tangled roots and sharp, irregular tree stumps beneath the light cover of snow. The orkin that inhabited the foul lands differed greatly from their Valcador kin. In place of industry, they used vile sorcery, more ancient than even the beast-men themselves. While wild manticores thrived in the hellish undergrowth, like flies about a corpse.\n\nI thought to wait a little longer, to find a safer place to take off from, but lack of time and the longing to get as far from Valcador as I could, made me impatient. To my left, a roaring river cascaded down the steep valley cliffs, creating an updraft of chilled mist. I glanced back at my flared wings, rustling them apprehensively.\n\nThis isn't going to be a simple trip.\n\nThe gleaming feathers of the fiery bird caught my eye as it made its way toward the mountainous horizon, confirming my instinct about it being the right direction.\n\nWhat are a few manticore riders or walls of twisted trees to me?\n\nI'd no idea whether the Cartographer had planned this, especially after he'd suggested that I'd have to navigate my way home.\n\nI just hope he's right about all this, for everyone's sake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Few things stole my attention as I flew, allowing the walls within my mind to hold tight against the doubts and hesitations. Despite the constant threat of attack, I felt content with the radiant light of the sun gleaming on my outstretched wings, and even more pleased to see the nearly impassable terrain passing by below.\n\nDespite Shadow Fen's sinister landscape, the sunlight here was clear and untainted, unlike the sickly hue that shone down through the smoggy clouds of Valcador.\n\nIronic that a culture of dark curses and sacrifice spares them a sky full of industrial soot.\n\nAll too soon, the light narrowed on the horizon, and the winter glow morphed into golden pillars as it began to sink below the clouds. As the day began to fade and the cold night crept in, slight trepidation fell over me once more. Scanning the snowy forest, I looked for a safe place to nest, preferably one above the cursed thicket.\n\nAll the while, I was just waiting for Mordrakk's dark voice to tell me that the dark forest was no match for my power, and yet he was silent.\n\nHe's too quiet, I don't like it when he's quiet. Even so, I considered that what I'd said to him earlier may have actually had an effect. It's almost like he's afraid I'll find out more?\n\nRegardless of his opinions, I knew better than to stay out after dark, especially seeing how well ebon wings could blend into the shadows. Therefore, as my sharp eyes scoured the ground, I could see that frozen rivers and lakes occasionally broke the snowy mass, as did a number of small orkin encampments scattered about the mass of knotted trees. I put as much distance between myself and those as possible until, finally, a large rocky ridge line came into view.\n\nTowering cliffs of craggy rock rose up, trees clawing at their rugged flanks with sharp barbs, as if trying to drag them down into the darkness. The escarpment rose like the head of a great beast, a row of more inviting trees clinging to its back, forming a green mane, while rock formations outlined its eyes, ears and teeth. The natural illusion would have been flawless if not for the arched ruins that sat on the edge of what would have been the great monster's muzzle.\n\nI passed close to the crumbling structure, checking for any signs of orkin activity, before circling back and landing on the cliffside just below an old tower. A large ledge sloped down to the forest, its far end consumed by the tide of cursed woodland, while above, ruined stairs snaked into the rock. I noted that the terrain provided adequate cover from any peering eyes, before I began searching for shelter.\n\nIt feels like everything's watching me here anyway, it's like the trees have eyes.\n\nThat idea made my spine prickle as I crept between two boulders, and heard the distant caw of the phoenix circling somewhere above. For a moment I was afraid it would give away my position, but I convinced myself that it couldn't be that stupid.\n\nIt's smarter than I give it credit for, I'll admit. I noted, as it vanished into the trees, without a trace.\n\nMeanwhile, I came upon a small cave, and clearing it of bats, settled down to watch the last rays of sunlight disappear over the horizon. As night's shadows began to pool around me, my eyes lingered on places I anticipated Mordrakk's dark image to manifest. Though only moss and vines covered the rugged walls, while dripping stalactites plopped water into small pools.\n\nHe's really missing out. Maybe I can have a relatively peaceful night for a change?\n\nI knew that was a frail idea, yet after turning some dry vegetation into a soft bed, and without Mordrakk's cruel words, my mind began to wander. I couldn't help feeling that his lack of taunting was deliberate; after all, I was one step closer to doing what he wanted. I just hoped the real Mordrakk didn't think I would leave Valcador so swiftly.\n\nThat's if I can still believe there's a difference between them.\n\nIt wasn't long after sunset that something finally stole my attention away from anxiety. I jumped to my paws when a faint fluttering in the trees drew my gaze, and crept cautiously toward the cave mouth. Icicles clung to the stone like glistening fangs, and a bitter wind gnawed at my scales. Faint, wispy clouds crossed the darkened sky, looming like ghosts in the moonlit blackness.\n\nBeyond, was an even greater sight. Despite all the deadly and otherworldly horrors amongst which I sat, the sea of sparkles crossed by the dancing aurora and cosmological clouds still offered the most intoxicating sight.\n\nHard to think the one bent on the world's destruction designed such a magnificent spectacle.\n\nIt was even harder to believe that one could engineer such a vast piece of art. It was far more reassuring to imagine it as a vast canvas filled with tiny holes and illuminated from behind by a glorious white light. I wished, just once, that I could view the stars in such a simple way again.\n\nBut how naive does that make me? I'd just be the ignorant fool Mordrakk takes me for.\n\nA rustling in the tree caught my attention and I jumped to face it, cursing myself for allowing my attention to slip. There was a dull flicker amidst the shadows, a light similar to that of a dimmed lantern between the frosty branches. I relaxed when I saw the phoenix, its glowing feathers dulled to mask its presence. Even in such an inconspicuous state, it looked magnificent, watching me for a while before settling to preen its feathers.\n\nThe earliest I could recall seeing it was back in Taldran. Yet there were no obvious signs that the Cartographer or the Elders had possessed the allegiance of such a creature.\n\nAm I so different? It feels like they used me just the same? I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts. No, I'm not a pet or a pawn anymore!\n\nThe phoenix gave a light coo, its ruby eyes sparkling like jewels. Its intelligent appearance urged a thought that at one time would have made me feel stupid.\n\nI guess that was before I learned there were things in the world that can understand me?\n\n\"What about you? Where do you fit in all this?\" I asked.\n\nThe bird's eyes twinkled, but as expected, its only response was a soft cluck.\n\nCan't talk back, what else was I expecting? A portion of my mind laughed at my stupidity.\n\n\"Yeah, just as I thought,\" I sighed, sparing the stars one last glance before I turned away.\n\nThey weren't the same, they'd not been for a long time. A shadow darting across the lights instantly changed my train of thought, and I darted for the cover of the cave. For a moment, it seemed I'd gone unnoticed, and with a dull flicker, the light of the phoenix's feathers died completely as it vanished into the forest.\n\nWell, at least one of us can disappear. I thought scornfully as I cautiously glanced around.\n\nThe beating of wings and the dark silhouette scooted by, before landing with a metallic thud that erased any idea I was imagining things. I slid down as the draconic figure shifted in the gloom; noting just how hard it was to distinguish him from the shadows. It didn't look like Pyro, and as he raised his head and sniffed the air, I recognised him as one of the other ebon dragons from the tower.\n\nSceptre, if I remember right? Trust Pyro to send some lackey after me instead of coming himself!\n\nAt first, I thought he'd just leave, but as the tense moments passed, I realised that was a futile expectation.\n\n\"Spread out, find our master's prize,\" he commanded eagerly as several vulpomancers materialised in plumes of shadow.\n\nMy heart jumped as the half-dozen serpentine forms silently skulked over the rocks and I slipped back behind a boulder, glancing around for a means of escape.\n\nIt's not going to be easy taking off without one of them seeing. I surmised, stealthily starting to creep away.\n\nThe shadow creatures vanished amidst the rocks while I moved to stay out of Sceptre's scouring vision. I managed to get a good distance away before I turned and scurried up the overgrown stairs to the ruined arches at the top of the ridge.\n\nIs anywhere in this cursed place really going to be safe? I thought as I caught a glimpse of the endless forest on all sides.\n\nAfter passing through one of the tall arches, I found the inside of the highkin ruin had collapsed, forming a pit of rubble and small pine trees hidden by the snowfall. Moments later, stones under me gave way, and with a clatter of armour and a snap of pain, I finally bounced to a stop on the cracked floor of an open chamber.\n\nBy the creators, why is everything north of Dardien falling to pieces!? I inwardly cursed, only for a loud thud to steal my attention.\n\nA scattering of snow from the peak of the arch across from me signalled that my fall hadn't gone unnoticed, and I ducked behind a pile of bricks as the vulpomancer's eyeless gaze passed over me. It gave a light hiss before creeping along the top of the ruin, and leaping over to the ridge's peak.\n\nThey're still not the most alert creatures, eyes or not. I let out a long-held breath as a new wave of relief washed over me.\n\nRelief that was shattered in a flurry of dark smoke as a set of deathly claws ripped me from my hiding space and threw me into the middle of the ruin. The vulpomancer gave a wicked laugh, the sound distorted by rasping breaths and hisses. I lifted to my paws to find more of them settling around me like murderous crows, before a whoosh of wings and clatter of claws silenced their laughter.\n\n\"Guardian, it is good to finally meet you in person. Although, I must say, I expected a little more,\" Sceptre taunted, feigning a courteous bow.\n\n\"Likewise,\" I replied as my mind raced in search of a solution.\n\nHe's got more arrogance radiating off him than Pyro, I need to keep him talking. Yet the ebon wing's proud expression soon faded, and he sighed.\n\n\"So much trouble over such a little whelp, you're hardly worth it,\" he stated.\n\n\"Ssstop this trivial boasssting, seizzze him!\" one of the vulpomancers hissed, jolting forwards.\n\n\"Very well,\" Sceptre sighed, casually waving a paw at me.\n\nWell, so much for keeping up his monologue!\n\nThe foremost vulpomancer leapt at me and my arcane blades despatched it with a fiery slice. A few more hesitated, while I spun and sliced another across the face with my wing blades. Even so, as their claws grazed my arcane armour, more poured forward, the overwhelming force of their blows forcing me to the ground.\n\nCome on, get up! When did you let yourself get beaten so easily!?\n\nI thought back to all the countless orkin strong holds I'd burned down in just a few weeks and kicked up. Yet to my surprise, almost as soon as they had started, my attackers stopped, quickly scattering back to their perches, leaving only one pair of eyes to peer down at me.\n\n\"Ready to give up?\" Sceptre challenged, as if I was a fish trapped in a barrel. \"Our master will not wait forever.\"\n\n\"Are you?\" I taunted, as I staggered back to all fours. \"I'm shocked your master lets you toy with your prey so pathetically.\"\n\nHe shook his head, snarling as he raised a forepaw to direct his dark companions back my way.\n\nOkay this is it, Mordrakk in my head or not, I can't let them beat me here!\n\nI crouched, ready to strike, when without warning, eldritch lightning lanced into one of the vulpomancers, disintegrating it in an instant. With my enemies momentarily distracted, I bolted without a second thought, darting rapidly up the side of the ruined wall toward the forest's cover. I heard a chorus of rage erupt from my hunters when another bolt of lightning lit up the ridge.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is going on? I was hardly given time to consider the fact as Sceptre bellowed.\n\n\"Find these imposters. No one can interrupt the master's plans!\" Another bolt lit up the ruins as he and his shadowy minions took to the sky.\n\nWhatever it is, so long as it's after them and not me, I don't care!\n\nI considered it may be some sinister Shadow Fen predator as the darkness of the trees encircled me and my instinct kicked in. I pressed myself to the floor, claws clutching at damp soil.\n\nA rustle in the undergrowth followed by a sharp hum caught my attention, but before I could react, something exploded from the vegetation in a shower of snow and pine needles.\n\nIn an instant, I was on my back, each of my paws held in place by another set of clawed limbs. My attacker was about my size with a sharp set of claws and bared teeth, but it wasn't a vulpomancer or a dragon. I was about to strike back when I glanced at the polished-white bird skull, through which two shimmering, amber eyes locked with mine. The moment the both of us realised, our visions widened.\n\n\"We really need to stop meeting like this,\" Neera offered as she hopped off.\n\nI was too stunned to answer as she tilted her head curiously, studying me so closely it was as if she had to convince herself I was real.\n\n\"Must you really be so barbaric in your actions? I assured you that this was the Guardian several minutes ago, and yet still you insist on assaulting everything we find,\" another indignant voice called from the bush, followed by a sharp hum and a flash of gold.\n\nIt was neither dragon nor demon; in fact, the glowing energy bound within the golden frame to form an arcane hawk was unmistakable.\n\nNeera? Apollo, what in the Creators' name are they doing out here?\n\nThe faldron glanced between us, dismissing Apollo's words with a shake of her head.\n\n\"Relax, Goldy, I was just making sure,\" she assured, patting my shoulder with her wing.\n\n\"Yes, well, while I do appreciate your concern, I am fully capable of dealing with all potential threats myself, thank you. My talismans and enchantments are designed to function in many different scenarios,\" Apollo countered.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I know, you don't need to remind me for the hundredth time,\" she replied, mocking him with an odd motion of her forepaws.\n\n\"What are you doing here, how did you find me? Who's with you?\" I blurted, the words firing like cannon balls.\n\nThe pair looked at me with a similar lack of understanding. Urgh, why does everyone always look at me like I'm supposed to be the one with answers?\n\nThe awkward moment ended when hissing shrieks and wing beats drew our attention.\n\n\"Less talk, more lightning, please!\" Neera commanded, waving a wing toward the approaching shadows.\n\nApollo rolled his glowing eyes, his metallic feathers ruffling with arcane sparks until his wingtips glowed, unleashing a bolt of lightning into the foremost creature and instantly turning another vulpomancer to dust. More of the creatures scattered in his wake, letting out frustrated hisses as they circled back.\n\n\"Come on, we have to take out the wing leader,\" Neera called, before darting back toward the ruins.\n\n\"Wait, what?\" I exclaimed, reaching out to stop her, only managing to get a paw-full of snowy twigs.\n\nSave questions for later, when there's not a flock of angry demons trying to kill us!\n\n\"Wait, what are you doing?\" I called, catching Neera as she stopped at the base of the ruined wall.\n\n\"Take out the dragon in the lead and they usually disappear, at least when there's a lot of them in one place,\" she elaborated, her rushed words almost lost to her exertions as she added. \"You seriously don't know how to deal with ebon wings?\"\n\n\"Indeed, her theory is correct, and yet I am uncertain as to why this new-found fact may be the case,\" Apollo chimed.\n\nIgnoring his explanation, I fixed my eyes on Neera.\n\n\"No, I mean what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Isn't it obvious? We came to find you,\" she replied, as if I should know.\n\nAs her words faded, a dark shape scampered across the stone above us.\n\n\"Look out!\"\n\nShe didn't even have time to glance up before I pulled her down and blasted white fire over her head, burning the vulpomancer into oblivion.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she replied casually, swiftly jumping back to her paws while shaking the snow from her ruffled feathers.\n\n\"Indeed, good show, Guardian,\" Apollo added, as I grabbed Neera by the shoulders.\n\n\"I need to know what you're doing here, who's with you? How did you even find me?\" I demanded, almost shaking the answers from her.\n\n\"Do not allow thessse arrogant wyrmsss to bessst you!\" another approaching vulpomancer commanded.\n\nThe three of us turned to see its grizzly form unexpectedly swallowed by a blast of green flame, as a shape darted by before landing on the wall above us.\n\n\"Are you okay...?\" I heard another instantly recognisable voice ask.\n\n\"Fine thanks, Bolty,\" Neera replied, backing away from me.\n\nBolty? Who's ever called him that? I thought, looking up to see the green dragon shake his head and scowl.\n\n\"Do you really have to call me that?\"\n\n\"It makes things simpler,\" she answered, jumping up onto the wall beside him.\n\n\"Boltock!?\" I exclaimed as I shook off my own surprise.\n\nHe'd changed since the last time I'd seen him. Most notable was the smooth silver armour adorning his scales. It looked almost too tight against his firm build, its wind-like shapes and encrusted opals suggesting that it was originally intended for a dragon of another element.\n\n\"It's good to see you again,\" the earth elemental offered with a relieved smile.\n\n\"Told you I'd find him,\" Neera announced proudly.\n\n\"On the contrary, it was the tracking talismans that determined the Guardian's true location, I believe that...\"\n\n\"We know!\" the dragon and faldron announced in unison, instantly cutting off Apollo's lecture.\n\n\"Where are the others?\" she asked Boltock, but he merely motioned to the sky as more flames erupted among the scattering vulpomancers.\n\n\"Wait! What others, how did you find me!?\" I repeated, pointing at Apollo with a frantic forepaw. \"What does he mean about talismans!?\"\n\nThe arcane construct jumped at the opportunity to explain, but before he could, another shadow passed over us, wings beating like a crack of thunder as the force of its claws sent us all sprawling over the wall.\n\n\"The wing leader didn't inform me you would be bringing guests,\" Sceptre hissed, words uttered through gritted fangs as he swooped low.\n\nThe three of us lifted to our paws. Apollo darting to my side as the ebon wing perched upon one of the ruined arches. Once more it was as if we were nothing more than meddlesome insects to him as he raked a claw along the rock.\n\n\"No matter, I'll deal with all of you if I must,\" he added, leaping forward with outstretched claws.\n\nI coiled up ready to blast him, but before the flames left my muzzle a gleaming bolt of silver struck his underside, pulling him upwards in a flurry of wing beats. Boltock and Neera jumped forward, while the new dragon and the ebon wing tussled in the sky \u2013 claws, wings and blades ringing out as silver armour struck corrupted metal. Bursts of fire sprang from both sides before Sceptre gave an angry hiss and withdrew.\n\n\"Don't think this is over!\" he called, snaking off into the night, the remaining vulpomancers retreating with him.\n\nThe moment they vanished, the silver dragon twisted gracefully in the air, before gliding down to us. The others didn't seem too concerned, but I watched him warily.\n\nI know him, we've met before. My eyes narrowed. He was Pyro's friend.\n\n\"Soaren?\" I asked sceptically, recalling the air elemental's face from the Season of Fire Celebration.\n\nThe larger grey dragon regarded me with the same surprised relief as the others. Not to mention he boasted the same air order armour.\n\n\"Guardian, it's good to see you again,\" he offered, stepping toward me before prostrating himself in a regal bow.\n\nI shook my head at the gesture, waving it off with a forepaw.\n\n\"Likewise, I suppose,\" I replied, unsure of my feelings.\n\n\"Blaze, isn't it?\" he asked as he lifted his head.\n\n\"Yes, but that name hardly matters anymore.\" As true as it was, the confession sent an emotional jab through me.\n\nWhy would he care, he's like Pyro? Ambitious, prideful? How can I trust him?\n\nI didn't want to repeat the mistakes that had led to Pyro's corruption, but Soaren seemed puzzled by my response.\n\nWhat am I saying, they all seem confused? I don't have time for guessing games, I need explanations.\n\n\"How did you get here, why are you here? Who else came with you?\"\n\nWith the threats gone, questions flowed from my muzzle like a river. Even so, they all looked slightly stunned by the verbal barrage and remained silent, until one voice broke through.\n\n\"Why do you think?\" It was the most wonderful, yet most intimidating sound I'd heard in a long time.\n\nI became as stiff as a statue, forcing myself to turn, and the moment I did, I was wrapped in a tight embrace.\n\n\"You're alive, you're alive!\" Risha's voice was filled with desperate relief as she buried her head into my shoulder.\n\nInitially, I tensed, feeling as cold as the ice in which I'd lingered for months. That was until the intensity of our reunion hit me, my heart thawed and I returned her embrace without thought. The moment was over far too quickly, and as she leaned back; our eyes met.\n\nI can't tell that she was wounded at all, Apollo did a great job!\n\nLike her brother, she was wearing a set of sleek, silver armour that fitted her slender body far more snugly.\n\nI didn't ponder on her new look for too long, however, as slowly the logical dread within me drowned out the warm feelings. I glanced away, recalling the Cartographer's words about my emotions compared to the creators.\n\nSo what if they can't feel like this? Why does it make me any stronger?\n\nIt was in that moment that reality seemed to hit her as well, and her smile wavered slightly.\n\n\"Where were you?\" she asked firmly.\n\nDespondency flowed back into me with the force of a tsunami, and I shied away once again as I muttered.\n\n\"I couldn't come back.\"\n\nIt seemed to take her a moment to process that, I could see the internal conflict behind her eyes, as if anticipation had been building ever since I'd left.\n\nShe's angry at me, even if she won't admit it, I can see it on her face.\n\n\"By the skies, what happened to your shoulder?\" she demanded abruptly, and I realised she'd caught sight of my scars.\n\nI shifted my wings, covering the wounds as I forced myself to look at her.\n\n\"It's fine, I'm fine, I just couldn't... I\u2026\" My response died in my throat.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she asked quietly, stepping back as I tried again.\n\n\"It's not what you think it is, any of this, I can't\u2026\"\n\nWhat can I tell her? That I'm just as much a part of the monster as I am the creators?\n\nI didn't want to believe that truth, I didn't want to admit that Mordrakk had been right about why I'd failed to return. She glanced away, and the memory of the last thing I'd told her began to eat away at me.\n\n\"You promised,\" she mumbled.\n\nGod or not, I couldn't stand the glare that followed. I could hear the illusion's disparaging voice in my mind, his distant words cast amidst a sea of whispers and slithering hisses. Then, as if at his whim, I felt a hint of bitterness, which I leapt upon like a life raft amidst the growing ocean of sorrow.\n\nEverything I've done, I did it all to keep them safe. All because I care for them more than anything. Do they doubt that I'll do absolutely anything for them, no matter the cost?\n\nAt that notion, a small island of reason appeared on the horizon of my conflict, its shores desperately calling me. What had I done by abandoning what I stood for? I knew why they looked up to me. I'd been their leader, braved the unknown with them at my side.\n\n\"Things changed, Risha,\" I admitted in a whisper so shameful I almost hoped she'd fail to hear.\n\nShe glanced away, her beautiful, sapphire-blue eyes falling to the mud at her paws.\n\n\"Yeah, looks like they did,\" she admitted tersely.\n\nI had to fight to keep remorse from dragging my conscience off its mental raft as I turned to Apollo. His golden frame was forced into what looked like a frown as he finally spoke.\n\n\"I trust the reactivation of your location talisman didn't prove too difficult?\" he asked.\n\n\"My what?\" I responded.\n\nOnce again, I was given that patronising look, no matter how fake it appeared upon his metallic face.\n\n\"Your armour's location talisman; it reactivated not too long ago and I was able to track it,\" he explained, jabbing a wing tip at my chest plate.\n\n\"It's how we found you, some ancient, magical nonsense,\" Neera interrupted, earning a deeper frown from Apollo.\n\nI thought back to only a day ago, a nagging feeling that I'd not been the one to activate the talisman; in fact, everything going on now seemed to lead back to the Cartographer.\n\n\"After your disappearance, your companions were quite concerned,\" Apollo continued, looking over each of the others in turn.\n\n\"I will admit, after failing to detect your beacon at the location to which the gateway was set, even I had my doubts, and yet, it seems your abilities are far greater than anticipated,\" he added.\n\nI silenced him with a stern look, driven by a fear that he'd unknowingly divulge a portion of the truth about Mordrakk and I.\n\nHe's wrong, I wasn't powerful enough. If I was Mordrakk would be gone and they'd all be safe.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come here, it's too dangerous,\" I stated, earning only puzzled looks from most of my friends.\n\n\"And that's a reason for you to be here, is it?\" Risha swiftly challenged.\n\nI shivered as she rounded on me, with a look similar to one a parent would give a chick that had continually disobeyed them. Yet there was a small quiver of pain in her expression and the sight broke me as I sighed.\n\n\"No, but it's better me being in danger than anyone else.\" She almost looked ready to beat that idea out of me, or at least to voice a firm retort, but her opportunity was stolen.\n\n\"He's right, the traitor may have scattered, but he will soon return with greater numbers,\" Soaren suggested sensibly, looking to the sky.\n\n\"Traitor?\" I questioned, hiding how I truly felt about the minds Mordrakk had already broken.\n\n\"Marshals of demons, wherever they go, those awful things swarm in greater numbers,\" Soaren replied.\n\nHe talks about them like they're already dead? I noted, only to pause. They don't know, do they? About Pyro?\n\n\"Not dragons?\" I asked, but he appeared almost insulted.\n\n\"They forfeited that name when they abandoned their allegiance,\" he replied sternly. \"Now come, we must return to cover before they have a chance to track us down,\" he commanded, leading off into the air.\n\n\"I would advise that you follow this descendant's example, Guardian. He has proved to be quite an adequate leader in your absence,\" Apollo suggested.\n\n\"Thanks for the tip, Goldy,\" Neera grumbled, while she approached.\n\n\"Are you really okay?\" she asked.\n\nI fought against the urge to snap at her for doubting me, but the only emotion that tempered my underlying rage was fear.\n\n\"Y\u2013Yeah... I mean you're all back, so why wouldn't I be?\" I stuttered.\n\nShe's like Risha, she knows when I'm lying. I'd no doubt about that as her long ears flicked back, but she didn't press any further.\n\n\"Well, I suppose we should follow our 'oh so great and powerful' leader,\" she finished in a somewhat mocking tone, before taking off after Soaren.\n\nApollo accompanied her with a sharp hum and a flash of his segmented wings. Even so, I stood still for a second, before Risha finally passed me, her eyes turned away.\n\n\"It is good to see you again,\" she whispered quietly, almost as if she were seeing a ghost.\n\nI glanced her way, only to see her in a light I wished I'd never have to witness again, saddened and pained because of my actions.\n\nAll I want to do is keep her and the others safe. The dangers are all things I've brought upon them, it's my fault.\n\n\"You too,\" was my simple response, as my heart ached.\n\n\"She's right, you know,\" Boltock observed, as his sister took off.\n\n\"Is it just the five of you?\" I asked, not wishing harm to befall anyone else for my sake.\n\nThere was at least one other dragon I knew who may have come after me, and part of me was still anticipating Ember to drop out of the night sky. Boltock gave a sigh and nodded, cancelling out my suspicions and drawing my curiosity.\n\nHas something happened, does she know about Pyro? All this time they've thought he's dead, right? I was caught trying to decide which fate was better: death or the truth. What do I tell them?\n\nNot wishing to dwell on such thoughts, Boltock moved to my side, a truly glad expression replacing his sorrowed look.\n\n\"Hey, even if I have said some dumb stuff, I still wouldn't give up on a friend. Not that my sister would let anyone doubt you were still alive anyway,\" he assured.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I responded.\n\nHe nodded, then fell back into the stern and obedient state of mind I'd once seen Ember adopt. I didn't want to think about why he was like that, not after seeing where such an attitude had gotten Pyro. Nor did I wish to speculate on what would happen if I told them about the dark ringleader of the ebon wings.\n\n\"Anyway, come on. We really don't want to be out here in the dark,\" he suggested.\n\nI nodded as he headed up the hill, glancing back as I lingered behind a moment longer.\n\n\"Oh, and welcome back to the wing,\" he called with a warm smile.\n\nI nodded again, looking down at my gleaming, golden gauntlets in the wet, snowy mud as he disappeared into the air. That's when I caught the sight of Mordrakk's sinister figure sitting upon a ruined pillar to my left, his flaming eyes narrowed and mouth flickering. He didn't say a word; he didn't have to for me to know exactly what he was thinking. He simply coiled back within his shadowy wings and clasped two sharp stones in his forepaws, smiling as he peered up in the direction of my friends.\n\nNo, I'll never let him. I spread my wings and leapt up. I'll never let him lay a claw on them!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"If you need a fire, make it brief. One is seldom out of sight in these forests,\" Soaren advised as I reached the cave in which the others had been hiding.\n\nNestled between two cliffs and shielded by a waterfall, it had only been a short flight from the ridge ruins.\n\nSeems everyone that's not orkin or ebon wing are doing their utmost to remain hidden. I noted, considering they had a better hiding spot then I did.\n\nTraversing the water-stained rocks, I peered inside to see a more habitable setting. Neera had constructed a fire, on which I assumed she intended to cook some squirrels and birds she had strapped to her improvised armour.\n\nIt's been far too long since I've slept by a decent fire. I thought, appreciating the warmth offered by the grey and red flame.\n\n\"You'll have to make several more hunting trips before we reach Talon's Rest,\" Soaren proposed, glancing to Neera.\n\nHis expression suggested that this topic was the only reason he accepted her presence.\n\nEven with all that's going on, some dragons still don't trust her? I thought, recalling what Pyro had once said about faldrons being elemental thieves.\n\nIt seemed Neera knew of that underlying mistrust all too well, yet seemed to take pride in it.\n\n\"Don't you worry \u2013 as long as I'm around, you won't go hungry,\" she replied, looking over one of her outstretched paws casually as she did so.\n\nThe larger dragon snorted, and I was reminded of a similar atmosphere I'd rather not recall. I shook the memory from my mind, locking it away with countless others.\n\n\"Wait, you needed to hunt? Exactly how long have you been out here?\" I asked, and everyone looked at me.\n\n\"Almost a whole season,\" one particularly frustrated voice responded.\n\nI didn't look at Risha as she watched me; I could feel the conflict still raging behind her gloomy expression. Everyone else shied away from the two of us, all appearing to understand and yet not having the nerve to speak to me as she did.\n\n\"Well, it doesn't matter now. We've found him, so we are to meet the others at Talon's Rest as planned,\" Soaren swiftly interjected.\n\nHis authoritative tone didn't sit well with me, nor did the idea that my friends were only here because of some 'strict orders'.\n\nThe last dragon following strict orders I trusted has tried to kill me multiple times.\n\nI pushed the mistrust from my mind and tried to avoid Risha's glare. Every moment she was angry with me seemed to hurt her, which only made me want to tell her that everything would be okay.\n\nBut if I tell her the truth, it will destroy her. I know how she feels about me.\n\n\"Talon's Rest?\" I questioned, latching on to the few of Soaren's words that didn't involve doom and gloom.\n\n\"Yes, it's a small griffin settlement on the east Shadow Fen border. We are to meet another New Order wing there before returning to the overlook together,\" he confirmed, removing his helmet.\n\n\"You mean Midnight Watch?\" I replied.\n\n\"It's a ruined keep at the southern end of the Storm Mountains, not too far west of Dardien. Though few call it by that name anymore,\" he responded sceptically, as if such information was not privy to all.\n\nI guess he's not had a crazy dragon following him around, passing on all the information then? I recognised, considering what the Cartographer had told me more so.\n\nI stared down at the flickering flames, as if expecting more images to appear in the fiery blend of colours. Images of Valcador's great army flashed through my mind, Balgore and his vast legions bearing the mark of the Brazen Horde. There was no way just one order's worth of dragons could face them.\n\nEven so, as Neera constructed a roasting spit from branches, I notice Soaren was still looking at me, as if awaiting a response he wasn't sure I'd offer.\n\nThey're looking at me like I'm supposed to be in charge now, but what's that worth, I'm not a leader?\n\n\"I've seen Valcador's army; they left no more than a few days ago.\" The immediate look of concern on his face did little to encourage me to press on as I reluctantly added. \"The ice fire forges are empty, tens of thousands are marching south, together with the ebon wings.\"\n\nSoaren's eyes slowly drifted to the fire, the dancing flames reflecting in them like a mirror. Despite his sorrow, his expression gradually hardened.\n\n\"So it's true; those traitors have fallen so far as to side with orkin?\" he muttered, spitting out the latter words as if they were poison.\n\nIn the back of my mind, I heard the distant tapping of rocks accompanied by the thunderous orkin war chant, the roar of their drums and the ungodly howl of their horns. I saw flashes of Pyro's mangled and mutilated corpse on the ice at my paws.\n\nHow can I condemn them anymore than I do myself? We're not so different. Just two sides of the same coin.\n\n\"They weren't always like that,\" I muttered weakly.\n\n\"All the more reason to hunt every last one of them down,\" he quickly snapped.\n\n\"Not everyone has a choice in the matter of what the gods make them,\" I challenged, earning a few puzzled looks.\n\nSympathy melted from Risha's glare for a moment, as if she were tired of hearing such things. I knew she was outraged by what it was doing to me, but neither of us said anything. Soaren, however, seemed to battle his pride as he considered my words.\n\n\"Then the best we can do is end their suffering swiftly,\" he stated, his eyes fixing on the fire.\n\n\"I wouldn't be so ready to take the life of one of my own,\" I advised, while he shook his head.\n\nMeanwhile, Mordrakk's voice sniggered, reminding me that I wasn't a true dragon either.\n\n\"All we can do is what's necessary, and that's all the more reason to return to the order master as soon as possible,\" Soaren instructed.\n\n\"And yet you still think you can beat them with what you have? You'll be sending hundreds to their deaths,\" I added, knowing most of us were doomed no matter what.\n\nHe gave me the same look Pyro had on the night he'd abandoned us.\n\n\"You're right,\" Risha finally interrupted, standing up and moving by my side.\n\n\"But the Elders have a plan. Only, to make it work, we need you, and they all thought you were dead,\" she snapped.\n\nI fought not to break under the pressure of her hurtful look, all too aware that she'd every right to be angry with me.\n\n\"I did what I had to do, to ensure hundreds didn't die,\" I countered, and she seemed slightly taken aback.\n\n\"That didn't stop such things from happening, though, did it?\" she added, falling silent as her news effortlessly broke through my emotional shield.\n\nShe's right, how many have died in this war since I left? How many places have the orkin raided or vulpomancers wiped off the map? The thought forced me back into a reclusive silence as she reluctantly moved away.\n\nAll that suffering and I can't even tell her I'm sorry correctly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "After eating, the four of them drifted off to sleep, allowing me time to creep out onto the ledge. The roar of the waterfall rushed by, engulfing the cliff face in cold mist. Amidst the gloom, I saw a fiery flicker dart between two rocks, and glanced over to see the phoenix watching me. This time I didn't entertain the idea of talking to it. Instead, I folded my wings around me like a cloak.\n\nMy eyes fixed on the only break in the gloom, the stars far above as most of my thoughts lingered on my friends. Against all odds, with the help of a kooky old dragon, and Apollo's strange, arcane magic, they'd found me.\n\nHow could I ever ask for better? I don't deserve to call any of them friends after all I've done.\n\n\"So, lost pieces return to the board,\" the distinctively raspy voice hissed as Mordrakk's illusion flickered into existence beside me, eyes cast out over the tangled forest.\n\n\"I thought I'd already won your little game?\" I answered, not even affording him the luxury of a glance.\n\nHis response was less than swift, and I could sense his underlying fury.\n\n\"You defeated nothing, and even if you had, there are still many others who continue to suffer because of your actions,\" he snapped.\n\n\"So you are admitting that you're tired of taunting me?\" I challenged. \"Or are you just not as all-powerful as the real Mordrakk?\"\n\nHis head whipped back to face me with the speed of a striking cobra, and my scars immediately began to burn under the intense heat of his baleful eyes. Wrapping a dark claw around my muzzle to force it shut, he continued.\n\n\"What knowledge you have of my existence isn't important. What you think you know of the universe beyond this world is but a speck of dust in a sea of cosmic transgressions. You are not the centre of any of that!\" he warned, shaking my muzzle to emphasise every syllable.\n\n\"And you are?\" I countered, shaking my head and forcing his limb to fade into smoke.\n\n\"If you knew of all the horrors creation has produced, you would not be so swift to blame anyone, and yet you are the only one stopping it from finally being free,\" he accused.\n\n\"That's not what you want, though, is it? That is just your excuse to hide the truth. What you want to do is destroy everything because you lost it,\" I pressed.\n\nHe smiled, waving a menacing forepaw over the forest.\n\n\"Not if you are right. If you are, the darkness you fear, and I, are not the same. The Outsider uses my image to see its will carried out, and its wish is to annihilate this creation fulfilled,\" he added, his flaming eyes daring me to say otherwise.\n\n\"If you are right, then isn't the being that has been corrupted by your\u2026\" He pulled back, waving a distasteful forepaw toward me, \"\u2026 beguiled mind. The real Mordrakk?\"\n\nLike I'd ever believe he's the real Mordrakk, this is a trick of some kind, surely. The moment he realised what I was thinking, his shadowy fangs parted with a wicked smile.\n\n\"I cannot deceive what you have surmised for yourself. For then who is the one being tricked?\" he questioned, before fading into the mist.\n\nI grunted as my scars stung, shaking the lingering glow of his toothy smile from my vision.\n\nHe can't be right. He's the deceiver \u2013 that's what he does. I assured myself. Yet I'm the one who came up with the idea he may be different to the monster at Ilivar.\n\nI slumped at the thought, aware that the self-concocted idea was the only reason I'd left my icy hiding place.\n\n\"I am sorry, Guardian, do forgive the intrusion, but I could not help noticing that you have isolated yourself,\" Apollo's cheerful tone surprised me.\n\nI suppressed my urge to jump in alarm, my head sinking as I acknowledged his arrival.\n\n\"I've been isolated for a long time, I'm fine with it,\" I confessed.\n\n\"Of course, I do apologise for making any incorrect assumptions,\" he answered.\n\n\"Don't be... it's not like anyone else is.\"\n\nThe metallic hawk landed on a rock beside me, claws tapping like polished gemstones.\n\n\"It is peculiar, is it not? How this world has changed? You are worshipped as a saviour, and yet you think so little of yourself,\" he observed.\n\nI glanced back at him, his glowing innards illuminating the icy cliffs and snowy banks around us.\n\n\"I don't think anyone intended for things to turn out like this,\" I confessed.\n\nHe has a magical way of knowing things, maybe that's why he's always trying to explain. I thought to myself, even if everything he said was confusing.\n\n\"The descendent female, she told me of all that you were,\" he stated primly. \"She never allowed anyone to think you were gone, and I realised just how alike to the old masters their kind really are: gracious, determined, loyal and loving. A truly fitting legacy,\" he reminisced, and for a moment, it almost sounded as if he choked on a millennia's worth of nostalgia.\n\n\"What was it like? Before all of this? I mean, I know, I saw it...\" I trailed off before confessing. \"I have dreams, or memories, about the Golden City, the Ethereals and the drakaran.\"\n\nImages of golden spires, the regal forms of star dragons flying graciously beneath a majestic sea of cosmic rainbows and gleaming starlight crossed my mind. Followed by the image of the lone dragoness, staring out over a sea of devastation as the burning world loomed beyond the desecrated horizon.\n\n\"I would imagine such impressions still linger in your mind. After all, the memories of most of creation lie somewhere within your forged consciousness,\" Apollo explained.\n\n\"As for your question,\" he added, looking back out over the cliffs.\n\n\"I do not recall much. Most of my core memories were removed from my recollection talisman the day I was reassigned to protect the Arcanum. Therefore, I was not permitted to access any other lexicons post-reassignment,\" he replied as if he were ashamed of being unable to recall.\n\n\"Goldfire, that's the dragoness I always see in my \u2013 or their \u2013 memories,\" I told him, and his feathers ruffled as he perked up.\n\n\"Indeed, Guardian, Seraphine Goldfire was her full name. She was the elder sister of my former mistress, lady Ilfaria, although she disappeared long before my time,\" he explained, as if glad of the reminder.\n\n\"So you do remember some things?\" I pressed.\n\nHis avian frame forged into a vaguely happy expression as he nodded.\n\n\"Why of course I recall such widely known things. What I fail to remember is the plan of the creators. Compartmentalization, no doubt,\" he chimed.\n\nHe clearly thinks he knows who I am, but what doesn't he know? Does he know what happened that day atop of the spire? Does he know what became of Mordrakk and Nakir, who I really am?\n\nI thought to ask, but the idea didn't strike me as a good one, especially considering he liked to talk so much.\n\nI can't have him accidently tell the others something they're better off not knowing.\n\nEven so, he seemed content to recount the life he'd once had, telling me everything about his time in the golden city, as if wishing to explain it all before his listener could be stolen.\n\n\"Ilfaria, Seraphine and their brother Phaethon were the descendants of the two drakaran hierarchs, Teeana and Balthazar. Their dynasty was one of the greatest among the stars, yet during the first centuries of war with the Infernal Blade, Seraphine disappeared.\"\n\nI did my best to indulge him as he went on about a time long before Mordrakk's corruption. Wars fought and won in an ancient age.\n\nAnd here I just want to focus on the evil I have to stop right now, not monsters of the past.\n\n\"You must understand that all of this was before my time, long before even the time of the Darkness,\" Apollo confirmed as he rambled.\n\n\"In fact, many lexicons hold legends proclaiming how Goldfire founded the mortal descendants upon Enishra, although how and why she did so are not clear to me,\" he concluded.\n\nI nodded intently, but most of his words went over my head. That was, aside from 'Seraphine'.\n\nIs she really the dragoness I see in my dreams? But why, she's never spoken to me before?\n\n\"And what... what happened to the rest of her family?\" I quizzed, and his plumage seemed to deflate.\n\n\"The truth of Seraphine's ultimate fate upon this world remains unknown to most. As for the rest of my mistress's bloodline? They died, as did all of my masters the day the Golden City fell silent,\" he explained with a hint of sorrow that betrayed my assumptions about his emotions.\n\nShame overcame me as I considered the ancient day I'd first failed to stop Mordrakk. It was entirely my fault, and it was hard to believe everything that had transpired since could have been prevented if things had gone to plan millennia ago.\n\nHow can I say I trust either of them though? Nakir and his cryptic legends are just as sinister as Mordrakk's blatant goal of annihilation, they're both wrong.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I confessed, staring down at my paws.\n\n\"I doubt that any of them would blame you for what transpired,\" he responded.\n\n\"I'm not what they made me to be. I'm...\" I faltered the moment the truth was at the tip of my muzzle.\n\n\"If anything, the fault for such a reality lies with me. I was designated to protect the Arcanum that day \u2013 and I failed,\" he admitted.\n\nSilence lingered between us as I neglected to reply, and continued to stare out over the cliffs.\n\n\"Do forgive me, it is not the place of a lowly construct to say such things about my masters, Guardian.\"\n\nI shook my head, dismissing his words with a wave of a forepaw.\n\n\"None of that matters now, no matter what anyone says. We're a few millennia too late for formality,\" I added with a smile. \"And what about you, Ilfaria and the others? You were all there the day this began, so what do you believe?\" I asked with a glimmer of hope.\n\nHe paused, pondering his answer carefully.\n\n\"I lack the capacity to say for myself,\" he began. \"Although I know my mistress would have believed in you, I have no doubt of that. As for her sister, well if the tales about her are true, I have no doubt she would have found you worthy of her legacy too,\" he confirmed, beak moulded into a smile.\n\n\"Then I really hope they were right,\" I admitted.\n\nHe didn't reply, and after a moments' silence, disappeared back into the cave with a respectful bow. Leaving me to watch over the cold darkness embracing Shadow Fen's forests."
            },
            {
                "title": "Broken Bonds",
                "text": "Light broke through the darkness of the forest in a sickly hue. It seemed the one good day of sunshine I'd seen over Shadow Fen's border was all it had to offer, as gloom now hung over the decrepit land like a blanket.\n\nThe day that followed attested to that, as rain mixed with half-melted snow. I was thankful that we spent most of our time on the wing, above the thick mist and twisting branches. The vast thicket sailed by like a mangled sea, swarming with thorns and crooked limbs reaching out like gnarled hands to drag some unsuspecting victim into the gloom. For the most part, I watched the sky for ebon wings or manticores, but the only threats I saw were the faint flickers of fire from orkin camps.\n\nThe nights were no different. I spent them sleepless beside the fire, distancing myself from the others as I'd done countless times before. I could feel the pessimism about them all, yet no one seemed angry, just unsure. I even considered running away again, but it felt like that would simply bolster Mordrakk's accusations. I really didn't want to give him any advantage over me. Surprisingly, his anger had faded, as if he'd accepted everything I'd told him and simply moved on with his sinister plans.\n\nThe only other thing to garner my attention was the Cartographer's phoenix. The arrival of my friends had not deterred the fiery bird, although it still lingered out of sight in the trees or boulders. I was never oblivious to where it perched, and as the days went by, I felt I had to ensure its safety as much as the others. Every night I would check on all of them from a distance, before finding a comfortable vantage point on which to stand watch. Each time the world seemed to grow a little darker, and before long, I started to attribute that to more than just the foul aura that clung to Shadow Fen.\n\nIt seemed things had changed more than I'd imagined, and sometimes it felt as if I'd not left my icy tomb at all. It wasn't hard to see the effect it had on the others either, and that did nothing to stave off my guilt. They were looking to me as a glimmer of hope, yet I was anything but.\n\nThe pressure of our predicament finally surfaced the day we reached Talon's Rest, or at least what remained of it. Soaren was first to land, his armoured claws touching down with a muddy splatter as his broad wings folded, his grim expression unchanged as the rest of us landed behind him. The stench of smoke filled the air, while black plumes drifted up into the cloudy sky. Cut into the cliffside above the wicked trees, the settlement was broken by several tiers of muddy earth, divided by a gushing river.\n\nCharred wood and smouldering thatch was all that remained of the griffin structures. The vast web of tree-like nests, bridges and ropes was similar to what I'd seen in Storm Peak. In the past, I may have looked upon the devastation with deep sorrow, but now, a yearning emptiness filled my heart.\n\nIt's just the same as every other village I've seen in the past few weeks. No matter how hard I try, evil always gets to them first.\n\nMonths of watching the orkin in Valcador had made me all too aware of the signs of a raid. Amidst the scattered muddy imprints of taloned feet and paws, were larger manticore prints. Additionally, the stained walls carried the scars of sorcery, a technique preferred by the orkin who inhabited the dark lands to the west.\n\nThis was hardly a fortress; it was a village with families! My rage boiled as I realised I wasn't the only one assessing the situation.\n\n\"Fires curse those beasts!\" Soaren growled, stamping a clawed gauntlet in the mud.\n\nI made sure to approach carefully, moving to his side so I could peer down at the river running between the cliffs. Apart from some collapsed bridges and rope, there was no sign of any corpses, though the revelation didn't bring any relief.\n\nI know what they do with prisoners. I recalled, thinking back to Taldran.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Neera asked.\n\n\"We need to find somewhere to nest for the night, we can continue to the overlook at daybreak,\" Soaren replied with a hint of regret.\n\nLooking back at the others, it seemed none of them completely agreed, even Apollo looked doubtful. Meanwhile, I concealed my concern as much as I could.\n\nThey don't like it, because it's not right. But moving on is the only realistic option.\n\n\"We should head up to that ridge line, at least there we can see anything approaching,\" I suggested, motioning to the cliffs.\n\nSoaren took a long look in the same direction, studying the area carefully before finally nodding.\n\n\"Very well, at first light we press on along the eastern Shadow Fen border, until we reach the south-western edge of the Storm Mountains,\" he agreed, stepping forward and taking off.\n\nAs the others followed, I noticed Risha staring over the smoking ruins. I thought to say something to reassure her, but what was there to add?\n\nThis is the reality of our new world; she knows that as well as I do?\n\n\"It brings back memories, seeing places like this,\" she admitted.\n\nShying away, I recalled what she'd told me of how her family had perished. That just made it harder to come up with anything to say. When she glanced my way, it was clear she knew exactly what was going on in my mind, and without another word she took to the air, and I soon followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The small rocky outcrop we landed on was no different to any other nest of the previous few nights, and once again, I soon found myself perched high on a cliffside ledge protruding from a cave mouth. I sat there for most of the night, watching a cold fog roll in from the hills and shroud the trees below. My eyes fixed on the swirling void, noticing every shift or flicker in the distance as bats darted between the foliage. Other than that, there was nothing to see except for the distant glow of the phoenix roosting on the cliff above us.\n\nAfter a few hours, the tapping of claws on stone and the splashing of paws in shallow pools caught my attention. My sudden movement disturbed the rainwater that had settled on my armour as I turned back. In the same instance, the droplets stopped hitting me altogether. Perplexed, I glanced around to see it bouncing away, as if hitting an invisible dome. All the while, Risha stood behind me, the blue marking on her forehead softly glowing as a portion of her concentration focused on keeping us dry.\n\n\"I... I didn't know you could do that,\" I admitted, even though it made perfect sense and was the last thing I knew she'd want to talk about.\n\n\"There seems to be a lot of things you don't know,\" she responded, in a curt but calm tone.\n\nI couldn't help feeling that the situation was more treacherous than flying through a thunderstorm. Realising there was no way I could change how she felt, I tentatively responded.\n\n\"Risha, I'm sorry, but if you knew\u2026\" Her expression hardened.\n\nThe rain around us fidgeted, her wings ruffling as she muttered.\n\n\"If I knew what? That you could come back from the dead? Well, it's a shame you already threw that revelation at me.\"\n\nShe looked to be battling back tears as she scuffed a foreclaw at the ground.\n\n\"Everyone thought otherwise, they all thought you were gone. The only one who didn't think I was crazy was Neera, and they believed her even less!\"\n\nI looked back into the rain, droplets kissing my wings as her concentration faltered once again.\n\n\"You knew that wasn't true, you're the smartest dragoness I know,\" I offered, but my reply didn't change the look in her eyes; in fact, it appeared to make things worse.\n\n\"Yes, and I had to spend all of that time thinking... Thinking I'd lost you \u2013 not because you were dead, but because of something even more dreadful,\" she exclaimed, stepping forward.\n\nEven more dreadful? If she really knew why I didn't come back... I felt my heart begin to ache as I thought about the truth.\n\n\"We all saw what happened, and still I waited. I thought you'd keep your promise,\" she hissed, stepping up close to me, rain whirling furiously about us as her eyes quivered.\n\nI shied away, battling the urge to cower under my wings as she pressed harder.\n\n\"I spent all that time knowing you were alive, so why didn't you just come back?\"\n\nI\u2013I want to tell her, but...\n\n\"I can't tell you,\" was all I managed to mutter.\n\n\"Why not?\" she demanded, but I merely edged back into the rain.\n\n\"You wouldn't understand,\" I replied, not daring to glance back as the freezing deluge graced my scales once more.\n\n\"I would try to, if you'd just tell me!\" she insisted.\n\nMy wings fidgeted restlessly, the urge to fly away stronger than ever.\n\n\"The last I recalled, you were keeping just as many secrets from me,\" I countered, the bitter part of my mind doing its best to uphold the conversation.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she replied, suddenly taken aback.\n\n\"You said the Elders have a plan? No one's seen fit to share that information with me so far,\" I pressed, though I had no real desire to know.\n\nWhat is it really? Do I just want to prove that we're both just as bad as each other?\n\nHer wings dropped slightly as words caught in her throat. She didn't need to say anything for both of us to know that she was just as reluctant to speak to me about that topic as I was to tell her the truth.\n\n\"Risha, I'm not the dragon you think I am, what anyone thinks I am,\" I uttered shamefully.\n\nShe looked pained and my heart ached even more, eyes quivering as they met hers and she added.\n\n\"I've always thought you were just a good, honest dragon.\"\n\nI opened my muzzle to respond, to tell her there was still some good left in me, but I couldn't lie to her.\n\nShe always sees through my lies.\n\n\"You're right about one thing though; you really have changed,\" she admitted, her wings drooping like wet curtains.\n\nShe bolted without another word, disappearing back into the cave before I could stop her. My head dropped, as did my wings and tail, sinking to the rock as if to melt into just another puddle.\n\n\"She still thinks the world of you, you know?\" a new voice broke the silence.\n\nBoltock appeared on a ledge above, shaking rain from his scales like a wet dog as I straightened myself. It wasn't hard to surmise he'd noticed his sister's feelings for me long before I had.\n\n\"That's what I'm afraid of,\" I answered meekly.\n\n\"You're afraid of my sister? And here's me thinking I was the only one,\" he responded, a hint of laughter accompanying his humorous tone as he hopped down next to me.\n\nI glanced back, his light-hearted attitude the only positive thing I'd heard in ages.\n\n\"I just don't want to hurt her... I don't want to hurt any of you ever again,\" I admitted, my voice hardly greater than a whimper as I caught a glimpse of his scarred wing. \"Sometimes, I think it's a mistake we ever met.\"\n\nI hoped, above all else, that I didn't truly believe that, and yet I wasn't afraid to accept it, if it meant they could all be safe. Even so, Boltock frowned.\n\n\"Hey, she's looked after me my whole life. She's the best dragoness I know,\" he replied sincerely, pausing for a moment. \"Well, actually...\" his voice trailed off as he glanced at the rainy darkness.\n\nAs gratifying as his speech and faith in his sister may have been, I still couldn't bring myself to truly understand why she was risking so much. Whether we loved one another or not, I wasn't the great paragon of goodness she'd once thought I was.\n\nI'm not worthy of all of this emotional suffering.\n\n\"I just wish Ember felt the same way about me,\" Boltock muttered, hope filling his eyes for a fleeting moment.\n\nI couldn't help but smile at the forlorn dragon. Coming upon a strange urge to cheer him up, just as he'd tried to do for me so many times.\n\n\"So you're finally admitting you like her?\" I asked knowingly.\n\nHis relationship with Ember was the one thing I'd noticed, as blatant as it was and with a good deal of Risha's help, and yet he shook his head.\n\n\"Do I really have to? Skies above, if I was able to work out that you and my sister had eyes for each other, I'd be surprised if she and a god haven't noticed I've always liked Ember,\" he answered casually.\n\nThe double revelation silenced my mind in an instant; even the dark whispers fell silent. It was as if Mordrakk couldn't intrude for that brief moment, as embarrassment truly gripped me like a vice. Meanwhile, Boltock gave a light snigger, his melancholy over Ember dissolving.\n\n\"How is she?\" I asked, curious about the fiery dragoness.\n\n\"We haven't spoken much since... Well, you know\u2026 But she's fine. She's pretty much a fully fledged member of the Fire Order now, creators know she was hatched for it,\" he explained thoughtfully, his eyes scanning the horizon as the first shreds of dawn began to emerge.\n\n\"Although I don't doubt she'd still follow you, now you're back. We all would, no matter how angry some of us are trying to appear,\" he added, glancing in his sister's direction.\n\nI winced, not so much deterred by his sister's frustration, but by what both he and Ember believed had happened to Pyro.\n\nHis death tore us all apart, if they find out about him now, will they still follow me?\n\nI wanted to tell him the truth, as much as I wanted to tell Risha. Worst of all, there was no voice in my mind telling me that it was the right or wrong thing to do.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I admitted softly, corrupted kindness demanding I lie.\n\n\"Don't be,\" Boltock sighed. \"After everything I did, she's better off without me,\" he confessed, shuddering slightly. \"Just don't\u2026 Don't make Risha go through the same thing \u2013 she deserves better after all she's done for me,\" he added.\n\nThe urge to tell him that everything I'd done had been to keep her safe welled inside. However, before the words could find their way out of my muzzle, the tapping of claws interrupted our conversation. We both looked back, half-expecting to see Risha, but Neera approached.\n\n\"Good to see someone kept him talking while we were sleeping,\" the faldron declared, smirking at Boltock.\n\nThe green dragon grinned right back, as if it were something to be proud of, while she jokingly waved her feathered tail.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I asked, moving back to greet her.\n\nShe looked at me with the wry patronisation she profusely radiated, as if I should know.\n\n\"I'm going hunting; all these days on the wing haven't given me much of a chance,\" she stated, puffing up her chest feathers in stoic emphasis. \"Unlike you, some of us have to eat.\"\n\n\"Well, you shouldn't go out there alone. I'll come with you again,\" Boltock protested, turning her expression to one of trepidation.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" she blurted suddenly, before stammering. \"I'll be fine... I mean no offence, but boulders don't make for the cleanest kills.\"\n\nOh, so she's been on the receiving end of that trick too? I couldn't help but smirk.\n\nThe green dragon frowned, as I spoke up.\n\n\"How about I come with you?\" She looked at me as if that was a challenge.\n\n\"Well, I never did see if you were any good at it,\" she mused, her eyes narrowing and ears falling back.\n\nI glanced back at the cave, then at Boltock.\n\n\"You okay with this? We shouldn't be long,\" I asked.\n\nHe looked uncertain for a second, then nodded.\n\n\"We have to eat, I suppose,\" he admitted. \"I'll tell them where you went, but just try to be back before Soaren gets too impatient. You know he'll want to get moving again as soon as possible.\"\n\nI nodded before glancing to Neera, who was already heading eagerly into the forest.\n\nAt least hunting's the one thing I'm good at where I don't have to worry about the fate of the world on my shoulders."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The tangled mass of barbed trees and twisted branches sailed by as we both made sure to keep as close to the ground as the gnarled limbs would allow. Our flight ended when we finally found a small clearing crossed by a stream. The moment my paws struck the frosty mud, I was reminded just how much I hated days like this. Even back in the village with Tarwin, hunting in the mist; while sometimes useful, was never my preferred atmosphere. I recalled the ghostly shadows that had once stalked me through such blankets of gloom, the thought increasing my anxiety tenfold.\n\nIt doesn't help that this is possibly the most unnatural forest on the whole continent.\n\nA vast swarm of crooked trees encircled us like a wall of broken fingers and talons. Dead shrubs, withered moss, silky fungi and fallen logs concealed the seemingly endless mass of rotting bark, all draped in a fine layer of snow and ice. Beneath which, a hard floor of frozen mud cracked under our weight.\n\nEven the wind felt wrong as it struggled to find its way through the tangled undergrowth, howling and moaning like a ghost. The vaguely recognisable form of an open path snaked its way through tangled roots and icy puddles. As we moved into the forest, I found it was just as much a maze under my paws as it was from the air. Navigating the contorted patchwork wasn't easy, and eventually I had to revert to leaping over most of the smaller obstacles.\n\nI'd no idea what Neera intended to hunt down here; I could neither hear nor see any animals. I couldn't even smell anything through the damp hue. The only sign that I wasn't in some dark nightmare was the sound of her bounding through bushes as she led the way, traversing the forest floor with considerably more elegance.\n\nI couldn't help feeling slightly ashamed that I was using this as an excuse to get away from the others. Not only that, it also granted me the displeasure of Mordrakk's dark illusion as he silently watched from the shadows.\n\nHe should be right at home in this place. He can just do me a favour and stay here.\n\n\"Good, now we should be able to find something,\" Neera announced as we came across another small stream.\n\nAs I glanced up, she stopped, her ears pricked while she sniffed the air before diverting her eyes toward a cliff face on our left.\n\n\"Although I've never hunted in a place this cold, this is too far north for a faldron,\" she added, ruffling her plumage with a shiver. \"Oh, and watch out for the trees, pretty much anything that crawls here will try to eat you.\"\n\nI felt an urge to peer into the closest bark pillar, while trying not to think about how many of them looked like gruesome faces, contorted into positions of terror or yawning mouths lined with rows of sharp teeth.\n\nSurely she's not come out here just to hunt? Not after how Soaren treats her.\n\n\"So what about you, why are you still here?\" I asked, trying not to make the question sound too intrusive.\n\n\"Well, there wasn't much reason for me to go back, that's for sure. That, and the orkin declared all-out war on everything north of Dardien,\" she responded.\n\nAs daunting as her words were, and as inspiring as her determination was, I still couldn't bring myself to understand why she was still risking so much.\n\n\"You know, for the first time since I left home, I actually wished there were more faldrons around. I mean, dragons and griffins are fine, it's just\u2026\" She smiled, and my head cocked at the mention of the composite creatures, not that she seemed to notice my curiosity as she continued.\n\n\"It's the same with all of them. Oh, she's an elemental thief, a feathered fiend, don't leave her unwatched. I mean, come on! What is the worst I'm going to do, steal some dragon's fire while they're not looking? Because I'm pretty sure that's not how it works,\" she joked, mocking the pompous voices of her accusers.\n\n\"You're none of those things, and besides, a lot of them don't even deserve dragonfire,\" I assured, my own bitterness regarding Dardien's betrayal bristling.\n\nShe laughed, ruffling her damp wings.\n\n\"Maybe, but I'd like to see any of those scaly-hide leatherwings or stuck up long-beaks catch a decent meal. The best they can do is still wriggling on the way down,\" she boasted, puffing up her feathers.\n\nI gave a slight laugh, recalling that as a hatchling, I'd tasted my fair share of living critters.\n\nNowadays all that memory does is make me feel nauseous. I thought with a mock gag.\n\n\"I bet I could catch a better dinner than that,\" I teased.\n\nShe smirked, straightened up, flared her feathered crest and twitched her ears.\n\n\"Is that still part of the challenge? Because it looks like both of us are going back with nothing at this rate,\" she commented.\n\n\"Depends,\" I replied, waving a forepaw.\n\n\"On what?\"\n\n\"On whether or not you want me to steal your job again,\" I added, and she snorted.\n\n\"Well, they didn't call me 'the Wyrm' for nothing,\" she retorted, flexing a foreclaw.\n\n\"Apparently I'm a demon,\" I added, shaking my head, the two of us sharing another laugh as we prowled along the stream.\n\n\"Don't get me started on demons. The bad, hissing black-winged kind, I mean,\" she commented, as if she feared to speak of the vile creatures. \"All my life I thought I knew about fighting the orkin, but those things\u2026\" she paused, as if even the memory of vulpomancers sapped her soul. \"They're something else.\"\n\nAs I watched, I thought to say something, but moments later her head shot up and her ears stood tall.\n\n\"You hear that?\" she gasped quietly, but without giving me any opportunity to answer, she bolted forward.\n\nIt took me a moment to realise she was gone, and I called after her as my mind began to race with panic.\n\n\"Hey, you should probably come and look at this!\" she yelled back.\n\nMy brief anguish subsided as I saw her crimson head rise from the snowy undergrowth, and I moved over to see she'd stopped next to a small log.\n\n\"Can't say its orkin, you make anything of it?\" she asked as I peered over.\n\nIce partially covered a pool of rusty, red-looking water. However, the faldron's eyes focused on the muddy bank, where the snow covering had been disturbed. Pressed into the moist sediment beneath was a vaguely visible footprint, frozen in place when frost had reclaimed the area. Instinct told me it could be no more than a day old \u2013 years' worth of hunting and tracking skills resurfaced as I brushed my forepaw over the hardened dirt.\n\nIt's got no claws or talons, so not a griffin or a dragon. Plus, it's not large enough for an orkin. I assessed.\n\nA smaller one \u2013 a runt or goblin, perhaps? I considered, but I knew they had rattier, more disfigured feet, leaving only one candidate: human.\n\nIt certainly looked as if it had come from a boot, and if I was correct, the orkin weren't the only things out there. The idea triggered memories of Tarwin and how some of her tribe attacked me the last time we'd met. Recalling what had become of Risha's home only reinforced my growing cautiousness too.\n\n\"They're definitely tracks. Human tracks,\" I warned, and Neera looked slightly crestfallen at not recognising that sooner.\n\n\"Humans?\" she asked sceptically, before glancing into the thick mist.\n\nMeanwhile, I scoured further along the bank, coming upon something else. Pressed against the base of the log, almost completely covered by snow, was a belt and satchel complete with a canteen. Pulling the leather attire free brought back a warm flicker of nostalgia as I turned it over in my forepaws, carefully noting the details of the metal band and scribbles etched into its side.\n\nIt's definitely human.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Neera asked as I placed the belt over my neck.\n\nAlthough just a reminder of what I'd once been, ultimately, it was useful.\n\n\"It's better with us than on the ground \u2013 waste not, right?\" I responded, and she nodded.\n\n\"You know you'll have to clean it first. The water around here's the last thing you want to be drinking,\" she advised.\n\n\"We need to find a clearing and get back to the others,\" I suggested, unsure of the significance of the human presence. \"We can hunt somewhere else later.\"\n\nI didn't doubt that most humans wouldn't hesitate to kill us like animals given the chance, and as reluctant as she seemed to go back with nothing, our findings clearly had her on edge too.\n\n\"Just follow the stream until it gets a little wider, we can get out from there,\" she suggested, before moving ahead.\n\nThe chilling gale grew in strength as the trees began to thin, the dawn's blissful light breaking through. It was like a ghostly pyre amidst the mist as it touched the withered trees, casting wicked shadows that shifted in the wind. As we cleared the last of the thickest cover, we moved into a clearing, but what greeted us was far from any normal sight.\n\nI had to stop sharply to avoid falling over the edge of a steep gorge. The roar of a fast-running river thundered from below, while a bank formed from rotting logs and twisted roots partially covered by snow occupied the edge. Opposite was more than simple forest.\n\nI sank to the ground, Neera mirroring my caution, her ears twitching like the wings of a nervous insect. The decaying peaks of a large structure stretched up from the corrupted forest like a great, rotting tree stump. More like a vile extension of the landscape than any building, its base bore several gaping holes between long-dead roots and a shabby, half-fallen log bridge.\n\nI felt the same rage stirring inside me that I'd carried through Valcador. Although this was nothing like the great ice fire foundries, this sick pit of corruption and decay was clearly the work of Shadow Fen sorcery. That notion was confirmed when I looked closer and saw several large, bone-clad orkin squabbling outside one of the yawning entrances. At least three manticores sat upon the structure's spires, all mounted by equally-fearsome riders.\n\n\"Skies above! I didn't think orkin could get any viler,\" Neera observed.\n\nFortunately, the beasts were oblivious to our presence, and while I watched, something else caught my attention. At another of the structure's decrepit entrances, several brutish orkin were battling with a grey griffin, while others struggled with a larger red dragoness. Chains about their captives' limbs writhed and twisted like metal snakes, while the same metal masks I'd seen over my friends' muzzles in Taldran were clamped over the dragonesse's snout.\n\nIs it just me, or do those restraints move like they're alive? I observed, as I saw two more dragons being heaved deeper into the rotten hollow.\n\nSmaller goblins made off with what sets of armour and weapons they could gather, while more orkin goaded the prisoners forwards with long spears and red-hot barbs.\n\nI felt a sharp spike in my already simmering rage at the sight of orkin slavery, images of my friends bound in cages and forced to fight in Taldran's arena flooding back. I really had to fight off the burning urge to leap down and kill them all, and by the way Neera grit her teeth, I was sure she was thinking the same.\n\n\"Skies curse these brutes, this must be where they took the survivors from Talon's Rest,\" she growled, clawing at the snowy moss in frustration.\n\nThere's got to be something we can do. I wondered, scouring the fortress. I can deal with them, but not while Neera's here, I won't risk her life too.\n\n\"Come on, we have to get back to the others,\" I declared. She looked at me with a shocked expression.\n\n\"Wait, you're just going to leave?\" she asked.\n\n\"I didn't say that, but we need a plan,\" I countered.\n\nShe seemed unsure, but said nothing as we crept back through the tangled forest in search of another clearing.\n\n\"I can't believe they actually live in something like that; they're no better than cockroaches,\" Neera snapped angrily.\n\n\"I have a feeling what we did in Taldran drove them to the extreme,\" I responded, and she at least seemed to brighten up at that.\n\n\"I suppose setting a giant golden dragon on them will do that, but this is Shadow Fen, not Valcador. Things out here are just sick. They always have been,\" she responded.\n\nI swallowed, glancing away.\n\nThe last thing I need's another friend who disagrees with me.\n\n\"The golden dragon \u2013 what happened to it after I left?\" I asked, harbouring a faint glimmer of hope that the centurion may have levelled the whole of Taldran.\n\n\"There wasn't much left of anything when we left, but your giant death-machine was gone,\" she explained, confirming my theory regarding Balgore's new attire.\n\nHow many more orkin have that armour too?\n\nMy thoughts trailed off when Neera suddenly stopped again, tensing up and staring into the trees.\n\n\"What is it?\" I questioned, stopping as the branches about us creaked and groaned eerily.\n\n\"I don't know. Let's just get out of here,\" she replied.\n\nThere was no hesitation from me as I moved on, scouring the trees with my own sharp senses.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" I whispered again, seeing nothing amidst the damp gloom.\n\n\"Trust me; there's nothing that can get by...\"\n\nA sharp yelp cut her response short when the ground under her paws erupted in a shower of snow and leaves. I leapt back, my paws brushing against the ground as a rattling net hoisted her kicking and flapping into the trees. Instinctively, I coiled back, aiming for the thick tether connecting the trap to the branches, but then I froze.\n\nThose feathers may keep her warm, but she's far from fireproof.\n\nUnfortunately, something else had no problem interfering as it wrapped itself tightly around my muzzle, dragging me back into the undergrowth. The foul scent of whatever it was burned my nostrils when I inhaled. Fortunately, my ambusher hadn't counted on my strength, and I kicked back, flapping my wings before they finally let go. I spun to face them, my wings flaring and blades sparking to life before I froze.\n\n\"Tarwin!?\" I exclaimed in utter surprise at the sight of the equally shocked girl staggering back.\n\n\"Blaze!?\" she stuttered, and I felt my wings' arcane weaponry relax at the sound of her voice, at least until she added.\n\n\"Did you just talk?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Reunions",
                "text": "\"What?\" My thoughts came crashing to a stop, leaving me unable to stammer anything more.\n\nShock and surprise suffocated the idea that this wasn't real, that it was some kind of dream.\n\nIt's a trick, this isn't her, it's Mordrakk's doing and she's most certainly not heard me talk. Humans can't understand any race other than their own!\n\nTarwin, for her part, looked to be experiencing the same level of stunned confusion, though she also appeared to recover far swifter as she pulled herself back to her knees.\n\n\"You're here, you're... I thought you were dead!\" she uttered as she leant forward and wrapped her arms around me.\n\nHer leather clothing was battered, worn and covered in an extra layer of fur pelts. Her skin was pale and dotted with numerous cuts, bruises and scratches. Even so, she felt real, and the sight of the smooth bow on her back along with her father's equally recognisable battle-axe cemented the idea.\n\nT\u2013this is really happening.\n\n\"So are you,\" I muttered weakly.\n\nShe let go and rapidly jumped back, as if somehow, I'd suddenly changed into some kind of venomous monster.\n\n\"You just talked again. You've never talked!\" she stuttered.\n\n\"I did?\" I replied, pressing a forepaw to my snout as she jumped again, laughing as if she were crazy.\n\n\"You're... By the spirits, you're talking!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"I can't talk. I mean, I know I can, but it's impossible for you to understand me. This has to be a trick,\" I reasoned, but she didn't seem to care.\n\n\"Blaze, this isn't a trick. You're talking, and wow! Your voice, it's so, so\u2026 normal,\" she continued, shock fading as I looked her in the eye.\n\nHow can she possibly understand me?\n\n\"How are you doing this!?\" I demanded, pointing a wing at her accusingly, but she just laughed.\n\n\"Wow! I never thought you'd look so adorable ever again, but you're so cute with that voice!\" she teased through her uncontrolled giggling.\n\n\"Of all the things, I'm not cute!\" I protested, but she just carried on laughing.\n\nI'm a dragon, I'm not cute! I thought, pouting with a huff.\n\n\"Get off me, you featherless freaks!\"\n\nNeera's angry voice caught my attention as I heard the sound of ropes and a scuffle. The disturbance forced me back to reality and I leapt back through the bushes toward her. The faldron was on the ground, surrounded by several humans as she thrashed and squirmed, flames spewing from her muzzle as she forced them back.\n\n\"Get away from her!\" I shouted as I barged between them, flaring my wings.\n\nIt seemed my newfound talent for speech extended to more than Tarwin, as all of the humans staggered back like frightened children. Meanwhile, Neera paused, looking at me like a stranger.\n\n\"Wait, they understood that?\" she observed, testing her own voice.\n\nThey offered her colourful words no response, though they continued to stare at me.\n\n\"You're just full of surprises, aren't you?\" she stated as she locked eyes with the humans, coiling back defensively.\n\n\"Believe me, this one is as much a surprise to me as it is to you,\" I replied.\n\n\"Yeah, so was that time you came back from the dead,\" she added, ruffling her feathers. \"Don't worry, I'm getting used to it.\"\n\n\"Put your weapons down, all of you!\" Tarwin commanded, emerging from the brush.\n\nHer companions gave her a confused look while she approached the pair of us. Just as I placed my tail before Neera to stop her from lashing out.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" another vaguely familiar voice questioned as the man it belonged to emerged from the forest.\n\n\"I thought we were hunting beast-men, not dragons \u2013 and certainly not my friend,\" Tarwin told the newcomer scornfully.\n\nHe looked as perplexed at her words as he did my own, and it was at that moment that I put a name to his face.\n\nYorik, that man tried to drive a sword through me last time we met!\n\nI had to admit that I'd little idea whether that had been his true intention in the midst of the night's chaos, but I still bared my teeth at his approach, which only seemed to bolster his bitterness.\n\n\"Your friends, they're animals,\" he responded.\n\n\"I'll show you an animal,\" Neera barked.\n\nI almost wanted to let her loose, but they remained oblivious to her challenge.\n\n\"Aren't we all just animals at the end of the day?\" Tarwin countered, swiping a bow from his grip. \"Now, are you going to stand there wasting time, or do you want to go and check the rest of the traps? If not, go and check on the horses or do something else useful,\" she commanded, and he reluctantly waved a few of the other men away into the forest.\n\nTarwin scowled, but seemed satisfied as she turned back to us. Kneeling before me, she observed the strap around my neck.\n\n\"Come on, Blaze, tell me I'm not crazy,\" she implored, placing a hand on the canteen hanging over my chest. \"I know you just spoke.\"\n\n\"You're not crazy,\" I responded, and both her and Yorik's expression told me this was all too real.\n\n\"Great spirits, it really did talk,\" the latter expressed with surprise as he staggered back and shifted to unsheathe a smaller knife from his belt.\n\nTarwin didn't notice, she just laughed while Neera's fearsome look focused on the small blade being slowly manipulated in the man's fingers.\n\n\"Please, don't ask me how I'm doing this, it's strange enough already,\" I almost begged, and her smile widened.\n\n\"It's not that strange, you've got the most handsome voice I've heard in a long time,\" she offered, placing a hand on top of my head. \"I thought we agreed never to wear this stuff, it's too noisy,\" she chastised, tapping the golden plates covering my head.\n\n\"That's if you don't scare every animal away with the amount of noise you're making first,\" I retorted, and she gasped, forcing a pained expression.\n\nYep, this is definitely the real Tarwin, for sure.\n\n\"Are you finished?\" Yorik questioned. \"Because I don't know if you've noticed, but you're talking to a golden lizard.\"\n\n\"First off, he's a dragon, and he's white, not gold. That stuff's just\u2026\" She glanced between me and her fellow human, while I ruffled my wings and shifted my paws.\n\n\"Armour,\" I offered, not fully understanding the arcane metal's true workings. \"The unconventional kind.\"\n\nMy simple answer was enough to complete her awkward explanation as she looked back at Yorik, who merely grumbled and turned away.\n\n\"What does it matter anyway?\" he stated, before taking his bow back from her. \"Come on, we still have to figure out how to get the others out of that fortress.\"\n\nFortress? Neera's head rose sharply at his statement, as did my own.\n\n\"The one by the river?\" we asked simultaneously, although only my words garnered a response.\n\nYorik paused and glanced at Tarwin, who in turn, scowled and glanced back at me.\n\n\"You've seen it?\" she asked, and I nodded, a response closer to our usual method of communication.\n\n\"They've taken a lot more than humans,\" I advised, saddened by the fact that one of our first real conversations brought bad news.\n\nShe just nodded, looking back at her companion with an expression I knew all too well.\n\nThat's her 'let's try something reckless' face. She had it the day this all started.\n\n\"No, you can't be serious,\" he responded, clearly knowing that look too.\n\n\"I'd like to see any beast-man fortress stand between me and him on a good day,\" she declared proudly, nodding to me.\n\nAs relieved as I was to realise that what had happened back home hadn't severed our bond, I'd a horrible idea about what she was planning. Yorik gave a low grumble, folding his arms as he leaned back against a tree.\n\nHe really doesn't like dragons, or any race by the sounds of it. I noted, seeing a lot of Tarwin's late father in the man. I don't think he has half a chance of holding her back though.\n\nHis consternation between the old ways and this strange new reality was ended by a sudden thud and the draft from a pair of large wings. Snow and leaves scattered as the wind whipped violently, branches snapping as Soaren thudded to the ground between us. A torrent of grey flame far superior to that which Neera had displayed exploded from his muzzle, narrowly missing Yorik and Tarwin as they darted aside. I felt a surge of rage when I almost saw my oldest friend roasted alive, but before I could do anything, Risha and Boltock landed beside me, the latter far more unsure of the human threat than his sister.\n\n\"What in the creators' name are you doing?\" Risha hissed, as if I were a hatchling that had gone against all instructions only to wind up in inevitable peril.\n\nI shook her off rapidly pushing myself between Soaren and my human friend.\n\n\"Don't bother negotiating, their minds have been mangled for an age,\" the air elemental advised.\n\n\"Stop it. They're not going to hurt anyone!\" I demanded, glancing back at Yorik cautiously as he readied an arrow.\n\nTarwin leapt up and shoved his weapon down, confiscating the sharp projectile.\n\n\"He's right, stand down,\" she instructed, placing her own bow and battle-axe on the floor.\n\nIt took only a second for the others to realise what had just transpired, and the inevitable questions came in swift union.\n\n\"Wait, they can understand you!?\"\n\n\"Of course they can, language is not a barrier to one bearing the armour of my masters. These mortals would do well to show respect to their Guardian and his peers,\" Apollo chimed distastefully, levitating down from the tangled trees to perch on a branch.\n\nAll eyes turned to the golden hawk as his head rotated to peer at the humans.\n\n\"Now, may I introduce myself?\" he proposed, continuing with the same scripted introduction he always boasted while the gears in my mind worked to fit the puzzle together.\n\n\"Wait, so my armour allows me to speak to them?\" I asked.\n\n\"Indeed it does, Guardian; however, I am detecting slight anomalies in the vocalisation of this particular species. It is oddly reminiscent of ancient infernal magic. I'm having trouble recognising the source,\" he added.\n\nI cut his explanation off with a shake of my head.\n\n\"But I can talk to them?\" I pressed.\n\n\"Of course, your armour and I are fitted with vocalisation talismans. Both enchantments are equipped to function no matter the language or state of those with sufficient intellect one wishes to communicate with,\" he told me, as if I should know. \"Should I tell them to surrender?\"\n\n\"What? No! Don't say anything, I can do the talking,\" I instructed, motioning for him to wait behind me.\n\n\"Hardly, those scaleless, soft skins have been nothing but barbarians in the north since the days of the Guardian War. The children of Mordrin, not much of a legacy, if you ask me,\" Soaren scoffed.\n\nHis prejudice was hard to accept, but I shook it off and ignored him as I moved over to Tarwin.\n\n\"How many people have the orkin, beast-men or whatever you want to call them taken?\" I asked, hoping that she'd treat me as if we'd always had the advantage of vocal communication.\n\n\"After the village was destroyed, we were forced to wander the wilderness. They killed and kidnapped at least half a dozen people before we tracked them here,\" she explained with a hint of regret.\n\n\"Wait, you're not seriously considering helping them, are you? We shouldn't even be able to talk to them,\" Soaren interrupted.\n\n\"Indeed, it would appear that their kind has been cursed by an ancient form of magic, rendering their language useless to all other species. May I recommend\u2026\"\n\nApollo was quickly silenced by my stern glare.\n\n\"I think they've taken prisoners from Talon's Rest too \u2013 dragons, griffins and their families. Do you really want to leave them?\" I asked, stealing Soaren's challenge.\n\n\"If that's true, there could be an entire wing of Fire Order dragons down there. They were the dragons we were supposed to meet,\" Boltock interjected, straightening his armour.\n\nDragons that could soon become an entire wing of ebons, if we don't save them. I thought to myself.\n\nAt her brother's admission, I glanced at Risha, and despite what she might currently think of me, she didn't disagree.\n\n\"I can't help feeling that you plan these things,\" she sighed, anger softening as she stepped up to my side.\n\n\"Planning would suggest I know what I'm doing,\" I added, offering a weak smile.\n\n\"At least the part of you that doesn't sit about and do nothing is still in there,\" she observed, lightly nudging my side with her wing.\n\n\"It seems you're full of surprises,\" Soaren added with a snort, backing down slightly.\n\n\"So, you want to attack the beast-men's fortress with a small army of dragons?\" Yorik asked sceptically, and Tarwin smiled as she nodded.\n\n\"As much as I know you'll hate it, yes I do,\" she confirmed confidently.\n\nYorik mumbled something about cursed spirits, before she offered him his arrows back and ushered him toward the river.\n\n\"I hope you really do have a plan,\" Soaren suggested, shooting me an uncertain look as we followed our new allies."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The blackened walls of rotting bark and sickly spires of twisted decay looked no less foreboding from the opposing riverbank. A large group of orkin stood watch amidst the tangled thicket of crawling roots, while two more were mounted on manticores.\n\nI studied the scene from the cover of a fallen log, trying to pick out the entry points, the most prominent of which was a small hole on the left side, connecting to the cliff via a small log bridge.\n\nRisha, Boltock and Tarwin were beside me, while Soaren and Neera sheltered further down the bank. Yorik and the rest of the humans had taken up a vantage point on the cliffside, along with Apollo, the construct serving as a means of communication.\n\nI'd no doubt that Soaren and Neera could deal with the manticores, despite my reluctance to ask it of them. While Risha, Boltock and the others could deal with the creatures on the ground.\n\nThat just leaves Tarwin and I.\n\n\"What about the ones inside, how do we know they won't just execute everyone before we get there?\" Boltock asked.\n\n\"Because I'm going to sneak inside before you attack,\" I stated, nodding to the small side entrance.\n\nHe seemed concerned but didn't appear to have any major problems with the idea; in fact, he seemed to admire it. His sister admired it less so, glancing up at the smaller entrance with a frown. I knew exactly what she was about to say, and I opened my muzzle before she could do so.\n\n\"No, you have to stay here \u2013 they'll need every dragon out here if they're to stand a chance against those manticores. The moment you see smoke from the inside, come in after me,\" I elaborated, before assuring. \"I've snuck into my fair share of orkin forts, I know what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"Let me guess, you learned that while you were stuck out here alone?\" she chastised.\n\nMeanwhile, Tarwin was looking between us, only hearing half of the conversation, but quite clearly understanding what we were discussing.\n\n\"I'm coming in with you,\" she declared, drawing more of my disapproval. \"Just because you can talk now doesn't mean you can argue. I'm not letting you go in there alone,\" she pressed sternly.\n\n\"Besides, I've got a little something to give those stupid creatures,\" she added, pulling several small, spiked orbs from one of her pouches.\n\nI recognised the orkin weapons in an instant. Not only had I been the target of such explosives, but I also felt an element of caution at the sight of them.\n\nThey're bombs, like the cannon rounds, only smaller.\n\n\"Where did you get those?\" I asked, trying to hide my excitement as I imagined the orkin getting a taste of their own fiery medicine.\n\n\"Surely you didn't expect me to spend months out here without picking up a few new tricks?\" she responded, tossing one of the orbs up and down.\n\nDoes she know how dangerous that thing is!? I had to fight not to lunge forward and snatch it from her. She's like a flightless hatchling playing far too close to the edge of a cliff!\n\n\"So, are we heading in there or not?\" she urged, nodding to the rotting fortress as she stashed the explosive.\n\nI let out a sigh, but Tarwin wasn't Risha, there was far less room for negotiation.\n\n\"Good to see there's still someone you listen to,\" the blue dragoness joked.\n\n\"Fine, but I have no idea what's going to be in there,\" I replied with a huff.\n\n\"Good, that should make it interesting,\" Tarwin declared, and I couldn't help rolling my eyes.\n\nIt's going to be just like old times, only with murderous rock monsters, flying horrors and miniature bombs.\n\nAfter assuring myself that every one of my other friends was ready, I motioned for us to begin our approach toward the bridge, where a lone guard stood by the entrance with a crooked spear.\n\n\"You ready?\" I whispered to my companion as she knelt in the bushes beside me.\n\nDespite the overwhelming difference between us, she simply nodded. Clearly, my newfound ability to speak hadn't changed the years of hunting experience we had together. She quietly drew an arrow, pulled her bowstring taut, and aimed for the guard's neck. I glanced between her and the oblivious orkin, half of my mind pondering whether she'd be able to take him down before he could warn any of the others.\n\nSeriously, if anyone can do this, she can. Moments later, the guard fell backwards into the fortress's entrance, clutching at the arrow in his neck. Point proven.\n\nSilently, we both scurried across the bridge and made our way inside. The structure itself seemed to be covered in damp bark, as if some foul magic had dredged the tree from the soil and frozen it in a constant state of decay. A pungent smell filled the air and sickly fungi clung to the flaking walls; it was so bad I felt a strange longing to have the hardened walls of the ice fire citadel back.\n\nI really shouldn't think about what can smell that foul, or what I'm stepping in.\n\nTarwin crouched beside the fallen guard, yanking the arrow from his neck and making sure her work was finished by swiping a dagger across his throat.\n\n\"Nice shot,\" I commented, flicking my tail at the orkin.\n\n\"Thought you knew I never missed?\" she boasted, snatching a wall torch from its decrepit holder.\n\nWe cautiously made our way into the maze of tunnels toward the centre of the festering structure. The deeper we moved, the more the walls glistened like wet slime.\n\nIt's like we've been swallowed whole, this place is disgusting!\n\nI tried not to think about the areas of the wall that seemed to writhe and wriggle, as if a whole carpet of insects were eating away at the decaying wood.\n\nThe more I look the more I just want to burn it all down. Even so, the swarms of bugs weren't the only things to shift in the dim light.\n\nAs we made our way around one tight bend, I saw a patch of large, bulbous mushrooms sprouting from the wall. I paused, raising my wing to signal for Tarwin to do the same. The fungus shuddered, as if disturbed by our presence, and with a scraping sound, one popped free from its place amidst the rotting bark and gave a low, chattering growl.\n\nOkay, now I've seen everything.\n\nThe creature looked like a mushroom; a set of mangled, grubby legs sprouted out below the bulb while a fleshy mouth lined with jagged, brown teeth broke its surface. It had no eyes and was no bigger than my head, but the deeper I peered down the tunnel, the more I saw.\n\nNot all were mushrooms \u2013 some looked like simple branches or wiggling maggots \u2013 but they all began to turn toward us with hungry sets of snapping jaws. I recoiled, fighting the urge to gag on the smell as the walls came alive. Tarwin took one look past me and brought the torch forward.\n\n\"Quick, get through before more of them notice,\" she commanded as the tide of nattering beasts collected themselves and began to advance.\n\nI didn't argue as the first of the little monsters jumped up at me like some kind of horribly deformed grasshopper. Without a second thought I cut it in two with my blades, the sizzling odour of its charred flesh smelt worse than when it was alive. Two more latched on to my paws as I staggered forward, only to be squashed like bugs. As more awoke, I opened my wings to keep them away from Tarwin, forcing them back with several heavy beats.\n\n\"Get through, I'll be right behind you!\" I called urgently as I kicked and clawed at the probing creatures.\n\nMy efforts did little to keep all of them at bay. The urge to simply blast them was tempting. Especially as I felt smaller ones trying to worm their way under my armour, only for the magical metal to tighten and slice them apart. One jumped at my face, trying to sink its teeth into the end of my snout before I snorted a puff of flame, turning it to ash.\n\n\"Remind me again why we were always so eager to see things like this!?\" Tarwin called as she squashed one of the festering creatures under her boot.\n\n\"That was you, not me, I was just dragged along,\" I retorted, half-focused on flicking one of the things from my tail.\n\nA sudden sharp pain lanced through one of my wing membranes and I turned to see several of them had sunk their teeth into the soft tissue. Shaking them off was easy, but watching the inky-black substance that flowed quickly into my veins wasn't so trivial to dismiss. I felt a wave of sickening nausea come over me as the golden glow of my natural healing began to stem the tide of rotting venom.\n\n\"Don't let any of them bite you,\" I called, all too aware that if the poison could do this to me, I'd no idea what it would do to a mortal.\n\nTarwin looked round, her face awash with alarm as she noticed the necrotic poison battling my celestial healing.\n\n\"Since when did your wings light up?\" she asked, smashing another grubby monster aside with the torch.\n\n\"Since I found out I wasn't like any other dragon. Now, will you please move!?\" I snapped urgently, battling away more of the ravenous beasts.\n\nThere was no more arguing, and we soon forced our way into a larger chamber where four tunnels converged. The combined light of several torches illuminating the chamber seemed to be enough to force the creatures back into their gloomy tunnel, and I slumped down with a huff. Taking several long breaths I inspected my wing, watching the wet holes slowly close as the rotting effects diminished. As Tarwin observed my rapidly healing wounds I knew I had to explain.\n\n\"I can't really be hurt, not from anything I've come across,\" I told her, although I made an effort to hide the dark scars on my right side as I did so.\n\nNot by anything aside from Mordrakk's claws.\n\nShe offered a confused look.\n\n\"Is that the same for all dragons or just you?\" she asked.\n\nI had to disguise just how much that obvious question hurt, when voices from within the maze of tunnels interrupted our conversation.\n\n\"It's the stinkin' wood grites, I's tellin' you, nothing more,\" the gruff voice of an orkin soldier announced as two shadows appeared ahead of us.\n\nWe took cover in another of the tunnels, Tarwin finding a pool of sickly brown water to douse her torch as they came into view.\n\n\"Stupid things keep trying to bite off more than they's can chew,\" the same orkin added, while his companion snorted.\n\n\"Shut your's trap, we's no venom without them little wretches,\" he added.\n\nI glanced at Tarwin, and it was clear she'd heard and understood their conversation too.\n\nI guess the orkin are just as cursed, if not more so. But if they're using the venom of those little creatures? I didn't want to think about how that could rot someone's flesh.\n\n\"Don't let one of them so much as scratch you,\" I whispered.\n\nTarwin gave me a look that told me how obsolete my comment was. While the two orkin passed by and moved off down the tunnel we'd just escaped.\n\n\"Douse that torch, I's don't want the stupid things swarming over us again,\" one of them muttered, and my attention spiked at that unwitting advice.\n\nSo those little things react to light then?\n\n\"Come on, this has to be the right way,\" I whispered, creeping down the tunnel from which the orkin had emerged.\n\n\"You just want to leave those two?\" she asked.\n\n\"I have a feeling they'll get more than they bargained for down there,\" I replied confidently.\n\nAs sceptical as my companion looked, I knew she trusted me. Even if our newfound ability to talk made it all a little weird.\n\nI just hope it doesn't make things too strange, how are we going to feel about one another after all this?\n\nAs expected, more of the wall-dwelling creatures resided in the next passageway, although, without torchlight to wake them, they remained placid. The only light we had came from the small puffs of white fire I dared exhale. It was like navigating a dark, trap-filled maze, until we reached a balcony overlooking a larger open area. It appeared the cavernous space had once been the core of the rotten tree; evidenced by the barely-visible growth rings in the floor.\n\nSo this was once a real tree? I considered, feeling a tinge of sadness at its reduction to a fetid tower of filth.\n\nAt least three more larger openings led into the maze of tunnels, and judging by the weak sunlight breaking through from outside, one particularly large maw had to be the main entrance. More light pierced through gaps in the tangled thicket of the cavernous roof, illuminating an assortment of bone effigies and roots that hung down from the rotten walls.\n\nBlood-covered pedestals bore the demonic glyphs of sacrificial magic, with gory shrines erected to ancient gods. The bloodied corpse of a griffin lay over the dripping slab of one sacrificial stone, their limbs bound and feathers scattered as if it were no more than slaughtered poultry.\n\nI heard that unmistakable grinding of stones. The sound made me feel sicker than any decaying venom could manage as Mordrakk drew another tally across my mind's wall of darkness. It didn't stop when I glanced upward. I suddenly found myself very relieved that it hadn't been Shadow Fen orkin to enslave my friends months ago.\n\nMore mutilated bodies hung from the festering walls like tattered red flowers, their innards splayed open and bony limbs tied back. Most were no more than simple forest creatures, deer, pheasants and mountain goats, runes carved into their hides. Clearly, anything on the scale of a dragon was too much of a prize. Several larger bone-cages hung amidst the wicked display, exposing those crammed inside to their impending fate.\n\nI focused on the prisoners, noting that most were humans. Larger creatures had been isolated in bigger cages, at least one of which appeared to be for dragons, bound within elemental-dampening chains. Four out of the five I could see were fire elementals. Another was reserved for a group of griffins, who looked to be in far worse condition than their leatherwing fellows.\n\nLooks like they've been here much longer? One glance back at the feather wing on the alter and I dreaded to think why. This land is sick.\n\nTarwin took one look at the cage containing humans, and I could tell she was battling hard not to find and kill every single orkin crawling about this horrific place. The sight forced me to accept that this may not be as simple as burning down a fortress in Valcador. I was immortal and fireproof, but the thirty or so prisoners were not.\n\nTo make matters worse, we weren't alone. At least six orkin stood among more empty cages and pits of sickly black goo that bubbled away in the festering bowels of the tree below. Most were clad in bone-like armour, bodies completely consumed by corrupt stone. I also assumed that the wood grites' necrotic venom tipped all of their crudely-sharpened weapons.\n\nThings can never be so simple, can they? I turned my attention to the weeping walls, specifically several large patches of sickly orange fungus nestled within the cracks. More grites?\n\nLooking back to the pools of bubbling sludge, I recalled seeing the same stuff before, on the war machines in Valcador.\n\nThey use it in weapons manufacture, it's flammable. I flexed my claws and ruffled my wings. The others are waiting for a fire? Well, I'm about to give them one.\n\n\"Do you have an arrow that can set that stuff on fire?\" I asked, pointing to the sickly bogs.\n\n\"Blaze, you're a dragon, can't you just breathe fire?\" she asked, and I sighed, a puff of smoke escaping my nostrils.\n\n\"My fire isn't exactly subtle. We need something that's going to cause a distraction, not roast everyone,\" I reasoned.\n\nHad the situation not been so serious, I was sure she'd have added something witty. Instead she looked at one of the torch-bearing orkin, then at the pit.\n\n\"I don't have any fire arrows, but if you can get one of the ones with a torch near a hole, I can improvise,\" she proposed.\n\n\"Okay, I'll get their attention, but we'll need a distraction to keep them occupied while we free the prisoners,\" I responded.\n\n\"Leave one of those cages to me,\" she said, grabbing at the canteen around my neck and pulling it off.\n\n\"Loud and to the point,\" she mumbled to herself, bouncing two of the explosive orbs in her grip as she looked at the leather-clad drinking utensil.\n\nNow I know she's planning something crazy, something very crazy. I was about to ask her just how ridiculous her plan might be, but before I could say anything, she spoke again.\n\n\"You know, I always thought I was the one with the ridiculous ideas. Maybe we're both just as crazy?\" She shifted slightly to strap the canteen to her belt with the rest of the orkin explosives.\n\n\"No, that's just you; you are the one with all the crazy ideas,\" I laughed.\n\n\"You say that as if it's a bad thing,\" she responded with a wry smile as she crept away.\n\nNow there's no going back, nor is there time to consider other options.\n\nAs she edged to fulfil her part of our plan, I crept slowly down the side of the balcony into the centre of the chamber. While I pressed my body to the foul-smelling filth, my mind screamed at just how much of an idiot I was being. Against all my better judgment, I jumped out into the middle of the heavily armed guards.\n\nTarwin's right, we're both crazy, but that's served us both well enough up until now.\n\nTaken completely by surprise, every orkin around me stopped what they were doing, a particularly large one turning back from the bloody altar. His rugged form was hunched and crooked beneath a layer of crude armour while an antlered skull covered his face. He peered at me with baleful green eyes, as he backed slowly toward one of the bubbling pits.\n\n\"What's this?\" he cursed as the majority of the others stepped closer, their weapons raised.\n\nIt wasn't hard to see the caution in them \u2013 these orkin were smarter than those of Valcador. I fought the urge to let my eyes wander toward Tarwin as I saw her creep around the edge of the room, before she began unscrewing several of the explosive orbs to get at the black powder inside.\n\nMeanwhile, the larger orkin gave a frustrated groan and finally charged at me. I darted into the air, kicking him in the face with my rear claws as he tried to grab my wings. It was seemingly a cue for the rest of them to attack, and within no time, I was battling several sets of hideously spiked blades.\n\nI dispatched two with my tail and another with a clean sweep of my wing, all the while wishing I could simply burn them and be done with it. One of the larger creatures drove a spear through the membrane of my left wing, pinning me down as another struck me across the back with a spiked club. My armour absorbed most of the blow as I swept the legs out from under another of my attackers, while the hooded beast stood on my muzzle, stopping any form of fiery retaliation. In that moment, I saw Tarwin appear above the altar, improvised canteen in hand. I'd no idea what she'd done with it, but as she produced another explosive orb in her opposite hand, I didn't stop to think about it for too long.\n\n\"Here, you overgrown fungus, have some of this!\" she shouted, tossing both the armed explosive and the canteen into the middle of the group.\n\nI took one look at the bloated leather pouch and immediately realised what she'd done.\n\nLoud and to the point, indeed!\n\nKicking up against my confused attackers, I yanked the spear from my wing, having barely enough time to escape before there was a blinding flash and the whole floor shook. The orkin were sent flying in a shower of sparks and flames, several landing in the sickly black pools, swiftly igniting the liquid and themselves. Tarwin released several arrows into the confused rabble as strange-smelling smoke began to pool in the air.\n\nWell, there's stage one of my plan. I surmised, leaping up onto an outcrop of rotten wood, peering at the tether holding the fire dragons' cage aloft.\n\nNow to complete stage two, before reinforcements arrive.\n\nThe walls began to twitch and chatter as the heat of the sudden explosion and the bright burst of light touched them. Within moments, fungal growths crawled from the decaying wood, immediately overwhelming two orkin as the rest were stuck between the growing fire and the tiny beasts' chattering teeth.\n\nI glided across the flames, cutting the tether free with a sweep of my wing blade. The rope snapped with a dry crack and the cage dropped toward the fire. Twisting around, I caught the severed cord in my teeth and pulled as hard as I could manage. I may have been stronger than a normal dragon, but the weight of a whole wing of them was just about the limit.\n\nI slowed their fall just enough, and the cage collapsed into the fire with a loud crash. Releasing the cord, I jumped to their aid, but before I could reach them, a very angry looking set of toothed fungi confronted me.\n\nI'm really starting to hate these things! I inwardly grumbled as three more leapt onto my back, gnawing at my armour while another pair latched on to my foreclaws.\n\nKicking up, I managed to buck at least one of them off, crushing another in my grip. More kept coming, one landing between my horns, its sickly teeth snapping only inches from my eyes. I dropped to the floor and rolled, crushing the ones on my back and head with a wet splatter as I tumbled into the fire. Their slimy green innards smelt so bad; I was almost glad for the acrid wreak of smoke filling my nostrils.\n\nThey smell even worse when they're burning. Resisting the urge to gag I rose to my paws, the inferno spreading rapidly around me. So much for subtlety, that stuff burns more than I thought.\n\nThrough the fire, I spotted one of the fire dragons rising to her paws, her muzzle still entombed within an elemental-dampening mask. I dashed over; she wasn't a dragon I recognised, but the same couldn't be said of me. The moment I began melting her bounds and helping her free of the mask, she gasped in surprise.\n\n\"By the fires, it really is you!\" she blurted.\n\n\"Can you free the others and keep this fire under control? We need to keep it and the smoke away from the other prisoners!\" I urged, nodding toward the other dragons as they struggled with their own chains.\n\n\"We can keep the flames down, but without reinforcements there's little hope of freeing everyone,\" she responded, glancing to the griffin-filled cage.\n\n\"Don't worry, help's on its way,\" I assured her, and for once, it seemed my reputation was good for something.\n\nShe nodded and began to coordinate what was left of her soldiers, while I looked to the upper level, seeing Tarwin taking shots at any orkin that got too close.\n\nOkay, they can keep the fire under control, now for part three!\n\nThat required reinforcements, and for once, it felt like they were taking their time.\n\nSurely, they've not left us or worse still, attacked each other!\n\nI knew Risha would never allow that to happen, though my trust in Soaren and Yorik wasn't so strong. I'd little time to dwell on the idea, when a barbed set of limbs suddenly snatched my paws out from under me. Instinctively, I lashed out at the coiling tendrils with my wings, rolling to the floor as they released me.\n\nI spun around, expecting an angry orkin, only to see the thrashing set of bloated limbs and vine-like tendrils extending from below a bulbous mushroom head. The ghastly beast looked more like a rotten pile of firewood than anything that deserved to be alive. Not only that, but this particular grite was larger than me.\n\nYeah, I'm really starting to hate these things! As if sensing my disgust, the creature's severed tendrils unexpectedly regenerated. Really!?\n\nThe grite charged with a gargled shriek, wrapping its thorny tendrils around my legs and pulling me on to its bulk before I could get off the ground.\n\nUpon landing, I discovered a layer of horrible orange slime covering the smooth surface of the bulb. I struggled not to let any get in my eyes or mouth as it pulled me back toward its mouth. One of my blades sparked to life as I moved, melting a deep line through what could only have been its face, before cutting its limbs once more.\n\nIt recoiled, severed stumps wriggling like giant worms. Shaking them off, I turned on the creature and opened my muzzle.\n\nI've really had enough of overgrown fungus for one day! Before I could blast it into ashes, the beast lurched forward as a great branch of twisted wood burst up through its body.\n\n\"Having trouble?\" Boltock announced, retracting the wooden spear with a casual flick of his forepaw, as Risha appeared beside him.\n\n\"You really do know how to get everyone's attention,\" she remarked as she peered out over the flaming chaos.\n\nI shook off more of the disgusting orange slime while the rest of my companions charged in across the room, their weapons brought to bear on the confused orkin and remaining grites. Soaren headed for the other dragons, before assisting another air elemental in freeing the griffins, while others blasted their fire with deadly accuracy. Apollo and Neera darted through the air above the flames, picking off others with shards of bone or blasts of lightning, while Yorik and his companions traded blows with more surprised beast-men.\n\n\"And you all really know how to make an entrance. Now come on, we still need to get them out!\" I declared as I leapt up toward the last occupied cage.\n\nRegardless of my audible voice, the frightened humans still shied away at my approach.\n\n\"I'll have to melt the locks,\" I stated, knowing I couldn't just drop the cage into the fire.\n\nBefore I could consider how to get them all out safely, a loud, grisly voice interrupted me.\n\n\"Wells, wells, wells, more wyrms for me's collection.\" I glanced over to see an orkin at the end of a looming balcony.\n\nA tatty black robe covered his hide, while a hood covered his horned head. His left arm was merged with a large chain whip, coiling about his spiny back and right limb, moulding into a formidable set of torturous utensils.\n\n\"You focus on helping them,\" I commanded, nodding at the humans before dropping down to confront the new foe.\n\n\"No, let us help you!\" Risha called out, her eyes darting between the slave master and the prisoners.\n\n\"No, save them first!\" I insisted.\n\n\"Why won't you just let us help you?\" she challenged, her eyes narrowing.\n\n\"Look out!\" Boltock suddenly shouted.\n\nThe orkin hadn't simply waited for our argument to conclude, and I glanced back just in time to see the flash of his whip. I darted aside clumsily as the chain struck the wet mud with a splat.\n\n\"Nots very impressive, demon, where's is the scourge of Taldran I's been tolds of?\" he mocked, swinging for me once again.\n\nThis time, it was my turn to knock him aside as I shot to my paws and forced him back.\n\n\"Get the cages!\" I shouted, slashing my attacker's knees with my wings.\n\nThe corrupted stone glowed white-hot, but didn't yield as his whip struck my side. My armour absorbed most of the impact, enough for me to ram my horns into his legs. The force knocked the brute into the mud, weaponised limbs flailing frantically as I jumped on top of him, coiling back ready to blast fire. He locked eyes with me before cutting off my attack with a well-placed kick to the chest.\n\n\"I's don't goes down to wyrms so easy,\" he taunted as he stood up.\n\n\"Well, I'm no ordinary wyrm!\" I growled, lunging at him as I recovered.\n\nClearly anticipating my response, he shifted his whip with alarming skill. With one flick of his hand, the chain wrapped around my front, halting my momentum, before coiling tightly around my neck. I landed beside him, choking on the constricting metal while he laughed. Unfortunately for him, a blast of blue fire abruptly interrupted his moment of success.\n\n\"By the skies, what did I tell you!?\" Risha shouted, as she jumped between us.\n\nWhat kind of dark magic is this? I thought as the pressure around my neck eased and the chain relaxed.\n\nAlthough the orkin's hide burned, it wasn't enough to make the metal coils any easier to escape. It was as if it was alive, constantly seeking to tighten and tangle. Risha had no such limitations as she coiled back and blasted the stone fiend with another burst of flame.\n\n\"Enough, you's stupid wyrm!\" the slave master shouted, angrily swiping at her with a flaming claw.\n\nShe darted aside when more chains lashed out from his spines, constricting her forelegs and tail. She struggled, but before she could break free, he dragged her off her paws.\n\n\"This is why I should be the one dealing with things!\" I hissed as I tried to get into a position to melt the writhing metal.\n\n\"Yeah, and you've clearly done a magnificent job \u2013 first you leave us all, now this!\" she scorned, and I had to admit, the accusation stung.\n\n\"Quiet, wyrms! Now where's...\"\n\nA high-pitched call cut the slave master's words short when a large mass of snowy white feathers and formidable talons pinned him to the floor.\n\n\"Not so tough without your little toys, are you?\" the griffin hissed furiously, strong talons cracking his rocky hide like cooked shellfish.\n\nThe squirming orkin tried to force his enchanted weapon around her, as he had with Risha and I, but it was only long enough to keep the pair of us tangled up.\n\n\"Ice Feather, stop toying with him,\" another feminine voice demanded when a second griffin slammed down onto two smaller orkin.\n\nThe second griffin's hide and feathers were the standard beige colour of most of her kind. While the former griffin, now identified as Ice Feather, screeched and snapped her prey's neck.\n\nThe moment life left its master, the bewitched chain relaxed.\n\nGuess I'm lucky they didn't have sorcery like this in Valcador. I thought, as after a few moments of awkward wriggling, Risha and I managed to stand.\n\nMeanwhile, the bay-coloured griffin shook the orkin blood from her talons, looking at us with a hint of satisfaction, before cocking her head and focusing her sharp eyes.\n\n\"Wait... are you?\" she asked.\n\nThis again? I sighed and lowered my head.\n\n\"Yes,\" was all I muttered, and I saw her satisfied look turn to shock.\n\nEvidently, seeing her supposed saviour beaten by a chain wasn't what she'd expected, enchanted or not. Even so, I noticed Risha was just as unsettled by her look.\n\nMeanwhile, a mass of tightly clustered rocks formed into an arm wrapped around the last cage, slowly easing it to the ground, as Boltock descended.\n\n\"Good work,\" I offered as the green dragon grinned triumphantly.\n\n\"You did say the cages were priority one, right?\" he asked, as his sister gave a disapproving grunt.\n\n\"Maybe he should consider self-preservation among his priorities,\" she grumbled.\n\nI stiffened; I could see there was still a swell of sadness driving her frustration.\n\nShe has to see I only do things this way to keep her out of harm's way, she can't heal like I can, I can't let her get hurt!\n\n\"So you're the one?\" another voice asked before I could offer Risha a response. I glanced up to see Ice Feather peering down at me.\n\n\"That's one of the things they like to call me, yeah,\" I answered, shifting uneasily.\n\n\"And who might they be?\" added another voice.\n\nI glanced over to see the red-scaled fire dragoness I'd commanded earlier approaching with two more dragons at her side.\n\nBehind them, the flames were steadily dying. The last of the orkin overwhelmed, and what was left of the insufferable fungus nothing more than ash.\n\n\"All of you, and pretty much everyone else I've met in the past few seasons,\" I answered.\n\nMotioning over them all with a forepaw, my eyes finally fell on the cage containing the humans as Yorik and his men pried it open.\n\nThey're all here because of me, no three races have worked together like this in an age. I knew the griffin and dragon relationship was strenuous at best, as for the humans...\n\nThe eyes of everyone with wings followed my gaze, and their expressions simultaneously converged into one of abhorrence.\n\n\"Savages, it surprises me that these ones weren't helping the orkin,\" the bay-coloured griffin announced.\n\nIce Feather appeared ready to add her own bitter observations, but I raised a wing to calm their collective anger, and thankfully that was enough.\n\nGood to see my reputation has its uses, no matter how much I hate it.\n\nLike Tarwin had said, there were at least a dozen imprisoned humans, many of them young and utterly terrified. Many of their surprised faces looked at me, and there was no doubt they'd also heard my voice.\n\nEven that scares them half to death? How am I ever supposed to make this work?\n\n\"Is the area secure?\" Soaren asked as he approached.\n\nNeera walked proudly beside him, her feathered body blissfully free of harm. Even so, the faldron was met with only a little less resentment than the humans, as Soaren swiftly commanded everyone's attention.\n\n\"Thanks to you, we're secure here. I didn't think anyone would be coming after us,\" the lead dragoness replied.\n\n\"Well, you can thank the Guardian's unwillingness to leave anyone who isn't an orkin behind,\" Soaren replied, glancing at me before continuing. \"Is this all that remains of the wing stationed at Talon's Rest?\"\n\nHer head sank slightly at his question, and she glanced over the six remaining dragons.\n\n\"It's what's left of the whole population, unfortunately. They came on manticores on a late-night raid. There was little we could do,\" she admitted.\n\nI saw a hint of defeat in Soaren's expression \u2013 no matter how much pride the dragon had; he could still fail.\n\nThat's something I know too well. I was reminded.\n\n\"Very well, we were to stop at Talon's Rest on our trip back to the overlook, but now it seems we have no choice but to head straight there,\" Soaren explained.\n\n\"My wing and I will be happy to accompany you, there's little left for any of our kind out here,\" the dragoness offered and Soaren nodded, giving a wing salute.\n\n\"Very well...\" he began, before pausing.\n\n\"Talvana, my name's Talvana,\" she announced.\n\nI could see the bored look in Neera's eyes while she stood quietly at his side, both she and I seeming to think there were more important things to focus on.\n\nTherefore, I glanced about, finding Tarwin, coming upon her climbing down a thick set of roots to join the others.\n\n\"This is going to take a lot of getting used to,\" she proposed, clearing the sweat from her brow and securing her weapons as she warily observed the congregation of dragons and griffins.\n\n\"Now you know how I felt when I found out about all this the first time,\" I added.\n\n\"Indeed, despite all of the legends regarding this world, it is populated by numerous threats. Regardless, I believe your plan was a complete success,\" Apollo interrupted as he appeared beside us.\n\nPerplexed sets of eyes focused on the shimmering hawk, but in a situation where humans, faldrons and talking dragons were all present, it really didn't seem to matter.\n\n\"So, you really are a leatherwing and not a griffin,\" Ice Feather announced, and I found myself confronted with the frosty-coloured griffin once more.\n\nTarwin stared, meanwhile Soaren gave a subtle snort somewhere behind us.\n\n\"Is that a problem?\" he asked.\n\nThe griffin snorted back.\n\n\"No, it's not; I just didn't expect a dragon to save our tails in these parts. I'm Ice Feather, this is Meadow Hide, and it seems we are indebted to you,\" she formally introduced herself, while motioning to her bay-coloured friend.\n\n\"What are they saying?\" Tarwin whispered to me.\n\n\"I suppose you could say they're introducing themselves... Which I suppose means the old alliance still stands for something,\" I added while she looked at me as if that explanation had gone right over her head.\n\n\"Old alliance?\" she questioned sceptically.\n\nI shook my head and quickly covered my muzzle with my wing.\n\n\"I'll explain later.\"\n\n\"In that case, I guess you'll be coming back to the overlook with us too?\" Soaren asked the griffins.\n\nBefore the featherwings could respond, a sudden roar, splintering wood and rattling chains burst through the tangled thicket above as a manticore rider landed on top of the humans' cage. Men, women and children scattered as it buckled, several of them falling over as the beast lashed out with its venomous tail. As it did, another manticore-mounted raider jumped down from the new hole in the ceiling, slashing at Soaren and the griffins.\n\nThe air dragon's wings flared, forcing Tarwin and me back as the brute atop the mangy beast smacked him in the face with a hammer blow, preventing a fiery retort. Without a second thought, I darted away. Neera seemed to have the same idea as she leapt up onto a cage, sending a flurry of bone projectiles into a third rider's neck as he stalked amidst the tangled branches above.\n\nThe sharp bone struck rotten wood as the beast jumped back, its orkin rider more intent on drawing a bow from his back, to fire down into the chaos.\n\nNo, everything's falling apart! Without thought I charged forward and blasted a jet of white flame over the orkin confronting Soaren.\n\nThe beast howled, rearing back as the griffins and Talvana dispatched it. I saw Risha and Boltock tackle the rider, while, Tarwin backed up next to me. Aiming her arrow at the manticore on top of the cage she let it fly into the barbed tail, giving Yorik a chance to slice the poisonous bulb off.\n\nThe winged feline reeled back in pain, and at the sight of the enraged beast, I charged over as Tarwin fired again, the second arrow finding its mark in the manticore's shoulder. Jumping up, I tackled the rider from his saddle and into the midst of the humans below. The crowd parted like braking waves as the stone brute rolled to a stop and readied an arrow.\n\nI coiled back, but before I could blast him, he released the poisoned projectile. I instinctively leapt aside, dodging the black shaft, only for it to strike home in Yorik's right thigh. I glanced back, filled with cold dread as the man gasped in pain and fell to the dirt.\n\nNo, no one else is going to die, not while I'm here!\n\nWithout hesitation, I jumped at the orkin, while behind me, another arrow struck the manticore's head bringing its flailing to an end. With her opponent vanquished, Tarwin ran to her fallen companion, while the orkin's stone fist grabbed my shoulder.\n\n\"Go, warn's the masters, warn's the masters!\" my opponent called, and with shards of ice and bony feathers glancing at his mount's barbed tail, the third rider took flight.\n\nSweeping around, I knocked my opponent's twisted feet out from under him, took in a deep breath, and opened my muzzle.\n\n\"When did killing become so easy?\" the dark voice rasped in my mind as Mordrakk's shadowy form appeared over my opponent.\n\nTime seemed to slow around me, and I shook my head in an effort to dismiss him from my vision.\n\nKilling them has always been easy, they're monsters, they're evil!\n\n\"Are we really so different? Is what either of us would do right now truly right?\" he asked, tapping his stones together.\n\n\"I don't care which part of the darkness you are, whatever you'd do is wrong,\" I hissed, my crazed voice lost amidst the chaotic sound of battle.\n\n\"So, if I am more of you, more of my children than I am of the darkness, then surely, by extension, whatever you do is also wrong?\" he taunted, then grinned as he mused. \"You'd do well to focus.\"\n\nSuddenly a very angry orkin erupted from behind his shadowy illusion, stone fist slamming the side of my head. My armour instantly hardened, though that didn't stop momentum from casting me aside.\n\n\"Stupids, wyrm, talks to itself. Now I's goanna haves yours head!\" he growled.\n\nBefore he could act upon that threat, a shard of ice struck him through the skull, and he fell to the floor in a twitching heap.\n\n\"I had that,\" I told Risha as she landed.\n\n\"I know, you seem to have everything handled all on your own,\" she muttered, frowning down at me.\n\n\"Look, I'm sorry but I can't be like you want me to be,\" I replied.\n\n\"I don't want to force you to be anything, I just want you to value yourself more,\" she declared, and with that she moved back into the crowd.\n\nWhat does she know? What's there to care about? I'm just the gods' means to an end, she's the one really worth saving, the one to look up to. I thought as the rest of the crowd began to gather.\n\n\"That shaft was laced with grite venom, foul little things. He's got no more than a day or two without proper healing,\" Meadow Hide explained as she looked over Yorik.\n\nApollo translated to Tarwin as she sat by the wheezing man and dressed the already blackening wound the best she could.\n\n\"Your friends, they're useful, I'll admit,\" he stammered to her through his pained exertions.\n\n\"Can you do anything?\" I asked Risha quietly.\n\n\"I need magical remedies and potions to cleanse the poison. If it had been manticore venom, it may have been easier, but I've never even heard of a grite,\" she replied, then winced. \"Plus, there's no teaching of human physiology in Dardien.\"\n\nAt her solemn confession, both of us looked to Neera, but the response from her was just as dire.\n\n\"Come, we must make it to the overlook before tomorrow's end,\" Soaren proposed as he and the other dragons moved toward the exit, turning his gaze away from the dying human.\n\n\"You're just going to leave them?\" I asked sourly.\n\nUpon hearing my question, Tarwin's expression also turned to shock. Soaren shook his head with a low growl.\n\n\"Their kind has no place among us. Whatever commitment they had to the alliance of old died with their kingdom long ago.\"\n\nHe can't just say that, and he can't just leave them. I won't let him!\n\nI marched to the door, blocking his path as I caught something glimmer in the tangled mass of roots above. The phoenix looked at me expectantly, the light of its radiant feathers a blessing these cursed walls didn't deserve. In the meantime, Mordrakk's image brooded in the back of my mind, suggesting that our fate was hopeless either way.\n\n\"I didn't feel like I'd a place among you the day your leader banished me from Dardien,\" I began, and I saw Risha perk up.\n\n\"Aries is not our leader, not anymore,\" Soaren replied, his eyes narrowing.\n\n\"No, but you take orders from his own flesh and blood, don't you?\" I challenged, and he looked ready to follow in Pyro's paw steps as he glared at me.\n\nThis is it, soldier, prove to me you're not like the rest.\n\n\"I do believe the Guardian is correct \u2013 leaving these mortals would be a cruel act most unfitting of Goldfire's legacy,\" Apollo chimed, but no one except me seemed to pay him any heed.\n\nEven so, he wasn't the only one on my side as Risha appeared next to me. At first, I was half-expecting a witty comment about honesty, but surprisingly, she stomped a forepaw.\n\n\"He's right, Soaren, they helped us, we can't just leave them here.\"\n\nI didn't take my eyes off his wrinkled snout. He had a decision to make: is he with or against me?\n\n\"What would you have us do, carry them?\" he retorted.\n\n\"Yes, if we have to, there are more than enough able wings to carry the injured,\" I confirmed, looking back at Tarwin.\n\n\"The rest of them can take the horses. With the injured in the air there's plenty,\" I reasoned, and my human friend nodded.\n\nSoaren glanced between us, and the longer he withheld a response, the more I looked at Risha. Then for the first time since I'd returned, the pair of us spoke in perfect union.\n\n\"But only a big strong dragon could do that.\"\n\nGood to see we still think alike, even if she's always two steps ahead.\n\nWith a final sigh, Soaren's defences fell.\n\n\"Very well, gather what you can. We leave as soon as we're able,\" he agreed reluctantly, turning toward the exit before anyone could complicate things further.\n\nThe other dragons followed his lead, leaving Risha and I standing before the crowd. For a moment, a smile remained on her muzzle. Clearly, she once again saw the good soul she thought I was. As much as I hated being that beacon, or to mislead her in any way, I didn't say anything as she offered a nod of approval.\n\n\"Who knew it would take a battle to get some of the old you back?\" she suggested, and I huffed.\n\nI still am the only me, I'm just smarter. Not to mention how much I care about her.\n\n\"Here we go again,\" Boltock interrupted as he appeared on my opposite side.\n\nI glanced his way, then to the room full of bedraggled survivors.\n\nNot 'again', I've never been part of something like this before."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Gallery of Thorns",
                "text": "The snowy forest sailed by, still a tangled mass occasionally broken by irregular ridges and gleaming rivers. The sound of beating wings filled the cold air, and what had started as just the six of us had now become closer to thirty. I made sure to keep a watchful eye on Tarwin as she and at least a dozen others rode along a muddy path below.\n\nIt reminded me all too much of how things used to be. How despite the rugged landscape forcing a good distance between us, I never let her escape at least one of my senses.\n\nOnly those lands were never as dangerous as this one. I'm just glad they've been able to survive out here so long.\n\nI had to admit, after wishing I could show her the sky for so many years, I was slightly disappointed that she wasn't one of those up here with me.\n\nAt least half a dozen wounded had been loaded onto makeshift saddles, allowing Meadow Hide and several other griffins to carry them. Meanwhile, dragons flew in a protective formation around them, their rough, scaly hides and sleeker bodies far less adept to the purpose of transportation. Some of the griffins were too young or wounded themselves to carry others upon their backs.\n\nThat left Ice Feather to carry Yorik's unconscious body in her talons, while another trio of featherwings held onto the rest. I tried not to think about their precarious positions too much, nor how the hot-headed griffins may decide to accidentally drop someone. Tarwin seemed to trust my judgment, and right now that was all I needed.\n\nShe's always had good judgment, at least most of the time. I neglected to ponder the fact her judgment sparked all of this in the first place. Better judgment after she was kidnapped, surely?\n\nEven so, I kept my distance, flying beside Soaren and Apollo at the front of the group. The latter beat his wings, darting through the sky like a fish through the deep ocean. While Soaren concentrated on controlling the wind, creating enough lift to allow him and the others to fly more easily with their precious cargo.\n\nAt least if he's focused on that, he's not complaining about everything. I noted, still sensing his disapproval. He's more open minded than most though, I'll give him that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Our flight continued until the dark mountains that had been a distant image on the horizon hours ago, began to draw closer. Looming from the thinning forest like a great wall of jagged stone, gloomy storm clouds and harsh winds swirled about them.\n\n\"Shadow Fen's southern border lies beyond those peaks, although we'll have to take a different route if we mean to get everyone through!\" Soaren called over the wind's howl. \"Shadow's Gate Pass lies just to the east!\"\n\n\"How much further!?\" I asked, fully aware many among us didn't have time to spare.\n\n\"A day at most. Though it would be unwise to make the journey at night, so we'll have to rest amidst the canyons after sundown,\" he added, and to avoid any conflict, I simply nodded.\n\nUsing the strong air currents, I dropped down, flying up beside Tarwin as the road led her out onto the ridge of a towering cliff.\n\n\"It's nice to see you don't have to kneel down for once,\" I called, as I came to an eye-level glide.\n\n\"Not for much longer! If you grow anymore, I'll be able to fly on your back,\" she teased as her horse slowed to a trot.\n\n\"Soaren says we have to rest for the night, the trip through the mountains is too dangerous to attempt in the dark,\" I informed her.\n\n\"Fine, as long as you think it's a good idea. But not all of us can spare the time,\" she responded, glancing up at the burdened griffins.\n\n\"I know, I'll make sure we move on as soon as we can,\" I assured, and with a final look of appreciation, I pulled away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Within the hour we began to circle in search of shelter, and by the time the sun had come to the end of its heavenly journey, the mountains resembled jagged teeth in a shadowy jaw. Below, rocky foothills and valleys stamped their claim upon the world, shattering the strangling grasp of Shadow Fen's wicked thickets.\n\n\"Find somewhere out of sight, manticores hunt better at night,\" Neera advised, earning another bitter look from Soaren.\n\n\"Okay, tell me I'm wrong. You leatherwings can't see in the dark, can you?\" she challenged.\n\nSoaren snorted as he swooped down to a large ledge beside Tarwin and the others. The horse-mounted humans coming to a stop as he moved toward a series of overhanging rocks at the rear of the ridge. The griffins came to rest among them, and in an instant, everyone set to helping those who needed it most.\n\nRisha and Boltock landed, the former swiftly moving off to put her healing skills to good use. Meanwhile, I turned to the cliff's edge, peering out over the tangled forest as the horizon stole the last shreds of sunlight. To the east, far beyond the distant shapes of the Storm Mountains, I could see a large trail of smoke rising into the darkening sky, illuminated from below by the light of thousands of individual flames.\n\n\"What is that?\" Boltock questioned as he appeared beside me.\n\n\"Valcador's army, they're moving faster than I thought. They'll be at Dardien soon,\" I stated hopelessly.\n\nThe green dragon looked at me with defeat in his eyes, but I ruffled my wings and suggested.\n\n\"Go help your sister, I'll keep watch.\"\n\nI found myself sitting there as the dim moon settled, while the stars remained hidden behind a sheet of thick cloud. After an hour or two, I gave up hoping the skies would clear, eventually edging a little closer to the fire my companions had constructed.\n\nAside from two dragons, Ice Feather, Apollo and a cautious group of humans, most were asleep. I prowled around the ridge's edge, peering into the darkness for any sign that the orkin might have pursued us, while trying not to be distracted by the snowy griffinesse's back and forth march. I assumed it was some form of griffin guard routine as I scoured the tree line for the phoenix.\n\nFor the briefest of moments, I thought I saw the bird perched upon a distant branch, and with nothing better to do, I moved toward the trees. Eventually coming upon where the tethered horses of my flightless companions quietly nibbled on the surrounding bushes.\n\nStrange how peaceful they are while the world's falling apart around them. I observed, almost envious.\n\nThat was when I caught another fiery flash amidst the rustling pine trees, but before I could look, the sound of footsteps on the nearby rocks met my senses.\n\n\"You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were trying to catch your death out in this cold,\" Tarwin proposed as she approached, covered by a large fur fleece.\n\n\"I've never really cared about the cold all that much,\" I replied while she took a seat next to me. \"How's your friend?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not too well, I just hope we get to wherever it is we're going soon, because I've never seen wounds like those,\" she admitted, before adding proudly. \"He's made of tough stuff though, anyone raised out here has no option but to be strong.\"\n\n\"Don't I know it,\" I sighed.\n\nRegardless of my guilt, I didn't want to think about the dire condition of the man who'd tried to sever me from my home.\n\n\"Cute new voice or not, I know that look. What's wrong?\" Tarwin asked, sensing my melancholy.\n\n\"Nothing, just thinking about something,\" I responded, but she shook her head and crossed her forearms.\n\n\"Oh no, now you've got no choice but to tell me,\" she insisted.\n\n\"Fine,\" I sighed in defeat. \"I was just wondering what it would be like if you were all... Well, like me and the others,\" I reluctantly admitted, rustling my wings as she gave me an inquisitive look.\n\n\"What, like a dragon or one of the grumpy ones with feathers?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not even anything like that, I suppose. After everything that happened today, it kind of makes me wonder what the world was like before all of this,\" I elaborated with a shake of my head.\n\n\"Oh, you mean like that thing you said you'd tell me about later?\" she asked, curiously.\n\n\"Yes, back in the fort?\"\n\nOh by the creators, this is going to be a long story.\n\n\"Soaren and the others were talking about an age-old alliance between the nine great races. Dragons and griffins are some of the only ones left that abide by it... Barely. For some reason, I don't think your kind counts anymore though,\" I explained, and she rightfully looked annoyed.\n\nEven so, her look of curiosity turned to one of determination. A look similar to the one she'd worn the day this all started.\n\n\"Wait, so you've all had this big war going on and you just left us out?\" she exclaimed, shifting her arms with a huff.\n\n\"It's a lot more complicated than that,\" I reasoned.\n\n\"Why? We lost our home to this mess, so we should have a right to fight back,\" she demanded, glancing back at the others.\n\nI felt another wave of guilt wash over me at the mention of our old home, but I managed to force it from my mind.\n\n\"Tarwin, it took me over four seasons to figure this thing out, and I'm still not sure I've managed to understand it. It's all much bigger than you realise; trust me, I know. The only reason I rushed into it all in the first place was to save you,\" I assured her, all the while trying not to think too much about all the things I might have messed up along the way.\n\nShe gave a light sigh as she asked.\n\n\"Are you saying I wouldn't do the same for something I cared about?\"\n\n\"I'm not saying you wouldn't, but... Well, you can't even fly, so it wouldn't work even if you wanted it to,\" I explained, my answer seeming to have her stumped.\n\nHer argument fell flat, her firm expression relaxing with a sigh. However, my remorse didn't waiver, and it forced me to go on.\n\n\"Look, I've no idea what they're planning to do about any of this, but I won't let them leave you,\" I declared.\n\n\"I never doubted that, it's just... The way things have changed worries me,\" she confessed, and I tried my best to hide my own doubts.\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" I lied.\n\nAs the words left my muzzle, I felt something scratching at my mind's deceit, and sure enough, in the corner of my eye, Mordrakk's fiery eyes shimmered amidst the trees.\n\n\"You should get some rest, I'm going to stay out here until morning,\" I told her, doing my best to avoid the flaming eyes of my mind's avatar.\n\nI didn't know whether she sensed I was trying to end our conversation before she could see the fragility of my misleading words, but biting her bottom lip, she reluctantly stood.\n\n\"So long as you're still here when I wake up, I don't plan on letting you out of my sight again after all this,\" she warned with a laugh.\n\n\"Now you're starting to sound like Risha,\" I commented, only to realise what I'd said as she looked at me strangely. \"She's my friend, the blue dragoness. The green one is Boltock, and Neera is the one with feathers,\" I quickly explained.\n\nShe gave me another odd look; the same look she'd given me the last time we'd met in the village. Specifically when she'd seen Risha and I together.\n\n\"What?\" I asked bluntly, but she shook the expression from her face and simply replaced it with a wry smile.\n\n\"Nothing I don't think you know already,\" she began cryptically, before quickly adding, \"Anyway, I still didn't say thanks for today. We wouldn't have stood a chance without you.\"\n\n\"Well, what are friends for?\" I responded, as she returned to the others.\n\nThe subtle glances of the dragon guards and Ice Feather were swiftly diverted when they saw me looking.\n\nClearly, their Guardian's stranger than they expected. Not that I care what they think about me.\n\n\"Kind lies, they seem to be becoming a habit of yours,\" hissed Mordrakk, appearing where Tarwin had been sitting.\n\n\"What else can I do, tell them they're all doomed?\" I grunted, and he didn't think twice before responding.\n\n\"Regardless, their fate is inevitable. I suspect you only lead them now to selfishly spare yourself the pain.\"\n\nI felt myself tense, fighting the urge to swipe him from the air.\n\n\"Or spare them from it. If I'm as strong as you say I am, then I should have no problem dealing with the extra pain,\" I snapped.\n\n\"A noble sacrifice, but ultimately it's a step on the path to giving them up entirely,\" he growled.\n\n\"As long as you keep telling me that, there's no way I'll believe it,\" I retorted.\n\n\"And what if you're right and I'm no more than a shadow of the true Great Master? Then the only one you are denying is yourself,\" he goaded.\n\nFinally, my head lifted, and with one flick of my tail I cut his image from the air.\n\nGlancing back, I dared not meet the eyes of those who had seen my crazy outburst as they stared.\n\nI look like such a fool; how do they still see me as a hero? I thought with a huff. Mordrakk's wrong; those are his lies, not mine.\n\nThe longer I dwelled on his words, the more the implications spun in my mind. If I were indeed wrong, he'd destroy the world the moment I retook the amulet, but if I was right, and he wasn't the real Mordrakk, there was a chance I could stop all of this. I could spend my whole life denying him, but if he was telling the truth, I'd only be denying myself, and all of those dark thoughts had been no one's but my own."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The light of dawn came on swift wings, rising over the mountains to reveal another gloomy day, marred by rainy drizzle and the damp stench of an entire forest's worth of rotting wood. It didn't take long to load everyone up and once again take to the air, especially under Soaren's insistent command.\n\nThe grey dragon led us through the maze of rocky peaks and winding river valleys for what felt like hours. All the while I distracted myself by keeping an eye on Tarwin as she rode along the muddy tracks below.\n\nSurely the orkin have to have sent something after us; an entire flock of manticores can't be far behind.\n\nAs the day wore on and the weather grew worse, I began to accept that the orkin might be the least of our worries.\n\n\"Wing leader, we must land, the featherwings cannot fly in these conditions while carrying the extra weight,\" called Talvana.\n\nThe look of frustration that passed over Soaren's face was not so subtle, but the weather forced him to agree.\n\n\"We'll find shelter down in the pass; we can walk to the overlook from there,\" he instructed, peering down at the terrain.\n\nAs he descended, I swooped down and passed the information on to Tarwin. As unhappy as she was about it, she was forced to agree, and before long, we were all settling down within one of the rocky valleys.\n\n\"Make for the tree cover,\" Soaren instructed as I landed behind him.\n\nTarwin rode up beside me, her horse's tired steps slowing as she glanced at her wounded friend. Meanwhile, Ice Feather moved him from her talons and onto the saddle over Meadow Hide's back.\n\n\"Keep your eyes open, there are far more than orkin dwelling in these hills,\" Talvana advised, her narrowed eyes scouring the gloom.\n\nSoaren nodded before motioning for her and two more soldiers to take positions at the front of the group. As they did, I looked out into the hills. Each sharp peak looming out of the mist looked almost like the shattered bones of some great skeleton set upon by the forest's ravenous vegetation. Tarwin and the other horse-mounted humans passed behind me as I fell in line with Boltock and Risha to bring up the rear.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" I asked my blue-scaled friend.\n\nRemoving her helmet, she shook her head as her dorsal fin sprang back into place. I could see where the orkin chain had marked her exposed neck and wings, and once again felt the sickly feeling that often accompanied the realisation of how quickly I recovered from my wounds.\n\n\"I'm fine, still just a little shaken,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Are you really?\" I pressed, and her smile faded.\n\n\"Yes, Blaze, I'm fine; besides, isn't there a lot more you should be worrying about?\" she replied, glancing between her brother and I, who was clearly pretending not to listen.\n\n\"I know, but if something happened to you, I'd never be able to forgive myself,\" I admitted, yet her stern look didn't falter.\n\n\"Did you ever stop to consider how anybody else would feel if something happened to you?\" she asked.\n\n\"But it won't, it can't,\" I assured, while the dark scar under my armour betrayed the statement as she regarded it. \"That's different,\" I muttered swiftly.\n\n\"How is it different? Or is it all part of what you're not telling me?\" she snapped.\n\n\"No, I mean it's nothing that you need to worry about,\" I insisted.\n\nIn the back of my mind, Mordrakk's voice pressured me to reveal the truth. Meanwhile, Risha took a deep breath, appearing more disappointed than frustrated.\n\n\"Look, I understand if you don't want to talk about it, there were a lot of things I only told you and... well, I just thought...\" she muttered, glancing back at me in anticipation of more.\n\n\"You wouldn't want to know, because everything you told me, isn't real, none of this is real,\" I admitted, waving a forepaw toward the snowy cliffs. \"It's all so small and fragile, and if you knew\u2026\" My voice trailed off.\n\n\"Do you think we'd be afraid?\" she questioned, placing a wing on my shoulder.\n\nI thought about that, knowing she was partially right. Even so, to provide her with at least some closure, I nodded. I could tell she knew that wasn't all of it, and yet she dropped the subject, brushing her wing back along mine.\n\n\"I'm sorry about what I said. I was frustrated with you \u2013 I still am \u2013 but you're still my friend, my best friend, and I'm sorry for my own lies,\" she paused, the words catching in her throat. \"I still feel the same way as before.\"\n\nShe knows something about this war, this plan the Elders supposedly have to save the world?\n\nAs much as I hated the idea, she was keeping secrets, yet I trusted her enough to believe it was the right choice. Besides, it would be hypocritical of me to think otherwise.\n\n\"Thank you, and thanks for standing up for me,\" I replied.\n\nHer smile failed to falter, and she lightly brushed my side with her wing.\n\n\"Well, who else would stand up for you like I do?\" she teased.\n\n\"I would, and I can think of at least two more dragons... well, not really dragons, but they all would,\" Boltock added, counting on his foreclaws.\n\nHis sudden interruption was a clear sign he didn't care much for hiding his eavesdropping. Not only that, but it was becoming very clear that the sweet, lovable and possibly naive side of him simply wanted us all to be friends again.\n\nCan I really say that's not all I want too?\n\n\"Are you two friends again now?\" he asked hopefully, and Risha rolled her eyes.\n\n\"We were never anything other than friends. I mean, only the best of friends can get really mad at one another,\" she revealed, and he gave a slightly bemused smile.\n\n\"Nothing more than friends, right?\" he teased, and both Risha and I exchanged knowing glances.\n\nEmbarrassment that I still failed to understand gripped me again as the muddy path we were taking rounded a sharp corner. Ahead, the cliff ended, and the ground rose steadily into mountainous peaks and valleys. Huge trees grew like a natural fortress upon the rough hillside, each one a mountain in its own right, their monolithic trunks rivalling Dardien's temple pillars in width. The lean bark was far from the tangled mass of thorny branches that covered the rest of Shadow Fen, and at the base of each, was a giant web of stocky roots, each thicker than a dragon's tail.\n\n\"This is it!\" Boltock expressed eagerly, bounding across an old cobble bridge that spanned the river.\n\nBoth Risha and I looked at each other in confusion.\n\n\"This is what?\" she asked.\n\n\"The Gallery of Thorns, you know, where legends say the curse of thorns was placed upon Shadow Fen?\" Boltock answered, as if such a thing was written on every scroll.\n\n\"Come on, you're standing right next to a legend, surely you've heard of this!\" he exclaimed, pointing at me.\n\nHe was about the only dragon that could joke about such things without sending me into a spiral of regret and anxiety. Even so, Risha seemed to disapprove of his blunt accusations, but my lack of disapproval forced her look to soften.\n\n\"He's right, you know, I thought you leatherwings were supposed to love all of that history stuff,\" Neera chipped in.\n\nWe all glanced up to see the faldron standing on a ledge above, a witty smile covering her muzzle. A moment later, she stood tall, sniffing the air.\n\n\"Still, I'd be just as wary of what might be in those trees as I am those of Shadow Fen,\" she warned, leaping down to the road and following Soaren, Tarwin and the others.\n\nBoltock beamed at the confirmation of his knowledge before following after her, while his sister and I shared another glance.\n\nWhat does she mean? What's in there that could be worse than anything else?\n\nBats and a whole manner of other dark creatures flitted amongst the towering bark monoliths, and I could feel my scales crawl at the sight of fungus lingering between the great roots. Rocks and other tough looking shrubbery broke up their mass, and only small patches of snow were able to work their way down through the bristling canopy. The winding path would have been invisible if not for Neera's guidance. Both she and the griffins were far better at peering through the dark, even if Soaren didn't admit it.\n\nAs we moved on, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something watching us. It was far more than the feeling I usually got when something stalked me from the shadows. In here, it felt like there was a great deal more than Mordrakk's illusion prowling the around. It was almost as if the whole forest had eyes, studying us like some kind of hungry predator awaiting the perfect time to strike.\n\nEventually, we reached an opening, where a great crevice tore deep into the hillside. One of the huge trees had fallen across the gap, its hollow insides providing a bridge up to some open ground on the opposing cliff top.\n\n\"We should stop \u2013 the wounded need time to rest and we need to find some food,\" Meadow Hide suggested, motioning to her back and two other equally-encumbered griffins.\n\nSoaren's frustration was clear, but thankfully, he avoided an argument.\n\nHe cares more about their lives than he lets on. I noted as I came to a stop beside him.\n\n\"Make a fire against the cliff face, and send someone out to hunt. Be swift, the trees will not hide our presence for long,\" he advised, motioning over to the rock face.\n\nTarwin and the other humans rode up on the opposite bank, before dismounting, tying their steeds to nearby trees and walking across the gorge. Neera lit the flame, while everyone else unloaded various cargo.\n\n\"Good, now see to them as best you can,\" Meadow Hide instructed, the language barrier making any form of efficient treatment difficult.\n\nSeeing them struggle, I moved over to where the majority of the humans were being treated, motioning for Apollo to assist in communication.\n\n\"I swear, if one of them calls me bird again\u2026\" Ice Feather snorted, looking at me in particular.\n\n\"Well, I don't know. They're kind of growing on me; better than orkin, that is for sure,\" Meadow Hide responded as she struggled to apply green dressing to a human's leg.\n\nI recognised the paste as something similar to the stuff Neera had used to help me, and sure enough, the faldron was already offering more to the other healers.\n\n\"They're about as interesting as my tail feathers,\" Ice Feather grumbled, flicking her notably featherless tail.\n\n\"Funny, I bet I could think of a few griffins who would find those pretty interesting,\" Meadow cooed, and Ice Feather uttered a shrill eep as her eyes went wide.\n\n\"Stay quiet, the pair of you,\" Soaren hissed, before turning back to a hushed conversation with Talvana and the other dragons.\n\nTaking a page from the wing leader's book, I left them to their awkward grumblings, finding my way to Tarwin. She was looking over Yorik's unconscious body as he trembled in his restless sleep.\n\n\"You should see if you can find anything in the woods that will slow the poison,\" Risha suggested, appearing at my side.\n\n\"Do you know about anything that could help?\" I asked.\n\nShe considered her response while Tarwin inspected the blackened wound spreading across her friend's slowly decaying leg.\n\n\"You could find some narcotics to keep him unconscious and dull the pain. Like I said, I've never seen poison like this before,\" she admitted, and my hope faded as she continued to mumble to herself. \"Gar leaves... or maybe Moon Crescent, that will be one of the only flowers in bloom this season.\"\n\n\"No, you should try to find Star Bloom. They're usually quite rare, but if there is one thing Shadow Fen's renowned for, it's magical plants,\" Neera interrupted as she finished her round of assistance.\n\nWe both looked at her curiously as she elaborated further.\n\n\"It's a big, glowing white flower. It should give him at least another day or two.\"\n\nTranslating her words for Tarwin was simple enough, even with the weird way in which Neera moved her paws to indicate the flower's dimensions.\n\n\"Well, what are we waiting for? We don't want to be out there too long,\" Tarwin responded, drawing her bow as she stood and looked out into the forest.\n\n\"I'm never one to say no to a good scavenger hunt.\" Neera perked up eagerly.\n\n\"Can you watch him? You know more about this stuff than any of us,\" I asked Risha, nodding to Yorik.\n\nDespite recent revelations, he was still one of the last people I'd want to leave her with. But she was the only one who knew anything about healing practices. She glanced between the others and I before nodding her acknowledgement.\n\n\"I'm coming too,\" Boltock called out, \"I'm not staying here with grumpy feathers, sour-scales or those frightened, well...\" he waved a paw at the humans.\n\nIt wasn't hard to understand why he didn't put a name to them; he wasn't as set on seeing the good in people as his sister. Nevertheless, his emotion, coupled with his exertions, was evidently enough for Tarwin to discern what he was saying about her people.\n\n\"Can't we just all be friends?\" she proposed.\n\n\"You should go and take care of them, we'll find those herbs,\" I told her, and despite her clear objection, I could see a new sense of responsibility wash over her.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she advised, jabbing the end of her bow into my shoulder.\n\n\"Funny, before yesterday I thought you were the one who needed to be careful,\" I laughed, and she lightly batted my wing with the weapon.\n\n\"Yeah, maybe I was until you decided to creep into that cursed fortress,\" she berated.\n\n\"Oh, and if you need to talk to the others, just ask Apollo, tell him I sent you and he'll do anything you ask,\" I added, glancing at the baffled construct before moving off into the forest with Boltock and Neera close behind."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Paragon",
                "text": "My previous observations of the trees' scale were put to shame as we moved through the mass of damp vegetation covering the frosty ground between them. The living palace looming over us was almost greater than the golden temples I'd seen in my dreams.\n\nSome of these trunks are large enough to hold an entire house! I thought, as we traversed tunnels bore into the roots.\n\nA calm wind blew across the vast sprawl of ferns and small saplings, its movement enough to disturb the small snowdrifts. Through the softly shifting landscape, I could see other things moving, as if there were a hundred eyes lingering just beyond my sight. The idea that the forest was alive became even more disturbing as we passed several trees that, with a small amount of imagination, could easily be mistaken for people, or even dragons.\n\nIt's like there's things petrified in the wood? I observed, seeing frozen figures the size of orkin with blade-like limbs. Let's just find what we need quickly and get out of here.\n\nAhead, the others cautiously scoured a cluster of mossy boulders for any sign of the glowing flower Neera had described. All we discovered were scattered blue blooms as we passed under an overgrown arch into a shattered graveyard of pale stone pillars.\n\nThe crumbling structures looked as if they'd been pulverised to ruins by some great beast, before the forest had slowly reclaimed them. Within the overgrown mass, most things were no more than single stones, scattered architecture resembling the ruins I'd seen around Valcador.\n\nNo, this is much older, highkin ruins were never so sharp, their architecture is smoother and more rounded. I observed, the stones exuding a mysterious aura.\n\n\"So why is it they call this place the Gallery of Thorns?\" I asked, glancing between Neera and Boltock.\n\n\"I told you, it was here the ancestors apparently fought a great monster, and it placed something called the Curse of Thorns upon Shadow Fen before it fell. It's one of the oldest bedtime stories there is,\" Boltock replied, as if I should know.\n\n\"They should have called it the Graveyard of Thorns,\" Neera added, peering down at one of the toppled pillars. \"I just hope a story's all it is,\" she added, quickly leaping over winding tree roots.\n\n\"Well, a lot of stories have been coming true lately, so I don't know,\" Boltock corrected, and I felt my mind wander.\n\nSurely not all legends are true? It's like the tale about Overlord's fell, a little too ridiculous.\n\n\"My point exactly, Bolty,\" Neera called back.\n\n\"That's not my name,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"I know, but it's sweet and so much easier to say,\" she teased, jumping over the far side of one of the giant roots.\n\n\"Sweet... I...\" he stammered; face almost as red as Talvana's.\n\n\"You can't expect every dragoness to be like Ember,\" I advised with a small chuckle.\n\nOh yes, because I'm the best dragon to offer relationship advice. My mind chastised.\n\n\"But... she's not even a dragon, and she flirts with...\" he frantically waved a wing in Neera's direction, before frowning. \"Did my sister put you two up to this?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't even know if she had,\" I told him honestly.\n\nHe at least seemed to believe that part, before I added.\n\n\"Besides, she's just messing with you. She was the first dragoness I saw after coming back from the dead \u2013 and she still jokes about it.\"\n\nEven so I did my best not to recall Mordrakk's dark image had also been there to taunt me, as Boltock seemed to lighten up.\n\n\"So you really did die?\" he asked, his voice lowered as if we were surrounded by a crowd of onlookers.\n\nOh, by the fires, I should never have brought it up again! I almost choked at the blunt question.\n\n\"I mean, if you don't want to talk about it\u2026\" he added, as I stumbled.\n\n\"No, no, it's fine,\" I assured, steadying myself. \"I mean, death wasn't fine, but knowing that I had to help you guys kept me going. Only\u2026\"\n\nI paused. The words swam calmly in my mind and yet refused to formulate into something that made sense. Outwardly, I fluttered my wings restlessly, pressing a forepaw to my partly-covered scars.\n\nOnly what? What else did I really come back for? Because Mordrakk wanted me to?\n\n\"Just don't let things like that rule your life. The world is a lot bigger than you think, trust me. And I know I have no right to talk about you and Ember, but...\" I stopped as the reality of that confession came to mind.\n\nI wanted to tell them about Pyro, about Mordrakk and everything else, but I couldn't do it. All the while a dark hiss echoed through my mind as Mordrakk slithered amidst my thoughts.\n\n\"No, you're\u2026 You're probably right. Risha tells me the same thing, and I want to move on. It's just, Pyro died because of me and my stupid mouth,\" he admitted, lightly pawing at the frosty ground.\n\nNo, it wasn't because of you, it was my reckless decisions. The weight of a million accusing voices flooded over my mind. I made those mistakes, he just tried to stand up for me.\n\n\"That wasn't your fault. If anything, it was mine. I was the one who left to save that village, and I'm the only reason Risha told you any of that stuff in the first place,\" I confessed, the weight of shame hanging like millstones tethered to my wings.\n\nNevertheless, Boltock looked at me as if he didn't quite understand.\n\n\"But she was right, you are special. You killed the Dark Guardian, fought those demons. You even died and you're still here!\" he exclaimed, spreading his wings.\n\n\"I don't think she was ever wrong about any of us, including you,\" I admitted. \"You didn't kill Pyro, and Ember didn't lose...\"\n\n\"Hey, forgive me if I'm interrupting anything!\" Neera called impatiently, peering back at us from over a cluster of roots. \"I found some herbs, not exactly a Star Flower or on your sister's list, but I know them, they should help.\" She fell back out of sight, her tail feathers flicking over the rim of the root as she added. \"Come on, I don't want to lose either of you out here!\"\n\n\"Let's go, before she gets her feathers in a bind,\" Boltock chuckled, swiftly taking off after her.\n\nI moved to follow, but before I took a step, something else caught my eye. There was a fiery glimmer in the gloom around me, and I looked up to see the phoenix flying low between the trees, its ruby eyes fixed on a large ridge of snowy rock to my right. With a light call, it came to land on the crippled root of a fallen tree, and I glanced between it, and the path ahead.\n\nThere has to be some kind of reason to all of this. Is there something it wants to show me?\n\nI was reluctant to leave the others, but whether any of them liked it or not, and regardless of what Risha told me, I was still always in far less danger than they were. There were still things I needed to know.\n\n\"What do you want?\" I asked, trying not to feel too stupid about speaking to the molten bird again.\n\nIt simply preened its glowing feathers, as if it had somehow read my mind and found insult.\n\n\"So you didn't want me?\" I added, shaking my head with a snort.\n\nUrgh, couldn't the Cartographer at least send me a guide who can talk?\n\nThe bird glanced back to me, then up through the trees, my eyes following until I was looking at the base of the ridge. Not only that, but the mouth of an overgrown cave. I glanced back at the bird, yet it found more interest in the cleanliness of its feathers than my perplexed expression.\n\nFine, I guess I'll just take a look on my own.\n\nI crept forward cautiously, wet mud and snow squelching under my paws as I reached the ivy-strewn entrance. Smaller ridges stretched out around the curved rim of the rocky formation. Similar to the roots of the large trees, it was almost as if the whole thing were some great stump, the tree itself ripped away long previously. If that were the case, then this tree would have dwarfed even the monoliths that stood around it.\n\nMeanwhile, the phoenix fluttered away with a soft coo, disappearing into the mist, as I parted the vegetation and peered inside. As I did so, I breathed a small pyre of flame; the light revealing the cave was far bigger than most I'd seen in the past few days. A narrow, moss-covered path snaked down from the entrance, the sound of water and a cool breeze echoing from deeper within. Cautiously I traversed each step, disturbing the soft surface and forcing it to reveal its true nature.\n\nIt's glowmoss, like in Dardien?\n\nI extinguished my fire as the moss's natural blue glow flickered into life. Like the steamy caverns under the city, it looked more natural and less well kept, hanging down from the ceiling in rough clumps, while tiny blue flowers bloomed like stars. As I reached the base of the pathway, I came across a small pool, its calm, lily-covered surface shimmering in the blue glow, surrounded by a pile of fallen bricks.\n\nThe ruined architecture was strangely familiar, and yet it wasn't identical to anything I'd seen previously. Strange, twisted branches of silver leaves grew from it, each glinting with light, as if covered in a swarm of fireflies. More of the plants here appeared almost humanoid, and just as before, I could almost identify faces in the gnarled bark. In fact, each of the branches bore a noble, even stoic, but motionless expression, the only movement coming from their leaves waving in the light breeze.\n\nThe sound of the phoenix caught my attention, its call echoing from deep inside the cave. Following, I found more glowing moss lined the walls, while dripping vines hung from the smooth ceiling. I had a feeling the flora wasn't what the Cartographer's emissary wanted me to see, nor was the small stream flowing gently over the rocks beside me. At least until the passageway came to an abrupt end.\n\nBy the creators... I was used to grand spaces, and yet they still had a way of astounding me.\n\nI came out onto a ledge, moist ferns and shrubs marking its rim as a large opening loomed above me, a hole in its roof crossed by fallen logs and the roots of more giant trees.\n\nA pair of waterfalls fell from between the natural mass, as did small flurries of snow. The stream beside me disappeared into the abyss below, collecting in another pool at the bottom of the cavern. The round chamber walls held a small town's worth of ancient ruins. Grasses and small trees sprawling all over them.\n\nIt wasn't as grand as some places I'd seen, and yet its glowing tranquillity made up for its dilapidated state. In the air above the pool, the recognisable shimmer of the phoenix's feathers gleamed as it circled and came to perch on top of a ruined wall.\n\nSo this is what it wants me to see?\n\nI followed a narrow ledge, until it met one of the flat plazas of cliffside ruins. Grand arches and spiral pillars encrusted with faded silver vines flanked me. Old carvings depicted noble beings, similar to the highkin I'd seen in Valcador's forgotten temples. It went on to include griffins and other races until finally it depicted dragons.\n\nThe armoured figures descended upon legions of demonic beasts, guided by shafts of sunlight bursting through broken clouds. An intense, fiery flame represented one angelic dragoness in particular, as if she were the brilliant light of the sun itself.\n\nIs that the dragoness Apollo talks about? I wondered, my fear of cryptic murals long since forgotten.\n\n\"The world is far bigger than you know,\" Mordrakk announced from behind me, and I glanced back to see his shadowy image perusing the ruined carvings.\n\n\"Don't waste your breath, you know I'm one of the only ones here who understands that,\" I snapped, but he didn't even spare me a glance.\n\n\"You think the Darkness to be the only thing to threaten my creation?\" he pondered, brushing a foreclaw over the image of four gargantuan monsters sitting in the shadow of an even greater demonic creature.\n\n\"You're the only threat I care about,\" I retorted with equal disdain.\n\n\"Every force that dared threaten me was broken, all the while proving that mortal kind couldn't be trusted with its own morals and rules,\" he spat bitterly.\n\n\"And you think destroying whole worlds is the way to make things right?\" I questioned.\n\n\"It does not differ from what you do. Do not deny you would do anything to protect your own \u2013 even destroy what you believe to be flawed. Do not pretend you did not do what you thought was best for them, regardless of how they felt. In that regard, we differ not,\" he challenged.\n\n\"Leaving them wasn't the same as what you did!\" I growled, releasing a small flicker of flame from my muzzle.\n\nHe simply grinned and faded from sight; meanwhile, I tried my best not to let his words fester.\n\nHe's wrong, killing orkin for the good of others is not the same as his genocides!\n\nI moved on to discover the crooked length of a toppled pillar provided a bridge to the bottom of the cavern, and the moment my paws hit the soft grass, I looked up through the mass of roots above, barely able to see stars. From its perch, the phoenix gave a light coo, drawing me over.\n\n\"So what do you want?\" I asked again, that nagging sense of stupidity still in the back of my mind.\n\nIt gave me another serious look, and frustration finally drove my attention away. A tranquil pool lay just beside me, its rim surrounded by an overgrown ring of archways. Plants rustled as if sensing my approach, while tiny fireflies came to life about me, highlighting four more of the strange-looking tree figures standing in the water.\n\nLike the others, it felt as if each one watched me, judging my every movement. A trail of stepping-stones led to a small island at the pool's centre, where more of the glowing insects buzzed about a large willow tree, its weeping branches devoid of greenery.\n\nI placed a cautious paw on the first of the stones, glancing back at the trees as if somehow, they could come to life at any moment.\n\nThat's ridiculous too. Trees are just trees. I reasoned, only for my mind to counter. Yeah, and so was fungus days ago, this is still Shadow Fen remember?\n\nGrass bit at my armour as I reached the island, and I fought to stay balanced in the small space surrounding the willow's base. Now I was up close, I could see it was clearly dead, and yet there was no sign of rot or decay. In fact, it seemed to resonate with warmth, similar to a warm breeze. Mosses and vines crawled over the surface of its silver bark, which appeared to be hollow beneath.\n\nI walked around its sides before finally pressing a paw to the trunk and brushing the clinging vegetation aside. An eerie wind blew as I did so, and I swore I heard some of the trees whisper. The silvery bark crumbled into dust under my weight, and I pulled my forepaw back sharply as I felt I'd done a terrible wrong. Worried, I glanced at the phoenix as if it would somehow tell me why, but it did little more than preen its feathers.\n\nSo much for helping me. It's just a tree, Blaze, calm down.\n\nConvincing myself it was no more than that, I moved round to the far side, where I noticed that the bark seemed to flow about a flat surface carved into the trunk.\n\nUpon closer inspection, I saw a set of strange runes and an ancient language written into its surface. All completely untouched by the passing of time and the surrounding vegetation. The symbols radiated with more lustre than anything else, and one particularly large symbol in its centre glowed a soft green.\n\nFunny, it almost looks like some kind of stag? The glow was not an ugly hue, it was similar to the colour of sunlight streaming down through lush leaves on a warm summer day.\n\nIt was almost alluring, drawing me in as my paws pressed at the soft grass below it. The sudden flutter of wings drew my attention away when the phoenix landed on an arch to my right, ruby eyes locked on the cervidae icon. It nodded its head, as if motioning for me to reach out.\n\nIt's just a tree. I told myself again.\n\nI glanced around for a distraction, but only found Mordrakk's shadowy form perched on the opposite arch.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked the fiend, and he looked between the tree and I.\n\n\"Old. A magic as old as the world itself,\" he told me, a blatant lack of care in his voice.\n\nHe didn't appear eager to add anything more as he surveyed the area for himself. It was possibly the first time I'd seen him interested in anything other than tearing me apart, and yet I was unsure whether that softened my fears or enhanced them.\n\nWhat's the worst that can happen? I thought to myself. It's only a tree, and I'm immortal.\n\nI reached out, placing a forepaw over the glowing stag. Suddenly finding myself unable to pull it back as a wave of exhaustion fell over me and I immediately felt weightless. The world became a blur as I felt myself fall to the ground, and a swirling mass of green light tore into my thoughts. All that lay beyond was a cold darkness, into which my consciousness swiftly disappeared."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "My head throbbed and my vision spun, when from nowhere, the world suddenly slammed into me. It reminded me of passing through Apollo's gateway, and like my dreams, this reality felt lucid. A gentle breeze blew against my scales, beckoning me to open my eyes, yet for a moment, I feared what I might see, suspecting that this was somehow another nightmare from aeons previous. As much as I cowered behind the obliviousness of my closed eyes, I knew I couldn't hide forever.\n\nThey flickered open, and I found myself staring into the dirt pressed against my muzzle. Lifting my head, a towering forest of grass surrounded me, and I sat up to see an endless sea of green. A light breeze drew shimmering patterns over the rolling hills, while leaves rustled amongst the rough patches of forest that dotted the plains. Mountains broke the distant horizon, and the rough silhouette of a city graced its opposing edge. Towering silver spires and domed temples, covered in tranquil greenery, basked in the blissful sunlight.\n\nThe sound of water, the call of birds, and the buzzing of insects filled the air. Several plumes of dust rose as flocks of giant earth-birds ran freely across the open expanse, and I immediately recognised where I was.\n\nIt's the Midnight Plains, I'm near Dardien. I felt dry soil shift between my claws and strands of grass tickle my bare under scales. This is a dream \u2013 it must be a dream \u2013 but I didn't fall asleep?\n\nFor a brief moment, I didn't mind being here, at least until a large wing of golden-armoured dragons flew overhead, their breastplates gleaming in the sunlight as they descended into the distant city. Moments later, the sound of a deep, low hum bellowed and a great wall of golden light rose up around the city, rising like flames until it merged to form one great dome of magical energy.\n\nThe moment it sealed, I felt like the most isolated soul in the world. Even the earth seemed to take an anxious breath as I felt a shiver run down my spine. The sky seemed to ripple with one great wave as ominous clouds began to gather. The growing darkness sent a jab of terror into my heart, and instinct drove me to find shelter as fast as I could, darting through the tall grass to take cover under a large boulder. A dull rumble echoed through the gathering storm, and lightning began to flicker. The birds fell silent, and even chirping insects fled.\n\nEvery facet of my mind that had sustained me in the frozen wilderness for so long was screaming at me to run with them, but another part of me couldn't help but fear it was futile.\n\nThen the sky erupted with an almighty boom, and a blinding bolt of lightning struck across the horizon. I closed my eyes and wrapped my wings over my head as a great shockwave blasted past, sweeping me from my paws. A surge of dust, rock and vegetation battered me as the blast ripped up the ground in an intense deluge of raw power.\n\nWhen my eyes opened, the world was gone. The grassy plains were nothing more than a barren expanse of lifeless ash, dotted with all kinds of bones. Scattered rocks were reduced to molten slag, trees to charred twigs, and the sky was cold and empty, filled with a sea of unforgiving stars. The mountains had crumbled, their bare peaks spewing red-hot fire, while opposite, the burning city cast a red glow all about me.\n\nMy eyes widened in horror when a great pillar of purple light reached up from the shattered earth to form a swirling storm of clouds. Shards of rock levitated about it, suspended in the burning air by some supernatural force, while dark swarms of winged beasts sprawled around it like bees protecting a hive.\n\nI gasped, but the hot air felt like it was choking me. It was dry, tasting of rot and decay and smelled no better. Meanwhile, fire began to spread, and from its flickering wrath, I could hear a cacophony of terrified screams.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is this foul place?\n\nI lurched back, something shifting in the ash under my paws. All the while, I staggered to stop myself from tripping, and when I looked down, I saw a blackened silver dragon helmet. Within was a flesh-stripped skull, the likes of which rolled out onto the scorched dirt to reveal a few blue scales. I fell back, but all that caught me was another pile of bones.\n\nI saw a flash of green and red scales. A set of crimson feathers drifted by in the scorched wind. I glimpsed a familiar wooden bow lying beside a shattered axe.\n\nNo! No, it can't be! I gasped in shock and the air itself seemed to vanish. This can't be it, there has to be a way to stop it!\n\nMy head spun frantically, until I caught sight of something that stopped my frantic attempts to escape. A pair of levitating stones struck an invisible wall, sending sparks and embers blossoming across its surface. I froze as the flames spread to reveal millions upon millions of tallies.\n\nI can't be responsible for this! Yet if not me, then who? I fell to the ground in a cloud of ash, curling up tightly as I did in the end of every soul-breaking nightmare.\n\n\"Maybe now you will understand. You cannot escape your destiny,\" rumbled the dark voice I knew all too well.\n\nEven as he growled the words, he seemed to slip away into silence, however. As did the harrowing sounds and the burning sensation of the world around me. The air returned, and I gasped for breath like a beached fish as a calming light shimmered beyond my closed eyes. It took me a few moments to work up the courage to peek, but when my eyes finally opened, I caught a glimpse of another familiar scene.\n\nThe world of ice, rocks and towering crystal pillars wasn't exactly my favourite, but it was far better than the apocalypse I'd just witnessed. The only differences were the light of the distant stars and the red glow emanating from the fireball steadily rising above the horizon. That was when my gaze settled upon the mysterious dragoness sat on the ruined outcrop, where many of my previous dreams had ended abruptly.\n\nOnly now she didn't stare out over the fiery horizon; she looked right at me with a set of magnificent golden eyes.\n\n\"I know what you just saw,\" her regal voice echoed, far more majestic than this frozen reality.\n\nNone of my dreams ever go like this. I've been here a hundred times and never has someone other than Mordrakk talked to me. Nevertheless, I shook off my shock and tentatively opened my muzzle.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I asked, hoping she could offer information Mordrakk would never give away.\n\nShe peered at me, as if my question hadn't quite been what she'd expected.\n\n\"This is an incarnation of your mind, a dreamscape drawn from aspects of your subconsciousness, all fused into one. Your mind contains the lost memories of far older, greater things,\" she explained, and the idea of just how much of my mind was hidden terrified me.\n\nIf Nakir and even Mordrakk are right, millions of drakaran and the Ethereals themselves endure in me.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I asked.\n\nThis time she regarded me as if that were a far more fitting question.\n\n\"I'm Seraphine Goldfire, first descendent of Teeana and Balthazar, pleased to make your acquaintance,\" she introduced herself with a graceful bow.\n\nHer pale-white scales shimmered like golden stars, as did her arcane armour as it shifted in a similar way to my own.\n\n\"I know that name is not new to you,\" she suggested, and I finally found my voice.\n\n\"Not new, just not very well understood,\" I clarified, and she nodded, smile fading.\n\n\"So you know of the legends?\" she asked, speaking more as if it were a matter of fact than a question.\n\nI shifted to keep my eyes focused on her face as she glanced back out over the flaming horizon.\n\n\"It has been a long time since I've seen the incarnation you have just witnessed,\" she admitted, glancing back sharply, causing me to jump.\n\nMy mind offered brief images of what I'd just seen. The destruction of the once tranquil reality was almost crippling. Yet she peered at me with a hint of curiosity as those thoughts burned through my head.\n\n\"Tell me, what do you think you saw?\" she instructed, and I reluctantly answered.\n\n\"I saw what's going to happen if I let Mordrakk win.\"\n\nShe considered that for a moment, slowly shaking her head.\n\n\"Maybe so, but one can never truly see the future, not even a god. Yes, you may manipulate and try to change it, but nothing is ever truly set,\" she elaborated.\n\n\"So that wasn't the future?\" I asked hopefully, and in the back of my mind, I could hear Mordrakk's intimidating growl.\n\nSeraphine shook her head once more before explaining.\n\n\"No, it was an image of what you fear will come to pass, coupled with the memories of past calamities that reside deep inside your mind,\" she explained, gesturing a forepaw about the barren wasteland.\n\nI felt words formulate in my closed muzzle, dance about my tongue and then die as a perplexing look crossed my face.\n\nWhat is she saying? Is my mind somehow connected to hers, as it is so many others? The idea made me squirm more than I'd like. No, that's impossible. Apollo said she disappeared long before the Darkness attacked the Golden City; she couldn't have been there when the Ethereals created me.\n\nMy confusion was all too evident, and she took a step toward me before continuing.\n\n\"The place in which you stand, the tree you made contact within the waking world \u2013 it is a portal to a magical network, established in an age long since forgotten, a network that contains a great deal of this world's past.\"\n\nHer words allowed a small part of my mind to fit some pieces together, and others soon followed as I began to realise what she was saying.\n\n\"So what I saw, that was your memory?\" I asked, and she nodded.\n\n\"One of mine fused with one of your own and influenced by countless others. If it had been pure, you would have seen it through my own eyes, just as I did, three millennia ago,\" she confirmed.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked, and a solemn look took hold of her expression.\n\n\"This world fell into ruin and tyranny because of my mistakes. It was besieged by an enemy in an ancient time. Now such things threaten to repeat themselves with a great evil born anew,\" she explained.\n\nI had a strange feeling about all the other evils that could lie out there among the stars, but for now, I had to focus on the ones I knew.\n\n\"I have waited far too long for this,\" she continued, looking back toward me.\n\nMy head perked up, and at that moment, I recalled exactly what had led me here \u2013 the Cartographer's bird!\n\n\"Waited too long for what?\" I responded immediately.\n\n\"To meet you myself,\" she replied promptly.\n\n\"Wait, since when have you wanted to meet me? I hadn't even heard of you three seasons ago,\" I answered with a tone of frustration.\n\nShe appeared a little shameful and apologetic.\n\n\"Ever since you first arrived in the city, I have known of you. The Elders, my heralds, made it quite clear who they thought you were,\" she admitted, and the final pieces of my mind's puzzle fell into place.\n\nShe's the one with whom the Elders have been in league with all this time! I'd thought they'd their own plans or had somehow been reporting to Nakir, but not this.\n\n\"That doesn't make any sense; why not just speak to me like the Ethereals did?\" I asked, but she shook her head.\n\n\"Even in their disembodied state, their power exceeds my own, though their supremacy has faded too much for them to aid you,\" she explained.\n\n\"I wouldn't call it 'aid',\" I grumbled, and it didn't look like she disagreed. \"That still doesn't explain what's been going on all this time, though.\"\n\n\"There is a power within Dardien of which very few know. Not even the current ruler is aware of its existence, as each of his predecessors were,\" she advised, and an image of Aries flashed through my mind as I asked.\n\n\"What power?\"\n\n\"One that can save the world as it did long ago, but you must go back and claim your destiny if it is to be so,\" she continued.\n\n\"And what destiny is that? So far, one is to save the world and the other is to destroy it,\" I grumbled.\n\n\"Neither is for me to say, and yet I think you know what it is you must go back for,\" she answered, and another wave of realisation blossomed within my mind:\n\nThe amulet.\n\n\"You know he will destroy everything if he gets it back, right?\" I stated simply.\n\n\"Only if you allow it,\" she advised, but that wasn't nearly enough to sway me.\n\n\"No, all of this stupid sentiment isn't going to stop him. What am I supposed to do?\" I demanded.\n\n\"You must trust that there is a way, even if you do not yet see it,\" she answered.\n\n\"That's not enough, there has to be something more. If you have been here for all this time and said nothing, you must know there is a way,\" I proposed, and she finally sighed.\n\n\"You know how much the truth can hurt,\" she reminded me, and at that, I knew she was withholding something.\n\n\"What is it?\" I demanded, tired of the never-ending guessing games.\n\n\"Upon the twilight of ages, you must come to me, Guardian. That will be the time for truth. Until then, do not stray away from the path you know is right.\"\n\n\"No, tell me what's really going on!\" I pressed, but even as I did so, the world began to fall apart and her image faded until darkness took hold and I was drawn back into consciousness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "My senses flashed back to me as a cold wetness flared across my face. The water stung my eyes as they shot open and my paws flailed wildly. Coughing, I looked up to see the blurred silhouette of a brown and green figure standing over me and I instinctively lashed out. The blurred form darted back with a slight laugh.\n\n\"So the Guardian still lives?\" a wild, old voice cackled as I finally finished spluttering and rolled onto my front.\n\n\"You!\" I hissed spitefully as I saw the Cartographer, one of his personalities lost in a fit of laughter.\n\n\"What in the creators' name have you been doing?\" I demanded angrily.\n\nHis laughter finally stopped, and wiping a teary eye with a wing, he suddenly lashed out at me with his staff. I ducked instinctively as it whooshed over my head, but missed his sweeping tail, which swiped my legs out from under me.\n\n\"Don't break the sanctity of such a place with your angered words!\" he scolded, as if I were some disobedient hatchling.\n\n\"Then again, it is good to see your reflexes are unhindered,\" his more reasonable tone added as I picked myself up.\n\n\"What in the creators' name are you going on about?\" I asked, prepared for another surprise assault.\n\nHe smirked, before jabbing at me with his staff. Only for me to swipe it aside.\n\nHe's totally bonkers! I inwardly moaned as he persisted jabbing, until I gave up.\n\n\"You! We are talking about you! What you just did was no idle endeavour! Connecting to such a vast magical entity would kill most mortals!\" he explained, pointing to the tree.\n\nI looked back to see it was still dead, while his phoenix sat nonchalantly on one of its branches.\n\n\"I can't be killed,\" I told him abruptly, but he gave me a questioning look before moving on toward the willow.\n\n\"This is an ancient earth shrine of the great Kashiyan Paragon, a deep magic that runs through the whole world. Many say it is older than dragonkind itself and contains the collective memories of their legacy,\" he explained, regarding the tree as if it were made of blissful gold.\n\n\"You wanted me to see that, she wanted me to see,\" I told him, knowing he knew what I was talking about.\n\n\"Of course, the mistress of Gold Flame has long awaited the time you'd be ready. We meant for it to be sooner, but Aries and your disappearance made that somewhat difficult,\" he scolded, sending another stab of guilt through me.\n\nNot that I care much for ruining his or the Elders' plan after all the trouble they've caused me.\n\n\"So, what is this grand plan of yours?\" I asked, fighting the urge to demand he tell me everything.\n\nHe stopped at the edge of the pool, moving his staff toward the phoenix and ushering the bird onto its tip with a wave of his wing.\n\n\"So, the great mistress told you there is hope?\" he asked, looking down at the water.\n\n\"She mentioned a plan, not hope, something about a power hidden in the city, something that can stop the Darkness,\" I answered, moving up beside him. \"Although I'd have been better off knowing this before you sent me to Taldran. Why not just use it to remove Aries and defeat the orkin before any of this?\"\n\n\"If only things were so simple,\" he admitted, looking at me as if I should just accept it. \"We assume you were told of what you saw?\" he asked, and I explained all that Seraphine had said to me.\n\n\"That was the eve of the Age of Tyranny, right before Lady Seraphine turned herself and her drakaran legion into the first mortal dragons in an attempt to save this world from the wrath of the Infernal Blade,\" he explained with the utmost respect, much to Mordrakk's disdain.\n\n\"An age of darkness followed, the world and its inhabitants served under the cruel reign of demonic overlords\u2026\" His voice trailed off as he looked mournfully at the tree.\n\nSo this isn't the first time darkness has won out over this world? Oh, doesn't that fill me with confidence!? My thoughts deadpanned.\n\n\"Such an age was many millennia ago,\" he added. \"Long before even our time. It ended when the rest of the star dragons finally found their mortal descendants and liberated their legacy. After that, they carefully took steps to ensure that this world would never be threatened again by such a great evil.\"\n\n\"Evidently, that didn't work,\" I replied curtly, expecting him to be insulted, and yet he looked ashamed.\n\n\"It wasn't long after that day, that the Great Master fell to the Outsider; not even the ancestors could have foreseen the treachery of their greatest lord,\" he declared, his words cold and empty.\n\n\"Why me? Why did she want me?\" I asked, trying to change the subject.\n\n\"Because you need to understand that in the face of utter destruction, the hardest decisions must be made; you must know that, as only she did.\"\n\nI paused for a moment, before a new wave of realisation hit me.\n\n\"What do you expect me to do? Let the world burn like she did?\"\n\nHe shifted back at my words, far from the proud old dragon that had scolded me for shouting only moments ago.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of him,\" I continued. \"The only way I know I can stop him for sure, without killing everyone else, is staying away. I proved that, and... I... I should never have come back.\" The confession slashed at my conscience like a knife, and I backed away from him.\n\n\"This is what you were after all along, you and the Elders. You just wanted another star dragon to make all the decisions you were too afraid to make! Or should I say Goldfire was too afraid to make again!\" I accused him angrily. \"I'm not going to be her instrument any more than I am the creators' or Mordrakk's, and I will not be responsible for anything like she showed me!\" I finished, turning away from him toward the exit.\n\n\"Many heroes have come before you with the same fear,\" he muttered, and I paused. \"We have seen a great many like you, watched them grow old and die. All had to decide between what was right and what was necessary,\" he added.\n\n\"I'm not a hero,\" I replied forcefully while Mordrakk formed in front of me, his shadowy form blocking the pathway.\n\n\"Just leave me alone,\" I growled.\n\nHe didn't say a word but simply looked up into the dull moonlight. Confusion gripped me for a moment until my eyes followed his. Through the mass of tangled roots and icicles, snow shifted and fell while the dull thud of wing beats disturbed the leaves as I saw them in the gloom.\n\nManticores!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Battle of Shadow's Gate",
                "text": "I have to warn the others! That was the only thought racing through my mind as I glanced back to the pool, to see the old dragon had vanished, leaving only his bird to fly up and out of the cave.\n\nWhat! So much for being helpful!\n\nRight now I'd little care for him, and I bolted up the pathway as fast as my paws would carry me. I emerged into the cold night minutes later, to find it utterly silent. The previously eerie wind was still, but that unsettling feeling of a hundred looming eyes still lingered.\n\nNo, I know I saw something skulking around up here. I glanced about frantically, before determining which direction the others had taken.\n\nI ran, yet quickly became disorientated in the thick vegetation and chilling mist. A maze of snowy bushes and monstrous tree trunks soon surrounded me, and I cursed myself for wandering off.\n\nI should never have left, why did I follow that stupid bird!?\n\nA disturbance in the undergrowth behind me caught my attention, and I tensed, coiling back before something came rushing at me. I'd little time to react when, with a roar and beat of its tattered wings, the manticore revealed itself, immediately slamming me down and pressing me to the floor, coiling its barbed stinger, ready to strike.\n\nThe anger I'd directed at my own incompetence flared, and I kicked up, spreading my wings. The blades of my claws and the edges of the leathery membranes flashed to life as my talons struck the creature's underbelly, just as its stinger shot down, narrowly missing my neck. With a howl, it leapt back, and I spun, catching its forelimbs with my wing blades. The searing weapons crippled it in a flash, before I forced my tail blade up through its neck, slicing its throat and dislodging the very angry orkin rider.\n\nYanking my tail free as the mount staggered, I could do nothing to avoid the blunt end of the rider's hammer. My armour hardened against the impact, but I fell to the ground with a head-spinning thud as the rider swung again. That was when several small blades struck his neck, ending in a gargled breath as he toppled from the saddle.\n\n\"Blaze!\" Neera shouted.\n\nI focused on her voice and the blurred shape of her bounding over the corpses.\n\n\"Where in the name of the great egg did you go?\" she demanded.\n\n\"It doesn't matter, we need to get back and warn the others,\" I retorted.\n\n\"That's if those things don't get there first!\" Boltock interrupted as he appeared behind her.\n\nI opened my muzzle to respond, but another savage roar drew our attention to three more manticores bearing down on us. Two erupted from the snowy undergrowth, Boltock darting aside to avoid their claws. Neera spun to face them, while I jumped to my paws as one charged me. Coiling back, fire surged in my chest, but the beast's rider had different ideas, the stone-fused creature released a black arrow at me.\n\nI was immediately thankful for my helmet's protection as it pinged off, though it gave me little time to avoid his mount's sweeping claws. Yet again I found myself muzzle-first in the frosty mud, pinned down as its barbed tail loomed.\n\nI could see Neera and Boltock struggling to take down the second creature as the third prowled around the edge of the fray. Then another, sudden movement shifted in the mist. At first, it resembled some kind of long black serpent, and I thought it was Mordrakk or an ebon dragon. The orkin targeting me was completely oblivious until the mysterious entity gave a dry groan.\n\nWith one swift lunge, a spiked tree branch impaled the rider, piercing through his chest as another wrapped around him and tore him from his saddle. Stunned for a second, I was reminded that I still had a very angry animal to deal with, when the manticore's stinger came down toward me, lodging in the ground as I rolled.\n\nWhat in the creators' name is going on, are the trees really alive?\n\nAt that thought, the undergrowth erupted and several tree-like figures jumped out from the mist, landing on the manticore's back. Their cries sounded like a hundred birds and insects had all combined into one terrifying cacophony as the manticore roared and thrashed. I seized the chance and darted around the floundering beast, as its new attackers sank sets of bark-encrusted claws deep into its putrid hide. Another pair of the strange tree creatures assaulted the second manticore, writhing roots dragging its rider into the undergrowth.\n\nOkay, now I've a good idea what the Cartographer meant when he told me to respect this place. I thought, terrified that my friends and I would be next as more roots sprang from the earth.\n\nHowever, as I looked about for any sign of attack, the mist began to clear, allowing the moonlight to reveal a path.\n\n\"Hey, over here!\" I called, and my companions retreated to my side.\n\n\"You know I'm starting to regret some of the things I said about this place!\" Neera declared, as more of the tree creatures dragged orkin and manticore bodies away.\n\n\"Mandrakes, retreat to the sky!\" one of our attackers cried, before a branch wrapped around his head and threw him to the ground.\n\nDespite his warning, many of those that had been stalking up in the canopy were too disorganised to counter the forest's ambush. Like a swarm of bees emerging from a hive, the beings identified as mandrakes, scurried down tree trunks, leaping onto the winged beasts with alarming agility.\n\nA leafy green glow flickered from within each of their twisting cavities, while swarms of similar-coloured insects buzzed within them. Their numerous limbs were like serrated daggers, and their backs sprouted a bustling thicket of sharp tendrils. Others bore thorns and barbs, while some appeared to be nothing more than deadly whirlwinds of serrated leaves.\n\nYeah well, just be thankful they only want to kill the orkin for now! I inwardly declared, as I glanced about.\n\n\"We need to get back, now!\" I called, looking at Neera.\n\n\"You don't say,\" she responded, glancing to the moonlit path. \"Come on, this way.\"\n\nMoving to follow, I was thankful to see that she had several plants strapped to her back.\n\nAt least some of us could do what we were supposed to do. I reassured myself.\n\nDespite the destruction we'd left behind, there was a shifting in the mist when another large manticore landed before us. Its wings were tattered and bloody, while its rider shook off severed branches that writhed like barbed snakes.\n\n\"Stupid plants aint's gonna stop me's,\" he growled as he charged at us.\n\n\"Come on, we can outrun it under there,\" Neera called, directing us toward a tangled set of roots.\n\nHow does she figure this all out so fast!? I wondered, yet I wasn't about to argue with someone who'd spent their entire life surviving in the wilderness.\n\nNeither did Boltock, as the two of us took off after the faldron. Ushering him into the thicket first I took one last look in the direction of the cave where the Cartographer had led me.\n\nSo much for a plan to save us all. I inwardly grumbled, before scurrying under the root cover. We'll all die out here at this rate!\n\nThe angry beast at my back struck the mass of tangled bark with a heavy thud, shaking free the frosty coat gathered on the tunnel's surface. It let out a vicious roar and took off, while I could see Boltock's tail ahead of me, as well as a fork in the tight passageway. The tip of my friend's tail vanished left, and I swiftly followed, squeezing through the tangled hole of barbs.\n\nI really hate these kinds of places. I have wings, I don't belong in here! I inwardly huffed, unable to shake the sensation that the vegetation could spring to life at any moment and crush us like bugs.\n\nThat was the least of my concerns when a part of the thicket exploded inwards and I found myself dodging a grasping claw. The orkin growled as we all slipped by, his manticore clawing through the roots like a bear after honey.\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right way?\" Boltock asked urgently.\n\n\"I'm pretty sure; at least it's better than being out there!\" Neera responded.\n\nThe sound of splintering wood and an angry growl cut short her words as the whole manticore smashed through into a larger area before us. She jumped back as the beast lashed out, forcing us all further back into the tunnel. I instinctively coiled back, but with my less than fireproof friend between our attacker and I, I swiftly rethought my actions.\n\nCreators curse this place, it's too tight!\n\nMeanwhile, the manticore reared up, snagging its tail in a mass of tangled thorns. In the same instant, the whole tunnel came alive, roots starting to coil around the beast like serpents. Seizing the moment, I forced everyone past the creature as it battled with the angry vegetation.\n\nNo more than a few moments later, another of the beasts smashed through the bark directly above me. The tight space made turning to face it difficult, and flames spat from my snout as I braced myself. Just as suddenly as it had struck, the monster vanished behind a wall of stone as the ground exploded upwards. It coiled back with a painful howl, falling against the wall where the ravenous undergrowth swiftly sprang to life, tossing the rider into reach of my tail blade.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I offered Boltock as I dispatched the disorientated orkin.\n\n\"Don't mention it,\" he responded proudly.\n\n\"Hey, that's all well and good, but less talk, more running, please,\" Neera called back.\n\nShe's right, we have to get back to the others before the orkin find them! Crawling through more of the tangled mass, we soon found ourselves on a ledge opposite the gorge and our camp.\n\n\"I told you this was the right way,\" Neera announced, immediately taking flight.\n\n\"Good, now go!\" I urged Boltock, who followed without hesitation.\n\nBeating my wings, I followed with the howls of our hunters in close pursuit. As Boltock reached the ground, I swivelled in the air to meet the first manticore head on. Surprising the beast with a swipe of my wings, I cut the rider from his saddle and sent him plummeting into the gorge. Unfortunately, the manticore wasn't so easy to deal with and swerved round to strike my side. Moments later, several more emerged from the trees, jumping forward as the horses tied at the other side of the bridge bolted.\n\nSo much for riding to the overlook. My conscience commented. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, right now, I've bigger problems.\n\nI couldn't focus on every attacker and for every one that the angry forest tore apart, another reached me. Fighting to stay airborne, I sent several blasts their way, flaming explosions scorching the wings of at least two and directly hitting another. I counted twelve before my mind settled for simply classifying it as a lot more than I could handle, and my instincts screamed.\n\nRun!\n\nAs the word radiated through my thoughts, I realised it was too late. I could hear fighting below me, and every part of my being wanted nothing more than to pick up everyone without wings and fly as far away from these monsters as I could.\n\nNo, think rationally. There's got to be something I can do! I thought as a manticore slammed into me, only to be struck down.\n\nAs I steadied myself, the sound of feathered wing beats heralded the arrival of two griffins, who immediately began clawing at the raiders with sharp talons and beaks. Torrents of fire followed the featherwings' assault as Talvana and the rest of her wing surged up into the fray.\n\n\"Steel yourself, Guardian,\" Apollo announced as he darted up next to me, wings beating furiously as lightning crackled around him.\n\nThe sight of more manticores to my left drew my attention away and I opened my muzzle to send a wall of fiery death their way. The flames turned several into fireballs that not even the forest dared consume as they fell. The rest swerved aside; wings singed as they fought to stay away from the grasping branches.\n\n\"Apollo?\" I called, and he hovered right up next to me.\n\n\"Do forgive me, Guardian, but may I say, it seems holding this area is irrelevant? The descendant has recommended we immediately make for the safety of our allies. Should I...?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, that plan sounds very good!\" I abruptly cut him off.\n\nI had to swerve to avoid another strike as the words left my muzzle, while finding his ability to hover in one place without attracting any attention very irritating.\n\n\"Splendid, I shall inform the others immediately,\" he chimed with a ruffle of his metallic feathers.\n\nI turned to follow him, only for another pair of manticores to block my path. I sliced the underside of one with my wing blades, while the second slammed into my back, sending me spiralling to the fallen log bridge. The whole thing gave a mighty shudder and I had to sink my claws in deep to avoid sliding off the curved edge. Flames drifted down as Talvana, Meadow Hide and Ice Feather, along with every other able-bodied dragon and griffin, battled above. Meanwhile, Soaren, Neera, Risha and her brother all held back any beast that got through as the injured hurried along a rocky passageway. Tarwin shot orkin from their saddles with extreme accuracy, while across the crevice, the forest continued to assault those that would dare break its sanctity.\n\nEveryone's fighting together... It's... The sound of Mordrakk's unimpressed growl filled me with hopeful pride.\n\nThat was until the log shook and three more manticores surrounded me. I jumped back as another tried to swipe at me from the air, but regaining my balance, and coiling back, I readied myself to burn them. Before I could exhale, the wood under me splintered and a stone claw dragged me down.\n\nI gained a brief glimpse of the orkin who'd yanked me into the hollow log, before firing and shattering the whole thing into pieces. The force of the explosion broke my attacker's grip and catapulted me back as the whole tube began to slip into the gorge. Fighting to steady myself, I bolted toward the others, digging my claws deep into the wood as it slipped out from under me before narrowly leaping out as it fell. I rolled to a stop on a bed of pine needles while the remaining manticores retreated into the night.\n\n\"By the skies, you idiot!\" a frustrated voice announced.\n\nDespite her anger, Risha grabbed my foreclaws in her own and helped heave me up.\n\n\"What were you thinking, taking them all on by yourself!?\"\n\n\"Better me than anyone who could actually suffer for it,\" I was swift to counter.\n\n\"And you don't suffer for it?\" she questioned, jabbing a wing at all the fresh cuts and bruises I'd sustained.\n\n\"They'll be gone in a few hours,\" I huffed, but she scowled.\n\n\"Well, at least you brought back something useful,\" she added, motioning to Neera and the herbs strapped to her back.\n\nWhy is she so stubborn, why can't she understand? I won't let any of them get hurt, not again!\n\nThe unmistakable sound of a horn echoed through the trees, and we all exchanged glances before Risha and I reluctantly set our argument aside.\n\n\"Come, they will not be so few in number next time. They'll no doubt come in force,\" Soaren proposed, raising his head as another horn sounded.\n\n\"You call that few in number?\" I caught Ice Feather grumbling under her breath.\n\n\"How far is it to the overlook?\" I asked, passing an uneasy eye over the forest, then the horseless humans.\n\n\"It's through Shadow's Gate. I'd hoped not to traverse it at night, yet it seems you brought back more than herbs,\" Soaren scolded.\n\nI reluctantly nodded, before he and the other more experience fighters flew over to their lead positions.\n\n\"You know, next time you think of bringing back an army, at least let me come with you,\" Tarwin joked as she appeared at my side.\n\nShe looked tired; in fact, so did everyone other than me.\n\nStill being unaffected by many of the world's rules is an advantage, no matter how much I hate it.\n\n\"Shame, I really liked that horse,\" she added, glancing across the gorge as several fires of various colours flickered in the gloom.\n\nI cast one look in the same direction and shuddered as I felt the eyes of the forest sink back into sinister lurking mode.\n\n\"I'm sure they'll be fine,\" I offered Tarwin, but for once she didn't look so sure.\n\n\"It's not the horses I'm worried about,\" she replied, taking in a deep breath before moving on up the pass.\n\nThey're all worried about me? I shook off the idea as I moved after them. They should know there's far more pressing things to worry about."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The steep path snaked along the edge of a sheer cliff face, while an equally towering rock wall loomed upward on the opposite side. Ruins similar to those I'd seen in the forest dotted the snowy terrain, some forming regal gateways and arches of stone over the ravine. The trees dwindled to almost nothing, but for all their size, the great wooden pillars were amazingly resilient. I still didn't quite know how I felt about the plant's ability to grow almost anywhere, and I made sure I kept an eye on the thick roots burrowing through the solid stone.\n\nI certainly don't want to meet the same fate as the orkin.\n\nNo one was flying, not even when the updrafts from several waterfalls would have made it easy. Following at the rear of the group, I could still smell our pursuers' foul odour in the air. More of them were undoubtedly amassing around us, patiently waiting for the time to strike. It was a daunting prospect that so many of them had managed to avoid the forest's anger, as well as the fact they seemed to stalk so effortlessly amidst the harsh terrain.\n\nThe road ahead was almost too perfect for an ambush. It wound slightly as the cliffs softened into a series of rough slopes and towering trees clung to every available perch.\n\n\"We should find more cover in the trees, the passageway to the overlook is not too far now,\" I heard Soaren advising the group as a smaller, cliffside forest came into view.\n\n\"Trees didn't stop them last time,\" Neera snorted from a rock to his left.\n\n\"She's right, they're too bold,\" Talvana agreed. \"We should send someone to fly ahead for reinforcements.\"\n\nSoaren glanced at the dark road before us, eyes narrowing as he squinted through the trees.\n\n\"They'd pick off anyone that tried to leave in a wingbeat,\" he stated, and I gave the cliffside ruins another wary look.\n\nGlancing back over a griffin's shoulder, I saw Tarwin, and as close as we were, I could tell by her face that she'd disagree with me if I insisted on going ahead anyway. The manipulative voice in my mind tried to worm its way into my thoughts with the idea that she'd betray me. But thankfully, it failed and reason took hold, yet before I could volunteer myself, Talvana spoke up again.\n\n\"One well trained dragon shouldn't attract too much attention while they are so focused on hunting the rest of you. Please, allow me to go ahead, the consequences could be more severe if we don't find help,\" the fire dragoness insisted.\n\nSoaren looked back over the beguiled group behind him, then sighed.\n\n\"Besides, you're not my true wing leader, Soaren. In the end, it's not your decision,\" the fire order dragoness added, tone as stern as the one Soaren often used.\n\n\"Very well, fly as fast as you can, don't engage anything until you reach the overlook,\" the air elemental finally relented.\n\nTalvana nodded once, and with a firm beat of her wings, she darted into the maze of overgrown ruins. I watched her vanish into the darkness like some kind of fiery ghost, pausing to look back at the muddy pathway behind us.\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" Risha enquired as she moved up beside me.\n\nThat look in her eyes, does she expect me to do something stupid again?\n\n\"They're not going to leave us alone. That last assault retreated too easily,\" I answered as she shook her head.\n\n\"I mean what are you doing? All of this hiding away, taking on all the orkin alone? We can keep bringing this up and pretending we've moved on, but what you did back there has to stop. You're not alone in this,\" she explained, reigniting my doubts as I responded.\n\n\"Risha, I...\"\n\nThe sound of dislodged rocks and a rush of paws caught my attention. I glanced up, expecting to see a set of ferocious teeth and a deadly barbed stinger, but thankfully it was Neera bounding down the cliffs toward Soaren.\n\n\"There are none of them ahead, but...\"\n\nA loud roar cut off the faldron's words as a ball of claws, fur and wings erupted from below the cliff's edge. Risha and I ducked in unison as the manticore slashed, while pulling up along the opposing rock face. I coiled back and glanced over the cliffside to see a whole pack of them clinging to the wall like giant bats.\n\nThey've been waiting down there this whole time!\n\nOne creature took advantage of my distraction, swinging around with its tail. Yet a bolt of lightning stopped its progress before it could strike.\n\n\"May I recommend you act upon your former plan? Speed is most certainly of the essence, and a point of defensive significance is also preferable to this rather vulnerable position,\" Apollo's calm voice proposed as he released two more bolts of lightning into more manticores.\n\n\"Run!\" I demanded, flames building in my throat.\n\n\"I'll run when you do,\" Risha replied, setting one of the beasts alight as the whole pack leapt into the sky.\n\nThe rest of the group erupted into a sprint as more monsters filled the air and I finally gave in, darting for the trees' cover with her close behind. Our attackers didn't hesitate to take full advantage of our retreat, yet the collective force of flames, talons and sharp projectiles held them back.\n\nNo, this is too easy \u2013 they could kill us all if they wish. This is something else. I thought, and as we retreated under the canopy, I felt a sense of dread crawl over me.\n\n\"I think we lost them. Ha, those stone-hides are too scared to fly under some trees!\" Ice Feather spat mockingly, catching her breath.\n\n\"No, we gave them too easy a target, this is far from over,\" Soaren stated, glancing back.\n\nA rustling in the trees, followed by several loud cracks, stopped everyone in their tracks as more manticores dropped from the canopy to perch on the branches like a flock of crows. Soaren spread his bladed wings and several humans drew their weapons, while the rest of us brandished blades, beaks and claws.\n\n\"Giant monsters, just like old times,\" Tarwin remarked nervously as she backed up beside me with an arrow drawn.\n\nI found it hard to disagree and even harder not to feel terrified. My dread only doubled, when another shifting sound amidst the trees marked the arrival of several dark forms, and with a soft whoosh, a large black serpent landed before us.\n\n\"You're right, you do make this all too easy,\" Sceptre announced in his sly, deceptively smooth tone.\n\nSeveral vulpomancers materialised from the darkness surrounding him, while the orkin shot uneasy glances their way.\n\nDon't let him distract you, just focus on keeping everyone alive.\n\nDense trees and a sheer overhang meant there was no way out. The ebon wing had us trapped, and I could hear the grinding of stones in the back of my mind.\n\n\"Kill us or be gone, traitor, don't waste our time,\" Soaren snapped, shifting his wings.\n\nThe dark-scaled fiend at least had the sense to look mildly insulted.\n\n\"Why be so swift to invite your own demise?\" he cooed, and Soaren snorted sparks.\n\n\"You had no problem trying to kill us a moment ago,\" Ice Feather growled, ruffling her wings.\n\n\"Do forgive these savages, they aren't ones for subtlety.\" He gestured to the rather disgruntled orkin rabble. \"Had it been I to find you first, I'd have simply snapped your neck like the poultry featherwing you are,\" he added.\n\n\"I'll show you poultry, you traitorous wyrm!\" Ice feather hissed, lurching forward.\n\nMeadow held her back while the ebon wing revelled in her reaction, his sharp fangs flashing as he smiled.\n\n\"Traitors to what, exactly? Surely you don't still believe that what remains of the old alliance is anything worth upholding? Neither of your kind has concerned yourselves with the other for centuries, and now you hope that what is left of your fragile friendship will prevail?\" He laughed, pressing a forepaw to his chest. \"I see you've even recovered your pale-skinned pets, how quaint,\" he added, waving a talon at Tarwin and the others.\n\nDespite being oblivious to his words, I saw Tarwin's grip on her bow tighten, and for a moment, I really wanted her to shoot him in his smug face.\n\n\"Such things don't concern you, traitor,\" Soaren interrupted, stepping between us all.\n\n\"I think you'll find such things concern me and my fellow ebon wings very much, as does anything that defies our master,\" Sceptre hissed, craning his neck round to peer at me.\n\nI felt the eyes of my companions, bar those who were oblivious to his words, all settle on me.\n\n\"You still think such a pathetic hatchling will save you from all of this?\" he questioned, opening his wings and motioning to his allies. \"No, you have no idea what's coming.\"\n\n\"And you do?\" Soaren challenged. \"Have you so readily devoted yourself to something that you don't completely understand?\"\n\nSceptre's muzzle curled into one last smirk.\n\n\"You speak as if it were by choice that we follow the Great Master. No, the weak soldier your pathetic ruler sent to Frostwrath is no more. All that remains now is perfection in my master's image. Purity and order, the very reason he created us. For what are we if not what we were made to be?\" he added, pulling back to address his companions.\n\n\"Leave this bold leatherwing to me, take your pick of the rest.\"\n\nThe orkin roared and ushered their winged steeds to jump from the trees.\n\nThis is it, there's more fangs, claws, blades and barbed stingers than even I can stand against.\n\nEveryone shifted, ready for what may be the last fight of their lives. With the painful grinding of rocks persisting in my mind, I ducked under Soaren's wing and leapt forward.\n\nHe'll not stand between them and the others, I will. It's my responsibility!\n\nBefore I could act, the trees shuddered and the wind began to roar. The welcome sound of wing beats thundered through the air, heralded by loud calls as a small army of dragons and griffins smashed through the canopy.\n\nGleaming armour, claws, teeth, beaks and talons dropped from the sky, dragonfire and lightning burning bright as the new attackers bore down upon our enemy and their mounts like the beating rain of a thunderstorm. In a flash weapons rang, and magic seared as they met with stone-hides and savage swords.\n\nI heard Sceptre roar a fit of curses before he snaked away into the gloom, while the vulpomancers about him scattered to bring their deadly claws to bear. Without a second thought, I identified them as my primary target and took off into the midst of battle.\n\nUnfortunately for me, reality didn't take kindly to my eagerness, and before I knew it, a set of claws plucked me from the sky. Heavy wing beats blasted air over my back, and as I fought to turn all I could see was the putrid flesh of the manticore's underbelly as it dragged me over the trees. I bit down on the forepaw wrapped around my left wing, sinking my teeth deep into the foul-tasting flesh while simultaneously burying my burning claws into its hide.\n\nThe retaliation ushered a guttural howl of pain from the creature, and with one flick of its paw, it threw me from the air. Its claws cut bloody scars through my exposed wings as the force sent me into an uncontrollable spin. I was crashing through branches with a series of bone-breaking crunches and wood-splintering cracks before I knew it. Had it not been for my armour, I'd have been a broken mess, and as I rolled to a halt, with my limbs burning and blood trailing from my tattered wings, I knew I couldn't stop.\n\nThrough my daze and the maze of trees, I could see the dancing lights of dragonfire and elemental magic. The din of battle was unusual. From where I lay, it looked less chaotic and more like an unscripted dance. A heavy thud dismissed my focus as the manticore landed beside me, the glowing wounds I'd inflicted hindering its movements.\n\n\"I's got's yous, you stinkin wyrm,\" the grisly rider declared.\n\nGritting my teeth, I lifted myself, before the orkin gave the reins a jolt and ushered his mount forward. The beast didn't hesitate, leaping onto a fallen log with a fearsome roar, rotten wood splintering under its weight as it came at me. Darting to the left, I tried to slash across its outstretched limbs with a swipe of my wing blades. Unfortunately, my wounded limbs were less willing to cooperate and the strike was only fleeting, doing little more than angering my opponent.\n\nRecovering from the near miss, the rage-filled creature swerved to face me. Savage or not, the manticore was proving a match for me in my current state, and before I could steady myself, it dealt a heavy blow against my side.\n\n\"Is that's all you's got?\" the rider laughed as his mount thudded towards me once more.\n\nI pressed all four of my paws close to the icy ground, anchoring myself as I raised my tail. The glowing blade at its tip sliced through the monster's underside as it charged over me. The gutted creature fell silent as its steaming innards spilled across the ground behind me, and its rider roared angrily.\n\nWobbling as I stood, I caught my breath just in time to see several more manticores darting down from the trees. I coiled back, diverting fire toward them before exhaustion demanded I pause to recuperate. Several of my attackers easily avoided the flames, only to be met by more jets of elemental fire combining like a rainbow of heat, as several dragons flew by.\n\nMaybe it's not so bad having an army watching my back? I thought, taking the opportunity to regain more of my depleted strength as I gasped.\n\nAn awful smell met my nose, seconds before I saw the shadow of an enormous axe swinging my way. I leapt aside, narrowly avoiding the jagged blade of the rider whose beast I'd just dissected. Having missed, his weapon embedded in the frozen earth, allowing me time to face him. He slammed a boot down on my tail, the corrupt metal pressing my armour against my scales in a tight pinch.\n\n\"You's nots doing that again,\" he growled, grabbing my muzzle tightly and yanking my head down. \"I's been dealing with wyrms like you's for a long time, you's no different, demon!\" he declared confidently.\n\nRetrieving his axe, he attempted to swing at me again, clearly aiming to cut off my head. I squirmed in his grip, really not wishing to find out what happened if I suffered an injury like that. Suddenly the sharp crackle of a steaming-cold ice shard embedding itself into his hand forced him to drop his axe.\n\n\"Don't you dare touch him,\" Risha roared, leaping from the undergrowth and landing on his back.\n\nHer agile form snaked between his spines as she coiled and unleashed a torrent of blue flame.\n\n\"Is everything okay, Guardian? I cannot help but deduce that you have been having some trouble,\" Apollo chimed, wings humming as he appeared beside me.\n\n\"Well, you deduced right,\" I muttered, little concern for his observations as I charged forwards.\n\nRisha's target was still distracted, and with all my strength, I kicked up into his chest. My burning claws sank deep into his hide, sending him sprawling across the ground, while Risha leapt from his back, slashing her tail blade across his throat.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I uttered through my exertions, as she landed at my side.\n\n\"Indeed, it seems that without this descendant's intervention, you would\u2026\"\n\n\"Enough, Apollo!\" the pair of us snapped in union, then without warning, Risha wrapped her wings around me.\n\n\"I really, really hate you right now,\" she scolded, \"But we have to fix this!\"\n\nMy eyes followed hers, watching as the small army of dragons and griffins battled the orkin.\n\nThis is the New Order, what's left of the old alliance?\n\nMordrakk's illusion scoffed at the idea, grinding his stones while he tallied up the lives I'd just ended. I tried not to care, pushing every doubt I had to the back of my mind.\n\nI need to focus on saving as many of them as possible.\n\n\"Come on, this isn't just some orkin rabble, Sceptre and the vulpomancers are still here,\" I urged Risha, before moving back toward the hilltop and the dozen or so manticores swarming above it.\n\n\"Yeah, and you're still keeping me in the dark about why they keep coming after you,\" she cursed as she ran beside me, while Apollo beat his wings to keep pace.\n\n\"There's no time for that now,\" was all I could offer, but her look was far from satisfied.\n\n\"Yeah, you could have told me days ago!\" she retorted.\n\nThe anguish in my mind flared at her lack of understanding, but for the first time the storm of other emotions overcame it, and right now, it really didn't matter. That only became more evident when several manticores dived down at us through the trees.\n\nApollo's wing tips glowed and what met our attackers wasn't what they'd expected. The lightning bolts seared the first's flesh to dust before arching to the next victim. As the initial few riders fell, the others pulled away, but Apollo was fast when he wanted to be, and he always hit what he was aiming at. One shot was enough to fell another, and as he moved to target a fifth, I diverted my attention to Risha.\n\n\"We have to get back up there,\" I stressed, gesturing to the hill side.\n\nShe nodded, and without another word, led on. The pair of us swiftly made our way toward the heaviest fighting, cutting down a pair of dismounted orkin as we went. When we reached the road and came upon a group of fleeing humans, something shouted out in my mind.\n\nWhere's Tarwin!?\n\nInstinct took hold, a surging determination I'd felt only a few times before. Looking around I saw Soaren beating back orkin attackers with the help of Talvana. While Ice Feather pinned another and Neera darted around like a moth. There was no sign of my human friends.\n\n\"We need to find Tarwin and the rest of her people. They can't just fly away like us,\" I announced.\n\nRisha set to scouring the battle as I swiftly moved back from the fray.\n\n\"Blaze, wait!\" she called out, seizing my tail. \"The last time you left to find her, you came back ready to give up,\" she responded, and I recalled the night in the village months ago.\n\n\"I won't give up. I can't, not anymore,\" I assured her.\n\n\"Is that just another part of what you're not telling me?\" she asked, her eyes scouring mine for the truth.\n\nA sharp shriek and a flurry of shadow cut short our conversation, and I shoved her away from the vulpomancer's formidable claws. Its talons locked with mine as we collided, and the ghastly veil that surrounded it bit at my scales like a bone-chilling wind. The dark beast hissed, its jaws snapping as my molten claws cut deep into its hide.\n\nNo, you're not going to lay a claw on anyone, you monster!\n\nMy scars burned in its presence, but I ignored the pain and twisted in the air, forcing it beneath me. It screeched as I shoved my rear paws into its underside, kicking it down into the dirt. The impact turned most of it to black dust, before I finally sliced its remains to pieces with a flurry of claw strikes.\n\nMaybe next time you come after me, you'll think twice! I thought as I back pedalled.\n\nWith a scurry of paws Risha was beside me again, as I muttered.\n\n\"Sorry, I didn't mean to push you so hard,\" I admitted bashfully.\n\n\"Yeah, well, better than dying,\" she panted, and I huffed.\n\n\"Exactly, you see my point now?\" She frowned, but I knew she'd be hard pressed to deny it.\n\n\"Get to cover, go now!\" I suddenly heard Tarwin command, immediately drawing my attention from Risha's disgruntled expression.\n\nIt took me a moment to home in on my friend's voice amidst the chaos, but I found her and several other humans fighting at least half a dozen manticores within an open space between two trees. All the while vulpomancers circled above like hungry carrion.\n\nNeera and Boltock were stuck on the ruins of a wall above them, both battling a creature of their own, while directly below, a shallow cave was filled with the rest of Tarwin's wounded companions.\n\n\"Can you help them?\" I asked Risha, motioning to her brother, Neera and the cowering humans.\n\nShe didn't want to leave me, but I knew she wasn't one for letting anyone down either, especially her brother.\n\n\"Yes... But\u2026\" she huffed, glaring at me. \"By the skies, you better come back in one piece!\"\n\nAs she made her way to the others, my attention locked onto one of the manticores as it reared up ready to slash at Tarwin. I leapt forward, spreading my wings as I collided with its neck. Digging my talons and wing blades deep, the beast howled, toppling to the ground. I heard Tarwin call my name, reminding me that despite our recent revelations, she didn't fully know of what I was capable of.\n\nThen I'll have to show her. She was always one for showing off!\n\nWith a final whip of my tail, I knocked the rider from his toppled mount and brought the blade across the beast's neck. The disorientated orkin got to his feet and I rose up to meet him, but not before an arrow pierced his skull and he staggered to the ground. I glanced at Tarwin, nodding in recognition, before another manticore lunged from the sky.\n\nWithout warning, a swift and bone-crushing strike ripped the rider from his saddle, as more dragons descended into the fight, setting the edges of the battle alight to prevent their escape. Freed from the inconvenience of its rider, the manticore thudded down and growled at Tarwin. In retaliation, it took her no time at all to send an arrow its way, before drawing her father's axe. Her assault only angered the beast, and with the power of its hind legs it lunged forward, claws outstretched and teeth bared.\n\nI leapt at its side, knocking it off balance while the axe found a home in its right forepaw. Battling disorientation, I heard the beast's pained roar, then the unmistakable sound of Tarwin readying another arrow. Before she could release it, a bolt of searing red flame, followed by a torrent of dragonfire scorched the flailing creature as a wing of fire order soldiers flew by.\n\nStaggering, I looked at her as she retracted the arrow and despite all the fighting and bloodshed, I knew that this was the world she'd always wanted to see.\n\nShe never liked being trapped in the village, she's wanted to be part of this for so long. I almost wished she could have seen it as I saw it, to the stars and beyond. At least back when it was a bit more peaceful.\n\nEven so, my thoughts were interrupted as an orange dragoness landed beside me with a flurry of cinder-spitting wing beats.\n\n\"Good to see you again, Blaze,\" a familiar voice announced, a hint of relief in her battle-hardened tone.\n\n\"Ember!\" Boltock shouted before I even had time to think.\n\nI didn't expect anything less of him when it came to her, it was as if her presence was a beacon no matter where he may be. Yet our fiery friend looked different than the dragoness she'd been before I left. Black armour covered her scales, similar to that which Pyro had once worn. Its edges glowed red with inscribed ancestral battle runes, unmistakably that of the Fire Order.\n\nSo she's a true soldier now, just like he was? I didn't know how to feel. She'll never be like him, surely?\n\nShe took a fleeting look at Boltock, then at me, and the green dragon's eagerness faded as I recalled that the two of them hadn't been so close for some time. Moreover, as Ember's eyes met mine; they didn't fill with the same relief the others did, more a stern hope.\n\nShe thinks I'm just as much a war hero as Soaren does. No, I'm not a soldier like them! I recalled how she'd not viewed me as strange the day we'd met in the training cave. So much for all my friends just being my friends!\n\nAnother roar cut short our reunion, and before any of us could react, a jet of purple flame engulfed the ground around us. I instinctively forced Tarwin back, covering her as the flames kissed my scales.\n\n\"Don't go into the fire,\" I suggested, but she shot me a knowing look as she deadpanned.\n\n\"You don't say.\"\n\n\"Ebon wings,\" Ember hissed as she patted out the fire and snorted a jet of her own from flared nostrils.\n\nMaking her opinion of the traitorous dragons clear, the knowledge of Pyro's fate momentarily stung.\n\nI'm going to have to tell her at some point just... I glanced around at the others, both Boltock and his sister saving the humans from the fire, while more dragons attempted to put it out. Just now is really not the time!\n\nMeanwhile, a set of black claws swiped overhead, as a second blast of flame and an unnatural wind scattered dragons from the sky.\n\n\"I've had enough of this; how dare you defy your Great Master so boldly. I will see that you all burn,\" Sceptre declared as he swooped in with his mouth wide open, expelling more flames.\n\n\"Get down!\" I called, and Tarwin took cover behind a rock as the ebon wing ignited the battlefield.\n\nAmidst the chaos, I caught his smouldering eyes fix on me, yet as soon as they did, plumes of flame and volleys of arrows graced his dark scales. He coiled back, opened his mouth and blasted a bolt of purple flame. With his adversaries stunned, his cruel laugh caught my ringing ears and I sat up to see him thud to the ground, his body marred by dusty wounds.\n\n\"All of this is so unnecessary. Accept that you will lose. You cannot fight the Great Master,\" he proclaimed, leaping forward and pinning me under one forepaw.\n\nHe was larger and heavier, peering down his wrinkled nose while his white fangs were stained red with blood.\n\n\"It seems the wing leader was wrong \u2013 I'm more than a match for you. Maybe once I have returned you to the Great Master, he'll see fit to put me in charge instead,\" he mused, raising a talon over my eye.\n\nI squirmed, but he merely laughed at my futile struggle as he hissed.\n\n\"So much for the creators' hero...\"\n\nA fresh hail of arrows followed by blasts of varying coloured flames assaulted the fiend as humans, dragons, griffins and faldron alike assaulted him in unison. He flashed his teeth, growling furiously as he whipped his tail about to swipe several of his assailants aside.\n\n\"Stop battling the inevitable, accept your fate and die!\" he roared, his neck coiling to send another fiery blast their way.\n\nTheir assault had been enough to unbalance him, and I pushed up with all of my strength, forcing him to swipe me aside with one heavy lash of his claws.\n\n\"Give up!\" he hissed, and with a twist of his head, dragged me across the ground like a bloody rag.\n\n\"Blaze, no!\" Tarwin cried over the silence that gripped my mind.\n\nWithout a second thought, I leapt up, charging horns first at the dark dragon.\n\nTarwin can now see the real power of her fallen star. My resilience didn't catch Sceptre off guard, and he met my attack with a bolt of fire.\n\nThe world exploded in purple light as the blast catapulted me through the trees and down the hill. Shrubs and branches cracked and shattered around me, before I finally crashed into a patch of ferns at the base of a tree. He swiftly glided to a halt before me as he folded his vast wings and scoffed.\n\n\"You'd have made a good ebon wing. If only you'd listened, you could have been one of the soon to be many,\" he mocked, scowling. \"You've the world's most powerful weapon but no idea how to use it.\"\n\nHe towered over me, ripping my chest plate away and pressing a talon to my heart.\n\nAt least it won't be the first time. I thought as I stared into his eyes.\n\n\"It matters not, I'll deliver your cold, dead body to the Great Master, and when you wake, this world, this war...\" He peered up into the sky. \"You'll wish death really had found you.\"\n\nThe appearance of a blue streak abruptly cut off his sly words. He staggered back, while blackness seeped into my vision, and my armour slipped away as my thoughts began to fade. The ebon wing only seemed to notice his injuries when he fought to stand, but it was too late, a glistening bolt of armoured scales sank their silver claws deep into his tattered wings.\n\nHe growled, kicking up with all the energy he had left, the spines along his back digging into the underside of his attacker's armour. His assailant seemed to have underestimated his strength, but they were swift, and with one clean sweep, the blades on their wings sliced the end of his tail clean off. Sceptre howled, coiling back like a trapped animal as his adversary spun round to face him.\n\n\"This isn't over,\" he hissed, and in a blur of black scales he vanished into the trees with only a trail of dusty ichor in his wake.\n\nI peered up through my darkening vision to see the sleek and serpentine form of a sky-blue dragoness clad in regal armour, her movements silent as her bladed tail swished and her sharp wings folded. Even in this state she wasn't hard to recognise, and as the light faded from my vision, I saw the silhouettes of others approaching.\n\nWe've made it, my friends are safe.\n\n\"I suppose this makes us equal now, Guardian?\" Zephyra proposed.\n\nYes, we're equal now. I inwardly mumbled as the world fell away and I passed into unconsciousness."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Overlook",
                "text": "[ The New Order ]\n\nA vague sense of awareness flickered back to me, timed with the rhythmic tapping of stones. The blurred image of some dark world swarmed into my vision before the staggered panels of reality realigned. I lay at the base of an icy pillar, below the faint light of stars. This time there was no ocean, no ruined outcrop, and most notably, no sign of the illusion claiming to be Seraphine.\n\nHigh above the pillar, the burning sphere rose into the unforgiving night; fire consuming its surface like spilled water over dry stone. Mordrakk mused over me from a vaguely throne-like rock formation, stones grasped in his talons. Even so, I raised a forepaw to stop my head spinning, barely managing to get it off the ground.\n\n\"So, everything is falling into place,\" he proclaimed, waving away several more tallies. \"How does it feel to know that everyone has played you for a fool since the beginning?\"\n\n\"No more than I've been used by you,\" I grumbled, as I staggered to my paws.\n\n\"Your gods, your leader and now your friends have all used you and you don't even see it,\" he continued. \"Your friends, your family, do you honestly believe that they have no part in this? The entire world is praying you will save them, and yet you know not all believe that to be true.\"\n\nHe clattered the stones together, sending sparks flying between them.\n\n\"After all, is that not what you wanted?\" he added slyly.\n\n\"What would you know of it?\" I snapped.\n\n\"Without my full power I see only what you see, but after what transpired in the Paragon, the events that have been creeping up on you since that first day you took a step into the void, I know exactly what they will ask of you,\" he taunted.\n\nHis claims to see things I couldn't, poured more fuel onto the flames of my dread. I peered into his eyes, ready to reply when more cryptic words silenced me.\n\n\"It is most unfortunate that your intellect is so overshadowed by my own. If you really want to know what your last hope is, I would ask your leaders, then your friends. You know at least one of them has been lying to you.\"\n\nThe cunning grin he wore during the latter part of his sentence sent a simultaneous rush of fear and rage through me, but before I could respond, he faded away, and within moments, the chilling illusion of my surroundings evaporated into the darkness with him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The heaviness of sleep wavered as my weary eyes slowly opened. I rustled my wings to feel the light texture of a warm sheet and a soft, mossy bed beneath me. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw a dull hue filter through what appeared to be white canvas, forming the walls of whatever room in which I lay.\n\nPeering down over the edge of what I discovered to be a stone bed, I could see the floor seemed to be no more than dirt, trampled slightly and covered by a thin layer of straw. As my vision continued to clear and the throbbing pain in my head began to fade, I lifted myself up and glanced about, concluding that I was inside some form of tent. Fancier than those I'd seen Tarwin and the hunters use. A firm wooden frame supported its canvas, and several wicker-crafted tables lined its walls.\n\nIt was clear that the room was only a small portion of the canopy. In fact, the whole thing was constructed on the foundations of a long-ruined structure, making it more like a permanent nest than a temporary shelter. The extent of the crumbling architecture was evident by the towering shadows cast over the cloth, resembling the shattered skeleton of an ancient beast.\n\nLooks like there's a whole ruined fortress outside.\n\nMy attention soon turned to what lay inside the tent. Primarily what appeared to be healing supplies and potions stored in glass vials or stone pots.\n\nI really hope no one wasted them on me when there could be so many others who need them.\n\nI suddenly recalled that I'd no idea what was going on, or where I was. Nor did I know anything of what had transpired after I'd blacked out. The light outside, and the fact my pain had dulled to a mild ache, told me that it had to have been at least a day or so.\n\nLooking myself over, as expected, I saw nothing more than a clean body of white scales hidden beneath a sheet. The only thing that hadn't changed was the ugly scar still staining my shoulder, although the wound had been dressed.\n\nIt felt like the first time I'd been without my armour for weeks, only this time, I'd no idea where it was. Not that I cared; I was almost glad not to have the reminder.\n\nThe sound of someone approaching interrupted my thoughts, and craving the distraction, I looked over to a flap in the wall to see a vaguely familiar face enter. A white griffiness, with pale-blue fur on her haunches, wore a leather saddle over her back, its pockets brimming with healing supplies. The moment she saw me, she cocked her head, and unlike most others, my recovered condition didn't seem to surprise her.\n\n\"It's good to see you again,\" Mountain Echo said kindly, turning her attention away from my scars.\n\n\"You too,\" I uttered, nodding at the memory of the griffiness who'd treated me in Storm Peak over a year ago.\n\nOblivious to my mental struggle, she moved on, setting several healing salves down on the table as I asked.\n\n\"What is this place, what happened to the others?\"\n\n\"This is the healing tent and your friends are doing fine. We've already treated most of the wounded, and the poisoned Mordrin is being cared for. Although, I'll admit, their medicines are not familiar to me,\" she explained.\n\n\"That one's more of an acquaintance than a friend,\" I muttered.\n\nNevertheless, I rolled onto my front and rose tentatively to my paws. Echo bore a concerned look, slowly replaced by a hopeful gleam, the same one I'd seen the day we had met.\n\n\"Do forgive my bold words, but the day I treated you I was surprised. Your ability to regenerate, it's...\" Her voice trailed off, and she waved a talon, as if to snatch the answer from the air.\n\n\"Amazing?\" I finished, but she shook her head.\n\n\"No,\" she answered, much to my surprise. \"We've been here for almost a whole season, and not everyone comes back from the skirmishes in good shape. I've seen a lot of friends die, too many souls brought back to me with no hope but the grave,\" she explained solemnly, bowing her head slightly.\n\nRemorse filled me once more, though fear overshadowed melancholy. A fear that soon I'd have to witness the same fate claim those whom I cared about so greatly.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I answered, voice devoid of emotion.\n\nShe shook her head again as it rose.\n\n\"You are the last one who should be sorry for such things, for it is you that brings me hope, brings us all hope. What you have survived and accomplished are proof to us all that it is not hopeless.\"\n\nIt was almost as if she was insulted that I thought anything less of myself.\n\nIf only she knew the truth, knew of the great darkness hidden below the banner of gleaming hope. If only she knew how powerful the forces that sought her world's destruction really were. How many more will come back to her dead before the end?\n\nAs much as I hated myself for it, I upheld her beliefs and simply nodded. She moved back to get more supplies, and one by one, I stretched my legs, before doing the same with both wings.\n\n\"I don't suppose you will need anything more for that?\" she asked, looking at my scar.\n\n\"I doubt there's a remedy in the world that can fix it,\" I admitted.\n\n\"I wouldn't be so sure. Your friend has been doing all she can to fix you up,\" she explained, slightly amused by the fact.\n\nConfusion gripped me, seemingly allowing the featherwing a little more entertainment as she giggled.\n\n\"The same dragoness who's been taking care of you since the last time we met, I see,\" she stated as someone else entered the room.\n\n\"I see you're awake and still alive,\" Risha groaned with both a faint hint of satisfaction and irritation as she ran a forepaw over her weary face.\n\nShe seemed to have recently escaped from a long overdue slumber, and yet her tired eyes conveyed everything that was going on in her mind. I shied away, fearing that I'd once again done something terrible. She looked at Echo, forcing a weak smile as the griffiness glanced between us.\n\n\"I'll leave you two alone, it was good to see you again,\" she finished, before slipping away.\n\nMoments later, Risha glanced over my body, as if she could see all the things still wrong with me that I was oblivious to.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I muttered, staring at the floor.\n\nShe sighed, placing a forepaw on the bedside and nudging my left wing.\n\n\"Of course, but what did I do? You just came back together all on your own, it's certainly not thanks to me,\" she hissed, nudging my wings slightly harder and causing the muscles to ache. \"You came back to me no better than a bag of broken bones. I left you for one moment and you went and got yourself blown up!\" she declared, flaring her wings.\n\nYet as soon as that flash of anger spiked, her mood softened. She shook her head with a slight grunt and turned away, focusing her attention on one of the supply-laden tables.\n\n\"Both of your wings were shattered \u2013 and don't get me started on your legs. No dragon is supposed to be able to take a lightning bolt to the muzzle and live to talk about it,\" she lectured.\n\nI made an effort to hop off the bed, slipping back down like a fool as she rummaged through the supplies Echo had left.\n\n\"So all this is yours?\" I asked, looking about the tent.\n\n\"Not all of it, but there aren't many of us who know about healing. I guess my lack of order progression in Dardien isn't a problem here, especially with all the experience I have following you around,\" she joked while returning to me. \"But I guess we both have things we don't tell one another,\" she added sourly.\n\n\"Don't get me wrong, Blaze, I respect what you do, a great many more may have been lost if you hadn't, it's just\u2026\" Her voice trailed off, while her tail flicked nervously.\n\n\"All the times you've been beaten and bloodied, I watched you die. Blaze, you're my friend, the best dragon I know, and to watch you do this to yourself while I'm so helpless to stop you. It... it's almost like you come back just so I can watch you suffer again!\" Her head sank as she muttered.\n\n\"I still love you. I always will, but we...\" As her words faded, I finally jumped down from the bed, placing my wing on her shoulder.\n\nJust tell her, tell her the truth! What am I afraid of, that she'll hate me? If she does, will that ensure her safety, will she stay away and not get hurt? I'd no idea whether the part of me that resisted telling her what I really was, was selfish or foolish.\n\n\"I don't want to pretend to understand, but you and the others are the closest thing to family that I've got, and if anything happened to you, I would, well\u2026\" I replied, thinking about Boltock's scarred wing, Tarwin's father and the sight of Risha lying on scorched stone with blood trailing from her shoulder.\n\n\"I care for you as well, more than anyone I've ever met, even if I don't really understand it.\" I laughed slightly at the confession. \"But they made me to protect their creation, and while I don't care for that purpose, if it means I can protect you, then that's why I have to be the one.\"\n\nLogic and love waged a war in my mind to rival that brewing around us. Meanwhile, I could tell she was angry; she hated me for what I did to myself. However, we both knew that if it had been her taking Sceptre's strike, she'd be dead, just like anyone else. She sighed, moving back to the shelves.\n\n\"I spent all night in here caring for you, and I still can't find anything for that,\" she pondered, flicking her tail in the direction of my scar.\n\n\"There's nothing you can do for it.\"\n\n\"So you're not so invincible after all?\" she challenged.\n\n\"I've had this wound since the day I left, if it was going to kill me, I'd be dead already,\" I confessed, shifting my shoulder to hide the scar.\n\n\"I'd be more inclined to believe that if you'd tell me what happened,\" she continued, rounding on me.\n\n\"I... I can't, if you knew...\" I stammered as I realised how close I'd come to telling her.\n\n\"Your lies hurt as much as all the lightning strikes in the world,\" she added. \"You'd die for me, and yet all I expect from you is honesty!\" she finished, her tone rising sharply, her tail and wings twitching in agitation.\n\nI coiled back; my failed emotional barricades unable to weather an assault they were never prepared to endure. I felt the urge to curl into a cocoon of silence, my last line of defence against such things. Risha noticed immediately, and unlike me, she actually knew what to do.\n\n\"Love is not something we hold each other to,\" she admitted quietly, seemingly as much to herself as to me. \"It's about us, sharing things, feelings, troubles, all of it. We're a team, Blaze.\"\n\n\"Risha, I'm sorry but...\" I started, but the words faded as they caught in my throat.\n\nHer eyes narrowed, as if she were playing different endings to my sentence in her mind.\n\n\"It's good to see you're awake and well,\" Soaren unexpectedly interrupted.\n\nHis appearance startled us both, and I jumped like a frightened songbird as he peered in from the tent flap.\n\n\"Yes, it's good to see you too,\" I replied sheepishly, part of me wishing he'd just leave.\n\n\"The order master and Elders request your presence in the keep. I am to escort you there as soon as possible.\"\n\nThe Elders? After what they've done to manipulate me, not to mention the Cartographer, they've got a lot to answer for.\n\nI nodded and Soaren stepped out.\n\n\"Do you want me to come?\" Risha asked.\n\n\"No, you should get some more rest,\" I advised, hoping she'd listen. \"I'm glad you stayed awake for me, but...\"\n\nShe yawned and ruffled her wings, thankfully not opposing my suggestion.\n\n\"Our tent is the red one by the training grounds. I'll meet you there later,\" she replied, brushing her muzzle against the clean side of my neck as she left. \"I trust you won't get into too much trouble without me around?\"\n\nI froze under her gentle touch but managed a nervous nod.\n\n\"I think I'll be fine, and thanks for taking care of me,\" I repeated, unable to avoid thinking about how much of an inconvenience I must have been.\n\n\"You would have done the same for me, although I'm still mad at you,\" she declared sternly as she left.\n\nI know she is, but what can I do? I thought, moving past Soaren through an opening into a larger part of the tent.\n\nHe bore the same stoic look, cloudy scales and silver armour, making him look more like a statue than a dragon, at least until he glanced at me.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" he asked, before leading on.\n\nThe main section of the healing tent was a large, round chamber covered by a tall, airy roof with multiple rooms surrounding its edges. Several tables formed from the remains of ruined walls guarded a fire in the centre.\n\nWater order healers and griffins moved about with purpose and urgency, tending to the wounded, routing through their healing remedies and performing a whole manner of restoration magic. There were other creatures too. At first, I'd mistook them for griffins, but upon second glance it was clear they were very different.\n\nMost prominent was their rear half, which wasn't that of a feline but of a horse. They had hooves and a flicking tail, the majority of their feathers and coat were white and, unlike their cousins, their ears were more equine than feathery-wolf. The scales about their front talons were jet black, as were their beaks. Most had sharp, clear-blue eyes, while their plumage was longer and more regal.\n\nTheir manner of dressing was also more majestic. What little metal they wore was silver and only served to cover their rear halves in small, elegant waves. Most else was covered by finely-crafted cloth and blue robes. Before I could observe any more, Soaren moved toward one of the exits and I followed into the fresh, mountain air.\n\nThe camp outside was as grand and bustling as a city market. Just as the noise I'd heard from inside the tent suggested, it looked to have been set up amongst a series of ruins, scattered around a shallow hillside. Beyond the tents, the size of the ruins grew until they formed an almost intact wall topped by a large keep and a tall tower. Even so, the surrounding tents were considerably smaller than the healing tent, with many larger ones sat further up the hill. Intricate decorations adorned some, while others had extensions to their main bodies. Several had flags flapping above their peaks, while others balanced precariously on elevated rocks or crumbling towers, accessible only by flight.\n\nSnow and icicles covered almost everything, while hardy vegetation clung to life at the camp's edges. Between them, a well-walked path stretched out toward the central keep. Dragons and griffins filled both it and the air, all busy taking weapons and armour for repair at forges or using their claws to train. Others emerged from tents with mouths full of food or sloshing barrels tied about their necks. While the sight of others filled me with horror.\n\nWounded soldiers weeping blood under battered armour as they slowly limped in from the road, were carted on stretchers or staggered from the sky. Some weren't even warriors, they were barely hatchlings, innocent bystanders caught in a war that I still felt was entirely my fault.\n\nThe sound of Mordrakk's voice and grinding stones whispered tales of the dark future. I tried to force him from my mind, using the idea that I'd finally be able to get some answers from the Elders to help put a stop to this.\n\n\"You weren't lying about this place,\" I observed as we moved toward the keep.\n\nWhile we walked, I could see more of the hillside below as well as the towering mountains encircling the camp. The hill the ruins lingered upon was an island in the midst of a great lake, each shore a steep mountain slope. The only escape appeared to be the sky or one narrow passageway behind us, marked by an old bridge.\n\n\"I had no reason to lie; you didn't expect such, did you?\" Soaren asked sceptically.\n\n\"No, I just\u2026 I didn't expect there to be so many,\" I replied, peering up at the crowded sky.\n\nMy escort glanced skyward with less optimism.\n\n\"Still too few to defeat the armies of the Brazen Horde, we're awaiting the arrival of more forces,\" he stated.\n\nHe's right, Valcador's army is huge.\n\nBefore either of us could add anything more, we reached the keep's outermost walls, passing between two towers guarded by griffins perched in wooden nests.\n\n\"I just hope that the Elders' plan can save us,\" Soaren finally admitted as we approached a second wall, this one much larger and surprisingly intact.\n\n\"Wait, you don't know what it is?\" I asked, and he looked at me as if I were stupid for thinking he could possibly be in the loop.\n\n\"Of course not, only the Elders, the order master and your other friends know of it,\" he told me.\n\nSo Risha's been keeping that secret from everyone else too?\n\nIt felt like she was almost manipulating me as much as the Elders and the creators. I swiftly silenced that destructive train of thought, telling myself that the Elders were doing this out of fear, and the creators saw me as nothing more than a tool to be utilised.\n\nRisha's reasons have to be different, she's not like them.\n\n\"Hey, it's good to see you're back on your paws,\" another voice sounded somewhere in the winged crowd, heralding the approach of another flying figure.\n\nI could see now why Neera had wished for more of her kind to be present. The crimson-feathered faldron looked out of place among the armoured rabble as she hopped down the wall and appeared before us. She ruffled her feathers, her ears standing tall as she grinned.\n\n\"Didn't take as long as the last time either,\" she added, jabbing at my chest with a foreclaw.\n\nSoaren glanced between us, catching Neera's expression and frowning.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he snapped. \"Aren't you supposed to be hunting?\"\n\n\"Please, I caught five weevils this morning. I'm just seeing how my friend's doing,\" she rebuffed, waving a dismissive forepaw at him.\n\nHis frown deepened, but she didn't show a care in the world.\n\n\"You are okay, aren't you?\" she asked, her tone reflecting her recollection of the last time I'd been in such a state.\n\nAt that time, she'd no confirmation that I'd recover, other than what she believed.\n\n\"I'm fine, more or less,\" I confirmed, shuffling my wings slightly, and she nodded.\n\n\"I'll be over by the training field when you are finished with grumpy here, I can think of more than a few faces that want to meet you,\" she proposed, glancing at Soaren.\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind,\" I offered, before the faldron finally turned, flicked her tail at Soaren, and disappeared.\n\n\"By the skies, she would make a good feather cloak,\" he grumbled, and I felt a spike of anger that he'd even suggest such a thing.\n\nI'd like to see him try.\n\nNevertheless, we moved on, passing under the gate of the inner wall to where the muddy path became a set of stone stairs leading up into the main keep. An open area of raised stone lay before it, upon which stood the largest of the tents. The clean-white structures were actually much larger than I'd expected, which I suppose was why we'd been able to see them over the ruins. Many seemed more like the great hall in my old village than any tent, leading me to surmise that they were for far more than just accommodation.\n\nMoreover, the hill's elevation offered a view over the army of tents below. White smoke rose from most, while the coming and goings of their occupants looked like an orchestrated dance.\n\n\"Greetings, Guardian,\" the Cartographer's familiar voice sounded, both welcome and irritating at the same time.\n\nThe old dragon appeared in the doorway with the phoenix perched atop his staff.\n\n\"You are relieved, we will take it from here,\" he added, glancing at Soaren.\n\nThe larger dragon glanced down at him suspiciously.\n\n\"And who might you be?\" he challenged.\n\nI could tell that the question irritated at least one of the Cartographer's personalities, but I stepped between them before either could reply.\n\n\"It's fine, just do as he says,\" I advised Soaren, who reluctantly nodded and did as requested.\n\nFunny they don't know each other; just how many secrets do the Elders want to keep? I noted, as the Cartographer returned the gesture and turned back toward the entrance.\n\n\"Come now, Guardian, we have been waiting for you,\" the more sensible of his two characters ushered, clearly fighting to stay in control as the second one twitched and mumbled under his breath.\n\nThey're not the only ones who've been waiting for answers. My thoughts snapped as I swiftly followed him into the depths of the ruined keep.\n\n\"It is good to see you are still alive,\" he added as I caught up.\n\n\"No thanks to you,\" I grumbled bitterly, and the second of his personalities sniggered.\n\n\"You didn't need us; besides, the trees of the Paragon will do anything to defend their heart, they merely needed a little nudge,\" his former voice resumed, stealing the other's humour.\n\n\"It still didn't stop the orkin from almost killing us,\" I argued with a degree of frustration.\n\n\"And yet here you are,\" he countered swiftly, and my argument ceased with a growl. \"Your loyalty and commitment are admirable. That is, when you care to use them,\" he added, and my frustration eased slightly.\n\n\"I don't even know if I'm supposed to use them anymore,\" I stated, recalling what Risha had told me.\n\nThe old dragon paused and looked at me, his second personality muttering some gibberish.\n\nWhat does he really mean? I glanced up, but before I could ask, a large set of wooden doors hinged open before us.\n\n\"Greetings, Guardian, may I say how happy I am to see you again,\" Apollo announced excitedly as he hovered from the door.\n\n\"You too,\" I offered.\n\n\"Indeed, I assume you are here to meet with the other descendant hierarchs?\" he asked, and I nodded.\n\n\"Yes, now allow us to proceed,\" the Cartographer interrupted swiftly, moving into the room and ushering me to follow with a wave of his spiked tail.\n\nHe talks like he knows exactly what Apollo is? I glanced at the arcane hawk, but he merely looked like he was awaiting instructions from me.\n\n\"I must admit, holding such a prestigious meeting in a place like this is not of the standard I am used to \u2013 just another example of cultural changes, I suppose,\" he announced as we moved after the kooky, old dragon. \"I have also taken the liberty of repairing your armour. Many aspects of it were not functioning at full efficiency.\"\n\n\"Good, please take it to Risha's tent when you're done,\" I requested.\n\nHe looked confused for a moment.\n\n\"Of course, but do you not wish for me to accompany you?\"\n\nThe last thing I needed was another patronising voice to tell me what I should do and how all I'd done to this point was wrong.\n\n\"No, I'll be fine on my own,\" I finished, moving off into the room ahead before he could question me further.\n\nA large fabric wall covered the crumbling holes in the stonework, while wooden beams similar to the tents outside reinforced the partially-renovated interior. More stone furniture nestled up against each wall, boasting arrays of weapons, food and potions, while a wooden platform created an elevated position at the far side of the room. Under-paw, the surrounding floor was a smooth, grey stone, covered by a generous layer of straw. A central brazier illuminated the space, its smoke escaping through a small hole in the canvas roof, while on a wooden stand to the right, sat a familiar set of deep-blue armour.\n\nA large table covered by parchment weighted down by stones, and claw blades, sat in the centre of the raised platform. It wasn't the regally decorated chamber or the rare items that adorned its shelves that caught my attention. The four old dragons standing before me stole my gaze. Vulkaine was the first to lift his head, his faded scales shifting as he moved.\n\n\"Hello, old friend,\" he offered in his always wise, calm tone, bowing to the Cartographer, who returned the gesture.\n\n\"We could say the same,\" he offered, the phoenix jumping from his staff as he bowed and settling on Vulkaine's wing.\n\n\"Traitor,\" the second of the Cartographer's personalities muttered, as if soured by the bird's chosen perch.\n\nEven so, the old dragon stepped aside and once again, I found myself standing before the judgmental eyes of the Elders as Vulkaine began.\n\n\"Greetings, Guardian, it is...\"\n\n\"I know! It is good to see me again. I've heard that before,\" I snapped before the fire Elder could finish.\n\nEven so, his expression remained unchanged, as always. Nonetheless, I could tell by their silence they were surprised.\n\n\"You lied to me!\" I accused, glancing between them and the Cartographer. \"The day we first met, you told me you knew nothing about who or what I was, you said you knew nothing of the past and you told me to give up on Tarwin!\" I exploded in a fit of anger.\n\nIt felt worse than when I'd confronted the creators for their manipulation. Maybe it was because these dragons couldn't smite me or hide behind projections if I offended them. Either way, the dark fiend in my mind revelled in my anger, as if it were a luxurious bath of hot water.\n\nThe Elders exchanged glances, and all the while the Cartographer's stranger half muttered uncontrollably. I looked to each face, awaiting an answer that was taking a considerable time to present itself. Once again, it felt as if they were waiting, judging and assessing me.\n\n\"Well, I'm here now, so just tell me what you want me to know so I can go,\" I demanded.\n\nVulkaine scratched the set of small, fire-like scales hanging under his chin.\n\n\"You seem rather eager to be free of those who would withhold secrets from you,\" he stated.\n\n\"Everyone I know keeps secrets from me, it's nothing new,\" I snapped, \"but when those secrets hide the reason I was created, I tend to resent those who knew but didn't tell me!\" I added, the memory of Nakir flashing through my mind.\n\nThe teeth of my angry thoughts snapped at the mental portrait like rabid wolves. Meanwhile, each Elder pondered my outburst, and once again, Vulkaine was the only one to speak.\n\n\"So it is true, you found what it is you sought at Goldfire Ridge?\" he asked, and my frustration boiled to the brim.\n\n\"If you mean the fact that I'm no more than a weapon? Yes, I suppose I did,\" I confirmed, the truth Mordrakk had revealed to me coming dangerously close to surfacing.\n\nThat's if they don't already know about that too!\n\nMy revelation didn't seem to surprise them; instead, they conversed with each other again. Their apparent disregard causing my scowl to deepen.\n\n\"It would seem congratulations are in order,\" Vulkaine announced, drawing himself away from the huddle and looking to the Cartographer.\n\nThe old dragon stopped his rambling and stood up straight.\n\n\"Wait, what!? What in the creators' name is there to congratulate anyone for? I want to know what you've all been doing!\" I finally screamed.\n\nThe room fell silent, and all eyes focused on me.\n\n\"You are aware of the legend set down at the end of the last age, that which regards one of unnatural blood among the nine great races of our legacy?\" Vulkaine asked, and for what it was worth, I nodded my acknowledgment.\n\n\"Such a thing was only a vague prediction to feed the hope of a hopeless world, one that became nothing but folklore after the tragedy of the Guardian War,\" he added with a hint of sorrow.\n\n\"There has been little hope since the day the war finally ended \u2013 almost seven hundred years of nothing but hapless legends, all slowly building to a new cataclysm. That is, until you appeared.\"\n\nTheir expressions changed to a vague hope. Unsurprisingly, it was the first time I'd seen anything other than empty glares upon their faces.\n\n\"I already know all of that, and it doesn't make any difference, because even with my help you cannot defeat the orkin. I've seen their army, their numbers exceed what you have here tenfold,\" I stated solemnly, and once again, they quickly assessed my response.\n\n\"You did not give up so easily the last two times the world asked more of you,\" the blue dragoness beside Vulkaine reminded me.\n\n\"You told me to abandon my friend the first time \u2013 and what choice did I have the second? Aries was going to imprison us all,\" I challenged.\n\n\"Upon both occasions there was none other than yourself to take the lead, and both times you were an inspiration to those about you, no matter how small you thought you were,\" Vulkaine added, glancing at the Elder dragoness to his left.\n\nI opened my muzzle to respond, but the words died in my throat. I recalled my journey to Ilivar, the friends I hardly knew following me across the world. I thought of Goldfire Ridge, knowing that even after the loss of Pyro they had been with me, trusted me to lead even if I'd no idea how.\n\nWould they follow me now, if I told them what really happened?\n\nThe thought of Pyro's apparent death filled my memories with an unwelcome darkness, bolstered by images of Boltock's limp body hanging from the wyvern's jaws and the memory of Risha bleeding on my back. I couldn't change the fact that they saw me as a sign of hope, even if they were all gravely mistaken.\n\n\"Hope can come in many forms, one only has to see it. Then it can become more powerful than any army the orkin can amass,\" Vulkaine announced, and the Cartographer's crazier side nodded in frantic agreement.\n\nI looked down at my paws, feeling the dull pain of my scars as I thought about that.\n\nIt's still unrealistic; hope won't save us from their savage blades or Mordrakk's ungodly wrath. Despite my hopeless look, the Elders exchanged glances once more.\n\n\"Though, only a fool would leave victory to sentiment.\" Vulkaine began with what I swore was a slight smirk.\n\n\"Courage, hope and loyalty are potent weapons in their own right. For us, however, there is knowledge \u2013 knowledge of an ancient world that, we have to confess, we've long tried to hide from those who live today,\" the ancient dragon explained, and my anger boiled over with the blatant confession that they'd always known.\n\nI tried not to focus on why they had lied, and yet, as his words tumbled about my mind, I became all too aware why it was so hard to find out anything about the ages before the Guardian War.\n\nAfter all, the victors write history, no matter how desperate those victories might have been.\n\n\"Seraphine,\" I muttered under my breath, and Vulkaine's eyes fell upon the Cartographer.\n\n\"Do you still possess the records?\" he asked, and without another word, the kooky dragon pulled back his hood and moved over to the table.\n\nWith a dusty thud, he produced a large and very old book from his cloak.\n\n'The Fallen Star.'\n\n\"Wait, I left this in... Hey!\" I cried in recognition, looking at the cloaked dragon.\n\n\"Yes, it was not the only part of our archive we found in that place, either,\" he retorted, and at that, my words stammered to a halt.\n\nWith a flick of his forepaws, Vulkaine opened the book, turning swiftly through the tattered pages with a precision that suggested he'd read the text a thousand times before.\n\n\"Very few know of the deep magic that resides within this world, much of which is no more than isolated ruins and long-dead enchantments like the Paragon. Yet some still remain,\" he began.\n\nFinally, he stopped turning pages, revealing a picture of four stone pillars with an eight-pointed star at their centre. Each pillar bore the symbol of an element, except for the scribbled out symbol of earth. I cocked my head, vaguely recognising it as a page I'd flicked past the last time I'd had the book.\n\n\"The elemental pillars are four broken shards of a great heart. These crystals are the source of all dragonkind's elemental mastery,\" Vulkaine explained. \"They were brought to us by the ancestors after the great liberation of our world and the founding of the council of nine. Such power was granted upon their descendants to ensure an age such as the one of tyranny would never again befall them,\" he went on, and I felt a strange sympathy for Seraphine.\n\nThose first mortal dragons had no elements; they were animals, like those the humans feared. I thought, taken back to the old village legends.\n\nAs I looked more closely at the picture, my mind forged another connection. I recalled what Nakir had told me about the Golden City, specifically the great heart that had once existed at its centre, the one that had been shattered.\n\nThese pillars have to have something to do with that, the same way the Sphere of Eternity did. Vulkaine seemed oblivious to my realisation as he continued, pointing to each pillar in turn.\n\n\"The pillar of air remains upon the Ivory Spire of Mist Wind, that of water lies deep within the ocean vaults of Parinthien, the pillar of earth was destroyed during the Guardian War, and that of fire...\"\n\n\"It's in Dardien, isn't it?\" I suddenly interjected, stepping back from the table. \"That's your great plan? You've wanted me to open it all along.\"\n\nThat's exactly what Acrodan wished of me, what started this whole mess!\n\nThe Elders and the Cartographer looked at me, and there was no sign that what I'd suggested was wrong.\n\n\"Yes,\" Vulkaine sighed. \"Since first finding you, we have hoped that a day would come that you would open the realm of fire once more,\" he admitted.\n\n\"So you manipulated me to do the same thing Acrodan wanted me to do? Don't you know what happened when I opened the sphere? I doomed us all!\" I exploded, most of my breath escaping as a snort of smoke.\n\nTo my surprise, the dragon's look became strangely contrite.\n\n\"What you must understand is that the power that dwells under Dardien is not of darkness. True, it is a secret to all but the Elders and the reigning Sovereign, but it is an older, purer power than that which the Dark Guardian had you face,\" Vulkaine assured me.\n\nFor a moment, a combination of their revelation and a lack of breath claimed my silence.\n\n\"Only two beings have ever been able to open the shard's power, for it is neither bloodline nor birthright that makes one worthy of Goldfire's legacy, but their loyalty and commitment to their kind,\" he added, placing a foreclaw upon the fiery symbol.\n\nThe image of Seraphine, beset by the apocalyptic sunrise, crossed my mind.\n\n\"Well, that means I can't. I'm not even a dragon \u2013 and I'm certainly not worthy,\" I admitted.\n\n\"Are you not? You are closer to the ancestors than any dragon that lives today. But it is not that which makes you worthy,\" he told me, lifting his head high.\n\n\"There was a reason the truth was kept from you, a reason we recommended against all that we hoped you would do. For if you had no greatness to aspire to, no roll to fulfil, then you would prove your worth to all, including yourself. For it was not our words or the words of our creators that drove you to do what you did,\" he elaborated, jabbing his tail at me in emphasis.\n\n\"Indeed,\" the Cartographer snorted, his wings and tail thrashing. \"We had hoped such a truth would be for all to see in time, but unfortunately that snake Aries cannot see goodness through his corrupt pride.\"\n\nI looked to each of them, unsure of everything they had said. They did all that so I could prove to the world I'm worthy?\n\n\"And what of him? What has he done with...?\" I asked, a strange sensation running through me as I ran a forepaw over my chest.\n\nMordrakk's dark avatar smiled at the idea of my gleaming amulet, eagerly grasping at the mental image as if it were tangible.\n\n\"We know nothing of the significance of your trinket, that is the creators' tool. Although we do know Aries placed it in the grand vaults below the temple after the forces still loyal to him seized it from us. That was only hours before we fled Dardien along with the New Order,\" he elaborated, then sighed.\n\n\"Yet we feared you may also need it to open the realm of fire,\" Vulkaine confirmed.\n\nIf they don't know about it, then they can't know the full truth. They must think of me as their last hope, just like everyone else.\n\nEvery aspect of my mind was telling me that withholding the information was both stupid and hypocritical, but fear built a wall against those thoughts and locked them away.\n\n\"So why do you want me to open this pillar of fire? Why not just ask me the day we met?\" I asked, and once again, they glanced at each other.\n\n\"Those who know of such an ancient defence are sworn to keep it secret,\" explained Vulkaine, \"lest it be needed in the darkest of times. We could not ask such a thing of you before you knew your true self. Furthermore, revealing the pillar while Aries sits on the throne would be most unwise.\"\n\nI turned away, my tail thrashing at the table.\n\n\"Your anger is understandable,\" he continued. \"Nonetheless, you must see that there is very little hope of defeating the armies of Valcador without the power of fire, and who knows what other dark forces are mounted against us?\"\n\n\"The last time I saw one of those things it contained a world-ending god,\" I pointed out, jabbing at the picture of one of the pillars with my tail. \"What is inside this one!?\"\n\n\"Little is known of it, but the one who opens the shard can unleash a magic far greater than any here possess,\" he reasoned.\n\nI thought about all the power I possessed already. It was dangerous and unwelcome, and the idea of giving Mordrakk more was incredibly frightening, but once again, fear stifled the notion.\n\n\"And how do I even do this?\" I implored.\n\nThe look they gave me told me I should know. I hated that look. It was as if the gods had created it just to irritate me.\n\n\"Do forgive our ignorance, but we were sure your companions would have told you already,\" Vulkaine started, and I felt another mixture of emotions toward Risha.\n\nIs this what she's been hiding from me? It was something I couldn't understand, not that it stopped me from asking.\n\n\"Soon, the New Order is to fly to war. You and your friends are to reach the temple and find the pillar before the battle can fall in the orkins' favour,\" announced Vulkaine, and as he spoke, I began to understand why Risha had been numb to the idea.\n\n\"What! You can't send them into battle. None of you should have to go! If you need me to find the pillar, then fine, but send me \u2013 and only me!\" I challenged, but he shook his head.\n\n\"You wouldn't know what to do with the ancient power should you find it, and in the meantime, the orkin would be free to pillage the lands surrounding the city,\" he elaborated, but I stood firm.\n\n\"They'll just slaughter everyone here instead, they'll kill my friends!\" I retorted.\n\n\"Every dragon, griffin and hippogriff here knows the risk of war, so do your friends, who were actually quite stubborn about the matter. They are loyal to you, so do not waste that commitment,\" the blue Elder chipped in.\n\nUpon testifying to the stubbornness of my friends, her words put a name to the unknown composites I'd seen outside. Nevertheless, I let out a disgruntled snort.\n\n\"I won't drag my friends into a war, nor will I watch any of them die because you didn't have the nerve to tell me about any of this sooner,\" I growled, but once again, they remained unfazed.\n\n\"It is not us that will be hard pressed to adhere to that request; those dragons will follow you to the end, you know that better than any,\" she continued, and with that, she had me stumped.\n\nOf course, I know they'd willingly risk their lives, it frustrates me so much!\n\n\"Quite so, it seems almost impossible to separate the five of you, even now,\" another authoritative and gracefully regal voice suddenly entered the conversation.\n\nThe almost silent tapping of claws emanating from a passageway behind the Elders heralded the arrival of Princess Zephyra.\n\nEven without her armour, the air dragoness looked no less majestic than the day we'd first met in Dardien's archive. Unlike the other dragons I'd seen, her scales and wings were spotless. I didn't know whether that was because she pristinely maintained her looks or that she'd not been in a situation in which she could sustain damage on the level of her soldiers.\n\nI found it hard to assume it was the latter, even if I was sure there was an element of self-preservation in her. After all, she was the one holding this New Order together.\n\nThat air of respect was apparent upon the faces of my companions, each of whom gave a subtle bow. I failed to perform such a formal gesture, even if she was on the list of dragons I at least partially respected.\n\nEven so, the princess didn't seem to care for such things and dismissed the routine submission with a wave of her forepaw.\n\n\"We can waste time with formality later, for now I am simply glad you're all here,\" she said, moving forward to the edge of the table.\n\nEven from here, the sight of her reminded me of her father. She was taller than I was and had an aura that demanded attention, which no one appeared reluctant to give.\n\nShe's certainly nothing like that cruel snake running Dardien. I thought, as even the phoenix perched on Vulkaine's wing seemed to straighten obediently.\n\n\"I trust our friends here have told you of their plan?\" the princess asked.\n\n\"They may have mentioned it,\" I replied, the idea of taking my friends into war working like a ravenous plague upon my thoughts.\n\nZephyra looked over them, sharp eyes lingering on the Cartographer as the old dragon put away 'The Fallen Star'.\n\n\"You want to take everyone into battle against an army that outnumbers us a hundred to one?\" I added sheepishly, but she remained silent.\n\nIn that moment of quiet, I was afraid she'd demand more, tell me that not everyone was even enough, and yet she accepted my reply with a subtle nod.\n\n\"I won't try to sweeten the idea, but it is true,\" she admitted. \"If we do not, then the orkin will surely spread, and if Dardien falls, nothing will stand between them and the cursed lands to the south,\" she continued, glancing to the Elders.\n\n\"It was never my intention to drag any of you into this, and for what I would ask of you and your friends... Well, I don't expect you to offer me any kind of forgiveness,\" she confessed, and in that moment my mind froze.\n\nShe's just as unhappy about this as I am.\n\n\"I have a feeling it wasn't you who did the dragging,\" I growled, scowling at the Elders.\n\n\"I think you should go, I will speak with him alone,\" she suggested, waving the elderly dragons away with a wing.\n\nThere was no argument as they funnelled out, Vulkaine offering me one last hopeful glance before he disappeared with the muttering Cartographer close behind.\n\n\"This role grows tiresome as of late,\" Zephyra admitted, running a forepaw over her weary eyes.\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" I admitted.\n\n\"Wouldn't you? I hear tell that you're a great leader, one I can respect, if your companions speak the truth.\"\n\n\"What they say and how I think about what they say tend to differ. I wouldn't have needed you to save me from Sceptre if I was any good at my job,\" I countered, before adding. \"Thanks for that, by the way.\"\n\nA look of curiosity covered her face, and she turned toward the tunnel through which she'd entered.\n\n\"Will you walk with me?\" she asked, motioning to the exit.\n\nI took a glance back at the opposite door. I didn't intend to catch up with the Elders any time soon and I'd little intention of staying here, so I swiftly took her up on the offer.\n\n\"They're good friends, you know?\" Zephyra assured me in a more relaxed tone, one I suspected was reserved only for private conversation.\n\n\"That's why I cannot risk losing them,\" I responded.\n\nThere was a knowing, compassionate look in her eyes.\n\n\"They're all I have,\" I added, and she cocked her head, a rather nonchalant gesture for one of her stature.\n\n\"Blaze, you should be proud,\" she said, a smile breaking across her muzzle. \"You didn't have to ask for such loyalty.\"\n\nProud of them? I've never thought about it that way. It didn't feel right, nor did I feel able to consider them as something to be proud of. They're dragons, not objects.\n\nThe interior of the ruined fortress was in no better shape than the exterior. Only the larger occupied sections and the tents erected throughout its walls held any furnishings to make them hospitable. Dragons, griffins and the strange new hippogriffs went about their business within the halls. They all noticed me, and all stopped what they were doing, allowing us to pass. I assumed their actions were due to the presence of the princess rather than my own.\n\nRegardless, I still didn't like the idea of everyone watching me, even after everything, it still stuck in my mind. Thankfully, it didn't last long, and after only a short walk through the halls, Zephyra turned and headed up a set of stairs toward a sunlit walkway on the ruin's outer edge.\n\n\"You've created quite the commotion around here, you know?\" she advised as we ascended the steps.\n\n\"I didn't know there were so many others here. I thought it would just be dragons,\" I confessed, and it was now her turn to take some pride, smiling to herself.\n\n\"There are a great deal more than I expected. I thought only the feather wings of the north still honoured the old alliance, and even then, I wasn't sure they would uphold it. As for those of the south, the hippogriff capitol of Mist Wind bears the pillar of air, and they were called at the Elders' request,\" she explained as the pair of us reached the top of the stairs and moved out onto the walkway.\n\nIt ran both left and right and was bordered by a squat stone wall. I could only assume that on the other side, the mountain dropped off to a steep slope or a cliff. The sound of a large waterfall reinforced that idea and as I moved forward, I could see that the ruin indeed sat on a spit of land between two great walls of tumbling water where the edges of the surrounding lake met the drop. The walkway traversed the whole length, forming an arched bridge over the water on each side, before meeting a pair of towers on the flanking mountainsides.\n\nIt was truly spectacular. I almost wished I could have seen it when it was still pristine. Looking down over the wall, I could see several more arches built below us, serving as landing zones for griffins, dragons and more of the horse-bird composites. Even so, I soon turned back to Zephyra, who seemed rather impressed by my stunned reaction. It was a drastic change to how I'd felt only moments ago, and I was pleased that such things could still amaze me. I latched on to every little fact like that, as if they were a raft keeping me afloat upon a sea of emptiness.\n\n\"I'm glad to see you're impressed,\" she announced proudly, before turning and continuing along the walkway.\n\nI followed, glancing about as several wings of dragons and griffins flew overhead, landing somewhere in the shattered towers above us.\n\n\"What are they, those featherwings?\" I enquired, seeking more information about the new beasts beyond a simple name.\n\nZephyra glanced up in the direction of the towers.\n\n\"Hippogriffs,\" she replied. \"They come from a kingdom far to the south, beyond the cursed lands.\"\n\n\"And they're involved in the Elders' great plan?\" I asked, nodding as I took in what I could.\n\nShe looked as if she'd known that statement would arise, yet blatantly hoped otherwise.\n\n\"I cannot say how for certain. The Elders only shared their plan after I helped you escape my father, and I'm not even sure they have shared it to its fullest extent.\"\n\n\"They sure like keeping secrets,\" I hissed bitterly, and I could swear I saw a ghost of a smile cross her muzzle.\n\n\"I cannot disagree. Before the celebration, I'd no idea that these ancient pillars still bound our races,\" she continued, flicking a foreclaw through a small mound of snow as she thought about it.\n\nI have a feeling discovering that only led her further away from her father. I thought, opening my muzzle to speak, but she continued before I could utter a word.\n\n\"I'm not going to pretend that I believe we have a chance of victory \u2013 the odds are stacked against us, and I'm sure you know that. The armies of the Brazen Horde are too strong for us to challenge,\" she admitted, peering out over the cliffside.\n\nThe distant light of the winter sun illuminated her scales, but her look was far from glowing. My eyes followed hers while her words span around my mind before abruptly falling silent. From this angle, I could see the gushing waterfall falling away onto the Midnight Plains and all that polluted its seemingly endless expanse. A vast swarm of darkness stained the land like a great tide washing in from the sea, flickers of glistening metal and flame broke its gloom and smoke rose from a thousand fires.\n\nI could see the ruins of an ancient city, its crumbling structures highlighted by the reflections from the rivers snaking their way through the remnants. They were the only things brave enough to break the vast masses of orkin occupying its streets and plazas. Several dragons still braved the onslaught in a valiant defence of their homes. Flashes of shining armour and jets of flame the only things that set them apart from the swarming filth.\n\nJust as I recalled, beyond the ruined city, the vast grasslands fell away into a deep fissure, marking the main access into the hanging city and the closest place to a home I had left. With my mind captivated and muzzle clenched, I stepped forward to the barricade in the hope that this was nothing more than an illusion.\n\nThey reached Dardien faster than I thought!\n\nMore dark shapes filled the sky, like a swarm of flies over a rotting corpse. Winged monsters swiftly overwhelming any dragons that stood against the hopeless odds.\n\nAll of this, and Aries has done nothing, even when they occupy the ground above his head!?\n\nNot only that, but the foul army had even begun to forge the ruins into something resembling Taldran. Crude structures were visible amongst the rubble, as were the deep pits the orkin had excavated throughout. The largest structures were three grand towers, each one in the advanced stages of construction. Meanwhile, dense swarms of beasts and pillars of smoke rose from the foundries, and the rasping chant of thousands filled the sky.\n\n\"How... how, long has this been going on?\" I managed to stutter through my shock.\n\nThe princess gave me a solemn look, hopelessness and anger filling her expression. I knew that feeling: the frustration of being so powerless.\n\n\"The orkin took the ruins of Andruid from my father's forces three days ago. We were too few to stop them, and without you, I didn't want to risk a battle we had no hope of winning. The remains of Dardien's army are still fighting within the ruins, but I fear it will not be long before the orkin find a way into the city itself,\" she admitted hopelessly.\n\nDespite the dire tone of her words, my mind set to work picking apart the pieces of information, stealing away the name of the former city as Andruid, then setting to work on what I could see occupied it. I tried to recall anything I'd learned about Balgore and his horde that would betray their strategy. Yet when my mind provided me with little more, I looked to Zephyra.\n\nThe princess seemed to have even less to say about the matter. All I could see was her underlying fury, and that made me choose my words carefully.\n\n\"What about your father?\" I asked, trying not to let my tone turn sour at the mention of the sly dragon.\n\nShe didn't seem eager to acknowledge or answer straight away, but as she continued to stare out over the horizon, her expression grew firm.\n\n\"He'll do nothing but hide where he thinks they cannot reach. Half of his army has abandoned him, and those that remain loyal he sees as expendable. He cares for no one other than himself,\" she stated, her voice fading into a whisper. \"Including his daughter, it seems.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I admitted quietly.\n\n\"Don't be... I'm sure to him I was nothing but a means by which he could ensure his bloodline endures,\" she admitted.\n\nI couldn't help but sympathise, having an entire life planned out with no choices was a curse I knew all too well. Every aspect of one's existence forged for a single purpose, and all for another's gain. Yet she must have someone who loved her, unlike the gods that had forged me.\n\nAries must think something of her? What of the rest of her family? I'd little idea about them.\n\nI said as much, but she shook her head and laughed emptily, as if it were a cruel irony.\n\n\"There is no one else. I never knew my mother, undoubtedly another beautiful dragoness of the royal harem, but whether she cared for me or not, I cannot say,\" she explained.\n\nI pondered for a moment, the empathy of feeling alone in the world far closer to me than most. I looked up and for once, thoughts of what my friends had done for me in such times filled my mind, thoughts of Risha in particular.\n\n\"I know that everyone here thinks you're more than that. I know I do,\" I assured, thinking of it as a compliment, if nothing else.\n\nIt's the least I can do to thank her for what she's done for me. She smiled, almost humbled as she raised a forepaw to her chest.\n\n\"That means a great deal coming from you,\" she stated.\n\nI shied away, wishing my words didn't carry such extra weight, but what she said next made me think again.\n\n\"Especially as a friend; without whom, I wouldn't be here.\"\n\nI recalled the image of her at the celebration, pinned before the death-dealing claws of a vulpomancer. I'd saved her life, and I knew I'd have done the same for anyone.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I responded somewhat sheepishly, a hint of the shyness I'd felt the day we first met resurfacing.\n\nEven so, everything I knew, be it good, bad or the words of a dark illusion telling me to go back to the ice, would soon be irrelevant. Ultimately, I didn't want anyone to die for me or because of what I'd done, and yet if there were anyone I'd follow in such a time, it was Zephyra.\n\nI trusted her, just as much as I trusted my friends. I swallowed my fear and hesitation, before finally quashing my instincts and thinking about what Risha had told me.\n\n\"This plan. You can't win without it, can you?\" I asked with a hint of regret.\n\n\"The legend of Dardien's true power is mighty. Only Seraphine herself and my great aunt Aria have ever been worthy of it,\" she explained, betraying a hint of fear in her eyes. \"Unfortunately, the fact that it is needed makes it abundantly clear that the orkin are not the foe we should truly fear,\" she added, and at that my heart sank.\n\nShe obviously knew there was something else, she'd seen it all, along with everyone else who had attended the season of fire celebration.\n\nDo they know about the Great Master and all he plans to do? Do they know about me?\n\nI knew that if I did go back, if I found the amulet, Mordrakk would win.\n\nHe'll kill everyone and everything, and after that, what does it matter? The idea chilled me to the bone, and despite my efforts to hide it, I knew Zephyra saw right through me.\n\n\"You're right, there is something else,\" I muttered, the truth once again on the tip of my muzzle and yet unable to escape.\n\n\"That is it, isn't it? What you're hiding?\" she asked, and I froze.\n\nDoes she know? How has she figured it out so easily? I stuttered, and after failing to speak, I simply nodded.\n\nYet she said nothing; she merely looked back over the war-ridden horizon.\n\n\"They never gave up on you, you know? I don't doubt they'll follow you to the end \u2013 not this so-called 'guardian', but you,\" she finished, gesturing at me with her tail.\n\nI really hope she's right. I thought as the beating of leathery wings sounded overhead.\n\n\"Your highness, King Halfbeak has arrived and requests your presence. The scouting wings from the valley have also returned,\" a soldier announced through some heavy exertions.\n\n\"Thank you, I shall meet him immediately. Please direct all returning wings to the dining tent and the healing tent, should they need it,\" Zephyra ordered, in a tone that sounded as though it came from a different dragoness, so much so that when she looked at me, I hardly recognised her.\n\n\"The council will be meeting to discuss the battle plan in a few days,\" she informed me. \"I trust you will be able to find your friends from here?\" she added, prompting me to recall the directions Risha had given me.\n\n\"Of course, your highness,\" I responded more formally, and at that confirmation, both the messenger and Zephyra disappeared from sight.\n\n\"Still think you made the right choice?\" Mordrakk's voice interrupted my thoughts.\n\n\"Do you?\" I responded.\n\nA wicked smile broke his muzzle.\n\n\"I have no choice in the matter, I go where you go,\" he replied.\n\n\"Maybe you're right about the future, but if I'm going to lose, I'm going to bring every last shred of you and your plans down with me,\" I countered, spreading my wings and leaping toward the camp."
            },
            {
                "title": "Midnight Watch",
                "text": "The camp itself looked larger from above. Yet the number of eyes I could feel focused on me as I flew did nothing to settle my emotions.\n\nMordrakk sat in the back of my mind, the easy choice and the right choice either side of his brooding image. He didn't seem concerned about which I took, yet his dark future felt far too close for comfort.\n\nNevertheless, I peered down over the crowds amidst the tents, then at those in the sky about me. Images of Dardien's vibrant population coupled with Storm Peak's and even my old home resurfaced.\n\nThey could all be gone because of me, and if my choice doesn't matter, what then can I do to save them?\n\nAll I had left was the belief that Mordrakk couldn't be right, and I focused swiftly on something other than that bleak future.\n\nRisha's directions returned to me as I searched for the training area and the red tent she'd described. I found the former first, the sight of several sparring dragons and other creatures striking battle dummies catching my attention. It was a large, open area surrounded by fallen walls, clearly having once been the foundations of a long since fallen structure. The lake and a pebbled beach sat to its left, with the tents bordering to the right.\n\nMany of the smaller structures differed in colour from the larger white ones, and just as Risha had advised, only one was red. Circling round, I landed close to the training ground, shifting the soft snow under my weight. Smoke rose from several braziers as I made my way along the edge of the practice ground.\n\n\"Glad to see they didn't take up hours of your time,\" a familiar voice observed, and I turned to see Neera.\n\n\"It's not like I'd have let them,\" I joked.\n\n\"So what did they say?\" she asked, leaping down from a ruined perch, her ears standing tall.\n\n\"I thought you'd know?\" I proposed.\n\nShe sat back, tail coiling over her claws as her wings ruffled.\n\n\"So they are going through with it?\" she murmured.\n\n\"If you mean sending us all into battle on a wild hunt for Dardien's last hope, then yes,\" I confirmed, feeling a slight stab of betrayal, before pressing. \"Why didn't any of you tell me?\"\n\n\"Look, it had nothing to do with me, I just do what you all do. Skies above, I don't think they'd even let me stay here if I didn't know you,\" she explained, waving her forepaws in emphasis.\n\nThat fact made me both angry and ashamed, and any idea that I may have upset her didn't make me feel better.\n\n\"Who else knew?\" I requested, trying to restrain my frustration as Neera glanced around.\n\n\"As far as I know, only the four of us, but I'm not the most informed, as you probably know,\" she confessed.\n\nI sighed and nodded, stepping away to the edge of the ruined wall.\n\n\"I am sorry, but they said you'd never come back if you knew,\" she continued, sounding genuinely remorseful.\n\nI don't have to guess who made that assumption. I felt ashamed that they would think so little of me, and even more so at the fact that I knew they were right.\n\nMordrakk gave a low, raspy laugh, and I slammed a mental door in his smug face.\n\nIt still doesn't mean he's right about the true reason I ran.\n\n\"You still don't think it'll be enough, do you?\" Neera asked, reading my expression like an open book.\n\nI glanced down at my paws, at the bare white scales in the wet mud, for what felt like the first time in ages. I shook my head.\n\n\"Don't tell them,\" I implored, and Neera nodded.\n\n\"For what it's worth, I think you can... Win, I mean.\"\n\nI wish I could believe her as much as she did herself, but unfortunately the mental vision of the fire that may soon ravage the world quickly consumed any hope.\n\nWhat's hope really worth next to that?\n\n\"Neera!\" the sound of new voices interrupted, cutting off my grim thoughts.\n\n\"No, I want her today!\" another announced.\n\n\"But you had her last time!\" the first voice replied.\n\nThe faldron was quick to turn her attention toward the commotion, her attitude abruptly turning from solemn to eager. Looking over, I saw three dragons, no older than a few years, run out from the camp and stop at Neera's forepaws, eagerly beaming up at the faldron.\n\n\"Come on, she only got back a few days ago, you can wait your turn,\" one small, red dragoness with yellow markings around her eyes and down her neck snapped at another teal-green dragon.\n\n\"But she has feathers, she's so cool, I shouldn't have to wait!\" the second dragon, clearly a water elemental, responded.\n\n\"Why can't we just share?\" a small bronzy-metallic dragoness, with scales like topaz, asked timidly, earning a disapproving look from her two enthusiastic peers.\n\nShe dropped back with a small 'eek', folding her wings over her head as she sank to the ground.\n\n\"Hey now, I'm good enough for all of you,\" Neera stated, playfully placing a foreclaw on her chest as she puffed up her feathers.\n\nI cocked my head curiously: Neera is a teacher?\n\nRisha had suggested desperate times called for desperate measures, but knowing how adept Neera was at surviving, it was a pleasant surprise.\n\nMy shock was nothing compared to that on the little dragons' faces as they laid eyes on me.\n\n\"By the skies, it's him!\" the red dragoness muttered, tugging at the wing of her watery-coloured friend. \"I thought he'd be taller,\" she added.\n\n\"I... I really like his... wings,\" the timid one added, once again garnering a perplexed look from her companions.\n\n\"I told you I knew a few dragons who'd love to meet you,\" Neera commented wittily as she edged my way.\n\n\"Wait, you're a teacher?\" I finally asked.\n\n\"Yeah, I mean everyone other than Risha is, and she only got out of that duty because they need every healer they can get,\" Neera explained as her students continued bickering.\n\n\"Told you she was telling the truth,\" the red dragoness stated, spitting her tongue out at her aquatic companion.\n\nHe growled as she added proudly.\n\n\"Dragonesses never lie, we're all too pretty to lie.\" She puffed up her chest in a way that made her bright yellow markings stand out like intense bolts of fiery lightning.\n\n\"Now, pay up,\" she added, holding out a forepaw.\n\n\"I didn't bring any dragoons with me, so it looks like you lose after all,\" he retorted smugly, but the young dragoness grinned.\n\n\"Looks like you'll have to give me one of your meals every day for a week then,\" she finished, withdrawing her paw and patting him on the back with her wing.\n\n\"Hey, what did I say about gambling?\" Neera demanded firmly, and the pair immediately froze with guilty expressions.\n\n\"Besides, I'm a faldroness, to be precise,\" she added, giving the red dragoness a wink. \"We can lie sometimes.\"\n\nThe fiery hatchling smiled back while her companion wrinkled his snout, flared his fins and looked to me for support.\n\n\"Err... good job,\" I improvised, awkwardly waving a forepaw at them.\n\nThe only response that earned me was a fit of laughter from all three, even the timid one.\n\n\"You're funny.\" Was about the only thing I could discern from the childish din.\n\n\"Don't worry, you'll get used to this,\" Neera offered.\n\n\"I wouldn't hold your breath on that one,\" another recognisable voice interrupted.\n\nThe laughing stopped abruptly, and both Neera and I looked to see Ember approaching, still wearing her order armour.\n\n\"Good to see you back in the land of the living. Not that I thought you were dead or anything,\" she added swiftly.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I answered, putting her awkward words to rest with a smile.\n\n\"Sorry I didn't come after you; I would have, only they need all the soldiers they have here,\" she stated somewhat shamefully.\n\nShe knows she made the right choice; I can't blame her.\n\nShe stretched out one of her wings, inspecting her armour closely.\n\n\"After all, I didn't meet Pyro over a romantic meal for two. It's just a shame he'll never get to see me like this after all we did together,\" she added, folding the leathery limb and standing straight.\n\n\"He'd be proud of you,\" I offered sheepishly, doing my best to hide the cold spear of guilt lancing through me.\n\nShe nodded, but swiftly turned her attention to the now silent hatchlings, who were still gawking at us.\n\n\"Teal, Scarlet, you two are with me and Storm today,\" she explained in an orderly fashion.\n\n\"But you two are so boring, Neera lets us hunt each other and practise take-offs over the lake,\" the watery dragon, who I assumed was Teal, moaned, pointing a foreclaw at the faldron.\n\nNeera shifted, as if she may be in trouble, but Ember smiled.\n\n\"Well, maybe when you've convinced your brother and I that you've earned it, you can try for real,\" she offered, and I noticed Neera mumble something about how real her lessons actually were.\n\nRegardless of whether she'd heard the faldron's muttering, Ember waved goodbye before she moved on, motioning with a flick of her tail for the two hatchlings to follow.\n\nThe disgruntled pair reluctantly followed, a series of dry groans and snide comments replacing their eager laughter as they trudged after her.\n\n\"She's changed,\" I commented, glancing back at Neera.\n\n\"I know, she keeps this up and she'll be the new head of the Fire Order,\" Neera proposed, pausing when she saw my crestfallen expression.\n\n\"Oh... I, I'm...\" she stuttered.\n\n\"It's fine, there was no way things were going to stay the same forever,\" I assured, waving a wing dismissively.\n\nShe appeared as if she thought it was anything but fine, yet didn't press the matter.\n\n\"Well, Brass, looks like it's me and you again,\" she announced, prompting the timid dragoness waiting behind us to raise her head while the rocky spines on her back stood up in excitement.\n\n\"See you later,\" Neera finished, turning to follow in the same direction as Ember and motioning for Brass to follow, an invitation the little dragoness eagerly accepted.\n\nI waited for a moment, peering out over the field of battling dragons and griffins as the early sunset illuminated them all in a golden hue.\n\nAll of this, all they're fighting for, those small dragons who've yet to experience a long life. All of it's going to burn, and it's my fault.\n\nThe grinding stones in my thoughts reminded me that there was no way I could let him win; not only that, but I had to do it without risking the lives of my friends. I had to find some way to fix all of this, and running back to the ice wasn't an option.\n\nIf there's a way, I owe it to all of them to move the sky itself until I find it. I thought, yet deep in my mind, Mordrakk's smile curled wickedly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "The inside of Risha's tent was far less regal than the others I'd seen. A skeleton of wood supported its inner walls, and the crimson fabric danced in the wind. Loose beds hung from chains and a small fire burned within a dish at the centre, filling the air with the light scent of smouldering oils. A set of stands held the armour I'd seen Risha wearing, an empty space beside it where I assumed Boltock stored his.\n\nAnother stand stood between them, its finely crafted wood hidden by the golden shards hovering about it, almost mocking the other attire with its gleaming elegance. Apollo had certainly done an excellent job restoring my armour, removing all evidence of its time in the cold, salty air.\n\nAnd still it looks so wrong, like it's not supposed to be here. I thought, almost as if the whole room wasn't worthy of its presence.\n\nFinding myself at the far side of the tent, I peered closer into the smooth silver surface of Risha's neatly polished gear. A well of warm thoughts about the magnificent dragoness battled amidst the onslaught of bitterness and guilt as I peered into my blurred reflection.\n\nI need to know if I'm ready to make the same decision Seraphine made millennia ago. I knew I was going to have to do one thing again, and the anticipation was killing me.\n\nI glanced at my golden armour, half-expecting Mordrakk to appear and lecture me on how he believed that was the only reason I ran in the first place. But all I heard were voices and the sound of the tent flap opening as I turned to see Boltock enter.\n\n\"Skies! I told her no fire. I mean, who uses fire against a dragon anyway?\" he grumbled to himself, stopping abruptly the moment he noticed me.\n\n\"O\u2013Oh... You're back!\" he exclaimed, and I stepped away from the armour as he continued. \"I mean, I didn't doubt you'd come back, especially after what Risha said.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't listen to everything Risha tells you about me,\" I answered simply.\n\nHe paused, a perplexed expression dawning over his face. Even so, I knew that behind his initial confusion, he remembered what had come of blindly following his sister's hope.\n\n\"I know she can get carried away, but\u2026\" he began, and once again, I stopped him.\n\n\"You asked me to keep her safe, to save her from the same pain you felt. The only way I can do that is to deny what she sees in me, because it's wrong,\" I added.\n\nHe was more than a little taken aback by that, but I knew, despite everything, he heard something in them.\n\n\"What about you?\" he added.\n\n\"There's nothing that can save me from this anymore,\" I admitted solemnly, turning away and dragging my weary body to one of the beds.\n\nHe watched, seeming to slowly process my words.\n\n\"The only thing she was right about was that I'd never come back knowing what I have to do,\" I added, jumping into one of the cots.\n\nBoltock glanced about, words seeming on the tip of his muzzle but struggling to escape.\n\n\"She never told me that, and if she had...\" He paused and straightened, \"well, there are some things she says I don't listen to, but I know when someone is wrong,\" he added with a firm paw stomp.\n\nI withstood his frown for a moment before sinking my head into the straw bed. Even so, he didn't say another word as he moved to his own bed, shaking off what parts of his armour he could, before flopping down.\n\n\"You know, for what it's worth, I'm glad you came back,\" he added, taking his helmet in his foreclaws, \"because if this all ends, if we die, at least we'll be together, and I know that means as much to Risha as it does to me.\"\n\nOne of my eyes cracked open as I glanced his way, his words dancing through my mind. As much as I wanted to believe him, I knew it was impossible.\n\nIf they die, I'll have to live with that guilt for eternity.\n\nIt seemed that Boltock's training had tired him enough to allow sleep to claim him swiftly, while the sounds of the world beyond the thin red walls died down to the low din of a busy evening. The glow of braziers and torches replaced the winter sun as I drifted between the darkness of sleep and the low light of the world, all the while expecting another cryptic visit from my own dark consciousness.\n\nThe sound of the tent flap opening summoned me back from the brink of sleep as Risha entered wearily. She glanced about, slowed her movements and quietly approached the rear of the tent.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" I asked as I lifted my head.\n\nHer head jolted sharply as she froze, holding her position for a moment, as if searching for the right response.\n\n\"Didn't they tell you?\" she asked.\n\n\"What? About the plan to charge straight into the largest battle of the century?\" I spat, the words like hot coals in my muzzle.\n\n\"Did they tell you about how I knew you wouldn't come back if you knew?\" she corrected. \"I'd have told you the moment we found you, but you weren't the same. You weren't the Blaze that promised me he'd come back,\" she explained, an air of frailty in her voice.\n\nI felt my emotions clash at the sight of her like that, and my resolve began to crumble.\n\n\"I'd have never taken any of you into battle at any time,\" I declared.\n\nStepping forward, she continued.\n\n\"No, you'd simply put yourself in our place a hundred times over.\"\n\nI leaned back as her declaration struck me, but I wouldn't allow my urge to protect them to fall so easily.\n\n\"How long do we have to argue about this?\" I asked bluntly.\n\n\"Until you give back the Blaze I know and love, because I'll fight for him as hard as he'd fight for me,\" she proclaimed, before finally sighing. \"Because he was the best of us.\"\n\n\"No, you're the best of us, Risha. You always have been,\" I assured, settling my head down.\n\nShe moved over to her own nest, glancing back as she climbed in.\n\n\"If that were true, I'd never have lied to you,\" she stated, her tone saturated with remorse.\n\n\"You never did,\" I muttered under my breath, but in the silence of the tent, only my dark avatar and I were able to hear and feel the heartache of such a sincere belief."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "After that night, the hours began to blur, more so than they had in the ice. Boltock and Risha had work to attend to, while I was little more than an icon for the rest of the bedraggled soldiers and others occupying the camp. In truth, I failed in that regard as well, hiding away in the cover of the tent most of the time. The looming threat of battle hung heavy over me and I feared the inevitability of a bloody dawn more than I'd ever feared any dark lord.\n\nAfter days of hiding, I finally made an effort to venture outside, mostly out of an urge to talk with someone other than myself.\n\nCreators know Mordrakk's not the best companion.\n\nAs I opened my wings, the golden plates of armour flew into place around me. Apparently, a blank mind was as much a signal for the attire to act as an active one, something I could only assume the enchanted metal had somehow learned from our time alone.\n\nI made no effort to fight off the shards as I stepped outside. The day was gloomy and overcast, a light snowfall mixed in with the cold rain, creating a mass of sludge-filled puddles, whilst making the air smell deceptively fresh. I tried to let my mind go, to pretend I was still home or somewhere that wasn't filled with the fear of war.\n\nThe sight of wounded dragons and blooded griffins flying in from their battles made that hope no stronger than a spark in a damp cave. Wherever I looked, there was no escaping the sounds of battle training, dragons my age, younger and older, moulded into soldiers for a cause that may not last the week. As for the smaller ones, I found it hard to watch and think about the things to come; it was only when my eyes fell upon someone familiar that I found the courage to move on.\n\nNeera was still teaching the group I'd seen her with days ago, while Ember watched beside her. Torn between observing the featureless walls of the fortress and the fiery orange dragoness, Boltock stood to the side too.\n\nWell, if there's any set of dragons I'm going to socialise with around here, there they are.\n\nTaking a deep breath and focusing my mind the best I could, I moved over to them. It didn't take long for the young dragons to notice me, and at their shocked expressions, each of my friends turned their attention too.\n\n\"I did say that tent was boring,\" Boltock muttered to Neera, glancing at me as the faldron covered a snigger with her wing.\n\nI could see Ember stiffen; a disapproving look reserved for what she deemed to be inappropriate behaviour shot their way. Any feeling of insult, embarrassment, happiness or otherwise fell upon me to no avail. All I could visualise were the dragons before me dying on the battlefield. Ember crossed the yard, stopping before me and averting her eyes from Boltock, much to his dismay.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she asked, as if she understood something I was struggling to grasp.\n\nWhat kind of a question is that these days, really?\n\nThe others fell silent as I nodded, but she didn't look convinced. The sound of hushed voices behind her served to stifle the conversation, and we all looked back to the trio of young dragons. They all froze, until the red dragoness, Scarlet, as I recalled, shuffled forwards.\n\n\"Can we see the fight now?\" she asked, and they all glanced at Neera with beaming expressions.\n\nEmber also looked at the faldron as the feathered dragonesse's amusement faltered.\n\n\"Oh right, that,\" she stammered sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck with a forepaw.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Ember asked, and Neera glanced between Boltock and I.\n\n\"She promised we would get to see the Guardian fight before he wins the battle!\" Teal blurted out, and Ember's expression fell flat.\n\nShe looked ready to give them all a firm lecture on how serious this was; however, at the sight of the small dragons and my friends, I felt a small part of their determination slip through the net of my dread.\n\nIf they're going to get anything before what's coming, the least I can do is give it to them.\n\n\"That's fine,\" I answered, stepping up beside Ember before she could open her muzzle to protest.\n\nThe little dragons' faces were bright as dragonfire, and my friends were just as shocked. Ember turned back to me, an air of uncertainty radiating from her.\n\n\"If I'm out here, I might as well do something useful,\" I added, but her doubts didn't seem to ease.\n\n\"Blaze, the fact that you're here is useful, there's no need for pointless games,\" she stated, turning her signature scowl to Neera and Boltock again.\n\n\"Let's do something simple,\" I suggested.\n\n\"You're sure?\" she asked, and I nodded.\n\nThe idea of fighting any of them terrified me, and yet I couldn't bring myself to say no.\n\nSo long as I don't hurt her, it could be fun, right? I thought, craving a break from the torment of my thoughts.\n\nEmber moved to the opposite side of the square, lowered her frame to the gravel, and opened her wings, the black blades on their edges gleaming in the dull sunlight. The eager muttering amidst the young dragons fell silent as she curled her tail like a spring, her claws flexing in the mud. Neera and Boltock watched from behind, the former with anticipation, the latter completely focused upon my fiery adversary.\n\nEmber gave me a subtle nod, leaping forwards before I could even move. I raised my wings clumsily, but without fear of an actual threat, and terrified I may unknowingly harm her, she swiftly swept my legs out from under me with the blunt edge of her tail. A series of gasps escaped from the smaller dragons and Neera laughed, while Ember circled around before placing a forepaw on me.\n\n\"One, two, and three... you're out,\" she counted, with a flick of her tail. \"I learned that one from you,\" she laughed, tail flicking whilst she helped me to my paws.\n\nI shook myself off as the trio of young dragons came bouncing over.\n\n\"Ember beat the Guardian... she beat the Guardian!\" they all exclaimed.\n\nThe armoured dragoness looked slightly unsettled by the praise, but I felt obliged to allow her every bit of joy she deserved.\n\n\"Yeah, she did,\" I admitted, shaking loose dirt from my wings.\n\n\"That fight wasn't as good as I thought it would be. I mean, if Ember can beat the Guardian, why can't she just win us the war?\" Scarlet questioned.\n\n\"Yeah, but I bet if he wanted to, there's like... A hundred percent chance the Guardian could totally kick her tail,\" Teal countered.\n\n\"Now, I'm sure you're all right, but you've seen the fight now,\" Neera interrupted, cutting off the eager babble as she jumped down and bundled them back with a few waves of her wings.\n\n\"But you made it sound like it was going to be epic!\" the water dragon protested.\n\n\"Plus, they only fought once!\" Scarlet added, arching her neck to stare at Neera.\n\n\"I promised a fight, I didn't specify how many or how entertaining,\" Neera corrected.\n\n\"Sorry if I made you look bad. I shouldn't have. You're everyone's last hope, not some dragon they need to see put on his tail,\" Ember apologised, brushing the dust from her wings.\n\n\"I know a few dragons who'd like to see me put on my tail,\" I sighed. \"Besides, maybe now they'll listen to you more; just remind them you beat me,\" I laughed.\n\n\"It's not that they don't listen, they're good chicks. It's just... We shouldn't have to teach such young ones how to fight. I only joined at five years because the academy put me into training. But I didn't join the order to teach younglings how to fare in battle. It's not what Pyro would have wanted either,\" she admitted, returning to the boulder on which she'd been perched.\n\n\"Well, if it's any consolation, you're both good teachers,\" I assured them, glancing back at Neera as she tended to the young dragons. \"Desperate times call for desperate measures, after all.\"\n\nShe looked cross at the suggestion, and for a moment, I was worried that she might direct her anger at me.\n\n\"Teaching orphaned hatchlings to fight isn't desperation,\" she growled.\n\nWhat did I expect? This is war? That darkness in my mind wasn't about to let this opportunity go unnoticed, and I could already sense it formulating ways to remind me of it.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I admitted.\n\n\"It's not your fault; Aries should have sent soldiers to defend the other settlements. Instead, he just kept us all in the dark while Valadran and Frostwrath burned,\" she spat resentfully. \"That was the real reason I agreed to do this, after Storm told me what happened to him and his brother in Ziliren...\" Her voice trailed off as she snarled. \"There is no way anyone, dragon or otherwise, should stand by and let this happen.\"\n\nI've never seen her like this, she's changed. I noted as the sound of paws beside me signalled Boltock's tentative approach.\n\n\"I still think you're right; you know?\" he told her, his eyes fixing on her for the briefest of moments.\n\nShe struggled to return the look as she nodded firmly.\n\n\"Thanks,\" was all the response he got, before an uncertain silence consumed the conversation.\n\n\"Hey, Bolty, you want to come lend me a paw?\" Neera called, breaking the silence and drawing his attention. \"We're going to the dining hall, morning training is over, remember?\" she proposed.\n\nHer reminder prompted him to follow, waving a rushed goodbye to Ember and I before disappearing. Even so, I did little more than wait while snowy drizzle settled on my muzzle.\n\n\"Well, I should probably get cleaned up before the council tonight,\" Ember proposed, looking over her armour as she jumped down from her perch.\n\nI don't want to think about the Elders' council after our last meeting. I inwardly hissed, yet nodded.\n\n\"See you later!\" she called as she sidled away.\n\nI was alone in the drizzle, and it was some time before I finally looked up at the training grounds. The rain was becoming too heavy for some, the only ones who withstood it were those attempting to teach water elementals how not to get wet.\n\n\"There you are!\" I recognised the new voice immediately.\n\nAdmittedly, she looked rather odd amidst all of the other creatures that passed her by, exchanging strange glances and muttering as they did so. I knew that should bother me far more than it did, but in that moment, I was just glad she was here.\n\n\"Spirits above, I've been looking everywhere for you. Did you forget that you and that hawk are the only ones I can talk to around here?\" Tarwin asked.\n\n\"No, I didn't forget, I just got distracted,\" I explained, warding off several scowling dragons with a stern glance.\n\nThe fact that such a distraction had been days of wallowing in pity wasn't something I wanted to admit, however. So I let her go on.\n\n\"Well, if it means anything, I've been tending Yorik for the past few days. Whatever those birds gave him seems to be working, even if all they do is stare at us like children,\" she explained with a huff. \"I've been worried about you too, but after that black dragon attacked, you just disappeared,\" she added.\n\nI nervously flexed my wings and sighed.\n\n\"Like I said, I'm not like other dragons, I'm not so easy to kill.\" She looked horrified that she hadn't asked more about it the first time.\n\n\"You do realise how strange all of this is, right?\" she asked, placing a hand on my helmet.\n\n\"Well, I've known exactly what you were saying since the beginning, so for me it's not that new,\" I reassured her.\n\n\"I'd a feeling that was the case,\" she confirmed. \"Although your voice is strange,\" she laughed. \"And now that we're not being hunted, I have a lot of questions for you, mister.\"\n\nAs much as I wanted to direct her to Apollo, knowing he'd answer every question under the stars, there was no way she'd want anyone other than me to explain about this new and unknown reality.\n\n\"I've no idea where to start,\" I stated, looking about as if the sight before me would somehow present the answers.\n\n\"You're not doing anything for a while, are you?\" she asked, and I shook my head, as she drew her bow. \"Good, then we're going hunting!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Finding a way off the island from the ground wasn't as easy as I'd anticipated, the roads and winding routes were difficult to navigate amidst the mass of tents and bodies. Yet Tarwin's tenacity was a trait she'd not lost, and eventually the long stretch of stone that led back toward the lakeside came into view. A pair of stone stumps that I guess had once been towers sat on either side, and despite the lack of obvious guards, I'd no doubt we were being watched as we moved out from the camp.\n\nTarwin clearly wasn't worried, and as we finally reached the forest on the opposite side of the lake, I tried to imagine life as it had once been.\n\nYears of hunting in the woods, all that time working together and being the best team in the village. All without speaking a word or having the knowledge of the world about us.\n\nOnly thing that's not changed is my willingness to follow her. I thought as she stopped, and so did I.\n\nThe gentle patter of rain and the light rustling of pine trees broke the silence. She carefully drew her bow, pulling back the string and releasing an arrow. The subsequent rustle and sharp caw heralded contact before a rather large bird fell from the trees.\n\n\"Good shot,\" I complemented, the playful humour in my voice feeling more than a little strange.\n\nTalking like this... Nothing's ever going to be the same again. I thought, as she looked back, brushing hair from her eyes.\n\n\"Thank you, let's hope it's something good,\" she replied, recovering the arrow.\n\n\"I hope you haven't forgotten how to catch things either?\" she asked in the way a teacher would before an important test.\n\n\"I haven't forgotten anything,\" I assured, straightening myself up.\n\nI remained true to that statement over the next few hours, although she made me all too aware that blazing claws weren't the correct weapons for catching prey, nor was dragonfire. Thinking back to a time I myself had made the same statement to my friends, made the light scolding a little embarrassing.\n\nEven so, she wasn't one to misuse my new abilities, and when our hunt finally concluded, a cooked meal was far easier to obtain. The sky had cleared slightly by the time we found ourselves beside the smooth, grassy banks of a small river, surrounded by ruined walls and crooked trees breaking up the grassy slopes. The winter sun had finally broken through, spreading its light, making the rushing water shimmer like liquid gold as it bubbled and surged over boulders.\n\n\"You know, I never caught this many after you left?\" she mentioned, motioning to the pheasants and rabbits piled up next to her. \"Although, I won't lie, I would have killed to get my hands on some more of those boom-orbs. They have their uses, that's for sure,\" she added mischievously.\n\n\"I haven't caught anything since leaving,\" I added, recalling the few times I'd actually hunted without her.\n\n\"Well, you could have fooled me,\" she responded, leaning back and taking a charred leg from the sizzling carcass.\n\nI looked down at the singed bird, licks of white flame still flickering from the burnt grass around it.\n\n\"I think there are a lot of races I've fooled,\" I admitted, and she gave me a perplexed look.\n\n\"Why's that? I thought you said they all trusted you, that's why they're all here, isn't it?\" she asked.\n\n\"They only trust what they want me to be. Like I said, I'm not like them, and I cannot explain everything because I don't know the full truth, but they're depending on me to be something I can't be,\" I added, the joy of being out in the wilderness with my closest friend all but exhausted by the reality check.\n\nTossing aside the small bone of her meal, Tarwin shuffled closer.\n\n\"Blaze, a few days ago, I'd no idea any of this existed. Well, I knew dragons, dark wizards and monsters were real, but nothing like this.\" She motioned back in the direction of the camp. \"It always makes me wonder why Father was so desperate to protect me from it.\"\n\nI picked up the courage to look at her, even if the mention of him made me want to crawl into the yawning hole inside my chest.\n\n\"Not that it did him much good,\" she continued in a whisper, tossing a small pebble into the river.\n\n\"No, if he had any idea of what was out here, he was right to be concerned,\" I replied.\n\nShe looked up, the pain in her eyes showing how many times someone had told her the same thing, only for her to refuse to believe it.\n\nComing from me, she can't ignore it. Can she?\n\n\"And you think that about your friends, do you?\" she asked.\n\nIt took a moment for an answer to come to me, and even then, all I could do was shake my head in disapproval while her expression grew more serious.\n\n\"I know he was just trying to keep us safe, but...\" she began.\n\n\"He was trying to keep you safe, not me,\" I cut her off, and once again, her anger seemed fuelled by the idea. \"I know he never trusted me, any more than he did the world. Yorik is the same, but sometimes I think not trusting anything is the best way to survive out here.\"\n\n\"Is that why you're afraid to do what they need you to do? Is it because you don't trust them?\" she asked deliberately.\n\nDo I trust them? Her question raced around my mind, but ultimately, I knew the answer.\n\n\"I don't trust myself, because I can't be sure what will happen if I make any mistakes,\" I corrected, standing up and moving to the riverbank as the surge of reality felt like a kick in the tail.\n\n\"So that's why you remind me of him,\" she observed, raising her hand to her chin.\n\n\"The moment I heard your voice, you reminded me of Father. Although you sound nothing like him, now I can see why. The way you act and talk, you're not so different,\" she elaborated, and the idea swiftly eased my racing mind despite my avatar's instant attempt to weaponise it.\n\nShe's right, I hardly protect my friends in a different way. But is that a good or a bad thing? Letting out a shallow breath, I ruffled my wings.\n\n\"Blaze,\" she continued, \"out here I think I'm one of the leading experts on being different. Back home, we always thought we were in charge, and I thought I knew everything about the world when really, I was only part of the smallest, most pathetic group to live in it,\" she admitted, shuffling over and crouching beside me.\n\n\"Tarwin, you're far from pathetic,\" I assured her, forging a smile across her face.\n\n\"Blaze, we were afraid of what we'd forgotten, and now that it's finally come back to us, we're ignorant of it. Father told me there was nothing but danger in the world, and yes, he was right, but he used that to hide the fact that our people had given up long ago,\" she went on, placing her hand on top of my helmet.\n\n\"Don't give up, because I know this world we've hidden from needs you,\" she finished, wrapping me in a hug.\n\n\"This world used to be a smaller place,\" I muttered as she released me and leaned back.\n\n\"I know, but it grew a whole lot the day I found you.\"\n\nI looked at her, allowing the armour encasing my head to slide away over my neck. All of the loss and sadness I'd suffered without her focused into one moment as I hugged her back.\n\n\"Then, for me, it could never have been any better,\" I assured her as she brushed a hand over the back of my neck.\n\nI'd no idea whether she could hear the words without my helmet, but it was clear that neither of us had to say anything more. As truthful as her words were, they didn't change the fact that, at dawn, I'd have to lead my friends into battle.\n\n\"Come on, it'll be dark soon, we should be getting back,\" she suggested, standing up and looking to the darkening sky.\n\n\"I know, the council is holding the last war meeting tonight,\" I informed her as my helmet slid back into place.\n\n\"Well, that makes it all the more important,\" she declared, motioning for me to follow as she moved back towards the camp."
            },
            {
                "title": "Council of the Elders",
                "text": "On the way back it seemed the camp guards weren't so dismissive, and the sound of beating wings signalled the approach of a larger dragon.\n\n\"Good, I've been looking all over for you,\" Soaren proclaimed, words battling through exhaustion as he straightened himself. \"The order master and Elders request your presence at tonight's council, you and your friends are all to attend,\" he explained.\n\n\"What about her, she's my friend?\" I asked, motioning at Tarwin.\n\nThe look on her face told me she'd heard; it was a look of pride. Soaren glanced between us, as if forced into a position not detailed in his orders.\n\n\"I am sure the order master will see fit to oblige your request, bring the mordrin, if you wish,\" he sighed, turning away.\n\n\"Her name's Tarwin,\" I corrected, but he simply grumbled to himself as he departed.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Tarwin whispered.\n\n\"Not everyone around here has given up on you, besides, even if they did, you'd be the last person I'd give up on.\"\n\n\"Say that to me again when you're with your blue friend,\" she teased.\n\nVerbally chastised, I blinked in confusion, before she waved goodbye and urged me to take off after Soaren.\n\n\"Boltock and the faldron will meet you there. Ember is already inside,\" the air dragon instructed, but his words were almost lost to the currents of my mind as much as they were the wind.\n\n\"What about Risha?\" I asked, the absence of her name the only thing I picked up on.\n\nHe banked right, toward the keep as the larger of the tents began to pass by beneath us.\n\n\"I'm sure she'll be there too,\" he added.\n\nThe memory of her last words and her current feelings made me question that, and my eyes fixed on the vast tent bearing the healing glyph of the water order.\n\n\"I'm going to go find her,\" I argued, banking away. \"You'll have to tell Zephyra that every race in the camp is coming, and I mean everyone!\" I added before he could question.\n\nNot that I'll listen if he objects. His expression telling me he knew as much. He's more like his order master than he knows.\n\n\"Very well, but be quick, and be quicker if your friend has already left!\" he insisted begrudgingly, flying off toward the ruined keep.\n\nI took him up on that last request as I dropped in front of the healing tent and stepped inside. A multitude of eyes watched me, be they dragon or otherwise. I didn't pay them much attention as I glanced about, catching no sign of Risha.\n\nMaybe she's already gone on without me? I thought as I noticed a familiar face amidst the crowd.\n\nThe wounded man lying upon the bed of moss glared at me as I cautiously approached. Tarwin had been right when she'd said whatever treatment Yorik had received was working, but that didn't change the fact he'd once thought to kill me. Despite his stern expression, he looked incredibly weak.\n\nI expect he doesn't want any of his kind to see him this way. Otherwise, Tarwin would have probably been here rather than with me.\n\n\"You, I know you can understand me,\" he coughed, and several griffins lifted their heads.\n\n\"I think you've always known I can,\" I offered, and what I thought would be shock was replaced by a laugh.\n\nIt was clear he'd accepted this strange new world for what it was. Just as I'd done.\n\n\"No, that was Tarwin's thing, that's why she's in charge,\" he responded, words broken by slight rasping.\n\n\"She's in charge because of her father, not anything to do with me,\" I stated firmly, but once again, he laughed.\n\n\"Obviously she knows far more about you than you know of her then,\" he answered, the suggestion irritating and intriguing me in equal measure.\n\n\"I was supposed to be in charge. After she got rid of you, her father deemed her ready to marry and I was to become the new chief,\" he began, immediately turning my thoughts to disbelief, anger and a cold, crushing realisation that such a thing wasn't so farfetched.\n\nTarwin hasn't told me any of this. What else hasn't she told me? I almost felt like I could rip the man's throat out for treating my friend in such a way. How dare he show her so little respect!\n\nBut what would that achieve other than turn me into the monster his kind has always feared? The more rational part of me interjected.\n\n\"But who should show up days before such a union could pass?\" Yorik went on knowingly, his glare growing sharper.\n\n\"She'd never have done anything like that,\" I insisted, but he shook his head.\n\n\"I think without you she'd have done anything her village needed, no matter how much she didn't want to,\" he countered.\n\nI was on the verge of growling, when his expression softened.\n\n\"I see now that such things may have been hasty. Don't think that I don't blame you for what became of the village, but those things matter little now.\"\n\nHe's not wrong, it was my fault. The memory of my old home in flames sent a jab of pain through me.\n\n\"You saved her that day, dragged her from the fire and then she saved us. The first time I saw you, I thought everything she said was stupid. I now know that was the narrow-minded view of a blind man,\" he confessed with a look confirming he'd deny ever having said this if I ever told anyone else.\n\nI glanced down at my paws, battling not to allow Mordrakk access to his words, lest he turn them against me.\n\n\"I fear that, if not for her, we'd still be stuck in the mountains, preyed upon by beast-men until we were nothing but scraps and bones,\" he went on.\n\n\"Who says this is any better?\" I asked.\n\n\"I do, and not because I trust you, but because she trusts you \u2013 enough to put the lives of our people in your care. Her judgment, no matter how strange, has never led us astray,\" he continued bluntly. \"We were to be married, and whether I liked it or not, I have to trust her,\" he added, words cut off by a cough.\n\nThinking about that, I knew I should trust Risha in the same way.\n\nBut it's not that I don't trust her \u2013 I just don't want to hurt her.\n\n\"There is the one thing I never saw in you until that night in the fire,\" Yorik added.\n\n\"And what's that?\" I asked.\n\n\"That you'd do anything to protect her.\"\n\nHe's right; I'd do the same for any of them. Though he spoke as if he almost demanded it as a promise.\n\n\"Blaze?\" Risha's voice broke my concentration, her tone slightly touched by confusion.\n\nI looked back to see her standing behind me as she asked.\n\n\"What are you doing here, shouldn't you be at the council?\"\n\n\"I came back to get you. I mean, after everything I said, I just\u2026\" My voice trailed off, and her look became sympathetic. \"Well, when it comes to talking, I still think you're far better at it than I am,\" I admitted finally.\n\n\"At least I know that's not a lie,\" she joked, moving away with a flick of her tail.\n\nI raised a forepaw to my muzzle, where the fin at the tip of her tail had caught me.\n\n\"Look, Risha, I\u2026\" My words died once again.\n\nThe truth's there and yet so far away. Just tell her, tell her! My mind screamed. She's your best friend, you can trust her more than anyone.\n\nThe confession was more distant than the stars, and Mordrakk sought to ensure it stayed that way. Meanwhile, she glanced back, hanging on my fading words, before shaking her head.\n\n\"You're right, we should be going, the council will be meeting soon,\" she proposed, changing the subject, moving toward the exit.\n\nI watched her while the truth burned like hot ashes in my muzzle, and swallowing my confession, I followed hesitantly.\n\nTrust is a two-way thing, and if Yorik's right, I have to trust her. But I promised to never let anything hurt her again too.\n\nMy mind craved a distraction from the mental conflict, and glancing skyward, I focused on the flocks of winged creatures passing overhead. The sounds of the camp preparing for the next day's battle drifted to my ears on the cold wind as my gaze panned over, eventually falling on the keep. Meanwhile, Risha looked back, her concern visible no matter how stoic she tried to appear.\n\n\"I take it you're not going to try and stop this?\" she asked.\n\nUncertainty filled my mind. I didn't want to take them into battle, that was true, but would it stop them flying into a war without me?\n\nThat's hardly any better. If I'm there, I can keep them safe at least.\n\nAt the back of my mind, I already knew the answer, and the same thoughts that had allowed me to hide away for weeks and justify my desertion, were busy working on a way to save them, without risking their lives or any other than my own.\n\n\"It doesn't matter what anyone says, I'll never be fond of this idea,\" I admitted.\n\n\"I don't think anyone here is fond of the idea,\" she reasoned.\n\nI stared at her, knowing there were a number of responses she wanted to hear, and yet I was fully aware that she expected only one, the one that left my muzzle.\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\nThe look she gave confirmed my suspicions. She sighed, opening her muzzle to respond, but I raised a forepaw to stop her.\n\n\"I don't need to know,\" I informed bluntly. \"I can't stop you; you were right. I know I should never have come back, knowing I'd have to risk your lives,\" I confessed. \"I just want you to know I'd never do anything to hurt any of you.\"\n\n\"I never thought that. I know you'd always do best by us,\" she assured.\n\n\"I just hope I don't come to regret anything,\" I uttered, shying away.\n\n\"You won't, I promise,\" she replied sincerely.\n\nAs much as I appreciated her words, I knew she couldn't stick to them indefinitely, much like my own promises.\n\nShe has no idea how tomorrow will play out; this could be our last night alive.\n\n\"There you are! Come on, they won't wait all night,\" Boltock's exasperated voice called as he appeared from the crowd.\n\nThe moment he made his presence known; the intensity of our conversation dispersed.\n\n\"Well, you're not in there either,\" his sister commented, drawing the green dragon to a halt.\n\n\"I wasn't going to turn up alone, and I found you two before Neera,\" he answered defensively, turning his tail to her and marching toward the keep before she could respond.\n\nEven so, her promise held its station at the forefront of my thoughts, and my weak smile broadened.\n\n\"About tomorrow... I... I'll hold you to that, you know.\"\n\n\"I have no doubt about it,\" she responded with a wry smile, before the two of us followed her brother."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "The meeting room for the council sat beneath the main keep, accessed by a large set of stairs below the wall. The remnants of a metal gate, shaped to mimic water, sat within a vast archway, while formidable icicles loomed down like clusters of frozen bats.\n\nLike the rest of the strange ruins, it was similar to those I'd seen in Valcador, although it was worn and rusted. The tower of the main keep loomed above it, illuminated by flaming braziers and torches, as were the two smaller flanking towers, each bearing a griffin guard upon their ruined summit. While small gullies of what may have once been water features snaked down on either side of the stairs as they descended.\n\nI tried to imagine its former beauty, adding running water to my mental image. The opportunity to take in more of the detail was stolen when we reached the bottom of the stairs, and found ourselves amidst a crowd of winged creatures.\n\n\"There you are,\" a voice cut through the noise.\n\nBefore I could determine who'd called out, I redirected my eyes to Neera and Ember. The latter of the pair stood beside one of the larger doors, while the other tried to enter without drawing too much attention.\n\n\"Glad to see you could find this place,\" Ember joked.\n\n\"You can say that again,\" Neera added as she straightened her cobbled armour and ruffled feathers.\n\n\"Forget about being noticed, it's hard to avoid being stepped on down here!\" she flustered indignantly.\n\nHer actions drew a laugh from Boltock, which seemed to be more like a way to avoid having to acknowledge Ember, though he clearly wanted to.\n\n\"So, I see you're all together at last,\" an older, instantly recognisable voice announced.\n\nAll eyes turned as Vulkaine strode into view. Behind him, the other Elders made their way through the crowd, everyone stepping aside to allow them passage as they exchanged a set of silent glances and nodded to their fiery companion.\n\n\"Elements of fire, water, earth and air,\" he stated wisely, looking to us all respectively, even encompassing Neera.\n\nI guess her fire is at least half air, after all. I reasoned, glad to see someone didn't have a problem including her in all of this.\n\nAs expected, the faldron radiated pride, while the others bowed their heads in recognition as their elements were stated. I did no such thing. Instead, I locked eyes with his clouded spheres, instantly recognising the centuries of wisdom, assuring him he was doing the right thing.\n\nIs it really the right thing, or the necessary thing? Before either of us could break the silence, another voice cast itself between us.\n\n\"It is good to meet you again, Guardian.\" It was a gruff, hardy and vaguely familiar sound.\n\nWe all turned, and my memory put a name to its owner, a large black griffin, one of his eyes clouded and crossed by a deep scar. Plated metal armour trimmed with gold adorned his body, distinguishing it from those of the formidable-looking griffins forming his guard. Without his throne, King Halfbeak appeared slightly less intimidating, though he still didn't look like a creature I wanted to cross. Even so, raising a talon up against his feathered breast, he lowered his head in a subtle bow.\n\n\"It's good to meet your friends once more too,\" he added, looking at Risha with a particular hint of respect.\n\n\"Good to see you again too, your highness,\" I offered, motioning toward him with a forepaw.\n\n\"I was glad to hear of your triumph over the Dark Guardian. Even if the news came almost three seasons later than anticipated,\" he commented, waving a talon in emphasis.\n\nI smiled, but with no clear response presenting itself, I remained awkwardly silent.\n\n\"Nevertheless, it would seem my efforts were not in vain, nor were yours. Perhaps the old alliance does indeed have more standing than we thought,\" he said, glancing at Vulkaine.\n\nThe older dragon nodded, but at that moment, his eyes fixed on something beyond me. The moment I noticed, I turned to see another figure appear beside the Elder, and the difference between them was incredible. Clopping hooves, hidden under a regal blue robe covering their white feathers and haunches, confirmed it was a hippogriff.\n\nTheir eyes glistened like the calm sky of a spring day, betrayed by a sharp, black beak. Instead of the armour worn by their half-feline counterpart, they wore a light frame of golden rings, necklaces and jewels, while a robe covered their rear legs and equine tail. King Halfbeak gave a subtle nod as the hippogriff noticed him, although their focus was fixed on me.\n\n\"Guardian, may I introduce Queen Eirian Silverwing, ruler of the hippogriff realm of Mistwind,\" Vulkaine continued, putting a name to the majestic creature while motioning toward her with a forepaw.\n\nI gave a subtle bow, as did the others. Unlike the griffins, Eirian seemed far more interested in me than any formalities.\n\n\"So this is the one of which the Sigils' legend spoke, the one of unnatural blood, the reason we are all here?\" she asked curiously, her divine voice almost putting Zephyra's regal tone to shame.\n\nSo why does that feel more like a statement than a question? I thought as I nodded, somewhat anxious that I'd pollute the smoothness of her voice with my own.\n\n\"Yes, your majesty,\" I responded.\n\nShe closed her eyes and raised a foreleg, bowing in a way so fluent it made every other form of respect I'd seen look like a rockslide.\n\n\"I am pleased to say that the pleasure is mine, and on behalf of the rest of my kind, I must express my utmost respect.\"\n\nWhen she raised her head, something nudged at my side, and I saw Risha motioning at the queen.\n\n\"T\u2013Thank you, your majesty,\" I stuttered, awkwardly repeating myself.\n\n\"The lands to the south have long waited for the day the creators would return, and not to a griffin after all,\" she mused, a smile parting her beak as she glanced at Halfbeak.\n\nIt took a moment for him to realise she was addressing him, at which point he huffed.\n\n\"I merely hoped, Eirian. If the creators decree that he be a leatherwing, then so be it,\" he responded, puffing up his feathers.\n\nShe nodded and turned to Vulkaine.\n\n\"My pleasure, Elder one.\"\n\nThe Fire Elder nodded, the first smile I'd seen upon his face, appearing for the briefest moment, before fading as Eirian turned away.\n\n\"Guardian, may silver mist's safe shroud find you,\" she added, before vanishing into the crowd.\n\nWhat just happened, it's like she had me in a trance!? I sat there, stunned at the compliment.\n\n\"Long-feathered spell-spitters,\" Halfbeak muttered under his breath. \"I shall take my leave, farewell, Guardian,\" he finished, nodding to the Elder and I before following after her with his guards.\n\nIs it just me, or is there some awkward tension there? Regardless, silence endured until a stunned Neera interrupted.\n\n\"Do all royals treat you that way?\" I caught her looking at me like I were a king.\n\n\"You have no idea,\" Risha answered for me.\n\n\"All but my own kind's, it seems,\" I sighed.\n\n\"I wouldn't be so quick to judge the one who has forsaken us all, for the Sovereign still has a part to play in this,\" Vulkaine stated wisely. \"But such things do not matter right now. Now come, we should begin,\" he finished, waving a foreclaw toward the hall.\n\nThe others followed gradually while I paused, the gravity of our situation gripping my mind as the confusion of my recent introductions faded.\n\n\"Blaze!\" a rushed voice announced, as if trying to steal my attention before I moved on.\n\nTarwin stood with a few other humans, and without a thought, I darted over.\n\n\"I still haven't quite gotten used to not understanding what is being said around here,\" she panted, crouching down to meet me. \"Not to mention your leaders want to meet in the hardest place to find!\" she stated, before standing to move on, muttering to herself. \"This is going to be the strangest night of my life.\"\n\nAs they shuffled by, a final few stragglers edged past. Before finally, I was surprised to see Zephyra.\n\n\"I thought you'd have been first to enter?\" I suggested as she approached.\n\nShe smiled, waving a dismissive forepaw.\n\n\"I thought you were the last one to have any expectations?\" she replied. \"No, this is the Elders' council \u2013 and yours,\" she added respectfully. \"So, with that in mind, shall we enter?\"\n\nIf I say no, will she stay out here with me? Alternatively, if I ask her to call this off and let things take their course, will she do so? That dark reality flashed through my mind, and I knew it was something I couldn't do. No that future, that's not ours.\n\n\"This is how every end that came before began,\" Mordrakk boasted.\n\nI gritted my teeth, nodded slowly to Zephyra and ignored my mind's dark words.\n\nThen let this end be the end of that. I thought as we entered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Narrow grooves and intricate markings, reminiscent of those I'd seen outside, covered the corridor beyond the archway and a pair of large wooden doors. As we passed through, the chamber opened out and I noticed it was slightly reminiscent of Dardien's elder chamber. The smoothed outer walls rose up to a roughly domed, more natural-looking ceiling, while the architecture of the room appeared to be older than the ruins above.\n\nBrazier light illuminated the space, and at its centre, a long table provided a sitting space for the few bodies it could accommodate. At the far end, the wall appeared to fall down into an ordinary cave, adding the sound of running water to the orchestra of noises.\n\nGriffins occupied the seats closest to me. King Halfbeak perched on a large stone pedestal protruding from the crowd. The hippogriffs sat opposite, with Queen Eirian sat upon a similarly large pillar. Beside them, were the humans, closest to the rear of the chamber and lacking a pillar altogether.\n\nI was unsure how to feel about that, yet was at least sure I should be glad they were here at all.\n\nAfter being outcasts for so long, I can't expect them to be welcomed with complete open arms so soon, can I?\n\nRegardless, the assembly all stood as Zephyra made her way to a throne on the far side, and except for the sound of gushing water, the cavern fell silent.\n\nFour large pedestals rose up and curved about the back of her, separating the chamber from the cavern below. The space before them was reminiscent of the platform on which I'd stood before the Elders upon our first meeting, while a fifth forward podium loomed over the table and crowd. More strange markings decorated its surface and the more natural features. Yet both dripping sediment and vegetation had taken their toll, fading the ancient symbols.\n\nThis place is older than I thought. I noted as my attention moved to the Elders sat upon each pillar. I wonder if they really care as much as they say.\n\nI moved around to the larger set of seats behind the podium, one of which was an old, stone throne. I noticed my friends, the Cartographer and his phoenix among them, while Apollo was perched beside the assembly and Soaren stood opposite like a silver extension of the ancient stonework. Risha and I exchanged glances, and I noted the seat next to her was vacant.\n\nDon't need to guess who she saved that for. I thought, happy she'd not completely given up on me.\n\n\"Don't tell me you got lost,\" Neera joked, seemingly proud of her position at the most esteemed end of the chamber.\n\nI shook my head and smiled, taking some relief from the break in the serious mood.\n\n\"We were beginning to wonder the same,\" the Cartographer muttered from across the arch to my right, giving me a knowing look as his second voice sniggered.\n\n\"Who's that?\" Risha asked, peering round me to see the old dragon.\n\n\"A friend... Well, an acquaintance,\" I muttered, taking the seat next to her.\n\nHe looked pained, his eyes fixing on me in particular before glancing back to her and smiling.\n\n\"We are the Cartographer, at your service,\" he announced, the phoenix shifting to balance on his staff as he offered a subtle bow.\n\nRisha looked as if she were trying to accept the kind greeting the way she would with any other dragon, and yet the confusion on her face grew somewhat.\n\n\"Cartographer of what?\" she asked.\n\n\"Don't ask,\" I interrupted, and to my surprise, he looked proud that I'd done so.\n\nBy the creators, I'll never understand that dragon.\n\nThe sudden appearance of Zephyra from the archway silenced our conversation. She moved between us to take her place on the foremost podium, nodding to Apollo.\n\n\"Would you do me the honour of translation?\" she requested, and without hesitation, he hovered forward, positioning himself above the central table.\n\n\"Greetings, noble races of the old alliance, my fellow leaders,\" the princess began while the construct translated and amplified her voice for all to hear.\n\nThe room fell silent and all eyes fixed on the princess, yet she looked at Apollo, and with a flash of light from his eyes, the golden hawk cast a flickering projection over the table. Like in the Taldran temple, it formed a shimmering image. Only instead of other worlds, what I assumed were the ruins above Dardien materialise before everyone. It was sad that the first things I identified were the cankerous orkin structures and the swarms of beasts coating the place like a carpet of insects.\n\nHow can anyone deny that this isn't going to work? I thought, noticing that even those most stoic were seemingly unsettled by the orkins' numbers.\n\n\"This is the most recent assessment of the Brazen Horde's occupation of Andruid,\" Zephyra declared. \"As you can see, it is a situation unlike any since the treachery of the Guardians. This is why you have all been called here, for this night we must once again decide how to act against this evil, lest it claim us all.\"\n\nA feeling of dread washed over me \u2013 this is it; this is real and there's no turning back.\n\nA new, more respectful silence gripped the chamber as each pair of eyes focused on Zephyra, many seeming to judge the young leader, especially the griffins. The gem-like eyes of the hippogriffs gleamed with more of a sense of pride and ancient tradition, while Tarwin and the rest of her kind just looked daunted.\n\nIt was at that point, I realised, that beside the Elders, the Cartographer, and maybe a few older dragons, none of them had ever attended such a meeting. It may have been because of that notion that the sense of remaining true to a long-forgotten treaty lay so heavy in the air, but Zephyra ignored the tension as she continued.\n\n\"The plains to the south have become infested by the enemy. The ruins have become a fortress for the brazen warlord and his commanders, the forces of which, I am pained to say, number in the tens of thousands, if not more.\"\n\nA chorus of hushed tones and voices filled the air as advisors whispered into the ears of their leaders and higher-ranking soldiers muttered about the dire situation. On the griffin side, the stamping of armoured talons cut off the whispering as a random featherwing spoke up.\n\n\"Maybe the ancestors should have been wiser than to leave the defence of the city to your kind alone.\"\n\nWithin moments, more voices rallied about the accusation.\n\n\"Indeed! Leatherwings have always been arrogant!\"\n\n\"You'd never slay a single orkin, unless it was within your own nests,\" another griffin added.\n\n\"I did not think your kind would be one to accuse others of arrogance,\" a hippogriff cut in as she stood up, and all avian eyes instantly set upon each other.\n\n\"And what would you know about any of this, you haven't set a claw north of the cursed lands in over a hundred years!?\" a griffin challenged, causing several hippogriffs to scowl and puff up their feathered chests.\n\n\"I will have you know that the world does not revolve about the northern lands,\" another hippogriff stated. \"The south and east bear many dangers you are lucky to be ignorant of.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe you should have stayed down there with the rest of those who abandoned the old alliance,\" a griffin retorted swiftly.\n\n\"The notable word there is old. This alliance has not been called upon in our lifetime, nor has it within those of two generations,\" one hippogriff cleverly replied.\n\nThey seemed to have their verbal adversaries beaten at that, and in their defeat, the griffins turned toward the princess.\n\n\"And what of your kind, what do leatherwings have to say on this matter?\"\n\n\"Indeed, your kind saw the passing of the last great age, surely you know more of this new plight?\" came more questions.\n\n\"Enough!\" a loud voice boomed, heralded by an almost godly stomp of metal talons.\n\n\"All of you remain silent. Senseless babbling will not see us closer to the orkins' defeat,\" Halfbeak declared, looming like thunder clouds atop his pedestal, the glare he shot the hippogriffs like lightning.\n\nThe queen of the avian-equines stood, waving her graceful wings to gently silence her restless subjects without a word.\n\n\"Indeed, he is right; we will make no progress this way.\" Eirian nodded at the griffin monarch, dismissing his glare with one of her own. \"We have waited long enough to make our move against the orkin, for if Dardien falls, nothing will stand between our enemy and the cursed lands.\"\n\nAn uneasy feeling fell over the room, a sensation only amplified as the hippogriff queen added.\n\n\"For should Mordrin's foulness rise again, there will be no hope of victory.\"\n\nA low grumble left Halfbeak's throat, yet even he seemed to fear those implications and both he, and the queen, turned their attention to Zephyra.\n\n\"There's also the situation involving your father. Dealing with this should have been his task to begin with,\" the King added, a clear hint of bitterness in his tone.\n\nZephyra collected herself and straightened. It was no surprise when her answer came.\n\n\"So it should. It is clear that Dardien's current Sovereign is unfit to rule. He points accusations of betrayal at his own subjects, to safeguard his crown. If we are to win the day, he will be relieved of his position,\" she admitted somewhat shamefully.\n\n\"And what of Dardien's armies?\" Queen Eirian asked, ushering an unsettled glance from both Halfbeak and Zephyra.\n\n\"What remains of our forces are stationed here, and as for those who remain in the city, we have no word. A small resistance force still battles within Andruid, but beyond that we cannot rely on Dardien's soldiers to aid us,\" the princess admitted, and a small, golden patch appeared upon Apollo's projection highlighting the band of armoured dragons trapped inside the city.\n\nThere's so few of them down there? I observed, heart dropping, as Mordrakk asked why I should save the dragons who'd betrayed me.\n\nBecause it would be the right thing to do but... My thoughts trailed off. How can I risk the lives of so many, to save so few? Heated arguments began anew around me.\n\n\"So tell me, how do you expect to face the armies of the Brazen Horde and those of Shadow Fen? Even with the Guardian's return, there are simply not enough wings,\" Halfbeak stated, glancing to Tarwin and the others before adding with uncertainty. \"Or arms.\"\n\nI sank back at the mention of my title, his statement compounding my fears and bringing to light how many lives would be lost if I didn't do something soon. Moreover, it was clear that Zephyra's resolve was also beginning to waiver, as she glanced from face to face with uncertainty. All the while, Apollo desperately tried to keep track of every word as he darted from left to right in an effort to translate everything. I heard the Cartographer huff and saw him lean forward, resting his head upon his staff.\n\n\"There's no longer any respect in the world \u2013 and they wonder why darkness flourishes,\" he muttered, glancing at me.\n\nHe sounds like Mordrakk. In that moment of chaos, it was hard to stop the dark image of my mind forming over the old dragon as I wished I could simply fall through my seat into the cave below.\n\nThis is exactly what he told me would happen!\n\nThe arguments went on until, with a booming roar, a storm of red-hot flame filled the roof of the cave, causing the rock to hiss and glow.\n\n\"Silence!\" Vulkaine boomed, drawing all eyes toward him and his Elder companions. \"Your arguments are meaningless; your fear is simply another weapon our enemies will use to their advantage.\"\n\nDespite a few disgruntled looks from the griffins, and a look of frustration for the intervention having taken so long from the hippogriffs, everyone sank back into their seats. Meanwhile, Vulkaine's faded eyes scoured the room, before he folded his wings and looked down at Zephyra.\n\n\"Your highness, if you please,\" he proposed, and she nodded, stepping back with a regal bow into the archway between the Cartographer and I.\n\n\"Good job,\" I whispered to the princess as Vulkaine swooped down onto the podium in her place.\n\nZephyra smiled, and nodded, while I could see the Cartographer appeared to share my adoration.\n\nNot everyone is against her. She's worth ten of every other king and queen in here as far as I'm concerned. I thought, as Vulkaine addressed the gathering.\n\n\"To confirm the princess's words, yes, there is an army out there whose numbers vastly exceed our own. Nevertheless, they are a crude mockery of the noble kind they once were, and they are now nothing but savages.\" There was a series of grunts and nods at that statement, and the Elder paused for a moment before going on.\n\n\"Long ago, this alliance stood for peace and tranquillity in the world, enduring for many an age before the Guardians were challenged. But we defeated that age of darkness, and I doubt that you would dishonour your ancestors' sacrifice to make this world a better place by letting such cruel and deceitful creatures claim it for themselves while you sit here squabbling.\"\n\nHis tone calmed, but his prompt to respect burned like a fiery passion within. The crowd shifted, and even the humans looked unsettled. Even so, it was Halfbeak who finally spoke up, bowing his head before the words left his beak.\n\n\"With all due respect, sentiment will not be enough to claim victory.\"\n\n\"Of this fact, we are aware. Yet we must ask that you trust in each other. For that is the reason we are here today.\" The Elder acknowledged after a brief moment of contemplation.\n\n\"I am sure you are all familiar with the legend the Sigils received from the creators themselves upon the eve of last age's twilight?\" he went on, and there was a series of muffled voices before most heads nodded in union. \"It states that when darkness falls, one of unnatural blood will be born among the nine great races of our ancestors' legacy.\"\n\nI felt the great weight of everyone's expectations fall upon me, and that desire to disappear grew stronger.\n\n\"This whole world is that legacy. The very ground upon which we stand, the water of the oceans, the air we breathe, everything the elements have sway over is that greatness, and through tyrannical ages past, our ancestors did not leave us so defenceless,\" he continued, and I felt those expectations shift, his revelation pausing the judgment I'd been dreading for so long.\n\nThat was at least until his eyes fell upon me.\n\n\"Guardian, if you would?\" The question was paralysing.\n\nHow can I stand before everyone here and act like I'm the hero? My mind raced, at least until each of my friends stood, and I realised the fire Elder wasn't just looking at me.\n\nSeeing them at my side was all the reassurance I needed, and we all took a step forward together. More whispers filled the air, forcing me to focus on my friends to block them out.\n\n\"Old friend?\" Vulkaine went on, and at the summons the Cartographer placed the Fallen Star before him with a dusty thud, and immediately the Elder set about finding the page he'd shown me.\n\n\"I am sure some of you have heard the legends regarding the elemental pillars, the foundations of all elemental magic that dwells within our world. As the descendants of our masters, dragon kind was bound to them, yet still the shards were shared amongst four of the nine races,\" the Elder elaborated, earning proud looks from the hippogriffs, and somewhat begrudging confusion from their half-feline counterparts.\n\n\"Only the leaders of each race were permitted to know of their true existence, unless more dire of circumstances arise,\" he explained, glancing knowingly at Queen Eirian.\n\n\"You speak as if the pillars are more than a legend. We had more reason to believe the Guardian would return than to put stock in the stories of magical crystals,\" Halfbeak scoffed, waving a talon dismissively.\n\n\"Quite the contrary, your highness, I think you will find a great many things are as far from legends as you or I,\" Vulkaine countered, pressing on despite the griffin's scowl. \"All living races still loyal to the alliance of the nine were called upon, Queen Eirian knows of this, her kind being the bearers of the pillar of air. The watchers of the water pillar are long forgotten, and those of earth long extinct.\"\n\nHalfbeak's expression stiffened further at that, as he pressed.\n\n\"So that of fire, you have it, don't you? It's in Dardien?\"At that, the fire Elder nodded, and the griffin king laughed bitterly.\n\n\"You had a power like that all this time and failed to utilise it?\" he growled.\n\nVulkaine nodded again, but before the royal featherwing could continue, the water Elder spoke.\n\n\"One cannot simply access the power within the pillars \u2013 only the founder of dragonkind herself and one other were ever able to open one without the use of a magic most dark. To enter any elemental realm, one must be worthy of Goldfire's legacy,\" she explained, and behind me I saw Zephyra shiver, glancing down at her foreclaws.\n\nShe doesn't think she's worth any more than I do? I thought, as I knew without a doubt, the Elders only needed me as Acrodan once had.\n\n\"And after eight hundred years, one of your kind hasn't been worthy of this? How do we know that this isn't just a show?\" Halfbeak replied caustically, the rest of his followers backing him up with a chorus of cheers.\n\n\"Not since the days of Aria has there been a dragon worthy of the golden flame, true,\" Vulkaine explained, unfazed as he glanced at me.\n\n\"Then the Guardian will open our salvation?\" Halfbeak asked.\n\n\"Would you prefer it were a griffin?\" Eirian's graceful voice interrupted, a sharp edge to her tone.\n\nThe feathering king scowled.\n\n\"I would prefer to know why we would waste so many lives in an unwinnable battle if our hopes rest solely upon one dragon,\" he countered.\n\nHe's right, how many will have to die? Even if I get this done as fast as I can, it'll be a blood bath!\n\nThe look in Risha's eyes showed that she knew exactly what I was thinking, but as I turned to ask the Elder, he spoke first.\n\n\"Because, as you know, the armies of the orkin are not our only enemy,\" he stated abruptly, and at the mention of some higher power, everyone fell silent.\n\n\"An evil greater than even the traitorous Guardians has returned, it hides behind the veil of the Brazen Horde, its dark agents manipulate the orkin and its ebon serpents kill wherever they wish. But I assure you that when the battle begins, the Darkness will no longer be able to hide,\" he stated, glancing over at Apollo.\n\nWithout a word, the construct steadied his hover and focused on the projected image as the Elder directed everyone's attention with a nod.\n\n\"As we know, the orkin are unaware of our location and our plans to attack. We have identified three strong positions within the city as well as an area of resistance from Dardien's defenders. If we can breach the outermost defences with an aerial assault, the most important thing will be to assassinate their leaders, leaving the rest to fall into anarchy. At that point, the true Darkness will have no choice but to battle in their stead,\" he began, the scenario playing out perfectly upon the projection as a series of golden spots and arrows.\n\n\"And what of the soldiers already in the city, could we not gain their assistance?\" Soaren questioned, his eyes fixed upon the marked area within the ruins.\n\n\"I agree, I will lead an elite force to aid the defenders. We will need as much of Dardien's support as we can muster, if we are to relieve my father of his position,\" Zephyra added, stepping up beside Soaren.\n\nIs it just me or do those two look at one another in an odd way? I observed.\n\nGlancing at the rest of the room, I noticed that while the other rulers still looked reluctant about what had been proposed, they nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Then there is but one task remaining: The Guardian and his wing must reach the temple, for it is beneath the elder chambers that the pillar is hidden,\" Vulkaine added, and once again, the idea of dragging my friends into battle was crushing.\n\nMordrakk's illusion watched from across the room, his fiery eyes visible from the shadows. Yet I said nothing of my thoughts as I recalled the pit in the Elders' chamber from the first day I'd arrived in Dardien.\n\nThat must be where it's hidden, that pit looked very deep. Assuming as much, I stepped up, looking down at the projection. But in the time it takes me to get down there... No, I have to do more, I have to stop the orkin first.\n\n\"I agree, but I get to kill Balgore, he bears armour that no blade but my own can match,\" I stated firmly, looking at the centre-most tower.\n\nEach pair of eyes peered at me as if I was about the only one in the room that no one dare question.\n\n\"So much for the secret passage,\" I heard the Cartographer mutter from behind me as Vulkaine turned.\n\nHe watched my friends and I closely, and I could sense a wave of uncertainty wash over them before he nodded.\n\nI'm hardly worth that level of respect, but if it gets me what I need, then so be it.\n\n\"Very well, it would seem a smaller sized wing will attract less attention; does anyone object to this?\" Vulkaine asked, glancing back to the crowd.\n\n\"No, my wings stand ready to do their part and die, should the time come,\" Eirian stated proudly, the rest of her kind mirroring her stoic pose.\n\n\"Very well, you have our support. My wings and Talon Guard will fly at your command. May this make for a better world, should we win the day,\" Halfbeak huffed, bowing his head respectfully. \"I just hope this elemental magic of yours is as potent as you claim.\"\n\n\"Hey! You're all talking about a city under a cliff, only accessible by flight. Spirits be damned if we are sitting this out, but you may notice that we've got no wings,\" Tarwin suddenly hollered, and my head rose at the sound of her voice, heralded by the bang of her father's axe against the table.\n\nA chamber full of the most powerful rulers and she shouts at them like fools. That's Tarwin, for sure.\n\nEveryone glanced back at her, but she stood firm, occasionally glancing to me while Apollo gave an interpretation of her words.\n\n\"It would seem your kind is as determined as you are stubborn. I admire your resilience,\" Vulkaine offered.\n\nTarwin glanced at him with an aura of understanding she'd reserved only for me all those winters past.\n\n\"I used to wonder why it was that the Dark Guardian of Mordrin endured for so long, and now I do not,\" he added with a knowing smile.\n\nYet despite Tarwin's insistence, no one really offered any solution.\n\nShe's right they certainly can't fly into Dardien with the rest of us. I thought, yet it was at that moment that Halfbeak finally spoke up.\n\n\"In honour of the old alliance and those that still stand by it, I will see that every soul willing to fight gets their due,\" the griffin told the Elders, his words encouraging Eirian to add her own agreement, before both the elderly dragon and Tarwin nodded.\n\n\"Very well, then, it is decided \u2013 tomorrow, on the eve of the longest night of water's season, we fly upon Dardien as our ancestors once did. May they smile upon us,\" Vulkaine finished, stepping back with a bow.\n\n\"See that your forces are prepared for battle at dawn, for soon thereafter, our fate will be decided once again,\" Zephyra added, and at that, the other rulers bowed and the crowds began to flow out of the chamber.\n\n\"Well, that was interesting,\" Boltock observed.\n\n\"I think I'll leave the politics to you guys,\" Neera added, inspecting her foreclaw as if that were far more important.\n\n\"Come on, we should all get out of here and rest. We'll need it,\" Ember advised sensibly as she began to walk out of the chamber.\n\nThere were no arguments, yet I waited for all of them to pass, before moving to Risha's side.\n\n\"I don't know if I can do it,\" I admitted, shying away from her gaze.\n\n\"Do what? What Vulkaine asked?\" she questioned.\n\n\"That pillar, if it's true. I know what it is, and if that was their plan all along, they're using me the same way Acrodan did,\" I told her.\n\nShe paused.\n\n\"If it's true, you'll be saving everyone, not dooming them like you think you did the last time,\" she assured me.\n\n\"I know, it's just... All this happened because I opened that sphere.\"\n\nNo all this happened because I failed. I still couldn't tell her the full truth.\n\n\"You did that to save us,\" she replied, not hiding the fact she was glad I'd chosen their lives all that time ago.\n\nWhat I'll not do to save any of them is beyond me, she knows that.\n\n\"I have to speak to them, there are some things I need to know. You go back to the nest, I'll catch up,\" I requested.\n\nInitially, she seemed reluctant to leave, but a moment later, she nodded, gently brushing my muzzle with her wing as she departed.\n\n\"Please don't go too far,\" she asked with a weak smile.\n\n\"I won't, I promise,\" I assured, nonetheless recalling how bad I was at keeping promises as I turned away.\n\n\"I suppose you're happy now, are you?\" I interjected suddenly, interrupting a conversation between Vulkaine and the Cartographer as I rounded on them.\n\nI caught Soaren and Zephyra glance back from the door as they departed, but neither of them intervened before vanishing. The only one who looked as if he may have something to add was Apollo, who was still slightly flustered from having to translate an entire argument.\n\nHe glanced at me, and as if reading my thoughts, said nothing, choosing instead to follow the princess and Soaren. The only dragons left to witness my frustration were the other Elders, yet a gesture from Vulkaine urged them to leave too.\n\n\"I'm starting to think you planned this whole war from the start,\" I accused the two remaining dragons.\n\nThey exchanged glances while the phoenix fluttered onto Vulkaine's horns, giving a coo that held a hint of dissatisfaction. I didn't even know that feeling was within the bird's range of emotions, but if it was, then such disapproval wasn't directed toward me as it peered down at its fiery master. Even so, the older dragon finally sighed.\n\n\"To wish for a war is a fool's choice, no matter the cause,\" he advised calmly.\n\nYeah, and even a fool would know that's true! My expression didn't soften one bit, but that didn't seem to surprise him.\n\n\"This darkness had been coming long before we knew of you,\" he said, \"but when you were found, we saw a chance to change that forever.\"\n\nSo I really am just a tool to everyone? I thought, and much to my frustration, there was no hint of shame or sympathy in his voice.\n\n\"Since the Guardian War, the world has stood shattered and segregated. The tension you just witnessed is a testament to how far we have fallen from the days of old,\" he continued.\n\n\"So why not just use this pillar to save them, surely there are other worthy dragons? Why not just use it like the last time you had to?\" I reasoned.\n\nVulkaine opened his muzzle to reply, but I dismissed his words with a wave of a forepaw and went on.\n\n\"So many have died because of what you failed to tell me, and tomorrow, many more will follow. If you'd told me about all of this on the day we met, it would have saved so much. Please don't say you didn't trust me, because everyone else trusted that stupid legend the moment they laid eyes on me,\" I snapped, closing in on Vulkaine with little regard for his larger size.\n\nHe and the Cartographer did nothing but look back at me, however, and I felt a strange sensation I was just playing into their claws even more.\n\n\"The elements are not weapons to be used so eagerly,\" the earth dragon interrupted, his first and most sensible voice taking the lead. \"Nor are those who command them. Only twice have their powers been called upon \u2013 once by Seraphine herself and again by Aria at the end of the Guardian War.\"\n\nI glanced between them, the expectance in their eyes no less than it had been the day on which we had met.\n\n\"And what of the amulet? You failed to mention that to anyone,\" I countered, unable to put Mordrakk's real plan into words as I added bluntly. \"You know that if he finds it, he'll kill us all?\"\n\n\"That's for you to decide,\" Vulkaine responded.\n\n\"No, it isn't enough. Even if you did convince the others, you can't expect any of this to work,\" I insisted, recoiling like an angry viper.\n\nI felt my mind freeze as Mordrakk's image wrapped itself about my thoughts, as if he were a snake ready to suffocate its prey. The action forced the truth to the tip of my tongue, but only at that point, did I at least feel I was in the presence of those who could understand and maybe fix it, or at the very least guide me.\n\nThe only problem is I don't trust them. I thought, though out of sheer spite I felt like telling them I wasn't a hero. But if I do make them reconsider, will it save the lives of my friends and every good creature left?\n\n\"I can't, because he's as much a part of me as any of the other creators, whether you knew that or not, and if I have it... I know I can't stop him,\" I finally confessed.\n\nVulkaine opened his muzzle to speak, but the Cartographer intervened, waving his staff between us, motioning toward the exit and adding.\n\n\"The princess is right, old friend, you should make ready before dawn.\"\n\nThe Elder remained silent, then nodded and departed.\n\nI watched him and the fiery bird leave, waiting for his long tail to snake around the corner before glancing back to the Cartographer.\n\n\"Come, walk with me,\" he proposed, motioning to another of the arches.\n\nI hesitated for a moment, unsure whether I could, or even wanted to take him up on the offer. However, I'd just told them the truth I feared more than anything, and if there was something he knew that could save all I cared about, I had to know. So I followed him out along ever-longer corridors and stairways that wound their way under the ruins, mixing with natural caves, caverns and walk ways.\n\nSome were collapsed, and after a short time, we approached a set of small stairs leading up onto the walls of the fort. To my right, the old ramparts met the cliffside walkway I'd walked on with Zephyra. While to the left, it curved around the front of the keep. Directly ahead, it wound out over the shore of the lake, meeting a small isle of snowy grass and pebbles before curving back slightly.\n\nAt its end was the ruined shell of a tower that looked to have been some form of signal fire. It seemed lonely, cast out into the cold as if the rest of the fortress didn't care for it. Even so, the Cartographer began to walk toward the crumbling extension, and I reluctantly followed. The moon had shed its cloudy veil, allowing majestic blue light to radiate down over the lake's icy waters as it illuminated my escaping breath like a ghost.\n\nIt may not be the midnight plains, but the moon here is so beautiful.\n\nIcicles and mounds of snow-covered rocks sparkled like glass, as if to add to the glittering display of the stars. The only break in the tranquillity was the darkness amidst the mountains and the flames of braziers dotted over the shore at our backs. From which, radiated the sound of hammering metal and laboured exertions. Amongst it all, I could hear the singing and the rhythm of merriment as many of the creatures celebrated.\n\nSo much for resting? I thought to myself as I glanced back.\n\n\"I'm sure that this, for many, will be the last chance to have such a time,\" my guide commented as he noticed my attention was diverted.\n\nI shuddered at the thought and turned back to see we were standing before the ruined beacon, like two fallen leaves cast adrift on the water. I peered up at the crumbling stonework, overcome by vegetation and snow, then my head sank as I realised just how right he was.\n\nThe old dragon seemed all too aware of the effects of his comment \u2013 avoiding the deaths that were certain to come at dawn wasn't an option. Yet I didn't know if I was sad or angry as I realised that it was nothing new to him.\n\n\"Of course, for many, it will also be a day of glory,\" he added.\n\nHe peered out over the calm water, ruffling the satchel containing the book that had led me to the truth. Yet I didn't manage to recover any joy from knowing that.\n\nHow can I think even a single positive thought on a night like this?\n\n\"No, you fool, tell him what you told all the others. You know it is right,\" the Cartographer's second voice muttered, sounding somewhat reasonable for the first time ever.\n\nThat caused my attention to perk, and I stared at him as he sighed.\n\n\"We cannot pretend to know how you feel,\" he began, eyes fixed on the inky darkness. \"We have lived for millennia, and yet throughout all we have seen, we see that one's soul is what cannot be lost,\" he told me sincerely, surprisingly sympathetic.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I asked once again, knowing there was no longer any hiding behind secrets.\n\nA dragon that does nothing but map knowledge in an archive can't be capable of all of this mayhem.\n\nHe seemed to acknowledge my summation as he glanced my way, one half seemingly surprised I'd asked, the other honoured.\n\n\"We are old, very old, far older than any dragon should be, old enough to know tales that have become myth, and to have seen many legends unfold before our eyes,\" he explained.\n\nMy mind fought to dismiss the idea; he was mad, I knew that for sure, but as he'd demonstrated, he was far from useless. He was one of the major reasons I was here, be that for better or worse. As I inwardly debated, he glanced down at the gold segments adorning my wings and tail.\n\n\"Etherium gold, arcane armour forged by the star dragons of old,\" he commended admirably, eyes glowing like gems.\n\nI felt the urge to shift it from his sight, but a combination of it being a futile gesture and the way he looked at the magical metal, subdued the idea.\n\n\"Who are you, really?\" I pressed.\n\n\"One of the few to see the dawn of our kind, we are a first-born dragon,\" he answered, his eyes fixed on mine, and all but his wisest tone fell completely silent.\n\nI may have mistaken him for one of Dardien's Elders, if not for his twitching tail and muzzle. Yet I shook my head, knowing it wasn't the answer I was after, and not offending him was off my list of concerns this time.\n\n\"So... you're one of the first dragons?\" I pressed and both of his personalities seemed intent on taking time to contemplate the eternally distant memory.\n\n\"We once told you that it was beyond our memory,\" he explained, his second voice scoffing at the idea. \"And for the most part, we were honest, which is why we gave you the tome of the Fallen Star \u2013 it was a record of many events to transpire over the twilight of the last age, before the Darkness, before the dawn of the Dark Guardians,\" he explained.\n\nMy eyes narrowed as my mind began to work on his words and fragments of my memories fell slowly into place.\n\n\"You're one of them, aren't you, one of the star dragons that became mortal?\" I challenged.\n\n\"No, not entirely. We were hatched in the years after the ancestors liberated this world, long after the Age of Tyranny and Goldfire's original sacrifice,\" he explained, voice trailing off as he looked to his claws. \"Our father was of the stars, our mother of the mortal drakaran, we were born of both worlds.\"\n\nSo he's half star dragon? I thought, still putting things together as he continued.\n\n\"We differ little from mortal kind, as we are bound to the elements, just like our mother. However, a first-born life is not the same as a star dragon's immortality, since we grow weary and tire without death, unlike the ancestors of gold,\" he sighed, looking past his foreclaws as if his reflection in the water were a ghost.\n\n\"Enishra, our great legacy,\" he mumbled, glancing up at the darkened mountains as if they were a grand gem in a treasury. \"We do hope you do right by her, as they once did,\" he added with a smile, his second personality nodding in agreement.\n\nMy eyes trailed up to the sky, almost as if I didn't deserve to look upon the treasure on which I stood.\n\n\"You know there's a way to stop him, don't you?\" I stated, while inside I hoped and begged for an answer that would prove me wrong.\n\n\"There will come a time of sacrifice, such things face us all. No matter what you believe or what you're told by your gods, mortal or otherwise, you stand here as you \u2013 and it is you who must choose.\"\n\n\"How could I have even let any of this happen?\" I confessed with a weak sigh. \"I should be dead, and he should have been locked away in the sphere forever,\" I added, recalling Mordrakk's revelation about the first time we'd fought millennia previously.\n\nThe Cartographer peered at me, almost as if angered that I'd think such a thing.\n\n\"And give up your life, all you have? If that were so, you would not have all that you have fought for: your friends, family\u2026 love,\" his voice faded for a moment.\n\n\"It was never my life, though, was it? It's just his last hope at victory. I'm nothing more than what I was made to be,\" I stated, and again he appeared frustrated.\n\n\"The same could be said for any of us, but we choose to make ourselves more. You can beat him because of the very fact that you are more, and if that were not so, you would be no different from an ebon wing,\" he continued, jabbing at my shoulder with his staff.\n\nHow different from them am I really? They're slaves to Mordrakk, I'm a slave to the creators? Even so, I tried to force a smile, but it ultimately wilted.\n\n\"If he's right, are we all so different in the end?\" I asked, the image of the orkin coming to mind, followed by the heated debate back in the council chamber.\n\n\"The creators make blunt accusations of those they see as nothing more than toys. Yes, mortal kind are fleeting, savage and unruly, but they are also loyal, kind and caring \u2013 you know this better than most. That is why you are more than they are, because you feel, you think, you see more, and you truly care,\" he stated matter-of-factly.\n\n\"An immortal being can never see the world like that, which is why, when the time comes, you can overcome even the Great Master,\" he went on, gesturing out to the darkness with a forepaw.\n\n\"This night is a testament to that, the longest night of winter. Upon this night, the tyranny of the Overlords was conquered. The night upon which the first dragonfire was lit,\" he explained, as if it were some kind of fairy-tale. \"We too have looked upon the stars, and the same image that greets us every night would have greeted Seraphine, as it does all dragons.\"\n\n\"Mordrakk thinks freedom is what makes us weak.\" He glanced at me knowingly. \"That is the Darkness speaking through him. We doubt the true Great Master would agree. But what do you believe?\"\n\n\"I think they're all wrong.\"\n\n\"For what they did to you?\" he asked, but I shook my head.\n\n\"No, for how they treat everyone, even those who follow them.\"\n\nHe smiled.\n\n\"And yet those who follow you...?\"\n\n\"They never should have,\" I interrupted before he could finish. \"I've already cost one of them everything and the rest a great deal because of what I did.\"\n\n\"I see, the ebon wing troubles you?\"\n\nWhat, how does he...? At that, I didn't care what he knew or how he knew it.\n\nI didn't know whether it was anger, sorrow, fear or weakness, but at the mention of Pyro, I felt completely powerless.\n\n\"No! I saw him die, and it haunts me every day. I know he's gone, I'm just afraid it will...\" My words faded.\n\n\"Happen to everyone else?\" he questioned.\n\n\"The truth is, the idea of my friends dying is not the only thing that scares me. I am terrified that, given the choice, they'll abandon me like Aries. I know Mordrakk would do anything to them to break me, that's why I cannot stop him, not with them at my side.\"\n\nThe Cartographer didn't seem to have any words to dissuade my horror, and I respected that he remained silent instead of feeding me false hope.\n\n\"It is a feeling that no god could ever have, to fear the loss of those who you hold most dear. It makes you more than them, and while we know you may not listen to us or the other Elders, you should listen to your own feelings,\" he advised, patting my shoulder with a wing as he moved by and added.\n\n\"Fear not the dawn, do not pity those who would follow you to it. Know, that pity should be directed to those that would stand in your way.\" He offered a smile, his second personality muttering about how many orkin were going to learn that lesson.\n\nI gave him a weak nod as he disappeared back into the keep, leaving me alone in the cold.\n\nHow can I believe him, how can I think he's right? I took one last glance back at the camp, the sounds of merriment persisting. My pity's right where it should be: all the lives lost because of me, because I've failed so many times.\n\nI couldn't let any of them do this, not the Elders, the princess and especially not my friends. I was the immortal champion of the creators, the weapon the gods crafted to save their mortal creations. I'd no care for that responsibility or for that which Mordrakk had charged me. I knew one thing though.\n\nI have to save them alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Soft snow slowly parted under my weight as I set down amidst the trees, cold wind blowing as my wings settled at my flanks. The night air felt still about me, and not even the trees rustled as I glanced about. The torch light and merry din drifted across the calm waters of the icy lake behind me, but as far as I could tell, no one had followed me.\n\nI was leaving them again, just as I always sought to, only now there was no stopping what had been set in motion. I was the only one who was going to die because of this war. I would tear through the whole orkin army, if I had to, and battle anyone that got between the temple and I. After that, I'd have to figure out exactly what the pillar of fire was and how to use it, but given my experience with shards of its kind, I didn't expect that would present too much difficulty.\n\nAs for Balgore's forces? I was immortal and had the power of a god. I'd become a daemon to the Brazen Warlord himself and I would live up to that name. My only other concern was Mordrakk's desire for the amulet. I'd no intention of hunting it down or letting any of them take it. That self-assurance gave me even more incentive to do this on my own, sparing every life in camp.\n\n\"You would trust this new power; one you know nothing of?\" the dark fiend's rasping voice questioned.\n\nI looked to see him sitting on a crooked branch to my right, fiery eyes peering at me as if I were more a fool than he'd previously thought.\n\n\"I don't, but I do trust myself, and if I'm as powerful as we both know I am, there's no need for them to act in my place.\"\n\n\"Then why even consider it?\" he asked.\n\nI opened my muzzle to respond, faltering before I spoke.\n\n\"You know you can't win this without embracing your whole self,\" he interjected, a flash of fire taking the shape of my amulet within his wicked claws.\n\nI turned sharply, flinging snow into his illusion, which faded only to reform before me.\n\n\"You should go, give up. Go back to them and revel in their false merriment!\" he growled.\n\nI staggered back, my paws slipping in the snow as I stumbled. He recoiled, his tail and wings curling about him.\n\n\"Why do you even care what I do?\" I asked, but his smile grew slightly.\n\n\"What will you do?\" he countered.\n\nMy eyes locked onto his as my scars burned.\n\n\"I'm going to destroy him; I'm going to destroy Mordrakk,\" I stated, without a single doubt.\n\nYet he didn't flinch, not even a hint of shock crossed his expression before he mockingly snorted a jet of embers.\n\n\"A very bold ambition, one I think you were never intended for, and yet you have wanted it since the beginning,\" he began, moving toward me. \"All of that anger you have harboured, the frustration that your life was never yours to live. First you blame the Elders, then the Sovereign, my own children, as I did, and yet all those times you were unable to unleash that rage...\" His lecture was cut short as I swatted his smoky form aside with my wing.\n\n\"You can't stop me,\" I hissed.\n\n\"I have no need; for once we agree on something. The Darkness must die,\" he responded, reforming on top of a jagged stump. \"But tell me, what will become of all of this, should you succeed? You cannot hide from the truth forever,\" he challenged, motioning to the camp with a foreclaw.\n\nI glanced away, thinking of my friends and my family, all of them consumed by the Darkness.\n\nEven if I win, there's still that truth; my own lie will surely turn them against me, just like Pyro.\n\n\"I still won't let them charge into battle because of me,\" I stated, and he looked at me as if the argument was becoming pitiful.\n\n\"You can keep saying that, but you will not stop them from following you \u2013 that is a curse you brought solely upon yourself,\" he assured. \"Besides, they are no strangers to battle,\" he added with a sly grin.\n\n\"Oh, and you'd know all about that,\" I snapped.\n\n\"I would not, nor would I care for it if I did, for their kind is still weak,\" he responded, as if insulted.\n\n\"Then tell me, why corrupt dragons? You have your vulpomancers, so why not just kill them instead of making ebon wings?\" I asked, and once again, he looked disgusted by my comparison between him and the Mordrakk commanding Pyro.\n\n\"Their kind is an ancient design, moulded in my image. Do you not wonder why my children take such forms, why their drakaran servants look as they do?\" he questioned, his flaming eyes narrowing. \"They have been diluted over the millennia, but they are still the best conduit through which the Darkness may spread its influence,\" he explained, frowning at me as if I were a chick who'd failed to listen so many times before.\n\n\"Perfect for killing, you mean,\" I added with an air of unease.\n\n\"That's just it though, isn't it? I never wished to kill you, nor did your fallen friend. He just wanted you to lead him home,\" he added with a cynical tone, and with a flash of smoke, he vanished.\n\nHome? what does...? I looked at the camp as my heart jumped into my mouth.\n\nWithout thought, I burst into the air, scattering snow from my paws as I rushed across the water. Like some cruelly arranged plan, perfectly timed and targeted, I saw a dark shape slash across the starry reflection below. Beating my wings harder, I opened my muzzle to shout out, but it was too late. It hit me like a knife from the dark, slamming into me with such force that, if not for my armour, my whole skeleton would have shattered.\n\nThe pain doubled as I struck the shore, landing in shallow water by the island's pebbled beach. I staggered, but before I could move, something landed over me and a sharp claw forced my head against the rocks.\n\n\"Leaving so soon?\" a horrifically familiar voice asked, and as I looked up, I stared into the purple, fiery eyes of the black dragon I'd led right to his target."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Truth",
                "text": "\"It seems that all that time alone has done nothing to dampen your observational skills,\" Pyro sneered, lowering his fanged muzzle to the left of my head as he whispered into my ear. \"I must admit, while seeing you make a mockery of Sceptre and watching you dance about this place completely oblivious was most entertaining, I think it is time we stopped with the games.\"\n\nThrashing, I was no better than a beached fish under his metal claw. I could almost feel the glee radiating from him as I glimpsed the reflection of his glowing eyes in the water.\n\nHe's too strong to fight like a normal dragon. Just calm down and think!\n\nI fell limp, and then with one great flap of my wings, I flipped up, blades sparking into life as I slashed at him. He leapt back as I stumbled to my paws; fixing me with a glare, lowering his body and baring his sharp teeth.\n\n\"I almost admire the fact your little band believes they have a chance,\" he hissed as two more shapes descended from the night, shadows pouring from their skeletal bodies.\n\n\"Did you really believe you could hide away up here without us knowing?\" he asked, waving a forepaw dismissively while adding mockingly. \"No, my fellow ebon wings and I will ensure that orkin fool is ready for you, thus making your annihilation all the swifter.\"\n\nI focused on my defence as he strode about me, my eyes fighting to watch him and his shadowy companions all at once. I may have been outnumbered, but I still didn't sense killing me had ever been their intention.\n\n\"I do pity them, you know? To resist the inevitable is folly, and yet still they fight,\" he went on, glancing at the camp.\n\n\"They don't know that, they haven't given up like you,\" I challenged.\n\nHe glared at me, fire burning in his one good eye.\n\n\"No, like you!\" he snapped.\n\nAlthough my blood ran colder than ice at those words, my resolve stiffened. I didn't say another word, but Pyro let out a long and chilling laugh.\n\n\"That's what we are, isn't it? You and I, every ebon wing and dragon, we have all given up and we don't even know it, because...\" He paused, moving his head closer to my own. \"Not one of us was ever created to understand.\"\n\nI staggered back, falling flat on my face with a splash as the vulpomancers suddenly slashed at my hind legs.\n\n\"You could say that about anything,\" I coughed, looking up at his scarred head as he snorted purple flame.\n\n\"That may be so, but if it's true, let's see if we can prove it,\" he stated, beating his wings and disappearing into the night.\n\nThe sound of merriment became that of panicked commotion. Several blasts of fire erupted from the tents as dark shapes spiralled down.\n\nNo, not again, not like the village!\n\nThe moment I saw the vulpomancers I darted forwards, only for those behind me to leap up and drag me back. I struggled in the water, thrashing my wings in an attempt to escape. They stayed just out of reach, mocking my struggle as they circled.\n\n\"I've waited a long time for sssome blood,\" one hissed, its rasping words slithering through dripping fangs.\n\n\"Careful, this one'sss flesssh is far from mortal,\" the second added, lips quivering below its eyeless gaze.\n\nThe former of the pair didn't seem eager to take that advice and lunged with outstretched talons. I swung to meet it with the sharp edge of my wing blades, leaving myself open to the claws of its companion.\n\nWhat's a few more wounds? All I'll have to do is sleep them off! I thought dismissively as I cut a burning gash through the spiked head of the first creature.\n\nIt screeched, shadowy smoke gushing from the glowing wound as it fell into the water.\n\nThe second brought its dark claws across my muzzle, black talons cutting at my armour and scales as I staggered back. It gave a horrific shriek, before charging forward, but I jumped back, darting aside as its bladed tail thrust forward like a spear.\n\nSpinning round, I seized the spiny mass in my jaws and pulled hard. The shadow burned my mouth and stung my nostrils, but my strength proved enough to drag the thrashing creature toward me. Retching and coughing, I tossed it into the water, reared up and smashed down onto its spiny head with all of my weight, splintering its horns and bony skull.\n\nThe sound of splashing behind me warned of the other creature's recovery as it took to the air in a flurry of smoke and water. I took a deep breath, cleared my throat and collected myself. I could see more of the beasts gathering above the camp and darting down into the confused crowds. They had adopted the same fireball tactic they had used to burn down my home, and while flames weren't as effective against dragons, they were against the camp's other residents, not to mention the tents themselves.\n\nI have to find Pyro. Driving off the ebon wings seemed to disperse them last time.\n\nWithout a second thought, I beat my wings hard and leapt into the air, blasting several of the swirling beasts aside as more winged fighters shot up from below. It only took a few moments before the calm night sky became a brutal aerial battleground of fire and slashing claws. I tried my best to evade most of the combat, not to mention the arrows, flames and magical bolts that lanced through the air.\n\nHow am I supposed to find anything in this!? I thought, narrowly avoiding a monster's talons, before realising. If Pyro's here there's only a few dragons he'll really be looking for!\n\nI needed to reach my friends! My first assumption was that Risha and her brother would be at their nesting tent, and I just hoped Neera and Ember would be close by too.\n\nI re-evaluated my priorities when I looked down on the fortress's ruined courtyard. The few dragons trapped on the ground were like fish in a barrel as the vulpomancers dove into them.\n\nThis is not how it's supposed to be \u2013 the battle's not supposed to be here \u2013 not now! Mordrakk's cackling echoed through my mind, his dark tone perforated by the sound of tapping stones. I need to find my friends and keep them safe... No, I need to keep everyone here safe!\n\nMordrakk believed I was capable of doing whatever I wanted, even if he frowned upon it, and while the images of the battle played through my mind, he didn't let go of that ambition.\n\nGritting my teeth, I swooped toward the attacking creatures. I let out a great breath of white fire as I darted through the shadowy throng, setting many vulpomancers alight and eliciting a chorus of horrifying shrieks. Those spared from the inferno swiftly came after me, and I twisted back, sending another explosive bolt into them. The blast tossed several aside, but many more persisted.\n\nMy instincts were urging me to fly away as fast as my wings could carry me, ignoring the urges I swooped toward one of the ruined towers. The vulpomancers had no trouble matching my agility as they swarmed after me. I swerved and dodged crumbling peaks and decrepit bridges until something in the corner of my eye grabbed my attention \u2013 one of the larger towers had a hole right through it.\n\nThe space was barely the size of an adult dragon, but tucking my wings at my side I flew straight through it. The confined walls ripped at my wings, and for a moment, I thought I would lose a limb or two.\n\nThe cold night air burst open around me and I spread my wings once more, swerving back to face the hole as my pursuers poured through. The blast of white fire I sent back at them struck cleanly and the whole tower buckled under the force of the explosion, crushing them under its weight as it toppled over the waterfall's edge.\n\nNot so immortal after all! A wry smile broke over my muzzle as I imagined the look of a certain human's face.\n\nIt seemed I wasn't the only one focused on the tower, and as I swooped back toward the cliffside, I felt the force of heavy wing beats above me.\n\n\"You're really starting to bother me!\" Pyro growled, lashing his claws at my wings.\n\n\"Likewise!\" I replied, dropping lower, spinning up and cutting the underside of his armour with my talons.\n\nHe roared as he recoiled and I swerved to avoid the rapidly approaching arches of an aqueduct, forced low to the lake. Pyro's shadowy reflection appeared beneath me, pushing me closer to the glistening surface, and then, as my legs struck the freezing water, I fought desperately to avoid crashing.\n\nWith a flick of my wings I shot out from beneath him, the beach ruins lying before us and just beyond that, the area used for training. It was still bustling with battle, and almost immediately, my eyes fixed upon a red tent.\n\nIt's not on fire! Was my immediate thought, even as the glow of flames and enveloping smoke covered everything.\n\nPyro caught up and once again fought to kick me down into the rapidly passing dirt. Swerving around the ruined walls, I dropped as low as possible, but despite the oncoming obstructions, neither of us moved aside.\n\nHe's waiting for me to bank. I predicted, so instead my wings flared. Good thing I know how to be unpredictable!\n\nPain erupted through the leathery membranes as they caught the air and I stopped sharply. In a flash, Pyro tried to do the same, but his greater size and momentum carried him straight into a wall, shattering the cobbles with a loud thud as he disappeared in a frosty cloud of dust.\n\nDespite my quick thinking, I fared little better; and unable to maintain my flight, I ground into the dirt, rolling to a stop in a shower of debris. Pain pulsed through me, until the sound of battle remerged in my ringing ears. I staggered to my paws, glancing around, first at the darkness of the lake, then at the fiery battle consuming the keep.\n\nThe blazing inferno horrified me, and even if the majority of my friends were indeed fireproof, my urgency to find them intensified.\n\nI limped as fast as I could to the far end of the training field, where something else caught my attention. I'd never heard such a desperate scream, filled with fear and yet so quiet it was hard to detect above the commotion. I looked to the source, spying a vulpomancer upon a small pile of rubble, its attention focused on a small hole. As it pulled at the rocks with its sickle-like claws, I heard another cry. This time I was sure I recognised those frightened voices, and instantly my mind snapped into place.\n\nThose are the hatchlings Ember was training!\n\nI charged as fast as my wounds would allow, lowering my horns. The monster's head shot up, eyeless gaze meeting mine as its fangs flared and its wings beat in an effort to escape. I slammed into it long before it could get airborne. Falling back into a flailing heap, it let out an angry hiss and spun back to its feet with unnatural swiftness, smacking my muzzle with its tail.\n\n\"How many timesss do you expect usss to fall for the sssame tricksss?\" it rasped, pressing a claw to my muzzle.\n\n\"For as long as there's still some of you left to kill!\" I mumbled around its deathly grip as I kicked up at its underside.\n\nAnother manoeuvre anticipated, it jumped out of reach, but what it failed to see, was my tail and the blade at its tip, which swiftly cut a deep line down its bony body. The beast gave a breathless howl, turning to dust as it fell over me.\n\nTry avoiding that next time! I thought bluntly, shaking away the residue.\n\n\"Whooo... that was incredible!\" an eager voice suddenly cried in excitement, and I looked to see blue wings fluttering like those on an insect as the young dragon leapt into the air.\n\nTeal, Scarlet, Brass and several other small dragons, all cheered in amazement.\n\n\"Can we see it again!?\" the red dragoness asked eagerly.\n\nI'd no idea about the mix of emotions I was feeling at her request, be it pride, sadness or anger that they had to be here in a war zone like this. Those ideas changed when Pyro's dark shadow rose up over the rubble behind me.\n\n\"You most certainly can,\" he growled, battered and panting.\n\nThe young dragons sank back into their hiding place when his glowing eyes passed over them, and I instinctively spun to place myself between the two.\n\n\"Now, why does this seem familiar?\" he asked, raising a foreclaw to his muzzle.\n\n\"Oh right, leave them alone,\" he taunted. \"The hero until the end, it seems. I wonder what will happen when you watch me tear the life from their bodies!\"\n\nI assured myself I'd never let him do such a thing, and for that moment, I didn't doubt I'd rip the rest of his limbs off, if I had to. He exploded forward, his wings flared and claws poised to rip me apart. I coiled back, ready to strike, when another shape leapt out from a ruined wall and slammed into his side.\n\nHe fell against an opposing wall in a shower of dust and snow as his attacker jumped back, beat her wings once and landed neatly before me.\n\n\"Just try it, traitor!\" Ember snarled in the most fearsome tone I'd ever heard.\n\nHer nostrils flared and snorted spouts of flame, smoke curling up from her bared teeth as her dark armour shimmered like black glass in the light of the inferno. Pyro lifted himself up and turned to face her with an equally ferocious hiss. But the moment he laid eyes upon her; his fiery aggression faded.\n\nOh no, this is it...\n\nA long, wicked smile crept across his scarred muzzle, and in that instant I knew his teeth, claws and dragonfire were the last things I had to fear.\n\n\"Blaze!\" an alarmed voice I knew all too well bellowed, and before I knew it, Risha appeared above me, seeing the smaller dragons and swiftly jumping down to the hole.\n\n\"What in the creators' name are you all doing here? Boltock, move these rocks and get them somewhere safe!\" she ordered when her brother swooped down next to her.\n\n\"We saw the Guardian fight; he took on one of those things and showed them who's boss with his fire and his claws and...\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea how dangerous this is!?\" Risha cut off the eager hatchlings' babble as they appeared out of the hole Boltock had cleared.\n\n\"Why not just let them enjoy the show?\" laughed Pyro as he began a slow prowl around us.\n\nEmber shifted to face his every step, a glare that could melt dragon scales beaming from her narrowed eyes.\n\n\"Leave, traitor, you're outmatched!\" she hissed.\n\nPyro ceased stalking and raised his head, and I felt my heart stop as his eyes met hers.\n\n\"I know you won't attack me,\" he purred.\n\n\"Try me,\" she challenged, spitting a jet of fire.\n\nRisha glanced between the pair, all the while keeping a wary eye on the hatchlings as Boltock pushed the little ones behind him.\n\nHow can she not recognise him? How can I fix this!?\n\nMy urge to run was almost inescapable, and yet my legs felt like trees rooted to the ground. Another instinct told me to charge and kill him, before he could tell them what had transpired. All the while, Pyro laughed, and Ember stiffened.\n\n\"Look at you! Look at us, all together again at last. It's a shame that feathered thief isn't here, I really wanted to kill her first,\" he declared, fuelling my urge to take his head off.\n\nEmber seemed slightly unsure, as did Risha, and even Boltock paused to peer at the black dragon as he grinned wickedly.\n\n\"You'll do no such thing!\" my sapphire companion snapped, jumping down to take a defensive position beside Ember.\n\nBoltock remained where he was, seemingly torn between helping his sister and protecting the hatchlings, while I felt no different from the statues dotting the camp.\n\n\"Now, now, is this any way to treat an old friend?\" Pyro mused, peering at Risha in particular. \"You were always so kind, so understanding,\" he reasoned, before glancing at Boltock, \"But so irritating, and yet not unlikable like your\u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off, glancing my way next, before his eyes fixed on Ember.\n\n\"He hasn't told you, has he?\" he purred, his fangs flashing as his grin widened. \"Now, what kind of saviour would lie?\"\n\nThat was it, and at those words, I didn't look like the only one who was about to collapse. Risha staggered back, but Ember merely relaxed, shock and disbelief overwhelming her fearsome expression.\n\n\"Pyro?\" she stammered. \"You... they said you were... you...\"\n\n\"Said I was dead?\" he finished her sentence, taking a step forward.\n\nShe made no effort to stop him as his tail coiled under her chin and he lifted her head so they could look eye to eye.\n\n\"You saw the death of a weakling. I am more,\" he boasted.\n\n\"The ebon wings... they, you...\" she stammered, and he slithered onto a small mound of rubble, posing proudly.\n\n\"And does everything you've heard about us compare?\" he asked, spreading his wings, pressing a metal foreclaw to his chest and lifting his head proudly.\n\nRisha managed to steady herself and Boltock seemed to forget about the others as he watched Pyro with a look I couldn't decipher. Ember's stupor vanished and she shook her head.\n\n\"You're one of them, a traitor!\" she exclaimed, and I saw a flash of irritation pass across his face.\n\n\"According to whom, may I ask? The Sovereign? This poultry rabble you call an army?\" he snapped.\n\n\"These innocent lives you would so readily slaughter!\" she challenged, and his frustration began to mount.\n\n\"It differs not from the fate they will all find upon the dawn,\" he countered, creeping back toward her.\n\nNo one had so much as glanced my way, and almost instinctively, I began to creep back. While, deep in my mind, Mordrakk's dark form was celebrating as he assured me how right he'd been all along.\n\n\"You don't need to do this, come back, fight with us and we can stop this,\" Ember pleaded.\n\nRisha glanced at me, the glare in her eyes stopping my racing heart.\n\n\"Oh, but I do, you see? Anyone who defies the Great Master will meet a fate worse than death, and every dragon here, every featherwing and snake still in Dardien, even the orkin, will fall under his rule. I have merely ensured my place within the new world order, a place by the side of the true master of this creation!\" he ranted, his proud mask fracturing like glass.\n\n\"And I now come with the liberty of extending that opportunity to you, so you may live,\" he offered, stretching out a forepaw.\n\nBoltock's expression turn to a scowl, while Risha glanced between them, her muzzle working, yet seemingly unable to speak.\n\n\"Come with me so we may rule together at the Great Master's side,\" he insisted, almost begging her as if he feared leaving her to Mordrakk's cruel wrath.\n\nDoes he still care about her, how is that possible? I wondered, the moment so tense, even the darkness inside my head fell silent.\n\n\"You and I together?\" she asked quietly, and as she spoke, my heart sank.\n\nThe idea that the truth of his fate had been revealed was forgotten as I imagined them all becoming like him. Pyro nodded and gently took one of her forepaws with his.\n\n\"There is no stopping this darkness, it will consume all,\" Mordrakk hissed inside my head, ushering me forwards to finish Pyro, as I should have done at Ilivar.\n\n\"I don't know you,\" Ember answered unexpectedly, swatting his forepaw aside. \"Pyro would never have done such horrifying things. He'd never betray us!\"\n\nShe took a slow step back, like she'd seen a ghost. \"You're right about one thing. I saw him die, and I would rather know that than consider ruling beside one who would do this.\"\n\nShe stared at him, harbouring no sign of aggression, seemingly searching for any shred of the dragon she once knew. Pyro stared back, his face uncertain for the first time, until something snapped within him.\n\n\"You're still blind!\" he roared, slashing at her with a foreclaw.\n\nShe ducked, but she was unprepared for his unnatural swiftness and his metal limb threw her to the side as it came down again. She was flung into Risha, knocking the pair to the ground. In a flash, Boltock jumped forward, landing beside me, but even he hesitated when Pyro glared at us both.\n\n\"I know neither of you has the nerve to face me!\" he hissed.\n\n\"No, but I do!\" another voice interrupted.\n\nBefore any of us could react, several sharp darts cut between the plates of Pyro's armour.\n\n\"Sorry I'm late, I thought the battle was tomorrow,\" Neera announced as she flipped in the air and landed between us.\n\n\"You!\" Pyro growled as he shook off her projectiles. \"You filthy feathered wyrm!\"\n\n\"Not just me,\" Neera retorted with an unexpected air of confidence, as, as if on cue, another larger dragon slammed into Pyro.\n\n\"Try doing battle with someone your own size, traitor!\" Soaren declared as he pinned the ebon wing down.\n\n\"Hello, old friend,\" Pyro replied, swinging his tail around to sweep the air elemental's legs from under him.\n\nThe grey dragon floundered over his aggressor, and Pyro seized him in his claws, throwing him aside like a rag.\n\n\"How has the order been treating you? Can't imagine they're any better now they've fallen apart,\" he hissed.\n\n\"Better than whatever dark monsters you've made pacts with,\" Soaren countered, swiping his tail to trip up the ebon wing.\n\nThe dark dragon anticipated his counter, and with a swift lunge, he caught it in his mouth and bit down, tearing the bladed armour off, leaving blood dripping from his fangs and Soaren howling in pain.\n\n\"The Orders are a joke, a mockery of our true potential. If only you knew what our kind really was, you'd understand that you are wasting your lives on a futile existence!\" he berated as he spat the blade out.\n\nNeera jumped up, sending several more darts into him as she leapt from boulder to boulder. Even so, he shook the bone blades off as if they were nothing more than biting insects.\n\n\"You know I'm right, all of you! You follow this weak coward!\" he shouted, pointing an outstretched wing at me. \"He's done nothing but lie to you. Even your Elders have lied to you for centuries, and your leader is a sly snake. Join the Great Master and he will show you the truth!\" he exclaimed.\n\nHe makes good points on all accounts, is there even a good side left?\n\nSoaren staggered to his paws, his head held low as if he may actually be considering Pyro's offer.\n\n\"You were my friend,\" he coughed, voice strained by bitterness.\n\nPyro hissed purple fire through flared teeth, before lashing out to grab Soaren's neck in his jaw, tossing him back at us with more ferocity than a raging manticore. Jumping aside, I fell to the floor while Ember and Risha leapt up in horror. Emptiness filled Boltock's expression, and Neera's futile determination endured as she tried to battle the monster alone. Blood trailed through Soaren's armour, and Pyro relished in his triumph.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Mordrakk demanded. \"All you have ever wanted is to protect your friends. Now they know the truth, you cannot save them from it any more, only from him.\"\n\nWithout thought I slammed my horns into the ebon wing's midsection, while in the corner of my eye, I saw Ember and Risha rush over to Soaren. I drove Pyro across the open field, slamming him against a crumbling wall. He coiled back and lashed out with his tail, but I jumped over the scything weapon, landing on top of him claws first and wrapping my golden gauntlets about his neck.\n\n\"Good, good, he can't hurt them if he's dead, show him real power!\" Mordrakk purred.\n\nForcing his head against the wall, I sank another paw into his empty eye socket, while seizing one of his horns in my mouth and with all of my strength, twisted him round until he ended up beneath me.\n\n\"Go on! Do it! You failed once, show them what you really are \u2013 you can't hide it forever!\" he spluttered, narrowing his eyes as if he were more than prepared to revel in the knowledge his death would beat me.\n\nI froze, panting heavily and staring into his baleful eye, I staggered back.\n\n\"No! I'm... I told you before, I'm not like you!\" I cried, desperately trying to believe that.\n\nHe growled, sprang up, and wrapped his metal claw about my neck, dragging me up to meet his fiery glare.\n\n\"Yes, you are, show them what you really are!\" he bellowed.\n\nMy wings opened as I tried to escape, but he wasn't about to allow me another strike and slammed his other claw into one of my flapping limbs.\n\n\"I can't believe you would be so dishonest, and all this time you thought you were protecting them. You are no better than any of us, just like the Great Master always said,\" he proclaimed, slamming me into the wall over and over, before throwing my limp body to the others.\n\n\"Look at him! Your saviour, the one you chose to follow. Where has he led you? You're nothing more than a stricken band of weaklings with no hope of salvation!\" he declared, as if to capture the attention of all of those battling about him.\n\nThe words almost seemed to silence the conflict, his message reaching the hordes of vulpomancers who unexpectedly retreated into the sky.\n\n\"And you!\" he declared, pointing a foreclaw at me. \"You're nothing, you're as much part of the darkness you seek to destroy as you are the one destined to stop it,\" he elaborated for all to hear. \"If you follow him, you'll all die! You believe in those legends and you will find a world no better than those described within them awaiting you!\"\n\nI opened one eye to see my friends around me. Not one of them dared glance down at my beaten and blooded form, and yet all at once they stepped forwards. Pyro scowled, fidgeting, and before he could add anything more, a torrent of fire consumed him.\n\n\"You know nothing of us anymore... You're a monster!\" Ember growled as she coiled between us, her wings spread and teeth bared.\n\n\"Is that what they would have you believe?\" Pyro asked as fire lapped his dark scales. \"There are no monsters, just those that will endure and those that will die,\" he warned.\n\n\"You betrayed us all! We were your friends, I loved you and you had no reason to give that up,\" she countered, as if still desperate to reason.\n\n\"I do only what I must, and I know he will betray you all in the end,\" he explained, pointing at me again.\n\n\"Like you?\" she retorted, and he returned a weak laugh as she pressed. \"I don't see you battling to save us from extinction.\"\n\n\"Do you really think he's going to either? I never thought you were so naive, my love,\" he added with a hint of dissatisfaction.\n\nShe neither answered, nor moved. She simply stared at him with the same expression she'd bore the moment she'd found out the hatchlings were in danger.\n\n\"I didn't wish for it to come to this,\" Pyro finally sighed. \"You'll all die, if not by my claws, then by those of my master. You may bring your army upon the dawn, but I assure you there will be no victory.\"\n\n\"We'll take our chances,\" Neera hissed as we all watched him vanish like a ghost into the darkness without another word.\n\nThe sounds of battle faded as swiftly as they'd began, and I knew he'd achieved exactly what he'd come for, to expose the truth.\n\nThen that's it, it's over. Not even my reputation's left to give them hope.\n\nIn the stillness, I shifted back to see Boltock and Neera. Soaren was picking himself up from behind them and Ember turned back to us with an utterly hopeless expression. One set of sapphire eyes in particular looked at me as if I were some kind of stranger, but she didn't say a word. I'd tried to save her from the truth, and now she knew.\n\nI just hope it doesn't destroy her like it has me.\n\nAfter what felt like an eternity of silence, I staggered away from them, running with no care for the pain coursing through my body or the blood trailing from my wings. I ran and never wanted to look back, but it was too late, running wouldn't save me this time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Moonlight poured over my battered scales as I flew toward the stars. Regardless, my bleeding wounds swiftly caught up with me, forcing me to land within the ruins of a watchtower high upon the snowy mountainside. I crashed within a crumbling circle of arches, scattering snow and frost as I came to a clattering halt.\n\nThis stupid armour, stupid body, stupid powers, stupid gods! Shaking off my arcane prison in a fit of rage, I sent the golden shards flying about me like autumn leaves. I don't want it; I don't want any of it. I just want things the way they used to be!\n\nPanting hard I stared out over the fiery scene that marred the midnight plains. The thought of dawn crossed my mind and scorched it like the wave of flames I'd seen blast across this world in my dreams.\n\nIt can't be real. I can't let it be real! I staggered, feeling like I'd been stabbed. But what can I do to stop it? I can't save everyone!\n\n\"You know, once it might have been a beautiful view,\" Risha whispered, landing beside me.\n\nI didn't even bother to lift my head. I'd heard this routine before.\n\n\"Before all of the smoke, the fire and whatnot,\" she added, a regretful expression gracing her face.\n\nI found myself wishing for that beauty to return \u2013 the way I'd looked up to her, before the war and all the fighting. I recalled how I'd felt in the golden temple the moment she'd told me how she felt, my promise to her and how I'd broken when I saw her in my dreams.\n\n\"Pyro's alive, that's what you were hiding, wasn't it?\" she continued.\n\n\"You know there are a lot of things I didn't tell you,\" I finally admitted, not daring to look at her.\n\n\"I know and... I'm sorry,\" she responded. \"I thought it was just you... After all, I saw Pyro die,\" she added, as if still trying to believe it herself.\n\n\"That's not it, though, is it? He isn't dead, and I know he should be because I was the one who\u2026\" I stuttered, my voice fading. \"I did that to him. I've done this to all of you. I caused all of this,\" I cried, gesturing out over the fiery horizon.\n\nShe shifted toward me, a determined and completely fearless look in her eyes as I went on.\n\n\"I did that to him the night they sent me to stop this. The Great Master had us fight at Ilivar, and I...\"\n\nShe placed a wing on my trembling shoulders.\n\n\"You did more than any other dragon could have done,\" she offered.\n\n\"That's the point, isn't it? I'm not a normal dragon, I never was,\" I replied, wishing nothing more than to scream the words for all to hear, and yet my voice felt weaker than ever. \"I didn't want to tell you, because I made myself promise that I'd never let anything hurt you again.\"\n\n\"I guess that makes my lie to you no better,\" she admitted, swallowing the irony with a small laugh, before adding, \"but nothing you did ever hurt me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I know you well enough to know that you'll just tell me exactly what I want to hear,\" I retorted.\n\nShe remained silent for a moment, and I forced myself to look at her.\n\n\"And why would that mean those things aren't true?\" she reasoned.\n\nI paused, only to lose my words as I saw my reflection in her beautiful eyes.\n\n\"Even if it is, it doesn't change anything. Pyro's still right about me, and if you knew everything that's at play here, you'd agree,\" I muttered.\n\n\"No. That wasn't Pyro. I know he could be demanding at times, but he'd never hurt any of us,\" she confessed.\n\n\"What about the night he died?\" I asked, almost instantly regretting it. \"You know the answer,\" I pressed, but still she said nothing. \"If I hadn't gone running off trying to save everyone, he'd still be alive.\"\n\n\"You did the right thing,\" she assured.\n\n\"Did I?\"\n\n\"To you, everything I did was the right thing, you said it yourself. Every other soul I meet tells me that everything I do is some divine action! Tell me how they were supposed to be the right decisions, when so many of them have led us to this?\" I finished.\n\nShe remained silent, watching me as if I were a stranger. Even so, I knew she wasn't afraid of me.\n\nShe's terrified of the fact I'm right.\n\n\"I should have stopped Tarwin leaving that day, because if I had, none of this would have happened.\"\n\n\"If that were the case, we'd have had to face this war without you, without hope of winning,\" she reasoned with more confidence and belief in her words than ever before.\n\nI knew then that she wasn't speaking to me as she'd done for the past few weeks, but as a friend. I closed my eyes and opened my muzzle.\n\n\"I'm like them, no more than a glorified ebon wing. The day the creators made me, the Great Master was there, and whatever they did to make me, a part of him was drawn into the mix. I'm just as much a part of him as I am the other creators,\" I explained, hoping that the little information I had would help her understand.\n\n\"It's me. It's always been down to me. Acrodan, the Sphere, the Great Master, they always needed me. That stupid amulet and me,\" I finally confessed. \"From the moment he was defeated, he's been planning this. The Guardian War, what Acrodan did, all of it was just part of his grand plan. All that time he was waiting for me, he's the only reason I am here like this and not some energy drifting about the stars!\" I struggled to even stop for breath as I gasped and jabbed a wing at the sky.\n\n\"I only exist to be his last hope of destroying everything. If we go to battle tomorrow and he gets that amulet, he can do exactly what he's been planning for thousands of years!\" I confessed, trembling so much it was a wonder the ruin wasn't shaken to rubble.\n\nEven so, I felt as if I didn't deserve anything more than to be buried in the darkness that pooled deep in the valley below. Yet the rustle of her wings broke the silence, her paws shifted and she finally looked up at the stars.\n\n\"You know, I never thought I'd be able to look at them in the same way again?\" she observed.\n\nI shifted, my gaze tentatively finding its way back to the night sky.\n\n\"I wish I could see them the same way I used to,\" I responded, and a smile parted her muzzle.\n\n\"No, before I thought they were nothing more than lights in the night, maybe a canvas filled with holes that had a bright glow behind it,\" she responded, her smile growing, before finally adding, \"but that's not quite how I see them now. Now they remind me of you and how you've changed everything.\"\n\n\"You should have stayed back in the city that night I first left, you'd have been better off,\" I added.\n\nShe spread her wings, draping one over me with little care for the blood upon my own.\n\n\"Is that what you really think? You wouldn't even have made it to the southern edge of North Rim without me,\" she teased, edging up to my side.\n\nI felt my mind conflicted as the warmth of her smooth scales met my own and her tail coiled about mine.\n\n\"I don't want anyone else to die because of what I've done. I want things to go back to how they were when everyone was happy.\"\n\nShe nuzzled my neck lightly. The warmth of her breath like soothing water, the touch of her wings like a smooth silk blanket across my back.\n\n\"You make me happy, and no god, no Great Master and certainly no white dragon that doesn't realise how important he is to his friends, can tell me otherwise,\" she stated with a firm and yet gentle tone.\n\nShe can't be... No, just forget it, be with her, just for this moment. Is it not what you want? A weak expression of happiness broke across my muzzle.\n\n\"What about you?\" she asked knowingly.\n\nI turned to her, our snouts nuzzling against one another.\n\n\"You know that you all mean everything to me. Far more than anything the creators could give me,\" I answered as our eyes met.\n\nShe nudged me back before glancing away with a wide smile.\n\n\"I doubt this big bad Great Master would be able to say that,\" she mused.\n\nI fought not to allow myself to deny her the victory, but ultimately, I had to tell her the truth.\n\n\"He's only waiting, and I'm not his slave like Pyro or the other ebon wings, but...\"\n\n\"But you are a dragon.\" Risha cut my speech short with a firm nudge. \"You're kind, caring and the most loyal dragon I've ever met.\"\n\nShe really believes that, doesn't she? I looked at my forepaws as they shifted. How can I tell her she's wrong?\n\n\"That's just it though, if I live and anything happens to you, what will I have?\" I asked.\n\nShe pressed a forepaw to my chest, before taking one of my own and pressing it to hers.\n\n\"I'm as immortal in here as you are,\" she declared simply, and I could feel a weak smile parting my muzzle.\n\n\"It doesn't change the fact that nothing lasts forever,\" I argued.\n\nShe let my paw go, and with a flick of her tail, moved my head so our eyes met again.\n\n\"Then you're my nothing.\"\n\nHer tone was firm, without anger or the same whimsical joy I'd always seen in her. There was more truth and commitment in her words than a whole universe worth of life and knowledge.\n\nIs this what the gods can't feel? This power is like nothing I've ever known, and yet it feels nothing like the rage and anger that's allowed me to burn down swarms of enemies or battle my way to victory.\n\nI glanced away, casting my eyes over the fiery plains below, until finally, a small laugh left my muzzle.\n\nDown there, across the cliffs and amidst the fire and smoke, was where she'd stood; a dragoness I hardly knew who'd refused to let me take off into the night alone, and for what?\n\n\"You know, for what it's worth, I still have no idea what love really is. I mean, I know, but...\"\n\nShe cut me off by placing a forepaw over my snout, lowered it to the ground and settled her head down beside me. She slowly sank down, snuggling up close and spreading her wing to cover the pair of us.\n\n\"That only makes you all the better at it, you loveable idiot,\" she teased playfully, her snout resting right beside my own.\n\n\"Risha... whatever happens tomorrow, I want you to know... I love you.\"\n\n\"I think the feeling's mutual,\" she added, and with that, the pair of us drifted to sleep side by side."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Dawn arrived faster than I ever would have liked. I awoke to the sight of a red sunrise, beset by the fires of Andruid far below. Dark smoke rose slowly across the scene like a black scar over the otherwise peaceful landscape as the orkin poured out like dark water into a tidal bay. The crimson sky held far less beauty with the knowledge of what lay ahead; almost as if marred by the bloodshed that was soon to come.\n\nI took in a deep breath, watching the wispy vapours escape my nostrils as I exhaled. Over the sound of clanking metal and wing beats, a multitude of voices filled the sky. I stood and glanced back toward the fading smoke of the overlook to see most of it reduced to nothing more than a smouldering field of blackened tents and charred wood. The tower I'd destroyed was clearly visible, as were several others that had fallen in the attack.\n\nIf the orkin didn't know where we were before, they certainly see us now. I thought as I spread my wings, my armour swiftly reforming about me.\n\n\"One day, you're going to have to explain how that works,\" Risha interrupted with a curious expression.\n\n\"I'm still waiting for Apollo to explain it to me,\" I responded.\n\nThe pair of us moved to the edge of the tower, the wind blowing at our backs.\n\n\"How do you know they'll still believe in the legend?\" I asked, focusing my eyes upon the mass of winged bodies gathering before the main keep.\n\n\"I don't, but what does it matter?\" she answered, spreading her wings. \"Besides, I can think of a few dragons that definitely will,\" she added as we took off."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Cold wind battered the frosty stone, spinning the dry straw cover into small flurries about us as we landed atop the main keep and made our way inside. The light of dawn poured in through a breach in the wall, illuminating the crumbling remnants of an old room. It was there Risha paused and glanced back at me as something else caught both our eyes.\n\n\"Good to see you're back,\" Boltock stated, his voice far from his normally humorous tone.\n\nRisha wrapped her brother in an embrace as both Neera and Ember appeared beside him.\n\n\"Glad to see you aren't too eager to leave without me,\" the sapphire dragoness joked with her brother while I tensed at the sight of Ember.\n\nShe can't think of me as a hero anymore, not even a friend. I thought, head sinking as I shrank back and stammered.\n\n\"I know why some of you might be angry \u2013 and you have all the reason to be \u2013 but...\"\n\nAn armoured wing settled on my shoulder, silencing my wittering.\n\n\"Nothing you did made that choice for him,\" Ember assured me, glancing back at the others. \"The dragon he was died that night. I regret it, but it's better that way,\" she added, focusing her attention on one green dragon in particular.\n\n\"He'll be down there, you know,\" I advised her reluctantly.\n\n\"I know,\" she answered, her eyes looking toward the exit.\n\nMy eyes followed, and as I slowly began to walk, the rest of them fell in behind me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "\"We must strike fast and hard, we cannot waste time on saving the others, not now they know we're...\"\n\nAn intense debate between the leaders halted as the heads of griffins and dragons rose from the war table.\n\nSeveral more griffins, Ice Feather and Meadow Hide among them, were putting on steel armour, marked by countless glyphs and patterns \u2013 Halfbeak's Talon Guard I assumed, taking note of the curved metal hooks some of the creatures held between their foreclaws.\n\nOn their backs were what remained of the able-bodied humans, and a wave of relief washed over me to see Tarwin was also present. Yet her eyes were about the only pair that looked unafraid of me.\n\nIs this it? Has the truth really made them all terrified of me? I slowly made my way into the room, passing the crowd until I was only a few steps from the edge of the opening that looked out over the rest of the camp.\n\nSilence consumed the crowd gathered amidst the ruins, and all eyes turned to me. The Cartographer watched from the corner of the room with far more curiosity than the others, until one dragon stepped forward.\n\nThe sound of metal claws tapped upon the stonework as Zephyra appeared. I stiffened, blocking out every pair of judgmental eyes and lowered my head in respect as I admitted.\n\n\"I'm here to fight.\"\n\nShe didn't take her eyes off me.\n\n\"As are we to stand beside you,\" she stated, falling into a regal bow, quickly followed by the rest of the griffins, hippogriffs, Tarwin, Elders, the Cartographer, his phoenix and Apollo.\n\nThe whole room bowed before me, yet it didn't stop there, and like a wave, the gathered crowds all bowed in respect. I looked over them all with an expression that belied the battle of awe and dread raging inside my mind.\n\nIt's... Not possible?\n\nFinally, I looked back and saw my friends dropping to kneel and spreading their wings. Until I finally saw Risha, the only dragon to remain standing. I peered into her magnificent sapphire eyes, and for the first time, I asked her the question for which she'd waited.\n\n\"Will you follow me?\"\n\nShe lowered her head to join the others, her bow exceeding the respect and hope the rest harboured, but it meant nothing compared to her words.\n\n\"To the very end.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Age's Twilight",
                "text": "[ The Battle of Dardien ]\n\n\"Welcome to the end of the world,\" Mordrakk hissed from deep inside my mind.\n\nA cold wind polluted by the stench of smoke and fire buffeted against me. The sun rose high above the gathering clouds and the air carried an unsettling chill. I stood in the midst of ruined walls, no more than four small mounds upon a jagged outcrop at the edge of the grassy sea that was the Midnight Plains. Beside me, were my friends and Apollo, opposite, Zephyra, the Elders and the other leaders.\n\nStretching out far along the small cliff to either side of us stood a long line of armoured dragons, griffins and hippogriffs, all backed up by two more rows of armour-clad bodies, each one smaller than the one that preceded it. Before us, the snow-dusted grasslands of the plains stretched out to the smoke-marred horizon, the desecrated ruins of Andruid just visible below the black shroud and the fiery glow that beset them.\n\nA vast carpet of writhing black stone and dark armour spanned the whole breadth of my vision, flaming torches and monstrous weapons scattered amongst them. Huge trolls stood in line with their back-mounted cannons. Ogres, giants and goblins broke up the squabbling ranks. While swarms of manticores and chimeras filled the sky.\n\nThe smell of death hung above the vast orkin army like carrion above a rotting corpse, but it was nothing compared to what every soul stood about me knew was coming. The rattling of metal plates and the light ringing of blades sounded rhythmically as the waves of uneasiness coursed through everyone.\n\nI glanced to my left, toward a slightly lower part of the ruined walls, where I saw Mordrakk's illusion staring at me knowingly. I looked past him and his darkness faded, albeit another sight took its place.\n\n\"I never thought it would come to this,\" I told Risha, and despite her evident fear, she glanced up at me.\n\n\"Guess we haven't crossed that bridge yet,\" she responded.\n\nIt's not a bridge I ever intend to cross. I thought, as the thunder of drums began, accompanied by the roar of the orkin war chant.\n\n\"One force's numbers do not make up for another's superior skills,\" Halfbeak observed.\n\n\"No, but I'm confident it doesn't harm their chances,\" Zephyra answered, before rounding on all of us.\n\n\"Halfbeak, take your talon guard down the right flank, get the Mordrins through so that their explosives can deal with the far right tower. Queen Eirian you and your sorcerers see that the left tower falls,\" the princess commanded, and the pair moved without question to opposite ends of the battle line.\n\n\"Vulkaine, you and the others should stay with me down the centre. Once the orkin lines are broken, we make straight for the palace,\" she added, looking to the old fire dragon and the other Elders.\n\nAll clad in their own sets of finely-crafted armour, bearing the same seal as the temple banners.\n\n\"Guardian, you and your wing deal with the centre tower and draw out their leader,\" she finished, and I nodded.\n\nThe wind settled, leaving a brief silence as the princess turned and stepped forward, claws tapping on the frost-laden stone until she reached the peak of the ruin. As her gaze passed from face to face, I could see the uncertainty in her eyes. But as she raised her head high, she dismissed any doubt I had.\n\n\"Soldiers!\" she began, tall and proud before the lines of battle-ready warriors.\n\n\"Warriors of Dardien, Storm Peak and the Silver Winds, all who now stand before me, all who would fight to fell this evil, rise up now!\" she continued, and as she did, all heads rose tall, armour chiming as a hundred wings spread.\n\n\"Our alliance has stood for over a thousand years, and this is not the dawn we will see it fall, not while any one of us still draws breath. No! Today is the day we fight for what is right, today is the day we strike a blow at the heart of darkness itself and make it known to the world that the kingdoms of old have not faded into the night, have not been broken! We will make sure all who would oppose us know that we shall not stand idle, that we will not give in to be forgotten!\"\n\nA courageous cheer overcame the distant chant, but any will to add my own voice to the chorus was stolen by what I knew was about to happen.\n\n\"Today, we will step back into the light! Fly steady, my brothers, sisters,\" the princess roared, before pausing and peering down at those standing directly before her. \"Friends.\" Her voice grew soft, before rising to a crescendo.\n\n\"Let this day be remembered as the day we took back our legacy!\" She turned to face the smoke-strewn horizon, silver flames flickering from her nostrils. \"For victory!\"\n\nHer wings exploded like lightning from her sides before she dropped over the edge. There was a roar of fire and an echoing wave of eagle calls as everyone around me followed like a great wave erupting from the mountainside.\n\n\"And it begins,\" Mordrakk rasped.\n\nI closed my eyes tight, and even though a thousand wings thundered like a hurricane about me, the world went silent, muting every moment that followed. The roar of the wind was quiet as it tore past, the calls of those about me lost in a frozen void. My heart beat like a drum, putting those of the orkin to shame, and my dragonfire burned like the flames of a furnace, occasionally purging white vapour from my nostrils.\n\nThe long, drawn out hail of a horn and a rattling wave of armour crossed the sea of orkin below as they took up battle-ready stances. The first strike came from the great cannons, as multiple booms rang in harmony, the bright flashes that followed swatting dragons from the sky like flies as they exploded into miniature suns. I plunged forward, swerving to avoid the steel hail, arrows and ballista fire. The rest of what I guessed I should call my wing by now followed in perfect, fluid motion.\n\nOthers around us weren't so lucky, and all I could do was watch dragons, griffins and others alike being blown apart. A tally etched into my vision as I saw the spiked balls explode, while crude arrows impaled others. Fearsome manticore calls signalled the engagement of multiple feline hunters, their claws, teeth and stinging tails thrown into a frenzy as their riders opened fire with poisoned arrows and dark magic, plucking more allies from the sky.\n\nIn retaliation, a virtual rainbow of fire burst through the swarm as dragons, griffins and manticores clashed together. Amidst the storm of beasts, the far larger and stronger chimera proved to be more dangerous, driving us closer to the army below, forcing me to avoid an intense hail of arrows. Without conscious thought, I coiled back, breathing a white-hot torrent of fire. The wall of bristling spears was reduced to ash as many more dragons joined the burning assault, searing any arrows that were fired in retaliation.\n\nSeveral hippogriffs swooped into battle lines, their regal flight formations becoming an arrow of pulsating lightning and magical wind, casting the enemy aside like autumn leaves. As arcane sparks lanced through the horde like an incinerating web.\n\nGriffin formations proved just as lethal as they cut swathes through the orkin with talons and razor-sharp beaks. All the while, I struggled to maintain my attention on anything for too long as a far larger adversary appeared before me. I'd never seen a troll so close before, but the great brute reared up on its hind legs to meet me.\n\nDarting aside, I narrowly avoided the crushing blow of its mighty fists, while several orkin weren't so lucky. Taking the opportunity, I swerved about its flank, blasting the mass of platforms supported amongst its dorsal spines with a surge of fire. The crude structure ignited like a dry bed of leaves, consuming the lethal siege weapon before the whole thing exploded with a fiery boom and the creature toppled.\n\nThe explosion threw me out of the archers' range, the others remaining close behind me, cutting down a pair of manticores and turning a chimera into a ball of fire as we ascended back into the aerial fray. Up here, the air was cold and brutal, filled with the thunder of wing beats.\n\nAs we fought our way through the sky-borne combatants, the snowy plains slowly slipped away, replaced by the dense ruins of the cliff top city. The world moved at such a pace it resembled a great sheet being pulled out from beneath me, each beast I cut down leaving another mark upon that endless scroll of Mordrakk's tally.\n\nSuch a vast number of winged creatures cast a shadow \u2013 it was as if one great monster were swooping down from the stars to smash against the world with a cosmic fist. As the rising sunlight broke, illuminating each armoured body, it was as if the plates and scales of each warrior were like gleaming stars.\n\nNever what I had in mind when I wondered if dragons could fly to the stars.\n\nEven so, the sky grew darker, filling with the smoke and pungent stench of the orkin's crude industry. Another pack of manticores forced us down toward the city, where we narrowly avoided the blast of cannon fire as we entered the polluted air directly above Andruid.\n\nThe river channels flowing through the tight ruins provided the best means of avoiding fire and getting around quickly. Yet the many bridges spanning the shore also became good firing positions for the orkin artillery, as did the wooden frames clinging to the crumbling structures. It was like Taldran all over again, and just as I'd once seen that wretched city burn, I didn't hesitate to set the foul place ablaze.\n\nThis time there's no holding back. I assured myself as the great wooden tower came into view, and I began plotting a course towards it.\n\nThat was when I heard the boom of more cannon fire. I swerved up with the others close behind as more blasts followed. The first, sent a storm of smoking projectiles through our formation. Although I hated myself, I prayed for those emitting the painful shrieks behind me, while selfishly begging that it was anyone dear to me.\n\nAs the initial shots subdued, I saw more flying formations drop down over the city, arrows bouncing from armour and scales alike. With wings locked tight at their owners' sides, claws outstretched, dragons and griffins in union plummeted toward the smoke and fire, tearing into the orkins' savage battalions, ripping them from boardwalks and bridges, while destroying cannons with arcs of magic and blasts of dragonfire.\n\nThe orkin were swift to retaliate with volleys of arrows and ballistas. Large, cumbersome ogres strode amidst the hordes, throwing chunks of ruined buildings. The weapons mounted upon the trolls proved more of a challenge. More of the great beasts reared up, shielding the artillery within their spines and slamming their fists down upon anyone who flew too close.\n\nI forced my attention away as the clatter of armour, the flash of cannons, magical fire and the sharp ring of clashing blades battered my senses with their horrifying symphony. I focused on my racing heart, each sharp intake of breath, and despite the carnage, the small shadows closing in about me confirming the presence of my friends.\n\nAs if taking one deep breath, the air about us seemed to pause, and I looked up just in time to see a swirling storm of hippogriff sorcerers. Blue lightning gathered around the left-most tower, blowing the great orkin structure into ruin and hailing the distant cries of victory from our forces.\n\nThey got one? Good, just two to go! I noted, fully aware the battle was far from won.\n\nAnother booming horn rang out from another of the towers, and from the centre of the ruins a new swarm of manticores bearing elite orkin riders flew up like angry wasps from a hive. They rose in formation, blocking out the sun and my view of the centre tower, before forcing us to dive down amidst the ruins.\n\n\"Go under them!\" I called, as I swerved abruptly.\n\nI found myself flying inches above the frozen river. The others followed close behind, as did at least half a dozen manticores swoop down into our path. Orkin laden bridges flashed by overhead, forcing me to turn back toward our pursuers as they struggled to navigate the tight terrain.\n\n\"Do you really want to be flying straight at them!?\" I heard Neera shout, and by the look on everyone's face, I was sure they all thought the same thing.\n\nI just nodded, opening my wings, slicing the first rider clean in half, engulfing two more with fire, while Ember and Boltock's claws cut down a third. Another found out just how sharp Neera's weapons really were, and ice encased the last as Risha flew by, the extra weight ensuring the orkin became very familiar with the frozen river below.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm pretty sure!\" I called back the moment we were free, while the faldron simply appeared pleased she'd had the opportunity to kill more orkin.\n\n\"Come on, we still need to get to the tower,\" I urged, looking up at the structure in an effort to formulate another way through its defences.\n\nI wasn't given long to ponder, as a hail of arrows and rocks flew down from the walls on either side of us. Several of the crude projectiles glanced off my armour, before I unleashed a torrent of flame onto the battalion of archers. The swarming creatures stood no chance, but as they writhed and heaved in the fire, many more projectiles forced us higher.\n\nI sent another fire bolt into a tower, forcing the orkin to rain from it like a flaming waterfall. Torrents of coloured flame consumed several more barricades as my friends came round at my rear, their armour holding up well against the arrows. The same could not be said for the thrown rock that crashed into me, knocking me from the sky.\n\nSeveral buildings clipped my wings, sending me into a frantic spin, while in my blurred vision, I saw my attacker, \u2013 a large, pale-skinned humanoid creature, with swollen features and a vaguely angry expression. Dust consumed the image when I crashed through the roof of an old building, throwing the world into the chaos of a loud ringing and a pounding in my head. When I opened my eyes, the dust was settling about me. I could barely make out the outlines of several dark figures, the sound of heavy armoured boots heralding their charge.\n\nThe blades on my wings flashed into life, illuminating the dust around me into a glowing mist. The first orkin swung at me through the cloud, missing as I jumped aside and swept a blade across his front. My tail struck a second, and a third felt the force of my other wing. As a fourth charged, I coiled back, the ensuing blast escaping my muzzle just as another jumped down from the level above, throwing me off balance. My fire breath missed, striking the roof and causing it to collapse, burying several more in the process.\n\nThe one on my back threw a wooden shaft around my neck and pulled back in an attempt to drag me to the floor. I bucked up, throwing him over my front and snatching the spear from his grip with my mouth. The creature writhed on the floor before I finally stuck his crude blade through his chest.\n\nEven so, four more orkin rose to their feet before me, shaking off debris as they brought their weapons to bear. Before any of them could move, they were consumed by a torrent of fire as Ember burst in through one of the windows.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she asked, but before I could answer, a shadow moved in behind her.\n\nThe large orkin lifted his hammer. I moved to strike him down, but a large piece of rubble beat me to it, slamming into his face. Ember and I glanced to see Boltock in another of the windows, rocky projectiles levitating around him.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Ember offered in swift appreciation.\n\nHe simply nodded as both Neera and Risha appeared next to him. Before anyone could take a moment's reprieve, something caught all of our attentions.\n\n\"Flyin' things make meh mad, I smash flyin' things!\" the ogre's angry voice boomed, lifting another ruined chunk from the wall.\n\nI instinctively coiled back, blasting the wall beside the dull creature before it could take aim. A bridge between us shook as the ruins exploded and the large brute fell forwards.\n\n\"No, stop that, flyin' things no play fair!\" it howled, effortlessly ripping a stone pillar from the foundations. \"I smashes you's all into the ground!\" it yelled, before charging across the bridge.\n\n\"I think moving would be a good idea!\" Neera warned.\n\nI agree completely. I was swift to think, when without warning, the bridge gave a firm shake before kicking upwards like a bucking horse, throwing the ogre into the air before the brute knew what was going on.\n\n\"What? Ogres are stupid,\" Boltock shrugged as his concentration faded and we all looked at him. \"And this city is made of stone?\"\n\nHe's just full of surprises, isn't he? I thought, feeling oddly taken back to the first time I'd really seen him use his power.\n\nAnother loud boom immediately demanded our attention when the whole building shook. We all peered down to see that the beast had fallen directly on top of a cannon, which immediately exploded, as did the troll on which it had been mounted.\n\n\"I suppose you aimed for that too?\" Neera joked, and Boltock's look neither denied or confirmed.\n\nAs the dust and smoke settled, I looked out over the raging battle outside, to the distant tower.\n\n\"We need to get up there, find Balgore and kill him!\" I declared, unable to help my growing impatience.\n\n\"No arguments here,\" Neera added, straightening her tail feathers and hidden weapons.\n\nEmber and Boltock both nodded and Risha moved up beside me. I glanced back at her while my eyes wandered to something in the smoky background. Above what looked to be a large, domed building, I could see a host of silver-armoured dragons, including Zephyra and the Elders.\n\n\"That's the ruined temple of nine, where the survivors from Dardien's defensive wings are held up,\" Ember informed as she moved over to get a better view.\n\nI glanced between the temple and the tower, when something else caught my eye. Despite the battle raging all about us, many of the cannons were aiming at the temple, only they weren't loading explosive shells. At first, I couldn't tell what the chain balls and small orbs were, until I looked down to see the same thing splayed out in the wreckage below us.\n\nThey're nets! I looked back at the temple in alarm.\n\n\"What is it?\" Risha asked.\n\n\"It's a trap. The temple is a trap!\" I exclaimed, spreading my wings. \"They left those survivors there for a reason!\"\n\nShe glanced over the ruined structure, and it was clear she saw it too. I didn't give anyone time to argue, not that I thought they would. I took off toward the ruins as fast as I could manage; Balgore's tower will have to wait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Battling beasts of every kind filled the air around us as we finally came upon the temple. I swerved and weaved through the fight, once again coming dangerously close to the swarm of blades and arrow fire. Amidst the crumbling stonework, I saw the fallen being swiftly hacked apart by the orkin. While those that fought back were quickly overpowered before they could take off again. Jets of flame, bursts of magic and sharp claws killed orkin in the hundreds, but it did little to reduce their numbers.\n\nWe have to break them soon, there's too many to just kill them all! I noted, yet as much as I thought about killing Balgore, I knew we'd be no better if we lost our own leadership.\n\nI saw the central tower loom above like a mountain as we crossed the open courtyard before the temple, and another flock of manticores forced us to dart about the ruined statues surrounding it. Flying between the towering stone impersonations of dragons, griffins and other creatures, we circled back on our pursuers and blasted them with flames, before rising over the shattered roof.\n\nThrough the crumbling dome I could see a large force of dragons within the ruined basin, most of which had formed a protective circle about the princess and Elders, while a guard of griffins reinforced them. With a crescendo of gargled hisses, my friends and I broke through the attacking manticores that had been circling above.\n\n\"Come on, now's our chance!\" I cried, diving towards the ruined roof as the others rallied behind me.\n\n\"You may want to double-check that,\" Neera responded, her words cut off by a booming roar.\n\nAll eyes fixed on something else amidst the chaos as a shadow and loud wing beats passed over us. I recognised that sound, and it filled me with rage. The shadow was the only warning I had before the wyvern tore into me. Its claws swatted me aside, its wings tossing my friends about like gnats as it grasped me in its jaws and lifted up into the sky.\n\n\"I's got's some scores to settle with you's, demon, and no black wyrm's goanna stop me's this time!\" Balgore declared from the creature's back, his spiked, golden armour rattling as the beast beat its wings.\n\nI squirmed, but the wyvern was careful to keep my bladed wings and claws at a distance.\n\n\"You's goanna know the full power of...\"\n\nBefore the warlord could finish, several sharp blades cut through the air, lodging between the plates in his neck. He merely grunted at the inconvenience, turning towards where the shots had originated.\n\nWhat met him was a wall of flame, forcing the wyvern's grip to loosen. Able to spread my wings, I jumped from its teeth, before slashing at its armoured head with all my strength. The etherium plates proved more than a worthy adversary for my weaponry, glowing red-hot until they finally broke, leaving enough time for the beast to bat me away.\n\nAs I fell, the wyvern moved to grab me again. Several shards of glistening ice and a shower of stone tore at the underside of its wings, throwing it off balance. Recovering from the rough descent, I swiftly avoided a towering statue of some great humanoid lizard. Unfortunately, my spinning momentum forced me toward the rapidly approaching temple wall, and unleashing a blast of explosive fire, I slipped through the narrow hole it blasted and into the shadowed interior.\n\nSpreading my wings, I steadied my landing amidst the dusty rubble the best I could, before finally hitting the floor, bouncing to a halt against a small pile of rubble. I could see my friends forcing Balgore away with volleys of fire and elemental magic, before rushing down to join me.\n\n\"Nicely handled,\" I offered, shaking dust, soot and bloody grime from my dented armour.\n\n\"I always tell you you're not the only one who can fight,\" Risha assured with a wry smile, her own armour marred by scars and scratches.\n\nThe sounds of the ground-based battle raging about us stole the conversation, growing louder as we swiftly climbed across the rubble to see the small circle of Dardien guards. All the while, more dragons swooped down, instantly cooking the orkin hoard with torrents of fire as they circled and finally landed to reinforce the soldiers.\n\nThere's just more wings flying in here! We're gathering like fish in a barrel! The moment I saw Zephyra step out from the group, I ran toward her to declare such a revelation.\n\n\"Brave soldiers of Dardien, we have come to aid you in the...\" the princess began.\n\n\"It's a trap!\" was all that escaped my muzzle as I almost skidded into her.\n\n\"What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed\u2026\" Zephyra asked, but I silenced her question immediately as every set of eyes turned to me.\n\n\"Balgore's not in the tower, he's trying to lure you all here!\"\n\n\"Indeed, it would appear the Guardian may have a point. This site would make for the ideal ambush,\" Apollo chimed as he hovered behind her.\n\n\"He's right, your highness, the orkin are preparing cannons to bombard the temple as we speak,\" Ember reinforced.\n\nCome on, she has to believe us! Zephyra glanced up at the shattered ceiling, then nodded.\n\n\"Defensive formations, make for the sky!\" she commanded, and instantly an armoured wall of dragons formed about her and the Elders.\n\nThe wyvern's recognisable roar and the crash of Balgore slamming through the temple wall punctuated her command as the warlord swiftly batted aside a battling flock of dragons and griffins. One leatherwing wasn't so lucky, and Balgore's mount plucked him from the sky, before landing on the crumbling head of a large draconic statue. Bloodstained, the squirming dragon in the wyvern's grip struggled until, with a loud crack, the beast shattered his spine and dropped him like a rag at the feet of the sculpture.\n\n\"At last you show yourself, fiend!\" Zephyra called firmly as she locked eyes with him.\n\n\"I's been waitin' to get you's all right where I's wants you's!\" he growled confidently. \"I's got a little present for you's all!\" he added, as I glanced around for any sign of what he may be up to.\n\n\"You's all's think you's can beat's us!\" he boomed, raising his golden hammer high, a cracked grin parting his rocky face. \"Instead's, I's goanna watch you's all die!\"\n\nWith a heavy flap of its wings his hideous mount battled back toward the centre tower. I lurched forward when the deep boom of cannon fire thundered, sending a rain of nets down over us. Many snagged on the rubble, but those that made it, pinned us like a fisherman's catch.\n\nI lashed out, my glowing blades making easy work of the chains, before I cut my struggling companions free.\n\nIs that all he's got? I thought, turning to take off after Balgore.\n\nBefore any of us could spread our wings, the ground shuddered as the rubble below the statue erupted in a shower of dirt, forcing the temple floor to sink into a newly-yawning pit.\n\n\"You need to get out of here!\" I insisted as a feathery slash from Apollo cut the princess and her guard free.\n\n\"I'm afraid I must agree,\" the construct announced, cutting himself free with several more blasts.\n\nThe ground shook again, and with a deep, reverberating roar some kind of stone monstrosity spewing green flames crawled up from the pit. The moment I saw it my mind instantly considered the monstrous silhouette I'd glimpsed deep within the ice fire foundry of Valcador, only now there were no chains to hold it back.\n\nIt was a huge, worm-like thing with a body formed from pulsating rows of sharp stone and molten green barbs. Two clawed legs supported its vast bulk on either side of its spiked, metal-clad head. While crude orkin armour was grafted to its stone hide by welded chains and metal rivets.\n\nShifting like a great serpent, it twisted and coiled. The ground gave another shudder as part of the temple collapsed and the beasts spiked tail whipped around. Green fire crackled under its stone hide, while an eyeless helmet covered a huge jaw and a great beak of rock.\n\nThat confirms how the orkin dig their burrows so quickly. I noted as someone amidst the crowd called in terror.\n\n\"Basilisk!\"\n\nThe hideous beast roared, sending a torrent of green fire into the chamber's far side. The baleful flames singed the air as smoke would one's lungs, filling it with a sickening, horrific scent. It was then that its true nature struck me as I looked in horror to see the flames reduced even dragons to nothing but charred bones glistening with green embers.\n\nBut... Dragons are fireproof? I thought as their deaths drew cheers from the orkin onlookers.\n\n\"Basilisk fire is the most potent known. Its poison will kill anything it touches!\" Boltock explained with a frightened eagerness.\n\n\"Go, find Balgore and kill him, we'll handle this abomination,\" Zephyra ordered.\n\n\"Princess or not, I'm not about to leave you all down here with that thing!\" I declared, but she spread her wings and looked at me confidently.\n\n\"Today is not the day upon which we find our deaths, not by this evil's hand. Now go!\" she insisted, and without another word, she took off, rallying at least half a dozen dragons, including Soaren and Apollo behind her as she flew claws-first into the basilisk's head.\n\nI felt the urge to fly up with her, but as they captured the creature's attention, something tugged at my wing.\n\n\"They won't last long against that thing; we have to break the orkin now!\" Risha demanded.\n\nI glanced between her and the aerial battle, before nodding reluctantly.\n\n\"Stay close,\" was all I added as I beat my wings and took to the sky.\n\nThere was no argument from any of them as they emerged from the temple's shattered roof behind me. Manticores and arrow volleys surrounded us once more, but the tower loomed just ahead. Surging upwards, we circled round the mass of wooden beams and scaffold supporting the bulk, blasting archers with jets of flame before the beasts and their ratty goblin allies scattered as we finally landed on the wooden sprawl.\n\nA large web of blackened beams, taught ropes, tattered cloth and rattling chains covered everything around us. Swiftly moving forward, we carved our way up through the maze of walkways towards the armoured platform at the summit.\n\nIt didn't take long for the orkin to regroup, and before I knew it, several manticores swooped by and another large orkin cluster scaled the ramp behind us, while more took up firing positions on the opposing walkways. With no thoughts other than command, I looked to Boltock and Ember.\n\n\"Do you think you can handle them?\" I asked, harbouring no doubt.\n\n\"No problem,\" both nodded eagerly in agreement.\n\n\"Can you deal with them?\" I asked again, this time directing my words at Neera while nodding to the archers on the walkways on either side of us.\n\n\"Consider it done,\" she confirmed, immediately taking off, darting amidst the wooden structure with skill and precision.\n\nAs fire engulfed the pathways behind us, I finally looked to Risha. Her expression told me she knew exactly what I was about to say. It was fortunate, because the manticores crawling down toward us didn't give me much time to say anything more.\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nThe feline beasts let out angry roars, forcing their chitinous tails forwards like poisoned lightning bolts. I swept at one barb with my wings, cutting it to a sizzling stump. As the creature recoiled, I ducked low, cutting at its forelegs with my claws as Risha jumped up and over my back, colliding claws-first with its rider.\n\nThe orkin swung wildly as his mount staggered, while Risha sank her claws deep into his hide, coiling her tail around to stab him in the back with the blade at its tip. She leapt back to me with a neat flap of her wings as the thrashing manticore rolled off the walkway, taking the dead rider with it.\n\nWe had little time to rest, the moment the first was out of the way, another pounced. Risha jumped back, her tail kissing the fiery combat behind us as I leapt across to another beam. The orkin looked between us with an air of indecision, before he finally fixed his attention on me.\n\nGood to see they still consider me the better prize. I thought as with one kick of his spiked boots, he ushered his mount on to an opposing beam.\n\nThe weak timber gave an uneasy groan as I lowered myself, and did my best to stay balanced. The orkin laughed as he crept closer, while I focused on his every movement and eventually, tucking my wings at my side, ran straight at him. He appeared perplexed for a split second, but hurriedly readied his weapon and pulled at his reins to flash the manticore's sharp teeth.\n\nI leapt into the range of its claws, the sudden movement dislodging several large icicles. The first one hit the feline beast's raised paw, knocking it off balance, while the rest sank deep into the top of its head.\n\nAs his mount collapsed, I ripped the shocked rider from his saddle, sinking my teeth deep into his neck. Vile black ichor flooded my mouth as he gargled and went limp, until I released him to fall after his mount into the pit below.\n\n\"Good work,\" I concluded, unable to hide my satisfaction, as I landed next to Risha.\n\nShe nodded once, as we glanced back to see Boltock and Ember had the orkin on the run, while Neera had torched most of the archers. Another group ran up a stairway to our right, intent on cutting us off.\n\nWe have to stay together! I started to move toward the others, but Risha caught me before I could.\n\n\"Come on, the way is clear, it's our best chance,\" she urged.\n\nI glanced between her and the others, and it was clear I wasn't the only one who didn't want to split up.\n\nThen what's the difference? Our levels of faith in them? I wondered, aware Risha was right. If we don't go now, it may be too late.\n\n\"They can handle themselves,\" she added reassuringly.\n\n\"You're right,\" I finally admitted, but not before sending a blast of fire into the oncoming horde, shattering the stairs."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "It wasn't long before the two of us found a route to the higher levels. With the monsters distracted below, it was clear, just as Risha had suggested, and we soon emerged onto a small series of steps running around the square rim of the tower's peak.\n\n\"He has to be up there,\" I proposed, nodding at the platform.\n\n\"I wouldn't doubt it,\" she added.\n\nSheets of scaled hide and rough furs covered the metal-reinforced summit, while the scent of death and decay filled the air. Meanwhile, flares of toxic-green fire burst up from the temple far below, while silver flashes indicated that our forces still fought back.\n\nEven if we kill Balgore, what's to say they won't still be stuck in there with that thing?\n\nIt was at that point I looked down at the flaming tower below us, the sight reminding me of the orkin mining structures back in Valcador. The centre was some kind of crude mechanism boring into a pit below the foundations, bearing the smouldering characteristics of something that could explode.\n\nIf my time in Valcador taught me anything... I began to formulate an idea.\n\n\"Stay close,\" I insisted, taking a cautious step up to the roof with Risha close behind.\n\nThe unexpected sound of metal talons upon wood forced us to freeze. I listened intently as the sounds came closer, but I noticed something else \u2013 the footsteps were light and sharp, unlike those of any brutish warlord.\n\n\"You're too late, little hatchlings,\" a silky feminine voice hissed.\n\nI glanced up at the snake-like form of the ebon dragoness coiling down from the rafters. The one Pyro had sent to guard the warlord.\n\n\"Omisha, I presume?\" I muttered.\n\nShe smiled, flexing a forepaw as if to offer a patronising pat on the head.\n\n\"I admire your eagerness to fulfil the master's great plan, but this is not where you're needed,\" she hissed, waving a wing as if to direct an ill-behaved chick to their nest.\n\nI narrowed my eyes, stepping forward without a hint of the fear her glowing eyes were clearly seeking.\n\n\"Where's Balgore?\" I demanded.\n\nShe coiled back, raising a foreclaw to her muzzle in mock contemplation.\n\n\"Let me think. Oh yes, he's at the switch on top of this tower, but I wouldn't worry; he'll be dead the moment it's triggered,\" she laughed.\n\nI fought not to allow my confusion to show, but nonetheless, she revelled in my perplexed emotions.\n\n\"Couldn't your brave friends figure out what these towers are for? We don't want to take Dardien, we want it gone, and when these towers are activated.\" She raised a forepaw, clenching it tightly, \"well, the hanging city shouldn't be too much trouble after that,\" she hissed, opening her paw and silently mouthing the word Boom.\n\nWait... So these towers are supposed to explode!?\n\nI had no time to consider what she had said before she slammed into me with a speed that put Neera's to shame. Her claws raked at my armour and her fire caused my scars to burn red-hot. She had me pinned, but with a hiss Risha leapt up and wrapped all four claws about her neck, pulling her backwards.\n\n\"That's my mate, you monster!\" she declared, slashing at the traitor's wings with her tail blade.\n\nThe ebon wing recoiled like a spring, and in her struggle, failed to notice that Risha was directing her toward the edge of the platform. Smashing through the row of spiked rails guarding the edge, she plummeted into the battle below, her tattered wings barely able to hold her as she flailed in the air. Risha leapt back beside me as I staggered to my paws and glanced at her in utter bewilderment, only to speak before she could quip.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I know... You fight better than me anyway.\"\n\nQuickly moving on we scampered upwards, a large square platform greeted us, laden with piles of munitions and several cannons.\n\nThat at least makes one part of my plan easier. However, in light of the new information I had to consider. I don't want to blow up the whole of Dardien doing this.\n\nSmoking chimneys and fires sat around the platform, while a tall spire draped in chains and slowly shifting machinery sat at the centre.\n\nThat has to be the top of their drill?\n\nA thunderous gust of wind shook me from my thoughts, prompting me to look into the distant horizon at the gathering mass of clouds.\n\nThe lack of Mordrakk telling me anything since the start of the battle made me feel uneasy, especially when I saw the gathering storm. In the same instant I observed several orkin guards abandon their cannons, rushing forward in an attempt to subdue us. Fortunately, they were no better than those who had preceded them, and when we finally finished them off, I looked back at Risha.\n\n\"Come on, if he's not here, we still have to destroy this thing before they can use it,\" I prompted.\n\nThe central mechanism whirred and rattled, as if it were winding up for its fatal blow. My guesswork was further corroborated when I saw what looked like a gigantic lever before a crude throne at its base, its handle wickedly forged from the same golden metal as my armour. There was no sign of Balgore, or the black dragoness.\n\nMaybe he doesn't want to sit on top of the explosives intended to kill him?\n\n\"We need to ensure no one activates this thing, before we figure out how to destroy it!\" I instructed.\n\nRisha nodded reluctantly, making her way over to the throne while I strode out onto the open platform. Making myself look as proud and confident as I could manage. Spreading my wings, I sent several blasts of magical fire into the air where they exploded amidst the gathering clouds.\n\n\"Where are you? I'm here, come and get me!\" I shouted as loud as I could, adding several more explosive bolts.\n\nWe waited in strained anticipation; nothing but the low din of battle filling the air until a thunderous roar boomed. The whole platform shook as the silhouetted form of the wyvern-mounted warlord appeared. His vicious steed hissed and its dorsal spines rattled, while its rider let out a confident laugh.\n\n\"I's been waitin' for this,\" he growled, waving his golden hammer.\n\nMy wings flared wider, the arcane blades flashing to life as his mount dropped to the wooden platform with a tremendous thud. Risha watched from the throne, as if every part of her body was urging her not to stand idly by. Yet she knew what she had to do. As did I.\n\n\"So have I, you filth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Brazen Warlord",
                "text": "I charged forward, drawing his attention away from Risha and the lever. His wyvern clumsily spread its wings, surging upward as it fumbled toward me. Without hesitation, I darted left toward one of the cannons. The confused beast swung round, its armoured neck far more agile than I anticipated, and before I knew it, my tail exploded with agony as its strong jaws crushed around my armour.\n\nIt dragged me out from behind the cannon and threw me against a pile of scrap metal, my armour cushioning most of the impact. Balgore laughed, ushering the thing forward once more. I coiled back and blasted fire at the creature's right wing, turning it into a tattered rag of burnt flesh. It let out an angry roar, lunging as I darted around its opposite flank, torching its other wing with another burst of flame.\n\nLet's see how tough you are when you can't fly! I thought, as it went from flailing in pain, to a fit of rage, sticking out its burnt right limb.\n\nThe speed at which it moved the charred appendage caught me off guard, and I landed flat on my face when it knocked my legs out from under me.\n\nAll the while Balgore bellowed a barrage of angry insults, continually forcing the wyvern forward. I staggered to my paws just as it swung round, its horns thumping into me like a battering ram. Nevertheless, I sank my claws deep into its putrid, scaly hide and slashed at its eyes with my wings, drawing great gashes across its golden armour.\n\nWhipping its serpentine neck around, the beast reared up and it was all I could do to hang on as I was dragged into the air with it. Inevitably thrown aside, crashing to the floor beside the throne.\n\n\"Blaze, what are you doing? You can't fight him alone!\" Risha shouted.\n\nRising from the dent I'd made in the frail metal structure, I looked back at her.\n\n\"No, but if he gets to that lever, everyone down in the city dies!\"\n\n\"Isn't this romantic,\" a mocking voice announced.\n\nI peered past Risha to see a dark shape materialise behind the throne, shadowy scales gleaming in the last beams of sunlight as distant thunder began to rumble.\n\n\"It is such a shame I have to intrude!\" Omisha announced, before she leapt at Risha.\n\n\"Look out!\" I called, coiling back.\n\nBefore I could take a breath, Risha spun round, bringing the blade on her tail across the underside of the ebon wing.\n\n\"Why, you are a bold little thing, aren't you?\" the dark dragoness mused as their wing blades locked in a clattering parry.\n\n\"You have no idea!\" Risha challenged, blasting a plume of fire into her opponent's face.\n\nThe ebon wing hissed, but as Risha fell back Omisha swept her paws out from under her.\n\n\"You focus on him, I'll take care of her,\" my blue companion instructed, jumping back to her paws with a snarl.\n\nTorn between helping her and tackling the warlord, I felt stunned. Fear and dread gripped me more than ever.\n\nNo, not here, not now. I'm in the heart of battle. I have to focus!\n\nAs I deliberated, the wyvern was busy battling with its tattered wings, much to Balgore's rage.\n\n\"Having issues?\" I taunted, prowling back towards him.\n\n\"The only issues I's has is with you's!\" he growled, slamming his hammer down on the wyvern's head. \"Go gets him, you's useless wretch!\"\n\nThe monster licked its bloodied lips, fixing its yellow eyes on me before it charged once more. I backed up against one of the cannons, craning my neck to face the pile of spiked orbs beside it. The beast's mouth opened wide and I exhaled, jumping up from the explosion with a beat of my wings. The blast wave consumed the wyvern as both the cannon and its munitions exploded.\n\nHow do you like that, you... I'd almost cleared its spiny back when a heavy golden mass swatted me.\n\nBalgore's crude hammer was more than a match for my armour, the force of its strike shattering bone and plates alike, and I crashed into the floor before rolling to a painful halt. All the while I could hear Risha battling Omisha, and a loud creaking through the tower as it shuddered. The explosion had shattered one of the main support beams, causing the whole thing to list. As it slowly shifted, the temple roof loomed into view.\n\nOne more explosion like that and this whole thing's going to topple! I thought, locking eyes with my opponent.\n\nThe wyvern swung round, its face and front half now matching its charred wings.\n\nHow in the creators' name is it still alive! The idea sickened me, yet as I thought, another fiery explosion lit up the sky behind Balgore, when the second tower came crashing down.\n\nTarwin did it! Despite everything, I inwardly cheered as several armoured griffins bearing riders swooped away from the destruction. Two down, last one is on me!\n\nBalgore took one look at the flaming remnants, his face contorting as he growled and snorted a stream of green embers.\n\n\"You's really are starting to anger me's, wyrm!\" he roared.\n\nCoiling back, I blasted several bolts at the wyvern's head, but despite scorching its scales, it was as if it didn't feel the pain anymore. In a flash, it swept out a bony wing and pinned me under its snout. I kicked up, pressing all four of my legs into its muzzle and letting my claws sink deep into its exposed hide. With all of my strength, I forced its mouth shut, very much aware that being eaten wasn't on my list of things to experience. All the while Balgore grinned down at me.\n\n\"Little demon... No more's than a wyrm under my boot!\"\n\nHe should really learn to stop taunting! Despite the wyvern's newfound energy, it couldn't ignore the heat of my claws as they turned white-hot.\n\nWith a shrill yelp, it reeled back, flames erupting from my armour and igniting the floor beneath me. Balgore's smile simply grew wider.\n\n\"This is what's I's after, demon!\" he declared loudly, lifting his hammer. \"A reals good fight!\"\n\nSuddenly, the sky let out a thunderous boom and arcs of lightning lanced through the dark air. With a stark flash, a purple bolt split the clouds, followed immediately by another as a light rain began to fall. I looked out over the distant plains as purple lightning strikes began to ignite fires and split the heavens open.\n\nThis is no natural storm. I noted, as where lightning struck, it opened smouldering holes in the earth, their depths illuminated by more purple flames. Just like under the brazier back at the celebration!\n\nBalgore looked to the sky, seemingly far more angered by the interruption. In that moment, I took my chance and leapt onto the wyvern's head, running down its snaking neck toward him. He met me with a stone arm, wrapping his fingers around my wing, holding his grip for a few seconds until the heat forced him to let go and I brought a searing claw across his chest.\n\nHis golden armour buckled and warped, but remained steadfast. The warlord took one look at it, and I recoiled, ready to fire. Before I knew it, his hammer slammed into my side. More of the wooden platform ignited as I rolled to a halt, the flames hissing in the growing rain.\n\n\"I's sick of this, demon. I's goin' to kills you's!\" he bellowed.\n\nThe ever-darkening clouds began to swirl and the wind blew wildly. It was as if the air itself was fleeing the storm as it consumed the last shreds of sunlight with another thunderous boom. I took one look at the molten holes the lightning had created and felt my blood run cold as the dark forms of winged beasts swarmed out like pitch-black rivers.\n\nVulpomancers... There's so many of them!\n\nMoving like the writhing tentacles of one great beast, illuminated by flashes of purple lightning, they began to coil within the clouds. Another soul-tearing shriek burst from the sky as a purple light swirled into existence within the storm and the wind blew harder, rattling the tower to its foundations. I battled to keep my footing as the structure's gradual descent toward the battle-strewn ruins accelerated.\n\nMordrakk laughed within my mind, before slipping away into the shadows amidst my thoughts. His time to act had finally come. Fear gripped me, and even Balgore appeared uneasy as the dark swarm began to gather, their shadows spreading across the snow-covered plains like a vast plague.\n\nI wonder if he realises who he's been serving all this time? I had to wonder, yet with a chilling war cry, he surged forward.\n\nHis battered wyvern staggered, while I did my best to steady myself. Before he could get close to me the wooden frame splintered, metal supports twisted and wailed, lengths of taught chains snapping back like whips as they broke. I glanced back at Risha, to see her desperately avoiding Omisha's attacks. Every fibre of my being was telling me to help her, and yet I knew if either of our adversaries got to the lever, it was all over. A fresh burst of lightning illuminated a new form, and seconds later, a jet of red flames hit the ebon dragoness.\n\nSeveral bolts of green fire and shards of bone followed, as Boltock, Ember and Neera all appeared in the sky above Risha. Omisha's face contorted with anger as they forced her back, her attention caught between them.\n\n\"You seriously think you can best me?\" she challenged, receiving a blast of blue fire for her trouble.\n\n\"Try us!\" Ember snapped as she landed with Boltock by his sister's side.\n\n\"As you wish,\" Omisha growled, surging forward.\n\nI felt another urge to rush over, but the sound of a thundering charge met my ears, as did the shaking of the platform.\n\n\"You's forgetting something, demon!\" Balgore called out as his wyvern rammed into me.\n\nOnce again, his mighty hammer swatted me aside. The moment I was tossed into the air, my instinct surged, and I darted back with a beat of my wings. Narrowly avoiding the wyvern's jaw, I landed as the beast twisted back, frantically shaking its charred head. Balgore roared, his words disappearing into a beastial chant as he tried to usher the wounded monster forward.\n\nThat thing's almost spent, there's hardly any fight left in it. I noted, readily raking my claws across the wood with a flurry of sparks.\n\nBefore either of us could charge again, the storm of wing beats drew closer and a dark cloud of vulpomancers swarmed overhead.\n\n\"What's this?\" Balgore demanded, locking eyes with Omisha.\n\nThe ebon wing took a courteous glance at the swarm, her eyes passing between the warlord and I.\n\n\"I believe your services are no longer required, nor are you,\" she informed Balgore with a condescending sympathy.\n\nHis anger waned for a moment, the green fire in his eyes flaring. Omisha ignored him, focusing on her own adversaries as several vulpomancers appeared over the edge and set upon the warlord. The otherworldly spawn ravaged his wyvern with little more than a few strokes of their dark claws. It gave a sharp shriek before dropping, burying Balgore under its weight. I stared as the swarm passed on, before glancing back at the others and the black dragoness.\n\n\"Now to see if this beast's work is worthy,\" she stated, blasting a bolt of fire into my friends and forcing them back as she prowled toward the lever.\n\nI leapt forward, but before she could lay a talon upon the golden handle, it froze solid, just as a pair of ice blades tore through her wings. She crumbled into a heap of scales, floundering down the stairs before the throne. Boltock and Ember recovered and Neera swooped low as Omisha stood, rustling her torn limbs in frustration. Risha appeared at the top of the steps, ice blade levitating at her side.\n\n\"You'll regret that!\" Omisha hissed, leaning back like a deadly snake ready to strike.\n\nRisha stood firm, taking up the blade like a master would a spear.\n\n\"Not as much as you'd regret pulling that lever,\" she challenged.\n\nOmisha smirked.\n\n\"We'll see about that, little one.\"\n\nLunging forward, she spread her wing blades, and my heart stopped as I saw them closing down on my closest friend. Risha was far from defenceless, and focusing all of her elemental magic, she spread her wings, instantly forging the rain pouring around her into a wall of ice. Her attacker hesitated, beating her injured wings in an attempt to back away. Two blasts of flame and a pair of sharp stones hit her from behind, along with a hybrid torrent of grey and red fire, sending her crashing through the ice wall.\n\nRecovering, she rose up, only to have her wings pierced by another pair of sharp ice spears. It all happened so fast, and my instinct urged me to join my friends, but as I staggered, Balgore's hammer caught my shoulder.\n\n\"I's not going down so easy!\" the warlord growled.\n\nKeen to avoid him I jumped back, avoiding another wild swing, leaving it to smash a hole in the floor where my head had just been. Struggling to free the blunt weapon, the dismounted warlord threw a stone fist my way, punching another hole in the wood as I rolled away.\n\nMy crackling blades hissed in the rain as it became a torrent, water dripping from my armour, turning to steam as it touched my blazing scales. I could see Risha's battle continuing in the corner of my eye as I leapt at Balgore. He didn't hesitate and I met the golden shaft of his hammer with my crossed wing blades. The weapons sparking like freshly forged steel as I held back the hulking brute.\n\nBalgore laughed as he pulled back, only to hesitate in anticipation of me releasing a bolt of fire. In that moment, I turned on the spot, slicing my tail blade across his knees and dropping him to the floor. I didn't give him another opportunity to strike as I sliced his left arm clean off.\n\nHe bellowed a mixture of pain and anger as the limb fell to the rain-drenched platform, his etherium hammer slipping from his limp grip. His cries turned to a booming sound of pure rage as he tried to bludgeon me with his remaining fist. Grabbing it with my claws, I twisted hard; the rock cracking to splinters as I looked straight into his fiery green eyes.\n\n\"Is that all you've got?\" I challenged, abruptly cutting off his bellowing roar when both of my wings surged forward like blazing scissors, slicing his head from his shoulders.\n\nThe cold rain hit his face as he fell silent and his head rolled down his spiny back onto the soaked platform. All that remained was a cauterised stump, still whistling with his last violent breath, before his body dropped to the floor. I drooped, panting hard as the nervous twitching of his remains faded, and I realised I'd done it. There was no more Brazen Warlord, Balgore was dead.\n\nBefore I could contemplate my victory, the tower heaved. I sank my claws into the moist wood and forced my wings closed, battling the wind as it clawed at the structure. The beating of battling wings drew my attention toward Risha and the others still locked in combat.\n\n\"We have to get off, this whole place is about to come down!\" I cried out, trying not to think about the sky-bound onslaught into which we would have to fly.\n\nThey all looked reluctant, but as I charged at the throne, Boltock and Ember joined Neera in the sky. I didn't care what Risha told me, or what we were to one another as I barrelled horns first towards her ebon-scaled attacker. Omisha leaned back to strike the blue dragoness with her tail, but Risha jumped aside, the wind dragging her down the stairs before she could steady herself. Omisha smiled at the opportunity for a swift blow, but as she stalked her adversary, I knew she'd caught a glimpse of me.\n\nHer wing opened like a flash of dark lightning, striking me in the face with incredible force. Blood filled my mouth followed by sharp pain as I staggered.\n\n\"I don't see why you are so prized, you're no better than a hatchling,\" she sneered, swatting Risha aside with her tail and rounding on me.\n\nShe swiped her foreclaws and I ducked, her bladed gauntlet scraping at the armour over my back as I pressed to the floor, desperately clinging to the slippery surface as it shifted further.\n\nMeanwhile, she landed and spun, moving to grab Risha before my friend could counter. I took the opportunity to sink my claws deep into her scales. The ebon wing howled and kicked me aside, giving Risha time to jump up from the stairs and wrap her claws over the dragonesse's back before biting down on her armour. Pulling back with all of her strength, and several heavy wing beats, she ripped one of the protective plates from Omisha's neck. All the while, the ebon wing kicked and bucked, but Risha remained unfazed as she sent a sharp spear of steaming-cold ice right through the back of our opponent's neck and out of the other side, purple dust and dark magic glistening in a faint spray.\n\nOmisha gasped, fire surging from her muzzle as her last breath escaped and she fell to the floor with a heavy thud, before rolling off the tower's slanted surface. Risha gasped as she fell upon the throne, and I rushed over holding her up as she panted.\n\n\"Thanks,\" was all I could offer through my exhaustion.\n\nShe gave a weak smile.\n\n\"What are friends for?\" she questioned as the ice she'd conjured dissolved into the rain.\n\nUnfortunately, the tower didn't intend to allow us the luxury of recovering, and with another mighty heave, the whole thing was ripped from its foundations in a cacophony of groaning steel, crumbling stone and splintering wood.\n\n\"You two, get off that thing now!\" three voices called in unison as the tower toppled toward the temple ceiling.\n\nWe both leapt up, just as the floor fell away, throwing us into a frantic swarm of beating wings as orkin, dragons and griffins scattered like insects from the falling structure's path. Even the horrifying Basilisk gave a deep wail as the vast wooden frame crash through the roof, exploding with a resounding boom and blowing the whole temple apart.\n\nLet's see that monster survive that! I thought triumphantly as the bright glow of the explosion consumed the battlefield and the shockwave tore through the rain-strewn sky.\n\nThen, for a brief moment silence fell over the scene. Nothing but the sound of the storm filled the air as the echoing blast faded. Then the din of battle gradually resumed and we steadied ourselves into a hover above the smoking wreckage.\n\n\"Did you get him?\" Boltock asked eagerly.\n\n\"Yes, Balgore's gone,\" I confirmed.\n\n\"And the black dragoness, who was she?\" Ember asked.\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"A lackey to ensure Balgore carried out his orders.\"\n\n\"She certainly made a mistake messing with you, Sis,\" Boltock added admirably, glancing to his sister,\n\n\"She made the mistake of messing with all of us,\" Risha responded, glancing at me.\n\nShe's not proud of it, is she? I understood how she felt, that dragoness had been like her once, no matter how dark she'd become. They all know at least one other ebon wing's still out there.\n\n\"Come on, this isn't over yet, we still need to get to the temple,\" I urged, motioning to the swarming mass on the horizon.\n\nNo sooner had I mentioned it, than a large wing of dragons and griffins flew up to us from the ruins. Although I was pleased to see Zephyra, Soaren and Apollo still among them, I also noticed that they were more than a few short. The Elders no longer looked so unscathed, nor had the horror of battle spared the radiant grace of the hippogriff queen, as the black marks of orkin blood tarnished her snow-white feathers.\n\nEven Halfbeak bore several new scars as he and a wing of talon guard emerged from the midst of the battle. I felt a wave of relief to see Tarwin and several other humans still riding the survivors.\n\n\"Good work, I doubt he'll be causing us any more trouble,\" Zephyra observed, glancing down at the smoking ruins.\n\nI nodded, but could tell that beneath her beaten armour, wounds and firm expression, the dragoness I'd met back in the archive was smiling.\n\n\"Now, we must rally what we can of Dardien's guard. We still need to deal with my father,\" she commanded.\n\n\"We should make for the temple. I fear it will take more than simple strength of wings to repel what is coming,\" Vulkaine added, glancing up to the gathering storm.\n\nHovering at his side, the Cartographer's expression was halfway between anger and fear, and even Apollo looked more concerned than usual.\n\n\"Very well, we make for the palace, and then you are to escort the Guardian to the temple. Let us pray that your elemental pillar is as strong as we all hope it is,\" Zephyra responded.\n\nAll of her wing shadowed her as she took off, followed by the Elders, the griffins and their king. I gained an impressed expression from Tarwin as she and the griffin she rode vanished into the great fissure, and without further hesitation, we followed.\n\nZephyra's not the only one hoping the Elders' proclaimed salvation is right. I thought, knowing what Mordrakk could do, and the swarm of dark beasts amassing in the sky could only be the beginning."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "The darkness of the great lake looked especially foreboding, as did the silent city that hung above its deceptively tranquil surface. Except for the dimly glowing mosses and scattered braziers, the many looming stalactites were devoid of light. Occasionally, a muzzle or two would emerge from a nest, sinking back into the protection of their cave at the sight of the battle raging in the stormy sky.\n\nCan't blame any reasonable dragon for staying in their home. I summarised, strangely relieved by the fact.\n\nNevertheless, even if one wished to fly, the air was still, the wind-written currents that had once flowed through the city were non-existent. Dardien's beating heart was dead and blood ceased to flow through its veins, and if not for Zephyra and the other wind elementals, it may have been impossible for us to fly down here.\n\nNevertheless, banking around one great stalactite, the palace's dimmed cliffside entrance came into view. The four flaming braziers at its front still burned with their elemental fire, as did the great order banners hang down from their grand pillars.\n\n\"Set down before the walls, let's hope my father's stupidity does not grip him still,\" Zephyra called, before swooping down toward the large plaza before the palace steps.\n\nWe all followed, and with a light clatter, the princess landed first. I noticed her eyes linger over the unlit brazier directly before the palace's main doors as I landed. I knew what she was thinking. If the dragon to light the fire of unity was worthy, the brazier should hold a flame comprising all four elements.\n\nI know how she feels, expected to live up to something.\n\nThe remainder of the armoured wing and the Elders landed just behind the princess. Halfbeak and several talon guard swooping in beside them. I couldn't help but notice the bewildered look on Tarwin's face as she saw Dardien for the first time, and despite everything, a smile broke across my muzzle.\n\nThat's a feeling I certainly know. I thought, recalling the stunned vertigo I'd once felt.\n\n\"The throne room is sealed, as always,\" Vulkaine observed, peering up into the shaded depths of the palace.\n\n\"Then let us see that my father's precious privacy is interrupted,\" Zephyra responded firmly, stepping up next to the Elder.\n\nDespite her response, the doubt and reluctance in the princess's expression was clear to see as she stepped forward. I, on the other paw, had no problem with overthrowing the snake that had betrayed me, and eagerly ascended toward the steps.\n\nUnfortunately, not all shared in our intentions, the clattering of armour and metal-clad paws signalling the emergence of guards from the palace pillars. Vulkaine took a step back as they surrounded us, leaving only the cliff edge at our backs.\n\n\"Stop, in the name of the great Sovereign!\" the lead guard commanded as the armoured group parted, allowing a tall, blue-scaled dragon to stride forward.\n\nAt first glance, I recognised him as the water dragon that had been beside Aries in the throne room, the one who had led me out of my cell. I also guessed he was the type of dragon who, without all of the soldiers, wouldn't even think about doing what he was about to.\n\n\"How dare you come back here and bring this war with you,\" he spat, his tone sharp and fluent, as if he wished to simply say the words and move on before anyone could challenge them.\n\n\"Tell your soldiers to stand down Irving, and step aside,\" Vulkaine requested, putting a name to the dragon with an almost tiresome expression.\n\n\"And who are you to order me, Elder?\" he responded with a dismissive flick of his foreclaw. \"You rallied this traitorous band and fled the city like cowards!\"\n\n\"You may dismiss his instructions, steward, yet you are sworn to mine,\" Zephyra interrupted.\n\nStepping up to face him, it seemed she came too close for his comfort, and he snaked back like a snail into its shell. Some bolder guards edged forward, but most were hesitant and failed to confront or even hinder their princess as she pressed.\n\n\"Your forces within Andruid are rallied by my side. The orkin warlord is dead and his army scatters as we speak. Yet the day is not yet ours. I must speak with my father.\" There was a tense moment, until, without hesitation, she swept through the guards.\n\n\"Your father will not agree to anything you have to offer; besides, if the warlord is dead, there is no reason for you to remain here,\" Irving answered, cautiously eyeing her armoured talons.\n\n\"The orkin are the least of our concerns, have you not looked to the sky?\" she asked sternly, waving a wing in the direction of the battle.\n\nIrving didn't say a word, while the guards exchanged glances with growing unease. The silence endured, until something unexpected shattered it.\n\n\"Did you not hear your princess? There is an enemy out there that won't hesitate to cast this city into oblivion if you don't listen,\" one of Zephyra's armoured wing suddenly spoke up, and we all looked as Soaren stepped up beside his leader.\n\n\"Don't tell me that you've never doubted Aries during your time in the order, don't tell me that you can sit by and let this city fall because of his blindness. Would you not see the restoration of what we once were and fight for what you all know is right?\" An uneasy wave of chatter spread amongst the armoured dragons.\n\n\"Bold words from a simple soldier,\" Irving muttered.\n\n\"I could say the same of your words, simple steward,\" Soaren countered sharply, causing Irving to flinch.\n\n\"If that's what you think of any dragon, you're no better than my father. Those who stand with me are not just soldiers; they're friends, all of them!\" Zephyra urged sternly.\n\nIrving's gaze lingered on her as he struggled for words.\n\n\"The princess is right!\" a voice called from the crowd.\n\n\"No more hiding!\" another shouted.\n\n\"No more dead dragons!\" others added, and before long they were all turned against their orders and rallied behind Zephyra.\n\n\"This is outrageous, you will all be charged with treason!\" Irving threatened.\n\n\"Perhaps, but you fail to notice that the world is falling apart,\" Zephyra countered, moving up next to him unhindered. \"You will take me to my father, now,\" she added with a slight growl.\n\nHe frowned and reluctantly turned, trudging back up the stairs with his tail between his legs. Most of us were ready to follow until a vulpomancer's horrifying shriek drew our attention to the tattered beating of black wings and shrill cries echoing through the city. Several swarms descended from the sky, spiralling toward us like living swathes of shadow.\n\nIrving took one look at them and bolted into the palace, while I spun around as a wave of fear washed over all who remained.\n\n\"Fly steady warriors of Dardien! Defend our home to the last,\" Zephyra roared from the stairs.\n\nSpreading my wings brought my blades crackling to life, and I glanced at my friends, knowing there was no way I'd let those things anywhere near the palace while I still had them to protect. Regardless, the vulpomancers' deadly claws struck, cutting away armour and flesh like paper from a book as they plummeted into our closed ranks. I leapt up as blasts of dragonfire erupted around me, wing blades flashing as I carved several monsters into shadow.\n\nArcs of electrical magic engulfed many, but those that broke through the elemental barrage landed amidst the crowd in plumes of choking shadow, cutting down anyone within their reach with swift strikes of their claws and tails. Beating my wings to hover, one of the creatures tore me from the air and dragged me up, its claws like ice upon my scales as its mere presence caused my scars to burn.\n\n\"Guardian, we meet again. What a pleasssant sssurprissse,\" it hissed as the pair of us fought in the air.\n\nIt slashed at my eyes, but my helmet stood firm against its grim talons. In response, I twisted, cutting a deep, glowing wound in its underside with my wing, forcing my release. The sudden pain didn't stop its eagerness to strike me again, so much so, that it was reasonable to assume it had only let me go to have the pleasure of chasing me.\n\nBy the creators, I really hate these cursed things!\n\nA piercing arrow struck its eyeless head, and it howled as it grabbed the wooden shaft, turning it to dust. Seizing the moment of distraction, I flicked it aside with my tail, sending it tumbling into the midst of combat below. The force was also enough to knock me off balance, my armour hardening against the unplanned impact, as I crashed and rolled to a halt.\n\n\"Blaze!\" I heard Tarwin cry.\n\nI snapped round to see her sat atop Meadow Hide's back, sending arrow after arrow into the swarm. Almost all were clean hits, but the mortal weapon was no match for the harbingers of death. I backed up as close as I could to the pair, my wings spread and weapons battle-ready as I focused.\n\n\"Steel yourself, leatherwing,\" the griffiness warned as several more vulpomancers plummeted toward us.\n\nI twisted back, sending blast after blast as more and more joined the surge. Bursts of blazing fire reduced them to shadowy residue before fading into oblivion, but upon vanquishing the first wave, more took their place, their claws outstretched and fanged jaws open wide.\n\nI continued fighting, cutting them down as if they were nothing more than meddlesome flies. Despite my efforts, several managed to land around us, and I was hopeless to stop a pair of dragon soldiers being cut down before my eyes.\n\n\"This is starting to turn into a really bad day!\" Meadow Hide called in frustration as she batted one of the beasts away with a sweep of her talons.\n\nI had to agree, especially when two more creatures snapped at me. One wrapped its claws over my head, slamming me to the floor before I could swing at a second. Nonetheless, I was still stronger than they were, and with a firm thrust of my legs, I burst upward, sending one flying as I struck the other with my tail.\n\nFree, I moved to assist Tarwin, only to have more materialise in my path. Occupied with shooting arrows, Tarwin couldn't see me; however, Meadow Hide had me in full view, and with an eagle-like call, she raked her talons through the beasts, cutting them down like weeds.\n\nLetting out a gruesome hiss another leapt toward her chest. I sprung up to meet it, but before I could, its claws ripped through her patterned armour, turning the feathers and flesh beneath into crackling purple flames and dust. With a final noble shriek, she reached out, her talons batting the dark fiend aside before the life left her eyes and she fell. I rolled to a halt as the vulpomancer skidded across the stone before me, a dull thud and rattle of metal sounding as the griffin and Tarwin hit the ground.\n\nI could see the sorrowful look in my companion's eyes as she realised what had happened, but a rasping laugh broke over the sound of the battle as the vulpomancer rose to its feet.\n\n\"Foolisssh, girl, I'd have thought you would have learned from the lassst time,\" it hissed mockingly, coiling its tail as it rounded on her.\n\nTarwin reached for her bow, but it had been thrown from her grip, leaving her with only her father's battle-axe. Grasping the finely-crafted handle, she narrowed her eyes. The monster lurched forward, as if believing such a nonchalant movement would be enough to steal her mortal soul. Tarwin moved quickly, ducking under its claws, drawing the axe up and cutting a deep gash in the outstretched limb. The creature recoiled, hissing like a snake before inspecting the wound.\n\n\"I sssee you grow tired of gamesss. Very well,\" it mocked as its wounds regenerated.\n\nThis time it wasn't holding back, and it leapt forward without hesitation as Tarwin raised the axe high.\n\n\"Not this time!\" I called, the rage of a hundred failures burning inside me as I leapt over its back, gripping its tattered wings with my molten claws.\n\nIt hissed and writhed as my weight dragged it to the stone, when all of a sudden, its movement ceased and the axe landed firmly in the top of its head. It gave a final, drawn out hiss before fading away beneath me, leaving the axe to clatter to the floor amidst the crackling dust. I looked up at Tarwin as she panted, moving as close to her as I could manage.\n\n\"Good job,\" she gasped, looking down over me before scooping up the axe and kicking aside the dusty remains.\n\n\"You too,\" I responded, rolling onto my paws.\n\n\"Consider this lesson learned,\" she added, addressing the dusty remnants of her adversary before glancing at Meadow's remains with a pained look.\n\nI felt another tally etched into my mind, taking its place among the many recently gained, and yet this one felt far more poignant.\n\n\"Fall back to the palace, fall back!\" several calls bellowed over the din of combat, and I looked to see a wall of soldiers breaking away toward the pillars.\n\n\"Blaze! Blaze! Come on!\" I heard another set of voices cry and realised with relief that my friends were still alive and very much in the middle of the fight.\n\nI didn't hesitate to fight my way to them, while Tarwin retrieved her bow and followed close behind as I cut down several more vulpomancers.\n\n\"Into the palace, quickly now,\" Vulkaine warned as he and the other Elders took up positions at the front of the retreating group, their muzzles bursting with fire while powerful elemental magic coursed over their aged scales.\n\nI've never seen a dragon look like that! It was now clear that they'd become masters of their elements, especially when their jewels lit up like stars and began to pulsate with the same elemental flames.\n\nI was hesitant to leave any dragon behind, but the force of my friends pulled me behind one of the pillars as a great flash of colour exploded down the palace stairs. The pulsating wave of elemental magic washed over the vulpomancers, sending the swarm into a burning frenzy, scorching them back to the oblivion from which they'd crawled. I peeked moments later to see the steps burning red-hot as the Elders' magic faded, leaving all four exhausted and gasping for breath as they fought to stand.\n\nI felt a strange sympathy for the ancient dragons. Their taxing assault had warded off our attackers, for now, but the vast field of dead bodies covering the palace plaza knocked me sick with guilt.\n\nHow many more does there have to be before this is over? I wondered, as Mordrakk etched more tallies.\n\nThe sight of my friends and the knowledge I'd saved Tarwin from the same fate was reassuring enough, urging me to stand as I looked over them.\n\n\"Come, this slaughter has gone on long enough,\" Zephyra commanded, her voice reassuringly stoic as she turned to the throne room doors.\n\nI couldn't imagine how the sight of so much death was affecting her, but she marched on with more determination and commitment than that with which she'd flown into battle with.\n\n\"She's right, you must go, we will follow,\" Vulkaine advised as he and the other Elders moved to the cover of the pillars to recuperate while the Cartographer appeared beside us, ushering us along.\n\n\"Now we shall see Aries' fault removed from our kingdom,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Come on,\" I urged the others, as they recuperated their shaken, battered and battle-scarred bodies.\n\nExcept for rattling armour, the inside of the hall was silent. The fires of the elemental braziers burned low, and tapestries fluttered in a light breeze. Zephyra marched ahead, Soaren and her guards by her side, while the Elders and the Cartographer moved up through the group to join them. Before long, they stood before the throne room's firmly-closed doors, but I doubted any lock would keep them out.\n\n\"How are you doing?\" I asked, turning to the battered dragons that walked beside me.\n\n\"Well, we're not dead,\" Neera eventually answered with a hint of determination, ruffling her singed feathers.\n\nShe's right, and I have to be grateful we've made it this far, at least.\n\n\"What about you?\" Risha asked, stepping close to my side.\n\nAs always, she was able to care more than I ever could. She understood the feelings and emotions racing through my mind, and she knew exactly what to do with them.\n\nI just wish I could understand those things so clearly.\n\nNervously, I ruffled my wings and glanced at the door, but before I could summon up an answer, the huge slabs of stone gave an almighty groan and a surge of green magic forced them open. The internal mechanisms creaked and groaned under the strain until finally they snapped to reveal the splendid light of the throne room, as pristine as the day I'd left.\n\nI diverted my eyes from a specific scorch mark in the marble, recalling polished stone melting under my paws as Aries told me what I really was.\n\nI could have killed him that day, though that would have only succeeded in proving him right.\n\nI wasn't the only one to notice the damage, although neither the princess nor the Elders paid it any heed. Nor did they acknowledge the cowering guards lingering amidst the pillars about us. I doubted any of them would follow an order from either side at this point, and the battle above was the only thing keeping them from fleeing the city.\n\nIrving stood next to the golden throne, looking down over us with a similar dread in his quivering eyes. To his left a very different pair of eyes observed our entry. Peering from under the helmet of his royal armour, they were like diamonds \u2013 hard silver spheres that felt as if they could cut steel with a single glare.\n\n\"You have a great deal of courage coming back here, especially with such wayward beasts,\" Aries hissed, spite dripping from his words.\n\nA loud slam punctuated the tension as the door snapped closed behind us, but all attention remained focused on the brooding Sovereign. My eyes dared not meet his, and as he surveyed us, my gaze lingered on his golden neck brace and its encrusted gems.\n\nHe's not worthy of that or any of this, why does anyone here still follow him? Why do I care that such a wrong, deceptive snake called me the monster!?\n\nWhile my mind raced, it was clear that Zephyra wanted to step forward. Her paws shifted nervously, but her expression remained firm as Vulkaine finally stepped up.\n\n\"It is over, Aries, Dardien is no longer yours, step down,\" he ordered.\n\n\"You do not tell me what is to be done, traitor,\" Aries hissed, and for the first time, I saw true anger break from under his cool facade as he bared his gleaming white teeth.\n\nVulkaine didn't flinch as the silver dragon uncoiled from the throne and flowed down the stairs like liquid silver.\n\n\"You would dare speak of treachery, when it was you who betrayed Dardien with your selfish arrogance?\" Vulkaine countered.\n\nAries snarled, forcing smoke from his flared nostrils.\n\n\"Do not speak to me of such things, or would you deny that the creators themselves chose me to rule?\" he challenged.\n\nVulkaine continued to stare as he'd done for the majority of the Sovereign's rule, as if his former master were no more than a pouty hatchling.\n\n\"An unfortunate turn of events you twisted to your favour, nothing more!\" he responded finally, much to the Sovereign's distaste.\n\nAries splayed his wings, allowing gleaming blades upon his regal attire to shimmer in the light.\n\n\"If you still fail to see the truth, then all of you must be replaced, may your successors show more loyalty to their Sovereign!\" he declared.\n\nAs far as combat went, the royal dragon was clumsy, though his blades were sharp and finely crafted, leaving me with no doubt they could cut through dragon scale with ease. A number of us lurched forwards as his blades came down, but Vulkaine didn't budge. The resounding ring as another blade parried the Sovereign's confirmed the Elder knew exactly what he was doing.\n\nZephyra forced herself between them, and her father froze as she shoved and sent him sprawling to the polished floor.\n\n\"Enough!\" she hissed, folding back her wings as she glared.\n\nHer father let out a deep growl, and for a moment, I truly believed she was right about how he saw her as nothing more than a statement of his succession.\n\n\"My dearest daughter, are you still led astray by these fools?\" he asked, glaring at the Elders.\n\n\"The only fool here is you, Father. You have allowed this city to fall into despair and misery to ensure your own rule. I shall allow it no longer,\" she proclaimed.\n\n\"And what will you do? Do you think you could do better than I? You are my blood; we are the same. You are no more a direct descendent of Aria than I am,\" he told her with a hint of satisfaction.\n\nHer stern expression shifted, and for a moment, I recognised her fear, the fear that she too would be unworthy of Dardien. Unlike her father, however; the princess's doubt quickly faded and she stretched out a wing. The gleaming silver blade scraped against his jewelled neck brace with a distinct chime, and the whole room seemed to take an anxious breath.\n\n\"It is not our blood line that makes us special. It is about worth and commitment. And you, Father, lack both,\" she confessed.\n\n\"So what now, my daughter?\" he spat in disgust. \"Kill me and be done with it? Take the throne for yourself? See how long you can hold it against the darkness you have so foolishly brought to this kingdom,\" he challenged, as if begging her to deliver a blow, if only to destroy her ideals.\n\nShe released a stream of smoke as she raised her wing high, slashing it down across his chest. The onlookers gasped as the blade fell with a clean strike, harmlessly glancing his scales but seeing his neck brace fall into her foreclaw.\n\n\"No! No dragon's life is worth less than my own, even one such as yours.\"\n\nAt that moment, I saw genuine fear cross his muzzle.\n\n\"Consider yourself relieved, dear father,\" she finished, with a jet of clear flame, before pulling back and turning to the Elders.\n\nThe ancient dragons nodded, and all of the draconic guards, griffins and hippogriffs about her bowed in respect.\n\n\"All hail Zephyra, great Sovereign of Dardien,\" Vulkaine and the other Elders declared in union, everyone else in the room repeating the declaration, including my friends.\n\nI offered her a subtle nod, and it felt good to have someone to respect in such a way for a change. Even so, I hated being treated like that, and if there was a way I could spare her from its torment, as she'd once asked, I would do it.\n\nShe's still my friend, more than she is a sovereign.\n\nZephyra stood tall for the briefest instant, before she waved a dismissive forepaw, ushering everyone to stand.\n\n\"Save your formalities, there is still a battle to be won,\" she proclaimed, approaching the Elders as I moved over to join them, motioning for my friends to follow.\n\n\"You must get to the temple, I fear time is growing short,\" she instructed in a hushed tone, handing Aries' neck brace to Vulkaine.\n\nThe Elder nodded and stepped to the Cartographer's side.\n\n\"Take them, old friend. Your eyes deserve to gaze upon the halls of Goldfire once more before the end,\" he announced, handing the kooky dragon the neck brace.\n\nAccompanied by Apollo, the old dragon nodded and hobbled up to me with the aid of his staff.\n\n\"As you wish. Now, you and your friends come with me,\" he commanded, looking over each of us in turn, his eyes lingering uncomfortably on Neera.\n\nI glanced to the battered faldron and her burns, and then something in my mind fell into place.\n\nI've no idea what the realm of fire is, but it has to be hot and, well, full of fire.\n\n\"I think you'll have to stay here,\" I told her reluctantly, the order feeling as if it tore away a deep, essential part of me.\n\nShe looked pained, and yet I knew she understood. She opened her muzzle to say something, but as she glanced at her burns, her words faded and she reluctantly nodded.\n\n\"Don't you dare have too much fun without me,\" she finally joked, tapping at my shoulder with a feathered wing. \"Good luck, and if I don't see you before this is all over.\" She paused and smiled, \"thanks, for everything.\"\n\n\"If anyone will be the last of us left, it'll be you,\" I assured her.\n\n\"Indeed, it would seem that despite your barbaric nature and lack of scales, you are an admirable warrior. I am glad to have been acquainted with you,\" Apollo chimed, expressing what could only be interpreted as a smile across his golden beak.\n\n\"You too, Goldy,\" she laughed as she raised a humbled paw to her chest.\n\nAt that, more wishes of luck were exchanged before we finally departed, following the Cartographer and Apollo out of the palace toward the Elders' temple."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Realm of Fire",
                "text": "The tunnels were empty, only the occasional panicked dragon or rushing guard passed us, scurrying forms silhouetted by the light of glowmoss.\n\nThe din of the battle raged on above, and I had no idea of the state of the conflict. I assumed neither the orkin nor the new order could stand against the dark swarm if its full might was unleashed. It was a sinister blessing that the vulpomancers hadn't overwhelmed the plains already.\n\nEven so, save for his constant tallies, Mordrakk had failed to talk to me since the battle began, as if he were focusing his attention elsewhere.\n\nThey can't be one in the same, surely he'd have acted by now. Tricked me, manipulated me...\n\nIt was a horrifying thought, but as much as I wanted to fight, the tunnels were about as far from the battle as I could be. The Cartographer walked at my side while the others strode behind and Apollo hovered above. The old dragon had the golden brace slung across his back, and as I looked at the gleaming gemstones, I began to think.\n\n\"We suspect you see them in much greater light than most,\" he interrupted my contemplation, and it took a moment for me to lift my eyes away from the magical gems.\n\n\"Something else I wasn't supposed to know about, I suppose?\" I answered bitterly.\n\n\"Really? And why would that be?\" he asked.\n\nI sighed, looking at my own golden armour.\n\n\"It's like the pillars, each one of those gems is a piece of one. That's how a sovereign can command all the elements,\" I elaborated my suspicions.\n\n\"Your mind works swiftly, Guardian,\" he replied with a somewhat proud smile. \"And yet that is not all,\" he continued.\n\nThey're just part of that ancient heart, the same as the Sphere of Eternity, why is the world so engrained with things that can destroy it?\n\nOur guide seemed to know exactly what thoughts were spinning around my mind and swiftly began to correct them.\n\n\"You see, unlike those you have witnessed, the elemental pillars do not trap the essence of monsters.\" His words reminded me of what Nakir had told me in the drakaran ruins.\n\nAs if I need to recall how much I hated that conversation. Nakir did say what the heart was once used for.\n\n\"They contain the souls of the dead, don't they?\" I added, and he once again, gave a proud nod.\n\n\"In simple terms, yes. When a dragon or any being bound to some form of elemental magic leaves this world, their soul is caught forever in a paradise that resides within the shard,\" he explained.\n\n\"Sounds too good to be true,\" I responded glumly, and he frowned a little.\n\n\"Many scholars have tried to uncover the truth of the elements, but they remain a power unknown to most. Even we do not fully understand them,\" he confessed.\n\n\"And yet you still think they can save us?\" I asked curtly.\n\nHe glanced back over his shoulder.\n\n\"Perhaps our hopes lie in a different form, and so they have for a long time,\" he admitted.\n\n\"I've heard that one far too many times recently,\" I grumbled, but he smiled at my dissatisfaction.\n\n\"Perhaps you have, and yet it has done nothing to deter you, has it?\" he asked.\n\nIs he joking, he's lucky he could even drag me into this war? I opened my muzzle to voice that concern, but he continued.\n\n\"Still, it matters not. We know you will do what is right \u2013 you will not allow more of the mortal realm to fall into shadow,\" he added, and for some reason I imagined a whole series of glorious paradises consumed by darkness.\n\nI looked about for Mordrakk's image, expecting him to have more than a little to add on the subject, but there was no sign of him.\n\n\"One day, I'd really like to know why everyone is so willing to put their faith into only one thing,\" I replied, and as the Cartographer opened his muzzle to respond, I raised a forepaw to stop him.\n\n\"Please don't give me any philosophical explanation, I've heard enough today.\"\n\n\"Very well, Guardian,\" he acknowledged.\n\nWe made our way through corridors, dungeons and crafting rooms until we finally found ourselves in the empty training cave, the one in which I'd unknowingly discovered what made me different. Memories of battling Thunder flashed through my mind, along with the laughably distant lack of trust toward my friends.\n\nIf there's one thing that's not changed since then, it's the fact I'd stand against everything the universe can throw at me for them.\n\nNonetheless, we moved swiftly through, emerging into the empty halls of the Elders' temple. It was certainly in a sorry state, toppled braziers spilled coals and cracked pillars leaned precariously, while the black soot of flames masked the decorative wall carvings, and a barricade covered the main entrance.\n\nJust how much fighting happened here after I left? I began to wonder about the true scale of the Sovereign's accusations against the Elders.\n\nSinged and torn, the tapestries had fallen from their hangers. While, scratches and dents marred the points where someone had tried to force the great golden door open. For an instant, I wondered if the gold came from the stars, like my armour. It wasn't hard to believe, and as I looked upon it again, it filled me with hope.\n\nIf that's true, no wonder they couldn't force it open.\n\n\"Come, we must be swift before any demons can discover our whereabouts,\" the Cartographer instructed as he made his way to the golden door.\n\n\"How marvellous, this mechanism is reminiscent of the most ancient drakaran architecture. It truly is a sight to behold,\" Apollo observed as he eagerly hovered over in a hurried effort to consume every detail.\n\nMeanwhile, cogs and gears began to whirl, just as they'd done that first day, as the large locking mechanisms spun and twisted, animating the door's murals. The large bar in the centre clicked forwards and parted, before sinking away into the walls on either side. With a final great whine, the metal slabs pulled apart to reveal the darkened Elder chamber.\n\nThe Cartographer walked through with little concern as braziers exploded into life either side of him, illuminating the long walkway toward the empty pedestals upon which the Elders had sat. Apollo hovered to the far end of the room, circling about the space like a firefly, taking particular interest in the ancient carvings that adorned the cave's natural ceiling.\n\nThe last time I'd looked at such things, I'd seen nothing but scribbles in the stone. It all looked so different now; after everything I'd witnessed. I now understood the meanings behind many of them, most of which were darker than I could have imagined. Even so, I was distracted by the gasp of awe as the rest of my friends entered behind me, and I glanced back to see them staring.\n\n\"Haven't you ever seen this place before?\" I asked, their stunned faces telling me otherwise.\n\n\"Never for real. It's rare for any dragon to receive the honour,\" Risha replied, and I looked back to the pathway.\n\nNo dragon other than me. I thought sourly. Given my true nature, I guessed the Elders' reputation hasn't gone untarnished in that regard.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Risha asked.\n\nI had to fight to look at her.\n\n\"I should have found the truth the day I first came here. Then none of this would have happened,\" I answered, not entirely sure that was true, even now.\n\n\"You can't think about how things might have been,\" Risha admitted, as she hurried her pace to my side.\n\n\"I know,\" I uttered.\n\n\"Do not despair, we doubt many who enter these halls know all they are destined to be, not even we. For there are a great many secrets here,\" the Cartographer called back, as he reached the rounded platform at the path's end, surrounded by a deep pit on all sides.\n\n\"The vaults of gold flame,\" his second personality announced respectfully, as he gazed up at the Elders' pedestals.\n\nMy eyes followed, flashing back to the day they'd told me to give up on all I cared for.\n\nAnd it was all part of their test? Why did I ever trust them?\n\nRegardless, the Cartographer raised his staff and placed the jewels about his neck, muttering strange incantations, before tapping the wooden stick on the platform. Apollo watched with great curiosity as the old dragon ushered us all to stand close behind him, before placing one forepaw flat on the stone.\n\nThe whole room began to radiate a faint hum, and the markings that covered the surface beneath our paws began to glow with an ethereal blue hue.\n\n\"Hey, does this thing remind anyone of...?\" Boltock began suspiciously, right before the floor gave a loud jolt and cut his sentence short.\n\nIt's like one of the lifts in Taldran! I steadied myself, when the same realisation struck me.\n\nThe platform gave another firm shudder before sinking steadily from the chamber. Darkness rapidly encroached, and as we descended, the grinding stone and the rumble of ancient mechanisms echoed through the halls until we began to slow.\n\nThe light of Apollo's eyes and the dull flicker of green from the Cartographer's staff were the only things to illuminate the cylindrical walls about us, until the platform lowered into a vast chamber. Braziers burst into life at our presence, and with a final, heavy thud, we came to a halt.\n\nA cold chill hung in the air, and even the roar of battle didn't penetrate so deep into the earth. That was both welcome and unsettling, but thankfully, the chamber wasn't completely devoid of sound. At first, I struggled to make it out, but as I listened, I noticed there was a faint chime emanating from a long corridor.\n\nDown here, the rock flowed to form towering arches, similar to the magnificent golden archways of the drakaran sanctum. Small, rounded grooves decorated the stone on either side, each one holding gleaming treasures or long-forgotten artefacts.\n\nSo much for the idea that dragons don't like hoarding gold. I thought as we stepped from the platform and began walking down the corridor.\n\nThe Cartographer seemed somewhat bemused and impressed by what he saw, and for once, Apollo appeared baffled by the fact that he'd no idea what he was seeing. The same surprise filled the eyes of my friends as we passed the plethora of ancient items.\n\n\"You've kept all of this down here, all this time?\" Risha asked, edging closer to the Cartographer.\n\nThe elderly dragon glanced at her, tossing back his hood with a flick of his head.\n\n\"Indeed, the treasures stored here are older than many care to recall, a testament to our past and our ancestors,\" he explained proudly.\n\nI inspected several of the grooves, filled with piles of gold and beset with gemstones that dwarfed even a full-grown dragon. Other artefacts that seemed almost out of place sat among the glistening piles, and I realised that to warrant a place down here, their importance must be greater than their appearance belied.\n\nOne such oddity was a towering pillar of black rock, taking on the shape of a great fang. Its tip almost touched the ceiling, and glowing veins of red magma covered its gnarled base. At first, I thought it to be the elemental pillar, but the Cartographer passed it without concern.\n\nAnother out of place relic took the form of several worn pieces of parchment, displayed upon a stone pedestal. Whatever they'd been ripped from was long gone, and by the looks of the pages, such a thing had been taken millennia previously. All that remained upon them were ruinous anagrams and demonic-looking scribbles. It had a deeply sinister look to it, an evil I failed to recognise, and so I swiftly diverted my gaze.\n\nWhat I saw next did nothing to ease my tension. Like a ghost, hidden within the shadows of its archway, was a suit of black armour, similar in design to that belonging to the princess. Crafted blades of reddened silver underpinned by a blood-red trim tipped the tail and wings. It was another thing I sought to divert my attention from, and upon looking away, another groove housing a set of golden attire stole my focus.\n\nIt was almost as regal and complex as my own. However, the belts and straps holding it together suggested it was far from the arcane metal that adorned my scales. Nevertheless, that didn't detract from its magnificence, as fiery red gems accentuated its surface and its horns were a seamless mix of gold and starlight silver, as were the decorative shoulder spines, hips and back. The Cartographer looked upon it with more respect than anything else we had passed; in fact, the armour seemed to demand everyone do the same.\n\nWhat some of us would not give to know everything about what's down here. I thought, glancing at Risha and her brother.\n\nNevertheless, the corridor opened into a larger chamber, almost identical to those of the drakaran sanctum, if slightly less noble. A set of golden arms were visible in the gloom above. Hanging limply, they resembled a gigantic spider, while strange glass lenses tipped the end of each, their sparkling rims crafted to resemble beams of sunlight. A large, golden core, scarred by deep etchings and fiery red runes, marked its centre and a large red crystal hovered perfectly beneath, while smaller gems orbited slowly about its girth.\n\nA similar golden formation reached up from beneath it, forming a smooth spire resembling a neat stalagmite. The whole thing looked like one of the strange arcane contraptions I'd seen in the Arcanum. Yet instead of a magical pool of glowing blue liquid within its centre, there was another of the rune-covered platforms.\n\nDoes that mean we have to ride it deeper? I began to wonder. How far down do these tunnels extend?\n\nThe idea strengthened when I looked about and saw nothing that struck me as the almighty elemental pillar. Yet amidst the mounds of treasure, a golden structure at the far side caught my eye.\n\nThe latter I recognised as something similar to the gateway Apollo had sent me through, although, if it was such a thing, it was completely dead. Its curved edges crawled with ravenous black stone, which seemed to have scuttled its way through from the other side. Though it wasn't upon the sight of the dormant portal, that my heart froze.\n\nLevitating above a stone pillar, surrounded by a flickering blue field of magic, a small golden chain twisted and warped about a glowing star of gold, flowing like some kind of small eel. The gleaming white gem at its heart shone with a heavenly light, and hummed, almost as if it were calling to me. The amulet, the eight-pointed star, the perfect shape to fill the empty socket in my armour.\n\nIs it really our last salvation or Mordrakk's last hope of victory?\n\nI stopped before the pillar, staring into the core of the glowing gem, gripped by a feeling of completion. Now I knew it was more a part of me than I could ever imagine, and yet I hated it. Even so, I reached out a forepaw, slowly sliding it through the weak magical barrier and placed it upon the amulet. The sound of paws and the tap of a wooden staff drew away my attention. The Cartographer stepped up beside me, lazily resting his head upon his staff as he peered at the gem.\n\n\"You know what happens if I take this?\" I asked.\n\nI take it and Mordrakk's just one more step closer to winning. The desire to turn away and leave it there for good was stronger than ever.\n\n\"Indeed, we do...\" he answered with a nod, \"but do you?\"\n\nI looked past him and at the four dragons who had followed me without question. Memories surfaced of all the others: Tarwin and the village, Zephyra, the Elders and all of Dardien, Neera and the griffins, even Apollo. Was I about to let all of that end and take back the part of myself I'd lost? Or was I finally going to use it for what it was made for and fight for what I knew was right? I finally glanced at the Cartographer, the old dragon clearly waiting for my decision, and mine alone. Apollo hovered above him, and for the first time since I'd known him, the arcane hawk said nothing.\n\nI'm not like them. I'm not their slave, weapon, creation or salvation.\n\nI looked back at the amulet, fixing my eyes on the lustrous white gem and the ghostly starlight projecting from its core. Now I knew that it was the light of a million souls, all committed to making me what I was, a sacrifice that led to this moment. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wasn't going to fail anyone again.\n\nI seized and pulled it to me with one swift stroke. Its weight returned as it left the pillar and fell into my forepaw, the chain falling loosely over my claws. I stared at it for a second, before lifting it to my armour. The loose chain vanished in a stream of white light as the amulet sprang into the air. Hovering before me, it turned, and in a burst of speed, flew into the empty socket, fusing itself to the metal with a triumphant hiss. I felt a wave of power rush over me, followed by a clarity I'd not felt in an age. It brought control, determination and reasoning to everything.\n\nIt's the truth for which I've been searching, no matter how I feel about it.\n\nApollo's expression lit up with glee while I stared down at the glowing gem, waiting for some kind of unholy assault that would see me fulfil Mordrakk's plan. To my surprise, no such event occurred, nor did the dark fiend appear to torment me.\n\n\"Guardian,\" Apollo acknowledged with a subtle tilt of his head.\n\n\"Nicely done,\" the Cartographer congratulated with a tap on my shoulder, before he turned and moved back toward the centre of the room.\n\nI motioned for Apollo to hold back on the formalities as I followed the old dragon.\n\n\"You look... good,\" Risha complimented.\n\n\"Yeah, but I think I'll feel better when this is all over,\" I responded, brushing an uneasy paw over the amulet.\n\nMordrakk knows \u2013 he has to know \u2013 what's he up to?\n\n\"The Guardian is right; even with this power, we do not have the strength to repel the servants of the Great Master indefinitely,\" the Cartographer advised as he approached a small dent in the central structure, placing his staff on it.\n\nWhile he muttered some magical incantations, the royal gems about his neck began to glow. I spent a moment looking up at the crystal, waiting for something amazing to happen.\n\n\"Guardian, the altar awaits one of worthy blood. Please come,\" he called, and with a slight hesitation, I stepped over.\n\nA surge of cleansing relief washed over me upon contact with the altar, as a fiery-red light glowed through my outstretched forepaw. It felt like something I'd once experienced in a dream, a pleasant feeling, which almost allowed me to forget all about what was going on about me. The Cartographer looked down at my paw, his second personality laughing with a joy it hadn't had the luxury of experiencing for such a long time. I pulled back sharply as the whole thing gave an almighty shunt, accompanied by the sounds of buckling metal and grinding stone.\n\nOkay, so what now? A magical vortex like the last shard I opened? My eyes shot upwards, but there was still no sign of movement.\n\n\"You will find nothing up there, for that is not the pillar of fire,\" the Cartographer's wilder voice cackled amidst jovial laughter.\n\nAs I considered his words, the centre of the structure opened in a flash of flames and a roar of ancient machinery. A great light filled the room, exposing a pool of bubbling magma. We all staggered back, almost tripping as a great shard of fiery-red crystal slowly rose from the lava, hovering graciously while its surface radiated a potent glow.\n\nSmaller crystal fragments orbited about it, settling as the whole thing came to a stop and the fiery doorway beneath it slowly closed. Its uneven surface was a deep, swirling orange, flickering and pulsating as if it were liquid. Once again, it reminded me of the sphere, only this shard was larger and more majestic. A surging hope replaced the darkness and despair I'd once seen in one of its kind, lapping over us in refreshing waves of rejuvenation as we all marvelled in its radiance.\n\nThe golden arms began to descend, encircling the pillar until they found seemingly random positions and stopped. Three pointed at the empty gateway across the chamber, each one positioned before the other, with the largest lens at the rear and smallest at the front.\n\nIt's similar to what the Cartographer wore in the archive, a magnifying lens?\n\nIn a crescendo of noise, the crystal above burst into flames and a beam of red light shot down into the pillar's jagged peak. The crystal twisted and pulsated as if it were alive, projecting a second beam directly at the first lens, before bouncing to the next until a virtual web of red light danced about it, finally striking the trio aimed at the gateway.\n\nThe three of them glowed, focusing the beam to a fine point, perfectly striking the dormant portal, where it bloomed into a swirling shroud of flame. Opening the doorway into the realm of fire. We all stood in awe at the sight. Even Apollo was speechless as the Cartographer laughed with joy.\n\n\"We have not seen such a feat in this lifetime,\" he cheered, before his joy faded and he fell back into a stern, respectful tone.\n\n\"Come, we should not keep the Elemental Queen waiting,\" he proposed, walking over to the stairs at the gateway's base.\n\nElemental Queen? I wondered, looking back at my slightly uneasy friends.\n\nDespite their nervousness, they looked as ready to follow me as they ever were. I dared not break that determination with any of my selfish doubts, and without another word, I led them toward the portal. The Cartographer nodded as I reached his side and slipped through the gateway without hesitation, his tail disappearing into the swirling flame before he vanished. Apollo zipped through after him, like an eager moth to the brightest of flames. Meanwhile, I swallowed my fear, trying not to recall the sickening experience of the last time I'd been through such a portal.\n\nCome on, you've been through far worse than that. I assured myself, and firmly placing my paw into the flames, I stepped forward, giving myself no time to hesitate before moving through into the unknown."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "It felt as if the world had fallen away about me, leaving nothing but a swirling abyss. The roar of fire and swirling light danced in my blurred vision, while bolts of crimson lightning illuminated a long tunnel of ethereal energy. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, I stopped, my paws landing firmly on solid ground.\n\nThe light faded behind me, and as I staggered forward, the sensation of falling abruptly vanished. An intense heat washed over my scales and there was a moment in which I refused to open my eyes. Even so, through the darkness of my eyelids, I could see a flickering light.\n\nWhen I eventually cracked them open, I found myself looking across a new landscape, unlike anything I'd ever seen. Nothing of the world outside passed through to this realm \u2013 there was no ground or sky, only great cliffs, canyons and levitating islands of fiery red crystal, resembling grand extensions of the pillar itself.\n\nThe mass of walls and twisting rocks stretched up high, vanishing into a hazy red, while a sea of glowing fire and bubbling lava flowed in great rivers far below, crossed by natural bridges and arches. Jets of flame spewed from the rough terrain, burning trees bloomed with molten fruit, while creatures resembling fireflies and phoenixes darted through the scorched air like comets.\n\nA large golden platform supported the open portal, and from this side I could see why the black rock bordered the edges of the vault's gateway. Charred flows of hardened lava crawled all over the crystalline landscape, while more slowly dribbled down from the cliffs to forge molten channels. Masterfully crafted, the streams marked either side of the steps leading down from the portal, while levitating braziers lit the way with a fire more potent than any I'd ever seen.\n\nThis place it's... Beautiful. I couldn't help staring in awe at stairways and channels cut into the crystal, marking out a pathway as it crossed the crevices via golden bridges. Was there a place like this inside the sphere too?\n\nNumerous golden buildings loomed around us, each one a great tower spanning several layers of crystal, boasting arches, landing platforms and tunnels similar to the structures within Dardien. However, there was no sign of any dragons amongst them; in fact, despite their pristine appearances, they were devoid of life, save for the smaller fiery creatures of the realm.\n\nWhat does it matter, we still have a job to do? Setting aside my shock I focused on the pathway snaking its way up toward the grandest tower.\n\nIt resembled a great blade, piercing several tiers of the vertical world before it disappeared into the haze, its walls so vast and detailed they could be a city in their own right. Below, a smooth wall surrounded the structure like a fort and before that, the road led to a staircase marked by three grand arches. More lava flows decorated the spans in a similar way to the gateway, whilst a flickering orange shield covered its doors, flanked by several golden statues of armoured dragons.\n\nThat looks like the magical field that my armour was held in. Realising the architecture here had to be star dragon, I stepped forward.\n\n\"Spectacular, this is truly beyond belief! I often theorised about the appearance of tesseract dimensions, and yet this... Well, this is beyond my ability to describe!\" Apollo babbled uncontrollably as he hovered higher to get a better view.\n\n\"Indeed, construct. You all would be wise to gaze upon these spires with respect, for you will probably never set sight upon this realm again,\" the Cartographer declared, before hastily stepping down the steps. \"Come, the queen's palace is a short walk, we must be swift,\" he added as he began to traverse the winding path.\n\nI glanced back over my shoulder to see that everyone had followed us through, and although a little shaken by the experience, they were unscathed. As we followed the old dragon, all eyes scoured the towering realm ebbing and flowing around us. On one side of the path, the cliff stretched up, forming a small overhang from which lava poured, dribbling by the path in a morphing pillar before plummeting lazily into the depths.\n\nCrystals hovered just above our heads, lighting the way as the path meandered around cliffs and crossed deep crevasses, before finally reaching the front of the wall via a beautifully-crafted golden bridge.\n\n\"To think, they kept all of this hidden under Dardien all this time,\" I heard Ember mutter, ruffling her wings in what I sensed was mild frustration.\n\n\"I bet it makes you re-think what it means to be a fire elemental,\" Boltock noted.\n\nShe glanced at him, and without any hint of anger, she nodded before returning her gaze to the golden fortress.\n\n\"I can't imagine what the realm of earth would look like. Or water,\" Boltock added curiously, glancing at his sister.\n\nShe gave him a subtle smile, seemingly lost in the idea of other elemental realms. The thoughts of great earth and water worlds swam through my mind too as we approached the end of the bridge, where yet another set of stairs led up to the fortress's arcane gate. An archway covered by a solid blockade of fire marked the entrance, guarded by a pair of dragon statues adorning two towers.\n\nTheir glowing-red eyes peered down at us, while fine gaps in their armour glowed with the same fury and their claws simmered like steel fresh from the forge.\n\nIs it just me or did one of them just move a little? My thoughts were cast back to the memory of the ghostly trees around the Paragon. I hate feeling like I'm being watched.\n\nThe only one who didn't seem either amazed or wary was the Cartographer as he hurried up the vast stairway.\n\n\"You've been here before, haven't you?\" I enquired.\n\n\"We have gazed upon the halls of flame once before in our lifetime, but it is good to have the pleasure of seeing them once again,\" he admitted, his dual tones harmonising in agreement.\n\n\"What of the other realms, the pillars of wind, earth and water?\" I asked curiously, hoping to get some information for my friends.\n\n\"Oh, we have not seen any other elemental realms. It is forbidden for any race other than those to bear the pillars to enter. Save for the ancestors themselves, of course. If you wish to know\u2026\" He looked back at me with a knowing grin, and I nodded.\n\n\"From the works of many scholars and the legends of the ages, we suspect that those elemental realms that remain uncorrupted are no less spectacular than this,\" he explained proudly, and I felt my face contort with confusion, followed by mild understanding, although it didn't stem the tide of my questions.\n\n\"But, if dragons are forbidden to enter any realm other than this, why and how are there more than just fire elementals?\" I asked, glancing at the others.\n\nThe older dragon smiled and rustled his own green wings.\n\n\"Our kind is bound to the elements by our heritage, for a dragon it is nature, not magic. While those among the other races can learn to master the elements with great training, those of our kind inherited their power from the first mortal dragons long ago.\"\n\nI nodded, despite my flourishing confusion. Unfortunately there was no more time for lessons, we had reached the archway, stopping at the face of its flaming gate. The Cartographer was first to approach, his cloak dancing in the hot wind as he stood close to the blazing barrier. Stretching out his staff, he muttered more ancient incantations, encouraging the gems about his neck to glow and the flaming barrier to fall away, revealing a large, open courtyard. Glowing-red seams of fresh lava etched their way through a smooth marble floor, while long flows of molten rock decorated its edges and more large dragon statues stood upon great plinths on either side.\n\nSmaller constructs lay in the shadows beneath them, boasting great swords and smooth shields similar to some bipedal statues I'd seen in Apollo's sanctum, and as the hovering construct passed by, his ramblings confirmed my thoughts.\n\n\"I see this position boasts a well-maintained force of defenders, and yet I am detecting no presence of an overseer,\" the hawk-construct stated, hovering to the face of one of the warriors as if inspecting an old companion.\n\n\"There is no need for such things here, these warriors are fuelled by the flames of the realm itself,\" the Cartographer explained as he reached the far end of the courtyard, pausing at another set of stairs leading up toward the shielded archways of the main structure.\n\n\"What now?\" I asked as we stopped behind him, but he merely sat down.\n\n\"We wait.\"\n\nWait... that's it...\n\nA flash of light above the central arch caught my eye. A symbol depicting a flaming pyre, similar to that on the Elder temple banners, flashed brightly before fading, while the sound of heavy metal feet clanged rhythmically upon marble. My first instinct was to defend myself, recalling the orkin and their twisted metal limbs, and yet this sound was nothing like that. The firm and imposing footsteps seemed to ring out in triumph, like the swords of champions clashing.\n\nAt their call, a tall, humanoid figure emerged, forcing me to back away cautiously. Forged from a multitude of smooth golden plates, it resembled my armour, and yet no bearer lay beneath, only a body of pure celestial flame, similar to Apollo. Its shoulders were large and smooth, and its chest bore a fiery red ruby at its centre. Its head resembled a heavy helmet, eyes hidden away behind slits in the protective gold, forcing regal horns of flickering fire from its temple.\n\nStopping at the stair's summit, it peered down at us with a judgmental stare, and then, reaching forward, it opened its left hand. A small, golden shaft of fire, lapped by fragments of metal flowed from its open palm, slowly enclosing the magical flame. The molten blade became longer than my whole body, looking as if it could carve through the stone hide of a troll with just one swift swipe.\n\n\"I am the Watcher. Who is it that so boldly enters this realm?\" the construct challenged, its voice reverberating against the cliffs in a way that betrayed its ethereal nature.\n\nThe Cartographer gave a faint bow before answering.\n\n\"We are here to seek aid from the lady of gold flame, as a servant of our great mistress of light, and a first-born of her mortal legacy, I beseech you, ancient one.\"\n\nThe construct fixed its attention on him, stretching out its empty hand.\n\n\"You bear the mark of the drakaran, their blood flows within you, first-born,\" he stated, before diverting his attention to us.\n\nI thought his gaze would settle upon me, just like that of almost everyone else, but another stole his attention.\n\n\"Amazing, absolutely amazing!\" Apollo chimed as he flew right up to the Watcher's face. \"You are of an ancient design. I have not seen a construct of your like before,\" he went on eagerly.\n\nThe Watcher looked puzzled, although his stern expression didn't change as he stepped back to inspect the smaller version of his kind.\n\n\"An overseer, here, what is the meaning of this?\" he rumbled.\n\n\"Please forgive me. I am Arcane Personal Overseer One-One-Zero, designated 'Apollo' by my former masters, pleased to make your acquaintance,\" he announced in exactly the same cheerful way he always did.\n\nOnly this time, what he said seemed to matter as the Watcher responded. They babbled nonsense for some time until I thought to intervene.\n\nWe don't have all day, surely, he'll think highly of my presence too.\n\nAs I stepped forward, I felt something odd brush against my mind, as if something new was calling to my thoughts. At first, I tried to block it out, the same way I did Mordrakk, yet it persisted until I heard a faint voice.\n\n\"Guardian, child of transcendent will, born of unnatural blood,\" it whispered faintly.\n\nIt was calm and soothing, flowing through my thoughts like water. I recognised it, and putting up little resistance I allowed its influence to take hold and draw me closer.\n\n\"Long have the descendants of flame awaited your arrival. You walk the pathway of heroes and bring to us a hope lost for millennia. But there is a great evil within your thoughts, seeds of the Darkness!\" With that the voice faded with a sharp hiss, leaving me to stagger weakly.\n\nI felt myself falling but did nothing to stop myself. Only the quick reaction of my friends stopped me from hitting the floor, and I found myself next to Risha when something else silenced us all.\n\n\"Step aside, Watcher,\" a fiery voice reverberated through the blazing realm.\n\nThe tone was as hot as flowing lava, as hard as steel, and yet as magnificent as the brightest of summer dawns. Watcher immediately did as instructed, with no regard for Apollo's rambling as the tap of metal claws on marble followed, each one carrying with it a paw step of such beauty and grace it felt as if the world itself could melt away at the sound. The final sight was almost unbelievable \u2013 a dragoness with sleek features bound within a suit of flickering golden shards appeared above the stairs.\n\nIt was as if the sun had descended to the world and taken on draconic form. Her eyes were like white-hot gems, golden flames formed her scales and her wings were like those of a phoenix, crossed by dancing patterns of liquid gold. She looked like one of the creators, and yet she was more magnificent than they could ever be.\n\nShe spread her wings and looked proudly over us all, raising her head tall and allowing the fiery rubies adorning her armour to sparkle like crimson stars.\n\n\"Greetings, children of Enishra, I am Seraphine, lady of gold flame,\" she declared radiantly, her introduction the most unnecessary thing.\n\nI know who this is, who in the world could fail to recognise her? I'd heard her in my dreams, she filled my memories, and for me there was no doubt that this was the immortal founder of all dragonkind.\n\nShe stood tall at the top of the stairs, her gleaming eyes passing over us with a regal grace that few could ever hope to match, before she paused, glancing at me before her eyes finally came to rest upon the Cartographer.\n\n\"So you have come back to me at last, first-born,\" she cooed, her muzzle curling with a warm smile.\n\nThe old dragon nodded respectfully as he fell into a bow.\n\n\"Yes, my lady. But we can say time has not been so kind upon our scales as it has upon the mistress of goldfire,\" he replied, admirably gazing upon her as if the sight were a blessing he thought he'd never see again.\n\n\"It matters not what ages have come to pass, you have fulfilled your duty beyond all that was expected of you,\" she praised, and once again, he could do nothing but agree with the utmost respect, his eyes seemingly hesitant to draw away from her gleaming figure.\n\n\"This... this is remarkable, Lady Seraphine. Your fate is finally known,\" Apollo babbled in shock as he was forced to land.\n\nSeraphine's expression didn't fade at his words. Instead, her tail flicked playfully, as if she were mildly amused.\n\n\"Indeed, and yet my fate was known to some,\" she responded, and at that the golden hawk fell silent.\n\nFunny, that's almost the same way he respects me.\n\nI felt a wave of uncertainty wash over me, and by the subtle apprehension of my friends, it was clear the feeling was mutual.\n\n\"So these are the four? Those who set out upon the dawn of the dark sun and vanquished the traitorous mortal Guardian?\" she questioned knowingly, waving a foreclaw in our direction.\n\n\"Tell me, which one among you had the bravery to face such a fate?\" As she asked, I could hear her voice inside my mind echoing her words.\n\n\"You are the one of unnatural blood, the hero, the saviour.\" It made me believe that her audible question was pointless, her thoughts were like an extension of my own and she knew exactly who I was.\n\nAll eyes turned to me, and my friends parted, allowing her to focus. Her head tilted curiously, and despite the dread welling up inside me, I felt her warm thoughts against my own. They were like a beacon, the welcoming heat of burning fire upon a freezing night. Swallowing my hesitation, I responded.\n\n\"That was me, your highness, although not one of us has more worth than another,\" I responded, glancing back over my shoulder at the others.\n\n\"Wise words \u2013 the making of a good leader is to see that he is worth no more than his followers,\" she responded, raising a foreclaw to her chest as if to sympathise.\n\n\"A dragon of the stars, the last of their kind... Yet different. You're not like them.\" Her thoughts spoke as if she only half knew me, and I felt a nervous shiver run through me.\n\n\"But I'm not a dragon, I'm... I'm something that shouldn't even be here,\" I stuttered nervously, earning a few confused glances from those that weren't privy to our mental conversation.\n\nYet there was a similar pain in her too, one I didn't entirely understand, though I could feel it as if it were my own. It was like a great flame that burned away every good thought I had. Meanwhile, she studied me closely, undoubtedly aware of her mind's fire seeping into my own. A look of sympathy once again graced her face, even as her own eyes trembled with the pain of a millennia's worth of memories.\n\n\"What's going on, what are you doing to him?\" I heard Risha suddenly demand as I staggered, backed up by her brother as they flanked me.\n\n\"They are loyal to you, Guardian, they fight in your name, not for what you are,\" Seraphine's thoughts added, and at that they faded sharply.\n\n\"What one is, does not define them. For once, not even we were of mortal kind. It is what one does that makes them who they are and the sacrifices one is willing to make for what is right... and you... you have had no shortage of such noble feats,\" she outwardly explained, before pausing.\n\n\"Yet, I sense that is not the subject that troubles you,\" she added, looking at all of us as she stepped forward. \"The Great Master has been a plague upon your mind for some time. You believe your life is not your own,\" she proposed.\n\nHer words echoed in my mind while the roaring flames of her own turbulent emotions died away, replaced by the rejuvenating heat that radiated from her flaming body. Risha and Boltock exchanged confused glances while I didn't even feel worthy enough to look into her eyes as she stood before me, no matter how kind and understanding they may be.\n\n\"You think that despite all you are and have done, you mean nothing to anyone but those who would wish ill upon you and your kind,\" she continued, her eyes narrowing as if she once again knew the answer and yet was seeking something different.\n\n\"He means a lot to us, your majesty,\" Risha spoke up.\n\n\"Yeah, not just anyone could have done all the stuff you did, Blaze,\" Boltock swiftly added.\n\n\"There's a reason why we follow him,\" Ember declared, nodding in agreement.\n\nI wanted to look back and tell them how much they meant to me too, and yet their words didn't change my thoughts, nor steer them from the darkness that swarmed in their midst. That was when I felt the warmth of Seraphine's tail coil under my chin, and with a subtle shift, she lifted my head so our eyes met.\n\n\"What of you, Guardian?\" she asked, without speaking.\n\nHer thoughts radiated through my mind; the burning memories replaced by a calm tranquillity.\n\nThey're right... I care for no one more. I responded mentally; my own thoughts projected into her mind. But it doesn't change my fate, or theirs.\n\nShe seemed to recognise the situation, moving her tail from under my chin as she continued to speak solely within my head.\n\n\"Your thoughts dwell upon what you will do. Will you end this world or save it? I cannot say. Your time came long after my own, and yet I see something in you that I have not seen in others.\" She turned her head and time seemed to slow around her.\n\n\"You are unlike the misguided creators of old; you may bear their power and their spirit, but they are as far from you as they are from me. You worry about who you are, and what will become of you should the day be won and this world survive the darkness set against it?\"\n\nOnce again, I could feel her sympathy, sense the pain she had felt when she'd doomed the world to an age of tyranny and oppression. I felt the sacrifice she'd made to save those she'd loved millennia past, and it hurt more than a knife to the chest.\n\nI don't know, I just want them to be safe. Safe and happy. I thought and she smiled.\n\n\"Not the goal of the creators then?\" she responded swiftly.\n\nI felt the darkness in me fade, and focused on her as time crawled to a stop.\n\n\"You are the Guardian, child of the Ethereals, and yet you live among my dragons and you have stood true to them without fault. You should listen to them as I once did, for when they tell you the answers lay here...\" She took a step back as her tail coiled and its bladed tip tapped against the gem stone amulet locked to my chest plate.\n\n\"They are right,\" she finished, peering at the sparking gem with longing interest.\n\n\"The souls of a thousand drakaran lay within you. Many are kin to those that dwell here within the realm of flame, and yet you say you have no potential for a life of your own, a life that is not bound to them?\" she observed, looking up into the endless realm of fiery crystals about us. \"Such things are earned, and it is for me to decide who is worthy of life, no other,\" she assured firmly, as the mental connection between us faded.\n\nI shook my head and looked back to see my friends observing me in another mildly concerned way. Meanwhile, Seraphine withdrew her tail from my amulet, drawing a lasting trail of bright embers from the gem, before setting her attention on the Cartographer.\n\nWhat did she just do to it? I thought, glancing down at the stone as it flickered with a red light, before fading back to its former white glow.\n\n\"You seek aid in the battle against the Great Master?\" she proposed knowingly.\n\n\"Yes, great lady,\" the old dragon answered with a nod.\n\n\"You bring one worthy of my legacy, one to unleash the warriors of flame,\" she offered, with another knowing glance toward me.\n\nThe old dragon also glanced my way, but the time of him knowing exactly what to do was over. It was now up to me.\n\n\"Though it seems you already lead one of the most loyal wings I have ever laid eyes upon. Guardian, know that it is not your purpose or destiny that earned you such respect,\" she commented, motioning to my friends.\n\nThe three of them shifted, their wings ruffling, each of them standing tall and proud. Finally, she nodded and turned to the towering cliffs. That was when I saw them upon the countless walls, bulwarks, towers and other structures, a vast army of fiery draconic shapes, all bound within golden armour like a mirror of their elemental queen.\n\n\"This will be the last great battle of our time, for age's twilight draws near and dragonfire will burn brightest before the coming night,\" she announced, spreading her wings. \"Go forth, children of Enishra, warriors of the golden pyre, my blessed descendants! Meet our great foe in glorious battle and send this darkness back into the abyss forever!\" she commanded, and as she did so, the dragons opened their muzzles, raised their heads, and unleashed jets of flame.\n\nThe atmosphere became alive with a storm of fire, before the first dragon vanished in a burst of light, followed by more until the whole army began to disappear in a series of fiery puffs. The Cartographer laughed with joy and amazement, while Apollo remained quiet, his open beak looking like it could fall off. I too felt a wave of prideful determination wash over me, and while I may not have been a pure-blooded dragon, I was proud to be here, in their most sacred place.\n\n\"The Darkness will once again know the wrath of those it thought defeated!\" Seraphine exclaimed, looking at the last of her vanishing army. \"Go now, fight for what is right,\" she directed as her gaze lowered.\n\nThe Cartographer nodded, before rapidly leading us out. My friends, Apollo and I all gave a bow as we turned to follow, and yet as I walked away from the founder of all dragons, I felt her divine will scratching at my mind once more.\n\n\"Remember, Guardian, you are who you choose to be. The Darkness has yet to meet a mind it could not call its own, and yet you are strong enough for all those who have fallen. Never forget yourself,\" she projected while physically nodding.\n\nI paused, thinking on that for a moment, before I returned the gesture.\n\n\"We will soon meet again,\" she added, before turning back toward the arches, with the Watcher at her side.\n\nWhy do I feel so good, so happy, knowing what's about to happen? I didn't have time to consider my feelings for long.\n\nAs I was about to follow after the others, Seraphine's head turned back to me, the blades upon her wings flashing to life.\n\nI felt my heart stop. She was no longer the considerate leader I'd just met. Her expression was as fearsome and fiery as her realm, and within an instant, I knew why \u2013 a horrifying shriek tore through the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon's Legacy",
                "text": "Black wings unfurled and beat furiously as a swarm of vulpomancers materialised through the reddened haze, dark plumes of smoke twisting about them. I ducked as several flew low overhead, their claws skimming my horns. A storm of fire dispatched the foremost creatures, turning them to dust as they approached Seraphine; her flames far more potent than anything I'd seen before. Those she missed swerved up and then swooped down low to bear their claws over us once again.\n\n\"How dare you enter here, dark spawn,\" the lady of fire growled as her eyes focused on the creatures.\n\n\"Run to the gateway, the Great Master's power must be growing if his servants are able to breach this place,\" she demanded, and with a flash of light, she leapt up into the air, cutting a pair of creatures in two before pursuing the rest.\n\n\"Impudent creatures,\" the Watcher stated with a blatant disgust as he held out his empty hand and grasped the air, pulling one of the vulpomancers into his crushing grip with an invisible force.\n\nHis sharp golden fingers melted the thrashing monster like a hot blade through butter, before it burst into cinders. Several more swooped down, standing no chance against his monstrous sword. Those left alive circled ready to dive at me, and with the sudden realisation I was dragged from my stupor.\n\n\"Come now, we cannot remain here!\" The Cartographer called, yanking me back toward the stairs.\n\nI wanted to stay, to fight for such a magnificent place, but he was right, and as the Watcher distracted most of the creatures, we fled.\n\n\"How did these things even get in here?\" Ember asked, maintaining a swift pace with the Cartographer.\n\nHe's spry for someone who's over a millennia old. I noted, but uncertainty regarding my allies was over as more vulpomancers passed overhead.\n\n\"It would seem that the numbers outside are growing. Their power will increase exponentially as reality begins to break down,\" Apollo answered.\n\nI only understood the direst meanings of his words as another screech signalled the arrival of more creatures. I stopped, scraping my claws on the crystalline surface as I leaned back to release a bolt of fire into the swarm. The impact sent one spiralling into a column of falling lava as the rest were set ablaze. Instead of disintegrating, as they had done before, the fire melted into the shadows surrounding them.\n\nWhat... But my fire has always been their weakness! I thought, staggering back as one struck the ground, exploding against the crystal like a drop of putrid rain.\n\nI thought that would be the end of it, but every burning vulpomancer began to do the same, slamming into each other in shadowy explosions, before consolidating, bubbling and blooming out into a whole new form. The bony shape of limbs, a coiling tail and a larger pair of tattered wings fused into existence, followed by a spiny crown and a hissing jaw melding together from what remained.\n\nThey're morphing together!?\n\nPurple fire sparked into life within its skeletal chest, burning brightly in the back of its fanged mouth. As it leapt forwards, I leapt back, its claws sinking deep into the crystal and drawing molten magma like blood. In one swift motion, the new goliath swung round to face me, smacking me aside with a lash of its serrated tail.\n\n\"What did you do to it!?\" Risha and Ember asked simultaneously.\n\nThe giant beast yanked its claws free of the ground and began to charge, smashing through the crystal pillars like they were frail glass.\n\n\"I don't know, I didn't think they could get any worse!\" I exclaimed, jumping to my paws.\n\nNo one had time to argue before its talons smashed down, shaking the ground and rupturing it in a flash of fire. The force sent us flying, throwing Risha and I toward the cliff's edge. Boltock fell back along the path, while Ember jumped into the air, unleashing a torrent of flames over the monster's spiked crest. Before I realised what had transpired, another hissing and snarling vulpomancer targeted me, earning a deadly slash from my tail.\n\nI really didn't think they could get any worse!\n\nNo matter how potent Ember's flame became in the realm of fire, it broke upon the giant monster's hide as it would upon a shield. All she succeeded in doing was drawing its attention and angering it even more. Meanwhile, I leapt to my paws, sending another blast into the abomination's exposed flank. Risha did the same, but once again, the fire did nothing but frustrate the monstrosity as it focused its eyeless gaze on Ember, twisting its tail to swat Risha and I aside.\n\nFighting to steady myself, I was cast over the cliff's edge, beating my wings and sinking my claws into the crystal to save myself from the fall. Several more shadows passing overhead stole my attention and another pair of smaller, yet no less angry vulpomancers set upon me. Hopelessly exposed, I kicked up onto the ledge, but before they reached me, a beam of bright green magic lanced across both, consuming them instantly. I noticed moments later, that it wasn't fire, but a mass of green roots, knotting up their wings and ripping them apart as they plummeted down into the sea of lava below. Apollo opened fire on the rest with several strikes of eldritch lightning, before forcing the larger beast to recoil away from Ember.\n\n\"I thought you were supposed to be good at flying,\" Risha stated as she appeared above and dragged me back onto the pathway.\n\n\"I'm sure that only counts in the real world,\" I retorted.\n\nShe didn't look so convinced, but as more green beams of elemental magic joined Apollo's arcane fire, it was clear neither of us had time to debate the matter.\n\n\"Come on, there is no time for this!\" the Cartographer hollered, directing us toward the gateway, his outstretched staff the source of the earthly magic that had struck the vulpomancers.\n\nAs he fired, Apollo's magical barrage forced the giant vulpomancer back further, and seizing the moment, we bolted.\n\n\"It would seem that the true darkness is beginning to reform,\" Apollo observed, pulling his attention away from the beast and hurrying after us. \"I fear if reality continues to deteriorate at this rate, these creatures will not be bound to such simple forms for much longer.\"\n\n\"You think?\" was all I could say as the larger vulpomancer recovered.\n\nWe reached the front of the gateway before it could catch us, and as the others stopped before the swirling wall of fire, I positioned myself at the top of the stairs, sending blast after blast of flame into the pursuing monstrosity. My efforts did nothing more than slow it down as it raised a bony limb to shield itself against the assault.\n\n\"Quickly, we must get back to the palace at once,\" the Cartographer demanded, rushing through the gateway with Apollo close behind.\n\nI motioned for the others to follow as I sent another bolt of fire into the creature's head, melting several of its spines and causing it to pause, snarling as fiery breath flickered from its gnarled throat.\n\nBy the creators, please don't tell me they can spit flames! I prepared myself to stand against the full force of its purple fire, but in that instant, it disappeared in a cloud of dark smoke and beating wings.\n\n\"What... where?\" I gasped in surprise, expecting it to re-emerge.\n\n\"Where did it go?\" Boltock finished breathlessly.\n\nBefore I could reply, a sharp wing beat and a set of dark claws sliced across my front, forcing me back across the floor and away from the stairs. Risha rushed to my side as I staggered to my paws, as a dull, mocking laugh filled the air and black wings erupted into the fiery sky.\n\nThat hit, that wasn't a vulpomancer.\n\n\"Leaving so soon? I'd have thought this realm would have warranted at least a little more of your time,\" Pyro proposed, circling around before thudding down to block our exit.\n\nMy heart was racing as he hissed, purple flames spouting from his muzzle like the forked tongue of a wyvern. He gave a wicked snigger as he strode forward, as if nothing had ever come between us. A wave of uncertainty seemed to cross us all, yet this time, the ebon wing didn't look so willing to toy around.\n\n\"Ember?\" he mused. \"Not the least bit glad to be here?\"\n\nHis purple gaze fixed on the orange dragoness; sharp tone still riddled with a deep longing.\n\n\"You have no right to even speak my name, not after all you've done!\" she growled.\n\n\"All I've done?\" he asked, raising his metal forepaw to his chest. \"Do you still fail to see that there is no hope for anything but what is to come? The petty band you ally yourself with is doomed!\"\n\n\"If you truly believe that, then why come back?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I came back to save the dragoness I loved from oblivion!\" he finally confessed.\n\nShe stared into his eyes as they bore down on her, her gaze as hot as her breath.\n\n\"Loved? If I really meant that much to you, you wouldn't have become a slave to evil. You would have just come back to me!\" she declared, even as sadness began to chip at her resolve.\n\nPyro shook his head and snarled. Flames burst out from his flared nostrils as the metal half of his face cracked like cooling lava.\n\n\"I am no slave. I am an ebon wing, the first of a new dynasty. I am the first of our kind's future, and if you cannot see that future, I cannot allow you to threaten it,\" he argued, proudly opening his wings and throwing back his head with a breath of purple flame.\n\n\"You're insane,\" Ember replied, stepping further back.\n\n\"So be it,\" he finally snapped, exploding forward without another word.\n\nEmber raised her wing as a futile defence, still hesitant to strike him no matter what he'd become. I rushed to come between them, but he was too close. The sound of rock on metal rang out when a block of dark stone tore itself from the gateway and slammed into the right side of his face, throwing him to the floor in a fit of anger.\n\nEmber staggered back as the shattered fragments fell over her, and glanced to where Boltock stood. The green dragon appeared unsure about what he'd done. I could tell he knew he might be forcing her further away \u2013 and that dread filled his eyes. However, there was also no doubt that he wouldn't let any harm befall the dragoness he'd loved for so long.\n\nNot that it matters, I'll kill Pyro myself before I let it come to that! I inwardly declared, as the ebon wing wrapped one claw about his glowing wounds.\n\n\"Come on, we have to get out of here!\" Risha hollered, finally managing to force the words from her muzzle with one panicked breath as she pulled me back toward the gateway.\n\nEmber gave Boltock a fleeting glance, before she bolted through the flaming portal.\n\n\"Boltock, come on!\" Risha called, pulling her brother back.\n\nPyro jumped to his paws, spitting flames.\n\n\"Go, I'll hold him off!\" I instructed the pair of them, but neither appeared willing to leave, especially Risha.\n\nI ignored my own frustration and flared my wings, forcing them back with me as we all leapt through the gateway in a flash of fire.\n\nAfter a second of molten chaos, we all fell in a heap upon the stone floor. Staggering to my paws as fast as I could, I glanced around to see the chamber had become a battleground.\n\nThe light of the pillar and its surrounding mechanisms illuminated the dancing shadows of vulpomancers, as they swirled and darted. It was almost as though the shard was alive and defending itself, as sparks of lightning erupted from the crystal to strike any beast that swooped too close. In the air, several dragon shapes defended the chamber as Seraphine's elementals materialised in bursts of flame. Their roaring fire burned brighter than any dragon's, casting the foe back into oblivion.\n\nThe Cartographer stood at the base of the stairs, his staff glowing as bolts of energy lit his features with a vibrant green glow. Apollo was above him, the construct's wing tips glowing white-hot as he expended the last of his shots and fell back to recuperate.\n\nMeanwhile, Risha and Boltock staggered up just ahead of me, while Ember recovered first and jumped before them. Shaking off my daze, I moved forward, and the Cartographer glanced back, striking another pair of vulpomancers from the air without even looking.\n\n\"Go... get back to the palace!\" he instructed, motioning at the exit. \"Quickly now, all of you... We will follow!\"\n\nSpreading my wings, I was hesitant to leave.\n\n\"Go now!\" he demanded, while effortlessly striking another vulpomancer.\n\n\"Come on!\" I shouted to the others, my determination fading as I caught Ember's sombre expression.\n\nSpreading her wings she followed the rest of us up into the air.\n\nCreators curse this place; the air is so still! It made flight incredibly hard, not to mention avoiding the swarming vulpomancers. I can hardly get off the ground!\n\nWithout warning, a furious roar overwhelmed the sound of battle as the gateway exploded in a surge of fire. Pyro's wings emerged draped in flames, driving the black dragon forwards like a hurricane of blazing shadow. I dropped below the others, twisting back as I spun in the air, half focused on trying to keep myself airborne while the furious ebon wing surged at me.\n\nHe swerved to avoid the first bolt I sent his way, leaving the blast to scatter treasure and stone in a cloud of clattering riches. The explosion knocked him off balance while the shockwave launched the four of us towards the surface. Scraping my claws against smooth stone, I came dangerously close to slamming into the shaft's cylindrical walls, before emerging into the Elders' chamber.\n\n\"Go, head for the doors!\" I ordered, noting the golden metal had been bent and warped.\n\nPyro and those monsters must have forced their way in. I noted, sparing no more than a fleeting glance at the ruined architecture.\n\nPassing the destruction, I beat my wings harder, catching up with the others as they flew toward the temple's main entrance. Several vulpomancers prowling about the pillars prevented us from slowing, torrents of fire all that stopped them from ripping us from the sky. Those caught in the flames began to melt into one another in the same way as they had done below, while those spared the fire leapt into the air. I cut down at least two as they took off, only for more to swiftly emerge from the shadows.\n\nHow did so many of them get down here!? Claws and bladed tails lashed at me as I battled through the temple's main door and out into Dardien's open sky.\n\nThe air reeked of smoke and death, the stormy skies awash with torrents of rain cascading down from beyond the great overhang. The world was a battleground of writhing tendrils, each formed from thousands of vulpomancers surging down like the twisting limbs of one great beast. Plumes of dragonfire met their descent as waves of Seraphine's fire elementals materialised to form great glowing swathes of fire. Their gallant efforts began to push back the dark tides, all the while offering hope to what remained of the New Order's battle-worn soldiers.\n\nWhile the swirling masses of vulpomancers recoiled and began to morph into more horrific forms, the lashing blades of griffins and hippogriffs magical blasts met their transformation. Our defence looked to be stronger than I could have hoped, but as more vulpomancers poured in, my flicker of salvation began to dwindle.\n\nWe have to find a way to put an end to this soon, or there'll be too many of them. I thought, twisting back and preparing to send a blast into the streaming shadows pursuing us. That was when something slammed into my back.\n\nPyro said nothing as he hooked his teeth around my neck and tried to twist. I folded my wings, yanking them away from his claws, sending us both spiralling toward the archways within one of the great stalactites. Through flashes of lightning, I caught glimpses of the vulpomancers shifting their attention from me to my friends, harrying them up toward the rain-strewn battlefield above.\n\nKicking up against Pyro's underside, I tossed back my head, slamming my horns into his metal mask. The armoured plates hardened upon impact, forcing purple fire to erupt over my neck as he roared and jumped away. The moment I was free, my own wings snapped open, halting my descent dangerously close to the vast walls of stone. Immediately, I swerved, darting into one of the arches. Navigating the rapidly passing maze in an adrenaline-filled flurry of sharp twists and turns as my wings caught on the pillars and tunnel walls, before I finally emerged into the open sky.\n\nFree, I did nothing other than surge upwards after the others, until I passed the cliff top. Rain lashed over my scales and harsh winds forced me up higher. A sea of explosive colours illuminated the spinning image as blazing elements waged war on the night and lightning lanced across the cloudy maelstrom. Within the ruins of Andruid, fierce fires burned the last of the orkin to ash, and within the midst of the chaos, like a set of gleaming jewels, I saw my friends. Their armour was battered and drenched, while a pair of vulpomancers still harassed them. In the limited time I had to glance back, I saw no sign of Pyro, and didn't hesitate.\n\nI slammed into the foremost shadow monster like a comet. It gave a shriek of surprise, its tattered wings flaring as it floundered away. In the same moment, a great gust of wind caught us both, forcing it back toward me, and I seized its horned head. My claws cut deep wounds of glowing white through its hide while the magical light of my amulet dispersed its shadowed cloak. It hissed and thrashed, but I opened my muzzle wide, unleashing a river of white flames, turning its body to oily ichors.\n\nThe second of the pair wouldn't be taken so easily, and spinning round, it slashed its tail across my face. The trident blade narrowly missed my eye as it cut a deep wound across my armour. In retaliation, I kicked it away with a buck of my rear legs, sending it swirling at the others.\n\n\"Look out!\" I warned.\n\nThe creature used the burst of speed to steady itself, but it was too late. The combined rainbow of flame from my friends dissolved it in an instant. I dropped down to fly alongside them, panting heavily as exhaustion caught up with me.\n\n\"We need to get back down to the city!\" I wheezed.\n\nOur hurried conversation was cut short when Pyro tore through us, blasting us apart like frail insects in a breeze. I spun in the turbulent air, battling to right myself as purple fire and the force of the storm forced us further away. Spinning around, he barrelled at me with tremendous speed, wings tucked at his side and claws outstretched, turning him into a gleaming arrow of black scales. Fire flickered from his muzzle and his scarred metal features shimmered in the flashes of lightning. I heard a plethora of shocked and panicked voices amidst the howl of the wind and pouring rain.\n\nI opened my muzzle, yet his claws sunk deep into any part of my scales they could find, and with a great heave, he forced me from the sky, like a falcon dive bombing its prey. The force knocked the wind from my lungs, weak flames and smoke hacking from my throat. I squirmed in an effort to escape, but every movement forced his talons deeper.\n\n\"This was entirely your fault!\" he roared, flames flying from his muzzle as his eyes narrowed.\n\nEmphasising his words, he tore away one of his claws, leaving a visible stream of blood trailing from my wounds. With all of his fury and rage, he slammed his razor-sharp talons deep into my scars, and searing pain lanced through me, igniting every nerve ending like lightning. The sensation felt as if it did far more than hurt on a physical level, as if he was ripping out my soul and I could do nothing to escape. With a final surge of his wings, he tore his claws from my scales and sent me flying like a rag into the ground. The sound of wings snapping open boomed like the crack of thunder, and he vanished into the darkness.\n\nI battled through the intense agony in an effort to steady myself, but it was too late, and with an almighty crash, the cracking of stone and an explosion of dust came the inevitable impact. Rock crumbled under the force, while my armour strained to protect me. The pain was unbearable, and darkness almost took me there and then as my mind fell into a muffled silence.\n\nIn the fiery light of the smouldering ruins, the dancing rain, smoke and flames surrounded me. Another surge of agony coursed through my body as the rock crumbled under me and I slid down to a bloody ditch, my shattered wings and back against a pile of wet rubble. All the while, I could feel the battle between pain and healing as my body rapidly repaired itself, my amulet glowing in harmony with the new feeling.\n\nBefore long, a dark shadow ignited a ring of purple fire around me and Pyro reappeared, wings folding to his side as he landed with deceptive grace.\n\n\"Great Master or not, I'm going to finish this,\" he snarled.\n\nI wonder if he knows he can't kill me, no matter how hard he tries. I found myself thinking again. He doesn't care about any of that, does he?\n\nShivering with pain, I pushed myself to my paws, mud and water falling from my battered scales as my scars throbbed. Pyro swiped at me with his metal claw, the dark blade smashing into my head, tearing another deep wound through my shattered armour and exposed scales. Before I had a chance to react, another blow struck from his tail, the force of the impact throwing me over the rubble and into the waterlogged pit.\n\nAt its far side, the ground fell away at the cliff's edge, and I could just about make out the fleeting lights of battle in the sky. He prowled into the pit like a dribbling torrent of shadow, silhouetted by the flashing battle behind him as he loomed over me with a cold empty stare.\n\n\"You never were one to harbour any faith,\" he sneered, jabbing his metal talon at me and smiling cruelly.\n\nI felt the pain in my scars flare again as an invisible weight began to crush me.\n\n\"And you still fail to fight back with any nobility,\" he added, flicking the blood from his claw. \"Say good bye to your legacy.\"\n\nHe rose up on his hind legs, ready to come down on me with both foreclaws.\n\n\"Pyro, stop this!\" a desperate voice called as a jet of fire erupted overhead, reducing the rain to a cloud of steam.\n\nHis attention instantly focused on its source, as the others landed around us \u2013 Risha and Boltock close to me, while Ember landed to block the ebon wing.\n\n\"Stop it! Your words hold no meaning to me,\" he growled, stepping back.\n\n\"I know that Pyro would never do this. This is not you; you don't have to do this!\" Ember insisted, stepping toward him without any hint of fear.\n\nHis blazing eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I wouldn't have thought you'd have been foolish enough to believe any of us have a choice,\" he answered, tail brushing against the edge of the cliff.\n\nMeanwhile, I stood with Risha's help, but I was little more than a shivering wreck. The more I rose from the floor, the more the intensity of my pain forced me back down, until it felt like the only thing holding me together was my battered armour.\n\n\"You won't win,\" Pyro continued.\n\n\"And you think you have? By giving up everything you fought for, all you cared about?\" Ember countered.\n\nThe dark dragon scoffed at the idea, snorting a jet of flame.\n\n\"I fought for nothing but a blind leader, a power that quells that of all those beneath it. The Great Master does no such thing. He promises all the power in the world, all that we want will be ours, and we must only serve him as our true ruler,\" he stated, the faintest hint of a plea in his tone.\n\nEmber looked away, raising a paw to her eyes as she shook her head.\n\n\"I really don't know who you are any more,\" she whimpered.\n\nHe smiled, a weak and hopeless gesture wrought by madness. It was the look of someone who'd lost everything and had now finally sacrificed any care for such things.\n\n\"I told you, I won't be like you. I know the dragon I loved would never have done so either, and for him I'll do what I have to,\" she admonished, stepping back and opening her bladed wings.\n\nSurprisingly, I could see the conflict in Pyro's mind. His former mate was right \u2013 this wasn't him; he'd died long ago.\n\nThis is just the darkness using him the same way it used Mordrakk.\n\n\"So be it!\" he growled once more, bounding forwards.\n\nEmber spun, darting aside and slashing at his metal leg with her blades. The sharp edge glanced against the metal, and Pyro landed where she'd stood with a hard thud, before knocking her legs out from under her with his tail.\n\n\"Ember!\" Risha cried, springing to her friend's aid, leaving me to bear the crushing weight of my scars.\n\nPyro instinctively swiped at her with his metal claw, but before his strike could land, I bolted forward, forcing myself between them. The power of his swipe flung me back into her, throwing us both close to the edge of the cliff. I sank my claws into the stone to avoid slipping over, but the rain-soaked ground made it difficult to get a grip and we slid slowly to a halt only inches from the precipice. I collapsed in the water, little more than a panting wreck as the pain oppressed me like a great dragon's claw. Risha stood, gasping for air as she glanced about.\n\nPyro returned his focus to Ember, knocking her to the rain-soaked rubble, glancing back at us and raising his metal claw for a final blow. In that moment, a bright bolt of lightning lit up the scene perfectly, and I dared not close my eyes. With a low whoosh, a block of rubble suddenly struck Pyro's head, forcing his intended blow to fail. Block after block followed, each one striking his head, bending metal, snapping crooked horns and cutting purple wounds into his scales. With a wicked growl, he whipped round, swatting another boulder aside with his tail.\n\n\"Leave her alone!\" Boltock warned, focusing on the shards of rock levitating about him.\n\nPyro scraped a metal talon upon the ground, drawing purple sparks as it raked stone.\n\n\"Oh, how long I have wished I could tell you the same,\" he hissed, coiling his legs and springing forward.\n\nHis wings sprung open, propelling him through the air directly at his target. Boltock released one of the boulders levitating at his left before darting to the side. Pyro, swerving to avoid the rock, crashed down into the rain-filled pit. With more stone projectiles hovering about him, Boltock's attention shifted, conjuring rocks and soaked sediment out of the watery pit, to swarm over Pyro like ravenous ants.\n\nThe ebon wing squirmed as the manipulated earth pinned him to the ground. Throwing back his head, he unleashed a torrent of flame, and with a forced flick of his tail, struck at the rubble beneath the earth elemental's paws, bringing the pile down. With Boltock's concentration broken, the rubble about the ebon wing returned to loose debris. Free, he jumped up to face his attacker as the rock fall almost buried Boltock.\n\n\"I have waited a very long time for this,\" he growled, striding slowly toward his partially buried adversary.\n\n\"So have I!\" Boltock shouted as he opened his wing and launched all of the rubble he could into Pyro's face.\n\nStaggering back with a cry of fury, the ebon wing shook his head, raising a defensive forepaw to his one good eye. In the same moment, Boltock jumped up, landing atop Pyro's head.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha cried, rushing to help her brother.\n\nUnder the pressure of my searing scars, I couldn't stop her as her elemental marks flared, forcing the water around Pyro's paws to spiral up, encasing his legs with solid ice. Her efforts to reach her brother were halted when the dark dragon swept her aside with his tail and Boltock's grip failed as the ebon wing threw back his head.\n\nIn an effort to secure his grip, Boltock took his chance and bit down on Pyro's armoured neck, bracing himself as the larger dragon tried repeatedly to throw him toward his jaws. Each attempt forced the green dragon's claws deeper, until they finally pierced his scales and Pyro shrieked in pain. Pure purple light and dusty ichors erupted from the wounds as he threw his head forwards with enough ferocity to finally cast Boltock over his muzzle like a drape. The moment he realised where he was, the earth elemental fought to get away, but it was too late, and with one furious snap, the black dragon seized him and bit down hard.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha cried, her tone of my nightmares.\n\nBattling against the force of Mordrakk's scars, I fought to get back to my paws, while Pyro glanced at Risha leaping at him with a fury equal to his own. The ebon wing was too quick and forced her aside, sending her rolling back into a pile of rubble.\n\nI... I have to do something! Battling the pain, I glanced between them, but with my mind in so much turmoil I couldn't focus on anything.\n\nDragging myself toward Risha, I collapsed by her side gasping for air. The determination in her eyes burned brighter than the most potent fire, a look even Mordrakk would do well to fear. Yet there wasn't enough strength left in her mortal body to support it as her quivering legs struggled to lift her.\n\n\"Get off him!\" Ember suddenly demanded as she jumped from the rubble.\n\nDespite being battered and bloody, she moved with the strength and prowess of the Fire Order's finest, and with one flick of her muzzle, she ignited her scales into a coat of flames. With one heavy beat of her wings, she slammed into Pyro's side. He lurched forward as the wind left his chest and fire burst from his muzzle, sending Boltock's battered body crashing into the rain-swept rubble. In response, he spun, smacking his former mate with a wing, knocking her to the floor.\n\n\"Enough!\" he bellowed, raising his metal claw. \"There will be no more of this, Ember!\" he spoke her name through gritted teeth as he swung his metal talon round with newfound ferocity.\n\nIn that moment, it felt as if time stopped. I saw her eyes close and his claw shimmer against the dark, rain-drenched scene. Risha sat up, eyes wide and horrified, as Boltock leapt up between them and in a flash of lightning Pyro's claws sank deep into his chest. The green dragon's eyes widened, and as he gasped, a cruel smile crossed Pyro's muzzle as he plunged his claws deeper.\n\n\"Boltock!\" Risha cried again, launching herself at them, no care or realisation of her wounds as she charged, half-limping, half collapsing.\n\nPyro glared, and with a flick of his talons, tossed Boltock at her, the pair falling in a pile over a mound of rubble.\n\n\"Boltock... Boltock!\" she cried, standing over her brother's limp body.\n\nI felt as if every scale had been ripped from my body, as if all the hope and joy that I'd ever felt was no more. I felt dead, and worst of all, I couldn't do anything while the pain and ferocity of Mordrakk's will forced me down.\n\nAll the while Pyro peered down his snout at us, as if finally satisfied.\n\nNo, He... I... I lurched forwards, but my broken body made no effort to carry me. He can't...\n\nJust ahead of my grounded muzzle, I saw Boltock gasping for breath under his sister's focused gaze, and that fearsome determination in her eyes completely stole her from the world.\n\nI saw Ember beyond them; she'd moved enough to see the green dragon that had come between her and Pyro's formidable strike. A cold realisation dawned on her face, and her eyes grew wide.\n\n\"You monster, you're horrifying, you\u2026\" Her words died as she lashed out, striking Pyro with her tail.\n\nRaising a forepaw to the large gash across his face, the strike caught the proud dragon by surprise. Spreading his wings, he flew back toward the cliff edge, but Ember leapt down to face him, her teeth bared, fire dancing across her scales and eyes filled with rage.\n\n\"You are not a dragon! I will have nothing to do with you, murderer!\" she roared, striking him across the chest.\n\nBatting her paw aside, he cut a deep wound through her left wing. Ignoring the pain she hissed, flinging herself at him, their wing blades clashing in a flash of flames. Pyro forced her back, and with a fearsome growl, raised his wide-open muzzle ready to come down mercilessly on her. She ducked, her wings slicing along his, allowing her to surge forward in one swift motion, and with a sweep of her tail she knocked his legs out from under him. She received a deep cut across her chest in return as his metal claw ripped through her damaged armour.\n\nBlood trailed from the new wound and she panted heavily, while similar gashes marred Pyro's body as he stood and shook himself off.\n\n\"I'm disappointed, maybe I'm better off without such a dragoness at my side,\" he taunted.\n\nWithout a word, Ember launched herself at him once more, and as expected, he raised a paw to meet her attack. Flaring her wings, she rose up slightly and with a firm kick of her hind legs, she sent her bladed hind claws into his face. He screamed as she clawed his eyes from their sockets, falling back, as he staggered to the cliff's edge.\n\n\"No, I am disappointed \u2013 disappointed with you!\"\n\nShe coiled her tail back, and with a final intense strike, she thrust its bladed tip into his chest. He gasped as the obsidian scythe sank through his scales and deep into his heart. All of his limbs went limp, he shivered, and looked at her as no other dragon could, until, with a final rasping breath, his muzzle closed. Ember retracted her blade, and with a swift flick she stepped back.\n\nHer eyes and muzzle quivered, there was no hiding the pain in her expression. The last Pyro saw of his former mate was fiery determination, before the life left him and his body slipped from the cliff into Dardien's depths. It left only Ember stood with rain dripping from her scales while I stared hopelessly.\n\nRisha's meek voice broke through the chaos.\n\n\"Boltock,\" she whimpered.\n\nForcing myself up I clawed my way over, only to feel sick with terror. We both looked down at her wounded brother while the rain battered our scales like a million ice blades. His armour was twisted and mangled where Pyro's claw had penetrated, and a steady stream of rain-diluted crimson seeped from his heaving chest. Risha placed a forepaw onto his head, focusing all her efforts on pressing the water against his wounds.\n\n\"Risha,\" he gasped as blood escaped his muzzle.\n\n\"Yes, it's me, I'm here,\" she assured, clutching his forepaw against her chest.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he coughed with a smile.\n\n\"Sorry? Sorry for what? You don't have anything to be sorry for,\" she whimpered.\n\nI could see she was fighting the greatest mental battle she'd ever faced, pain emitted from her like the heat of a fire.\n\n\"I'm sorry for breaking promises,\" he added, the sparks of life fading in his eyes.\n\n\"No, no, no, I told you I would look after you, we\u2026\" Her words failed her.\n\n\"We look after each other,\" he interrupted with a gasp.\n\nShe nodded, tears mixing with rain as they rolled down her quivering muzzle.\n\n\"But not now, not any more, you have to\u2026\" His voice trailed off, his eyes meeting mine.\n\nI swallowed, rejecting the burning pain that coursed through my aching limbs. As much as I didn't want to, I knew what he was telling me, and despite all that was going on in my mind, I nodded.\n\n\"W\u2013Where's Ember, is she okay?\" he asked.\n\nRisha nodded.\n\n\"Yes, you saved her, she\u2026\"\n\n\"She's the one who's sorry,\" the fiery dragoness interjected, rushing over as fast as her injuries would allow and settling at his side.\n\nHe shifted the best he could to look into her ruby-red eyes.\n\n\"You saved me... you, you...\" Her words faltered.\n\nHe looked at her as if she was the greatest thing in the whole world, then finally something seemed to flash in his mind and his muzzle opened.\n\n\"Ember... I never told you how much I\u2026\"\n\nShe leaned forward, silencing his words. Taking his forepaw in her own, she pressed her muzzle to his and kissed him. I'd never seen it before, and yet immediately I understood. Risha let go of him, leaving them both in their embrace, muzzles locked and eyes closed until, finally, Ember leaned back, tears filling her eyes.\n\n\"I know, I've always known,\" she smiled at the confession. \"And I am sorry,\" she admitted.\n\nBoltock gasped as his head fell back.\n\n\"Does this mean we're friends again?\" he asked.\n\n\"We've always been friends,\" she answered.\n\nHe smiled as his final breath escaped, his head slumped gently against the wet stone and his eyes faded.\n\n\"No...\" Risha whimpered, her voice so quiet it was almost lost to the storm.\n\nTurning back to me, she pressed her head into my shoulder, shivering violently as tears filled her eyes. I wrapped my wing over her back and lowered my head over hers, closing my own eyes. When they opened again, I saw Ember quivering as she looked over Boltock. She gently placed his paws back on his still chest, stepping back as tears started to leave her eyes.\n\n\"I love you too,\" she whispered almost silently, bowing her head.\n\nI had no words for either of them. I had no words for anything. My own horror and sorrow didn't register in the barren wasteland that my mind had become.\n\nAn almighty crack of thunder exploded above us, shattering the grief as lightning and purple fire flashed across the sky. I felt my scars burn when the flickering clouds erupted into flame and a great shockwave burst out, sending the rain into a frenzied tempest, shattering all that remained of the battle above like flies in the wind.\n\nThe vulpomancers turned toward the hurricane from which they'd emerged as it began to swirl and flicker, flames growing within its heart. Ember and I peered at the firestorm, when, with a burst of light and a deep roar, two great wings emerged from its sides and a draconic shape formed from the swirling clouds.\n\nEven Seraphine's elemental army couldn't withstand Mordrakk's dark, ethereal body as it poured from the fire like a great serpent set on devouring the world. His eyes scoured the battlefield with casual interest, while his wing beats forced the ground to shudder violently.\n\nRisha pulled herself away and I raised a paw to the gem in my chest.\n\nThis is it; he's finally come for it. Only now, I was the last dragon in the universe that was going to let him win."
            },
            {
                "title": "Virtue of Selflessness",
                "text": "Staggering back from Risha in an agonising recoil, I felt a wave of pain surge through me. While the swarm of vulpomancers coiled around the storm's glowing core, releasing another great flash and a deep rumble. There was a brief moment of uneasy silence, as if the world itself was holding its breath in terrified anticipation. Then the brightest of lights exploded in one great wave, ripping at the ground and tearing buildings from their foundations.\n\n\"We have to go!\" was all that escaped my muzzle as I battled the surging pain.\n\n\"He's right. We need to get back to the others,\" Ember added, eyes still filled with tears.\n\nRisha's gaze remained locked on her brother, and for a moment, I feared she'd never leave him.\n\nWho am I to tell her otherwise, who's anyone to take her away?\n\nEmber rustled her wings nervously and I motioned for her to go. Her expression shifted from pained sorrow to mild disapproval as she hesitantly took off and I tentatively limped towards Risha.\n\n\"Risha, we can't stay,\" I urged, hating myself for uttering the words.\n\nI dared not look at Boltock's body as my mind struggled to come up with any outcome that didn't involve leaving him here.\n\n\"He wouldn't want you to stay here,\" I offered, my request becoming more of a plea.\n\nShe gave another soft whimper as the earth-grinding roar of devastation rapidly thundered closer. I glanced up to see the wall of vulpomancers sweeping aside all in their path, be they mortal or elemental. Risha lowered her paw to the stone beside her brother, looking at him for a moment before closing her eyes.\n\n\"Never again. That is what I said, never!\" she hissed, staring up at the sky.\n\nAs encouraging as it was, her determination alone wasn't going to stop the encroaching destruction, and as the rubble around us began to tremble, I staggered back.\n\n\"We can't stay here!\" I cried desperately as shards of stone began to lift into the air.\n\nShe looked at me with a cold, empty expression. I'd no words for her, nor could I avoid the feelings welling up inside. Spreading my wings and ignoring the pain, I caught the fierce wind and was dragged back into the battle-strewn sky. Risha took one last look at her brother, quiet words leaving her muzzle before she reluctantly took off after me.\n\nHow can I ever make things right again? How can I ever talk to her again?\n\nI flew toward the city through a sky filled with fleeing dragons, griffins and elementals, the latter of which swooped back toward the oncoming swarm to hold it back as their mortal allies flew toward the cover of Dardien's hanging spires.\n\nDespite their efforts, the bursts of elemental flame were no match for the sheer force of Mordrakk's will. The cliff top behind us almost collapsed as the wave surged forward, sweeping aside everything in its path. Writhing masses of beasts coiled out from the oncoming horde; I sent blasts of flame into as many as I could, but the vulpomancers simply morphed together and reformed into ever more horrific monsters, as if each one was an integral part of something greater and unimaginably terrifying.\n\nAs we reached the cover of Dardien's overhang, the swarm followed, coiling back, before smashing through rock as if it were dry sand. They had no care for their bodies as they ploughed into stone, shattering whole spires under their sheer weight and numbers. I heard screams and frantic cries, walls of fire burst out from every crevice and archway, and yet none was enough to stem the tide.\n\nI almost felt myself drop from the sky as the physical and mental pain ravished my body. The burning from my scars clawed at my soul, and the idea of how many would die made my blood run cold.\n\nThe palace's vast face lay ahead of us, and we rushed for it as fast as our wings would carry us. We hit the stone pillars of the main hall in a less than dignified landing, while I caught a glimpse of Ember as she slipped through the main doors, the huge slabs slowly closing.\n\n\"Go, get through!\" I shouted to Risha, as the dark tide swiftly consumed the palace plaza, vociferously followed by the steps.\n\nTo my horror, a swift gust of wind extinguished the elemental flames and the pillars began to buckle as the beasts surged through. I sent repeated blasts of flames into the relentless wall of claws and teeth until my fire became nothing more than a smoky sputter.\n\n\"No, not without you! I'm not losing anyone else!\" Risha growled.\n\nI knew that wasn't negotiable, and so bolted toward the door, the full force of the swarm gnawing at our tails in an effort to drag us back as we snaked around the seal's edge moments before it slammed shut.\n\nI fell to the marble, gasping for breath. Risha landed on top of me, sorrow and shock still torturing her mind as she half wept and half-panted. With a loud clunk, the door's mechanisms fell into place, drowning out the symphony of scratching claws on the other side.\n\nThat door... It won't hold them back for long. I noted, recalling the temple's shattered defence.\n\nI felt Risha shift as she rolled to her paws, her eyes closed tight while she spent a few moments coming to terms with all that had just transpired.\n\nMy body screamed for me to stay down and recover. My armour clattered weakly as it forced itself back together over my bloody wounds as I tried to reach her with a forepaw.\n\nWhat can I do? He's gone, and nothing I can do or say will ease that pain.\n\nI pulled back my forepaw and gave a low growl, a warning to any darkness that may be lingering in my mind as I slashed at the ground. There was neither shame nor guilt, there was only rage. I gritted my teeth, bared my fangs, shook my head and fixed the door a glare I hoped could melt through it.\n\nThe sound of scratching claws from the other side sounded like a swarm of chattering insects. But as I focused, they faded and an eerie silence filled the hall.\n\n\"Are you two okay?\" Ember called, rushing over.\n\nMy anger faded at the sight of the battle-scarred dragoness, her face still wrought with pain, and yet her mind focused more on the current situation than the past. A small crowd of soldiers, the Elders and the princess gathered behind her. The Cartographer was with them, and Apollo hovered overhead. Ember looked at me, but I nodded to Risha, redirecting her attention. There was a brief exchange of regrets, before Risha curled into Ember's wings and continued to whimper.\n\nI have no right to be there for her, I'm the last one who deserves to comfort her.\n\n\"Greetings, Guardian, I am glad to see...\" Apollo began, only to trail off with a hint of emotion that betrayed his magical nature.\n\nHe paused, his beak sinking into what appeared to be a frown. Meanwhile, Neera pushed through, rushing over to us.\n\n\"You're back, by the skies you... Hey, where's... where's Boltock?\" she asked with a chilling realisation.\n\nHer expression instantly filled with dread, her ears sinking as Apollo glanced between us while dipping into a landing.\n\n\"I am sorry, Guardian,\" was all he said as Neera looked at me in shock.\n\n\"You... I...\" Was all she managed through the storm of emotions racing behind her eyes. \"What happened...?\"\n\nOur mourning was overwhelmed when something more significant slammed against the door behind us. Whatever it was caused the rock to quiver and crack slightly. Jumping to our paws, we turned while slowly stepping back toward the others. Countless soldiers jumped into a defensive position about the chamber, claw and wing blades bristling as the banging ceased.\n\nI found myself between the Elders and Zephyra, while Risha appeared at my side. I glanced up at the princess, guilt filled her stare, guilt that dwelled on the loss of thousands.\n\nBeyond her, I didn't care for any empathy the Elders may have offered, to them this was probably just another opportunity to test my loyalty. All I could think about was Boltock. If I'd done what I was supposed to do sooner, there was a chance he may still be alive. Zephyra seemed to notice the conflict in me, her eyes demanding I do more than feel sorry for myself.\n\n\"How do you expect us to win now?\" she asked, directing her question at the Elders.\n\n\"The elemental fire will hold them back for a time. But their numbers are greater than anticipated,\" Vulkaine explained.\n\n\"Indeed, it would seem they number nearly as many as the day the Golden City fell; it will take a great power to cleanse this area,\" Apollo added, unaware of just how demoralising his bluntness was.\n\nZephyra stepped back, her head drooping as she desperately tried to think. What was left of her order stood around her, glancing at one another with an air of uncertainty.\n\n\"Well, well, my daughter, it seems you are not as strong as you expected, what now?\" The sound of metal claws on marble heralded Aries' appearance.\n\nZephyra met her bedraggled father with cold stare.\n\n\"What would you have done? Cower down here, waiting for them to take you, without offering anyone a chance to fight?\" she challenged.\n\nHe glared over the uncertain and questioning array of faces.\n\n\"Does that really differ from what you're doing now? Besides, no one is without their price \u2013 we simply give them what it is they're after and they will leave,\" he stated.\n\n\"And what is that?\" she asked sharply.\n\n\"Oh, I think you know, as does everyone here,\" he hissed, peering straight at me. \"Not so much of a hopeful legend. Just as I said, the myth has doomed us all,\" he proclaimed, jabbing a wing my way.\n\n\"You won't lay a claw on him,\" Risha interrupted, stepping in front of me.\n\nAries dismissed her approach.\n\n\"You'll have to go through me too,\" Ember added, stepping out beside Risha and spreading her wings like a shield.\n\n\"And me!\" Neera added, mirroring their move.\n\nThere was a light hum as Apollo settled above me, saying nothing as he did his best to express a scowl.\n\nTarwin stood beside them, oblivious to what they were saying, but by the way she gripped her bow, I'd no doubt about what she would tell the former Sovereign. Zephyra glanced at us all and smiled, before moving to block her father's view with her wings. He scowled and looked around in frustration.\n\n\"And will you all sit by and let this happen? Will you die when such a fate could be avoided?\" he challenged the remaining crowd.\n\nThere was a sense of unease until one voice I recognised called out.\n\n\"Better to die with dignity than die a coward,\" Soaren declared, stepping forward, locking his eyes on the former sovereign as several more soldiers stepped up behind him.\n\n\"Your plea is futile, Aries, there is no reasoning with this foe,\" Vulkaine added, dismissing the argument entirely.\n\nAries squirmed, stepping back toward the door with a frustrated hiss. The deep rumbling that followed Vulkaine's words made a sound as if the whole world was in pain. The noise not only radiated through the air but through my mind. Evidently, I wasn't the only one to suffer such a thing, as everyone in the chamber looked around in shock.\n\n\"You are all correct in only one regard. No soul will escape this day,\" a deep, booming and immediately recognisable voice warned.\n\n\"Cometh the one of unnatural blood, born to one of the nine great races of our legacy, all doomed to die, flawed and broken by their ambitions, betrayed by the beliefs of their creators. There is no hope for you now; your Guardian has failed you and I will reclaim what is rightfully mine!\" Mordrakk spoke directly into everyone's mind.\n\nThe crowd staggered back, some desperately trying to shake his voice from their heads while a crazed laugh drew everyone's attention toward Aries as he declared.\n\n\"Congratulations, my daughter, you have doomed us all!\"\n\nThe door behind him bulged inward with an ear-piercing crack. For a moment, the rock itself liquefied, twisting and morphing until it exploded, giving way to a tide of choking black smoke. The darkness wrapped about Aries like a hurricane of gnashing teeth, flashing crimson and instantly turning him to dust.\n\nA plume of deep red fire disintegrated the remainder of the door into charred ash. Pillars shook and came toppling down, roof braziers clattered as they fell to the floor and scorched marble cracked into sharp splinters as it was crushed by the weight of what should have been weightless.\n\nI saw Zephyra lurch forward as her father dissolved before her eyes, yet the storm swallowed his muffled screams, and an invisible force pushed her back while the swirling mass slowed and Mordrakk's draconic figure finally materialised.\n\nHis wings were almost indistinguishable from the smoke, but what was clearly visible was the flaming heart burning like a furnace at its centre. His claws clutched at the floor, cutting deep molten gashes through the marble. While his head stretched forwards upon his slender neck, his mouth filled with fire behind rows of razor-sharp fangs. Embers snorted from his flared nostrils, and the fiery glare of his eyes pierced deep into my soul.\n\nUnlike before, it felt as if he could kill us all with nothing more than a glance. Only this time I was far more terrified of what he'd do to those standing around me. He lowered his head to our level, his eyes scouring each horrified face with great satisfaction.\n\n\"Such courageous souls who dare to challenge me. Your efforts are almost admirable,\" he purred in a deeply patronising tone.\n\nNo one responded while his head snaked about, taunting further. Ember, Risha and Neera pressed slowly to my side, but his dark eyes didn't set upon me as I'd expected.\n\n\"Did you really believe that you could prevail? I am your creator, your master, the twilight and the dawn. I am everything you ever were,\" he condescended, pausing for a moment, as if he expected a response.\n\nWhen he received none, he snorted a jet of fire and growled impatiently.\n\n\"Very well, I will see your deaths are as slow as your tongues,\" he snapped.\n\nAs he coiled back, I peered at him through the crowd, and without thinking, I stepped forward. I felt the others slip away; their attention focused on blocking Mordrakk's imposing image from their minds.\n\n\"Now you will all burn in the fire!\" he bellowed, opening his muzzle.\n\n\"No!\" I declared, stopping between them.\n\nWith a sharp hiss, his muzzle snapped shut and his head swivelled, narrowed eyes fixing on me.\n\n\"Guardian!\"\n\nI stepped further forward as his head craned down to my level, his flaming muzzle dwarfing me as it glided up to my own. He peered at my amulet and snorted another plume of embers into my face.\n\n\"It would seem you have fulfilled your purpose perfectly,\" he goaded.\n\nA terrified shiver ran through me, and I almost faltered. But forcing myself to remain firm, I stared back.\n\n\"Your purpose, not mine,\" I spat.\n\n\"It matters not to me what lies have filled your mind. I gave you your chance and you chose the way of my traitorous children,\" he answered, glancing to the others. \"And now you will see the flaw of their ideals, you will feel the pain they felt.\"\n\nNo, take it! I screamed within my mind, knowing he could hear me no matter what.\n\nThe giant, shadowy form paused with a fiery grunt. No matter what I did now, I believed we would all perish.\n\n\"You would give up everything you have fought for, if only to spare these insignificant souls for a few moments more?\" he asked in his infinitely condescending tone.\n\nI stepped right up to him until the cold chill of his smoke forced my body to crumple and the flames of his eyes charred my soul.\n\n\"If you believe that what I do is a weakness, you should have no problem with it. Yes, I would give you anything to spare them, even for a few moments.\"\n\nHe stared at me, seemingly thinking deeply upon the offer.\n\n\"Very well, you will have your reprieve. If only so you can watch them die!\" he growled.\n\nHis muzzle flashed, crashing down over me in a torrent of fire and shadow. The world went dark and icy coldness washed over me. I felt as if I was falling, before being plunged into a storm of purple fire that scorched even my fireproof scales. There was a distant voice amidst the destruction, cast upon a sea of screams and cries for salvation until everything fell silent."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "My eyes shot open to a familiar place.\n\nThe world was dark, cold and shimmered under the light of distant stars, while glossy stone pillars gleamed around me. The great sphere of Enishra sat high in the darkness, flickering lightning storms covering its gleaming blue seas and vibrant green land. All were trapped in an eerie silence. Not even the tapping of stones or the dark spectre's cruel, twisted voice could be heard. Despite the quiet I could still see him sitting on top of a rock, his fiery eyes fixed upon me while his bony tail twitched.\n\n\"That's it then, you've won?\" I questioned.\n\nHe glanced up, his arrogance infuriating me. Clumsily, I staggered forward. My body was weak, but the pain of battle had left me, even my scars and battered armour were no more than a memory as I stumbled across the rocks, until one hurdle beat me, and muzzle-first, I fell to the glassy floor. I wrapped a paw about my snout as the pain of impact took hold, while a light drew my eyes up toward a pair of eyes.\n\n\"Isn't this everything you wanted?\" I growled through gritted teeth.\n\nThe dark illusion cocked his head curiously.\n\n\"Is it?\" he questioned sharply.\n\nI rose to my paws.\n\n\"Don't bother with the games, I was stupid to think you were doing anything but deceiving me from the start,\" I replied.\n\nA ghost of a smile crossed his muzzle.\n\n\"Really?\" he began, looking back up at the starry ocean. \"If that were true, why would I be here now?\"\n\n\"It seems I was also wrong to think gloating was beyond you,\" I grumbled, and his eyes snapped back to me with a hint of insult.\n\nI gave a weak smile of satisfaction while he shook his head.\n\n\"You know it is not over,\" he continued, turning away and walking off into the shimmering landscape.\n\n\"I said forget the games!\"\n\n\"You assume I truly play such things?\" His molten grin returned, and he scratched a claw against the smooth stone. \"Indeed, you have followed every direction I have set forth, fulfilled your part in my plan without question, whether you knew as much or not,\" he began, trailing his claw from the stone before stopping just above it.\n\n\"Now the time for such things has come to an end and I find myself in a position I have not been in for millennia,\" he continued, and it became my turn to cock my head in confusion.\n\nHis sly grin deepened.\n\n\"Do not mistake my intent. I know you have one last fight left in you. You are not dead, not yet, and neither am I.\"\n\n\"You are the last one in the universe that I would trust right now,\" I replied, but his expression didn't fade.\n\n\"I've always counted on that; paranoia is such an efficient motivator,\" he added, pressing his paw back to the stone.\n\n\"Though, you cannot deny that we have always had one thing in common.\" He smiled at my increasingly perplexed look. \"Our enemies,\" he added, and with a thrust of his outstretched forepaw, he sank his claw deep into the ground.\n\nA pool of golden light blossomed from the tip and his dark image dissipated with a laugh as the light flooded outwards. I felt a brief sensation of falling, forcing me to instinctively spread my wings, but before I could even think about flight, I slammed into something hard.\n\nUrgh\u2026 I hate that feeling.\n\nMy eyes flickered open to find a hall of silver pillars. Tangled vines wrapped about each, while levitating braziers hovered between them. A cold chill blew through arches on either side, beyond which the sky flashed and flickered as if the clouds themselves were furious.\n\nLightning lanced and thunder boomed, accompanied by swirling torrents of flame, shattering all that they struck. The stench of smoke hung in the air, and the sound of demonic laughter made a mockery of the death and destruction. A mass of tightly-packed silver thorns and vines, almost identical to that I had seen in another of my visions, covered the surface of a mighty door standing before me. However, one thing didn't match my dream, a flickering image of my amulet hovering in the turbulent air.\n\n\"It looks magnificent, I must admit. I never saw such a thing in my time,\" interrupted an unmistakable voice.\n\nI turned to see Seraphine standing behind me, but she was not the flaming elemental queen I'd seen within the realm of fire. She was now a white-scaled star dragon, dressed in equally regal armour. Her scales gleamed like starlight and her eyes shimmered like jewels. Despite all her beauty and magnificence, I averted my gaze.\n\n\"Is this it, am I dead?\" I muttered.\n\n\"I can think of many that would give you a long explanation on the feasibility of that, especially in your case,\" she replied with a light hint of humour.\n\nThe feeling wasn't mutual.\n\n\"This isn't it then, I'm not dead?\" I demanded, angered by the idea.\n\nAs if in reaction to my rage, a deep boom shook the hallway, dust shuddered from above and the walls groaned in pain. I glanced up as the sound subsided into a deep grinding, beset by horrific laughter and a war chant that put the orkins' vast legions to shame. Amidst it all, I heard the distinct calls of bedraggled soldiers and survivors, and it became increasingly hard to believe that this was simply a memory of events long since passed.\n\nSeraphine paid no attention to the disturbance.\n\n\"Life is not a thing to be given up so readily,\" she proposed thoughtfully.\n\n\"It is if you're going to live forever. It's not worth anything,\" I muttered, shaking my head.\n\nThere was another loud explosion beyond the walls, and yet she smiled.\n\n\"You think only of the futility of your own life. While your soul is, without doubt, important, it is not everything,\" she reasoned.\n\nThe pain in my heart surged at the reality of just how many lives that were going to be lost, no matter what I did.\n\n\"Not that it matters, Mordrakk's won. He's the god of everything, so in what world was he not going to win?\" I countered, waving a dismissive forepaw.\n\nShe peered at me curiously.\n\n\"Just because one stands against insurmountable odds, it does not guarantee defeat. Nor does one's power ensure victory,\" she explained.\n\nI felt a fragile smile cross my muzzle, summoned by how little I cared at that moment.\n\n\"Like you did?\" I asked.\n\nHer expression remained curious and I feared either pain or anger may dawn upon it, but her smile persisted.\n\n\"There are very few who could understand, since it is far more complicated than that. There are fewer still that can see it is more than a simple choice,\" she explained, looking past me as another thunderous boom shook the pillars.\n\n\"Come, walk with me,\" she proposed.\n\nI paused for a moment, watching her move toward the door, her claws tapping rhythmically on the floor. Another explosion shook the hall, causing suspended braziers to break free of their magical fastenings and topple to the floor. Moving quickly I arrived at her side as she stopped before the door.\n\n\"Age's twilight, long before the Guardian War or the Great Master's betrayal, came the day the Infernal Blade would wipe out all life upon Enishra forever,\" she began as the door untangled and started to open.\n\n\"For millennia, every soul suffered the harsh wrath of Ophelia's legions, all because of what I did in my efforts to save them from oblivion,\" she continued as the door vanished and we stepped through into a large circular room.\n\nIts silver walls and stark, natural-looking design resembled drakaran architecture, while several pillars enclosed a levitating silver table, marking the centre. Except for the one holding the door, all the walls were open, the only thing separating us from the sky was a large set of silver columns and a fine, violet curtain. Armoured, silver humanoids with long silver hair and pointed ears that broke through their regal attire guarded the edges of the room. Among them, at least three old and worn golden sentinels stood, like in the realm of fire.\n\nSeveral armoured dragons rushed about the room, their dulled scales lacking any evidence of elemental powers. While griffins and several other species I didn't recognise all scurried about alongside them. Each creature was scarred and beaten, their armour splintered, robes tattered and eyes struck with weariness. It only took one look to the outside world to understand why.\n\nBelow the tower upon which the room was perched, I could see the vast sprawl of a silver city. It looked peaceful and relatively intact, although I suspected that peace was awaiting an imminent disruption. A mosaic wall of blue magic bordered the sprawl, projected by a ring of towers spanning the outskirts.\n\nThe translucent bulwark flashed with arcane lightning as monstrous explosions repeatedly struck against it. The source of the disruption was a seething black mass of shadow, eagerly waiting beyond the protective shield. Bolts of scarlet flame rained from the angry sky as great swarms of winged monsters filled the air like flies about a corpse. It was an even more intense version of the reality I'd left, a literal nightmare, and I finally looked at Seraphine.\n\n\"This is Andruid, over three thousand years ago, the longest night, end of the Age of Tyranny and dawn of the Liberation war. Here is where the world was almost destroyed. If not for my decision to save it and the intervention of my star-born ancestors at the battle's direst moment, the world would have been consumed by evil,\" she explained, a pained expression filling her eyes.\n\n\"Never have I had the courage to relive this memory,\" she added.\n\nThree thousand years? It was hard for me to keep track of it all. Even before the Guardian War the world was almost destroyed?\n\n\"Every bastion of resistance, from Ilivar to Exilar has fallen, my lady,\" the voice of a dragon interrupted from the door behind us.\n\nHe was oblivious to our presence, passing through us like we were ghosts as he collapsed in an exhausted heap. In that instant, all the war-torn occupants of the room looked up in surprise when another explosion shook the distant shield.\n\nThen a draconic figure stepped up from the crowd, to whom my ghostly companion nodded. The new dragoness had dull-brown scales and wore a set of battered golden armour. Most notable was the lack of any markings upon her head, making her little more than a glorified sand lizard with wings.\n\nShe has no element, none of them do. Even so, my eyes focused on her.\n\n\"My Lady Seraphine, I'm sorry, I wasn't fast enough,\" the collapsed dragon began as he looked up at her.\n\nThat's Seraphine? I wondered, glancing to the ghost dragoness at my side as she nodded. But she looks so powerless, so weak?\n\n\"It matters not. Know that your news is invaluable,\" past-Seraphine assured.\n\n\"So this is it, this is all we have?\" the voice of a weary, dull-blue dragon interrupted.\n\n\"I know, Azorean, but there is little that anyone can do to prevent this now,\" the lead dragoness stated, her voice stricken with pain.\n\nAzorean nodded uneasily as both he and past-Seraphine moved back to the war table in the middle of the room.\n\n\"Mortakine has entrusted his Overlords with the assault upon the city, Galro'th the Decimator comes to break the defences. Their legions could destroy the barrier any moment,\" he explained as past-Seraphine peered over the table.\n\n\"I can see,\" she answered as another explosion struck the shield.\n\nThere was a loud crack, and the magical barrier began to shatter as if it were nothing more than glass. I saw the look of horror pass over the faces of everyone in the room as more and more of their last defence fell. Another almighty explosion rang out from below the battle.\n\nThe earth itself trembled as a powerful surge blasted through the city. The ground heaved in a vast wave of rupturing stone and crumbling buildings, surging out toward the base of the shield. Finally, it flickered out and a wall of fire, magma and earth erupted from the surface, swallowing the edge of the city like a hungry beast.\n\nVast legions of shadow swarmed into the streets with little care as a mountain of fire and stone rose from the newly opened chasm. Everyone in the room glanced at each other, then at past-Seraphine as she stiffened and glared out at the oncoming tempest.\n\n\"I once felt like you do, staring into the face of an enemy we never had a hope of defeating. At the time, I'd no idea that our salvation would soon rain down on the foe, but it was at that darkest moment, that I truly felt like giving up,\" the ghostly version of the same dragoness beside me explained.\n\nBefore I could respond, the shockwave tore through the tower, forcing me to the ground. The dragons about me frantically took to the sky before the swarm of demonic creatures tore them down. I caught a glimpse of past-Seraphine battling amidst the chaos, but before I could consider what had happened, the tower began to topple. Dust and destruction consumed my vision as the world swirled into calamity.\n\n\"I never wanted any of this! I didn't want any of them to suffer because of what I did!\" I called out into the storm as the vision of Seraphine beside me disappeared.\n\n\"There are very few out there who would want such a thing, and yet destiny has a plan for us all. Sometimes suffering is unavoidable,\" she determined as she re-materialised from the dust.\n\n\"So much for fate,\" I scorned, hating the idea of destiny.\n\n\"And do you think your fate is to die here alone?\" she asked.\n\n\"My fate was to help Mordrakk win. He took what the creators made me for and twisted it, he's the only reason I exist,\" I replied, and she looked almost disappointed in me.\n\n\"I thought you were to stop him?\" she corrected, but I gave a low growl.\n\n\"And I failed at that task the moment I hatched!\"\n\n\"Did you?\" she questioned, before elaborating further. \"The part of Mordrakk that is within you was exposed to the world as you were, and whether he liked it or not, he was forced to see things as you do. You changed that part of him.\"\n\nI opened my muzzle to argue that he'd simply manipulated me from the start, but I froze.\n\n'You cannot deny that we have always had one thing in common.' The words of the illusion came to mind.\n\n\"I have no idea any more, but I'm not anyone's saviour,\" I admitted with a sigh.\n\nShe smiled, seeming to understand far more than I did.\n\n\"Nor did I think I was anything of the likes,\" she confessed.\n\n\"Maybe the daughter of two hierarchs, left to live in the extravagant splendour afforded by families of noble blood, but no saviour,\" she reasoned, but swiftly corrected.\n\n\"But when the time came I needed to do what was right. I did not hesitate to do all I could, no matter the cost,\" she advised.\n\n\"That should have been the creators' job \u2013 they are the gods, not us,\" I expressed, waving my wings in emphasis.\n\n\"Is it? Of all of the battles won and lives saved, how often do you hear their true names?\" she asked.\n\nI momentarily recalled all they had done: the Sphere of Eternity, the war of its creation, even the ancient battle I've just witnessed. It's all been down to them in one way or another.\n\nSeraphine noticed my thoughtfulness, snaking her head in close to mine. A flash of flames coursed over her body and she went from a starlit drakaraness to the dull-scaled dragoness I'd seen staring up at us at the world's end. I staggered at the sight and the recollection of the sacrifice she'd made long ago.\n\nShe gave up everything.\n\n\"It is not for the gods to decide the fate of the world, for when their creation truly called on them, they failed. Their ignorance and inability to understand is why they fail. I too, did not see the world as it truly is before I became mortal, and yet you do. You understand, and when you believe in them for what they truly are, you can believe in yourself and achieve anything,\" she explained with a fiery passion, looking back at the flickering image of my amulet as it rematerialized.\n\n\"When the universe calls upon a saviour, that salvation will slip into legend, but when the world calls upon such a hero, they will be remembered,\" she told me as I followed her gaze to the gleaming gem.\n\n\"But I'm immortal,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"Perhaps, but the inability to die is only one definition of the word. In the drakaran tongue, it has more meaning. It's a symbolism of attachment and commitment, love and care. Your care and commitment to them have made you far more mortal than any being of the stars has ever been, but you fear to lose them far more than any creature has ever feared death, and so while you are not truly mortal, you are indeed one of them.\"\n\n\"What about a soul? You said yourself I don't have one.\"\n\nShe gave a wry smile, flicking her long, slender tail in the air behind her.\n\n\"No, I said such things are earned, and even then, what defines a soul?\"\n\nI glanced about, as if the endless expanse of swirling dust would offer an answer. Seraphine watched with great care, flicking her tail again.\n\n\"If we knew the answers to such things, there would be no reason for them, for there is no definition of who we are, and yet you gave up all of that, did you not? Just now, for them,\" she added, and with that I realised, 'sacrifices must be made.'\n\n\"It's selflessness, isn't it? That's what they can't understand,\" I asked simply, and her smile grew.\n\n\"A virtue you hold in very high regard, more so than the Great Master tells you, I suspect,\" she suggested knowingly.\n\n\"Of course I...\" I started but faltered as my eyes fell to my reflection in the floor.\n\n\"I have to go back. If there's even a small chance I can stop him, I have to try, no matter what happens to me,\" I finally admitted.\n\nTo my surprise, she shook her head.\n\n\"That is not for me to say, but the world is calling for a saviour, and it will only call for one alone. For the universe called upon salvation time after time, and those saviours faded into dust,\" she proposed, stepping back before moving off.\n\n\"Wait!\" I called, stepping toward her. \"Your decision, that day... did you regret it?\"\n\n\"Many times, but why would that mean it was not the right thing to do?\" she finished, then vanished in a fiery flash.\n\nI looked at the image of the amulet.\n\nSacrifice, that's what litters my history, but it's not what defines me.\n\nI was selfless, yes, but that alone wasn't my virtue, and I knew now why I had to try to do what gods and demons had failed to do.\n\nI have to do it, not for me \u2013 nothing of the Guardian was ever meant to be for me \u2013 but for the ones the gods can never truly care for.\n\nI reached out toward the amulet, grasping the image in my paws, and the ghostly world about me began to fade.\n\nI'm not like them, I've never been like them, I declared in one intense thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The darkness became that of closed eyes, and as I felt the warmth of the world return, they gradually opened onto the cracked and scarred ceiling of the throne room. Dust settled about me, a low hum and the distant rumble of the storm echoing through the halls. The commotion was like a beacon calling me back, and I caught a glimpse of Risha's magnificent blue, fear-filled eyes staring down at me. I shifted my head and more dust fell from my armour as it came to life about me.\n\nWhen my sapphire companion realised what was happening, a slight glimmer of hope replaced her dread, and she lifted my head in her forepaws.\n\n\"Blaze?\"\n\nMy body ached as I rustled my wings and shifted the rest of my limbs. She stepped back when I rolled onto my front, rubble falling from my scales as I eventually stood. My armoured fragments levitated up from the floor, reasserting their positions over my battered scales. Risha remained speechless, before wrapping me in a winged embrace.\n\n\"Don't you ever do anything like that again!\" she demanded, pressing her head against my neck.\n\nI looked down at her and saw that the amulet was gone, as was Mordrakk and all signs of his vulpomancers. Yet I made sure to give her my full attention, no matter what. I didn't care whether I understood it or not, I just needed to share all of the love and compassion I'd always felt for her.\n\n\"What did you do?\" she quizzed moments later, pulling back and looking at me.\n\n\"I gave him what he was after, and now...\" I faltered as I glanced past her to the stunned crowd recovering from what looked to have been a shock of terror.\n\nAs far as I could see, Mordrakk had stayed true to his word and not killed any of them, if only so I could watch them die. I blocked that idea from my mind, recalling all that Seraphine had said.\n\n\"But that doesn't mean this is over,\" I assured, stepping back and looking beyond the shattered remnants of the door.\n\nA fallen pillar lay between it and I, beyond which, the palace was in ruin. What I could see of the sky outside lay darkened by the storm of vulpomancers.\n\n\"You know what you must do, there is still time,\" Seraphine's regal voice whispered in my mind.\n\nI straightened and looked back to the others. Ember, Neera and Tarwin stood in the foreground. I moved over to them first, each of them stepping aside before following me toward Zephyra and the Elders.\n\n\"There's something I have to do, and there's very little time left,\" I began.\n\nEveryone fell silent the instant I spoke. Tarwin smiled and the Cartographer's muzzle broadened into a grin. He looked up at Zephyra, the dragons, griffins, hippogriffs and every loyal soul that still stood with her. Finally, the new Sovereign looked down at me and gave a weak smile.\n\n\"I have no idea what you just did, but you did it for us. What do you have in mind?\" she asked.\n\nI felt hesitant to ask anything of them, but forced the words from my mouth.\n\n\"I need to get to him. I need to get through the storm, it's our only chance to stop him for good,\" I advised.\n\nI saw a wave of uncertainty wash over Zephyra. No doubt ordering everyone to fly into the swarm wasn't her idea of a battle.\n\n\"That's a lot of sky to get through,\" Halfbeak observed from beside her, and yet for all the doubt in his words, he didn't oppose the proposal.\n\n\"I thought it was a griffin's goal to give all to achieve victory, or die with glory?\" Eirian responded, a small smile crossing her dark beak.\n\nI expected the griffin king to comment, but instead the signs of a smile also crossed his scarred features.\n\n\"Indeed it is,\" he said proudly, and both of them looked to Zephyra.\n\n\"It would not be a flight to victory,\" Vulkaine advised, and despite the warning in his words, he too bore no objection.\n\n\"But victory will not be our goal,\" Zephyra added, looking at me knowingly as her expression hardened. \"We put an end to this today. We do all that we can to ensure that it's over.\"\n\n\"An army against us, impossible odds... never imagined that's how I'd meet my end,\" Halfbeak added, yet he seemed strangely calm about the fact.\n\n\"Save your words, this is not over yet,\" the Cartographer assured, moving over to me.\n\n\"We would ask from whence this new determination came, but...\"\n\nI spoke before he could finish.\n\n\"I think you've known all along.\"\n\nThe second of his wacky voices chuckled as the sound of shifting paws signalled Zephyra's acknowledgment.\n\n\"To the end,\" she proposed.\n\n\"To the end,\" I responded with a subtle bow.\n\nIt was the first time I had seen her smile at such a gesture, and she returned the formality before moving past me.\n\n\"If you get up there, can you stop him?\" Risha asked quietly.\n\nI knew she was one of the few who cared about me enough to voice such a concern, and for that, I was thankful. She was also the only one to see my uncertainty as I nodded.\n\n\"You're not going alone though,\" she demanded, ruffling her wings.\n\nI felt the urge to stop her again, but I knew there was no way to deny her this.\n\n\"No, you're not,\" Ember and Neera added in equally courageous tones.\n\nThe orange dragoness approached, placing a wing over Risha's shoulder.\n\n\"For Boltock,\" she declared, and Risha nodded with equal determination.\n\n\"Indeed, it would not be possible for me to allow you all to go alone. I am tasked with your protection and I am yet to be relieved of such a duty,\" Apollo informed as he hovered above us.\n\n\"You know, once I thought we were inseparable, but now...\" Tarwin said as she approached.\n\n\"Now what?\" I asked as I moved away from the others slightly.\n\n\"Now, Blaze, I'm not going to pretend I understood all that stuff that just happened, but I have a pretty good idea what my best friend would do at a time like this,\" she stated, gripping her bow.\n\nFor once, I didn't feel any dread for what was coming, though a part of me did feel sorry that she had to be stuck here on the ground.\n\nIf I could carry her, I would.\n\nAn unexpected tapping of claws marked Vulkaine's appearance, and, as if reading my mind, he stated.\n\n\"I can see now why you put so much worth into this one,\" he observed, lowering his head and smiling at me for the first time.\n\nTarwin looked at him with a hint of confusion as he undid the straps of his armour, shrugging off the plates covering his shoulder to reveal the leather that usually cushioned the plate as he added.\n\n\"It would be remiss of us to leave such capable warriors behind.\" Tarwin glanced back at me, but I simply shrugged.\n\n\"I don't think anyone's ever ridden a dragon before,\" I stated, and her expression turned to mild shock.\n\n\"Don't be so sure,\" Vulkaine added knowingly as he lifted Tarwin onto his back with his wing. \"Hold on tight, little one,\" he advised as he rose up.\n\n\"Ready for one last fight, old friend?\" he asked, glancing down at the Cartographer.\n\nThe elderly dragons smiled at one another as the phoenix on top of the Cartographer's wing cawed.\n\n\"Are you?\" he replied.\n\n\"I bet this was the last thing you had in mind the day we met,\" I pointed out to Risha.\n\nShe merely brushed off the comment with a wry smile.\n\n\"It wouldn't have made any difference if it was,\" she responded.\n\nZephyra took up a position on top of a fallen pillar and looked down over us all.\n\n\"I know not all of you came here for this,\" she began, gesturing about the devastated throne room with her wings.\n\n\"And I know many of you suspect you will not see daylight again. I myself am uncertain, yet I know this. There is a darkness out there, and if we do not stop it, it will destroy all we know, love and cherish.\" She paused, taking a breath, allowing her message to linger.\n\n\"I know that one day, we are all going to die, be it tomorrow or in a hundred years' time, but today we fight, and together we will show this evil that we will not be defeated, we will not be silenced and we will not be so easily vanquished!\" She stomped an armoured talon on the stone.\n\n\"And if we are to die, we will all die united, as those who stood tall and dared to strike a blow at the heart of darkness itself!\" she declared, her wings flaring and glowing fire bursting from her muzzle.\n\nThere was no lack of a response, as cheering, fire and the stamping of claws echoed out into the storm. Her eyes passed over everyone still willing to follow her.\n\n\"For our freedom, for our legacy!\" she shouted, beating her wings, taking to the air and spinning out of the shattered door.\n\nThere was no shortage of wing beats as everyone jumped into the sky, and there was certainly no hesitation from any of us as we followed her to the end."
            },
            {
                "title": "Skies of Dragonfire",
                "text": "I made it my sole purpose to stay right behind the Sovereign as we cleared the broken cliff top. Most signs of battle had been wiped out and the sky had turned dark as pockets of elementals still battled back the tide. They were illuminated by flashes of lightning and battered by harsh winds that whipped up the pouring rain, making it shimmer like the scales of a dragon as it twisted and writhed.\n\nThe ruins below were still alight, orkin structures razed to the ground by the shockwave of Mordrakk's arrival. Despite the sheer devastation, the giant cataclysm before us stole my attention and that of all others around me. It resembled an immense, unnatural sun, its purple heart stirring and flickering within the dark clouds as if alive. A sharp beam stretched above and beneath the core, blasting a giant crater in the earth while simultaneously punching a hole in the darkening clouds.\n\nWhat stone it hadn't devoured, swirled about the unholy spire like a staggered shoal of levitating islands. The dark shapes of vulpomancers flowed amongst them, their unimaginable numbers condensing into even more horrifying forms.\n\n\"By the creators,\" I heard several voices mutter.\n\n\"Fly steady, soldiers, this is it!\" Zephyra called, glancing back at us. \"Do what you must, Guardian, we'll do all we can to deal with these fiends,\" she nodded and banked down to the right.\n\nThe rest of the army began to follow, and I got one last glimpse of Tarwin pressed low against Vulkaine's back, her bow ready as the Elder dove. I sincerely hoped he'd been truthful when he said he realised her worth.\n\nI'd little time to dwell on the thought as we closed in on the swarm. Its fluent movements forged into several swirling tendrils, lashing out like tentacles. As dragons swirled about the dark limbs, flashes of lightning appeared about them as elementals once again materialised to aid in the new assault, while I fought the urge to break away and help as many as I could.\n\nThey know what they have to do, as do I! With that firmly in mind, I weaved and darted through the swarm, my friends close at my back.\n\nI could see the levitating ruins ahead as several dark tendrils coiled to stand between us. Swerving to avoid their initial resistance, Risha and I both swooped to the right while Neera and Ember went left, splitting the swarm's attention.\n\nA large gap between two levitating shards opened up ahead of me, and I made that my destination as the two throngs of vulpomancers curved around to pursue us. I glanced at the others, but there was no time. Risha was close to my side, while Neera and Ember flew a few wing lengths away to my left. Before I could say anything, the pair spun and unleashed flaming torrents over the swarm. I didn't hesitate to add my fire to theirs as the narrow space between the levitating rocks came rapidly closer.\n\n\"You all go, I'll hold them back,\" Ember instructed, darting about in a fiery dance.\n\n\"Like the skies I'm going to let you take them all on your own,\" Neera eagerly added, swirling about the writhing mass with equal agility. \"You go kick that dark lord's sorry tail, we'll handle these things,\" the faldron added, making an aerial mockery of several vulpomancers.\n\nI'd no time to call back, and yet felt we all knew that this may be the last time we saw one another. I glanced at Risha, scooting between the oncoming shards as she sped after me. Moments later, both of us were fighting to steady ourselves in the air between the whirling spikes as a strong updraft caught and flung us toward the great central light. My vision swirled as I fought, until inevitably, with a loud clatter, we struck something hard.\n\nI opened my eyes to find sleek stone and rose to my paws, looking about to see a desolated chamber unlike any other. The walls were shattered, yet the sound of the storm and battle drifted away upon an eerie breeze. Shards of broken earth and ruined buildings levitated, as if frozen in the midst of a titanic explosion. Even the ground on which we stood was at a crooked angle. Vines of purple light snaked about the destruction, but there was no sign of vulpomancers amidst the lingering shadows.\n\nRisha staggered up beside me, shaking the dust from her battered armour while glancing back as two shards levitated together to seal the passageway behind us. I looked, and to my surprise, my eyes met with Apollo.\n\n\"Good to see someone else made it,\" I congratulated grimly.\n\n\"Indeed, I assured you it would take far more than this to keep me from my duty. Come, there is still much to be done if we are to stop this madness,\" he responded swiftly, before flying off into the desolated ruins.\n\nAs he moved, I caught Risha staring at the closed passageway with a distant look in her eyes.\n\n\"They'll be alright, we need to keep going,\" I assured her.\n\n\"I suppose it's just like old times now,\" she offered as we traversed a set of shattered steps and made our way into a crumbling hall after Apollo.\n\nA series of ruined archways confronted us, each one crooked and out of place in comparison to its predecessor, creating the illusion of a long, twisted tunnel, its far end illuminated by a pulsating, purple light.\n\n\"There never should have been any old times like this,\" I admitted.\n\nThe look on her face told me that she wasn't free from regret either.\n\n\"There's at least one good thing to come out of it,\" she proposed.\n\nI lifted my head, feeling a fleeting smile cross my muzzle.\n\n\"Thanks. For everything you've done. I just wish it could have been worth more,\" I stated.\n\nShe hesitated, it wasn't hard to believe that most of her optimism had finally died, especially with the death of her brother. Yet the thought didn't bring as much pain to me as I knew it should.\n\n\"You too.\" She nodded.\n\n\"Don't despair yet, this is not over,\" Apollo assured as we reached the end of the corridor, emerging onto a large rounded platform of smooth black stone.\n\nA swirling storm of clouds mixed with more shards of levitating rock and ruins formed its walls. Most notable of all, a jagged pillar of stone jutted up from its centre, upon which a sphere of purple flame encased the familiar form of my amulet. Strangely enough, there was no sign of Mordrakk, and I cautiously moved forwards, battling against the magical gale pulsating from the central fire.\n\n\"I was beginning to wonder if you would make an appearance. Not that it matters,\" announced the distinctively grizzled voice.\n\nShadow poured to the floor before us, forming his familiar shape, now clad in the dark armour I'd seen in my visions. I stopped between him and Risha, the unnatural wind buffeting at my body.\n\n\"You even dare to bring this pathetic worm here,\" he added, a pair of eyes materialising to glare at Risha.\n\nThe dragoness bared her teeth and snorted fire, but the Great Master's stare moved past her and onto Apollo.\n\n\"And this, a lowly slave fleeing from its masters,\" he added.\n\nApollo's fortitude stiffened, his gleaming feathers bristling.\n\n\"You are not my master, nor will you ever be,\" he declared boldly.\n\nMordrakk's muzzle quivered as he let out a rasping hiss, flicking one of his mighty talons and sending the construct flying back with a simple blast of wind.\n\n\"I will not let you do this,\" I declared, stealing back his attention.\n\nHe peered down at me like I was no more than a pathetic speck of dust.\n\n\"What choice do you have? This was always going to be your fate,\" he mocked.\n\nBlasting a burst of fire at his chest, I bolted at him, darting between coils of writhing shadow in an attempt to reach the amulet. The blast sizzled on his armour as it glowed white-hot, while he gave no more than an unimpressed growl before swiping me aside with a flick of his claw.\n\nI hit the floor and Risha instinctively sent blue flames his way. The fire merely dissipated against his shadowed form as he morphed about it with cruel laughter. Undeterred, her blades cut two deep gashes into the hot metal of his armour, distracting him as he twisted back above her.\n\nIn the same moment, I summoned all of the fire I had left, blasting several bolts into his side. When the shots hit their target, his eyes snapped back to me, his idle paw knocking Risha to the floor while his other generated a wave of shadow, forcing me toward the edge.\n\nNo, not this time! Before I could falter, a burst of purple energy erupted from the amulet, drawing his attention.\n\n\"I need not waste my time with this trivia,\" he affirmed, casually swatting me to the edge, before turning back toward the storm's heart.\n\nI clambered back onto the flat surface, focusing on Risha as Mordrakk raised a foreclaw to the amulet. The whole place gave a mighty shudder as his grip closed around it, and with a painfully bright flash, he thrust it into his chest. I reached Risha as he lurched, as if in pain, generating a surge of magical wind, flame and lightning from his molten heart. His shadowy scales seared like melting iron, as the amulet's celestial glow darkened, its gold becoming as black as the night sky as it branded its way into him.\n\n\"My power restored!\" he proclaimed, his grisly voice harbouring a new ferocity as it reverberated throughout the petrified halls.\n\nThe spikes of his armour grew like winding roots as burning cinders spewed from his ethereal form. Then his molten eyes met mine.\n\n\"Gaze upon the true master of creation and be thankful that such a glorious sight was your last!\" he bellowed, flaring his wings as he lashed his claws at the central pillar.\n\nWithout thought, I jumped over Risha and wrapped her in my wings. The world exploded and a violent wave of purple fire washed over us.\n\nIt receded seconds later, and all I could feel was the roaring wind and harsh clatter of the rain as it whipped against my red-hot armour, each drop hissing and boiling away. The levitating cloud of rock and rubble had fallen, leaving only the central light and the slowly crumbling platform upon which we stood. Yet there was a light cough under me as Risha rolled from my grip.\n\n\"Blaze?\" she murmured, pressing a forepaw to her face.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" I asked desperately, but she didn't seem to care.\n\n\"You're not the one who should be asking that question,\" she scolded looking over my steaming scales. \"What in the creators' name happened?\"\n\nI looked to the sky. Directly above us, the clouds forged into a swirling maelstrom, its centre disappearing into a bright light, resembling some gigantic, upside-down whirlpool.\n\n\"I don't know, but it can't be good,\" I answered, a fleeting glimmer of hope in my voice as an idea filled my mind, an idea I dared not share.\n\n\"But we can still stop it, can't we?\" she asked.\n\nI glanced back at her with a lost expression, unable to answer. A sharp hum caught my attention and my head perked up as it came closer.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked Apollo as he descended.\n\n\"I do not fully understand, but it would appear the Great Master has opened a gateway, and without proper containment enchantments. At this rate it could permanently tear through reality,\" he explained.\n\n\"Is there any way to stop it?\" I asked desperately.\n\n\"I do not know. But any chances of sealing the breach will not be obtainable from this end, the power source has gone through with the Great Master,\" he added solemnly.\n\n\"Gone where?\" Risha asked curiously.\n\n\"The Golden City,\" I answered for him, and he didn't correct me as I turned to face her.\n\n\"Well, we have to go after him, we have to...\" She stopped as she looked at me. \"No, no, no, you're not going up there alone, no way.\"\n\nApollo had a different response.\n\n\"Indeed, the possibility of traversing the gateway is not impossible; there may still be a chance to stop him, although the transition will be treacherous and...\" He looked over at Risha.\n\nI merely sighed, shivering as cold rain ran across my scales. She saw the inevitable and made every effort to fight it.\n\n\"No, you can't, I won't let you!\" she stuttered, restlessly rustling her wings. \"Not again!\"\n\n\"I have to; this is what I was created to do. I can save you, all of you,\" I finally admitted.\n\n\"By giving yourself up, you're the only thing I have left and I...\"\n\nI put a paw on her shoulder.\n\n\"I'm not giving up anything,\" I assured with a smile.\n\nShe stared right at me, almost unable to speak.\n\n\"You have to come back, you...\"\n\n\"I promise, I will come back,\" I assured, but she didn't seem willing to fall for the same thing again.\n\nShe glanced away and closed her eyes as I stepped back and spread my wings. The instant I did so, she wrapped hers over me, pressing her muzzle to mine in a tight embrace. I felt a wave of emotion unlike anything I'd ever known as our muzzles met, and I looked into her closed eyes, before my own slid into darkness.\n\nShe's kissed me...?\n\nI'd never understood, I still didn't, and yet I knew if there was one thing left in the world that was worth flying into oblivion for, it was that. Her embrace lasted for what seemed like forever, and I was content with simply allowing the world to fall apart around us. But no sooner had it begun, did it stop, and reluctantly she pulled away.\n\n\"You were never good at promises,\" she laughed.\n\nI was speechless, utterly stunned, the only sensation remaining; that of the cold rain trailing across my scales. Before I took a deep breath and stood tall.\n\n\"I love you.\" The words left my muzzle in a way I'd no care to control.\n\nShe didn't respond, but there was a furnace burning in her eyes the moment she heard the words. I nodded, glancing up at the storm as she smiled and finally added.\n\n\"I know, you're everything to me and more, but...\" she paused momentarily, \"go save the world.\"\n\nHer expression was enough to show that she believed in me more than anyone ever had. I was her icon of goodness, her beacon of hope, the very thing that had allowed her to see a reason to believe the world could be something more than cruelty and corruption. No matter what I thought of her seeing me like that, it was all I needed to believe before I took off into the swirling wind.\n\nApollo was swift to follow, his form becoming a sharp golden arrow as we fought through the tempest. The light came closer, wind and rain cracked upon my scales like whips, and clouds wrapped about me until the only visible thing was the sheen of Apollo's frame as it moved through the swirling funnel.\n\nFiery images and the sound of voices whirled about me in the bitterly cold air. Until, with a thunderous crack, a new surface appeared below and the golden world materialised in a blossoming swarm of shimmering dust.\n\nBefore I could steady myself, I hit the floor, clattering against the marble as I bounced to a halt with my head against the polished expanse. I lay there for a moment trying to compose myself, until eventually, my eyes flickered open. As I sat up, the sight stretching out across the cosmic horizon stole my breath away. A sea of stars shimmered behind the great golden spires, bridges and towers of the Golden City.\n\nSo this is it... It's beautiful.\n\nA rounded platform stretched out around me, connected to a vast network of walkways spanning the city like a magnificent, golden spider's web. Bridges of glowing light and gleaming crystal sat amongst the numerous things that defied explanation. Yet the endless skyline was devoid of any activity, and despite their gleaming magnificence, the colossal spires lay in scorched ruin. I recalled brief images of the battle I'd once seen take place here millennia previously, and yet it appeared as if such a thing could have happened only the day before.\n\nThe sound of my claws tapping on the floor gave little comfort in the midst of the silence as I approached the edge and peered down into the endless expanse of advanced architecture. Then I looked up to the towering horizon, one great pillar dwarfed the others, surrounded by numerous smaller spires, each one enormous in its own right. Atop its highest peak, a flickering cloud of darkness swirled into existence, and from the depths of the city, another purple glow writhed in response.\n\n\"Remarkable, I have not gazed upon these skies for millennia,\" Apollo remarked happily.\n\nYet even as that joyous realisation struck him, he faltered.\n\n\"Where do we need to go?\" I asked uneasily.\n\n\"The Great Master seems to have taken to the summit. It is the central point of the city, constructed directly above the great chamber that once held the heart. There, I suspect he will be able to disrupt the anchor between worlds,\" he explained, his voice fading a little at the latter part.\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Take me there as fast as you can.\"\n\n\"Of course, Guardian, right this way,\" he obeyed, darting off into the sky without hesitation as I followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "I soon found that flying amongst the golden mountains and magnificent archways was quite easy. Despite everything, they were still some of the most beautiful things I'd ever experienced. The air was like a thick soup under my wings, but it felt completely normal, as if engineered for flight.\n\nI recalled what Seraphine had said about living here, and it wasn't hard to imagine why she may have thought her life would have never been anything more.\n\nWho in the creators' name would ever want to leave here, even for glory?\n\nAs I imagined what the city might have looked like previously, a great shadow blocked out the stars, and with several arcs of lightning, a rounded shell of magical energy formed about it.\n\nI felt my heart fill with dread; it wasn't the only thing to catch my attention, however; as another thunderous boom rang through the air. A great gash of purple light tore its way across the sky, followed by several more. Each strike scarred the tranquil illusion of the stars as they allowed vast swarms of vulpomancers to pour into the city.\n\nAs we flew close to the golden skyline, I hoped they wouldn't notice us, that they were more concerned with finishing the destructive work they had started millennia ago. However, it was a hopeless dream, and one of the writhing masses directed itself toward us like a hungry predator hunting wounded prey.\n\n\"Get to wherever it is you need to go, I'll find you,\" I commanded Apollo.\n\nBefore he could reply, I dashed aside and curled about the peak of one of the towers. As expected, the swarm came after me, flowing about the pillars and arches marking the edges of the golden skyline like water over rocks.\n\nNow that I have their attention... I fixed my eyes on another, larger tower, beating my wings hard to gain a lead on my pursuers.\n\nI circled its peak and turned on them with a blast of white fire. The swarm broke upon impact with the flames, as if it had struck a wall. Unfortunately, their advance didn't stop, and soon they began to flow over the edges of the flame.\n\nRealising that simply burning them had become as useless as trying to burn dragons, I quickly made for an open corridor, slowing slightly until I could see the open sky at its far end, and as expected, the swarm followed.\n\nTry dodging this!\n\nThe moment I had them trapped within the corridor's confines, I fired several more blasts. All that I could see of them vanished in a fit of flapping wings, smoke and roaring fire as chunks of the ruined golden structure came crashing down atop them.\n\nDespite my success, a surge of darkness overshadowed me and the lash of a large bladed tail struck hard. A vulpomancer that dwarfed me, clawed its way forward from the fire, its skeletal form morphing and dripping with black ichor as it reformed and let out a furious roar.\n\nI darted back into the air as fast as my wings would allow, heading out of the tunnel with the angry creature close on my tail. I heard it smashing its way through the archway like a living battering ram, crashing its way into the sky. Spinning back, I watched its huge wings uncoil into a tattered, black sheet, while narrowly avoiding its snapping jaw.\n\nIn my rush to escape, I caught a glimpse of Apollo on a platform just below the towering peak he'd called the summit, and sent one last distracting bolt of fire into my pursuer before heading down toward him. The giant beast gave a pained roar, and as if driven by the rage of their larger cousin, more vulpomancers dropped down from the sky.\n\nAll I could hope for was that my companion had a solution as I quickly set down on the polished marble beside him. More golden pillars marked the edge of the platform as well as the base of a large stairway winding up to the summit's peak, to which a magical wall blocked access.\n\n\"I really hope you've got a solution,\" I gasped, quickly moving to the energised barrier.\n\n\"Yes, it would seem that the Great Master has erected a barricade. I will try to disable it,\" he responded, inspecting the magical barrier as if it offered far more information to him than I could understand.\n\nNot that I had time to argue. I did my best to keep the vulpomancers away, but their sheer numbers and the fact that one was larger than a fully-grown dragon made it difficult. I managed to cut several down before the larger one smacked me aside with its claws, cutting deep black wounds into my armour and scales. I winced at the pain as it turned to me with a low hiss of satisfaction, but jumped to my paws, only for it to pin me down.\n\n\"Any time now!\" I called to Apollo from under its crushing talons.\n\nHe focused on the barrier, hovering back from it sharply.\n\n\"It would seem I am unable to access the barrier's enchantment matrix, I will have to find an alternative method,\" he declared, hovering toward a small crystal shard next to one of the pillars.\n\nI forced back my frustration, slashing across the giant's claws with my wings. The blades sliced off one of its talons, forcing it to recoil as the severed claw swiftly began to reform. In that brief moment of distraction, several smaller vulpomancers pounced, and I fought them off as they slashed at me with cruel joy. Meanwhile, Apollo glanced back, narrowing his eyes in determination.\n\n\"It appears I will have to overcharge the talisman,\" he acknowledged boldly.\n\nI knocked down another vulpomancer and jumped back as the larger one snarled at me with a newfound eagerness. I'd no idea what my golden companion meant, but as one of the creatures leapt at me, I had little time to consider it.\n\n\"Whatever you need to do, just do it fast!\" I called, holding the creature's teeth away.\n\nHe moved back to the magical barrier, and spinning swiftly he forced his avian frame into the magical wall. An explosive flash of light filled the world as sparks of lightning erupted from each of his splayed feathers, arcing across the whole barrier. The force of his intervention shattered the magical field into millions of tiny fragments, as the intensity of the energy burst forced the vulpomancers into the sky. With my dark attacker gone, I staggered to my paws to see that the barrier was completely disintegrated.\n\n\"You did it!\" I called to Apollo, only to pause as I saw him.\n\nHis frame sat upon the marble floor like broken stones, emitting the weakest of hums, while his eyes still flickered like a dying flame. Regardless of the open stairway ahead, I rushed over.\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I expended all of my talisman's power in one burst, overloading the barrier; it will only be disabled momentarily,\" he answered, as if I should know.\n\n\"What about you, you're going to be okay, aren't you?\" I urged.\n\nHis frame weakly forged a frown.\n\n\"Under normal circumstances, I may recharge, but for my kind such circumstances have not existed in an age,\" he explained.\n\nI told him to... but, it was all so fast... I felt my racing thoughts ease as the realisation finally hit me.\n\n\"You shouldn't have done that...\" I began, but his frown shifted to a smile.\n\n\"Do not be ridiculous, it is my duty to serve. I am just glad that... I had a chance to rectify at least some of my mistakes.\"\n\n\"They were never your mistakes,\" I assured him, the thought of those still alive because of what he'd done firmly in mind.\n\nRegardless, his glowing eyes rolled and flickered.\n\n\"Thank you, Guardian. I am glad to have met you. I do not doubt you are everything they meant you to be and more,\" he replied, before the last flicker of light faded and his frame slipped apart as the arcane light within him faded.\n\nI stepped back, pausing for a moment of respect that would never have crossed my mind the day I'd met him.\n\nSo many of them gone... Just for me? I fixed my eyes on the tower, and spread my wings. I'm going to finish this, for all of them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "The peak of the tower was a vast, rectangular plaza lined by a squat golden rail, its floor a glistening marble etched with intricate golden patterns. Four pillars sat at each corner; their tops adorned by flaming dragon statues. Another golden plinth stood directly ahead of me, beyond which, the world fell away into a great scar of purple light and a vortex of swirling clouds.\n\nAn eerie sensation leaked from the void while strikes of lightning forked out and struck the spires. Each flash gave an ear-splitting crack as it ripped parts of the structure back into the abyss, reducing the gleaming etherium to nothing but dust. All the while, I had to battle to keep my paws on the ground, locking my wings at my side as the forces sought to pull me forwards into the yawning void. Before I knew it, together with the marble under my paws, I was thrown into one of the pillars and flopped to the floor.\n\n\"Your persistence is valiant,\" Mordrakk snapped, \"almost admirable,\" he continued as his shadowy body materialised, \"but there is nothing you can do to stop fate now.\"\n\nI lifted my head, scars burning under the intensity of his glare. I looked up, assessing every aspect of his defences. Except for a few dents and chips in his armour, it appeared to be all but impenetrable. So desperation focused my attention on the hole his initial attack had ripped in the floor. All the while he paid me no heed as he placed a forepaw upon an altar at the tower's edge.\n\n\"How do I fare now? Has your great plan fallen into ruin?\" he bellowed into the swirling storm, raising his head up as he spoke to the void itself. \"And what of you, my children? What now becomes of your ridiculous plans?\" he went on, glancing to each of the draconic statues adorning the surrounding pillars.\n\nThen he turned back, glaring at me through his narrowed eyes. I closed mine tight, and every thought, every memory of all I'd done, all I was, and all I was fighting for flashed through my mind. With one great force of will, I lifted to my paws, bringing a scowl to his less than impressed look.\n\n\"Your determination is the only part of you that will be worth remembering,\" he proclaimed.\n\nI flared my wings and opened my eyes, ignoring the increasing pain as my armoured blades flashed to life.\n\n\"I guess I can thank you for that,\" I responded.\n\nNo words heralded the roar that parted his muzzle as he charged at me. An invisible force threw me back toward one of the pillars. One swift blast of fire escaped my muzzle. It exploded at his feet, exactly where I'd intended. More of the broken floor fell through, collapsing in a cloud of shrapnel and white fire. Mordrakk disappeared in the debris, releasing his magical grip, leaving me to fall. Despite my best effort, I was unable to stop myself from sliding down the tilted surface after him as the splinters of broken marble gave way.\n\nAs I plummeted, I saw spinning flashes of a great chamber filled with towering columns and a high ceiling. My momentum threw me into one of them, leaving me battling to slow my descent by grabbing at it with my claws. Ultimately, I slipped to the floor with a significantly less painful thud, my eyes opening to the sight of an endless maze of columns.\n\n\"Where are you?\" Mordrakk growled, his shadow swarming through the golden columns like a ghostly tsunami.\n\n\"To believe that any of this will achieve anything is folly, and for what? You will not leave here,\" he rasped, twisting back his neck, unleashing a torrent of flame, flooding the whole chamber with a great wave of heat.\n\nAs the fire gushed around each pillar, I pressed my back against the one I was hiding behind, listening carefully to each of his ground-shaking steps amidst the hiss of red-hot metal. I collected myself once more, marking each boom and groan of toppling gold as he smashed his way through. It took me back to years of hunting, waiting patiently for prey to come right where I wanted it.\n\nMy eyes flashed open.\n\n\"We'll see about that,\" I called as I spun out from the scorched cover.\n\nThe left side of his head sat directly between the pillars before me and I sent several blasts of fire into his molten eye. His face contorted in anger, fire and embers fleeing from his muzzle as he spun round, shattering several pillars with a swing of his vast wing, nearly bringing one down on top of me. The ground shook violently when the huge golden cylinder slammed down and his dark form strode over it effortlessly.\n\n\"I grow tired of this,\" he growled.\n\n\"Well, I wasn't planning on making you wait!\" I retorted as I jumped at him.\n\nMy claws hit the top of the pillar and my eyes locked upon the small chinks in his armour surrounding the amulet. Reaching forward with my foreclaws, I flew through the air, but before I could even get close, his invisible grip tore me away. With a simple clasping motion \u2013 there was no doubt he could crush me like a bug. Drawing upon the last of my breath I sent a bolt of fire into his chest.\n\nThe explosion shattered and warped his armour, but the amulet remained firm. All the while, he growled, armour cooling as he willed it to reform, throwing me up into the air in a fit of rage. He opened his mouth to unleash a blast of flame. In the same instant, I fired back, glimpsing my bolt as it passed through the plume of purple flame and exploded in his throat. His shot swept me upwards like a leaf in a hurricane, melting my armour, scorching my fireproof scales and returning me to the summit.\n\nMy whole body felt heavy, and my scales particularly felt as if they were melting, searing with a pain so fierce I simply wanted to die.\n\nI can't, I made a promise.\n\nThe hole before me exploded and dark talons clawed their way out. Mordrakk's wings flared as his head and body snaked upwards, neck and chest seared by white fire, as he let out a low hiss.\n\n\"It's over!\" his deep, rasping voice boomed as he raised a foreclaw and seized me with his invisible grip.\n\nThis time he threw me up into the air and released me as his flaming muzzle opened. My assent slowed and then I began to plummet toward his flaming maw. Stretching out my claws, white fire sparked into life and my wings fell flat to my side as the blades upon them burned brighter than ever before.\n\nFire erupted from Mordrakk's mouth as I fell directly toward him. The world became nothing but a swirling storm of flames, as the fire began to scorch the armour from my body and the scales from my flesh. I didn't care. I held my descent through the column of fire until I was sure I was deep inside his molten heart, and with every blade still stuck to me, I thrashed and kicked, cutting my way through the living shadow.\n\nIn that instant, just as the pain was about to consume me and the darkness of oblivion steal my sight, there was a small flash amidst the fire. Time slowed, almost to a standstill, and the light glimmered like a star in the clearest night, a beacon of warmth and happiness amidst the darkness.\n\nIt called out like a song.\n\nSurrounding it were several molten cracks, like ruptures in a scorched river bed. Reaching out with one forepaw, drawing on all my remaining strength, I surged forwards, grabbing the light in my claws.\n\nGasping for breath, my scorched body fell to the mercifully cool marble. I opened my eyes and looked at my slowly opening forepaws, discovering a golden star, its centre swiftly turning back to a blissful white gem.\n\nReunited with my amulet, a burst of power surged through me, filling my veins with a new energy. I looked back to see Mordrakk shattered and broken, his armoured form destroyed by molten ripples emanating from the gaping hole in his heart. The dark dragon craned his head to sneer at me, trails of ethereal magma oozing from his wounds and muzzle.\n\nHe said nothing as he sprang forward with all the rage and energy he had left. I clutched the amulet tightly in my claws, ducking under him as he flew clumsily overhead and skidded to a halt before the altar. I rose to my paws, and as I loosened my grip on the amulet, it sprung into the air before retaking its rightful place within my own armour's chest plate. More of its power filled me the moment it connected, and as I focused, my body and armour began to reform as if made from liquid light. Mordrakk watched with a disgraced snarl on his scarred face as the blissful glow of my new aura shone upon him.\n\n\"You know not what you're doing. You are nothing, for I am the Great Master, I will last for all eternity!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"Nothing lasts forever,\" I replied.\n\nCoiling my neck, I fired every ounce of flame my re-energised body could give, right into the hole I'd ripped in his chest. This time, there was no holding back, and as he staggered, I charged, tearing at his tattered wings, crippled limbs and traumatised hide.\n\nThe white light from my assault tore through the darkness of his body, ripping him apart, until finally all that remained was a smouldering hole through the middle of his frame. All the while he smiled wickedly, as he backed all the way up to the edge of the platform. His head quivered as he peered at me, his body like glass frozen in the midst of shattering.\n\n\"You... are all... doomed,\" he riled with one last rasping breath.\n\nWithout another word, he staggered back and plummeted into the swirling vortex. I stopped at the edge and collapsed, the molten marble solidifying as the golden fire receded from my scales.\n\nIt's done, it's over. He's gone... It didn't feel like I imagined it would, especially as I looked up at the gathering cataclysm, where a sharp gust of wind carrying a distant voice drew my attention toward the altar.\n\nThe four draconic figures on top of the pillars leapt into the air and bound together into the ghostly form of a spectral dragon that hovered over it, peering at me with silent curiosity.\n\n\"There, it's done. He's gone,\" I declared, rising to my paws.\n\nThe ghostly silhouette said nothing; it simply looked down at the altar. I approached, and as I did the ghost's eyes came to rest on the amulet. Before I could do anything more, the sound of unimaginable agony echoed through the city. An impossibly dark presence began to well upwards like a bubbling froth, and a chill as fearful as my nightmares filled the air. The illusion was the first to look toward the great void as it parted, purple fire spewing from its deepest bowels.\n\nIts image burned my eyes and I clawed at my head as an impossibly foul voice scratched at my thoughts in an ancient tongue. Every vulpomancer that still swirled about the city instantly turned and began to flow toward the new entity, steadily increasing the new feeling of utter hopelessness. Through my cowering gaze, the ghostly draconic illusion still motioned for me to move toward the altar.\n\nDigging my claws into the marble, the wind tearing at my scales and my body lit up like a golden star, I reached the precipice and peered up into the abyssal heart of the Darkness itself.\n\nThis is it... The monster behind everything, he brought it back.\n\nAs I thought about all I'd done and all I cared for and loved to reach this point, its image was pushed from my mind. There was only one thing I could say in that moment, one overwhelming regret that consumed me.\n\n\"Sorry...\"\n\nI coiled back and sent blast after blast into the altar until the summit itself began to fall apart. The darkness gave an almighty scream as the void folded in on itself, shattering the abomination and sucking it back into the abyss. Lightning and flames danced about as if it were reaching out to find purchase before disappearing into the void. The calamity forced the world to tremble and the ground under my paws shook as the whole summit listed towards the void's gaping maw.\n\nIt's done, it's over, there's no more darkness, no more Guardian. Was all that surged through my mind as the world around me ended with an explosive blast of light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "My eyes opened to the sight of a golden hall, long and regal with a small pedestal at its end. It was drakaran in design, illuminated by flaming pillars of varying colour. It felt as if my body had been ripped to pieces, and yet the sensation of pain had abandoned me. The whole place felt almost lucid, a weak veil of a world that could be cut with one light sweep, but I felt no urge to tear it down.\n\nI sat up, looking over my scales, which were now devoid of scars and armour. Four glowing orbs circled above like hungry vultures waiting for me to die. I felt my eyes roll as I blinked, and they came close enough for me to realise what they were.\n\nIt's just like Mordrakk said, once he's vanquished, what need do they have of me beyond reclaiming their lost power?\n\nSuddenly, they scattered like frightened birds, and a graceful figure strode out from the blinding light. There was no mistaking Seraphine, proudly smiling down at me.\n\n\"It's over, he's...\" I began, but she shook her head.\n\n\"The fate of such evil matters little now.\"\n\nShe lifted a foreclaw and my amulet materialised in her palm. I stared at her outstretched limb as the golden star drifted inches above her gentle grip.\n\n\"The darkness has passed, and with it, the twilight of ages falls into the night,\" she explained, looking about the golden hall.\n\n\"So fades the Age of Legend and comes the age of mortal kind, its dawn ablaze with dragonfire,\" she continued, and my head slumped.\n\nIs this it? Are they safe, have I saved them? I made no effort to ask, yet she seemed to know.\n\n\"What of you, Guardian?\" she asked.\n\nI had to fight back tears as I thought about what I'd done, the promise I'd failed to keep.\n\n\"You will be remembered,\" she added as she pressed the sole of her right forepaw to the floor.\n\nThe second her claw-tips struck the flat surface, there was a spark of light and a pool of gold spread across it. It took a moment for me to realise that the pool was settling, and as it did so, an image appeared. I could see my reflection and more: a vast darkness, rain pouring down upon the sea of gloom, snow and muddy grass. A storm flashed and rumbled, while a radiant pillar of sunlight broke through the gloomy cover like a sword. The image was how I'd imagined Apollo had once seen things as my perspective darted about like a moth, before it finally settled.\n\nI saw a battle-torn cluster of armoured dragons, griffins and hippogriffs, all of them scarred, broken and covered by mud. I picked out faces from among the group \u2013 Halfbeak, Soaren, even the Cartographer. I saw two of the Elders, one of which was Vulkaine, yet it wasn't to the old dragon that my eyes were drawn, but to the girl that jumped down from his back.\n\nTarwin had always wondered about the world, and I suppose now she had that dream fulfilled. From the armoured group of soldiers beside her emerged another familiar face. Zephyra seemed as battered and broken as the rest of her troops, and that look of sadness still filled her eyes as the new Sovereign peered into the sky with a hint of hope and admiration.\n\n\"You will be remembered as a hero and a legend,\" Seraphine went on as the light beamed across their faces and a victorious cheer spread through them all like wildfire.\n\nEven so, I noticed several of those I'd picked out were hesitant to join the rest of the victorious crowd, urging me to look up at Seraphine.\n\n\"Can you show me?\" I asked desperately.\n\nShe didn't have to look into my thoughts to know who I was talking about.\n\nThe image shifted before settling upon two more recognisable faces. A relieved breath escaped my muzzle at the sight of Neera and Ember standing on a ruined rooftop. Regardless of the cheering crowds, neither joined in; instead, they looked to one another solemnly, forcing my heart to sink.\n\nI glanced up at Seraphine, hardly daring move my head as she nodded at the final image settling into place, this time far from all others. The platform of Mordrakk's crucible had turned to rubble, strewn across the rainswept wasteland. One sight stood out amidst the dust and settling carnage, a lone blue gem amidst a sea of mottled grey and dirty brown as the sunlight shone down from where her last hope had disappeared into the void.\n\nRisha's eyes bore no joy or happiness. They boasted nothing but a fleeting hope as the light of both a flickering purple and burning white star reflected briefly within them. I reached out, but the image fell from my claws like water, and when it settled, I felt that hole inside my heart sink deeper.\n\n\"No, I won't be remembered like that,\" I gasped, shaking my head.\n\nSeraphine glanced at me curiously.\n\n\"Then what, Guardian?\"\n\n\"Remember me as a dragon. A friend, and no more, I was no more,\" I begged.\n\nShe considered my words as if they were the most important things to meet her ears in the last millennium.\n\n\"You truly were those things, and more,\" she added respectfully.\n\nI thought about that, about all my friends Tarwin, Ember, Boltock, Neera and finally Risha.\n\n\"I wish I could be there; I should be with them.\"\n\n\"And if you could, what would you do?\" she asked as she plucked fiery light from my amulet's core as she'd done in her realm.\n\nMy gaze finally managed to meet hers, and for a moment, she looked as far from the gods as I'd always wanted to be.\n\n\"I would tell them all how right they always were and how much I care for them. I would tell Risha how I've always felt and I...\"\n\nI trailed off as the thought blossomed, the image like a hopeful portrait upon the shrivelled canvas of my mind.\n\nSeraphine smiled as a fiery light flashed in her outstretched foreclaw and her grip closed about the amulet. Finally, my muzzle quivered and one lonely sentence escaped.\n\n\"I'd tell them that, for centuries, I've looked to the stars for guidance. But sometimes the stars can guide us in more ways than we can ever imagine.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "\"Is that it?\" the young voice asked abruptly, a pair of unsatisfied eyes peering up toward the blue dragoness holding the closed book.\n\nWith a slight sigh, Risha looked down at the dragon and smiled.\n\n\"Yes, Teal, as far as we know, that's it,\" she admitted, masking how she truly felt by turning to place the book behind her.\n\nTeal cocked his head, shifting his webbed ruff. Beside him, another set of curious eyes focused on Risha.\n\n\"That can't be it. We all know how the battle ended, plus all the parties, the coronation and all that stuff. But a dragon like him couldn't have just vanished,\" a second young dragon added.\n\nRisha's smile didn't falter, even as she shook her head and gazed up into the chamber in which the small class of bickering, young dragons sat.\n\n\"Well, Scarlet, I don't think there ever was another dragon like him,\" she said quietly.\n\nHer forlorn look didn't go unnoticed, and the mumbling paused for a moment as the group realised what they'd brought up. Their heads drooped, as did their wings.\n\n\"Sorry, Risha, we didn't mean anything bad by it. It's just, after what we saw, it's kind of hard to believe he's gone,\" the fiery dragoness apologised, her yellow eyes gleaming with the faintest hint of respect as Teal nodded beside her.\n\nRisha shook her head slightly as she glanced back down at the pair.\n\n\"It's fine, it's hard for anyone to believe he's gone.\" As she spoke, the sounds of parents arriving began to drift in from outside.\n\n\"Come along now, Vermillion, it's time to go,\" the voice of a tall dragoness beckoned a red-scaled hatchling to move off swiftly after her and wave goodbye to his teacher.\n\nRisha smiled and waved a wing back as more parents swooped down, calling out names, and more of her class took off into the air.\n\n\"See, I told you stories always make the last session go faster,\" Scarlet told Teal, spitting her tongue out at the water dragon as he scowled back at her.\n\n\"Well, I never disagreed with you,\" another meek voice announced from behind the pair, and a small, bronze-scaled head appeared between them.\n\n\"Oh come on, Brass, you never disagree with anyone,\" Teal laughed.\n\nThe shy dragonesse's muzzle parted with a small grin.\n\n\"No, just you two,\" she teased with growing confidence.\n\n\"Good to see I can actually find you three in the same place for a change.\" Each of the four heads perked up in recognition of a new voice floating in from outside.\n\nEmber stepped in from one of the stone arches, her orange scales and polished golden armour gleaming in the radiant light of a pair of glowmoss lanterns.\n\nTeal and Scarlet sank back into their folded wings as the fire dragoness approached, Brass meanwhile rushed up to her eagerly.\n\n\"Did you speak to them?\" she asked, practically beaming at the older dragoness and resting her forelegs against her chest.\n\nEmber smiled and wrapped her scarred wing around Brass's shoulders.\n\n\"I did indeed; tomorrow you can start training with Neera and the rest of her wing out in the woods.\"\n\nAs soon as the words left her muzzle, it wasn't hard to see that the mostly-timid little dragoness was battling not to jump up in glee.\n\nHer two friends, on the other paw, clearly felt quite the opposite.\n\n\"What, how come she gets to train with Neera and the other survivalists?\" Teal and Scarlet asked in perfect unison.\n\nEmber gave them both a stern look.\n\n\"Because she doesn't go running off from class. Besides, Neera doesn't have time for all of the younglings that want to be part of her wing,\" she explained, only sounding a little chastising.\n\n\"I just think the order needs more faldrons, and they're like... A hundred percent more fun than regular dragons,\" Teal answered, folding his forelegs as he pouted.\n\n\"Well, I think the time of running off to hunt down fire flowers is over,\" Risha intervened, looking down at the sulking pair.\n\nEmber glanced at her sapphire friend for a moment, their brief expression one of mutual respect.\n\n\"Hey, it wasn't that bad! I even found a red one, and we all know that finding a fire flower the same colour as your element brings you good luck,\" Scarlet declared proudly, raising a forepaw to her chest as both Risha and Ember rolled their eyes.\n\n\"You know that's a game for hatchlings, right?\" Ember replied, and the red-scaled dragoness frowned.\n\n\"I'm eight, nearly nine, thank you!\" she snapped, puffing up her chest to display her bright yellow markings.\n\n\"Besides, Risha never really had a problem with it when we brought fire flowers back to class for her,\" she added, pointing a forepaw at her teacher.\n\n\"Only when it wasn't during training time, I bet,\" Ember countered, shooting a knowing glance at Risha.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked, approaching her water elemental friend.\n\nRisha shook off Scarlet's comment and smiled.\n\n\"I'm fine, just. Well, only about as fine as everyone else is these days,\" she admitted.\n\nEmber nodded before moving over to place a wing on her shoulder.\n\n\"What about you?\" Risha asked, looking back at her.\n\nEmber sighed, glancing down at her gold-clad forepaws.\n\n\"The order's sending us back out to Storm Peak to clear up the last of the orkin. Skies know where else they are going to need us, especially with all of the ebon wings still out there. I don't think this war's going to be over as soon as we hoped,\" she confessed, but Risha shook her head.\n\n\"Ember, that's not what I meant. I meant how are you?\" the sapphire dragoness elaborated, pointing a claw to Ember's chest.\n\nIt wasn't hard for Risha to notice her friend's reluctance to speak, but she knew if there was any dragoness Ember could open up to, it was her.\n\n\"Pretty much the same as you. I've got over the whole flying off thing,\" she finally admitted, and Risha nodded. \"But if you're asking me about that, then how do you really feel?\" she pressed, redirecting the question back at Risha with a glance.\n\nThe sapphire dragoness paused and shook her head.\n\n\"I... I miss them, both of them. They were all I had,\" she confessed, and Ember nudged her shoulder reassuringly before backing away.\n\n\"Well, you've still got me and Neera, and I don't think Queen Tarwin and the tribals would turn you away either,\" Ember reassured.\n\nRisha smiled as a small laugh escaped her muzzle.\n\n\"Thanks, Ember.\"\n\nThe orange dragoness nodded, before turning back to the three youngsters.\n\n\"Come on you lot. Oh, and Teal, your brother is waiting down by the temple. He said you need some more practice with your defensive stance before going for dinner,\" she added, ushering a disgusted look from Teal.\n\n\"Oh, skies curse him! No dragon is supposed to be stood still for that long,\" he mumbled indignantly.\n\nMeanwhile, a sly smile appeared on Scarlet's face as she walked beside him, while Brass just pranced merrily.\n\nRisha watched them all leave, waving to Ember with a wing, as she and the younglings flew off into the crowded Dardien sky. Finally alone, she let her outwardly positive personality relax and peered down at the book she'd been reading only moments ago.\n\n'Dragonfire' was its title, and besides the blazing text, it bore the image of an eight-pointed star, with a long, serpentine dragon weaving between the points. It represented the Seal of the Guardian. The most well-known image throughout the city, through the entire order, in fact, even rivalling that of the Seal of Eternity.\n\nFor all of the fame garnered by the tale that ended the last age, she was the only one to possess a real copy of the book. She placed a forepaw on the cover as she thought about that, trying not to dwell too much on what it all meant. The words within had been copied by the Cartographer and the Elders from the Guardian's own memories, granted to them by Seraphine herself so they may remember it as he did. Honour him for all he did to save them from the evil wrath of what the order had come to call the Great World Dragon.\n\nShe loved reading out parts of their adventures together to the class, even if she had to leave out some of the more graphic details. Despite all of the celebrations, the festivals and even a whole day dedicated to remembering him, she still felt lost. Those feelings were all that were left of her hero and her closest friend. It was such melancholy thoughts that she tried to avoid, as depression was too easy a trap for a dragon to fall into.\n\nShe took the book, slipped a small satchel over her neck, placed it inside and began to walk through Dardien's vast tunnels. She made the journey every day, the route providing her with a very good view of the renovation work and repairs going on throughout the city. All watched over by the new Sovereign Zephyra, and the newly founded Order of Enishra.\n\nThe city was far more alive now than it had ever been. Griffins, hippogriffs and even humans were permitted to fly about the great hanging stalactites, the latter forming close bonds with their escorts, while their new tribal kingdom flourished under the rule of Queen Tarwin.\n\nRisha made her way into a large, open chamber, its roof smooth and its edges lined with towering pillars of gold. At the far end, a gloriously decorated arch opened out to the crowded skies, each side guarded by a golden-armoured dragon.\n\n\"Everyone has to change,\" the dragoness muttered to herself as she recalled just how different the intricate attire worn by the guards was from the sharp silver armour they'd once boasted.\n\nThough, the soldiers weren't the reason she came here so religiously, and moments later, she turned to the opposite end of the chamber to gaze upon a row of magnificent statues. The sentinels flanked her on either side, their brave poses as heroic as those who'd inspired them. Many were dragons, but some were griffins and other races that had participated in the Second Great Battle of Dardien. At the very back of the hall, one great statue dwarfed all others.\n\nThe great masterpiece of stonework depicted four dragons and a faldron, each standing triumphantly upon a rocky ridge. The four figures had come to be known as the Dauntless Wing, four souls to mark the points of a star and one to stand in the centre. Even cast in stone, it wasn't hard for Risha to make out each face, even her own, and yet the dragon that stood in the middle was who always stole her attention. His scales were encased in the sculptor's best interpretation of magical, star dragon armour, and a large diamond was affixed to his chest plate.\n\nRisha slowly approached the cylindrical base of the grand monument and sat down on the cool stone before it. Engraved in the smooth marble surface, around the circumference of the base, were many names, each one a small tribute to those who'd fallen in battle. Her attention was always drawn to two names in particular, at the very top of the list.\n\nRaising a forepaw, she brushed a quivering set of claws across the names of her brother and the dragon she loved. Looking back up at their stone monuments reminded her of what she'd seen, all that changed that day they'd met. He'd been the best of the world, shown her all the good someone could do. He'd given everything for them right until the very end, even his life. With that thought, she stepped back, and holding back tears, straightened herself.\n\n\"I love you,\" she admitted to them both, glancing at the sky.\n\nPeering at the crowded air, she wondered how long she could do this. For now, it was firmly set in her mind that she would do it for as long as she lived, but that would be a long time for such a young dragoness.\n\nThen something else caught her attention and she looked to see a hooded dragon approaching. Assuming it was just another mourner, she didn't pay much attention as the tapping of their claws ceased and the figure stopped at the base of the statue beside her. There was a moment of silence, and for some reason she couldn't help but look at the mysterious stranger. Dark robes covered their body, and from what she could see, their scales were a distinct, fiery-red, tipped with sharp flicks of gold.\n\nShe caught a glimpse of something strange through the gaps in the cloak \u2013 three jagged markings of white along the scales on the left side of their neck and shoulder, shaped almost like claw marks. She assumed it must be some kind of strange hatchday marking; they were common among dragons, but their location on this occasion seemed oddly familiar. Regardless, as the stranger sat down and sighed, her curiosity was too great for her to keep her muzzle closed.\n\n\"Sorry, I don't mean to sound inconsiderate, but...\" she began, and the dragon looked at her with a pair of sky-blue eyes.\n\nShe knew immediately how strange that was for a dragon of such an element, yet she paused, fearing she may have just done something stupidly disrespectful. The dragon merely looked at her until she finally plucked up the courage to look back.\n\n\"I lost someone too, if that's what you're asking. Actually, I lost a lot of things,\" the stranger admitted, his voice striking so many memories.\n\nIt was impossible; no way could she be hearing that voice again. Yet she was so sure.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I lost my brother in the battle, and... well, someone else I cared about,\" she admitted, and the stranger shifted his forepaws as if he were suddenly incredibly nervous.\n\nIn that moment, Risha caught a glimpse of something shiny within his robes. There was something around his neck, a fancy pendant maybe or an enchanted trinket? No, none of those things glowed with the faint light of a white flame. Overcome, she tilted her head to get a better look at the amulet, and finally the stranger mustered up the courage to look back at her. His hood fell from his four horns and the instant his red-scaled features were revealed, her mind went blank.\n\n\"I also made someone a promise,\" he admitted, his now familiar eyes fixed on her even as they shivered with guilt.\n\nStunned, Risha could only smile warmly as she finally responded.\n\n\"I imagine they'd hold you to it. But then again, there's always more bridges to cross.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Age of Fire 1) Dragon Champion",
        "author": "E.E. Knight",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "BOOK ONE: Hatchling",
                "text": "BESTIARIES ARE WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS. \u2014Islebreadth\n\nThe hatchling tasted his first air. Cool and dry compared with the dampness inside the egg, its strangeness set him aquiver.\n\nHe had only just discovered a new world in the slow awakening, one so different from the muted patterns and colors, muffled echoes and stale tastes of the old. He had been snug in his dark little space, drowsing and dreaming, when sharp, cracking noises had woken him. He'd suddenly hated the enclosure in which he'd floated for so long. Instinctively, he tried to uncurl his long neck. He had jerked his chin upward, feeling the growth on his nose strike the inner surface of the hard cocoon. Three more taps, and the shell had cracked.\n\nThe air relayed so many new impressions that his senses rebelled, and he gave a tiny snort.\n\nHe wiggled his nose and widened the hole. When he could get his snout well out and open his mouth, he took a real breath. His long lungs, running almost the length of his back, filled entirely with air. Its zest, the new sensation of his lungs inflating and deflating, invigorated him as much as the rich dose of oxygen to his bloodstream. He pulled his head back, and the sawtooth on his still-wet nose opened the egg further. Now he could get his head out.\n\nThe light, dim though it was, hurt his eyes. Scrabbling sounds and a deep, rhythmic whooshing above roused his curiosity. Determined, he turned his head.\n\nA presence, huge and green, lay curled around him\u2014strange yet familiar\u2014and beyond that, he sensed an even larger enclosure of rock and shadow. Another casing, many-many times larger than the first? Echoes played off the hard stone, chasing each other through the great space.\n\nHe wriggled his head free. Now he could use his neck to look around. A nasty drop hung before him. Many neck-lengths below, two shapes writhed; both had necks like his, with equally long tails projecting out of their hindquarters. Identical in every aspect save color, they pushed and clawed at each other using four stubby legs. Their mouths yawned agape, displaying sharp white teeth, and atop their snouts stood sawtooths just like the one he'd used to poke his way out of his shell. Both the combatants had short crests covering their necks. One of the hatchlings was a rich ruby color, and it sank its teeth into the coppery opponent, rending flesh and muscle and eliciting a plaintive cry.\n\nSomething about those crests sweeping back from the armored ridge of their eyes and forehead put him into a seething rage.\n\nHe longed to join this contest. He uncoiled his body; his fractured egg was no match for his new strength. It separated, and he twisted over so he could crawl.\n\nThe crack of the egg opening interrupted the red hatchling in its triumph. It released its opponent's torn foreleg and looked up. In the flick of an eye, it scuttled to the rock face and began to climb toward him.\n\nHe did not wait to meet it amongst the other eggs. He moved to the edge of the shelf to get it on the way up, instinctively wanting the advantage of the high ground.\n\nA wet slipperiness slowed him, and he looked down to see a sagging mass dragging from his belly. One of his legs was caught in it. Frenzied, he tore at it with his rear limbs. He arched his back and parted from the drogue. If he felt pain, the desire to get at the other crested hatchling smothered it. He gained the edge just as the red's head appeared. Its shining slit-pupil eyes widened as it saw him come to push it back down.\n\nBut the red was strong, stronger. It got its thick shoulders tucked under his narrower ones and muscled over the edge of the precipice. They faced each other, mouths open and declaring battle with little squawks of fury.\n\nHe forgot the cave, forgot the giant green presence behind him, forgot the faint tapping emanating from the last two eggs. He went for the red crest, to shove it off the ledge and put an end to it.\n\nHis bites scored at the red's armored skin and crest to no effect. Before he knew it, he was on his back, the red's gaping jaws finding his throat. More frustrated than afraid, he clawed at the red's leathery underbelly. A mist veiled his vision.\n\nThe pressure on his throat vanished. As his vision cleared, he saw Red fighting with the other crested hatchling. His copper brother had somehow climbed the cavern wall to the egg shelf, intent on revenge for its crippled limb. It rode Red's back, grasping at the back of Red's neck just under the armored crest. He turned on his side, momentarily too weak to stand, and watched. Red writhed and rolled, trying to get the maimed hatchling beneath it.\n\nHe flicked out his tongue and smelled blood, blood, everywhere. Pouring from him, from the wounded copper, and from Red's belly. A tear dripped there, where Red's egg sac had been attached.\n\nHe moved his head. Some strength still remained in his neck muscles, and he used them. He drove the sawtooth on his snout into the red's belly, finding the umbilical hole. He dragged upward, gutting his nest mate.\n\nBlood flooded his nostrils and eyes as he righted himself to force the prong in deeper. He heard one agonized cry, cut off as the copper hatchling grasped the red's throat. Alarmed peeps sounded behind him.\n\nThe struggle ceased; Copper dropped the crushed neck.\n\nHe opened his mouth and advanced on his remaining sibling. Copper shifted sideways, shielding its injured limb. Too near the edge. He bull-rushed the copper crest and began to push, using the armored ridge above his own eyes as a battering ram. Weakened by the maimed foreleg, the hatchling went over with a scream.\n\nThe fall was not fatal. He looked over the edge and saw Copper lying quiescent. Rapid panting echoed from below. At the sound of eggs breaking, he turned.\n\nTwo more siblings had their heads out of their eggs, squeaking weakly. Green. Uncrested. He relaxed and moved toward Red's corpse. He now knew hunger. Lapping the pooled blood did not seem enough; he began to chew at the corpse. After sufficient worrying with his curved teeth, he pulled away a mouthful of flesh and followed it with another. The meal made him flush with strength, so much so that when his copper nest mate again ascended to the ledge, he pushed it back over with no trouble at all.\n\nThe others, the females, took forever to get out of their shells. When they finally joined him at the corpse, still dragging the deflated balloons of the umbilical sacs they were too weak to get free of, he let them eat. He felt the urge of thirst and moved off from the corpse to a narrow corner of the ledge, where he drank from a little trickle of water running down the cavern wall. It felt almost as invigorating as eating, but nowhere near as good as pushing his brother off the shelf.\n\nHe looked around the cavern. Glowing blue-green splashes grew at the edges of puddles at the bottom of the immense cave. They seemed to thrive best nearest the cliff wall where he smelled dragon waste, strange and yet familiar. Tiny things, tinier than he, lived in the roof of the cavern. The sights of his new world so fascinated him that he failed to notice his brother gain the egg shelf once again.\n\nThe piping of his sisters alerted him to the male's presence. He scrambled back to the corpse, but the cripple clutched a torn-off hunk of tail in its jaws and scuttled off the ledge, moving in a clumsy fashion but almost as fast as he could with four good legs. He had to content himself with opening his jaws and screaming down at the coppery shape on the cavern floor. The male ignored him and gnawed on the piece of tail.\n\n\"Dear Auron. My pride. One day you'll be a worthy dragon.\"\n\nThus Auron learned his name. He turned a quick circle, looking for the source of the voice seeming to whisper in his ear.\n\n\"This sound is the voice of your mother, Auron. I'm glad you can hear me; it means you're healthy.\"\n\nHe heard a trill from above him and saw Mother's spade-shaped head looking down. His mother, big enough to be a world herself, reclined against the cave wall. He tasted the rich nepenthe of the air around her; it smelled better even than the bloody tang of the air around his deceased sibling.\n\n\"I know this is strange, and you can't speak yet, not until you're grown a bit and learned. But you can understand\u2014even in the egg, you could understand. I showed you stories, remember?\"\n\nHis mother's voice was familiar, but he could remember no stories, just vague dreams of floating in light, pictures, sensations that rolled about in his head unmoored. Her speech, after its first startle, relaxed him. He felt his eyelids closing.\n\n\"Time for you to sleep and grow, little Auron. Don't worry, you and your sisters are safe, we are deep-deep. No assassins will get here, for Father is on guard.\"\n\nShe began to sing, and he recognized the rhythm of her tune, not strange at all. He dozed off, lulled by the comforting cadence of the song.\n\n\u2003Listen my hatchling, for now you shall hear\n\n\u2003Of the only seven slayers a dragon must fear.\n\n\u2003First beware Pride, lest belief in one's might\n\n\u2003Has you discount the foeman who is braving your sight.\n\n\u2003Never Envy other dragons their wealth, power, or home\n\n\u2003For dark plots and plans will bring death to your own.\n\n\u2003Your Wrath shouldn't win, when spears strike your scale\n\n\u2003Anger kills cunning, which you will need to prevail.\n\n\u2003A dragon must rest, but Sloth you should dread\n\n\u2003Else long years of napping let assassins to your bed.\n\n\u2003'Greed is good,' or so foolish dragons will say\n\n\u2003Until piles of treasure bring killing thieves where they lay.\n\n\u2003Hungry is your body, and at times you must feed\n\n\u2003But Gluttony makes fat dragons, who can't fly at their need.\n\n\u2003A hot Lust for glory, gems, gold, or mates\n\n\u2003Leads reckless young drakes to the blackest of fates.\n\n\u2003So take heed of this wisdom, precious hatchling of mine,\n\n\u2003And the long years of dragonhood are sure to be thine.\n\nThere weren't any grays on my side of the family,\" Father grumbled.\n\nLarger even than Mother, Father rested on a massive stalagmite, wrapped about it like a constricting snake. His fiery eyes, under the armored ridges that led back to his crest in its six-horned glory, glowered down on the brood. Father's bronze scales reflected the muted aqua light of the cave moss.\n\nTo little Auron, Father had a harsh, intimidating odor, very different from Mother's comforting one. He tucked his head into his gray flank, a little afraid at Father's tone, but resisted the instinct to close his eyes.\n\n\"You know very well my father was a gray, AuRel. When I sang my lineage at our mating, it didn't bother you.\"\n\nFather pulled back, raised his mighty neck high, and snorted. For a moment it looked to Auron as if he might bite Mother.\n\nBut he brought his head down and flicked his forked tongue, drawing it across her face. \"I was watching your wings, my love. They hypnotized me. I had never seen such a span on a maiden before. I hardly listened.\"\n\nHis parents touched noses at the memories evoked, and Auron heard a low thrumming.\n\n\"We have every right to prumm to each other\u2014three on the shelf. Not bad for our first clutch,\" Mother said. She pulled Auron's two sisters closer to her with her tail. The hatchlings peeped and yawned at the touch, but didn't wake.\n\n\"But still, of all the infernal drafts,\" Father continued. \"A red, a copper, and a gray. What happens? The red is killed, the copper is maimed, and the gray has the nest!\"\n\n\"The red fought well, my lord. Just too eager, impetuous. He left the copper without finishing it.\"\n\n\"Just like his grandfather, darkness keep his bones. A besung dragon, he. I still don't see how a gray got the better of him or the copper.\"\n\n\"He used his egg horn, my lord.\"\n\n\"He did what?\"\n\n\"Gutted him from the yolk sac up. I hardly believed my eyes.\"\n\nFather looked down at Auron, a new interest in his eyes. \"Clever little blighter.\"\n\n\"Eggs and legs! Don't call the pride of our clutch a blighter, AuRel! Like it or not, he is your champion. It's for you to see that he lives to loose his first fire.\"\n\n\"I wonder... ,\" Father mused. \"A gray. Thin skinned: the first elf with a bow that\u2014\"\n\n\"He'll be quick. Silent,\" his mother countered.\n\n\"Perhaps.\"\n\n\"All the less hunger to fill. Remember your youth, the chances you took.\"\n\nAuron got a mind-picture from his father. Stolen sheep, screaming warriors, the pounding of hunting horses. He felt old scars, crusted over with misshapen scales. He shivered.\n\n\"See!\" Mother exclaimed. \"He takes to your mind already. He learns from you. Teach him.\"\n\n\"In good time. Perhaps the copper will reclaim the shelf?\"\n\n\"Not likely. Auron has weight on him already, and is alert and quick.\"\n\nFather looked down at the copper, who had retreated to a crevice in the cave wall away from the egg shelf. \"It might be kinder to just\u2014\"\n\n\"No. He shall have his chance. I hear him hunting slugs and rats. Appetite will soon drive him outside. You have fathered two males, my lord. Think of it! Four survivors of five eggs. The words will sound fine in your lifesong.\"\n\nArmored fans expanded from Father's crest at the thought, covering sensitive earholes and the pulse points behind the angle in his jaw where the twin neck hearts worked, then returned to their sheaths. Auron felt his own griff descend a little, but they seemed thin and flimsy by comparison.\n\n\"Perhaps you are right. A worthy line for the battle roar,\" Father said, as though he'd thought of the idea himself. \"Though you may have to help me with it. Wordplay is not my strength.\"\n\n\"I remember every word of your mating song, harsh though it was to my ears. But I took to the sky with you nonetheless.\"\n\n\"If my song was lacking, what reason had you?\"\n\nMother's skin darkened again, and Auron saw a mind-picture of Father shining in the glare of the Upper World, only four horns on his head but still mighty, beating his wings so as to bend the trees as he sang.\n\n\"Your great horned head, my lord,\" Mother said as her skin turned the richest green. \"Ten thousand scales that reflected the yellow sun, your bellows that shivered the very clouds. Your presence captivated me. I lost my head... and my hearts. The first came back to me... afterwards. But you shall always hold the second.\"\n\nAuron's nose itched abominably. He felt the urge to rub his egg horn against the cave wall, but fought the instinct. After seeing his sisters lose theirs by scraping them off against Mother's scales, he decided he did not want to part with his. His egg horn still smelled faintly of his brother's blood, reminding him of the service it had done. There was still the copper to think of, and he worried that he might need its point again in another fight.\n\nClimbing Mother took his mind off the discomfort. He swarmed up her neck and stood atop her head, bleating out his satisfaction with his feat to his sisters below.\n\nHer tail was even more of a challenge, for she swung it up and down, back and forth, until he felt giddy with the motion as he hugged its whirling end. On a low sweep of her tail, he gathered himself and leaped. He sailed over his sisters in a splay-legged fall, and upon landing instinctively absorbed the impact with his tail.\n\n\"'Gain, Mama!\" he squeaked, scaling her haunch. His hooked claws made climbing her armored skin easy.\n\n\"Not just now,\" she countered. \"Eat a little.\"\n\nHe remembered his appetite and returned to the half-eaten horse, placed on the shelf this morning by Father. It was much better than the egg-size slugs Father had gathered the two previous days. Mother seemed content to eat slugs, though, even with horse-flesh available.\n\n\"Wish we could 'ave 'orse every day, Mama,\" he said. His sisters had not left him much for seconds. They were useless baggage. All they did was eat and sleep and chatter at each other. If he tried to get them to do something interesting, like wrestle, they would skedaddle for Mother's belly, squealing. He almost wished the copper would try to take some horse.\n\n\"Father has to hunt the Upper World if we are to have horse, Auron. He can't afford to be gone too long.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It's a risk, dear. You and your sisters are precious beyond my words' ability to tell. He doesn't dare leave us.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Someone might try to come and take you.\"\n\n\"Who would come?\"\n\n\"Your father will tell you, when the time is right.\"\n\nAuron\u2014with a belly full of horse entering his bloodstream\u2014bristled. \"I'll fight 'em, Mama!\" He shot to the edge of the shelf and looked down, in search of foemen come to harm Mother and his hapless sisters. His griff descended along either side of his head and rattled against his crest at the thought.\n\nSomewhere below, he heard his brother, worrying rats from among the offal at the base of the cave wall. He reversed himself like a whip cracking, and dashed back to the carcass.\n\n\"Wind and sand, how quick you are! But rest now, Auron. When you're grown, you'll have a clutch of your own to fight for.\"\n\n\"Not sleepy!\" he insisted, glaring at his sisters and spoiling for action. They retreated to the shelter of Mother's left hind, meeping.\n\nAuron belched, and the fetid smell pacified him. But the horse still needed guarding. Mother's warm belly beckoned, yet he curled himself around what was left of the head and forequarters. If Mother was right, the next horse might be some days off, and he could not bear the thought of the copper making off with such a prize.\n\nDays passed. Once the remains of the horse joined the pile at the shelf base, and not a bite of slug was left to be had, Auron felt bold enough to explore the cave. Should his brother gain the egg shelf, he felt confident enough to teach him a real lesson, though his desire to kill him had ebbed.\n\nWhile the cave looked like a vast expanse from the egg shelf, it was anything but. There were great pillars of stone that met others hanging above like the teeth in his mouth, only less precisely arranged. There were cracks and fissures too small for his parents but a satisfactory size for an inquisitive hatchling, and places where the ceiling came low enough for him to torment the bats who clung here and there.\n\nAway from the smells of the egg shelf, he snuffled amongst the pools and refuse of the cave floor. Music in the form of trickling water sounded all around; each fall had its own syncopation, from deep plops of heavy drops to the more rapid cadence of little streams splashing from ceiling to cave floor.\n\nStalagmites were almost as easy to climb as Mother. He tried one in the higher part of the cave, wrapping himself around it in imitation of his father. Finding a comfortable rest, he froze. Rolling only an eyeball, he looked down at his body, almost indistinguishable from the cool stone he clung to. Faint darker bands could just be distinguished amid the gray. Was he developing a different color? Mother said dragons came in many colors, though dragonelles were usually green. His sisters asked endless questions about colors and played with sparkling stones and bits of metal Father gave them. They arranged them in intricate patterns, rhyming as they counted the colors:\n\n\u2003Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue,\n\n\u2003To my lord I shall be true.\n\n\u2003Copper, Silver, Black, and White,\n\n\u2003Who will win my mating flight?\n\nAuron wondered why grays weren't part of the song. Was something wrong with him? The question worried at him. But only until he caught the scent of a fresh slug trail on his tongue.\n\nA season had passed. The bats became torpid, their endless output of guano slowed, and the fungus that lived off their droppings shrank back from a carpet of light to spotty patches, little green points like stars on the cavern floor.\n\nAuron, his belly holding nothing but hunger, hunted.\n\nThe slug trail was old, but not old enough to fade into the cavern murk with the growing hatchling's sensitive nose held to the rock floor. The slugs had also slowed with the change in the bats, until they hardly moved from hiding place to hiding place.\n\nEven his sisters, who shared none of his interests or sports, joined him in hunting. Useless in all other respects, he grudgingly gave them credit for slug trapping. Though they were not so active in searching out food as he, they did show some skill at guessing where the mindless soft-skinned prey would be in its wanderings, and more often than not, chose the right perch to while away the day waiting for the faint slurping sound of a moving slug.\n\nAuron's legs were longer now, the claws thicker at the end of his four digits, divided three long and one short. The hind limbs, more muscular than the front pair, allowed him to leap clean to the egg shelf from the floor of the cavern. The black stripes descending from his backbone were more pronounced now, and his gray had deepened everywhere except his underside, still pale as slugmeat. His leathery skin gave him the ability to wriggle into cracks even his undersize brother could not reach. He and his brother crossed each other's trails in their endless explorations, and sometimes he caught a flash of copper as the cripple dived into the lake at the base of the waterfall.\n\nThe slug trail disappeared into a crack in the floor. The aperture was festooned with dried fungus, full of dormant spores awaiting the trickle's return. Auron circled the exit and saw that if he shifted a boulder, he could pursue the slug.\n\nHe wiggled under one end of the boulder and pressed his backbone hard against the rock. He strained to no effect. He gathered himself for a real shove\u2014and heaved until his vision went red. The rock did not move. His tail whipsawed in his petulance as he came out from under the shelf.\n\n\"Pogt!\" he swore, using a Dwarvish curse his mother taught him by accident in one of her mind-stories. He brought up his neck in an intimidating arc. He felt something gurgle behind his breastbone, his neck muscles stiffened, and he vomited a thin stream of yellowish liquid at the rock.\n\nAmazing.\n\nHe tasted the air around the expectorate. The odor singed his smell buds on his tongue and nasal membrane. He snorted in disgust and turned to find Mother. She would be able to move the rock. He scrambled to the egg shelf.\n\n\"Mother, the rock, Mother. A slug went down a hole and a rock is in the way!\"\n\nMother opened an eye. She had grown perceptibly thinner, eating only the leavings from her hungry brood. She closed it again.\n\n\"Mother! I need a rock moved. I can get a slug if you move it!\" he insisted.\n\n\"Quiet, Auron. You'll drop the bats from the ceiling, you're making so much noise.\" His sisters, waking from their nap, glared at him in agreement.\n\n\"It will only take you moments, Mother! Please, I'm so hungry!\"\n\n\"A rock over a dry trickle, Auron?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Your father put that there for a purpose. He will move it for you, maybe. Please let me sleep.\"\n\n\"The slug will get away!\"\n\n\"Slugs and bugs, let it. Your father will be back soon.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nMother's tail lashed out, the thin end catching him across the snout.\n\nHe smarted to his eye sockets. \"Owww! You didn't have to crack me!\"\n\nHis sisters touched snouts in triumph and thrummed out their satisfaction to each other. Auron ignored the prrum.\n\n\"I wasn't biting anyone,\" he said in a much quieter tone.\n\n\"Don't whine. You are flapping me to distraction. Check the floor for dead bats if you're that hungry. I've been hearing them fall all day. Will this winter never end?\"\n\nShe turned her head back and forth, a sign Auron knew meant she was listening for Father.\n\n\"We must have patience, Auron.\"\n\nPatience comes hard to a four-month-old hatchling, so Auron passed his time trying to shift the rock. He tried pushing it, he tried pulling it, he tried rotating it. He tried different angles, but the rock remained immovable. Finally, he fell asleep on top of it.\n\nFather made a noisy entrance, waking him. At other times, Father moved stealthily enough for Auron to pick up his smell before his sound\u2014as stealthily as something of his bulk could move, that is. But Auron heard him enter the great passage at the top of the cave this time; something was wrong with his walk. Was Father hurt?\n\nAuron climbed a stalagmite for a better view and saw Father moving to the egg shelf. He held something in his jaws, as well as a forearm. Food!\n\nFather was arguing with Mother when he joined the family at the ledge. \"You'll eat a whole horse, and that's the end of it,\" Father rasped. \"I went to a lot of trouble for these.\"\n\nThe bronze dragon's mandibles moved, and Auron watched him work the inside of his mouth with his tongue. An ivory tooth fell out, broken and bloody.\n\nAuron noticed shafts like quills in Father's neck, and a longer length of carved wood in his flank. \"Father, there's a spear in your side!\" Auron said.\n\n\"What's that?\" He craned his neck and sniffed at his flank. \"Too big to be a spear, Gray. That's a lance. It's a weapon men riding horses use; they can drive it right through you. If they can get their horse to charge a dragon, that is.\"\n\n\"Two sii to the right, and it would have gone right up your tail-vent,\" Mother chuckled.\n\nAuron clamped his jaws shut to keep from laughing.\n\n\"So that's what kept you,\" Mother continued, sniffing at one of the dead horses. \"You flew with two horses in your claws?\"\n\n\"Two horizons at least. My jaw is going to be sore for a week. What really slowed me down was this.\" Father opened his hand, and a mass of fabric, rope, and broken pieces of wood fell to the floor.\n\n\"What is that? More to eat?\" his sister Jizara asked.\n\nThe mass moved, and Auron saw a foreleg emerge. It was thinner than his, proportioned strangely, and with four-and-one as its claw arrangement\u2014though perhaps claw was the wrong word, as the creature had no talons.\n\n\"That's what's left of a tent. I came on them in the night, and their horses bolted. Few managed to mount. Brave men\u2014they fought instead of running.\"\n\nSomething shot from beneath the fabric, running on its hind legs. It stumbled in the dark; its fearful panting echoed from cold stone.\n\n\"That's a man, Auron. After it, let's see you hunt,\" Father said.\n\nAuron jumped in pursuit, driven as much by its flight as by Father's words. It smelled of blood and horses, but there was another dirtier scent to it, a little like a dead wolf Father had once brought to the cave.\n\nThe biped heard Auron coming. It tried to crawl into a crevice. Auron grabbed it by the leg and pulled. He scrabbled with all four claws. The man was larger, but he was stronger. He pulled it out into the open.\n\nIt lashed out with a foot and caught him in the eye. It kicked him again across the snout, hurting far worse than one of Mother's smacks. He let go, tasting and smelling his own blood on his tongue now. But he was close enough to hunt by eye and ear.\n\nThe man crawled away, seeking refuge in the crevice. It had curious coloration. Auron noticed the varied hues, even as he gathered himself and jumped, of the second loose skin over its first.\n\nHe landed on the man. He aimed a bite at the neck, but got only a forearm in his jaws. The man shifted his weight, pivoting very differently from the way his sisters did in their halfhearted wrestling bouts. The man had much more strength in his forearms than Auron was used to.\n\nHe felt a sharp pain in the pit of his foreleg.\n\nFather's head loomed above. In a flash, Father had the man's skull in his jaws and off its neck. Blood geysered into the air.\n\nThe body twitched as it exsanguinated, and Auron kept attacking the headless corpse, ripping at it with his teeth.\n\n\"Auron, stop,\" Father growled.\n\nAuron froze, teeth clamped on the man's shoulder.\n\n\"Look in its hand, Auron. It had a knife.\"\n\nAuron drew himself off the blade and sniffed at the wound in his armpit. A steady flow of blood joined the man's on the floor.\n\n\"Will I die, Father?\"\n\n\"No, you were lucky. Lick the wound clean.\"\n\nAuron nursed himself, and Father continued.\n\n\"When you leap like that, let your back legs do the killing. You're still fighting too much with your mouth. It's all right for taking the neck of something that's half-dead. But when you've got a hold of the prey, remember, he's got a hold of you, too. Pin and dig with your saa. They put up less of a fight when they're gutted.\"\n\n\"Yes, Father. 'E hurt by nose, too.\"\n\n\"Many a drake has gotten worse from his first kill of a hominid. You did well, my champion; I was months above ground before I took one, and it was just a half-starved blighter I ran to death. Sheep are easier.\"\n\n\"Bay I eat 'im?\"\n\n\"He's your kill,\" Father said, swallowing the head. \"Well, mostly.\"\n\nAuron soothed his aching hunger, messily, appetite winning out over manners. Mother had taught him not to bolt his food lest it come back up, but Father seemed to understand hunger better.\n\n\"It was your mother's idea. Her father taught his drakes to kill this way. I may have saved you from a nasty surprise later. Remember, with hominids, what they lack in strength they make up for in tools, and plans, and magic. Cowardly way to do it, letting a piece of metal do your killing, but there you are.\"\n\nThey shared the corpse, Father crunching down the bones after Auron took most of the meat. The bleeding stopped in his nose and side. Father's battle wounds already showed brownish scabs among his riven scales.\n\n\"Father?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"What is under the big rock? I followed a slug, but couldn't move it. Mother said you put it there.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised you couldn't. Someone your size shouldn't be able to.\"\n\n\"Will you show me?\"\n\nFather's lips rippled across his teeth in thought. \"You've made your first kill, Champion of our Clutch, so as far as I'm concerned, you're no longer a hatchling. Come along, then.\"\n\nFather led the way to the rock. He brought his long neck down and sniffed at Auron's bilious spit.\n\n\"You are growing. That's your foua. Perhaps four more seasons, and your fire bladder will be able to turn that into real dragon flame\u2014as long as you eat properly. Fatty flesh brims the bladder, the old red used to tell me.\"\n\nAuron knew about the fire; his mother said breathing his first would mark his passage into drakehood. His body would put a special kind of liquid fat in his fire bladder, ignited when he spat by the substance he was already producing. Mother knew everything.\n\nFather pushed the boulder aside.\n\n\"How do you climb down that, Father? It's too small.\"\n\n\"My neck fits. That's all that has to go there, really. It is only a short distance. Climb down and look.\"\n\n\"Is it dangerous?\"\n\n\"Yes, but not in the way you think.\"\n\nAuron sniffed the air wafting up the sink, but smelled only the congealed blood in his nostrils. He shifted back and forth at the rim of the shaft in uncertainty.\n\n\"Would a little light help?\" Father asked. He coughed, and a gob of flame struck the dead moss hanging there.\n\nThe blazing light revealed a narrowing shaft, so even if Auron fell, he would not fall far.\n\n\"I don't see anything, Father.\"\n\n\"Get under the overhang. It's not far\u2014my neck isn't that long.\"\n\nAuron tested his wounded leg and decided it would not hold his body weight. He went down the shaft tailfirst.\n\nSomething gleamed under the overhang, reflecting the light from the burning moss. Auron entered the alcove and stopped breathing, amazed.\n\nA cascade of silver covered the floor, flowing out of rotting containers like the tent he had seen earlier. Shining golden-colored disks filled little fashioned chambers. Here and there, colored stones like the ones his sisters played with lay amid the metal.\n\nFather peeked in. \"Overwhelming, isn't it? It isn't much, as hoards go. I'd rather eat the gold than keep it to look at. You may have a mouthful or two, if you wish. If you haven't sneaked some already, that is.\" Father chuckled at unvoiced memories.\n\nAuron took a mouthful of the coins. They had no taste, and he spat them out again.\n\n\"Why\u2014\" Father exclaimed. \"Oh, of course\u2014scaleless. That would explain your docility. When my father first showed me his hoard, I actually attacked him when he came near it.\"\n\n\"Why won't I grow scales?\"\n\n\"Grays are different, my son. It means you must be careful: your skin will be pierced more easily. But on the other sii, having no hunger for gems and gold will allow you to live in the Upper World and far from men if you wish. Other dragons must seek heavy metals out in the Lower World, where there are dwarves and blighters to deal with\u2014or steal it from men or elves above.\"\n\n\"Where did you get it?\"\n\n\"Towns, caravans... Some came from your Mother. She once did a favor for some dwarves, and cleared out a cavern of blighters. They gave her the silver you see in return. Pretty, isn't it? Reminds me of moonshine.\"\n\n\"The dwarves didn't kill her?\"\n\n\"She was careful. She met them only in pairs, well above ground. Her gift with languages, you see.\"\n\n\"Why do dragons help hominids who will try to kill us?\"\n\n\"'The enemy of my enemy is my friend, until my enemy is dead,' \" Father quoted. \"But while helping clear out the blighters, she found this cavern. She decided it would make a good nesting chamber. She knocked off two riders with one tailswipe, you might say.\"\n\n\"I shall remember that, Father.\"\n\n\"That's my drake.\" Father chuckled. \"Clever little blighter. You think, don't you? Like your mother. They'll have a time of it, hunting you, once you put on some size.\"\n\n\"Hunting me? Does something want to eat us?\"\n\nFather extended his neck, and Auron shrank back, afraid of the great crested-and-horned head. Father always looked angry, but perhaps it was just the ridges of his brow.\n\nBut Father just gave him a gentle lick of his tongue. \"No, Champion, nothing eats a dragon, except through luck.\"\n\n\"Then why?\"\n\nFather lowered his head, offering Auron an easy path out of the hoard-cave. Auron climbed over the horned crest and ran up his father's neck.\n\n\"That is your favorite word, according to your mother. Well, that's a story. I'll tell it as best as I can. My father told it to me long ago, just as my grandsire told him. I think I was older than you when I first heard it, but you are already word-wise, so I'll tell you, if you like.\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\nFather closed his eyes for a long moment, and then opened them. And so he began....\n\n\"Long ago, so long ago that the Upper World was shapeless, and the Lower chaos, the Sun had four Great Spirits work together to give form to the two worlds: one of light, the other of darkness. They formed mountains and valleys, oceans and deserts, caves and clouds. When the worlds, Upper and Lower, were done, two of them were ordered by the shining Sun to fill the Upper World with life to worship Her. These Spirits were Air and Water. Water made many green plants and growing things that love the Sun. Air made birds to fly with the wind and beasts to roam everywhere, and all worshiped the Sun. Flowers opened their petals to her; birds sang to welcome her rising.\n\n\"The Moon grew jealous of all this attention, for he's ugly and pockmarked, so gruesome that wolves of the forest warn everyone of his coming. He persuaded two other Spirits, Fire and Earth, to create from their depths a being to murder the Sun worshipers. They made the blighters. You haven't seen a blighter yet, have you? They're sort of stooped-over things, with big hairy arms and long-fingered hands that could wring a hatchling's neck.\n\n\"It was a bad time for the world. The blighters killed and ate many of the things Air and Water made, and the more they ate, the more they bred, spoiling everything like flies. The Sun grew angry and told the Moon to apologize, but the Moon refused and evermore hid from the sun. The Sun ordered the four Spirits to work together and do something about the blighters.\n\n\"Now Earth, Air, Fire, and Water can kill, but they mostly do it by accident when trying to accomplish something else. They are very busy keeping the world clean and renewed, and they did not have time to fight the blighters. But they could create life, and they decided to work together to make something that the blighters could not eat, like the animals and birds, or cut like plants and trees. They worked and thought, and after many attempts, some of which still wander the world today, they brought the dragons to life.\n\n\"Each of the Great Spirits gave a gift to dragons as they created them. Earth gave them his armor like forged metal. The blighters could not bite or claw through it. Air gave them her ability to fly, so they could go where they willed in the world at need. Water gave them her supple strength. Fire gave them a kingly gift: his ability to bring flame.\n\n\"The dragons had a great hunger and flew over the world, eating the blighters and taming them. The blighters hate us, yet in a way, they worship us, too. So we drove and ate and ordered the blighters as we saw fit. The Upper and Lower Worlds were again in balance with the blighters checked, and the Sun looked down and was satisfied.\n\n\"'Fine work, Great Spirits. Whom do I have to thank for setting things to rights? I wish to reward the one responsible.'\n\n\"Each Spirit claimed the credit, saying that the gift he or she had given dragons was the one that made us supreme. There were endless disputes and arguments.\n\n\"'Since you have fallen back to squabbling, and none can prove his case, I shall withhold the reward,' the Sun said, showing her disgust.\n\n\"Each Great Spirit retreated to his place in the Upper and Lower Worlds, and thought black thoughts. Being of similar greedy mind, each had the same idea: 'If I can prove I am the greatest, I will get the reward. But how to prove I am the master of the others? I know: I shall create something that can kill even dragons!'\n\n\"Earth, deep in the ground, made the delving dwarves. He gave them the ability to fashion arms and armor that could pierce dragon-scale, and the fearless solidity of mountains.\n\n\"Water, in her slow wisdom, made the elves that live amongst the green growing things she nourishes. They age like trees and move like windblown leaves. They are patient hunters, keen eyed and eared.\n\n\"Air, far above, made men. Man the wanderer, man the hunter, man the flexible. Man does not stand like a mountain in the face of difficulty, or wait like trees for the season to change, but figures a way over, under, or around it.\n\n\"Fire was lazy and capricious; Fire did no work. Instead he took aside a few of the others and turned them to his own purposes, and taught them magic. These mages would kill or control all the dragons, then kill or control all the other races in time, and one day put Fire in the sky to replace even the Sun. Even worse, Fire taught these mages some of the secrets of Making, so he would have someone else to do his bidding.\n\n\"But like the Spirits that created them, these people fell to squabbling. The Spirits' peoples spent their time in feuds. Men fought men when there were no elves to slay. Sadly, each race did manage to kill its share of dragons, for we were too arrogant in those early ages, before we learned to fear.\n\n\"Without the dragons ordering things, the blighters also came back and made trouble for the other races. Since then, the world's history has been little more than a litany of wars among the Spirits' creations.\n\n\"So now we dragons must hide, or assassins will come to slay our families. The dragons who knew better times are almost gone. The dwarves find our caves, the elves trap us by wood and water, and always more and more men come with their flocks, their forts, their roads, and their cities.\n\n\"I know more of fighting than I do of wisdom, little gray. But I will offer you this: Learn something of the ways of all the races, but especially learn of men. Your grandsire, my father, destroyed an army of them, but a new army came filled with survivors of the old. When he came to smash and burn their war machines, they surrounded him, and that was the end of a very mighty red. They adapted\u2014a word I learned from your mother\u2014to him and his manner of fighting. If we dragons are to last, we must adapt to this new age, or the work of the Four Great Spirits in creating us will come to naught. Dragon kind will continue to dwindle, until one day there are no more eggs.\"\n\nFather stared off in the direction of the egg shelf, his nostrils taking in great drafts of cavern air, as though searching its approaches for the sight or smell of enemies.\n\n\"What's dwindle, father?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"Nothing for you to worry about today.\"\n\nThey finished the remains of the man. Auron smelled his blood on the man's knife again, and made to kick it down the hoard-shaft, but Father made him carry the weapon back to the shelf to share his lesson with his sisters.\n\nChange came with new air. The season above had finally cavern.turned, and faint traces of spring life filtered down to the cavern.\n\nIt could not come too soon for Auron. Even dead bats were becoming scarce.\n\nWith the renewed air came water, first dripping, then trickling, then cascading in torrents from the melt above to some unknown reservoir below. Auron did not mind the wet; it rolled off his hide as easily as it ran down stone. He drank from the accumulated pools, smelling and tasting the world above through the liquid conductor.\n\nAt the touch of the water, the dead lichen gave way, leaving little patches of growth. The bats started their nightly ventures, returning to the cave to leave a shower of fresh, ammonia-smelling fertilizer for the moss.\n\nThe life returning to the cave affected even Mother. She still had a listless, pinched look to her, but sniffed the air coming down from above with some of her old energy.\n\n\"Soon we'll be in the Upper World, little gems. Meat and heat, no more dead bats for you.\"\n\n\"Father will have an easier time hunting?\" Wistala, his smaller sister, asked.\n\n\"Yes, but we won't see much of him. He will be flying far and wide, to make sure other dragons do not encroach upon us. Besides, the appetites of a family of dragons soon exhaust an area. Overhunt a forest one year, and you will starve the next.\"\n\n\"What is the Upper World like? Dangerous?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"Big and beautiful. There's life everywhere, all singing different songs to the four Great Spirits. You could fly your whole life and see only a part of it. Now you just have the music of the melt on its way through our cave. In the Upper World you will hear rain fall from the sky, wind in the trees and on the grasslands, the crash of the ocean probing the land for weakness. Lightning will light up a place she wants her lover Thunder to visit. And far above, the Sun and Moon travel in silence, listening to the music.\n\n\"There is danger there, yes, but remember, you, too, are dangerous. In all the world there is nothing more dangerous than a wary dragon. What is a dragon's most deadly weapon?\"\n\n\"His fire!\" Auron ejaculated.\n\n\"Strength?\" Jizara asked.\n\n\"The senses,\" Wistala said after a moment's thought.\n\n\"All right, in a way, but not right enough,\" Mother said. \"It is the dragon's cunning, which guides all the other weapons. To know when to fight and when to run, to fool the strong into thinking you are stronger than they, to fool the weak into thinking you are weaker and encourage them to rashness. Let your prey think you are harmless, give those hunting you the impression you are going one place, and then be where they do not expect you.\"\n\nAll very well, Auron thought. I will be running all the time, to save my scaleless skin. My sisters will have less to fear in the Upper World than I.\n\n\"You think your skin is a weakness, Auron?\" Mother asked.\n\nAuron looked up at Mother. She sniffed at him, her head cocked affectionately. He could not lie; she read his mind as easily as his expression.\n\n\"Yes, Mother.\"\n\n\"Jizara, climb that stalagmite, would you?\"\n\nJizara, obedient as always, moved to the wide base of a large stone prominence.\n\n\"Now listen, Auron.\"\n\nJizara began to climb, and Auron heard her scales rasp against the stone.\n\n\"Climb the wall, Auron. Keep your claws sheathed, use the strength in your sii.\"\n\nThe wall was a harder proposition than the stalagmite, but using his neck as well as his tail, he managed to reach the cavern roof. He hung upside down, hugging the stone.\n\nMother raised her head to stare levelly into his eyes. \"Auron, you did not make a sound doing that, apart from your breathing. Was that a weakness or a strength?\"\n\n\"What good is it?\"\n\n\"There will be times when you will not want to be heard. If I were an elf venturing into this cave, all sharp eyes and ears, I would not hear you climb up there to hide, nor would I see you in the shadows. You reflect no light\u2014your coloring lets you blend perfectly. By the time the elf got close enough to see you, it would be too late.\"\n\nAuron felt flush with achievement. Even Father could not lurk in this manner. \"I understand, Mother.\"\n\n\"But will any dragonelles want a mating flight with Auron, Mother?\" Wistala asked. \"He hardly looks a dragon. More like a lizard.\"\n\n\"Keep a civil tongue, Tala,\" Mother scolded. \"My mother was a dragonelle who had her choice, yet she chose my gray father. There is more to a dragon than the shine of his scales.\"\n\n\"My mate will be a mighty red, Mother. Red like a ruby!\"\n\n\"I want a bronze, who shines like Father,\" Jizara said, still atop the stalagmite. \"Though less horns and scars.\"\n\nMother chuckled. \"His horns seem ugly to you now, girls, but someday you will have a belly full of waiting eggs. You'll think differently!\"\n\n\"Who cares for dragonelles?\" Auron said, scooting sideways to find a crevice to better camouflage his shape. \"I'll never mate!\"\n\nMother rubbed the top of her head along his back. \"My little clutchwinner, life still has much to teach you.\"\n\n\"You'll teach me more, though, won't you, Mother?\"\n\n\"Of course. But in another year or two, it will be time for more eggs. And then Father will bar you from this cave.\"\n\n\"We won't see each other?\"\n\n\"Other things will occupy your mind. But I'll always be with you. I'm part of your song.\"\n\nAuron stalked the floor of the cavern. He explored his brother's stale scent near the fishing pool. He smelled Copper's marks all around a deep crack in the wall of the cave, where a trickle had found a new outlet. Where his brother came once, he would come again, so Auron found a perch and froze against it to await his return.\n\nIt was time for the cave to be Auron's. He would drive his brother out, or kill him. The scent of another young male so close to his sisters was intolerable. Auron rubbed his egg horn in anticipation. This vestige of his hatching was firmly fixed to the end of his nose now: a sharpened spur he could drive through even his brother's scales if it came to killing.\n\nStillness never suited Auron. His sisters were better at sitting and waiting; he wanted to be up and following a trail. With nothing to occupy his mind but looking and listening, he dozed.\n\nSplash(tap)... Splash(tap)... Splash-splash(tap-tap).\n\nAuron woke, nerves racing with danger, though he did not know the source of his alarm. He opened an eye and rolled it to and fro across the pool. The splash-tap rhythm repeated itself over and over. Auron's ears located the source: the wall of the pool and the trickling fissure.\n\nWhatever was making the noise was behind the wall, in some hidden cavern curtained off by a sheet of rock and flowing melt.\n\nAuron slipped down from his stalagmite and crept to the pool. The stranger behind the wall was timing its work with the sound of water falling from above. He could not be certain, but the fissure seemed wider than when he had smelled his brother's footprints at the crack. He wanted a better look, but there was no cover close to the crack\u2014 \u2014save the pool! Auron slipped into the icy water; his hearts jumped. There was a shelf under the waterfall, and he laid his head atop it, keeping his body submerged. The water showered off his skull before entering the pool below. Through the veil of droplets, he could see the crack, and his eyes picked up flecks of stone flying out with each tap.\n\nHe wished he could find Father and tell him, but Father was away hunting. He had just left the day before, and would be gone for days on his search.\n\nA section of cavern wall fell away into the hidden chamber. Auron could tell it was pulled and supported by some unknown strength: it did not fall naturally.\n\nA pointed, shining dome appeared at the new hole, and it turned left and right. Auron saw eyes behind thin slits in the shell. A figure stepped out into the cavern, pressed its back against the wall, and froze.\n\nIt was thick-limbed, standing on two legs, not as tall as the man Father had brought, but far more broad. A great helm sat on its head, and Auron heard breath moving through the faceplate. It probably weighed three times what Auron did with all its metal trappings added. Something sharp on a long pole emerged next, passed from the shadows to the intruder. Ornately wrought barbs decorated the pointed head.\n\nA spear!\n\nHe heard voices exchanging words in low tones, very different from Drakine. \"Az-klatta. Mu-bieblun,\" the one on the outside growled to another.\n\nAuron shivered at the foreign sounds, which made the danger all the more real. They must be dwarves, and dwarves hunted dragons. He flinched, but stopped himself from leaping away outright. Instead he sank back into the pool, shielded by the waterfall, and swam away underwater. He poked just his eyes and crest above the water against the cave wall at the far end, careful to keep the cascade between himself and the dwarves.\n\nHe scrambled out of the water and into cover as quick as four legs could carry him. He wove between stalagmites, making for the egg shelf. He had to warn Mother before more dwarves\u2014 Something crashed atop his back.\n\n\"Got you! Death has come for you, softling.\" The copper hissed.\n\nAuron clawed at his brother with his free leg; he felt his saa rake against layers of scale.\n\n\"By the eggs that sheltered us, there's something you don't know,\" Auron said. \"There are others in this cave. Dw-auuggg!\" Blinding pain as the copper's teeth tore the soft tissue of his earhole behind his crest, near his beating pulse point. Auron thrust up with his rear legs, but his brother's entire weight bore down on the weaker front legs.\n\nCopper's tail immobilized a leg, and the good forearm pinned his mouth shut to stop Auron's squawking. \"Others? I know about them. Good friends, strong friends, who'll give me more of a chance in this world than my own kind. I saved your life, but would you share the egg shelf with me? Allow me a full belly? Even one sniff of Mother? I've lived in hunger and hiding since the day I came out of the shell, thanks to you.\"\n\nAuron could not respond. He could hardly breathe through his nose, let alone speak of the instincts that had driven him.\n\n\"So you'll die now, as you should have died out of the egg. Two brothers, both stronger, and you ended up with the nest. It's time to right a great wrong. Nearly time, that is. First you get to watch Mother and the chatterers skinned. Stop writhing, you lizard\u2014you're worse than a snake! Too bad you shan't see me gorge myself on Father's gold.\"\n\nThe copper used his good forearm to twist Auron's head on his thin neck. Auron could just see the egg shelf and Mother's ridgeless back, pale green in the mosslight. He wasn't a snake; he was a drake, even if he lacked Father's scaly bulk. A snake was all spine\u2014 Auron whipped his tail up like a cave scorpion striking. He aimed for his brother's eyes, but the copper must have seen the blow coming. Instead Auron caught him on the side of the head. Auron twisted his limber body, and his smaller sibling gave way. The pressure on his neck vanished, and the two rolled across the cavern floor. Their jaws snapped at each other's heads, and Auron took the worse of the exchange. Neither could catch the other's neck.\n\nThey glared at each other, mouths agape. Auron sidestepped, but his brother turned, keeping the crippled arm behind his body.\n\nWhy wouldn't his brother close?\n\nHe realized he had not time for a fight to the finish. The copper was playing him, keeping him away from the egg shelf while the dwarves gathered.\n\n\"You live this day if you trouble me no further,\" Auron said. \"Though when I tell Father of this, he may feel differently. He'll pull the mountains down to find such as you, who'd lead assassins to the egg shelf.\"\n\nAuron did not wait for the snarled reply: he jumped away from his brother and ran. There was no chase; the cripple could not hope to run him down.\n\n\"Mother! Mother! Mother!\" Auron trumpeted as he approached the egg shelf. \"Others! Assassins, dwarves, here in the cave.\" Auron leaped for the egg shelf, gaining it in a bound his scaled sisters could never match.\n\nHis mother was on her feet, neck and tail curled protectively around her female hatchlings. \"We are discovered?\" she said, nostrils flaring as she sniffed the air.\n\n\"They're here. With spears, Mother,\" Auron said, instinctively turning and putting his small body between the approaching dwarves and his family.\n\n\"No! I'm faint with hunger, and the winter's been so\u2014,\" she began. She froze, looking out into the cavern. Auron had already spied them with sharp dragon eyes.\n\nFigures appeared out of the shadows. They clambered over stone ridges, appeared and disappeared behind stalagmites, leaped over fissures in the cavern floor by bowlegged jumps. Many. Many-many. Some ran with spears, some with axes, some with climbing poles. Others came with heavy shields held before them, sheltering dwarves carrying machinery of some sort behind.\n\nMother reared up on her hind legs. Not to fight; she turned her back to the assassins, and gripped a broken-off stalagmite near the cavern ceiling. As it came loose, Auron smelled fresh air from above.\n\n\"I hope you aren't too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb.\" She nosed Wistala up the wall.\n\nAuron planted his legs wide and opened his mouth at the approaching dwarves. Oh, how he wished! He wished he had wings to spread, to frighten them from their approach. He felt his body begin to seize up, to spray his bile if nothing else\u2014 His mother plucked him by his back and almost threw him into the hole. Something flew out of the dark and glanced off Mother's neck. Below, he saw Jizara wide-eyed with fear, tail, limbs, and neck wrapped around Mother's hind leg.\n\n\"Jizara! By your egg, Jizara, let go! My hatchling, I can't fight with you there.\"\n\nNothing frightened Auron so much as the sight of Mother gently trying to pry his sister loose from her leg. His mind cleared. He couldn't fight, but he could give Mother one less worry.\n\n\"Jizara, up here! Don't you want to see the Upper World?\"\n\nSomething flashed up at Mother, sticking in her neck. Arrows. Spearpoints appeared above the rim of the egg shelf, followed by helmed heads, armor clanking and chain grating in the movement.\n\nMother looked up at him, and he read her. Mother's mind was a fog of fear, two hatchlings to go into the Upper World unguided, one clinging to her as wounds stung her body.\n\n\"Climb! Auron, climb!\" Mother implored, looking at him one last time before turning to face the spears.\n\nWistala would not move until Auron head-butted her. Then she fled, throwing loose rocks in a mad scramble up twists and shelves in the narrow chute. The sound of their panting echoed in the confined space, drowning out the battle cries of dwarf and dragon behind. No moss grew here to light their way; Auron grew more frightened rather than less as they climbed.\n\nThen from behind came a cry\u2014such a cry of anguish, a dragon's shriek to rend the mountain's heart. Perhaps the sound of a dragon in her death throes, perhaps the wail of a mother who has seen her offspring die under her eyes. Auron would never know.\n\nThe glare from the snow hurt their eyes, the wind chilled them, and the light and horizons of the Upper World made them feel and the light and horizons of the Upper World made them feel even more helpless and alone. Not even birds flew this high. A few stringy, wind-tortured pines clung to their tiny accumulations of soil among the rock several dragon-lengths below among splashes of lichen.\n\nThey might never have made it out of the cave if it hadn't been for Auron. After a lightless, bone-tiring climb, they came to a dirty widening filled with dried odds and ends of dead things. The tunnel narrowed again before being blocked by ice and snow. Wistala began to cry and beg him to return to the egg cave; she had to know if Mother and Jizara were still there. Auron could smell the air through fissures in the ice and hear the wind moving just beyond. He lashed at the ice overhang with his tail, his fear and anger and loneliness driving each blow until bloody tailprints covered the frozen bar. Auron turned and tried to bite it, but succeeded only in tearing a layer of skin off his gumline. The bile building inside him came out in an acrid shower; it ate at the ice and made the tunnel smell like bat urine. At last he coiled and threw his body against the ice, bursting into the outer world\u2014 And over a precipice. Auron clawed at the rocks wet with snowmelt and began to fall, when Wistala clamped her teeth on his tail. She braced all four of her legs until he found his grip. He pressed against her, squinting out the glare and resting on a shelf a fraction of the size of their familiar roost below.\n\nWhen his hearts slowed again, Auron looked at his sister with new interest. She had never struck him as quick enough to act in a crisis, at least physically.\n\n\"Does your tail hurt?\" Wistala said, sniffing at the blood leaking from deep tooth punctures.\n\n\"Not as much as the rest of me would have, had I fallen.\"\n\n\"It's too big.\"\n\n\"What's too big?\" Auron said, bringing his tail before his eyes. Had she bitten it clean through so the tip would fall off?\n\n\"This,\" she sniffed. \"The Upper World. I feel like we're nowhere.\"\n\nDistances so vast that there were no words for them marched off to the murky line where horizon met sky on the flat ground to the west. A mind-picture was one thing\u2014but the dragon wings of clouds high, high above and the little splashes of green and brown below with the sun marking all with either her revealing light or bluish shadow made him feel like a pebble within the cavern. The sun would cast her shadow, the trees would fight to reach her, and the clouds would move above whether he and Wistala drew breath or died under a dwarf ax. How could such little things as a pair of hatchlings matter, when measured against infinity?\n\nHe pressed against his sister. She was the most important thing in his world now. The rest of the Upper World was too much to take in right now, but he could build a new world around her. Mother wanted it that way.\n\nAuron looked at his sister, her scales shining green in the sun. She kept her head low, eyes rolling this way and that in the sunlight, the black slits in their rippled golden irises clamped almost shut against the glare.\n\nIt reminded him of a memory of Father's. \"Do you have mind-pictures?\" He had never used the word before to her; he had hardly used it with his mother.\n\nBut she nodded. \"Impressions of Mother's. Or perhaps Father's. Or other dragons from the old song? I don't know. I feel as though I've been up here before, looking far down.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\n\"But that doesn't mean I like it any better. Should we wait for a while and go back to the cave?\"\n\nAuron felt like biting her, but he resisted and changed the impulse to an embrace. He hooked his neck around hers. \"We could do that. Suppose the dwarves are waiting for us? Or worse, climbing the chimney even now? Father said never to fight a dwarf without room to maneuver. They are strong, the strongest of the assassins. I don't know if I can climb more. I'm already hungry. Hungriest I've ever been.\"\n\n\"Then we should climb down the mountain while we have strength. Mother shared stories about hunting with Jizara and me. Fur and feather, she said it's never too early to start. Tired hunters catch less or nothing\u2014then starve.\"\n\nThey craned their necks down over the precipice, sniffing and looking.\n\n\"I think I see a way,\" Wistala said. \"You found the way up the chimney\u2014I'll pick the path for a while. Follow my grips.\"\n\nAuron used his crest to push her aside. \"No, if one of us falls, let it be me. I'm lighter\u2014I'll land softer. Besides, I have the longer neck and tail, so I can try more grips.\"\n\nHe marked a gentle slope leading to a meadowed valley and made for it. They did not reach the valley by the time the sun disappeared behind the mountains, but they did find a larger shelf to rest on, with a jumble of flattened rocks that cut the wind. They were near the tree line. Auron hated trees at first sight. They reminded him of spears. So different from the comforting glow and the moist smell of soft cave moss.\n\n\"The runoff is freezing again. We should stop,\" Wistala said, panting.\n\n\"I'd like to see those squatty dwarves climb down that,\" Auron said, making a mental picture of the overhang below the precipice he had almost gone over. Wistala nodded. The thought of a few dwarves plummeting down the rocks warmed them.\n\nAuron spread his aching limbs on the shelf. His body trembled with exhaustion. Wistala lay down beside him, hugging her scaleless belly to him.\n\nHe finally gave voice to his great hurt. \"Is Mother\u2014?\"\n\n\"Don't speak of her, or I'll cry and cry, and I'm feeling bad enough as it is. Why did the assassins have to come to our cave?\"\n\n\"The world grows harder for dragons every day,\" Auron said, quoting something he overread Father thinking to Mother.\n\n\"I don't think we're strong enough yet, Auron,\" Wistala said in her smallest voice. \"Not to be out here alone.\"\n\n\"We're not alone. We have each other. We have Father.\"\n\n\"Father? Scale and tail, what does he know about watching over hatchlings?\"\n\nAuron's eyelids narrowed. Father was great beyond his sister's singsong little imagination.\n\nAuron stifled the impulse to lower the battle fans from his crest. \"You shouldn't\u2014Oh, I don't want to quarrel.\"\n\n\"We must tell him about the dwarves,\" Wistala said. \"He'll get angry and roast 'em. But where is he?\"\n\n\"I can't say. I think the gap he used was to the west; he would always go out early, so the sun would be shining on the land outside the cave but not in it.\"\n\n\"Then we've climbed down in the wrong direction. We've come a little north, haven't we?\"\n\nAuron's sense of direction was sharper than his sister's. \"No, we've gone almost straight east. The stars will show us. We'll see them all in this cold air. We're finally going to see stars, Wistala.\"\n\n\"I'd rather never see stars and sleep tonight between Jizara and M\u2014\"\n\n\"I know.\" Auron said, gently clasping her snout shut with lip-covered teeth.\n\nThe stars were cold and remote, and the moon hung in the sky like the shining edge on a dwarf-ax. Auron had no heart for them, after using them as Father had taught him to find north. All he had to do was follow the nose of the Bowing Dragon. He paid homage to Susiron, the center star, the one thing in all of the Creation that never changed.\n\nOnce you've fixed on your star, you'll know where you are for the rest of your life, he remembered Father saying in one of his oracular moods. But had he been talking of Susiron? There was still so much Father hadn't taught him. Like what to say to a scared hatchling to comfort her, when his own gut was a cold shell of fear.\n\nOr how to find and kill dwarves!\n\nSomething hot started in his chest, just where his long muscles could squeeze it.\n\nThey woke with sinews knotted: limbs, necks, and tails equally wound up. A light dusting of snow had come just before dawn.\n\n\"Brother!\"\n\nAuron startled. \"What?\"\n\nWistala touched the tip of her nose to his in relief. \"You're all white. I thought you had bled to death. I've never seen you anything but gray, or green when you sit on Mother.\"\n\n\"I didn't know I was doing it.\"\n\nWistala looked back up at the shelf they had descended from yesterday. \"Did Mother put a dream in your head?\" Wistala asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then she's dead.\"\n\n\"We don't know that. Maybe she needs us nearby to tell us dreams.\" Auron still felt tired, doubly so with this cold ache slowing his movements. Without Mother feeding him stories as he slept, he passed the night lightly, waking at creaks from the crooked pines.\n\n\"Look, Auron,\" Wistala whispered. \"In the rocks. Hungry?\"\n\nNimble animals moved along the edges of the heights above the tree line, pawing away snow and pulling up fodder from tiny reservoirs of soil between the rocks. They had horns and odd, tufted little tails that flicked this way and that in a lively fashion. Auron sniffed the air: the animals were upwind. The scent made his mouth water.\n\n\"Hoof-feet. I think those are goats. After them, Wistala!\"\n\n\"Auron!\"\n\nAuron slithered between the rocks, moving to the food as fast as he could. A long-horned goat blatted an alarm, and their white fur flashed as they bounced from stone to stone, heading for the trees. Auron reached the ground where they had been feeding, but not even echoes of their flight reached him.\n\nWistala joined him at the tree line, her scales bristling. \"Scents and vents! You're hopeless.\"\n\nThe goat smell all around only made Auron all the hungrier. He lashed his tail petulantly. \"What should I have done? We need food.\"\n\n\"Young drakes! Twice the muscle and half the sense of drakka. We were downwind. They would have fed their way right to us, perhaps. You're not fit to hunt anything but slugs.\"\n\n\"Am too.\"\n\n\"Then where's your kill?\"\n\n\"I didn't know they could run so fast,\" Auron said after a moment's thought.\n\n\"Thank the Spirits for rats and bats that die and fall to the cavern floor, then.\"\n\n\"If I could fly, I'd find us food. Dead beasts, beached whales, carcasses bears have buried till they're tender. I'd drive wolves away from their kills. Or best of all, a battlefield feast. That's what Father ate before he flew off with Mother.\"\n\n\"I can hardly stop my mouth watering,\" Wistala said, clamping her nostrils shut. \"If cold and covered with flies is your taste, so be it. I'm going to find us something fresh and warm. Rest somewhere out of the wind, and wait here.\"\n\nShe moved off down the slope, and Auron curled up among the roots of a pine, where he watched his scales change color as the sun climbed up the sky and moved the shadows on his back.\n\nWistala returned, dismayed. \"I almost got some big-footed eary hopper. Only a couple mouthfuls if I had, but anything sounds good now.\"\n\n\"Almost\" won't fill our bellies, Auron was about to say, but thought better of it. His sister looked to be close to tears as it was. \"A mountain hare?\" he asked.\n\n\"Perhaps. It jumped at the last moment and ran like an arrow. An arrow that zigzags. It turned quick as thinking. We need to eat. What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it. You'll get one another time. Let's try to find the western entrance. We'll be able to smell where he goes, if nothing else.\"\n\n\"There was a herd of deer in a gully, but they have ears like dragons. I think they even smelled me downwind. Every time I crept up, they began to move away. I'm sure they can outrun me. I found a perch, but they never fed near enough to it, and now it's getting dark.\"\n\n\"Show me this gully,\" Auron said.\n\nThey moved into thicker stands of timber, interspersed with marsh meadow. Snow still hid in shaded areas under timber, but yellow and blue wildflowers sprouted bright in the sunny spots.\n\nThe gully coursed down the mountainside, deepening as it descended. Half-exposed mossy rocks stood out from its sides, like the bumps in Father's pebbled underbelly.\n\n\"Softly now, Auron,\" Wistala said with her mind. He followed as she crept from rock to rock on the side of the gully.\n\n\"There.\" It took Auron a moment to know what she was talking about. A wide-antlered deer stood atop the gully, staring straight at them. Auron twitched, but Wistala put her tail across his neck.\n\n\"They can run longer and faster than us. One leap\u2014that's all you get with deer,\" Wistala echoed Mother's words to him. Her mind felt so like Mother's; it made his hearts hurt.\n\nShe continued. \"If I come any closer, he walks away, always watching me. I don't dare walk directly at him, but even at an angle he moves all of them downhill. We can't see the herd now, because they're around the bend he's standing on.\"\n\n\"Wistala, can you find your way lower down the gully? Back out and go around. In a big loop?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\n\"You're good at finding a perch. Get to one over the gully, and I'll bring them to you.\"\n\n\"You mean like... like,\" she thought, forming a mental picture of a shepherd moving his flock when the word escaped her.\n\n\"Like I'm herding them. Exactly.\"\n\nShe looked around. \"Give me until when the sun rests on that dead tree branch. Drive them then. Can you hold down your hunger until then?\"\n\n\"I'll do my best.\"\n\nShe brushed him with her nose. \"It'll have to do. Remember, don't go right to him or he'll run. Angles, angles.\"\n\n\"Get going\u2014I'm trembling already.\"\n\nHe stayed in her mind until she was out of range, getting the feeling for how she moved among the trees, taking advantage of every deadfall and stump. Why hadn't Mother taught him to move like that?\n\nHe waited, watching the sun. The stag had plans of his own, and vanished below the ridgeline. Auron tried to get the sun's angle right and crept down the gully, turning color at every pause. He crept under a boulder's shadow, turning half-white to match the snow beneath, and caught sight of the stag. It had crossed over to the other rim of the gully, in the direction Wistala had gone. He glimpsed the herd now and again. The deer seemed to vanish against the trees when not moving.\n\nHe hoped they wouldn't wander down the gully of their own accord before Wistala was ready. But the herd left the shelter and came to a meadow where rich new grass already stood thick on the ground. Auron peeped an eye up over the edge of the gully and watched. The canny stag, after a long look at the meadow, moved to put himself downwind of his females and offspring again.\n\nAuron got a flash of a mental picture. Faint, it faded in an instant, but he had the impression of Wistala being above the gully.\n\nHe ventured out into the meadow, not moving toward the herd but creeping along the tree line, feet plunging into the frigid water of a mountain marsh. Deer heads came up, ears twitching, and as one the herd returned to the gully. Auron angled back for the place he had last seen the stag. He heard the deer moving down the gully. If he could just keep\u2014 The stag exploded from almost beneath his feet, bounding down the slope as if he were made of lighting. The other deer leaped away, fawns already able to keep up with their mothers even in flight, white tails flashing in a confusing mix of directions. Auron had no choice but to run in pursuit.\n\nHe scuttled forward in a dragon dash. In open ground, he might have had the stag, but the trees made his sprint a clumsy one. He ran along as best he could after the first burst, but the sounds of the deer faded into the woods. Wistala would be heartbroken, they would go hungry for another day\u2014and it was his fault.\n\n\"Auuuuu-ron!\" he heard a high, trilling call of his young sister. \"Blood and mud, I've killed!\"\n\nNew vigor in his limbs at the thought of blood-warm food, Auron located on the sound. Wistala was already dragging the carcass up a grandfather of pines, the still-twitching body of a yearling buck fully her own size in her jaws. Auron looked at the kicked-up ground where she had pounced from the hundred-limbed tree.\n\n\"What are you carrying it up there for?\"\n\n\"You want to fight wolves for your dinner?\"\n\nAuron's stood up tall on his legs, his lips pulling back to reveal the full length of his hatchling teeth. \"I'd like to see them try, hungry as I am.\"\n\n\"Then get up here and join me.\"\n\nHe coiled and sprang up to her place on the bloody trunk in a single leap. She hung the kill in the crotch of a tree. Together, they ate.\n\nI feel like we're going back up the mountain,\" Wistala said the next day.\n\nThe mountains marched north to the horizon, but to the south the ground was lower, a gap in the mountains' teethlike wall. They had been traveling since dawn, watching out for each other by taking turns. While Wistala rested, Auron would move through the pine woods until he was about to lose sight of her. Then he would jump up a tree and keep watch while she caught up and then went ahead until she could hardly make him out.\n\n\"We need to cross over to the west. This is the easiest way.\"\n\nWistala snorted. \"Easiest? I'd hate to try the hardest. I don't want to leave the trees, Auron. We'll still need to hunt.\"\n\nAuron aligned her head with his, pointing to a bare ridge with their noses. \"When we get to that spot, we'll be able to see west.\"\n\n\"You know this how?\"\n\n\"Mind-pictures from Father.\"\n\n\"Father hardly gave us any. Oh, I wish we had our wings.\"\n\n\"Wishing won't get us up the hill.\"\n\n\"I never said any such thing\u2014Wait, Auron, there's something ahead.\"\n\nAuron heard it, too. They hugged tree trunks, pressing their bodies flat to the scabby-barked boles. Auron put himself toward the sound of pine needles being crunched underfoot, with Wistala on the other side of the trunk. He turned a deep brown and kept one eye open. His sister touched his tail with the tip of hers.\n\nA flat-faced mountain of muscle and fur appeared, moving on all fours. It picked up a hint of their scent and stopped, turning its colossal head to and fro with its short snout in the air.\n\n\"Bear. Alone,\" Auron thought to her.\n\n\"Dragons can't eat bears.\"\n\n\"Not dragons our size. You should see this thing. If we climbed a tree to get away, it would just push it down.\"\n\n\"It doesn't know we're little, though. Do we smell like little dragons or big dragons?\"\n\n\"How should I know?\"\n\n\"We're going to find out, brother.\" Auron heard a faint sound from the other side of the tree, like a spill of rain.\n\nThe bear's head turned at the sound, wizened eyes looking directly at their tree.\n\n\"That's done it\u2014he knows where we are,\" Auron thought. \"What a time to panic.\"\n\n\"I didn't panic.\"\n\nAuron's sharp eyes saw the bear's nostrils twitch. It stood up on its hind legs and sniffed. It came to the ground, turned, and ran. Auron watched it head for thick timber in its odd, lolloping run.\n\nWistala craned her long neck around the tree and watched it go. \"We smell like big dragons,\" she said.\n\nAuron rubbed his snout against his sister's. \"Do you think I'll have my own song to sing?\"\n\nWistala still searched the tree line for signs of the bear. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"Will I ever be as great a dragon as Father?\"\n\nShe blinked as she thought. \"You're smart and careful.\"\n\n\"But will a dragonelle want me? My skin doesn't shine, I'm thin\u2014\"\n\n\"Remember what Mother said. It's a gift in a way\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't remind me of Mother. And Mother's not a dragonelle. Who would mate with me? You're lucky.\"\n\n\"Lucky?\" she cocked her head, startling a red-winged bird into flight from the branch above.\n\n\"You're normal.\"\n\n\"Drakka don't have it any easier. Harder, in some ways. Mother told us there are only a few males left. They die in wars, in the nest, or in challenges over territory. Stupid fights.\"\n\nAuron didn't remember Mother saying any such thing, but she had spent more time with his sisters. \"So even a gray\u2014?\"\n\nHis sister leaned against him, and he felt the pleasant prickle of her scales. \"Many dragonelles go mateless their whole lives. Don't be foolish about your fights, you know\u2014\"\n\n\"Your wrath shouldn't win,\" Auron supplied.\n\n\"Exactly. And you're quick. You swing your neck and your tail so fast sometimes. It's quite impressive. Even to a sister who knows all your faults. You'll have a mate and a clutch to be proud of one day, I'm sure, and raise a sii of clutch champions like yourself.\"\n\nAuron felt his skin go warm at the praise.\n\n\"Oh, quit prruming,\" Wistala said. \"First we've got to live until our wings emerge. That's years off, and we still have to find Father.\"\n\nA mountain is the least pleasant place to be in a thunderstorm. They had just reached the ridge as twilight began. From its heights, they saw storm clouds sweeping up from the horizon in a rolling line, like ranks of an advancing army from one of Father's mind-pictures.\n\nAuron didn't know much about weather, but the air had an ominous tang to it, and there was a rumbling in the distance, as if mountains were falling apart far away. Something about the air and the sound made him want to get underground. But he had his look at the landscape. Details to the west were hazy, but far to the south, Auron could see a white-watered river, and more mountains, blue lumps on the far side of the river.\n\n\"I think we should get off this ridge,\" he said. Another wooded valley stood below them.\n\nWistala agreed, but they did not make it back into the trees before a battle between Air and Water broke out above their heads. Air pushed up from the west, moaning and shrieking out her anger, and Water tried to stop her by hurling sheets of rain. They pitted Lighting and Thunder against each other, lighting the valley with flashes.\n\nThe two hatchlings couldn't get under anything, but they did wedge themselves between a pair of boulders to keep out of the worst of the wind. They pulled down their water-lids over their eyes, which blurred their vision.\n\n\"It sounds like the end of the world,\" Wistala said, shivering against him.\n\n\"The Upper World needs the rain. It keeps everything refreshed,\" he said, tucking her head against his flank.\n\n\"I hate the Upper World! It's all noise and danger. Everything can see me from far away, and there's nowhere dark to hide.\"\n\nAuron stuck out his tongue. He curved it so the forks made a channel for the rainfall to run down. \"But taste this water, Wistala.\"\n\nShe glared at him, her eyes clouded by the water-lids. \"I'm not thirsty.\"\n\n\"Taste it anyway.\"\n\nThe tip of her tongue flicked out. \"There. Happy now? What's\u2014?\" She paused, and stuck out her tongue a second time, then a third. \"Threat and wet, this is rather good.\"\n\n\"Better than cave water.\"\n\nThey startled at every flash of lightning, and their necks bobbed down at each chorus of thunder, but they stood firm with tongues out, defying the storm, enjoying the trickle of rainwater.\n\nThe worst of Air and Water's fight passed on over their heads, though the storm still blew as if all the wind in the world were trying to rush through the river gap. Real night fell, but less cold than those they had passed the previous two. Rather than making them wet and uncomfortable, the rain improved Wistala's mood, for it flushed the accumulated dirt away from under her scales. She rolled and arched in the softer, after-storm rain, prruming. Auron, with no twigs or pebbles rubbing under his scales to trouble him, merely felt clean and refreshed.\n\nThey awoke the next morning with just enough of an appetite to make a hunt feel like a pleasant necessity. After finding another group of goats in the heights, they reversed their method with the deer. This time Wistala drove the goats toward Auron, who hugged the side of a rock with an eye cocked to the game and his body tinted a perfect match for the slate-colored stone. A goat caught his scent too late; Auron's dragon dash brought it down, though Auron took a kick in his voicebox for the trouble. It turned out to be a stringy old billy, but the satisfaction that their hunting system worked so well flavored the tough meat with the zest of accomplishment.\n\nIt would have been an easier dinner yet, had they pounced on the horses corralled under the trees.\n\nThirty-seven horses sharing a small space\u2014Auron counted them using his fingers singly and toes to keep score of groups of eight fingers\u2014made an easy scent trail to follow. What had Father told and shown him about horses? Men armored them and rode them into battle. Elves used them to move from one place to another quickly, but fought on their feet. Dwarves harnessed them to pull wagons or carry packs, blighters ate them, and dragons frightened them. It took an exceptionally good rider to stay saddled when facing a dragon.\n\nAfter counting the horses, he backed away as slow as a winter cave slug. He turned to find Wistala.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked, sensing danger in his caution.\n\n\"Horses. Not wild\u2014someone has caught them between downed trees.\"\n\n\"And just left them? We'll have an easy meal, then.\"\n\n\"I don't care for the look of it. All those horses and no one around.\"\n\nShe sniffed the air. \"Are you sure of that, Auron? I smell a cold fire.\"\n\n\"I did, too, but I saw no hominids.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean they weren't there. Sneak and peek, elves hide so well, they look like tree limbs, until they put an arrow in your eye.\"\n\n\"Want to take a look yourself?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"No, I'll keep my eyes, thank you. Let's circle round.\"\n\n\"Wistala, this morning when the sun rose, we were in the shadow of the mountain we came out of. The west tunnel must be here somewhere.\"\n\n\"High, do you think? So that only a dragon could fly in or out?\"\n\n\"I wonder. Remember the bats? It would have to be near where they could go out and hunt at night. The bats used the west tunnel, I'm sure of that.\"\n\n\"Mother said the blighters used to live in the cave. Maybe they had a lower entrance the bats used.\"\n\n\"It won't hurt to go up the mountain a little. To some of the higher meadows. I don't want to be in these trees if there are elves hunting.\"\n\nHis sister nodded, and they raised their noses in the air until they were sure of the direction of the wind. It was blowing out of the northwest. They couldn't travel right into it to let the air carry a warning; the best they could do was cut across it. They crept along low, keeping their bellies to the ground, slithering through underbrush when they could.\n\nThey gained a high meadow. The warm western sun and spring air had reduced the snow to clumps of ice beneath the beds of pine needles or in the shade of rocks. Wistala's green scales and his chameleon-like coloring made Auron confident of crossing the meadows safely. He hoped to get to a prominence, a splinter of the mountain that had fallen away and pointed like a claw at the setting sun \"Auron! Auron... look.\"\n\nHe followed her gaze up. A dra\u2014Father! Father was flying in from the southwest. He came down in two great loops, prey carried in each sii.\n\nAuron dashed across the field for the stone projection. He'd turn himself yellow as the sun if he could, if it would just get Father to look down.\n\nThe dragon's eyes were elsewhere. He disappeared behind the shoulder of the mountain. Auron got up to the outcropping, just enough to read Father's mind: he was exhausted from long flight, burdened with food. Auron tried to broadcast danger with every thought in his brain, but by the time he reached the perch, all he could see was Father's tail disappearing into a cave shaped like the half-moon.\n\nA cascade of broken rock stood below the cave mouth, as if the mountain had vomited its innards from that aperture. Remnants of what Auron guessed to be battlements stood all around. The ruins stood like teeth around the edges of the mouth, broken teeth shattered by some blow years ago. Leveled walls, fallen towers, and debris-filled ditches were overgrown with grass and lichen; mountain creepers hung their tresses to curtain the cave.\n\nAuron waited at the prominence. He couldn't feel Father's mind anymore. Wistala climbed up on the slab with him, so she just poked her head over the edge.\n\n\"Father didn't see me,\" he told her.\n\nWistala gulped anxiously.\n\nA terrible roar came from the cave. Even louder was the thought projection from Father...\n\nBetrayed! The Wheel of Fire! Auron got a flash of mind-pictures, dwarves and some kind of cliff-hugging buildings at the edge of a mountain lake.\n\nSounds of battle echoed from the cave. Auron caught the faint flash of light from within. Dragon fire! Auron felt his heart beat with excitement at the thought of dwarves roasting in dragon fire.\n\n\"Ku! Ku! Kuuuuu!\" echoed dwarf voices.\n\nFather reappeared at the cave mouth, his face a black mass of soot, flames still licking from the sides of his mouth. He held his near foreleg tight to his body, where blood poured from his forejoint. Spears stuck from his neck in a gory collar. Father spread his wings. Auron saw a dwarf somehow clinging to his back, knees locked on Father's armored spinal ridge, hacking at the base of the dragon's neck with a crimson-painted ax. Father reared up on his hind legs, smashing the dwarf into a smear on the cavern roof.\n\nWistala couldn't watch. She threw herself off the prominence and into the meadow, crying.\n\nA horn sounded.\n\nFather's mind was a iron wall of pain. Before he could flap his wings, bundles of grass flipped up; Auron saw spears and bows in the hands of pale-skinned elves with camouflaged shields. Arrows and spears sang as they tore through the air, some burning as they flew. Others above the cave popped up to empty baskets on Father, round glass globules that glittered in the setting sun as they fell.\n\n\"Above you!\" Auron trumpeted, putting every ounce of wind from his long lungs into the shout. His voice cracked in his first dragon roar.\n\nAs Father twisted to look up, many of the weapons from below struck his scales. The globules hit him and shattered, and smoke came from where they struck. Auron felt the pain so clearly that he rolled into a ball.\n\nBut Father flew. He flapped to the sky under a rain of spears and turned north.\n\nThe elves who didn't watch the fleeing dragon turned to look at Auron.\n\nThe elves sang to each other, clear-voiced notes echoing between wood and ruin. Mother had imprinted him with some tongues, but he did not know elven song-calls. Auron made a decision as he caught a last glint of Father's scales before he disappeared into the clouds.\n\n\"Wistala, lie flat. The elves are coming; I'm going to make myself seen to them. They'll chase me for a while, maybe a long while. You're going to have to go north alone.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nAuron could hear hoofbeats from the woods below them. \"No time!\" he thought. \"Go north. I think Father is going to the city of the Wheel of Fire dwarves. It's built into the side of a mountain, next to a lake.\" Auron did his best to send the mind-picture he got from Father. \"It's not far, an hour or two's flight for him, two days' journey for you. Don't go anywhere near the cave\u2014it's crawling with elves. Can you?\"\n\n\"Blades and raids, let's fly. I want us to be with each other, no matter what.\"\n\n\"One of us has to make it, Wistala. You hunt better than I. You have a chance of making it alone in the wilderness.\"\n\n\"I don't know the way!\" she thought, despair clouding her mind and making her words hard to read.\n\n\"Follow the mountains north. You can't miss this lake\u2014it's on this side of the mountains and very big.\"\n\nAuron craned his neck over the outcropping one last time, looking at the elves in the ruins. A few were running toward his overlook, carrying spears and bundles. More hoofbeats came from the forest, and he saw bareback elves leaping their horses up the slope toward their meadow. He touched his nose to Wistala's, shoving his sister into a crevice with his body.\n\n\"Go to Father. Follow the Bowing Dragon. Follow Susiron. Father is there!\"\n\n\"Auron, I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, you can. Don't waste time.\" He trotted out into the meadow, arcing down for the pine woods. Lithe elves ran among the horses. A moon-haired rider in a long cape hanging almost to the hooves of his horse blew a silver horn. Other horns answered from the pine woods.\n\n\"You're brave, brave, brave-and-good-and-I-can't\u2014,\" Wistala mind-called faintly.\n\n\"Good-bye, sister,\" Auron thought. If there were elves in the pine woods, he'd best go up, among the rocks. Horses couldn't climb rocks as well as he. Neither could elves, probably.\n\nRunning was hard. Auron only had two speeds: a sprint and a dog-trot. Neither would serve him now: the sprint would exhaust him, and the riding elves would catch him if he trotted. He did the best he could, lengthening the stride of his trot and running like a cat, using both his sii and saa in pairs.\n\nThe meadow gave way to a tangle of boulders. Auron put the biggest ones he could find between himself and his pursuers.\n\nThe elves jumped from their horses at the edge of the boulders, spinning as light and landing as soft as windblown leaves.\n\nA hawk, and then another, swooped in from overhead. They dived at him, and he went flat as metal-sheathed talons cut the air above him. The hawks flapped skyward again and circled above him.\n\nHe clung to the side of a rock, panting. The hawks weren't fooled, and they tightened their circle, screaming abuse in bird speech: \"Hey-ya-ya hatchling! Your hide will be made into a chair for my keeper's sit-upon!\"\n\n\"Aiyeek! Where are your wings? Where is your fire? Are you a dragon or an overgrown skink?\"\n\nThe elves were trilling closer now. Auron dashed, climbing farther. He saw a running elf, its hair thick with leaves, out of the corner of his eye. The elf let out a shriek like an angry falcon and pointed with its spear.\n\n\"Hey-ya-ya hatchling, you're in for it now! The riders are in the rocks with you.\"\n\nAuron hoped one of the hawks would swoop low enough for him to bite. He kept climbing, watching elves to either side hop from rock-top to rock-top, nimble as the mountain goats he had hunted with\u2014 Wistala! He had to prolong the chase, whatever the cost. She was probably going up the mountain, and he was putting the elves too near her. The longer he could flee, the better her chances. The sun was nearly down and in the dark, both of them could see better than the elves. He took a moment to catch his breath and sniffed the air to locate the horses.\n\nAnother song-cry, and something flew through the air. It shattered among the rocks like ice cracking, and Auron caught a whiff of burning in his nostrils\u2014but no flame came with it.\n\nHe didn't wait to find out what it was. He slithered back down the hill toward the scent of horses. He felt light, detached, muddle-minded. Elven magic clouded his will. He suddenly longed for sleep.\n\nAn elf stepped out of the shadows, hurling a spear at him with a savage yip. It was a vicious, two-pointed weapon with glittering barbs at its points. Auron whipsawed his spine to avoid it and rushed between the elf's stance, knocking the pale hominid down in his passage. He scrambled up a tall boulder.\n\nThe gathered horses he and Wistala had first happened upon stood below, stamping in nervousness at his odor.\n\nHe leaped down from the rocks onto the back of a horse, claws extended. The horseholders dropped reins to draw their knives. Auron bit and clawed to either side, a fighting daemon in the half-dark. The horses screamed their pain and panic.\n\nThe one he clung atop bucked him off, kicking another, and the ranks of horses turned as one and galloped away from the rocks. Auron twisted in the air and landed on his feet, running after them in his best dragon dash\u2014squawking.\n\nSo began a strange three-part chase across the mountain meadow. One horseholder managed to leap atop his mount, trying to cut off the stampede, but the horses would not be slowed on a night of alarm, blood, and dragon scent. Then came little Auron, not even half the weight of the smallest pack pony, trying to make up in noise what he lacked in size. Elves ran behind him, answering musical instructions whistled by the one in the great cape.\n\nAuron's sprint gave out as he neared the trees. He saw a deep shadow beneath a pile of boulders. Perhaps a cave entrance? Underground he would have the advantage against the elves, especially if the cave were tight.\n\nHis lungs felt like they were filled with dragon fire. He shot under the overhanging rock, but found only cold stone where the slab met the mountainside. It could still be called a cave, but only a tiny one added as an afterthought in the forming of the world.\n\nIt was cramped, but he was just able to turn himself in the space between the overhang and the rock below. He caught his breath and watched the advance of torchlight; the elves had started fires to aid their hunt for him and their horses. The confusing fog from the elf magic cleared. Auron shrank back into the crevice, pressing himself as flat as possible, his scaleless skin coal black. He'd sell his life dear. Most important, Wistala would get away. Mother's clutch would not all die. Wistala would win through; she had more skill and sense than he ever credited her with on the egg shelf. He could do nothing for his mother and Jizara against the dwarves, but he'd help Wistala make it out of reach of these hunting elves yet.\n\nHe might as well have left a lighted trail for the elves; they gathered around the overhang, whispering to each other. One, greatly daring, got on his hands and knees to look beneath the stone, torch held in front of him. Auron rushed forward, and the elf dropped the torch, sending it spinning as he passed it, biting at the probing face.\n\nThe elves made a clucking noise together. Auron pressed himself to the back of the cave, trembling. No spearpoints probed for him, as he expected. Instead they threw more crystals into the crevice-cave, crystals that shattered and released the nose-searing gas. Auron knew this time to clamp his nostrils and mouth shut, and he shot out from the overhang. He'd break through the ring of elves or die fighting.\n\nHe came out of the cave, not noticing the tree roots that magically appeared at the end of the overhang. He became tangled up in them. The more he tried to get through, the less he could thrash. His limbs were encumbered by vine growths; then he was stuck. Netted!\n\nA two-pointed spear stabbed at his neck, striking at either side. He thrashed his head back and forth, and another pinioned him just behind his crest. The elves chirped at each other in their quick tongue, and the magic mist poured out from the cave, clinging to the ground like slow-flowing water. It washed over him, and he held his breath for as long as he could, wiggling his hindquarters. He finally took the searing draft into his lungs. As consciousness faded, he begged of his mother's guiding spirit forgiveness for not looking after Wistala better.\n\nHe, the Champion of the Clutch, died without killing a single enemy in battle! What would Father say?\n\nHe woke to pain. He grew aware of specifics as he opened and tried to see through gummy eyes: nausea and a dirty feeling around his hindquarters. His limbs burned cold.\n\nIt was a misty dawn. Not quite fog, not quite drizzle, the weather washed out the color from the landscape, and everything hovered gray and indistinct between earth and sky. How was it that he still lived?\n\nHe looked down his nose. Three leather bands, reinforced by rivets and rods of metal, clamped his mouth shut. The one nearest his nostrils had a brass emblem on it. He shifted his eyes left and right. Stout wooden objects like the dwarves' ladders were all around him: one underneath and two joined just above his spinal crest. He searched his mind for the word... like cave... cage. He was caged.\n\nThe elves must have felt the cage was not enough, because his limbs were pressed tight against his side and his claws were wrapped in linked chain and leather. He moved his head as much as he could, and caught sight of another leather band across his back. He was in some kind of harness. It barely allowed him to breathe; real movement was impossible.\n\nOutside the cage he saw half-circles of wood to either side. It took him a moment to realize he was under a wagon. Though he couldn't see much, he could smell perfectly, and he learned all he needed to know that way. Horses all around, dwarves and elves intermixed, and a musky smell of wet fur, perhaps wolves or dogs. He smelled fire and something else, a scent that set him all atremble: meat cooking. He knew for certain what that was; Father had brought home charred dinners many times. His appetite was the only thing free, and it plagued him.\n\nHis hearing also worked.\n\n\"About time for the swag to be divided, heh?\" a guttural, and therefore Dwarvish, voice said from behind a veil of linked rings. Do dwarves never show their faces? The hominids spoke Parl, a simple language of trade and diplomacy that even Father understood.\n\n\"There'll be food tonight,\" an elf said, making Auron's heart skip a beat. Was he being saved for something else? \"Join us, ally. The menace of the Iwensi pass has been driven away. Our flocks and forests are safe again. Your brothers to the south will rejoice when they hear the news.\"\n\n\"Who gives a flock what you celebrate? And as for those toll-takers on the falls, they can count their coin and rot. The Burning Wheel have bigger slugs to fry. Though I wish we'd seen a better haul here. Dragon hoard, indeed!\"\n\n\"This is not the fault of my people,\" a different elf said, higher pitched than the first. A female? Her face lay shadowed within the cowl of a great cloak. \"With live young dragons commanding the price they do, had we come away with more than one\u2014\"\n\n\"It's been bad luck all around. Even this one\u2014it's more of an overgrown lizard than a dragon. Are you sure of it?\"\n\n\"It's a young dragon, less than a year out of the egg,\" the elf said.\n\n\"What's wrong with him? Do they all turn the color of dead twigs when restrained?\"\n\n\"I've heard of scaleless dragons, but I've seen few enough, praise Helo, to know for sure. No doubt he still has some growing to do,\" the female elf said.\n\n\"Save it for haggling on the quay, Hazeleye. You and Oakroot's bunch are welcome to him. He's not worth more'n four hundred to the Burning Wheel.\"\n\n\"Four hundred gold pieces for a live\u2014?\"\n\n\"Four hundred silver, elf.\"\n\n\"Is this a joke?\" the male elf broke in.\n\n\"Do you see me smiling?\"\n\n\"I don't see anything but a beery beard with a lot of soup rotting in it.\"\n\n\"Enough, enough, good people,\" interjected the female Auron had heard called Hazeleye. \"Let's leave this to the professional bargainers. We'll just trust each to get the best deal to be shared among us poor soldiers.\"\n\n\"The dwarves killed a hatchling by her mother,\" yet another elf argued, and Auron had to shut his eyes. The last sight he'd had of Jizara, clinging to Mother's leg, still lived and moved in his brain. He shed tears that joined the mist wetting the meadow grass. \"I saw the body as we hauled up the hoard. By rights they should pay us for that.\"\n\nThe dwarf sprang to his feet with a clatter of metal plates. \"Insults! From the experts at killing dragons who let the bronze get away, no less.\"\n\n\"The bargainers, the bargainers, let them work it out. They meet anon,\" Hazeleye's delicate voice said, quieting the grumblings of elf and dwarf alike.\n\nAuron did not know what the overland wagon journey was like for the elves, but for a hatchling caged and bound, it was torment. After parting with the dwarves, with more hard words from each side about being robbed by the other, the elves put him in the back of the wagon he had been under. They faced him to the rear. He could see just another wagon, pulled by some kind of wide-set cattle that smelled delicious, plodding along in the wake of his conveyance. His only relief from the torture of cut-off circulation was to turn on his side or back and allow the blood to travel at a different angle.\n\nAuron had plenty of time to examine the emblem on the band around his jaw. His egg horn raised the band of leather enough that the little bronze circle faced him like an opponent across his pebbled length of snout.\n\nIt was a little figure of a man, arms and legs outstretched so they touched a perfect circle around the figure. The emblem showed little workmanship; there were no marks of tooling, so Auron assumed it must have been poured or stamped from a mold. The little faceless figure stood always in his vision as though waving madly, taunting him. Even sleep brought no escape. He danced through Auron's unhappy dreams, freed from the golden circle to stamp and gesticulate and throw sparkling orbs at fleeing hatchlings.\n\nAs if the traveling was not harsh enough, each morning and night they fed him by shoving a length of stiffened leather into one of his nostrils. It had been sewn and hardened into a tube thanks to some manner of glazing. The agonizing process was concluded by the elves pouring a mixture of fresh blood and water down the hose, and he had no choice but to hold his breath and gulp. He sometimes choked. Once he lost consciousness, and woke to two strong elves holding him up by his tail and bouncing him up and down as the liquid drained from between his clamped teeth.\n\n\"Do you have to do it all at once, Jayflight?\" the one called Hazeleye said one evening. She knelt beside the cage and watched Auron wheeze and thrash. \"Give him a chance to breathe, would you?\" She looked at him with a tear in her one clear eye; a patch stood at the midpoint of a great scar running down her face on the other side of her broken nose.\n\n\"You're not of our clan, Haz. You speak hardly a dozen words of our tongue. How do you know how we've suffered from the dragons in the Red Mountains' dales? Try keeping your flocks and herds with a grown one of these around. Then tell me about giving them a chance.\"\n\nShe reached out and touched his neck. Her skin was greasy compared with his dry hide. He felt dirty where she placed her hand. \"A suffocated hatchling won't bring us much in trade. We can't even get a purse of silver for this one's hide. There's no market for aphrodisiacs from such a young one. Some magiker might want his bones, but that won't replace your stolen sheep after we've had our cut.\"\n\nShe spoke into his ear, her tone soft, but he couldn't understand the words. One sounded like it might be sea, but he couldn't be sure. She looked up again and returned to her conversation. \"I can't bear seeing any creature tortured. Even dragons.\"\n\nThe others just shook their heads and laughed.\n\nThe sea. Auron had heard of it, had seen his parents' visions of soaring above its jagged coastline on their mating flight. His first real sight of it was as a choppy bay seen through the angled bars of a cage.\n\nIt was mostly obscured by something made of wood, the size of a full-grown dragon floating upside down with its claws pointing in the air. Two trees grew out of the center of the construct, but they were striped bare of branch, twig, and leaf. It must be a ship: the wooden wings that hominids used to cross water. Shirtless men in loose pants stood around, waiting to pull on lines, or helped dwarves carry more constructs on board. All around was man-laid stone, man-cut wood, man-flattened earth. Only the birds retained their natural shape, though Auron wondered if men colored them white to make them more pleasing to the eye against the bright sky.\n\nHe smelled the ocean, and he didn't like it. It smelled like rotted fish and stagnant marsh, overlaid with salt.\n\nFour dwarves picked up his cage, one at each corner, and walked up a ramp to the ship. Auron's limbs had more mobility; he had lost weight during the wagon ride, and his circulation flowed more freely. It was the closest he had been to comfortable since capture. As he passed along the deck, Auron got his first look at the limitless horizon of the sea, a precise line dividing the world in two. They set Auron down on deck, and he felt the surface move in the harbor. It was a pleasant feeling, bringing memories of his dreams of flight.\n\n\"Take the dragon below,\" he heard the now-familiar voice of Hazeleye order.\n\n\"What, to the hold? He's riding on deck with the horses\u2014we have enough cleaning to do as is.\"\n\n\"He'll die of thirst in this sun. Below, or by Helo, I'll take it to the captain or find another ship.\" She climbed up onto the high deck at the back of the ship and looked out at the quay with her hand shielding the sun from her eyes.\n\n\"Ugly elf-witch,\" one of the sailors muttered to the other as they picked Auron up. They attached a line to his cage and lowered him into the dark of the hold. Musty-smelling netting lay everywhere: bound around cargo, piled on the floor, hanging limp from the ceiling. They ensnared Auron in another layer of it, securing his cage to the ship's side, as if the leather bands and cage weren't enough to keep him captive. Auron smelled rat urine.\n\nHe waited a day, a night, and another day in the stuffy hold. Rats nibbled at the sore spots the leather had made on his hide. Hazeleye fed him, and cleaned him by spraying seawater into his cage. The water disappeared into some kind of gutter at the wall of the ship.\n\n\"I'd give you some chicken if I dared take your bands off,\" she said, pouring a little blood-mixture into the nasal tube. He still hated the tube. He felt as though he were starving anyway, so he might as well starve without having a piece of leather threaded through his snout twice daily. No matter how much he struggled and glared, she persisted in her feedings.\n\nTwo other hatchlings arrived, caged as he was. One was hardly out of the shell, a young silver dragon with a barely healed wound where its egg tooth had been. It was wan and looked at him miserably. The other was green, a dragonelle.\n\nAuron made mind contact with the young male, and got such a wave of confused anguish that he had to break off the conversation before it even started. He read all its history in a flash. The dragon had been hatched in captivity, had never known the smell of its mother or the proud eye of its father. Just some brute of a blighter who had cared for it, and poorly at that. It was harder to know the mind of the female; she must have been a more distant relation. If they could only speak!\n\nHe tried again, simplifying his thoughts to her, trying to remove emotions, mind-pictures, ideas, anything but bare words.\n\n\"You... name?\"\n\n\"Not... as... such.\"\n\nNot as such? What did that mean?\n\n\"I Auron. I gray. Father AuRel. Father bronze. Your name?\"\n\n\"Not... as... such.\"\n\nAuron thumped his tail against the deck. Wasn't she paying attention? \"What?\"\n\n\"Not as such.\"\n\nAuron broke it off and rotated his neck so his eyes faced the wall. But for some reason, he felt better. Just the smell of other dragons, the feel of their minds, comforted him. In some ways, wretched as he was, he had it better than they. The dragonelle didn't have the knack of mind-speech, and as for the poor young male, fresh from the egg, he was utterly lost. At least Auron had known his mother and father, his sisters. He had seen dragons and knew what he was.\n\nHazeleye and another elf came into the hold, two ship men trailing behind. The male bore a box. He set it carefully on deck and opened it. Sawdust spilled out onto the floor, Auron sniffed the distinctive dry odor. The ivory tip of a dragon egg could be seen within.\n\nThe elves spoke for a moment; Hazeleye squatted and put her ear to the egg, before shutting and locking it again. They talked as the sailors secured the chest among sacks half-filled with more sawdust. The male spoke sharply to one of the men in Parl.\n\n\"Watch it there, that's not a cask of pork. Humans! You never take the time to do aught properly, do you?\"\n\nThe sea-men ignored the comment. Perhaps they were inured to that kind of speech from elves. Another sailor descended with a pair of lanterns, and put them next to the chest. Auron smelled the almost dragonlike scent of burning oil. The elves spoke some more, and Hazeleye pointed to netting in the corner of the hold.\n\nLater that day, the ship's motion altered. Auron felt it change directions, and rock harder side to side. Was it beginning its flight above the water?\n\nAuron submitted to a feeding from Hazeleye and watched her do the same to the female and the hatchling. It was almost as bad to watch it as it was to go through it. He tried to keep out the other dragons' pain as best he could.\n\nWith the ordeal over, the elf filled the oil in the always-burning lanterns and climbed into some smaller netting strung between two square-carved tree trunks holding up the ceiling above like stalagmites in a cave. Auron watched her rock and think with the eye facing her, and she looked back at him. With one eye.\n\nA man in clothing so bright, it reminded Auron of a dragon's hide stepped down into the hold the next morning. \"So, how is our floating garbleup?\" the man said, using an unknown word.\n\n\"Well enough, Captain. It's not my first passage.\"\n\n\"To the Isle of Ice? Truly?\"\n\n\"A long voyage, I know.\"\n\n\"Then you should also know better than to claim you could hire another ship.\"\n\n\"It got your mate to do what I wanted.\"\n\n\"This is my third trip in three years. Each time with dragons.\" He looked at the cages. \"This one won't live much longer,\" he said, eyeing the little one. \"The female seems a fine strong one\u2014you'll get your price for her. But what is this?\" he said, coming to Auron's enclosure.\n\n\"A male.\"\n\n\"Of no color? His Sagacity'll no more take him than he'd buy a basilisk. He'll be cut up for fish bait by sunset the day we land.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\"\n\n\"I know the pointy-head will laugh in your face if you try to sell him a birth defect.\"\n\n\"Then he doesn't know as much as he claims about dragons. Rumor is he has an idea to breed them. A gray can have any color offspring.\"\n\nThe captain shook his head. \"I think not.\"\n\n\"Captain, these cages aren't doing them any good. Can your armorer fix it so they're chained to the wall?\"\n\n\"If you're willing to pay for the damages to my ship.\"\n\nAuron saw the elf clamp her jaw shut as tightly as his. \"Yes,\" she finally said. Funny that hominids could show emotion now and again. It made them almost dragonlike.\n\n\"Then I'll arrange it, kind heart. I might have a goosedown pillow in one of my sea chests, if you'd like that for their precious heads, as well.\" He walked back up the entry hatchway, chuckling. The elf said something to herself in her own tongue to the gaily colored back.\n\nShe walked over to Auron's netting. \"Were you listening? Were you?\" she asked, absently patting him as she looked up the hatchway the other had used. Auron didn't understand her language, but at her touch, he knew her feelings. They were warm and caring, similar to Mother's, and lifted some of his misery. She paused in her stroking, drawing her hand away as if he were burning. Her eyebrows came together like head-butting hatchlings. \"You were listening,\" she said, switching to the Parl she employed with the captain. \"I saw your eye. You looked at me; you looked at the captain. Are you one of the dragons who know our tongues? Nod if you understand.\"\n\nAuron wondered if he could turn her sympathy to his advantage. He had watched hominids enough to know that for some reason they shook their heads side-to-side to indicate negation, up-and-down for agreement. Dragons sensibly closed or opened their nostrils. He shook his head up-and-down.\n\nHer eye widened, and then she laughed. It was a pleasant sound; he liked it despite himself. \"I wonder if you'd speak,\" she mused. \"I don't think I'd better give you the chance. I'm childish-foolish, but I'm no fool.\n\n\"I know something of dragons, little one. I used to be as fresh and little as you, when I had flowers in my spring hair. Our... what would the word be in Parl... elders, our frost-haired elders thought me bright, so I was apprenticed to a great... student-nature, no, student of nature. Her name was Ilsebreadth. She knew everything there was to know about wild creatures. She could tell what kind of winter we'd have by where the squirrels would hide their acorns, or tell if a pine tree was healthy by smelling the sap. She spoke to bears and owls about their hunts.\"\n\nAt the mention of hunting, Auron perked up a little. Then he remembered his hunts with Wistala, and his hearts ached at the loss.\n\n\"The frost filled her hair as I grew up, but there was still one great mystery: dragons. She became obsessed with finding an ancient dragon before she had to put down roots for the last age. She sought one of the first sons lingering from the days of your kind's dominance. Yes, I know, dragons were here before the paran, the blighters, or their descendants, the naran\u2014the speaking-people.\"\n\nAuron wished he'd been born into a time before the naran. Why did the Great Sprits have to curse the earth with them? Squabbling fools.\n\n\"Dragons make art, dragons tell stories, all without the written word. Your kind's history goes far before and beyond that, into the mists of time. What secrets you must know!\"\n\nAuron followed her story with no small amount of difficulty; she had to pause to form words, as if she was used to thinking of her tale but not speaking it. Especially not in Parl. There were no mind-pictures, either, but that could not be expected from an elf. Even\u2014and Auron admitted this only with his hatchling teeth rubbing against each other in displeasure\u2014a kindly elf.\n\nThe elf tucked her long lower limbs under herself to sit beside him. Again Auron found the gesture almost dragonlike.\n\n\"She decided to hunt NooMoahk, the black. Not hunt to kill, but hunt to meet. It was a long hunt, and we picked up enough dragon lore for a shelf of books. After much travel, we came upon a caravan trader who had sold a warrior black dragon scales for a shield and armor. After a good deal of bargaining, he agreed to take us to the dragon's hold. We had to cross a desert, the hardest journey of my life. Ilsebreadth sickened and died on the trip, but I pressed on after; I didn't want her dream to die with her.\n\n\"I found him, but was betrayed by the trader. He wanted to use me, then hand me over to the dragon\u2014for more scales, I suppose. I got away only after an ugly fight with his men, which left me with this memento,\" she said, turning the corner of her mouth up on the scarred side of her face and revealing hair the fiery colors of a fall forest. The leaves growing in her locks had a dry smell, like bark peeling from a birch.\n\n\"I found NooMoahk, easy as berry picking. Would you believe I came face-to-face with the greatest of all blacks? A slender twig of a youth before a dark hurricane? He would have eaten me, I'm sure, but I'd picked up a strange tidbit while writing Ilsebreadth's words for her records. I knew you dragons love music. I had a poor voice for an elf, but I sang him a sea song:\n\n\u2003Agone, away, abreast the endless sea\n\n\u2003To circle in my journeys,\n\n\u2003And then come home to thee.\n\n\"That was one of the verses. A silly song that rose and fell like the waves. But he liked it. He cocked his head, like a dog hearing a whistle\u2014\"\n\nHow Father would snort if he heard that, Auron thought.\n\n\"\u2014and said a word to me. In my own tongue, the sea tongue, even: more. And I gave him more. He was old, isolated, lonely. I think he liked having someone to talk to, even if it wasn't another dragon. In his turn, he told me some fine stories. Kings forgotten even by their worn-down coin, empires turned to dust, terrible battles that would live forever, if only someone could remember who fought or why.\"\n\nAuron flexed his claws inside the leather mittens. Did elves always talk this much? Hazeleye was worse than his sisters.\n\n\"Perhaps he was too old, for I read to him some of our inscriptions of dragon lore. He corrected the work of Ilsebreadth, filled in gaps. He had a dream of understanding between dragons and people. He said it had been so, once. But he let slip the great weakness of dragons without even knowing it.\"\n\nHmmpfh, Auron thought. Dragons have many weaknesses, but no great one. Wouldn't Mother have mentioned it so he could be on his guard?\n\nWait, another part of him said. The patient part, that had been memorizing her story, in case he could glean some advantage from the rows of words. Father had said that the dragons were dwindling in number. Had some flaw been discovered in the masterwork of the Great Spirits? A fatal flaw?\n\nShe leaned closer. \"Would you like to know the great weakness, little one? The chink in the armor? I put it in the book, but it was burned by those barbarian fools years ago.\"\n\nThe cargo hatch came open, and the ship's armorer descended with chain wrapped across his shoulders and tools. Hazeleye stood, as if ashamed to be caught next to him.\n\n\"You want the beasts chained?\" the armorer said. Auron felt himself demoted from being someone to be talked to, to just a beast.\n\n\"Well chained,\" Hazeleye said. \"They'll be healthier if they can move a little. I want my investment to pay off.\"\n\nBeing chained was better than being bound and caged. The bands were taken from his snout, the little brass emblem no longer waved at him from the other side of his nose. The collars around his neck and under his arms weighed on him. But he could move.\n\nAt first it was excruciating. When he first moved his foreleg after the armorer unhooked it, his sii and saa in chain-and-leather bags fixed by a bracelet, the agony of it brought a squeal from his still-closed mouth. He rolled on his back and over again at the pain. It blinded, it ran along his skeleton like a bolt of lighting. As it faded, he felt himself at the end of the chain he had thrashed to its limit, just a leg-length from the wall.\n\n\"Secure enough,\" the armorer said. \"Watch his claws\u2014I don't think he can get through the mail in there, but there's no telling what a dragon can do in time. You'd be better off killing him and feeding him to the others, though. A gray's worthless.\"\n\nHazeleye said nothing.\n\nAuron watched him fix the other two hatchlings. The littlest one hardly put up a fight; it just lay limp in its bonds after one wiggle. The green must not have been as long confined. She struggled to her feet before crashing to the deck.\n\nThe armorer returned to Auron, and jerked the eyebolts attaching the twin collars to the wall. He nodded in satisfaction and picked up his tools.\n\nAlone again with Hazeleye, Auron stared at her, moving his limbs in their sockets. He stretched and it felt good. He used his other eye to look at the eyebolts, remembering how the armorer had used a tool like a blunt knife to drive the claw-thick screws into the wood. Man and his ingenious tools! He'd driven metal claws into wood with no more effort than a mother dragon would use to roll an egg in the nest.\n\nThe fixture was worth a closer look.\n\nLittle enough light came into the hold, but Auron could tell it was night. Hazeleye slumbered in the reek of the oil lamps warming the egg chest. Her hair had transformed to a dried mass of seaweeds. A few bulbs hung amid the tresses.\n\nAuron's nose hurt, but this time it wasn't from a feeding. After two false starts, he learned how to use his egg horn to turn the screws holding the eyebolts in the wood. He unscrewed one too far, and it clattered to the floor. The elf moved in her sleep, but she did not open her eyes.\n\nHe had the rest almost out of the wood. One good pull, and he would be free!\n\nThe hatchling female watched him. She strained against her bonds once, rattling the chains. He glared at her, trying his best to think \"Keep quiet!\" to her incommunicative mind.\n\n\"You are clever, little one,\" the elf said from her hanging bed.\n\nAuron spun, ready to throw himself against her. He wouldn't be caged again; he'd impale himself on whatever weapon she drew before they could do that to him. She made no move to rise. She lay there, spinning a golden coin between thumb and forefinger. On it Auron saw the insignia of the faceless man spread-eagled in his circle.\n\nShe tossed the coin into a bucket holding some plates and remains of dinner. \"Go on. I won't stop you. One thing, though, when you jump off the ship, be sure to head east. We're out of sight of shore. Do you know how to find east?\"\n\nAuron sniffed the air about her, searching for a fear-smell but finding only elf and bilge, then nodded his head hominid fashion, up-and-down.\n\n\"Remember, little gray dragon, that I let you go, and told you where to swim. If there's any honor in you, someday you'll repay the favor.\"\n\nEver so slowly, she got up.\n\n\"Trust,\" she said, using Drakine. Badly, but he understood the world.\n\n\"Trust,\" she repeated, moving toward him. She went down on her hands and knees, and put her head below his.\n\n\"Trust,\" she said, reaching out ever so gently to tickle him under the chin. He stifled an involuntary prrum. She turned something beneath his snout, and drew out a long metal pin. His muzzle fell away, and he opened his aching mouth.\n\n\"Will you remember this night, I wonder,\" she said, backing away from his young sharp teeth. He smelled her fear now\u2014no, it was just tension.\n\n\"Trust,\" he said in Parl, as badly as she spoke Drakine. He must find out the weakness of dragons she'd mentioned. But first, there was something just as important\u2014 He flung himself against his bonds, not at her, but at the green. He broke free of the wall, trailing chain and eyebolt. He clawed at the chains with his bagged sii, then reached an arm up and chewed the bag off his foreleg, losing a hatchling tooth in the thick leather. He tasted his own blood.\n\n\"Run! You have no time,\" Hazeleye hissed, her ear cocked towards sounds of alarm from above.\n\nAuron tick-thump-thumped across the deck to the green, his claw and three bagged feet making it a strange waddle. He touched his nose to hers, and her eyes opened in surprise. She had bright white-gold eyes, brighter than his mother's or his sister's.\n\n\"What is your name?\" Auron thought.\n\n\"Natasatch, you blockhead,\" she thought back.\n\nAuron broke contact and scrambled up the wooden steps to the hatchway. He thumped it open with a head-butt. Once it gave way, he heard Hazeleye scream \"Ware! A dragon's loose!\"\n\nAuron climbed onto the tilted deck, found sailors of the night-watch running to gather sailcloth and rope. He opened his mouth to threaten them and smelled the clean sea coming in over the side of the ship on a welcome breeze. The air smelled like freedom\u2014he ran toward it.\n\nA skinny sailor, braver or less experienced than the rest, grabbed at the iron links dragging behind him as he neared the rail. Auron lashed with his tail, catching him on the temple, then turned and snapped his teeth shut, just missing the young man's face. The youth released the chain, sat upright, and scuttled backwards with a speed that gave Auron more satisfaction than anything since he had been captured. He heard water foaming against the side of the ship somewhere below in the darkness, and shot under the rail and over the ship's side.\n\nHe tucked his legs to his sides as he dived, plunging into the water like an arrow. Without even reading the stars, he felt the ship was heading north, so he was on the wrong side of the vessel. He opened his eyes with water-lids lowered, then pivoted under the hull of the ship.\n\nThe chains dragged at him. He had to thrash to move through the water, and at a pace he'd never be able to keep up for with them trailing long behind him. He broke the surface at the far side of the ship and chewed his other foreclaw free. He could see nothing on the horizon to the east over the gentle swell.\n\nThe ship was his prison, but it did float. He pressed his legs to the side and wiggled his hips, shoulder, and tail to swim to the part under the overhang of the back. Swimming would be so easy if it weren't for the metal dangling beneath him, and the weight of his collars. He clung on to the wood of the ship with his good claw as he freed his hind legs, chewing through the leather bags. He lost teeth in the process, but they were just hatchling teeth.\n\nSpitting blood, he looked at the collar under his arms. That wretched human had somehow fixed it in a way that he could not see how to get it off. But he might be able to break the chain dragging at him. He clamped his teeth to the wooden wing that steered the ship and curled his spine, bringing his bigger back legs to the loops of the chain. He fixed his claws in the convenient holds and called on what reserves of strength he had, pretending he had a dwarf to gut under his hind legs.\n\nAuron's legs, so long confined, hardly had the power to keep their grip, but the muscles in his back broke the chain, and its accursed links went to the bottom unregretted. He heard man voices above, searching the sea for him, but the ship did not stop. He re-gripped the back of the ship and managed to get the chain of the neck collar off as well. He tried to slip the metal collar off his head, but he couldn't remove it without taking his head with it.\n\nHe panted after the effort, legs shaking with fatigue. Thank the egg that sheltered me, they're useless when swimming. More and more men were going to the rail around the ship; sooner or later one might think to look under the stern. He closed his water-lids again and swam underwater from the ship, into the pathless ocean. He might exhaust himself, he might sink, but he'd do it as a free dragon.\n\nSeawater provided a strange buoyancy. It lifted him, like an updraft in his parents' memories of flying.\n\nIf it weren't for the collars, he'd swim forever, Auron thought. He found he could course along in the water with just his nose and eyes above the surface. With his great lungs full of air, staying afloat needed no effort at all. Which was as well, for as he swam steadily east he found he needed more and more drifting breaks.\n\nHe realized it was fortunate he didn't have heavy scales. The sea would not have been so kind to him with a thick layer of armor all around his body. He remembered Mother's words about weaknesses not always being weaknesses, and he turned on his back and stretched his legs in the air until he sank for the pure joy of it. The fresh air, exercise, and stimulating seawater, after his confinement in wagon and ship's hold, brought him back from the torpor of captivity into something like the exhilaration he felt after his first kill with Wistala. He looked to the stars and wondered about her.\n\nMental state or no, his body needed rest, food, and water. He drank some seawater, but it gave him cramps. He had heard the sea was full of fish, but on his short dives, even with water-lids raised and the sea stinging his eyes, he saw nothing to eat. He bit at some floating gob of translucence that night, and it somehow hurt him on the armpit and neck, raising welts that still pained him two days later as the waves began to rise when the Air and Water Spirits took up arms.\n\nHe floated out the mild storm, feeling it push him north. Though he could not see the stars, something in him told him he was far away from home, impossibly far from Wistala and Father. When the weather lifted, he searched the horizons anxiously, hoping for sign of land. His laps thrusting himself eastward grew briefer and briefer.\n\nThe sight of birds flying east the afternoon after the storm gave him heart. Sure enough, they soared above the next day, and moved back east at night. He followed them as best he could, trying to rest less and swim more despite hunger and thirst, until the next morning when he saw the dawn break over a bump on the horizon.\n\nSun! Glorious Sun revealed land to him. So that was why dragons used their wings, to rise to the Sun and play nearer to Her! Father had spoken of the Spirits and the Upper World, but Auron took an oath to himself that if he ever had hatchlings, he would teach them first and foremost to be grateful to the Sun, She who showered the Upper World with life-giving light.\n\nAs the giddiness faded he struggled toward the bump on the horizon, swimming across the current. The last struggle. The land disappeared, and for a time he feared he had been having visions brought on by swallowing seawater. Then he saw it again, a blue smear on the horizon.\n\nIt was too much for him. He stopped and rested. Every moment floating in the current dragged him north, away from the land. He clamped his teeth and started the long labor of body and tail again. He fixed his eyes on the land, and swam and swam until he felt it more desirable to sink and die.\n\nA strange clarity broke through Auron's veil of despair. He knew he was being faced with the first great struggle of his life. Not against foe, not against fate, not against even the sea. The true battle was within him. His will to live was losing the battle, outnumbered by a tired body, achingly empty innards, and a bled-dry spirit ready to abandon the struggle.\n\nIf my mind wants to give up, I'll ignore it and concentrate on my body. That way my will only has one enemy to fight.\n\nHe shut his eyes and sank until just the tip of his nose stood above the waves. He swam through pain, swam through exhaustion, swam past death of hope. Nothing would stop his body unless his heart ceased to beat, and he decided he would force that to keep pumping if it came to a test.... And so he touched sand.\n\nHe lifted his head out of the water. Waves were pushing him up to a beach, beneath upright rocks huddled together like a family of giants crowned by bird droppings. Gulls and split-tailed avians he had no word for floated above on the air, ignoring his struggle. He felt more like a corpse than like a dragon. He couldn't even drag himself out of the water; it pushed and rolled him up onto the beach like a piece of driftwood. The feel of being on dry land sickened him. He knew he was not moving, but the ground still seemed to lift him up and set him down as regularly as the waves. He gave in to his fatigue and let go of consciousness.\n\nA pinch in his nostril woke him. A little creature standing on legs like claws pulled at his flesh with a snipping little hand, holding a second giant mandible before it like a warrior brandishing a shield.\n\nAuron snapped at it and got it down, feeling it twitch in his throat. There was another at the elbow of his rear leg; he craned his neck around and it ran sideways, waving the ridiculous claw at him. He gobbled that one down, too.\n\nSplashes in the water caught his eye, too late to get the other crabs on the beach. It was night, or early morning. The wind had grown cold, and the ocean had shrunk away from where it had deposited him.\n\nAuron got to his feet. He wanted water. He wanted water more than anything.\n\nHe crawled over to the rocks. They were on the highest land about; there didn't seem to be much to this part of the coast. The sea curved away on both sides of his hook-shaped beach.\n\nHe looked up at the top of the rocks, not even as high as the egg shelf had been from the cavern floor, but he had no strength to leap. He climbed, his twin collars clanking against the stone. He found a bird nest, but no eggs were within. Either it had been raided or it was the wrong time of year for these birds. He looked up at the Bowing Dragon. It was higher in the sky than he had ever seen it.\n\nDisturbed gulls screamed at him as he climbed, but he ignored them. He reached the top of the boulders and looked around. There were no hills, just trees\u2014stumpy trees over coarse bushes with more rocks sticking out among them in a sea of wind-bent grasses.\n\nPools of bird-dirtied water stood atop the rocks. Rainwater! He drank the vile stuff, but foul or not, it helped the cramping feeling in his innards and gave him fresh life.\n\nHe wondered where he was. There was more ocean on the other side of this place; it seemed to be a long finger of land. Perhaps an island. He'd wait for daylight and explore to the north\u2014 A shape landed atop the rock next to his; he smelled dragon.\n\n\"What-what? What-what?\" a drake thundered. It had blue-green scales, like wet shale.\n\n\"I've\u2014,\" Auron said.\n\n\"What-what! Not here ye don't, hatchling. I'll roast ye. This me island.\"\n\n\"I've\u2014,\"Auron tried again.\n\n\"Back-back to the sea! Back-back to the water! Interloper! Out-out!\" it snarled, advancing on him, ready to bite.\n\nAuron backed up, and he fell with a thump to the sand below. The drake leaped, but Auron scuttled out of the way in time. It lashed out with a claw, sending a spray of sand at him. It charged him. Auron dragon-dashed into the water.\n\n\"I can't swim anymore\u2014I'll die,\" Auron pleaded.\n\n\"A good thing, too, by me mind, gray-gray.\"\n\nThe drake patrolled the beach, watching Auron as he swam south and around the island.\n\n\"Can you tell me how to get to land?\" Auron shouted.\n\n\"Ye said ye'd drown. Get on with it, hatchling-hatchling.\" It paced back and forth, raising and lowering its head with aggressive jerks.\n\nAuron's hope fled, and he swam east around the island's farthest point. The drake watched him, standing like a dragon shaped of stone, until Auron didn't have the heart to look back anymore. The island receded behind him as the moon looked down on him. He swam in the calm water behind the island, not even bothering to raise his head. The stars came right to the horizon to the east. There was no more land, and his collars were too heavy. His tail thrusts gave out, and he rolled on his back and floated, neck pointing this way and that, directionless.\n\nSomething bumped him. For a moment he feared it was the drake, come to put an end to him. But it had a smooth skin, a little warmer than the water.\n\nIt was some sort of fish. No, fish weren't warm, and it breathed through an aperture atop its head. He craned his neck down and looked into an eye. A merry eye, one that seemed amused with the strange creature on its back in the night.\n\nAnother one broke the surface next to the first, looking at Auron before disappearing in a flash of glistening fin and tail.\n\nAuron tried thinking at them, but got nothing except a comforting feeling of friendly intelligence. A head popped out of the water: oversize forehead and a short, smiling snout. It was a familiar-looking face, more so than that of the hominids, dragonlike in general form except for the lack of crest and placement of the eyes. Dolphins, they were dolphins, he realized, dredging a memory of Mother's from his subconscious.\n\nWhatever they were, they were moving through the water. The one under him sank, and another came up, gently pushing him on the belly. Auron rode it for a while, its back fin tucked under his foreleg, until it sank and was replaced by another. As if pleased with themselves, the dolphins began to leap and play.\n\nBy the time dawn came, Auron realized he was within an easy swim of another shore. A real shore. Mountains rose almost out of the water, green moss covered mountains, with waterfalls zigzagging down their sides. He found the strength to swim into one of the freshwater inlets, and he drank carefully from the waterfall. Echoes of Father warning him never to drink too much after exerting himself sounded in his ears. The dolphins bathed in it, as well, squeaking and clucking at each other like birds. He raised his neck to look down the narrow strip of beach. Some kind of human construction hugged the rocky walls of the mountains at another wider inlet. He realized that what he had thought were stars on the horizon were the fires of man.\n\nSomething excited the dolphins, and they vanished. Auron saw ships leaving the man inlet, three wooden ships each with a single mast\u2014though for now, the men worked the boats with long oars on either side. Auron recognized nets hanging from the sides, and he shuddered. He froze against the side of the mountain, hiding in plain sight. Men never spotted you unless you moved. But the ships were looking for fish, not dragons, and they moved out into the bay, dragging nets between them.\n\nWhere there were men, there would be garbage, rats that ate the garbage, cats that hunted the rats, and dogs that chased the cats, any of which Auron would gladly eat. But not in daylight. For now, he could drink and sleep. He wiggled into the cold sand among some rocks at the base of the mountain until only an eye and his nostrils were above ground, and he slept.\n\nThat night he raided the garbage pile, crunching down fish heads and tails. He had no luck with rats, cats, or dogs. Perhaps his smell warded them off, even in the reeking trash pile.\n\nNot to worry, he thought, licking up scrapings unfit even for pigs, The next night, or the next, they'll grow used to it, and get too close.\n\nA dog barked at him, and a second took up the call until the first was silenced by a shout from its owner. He left the waterside trash heap and nosed along the riverbank until he came across a nest of waterfowl eggs. The mother fled to the air, and when the last egg had been eaten, Auron crossed the inlet to the steep mountainside opposite the man dwellings. He climbed it in the dark, wanting a good look at the coast from the heights.\n\nHe napped until dawn amid green mosses and grasses atop the cliff; when the sun lit the coast, he had some idea of where he was. Eastward, the northern marches of the string of mountains that his parents had chosen as their home range matched the white of the clouds with their snowcaps. There looked to be forests between mountains and coast, running almost to the edge of the dry world. North and south, the coast stretched to the horizon in broken cliffs, a narrow beach and sentinel rocks washed by the water. West, he could see ocean, a faraway chain of low islands at the horizon, including a long grassy one inhabited by an unpleasant drake. It was a cloudy, rainy land. Auron felt the pressure of clouds piled up against the mountain. With nowhere to go, they lightened their burden by dumping rain onto the belt of forest.\n\nHe explored the cliff top and found more tracks of man and horse than he felt comfortable with, and he felt very small and lost in the vast distance between sea and mountains. He saw flocks of sheep, sheltering out of the wind. Where there were sheep, there would be shepherds, dogs, men on horses. Why couldn't he have landed on a coast that knew the sound of wild wolves?\n\nHe wasn't up to a long overland journey just yet. He had to eat, get his health and strength back. From what his parents had told him, even the mountains might not be a refuge; dragons dwelt there, and they would no more accept him than the island drake had.\n\nAuron didn't dare climb down the cliffs in daylight\u2014he might be spotted. He needed time to think. Rain swept in from the ocean, and he watched the sailors on the fleet of open boats bring in their nets.\n\nThere was another waterfall to the north of the village where the women took their water pots and laundry. The watercourse didn't run through the settlement, but the people traveled from one side of it to the other often enough that they had built a footbridge. Some gardens stood at the foot of the cliff, there, in good soil formed by the endless fall of dead vegetation from the cliffs. Perhaps at one time the inhabitants also feared something farther north; the beginnings of a wall stood along the stream on the village side, but it had never been completed.\n\nThe women used the wall to sort linen as they washed it, and to get some of the water weight out of the cloth before carrying it in baskets back to their homes. Auron knew all this because after another night raiding garbage in which he managed to take a bloated rat and two gulls, he spent a day watching life from the other side of the inlet. A convenient cluster of rocks stood just offshore at the mouth of the stream. He hugged them, draped with seaweed, looking like just another projection in the storm-tossed surf. He repeated the vigil the next day, after he decided what he would do if an opportunity arose.\n\nMany of the village children, especially the females, accompanied their mothers in the routine. They played or helped according to the disposition of the parent, while the women talked in melodious voices that reminded Auron of bird chatter at dawn. One potbellied child in a smock wandered across the beach, ignoring the occasional brayed voice of her parent. A long-haired boy sat on the footbridge, dangling a line in the stream. He kept her from crossing the bridge, and the girl went to the wet sand at the water's edge and began to make hills, decorating them with washed-up shells.\n\nAuron slipped into the water, coloring himself like the sea bottom, and he drifted toward the beach with gentle movements. A flying pelican dipped low to take a look, and thought better of it.\n\nThe boy perhaps saw his back appear among waves, for he shouted. At the noise, Auron shot out of the surf and had the child in his jaws before she even could turn to see what was coming at her out of the ocean. He whipped his head back and forth, breaking her neck and silencing the brief scream.\n\nAt the stream, women forgot their laundry and snatched up their children. Auron raised his head, limp child in his jaws, and looked at the stick-thin boy. The boy dropped his pole and took up a stone from the foundation at the edge of the footbridge.\n\nBrave, but too late, Auron thought. He returned to the surf. Out of rock-throwing range from the shore, he came up again and rolled over on his back to eat, bobbing in the easy swell.\n\nAn alarm rang among the buildings. The humans acted with the typical energy of their species. Narrow boats put out from shore as they lit a smoky bonfire on the beach. Auron poked his head up, part of his kill yet unswallowed, and saw the faraway fishing boats abandoning their half-empty nets. His head gave the narrow boats a mark, and they plied their oars toward him.\n\nHe floated, finished his meal, and decided he had time to wait for a belch to come up. An arrow or two whistled from the thin boats, but they fell short. Auron rolled over and began to swim out to sea, keeping underwater as much as possible.\n\nThe fishermen were more skilled than the men in the narrow boats. Every time he came up for air, they adjusted course. The oar boats put up sails, but by swimming west straight into the wind, Auron stayed well ahead of them. The fishermen came at him in two pairs of two boats, smaller nets strung ready and men hanging on to the bows with iron spears in their hands.\n\nAuron could see the nets coming in time to avoid them easily. As he breached again behind the fishing boats, a barbed spear plunged into the water beside him. Men in the stern stood ready, as well.\n\nThe spear had a line attached, and Auron grabbed it in his mouth. He pulled, and the men at the other end pulled back, stronger than he could. He kept up the fight until he knew the boats were gathering, then came to the surface and drew breath, released the line and dived. He swam as fast as he could out to sea, and when he came up again, the boats took up the futile chase one more time.\n\nAuron conserved his energy. One of the fishing boats turned back, but the other three, and the narrow boats, came on in a straggling line behind him, each making its best speed into the wind. Auron did not know much of men, but he admired the way these used their ships like hunting horses. Their boats, nets, spears, and the determination behind their inventions impressed him. No wonder enough men like these, working together, could kill even a great dragon like his grandsire.\n\nNow he had to complete his plan in such a way that would take advantage of their deadly tenacity. Yet not allow them a good shot at him.\n\nAuron reached the chain of islands. As he came to shore, he saw the men had anticipated this chance. Barking dogs and clusters of men were already setting out in little boats from the larger fishing vessels. The narrow boats had taken down their sails, and they knifed through the water under a spray of oar power. Grim-faced captains stood in the bows, spears pointed at him as they directed the oarsmen.\n\nAuron would not run just yet. He turned and faced the hunters, and let out such a bellow as would have put all the bats by the egg shelf to flight, were he still in the cave with Mother. It was no dragon roar, but it was no hatchling peep either. Let them come with their dogs! Land or sea, he had the room and energy to run.\n\nHe just hoped they didn't get too good a look at him.\n\nAuron ran for the trees, thick on this side of the little island, a hummock of rock-strewn land, perhaps the tips of some lost mountains swallowed by the sea. Auron disappeared among the rocks, but not before he saw one of the fishing craft racing around the point to the other side of the island, in case he took to the water again. The men thought ahead!\n\n\"What-what?\" the slate-colored drake brayed from the ridge of the island. His head stood above grasses, and he saw Auron putting the rocks between himself and the beach. Shrieking birds circled above him\u2014he must have been among their nests. \"Back again-again? Ye shan't live this day, intruder-intruder!\" The slate drake advanced through the tangle of vegetation holding the shifting sand in place.\n\nAuron looked at the murder burning in the drake's eyes. He heard a dog bark. \"I think not-not,\" Auron said, and dived into the boulders. He fanned his tail along behind to cover his tracks in the sand.\n\nAuron could not see the spearmen coming through the rocks behind their dogs, the fishermen with their harpoons, or the determined captains of the seacoast people among them signaling and giving orders. But the drake did. Auron read confusion in his enemy's mind as the wingless drake shifted his gaze to the noise of the approaching hunters and froze. Confusion became realization; realization gave way to panic. The drake turned and ran for the trees. The men pointed, released their dogs, and sounded wailing horns as they followed.\n\nAfter weeks of gorging on an ample sea diet, Auron burst his chest collar by flexing his back muscles until the pin holding it closed gave way. The one on his neck proved more troublesome. Though he could twist his head enough to chew at it, the iron hoop proved invulnerable at clasp and joint. Even with his rear claws under it, he could not break the thing, at least not before his neck gave way, or so he felt as he strained. In the end, he decided to live with it until such time as he grew strength enough to break it, hopefully before his neck thickened enough that it would choke him. This was not as far-off a worry as it might seem. His neck had already grown to the point where the collar no longer rested at his shoulders.\n\nOther than that nagging doubt, Auron enjoyed his time on the island chain. He discovered the joys of lobster and crab hunting, oyster prying and clam digging. He watched pelicans fish by swooping low over the water, folding their wings and striking when they spotted the scaly flash of their prey. The odd-looking birds could then scoop up the stunned fish. Auron imitated them by clinging to a reef offshore, and when he saw a fish, he would belly-flop into the water. It didn't work every time, but he caught enough fish to keep his appetite at bay in only a morning's effort.\n\nHe learned to speak with the seagulls and terns, though their simple discourse bored him unless he wanted to know the state of the tide or what the weather would be like the next day or where the fish were reputed to be running.\n\nHe swam and explored some of the other islands in the chain. Most were little more than grassy sandbars. Because there was wood on his, the men returned to it at times to build fires on the beach and smoke their catch. Boys from the inlet settlement learning their fathers' skills never failed to explore the lair of the late and unlamented drake: a cave dug into a rockpile. They raked over the sand for dropped dragon scales, and pointed to the place where two dogs and a man had died while killing the drake. Auron watched their visits and those of the fishermen from the sand, his body speckled over and striped with sea-oat shadows, doing his best to pick up their words.\n\nMost days it rained as spring warmed and grew into summer. For the first time in his life, Auron had all he could eat. When sated, he sat atop rocks if the sun shone, and measured his growth by watching the collar in its progress up his neck. He swam among the islands in nervous bursts of energy. He felt the beginnings of the wanderlust that Mother told him drove young dragons many horizons from their birthplaces. But the hungry hatchling part of his brain still argued for staying among the islands where food was plentiful and dangers few.\n\nThe only real conversation with anyone he had was after a storm, when a mighty rounded beast was washed to shore. It was armored like a dwarf, and had a beak on it like a bird. Auron saw it resting on the sand, as it pushed its bulk back from the grasses to the sea.\n\n\"What are you, a sea dragon?\" Auron asked, circling the creature's bulk. Deep down, he thought it couldn't be a dragon, but he didn't want to offend it if it was some strange offshoot.\n\n\"Waat dat?\" The creature understood his speech, though he returned it with a thick accent.\n\n\"Sea dragon. You. What are you?\"\n\n\"I'm de greaat sea tuurtle. Kippeesh, my naame. You sum overrsize iguuana?\"\n\n\"I'm a dragon. A young one, no wings or fire yet.\"\n\n\"Draagon. Oh, yees, I know of dem. Long ago, dey say, draagons rule de world. Before demen came.\"\n\n\"Demen?\"\n\n\"De' men. Demen, dey go in sheeps, of wood and net.\" The sea turtle pushed himself a little farther along the sand, building a wave of it in front of him, as if he were some great vessel traveling through the water. \"De' world theirs now.\"\n\n\"Men don't rule the world. They live on it, same as the rest of us. They hardly go in the Lower World, and they don't control the Upper One.\"\n\n\"Ha! Eveery yeear is moore men. Moore sheeps. Eveen on de' old draagon isle, amoong the mists. De inlaand oceean is deers now.\"\n\n\"Inland ocean? What's that?\"\n\nThe turtle waved a flipper. It could hardly be called an impatient gesture, slow as it was, but its voice cracked. \"Hatchlings! Same with sea turtlees. Queestions. Dis, all dis wateer. Inlaand oceean. I go in heem, follow de summar across de waatar. Demen alwaays, eveen wheere elvees leeved. Draagons, too.\" The sea turtle dropped its head, exhausted from long speech.\n\n\"Even on this dragon isle?\"\n\nAuron had to wait for two more pushes through the sand for an answer.\n\n\"Yees, I stay away, no place for eggs, seence long ago. Draagons gone now, just de' men. You want adveece of old tuurtle, hatchling, you staay far from de' men. Faar.\"\n\n\"Where do the dragons live now?\"\n\nThe sea turtle said nothing; it had reached the point where water flowed up and around it. It went another body-length through the sand, inspired by the waves' touch.\n\n\"Where do dragons live now?\" Auron repeated.\n\n\"Dis place, seence you here. Not know otheers.\"\n\nAuron felt the waves pull at his ankles. The wash of the sea seemed a constant, menacing hiss. His claws sank into the sand. He wanted dry land, mountains, and forests around him, real caves, rather than crannies between piles of rocks. Not an island of birds and fishermen. He watched the sea turtle catch another wave and swim, transformed from a plodding lump of horn to a graceful aquatic. It didn't so much as say good-bye.\n\nHe switched to swimming in the bay. He wanted to find a way east, to the forests and then the mountains. Then he could go south to more familiar lands. Finding Wistala and Father was but a faint hope, but it was the only hope he had. Then there was Hazeleye's tantalizing story of NooMoahk. What was this great weakness of dragons? Was it why they were dwindling from the world?\n\nIf he could find the right sort of river, he could feed himself on fish for much of the journey. There were three rivers flowing into the island\u2014sheltered bays at breaks in the cliffs, all had settlements similar to the one whose garbage he raided when he first arrived.\n\nThe group of dolphins who had rescued him came alongside in one of his explorations. He recognized some of the faces from that night, so long ago in the reckoning of a hatchling. They gathered, the males swimming loops around him while the females and their calves kept a respectable distance.\n\nAuron slept at one of the freshwater cascades splashing down the rocky cliffs. There were frogs everywhere in the pools of spray that night. He absently snapped them up as he considered his choices. He would have to climb the cliffs again and go overland as best he could. He'd just hurry to the forests; it couldn't all be man country from here to the mountains.\n\nThe fishing boats were in sight again at dawn, four of them working their nets. He took care to dive deep as he fished for his morning meal, only surfacing for air in masses of floating seaweed. Tiny fish sheltering in the green coils dashed away in all directions as he entered the mass.\n\nAs he relaxed with just his nostrils poking up from the seaweed, his ears picked up a strange underwater screaming. It took him a moment to make out the sound of Dolphin speech, so different was it from their usual clicks and squeaks. It came from the fishing boats.\n\nSo the men hunted dolphins as well as dragons!\n\nAuron's nostrils flared, and he ground his loose hatchling teeth, already being replaced by larger ones coming in. It was a hard world. Small fish were eaten by bigger fish, and the bigger fish were in turn eaten by the dolphins. It was not surprising that man ate the dolphins. A hard world.\n\nAuron dived. A hard world for men killing the creatures who saved his life!\n\nHis water-lidded eyes made out layers of nets around the dolphins, and the boats around the layers of nets. Perhaps the men had fed the dolphins, tempting to come closer and closer until one day they could use their nets. Or the dolphins had blundered into them. A few males swam outside the nets, circling frantically, and Auron saw a dead dolphin hauled to a ship by its tail, a harpoon projecting from its back. Blood tinted the water pink.\n\nThe sight of nets only increased his fury. Ancient\u2014to a hatchling\u2014wrongs gave his slender frame a hot strength. He tore into the nets circling the dolphins, a mad dervish of claw and tooth. He grabbed strand after strand in his jaws and pulled back; his rows of serrated teeth parted even the wet, limp lengths of netting.\n\nThe dolphins didn't know what to make of him. The netted ones shrank away from his thrashings, and it wasn't until one of the males went through the ever-widening gap and back out again that the rest got the idea.\n\nAuron needed air, and he surfaced within the nets as far from the boats as he could. Shouts sounded across the surface of the bay. A harpoon arced toward him, soaring into the air before nosing over and diving like a kingfisher. Though deadly at a few yards, a harpoon was not a weapon for this kind of work, and it fell impotently into the sea.\n\nHe went under again as the men drew in their nets in an attempt to catch him. He swam furiously at the approaching web.\n\nAnger hinders wit, which you will need to prevail, he heard Mother singing. The net was not the enemy; the enemy was the arms of men hauling it toward him. He turned away, but another net seemed to swim up from behind as the men handled their boats to trap him. He dived straight down, and the nets came together in a tangle as his tail brushed the closing weights at the bottom.\n\nAuron corkscrewed his body and came up under the nets. He clung to the bottom of the mass, pushing and pulling at them as a dragon caught within might. The smaller boats came away from the main; Auron saw sharp faces and sharper harpoons of men leaning over the front. If the best harpoon men were in the smaller boats, who remained in the larger?\n\nHe swam down, then up again to the far side of one of the fishing boats, his body colored like that of the sea bottom.\n\nThere was nothing he could do about his shadow. One of the men, more wary than the rest bent on sticking a harpoon in him, raised a shout Auron heard even body-lengths beneath the water. But he was already on the other side of the largest of the boats. He climbed up the fishing craft's side and clung to the rail with sii and saa.\n\nTwo men came at him, graybeards gripping clubs and hooks.\n\nAuron stuck his neck straight out, as stiff as the central tree of the ship. \"Oh, will you?\" he roared with a mouth leaking blood\u2014having left several hatchling teeth behind with the nets.\n\nThe men shied at the bellowed Drakine words. One hurled a club at him; it bounced off his nose before cracking him in the crest. White-and-yellow pain raced from his sensitive nose tissue to his eyes and back again, blinding him for a moment. His neck arched reflexively. Through a mist he saw the other coming at him with a hook. The grandfather buried it in his neck at the collarbone.\n\nAuron screamed and leaped into the rigging, tearing free of the man's grasp at the cost of further pain to his neck. He saw red. His body seized up, and he spat down on the fishermen.\n\nSomething hotter than his fury boiled out of his throat, pulsing along the roof of his mouth. As the hot slime struck air, it burst into flame, surprising Auron as much as the men\u2014if the man who plunged the hook into his neck had time to be surprised before his skin caught fire.\n\nThe flame's smell came through even his instinctively clamped nostrils and made him think of Father. A river of orange blossoms raced across the deck to cordage and sail, spread still farther along the rail by the screaming fiery figure who had thrown the club. He rolled on the deck, but succeeded only in setting a furled sail alight as he died. Another man in the front of the ship dived overboard.\n\nOne of the small boats rowed toward Auron's. The launch was only a few oar strokes away from the fishing boat. Auron jumped to the other side of the rigging, and this time summoned his flammable bile from deep within. One man realized what was coming and dropped his oar to better leap from the boat. Another braver one in the bow brought his harpoon back for a throw, pointing at Auron with out-thrust arm before hurling the missile.\n\nThe harpoon and flame met in midair. The iron weapon and Auron's flamecast crossed in the sky; the burning liquid hit the boat but the harpoon missed its mark by a hand's breadth, diverted by the fiery spray. It flew past Auron close enough for him to get a whiff of hot iron, the wooden handle trailing smoke.\n\nThe little boat turned, engulfed in flame, writhing heat-distorted shapes of the harpooner and oarsmen still at their positions. Auron marked the nearest fishing boat and dived into the water. The legs of the swimmers waved enticingly above, but he had bigger boats to fry.\n\nAuron swam to the shallow bottom of the bay and shot back up, sudden pressure changes hurting his sensitive ears. He exploded out of the water, landing on the deck amid dropped lines and discarded fishing gear. Men dived overboard. He spat again at the mast, but instead of a liquid jet of fire, small droplets of flame flew out as his muscles squeezed out their spasm. Auron looked at this phenomenon, head swinging side to side as he took it in from all angles, when movement behind him caught his eye.\n\nA boy\u2014holding a harpoon taller than its bearer in his twiggy arms\u2014lunged from a hiding place among the rolled nets. The point bit into his side. Auron lashed out with his tail, sending boy and weapon overboard. Pain driving him, Auron went into the ship's wheel and ravaged it: he tore apart fittings, struck wheel and tiller ropes, and finally hurled the remains overboard before moving on to the hold. He splintered enough oil-soaked wood so that even the minuscule gobs of fire he could spit began to crackle and pop as they spread.\n\nHe crawled back to the rail and poked his head up. The other \"hunting\" boat with the harpoon men moved toward his as the other two fishing ships raised sail, abandoning their tangled nets and floated lines. Auron did not know if they were coming for him or to fight the fire\u2014and he did not wait to find out. He went over the far side.\n\nWater and Fire! The fishermen chased him even underwater. The men went headfirst into the water, broad shoulders making clumsy splashes, each holding a harpoon and quenching the fighting heat in his body with their courage. Auron plunged as far down as he could and clung flush to the rocky bottom. The men swam toward him for a moment, but perhaps had trouble seeing underwater, giving his camouflage an edge. The men could not hold their breaths long; they waved to each other and floated slowly toward the surface, back to back and harpoons ready to stab at whatever came from the murk. Swimmers from the other ships clung to the sides of the launch.\n\nAuron accepted the draw and watched their little flat-bottomed boat row toward the larger ones. He came up to breathe and took in the havoc he had loosed. Two fishing boats burned. Horribly blackened bodies floated in the gentle waves of the bay under seagulls already dropping for a meal. A dissipating fire slick kept the birds from another body, probably that of the determined harpooner. Dolphins still circled in the water, nudging at the dead member of their family floating there. And something else. One bore the boy Auron had knocked overboard. The men had missed him in the confusion and smoke of burning ships.\n\nAuron swam over, his nose, eyes, and crest cutting the water ahead of the swirl of his snakelike body. The boy floated facedown in the water, pale and unresponsive as the dolphins poked him again and again to the surface.\n\nHunger gnawed at Auron, despite the fading heat of battle. He took the dead or unconscious boy by the neck\u2014breaking vertebrae as his jaws closed\u2014and swam for the cliffs. A dolphin came close alongside for a moment of pale regard. Its eye held no merriment this time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Drake",
                "text": "\u2002IF LEGENDS KNEW WHAT AWAITED,\n\n\u2002THEY'D SPEND THEIR YOUTHS DIFFERENTLY.\n\n\u2014Naf Touraq\n\nThe seaside days of plentiful fish, oyster, and lobster made Auron's reacquaintance with hunger that much harder to bear.\n\nHe crossed rainswept, stone-studded, uninhabited country for two days after climbing the bay cliff. He sought the white tips of the faint mountains. All he found to eat were snails and slugs among and under the rocks. They were hardly worth the effort of time and tongue to find, given how many it took to make a mouthful.\n\n\"I'll leave you for the birds,\" he finally said to one snail creeping amid the flaky lichens of the rocks. Its antennae waved in the odor of his breath.\n\nAuron had passed into drakehood in blood and flame. The realization didn't come to him until the second night after the fight with the fishermen that, had Mother and Father been present, they would have recognized his first fire as a black-smoke symbol of his, and their, achievement\u2014even as they drove him from their cave and territory. His wings were still years away, but according to his parents, these would be his wandering years. Drakes were supposed to range about on foot, finding new hunting ground, learning how to outfight\u2014or outwit\u2014their enemies.\n\nAuron didn't want any of it. He was proud of his first flame, but if some wizard could work spellcraft, he'd give it up, go back in time. He wanted to smell his mother again, or even Wistala, or hear the claws and scales of his father as he returned from a hunting trip.\n\nBut even wizardry couldn't grant a drake's wish. Mother and Father had gone the way of so many other great dragons. The weakness?\n\nAuron wandered south and east. He found a few human trails, recognizing hoof- and footprints running north and south along the coast. Once he saw the smoke of a campfire and smelled the musty odor of burning peat, but hesitated to investigate further. He guessed it to be men, and after the bloody encounter with the fishing boats, the cautious voice of his mother's wit told him to keep an eagle's distance. By the third day, he saw forests staining the slopes ahead black across a stretch of land a little lower than the coastal hills. Trees meant game, though whether he was up to dashing down a deer remained to be seen. His appetite would settle for a sick hedgehog.\n\nWater helped the hunger pangs. He drank from rain pools, the collar tinking as it scraped stones. There were thunderstorms, none so frightening as the first he experienced\u2014yet more miserable from loneliness for Wistala than the noise and wet of the storm.\n\nAnother day passed in slinking across the hilly marshes brought him off the heights and into trees. Pines, communal trees that just touched each other with their branches as though looking for reassurance from others of their kind, gave the forest a pleasantly scented stillness in the gentle summer air. Between the rolling moraines flowed endless streams into lakes girded by poplar and birch; Auron made better time swimming across water than he did negotiating tree trunks. Hunting did not bring him much in the way of game. He found a rank-smelling pile of sticks at the edge of a lake and tore into it, only to find its builder fled. He was reduced to pulling up mice and voles from their shallow homes when the lakes yielded little but bony catfish and craws. He slept curled around a stone one morning, and was rewarded with an ambush of a summer-fed hare when his ear woke him to the sound of it chewing dandelion.\n\nThe moon waxed, bringing with it the sound of wolves as it rose each night. They were talkative creatures, singing back and forth to each other from hilltop to rockpile in sad, sonorous voices. Auron didn't know much about wolves, except they looked something like the dogs of men: more dangerous in some ways, less so in others. Dogs brought men; wolves only called other wolves to their aid. Father had said something about groups of wolves being dangerous, so Auron took to sleeping in trees.\n\nHe still cut across man trails each day, old and rarely used, and they became older still as he traveled deep into the forest, always heading for the mountains until hunger forced him to forage. Now and then he came across cabins in glades. Bear pelts and wolf hides stretched across windows warned him of the fate of livestock raiders, so he stayed clear of the barns and coops. He trekked warily, avoiding any hint of man smell.\n\nWhile doubling back from a strong man odor, he ran into wolves.\n\nHe was retracing his steps across a dry watercourse and up a rise no higher than a sapling when he came nose-to-nose with three of them. They were a lighter gray than he, with more closely set eyes and mouths that hung open in the summer warmth. A younger one, all paws and ears, joined his three elders. Auron caught flashes of movement at the corner of his eye; wolves slunk down the sides of the hill, heads and tails low to the ground. Auron crouched, putting the softer skin of his belly close to the ground.\n\nAuron looked into the eyes of the nearest wolf, a crystal blue of such brilliant purity they reminded him of the gemstones his father gave his sisters. The eyes held a wary cunning; dangerous jaws dripped with hunger. Each waited for the other to make a move.\n\nThe nearest trees that would bear his weight stood at the top of the little knoll the four wolves occupied.\n\nAuron made the first move, a leap up the hill with four claws splayed, hoping to scatter the predators with a sudden rush. The leader jumped sideways, whipping his body around in a snapping blur to sink his teeth into Auron's throat. He caught hold of the thickest part of Auron's neck, and the others joined in.\n\nThe teeth locked so fast, Auron felt no pain. Auron took advantage of his limber spine and turned around, rolling over on a wolf and injuring it enough for it to cry through clamped teeth. The young one caught Auron by the foreleg. Auron counter bit, crushing its skull in his jaws. The leader hung on with a determination that served the pack when bringing down a deer or an elk, but against a dragon, the death grip became just that. Auron rolled over and opened the wolf with his rear claws, tearing the leader from throat to hock. One of the flankers got a grip on his rear left leg, and Auron's bloody front claws found its ear-and eyeholes. Red flesh came away as the grip of the wolf's teeth relaxed in death.\n\nAnother bit at his face, not closing for a grip. Auron brought his neck up to get out of reach and bite back, but something tugged at him. Somehow, despite the disemboweling, the leader still held on. Auron pulled it off with his front claws, opening long wounds on the base of his neck. A wolf was atop his back, biting at the thicker hide along his spine, and Auron knocked him off with a crack of his tail. It flew against a tree, tumbled to the ground, and lay still.\n\nAuron crushed the head of one of the injured ones trapped beneath him with both front paws. He felt blood flowing out of his neck. He and the last wolf exchanged a brief flurry of bites; Auron tore its ear, and the wolf bit off a length of his upper lip. The combatants stared at each other, Auron among a carpet of dead wolves and the other with paws spread, ready to leap in any direction.\n\nThe drake felt strangely light and exultant. \"Will you come?\" Auron asked in beast speech, spitting blood from his lip wound.\n\n\"My pack dead, as need I,\" it returned, lowering for a spring. It spoke well, though its constructions rang oddly in Auron's ear.\n\n\"Wait!\" he said, putting his heart into it. \"Pack not dead if you live. Why we two fight?\"\n\n\"You not bear, so you prey. Shorter than deer, bigger than sheep.\"\n\n\"But I fight better. I not prey.\"\n\nThe wolf's tail drooped as it looked on the corpses. It said nothing.\n\n\"I hungry, too, a traveler to the mountains. You know woods. We hunt together. Share.\"\n\n\"Cannot.\"\n\n\"Why? Two can hunt better than one.\"\n\nConfusion filled the crystal eyes. \"But you not me-people,\" the wolf said.\n\nAuron thought for a moment. Wolves hunted together as second nature, but didn't dogs, which were practically wolves, hunt with men? Did the dogs think of men as part of their tribe?\n\n\"Then make me one,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Not understand.\"\n\nAuron lowered his head to the level of the wolf's. Then below it, fighting a throbbing hurt in his neck. The wolf brought up its head and stood taller.\n\n\"We make pack. Pack has two. You leader,\" Auron said. \"I Auron. I do as you say. I promise this.\"\n\nThe wolf looked at him and sniffed at the scent of dragon blood. Its remaining ear flicked up and tail gave the tiniest of wags. Auron gave a hint of a prrum in response, though in his pain, the noise didn't come naturally.\n\n\"This story to sing from highest hill. Good Aer... Aur-ron. Auron. But you kill leader. With me-people, mean you leader.\"\n\n\"I bad leader. Not know this land. No, me not wolf... you-people, I mean. You leader.\"\n\nThe wolf's tail wagged once, and it brushed Auron's face with the side of its own. \"Settled. I Hard-Legs Black-Bristle of Dawn Roarers. Must leave this stink-of-blood behind. Come.\"\n\nAuron followed.\n\nAuron picked up wolf speech easily. It was enough like beast speech for him to understand most of what Blackhard\u2014as the pack-familiar was rendered\u2014said to him; each day he spoke it better. The hardest part was the phrasing required when the pack member asked something of its leader. Reading and imitating the body language that often passed for simple words took him no time at all to pick up.\n\n\"Goodwolf if stop by lake, try for fish?\"\n\n\"Good if wolf stop by the lake and try to fish,\" Blackhard corrected, with a nip in the air just in front of Auron's nose. That habit took some getting used to.\n\n\"Good if wolf stop by the lake and try to fish,\" Auron said again, and Blackhard smiled in assent. Wolves were smilers, but Auron didn't have the muscles to imitate it properly. Auron took in the banks of the lake in a slow examination. A cluster of man houses stood on the other side, hardly visible through the morning lake mists. Men fished here, too. Satisfied, Auron slipped into the water and floated upside down, nostrils above water and eyes beneath. He caught a bottom-feeder for himself and brought one back for Blackhard.\n\n\"Fish is a good stink. I like to roll in the leavings. Confuses the prey,\" Blackhard said. \"Don't know what it would take to cover your stink-of-dragon. Skunk, maybe. You are only creature whose front end smell worse than back.\"\n\nAuron knew what a skunk was, and didn't care to try rolling in one. He couldn't help it that eruptions of gas from his fire bladder startled Blackhard.\n\nThe howling at night fascinated him. The wolves told each other stories, claimed territory, negotiated hunting rights, and prayed to the Moon for game and healthy offspring all at the same time.\n\n\"White-Tooth Winter-Nose heeeere! Forests thick with deer, the Fell Runners thank you, O My Mooooooon!\"\n\n\"Thank thee, Moooooooon!\" others in White-Tooth Winter-Nose chorused.\n\n\"My pup Deep-Eyes Feather-Tail made his first kill todayyyyyyyyyy, O My Cousiiiiiins!\" a faraway voice called.\n\n\"Honor and Praaaaaise!\" a distant pack answered.\n\nBlackhard could stand it no more. He stood, crossing his front legs on a stone to elevate his head. \"Hard-Legs Black-Bristle, last of Dawn Roarers heeeere! I hunt with an Outsider, one who spared my life and the life of my pack, and asked to hunt with meeeeee. This Outsider is a drake named Aurrrrooooon!\"\n\n\"Whaaaaaaaat?\" came many cries from afar, as the forest wolves took in the news. Consternation broke out as others spread the word.\n\n\"You call your name, Auron, there's a good wolf,\" Blackhard said.\n\n\"You mean howl?\"\n\n\"Yes. You speak the tongue well enough. Just make it good and loud.\"\n\nAuron put his stumpy front legs on a fallen tree trunk and extended his long neck to the moon. He inflated his lungs until his body swelled like a puffing fish.\n\n\"Auron son of AuRel here!\" he bellowed. \"I travel to the Eastern Mountains to seek my kind, but for now I hunt with the Dawn Roarers.\" It was more of a roar than a howl, but it was no sound a wolf could make.\n\n\"We seek free passage though your lands to the Eastern Feeeeeeells, as good wolves in your laaaaands. Pass this neeeeeeews,\" Blackhard added.\n\nTheir words were spread over the howling network. Auron listened to the wailing cries as tingles danced up and down his spine. He felt very un-wolfish.\n\n\"Hanging-Tongue Snow-Crossed of Silent Fangs heeeeeere!\" a wolf called from the north. \"Three packs now ask for Thing to know this news at midsummer night. We meet at the rock-tree at the three-river falls. If you wish to pass, we must hear this story and smell-hear-see this Outsider in full. Pass this neeeeeews!\"\n\n\"I wiiiiiiiill as I am a good wolf!\" Blackhard answered. \"Hard-Legs Black-Bristle of Dawn Roarers heeeeeere! There will be Thing at midsummer night by the rock-tree at three-river falls. Pass this neeeeeews!\"\n\n\"Pass this neeeeeews! Pass this neeeeeews!\" echoed wolves from hilltop to hilltop.\n\n\"There has not been Thing in my lifetime. I've seen only two summers,\" Blackhard said as they crossed the smallest of the three-rivers well above the roaring falls. On the other side of the river, a pack climbed out of the wet and shook their coats, flushing sparrows from gorse bushes and devil's club with their spray.\n\n\"Will we see the falls?\" Auron asked. He wondered what could make such a noise; it sounded like all the dragons in the world arguing farther down the river.\n\n\"Why? There's nothing to eat there,\" Blackhard puffed as he swam. \"Oh, I imagine it can't do any harm. It might be just as well to keep you out of sight until Thing. A gathering of two packs-of-packs-of-packs of wolves can be trouble.\"\n\nAuron worked the numbers in his head, wolves using pack to mean eight to twelve. Usually. Over a thousand wolves! They climbed up onto the far bank. Auron slithered to the top of a rock to let the sun dry him, keeping one eye cocked to the fast-running river for fish.\n\n\"Hungry wolves, who can only catch, and cache, so much game. There may be many more packs\u2014this news has been howled from the mountains to the seacoast. There will be fights. There won't be so much as a mouse to eat until we can disperse. To the falls it is.\"\n\nThe unlikely pair stayed along the riverbank; Blackhard had to stop and scratch while waiting for Auron to catch up.\n\n\"No wonder your kind grew wings,\" the long-legged wolf said as Auron climbed over yet another fallen tree. \"You're slow on the ground. When will you be able to fly?\"\n\n\"That's years off. Perhaps a pack and a half-pack of summers.\"\n\n\"I wish I could live to see it,\" Blackhard said, loudly for the sound of falling water now grew with each step. \"It must be something. To be able to terrify men, even. I've heard stories of flying dragons. One of our pack saw one against the moon, before I was born. Here we are. Be careful\u2014the rocks are slippery.\"\n\nA mist rose from the roar. They stood at the brink of a great cauldron steaming in the summer sun. Auron looked across from their cliff. Another river poured into the turmoil from the high plateau. Trees clung precariously to the edges of the cliffs, some even on little shelves jutting out from the rock face. A third river joined the others below, to tumble over a much smaller fall farther downstream. Auron saw a long house of men below the lesser falls. Birds whirled above, floating on the updraft.\n\n\"Eagles hunt here, not wolves,\" Blackhard said. \"The man-place is new. Is there nowhere they don't go?\"\n\n\"What will happen at Thing?\" Auron could feel the impact of the water, transmitted through the stones up to his cliff. He imagined the wolves deciding he had committed a crime against their kind\u2014and tearing him to pieces.\n\n\"We need a Thing now and then. Young females leave packs, sometimes new packs are formed by thwarted males who could not rise in their own. It is good for wolves to mix now and then; a pack that stays only within its territory weakens its blood. Your coming was taken as a signal to gather. There's also curiosity to it. I suppose only a handful of wolves even know what a dragon smells like nowadays.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"The same reason we no longer roam to the coast. Men. The other hominids make war on you, as well, I'm sure; men go on great journeys to kill your kind. They hunt for dragon eggs. Their dogs like to brag to us.\"\n\n\"Men. First it'll be dragons, then it'll be your kind, Blackhard.\"\n\n\"Our kind,\" Blackhard corrected with a gentle nip at Auron's crest. \"Let a starving wolf pack take even one sick sheep in the dead of winter... Good thing they kill each other off, else the world would be covered with them like moss on a fallen tree.\"\n\nThe rock-tree looked to Auron more like a rock-mushroom. It was made of a dun-colored stone, narrow layer topped with layer, some slightly darker, some lighter. At the top it widened into an overhang; the overhang narrowed gradually to the crown, which had a tree sprouting out of it like a feather in the hat of an elf.\n\nLong ago, a piece had cracked off the mushroom crown and fallen to the base, and as the moon rose, a black wolf with snow-white ears and muzzle jumped atop the pedestal. It took in the gathered wolves, sitting or lying in the darkness, even unto the cliffs surrounding the rock-tree. Auron waited, in between the fallen piece and the rock-tree in deep shadows. The other wolves avoided him.\n\n\"Bitter-Bite Coat-White heeeeeeere!\" it howled; the other wolves took up the call of heeeeeeeeeeeere!\n\n\"Some of you know me, for this is my second Thing,\" the white-tipped wolf began. \"One or two of you even knew my father, Low-Ear Moon-Breath, leader of the Wind Song Pack.\"\n\nA few gaunt, elderly wolves in the front ranks thumped their tails against the dry bedrock of the empty river in acknowledgment.\n\n\"We've had fights today, matings, divisions, and aggregations. Such is the nature of Thing. Even Wind Song has lost daughters to other packs, and we gained a new son. Broad-Back Short-Whiskers challenged me for my place on Speaking Rock of Thing, and I emerged victorious. Being a good wolf, he returned to his place.\"\n\nSnufflings of appreciation rose from the assembly.\n\n\"Our first concern is the news that Hard-Legs Black-Bristle, last of the Dawn Roarers, has taken into the pack he now leads an Outsider. Such an event is not unknown to us. All of you know stories of we-people in our mercy raising orphaned elves, or humans even, teaching them to be wolves so that they might carry back to their kind wisdom and understanding. But Hard-Legs Black-Bristle has taken not a baby to be raised, but a mature entity into his pack. A young dragon, no less.\"\n\n\"Hear! Heeeeeeeaaaaaaar!\" the audience howled together. \"Let us hear how this came about.\"\n\n\"Will the leader of the Dawn Roarers tell this tale?\" the white-tipped wolf asked of Blackhard.\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"Then join me on Speaking Rock.\"\n\nBlackhard jumped up on the rock, but Auron saw that he took care to keep his head lower than Bitter-Bite's. He told the story of their meeting, battle, and outcome in a few short phrases, admitting that had he fought Auron to the end, the Dawn Roarers would have ceased to exist.\n\n\"The life of the pack is more important than the outcome of the fight,\" the white-tipped wolf observed, and the elders nearest the rock nodded agreement.\n\n\"Let us see this young dragon,\" one of the audience said, and others took up the call.\n\n\"Auron, step in front of the Speaking Rock,\" Blackhard said.\n\nAuron crept forward, taking care to keep his head low to the ground. The wolves looked interested, but on a wolf it was hard to distinguish interested from about-to-spring. There were a few growls, a few whines\u2014mostly from those wolves downwind\u2014and a laugh or two.\n\n\"Why it's just a baby.\"\n\n\"It's so small. Hardly bigger than one of our-people. It's all neck and tail.\"\n\n\"Where are the wings? Don't dragons have wings? Is that really a dragon?\"\n\n\"The Dawn Roarers must not have been much if they let that lizard take them.\"\n\nAuron heard Blackhard growl above and touched the honorable but still tender scars left by the lead-wolf's death grip on his neck. He raised his head, extended his griff from his crest, and spat fire at the base of the Speaking Rock.\n\n\"Can a lizard do that?\" Auron asked the assembled Thing. The wolves backed away from the flame, tails between legs.\n\n\"Calm down,\" the white-tipped wolf barked. He sniffed at the flames. \"That's no woodsmoke from lightning. We can take it as proved that he's a young dragon. But let's go on to the more important question: Is he welcome in our lands as a wolf?\"\n\nA babble of opinions broke out\u2014some saying that he was taken into a pack, and therefore was; others maintained that Blackhard had been coerced by the shadow of his own death into admitting Auron, and therefore wasn't.\n\n\"Are you calling me a coward?\" Blackhard said to the wolf who had raised the last question.\n\n\"With your pack lying dead around the prey? I do!\"\n\nBlackhard leaped off the Speaking Rock and into the crowd of wolves, snarling. Auron caught a flurry of teeth, bites, and shakes exchanged between the wolves in a blur of dancing fury. The snarls ended as quickly as they began, with Blackhard standing triumphant over his cringing opponent.\n\n\"I concede the point as a good wolf,\" the loser said.\n\nBlackhard had blood running from his muzzle and saliva matting his fur. \"Does anyone else challenge my courage?\"\n\nOnly the crickets answered from the gorge. The roaring rivers thundered on, oblivious.\n\n\"Then hear me, O Wolves. The Dawn Roarers go east when the sun rises. We ask to pass through your lands in peace, as good wolves. We ask for neither help nor hindrance in our journey. Can Thing assent to this drake being named as one of our-people, a good wolf?\"\n\n\"What say you, wolves? Yea or nay?\" the white-tipped wolf asked.\n\n\"Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!\" Thing answered.\n\n\"Then we name him Long-Tail Fire-Heart,\" Blackhard said. \"Though to any who would join the Dawn Roarers, they will call their brother Firelong.\"\n\n\"We wish the Dawn Roarers luck before they return to their territory, and hope that not too much is claimed in the interim by rival packs,\" the white-tipped wolf said, with an eye toward the packs from Blackhard's part of the forest.\n\nAuron and Blackhard left Thing and wandered back to the river. Blackhard drank deep from the cool water and assented to Auron licking the wounds on his muzzle clean.\n\n\"You're a good wolf, Firelong,\" Blackhard said when Auron finished. \"Stinky, but a good wolf.\"\n\nFirelong-Auron said nothing. He looked to the woods, where two other wolves, slightly smaller than Blackhard, stood sniffing them.\n\n\"If the Dawn Roarers are to have pups, it will take more than the two of you,\" one said, advancing to the riverbank with her head held in a sidelong manner. \"I am Bright-Sight Fey-Bark, and this is my friend, Way-Nose High-Star. We would join such a pack as you lead, and would be good wolves for you.\"\n\nThe other female joined her, and all three wolves wagged their tails. Blackhard approached them, and they began sniffing each other's tail-vents. Auron tried to keep from snorting at the sight. He might be an adopted wolf, but some customs...\n\nThe canines ran and played in circles, Blackhard trotting alongside first the one female, then the other. \"Very well, Feybright and Highway. As you are good wolves, and the Dawn Roarers needing pups, you will come with us before dawn to the mountain's east.\" He wandered back to the riverbank and took another drink. He glanced admiringly at the females as they curled up at his feet.\n\n\"It's good to be the lead wolf,\" Blackhard said to Firelong-Auron, his feathery-haired tail up and out.\n\nThe journey east passed well enough, and the mountains grew ever greater, until they came to the sheep hill. The wolves were born rangers, and they used their boundless energy and long legs to pick an easy path for their slower adopted pack mate. Three young, healthy wolves and one drake learned to hunt together. While Auron was useless at running down prey, he could sometimes ambush a meal by camouflaging himself in a tree if the wind blew strong enough.\n\nThey had no brushes with man until the sheep hill. It was a bare meadow rising out of the trees around it. The goats on it appeared unattended, so the wolves brought down a slow-footed nanny and took an easy meal. Auron had sharper eyes than the wolves, and he saw a shepherd boy running from his hiding place behind a rock and into the woods.\n\n\"He should be run down and killed,\" Auron said. The other wolves put up their ears.\n\n\"There aren't many men in this part of the forest,\" Highway said. \"We're safe enough for now, and we're only passing through.\"\n\n\"He's left the others at large,\" Feybright added. \"Good if wolf take another kill? This goat was stringy. Not much for the four of us, and Firelong does eat a lot.\"\n\n\"Good wolves, you'll have to learn to be more careful of men when we return to the lands of the Dawn Roarers,\" Blackhard said. \"There are men there, and it doesn't do to kill anything but stray livestock.\"\n\n\"Strange that he ran,\" Feybright said. \"The last boy my old pack came across threw stones.\"\n\n\"This one was young,\" Highway said.\n\n\"You're forgetting Firelong,\" Blackhard said. \"A drake is a rare sight in these parts.\"\n\n\"Yes, with the Dragonblade at work.\" Feybright agreed.\n\n\"What's that?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"The Dragonblade?\" Feybright said, and stood silent for a moment with eyes closed. Her ears turned this way and that as if listening to voices only she could hear. \"That's what his dog pack calls him, anyway. A great man-warrior. He has slain six of your kind, Firelong. Some fully grown dragons. He has a terrible spear, and a great sword. They had frightful names I've forgotten; the story was howled only once that I heard. The dogs claim he has forefathers human, elf, dwarf, and blighter, and took the best parts from each. But dogs always talk up their masters. Oh, they say he has cleared the dragons from the western face of the mountains from the hard-frost in the north to the warmlands in the south. More dog-brag, I suspect.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't work with a group of dwarves called the Wheel of Fire, would he?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"The dogs didn't mention that. Others have seen them. Fierce men, with knotted beards and bearskin vests. Though this Dragonblade wears armor of shining dragon scales. Or so the dogs say.\"\n\n\"Bite the dogs, we'd best move on,\" Blackhard growled, looking in the direction of the vanished boy.\n\nThat night, the howling chain called them, their foothill cadences strange to the ears of the deep-woods wolves.\n\n\"Black-Snout Hill-Chaser heeeeeere! Men under torchlight in the stone-man-mountain gatheeeeeer. Many horses they riiiiiide. Hunters the hills waaaaaalk.\"\n\n\"All this for a goat?\" Highway asked.\n\n\"No,\" Auron said. \"I suspect it is me. They mean to track me down. As you said, dragons are rare around here. I hope they don't become rarer.\"\n\n\"We are near the mountains. There are no man-roads there,\" Feybright said. \"What do you mean to do there?\"\n\n\"Cross them. I've seen the east side of the mountains. It looks over flat, empty lands. There are beasts to hunt. Not as much water, but I can get by.\"\n\n\"Can you get over them?\" Blackhard asked.\n\nAuron sniffed the ground, a gesture he picked up from the wolves to show indecision. \"I climb better than I run. There are roads under as well as over, of which you people of the Upper World are unaware. One way or another, I'll find my way through.\"\n\nBlackhard took his howling position and acknowledged the calls of the foothill wolves. He stared at the moonlit march of mountains ahead. \"We will travel with you one more day. I want to see you clear of these men. Then the Dawn Roarers turn for home.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Blackhard,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Just doing as a lead wolf would for one of his good wolves. So those are high mountains. They look a poor sort of place for wolves.\"\n\n\"Wolves don't have wings. Dragons do.\"\n\nBlackhard wagged his tail. \"That they do. When you have yours, you fly back to the forest. My great-grandkits will be on the lookout for you, Firelong.\"\n\n\"As a good wolf, I will.\"\n\nThe next day they climbed an endless slope until trees gave way to green meadows in clearings left by winter avalanches. When Auron saw Blackhard looking west into the forests stretched out under them, and the two females panting and crossing back and forth behind him, he knew it was time to say good-bye.\n\n\"Are you thinking of your home?\" Auron asked.\n\nBlackhard sniffed Auron, and he gave the drake's nose a playful nip. \"No. I'm worried about you. The wind carries the sound of hooves. They are hunting you.\"\n\nAuron couldn't hear anything but the wind, but he took the wolf's word for it. \"They're too late, unless they're planning on tracking me with mountain goats.\"\n\n\"We've left a trail. Those sheep we took\u2014\"\n\n\"They must have been wild,\" Auron said. \"There wasn't so much as a barn to be seen for hours.\"\n\n\"Then it is time to say good hunting. Highway, Feybright, say your farewells to your pack mate.\"\n\nThe females sniffed and licked at Auron. \"Good hunting, Firelong. May your new pack run far,\" Feybright said, giving the traditional farewell to males off to seek new horizons.\n\n\"This story will be howled for generations,\" Highway said. \"Starting with our cubs.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't have packs, Feybright. The Dawn Roarers will be my only pack. I'll miss you.\"\n\n\"A strange act of fate, our meeting,\" Blackhard said. \"Somehow I think your name will come up more than mine generations hence, but I'll be a wolf in the howled tales for many summers. I'm the leader of the pack and a well-traveled wolf, thanks to you.\"\n\n\"I got to the mountains alive, thanks to you,\" Auron said. \"Our days as a pack will go into my song, and it'll be taught to my hatchlings, if I ever take a mate. I'll pass along my memories. You'll be a wolf renowned among dragons and wolves, Hard-Legs Black-Bristle, leader of the Dawn Roarers.\"\n\nThe females exchanged proud glances. \"Our pack in a dragon's howls. Imagine that!\" Highway said.\n\nBlackhard smiled and wagged his tail. \"That is many tomorrows away. Be careful until you are well away, Auron. I don't like the idea of men hunting you.\"\n\n\"All the more reason for me to go. Good hunting, Blackhard.\"\n\n\"Good hunting, Firelong.\"\n\nAuron couldn't watch the wolves leave. He already missed the nightly sound of wolves calling each other across the hills. A return to the solitude of a wandering young drake. He turned for the mountains, and walked away without looking back.\n\n\"Hard-Legs Black-Bristle, leader of the Dawn Roarers heeeeeere!\" Auron heard wailed from behind. \"Beware, men in the mountains, for a good wolf comes to you in dragon skin. Let those who would hunt him fear the Dawn Roarers, so says the leader of the pack.\"\n\nAuron soon had company, but not the kind he desired. Some kind of great dog, a shaggy thing that looked to be the product of wizardly mating between bear and wolf, watched him from a sky-framed meadow above. It began to bark.\n\nWorse, its warning was also echoed by men's voices: they hooted to each other from mountainside to mountainside in musical calls.\n\nWorse still, the dog seemed content to bay at him from its vantage, giving Auron three choices. He could continue to climb the hill until he reached the dog's meadow. Though he felt sure he could kill it and continue on up, a dog meant men were near. The mountain had two other spurs, pointed out like an eagle's toes with forested valleys between. He could descend to the right or left and try another way up, or go back into the forests and attempt the crossing at a different mountain pass. He wished he had a mind-picture from his father of these mountains, but they were only vague memories this north of his normal range. From what he could see, to the south, the slopes were not so rugged, and therefore were more likely to have men on them. The north held steeper climbs, and one flat-topped mountain with a near-vertical face. Unlike its taller fellows, the flat-top was not snowcapped.\n\nThe barking from above grew more vigorous. The dog looked over its shoulder and began to caper, signaling the presence of men. It advanced a few paces down the hill toward the drake. Auron had learned from the wolves that dogs grew braver as their men grew closer. Forced into action, he dragon-dashed down the hill into some short-needled bushes. He would take the more difficult northern route.\n\nHis run gave the dog heart; it descended the steep hill to come after him.\n\nAuron heard a horn sound, then a second blast. He looked up toward the dog. Another dog, lighter-furred and smaller by the weight of a lamb or two, joined it. Three men followed behind: thick fur boots ending in hairy legs showed between the boot-bindings and their loincloths. They wore padded jackets sewn with wide leather thongs. High fur hats made them seem tall. Auron took a second look at the strange headgear: the hats looked as if an animal slept on their heads with hind legs dangling over their ears. They carried walking sticks topped with double-sided claws and some kind of short spears gripped in the hand opposite the one carrying the stick.\n\nHe could get the dogs, at least, and then the men would be at a disadvantage, relying on only their weak senses. He pressed himself flat to the ground and crept out from under the bushes, slowly enough for his color to change as he shifted positions. The lead dog showed no sign of seeing him. It continued to bound down the hill, with the other a few lengths behind. The three men spread out as they came down the hill.\n\nThe dog smelled him; he could hide his outline but not his odor, even amid the fragrant mountainside flowers and berries. It slowed down, bearlike head held to the ground and wary eyes looking at the spreading, thorny bushes.\n\nThe dog gave a querulous whimper.\n\nAuron launched himself forward, exploding out of the grass and into the dog's face. He bit, getting only a mouthful of fur as the dog pivoted to the side with more speed than an animal of its bulk should have. Auron whipped around to face it, keeping his open mouth between the dog and his flanks using his long neck.\n\nHe felt a bite on his far rear leg. The second dog danced away as Auron spun to face it. He dashed toward it, and it turned tail and ran, giving the other canine the opportunity to leap on him from behind.\n\nAs the men ran nearer, Auron fled, but each time he turned, one dog drew his attention as the other bit at his backside. The dogs did not fight like wolves; neither did anything more than bite him hard and then flee from his riposte\u2014the best he managed was to get a mouthful of tail in his counterbites. He was hurt and growing tired from charge after desperate charge at the dogs.\n\nAnother horn call shook Auron from the cycle of bites, turns, and flights. One man moved to throw one of his spear, but another put a hand on his arm. Perhaps they feared killing one of the dogs. Auron couldn't flee cross-country, so he fled upward, climbing a pine and pulling up his tail just as the smaller dog jumped at it.\n\nHeart pounding, he cursed himself as he clung to the branches. He was treed. The dogs began barking, standing on their hind legs with front paws on the trunk of the tree, slobbering mouths wide.\n\n\"Get away, if you know what's good for you,\" Auron growled down to them in wolf speech. He rattled his griff against his crest in warning.\n\n\"Caught! Treed! Caught! Treed!\" the larger barked back.\n\nThe men approached and spread themselves around the tree in a triangle, puffing from their long run. The one who tried to throw his spear earlier released it this time, but Auron shifted his body, and the weapon only took a piece out of the pine.\n\nThe man downslope laughed and taunted his frustrated fellow hunter. There was no telling what the men might do, given time. Blood trickled from his haunches and dripped onto the tree branches and baying dogs below. Auron calculated distances, shifting his head side to side as he triangulated. He sprang from the tree onto the laughing mountain man. The human was not so quick to move as he was to laugh\u2014Auron landed full atop him before he could bring up his spear. The pair rolled down the hill.\n\nThey fetched up against a rock, Auron's supple frame bruised, but the man's broken. The mountain man cursed and waved his arms, but his oddly twisted torso would not move below his rib cage. The man still drew a knife from his belt, but Auron had seen that trick long ago with Father. He knocked the weapon away with his tail and tore at the man's face. With the hunter unable to recognize anything but his own pain, Auron jumped atop the rock that had stopped their roll.\n\nThe stricken man's movements brought the other two running. Both threw spears, but Auron slipped behind the rock and watched with only his eyes and crest showing as the missiles bounced off the shielding rock.\n\nThe hated dogs ran as close together as if they were harnessed, bloody mouths gaping and eyes alight with the hunt. Auron tensed, raised his neck, and threw his head forward, hurling fire at the oncoming dogs. They turned into tumbling balls of flame, still going downhill. The men following behind threw themselves on their faces. The liquid fire fell well short of them, but it had its desired effect: by the time they raised their heads, Auron was gone.\n\nWithout the dogs following, Auron's escape went better. By the time the men caught sight of Auron again, he was nearing the floor of the valley. He ran into the woods and went to a fallen tree. He panted from his run as he cleaned the wounds in his haunches.\n\nHis tongue probed the wounds. I'm becoming a well-scarred drake.\n\nThe men, bent on avenging their companion, came into the woods, following his blood trail. He heard their voices and footsteps. Auron shifted himself around on the fallen tree so he faced the approaching men. His skin tingled as it shifted color again.\n\nHe watched them, hugging the tree trunk close. One of the men deliberately broke a branch and stuck it into the ground after etching something into a patch of dirt he exposed by kicking away the carpet of pine needles. He hung his fur hat from it. Some kind of pre-battle ritual? His companion stood ready and wary with spear raised over his shoulder.\n\nUnlike the dogs, the men ventured onto the log until one caught sight of his half-closed eye. Auron scrambled through their legs, knocking both from the tree trunk. They fell on opposite sides of the log. He jumped onto the hatless man, gripping by the throat as his saa dug in to flesh. Auron was heavier and stronger now. He tore the man open. He hooked his back claws onto the screaming man's hip bones, toes well inside the soft stomach, and with a kicking motion separated legs from torso. Both halves twitched as he scuttled off, dragging a loop of innard wrapped around his ankle as he turned toward the last man.\n\nThe other hunter jumped back on the log\u2014spear ready to throw. He saw his eviscerated friend and let out a choking cry. Auron gathered for a leap. The hunter threw his spear. Auron ducked, and it clattered off the one armored piece of his body: his crest. The man turned and fled. The spear's impact hurt Auron's ears and jaw, but he jumped after the man nonetheless. He bounded to the tree trunk and leaped in pursuit of his erstwhile hunter, but the man's fear gave him a rabbit's speed. Auron failed to bring him down in the first dash, and the man soon outdistanced him.\n\nHe paused at the corpse and ate. He was hungry enough to finish the entire corpse, but stopped after consuming the thick leg muscles and a few choice vitals. As he nosed under the rib cage, seeking the heart, he remembered his mother's words: Gluttony makes fat dragons, who can't fly at their need. He left without eating another bite.\n\nAuron wished he knew more of men. He looked at the branch stuck in the dirt, the hat, and the sign beneath, but could make nothing of the arrangement. Was this a man version of a mind-picture? It wasn't a picture of a dragon. Nor was it an image of a face, as he had seen on Father's coins, or even that wizard's cursed circle. He somehow felt it was a threat, so he knocked over the stick and rubbed out the mark.\n\nHoofbeats.\n\nHe cocked his ear in the air and decided they were coming from the ridge he had descended. Of course, his flame had left smoke\u2014burning dogs, perhaps\u2014for the horsemen to use as a mark when answering the horn calls. What the mountain men could read, others could. They would also follow the blood trail or, worse, use more dogs.\n\nAuron trotted away from the slaughter at the fallen log. He had eaten too much after all, and he felt bloated. The fight\u2014and the need to refill his fire bladder\u2014had given him an irresistible appetite. He cut through the woods in the direction of the flat-topped mountain at the best pace he could manage. A stream wound its way through the bottom of a deep, stone-studded ravine. The rill was more waterfall than waterflow as it jumped from stone to stone. Auron drank and washed out his wounds again. He rubbed his crest against a rock, testing the armored ridge. He felt sure it was cracked, though his sii detected nothing when he probed.\n\nHe found the remains of some bird's meal: a fish, crawling with flies and ants. He wiped his feet and rolled about in the area as best he could, imitating Blackhard, and then ascended along the edge of the stream. When his feet no longer smelled like fish, he trotted through the water. Foggy and sleepy, he resisted the impulse to crawl beneath a log and nap. He missed his friend Blackhard's tongue-hanging smile of infectious energy. Auron felt sure that if the Dawn Roarers were along, joking and laughing, he'd be up the hill in a song.\n\nTired of climbing, tired of running, tired of being hunted, Auron wondered if he dared take to a tree for a nap. Probably not. Some combination of hominid woodcraft and dog nose would find him out; fifty horsemen instead of three men would then surround him. He drove himself on as the shadows lengthened, his wounds making every step a stab.\n\nThe poplars and birches growing in this soggy part of the woods, sheltered by a spur of the mountain, thinned and gave way to spruce and hemlock as he went up another slope. Through them he caught sight of the cliff side of the flat-topped mountain: scored as if some titanic dragon had flown up and down the granite face dragging its claws into the rock like a man's plow making furrows in a field.\n\n\"Can you climb that?\" he asked himself in a quiet mutter.\n\nMust you climb it is the question, and the answer is yes\u2014part of him that spoke with his father's voice answered. The cliff looked too formidable for even the mountain men to manage, and from the top he could pick a route through the mountains east. The sun was falling, which was good. If he could ascend it in the dark, he would vanish from the pursuit as if lifted up by his still-dormant wings.\n\nIt couldn't hurt to take a good look at it while the light lasted. He licked his scab-stiff, bitten flanks again as he examined the mountain. The fluting looked deeper on the side nearest him, though that would give him a farther distance to climb. But the channels would offer him more places for his sii and saa. Nevertheless, it would be like climbing the side of his parents' cave a hundred times over. He closed one eye and kept watch with the other.\n\nBlackhard was a long way off, howling. Considerate of him to go off so as not to disturb a good sleep.\n\nAuron awoke with a start.\n\nIt wasn't Blackhard's voice; it was some strange wolf's, and at great distance. It was too faint for him even to make out much of the call, which sounded like news of the Thing being relayed to wolves who couldn't attend. He looked at the moon and startled: he had fallen asleep, and night had come upon the land.\n\nToo big a meal with too much left to do. Auron's conscience roused him faster than the sense of danger did. Hoofbeats thudded faintly, far off but all around. The woods had been turned into a cage with innumerable bars.\n\nAuron surveyed the gaps in the trees and started a slow walk through the forest. His imagination turned the trees into watchful elves with ready spears, waiting for him to step under their moon-shadow to strike. As the trees thinned, he saw flickering pinpricks of watch fires on the hills ahead.\n\nSo much effort for one small drake! Hundreds of men hunted him, a drake of no reputation. He counted nine watch fires between forest and cliff; behind him, he saw others on the ridge where he had first encountered the prowling dog. He heard dogs in the forest barking at shadows, and the cracking sounds of men blundering into branches.\n\nHe felt it was still early in the night. With enough hours, he could creep between the watch fires and get up the cliff before they knew he had slipped the encirclement. He began a slow and stealthy journey toward a fire. Drums broke out, alarming him for a moment, but no men appeared, and he relaxed\u2014the fearsome tattoo perhaps was designed to drive him west and deeper into the wooded valley. He could pick out the silhouettes of men now and then, crossing the fire with their dogs. Curse the human-canine alliance! Men's brains and dogs' senses made a formidable team.\n\nTo his right, he saw a hunter in one of the tall fur hats leaning against an outcrop of rock. A stillwatch. The wind blew out of the west, and would carry his scent parallel to the watch fires rather than toward it, thankfully, but this hunter was directly downwind. The man showed no sign of smelling him, and Auron thanked the Sun for Her absence and the peculiar weaknesses of humans.\n\nThe watch fires cut his night-wide eyes with a painful glare. Auron heard some stirring beyond the crackling logs, but the sounds could have been anything from picketed horses to a herd of sheep. He had two options: slip through the shadows between the fires, the most likely areas to be guarded; or dash right across, traveling in and out of the light in a matter of a few seconds. Auron preferred the latter, and he nerved himself for the run.\n\nA boy toting a load of firewood on his back appeared in the light. He dumped the burden with a sigh and started to build up the fire. The boy's motion might be confused with his, and Auron took his chance.\n\nWhen the boy turned his back, Auron raced up the slope toward the hilltop fire. Under other circumstances, the boy would have been an easy kill, but Auron whipped past him. A dog at the next bonfire to his left sprang to its feet and barked, but Auron was already out of the light.\n\n\"Niy! Niy!\" a man's voice called, and Auron saw a squatting figure get to its feet. A horse... no, a pony, got wind of him and reared before it turned to run.\n\nAuron strung out his dash as long as he could, overfilled belly scraping the ground in between stretches. Curse his appetite! One of the mournful horns of the mountain men blew as he jumped over a stone wall running down the other side of the hill. He turned and ran along the top of the wall, hopeful that the pursuit would continue in the direction he had been moving. The cliff beckoned, but he trotted parallel to it until he heard the baying of dogs on a scent and thudding hooves behind.\n\nHe looked up at the cliff. It loomed above like the world were standing on its side. The sky around it glowed a faint pink. Dawn already? But then it was high summer, and he was north, where the nights would be short.\n\nThere was nothing to do but try. He turned for the cliff.\n\nThe baying of dogs behind and the mens' shouts froze him in alarm.\n\nHe stood atop a shelf of rock. The shelf jutted from one of the boulders scattered at the base of the sheer wall, like fallen pinecones around a tree, and he watched them close in. Shadows loomed in the morning mist: men on horses, men afoot, dogs both free and leashed, boys with slings and mouths full of stones. Worst of all, archers with great recurved bows stood atop the rocks to either side with arrows nocked, ready to shoot when they saw a target.\n\nA pack of dogs had caught up to him; he had killed two before the rest backed off and set to baying. Now the horsemen gathered. He could hear but could not see the mounts in the mist.\n\nThe archers would probably kill him, and the odds were worsening by the minute. Soon there would be men with spears and swords among the rocks. While the dogs were still keeping their distance, he crept to the cliff face, letting his nose lead the way and slowly curling and uncurling his body as he flowed from hiding spot to hiding spot like a tar seep. Soon he had to grip cracks in the stone with short-clawed sii. He had made the transition to vertical travel, and long climb was begun.\n\nOne of the archers shouted, \"niy!\" and an arrow tapped off a rock next to him. The channel he climbed closed to something like a notch a dozen body-lengths above. If he could reach that, the archers would have trouble getting an angle on him, and their bows might not throw the missiles that high.\n\nHe felt something pull at his haunch, and looked down to see an arrow piercing the thin webbing between leg and stomach. These were not elven arrows, but ugly black shafts with barbed points and red fletching. Auron looked back: two archers stood shoulder to shoulder, speaking to each other out of the sides of their mouths as they drew marks.\n\nAuron heard the bows twang, and he threw himself to a new fissure. He felt the passage of the arrows before they hit bare stone where his chest had been, sending sparks from their steel heads. Auron flattened himself into a crevice, painfully snapping the shaft in his leg. If only he were a real armored drake! By now he would have scales on his back that would allow these assassins to rain all the arrows they could at this distance, without effect unless they caught him in the throat or eye. The fissure protected him from arrows for the moment, but it did not run up farther than a neck-length or two.\n\nA bow twanged again, and it would be hard to say who was more surprised at the hit: the archer or Auron. The drake felt something like a horse-kick in his side. An arrow stood out from his chest, its black shaft projecting from his rib cage, blood welling around the edges of the wound. Auron took a surprised breath, and pain racked the right side of his body. He lost his grip and tumbled from the cliff.\n\nHe righted himself in the air and landed on his feet, among men with spears. A silver-helmeted man managed to skewer his tail, holding him pinned while the others closed in to kill.\n\nAuron spat fire in a great arc at the spear points closing in and was rewarded by screams louder than the air-eating roar of his flame. He turned to bite at the one holding the spear in his tail. The man put up an armored forearm, and his mouth closed on that, but he was free of the pinning grip. Auron clawed the man across the legs and leaped away into the rocks before others could get him from behind.\n\nWriggling between cliff walls and boulder, careful to keep the arrow shaft from striking rock, Auron was leaving a blood trail, and he knew it. The screams of a dying man gave him grim satisfaction. He felt short of breath, weak but content. He might be trapped, but he had taken his share of hunters and their animals.\n\n\"Dragon!\" someone called in Parl, a booming roar that might have come from a bear. \"Dragon! Come out and face me. Bring fire, tooth, and claw, foul creature.\"\n\nFoul creature, indeed! Auron thought. Even bleeding, he was cleaner of skin than any of the greasy men or flea-hosting dogs hunting him.\n\n\"Demon spawn! Plague of women and children! You face a man this time, not a child. Come and try to take me.\"\n\nThe voice was at least ten body-lengths behind, somewhere among the rocks. The hunter would see the blood trail soon. Best to distract him.\n\nAuron lowered his head and tried to sound as much like Father as possible. \"Do you throw a spear, man, or just insults?\" Auron said in Parl, doing his best to rattle his griff as loudly as a winged dragon might.\n\n\"I throw Byltzarn, 'white spear of lightning' in this tongue, and wield Dunherr, 'the thunder's edge.' Their bearer is known as the Drakossozh, 'the dragon blade.' Hear my name and despair, for I hunt your kind up and down these hills!\" The voice moved away from the cliff's edge. Auron heard words hissed back to another voice using the human tongue.\n\nAuron extended his neck around another rock. \"Noble titles. Kill me today, and you will have earned them.\"\n\n\"I will only have dispensed justice, child-snatcher. It's been a hell of a spring for me. I killed two dragons plaguing the Burning Wheel dwarves at the Highlake: a great bronze male and a young female. I've been on your trail since the coast, when you did murder to the village of Sarsmyouth and killed old men and boys trying but to feed their families. 'The sooner a blood debt is collected, the better,' as my grandsire Odlon used to say.\"\n\nAuron froze against his stone. Wistala, Father, it had to be! His fire bladder filled even as his heart went cold. He heard a heavy tread among the boulders. He finally saw Drakossozh, a tall man with shoulders like a draft ox. The Dragonblade wore a shining silver helm marked by two curving wings sweeping up and meeting like two crescent moons above a spiked face mask. His spear gleamed white even in the gloom of the morning mist; his sword handle was formed like an open dragon's mouth. The wide blade of Dunherr projected from it like a dragon's tongue before ending at twin points. He wore scale armor, also shaped like that of a dragon's, though if they were dragon scales, some craftsman had carved and polished them into art. A red sash was thrown over his shoulder, human ideograms stitched into it in a series of white dots, and tied at his sword hilt.\n\nAuron thumped his wounded tail, hard, on the reverse side of the rock. The man whirled, but only a small portion of Auron's head and neck was visible. He watched the man through one barely open eye. \"Will you face an armed man, creature, as fiercely as you did a child hardly able to walk?\" The man's spiny helm searched to and fro, moving like a weather vane rather than like living flesh.\n\nAuron faced him, shooting his head forward and vomiting flame. The man threw his armored elbow before the eye slits in his armored mask as he knelt behind another rock, but too late. Auron's fire coated him in a cascade of yellow-orange liquid. Spent and pained, Auron inhaled smoky air into his one good lung and slipped off the rock.\n\nHe saw a tower of flame rise. The fire slipped from the Dragonblade's armor like surf from a sea turtle's back. Somehow, the man lived. Drakossozh came at him, spear point held to skewer and kill. \"All you've burned is the sash, with the names of those in Sarsmyouth you murdered stitched into it. But they remain in my memory. Tirea, the child, Guldan, the fisherman... ,\" he recited, swinging the sword to kill.\n\nAuron writhed under the blade and shot between two rocks, snapping off the arrow in his side in a flash of red pain. The man brought his sword down as Auron ran, lung filled with blood and agony, and he felt as though his tail had been stepped on. It did not hinder him, and Auron leaped atop another rock. An arrow shot under his neck.\n\nThe Dragonblade shouted, and Auron saw silver helmets and spear points bobbing among the rocks. The Dragonblade hopped upon the tallest boulder, leaping as nimbly as an elf even in his smoldering armor, and he continued to bellow orders. They were answered by the archers\u2014one fired a flaming arrow in Auron's direction. It struck a tree trunk and burned, throwing off bright sparkles that hissed as they landed on mist-wet stone.\n\nEach breath was agony, and Auron ceased running so he could get air in his body. A mountain man blew his horn, and Auron saw spears pointed in his direction. He noted dully that a third of his tail had been chopped off.\n\n\"Why you're hardly worth skinning!\" Drakossozh bellowed, laughing. \"Those fishermen made you out to be a sea monster of awesome size and ferocity. When I found one of your teeth, I wondered. I'm proved right. Again.\"\n\n\"Do you always talk your dragons to death?\" Auron said, further pain coming with the words.\n\n\"No. But with your death, I will have taken all the colors, save black. There will be feasting and dancing tonight, as you rotate on a spit. Headless, for I must have my trophy.\"\n\nAuron flirted with the thought of whipping his neck down to shatter his skull on a rock, but turned so that the man might try to take his head. He cried the best dragon roar he could, but it was hardly loud or fierce, and it ended with a bloody cough.\n\n\"Your men wait for you. None seem eager to approach,\" Auron said. The men ringed him, but none threw spear or shot arrow.\n\nThe Dragonblade jumped down from his perch and strode toward Auron, a wisp of smoke or two still coming from nooks in his armor. Mountain men fell in behind him, gripping their climbing picks two-handed.\n\nHorses screamed in the distance and thundered out of the mists. Auron turned his head, trying to pierce the fog that had turned the land into shadow and hint. A boy with a torch ran among the horses, looking fearfully over his shoulder. Two dogs trailing their leashes ran for the rocks, tails tucked beneath legs. Pairs of glowing eyes reflected light from the gloom.\n\n\"Firelong! Firelong!\" a voice in the fog howled. \"Tell me you still live, or I'll tear out the throat of every man, dog, and horse here. Answer, O my good wolf.\"\n\nIt was Blackhard. Auron felt his heart pound.\n\n\"Blackhard! Brother!\" he howled, as best he could.\n\nThe Dragonblade raised his spear for a throw, but a white-haired mountain man put a restraining arm on his shoulder. \"Sir,\" the oldster said in Parl, \"those are the voices of wolves, calling for the beast, and the dogs whimper in fear. Look away from the rocks. Some magic in the dragon draws them.\"\n\nGroups of mist-dampened wolves stood like a gray tide at the edge of the boulder-fall. Ears quivered; lips pulled back to reveal rows of shining white teeth. The Thing growled as one wolf, a sound that could freeze even the sap in the trees.\n\n\"Let the beast go, I tell you,\" the mountain man urged. \"Hardly a man is left in the villages; if the wolves run mad, it will be the death of my valleys. Let the hunt end.\"\n\n\"The dragon may go!\" Dragonblade yelled to the assembled men. He removed his helmet, revealing a thick-skinned face as tough as a grandfather oak. Sword-hard green eyes set off tight rust-colored curls gray at the temples. The eyes locked on Auron. \"But the hunt will go on. Another day.\"\n\nAuron drew a wheezing breath. \"So be it.\" He turned and limped to the wolves.\n\nAs night fell, Blackhard nuzzled him.\n\n\"I didn't like the look of things after you left. My heart and conscience both troubled me. There were men riding everywhere. But the real insult: those collar-fool hounds running free in our forests, scaring every elk and caribou for miles. The dogs had the gall to mark every third tree, as if they owned the woods. I called Thing, and found the same outrage had been committed from the three-rivers to the ice passes. Man can do as he likes in his fields and meadows, but the wolf-woods are another matter. Thing decided to teach them a lesson, and we knew that where you were, the men would be. We closed on them even as the men gathered around you.\"\n\nThing had since dispersed, and the Dawn Roarers rested on an island surrounded by marshland. Not even a fox could track them here.\n\n\"I'd be turning on a spit if it weren't for you, brother. This good wolf is grateful,\" Auron said. Feybright licked the wounds at his chest, and Highway the stub of his tail.\n\n\"As you should be, Auron,\" Blackhard said. \"Stay with us awhile, in the forests of the Dawn Roarers.\"\n\n\"Soon I'll be making so much noise, every deer for miles will run. It wouldn't be good hunting. Don't forget the smell.\"\n\n\"It gets worse every day,\" Blackhard admitted. \"You reek like a man's tallow light. How can you stand yourself?\"\n\n\"'A dragon knows not his own strength, or smell,' \" Auron quoted.\n\n\"Another proverb? Dragon saws aren't very practical. Now the humans would have done better to learn one or two words of wolf wisdom. 'Ware where when lift leg,' for example.\"\n\nAuron laughed, wolf-style, and coughed up more blood. But only a little.\n\nSix rainy days later, Auron followed the road south, remembering Blackhard's words: \"It doesn't look it in this part of the forest, but to the south this road joins another from the coast, and becomes an ancient road from long ago, even as men think of time, older in this land than wolves. It's the fastest way back to the southlands.\"\n\nHe'd decided against another climb. His wind was short with the wound to his chest, and his hunger trebled. Physical hurts aside, the Dragonblade's men were crawling across the western slopes of the mountains like ants on rotten melon. He'd try his luck south before attempting the mountains again.\n\nThe wolf was right: the road did not look like much. The trail consisted of a pair of ruts winding between tree stump and hillside, surrounded by beaten-down weeds. Stone markers bordered it here and there, leaning like loosened teeth. Whoever had made it knew their business: the road cut through hillsides and had embankments built under it at depressions, and the vestiges of cut-stone bridges still stood alongside fords used these days. Here and there, water and wind had scoured away the dirt and detritus to paving stones beneath. The road's makers must have cut down a mountain to construct it.\n\nThe drake wanted to get away from Drakossozh and his men in this land between mountains and coast, and the wolves said this road would guide him away quickly. He could try the mountains again where they were lower, at the gap where he'd been born. He moved along it, keeping to the trees. Once out of the forest, he'd have to worry about circling around villages, but that could be done at night. If the Dragonblade still sought him, he would hunt to the heart of wolf country, not in lands inhabited by other men. His wounds had turned to scars, but his lung had not completely healed: he still found himself out of breath and needing a nap after the short lengths of his journey.\n\nHis parents had told him drakes wandered aimlessly. But Auron had a purpose. He'd find NooMoahk, learn the secret weakness of which Hazeleye had spoken. The Dragonblade and those like him were probably using it to clear the mountains of his kind. Perhaps he could overcome the weakness the way he'd overcome his lack of scales (so far!). Then when it came time for him to mate, his clutch would be taught it, as well.\n\nHe saw only one group using the road to move north: cloaked, sandaled humans stepping into the forests, behind another cloaked man on a horse singing a marching song. Auron would have thought nothing of them, except the rider's horse bore an emblem stretched on a fly-blanket across its face: the little man in the golden circle. He hurried away as fast as he safely could\u2014that emblem had brought him nothing but unhappiness in the past, and the farther away he fled from it, the better.\n\nA rider or two went south; Auron took care to stay downwind from the road so the horses would not become alarmed and warn the riders. He kept himself fed at the innumerable little rivers, all moving westward down from the mountains to the far-off coast. Plentiful fat and tasty fish were fighting upstream and dying along the riverbanks, and their red flesh was welcome. After watching a bear do it, he learned to raid honeycombs; his skin might not keep out arrows, but it was impervious to bee stings. A little honey went a long way: after a few tonguefuls\u2014and some crunchy insects\u2014he left the bees to buzz out their outrage.\n\nIt was raining again when he saw the tradesdwarf.\n\nAuron was sleeping out the rain with one water-lidded eye open, his belly pressed to pleasantly warm mud in a runoff-filled ditch, when he saw the red-and-gold cart and string of ponies going south along the road. The cart had two horses drawing it. It was an odd two-wheeled construct, too big to be a chariot but too small to be called a wagon. A beardless dwarf sat at the reins, dry under a canopy that extended from the covered cart behind. The unhappy-looking string of ponies walked behind, packs tied to their backs. The dwarf grumbled to himself as he drove, a studded leather face-shield muffling his words.\n\nThe dwarf was not dressed for war. There was not so much as an ax or a spear in sight. He wore simply cut brown clothes with polished metal buttons holding the double-breasted front closed, and leather pants that had boots built in, or perhaps boots that extended high on leather pants. A sagging, brimless leather cap, not a helm, sat on his head.\n\nAuron could never say for sure what inspired him to do what he did next. The horses looked tempting, but he was far from starving, so it wasn't hunger. And had he desired murder, he would never have trotted out into the road and reared up on his hind legs.\n\nThe dwarf pulled up his horses with a cry of \"Pogt!\" He did not reach for a weapon, but a purse, and flung a handful of coins past Auron and into the woods.\n\nSomething about the motion caught Auron's eye. He glanced to see where the money landed before he turned back to the tradesdwarf, who now had his whip ready to put his horses into a gallop. If only Auron would get out of the middle of the path.\n\n\"Money, dragon... there! Silver!\" the dwarf shouted in Parl. \"A mouthful at least!\"\n\nAuron flicked out his tongue and smelled the horses.\n\nThe dwarf whipped his horses, and they took a few steps forward, but when they smelled Auron, they reared up, protesting with high whinnies.\n\n\"Klatta buggak!\" the dwarf shouted. Auron caught a flash of white eyes from the slits in his mask.\n\nAuron dropped back onto all fours and cleaned an ear. Couldn't the dwarf see that the fans weren't extended down from his crest?\n\n\"Well, creature, what is this? Robbery? I carry trade goods, not gold.\"\n\nAuron extracted a tick from his earhole.\n\nThe dwarf rose in his seat. \"Murder? You'll find me a poor meal, and I have many kinsmen to avenge me. I'm a journeyman of the great Chartered Company of the Diadem.\" The dwarf pulled a chain from his shirt\u2014a diamond-shaped pendant in silver hung from it. \"If your sire and dam taught you any wisdom, I'm sure they told you not to cross us.\"\n\n\"Neither,\" Auron said. \"I came to beg a favor.\"\n\nThe dwarf made a noncommittal noise, then settled for pushing the cap back on his head. \"A favor? A favor? What favor can I grant a young dragon? I, a poor dwarf in my company's service.\"\n\nAuron hooked the collar in the ear-exploring claw. \"This souvenir. I wish to be rid of it. Before I get any bigger and... air-starve\u2014and choke.\" Auron hoped his slow, awkwardly phrased Parl got the point across.\n\n\"Hmmmpfh,\" the dwarf said. He hopped down from the driver's seat and clumped over to Auron. \"Now you've got me curious. A collared dragon. But then I'm young, and haven't seen much of the world. I was apprenticed to a miner, you see. It wasn't a life of new experiences.\"\n\nAuron lifted his head, watching the dwarf's hands.\n\nThe dwarf took up the collar. \"Man-work. Shows all the craftsmanship of a warm pile of horsechunt. Follow me. There's an old bridge ahead\u2014I was going to camp beneath it for a dry fire.\"\n\n\"I can offer you little in return, save a hunt or two. What forest meats have you a taste for?\"\n\n\"This will be our bargain. Gather all the coins I threw, don't eat any of them, and follow behind and return them to me. I'll take care of your 'souvenir.'\"\n\nAuron rooted for the coins\u2014he smelled precious metals easily enough, though he had no appetitie for them\u2014and carried them in his mouth well behind the dwarf and his animals.\n\nThe road sloped down and turned, coming to the broken bridge spanning a river-carved gully. Once the bridge had stretched above the riverside willows; now only broken columns remained past the first arch. The dwarf pulled his cart under it and unburdened his animals.\n\nWhen Auron joined him, the tradesdwarf touched his nervous horses and muttered soothing words to them. He blocked the wheels with stones, put down an extra set of legs for the cart, and unharnessed the draft animals. The dwarf took the string of ponies from the back of his cart and tied them beside the newer road at the drift that had replaced the bridge, using the stone pillar to shield them from wind and weather. When the animals were munching in their nose bags, he returned to Auron, wringing water from his cap. Auron saw straps holding the face-shield in place, fixed across thick, woolly hair.\n\nHis companion resettled his cap. \"What a land. When it's not raining, it's snowing,\" the dwarf said, opening the back of his cart. Chests with rows of tiny drawers, glass jars with crystal stoppers, and tools hung inside with cooking and camping equipment.\n\nAuron spat out the coins. \"I'm a stranger to this land, until a moon or two ago, that is,\" Auron said.\n\n\"That so? I'm not surprised; dragons don't stay long hereabouts. The men got them all, or so I'm told.\"\n\n\"I've met the hunters,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Then you're doubly lucky. Wise to go south.\" The dwarf found a hammer and a flat piece of metal.\n\n\"I'm trying to get over the mountains. I wish to go far east and find others of my kind.\"\n\nThe dwarf raised the face-mask to him, paused, and then set his tool against Auron's collar. \"That so,\" the dwarf said.\n\nAuron watched him adjust the collar out of the corner of his eye. He didn't like the feel of a hominid at his neck. Auron both felt and heard a sharp tap, and the collar dropped to the ground, opened wide.\n\n\"Your favor has been granted, young dragon, by Djer of the Diadem. Do you like sausages better than silver?\" the dwarf asked.\n\n\"My name is Auron, son of AuRel. I've never had sausages, but I've no appetite for coin.\"\n\n\"My store of dragon lore isn't great,\" the tradesdwarf Djer said, building a tent of kindling on the ground. \"You're only the second I've seen in my travels, and the other was high up and far off. But I'd heard if you're cornered by a dragon, offering them coin to eat will save your skin. Is that just a tale?\"\n\n\"No, it's the truth. I'm scaleless. Scaled dragons eat the metal. It gets turned into armor. Since they shed them sometimes, a dragon will hoard money so his coat stays healthy.\"\n\n\"Ahhh. So the legend I've been told has some truth to it for a change. A dragon with no appetite for gold, eh? Wait a moment, Auron, and have a meal with me before you move on. I've never talked to a dragon before.\"\n\nAuron found he liked being called a dragon, though any fool chickadee could see he had no wings. \"I've never talked to a dwarf although I've seen them before. They were geared for battle, the Wheel of Fire dwarves.\"\n\nDjer rubbed his hands clean on a soft piece of leather hanging from his belt. \"We of the Chartered Company don't think much of them. We'd rather earn our riches than kill for them. We have little to do with the Wheel of Fire and their ilk, or their wars. Silly and dangerous way to accomplish a simple task. We're not far from their lands now, in the by.\"\n\nAuron gulped down his excitement, picked his words carefully. \"Are there any dragons in the area? Perhaps a bronze who fought with the Wheel of Fire?\"\n\n\"I see. A feud.\" The dwarf started a fire.\n\n\"Please.\" Auron said the world with difficulty.\n\n\"No. I know the Dragonblade spent some time here... oh, last summer, I think, hunting for one of your kind. A bronze, this pelt-trapper told me.\"\n\nAuron stared at the burning twigs as they licked at a larger piece of driftwood. So the Dragonblade's story was not just brag meant to cow a young dragon.\n\nDjer got out a frying pan. Auron was grateful for his silence. As darkness fell, the fire grew brighter against the now-shadowed riverbank. Djer threw a spoonful of delicious-smelling lard and strips of meat into the pan, and soon they were sputtering, all the while the dwarf grumbled in Dwarvish as though in an argument with the hot iron and its contents.\n\nWhen the meat was ready to be turned, he spoke again to Auron. \"Let me tell you something about dwarves, young dragon. Who you're related to determines your future, unless you're a granite- hardworking dwarf. I was born not even to miners, but to diggers. Plain tunneling folk, my father and his before. My father gave all he had to get me apprenticed to a miner, and I spent weary years working double-time saving to buy into the Chartered Company at my age. Gave up tobacco and beer, ate day-old bread so I could save to buy in.\" The dwarf sighed. \"Even so, I'll never go anywhere with the Company unless I work out my life behind these horses in unprofitable lands\u2014and I'm getting tired of the view\u2014or do something special for the Company.\"\n\nAuron saw eyes glittering from behind the mask.\n\n\"You say you want to go east?\" the dwarf asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Every year a trade Caravan goes east, from the gap in the south of these mountains across the steppes, crossing the realm of the Ironriders. The great east is a land of spices, timbers, fabrics, and metals that can't be found around the Inland Sea. It's the backbone of the Chartered Company, that Caravan. How would you like to travel it with me?\"\n\nHe pulled the sausages off the pan with a fork and tossed one to Auron. It burned his unsheathed tongue but was admirably tasty, better even than a fire-roasted horse Father brought home.\n\n\"You go every year on this trip?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"Ach, no\u2014I'm not important enough. But if I could bring a dragon along, well, they'd take me, sure and certain.\"\n\n\"How would a dragon help?\"\n\nAuron thought he saw a glow from behind the mask as the dwarf pulled his beard. \"Remember what I said about money? We pay our way east, rather than fight through the Ironriders. Bribes. Hiring guards. There's a money wagon that we pay expenses out of. Usually we guard it with strong warriors, men hired at great cost. Funny how trustworthiness costs more than muscle. A dragon would be better. Ideal for you. You'd have nothing to do but ride with the treasure and look fearsome whenever we open it to pay the Steppe Kings. You'd eat rich and travel in style. What say you, Auron?\" Djer finished a sausage and tossed Auron another.\n\n\"Answer me a question first,\" Auron said.\n\n\"No trade secrets.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Why do dwarves hide their faces?\"\n\nThe dwarf chuckled. \"Part custom among strangers. But there is sense to it aboveground.\" Djer turned away from the fire, took off his cap, and reached behind his head. He peeled away the mask and turned to Auron. Great limpid eyes like that of an owl regarded him half-hidden by a heavy brow thick with hair. A scraggly beard... Auron widened his eyes and looked again. The dwarf's beard shone, faintly, rather like the moss in his parents' cavern. Tiny flecks of copper dust sparked in his beard.\n\n\"Your beard... it glows.\"\n\n\"It's sort of a moss. Most dwarves cultivate it in their whiskers with a morning sprinkling of sweetwater. Weathier men than I add silver, gold, or even jewels to enhance the glow. Useful when you're in a dark hole. Sunlight kills it. And hurts the peepers, in the by. So what do you say, dragon? Help me earn a dusting of gold for my young whiskers?\" Djer tossed him another sausage hot from the pan.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Auron finally said. \"On this trip, will there be a lot of sausages?\"\n\nAuron rode in the back of Djer's cart curled up on the floor, stomach full of food, out of the wind and rain. If this was all he had to do to make his way east, he'd be happy to sit atop the dwarves' bags of gold.\n\nAuron had decided to take the road east after long thought. For all he knew, the Dragonblade was hunting the lands between mountains and coast for him, and if he lingered, he'd be found again.\n\nHe wanted to travel to NooMoahk, and learn the great weakness of dragons. Perhaps by exploiting it, the hominids were killing them off; his father had spoken darkly of the dragons vanishing from the earth. How many times had the scene with his family been repeated up and down the mountains, he wondered? How many dragons had been slaughtered in their caves? If Hazeleye had uncovered some weakness that allowed assassins an edge, he wanted to know it, so other dragon families wouldn't suffer the fate of his. NooMoakh lived somewhere where dragons reached maturity and old age, perhaps in a land far from assassins in the empty plains. At the very least, he might find safety, other dragons living and hunting in peace.\n\n\"We're coming to a village,\" Djer said. \"Stay quiet back there. I won't open the cart unless no one is around. I might have to do a little tinkering; having you along means the meat'll run short soon.\"\n\n\"A village of men?\"\n\n\"What else? They breed like rabbits, and roam like wolves.\"\n\nAuron pushed under some tenting and curled his shortened tail beneath him. The little house-on-wheels bounced on its springs as it neared the village and crossed more ruts in the road.\n\n\"What ho!\" a man's slow voice called from the road. \"If it isn't the wandering dwarf.\"\n\n\"Still trying to get new money for old hides, Djer Highboots?\" another said in a more friendly tone.\n\nAuron heard Djer lift himself in the seat, and he could picture the dwarf taking off his hat. \"Afternoon, my men, afternoon. I see the manner of the men of Irr-on-Slackwater is as welcoming as always. Why the spear, Gule the Younger?\"\n\n\"A dragon's been tracked on this road, north of three-arch bridge. Drakossozh himself seeks the beast. Oddly enough, he seeks you, too. Seems his armor took fire in battle with a dragon.\"\n\n\"Ahh, a beautiful bit of workmanship. I remember it. Well, well, well, if it were any other time, I'd wait a month for him, but I have a Caravan to meet.\"\n\n\"The thane has bade us give you food, fuel, and fodder while you wait for him. You're the only dwarf hereabouts.\"\n\n\"And whose fault is that? The thane himself and his 'men's money for men's goods' decrees; your priests railing against dwarves bringing in liquor and wine, and that dryhole wizard's emblem on the lintel of every shop meaning I'll get my head knocked in if I darken the doorstep. The great Chartered Company'd have a crafts-dwarf in your village, if only you'd patronize them. You're getting as bad as the barbarians. I've been up north since the snow melted, and what do I have to show for it? Six ponies' load.\"\n\n\"Dwarves never tire of blaming others for their troubles,\" the slow voice said, as though it were speaking words of a foreign tongue.\n\n\"Ach,\" Djer said. \"You go about your business, and let me do mine.\"\n\n\"You'll wait here for the Dragonblade, if you want the thane's goodwill.\"\n\n\"The thane will let me pass, if he wants the goodwill of the Diadems. I'm driving on.\"\n\nAuron felt the cart lurch into motion. Djer set his horses to a trot, and the bouncing stopped only after an hour's hard travel. A panel behind the driver's seat slid open, and for the first time, Auron saw a weapon, a stout mace, taken from a box beneath the little window.\n\n\"Trouble?\" Auron said. \"Did they ride after you?\"\n\n\"Not from behind. Ahead. Take a peek.\"\n\nAuron looked over Djer's shoulder. He saw a line of dirty-clothed men, interspersed with gangly boys, trudging in a tight line up the road. A man walking his horse led them. The leader carried a shield and sword, but the men had only clubs, staves, and hoes. Auron had seen a column like it before, farther north along the road.\n\n\"Beeyah, dwarf! Off the road,\" the leader shouted in Parl. He halted his file with a sweep of his shield. \"There's good men afoot, and some riding dwarf bastard isn't going to push us off.\"\n\nDjer said nothing, but clucked his tongue and shifted his horse to give them room to pass. He snapped the panel shut, cutting off Auron's view.\n\n\"There's room to share the road,\" Djer said. \"Space for both of us.\"\n\n\"Go to the other side. That side's upwind of us.\"\n\nAuron felt the cart lurch to a halt, setting the hung tools inside swinging on their hooks.\n\n\"This is as far as I go,\" Djer said. \"If you wish to pass upwind, you go to the other side and do so. I'll not move.\"\n\nThere was a quiet pause.\n\n\"Take my advice, dwarf. Keep heading south, and don't come back. Your kind aren't much liked up here. We don't care for dwarvish settlers. This is man-ground.\"\n\n\"That'll be news to my cousins in the mountains. They were here before Hypat laid the first paving stone.\"\n\n\"Don't answer back to an officer, dwarf,\" an unfamiliar voice yelled in Parl.\n\n\"Let's tip his cart!\" another shouted.\n\n\"Beeyah! Beeyah!\" voices chorused.\n\nAuron heard stamping feet, and Djer shouting. The cart heaved, spilling Auron and the goods inside everywhere. He crashed to the side of the cart under a rain of tools.\n\n\"Away from those ponies!\" Djer shouted. \"I'll kneecap you, you filthy dogs!\"\n\nAuron heard laughter and fading footfalls.\n\n\"Barbarians,\" Auron heard Djer mutter. \"Are you well, drake?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. Your cart is a mess.\"\n\nDjer opened the door, and Auron hopped out and stretched neck and tail. The ponies still stood in their traces, nosing the grass. Djer grunted, and heaved the cart back on his wheels. Auron marveled at the strength in his compact body.\n\n\"At least they didn't rob you.\"\n\n\"They tried. The knots on the ponies' lines were beyond them, ignorant hurks, and the wire core in the rope turned their blades. One of them filched a fine pair of boots, though, may the feet that stole them suffer of toeworm.\"\n\n\"Some thane in these parts. Letting bands of robbers roam the roads.\"\n\n\"Those were the thane's men.\"\n\n\"In the village, what did the wizard's emblem you spoke of look like? The one that meant you'd get your head knocked in?\"\n\n\"Silly piece of figuring, like something scratched in a barbarian cave wall. A circle\u2014\"\n\n\"With a man in it, arms and legs outstretched?\"\n\nDjer rebalanced one of his ponies' packs and retightened the girth. \"Yes. You've seen it?\"\n\n\"Closer than I care to again.\"\n\n\"Some rabble-rouser stirring up the men. Their kind come along every couple of generations.\"\n\n\"Will these men pursue us, once they talk to those you left behind?\"\n\n\"I have friends in that village\u2014all that talk about the thane back there was just a hurk getting too big for his boots. I don't want to spend time around Drakossozh and his men. Did you burn someone important, young dragon?\"\n\n\"Only those that were hunting me. Perhaps the Dragonblade's pride, as well.\"\n\n\"Ach, I see. Then you did kill something important, in the by. A dwarf will fight for honor, but a man will kill for pride.\"\n\nAuron thought for a moment. \"What's the difference?\"\n\n\"Honor is how others see you. Pride is how you see yourself.\"\n\nAuron spent weary hours in the back of the cart as the woods gave way to open lands. He could no longer take breaks to walk alongside Djer at the plodding pace of his draft horses; they traveled through farms and fields of men. Farm wains, wagons, and dispatch riders all used the road, no longer rutted and uncared for, but paved wide enough for two wagons to travel abreast. Djer called it the Old North Highway.\n\nAuron diverted his mind from his cramped body by learning Dwarvish. Djer started by naming parts of the body, sights along the road, and items in the cart, and before long, Auron could understand simple bedtime rhymes such as Djer's mother used to lull her son to sleep. Other times they had to fall back on Parl, as when Djer told him about Hypat and the Old North Highway.\n\n\"It's a mighty root of an even mightier tree. Ancient Hypat, at the mouth of the Falnges River, Queen of the Inland Ocean. In better times, Hypatian culture surrounded the ocean like a crown on a head, but even the mighty age and fall. It is still a great city.\"\n\n\"Will I see it?\"\n\n\"No, we make for the Delvings at Diadem. The Waterfall Mountain on the Falnges, the birthplace of the Chartered Company. We had our beginnings moving cargo past the six falls. Endless trips up and down the Iron Road.\"\n\n\"Iron road?\"\n\n\"Rails and carts, young dragon, rails and carts\u2014as we have in the mines, though bigger there. Pulled by wraxapods, the mightiest creatures to walk the earth. Stronger than dragons. So big that they didn't need their brains, I suppose, for while they're the largest beasts afoot, they're also the dumbest. We hoist entire barges out of the water, and they pull them uphill many hundreds of quivers.\"\n\n\"What's a quiver?\"\n\n\"You're empty of knowledge but full of questions, Auron. A quiver is a unit of measurement, though it varies between man, elf, and dwarf. It's the distance an archer can fire twelve arrows, if he paces out to the end of each one's flight. Nearly four thousand rods.\"\n\nAuron wanted to ask what a rod was, but suspected the dwarf would tell him \"sixteen fingers\" or some other senseless term. A distance remained the same no matter how you measured it.\n\n\"Is that where we will join up with the Caravan?\" Auron asked. Djer always put extra emphasis on the word, so Auron did, too.\n\n\"Oh, no\u2014it's being formed up in the plains at Wallander. But we shall go, the two of us, into the Delvings and request an audience with one of the Partners. When he hears a dragon has been brought in, perhaps Byndon himself will see us. Then you'll see some bargaining. How I wish I had gold in my beard! They never take a poor-faced dwarf seriously.\"\n\n\"I hope they serve sausages,\" Auron said, his empty stomach growling.\n\nThey passed into familiar lands, returning to back roads and wild hill country surrounding the mountains of Auron's birth. Djer urged his horses along, seeking the river. If they could get to the Falnges, they'd be able to travel over water to the falls, saving time and effort. The Caravan would be leaving shortly and not return until the spring. Djer did not want to be left behind.\n\nThey found a landing, a human town but with dwarves working on the docks, and it was just a matter of time before Djer found some representatives of his Chartered Company to bargain for passage on an eastbound barge. Auron watched the river traffic from the driver's slot in the cart: a mixture of everything from canoes to two-masted sailing ships. The river was so wide, details on the other side were indistinct. The barges were especially interesting: teams of horses pulled long, narrow, squared-off boats with cargo and a few people on board from a well-tended path on the riverbank. Auron did not know how much power a horse had, but he thought it would take a dragon at least to pull one of the barges, were it on a good road with wheels under it. Yet the teams of mighty draft horses, with waving manes of fur at neck, hoof, and tail, managed to pull the loads along the river with nothing but a dwarf riding them urging them along with gentle taps from a quirt.\n\nAuron wondered why moving things to and fro was the object of so much effort, but put it down to the eccentricities of hominids. Djer had done his best to explain trade, and while Auron could repeat back to the dwarf the substance of what he had been taught, he didn't really understand all the talk of supply and demand and rarity. But if it would get him away from this land of men, dwarves, and elves, he would go along with it.\n\n\"There's a piggy-back due in tonight,\" Djer said, clapping his hands and rubbing them together as he settled himself into the driver's seat. \"Now you'll see something, young dragon.\"\n\n\"A piggy-back?\"\n\n\"A barge, almost a floating village. We just drive our teams and wagons onto it, and the barge does the rest. I bought us a meal. I hope you like fish. It's the cheapest thing at the market here.\"\n\nThis news meant a few hours' inactivity, so after eating the salty dried fish, Auron curled up among the camping goods and slept.\n\nWhen Djer woke him, there was a strange odor in the air. The cart now stood in a line of wagons, with Djer at the reins, waiting to be loaded onto a wooden construct that looked like another dock, complete with little houses, attached to the longest quay at the riverbank town. Auron saw what was making the smell: four-legged beasts, legs as broad as tree trunks, with thick necks and fleshy, beaked mouths. They stood, stomach deep in the river, two abreast in front of the barge. A little boat manned by dwarves floated at their heads; at the moment the dwarves were opening bales of greenstuffs and leafy tree branches to feed the animals, which engulfed the food in their flexible beaks.\n\nDjer drove his cart and joined the other wagons on the deck of the barge. Auron saw hatches leading to what he guessed to be holds\u2014bringing back memories of his long stay in one, though the ship he had traveled in was smaller than this barge\u2014and travelers with bundles lounging at the rails.\n\n\"Those must be wraxapods,\" Auron said.\n\n\"That they are,\" Djer said. \"Did you see the little boat in front? The handlers pole that along\u2014they make sure the beasts have decent footing. Sometimes they'll stop and let the creatures graze from the trees along the bank, but usually they make a trip just being fed at the stops. Another dwarf works the other end; our gardens at the Delvings are bedded with their droppings. Every time I become discouraged with my position in the Chartered Company, I just think of the wraxapod tenders.\"\n\nAuron looked at the massive slabbed hindquarters at the front of the barge, absurdly tiny tails, more like flaps, swishing back and forth at flies gathered at their tailvents. \"I didn't know anything was bigger than dragons,\" Auron said.\n\n\"I don't know that they're longer, but they are heavier. Of course, they aren't meant to fly. Just eat a lot, chunt a lot, and have little ones like them. What a way to come into the world. Like getting dropped out of a tree.\"\n\nThe barge eventually got under way, and the wraxapods stepped into the current. They moved ponderously, slowly it seemed to Auron until he looked at the riverbank. He marked the progress of a tree with astonishment. The barge was actually traveling at a speed Djer could get with his cart only if he cantered his horses.\n\nThey traveled by night, as well, changing only the dwarves in the boat at the front. Auron saw a team return, covered with saliva from the wraxapods, river mud from the sounding poles coating their arms. As Djer lay wrapped in a blanket on his driving bench, and Auron lay curled in the rear of the wagon, they spoke through Djer's window.\n\n\"Dwarves are not what I expected,\" Auron said.\n\n\"What did you expect?\" Djer's voice said from outside.\n\n\"Fierce warriors in armor, hunting dragons and searching for gold.\"\n\n\"That describes a few. I suppose all the ones that dragons encounter. If it makes you feel any better, you're not what I expected from a dragon. So curious and not at all fierce.\"\n\nAuron didn't know how to feel about that, so he went back to his bits of dwarf lore. \"You were created by the Earth spirit, and made determined hunters of my kind, so we have little choice.\"\n\n\"Who told you this?\" Djer said, sounding more awake.\n\n\"You're woven into the dragon legend that way.\"\n\n\"Ahhh, I see. Spirits, eh? Dwarves don't hold with spirits. We believe only what we can see, or hear, or touch. We're a literal-minded people. We have legends, and some chants that speak of a creation. Would you like to hear my favorite?\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Can I tell it in Dwarvish? You've improved enough with the tongue so I think you might follow it.\"\n\n\"Yes, try me.\"\n\n\"One says that Dwar, his sons, and their wives were riding in a ship. A great storm threw them off course, and they became lost in a mist. Dwar had a vision of a land promised to them, if they could just free it of a curse of ice and snow, and told his steersman where to take the ship. His sons despaired, and their wives said he was raving, for they headed north where there was little to eat, snow so bright it blinded in the day, and winds so cold they froze the blood at night.\"\n\nAuron understood his words well enough. The drake relaxed and tried to make the Dwarvish words bring forth the pictures in his mind, rather than translating into Parl or Drakine.\n\n\"They fetched up against a continent of ice. Ice mountains, ice fields. They went into an ice cave, but they began to freeze. They burned everything, even the ice-locked ship. Dwar's tinderbox was empty, so he went to a mountainside and began to dig through the ice. All the others grew weary and faltered, but Dwar did not stop.\n\nHe ignored fatigue, hunger, thirst, because he knew they had to find fuel or die. He found a golden tree in the ice, the Sun-Tree. Once there had been many, dropping jewels and nuggets to the earth like apples and pears each season. But it was life and death for his people, so he took his ax and broke off a limb, then another, then another, and started a fire. The tree was indeed magic, and when its wood was burned, it called to the Sun, and She came and warmed the land and melted all the ice. They were in a beautiful vale. Dwar commanded his kin not to touch the tree, but to take only the gold and jewels that would grow like fruit on the two remaining limbs. Dwar's heart gave out from the strain of his digging in the ice, and as he died, he bequeathed the mountains and valleys to his people, but the tree to just his sons.\n\n\"Dwar's sons noticed that the trunk and roots of the tree were made of gold. They did not want to wait for tiny nuggets to drop, when they could get so much gold just by chopping down the tree. They cut it down and dug up some of the roots and got enough from the tree to all become kings, but the easy-gotten wealth brought only unhappiness. There were intrigues and plots, double-dealings and waste in the family. Money that came quick was spent quick, and their great-grandchildren knew poverty. But they heard stories and learned the lessons from the spendthrift sons; they knew there were other Golden Trees out there if they looked and worked, for its roots ran through the mountains everywhere. I've shortened it, but the chant ends thus:\n\n\u2003A Golden Tree awaits the son\n\n\u2003Of Dwarkind, each and every one\n\n\u2003So dig your mines, harden your hands\n\n\u2003Mind your trades, work your lands\n\n\u2003Dwar's bounty waits just out of sight\n\n\u2003For the faithful in labors right.\n\n\"We have many other stories and proverbs, parables and aphorisms. Some of the ones about warfare and revenge have been expanded upon until they are a way of life, and you get groups of dwarves like the Wheel of Fire. We in the Chartered Company like to think of our own firm as a Golden Tree, of a sort. I just hope the Partners take better care of it than Dwar's sons did.\"\n\nAuron thought of Djer's words until he fell asleep, and then at dawn they came to the Delvings at Waterfall Mountain.\n\nAuron got a prime view from Djer's cart. Though the barge pulled for the landing on the south bank, where the \"iron road\" Djer spoke of would haul the cargoes destined to go upriver past the falls along the quivers of rails, he still saw the mountain when the barge turned for the docks. A waterfall poured down on either side of it: a great rock slope that divided the wall of water cascading from above, the last of the six falls of the Falnges. Auron saw galleries and balconies, dozens of them, cut into the side of the rock, some hardly more than an arm's length from the falling water to either side. A tower stood atop the mountain\u2014or perhaps the top of the mountain was shaped into a tower\u2014with sculpted walls that narrowed to a bell shape, red-and-gold pennants fluttering from the peak.\n\nAuron had seen some towns of men, but this topped even the mind-pictures of distant cities he had received from his parents.\n\n\"How will we get there?\" Auron said. \"Can a boat make it through that boiling water?\"\n\nDjer laughed. \"There's a landing at the upper part of the mountain, but it's a brave captain who tries for it, with the current running the way it does. We'll get there by going underground. Just a moment\u2014I've got to sign over my pack train to the warehousers.\"\n\nAuron caused a stir at the gates as he padded up to the underground entrance at Djer's side. The guards at the gates, clad in golden mail under red capes, red leather boots set solidly on the doorstep, and layers of chain and woven cord shielding their eyes, crossed their pikes as the unusual pair approached. The gates were covered by curtains of some kind of thick material, emblazoned with the many-faceted diamond design of the Diadem.\n\n\"Tradesdwarf, you know that's a dragon,\" one of the door wardens said. Auron now knew Dwarvish well enough to comprehend the talk.\n\n\"I didn't think it was a dog. I've sent a messenger to the Partners. I'm Djer, on Sekyw's staff, just returned from the northlands. There will be a pass for me, I expect.\"\n\nOne of the wardens pulled aside the curtain and rapped on the door of iron. He spoke through a sliding slot to someone within.\n\n\"You're to wait. Sekyw is coming for you,\" the warden said, sticking forward his silver-sparkled beard as if it were a weapon to keep them from the door.\n\n\"Hmmph,\" Djer said, and walked over to a stool set under a canopy.\n\nThey were offered no food or drink, and sat and watched other Company dwarves pass in and out of the gates. Some stopped and gaped at Auron, but most passed the pair with nothing more than a glance from mask-shuttered eyes.\n\nUntil one dwarf, an exceptionally stout one with a gold-dusted beard that not only extended down from his chin but out from the sides, as well\u2014so that it seemed to Auron that he held a hairy shield under his nose\u2014came from the iron door with a nod toward Djer. The tradesdwarf stood up and took his hat in his hands, wringing it.\n\n\"My apologies for keeping you waiting, Djer,\" Sekyw said, glancing at two sheets of paper, one with many lines of closely written columns and the other nearly empty save for a few bare lines. \"I hold in my hands two items: a report of your summer's trade in the northlands that is most unsatisfactory, and some wild proposition involving a dragon. We're going to discuss both before seeing a Partner, so which shall it be first?\"\n\n\"The dragon and I are weary with travel. Might we take some refreshment in a warm hall?\"\n\n\"First I want to hear why you had such a poor season up north,\" Sekyw said, inspecting the paper, then its blank other side, turning the sheet back and forth as if expecting something else to have appeared there while they talked.\n\n\"Some villages refused to even trade with me. They said that they would only buy human goods. I picked up a little money doing some blacksmithing and ironmongery\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I've heard stories of dwarvish prejudice before. A good tradesdwarf wins through nevertheless. I had a mind to revoke your charter, even after I read this. What are you trying to pull off here, Djer? Hunt up some oversize lizard and call it a dragon?\"\n\nAuron liked Djer, and couldn't stand to see him upbraided any more. \"Lizards don't talk,\" he said, in his best Dwarvish.\n\n\"I wasn't speaking\u2014,\" Sekyw said, then caught himself. \"I beg your pardon, uh, young drake.\"\n\n\"His name is Auron. Auron, this is my superior, Sekyw. Auron seeks passage eastward. I thought we might help him, and he us.\"\n\n\"I've never seen a dragon up close, but I've been told their scales gleam like polished metal.\"\n\n\"He's a gray. That's what allows us to use him in this capacity\u2014he has no appetite for gold.\"\n\n\"A dragon that doesn't eat gold? Preposterous.\"\n\n\"Djer speaks the truth,\" Auron said. \"I'm not sure I like you. I think I'll find my own way east. Thank you, Djer.\"\n\n\"Auron, wait!\" Djer implored, but Auron winked at him with one eye. He squeezed his chest muscles and spat a mouthful of fire next to Djer's stool. \"Some warmth on the cool morning, since your superior offers none.\"\n\nThe guards at the door startled, but Sekyw just rolled an appraising eye at Auron. \"Perhaps you are worth going to the Partners for,\" Sekyw said. \"Open the gate!\"\n\nThe dwarves led him into the mountain, but these were no caves. They were tunnels of marvelous workmanship, well aired and drained, making use of skylight and running water to add light and music to the interior. Tiny trickles of fresh water fell in curtains along the passage, and sheets of cut crystal reflected splashes of light. The entrance hallway was taller than it was high. Dwarves passed through it, often bearing lamps and papers, along red carpets that lined the main entry hall. In the deeper depths, a beard or two glowed faintly as its owner passed from door to door.\n\n\"The rest of it is sound and well-tunneled, but the entrance hall was designed to impress visitors,\" Djer said. \"Have you ever seen the like? Ever imagined that such could exist?\"\n\n\"No,\" Auron said, and understood a little better Djer's \"honor of serving the Company\" talk.\n\nThey walked over arches bridging pools filled with gold and white fish, and gardens of rock, crystal, and colorful fungus. From some tunnels, Auron smelled cooking meat or baking bread. Others smelled like draft animals, as there were horses deep within the catacombs to help the dwarves in their labor. Whenever there wasn't the sound of trickling water, they could hear the sound of hammers ringing faintly up ventilation shafts; the whole construct reminded Auron of the busy honeycombs he had raided.\n\nFinally they stepped into an alcove and went up a turning stair, then to a wider stair filling the end of an interior hall, larger than Auron's egg cavern.\n\n\"The Gathering Hall,\" Djer explained. It's dark now, but at celebrations, the lamps are lit, and the marble is polished so it reflects light like a still pool does the sun. I saw it thus when I joined the Company at my greeting ceremony.\"\n\n\"That was a good group,\" Sekyw said. \"Many of them no longer drive carts; they've opened up trade routes and manage them. I wish your achievements were worth bragging about, young dwarf.\"\n\n\"If you're referring to Brorn of Gallahall and his cousin Mriorn, they've been in civilized country. I've been among barbarians these years, in the by.\"\n\nSekyw frowned. \"Serious dwarves never make excuses.\"\n\n\"I wasn't making excuses; I was drawing a comparison.\"\n\nThey came to a long hall, mosaic portraits of gray-bearded, glowering dwarves lining the walls.\n\n\"The original ten Partners,\" Sekyw said, slowing his pace so the other two could look. \"They started the Diadem as porters, carrying loads from the eastern landing at the top of the falls to the calmer waters here. On their backs to start with\u2014they had no money for draft animals. No iron road, nothing but a trail then. Hard days: they had to face blighters, bears, forest wolves, robbers, even... errr, dragons. Now there are sixty Partners, though some run halls in other cities, or in the east. Little dragon, the Chartered Company is greater than many kings in this world. Kings grow feeble and die, sometimes their kingdoms die with them, but the Company only grows stronger with each generation.\"\n\nThere respectful silence reigned in the upper halls; the scroll-carrying dwarves wore slippers instead of boots.\n\n\"How many Partners still live?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"Only two. Old Vekay and his brother, Zedkay. They're both over six hundred, which is ancient for our people. They occupy sinecures now; we wheel them out for ceremonies. The younger Partners have the real power. Speaking of which, I'm taking you two to see Emde, who manages the Eastern Route from here.\"\n\n\"I had hoped for Byndon,\" Djer said.\n\n\"Byndon's out. Vekay and Zedkay didn't like it, but they're only two, after all. Emde's the real up-and-comer nowadays, a good dwarf to have on your side and a bad one to cross.\"\n\nSekyw led them to an antechamber, and Auron smelled outside air. A number of dwarves bearing leather folios waited on stools ringing the velvet-lined room. Every pair of bored eyes in the room turned to Auron, who stretched himself on the floor. The ability to rest with neck and tail extended, after his cramped journey in the cart and use of his muscles in the Delvings, gave him contentment that brought a prrum to his throat. Auron smelled tobacco, leather, and paper, odors he was beginning to associate with dwarves of commerce. They seemed to travel in their own world of peculiar contests and jealousies, but he preferred them to the ax-wielding sort.\n\n\"By my beard, is that thing purring?\" a dwarf asked.\n\n\"Forgive my friend,\" Djer said. \"He's been long a-traveling.\"\n\n\"It looks dangerous. Shouldn't it be collared?\" another\u2014a graybeard\u2014said with the cantankerousness of a dwarf still bearing briefs at his age.\n\nAuron brought his head up. \"I wore a collar once, and I'll never have one on again while there's breath in my body,\" he said, in his rough Dwarvish. \"I'd advise you not to, but feel free to try\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough said, young dragon,\" Sekyw broke in, glaring at the graybeard. \"We believe you. Elbee, keep a bargainer's tongue\u2014he's just another prospective employee. The dragon is offering his services under contract.\"\n\nSekyw rang on a bell-rope and spoke in a page's ear. After the leather-padded door shut, the senior dwarf stood with hands clasped behind his back. The door opened again after a moment.\n\n\"Twenty-seven ticks,\" Sekyw said, so quietly that only Auron heard him. \"Not bad.\"\n\n\"Hats off, and let me do the talking,\" Sekyw said more loudly, and Djer and Auron passed into the inner room. It was wood paneled, furnished with imposing\u2014and low\u2014chairs, tables, and desks. A dwarf in a most ornate vest with sparkling crystal buttons stood at the back of the room, which opened up onto a sunny balcony. Fine polished glass of some kind filled one wide eye socket. The dwarf squinted with the other eye.\n\nAuron heard the sound of the waterfalls outside, and from what he could see of the view, they were high up the mountain. In their travels through the tunnels, they must have come right through behind the southern waterfall and entered the mountain proper.\n\nHis companions bowed their heads. Whether this was ritual or a way to cut the glare from the balcony Auron couldn't say.\n\n\"We'll finish later, Aytea,\" the dwarf said. Another richly dressed dwarf etching on a sheet of polished bronze stood, furrowed his brows at Auron, and left by a different door concealed in the paneling.\n\n\"By the banner, it is a dragon,\" the Partner said, coming around his desk to get a better view of Auron. He moved in a stooped-over fashion, as if bearing a burden on his back. Jewels were woven into his long, gold-braid-wrapped beard.\n\nSekyw pulled at his beard, spreading it wide across his chest. \"Most honorable Emde, thank you for your attention. This dragon has a rather unique bargain he's offered me. Or rather us. The Chartered Company, that is.\"\n\nAuron felt Djer stir next to him, and smelled nervous sweat on Sekyw.\n\nThe Partner leaned over even more and brought his monocled eye level with Auron. \"Is that so, future skyking?\" he said in Parl. The dwarf's pupil looked like that of a hungry wolf's behind that plate of tinted glass.\n\n\"I know some of your tongue,\" Auron said. \"But if you'd rather speak in Parl, that is easier.\"\n\nSekyw cut in: \"The drake seeks a road east; he says he searches for a distant family member or somesuch. We've offered to take him along, as treasure guard. Though he breathes fire and bears the scars of battle, he has no appetite for precious metal. He could keep all\u2014thief, brigand, or dishonest dwarf\u2014from pilfering our expense wagon. The only cost to us would be his food.\"\n\n\"Which wouldn't be one-tenth the cost of trustworthy guards-men, perhaps not even one one-hundredth,\" Djer added.\n\nSekyw tapped the dwarf's high boots and gave a quick shake of his head. Auron felt his lips pull back from his teeth, and covered his mouth again with an effort.\n\n\"Who's this? Who's this?\" Emde asked.\n\nSekyw harrumphed. \"One of my tradesdwarves, sir. He found the drake on the road.\"\n\n\"The bargain is with Djer,\" Auron said. \"And no other.\"\n\n\"Djer deserves credit for finding you, young drake,\" Sekyw said. \"Having the courage to sit down and talk with you is to his credit. But only a Partner can make a contract with a non-dwar.\"\n\n\"That's so,\" Emde said. \"Though there seems precious little for me to do, with the bargain, and a good one, already agreed to.\"\n\n\"Then make Djer a Partner,\" Auron said. \"For I'll keep no other bargain.\"\n\nAll three dwarves stared at him. Sekyw began to sputter like a broken teapot: \"But... but... pttt...\"\n\nEmde chuckled. \"Djer, this drake is loyal to his friends, I will give him that. Young skyking, this copper-whiskered, though apparently promising, youngster can't be brought into the Partnership. There are rules, traditions, codicils, seniorities\u2014\"\n\n\"I thought you were simple dwarves of trade. If it is so difficult, I can find my own way east.\"\n\n\"Just a moment,\" Emde said, holding out his hands. \"You've not even tasted the hospitality of the Chartered Company. At least have a meal before you go. It's not every day one gets to talk to a young skyking.\" The Partner pulled on another bell-rope by the door his secretary had left from.\n\n\"Why do you keep calling me skyking?\" Auron asked, sniffing the air in the hope food was on its way.\n\n\"That's the old Dwarvish word for 'dragons,' in happier times. Funny, but I heard it used just the other day.... Enjoy the view while the food is being prepared. Excuse me, and Sekyw, as you value your position, don't let our visitor leave without further negotiations.\"\n\nThe smell of food brought Auron away from the view of the great river valley: hills reduced to hummocks and trees foreshortened to blades of grass. He and Djer left the balustrade and returned to the office, where platters were being uncovered on an end table.\n\nEmde came in from the main door. Auron got a peek at the tops of the assembled dwarves' heads. They were bowing to two wizened figures, whitebearded and wrinkled, shuffling into the office supported by canes of carven crystal. Djer sucked in his breath and bowed, and Auron had to tear himself away from the food.\n\n\"Shut the blasted curtains, Emde,\" one said, a little more red-faced than the other.\n\n\"We're not petitioners you need to dazzle,\" the other said.\n\nDwarves appeared as though by magic and closed off the view, then disappeared as suddenly as they arrived.\n\n\"Young skyking,\" Emde said, ushering in the two, \"it is my honor to introduce Vekay and Zedkay, of the original Charter, our senior Partners. I told them we would be happy to join them in their quarters, but they insisted on coming down for a meal and a talk.\"\n\n\"Ach, most pleased,\" the red-faced one introduced as Zedkay said, in an accent enough like Djer's for Auron to like him better than the other dwarves he had met today. \"Don't stand on ceremony when you can stamp on it, I always say. Dig in, young skyking\u2014there's an entire roast for you at the end there.\"\n\n\"Or if it wasn't for you, it is now,\" Vekay added.\n\nAuron and Djer started in to their meal with day-old appetite; Emde and Sekyw ate a polite morsel or two. Sekyw ate with more enthusiasm after Vekay elbowed his brother and said, \"That's a hard-working dwarf's appetite if I ever saw one,\" pointing to Djer.\n\nDjer smiled with grease running down his chin.\n\n\"There's a question of a bargain young Djer made with this dra\u2014skyking,\" Sekyw said.\n\n\"The dragon is insisting that he'll keep the bargain with our tradesdwarf alone, and the Partnership rules...\"\n\nThe oldsters mumbled at each other. \"Why, yes, he's young,\" Zedkay said, more loudly to the assembly, \"but so were we at the Chartering. I hardly had hair below my ears, and Vekay had but a tuft on his chin. The elders treated us as good as any other of the Company, though.\"\n\nVekay tucked his beard in his belt and buttoned his frazzled woolen vest. \"Just the other day we were speaking to Emde about the Charter, and how it was modeled on the Ancient's Riian Partnership. Ages past, long bankrupt, but in those days, the Riians had elves, men\u2014yea, even dragons\u2014working for them. Happier times.\"\n\n\"Happier times,\" Zedkay agreed, before his brother continued.\n\n\"They had several skykings, the stories go, young males who were making a nuisance of themselves otherwise to their families. We kept their stomachs full, and they flew as couriers, across the Inland Sea, to the east, to the lost kingdom of Wyang, even. Didn't lose a single pouch in hundreds of years, or so they claimed. A very lucrative business, courier service.\"\n\n\"Very lucrative,\" Zedkay rasped. \"So don't be so quick to throw away the goodwill of a skyking over a niggling matter of procedure.\"\n\n\"But the Charter,\" Emde said.\n\n\"The Charter won't be hurt,\" Vekay said. \"There are provisions to add Partners for contingencies in it.\"\n\n\"That takes a Significant Majority in a Quorum Vote,\" Emde said, \"and we don't have anything like a quorum\u2014\"\n\n\"Or a Simple Majority of the Founding Partners, as you'll find in Paragraph Two of Article Nine, methinks,\" Vekay said.\n\nEmde reached into a pocket, retrieved an ivory scroll-tube, and uncapped it.\n\nSekyw pulled at his beard, wincing at the pain.\n\n\"I move that we make this hungry young dwarf a partner,\" Vekay said, looking at Djer.\n\n\"Seconded,\" Zedkay said as Sekyw fell into a barrel chair with a thump.\n\n\"All in favor?\" Vekay said, as he and Zedkay lifted their supports high.\n\nThe ancient dwarves held aloft their crystal canes, the tips at the base sparkled through some inner incandescence.\n\n\"Motion carried by Simple Majority, for the record,\" Vekay said. \"Off the record, it was a unanimity. I'd like to welcome our new Partner, Djer, and invest him with all the responsibilities and privileges therein. 'Bout time this leaky mountain had some new blood.\"\n\n\"By my beard, it's legal,\" Emde said, looking at the tightly spaced fine print on the scroll.\n\n\"Will you take the bargain, Auron?\" Djer said, blinking as if he had stepped into bright sunlight.\n\n\"Of course, my friend,\" Auron said, inspecting the banquet on the side table. He found a platter of sausages, conveniently linked, and began to eat. After they disappeared, he moved on to the roast.\n\n\"Is there anything you'll require, young Partner?\" Vekay asked.\n\n\"I'll need an assistant, to help with sundry matters relating to the dragon,\" Djer said. \"I'd like Sekyw\u2014he's a good dwarf, and he could do with a taste of travel.\"\n\n\"What sort of sundry matters? Feeding him?\" Sekyw said in a quiet voice.\n\nDjer watched Auron eat. \"Yes, and other things. You'll see what you'll be dealing with within the hour of that roast disappearing.\"\n\nThe three partners laughed.\n\n\"You'll head up the Iron Road tomorrow,\" Zedkay said. \"If I remember my tallies for this year right, you'll have to hurry; most of the tradegoods have made the trip to Wallander. Too bad your young skyking doesn't have his wings yet.\"\n\n\"We'll leave at once. No sense wasting a night. We can sleep on whatever cargo's making the run now.\"\n\nAuron held the roast in his forepaws, dribbling juice on the carpet. \"No, after we eat. And stock up on sausages.\"\n\nWallander was just that: a land surrounded by a wall. The palisade enclosed gardens, pastures, the riverbank, and landing. A few houses, with only half-walls of clay bricks keeping them from being called shacks, sat at the riverside. There was no dock proper. A long spit of mud had been built up with gravel to form a dike. Shallow-draft boats just pitched up on the dike; deeper ones lowered planks to the spit.\n\nThe wall had a single tower in the center and at each end: round wooden constructs of three rings, each one smaller than the first, ending in a mast as Auron had seen on ships. The familiar red-and-gold banner of the Diadem waved there, a long pennant as narrow as a dragon's tail. Something about the foundation of the towers looked strange to Auron. There was an arch underneath, tall enough for a dwarf to walk upright. Auron thought it an unusual kind of gate, but one that would allow dwarves and their flocks to pass easily outside the walls. Over the walls Auron saw the dust-streaked backs of a herd of wraxapods.\n\nThere were wagons, though not as many as Auron imagined when the Caravan had been described to him on the weeklong rail-to-river trip. Djer and Sekyw pored over maps, tracts, and books, trying to prepare themselves for the bargaining that would take place in the fabled bazaars at the other side of the steppes.\n\nAuron studied the maps, as well.\n\nWallander marked the gateway to the dangerous steppe country. Auron had seen some of it in mind-pictures from his father, and heard more from Djer and his new assistant as they discussed the Caravan's journey. The steppe was a brown land of extremes: heat and cold, mud and snow, with dust in between. It was owned by the fabled Ironriders, endlessly warring clans who were born, lived, and died on their horses. They were nomads who traveled light, trading pelts and cattle even for the horseshoes that gave the clans their name in Parl. There were principalities here and there along the rivers cutting the plains and ruins that hinted at a greater culture before that of the Ironriders.\n\nDjer's new role as Partner, complete with red velvet vest closed by a golden chain\u2014a last-minute gift from Zedkay, who claimed to have a closet full that he did not need\u2014gave him instant deference on the rails and river, except by the captain of the Suram, an irascible river elf named Windcheek with hair growing in imitation of cattails.\n\n\"Full of wind, and cheek,\" Djer said after he asked the captain if they would make Wallander in time for the Caravan for the second day in a row. The vessel, named in the nomad-tongue for the warm south wind, was a single-masted galley that could be rowed\u2014even by Partners, as Djer learned\u2014on the few occasions when the wind didn't serve. She sailed crammed with last-minute supplies and travelers for the Caravan.\n\nTo pass the time and settle his nerves, Djer fashioned a \"rooster claw\" for the stump on Auron's tail. He took a dwarvish fighting-gauntlet and modified it into a sock that fit over the stump. A tiny round shield covered one side, and Djer fixed a point taken from a pike to the end. Auron found it light and handy, entirely satisfactory except for one item.\n\n\"It shines too much,\" he said.\n\n\"Easily fixed,\" Djer said, and took it away for an hour. When he returned, it was as black as Auron's claws.\n\nAuron put it back on, and after a few practice tries, he thrust his extra claw a dwarf-finger's depth into the side of the ship.\n\n\"Ai-yo, wingless,\" the elf captain called. \"Take care with my ship. I'll not stand for you splintering my woodwork. Do it again, and I'll spit you.\"\n\n\"The Chartered Company's ship,\" Djer corrected.\n\n\"It's my ship from when it leaves the falls until we touch sand at Wallander. Then it's the Company's ship again, dwarf.\"\n\nSekyw flushed. \"You shouldn't let him speak to you like that. You're a Partner, after all.\"\n\nDjer sprinkled his beard with river water. \"He can say what he wants. I care not. As long as he gets us to the Caravan in time.\"\n\nSo Djer breathed a sigh of relief when they rounded one of the wandering river's many wide bends and came upon Wallander with the Caravan still assembling. The captain piloted the flat-bottomed galley past a chain of sand hummocks in the river and threw down her anchor at the landing. Small boats, bearing supplies and trade goods from a southern Caravan from the ivory-rich forests of Bant, rowed back and forth across the river like busy water-beetles. The crew jumped overboard, splashing as they set up the gangplank to the entry port at the ship's waist.\n\nSlave-laborers with sweat-darkened leather bands at their waists and wrists hurried on board, urged onward by the yells of a dwarvish taskmaster. Auron looked upon his first blighters. They resembled heavy-muscled men but with bigger heads and jaws, longer of finger and toe. They were covered with hair, growing in varicolored patches short and curly on chest and back and longer, almost manelike, at face, forearm, and knee.\n\n\"Prisoners taken in wars, or more likely the children of the defeated grown large,\" Sekyw said. He made his way from the water, supporting his bulk with a gnarled walking stick. The three watched the unloading then turned and hiked up the trodden-over riverbank. The dwarf in charge of the landing bowed and answered a question from Djer.\n\n\"Now you'll see something wonderful, Auron,\" Djer said. \"A traveling tower. A marvel of dwarvish brains and engineering.\"\n\nThey crossed between temporary pens, piles of rugs, rolls of fabric, mirrors, and furnishings of all description. Stacks of arms, suits of armor, shields, and more mundane tools covered the landing, being counted and recorded by apprentice dwarves of the Diadem.\n\nThey walked in the shadow of the tower, and Djer pointed to its base. \"It moves, friend dragon, on those. A revolving track.\"\n\n\"A what?\" Auron asked. He saw wheels, resting on and surrounded by a line of what looked to be small rectangular shields, linked like warriors standing in close ranks.\n\n\"Sort of a road that runs along the wheels in a loop. Driving wheels keep the road moving, and smaller wheels run along it bearing the weight. The tower is lighter than it looks\u2014past the machinery, it is almost all wood within, save for some cables in the upper levels. I've never been inside one; I've just heard about them.\"\n\n\"I took this trip when I was apprenticed,\" Sekyw said. \"I'll give you a tour, if the tower-baron will let us climb in.\"\n\n\"I must find Esef, the Partner-in-Charge, first. Say, my good dwarf!\" Djer said, buttonholing one of the dwarves counting trade goods. The apprentice took pen from scroll box with a sigh, until he recognized the vest and chain. He grew as animated as if his boots were aflame. Auron looked at the scroll box: by turning a tiny crank, the user could roll the enclosed paper across the writing surface, protecting all but the paper under the pen from dirt or weather.\n\n\"This way, sirra, this way,\" the apprentice said, leading them to a platform built into the wall. Little houses projected out of the wall; stairs led up to the door on the lofted house. A line of dwarves waited on the steps up, entering one by one after a pause of a moment or two, then descended via a sliding-pole on its own little platform by the door after conducting their business within. Djer, as befitted a Partner, jumped the line and walked right to the door, leaving Auron, the apprentice, and Sekyw waiting. Auron heard a sharp exchange within, followed by quieter words. A bald dwarf with a short pipe gripped in clenched teeth appeared at the window of the wallside house.\n\nDjer joined him. \"Auron, come up. Esef wants a better look at you.\"\n\nAuron had no desire to slink past the waiting dwarves on the stairway, so he swarmed up the pole. It was an easy climb that left him barely puffing despite his healing lung. He entered the room; it was larger than it looked. The office projected out from the other side of the wall, as well, though the heavy shutters were down to keep the wind from blowing papers scattered on a desk and pinned to the walls.\n\nEsef had a marking pencil tucked behind one ear and an etching stylus behind the other. Either the pipe or one of the marking implements occupied his hand as he signed scroll box after scroll box.\n\n\"By my beard, I'm happy to see another Partner here, even if he's new to the vest,\" Esef said. \"So you've brought a guardian for the expense wagon? A young dragon, the letter from Emde said.\"\n\nDjer told the story, jumping over parts whenever Esef's attention wandered to the scrolls presented by dwarves still coming in and out of the house.\n\n\"He looks alert enough,\" Esef said, lifting one of Auron's scarred lips to look at his teeth. Auron muzzled his temper, but couldn't help his griff. They descended and rattled against his crest. If only Blackhard could have seen this, how the wolf would have grinned.\n\n\"Very well. I'll terminate the contract with Hross's bull-backs. Pay 'em for the time so far and see them off on the boat you came in. You may have to dicker a bit on traveling expenses, but be generous. We use Hross on the river and in the southlands, as well.\"\n\nDjer opened his mouth to add something, but Esef's attention had already turned to the next dwarf in the door. Djer rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Auron. \"Let's go,\" he said.\n\nWhen they slid to the sand at the base of the pole, Djer patted Auron. \"I thought the Partners did nothing but play ten-pins and down flagons with their cronies.\"\n\n\"Not all sweetmeats and cakes, eh, Djer?\" Sekyw said. \"If you want my advice\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll ask for it in writing. At the reading of my will, in the by,\" Djer grumbled under his breath as he turned away.\n\nThe men were easy to find. They already stood guard around the expense wagon. Auron's latest conveyance was a high, short wagon with oversize rear wheels and extra-thick axles. Four mighty men in leather vests, arms bulging from cut-off sleeves, lounged around, laughing and fighting with wooden practice-swords. A man that reminded Auron of a scarecrow in a field, all wide-brimmed black hat and thin limbs, was inspecting the contents of a breadbox.\n\n\"Five loaves a day, of this quality,\" the scarecrow said to the white-aproned dwarf.\n\n\"One loaf feeds a dwarf for a day, and you want meat, nuts, and fruit besides?\" the commissary said.\n\n\"No need for that now, no need,\" Djer said in Parl, interrupting. \"I beg your pardon, but are you Hross?\" he asked the scarecrow.\n\n\"That I am, my young... Partner, is it?\"\n\n\"Djer. I've only just joined the Caravan. We've hired another to guard the expense wagon, and since your contract doesn't begin until we set out, we'll no longer need your services. Thank you just the same. You'll be paid at the bargained rate for your time so far and given\u2014\"\n\n\"What's this?\" the scarecrow said, wispy eyebrows crashing together. \"Who've you hired? There's none east of the mountains as traveled and trustworthy as the men of House Hross.\"\n\n\"House Hross, from what I know, has the best of reputations. But you are expensive, and this dragon will do as good a job, for much less.\"\n\nThe scarecrow stared at Auron, pupils shrunk to pinheads. \"I see no dragon. I see a scaleless lizard.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless, he owes us a favor, and he's only one mouth to feed, whereas\u2014\"\n\nThe men protested in their own guttural tongue. They elbowed each other and pointed at Auron, laughing. After further words, the men grew agitated. One, a gap-toothed fellow with furry knuckles, spat on Auron. The man took a step forward, shifting weight to one leg so he might kick, but another long-haired man held him back in a brief struggle. The one with the long hair said something as he reseated a silver circlet about his head, pulling the hair from his eyes.\n\n\"You'd trust that thing over men of skill and honor?\" the scarecrow said.\n\n\"That I do, Hross. I'm sure you'll be able renew your contract next year,\" Djer said. \"The Company will pay for you to get back down the falls, of course.\"\n\n\"But that's two hundred\u2014over two hundred\u2014days without pay. My men and I won't stand for it.\"\n\n\"I don't see that you have a choice.\"\n\nThe men said something to Hross, and Auron caught the word dragon and fire but little else.\n\n\"A dragon that age breathes little fire,\" Hross said. \"It's not anything like full grown. Suppose it gets sick.\"\n\n\"I'm healthy,\" Auron said.\n\n\"So you speak,\" the scarecrow said. \"But do you fight with anything besides your bragging tongue?\"\n\n\"What bragging have I done?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"This dwarf maintains that you can do as good a job as my men. You've oversold your abilities, lizard. Get yourself some scales, and try again.\"\n\nAuron ignored the insult as he would a buzzing fly.\n\n\"Our belief in the dragon isn't changing,\" Djer said. \"You and your men will have to leave.\"\n\n\"Just one of my men could take that thing apart in a fair fight,\" Hross said.\n\n\"Ask him what a fair fight would be,\" Auron whispered to Sekyw in Dwarvish.\n\n\"What do you mean by a fair fight?\" Sekyw asked.\n\n\"No fire breathing. My men each choose their weapon.\"\n\n\"Give me my choice of weapon, and I'll fight all four. Without fire,\" Auron said.\n\nThe scarecrow translated for his men, and they talked among themselves. \"Young Partner, we'll happily take the test. My four against your dragon, hand to hand. My men get one weapon each, and as long as we approve of the weapon your dragon has, we'll fight to see who is the strongest.\"\n\nDjer looked at Auron, and Auron nodded.\n\n\"It's a match. But we see the weapons your men choose, or there's no fight,\" Djer said.\n\nThe man stuck out his hand, but Djer shook his head. \"We're putting it down clear and simple in writing. If you lose, you leave the camp with your men at your own expense. If you win, your original contract holds.\"\n\nThe scarecrow translated for his men, and they all nodded. The one who had spat said something, his lip raised in a sneer.\n\n\"My men demand the body,\" Hross said. Auron craned his neck to Djer's ear and whispered.\n\n\"That will go in the contract, too. If the dragon gets to keep the bodies of his kills,\" Djer said.\n\n\"This is to the death, lizard,\" the gap-toothed man said to Auron, in guttural Parl. The long-haired one with the circlet about his brow said something in a language Auron didn't understand, but the others barked at him.\n\n\"It's a bargain, man,\" Auron agreed.\n\nWord spread through the camp as if criers had sounded the news of the match from the towers. The scarecrow emptied a corral of draft horses, and dwarves began to assemble; they perched on the rails like sitting birds on tree limbs.\n\n\"I'm about to sign the agreement,\" Djer said, fixing Auron's fighting-tail on the stump. \"Are you that sure of yourself?\"\n\n\"Every fight of my life has been unfair,\" Auron said, watching the men hang chain shirts over each other's shoulders and strap on armor. What he didn't add is that he'd lost each of them, and survived only by strange chance. \"This is one where I've picked the odds.\"\n\nDjer looked at the men. \"Sekyw, they're armoring themselves.\"\n\n\"Nothing was said about armor!\" Sekyw shouted to Hross.\n\nHross pointed to the unsigned document, pinned to a post of the corral. \"Exactly. Nothing was said about armor.\"\n\n\"Let them. The more armor, the better,\" Auron said, swinging his tail to make sure the fighting claw was fixed. \"Shields, helms, braces\u2014I hope they pile it on. It'll slow them down.\"\n\n\"You're only betting your life. I'll be betting my money,\" Sekyw said, counting handfuls of coin.\n\nDjer walked over to the agreement and signed it, and handed the pen to the scarecrow with a bow. Hross scrawled his name and returned to his men.\n\n\"Four armed men against one drake, no flame,\" Sekyw called to the dwarves. \"Four to one, but I'll give you better odds. Three to one. I'm offering three to one.\"\n\n\"I'll put down three silver,\" a dwarf called.\n\n\"Six Diadem gold on the men,\" the captain of the Suram said. The elf towered over the assembled dwarves.\n\nSekyw worked the crowd with scroll case and pencil.\n\n\"Were your life not in the balance, I'd want the greedy blighter to lose,\" Djer grumbled.\n\n\"Think of it as a consolation prize if the men get lucky,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Never. I'd be out a Partnership. But more important, I'd be out a friend,\" the dwarf said, tickling Auron under the chin.\n\n\"Back in a moment,\" Auron said, his tongue flicking in and out in a rasp across the dwarf's wrist. He didn't want this fight for himself, but for Djer. Djer's honor, rather than dragon pride.\n\n\u2002First beware Pride, lest belief in one's might\n\n\u2002Has you discount the foeman who is braving your sight.\n\nBut his mother had never mentioned the honor of those who had done you a good turn and offered help in a time of need.\n\nAuron faced the four men. All wore armor of one sort or another, head to toe, save one man who wore only chain-and-leather gauntlets. The unarmored man held a net before him. Auron looked at the net, and his fire bladder stirred. He couldn't help the puffs of smoke that appeared from either side of his mouth as he suppressed a belch. Two of the men carried boar spears, with long points and crossbars to stop him from pulling himself toward the holder if impaled. The last man, the long-haired one, removed the silver circlet holding his hair and pulled a helmet on. He snapped down the face- plate and took up a dwarvish double-headed ax.\n\nThe scarecrow whispered something into the ear of the ax-man, then spoke to the man with the net before retiring to the other side of corral rails. Dwarves dropped their tasks and climbed upon wagons and even the outer wall to get a view. Sekyw was not the only one taking bets; Auron saw coin and rings passing to holders all around. He wondered if Djer had hazarded a bet.\n\nAuron brought himself back to the coming fight. This confrontation was not the joke Auron made it to Djer, for all that he wanted to help his friend. But this time he'd chosen the conditions and the odds, as a way of proving himself after being trapped by hunters twice in his short life.\n\nThe four men shuffled back and forth, talking amongst themselves. Neither side wanted to make the first move. The net-holder took a step forward, prodded by the ax-wielder, whose hair hung from the bottom of his helm. The spearmen fanned out.\n\nAuron locked his eyes on the net-man. He put the fury from his fire bladder into his eyes, concentrating on the man's dark eyes until the spear-men and the sword-wielder shrank away, as if viewed from a distance. Conversely, the net-human's eyes grew until the loathsome round irises of the human's brown eyes filled his vision. Auron felt as if he were out of his body\u2014the drake wearing his frame crept toward the net-holder as Auron floated somewhere above, watching dispassionately.\n\n\"Wer! Athack!\" the spear-men's voices shouted at their companion, who stood like a statue. The ax-wielder pulled net-man back as Auron jumped.\n\nAx-man, net-man, and Auron went down together as the drake landed on the chest of the retiarius. Auron raked through the netting with his saa, and the net-man came out of his trance, screaming out his death throes. The spear-men charged, and Auron tried to side-step, but his feet entangled in the netting. In the moment it took him to free himself, the spear-men bore in with their weapons.\n\nAuron writhed and avoided impalement, but one of the spears tore a jagged wound along his ribs. The other dug into the dirt, and as the man pulled it free, Auron whipped his armored tail up and caught the man squarely aside the head. There was a crash of metal, which staggered the spear-man. Auron bit at the ax-wielder. The man kicked him in the snout as he slid backwards toward the ring of spectators.\n\nThe spear-carrier who had wounded Auron raised his weapon to strike once again. Auron dragon-dashed between the man's horribly hairy legs, knocking them out from under him as he wiggled through. The man planted his spear in the dirt, missing Auron but keeping himself upright with the pole. Auron whipped his neck back and bit up and under the armor at the man's legs. He felt his fangs go deep, but he did not grip and tear, for the ax-man was already stepping in. The long-haired man, the quickest of his foes, was on his feet and supporting the man whose helmet Auron had dented. He backed off, holding his shield-tail between him and the ax-wielder.\n\nAuron smelled the blood running out of the leg of the spear-carrier he had bitten. The man ignored the wound; he took a short grip on his spear and used it to maneuver Auron toward the corner of the corral. Auron read the blood trail the spear-man left and waited. As the other two retrieved the net from the body of the retiarius to join him, the suddenly pallid man's eyes rolled skyward in his skull, and he toppled over. The crowd either howled in triumph or wailed in dismay, depending on which side their money stood.\n\nThe other two stared for a moment, as if trying to discern the magic that had felled their second comrade. They tried to keep him in the corner, holding the net between them. Auron coiled his body, ready to spring to the left of the one still weaving in his concussion.\n\nHe felt something pull at his neck. The audience let out an outraged yell.\n\n\"Naf! Fus pack-par!\" a screeching voice called from behind.\n\nAuron spun. The scarecrow had maneuvered through the crowd and tossed a lasso around his neck, and even now was trying to haul him to the rails of the corral. He heard footsteps behind as the men ran in to finish him. Auron obliged the scarecrow, and uncoiled, launching himself through the gap between the upper and lower bars. The man dropped the rope in alarm, but Auron's crest caught him in the midriff. Hross folded like a sheet fallen from a washline.\n\nAn outraged dwarf grabbed and cut the line around Auron's neck, stopping Auron from digging his teeth into his foe's throat. Hross lay below, arms crossed at his middle, mouth open and making unintelligible gasping sounds. In the second that cutting the line took, Auron's furor faded, and he took up Hross's head in his mouth, clamping his jaws firmly to either side of the man's skull so that the scarecrow's eyes looked out at the ax-man climbing over the rails.\n\nAuron tried to say, \"Stop the fight,\" but saliva and a hissing noise were all that came out of the sides of his mouth.\n\n\"Wait! Wait!\" Hross shouted, raking Auron's snout with his fingernails. Auron made ready to crush his skull should the man try for his eyes. The ax-man looked at his employer, held in Auron's jaws like an oversize stick in a dog's mouth, and laughed. He dropped the ax and went down on one knee, holding his right hand palm-outward at Auron.\n\n\"The dragon wins! You win, dragon,\" Hross added, to a general cheer. The shouts and applause degenerated into a hundred individual arguments over the bets.\n\n\"It turned into a bad dwarvish joke,\" Djer said later as he and Auron approached the center tower. \"Three hundred individual, crisscrossing arguments about wagers. Most of the dwarves that bet on the men held that Hross had invalidated the bet by getting involved. Of course, the ones that bet on you said that you won nevertheless. We finally forced Hross to pay the bets he had made, and then cough up at least a symbolic restitution to the others that bet on you. Hross complained at first, but when he saw that every dwarf in the ring would take\u2014or give\u2014either his money or his flesh to get what was owed, he opened his purse. I don't know why he bothered closing it again\u2014it was as empty as the bodies in the ring. Decent of you not to eat them after all.\"\n\n\"That man with the ax, err\u2014\"\n\n\"Naf,\" Sekyw supplied.\n\nAuron tried the name. \"Naf\u2014human names are hard on a dragon's mouth, I need to learn some of their tongues\u2014laughed and clapped me on the back. I didn't understand a word he said, but he seemed willing to leave it at that. He seemed a good man, and after that I lost my appetite to eat his fellows.\"\n\n\"I don't know that these mannish mercenaries keep friends long, or even care if a couple chunt off. They're not dwarves, after all.\"\n\nThey stood for a moment in the shadow of the tower. Forged wheels on the linked-shield rolling road were being oiled and cleaned.\n\n\"The towers leave tomorrow,\" Sekyw said. \"They're a sight to see moving. They'll roll along for a hundred days or more.\" He took them beneath the tower; the dwarves just had to bow their heads. Sekyw rapped on a wooden portal with his walking stick. \"Tower-warden, open, our brave drake wants a look inside this dwarf-wonder. The Partner Djer wishes to accompany him on a tour.\"\n\nSekyw stepped out of the way as the flat surface above dropped down, a stairway supported by ropes. Polished brass gleamed at the ends of dwarf-size handrails.\n\n\"Our ally is welcome,\" a dwarf in armor of woven leather said, descending the stairs to bow. Sekyw took them up. They saw all manner of wheels and drivers, interlocking mechanisms like the insides of an intricate clock grown to dragon-size. A forged web of steel held up the floors above. A dwarf or two lounged, giving the metal gears an occasional rub from a cloth that reeked like lamp oil.\n\n\"The first level is the driving rooms,\" Sekyw explained. \"Note how many of the wheels and structural reinforcements have holes. It makes it lighter, with only the tiniest loss in supportive strength. We'll ride the cargo verticator from here\u2014easier that way. Since the tower isn't moving, the dwarf-lifts aren't working.\" He pointed to a vertical belt of leather, with little metal handles, or perhaps footrests, which ran on its own set of wheels, a smaller, vertical version of the treads below.\n\nThey stepped onto a metal-webbed platform in the center of the tower. It rested in a cage with bars at the corners, and Sekyw reached for a bell-rope. He pulled twice, and the grate on the floor lifted to a gap in the ceiling above. Djer gasped and grabbed at one of the handrails running between the corner bars.\n\n\"First time in a verticator?\" Sekyw said.\n\n\"Ach, no, I used them in the mines. We'd ride up in the coal-scuttles. You had to jump in right or you'd get a good knock in the head. What do you think, Auron?\"\n\n\"I could have hopped up to the next level easily enough,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Dwarves can't jump like dragons. Well, not up, anyway,\" Sekyw said.\n\nThe second and third floors each held two spoked wheels, like wagon-wheels without the rims. They turned the tree-trunk-thick axles that descended into the driving room below.\n\n\"A testament to the strength and endurance of dwarves. Each spoke takes three dwarves, two pulling and one pushing so they interlock with the team ahead. They push-pull for four hours on floors sanded to keep them from losing their footing in their own sweat. The towers are also pulled by teams of wraxapods, but the capstan-dwarves can drive the towers in an emergency. Each floor runs one side of track. If they want to turn the tower, they just slow down one side. They match their pace to the beat of drums. The tower captain sends down orders to the drummers through that speaking-tube,\" Sekyw said, pointing to a flowerlike projection from the wall.\n\nAuron had enough imagination to picture the room filled with sweating dwarves, turning the wheels in time to the beat of the drum. Sekyw rang his bell-rope again, and they traveled up to living-floors. This floor was a little higher than the others, to give the dwarves more air as they ate and slept. Sekyw showed them store-rooms full of food and coal, kitchens and bathrooms, and the fixtures where the dwarves slung their hammocks. Wide dwarves, almost as broad as they were tall, greeted them merrily and explained everything from how to get a drink from the gravity-fed cisterns to the watchkeeping system, with labor teams tracked on polished slate boards marked with something Sekyw called chalk.\n\nThey walked out onto the first battlement, level with the walls around the settlement. In the welcome clear air and sunshine, Sekyw walked them past war machines designed to hurl javelins, fire, or helmet-size scoops of metal missiles.\n\nDjer picked up one of the pieces of shot. It was a little smaller than his fist, a round sphere of iron. \"They can knock out a helmeted man, fired from a height, or kill his horse. They're fired from something that looks like a slingshot on a board.\"\n\nThere were two more battlement levels as the tower narrowed to the top. They had to ascend ladders to go higher. Fixed crossbows placed between timber crenellations in the walls replaced the larger engines of the floor below. \"Archers, too,\" Djer said, opening a case and looking at the arrows standing within.\n\nThey moved up to the tower-captain's post, where a nest of speaking trumpets projected from the floor like a bouquet of oversize pitcher-blossoms under a peaked wooden canopy. A single watchdwarf nodded to them as they explored the level, but kept an ear cocked to the trumpets. They looked down at the chains being laid out for the wraxapod team. A walkway projected out from the tower-captain's post in all four directions of the compass. Above them, a pole with rungs going up it like legs of an insect led to an observation post at the tip, with the huge\u2014now that they were near it\u2014flag of the Diadem fluttering above.\n\nAuron marked a veritable nest of speaking tubes.\n\n\"The towers talk to each other, the teams, and the convoy with flags by signalmen at the end of these walkways. At night we use fireworks of different colors.\"\n\n\"May the Law and Order pity the apprentice who misses a signal,\" a gruff voice said from the tower-captain's post. \"For I won't.\"\n\nThey turned to see another squat dwarf emerging through a hatch in the floor. He wore a sash of red with gold braiding, but was barefoot. Auron couldn't help staring at his feet; he'd seen horses' hooves that looked more fragile.\n\n\"Commodore-of-the-Caravan Stal, pleased to meet you. You must be Djer and his dragon,\" the barefooted one said, bowing with a gesture only a little more pronounced than a nod.\n\nDjer and Sekyw bowed low, so Auron lowered his head, as well.\n\n\"Heard about the fight from some of my men\u2014sorry I missed it,\" he said. \"What does our guest think of the Traveling Towers?\"\n\n\"I didn't know such things existed, or could exist, sir,\" Auron said in Dwarvish.\n\nThe commodore gave a more pronounced bow. \"So you know a civil tongue, as well. I worry at times how we'd fare against a full-grown dragon. This wood is coated to stop flame, but that's just from fire-arrows and what-have-you. Thankfully, your kind are rare.\"\n\nAnd getting rarer, Auron thought. But he said, \"It would be a desperate dragon to go against all this for a wagonful of gold.\"\n\n\"Once the Caravan gets moving, I'd like to come out of the towers and join you for a meal, young drake. It's a long, slow trip. You're a new experience. I've made near two hundred round trips since starting on the push-pull level, and you're the first live drake I've seen.\"\n\nAuron wondered how many dead drakes he had crossed, but thought better of asking.\n\nLong, slow trip. Auron had time to consider in full the meaning of those words as his cave-on-wheels ground along, day after ever-so-the-same day.\n\nHe thought of it as a cave because it was dark and enclosed. There were solid doors at the rear, but they stayed locked from both inside and out\u2014the dwarves showed him how to work the simple sliding bolt that secured it from the inside. Auron had a source of air in the roof: there was a vent window shaped like a mushroom. A dwarf might be able to see out the slit, if he had something to stand on, but Auron could not work his crested head into it so that he could see. He settled for looking up at the sky at an angle, or sticking his nose up into the vent and experiencing the steppes through his nostrils. He smelled wraxapods, draft oxen, and sun-dried grasses, overlaid with dwarf.\n\nThey locked him inside the wagon soon after the towers, pulled by straining wraxapods, moved away from the walls of Wallander. To the drake's ears they made a sound like a constant mild earthquake as they ground across the steppe. Auron's own wagon had a team of no fewer than sixteen oxen pulling it along, and those numbers were often doubled at fords on the rare watercourses running across their paths. The double team was necessary for the wagon, burdened as it was with iron-banded chests of gold and silver.\n\nAuron ate well and slept better, warm out of the cold winter wind that brought chilling rain and flecks of snow like blown sand. He got to know the sound of the traveling towers crunching snow beneath the rotating roads they carried with them. He took entertainment in his dreams, either vaguely pleasant visions of clouds and landscapes, or vivid experiences from his ancestors somehow passed down through his parents, sights and sounds and smells and tastes that wafted through his consciousness without explaination.\n\nHe found time to compose a few couplets to his own song, should he ever meet the right mate once his wings had grown. All the while, his lung healed, and the wounds from his battles became faint white scars on his gray skin. Best of all, his tail slowly lengthened.\n\nA dwarf woman\u2014who also cared for the beasts outside the wagon\u2014fed him twice a day as the teams were hitched and unhitched. At those times, Djer and an accounting dwarf counted the money again and again, paying out small amounts to the nomads and merchant-nobles of the steppe for grain, eggs, and meat. Djer told him of teams of men and horses dragging tree branches and rolling bales of hay to feed the wraxapods. All had to be bartered in workmanship or paid for in coin.\n\nAt night, the dwarves allowed visitors into the camp, always ready to make a bargain with king or serf. Auron's one and only alarm on the long trip came when he heard a stealthy set of hands trying the vent at the top. Spoiling for action, Auron gave a growl that corkscrewed into a full-throated dragon cry, and whoever explored the roof jumped off with the speed of a cat that had unexpectedly landed on an iron stove.\n\nAuron got his promised dinner with the commodore. While Sekyw stood watch in the cart, the commodore took Auron to his room just under the command-cupola, and showered drake and Djer with food and tales. Auron heard stories of young men Stal met as warriors, who later became kings and dotards over the course of long years of Caravan. He showed them a tapestry to commemorate the Battle of Hurth crossing, where Stormrider K'ada va K'on brought his hordes against the towers until the Hurth turned red with their blood. They heard of ageless wizards living in icy wastes, writing in lost tongues on the skins of man and blighter, and the great king of the Unmapped Continent, who sent emissaries north on flying carpets. How much was truth and how much was legend, Auron had no way of knowing.\n\n\"What do you know of NooMoahk, the black dragon?\" Auron asked.\n\nStal flicked crumbs of his meal from his beard. \"Hmmmm, that's an old name. My last news of him goes back years, must have been around the time of the Blizzard that Killed Spring, it seems. A good forty years ago. We had a band of men traveling with us. They had camels as well as horses, and planned to cross the desert to kill him, for they said he still lived, but had grown feeble. He must not have grown feeble enough, for they said they'd meet us for the return trip at the rustless iron temple at the edge of the desert. It's a fascinating place. There's a well there that's never empty, and thick groves of fruit trees. They say a mighty king is buried there, but no one remembers anything more than that. But I've lost my grip on the tail of my tale\u2014the men were not there waiting for us.\"\n\nA day later, when the accountant dwarf and Djer did a full counting of the coin, an argument broke out.\n\n\"We both signed the tally two nights ago,\" the accountant insisted. \"After we bought that herd of mutton.\"\n\n\"It must not be right. How can there be so much missing?\" Djer said. \"None have been here but Auron and Sekyw.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the drake eats coin after all, though I beg your pardon for saying it.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. Who searched Sekyw?\"\n\n\"Myself, and then two others. We felt his clothes, he removed his boots\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I know the procedure. Perhaps he ate it. The fat would mask the sound of its clinking.\"\n\nThe accountant bristled. \"Never. There's a magic on it. It's death to swallow it\u2014I've dusted the gold with powdered poison myself. He had no water to wash it with.\"\n\n\"So you told me,\" Djer said, looking at Auron in the back of the open wagon with a wounded expression.\n\nAuron lifted his head. \"My friend, I did not touch so much as a coin. And if I ate it, wouldn't it have killed me, as well?\"\n\n\"I never tested the formula on a dragon,\" the accountant said.\n\n\"Send for Sekyw,\" Djer ordered.\n\n\"I don't mean to add to the mystery, but there's sand on the floor,\" Auron said, sniffing at a crevice between thick planks of the wagon bed.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"There's sand on the floor of the wagon. Not much. A pinch or two. But it smells like the riverbank. It wasn't there before. I know the smell of every crack in this cage by now.\"\n\nDwarves began to gather, sensing something wrong. Sekyw came up, looking as bulky as ever.\n\n\"I wish we had weighed him before and after he rode with the money,\" Djer muttered to Auron.\n\n\"Sir,\" Sekyw said, rolling his eyes at the other dwarves, \"I'm a dwarf of years of experience. I hold a position of trust with the Company. Am I to understand you think I took a few handfuls of coin? To what gain, at such risk? My pension is worth more. The dragon must have eaten it.\"\n\n\"Only two have been alone with the money, you and the young skyking. I just wanted to have both of you present while I thought this through,\" Djer said.\n\n\"Are you sure there is no error in the count?\"\n\n\"None,\" the accountant said.\n\nSekyw walked over to Auron, pointing with his stick. \"Then it must be the dragon, as I was searched when I left the cart\u2014\"\n\nAuron snorted.\n\n\"Quiet, please. I can't think when you're talking,\" Djer said. \"Shut up or I'll cram that stick in your mouth.... Umta, did you check the stick?\"\n\n\"Solid orewood,\" the accountant dwarf said. \"I felt it myself\u2014it was no heavier when he left as when he went in.\"\n\n\"There's gold in it,\" Auron said. \"I can smell it.\"\n\n\"Umta!\" Djer said. \"The stick!\"\n\nThe dwarf called Umta swore and snatched the stick from Sekyw's hand. He worked first the handle, then the tip, trying to open it.\n\n\"This is outrageous. That stick was a present from my master when I was just an apprentice. To my knowledge, it's nothing but solid orewood.\"\n\nDjer went over to Umta and took up the stick. He cracked it across his leg, breaking it in two. Dirt flew in all directions.\n\n\"So it was hollow, and weighted with dirt. That proves nothing,\" Sekyw said, but his face had grown pale.\n\nAuron sniffed at the stick. \"Empty the ground-end, Djer. On something clean.\"\n\nDjer poured the end of the stick out on the accountant's tally sheet. A trickle of sand, golden against the other dirt, poured out.\n\n\"Who would weight it with dirt, and a little sand? Where's the gold, Sekyw?\"\n\nSekyw looked down at the evidence and wheezed. Dwarves watching murmured to each other as they worked it out, or had others explain it to them.\n\n\"As you value your life, where's the gold?\"\n\nSekew tore at his beard. \"The stick was magic, it opened only at the right word. I buried the gold. I buried it so the dragon would take the blame. It's unfair. I've sweated for this Company for as long as you're old, and just because you happen upon a friendly dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"There will have to be a trial. Though your confession will be to your credit,\" Djer said. \"Jealousy drove you to something this stupid?\"\n\n\"Never Envy other dragons their wealth, power, or home,\" Auron translated, as best he could.\n\n\"What's that?\" Djer asked.\n\n\"A song that we might do well to translate into Dwarvish.\"\n\nThe sight of the markets in the East would have been worth the winter's trip to Auron, even without his task of guarding the dwarves' treasure.\n\nThere were colorful tents and dun huts, run-down stalls and gold-flaked wagons, warehouses and barges loaded with goods under a late-winter sky. The steppe country ended at the feet of a sickle-curve of mountains from the north, hummock-shaped, snow-dusted slopes harboring only a few patches of desert fir. They were in a land the commodore identified as Wa'ah.\n\nWa'ah sat in the spine hills between the Vhydic River, which ran south to the Jeweled Princedoms, and the Na, the slow-flowing artery to the East's fertile coast and myriad islands. Here the twenty thousand paces of the Golden Road joined the navigable lengths of the Vhydic and the Na under the Suerzain of Wa'ah. The suerzain was a monarch with the wisdom to leave a good thing alone by not levying tolls, duties, dock fees, or taxes on the river-road trade. He employed a small army of merchants himself, and the suerzain's storehouses and food markets, corrals and smithies\u2014located in the best spots, naturally\u2014competed for the custom of traders from near and far.\n\nThe towers halted their inchworm journey on the west side of the Vhydic, where the spring's first wildflowers already bloomed on the banks of the more sheltered backwaters. Rather than hiring boats to shuttle their goods across, the dwarves assembled their own from frames carried by the wraxapods. It was the knocking sound of hammers driving wooden pegs that revealed to Auron that the journey had ended.\n\n\"But not your duties, Auron,\" Djer said. \"We'll spend the rest of the coin in a month or so buying new beasts and wagons for the return trip. We'll return to Wallander with three times the goods and one-tenth the money that we set out with. But our first purchase will be at the suerzain's market for some fresh fruits and vegetables. You may not get tired of salted meat, but I've had enough dried mushrooms and peas and apples to last me the rest of my life.\"\n\n\"It is still the plan for me to return with the Caravan, at least partway,\" Auron said.\n\nDjer gave his crest a friendly tap, like a merchant testing the soundness of a copper pot. \"Of course. You'll ride in more comfort this time, in the by, and they say the summer is a better time to see the southern steppe. Having you along mightily impressed the Steppe Kings' men. I exaggerated a bit and told them you were an important scion of a family of dragons in our mountains, learning something of the world as a student and ambassador to the Chartered Company. It didn't hurt to have the Ironriders think that any nonsense would be avenged by some very angry dragons.\"\n\nAfter a day of preparation, the dwarves opened their own market, showing off jewelry, weapons, armor, and other finished goods brought out of the countries ringing the Inland Sea. Djer had Auron perch atop the money-wagon, and some visitors made the trip across the Vhydic just to see him, for not even the menageries out of the East could boast of a drake's presence. His display especially excited the merchants of the Na basin and the eastern coast. Djer was happy to relay to Auron their belief that any endeavour that took place under a dragon's gaze was considered certain to bring luck and success. Some went so far as to stand beneath his wagon, look solemnly at him, bow, and mutter in their own tongues. Others clapped to get his attention and then tossed a coin or two onto the flat roof of the wagon. Auron made a pretense of eating the money and later presented it to Djer, who would spend it on fat joints of beef and mutton. Djer told him that if he were a golden dragon, instead of a gray one, it would impress them even more. When he hinted that he knew of an elf-artisan who could paint his skin until anyone would think he had come out of the egg that color, Auron snarled in mock fury and chased his friend around the wagon nipping at the dwarf's fleeing buttocks.\n\nAuron saw that men, elves, dwarves, and blighters came in different colors, just as dragons did, though in muted, Earth-spirit hues. Some wore plain-sewn furs, others rich robes with glittering pieces of stained glass woven into the fabric. Rich or poor, perfumed or smelling of charcoal smoke, they all tried to buy cheap and sell dear to others with the same goal in mind. They spoke a form of pidgin Parl of many words run together to make sure the point was taken. Auron heard traders asked if they would like to see more with the phrase \"thou-you want-care look-see else-more-different?\"\n\nAuron found it all amusing. Even better, he could enjoy the feeling of being amused.\n\nThe waning moon told them they had been on the banks of the Vhydic for over a month. Auron and Djer treated themselves to a private dinner just below the doors of the wagon. The nights were now warm enough for them to stand outside without huddling close to the fire and shivering.\n\n\"Your beard is looking well,\" Auron told Djer one evening as the dwarf sprinkled his beard with the faintly sweet-smelling water that fed the glowing mold nestled within. Shining flakes picked up the light. \"And is that a little gold dust?\"\n\n\"Ach, I splurged,\" Djer said, winking at Auron with one of his great eyes. \"This will be a profitable trip, from push-pull dwarf on up.\"\n\n\"When do dwarves mate?\"\n\n\"I'll take a wife once I have my own line open,\" Djer said. \"There was a maid, once, in the mines. A kind maid, even to a nobody of a coaler. I should like to return to her stove-corner and take her up to a home...\"\n\nThe dwarf glanced over at Auron. \"Funny the chance that makes a dream come true. Almost makes you believe in that elvish rot about fate and such.\"\n\n\"Almost,\" Auron said.\n\n\"Yes, you've got enough of an ear for Dwarvish to know a curse when you hear it. I don't care for almosts. The word is a cheat.\"\n\n\"There's no almost about this trip. Meeting you is the best thing to happen to me since...\"\n\nDjer laughed to end the silence. \"And you, my friend, you've grown on dwarf hospitality. I see some bumps on your crest, too. Would those be horns coming in?\"\n\n\"Are they even?\" Auron asked. He remembered his sisters and their discussion over just where on a dragon's crest horns were considered attractive, and was vain enough to have it worry him.\n\n\"One's right on top, and the other is just in front of your ear,\" Djer said, and laughed as Auron's sii flew to his crest. The buds were there, midway up each side of his crest, what his sisters might consider ideal. At least he was normal in that respect.\n\n\"We're both growing,\" Djer said, slapping his vest-covered belly, now full with a feast bought by Auron's collection of coin. \"Another year or two, and you wouldn't even fit in that wagon.\"\n\n\"And you are about to burst that vest like a hatchling's egg.\"\n\n\"What was it like, being in an egg?\" Djer asked. \"Dwarves come like mammals; we don't have memories of it.\"\n\n\"Safe. Wonderful. Like you feel on a cold day in winter when you're sleeping somewhere warm, not quite awake but not really asleep, either. Your senses flicker on and off.\"\n\n\"You're an education, Auron. I'm now a dwarf of position and experience. I owe it all to you.\" He pulled out a long-stemmed pipe and lit leathery leaf within. Djer had been experimenting with different pipe-fillings available at the market, and had found a rich-smelling, almost beery kind that revolted the drake.\n\nDjer expelled a contented sigh along with the fragrant pipesmoke.\n\nAuron flicked out his tongue and touched the dwarf's callused hand. \"You worked double shifts in that mine to buy into the Chartered Company. You worked hard and drove your cart even when it wasn't bringing you much in return. Then you did a favor for a strange beast that in another time or place might have killed you. Your success is entirely your own.\"\n\nWith the money-wagon emptied like a larder at the end of winter, Auron toured the markets and stalls with Djer. They explored the offerings of the Vhydic and lands beyond. Auron thrived on the experience. The color and energy of the place was infectious, if a bit overwhelming to a young drake. The markets attracted such a mixture of peoples, sights, and sounds that he felt like just another visitor in a land where every face is a strange one and every sight an oddity. Dogs slunk behind their master's legs at his coming, and horses danced in fear, but his presence inspired nothing but interested looks and excited comment, a welcome change from the angry call of hunting horns or the scrape of swords being drawn.\n\nAuron paused at the vendors offering hanging maps and delicate scrolls, the work of men who could not communicate through thought-pictures. But they had some advantages over the mental way of the dragons. A man or dwarf did not have to rely on the accumulated memories of his blood-line: he could learn from the writings of those in another time and place, if he just understood the symbols. An old story did not die with its owner, but lived on whenever someone picked out the words. The inventiveness of the hominids made up for their physical weakness.\n\nHe saw strange long-necked birds which stood on legs as tall as a horse, and a messenger who flew off east on the Golden Road on a vulture that had the wingspan near that of a mature dragon. He smelled a precious metal that came out of the south, something Djer identified as platinum. He tried wines and spirits, passing from exhilaration to sick exhaustion in six wild hours. There were piles of timber that gave off sparks when struck with a piece of flint, crystals that gathered the sun's heat during the day and warmed a room at night, and puppets that danced without strings and told stories to amuse child and adult alike. What was magic, what was art, and what was craft could not be said except by the makers, who worked with all three to produce the wonders of the bazaar of Wa'ah.\n\nAuron carried the sights, smells, and sounds of the land of the Golden Road between the Rivers for the rest of his life.\n\nThe barbarians must have slipped across the mountains in the night. Auron heard the far-off clamor of battle before dawn, followed by the nearer sound of dwarves blowing their alarm horns. The round horns, wound once around the torso at the shoulder with the bell baffled so the sound was projected in all directions, cut through the morning birdsong like a dragon's battle scream.\n\nThe dwarven camp had always been arranged for defense, with the three towers as corners of a triangle filled by wagons running like the walls of a castle between them. The dwarves rushed to fill in the gaps with barrels, boxes, and beams, closing the riverside gap with Auron's stoutly built treasure wagon. Auron had no role in the drill, nor could he find Djer, so he dashed to the northernmost tower and climbed the outside to get a better view. Panting from the climb, he wrapped himself around the pole leading up to the crow's nest. The dwarf above stamped his feet in excitement.\n\nEven with the predawn only turning the high swirling clouds gold, there was more than enough light for Auron to see the panoply of attack. A long column poured out of the mountains, dividing itself into three separate wedges like an approaching hydra. The farthest off turned and made for the Golden Road, the middle for the palisades surrounding the king's warehouses, and the nearest turned for the riverbank.\n\n\"They're not making to cross the river,\" a dwarf in the watchtower called down to the commodore. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\"Can't you hear the horses?\" Auron asked. \"To the west, to the west, dwarf!\"\n\nThe watchman shifted his grip on the rail and leaned out to look at the steppe and brought a glass to his eye. \"No... yes... no, is there something out there?\"\n\n\"Many somethings,\" Auron said, backing down the pole.\n\nBelow, in the command cupola, the commodore held some sort of visor to his face, looking out to the steppe. Anxious dwarves stood all around. Auron reversed himself so his head hung down to hear the conversation below.\n\n\"By the hammer that made Ezkad's ax, it's the Kun-Dhlo,\" Stal said, lowering the glass lenses. \"We bought cattle from them only last month. They must be coming with every boy and graybeard who can ride. We're too spaced out. The towers can hardly cover the walls, let alone each other,\" he said to Esef, who had puffed his way up the ladders at the alarm. \"We've gotten lazy in these smooth days of peace.\"\n\nThe commodore inhaled and put a speaking-trumpet to his mouth. \"Wind every crossbow and stand to the walls, O Dwarves! Stout arms and hearts, or our names'll be memorials on the battle wall!\"\n\nAuron watched a long line inch across the steppes. The horsemen were walking their mounts rather than racing pell-mell for the towers. Whoever led the Kun-Dhlo knew how to discipline the warriors.\n\nThe same could not be said for the warriors on the other side of the river. Auron saw that one of the suerzain's warehouses was already aflame. Wagons began to burn as screams and the noise of battle, like a thousand frantic blacksmiths hammering out tin pots, floated from the far bank of the river.\n\n\"What'll it be, sir?\" Esef asked. \"We can save many lives if we abandon the stock and keep to the towers. They want our goods, not our lives.\"\n\nThe commodore scraped at the floor with one of his tough feet like a horse eager to be off. \"Dwarves don't abandon their own. I've a duty to the Company, as does every dwarf here, to make them trade in blood for what they'd take without gold.\"\n\n\"Give em a taste of our law,\" a beardless signaldwarf said, but the elders ignored him.\n\n\"We should have dug a trench. In my youth, before the suerzain's family came to power here, we were more careful,\" Esef observed.\n\n\"Too late to regret it now,\" the commodore said. \"Go down and open the stores. If there are any mail shirts, hand them out to the dwarves on the barricades.\"\n\n\"Where shall I go?\" Auron asked as Esef spoke into one of the tubes.\n\nThe commodore jumped. \"By my beard, I thought you were the tail of the banner hanging down. Stay in the towers, young drake! It's the safest place. We may lose a good many dwarves, not to mention our stock.\"\n\n\"Where's Djer?\"\n\nEsef raised his face from the speaking-tube. \"Where a dwarf his age should be, at the barricade.\"\n\nAuron fixed his stumpy tail and swung below the cupola, climbing down the side of the tower as he had come up, eschewing ladder for claw. He found Djer shouting orders for the dwarves to add everything they could move to the barricade. He held no weapon; he pointed and gestured with the long stem of his pipe.\n\n\"What shall I do?\" Auron asked.\n\nDjer kicked a case of crossbow bolts open on the ground. \"Here, bowmen, take more!\" he shouted, then looked at Auron as if he had just met him as a stranger. \"Die on the walls with the rest of us.\"\n\n\"Doesn't anyone here know how to fight a battle?\" Auron asked.\n\nThe dwarf set his mouth. \"We're traders first. Warfare is a long second. The towers haven't been attacked in generations. Our machines used to frighten our enemies.\"\n\n\"Another almost,\" Auron said.\n\nThe drake could read the fierce light in Djer's eyes, even behind his daylight-mask. \"But they'll still find that we'll die only once we've built a wall of bodies around us.\"\n\nAuron saw arrayed companies of men in his mind, memories passed down from his grandfather. \"Let the machines try to win it for you. But be prepared for them to fail. When men fight, they always keep a strong force out of the battle, in case of the unexpected. Don't put all your dwarves on the walls\u2014keep something back.\"\n\nDjer looked up at the towers, where the push-pull dwarves were manning their devices for hurling death at the enemy, and at the widely spaced dwarves, only two to a wagon, at the barricades.\n\n\"There's few enough down here. You'll be the reserve. Your fire might be a surprise if all else fails.\"\n\nAuron tensed, and his earholes tucked themselves behind his griff as they descended from his crest. \"I will try.\"\n\n\"Horses won't be able to get past the barricade. It'll be like the battle in the tapestry. They'll ride round and round until they're all dead. There might be some fights if they dismount and try slipping through, but we should\u2014\"\n\n\"They're coming! Why don't the towers fire?\" a dwarf shouted from the wall.\n\nAuron craned his neck and looked through a gap in the heap of wagons, bales, and boxes that served as a wall. The horsemen sat their mounts, still well away from the wall. The towers facing the lines of riders launched their missiles. Some flamed in the growing light, leaving smoke trails as they arced toward the enemy. The towers wasted no further missiles after the first fell short. Auron heard whistles and trumpets from the enemy and saw a rustle of motion from behind the barrier of horses.\n\n\"Some among them know how far our war-machines can throw,\" Djer said.\n\nGaps opened in the screen of horses. Figures on all fours charged forward as the first rays of the dawn touched the banners at the tops of the towers. They were like dogs, only heavier. Auron heard pained squeals and realized they were swine. He saw blood running down their flanks, impelled by cruel spikes digging into their flesh. The pigs bore bags across their backs, the kind of satchels men sometimes put on their horses, though to what purpose Auron could not guess.\n\nThe dwarves did not wait to find out. The towers launched their shot and flame, the walls crossbow bolts. A swine or two fell, but the rest raced forward, some with crossbow bolts stuck through their fleshy shoulders and necks.\n\nThe dawn went white, and there was a thunderclap. A pig had disappeared, apparently in a flash of lightning.\n\n\"Sul-fire! Ware! Sul-fire,\" a dwarf at the barricades shouted. \"They're under the walls, bring fire buckets! I smell a\u2014\" Another explosion cut the shout off; the dwarf and pieces of his wagon flew into the air as if by a giant's fist driving up from the ground. Auron's nostrils caught a noxious reek: a sulfurous mix of rotten eggs, burning flesh, and acidic smoke.\n\nMore thunderclaps sounded, though only one blew another gap in the barricade. Pieces of debris, flesh and wood, fell to the ground. Some dwarves hurled themselves from the walls, but most stood to their posts\u2014bravely obeying orders or frozen in fear of the thunderclaps.\n\n\"The horses come. Loose, loose!\" a dwarf called.\n\nBlowing smoke obscured Auron's view, and still another explosion made the dwarves duck, upsetting the aim of the crossbowmen. The commodore must have held some of his weapons against this moment, for the towers suddenly doubled their fire. Flame and iron rained onto the line of horsemen.\n\n\"Watch the riverside. Some are crossing,\" a deep voice from the southern river-tower boomed.\n\n\"Every dwarf to the north wall!\" Djer shouted. He stood on a barrel to see the attack, still with a pipe in his hand. \"Let the towers take care of the river.\"\n\nSome of the attackers came off their horses, running forward with ropes and hooks. Others fired curved bows from their wheeling mounts. Arrows struck home among the dwarves; the riders were better marksmen on horseback than the dwarves standing still. Another pig exploded, this time frightening horses as well as dwarves. A few of the latter jumped off the wall and ran for the nearest tower. The towers were sending their missiles toward the river now, holding back the attack by the men who had crossed the river.\n\nA wagon lurched over, spilling a dwarf as it was dragged from the wall. Horses of the Ironriders pulled at the wheels with ropes and hooks, hauling it out of the barricade by main force. More horns sounded from the attackers, and another rain of steel from the commodore's tower felled horse and man alike among the pullers. The wagon stopped ten paces from the wall, and riders with spears and curved swords spurred their mounts toward the gap.\n\nDjer jumped from his barrel and grabbed two dwarves running for the towers toward the gap. \"Fill the breech!\" he yelled, waving dwarves over from the other walls. But the archers were riding all around the dwarves' triangle now; the dwarves at the other walls worked bow, crossbow, and sling to keep them off. Each side traded shots; dwarves to either side of Djer toppled, sprouting feathered shafts. With a cry a body of horsemen\u2014all fur cape, pointed hat, and long, black-feathered spear\u2014charged the gap. Auron caught a wild look of fear in Djer's eyes as he stood alone at the breech without even a shield, working the lever of a crossbow.\n\nAuron roared. His call rose above the clamor, not the sound of dwarf, man, horse, or even swine. Perhaps a lion could make a sound like that, but it would lack the trumpet quality of Auron's length of neck. He dragon-dashed straight for the gap and the charging horses, griff extended so his head resembled the point of a battering ram\u2014Djer would not face the raiders alone. Once he was alongside his friend he loosed his foua, spreading a long arc of liquid flame on gap and tipped wagon alike. The superheated wood exploded with a crackling fshoosh.\n\nA horse and rider braved the inferno; Auron turned his head toward them. His fire struck the horse on the forequarters, melting away skin and muscle, and the beast crashed headlong in its death. Its rider, also aflame along his arms and face, flew forward to land in a horrid writhing heap. Other horses shied away from the flames, turning at the last moment to run along the walls, their riders desperately striking at dwarf heads along the barricade.\n\nAuron stood in the breach making a show of lashing his neck and tail with mouth open and battle fans extended, enlarging his head. Another wild rider, cape flying out behind, jumped the flaming wagon-trek-tow with a moon-white horse. He held a kitelike banner in a muscular arm, the sharp end pointed for Auron's breast. Auron's neck muscles convulsed, but only sour gas came up his fire channels. Something twanged behind; a crossbow bolt buried itself in the man's broad chest, and he toppled backwards off his horse. The beast danced around Auron, away from the flames and into the darkness of the dwarf compound.\n\n\"Reload this!\" Djer barked at a dwarf beside him, handing over the crossbow that had felled the banner man. He ran over to the man and picked up the banner, holding it like a spear, and stood beside Auron.\n\n\"The fire was a shock for them. I knew you would not fail me,\" Djer said grimly.\n\nArrows arced overhead. \"Build up the bonfire,\" Auron said. \"Have your dwarves throw barrels, anything on it. The horses don't like it.\"\n\n\"I don't like it much better,\" Djer said, coughing in the smoke blowing their way. \"But we'll do it.\" He shouted orders, and dwarves ran up to throw anything they could lay their hands on, making a blister of fire around the gap in the wall.\n\nThe Ironriders charged again, braving the fire of the towers. The horses turned away at the last moment. Some of the riders, in their battle fury, jumped off their mounts and fought the dwarves on the walls with fist and dagger, but were met by a wave of hard-armed push-pull dwarves, released from the towers to aid the fight on the walls. A third charge broke almost as soon as it started, when the first missiles from the towers rained down on the front ranks.\n\nBy the time the sun was two diameters off the horizon, it was over. Across the river, looted barges and warehouses, wagons and stalls burned, putting an inverted mountain of black smoke into the spring sky. Djer retrieved the white horse that had bolted past Auron and rode up and down the walls like a horseman-born, his stumpy legs gripping the beast's back as the man's saddle dragged from its belly. He still pointed with his pipe as he shouted.\n\nAuron found himself shaking as the riders retreated. The Ironriders still blew horns and whistles defiantly, covered by archers who let it be known that they were leaving at their own pace, still fighting\u2014a dwarf who stood up to jeer fell with an arrow through his cheek; he lived but never shook his fist at anyone again\u2014as they quit the field.\n\nThe commodore received a trophy of battle as he passed among the wounded dwarves. It was a green, kite-shaped standard stretched tight on a narrow crossbar. Stitched in black was a figure of a man with arms held out, pointed up from his shoulders as if he were trying to fly, surrounded by a golden circle encompassed by the limits of his hands and feet. It was no small feat of workmanship, especially in the intricate weaving of the golden threads. They were braided into the circle like a maiden's locks. Perhaps they were a woman's hair, at that.\n\nSo my old enemy has followed me even here, to the other side of the world. \"Which Steppe King bears that banner?\" Auron asked.\n\nThe commodore raised an eyebrow. \"I've not seen that one before. The figure isn't in the style I've seen among the Ironriders.\"\n\n\"I've seen it before,\" Djer said. \"When I worked the Varvar coast as a tradesdwarf. Meant 'Dwarves aren't welcome.'\"\n\nThe commodore shrugged, but Auron saw wide eyes narrow behind his face-mask. \"Perhaps the Ironriders copied it.\"\n\n\"Were the others driven off, as well?\" Djer asked.\n\n\"The barbarians on the other side of the river fared better. They came for pillage, not murder. How they got over the mountains without warning is beyond me. An unexpected feat of generalship for the Ironriders.\"\n\n\"Whoever he was, his men fought well,\" Djer said, stroking the gray-white horse's mane in thought.\n\n\"They lost. History won't remember them. If he wasn't killed here, his head is probably already on the steppe. The steppe men don't care for leaders who take them into defeat.\"\n\nAuron thought of the rider's skilled attack: the exploding swine, the horsemen pulling apart the wall, the archers who felled the long row of dwarves lying in a hallowed wait for the pyre. The terrible, bloody determination of man, he thought. Will it outlast dragons and dwarves?\n\nThe dwarves of the Chartered Company were some of the few to leave Wa'ah with most of their purchases intact. The barbarians, who melted away as quickly as they appeared, had pillaged both ends of the Golden Road, leaving many the poorer and unhappy with the suerzain.\n\nThe towers rarely stopped on the way back, with spring fodder more readily available for the wraxapods, but they did rest at the Iron Temple.\n\nAuron rode as a passenger on the return trip, looking out of the forward tower's slow-moving cupola at a countryside of unrelieved horizon. According to the dwarves, they traveled through the steppe at its most beautiful, when a riot of yellow and blue broke out across the sward.\n\n\"It seems good earth,\" Auron said to the commodore. The treads of the traveling towers churned up rich black soil. \"Why are the lands so empty?\"\n\n\"The Ironriders are nomads. Wherever their horses can run, they claim, and they don't take to settlers. Some of the patches of trees you see were once planted settlements, but those elms might as well be gravestones. We have some success with them because we travel, as they do.\n\n\"The Iron Temple where we will stop marks the grave of the last king to subdue them. Tindairuss was his name, of the land of... Oh, the name escapes me. Back then the Ironriders rode under Ju Ain K'on, which means 'bloody hooves.' He slaughtered and stole and expanded the lands of the Ironriders to the very falls of the Falnges. Tindariuss and the riverside elves suffered their depredations, and he formed an alliance of those victims of Bloodyhooves. That dragon you mentioned, NooMoahk, figures into the tale somehow, but since I heard it from the lips of an Ironrider, I don't know that I trust the details. Tindairuss won many victories, and for a while his men settled the steppe, but he grew old and fell ill. Even before he died, his sons fought with his brothers over the kingdom. The queen sided with one son, but he was assassinated. The kingdom was divided into a confederation for a time, but now their lands are a few overgrown walls of stone. The usual story with men. Many joined with the Ironrider clans. I can only imagine what Tindairuss would think of his blood riding with his mortal enemy. The Iron Temple must quake with his anger.\"\n\n\"They build a temple to him in the middle of the steppe?\"\n\n\"The work of the son who ended up being assassinated. It was at the site of his father's greatest triumph. Can't imagine why anyone ever felt the need to fight a battle there. It looks just like any other part of the steppe. It was a well before. The only one for a distance, so perhaps there was a reason for the battle after all. That's why we shall stop there. Our casks grow empty.\"\n\nThe caravan stopped for two days of rest at the well, forming itself into the triangular fortress Auron knew so well, though tighter, and with a ditch dug all around. He walked up the hill with Djer as a line of dwarves with wheelbarrows hauled casks to the top of the hill, corded muscles glistening in the sunshine.\n\nThe temple was made of metal. It showed only dirt, no sign of rust or tarnish. Djer ran a hand along the smooth side, leaving the black face underneath as shiny as if it were wet. The four sides of the square inclined slightly to a flat roof thirty hands above. A column of metal pointed from it like a lance aimed at the sky.\n\n\"What ore is that?\" Auron asked. His Dwarvish was accomplished without effort, though it didn't ring quite right in the ear because of the way his head was constructed.\n\n\"If I knew, I'd own the Chartered Company,\" Djer said. \"Wizardly artisans must have made it, and the skill is lost, like so many other gifts, in these bitter days.\"\n\nAuron placed his claws on it; a metallic ping sounded as he touched the surface. \"It's a bare surface. I thought men wrote on everything.\"\n\n\"Just above the door,\" Djer said, pointing.\n\nAuron looked at the apocryphal letters. \"I must learn to read one of these days.\"\n\n\"Many who can wouldn't know what to make of that. The characters are unknown to me.\"\n\n\"You know it's time for me go.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Djer said, his stubbly face turning serious. \"I keep hoping you'll change your mind.\"\n\n\"I want to find my own kind. NooMoahk, first of all.\"\n\n\"Steel yourself. It is a hard journey across the desert.\"\n\n\"I know. I'll ask you for a set of saddlebags, with plenty of water skins.\"\n\n\"Done,\" Djer said, rapping Auron's crest with his knuckles. \"But I cannot let a friend such as you go without something.\"\n\n\"You've given me my tail-point. That is enough.\"\n\n\"Not hardly,\" he said, searching his pockets with eyes rolling skyward. He fished out a ring. \"I've put the seal of the Diadem on this,\" he said, showing it to Auron. \"It's my Partner-seal, and more besides. Have you seen what I've chosen as my insignia under the diadem?\"\n\nAuron looked at the etching on the golden surface. \"Is that supposed to be me?\"\n\n\"A dragon. Well, I thought it looked like you, anyway. I'm no artist.\"\n\n\"Dragons have wings. I don't... not yet.\"\n\n\"Winged or no, you're the reason I'm a vested dwarf.\"\n\n\"I'm honored,\" Auron said, his skin flushing reddish with pleasure.\n\n\"You can honor me by keeping it. Should you be in great need someday, showing it to one of the Chartered Company will get you whatever assistance we can offer. Traditionally a Partner gives his emissary ring only to a chief-of-staff on an important journey. You're welcome to this for the rest of your life\u2014may it be blessed with many healthy years.\"\n\n\"I would wear it with pride, but it won't fit my finger.\"\n\n\"Then wear it on a horn, once you grow a proper one. Or a chain around your neck, for that matter,\" he said, pulling a long, thin strand of steel from his other pocket. \"I hope I've made it big enough for a fully grown dragon. I could wear this for a belt.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"The chain is special, Auron. A piece of my people's magic. It's a dwarsaw. Pull any part of it tight, and it will cut even an iron collar if scraped back and forth across it, should anyone succeed in putting you in chains again. Keep it as a memento of the first favor I did you.\"\n\nAuron tried pulling the links tight, and tiny serrated crystal blades like teeth appeared from their shell-like housings.\n\n\"You honor me with it.\"\n\n\"By my shining beard, Auron, this'll be a tale no one will believe in a century. A dwarf and a dragon, brought together by chance and bonded by friendship.\"\n\nAuron reared up, took the dwarf's hand in his sii and shook it, dwarf-fashion. He flicked out his tongue, smelling Djer and his pipe tobacco into his memory. \"That's the best thing about friendship. It is a gift that cannot be lost. Only thrown away.\"\n\nHungry, thirsty, and cold, Auron asked himself for the eighteenth time, in as many days, what drove him from friendship and comfort into a waste. When he had first thought of finding NooMoahk, it had been a vague wish, an effort to find a new foundation for his life, and to discover the truth behind Hazeleye's story about discovering a weakness in dragons.\n\nBut he hadn't counted on the power of the wasteland. It was vaster than the dwarf maps indicated.\n\nThe dwarves prepared him for the desert as best as they could. Dry meat, especially sausages, and bladders of water filled the two saddlebags adapted for drakeback. Auron found when he emptied the water he could eat the skin, the tough leather gave his stomach something to work on through the cold nights. For this was no desert out of legend, a hot expanse of rock and sand\u2014at least at this time of year\u2014but a cold, dry waste of rattling pebbles and windblown rolling weeds bouncing off larger rocks.\n\nAuron saw his tail and midsection thin perceptibly over the journey, as even one set of leather saddlebags disappeared into his hungry gullet, and he feared his fire bladder was reabsorbing the liquid fat contained within. He did his best to trot along as the wolves did, hardening his heart and muscles to the unnatural gait. He went steadily south, every night the object of the Bowing Dragon's homage sunk a bit further toward the horizon. Sometimes, if he was lucky, at twilight or dawn he could catch hopping little rodents who sought bugs beneath the stones. Their hairy little bodies made him even more thirsty. He caught several, and in stands of brush found termite nests that he opened by using the dwarsaw to open their fortresslike towers, so he could shift them and dig out the nests underneath.\n\nThe blue smudge on the horizon that appeared on the twentieth day without water gave him hope. It must be the Bissonian Scarps of the old dwarf maps as rendered from the tongue of the people of Tindariuss, and somewhere within the dragon's home. Auron could no longer jog along, but he could walk. He stalked the mountains as if they were prey, planting alternate feet front-and-rear with dried-out muscles and joints that creaked as he walked.\n\nSomething floated above, on wide wings with feathers that spread like fingers. Auron walked on, ignoring it, and it came lower in a half-hour's worth of lazy circles. Its shadow passed over him, and a cold tail-tip of dread ran up his spine.\n\n\"You should have been picked over a week ago, if you came out of the north, dying one,\" it called down to him, in bird speech. \"Why did you choose my desert to kill yourself, hatchling?\"\n\nAs though inaccurate old maps were my fault.\n\n\"I'm no hatchling, I've breathed my first fire, feather-wings,\" Auron croaked.\n\n\"You should rest more. You'll pant your life out in cramp and pain otherwise. I've seen a dozen kinds of desert death, and can foretell yours easily. You still didn't answer my question.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the advice.\" Auron rather hoped the vulture would come within leaping distance. He waited for it to wheel around again before continuing the conversation. \"I seek a relative, a black dragon named NooMoahk. If you aid me, you'll find me grateful.\"\n\n\"I'll find you stretched out beneath the sun, with your last breath long since blown east. I'd like to know what favor you can do me.\"\n\nAuron had to wait again for another circle; he didn't feel up to shouting. \"NooMoahk doesn't eat sand. There must be hunting to be had in those hills. I'll keep the four-leggeds off my kills until you get your chance to pick the bones.\"\n\n\"Dragons are notorious bone-eaters, so I wonder. Let me turn the question on its back and try poking at the belly. What can I, the genteelest of hunters, do to aid you?\"\n\n\"Genteelest?\"\n\n\"I don't do my prey the discourtesy of killing it, but politely wait for it to die. What flesh-eater can say more?\"\n\nSome flesh-eaters are too ill-bred to wait and dine on the lips and tailvents, Auron thought. \"Take me to the nearest water.\"\n\n\"There are springs in the mountains, though you must first pass up and over the dry hills. It's high summer and dry.\"\n\n\"Nothing in the desert?\"\n\n\"There is a waste-elf oasis, but they'll have you turning on a spit.\"\n\n\"What are waste-elves?\"\n\n\"Outcasts, mostly. There are more than usual at their oasis. They've just struck some caravan that lost many of its guards in a far-off land\u2014we vultures are great observers of all that goes on beneath our eyes\u2014and they're despoiling the wine and women taken. There would be good eating, if they would ever finish the job and move on.\"\n\n\"Do they ride horses?\"\n\n\"Ride them? They share their tents with them.\"\n\n\"Where away?\"\n\n\"The pit country. A bit east of southeast from here. You would reach it by nightfall, and if you have a dragon's nose, you'll smell the water by afternoon.\"\n\n\"Do you know many more vultures?\"\n\n\"We are a far-flying people.\"\n\n\"Tell them to gather for a feast, above this oasis at dawn tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You speak bravely for something I took to be a meal in a day or two.\"\n\n\"What is the worst that can happen? If the waste-elves get me, they may pick at my hide.\"\n\n\"Young drake, the desert is a changeless place. To be honest, I find it a little boring a'times. I shall call my aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, and relations thrice removed to observe events. Look for us when the sun rises. We will enjoy the show from on high, though the ending may ill-suit you.\"\n\nAuron followed his nose to the sinks. The desert became rockier, and he reached a country of tortured landscape. It was as if long ago boulders had plunged from the sky and into the desert, leaving sheer-sided craters when they punched through the surface. He wondered what mad work of Earth or Water Spirit had created them in the forming of the world.\n\nHe had to restrain himself from rushing forward at the smell of water. He heard songs in high elven voices mixed with the shouts of men\u2014and occasional screams\u2014echoing up from the largest of the craters.\n\nThe sun descended behind him, and Auron did his best to cover the last distance across the desert with the sun directly behind him. If they had guards watching the empty space around the pit country, they would not be watchmen for long if they spent their time staring into the horizon-touching sun. When he could distinguish voice from voice, he stopped and hugged the dirt; nightfall would mask the rest of his approach.\n\nHe saw a hominid\u2014it was too far away to determine if it was man or elf\u2014climb atop a claw-shaped rock and stand, staring out into the desert to the east. Water trickled, its sweet sound tantalizingly near within the pit. Auron crept to the edge of the sink and looked down.\n\nA sea of creepers hung from the rocks. The bottom of the sink was sand and bush, flowing from a notch that gave the oval a teardrop shape. At the widest part of the circular canyon, there was a pool, fed by trickles of water coming out of the vertical rock face. The narrow end had either been shaped or dug into a long fissure inclining up to the surface of the desert, a good six drake-lengths above the canyon floor. It was here, at the only entrance that didn't involve climbing, that the watchelf stood on his promontory.\n\nCaves and shelves filled the sides of the canyon, and the waste-elves had turned these into little homes, each inhabiting one like owls sharing an ancient hollow tree. Ropes and ladders hung from some; others could be reached by stepping rocks in piles or handholds cut into the stone. A corral of stacked stone stood by the pool with a few camels; the horses, as the vulture said, must be in the tents covering the pit floor. A capacious tent: a patchwork of rugs and what looked like sail material from a ship ran from the opening of the incline to the surface halfway across the floor of the canyon. Lamps burned within, and disturbing sounds rushed into the darkness, shouts and screams of women. Auron smelled blood, and he looked over to a blackened pit where a limp form lay pale in the darkness.\n\nCharcoal in little pots and troughs had meat roasting above on skewers. An elf or two, in sandals and loose robes with thorns growing in their hair, wandered from tent to tent, wine bottles dangling in their fingers. Auron saw scimitars and recurved bows scattered in the little caves and shelves. These were warrior elves, and judging from the sounds in the tent, cruel.\n\nAuron made a mind-picture of the pit, and moved away from the edge and crept among the stones, slithering with his belly scraping the cold rocks toward the watchelf. He tasted the air. There was more than one there, though where the others might be the airs did not say. At least he knew where one stood.\n\nHe thanked his star that the waste elves kept no dogs. He needed water, food, and rest... but to do that he needed to drive the waste elves away.\n\nBut how?\n\nAfter a few moments' thought, he slithered forward at a stalk, his body the color of the night sand. He withdrew his claws to climb the watch-rock silently, sticky sii finding grips in the wind-cut limestone. He had to be careful with his iron-sheathed tail, however. He could not climb with it as he was used to, for fear of the metal scraping the rock.\n\nThe waste elf nodded above, seated cross-legged on the rock with his head lolling against his chest. Auron climbed sideways as he neared the top. The elf's ears must have picked up something, but in the second it took his brain to answer the call, Auron's tail lashed up, catching him full in the face with the tiny shield. His tail knocked the elf backwards into his waiting jaws, and the skull gave way with a crunch.\n\nThe splattering rain of blood landing on the stones below woke the others. Auron heard one call a jest about the sentry relieving himself too noisily. The elves spoke Parl. Auron saw two figures below stir in their sand-covered blankets, and he jumped down among them.\n\nThe murders were done in an instant. The elves waited there prepared to blow a warning on brass horns, not to fight a lion's weight of claws, teeth, and tail plunging onto them from a height.\n\nAuron ate a selection of organ meat and lapped at the salty blood, feeling strength from the meal flow into his limbs as fast as the liquid flowed into his stomach. When he finished, he went to work on the bodies, rending flesh and tearing joints until the remains could not be identified as coming from man, horse, or swine by anyone save a scholar of bone fragments. Then he searched the ground for his footprints and obscured them with brushes of his tail.\n\nHe returned to the pit.\n\nThe revels had grown louder with the night progress.\n\nAuron scaled the sink-side, above the water. When he sank into the pool, it was like a pleasant dream brought to life\u2014the water seemed to caress his skin with living tongues. He drank, but not too deeply.\n\nTwo men staggered out of the great tent at the canyon mouth, carrying a body by the wrists and ankles. Long hair wet with blood trailed on the sand as they hauled the burden to the mass grave. They tossed the corpse onto the other without word or ceremony, sending an empty bottle crashing against the rock wall after it. They turned back toward the tent, but one found the effort of corpse-removal too fatiguing, and slid to the floor of the pit in a stupor. The other chuckled something Auron could not make out and moved for the glow shining out from a crack in the tent flaps.\n\nAuron took another welcome tongueful of water and then went to work among the bloody ruins of the elves' victims before settling down for a wait.\n\nOnly one more body came out of the tent after the screaming stopped, but the bearers could not be bothered with dragging it all the way to the other end of the box canyon. They tossed the torn body of the pathetically skinny boy against the canyon wall. One gestured at the other with a bloody pair of tongs, and the other cackled as they staggered back inside.\n\nThe sun came up an hour after the last sounds of bloody revelry died. Auron looked up into the sky and saw the vultures circling. Perhaps six or seven rode the air currents above, with new ones arriving every few minutes. The others came of their own instinct, attracted by the sight of their brethren gathering.\n\nA pair of waste elves came running down the canyon entrance on the other side of the tent, shouting an alarm. Half-awake elves and men rolled to their feet, reaching for weapons.\n\nAuron let them gather under the unsettling sight of the carrion beasts above and hear the tale from the relief.\n\n\"Twas a ghastly sight. Gongglass and Nardi are in pieces. Couldn't tell who was who. They were taken unawares, and the intruders left no tracks anywhere near the fight. Whatever it was tore them apart from the wind.\"\n\nThe elves and men muttered, looking around the canyon walls, then to the vulture-filled sky.\n\n\"Blood, blood on watch rock!\" one said, looking toward the lookout Auron had visited.\n\n\"Where's Tirl? And Sandglitter?\"\n\n\"Dead!\" Auron roared, lifting his head from the pile of bodies. He had festooned himself with guts and tucked severed arms into his crest so they stood up like antlers. \"Your lives were forfeited with the treasure you stole! It bore a curse. All who touched it are the Revengerog's, summoned from the abyss at the breaking of the Hidden Seal.\" From the pit Auron swayed back and forth, surreptitiously letting go his urine in a wide arc. He had been long without water, and it was strong with a bitter acid odor.\n\nThe horses and camels, already nervous with the waste elves' fear in the air, caught the powerful scent in the swirling airs of the canyon. The camels bellowed and the horses screamed and ran, adding to the confusion before the tent. Elves threw themselves from their caves as the crowd dissolved pell-mell through the tent, in a footrace where a roaring blood-drenched demon would take the hindmost. In the rush, the supports were knocked out from the tent, and it came down on men and animal alike.\n\nAuron placed his front legs on the edge of the pit, stretching his neck as far as it would go. A transfixed man stood gaping from under a wide hat, eyes blinking in the dust of fleeing men and animals. Auron would have to kill one more. He dragged the costume of intestinal tresses across the floor of the canyon.\n\nThe man stood, laughing like an imbecile. He bent over, cradling his stomach, sat, and took off his hat to fan himself.\n\nIf he's thinking I'll spare him out of fear of killing a madman, he's in for a surprise, Auron thought. If he really has lost his senses, it's still the kindest thing to do. Then Auron paused\u2014something about the man's circlet, pulling his hair away from his face, caught his eye. The metalwork was of a style he had seen before. And the laugh had a familiar bray to it.\n\n\"Auron,\" Naf said in thick Parl. \"I've not touched the treasure yet, so you have no cause to kill me, 'Revengerog.'\"\n\nAfter Auron washed himself in the pool, he emerged to find Naf extracting a camel, trapped in the fallen tent. The beast was in no mood to be quieted, and Naf beat it into a corner with the flat of his scimitar and tied it securely.\n\nHe returned to Auron covered in bites and spit. \"That camel put up near as good a fight as you did last fall, drake,\" Naf said.\n\n\"I hope that is meant to be a compliment. If it is an insult\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no insult intended. I don't know dragons, but it's sad to learn they have no sense of humor.\"\n\n\"All of a dragon's senses are sharp. Sight, hearing\u2014\"\n\n\"Wrak! That's not what I meant. Men laugh when they encounter the unusual, the ridiculous. The unexpected.\" Naf poked his head into a tent, entered it, and came out again with some sacks over his shoulder and a waterskin made out of something the size of a goat.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Auron said. \"The unexpected means one should be cautious, not laugh.\"\n\n\"How do you explain color to the blind? It's an unexpected ending to a story, perhaps. Here's an example of what I mean. 'Two cannibals are sitting by the fire. One says, \"I hate my wife's brother.\" So the other one says, \"Then try the potatoes.\" ' Do you see?\"\n\nAuron stuck out his tongue and tried to smell the humor. \"No.\"\n\n\"True, it's a poor jest.\"\n\n\"What were you doing with these wretched elves?\"\n\nNaf began to fill the sacks with food. Sides of meat wrapped in paper, flat loaves of bread, a pot of cheese, dried fruit and nuts disappeared into the sacks. \"I didn't know the kind of robbers they were when I joined them. After I split from Hross, I went south to seek a fortune, and word was going around about an attack on the Golden Road. I thought I'd try for the loot, but all they got was a caravan on its way back. We missed the sack.\"\n\n\"I was there. They didn't sack the dwarves.\"\n\n\"I'm happy for the dwarves. They dealt honestly.\"\n\n\"We were attacked by someone with a strange standard. A figure of a man inside a circle.\"\n\nNaf paused. \"The Andam were involved? If I'd\u2014\"\n\n\"Andam?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"It translates into Parl as 'true.' I think they're lieges of some barbarian king. Hross was disgusted with the dwarves and wanted to go north and join them. That's one of the reasons we parted.\"\n\n\"You fear them?\"\n\n\"They have some unusual beliefs. I don't mean unusual in the humorous sense, here.\"\n\n\"They fought well,\" Auron said, remembering the horsemen.\n\n\"Good thing you won. They don't take prisoners. Well, women, they take. One of their practices is that the man who fathers the most children is held in high regard. They don't much care how the babies get started, as long as they do.\"\n\n\"These waste elves were not kind to their captives.\"\n\n\"I had nothing to do with that.\"\n\n\"You did nothing to stop it, either.\"\n\n\"Why should a drake care? You'd eat them, given the chance.\"\n\nAuron snorted. \"If I were hungry, and there was no easier meal, yes. But I wouldn't kill six if one would fill my belly. Nor would I torture them first.\"\n\nNaf nodded. \"Are you hungry now?\"\n\n\"I've had my fill.\"\n\n\"I'll show you something, drake. I'd like to part on better terms than before,\" he said, and went to a small tent. He rolled out a wine barrel, still wrapped in cargo netting. He found a mallet and pounded the edge into the top of the barrel. He lifted out the lid and said something in a foreign tongue. A pair of hands wrapped themselves around his neck, and he pulled out a girl-child. Her skin was stained purple with wine, and she squinted in the sun as she trembled in Naf's arms.\n\n\"Auron, this is Hieba. I've been watching her since we hit the caravan. I hid her from those bastards this past week. You solved my problem of what to do with her.\"\n\nAuron flicked out his tongue. The dark-haired girl smelled of wine. \"You will take her out of the desert?\"\n\n\"No, I'm going to ask you to do that. Some of the elves might work up the courage to come back. They'd certainly follow my trail; I'm not skilled enough to hide it from a waste elf. I've got a chance in ten of getting out of the drylands alive. She has better odds with you.\"\n\n\"Me, look after a human child? I go to the mountains to seek an ancestor.\"\n\n\"NooMoahk?\" Naf said. \"He's long dead. Years, or so I've heard.\"\n\n\"That's been said before, and those who believed it were wrong. They died for their bad guess.\"\n\nThe girl babbled something to Naf, but he showed no more signs of understanding than Auron did.\n\n\"Is she weaned?\" Auron asked. He knew hominid children drank from their mother's breasts\u2014and not much else.\n\n\"She's four or so, and drinking goat milk. I know no more about children than you, save what I remember from being one.\"\n\n\"What are you doing with her?\"\n\n\"I found her hiding under a mule's hind legs when the caravan was taken. I'm not much more than a mule-tender to the waste elves, so I was able to get her into one of the barrels. She's old enough to know to keep quiet, anyway.\"\n\n\"Come with me, then. You can mind the girl, and I'll keep the elves off,\" Auron said.\n\nNaf chuckled. \"The waste elves might not believe in the Curse of the Revengerog if they see our tracks leaving this place together. I've been with them only a few months, but know they hold to grudges like a dwarf with a nugget.\"\n\nNaf set the girl atop Auron's back. She cried, but so quietly, it made Auron feel for her days in hiding, confined in a barrel. Auron turned his neck to look at her, tears cleaning the wine from the sides of her nose.\n\n\"Nula,\" she said.\n\nNaf stroked her hair. \"I got that anyway. It's 'pony' in one of the eastern tongues. She thinks she's going on a pony ride.\"\n\n\"Why do you trust me with her? Why wouldn't I eat her as an afternoon snack?\"\n\n\"Because you're agreeing to take her. There are a lot of legends about dragons among my people. They don't strike the same terror into us as some other nations of the world. They can be dangerous, but they tell the truth.\"\n\n\"Even if that is true, I cannot remember making any such promise. What people are yours?\"\n\n\"We once were counted among the mighty. NooMoakh figures into our sagas, as a matter of fact.\"\n\nAuron's detailed memory supplied a name. \"Together with a king named Tindairuss?\"\n\n\"Yes. Touching that someone else knows our fireside stories.\"\n\nThe girl began to bang her heels into Auron's sides.\n\n\"Walk her around a little. I'm going to load up my camel.\"\n\n\"Put something for her to eat in some bags. Waterskins, too. It'll be days before I get over the mountains. She'll need blankets, as well.\"\n\n\"And you thought you couldn't care for a child.\" Naf chuckled, watching her explore Auron's pebbly skin with little hands. Auron's skin flushed purple at her touch.\n\n\"I'll take her to the other side of the mountains and find some of her kind. NooMoahk can wait a little longer.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Auron.\" Naf rolled dried meat and fruit into a blanket and fixed it so Hieba could sit on it. \"This reminds me of some of the stories of Tindairuss and NooMoahk the Black.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps you are destined to be a king, as well. That silver you wear about your head is a bit like a crown.\"\n\n\"My people couldn't have a king of the old blood even if they wanted one. We're ruled by the Ghioz now, which is better than being raided by the Ironriders. But it's hard to better oneself. The Ghioz keep a man in the station of his birth.\"\n\n\"I wish you luck in bettering yourself, then.\"\n\nAuron watched Naf gather food for the camel whistling tunelessly all the while. Finally he nosed out a chest from under the collapsed tent, opened it, extracted a leather pouch, and hung it around his neck. Auron swung the girl on his tail, letting her feet splash in the pool as he did so. The delighted giggles from the child brought back memories of Mother. In all likelihood, this girl had no parents, too. He felt suddenly protective of her, as if she were a hatchling rather than just a human. He rasped the child across the back of her neck with his tongue, and she shrieked and wriggled then babbled to him.\n\nAuron heard a cough, and looked to see Naf standing there with the loaded camel on a lead. Naf pointed to a pile of supplies he had scavenged. The man winked at him and led his camel out of the canyon while the girl kicked her feet into the water.\n\nWith Naf gone, the circling carrion birds swept into the canyon and alighted near the bodies, transformed from graceful fliers to ungainly, ugly walkers. The girl pointed to them and barked out a word.\n\n\"You can't speak Parl, can you?\" Auron asked the girl. At the rumble of his voice in her ear, the girl ceased playing in the water and started to gabble in her own tongue, though whether it was a language of her own invention or not, Auron could not say. He set her down and swung the end of his tail gently before her. She grabbed on to the point Djer had fashioned, and then dropped it again.\n\n\"Iss,\" she said, definitively. Auron somehow knew she thought it was cold and hard, not like the rest of his skin. How would he know that?\n\nHe forgot the sound of Naf whistling as he walked out of the canyon, forgot the vultures now dropping to the corpses piled in the dead-pit, forgot even the little girl who had dropped to her knees to look at his toes. He concentrated hard and tried to send a mind-picture of her sitting on his back. Nothing came back, but she jerked her head up and looked around. He continued to project the picture. Her face screwed up as she shut her eyes. Auron snorted. If Naf were just here, he would think her face worthy of a laugh.\n\nThe picture faded from his brain, and the girl looked at him, little eyebrows together. She slowly got to her feet and climbed on his back, at the deliberate pace of one who is trying to do something just right. When she was perched atop the central arc in his long spine, she set her hands on her hips, as if to say, \"Now what?\"\n\nWhat was a journey toward the mountains. The little girl found it more comfortable to sit on the saddlebags over his rear legs and lay her head along his spine, the food-filled blanket cushioning her from the knobby ridge of his backbone. Auron looked back at her now and then and decided she was sleeping, perhaps the slight back-and-forth motion of his body as he walked reminded her of the cradles humans kept their children in. He slowed his pace and was careful to choose an easy path. The flat ground was beginning to give way to the first foothills of the reddish mountains. He found a watercourse that looked as if it led to a notch leading to a mountain's shoulder. He could get a decent look-round from there.\n\nIf NooMoahk claimed this part of the waste, he did not patrol it often. Auron smelled no hint of dragon, just more of the little rodents, and hawks above hunting them. The girl explored the contents of his saddlebags and pack, and ate and drank when it suited her, which was often. She went to pains to conceal herself behind a rock when she had to answer other needs, but giggled and hung off his back to watch when Auron paused to do the same. They spent their first night in a little notch at the base of the watercourse wall; Auron wrapped himself like a snake around her.\n\nThe second day she talked less and ate more. They came to the shoulder of the mountain, and from it Auron saw valleys of scattered tall trees, with fernlike leaves sprouting from the top. Auron took her into the valley and found a trickle or two of water, and he set Hieba down to drink and bathe while he looked at the strange trees. They came in two varieties, a short kind with a wide base that narrowed before the fronds sprouted at the top, and a taller kind with a more slender trunk. Both were armored with thick growths of bark that stuck out like a phalanx of dwarves in a circle holding swords to their enemies. Vividly green lizards hunted bugs on the trunk, and Auron moved from tree to tree swallowing them as the girl washed herself. Farther above on the hills, he saw shaggy things that might have been skinny sheep or woolly-haired goats.\n\nHe let the girl walk on the flatter, sandy floor of the valley, and she clung to his tail as he explored.\n\nSome prowling catlike thing on four paws growled at them from behind a rock. It stared at the girl but seemed wary of Auron. When he showed his teeth and extended the fans down from his crest to cover his earholes, it slunk away.\n\nThey exchanged words rather than conversation. Hieba would touch things and announce their names in her tongue, and if it was easier than the word in Parl, he would use that. Otherwise he would teach her the Parl. She imitated some of his growls when he saw the hunting cat, and as an experiment, he tried a word or two of Drakine on her. That she found a terrific game\u2014trying to make the sounds he produced\u2014though she tired of it and went back to her native chattering. She chased some ground-running birds into a tangle of bushes and emerged with a red mouth and fingers. Auron startled for a moment and almost loosed his fire on the bushes, when he realized it was just the remainders of some berries she had found.\n\nThe valley widened, and Auron found the remains of a settlement. Hominids of some sort must have lived in the valley once, but whether they were men, elf, dwarf, or blighter he could not tell from the old walls and roofless shells. They settled down for another night on a tiled floor sprouting red wildflowers from the accumulated dirt and cracks in the masonry.\n\nHieba slept that night with her arms around the drake's neck. Auron had to hide the dwarsaw out of her reach, and his neck ached from staying curved around her the whole night, but for some reason the discomfort seemed worth it.\n\nAuron and Hieba shared explorations, hunts, romps, and adventures that summer. They also shared a patois of their own making: a mixture of Parl, Hieba's tongue, and Drakine.\n\nThe explorations consisted of shallow caves. Auron found a crack or two that wind whistled out of, hinting at caverns beneath the mountains. One cave must have been a refuge at one time; they found hoops of iron that had stood around the remains of wood long since devoured by insects as well as tools and weapons rusted into unrecognizable shapes. They climbed trees to raid birds' nests, first with the girl clinging to Auron's neck and later with him following her. Her clothing began to disintegrate, and Auron was at a loss until he chewed a hole in a length of blanket, which she wore as a poncho. They made it in easy stages to the south face of the mountains, a well-watered expanse that looked out on forested hills as far as the eye could see, dipping into a valley that paralleled the mountains.\n\nHunting was a necessity, of course, but she helped him by acting as a game spotter. Her young eyes were better at picking out motionless game than Auron's, and a number of thick-furred rabbits met their end thanks to her vision. Auron found nothing strange in a child tearing into a rabbit or goat corpse with her fingers, extracting still-warm organ meat and conveying it to blood-smeared maw, though he expected if she were ever reunited with her kind, she would have to be taught to eat differently.\n\nThe romps were even more frequent than the hunts. She ran more than she walked. The child lived at a pace that had only two speeds: full sprint and rest. After an hour or two of running, climbing rocks, trees, and Auron\u2014who approached pony-size in height even though he had long ago passed it in length\u2014she would collapse into a softly snoring heap. She imitated Auron in eating anything she could catch, including beetles, though he kept her away from the badgers, porcupines, and skunks that he had become acquainted with while he ran with Blackhard. But she also found nuts and berries, and would sit in front of a bush and eat until her face was smeared with purple juice. Auron licked her clean, wincing at the horribly sweet taste of the fruit.\n\nShe offered him a mashed mass of pulp and skin, sticky in her hand.\n\n\"Rotten,\" he said.\n\n\"Sweet!\" she insisted. \"Sweet sweet sweet. Berry-sweet!\"\n\nHe took to calling her \"berrysweet,\" because something about the way he pronounced the word made her giggle, and something about her giggle made him prrum with pleasure.\n\nShe wrestled with Auron, and instinctively picked up sticks to poke and clobber him, abuse he would tolerate for a while, and then he would take the weapon in his jaws and break it. Her feet, knees, elbows, and hands became as rough as Auron's skin. Then there were days when she was content to collect stones or flower petals, and nights when she would refuse to sleep and Auron had to follow her close, futilely transmitting mind-pictures of sleeping little girls as she chased fireflies or the mysterious croaks and hoots from the trees.\n\nThere were adventures, too. Another cat followed them for a day or two, perhaps waiting for Hieba to leave Auron's side. Auron left her at a stump gathering termites with a stick, and changed color in a patch of tall grass. The cat made a wary approach, but failed to out-jump Auron's flame. The flaming explosion and colorful fire sent Hieba running for Auron's back, but she soon lost her fear and began to tend to the fire by dropping deadfalls into it. It must have stirred some memory in her, for she stood awhile looking around, as if expecting other people to gather.\n\nThat night she wept beside the fire, and could not be consoled, so Auron left her to her mewling. Though he did not sleep until she did.\n\nThey dodged a group or two of blighters. Auron never chanced following them to find their holds, and he was not about to turn Hieba over to them, so their origins and intent remained a mystery. His father had once told him that the blighters worshipped dragons. Perhaps they had settled the mountain range to be near NooMoahk.\n\nSummer became fall, and Auron led Hieba west along the wetter side of the mountains in easy stages, sometimes waiting for a day or two before traveling again. He had no idea what lay to the east, but he knew humans lived somewhere west. The weather turned rainy, swelling creeks into rivers so at times they had to swim to get across. Or rather Auron swam; Hieba clung to his back like a turtle on a log.\n\nIt was at one of these rivers that they met NooMoahk.\n\nAuron's year-filling quest ended on a rainy afternoon as he prowled a rocky riverside smelling out game trails. Had NooMoahk not shifted his tail, Auron would have taken the black dragon for the remains of an avalanche, so craggy were his scaly, fleshless hindquarters. Auron jumped at the sudden movement, then the startle turned into realization, then the realization into a shuddering thrill that set his capped tail a-quiver.\n\nBut Auron knew better than to sneak up on a dragon from behind. He turned and put his neck around Hieba's shoulders. She had stuck wildflowers in the rents marring her blanket-wrap.\n\n\"Careful-and-quiet,\" Auron said in their patois. \"Danger maybe-maybenot.\"\n\n\"Will-do,\" Hieba said back, sotto voce with eyes round as she looked at the black bulk. NooMoahk's tail worked from right to left to counterbalance the neck and head, which seemed to be rising and falling in a mist of roaring whitewater and rain.\n\nAuron had to pull her away from the sight, so transfixed was she by the fully grown dragon. They circled back downhill and went up the bank of the river moving from tree to tree. A jay shrieked at them, blaming them for everything from the rain to the lack of insects in bird speech; Hieba clamped her lips in frustration.\n\n\"Bad blue-bird,\" she chided. Bigger drops dropped from the branches above, striking them like fairy taphammers.\n\nNooMoahk, the legend, in all likelihood one of the oldest creatures to walk the earth, was fishing. His massive body sat atop a cliff, wings folded against his sides and head swinging at the end of its long neck above a waterfall. He snapped at fish making leaps, or plunged his head into the lake pool the rapids to rise again with water streaming from between clamped teeth. Auron saw something silvery wiggle out from between his lips and fall back into the lake, but others must have remained behind: NooMoahk lifted his nose to the sky and let whatever was in his mouth slide down his pine-trunk-length throat.\n\n\"Big-animal,\" Hieba said. \"Danger maybe?\"\n\n\"Maybe-not, Berrysweet,\" Auron said. \"We go closer.\"\n\nHieba could creep along as quietly as a caterpillar when she wanted to, and she led Auron through the brush at the riverbank, opening branches for him so he would not snap them. Auron hoped he could get in range to use mind-speech; NooMoahk would be more receptive to that. A drake roar from the woods might seem too much like a challenge. And mind-speech wouldn't reveal their location in case he objected to the presence of another of his kind.\n\nNooMoahk's crest was a mass of horn. Auron counted twenty-odd points extending out and away from the thick skull armor, gnarled and corkscrewed like tree roots. But the rest of him had a sunken-in look. Where muscle had bulged on father, NooMoahk had stringy ropes. Father's armor had glittered even in the faint light of cavern moss, but the old black's scales were dull and grew in irregularly where they had not fallen out. His wings drooped from sagging back muscle as though he did not have the strength to hold them to his body. He had a musty smell, even in the rain, like cobwebs thick with dust. But his eyes still burned as if red coals glowed under the horny ridges of his brow. Auron felt weariness and pain, and knew he was within range of the ancient dragon's mind. Father had never taught him anything about speaking to strange dragons, so he just sent the first thing in his mind when he brought his head up to swallow again.\n\n\"Am I in the presence of NooMoahk?\" he thought.\n\nThe dragon did not react. He lowered his head again.\n\n\"NooMoahk?\"\n\nStill nothing.\n\n\"NooMoahk, my name is Auron, a young drake. A gray of the line\u2014\"\n\nNooMoahk's head froze, and he sniffed. \"What am I imagining now?\" Auron heard his mind say.\n\nAuron stepped out from the foliage and onto a riverbank stone. \"No, I am here as a stranger to you,\" he said aloud.\n\nNooMoahk shifted his bulk around, tripping on the expanse of limp wing at his side. He faced Auron as if the drake were a foe. \"I've been challenged for my hold many times, at least long ago, but never by one so young. There's fire in me yet, and you've still got bits of shell on your skin, hatchling.\"\n\n\"You don't understand me. I don't come to challenge you.\"\n\n\"Then you should have better manners than to trespass and disturb me in my meal.\"\n\n\"I... I need your help.\"\n\nNooMoahk's eyes darkened. \"Explain yourself. If this is some trick\u2014\"\n\n\"No trick. I've come from the other side of the Red Mountains to find you. I've been orphaned by assassins and chained by elves. I seek the wisdom of my kind. I know there's much my parents would have taught me had they lived,\" Auron said.\n\n\"If you've come to tell me a tale that ends, 'The world is a hard place,' I know that one already.\"\n\n\"When's the last time you had to defend your hold, sir?\" Auron asked.\n\n\"When you get to be my age, time slips away. Perhaps five hundred years? A dragon flying from the north, he was. The southern dragons have been hunted out long ago.\"\n\n\"That's the problem of our people. We're disappearing, NooMoahk.\"\n\n\"What 'our people' are those? Are you of my lineage? What were your parents' names?\"\n\n\"AuRel, Clutchwinner of AuRye and Epata. My mother's father was EmLar, a gray like me.\"\n\n\"You are a gray, there's no question of that. EmLar, EmLar, I had a grandson named EmFell. I never learned the fate of him. You say you're from the Inland Ocean?\"\n\n\"The mountains east of it, yes,\" Auron said, thinking it best not to say that Mother had never mentioned a grandsire named EmFell. Was that the same as lying?\n\n\"Well, on the chance that you are a distant relative, I'll allow your presence. Temporarily. Perhaps you can make yourself useful.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Auron said, wondering what the last might portend.\n\n\"It'll be good to have someone to talk to. I will admit I've taken in my share of stray hominids just to have someone to talk to, though there've been those that took advantage of my generosity to engage in thievery. Had to eat them\u2014my hospitality extends only so far.\"\n\n\"We wouldn't think of stealing from you, sir.\"\n\n\"We?\"\n\nAuron turned to the woods. \"Hieba, come see,\" he said in their shared language.\n\nThe girl peeped from behind a tree trunk.\n\n\"A drake traveling with a human child? What is she, an offering?\"\n\n\"Not at all, sir. A foundling, like me. She would have died in the desert if I hadn't carried her here.\"\n\n\"Word of advice for you, young drake. Don't mix with hominids. Even the dwarves don't live one-tenth of a dragon span. If they don't betray you to their kind, they grow old and die just when you're getting to understand them. Don't share your hearts with one.\"\n\n\"I'm keeping her until I can find some of her kind. Are there other humans within an easy journey?\"\n\n\"I should think not. What spoils of war I've taken in the past I've turned over to the blighters. Their swords, purchased at no small cost to my hide, keep the other races away.\"\n\n\"It must be a wise policy. I've never heard of a dragon as old as you. They say you go back to the forming of dragons.\"\n\n\"Forming of dragons?\" NooMoahk said, yawning to show yellow-and-brown teeth. \"Ancient I am, but not that ancient. No, when I came out of the egg, the world was much as it is now. Men used flint then, before they learned the smelting secrets of the dwarves. Not so many elf babies were stillborn, and forests of ancient rooted elves sang around every waterfall and mountain lake. The blighter kingdoms of Uldam and Gomrotha ruled the axis of the world; they drove the other hominids like hares before their chariots. I can vouch that the mountains haven't changed, though I've seen ice floes melt from the plains to the north. Forests came to take their place and then left again in the dry dustcloud years. Braaack. Excuse me, I'm not much used to speech, and I've got a belly full of fish.\"\n\nNooMoahk lay his head across his back, tucking his nose behind his flank like a goose sleeping with its head under a wing. Auron backed away and brushed a friendly tongue over Hieba's face.\n\n\"Danger maybe-so?\"\n\n\"No, no, Berrysweet. It rest; we rest.\"\n\n\"It's big as mountain,\" she said, after screwing up her face in thought.\n\n\"Almost old as mountain, too-too.\"\n\nWhen NooMoahk awoke, hours later, Auron found he had to go through the tiresome task of introducing himself and Hieba again.\n\n\"Years ago, it seems, I met a gray with a human child,\" NooMoahk said, suspicion burning in his eyes. \"He didn't have a cut-off tail, I don't think. No idea whatever happened to them. You're saying that was today?\"\n\n\"Yes. It rained, you were fishing.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course. You have an old dragon's apology. Age plays tricks on the mind. What is that on the end of your tail?\"\n\n\"Dwarves made it for me. It's sort of a shield and a weapon.\"\n\n\"You weren't planning to fight me, I hope.\"\n\n\"No. I think you said you'd be happy to let us stay for a time, that you'd be glad of the company,\" Auron said. NooMoahk hadn't said exactly that, but it wasn't a lie.\n\n\"I did? So I did, and I am. Come, come, the main entrance to my hall isn't far. I don't travel more than a few hours from the doorstep anymore. Follow. It looks like it might rain again, and you might as well arrive dry.\"\n\nHe did not travel up the mountainside, but down. They crossed the fishing river by walking across NooMoahk's back as if it were a bridge, and then trailed him down the side of the mountain. Auron saw a road zigzagging its way out of the forest and up the hill. It must have been long abandoned, for giant trees grew through unearthed sheets of paving rock. At each turn a broken tower stood, straddling the road on two legs planted far apart. Only one arch remained; the rest had fallen away long ago.\n\n\"They were pretty,\" NooMoahk explained. \"Flowers used to grow from the tops, they trailed greenstuff down. The earthquake that came before the dustcloud brought them down, and the flowers died in the darkness. It was a blighter road once. Never let the other hominids tell you that the blighters didn't build anything of beauty or wonder.\"\n\nThey climbed under an overhang with the remains of inverted towers hung like teeth from the cavern roof. The ruins of the mountainside city made even NooMoahk seem small, though the buildings that hugged the cavern walls had long since collapsed. Three roads at one time threaded between the buildings and into the mouth of the cave, but only one was still open. The others were dammed by crumbled granite and blood-brown brick piles.\n\n\"This was once Kraglad, a city of Uldam. The Empire's southgate. A wonder of engineering, half-a-thousand years in the making. Files of men in loincloths used to come up the arched road, bearing tribute. Before disaster and war, of course. Don't bother poking your head in the windows, um, ummm-Auron. The blighters have picked it clean as a desert skeleton.\"\n\n\"Were you the disaster?\"\n\n\"No,\" NooMoahk said. \"Though some say I was, it isn't true. I was formidable in my day, but not that mighty. It would take ten dragons or more to do this. I will admit that I drove some squatters out of the halls beneath.\"\n\nHe led them down, and the smashed buildings gave way to a termite nest of caves. NooMoahk sniffed at one of the passages. \"Blighters are down here again, poking around. They won't trouble us, or you, as long as you're with me.\"\n\nIt felt good to be underground again. Quiet underground, forgotten underground. Not full of moving air, water, and light like the Delvings of the Diadem, or some shallow cave with no secrets to it save a hibernating bear. The air tasted like it had been placed there at the forming of the world and not moved since. Echoes of their movements disturbed a bat or two, which kept them company by flapping along NooMoahk's long sides. Best of all was the smell of dragon. Not Father's sharp tang, or Mother's comforting nepenthe, but a dragon smell nonetheless. Hieba gripped his back-ridge with both hands as she rode him.\n\n\"Dark,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, safe dark, Berrysweet. Good with us.\"\n\nNooMoahk snaked his head between his legs and looked at them. \"Careful here, we're going to go down a sink. There's plenty of holds for your sii.\"\n\nAuron squeezed past his elder and poked his head into the sink. There was a glow beneath, like the one in Father's hoard. NooMoahk must have accumulated an enormous trove over his many years. He snapped his jaws shut and listened to the echo. It was a long drop.\n\n\"Arms and legs. Strong now. Hang on,\" he told Hieba.\n\nShe swung herself so she was against his chest, arms around his neck and legs around a foreleg. NooMoahk started down, almost filling the chute. Auron waited until he was sure he wouldn't be swatted off the cavern wall by a careless swipe of the old dragon's tail, and then he climbed down.\n\n\"No like,\" Hieba protested after a minute.\n\nHe shifted himself around so she was right side up. It made the climb slower. Below him, NooMoahk's tail disappeared.\n\nThe chute changed direction after a dragon-length. Auron heard NooMoahk's bulk receding down another passageway, blocking the glow. He followed and Hieba came up and sat on his back again. She began talking to herself; Auron understood enough to know that she was counting things.\n\nThey came to a cavern, wide and low. Stalactite-stalagmites joined to make columns between floor and ceiling, though they had been carved to make grotesque faces, or figures in tortured poses. Hanging upside down from the ceiling or squatting on the floor beneath were carvings of blighters driving or tormenting the other forms. Flat and polished panels had been formed in the middle of some of the vertical tableaux, writing like claw-scorings told tales of the glory of Uldam.\n\nA rattling filled the cavern, like rocks being shaken in an iron drum. It came from NooMoahk. The old dragon lay curled a little above him on a circular dais in the center of the cavern, already asleep. Rather than steps as humans and dwarves used, the surface went up to a platform marked in a series of foothold notches. The dais had curved stonework, tapering like giant dragon claws, projecting up and out from the platform. They must have been carved from the rock of the dais, for they were strong enough to bear the weight of NooMoahk, who slept against them like a snake resting against tree branches.\n\nA crystalline statue, worked with silver, gold, and gems, stood in the center, bathing NooMoahk with cold light. Auron had seen enough artifacts of the hominids to know that it was some kind of artistry, but what it was supposed to depict, he could not say. The crystal leaned out and bulged at the top, cut into thousands upon thousands of facets. There was a faint white glow from within, refracted by the crystal into a blue-white shape that changed and danced as Auron circled the giant gem.\n\nHieba pointed at the crystal. \"Pretty!\" she exclaimed.\n\nAuron swung his head up and down. From some angles, it looked as if a form with two arms and two legs writhed within, limbs disappearing and reappearing as he shifted his gaze. But if he took two more steps, it turned into a starburst of light. Two more steps, and the starburst shattered into a thousand slivers. The heart of the stone never presented the same image twice. He wondered if this was all that remained of NooMoahk's hoard.\n\nHe broke away from the stone and walked around to the edges of the cavern. Hieba protested for a moment, but her eyes turned to take in new sights. There were galleries and filled-in passageways. He saw chests and shelves against one side, a dim glow from the cavern roof revealed iron-bound books and scroll tubes. Another wall looked to be some kind of honeycomb with the cells filled in with masonry. A trickle of water, but just a trickle, fell into a pool at another end. Then there was the end of the cavern where they came in. There must have been battles by the chute, the carven stalactites were broken and the walls blackened from dragonfire. Melted metal had sunk into cracks in the cavern floor and hardened.\n\nHieba jumped off him and rooted in his saddlebags for a blanket. \"Cold,\" she explained, wrapping herself up and hugging his back tight. If they were to have a home in the mountain, Auron decided to make it nearer the entrance, where he could have a fire for her.\n\nGiven space and a permanent home, Hieba turned out to be something of a packrat. Odd shapes, vivid colors, and interesting textures collected in the form of broken bricks, agate stones, and bark accumulated in the room they shared within the ruined city. It was built into the wall of the cave: rock face formed their rear wall, and could be gotten to only by ascending the staggered staircases of the building next to them, then traversing a broken bridge. He placed a sapling trunk across the gap in the span and drew it in after them each night. Auron took a lesson from the dwarves and had his hold reachable only by this circuitous route. If the blighters came prowling, he could meet them at the broken bridge or grab Hieba and climb down the far wall.\n\nThere was a sort of a porch at the front of the room formed by the roof of the larger home below. It was thickly coated with soil, though whether in the old city it meant that the porch served as a garden, or simply that over the long years detritus accumulated, Auron could not tell. He stood there with Hieba and tried to picture the city in its glory with both the cavern roof and floor occupied.\n\nHe worried about the blighters because he stole their offerings to NooMoahk. The elder dragon didn't seem to miss them; he sniffed the empty fountain at the center of the outer city now and then as he passed in and out, not knowing that many of the sacrificial goats and birds ended up in Auron's hideout. When Auron went back to the cavern to speak with the dragon, the subject never came up. But the blighters set about their offerings with ceremonial bells and gongs, and howling responsorials as the animals were slaughtered. After that kind of effort, if the blighters found that the flesh was going into stomachs other than those the demigod had intended, there would probably be trouble.\n\nAuron continually planned to set out westward with Hieba, to get her among her kind, but the circumstances never seemed quite right. There were too many blighters coming and going, or NooMoahk was in the mood to tell stories and hear them in return, or Hieba had lamed herself leaping from a broken wall. Her giggles when he chased her through the ruins, or wide-eyed awe when he lit a pile of tinder by spitting on it, or pony rides seemed a more profitable way to spend his time. And then it was winter, though it was a mild one on this side of the mountains, and Auron looked at it as another reason not to travel.\n\nHieba never tired of \"visits.\" She was losing her baby fat, gaining height, and steadily waxing muscular. She took to climbing down the chute to NooMoahk's cave herself, with Auron beneath, anxious that she would slip. NooMoahk wasn't awake when underground often, but when he was, he was entertaining to listen to. Unless the subject was his own eventual death.\n\n\"Dwarves and blighters burn their dead; humans bury them. Elves turn into treelike growths that live on for thousands of years, gradually going silent. When a dragon dies, his skull adorns some stinking emperor's threshold or a wizard's library,\" NooMoahk said, for the third time in Auron's memory. Hieba swung from the projecting rocks of his platform, amusing herself by hanging from wrists, ankles, or a combination like a monkey in a tree.\n\n\"If it's found,\" Auron said, for NooMoahk's black grumblings made for long silences between him and Hieba when they returned to their attic. \"The blighters don't go anywhere the sun doesn't touch in the cavern. They must think a strong spirit lurks here. Super\u2014superstition may keep grave-robbers away. What do the elves do when the tree version dies?\" Auron said, trying to change the subject.\n\nThis time he succeeded. \"Forest fires take many. The elves then take the ashes and mix them into clay. The elves have a legend that they were formed from a clay pit. Their creator made them through sculpting clay by a riverbank. They then fire and glaze them before they are put in crypts. Good a way as any, I suppose, and if there's anything to their legend, this creator was a master. I've never seen a warty elf.\"\n\nAuron saw an opening to NooMoahk's mind. \"I've seen an ugly elf. Scarred from battle.\"\n\n\"So have I, come to think of it. Though they were honorable scars, from a fight where the odds in number and weight were against her, to hear her tell it. Could she tell stories! And could she sing! Hazeleyes was her name, it seems to me. As full of questions as you are, Auron. Wanted to know everything about dragons.\"\n\n\"Did she learn 'everything'?\"\n\n\"She learned the most important thing. Not to fear us, but to leave us. Dragons don't hunt hominids unless there's nothing else to be had: there's easier prey out there, though blighters breed so fast, we used to eat them like I take fish from the pool. Not many creatures kill for fun; food supplies are too vital to waste in purposeless killing. Blighters do, and they taught the trick to the other two- leggers. Wool-brained barbarians, the lot.\"\n\n\"Why did this Hazeleye\u2014Hazeleyes ask so many questions?\"\n\n\"The hominids fare poorly with mind-pictures. They keep tales by writing and drawing. Haven't you seen writing? Fascinating, I've got tomes full of it.\"\n\n\"Yes. So this Hazeleye was recording dragon stories?\"\n\n\"More than stories. How we are born, when we die. How we choose mates. I talked to her because I miss the days before I grew old. When flying was joy, instead of burning torment. When my friend Tindairuss rode atop my back with bow and javelin, in silver armor trimmed with polished black to match my scales. We used to get on better with the lesser races, Auron. Back then, they took the loss of a few cattle as the price paid for a dragon keeping order in the land and the blighters at bay. With the blighters driven away, as they are now, they've decided they can get along without us. Now we're hunted, hunted as blighters, after all we've done for them.\"\n\n\"Did this elf learn any secrets? Perhaps she was a spy, sent to discover ways to better kill dragons. Probe our weaknesses.\"\n\n\"Weaknesses?\" NooMoahk snorted. \"Bah. I've heard that venting. 'Every worm has a weak spot,' and so on. Auron, dragons are the acme of all the creatures between the Sun and the Moon. Don't let legends tell you otherwise. Dragons are all individuals, some better, some worse, and while every now and then there are those that survive into drakehood or beyond defected, each dragon doesn't necessarily have a failing. Look at you. To some you're one big 'weak spot,' being scaleless, but you seem to do well enough. It's just stories the hominids have come up with to nerve themselves to kill us.\"\n\n\"Then is it our love of precious metals?\"\n\n\"Is what?\"\n\n\"The defect of dragons. What enemies could use against us. The thing that could be our downfall?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about, Auron? I'm tired.\"\n\nAuron felt his fire bladder convulse with frustration. \"I heard you were wise; that you had discovered some weakness in dragons. There are fewer and fewer in the world. Everyone has told me so, from my own parents to a dwarf I've met. I thought perhaps this elf tricked something out of you, and assassins were using it against us.\"\n\nNooMoahk closed his eyes, and for a moment Auron feared he would drop into one of his unexpected naps. Then he opened them again. \"Moon's treachery, Auron, but you're a foolish drake. Each dragon is a little different. Perhaps you just haven't met enough. How could we all share the same failing? As for being tempted and bound by glitter, let me show you my treasure chamber.\"\n\nNooMoahk sighed and heaved himself off his platform. Hieba, who had been lying propped against one of the projections transfixed by the crystal statue, came out of her reverie and jumped down to follow. He walked to the side of the cavern cut into galleries filled with chests and shelves. Auron heard a low humming and felt the air stir. He traced the source to shapes, like little stars, hovering in the formed cavern roof. As they approached, they glowed brighter.\n\n\"What that?\" Hieba asked. She pointed with her eyes at the objects.\n\nNooMoahk either understood her or made a good guess. \"Those belonged to some wizard. She wanted to catalog my treasure, but got greedy and tried to steal some of my claws that had fallen out for some bit of alchemy. She got away, but the hair on the back of her head will never grow right again, I expect.\"\n\nAuron looked at a shelf. No stacked coin or trays of gems lay there, but scrolls. Others held books, cloth wrapped palimpsests, even etched tablets and bronze plates.\n\n\"This is treasure?\"\n\nNooMoahk nosed open a chest holding skins stained with faint ideograms. \"Treasure, as you understand it, Auron, is a dead thing.\"\n\n\"Treasure dead,\" Hieba repeated, in creditable Drakine.\n\n\"Yes, dead. It doesn't know how to make more of itself. This is knowledge. Philosophy. Histories. Poetry. Knowledge is a funny thing, Auron. The more of it that's in your head, the more your head can hold. It breeds on its own. You never know what the next bit of reading is going to do, what it's going to meet up with in your head and mate. You'd be surprised at the offspring a piece of science on trees, say, and the description of the wreckage from a naval battle will have.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"Do you know why wood floats on water, Auron?\"\n\n\"Because... because it's from a tree? Water Spirit made the trees, right? They made it so it would float?\"\n\n\"That could be one reason, and perhaps you'd settle for it. Another could be the air pockets inside the wood; as the wood dries, the places that held sap or water empty and fill with air. If the wood is properly treated by the hominids, it takes a long time for the water to get back in. The air is lighter than the water, so it rises to the top.\"\n\n\"Then why doesn't wood fly up in the air?\"\n\n\"Because the wood is heavier than the air.\"\n\n\"That can't be. A dragon is heavier than air. A bird is heavier than air.\"\n\n\"Auron, I'm tired, I can't explain air currents across a wing creating lift now.\"\n\nHa! thought Auron. Every dragon knows the Air Spirit gave his gift of flight to dragons. NooMoahk is just trying to make something simple difficult.\n\n\"My point is that with knowledge, you don't need treasure. Long before I met Tindairuss, I read anything I could get under my eyes. I collected and guarded these works. Before my mind began to cloud, I had a reputation; sages from across the land mass came to consult. They made me presents of chests of money. Anyone could mine and make money; no money could buy the making of liquid fire, or how to improve fruit crops with a certain kind of insect if the knowledge was lost.\"\n\n\"Do they still come?\"\n\n\"No. My mind isn't what it was, and the lands and traditions of the hominids have changed. There are just a few blighters in these mountains now. The Ruby Crowns to the south have fallen back into savagery; jungle lives in their cities. There's the desert to the north, and the steppe country knows only the lands where they can drive their flocks. Hypat is a shadow of its former self on the Inland Ocean. The hominids put down the pen and took up the sword.\"\n\n\"Would you teach me more?\"\n\nAt first Hieba stayed with him as he studied. NooMoahk introduced him, as a first step, to the runes of the blighters. Hieba would work with him for a brief time, but grew bored and amused herself elsewhere. NooMoahk's chamber had nooks and crevices for her to explore. As long as she did not wander up to the ruined city at the cave mouth, Auron left her to roam. He had examined the cavern, and there were no wells for her to fall into. She stayed within the lighted area shining from the crystal on the dais.\n\nAs the weeks progressed, he moved on to an old dwarf-tongue. It was a simple language of counts and tallies, designed more to record facts than ideas.\n\n\"You have a good memory, Auron, even for a dragon,\" NooMoahk said as Auron sounded out a list of warriors and gear an ancient dwarf lord took on a vengeance raid.\n\n\"Why did you start to read?\"\n\n\"It was not long after I uncased my wings. West of here, near the mountains that mark the end of the Hypatian Empire. I was as hungry for gold as any dragon in those days. I'd thrown in with some men who stole cattle and horses; I'd stampede them down a hill into a dry riverbed or some other rendezvous, and they'd sell them.\n\n\"Their company grew larger, and they decided to try raiding trade caravans the same way. I'd scare off the draft animals, eat a few, and then they'd round up the herd and drive it back to the caravan, then attack it while negotiating. They were always looking at maps of the trade routes and lists of goods, which interested me because it could tell me about a land without me having to fly there and look around. Only later did I find out the information was not always reliable, but that's another story. One of the thieves was better educated, and would read messages being couriered between cities. He showed me the letters, and explained that the messages were a way men talked over distances. At first I thought it was some magic device, where they spoke to the paper and then the paper spoke back to whoever unrolled the message. He said there were such things, but they required great magic only mighty kings could afford. He showed me how it really worked and I found it fascinating. You can't imagine how many different things you can learn reading, Auron. It would take dragon-lifetimes to find it out yourself.\"\n\nNooMoahk's eyes clouded over, as they sometimes did when he was lost in memories of his youth. He wavered for a moment, and Auron thought he would fall asleep. Then he returned to wakefulness, looked at Auron, and growled.\n\n\"What? Insolent youth, come to challenge me?\"\n\n\"It's Auron, NooMoahk.\"\n\nThe dragon rose on his feet, pulling up his lips and extending the armored fans down from his massive crest.\n\n\"Whoever you are, you met your doom when you met me. This is my hold, trespasser! Your smell offends my air, drake.\"\n\nHis gap-toothed jaws opened, and he lunged at Auron. Auron sprang aside, and dragon-dashed between the shelves of books, knowing NooMoahk wouldn't use his fire. He crept through a gap at the end of the aisle and came up between more shelves, looking for a dark spot to hide.\n\n\"NooMoahk, you've been teaching me to read,\" Auron said, clinging to one of the shaped stone columns in the cavern. A blighter with rings in each ear snarled down at him, pointing a trident at the base of the column, formed into the shape of an elf, dwarf, and man, all on their knees.\n\nThe dragon turned towards his voice, sniffing at the lowest shelves.\n\n\"That so? I've got a lesson for you then. A final lesson, you might say.\"\n\nHieba trotted across the cavern, interested in the commotion in the library. Her motion must have caught NooMoahk's eye; he turned his neck to look at her. Auron heard vertebra bones crackle.\n\n\"Augh! Assassin!\" He turned his ponderous form toward her. Auron crept around behind, in horrified agony, ready to dash between his legs and snatch up Hieba. But what if NooMoahk just used his fire?\n\n\"NooMoahk sir, what is wrong?\" she squeaked in Drakine.\n\nThe ancient black paused, and sniffed the air in confusion. \"Blood and thunder... Hieba, little one, what are you doing down here? Where's Auron?\"\n\n\"Here, sir. We were doing some reading, and you had one of your difficulties.\"\n\n\"I did?\" Doubt and fear clouded NooMoahk's eyes for a moment. \"Auron, I'd better rest for a while.\" \"NooMoahk went to his dais, belly and wings dragging. He curled around the crystal and tucked his nose in the crook of his leg. In a moment he rumbled in his sleep.\n\n\"NooMoahk is sick?\" Hieba said.\n\n\"I don't know, Berrysweet. Come up, and we'll go.\"\n\nAnd go they did.\n\nIt was the only choice. Whatever secrets NooMoahk's failing mind and lost library held, they would take time to worm out. He could hardly leave Hieba in the ruined city, with blighters coming and going, and after the scene in the cavern, he didn't dare leave her around the black.\n\nIt was good traveling in the mild climate south of the mountains. Hieba had grown into a wolflike child of energy and appetites. Working together, they were a match for even the wariest stag. She improvised leather clothing from their kills of deer and wild pig\u2014though the badly cured hides reeked even to Auron's nose\u2014and tools of wood, bone, and rock. When a pack of blighters got on their trail, they took refuge on a rocky prominence set in the crotch between two streams, and she hurled fist-size stones and shouted threats down at the blighters crawling up after them. Auron stayed hidden until the two most determined neared the summit. The sight of their burning, twitching corpses cartwheeling back to the base of the hill made the others give up the chase.\n\nThey found a westward-flowing river and followed it along its twisted course. They came across ruins, both of ancient stone construction and more recent wood, before reaching a human settlement set behind a wide earth-and-wood loop. The woodsmoke and man smell reached even across the river. Canoes and fishing floats were pulled up to the riverbank, and timber bundles stood ready to be floated downstream.\n\nThey swam together through the cold water and emerged on the settlement side of the bank. The sound of axes could be heard from the woods, and they could see part of the stockade through the trees. There were stubbled fields lying fallow in the clearings. Near enough. Auron tried to find the right words, but their special shared language wasn't up to the task.\n\n\"Hieba, now you join ones like you. They take care of you.\"\n\nShe looked doubtful. \"Strangers. Not know.\"\n\n\"We talked this through before. You're human. You must grow up with humans.\"\n\n\"No. Me with you.\" Troubled, she'd reverted to childish pidgin, \"Find food, find shelter, me get wood, you make fire. Like same before.\"\n\n\"I go NooMoahk. Maybe danger. Blighters. Not safe for you.\"\n\n\"Me safe with you.\"\n\n\"Safer here, Berrysweet.\" Auron put down his shield-spike, dug the point in the dirt. \"Here, you keep this. A present.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Auron said, turning away. He was unable to look into her face anymore.\n\nShe picked up Djer's tail-cap and followed.\n\nAuron wheeled. \"No. You go. You human. Not good with dragon.\"\n\nShe planted her legs and set the shield between them, gripping it in wiry young muscles. \"I strong. I smart. I come.\"\n\nAuron's tail lashed. He dropped his fans from his crest and growled. \"No. Go.\" His stomach writhed with unhappiness. The last thing he wanted to do was scare her into running, but if he had to...\n\n\"Hieba stay with Auron,\" she said, eyes running with water and her dark tangle of hair streaming in the fresh wind.\n\n\"No!\" Auron roared. Pheasants took to the air, and the sound of axes chopping ceased. Auron snarled. \"You stay. I go.\"\n\nTears flowed down her face, creating streaks through the dirt. She took a step toward him, dropping her weapon and opening her arms to put them around his neck.\n\nAuron spat fire at his feet, creating a wall of flame between them. He looked at her face, distorted by the heat between them, and felt a pain like a knife enter his heart. He saw the forms of men with spears and axes running through the trees. He jumped through the curtain of flame, roaring and snapping.\n\n\"Go! Run from me, Hieba!\"\n\nShe screamed and fled, all brown limbs and hair disappearing through the brush. Toward the men.\n\nThe moldering city echoed even emptier without Hieba's chickadee chatter. Auron had fewer worries on his trip back, but he had grown so used to the child's presence in their months together, he found the void she left impossible to fill.\n\nHe hoped he could replace her by becoming engrossed in the dragon's library. NooMoahk hardly knew he had been gone. The black sniffed at the bighorn sheep Auron bore as an offering and settled down to the meal without question or comment. Auron returned to his studies and NooMoahk's on-again, off-again tutelage.\n\nAuron's tenacious memory made the best of his time and studies. He learned living alphabets and dead tongues, the epic poetry of Gwer and antithetical prose couplets of Doong. The library had many old, well-preserved works. All of NooMoahk's writings hardly had a smudge of dust or a scent of mildew, whatever their age.\n\n\"Something in those wizard lights,\" NooMoahk said. \"They preserve the paper. They don't stop the ink from fading. I have scrolls that are illegible now, but they keep the damp out and the dust off.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know more about how they do these things, my lord. Are there books on magics here?\"\n\nNooMoahk pulled back his lips in disgust. \"Don't dabble in magic, Auron. There's always a price. Spellcasting takes its toll from the wizard, the subject, and the world at large. That desert north of these mountains, the earth died there because of wizardry. When you crossed it, did you see a place where there were pits and holes of different sizes in the earth?\"\n\nAuron remembered the refuge of the waste elves. \"Yes. That had something to do with a wizard?\"\n\n\"Yes, his name was Anklamere. Those craters are from a fire-hail he called down on his enemies. Anklamere's tower stood farther east. He withered a land greater than some nations with his magics. Tidairuss had once counted him an ally, but they grew estranged, and in the end, Anklamere allied himself with that murdering Bloodyhooves fellow. The woman whose head I singed was an assistant of his.\"\n\n\"What ever happened to him?\"\n\n\"Tindairuss slew him like the mad dog he was in the end. I didn't see it myself; I was occupied with Anklamere's gargoyles at the time. But he had once been a great man and a good friend. Tindairuss seemed years older afterwards. He died soon after, in battle. Life hasn't been the same since we parted. I can't see an army on the march without thinking of him, and it pains me like a spear. We were good friends. It was a friendship such as two dragons cannot have, for we worked as a team. With dragons, there can only be mating, if female, or challenge, if male. There was none of that with him.\"\n\nNooMoahk faded into sleep, and Auron unrolled a map, trying to associate some of the names and places the old dragon had mentioned. NooMoahk often spoke of great events, which as far as he knew weren't even legends by this time. Other empires had grown and faded in the interim; the deeds of NooMoahk's prime were forgotten.\n\nNone of which helped him learn the weakness of dragons.\n\nHe learned Elvish. It was a subtle tongue more of rhyme than reason, with the most expansive alphabet of the tongues\u2014to get the sound of the words right. He recited their songs and poetry, but found little of magic, history, or the ordering of the natural world. The dwarves and men were better sources for such matters.\n\nHis studies slowed as the seasons passed, for he was more and more occupied with feeding NooMoahk. The black hardly left the cavern except on summer days, when he would drowse away the hours at the mouth of the cave with his bare patches of skin absorbing the sun. Otherwise he slept. When he was awake, though he no longer treated Auron as a challenger, he sometimes took him as his own kin. Auron received a wealth of mind-pictures of NooMoahk's youth, when the blighters still ruled the heart of the continent. He saw men, dwarves, and elves unite to overthrow the blighters' power, with dragons in the middle. Some ruled blighter kingdoms as feudal lords, others helped the allies, more remained neutral, and a few profited like vultures from the dead strewn across battlefields without count.\n\nSeasons turned to years, and Auron grew. Soon he was carrying back two sheep, or three goats, or the biggest of deer in his mouth. His tail began to regrow. Long blisterlike swellings grew across his back, and NooMoahk, when awake in his lucid moments, sniffed at them approvingly.\n\n\"Your wings are starting to rise. One day they'll pop. The skin on your back will be almost clear, and it'll itch like you've got fire-bugs. I should think you'll be a fine flier, Auron. You're not weighed down with scale.\"\n\n\"That's what Mother said.\"\n\n\"She was right. It'll be time for you to mate, once you can fly. There's no young dragonelles in these mountains, as far as I know. You may have to do some flying before you can sing your song. By the way, I don't think I've heard your lifesong.\"\n\nAuron snorted. \"I've had other things to think about than composing hymns to myself.\"\n\n\"You'll wish you had worked on it when some flash of green catches your eye,\" NooMoahk said. \"Though you may have to do a lot of flying to find one. When I first fledged, I had my choice, but those were different times. I haven't seen a female in... well... long enough so I can't remember when exactly.\"\n\nAuron gave voice to an old worry. \"Even if I do find one\u2014I don't impress. Nothing to shine.\"\n\n\"A good song will cover for your lack of scales, and more. Take some hints from those elven poems. You'll want a song to impress. After your mating flight, she'll expect you to help find a prime spot for your clutch. There's no pride in this world like what you'll feel when you hear your first eggs tapping.\"\n\nAuron thought back to his bitter entry into the world.\n\n\"Funny thing about hatchlings. First being they see, well, it's mother as far as they're concerned. I heard an old story once about a clutch on a mountainside. The parents were killed one way or another, and the hatchlings took to this old turkey-vulture that came to eat the dead male. The turkey-vulture ended up raising three dragons until they were old enough to climb down from the heights.\"\n\n\"Really, my lord?\" Auron said.\n\n\"There were a couple of other occurrences, but I can't think of them now. That elf Hazeleyes might have some notes in her papers. There's a leather folio with some of her scribblings on the shelves somewhere. She was very interested in the subject.\"\n\n\"Hazeleye?\" Auron didn't want to press the matter. NooMoahk's mind worked best when left to wander at its own pace. Auron had learned that too many questions could confuse him out of his recollective mood.\n\n\"Yes, a scarred-up she-elf. My last visitor before you.\"\n\nAuron felt a thrill flutter up his spine between his still-cased wings.\n\n\"Maybe some of the stories are in her notes. Could I see them?\"\n\n\"You'll get a chance to practice your Elvish. She made herself a little table here somewhere. Her notes might still be around. I made her write down some of her sea-chants for me.\"\n\nThe table had been upended in one of NooMoahk's addled rampages through his library. Auron righted it, and found papers and scrolls folded in a leather blotter. Hazeleye had evidently run short of writing material and used other scrolls for her note-taking, writing between lines and in margins. She used ink, charcoal, and even blood in a hand that varied from spidery to minuscule. Auron concentrated and tried to follow her thoughts crammed in between the more flowing script of the author.\n\nNOOMOAHK KNOWS... TONGUES... ELVISH IN\n\nTHREE DIALECTS, THE TRADE SPEECH OF DWARVES, BLIGHTER... APPARENTLY EVEN THE MOST SCATTER-\n\nBRAINED SPARROW HAS... MEN DEVELOPED PARL, FAST BECOMING A TONGUE COMMON BETWEEN THE TOOL\n\nMAKING RACES. THIS INTEREST OF THE DRAGON IS UN-\n\nCOMMON, BUT HARDLY RARE. LITERATE DRAGONS COME DOWN TO US IN LEGENDS OUT OF THE EAST...\n\nIt was heavy going.\n\nIt took months and innumerable trips back and forth to the crystal at the altar-dais where the light was better, but he fought his way through her notes, first organizing them and then reading them as NooMoahk dozed. It was obvious that she was putting together a book on dragons, everything from their birth, maturation, mating, and aging. Much of it made little sense to Auron; she spent a good deal of time disproving beliefs of the hominids that had sprung up around dragons. At times he couldn't determine what she was trying to disprove, though some she outlined. He thumped his tail in amusement when she spent pages describing the fire bladder. Hominids thought dragons were like the earth, with a mysterious center of fire that they brought forth like a volcano erupting in limitless quantities. Even with her conversations with NooMoahk, she got a few things wrong. Her descriptions of mind-pictures made it seem like a mental conversation between dragons, rather than the sharing of pure experience from one dragon's memory to another.\n\nShe filled any number of pages with stories of dragons out of the egg attaching themselves to their mother and the few cases, some of which she considered apocryphal, of hatchlings \"fixing\" to other species because their mothers were not present when they hatched. She supposed with time dragons could be domesticated like any other species the hominids chose to husband. Auron ground his teeth and felt his fire bladder pulse at that thought: Imagine dragons raised like chickens. Of course, the fault in her theory, to Auron, was the acquisition of the first generation of eggs. He wouldn't care to be the elf, dwarf, or man who tried to wrest a clutch away from a mated pair.\n\nHe surreptitiously studied sorcery, but found the endless formulae, recitations, hand movements, and minutiae of magic dreary. He preferred the tales told by the scrolls of civilizations, where he learned that combing a list of their rulers' edicts revealed more than histories, though they made for interesting reading, as well: stories of brooding tyrants and fiery revolutionaries, statesmen who plotted behind the scenes and women who intervened behind the bed-curtains.\n\nYears waxed and waned. The blighters quit leaving offerings of food. NooMoahk's appetite had diminished, but Auron's increased. He was growing, and no matter how much he ate of a kill, he was hungry before the sun made a quarter of its journey across the sky. He remembered his father's advice about overhunting his territory and made sweeps through the forests of the south lasting for weeks. He was grateful for the mild winters on the south side of the mountains: there was always game to be had. He never had to resort to eating blighters. The blighters had built a few mud-and-wood communities in the foothills, surrounding them with palisades of sharpened tree trunks Auron didn't care to challenge, for spears were plunged into the soil before every hut.\n\nThe change happened on one of his long hunting trips out, eleven winters after saying good-bye to Hieba. He was resting high on the vine-laden head of an elephant statue dominating a forest ruin, watching the grassy square before the statue. A seep of water still came up through a shattered fountain, pooling among the broken paving-stones. He had found fresh deer droppings in the grass, and decided to wait for the herbivores to reemerge. If he was quick, he might get two before the others bounded off into the forest.\n\nAn annoying itch across the stretched skin of his wing cases drove him to distraction. He was trying to remain motionless, a mottled green-and-gray atop the elephant god, fighting a battle against the urge to scratch himself against the cracks in the stone statue.\n\nAntlers emerged from the forest gloom; a black nose sniffed the air of the ruined city-square. A buck stepped forward to stand as still as the elephant god while he took in the land with deep brown eyes.\n\nAuron tensed.\n\nThe buck crossed toward the fountain, taking three steps, then standing. Three steps, then standing. His harem followed him out of the forest, immature males to either side, heads swiveling at every birdcall.\n\nAuron shifted his rear legs, ready to leap down among them with claws splayed. He gathered himself for a spring.\n\nA burning sensation shot up his back, followed by an all-consuming itch. He fought a brief battle against raking need. Though he was hungry, he lost his concentration and gave in to instinct, rolling on his side. He found a crack atop the statue and drove his back across it in pained ecstasy.\n\nThe deer sprang for the woods, but he hardly noticed. He pushed his burning back across the statue, making for a jagged ear. He felt his grip go, and he was falling through the air, vexed not at the plunge down the side of the statue but at the loss of his scratching surface. He pivoted his long torso and landed with a thud that sent dead leaves flying and mud splattering against the pinkish stone. Auron took a pained breath and backed against the statue, sawing his spine against it. He felt something burst and wet his back. The relief was indescribable. He writhed and sawed the other side of his back against the edge of the statue, with a like result. The side of the statue was coated with blood, pus, and a clear liquid. Auron reversed his neck and looked at his back; his skin hung in shreds on either side of his spine. Knobby projections stood just behind his forelimbs.\n\nAuron went to work with his teeth, rending flesh and working the hole in his skin wider. The clear liquid was hot and bitter on his tongue. He chewed a long furrow down his left side, then his right, along a bony limb working itself out of the wounds.\n\nA bloody wing unfolded, without Auron willing it. It had two joints beyond where it joined his shoulder, one midway along its length and the second near the tip. It rather reminded him of the wings from the bats in his parents' cave: the skin stretching from his back to the pointed tip had the same leathery, veined look. He lifted it above his head. The skin was thin enough for him to see the sun through it. But there was another to free. Auron savaged the other side until his right wing unfolded. He began to lick his wings clean, despising and at the same time greedy for the taste of the slimy fluid still clinging to the membrane surface. With that done, he returned to the top of the elephant in a quick climb. He wanted wind on his wings to dry them.\n\nHe extended them to the sky, feeling newly freed muscles work along his back. He turned himself so the sun shone better on the glistening wings. The gaping wounds at the base of his fleshy fans hardened\u2014the sunshine or the air turned the liquid into a clear extrusion. Pain throbbed along his back, but the relief from the nagging pressure and itch compensated for it.\n\nHe flapped his wings experimentally. They made a creaking sound as unused joints aligned themselves. He extended his span as far as he could. Judging from the shadows they cast atop the elephant, his wings were as wide as he was long, though the shadow of his frame seemed tiny compared with the expanse of wing.\n\nIt occurred to him that he had seen a dragon fly only once, and that was Father rising in battle from the cave. He flapped again, more vigorously, his wings curving as they went up and down like a skilled oarsman rowing. As dead vegetation flew from the vines, his front feet rose from the surface.\n\nAmazing.\n\nHe jumped for the ground with wings extended. It turned into a flight across the old deer-tracked square. He had to tip his wings and swoop in a circle to avoid plunging into the trees, just catching a branch with his tail-tip. He dodged under vines hanging from tree limbs, then found himself slewing to the right. He crashed among the branches, some instinct folding his wings before he struck the ground. He shook his frame clean of mud, vine, and leaf and returned to the square. Mind-pictures of flights handed down from his parents and NooMoahk told his body what to do. He flapped hard and rose.\n\nAuRon felt a strange duality\u2014the part of him that was flying was separate from the part of him that was observing the flight, like a dream where he watched himself. Both halves shared one emotion: exhilaration. The freedom from earth, from shadows, from gravity made anything possible. He felt like one of the Great Spirits of Creation, a lord apart from and above the world.\n\nHe was breathing hard, but there was none of the agony of an extended sprint. Unlike running, his body was created for this, from the thick tree-root muscles across his back to the narrow, cablelike sinews of his outer wing. An updraft rose from a depression in the forest set against a cliff, and Auron experimented with it. The trees beneath shrank and foreshortened, and he was among the clouds.\n\nWhen he tired, he found he could float on the updraft, circling with the least of adjustments at the tips of his wings. Such felicity! Even NooMoahk hadn't passed mind-pictures of this; the armored dragons were too heavy for these drifting pleasures.\n\nThe sun began its descent, and so did he. His new muscles had tired, and he drifted down, down to the elephant's head again. He landed, striking first with his tail to absorb the impact and slow him, then folded his wings with some awkwardness. His newly used muscles were sore, dreadfully sore. The wounds on his back had opened again in the flight, and he licked the blood oozing from the cracks in the translucent scab material. He knew he was hungry, but fatigue overcame him, and he slept even before it was fully dark.\n\nHe awoke to a burning ache across his back. Monkeys hooted from the trees, and another group of baboons stalked through the ruined square, hunting some kind of nocturnal creatures. Auron's mouth wetted, and he jumped down among them, gobbling three young ones whole in quick succession before chasing another shrieker up a tree to bite it in half. His appetite somewhat assuaged after finishing the two pieces, he drank from the fountain pool and opened his wings again. The effort made him wince. He hadn't been this tired in years, perhaps since his battle with the Ironriders. He wandered in memory for a moment before curling up to sleep, back pressed against the cool stone of the elephant statue.\n\nHe flew again briefly the next day, just long enough to find some wide-horned cattle in a muddy swamp. Without thinking, he folded his wings and dived. The beast did not even know what landed on it; it was dead in an instant. The rest fled splashing as he settled in on his kill.\n\nAfter dining on liver, heart, and kidneys, AuRon left the carcass to the gars and the crocodiles, and climbed a water-oak with a quarter of the kill. He'd hang it overnight\u2014it would make a fine breakfast.\n\nHe was a dragon now, if far from fully grown. Mother would have been thrilled, Father proud. In another decade or so, he'd reach true dragon size and sometime after that reach his adult weight. There were decisions to make. NooMoahk, though he spent most of his time napping, was a consideration. The old dragon could no longer take care of himself. If AuRon left him on his own, he'd either quietly starve in his cave or wander into the woods, with every chance of never seeing his hold again.\n\nAuRon watched a green-brown crocodile swallow the leavings from his kill in gulps as a white bird stood on its back. The twig-legged bird stabbed the croc behind a rear leg, and came up with a glistening leech. AuRon's position was similar: NooMoahk couldn't hunt any more than that crocodile could get a leech off its hindquarters, but if the bird wasn't careful, the crocodile would make a meal of it. Like the bird, AuRon got something out of the relationship, too. In the years with NooMoahk he had gained some perspective on dragons and their place in the world.\n\nIf dragons had once ruled the world, they did a poor job of leaving any record of it. Everything the hominids knew of dragons came down through myth and wives' tales. Sometime, several lives of even ancient dragons like NooMoahk ago, the dragons had taken the three races under their wing, so to speak. They protected them against the dominant hominid of the time, the blighters, and were fed and obeyed for a time. But as the blighter menace faded, dragons were seen as a burden rather than a blessing. The races, each in their way, rebelled or escaped the authority of dragons, and the hunting began. There were exceptions, like the alliance between NooMoahk and Tindairuss. But there was no doubt in AuRon's mind that the hominids were waxing and the dragons waning.\n\nAuRon had three choices, none attractive. He could live in a remote place, like NooMoahk, and trust to distance and terrain to shield him from assassins. The mountains were far enough from the paths of the hominids for the blighters to exist, after a fashion, so he imagined he could as well. The blighters might even be convinced to follow him, as they once did NooMoahk.\n\nThere was an attraction to that choice. After all, why should he care what happened beyond his lifespan? He could mate and live out his existence, perhaps better but certainly no worse than most dragons. But if he could find a mate, could he be sure of that isolation in twenty winters, or forty? The hominids knew the mountains existed, and eventually they would come. And there was the problem of a hoard for mate and brood. NooMoahk's falling scales were a testament to the lack of precious metals in the area.\n\nThe second choice was to join with the hominids, to serve rather than rule. The dwarves spoke of using him as a courier. He and Djer were friends; for a time he knew he could have safety, food, and shelter. But if he took a mate, would the dwarves expect his mate and hatchlings to serve them someday? He imagined so. The dwarves had any number of shining qualities, but they gave nothing away.\n\nThe third option was so remote, it hardly seemed a possibility. He could find some like-minded young dragons, convince them of their predicament, and get them to act together on a solution. Dragons were an independent species, jealous of everything from mates to hunting ground, and the very idea was like a gourd with no stem. AuRon couldn't see how he could get inside without smashing it. Male dragons wouldn't listen to him without a fight, a chancy business, and females, if Mother and his sisters provided any guide, were too concerned with mating and hatchlings to see beyond their immediate horizon.\n\nAuRon watched the sun settle in the western mists rising from the river's swamped banks. The dilemma was a hard bone to swallow. Perhaps he would wait for one of NooMoahk's more lucid moments and talk it over with him.\n\nHe glided into the cavern bearing another chunk of water buffalo in his rear claws. Flying with the beast's dead weight was a challenge, and his claws got caught in the meal, causing him to make an inelegant landing on his front legs and chin. He could almost hear Wistala's braying laughter as he picked himself up.\n\nHe heard something\u2014a dragon's shriek.\n\nAuRon forgot the buffalo and raced to the sink in a series of hops, half-dash and half-flight. He jumped for the lower entrance; the cave wasn't wide enough for him to use his wings. A rope ladder caught on his left front elbow, and he bit himself free in a frustrated snap of his jaws.\n\nSomething wide-eyed turned and fled from before him, running on all fours like an ape. Blighters!\n\nAuRon folded his wings in tight and dashed through the cave. The sentry, if that was what it was, was faster than it was watchful. It wasn't until they reached NooMoahk's lair that AuRon could catch up to it with a leap. It died shrieking under his claws, but AuRon hardly noticed.\n\nAn assassination unfolded before his slit-pupiled eyes.\n\nArmored blighters hurling spears had NooMoahk surrounded on the dais, coiled about the crystal statue. Dragonfire lit the room in an infernal glow of orange and black shadow; the flame's oily smell mixed with the coppery odor of blood. Pairs and trios of blighters sheltered behind columns, with larger ones shouting orders and gesturing with swords. They placed spears into some kind of throwing stick, then jumped out from behind the rock to hurl their missiles into NooMoahk's sides. So many spears hung from wounds in his sides that he looked like a blood-soaked porcupine.\n\nThe blood scent, the screams of battle, and the spade-in-dirt sounds of throwing spears striking NooMoahk's flesh awakened something in Auron. He braced his legs wide and half-opened his wings and bellowed a challenge that brought pebbles down from cracks in the ceiling. The blighters froze at the sight of AuRon: tall as a warhorse but much longer, opening his wings like a standard unfurling.\n\n\"You vermin! You dare trespass in a dragon's hall?\" he bellowed in his father's voice.\n\nNooMoahk rolled off his refuge, snapping spear shafts to lie, belly up, in the blood pooled on the floor.\n\nA blighter shouted something back, and spears arced toward AuRon. He jumped to the right in a flash, and one spear punched a hole in his wing before clattering to the floor with its fellows. The blighters took up hand axes and stabbing spears, and they followed their hulking leaders in a ragged line to surround AuRon as they had NooMoahk. They were more numerous than AuRon had thought at first, and others popped out from behind pillars and appeared from beyond the flame-light. He couldn't deal with a sixth of them with his flame, they would close and kill him like a deer surrounded by wolves.\n\nAuRon turned around, whipping his tail low along the ground. A few blighters were quick enough to hop it, but the others went over like the wooden pins in the dwarves' game of tendown. AuRon ran for the exit and felt a thrown ax dig into his flank.\n\nA little lamely, he jumped over the corpse of the sentry-blighter and dashed down the tunnel, wings folded again and tail waving behind to keep his pursuers off his haunches. The closer space of the tunnel amplified their triumphant shouts and hunting cries.\n\nAt the widening of the down-shaft, AuRon reared up and grasped the jagged stone of the tunnel roof first in his fore sii, then his rear ones. He hung upside down, like a clinging lizard hunting insects. The blighters pointed with their stabbing-spears and gabbled. AuRon was just out of their weapons' reach.\n\nBut they were within his.\n\nHe stiffened his neck and vomited up his fire bladder's contents. Gravity and his muscles sent the liquid flame over the heads of the foremost blighters. The ones in the rear tried to spread out, but the tunnel confined them under the deadly shower. AuRon worked the flame forward, squeezing every ounce of his fire bladder. The remaining mass of blighters ran forward, pushing those in front of them, their desperate cries filling the tunnel with animalistic screams. The crowd dropped their weapons as they shoved and shouted\u2014 \u2014right over the edge of the tunnel and into the deep shaft. The packed river of panicked blighters plummeted over the edge en masse, too fearful of the pursuing flames to look forward until it was too late. They were shoved to their doom by those behind. The last few realized their mistake and jumped for the rope ladders, only to be batted off by AuRon's tail to plunge into darkness with their comrades.\n\nWhen the echo of the last cry faded, AuRon climbed down from his refuge and waited for the flames to die down. He crossed the pool of fire, fed by burning bodies, by crawling the wall and crept back to NooMoahk's chamber. The battle blazes there had gone out, and only the familiar crystalline glow lit the chamber. AuRon heard a wheezy breathing and knew NooMoahk still lived.\n\n\"NooMoahk?\" he called into the darkness.\n\nA red eye opened, joined by a second, and AuRon heard the bulk of the ancient dragon rise. \"Never,\" NooMoahk grated.\n\n\"NooMoahk, it's AuRon. The blighters are gone.\"\n\n\"You'll never have it. This is my hold. Trespasser!\" NooMoahk roared, coming forward, sagging griff extended. His wounds still leaked a little blood, but the spears, save for a few snapped-off heads, were out of the unarmored spots on his hide.\n\nAuRon read murder in the red coals burning in NooMoahk's long face. He stepped back, lowering his head and hugging the ground. The pose failed to mollify the dragon, who came forward in a rush.\n\nAuRon turned and ran, not as a feint this time, but in earnest.\n\nNooMoahk pursued, shouting threats: \"My hold, my city, my mountains! I'll throw your bones to the cave rats, you jackal.\"\n\nAuRon climbed up the shaft in a flash, and scrambled for the cave mouth. NooMoahk, more animated that Auron had seen him in years, stayed a few lengths behind, driven on by fury born of instinct.\n\nWhen he had enough sky above, Auron launched himself into the air. NooMoahk was long past flying, and in a day or so, when he had a chance to get the heat of battle out of his blood...\n\nHe heard a rustle and a flap behind him. NooMoahk flew! His gaunt, almost scaleless frame gained the air. With his second line of defense shattered, Auron flew between the remains of the upside-down towers at the giant cavern's mouth and went higher.\n\nNooMoahk made a chase of it, following AuRon north and into the sky. On the other side of the mountains, the dun desert stretched below. Auron fled into what NooMoahk would not consider to be hunting territory. Whatever madness drove the tons of mind and muscle behind him, it would perhaps be content with chasing him into a wasteland.\n\nA few hours' flight convinced him otherwise.\n\nPerhaps if AuRon were more used to flying, he could have out-flown the old dragon, but AuRon's new muscles barely kept him ahead of NooMoahk's old ones, after the first burst of the chase shrank the black into a dot as large as a claw. NooMoahk gained steadily after that. AuRon was forced by fatigue to glide more and more frequently to rest his wing muscles. The addled NooMoahk was too old a hunter to give up the chase without a kill at the end of it.\n\nEven darkness, when it came, was not enough; a bright moon lit the dry sky enough for AuRon to see their pair of shadows two score of dragon-lengths below. NooMoahk was even with him, diving for him with jaws agape. Again and again, through a desperate use of his wings, Auron rose in the sky when NooMoahk plunged for him. His body was a long rope of agony, his wings a rack of flame. He did not dare fight NooMoahk on the ground, where the elder dragon's weight and remaining scales would make the difference, so flight was his only option. But it didn't have to be a directionless flight\u2014 Below AuRon saw the edge of the desert, a familiar hill or two, one with a mound over the monument well where he had said good-bye to Djer and the Diadem. AuRon steepened his glide and then circled up to bite at his pursuer. He caught a mouthful of tail before folding his wings to dive like a hunting hawk.\n\nNooMoahk roared his outrage and followed. AuRon saw the earth hurtle up to meet him, and in the moonlight made for the tomb of Tindairuss. The black dragon dropped from the sky, perhaps looking to crush the offending fly under him even as he crashed to earth. The wind whistled in AuRon's ears as he fell more than flew. When the rustless metal became clear in the color-draining moonlight, he opened his wings again\u2014 Not enough. He hit the side of the pole-projection at the top of the tomb with a resounding thump and felt something in his shoulder give way. He grabbed the narrow column, thinner than a young palm, in his rear claws and looked up to see NooMoahk almost atop him, opening his wings to aim rather than stop his plunge.\n\nAuRon leaped from the pole at the last moment. He landed atop the mausoleum at the same moment NooMoahk crashed down; the impact ran through the iron structure like a thunder from the Air Spirit. NooMoahk pivoted to bring his jaws into play, griff clattering against ancient multihorned crest, but he was pinioned. The sharp pole atop the center of the monument ran right through him, a gory needle sticking up from his back. The dragon drew a rattling breath and collapsed.\n\nNooMoahk's breathing became short and labored, and AuRon could feel his slowing heartbeat through the iron. NooMoahk rolled his head back and forth and scraped ineffectually at the top of the monument with his claws, the fire in his eyes finally smothered. AuRon approached, knocking aside scales that had fallen off the dragon's body when he hit.\n\n\"AuRon, you've got your wings at last. You're a dragon now,\" NooMoahk said. Blood stained his teeth black in the moonlight.\n\n\"Yes. Do you know where you are?\"\n\n\"The cave? No, we're outside. What is this place?\"\n\n\"You had a lapse. You chased me. We flew, and you hurt yourself landing.\"\n\n\"I flew? I flew? I thought I was past it,\" NooMoahk said, trying to right himself, then falling back with a groan. The black's mouth turned up at the corners in an oddly human expression: he was smiling. \"I'll never fly again. No pain, but I feel a chill. Are we on metal?\"\n\n\"It's like iron. This is the monument the men raised to Tindairuss. He is buried here.\"\n\nNooMoahk sniffed at the blood trickling on the metallic surface, keeping in well-rounded pools. \"Is that the truth? Or something to comfort a dying dragon?\"\n\n\"Can you move your neck? Look at the words on the side. You know the script.\"\n\nNooMoahk dragged his head across the surface, and with his long neck examined the characters AuRon pointed to with his tail. \"I never knew this place existed, or I would have visited it before.\" He was silent for a moment, and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. \"AuRon, you'll see to it. Rest me in the same earth he does. Don't let some wizard grind my bones.\" The eyes shut again. NooMoahk took a last deep breath.\n\n\"Yes, my lord. I'll see it done.\"\n\n\"Tindairuss, old friend, I come,\" NooMoahk wheezed. \"We'll fly to\u2014\"\n\nThe ancient head, crest crowned with its spread of horns as numerous as a jellyfish's strands, dropped. AuRon could not hear a heartbeat.\n\n\"Beware, Great Spirits, for a dragon has returned to hunt your realms,\" AuRon quoted, without knowing the origin of the words. They just came to him. His body felt heavy, and his legs buckled.\n\nSomething wetted his eyes, something that even closing and opening his water-lids didn't remove. AuRon flicked his tongue out, curious for the taste. Salt."
            },
            {
                "title": "Dragon",
                "text": "\u2002STRENGTH WITHOUT VISION IS TYRANNY.\n\n\u2002VISION WITHOUT STRENGTH, DREAMFUL IMPOTENCE.\n\n\u2002BREED THEM, AND THE WORLD IS YOURS.\n\n\u2014Wrimere the Wyrmmaster, Wizard of the Isle of Ice\n\nThe young dragon AuRon flew south after seeing to the burial of his mentor. It was no small job. He wished to do his duty to the ancient dragon, so after some thought, he started work. AuRon's foua made a pyre of the dead dragon, and with the weight burned off, he placed the bones into a circular burial trench dug into the grassy ground of the hill. NooMoakh's bones lay in a ring around the tomb of Tindairuss, the last buried tailbone dropped just a claw's length from the nose. AuRon's sii claws were dull and tender from days of moving earth, digging until his own blood mixed with the loam around the well.\n\nAt last he was resolved. The physical labor cleared his mind; he knew his path. NooMoahk's hold would be his and his alone. He would live a solitary existence among the aging manuscripts, losing himself in dead tongues of even deader sages. AuRon knew now the dull ache of loneliness was trivial compared with the pain of saying good-bye to friends through death and distance. His family, Blackhard, Djer, Hieba, and NooMoahk had passed into and out of his life, each one leaving a bigger hole than the one they filled. It was better never to have others in one's life than to lose them.\n\nThere would be the blighters to deal with, of course. He would live apart, above them in the manner of earlier days: a remote liege lord they could turn to in trouble, as long as they did not hunt in his forests or fish in his streams. Their interactions would prevent attachments that might hurt when the hominids ended their brief, furious lives.\n\nIt was a bitter lesson. He realized now there were more ways to be left vulnerable than being born without scales.\n\nDragons were meant to fly, to hunt, to live alone and free. Flying was the purest freedom he had ever known. Riding the sky went to his head like wine, but left him exhilarated rather than a throbbing head. It reduced distances and obstacles to nothing more than vistas beneath him, made hunting a trifle, and gave him a new world to explore\u2014a world of cloud-heads rolling beneath him like ocean waves and wisps above as light as a goose's feather borne by currents and tides invisible. With each beat of his wings on his trip back across the desert, he felt more a lord of the lands under his eyes beneath: a Power above ground dwellers and beyond their comprehension. He was a dragon, a terrible prince of cave, water, and sky who would rule through wit backed by tooth and flame.\n\nHe made the journey back to the mountains in two flights, resting in the desert a day, letting the summer sun bake his skin clean. With the growth spurt that preceded uncasing his wings over, his appetite was reduced; the trip brought only a pleasant hunger and thirst rather than an all-consuming appetite that drove every other thought from his mind. Instead of searching out game, he watched the heights slide up from the south until he was among the peaks, fighting the headwinds coursing through the peaks.\n\nNow to find the blighters.\n\nThe huts clustered on the hillside like a ring of warts. Just inside a wooden palisade stood a line of stone-bottomed, rounded thatch-topped huts, most with wisps of smoke coming from a soot-rimmed central orifice. A more imposing hut, roofed with tusks of something that might have been elephants, stood at one end of the empty space in the village center: a common ground of charcoal pits and clay-colored grain dumps. A V of head-poles\u2014AuRon dredged from memory the word for the blighter's spikes, stood before the village. The lines extended out from the gate down the slope, groups of three empty bleached skulls mounted to stare out at visitors to the village.\n\nAuRon wheeled and swooped over the huts, getting a better look.\n\nBlighters took up their pointing children as AuRon circled their settlement. Livestock, mostly goats and cattle, bleated or bellowed alarm. A few blighters took up spear and bow, or held up shields against the threat from the sky.\n\nAuRon spread his wings wide and drifted over the village in silence, riding the wind. With a dip of his wings and a swoop of his neck and tail, he turned. \"I come to parley. You're in no danger,\" he called. \"Bring forth your elders!\"\n\nHe alighted in the center of the village, reared up, and rested on his hind legs so he towered over the blighters. AuRon was nothing like the size of NooMoahk, but in length he had already exceeded the greatest snakes of the jungles south. He got light-headed and saw spots if he sat like this for too long, but he held the pose until two blighters of commanding girth emerged from the royal hut.\n\n\"What hospitality can we offer, who speaks our tongue of old and knows our ways, young dragon?\" one called, resting on a curved cane of some gnarled wood that tapered like a tooth.\n\n\"I ask nothing yet. Where is your third elder?\"\n\n\"Dokla is not as old as I or as Keerh. He leads a game drive south of here.\"\n\nAuRon's knowledge of blighter ways gave out at this impasse, so he simply asked, \"Will you speak for him?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then bring your people out. I wish them to hear us, and to see while we talk.\" AuRon's mouth was growing sore from forming blighter words.\n\nThe blighter who had not yet spoken put a steer-horn to his mouth and made a rattling, whistling call through it. Other blighters led their wives and children from the huts, holding weapons but walking with the points trailing in the dirt to show that no threat was intended.\n\nThe elder's wives unrolled wooden mats on the ground, and the blighter chieftains sat cross-legged, facing AuRon.\n\n\"I am called Bund-kleh'Tran. Visitor, speak your name and your wants.\"\n\n\"I am Gray Dragon AuRon, out of the west,\" AuRon said, straining to translate his thoughts into the blighter's speech. \"I've seen fourteen summers since coming out of the egg. I've climbed mountains and swum oceans. I've sailed in ships and traveled in carts. I've hunted with wolves and been hunted by men, learned from elves and bargained with dwarves, stood my ground in battle and driven my enemies from their lairs. I've defeated a fully grown dragon by wit and wing. I bear four great wounds as testament to this. I come to claim the ruins of Kraglad, a city of old Uldam, and take the black dragon NooMoahk's place.\"\n\nThe blighter elders whispered in each other's ears. Bundkleh'Tran pushed the tip of his staff into the ground. \"Two generations ago, NooMoahk-vhe was our lord. None with him now speak.\"\n\n\"NooMoahk is gone. I will take his place, as his heir, and I want peace with the Umazheh,\" AuRon said, using the blighters' word for themselves.\n\n\"What price is the peace?\" Bund-kleh'Tran said, after shooting a glance at his fellow elder.\n\n\"Just as I said. The ruins of Kraglad will be mine. The river east and west of the old city I claim, as well, and the lands in between the two. I will not touch Umazheh or Umazheh's herds, as long as they stay off that land. Beyond the rivers, I hunt where I choose. In return for this fealty, you will have my aid against any enemy of the Umazheh within one day's dragonflight of Kraglad. This is many mountains east and west of here, and much of the southern forest to the borders of old Uldam. If famine or disease strikes your herds, I will succor the Umazheh as I can by hunting. These are my terms.\"\n\nThe chieftains retired and whispered, still facing AuRon. AuRon could hear them, but most of the words were unfamiliar. After a conference, they approached him again.\n\nThe blighter named Keerh crossed his arms across his chest. \"We stand at an impasse. Kraglad is revered of our people. NooMoahk-veh claimed our shrines. This wrong must be righted.\"\n\n\"A dragon needs safe refuge. Pilgrims who come in peace unarmed, preceded by a harbinger, will be allowed within the city.\"\n\n\"We must bargain for what is rightfully ours?\" Keerh asked of Bund-kleh'Tran.\n\n\"A dragon is better as an ally than as an enemy,\" Tran said, gripping his staff with his hand reversed. AuRon wondered if the awkward gesture meant indecision.\n\nSomething flashed at the corner of his vision, and AuRon crouched. Two arrows that would have found his heart struck his shoulder instead.\n\nBund-kleh'Tran lifted his arm, and a wide blade shone in the sunlight as it emerged from the cane-scabbard. His aged companion Keerh, moving quickly for a blighter of such age and weight, reached to a hidden scabbard at his back and drew a fighting ax.\n\nAuRon whipped his tail across the ground in anger; the instinctive gesture scattered charging spear-blighters. Tran swung his ax-wide sword as if to cleave the dragon's skull from crest to snout, but the blade opened AuRon's chin as he avoided the swipe. He was not so lucky with Keerh, who plunged his battle-ax into AuRon's throat, swinging under the armored griff. AuRon felt his neck stiffen, the blighter had cut into the muscle-wrapped tube leading up from his fire bladder. A sphincter at the outlet of his fire bladder clamped shut at the touch of air; his flame was useless.\n\nAuRon hugged the ground, protecting his soft belly. He extended his wings and flapped hard, sending up a cloud of dust and pebbles from the open ground at the center of the ring of huts. Keerh and Tran turned their heads from the stinging spray for a second\u2014 \u2014which was all AuRon needed. He pounced, getting a forelimb on each elder blighter's chest. He knocked them to the ground and bore down with all his weight and muscle, and felt a satisfying crunch as his sii tore into collapsing rib cages. Even more satisfying, though brief, was the shriek from Keerh.\n\nMore arrows pierced his flank. AuRon turned to see that the blighter charge had become a rout. All save one blighter had dropped his spear. Some flung themselves on the ground; others ran. The lone attacker, perhaps not knowing his fellows had deserted him, still ran forward with spear point raised. AuRon's tail flashed over and forward like a bullwhip; he knocked the spear into the ground. The weapon stopped, but the charging blighter didn't, and the unfortunate tripped over first the haft and then his own foot. The blighter sprawled before AuRon.\n\nThe arrow wounds burned him; the blighters must have dipped the heads in some foul substance. \"Don't move,\" AuRon said to the blighter before him. \"Or you die, and I consume this village to the last goat-kid.\"\n\n\"Mercy! Mercy, great AuRon!\" the blighter cried.\n\n\"I'll do more than show you mercy. Lift your head, and tell me your name.\"\n\nThe young blighter lifted his slobbered face. \"I am called Unrush! I ask your mercy.\"\n\n\"Unrush, are you a father?\" AuRon said, a little thickly.\n\n\"Of eleven youth, by two wives. Spare us!\"\n\n\"Then you can be called an elder. Unrush, you're in charge of this village now. Don't worry, when this Dokla comes back, I'll make him understand. You may pick the third elder yourself. If the three of you play fair by me, I'll see you chieftains of all the Umazheh of these mountains. Did you hear the bargain I offered to the dead ones?\"\n\n\"Yes, and it was fair! Most fair!\"\n\n\"Then keep it and see your Umazheh safe and prosperous.\"\n\nAuRon fought a growing weariness as he flew off to the river where he had first met the fishing NooMoahk. The arrow wounds throbbed. He submerged himself in the cooling water and worried at the arrow points with his clipping front teeth. Only once the arrowheads were out, and the blood ran as freely as the water coursing over him, did he allow himself to lay his head on the riverbank. The sun pained him. He sank into a half-sleep and dreamed of a sky filled with thunderheads.\n\nHe awoke chilled and hungry, with the feeling it was some days later. The moon's face had turned a full quarter farther toward the earth. At some time he had hauled himself out of the water, but he had no memory of it. He sniffed the air and smelled woodsmoke. And blighters.\n\nUnrush emerged from the thick riverbank ferns. He carried a sword, thickened almost to ax-width at its far end and notched like a claw. In his other hand he carried a skull by its wiry hair. He tossed it to AuRon.\n\n\"Dokla never saw reason. I took his head in single combat.\"\n\nA few other blighters emerged from the woods, spears pointed straight up.\n\n\"What now?\" AuRon croaked. The head stank and was crawling with maggots. The fight must have been some days ago.\n\n\"Some say: let us kill the dragon while he is weak. I say: dragon must grow strong, so the Umazheh of these mountains grow strong with him.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"We have bound the families of the defeated chiefs. Blood sacrifice our pact to seal.\"\n\nAt another time, AuRon would have welcomed the meal, but he was still half-sick from the venom in the blighter arrows. He was not in the mood to kill and eat screaming hominids.\n\n\"No. Send them away. West, south, east\u2014I don't care. They shall go into exile.\"\n\nThe blighter's shoulders drooped. \"You are too merciful to those who tried to kill you,\" Unrush said.\n\n\"Those who tried to kill me are dead. Except you.\"\n\nUnrush digested this, and nodded. \"So they live.\"\n\nAuRon licked his aching flank. The skin was discolored where the scar tissue was growing. \"If you want to bring me the archers who shot me, I'll eat them instead.\"\n\nAuRon's throat healed. He settled into the vigorous life of a young dragon-lord as his tally of years doubled. The blighters kept their bargain, and Unrush grew into the role of a feudal lord himself. As his people multiplied, his two fellow chieftains claimed lands of their own, and the village where AuRon struck the bargain became the seat of a paramountcy. Whenever Unrush called his arch-chieftains together, he invited AuRon to sit at his side. The blighters gathered in song and beat thrilling tattoos on their war drums on these occasions; spitted bullocks turned over charcoal pits while the leaders spoke or sang.\n\nWhen warlike men in white headcloths came up from the south, scimitars tucked in their scarlet sashes, AuRon flew off, leading his gathered warriors to his first true war. At an assembly of blighters, he heard stories of more and more men following ancient roads through the jungles to the south, hunting elephants in the misty forests. Skirmishes between hunting parties in the woods brought soldiers up from the south, an army to drive the blighters from the mountains.\n\nAuRon heard their petition for war and gave the blighters his aid, fulfilling his feudal promise. He started a great fire in an empty grain pit, and the blighters thrust their oiled blades into the fire until the air was filled with the sharp tang of heated metal. Then the warriors sang songs and took oaths before jumping through the flame. Only a few failed in the feat. AuRon circled above his \"fireblades\" as Unrush led his soldiers south, bearing before them poles mounted with the sun-whitened skulls of their foes. Red banners sewn from the sashes of the men hung down, with dreadful runes dyed into the blood-colored cloth.\n\nThey sang as they marched (to the beat of drums so long they had to be carried by three blighters):\n\n\u2003In fighting lust\n\n\u2003our blades we trust.\n\n\u2003To herd and hut\n\n\u2003The way is shut.\n\n\u2003While Umazheh stand\n\n\u2003with spear in hand\n\n\u2003and blood that runs\n\n\u2003from Umir's sons.\n\n\u2003Uh-rah! Uh-rah!\n\n\u2003Battle will try!\n\n\u2003Arrows will fly!\n\n\u2003Foekind will die!\n\n\u2003Uh-rah! Ur-ri!\n\nThe men camped on a hilltop within a circle of cut-down trees, the branches facing the forest trimmed and sharpened into obstacles. AuRon watched them from above, hanging silently in a cloudy evening sky, deep in memories of battles and wars handed down from his fathers or pieced together in NooMoahk's library. He drifted on the jungle updrafts and counted their numbers before flying back to tell Unrush that the men had two spears, at least, to his one, and war machines besides.\n\n\"Then we must have the humans attack us,\" Unrush said, after consulting with his chieftains.\n\nAuRon knew how the men would array themselves for battle. \"The men will attack with bow and missile-machine. When they've done their killing from afar, they'll come in to take the heads of those who are left.\"\n\n\"Then we run?\" Unrush said over the discontented mutterings of his warriors.\n\n\"No. We'll use the dark to make one Umazheh take the guise of five.\"\n\nAuRon had the blighters cut torches and issue them to each warrior. The moved quickly and quietly by night and surrounded the invaders out of the south. Each group lit a sheltered fire once they were in position. AuRon flew circles around the camp, guiding the blighters until he judged them in position, then he drifted above the camp. When the deep dark of predawn cast the night even blacker, and tiny flickers of hidden campfires showed the blighters to have completed their encirclement, he adjudged it time.\n\nA humid dawn shrouded the fireblades' battle-trial, softening the bird-haunted trees and giving their oiled weapons a deceptively soft glow.\n\n\"Umazheh!\" AuRon roared from the sky, his call echoing across the jungle.\n\nThe blighters thrust their torches into the fires and spread out, waving one in each hand as they moved from tree to tree. Trumpets in the men's camp sounded the alarm, and the humans ran to their breastworks. The sight of the seemingly endless torches moving between the trees would have unsettled AuRon; what it did to the men far from their homes, he could hardly imagine.\n\nBut AuRon did not let them join their comrades standing guard at the edges of the camp. As they streamed from their tents and leantos like a host of scurrying white-headed ants, AuRon dived from the sky with a roar. He plunged down and swooped over the camp, loosing his fire on the war-machines of the men. Rope and wood burst into angry orange flame. The war-machines became horribly animated as the ropework burned away, flinging bits of smoking metal into the sky, or lurching about and collapsing as the great bent timbers came free.\n\nHe saw a grand tent, its entrance arched with elephant tusks, on his second pass, and wheeled with wing-tips cutting tent ropes to set it alight\u2014along with the man standing before it shouting to his comrades.\n\nAuRon flapped into the air, ruin in his wake, and noticed an arrow through his arm and a dull ache in his neck. He rolled over in the air and felt a second arrow buried where his neck joined his shoulder. Fighting fury pulsed hot, and he began a stoop to dive and smash and kill\u2014no, he'd just take more arrows that way. He turned and came in low over the burning war-machines, keeping clear of the well-disciplined array of archers ready with another volley. He grabbed a burning war-machine in his saa and, flapping his wings madly, managed to pull it into the air with him. He ignored the painful licks of flame until he hovered high over the archers.\n\nThe bowmen dropped their arms and scattered as the burning ballista fell among them.\n\nAuRon arced up and folded his wings, turning in the air as he plunged to earth. Just before impact, he opened his wings and beat them so hard a windstorm beneath him tore tents from their moorings. He grabbed up a man and flung him shrieking toward the burning commander's campsite.\n\nThe turbaned men, helms now fastened above their head-wrappings, gathering in knots of spear-wielding hunters, advancing on AuRon from behind tightly locked shields.\n\n\"Now, Umazheh, to me!\" AuRon called.\n\nThe blighters swept out of the morning fog. Their blades, axes, and stone hammers could be seen dull against the pinkening sky as they poured up and over the barricades, dispersed ranks coming together as the circle closed. A few still carried torches, holding them high as they went so smoke masked their coming.\n\nThe men of the south died well. They gathered in little clusters, standing back to back and meeting the blighters on the tips of their spears. In this bitter chapter of the history of hominid warfare, quarter was not asked or expected. AuRon did what he could with his tail\u2014hammering down a shield wall here, knocking aside a phalanx of spears there. By the time the sun was what the blighters called \"two hands\" above the horizon, it was over. Dead blighters lay piled around little mounds of white rags red with blood.\n\nThe blighters formed a ring around AuRon and sang their song of Deathrage, thanking the fighting fury that carried them through their losses to victory. Then the skull-taking began.\n\nFor a moment in that misty dawn, with the heavy air thick with blood, AuRon thought of leading the blighters south. With so many men dead in the jungle, there would be villages, even towns to the south awaiting spear and flame. Men tried to drive the blighters from the mountains; it would only be just to dispossess the would-be conquerors of their lands and lives. He could, in time, rule a land from the mountains to the southern ocean, that blue ribbon that he had seen on his farthest flights. If he had done this with a few thousand blighters, what could he do with ten times ten the number in a few score of years?\n\nThis would require some thought.\n\nHe saw a blighter turn over a writhing comrade whose gut had been opened by a scimitar sweep. The blighter mumbled something to the pain-racked warrior, then thrust a knife into the cripple's armpit. The wounded one died with a whimper, answered with equal sadness by the one who ended the pain. AuRon watched tears run down the face of the blighter as he took a ring from the dead warrior's ear and slipped it over the thin, semi-opposable finger opposite the true-thumb before dragging the body to the hero's pyre.\n\nOne such victory was enough\u2014even for a dragon's lifetime.\n\nThere were dead to be burned, families, herds, and possessions to be distributed, leaders to be replaced. Unrush lived through the battle, but all his chieftains had fallen before their men. The bravest of their warriors rose to take their places at the sitting-mats of council meetings. Unrush found a charred sword with a dragon's head on the pommel in the wreckage of the battlefield, and named his seat the dragon-throne to honor AuRon's role in preserving his mountains from the encroachment of men. But AuRon took little pleasure in the ceremony.\n\nHe could still enjoy his library. In it were thoughts and ideas far richer than the bickering and chafing between blighter clans that required his occasional attention. AuRon almost wished that Unrush ruled as the kind of blighter-king the men's tales described: a blood-thirsty warlord who lopped the heads off of any malcontents. Instead, when Unrush's chieftains could not compromise on the parenting of a family of orphans or watering rights at a mountain pool, they came to AuRon with their petitions. Criminals sometimes appealed Unrush's judgments. If they were backed by any kind of numbers in the community in the case of crimes of property rather than blood, AuRon told the blighters that exile would be sufficient punishment.\n\nThey were a greedy, quarrelsome race, so AuRon found himself holding audience more frequently than he wished.\n\nIt wasn't all irritation. The blighters offered him animals every time they came before his dais. AuRon rearranged the crystal-centered cavern to make use of its glowing light: his favorite books and scrolls stood on long tables circling his dais, the wizard-stones that preserved the books ringing the shelves. A tradition grew that only certain favored blighters were admitted past the tables; those lower on the pecking order had to address the dragon from beyond the ring of books. AuRon heard the blighters coin a new title, Uthvhe-Rinsrick, appended to their names, which he translated as \"of the Lord's Inner Circle.\"\n\nBut one spring, even the blood of knowledge began to stick in his throat. Driven by an urge only half-understood, he sought escape in flying, circling far out over forest, mountain, and desert. He searched the sky more than he searched the ground, and it occurred to him that he was looking for other dragons.\n\nThe taunts of his sisters came back to him at those moments. Even if he were to fly across a female, \"bright of scale, long of tail, and free of male,\" as Father used to say, he was not the sort of dragon who made an impression to a potential mate. Nor did he have a rich hoard of coin and gems to tempt her appetite, or a litany of burned towns and hosts scattered to prove him a dragon of fearsome reputation able to guard their young. He looked at his reflection at times in NooMoahk's fishing pool. He had two horns on his crest already longer than even his rear spur-claws, and two more nubs were coming in. All his battle scars proved was that he was a thin-skinned gray, ruler of a few villages of goat-herding blighters hiding among the ruins of a broken empire.\n\nHardly the sort of dragon who would attract a mate.\n\nBut flying, exploring, patrolling could keep the thoughts away for a time. He had just finished a hunt in the forests of the southern borderlands on foot, snapping up two-legged flightless birds that ran from him with bobbing heads, when he came across the washer-women. While taking a drink from a stream, he smelled humans in the water. Something about the smell made him want to investigate. He followed the flow, creeping along the riverbank as low to the ground as a snake. He traced the tantalizing smell to its source: a village built up off the ground on poles. Pigs and chickens lived under the stilted huts, with humans above. Women washed clothes at the river. It was their rich female smell that had attracted him.\n\nHis appetite, which he thought sated just minutes ago by a bellyful of flesh and feathers, got the better of him, and he rose from the riverbank reeds.\n\nThe women left their laundry, screaming as they ran to the huts. AuRon dashed after them, flattening reeds and scattering piles of wet cloth, but they had too much of a head start. Men poured from the village, snatching up arms and shields. He had no desire for battle in the middle of a man village with foes on every side. AuRon snapped impotently at the hindmost female. Frustrated, he turned his chase into flight and rose to the sky, strange lust-hunger forgotten.\n\nAuRon flew north, wondering if he had learned a lesson. He had heard tales of young mateless dragons chasing down hominid females, even pursuing them into castle towers or taking them prisoner to toy with before eating. According to Mother, it meant the end of many a dragon. Hominids avenged the loss of their women, whereas a dragon could sometimes make off with half a herd in the belly and get away with it.\n\nPerhaps he'd become that sort of dragon, pursuing the smell of human females instead of his own kind. He saw himself as a night- stalker, twisting natural desires down a desperate path that would lead to his death. Sickened at the thought, he resolved never to chase down that particular smell again.\n\nBut that night, he dreamt of screaming womanflesh.\n\n\"A prize, a gift for you we bring, O AuRon-vhe,\" Unrush Uth-Rinsrick said some months later. \"Today the Feast of the Deathrage among my people is marked. We remember! We give! We revel! Join us, we ask. The fireblades gather.\"\n\nThe blighters had probably dug up a jade bauble in one of the ruins to the south. AuRon had a collection of statues in his library. The statues were better company than blighters: quieter and certainly more aesthetic.\n\n\"In what manner am I to join?\"\n\n\"Accept our offering. We bring you a prisoner.\"\n\nAuRon nodded. So that was it. The blighters occasionally brought him some wretched hunter who had wandered too far in the forest. Rather than just kill him, they presented him to AuRon and watched while he made a meal of the trespasser. The half-starved prey never made much of a dinner; he would have preferred a bullock.\n\nThe blighters filed in and formed a circle. AuRon cast a wary eye over them; he had set down a law that said no weapon larger than a dagger was to be brought into his cavern. A blighter witch-doctor had stirred up a few malcontents against him once; while they perished in fiery battle, he never did find the witch-doctor. AuRon didn't trust any but Unrush. A dragon couldn't afford to trust if he was to live long.\n\nThey dragged the captive in. He was small and dirty, pinioned by a pole thrust across the small of his back and bracketed by his elbows. His hands were bound before him. One of the keepers pulled him along, and another lashed him from behind with a leather switch.\n\nAuRon unwrapped himself from the dais\u2014wanting to put the captive out of his misery and be done with it\u2014and the blighters fell back to form a ring around dragon and prey.\n\n\"Day of death! Rage of death!\" the blighters chanted.\n\n\"Take your sacrifice, sacred spirit of the fireblades,\" Unrush howled, rolling his eyes in barbaric ecstasy.\n\nAuRon sniffed the captive, and startled. The woman smell. The hunger that was not all hunger rose in him, wetting his mouth and quickening his heartbeat. AuRon trembled like a hatchling out of the egg.\n\nThe sacrifice raised her bruised face. \"Bite. May you choke on me, if you've forgotten your daughter, Auron,\" Hieba said in dragon tongue.\n\nAuRon's mind flashed back to his good-bye in the woods outside the lumbermen's stockade. He saw Hieba again as a scared little girl, running from her guardian through the wildflowers.\n\nWhen the first shock faded and he saw the ring of confused blighters again, he snorted.\n\n\"Berrysweet!\" It felt good to say the word again. He stepped around her, putting his body between Hieba and her captors.\n\n\"I can't believe I'm here again,\" she said quietly, perhaps more to herself than AuRon. \"It feels like this was a dream-life.\"\n\nThe blighters grumbled to each other. The one who had beaten her shifted to the back of the crowd.\n\nAuRon turned his head toward the blighters. \"The Umazheh may go,\" he said. \"By a trick of fate, I know this human. There'll be no ceremony with her. Go with my profound thanks\u2014you've given me five herds' worth of satisfaction in bringing this human here.\"\n\nUnrush scratched the gray bristles at his temples and talked to his fellow chieftains.\n\n\"Bring her to the dragon-throne tomorrow night, my lord. We will have oxen and swine, and wine in the year of our bargain first casked. What is your answer?\"\n\n\"I will be there. Tomorrow night.\"\n\nHieba touched her dirty, scratched hand to the crystal statue.\n\n\"I remember this from when I was little,\" Hieba said, speaking the tongue of the sons of Tindairuss. AuRon had to ask her to repeat words at times, but it was a version of a language NooMoahk knew well and had passed on to him. \"I believed this was my mother and you were my father, Auron. The stone was light and warm and constant, and you were strong and brave and wise. I wonder what it is? I suspect it's worth a principality of Hypat.\" She sagged against the pillar and sank to her knees.\n\n\"You need sleep and food,\" AuRon said. \"A bath perhaps? There's still the trickle at the back of the cave. It's bigger than you remember. I added rocks to give the water more notes to play on its journey.\"\n\nBut she was asleep.\n\nAuRon sniffed around the cavern. There were a few joints lodged high up in the pillars carved from the rock, but he suspected the meat was past edibility\u2014at least to a human\u2014even in the cool of the cave. He did not want to leave Hieba alone in the room, though it would be a suicidal blighter who would return to do her harm after he had dismissed them. He went into the outer city and burned out a rockchuck nest. The hare-size rodents would at least make a mouthful or two for Hieba when she awakened. He hurried back to the cave with his scorched prizes to find her comfortably asleep in the warm light of the statue.\n\nIt was a testament to her exhaustion that she did not awaken at the smell of cooked food, or for hours afterwards. AuRon curled his long body below the dais and looked at her. There was still something of the little girl he knew in the concentrated expression on her face: Hieba had always slept as if she were putting her mind into it. Her bronzed skin and jet-black hair, slender limbs and supple bosom marked her as a human of some beauty, as he was able to judge it.\n\nShe arose and let out a squeak of excitement at the food, tearing into it with nail and tooth with a ferocity that would do a hatchling credit.\n\n\"I'm so happy to find you, still here, still yourself, Auron-who-was-a-father,\" Hieba said.\n\nAuRon sniffed at her; beneath the dirt and sweat he could smell a grown woman. \"It's pronounced AuRon now that I'm a full-fledged dragon,\" he said. \"Though you may call me pony as you first did and I'd be glad just for the sound of your voice.\"\n\nHieba put her arms about his neck and he felt her squeeze, a prrum came from deep within him.\n\n\"AuRon,\" she said, trying it out. \"AuRon. The name pounces like those golden cats in the mountains. Suits you.\" She broke off the embrace, walked along his side, and squatted to look at the folds of his wings.\n\nAuRon had a thousand questions. \"Have you traveled far?\"\n\n\"Yes. Though I was on horse until my blighter guide played me false.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" AuRon said. But hominid treachery was hardly a new story. He had scrolls\u2014and a lifetime of experience with it.\n\n\"Not from the tribe that brought me here; this was a different group. They trade with the Dairussan. Perhaps they took me for a long-lost Bant on her way home.\"\n\n\"The sons of Tindairuss?\" AuRon translated. \"You grew up with them?\"\n\n\"Yes. My childhood was over as soon as I went into that camp. They put me to work doing laundry and sewing, always sewing. I think I could sew in my sleep. I was there for years, and I even ran away once to find you again. But I came back hungry and cold.\"\n\n\"So you've run away again?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"No. When I was perhaps fifteen, a group of soldiers rode into camp, under a captain. He was a man of great renown. A man named Naf Touraq.\"\n\nAuRon snorted. \"Did he once travel with dwarves, working for a man named Hross?\"\n\nHieba laughed. \"Yes. The same Naf who found me, who gave me to you in the desert. All the other soldiers threw their filthy rags at me and pinched whatever they could reach, but not him. Naf saw something that made him call to the others to bring me to him. He had that shield-point thing you wore on your tail in his lap. I was trembling. I was of age, and I knew it would happen sooner or later. But it wasn't what I feared. Or maybe hoped. He wanted to talk. He told me the story from his eyes, and gave me back the shield. He said it was made by dwarves and given to you as a present. When I heard the story of how he found me, it brought back memories of my parents. I had actually forgotten them until I started talking to him. I went to sleep remembering that night of fire and screams.\"\n\n\"He is a good man. How many others in some nest of thieves would take such risks to preserve a child?\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nIt felt good so see Hieba's smile, to hear her oddly mature voice\u2014yet he felt a tinge of jealousy at the longing expression on her face. AuRon waited for her to continue.\n\n\"He never left my thoughts after that, ugly though he is. I... I rode off with him. He and his riders were patrolling the borderlands. There were rumors of blighters up the river from the timbermen's settlements. Naf and his Red Guard were to take care of the danger. He took care of it by riding with one other man into their camp and making a treaty. It turned out that the blighters were happy with the timbermen; there was more game in the clearings they made. They came to a just arrangement and even began trading. I could see why his men loved him. He's a warrior who would rather talk than fight. He claims it's not by natural desire, but by experience.\"\n\n\"There are no winners in battle. Just survivors,\" AuRon agreed.\n\n\"The blighters on the river told of a dragon who had made an alliance with the blighters of these mountains. These were the families of some who did not want a dragon as their liege lord.\"\n\n\"They offered to guide you to me?\"\n\n\"No, that came later. Naf and the Red Guards had other business south, and I traveled with them. I learned to ride, to pull a small bow from horseback, even to swim my mount across rivers. Naf modified your shield so I could wear it on my arm. I practiced with it and a dagger in the hand opposite. The men laughed until I used it in a fight. But something happened while Naf was rigging it to fit over my forearm. I don't know if I kissed him or he kissed me... it doesn't matter. Naf and I are in love, AuRon, and we'll be married now that he's taken a position with the Silver Guard at the Dome. He's popular with the men, and he's made himself indispensable to the Ghioz\u2014they're a foreign people with their own tongue who rule Naf's. He's risen higher in the ranks than any other of the Dairuss.\"\n\n\"Then why aren't you with your mate? What drove you back to my mountains? Looking for dragons is dangerous work for any band of warriors, and you're only one hominid. You surely didn't come merely to tell me of your good fortune.\"\n\n\"Events across the mountains delayed our happiness. We need a dragon. Or the advice of one, at least. It concerns other dragons, evil\u2014\"\n\nAuRon held up a sii. If they wanted to hire him to hunt his kin, Hieba would have risked much in her travel to hear the word no. But could Naf be so stupid as to think\u2014Surely not. In any case, AuRon remembered he had to attend to Unrush and his chieftains at their celebration.\n\n\"We will talk later.\"\n\nShe knotted her fists, again looking like the petulant child AuRon had once known. \"But Au\u2014\"\n\n\"Later, Berrysweet. We must hurry. You've been asleep, and it is probably already growing dark outside. You say you are a good rider?\"\n\n\"I spent two years keeping up with the Red Guard. I can handle any horse, day or night.\"\n\n\"I'm no horse. You'll be atop my shoulders. We will fly. Walking is tiresome when you have wings.\"\n\n\"Fly? On you?\"\n\n\"I suppose I could grip you in my claws. You need clothing and more. I don't have so much as a bowl and spoon about here for you.\"\n\n\"Yes, AuRon, let's! It'll be like something out of a legend. Or a dream.\"\n\n\"Then let's give you a dream worthy of passing on to your children and they to theirs.\"\n\nHieba and AuRon went to the downshaft. In the intervening years blighter masons had built up the cavern entrance, first with a rickety bamboo staircase and later a set of stairs chipped into the cavern's slide, wide enough so a hominid could walk up without pressing its back to the cavern wall. The masons had also carved AuRon a set of sii holes, shaped like the faces of bellowing blighter warriors. AuRon used the gaping mouths to climb as Hieba took the stairs. She kept pointing to familiar objects as they walked through the ruined city at the cavern's mouth.\n\n\"The bats were really bad up there. Down that way was a room with beautiful tile... it was some kind of bathing cavern, but the running water was gone, and everything was just moldy and damp. There were lots of tools with the handles rotted off over there...\"\n\n\"You remember much.\"\n\n\"I remember you always pacing in the background while I explored.\"\n\nThe tunnel widened out to the beginnings of the cavern city proper. AuRon halted. \"I fly from here.\"\n\nHieba crossed her arms, rubbing her palms on her elbows. \"I wish you had reins, or a saddle, or even a mane.\"\n\nAuRon flattened himself to the ground, his body resembling a snake grown to colossal size. \"Just hold on with your legs. My neck isn't any wider than a horse's body above my shoulders.\"\n\nHe let Hieba put her hands across his back just above his forequarters. He twitched\u2014throwing her to the ground in the process.\n\n\"Hey!\" she squeaked.\n\n\"Sorry, dragons are sensitive when it comes to their necks. It's the bit the assassins like to go for.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should put a blanket over your back first, like with a horse.\"\n\n\"I don't have one. I'm not a horse. I can control myself better than that.\"\n\nAuRon regretted his statement when she tried again. This time she managed to swing her leg over his back and sit. AuRon fought the urge to roll around to get her off. He found his body jerking in all the wrong places. His back feet wanted to stamp; his tail kept swinging.\n\n\"Is this to warm up your muscles?\" Hieba asked. He felt her hanging on with arms as well as legs.\n\n\"No. You feel like an itch I can't scratch.\"\n\n\"You want me to get off?\"\n\n\"Yes, but don't. I'll get used to it. Maybe we should try walking for a while. I don't want to shrug you off when we're at the cloudline.\"\n\nAuRon started walking, stomping with his legs as he moved. The stomping helped, for some reason.\n\n\"This is different from a horse,\" Hieba said. \"You're more side-to-side rather than up-and-down. You're higher than a horse, too.\"\n\nAuRon curved his neck to look back at her; she was swinging back and forth as he planted first one foreleg, then the other.\n\n\"I've seen men riding elephants. They're higher still, though a full-grown dragon is near that height.\"\n\n\"How long until you're that big?\"\n\n\"If I live, hundreds of years. Dragons grow slowly once their wings are uncased.\"\n\nHieba looked wistful. \"Wish I could see that.\"\n\n\"You saw NooMoahk. He was as big as we get.\"\n\n\"He was old; he had sort of a sunken-in look. But I didn't mean any dragon. I meant you. Elves and dwarves live a long time. Sad that humans and blighters don't. We miss so much.\"\n\nAuRon threaded his way through the buildings and over piles of rubble, buildings-on-top-of-buildings to either side leaning over him. The old city's empty windows looked blankly down on them, as if to say, I remember the mighty kings in their chariots parading this street. You are just wanderers in the graveyard of an empire, insignificant and forgettable.\n\n\"Hieba, there's a philosopher named Awu. He was a dwarf of another time and age, who somehow ended up king of one of the Eastern Realms at the rim of the Typhoon Seas. Back then, the hominids were divided into 'greater' and 'lesser' races; the elves and dwarves were considered the greater races, the humans and blighters the lesser ones. He said the shorter-lived races would be thriving when the others were gone and just legends. In his mind, the great races think only of themselves, the lesser live and build for their children and grandchildren's world. He wrote, 'Each of the Great Race stands on his own, and can rise to the stature of a colossus in the given span of years. Each of the Lesser stands on the shoulders of the last generation. In time, the pyramids of the Lesser will be the taller.'\"\n\n\"Then perhaps my grandchildren\u2014\"\n\n\"You and Naf have a clutch?\"\n\n\"No. No, not yet. With matters as they are... I'll explain later.\"\n\nThey could see the sky, framed by the fanglike hanging towers of Kraglad. \"I'm going to open my wings now,\" he warned. \"Let me know if you feel like you're losing your grip.\" AuRon felt her slender limbs tighten about his neck, just where the collar Djer removed had rested. He felt a tug at his neck. \"Owww,\" Hieba said.\n\n\"Leave the chain alone,\" AuRon said. \"It's a dwarsaw, not a halter.\"\n\n\"I remembered it from long ago. It didn't look dangerous.\"\n\n\"Just take my neck.\"\n\nHe dragon-dashed forward\u2014wings flapping\u2014and rose into the air.\n\n\"Heeeeeeee!\" Hieba shrieked, in delight this time. AuRon felt her arms go around his neck, but didn't dare look back; while taking off, he needed to stick his neck out stiffly forward.\n\nHe was above the old rooftop gardens of the city, rising for the inverted towers. He dipped one wing a trifle and banked out of the mountain-rending cavern and into the late afternoon sun. Only when he caught an updraft and shot to the cloudline did he risk looking back at Hieba.\n\nShe still had her legs tight about his neck; the blood vessels there throbbed under her grip. Her mouth was open, and her shoulder-length hair fluttered in the wind like a black banner. Her skin was flushed from bosom to face, and her white teeth shone against her coppery skin.\n\n\"Good?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"This is... this is... this is... rapturous!\" she shouted.\n\n\"Enjoy.\"\n\n\"Enjoy? Why do you ever land? If I were you, I'd find the tallest mountains in the world and never leave the clouds.\"\n\n\"You've never lived through a storm in the heights. It gets cold. Dragons like it cool and dark, not ice-coated with the wind howling.\"\n\n\"Fly! AuRon, let's fly forever!\"\n\n\"You see more world this way. But we're just off to a village we could have walked to in two days when you were little. We'll be there before the sun touches the horizon.\"\n\n\"Blighters. I don't want to think about them. I just want to touch more clouds,\" she giggled, sticking her arms out in imitation of AuRon's wings.\n\n\"I'll go down a little. I think you need thicker air.\"\n\nAuRon crabbed down until they were able to see individual branches on the trees and rocks below. Flying was more of an effort at this altitude, with the unpredictable winds, but he thrilled Hieba by plunging suddenly off precipices and sweeping low over meadows. A few blighter herders waved their crooks as he passed.\n\nThey circled Unrush's throne-village. Its walls were stone now, and there were monuments to the fallen at the Battle of the Misted Dawn years ago. More skulls decorated the path to the dragon-throne, and Unrush had a stone-walled house with a slate roof, with three subhouses for his wives branching off the main structure, and a private walled garden. His lava-rock throne, its rock prised by AuRon from the edge of the southern ocean, stood under a canopy of fig trees. The thin-limbed boughs had been chosen as the fruit of his paramountcy.\n\nAuRon landed to the pounding of drum and gong. Blighters had meat and vegetable roasting over charcoal pits, and the populace had decorated all the dwellings with red flowers. Blighter-females in garlands of red and white, skirts tied about their waists, made obeisance as AuRon folded his wings.\n\nUnrush came out of his house, wearing finery taken from the bodies of his victims, cleaned, and cut to blighter taste and style\u2014layer after layer, as if to say that he could afford to wear nine sets of clothing at a time. He bore a bronze basin, slopping over with wine.\n\n\"Drink, O Sky Lord, drink, wash, and our welcome take!\"\n\nAuRon lapped, just enough to wet his tongue.\n\n\"Unrush, it's an odd fate that you brought as a captive the person I most wanted to see. She's lost her pack and saddle. Could your wives find her something to wear to the feast? I'd like you to show her the hospitality of the Umazheh.\"\n\n\"Yes, O Sky Lord, I will,\" Unrush said. He pointed at Hieba and called to one of his wives, or perhaps a sister. AuRon still had trouble with the complicated blighter family trees, where a chieftain's brothers and sisters held more responsibility than his wives. Hieba looked uncertain, but the royal blighter and some girl-children pulled and pointed until she went into one of the smaller wife-annexes.\n\n\"The spits groan under their weight, AuRon,\" Unrush said. \"We must eat soon. But news comes with Balazeh. From the deserts, and north. It is for us to discuss on this auspicious day.\"\n\n\"What news?\"\n\n\"War. War such as the world has not seen in a redwood's age. Umazheh of waste, Umazheh of swamp, Umazheh of the high steppe\u2014the last of the charioteers\u2014gather.\"\n\n\"For what? Who gathers them?\"\n\n\"Holy ones. A magus out of the north. They speak strong words. They foretell of the death throes of accursed Hypat.\"\n\n\"Hypat is far from here. It would take a season, and you would not even be at the river gap.\"\n\n\"Distance not count, enemies not count, time not count. Only the new era counts.\"\n\nThis last sounded a little singsong to AuRon's ear, and Unrush said it without his usual inflection.\n\n\"When did you hear this?\"\n\n\"Balazeh arrived the news,\" Unrush said, pointing to a tall, longer-legged blighter with purple tattoos covering his neck and shoulders like a cloak. \"A prophet came to him, and crowns and new thrones were promised. Six days since passed. We will meet on the eastern river at winter solstice. Will you war-call?\"\n\n\"I will have to think about this. It is not like our last battle, when men came to drive you out of these mountains. Balazeh and his holy man call you to destroy the homes of others.\"\n\n\"Once all this was ours. It will be again.\"\n\n\"Once there were trees on these slopes. What would you do if trees grew again here?\"\n\n\"Cut them.\"\n\nHieba returned, cutting off further discourse. She wore clothes mostly made of bright beads and copper bands, a pleasant accent to her dark hair and eyes. She stood at AuRon's side.\n\n\"AuRon, they have wonderful things in there. I never thought of blighters as artistic, but they are fine craftsfolk.\"\n\nUnrush's people gathered in a circle, singing, first one side of the village and then the other when their voices tired. Hieba, Unrush, Unrush's family, the fireblades, and any number of local dignitaries flanked AuRon, as he was the honored guest. Blighter females circled endlessly, all traveling in the same direction to avoid confusion as they distributed platters of food and bowls of wine. Laden blighters hauled sputtering joints from the charcoal pits and placed them on a woven mat set before AuRon.\n\nHieba attracted attention, as well. The blighter females came forward to admire her soft hair and delicate\u2014at least in comparison with a blighter's\u2014hands. A group of males clustered in the center of the ring of food bearers. Every now and then, one would charge forward, and leap and stamp, waving his weapon in the air and howling until Hieba clapped.\n\n\"They're not so bad once you get to know them,\" she said.\n\n\"Whatever you do, don't get up or touch one. It means you'd be his wife.\"\n\n\"What?\" Hieba said, shrinking back from a warrior springing shoulder-high on powerful legs and smiting invisible enemies.\n\n\"Those are suitors, not performers. Humans and blighters can mate, you know, but the offspring is sterile, like a mule.\"\n\n\"What if I get up and touch you?\"\n\n\"Tribal custom is rich and full of precedence, but I don't think it covers that. Dragons figure into their traditions as icons of luck, or dread.\"\n\nShe edged closer on her sitting-mat to AuRon, and smelled his basin of wine.\n\n\"Pfhew, what is that, AuRon?\"\n\n\"Wine. Mixed with blood, or so it tastes. It's part of the celebration. This is a ceremony about victory in battle.\"\n\nShe dipped her hand in it and tasted the mixture from her palm. Unrush and the other blighters gasped and muttered to each other at the gesture.\n\n\"What did I do?\"\n\n\"It's not so much what you did. It's what it meant. Only mated couples eat from the same dish.\"\n\nAuRon turned to Unrush. \"This human is as a daughter to me; she shares my repast. Please show her the same respect you do to me.\"\n\nUnrush waved a hand, and the blighters quieted.\n\nThe celebration started in earnest. Children ran across the village center, waving red-feathered streamers attached to the end of sticks. The fireblades followed, going through the blighter military evolutions: storm front, whirl and fade, flank sweep, and crescent hunt. They beat their spears on their shields, stamped, and shouted in time to their drums. When the display was over, their wives joined them, and the muscular warriors picked up the females and bore them overhead, some using just one arm to the howls of delight from those too old or two young for such feats. Hieba enjoyed it immensely, rattling her beads and striking her copper bracelets together.\n\nAll at once, there was a disturbance at the gate. AuRon raised his head above the crowd and saw a cluster of blighters bearing torches. The ends burned with a bluish flame. The intruding blighters approached. One rode some kind of camel with hair trailing just above the ground. The rider waved the ones at the gate away, and they shrank from him like scolded children.\n\nUnrush stood up and shouted something, and the revelers fell back before the stranger's approach.\n\n\"Stay close to me,\" AuRon said to Hieba. \"If I open my wings, get on my neck.\" AuRon took a few steps toward the gate to put his length between the strange blighters and Unrush's people. Unrush and a few of his chieftains came forward. Neither group showed unsheathed weapons, but there was a tension in the air.\n\n\"This is Balazeh?\" Unrush asked his guest.\n\n\"Yes. That is Staretz, a magus of the north. He is strong in wizardry. With him is Korutz, lieutenant to the King of Charioteers in the high plains. Make obeisance.\"\n\n\"It is for the visitor to do,\" Unrush said. \"Even if the King of Charioteers comes himself.\"\n\nStaretz, to AuRon, was just a tough old blighter, looking like a gnarled tree clinging among high rocks, dried out and twisted but fiercely intent on survival. He did not descend from his camel, but cleared his throat, waiting for a greeting. Unrush stood his ground and ignored the elbow of Balazeh prodding him.\n\nOne of the magus's retainers broke the silence. \"So it is true. There is a dragon in these mountains. Who sits on the renowned dragon-throne, word of which has come even to the north?\"\n\n\"Who wishes to know?\" one of Unrush's sons asked. \"It is for him to make introductions.\"\n\n\"Stop this,\" AuRon rumbled. \"Such an important visitor comes, and we cannot welcome him properly while he sits on his mount.\"\n\nStaretz made no move, but the camel's legs folded up beneath its cloak of fur.\n\n\"Dragon-king, you shame two proud Umazheh,\" Staretz said in Drakine, with surprising facility. AuRon had never heard it pronounced so well by a hominid. \"Staretz of the Hardgrounds speaks to the Umazheh of these mountains.\"\n\n\"Unrush of Uldam's Gates welcomes you,\" Unrush said, coming forward with a mat under each arm. He unrolled one on the ground for the visitor, and when the magus was comfortable, sat himself opposite.\n\n\"Thank you, great king,\" Staretz said.\n\n\"No king,\" Unrush said. \"Just a high chieftain, by the fates and this dragon's mercy.\"\n\n\"The King of Charioteers says more, and sends his lieutenant Korutz to you as an ambassador. They say your domain covers these mountains from where the sun touches at dawn in the east to the last light of dusk in the west.\"\n\n\"True, but there are not many among these mountains. Our flocks number in the multitudes, but our spears counted only ten score, ten times and four.\"\n\n\"It is those spears, and this dragon, that we must discuss. Noble king, great dragon, I come to you with a vision.\"\n\n\"I listen,\" Unrush said.\n\n\"It is for the ears of the Umazheh. Will the human understand?\"\n\n\"She does not know our speech,\" AuRon said. \"She is a decoration. No more.\"\n\nStaretz planted his palms on the mat and leaned forward resting on his long arms like an ape god in the south. \"There is confusion among our old enemies. They have grown rich, and in being rich think they deserve this, that it has always been so and will always be so. With wealth comes softness\u2014the best money-pilers rise and breed more like themselves\u2014while the strong and brave wither away. We, on the other hand, we of the wastes, of the mountains, of the frosts, snows, and swamps, we have grown hard in our exile far from the fallow lands.\n\n\"What was stolen from us will be returned. The nameless gods promised us our reward after long suffering.\"\n\n\"I have heard those tales, too,\" Unrush said. \" 'That the skies would fill with fire, that the seas would boil, that rock would melt away like ice in the summer sun.' None of this has passed.\"\n\n\"I have seen it. I saw it in the north, at the edges of the Hardgrounds, the dwarvish city of Kell. The Varvar joined with my people and destroyed it, three years ago. I watched a glacier melt, the skies burn, and the battlements dissolve when the UnderKell was drowned. Since then I have gone from tribe to tribe, telling my tale that the days of doom have come, and our reward and return from exile is here.\"\n\nAuRon's sii furrowed the ground. \"What melted the glacier? Fire from the sky? How was this done?\"\n\n\"You would know best, young dragon,\" Staretz chuckled.\n\n\"A legion of chieftains gather, each with their legion of spears behind. We will roll like a wave westward, and again all the lands between the cloud peaks and the great East will be ours. As it was in the days of Great Uldam. We will not fail. Will you join our numbers and earn your reward?\"\n\nTo his credit, Unrush leapt to his feet and roar out his agreement, though he trembled. AuRon knew his blood pulsed with hopes of battle and glory, but he had his people to consider.\n\n\"I must consult,\" Unrush said.\n\n\"Consult?\" Staretz laughed. \"Ha! Great kings are not made by consultation. They are made by decision.\"\n\n\"He must consult with me,\" AuRon said. \"I am his liege lord, and if he wishes me to be at the head of the fireblades, we must speak alone.\"\n\n\"Time runs short,\" Staretz said. \"I leave Balazeh and Korutz to hear your answer. I must go east, and speak to the Umazheh of the river, your cousins.\"\n\n\"Stay with us. A few days won't matter,\" Unrush said.\n\n\"I leave in the morning, before the sun rises. The spirits compel me to make haste. Every spear will count in the reckoning that approaches.\"\n\nUnrush gave instructions for Staretz and his retinue to spend the night in his lodge. Balazeh and Korutz retired with the magus. Unrush ordered his family to show them every hospitality, then returned to the center of the village.\n\n\"Let us sleep, under the stars AuRon, for there is much to be discussed.\"\n\nThe celebration continued. The hints of war raced through the camp like shooting stars, causing brief outbursts of excitement as the rumors passed. Hieba, still fatigued from her journey and captivity, slept against AuRon's belly as he turned his neck to face Unrush across the coal-pit. The red glow made the chieftain look like some god of war cast in bronze. He fingered a curved dagger that he wore on his thigh, a prize of the Battle of the Misted Dawn.\n\n\"What is your mind on what Staretz has said?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"He speaks like something out of a legend,\" Unrush said. \"But how is the truth gained? He is not the first to see the fulfillment of prophecies. But the Umazheh grow excited, I can feel it.\"\n\n\"You've started your people on a good path,\" AuRon said. \"What was empty meadow now has flocks, and where flocks once grazed, there are villages. This place has become what men would call a town, even if your streets are in rings and your huts still roofed with thatch.\"\n\nUnrush nodded. \"Next the Kwo-Atlsh-Hen, the High Mountain Road will be built, a shortcut of bridges over the gorges and through the passes that will link the villages. Bridges of stone there will be.\"\n\n\"War will mean an end to that,\" AuRon said. \"Your stonemasons will have to swing axes rather than hammers, your blacksmiths will make weapons instead of tools, and your laborers will carry spears rather than earth.\"\n\n\"Why build a kingdom when conquest gives?\"\n\n\"Unrush, you've seen battle. I fear your people will be fed into war, like charcoal into this firepit, to roast another's feast. I also tell you that the men on the other side of the Falnges know what is coming; you will find them prepared. Hieba told me as much.\n\n\"I will go away with her; an old friend calls. I may not return. You've shown wisdom in leading your people, and I wish to give you the cave, my books, all the dominion I asked in our original bargain. You have many good years left to live. Think of what you can build and leave for your family, your people, if you devote the rest of your days to their future, rather than risk them in war.\"\n\nUnrush leaned back, stunned. \"You would give Kraglad?\"\n\n\"The seat of the dragon-throne could be beneath the old statue.\"\n\n\"The sun-shard,\" Unrush mused.\n\n\"A gift to you and to your people. I hope you will take my advice and learn from the library. There are lifetimes' worth of wisdom there.\"\n\n\"My mind warned against war, though my heart lusted after it. I will follow my mind's path. You will live in our songs as the patron of a people.\"\n\nThe dawn came. Unrush's village woke to a brilliant summer dawn, a yellow sun set against the sky of the deepest blue. AuRon had not slept. His mind raced with the thought of leaving his cave, doubt and hope at war for his spirit.\n\nHe felt Hieba stir at his side. She yawned and joined a file of blighters going to the town's bathing spring, cranky children in tow.\n\nStaretz and his two ambassadors held court with Unrush and some of his people. AuRon picked out a few words: \"One war in my lifetime is enough\" and \"You toss away greatness for your people\" from Unrush and the ambassador Korutz respectively. Dragons do not smile naturally, but AuRon, having picked up the gesture somewhere or other, found his facial muscles pulling the ends of his mouth up at the news. Unrush had shown himself wiser than the venerable Staretz, and more persuasive, for his chieftains gathered behind him, symbolically backing him.\n\nThe magus left, surrounded by well-wishers, those wishing to have their fortunes told, and sufferers of disease or injury. AuRon craned his neck to look at the spring, where Hieba stood waiting her turn in a line of blighters for morning ablutions and cooking water. AuRon wanted to get her back to the cave. There were a few books he wanted and he needed Hieba's help to fashion bags to carry them away. Blighters tossed some of the bony remains of last night's dinner into a garbage pit outside the village walls, and AuRon slithered out to join the dogs in a hunt for leftover morsels, more out of competitive interest in stealing a choice tidbit from the hounds than real hunger. As he nosed among the bones, Staretz led his retinue out of the village on his hairy camel. The magus's face wore a mask of magnificent indifference to the rebuff. Blighters accept victory with song, and act as if defeat had not happened.\n\nAuRon was glad to have the distasteful camel smell out of his nose.\n\nScreams of pain and confusion rose from the village.\n\nAuRon raised his neck and looked over the stone-and-tree-trunk wall. Unrush was staggering up the steps to his house, hounded by blighters both of his village and the strangers. Korutz clung to his back, Unrush's long hair in his teeth. A knife splashed red blood on the water-smoothed stones as Korutz stabbed Unrush up under the rib cage. Unrush threw off his assailant and lashed out, but Korutz rolled to his feet, torn-out hair gripped between his teeth.\n\n\"To me, to me, my people!\" Unrush shouted from the door of his hut, spitting blood as he screamed. One of his fireblades put hand on hilt, but his mate gripped his arm.\n\nAuRon read death in Unrush's eyes as easily as the restraining female did.\n\nAnother blighter stepped forward and buried a spear in Unrush. AuRon's friend turned and looked at the shaft in wonder, as if it were some limb that had sprouted mysteriously from his body. He gripped it in both hands and collapsed to his knees. Another blighter stabbed him in the neck, and Korutz kicked him over, where he lay wetting his doorstep with his own blood.\n\nAuRon could not help Unrush, but he could avenge him. His fire bladder throbbed hot. He jumped onto the wall and bellowed a challenge of pure fury; he had no words for the rage he felt. He would make a pyre of this place\u2014 The blighter Balazeh emerged from the huts, dragging Hieba by arm and hair. Others clustered around her, seeking safety in her presence. AuRon came off the wall and toward them; the crowd shrank toward Unrush's great hut. Balazeh came to the forefront, holding a stabbing-spear tightly enough under Hieba's chin for blood to flow down her bosom. The tattooed veins on his neck stood out with the effort to keep her in his grasp.\n\n\"Dragon!\" Balazeh cried. \"What's done is done. We bear no ill will for you.\"\n\n\"Stab and burn, you filth!\" Hieba swore in the human tongue. \"AuRon, tear this creature's arms off!\"\n\nBalazeh showed no sign of understanding her. Everyone shouted and talked at once.\n\nAuRon reared up and raised his neck until his head swam. \"Let her go and I'll hear your terms,\" he said.\n\n\"Hear them now. The faint-hearted one is dead,\" Korutz said, waving his bloody dagger at the corpse. \"This is a matter for the Umazheh elders now, not for outsiders, however powerful.\" As he spoke, Balazeh dragged Hieba toward the door of Unrush's hut, where a number of the females had already disappeared. \"You return to your cave, and she will be released to walk back to you. On the journey, she will be watched; if you appear in the skies or on the ground before she reaches your cave, we'll loose an arrow through her.\"\n\nBalazeh turned at the door of Unrush's hut.\n\n\"Perhaps an offering of cattle and sheep as well will satisfy? We can be friends again.\"\n\nAuRon lowered his head and took a step toward the crowd on the stairs. He snapped his teeth shut, and the clack echoed from the village walls.\n\nAt the sound, Unrush's body twitched. The bloody body rolled over. Only AuRon saw the turn, every other pair of eyes was on him.\n\n\"I must think.... Cattle, eh?\"\n\nUnrush crawled to his door, pulling his body along with one arm, leaving a wet trail.\n\n\"Fat cattle, heavy with the summer's feeding. And sheep,\" Balazeh said, his eyes alight. He kept the blade of the stabbing-spear to Hieba's throat, but he pulled its point from her chin. \"You have my word.\"\n\nAuRon had to give Unrush his chance. \"How many cattle?\" he asked.\n\n\"A five counted five times, five over. Yearly.\"\n\nUsing a sii claw, AuRon drew a circle in the dirt and filled it with a stick-figure of a man, arms and legs outstretched. \"This sign will hold your vow.\"\n\nBalazeh trembled as he looked at the sign. \"The Wyrmmaster's power praised be.\"\n\nEvery movement wrote further pain on Unrush's face, but the crippled figure still crept along the wall of his hut. He reached to his waist and found what he sought.\n\nUnrush opened his mouth and sank his teeth into Balazeh's ankle. His ceremonial dagger flashed up, held in his good arm, and cut across the back of the assassin's knee. Balazeh shrieked, and Hieba broke from his grasp.\n\nAuRon sprang. The blue sky turned red, the yellow sun into an angry orange eye.\n\nThe blighters fell under his fury like wheat caught in the crook of a scythe. He crushed Balazeh's skull in his claw before backarming Korutz so hard that he flew over the village wall. He loosed his fire bladder upon hut and pen, and a frightened wail rose like a storm's wind. He caught up a screaming blighter in his jaws and bit down until he felt his teeth join inside its belly. He swept his tail across the village square\u2014where only a few hours ago, celebrants had danced\u2014and dashed a trio of blighters against a hut wall. Nothing lived within his reach, save Hieba.\n\nHieba was the only figure who ran toward him. The rest fled. She jumped onto his back; his head whipped back, and he almost bit her, so mindless was his anger in the fight. He lifted his head and spat fire into a grain pit.\n\n\"AuRon, it's over. It's over now,\" Hieba said.\n\nThe red color faded. Colors took on their normal hue.\n\nHe touched Unrush with his nose, but the blighter showed no sign of life. Unrush's teeth still held pieces of tendon from Balazeh in a death grip, but the wrinkled eyes were vacant. AuRon ran his tongue across the Umazheh's face, shutting the staring gaze.\n\nAn arrow whistled under his chin.\n\n\"AuRon, enough, let's go,\" she urged.\n\nAuRon remembered the burning poison the blighter darts bore and raised his wings. He launched himself into the sky, leaving wind-driven flame and raised dust behind.\n\nAuRon fought headwinds all the way west. The landscape crawled beneath them, belying their speed toward the falling sun. They left the mountains and crossed the tributary of the Falnges far above where it joined the larger river. Beneath them, on the banks above the blighter settlement, a warlike camp stood on the peninsula of a pear-shaped bend in the river under hilltop watch-towers. Warrior blighters built walls and boats from the ample timber, ready to transport a great army downriver.\n\nAn hour's flight downstream, they came to the town of the river-men. The settlement had grown since AuRon had last seen it. Mines of some kind scarred the hills around it, and men waded into the current to gather the lumber floated down the river from the loggers. They were in Dairuss.\n\nThey found a secluded field, and AuRon landed. Hieba climbed off his neck, hardly able to move after a full day's flight. \"How far have we come?\" she groaned.\n\n\"We're across into the headwaters of the Falnges.\"\n\n\"You've left your cave, your library, everything. Just because I asked.\"\n\nThat was not quite true. AuRon still had a few books, Djer's ring, and the dwarsaw, secreted in the pouch of skin that held his armored fans.\n\n\"After what happened back there, it will be a brave blighter that goes in my cave for a few years. Nothing there matters. I would like to talk to Naf, and there's a dwarf to whom I owe much that I haven't seen in years.\"\n\n\"Dairuss is not a rich land, AuRon. There are terrible tragedies happening on the other side of the mountains, around the Inland Ocean. Naf knows about it more than I; I just know that our land has more and more people coming through the passes every month. They sicken, they starve. The Silver Guard turns away many more, and none can say what happens to them.\"\n\n\"What do they flee? War? Starvation? Disease?\"\n\n\"It is dragons, AuRon, a plague of dragons. Naf can tell you more. He's spoken to many of the elves and dwarves.\"\n\n\"Dragons? If it is so, I cannot blame them. My kind are hunted wherever they live, from the deepest cave to the highest peak. If you expect me to fight against my own kin, just trying to protect home and clutch\u2014\"\n\n\"AuRon, I don't think it's like that. These dragons are slaves of men, who ride them into battle as the Ironriders do horses. The dragons do the bidding of another, and his orders are harsh.\"\n\n\"Does he have an signet?\"\n\nHieba rubbed her thighs, thinking. \"Yes, I've heard tale of a golden circle, with an open-armed man within. Do you know aught of it?\"\n\n\"Only a piece or two in a long chain of events, at most. Barbarians from the north, a wizard... and an old wrong.\" He thought of the emblem that had once rested on his snout. \"I wonder who knows the full tale?\"\n\n\"Naf may introduce you to the one. It is she who said we must seek you out.\"\n\nZanakan, the City of the Golden Dome, stood between two long arms of mountain. Old battlements, fallen into ruin, traced the ridges down to a stronger wall and gate below. Wood and stone stood in the gaps of older, greater battlements like scarecrows standing where soldiers should be. It was a strange sort of city, AuRon thought as he circled above it. More people lived outside the walls than within, judging from the occupied shacks and tended cooking fires. A broad loop of the Falnges writhed between the sheep-covered hills to the city's gates. A stone wharf and wooden piers covered a length of riverfront that rivaled the great ports below the falls, but AuRon could discern little activity at the river. There were many boats, but sails had been converted to tentage, and lines that should have held up masts tied boat to boat or pier.\n\nAlarm horns blew from the steps of the Golden Dome, a star-shaped structure with six points radiating from the dome-covering. This landmark, a legacy of Tindairuss, gave the city its fame and name.\n\n\"Don't go any lower,\" Hieba shouted. \"Crossbowmen wait in those towers around the dome. Go into the mountains\u2014there's a watchpost high on the north side. Can you see the trail leading to it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"There's a ledge big enough for you. Land there.\"\n\nAuRon had seen the spot she described\u2014his distance-vision rivaled an eagle's,\u2014but there was no need to boast to a weak-eyed human.\n\n\"Are there men with crossbows there?\"\n\n\"Yes, but when they see me, they'll not shoot. The scouts of the Silver Guard call Highhold home. They know me.\"\n\nAuRon still made a fast pass over the stone stairs of the tiny castle clinging to the side of the mountain like a barnacle on a breakwater. No stinging arrows rose, and he turned and made a slower pass below the arrow slits set in the side of the structure, giving the watchers a good view of Hieba. He saw a landing spot before a door in the side of the castle. The men had planted a flower garden on their doorstep with dirt hauled from below. AuRon did his best to land without crushing the blooms, but his hind leg still inadvertently stomped a row of flowering ferns.\n\nFaces appeared at the windows, and an iron-banded door opened.\n\n\"By the hair of a she-elf, she did it,\" a man called to his fellows within.\n\nAuRon felt Hieba sag upon his back. She climbed off his back and fell to her knees. She kissed the gray-green stones of the mountain and looked up at the Sun.\n\n\"Thank you, blessed life-giver,\" she said.\n\nMen streamed from the fort until fourteen stood in the courtyard. Two more remained at their stations on the battlements, looking out at the mountain pass to the north and plains to the east.\n\n\"Beyond our hopes! Hieba, little darkling, you've come back,\" a man said. He was as craggy and pocked as the mountain, and topped by the same white crown.\n\nHieba flew to him. \"Evfan, you old condor, you haven't drawn your allotment yet? Worried that the valley air will kill you?\"\n\nEvfan planted a kiss on her forehead. \"It's quieter up here nowadays. We've missed you, and so has the commander. My heart stopped for a moment when I saw the wings come up out of the east. I thought it was our turn.\"\n\n\"Has the war come that close?\"\n\n\"They burned out Enderad and Ilslis on the other side of the Paired Passes. What's left of the Apatian elves are scattered in the valleys or outside these walls.\"\n\nA youth wearing his first beard against the cool of the heights spoke up. \"The queen is stalling, but she cannot assuage the emissary forever. There are those in the city who are sick of elvish refugees and their pious airs, and tales of woe from dwarvish beggars.\"\n\nEvfan's eyes narrowed. \"Scabbard your tongue, boy. What I allow to be said among men of the guard at table and what is permitted in front of guests are shields of different greathouses.\"\n\n\"Yes, guideon,\" the boy said.\n\n\"Hieba, if I'm to be part of these affairs, I want all made clear to me,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Evfan, perhaps your new stag could run down the mountain with a message that I've returned? Does my lord want me to keep AuRon here, or have circumstances changed so that we need to find a refuge for him elsewhere?\"\n\n\"The Silver Guard stands loyal, first to the queen and then to Commander Naf, little raven. Much else has changed, but that remains true. We've a good stock of salted meat here, and if what I know of dragon's eating, and excreting, is true\u2014we'll be able to plant a new garden before the snow comes.\"\n\nThe scouts of the Silver Guard emerged from their castle, curiosity finally getting the better of their fear. They wore soft leather boots and gray uniforms of thick wool. Bright, silvery sashes crossed under their weapons belts, save on the officers, who wore theirs over their shoulder. They carried little ax-hammers in soft sheaths across their backs. Manlike, they crossed over from fear to overfamiliarity in a twinkling. The men patted AuRon's flank and examined his claws as if he were a horse at auction.\n\n\"You wouldn't think those wings could fold into nothing, but they do,\" a veteran said, running his hand along the tight mass of skin and bone covering AuRon's back and flanks. \"Seems like if you get in under the arms, you'd kill it easy enough.\"\n\nAuRon turned his long neck to face the man, and extended his griff from his crest, doubling the size of his head as his snout poked the man in the shoulder.\n\n\"Yiy!\" he shouted, jumping back against the little wall at the edge of the cliff.\n\n\"Careful, or you'll learn about dragon fire the hot way,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"No offense, skyking,\" one of the soldiers said, stepping in front of his startled officer.\n\n\"As long as you keep your hands to yourselves, there will be none.\"\n\n\"Dragons are much on our mind,\" the older one said. \"There's war on the other sides of these mountains. There are dragons in it, dozens of them, or so I've heard.\"\n\n\"I've food on my mind, not rumor.\"\n\nEvfan intervened. \"Getting acquainted can wait. Open a cask of pork and a cask of beef for our guest. Flying's hard work, judging from the birds and their appetites.\"\n\n\"And dragons get irascible when they're hungry,\" Hieba said, stepping under AuRon's chin and rubbing the soft spot under his long jaw.\n\nFood and snowmelt put AuRon into a better mood, though the heavily salted meat made his head throb. He slept in a tight ball in the corner between the mountainside and the cliff-clinging castle, out of most of the wind. His rest was disturbed by two runners that came up the long trail down to the city, but they only had messages to be passed farther into the mountain passes. The wiry men rather reminded AuRon of Blackhard's wolves; they had the same cautious eyes and fleshless frames.\n\n\"Say nothing of the dragon, if you value your allotments,\" Evfan said, seeing them out the door to the path down the farther side of the mountain. \"It's a matter for the Silver Guard, by the queen's order.\"\n\nAuRon settled back down and dozed until dawn. The sight of the sun coming up over the flat lands to the east, dyeing the morning mists of the Falnges orange. AuRon forgot his concerns and took in the sunrise. Existence was a long march from despair to despair, but there were spots of beauty along the way.\n\nHe wished for a mate and hatchlings to whom he could pass the picture.\n\nHieba and Evfan appeared, she at the castle door and he on the parapet above.\n\n\"There are people on the trail,\" Evfan said. \"Three. Could be the commander. He'd get that far if he was outside the high wall before dawn, as is his way.\"\n\nAuRon uncurled himself, stretched from nose to tail-tip, and followed Hieba to the cliff wall. He looked at the long path snaking down the mountainside, and saw three hominids on the ascent. After his search of the valley and the plain, Evfan joined them at the wall.\n\n\"The big one could be Naf,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"I hope so. I haven't seen him in nearly a year. It took that long to find you.\"\n\nThe three inched up the path, at this distance looking like ants ascending a difficult twig. Two helped a third along.\n\n\"It is Naf, no question,\" AuRon said. \"Another man in a hunter's cape, and a third, cloaked. The cloaked one is shorter than the other two, perhaps a woman. Whoever she is, she's not used to mountain climbing.\"\n\n\"By the seven prophets, I hope it's not the queen,\" Evfan said. \"We've got nothing fit to serve her. Salted meat, biscuit, and dried fish for the queen? Soldier's wine?\"\n\n\"The queen doesn't dare step outside her gardens without escort,\" Hieba said. \"It's not the queen, or any other Ghioz. They'd have us come down to them. They are Ghioz, after all.\"\n\n\"Scabbard your tongue, Hieba,\" Evfan said, veering from his worries about the contents of his larder. \"That sort of talk might get you a bad name, and you're to be the wife of the Commander of the Silver Guard.\"\n\n\"Since when is there an edict against truth?\"\n\n\"There's private truth and public truth, girl.\"\n\nThe humans lapsed into welcome silence, allowing AuRon to watch the climbers. When they grew close enough to wave, Hieba jumped down the path like a running deer.\n\n\"To be that young again,\" Evfan mused to himself.\n\nAuRon saw Hieba run into Naf's arms. He felt a spasm in his fire bladder; gladness at Hieba's joy folded under a crest of jealousy. Naf would take Hieba away again, leaving him lonelier than before.\n\nNaf still wore the silver circled about his long hair. He had filled out since AuRon had last seen him as a desert-lean bandit: his neck was thick with muscle and the lines around his mouth and eyes deep with age and cares. AuRon could no more judge human beauty than he could talk to the stars, but Naf's face still looked as though it was put together from two different halves. The cloaked figure squatted and rested while the lovers embraced, and the third, the man in the hunting cloak, scratched a red beard and looked out on the vista of city, river and plain.\n\nThe four continued up the mountain, Naf and Hieba holding hands as they picked along the trail. They covered the short distance left easily, except for the cloaked figure, who paused at the edge of the outlook. AuRon could hear wheezy breathing from beneath the cowl.\n\nAuRon sniffed, but smelled only thick man-scent and traces of charcoal on the cloak.\n\n\"You know... me gray... we once... did trust... one another,\" she said, lowering her hood to reveal a scarred face and hair like hoarfrost in the sunshine. It was Hazeleye, her hair bristling with pine needles. \"It is him,\" she continued, gaining her breath back. \"It's tiny now, but he still has his egg horn. I've never known a dragon to keep it, save this beast.\"\n\nNaf approached, and grabbed him by the loose skin at his jaw joint. The man stared down AuRon's snout. He saw brushstrokes of gray at his temples. \"Old beast. Somehow I knew we weren't through yet.\"\n\n\"Old? Not a phrase I'd choose for myself. I am yet young, not even three score years of age; I've still a hundred winters before I'm counted in my prime.\"\n\n\"There is still one here you do not know,\" Naf said. \"This is Hischhein, counselor to the queen, of the ruling house of Ghioz.\"\n\n\"Welcome to our land, young dragon,\" Hischhein said. For a courtier, he spoke the tongue of the Dairuss with a thick accent. \"This is a long-hoped-for day.\"\n\nThe elf looked at the whitecapped mountains. \"And a cool one, even in summer. I wouldn't care to pass a winter at this post.\"\n\n\"Shall we talk inside?\" Hieba asked.\n\n\"No,\" Hazeleye said. \"What I've come to tell is best done under clean sunlight.\"\n\nThe Silver Guard brought out chairs of wood and fur, and the visitors sat.\n\n\"We have dark news, too,\" Hieba said. \"There is war coming from the east, out of the Bissonian Heights and beyond. The blighters are building boats for a descent of the Falnges.\"\n\n\"They will come in the tens of thousands,\" AuRon said. \"Not just from the river, but in chariots as of old.\"\n\n\"The queen's diplomacy has not bought us the time we had hoped, then,\" Hischhein said, rubbing his brows together in thought. \"They may mean to catch us unawares.\"\n\n\"If you've brought me here to fight\u2014,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"All in good time, AuRon,\" Naf said. \"We know there is only so much one dragon can do. We have a great favor to ask, more dangerous than battle, but more hopeful, as well.\"\n\n\"Let him hear all in its proper order,\" Hazeleye said. \"He has little reason to love elf, dwarf, or man, if I know much of the lives of dragons these days.\"\n\n\"The dwarves were good enough to him, from what I saw,\" Naf said.\n\n\"You weren't at the raid on his nest cave,\" Hazeleye said. \"I was. AuRon, war has come out of the north; its source is the very island and the very man you were destined for when we were on the ship. It is not a war of territory, of conquest, of loot, of pride, of women, of any of the reasons that take sword from sheath and fill the sky with arrows. It is a war of death. Barbarians come from the misty north only to kill and supplant. There are no slaves taken, no prisoners exchanged, no children spared unless they are human. It is a race war, pitting man against elf and dwarf. Blighters fight as allies of the men, for now at least, but I've read tomes of the Wizard of the Isle of Ice. He means to clean the earth of them, as well.\"\n\n\"This is the Wyrmmaster?\" AuRon asked. \"The wizard within the circle of man?\"\n\n\"Where did you hear this?\" Hazeleye asked.\n\n\"From blighters preparing for war.\"\n\n\"He doesn't seek power for himself, but for his kind. Even men who oppose him are counted his enemy and murdered. He wishes to usher in an age of men, to fulfill what he calls Man's First Destiny. I've heard weary hours of it, and have no wish to belabor you.\"\n\n\"Hominids killing each other off, even in race war, is nothing new. I know your history.\"\n\nHischhein shook his head. \"This is not a kingdom or two. This is war on a scale never before seen. From the rolling ocean to the west to the myriad isles of the east, he means to clear the land for the sons and daughters of men. Elves, dwarves, blighters, and yes, I believe even dragons are to be swept away.\"\n\n\"I thought he used dragons.\"\n\n\"He does,\" Hazeleye said. \"As slaves. As warhorses. The dragons he has have no more free will than... than...\"\n\nThan an exploding pig? AuRon thought to himself.\n\n\"...than a hawk trained to bring down a duck.\" Hazeleye finished, then added in Elvish. \"And I'm the cause of it all.\"\n\nAuRon met her gaze, trying to read further in her eye.\n\n\"What's that?\" Hischhein asked.\n\n\"A curse,\" Hazeleye said.\n\n\"He's ordered them to do more than hunt, AuRon,\" Naf said. \"They wreck cities, devour and scatter herds, pull down bridges, sink boats\u2014\"\n\n\"I've seen it firsthand, Naf,\" Hazeleye said. \"AuRon, I gave up hunting dragons after that last trip. The ship docked and offloaded the other two hatchlings. Some of the Iceislers gave me a tough time for losing you. If they had known I'd loosed you, there's no telling what they would have done. Even the lowliest dockhand muttered about 'elvish indolence' loudly enough for me to hear. One of the beastmasters raised his hand to me, if you can believe it. I gave him the toe of my boot where he won't soon forget it, and I bit another's earlobe off.\" She clicked her teeth together for emphasis.\n\n\"I set to training hunting dogs and falcons. I'd had enough roaming, so I settled in Krakenoor, city of the bluewater elves and of my youth, and it's approaches are thick with elves who've rooted for their Last Age to be near it. Krakenoor's older than any land of men. 'Twas a beautiful old place; there was the Wetside built so it floated out on the Inland Ocean, and the Dryside.\"\n\n\"I've read of it,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"You missed your chance to see it, unless torn pilings and fallen walls are of architectural interest. Krakenoor is no more. Alas! for its old boardwalks and water gardens. Perhaps we'd lived in peace too long, with friends to the north and primitives to the south. The dragons came at dawn, two dozen if there was one, flying in from the sea low enough for their wingtips to raise white splashes where they brushed the sea. They tore through the fishing fleet as it was heading out, capsizing the larger boats and knocking the bottoms out of the cockleshells. I had a view. I was out with my osprey on the cliffs above the Dryside, south of the old watchtower. There were dragons larger than you, AuRon, with pairs of men atop neck and haunch, in sort of basket-saddles to either side. Others were your length or smaller, following the great ones, some with riders and some without.\n\n\"They divided. A pair of big ones and most of the little ones bore in to the sea-fortress on the Wetside harbor mouth. It has withstood tempests, surf, and war, but never such a storm as this. The timbers were thick with paint, and the firebuckets weren't enough for dragon-foua. Orange fire, reflecting the rising sun, broke out in a dozen places, but especially near the longbridge connecting the Wetside to the Dryside. Elves who didn't wish to burn to death leaped into the bay, but were met by wingless drakes.\"\n\nHazeleye shuddered, then went on. \"Dryside put up a fight. The elves in the citadel made it to the towers and walls. My own eyes caught Lord Fairwind in the courtyard with his seven-foot bow of yew. I've seen him draw it at festivals, the bow cosseted in his right foot as he pulls the string with both hands to his eye while balancing on the other leg. He can drive a lead-cored arrow deep enough into an oak so the feathers are all that can be seen of the shaft. He put one of his steel-tipped arrows into the neck of a great dragon, bringing it and its riders down in the old wood-chapel. As he ran from the fire of others, I saw another dragon fly in and seize him from behind. It dashed him against the Citadel's walls.\n\n\"I hardly have the heart to tell the rest. I ran and hid among some brush on the far side of the tower, which was pushed over into the sea. Men came in from the sea in longboats with the heads and tails of dragons fore-and-aft. The dragons hunted any elves who tried to flee, and the men came for murder, not for plunder. Even the smallest babes in swaddling clothes were spitted on the broken timbers of the city, before all was set aflame. The dragons attached some sort of iron contraption to the ends of their tails, and began to smash things up. The dragons saw to it that no stone stood upon another. They broke the foundations of the tower with tailswipes and pushed it with elves still screaming inside into the sea.\n\n\"The dragons rested in the ruins of the city feasting on their prey, then roared inland. Those who had hurt themselves in battle went afoot, the rest aloft. Death and destruction passed over me time and again until the merest flutter of a crow's wings put me on my face in the undergrowth.\n\n\"I lay there, watching, praying for the sun to hurry across the sky before I was discovered. When darkness came I started east.\"\n\n\"We know they've served the dwarves, and men who will not join them, likewise,\" Hischhein said, his face wet with the story of Hazeleye's grief. \"It is always the same. The dragons see to it that there is no rumor of approaching war. They come in sudden fury from the darkness, and the men follow to take advantage of the chaos. Ancient Hypat wears a circlet of burned cities, and it will be the next to fall, I fear. The Wizard of the Isle of Ice has sent an ambassador to my cousin, our queen. He thinks the Dairuss a barbarian people, an opinion perhaps many of the Ghioz shared until this last lesson in true barbarity. The queen plays for time, shows him preparations for war, which are in truth preparations for our defense. Our good cousins in Hypat will find their eastern doors held while we still live.\"\n\n\"The queen's first duty is to her people,\" Naf said. \"She could spare her land much grief by becoming an ally of this far-off wizard. The people already complain about the refugees from the other side of the mountains. When they hear that war is coming out of the east, they may force her to choose the wizard's side.\"\n\nHischhein looked at Naf in blank astonishment. \"The Dairuss are ignorant of politics. I am surprised that you, commander of our foremost forces, would even think such thoughts, leave alone give voice to them. Those words, which I will endeavor to forget, could cost you your command.\"\n\nAuRon saw that Naf's eyes were alight with battle. \"Hischhein, the Dairuss aren't as ignorant of the affairs at court as you think. Chamberlains tell stories more interesting than who has a certain green-eyed smoke-dancer brought to his suite at night.\"\n\n\"How-how-how dare\u2014,\" Hischhein sputtered.\n\nNaf lunged. The explosive energy in coiled body flashed out, turning over the furred chairs, and he pushed Hischhein across the low wall and over the edge of the cliff. At the last moment, he grabbed the Ghioz's ankles.\n\n\"Naf, to attack the Ghioz is death!\" Hieba shouted, running to him.\n\nAuRon stretched his neck so it hung over the abyss, and saw the interesting sight of Hischhein thrashing like a fish on a line\u2014enmeshed in his own mountain cloak\u2014with his back against the cliff wall. Naf's muscles bulged as he held the man's feet at his chest. Naf ignored Hieba's attempts to aid Hischhein.\n\n\"The queen will sell us out, am I right? She plots with this ambassador to join the war. She'll sell us as slaves and open the falls to the blighters!\"\n\n\"No! No! Help, men of the Guard, seize him!\"\n\nNaf released his grip, and Hischhein screamed as he dropped, but Naf grabbed his feet again.\n\n\"The next drop will be farther, and every man will swear you had a seizure and fell. Tell the truth, and my guides will see you over the mountain to the borders of Hypat. You have my oath. Do you witness it, Evfan?\"\n\n\"I do hear your oath.\"\n\n\"No, you are wrong. The queen is true to her duty. What put such thoughts into your head? Put me before this witness who slanders the queen and let me defend her.\"\n\n\"My forearms ache to let you go.\"\n\nHischhein ceased his struggle. \"Then drop me and be damned as a murderer by the gods you hold dear, Naf. I'll die with a clear conscience, and you'll die with my murder on your soul.\"\n\nNaf took a deep breath and pulled the Ghioz up. Hischhein's face was red and flushed as Naf let him breathe.\n\n\"Sir, forgive his madness,\" Hieba pleaded, on her knees before Hischhein. She kissed his feet in desperation, and AuRon felt his sii claws slide within their sheaths.\n\nNaf kneeled and bowed his head. \"You have my apologies, Counselor, but I had to be sure. The Silver Guard will stand true to the queen, now that we know the queen is true to us. But I'd heard that she's become intimate with this ambassador, and has had him brought to her bedchamber in secret.\"\n\nHischhein's eyes widened. \"I am deep in court secrets, and I have not heard this.\"\n\n\"No one knows more secrets than a washerwoman. The same one who does the queen's sheets attends to my bedclothes. She gets all the gossip from the chambermaids. I pay her well.\"\n\n\"You've more layers than an onion, Commander. I shouldn't want you as an enemy.\"\n\nAuRon curled himself on the ledge like a great hunting cat of southern jungles. \"Naf, I wait to hear how I fit into this.\"\n\n\"That was my job, dragon,\" Hischhein said. \"I want you to know I speak for the queen on this matter. She will offer you mountain, forest, and plainland on our southern borders to live as you will, with the soldiers of Dairuss seeing that you are not disturbed, if you will help us in our need.\"\n\n\"The promises of man rarely outlast a generation, Counselor,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Our queen rules not just by word, but by law, as well. She obeys the laws laid down by previous rulers and their Council. Were we to break this, all would be weakened. Besides, a dragon on our southern borders will discourage invasion from the barbarians farther south.\"\n\n\"Would that you were dwarves! They get to the point with half the words.\"\n\n\"Very well. May I call you AuRon?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Hazeleye has told us something of your past. Our enemy is the one that ordered your family hunted out of the mountains, that the eggs and young of your parents might be taken. I do not know what sort of filial loyalty dragons have, but beyond that, he has done likewise to other dragons on the other side of the Inland Ocean, or so Hazeleye tells us. We know very little of this Isle of Ice, save that it is a foggy place surrounded by treacherous rocks, and no strangers get outside the port.\"\n\n\"They know this not only from me, but from others, as well,\" Hazeleye said. \"None have been beyond the port at the glacier bay.\"\n\n\"You need a dragon to fly over it, and spy out his land?\"\n\nHischhein looked uncomfortable. \"Much more than that. We'd like you to join the other dragons under the wizard. Serve in this flying army of his. And when you get the opportunity, kill him.\"\n\nAuRon's blood coursed hot with anger. He saw the people, speaking to him as through red gauze.\n\n\"So I am to be an assassin?\" AuRon asked. \"I've learned to hate that word. An assassin is a sneak. Am I to worm my way into the cave of his enemy to kill him as he sleeps?\"\n\n\"He's made slaves of your brethren, AuRon,\" Hieba said. \"It's not just elves and dwarves dying\u2014dragons fall in this war, too. He has them under some spell.\"\n\n\"This war will lay waste to ancient lands and nations,\" Hazeleye said. \"Barbarians will fill the void. A civilization built by elves, men, and dwarves that goes back further than any in living memory will be gone, with savages squatting in the doorways of monuments whose making they could never comprehend.\"\n\n\"No more writing, no more music\u2014,\" Hieba began.\n\n\"My friends, I came here thinking you were in danger. Take my advice. Ally yourself with this wizard. If you cannot defeat him, you might as well spare yourselves extinction. Adapt to the new world. That is what I am trying to do.\"\n\n\"I see the legendary selfishness of dragons is not exaggerated,\" Hischhein said. \"Even when it comes to their own people.\"\n\n\"What about the favor you owe me, AuRon?\" Hazeleye said.\n\n\"I've heard you out without roasting you. That favor is paid. Count yourself lucky that after you freed me, I did not dedicate my life to hunting down those who slaughtered my parents and sisters.\"\n\n\"Do you know both sisters are dead, AuRon?\" Hazeleye asked.\n\n\"Jizara stayed by Mother's side. You know as well as I that they both died. Wistala made it out of the cave with me, and I heard of her death from her slayer, the Dragonblade.\"\n\n\"I knew the man. He was skilled, but a braggart when it came to telling scores. She may still live.\"\n\nAuRon felt his hearts stop for a moment. He took a deep breath, trying to fight hope.\n\nHazeleye let that sink in for a moment before continuing. \"AuRon, I made a fortune, now lost again, capturing dragons for this wizard. He paid triple, triple his bounty for healthy female hatchlings. I was not the only hunter. There is a possibility that your Wistala may be on his island even now, as his thrall. If I were to guess where in the wide world she was, if she still lives, it would be there.\"\n\nDeep pain drove a spike through AuRon, further angering him. He wanted to roar and stomp, lose the hurt awakened in him in an orgy of death. But he fought down the emotions and hugged his body to the mountainside. The cool rock under his chin soothed him.\n\n\"I must think,\" AuRon said. \"Leave me to listen to the wind for a while.\"\n\nThe hominids filed inside, Hieba under Naf's arm. AuRon felt a seep of jealousy, but the girl belonged with other humans. Naf turned her for the door, but at the last second she broke away from his grip and ran to AuRon. She flung her arms about his neck.\n\n\"Father,\" she said. \"Whatever you do, wherever you go, my heart is there, too. I'll always remember you.\"\n\n\"Berrysweet, I'm not going anywhere just yet. I've still to reconcile mind and heart.\"\n\nAuRon looked north for a long stretch of silent hours. Naf came out and offered him food, but he had eaten well the previous day and was not hungry as yet. He watched the shadows change as the sun crossed over to the west, watching them lengthen and then dissolve into the night. The stars came out. AuRon wandered in memory, and circled back again and again to something Mother had said. Once you've fixed on your star, you'll know where you are for the rest of your life.\n\nHe looked at the star, the star the Bowing Dragon pointed to. His star.\n\nIt led north.\n\nAuRon hovered outside the castle, sailing on the mountain winds, rather proud of himself, for a heavier dragon could not manage the trick without much beating of the wings.\n\n\"Naf! Naf!\" he called through the shuttered windows.\n\nHe heard curtains being pulled aside and Naf opened the wind-shutters. A hint of stove-light framed his powerful shoulders and Hieba stood behind, clinging to him.\n\n\"Have you settled your mind?\" Naf asked, almost shouting.\n\n\"I'll go north. What you have in mind may be impossible. I may not even meet this wizard. I can't see him trusting some dragon out of the wild. Covering myself in blood and offal won't do it this time.\"\n\n\"Even information would be valuable. If we knew ahead of time where and when the dragons were coming, we would do better.\"\n\n\"I will do all I can. Keep well, Naf, for your sake and Hieba's.\"\n\nNaf took Hieba's hand. \"I will, friend.\"\n\n\"Hieba, thank you for coming back to me.\"\n\nAuRon didn't wait for a reply, but folded his wings and shot down the mountainside like a diving hawk. He spread his wings again at the bottom of the mountain, feeling the pressure-change, and swooped off to the north. The Bowing Dragon showed him the way.\n\nAuRon followed the Falnges and saw the familiar landing of Wallander. The towers were gone, perhaps they had not returned yet from their yearly run. There were only three lights in all the town's space, and AuRon smelled hardly a hint of dwarf. He rested farther downstream, out of sight of the settlement.\n\nIf the blighters meant to descend through the mountain gap, the Dwarves of the Diadem stood in their path like a stopper blocking a bottle's mouth. The falls of the Falnges marked the only break in the mountains east of Hypat, and the Delvings controlled the falls. Putting himself in the seat of his enemy, AuRon wondered if this wizard knew the importance of the iron trail linking the top and the bottom of the falls. If he did, he would certainly strike the dwarves to open the way for the eastern forces now gathering. AuRon had to warn the dwarves; he owed Djer and the others that much.\n\nThe next day he saw the familiar mountaintops of his birth range. An hour's northward flight, and he'd be able to land on the cave ledge from which he and Wistala had gotten their first look at the Upper World. But he had no time for sightseeing in the Iwensi gap.\n\nThere was little river traffic. It seemed strange that in the intervening years the river had grown emptier of boats. The ones he did see pulled for the bank as fast as they could at his appearance, and even they were not cargo ships but smaller vessels taking traffic from one side to the other.\n\nThe landing at the top of the iron trail was even emptier. AuRon spotted a cluster of dwarves sheltering under some trees near the wharf despite the dwarves' attempt to conceal themselves. He saw arrow points balanced on fingers holding bows. He tipped his body and glided away out of range. A single sweeping look at the landing told him all he needed to know: broken ships, a smashed dock, carts knocked off their iron rails all said that the dragons had been there.\n\nHe flew over the first of the falls, a series of white steps bordered by sandy washes. Sparkling mist threw a rainbow. AuRon saw the shattered front of a river-ship resting alongside the bank. The wood had not yet reached the sun-drained color of driftwood. The ship must have died recently. AuRon floated through the deepening canyon, flying over fall after fall. A crossbow bolt flew down from one of the cliffs as he rode the swirling air currents above a roaring waterfall, but it fell well short. The river turned in a sweeping curve west, slowing and widening before the last fall, and AuRon finally spotted the rocky peak of the Delvings framed by the setting sun.\n\nThough the carven tower was in ruins, the flag of the Dwarves of the Chartered Company fluttered on a makeshift staff above the smashed masonry. The Delvings still lived.\n\nAuRon flew to the lower landing and circled on the confused air coming up from the boiling water of the last falls. A pair of dead wraxapods\u2014giant bones still held together by a few strips of sinew and crawling with crows\u2014lay in the mud near the landing. A wraxapod calf grazed upwind from the bodies in an open field.\n\nThere had been fighting at the Delvings. The balconies were blackened and blasted. Fine woodwork had been reduced to char; metal rings rattled on rods in the wind where curtains had once stood. AuRon saw no bodies of dwarf or dragon, so some must still remain within the Delvings. AuRon dropped from the sky, sliding right and left on the air currents and keeping out of crossbow range. The sun shone into the openings on the mountainside, but the galleries were as empty as the eyeholes in a skull. Perhaps\u2014 A sapling-length shaft shot up from the ruins, whistling as its forged feathers cut the air. AuRon twisted in the sky, and the oversize spear punched through his wing, still rising. AuRon flapped upward and watched the missile at last tumble and plunge into the river. The dwarves must have mighty war-machines in one of the caverns.\n\nAuRon would get nowhere with the dwarves in the Delvings; he could shout all he wanted, but from a safe distance he could not be heard over the roar of the falls. He was reluctant to try the door he had entered with Djer years ago. It was undoubtedly guarded by further war-machines. He looked over at the field with the wraxapod calf. The dwarves would not leave a valuable animal unattended.\n\nSure enough, a pair of dwarves was pulling at a chain about the calf's elephant-height neck. AuRon turned and flapped over to the field. The herders dropped their leads and ran for the trees.\n\n\"I mean you no harm,\" AuRon called. \"I'm an old friend of the Diadem\u2014I can prove it.\"\n\nThe dwarves did not stop for conversation until they were well under the trees. \"We'll listen to no more ultimatums, dragon!\" a voice shouted from the undergrowth. It echoed oddly. The dwarf was using some kind of speaking-trumpet that made the sound hard to place. \"This is not a war of our starting, but unless you're here to beg for peace through our mercy, you're wasting your time.\"\n\n\"I've nothing to do with the others. I seek Djer, a Partner in the Chartered Company. I bear his signet.\"\n\n\"Djer? He's in no shape to talk, dragon. The work of your kind.\"\n\nAuRon felt a stab, a pain fiercer than the wound in his wing. \"May I alight in safety?\"\n\n\"We'll do nothing to harm you. What's left of our warriors are all at the Delvings.\"\n\nAuRon landed, frightening the wraxapod calf so that it lumbered away trailing its chain leads, bleating in fear. AuRon sniffed, looked, and listened before approaching the trees where the voice had come from.\n\n\"I've a ring belonging to Djer with me.\"\n\n\"Leave it and go to the other side of the field.\"\n\nAuRon obeyed, his tail lashing in impatience. He placed the ring on a stump in the field and strode away. Djer was a brave dwarf; it would be like him to be at the forefront of a battle.\n\nThe dwarf, a beardless youngster, crept out of the trees, face enclosed by thick layers of wrapped cloth examining first the meadow, then the sky. He snatched up the ring and then ran back into the trees.\n\nAfternoon had turned to twilight before another dwarf returned, a dwarf in chain mail with his beard cut short so it would not become entangled in his armor.\n\n\"By the Golden Tree, it is the Gray Dragon,\" the dwarf muttered to the wraxapod herder. The dwarf raised his mask. He had the staring look of one who had seen much fighting.\n\n\"Dragon, I've spent so much time cursing your kind, I've forgotten your name. But I've seen you before, among the towers and in battle. I was there when you stopped the charge of the Ironriders with your fire.\"\n\n\"AuRon is the name, and thank you for coming.\"\n\n\"Altran is mine, once on the staff of Djer, may his vest sprout gold.\"\n\n\"May I see him?\"\n\n\"Best if you don't. He was hurt in the last battle. He needs quiet.\"\n\n\"To heal?\"\n\n\"To die, the physikers say.\"\n\nAuRon's claws closed on the wet earth, tearing soil and worms. \"Take me to him. If you love your master, if you remember me in the fight by the river, you'll do as I ask.\"\n\nAltran dragged grimy fingernails across what was left of his beard. \"I will. My charter means nothing to me anymore, with the great Caravan gone. They've laid him out with the others beyond hope. Come, the burial cave is not far.\" Altran sent the herder ahead and led AuRon into the forest.\n\n\"What happened to the Caravan?\"\n\n\"Last year we were on the steppe. The same story as everywhere: six dragons came with the horsemen this time, bearing that cursed banner of the figure in the golden circle again. They burned the towers. The survivors went west with Djer. The Ironriders began to gather. He wouldn't stop. He drove us, wouldn't give a full night's rest even, but we made Wallander before the snow flew. Thinner, but alive.\"\n\n\"How are matters at the Delvings?\"\n\n\"The Partners built it sound. The dragons have burned out the upper galleries, and not a dowel still remains on the balconies, but no dragon has made it past the first inner door. We've got all the water we need, and food for a year or more if it comes to that.\"\n\n\"Has it been just dragons, or have men attacked with them?\"\n\n\"No men, no blighters\u2014yet. The Underroad is held by our best dwarves; if they do come in force, we have a hundred ton of rock to close Deep Passage. I'm for moving to the mountains or across. The Delvings are strong, but to me it just means we die a year from now, like rats in a watched hole.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. It grieves me to see the Delvings as they are now.\"\n\n\"That was a good year, when Djer landed at Wallander with you. You brought us luck before, maybe you will again.\"\n\n\"But too late for Djer, it seems.\"\n\nThis last came as AuRon spied the burial cave, set well away from the rest of the Delvings. Thankfully only two lanterns lit the place, hiding most of the agony in shadow. Moaning dwarves lay under blankets stretched above, to shield them from the sun. Flies buzzed everywhere, thick enough on the dead to give the bodies a blue-green carpet. Two hollow-eyed dwarves wandered among the dying, giving water in response to weak pleas but deaf to all other requests. The charnel house smell of burning flesh filled AuRon's nostrils from a fire pit where wisps of blue-black smoke despoiled the clear glint of the stars above.\n\nThe buzzing of the flies made AuRon narrow his eyes and fold his ears.\n\n\"Skin of the Golden Tree, it's worse than ever,\" Altran said. \"They must have brought up the batch from the last attack. They had Djer in the cave when I last saw him.\"\n\nAltran picked among the bodies, dead and near-dead.\n\n\"Have we surrendered?\" one of the attendants said in a tone that marked him as one who didn't care either way.\n\n\"No, this is a friend. An old friend. Where's Djer?\"\n\n\"Djer who?\"\n\n\"The Partner. Djer Highboots. Come, dwarf, pull your helm on straight.\"\n\nAuRon stepped carefully over the prostrate dwarves, and put his head into the shadow of the cave. He found Djer, not by smell, not by sight, but by the cloak hung to separate him from the other dying dwarves. A blazoning of a dragon, akin to the one on the ring, marked the cloak and what was left of the vest on the wheezing body.\n\nAltran removed his hat and bent next to the dwarf. AuRon forced himself to look at what remained of his old friend. Djer's skin was blackened and flaked like that of a spit-roasted pig. His eyes were withered, lifeless things in horribly empty sockets streaming pus down his nose and cheeks, and his lips burned back to reveal teeth belonging to a corpse.\n\nYet he still breathed.\n\n\"Djer, the dragon AuRon is here. He would speak with you.\"\n\n\"Why is he not... bandaged?\" AuRon growled, having trouble finding his words. \"By... by... by the Sun and Stars, I'll have someone's skin for this.\"\n\nThe attendant shrank away in fear, but Altran held up a hand.\n\n\"Ach . . .'andages... no... hurts... worse... AuRon,\" Djer wheezed. \"Just cool air.\"\n\n\"Djer, do you know me?\"\n\n\"AuRon... AuRon. I 'ish I could see. Ears only 'ing working... ha' you co' wi t' dragons?\"\n\n\"Against them. I've come against them, my friend.\"\n\nAt this the dwarves, even the attendants, lifted their chins and looked at AuRon.\n\n\"How did this happen?\" AuRon finally said. He'd take Djer's dwarsaw and wrap it around this Wyrmmaster's neck. Then pull... slowly.\n\nDjer tried to talk, but began to cough, in weak, pained gasps.\n\nAltran spoke up. \"He was at the front doors. The second attack. We hadn't rigged the ballistas at the balconies yet. We had to lure the dragons in close, so we'd have a chance with the crossbows. Djer, myself, and six dwarves, may they rest undisturbed, sheltered under some rocks near the door. The dragons had to land to get at us. We got one. Another landed, and Djer tried to get everyone inside the doors. Muftor fell, and Djer went back for him. They both got caught in the open by another's fire. Djer got Muftor in all right, but he was a corpse by the time the doors were shut. We claimed our vengeance. The dragon that burned Muftor and Djer, the crossbow dwarves got him, too, when he took off again.\"\n\n\"AuRon,\" Djer said, his coughing dying away.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I tuk 'lame inta lungs. It 'urts. E'ryt'ing 'urts.\"\n\n\"Can they do anything for him?\" AuRon said, turning on the dwarves.\n\n\"What medicine we have goes to those that will live,\" Altran said.\n\n\"End it... AuRon... as my 'riend,\" Djer said.\n\nAuRon didn't look around for agreement or assent. He stabbed down with his neck. His snout smashed into Djer's head, crushing his skull as quickly as if Altran had brought a sledgehammer upon it. The wet crash echoed off the walls, and even the dying startled.\n\nIt was not hard to do. The burnt, suppurating thing at the mouth of the cave was not Djer, but a corpse still tormenting the remains of consciousness within for a few more days. Djer had died at the door of the Delvings as he had lived, risking himself to help a friend.\n\nSomething cold, like a block of swallowed ice, rested in AuRon's stomach. It hurt.\n\nHe smelled a familiar scent from Djer's body and marked a tobacco pouch at his waist. He bit it away from Djer's belt.\n\nThe attendants wouldn't come near the body until AuRon took his blood-and-brain-smeared snout out of their sight. AuRon turned away and sat up so he could wash himself. It felt good to breathe the clean air away from the dying.\n\nAltran approached, wet eyes glistening in the moonlight, and cleared his throat. AuRon saw the dwarves dragging Djer's body to the fire pit.\n\n\"Wait!\" AuRon growled. \"What do you think you're doing?\"\n\n\"No time to bury the dead,\" one of the attendants said.\n\n\"What do you do with your dead at other times?\"\n\n\"As a Partner, Djer would rest in the Hallowhall,\" Altran said. \"Others have cairns in the mountainside. It's too dangerous for many to be out piling stones.\"\n\n\"Why should those who give their lives defending the Delvings be accorded less honor than those who die in their beds? Even blighters have more ceremony for their fallen than this.\"\n\nThe dwarves looked at each other unhappily. AuRon thrashed his tail. \"There's not a dwarf here but deserves to be laid out in the Hallowhall. Does this cave connect to the Delvings?\"\n\n\"Yes, by a narrow passage. No dragon your size would get through,\" one of the attendants said.\n\n\"I don't want to get through. If you'll take my advice, you'll carry these dwarves, living and dead, into the Hallowhall and arrange them as you would a Partner.\"\n\n\"After all this, we're to take orders from a dragon?\" the other attendant said, taking up his water pail again. \"Bah!\"\n\n\"None of that, you! He has the dead Partner's signet-ring,\" Altran said, his voice loud and harsh. \"He's served the Chartered Company. I'm no lawdrafter, by the Golden Tree's roots, but I'd say he has authority to give orders to bed attendants. Unless another Partner says otherwise. So do it, with my help and what's left of Djer's staff, or I'll have you expelled. You wouldn't want that. The wilds are not a good place for a dwarf these days with all these murderous men about.\"\n\nThe dwarf's fury faded as quickly as it came on. He turned to AuRon. \"Dwarves are quick to quarrel when events turn against them.\"\n\n\"Not just dwarves,\" AuRon said. \"I can do nothing more for Djer. Will you see that he takes his rightful place among your dead?\"\n\n\"I'll attend to it. I expect it won't be too long before I see him again in the spirit-world. Even the Delvings can't be held forever against dragons. We hear of hosts of men coming out of the north.\"\n\n\"There may be blighters descending the river before winter, though the men of Dairuss will fight them as long as they can.\"\n\n\"Then all is lost.\"\n\n\"Don't despair. That does half your enemy's job for him,\" AuRon said. He removed the ring from the dwarsaw chain, working the heavy clasp with his sii. He held out the ring to Altran. \"I know Partnerships cannot be inherited, but whatever dwarves and interests in the Company Djer possessed are now in your hands.\"\n\n\"They were considerable. Doesn't seem it matters now.\"\n\nAuRon put the dwarsaw in Djer's tobacco pouch and tucked it into his ear. \"I must hurry on my way. Don't let your fellow dwarves scatter. You have friends yet, east with the Dairuss, south with the elves scattered in the forests, and west in Hypat.\"\n\n\"What about north? That is where the true danger rests.\"\n\n\"Leave that to me.\"\n\nAuRon backed away from the wounded dwarves and saw that the attendants were fashioning litters to carry them back into the Delvings. He would come back one day, and visit Djer's resting place.\n\n\"Altran, one more thing. Djer didn't die for nothing. He won't lie in his grave unavenged.\"\n\nThe old maps of the Hypatian cartographers AuRon had lingered over showed the Isle of Ice to be not one isle, but many. Like a great tree that had thrown off hundreds of saplings, the island was surrounded by small rocky islets. It was a daring sailing master who took his boat to the largest isle in the best of weather. When the winds of the equinoxes blew, attempting it meant a storm-tossed suicide.\n\nWeather not only guarded the isle, but conspired to hide it, as well. The currents of the inland ocean moved as the hands on a dwarvish clock, bringing warm air up from the sunny southwest before changing direction at the archipelago to run down the barbarian coast toward Hypat. As the air passed over the cooler waters, mists formed and shrouded the topography in belts of fog, and atop that, a cloud belt. It was this last that AuRon tiredly cursed as he drifted in the sky.\n\nThe Bowing Dragon stood higher in the sky than he had ever seen, and were it not for him and the polar star, AuRon would have despaired. But the science of Hypat had mapped the stars as well as the coast, and their positions told him he was in the right latitudes to find the isle.\n\nHe needed rest. He had been flying for three days, fighting a cold north wind. Autumn, the most dilatory of the seasons, was already on her way in the north of the Inland Ocean.\n\nA faint light flashed in the clouds far ahead, like reddish lightning, only the light grew and faded in the time it took for AuRon to inhale and exhale, rather than in the eyeblink of a storm's burst. AuRon forgot his fatigue and drifted. He counted twenty breaths, and it happened again, and he angled himself to make for the light. When it happened a third time, leaving an echo of itself on his sensitive eyes in the same place it had flashed before, he knew it was not a weather phenomenon, but something happening at a fixed point below.\n\nHis wings rose and fell with new energy brought on by hope. AuRon descended into the clouds, following the regular pulses of light. The air currents changed; he felt the loom of the land underneath, though he could not see it.\n\nHe broke out of the clouds, over land as far as he could see in the dim light. A flame, a great jet of burning gas, lit up a cratered mountaintop beneath him. It reflected from ice frozen into the rocky bowl. The fireball rose and dispersed into faint purple flame before dying out entirely. AuRon drifted, waiting for the next expulsion. It came as expected, with a whistling roar. Its burst gave shape to the land beneath, a vista of crags and ice. AuRon could neither hear nor smell the sea; he must have been flying over the island almost since he first saw the flames through the clouds.\n\nAuRon dipped his wings and turned for the nearest mountainside out of the wind. He landed at a crag just deep enough for it to be an easy climb to the bottom, drank a mouthful of water running into it from a melt on the mountainside, and fell into an exhausted sleep.\n\nAuRon awoke to a cold, sunless dawn. The sky was a colorless overcast. Only the shading of gray varied as one patch or another began to drizzle rain. He climbed out of the crag and stretched and folded his wings a few times, feeling sore. There were rain puddles caught among the rocks everywhere. It must have poured while he slept.\n\nThe crater-topped mountain still whooshed out a fireball at the same rate as it had last night. In the muted light of day the explosion was subdued. AuRon looked around the valley.\n\nHe felt as if he were at the roof of the world, a land of jagged peaks and ice. The valley fell away to the south, opening up on flatter lands, but flinty ridges interwoven with seas of snow blocked the view in the other directions. AuRon leaped into the sky and circled the fireball-spewing crater.\n\nPast the ridges the land became more hospitable. Moss gave way to pines and grass, which in turn fell into little meadows, forests, and lakes in the steep-sided valleys between the mountains. Glaciers like dirty walls hung between the mountain ranges, emptying into lakes and streams of white water rushing down the slopes. There were forests and long stretches of bush, depending on whether the trees could find footing. On the rolling hills at the feet of the mountains bighorn sheep and mountain goats moved in herds. There was no sign of human habitation.\n\nAuRon flew south, to the widening in the valley. The craggy plateau gave way to steep fells coated in green. He spotted another mass of brown grazers beneath, and flew lower to take a look. A herd of some kind of cattle with a high ridge of muscle atop their forelegs had their noses buried in the mountain pasturage. They had shaggy faces and curved horns, tougher and wilder looking than the cattle AuRon had seen elsewhere. He saw a shepherd, marking the fact that the herdsman just scratched a dog and watched him fly overhead. Were the dragons on this island under orders not to hunt cattle?\n\nThere were glaciers everywhere between the mountain peaks, looking like white floods that had been halted by some magic as they poured out of the mountains. The base of every glacier was soggy, alive with birds poking amongst clumps of plantains and wild buckwheat. AuRon saw a few houses, thick-walled constructs with only a door under a thick roof alive with wildflowers and ivy.\n\nA distant speck caught his eye, framed against the steely sky. It was a dragon. His kindred rose into the sky with lusty wingstrokes. AuRon changed his direction a little more eastward, catching a whiff of the sea.\n\nHe swung behind a rainsquall and came upon the castle. It was nothing much to look at, just a roofless tower atop an overhanging cliff, with a circle of buildings behind a wall at the base of the tower. Someone had used the tower to erect a wooden platform atop it, three ladders with intermediate platforms climbed up to the final level. A low wall, not even shoulder-height on a man, threw a wide loop over the lands on the grassy slope leading to the tower, where a herd of sheep grazed. A man stood up among them, a cloak tight around his shoulder and hood turned against the wind, bearing a silver-tipped bugle made out of one of the twisted horns of the cattle he had seen in the highlands.\n\nBelow the watchtower, a cave yawned in the cliffside. AuRon saw another dragon within, leather and steel clamped tight around its mouth. It had only recently uncased its wings; AuRon could still see scar-tissue among the scales on its back. Two more men, thick girdles holding tufted cloaks shut against the cold and furred boots on their feet, held the young dragon with ropes while another sat on its back. He tapped the dragon with a steel-hooked staff and pulled on reins looped through rings in the youngster's ears. More men with cords threaded through holes punched in the dragon's wing-edge pulled at the thin bones of its wing, raising and lowering the limb. The dragon's tail hardly twitched when the man rapped it beneath the armpit in the delicate, unscaled flesh.\n\nThe work proceeded until one of the men noticed AuRon drifting outside the cavern. The cliff faced into the wind, creating an updraft that AuRon could ride, hardly flapping his wings. One of the men on the wing-ropes glanced at AuRon, then took a second look. He called to his fellows, and they stopped what they were doing to look at AuRon.\n\nAuRon looked farther into the cave. It narrowed, but not by much. There was an older dragon in a tunnel branching off from the main tunnel. Men crawled across its back adjusting some kind of harness. The dragon looked to be offering advice to the men. It raised its head to look at AuRon, and its armored fans flicked out briefly.\n\nBold action was usually preferable to looking indecisive, so AuRon caught a favorable slant of wind and dropped into the cave. He didn't even have to fold his wings to land.\n\nThe cave was even rougher than the ruins of Kraglad. The floor sloped, the walls were of uneven height; no chimneys or chutes provided ventilation that AuRon could detect. It smelled of male dragons; a thick, sharp smell like lye permeated the air. The two other males in the cavern ignored AuRon, though AuRon twitched and shook as he passed, every muscle alive and ready to jump.\n\nA warrior with an elaborately wrought girdle approached. Blue eyes peered out at AuRon from a tangle of hair and beard. It was hard to tell where the man's eyebrows ended and his beard began.\n\n\"What brings you, high-flyer?\" the man said, in glottal Parl. \"Are you a messenger out of the East? I don't know you.\"\n\n\"I'm a stranger here,\" AuRon admitted. \"My business is my own. I've flown from a land where even the stars are strange. My name is NooShoahk, of the line of NooMoahk.\"\n\n\"You're a civilized dragon. You speak well.\"\n\n\"I read and speak the four hominid tongues, and dialects besides. I've heard you need dragons who can fight, and flew far to join.\"\n\n\"Join? Join? We've had men join, but never dragons.\"\n\n\"A wise man knows that just because something hasn't happened, doesn't mean it can't happen.\"\n\n\"I leave wisdom to the Wyrmmaster. I'm but a servant of his Supremacy.\"\n\n\"Wyrmmaster? I'll obey a just lord as liege, but I'll call no man my master.\"\n\n\"He has a way with your kind. Wait here.\" The man turned, muttered something to one of the men at the ropes, and moved off into the cavern until he disappeared into the shadows left by tallow dips set into the walls. The other men continued with their duties, watching AuRon out of their eye-corners and drooping lids. AuRon smelled bloody meat somewhere within the cave.\n\nThe older dragon, wearing a harness that reminded AuRon of the baskets he had seen men and blighters put on mules, approached. It had scales of muted red, like laterite. There were no challenging bellows, no display of armored fans. Its crest bore six goodly-size horns.\n\n\"You I not know,\" it said, golden eyes blinking at him in confusion. \"You fly with men other side mountains?\" Its speech was harder to interpret than the hairy man's Parl.\n\n\"The mountains to the east?\"\n\n\"That way,\" the dragon said, pointing with its snout toward the Red Mountains.\n\nAuRon marked new men entering the landing-cavern. Men in dragon-scale armor. \"Yes, I come from the other side of them.\"\n\n\"Is good hunting there?\"\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\n\"Fighting stock or breeding stock?\"\n\n\"Neither. I've only just arrived.\"\n\nThe dragon looked him up and down for a minute. \"You not fighting stock, no scales. Not breeding stock, no scales\u2014old man not want soft hatchlings. I think you laughingstock.\"\n\n\"Your wit is as quick as your tongue.\"\n\n\"Is like joke?\"\n\nAuRon didn't know what to make of that, so he just snorted. \"Is like joke.\" It couldn't hurt to agree. An odd sort of exchange with another male, neither a challenge nor a gesture of accommodation.\n\nThe men with the younger dragon began to swear. Their charge was flapping its wings furiously, forcing the men on the wing-lines to lie flat.\n\n\"Good trials, then, laughingstock. We see each other a'morrow.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nAuRon waited and watched the men get their dragon under control, and then begin the \"lean right, lean left, tip forward, tip back\" routine again. It struck him as odd that men, creatures without wings, should be giving lessons to dragons, creatures who took to the sky like seals to water.\n\n\"So you've come to join us?\" a flat voice said. The sound reminded AuRon of the slow rumble of the wheels on the dwarves' traveling towers.\n\nAuRon shifted his neck at the words, instinctively covering his vitals.\n\nThe newcomer was a man, one of those diamond-shaped men whose power seemed to come from their bellies. He had gray hair still flecked with black, close cropped, but no beard. His face was strangely immobile, as if he wore a mask, though he showed a full set of white teeth with his smile. He wore a shimmering short- sleeved tunic, cut deep and revealing black-flecked hair on his chest and powerful arms in thick leather wrist-guards. Pants, stitched at the outer seam like elvish riding breeches with leather pads sewn in, disappeared into soft leather knee-boots. AuRon recognized dragon scale at the tips of his boots, and on the leather at his wrists.\n\nBeside the older man was a youth, hardly out of his teens. AuRon did not know his face, but startled when he took in the man's array of armor and weapons: the silver helm, with the swan's wings sweeping up to meet above, the sword with the hilt fashioned like a gaping dragon's mouth, the polished black armor of dragon-scales. The spear was gone. The Dragonblade's armor had been modified to fit his slighter body. The spiked face-plate was up. It revealed a cruel, scarred face, as if something had taken a handful of flesh from the cheek and cut it away with a knife. Fissured pink tissue covered his cheek, but not thickly enough so that AuRon couldn't make out the bone beneath. One eye\u2014the center of a scar\u2014was gone; in its place a red ruby glittered.\n\n\"It's just a gray,\" the young man in the Dragonblade's armor sneered. \"No use to us.\"\n\nThe older man held up a hand. \"Tell me, dragon, you've heard of us and come to join?\"\n\n\"The whole world is hearing of you. You should be more surprised if I hadn't. Do I speak to the Wizard of the Isle of Ice?\"\n\n\"If by Wizard do you mean sorcerer, no, I don't possess that gift. If you mean am I part of a movement that will change the world, well, I do my part. Of late, the Varvar, the Quiol, and the Endiko have been calling me the Wyrmmaster.\"\n\n\"Or his Supremacy?\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Win a few battles for your people, and you'll find yourself called all sorts of ridiculous titles, O Good Dragon NooShoahk. They tell me that you name NooMoahk in your song. If so, I bow in recognition of your great line.\"\n\nWhich he did.\n\nAuRon bowed in return.\n\n\"Why do you wish to join us, NooShoahk?\" the Wyrmmaster asked.\n\n\"Vengeance.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" the Wyrmmaster said.\n\nAuRon kept his words to a minimum until he had a better feel for the man. \"You kill elves. You kill dwarves.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster and the younger version of the Dragonblade exchanged a look. \"This has happened before, Eliam. Coloklurt came out of the East to join us... what was it, eight years ago. Poor, half-starved wretch when he arrived, and now he's one of our sleekest fighters on the elven coast.\"\n\nThe man wearing the Dragonblade's armor gave a strange twitch of his shoulders. \"He's got a wary look in his eye. Like he's bracing for a fight.\"\n\n\"You've been around our dragons too long\u2014you've forgotten what a wild one looks like. I just see a proud young dragon. With a few scars,\" the Wyrmmaster said. \"Are they souvenirs of battles with the lesser lines?\"\n\n\"Lesser lines?\"\n\n\"The line of hominidae, young dragon. There were the blighters, the crude first attempt by the Guiding Hand, and then the failed branches of sylvanline and dwarrowline, before the flowering of man.\"\n\n\"The blighters I knew kept their place. But I've been hunted by elves and dwarves, and all my family is dead at their hands. Men, too, have brought me to bay.\" AuRon looked at the scarred youth in defiance, but the single green eye just stared back at him.\n\n\"A tragic story, one shared by many others of your kind who were not lucky enough to survive. Someday I'll tell you the truth behind your suffering, if you wish.\"\n\n\"Truth is a worthy goal, but I look for revenge, Wyrmmaster.\"\n\n\"That's Supremacy to you, gray,\" the youth said, stepping forward with hand on sword-hilt.\n\n\"We'll work out the titles later, Eliam,\" the Wyrmmaster said, gripping the weapon so that it could not be unsheathed. \"NooShoahk looks a little hollow about the eyes. We're poor hosts to one who has come so far to offer wing, claw, tooth, and fire to our cause. Tell me, is Shadowcatch still the ranking dragon?\"\n\n\"No, Wyrmmaster,\" the hairy-faced man spoke up, \"As of the last trial, Starlight outclimbed Shadowcatch. The new order is Starlight, Shadowcatch, and Ramshard.\"\n\n\"You're not thinking of giving him a chance at being a breeder,\" the young Dragonblade whom the Wyrmmaster had called Eliam said.\n\n\"Odd names for dragons,\" AuRon opined.\n\n\"These dragons were born here. Different land, different traditions,\" the Wyrmmaster said easily. \"Feed our bright new dragon, and give him a day's rest. We'll hold trials on the morning after. We'll match Ramshard and NooShoahk. We can use a dragon of this gray's intelligence in the cause. What do you say, NooShoahk? Care to test yourself against one of our best dragons?\"\n\nAuRon wondered if he was speaking to the wizard he had come to slay, or some herald. He was in no shape to kill and then fly; he needed rest and a meal. Then there was Wistala. If there were a chance that Tala lived on this island...\n\n\"A fight?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"That's part of it, but there are strict rules. Flying figures into it as well, laden and unladen. You should do quite well. I've read that grays are the fastest dragons in the sky. We could use more of your kind. Pleasant duty.\"\n\n\"As you say.\"\n\n\"An ideal way of thinking, NooShoahk. I predict you'll go far.\"\n\nAuRon could never have imagined a barrack for dragons, but that was where the bushy-faced man with the elaborate belt, who AuRon learned was named Varl, led him. It was only a brief walk down through the crudely dug tunnels. They passed a man staircase, and AuRon smelled fresh air coming down from above. Another shaft had lines and guide-rails built into it.\n\n\"We bring loads up and down that shaft. It's counterweighted to make the hauling easier. Clever thing. Some dwarf did it years ago.\"\n\n\"The dwarves dug these caverns?\"\n\n\"No one knows who first dug them. It could even have been dragons. I'm certain they lived here. Blighters made new passageways for us. A few of them are still here, they live on the seashore on the other side of the island and fish. Not many left now.\"\n\nHe led AuRon into a labyrinth of caves. Alcoves and passageways smelled everywhere of male dragons. They passed the armored back of a copper dragon curled in a tight ball, sleeping. He glanced at the dragon's forelegs. It wasn't his brother.\n\n\"This'll do,\" Varl said. \"This one has some cracks in the ceiling; you get a bit of air flowing in. It gets thick down here, even for me.\"\n\n\"The Wyrmmaster said something about food?\"\n\nVarl lifted a wooden stick from his belt and went to a tallow dip. \"At the opening just before we passed Shieldwall, that copper you sniffed at, they'll dump meat or fish in a few hours. Plenty for all. We've eighteen pairs of wings out south. You're in the fighting stock stalls for now, and you'll learn they live for their stomachs.\" He lit the thin splinter of wood and touched it to a dip beside AuRon's alcove.\n\nThe smell of the burning fat awakened AuRon's appetite. \"What'll happen at these trials?\" AuRon asked, getting his mind off his hunger.\n\n\"A challenge between sets of dragons. The Wyrmmaster uses it to judge what job each dragon has. Who can fly with the heaviest burden, who is the fastest on the wing. The best get their choice of females.\"\n\n\"And the worst?\"\n\nVarl's beard changed shape, so AuRon guessed he was smiling. \"They become fighting stock. Just do your best\u2014the reward's worth it.\"\n\nAuRon had never imagined dragons could be so cooperative. When the meal cart came, pulled by a pony that didn't mind being underground or the smell of dragons, three other young dragons emerged and joined AuRon in sniffing over the joints. AuRon guessed they were a few years younger than he. He tried to speak using his mind\u2014it had been so long\u2014but he just got back a blurry image or confused emotion. The Wyrmmaster's training had done what nature couldn't: put dragons together without fighting. Whatever else might be said about his Supremacy, he was a genius with dragons.\n\n\"Mutton again. I want cattle,\" one said.\n\n\"Cattle for the fighting dragons. You still learn flight, Sharpclaw. I trade you your ore-lump for next ration of cattle.\"\n\n\"Agreed. Unless it is gold.\"\n\n\"Done. Urrrrr! Sore from flying today.\"\n\n\"As I, Hawkhit.\"\n\n\"You flew quick at trials, Hawkhit,\" the third said. \"They let you fly free-ear, I say.\"\n\n\"What does free-ear mean?\" AuRon asked. \"No man on your back?\"\n\n\"New one not know free-ear,\" Sharpclaw said. \"You learn soon enough. They make you fly message, fly scout, I say.\"\n\n\"Fine with me, I say,\" AuRon agreed.\n\n\"You do trial?\" Hawkhit asked.\n\n\"Tomorrow, I'm told,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Try best, then not end up in stalls, sore and sleepy. With females, if you win, yes? You still want?\"\n\n\"Where are they? I haven't smelled a dragonelle in years.\"\n\n\"Maybe you see. Maybe you not see, end up back here, Laughingstock.\" Sharpclaw said.\n\n\"The name is... NooShoahk.\"\n\nHawkhit lifted his head to help a haunch down his throat. After it made its bulging progress down his muscle-wrapped neck, the dragon shot out his tongue in disdain. \"That old name. You get new name after trials. Carry with honor. Carry men with honor. Take war to enemy, make Old Man proud.\"\n\n\"On foot, to wing, Aloft!\" Varl shouted.\n\nAuRon rose into the sky, on a beautiful day marred only by a few wandering clouds. Ramshard, more used to the cadence than AuRon or the other dragon at the trials, was in the air first. AuRon shot upward like an arrow, passing first the young blue dragon, then the golden Ramshard. The race was from the smooth-stoned strand up a cliff, then to the tower above the dragon caves. AuRon won handily, and had time to circle the watchpost twice before Ramshard caught up.\n\nHe won at all the flying contests, save the burdened one. The heavier dragons both outflew him as they raced, laden with boulders in baskets across their backs along the length of the fjord leading to the port town and back. AuRon's wings tired almost as soon as he got aloft, and it was all he could do to finish the race.\n\nThe blue dragon was eliminated when the flying tests were done. The contests paused while humans and dragons enjoyed a festive meal, then resumed again in the open field on the long slope under the watchtower.\n\n\"NooShoahk, the rules are easy,\" Varl said as the dragons came to the center of the sheep field. \"First dragon on his back loses. You can also lose by being pushed beyond the wall, or off the cliff, I suppose. No biting, no clawing, no fire, no flying. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"I do if the gold does,\" AuRon said. Ramshard must enjoy its position as breeding stock. The gold glared at AuRon, tail thrashing, fans extended down from its crest, every scale rippling, nostrils opening and shutting at the odor of another dragon. He had seen that look before, in the eyes of his brother dragons the day he came out of the egg, or when the aged NooMoahk forgot himself.\n\nVarl ran for the tower, where the Wyrmmaster sat in the shade of the first platform. Eliam raised his sword when Varl was inside, and brought it down.\n\nRamshard and AuRon both sidestepped up the slope, each looking to gain the advantage of height. One of AuRon's rear feet slipped against a rock slippery with moss, and before AuRon could brace himself with his tail, he was on his side. Ramshard might have gotten his name from his fighting style, for that's what he did. The gold dragon-dashed forward, head lowered to smash his crest into AuRon and roll him the rest of the way over.\n\nAuRon turned the fall into a roll. He turned a full circle, wings tight against his spine, to be on his feet again just as Ramshard's head gouged a furrow where AuRon had been lying. AuRon turned quickly, and used the advantage of the slope to come down on Ramshard.\n\nEven though his rear legs were upslope, AuRon could no more push the gold over than he could move a mountain. His heavier opponent hugged the ground with legs braced out to either side. Ramshard thrust its head under his arm, and AuRon had to scuttle away to keep from being flipped.\n\nThe dragons circled, both tails thrashing. Ramshard made a lunge, then a second, and both times AuRon backed away toward the wall. When AuRon felt his tail brush the stones, he faked another fall, but Ramshard was too canny to dash forward. Instead the gold moved upslope yet again, trying to come to grips with AuRon in a way that its body weight would force AuRon over.\n\nRamshard lunged again, and AuRon mirrored the move, throwing his weight forward, as well. Their shoulders came together with a crash as their necks dueled, each trying to push the other's neck to the ground.\n\nAuRon strained as hard as he could, but he felt his neck being forced downward. His vision began to go spotty, and the gold got a sii on his shoulder. AuRon felt himself tipping...\n\nHe shifted his tail to balance himself and turned the motion into a whip-crack to Ramshard's head, catching the gold solidly across the snout from an unexpected direction. Ramshard backed off, wincing in pain, armored fans rattling loudly over the morning breeze. AuRon swung his hindquarter around, and rained tail-blow after tail-blow on his enemy. The gold backed up, unable to parry the blows with his own tail, indeed unable to ward off AuRon's strikes with anything but his head and neck. AuRon's remarkably flexible tail lashed out again and again, and all Ramshard could do was keep backing up\u2014 Right over the cliff. Suddenly the gold's hindquarters were falling, and Ramshard dug in with its front claws, scrabbling for a grip. AuRon lowered his crest and drove it into Ramshard's shoulder until the gold lost its grip.\n\nBut the dragon came up again, still with fans extended, flying now. It spat its fire, not a deadly stream of flame, more of a contemptuous burst, then turned tail and flew off to the south.\n\nThe gathered humans cheered. Varl came out and thumped AuRon heartily on the shoulder.\n\n\"Fine a fight as I've ever seen, NooShoahk. As fine a fight, I say.\"\n\n\"Cursed renegade,\" the Wyrmmaster said, breathing hard after his climb down the tower. \"He's been warned about flying off before. Eliam, that's another one for you to go after. Take Starlight.\"\n\nThe younger Dragonblade bowed and hurried into the tower.\n\n\"He'll be dead by tomorrow's sunrise,\" the Wyrmmaster said. \"Dooms, what a loss. But it's to be expected. He didn't want to be a loser at the trials, not after his years as breeding stock.\"\n\n\"Is being demoted to the fighting stock stalls so bad?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"It's not so much that, it's what goes with it, my new breeder,\" the Wyrmmaster continued. \"Being warrior stock means being around other male dragons, side by side, living or fighting. You can no more do it with dragons than you can with stallions.\"\n\n\"You mean\u2014,\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"That's right,\" Varl said. \"We castrate the losers.\"\n\nBreeding stock lived under different conditions from the fighting stock. In some ways it was restrictive, but there were advantages.\n\nThere was the smell of females. AuRon's alcove was dim and cozy, off a tunnel that led to the main entry cavern in one direction and to the quarters of the females in the other. To avoid fights among the four members of the breeding stock, each male was allowed to mix with the females for seven days; then the next in order took over. Each had a separate tunnel leading to his sleeping cave. Gates with bars separated the males from the females otherwise, but the bars did not prevent the enticing smell of female dragons from traveling up the corridors. It was like Mother's, in that it was a rich, satisfying smell that soothed him; but it was also more exciting in a way that was new, like the smell of human females, only a hundred times more powerful.\n\nThere was the solitude. AuRon was grateful for the time alone to think. His task was greater than just killing the Wyrmmaster, it seemed. This was no sorcerer casting spells, who could be knocked from his tall tower and forgotten as soon as his magic faded. This wizard had constructed a system, a society, and one murder wouldn't bring it down.\n\nAuRon felt alone and a little ashamed. Though he was around dragons for the first time since NooMoahk's death, he was burdened by fear and secrecy. Before he has lived speaking the truth, dealing cleanly with those around him; here he chose even a false name to mask his identity. Father would not have approved. A dragon was his voice, roaring fair challenge to foes, speaking plainly to friends, singing of brave deeds to his mate. If his current path wasn't an act of treachery, then nothing was. How could he put this experience in his song? Would it be worse to put it in, or compound the lies by leaving it out?\n\nIn the other ear, however, there was the pampering. The only thing AuRon could compare it to was his days with the dwarves and their caravan. The handlers plied him with more food than he could ever eat, of a quality and variety he had never before experienced: lamb, goat, mutton, beef, red fish, white fish, various sorts of shelled creatures from the sea\u2014such a delight to crack apart and sample!\u2014cheeses, breads rich with butter and honey, even wine and ale. This Wyrmmaster had learned that dragons could appreciate wine. AuRon grew to look forward to a nightly bottle at night's meal, corked and sealed with some mysterious elvish waxen imprint, as the final relaxing touch before he settled into a dreamless sleep. There were also lumps of a strange metal-mineral blend that the dragons called ore and longed for like horses did bits of fruit, but for which AuRon had no appetite.\n\nThe only unsettling part of his existence was the Dragonguard, the most dangerous element of this wizard's system. This corps of men stood watch in little groups at tunnel mouths and cave junctions. Varl told him they were recruited from the Varvar coast, towering giants of muscle and beard dressed in patterned dragon scale\u2014though AuRon wondered why they seemed to prefer green, the color of females, as the dominant hue in their garb. They helped handle the younger, pre-trial dragons still being trained. Eliam, bearer of the Dragonblade, was their chief despite his youth. There were more of them around the breeding stock than the easier-to-handle fighting stock. When they wanted a dragon's attention, say to clear a passageway for a cart, they blew a peeping whistle from behind their helmet and pointed, a practice AuRon found detestable.\n\nBut they didn't attempt to put a collar on him. The discipline of the Dragonguard was enough to keep order, as AuRon was soon to learn.\n\nHe had a formal introduction at court, a rare thing for even a dragon of breeding stock. Or so Varl said when he led AuRon into the Highhall.\n\nIt was a wooden lodge, with doors the size of those on a barn and balconies projecting from walls and roof, set high on the side of the fjord leading to the port. There was no landing beneath, only a waterfall cut right through the Highhall's foundations before plunging a good six dragon-lengths into the sea below. Visitors had to land at the port, then use sturdy mountain ponies to make the climb. Rune-stitched pillars greeted AuRon as he and Varl finished their long walk from the tower cliff to the fjord gap. As they climbed the outer stone staircase to the hall, Varl offered him some advice.\n\n\"Just agree with what the Wyrmmaster says. 'Yes, Supremacy' is best. There are embassies from the nations of men at court now\u2014they're about to leave before winter comes. The Wyrmmaster wants them impressed. You speak well\u2014everyone has noticed it.\"\n\n\"I speak well, but it's best if I just say, 'Yes, Supremacy'? One needn't be a privy councilor to manage that.\"\n\nVarl opened the great doors to let AuRon go through; though he was slender enough, his midjoints grazed the doorframe as he passed inside.\n\n\"NooShoahk, you get any bigger, and we'll have to build a larger hall,\" the Wyrmmaster said from the cavernous interior. Lines of reinforcing beams stretched from angled roof to angled roof, well joined, and two iron chandeliers hung from each. Lining the hall were alcoves, empty chairs sitting in most, and at the far end a lectern that could be reached by climbing a short staircase. Humans of various size and coloring stood at the far end by tables laden with food and drink.\n\nIn the balcony above, stout men with cocked crossbows waited, their eyes shifting from AuRon to the Wyrmmaster.\n\n\"My brothers, this is our latest ally, a dragon out of the south named NooShoahk. He's a flier the likes of which we've never seen here on the Ice Isle. We're proud to have him join our cause.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster introduced AuRon to the barbarously titled men: there was Svak the Thunderarm and Gulland Longsound, and Khon Gi-Gesh and many others that AuRon lost track of as they approached and were introduced, all important men in the barbarian tribes they represented. They patted AuRon experimentally, or shifted their heads so they could peer under his lips at his fangs. The thing he liked least about mixing with humans was being poked and prodded. Varl read dragons better than most, and moved to his side and made sure they did not outrage him further. Someone offered him a bone joint, waving it before him to get him to open his mouth, but AuRon ignored it.\n\n\"NooShoahk, I'm having you meet these men for a reason,\" the Wyrmmaster said after the barbarian gave up trying to feed him. Varl put his bulk between AuRon and the Wyrmmaster, and the assembly moved off to the food and drink. \"I've of a mind to use you to send messages to our allies. I've used dragons before, but most require many rest stops and hunting breaks. You, on the other hand, I believe to be twice as fast as a scaled dragon, probably a good deal faster than that if the scaled dragon is carrying a rider. You know your maps, you know your stars\u2014otherwise, you could never have found this isle.\"\n\n\"The fire mountain brought me in. Otherwise, I might still be hunting for it.\"\n\n\"My beacon? Yes, clever, isn't it? But it's nothing to do with me.\"\n\n\"Some wizard's work, then?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. It was here when I first landed, a lifetime ago, seeking to speak to a pair of dragons in the very cave you call home. Holdovers from an earlier age, like your renowned linelord NooMoahk. I've no idea who built the beacon, but I could determine how it works. That mountain expels flammable gas from far beneath the earth. Someone installed some sort of valve; the pressure builds, and at a certain point it releases it in a rush. The force of the outburst of gas triggers a spark, using the same principles as lightning, and you get that explosion. Brilliant.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster spoke lower. \"What is your vision?\"\n\n\"My what?\"\n\n\"Follow me outside.\"\n\nVarl trailed along, and a pair of women stood up at a motion from the Wyrmmaster, both in the traditional red cloaks of the men of the Jagged Isles. One sang, filling the cavernous hall, as the other danced from man to man, her body moving elusively under a cloak, which she opened at times to reveal her unclothed flesh beneath. With his guests occupied, the Wyrmmaster closed the great doors behind him, took up a walking stick, and led AuRon to a rocky ledge just above the waterfall.\n\n\"A good spot for thinking,\" he said, settling his wide frame into a thronelike chair carved from a tree stump. He rested his hands on the wolf-heads carved into each arm of the chair. \"Are we what you expected, NooShoahk?\"\n\n\"I expected more camps of war, more ships. This is a great island, but it seems deserted. Even of dragons.\"\n\n\"This island makes a poor base for conducting a war: distance, the weather, all the dangerous shallows around it. Were you to go to Juutfod, there you'd see otherwise. The dragon ships of the Varvar set out from there, and take wind down the coast in their raids. Or the floating ring, something we seized years ago from a group of sea elves. More of the fighting dragons live there than here.\"\n\n\"Then why choose this place?\"\n\n\"This is where the real work is, in forging and continuing the alliance between dragons and men. Dragons can fight, and men can conduct campaigns without me telling them where or when to move. I'd no doubt do a worse job than many of these warlords.\"\n\nAuRon would not have chosen the word alliance. \"Yes. Why did you ask about my vision?\"\n\n\"You came here for a reason.\"\n\n\"To fight elves and dwarves, as I said. I learned of your war through some blighters in the East.\"\n\n\"I don't kill for the sake of killing, NooShoahk. This war serves a larger purpose.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster looked out at the green walls of the fjord, a steel-colored sky matching the choppy sea beneath. They both smelled the keen wind.\n\n\"Long ago, man and dragon were inseparable. Did you know that? It's fallen out of our history somehow, both races have forgotten their joint glory. But there was a time of peace, of learning, of prosperity. Man served dragon by keeping his herds and guarding his lairs; dragons served man by acting as his eyes and ears in the sky, or bearing messages faster than any horse or ship could hope to travel.\"\n\n\"I'd heard of such a time, but I thought it was the blighters who fed us in exchange for our service.\"\n\nThe Wrymmaster scowled. \"Lies, lies spread by elvish historians bound in books made by the dwarves. It is a deep-laid plot, NooShoahk. The failed lines know man, if left unmolested, will take his place at the head of races, and build a world beyond their imaginings. They are jealous of the ingenuity of man, of his speed and adaptability. So they start disputes between nations of men, pitting brother against brother while the dwarves make money selling swords and the elves barter for plunder to furnish their lives of luxury. It is disgusting, every time I read a history of some war or other, to see the threads of the elvish plots. Such waste. Terrible, terrible waste.\"\n\nThe Wrymmaster sank into thought for a moment, and AuRon opened his mouth, but he was preempted.\n\n\"I know what you are thinking, young skyking. You wonder how this was revealed to me, instead of some other. We have to go back to my childhood. I'd devoted my life to learning about dragons since I found an old book in my village, some tome brought back from a war by a man who couldn't read, a war against a vicious band of elf-brigands. He was tearing pages out one at a time and using them to start fires in the wind. I opened it, and saw beautiful drawings of dragons. I saved the book. In truth, I stole the book, yes, stole it and learned its secrets. This took me some time. It was in Elvish, of course, to keep human eyes from discovering the truth within.\"\n\nAuRon suspected he had heard of the author of the book\u2014the tome of Islebreadth and Hazeleye.\n\n\"Of course I had to learn Elvish well enough so I could read it. This was not easy, as the dwarves who owned my family's land demanded the lion's share of each harvest, and a book, let alone a tutor, cost dearly in silver. My father could hardly afford to keep us in clothes, let alone pay for education. I ran away to town, the Varvar port of Juutfod, knowing I could never further myself at home. I fell in with the most brilliant man I've ever met, a shipbuilder and trades-man once upon a time, who had been ruined by a conspiracy between the shipwrights of the sea elves and a band of dwarves. We shared the gutter. His name was Praskall, and he could read many languages, and he helped me with the book. It was from him that I first learned of the workings of elf and dwarf to keep man as but a crude tool in their hands. Anyway, I deciphered the book.\n\n\"This Ilsebreadth had first spoken to two dragons on some mysterious island in the north that only the sea elves could find. I set out to find this island to the north. I did, and sailed up this very fjord with a crew of four. We found ruins, pieces of an older civilization, and went looking for their cave.\n\n\"But the dragons also found us. They killed my crew; the pair had a nest of hatchlings to feed. They captured me, as well, and brought me back alive to keep for a later meal. These were an ancient pair keeping the island to themselves and remembering times past. They knew some of the tongues of men, and I spoke to them. I reminded them of long ago, and promised them that if they let me go, I would in a few months give them back ten times my weight in fresh meat. They accepted the bargain, and so began the first step on the road to reestablishing the rightful relationship between dragon and man. I raised goats, not very successfully at first, but the dragons gave me more time, and soon I had flocks of sheep for them. On sleepless nights, I would sit on this spot, whittling this chair, and think about what was, and what will be again. Man's destiny, man's First Destiny, was to be the lord of the surface of the planet, just as dragon's destiny is to rule the sky.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster showed no sign of tiring. As he spoke, he grew more intense.\n\n\"Eventually I convinced the dragons to let me go and get more men, so the herds could be increased. I gathered together a band of far-seeing men. Men with a vision for a better life. They laughed at us. We had criminals among us, a few drunkards, and the women who joined us, well, they weren't welcome in any of the respected homes of Juutfod. But I led them here, and you see all around you what we built.\n\n\"The real turning point came when I delivered a herd of cattle to the cavern. They had a clutch, and the eggs were just beginning to stir. I lingered, slaughtering and salting down the meat so it would last for their clutch. When the eggs hatched, there were two males, and the usual fight commenced. A golden was the victor; he won out over a sickly looking red, tearing him badly across the neck. I asked for the skin to make a cuirass, and the dragons agreed. Little did they know, as I hurried away from the eggs, that the red still lived.\"\n\nThe cloaked girl's dance must have been pleasing to the crowd; there was a lusty hurrah from inside the lodge.\n\n\"That was thirty-seven years ago, NooShoahk. Thirty-seven long years, of thought and work. I'm called a wizard because I know something others don't. If you get something when it is young enough, you can train it to accept anything. The red lived, only just, and learned from me. I named him Revanan, taught him to speak Parl. Most of all, obey. When the time came, I saw it breathe fire, and taught it to use that. I sent out bounties on healthy female hatchlings.\"\n\nAnd so my family died, Auron thought. \"What happened to the pair who gave you the red?\"\n\n\"The dragons of the cave grew old, infertile. They had grown used to being fed by man and forgotten how to hunt. I wanted their caves for myself, so I cut off the flow of food. Cruel? Perhaps, but I had young breeding pairs that needed the space, and dragons have been known to drive their parents out of the cave before this. They grew so weak, they could barely move. They feared to come out of the cave, for Revanan made frightful noises outside.\n\n\"Eventually Revanan went in after them. He was wounded in the fight, so that he'd never fly again, but it did not matter, he'd done the most important service in giving me the ancient caverns. I moved the few females I'd acquired in to the old nesting cavern, expanded what I could, and made do with the rest. Now let me show you what has been built, to the lasting glory of man and dragon. Come, Varl, we'll walk back to the caverns. No, I don't need my heavy coat. The exercise will warm me, and I'll use good NooShoahk here as a windbreak.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I can't take you to the stalls of the females, but it's another dragon's turn,\" the Wyrmmaster said, panting a little as they went up the trail to the tower.\n\n\"Shadowstalk's, sir. NooShoahk is next,\" Varl said, helping the old man up the trail.\n\nAuRon looked out at the docks. The boats of the dignitaries were being made ready for sea.\n\n\"That's the one thing I can't manage. If you unaltered males come together among the females, there's blood on the walls. Have you met Starlight yet? Until you arrived, he was the fastest of our dragons, and as devoted a member of the breeding stock as I've known.\"\n\nThey entered the dragon caves by another passage, one large enough for AuRon to enter afoot, but not fly into. It meandered back and forth, showing signs of recent work. Men with shoring timber on their shoulders made way for the trio. AuRon heard the pounding of picks in time to blighter song, and knew work was going on down one of the shafts.\n\nThey descended a set of uneven stairs, the air thick with dragon odors. AuRon went down slowly and uncomfortably, keeping his legs tucked well under. The passage widened again and they passed two members of the Dragonguard, who nodded their metal-shrouded heads as the Wyrmmaster passed.\n\n\"Look now, NooShoahk, for in a few years you won't fit,\" the Wyrmmaster said.\n\nAuRon heard a raucous noise, and the passage turned a corner and widened. Light and air came down from somewhere above, the light coming in dispersed by domes of white-colored glass and the air pushed by a clattering thing set against the wall that sounded like a broken spinning wheel. Most of the noise came from hatchlings, wrestling and chasing in the center of the room. Older ones, on the verge of drakehood, napped on pallets set against the wall, ignoring the squawks of the younger generation. Members of the Dragonguard and other men moved among them, breaking up serious fights or sitting on the floor telling stories with puppets or carved figures. It was glorious chaos.\n\n\"We have another hall for the maturing drakes. They spend most of their time outdoors, exercising, cooperating in hunts, learning to obey orders. But this is where the sense of community takes form. Let me show you where the real magic is.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster led on through some curtains. AuRon felt the room get warmer. Thick mats covered the floor, and AuRon smelled dragon eggs. This room was darker than the others, lit only by a pair of coal fires at either end. Men in spotless green robes sat at either end, tending the fire and listening for taps at the cask-size eggs.\n\n\"They wear green for a reason. Hatchlings react more quickly to something that is green, like their mother's scales.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just use females?\"\n\n\"It's important that the first thing they see out of the egg is human. They bond better that way. The mothers won't break off fights between males, and it's vital for us to do that if we're to have enough dragons. A dragon will accept whatever it first sees as its kind. The writer of that book called it impression, the great weakness of dragons.\"\n\nAuRon fought to keep his foua inside. The application of Hazeleye's book sickened him: hatchlings emerging out of the egg, not to revel in soothing thoughts of Mother, but to imprint upon humans to better obey orders. He looked around so the Wyrmmaster could not read the fire in his eyes. \"How many do you have?\" AuRon asked. \"Dragons of all types, that is.\"\n\n\"That I tell no one. I know, and my nestmen know, but that information is kept from any who might leave the island. You, my friend, will be flying for me very shortly. But I'll let you enjoy your time among the females first. I remember what it was to be young.\"\n\n\"It your turn, NooShoahk,\" one of the Dragonguard said, after AuRon returned from his morning visit to the sandpits outside the caves, where the dragons took care of their natural functions. \"This morning we open the gates, you have pick of females.\"\n\n\"How do I know which ones the others have mated with?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"Not matter. Watch and ware. If any give trouble, come to me, tell me who. Some shes make fight.\"\n\nAuRon followed the heavy tread of the soldier past the now-open gates. The smell of females pulled him down the tunnel like the current of a swift river. He sensed a larger space ahead in the darkness.\n\n\"Watch for eggs. Smash eggs mean much trouble,\" his guide advised, stepping into an alcove and opening a second gate. \"Now you go in.\"\n\nAuRon heard chains rattle in the darkness. It took only a moment for his eyes to adjust, but he couldn't resist calling into the long cavern.\n\n\"Wistala, are you in here? Wistala?\"\n\n\"We've none with that name, breeder,\" a dragonelle to his near side said, from a narrow ledge cut into the cavern. AuRon saw that this cavern was like a tall tunnel, very long and narrow enough for him to touch one side with his nose and the other with his tail. It was cold and damp, icy cold water trickled everywhere, forming pools in the floor. One dragonelle had her long neck stretched to suck up water from a pool. He saw a cage about her snout, rather like a metal muzzle that he'd seen on savage dogs. The dragonelle could only open her mouth a little. It would be hard for her to eat, and impossible for her to spit fire without hurting herself badly enough so she might die of the burns. AuRon counted eleven dragonelles, well spaced out in long chasmlike cave. Most were asleep.\n\n\"What color is he?\" AuRon heard faintly, within his mind.\n\n\"He's a gray,\" was the answer, a louder mental echo of thoughts directed elsewhere.\n\nMind-speech! The first he'd heard since mixing with the dragons on this island. He had almost forgotten what it felt like.\n\n\"AuRon, is that you?\" came across, faint but firm. The words felt familiar.\n\n\"Wistala?\" AuRon thought back, running toward the source of the mind-speech. Green eyes flickered at him in the darkness, from the perch farthest away from the gate. \"Wistala, are you here?\"\n\nThe dragonelle raised her muzzled head. \"You are the gray, that gray from long ago. AuRon son of AuRel, who escaped to drown at sea rather than live in a collar.\"\n\nAuRon stopped, smelling the female. She was familiar, but so briefly and so long ago had he known Natasatch that he hardly recognized her.\n\nAuRon knew her sound, her scent, and her eyes, but the rest of her was changed as much as he. Her scales had turned into the shimmering green sea of a dragonelle's rather than the duller color of a female hatchling. Her tail and her neck were both long and supple; the slightest movement of either riveted his gaze. He looked at her decorously folded wings and wondered what they would look like spread and aloft in the warm glow of sunshine.\n\n\"So you ended up here after all. Of breeding stock, no less,\" Natasatch said with her mind.\n\n\"I'll tell you all about it. Let's go outside,\" AuRon thought.\n\n\"He doesn't waste any time, and hardly a bud on his crest,\" one of the other dragonelles said dryly.\n\nNatasatch pulled at the collar around her neck with her saa spur. \"I'll listen,\" she thought. \"If you can get them to take this off.\"\n\nAuRon hurried to the Dragonguard. It would be good to have someone to confide in, someone with whom he could curse this mad system. \"I'd like to take one up. The one on the far end, Natasatch. Could you unlock her from the wall?\"\n\nThe guard chuckled behind his visor. \"Heh. She see new dragon, try old trick. She's forget, humans know her. No, you want mate you inside mate. Get used to it. You no want her, she plenty too much trouble.\"\n\n\"I'll go to the Wyrmmaster.\"\n\n\"They his rules.\"\n\nAuRon turned, putting as much contempt into the gesture as he could, and returned to the dragonelle cavern. He made the long walk back to Natasatch, ignoring the ribald comments from the other females. A couple of the dragonelles swept droppings off their ledges as he passed, hurling challenges with their cast. He concentrated on the sound of trickling water to keep them out of his mind.\n\n\"You've tried this before,\" AuRon thought.\n\n\"Me, and some others.\"\n\nAuRon made the short jump up onto the platform beside her. She tried to snap at him, but it just turned into a thump of her muzzle on his crest. She glared at him.\n\nNatasatch's ledge was wide enough for her to lie on, and there was an alcove cut into the wall where she could sleep if she wished to curl up. Her chain was attached above the little half-cave. She backed into her alcove, still trying to intimidate him with her stare.\n\n\"I need to talk to you,\" AuRon said, keeping his voice low enough so he could hardly hear himself over the sound of the water on its way to the floor. Using his voice was safer than using his mind: he did not know if all the dragonelles could be trusted. \"I'm not here for that, I'm not about to mate in some filthy hole with a bunch of dragonelles watching.\"\n\n\"Au\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't use my name anymore, please. They call me NooShoahk here, so use that if you must. Tell the others you were mistaken about me. But know, I'm not here to breed hatchlings for this wizard.\"\n\n\"Then what are you doing?\"\n\n\"As soon as I know, I'll tell you. I'm casting about, learning my way around.\" AuRon lowered his voice to a mere breath of a whisper. \"These dragons he's commanding, they've killed friends of mine and many, many others. The Wyrmmaster thinks himself some kind of prophet; he's on a mission to clear the earth for man. Using dragons.\"\n\n\"We've heard rumors of battles. Sometimes dragons disappear.\"\n\n\"I've seen what these men are doing with the help of our kind, and it's horrible.\"\n\n\"What's going on down here is horrible too, Au\u2014NooShoahk,\" Natasatch said, in a whisper that matched his. \"They take our eggs almost as soon as they're laid. We hear they're making a new kind of dragon. A dragon to serve man.\"\n\n\"That's not far from the truth. They're not making dragons so much as shaping them. Perverting natural instincts, changing how dragons react to each other and men. I feel like I've landed on an island where the deer fly and the wolves roost in trees at night on the orders of field mice. But I've no idea what to do yet. I just can't see how to get my claws into it.\"\n\n\"Get help. If other dragons off the island knew what we were forced\u2014\"\n\n\"Other dragons? How many are there?\" AuRon asked. \"It took better than a year to find just one, and I knew where he was. Then there's the problem of how to convince a male, who thinks you are coming to claim his territory, to abandon his range and take a week's worth of... no, other dragons aren't the answer. If we could get dwarves onto this island, they'd be able to mine up under all this, and they're built for cave-fighting. But the dwarves I know have troubles of their own, and I wonder if all of them together would be enough against the dragons that are already here.\"\n\n\"Blighters can tunnel. I'm told there are some on the other side of the island.\"\n\n\"The blighters already work for them. But it wouldn't hurt to talk to them.\"\n\n\"Careful of the Dragonguard. Their captain lives to kill us: male, female, or hatchling. One scarred him when he was a child, they say.\"\n\n\"I imagined it was something like that. I was acquainted with his father. When I take a deep breath I still feel a twinge to remember him by. I've no idea what became of him, but I know this Eliam carries his sword. Along with the grudge you speak of.\"\n\n\"I've been in this hole for so long, I've forgotten what the sun looks like. At first I just slept, like the others, but I began to go mad. I had visions. I need air and light and space.\"\n\nAuRon tried to give himself hope for both of them. \"Natasatch, I'll do what I can. Perhaps I can get the Wyrmmaster to let me take you flying. I'll say I can't mate underground.\"\n\n\"He'll say learn, or lose your privilege. That's what the other males do. We don't have any choice, and then the eggs are taken.\"\n\nAuRon sighed. \"I thought if I could just get at this wizard, I could kill him and fly back. But it seems all the men here are a part of his vision for the destiny of man. If he died, they'd still be able to breed and train dragons. There's no magic to it\u2014it's a matter of skill and experience. It won't stop with the death of one man.\"\n\n\"They've had some trouble with us. There's a reason there are so many empty ledges, gray. Some of us have taken to smashing our eggs, and this morning, Nereeza had a clutch.\"\n\n\"Natasatch, give me a few days to think. We'll get out of this somehow. You'll see the sun and feel the sky, and fly\u2014\"\n\n\"Fly? I've never flown, AuRon. I've had this collar about my neck since they took me off that ship, and I've been in this cavern since my wings came out.\"\n\nAuRon blinked, astonished. So many seasons, so much time had passed since the day he had first flown. He tried to imagine Natasatch's years in the damp. Somehow depriving her of flight seemed as much of a crime as what they were doing with the eggs.\n\n\"You'll fly. As I'm true to the song of my ancestors, you'll fly. We'll go above the mountains, above the clouds, together.\"\n\n\"Together? Like a mating flight?\" Natasatch asked, tilting her head and resettling her wings.\n\n\"Well, I mean\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I shouldn't make jokes, but jokes are all that keep me going.\"\n\n\"I'll see you again soon,\" AuRon said, jumping off her ledge. \"Don't lose heart.\"\n\n\"I'll be waiting. It's all I do, after all.\"\n\nAuRon woke from his nap when the cart went by. It was not one of the two-wheeled ones, laden with food and pulled by a pony, but a lower, four-wheeled construct, high sided and thickly padded with mats of straw. One woman\u2014it was rare to see human women among the dragons\u2014pushed it, and the other pulled it from a leather strap about her waist. Four members of the Dragonguard walked before, carrying two-pointed spears AuRon remembered from his capture. He shuddered, and lifted his head when Eliam followed with four more of the Dragonguard. A pair of the Wyrmmaster's green-clad assistants brought up the rear.\n\n\"All this effort to shovel out the sluice?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"It's time to collect eggs, gray. We think one of them has laid. Sometimes they can be troublesome.\"\n\n\"The eggs?\"\n\nEliam stepped out of line and rounded on him. \"You know what I mean. Come along, you might learn something about your place in the world.\"\n\nWhich was just what AuRon was looking for. He trailed the procession past both gates.\n\nThe dragonelles hissed and spat from within their caged snouts when the cart appeared; the forward men brought down their wyrmcatchers and held them at the ready. The men stepped slowly, their dragon-scale armor clinking as they moved. AuRon wondered what would happen to the women at the cart if one of the dragonelles managed to loose her fire properly. The green-clad assistants looked on each ledge\u2014they were just below head height\u2014and searched the dragonelle's perches for eggs.\n\nThe wyrmcatchers peeped their whistles behind the face masks when they came to a shelf midway down the cavern.\n\n\"Four... very good, Nereeza, now move out of your alcove,\" one of the assistants said.\n\n\"My eggs, my duty,\" Nereeza said. \"I beg: let me see them hatch.\"\n\n\"You know we'll take good care of them.\"\n\n\"My eggs, my duty,\" Nereeza insisted.\n\nEliam lowered his visor and whistled sharply. Two of the wyrmcatchers stepped forward, and went to either side of the dragonelle. Eliam drew his sword and hopped up onto the egg cart to see better. She backed away from one, curling her tail around the eggs, and the other took the opportunity to catch her neck in the crotch of his spear. AuRon noticed that the spear had handles sticking out, perpendicular to the shaft, and another wide pad at the rear for the man to brace against his shoulder.\n\nThe woman who pulled the cart unharnessed herself and stepped away, making soothing sounds.\n\nAnother birdlike peep sounded from Eliam, then a louder one, and the rest of the wyrmcatchers pinioned Nereeza. One used his wyrmcatcher to hold her snout aloft. The Wyrmmaster's assistants climbed onto the egg shelf. Liquid fire bubbled out of Nereeza's mouth, bringing a sizzling sound as it splashed against her lips and nostrils.\n\nAuRon tightened his jaw, imagining the pain on his own snout.\n\n\"My... eggs... my... duty,\" Nereeza managed to gasp through her flaming lips. She lifted a leg. Eliam sounded three shrieking trills as he made an astonishing jump from cart to ledge. His sword swept up as Nereeza's leg came down, not fast enough. As his sword opened her neck in a splatter of blood and fire, her foot came down on the eggs in a wet crunch. Another spearman plunged his weapon into her leg, pushing it away from the mess of shell and slime. Nereeza's windpipe burbled as it took in blood. Eliam put the sword up over his shoulder, then swung again, and AuRon heard the blade bite into Nereeza's vertebrae and pass through. AuRon had heard bitter legends of dragon-killing swords; now he'd seen one used. On a female. With her neck immobilized so that the soft underside was exposed.\n\nOne egg remained, and the Wyrmmaster's assistant took it up as he would pick up a baby, getting it out of the way of the still-twitching corpse, and transferred it to the padded cart. The procession continued to the other end of the cave, and back again. No further eggs were found.\n\n\"A bad casting. Perhaps the breeding stock's not up to the job,\" one of the egg keepers said as they followed the cart out.\n\n\"This gray is eager enough. Been long away from his kind, they say. He'll do better.\"\n\nFour of the Dragonguard fell out of the procession, drew weapons that were half-ax and half-blade, and went to Nereeza's shelf. They began working on her foreleg, severing it from the trunk. Nereeza's body twitched in ghastly reaction as they worked.\n\n\"A dead dragonelle's too big to get out in one piece,\" one of the females said in AuRon's ear. \"They have to take us out in sections.\"\n\nEliam went to Nereeza's head and took out a small dagger. He cut her ears off and stuck them in his belt. He approached AuRon, cleaning his blade with an oily rag. He flipped his visor up and grinned at AuRon from behind his bloody armor.\n\n\"I hope you've learned something about the world we're building, gray,\" Eliam said. \"It's a world of alliances. Those who help us will be rewarded. Those who hinder us\u2014\" He jerked his chin at the butchery behind him. \"I've got nearly a hundred... a hundred!... pairs just like this, from hatchling, drake, and dragon. Watch yourself, or one day you'll be in my collection.\"\n\n\"Eliam!\" one of the egg keepers said.\n\nAuRon lowered his head to Eliam's level, waggling his ears. Yes, \"I've learned something. If you come for mine, you'll need more than eight men.\"\n\nThree days later, AuRon was summoned again to the Wyrmmaster's lodge. He flew this time, watching a pair of ships catch the breeze down the fjord. Farther out at the widening of the fjord where it met the sea, four young dragons were making practice flights with riders. AuRon watched the dragons swoop along in a staggered line like fishing pelicans, wingtips almost touching.\n\nThe Wyrmmaster stood watching the ships put out to sea. It was a cool morning; he had his cloak pulled tight around his chest and a knit skullcap on. AuRon landed, and the Wyrmmaster turned on him with a friendly smile.\n\n\"There go my allies among the human nations. All good men and true, save Svak Thunderarm. He participated in the war against the Wheel of Fire Dwarves, but will not send his men farther south, as he says his people have no enemies there. It's as if he ignored everything said at this gathering.\"\n\nAuRon guessed what was coming. \"Men forget those who do favors for them. Perhaps there are some among his people who are more farsighted than he.\"\n\n\"I know there are. That is why I asked for you, NooShoahk. Are you rested enough for a long flight? They say you took to sleeping among the dragonelles.\"\n\n\"I've been long away from my own kind, especially females. Having so many all to myself\u2014I wanted to make the most of my week.\"\n\n\"I understand. Stars above, more than that, I approve, my new-horn young gray. I've some messages that need to go to Gettel at Juutfod's dragon tower. Then I wish you to go on to Thunderarm's hold at Maganar. There are some men there who may welcome a change in leadership. After you've delivered that message and taken replies, you may return here for a time. With luck, I'll have to send you south with more messages, and you'll be spared some of the winter.\"\n\n\"I'll need to look at a map to find these places. I've never been to either.\"\n\n\"Come to the map room. Or rather, have your head come to the map room\u2014the stairs are too small for you\u2014and I'll show you.\"\n\nHe returned to his lodge, and AuRon waited until he opened the shutters on one of the upper rooms. By rearing up on his hind legs, he could just get his head inside so he could turn it and look at the walls. There was a map of the Isle of Ice filling one wall, attached to it a smaller map showing the archipelago around it. A huge table of sketch-maps and notes stood in the center of the room, and on the other long wall a case. The Wyrmmaster unlocked the case and opened it to show a map of the lands around the Inland Ocean. Rib-boned pins stuck out of it in various places, like a hedgehog trailing bracken.\n\n\"What do the pins say?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"You're quicker than some of my captains, NooShoahk,\" Wyrmmaster Wrimere said. \"The pins let me know who and where my friends and enemies are. With your help, this map will be kept more up to date. Much of the information on it is months old, if not a year. I'd have more courier dragons, but we've had losses to replace. I sent out too many untrained dragons at first, and they reacted unpredictably in battle. Now only a few dragons are trusted to fight without men to bridle their natural fury. White silk means members of the Circle of Men. Red silk shows where my dragons are based. Blue silk are blighters who have allied themselves to the cause\u2014they'll be the rude labor that builds our new world\u2014green is for the elves, and gold the dwarves. This summer I've pulled out a gold pin and two green ones. A good year.\"\n\nAuRon looked at the headwaters of the Falnges. Naf's land was marked with a black pin. There were only a few scattered on the map, most of the others were clustered in the old Hypatian Empire.\n\n\"What does black mean, your Supremacy?\" AuRon asked.\n\n\"Those are the saddest of all. Those lands are ruled by men, but they've succumbed to the influences of elvish plots or dwarvish gold, and as such must be treated as the failed lines. Human hygiene demands their extermination.\"\n\n\"Starlight returns! Starlight returns!\"\n\nThere was excitement in the saddling cave. AuRon looked up from the bandolier Varl was fixing about his neck to see a silver dragon gliding into the cave. It was a rather stunted dragon, even AuRon with his unusually thin body probably outweighed him, but it flew gracefully.\n\n\"He's our ranking dragon, NooShoahk,\" Varl said. \"He was the fastest until your trials. The Wyrmmaster calls him a dragon for the others to imitate, and Starlight loves the Wyrmmaster more than life. He's one of the older dragons of the new generation.\"\n\n\"Older! Why it's smaller than me.\"\n\n\"They say he was ill when he was young. But don't be fooled\u2014he's killed dragons larger than you in the trials.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"He's a venomer.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"You've never heard of a venomous dragon?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"He secretes poison in his bite. A few drops will send a horse into a seizure that'll snap its neck,\" Varl said, and then lowered his voice. \"The Dragonguard carry special daggers. They've got a hollow core; you stab someone good and hard and then wrench the blade. It breaks a vial and gets the poison in. He's milked for it now and again. I'm told a lot of the riders carry it, as well, in case their beast bolts.\"\n\n\"Why tell me?\" AuRon asked, watching the silver cast an imperious eye on the dragons bobbing their heads in welcome.\n\n\"The first dragon I ever trained was a fine blue. I even named him; Icelake he was called. Strong, fast, smart. We'd follow the terms out to the lesser isles and fish, no wood to be found but he'd use his fire and we'd have dragon-fried cod. He outflew Starlight there in his trials, got put into the breeding stock. A few days later, we found him dead. Starlight doesn't like being bested. Someone's bound to tell him you could fly circles around him. I don't want to find you all stiff and broken like I did Icelake.\"\n\nAuRon stalked past the other dragons to the cave mouth. Starlight raised his head high, and instead of lowering his, AuRon brought his up to the cavern roof, extending his fans. Starlight hissed and thrashed its tail; dragon handlers came running, alarmed.\n\n\"Who do you think you are, gray?\" Starlight barked.\n\n\"I know who, and what, I am. Do you?\" AuRon asked.\n\nWithout waiting for a reply AuRon left the cave and flew southeast, four brass cylinders around his neck. Three were to go to the Wyrmmaster's servant at Juutfod for further dispersal, and the last he was to take into the mountains and Maganar.\n\nAs soon as the island had disappeared into the misty horizon behind him, he'd been tempted to turn away and just make his way to Dairuss. Being free of the Wyrmmaster's ill-ordered world, the baleful gaze of Eliam and his Dragonguard, the regimented existence where even mating was a function of time and not choice, made him value the open sky and free air. He had no wish to give it up again and go back to a place where he might be killed for disobedience, or castrated because another dragon was stronger than he. The prospect of life with one's ears threaded for reins or chin and wings pierced for guidelines was not something he wished to chance.\n\nOnly one thing called him back, and that was the misery of the female dragons. The males filled him with loathing, leavened only with a little pity, but the plight of the unhappy greens was overtaking even his old desire for vengeance for Djer. He thought of the callused spots on Natasatch's face where her muzzle had chafed, and the chain that prevented her from ever getting out into the sky and sun.\n\nJuutfod was easy to find; he made landfall by midnight. It rested on a long spur of land, serrated to the south by sandy inlets, projecting out into the ocean and falling into a series of islands. It was the home of the Varvar, the masters of the dragon ships that wandered so much of the eastern coast of the Inland Ocean.\n\nHigh above the city, among the steep-sided mountains of this part of the coast, stood the dragon tower. It was part of the Wyrmmaster's vision to have many of these in the realms of man, where dragon-born communication lines would meet, but so far only this first had been built as a model of what was to come. It was imposing, perhaps too much of an engineering feat for other barbarian tribes. It had a wide top, and a hollow center lined with alcoves where dragons could rest in safety, with rooms and storehouses for man and dragon beneath. A flame was kept burning at all hours atop the tower, a flame magnified by a polished bowl of silver turned around and around by a windmill-driven pivot.\n\nAuRon landed and was inspecting the beacon when a Dragonguard came forward from his watch-shelter.\n\n\"What, no rider?\" the man asked. \"Was there an accident?\"\n\nAuRon cat-stretched his back. \"I carry no rider so that I can fly faster. I bear three messages for this tower. Wake your master so I may put them in his hand.\"\n\n\"Her hand. Go below, pick a berth. We've no dragons staying at the moment. We'll have food swung up, and the raincatchers are full.\"\n\n\"I'll only stay a night. This last message needs to be taken inland.\"\n\nAuRon climbed down to an alcove. The hollow center of the massive tower was lined with ledges and bays, and a set of ropes going to the bottom hung from a steel arm at the top. Each bay had a narrow window and a pelt that could be swung to curtain it with the flick of a snout. AuRon curled up in an alcove near the top, and watched reflections from the signal beacon play across the stones on the inner walls of the tower.\n\nThe blocks above creaked, and AuRon looked over the edge of his perch to see a platform being raised. One set of lines did the lifting, and another maneuvered the platform so it could be brought to any of the shelves. A human rode it.\n\n\"Up. Up,\" she called. \"A bit to the northside. No! Northside! Better. Up. Up...\"\n\nThe platform arrived at AuRon's berth, and a human female stepped off. She was tall, like the people of this part of the coast, with reddish hair that reminded him of Hischhein pulled away from her face and into a thick braid. She wore a leather tool-vest and loose peasant-pants tucked into soft boots.\n\n\"Welcome, skyking,\" she said, looping chains over a pair of iron hooks so the platform joined the bay. \"I'm Gettel, his Supremacy's factotum in Juutfod, and your host. We've got pork in cask, and some fresh mutton for you.\"\n\n\"My name is NooShoahk. I'll have a little of both, but only a little. I need to be on wing again tomorrow.\"\n\n\"NooShoahk... hmmm... That's a dragon name, gray.\"\n\n\"I wasn't raised on the island. I've only just joined.\"\n\nShe pried open a cask of pork with a crowbar. \"Pork it is,\" she said, lifting the cask with a grunt and setting it on his platform. She threw a joint of mutton on top of it.\n\n\"Here are the messages,\" AuRon said, passing her three of the cylinders.\n\nShe looked at the labeling.\n\n\"They're correct. I can read Parl.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said. \"Welcome to my tower.\"\n\n\"It's remarkable,\" AuRon said, noticing the emphasis she gave the word my. Sometimes with humans how they said a word was as important as what the word was. \"Do you know how long it took to build?\"\n\n\"Do I? A dozen years of labor, and that's after the materials had been collected. I drew the plans myself. It's not finished yet, even now we're working on some catacombs beneath. I selected this spot because of the caves nearby.\"\n\n\"The Wyrmmaster is wise to have you.\"\n\n\"He gives opportunities to those denied them elsewhere. A woman on this coast who wants to make anything but babies isn't thought much of. In girlhood I'd designed a round barn for my father, with a winch in the center, like this but on a smaller scale. It was a curiosity, people came to see it from all around, and then clap my brothers on the back and congratulate them on the fine work. In Juutfod I went to one of the councils he and Praskall held. They're building a new world for men, and I joined to make sure they built it for women, too.\"\n\nThe next morning AuRon continued on his journey east, following the river. This part of the coast was a network of lakes and rivers, the constant rain and melt from mountain glaciers fed innumerable rivers and streams, and marshlands in between. It looked a poor land for anything but fishing or falconing waterfoul. He wondered if somewhere below wolves still howled the tale of Blackhard and Firelong.\n\nThe river was his route into the mountains. He followed the northern fork\u2014the southern led toward the former delvings of the Wheel of Fire dwarves\u2014and came upon a riverbank town. Maganar was a strange sort of town: it was more of collection of settlements in the valley on both sides of the river, with smallholdings on every hillside. With winter on the way, the fields were clear of crops, though he saw boys out with slings. They hunted for migrating birds that had stopped for a meal in the fields. The smallholders were shifting timber closer to their homes and making repairs to roof and window for the coming winter.\n\nAuRon had been told to look near the riverbank for a clearing with six huge poles, where a tent was put up for festivals and gatherings. He saw the open area, and the tree-trunk-size poles, and alighted within.\n\nChildren ran to get their parents, out of excitement rather than fear. AuRon waited and pulled out the last bronze message-bottle from his bandolier. A boat crossed from the other side of the river and a group of men got out. They were dressed in soft deerskin, and many wore black, furry hats with flaps of pelt that hung down the sides. More men emerged from the buildings on the clearing side of the river. Only a few bore weapons.\n\nThey reminded AuRon of birds, gathering and gathering until they all decided to do something. When the men adjudged enough of their numbers present, one stepped forward from the chattering throng. He had a braided blond beard.\n\n\"Well, dragon, if it's Thunderarm you seek, he's away with your master, and his living son's not old enough to speak for his house.\"\n\n\"My name is NooShoahk. If he hadn't returned yet,\" AuRon said, \"I was to give this message to someone named Urlan Ironmonger.\"\n\n\"That would be me, gray dragon,\" a man said, stepping forward. He had a twisted left arm; it had been broken and set badly. He took the cylinder in his good hand and opened it. \"Where's Wickman? I need this read to me.\"\n\nA thin man came to the front of the crowd, walking slowly with the aid of a cane. Something about his scarecrow frame seemed out of place among these burly barbarians. Then AuRon realized what it was. He was looking into the face of the man he had once known as Hross. And Hross was looking at his shortened tail.\n\nThe people of Maganar were hospitable. They slaughtered a stringy old milk cow for him, and chickens besides. Hross showed no sign of recognizing him after the first appraising glance, and took the cylinder off to his riverbank home to read it to the man with the crippled arm.\n\nAuRon watched the town shut down for the night. He was used to seeing young people out on the Isle of Ice after the elders had gone to sleep, talking and singing and courting. There were young women, bringing cattle into barns and working the wells, but not many young men.\n\n\"Do men ride you into battle?\" a boy asked. His Parl was thickly accented, and slowly enunciated, but intelligible enough.\n\n\"Not yet,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"I practice on a thudmog, except it's got a hard shell, not like yours. Neck's shorter, too.\"\n\n\"A pony would be more realistic, I think. You want to be a dragonrider someday?\"\n\n\"Yes. They're the best. They're the only ones who came back from the reckoning with the dwarves. I had two brothers, but they were just axmen. The dwarves killed them, my father says. He lost a hand. When I'm grown, I'll take our wergild from the dwarves. I'll see to it.\"\n\n\"You'll take their place? How can one boy fill two sets of shoes?\"\n\n\"I'll fight twice as hard.\"\n\n\"Listen to a dragon, boy. Stay home and take a wife, and raise two sons to do the same. Could be some dwarf will come to this village looking for wergild for his brother some day, and if that happens, they'll need all of you here.\"\n\nThe next morning Urlan Ironmonger and the other men came, again bearing the message-tube.\n\n\"Give this to no one but the Wyrmmaster,\" Ironmonger said. \"Tell him we've all put our mark to Wickman's words. We'll be true to them.\"\n\n\"You've put your mark to Wickman's words, and will be true to them. I'll tell him myself.\"\n\nAuRon spread his wings, and the men backed up. He launched himself into the air, and climbed away, already wondering about the contents of the tube. If his memory wasn't playing him tricks, he'd come close to a man who had known he had traveled with dwarves. He was younger then, but Hross had definitely looked at his tail. What was in the message tube about his neck?\n\nIt was sealed, so he didn't dare open it. Losing it was out of the question\u2014the harness was well made, and he had been told to bring back the reply. Was he bearing his own death sentence back to the Wyrmmaster?\n\nHe only just remembered to call at the Juutfod tower, so preoccupied was he with what he might do to escape the situation. There was another message to bear back to the Isle of Ice, so he added the tube to his bandolier. As he headed out to sea from Juutfod, he paused, circling. It would be safest to just fly back south, tell Naf all he could, and help his friends prepare for the storm gathering as little flags in the mapcase. But that would leave Natasatch and who knows how many eggs in the hands of a murderous madman. He wavered, tilting his wings first south, then northwest. South, northwest... south, northwest... Naf, Natasatch.\n\nHe chose Natasatch.\n\nHe decided to deliver the messages immediately upon landing, and wait until the Wyrmmaster had read them to take action. Perhaps Hross assumed that in the intervening years AuRon had fallen in with the Wyrmmaster, and forgotten their old feud.\n\nAuRon landed at the lodge, exhausted from worry and flight, on a final warm afternoon of autumn. A few of the men lounged about the place, enjoying the sunshine's glow, and they came in to see what news he bore.\n\nThe Wyrmmaster took the bandolier with his disarming good humor. \"A quick trip, my good friend. In a boat that journey would take weeks, with fair weather.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to miss my turn in the breeding cave,\" AuRon said, to general guffaws. Even Eliam laughed with the rest.\n\nThe Wyrmmaster examined the tubes, and looked at the seals to see which was which. He read the one from Juutfod first.\n\n\"They've burned another fishing fleet at Rerok Isles,\" the Wyrmmaster said. \"There'll be hunger in Hypat this winter, with no traffic in smoked fish up the Falnges.\" He opened the second, and read it. He pursed his lips, and read it again.\n\n\"Will the men of Maganar stand with us?\" Eliam asked. \"Or does that ungrateful cur have more friends?\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster handed the message to the Dragonblade.\n\n\"You can go and rest now, AuRon,\" he said.\n\nAuRon shifted his weight and caught himself. \"NooShoahk, you mean, Your Supremacy.\"\n\n\"You mean your name isn't AuRon? Never has been?\"\n\n\"I've heard the name, yes, but never used it. Why should I? I'm proud of NooMoahk; he fought alongside humans just as I would. No, my name's not AuRon.\"\n\n\"There's a man who says that you are a gray dragon named AuRon, and that you're a friend of the dwarves.\"\n\n\"What man? I talked to a woman at Juutfod, and the guard only at night.\"\n\n\"In Maganar. He wrote a note, asking if I knew your history. Come to think of it, I don't know much about your origins.\"\n\nMembers of the Dragonguard gathered, and Eliam stood before the Wyrmmaster, his hand on his sword hilt. AuRon tried to keep his tail still.\n\n\"Someone at Maganar said this? It wouldn't be that elf calling himself Wickman, would it? Tall, thin, spidery looking?\"\n\n\"There's an elf in Maganar?\" the Wyrmmaster said.\n\n\"Perhaps a part elf, but he looked and smelled of it. I thought it strange, but as I was new there\u2014\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster rounded on his men. \"Who served at the battle with the Wheel of Fire?\"\n\n\"Me, sir!\" a Dragonguard said.\n\n\"With Thunderarm, was there a strange man, tall and thin?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Dark as well, and most of the rest were fair. He seemed an odd duck. Stayed out of the battle, but he was older, and none of the woodmen thought aught of it, so neither did we. Name was Wicker or something.\"\n\n\"Wickman?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I think that's it.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster turned red. \"By the storms, Thunderarm's held a viper to his bosom. No wonder his mind was poisoned to me. This elf's had his ear long before this dragon came. That's how the elves work, my men, since the first man planted his crop and looked to build a cabin in their woods. They plot and they plan and they infiltrate and deceive with honeyed words that hide the taste of hemlock. He'd have me doubt my own messenger, this dragon who's lost three kingstones of flesh winging my messages as fast as the wind. Someone will be taken to account for this!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't report him to you sir,\" the Dragonguard said, visibly worried. \"Now that I'm thinking of it, he did bathe a lot. Had books, too.\"\n\n\"They're master deceivers, and honest men like you look for only truth in their fellowship. But don't worry, the true hearts will get their reward, here and in the afterlife. We'll claim our birthright, and the tricksters will get what's coming to them. Books! Bathing, in lavender-scented water no doubt. Effeminacy and corruption among our ranks. No wonder the battle was so hard. The dwarves no doubt had warnings, or more.\"\n\nFlecks of spittle appeared at the Wyrmmaster's mouth as he continued. \"What diseased seeds have been planted in honest Maganar, I wonder? I can guess. I've seen it before, time and time again. Defeatism. Dwarf-love. Empty cradles, too, for the elves will take a babe and raise it for their wicked purposes at times. Their crimes are well documented. It's our job to see that the truth is told.\"\n\n\"Send me back with some riders, Your Supremacy,\" AuRon said. \"Give me a day to recover, and send me back with some of your true men. We'll take this spy before he knows his web has been discovered. They'll get a good look at his ears, and with that evidence open him up and see what the shape of his heart is. But take my advice and never trust the men of Maganar in battle again. Leave them in peace, until generations have passed and unspoiled minds are ready for the truth.\"\n\n\"No, good dragon, you won't go back just yet. You'll take rest, and a deserved reward for a job well done. Not only have you brought me good news in record time, you've unmasked a traitor, tripped up by his own evil plots. Eat and sleep, fair and faithful servant.\"\n\nAuRon bowed, and backed out of the hall. He met the eye of Eliam. The lone orb held the hatred of two.\n\nAuRon slept with one eye open. It was a trick he had never managed when he was younger, but lying in an unprotected cave off a tunnel that anyone might come down forced him to learn how to do it. Being afraid for your life sharpened the powers of concentration.\n\nThe Dragonguard was watching him. Eliam Dragonblade must have passed the word quietly among his men, for AuRon felt their eyes upon him even when they had their visors down. There were the sounds of footsteps following him when he went outdoors. Footsteps echoing in tunnels that stopped when he did. Even at feeding times, there were extra men milling about.\n\n\"Watch yourself, NooShoahk,\" Varl muttered as he cleaned up the bony remains of a meal\u2014the food was of such quality and quantity AuRon now only ate the bones richest in marrow. \"Nothing's been said to me direct, but I hear His Excellency Eliam is hoping on a fight. Word is the Dragonguard's to stick you at any excuse.\"\n\n\"That's odd. It could be the accusations against me from Maganar.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's Starlight's doing. He doesn't care for rivals, as I said.\"\n\n\"We're to carry these when we're around you,\" Varl said, showing AuRon one of the special poisoned daggers carried by the Dragonguard, from its concealed sheath under his jerkin.\n\n\"I'm in your debt,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"I've been around enough beasts to know the good from the bad,\" Varl said. \"You're one of the good ones, NooShoahk.\"\n\n\"I might say the same about you.\"\n\nThe warning floated at the top of AuRon's consciousness from then on. AuRon wished for another assignment, just for the chance to fly free of searching eyes and stealthy steps. He'd been through many dangerous times in his life, but except for his capture by the elves he'd always been free. It never occurred to him that he could lose his freedom without someone putting a collar about his neck and a muzzle on his snout, but that was how he felt in the caverns of the Wyrmmaster. He pitied the dragons where in, who'd never touched the sky except at the behest of a rider.\n\nThere was more on his mind than just the Dragonguard. He found himself thinking of Natasatch, her shimmering green skin and elegant frame. The thought of other dragons scrabbling at her flanks\u2014ignoring the ancient dragon mating rituals in eager lust\u2014made his fire bladder boil. By the egg that protected him, the next time he faced another member of the breeding stock in battle, he'd give it a fight to remember! He wanted to see her, smell her, talk to her, with such longing that sleeping with even one eye closed became an impossibility. Gentle questioning of Varl revealed that there were no subsidiary entrances to the dragonelle's cavern, at least nothing large enough to admit any but a new hatchling.\n\nRelief of a sort came one night as AuRon thrashed in circles, unable to settle into a comfortable position. He thought over her words, the soothing cadence of her voice, in an attempt to lull himself.\n\n\"AuRon, AuRon, if only you could be beside me. It's all I want, more than air and sun, more than a bellyful of eggs. Just you, AuRon.\"\n\nPleasant fantasy!\n\n\"I'd be there if I could,\" AuRon imagined himself saying in return, comforting her in the damp of her cave. \"I'd take you to the sky, and you'd hear my song, your scales glittering like elf-diamonds in the sun.\"\n\n\"AuRon, is that you?\"\n\nOdd thing for a fantasy to say. Didn't she see him right next to her? Didn't she feel his tail entwining with hers? Then it occurred to him that he felt other thoughts and emotions behind the words.\n\n\"You're still in the dragonelle cavern?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"Then we're communicating, through many dragon-lengths of solid stone. I didn't know it was possible. I don't hear anyone else.\"\n\n\"Our minds must have found each other,\" she said.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"As well as ever. There's a new dragonelle here. Shadowcatch is giving all his attention to her. Poor thing, she's barely fledged.\"\n\n\"I don't have another turn until after Starlight,\" AuRon said. \"I long to see you.\"\n\n\"I long to see you,\" she echoed.\n\nAuRon heard footsteps. \"There's someone coming. What's Shadowcatch like?\"\n\n\"Bloated. Loud. He's a black, a bit on the dull side.\"\n\n\"His scales or his manner?\" AuRon asked, a thought tickling at him.\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nThere was someone at AuRon's bay, but he pretended to be asleep.\n\n\"There's going to be trouble tomorrow or the next day. I can feel it. Epinonia, Alhala, and Ouistrela are all ready to lay. Starlight's doing, I expect. Ouistrela's fought the rest off, but she's scared of Starlight's bite. She submitted.\"\n\n\"I must go\u2014,\" AuRon said, breaking contact and rolling his watchful eye.\n\nEliam Dragonblade stood in the shadows of the tunnel, picking at a fingernail with a dagger. It had sawtoothed edges and narrowed near the hilt. The dagger looked to AuRon like the one Varl showed him. Two more of the Dragonguard stood behind.\n\n\"I'm sorry to wake you, but I have news.\" Something that would have been a smile on another crawled across his face like an insect.\n\n\"We all do what we can. Those who can't make news deliver it. Another victory across the sea while you stayed here, cutting the throats of bound dragonelles?\"\n\n\"Two pieces of news,\" he said, ignoring the taunt. \"Three riders have been sent to Maganar, to get to the bottom of the deception taking place. They'll be back within the week, NooShoahk.\" He placed the tiniest emphasis on the name.\n\n\"Wise of His Supremacy to act quickly,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Treason is dealt with swiftly among our kind. We'll soon find out who the deceiver is.\"\n\n\"I'm happy to hear it. The second piece of news?\"\n\n\"Three drakes have begun to fly. There will be more trials soon. Even Starlight will be involved this time, as well as you.\"\n\n\"Why not Shadowstalk?\"\n\n\"His turn in the dragonelle cave.\"\n\n\"So it is. I look forward to flying against Starlight.\"\n\n\"He looks forward to meeting you in battle.\" Eliam tossed the dagger in the air. It spun as a blur, but he snatched it by the hilt as if by magic.\n\n\"How can he be so sure of facing me? Isn't the idea to face the younger dragons and give them a chance to prove themselves?\"\n\n\"You two are the swiftest. You'll be sure to face each other at the end of the trials.\"\n\n\"So be it.\" AuRon said. \"You're quick with that dagger. Have you ever faced a real dragon in single combat, as your father did?\"\n\n\"Many times. I have the ears to prove it. Four times my father's tally, and I'm only half the age he was when he was killed.\"\n\n\"I wonder.\"\n\nEliam spun his dagger again, but missed the hilt when it came down. It bounced toward AuRon, but the Dragonblade stepped out and caught it with the blade pointed at AuRon. The motion turned into a lunge at AuRon's flank.\n\nAuRon, keyed up though he was, resisted the urge to lash back. He stood there, quivering, as the blade halted a claw's width from his rib cage.\n\n\"You don't react,\" Eliam said. \"Is it wisdom or fear, I wonder. Men, you'll say\u2014\"\n\n\"NooShoahk, NooShoahk!\" AuRon heard Varl's voice calling. The keeper appeared around the bend of the cavern, his wild hair streaming. He halted. \"What passes here?\"\n\n\"Nothing of consequence,\" Eliam said, sheathing his dagger. \"What's your business?\"\n\n\"A fishing boat just got in. Her hull is full of tuna the size of dolphins, they say. I was wondering if NooShoahk would care for fresh fish for a change, before it gets chopped into hatchling-meal.\"\n\nEliam shrugged, the black scales at his shoulders shifting and glittering in the candlelight. \"My business here is done. Enjoy your fish, NooShoahk.\" He burst out laughing. \"Gar, you deserve a good meal before the trials.\"\n\nThe Dragonblade and his armored shadows left.\n\n\"I was wondering what he was up to here,\" Varl said.\n\n\"Bearding a dragon in his den, I'd call it,\" AuRon said. \"I'm glad you arrived when you did. They say fish is good for the mind and I need to use mine, like I've never used it before. Let's feast.\"\n\nVarl feasted, but AuRon just nibbled, Mother's words about gluttonous dragons running through his mind. The tuna were enormous; Varl had not been making that up.\n\n\"Have you heard about the new trials?\" AuRon asked, as they watched the fish being grilled and eaten by the people of Icelanding. AuRon caught a whiff of pepper and cooking oil.\n\n\"That I have. Remember what I told you about Starlight.\"\n\n\"Seems an unfair way to test the new dragons, matching them against older ones.\"\n\n\"The Wyrmmaster only wants the best to have a chance to breed. Though it seems when it's Starlight's turn, he goes up against the worst lots.\"\n\n\"Is the Wyrmmaster trying to breed venomers?\"\n\n\"No, they're taken away. Too hard to handle among other dragons. Dangerous.\"\n\n\"Taken away where?\"\n\n\"To be killed.\"\n\n\"Have you seen the bodies?\"\n\n\"Ummm, no, I suppose not.\"\n\nAuRon asked something that had been tapping beneath his thoughts, like dwarven miners. \"What do you think of the wars down south? The destiny of man?\"\n\n\"I don't. I fought for all that years ago, but I've had enough.\"\n\n\"Did your king lead you to war?\"\n\n\"He was called the tarn, though our people didn't pay him much mind. My village hardly had a name it was Bder's Clearing, is how it would be said in Parl. One day a pair of men flew in on a dragon. One spoke our tongue; the other just worked the dragon. It was a sight, that dragon, all sleek muscle and shiny bronze scale. The one who spoke to us told us a tale of how wronged we were, driven away from the coast by the sea elves\u2014it was the first I'd heard about us being wronged, but when I asked my father, he said it was the truth\u2014and that men were gathering to reclaim their heritage. Men and dragons. They had shining swords and capes and the standard with the man in the golden circle. I just wanted to sit on that dragon.\n\n\"I joined up and marched away with some of the others. The dragonrider left, but the other stayed. We learned to call him swordthane, or just thane. We ended up in this little town on the coast. It was a sea elf town that had been burnt out. The site of the first victory for the Wyrmmaster's idea. We all had to stand on the spot where the first blood was spilled and take an oath. I saw men making themselves comfortable in homes built by the craft of others, too, and I wondered what had become of those who had built the homes.\n\n\"They have trials for men, too, and they judged me fit only for holding a shield and throwing axes. I saw three battles: killed a dwarf, four elves, and two men. I was wounded. They knew I liked being among the dragons, and so for my service they made me a keeper.\n\n\"My spirit still soars every time I see a dragon aloft, so I'm happy enough. I look forward to talking with you. You're different from the others. The Wrymmaster's methods produce willing dragons, but I wonder if it doesn't take something out of the breed at the same time.\"\n\n\"That thought wandered through my mind, as well,\" AuRon said. \"My father admired humans in his way, but saw them as enemies. I don't feel that way, though if I speak from my heart, I must tell you that I thought the way humans and dragons cooperated on this isle would be different.\"\n\nVarl smiled in understanding.\n\n\"This fish has made me hungry for more. Gather your camp-gear and saddle me. We'll go out to one of those islands where you and Icelake would fish upon a time.\"\n\n\"Even full as I am, I can taste the dragon-crisped cod,\" Varl said.\n\nThey agreed to meet in the morning. AuRon could not sleep; he continually caught hints of Natasatch's discordant dreams. It interfered with his concentration.\n\nThey flew out to one of the islands before dawn the next morning, near enough to the Isle of Ice so it could be seen on a clear day. From the air it looked like pig with its nose in the air, the rocky feet and snout pointed out to sea. The flatter part was dotted with running brambles and thick grasses.\n\n\"The lobstermen sometimes come in small boats, but it is a bad place for reefs,\" Varl shouted over the autumn wind.\n\nThey landed and made camp at a circle of stones and washed-up logs used by the lobster-trappers. Fishing is a hunt of patience, which AuRon was sorely short of. After the sun lifted clear of the horizon in its climb, AuRon gave up and hunted as the pelicans did, diving with a terrific splash into the water and scooping up stunned fish with his mouth. As he waded ashore and raised his water-lids, twitching fish in his mouth, Varl ran up to him with branches he had cut for spits. AuRon dropped the catch onto the rocks.\n\n\"How many more times must you do that for a full belly?\" Varl laughed.\n\n\"I haven't time to do it again, my friend.\"\n\n\"We have all the\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm going back to the island. I'll come back if I can. If I don't, it means I'm dead. Do what you think is best.\"\n\n\"NooShoahk, what is this?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, my friend. This was all an excuse to get you off the island. I didn't want you to be a part of what is coming. I've been false with you. About unimportant things. In other matters I've been true, and always will be. Thank you for what you've done for me.\"\n\nAuRon raised his wings, and in a single jump and a mighty beat was aloft.\n\n\"Are you mad?\" Varl shouted.\n\nAuRon made a final loop over the confused barbarian, feeling for the dwarsaw tucked tightly within his ear. \"Yes. The question is, am I mad enough?\"\n\nAuRon flew faster than even he had at the trials. He wished to return to the island before Shadowcatch arose from his slumbers.\n\nHe landed in the cave, and did not stop to speak to any of the keepers as he hurried to the caves of the breeding stock. When he stood at the gap that led to the breeding stock's chambers, he concentrated on repeating the trick he had been practicing the night before. He watched his scales change over from gray to the dull black that matched the stripes descending his back.\n\nFrom deep within his own cave, he heard voices.\n\n\"Well, did he say anything about when he would return?\" Eliam rasped.\n\n\"Fishing with Varl was all I heard,\" someone answered, probably the Dragonguard Rand, who was on duty when AuRon rose.\n\n\"He's playing us false,\" a dragon's voice said in the clipped tones of a trap snapping shut. Starlight's.\n\nThere was silence for a moment. Then Eliam Dragonblade spoke. \"We'll wait till he returns then. If we go after him outside, unless fortune hands him over, he'll just outfly us. He's that fast.\"\n\nAuRon ignored it, and puffed himself up as best he could, filling his long lungs with air to make himself appear larger, and slunk down Shadowcatch's tunnel.\n\nThe dragon slumbered in his alcove. He was younger than AuRon, but had grown a little larger on the rich meals of the Wyrmmaster. AuRon padded by at his most silent, not even breathing. The smell of another male so close put fire in his veins and chest, just what he needed for the day's work. He made his way to the gate at the dragonelle's cavern. Shadowcatch's nostrils twitched, and his lips peeled back in his sleep to expose sharp yellowed teeth.\n\nA sleepy Dragonguard stood up when AuRon came to the gate. AuRon stumbled and knocked the tallow-light from the wall with a folded wing. Only a single light from farther up the cave illuminated the open gate. AuRon snarled.\n\n\"No matter, sir, I'll relight it.\"\n\nAuRon hurried past in the dark. He wondered how long he had before the ruse was unmasked.\n\nHe entered the dragonelle's cave. A new dragonelle, with freshly uncased wings, lay on Nereeza's perch, but otherwise all was the same. Two of the dragonelles lay encircled around fresh clutches of eggs and a third, Alhala, lay swollen and panting, ready to clutch.\n\n\"This ends today,\" he said with his mind.\n\n\"Hurry, AuRon!\" Natasatch thought. \"They'll be here to gather the eggs soon.\"\n\nThe dragonelles stirred. He felt their confusion.\n\n\"I won't end up like Nereeza!\" Ouistrela growled, using her voice rather than her mind.\n\n\"What do you mean by AuRon? It's NooShoahk, isn't it?\" thought the one who had teased him before. \"That is Shadowcatch's tunnel. What\u2014?\"\n\n\"No time to explain,\" AuRon said, moving to Ouistrela's ledge. \"But your eggs are never going to be taken from you again.\"\n\nThere was only one dwarsaw, and AuRon had to go about the job carefully. He'd only done six dragonelles when he heard voices from the gate. He scrambled up to the ceiling and clung upside down in the shadows, just as Father used to hide when he was on guard. His skin turned a mottled gray and black to match the vaulted cavern roof.\n\n\"Yes, two laid during the night. There may be three clutches by now,\" the guard said. \"Shadowcatch is in there.\"\n\n\"You've been napping on duty again, Rov,\" someone laughed. \"Shadowcatch still sleeps off his wine in his chamber.\"\n\n\"It can't be, he only\u2014\"\n\n\"Then again... ,\" Eliam's voice echoed. \"Ijon, go and get the ready-guard. There may be trouble in the egg cavern. The rest of you, after me.\" AuRon heard a sword being unsheathed.\n\nThe keepers and the dragonguards came into the cavern cautiously, wyrmcatchers at the ready. They relaxed when they saw the dragonelles upon their perches. Eliam looked all around the cavern, flashing a beam from a focused lantern into the corners. He searched the ceiling\u2014the light played across AuRon's haunch before moving on\u2014and looked at each dragonelle carefully. All were chained to the wall; all had their muzzles on.\n\n\"Rov'll lose his cloak for this, the lazy wretch deserves it. Two clutches,\" the Dragonblade said. \"We'll have another before sun-down, I think. A good month.\"\n\n\"The ready-guard?\" a Dragonguard said.\n\n\"No harm in having extra men. Ouistrela's got a glint in her eye. I think she means trouble,\" Eliam said. He raised his voice, so he could be heard farther down the cavern. \"Ouistrela, be sensible. You give us few enough eggs as is, you don't want to anger me; I'll have you dragged out of this cavern. In sections. Don't forget what happened to Nereeza.\"\n\nAuRon held his breath, praying that Ouistrela would hold her tongue. And her place.\n\n\"I remember Nereeza, sir. She was foolish.\"\n\n\"And you aren't going to be foolish, are you?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nThe sound of armor at the run interrupted the conversation. A file of men in dragon scale came into the cavern, killing spears at the ready. AuRon counted twenty, all well armed, and began to despair. What if he had to deal with them all at once?\n\n\"Quick work, Pskor,\" Eliam said, holding up a hand. \"But it was a false alarm. Grab a wyrmcatcher each, you four. Durar, take your team and help with the carrying. We've got two clutches of eggs to haul. Visor's down and eyes up!\"\n\nThe men snapped their visors to, and began their maneuvers to the piping whistles. They moved down to Ouistrela's ledge and fanned out, wyrmcatchers ready.\n\n\"Now remember your promise, Ouistrela,\" Eliam said from behind his mask.\n\n\"I remember my promise. I remember my promise to Nereeza.\" She leaned forward, and her chain slid off the back of her collar. It rattled as it swung. With a quick turn of her head, Ouistrela tossed off her muzzle, as a warrior might cast away his scabbard after unsheathing his sword in a duel to the death. She had been holding the dwarsaw-severed muzzle to her face with her ears. \"I never thought I'd get a chance to fulfill it so soon.\"\n\nEliam's helmet let forth a piercing shriek as he backed away. AuRon released his grip on the cavern ceiling and twisted like a cat as he fell, still watching events.\n\nMany times AuRon had seen some small bird rise out of her nest to drive away a larger and more dangerous raptor, making up in fury what she lacked in size. This time that tiny bird's desperate courage flamed in a body many tons of armored muscle greater. Each of Ouistrela's legs had the power of a tiger, her tail a battering ram, her jaws a saber-toothed avalanche. She leapt into the massed Dragonguard. The first wyrmcatcher she struck with a hind leg exploded into pieces of armor flying in all directions.\n\n\"At them!\" Natasatch called, cutting off her own muzzle with the dwarsaw AuRon had left in her sii.\n\nGouts of flame blasted the men and women of the egg-party. Epinonia created a wall of flame behind Ouistrela's bloody chaos, Alhala in front of them, despite her belly full of eggs. Most died instantly. The Dragonguard's scale protected them from the worst of the fire, but they suffocated in the oxygen-devouring heat. Those outside the flame fell under dragonelles leaping from their perches. The still-muzzled ones encouraged the others with fierce roars: \"Behind you Ouisa, with a spear!\" \"One's crawled under your ledge, Epinonia, beware!\"\n\nA figure ran toward AuRon, silhouetted by the dragonfire behind. It bore a sword in one hand and an envenomed dagger in the other. Eliam Dragonblade ran from his men's fight. As he passed one of the still-collared dragons, the barely mature dragonelle now on Nereeza's perch, he swung his sword at her throat. She avoided the blow, but the Dragonblade caught her in the tail with the dagger, ignoring the enraged screams of the other dragonelles. He also ignored AuRon, who advanced down the tunnel, a red mask tinting his vision.\n\nAuRon was too late.\n\nThe maiden sniffed at her wound, eyes widening in confusion from the blade's pain, then began to spasm in agony. Eliam watched for a few seconds, then beheaded her.\n\n\"That's all you're good for,\" AuRon said, planting his feet to block the narrow path to the exit. \"You're an executioner, not a warrior. I doubt the Drakossozh was your father after all. I think a blighter got in there ahead of him.\"\n\nEliam Dragonblade tossed away the broken-bladed dagger and drew another from his vambrace. \"I've heard cornered dragons taunt me before, gray. I've still enough venom for you.\" He avoided a futile tailswipe by a nearby chained dragonelle and approached AuRon with the dragon-killing sword Dunherr in one hand, the dagger in the other. He feinted with each, and AuRon backed up, wary. \"I think I'll put your whole head upon my wall. I'll leave your eye sockets hollow, a reminder of your blindness to your own impotence. This little ambush won't change anything. We'll start again when you're all dead.\"\n\nAuRon wondered what Father would do, one-to-one with a deadly warrior. Behind the Dragonblade, AuRon saw Natasatch freeing other dragonelles with the dwarsaw.\n\nEliam flipped the dagger in his gauntlet, ready to throw it into AuRon's unarmored bulk.\n\nAuRon did what Father would have done. He took a deep breath, tensed himself, and...\n\nRoared. It was a roar as AuRon had never sounded before, perhaps never could again. Even NooMoahk in his prime might not have been able make such a sound as AuRon could with his whip-quick neck and body. AuRon poured every grain of his strength into the bellow, sending it up his long neck and out his gaping mouth in an explosion of sound that shook the walls of the dragonelles' cavern. It froze the other dragons in their places; even Ouistrela stopped grinding the burnt and bloody remains of the Dragonguard beneath her claws. It made the nerve endings in the beheaded dragonelle fire; her body jerked on its perch.\n\nThe Dragonblade stood at the epicenter. But not for long. His weapons fell to the floor as he clasped his hands to his helmeted ears. He dropped to his knees, and AuRon saw blood run out of his helmet. The body toppled over, muscles twitching as it died.\n\nAuRon flipped up the visor, the scarred face beneath was masked with bloody slime running from eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. AuRon felt as if he were swimming underwater.\n\n\"Free the others,\" he said over his shoulder as he went to the gate. Rov had fled, without even bothering to shut the gate.\n\nHe returned to the dragonelle cavern. \"Natasatch, stay here with Ouistrela, Epinonia, and Alhala. The rest of you, follow me up. We're going to the landing cave.\"\n\n\"No, AuRon. Saima can watch things down here.\"\n\n\"We need no guardian,\" Ouistrela said. \"If any are brave enough to come down here, I've still got other dragonelles to avenge. Like poor Ktarata there.\"\n\nSo seven dragonelles followed AuRon up the tunnel. They reached the chamber of Shadowcatch.\n\n\"What fires this?\" the black asked. \"I heard fighting, and... what are you doing here, gray?\" he said, extending his griff and giving a quick rattle.\n\nAuRon planted himself, tail thrashing. \"I'll have you know\u2014\"\n\nNatasatch put her green length between the males. \"Stop it, you two. Shadowcatch, we've had enough of our eggs being stolen, our hatchlings being castrated. You've gotten so fat, you're due for the knife, too, I'd think! This gray is AuRon. He's killed the Dragonblade, and he's taking us out into the sun.\"\n\n\"Don't get in our way,\" another dragonelle said. \"Ouistrela tore one ear off, and I'll take the other. You can sit here and rot, or you can become a free dragon, with a real dragon name.\"\n\n\"It killed the Dragonblade?\" Shadowcatch said, eyes wondering underneath his armored brows.\n\n\"Without even touching him. Scared him to death, I think,\" Natasatch said.\n\n\"Come with us,\" AuRon said. \"Take your own name, and begin your own song with great deeds done bravely this day. You're a black. I knew NooMoahk the ancient. If any of his blood is in your veins, you'll be a besung dragon someday.\"\n\n\"Blood and flame, I'm with you. I'll teach 'em dragons can't be broken like horses.\"\n\n\"Spoken like one with his dragonhood intact,\" Natasatch said. \"To the landing cave!\"\n\nThe landing cave exploded, as if an unsuspected volcano had suddenly awoken beneath the cliff. AuRon the Gray, Shadowcatch the Black, and the Dragonelles of the Isle of Ice came up in fire and fury. Riderless fighting stock launched themselves out of the cave in confusion. AuRon, Natasatch, and Shadowcatch tore through the Dragonguard, the riders, and the few keepers who took up weapons. Shadowcatch cornered the survivors down a cave used to hang tack, and bellowed threats until they threw down their weapons and came out. When a Dragonguard pulled his poison dagger to stab Shadowcatch, the other humans restrained him.\n\n\"You fool, he'll burn us with you,\" the others said.\n\nThe dragonelles heard the confused cries of hatchlings even from afar, and poured down into the caves like a flaming green sea. Young drakes saw men and dragons fighting, and sided with their blood. The dragonelles hunted through the wreckage until the last hatchling was under their care. Only then could AuRon calm them and stop the killing.\n\n\"You may take to your boats and leave,\" AuRon commanded the captives. \"Take your wars, your hatreds, elsewhere. This island is forfeited to the dragons you abused.\"\n\nAuRon was relieved beyond words. There was still so much to do. Confused dragons, both fighting stock and drakes, still hid in their lairs, waiting for the order they had been bred to wait for. They would have to be taken in hand and taught to be dragons again. There would be those who could not survive on their own, of course. Some he would lead to Naf, some he would lead to the dwarves, so that they might be used in case of more attacks from the other tribes under the Wyrmmaster's sway.\n\nBut that was for the coming months. He owed much to Natasatch. A song, for a start.\n\n\"Are you ready to fly?\" he said as they stood beneath the ruins of the watchtower. In the distance, the lodge of the Wyrmmaster burned as Shadowcatch and some of the other fighting stock searched the island for more of the Dragonguard.\n\nNatasatch stood happy in the Sun. \"I'd forgotten how warm She was,\" she said, looking up at the yellow blaze. \"She makes me feel clean.\"\n\n\"Enjoy it. She only visits this island once in a while. Rain and mists seem to be in charge of this place.\"\n\n\"And snow. Though it never gets very cold here, just as it never gets warm. The sea, you know.\"\n\n\"Weather doesn't matter. We'll be deep. Deep-deep. Watching our eggs.\"\n\n\"Only if you will sing to me,\" she said. She spread her wings, a span seeming as wide as a cloud, and launched herself into the sky. She flew unevenly until she found her balance.\n\nAuRon followed, rose up under her, and sang:\n\n\u2003Line of AuNor, dragon bold\n\n\u2003Flows to me from days of old,\n\n\u2003And through years lost in the mist\n\n\u2003My blood names a famous list.\n\n\u2003By Air, by Water, by Fire, by Earth\n\n\u2003In pride I claim a noble birth.\n\n\u2003From EmLar Gray, a deadly deed\n\n\u2003By his flame Urlant was freed,\n\n\u2003Of fearsome hosts of blighters dark\n\n\u2003And took his reward: a golden ark!\n\n\u2003My Mother's sire knew battle well\n\n\u2003Before him nine-score villages fell.\n\n\u2003When AuRye Red coursed the sky\n\n\u2003Elven arrows in vain would fly,\n\n\u2003He broke the ranks of men at will\n\n\u2003In glittering mines dwarves he'd kill.\n\n\u2003Grandsire he is through Father's blood\n\n\u2003A river of strength in fullest flood.\n\n\u2003My egg was one of Irelia's Clutch\n\n\u2003Her wisdom passed in mental touch.\n\n\u2003Mother took up before ever I woke\n\n\u2003The parent dragon's heavy yoke;\n\n\u2003For me, her son, she lost her life\n\n\u2003Murderous dwarves brought blackened knife.\n\n\u2003A father I had in the Bronze AuRel\n\n\u2003Hunter of renown upon wood and fell\n\n\u2003He gave his clutch through lessons hard\n\n\u2003A chance at life beyond his guard.\n\n\u2003Father taught me where, and when, and how\n\n\u2003To fight or flee, so I sing now.\n\n\u2003Wistala, sibling, brilliant green\n\n\u2003Escaped with me the axes keen\n\n\u2003We hunted as pair, made our kill\n\n\u2003From stormy raindrops drank our fill\n\n\u2003When elves and dwarves took after us\n\n\u2003I told her \"Run,\" and lost her thus.\n\n\u2003Bound by ropes; by Hazeleye freed\n\n\u2003And dolphin-rescued in time of need\n\n\u2003I hid among men with fishing boats\n\n\u2003On island thick with blown sea-oats\n\n\u2003I became a drake and breathed first fire\n\n\u2003When dolphin-slaughter aroused my ire.\n\n\u2003I ran with wolves of Blackhard's pack\n\n\u2003Killed three hunters on my track\n\n\u2003The Dragonblade's men sought my hide\n\n\u2003But I escaped through a fang\u00e8d tide\n\n\u2003Of canine friends, assembled Thing\n\n\u2003Then met young Djer, who cut collar-ring.\n\n\u2003I crossed the steppes with dwarves of trade\n\n\u2003On the banks of the Vhydic Ironriders slayed\n\n\u2003Then sought out NooMoahk, dragon black\n\n\u2003And took my Hieba daughter back\n\n\u2003To find her kind; then took first flight\n\n\u2003Saw NooMoahk buried in honor right.\n\n\u2003When war came to friends I long had known\n\n\u2003My path was set, my heart was stone\n\n\u2003I sought the source of dreadful hate\n\n\u2003And on this Isle I met my fate\n\n\u2003Found Natasatch in a cavern deep\n\n\u2003So I had one more promise to keep.\n\n\u2003To claim this day my life's sole mate\n\n\u2003In future years to share my fate\n\n\u2003A dragon's troth is this day pledged\n\n\u2003To she who'll see me fully fledged.\n\n\u2003Through this dragon's life, as dragon-dame\n\n\u2003shall add your blood to my family's fame.\n\nThey flew up and up, circling each other. Natasatch panted with the effort, but sailed higher and higher, till she was above even the beacon-mountain. AuRon circled her, worried and shouting advice.\n\n\"Will you be careful? If you're not used to altitude, you'll make yourself giddy.\"\n\n\"Let's touch the Sun, AuRon! She's calling to us.\"\n\n\"That's impossible.\"\n\n\"Dragons are so literal,\" she said, rolling over and swooping under him.\n\nThey embraced, their necks and tails wound around each other, and their wings met. They began a long fall to the world below, joined. They fell for a minute or more before they broke the embrace, hearts pounding.\n\n\"That's how it's supposed to be,\" Natasatch said, turning lazy circles. AuRon swooped around her, flicking her lovingly with wingtip and tail. \"Among the clouds.\"\n\nAuRon's body rippled with color, first red, then orange. He wandered through the spectrum and back again in delight. \"Climb again, my mate,\" he implored.\n\n\"The last one almost burst my heart, my lord. Let's find a cool pond of glacier water. We'll drink, and I'll catch my breath. Then we'll try to go higher.\"\n\nThey flew over a glacier, dazzled by its whiteness in the rare sunshine. Using it, Starlight caught them unawares.\n\n\"AuRon, beneath you!\" Natasatch shouted, catching a flash of scale.\n\nAuRon rolled over, bending his spine until it felt as though it would break, and the silver dragon missed his strike. Jaws snapped shut where AuRon's shoulder had been.\n\n\"What are you doing, Starlight? The fighting is over!\" Natasatch screamed.\n\n\"You cows! You stupid, shortsighted cows.\" Starlight growled, turning. He hung in the air, a trick few dragons could accomplish. His body was dwarfed, but he had a full-grown dragon's wingspan. \"By the egg that sheltered us, these humans were Dragonkind's last chance. They thought they were training us, but I was using those human fools to clear the earth of the hominid threat! Now you've set us back generations! Generations!\" He folded his wings and dived at Natasatch, and AuRon banked and shoved her out of the way, his wing met Starlight's with a bruising rap.\n\n\"No one is going to use anyone, Starlight!\" AuRon said.\n\n\"I remember you from the ship,\" Starlight said. \"I'd just lost my egg tooth. I saw you still had yours, so I remembered you. That elf let you go. This is some plot of theirs, isn't it? To get dragons to fight for elves?\"\n\n\"If the hominids want to destroy each other in wars, that's their affair. I want the dragons out of it,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"Whoever wins in their war will be the stronger for it,\" Starlight said. \"Then they'll put an end to us.\"\n\nThe dragons flew in concentric circles, Natasatch inside, AuRon around her, protecting her from another strike, and Starlight around the mated pair.\n\n\"We'll see,\" AuRon said. \"Consider this, Starlight. Once the Wyrmmaster's people did away with elves and dwarves, and probably the blighters as well, what would they need of us? The dragons under their control would be slaughtered like old warhorses for their flesh and hides.\"\n\n\"I'd have moved long before that,\" Starlight said.\n\n\"You're too slow. Slower than I,\" AuRon said, wondering if he had the strength left.\n\n\"Ha!\"\n\nAuRon flew at Starlight, mouth open and claws out. Starlight sideslipped away, but AuRon still got a mouthful of wing. He tore away the thin skin and banked as he climbed, making sure Starlight didn't attack Natasatch.\n\nStarlight screamed in fury and spat fire in AuRon's wake. It flapped its oversize wings, climbing after AuRon. Starlight rose fast. AuRon summoned what reserves he had, rising up and up, but it seemed every time he looked behind, Starlight's fangs were closer. Starlight was small, but it was strong and knew how to use its wings.\n\nThey climbed higher into the thin air. The old injury to his lung throbbed. AuRon tasted his own blood with each exhalation, but Starlight was just behind. AuRon looped, thinking his flexibility could allow him to turn over in a tighter circle than his pursuer.\n\nHe was wrong.\n\nStarlight's fangs closed on his tail. Liquid fire flowed into his veins. AuRon slammed his rear feet together on his tail, digging his claws into his own flesh, battling pain with more pain. He struck back, snapping at Starlight's wing joint. Each dragon held the other's flesh in a death grip, and both began to fall to earth.\n\nAuRon kicked out with his legs, pulling his own tail off near his haunch. Flesh separated from flesh in a spray of blood. The agony caused him to pull his head up and away from Starlight, taking the wing joint with him.\n\nHe flapped free of Starlight.\n\n\"You die, you die!\" the silver screamed as it let go the tail-meat. AuRon had torn the tip from one wing and destroyed the other. Starlight spun on his one wing, in tight circles, unable to balance in flight. AuRon drifted until he saw Starlight break against a mountainside, tumbling along with the stones he loosened to the rocks below.\n\n\"I'm sorry, my brother,\" AuRon said. He felt ill with pain and exhaustion, but his legs worked. The poison hadn't made it into his system before he pulled his tail off. He still feared for himself, he was almost as unbalanced in flight as Starlight, and he began to dive. He shifted his neck this way and that, trying to right himself.\n\nNatasatch was beside him in a flash. \"Hold on to my tail! I'll pull you.\"\n\nHe bit into her tail, and they flew like joined dragonflies. AuRon worked on shaping his wings so he could get along better without the counterweight of his tail. They landed at a glacial pool, and drank.\n\n\"I saw Starlight fall. What happened to your tail?\" she said, sniffing at the stump. What was left was no longer than AuRon's foreleg.\n\n\"It seems fate is determined to see me tailless. Better it than my neck, I suppose. Pulling my own head off wouldn't have worked as well.\"\n\nNatasatch licked at the thick sludge coating the wound, prruming to comfort her bleeding mate. \"Poor Starlight. I tried to be his friend, once, but he was taken before he hatched. The oafs that raised him made him into a blighter, or worse. The Wyrmmaster channeled his viciousness, but couldn't subdue it.\"\n\nAuRon spat blood and phlegm. \"We need food and rest. But I have to see to something first.\"\n\nThey flew\u2014awkwardly, in AuRon's case\u2014to the ruins of the Wyrmmaster's lodge. The piled stones of the foundation still stood, but both stories and part of the roof were gone. The lodge had collapsed in on itself. The smoke of the fire could be smelled from high in the sky above.\n\nA few drakes lurked in the woods, watching the fire. They scuttled for cover when AuRon and Natasatch circled the ruin, the strange sight of a tailless dragon frightened them off at the end of this wild day. AuRon spied Wrimere, sitting in his carven chair, staring out at the fjord. A dragon boat, crammed with people and possession, was pulling away from the isle as a dragon circled above.\n\n\"You were the cause of this, they tell me,\" the Wyrmmaster said as AuRon landed. Natasatch circled once more overhead, then dropped down beside him.\n\n\"I wasn't the cause of it. I'm the end of it.\"\n\nThe Wyrmmaster looked as though some cavern inside him had collapsed. His hair streamed in the wind, his thick-featured face even more masklike. He looked at AuRon out of the corners of his eyes.\n\n\"I liked you. I liked you from the first. You were a dragon of rare quality. I spoke for you when others warned me against you. I should have known the elves sent you. What will the payoff from the dwarves be, I wonder?\"\n\n\"An elf bade me come here. You're right about that. You're wrong about everything else, though.\"\n\n\"They'll kill your kind, if they can. The elves and the dwarves. One by one, you'll dwindle and die. An alliance with men against them was your last chance.\"\n\n\"The things you were raising here weren't real dragons. It was no solution to the dilemma of dragons. Just another problem. If dragons, with all their gifts, are to die, it'll be the fault of dragons. Not their assassins,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"When you're older, when you have eggs of your own, you may think differently. One of the follies of youth is the belief that you shape events. It's the other way around, and always has been. Now you, AuRon the all-knowing, AuRon the all-powerful, AuRon the ambitious, comes to close the book of my life. A creature as strong as you completes the victory by killing a wobbly old man in his chair.\"\n\n\"I had hoped\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, I won't let you,\" the Wyrmmaster said. He pulled a dagger from between his legs, one of the wide-bladed kind used by the Dragonguard. He plunged it into his stomach and snapped off the hilt with a cry. The Wyrmmaster let out sort of a strangled rattle. His body convulsed in the chair, leaving a pair of open eyes sightless to the sun.\n\nNatasatch sniffed at him. \"Men are such fools.\"\n\n\"He was a great man. He just poured his greatness into the wrong river. Let's be done with this.\"\n\nNatasatch spat out her foua. The carven wooden chair burst into flame along with the corpse. The cinders of both mingled as they rose into an annihilating blue sky. The Isle of Ice belonged to the dragons now.\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nBig as it was, the Isle of Ice and its archipelago surrounding it could not remain the home of all the dragons there when the Wyrmmaster's men quit. AuRon and Natasatch stayed, as did the brooding trio of dragonelles and those who had hatchlings to care for.\n\nSome, like Shadowcatch, had their own aspirations and left gladly. The black dragon Shadowcatch of the breeding stock lumbered south, where he played no small part in the wars against the armies of the Men of the Golden Circle and their dragons.\n\nA few of the fighting stock stayed. They could not father clutches of their own, but Epinonia and Alhala each took one as mates, and they raised their hatchlings to breathe their first fire as if they were eggs of a mating. Others lived out their lives on smaller islands of the archipelago, which were rich in both fish and ores dear to the stomachs of dragons.\n\nAuRon and Natasatch took as a home a pleasant cave on a cliff on the Isle of Ice. Natasatch found it, that is. AuRon explored it and pronounced it ideal. It was near enough to the sea so AuRon could count on a successful hunt in the waters of the Inland Ocean, and there were even a few blighters to remind him of his days in NooMoahk's cave and make improvements to the egg cavern. He would move some of his library there in later years, that which did not go to the Hypatian archivists or the Longhalls of the Golden Dome in Dairuss.\n\nBut in their first year together, they cracked stone, as the saying was, and whispered words of love and comfort to each other the night Natasatch laid their first clutch\u2014five eggs on an egg shelf of her own choosing. AuRon showered her in beef, goat, sheep, and fish, until she begged him to stop out of fear that she'd grow too big to ever leave the cavern again.\n\nHe thought to them, formed images in his mind as he watched over the eggs. His own parents in the cave, Wistala tasting rainfall, a wolf howling at the moon, a dwarf frying sausages, a berry-smeared girl, a great, gaunt black dragon, a mountaintop signal-flame on their Isle of Ice.\n\nA month later came the first stirrings within.\n\n\"Did you hear a tap?\" AuRon asked, woken from sleep. Sometimes they spoke; sometimes they used their minds. It made no difference.\n\n\"I've been listening to them all night, my love,\" Natasatch said. She rarely fell fully asleep, and never when AuRon was out hunting. \"It's a regular Blighter Summer Gathering, there's so much noise.\"\n\n\"When will they come out?\"\n\n\"Oh, it won't be for hours yet. Be calm.\"\n\n\"I am calm. I just can't bear waiting. Five is what my parents had. Three males and two females.\"\n\n\"We should be so blessed.\"\n\n\"If we are, I'll need your help,\" AuRon said.\n\n\"You know you have it. What is in your mind?\"\n\n\"I want to keep the males apart. Until we can make them learn not to kill each other.\"\n\n\"But dragons have always been that way, AuRon.\"\n\n\"Does that mean they always must be that way? The Wyrmmaster was wrong on many things, but he wasn't wrong to keep all the males alive. Fewer dragonelles would wander the earth mateless if more males survived the first hour of their hatching.\"\n\n\"What would you teach them differently?\"\n\n\"It'd teach the stronger to protect the weaker. I'd teach the weaker to outsmart the stronger. And I'd have the dragonelles teach cooperation to both.\"\n\n\"Can dragons change the inheritance their nature gave them?\"\n\n\"They must. If they are to survive\u2014if we are to survive, they must.\"\n\n\"My lord, my love, my AuRon... the things you expect of dragons.\"\n\nOne of the eggs wiggled as the hatchling within changed position. The mates turned to their clutch. Natasatch put her head close to the eggs and began to sing:\n\n\u2003Listen my hatchling, for now you shall hear\n\n\u2003Of the only seven slayers a dragon must fear...\n\nAuRon flicked out his tongue across their restless egg. He tasted the shell of their first clutch. Cool and dry compared with the dampness within the cavern, its strangeness set him aquiver."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Memoirs of Lady Trent 2) The Tropic of Serpents",
        "author": "Marie Brennan",
        "genres": [
            "historical fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "In which the memoirist departs her homeland, leaving behind a variety of problems ranging from the familial to the criminal"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "My life of solitude\u2014My sister-in-law and my mother\u2014An unexpected visitor\u2014Trouble at Kemble's\n\nNot long before I embarked on my journey to Eriga, I girded my loins and set out for a destination I considered much more dangerous: Falchester.\n\nThe capital was not, in the ordinary way of things, a terribly adventurous place, except insofar as I might be rained upon there. I made the trip from Pasterway on a regular basis, as I had affairs to monitor in the city. Those trips, however, were not well-publicized\u2014by which I mean I mentioned them to only a handful of people, all of them discreet. So far as most of Scirland knew (those few who cared to know), I was a recluse, and had been so since my return from Vystrana.\n\nI was permitted reclusiveness on account of my personal troubles, though in reality I spent more of my time on work: first the publication of our Vystrani research, and then preparation for this Erigan expedition, which had been delayed and delayed again, by forces far beyond our control. On that Graminis morning, however, I could no longer escape the social obligations I assiduously buried beneath those other tasks. The best I could do was to discharge them both in quick succession: to visit first my blood relations, and then those bound to me by marriage.\n\nMy house in Pasterway was only a short drive from the fashionable district of Havistow, where my eldest brother Paul had settled the prior year. I usually escaped the necessity of visiting his house by the double gift of his frequent absence and his wife's utter disinterest in me, but on this occasion I had been invited, and it would have been more trouble to refuse.\n\nPlease understand, it is not that I disliked my family. Most of us got on cordially enough, and I was on quite good terms with Andrew, the brother most immediately senior to me. But the rest of my brothers found me baffling, to say the least, and my mother's censure of my behaviour had nudged their opinions toward disapproval. What Paul wanted with me that day I did not know\u2014but on the whole, I would have preferred to face a disgruntled Vystrani rock-wyrm.\n\nAlas, those were all quite far away, while my brother was too near to avoid. With a sensation of girding for battle, I lifted my skirt in ladylike delicacy, climbed the front steps, and rang the bell.\n\nMy sister-in-law was in the morning room when the footman escorted me in. Judith was a paragon of upper-class Scirling wifehood, in all the ways I was not: beautifully dressed, without crossing the line into gyver excess; a gracious hostess, facilitating her husband's work by social means; and a dedicated mother, with three children already, and no doubt more to come.\n\nWe had precisely one thing in common, which was Paul. \"Have I called at the wrong time?\" I inquired, after accepting a cup of tea.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Judith answered. \"He is not at home just now\u2014a meeting with Lord Melst\u2014but you are welcome to stay until he returns.\"\n\nLord Melst? Paul was moving up in the world. \"I presume this is Synedrion business,\" I said.\n\nJudith nodded. \"We had a short respite after he won his chair, but now the affairs of government have moved in to occupy his time. I hardly expect to see him between now and Gelis.\"\n\nWhich meant I might be cooling my heels here for a very long time. \"If it is not too much trouble,\" I said, putting down my teacup and rising from my seat, \"I think it might be better for me to leave and come back. I have promised to pay a visit to my brother-in-law Matthew today as well.\"\n\nTo my surprise, Judith put out her hand to stop me. \"No, please stay. We have a guest right now, who was hoping to see you\u2014\"\n\nI never had the chance to ask who the guest was, though I had my suspicions the moment Judith began to speak. The door to the sitting room opened, and my mother came in.\n\nNow it all made sense. I had ceased to answer my mother's letters some time before, for my own peace of mind. She would not, even when asked, leave off criticizing my every move, and implying that my bad judgment had caused me to lose my husband in Vystrana. It was not courteous to ignore her, but the alternative would be worse. For her to see me, therefore, she must either show up unannounced at my house... or lure me to another's.\n\nSuch logic did little to sweeten my reaction. Unless my mother was there to offer reconciliation\u2014which I doubted\u2014this was a trap. I had rather pull my own teeth out than endure more of her recriminations. (And lest you think that a mere figure of speech, I should note that I did once pull my own tooth out, so I do not make the comparison lightly.)\n\nAs it transpired, though, her recriminations were at least drawing on fresh material. My mother said, \"Isabella. What is this nonsense I hear about you going to Eriga?\"\n\nI have been known to bypass the niceties of small talk, and ordinarily I am grateful for it in others. In this instance, however, it had the effect of an arrow shot from cover, straight into my brain. \"What?\" I said, quite stupidly\u2014not because I failed to understand her, but because I had no idea how she had come to hear of it.\n\n\"You know perfectly well what I mean,\" she went on, relentlessly. \"It is absurd, Isabella. You cannot go abroad again, and certainly not to any part of Eriga. They are at war there!\"\n\nI sought my chair once more, using the delay to regain my composure. \"That is an exaggeration, Mama, and you know it. Bayembe is not at war. The mansa of Talu dares not invade, not with Scirling soldiers helping to defend the borders.\"\n\nMy mother sniffed. \"I imagine the man who drove the Akhians out of Elerqa\u2014after two hundred years!\u2014dares a great deal indeed. And even if he does not attack, what of those dreadful Ikwunde?\"\n\n\"The entire jungle of Mouleen lies between them and Bayembe,\" I said, irritated. \"Save at the rivers, of course, and Scirland stands guard there as well. Mama, the whole point of our military presence is to make the place safe.\"\n\nThe look she gave me was dire. \"Soldiers do not make a place safe, Isabella. They only make it less dangerous.\"\n\nWhat skill I have in rhetoric, I inherited from my mother. I was in no mood to admire her phrasing that day, though. Nor to be pleased at her political awareness, which was quite startling. Most Scirling women of her class, and a great many men, too, could barely name the two Erigan powers that had forced Bayembe to seek foreign\u2014which is to say Scirling\u2014aid. Gentlemen back then were interested only in the lopsided \"trade agreement\" that sent Bayembe iron to Scirland, along with other valuable resources, in exchange for them allowing us to station our soldiers all over their country, and build a colony in Nsebu. Ladies were not interested much at all.\n\nWas this something she had attended to before, or had she educated herself upon hearing of my plans? Either way, this was not how I had intended to break the news to her. Just how I had intended to do it, I had not yet decided; I kept putting off the issue, out of what I now recognized as rank cowardice. And this was the consequence: an unpleasant confrontation in front of my sister-in-law, whose stiffly polite expression told me that she had known this was coming.\n\n(A sudden worm of suspicion told me that Paul, too, had known. Meeting with Lord Melst, indeed. Such a shame he was out when I arrived.)\n\nIt meant, at least, that I only had to face my mother, without allies to support her in censure. I was not fool enough to think I would have had allies of my own. I said, \"The Foreign Office would not allow people to travel there, let alone settle, if it were so dangerous as all that. And they have been allowing it, so there you are.\" She did not need to know that one of the recurrent delays in this expedition had involved trying to persuade the Foreign Office to grant us visas. \"Truly, Mama, I shall be at far more risk from malaria than from any army.\"\n\nWhat possessed me to say that, I do not know, but it was sheer idiocy on my part. My mother's glare sharpened. \"Indeed,\" she said, and the word could have frosted glass. \"Yet you propose to go to a place teeming with tropical diseases, without a single thought for your son.\"\n\nHer accusation was both fair and not. It was true that I did not think as much of my son as one might expect. I gave very little milk after his birth and had to hire a wet-nurse, which suited me all too well; infant Jacob reminded me far too much of his late namesake. Now he was more than two years old, weaned, and in the care of a nanny. My marriage settlement had provided quite generously for me, but much of that money I had poured into scientific research, and the books of our Vystrani expedition\u2014the scholarly work under my husband's name, and my own inane bit of travel writing\u2014were not bringing in as much as one might hope. Out of what remained, however, I paid handsomely for someone to care for my son, and not because the widow of a baronet's second son ought not to stoop to such work herself. I simply did not know what to do with Jacob otherwise.\n\nPeople often suppose that maternal wisdom is wholly instinctual: that however ignorant a woman may be of child rearing prior to giving birth, the mere fact of her sex will afterward endow her with perfect capability. This is not true even on the grossest biological level, as the failure of my milk had proved, and it is even less true in social terms. In later years I have come to understand children from the perspective of a natural historian; I know their development, and have some appreciation for its marvellous progress. But at that point in time, little Jacob made less sense to me than a dragon.\n\nIs the rearing of a child best performed by a woman who has done it before, who has honed her skills over the years and enjoys her work, or by a woman with no skill and scant enjoyment, whose sole qualification is a direct biological connection? My opinion fell decidedly on the former, and so I saw very little practical reason why I should not go to Eriga. In that respect, I had given a great deal of thought to the matter of my son.\n\nSaying such things to my mother was, however, out of the question. Instead I temporized. \"Matthew Camherst and his wife have offered to take him in while I am gone. Bess has one of her own, very near the same age; it will be good for Jacob to have a companion.\"\n\n\"And if you die?\"\n\nThe question dropped like a cleaver onto the conversation, severing it short. I felt my cheeks burning: with anger, or with shame\u2014likely both. I was outraged that my mother should say such a thing so bluntly... and yet my husband had died in Vystrana. It was not impossible that I should do the same in Eriga.\n\nInto this dead and bleeding silence came a knock on the door, followed shortly by the butler, salver in hand, bowing to present a card to Judith, who lifted it, mechanically, as if she were a puppet and someone had pulled the string on her arm. Confusion carved a small line between her brows. \"Who is Thomas Wilker?\"\n\nThe name had the effect of a low, unnoticed kerb at the edge of a street, catching my mental foot and nearly causing me to fall on my face. \"Thomas Wil\u2014what is he doing here?\" Comprehension followed, tardily, lifting me from my stumble. Judith did not know him, and neither did my mother, which left only one answer. \"Ah. I think he must be here to see me.\"\n\nJudith's posture snapped to a rigid, upright line, for this was not how social calls were conducted. A man should not inquire after a widow in a house that wasn't hers. I spared a moment to notice that the card, which Judith dropped back on the salver, was not a proper calling card; it appeared to be a piece of paper with Mr. Wilker's name written in by hand. Worse and worse. Mr. Wilker was not, properly speaking, a gentleman, and certainly not the sort of person who would call here in the normal course of things.\n\nI did what I could to retrieve the moment. \"I do apologize. Mr. Wilker is an assistant to the earl of Hilford\u2014you recall him, of course; he is the one who arranged the Vystrani expedition.\" And was arranging the Erigan one, too, though his health precluded him from accompanying us. But what business of that could be so urgent that Lord Hilford would send Mr. Wilker after me at my brother's house? \"I should speak with him, but there's no need to trouble you. I will take my leave.\"\n\nMy mother's outstretched hand stopped me before I could stand. \"Not at all. I think we're all eager to hear what this Mr. Wilker has to say.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Judith said faintly, obeying the unspoken order woven through my mother's words. \"Send him in, Londwin.\"\n\nThe butler bowed and retired. By the alacrity with which Mr. Wilker appeared, he must have sprang forward the instant he was welcomed in; agitation still showed in his movements. But he had long since taken pains to cultivate better manners than those he had grown up with, and so he presented himself first to Judith. \"Good morning, Mrs. Hendemore. My name is Thomas Wilker. I'm sorry to trouble you, but I have a message for Mrs. Camherst. We must have passed one another on the road; I only just missed her at her house. And I'm afraid the news is unfortunate enough that it could not wait. I was told she would be visiting here.\"\n\nThe curt, disjointed way in which he delivered these words made my hands tighten in apprehension. Mr. Wilker was, quite rightly, looking only at Judith, save a brief nod when he spoke my name; with no hint forthcoming from him, I found myself exchanging a glance instead with my mother.\n\nWhat I saw there startled me. We're all eager to hear what this Mr. Wilker has to say \u2014she thought he was my lover! An overstatement, perhaps, but she had the expression of a woman looking for signs of inappropriate attachment, and coming up empty-handed.\n\nAs well she should. Mr. Wilker and I might no longer be at loggerheads the way we had been in Vystrana, but I felt no romantic affection for him, nor he for me. Our relationship was purely one of business.\n\nI wanted to set my mother down in no uncertain terms for harboring such thoughts, but forbore. Not so much because of the sheer inappropriateness of having that conversation in public, but because it occurred to me that Mr. Wilker and I were engaged in two matters of business, of which the Erigan expedition was only one.\n\nJudith, fortunately, waved Mr. Wilker on before I could burst out with my questions unbidden. \"By all means, Mr. Wilker. Or is your message private?\"\n\nI would not have taken the message privately for a hundred sovereigns, not with such suspicions in my mother's mind. \"Please,\" I said. \"What has happened?\"\n\nMr. Wilker blew out a long breath, and the urgency drained from him in a sudden rush, leaving him sagging and defeated. \"There's been a break-in at Kemble's.\"\n\n\"Kemble's... oh, no.\" My own shoulders sagged, a mirror to his. \"What did they destroy? Or\u2014\"\n\nHe nodded, grimly. \"Took. His notes.\"\n\nTheft, not destruction. Someone knew what Kemble was working on, and was determined to steal it for their own.\n\nI slumped back in my chair, ladylike dignity the furthest thing from my mind. Frederick Kemble was the chemist Mr. Wilker had hired\u2014or rather I had hired; the money was mine, although the choice of recipient was his\u2014to continue the research we ourselves had stolen in the mountains of Vystrana, three years ago. Research that documented a method for preserving dragonbone: an amazing substance, strong and light, but one that decayed quickly outside a living body.\n\nThe Chiavoran who developed that method was not the first one to try. What had begun as a mere challenge of taxidermy\u2014born from the desire of hunters to preserve trophies from the dragons they killed, and the desire of natural historians to preserve specimens for study\u2014had become a great point of curiosity for chemists. Several were racing to be the first (or so they thought) to solve that puzzle. Despite our best efforts to maintain secrecy around Kemble's work, it seemed someone had learned of it.\n\n\"When?\" I asked, then waved the question away as foolish. \"Last night, and I doubt we'll get any time more specific than that.\" Mr. Wilker shook his head. He lived in the city, and visited Kemble first thing in the morning every Selemer. This news was as fresh as it could be, short of Kemble having heard the intruder and come downstairs in his nightclothes to see.\n\nI wondered, suddenly cold, what would have happened if he had. Would the intruder have fled? Or would Mr. Wilker have found our chemist dead this morning?\n\nSuch thoughts were unnecessarily dramatic\u2014or so I chided myself. Whether they were or not, I did not have the leisure to dwell on them, for my mother's sharp voice roused me from my thoughts. \"Isabella. What in heaven is this man talking about?\"\n\nI took a measure of comfort in the irreverent thought that at least she could not read any hint of personal indiscretion in the message Mr. Wilker had brought. \"Research, Mama,\" I said, pulling myself straight in my chair, and thence to my feet. \"Nothing that need concern you. But I'm afraid I must cut this visit short; it is vital that I speak to Mr. Kemble at once. If you will excuse me\u2014\"\n\nMy mother, too, rose to her feet, one hand outstretched. \"Please, Isabella. I'm dreadfully concerned for you. This expedition you intend...\"\n\nShe must be concerned indeed, to broach such a personal matter before a stranger like Mr. Wilker. \"We will speak of it later, Mama,\" I said, intending no such thing. \"This truly is a pressing matter. I've invested a great deal of money in Mr. Kemble's work, and must find out how much I have lost.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Frederick Kemble's\u2014Synthesis\u2014The symposium\u2014Lord Hilford\u2014Natalie's prospects\u2014Two weeks\n\nBeing a recluse is not good for one's conversational agility. I was accustomed to thinking over my words, revising them, and writing fair copy before sending the final draft of my letter to its recipient. My comment accomplished its intended purpose\u2014she let me go at last, with Judith's polite farewells to fill in the awkward gaps\u2014but my satisfaction faded rapidly as I went out into the street. \"I fear I will regret that,\" I admitted to Mr. Wilker, pulling on my gloves.\n\n\"I don't think you've lost much of your money,\" he said, raising his hand to signal a hansom on its way to the nearest cab stand.\n\nSighing, I drew his arm down. \"My carriage is across the street. No, I don't mean the investment; I don't regret that in the least. Only that I said anything of it to my mother. She is determined to see bad judgment in everything I do nowadays.\"\n\nMr. Wilker did not respond to that. Although we were on more cordial terms by then, we were not in the habit of sharing our personal troubles with one another. He said, \"All is not lost, though. Kemble took his current notebook upstairs with him last night, so that he could read over his thoughts as he prepared for bed. His wife may deplore the habit, but in this instance it's been a godsend.\"\n\n(To those of my readers who flinch at minor blasphemies of this sort: I must warn you that there will be more ahead. Mr. Wilker restrained his language around me in our Vystrani days, but as we grew more comfortable with one another, he revealed a casual habit of naming the Lord. If I edited his language here, it would misrepresent his character, and so I pray you pardon his frankness, and mine. We were neither of us very religious.)\n\nMrs. Kemble was no resentful housewife; she worked alongside her husband, handling the practical matters of ordering and measuring chemicals, while he spent hours staring at the wall and chewing on the battered tail of his pen, mind lost in theoretical matters. But she believed in a separation of work from daily life, and I\u2014who, you may have noticed, am more of Frederick Kemble's mind\u2014blessed her failure to break him of his habits.\n\nI said as much to her when we arrived at Kemble's house and laboratory in Tanner Fields, and got a dry look that did not entirely hide the nervous aftereffects of the intrusion. \"I appreciate that, Mrs. Camherst, but I'm afraid it didn't save the glassware.\"\n\n\"May I see?\" I asked. Mrs. Kemble led us into the cellar, presently in a state of half gloom, the only light coming in by the street-level windows. It was enough to show the destruction: shattered glass everywhere, measuring instruments bent and smashed. A chemical stink flooded the air, despite the open windows and a boy outside cranking a device to ventilate the room. They had not merely taken Kemble's notes; they had also done what they could to delay his further progress.\n\nI held my handkerchief over my nose and said, \"Mrs. Kemble, I am so very sorry. If you send a letter to my accountant, I'll see to it that you're reimbursed for what you've lost. It can't restore your peace of mind, but\u2014\" I gestured helplessly. \"It can at least replace the glassware.\"\n\n\"That's very good of you, Mrs. Camherst,\" she said, mollified. \"Kemble is upstairs; I needed him out from under my feet while I sort out what's broken and missing. Lucy will make you some tea.\"\n\nMr. Wilker and I went obediently up to the parlour, where we found Frederick Kemble scribing furiously onto a loose sheet of foolscap. Others like it were scattered across the table and the floor, and Lucy, the Kembles' remaining unmarried daughter, was trying to find a clear space to set down a tray containing not only tea but a stack of blank paper. She saw us come in and touched her father's elbow. \"Papa\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now\u2014let me\u2014\" He jerked his head in a motion I thought was meant to stand for a wave of his hand, his actual hands being occupied in note-taking.\n\nLucy retreated to our side. \"What is he doing?\" I asked, not daring raise my voice above a murmur.\n\n\"Writing down as much as he can remember,\" she said. \"From the notebooks that were taken.\"\n\nAfter three years' work, the process for preserving dragonbone must have been engraved on the inside of his eyelids; I had it memorized, and I was not even chemist enough to understand what most of it meant. As for the rest\u2014\"Mr. Wilker said the most recent notebook was not taken, yes? So long as we have that, the older notes do not matter half so much.\" Most of them were obsolete by now, documenting failed experiments.\n\nLucy spread her hands. \"He says even the old notes are important\u2014that he likes to look over them from time to time.\"\n\nShe went off to fetch more teacups, and then Mr. Wilker and I settled in at the far end of the parlour to hear Lucy's account of the break-in and the investigation thus far. By the time she finished, Kemble was ready to pause in his work and acknowledge the rest of the world.\n\n\"If they'd come before the Sabbath...\" he said, clearly grateful they had not. His daughter presented him with a cup of tea, which he took and drained absently. \"I was looking back through the old notebooks during lunch on Eromer, and something there caught my attention. Last year, I\u2014\"\n\nMr. Wilker, who had long since learned to recognize the warning signs, cut him off before he could descend into a thicket of scientific language I would not understand in the slightest. The body of our collective knowledge has grown so rapidly in my lifetime that although I am accounted an extremely learned woman, there are whole fields I know very little of; chemistry is one such. It was not a part of young ladies' curricula in my youth, and my self-education had gone in other directions. Mr. Wilker therefore diverted our chemist to the points he knew I would care about. \"You said something about that this morning, yes. It gave you an idea?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Kemble said. \"It's only a thought so far; it will take a great deal of testing. But I may have an idea for synthesis at last.\"\n\nHad that not been the fifth time I heard those words from his mouth, I would have been more excited. It was, after all, the purpose for which we had hired Kemble. We knew how to preserve dragonbone; that was no longer a challenge. But Mr. Wilker and I, discussing the matter three years ago, had seen the peril in that knowledge.\n\nQuite apart from the desire of hunters to preserve their trophies, and the desire of natural historians to study their subject at leisure post mortem, the qualities of dragonbone made it attractive to other kinds of person. Its mechanical properties were far superior to those of iron and steel, being both lighter and stronger\u2014and as the easily accessible iron deposits in Anthiope and other parts of the world began to run dry, the value of any alternative grew by the year.\n\nI could enumerate at length the drawbacks to the industrial use of dragonbone. Indeed, I had an article already prepared on the subject, ready to send at a moment's notice to all the reputable publications. Dragons were even rarer than iron, and while it was true that they reproduced (which ore was not known to do), any widespread demand for their bones would lead to mass slaughter, perhaps even to extinction. The irregular shape of many bones rendered them less than ideal for the construction of machines, which would result in a great deal of waste. The expense and hassle of harvesting them from dead dragons (many of whom lived in locales as foreign and distant as those still rich in iron) rendered the prospect less than entirely profitable. It went on for pages, but the entire thing was flawed in its basic assumption, which was that people would consider the matter rationally before making their decisions.\n\nThe truth was that the idea would bring speculators flocking like vultures to a dead horse, ready to pick the bones clean. And if I tried to persuade myself that I was exaggerating\u2014that such a doom-filled scenario would never come to pass\u2014I had only to consider the Erigan continent, where the lure of iron had led several Anthiopean states to involve themselves in the affairs of the nations there. If Thiessin was willing to conquer Djapa, and Chiavora to encourage revolution in Agwi, and Scirland to insert itself between the Talu Union and the military might of the Ikwunde, for the sake of being able to build new steam engines, we would not hesitate to sacrifice a few dumb beasts.\n\nI sighed and drained the last of my tea. \"With all due respect, Mr. Kemble, I would almost welcome another set of eyes on the matter. I have every confidence that you can solve this riddle, given sufficient time\u2014but that, we may not have. Sooner or later someone will figure out Rossi's method, even without your notes. If we are to avert chaos, we need a way to satisfy the demand for this substance that does not involve butchering dragons.\"\n\n\"I doubt we'll be that lucky,\" Mr. Wilker said, sounding bleak. \"With the eyes, that is. How many people will go to the amount of effort you and I have, just to spare animals? We already butcher elephants for their ivory and tigers for their skins, and those are only decorative.\"\n\nHe was likely right. Sighing, I said, \"Then we had best hope the police recover the notebook\u2014small hope that it is. Do we have any notion who took it?\"\n\nBy the grim silence that fell, the answer started with \"yes\" and got worse from there. Mr. Wilker replied obliquely. \"You know about the symposium, I think.\"\n\nA gathering of scholars, hosted by the Philosophers' Colloquium, the preeminent scientific body in Scirland. Mr. Wilker had not been invited to attend, because he was not a gentleman. I had not been invited to attend either, because although my birth was gentle, I was not a man.\n\nBut we knew someone who met both of those requirements. \"If it was one of the visitors, Lord Hilford might be able to find out.\"\n\n\"He won't have much time,\" Kemble said, coming out of the reverie into which he so frequently lapsed. \"Doesn't that end this week?\"\n\nIt did, and the scholars would be returning to their homelands. \"Indeed. Then I suppose I know what I am doing with my afternoon.\"\n\nI was at the door to Lord Hilford's townhouse before I remembered that I had promised to pay a visit to my relatives by marriage. I knocked on the door anyway, thinking to ask the earl whether I might send them a note. As it transpired, he was not yet home from a lecture, and so I had more than enough time while I waited for him in the drawing room.\n\nIf you find yourself thinking that I had enough time to make good on that promise, you would be more or less correct. The Camhersts lived not far from Lord Hilford, in Mornetty Square, and it would not have taken me above twenty minutes to get there and back. But I did not know how long they would keep me, and it was of the utmost importance that I warn Lord Hilford about the intruders at Mr. Kemble's as soon as possible. If any of the visitors to the symposium were behind this outrage, we had limited time in which to find out\u2014even more limited time in which to do anything about it.\n\nSo I told myself, at least. The truth is that, although I had told my mother that Matthew, my brother-in-law, had agreed to take in little Jacob while I was gone, I had neglected to mention his lack of enthusiasm for the entire plan. His wife did not mind the addition of a temporary child, but Matthew minded very much the possibility of keeping him permanently. He might have even been the one who spilled the secret of the Erigan expedition where my mother could hear. Drained by my morning confrontation and by the dreadful news of the break-in, I was not minded to face anyone I did not consider a good friend.\n\nI therefore wrote out an excuse and had Lord Hilford's boot-boy run it to Mornetty Square. Then I linked my gloved hands together and paced, and worried, and made a hundred different (and useless) plans, until Lord Hilford came home.\n\nWhen I heard his booming voice in the front hall, I did not trouble to wait in the drawing room. He saw me as I came to the door, and the white tufts of his eyebrows rose. \"Not that it is anything but a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Camherst\u2014but I judge by your expression that whatever has sent you here is not good.\"\n\n\"It is not,\" I confirmed, and explained while he divested himself of overcoat and hat. His cane he kept; over the years it had become less of an affectation, more of a necessity, as his rheumatism worsened. Lord Hilford followed me into the drawing room and lowered himself into a chair with a sigh.\n\n\"Mmmm,\" he said when I was done. \"Makes me wonder if someone has been to Vystrana. I've heard nothing from Iljish in Drustanev, but you know what the post is like. And someone might have slipped past them.\"\n\nThe villagers were supposed to protect the nearby cavern from curiosity-seekers. It was the preserved dragonbone in that great cemetery which had given the first clues to the role of acid in that process. \"We said nothing of it in the book,\" I reminded Lord Hilford, referring to the monograph we had published after our expedition. \"Only that the dragons tore apart their deceased kin and took the pieces to a certain cave. No one could assume preservation from that\u2014nor could they find the cave.\"\n\nThe flapping of the earl's hand reminded me I was saying nothing he did not already know. \"Still, it's a possibility, and one we have to consider. Another possibility: Kemble talked.\"\n\n\"If he had talked, would they have smashed up his laboratory?\" I said indignantly. Then I saw the flaw in my own logic. \"Ah. You are not accusing him of selling the secret\u2014only of letting slip some hint that might have allowed another to guess what he's doing.\"\n\n\"Any of us might have done it,\" Lord Hilford admitted. \"Including me. I'd like to think I'm discreet, but\u2014well. Scholars drink a great deal more than anyone thinks, and I don't hold my liquor as well as I once did.\"\n\nI thought that I, at least, was unlikely to have betrayed our secret. Not out of any particular virtue; only from lack of opportunity. I hardly spoke to anyone who didn't already know. But it would do no good to say that, and so I said only, \"Is there anyone among the Colloquium's visitors that you would suspect? Or among its members, I suppose.\"\n\nLord Hilford grunted. \"Several, unfortunately. There's a ratty Mar\u00f1eo fellow I don't trust in the slightest; he's been accused of passing other people's research off as his own. Guhathalakar openly admits he's working on the issue of preservation. No one in the Bulskoi delegation is, but they have more opportunity than most to go poking around in Vystrana. The Hingese... I'm sorry, Mrs. Camherst, but without more to go on, all I can do is guess.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Wilker is still at Kemble's, and they've spoken with the police; we can hope for some kind of lead.\" I got up and paced again, fingers twisting about one another. \"I wish I could do something to hurry the research along. Money is only helpful to a point; it cannot make Frederick Kemble's brain work faster.\"\n\n\"Attend to your own research,\" Lord Hilford said, very reasonably. \"You may find something of use there; or if you do not, then every bit we know about dragons is one more bit we can use to protect them. But, ah\u2014if I may shift us from one nerve-wracking topic to another\u2014\"\n\nIt was enough to stop me pacing. I tried to remember the last time I had heard the earl so wary, and could not think of a single time. When I turned to look, he was chewing on the drooping end of his moustache. I waited, but he did not speak. \"Oh, out with it,\" I said at last, quite sharply. \"My nerves are no less wracked for being forced to wait.\"\n\n\"Natalie,\" he said, reluctantly. \"Or rather, her family.\"\n\nHis granddaughter was not ordinarily a topic of any tension at all. Nor were her family, but\u2014\"Let me guess,\" I said with a sigh. \"They have decided I am not fit company for her. Well, everyone else in Scirland has come to the same opinion; I am not fit company for anyone.\"\n\n\"That isn't precisely it. They think you eccentric, yes, but for the most part harmlessly so. The trouble is that an eccentric is not good company for an unmarried young lady\u2014not if she wishes to change that state.\"\n\nI frowned at him in surprise. \"But Natalie is only\u2014\" My arithmetic caught up with my words, and stopped them. \"Nearly twenty,\" I finished heavily. \"I see.\"\n\n\"Quite.\" Lord Hilford sighed, too, studying the head of his cane far more closely than it warranted. \"And so her family is quite adamant that she should not accompany you on this expedition. You are likely to be gone for six months at least, likely more; it would be ruinous to her marital prospects. Old maids and all that. I've argued, truly I have.\"\n\nI believed him. Lord Hilford had progressive notions of what ladies might do, and he doted on Natalie besides; but in the end he was not his granddaughter's guardian. \"Have you spoken with her?\"\n\n\"She knows how her family feels. I was hoping you might approach her\u2014woman to woman, you know\u2014and see if you can't reconcile her to the situation. They aren't intending to shackle her to some brute.\"\n\nIf she did not look herself out a husband soon, though, she might have trouble finding anyone other than a brute. \"I will see what I can do.\"\n\nLord Hilford sounded relieved. \"Thank you. You'll have to be quick about it, though. I was intending to write this afternoon, but now I can tell you in person: the schedule has moved up. Can you and Wilker be ready to depart in two weeks?\"\n\nHad I been holding anything, I would have dropped it. \"Two weeks?\"\n\n\"If you can't, then say so. But it may be another delay otherwise. There's going to be a changeover at the Foreign Office, and the incoming fellow is not very keen on travellers going to Nsebu, not with the unrest in the area.\"\n\n\"Unrest?\" I echoed, my mother's comments rising to mind.\n\n\"Ah, yes\u2014that hasn't reached the papers yet,\" Lord Hilford said. \"I had it from our man in the Foreign Office. A group of Royal Engineers were ambushed while surveying the south bank of the Girama, which is territory that is supposed to be firmly in our control. It seems Eremmo has quieted sufficiently under the Ikwunde yoke for the inkosi to start looking outward once more. It has certain people rather worried.\"\n\nAs well it should, given the military success the Ikwunde had enjoyed in the last fifty years, under one warlike inkosi after another. Still, I had faith in our soldiers there; and besides which, the river region between Bayembe and Eremmo was clear on the other side of the country from Nsebu. \"One scare after another,\" I sighed. \"I am beginning to think this expedition will never happen.\"\n\n\"It will, Mrs. Camherst, if we move quickly enough. Otherwise we'll have to argue the new fellow around.\"\n\nWe had already spent months arguing the previous fellow around. I reviewed the state of my affairs, and suppressed the unladylike desire to curse. I had counted on Natalie to be my companion on this journey. Would it be worse to travel alone\u2014with an unmarried man, no less\u2014or to find some other woman on short notice? Or rather, would suffering the latter be worse than suffering the consequences of the former?\n\nEither way, I could not let it change my answer to Lord Hilford. \"I can be ready, yes. You will have to ask Mr. Wilker yourself.\"\n\n\"I know what Tom will say.\" The earl levered himself up out of his chair. \"Two weeks it is, then. I'm sure you need to prepare. And in the meanwhile, I will look into the matter of this break-in.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Natalie's wings\u2014The merits of a husband\u2014Keeping promises\u2014Ladies at supper\u2014Lord Canlan\n\nMiss Oscott is here,\" the footman informed me when I returned home. \"I believe she is in your study, ma'am.\" Natalie. I would have preferred to delay my promise to Lord Hilford, but if I was to leave in two weeks, I simply could not spare the time. \"Thank you,\" I said, distracted, and went upstairs.\n\nMy study had been my husband's study, once. The servants had called it the study for a good two years after his death; it was not the sort of room women normally laid claim to. But eventually their speech had shifted. No doubt that owed a great deal to the amount of time I spent there, often in the company of Natalie Oscott.\n\nShe was indeed there, tacking a sheet of paper onto the piece of corkboard we had hung for the purpose. \"Oh, good heavens, Natalie,\" I said when I saw the figure drawn on it. \" That again?\"\n\n\"I've improved it,\" she said, flashing a grin at me over one shoulder. \"On advice from an enthusiast in Lopperton. He thinks I'm a lad named Nathaniel\u2014I do a very good boy's hand, when I put my mind to it. On account of falsifying my brothers' workbooks, when they had not written the exercises our tutor had set. What do you think?\"\n\nThe sheet of paper bore a large diagram, whose predecessors I had seen several times before. A wing spread across the page, with measurements carefully marked out, and annotations I could not read from where I stood. Even at range, though, one difference was apparent. \"Are the wings curved?\" I asked, curious despite myself.\n\n\"Yes, he thinks that would work better than a straight line. And he suggested an alteration to the harness, too, which he is going to try for himself as soon as he can get it built.\"\n\nTo be perfectly honest, I thought they were both mad. True, as I said in the previous volume of my memoirs, I had been obsessed with dragon wings since I was a small child, and the idea of being able to join them in the sky was attractive. But a human being cannot possibly achieve the pectoral strength necessary to fly by flapping artificial wings\u2014that having been Natalie's first notion. The best he (or she) can hope for is to glide, and even then, I had my doubts.\n\nBut Natalie found the notion an intriguing challenge. For her, the puzzle was intellectual: was it possible to engineer such a thing? In pursuit of that question, she had taught herself a great deal of mathematics, most of which I understood not at all. She had also entered into correspondence with others, for she was not the only one with an interest in the matter.\n\nNatalie had not yet attempted to construct or test any of her designs, for which I was grateful. Although my husband had called me the queen of deranged practicality, putting into practice ideas others would never think to attempt, even I have my limits. Those limits may, as this narrative will show, lie further out than I claim (and honestly believe)\u2014but I never know that until I pass them. And that, I invariably do under circumstances in which going further seems to be the only feasible course of action. It is only afterward that the \"deranged\" part of \"deranged practicality\" becomes apparent to me.\n\nBesides, I was less sanguine about others' foolishness, and I should not like to lose my closest companion to a broken neck. Natalie had been a great source of comfort to me since Jacob died. It made my heart all the lower, thinking that I could not bring her with me to Nsebu.\n\nShe saw my fallen countenance, but mistook the cause. \"I promise you, Isabella\u2014I have no intention of committing my own bones to the tender mercies of physics. At least not until after Mr. Garsell has conducted enough tests of his own to assure me the design is sound.\"\n\n\"That isn't it.\" I sighed and went to my desk\u2014Jacob's desk, once\u2014in front of the broad windows overlooking the back garden. The surface was cluttered with books and stray pages, my preserved sparkling Greenie standing guard over them all; I had forbidden the maid to touch anything there, even to dust. Maps of Eriga, travellers' reports, a draft of an article I was considering asking Lord Hilford to submit for me, under his own name. The Colloquium would not accept a paper from a woman.\n\nPerhaps it was the reminder of the Colloquium's requirements that made my voice more bitter than I intended. \"I spoke with your grandfather today. About your family.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" That one word might have been a valve, letting out all the air and vitality that had made her so animated.\n\nI lowered myself into the familiar leather of my chair. \"You know, then. That they don't want you to go to Eriga.\"\n\n\"They want me to stay here and find a husband. Yes.\" Natalie turned and paced a few steps away.\n\nHer deficit of enthusiasm was plain enough that I could read it without seeing her face. \"It needn't be bad, Natalie. You have your grandfather on your side, and from what you tell me, your family has at least some understanding of your interests. My father consulted a matchmaker to obtain a list of unmarried men who might share their libraries with me. I am sure you can go further, and find yourself a husband who will support you in your work.\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\"\n\nShe did not sound convinced. Before I could muster the words to develop my argument, however, Natalie spoke again. \"It is an untenable situation, and I know it. One way or another, I must be dependent upon someone. If not a husband, then one of my brothers, or\u2014\" She caught herself. \"I cannot ask that of them. But how much less can I ask it of some stranger?\"\n\nI had not missed that or. She had been about to list a third option, and had stopped herself. I could guess why. Rather than approach it directly, though, I said, \"Do you not want a husband? Presuming you could get a good one.\"\n\nShe stood very still; I think she was considering my words. Then she turned to face me, and answered in the tone of one who had never realized her true reply until this moment. \"No,\" Natalie said. \"I don't.\"\n\n\"Not for security,\" I said. At that time the Independent Virtue movement had not yet taken shape, but its arguments were beginning to be spoken, in hushed, half-scandalized whispers. If a woman traded her marital favors for financial support, did that not make marriage a form of prostitution? \"But for companionship, or love, or\u2014\" Now it was my turn to stop shy of my final words.\n\nNatalie blushed, but answered me. \"Not for any of those. I welcome the friendship of men, of course. But childbirth is dangerous, and motherhood would demand too much of my time; and I have no interest in the, ah, activity for its own sake. What is left?\"\n\nVery little, really. Except, perhaps, for an end to her family's nagging\u2014and that could be gotten in more than one way.\n\nIt would have been wiser for me to wait until I had examined the state of my own finances. But I was to leave for Nsebu in two weeks, and had no desire to waste my time or Natalie's on the wrong preparations. \"If you must be dependent on someone,\" I said, \"and if your conscience will permit it, then be dependent upon me. Widows often take on companions, and you have very nearly been mine these past few years; certainly you have been a dear friend. We might make it official.\"\n\nThe hitch in her breath told me I had struck my mark precisely. Still, she protested. \"I could not do that to you, Isabella. If I do not marry, I will be a burden forever. What if you change your mind, two or ten or twenty years down the road? It might poison our friendship, and I would never wish for that.\"\n\nI laughed, lightly, trying to ease the desperate tension in her eyes. \"A burden forever? Piffle. Stay with me, and I will qualify you for a life of independent and eccentric spinsterhood, supported as you choose by your learning and your pen. Other ladies have done it before.\"\n\nNot many, and few in the sorts of fields that Natalie had proven herself drawn to. Historical scholarship was more permitted to women than the designing of crazed glider-wings. But I had formed the resolution to live my own life as my inclinations demanded, and furthermore to do so with such zeal that society could not refuse me; it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to preach feminine obedience to Natalie now. She knew the obstacles and the cost: she had seen how I lived.\n\nBy the growing light in her eyes, the obstacles were trivial and the cost not even worth mentioning. Her mouth still spoke protest, but only because of her commitment to logic. \"My family will take some convincing, I fear. Possibly a great deal of it.\"\n\n\"Then you have two choices,\" I said, rising from my desk. At this time of day, the light through the windows at my back would frame me with a kind of halo; I was not above using that for dramatic effect. \"You may stay in Scirland and work on convincing them, and I will welcome you at my side once that is done. Or you can inform them of your intentions, leave for Nsebu with me in two weeks, and let them work through it on their own.\"\n\n\"Two weeks?\" Natalie said, her voice going faint. \"You are leaving in\u2014oh, but\u2014\"\n\nI waited. My words were sincere; I would welcome her company whether she had to join me later, or wait for my return to Scirland. It would not be fair to importune her with my preference.\n\nBesides, I knew her well enough to guess her answer. Natalie's shoulders went back, and her chin rose. \"I had promised to come with you to Eriga,\" she said. \"A lady should keep her promises. I will inform my family at once.\"\n\nI had never thought Maxwell Oscott, the earl of Hilford, to be a sadist. His chosen method for smoking out the thief, however, had me reconsidering the matter, with conclusions not favourable to him.\n\nThe symposium whose attendees comprised our most likely suspects was, as Mr. Wilker had said, scheduled to end that week. With the police turning up nothing of use in their examination of Mr. Kemble's laboratory, Lord Hilford settled upon a more direct method of looking for the guilty party, which was to invite everybody to supper and see if anyone flinched.\n\nTo this end, he arranged, on vanishingly short notice, to rent out the upper hall at the Yates Hotel, and made certain that all those we suspected would attend. His excuse for this event was that the Colloquium, which would be hosting a formal banquet the following night to mark the end of the symposium, did not permit women within their hallowed walls, and he was most determined that the gentlemen attending should meet various ladies of education and merit\u2014chief among them, though he did not advertise this fact, the widowed Mrs. Camherst.\n\nI suffered Lord Hilford to put me in the limelight because it would aid in our efforts, but under my mask of cooperation, I was petrified. At that time, the only monograph attributed to my name was A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana, which was hardly a scholarly work; I had laid no claim to Concerning the Rock-Wyrms of Vystrana, being concealed in the small print line \"and Others\" that followed Jacob's name. The few articles I had published regarding my research on sparklings had not gone to scholarly journals. Furthermore, I had been a confirmed recluse for going on three years. The prospect of attending a dinner party with a crowd of intelligent strangers made me so ill, I could hardly eat.\n\nBut if my spine weakened, I had only to think of the dragons who risked slaughter if the secret of dragonbone preservation became widely known, and my resolve returned to me on the spot.\n\nThe upper hall at the Yates blazed with candles that night, their light reflecting from polished wall sconces, crystal chandeliers and glasses, and the silver cutlery laid in precise ranks along the table. The men who filled the room were a mixed lot: northern Anthiopeans in their black-and-white suits, southern Anthiopeans in calf-length caftans, Yelangese in embroidered silk robes, Vidwathi with gems pinned to the fronts of their turbans.\n\nIt was not a proper dinner party, such as Mrs. Gatherty would approve of; the gentlemen outnumbered us ladies by more than three to one. But Lord Hilford had done an admirable job, given the short timeline, of organizing female guests, so that Natalie and I were not the only women present. The noted ornithologist Miriam Farnswood was there, as was the mathematician Rebecca Norman; the others, regrettably, would mean little to a modern audience, as their work has not survived history's forgetting.\n\nI pasted a smile on my face, took Lord Hilford's arm, and sallied forth to see who flinched.\n\nHe introduced me, one by one, to the individuals we considered to be possible culprits. Nicanor de Androjas y Re\u00f3n (the \"ratty Mar\u00f1eo fellow,\" whose nose did give him an unfortunately rodentlike profile), Bhelu Guhathalakar, Cuong Giun Vanh, Foma Ivanovich Ozerin. Mr. Wilker was with us throughout. None of us expected our interlocutors to have broken into Kemble's laboratory themselves\u2014that was undoubtedly the work of some hired criminal\u2014but surely the thief would, by now, have glanced through Kemble's notes. Both Mr. Wilker and I were mentioned in abundance. The connection between that work and our names could not be missed.\n\nCuong dismissed me immediately as beneath his notice, directing all his conversation to Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker. Ozerin gave me more attention than I wanted, but entirely of the wrong kind; I extracted myself from that situation as soon as possible. De Androjas y Re\u00f3n did indeed flinch, but he flinched at everything. (I daresay that man was even less comfortable in such a crowd than I was.)\n\nBy far my best experience was with the Vidwathi chemist Guhathalakar, though not, at least initially, for any reason useful to our investigation. He was a younger man than the others, thirty at most, and of a type I have met countless times in my life, which I confess is one of my favourites: so powerfully interested in his subject that trivial considerations such as the sex of his conversational partner are quickly forgotten. I might have been an orang-outang, for all he cared; what mattered was that I showed an interest in chemistry, and could respond to his statements with intelligent questions (even if I did not understand the answers). It took no encouragement at all to get him expounding at length, his voice growing louder in his enthusiasm.\n\nIt took only slightly more encouragement to steer his exposition in the desired direction. \"Dragonbone, yes,\" he said, his Vidwathi accent thickening as his mind raced ahead of his Scirling. \"I think it is on the anvil. With so many working on the problem, and the new equipments we have now, we will have answers soon.\"\n\nHe showed no sign of secret knowledge, no coy hint that he knew more than he said. Even as I responded, I transferred my attention to the milling guests around us. Guhathalakar's voice carried well enough that soon the entire room would know we were discussing the preservation of dragonbone. \"It would be a tremendous breakthrough, if so. But I confess myself troubled as to the potential consequences, once the problem has been solved. My own interest being in natural history, I cannot be easy with anything that might encourage men to butcher dragons.\"\n\nAn indulgent chuckle from my left heralded the arrival of Peter Gilmartin, marquess of Canlan and vice president of the Philosophers' Colloquium. \"But did your own party not butcher a dragon for study in Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst? Indeed, I believe the drawings of that carcass were your own work. Surely it would be beneficial if natural historians could keep dragon skeletons for study, rather than having to obtain a fresh specimen each time they have a new question.\"\n\nHis words were sensible, but his patronizing tone ruffled my feathers the wrong way. Still, deference for his rank forced me to moderate the reply I wanted to make. \"It is not natural historians who concern me, my lord, but others, who would likely not be satisfied with a handful of skeletons. Humanity is not known for its moderation.\"\n\n\"And yet, think of the advances that might come from this discovery. Should we put the well-being of savage beasts above our own?\"\n\nI had an entire article's worth of reply ready for that, but Lord Canlan gave me no chance to begin. He turned instead to Guhathalakar, leaning forward with a friendly and conspiratorial air. \"I should like to talk with you tomorrow, when we are in more scholarly surroundings. Your work interests me a great deal, and I believe I may be in a position to help it along.\"\n\nHad a Vystrani rock-wyrm breathed on me in that moment, I would not have been more frozen. While Guhathalakar made his reply, my gaze was pinned to Lord Canlan, unblinking, as if by sheer intensity of stare I could prove or disprove the sudden suspicion in my mind.\n\nThe marquess was in no position to exploit Kemble's research himself; his primary interest was in astronomy. But that did not mean he could not benefit in other ways. For example, by selling Kemble's notes to the highest bidder.\n\nDid I imagine it? Was the smile he directed at me before moving onward merely more patronizing courtesy, or did it send a private, gloating message that he had what I had lost, and intended to profit thereby?\n\nHe was a marquess, above even Lord Hilford's elevated station. I could hardly accuse him where he stood\u2014though shock nearly overrode my better judgment and sent the words flying out by reflex. And he had said nothing I could even begin to construe as evidence, let alone expect anyone else to accept.\n\nI fulminated on this through dinner, for there was no opportunity to step aside with any of my own friends and give them my suspicions. Afterward, though, while Lord Hilford was bidding his guests farewell, I pulled Mr. Wilker into a corner and delivered the tale in a rush.\n\n\"It's a thin reed,\" he said when I was done, and frowned across the room at where Lord Canlan stood.\n\nAlthough the words of his reply were scarcely encouraging, I took heart from them nevertheless. There was a time when Thomas Wilker would have scoffed at my fears and chalked them up to an overactive imagination. Now he gave them due thought\u2014even if that thought did not lead him to agree.\n\n\"I don't know how he would have learned about Kemble's research,\" I admitted. \"But you have met him before\u2014is he the sort of man who would flaunt his coup in front of me like that?\"\n\nMr. Wilker's grimace gave me my answer. \"When it is the project of a woman and a man like me... then yes. He loves nothing more than to put his lessers in their place.\"\n\nAn unpleasant personality hardly constituted proof, though. \"Will you be at the dinner tomorrow night?\" Mr. Wilker shook his head, mouth set in a hard line. Of course not: his sex might grant him entrance to the Colloquium's premises, but the son of a Niddey quarryman would not be invited to their celebratory meal. \"Lord Hilford will have to watch, then. Lord Canlan may be offering the notes for sale, or at least sounding out his prospective buyers. Given how chatty Guhathalakar is, it won't be difficult to encourage him to say.\"\n\nA muscle tensed in Mr. Wilker's jaw. \"It doesn't offer very good odds for stopping him, though. We can't ask Lord Hilford to make a scene.\"\n\n\"It's the best we can do for now,\" I said. And left unspoken the rest of my thought: that we might not have any chance to do better."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Farewell to Jacob\u2014My brother-in-law\u2014Lord Denbow is distraught\u2014Natalie's escape\u2014Scene at the docks\u2014A woman's wishes\n\nI can only blame myself for the incident that occurred prior to my departure from Scirland.\n\nThe rush to depart left me with several dozen matters to take care of, ranging from soothing family to receiving Lord Hilford's report on the final dinner of the symposium. (He did indeed question Guhathalakar, but to no avail; Lord Canlan had ignored the man all night, much to Guhathalakar's disappointment.) One matter in particular had me more distracted than most.\n\nOn the afternoon before my departure, Mrs. Hunstin, the nanny, brought my son downstairs to await his uncle and his aunt, who would be caring for him in my absence. Jacob was dressed in a toddler's tunic, but his hair, a sandy shade that had not yet darkened to his father's rich brown, was presently bare of the cap clutched in his free hand. The other was clinging tightly to the nanny's thumb, his eyes fixed on the staircase, which he descended one careful step at a time.\n\nMy mother had accused me of heartlessness, abandoning him to go gallivanting (her word) off to foreign parts. Her accusation was only the first of many, as that judgment eventually spread not only to others in our social circle, but to complete strangers and even the news-sheets. There is no reason anyone should believe me, justifying my behaviour at so late a date, but since I cannot move on without addressing this subject, let me say: a pang went through my heart at the sight of my son.\n\nI had not been close to him during his rearing; he was not a fixture of my life the way children are for more involved mothers. I found more satisfaction in scholarly work than in the day-to-day tasks of feeding, cleaning, and comforting him. In hindsight, a part of me does regret missing such events\u2014but even then, my regret is an intellectual one. The development of children from soft, formless infants into adults is a complex process, and one I have come to appreciate on account of my dragon studies. (If you read that comparison as demeaning, please understand that, for me, it is not. We, too, are animals: the most wondrous and fascinating animals of all.)\n\nDespite that distance, however, I was not without feelings for my child. Indeed, I imposed that distance in part because of my feelings. Jacob's serious expression, focused on the challenge of navigating the stairs, reminded me profoundly of his namesake. As people had told me, again and again, he was in some sense a piece of my husband, something left behind by Jacob the elder. I was not always prepared to deal with the reminder of that connection. And so a part of me chose instead to flee.\n\nBut it does a disservice to my own life to claim the Erigan expedition was motivated by fear. It is equally true, if not more so, to say that I was running toward something, as well as away. Jacob and I had shared a love of dragons, and if leaving his child behind was a betrayal of his memory (as so many people assured me it was), staying home would have been a betrayal as well. We had agreed, on a mountaintop in Vystrana, that caging me in the life expected of a Scirling gentlewoman would be the death of me: spiritually, if not physically. I had been caged for three years, caught in a trap of my grief and obligations as well as society's expectation, and the work I did on paper granted me only partial freedom. Enough to make me long for more, but not enough to satisfy.\n\nAnd yet I was leaving behind a child. An innocent toddler, bereft even before his birth of one parent; now I proposed to subject myself to any number of potential calamities that might rob him of the second.\n\nI cannot say whether, given the chance to revisit that choice, I would change my mind. I know now, to a very precise measurement, how great the dangers would be, and how narrowly I escaped them. But I also know that I survived. Little Jacob was not left orphaned, as so many had direly predicted.\n\nDid I have the right to undertake such risk? I can only give the same answer I gave then: that I have, and had, as much right as any widower in the same situation. Few question the widower's decision, but everyone questions the widow's.\n\nOn that day, I buried all such thoughts beneath the press of business. (Almost all of them. The aforementioned pang was real, nor was it alone.) When little Jacob had finished his conquest of the stairs, I knelt on the cool stone of our front hall, putting myself closer to his eye level, and held out my hands. He came to them, hesitantly, after a nudge from Mrs. Hunstin.\n\n\"You must be very good,\" I told him, trying and failing to affect the tone I had heard others use with toddlers. \"Nanny H will be coming with you, so you must mind her as you always do, even if you are in a different house. I shall write to you often, and she will read you my letters; she will write to me of how you are doing. And I shall be home before you know it.\"\n\nHe nodded obediently, but I doubt he grasped the import of my words. That I should go away for a few days was a thing he had experienced many times; that I should go away for months or a year was beyond his comprehension.\n\nI heard the crunch of gravel before the ringing of the bell. My brother-in-law Matthew had arrived, and his wife, Elizabeth, with him. They came into the hall, and I gently shooed Jacob toward Bess, with Mrs. Hunstin close behind.\n\nMatthew sighed, looking at Jacob, and shook his head. \"I know it's too late to talk you out of this. But still\u2014\"\n\n\"You're right,\" I said, before he could finish that thought. \"It is too late. I am profoundly grateful for your assistance, Matthew; never doubt that. But I am going to Eriga.\"\n\nHis jaw shifted, briefly giving his face the air of a bulldog facing an unwelcome target. \"I never would have predicted that Jacob would marry so obstinate a woman.\"\n\nI wanted to say, then you did not know him very well. But in truth, I'm not certain Jacob himself would have predicted our match, in the years before we met. Antagonizing Matthew would accomplish very little, and so instead I said nothing; I merely kissed my son on the head, admonished him once more to be good, and waved them off down the drive.\n\nTheir carriage, departing, passed another on its way in. The coat of arms painted on the door was familiar; it was the white stag's head on a blue field of Hilford. The carriage, however, was not the earl's. I stood in the entrance, frowning, and so had no chance to hide when the door flung open (almost before the carriage had stopped) and emitted the angry form of Lewis Oscott, the Baron of Denbow\u2014and the earl of Hilford's eldest son.\n\n\"Where is she?\" he demanded, striding across the gravel to confront me. \"Bring her out here at once.\"\n\n\"She?\" I repeated dumbly, for my tongue had not yet caught up with my brain.\n\n\"Natalie!\" His bellow made my ears ring. \"I have tolerated her association with you; until now it did little harm. But this is beyond the pale. You will give her up this instant.\"\n\nMy brain had only got as far as knowing who \"she\" was. Why else would Natalie's father be here, if not because of his daughter? But the rest still escaped me. I had not seen Natalie in several days\u2014a fact which, in retrospect, should have concerned me. We left for Eriga on the morrow, after all. I had been too distracted to think of it, though, assuming (when I considered it at all) that she must be with her grandfather.\n\nA foolish assumption, and one that was now having some very unfortunate consequences.\n\n\"My lord,\" I said, collecting my thoughts, \"I cannot give you what I do not have. Natalie is not here.\"\n\n\"Don't lie to me. Where else would she be, if not here?\"\n\nThe accusation set my back up. \"With her grandfather, perhaps? I take it she spoke to you about her intentions.\"\n\nHe snorted in disgust. \" Intentions. It is madness, and you know it. A position as a companion is all well and good for women who cannot do better, but Natalie has perfectly good prospects, so long as she is here to take advantage of them. And you will not want her with you forever. When you tire of her\u2014or get yourself killed, which is entirely possible\u2014what will become of her? No, Mrs. Camherst, I will not allow you to ruin my daughter's future for your own benefit.\" Setting his shoulders, he strode forward.\n\nI slapped my hand against the doorjamb, barring his way with my arm. \"Your pardon, Lord Denbow,\" I said, with icy politeness. \"I do not recall inviting you in.\"\n\nThis sudden and brazen resistance startled him, but he did not let it slow his tongue. \"I am here to collect my daughter, Mrs. Camherst, with your permission or without it.\"\n\n\"If she were here, I would be glad to broker some kind of negotiation between the two of you. As she is not, you will have to seek her elsewhere. I will not suffer you to rampage through my house regardless.\"\n\nHe was not so far gone as to try and shove me aside, though he very easily could have done so. His fury thwarted for the nonce, he resorted to persuasion. \"Mrs. Camherst, please, see reason. You are determined to put yourself in danger, regardless of the consequence to your family; very well. I have no authority to command you to better sense. But I can protect my daughter, and I will.\"\n\n\"Lord Denbow,\" I said, moderating my own tone to suit his. \"I have told you, she is not here. I have not seen Natalie in days. Should I see her before I leave, I will tell her you came, and advise her of your concerns. That is all I can promise.\"\n\nHe deflated visibly, like the punctured bag of a caeliger. \"I am sure she is coming here. Please, might I\u2014\"\n\n\"I will tell her you came,\" I said firmly. Had he not attempted to thrust his way into my house, I might have been more tolerant; as it was, I wanted him gone. \"If I see her.\"\n\nWith that, he had to be content. By then the footman was hovering behind my shoulder, looking distressed at the prospect of having to forcibly evict a baron from the premises, but determined to do so if necessary. (Clomers was a very good footman, the best I ever had.) Half-fuming, half-dejected, Lord Denbow returned to his carriage, and so away.\n\nOnce he was well down the drive, I deflated a bit myself. \"If he comes back, do not let him in,\" I said wearily to Clomers; and, having received his stout agreement, I went upstairs to my study.\n\nNatalie was sitting in front of my desk.\n\nI very nearly swallowed my own tongue at the sight of her. While one part of my brain sorted out the contradictory impulses of gasping, shrieking, and demanding an explanation of her, the rest noted certain details: the open window on the side wall, overlooking a fine (and easily climbed) oak tree; the fierce and frightened look in Natalie's eyes; the small valise on the floor at her feet.\n\n\"He locked me up,\" she said, sounding almost as if she could not believe it. \"We argued for days, and when I told him I was going whatever he said, he locked me up. Him and Mama. I am sorry to have made you a liar.\"\n\n\"She only lies who tells a falsehood knowingly,\" I said, as if such distinctions were at all the most relevant thing at hand.\n\nNatalie drew in a breath, and the unsteadiness of it advertised her distress. \"I fear I have made a great deal of trouble for you. I came here intending to go with you tomorrow\u2014but if I do, Papa will be infuriated.\"\n\nIf she did not, then she would have little choice but to return to her family. And while they might have what they perceived as her best interests at heart, the disjunct there was severe enough to send Natalie up my tree and through my window, and who knows what else before that. Her actions, more than any words, told me that return was simply not to be borne.\n\nHer grandfather might protect her against the worst of it\u2014but a better protection would be to go beyond her family's reach. \"Your father will have to be infuriated in Scirland,\" I said, the dryness of my tone covering for any temporary quailing of spirit. \"He doesn't have a visa for Nsebu, and isn't likely to get one anytime soon.\"\n\nHope kindled new life in her posture. \"Do you mean\u2014\"\n\n\"The ship leaves tomorrow,\" I said. \"We must think of how to get you on it.\"\n\nWe smuggled her on board by way of the workers' gangway, where her father would never think to look. With Natalie dressed in the clothes of a laborer (yes, trousers and all) and a sack of potatoes on her shoulder, Lord Denbow never had the slightest chance of spotting her.\n\nHe was there, of course, and made a great protest, insisting to the gathered members of my family (Paul and Judith; my mother and father; my favourite brother, Andrew; Matthew and Sir Joseph, who was my father-in-law) that I had kidnapped Natalie.\n\n\"I have not kidnapped her, my lord,\" I said, covering my nervousness with irritation. In his distress, he had not yet thought to ask me outright whether I had seen his daughter. If he did, I would have to make up my mind whether to lie, and a sleepless night of pondering that very question had failed to supply me with an answer.\n\nI had kept my word, if only halfheartedly, talking with Natalie of his concerns. The conversation had failed to divert either of us from our course. My one source of apprehension was that I had no opportunity to speak privately with certain individuals, namely, Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford. The former would be coming with me on this expedition, and the ear not occupied by Lord Denbow's furious expostulations was being filled with my mother's insistence that in addition to it being madness for me to go abroad, it was even more mad to do so without any kind of female companion. Marriage had provided me with a mystical shield against impropriety, one not entirely lost with widowhood, but she still feared rumour. (In fairness to her, I must say she was right to do so. But I get ahead of myself.)\n\nLord Hilford, I thought, had guessed something of what was going on, though whether he knew I was actively helping Natalie, I could not say. I did, however, see him draw Mr. Wilker aside upon his arrival, and whatever he said turned Mr. Wilker's face to stone. That done, Lord Hilford set himself to diverting his son as best he could. They went together to examine my cabin, to satisfy Lord Denbow that Natalie was not there; I hoped she had found a good place to conceal herself until we were well away from shore.\n\nAndrew, to my pleasure and relief, set himself the same task with our mother, and accompanied me on board when the time came, as he had done when I departed for Vystrana. \"So, where are you hiding her?\" he asked as we crossed the deck.\n\nA heavy step brought my head around. Mr. Wilker had joined us, pacing to my right, leaving me feeling trapped between them. But Andrew was grinning as if it were all a tremendous lark, and the grim set of Mr. Wilker's jaw told me he would not be surprised by anything I might say.\n\n\"She is hiding herself,\" I said. \"I honestly don't know where. This was her decision, you know, though I support her in it.\"\n\n\"Miss Oscott is even less sane than you are,\" Mr. Wilker said.\n\n\"Then she's in good company,\" I said lightly. That would not be the end of it, I knew; but Mr. Wilker would not go against Lord Hilford's clear wish, that his granddaughter be permitted her escape. He was too loyal to the earl, and owed him far too much. What arguments we would have\u2014and oh, did we have them\u2014would come later.\n\nOur ship was the Progress, the famed steamship that for many years formed the primary link in the Scirling-Erigan trade. Built from Erigan steel and fueled with Scirling coal, it was a symbol of the partnership inaugurated by the Nsebu colony\u2014at least, it was seen as a partnership on our side of the ocean, though the truth was less balanced than that word implies. The bulk of its capacity was given over to cargo, some of which would be scattered through various ports like seeds as we made our journey, the rest traded in Nsebu before the holds were filled once more with iron, gold, ivory, and more. But the Progress was the jewel of that sea route, and so it also had passenger cabins, well equipped for the comfort of the dignitaries who occupied them. The three of us were hardly dignitaries, but Lord Hilford qualified, and had arranged for us to travel in style.\n\nWe met him emerging from my cabin with Lord Denbow behind him. Or rather, Lord Hilford emerged; his son charged, backing me against a wall. \"Enough of this, Mrs. Camherst! You will tell me where my daughter is, or\u2014\"\n\nMy brother was already stepping to defend me. I was very glad that Lord Hilford intervened, before I had to discover what Andrew would do. \"Lewis! Control yourself. Or do you want the crew to drag you bodily off this ship? You are making a scene.\"\n\nAll hail that bane of the upper class, a scene. The spectre of being publicly shamed was enough to check Lord Denbow. It was not enough to calm him, but with his momentum broken, the baron knew he could not prevent the ship from departing. And if he attempted to detain me, he would face any number of consequences. He could not decide what to do before his father took him firmly by the arm and dragged him away, not quite by force.\n\nStill, he indulged in one final accusation, shot over his shoulder. \"You will ruin her life.\"\n\n\"I have not ruined my own, Lord Denbow,\" I called after him. \"Trust your daughter to find her own way.\"\n\nNatalie emerged when we were out of Sennsmouth harbor, and once she was properly attired, I called Mr. Wilker in.\n\nHe shook his head at the sight of her. \"I would ask whether you have any notion what you've just done. But you're the earl's granddaughter, and I know you've inherited at least a portion of his intelligence. So I will only ask you, in God's name, why.\"\n\n\"Because I had to,\" Natalie said.\n\nI understood her meaning, but Mr. Wilker clearly did not. Yet we required some degree of comity, or this expedition would be doomed before we arrived in Nsebu. \"Mr. Wilker. I am sure you endured hardships of your own, gaining your education, forcing those of higher station to accept you as their intellectual peer. Why did you do it?\"\n\n\"This will rebound on her family,\" he said, ignoring my question.\n\n\"And were there no consequences for your own family, when you left Niddey for university?\"\n\nIt was a guess, but not a blind one; I knew Mr. Wilker was the eldest son of his line. His indrawn breath told me I had struck my mark. Belatedly\u2014as usual for me, I regret to say\u2014I wondered whether his sensitivity on this matter was because of his own experience, rather than in spite of it.\n\n\"When you came to Vystrana, it was different,\" he said, as if appealing to me for reason. \"You came with Jacob, and with his blessing.\"\n\n\"Are a woman's wishes only fit to be considered when blessed by a male relative?\" I asked sharply. \"If so, then take Lord Hilford's for Natalie, and let us be done with it.\"\n\nHe flushed, and left soon after. It was not the last time we argued the matter, but my words had lodged under his skin like a barb, and their effect became apparent in due course."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "In which we arrive in Eriga, where we achieve both success and scandal, and embroil ourselves in various conflicts"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Sea-snakes\u2014The port of Nsebu\u2014Faj Rawango\u2014Half-naked men\u2014Nsebu and Atuyem\u2014We are no threat\n\nEven at the reliable pace of a steamer, the journey to Nsebu was not short. We stopped in various ports for trade; we battled foul weather; once three boilers broke Progress made no progress at all until down in concert, and the they were repaired. We were at sea for a month altogether, and to alleviate my boredom (for we soon completed the plans for our research, and there are only so many hands of whist one can play without going mad) I began observing the sea life.\n\nFish and whales, sharks and seabirds; the latter held the most interest for me, as I had not lost my childhood partiality toward wings. But despite its lack in that regard, I was most captivated by the great sea-snake we saw one afternoon near the end of our voyage.\n\nWe were entering Erigan waters, crossing the latitude known as the Tropic of Serpents, so named for the large numbers of sea-snakes found there. This was the only one we got a good view of, and all the passengers (and half the crew) crowded to the rails to observe it. \"People argue about whether they should be considered dragons,\" I said to Natalie, watching the great coils rise above the water's surface and slip away once more. \"Your grandfather doesn't believe the Prania sea-snakes should be, but I wonder about these beasts. There are so many creatures around the world that seem partially draconic in nature, but they lack wings, or forelimbs, or extraordinary breath. I think sometimes that Sir Richard Edgeworth's criteria may be wrong\u2014or rather, too strict.\"\n\n\"Another thing to study,\" Natalie said, amused. \"Will you ever be done?\"\n\nI smiled into the sun, one hand holding my bonnet against the firm grasp of the wind. \"I should hope not. How dreadfully tedious that would be.\"\n\nFour days later, with all the passengers lined up at the rail once more, the Progress steamed past the rocky outcrop of Point Miriam and into the deep harbor of Nsebu.\n\nBecause the geography of this region will be of great relevance later, I should take a moment to describe it now. The land of Bayembe lies on the northern side of the Bay of Mouleen, mostly along a plateau lifted above sea level, but beneath the mountains that form their northern border with the Talu Union. Their eastern border and part of the southern are ocean; the rest was, at the time, the disputed territory between the Girama and Hembi rivers, and the edge of the great, sunken swamp of Mouleen, whose streams spill into the bay at a thousand points.\n\nMouleen is born from an eccentric quirk of geology. It would, in the normal way of things, be a great river delta, as the Girama, the Gaomomo, and the Hembi converge only a few hundred kilometers inland, the culmination of their long rush to the sea. But a fault in the underlying rock dropped the region nearly to sea level at what should have been the confluence, with the result that all three rivers tumble over a cliff and drown the land below. Furthermore, the prevailing winds at that latitude blow from the east, funneling much of the atmospheric moisture into the low channel formed by that geologic fault, and therefore much of the rain. The resulting morass is the impenetrable jungle of Mouleen\u2014more colloquially known as the Green Hell.\n\nBut that was not yet my destination. Although I spared a few glances for the emerald band that marked the western edge of the bay, the bulk of my attention was on the town perched just off its corner, over which the fort at Point Miriam stood guard.\n\nNeither words nor images suffice to communicate what greeted me as we came into port, for even the best artwork is a static thing of the eye alone, and words are by their nature linear. I can tell you of the smells that assaulted my nose: the salt sea, the coal smoke of other steamers, the fish and shellfish that even today make up a brisk part of the port's local trade, the spices whose aromatic vibrancy is all out of proportion to their quantity. Unwashed bodies and tar, fresh-cut tropical lumber, the greasy stench of lunch being fried for dockworkers and hungry travellers alike. But I can only tell you of one scent at a time, and I cannot present those to you at the same time as I give you the sounds and the sights, the mad clamour that was my first experience of Eriga.\n\nWith the knowledge I have now, I can give the proper names to what I saw then only as a bewildering array of peoples. There were Scirlings among them, of course, merchants and soldiers, there to protect our interests in iron production. Nor were we the only Anthiopeans, despite tensions with our rivals over their involvement elsewhere in Eriga; there were Thiessois, Chiavorans, a cluster of Bulskoi looking exceedingly uncomfortable in the heat. Pigtailed Yelangese bustled around their ships, and Akhians were nearly as common as Scirlings.\n\nBut it was the Erigans who dazzled my eye, for they were new to me, and formed the bulk of the crowds.\n\nAmongst themselves, they displayed a hundred different modes of dress and adornment, a hundred different details of physiognomy that mark one people as distinct from another. I saw complexions ranging from inky blue-black to bronze, mahogany, and dark amber, sharp chins and square jaws, high foreheads and low, full lips and wide mouths and cheekbones that rode flat or stood out like the arches of a bow. The people wore their hair in loose braids or braids close to the scalp, in beads or strips of fabric, in soft clouds and corkscrew curls and sharp ridges held in place by white or red clay. There were Agwin veiled from head to toe and Menke in little more than loincloths, Sasoro in silver and Erbenno in embroidery, Mebenye and Ouwebi and Sagao and Gabborid in variations on the folded wrap, whose subtleties of color and arrangement communicate a great deal to the knowledgeable eye, but escaped my understanding entirely that first day. And, of course, there were countless Yembe, the dominant people of that land.\n\nI had studied the Yembe language (from a reference grammar, which is an abominable teaching tool), but it had in no way prepared me for the social language before me now. Staring out at the docks, I understood, for the first time, that I had left behind the familiar commonalities of Anthiope, and crossed the oceans to a different continent.\n\nMr. Wilker put his hand under my elbow, which tells me I must have reeled. \"It will be a little while before we can go ashore,\" he said. \"You might want to go below until we do. The sun can be brutal, for those not used to it.\"\n\nOnce he would have phrased it as \"you should go below.\" Disagreements over Natalie's presence aside, we had indeed made great strides in our relationship with one another. \"The sun does not bother me,\" I said absently, digging in my satchel for my sketchbook. I'd done little drawing since leaving Scirland, the pitch and roll of the ship wreaking havoc on my ability to place a precise line, but I could not pass up this opportunity to sketch the docks.\n\nI could feel him wrestling with the answer he wanted to make to that, before finally swallowing it\u2014for the sake of harmony, I suspect. \"I will make certain our trunks are being seen to,\" he said, and went away.\n\nI had only put the broadest outlines of the scene down on paper when a popping noise sounded behind me, and then my page was in shadow. \"Natalie,\" I said, annoyed.\n\n\"You'll burn otherwise,\" she said, all practicality as usual. \"Grandpapa warned me. About the sun, and about you\u2014that you wouldn't take sufficient precautions.\"\n\n\"The sun here is strong, yes. It was strong in the mountains of Vystrana, too, and I had little trouble there.\" I had suffered more from dryness of skin than from sunburn.\n\nNatalie laughed. \"Yes, because you were cold all the time. You covered up and spent much of your time indoors to get away from the wind. But carry on with your work; this parasol is shading us both.\"\n\nI hadn't needed her exhortation to continue. Line by line, the people were taking shape beneath my pencil, surrounded by crates and ropes and warehouses and shops, with little boats bobbing in the water at the lower edge of the scene. Drawing at speed was something I'd practiced these past few years; the images I produced lacked the polished elegance of my youthful art, but I'd improved greatly in my ability to capture the subject accurately in a short span of time.\n\nBy the time Mr. Wilker returned, I had enough of it down that I could fill in the remainder without trouble later on. \"Is it very far to our hotel?\" I asked, tucking my pencil away and closing my sketchbook. Certainly there would be other sights worth seeing beyond the docks, but I hoped to manage some individual portraits. Sailors the world over are a visually fascinating lot.\n\n\"Actually,\" Mr. Wilker said, \"it seems our plans may have changed. See that fellow at the corner there, beneath the yellow awning? The short one, with the band of gold around his forehead? He's a messenger from the palace, sent to watch for our arrival. The oba has invited us to be his guests.\"\n\nI blinked at him in startlement. \"At the palace? Surely not.\"\n\n\"It seems so,\" Mr. Wilker said. \"And we're expected to come straight on. The messenger brought horses, and he says we needn't worry about our trunks.\"\n\nNo doubt the gesture was intended to be helpful, but in my travel-frayed state, it struck me as faintly sinister. \"What is this messenger's name?\"\n\n\"Faj Rawango,\" Mr. Wilker said, with the careful air of one who doesn't trust his tongue not to trip over the unfamiliar syllables. He too had studied the language, but Faj Rawango was not a Yembe name. Was the man a foreigner, or did he hail from one of the other peoples that made up the nation of Bayembe?\n\nI didn't realize Mr. Wilker and I had both fallen into a brief silence until Natalie broke it by saying, \"Well, we cannot refuse such an honour.\"\n\n\"No, of course not.\" I replaced my sketchbook and drew the satchel up onto my shoulder. \"And I suppose there isn't much to be gained by delaying. Come, let us go meet this Faj Rawango.\"\n\nWe descended to the ship's longboat and were taken in to shore, disembarking on the salt-stained wood of the docks near where Faj Rawango stood. He was, as Mr. Wilker had spotted, a small fellow by the standards of those around him; in fact, he was a bit shorter than I. His skin, though still dark, was lighter and more reddish in tone than many of those around him.\n\nLacking a better option, I greeted him in the Yembe manner, touching my heart, and received the same in return. Natalie and Mr. Wilker echoed us both. But once the formal greetings were done\u2014a rather lengthier process among the peoples of that region than among Scirlings\u2014Faj Rawango spoke in our own tongue. \"The oba regrets putting you to the trouble of a further journey, but you will rest in more comfort in the royal palace, in Atuyem.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of him,\" Mr. Wilker said. \"Our arrangements are for rooms in a hotel near Point Miriam. We had hoped to perhaps gain an introduction on some future date, but had no thought of imposing on his time and generosity so soon after our arrival.\"\n\nFaj Rawango dismissed this with a wave. \"It is no imposition. He has met many Scirling merchants and soldiers, but no scholars. He is very curious about your work.\"\n\nThe last time a foreigner with a title had taken an interest in our work, it had not ended well. That, more than anything in the messenger's words, put apprehension in my heart. But what could we do? As Natalie said, we could not refuse this invitation. I cursed the politicking that preceded our journey. Necessary though it had been to procure our entrance to Nsebu, it had apparently drawn rather more of the oba's attention than I wanted.\n\nOur horses waited beneath a striped canopy not far away, in company with enough others that I understood the place to be some kind of waiting room for equines. Ours, however, stood out from the crowd, not only for their quality, but for the grandness of their equipage, beaded and gilt. No fewer than four soldiers stood watch over this wealth, who clearly would form our escort.\n\nI call them soldiers, but at the time I had difficulty attaching the term to them, despite the Scirling rifles they bore. To my mind, a soldier was a man in uniform. I thought of these men instead as warriors, for their garb looked nothing like the uniforms I was accustomed to\u2014stiff wool in solid colors\u2014being drapes of cotton tied about their waists and dyed in some intricate pattern, with leopard skins hanging down their back like cloaks. Wool, I suppose, does little to protect one against a rifle ball or a cavalry sword, but such logic did not prevent me from fearing for the men's bare and unprotected flesh.\n\nAs I turned to mount, I saw Natalie blushing. Until that moment, it had not even occurred to me, in more than an intellectual sense, that the men were half-naked. Then, unfortunately, I could think of nothing else. My own cheeks heated, and I fumbled my rise to the saddle, catching my shoe in the hem of my divided skirts. (My self-conscious embarrassment was somewhat mitigated by seeing Mr. Wilker a bit pink in the ears himself\u2014likely more for ladies being exposed to such a thing than for his own sake, as gentlemen see one another bare in many contexts. We had all known this would happen, the climate of the region being what it is, but knowing and experiencing were separate things.)\n\nTo cover for my loss of composure, I questioned Faj Rawango as we rode out of the dockside district and through Nsebu proper. Or rather, that was my intention; it soon devolved into a polite argument wherein each of us tried to insist upon using the other's native tongue, with the result that he spoke to me in Scirling and I responded in Yembe. Languages have never been my m\u00e9tier, so I fear he had the better of me in the comparison of skill, but my experience in Vystrana had taught me that there is nothing like using a language on a regular basis to better one's skill. I therefore persevered until Faj Rawango bowed in the face of my stubbornness and began answering me in Yembe.\n\nWe conversed on a variety of topics then, exploring as widely as my limited vocabulary and Faj Rawango's instructions from his royal master would allow. The former was more of a restriction than the latter, but I soon discovered (through my customary curiosity and lack of discretion) that the political climate of Bayembe was not a suitable subject. The man did not chastise me for asking, but he showed a marked disinclination to speak about the movement of Ikwunde troops that had so spooked the new man at the Foreign Office, or even more generally about the expansionist ambitions of the inkosi, their ruler. Nor would he speak of the Talu, the \"union\" to the north that was, in truth, an empire by another name, assimilating its neighbours one by one. Clearly such matters were not for the likes of him to share with Scirling outsiders\u2014even outsiders here for non-political purposes.\n\n(Yes, I thought my stay in the region would be non-political. When you have finished laughing, you may proceed.)\n\nWe spoke instead of the men and women we passed, Faj Rawango giving me my first education in distinguishing one people from another, which in retrospect was at least as valuable to me as his political opinions would have been. Physical distinctions are, of course, often muddied by intermarriage, but enough patterns persist in that region to be of moderate use, and of course the apparel and ornament of each people has its variations. Nowhere, however, did I see anyone resembling Faj Rawango himself, and he deflected me when I asked. My suspicion that he was of foreign birth grew, but I did not press.\n\nIn this manner did we ride through the fortified gates of Nsebu and into the grass beyond.\n\nThese days the two places have run together into one indistinguishable city, but back then Nsebu and Atuyem were quite separate. The former had a small port district that had, up until fifty years ago, been all there was of the town. Increased trade had spurred its growth, and then the alliance between Scirland and Bayembe had seen the construction of the fort at Point Miriam, with the colony following soon after. Now Nsebu was a strangely hybrid place, creeping across the open ground toward the more aristocratic precincts of Atuyem.\n\nThese sit above Nsebu both socially and physically, on a plateau high enough to enjoy cooling winds, but near enough to the port to benefit from the trade; which is why Bundey n Mawo Nsori, the reigning oba a century before, had moved his primary residence there. Atuyem is further stratified between the lower town and the upper, which perches atop a rocky, flat-topped hill, the better to command a view of the surrounding countryside. The walls of the oba's fortified residence rose higher still, a crown surmounting that stony head, and they shone gold in the afternoon light.\n\nMuch of that gold was metaphorical, an illusion created by the color of the soil used in building the walls and the warm glow of the sun. The highest tower within the complex, however, gleamed too brightly for mere dirt. The stories were untrue, that the oba of Bayembe lived in a palace of solid gold; but one tower, at least, had been plated in the substance.\n\nIt was a suitably impressive display of wealth\u2014though one the oba perhaps regretted in a time of such conflict and greed. Then again, Bayembe's gold was not what attracted interest from Satalu, Ikwunde, and Scirling alike. Iron was the prize those three lands sought to claim.\n\nAround that central fortress spread the courtyards and compounds of his chief nobles, patriarchs of the various lineages that made up the aristocracy of Bayembe. These had, over the years, grown too numerous and extensive, crowding all others off the small hilltop, exiling the common folk to houses and shops gathered around the rocky skirts of the hill. Our little party attracted a great deal of attention as we rode through, for our escorts were clearly royal warriors, and Faj Rawango a high official; nor had Scirlings become so common here as to be unworthy of remark, as they were in Nsebu. Natalie and I drew particular commentary, Scirling ladies being very uncommon in any part of Bayembe.\n\nI rode self-consciously, feeling the burden upon me of representing my race and my sex to these people. My clothing\u2014 travel wear that was simple to the point of tedium by Scirling standards\u2014seemed fussy and overcomplicated here, designed for sensibilities and a climate foreign to this place. I knew my face was flushed and damp with sweat, and likely sunburnt despite the protection of my bonnet, and the gritty dust of these grasslands clung to me all over. As representatives went, I felt like a shabby one indeed.\n\nWe circled the base of the hill along what was clearly the main road, until we came to a gate built in the style of these lands: hard-pounded earth, decorated with bright tiles, and studded regularly with wooden struts that were, as I understood it, both internal supports and climbing aids for when the exterior needed repair. Here Faj Rawango conversed briefly and incomprehensibly with a guard, making it apparent just how much he had slowed and clarified his speech for my sake. Thus interviewed, we rode onward, and began our ascent of the hill at its gentlest point.\n\nThe Atuyem we traveled through now was entirely different. Instead of the clamour and crowds of the base, we passed the near-faceless walls of the lineage compounds, whose decorative tiles communicated a message beyond my skill to translate. Guards stood at the gates, and servants traversed the roadway, some of them bearing the shaded palanquins of their masters. Where the curtains were gauzy, I could glimpse dark shadows within, that sometimes stretched out gold-laden hands to twitch the fabric aside and study us directly. These stares were different from the ones before: to the nobles of the heights, we were not mere curiosities, but new variables in the political equation of their land. Whether our effect would be positive or negative had yet to be determined.\n\nIt was both a relief and a fresh source of tension to ride through the mighty gates of the oba's own fortress, away from those measuring eyes. We dismounted in a front courtyard and were met by kneeling servants who offered up bowls of fresh, cool water with which to cleanse our faces and hands. Our escort stood at attention while we conducted our ablutions, then saluted and jogged once more out the gates.\n\nIn their place came a pair of what I guessed to be upper servants, one male and one female. \"Rooms have been prepared,\" our guide said. \"These two will show you.\"\n\nThe presence of two servants gave me a hint as to what we might expect. \"Are our quarters separate?\" I asked.\n\nFaj Rawango nodded, with an impassivity I read to mean he had anticipated the question, but still thought me a simpleton for asking. \"Men and women do not lodge together in the royal palace.\"\n\nI wondered what they would have done had Jacob been alive, and here with me. Were married couples given joint quarters, or did husbands have to arrange to call upon their wives? But that was hardly the sort of question I had come here to ask. \"We intend to spend much of our time together,\" I said instead. \"Our work requires it.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Faj Rawango said, all courtesy. \"There are public areas.\"\n\nWhere we could be watched, I supposed, for any hint of improper behaviour. I had hoped to leave that sort of thing behind in Scirland.\n\nWe suffered ourselves to be led away, Mr. Wilker in one direction, Natalie and I in another. Our new guide was an older woman, her hair faded to an iron-grey that reminded me of Scirland's interests in this region. She led us through a honeycomb of courtyards and colonnades, until at last we climbed a set of stairs to a cool and airy room tiled in blue.\n\nBy now I was tired enough that my brain had become sulky about handling a foreign tongue, but I understood from the woman's words that this was to be a shared residence for Natalie and myself. It was sparsely furnished by Scirling standards, with a few padded benches and stools of the kind that can be folded out of the way when not in use, and chests for our belongings. The bed was draped with gauzy curtains, the better to keep out troublesome insects while still allowing cooling breezes through. After the cramped conditions of the ship and the rigor of a long ride, it seemed to me like a small corner of heaven.\n\nWhile Natalie asked after the bathing arrangement, I explored. One set of windows, covered with wooden laths hung on string, faced west, and looked out over a section of the palace that, by what I could see of the bustle therein, was a working area for servants. We had not, it seemed, been given terribly desirable quarters, however elegant the tiling.\n\nThe windows on the opposite side overlooked another of the myriad of courtyards that made up this palace. (Indeed, I was not far wrong in thinking of the place as a honeycomb; it was composed as much of open space as enclosed, and virtually everything of substance seemed to take place in the former. In a country as hot as Bayembe, fresh air is not only pleasant but necessary for survival.)\n\nOur servant departed, and Natalie collapsed with a sigh on the bed\u2014the benches there being far less suitable for collapsing upon than sophas and divans. \"I promise I will say this only once,\" she remarked, \"but good Lord, the heat.\"\n\n(With all due respect to Natalie, whom I love as my own self, she lied. If I took a sip of gin every time she said that during the expedition, my liver would be foie gras. )\n\nI gave in to temptation, sitting down on a bench and unlacing my boots. The coolness of the tiles beneath my bare feet was a blessing. \"I can't decide whether this is a good development or a bad one,\" I said. \"Has the oba brought us here to offer his assistance, or is he going to interfere?\"\n\n\"Why would he interfere?\" Natalie asked, reasonably. \"I can't see what he would gain by it, and he would risk antagonizing our fellow countrymen.\"\n\n\"That might be reason enough. It would be minor antagonism at worst\u2014I doubt the military and industrial gentlemen have much concern for our research\u2014and so it would be a relatively safe way for the oba to show that he won't be pushed around by Scirlings.\" I scratched my fingers vigorously along my scalp. \"One thing is certain; he has quite neatly separated us from most of our countrymen. Perhaps he thinks we'll be less of a danger that way.\" My fingers came away covered in sweat and grit, and I grimaced at them.\n\nNatalie rolled over to regard me directly. \"But we aren't any kind of threat, are we?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"I don't see how we could be.\"\n\nLater I would recall those words with a great deal of irony."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Meeting the olori\u2014M. Velloin\u2014My views on hunting\u2014The uses of M. Velloin\u2014Dinner at Point Miriam\u2014Sheluhim\u2014The worship of dragons\n\nTrue to Faj Rawango's words, there were public areas in which we could socialize with the opposite sex. Before we found them, however, we had to run a gauntlet of women.\n\nThe next morning (having dined alone and retired early the night before), Natalie and I sponged ourselves off, dressed in fresh clothing, and went downstairs in search of Mr. Wilker. Trying to follow what we thought was the proper path, we found ourselves in a courtyard full of ladies, all of whom fell silent at the sight of us.\n\nWe were, I own, shockingly out of place. Everyone else in the courtyard was Erigan, and dressed in patterned cotton wraps that looked a good deal more comfortable in that weather than our own stays and long-sleeved dresses. Such exotic creatures as a pair of Anthiopean women must, of course, draw attention. But there was, I felt, more to it than that: we had now entered waters not only foreign but political. We were not merely strangers; we were, as I had thought before, new variables.\n\nIt soon became apparent whose responsiblity it was to address the change in the local calculus. A woman sat on a low stool at the far end of the courtyard, watching us, and by the disposition of the people around her, she was clearly the most important in the group. Her features were of the sort Faj Rawango had identified to me as characteristically Mebenye: a low forehead and rounded jaw that gave her broad face an almost circular appearance. It was a friendlier shape than a more angular face might have been, but the set of her full mouth and the sharp regard of her eyes warned me not to read personality into physiognomy.\n\nShe gestured, and another woman approached us. Speaking in Yembe, she said, \"Olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim bids you come speak with her.\"\n\nThen I knew who had snared us. \"Olori\" was the title given to the oba's lesser wives; we might translate it as \"princess consort,\" the position ranking below that of his principal wife or queen, who had the title ayaba. The current oba had three wives, I knew, but that was where my knowledge ended. Information on them had been hard to come by in Scirland, and what little I'd gleaned had to do with Idowi n Gemo Tagwi, the queen.\n\nThe only way to learn was to proceed. Natalie and I approached, until the olori held up one hand for us to stop, about four paces from her. She sat beneath a canopy of beaded and embroidered fabric, and her hair was braided with gold, a match for the jewelry that burdened her every limb.\n\nI curtseyed to her as I might to the queen of Scirland, hoping either that other Anthiopean women had been here before me, or that the olori would independently recognize it as a gesture of respect. Scarcely had I risen from this, and Natalie beside me, when the woman spoke. \"You are here alone?\"\n\n\"No, olori,\" I said, hoping I was unlikely to go wrong if I addressed her by her title. \"Miss Natalie Oscott here is my companion, and we also came with a gentleman named Mr. Thomas Wilker.\"\n\nThe pursing of her lips did not look impressed by this answer. \"Your name. It is Isabella Camherst.\"\n\n\"Yes, olori.\" We must have been a topic of gossip before our arrival.\n\n\"Women of your people take the lineage name of their husband, yes? Then this man is not your husband. You came here alone.\"\n\nToo late, I understood. \"I'm afraid my husband is dead.\"\n\nHer gaze flickered across my body. Looking for signals of mourning or widowhood, I supposed. \"And his brother did not marry you?\"\n\nI thought of Matthew, and narrowly avoided laughing at the thought. \"That is not our way, olori.\" Tardily, the recollection came that Bayitists in some countries faithful to the Temple still followed such practices\u2014often the ones who also took multiple wives\u2014but I did not trust my command of the language to address so complicated a topic, nor was it particularly relevant. Scirlings did not do such things; that was enough.\n\n\"Mmmmm.\" The olori showed no sign what she thought of this. She was, I suspected, a deeply political creature, who never showed much of anything unless it might bring her gain. I did not like her, but whether that was because her reserve hid any impulses I should fear, I could not tell.\n\nThen she asked the question\u2014the same question I have gotten dozens, nay, hundreds of times in my life, always with that same air of faint disbelief. \"You are here for... dragons?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She could be reserved all she liked; I made no effort to hide my enthusiasm. \"We are scholars of dragons.\" It was the closest I could come to saying \"natural historian\" in Yembe.\n\n\"What is there to study? They are not gods or great heroes. They are not even livestock, or beasts of war. You cannot train them to be useful. Are you hunters?\"\n\n\"Gracious, no!\" The words burst from me. \"That is\u2014we have hunted dragons, Mr. Wilker and I have, though I suppose it would be more precise to say he did the hunting. I only drew the body afterward. But we are not hunters as I think you mean it, olori, killing them for sport or for trophies. We seek to understand them: their nature, their behaviour.\"\n\nOrdinarily this is the thread my conversational partners pursue, the (to them) incomprehensible question of why understanding the nature and behaviour of dragons is worth so much effort, if not for the purpose of killing them. Olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim had other things on her mind. \"Draw them? Then you are an artist?\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" I answered, taken aback. \"I'm much more of a scholar, really, but I do draw and paint. For my work.\"\n\nFor some reason, this appeared to please the olori, though I could not imagine why. She put her hands on her knees with a self-satisfied air, nodding. It seemed to be a signal that our interrogation was done: other women began to speak then, and Natalie and I passed a pleasant (if mentally taxing) half hour conversing in Yembe. We only escaped by pleading the necessity of finding Mr. Wilker.\n\nThis gained us a guide, who showed us through the royal honeycomb to a more public courtyard. We found Mr. Wilker there, beneath the shade of a spreading tree, deep in conversation with another man.\n\nI was not sure whether I should be surprised that his companion was Anthiopean. Foreigners were not all confined to the colonial districts of Nsebu, of course, but I had not expected them to seek us out so quickly. Or had Mr. Wilker sought him out?\n\nHe did not appear to be a military man. Blond of hair and reddish of whisker, he wore loose, practical clothing made out of the fabric the Isnatsi call khaki, not a woolen uniform. His fair skin was weathered to a solid brown, much seamed with lines, though I judged him not to be above forty. He had the fit look of an athlete, and I had no idea who he was.\n\nMr. Wilker did not leave me long in suspense, of course. Rising from his stool, the other man a heartbeat behind him, he said, \"Ah, Mrs. Camherst, Miss Oscott. I'm glad you could join us. May I introduce M. Gregoire Velloin?\"\n\nM. Velloin's hand was solidly calloused, with thick, blunt nails. A working man's hand, I thought. When he spoke, I was surprised to find his voice tinged with an Eiversch accent, instead of Thiessois. \"Mrs. Camherst, a pleasure. Miss Oscott, very nice to meet you. There has been much gossip in advance of your arrival. You are not what I expected.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" I said, mildly nettled for no reason I could discern. Perhaps my audience with the olori had put me out of sorts. \"What did you expect?\"\n\n\"Someone older and plainer,\" he answered, with bluntness that was likewise much more Eiversch than Thiessois. \"I had heard you were a widow.\"\n\nNow, at least, I had reason to be nettled. \"I am, sir. But my late husband's passing has no bearing on my age or appearance.\"\n\nRather than taking offense, he laughed. \"Oh, indeed. But that is rumour, is it not? Making assumptions with no basis, just to fill the time. I am sure gossip will be more accurate, now that you are here.\"\n\nBased on my experiences thus far, I sincerely hoped I would not be there for long. I had far rather be out in the bush, pursuing dragons, than dealing with the people in Atuyem, be they Erigan or Anthiopean. \"What brings you here, M. Velloin? You cannot be with any Scirling delegation, and I note your accent\u2014and yet you affect a Thiessois title of courtesy.\"\n\n\"And a Thiessois name, too. My father was of that land; he was born in Fonsmartre. You know of it? Quite near the border, yes. He emigrated in his youth, and married an Eiversch woman. But I am monsieur instead of Herr because I have made my home in Thiessin for ten years now, and it is owing to the generosity of a Thiessois patron that I am here.\"\n\nI frowned. \"You have not yet answered my question, monsieur.\"\n\n\"M. Velloin is a hunter,\" Mr. Wilker said, intervening.\n\nThinking back over my words, I winced; the hostility I was showing to our Anthiopean companion held some echoes of my early behaviour toward Mr. Wilker himself. I made an effort to moderate my tone. \"I see. Is it the elephants you are here for, or the leopards?\"\n\nVelloin smiled, as if our conversation had been friendly all along. \"I do not discriminate, Mrs. Camherst, except to choose only the most dangerous of prey. There is no challenge, without risk. I have hunted tigers in Rematha, bears in Kaatsedu, and mammoths in Siaure. Here I will hunt the elephant and the leopard and the dragon.\"\n\nSo much, I thought, for friendliness.\n\nNatalie laid a restraining hand on my arm; she knew what the stiffening of my posture meant. It did not stop me from speaking. \"The dragon. Indeed. In that case, I cannot honestly wish you luck in your endeavours. I have little fondness for sport hunting in the first place, and less in the case of dragons. You may not be aware, sir\u2014unless you make a habit of reading scientific monographs, which I doubt\u2014but on our Vystrani expedition\u2014\"\n\n\"You discovered mourning behaviour among Vystrani rock-wyrms.\" Velloin's mouth had compressed, though he maintained a good approximation of his amiable tone. \"I do read monographs, Mrs. Camherst, where they concern the great beasts. A good hunter must know his prey.\"\n\n\"They are more than prey,\" I said, biting the words off. \"That you should see them so, for the mere prize of teeth and claws, is a very great pity.\"\n\nPity fell far short of what I truly meant, but Scirling politeness restrained my tongue. Now, years after the fact, I have no compunctions about telling you what I truly felt.\n\nIt is true, yes, that my companions and I have killed dragons in the course of our research, and sometimes even for the purpose of that research. But even before I developed reservations about such practices, I had an utter loathing for trophy hunting, which was (and in many places still is) considered a wonderful expression of masculine virtue. Rarely do such men hunt verminous creatures, of the sort that truly plagues the common people; if they foxhunt, it is with a fox captured for the purpose and released in a pleasant park, not the one eating the chickens of the peasant outside that park.\n\nNo, the beasts they hunt are the splendid ones, the majestic kings and queens of the wild, and they do so for no better reason than because a splendid trophy is far more glamorous than a scrubby one. The occasional hunter will test his courage by going after a hippopotamus, which is as dangerous as it is comical looking, but most prefer those with pelts or hides they can display after the fact. To kill a creature simply to decorate one's study is repellent to me, and I cannot help but be repelled by those who engage in such activity.\n\nAnd that abhorrence is redoubled when the hunter's target is a dragon, for I, as all the world knows, am partisan to their kind.\n\nVelloin seemed unconcerned by my disapproval. Why should he be? I could do nothing but seethe. \"Teeth and claws are prizes, yes, but hardly the only ones. I have captured animals, too\u2014even a dragon, once. You may have seen it yourself.\"\n\n\"What dragon?\" I asked. The question came out sharp, for a dreadful suspicion had taken shape in my mind.\n\n\"A Moulish swamp-wyrm,\" he said. \"Took it from near the coast; only safe place to go, really, and hardly even then. The creature was a runt, but it made its way into the menagerie at Falchester.\"\n\nHe was watching me as he spoke, and I could not hide my reaction. I had indeed seen that dragon, along with two other runts, on the very day that I met my husband. Without those dragons, I might never have married Jacob, with all the consequences, both good and bad, attendant upon that decision. The thought of owing even a fraction of my happiness to a man like Velloin was infuriating.\n\nCasually, he added, \"I hope to try again, in the jungle or out in the savannah. Buyers are much harder to find for full-grown dragons\u2014too difficult to keep them caged\u2014but still, the challenge is the thing.\"\n\nIt would be hypocritical for me to wish him luck in that endeavour. It would also, however, be hypocritical for me to condemn him, given the joy I had derived from seeing those captive dragons. In the end, I clamped my jaw shut and let others take the conversation onward.\n\nUnfortunately, it transpired that Mr. Wilker had engaged us to dine with the bloodthirsty M. Velloin that afternoon. He was on good terms with a number of people at Point Miriam, which served not only as a defensive fortification but also as the home of Nsebu's colonial government. Given that we were newcomers to the royal palace, unfamiliar with the rhythms of life there and (thus far) ignored by the oba who had invited us in the first place, it made all the sense in the world that we should accept Velloin's invitation. But I did not like the idea, and regretted that I saw no acceptable way to beg off.\n\nOn the contrary, our plans rapidly expanded from a single meal to a full day in the man's company, exploring the lower town of Atuyem before riding back down to Nsebu. As we left the royal compound, Natalie making light conversation with M. Velloin, I seized hold of Mr. Wilker's sleeve and dragged him back, so that I might hiss my words without being overheard.\n\n\"How could you put us in the company of such a man? And with no warning? You know quite well my feelings on the matter.\" I glared at M. Velloin's broad back.\n\nMr. Wilker freed his sleeve from my grasp with an irritated jerk. \"I did so because he can be useful to us. Or would you rather kill more dragons, for the purpose of our tests?\"\n\nWe had passed under the arch of an unfamiliar gate and out into a street, whose surface was not so well maintained as the one that led us in. At Mr. Wilker's words, I stumbled over an uneven bit of stone. We had agreed, when this expedition was first planned, that one of our tasks must be to test Rossi's preservation process on the bones of an Erigan dragon, to determine whether it was effective only on Vystrani rock-wyrms, or for a broader selection of species. And for that purpose, indeed, we required a dead dragon.\n\n\"Then\u2014\" M. Velloin's back had taken on an entirely different cast in my eyes. \"You mean to steal his kills.\"\n\n\"Once he has his trophies, there's no reason for him to deny us the rest. We can tell him we're trying to make plaster casts of the bones; it's a reasonable enough excuse for us to take them.\"\n\nPlaster casts had, before the preservation method, been the only means of keeping dragon bones for study. It did not work very well\u2014encased in plaster, the bones deteriorated more rapidly than usual\u2014but Elia Paradino had improved the process a bit. Mr. Wilker was right; it made a very good cover.\n\nStill, I sighed. \"It will require us to be in his company. Quite apart from his hobby, I do not like the man.\"\n\n\"No one is asking you to marry him, Mrs. Camherst.\"\n\nThree years had passed; my grief for Jacob was no longer an open wound. Or so I had thought. But I was tired, and vexed with M. Velloin, and above all, I was on an expedition to study dragons. Bayembe was a vastly different place from Vystrana, but the fact remained that it had been on such an expedition that Jacob died.\n\nThis time I did not stumble. I stopped entirely. Only for a moment\u2014then I forced my legs into motion once more\u2014but it was enough to tell Mr. Wilker he had erred. He stopped, too, and turned to face me, so that I had to halt again.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said, and I think it was not the heat alone that had flushed his face red. \"I\u2014I didn't mean that as a jab. It was supposed to be facetious, but I didn't think before I said it. Please, forgive me.\"\n\nI wondered, irrelevantly, how long our relative harmony would have to last before I stopped reflecting on the change from our early interactions. But for that harmony to last, I had to do my part, which did not consist of standing in the middle of a street reflecting on such things, while Mr. Wilker's apology hung in the air. \"Forgiven,\" I said. \"I did not take it as an insult; it simply\u2014 well. You understand.\"\n\nWe had, of course, attracted the attention of the other two, who had paused in the street up ahead. \"Is everything all right?\" M. Velloin called.\n\n\"Yes, quite,\" I called back, and offered Mr. Wilker a reassuring smile before going to join the others.\n\nDinner at Point Miriam was oddly disorienting. The heat and scent of the air were inescapably Erigan, but the house in which we dined had been built according to the standards of my people. The table was laid as if it stood in some lady's country house, and beforehand we enjoyed hors d'\u0153uvre in a drawing room that might have been a small piece of Scirland transplanted onto foreign soil. The effect might have been intended to reassure, but it made for a sweltering evening; our architecture is not suited to the climate.\n\nThe composition of the group was quite as unbalanced as Lord Hilford's snare-setting meal had been. There were only three ladies in attendance: myself, Natalie, and a married woman from Uaine named Erynn Anne Kerwin, who was there with her husband.\n\n\"Such a relief it is to have other women here,\" she said upon our introduction. Her accent was much like Mr. Wilker's, but stronger. Uaine, lying as it does to the north of Niddey, is the most isolated of the large Scirling Isles; it is isolated even now, and was more so then.\n\n\"I take it you don't find much company among the Yembe,\" I said, which was perhaps not the most politic response.\n\nMrs. Kerwin did not take offense. \"Oh, I spend a mort of time with them\u2014but that's work, not leisure.\"\n\nDespite my having come to Eriga for work of my own, I had assumed Mrs. Kerwin was here as an adjunct to her husband, whose profession I had not yet determined. Embarrassment leashed my tongue, and so it fell to Natalie to say, \"What work is it that you do?\"\n\n\"We're sheluhim,\" Mrs. Kerwin said.\n\nEmbarrassment had put a leash on my tongue; startlement took it off again. \"What\u2014do you mean to say that you're proselytizing to the Yembe?\"\n\n\"That is precisely what we're doing,\" Mrs. Kerwin said. If her warm smile had cooled somewhat, I could not blame her. \"We have brought the sacred fire of the Temple to this land, and will carry it to all peoples. Already a number of men and women here have chosen to become the Chosen of the Lord, following His laws. Sure I am that number will only grow.\"\n\nIt was unfair of me to be so startled. Sheluhim have been traveling all over the world since men invented ships safe enough not to drown their passengers in the ocean; it was only that I had never encountered any myself. There were a few Bayitist sheluhim in Scirland, trying in vain to convert Magisterials back to the old ways, but the proselytizers of both major sects devoted the bulk of their efforts to lands where Segulism held no sway in any form.\n\nMrs. Kerwin was almost certainly a Temple-worshipper herself, being from Uaine. The Magisterial reforms in Scirland never penetrated that island very deeply. I had dealt with her coreligionists in Vystrana, but theirs was a rural theology, not the sort that sought to convert others to its way. And no Magisterial sheluhim had yet taken it into their heads to convert the Vystrani.\n\nThis, however, was a land of heathens, and with the Scirling presence, prime territory for such efforts. I should have expected to find her kind here.\n\n\"Erigans worship their ancestors, do they not?\" Natalie asked. She and I had both done a certain amount of reading during the preparation for this expedition, but very little of it had been devoted to religion.\n\n\"Together with idols of nature, yes,\" Mrs. Kerwin said primly. \"They are entirely lacking in scriptures of any sort, and of course what few of the laws they follow, they follow by accident.\"\n\nHad I known more about Erigan religion at the time, I would have pointed out to her that what they lacked were scriptures of our sort. At the time, however, I was both ignorant of such matters and distracted by a different thought. \"Have you gone down into the swamp at all?\"\n\nMrs. Kerwin looked horrified. \"You mean into Mouleen? Certainly not. We wouldn't survive two days there. Wild beasts, fevers, not to mention the natives\u2014\"\n\n\"I take it they don't welcome visitors?\"\n\n\"They have the Ikwunde on one side and the Yembe on the other.\" M. Velloin had overheard our conversation. \"And the Satalu lurking in the wings, hoping to snatch up Bayembe for themselves\u2014though to what extent the Moulish are aware of that, who can say? They trade occasionally with the peasants along their borders, forest ivory for food, that sort of thing. But those who go deeper into the swamp never return.\"\n\nI wanted to shift away from Velloin, but he was clearly somewhat informed about the region, and I could not pass up the chance to ask. \"There are stories about the Moulish, that say they worship dragons as the Draconeans once did.\"\n\nWe were gathering quite the audience now: not only Mr. Wilker, but Sir Adam Tarwin-Bannithot (who was then the governor of the Nsebu colony) and a man whose sober dress and Uaine accent marked him as Mr. Kerwin. The latter said to me, \"I take it you've read the work of Yves de Maucheret.\"\n\nBy M. Velloin's expression, so had he. \"Yes,\" I said, \"though he was writing two hundred years ago, and not everything he put to paper has proved to be true. Still, it's enough to intrigue the mind, isn't it? Dragons rarely tolerate human company well, and Moulish swamp-wyrms are not known to be the most approachable of breeds. If the Moulish do indeed worship them, do they do so from afar? Or are they able to partially tame them, as the Draconeans are said to have done?\"\n\n\"They are nothing like the Draconeans,\" Mr. Kerwin said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand. \"That ancient civilization\u2014well, it was a civilization. They built great temples, developed art, administered territory across multiple continents. The Moulish bang on drums and run about naked. They may worship dragons, but there is no reason to suppose their manner of doing so bears any resemblance to Draconean religion.\"\n\n\"And yet, it would be closer to Draconean religion than any other example we have before us today,\" I said. \"Do not ethnologists use modern evidence to analogize to the past? We might learn a great deal from the Moulish, regardless of their musical traditions and sartorial habits.\"\n\nI spoke with the assurance of a young woman who thought her experience with natural history and ad hoc education in other subjects more than qualified her to hold forth on topics she knew nothing about at all. The truth is that any such comparison is far more complicated and doubtful than I presented it that evening; but it is also true that no one in my audience knew any more about it than I did, and most of them knew less. My assertion was therefore allowed to stand unchallenged.\n\nFor those who wonder why I showed such interest in the Draconeans, whose works I dismissed in the previous volume of my memoirs, do not think this meant I had undergone any great change of heart in the intervening years. I still at that time cared little for their ruined temples and stylized art; my interest was in living things, not dead civilizations. But as I said to Mr. Kerwin, the Draconeans were said to have tamed dragons. That was of great interest to me indeed, and so if Moulish religion was able to shed any light on the matter, then it, too, fell within the sphere of my attention.\n\nOf course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note\u2014in much the same way that a fisherman's lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.\n\nSir Adam said, \"I wouldn't waste much time or thought on the Moulish, if I were you. Whatever you might learn regarding dragons cannot possibly be worth the risk, and as for learning anything about humans\u2014feh. That swamp is a backwater, in every sense of the word.\"\n\n\"A backwater which is presently protecting this country, is it not?\" I said.\n\nHe shrugged. \"For now.\"\n\nA brief silence fell, broken a moment later by Sir Adam's uncomfortable cough and too-loud amendment. \"Besides, you won't get into the swamp, not without the oba's permission. And he won't give it.\"\n\nThere is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have. \"Whyever not?\" I asked. \"Or rather, why should I need his leave in the first place? Mouleen is an independent state, is it not?\"\n\nMr. Kerwin muttered something about not dignifying that festering pit with the name of \"state,\" but my attention was on Sir Adam. He said, \"At times like these, with the Ikwunde interfering with our work at the rivers, we must keep a careful eye on our borders.\"\n\nWhich was not much of an answer, but it was all that I could get from him, in the wake of that momentary lapse. Sir Adam had taken a bit too enthusiastically to the prescribed regimen of gin and tonic, with which we all held the malarial fevers at bay, and had said something he should not. Why would the Green Hell cease to protect Bayembe? Were the Moulish looking to ally themselves with the Ikwunde on the other side?\n\nI did not know, but Sir Adam's slip had made me wary. I wanted only to study dragons, but first I had to get past the humans, and I feared they might be a greater danger to me than all the fevers of the tropics combined."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "A certain taboo\u2014The agban \u2014Galinke\u2014Matters of lineage\u2014Natalie joins me\u2014Making use of M. Velloin\n\nI must warn my male readers that I am about to address a topic which may be deeply discomfiting to them, taboo as it is for their sex.\n\nWhen I awoke a few mornings later, I found my bedding stained with traces of blood. I clicked my tongue in annoyance; caught up in our affairs, I had not monitored the days as closely as I should, and my menses have never been the most reliable besides. But this was, I thought, only a minor irritation. I wet a cloth, washed myself clean, changed into a fresh chemise, and called for a servant.\n\nWhen she came, I gestured at the stained bedding, washcloth, and chemise, indicating that she should take them away to be laundered. \"And I will need rags,\" I said\u2014as yet blissfully unaware that in many parts of the world, rags are not employed, but other, less comfortable alternatives.\n\n(Indeed, for those young ladies who wish to follow in my footsteps, I must warn you that this inconvenient fact of our sex is one of the most vexatious aspects of being a lady adventurer. Unless you contrive to suppress your courses through pregnancy\u2014which, of course, imposes its own limitations\u2014or through strenuous exercise and privation, you will have to handle this necessity in many circumstances that are far from ideal. Including some, I fear, where the smell of fresh blood is a positive danger.)\n\nReturning to the moment at hand: the serving girl's eyes widened at the sight of the stains, and she darted out of the room almost before I had finished speaking. So rapidly, in fact, that she left the laundry behind. I sighed, wondering if the fault was with my imperfect command of the language, or whether she\u2014being prepubescent\u2014was the sort of silly nit who bolted at the sight of blood. Well, I thought, if it came to that, I could sacrifice the rest of the stained chemise for rags.\n\nThe girl returned with equal speed, though, this time accompanied by a much older woman, who went to gather up the bedding and other articles. The girl herself approached me and draped an undyed robe over a bench, indicating shyly that I should wear it.\n\nI saw no rags. \"Thank you,\" I said, \"but I have my own clothing; I only need something to stanch the bleeding.\"\n\nThe older woman\u2014who was, by the look of her, well past the age of bearing herself\u2014said, \"Put it on; Lebuya will take you to the agban.\"\n\nThis was not a word I had encountered, either in my studies or my time there. \"Agban?\" I repeated.\n\nShe indicated the soiled items. \"Until you are clean.\"\n\nMy first thought was that she meant a bath. But I knew the word for \"bath\"\u2014that was where Natalie had gone, while I worked on rousing myself to wakefulness\u2014and had she meant such a thing, would she not have said \"where you can wash yourself\"? Suspicious, I asked, \"How long will that be?\"\n\nBy her reaction, I might have been as young and ignorant as Lebuya, needing an older female relative to explain the basic matters of womanhood to me. \"Seven days.\"\n\nI recoiled. She did not mean blood on my skin; she meant impurity. It was not a topic that concerned us much in the relaxed Magisterial traditions of Scirland, and although I had encountered traces of it in the Temple-worshipping environs of Vystrana, many of the finer points of religious doctrine there had been whittled down to accommodate local practicality. The women of Drustanev could not afford to seclude themselves for the duration of their \"impurity.\"\n\nBut I had not expected to find evidence of the Kerwins' success here in the oba's own palace. Startled, I said, \"I didn't realize you were Bayitist.\"\n\nShe frowned at me. \"What is Bayitist? You are unclean; you cannot stay out here, where you will pollute others. Go with Lebuya. She will show you.\"\n\nNo, this was not the work of the sheluhim; it had the sound of a standard practice, and surely I would have heard if the entire ruling class of Bayembe had converted to Segulism. But I could no more afford to lose a week of my life than the women of Drustanev could. (Or at least I was not willing to; that, I think, is the more accurate statement, though it benefits from hindsight.) I planted my hands on my hips, drew myself up like a proper Scirling lady\u2014taking Judith and my mother as models\u2014and said, \"Nonsense. I have gone about in this condition once a month for my entire adult life, and never polluted anyone.\"\n\nThe old woman made a gesture I thought was probably a ward against evil and said, \"Then the oba will throw you into the Green Hell\u2014if he does not have you executed for witchcraft.\" She picked up her bundle and left.\n\nMy certainty that the oba would do no such thing faded when I looked at Lebuya, who would not meet my eyes. She had avoided them, as she avoided touching me, placing the robe on a bench rather than handing it to me directly. She had brought an old woman to take away the stained fabric\u2014someone past her own bearing days. The implications I saw there might be my own invention, but I did not doubt that some manner of significance clung to those actions. Whether the oba punished me or not, I would not be able to carry on my work as usual; it would be all around the palace before lunchtime that I was unclean, polluting everything around me. The consequences would damage us far more than a week of enforced idleness would.\n\nHad we stayed at our hotel down in Nsebu, or better still among the Scirlings at Point Miriam, I might have avoided this difficulty. Since I had yet to see any particular benefit from being housed in the royal palace instead, it was with no little annoyance that I picked up the robe and put it on. The thing was shapeless cotton, draping to the floor, the sleeves long enough to cover my hands; there was even a hood for me to draw up over my impure face. Lebuya produced a pair of rough sandals and set them on the floor for me to don. I wondered if someone would come into the room after I was gone to purify it, and thought they probably would.\n\nNatalie chose that moment to return, saving me the confrontation of insisting that, impure or not, I would go nowhere until I spoke with her. Her eyebrows rose at my explanation, and when I was done, she sighed. \"Unless there's an exemption for unmarried women\u2014which I doubt\u2014then I'll be taking your place in this agban of theirs just as you're ready to leave. How can we be expected to get any work done, if one or the other of us is locked away two weeks out of every four?\"\n\nIt would not be that much time\u2014as I said before, my courses have never been fully regular\u2014but I brooded upon Natalie's question as I followed Lebuya out. We might escape the restriction by going into the bush for an extended period of time; even then, though, we would need porters to assist us, and what if they rebelled against serving impure women? Perhaps we could hire foreigners from the docks. But they would not know the bush as the locals did, and lack of experience on that front might prove very dangerous.\n\nWith the hood blocking the edges of my vision, I could not see our path clearly, but it was not one I had traced before. We left the women's wing by what I suspected was a back entrance, passed through a low wall\u2014not leaving the palace, but entering a new region of it\u2014and came at last to a modest building that seemed almost like an ordinary house.\n\nI did not need Lebuya's pointing arm to tell me where I was to go. This, obviously, was the agban: the prison for menstruating women. And I was to remain here for seven days? I should have brought my notebooks\u2014presuming, of course, that they would not be irredeemably contaminated by such use.\n\nSighing, I muttered a thank-you to Lebuya that was not very heartfelt, and went inside.\n\nThe interior was pleasant and not at all prisonlike. It was, after all, where palace women spent one week out of every four; I suspect servants had their own agban elsewhere, as neither Natalie nor I ever saw one there. The front room had benches and hooks along the walls, one of which held a robe like mine, with the sandals beneath. I took this as a sign that I could discard my own. Thus freed, I ventured onward to a small courtyard, where a woman I judged to be around my age lay on a carpet beneath a tree, reading a book.\n\nShe looked up as I entered and smiled, showing only a little surprise. \"I have not seen you before. You must be one of the new guests, those who came to study dragons.\"\n\n\"Isabella Camherst,\" I said. \"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me.\"\n\nThe woman rose, laying her book aside, and touched her heart in respect. \"Galinke n Oforiro Dara. I'm glad you came. It's pleasant to have time to read, but after a day or two I find myself eager for company.\"\n\n\"We're allowed to have things with us, then?\" I said, gesturing at her book. \"I was afraid they would burn my notes if I brought them here.\"\n\nGalinke laughed. \"No, no. We would go out of our minds if we couldn't have distraction! But why would you work, when you could relax?\"\n\nI joined her under the tree and discovered that, to Yembe women, and those of other Erigan peoples who engaged in similar practices, seclusion was not an exile, but more in the nature of a holiday. The other three weeks out of the month, they were obligated to work at various tasks\u2014not the backbreaking labor of the peasant in the field, certainly, but weaving, child rearing, and other duties suitable to highborn women. When their impurity sent them to the agban, they could enjoy complete leisure. (They could also enjoy a respite from their husbands, which for some of them was even more valuable.)\n\nGalinke herself was not married. \"For now,\" she said with a sigh. \"My brother would make a match for me, but he has to wait, in case it ends up being necessary for me to wed the mansa.\"\n\n\"The mansa? \" I repeated, sure I had misunderstood the Yembe sentence. That was the title given to the Talu leader.\n\nShe nodded. \"He has one wife from each of his subject peoples\u2014as our ancestors had to do, when Bayembe was young. Even now, my brother has a Mebenye wife and a Sagao one, to keep the different peoples happy.\"\n\nHad she been Scirling, I never would have blundered in such fashion. We trace descent through the paternal line, and pass on family names in the same manner; the Satalu do likewise, as do societies in many parts of the world. But the Yembe and the other peoples of their country are matrilineal: individuals belong to their mother's lineage, not their father's, and inheritance therefore passes from a man to his sister's son.\n\nGalinke's lineage name was Oforiro Dara, which is to say she came from the Oforiro branch of the Dara line, as her mother had before her. Her mother, clearly, had been a lesser wife of the man who wed the mother of the current oba of Bayembe\u2014whose lineage was Rumeme Gbori\u2014and Galinke herself was the oba's half sister.\n\n(I say \"clearly\" as if understanding came to me in an elegant flash. It didn't; I sat openmouthed for a solid minute while my brain struggled to bend itself around a system of kinship and inheritance utterly foreign to my way of thinking.)\n\n\"But\u2014\" I said, still working through the implications. \"If you wed the mansa, would that not mean your children would have a claim on Bayembe?\" The feud between Talu and Bayembe was an old one, as old and as bitter as that between Thiessin and Eiverheim, and it had only grown worse in recent decades. Anthiopean influence to the north had encouraged several Erigan kingdoms to band together against them, though their Union had swiftly transformed into something much more like an empire, with the others in a client-state role to the mansa of Talu.\n\nOver time the Union had begun to intimidate their neighbours into joining them: a less violent approach to conquest than the Ikwunde used, but still not very appealing. Getting a claim on the rule of Bayembe would be exactly the sort of tactic the mansa might use, and I did not think the oba would be so foolish as to allow it.\n\n\"How could he have a claim?\" Galinke asked, politely baffled at the wrongheadedness of my question. \"I'm not Rumeme Gbori. Only our sister Nsami's sons can inherit.\"\n\nNsami, presumably, being the oba's full sister. Give me dragons any day; I understand their ways far better than those of my fellow human beings. We make our world much too complicated.\n\n\"I thought your brother detested the mansa,\" I said, then winced. \"Forgive me. This is turning into gossip, and I have no business talking of such things.\"\n\nGalinke waved my apology away. \"What else does anyone in this place talk about, other than politics? You are right. But a wise ruler must be prepared to do what is necessary for the well-being of his people. Even if that means giving his sister to a man he detests.\"\n\nOr inviting foreign soldiers to come defend his land\u2014but I kept a better leash on my tongue this time, and did not say it. Still, the entire point of Bayembe's alliance with Scirland was to make sure this land would not have to give in to Talu pressure, just to defend themselves against the Ikwunde. If the oba was keeping Galinke in reserve, it suggested that he was less than entirely confident in our aid... or less than entirely pleased with it.\n\nGalinke seemed matter-of-fact about the possibility of marrying the enemy, which is more than I could have managed in her place. I said as much to her, and she shrugged, looking philosophical. \"Such trades are common. Not with the Satalu, perhaps, but others, to join one lineage to another. I have always known my marriage would be arranged.\"\n\nI squelched the urge to tell her I had helped Natalie flee Scirland, that she might avoid any marriage at all. \"I hope the good efforts of our soldiers can at least spare you that particular fate,\" I said. \"I have heard rumours that the Ikwunde are moving their forces toward the rivers, which means we may have a chance to prove our use quite soon.\"\n\nThe words were as much a test as conversation, and I think Galinke knew it. Her full mouth curved in a hint of a smile. \"The Ikwunde can never stay still for long,\" she said. \"No sooner do they digest one meal than they go in search of another.\"\n\nSo she, unlike Faj Rawango, was permitted to discuss politics with me. I pressed the advantage. \"You are fortunate to have Mouleen defending most of your southern border. I am told that anyone who tries to venture beyond the edge of the swamp is never seen again. Is that why the oba restricts travel there? To protect his people from the Moulish?\"\n\nGalinke laughed. \"Few people wish to go there in the first place, except for hunters, sometimes. But my brother must keep a close eye on his borders in these troubled times, until we can build better defenses for them.\"\n\nThe only defense we had built thus far was Point Miriam. Were we planning another, or more than one, for points along the border? I had no chance to ask her; a servant entered then with food, and in the course of dealing with that, Galinke turned the conversation so deftly that I did not even notice until hours later.\n\nI came to know her rather well over the four days we were in the agban together, and liked what I saw. Although we never returned to the specific matter of the Ikwunde, I learned a great deal about Bayembe politics from our conversations. This I absorbed more out of duty than anything else, for while Galinke seemed to view such things as a puzzle, an engaging challenge for her intellect, I could not bring myself to enjoy them in the same way. I had not been raised to such a life, and was grateful indeed for my freedom.\n\nIn retrospect, I wonder about those conversations. Galinke had not been forbidden to discuss politics; had she been instructed to do so? Certainly my time with her changed my view of the alliance between Scirland and Bayembe, which until that point had largely been shaped by the news-sheets of Falchester. Those sheets spoke glowingly of economic opportunity, and disapprovingly of the rapacious behaviour of Bayembe's neighbours, from which we were nobly protecting them.\n\nThis was not inaccurate, but it lacked nuance. From Galinke, I began to understand the unequal nature of the \"alliance\"\u2014which is why I scar it with quotation marks\u2014and the extent to which that economic opportunity favored Scirland. She spoke obliquely, of course; at no point did she tell me outright that her half brother resented the dependent condition of Bayembe, which he had inherited from his predecessor, the last oba of the previous royal lineage (and a less than competent ruler). Nor did she spill details of our government's plans, though I think she knew them. She did not even say that the aggressive movements of the Ikwunde and the Talu Union were driven by a desire to build strength against Anthiopean influence; that, I think, is something she did not think of consciously, as both nations were the enemy to her, and she was uninclined to view their behaviour in a tolerant light. Galinke merely talked, in the delicate and subtle manner of a well-trained courtier, and the ship of my thinking heeled slowly over to a new course.\n\nDespite all the trouble that came of it, I thank her for that work, whether it was carried out on her brother's orders or not. Had she not laid those foundations in my mind, I might have failed to grasp the significance of later hints, and the course of history might have been very different.\n\nAfter Galinke departed, I had two days in which I shared the agban with three women I did not know, with whom I made polite but uninteresting conversation, and otherwise devoted myself to my work. The leisure time might have been pleasant if I had been tremendously busy prior to my seclusion, but by the time Natalie arrived on my final day, I was more than ready to get back to my affairs.\n\n\"Mr. Wilker was less than pleased to hear where you'd gone,\" she said with a wry smile. \"And even less pleased when he realized this would be a regular occurrence.\"\n\nShe had arrived at lunchtime, and joined me for the plain but nourishing food that in Bayembe was considered suitable for impure women: eggs and fufu (a doughy mass made from yams). \"I imagine Mr. Wilker was unhappy to be discussing the subject at all,\" I said; he was unmarried, and so had never yet been forced by domestic necessity to consider that aspect of women's lives. \"I'll see him straightaway tomorrow. What has happened, while I languished in here?\"\n\n\"In terms of work, very little. I have met more of the palace ladies, and Mr. Wilker has spent much of his time at Point Miriam, talking to the Royal Engineers stationed here. They've been surveying the countryside, which may be of use in helping us chase dragons\u2014though of course that is not why they're doing it. They are planning a railway, and a dam in the west, too, if the Ikwunde can be pushed back. Did you know that someone has developed a turbine which can use water to generate power? Like a waterwheel, but far more efficient.\"\n\nI laughed. \" Which one of you has been speaking to the engineers?\"\n\nNatalie ducked her head in sheepish acknowledgment. \"I have more to converse about with them than with the palace ladies.\"\n\nGiven that the Royal Engineers are the unit responsible for building and/or destroying anything the army needs or wishes removed, I doubted they were accustomed to young women quizzing them on their work. \"What of M. Velloin?\" I asked. \"Is he still in Atuyem?\"\n\n\"Yes, though he intends to go out hunting soon.\"\n\nThis was precisely what I wanted to hear. The next morning I presented myself to the old priestess who oversaw the agban ; she purified me by means of prayer and rolling an unbroken egg down my arms and legs and back, and then I was on my way. (No, I do not know the significance of the egg, except that it is a symbol of fertility, and therefore considered to be good luck.)\n\nMr. Wilker was not in the palace. I sought him down in the lower town, where some kind of festival was under way, with a boisterous parade wending through the narrow streets. Many of the people I attempted to question were drunk; I could discern only that the festival was religious in nature, as evidenced by the finely carved masks worn by the dancers at the heart of the parade. After days of quiet in the agban, the noise and movement were jarring; I was on the point of abandoning my search when I finally saw a handful of Scirling soldiers at the side of the road, and Mr. Wilker among them.\n\n\"There you are,\" he said when I arrived. \"It's going to be damned inconvenient, Mrs. Camherst\u2014pardon my language\u2014if you and Miss Oscott must be locked away like this.\"\n\n\"I will see if anything can be done,\" I said. \"In the meantime\u2014is there any chance we could join M. Velloin's hunting party?\"\n\n\"If we can persuade him to wait until Miss Oscott is free, then yes. Or if we are willing to leave her behind.\"\n\nI was not willing to leave Natalie, but Velloin agreed to postpone his departure, and so we made plans to join him, combining our research with his hunt for trophies. Credit where credit is due; Mr. Wilker was right in suggesting it. Indeed, without M. Velloin to assist, we might have had more difficulty in beginning our work."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Into the bush\u2014Okweme and his interest in me\u2014The watering hole\u2014 My first savannah snake\u2014Hunting tactics\u2014We study the carcass\u2014 Chemicals and plaster\u2014An awkward conversation\u2014An even more awkward interruption\u2014Rumours\n\nWe made quite a cavalcade as we headed out into the grasslands the following week. In addition to the usual necessities of food, water, tents, and so on, plus the guns and ammunition for the hunters, our scientific expedition, which had attached itself to M. Velloin's group like a barnacle, carried a great deal of equipment. There were no fewer than four pack mules devoted to our notebooks, scalpels, measuring devices, plaster, tubs, and so on, along with a tent to do all the work in\u2014not to mention, of course, the chemicals for preserving bone, which was our true purpose in coming.\n\nIt was by then the first week of Gelis\u2014a fact which I consistently forgot, despite my assiduous care in recording the date in my journal every day. It did not feel like Gelis. The Days of Light were drawing near; the weather, my instincts insisted, should have been settling into the kind of damp, aching cold that made one glad even for a candle's flame. Instead it was as hot as a Scirling summer day, with not a cloud in the sky. Bayembe was firmly in the grip of its long dry season; the intermittent wind kicked up veils of dust from the hard ground, and the stiff grasses rattled as our horses and mules moved through them.\n\nI have not been to Bayembe in nearly twenty years, but my memory of it remains as fresh as yesterday. Not the factual details, but the experience of the place: the enormous quality the sky seemed to take on, and the vast stretches of dry grass rustling in the breeze. Scattered umbrella thorns spread their branches like flat clouds above the ground; I caught occasional movement in the grass that told me small creatures had taken advantage of the shade beneath.\n\nI had put on a bonnet for the ride, of course. My shipboard argument with Natalie aside, I knew better than to ride all day in the tropical sun with a bare head. But compared with the damp chill that had greeted me in Vystrana, this warmth seemed a friendly welcome, a promise of good things to come. I did not yet realize how brutal the heat would become\u2014though even then, I would choose that heat above an equal or even lesser degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.\n\nM. Velloin rode with a rifle tucked into one arm, its barrel lying across the pommel of his saddle. I nudged my mare up to join him and asked, \"Do you expect to have need of that, this close to Atuyem? I would think there are too many people about for your sort of game to show their heads.\"\n\nHe laughed easily, teeth flashing predatorily in his tanned face. \"One never knows, Mrs. Camherst. Besides, in these troubled times, it isn't only beasts we need to watch for.\"\n\n\"The Ikwunde?\" I asked, skeptical. \"I have heard they are threatening, but even if they overran our troops at the rivers, we would know of it long before they got this far.\"\n\n\"Single men can be as dangerous as armies, Mrs. Camherst, in the right place. But no, the truth is only that I like to keep my hand in. There are small beasts about that make good target practice\u2014and good eating, too, some of them.\"\n\nHe was not wrong about the small beasts. I had field glasses with me, and put them to frequent use as we rode; it allowed me to see the creatures keeping a wary distance from our noisy herd. Low disturbances in the grass were occasionally visible as rock hyraxes, while larger ones were the rangy, rust-furred wild dogs endemic to the area. A cloud of dust marked the passage of a herd of zebra. An odd lump on a distant tree proved, upon examination, to be the recumbent body of a leopard, draped elegantly along a branch with its tail curving below. \"Keep your distance,\" I murmured under my breath, as much for the leopard's safety as our own.\n\nI had spoken in Scirling, and did not expect to have an audience. But from behind me, a voice said in Yembe, \"I would like to learn your language.\"\n\nTurning in my saddle, I found my interlocutor was a tall, well-made young man, one of the Yembe who had joined us for this excursion. Not a porter; the richness of the cloth wrapped about his hips and the gold braided into his hair made his status clear. He rode with easy grace, and his horse was, if I did not miss my guess, an Akhian stallion of breeding as good as his own.\n\n\"I would be a poor teacher, my lord,\" I said, defaulting, in the absence of his name, to a generically polite address. \"I have struggled three years to acquire any ability in your language. Such things do not come easily to me, I fear.\"\n\nHe smiled broadly and touched his hand to his heart. \"I am Okweme.\"\n\n\"Of what lineage?\" I inquired. \"If it is not impolite to ask.\"\n\n\"It is not impolite. I belong to the Kpama Waleyim.\"\n\nMy mare danced beneath me at my involuntary start of surprise. After meeting Galinke, I had vowed to learn more about the various lineages, and now that vow was bearing fruit. \"You are the olori's son!\"\n\n\"I am,\" he said, still smiling. \"But here, in the bush, I am only Okweme.\"\n\nOnly a prince, as we would consider such things. A prince, and the son of the woman who had examined me on my first day in Atuyem as if I were a beetle under a magnifying glass.\n\nBut he had nothing of his mother's calculating manner. Okweme was a font of information about the savannah and its creatures, which he did not hesitate to share with me as we rode. His familiarity came from long experience as a hunter, but he did not put me off as Velloin had, for he seemed little concerned with the glory of his trophies. Or perhaps it was merely that he was a far more personable man.\n\nOkweme took our plain supper with us when we stopped for the night, and traded delicate corrections to our Yembe grammar for some basic instruction in Scirling. Afterward, while Natalie and I helped one another dress for bed inside our tent, I said, \"He seems a friendly sort. I'm surprised he's taken an interest in us, though. Aren't we far beneath his station?\" Galinke had talked to me, but that was because we were locked in the agban together.\n\nNatalie laughed. \"An interest in us? I only saw interest in one person.\" She poked me in the side.\n\n\"Me?\" I said, twisting to face her. \"What? Why?\"\n\n\"Oh, let me think,\" she said, turning so I could undo her buttons. \"A handsome young man, an available young woman...\"\n\nHer description took me aback. I was not accustomed to thinking of myself as young, for all that I was barely twenty-three. I had been married; I was a widow, and had a son. In the eyes of society, all those things put me firmly into the category of \"mature,\" and not the sort of woman with whom handsome young princes would trouble to flirt.\n\nBut what were Yembe views of widows and their marriageability? It was not something I had thought to research before coming, and now I felt the lack most acutely.\n\nFortunately, I soon had other things to occupy my attention. The following day we moved into a region too arid for agriculture, and here flourished the kind of game that attracted M. Velloin's eye.\n\nIn terrain of that sort\u2014an arid mosaic of grassland and savannah, which is a kind of loose woodland\u2014watering holes are everything. Their number is few, and a wide array of creatures must come there to drink; but the predators know this, and lie in wait for their prey. The approach to a watering hole is therefore perilous, and the beasts remain in a state of heightened alertness while there.\n\nM. Velloin had not come this way before, but Okweme and the other Yembe with us knew the area well. They directed our group to a stony hillock, lesser cousin to the one upon which Atuyem stood. It lay downwind from the watering hole, which was as great a benefit as its elevation; if we did not make very noisy spectacles of ourselves, we could observe the area at our leisure, and make plans for further work.\n\nI dismounted on the lee side of the hillock and immediately began scrambling up its slope. M. Velloin would be not far behind me, I was sure, and I wanted the chance to see this for myself, without his presence spoiling the moment. Nearing the top, I dropped into the grass and (silently cursing the long skirt of my dress) crawled the remainder of the way, until at last I could see what we had come for.\n\nMy gaze went first to the elephants. They were simply too large to overlook. A group of six had come to the far side of the watering hole; the rest of their herd stood a little more distant, perhaps keeping guard. The largest of those at the pond's edge, whom I judged to be an old cow, was showering a juvenile with water while he splashed in the shallows. For all that I am partisan to creatures with wings, a delighted smile spread across my face at the sight. The playfulness of the pair was undeniable, and charming. (I may also say that their large, flapping ears would very nearly serve as wings\u2014an exaggeration, but one that crossed my mind whenever I saw the beasts.)\n\nThe watering hole itself was a kidney-shaped pond, muddy and reflective under the bright sun. It was, I later learned, fed by a tiny spring, which kept it present year-round; others wither to a tiny puddle or vanish entirely during the dry season. Even with the spring, I could see the hard-packed dirt where the waterline had receded; it would withdraw farther still before the rains came again.\n\nA herd of gazelles had arrayed themselves not far from the elephants, presumably seeing their fellow herbivores as no threat, despite their great size (against which the gazelles seemed positively tiny). Frogs spotted the water's edge like brown, restless lumps, and flies and other insects made a haze a little distance above. Several pairs of Erigan geese floated near the middle of the pond, muttering amongst themselves and occasionally setting up a great ruckus with their wings, the shading of whose red and grey feathers at rest resembled nothing so much as the scaled back of a Hakkoto carp.\n\nOut of both wariness and eagerness, I looked about for predators, but saw none. Lions, of course, prefer to hunt at dusk and at night; leopards and hyenas are the same. Cheetahs will hunt during the day, but they are less common in that region\u2014 their niche being occupied by a Certain Other Beast.\n\nMy eye, I am not ashamed to admit, was simply inadequate to the task.\n\nTheir business at the watering hole done, the gazelles were loping away, their delicate legs flickering through the grass. Then something else flickered, too, that was most decidedly not a gazelle.\n\nIt came low and fast through the cover, at an angle to the herd that caused them to startle and veer in their course. Then, with a surge that caused my heart to give a great leap, it sprang into the air: an Erigan savannah snake.\n\nThe dragon's wings seemed to go on forever. Long and narrow, they are incapable of sustained flight, but they work excellently well for the species' chosen method of hunting. On the ground, with their wings folded in tight to their bodies, savannah snakes can very nearly equal the speed of a cheetah. Once they come within range, though, they leap upward and spread their wings, gliding above the panicked herd until a suitable target presents itself. Then they swoop down, long necks extended, and bite down hard upon the spine of their prey. If the dragon has gauged his attack well, he retains enough momentum to drag the beast sideways out of the main herd, whereupon the rest thunder off and he may enjoy his meal in peace.\n\nSo it was on that occasion. The entire incident was over with shocking speed: a few seconds of the dragon in gliding flight, followed by a bellow and a confusion in the rushing mass of gazelles. Then they were gone, leaving their dead brother or sister behind.\n\nIn repose, the savannah snake is not the most prepossessing of dragons. Compared with the Vystrani rock-wyrms I had known before, it seems almost laughably small; the largest specimen on record today weighs ninety-eight kilograms. Its scales are dull, shading to green during the rainy season and dun in the dry, and the elongated structure of its body, along with the contrast between its deep chest and narrow waist, conspire to give it the appearance of a serpent that has recently swallowed a very large meal. But its wings are a glory: slender and maneuverable, their translucent membrane glowing gold when the sun shines through them. (A sight most commonly available to their prey, who do not much appreciate the aesthetics. But I once had the pleasure of seeing a savannah snake airing its wings after being tumbled into water.)\n\n\"Ah, she's a beauty.\"\n\nI had a smile on my face and words of agreement on my lips before I realized the remark had come from M. Velloin. At some point\u2014I did not know when\u2014he had crawled up to join me on the hilltop. He had brought field glasses, and raised them to better study the feasting dragon. Beneath that, his expression was not one of wonder, but rather of calculation, and I could guess what equations were in his mind.\n\nOn the other hand, I had come here to take advantage of the fruits of his hunt, and could hardly fault him for doing that job. I merely disliked him praising the beauty of the savannah snake with such a purpose in mind.\n\n\"They are solitary hunters, yes?\" I asked, determined to make use of his knowledge.\n\n\"The females are, like that one there. Males will hunt together sometimes, in pairs or trios, occasionally quartets. Especially if they're brothers. If you hunt males, you must be certain how many there are, or that last one will be on your head while you're taking aim at the others.\"\n\n(I must confess my imagination presented me with a picture of M. Velloin shrieking and running about with a dragon attached to his scalp. The reality, of course, would have been bloody and not at all amusing, but the image entertained me.)\n\nI tugged my hat forward to better shade my eyes. \"How do you hunt them? With a rifle, I presume\u2014but do you chase them, or lie in wait?\"\n\nM. Velloin snorted. \"Good luck chasing them; they can outpace an Akhian without trying. If the terrain allows it, lying in wait works very well. Unfortunately this hill is too distant to be of any use, unless the snake drives its prey right past us.\" He put down his field glasses and gave me a predatory smile. \"Let me show you how it is done.\"\n\nThe showing took several days. Even an experienced hunter like M. Velloin is not successful on every outing\u2014not in bagging dragons, at least, though there was not an afternoon in which he failed to bring back some kind of carcass. We dined that first night on roast waterbuck, and he took two zebra the following day, whose striped hides our servants were set to defend from scavengers attracted to the smell. Okweme and his companions went out at dusk in pursuit of lions, but had no luck.\n\nM. Velloin's tactic for dragon hunting was this: He would watch from the hilltop until he saw a cloud of dust advertising the approach of some group of medium-sized herbivores (antelope or other such ungulates\u2014never anything so large as an elephant). Then he and the others would ride to intercept it, close enough to the watering hole to be within a savannah snake's likely orbit. The arrival of men on horseback would invariably spook the herbivores, which in turn could sometimes be relied upon to provoke the snake, if present, into striking. Then M. Velloin, galloping along with the herd, would attempt to shoot the dragon from the sky.\n\nThis is, of course, a hazardous undertaking. Like all species then considered to be \"true dragons,\" the savannah snake possesses extraordinary breath, in this case a corrosive mist. On the first instance of M. Velloin successfully flushing a dragon, he failed to shoot the beast, and one of the other men took the retaliatory spray across his right arm and shoulder, even up to his face. This immediately raised painful blisters, which soon after burst; and in a tropical environment such as Bayembe's, open wounds of that sort are extremely dangerous. They attracted midges and flies, and despite our best care, soon became infected. The man ultimately survived, but he was scarred thereafter, and much weakened in body.\n\nYet such perils do not deter hunters from their goal. M. Velloin was not the only one to ride out again after the man was wounded, and two days later, he met at last with success. And, as per our arrangement, he immediately quit the field and dragged the body back to where we had set up camp.\n\nAlmost immediately. He had, I saw, taken the time to claim his trophies, prising the teeth and claws free. I scowled at him. \"I should like to have seen those in place, M. Velloin. We are not only going to make casts of the bones; there is a great deal to be learned by studying the specimen as a whole. How am I to understand its swift running, when you have taken away the claws?\"\n\nHe looked abashed, and also like he was trying to use his abashment to mollify me. I refused to be mollified, and ordered him out of the way as we got to work.\n\nThe routine will be familiar to those who read the previous volume of my memoirs. My words to M. Velloin were true; I had every intention of extracting as much data from this carcass as possible. I therefore set to work sketching, while Mr. Wilker and Natalie took measurements, which I would use to correct my anatomical drawings when I produced the finished images.\n\nWe had quite an audience at first, some of whom were even willing to assist rather than getting in the way. M. Velloin, I must grant, was among those who chose to help. But our work is not exciting to watch, and so before long most of the observers drifted away. I was on my knees in the dirt beside the snake, flexing and twisting its hind foot to consider how it ran, when I realized that one was still present and watching very closely: Okweme, the oba's son.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" I asked, too distracted by my task to address him as politely as I should have.\n\nHe slid one of my sketches from beneath the rock pinning it down and studied it. \"You are indeed an artist.\"\n\n\"Had you any reason to doubt it?\"\n\nOkweme shrugged, returning the paper to its place. \"Women sometimes exaggerate their skill, to attract a better husband.\"\n\nIt was very fortunate that Mr. Wilker was undertaking the task of butchery, severing and defleshing a wing on the far side of the carcass. Had the knife been in my hand, I might have cut myself. Was Natalie right? Was he evaluating me as a potential marriage prospect?\n\nAmong the Mebenye and the Yembe alike, creativity and artistic talent are considered great virtues in a wife: well, I was an artist. I was also a widow with many fertile years ahead of her, and that is not a thing they tend to leave at loose ends in their society. And this might explain the olori's interest, when I told her of my work. But surely a prince like Okweme was not so bereft of prospects that he needed to court the first unmarried woman who wandered by, artistic talents notwithstanding. Why should he be interested in a Scirling, anyway?\n\nI had to answer him. \"I am hardly a professional,\" I said, realizing too late that a disclaimer of skill is a sign of modesty, and also attractive. Was there nothing I could say that would not dig me in deeper? In desperation, I rose up to lean over the snake's body. \"Mr. Wilker, is the wing ready? Ah, excellent. We should take the casts now, if Natalie has mixed the plaster.\"\n\nShe had indeed, along with other materials none of us mentioned aloud. We retired into our tent with the wing bones: long things, so slender it seemed they must snap beneath their own weight. But of course they did not, for that is the virtue of dragonbone. \"The solution is under the cot there,\" Natalie said in a low voice, then went out, pulling the flaps shut behind her.\n\nMr. Wilker took the bones over to the cot. Between the two of us, he was the superior chemist (I being not much of a chemist at all), and better qualified to run the process that should, at least in theory, preserve savannah snake bones as well as those of rock-wyrms. I busied myself with the plaster, which would suffer an unfortunate miscarriage of procedure in the next few hours, resulting in no usable casts at all. The prospect of mockery for my error hardly pleased me, but we had agreed that it would arouse less suspicion than if Mr. Wilker were blamed for the loss. And we did not want anyone giving much consideration to the question of why we had no casts\u2014not when we would, we hoped, be busy hiding the actual preserved bones.\n\nWe worked in silence for about a minute. Then Mr. Wilker cleared his throat. \"He has one wife already.\"\n\nSavannah snakes, as I have said, are not large beasts. Of course Mr. Wilker, on the other side of the carcass, had heard every word. I flushed and answered him sharply. \"Is that meant to deter me? I am not looking to make him my new husband.\"\n\n\"I didn't think you were,\" he said. Then he fell silent: perhaps because he was attending to the task of dripping one chemical solution into another at a steady pace, or perhaps because he was thinking. Either way, when the dripping was done, he went on. \"But you haven't exactly been dissuading him.\"\n\n\"Instruct me in how to dissuade a prince in a fashion that will not offend him and cause us trouble soon after,\" I said, \"and I will do it with a glad heart. Until then, I must go on trying to be polite, for the sake of our expedition.\"\n\nMr. Wilker laid the last of the bones in their chemical bath and sealed the top, to protect them from both dust and prying eyes. We would need to remain here for at least three more days before they could be moved; I hoped M. Velloin would not take it into his head to shift his camp. Then my companion stood, looking at me. \"Do you want to remarry?\"\n\nMy hand on the edge of a plaster-filled tub almost overturned it, which would have made a very nice answer for why the casts had failed. \"I fail to see how this has any relevance for our work, Mr. Wilker.\"\n\n\"I should think it's obvious, when you attract marital interest wherever we go.\"\n\n\"One princeling hardly justifies that description.\"\n\nIt would have been wiser for me to leave the matter there. But I made the mistake of looking at Mr. Wilker, whose expression I could not read. With the flaps closed, it was stiflingly hot inside the tent, and I was all too conscious of the need to keep our voices low. Natalie was supposed to be keeping watch outside, but canvas makes a very poor barrier to sound. All these factors and more combined to make me leave my plaster tubs and cross to Mr. Wilker, who, with the cot and the box it hid behind him, could not retreat. \"Do you have a personal reason for broaching this topic, Mr. Wilker? Because if so, I would thank you to do me the courtesy of admitting it.\"\n\nHis face had been reddened by days in the sun, but I think he flushed still further. \"Mrs. Camherst\u2014\"\n\nI will never know what he would have said. I suspect, looking back, that he would have pointed out to me what the roaring of my heartbeat in my ears had obscured: Natalie's voice outside, greeting the man approaching our tent, warning us that we were about to have a visitor. But I did not hear it, and Mr. Wilker did not find his tongue quickly enough, and so when light burst upon our dim little scene, M. Velloin found me standing scant inches from my companion, face tilted up toward him, and both of us red as beets.\n\nWe could only have looked more guilty had he caught us in an embrace. We sprang apart with exclamations of surprise, me retreating to my plaster. With Velloin silhouetted against the brightness outside, I could not see his expression, but the way his head turned from me to Mr. Wilker and back again said more than enough. \"I thought I would see how you're getting on,\" he said, and I could have slapped him for the amusement in his tone.\n\n\"Quite well, thank you,\" I said, failing to sound at all polite. \"Thank you for the specimens.\"\n\nHe approached me and held out a sack. \"The claws. I assumed you would like to examine them.\"\n\nVelloin offered them to me, not to Mr. Wilker, which under the circumstances was not only decent of him but surprising. He had to have been questioning my scientific purposes\u2014men like him generally do\u2014and would question them even more now. \"Thank you,\" I said, this time with more sincerity. \"I will draw these this afternoon, while the plaster dries, and return them to you.\"\n\n\"No need to hurry,\" he said. \"I'll be going out with the prince in an hour or so, to see if we can't bring down a few lions. You're welcome to join us, Wilker.\"\n\nMr. Wilker was not a hunting enthusiast, but I was hardly surprised when he accepted. It would separate the two of us for a time, which was good both for our own peace of mind, and for quelling suspicion.\n\nOr so I hoped\u2014quite naively. As you may have guessed, this was the beginning of the long-lived rumour that Mr. Wilker and I were on intimate terms. At least, this is the point at which such whispers became common currency in Bayembe; it is possible that the simple fact of my departing on the expedition with him, especially in combination with the to-do over Natalie, began those rumours at home even before more specific word arrived from Eriga. A widow, by virtue of having been married, is protected from a degree of scandal that would ruin a maiden, but it does not mean that she can carry on in whatever manner she pleases without anyone taking notice.\n\nI would like to say that I cared not a whit for the whispers. It would suit my dashing reputation for me to shrug off the concerns that burden more ordinary women. I was younger then, however, and apart from the damage to my own esteem, I cared a great deal for the effect the rumours had on those around me. It undermined Mr. Wilker, to have his scientific work overshadowed by impropriety; it reflected badly on Lord Hilford, to have given his patronage to two such scandalous people. But what enraged me the most was the foul elaboration of the rumour that said our indiscretions had begun in Vystrana, and that Jacob had either winked at it, or died because he did not.\n\nAll of that lay in the future that Gelis afternoon. The first stirrings of it, however, began during the hunt that night, when Okweme was (so I later heard) jocular with Mr. Wilker in a way that did not seem friendly at all. It continued for the remainder of the trip, and when we returned at last to Atuyem, the seed nurtured in water found fertile soil in which to grow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The rumours continue\u2014Galinke's theory\u2014Two months in the bush\u2014Reconsidering Edgeworth\u2014Malaria\u2014Witchcraft\u2014A letter from Lord Denbow\n\nOne might have expected Okweme's interest in me to cool, with rumour saying I was already involved elsewhere. On the contrary, he pursued me more closely after that\u2014but I did not like his reasons for doing so.\n\nHe said nothing directly, of course. But his manner shifted: friendliness taking on an oily sheen, warmth bringing him closer than I wished him to stand. I tried to describe this to Natalie, and could not find anything specific to point to; the problem was in the aggregate. \"I cannot help but feel,\" I said in frustration, \"as if my supposed misbehaviour with Mr. Wilker has, in his eyes, made me available to any man who chooses to claim me. One expects this sort of thing from a rake at a masquerade ball in Vickery Gardens, not from the son of a king.\"\n\n\"Some of those rakes at Vickery are the sons of kings,\" Natalie said dryly. \"But I know what you mean. Well, I shall cease telling him where you are; perhaps that will help.\"\n\nIt did, but not enough. In desperation, I turned to Galinke. My irregularity meant I did not rejoin her in the agban, but I saw her after she emerged, and she invited me to stroll with her in the oba's gardens. As soon as I thought it reasonable, I directed our conversation to that particular knot. \"There is nothing between myself and Mr. Wilker but professional matters,\" I told her, when the tale was done. \"But I cannot see how to convince anyone of that.\"\n\n\"Sometimes women keep themselves to our side of the palace for a long time, and after that the rumours fall quiet,\" Galinke said. \"But only sometimes. And you cannot do that, not without abandoning your work.\"\n\nWhich I would never do\u2014though sometimes I had cause to be glad for the segregation the palace imposed. \"Tell me,\" I said. \"Okweme is your brother's son; have you any notion why he might be pursuing me? He did so even before I sullied my reputation. My skill with a pencil is hardly enough to make me a desirable catch, and I do not flatter myself that my beauty or charming manner has anything to do with his intentions. What political benefit might he gain, that I do not see?\" Or what benefit his mother might gain, though I did not say it. I was beginning to think she had set her son on me, like a hunter putting a hound after a rabbit.\n\n\"Your people are currently very important in Bayembe,\" Galinke pointed out. \"If they gain more territory and influence here, it could be to Okweme's advantage to have a connection.\"\n\n\"But I lack connections. My family, if they were Yembe, would not even rate chambers in someone else's compound up on this hill. My late husband's family would, but only barely. Unless\u2014\" The hypothetical I had described, the Hendemores and Camhersts as Erigan families, gave me a new idea. \"Is it possible he thinks my children\u2014 our children, if he married me\u2014would inherit something of value? We pass down such things in the father's line, not the mother's. My brothers' wealth, such as it is, will go to their sons, not mine.\"\n\nGalinke had been shaking her head as I spoke, but the way in which she stopped told me a thought had come to her. She cast a surreptitious glance around and then, seeing no one, still took the precaution of drawing me down onto a bench, where we would be half-concealed by a stand of flowering reeds.\n\n\"It would be very strange,\" she said. \"But\u2014to your people, children belong to their father's lineage. Here, it is the mother's. Your people would expect Okweme's sons to inherit from him.\"\n\nI began to see what she aimed at. \"Is there something of value he has, that he cannot pass down to his own children?\"\n\nGalinke nodded. \"Certain honours and property from his uncle, yes. And Okweme has no full sisters; all of Denyu's other children have died, so his heirs are more distant\u2014cousins he does not like. He has two daughters from his wife, but that means nothing. They belong to her lineage, not his. But your children would belong to your lineage\u2014and he could try to argue that, by the customs of your people, what is his should become theirs. To do otherwise would be to leave them with nothing.\"\n\nIt was almost enough to make me laugh. Okweme n Kpama Waleyim wanted me for my country's inheritance laws\u2014or at least that was our speculation, though we had no proof as yet. But putting even a possible explanation on his behaviour renewed my incentive to escape it. \"I shall have to contrive to be in the field more often,\" I said. \" Without him, this time. Tell me, what happens if a woman becomes, ah, impure, while out in the bush?\"\n\nI will not say it was my desire to avoid Okweme and the agban that led to our second excursion, but they were among the relevant factors. He was not so shameless as to contrive a reason to join us again\u2014not when there would be no hunting on our trip\u2014and Galinke assured me that rural people were more flexible in matters of impurity, so long as we had ourselves cleansed appropriately.\n\nOther factors included our first preservation attempt, which, while not a failure, had been less than perfectly successful. Mr. Wilker (who was exceedingly stiff with me, on account of our as-yet-unfinished confrontation) said the acidity of savannah snake blood differed from that of rock-wyrms, but thought he might adjust the process and achieve better results. And apart from the anatomical study of dragons, we had a great deal to learn about their behaviour and movement, which would require observation under conditions that did not involve Velloin shooting everything that moved.\n\nWe spent more time in the bush over the following two months than we did enjoying the comforts of Atuyem, which was exactly as I preferred. Mind you, I cannot pretend the environment of Bayembe is entirely pleasant: as in the previous volume of my memoirs, there is a great deal I am omitting regarding the heat, the dust, and the ever-present flies, whose buzzing I learned to hate beyond all reason. (One night a fly became trapped in our tent, and its aimless wandering in search of an exit brought me to the very end of my tether; only Natalie's intervention kept me from turning up the oil lamp and lighting the canvas on fire.) But on the whole, I find the hardships I suffer in warm climes vastly preferable to those of the cold\u2014flies being the exception.\n\nWhat pleased me was the understanding, for the first time in my life, that I was indeed a naturalist. Not the wife of a naturalist, brought along for her artistic and secretarial skills; not a hobbyist, collecting sparklings in her garden shed; but a scholar in my own right, engaging fully in my work. The tasks we set ourselves\u2014to document the prey of savannah snakes, their breeding habits, their sexual differentiation, and so on\u2014gave myself and Mr. Wilker sufficient distraction to pretend our unfortunate conversation had never occurred, and we fell into a rapport (at least for the purposes of our work) that was deeply and satisfyingly professional. I will not bore you with the minutiae of that work; anyone interested may refer to Dragon Breeds of the Bayembe Region, Draconic Taxonomy Reconsidered, or the articles eventually published in Proceedings of the Philosophers' Colloquium over the years following our expedition. As the second of those titles indicates, however, it was during my time in Eriga that I began to consider the question of what, precisely, constitutes a dragon.\n\nAt the time, of course, we were all still operating on Sir Richard Edgeworth's criteria, which were six in number:\n\n1) Quadrupedalism\n\n2) Wings capable of flight\n\n3) A ruff or fan behind the skull\n\n4) Bones frangible post-mortem\n\n5) Egg laying\n\n6) Extraordinary breath\n\nOur voyage to Eriga had reminded me of the disputes over the great sea-snakes, which at the time constituted the main challenge to Edgeworth's model; I also thought about \"draconic cousins\" such as wolf-drakes, wyverns, and even my old sparklings. Furthermore, there were various theories regarding dragons in the Bayembe region, with some arguing for three breeds\u2014 savannah snakes, arboreal snakes, and swamp-wyrms\u2014and others for as many as seven. (The latter came closer to the mark, though as it later turned out, for entirely the wrong reasons.) We could not see the swamp-wyrms without permission to visit Mouleen, but we applied ourselves to examining the distinctions between the grass-dwelling savannah snakes and tree-dwelling arboreal snakes, and found them to be entirely opportunistic: there is no meaningful difference between the two, beyond the simple matter of what territory each beast takes for its own.\n\nDry work to tell of, but it pleased me deeply\u2014all the more so because it took me away from the strict and unfamiliar customs of Atuyem (of which the agban was only one), as it had previously taken me away from the strict and familiar customs of my own land. It was therefore a grave disappointment, as well as a cause for alarm, when Natalie fell ill.\n\nI cannot say it was a surprise. Tropical diseases are legion, and we Scirlings are terribly susceptible to them. We all drank our gin and tonics as advised (I grew to like them, which of course made me a scandal when I drank them for pleasure back home), but one cannot haunt the bug-infested environs of watering holes without risking malaria.\n\nWe knew the signs to watch for. For Natalie to develop a headache was nothing of significance\u2014we all suffered them, from the brutal strength of the sun and our appalling excuses for field pillows\u2014but when she began to shiver, on a day when I was having to exercise care lest the sweat dripping from my face mar the page on which I sketched, there was no question as to the cause. And Natalie, to her credit, did not attempt the foolishness I have seen from others (men and women alike), which is to insist that it was nothing, she could go on working, it would pass. Malaria is nothing to trifle with, and we all knew it.\n\nAs soon as the porters we had hired could pack our camp, our guide (a chatty Mebenye fellow named Welolo n Akpari Memu, who knew the bush as well as I know my own library) led us to the nearest village, where Natalie could rest in greater comfort. That much, at least, went smoothly.\n\nWe ran into difficulty, however, when it came time to treat her illness. I cannot fault the medical assistance she received; they gave her water and herbs for the fever and the pain, which is all we could expect from a small cattle-raising village in the Bayembe bush. Erigans may be less vulnerable to such afflictions than Scirlings and other foreigners, but their people still suffer malaria often enough for it to be a familiar foe.\n\nThe assistance they offered, however, did not end at the medical.\n\nNatalie's treatment was being overseen by an old woman\u2014the oldest in the village, I think\u2014whose name I never did get; they only called her Grandmother. Between her rural accent and missing teeth, I had difficulty understanding her speech, but I soon picked a repeated word out of her explanation: witchcraft.\n\nYou will hear more of this later. For now, it will suffice to say that there is a view common across Eriga which attributes most or all trouble to the malevolent action of witches. These are not necessarily the figures of intentional and blasphemous evil my Anthiopean readers associate with the word; witchcraft can, as I understand it, be accidental, the result of ill will or unresolved conflict in someone's heart. Nor would Grandmother or her neighbours have claimed Natalie's problem consisted solely of witchcraft, and had nothing to do with our bizarre fondness for spending time in fever-ridden areas. But what sent us to such places, or weakened Natalie so that she fell ill? Witchcraft, clearly. And Grandmother, it transpired, wanted to bring a man from another village to treat Natalie's spiritual ills.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Mr. Wilker said when I told him. \"It won't do Miss Oscott one bit of good, and may upset her.\"\n\nWe were outside the house in which she rested, so she would not overhear our conversation. Beyond the edges of the small village, which hunkered down as if hoping the sun would cease beating on it so fiercely, the tree-spotted grass stretched forever. I felt very small and very insignificant: any one of us could cease breathing and this place would not care. \"Grandmother believes she has one of the worse forms of malaria,\" I told him. \"The sort that most frequently kills.\"\n\n\"Then we must get her back to Atuyem, if she can be moved. Sir Adam's doctor can treat her best.\"\n\nThis required us to time our journey very carefully. Most forms of malaria afflict the subject with periodic fevers (the interval of which is the primary means of distinguishing them), and during the respite the patient may be more capable of activity. That is not, however, the same thing as being well. Natalie suffered terrible joint pain, and this she did endure with admirable stoicism; she knew as well as we did that there would be no relief for her out in the bush. When her fever returned, we stopped until she could ride again. And so, by agonizing stages, we made our way back to Atuyem.\n\nI expected our quarters there to have been given to another during our absence. (Those of you with good memories may recall we had been invited into the royal palace itself by the oba, supposedly because of his great interest in us; the man had ignored us completely since our arrival. There was every reason to think his interest had vanished.) To my surprise, they had not, and furthermore his own royal physician came with Dr. Garrett to examine Natalie and treat her. I was, in the meanwhile, given my own room, so that I might not have to share a bed with a sick woman.\n\nSir Adam, however, did not even do me the courtesy of allowing me a chance to sleep in that bed before he sent a message demanding my immediate presence at Point Miriam. I defied him long enough to bathe; you could have grown strawberries in the dirt caked on my skin. Then, wearing one of my non-bush dresses\u2014which is to say, one of the only clean items of clothing I had left\u2014I rode wearily down to Nsebu in answer to his summons.\n\nOur resident ambassador had a fine office set up in one of the rooms, with heavy oak furniture totally at odds with their Yembe surroundings. The tired and therefore cynical part of me wondered if he had imported it so that he might plant his fists on the desk and loom at me across its polished surface in proper Scirling fashion.\n\n\"I have received,\" he said, biting each word off, \"a letter from Lord Denbow.\"\n\nMy head was full of malaria and draconic taxonomy; it took longer than it should have to place the name. \"Natalie's father.\"\n\n\"Yes. Miss Oscott's father. He is demanding I send his daughter home at once. Mrs. Camherst, what the devil have you done?\"\n\n\"Nothing like you are thinking,\" I said, wishing desperately that I had ignored his summons until the following morning. A night of sleep would have been more precious than dragonbone, right then. \"Unless you are thinking that I did as Miss Oscott wished, in which case you are correct.\"\n\nSir Adam slapped his hand atop his desk. \"This is no subject for jokes, Mrs. Camherst. Lord Denbow is very angry.\"\n\nI wondered how long ago his letter had arrived. Not that it mattered; Sir Adam would hardly be persuaded by the argument that leaving a baron to stew for a few more months would improve his temper. \"Lord Denbow may be angry, but I will lay pebbles to iron that Lord Hilford is not. Or have you forgotten that the earl is our patron? He knows his granddaughter is here, and does not mind.\"\n\nAcknowledging my sponsor's complicity may not have been my wisest move; I apologized to him for it later. It did no good in either case. Sir Adam launched into a diatribe about Lord Denbow, not Lord Hilford, being the legal guardian of Natalie Oscott, and furthermore the girl's own wishes not being of the slightest relevance. I suffered this in silence, but when he expanded his theme and brought up Natalie's illness, I lost my temper utterly.\n\n\"So you will blame me for her malaria? As others blame me for my husband's death\u2014how very familiar. I cannot be permitted to make my own choices, as Natalie cannot either, but I am somehow to blame for the choices of others. What tremendous power I seem to have! But certain things are out of my hands, Sir Adam, and one of them is whether Natalie will even live to be sent home. I suggest you search your heart and find the decency to leave the matter of her disposition until after we know the answer to that question.\"\n\nI had risen from my chair during this tirade, and by the look on Sir Adam's face, the last thing he had anticipated was for me to shout right back at him. (I think he expected me to break down crying\u2014which only goes to show how little he understood this entire situation.) What he thought of the rest of my words I cannot say, but one part at least had clearly penetrated his mind, for he said, \"Yes, well, everything of course depends on whether the girl recovers.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" I said, mimicking the biting manner in which he had begun our meeting. \"And if you should breathe even one word of this where she can hear, you and I will speak again.\" Whereupon I pivoted sharply and walked out of his office.\n\nI must grant Sir Adam this: he had sufficient discretion that he had not said anything of Lord Denbow's letter prior to our return. (He would not want our internal troubles known among the Yembe.) He also was sufficiently chastened to leave the matter in peace during the weeks it took Natalie to overcome her malaria and regain a modicum of strength.\n\nBefore he had an opportunity to raise the matter again, someone else stepped in and, in the manner of one who takes a chessboard and flings its contents into the air, changed the game entirely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The oba's interest\u2014Ankumata's history\u2014Legs of iron\u2014 Royal greetings\u2014Guard dragons\u2014A mission to Mouleen\u2014The carrot and the stick\n\nI said before that the oba of Bayembe had first invited us to the palace, then ignored us. I have never been a political creature, and so I can only guess at his motivation, but I believe he was testing our ostensible purpose in coming to his land. In short, he brought us under his eye, then left us to our own devices, in order to see what we would do.\n\nThe Scirlings who visited Bayembe came for a very narrow list of reasons. First there were the merchants, trading through the port of Nsebu even before it was established as a Scirling colony. After them came the diplomats, to represent our interest in Erigan iron, and they made arrangements for the soldiers (who equipped and trained the Yembe with Anthiopean guns against the Satalu and Ikwunde) and the engineers (who would build railways and dams, from which Scirland would subsequently profit). Beyond them were a handful of sheluhim and hunters like Velloin, and very few others.\n\nMy little group was therefore an aberration\u2014and one that, as I came to understand, held particular interest for the oba. When it became apparent that Natalie would live, but while she was still recovering in her bed, he sent messengers to summon myself and Mr. Wilker to meet him at last.\n\nThis summons put a nervous chill in my heart. Given his previous neglect, I could only assume Sir Adam had spoken to him, and he was going to order Natalie at a minimum and possibly all three of us out of the country, lest Lord Denbow speak out in the Synedrion and cause diplomatic trouble. If he did, I could not think of a single thing I might say that would retrieve the situation.\n\nGood grooming was unlikely to sway him, but I attended to my toilet with the finest care I could manage\u2014much finer than I had ever troubled with before. (My Season does not count; Mama and the maids took care of it then.) Then, my heart fluttering with nervousness, I went to meet the ruler of Bayembe, in a courtyard before the golden tower of Atuyem.\n\nGiven the man in question, I must provide a certain amount of context first. Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori has been the subject of so much mythologizing during the course of his life that I feel it necessary to set the record something closer to straight before I proceed with any account of my dealings with him.\n\nIt is true that he was born to his father's fourth wife (putting him out of what was then the royal lineage), and that he was born deformed. The exact medical nature of his deformity I do not know, but it left his legs unable to bear his weight; though healthy in other respects, he was not able to walk until well into his childhood. Some sources claim he was seven when this changed, and others ten. The exact number does not matter.\n\nWhat matters is that his mother died, and there is credible evidence to say that she was murdered by one of her co-wives. Ankumata would likely have died, too, except that a man of his father's court took him and raised him away from Atuyem, as his own son. And this man happened to be a blacksmith.\n\nI cannot adequately convey the importance of that to a non-Erigan audience. For my Scirling readers, blacksmiths are a feature of village life: strong men, but not expected to be particularly bright. Their reputation in Eriga, and particularly in the eastern part of the continent, is a good deal more impressive. More than a few peoples there trace their origins back to a legendary blacksmith-king, and many more attribute magical powers to men who work in iron. It is part of the reverence they give in general to artisans, but it goes beyond that. An ethnologist could theorize for you whether this has something to do with the abundance of iron in Erigan soil, or whether it arises from some other aspect of Erigan existence; I can only report the fact of it. For Ankumata's subjects, it was as if he had been taken to be raised by a particularly wise magister, the sort who knows the secret of bringing golems to life.\n\nAnd that is nearly what this blacksmith did. When Sunda n Halelu Gama took Ankumata into his home, the boy still could not walk; he rode there on his rescuer's back. But once there, Sunda\u2014who, in the more dramatic version of this tale, is said to be Adu himself, the Yembe god of blacksmithing\u2014set about crafting for him a set of iron leg braces that would do what the boy's own muscles and bones could not. So wondrously did he craft them, the story goes, that they weighed nothing at all, and no sooner did Ankumata don them than he leapt over the blacksmith's house to show his joy.\n\nThe truth is rather more prosaic, I am sure, for I never saw the oba leap any distance at all. But the braces do exist, and I believe he could not walk without them, which means Sunda deserves every bit of the credit he receives. He, perhaps more than any other save Ankumata's own father and mother, made the man who came back and claimed the rulership of Bayembe (a tale in its own right), and held it for so many years.\n\nAnd what of the man himself? I found his age hard to judge; history told me he was fifty or thereabouts, though (as I have said) mythologizing has obscured some of the finer points of his life. He was broad of feature, as Yembe often are, and I think his shaved head was a disguise for natural hair loss (a bald scalp being more regal than a patchy one). He gave a sense of being both shrewd and good-hearted, which is an impressive combination, and not one many people of either sex can easily convey.\n\nHe greeted us sitting on a stool that made up in splendor for the deliberately simple appearance of his braces. The stool, as some may know, is an element of Sagao regalia adopted by the Yembe from their riverine subjects centuries ago, and although it is often likened to an Anthiopean throne, the truth is that its significance more closely parallels that of the crown. Yembe rulers are invested in their office by being seated upon the stool\u2014 and not just the oba, but the lineage chiefs as well, each with their own ancestral stool. This one was of sufficient size that I might have called it a bench instead, and moreover was crafted of solid gold, but it had its origins in the smaller and more humble wooden stool found in every home in the region.\n\nBeyond that, much of the scene was a common one. I have, at this point in my life, met enough heads of state to know they are almost always seated in some kind of frame\u2014before a tapestry or painting or coat of arms, atop a dais, or, in this case, beneath a splendid awning\u2014and surrounded by ministers, servants, and assorted hangers-on. How else is one to know that they are important? His wives were there, and various youths bearing enough resemblance to one of those women or to the oba himself for me to guess them to be his children; the olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim and her son Okweme were in the group, and I was not glad to see them.\n\nNor was I glad to see Sir Adam and several of the army men. To my heightened nerves, this seemed like proof that we were all to be ordered back to Scirland. (The truly irrational part of me tried to combine this with one of my other problems, and invent a scenario in which Natalie and Mr. Wilker would be sent back, but I would be forced to marry Okweme.) But they could not command my attention now; it must all go to the oba of Bayembe.\n\nA court functionary had instructed me beforehand that I would be permitted to show respect in the Scirling way (by curtseying) rather than the Erigan way (by kneeling and, before a personage as august as the oba, lowering my face to the ground). I have never been especially graceful at curtseying, and my knees have a regrettable tendency to go tremulous and unreliable when I am nervous; I almost wished they would let me kneel instead. It is difficult to fall over when one is already on the ground. But it might have looked a mockery if I tried, and so curtseying it was, with Mr. Wilker bowing at my side.\n\nOur progress was marked by sonorous words from the griot at the oba's side. These learned men and women are sometimes called bards, but more often we use the Thiessin word, which serves as a synonym for a full dozen terms in different Erigan languages. I might equally use a dozen terms to describe them in Scirling: historians, storytellers, poets, musicians, praise-singers, and more. They are attached to aristocratic and royal families, and are often aristocrats in their own right, with all the power and wealth that implies.\n\nI could not make out what the griot was saying; he spoke in the highly stylized form of Yembe used for his work, which bears as much resemblance to ordinary Yembe as Akhian or Yelangese calligraphy does to ordinary text, and is even less comprehensible to me. (Calligraphy at least will sit still and give you a chance to puzzle it out.) Knowing what I do now of their customs, however, I expect the bulk of it was a recitation of the oba's praise-names, his ancestors, his ancestors' praise-names, and other things meant to impress us with our insignificance in comparison to him.\n\nOne of those praise-names, rendered into English, is \"he whose legs are made of iron\"\u2014or \"Iron-legs,\" I suppose, though that lacks elegance, sounding more like the nickname sailors might give to a particularly salty captain. Certainly the braces, at least in their most recent iteration, deserved a degree of elegance. Gold had been inlaid along their sides in the characteristically geometric patterns of Yembe art, for it would not do to clothe the country's ruler in anything ordinary. But no effort had been made to gild the steel completely; to do so would defeat the purpose. Nor did he wear the lower-body wrap affected by many in his court that might have concealed the braces. Instead he wore an elaborate loincloth, for Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori understood the role of his own infirmity and its cure in his legend, and used them to his advantage.\n\nThis was a man who had taken weakness and made it strength. If you understand only one thing about him, that would be enough.\n\nWe minced our way through the opening formalities and the inquiries into Natalie's health. I half-expected this to lead into Sir Adam's demands, but no; the ambassador stayed silent (looking, if truth be told, a trifle bored), and the oba said nothing of Lord Denbow.\n\nInstead he waved back the youth cooling him with a large fan and stood. I heard a quiet hiss as he did so: the braces contained cunningly engineered hydraulics. In a mild voice that did not obscure the weight of command, he said to myself and Mr. Wilker, \"You will walk with me.\"\n\n\"Yes, chele,\" we chorused. I suppose I might render the word as \"Your Majesty,\" since an oba is the sovereign ruler of his nation (though in a different manner than a Scirling king); this, however, would obscure its derivation from eche, the Yembe word for \"gold.\" Polite address for the oba meant something closer to \"Golden One.\"\n\nTo my startlement, the invitation appeared to extend only as far as the two of us and his griot. By subtle signals Ankumata indicated to his wives and his servants that they would stay behind; the servants were less subtle in communicating this to our fellow Scirlings. Sir Adam's protest faded behind me as we followed the oba through a shadowed archway into a garden\u2014 the same garden in which I had walked with Galinke a few months before.\n\nThe oba walked slowly, though how much of that was his braces and how much the dignity of his rank, I cannot say. After we were well through the arch and out of earshot of the others (though not out of bow or rifle shot from the guards on the high walls), he addressed Mr. Wilker. \"You have studied dragons. What have you learned?\"\n\nUnlike the boyar of Drustanev, who had once asked a similar question of Lord Hilford, Ankumata seemed genuinely interested in the answer. Mr. Wilker collected his thoughts and delivered a good pr\u00e9cis of our findings thus far, adding\u2014unwisely, from the perspective of my still-twitching nerves\u2014the regretful coda that \"Miss Oscott's illness forced us to suspend our work for the time being.\"\n\nThe oba nodded. Then, without warning, he spoke to me. \"You have a desire to study the dragons of the swamp.\"\n\nMy heart gave a great thump in my chest. It was not precisely a secret, but I had only spoken of it to a very small number of people, and did not like the reminder of how easily gossip spread. But I could hardly lie to the man, and so I said, \"Yes, chele. There is more we could learn about the dragons here\u2014there will be more for years to come, I imagine\u2014but comparison is useful; we might in some ways learn more about savannah snakes and other breeds by looking at Moulish swamp-wyrms than by studying the others alone.\"\n\nWe had reached the end of the garden, where a staircase led up the wall. One hissing, mechanical step at a time, Ankumata climbed; we followed, though not before exchanging a look of puzzlement.\n\nAt the top, with the guards standing respectfully aside, the oba gestured downward. \"I have captured savannah snakes. But only their breath is of use; they cannot run with chains on, and if I remove the chains they escape.\"\n\nI found myself looking down into a dry, sandy moat, at the bottom of which two discontented dragons paced at the ends of their iron tethers. \"You use them as guards?\" I said.\n\n\"They impress people,\" the oba said. \"They are not useful.\" He took a piece of dried meat from his griot's hand and threw it to the sand below, where one of the snakes looked at it with resignation. (They will eat carrion, but prefer their meals to be juicy and running away.)\n\nOffering advice to the sovereign of a country is a touchy affair, but his silence seemed to invite my thoughts. Cautiously, I said, \"Were these captured as juveniles, or adults?\" He indicated it was the former, and I rubbed one finger across my chin. \"Hmmm. Perhaps if you raised them from the egg... some birds will imprint on the creature they see first. I do not know if it is the case with dragons.\"\n\nAnkumata smiled. It should have been encouraging\u2014a sign that I had not offended him. His expression, though, was not exactly one of pleasure; if anything, I would call it satisfaction. As if I had played into his hands.\n\nHe said, \"You will go into Mouleen and get me swamp-wyrm eggs.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" I said, echoed closely by Mr. Wilker.\n\n\"We have tried raising savannah snakes from eggs. It does not work. But the Mouri, the farmers on the edges of the forest, say the Moulish raise their dragons from eggs, and this is why swamp-wyrms eat anyone who tries to go into the swamp. You will bring me eggs, so that I may try it myself.\"\n\nAs royal orders went, this was a tall one. \" Chele... who is to say we will not be eaten by the dragons? Or fall prey to disease, or to the Moulish. I am told they kill anyone who comes into their forest.\"\n\nHe dismissed this with a flick of his hand. \"The forest kills people, not the Moulish. They dislike hunters, but you are different. And I will send Faj Rawango with you.\"\n\nI had not forgotten the messenger who came to collect us on the docks. A short man, compared to the Yembe, and more ruddy of skin, nor was his name a Yembe one. He was Moulish? I briefly damned Yves de Maucheret for spending all his words on tall tales of the Green Hell, and none on describing that place's inhabitants.\n\nEven with a guide, however, our survival was far from assured. Our success was even more so. \"If you will pardon me for saying so, chele, your kingdom's climate is very different from that of Mouleen. I doubt whether any hatchlings would thrive here. And even if they did, this is quite a lot of work simply for a few palace guard dragons\u2014\" I stopped, my words cut short by understanding.\n\nAn understanding which, as it so often does, trotted out of my mouth without asking leave of my brain. \"Ah. It isn't your palace you intend to guard, or not only. You are hoping to use them against the Ikwunde. Or the Satalu.\"\n\nThe oba's face hardened. In conversation with a sovereign, or anyone else of power, it is not generally advisable to say what they have chosen to keep unspoken, especially when it pertains to matters of state. But after a pause, he laughed: a long, hearty chuckle that called an involuntary smile from me. \"You see? I am not wrong to send you. Your mind is sharp; you see things well.\"\n\nI was also an outsider, not only to the Moulish, but to the Yembe. Such a person might die, and it would be no great loss to his nation.\n\nMr. Wilker and I exchanged looks. On the one hand, it was a research opportunity, and one we both desired; nor were the physical risks appreciably worse than they would have been without the oba's involvement. On the other hand, it placed a burden on us, one we might not be able to fulfill. What if he was wrong about Moulish control of the dragons? Or what if they did indeed tame them, but we were not able to learn how? The warmth of our reception when we emerged from the Green Hell might depend heavily on what we brought with us.\n\nI wondered how useful the eggs could possibly be. No large species of dragon reaches maturity in less than two years, and some take longer. Did Ankumata expect to still be at war two years from now? With enemies on both sides, I supposed he might. And even if he were not, it would be no bad thing to improve his country's ability to defend itself. I doubted this man, heir to centuries of Bayembe sovereignty, enjoyed his present dependence on Scirland.\n\nCarefully, Mr. Wilker said, \"What if we decline?\"\n\nOne dark, gold-ringed hand waved this question away. \"Is this not something you want? And your assistant, the young woman. You would want her with you, of course, once her strength returns.\"\n\nThis time I kept my thoughts behind my teeth. It was bribery, or perhaps I might more charitably call it payment: if we agreed, then he would block Sir Adam's attempts to claim Natalie. \"But if we do not go...\"\n\n\"Then I imagine the girl's father will retrieve her. Your ambassador says he is an important lord. I would not want to offend him.\"\n\nFirst the carrot; now the stick. If we did not agree, Ankumata would do nothing to stop Sir Adam. It might even go further than that: if I protested or caused too much trouble, I might find myself evicted from the country as well.\n\n\"Might we have time to consider your generous offer?\" Mr. Wilker said. \"We would have to speak with Miss Oscott before we could make any decision.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course. Such choices should not be made rashly.\"\n\nWe descended the stairs. I saw Galinke in a far corner of the garden; she sat with three other women, but I knew from the angle of her head that she had been watching us on the wall. It confirmed my suspicion that her interest in me had not been entirely casual, and that her royal brother knew some of what we had discussed. Which operated to my benefit, at least in part; whether I would thank her for it or not remained to be seen."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "A nice idea\u2014Consulting Natalie\u2014Companions in my madness\u2014More preparations\u2014The long rainy season\n\nThere was no privacy to be had in the palace. Mr. Wilker and I went into the lower town, ostensibly to visit the market, but in truth to talk away from interested ears.\n\n\"You are going to tell me I should not have brought Natalie,\" I said with a sigh after we had cleared the gate at the base of the hill.\n\nMr. Wilker shook his head, looking resigned. \"That ship sailed from Sennsmouth months ago\u2014and if it were not Miss Oscott, it would be something else. He did not quickly volunteer the threat, but he wanted and expected us to press for it.\"\n\n\"If I had enemies on my borders and allies only too eager to take advantage of my weakness, I suppose that I too might be ruthless in my use of tools.\" I sighed again. \"Empathy, however, does not make the tool any happier about her use.\"\n\nWe entered the market. It was not the chaos of dockside Nsebu; this was laid out in an orderly fashion, though not the grid of streets common in many Anthiopean cities. The merchants and artisans organized themselves instead by lineage, each of which formed round clusters through which Mr. Wilker and myself wound. On all sides we were besieged by vocal and determined hawkers, selling everything from copper pots to religious charms.\n\nUnder the cover of this clamour, Mr. Wilker said, \"What do you think?\"\n\nI shared with him my wall-top evaluation of the risks, and concluded by saying, \"I won't deny that I've been trying to think of how we might convince the oba to allow us into Mouleen. I thought I might approach him through Galinke, his sister. To become involved in the affairs of Bayembe, though... not to mention that it may not be fair to the dragons. They did not ask to participate in this war.\"\n\nMr. Wilker's laughter briefly lightened the concern that weighted his expression. \"I might have guessed you would fear for the dragons' well-being.\" Sobering, he went on. \"It's a nice idea, conducting our work without getting tangled in local affairs. Maybe in twenty or fifty years it would be possible. But we chose to come here now, and having done so, I don't think we can escape politics.\"\n\nWe were talking ourselves into accepting. I wanted to see the swamp-wyrms of Mouleen; I had wanted to see them since I saw that runt in the king's menagerie. They were ugly beasts, and not known for their charming personalities\u2014but they were dragons, and that meant I loved them.\n\nI could not in good conscience make that decision, however, without first taking a certain precaution. \"We shall have to talk to Natalie. Whether the oba would have found another lever or not, she is the lever he has chosen to use, and I imagine she will have an opinion on the matter.\"\n\nAt the beginning of our journey, I had thrown some sharp words in Mr. Wilker's direction regarding the validity of Natalie's wishes. Now their effect, and that of our trio's months of partnership, began to show. He nodded, with no hint of surprise or reluctance. \"Indeed. Malaria may have dulled her taste for adventure\u2014but if not, then I think we know our course.\"\n\nMalaria had not, in fact, dulled Natalie's taste for adventure. \"I knew it was a risk when I came here,\" she said cheerfully, despite the pallor that had overtaken her in the aftermath of the fever. \"Pity it isn't one of those diseases where, after you've had it, you never need fear it again. But what is this you say about Mouleen?\"\n\nI explained the oba's requirements to her, and his halfheartedly veiled threat. She made a face. \"I shan't ask you to go into the swamp for me. If my impending deportation is the only thing making you consider it, then don't worry about me; I'll find some other way to deal with my family. Hide behind Grandpapa's skirts, perhaps, or run away to join the circus.\"\n\nShe spoke lightly, but I could see that she meant it. Her resolve comforted me. It is one thing to decide that you are willing to risk leeches and fever; it is another entirely to drag someone else along with you.\n\nWhat showed on my face in that moment, I do not know, but Natalie's smile faded and she reached out to take my hand. \"Isabella, what is it?\"\n\nI could feel my answering smile waver. \"Only reflecting on how fortunate I am, that I should not be alone in my madness.\"\n\nIt sounds like a platitude, but it is the honest truth. I found myself nearly overwhelmed with gratitude more than once over the subsequent days, as we prepared for our descent into the Green Hell. I was grateful for Natalie's companionship and enthusiasm; for Mr. Wilker's reliability and professional cooperation; for Lord Hilford, my patron, whose money made my presence in Bayembe possible; for Faj Rawango, without whom this escapade would have stood at best a minuscule chance of success. I was even grateful to Ankumata. Undoubtedly he was using us for his own ends\u2014but he had also permitted us into his country, provided us with quarters in his own palace, and given us both the permission and the guide that made the next stage of our research possible.\n\nThe preparations were extensive, and unlike any I had made before. On our previous trips into the bush, we had been able to bring pack animals for our gear, but Faj Rawango warned us that horses, donkeys, and mules all tended to sicken in the swamp. Our supplies must be minimal, or we would find ourselves overburdened when the animals died.\n\nThe economies we made, however, were in peculiar places. Two tents (very small) and a minimum of clothing, but seemingly endless quantities of gin and tonic water, which would be our main protection against not only malaria but the parasitic infestations caused by foul water. (On no trip before or since have I carried more alcohol than undergarments.)\n\nWe also agreed, in a hurried conversation, to bring with us not only our chemical materials, but also the preserved bones we had gathered. Leaving them anywhere in Atuyem was not feasible; someone would be sure to find them. Destroying them would have been difficult, as the main feature of preserved dragonbone is its remarkable durability. If they became too burdensome to carry\u2014in bulk, not mass, as savannah snake bones were even lighter than those of rock-wyrms\u2014then we would bury them, with the hope of retrieving them later, but until then we would keep them under our watch.\n\nOne of the necessary tasks has become an oddly routine part of my life over the decades. I wrote letters to Lord Hilford, my parents, my brother Andrew, and my brother-in-law Matthew Camherst, explaining the alteration in our plans, with the unspoken understanding that this might be the last communication they received from me. Certainly it would be the last for a while; there was no postal service in the swamp, and even these letters would not go out until the next Scirling steamer came into port. I did not have to lay out instructions for what should be done if I perished\u2014that, I had taken care of before my departure\u2014but the implication whispered ominously between every line. I was only grateful that I would not be within my mother's reach when she read her letter.\n\nEven that missive, however, was easier to write than the one to my son. I was painfully aware, with each line I scribed, that it might be the last he would ever hear from me. That had been the case with each letter, of course, but I felt it now more keenly than before. His brief note took me longer than all the others put together.\n\nIt was Seminis before we were ready to go. The calendar used in Bayembe, of course, is not the common Anthiopean one, and most of my Anthiopean readers will have no sense of what that means for the region. I will therefore make clear the significance, so that you may all appreciate our folly:\n\nThe long rainy season had begun.\n\nAt first the change was refreshing. Bayembe had been parched since our arrival; it was a positive delight to breathe air washed clean of dust, to see flowers bloom and gold things turn green. But the humidity in that season is dreadful\u2014it is true what they say, that dry heat is more tolerable than wet\u2014and, as you may recall, we were about to descend into a region known for its abundant rainfall.\n\nFaj Rawango warned us. But he was a servant of the oba, and the oba wanted us to go; he did not warn us very strenuously. We, for our own part, were fools. None of us had experienced a rainy season in Eriga, let alone in the swamps of Mouleen, and Yves de Maucheret, the great Thiessois traveller whose writings were one of our only sources regarding the Green Hell, had not said much about the rain. We shrugged off Faj Rawango's warnings, loaded our pack donkeys (with a twinge of conscience for the fate to which we were about to subject them), and bade farewell\u2014though we did not know it\u2014to our last dry moments for a long, long time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "In which we suffer many privations for the sake of our research, and risk death by a variety of routes"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "An introduction to the swamp\u2014The drakefly\u2014Moulish notions of property\u2014Five visitors\u2014We are tested\n\nWords, I fear, will again fail me as I attempt to describe the environment into which we now entered. But words are what I have, along with my humble line drawings, and so I must employ my tools as best I can. For it is important that you have a clear sense in your mind of the world I inhabited for the better part of the next seven months, and keep it always in your thoughts as you read of the events that transpired there.\n\nThe first thing and the last, the thing that was there at dawn and still with me at dusk and present all through the day and the night, the thing that, it seemed, could not be escaped for even the briefest moment, was the heat. Even for a creature such as I, who passionately favors warmth over cold, it was oppressive and often foul. The high plateau that makes up much of Bayembe is arid and windy; these factors mitigate the tropical heat. But in the airless, low-lying swamp so aptly called the Green Hell, there was no such happy aid. In a region that humid, sweating brings no relief, for the air is as wet as your skin. You drip with sweat; it pours from your body; if you wipe it away then more comes to replace it in mere seconds, and all you achieve is to dehydrate yourself. So you endure the sweat, long past the point where you would give your left arm for a cool bath, and this becomes your new reality, until you cannot remember what it felt like to be dry, let alone cold.\n\nI learned to survive it. I cannot tell you how. It is a trick of the mind, one I chanced upon when I reached my absolute limit of endurance and knew there was nothing I could do to relieve my state. Somehow I accepted the situation; I acknowledged it, then laid it to one side and went on with my work. I was still filthy with sweat and longed for a cool breeze, but these things no longer consumed my thoughts. (Natalie and Mr. Wilker, I presume, must have made their own peace with the heat, for neither of them ran mad with a shotgun or tore off their clothes in a futile quest to lessen their suffering.)\n\nOther matters, however, could not be disposed of through tricks of the mind.\n\nAfter the heat, there are the insects. Gnats, mosquitoes, dragonflies, butterflies, black flies, beetles, moths. Ants and spiders; my temperate-dwelling readers cannot imagine the spiders. They are every size, from too small to see to larger than my outstretched hand, and some of them are quite viciously poisonous. Others will lay their eggs below your skin, with predictable and gruesome consequences. The ants, at least, have the courtesy to advertise their hazard; there are some, fully three centimeters in length, that are the most amazing shade of electrical blue. They warn you, very clearly, that you will not be happy if you provoke their bite.\n\nSo your skin crawls not only with sweat but with insects and their effects. In the meanwhile, you stab yourself with thorns and spines if you are so careless as to lay your hand upon a tree; and you will lay your hand, because you will lose your balance on the rough ground, or slip in mud, or tangle your foot with an unseen branch or root. The wounds inflicted by flora and fauna alike risk infection, plus even the slightest hint of blood (and yes, my female readers will be thinking now of the occurrence that sent Natalie and myself to the agban ) brings all manner of creepy-crawlies flocking to gorge themselves upon it. Leeches are not even the worst; I came to be quite sanguine about leeches, if I may be forgiven the dreadful pun. Once you overcome your disgust, it is easy to pull them off and cast them away\u2014and this I did more times than I can count.\n\nBut not all the denizens of the forest are unpleasant. Such an environment teems with life not only on the small scale but the large: guenons and mangabeys and colobus monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees, bongos and duiker and okapi, pygmy hippopotami and forest elephants and night vipers and more birds than a hundred naturalists could hope to catalogue in a year.\n\nAnd, of course, dragons\u2014but I will come to them in time.\n\nAmidst this panoply of life, humans are not easy to find. Had I given in to the impulse I entertained from time to time and gone blundering into the Green Hell without proper guidance\u2014and if I had, through divine Providence or sheer blind luck, managed to survive a month, which I doubt\u2014I still might never have found the Moulish. There are fewer than ten thousand of them in an area more than fifty thousand kilometers square, and they shift camp regularly; it is like looking for a migratory needle in a haystack the likes of which you have never explored.\n\nWith Faj Rawango guiding us, we still could not find the Moulish. We could, however, go to a place where they might find us.\n\nAfter leaving Atuyem, we traveled along the Bayembe border a hundred kilometers or so inland, keeping to the savannah, where our progress was easier. But we drew steadily closer to the broken land that fell from the plateau into the swamp, and the Green Hell loomed ever larger to my left; I stared frequently at it while we rode, even to the point of neglecting my other observations. Was it my imagination that supplied a distant sound of drumbeats? That emerald sea seemed an abyss to me, full of dragons and fevers, from which I might never emerge. Perhaps the sound I heard was only the pounding of my own heart.\n\nBut I had committed to this purpose. When at last we came to the region Faj Rawango sought, we bade farewell to the landscape that had been our home these four months, and which had grown almost comfortably familiar, and addressed ourselves to the forest below.\n\nOur descent from the plateau was swift, but we were still some way above the swamp floor when we came upon a clearing. It had obviously been hacked out of the jungle more than once, but as swiftly as men cut the vegetation away, it grew back. \"It is a place of trade,\" Faj Rawango said when we asked. \"We\u2014the villagers bring their harvest here, and the Moulish bring meat and ivory.\"\n\n\"How long will it be until they come?\" Mr. Wilker asked.\n\nFaj Rawango only shrugged. They would come when they came. It was not a formal market, to be held every four days.\n\nWe set up our tents. There is a hazard to having a party with multiple naturalists in it; we occasionally shirk our camp chores in our rush to observe the world around us. (I fear Mr. Wilker and I left Natalie to do much of that work herself.) Myself, I became distracted with only two tent pegs in the ground, because a buzzing, fluttering sound drew my eye to the trees.\n\nThe creature I observed was birdlike but, with my recent taxonomical efforts fresh in my mind, I hesitated to classify it as such. In size it was comparable to a bird, with feathers of a luminescent blue-green, and a drooping bifurcated tail. Its head, however, was distinctly draconic, with a muzzle in place of a beak.\n\nI had only a moment to observe it; then it spread its wings to fly across the clearing, and I saw the reason for the buzzing sound.\n\nLike a dragonfly, it had two long pairs of wings.\n\nI exclaimed in delight, and then had to explain the cause to my companions, who had not seen the creature. Natalie is the one who coined the term \"drakefly,\" on account of their insectoid wing configuration; Mr. Wilker objected to it, as the animals were clearly not insects of any sort, but it is the common designation even today.\n\nWe were still arguing this point the next morning, when Faj Rawango returned from the forest around our camp. His appearance stopped us short, and set both Natalie and myself to blushing, for he had discarded the wrapped garment of the Yembe, and in its place wore nothing more than the briefest of loincloths, held on his hips by a thin cord.\n\nDressed that way\u2014I might better term it \"undressed\"\u2014he seemed an entirely different man. With his Yembe trappings shed, those details which marked him as separate could no longer be overlooked: the smaller stature, the reddish cast to his skin, the leaner facial structure. He did not look like the other peoples who had surrounded us since our arrival.\n\nMr. Wilker broke the silence first, clearing his throat. \"The iron knives we brought. We'll be bargaining with those for their assistance?\"\n\nFaj Rawango shook his head. \"No bargain. We will give them the knives. They will help us.\"\n\nIt sounded like sophistry, but he appeared to believe there was a genuine difference. \"Why would they help us,\" I asked, \"if not in trade? Is there something else we will be offering?\"\n\nHe squatted down near us and picked up the pot that had contained our morning porridge. He had, I think, spent his time out in the forest not only changing his apparel, but considering how to explain the situation to us. \"This,\" he said, holding up the pot, \"isn't yours anymore. Not only yours. It belongs to the camp. Everything you have, you'll share. And they'll share with you. This is how they do things. It's how they survive.\"\n\nI quote him as exactly as I can; if his meaning is not clear, that is because the kind of society he described is foreign beyond the ability of mere words to explain, at least for all who are likely to read this account. The Moulish have few material possessions, and little concern for personal property as most of us see it. Their way of living neither permits it nor derives much benefit from it. To own more than you can carry is folly; you will have to abandon it when the camp moves. But most of the things you own\u2014if the \"you\" in this instance is Moulish\u2014are easily replaced anyway, so their abandonment is no great loss. To try and hoard more than those around you have is a grave insult to social harmony and, I think, to the spirits; it invites ridicule from your fellows and, if that fails, more aggressive methods of forcing you to share. From this the Moulish get their reputation as thieves, but that word belongs to a different world.\n\nFaj Rawango explained it as best he could, but we had little basis on which to understand him; and besides which, he was not Moulish\u2014not precisely.\n\n\"My father came from the forest,\" he said, when Natalie pressed him for his story. \"My mother was a villager in Obichuri. I went into the forest for a time when I was a boy, but came back and studied, and went to Atuyem.\"\n\nHe was an intensely private man; it took us months to expand that brief summary into something more like a story, one fleeting detail at a time. I will share the whole of it now, though\u2014as much of it as I ever learned.\n\nHis mother had belonged to one of the Sagao lineages whose traditional role is that of the griot. To this day, I cannot tell you that lineage's name; Faj Rawango never shared it. Despite the matrilineal nature of Sagao society, he was not welcomed by his mother's people\u2014likely out of distaste for his Moulish blood\u2014 and so he did not claim kinship to them. It was, I think, this same estrangement that sent him into the forest. But he declined to stay there, and upon returning to Bayembe, laid claim to the education that was his right. It did not suffice to make him a griot, but it won him a place in the civil service, and thus he came to us.\n\nWhat lineage did his mother's family serve? Not the royal one, that much I knew. How did he end up with his name? It was neither Sagao nor Moulish; I found out much later that it came from the Mouri, the people dwelling at the northern edge of the forest, who are close kin to the Moulish. I had only fragments of story, never the full tale. He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.\n\nThis, of course, is the judgment of later years. At the time, those fragments made my curiosity itch like mad. We thought we had discovered more, though, the day that a group of five Moulish\u2014two men, one old woman, and two male youths\u2014 showed up in our clearing.\n\nWe heard them coming well in advance of their appearance. It is no advantage to be silent when traveling in the Green Hell; animals will attack silent creatures. The Moulish sing and stomp as they go, making themselves sound a far larger party than they are, to scare off beasts that might otherwise trouble them. We were therefore ready when they emerged from the trees.\n\nAll were dressed in the manner of Faj Rawango, in brief strips of barkcloth hung from their hips, and (apart from the occasional ornament) nothing more. The old woman was bare-breasted like the men\u2014a sight that startled me a great deal at first, but soon became routine. (Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.) They looked at us with open curiosity, and listened with interest as Faj Rawango explained our purpose there.\n\nPhilologists say that there used to be a Moulish language unrelated to the Sachimbi family, that today only survives in some of their songs and chants. It was fortunate for our purposes, though perhaps tragic in other ways, that it has since been replaced with a language derived, through the Mouri villagers, from Yembe and other Sachimbi tongues native to the region. Because of this, while I had difficulty understanding Faj Rawango, the task of learning this new language was akin to learning Chiavoran when one has studied Thiessois. I could, by extrapolating from that common foundation, expand my vocabulary with good speed, although grammar took more time. For one such as I, with average skill at best on that front, this was a vital advantage.\n\nI was therefore able to determine that Faj Rawango greeted the two adult men as \"Brother,\" and the old woman as \"Mother.\"\n\n\"I thought he said his mother was a villager,\" Natalie whispered to me, confused.\n\n\"It may just be a title of respect,\" I whispered back. \"The men, though... Mr. Wilker, can you understand him? It sounds like he's actually claiming to be their relative.\"\n\nMr. Wilker waved me to silence, the better to listen in, then nodded. \"That's why he wants to join them in their camp. Because he's their brother. Half brothers, perhaps? They don't look much alike.\"\n\nIndeed they did not, beyond the simplest resemblance arising from their shared heritage. Faj Rawango gestured at our camp, and as if that were a signal, one of the men and both of the youths began to prowl around, examining our tents and equipment. One of the boys approached the three of us and asked a question I could not understand.\n\n\"Your names,\" Faj Rawango said. We obediently gave them, which led to much merriment on all sides; the Moulish had great difficulty pronouncing them, as we did we with theirs. The old woman was Apuesiso; the men were Natchekavu and Eguamiche; the youths were Kisamilewa and Walakpara.\n\nIt was Kisamilewa who had approached us, and his attention soon alighted on the notebook I held. He extended one hand for it, in a manner that struck me as peremptory; but, mindful of Faj Rawango's comments on property, I handed it over. Not without misgivings: it was a fresh book, not the one in which I had recorded my savannah observations, but it did have my sketch of and notes on the drakefly, as well as sundry less memorable creatures. I did not want to lose them.\n\nAnd lose them I did. Kisamilewa smiled broadly and walked off, notebook still in hand. (I did not regain it until nearly a month later.) It was, of course, a test: would we share as we were expected to? My notebook was not the only thing the Moulish claimed that day. Much of it, I realized in time, was not even \"sharing\" by their own standards; they pushed as far as they could think to go, beyond the boundaries of their usual sense of propriety. We were strangers to them, more so even than the \"villagers\" (a category encompassing not only Mouri, but every Erigan who is not Moulish), and it was necessary to see what we would do.\n\nWe handed over pots and pans, notebooks and compasses, an entire crate of gin. (A drink they returned as soon as they tried it; the taste was not at all to their liking.) I began to wonder where it would end, and no sooner had the thought but found my answer: Walakpara pointed at my blouse.\n\nI almost did it. The heat was intense\u2014I understood why the Moulish wore so little clothing\u2014and I had been insisting to myself so vehemently that I must cooperate that I almost began to undo my buttons. Mr. Wilker's gaping stare stopped me, though, as did the understanding that I would be eaten alive by insects if I stripped. (And although I had an undershirt beneath the blouse, would they not ask for that next? Would it end before I was naked?)\n\n\"I'm afraid not,\" I said firmly, in Yembe, and vowed to take the consequences.\n\nMy refusal was met, not with anger, but with laughter. Apuesiso said something to the boys; it had the sound of calling them off from the hunt. My blouse stayed on; some of our belongings were restored; and so we packed up and went to join their camp."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Entering the Green Hell\u2014Moulish society\u2014Hunting and other tasks of daily life\u2014Geguem\u2014Trousers\u2014We go deeper\n\nFaj Rawango had given us other warnings on the ride to that clearing, chief among which was to show no fear of the forest. The villagers fear it\u2014with good reason; they do not know how to survive in it\u2014and the Moulish scorn them for this; to show fear, therefore, is to mark oneself as a villager, and not welcome.\n\nIs the swamp frightening? In some ways, yes. I have mentioned the great variety of creatures that live within it; what I have not yet said is that they are invisible to the untrained eye. You hear them on all sides, but the dense growth conceals them, sometimes even when they are scarcely two meters away. It is also as near to trackless as makes no difference. The clearing in which we had camped persists only because the nearby villagers maintain it; Moulish camps vanish almost as soon as their inhabitants depart. I never did acquire the skill by which they find their way, and so following our quintet of guides felt like plunging into an abyss from which I might never return. I had been far from home before, but never had I felt so strongly that I was in a different world entirely. I could only trust to those around me, and hope it would be enough.\n\nContrary to some of the more foolish reports that have been made about my time in the Green Hell, facing the swamp with courage does not make one an \"honorary member of the tribe.\" It may suffice to win acceptance in a camp, and from time to time I did wonder whether the Moulish around me recalled any note-worthy difference between us, apart from my childlike incompetence with various tasks. (\"Childlike\" is a generous term. I might better be compared to the victim of a head injury. Moulish children are astonishingly competent, on account of not being coddled, as offspring in Scirling society are.) But the basic assumptions of life in the swamp are not those of life outside it, and although I reached the point of being able to navigate them with a degree of ease, they never became habit, much less unthinking reflex. I misstepped time and time again, and was tolerated only because of my willingness to learn from my mistakes.\n\nAs an example of this: when we came to the Moulish camp, perhaps two hours' walk from our clearing, I assumed we would be taken before some kind of chief or headman. It took me days to understand how erroneous this assumption was. The elders of their people are looked to for wisdom and advice, and their youths for judgment in times of conflict (a fact which startles me deeply even now, depending as it does on a view of the cosmos I do not share), but there is no single leader, nor even a formal council.\n\nHow could there be? If there are eight elders in camp today, there may be only six tomorrow, two having wandered off to spend time in another camp. This, also, is a source of the odd acceptance we encountered: membership in a camp is not at all a formalized thing, like the lineages of the Bayembe region. A member is someone who eats and sleeps near the others, and contributes to their work. As soon as that person leaves\u2014and they do leave, very often, while others show up\u2014that membership ends, until the next time.\n\nThis, we came to understand, was the source of our confusion over Faj Rawango's greeting to the others. Natchekavu and Eguamiche were his \"brothers\" in the sense that they were men of his own generation, nothing more. Claims that the Moulish have no concept of \"family\" are not true; they acknowledge that some people are the sons and daughters of the same parents, and such relatives often work together when they are in the same camp. But all those of a given age group within the camp are brothers and sisters, as all those above them are mothers and fathers, or (if older still) the camp's elders. Faj Rawango calling those two his brothers was simply a way of claiming the right to join their camp, and to bring the three of us with him.\n\nIt sufficed to get us in the door, metaphorically speaking. Those presently belonging to the camp\u2014about fifty altogether\u2014gathered on the open ground at the center, where Kisamilewa and Walakpara, the youths who had brought us in, explained our situation. We distributed the iron knives and a few more things besides, and assured them, through Faj Rawango, that we did not at all mind doing our share of the work. There was a stretch of time during which he was drawn in for further questioning, and the rest of us shooed to the edge of the camp. This was nerve-wracking on two accounts, the first being that we worried about the closer examination they were giving him, and the second being our inability to cope in more than the most atrociously broken Moulish with the questions we still received during that time.\n\nI cannot give you a full report of why the camp chose to accept our presence that day, any more than I can recount who said what and to whom. At the time they were all strangers to us, apart from our quintet of guides, and even those five I could only understand in snatches. I felt, indeed, as if I had suffered a head injury, and lost all comprehension of the world around me. Curiosity had a great deal to do with it, I know; the Moulish were largely unfamiliar with pale-skinned Anthiopeans. But there were deeper reasons I never fully uncovered. The decision having been made, the Moulish frowned upon us questioning it, as that might disturb the harmony created by their agreement\u2014and they prize harmony to a high degree.\n\nWhat I can tell you is that we were allowed to stamp out our own bit of forest, not quite a part of the camp but near to it, rather like the clearing in which their children played. Instead of building temporary leaf-walled huts as the Moulish did, we pitched our tents in that space, stacking the supplies and equipment between them and using a few crates for seats and tables. After some discussion with Faj Rawango, the Moulish slaughtered the donkeys who had carried our belongings from Atuyem (our horses having remained in a nearby village). Both creatures were mild-tempered enough that I did regret their fate, but as Mr. Wilker pointed out, the alternative was to wake up some morning and find nothing but a bloodstain where they had been. Better that our hosts should get the benefit of their meat, rather than some nocturnal predator.\n\nHis logic was sound, but I could not help seeing the poor donkeys as our last link with the world outside the Green Hell. With their deaths, we were committed to this course, for good or for ill.\n\nIf we wished to be successful in the mission Ankumata had given us, then we could not pursue it immediately.\n\nWe could not even pursue our broader agenda of research. If we went gallivanting after swamp-wyrms straightaway, the Moulish would have dismissed us as antisocial lunatics, more concerned with our own inexplicable desires than with the well-being of the camp. At best they would have lectured us on our lack of consideration; at worst they would have abandoned us, solving an intractable conflict in their usual manner, which is to simply walk away from it. A group as small as ours does not survive well on its own in the swamp, even with guns to help. We had to prove our worth to the camp first.\n\nFortunately, proving our worth was far from incompatible with the work of naturalism. The morning after our arrival, a deafening chorus of cicadas and other insects roused us from our sleep, followed shortly by Faj Rawango. \"Today is a hunt,\" he said, and nodded at Mr. Wilker. \"They'll expect you to come and help with the nets.\"\n\n\"What of Natalie and myself?\" I asked.\n\nHe shrugged. \"Here with the children, or making noise to drive the game into the nets. They will tell you.\"\n\nIt was a near thing that morning; the children were fascinated by everything from my clothing to my hair, and wanted the chance to study me. But I, of course, preferred to study the swamp, and so we compromised: Natalie remained behind, and I came to do my part in the hunt.\n\nThis entailed walking past what I later learned to identify as the sacred hunting fire, whose odorous smoke\u2014nearly as foul as a swamp-wyrm's breath\u2014must touch all those who go out for that task, and then navigating the intricate maze that is the natural environment of Mouleen. We were still close enough then to the swamp's edge that the land was mostly dry; farther in, one seemingly cannot go ten feet without crossing a waterway. Here I only had to wade through two narrow streams before we came to the area chosen for our day's work.\n\nIt was as Faj Rawango had said. The men (with Mr. Wilker among them) strung nets between the trees in a broad arc; then the women (myself among them) beat sticks together and shouted at the top of our lungs to frighten the game from us into that arc. Now I began to see all the creatures only my ears had detected before: tree hyraxes, talapoin monkeys, delicate little duikers. Where larger animals charged, the nets were pulled aside to let them through; the Moulish will hunt such beasts, but by different means than we used that day. The smaller ones, once caught, were clubbed or stabbed with fire-hardened spears.\n\nI had not brought my notebook, but I recorded all that I could in my memory, for commitment to paper that evening. This became the standard mode of my work for much of my time in the swamp; although we did have excursions wholly for the purpose of observation, a great deal of our data was gathered in the course of participating in the daily labors of our Moulish hosts. It is excellent training for the memory, if not quite as good for scholarly progress, which prefers to commit things to paper straightaway.\n\nI could not, however, resist asking questions. (Nor could I resist paying attention to things the Moulish considered entirely uninteresting. They are fond of giving nicknames to people; mine was soon Reguamin, which translates to something like \"woman who stares at things.\" Natalie was Geelo\u2014\"builder\"\u2014for her good assistance with huts and other such structures, and Mr. Wilker was ignominiously dubbed Epou, \"red,\" for his permanently flushed face.)\n\nOn our way back to the camp, when we reached the first of the streams, I gestured at the water. Grammar was beyond me as yet, but I knew from Faj Rawango the word I wanted. \"Legambwa?\"\n\nThe girl leading me laughed. She was no more than sixteen, I judged; her name was Akinimanbi, and in all my time with her I rarely saw her other than cheerful. Her answer meant nothing to me, but she was quickly adapting to my ineptitude, and bent to splash her hand in the water, indicating its shallowness. By way of similar motions and a few Yembe words I inquired as to the depth a swamp-wyrm would require, and got a shrug; her explanatory gesture seemed to indicate a variety of possibilities, from little more than half a meter to a channel that would merit the name of river.\n\nI pantomimed jaws latching onto my leg, and pretended to scream. Akinimanbi laughed again. That much I understood; she thought me foolish for worrying about such a thing. The significance of her waving arm, however, was opaque to me, as it seemed to indicate the trees. I had thought swamp-wyrms aquatic, but I had not forgotten the so-called arboreal snakes of Bayembe; were their lowland cousins similarly opportunistic, and known to climb? I might be eager to see dragons of any sort, but the prospect of having one drop on my head was alarming.\n\nNo dragons fell on my head during our return to the camp, nor in the days that followed. We were about three weeks in that location, with hunts every few days, and smaller excursions to gather food every morning: nuts, berries, roots, frogs, whom the Moulish ate in vast quantities, without ever seeming to dent the supply.\n\n(Because someone always asks: yes, I ate termites. Also ants, beetles, caterpillars, and the cicadas whose cacophony woke me every morning. If one is to live without the benefits of agriculture beyond sporadic trade with villagers, every source of food becomes vital. I will not, however, pretend I ever became fond of the practice. Insects are too crunchy for my taste.)\n\nDuring those three weeks, we applied ourselves assiduously to being good members of the camp\u2014a task made easier by the absence of dragons, at least that we saw. Moulish came and went, some of them drawn from other camps after word reached them of our presence; others moved to visit kin, or to get away from neighbours who vexed them. It meant constantly learning new names and, as our command of the language improved, explaining ourselves again and again; I began to feel we would never truly settle in, but be trapped forever in this limbo of novelty. But in time the questions stopped.\n\nWith the fluctuation of the camp (most of which I will gloss over here, except where it becomes pertinent), you might rightly ask whether we stayed with the same people our entire time in Mouleen. For sufficiently small values of \"the same people,\" the answer is yes. Akinimanbi, I discovered, was newly married, and she and her husband Mekeesawa shared a fire with her grandparents, Apuesiso and Daboumen. At all times except a few I will note in due course, we were always in camp with one or the other of those two couples, and often both.\n\nAs in the previous volume of my memoirs, I will not force you to toil through broken sentences that would more accurately represent my early lack of skill with the Moulish tongue. You may simply imagine that when I said to Akinimanbi, \"I've heard that the dragons here are rather bad-tempered,\" one morning shortly before we left that campsite, my phrasing was not nearly so fluent.\n\nShe shrugged, cracking nuts with great efficiency and throwing the shells into the fire. \"A hippopotamus is worse. The dragons usually won't chase you.\"\n\nI had less faith than I might in that \"usually,\" owing to my experiences with the \"usually\" approachable rock-wyrms of Vystrana. \"Do you ever hunt them?\"\n\nAkinimanbi stared at me as if I'd suggested throwing a baby into the fire along with the shells. \" Hunt them? That would be\"\u2014and she finished with a word whose meaning I could not guess. ( Geguem, which I suspect is a term left over from the older language.)\n\n\"I don't understand geguem,\" I said, apologetically.\n\nShe looked to her grandmother, Apuesiso, who was squatting on the other side of the fire. I could not imitate their posture; a lifetime of chairs has trained me out of the position. I sat on one of our crates, having discovered that sitting cross-legged on the ground meant unpleasant visitors crawling up my skirts.\n\nApuesiso was braiding a rope from some fiber I had not identified. Without pausing in her work, she sang a song, at least half of which was in the older tongue. I could not understand a word of it, and prepared to say so. But Apuesiso knew that; I think she began with the song for reasons of tradition or propriety. When it was done, she shifted without pause from music to speech. \"A long time ago, a man killed a dragon. He was ashamed of what he'd done, so he tried to hide it by getting rid of the body. He ate the meat, used the skin, and turned the teeth and claws into tools. But it was no good: the spirits knew what he had done. Geguem.\"\n\nMurder, then; or perhaps sin. \"Did they punish the man?\"\n\nBy her snort, I might have asked whether rain fell from the clouds. \"Because of him, we die.\"\n\nThe broken quality of our conversation meant I had to ask several more questions before I properly understood what Apuesiso meant. The death of the dragon was, in their view, the reason human beings are mortal.\n\nI am more a natural historian than an ethnologist; my immediate thought was to wonder how hungry that man must have been to resort to eating foul-smelling and fouler-tasting dragon meat. But of course such myths change over time; the exact phrasing owed more to the usual hunting practices of the Moulish than to the actual disposition of a dragon's body. (Indeed, I later heard another rendition of the story wherein the bones were also said to have become tools. I was far too excited about that one, until it became apparent that, no, the Moulish ancestors did not have their own method for preserving dragonbone.)\n\nBut if I have relatively little interest in the religious practices of other people, there is no surer way to draw my attention than to bring up dragons. \"Why did he kill it? Was it for food, or did the dragon attack him?\"\n\nThey laughed my questions off, as well they might. It was a myth; such narratives are not known for their exploration of the human psyche and its motivations. As well ask why Chaltaph refused the gifts of Raganit in the Book of Schisms: scholars may think up interpretations, and those are enlightening in their own fashion, but in the end the story itself gives no clear answer. But the taboo against further dragon killing was clear.\n\nI brought this up with Natalie and Mr. Wilker that afternoon, as we went through the tedious routine of washing our clothes in buckets of water collected for the purpose. (We could not use groundwater, as it was too often muddy. Fortunately, the storms that came every afternoon as regularly as clockwork made it easy to collect rain.)\n\n\"So they won't look kindly on us killing a dragon,\" Mr. Wilker said, wringing out one of his shirts. It is a credit to the man that he never once asked Natalie or myself to do his laundry for him\u2014 though on reflection, it may be more a discredit to our own clothes-washing skills, or lack thereof. We were both too gently reared to have firsthand experience with such matters; Mr. Wilker, with his working-class childhood on Niddey, knew more than we.\n\n\"About as kindly as we would look on someone pulling another fig from the Tree of Knowledge,\" I said, trying, with less than total success, to scrub mud from the hem of one of my skirts.\n\nNatalie was hanging the clean articles from a line to dry (inasmuch as they could, in the eternally damp air of that place). \"No tests on bone, then, unless you want to try and do it in secret.\"\n\nMr. Wilker and I exchanged glances, then both shook our heads. \"Not yet, anyway,\" he said. \"Too much risk of being found out and losing their goodwill.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" I added, \"it works, with modification, on both rock-wyrms and savannah snakes, who cannot possibly be related except in the most distant sense. I think we can assume it would work on swamp-wyrms as well. And as much as I would like to be able to study samples for reasons other than preservation, Mr. Wilker is right; it would lose us their goodwill, which would do more harm to our work in the long run.\"\n\nI had gone on with my skirt-washing efforts while I spoke, but my thoughts had drifted from that task; it startled me when a pair of hands appeared and took the skirt away. Mr. Wilker set it against the crate lid he was using for a washing board and began to scrub it, doing in mere seconds what would take me minutes to achieve, if indeed I could at all.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said, blushing. \"Would it scandalize you terribly if I cut that apart after it dries and turned it into trousers?\"\n\n\"Oh, please do,\" Natalie said, with vast relief. \"Then I won't feel guilty for doing the same. Skirts in this place are sheer madness.\"\n\nMr. Wilker had seen me in trousers before, in Vystrana. He had not liked it at the time\u2014but then, we had not liked each other at the time, either. He said, only a little stiffly, \"It seems the practical choice, yes.\"\n\nNatalie and I accordingly spent the evening cutting up and restitching our clothing, much to the amusement of our hosts the following morning. The only differentiation they observe in clothing the two sexes lies in how they hang their loincloths; skirts versus trousers meant little to them in that regard. But Natalie and I both felt awkward in such masculine garb, and it showed. We soon adjusted, however, and this is the origin of my practice of wearing trousers whenever I am on an expedition, which has been such an article of gossip over the years. (Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker's Club should not be counted; I was extremely drunk at the time.)\n\nOur decision was timely, as we moved camp the very next day. I have spoken already of the tendency for the Moulish to come and go from a camp; there is also the migration of a camp wholesale, when they have been long enough in an area to exhaust the nearby sources of food, and must move elsewhere to find game and wild fruits.\n\nThis created a spot of difficulty for our expedition, as we had known it must when they slaughtered the donkeys. With no beasts of burden, the Moulish carry all of their belongings with them, in baskets strung from tumplines on their heads. Although this is quite an effective method for those whose neck muscles are conditioned to it, the four of us (Faj Rawango included) could not be so described, and also had more equipment than we could carry in such fashion.\n\nOur best guess at conversion from \"distance a Moulish man carrying a burden can walk before noon\" to Scirling units told us they intended to move about fifteen kilometers farther into the swamp. Some of our things we could abandon, having discovered we had no real need of them. (A proper Moulish sentiment, and one that has become habit for me over the years.) Others we could get rid of, so to speak, by encouraging members of the camp to take them; they rarely resented us borrowing things back when we needed them. But some items\u2014foremost among them the crate of gin and the box containing our preserved dragonbone\u2014posed a genuine problem.\n\n\"Well,\" Mr. Wilker said with a sigh, \"I suppose we could conduct another experiment. Bury the bones, and see how they fare in this muck.\" He kicked at the wet soil.\n\nThat box was nailed firmly shut; the Moulish did not know what was in it, and I preferred to keep matters that way. \"Will we be able to find it again? I feel I've come to know this area quite well, but I'm sure that a week from now it will look like every other bit of swamp to me.\"\n\n\"They know the spot,\" Natalie said, fishing a machete from among our baggage. \"And I think Faj Rawango could find it again. We'll just have to ask for help. I fear, though, this is the closest thing we have to a shovel.\"\n\nWe dug the hole with two machetes and our bare hands, which would not have gone very well in more solid earth. In that terrain, however, it was more a matter of hacking through a mat of roots, then scooping away what muddy dirt remained. (And then pausing with every handful to shake off the small creatures crawling up one's arms.) This, of course, attracted an audience, but we were able to satisfy their curiosity by saying we only wanted to spare ourselves the effort of carrying the box's contents with us.\n\nEverything else went into packs and baskets and so on. Akinimanbi talked her husband Mekeesawa into taking our bottles of gin, removed from their crate and wrapped in clothing for protection; he grumbled at carrying a tumpline-hung basket \"like a youth\"\u2014grown men carried their nets and spears, not other burdens\u2014but agreed without much rancor, as the rest of us were taking on substantial loads of our own. And so, shouldering our loads, we went with our hosts to their next camp."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The heart of the swamp\u2014Leeches\u2014Egg-hatching season\u2014Hunters of knowledge\n\nI thought I had seen the Green Hell during our weeks in that first camp, but I was wrong.\n\nCompared to the swamp proper, those upper reaches are dry and scrubby, with dwarfish vegetation (however much it may tower above the trees and brush of the savannah). Once you descend into the heart of the Green Hell, you find yourself in a land of water and giants.\n\nThe trees there soar forty or fifty meters high, as if they were the pillars of some great temple. Their roots form great bladelike walls, bracing the trunks in the soil, sometimes growing closely enough that earth accumulates in between and a smaller tree begins growing in the cup thus formed. The space beneath is emerald and dim, save for where a stray beam of sunlight breaks through the many layers of vegetation to strike the ground. There the swamp grows even warmer, but at the same time the light is a glorious thing, as if it carried the voices of angels.\n\nMost of the light is to be found where the waterways grow wide enough that branches cannot fully bridge the gap. But these are rare; storms and floods along the three rivers that feed the swamp can change the landscape enough that what last year was a minor stream has now become a main artery of the delta. \"Rivers\" in Mouleen therefore have trees growing in them like islands, and are patched with sunlight like a piebald horse.\n\nWhen we came to a waterway deep and broad enough to be troublesome, or (more often) turned to follow one for a substantial distance, the Moulish paused to make simple rafts, on which they floated their belongings for ease of transport. \"Tuck the hems of your trousers into your stockings,\" Mr. Wilker said, suiting action to words. \"It will reduce the chance of you finding a leech on your leg.\"\n\n\"I think trousers just became my favourite thing in all the world,\" Natalie said.\n\nWe tucked our hems into our stockings and half-waded, half-swam downstream. When we came out again, our hosts picked leeches off their limbs with an unconcerned air. We Scirlings examined ourselves and one another; Natalie circled behind me, and I felt her tug on the fabric of my shirt. Then she made a most peculiar noise\u2014a sort of strangled moan.\n\n\"Ah, Isabella?\" she said. \"You, ah\u2014your shirt\u2014\"\n\nMy shirt had come loose from my waistband during our exertions. I put my hand to my back, very unwisely, and felt the soft, disgusting mass of a leech just above my right kidney.\n\nI fear it may damage my reputation to admit this, but I yelped and promptly began to dance in a circle like a cat chasing her tail, trying to see the leech and also to get away from it. The latter was futile; it had fastened onto me, and slapping at it with my hand was hardly persuading it to let go.\n\nThe Moulish were no help, as they found my antics utterly hilarious. Finally Akinimanbi took pity on me; while Mr. Wilker held me by the shoulders, stopping my dance, she lifted my shirt and pried the thing off. I shuddered at the sight of it, and kept shuddering for a good while afterward, obsessively running my hands over various parts of my body to make sure I had no more bloodsucking passengers, at least none of any size larger than a mosquito. (I did, as I have said, eventually become accustomed to leeches, but this being my first encounter with them, it did not proceed so calmly.)\n\nOn we went, until we came to the place the camp had agreed upon for its next site. How they identified it, I do not know; with the landscape as changeable as the shifting waters, there seemed no guarantee a location would still be where one remembered it, even if one could find it again.\n\nWith what remained of the day (and our energy), we helped the others cut away brush and saplings from the new site, trimming the detritus to make huts for them to sleep in. Pitching our own tents took longer, and when it was done, I had no will even to eat. But Natalie insisted we feed ourselves, so I swallowed a plantain and some starchy root whose name I had not yet learned, then collapsed face-first into my pillow.\n\nThis was the basis of our routine for the next several months. The camp\u2014or rather, the portion of it that consisted of us and Akinimanbi's family\u2014never stayed more than three or four weeks in any one place. We were in the depths of the rainy season now, which meant a daily deluge each afternoon, and often showers at other times of day; it is not the near-constant rainfall seen elsewhere in the world, but it is more than enough. The mountains farther inland had melted their snowcaps by now, feeding the three rivers; it began to seem that the swamp was eighty percent water and twenty percent land. Campsites were wherever the ground rose high enough to have a chance of staying above the flood. Nor were such places accidental: Mekeesawa told Mr. Wilker that they piled branches and planted certain vegetation in what passed for their \"dry\" season to ensure these miniature hillocks would persist.\n\nThere was, I began to realize, more organization to their society than met the eye\u2014though it is still nothing like as structured as those which develop in less ecologically hostile regions. The Moulish cannot afford stratification by class, nor even much in the way of gender roles; all must do what they can. But they not only understood their environment, they shaped it in small ways to suit their purposes. They also maintained a surprising degree of connection between camps, firstly through the constant migration of people, and secondly through the use of talking drums.\n\nNatalie was fascinated by these. For a people with so few material possessions, and most of those temporary, the drums were treasures: carved with elaborate designs, and carried with reverence each time the camp moved. Their use is too complex for me to explain, but the Moulish have a way of translating their language into drumbeats, which can then be used to send messages between camps. By passing a message from one camp to the next, they are able to communicate from one end of the swamp to the other, much faster than any human could carry a message. The drums therefore permit them to stay in touch with kin far away, and are often used to ask or tell where someone is, so that another may find them.\n\nMekeesawa explained this to me one afternoon, while Natalie was questioning the current drum bearer about the method of translation. He added, \"It is very useful during this season. No one wants to wander for too long.\"\n\nBy now my command of the language had improved substantially, such that I could converse with him in more than my early mixture of nouns and mime. I laughed and said, \"Because of the rain? I can understand that.\"\n\n\"The rain,\" Mekeesawa said, \"and the dragons.\"\n\nWe were not busy with any task for the camp; I judged it safe to question him, without fear that my interest would seem selfish. \"What makes them more dangerous in this season than another? Do they object to this much water?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"They love it. Full of things to eat. But this is when the eggs hatch.\"\n\nI attempted not to perk up like a scent hound that has come upon the trail of a fat, juicy rabbit, but I fear my success was middling at best. It was easy to forget that a world existed outside the Green Hell: a world, and perhaps a war. Had the Ikwunde backed off from the rivers, or were Scirling soldiers and Bayembe warriors fighting them as we spoke? I had no way of knowing.\n\nEven if open conflict had broken out, nothing I did here could affect it\u2014or so I thought. Eggs would not help Ankumata immediately. Even so, Mekeesawa's words reminded me that the oba would be waiting for us to deliver on our promise.\n\nIf the eggs were in the process of hatching, though, he would have to wait a while longer, until there was a fresh set. \"Do the dragons lay them in the water?\" I asked. \"Or on dry land, and they hatch when they become submerged?\"\n\nIt was not, I thought, an alarming question. Mekeesawa, however, clapped his hands together, which I recognized as a sign to ward off bad luck or evil spirits. \"I don't know about such things,\" he said.\n\nThe peculiarity of his response arrested me. The key factor distinguishing the Moulish from their neighbours\u2014even the closely related Mouri\u2014is not physiognomy or language; it is their relationship to the swamp they call home. They know every plant that is useful and every one that is hazardous, every insect that can poison you and every one that can be eaten for lunch. They hunt a wide variety of creatures, even hippopotami and forest elephants (against whom they use some of those poisonous insects), and are as well versed in the behaviour and life cycle of those beasts as any naturalist could hope for.\n\nNow a Moulish hunter claimed to me that he did not know where swamp-wyrms laid their eggs. You may understand, gentle reader, when I tell you this made me suspicious.\n\nI considered several possible responses and settled on, \"Many animals become quite violent if they believe you might threaten their young. I should like at least to know what to watch out for, so as not to stumble upon swamp-wyrm eggs.\" Of course I would go looking for them eventually, but this made for a more discreet way of questioning him.\n\nMuch good it did me. \"They've all hatched by now,\" Mekeesawa said.\n\n\"Yes, but if we are still here when the next set are laid\u2014\"\n\nI should have known better. Yves de Maucheret had claimed the Moulish worshipped dragons; I had seen no sign of it thus far beyond that one myth, the tale of how humans became mortal, but I should have known that something gave rise to that claim. I had clearly stumbled upon a taboo subject, and it is my fault for letting my intellectual curiosity drive me into pursuing it too directly.\n\nNo more would Mekeesawa say on the topic, and I had to restrain the urge to question others in the camp, in the hopes of finding someone more willing to speak. Instead I passed this along to the others, and we discussed how we might proceed.\n\n\"We have a fair bit of time to spare,\" Mr. Wilker said. The rainy season meant the Moulish had only to drop a net in the water to get their supper; they spent much of their day at leisure, singing and dancing, when they were not occupied with household tasks like pounding out fresh barkcloth or weaving baskets. \"We've gathered useful information for the general purpose of naturalism, but perhaps it's time we devoted ourselves more strictly to dragons.\"\n\nI nodded in agreement. We had caught distant glimpses of a few, and likely been closer to more; a swamp-wyrm who wishes to remain concealed is not easily spotted. But those glimpses had taught us very little so far. I said, \"Not pursuing eggs, of course; not immediately. But we know virtually nothing of what swamp-wyrms eat, or how they hunt, where they sleep, the differences between male and female, their mating habits...\" I ticked each item off on my fingers, and stopped when I ran out on that hand. I could have kept going. My understanding of what a naturalist did had greatly deepened in the years since Vystrana.\n\n\"We don't even know how one might safely observe them,\" Natalie pointed out; and that became our first question to answer.\n\nFor some time we had been agreeable if moderately inept members of the camp, mostly going along with the day-to-day activities of our hosts. Now that we reared our heads as naturalists, however, we met with more difficulty. Not hostility, per se, but simple confusion.\n\n\"This is the lazy season,\" Akinimanbi said, suiting inaction to words. At her side, Mekeesawa was stripping the bark from a branch to make a new spear, but his movements were desultory. He might have been a Scirling farmer, whittling wood to give his hands something to do. \"Why would you go out when you don't have to?\"\n\n\"We do have to,\" I said, and then stopped. Most of the reasons I could give her were so foreign to the world in which she lived, I might spend the next hour explaining them and still not convey my point. There was nothing like the Philosophers' Colloquium here, nor journals in which one might publish, nor acclaim given for that sort of thing. And simple scientific curiosity, as I had learned in Vystrana, rarely meant much to the people for whom my object of curiosity was their daily and sometimes disagreeable reality. (One need look no further than Scirland for proof of that: while we have naturalists who study local birds and bugs, they are far outnumbered by those whose interest lies in more distant lands\u2014myself chief among them.)\n\nAkinimanbi waited patiently while I considered how to explain myself without seeming like a madwoman. At last I said, \"If you consider the three of us to be hunters of a sort, then what we are hunting is knowledge.\"\n\nHer eyebrows went up at this, and I realized my error. \"Except it's not like your story, where the man did wrong by killing the dragon! We don't want to kill anything. Forget what I said about hunting; we gather knowledge, as you gather food. To, ah, feed our minds. Or\u2014\"\n\nAt this I stopped, because Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa both were laughing at me, slapping their thighs and rolling back where they sat. I deserved it, for the way my words had tumbled over one another; I might have explained myself, but the part about not seeming like a madwoman had been a resounding failure.\n\nBelatedly, I thought of a better way to make my point. \"Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar\u2014but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah\u2014\" Mekeesawa nodded. \"Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. \"You don't live in all those places.\"\n\nWith the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa's point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?\n\nThinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting for it.\n\nBut that day in the Green Hell, I could hardly present these books to Mekeesawa. I gave the matter my final try. \"There is a man\u2014an elder of my camp, in a manner of speaking. He has asked me to do this for him.\" That was the best explanation I could give for Lord Hilford's role as my patron. \"And if that does not make sense to you, then I can only ask you to tolerate the madwoman.\"\n\nI suspect that last suggestion was the one they accepted in the end. One way or another, we got the freedom to continue with our work\u2014and, at long last, an explanation for Akinimanbi's overhead gesture so many days before."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Traversing the flood\u2014Moulish engineering\u2014Swamp-wyrms on the hunt\u2014I miss my footing\u2014My misfortunes\u2014Witchcraft, again\n\nI have described to you how the inundation of the Green Hell made the place almost more lake than land. We had gained two newcomers to the camp since settling there, and lost five others; I had assumed they went by raft while I was otherwise occupied. But travel by raft is too dangerous during that season: apart from the usual predators, swamp-wyrms not excepted, the water swarms with small, eel-like creatures we had dubbed fang-fish, which are rapacious carnivores. To avoid these hazards, the Moulish traveled by other, more exciting means.\n\nThree of us went out with Mekeesawa; Faj Rawango elected to stay in camp, I think to mitigate any sense that we were being antisocial by pursuing our own ends. Mekeesawa took us to the end of the long spit of land on which we had pitched our camp, and we waded across a shallow stretch to another spot that was not so much island as tree. It was one of the great forest giants, tangled about with smaller parasitic trees, and he indicated to us that we should climb.\n\nTamshire's rocky soil does not support much in the way of good climbing trees; nor do Tamshire's gentry support much tree-climbing in girls. Mekeesawa clambered up with no trouble, and Natalie followed him with surprisingly little, but I required Mr. Wilker's assistance. My face, I am sure, was flamingly red by the time we reached the others; in part because of the heat, but much more because of the indelicate physical contact his aid required. We had swept aside our conversation on the hunt\u2014or rather, swept it under the rug\u2014but it is difficult to ignore questions of propriety when a man places his hand on your posterior to help you up a tree.\n\nHe, at least, could blame the redness of his skin on his Niddey ancestry. (I am not sure Mr. Wilker had stopped being red since we arrived in Nsebu.) And we were both soon distracted by what Mekeesawa had brought us up there to see.\n\nThe giant tree soared higher still, but here the parasites that clung to its trunk branched outward. In front of us those branches tangled with others from another tree; then I looked more closely, and saw the tangle was no accident at all.\n\nIt may have begun that way. But just as the island on which we camped had been built up by human action, so too had this tangle been fostered, with creeping vines binding the branches together and shaping them into\u2014\n\n\"A bridge!\" Natalie said, grinning from ear to ear.\n\nIn Scirling, I said to her, \"You truly have the soul of an engineer.\" I did not mean it as a slight, though. Nor did I mean to denigrate the bridge, especially once I discovered it was part of a semiformal network extending across various parts of the swamp. During most times of the year this elevated system is more trouble than it's worth to use, but when the waters rise high, it allows the Moulish to traverse the places where dragons and other predators are likely to lurk.\n\nAs works of building go, it may not be as obviously impressive as a Nichaean aqueduct or a Yelangese highway. But I defy anyone to stand at the end of a Moulish tree-bridge and not be impressed.\n\nI also defy them not to be the slightest bit nervous about committing their weight to such a structure. Mekeesawa went first, examining the bridge and pausing occasionally to weave a branch in where it would grow to reinforce the whole. While the process was fascinating to observe, it did not exactly foster confidence.\n\nWe three Scirlings exchanged dubious looks. \"There are two ways to approach this,\" Natalie said. \"Mr. Wilker, you are the heaviest of us. If you go first, the bridge will be the least damaged and most able to support your weight; however, that may increase the risk for Isabella and myself. If we go first, you will have some warning as to its structural integrity... but it may also be damaged, and therefore unsafe, by the time you cross.\"\n\nMekeesawa was by then on the other side, and waving impatiently for us to come. \"It must be quite safe,\" I said, and made myself approach the end of the bridge. \"The Moulish cross these things all the time.\"\n\n\"The Moulish,\" Mr. Wilker muttered, \"weigh half what I do\"\u2014which was only a minor exaggeration.\n\nI drew in a deep breath and set my foot on the branch, gripping a nearby vine as if my life depended upon it (which I hoped it would not shortly do). The structure I faced was to what I would call a \"bridge\" what a rope ladder is to a staircase: it might support my weight, but that did not make it reassuring. Sparing a moment to bless once more the decision to dress in trousers, I slid my other foot past my ankle, settling it just beyond the point where another branch crossed my main support. Bare feet, I realized, would be much better for this task, being able to bend and grip the surface\u2014 but only if those feet belonged to a Moulish woman, mine being far too tender for the task. The branches and vines I gripped were, at least, blessedly thorn-free; at this height, they had much less to fear from passing herbivores. Step by step, I proceeded.\n\nIt is inevitable, I suppose, that halfway through such an undertaking, one will commit the error of looking down.\n\nBeneath me lay a lacework of branches and vines too thin to support my weight if I fell; beneath that \u2014vertiginously far below\u2014the water was a murky, green-brown plate, broken only by the wake of something swimming just beneath the surface.\n\nI forced myself to look away and breathe through my nose, preventing the hyperventilation that would have made me dizzy. When I finally forced myself to take the next step, my shoe slipped a few centimeters: not enough to imperil me, but more than enough to set my heart racing. The half-dozen steps it took to reach Mekeesawa seemed to take forever\u2014but then, at last, I was safe.\n\nWhether Natalie and Mr. Wilker had similar difficulties, I cannot tell you, for I was busy restoring strength to my now jellylike limbs. Once we had recovered, Mekeesawa led us onward to a place where he said we could likely observe the dragons\u2014 including some of their young.\n\nThis was an area low-lying enough that it had been thoroughly drowned by the flood, with only the tips of underbrush poking up here and there in the water to show there was anything between the trees. Swamp-wyrms love such territory; it is full of fish, frogs, and other bite-size snacks. Much of their diet comes from these sources, but they do also pursue more substantial targets; and here, as in the savannah, we did not have to wait long before we saw this demonstrated before our eyes.\n\nThe manner of it was quite similar; only the environment differed. In the trees across the way from where we sat, a troupe of colobus monkeys had begun a chattering argument amongst themselves. One of them so offended another that the second took to flight, branch to branch across an overhanging tree; and so it met its end.\n\nA ripple of disturbance made a traveling V along the water's surface, our only warning of the dragon. And scant warning at that; an instant later, the swamp-wyrm burst above the surface, lunging into the air with jaws extended\u2014snap! And the monkey was gone. A great wave spread as the wyrm splashed down. The colobus troupe fled in a panic, but one of them missed his grip upon the next branch and fell. He floundered only briefly in the water before the lithe, mud-green body eeled over to him and sent him to join his brother.\n\nThis is not the only way swamp-wyrms hunt, of course. They will, like crocodiles, snap up creatures that wander too close to the water's edge, as well as those in the water with them. In the drier reaches of the forest, they will behave more like arboreal snakes, concealing themselves beneath brush or twining around a tree. This semi-aerial hunting, however, is their most striking characteristic. When they swim, they fold their wings up into something like a fin that helps them steer at speed; then, when they are ready to strike, they extend their wings and use them rather like the arms of a ballista to propel themselves into the air. Sometimes one will lurk beneath his prey and bring his mouth just to the surface of the water; then he will patiently expel his extraordinary breath (which readers of the first volume may recall is a noxious fume) until the creatures above are so overcome that they drop. The result is rather like manna from heaven\u2014at least if you are a swamp-wyrm.\n\n\"It's very like a savannah snake,\" Mr. Wilker said when the dragon had subsided once more. \"They may be more closely related than we thought.\"\n\nNatalie's mind was on more immediately physical matters. \"I've never seen a wing fold like that. How on earth are those joints structured?\"\n\nWithout killing and dissecting one, answering that question would be difficult. But we had more than enough to occupy us, trying to estimate the size of the beast (from our brief glimpse of it), querying Mekeesawa about how that compared to the usual run of swamp-wyrms, and guessing at the number of colobus monkeys a dragon would have to eat each day in order to keep itself in good health.\n\nMr. Wilker climbed a tree to study the water, calling down observations regarding the movement patterns of the creature, while Natalie exhorted him to be careful he was not eaten himself. I took my sketchbook from the small bundle I had lashed to my back and put down a loose collection of lines, but what I had observed thus far was grossly insufficient to let me make a good drawing. I had seen the one Velloin captured, but it was a malformed runt, and much inclined to curl into a sullen ball. I remembered well enough that the legs were set more like a crocodile's than those of a terrestrial dragon, but not their exact disposition, and of the jointing of the wings I had little idea, on account of the runt's deformities.\n\nIndeed, it took many observational trips before we had good data on such matters. But those trips took longer than they should have, because of the difficulties we\u2014or more precisely, I \u2014encountered.\n\nIt began on the journey back to camp, when I fell into the swamp.\n\nWe had crossed two tree bridges on the way to that spot; those traverses had been enough to reassure me that the structures would bear our weight. Perhaps that reassurance made me careless; I cannot say. I believe I was still as cautious as any woman might be who is trusting her life to a few branches woven together with vines. But on the second bridge, not far at all from camp, I misstepped, and found myself off balance. I reached for a vine\u2014it tore\u2014I windmilled my arms, trying to recover\u2014I struck a nearby branch\u2014and then I was falling.\n\nThe instinct to flail for support was still active, and it saved my life. My right hand caught a lower branch, and if its bark tore half the skin from my fingers and palm, it slowed my descent. Slowed, not stopped: when the limb finished bowing beneath my weight, my arm was nearly yanked from its socket, and I lost what grip I had. Like that second monkey, I fell into the water, and you may recall that the purpose of these bridges is to lead the Moulish safely past the areas where dragons and other perils may lurk.\n\nI hit the water with a slap, driving down hard enough that I sank almost to my knees in the soft mud below. That came as near to killing me as the fall or any predator did; had I not managed to pull myself free, I might have drowned in short order. But pull I did, with all the strength that a good dose of panic can bestow. Then I kicked to the surface and sucked in a great gulp of air, and at that point I was home and dry, apart from being in the middle of some dragon's possible hunting pool.\n\nA commotion off to one side was the two men hurling themselves down the tree as fast as they could go. I struck out toward that sound, trying not to splash too much. My thoughts kept returning to that smooth ripple across the water, and the swift death that had followed. Would a swamp-wyrm attack something as large as a human woman?\n\nThe general answer to my question is yes. But as it turned out, that was the least of my worries.\n\nMy fall had sent everything in the water darting away, but now they were returning. I felt movement past my limbs, and then a sharp pain on my left arm: one of the eel-like fangfish had found me, and buried its sharp teeth in my flesh.\n\nIt had already been imperative that I get out of the water, but with this, my situation became dire. Fangfish will come to the scent of blood, and a school of them could tear me to pieces, leaving nothing but a skeleton behind.\n\nAs with the leech, I reacted on terrified instinct, seizing the fangfish and ripping it free. My blood made a dark ribbon in the muddy water. I retained sufficient presence of mind to shout for Mr. Wilker to stay out; he had reached the shore, and was plainly about to throw himself in, but it would help not at all for both of us to be chewed on. Heedless now of splashing, I redoubled my efforts, and soon came within reach of his arm; he gripped my wrist and hauled me from the water.\n\nMy breath sobbed in my chest, from exertion and fear alike. But I was safe now\u2014or so I thought, until I heard Mekeesawa shouting in alarm. Heart pounding, I turned to look over my shoulder, expecting that narrow and graceful V.\n\nWhat I saw instead was the charging thunder of a pygmy hippopotamus.\n\nYou may laugh; hippos are absurd-looking creatures, and the term \"pygmy\" suggests a pocket-size version. But your average pygmy hippo weighs more than two hundred kilograms and will beat the living daylight out of anything that trespasses in its waters. It is smaller and less vicious than its savannah-dwelling cousin, but this is like saying that a tornado is smaller and less destructive than a hurricane. While true, that does not mean it cannot wreak havoc.\n\nMr. Wilker and I prepared to run. But Mekeesawa, knowing what we did not, urged us back up into the branches instead.\n\nWhich is how I came to be treed by a furious, porky creature that would have cheerfully employed its silly little legs to stomp me into the mud. Once roused, hippos cannot be trusted to stop at defending their waters; they will chase the intruder, and can often outrun him. The one benefit of the entire debacle was that the creature's bellows of rage drew the attention of the nearby camp, and some of the hunters came and killed it; we dined upon hippo meat that night.\n\n(This, you may be interested to know, is the incident which pesuaded me to wear trousers at all times while in the field. I no longer cared what others thought proper; I was all too aware that I never knew when I might have to swim, run, or climb a tree to escape an angry beast. I may risk my life on a regular basis\u2014or I did in my youth\u2014 but I will not do so in the name of mere propriety.)\n\nI had torn a great deal of skin from my hand, wrenched my shoulder, and thoroughly jammed my legs with my landing in the mud. This slowed our progress, and as I indicated above, it was only the first of many setbacks.\n\nTo this day, I maintain that the difficulties we suffered were only the natural consequence of doing strenuous work in a hazardous environment. I have been in other hazardous places before and since\u2014Vystrana; the Akhian desert; anywhere politicians may be found\u2014but I think only the Mrtyahaima peaks equal the Green Hell for sheer lethality. Even the Moulish, who know the region better than any, suffer a great deal of hardship as a result of living there. Had we not encountered difficulties, it would have been a clear sign of supernatural blessing.\n\nBut I cannot deny that the dragon's share of those problems fell upon my head. It was I, not Mr. Wilker or Natalie, who fell from that bridge. I am the one who, on a subsequent day, was bitten by a venemous snake; I am the one who fell inglorious victim to an intestinal parasite, which had to be purged with a careful dose of strychnine. I broke two fingers on two separate occasions, attracted leeches like iron filings to a magnet, and knocked one of my sketchbooks into the campfire one night. I was, in short, a recurrent disaster.\n\nThe effect of this upon my mood was if anything worse than the incidents themselves. In Vystrana I had ostensibly been my husband's companion and secretary to the expedition; here I was supposed to be an equal partner with Mr. Wilker, yet I felt incompetent in comparison. It raised the spectre of our old strife\u2014less, I should say, through any fault of his, and more through my own self-doubt. I tried harder to prove my worth (which led to things like the broken fingers), bore an unjustified grudge against Mr. Wilker for seeming proof against all perils, and generally made an utter shrew of myself. (How the two of them never gave in to the urge to chuck me into the swamp, I will never know.)\n\nThe most detrimental effect, however, was upon our pursuit of a certain goal.\n\nI had not forgotten the matter of dragon eggs. Remembering Mekeesawa's reticence on the subject, I tried asking Akinimanbi; Natalie's theory was that the Moulish had a gender taboo, and such things were considered the proper province of women.\n\nAs theories go, it was not a bad one, but in this case it was incorrect. It might have been a seasonal taboo\u2014eggs not to be spoken of in the season of their hatching\u2014but I did not know enough to suspect such a thing, and in any event that was not it either. This frustrated me enough that I began to press more sharply than was polite.\n\nWhich did not earn me an answer, but did give me something else. Akinimanbi rounded on me at the edge of camp and said, \"Why should I tell you? You're cursed!\"\n\nBy then the \"camp\" had dwindled to Akinimanbi, her husband, her grandparents, and our crew of four. This was usual for the season; later they would come back together in larger groups. I had cause to be grateful for the smallness of the camp, as it meant the embarrassment of our argument was seen only by a few. \"What do you mean, I am cursed?\"\n\n\"All these accidents,\" Akinimanbi said, gesturing at my splinted finger. \"A witch has put an evil spell on you, Reguamin. Everyone knows it. No one will tell you anything until you deal with it.\"\n\nBefore the last division of the camp, some of the youths had been telling stories in my presence\u2014quite loudly\u2014about people under the influence of witches. I had not realized their stories were meant as a coded message to me. It was the same notion I had gotten from the grandmother in that village, when Natalie became ill with malaria; and I had as little patience for it now as I did then.\n\n\"No one has put a spell on me,\" I said, \"evil or otherwise. It's simply bad luck. Or who are you saying has done this? Your husband? Your mother? One of the people who has been with us in camp?\"\n\n\"The witch doesn't have to be here,\" she countered. \"It could be a villager. Or someone in the land you come from.\"\n\nThat struck me as very convenient. Blame misfortune on someone not even present: it was the same as saying the Lord did it, with an extra helping of blame. \"No one in my land practices witchcraft,\" I said. \"If anyone does such things, it's your own people.\"\n\n\"Everyone practices witchcraft,\" Akinimanbi said forcefully, stepping closer. With my advantage of height, she should not have been able to glare down at me, but somehow she gave the impression of doing so. \"They practice it in their hearts, when they become angry or upset. Maybe your brother here in camp lusts after you, but you won't marry him, so his heart works witchcraft against you. Maybe you have a child who wasn't mourned properly, and so its spirit has cursed you. Who have you wronged?\"\n\nI thought of the tension between myself and Mr. Wilker, my mother's disapproval, Lord Denbow's fury at Natalie's disappearance. But if he were working witchcraft, would it not target his daughter instead?\n\nIt was all nonsense, just like the legend of Zhagrit Mat. I even wondered for a moment if one of the Moulish might be responsible for my misfortunes. But no; it was simply bad luck, and I said so.\n\n\"Bad luck has a cause, Reguamin,\" Akinimanbi told me darkly. \"If you spent your time staring at the right things, you would understand. Until you take care of it, the bad luck will not go away.\"\n\nAnd she would not tell me what I wanted to know. Controlling my impatience and frustration as best I could, I said, \"Assuming for a moment I believe a word of this... how would I take care of it?\"\n\nEven the hypothetical possibility of my cooperation made her look relieved. \"Find the cause. Think who you've wronged, and make peace with them. Undo the witchcraft.\"\n\nI could hardly go back to Scirland for a tearful reconciliation with my mother. \"I will think about what you've said,\" I told Akinimanbi, and hoped that would be the end of it.\n\nBut the worst, of course, was yet to come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Yellow jack\u2014The dragon roars\u2014Akinimanbi's argument\u2014The ritual\u2014Natalie and Mr. Wilker\u2014My confession\n\nYou may recall that I praised Natalie Oscott in an earlier segment of this narrative, for not being so foolish as to attempt to press on with her work when she suspected that she might have contracted malaria.\n\nI was less sensible than she.\n\nMy excuse\u2014and it is a poor one\u2014is that I already felt a keen sense of my insufficiency, owing to the string of misfortunes I had suffered. My broken fingers had healed enough for me to be of use once again; I did not want to delay us more, or put my share of the burden on Mr. Wilker and Natalie. (No, that phrasing is too noble, though I shall leave it for posterity. I did not want to surrender to others' hands what contributions I might now make.)\n\nWhen I felt the first stirrings of a headache, therefore, I shrugged them off. The ache in my body I attributed to the ongoing lack of a proper bed; stiff muscles were a familiar problem, and if they pained me more now than before, surely that did not mean anything. Nor did my lack of appetite, which could be attributed to weariness with a diet of hippo meat, honey, and termites, and a craving for the familiar comforts of home\u2014never mind that I felt no such craving, not even for foods that were ordinarily a pleasure. Part of me recognized the peril in these signs, but I was not yet ready to admit their significance, not even to myself.\n\nThat stage of my denial may, perhaps, be excused. But as the day wore on, I began to shiver, and then I acted like a proper fool: I strove to conceal my shudders from the others, knowing they would insist we return to camp at once. The three of us had found a swamp-wyrm wrapped around a tree, lying in wait for unwary prey, and I had at last a good opportunity to draw it; I told myself that the opportunity should not be wasted, and that evening would be soon enough for me to lie down and rest.\n\nBut soon my hand began to shake badly enough that it affected my work. And Natalie, who had been crouched where she could study the jointing of the dragon's wing, noticed.\n\n\"Isabella,\" she whispered, in a tone of concern.\n\nBefore she could say anything further, my lack of appetite abruptly asserted itself in the other direction. I dropped my sketchbook and vomited into the underbrush, and from there matters only got worse.\n\nThe dragon fled, which brought Mr. Wilker back to us, and he wasted no time in lecturing me as I deserved (though at the time I was bitterly angry with him for it). He insisted we return to camp on the spot, and I was no longer in any condition to argue; indeed, I was in no condition to walk. Before long he resorted to carrying me, and by such ignominious means did I find myself back in my tent.\n\nOnce laid on my pallet, I moaned and curled into a ball. Mr. Wilker, about to depart, stopped and turned back. \"What is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"My back,\" I said. \"It aches.\"\n\nHe dropped to his knees and rolled me over against my protests, peeling back my eyelids with careful fingers. Whatever he saw there made him recoil. \"God almighty. This isn't malaria.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nI will never forget the look of abject fear in his eyes. \"I think you have yellow fever.\"\n\nAnd so I did. The early stage is much like malaria; the back pain and sometimes a yellowing of the sclera in the eyes are what distinguish the two. For the next three days I shuddered and sweated on my pallet, alternately attempting to take sustenance and refunding it a short while later. It was like a dreadful case of the 'flu\u2014dreadful first because it was so physically unpleasant, and second because I knew the peril I was in. Yellow jack rarely kills Erigans; they most often contract it in childhood, and afterward are immune, as we Scirlings are with measles or the pox. But for those of us not exposed to it from an early age, it can be very hazardous indeed.\n\nI knew all this, and yet when my fever abated, I still fell prey to the unfounded optimism that accompanies the course of the disease. \"I feel quite better,\" I insisted, and ate a hearty meal to prove it. \"We shall be back at work tomorrow.\"\n\nBut Mr. Wilker would not let me take refuge in hope. \"If you remain healthy for a week,\" he said, \"then we may consider it. Until then, you rest.\"\n\nHe was, of course, correct. Some people escape yellow fever that easily, but I was not among them. Shortly after my apparent recovery, I entered the second, and far worse, stage of the disease.\n\nI can tell you very little of what happened during those days, at least from my own perspective. I was delirious with fever and pain, which rendered my memories little more than a hallucinatory smear of impressions. Natalie told me afterward that Akinimanbi's grandmother Apuesiso stripped me bare and coated me in cool mud, changing it as necessary to bring my fever down; this explains why, when I came to my senses, I was filthy and naked even by the minimalist standards of the Moulish. She also told me I vomited black bile, which is a terrible sign and heralds death more often than not. I dreamt of the talking drums, pounding out my doom. I shook and I raved; I sweated blood out my pores, and where the mud did not cover me my skin was gold with jaundice. In short, I nearly died\u2014a phrase I can write with equanimity only because it was so long ago, and because I have the reassurance of knowing I survived. (As you can plainly tell, for I am not writing this memoir from beyond the grave.)\n\nBut at the time, it was nothing short of terrifying, even once the worst was past. Knowing that, having recovered, I was thereafter proof against further infections comforted me little; I had thought myself recovered before, only to be dragged under once more by the second stage of the fever. I lived in fear that this new reprieve was likewise temporary, and I would soon succumb entirely.\n\nMy will to live was sufficient to make me bathe, so that I could dress once more in something other than mud. But my enthusiasm for our research was shattered by the conviction that the Green Hell was going to kill me.\n\nIn this fragile state did the dragon find me.\n\nIf you have never been seriously ill, you cannot understand how sensitive your mind is afterward, how easily jarred by the world around you. But remember that state, if you have experienced it, and imagine it if you have not.\n\nNow imagine that a sound begins in the forest, beyond range of your sight. It is a snarling, roaring sound, which your tired, sensitive mind immediately tries to identify, fitting it to one beast or another you have seen. You fail, because this is nothing like any animal call you have heard before, and this failure makes you afraid. Is the creature something new, or is your mind going to pieces?\n\nBefore you can answer that question, the sound changes. It draws closer, in a trampling rush that paralyzes you where you sit. And then something comes bursting between the trees, a beast like none in all the world, with a terrible maw and a seething, many-legged body behind it, which snarls and rages in a swift circle around you, then turns its fury upon your camp. It knocks down tents, flings your belongings into the dirt, scatters the fire and stomps your clothing into the ashes. It is chaos and noise incarnate, and if you were healthy and well rested you would recognize it as nothing more than someone wearing a wooden dragon mask, with others trailing behind it under cover like a Yelangese festival puppet.\n\nI was not healthy, nor well rested, and I had never seen such a puppet. I shrieked and cowered, the noise and destruction too much for me to encompass. The dragon saw my fear and fed it, rushing at me again and again\u2014and then, with one final snarl, vanished back into the forest.\n\nSilence fell, more complete than any I had heard since coming to the Green Hell. The display had shocked even the natural beasts of the swamp into quiet.\n\nJust as I began to regain my breath, Mr. Wilker broke the silence. Red with rage, he stormed forward, to where Apuesiso was picking herself up from the dirt. He swore the air blue in Scirling, then mastered his tongue enough to speak in a language she would understand. \"What is the meaning of this? Your people have just destroyed half our things! They've terrorized Isabella\u2014is this how you treat a woman only barely recovered?\"\n\n\"It is how we warn those who do not listen.\"\n\nThe voice was not Apuesiso's. I turned, still trembling, and saw Akinimanbi standing a little way behind us. She and Mekeesawa had not been with our camp in some time\u2014not since before I fell ill. When had she returned?\n\nOnly just now, by the surprise with which Mr. Wilker and Natalie faced her. Akinimanbi nodded to her grandmother. \"She sent word of what happened, through the drums. We brought the legambwa bomu. It is a thing we do, when people ignore the advice of those around them.\"\n\nThat gave me the strength to rise to my feet. \"You are saying I brought this upon myself? How? And what is this\u2014this destruction supposed to teach me?\"\n\n\"It teaches us all,\" Akinimanbi said, gesturing around the camp. Following her hand, I saw that Apuesiso and her husband Daboumen had not been spared the pseudo-dragon's wrath: it had torn leaves from the roof of their hut, smashed their meat-drying rack, broken the new spear Daboumen had been working on. \"We have made noise in the world, and so it comes back to us. We are all to blame for letting it reach this point.\" Her gaze came back to me, its weight almost palpable. \"You know what the noise is, Reguamin. You must root it out, before it kills you.\"\n\nNoise, to the Moulish, was not simply unpleasant sound. It was a disruption to social harmony. And Akinimanbi directed her words to me, as the pseudo-dragon, the legambwa bomu, had directed its roars.\n\nEven with my body and spirit exhausted by fever, I did not believe in witchcraft. But I had submitted before to foreign rites, in order to reassure those around me\u2014could I not do the same here?\n\nIt depended on the rites in question. The Vystrani might have been Temple-worshippers, but at least they were Segulist. I did not know what might be required of me here.\n\nThere was a simple way to find out. I drew in a deep breath, stiffening my weak knees, then went forward so I could talk to Akinimanbi without others listening in. \"What would I have to do, to rid myself of this ill?\"\n\nShe said, \"Witchcraft is caused by the evil in people's hearts. It unbalances the world and makes problems for everyone. Whatever evil is in your heart, you have to let it go.\"\n\nI could not contain a weary snort. \"It's that simple? I decide to let go of whatever troubles me, and all will be well?\"\n\nAkinimanbi shook her head. \"Maybe others resent you. Maybe your brother and sister\"\u2014by which she meant Mr. Wilker and Natalie\u2014\"or people who aren't here. Have you done something to offend them?\"\n\n\"I can hardly mend bridges with people all the way back in my homeland.\"\n\n\"Apologize to them anyway,\" she said. \"Here, in camp. We will hear you, and so will the spirits.\"\n\nHer advice struck me as oddly Segulist. The New Year lay several months off as yet, but she was urging me to repent of and atone for my errors. Had I not known better, I would have wondered whether sheluhim had come to the Green Hell after all, or some shred of our religion filtered through into the Moulish world. I think, however, that such practices are simply a basic human impulse. If we cannot ask for and receive forgiveness, how can any society survive?\n\nI have never been a very good Segulist, though, and I still did not accept the notion that following Akinimanbi's counsel would end my misfortune. With all the dreary pessimism of my half-dead state, I told her as much.\n\nHer reply was pragmatic and eye-opening. \"Is that a reason to stay silent?\"\n\nThere was no good answer to that. All the things I feared\u2014 giving in to superstition, humiliating myself in front of others, tearing the scabs off wounds I was happier ignoring\u2014did not outweigh Akinimanbi's point. My spirit was not easy; it ached under the weight of all the things I had not said, even to myself. Even if that was not the cause of my woes, would it not be better to lay that burden down?\n\nAnd\u2014lest you think my motives were purely noble\u2014I suspected that going along with her plan would also remove the barrier that stood in the way of my research.\n\n(Admitting to such mercenary thinking will not reflect well on me, but I do not want anyone thinking I am one of the Righteous. The driving force in my life has always been my passion for draconic research, and although I have tried to be fair in my dealings with others as I pursue that goal, my motivations are not what you could call selfless.)\n\n\"Very well,\" I said, resigning myself to this fate. \"Show me what to do.\"\n\nI did not speak of what followed for many years after the fact. It was too personal, not only for myself, but for Natalie and Mr. Wilker, and while I may choose to expose my every flaw here in this text, I have no right to decide the same for them. Before he passed away, however, Mr. Wilker gave me permission to tell others what he said that day, and everything Natalie said became public eventually, in its own fashion. What Faj Rawango and our Moulish hosts said was, to their way of thinking, behind them as soon as the event ended; they do not object to others mentioning it later, so long as it is not done to encourage further discord. Furthermore, it feels contrary to the spirit of the event itself to dishonestly recount what we said. I will therefore set it down with as much precision as memory permits.\n\nThe Moulish, of course, have ceremonies for such things. The youths who had made up the legambwa bomu rejoined us, as did Mekeesawa, and we all seated ourselves around the central fire of the camp\u2014a significant place, as it is both literally and metaphorically where they come together as kin. Certain leaves were thrown into the fire, creating fragrant smoke, and we scooped this smoke with our hands as if we were hunters departing with our nets. The leaves may have soporific qualities; I cannot say for sure. It is possible that the feeling of quiet contemplation that settled over me was simply the consequence of my choice.\n\nI began by making my apologies to the camp. \"We came here not to aid you and act as kin, but to learn about dragons. We want this knowledge for our own people\u2014\" I caught my phrasing, stopped, and began again. \" I want this knowledge for my people. They will respect me more if I learn things they do not know. But they will not respect you for knowing it, because you are of a different people. I was going to present the knowledge as my own, even though you helped me gain it. That is not fair to you, and I am sorry.\"\n\nOur hosts clapped their hands, to banish the evil in my words. Then Akinimanbi said, \"I have been impatient with your ignorance, Reguamin. You try, but you are like a child; I have to spend much of my time telling you what to do or what is going to hurt you. It makes for more work.\" She cupped one hand over the bare skin of her belly. \"But I carry a child now, and teaching you has prepared me to teach my son or daughter. I should not have resented you.\"\n\nDutifully I clapped my hands, but my cheeks heated with embarrassment. I was a world traveller, a natural historian, and beginning to think of myself as intrepid, even if that sense had taken a beating of late. Being called an ignorant child put me quite neatly in my place.\n\nMekeesawa spoke next. \"My brother left to join another camp because he did not like having you among us. I had not seen him since before the floodwaters rose. I thought about going to visit him, but I did not want to leave Akinimanbi, and she did not want to leave you. Finally I insisted we go, and she agreed\u2014but while we were gone, your troubles grew worse. She might have stopped it, if she had been here. I took that from you; and I was angry at you for being the reason I have not seen my brother, and for claiming so much of my wife's attention. Forgive me.\"\n\nOn it went, through Akinimanbi's grandparents and the others in camp. It was an eye-opening experience; despite living among them all these months, we had not seen the effects of our presence very clearly. Our willingness to do our part, however ineptly, had won us a degree of tolerance; but our ineptitude, and the burden it imposed on those around us, was greater than we had realized. I saw that understanding dawn on Natalie and Mr. Wilker, even as it did on me. They were not the focus of this undertaking, being not the ones supposedly targeted by witchcraft, but the arrangement of it was such that we could not help but all be made aware of some of our errors.\n\nFaj Rawango kept his words simple, because of our Moulish audience. \"You made a promise,\" he said. \"You have not yet carried it out. If you are set on keeping your word, then I do not believe witchcraft will come on you\u2014but if you are reluctant in your heart, it will.\"\n\nMy promise to the oba. Was I set on keeping my word? I honestly did not know. I should not have made that promise so blindly; I had sworn to give Ankumata something that belonged to another people, without understanding its value to them. I still hoped that, when I learned more, a solution would reveal itself\u2014 but what if it did not? Which obligation would I honour: my promise, or the debt I owed to the people around us now?\n\nWhen it came time for Natalie to speak, she hesitated and looked around the fire. \"I\u2014I don't think I can say this in your language. Not easily.\"\n\nDaboumen flapped one hand at her. \"Your words are for your sister and for the spirits. They will understand you.\"\n\nI confess I felt relief at that. The Moulish might be watching, but what we Scirlings had to say, we would say only to one another. Natalie looked equally glad. In our language she said, \"The truth is that I'm not sure what to say. I think you were an idiot not to admit you were unwell, but apart from that, there's very little I resent you for, and far more to make me grateful.\"\n\n\"Your father would not agree,\" I said ironically. \"If there is anyone minded to curse me, I think it may be him.\"\n\nNatalie shrugged. \"Apologize to him if you will, but not to me. While I do not think this is the life for me\u2014I miss my bed too much\u2014it has given me the courage, and I think the freedom, to pursue the life I do want.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" I asked, curious.\n\nShe blushed and glanced sidelong at Mr. Wilker. \"I\u2014do you remember what I said to you before we left Scirland? About things I was not interested in?\"\n\nHer reddened cheeks directed my memory. She did not want the touch of a man. \"Yes, I remember.\"\n\n\"While we were in Atuyem, I found out that sometimes co-wives will... provide one another with affection. I have wondered, from time to time, whether that is what I want. But I\u2014well. Suffice it to say that I have tested my theory, and proved it false. I enjoy the company of women a great deal, but I honestly do not think I want anything, ah, more.\"\n\nBy now her blush was fierce, despite her oblique phrasing, and Mr. Wilker's expression far too stiff to pretend he had not caught her meaning. Sometimes a widow's companion provided her with more than just a friend, though such arrangements were not spoken of in polite society. I wondered with resignation whether those rumours had begun making the rounds as well.\n\n\"I understand, Natalie,\" I said. \"And you are welcome to stay with me for as long as you please. If you do not want to join me on expeditions\u2014\"\n\n\"I honestly think I would like to work,\" she said. \"At a proper career, I mean. But that is something we can talk of later.\"\n\nGiven a choice, I would have preferred to go on talking about whatever career she had in mind, rather than continuing with this ceremony. But the Moulish were waiting, and Mr. Wilker had not yet had his turn. Natalie and I clapped; the others followed suit; and now I had nothing left with which to delay.\n\nHe sighed. \"Where to start.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" I said involuntarily, glad all over again that we were speaking Scirling. \"That bad, is it?\"\n\nMr. Wilker scrubbed one hand across his face. \"No, not that bad. But we have never been very good at saying things to one another, have we?\"\n\nI had to grant the point. \"We resented one another in Vystrana, for certain. I thought you low-class\u2014which was entirely arrogant of me, and I'm sorry for that. But I also resented you for being a man, and not having to justify your presence on the expedition. You were skilled, and that was enough. I had to ride my husband's coat-tails.\"\n\n\"No coat-tail could have brought you in if Lord Hilford did not think you qualified,\" Mr. Wilker said. \"Which I did not see at first. But even once you had proved yourself... I mean no slight against the earl, who has been exceedingly generous to me. But my position is far from secure. I feel the necessity, every day, of proving myself to him and to the world, and I have spent far too much time worrying that...\" He trailed off, and I could tell he had gone further into the truth than he meant to. But having gone that far, he could not retreat, and so he finished what he had begun. \"Worrying that I would lose my place to you.\"\n\nStartled, I said, \"But you have so much knowledge I lack!\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014but you amuse him. I don't mean to belittle you by saying that, either. Lord Hilford likes to shock people, and he likes other people who do the same. Getting as far as I have, though, has depended on caution, on never offending those whose toleration and aid I need. I may be a good assistant for him, but I am not what he looks for in a prot\u00e9g\u00e9.\"\n\nWe were indeed headed for territory through which our command of the Moulish language could not have borne us. I said, \"I have wondered from time to time which of us faces the more difficult obstacles. A lady can be taken as an exception to the rules, if her breeding is good enough; mine will carry me this far, at least. You cannot escape your own breeding as easily. But I think that, in time, the quality of your work will win you a place in the Philosophers' Colloquium; they have taken men of your class before, if not often. They have never taken a woman. So there are doors that will open for you, which remain firmly nailed shut for me.\"\n\nFor the first time, I saw Thomas Wilker unbend enough to grin at me. \"Shall we storm them together?\"\n\n\"That sounds like a splendid plan,\" I said, and extended my hand. He took it in a firm grip, the way he might have taken a man's hand, not a lady's. The very frankness of the gesture made me say, \"You\u2014do not have an interest in marrying me, do you?\"\n\nA laugh exploded out of him. \"For God's sake, no. No insult intended\u2014\"\n\n\"None taken. To be perfectly honest, I have little interest in remarrying.\" I sighed and released his hand, returning my own to my lap and studying it as if it were of great interest. \"I would give a great deal for Jacob to still be alive. But with him gone... a widow has freedoms a wife does not. I could wish for greater financial security, but apart from that, what would I gain from having another husband?\"\n\n\"It would provide a father for your son,\" he said.\n\nThat swiftly, the scab was torn off. Little Jacob: he did not deserve to be thought of as a wound, but there it was, and with my defenses lowered by illness and this ritual, I could no longer pretend otherwise. A sudden jolt rattled my shoulders, as if something\u2014a laugh, a sob, a shout\u2014wanted to burst free. \"My son. Oh, God. What am I to do with him?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nThe words came forth, slowly at first, then increasing until they formed a flood. \"How could I risk coming here, when I have a son? Of course, few people ask that question of men who leave their sons behind to go abroad\u2014because those sons have mothers to care for them. But even if the man is a widower, he does not face a tenth the censure I have received. Should his child be orphaned, everyone will pat the boy on the head and praise his father's courage. Should I die, Jacob will grow up knowing his mother was an unfeeling madwoman who got what she deserved.\"\n\nI could not bear to look at anyone, whether they spoke my language or not. I fixed my gaze on the fire, as if its flames could burn this tangle out of me, and leave me free of such conflicts. \"I resent my son. There\u2014I have said it. I resent him because he shackles me; I cannot live the life I want, not without feeling guilty for devoting my heart to the thing that makes me happy. Surely it is selfish of me to care so much about the contributions I could make with my intellect; surely the greatest contribution to society a woman can hope to make lies in raising her children. No sacrifice she might make is too small, in service to that great cause.\n\n\"And all the while I have people telling me, at least you still have something of your husband. Do they mean the book chronicling our work in Vystrana? No, of course not\u2014never mind that we undertook that work together, with intent. That cannot possibly be as valuable as the accidental consequence of biology.\"\n\nVery quietly, Tom said, \"Is not a child worth more than a book?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said violently. \"But then for God's sake let us value my son for himself, and not as some relic of his father. When he is grown enough to read, I will be delighted to share his father's legacy with him; it is my legacy as well, and I hope he has inherited our curiosity enough to appreciate it. I would not mind a motherhood where that was my purpose\u2014to foster my son's mind and teach him the intellectual values of his parents. But no; society tells me my role is to change his napkins and coo over the faces he makes, and in so doing abandon the things I want him to treasure when he is grown.\"\n\nAt long last I brought my gaze away from the fire. Akinimanbi sat with one hand on her belly; she was bearing, and seemed glad of it. I was happy for her\u2014but I had never particularly wanted that for myself, and at least half of my disinterest in remarrying stemmed from that fact.\n\n\"'Would that I were a man,' \" I said, quoting Sarpalyce's legend. \"Except that I do not wish I were a man. I only wish that being a woman did not limit me so.\"\n\nThe fire crackled quietly. Then, nodding\u2014in understanding or acceptance, perhaps both\u2014Tom Wilker brought his hands together in a clap.\n\nThe others followed suit. I did not cry; I have rarely been prone to tears. But I felt purified. There is a word I learned later, a term from Nichaean drama: catharsis. I had, at long last, said what was bottled up tight in my heart, and while I still did not believe in evil spirits, I felt infinitely more free for having spoken.\n\nOf course, others believed in evil spirits. Daboumen gestured me out of the way. I obeyed and watched, mystified, as he dug in the soil beneath where I had been sitting. I had chosen the spot of my own free will\u2014no one directed me there\u2014but a few inches below the surface, he found a twisted, ugly piece of wood. (Cynic that I am, I believe he placed it there by sleight of hand, though I am uncertain how he managed that when his only garment was a loincloth.)\n\n\"The witch put this there,\" he said, and gave it to me. I did not need his gesture to guess my part in the script: I threw the twisted thing into the fire.\n\n\"Now,\" Akinimanbi said, \"you are free.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "In which I make several discoveries, not all of them related to dragons"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Improved fortune\u2014A newcomer in camp\u2014The \"pure\"\u2014The Great Cataract\u2014Yeyuama's challenge\n\nWhen I have related an abbreviated version of this tale to others, every last one of them has asked the same question: did the ritual work?\n\nI am not sure how to answer that. Did we suffer no more mishaps in our research? Of course not; we were still in the Green Hell, which had not transformed itself into the Garden of Paradise simply because my companions and I voiced our woes. Furthermore, I doubt there is a single person reading this account who is not aware of the even larger problems I was to encounter before long.\n\nBut it is true that I no longer felt myself jinxed. In part, I attribute this to the improvement of my mood and my concentration; I no longer made the sorts of careless errors that had caused me trouble before. The rapport between myself and my companions improved, and so did the coordination of our efforts, with concomitant good effects. And since human minds are very good at finding patterns, and ours had recently shifted from looking for bad luck to looking for good, we wrote off setbacks as expected, rather than proof of misfortune. This is how I explain it, at any rate; our Moulish hosts, of course, viewed the matter differently.\n\nWhat mattered was that both groups were in better spirits, and as a result my companions and I soon found ourselves offered the very opportunity we had been looking for.\n\nIt began with the arrival of a newcomer into camp, a man I had never met before. Mekeesawa introduced the man as his brother Yeyuama, and I soon realized he was an actual brother: related by blood, not merely by age, as the Moulish measure such things.\n\nYeyuama was not like the other Moulish men we had known, in any age group. \"Did he go out hunting with you yesterday?\" I asked one morning, about three weeks after I had purged myself of the witchcraft taint.\n\nThe intimacy of the ritual had changed matters between Thomas Wilker and myself; he was Tom to me now, and I was Isabella. (Natalie remained \"Miss Oscott\" to him, I think because of his situation with her grandfather. I found myself much more aware now of his little deferences, the ways in which he acknowledged his lower-class origins and made certain no one would think him trying to rise above them.) Tom said, \"Not that I saw. Was he here in camp?\"\n\n\"Not that we saw,\" Natalie said. And that was peculiar indeed, for it did not fit any of the patterns we knew for Moulish responsibilities.\n\nYeyuama did not keep us wondering for long. He came over to the fire we had built in front of our much-bedraggled tents and squatted on his haunches with the ease of a man who has sat thus his entire life. \"You follow the dragons, Reguamin,\" he said.\n\nFollowed, and stared at. \"With caution, yes,\" I said, hoping my humourous tone would come through. Yeyuama had an air about him that intrigued me: both gentle and watchful, as if he could spring into action at a moment's notice. He was extremely fit; the Moulish are not a fat people, as a consequence of diet, behaviour, and natural physique, but Yeyuama had the compact musculature of a man who both eats well and exercises often.\n\nHe cocked his head at me. \"Have you killed?\"\n\n\"A dragon? No, of course not. I know the story.\"\n\nYeyuama waved that away. \"Not only dragons. Anything.\"\n\nMy thoughts raced back to the savannah snakes we had hunted, the rock-wyrm in Vystrana, the wolf-drake I had shot (but not killed) when I was fourteen. \"With my own hands?\" He nodded. I was about to say no\u2014I wanted to say no, as it was clear which answer Yeyuama was looking for\u2014when I remembered the Great Sparkling Inquiry.\n\nBoth ethics and pragmatism prevented me from lying to him, the latter because my face fell before I could stop it. \"Yes. In my homeland, there are these creatures...\" I held out my fingers to indicate the size of a sparkling. \"Like insects.\"\n\n(Lest anyone accuse me of dishonesty, I must assure you that my taxonomic speculations had not yet gone so far as to change my thinking about sparklings. Would I have admitted it to Yeyuama, had I begun to think of them as members of the draconic lineage? I do not know. The honourable answer, of course, is yes\u2014but I am not certain my ethics would have carried me that far.)\n\nYeyuama brushed this off as being of no consequence. Everyone in Moulish society killed things like insects, but only grown men were hunters. He looked next at Natalie, who denied killing anything, and Tom, who confessed it. Yeyuama nodded, as if he had expected that. \"What I have to say is not for you,\" he told Tom. \"Only the pure may hear it.\"\n\nThe pure: those who had never hunted and killed. Yeyuama was pure; he never went with the other men. He was, I realized, the closest thing to a priest one might find in Moulish society. This must be what Yves de Maucheret had meant.\n\nWith our recent conversation so fresh in my mind, I could easily read Tom's expression. Here, where there was no stratification of wealth or birth, he had expected to be able to participate in full; to be refused, as the Colloquium refused him, cut deeply. On impulse, I said to him in Scirling, \"You've shot animals with a gun. Perhaps that doesn't count as 'with your own hands'?\"\n\nThat provoked a rueful, bitter laugh. \"No, I imagine it counts. And besides, when I was fifteen I cut the throat of my family's carthorse after he broke his leg. Don't offer,\" he said, forestalling the next words out of my mouth. \"It may upset them if you share what he says afterward. If this is a research opportunity, then you two should make the best of it.\" He got up and left.\n\nAs it transpired, the core of what Yeyuama told us was not so secret that I feel obliged to leave it out of this narrative. (There would be a great gaping hole if I did, as if you walked in at the tail end of some tremendous anecdote being told over drinks. Everyone in the room would be goggling and laughing and you would wonder where the elephant came from.) I may elide some details, but the bulk of it should be clear to you.\n\n\"There is a test,\" Yeyuama said, once Tom was gone. \"Before you can touch the dragons. This test is dangerous; sometimes it kills those who try.\"\n\nA Moulish man\u2014a lifelong resident of the Green Hell\u2014was telling me something was dangerous. I said before that the Moulish do not fear their home, because they know how to survive it; this does not mean, however, that they fail to respect its perils. I asked, \"Do we have to say now whether we will try? Or may we decide after we know what the test is?\"\n\nYeyuama laughed, breaking the atmosphere of hushed secrecy. \"Only a fool would agree without knowing. I will show you. There is no shame in refusing; most boys do.\"\n\nFor there to be men like Yeyuama, who have abstained from killing in order to remain pure, this test must be offered while they are still young\u2014before they, as youths, join the men on the hunt. I use male terms; virtually all of those who \"touch the dragons\" (a phrase whose meaning will become apparent later on) are men, though the Moulish denied any prohibition against women when I asked. It is simply that the challenge is a strenuous one, and few women choose to undertake it. But there was no resistance to Natalie and I trying. Merely a great deal of curiosity, to see how the Scirling women would do.\n\nThis challenge required us to go with Yeyuama on a lengthy journey. He would not name our destination, but we knew it lay west, toward the cliff from which the three rivers fall. It would take us the better part of a month to get there and return, he estimated, and no one could go with us who was not also pure.\n\nWhich meant leaving behind both Tom and Faj Rawango. The latter said, \"After this, you will get eggs for the oba.\"\n\nThe way he phrased it, I wasn't sure whether it was a statement or a command. \"After this, I may finally have some notion of how to do that. But much will depend on when the egg-laying season is.\" I thought about how long we had already been gone, and added, \"Would you like to go back and report to him? He must be wondering.\"\n\n\"No,\" Faj Rawango said. \"I will stay here.\" (A decision which I chalked up mostly to his unwillingness to report so little progress. He did not seem to be enjoying his sojourn among his father's kindred.)\n\nTom was another matter. \"You'll be going from camp to camp,\" he said, having queried Yeyuama for details. \"Not going entirely on your own. Still...\"\n\n\"You do not like it,\" I said.\n\n\"First that business with witchcraft, now this test of theirs. I didn't expect you to embrace so many of their ways.\"\n\nI had not embraced anything. In the case of the witchcraft ceremony, it was more \"shoved unwillingly,\" and as for this\u2014 \"We require doctors to obtain certification before they can practice, and lawyers must sit examinations before they can pass the bar. Whatever this test may be, think of it in that light. It is a matter of qualification, nothing more.\"\n\n\"Passing the bar,\" he said dryly, \"rarely threatens one's life. But you're right about one thing: it appears to be necessary. We can observe dragons all we like, but there are some secrets we won't know unless you go through with this. I'm not trying to stop you. I only wish we had another way.\"\n\nFor my own part, I wished he could come with us, though I had wit enough not to pain him by saying so. Natalie and I packed up what we could; it was not much, as neither of us had the strength of neck to carry a basket on a tumpline. Then we made our farewells to Tom and Faj Rawango, Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa, Apuesiso and Daboumen, and ventured deeper into the swamp.\n\nI will gloss over the process of our journey, in favor of coming more quickly to its end. Suffice it to say that we did, as Tom had predicted, go from camp to camp, meeting both strangers and people who had formerly been part of our own camp, and enduring a thousand questions when they discovered that Yeyuama was taking us on this pilgrimage. I soon realized our destination was not secret; it was merely taboo, a thing not spoken of except when the occasion arose. Those we passed seemed to have at least a general understanding of what Natalie and I faced, and few of them seemed to think we stood much chance.\n\nThere is no faster way to harden my determination to do a thing than to assume I will fail at it. But when I saw at last the challenge Yeyuama intended, the revelation shook even my self-confidence and will.\n\nWe had left the last camp behind two days before. My sense of geography was sorely addled by the tracklessness of the swamp, but Natalie and I, making estimates of the distance we had traveled, could guess where Yeyuama was taking us. We were drawing near to the western border of the Green Hell.\n\nThe noise grew by subtle degrees as we traveled onward, at first remaining faint enough that my conscious mind did not notice it. Then it rose high enough to attract my attention: the steady, rushing thunder of falling water. \"We must be near,\" I said, and got a bright grin from Yeyuama in response.\n\nThis I took to be agreement, only realizing my error after we had slogged at least another mile onward. We were not yet near at all. I had simply underestimated the magnitude of what we had come to see.\n\nThe Great Cataract of Mouleen.\n\nAs I have said before, the three rivers of Girama, Gaomomo, and Hembi come together west of the Moulish swamp, a confluence of the sort that happens in many parts of the world. But here, as nowhere else, the rivers are stopped shy of their peaceful meeting by a fault in the earth that dropped the land of Mouleen not quite a hundred meters below the rivers' previous beds. Along this curving and irregular edge, the three rivers spread out and break up their flow, plunging downward in a roar of countless waterfalls.\n\nYeyuama brought us to the very edge of the great lake which forms the base of these falls, an expanse of water large enough to give me an unobstructed view of much of the Great Cataract. Even at this range, I could feel the force of it: the constant thunder of the water, torrents of it crashing endlessly down, threatening to drive the air from my lungs. Everywhere I looked I saw rainbows, light refracting from the mist thrown off by the falls. I might have stepped through some portal into a magical place\u2014the homeland of wild-hearted faerie creatures grander and more terrible than any human could hope to understand.\n\nMy face opened with exhilaration, in an expression that was not quite a laugh. I could not help myself; the madness I felt at the mere sight of this place could not be held in. Natalie looked much the same. Yeyuama was solemn by comparison; but then, of course, he had been here before. And this place, clearly, was sacred to his people.\n\nI could not imagine a place less like the sober Assembly Houses I associated with religion; but I could, with no difficulty at all, understand why one might attach such a word to this place. Such sublime grandeur seemed very much like a thing of the gods.\n\nThe cataract itself was too breathtaking to behold for long, even though the height of the floods had passed and the waters of the swamp were beginning to subside. My eye sought out more restful sights. I saw that the lake was the hollow pounded out by the falling water, and surmised that it must be quite deep. From there the mingled contents of the three rivers spread out through the low-lying region we called Mouleen, and thus gave rise to the swamp; indeed, from here we could no longer speak of it in a meaningful sense as a river, whether singular or multiple, for the waterways branched and recombined into the mazelike delta which I had been inhabiting for the last five months.\n\nBut for what purpose had Yeyuama brought us all this way?\n\nSuch was the noise that I had to raise my voice almost to a shout in order to be heard. \"Is this the place of the test?\" I asked, gesturing at the entire stunning scene: cataract, lake, and all.\n\nYeyuama grinned again. \" That, Reguamin, is your test!\" And he pointed.\n\nThe broken curve of the Great Cataract was not a single fall, but many. Here and there along its length, islands persisted on the edge, dividing the whole into its parts. It was not, however, to one of these that Yeyuama directed my attention, but rather to an island within the cascade itself.\n\nIt jutted out from the white thunder perhaps two-thirds of the way between us and the plateau above. It was framed by falling water all around: the rivers tumbling down one stage behind, then parting to plummet the remaining distance on either side. Thinner trickles, some of which might have been respectable falls in other parts of the world, ran through the island and emerged from its front like strings of diamonds. And the whole of the island was thickly covered in verdant growth, trees finding purchase on the stone, vines falling in elegant curtains below.\n\n\"You must visit that island,\" Yeyuama said, his voice strong over the roar of the water. \"Then you will be ready to touch the dragons.\"\n\nI understood why many boys refused, and few women tried. Visit the island? How was one to get up there, or for that matter to come back? It stood in the midst of the falls, nowhere near the border of the lake. To go over the first edge in a boat (or the more stereotypical barrel) would only result in missing the island, or being dashed to pieces if one did not. Swimming the lake would be both hazardous and difficult, as the current pushed one away from the base, and once that obstacle was surmounted one still had the challenge of climbing the rock face.\n\nYes, these were the thoughts in my mind as I stared at the Great Cataract of Mouleen. Of course I had begun to ponder how it might be done. If you know anything of my life, you will not be surprised.\n\nNatalie and I discussed it, once we had retired far enough to be able to converse in more normal tones. \"I expect it used to all be like that,\" she said, sketching out a shape with her hands. \"Multiple tiers\u2014you can still see fragments of it, apart from that major island. But the force of the water would, over time, knock down the lower tiers, leaving that one remnant as the only piece of significant size.\"\n\nThe geologic history of the place interested me less than the navigational opportunities it afforded. \"I don't suppose there are likely to be caves behind? Perhaps it's a mystery of sorts, with a tunnel that offers safe passage. Those who pass the test are the ones who find it.\"\n\n\"And those that don't are the ones who die,\" Natalie said, with a decided lack of optimism. \"It would be lovely if there were a tunnel, but somehow I don't think you will be that lucky.\"\n\nI noticed her choice of pronoun. Somehow, without ever saying so directly, we had agreed that I would be the one to attempt this thing, not both of us together. There was no particularly good reason for it, and several against; indeed, others were quick to point out later that only one of us had a small dependent child at home, and that one was not Natalie. But only one of us was mad enough to try, and that one was not Natalie, either.\n\nBecause I could not look at that island, overgrown and floating in the midst of rainbows, and not want to experience the triumph of standing on it with my own two feet.\n\nYeyuama caught frogs and roasted them while the two of us discussed the matter in Scirling. There was no need to speak in the Moulish tongue for his benefit; he had made it clear that he would offer no advice, and he was good enough at maintaining his poise that no twitch of alarm or satisfaction would steer us in one direction or another. We were entirely on our own.\n\n\"Why is this the test?\" I asked at one point, when our speculations had ground to a halt. Then I repeated myself in Moulish, for this, at least, was a question Yeyuama might answer.\n\nBut he shook his head. \"You will see\u2014or you will not.\"\n\nMeaning that only those who passed the test were fit to know the answer. I ground my teeth in frustration and renewed my determination to reach that island.\n\nWe scouted the area for another two days, circling the edge of the lake to view the island from different angles. It seemed likely that the best approach was from above, coming down from the rivers onto the island; without viewing the land up there it was hard to be certain, but it seemed more promising than any attempt to come at it from below. But then how to return? \"If I had a long enough rope...\" I began, then shook my head. \"It would have to be absurdly long, and I have never been good at climbing.\"\n\nNatalie opened her mouth to answer, then stopped.\n\n\"No, it's foolish,\" she said, when I looked at her inquisitively.\n\nI laughed. \"And I am, of course, the last person to entertain foolish notions. Out with it, my dear.\"\n\n\"You would break your neck,\" she protested.\n\n\"And I am unlikely to do so by the means we have already discussed? You have my curiosity up now, you know. There is no help for it; you will have to tell me.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"We don't even have suitable wood, so it couldn't be done anyway. But I was thinking of those glider wings.\"\n\nHer obsession back in Scirland. An untested design, though recently improved by that enthusiast in Lopperton.\n\nA chance to fly.\n\nI tried to throw a halter over the nose of my sudden, wild hope and hold it back from galloping away. It was reckless. It was impossible. Natalie was right; we did not have suitable wood.\n\nWe did, however, have something else."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "A need for dragonbone\u2014Sketches in the air\u2014An angry dragon\u2014More truth\u2014\"We have the forest\"\n\nCan you not tell me what you need them for?\" Tom asked, as we waded across a shallow stream. \"Even the slightest hint.\"\n\nI could have told him that I didn't want to offend Yeyuama and the others; it had the virtue of being true. It was not, however my chief reason. \"If I tell you, then you will try to talk me out of it.\"\n\nHe stopped on the bank and stared at me. \"Is that supposed to set me at ease?\"\n\nOur time in the swamp had left him a scruffy thing, his clothing stained beyond repair, his hair grown shaggy and his jaw darkened by stubble. Likely my own appearance was little better (although I was at least spared the stubble). Had we wandered the streets of Falchester in this state, we would have been thought lunatics\u2014which was, I imagined, not far off the mark. Long residence in harsh and unfamiliar conditions does strange things to the mind. You swiftly learn not to heed irritations that would be unbearable in the normal course of your affairs, and you embrace notions that would be unthinkable at home.\n\n\"It is supposed to be honest,\" I said. \"I do not want you chiding me afterward for hiding more from you than I must.\"\n\nTom's first response to that was inarticulate. Then he said, \"I have asked myself, time and again, what possible need you could have for dragonbone\u2014 dragonbone, when we're among a people for whom dragons are in some way sacred. You don't mean to impress them with it; that wouldn't be as dangerous as you've implied. What, then? Everything I can think of is worse than the previous idea.\"\n\nHe would not have thought of Natalie's wings; I was fairly certain he had no idea of her interest in the subject. I considered asking him what he had thought of, but decided it would only upset him further. Instead I fell back on the only recourse available to me, which was simple persuasion. \"Please, Tom. If we are to proceed with our research, and fulfill our promise to the oba, I must do this. And it will go better with your help.\"\n\nHe sighed in frustration, but said, \"I am here, am I not?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I admitted. \"For which I thank you.\"\n\nBy then the others had caught up to us: Natalie and Yeyuama, Mekeesawa and Faj Rawango. The rest of our camp was not far off, but we six were making a side journey to retrieve something left behind during our earliest days in the Green Hell.\n\nThe box was still where we had buried it. Already the wood was somewhat worse off for being buried in the wet earth, and the fabric that wrapped the bones was half-eaten by insects, but the bones were still wholly preserved.\n\n\"Will it be acceptable to use this?\" I asked Yeyuama, holding out an alar humerus for him to see.\n\nHe frowned at the bone. \"Who killed this dragon?\"\n\n\"A hunter,\" I said. \"But not in the way that your brothers are hunters. He kills animals only for the pleasure of proving himself stronger than they, and takes trophies to prove his strength to others.\" Yeyuama indicated the bone, and I shook my head. \"He does not know we have this, and would try to take it if he did. We kept the bones so we could understand dragons better.\"\n\nAkinimanbi had explained to him our purpose in the swamp. Her rendition had made us sound more like priests than scholars\u2014 but that was not entirely unfitting; or at least it was useful to our cause. Yeyuama said, in a cool tone masking something I could not read, \"Dragon bones fall to dust. How is this one still solid?\"\n\nWe had been cautious in who we shared that information with, but I had no fear of sharing the truth with him. Not because he lived far from Vystrana and would never trouble the dragons there; not because he lacked the chemical equipment to imitate our work. Those things were true, but also irrelevant. Yeyuama was pure: he would never kill a dragon for its bones. Nor would he help others do so.\n\nI therefore told him everything, as much as my command of his language allowed. The mourning behaviour of rock-wyrms; Rossi's experimentation; Frederick Kemble's struggle to synthesize a replacement for the bones, which might be aided by Tom's efforts with the savannah snakes. Yeyuama listened in silence, and when I was done he sighed, gesturing at the bones. \"You should not have done this before facing the island. But you may use it.\"\n\nI wondered if the Moulish had funerary customs for their own dragons. Was that what Yeyuama meant by \"touching the dragons\"? Well, I would find out soon enough\u2014if I did not break my neck.\n\nNatalie sorted through the bones, chewing on her lower lip. \"Mr. Garsell insists a curved surface is better, but still, I could wish some of these were straighter. The ribs, though, will be useful for the center of the frame, and we can make cords...\" She trailed off, sketching in the air.\n\nTom had a good visual imagination. He followed the movement of her finger with narrowed eyes. Before I could divert him, his jaw sagged in disbelief. \"You\u2014Isabella, please tell me she isn't planning to build some kind of wing.\"\n\nMy mouth opened and shut a few times, while he stared at me. Then, helplessly, I said, \"Would you like the truth, or a comforting lie?\"\n\n\"What in God's name are you doing? \" he demanded. We were speaking Scirling; the three Erigans looked on in interest, no doubt speculating as to what we might be saying. \"Do you have to fly with the dragons to prove your right to study them? Moulish swamp-wyrms don't even fly!\"\n\n\"They do glide, though\u2014and I shall do the same. It's an unconventional solution to the problem I've been set... but Tom, I believe it will work.\"\n\nHe squeezed his eyes shut, hands frozen in midair as if, should he just concentrate hard enough, he could make this entire conversation not have happened. Then he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Yeyuama. In Moulish, he said, \"I know I am not 'pure.' But please, for the love of\u2014of whatever spirits you worship, let me help with this. If she is injured, I'll never forgive myself.\"\n\nHis concern touched me, all the more so because he made no reference to the consequences he would likely face in the event of my death. Jacob had once told me he would be blamed if anything happened to me in Vystrana; Tom, I suspected, now occupied the role of \"man responsible for my well-being\" in the eyes of society. I said to Yeyuama, \"He has some knowledge of healing injuries. I hope, of course, that his skills will not be necessary, but if they are...\"\n\nYeyuama sighed, looking resigned. \"If I don't agree, he will probably follow us.\" Tom did not deny it. \"Very well, Reguamin. Your brothers and sister may assist you. But they may not go all the way with you.\"\n\n(At the time, it surprised me that Yeyuama agreed to let anyone else be involved. In retrospect, I think Tom was not the only one dumbfounded at my chosen approach to the problem of the island, and Yeyuama did not want to be responsible for killing me, however indirectly. That is only speculation on my part, though.)\n\nWe bundled up the bones Natalie deemed useful and took them with us back to camp, but we would not be with our hosts for much longer. As I proposed to come at the Great Cataract from above, and was bringing bulky equipment with me for the task, it would be easier for us to make the journey along the top edge of the swamp, rather than in its depths. So long as our paths lay together, however, we would travel with the other members of the camp, who were shifting to a new location.\n\nIt was by then becoming a larger group once more, as the seasonal round brought the Moulish back together, and they sang as they walked. Natalie had been singing with the Moulish for some time, but now Tom joined in; his voice was rough but tuneful. \"You should sing,\" Yeyuama prompted me; when we left the camp, he would break off on his own to wait for me at the base of the Great Cataract.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" I said hastily. \"The frogs are more melodious than I.\"\n\nHe seemed puzzled by my protest. \"Why does that matter? It makes harmony.\"\n\nThe word he used, ewele, has the same double meaning as its Scirling translation: not only the effect produced by music, but a concord among people. Judging by the way he deployed it now, he meant the latter sense\u2014or rather, he meant the latter produced the former. Still\u2014\"I would be embarrassed to try.\"\n\nBut Yeyuama would not accept my refusal. Nothing would do but that I sing. And so I did; Natalie gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder, and Tom did his best not to wince. But the Moulish all smiled: however out of tune I might be, now I was harmonious.\n\nOur harmony, alas, did not last. It was broken by a furious, coughing snarl, and the sound came from some distance ahead.\n\nAll singing fell silent. The hunters, who carried few burdens other than their spears and nets, dropped anything else they held and vanished into the surrounding growth. Mothers and elders boosted children into the trees, and within a few seconds I could not see them, either. Even after my time among them, I was startled at the speed with which they all concealed themselves.\n\nYeyuama had gone stiff at my side. He met my gaze, and I saw him make a decision. \"Dragon,\" he said, and I nodded. \"An angry one. Come.\"\n\nThat seemed to be extended to all three of us\u2014three, because Faj Rawango had gone with the hunters. Tom stepped forward, but Natalie shook her head and grabbed the bones tied to his back. \"Leave these with me. I'll hide them.\"\n\nAs I went forward with Tom and Yeyuama, I wondered uneasily whether those bones might be the cause of the disturbance. It was the death and theft of their kin that had made the Vystrani rock-wyrms angry; we had not observed anything of the sort here, but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Moulish dragons were sullen and hostile creatures under the best of circumstances, but I had never seen one in a fury. Had we inadvertently provoked this one?\n\nI had my answer soon enough, in the shouts and curses of men.\n\nThey were not speaking the Moulish tongue. I picked out Yembe words here and there, but the part that came through the most clearly to me was an unholy admixture of Thiessois and Eiversch. And although I had not heard that voice in months, the language of the profanity told me who the speaker must be.\n\nM. Velloin had come into the swamp in search of newer and more exciting prey.\n\nYeyuama's expression hardened as I gave him this explanation in a quick, worried undertone. \"We will not let him kill a dragon,\" he said\u2014leaving unspoken what measures they might take to prevent him. Yeyuama himself might be pure, his hands unsullied by death, but the same was not true for the hunters.\n\nI half-expected to hear screams before we even reached the scene. The hunters, after all, had gone before us, and must already be in place. I also expected the raging of the dragon to subside, for Velloin was assuredly armed with a good rifle, and had shown pride in the swift kill. But neither shift came, and as we crept to the edge of the scene behind Yeyuama, I saw for myself what was happening.\n\nFive or six Yembe hunters were ranged around the dragon, spears at the ready\u2014but it was spears they held, not rifles, and they used them only to keep the dragon at bay. Three other men were engaged at closer range, hauling with all their might on ropes that had been looped about the swamp-wyrm's limbs. Velloin stalked around this fray, protected, as the others were, by a kerchief tied over his mouth and nose in addition to a pair of goggles, to keep the noxious gas from his eyes. He held another lasso in his hands, and as I watched, he flung it over the dragon's muzzle and dragged the loop tight.\n\n\"God almighty,\" I whispered, staring. \"They're not trying to kill the dragon. They're trying to capture it.\"\n\nVelloin had done it before, and had said he wanted to try again. But the swamp-wyrm before us was no runt; it was a splendid beast, one of the largest I had seen. Even with four men trying to bind it, the creature still thrashed. It was difficult to imagine Velloin could drag it ten feet like that, let alone into a cage.\n\nAs it transpired, he didn't intend to. Velloin passed his rope to another man, then picked up a bow. The arrow he nocked was too light to have any chance of killing the creature, but before he put it to the string, he dipped the head in a small clay jar. Poison of some kind, I assumed. Something to weaken and slow the dragon for easier transport.\n\nHe did not get the chance to try. Yeyuama had been watching the scene with narrowed eyes; when he saw the poisoned arrow, he lifted his hands to his mouth and made a sound like a birdcall. Like, but not the same: clearly it was a signal, and just as clearly, this was what our own hunters had been waiting for.\n\nI would have sworn my oath on the Holy Scripture that there were no Moulish in the immediate vicinity of this struggle, but on Yeyuama's call, half a dozen nets dropped from the trees to snare the men below. Spears thudding into the ground at the feet of the Yembe caused several of them to leap back. Ropes slipped free of hands, and then the dragon spun about, smashing men to the ground with its muscular tail.\n\nWhat followed was chaos. Half-restrained as it was, the swamp-wyrm could not move easily, but it was determined to crush its tormentors; then Yembe spears began to stick in its hide, and it changed its intent to flight. This most of the Yembe seemed willing to let it do, but as the dragon slipped away, I saw Velloin raising a rifle.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nI did not even realize I was the one who had shouted until I had already flung myself forward. Then there was nothing to do but continue. \"Hold your fire, sir!\" I commanded, staggering across the trampled ground, coughing on the foul air.\n\nOne of the Yembe caught me. But I had caught Velloin's attention; for a moment that rifle was pointed at me. Then the hunter saw me properly, and jerked in surprise.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, tugging down the kerchief that covered his face. \"Mrs. Camherst, I presume. My God\u2014you still live.\"\n\n\"I was not aware my status was in question,\" I said, trying and failing to pull my arms free of my captor. \"Will you tell this man to unhand me?\"\n\nVelloin grinned, not pleasantly. \"I do not give orders to the son of a king, Mrs. Camherst.\"\n\nConfused, I twisted to look up at the man holding me. He released one arm and uncovered his own face, revealing Okweme n Kpama Waleyim.\n\n\"Is this your scheme?\" I asked him. \"Or Velloin's? I have a hard time believing it is his; surely he would prefer to kill his prey, rather than snare it.\"\n\nOkweme's grin was as unpleasant as Velloin's. Had I ever thought the man friendly, let alone attractive? \"We are here at the request of my royal father. He will not be glad to hear that you interfered.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just her,\" Velloin said. He resettled his rifle on his shoulder. \"Those nets and spears must have come from the swamp rats. Come out!\" he shouted, turning to scan the trees. \"We know you are there.\"\n\nTom needed no encouragement; indeed, I suspected Yeyuama must have been holding him back. Yeyuama himself followed a step behind. One might have mistaken his slow stride for relaxed, but to my eye, it had more the character of focused anger. The hunters stayed hidden, and I blessed them for it.\n\nI had grown accustomed to measuring people according to Moulish stature, against which Tom, whose height was middling at best, seemed a giant. Facing Okweme and Velloin, Yeyuama was almost childlike in his smallness. There was nothing childlike, however, in the look he directed at the interlopers. \"You are not welcome here.\"\n\n\"Speak Yembe,\" Okweme snapped.\n\nYeyuama merely raised his eyebrows at the man. \"He doesn't know your language,\" I said, remembering my own experience with the Moulish tongue. \"He might pick a few words out from what you say, and vice versa for you\u2014no more.\"\n\n\"Then you translate,\" Okweme said.\n\nHowever little I wanted to follow his orders, an interpreter would be necessary. \"Unhand me, and I will.\"\n\nScowling, Okweme complied. I explained my position to Yeyuama, then repeated his original message and his subsequent expansion. \"You have tried to harm one of the dragons. Because he is feeling merciful, he will let you go, but you must not return.\" (His actual phrasing had been \"Because you are ignorant,\" but I softened it; proverbs about shooting the messenger kept dancing through my mind.)\n\n\"Harm?\" Velloin said, with half a laugh. \"That is rich. How many have you harmed, Mrs. Camherst, pursuing your research? Or are you still reliant on others to do your butchery for you?\"\n\n\"I can learn by observation alone\u2014and so I have,\" I said. Yeyuama looked to Tom for a translation, but Tom was rigid with tension, watching the rest of us. Gritting my teeth, I conveyed what Velloin had said.\n\nVelloin saw my discomfort and pressed the advantage. \"Have you stolen any eggs yet? Eg gs,\" he repeated in Yeyuama's direction, very loudly, making sure he noticed the word. \"Tell your friend about your own orders\u2014that the oba sent you to take away something even more precious than a living dragon. See how he likes you, when he hears that.\"\n\nHe had me over a barrel. I was not good enough at lying to make up something else to say to Yeyuama; even my hesitation gave too much away. Desperate, I looked at Tom, and saw him open his mouth, perhaps to lie on my behalf.\n\nNo, I thought, very distinctly. Perhaps I was like these two, in that I had come here for the oba's gain as well as my own. I would not further compound that by trying to conceal anything. That was witchcraft, at least in the nonsupernatural sense; it was evil. And such evil must be purged with truth.\n\nI relayed Velloin's words as faithfully as I could, then said, \"It is true. The ruler of Bayembe sent me here to take eggs, though I have not done it. If these men do not shoot us, I will explain more later; but the explanation will not supercede the apology I give you now. I made my promise to the oba in foolish ignorance, without first learning what its consequences would be. I am sorry. And I am doubly sorry for not telling you sooner.\"\n\nYeyuama listened without blinking, without any hint of reaction. When I was done, he remained silent a moment longer, while my nerves wound tight. Then he said, \"You will be tested. After that, we will see.\"\n\nTested? Another witchcraft ritual, perhaps. Okweme interrupted my speculations. \"What did he say?\"\n\nI translated both that and Yeyuama's next words. \"You are noisy\u2014he means something more like 'disruptive'\u2014and ignorant, and you do not care to learn. You must leave now.\"\n\nVelloin snorted. \"How does he think to make us leave? We have rifles.\"\n\n\"And we have poisoned spears,\" Yeyuama said, through me. \"We have nets and traps. We have the forest. You are villagers, and our home will eat you. Go now.\"\n\nThe other Yembe heard my translation and looked uneasy. They were indeed villagers, outsiders to this place, and although they had spent this entire time looking for the hunters they knew must be about, they had not yet spotted a single one.\n\nIt was a fragile threat. These people could easily kill Yeyuama; the Moulish, however, could kill more than a few of them. Then the oba might send a larger force, this one hunting not dragons, but men. However well the Moulish knew the Green Hell, they were safe here largely because no one cared to face the difficulty of coming after them. If they gave the oba a reason to change his mind, they would lose.\n\nBut those were future possibilities; the present was this confrontation, and I could see that the other men were not eager to gamble their lives against the demons of the forest.\n\n\"I recommend you take his advice,\" I said. \"The Moulish are quite fierce in defending what they hold sacred. Please assure the oba that I will have useful information for him soon; he must, however, be patient a while longer.\" Information, of course, was not the same thing as eggs, nor was \"useful\" the same thing as \"encouraging.\" But it would, I hoped, buy us a little more time.\n\n\"Very well,\" Velloin said, and shot a look at Okweme that silenced whatever the prince had been about to say.\n\nTom spoke, for the first time since this entire affair began. \"I don't recommend trying to come back at a different point. By this time tomorrow, the entire swamp will know of your hunting party, and I doubt they'll be so generous a second time.\" The talking drums. The Moulish were not a unified state, but at times like this, they could act in concert, and would.\n\nI did not know whether Tom had convinced Velloin or Okweme, but it at least gave the other Yembe something else to be worried about. The two leaders might have a mutiny on their hands, if they tried to come back.\n\nThey left for the time being, at least, and I sagged in relief when they were gone. But not for long: there was still Yeyuama to deal with, and the revelation Okweme had forced upon me. As little as I wanted to return to that topic, delaying would be even worse.\n\nBut when I tried to explain further, he stopped me with the same answer as before: \"You will be tested, Reguamin. Then we will see.\"\n\nOminous words. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to accept them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Into the open\u2014Constructing the glider\u2014Wishbones\u2014Across the river\u2014Abseiling again\u2014The waterfall island\u2014Movement in the water\u2014Bees\u2014Strangely regular stones\u2014My great leap\n\nGiven the dangers I had already faced in my short life\u2014 deadly disease, attacks by wild beasts, kidnapping, and other threats from human sources\u2014you would not think that leaving the forest for the more open ground of the savannah should be frightening. Yet so it was.\n\nThe villagers of the Moulish border fear the forest, and when I went into the Green Hell, I experienced a taste of their fear. But the reverse side, which I have not yet mentioned, is that the Moulish themselves fear the land outside the forest. It does not quite go so far as what physicians term agoraphobia\u2014the fear of open places and crowds\u2014but after a life lived in the close embrace of the swamp, the savannah feels like a desiccated wasteland by comparison, one in which there is no shelter to be found. You are exposed: the sun beats down without mercy, the scattered trees providing only tiny oases of shade, and everything can see you.\n\nBeing not Moulish, and only a visitor to the Green Hell, my reaction was not so extreme as theirs; but I did gain a degree of sympathy for it. My months in the swamp had acclimated me to an environment never further away than my elbow. Now I felt as if I teetered atop a small and unstable perch, and might at any moment go tumbling away into the emptiness.\n\nThis feeling was all the stronger because I knew I would only be in the open air for a short while, after which I would tumble (or, one hoped, serenely glide) back into the confines of the swamp. I was not particularly eager to return to the Green Hell, but at the moment it felt familiar\u2014and besides, I hoped, great discoveries awaited me there.\n\nHaving departed from our Moulish hosts, Tom, Natalie, Faj Rawango, and I picked our way across the broken land where the fault that created the Great Cataract began. It was not easy going, but moving out onto flatter land would bring us too near the villages, and the men who fortified and held the rivers against Ikwunde advances. We did not want their attention and their questions. In due course, however, we came to the bank of the Hembi and settled down, under Natalie's guidance, to build a pair of wings.\n\nI would not be able to fly with them, of course, in the sense of achieving the kind of lift and maneuverability that most breeds of dragons can manage. I lacked the thoracic muscles necessary for such a thing; the best I could hope for would be to glide. Even that was the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, though, and so I threw myself into this task with goodwill.\n\nThe center of the frame was an oval shape, made by lashing ribs together, with a division where they could be pulled apart for easier transport. Two femurs reached out from this to form the leading edges of the wings, the surface itself consisting of canvas stretched over fans of alar cartilage. I painted that canvas with the sap of the rubber vine to make it airtight, while Tom helped Natalie lash the bones and cartilage together with gut and cord.\n\nI myself would hang feet-down from the center of this affair, just behind the femurs, with a crossbar for me to grip. Natalie was going to use a fibula for the crossbar, but I had, out of nostalgia for my childhood, insisted that a wishbone be among the pieces we preserved, and it seemed too apt not to employ here. (Apt and\u2014I must admit\u2014superstitiously lucky. If wishbones were a thing of flight, and I wished to fly... an irrelevant connection, of course, as it would not be serving anything like the anatomical function of a furcula in this instance. But when one is going to fling oneself off a cliff, these little superstitions become oddly vital.)\n\nTom and I had spent enough time studying the mechanics of flight for me to need little instruction in the use of my glider. By leaning my weight to one side or another, I could turn; by throwing it forward or back, I could direct myself down or up. But only so far: the control offered by such a design is limited in the extreme, as enthusiasts of more advanced designs are no doubt shouting at the page even now. Furthermore, while I might not need instruction, to undertake such a thing without practice is little short of suicidal. But the art was in its infancy back then, and that meant there had been no dramatic accidents (such as the one that claimed the life of Mr. Garsell, Natalie's Lopperton friend, three years later) to instil the proper fear in me. I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrifed\u2014not enough to turn back.\n\nWhile we did this work, Faj Rawango scouted the river. He soon returned with good news. \"If you can cross the Hembi,\" he said, \"and come at the falls along the spit of land between it and the Gaomomo, I think you will be almost directly above your island.\"\n\n\"That sounds ideal,\" I said. \"I would prefer not to have to glide along the waterfall any farther than I must, as the air currents there are likely to be unpredictable.\" (We had, in those days, a general sense that air currents were relevant to flight; the specifics had not yet been tested with anything more complicated than a kite. If they had... but it is quite useless to second-guess my own actions at this late date.)\n\nTo cross the Hembi, I would need some sort of vessel. Faj Rawango accordingly went out again, and while he was gone, I held my final conference with Tom and Natalie.\n\n\"There's a good vantage point a mile or so back,\" Tom said. \"We'll watch from there\u2014though to be honest, it will make no difference one way or another.\"\n\nA born gentleman would not have shown his nerves at the thought of what I faced. I was glad Thomas Wilker was not a born gentleman; it made me less ashamed about the storm of sparklings dancing in my stomach. \"I will feel better for knowing you are watching,\" I said, and shook his hand.\n\nNatalie embraced me. She had been all efficient concentration during the building of the glider, but with that task done, she had nothing to distract her from the situation. \"I think the design is good,\" she said into my shoulder, \"but if it is not\u2014\"\n\n\"I have every confidence,\" I told her. \"Come, though\u2014we must give my conveyance a name. What shall we call it?\"\n\nA dozen possibilities fluttered through my mind as I said that. I had named my son after his father, but to call a glider after them both seemed a bit much. Greenie, after my beloved sparkling trophy? Ankumata, in an attempt to flatter the oba, or alternatively Lord Hilford? Draconean, in honour of the ancient civilization?\n\nTom made a sound I had never heard from him before, which I can only call a gurgle, as if he almost swallowed his tongue laughing. \"Furcula,\" he said.\n\nI had related the story while we built the glider, of how I dissected a dove in my childhood to discover the purpose of a wishbone. \"It is vital to flight,\" I admitted. \"And if it breaks, well, that is supposed to make my wish come true. Furcula it shall be!\"\n\nAnd so it was that, with the wondrous Furcula in two pieces athwart my lap, I came to be rowed across the Hembi River near the border of Bayembe, for the purpose of flinging myself over a waterfall.\n\nFaj Rawango rowed the small boat, and studied me with an unblinking gaze as he did so. \"What is it?\" I asked, when I could bear the silence no more.\n\nHe did not answer immediately, to the point where I thought he might not do so at all. At last he said, \"You could have gotten eggs more easily than this.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" I said, after some reflection. \"We still know nothing about dragon mating: when it happens, where eggs are laid, even how to tell a female swamp-wyrm from a male. I would have had to go searching. That would have upset the Moulish, possibly to the point of violence\u2014which is a different sort of cost, and one I am not eager to pay. And then there are other things I would not have learned. They may not be entirely relevant to natural history; tree-bridges, for example, are not directly concerned with dragons, but rather with how humans coexist with them. That is, however, something I am interested in knowing. As is this priesthood, or whatever term I should use for it, that Yeyuama belongs to. So perhaps I pay in difficulty, but I believe I gain more than enough in return.\"\n\nFaj Rawango pulled steadily on the oars, not taking his eyes off me. \"You do not do this for them.\"\n\nThe Moulish. In all honesty, it took me a moment of thinking to understand what he meant. Some years later\u2014after stories of my exploits aboard the Basilisk began to filter back home, and the outrage over my Erigan deeds had faded somewhat\u2014there were those in Scirland who romanticized me as some kind of champion of the Moulish, nobly aiding them with no desire for my own gain. This is entirely false, and I cannot decide if its falsity is too flattering to me, or perversely insulting, to myself and the Moulish both. One could imagine that I approached my research the way I did out of respect for our hosts and their traditions, but insofar as that is true, I cannot claim credit for it. It was the accidental consequence of my true reasoning, which was concerned with how to achieve the best results with a minimum of fuss. Flinging myself off a waterfall was, in my ledger, less fuss than Velloin's approach; that is as noble as I can claim to have been.\n\nWe were nearly to the far bank of the Hembi. The Moulish had not been on my mind, not in that fashion, but now Faj Rawango had put them there, reminding me of a conversation in Vystrana years ago, about what good our expedition could do for the people of Drustanev. This time we had done better; we had not held ourselves aloof from those around us, but had assisted in their daily work, contributing where we could in repayment for their hospitality. Still, it was not as much as we might have done.\n\nNow was hardly the time to be thinking about such matters, when I needed all my concentration for the task of not dying. I said to Faj Rawango, \"I hope I have at the very least not been detrimental to our hosts. But if you know of any way I can be more beneficial to them\u2014\"\n\nThe prow of the boat scraped against the bank. Faj Rawango did not answer me. It was, I think, not his place; I was asking about the Moulish, and although they were his father's people, they were not his own. Furthermore, the point was not so much to effect a trade, wherein I gave them a particular thing in exchange for what I had received thus far, and would receive in the future. The point was to make me think about the question.\n\nI did not intend to think about it right then, not when I had more immediately perilous concerns at hand. But as I turned to brace myself against the boat's edge and step out, I swept my gaze across the long, shallow valley where the three rivers came together, just to reassure myself the Ikwunde were not even now sneaking a raiding party across.\n\nThey were not. The waters here were too treacherous to make a good crossing, and the close spacing of the rivers meant they could too easily be caught with their forces strung out in a vulnerable line. But as those thoughts went through my mind, I remembered something I had heard Natalie say.\n\nThe Royal Engineers were planning a dam, somewhere in the west.\n\nI knew the geography of Bayembe passably well by now. More than well enough to be certain that there was only one part of the country with a river that might usefully be dammed, and that was this western region, the border with Eremmo.\n\nSpeculation froze me where I stood, with one foot in the boat and one on the bank. They could try to dam the Hembi\u2014but if they did so anywhere in this valley, it would spill over into the nearby Gaomomo and Girama, with very little profit to anyone.\n\nIf one were to dam all three rivers, though...\n\nFaj Rawango said something to me, but I did not hear it. My mind was racing across the landscape, wishing desperately that I had one of those survey maps on hand, or that Natalie were there to answer a few questions. Could all three rivers be dammed? And what would happen if they were?\n\nIt would create an enormous, shallow lake all through this valley. One which the Ikwunde would find much more difficult to cross than these three rivers; they would need a fleet of boats, or else\u2014if the lake stretched far enough\u2014they would be forced up into the western hills, which offered difficulties of their own. Provided the thing could be built (which would be easier said than done, with the Ikwunde making forays into the area), it might substantially improve the defensibility of this border. Had Galinke not said something about that, when we were in the agban? And with the water turbines Natalie had been so excited about, it could supply power for a number of industrial purposes, which I was sure would be very useful to our commercial interests here.\n\nBut what would it do to the swamp below?\n\nI turned, staggering a little as the boat shifted beneath my foot, and looked toward the Great Cataract. I was no engineer; some of the ideas that went through my mind then were utterly false. (The dam would not, for example, cut off all water to the Green Hell; it must perforce allow the rivers through eventually.) But I was correct in my basic assumption, which was that a dam would interfere with the flow of the water, and that would, in turn, have untold consequences for the creatures and people of Mouleen.\n\nBy then Faj Rawango had stood and reached for my arm. \"Are you all right?\" he said, awkward in his concern. \"If you do not wish to do this... I'm sure there's another way.\"\n\nHe thought I was paralyzed by my impending doom. \"No, that isn't it,\" I said, then belatedly added, \"Thank you.\" I finished disembarking and bent to retrieve the pieces of the Furcula out of the boat; they were light enough that it was easy to carry one in each hand. \"But please do me a favor. Ask Natalie whether those engineers were talking about building a dam here.\"\n\nWhether they had admitted it to her or not, I was convinced that was their intent. If memory served, Lord Hilford had said something about an attack on the Royal Engineers in this area. This might also explain what Sir Adam had meant, the night we dined at Point Miriam; he had said something about how the Green Hell might not always defend Bayembe. Oh, he knew what this would do\u2014I was certain of it. Certain, and seething mad, that he would dismiss the \"backwater\" as an unimportant casualty in pursuit of this goal.\n\nIt seemed Faj Rawango knew nothing of such plans; he frowned in puzzlement, but nodded. Then he handed me my small, waterproof bundle, which I strapped to my back. It held a notebook and pencils, a bottle of water and a few strips of dried meat, a coil of rope, a penknife, and bandages with which to strap up any joints I might sprain along the way. A few other small odds and ends. They would, I hoped, be enough.\n\nFaj Rawango blessed me in the Yembe fashion, which I acknowledged with gratitude. They say there are no atheists in war; I tell you that pantheists abound at the edge of a cliff. I would have taken the blessing of any god I could get.\n\nThen there was nothing left to say. I put the dam out of my mind; it should have been difficult, but preparing to risk one's life concentrates the mind wonderfully. Natalie had a letter in her pack, addressed to my son, in case I should not survive this. Jacob was too young to read it, or even to understand its meaning if someone else read it to him, but the words needed to be set down for posterity. (His posterity, not that of the world; I will not share its contents with you here.)\n\nI hesitated: this was my last chance to turn back. Then, with what I hoped looked like a decisive nod, I left Faj Rawango and walked toward the edge of the cliff.\n\nRocks broke the smooth flow of the water here, making treacherous rapids no boat could approach. Now that I was atop the cliff, I could see those rocks went very near to the edge\u2014no, all the way to it; there was a perch from which I could survey the (vertical) terrain. Leaving the wings of the Furcula on the ground with my bundle to pin them in place, I went to see what I faced.\n\nFrom the ground, the mist of the falling water had been an exquisite thing, veiling the cataract in rainbows and mystery. From here, it veiled the ground instead\u2014which was a mercy. I had vertigo regardless, the world reeling around me as I gazed over the cliff. But it did not reel so badly that I failed to find the island for which I aimed.\n\nIt was not so far away. In fact, from here it looked quite different: not so much hovering as dangling, as a pendant dangles from its chain. The chain on the far side was broken, inasmuch as I could see through the thunderous mist, but a rough string of rocks, some of them overgrown with vegetation, appeared to lead from my perch down to not very far above the island's surface. Was this how the Moulish made their own journey?\n\n(In fact it was not. But I will not tell you how they did it, for I do not want hordes of curiosity-seekers to try that path for themselves. Suffice it to say that their way is far easier than my own\u2014which accounts for Yeyuama's willingness to permit me some assistance. Fortunately, few people are reckless enough to imitate what I am about to detail.)\n\nThis presented me with an interesting choice. The intent had been to fly the Furcula down to the island, and then to fly a second time from the island to the swamp below. But that, of course, was to commit myself to the hazard twice, and furthermore to do so when my first jump, of necessity, must be the more difficult of the two. The wind whipped about me quite strongly, and my target was small. It seemed I had another option, however, which was to try to climb down by terrestrial means, and then to use the Furcula for the second, and much easier, stage.\n\nOf course this had its own hazards. The rocks were wet with spray. I must climb with the two pieces of the glider strapped to my back, which would not be easy; they might act as a sail to carry me off. I could not even be certain that the path I thought I saw would take me all the way; it might prove more broken than it seemed from this angle.\n\nBut with a choice between those perils and the ones attendant upon flinging myself from the cliff, I found my answer was clear.\n\nThe first part of the descent was relatively easy, save that I had to watch the edges of the glider's wings, lest I damage them against the stone. (The dragonbone, of course, would survive any knock I might give it; the bindings and canvas, however, might not.) The stones were indeed slick beneath my hands, but there were also pockets of dirt and small plants; for a wonder, none of them were thorned, nor occupied by anything worse than a confused beetle or two. I had to make a sideways traverse that was worryingly narrow, and the wind was indeed tugging at my unused wings, but the difficulty grew the closer I came to the island.\n\nI will not pretend I navigated this challenge with aplomb. My heart was racing, my hands cramping with tension, and I knew that the mist was a blessing; without it I might have seen exactly what awaited me if I fell. As it was, I kept my gaze glued to the rock no more than a few feet away. Unfortunately, I could not do so forever: there came a point where my so-called path ended, and I was not yet at the island.\n\nFrom above, it had looked complete. As I had feared, however, the view had been deceptive. The path brought me laterally to the island, but not vertically. I stood above it, with no easy way to close the gap.\n\nEvaluating this required me to look down, which promptly rendered me certain that my foot would slip, the wind would seize me, the very stone would fling me off. I clutched the cliff face as if it were the dearest thing to me in the world; indeed, at that moment no thing could have been dearer. But I could not stay there: one way or another, I had to move.\n\nTo go up would be as hazardous as coming down had been, with a flight still waiting at the end of it, and my body exhausted by this trial. Would the others see me, and send Faj Rawango back?\n\nThe alternative was no safer. I had a coil of rope wrapped about my body, and Jacob had taught me to abseil in Vystrana. Even presuming I could do so again, however, it would cost me my rope; I could not untie it once I was at the bottom. And to try abseiling with my bundle and wings strapped to my back...\n\nI am a scientist, and fond of thinking matters through in a rational fashion. On some occasions, however, rational thought is not one's friend. Before I could weigh the circumstances in great detail, I edged back along my path, to a space where a larger outcropping gave me a bit of safety to move.\n\nThere I unstrapped my wings (nearly losing one to a gust of wind) and my bundle, tying them together with my belt. This achieved, I went back to the end of my pseudo-path and, hoping with all my might that I was not committing an act of abject stupidity, dropped them over the precipice. They tumbled a bit in the air, but landed on the island as I had hoped. Whether they had been damaged in the fall would remain to be seen: first I must try not to damage myself.\n\nI had kept my coil of rope, which I fixed about a stone, blessing Tom and Mekeesawa for teaching me knots during my time in the swamp. There was no time for questioning whether the rope might slip, or my weight pull the stone loose; such questioning would only paralyze me. I wrapped the rope around my body as Jacob had taught me, and committed myself to the void.\n\nIt was not like abseiling in Vystrana. Here there was mist, which softened my hands and made the rope burn them unmercifully; here there was also an unpredictable wind that tried to spin me about like a top. I cracked not only my knees against the wall but also my shins, my hips, my shoulders, my elbows\u2014 every part of me, including my head, though fortunately that blow was glancing. I felt I had gone a hundred meters, but I was not yet at the island; I dared not let myself look down to see how much farther I had to go.\n\nAs a consequence, the ground beneath my dangling left foot took me by surprise, and I thumped onto my posterior when my grip loosened for an instant. Fortunately the rope, wrapped about my body, kept me from rolling off the nearby edge, which I might otherwise have done.\n\nSome minutes passed before I could force my mind to work again, and more before I could persuade my body to unwrap itself and crawl away from that edge.\n\nBut I had done it\u2014half of it, at least. I was on the island.\n\nNot without damage. I was bruised and scraped, and my wings, when I collected them, had suffered three small ruptures in the canvas. I had needle and waxed cord with which to repair that, however, and they were (I hoped) not large enough to endanger me. I was not eager to contemplate the perils of getting off the island, however, not when I had only just arrived.\n\nInstead I set myself to discover why Yeyuama had sent me here.\n\nThe island was not large. I estimated it to be no more than thirty meters across where it met the cliff face, and less than that in depth. Here and there the rocks projected through the vegetation, but much of it was thickly overgrown, and rivulets from the thin falls behind traced paths through and under the green. It was a beautiful place, and I intended to draw it before I left, but I saw nothing that looked like an answer.\n\nSo I went to the edge of the island, where it projected into the air. My gaze went first to the cliff above, to the place from which I thought Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango might be watching. Between the distance and the mist, however, I could not spot them. Next I looked down (with a careful grip on a stone to make certain vertigo did not send me over), but there was no hope of seeing Yeyuama. He should be watching for me, though, and we had arranged to meet by a particular large and identifiable tree.\n\nI did, however, see something else.\n\nThere was movement in the water below that was not turbulence from the falls. It moved crossways to that turbulence, in a smooth and sinuous curve, shifting as I watched. The curve was not large relative to the lake as a whole but, measured against the bank, must have been at least ten meters long. It reminded me of nothing so much as a serpent I had seen eeling through the muddy, still waters of the swamp.\n\nSerpent. Sea-serpent. Dragon.\n\nHeedless of my lofty perch, I dropped to my knees, then to my stomach, so I could lean out in greater safety and get a better view. The movement I had been watching faded\u2014dove deeper, perhaps?\u2014but there was more to the south. A second disturbance. Watching, scarcely daring to blink, I counted three in all, that I could be certain were distinct from one another; there might have been more.\n\nThis, I was certain, was what Yeyuama had sent me to see. There were dragons in the lake below.\n\n(I was glad all over again that I had not chosen to try and swim those waters in my quest for the island.)\n\nDragons in the lake. What might it mean? They were not swamp-wyrms; of that, I was sure. They were too large and too mobile, eschewing the stalking tactics of their downstream kin. Kin\u2014that was an intriguing notion. How did these dragons relate to the other local breeds? Surely the lake could not support a large population. How did they propagate, with so small a number?\n\nThe chain of thoughts that followed was not, I confess, entirely scientific. My astonished mind leapt from one idea to another with the speed and unpredictability of a grasshopper, making connections and then discarding them. But the picture formed by those it did not discard felt right; it explained the data, albeit with some intuitive leaps along the way.\n\nI had been asking about dragon eggs. Mekeesawa put me off. Akinimanbi told me I would get no answers so long as I was under the baleful eye of witchcraft. I duly got myself out from under it, and Yeyuama appeared. He brought me here, saying I would understand once I saw.\n\nAnd our expedition, in all our observation, had not managed to record the differences between male and female swamp-wyrm anatomy.\n\nHumans have a small degree of what we term sexual dimorphism, with males generally a bit larger than females, and slightly different in form. Other species have more. And in some insects, for example bees, the number of fertile females is extremely low, with all others being males or infertile females.\n\nIn Vystrana, I had speculated briefly about the existence of a \"queen dragon.\" Rock-wyrms had no such thing... but lying full-length on that waterfall island, I became convinced that swamp-wyrms did, and they were in the lake below me.\n\nThe full shape of the thing did not become clear to me until later, when Yeyuama, satisfied by my achievement in reaching and returning from the island, shared with me the details of his calling. (Details I will, out of respect for his wishes, leave incomplete here. The biology is of concern to my audience, and that I will share; the rituals and geographic specifics will remain with the Moulish.) But my theory was correct in its general outline, which is that what lived in the lake were the females of the breed, and those we had seen until now were exclusively male. And while I might have seen that from the shore\u2014with difficulty, on account of the turbulence in the water\u2014this rite of passage served a multifarious purpose, not only showing me the female dragons, but testing the qualities necessary for carrying out the work of Yeyuama and his brethren.\n\nI sat back, breathless with speculation and delight. A thousand questions wanted to burst from me, about the dragons, about how the Moulish interacted with them, and what I might do now that I understood.\n\nAlas, the man who could answer them was a very long way below me, and I had not yet passed his test. First I had to return to the ground in one piece.\n\nNewly energized by my excitement, I retrieved the pieces of the Furcula and set to work stitching closed the holes that had formed in my wings. My needlework has never been impressive, but the necessity of repairing our clothing, not to mention modifying my skirts into trousers, had made it functional, and I included patches cut from my shirt-tails to cover the seams for extra reinforcement.\n\nWhen that was done, I drank some water and ate a little, surveying the island with an eye toward sketching it before I departed. It was only partially a delaying tactic, putting off the moment when I would have to test the glider; but I am glad for that delay, as it led me to notice the oddity of my surroundings.\n\nSome of the island's stones were too regular in shape.\n\nNot very regular; they had been badly weathered by the elements. But here there was something like a row, and there, a corner. Heedless of my raw palms, I began to dig at the covering growth and dirt, hacking away with my penknife when the roots and vines resisted my pulling. And I uncovered enough to confirm my suspicion.\n\nThere were ruins on this island.\n\nRuins of ruins: if Natalie was right, and there had once been a more continuous ledge interrupting the progress of the Great Cataract, then the rest of what once stood here had gone tumbling down with it. But there was enough for me to be certain that what I saw was not natural.\n\nThe Moulish do not build in stone. There is no reason they should; the Green Hell is not well supplied with it, except at the edges, and stone houses cannot move with their owners when the nearby food runs out. Anything they might build would be lost to the jungle by the time they came back, and so it is far easier and more sensible to simply fashion a new hut at need. The peoples of Bayembe use some stone, but much more mud brick, whose raw materials are abundant and cheap. And with these ruins so weathered and overgrown... it was not the work of anyone recent.\n\nMy instant thought, of course, was that the ruins were Draconean. Yeyuama had sent me up here as a rite of passage, so that I might \"touch the dragons\"; it seemed obvious that this should be a relic of the civilization that had once worshipped them, the civilization to which Yves de Maucheret had compared the Moulish religion. There was nothing here, however, to indicate a Draconean connection, apart from their apparent great age\u2014and I was no archaeologist, to estimate more precisely than \"thousands of years old.\" No great walls stood on this island, no striding statues or other characteristic pieces of Draconean art.\n\nNonetheless, it was intriguing enough that I felt obliged to document the remains. In several places the overgrowth was too thick for me to pursue the remnants of the walls, but I sketched as much as I could uncover, working my way methodically across the island. This systematic approach soon brought me to another suspicious regularity: an alcove in the cliff, where the water of the falls parted around the promontory of the island. It was nearly my height, and oblong in shape\u2014almost like a door.\n\n\"I will feel like an idiot if I was right,\" I remarked to the air. If there truly was a tunnel to this place, and I had simply failed to find its entrance... but at least that would save me jumping off the island when I left.\n\nCloser inspection told me I was not so lucky as to be an idiot (at least not where this matter was concerned). The alcove was far too overgrown and silted with dirt to be the means by which the \"pure\" reached this place, and my probing hand, reaching through the leaves, found stone beneath.\n\nSmooth stone. Far too smooth to be natural.\n\nThrusting both hands into the greenery, I found more smoothness\u2014indented with lines, as if it were carved.\n\nThe vines resisted my tearing them away, as they had a good foothold in the dirt along the sides. But I was stubborn, and my curiosity was up; and once I had torn enough out to see what lay behind, nothing short of the island dropping out from beneath me would have turned me from my task.\n\nThe entire back of the alcove was filled with a vertical slab of granite, much discoloured by the ages, but inscribed from top to toe, except where a gap in the middle broke the text into two portions.\n\nI stared at it, mouth open. This was not, I felt sure, what Yeyuama had sent me to see; it was too thoroughly buried. No one had laid eyes on this in a long time. But then what was it? The writing in the top half reminded me of Draconean\u2014well, truth be told, it reminded me of chicken scratches, which had been my first impression of that ancient script when I saw it as a child. But I had seen enough Draconean writing since then to know this was far more chicken-scratchy, as if a child had tried to imitate their work.\n\nOr had been in the process of developing it. Could this place be older than the Draconean ruins we knew? I wished I were archaeologist enough to guess. Regardless of the truth, I had no idea what to make of the text in the lower half, which was quite different in appearance: little rounded blocks, which I might have thought decorative had there not been so many, in tidy lines.\n\nI take the time to describe this stone to you, even though many of my readers have likely seen photographs (or the thing itself, in the Royal Museum or a touring exhibition), because I want you to understand what I found that day. I did not know what I was looking at, other than a puzzle. And one which, alas, I could not take with me: had the Lord Himself given me the strength of ten men, to pluck that slab from its sheltered pocket, I could not have taken it off the island. The weight would have sent the Furcula straight into the lake. Nor did I have any large sheet of paper with which to take a rubbing.\n\nI briefly contemplated tearing all the blank pages from my notebook and making a kind of mosaic, but it would have taken an age, and my sunlight was rapidly vanishing. As nervous as I was about trying my wings, darkness would make that task neither easier nor safer. I must do it now, or wait until the morrow, and I did not relish the thought of a night spent up here in the thunder and the cold spray.\n\nWere it not for that ticking clock, I do not know how long I might have dithered. Instead I set to work, slotting the two pieces of the glider together, tightening their lashings, tying my bundle to my back.\n\nThat sufficed to get me physically ready. My mind was another matter entirely.\n\nThe wind tugged at my wings as I went toward the edge of the island, though not so strongly as to risk lifting me off my feet. I almost wished it had; that would have reassured me that this contraption was indeed capable of supporting my weight. But no: like a baby bird, I must hurl myself into the air, and see only then whether or not I could fly.\n\n(I had always thought baby birds adorable beyond words. Now I found myself admiring them for their courage.)\n\nHave you ever stood at a precipice and felt a sudden fear, not that you will fall, but that you will fling yourself over? That the instincts which preserve our lives will fail you for that one vital moment, and in the gap, you will, for no good reason, step forward and seek your own end? I have, on more than one occasion. That afternoon in Eriga, however, I discovered that it is not so easy as your fears would have you believe. I had reason to step forward; flinging myself over was my purpose in being there. Yet my legs stood frozen. They might have sunk roots into the ground, so little capable was I of lifting my foot even an inch. With the harness of the Furcula wrapped about me\u2014a promise that I would not die\u2014I became convinced of my own doom, and could not move.\n\nThe wind jarred me from my paralysis. A stronger gust knocked me a little sideways, slightly off balance, and before I could regain my inertia, I ran forward and leapt from the island, into the rainbows and mist."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "On dragon wings\u2014Air currents\u2014Demise of the Furcula\u2014Journey downward\u2014I spend a miserable night\u2014Movement in the forest\u2014Labane\u2014The use of a Scirling woman\n\nAnd I flew.\n\nGlided, rather\u2014but it was enough. Instead of falling to my death, I hung suspended in the air, floating on currents and the carefully measured physics of my wings.\n\nIt was a miracle.\n\nAn uncomfortable one, I must say. We have invented better harnesses since; the one I wore dug unmercifully under my arms, and I held the crossbar in a strangulation grip out of fear that I would somehow slip free. This dragged the nose of the Furcula downward, and I began to descend more rapidly; a hasty shove sent my nose upward once more, leveling me out. My heart pounded so hard it seemed in danger of leaping from my chest, but I was flying.\n\nMy panicked gyrations had not only changed my altitude; they had altered my direction. I was headed swiftly for the northwestern corner where the Green Hell met the Great Cataract and the plateau above, and while the dragonbone struts might survive the collision, my own bones would not. I attempted to turn right, over the forest, but something\u2014a wrong shift in my weight; a trick of the air currents\u2014fought me, so that it was easier to go left instead. I skimmed along the falls, back toward the center and the waterfall island, though too low now to make a landing where I had begun.\n\nLanding there was not my aim regardless. I had lost sight of the tree where I was supposed to meet Yeyuama, but was more concerned with finding a safe place to alight. My original intent had been to plunge myself into the lake, in preference to crashing into a tree; now that I had seen the queen dragons, such plans seemed less wise. If I could direct myself to the edge of the lake, though, it might be safe enough.\n\nNo one, man or woman, can take into account factors they do not know in the first place. So it was with me and the behaviour of air currents.\n\nHot air rises. Birds take advantage of these drafts, which we now call thermals, to gain altitude. The air near the falls had been cool, owing to the mist thrown off by the water and the growing shadows of the setting sun, but over the forest proper it was the full blazing heat of a tropical afternoon.\n\nThe Furcula rose. I was trying to direct it downward, but my control was minimal and my skill even less; I was, even more than I had realized, at the mercy of the elements around me. Instead of settling, my glider lifted me up, up, above the shorter trees near the lake's bank, above the giants beyond. Glorious as flight might be, this was not at all what I wanted.\n\nAs before, I would have to turn myself about and head back the way I came. I threw my weight to the side... and lost stability altogether.\n\nSome unexpected draft\u2014from the Great Cataract or the slopes of the Green Hell, I do not know which\u2014sent me veering sharply to the side. This sudden shift in my balance made my legs swing wildly, turning my course still more erratic. The attempt to bring my lower body under control caused me, by reflex, to draw my arms in; the Furcula tipped downward. My toes slapped a high branch. I forced my hands outward again, and the glider lifted, but by then there was no hope of regaining control.\n\nI was going to crash.\n\nI knew this, very clearly. I felt I had all the time in the world to know this fact, to study it, to imagine what the consequences would be. I saw the forest below me and tried to evaluate one spot or another for its desirability as a crash site. A foolish waste of time: the emerald sea that was the canopy of the Green Hell had little to offer in the way of variation, and I had not the slightest control over where I would fall. I saw the top branches approaching, and had the presence of mind (though it threw my glider off even more) to draw my legs up, so I would be less likely to catch my ankle somewhere and dislocate a joint.\n\nThen I struck the branches, dragging through them for a short distance before the resistance grew enough to stop my forward momentum.\n\nAnd then I fell.\n\nI did not fall very far. I was strapped into a dragonbone glider; the wings were too large to pass easily through the trees, and too strong to break. But they dragged some distance through the branches before catching against a few sturdy enough to hold, and then I jolted to a halt.\n\nI almost kept going. The Furcula had stopped at an angle that left me dangling from the crossbar, my weight only partially supported by the harness, and the jolt caused my grip to falter. I made an undignified noise, half yelp, half squeak, and clutched for dear life at the wishbone. My devout wish at that moment was for it not to break.\n\nThe bone held. But my grip would not; sooner or later it would give way. Thinking to support my weight by some other means, I glanced about, saw a nearby branch, and attempted to hook my leg over it.\n\nThis jarred my glider loose from its precarious angle. With a cracking of branches, the Furcula and I slid free once more. For a moment we were in relatively open air, and I, driven by terrified instinct, dragged the glider's nose down as hard as I could, lest I lose the support of the harness entirely. The Furcula struck another branch, nose first, and flipped entirely upside down\u2014and there, again, it stopped.\n\nOnce my heart slowed to something like a sustainable pace, I realized that I had inadvertently improved my situation. I still sat above a lethal fall, but at least the glider was now between me and my potential demise.\n\nMoving carefully, I persuaded my hands to let go of the wishbone, extricated my arms from their harness, and shifted myself around until I sat atop the bones that formed the central frame of the glider. The branches beneath me might give way, but the bones, at least, would hold.\n\nThere I sat for several long moments, concentrating on nothing beyond my breathing and my pounding heart. When at last I achieved a semblance of composure, I opened my eyes and looked about.\n\nI was still in the forest canopy\u2014a fortunate thing indeed. Beneath the level on which I sat, the branches became much more numerous, and might have speared me through the canvas. Below that would be a gap in which there were few branches at all; had I plunged through the understory, I would not have stopped until I reached the ground thirty meters below, and there I would have died. As it was, I had suffered nothing worse than an assortment of scrapes and bruises, and two wrenched shoulders. For an uncontrolled landing in a glider, I considered myself virtually unharmed.\n\nOf course, I still had to reach the ground alive.\n\nI thought longingly of my rope, left dangling above the waterfall island. I could have used its aid now. Lacking such, I faced a long and hazardous climb\u2014one I was not at all certain I would survive.\n\nWhat did I have that might serve as a rope? My clothing, if cut apart; but I did not relish the notion of climbing naked, nor surviving in the Green Hell that way afterward. I was neither as hardy nor as resistant to disease as the Moulish. The bindings on the glider frame, but they were too thin to grip, and too firmly lashed into place. The canvas of the glider wings.\n\nThat, clearly, was my best prospect\u2014compared against the alternatives, which was not saying much. I would not call it ideal. I had to balance on the branches of the tree in which I had landed and use my penknife to cut through the tough, rubber-painted fabric. My harvest, such as I could collect without endangering myself, was not very large. But I had seen the Moulish use vines to support themselves when they climbed trees, wrapping them about the trunk like straps, while bracing their feet against the bark. Where the tree afforded no good branches, I could try the same.\n\nMy descent to the forest floor was nothing short of grueling. As I said in my description of the tree-bridges, I was not much of a climber (though I was a much better one by the time I reached the ground). I slipped often, and had to rest a dozen times along the way. I strained my fingers and my ankles, scraped my left knee raw, and was stabbed by countless thorns before I thought of wrapping a length of rubberized canvas around my palms to protect them.\n\nThe only saving grace was the chance to observe the life of the forest from this new vantage. (If you doubt that I had any care for such things when my own life was in danger, understand that it was a means of distracting myself from my peril.) Birds and insects buzzed about me, and monkeys danced through the trees. I saw a drakefly alight on a nest not ten feet away, and discovered that in addition to eating insects, they are thieves of eggs.\n\nI would have taken notes on this, but the light was failing me. As I neared the lowest rank of branches, I was forced to consider my situation. Should I finish my descent to the ground or not?\n\nI hardly relished the notion of spending the night in a tree. But I was exhausted in body and mind, which would make the remainder of the climb even more perilous; furthermore, this would be my first night in the Green Hell without the shelter of a tent or hut and the warning light of a fire to keep animals away. There were nocturnal predators in the swamp, some of which would certainly be bold enough to prey upon a lone, helpless woman.\n\nNo, the tree it must be. I lashed myself in place with the strips of my poor, butchered Furcula, and attempted to get some rest.\n\nAs you might imagine, this was easier said than done. I had grown accustomed to the sounds of the forest, but they seemed different when no wall, however flimsy, stood between me and the creatures making them. Furthermore, my bindings did nothing to convince my brain that I was not going to tumble off the branch if I so much as breathed too deeply. Nor could I help but think about my companions, who would have seen me go careering off over the swamp. They might have even seen me crash. The thought of their fear made my heart ache.\n\nHow far had I gone? I had the vague sense that my course had taken me southward and east, but beyond that, I had lost all sense of distance or direction.\n\nMy sense as a naturalist reasserted itself. I was not in the heart of the Green Hell, that wet, tangled delta. The ground beneath me was drier, which meant I must be on the slope\u2014but not too far up it, as the vegetation was not the scrubby stuff we had camped in while first waiting for the Moulish. (\"Scrubby\" by the standards of Mouleen; it would have been a respectable forest, albeit fantastically overgrown, in Scirland.) And I had not been in the air so long as to come anywhere near the bay. I was therefore somewhere in the southwestern quadrant of the swamp, and if I headed west and perhaps a bit downslope, I would come once again to the Great Cataract, which was a place my companions might find me\u2014if I did not come across any Moulish first.\n\nIf I did not perish first. I had only a little water and food; my survival was far from assured.\n\nFear of my state kept me awake long into the night, but exhaustion can trump many things. I did at last snatch a bit of sleep, and woke with a start around dawn.\n\nMy disorientation was profound. I did not know where I was, and felt for an instant as if I were about to fall. I clutched the branches around me, then hissed in pain at the pressure on my abused hands. Every part of my body ached ; I had not felt this poorly since my bout of yellow fever. This, I realized when my heart slowed down, was the flaw in leaving the last of the climb until morning: my various injuries were all much the worse for a night spent rigid and terrified in a tree.\n\nBut there was nothing to be done for it now. I worked my way methodically through my body, easing cramped muscles and warming stiff joints as best I could without unbinding myself from the tree. (That, I wanted to leave for as long as I could.) This done, I considered the food and water still tied to my back. Should I consume them now, for strength? Or conserve them for later?\n\nBefore I could decide one way or another, I saw movement down below. My instant thought was predator, and I froze\u2014but then I saw the movement had a human origin.\n\nI was exhausted and terrified, and did not yet have my bearings. Moreover, I had no reason to expect anyone but Moulish here, on the southern side of the Green Hell.\n\n\"Hello! You there, down below! Oh, thank heaven you're here. I was so worried I would\u2014\"\n\nThe men froze, raising their spears as if to attack. Then, far too late, I took in all the details that should have warned me.\n\nThese were not the short, slight figures of Moulish hunters. They were taller and darker of skin\u2014nearly as dark as the Yembe. They wore fringed bands about their arms and calves, carried shields of hide stretched over a frame. And they journeyed in silence through the swamp, as the Moulish rarely do.\n\nThey were strangers, men of a people I had never seen before, and by the looks of their armament, their purpose here was not peaceful.\n\nYou may blame me for being so slow to recognize them, and I will grant that as fair. I had seen no accurate images, only the caricatures then current in Scirling news-sheets, which were exaggerated for the purpose of whipping up support for the Nsebu colony and our alliance with Bayembe.\n\nThey were Ikwunde warriors.\n\nOn the other hand\u2014and I can laugh about it now, when the event is years behind me\u2014it took them a comically long time to spot me. They had no reason to look for a woman halfway up a tree. When one of them at last turned his gaze upward, he leapt back a full pace in shock.\n\nBy then I was wishing I had untied myself, so I might at least have tried to hide. But I was still bound in place, and could not take back the unwise words that had drawn their attention to me. The one who had seen me pointed his spear, directing the others' eyes, and they began to talk in quick, low voices amongst themselves.\n\nTheir language is wholly unrelated to the Sachimbi family; I could not understand a word of it. The tone, however, and the hostile looks I received, told me their conversation was not one of pity. With fumbling fingers, I began trying to unbind myself.\n\nThey saw the movement, and it seemed to hasten their decision. One of the men yanked the spear and shield from my spotter's hands, giving what was clearly an order for him to climb the tree. I redoubled my efforts\u2014to what end? Did I think I would escape them? But I had to try. Whatever these men were doing here, I wanted no involvement with it.\n\nI soon discovered why my spotter had looked grumpy upon being ordered after me. Ikwunde, of course, is a nation of desert and grassland; they are a herding people\u2014or they were, before the inkosi Othaku Zam redirected their efforts toward conquering his neighbours. My spotter was as bad a climber of trees as I. He got one of his companions to give him a boost up, but then had to contend with the parasitic tree wrapped around the base of my own, and did very poorly.\n\nNot that I fared much better. I got myself untied at last, but nearly fell in trying to change my position. I could not go groundward, not with that man below me, nor could I leap across to another tree like a monkey. Up once more? I could not reach the stripped frame of the Furcula, and it would not do me any good if I did.\n\nI was, I thought, too high for them to throw a spear at me. (I did not know how far an Ikwunde warrior can throw a spear.) Given how badly my pursuer climbed, I might simply outwait them on my branch\u2014for surely they had pressing business elsewhere.\n\nBut I underestimated the determination and agility of the man sent after me. He drew close below me, close enough that he would have caught my skirt, had I been wearing one. Frightened, I kicked out, trying to deflect his hand or even strike his head.\n\nI should not have tried. The attempt destroyed my precarious balance, and I fell.\n\nMy panicked grab at the branch slowed me, as did the smaller vegetation I crashed through on the way down. It was brake enough that I escaped a fracture. But I landed hard, driving all the breath from my body\u2014and even had I not, they would have been upon me before I could flee.\n\nThe Ikwunde surrounded me. There were five of them, and very terrifying they looked, from my perspective on the ground. One barked a question at me, which of course I could not answer. He asked again, his voice growing steadily more angry, and I feared he would kill me simply for my lack of comprehension.\n\nI held out my hands as if they could ward off such a fate. \"I am unarmed. You see? I am no threat to you. I\u2014\"\n\nThey, I think, understood me no more than I did them. One seized the bundle on my back and wrenched it away, upending its contents onto the ground. Notebook, needle, thread; what remained of my scant rations. He picked up the notebook and began to page through it. \"I am a scholar,\" I said, even though I knew the words were useless. \"Surely you must see. I am only here for study.\"\n\nBut it mattered naught what I was there for. The fact remained that I had seen them. Ikwunde warriors, in the Green Hell, where they had no business being.\n\nNo more than they had business at the rivers, which was territory Bayembe supposedly controlled. But our soldiers were on guard for them there, and so I supposed it was inevitable that they should try their luck here, despite the lethal reputation of this place. I had heard nothing from the Moulish of previous attempts; this must be their first.\n\nThere were only five of them, though, with no sign of more. Five men might be dangerous to me, or to the Moulish, but not to Bayembe. Not even these five, whose distinctive regalia I now recognized: they were Labane, some of the most elite troops the Ikwunde possessed. Chosen as young as ten, they were taken into intensive training, and lived the next twenty years in a regiment with their new brothers, according to their shared age. A Tsebane (for that is the correct form of the singular, though one never saw it in Scirling papers at the time, and rarely sees it now) cannot marry while he still serves; there is nothing in his life except loyalty to his brothers and to the inkosi, the ruler of Ikwunde. And the task to which the inkosi set him was war.\n\nSuch men had no need of a captive. I would only slow them, threaten the secrecy of whatever they sought here. I knew, as clearly as I knew my own name, that they stayed their hands only out of confusion, that a battered, trouser-clad Scirling woman should fall out of a tree at their feet; once their confusion was satisfied or grew dull, they would kill me.\n\nWhat reason could I possibly give them for sparing me?\n\nInnocence would not avail. Neither would a plea to their compassion. I seized upon the only thing I could\u2014which was my notebook, dropped in disgust just a moment before.\n\nWhen I reached out to collect it, three spears whipped down to point at me. I persevered, taking the volume in my hand and paging to a suitable sketch. This I held up for one of the Labane to see: the one I thought must be their leader, for he had ordered my pursuer up the tree. \"You see this? The dragon. Legambwa,\" I added in Moulish, for there was a greater chance they would recognize that word than the Scirling one. Belatedly, I thought to switch to that tongue, and proceeded in a mixture of it and Yembe, in the hope that some fragment or other would be familiar to my captors. \"They are all over this swamp. Very dangerous. They will attack you. But I\u2014I can show you how to avoid them. How to be safe.\"\n\nI illustrated my words with pantomime, pointing repeatedly at the swamp-wyrm sketch, then using my hand, clawlike, to suggest a draconic attack. My palm I pressed to my heart, indicating by warm and hopeful tone that I offered a way to avoid such perils.\n\nPerhaps someone among my captors spoke a rudimentary amount of Moulish or Yembe; perhaps my pantomime was effective. Perhaps something else passed among them, during their brief conversation. I had, as some readers may recall, been caught by strange men in a foreign country once before, but on that occasion I had been able to parse their language as a dialect of Eiversch, which made communication possible, if not easy. This was as opaque to me as Draconean, and that, as much as the warlike nature of the men who had caught me, made this incident far more terrifying. I felt as if I were in the grip of yellow fever again, the world around me making no sense, and I my next breath potentially my last.\n\nSomething persuaded them, whether it was any part of my plea or a notion of their own making. All I knew was that the one who came for me did so with a length of vine rather than a spear, and so I did not resist as he bound my hands together behind my back. Nor did I protest when he ripped apart the fabric of my bundle and used it to gag me, though I dearly wished for a drink of water before he did. I was not dead yet, and that was more than I had expected a moment ago; everything else could wait.\n\nWhen they dragged me to my feet, someone worked at my wrists for a moment, and then I felt a tug on my bound arms. They had tied another length of vine to the first, making a kind of leash to prevent me from running.\n\nAs if I could run. You have an image, I hope, of the treacherous terrain that makes up the Green Hell; now try to imagine traversing it at speed, with your hands behind you to disrupt your balance. I would not get ten paces before I fell. I nearly fell when a Tsebane shoved me forward, but through sheer determination not to squander my reprieve, I managed to keep my feet.\n\nThey placed me in the lead, as if I were the canary whose demise would warn them of danger. I dearly wanted, once I could think straight, to lead them into just such a situation; there were predators out there, patches of sucking mud, even perilous insects that might be persuaded to attack. Unfortunately, my previous luck with such tactics notwithstanding, I could not be sure I would survive the trap myself\u2014and besides, they did not yet trust me. Any attempt to lead them astray would result in a spear between my shoulder blades.\n\nIn order to survive, I had to prove my worth as a guide.\n\nI therefore bent all the knowledge I had gained of the swamp to the task of impressing them. This was difficult to do, bound and gagged as I was, but I led them ostentatiously away from a thicket of underbrush whose thorns housed very unpleasant ants, then veered again, nodding my head upward, to avoid a serpent dangling from a branch.\n\nStep by step, hazard by hazard, we proceeded into the depths of the Green Hell."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The safety of the Moulish\u2014Another party\u2014Something in my pocket\u2014The loss of my knife\u2014Refuge on high\n\nI had some hope that a friend might find me. Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango had promised to watch from the plateau above; they, unfortunately, were on the north side of the swamp, and could not quickly reach me, the descent from that point being more or less impassable. But Yeyuama had promised to watch from the lake. He knew this place as well as I knew my own garden, and might even now be on his way toward me.\n\nWhich, I soon realized, might get him killed. One against five was terrible odds, and worse when the one is sworn to nonviolence. But surely his sharp eyes would spot the Ikwunde before they saw him? And if not, I had seen for myself how easily the Moulish could conceal themselves when they chose. Perhaps he could gather hunters to help. They had followed his lead against Velloin and Okweme\u2014though I suspected that was because the conflict there was dragon-related. Would the camps here stir themselves to help me? We had met briefly during my first journey to the Great Cataract, but these were not the Moulish who had been a part of my larger social world these past months.\n\nSuch were my thoughts, chasing in anxious circles like a mouse trapped in a box. It was preferable to thinking about the alternatives.\n\nUnfortunately, the Labane were driving me northeast: deeper into the swamp, but away from the lake. With each step, the chances of Yeyuama finding us decreased, and the chances of us stumbling across a Moulish camp increased. I had once likened finding them to searching for a migratory needle in a haystack, but now, with such risk attendant, I feared a needle behind every straw.\n\nIt was possible the Moulish would be safe nonetheless; they might hear the Labane before they drew near, might hide themselves before one of these warriors struck. That possibility was not one I could rely upon: to do so would be despicable, a callous abrogation of what I owed them for their shelter and aid.\n\nI therefore had to escape.\n\nThe skill and courage of the Labane are praised even by their enemies, but they were not foolhardy enough to travel the Green Hell in darkness. When it came time to halt, I meekly advised my captors away from what I recognized as a trail nocturnal predators would follow; this I did not only for my own safety, but to convince them of my sincere aid. We camped in as secure of a location as I could find, and I was, with reluctance, ungagged long enough to consume what remained of my own water and food. Whether they would give me any of their own the next day, I could not tell.\n\nThey bound me, of course, feet as well as hands, before sitting me against a tree and tying my body to it for good measure. One of the five kept watch, too. I had expected it, but still I cursed inwardly. How could I escape, with such measures in place?\n\nIn time I had to give up that question, for exhaustion claimed me, like falling over a cliff. In the morning my captors held a conference in which they seemed to be debating my continued use; I could scarcely breathe until one came to untie me. I would live another day. But how many more would I have?\n\nThis day proceeded much like the first, except that I did my best to guess where the Moulish might be, and to guide the Labane away from such places. This made for a fair bit of wading through inhospitable muck, but my captors could scarcely fault me for that; as far as they knew, inhospitable muck was what the Green Hell was made of. At one point I smelled a foul odor clearly recognizable as the lingering effects of a swamp-wyrm's extraordinary breath, but the dragon itself\u2014both fortunately and otherwise\u2014was nowhere to be seen.\n\nWe did, however, find something else. And as wretched as it was to be a captive, a part of me is glad I had not escaped the previous night, for I would have missed my chance to learn more about what the Labane were doing in Mouleen.\n\nI feared at first that we had come across Moulish hunters, or worse, a camp. But the sound and movement that made my captors go into ready crouches proved to have another source: a second group of Labane.\n\nThis was a group of three, but I saw that they carried extra equipment, and some of it was bloodstained. From this I guessed that their brothers had met with misfortune along the way. I cannot be glad for the death of men, even my enemies, but it reassured me that my captors would see my value as a guide. Indeed, I hoped that was what they were telling the second party, as the two exchanged information in low tones. By his gestures, it seemed the other leader was vastly annoyed at his men having gotten turned around in the swamp.\n\nFor my own part, I was busy thinking. Two groups: that made it likely there were more than two. Both of them small. None of them carrying guns, whose crack would advertise their presence for kilometers around. Everything about this arrangement spoke of stealth. I was certain now that these were scouts, looking for a path across the Green Hell.\n\nI was no military strategist, but I knew that if they succeeded, it would mean dreadful things for the defense of Bayembe. It was more imperative than ever that I escape and warn someone.\n\nThe second group did not join our own, strengthening my belief that these were scouting parties. I wished them ill fortune and damnation in their search. Our home will eat you, Yeyuama had said. For the sake of those to the north, I prayed that it would.\n\nWe continued on. I stumbled often with exhaustion; the leader finally unbent enough to allow me more water, without which I believe I would have died. But the various scrapes I had taken were hot and tender, and my joints ached; I was not sure how much farther I could go. Only the prospect of escape gave me strength... but I knew that the later such escape came, the more likely I was to fail.\n\nOddly, it was a fall that gave me hope. I tripped over a tangled fern and landed hard on my right side\u2014hard not only for the force of it, but for the object in my pocket that dug painfully into my hip. It was, I realized, my penknife: the same penknife I had once nicked from my brother Andrew, so many years ago, which had accompanied me faithfully ever since.\n\nWith that knife (and a bit of flexibility), I might be able to cut myself free. That was one hurdle cleared, at least potentially; and the relief of it gave me conviction that I could clear the others, too. I would need a distraction, something to divert the man keeping watch that night, and then I would need an escape route.\n\nBoth meant choosing our campsite wisely. I forced my tired mind to focus, and was rewarded with the observation that there were quite a few drakeflies about. I mentioned before that they are insectivores; from my research I knew that, for drakeflies to be present in such numbers, there must be a hive of some sort nearby, to provide a suitable concentration of potential meals.\n\nFinding what I was looking for without being obvious about it was difficult, but at last I spotted what I had hoped for: a wasps' nest, not too high above the ground. The wasps would ordinarily be dormant at night, but I knew\u2014from painful experience\u2014that they were easily disturbed.\n\nI contrived to get my knife out of my pocket while taking care of biological necessity\u2014the one task for which my captors unbound me, as none of them wanted the job of assisting me. (They did not, however, grant me any privacy during the process.) I kept it folded in the palm of my hand while one of them re-bound me, and breathed easier when the task was done. I was, as before, tied to a tree, and then I watched as they ate their evening meal.\n\nThey carried some rations of their own, but supplemented them with hunting as the occasion arose. (Hunting only, never gathering; I cannot blame them for fearing what plants might be poisonous, nor for distrusting the advice I tried to give them.) Earlier that day I had discovered how far a Tsebane can throw a spear, when one of them skewered a duiker at a distance I would have thought impossible. It raised the very real possibility that, in my flight, I might catch a spear between the shoulders... but I screwed my courage tight. I must do this thing.\n\nThis thing, however, had to wait for them to settle in for the night. The evening before, the leader had checked my bonds before bedding down; I could not risk him noticing any change. Once the camp was silent, though, with only one man keeping watch, I unfolded the knife and set to work.\n\nThe vines binding my wrists were first, and the most difficult. I cut my hands several times, and once dropped the knife\u2014a loss that put my heart in my mouth, for what if I could not find it again? But I did, and resumed my task, feigning exhausted sleep the whole while.\n\nThe next part posed a different set of challenges. I waited, eyes closed to slits, until the watchman looked the other direction; then I slid my right shoulder (the one farthest from him) out from under the vines. Now I must be swift, for if he looked closely, he would see that I should not be able to slump so far in my bonds. With my right hand I felt about for something I could throw: a stone, a branch, anything.\n\nNothing came to hand. There are few stones lying about in Mouleen, and fallen branches are too often tangled with whatever has grown about them. With a sinking heart, I realized I would have to throw what was, right then, my most precious possession: my knife.\n\nBefore I did that, I would need to get one more use out of it. Working quickly, trying not to pant with fear, I transferred the blade to my left hand, blessing the undergrowth that gave a tiny amount of cover to my movements. I drew my ankles up as close as I could, wincing at the sound; the guard glanced my way, but did not react. With the penknife I cut through the vines on my ankles (and also cut my calf, for I was clumsy with fear and insufficient ambidexterity).\n\nPerhaps I made a sound. Perhaps the Tsebane was simply that wary. But he turned then, half-rising from his crouch, as if to come investigate me.\n\nI yanked myself free of the last of the vines and threw my knife at the nest. My arm had not the range of a Tsebane's, but I had spent their entire meal calculating the arc from me to that nest, repeating to myself again and again that I would strike it true. And so, through blind luck, divine providence, or sheer conviction that I would succeed, I threw right on my first try.\n\nI did not stay to see the results, though I heard them as I fled. I dodged around the tree, and knew I had chosen right when the watchman's spear thunked into the wood; then I was off, through the forest, running desperately (but not at all quietly) for the closest thing I had been able to approximate for a safe escape route.\n\nA nearby waterway.\n\nI dove in without a single thought for leeches, snakes, fangfish, swamp-wyrms, or anything else. I exhaled a portion of my air, so as better to sink down, and began to push my way along the muddy bottom, trying not to shriek in fear when I felt things brush against my body. With my eyes shut, I could not see where I was going; I could only hope that by me moving underwater like this, in the darkness, the Labane would not be able to see me to throw a spear. (Or, better still, that they were too occupied with the wasps to pursue\u2014but I could not take that risk.)\n\nMy intention was to stay underwater for as long as I could; and so I did, but that was not very long. The pounding of my heart soon drove me to the surface, where I tried to gasp in a new breath as quietly as I could\u2014partly to keep from being heard, and partly because I wanted to listen for the Labane. I thought to hear curses and shouts from the direction of the camp, on account of the wasps. The silence that greeted me caused my muscles to clench in fear. The Labane were not ordinary soldiers; they were trained from childhood to accept pain and privation without complaint. They might die of the wasp stings, but they would not scream.\n\nIt meant I had no idea where they were.\n\nI continued along a short distance, diving when I could, but fear kept using up my air. My progress was maddeningly slow, and when I surfaced for the fourth time, I saw movement on the bank I had left.\n\nWhether it was a Tsebane, I cannot tell you. I believed then that it was, and did not stay to confirm my suspicion. I flung myself toward the opposite bank, not caring now how much noise I made, and plunged into the forest on that side, praying the water would delay them, praying some creature might eat them, praying for anything that might aid me.\n\nWhat I found was a tree.\n\nThere were many trees about, but this one was of a particular sort: one of the forest giants, its trunk well wrapped in parasitic growths, standing alongside what a few months ago would, I knew, have been a flooded region. It was, in short, the kind of tree often used for tree-bridges\u2014and that gave me an idea.\n\nI dragged myself up with the panicked agility of a squirrel, clawing my way from one handhold to another, too driven by fear of what lay behind to even squeak when my footing slipped. The farther I went, the more apparent it became that I had chosen correctly: this tree and its parasites had been cultivated by the Moulish, which meant there was a bridge somewhere above me.\n\nWhen at last I reached it, I crawled out a little distance, until I was something like halfway along the span. Here I lay, flattening myself as best I could amidst the twined branches and vines of the bridge, far away from any tree the Labane might expect to find me in.\n\nThey did not know the forest. They would not think to look for the bridge.\n\nOr so I prayed.\n\nMy decision was rewarded when I heard a quiet voice below. Whether it had been a Tsebane on the other bank, one was here now\u2014no, two, for I heard a response from not far away. They were indeed searching for me. And I had no doubt that if they found me, they would not take the chance they had before, that a Scirling woman was too useless to pose a threat.\n\nBut they did not find me. They searched in the area for a time; I heard them going back and forth, though they were surprisingly silent for men in darkness, in terrain totally unlike their homeland. I was well concealed by the structure of the bridge, though, and from the ground the bridge itself looked like nothing more than a particularly thick tangle of branches. One had to know what to look for to spot it, and they did not.\n\nNor did they know what hazards to look for. I heard a coughing roar, familiar to my ears, and knew they had woken a swamp-wyrm.\n\nI heard no shouts of pain to tell me the creature had taken a bite out of a Tsebane, nor any equivalent sound from the dragon. I did catch a faint scent of its extraordinary breath, drifting up from the ground below, and was glad to be out of range. More distant sounds might be the Labane fleeing; I could not tell. But I stared into the darkness above me and blessed the forest which had cut and scratched and stung and battered me\u2014and, ultimately, protected me.\n\nI lay rigid and frightened for what seemed like an age before light began to filter through the green, and then lay for a time longer before I could persuade myself to move. Even then, I peered through the vines in all directions, picking off leeches while reassuring myself (insofar as I could) that the Labane had not laid a clever trap that I was about to spring.\n\nThey had not. Eventually I climbed down, aching from head to foot. But I could not permit myself the luxury of collapse: quite apart from my ravenous hunger and need for water, I had to warn the Moulish."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The drums speak\u2014Others are missing\u2014Ikwunde plans\u2014Point Miriam\u2014Politics\u2014Wisdom and foolishness\u2014Moving the eggs\u2014Fang fish\n\nI would not go so far as to say I found the Moulish; it would be more accurate to say they found me. I did, however, correctly read my surroundings to the extent of guessing where there might be a camp, so of that I can be proud.\n\nMy grammar, I fear, suffered terribly from my exhaustion and distress. It took far longer than it should have to explain the situation to them, while an elderly man fed and watered me. Then one of the hunters, an energetic fellow named Lumemouwin, wanted to go out with the others to look for the Labane. \"They will kill you,\" I said helplessly. I knew the Moulish were perfectly capable of moving in stealth, but that did not change the fact that I would feel any deaths as if they were my fault. \"Please, will you not warn the other camps\u2014\"\n\n\"We will,\" said one of the grandmothers, a woman called RiKwilene. \"But first we must know what to tell them.\"\n\nShe meant rather that they wanted to make sure what I said was true, before they alarmed anyone else. I suppose I did not look like the most reliable messenger, and foreigners have been known to run mad in jungles before. That did not make me any calmer as they sent hunters out to investigate.\n\nBut the men returned before long with confirmation that they had seen what few signs the Labane camp had left behind. (No bodies; it was too much for me to hope that the wasps or the dragon had done them in.) Then the elders took to the drums, pounding out the message that would soon spread from one end of Mouleen to the other.\n\nThe drums brought Yeyuama to me a few days later. As grateful as I was to see him, I immediately noted that he was alone\u2014or rather, accompanied by two young men I did not recognize, both of them Moulish fellows. \"Where are the others?\" I asked, my hands twisting about one another. \"Has something happened?\"\n\nYeyuama shook his head. \"I do not know. They never came down from the cliff.\"\n\nMy first thought was that the Labane had captured them. Then I told myself that was foolishness; the Labane were coming from the southern side of the Great Cataract, and my friends had been on the northern. Still, it did little to reassure me. (It would have done even less had I known that the Ikwunde pressed an attack along the Girama River the very day I went over the waterfall\u2014I think to divert attention from their scouts in the swamp.)\n\nIf I would feel guilt for the deaths of any Moulish, how much more would I feel if anything happened to my companions? I bore a great deal of responsibility for their presence here in the first place. I looked from Yeyuama to Rikwilene. \"Can a message be sent out, asking after them?\"\n\nShe frowned and shook her head. \"The villagers will wonder, if they hear too much speech from the drums.\" (The \"villagers\" in this case were the Labane scouts.) \"Someone will send word if your brothers and sister are found. The other camps know you are here.\"\n\nI argued, but could not budge her. Which was, I suppose, practice for what followed, when we began to discuss what to do about the Labane.\n\nWith the aid of a map laid out in sticks and leaves, I explained the larger situation: the impending war against the Ikwunde, of which the Moulish knew only a little, and what might happen if the people to the south could bring their army through the swamp. Here, however, I ran into immediate objections. \"As many villagers as all the people of the forest together?\" Lumemouwin said skeptically. (I had told them there were more Ikwunde than that, but they simply had no personal experience of human crowds on that scale.) \"Impossible. They could never bring them through. The forest would eat them.\"\n\n\"The forest might eat some, yes\u2014but even if two in every five die, it could be disastrous,\" I said. \"For you as well as for the peoples of Bayembe; I assure you they would not hesitate to kill Moulish along the way. Though I wonder...\" My words trailed off as I stared at my own map. Yes, the Ikwunde could march through, if they were prepared to accept such attrition. But could they do so effectively? I had heard military men talk about the importance of supply lines, and my own experience with the logistics of carrying equipment through the Green Hell made me doubt an army would fare well. A small, mobile group like the Labane could manage\u2014but a small, mobile group would not be good for much more than harrying villages along the northern border. Was the aim to distract the defenders stationed along the rivers? Surely this was too much trouble for something so small. Unless they had a more valuable target...\n\nMy map was incomplete. I had focused on the Great Cataract and the northern and southern edges of Mouleen, but I had not paid much attention to the eastern end. With one hand I fumbled blindly for another stick, and jammed it into the soft dirt.\n\n\"Point Miriam,\" I whispered.\n\nIt was a fort\u2014but one built to defend the harbor. The Ikwunde were not great seafarers; they had, however, conquered enough coastal towns that they might conceivably mount an assault on Nsebu and Atuyem. That was why the Scirling colony had been placed there: our defense of the harbor was part of our agreement with Bayembe. We had built our walls and placed our guns, and all of that effort was focused on the sea, which they believed to be their only point of vulnerability.\n\nBut the eastern fringes of the Green Hell came very close to Point Miriam. And if an attack came from the fort's landward side...\n\nHow many men would they need to take it? I was not tactician enough to guess. A small force might do it, though, if they had surprise on their side; and undoubtedly it would be a great surprise if the Ikwunde appeared out of the swamp to assault the fort. My mind spun out possibilities for what would follow: an invasion force by sea, perhaps, once the harbor's main defense was gone, or perhaps an attempt to hold the fort itself. All of the possibilities were dreadful.\n\nSwiftly I laid out for the others what I envisioned. \"Can you warn the fort?\" I asked when I was done. The Moulish carried out some amount of trade with the villagers along their borders; surely that was true along the bay as well.\n\nThose around me exchanged glances. \"We can tell the camps in the east,\" Rikwilene said. \"But will the villagers listen?\"\n\nThe villagers, or the Scirling officials at Point Miriam. \"If the message was from me...\" I dismissed this thought before it was even complete. \"They'd have no reason to trust such a claim. Even if they believed the words came from me, they would doubt my judgment.\" Sir Adam would hardly be inclined to vouch for my reliability. And while I wanted to believe they would take precautions regardless, I knew they were just as likely to laugh it off. No one could assault Point Miriam through the Green Hell. No one.\n\nIf I went in person, I might have a chance of persuading them. But the scouts were already in the swamp; the army could not be that far behind. My odds of making it the length of Mouleen before they mounted their attack were even worse than my odds of Sir Adam listening to a transcribed drum message.\n\nBut there were people who would listen to the drums. And I had seen for myself how effective they could be, the day we found Velloin and Okweme trying to kidnap a dragon.\n\nI looked around the circle at the gathered camp, youths and hunters and elders, with the children slipping between legs to listen. \"Please,\" I said. \"You can stop them before they even get to Point Miriam. You can save any number of lives in Bayembe. If you send a message to the camps\u2014I have seen how strong your hunters are. You can fight the Ikwunde. Not head-on, of course, but from the shadows\u2014\"\n\nEven before I started, I knew it was a lost cause. Heads were shaking all around, men and women drawing back in disapproval. \"This is a villager fight,\" someone said; I did not see who.\n\nIkwunde against Yembe, Scirlings interfering, Satalu in the wings. What did any of that mean to the Moulish? Even if the Ikwunde conquered Bayembe, enclosing the Green Hell on three sides, it would have little consequence for the people here. Oh, perhaps someday that would rebound ill upon them\u2014but vague fears of \"someday\" would persuade no one to put himself in harm's way. Indeed, from their perspective it might be better if the Ikwunde triumphed, for that would destroy or at least set back the Scirling colony, and take with it the plans for a dam above the Great Cataract.\n\nNot that the Moulish knew of the dam...\n\n\"What does this mean?\" Yeyuama asked, snapping his fingers.\n\nI stared at my hand. I had not even realized I had done that, so caught up was I in my thought. \"It means I've had an idea,\" I said slowly. \"One I should perhaps share only with you\u2014to begin with, at least. It concerns the dragons.\"\n\nHe nodded and beckoned the two fellows who had arrived with him to join us off to one side. \"They are pure,\" he said, when I looked quizzical. \"I brought them for the ceremony, but what you have to say comes first.\"\n\nI would have been happier sharing this only with Yeyuama, who at least was familiar to me. But I was in no position to object. \"It concerns what those hunters said,\" I told the three of them. \"I needed permission to come here, from the oba of Bayembe, and he required a promise from me in return.\"\n\nThis tale I kept as short as I could, stressing at every point my ignorance in making that promise, and my apology for having done so. \"But,\" I said, and then took a deep breath. \"If it is not wholly blasphemous to suggest this... then I think, should that bargain be kept, it would help save the forest from a very great danger. One your people are not yet aware of.\"\n\nExplaining the dam was both easier and more difficult than I expected, first when I told Yeyuama and the other two, then again when I repeated my words for the rest of the camp. The Moulish understood dams well enough; they created their own in certain seasons, to aid in their fishing. But a dam large enough to control the Great Cataract? Nothing in the world could be so powerful.\n\n\"I assure you it can,\" I said, with all the conviction I could muster. \"And if this is built, it will change your forest forever. No longer will the floods rise as before; the swamp will always be in its dry season. The waterfall itself will be changed, and Yeyuama fears what the consequence of that may be for the dragons.\" This had not been in my original speculations, when I stood on the bank of the Hembi, for at that time I had not yet seen the queens in the lake. Yeyuama's hands had trembled when the possibility came to him. After that, he had given his full support to my plan.\n\nI said to my assembled listeners, \"If you stop the Ikwunde from crossing the swamp and attacking Point Miriam, I will tell the oba that in gratitude for your help, he must not build this dam. It will be an agreement between his people and yours, sealed by the giving of a gift. The specifics of that gift are a matter for the pure, but I truly believe it will gain you this man's friendship. And that friendship will protect your home for generations to come.\"\n\nThey needed time to consider it, of course. Such a thing could not be decided on a whim. I chafed at every minute of delay, but Yeyuama took pity on me; he and the other two pure drew me aside for the ceremony acknowledging my safe return from the island, which also served as distraction.\n\nIt should have been done on the bank of the lake, but we could not spare the time to go there. They built a hut away from the camp, then put me inside it with a small fire, onto which they threw the leaves whose scent was so reminiscent of a swamp-wyrm's extraordinary breath. It was the same material used on the fire the hunters passed when leaving camp, but whereas they were only required to walk through the smoke, or perhaps scoop it onto themselves with their hands, I was left inside the hut until I nearly asphyxiated. When Yeyuama finally let me out, I was glad enough of the fresh air that I hardly minded his insistence that I strip naked (yes, in front of all three of them) and bathe myself in a quiet and predator-free part of the swamp.\n\n\"The smoke purifies us,\" he said when I was done and clothed once more. \"Nothing can undo the harm caused by that first death, but we come as close as we can.\"\n\nYeyuama's distraction had served its purpose, with pefect timing. A boy came running up just then, summoning the four of us once more back to camp.\n\nThe other pure were drawn into conversation briefly after we returned, while I waited apart. Then I was beckoned over, and Rikwilene delivered their answer. \"You speak wisdom on some things,\" the old woman said, \"and foolishness on others. We will not attack the Ikwunde.\"\n\nMy heart sank. All that hope... but this was too much to ask of them, and the possible reward too uncertain.\n\n\"Our hunters can be hunters of men when there is no other choice, but what you ask\u2014for us to stop their camps so directly\u2014that would only result in death on both sides. But,\" Rikwilene said, and my breath stopped, \"we have agreed to try other ways.\"\n\nOn the instant, my imagination filled with new possibilities, each one madder than the last. The hunter Lumemouwin stopped me, though, with a cautionary hand. \"You do not know the forest, or our people. Not well enough. We will be the ones to make these plans.\"\n\nHe was right. I was no tactician, nor was I Moulish; I did not know how they might be most effective. What I had to offer was information, and assistance with the world outside when this matter ended. \"If it would be useful,\" I said, \"I can tell you things about Point Miriam, and the weapons the people on both sides carry.\"\n\nYeyuama laughed. As tense as I was, it shocked me that he could be so cheerful. \"We will have to think how to translate that for the drums, but yes. And you can do more than that. You are one of the pure now.\"\n\nAs pure as a hut full of foul smoke could make me. \"Yes,\" I said. \"The promise I made\u2014\"\n\n\"Not that,\" Yeyuama said, grinning. \"Come. This, too, is only for a few ears.\"\n\nThe ears in question were those of the pure: those who had qualified themselves to \"touch the dragons.\"\n\nThat category, you may note, does not include your ears, nor your eyes neither. (Unless you have undergone that test yourself and passed, in which case you will not need me to tell you what I am about to omit.) As before, I will speak only of those things which I believe are safe to be shared with others, based on the judgment of my more experienced Moulish counterparts. I may have gone to the island and returned, but that was only the barest part of what it meant to join their ranks.\n\n\"If we move the eggs now,\" Yeyuama said when we had drawn apart, \"they will hatch early. And then they may feast upon those who come into their waters.\"\n\nI received these words in wide-eyed silence. He spoke the way my parents' housekeeper in Tamshire might, suggesting that it would be advisable to shift the winter shutters into position a few weeks early. As if \"moving the eggs\" were a common task\u2014just one not usually done at this time.\n\nWhile the other fellows considered it, Yeyuama explained to me. And this, suitably edited, is what I learned.\n\nThe dragons I had seen in the lake were, as I have said, queen dragons, the females of a species for which I had heretofore only seen the males. Now I learned that the chief task of the pure was first to bring suitable males up to the lake for breeding, and then to disperse the eggs after they were laid, to various points around the swamp.\n\nThe ramifications of this have been laid out extensively in my more academic works; I will dwell on only one now, as many of you are no doubt anxious to leave the dusty byways of natural history and get back to the invading army. The eggs so distributed were not, as is common among other draconic breeds, large and few in number. They were myriad, and shockingly small: less than ten centimeters in length. I thought of swamp-wyrms and their usual habits, and asked Yeyuama how on earth newly hatched dragons could be of much use in stopping an army, however many of them there might be.\n\nHe grinned from ear to ear, as delighted as a magician pulling back the curtain to reveal his great trick. \"You have seen them, and feared them. But you have called them fangfish.\"\n\nThe tiny, eel-like predator that had taken a bite out of my left arm back in Floris; the entirely aquatic creature we had thought at best to be a draconic cousin. In reality it was the infantile form of the great swamp-wyrm. They hatched in abundance, and were eaten in abundance not only by snakes and other creatures, but by their own, more mature kind; those who survived grew and changed, eventually becoming the full-grown dragons to which we had devoted the bulk of our attention and study.\n\n(Despite the unsightly scar on my arm, there was a part of me that thought in delight: I've been bitten by a dragon!)\n\nThen I remembered the swarms of fangfish that had roiled the waters during the flood, the avoidance of which had spurred the construction of tree-bridges. If the Ikwunde attempted to wade through on their way to Point Miriam\u2014and they could hardly avoid it\u2014then the consequences would be very bloody indeed.\n\n\"You will help,\" Yeyuama said, still grinning. \"Your way of going to and from the island was madness; I have never seen anything like it. Most of us go a much easier way! We should call you Sasoumin instead.\"\n\nSasoumin\u2014\"woman who flies.\"\n\nYeyuama went on while I was considering my new appellation and fighting the urge to giggle with delight. (Even now, I believe that is the name by which I am best known in the swamps of Mouleen. It is much more flattering than some of the sobriquets I have born in the news-sheets of Scirland.) \"I will show you where the eggs are, and you will help move them; that is your work now. We will use the drums to tell others to do the same.\"\n\nI will, of course, not tell you where the eggs are initially laid, save to say that they are not on the island; the purpose of that challenge is to give a view of the queen dragons, and to test the mettle of those who will henceforth be taking their unhatched offspring from their original place of laying to new locations deeper in the swamp. This stage of the process I did not do, for it was not the correct season for newly laid eggs. Although the experience sounds hair-raising\u2014queen dragons are decidedly unfriendly\u2014it is one of my great regrets that I never had the chance, for my time in Mouleen was drawing to an end, and I have never been able to return for more than a few days. To come so close to one of the queens... I have had other breathtaking experiences in my life, some of which (others would say) surpass even that one. But one does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger. I would have loved to place that in the jewelry box of my memory.\n\nI did, however, go with Yeyuama to where the current clutches of eggs were buried, in soft swamp muck. This is where they do much of their incubation, before being shifted to the water for hatching. The history of how this process developed has been discussed at greater length by the Yembe historian Chinaka n Oforiro Dara; I advise those interested in such matters to read her work, and to consult my own monographs for analysis of its effect on draconic development.\n\nBut enough of such matters: there is an invading army to attend to.\n\nDrums had passed the requisite messages through the Green Hell, faster than any messenger could carry them. The four of us (myself, Yeyuama, and our two companions) were not the only ones shifting eggs; indeed, ours were likely to be the least relevant, for the Ikwunde were almost certain to make their crossing farther to the east. To hatch only some of the dragons now would, however, disturb the balance of the swamp. As it was, Yeyuama admitted that the effects of this would be difficult, as it was not the season of flooding, when food would be most abundant. \"I hope they get a good meal off the Ikwunde, then,\" I said.\n\nHe shrugged philosophically. \"If necessary, we will make another queen egg next year\"\u2014and that is how I discovered that part of the egg-handling process fosters the sexual differentiation between the queen dragons in the lake and their male suitors in the swamp.\n\nI keep diverting to matters of natural history. This is, I suppose, because what followed was akin to a large number of dominoes toppling over where I could not see them. Much of it I only learnt about afterward, or pieced together from what I was not told; altogether, the picture it made was very complex. As is only fitting, I suppose, for the chain of events that led to me being accused of treason against the Scirling crown. I shall have to give you the larger picture first, and then my humble strand within it that stitched these events together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Nagoreemo's message\u2014Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango\u2014 The Ikwunde cross the swamp\u2014Captives of war\u2014My army\n\nThe Moulish had, as per my request, sent a messenger to the fort at Point Miriam. In their generosity, they did not even recruit a coastal villager to carry the word on their behalf; this was deemed important enough that they sent one of their own, a man who spoke Yembe, an elder named Nagoreemo.\n\nHe left the Green Hell and climbed the rocky slope up to Point Miriam, drawing many stares, I imagine, from Scirlings unaccustomed to seeing a man in nothing more than a loincloth. At the gate to the fort he was stopped by one of the soldiers on guard, and in his careful Yembe, conveyed the news that an Ikwunde force intended to pass through Mouleen and attack them from the landward side.\n\nWhat words he used to explain this, I do not know. My own conjecture had been translated into the language of the drums, which is (of necessity, owing to how that language functions) both long-winded and limited in its specifics. But the Moulish are practiced at sending a message the length of the swamp without distorting it, so I have faith it arrived at the coast in much the same shape it left our own drums in the west. Once there, however, it was interpreted by the local camps, then given to Nagoreemo, who then translated it into Yembe and relayed it to soldiers whose own grasp of that tongue was, I suspect, less than fully proficient.\n\nSmall wonder that no one believed him. One of the officers at the fort, an army major by the name of Joshua Maitland, believed Nagoreemo was a defector from his own people, come to warn them about an ill-advised Moulish assault on the fort. Others thought him simply mad. The result was that he was turned away\u2014 with, I am ashamed to say, many jeers, and even a few blows from rifle butts. That venerable elder deserved better from us.\n\nIn the meanwhile, events at the far end of Bayembe had become quite warm, to distract all eyes from anything that might be happening along the bay. The Ikwunde mounted a series of assaults along and across the Girama, including one that nearly made it to the Hembi before our forces caught them. This, as you may imagine, raised alarms all through that region, with the consequence that our side instituted new patrols to watch for any Ikwunde advance scouts. They not only found some of those; they also found Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango.\n\nHad the patrol that found them been composed of Bayembe forces, all might have been well, for Faj Rawango was experienced enough in the ways of the oba's court that he could have demanded, and likely received, a proper hearing. They were, alas, found by Scirlings\u2014and promptly taken prisoner.\n\nDid the lieutenant think those three were Ikwunde spies? No, of course not; only one was Erigan, and even the blindest Scirling private could see that the short, slight Faj Rawango was nothing like the tall, well-knit men in the Ikwunde army. But they were something inexplicable, and so they had to be detained. (The fact that Tom and Natalie both explained themselves to him at length did not dissuade him from this course.)\n\nThey were soon transferred into the care of a captain\u2014but this fellow, alas, had heard complaints of their activities from the despicable Velloin, who had given a highly biased account of our meeting in the swamp. As a result, they were read a lengthy diatribe on civilized behaviour and the necessity for them to reflect well on Scirland; following this, they were summarily packed up with the wounded from the river fighting and shipped back across toward Nsebu. All three of them were somewhere in the middle of the savannah when the rest of this matter resolved.\n\nThe Ikwunde, from what we can determine, were following a plan more or less like the one I had posited, though with a great many subtle flourishes I could never have imagined and honestly cannot recall. (Those interested in such things can find an exhaustive discussion of all aspects of the Ikwunde War in Achabe n Kegweyu Gbori's ten-volume work Expansion and Retreat of the Ikwunde, translated into Scirling by Ezekiel Grant.) Scouts like the ones I encoutered had been sent into Mouleen all along its length in the hope of locating a waterway suitable for transporting their army by boat; needless to say, this failed. The Ikwunde therefore took the information gathered by their scouts\u2014including, I fear, some I provided myself\u2014and sent five companies of Labane by the shortest route possible, from Osheth on the Eremmo border to Point Miriam.\n\nToward Point Miriam, at least. They encountered some difficulty along the way.\n\nI saw with my own eyes how rapidly the swamp-wyrm eggs hatched once placed in water, the \"fangfish\" wiggling free like the eels they resembled. They are a disturbing sight then, soft and almost helpless looking, but with mouths already full of teeth. We took great care in crossing the waterways as we traveled from egg cache to egg cache, and even more care after that task was done, when Yeyuama and I set out for the eastern edge of the Green Hell.\n\nFor although I esteemed the Moulish greatly and knew they would be of more use than I in opposing the Ikwunde, I could not bring myself to sit idly by while this matter played out. If nothing else, I needed to see enough that I could accurately inform the men at Point Miriam of what had transpired.\n\nWhich meant I was there to see one of the Labane companies\u2014 already much worse off for their travels to that point\u2014attempt a crossing of fangfish-filled water.\n\nThey had searched for a way around it, and been thwarted by creative Moulish troublemakers; now they had no choice but to build rafts and attempt to pole across. Yeyuama had refused to try and provoke any fully grown dragons into troubling them, because these Labane carried guns, but he could not stand in the way of a swamp-wyrm's own inclination. One took great exception to the Labane trespassing upon his territory, and rammed a raft before anyone aboard it saw him there.\n\nI had thought to feel triumph at watching the forest eat those who would trespass in it. When the moment came, I merely felt sick. There was no pleasure to be had in the screaming\u2014for even a Tsebane will scream when a dozen infant dragons latch onto him. It is a horrible way to die, and yet those who did may well have been luckier than those who were merely bloodied, for the latter faced near-certain infection, which in many cases was only a more protracted way to go.\n\nBut I knew better than to think we could warn them off their course; these were, after all, the most dedicated troops the inkosi possessed. And when my resolve faltered, I had only to remind myself of the casualties my allies suffered. Despite warning and care, the Moulish had not been able to stay entirely safe; Labane scouts had caught some of them, and one camp was overrun as they tried to move out of the army's line of march. All in all, twenty-one Moulish died, which is a massacre for numbers as small as theirs.\n\nBecause of this, some among the western camps argued in favor of actively hunting and killing those the forest had not disposed of. But the youths brought out the legambwa bomu, the dragon mask, and charged around with it, reminding all that killing was what cursed humankind with mortality; and while killing for food might be a tragic necessity, killing these men was not. They therefore took the surviving Labane prisoner.\n\nPrisoners were not something they had much experience with. The Moulish deal with their own internal problems by talking it out or walking away to a new camp, not by waging war. Tying people up was something done only when a person had run mad (or, as they would put it, was targeted by serious witchcraft). What should they do with their captives?\n\nHad I not just spent seven months in the swamp, flung myself off a cliff, crash-landed in the trees, been a captive myself, and then run the length of the Green Hell, I might have thought my answer through more thoroughly. As it was, I asked whether they would be willing to send enough hunters with me to escort the prisoners to Point Miriam, and the Moulish, glad to be rid of them, agreed.\n\nThis is how I marched out of the jungle toward the fort with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.\n\nOur slow pace (limited to the speed of hobbled Labane) and general disorganization went some way toward establishing us as no threat. Soldiers, however, are apt to get nervous around armed strangers, even when the weapons in question are nets and fire-hardened sticks of wood. I placed myself prominently at the front of the group, intending to draw the eye and give the soldiers something like a familiar (by which I mean a Scirling) face to reassure them.\n\nThis might have been more successful had I looked less a scarecrow. I had been in the same clothing since the morning I parted from Tom and Natalie, and it had seen a great deal of abuse in the interim. I was unwashed, underfed, and giddy with the success of our plan. So it was that when rifles were leveled in our direction, I waved my arms above my head, hallooed the fort, and cried out in a loud, laughing voice, \"Do you believe us now?\"\n\nIt was of course my luck that Major Maitland answered me from the wall (though I did not know he was the one who had misinterpreted Nagoreemo until later). He shouted down at us, \"You and your army of savages can stop right there!\"\n\n\"My army?\" I looked at the Moulish with exaggerated surprise. \"These do not belong to me, sir. Unless you mean our prisoners? I would not claim them if you paid me, for it was their intent to sneak up on you from a direction you did not expect\u2014as I believe you were warned, though you did not listen. Fortunately for you, the Moulish believe in sharing what they have, and they have wit and common sense in abundance. More than enough to make up for its lack elsewhere.\n\n\"I, by contrast, am Scirling, and less well schooled in generosity. I therefore say that if you and your masters do not promise to clap these Ikwunde in irons and then reward these brave people as they deserve, then we jolly well may just let these fellows go, for they are not worth the nuisance of keeping.\"\n\n(In hindsight, I can see how this may have been construed as a threat.)\n\nMaitland went quite purple. I think he might have given the order to fire\u2014a few warning shots to put me on better behaviour, at least\u2014but by then Sir Adam had attained the top of the wall and seen what lay outside. \"Mrs. Camherst?\" he called down, shocked, and I answered, \"What is left of her.\"\n\n\"What the devil is all of this?\" he demanded, gesturing at the mass of people I stood with.\n\nThis time I answered him with more decorum, although Maitland provoked me sorely with his own interjections. Sir Adam continued to question me\u2014how had we captured them; how many there were; what on earth did I think I was wearing\u2014 until I said, \"Sir, I will answer everything to your satisfaction, but not by shouting it up at you. This is dreadfully public, and my voice will give out. Will you take the prisoners, and give your surety that the Moulish will be rewarded? They, not I, have done the work of capturing these Labane, and have killed a great many more besides, at no small risk and cost to themselves.\"\n\nMaitland snorted loudly enough for me to hear it, even at that range. \"You expect us to believe that your savages killed Labane warriors with\u2014with what? Sharpened sticks?\"\n\n\"No, Major,\" I said coolly. \"They killed the Labane with dragons. As a gentlewoman and natural historian, I assure you it is true.\"\n\nI suspect it was my declaration more than anything else that opened the gates of Point Miriam to us, for everyone wanted to know what I meant by they killed the Labane with dragons. We shuffled in, me at the front, the Moulish surrounding the hobbled prisoners, and I made sure to find a soldier with good Yembe to serve as an interpreter before I let Sir Adam take me off for questioning.\n\nIf that strikes you as a phrase that might be applied to the suspect in a crime, you are not far wrong. Sir Adam was deeply suspicious of my tale; he called in a doctor to examine me before anything else, so certain was he that I had lost my reason. (I blame the trousers.) Much tedious back-and-forth ensued after that, but the important moment came when I told Sir Adam what I intended going forward.\n\n\"In return for their work in saving this colony and Bayembe,\" I said, mustering what remained of my energy, \"the Moulish do have a price.\"\n\n\"Gold?\" Sir Adam asked. \"Guns? Out with it, Mrs. Camherst; tell me what you have promised them.\"\n\n\"Nothing so mercenary, I assure you. But it is the forest known as the Green Hell that has protected Bayembe and this colony; it must be protected in return. I understand that you intend to build a dam in the west, across one or more\u2014I presume all three\u2014of the rivers. The plans for this must stop.\"\n\nThe governor shot to his feet. \"Mrs. Camherst, I do not know where you have gotten your information\u2014\"\n\nUnder no circumstances was I going to name Natalie. \"Do you think no one knows what your engineers are here to build? Do not fear for the defense of Bayembe, Sir Adam. Even without your lake, I assure you, this country will be safe.\"\n\nI was extraordinarily lucky that he stopped me before I said anything more.\n\n\"Damn the defense,\" he growled. \"Our soldiers can stop the Ikwunde. There are contracts depending on that dam, Mrs. Camherst\u2014blast it, what do you think the point of this colony is?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked, mostly to purchase time to think.\n\nHe made a disgusted noise. \"Power, of course. Of all kinds. Power from the dam, and we have contracts saying that eighty percent of it will be ours for a period of fifty years after construction is done. With that and Bayembe's iron, our profits will be enormous. Think of what the effects of that will be. And you expect us to throw all that away, simply because a few naked savages stopped a raid?\"\n\nMy hands were shaking; I clutched them tight in my lap. \"I knew nothing of this.\"\n\n\"Of course you didn't. You are nothing more than a reckless young woman\u2014\"\n\n\"Who just saved this colony from invasion and possible destruction.\" My voice wanted to shake, too; keeping it steady made my words come out loudly. \"You should perhaps consider keeping the young ladies around you better informed, Sir Adam\u2014 but in this case I am glad you did not. Can you not see the headlines now? SCIRLING GENTLEWOMAN SAVES NSEBU. DARING FLIGHT REVEALS DASTARDLY PLAN. SWAMP NATIVES DEFEAT LABANE WARRIORS. HUMILIATED PRISONERS BROUGHT IN CHAINS TO FORT. And then can you imagine the response if people learn that you turned your back on those who kept Labane spears out of it?\"\n\nHe did not go purple as Maitland had; he turned pale instead. \"Are you threatening me, Mrs. Camherst?\"\n\n\"No, Sir Adam,\" I said. \"I am merely explaining how people back home will see this. If you hear a threat in that, it is only because you fear the inevitable consequence.\"\n\n\"It is not inevitable,\" he said, his voice trembling. \"It is something you intend to bring down upon me. It is a threat, Mrs. Camherst, however you try to disguise it with pretty language.\"\n\nI sighed. I was weary; I was filthy; I had entirely spent the energy which had sustained me on the way here, and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a month while my various wounds healed. \"Very well, Sir Adam. Call it a threat if you must. I gave my word to the Moulish that I would do everything I could to assist them in this cause, and I intend to keep it. Lock me up if you wish; it will not help you, for I have already written down my tale, and made arrangements for it to be shared with friendly ears.\"\n\nIt was the last inspiration of my tired brain: an utter fabrication, invented on the spot to forestall the house arrest I otherwise saw in my future.\n\nIt failed.\n\nSir Adam strode to the door. \"Find a room for Mrs. Camherst. And see that she does not leave.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Royal displeasure\u2014Eg gs for the oba\u2014Overly frank questions\u2014Accusations of treason\u2014Life outside the Green Hell\u2014 Farewells, and a reflection on sorrow\n\nBut of course I did leave in the end\u2014courtesy of Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori.\n\nI do not know what precisely he said to Sir Adam, but I believe it had something to do with the promise I had made before departing for the Green Hell. He wanted to know why I had failed him, and refused to let a Scirling question me in his stead. It was not freedom; armed guards accompanied me from Point Miriam to Atuyem, and took me back again afterward, too. Still, it was the salvation I needed. Sir Adam's outburst had stopped me before I admitted that the success of my plan depended on me speaking with the oba, and so he let me go.\n\nThis time there was no public ceremony, no hangers-on. The oba preferred to express his displeasure in private. Apart from the guards who stood both outside and inside the chamber, there was only his griot for company, and his sister Galinke.\n\n\"The Golden One grants you what you desire,\" the griot said, \"and in return, you betray him.\"\n\nIt was not a good sign that the griot spoke to me. This is a thing they do in Bayembe, to underline the exalted status of the oba; he speaks to his griot, and the griot speaks to whatever lowly soul is unworthy to receive the words directly. Mr. Wilker and I had previously been honoured by Ankumata's friendliness, but I had now lost the privilege.\n\nGalinke sat with her hands folded and eyes downcast. This rebuke was for her as well as for myself; she had suggested me to her brother as a tool, and so she too had failed him. And I, in a sense, had failed her.\n\nMy curtsy was as deep and respectful as I could make it. \" Chele, I thank you for bringing me here today. There is more you have not heard, but Sir Adam would not release me to tell you.\"\n\nAnkumata gestured at his griot, who said, \"Speak.\"\n\nI had rehearsed the words all the way from Point Miriam. \"You asked me to bring you eggs. Whether you meant me to collect them, trade for them, or steal them outright, I soon discovered that for me to do any such thing would have been a grave insult to the Moulish, and dishonourable repayment for their generosity, without which I certainly would have died in the swamp. My promise was a blind one, and I will know in the future not to repeat that mistake.\n\n\"But blind although my promise was, I have found a way to keep it.\"\n\nAlert readers may recall that Yeyuama had told Okweme that he would address my intended theft of eggs after I had visited the island. I thought at the time that he was referring to my possible death in the attempt; had I perished, it might well have been seen as proper judgment upon me for my intended crime. But when we debated the possibility of stopping the Ikwunde and the dam alike, he told me his true meaning\u2014which was not at all what I expected.\n\nIt is the privilege and responsibility of those who touch the dragons to move the eggs where they are needed. Prior to the island, any attempt on my part to interfere with that process, whether by theft or trade, would have been a blasphemy grave enough to ensure my death.\n\nBut after the island... if I wanted to move eggs somewhere, then it was my right to do so.\n\n\"The Moulish have agreed to let me offer you eggs,\" I said. \"I do not have them with me; you will have to wait for more to be laid. But when the time comes, certain men among them will bring you eggs and instruct you in their care. When one of those dragons perishes, they will bring you another\u2014for the ones they supply will be incapable of breeding. This is not meant as a slight against you; it is the unavoidable consequence of swamp-wyrm biology. But if you place those dragons in the rivers above the Great Cataract, you will have a defense like that which has just protected Point Miriam.\"\n\nThe oba listened to all of this impassively, hiding his thoughts behind the mask of a man who has survived political waters more dangerous than those the Labane tried to cross.\n\nI swallowed and went on. \"For this arrangement to work, however, the Moulish will require something in return. They have sheltered your land, at no little risk to themselves, and now offer you a treasure; moreover, what they require is a necessity for that treasure to thrive. I hope your generosity and wisdom will see the value in granting their wish.\"\n\nHere I paused, until the griot prompted me to continue. This was the most delicate point, for if I angered Ankumata as I had Sir Adam, I might be locked up and never let out again.\n\nBut I could hardly stop now. \"The dam,\" I said. \"The one planned in the west. Its effect on the swamp would be catastrophic for the Moulish and their dragons both. If you wish for the arrangement I have described, then you must not allow the dam to be built.\"\n\nSilence fell. Ankumata propped one hand against his leg brace, unblinking gaze never wavering from me. I fought not to squirm under its weight. Eighty percent of the power, Sir Adam had said; that was the dragon's share of the benefit, and I had no doubt that most of the cost in labor and material would come from Bayembe, not Scirland. It was not a deal that favored the oba. But could he abandon it? And did he wish to?\n\nThe next words did not come from the griot. They came from Ankumata himself.\n\n\"There is no profit for your people in this trade.\"\n\n\"We have already had our profit,\" I said, \"in the safety of those who would have died in the Labane attack.\" My mouth was very dry. Surely it was a good sign that he was no longer speaking through his griot, but his words reminded me that my peril came from multiple directions. \"As for the rest...\" I shrugged helplessly. \"I can only do what I think is right, chele. For as many people as possible. This seems better to me than allowing the dam to be built. But perhaps my judgment was incorrect.\"\n\nMore silence. I do not know whether Ankumata was still thinking, or merely waiting, to make certain no one would think he rushed into his decision.\n\nI nearly jumped out of my skin when he said, \"The gift is good. There will be no dam.\"\n\nMuscles I had not even known were tight suddenly relaxed. Then my traitor mouth betrayed me, saying, \"Are you certain? Sir Adam, I fear, will be angry\u2014\"\n\nAnkumata's eyes gleamed with what I think was suppressed amusement. \"Your country has promised assistance in defending Bayembe. I accept the assistance you have provided on their behalf.\"\n\nThat was undoubtedly not the wording in the treaty\u2014but if he thought he could get away with that argument, who was I to disagree? I asked, \"Is that why you sent me to the swamp, instead of one of your own? Because you could call it Scirling aid? No, that cannot be it. I thought at the time that you would not mind as much if we died. Later, it occurred to me that you could more easily disavow our actions if we caused trouble. But if that were the case, you could have sent Velloin. Or both of us together, but I am sure someone has informed you of how I detest the man. I cannot think why you did not send him instead, before me, unless it is because I am Scirling and he is not.\"\n\nThis is why I have declined all offers of diplomatic postings. As I have grown older (and in theory more sedate), various government officials have thought to take advantage of my experience and international connections by sending me as an ambassador to one place or another. But I have at all ages been too prone to speaking my mind, and not always judicious enough in who I speak it to.\n\nThe oba of Bayembe, however, chose not to punish me for my frankness. He said, \"If Velloin were a woman, he would not have gone into the agban.\"\n\nI did not immediately parse his meaning. I looked to Galinke, who smiled; I thought of the days she and I had spent in conversation there. My seclusion had been less than entirely willing... but I had gone, rather than risk offense to my hosts, which might have jeopardized my ultimate purpose.\n\nVelloin would not have bent to such concerns.\n\nUnderstand: this is not the same thing as saying I was perfectly respectful of Yembe traditions, or Moulish ones, either. Romantics of various sorts over the years have painted me as a kind of human chameleon, adapting without difficulty or reservation to my social environment; this is twaddle. (Flattering twaddle, but twaddle all the same.) As I indicated during my account of the witchcraft ritual, my driving concern has always been my research. In pursuit of that, however, I have generally believed that it is more to my advantage to cooperate with those around me than to ignore them. Sometimes this has been a nuisance, and on occasion an outright mistake, but overall this philosophy has served me well.\n\nAnd on this occasion, it explained why my solution to the problem had appealed to Ankumata.\n\nI curtseyed again and said, \"Thank you, chele. \" Then one final thought occurred to me. \"If\u2014if I may ask one more thing\u2014\"\n\nHe made an exaggerated show of wariness, but gestured for me to continue.\n\n\"Have you ever killed anything? Not flies and such, but animals or humans.\"\n\nHis hand had come to rest again on the iron of his braces. They made him strong in some ways, including a few that healthy legs would not have, but they could not do everything. Ankumata said, \"I am no hunter.\"\n\nI nodded. \"Only those who have never killed may do the work that will bring swamp-wyrm eggs to you. There are other requirements as well, which you cannot fulfill... but I think it would please the Moulish to know that they are giving their dragons to a man who is in that sense pure. You may wish to find others who have not killed and recruit them to assist.\" My gaze flickered briefly to Galinke. \"Women as well as men.\"\n\nThis audience had used up more than enough of the oba's time. He dismissed me with a wave of his feather fan. \"I will read your research notes before you depart.\"\n\nNone of the secrets Yeyuama had shared with me were written down, so agreeing was easy enough. \"I will see to it that you have copies of what is printed afterward as well,\" I promised, and retreated from his presence with a sense of profound relief.\n\nThe natural effects of the agreement to transplant swamp-wyrm eggs into the border rivers of Bayembe did not become fully apparent for a number of years after my departure, and so I will not address them here; that is a matter for later volumes.\n\nThe political effects, however, played out more rapidly, as I found myself accused of treason against the Scirling crown.\n\nThese accusations came in three distinct waves. The first was immediate, following on the rumours that I had brought an army to the walls of Point Miriam and threatened the soldiers there. That, I think, prepared the soil for the later rumours; it made for a good story, and a pleasingly scandalous counter-narrative to the tale of Isabella Camherst, savior of Nsebu.\n\nThe second wave was a product of my argument with Sir Adam and subsequent house arrest. He had the good sense not to share the specifics of our conversation, but a great many people knew I had done something dreadful enough to warrant being locked up, and later marched under armed guard to see the oba. When that selfsame oba intervened to have me released, whispers began to fly that my loyalties lay not with my own homeland, but with our colonial ally. No one could say for certain what action I had taken on their behalf\u2014that awaited the third wave of accusations\u2014but rumour supplied any number of scurrilous possibilities.\n\nAs for the third wave, it did not take shape immediately. Ankumata was too experienced a politician to tell Sir Adam of his arrangement with the Moulish before he had to; I was safely back in Scirland by the time that matter came to light. (And a good thing, too, or I might never have escaped with my life.) But eventually it became known that there had been plans for a dam, and that Bayembe had backed out of those plans, in favor of some arrangement with the Moulish. This damaged the trade agreements with Scirland, which led to other foreign parties taking an interest in Bayembe, and ultimately weakened our influence in that country. I would not say this damaged Scirland, in the sense of inflicting harm upon my own nation; but it robbed us of a profit we might otherwise have had. This was more than enough for some to declare me a traitor to my own people.\n\nAll of this was inadvertent on my own part\u2014but it does little good to cry, \"I only wanted to study dragons!\" Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.\n\n(That is a lie, though I will leave it in. Not the entanglement\u2014 that much is true\u2014but the notion that I would like it to be otherwise. If science were only some abstract thing, without connection to our lives, it would be both useless and boring. But there have been times when I wished that I might snip a few of the threads tying it to other matters, so they would stop tripping me as I went.)\n\nThe effect of these accusations, along with others acquired during the expedition (such as the rumours of intimacy with Tom), was to drive all interest in my scientific discoveries out of the public mind in both Bayembe and Scirland. While my companions and I recuperated from our trials\u2014in Nsebu, for Sir Adam had refused to allow us to return to Atuyem, even after my house arrest ended\u2014we endured endless questions, not one of which had to do with natural history. On Tom's advice, I answered as few of those as my indiscretion and the status of my inquirer would allow. The political negotiations played out with a minimum of our involvement, which was as I preferred; I devoted myself instead to making better notes of my observations in Mouleen, since swamp conditions had made proper efforts there impossible.\n\nIt was a peculiar time. If I had felt odd briefly leaving the Green Hell for the savannah during our trek to the Great Cataract, how much stranger was it to sit on a chair in a Scirling-style house, to sleep in a bed, to wear skirts once again? The air felt positively cool and dry after the oppressive humidity of the swamp, and the sky seemed impossibly huge. Things that had become routine to me these past months reasserted themselves as unthinkable: had I truly eaten insects? Conversely, things which had once been shocking were no longer so. When every woman one has seen for half a year, only Natalie excepted, goes about wearing nothing more than a loincloth, the Gabborid custom of leaving one breast bare seems positively modest.\n\nOver it all hung the certainty that we would not be in Eriga for much longer. \"They'll drag us home,\" Tom predicted, shortly after we were reunited. \"The soldiers were talking on the way here; they said the government might recall all civilians from Nsebu, if the Ikwunde continue to press. Except for the trading companies, of course. And now, with what you've done...\" He shook his head, bemused. \"There will have to be an inquiry.\"\n\nNatalie laughed. The recent surprises seemed to have done her in; her manner was that of a woman who had washed her hands of everything, and now was merely waiting to see what would happen next. She said, \"Well, I've ruined myself thoroughly enough to avoid marriage, and if I am very stone-headed I may yet avoid the madhouse. I suppose I am ready to go home.\"\n\nI was not. Now that I knew fangfish were immature swamp-wyrms, I wanted to study their life cycle in greater detail, perhaps get an estimate for what percentage survived that infantile stage and grew to adulthood. I wanted to see the seasonal mating of the swamp-wyrms in the lake below the Great Cataract; I wanted to watch the great queen dragons lay their eggs, and distribute them through the forest alongside Yeyuama and the others. I wanted to document how the hatchlings fared in the river environment of Bayembe (and that was before I knew what would happen after their transplantation).\n\nBut I have never once left the site of an expedition feeling that I have learned everything, answered every question there is to ask. My curiosity always finds new directions. Despite that, I was honestly not certain I could face the Green Hell again\u2014not so soon. Like a man undertaking strenuous labor, I had thought myself fit enough while I was still working, but now that I had stopped, a profound weariness set in, as much psychological as physical. A mattress might feel strange beneath my back at night, but I was not eager to trade it for a damp pallet again.\n\nRegardless, the choice was not ours to make. Tom was right: before the month was out, Sir Adam informed us that we were to return to Scirland. \"Are our visas revoked?\" I asked.\n\nI meant the question politely enough, but Sir Adam was not inclined to read anything I said in a charitable light. He said, \"They will be, if that's what it takes to get rid of you.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary,\" Tom hastened to assure him, and we left his office.\n\nWe did obtain permission to return to Atuyem\u2014under escort, of course\u2014so that we might make our farewells there. I had already parted from Yeyuama two weeks before; the Moulish did not tarry long in Point Miriam after handing over the Labane. I sent gifts with him, as lavish as I could arrange: more iron knives, foodstuffs not found in the swamp, anything I thought the Moulish might find of use. They wear little jewelry, but I sent a carved wooden pendant for Akinimanbi, a charm made in Bayembe to protect infants from sickness. I had no belief in its supernatural efficacy, nor would Akinimanbi necessarily think much of an item that invoked a Yembe god, but it was the best gesture I could think of to express my gratitude for her aid and forbearance.\n\nIn Atuyem, I met with Galinke and clasped her hands. \"Despite all the trouble and confusion that has come of it,\" I said, \"I am still more grateful than I can say that you recommended me to your brother. I only wish there were something equally vital I might do for you in return.\"\n\nShe smiled broadly. \"In a way, you have. The more secure Bayembe is, the less likely it is that I will be sent to the mansa as his wife.\"\n\nI had not forgotten our early political discussions in the agban, which had played no small role in affecting my decisions. \"Then I am glad to have been of service,\" I said.\n\nGalinke was not the only one who benefited from our expedition. Faj Rawango had, on account of his ancestry, been appointed to a prominent role in the new contact with Mouleen. And of course Ankumata had gotten what he desired, though he did not bid us farewell in person.\n\nWhen people speak of the tragedies in my life, they ordinarily mean the deaths: not only Jacob, but all those around me who have perished, whether in direct consequence of danger or simple misfortune and the passage of time after our friendship has formed. At times, though, I think these partings should be accounted as highly, if only in the ledger of my own sorrow. Akinimanbi did not die on a Labane spear, but I never saw her again after leaving for the Great Cataract; in that sense I lost her as thoroughly as if she had died. So it was with Yeyuama as well. I only saw Faj Rawango once more, years later, and although Galinke corresponded with me, we could not be friends the way we might have been had we dwelt in the same land. So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.\n\nBut the only way for me to avoid such losses would be to stay home, to never journey beyond the range of easy visitation. As my life will attest, that is not a measure I am willing to take; nor would I forgo the pleasures of my transient friendships if I could.\n\nSo we made our farewells, packed our things, and boarded a steamship in the harbor of Nsebu. Much browner, thinner, and more worn than we had been when we arrived, we made our way back to Scirland."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Reactions at home\u2014A stranger to me\u2014Conversations and apologies\u2014No longer a recluse\u2014The thief\u2014A small bar\u2014The cost of the world\n\nThere was indeed an inquiry, and a flood of articles in the news-sheets, and gossipmongers swirling in the social waters like so many hungry fangfish.\n\nThat I survived these things at all owes a great deal to Lord Hilford, who was my tireless champion in venues ranging from Society to the Synedrion. He defended me against Sir Adam's report, accusations of fornication, and his own son (who had not forgiven me in the least for absconding with his daughter). Natalie was disowned, and took up residence with me as my permanent companion.\n\nShe proved surprisingly able with Jacob, once she was a resident of my house rather than a visitor to it. \"I would not want one of my own, I think,\" she said with a laugh, \"but I do not mind borrowing yours for brief spans of time.\"\n\nMy son. Now three years old, he had grown tremendously in my absence; I might not have recognized him, had his resemblance to his father not become even stronger. He, I think, barely recognized me at all, shrinking into Mrs. Hunstin's skirts when I crouched down and held out my arms for him to come.\n\nHis diffidence struck me like a blow. It was not only his youth that made him forget me, or the fact that I had been absent for a third of his short life; it was the distance between us before that. I was, I thought wryly, as remote a figure in his world as a queen dragon was to a fangfish, dwelling far away in the clean, turbulent waters of the lake. (Of course I thought of it in those terms. My head was full of plans for the book I would publish, which I had been using as a distraction from the prospect of a Synedrion hearing. And I had begun to think about motherhood as a naturalist might\u2014which made it much more interesting to me.)\n\nThe witchcraft ritual had purged some of the tension and pain from my thoughts, though, and on the journey home I had realized that I was eager to see my son once more. I vowed, as Mrs. Hunstin coaxed him toward me, that I would find some means of improving matters between us. I still had no desire to be the sort of mother society expected me to be; but surely I could be some kind of mother to him, in my particular way, to a greater extent than before.\n\nMy own mother... I will not go into detail regarding the conversation between us, save to say that \"conversation\" is an exceedingly polite name to give it. She had heard the rumours about Tom Wilker, and drawn very erroneous conclusions from them, not the least of which was the notion that I had only gone to Eriga for his sake. I took great exception to her readiness to condemn me, and after that I no longer had to ignore her letters, for she wrote me none.\n\nAndrew I apologized to for the loss of the penknife he had given me when we were children. He listened to the tale of its demise with all the wide-eyed excitement of the eight-year-old boy he had been, and afterward clapped me on the back as if I were a man. \"It fell in a noble cause,\" he said solemnly, and then demanded to know whether Erigan women really went bare-breasted.\n\nI had expected to return to my life as a recluse, albeit for different reasons than before. I imagined myself rising each morning to write papers on our observations, Tom and I having agreed to bombard the Philosophers' Colloquium and other scholarly bodies with material until they were forced to acknowledge our existence and our merit. We had plans for another book as well, which ultimately turned into two: Dragon Breeds of the Bayembe Region and Dragon Breeds of Mouleen.\n\nBut I had not accounted for my celebrity, which brought a flood of mail and even some curiosity-seekers to my house in Pasterway. Natalie dealt with these, but I could not (and did not) refuse all invitations to events and house parties; if I wanted the Colloquium to acknowledge me as a scholar, it was to my benefit to present myself as such in public. (This also lent strength to my assertions that any scandals, real or imagined, associated with my time in Eriga were secondary at best to my true purpose there.) I set to work making a place for myself in Society, even if it was not the place Society intended for me.\n\nAnd, one Athemer morning in early Pluvis, I sat down in Kemble's parlour with Tom, Natalie, Lord Hilford, and Frederick Kemble himself, to discuss the matter of dragonbone.\n\n\"It was Canlan,\" Lord Hilford said. \"I have no proof of it\u2014nothing I could take to a court, not with a marquess as the defendant\u2014but I'm certain he is the one behind the break-in. The man I set to investigating wrote to me recently, reporting that Canlan received a very large sum of money from a company in Va Hing. A new outfit, one whose members include several chemists and industrialists.\"\n\nTom frowned, drumming his fingers on one knee. \"But why sell the information, when he could profit more by exploiting it himself?\"\n\nThe earl snorted. \"Because he needed ready money. The Canlan estates are not what they once were; to invest in this research himself would require more funds than he can spare. And also, I suppose, because he's lazy. Gilmartin isn't a chemist himself, which means he would need to hire men who are, which means dividing his profits, and also a great deal of work I doubt he's inclined to undertake. Much easier for him to hand it off to someone more energetic.\"\n\nI thought of the accusations against me, that I had betrayed Scirland by helping Bayembe do without our help. That had largely been inadvertent on my part, but Canlan had sold this knowledge to Va Hing with malice aforethought.\n\nOf course, I could hardly throw stones, not when we had stolen the seeds of it from a Chiavoran working for a Bulskoi lord in Vystrana. Whatever came of this would be an international collaboration, against the will of all involved.\n\n\"What do you have for us, Mr. Kemble?\" I asked.\n\nHe rose and unlocked his desk, taking from it a small oblong wrapped in canvas. Because I was the one financing his work, he handed it to me first.\n\nMy hopes were too high; I nearly dropped the thing, surprised by its heavy weight. This was not the feather-light material from which we had built the Furcula. I unwrapped it nevertheless, and found in my hands a solid bar the color of dragonbone, no longer than my palm.\n\n\"Chemically, it's the right substance,\" Kemble said. \"Which is more than I had a year ago. But the structure is entirely wrong. It's too dense; it weighs more than lead. Though it's stronger than lead, for what that's worth.\"\n\nHis tone said he did not think it was worth much. \"If it has the strength of dragonbone, surely that is of use,\" I said, giving Tom the bar to examine.\n\nKemble grunted. \"Only if you could produce it in large quantities, easily and cheaply. Which, right now, you can't. Or at least I can't. I gambled on making that; it cost all the funds you gave me for the next year. I had to know if it would work. But you might as well build your machines out of firestones as use that for any industrial purpose.\"\n\nI could not contain my wince. His funds for a year? I could not fault him for the experiment, but even so...\n\nKemble proceeded to outline the method by which he had created the bar, while Tom and Lord Hilford asked intelligent questions. I followed none of it, but slouched in my chair in a most unladylike fashion and chewed on my lower lip. It was progress, though not success. And I was determined to follow through until it became success, even if it bankrupted me\u2014but far better, of course, if it did not. With Natalie now a part of my household and Jacob steadily growing, I would need a greater income.\n\nUp to that point, my sketches had only been for private pleasure, and later for field notes and scholarly illustrations. But news of what transpired in Eriga had ignited public interest: all the world knew the Moulish had just defeated the mightiest warriors of the Ikwunde with dragons. Might there not be a market for pictures? Several news-sheets had offered me money for the \"true story\" of what happened in Eriga, and while I did not trust them to report my experiences honestly, it suggested I might profit by selling a non-scholarly book as well. Something of more substance than A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana, but less density than what I would present to the scholarly community.\n\nI had more reasons than just Kemble's research and the maintenance of my own household to spur me. Lord Hilford had been my patron for this expedition, but I could not depend upon his generosity forever; he had his own financial security to consider, and besides which, he was not a young man. By the time I was ready to begin the project I had in mind, he might not be in a position to fund it.\n\nThe sea-snake we had seen on the voyage to Nsebu; the lack of difference between savannah snakes and arboreal snakes; the drakeflies in Mouleen; the swamp-wyrms and their queenly kin and the fangfish I had not known were related. Wolf-drakes and sparklings and wyverns, and all the other creatures that we classed as mere cousins. I was increasingly convinced that our entire draconic taxonomy needed to be rethought\u2014but to do that properly, much less persuade anyone to heed me, I would need a great deal more data than I had now. For all my reading, there were still woeful gaps in my knowledge, particularly where the scholarship was in another tongue; and once I had remedied that lack, I would need to undertake a much larger study than anyone, so far as I knew, had ever attempted.\n\nTom saw me chewing on my lip and leaned over. \"Something troubling you?\"\n\n\"Not troubling, precisely,\" I said, keeping my voice down so that I might not interrupt Kemble and Lord Hilford.\n\nHe raised one eyebrow, inviting me to elaborate.\n\nA slow grin crept over my face, against all rationality and common sense. \"How much do you suppose a voyage around the world might cost?\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Dragon Lightning",
        "author": "J. S. Burke",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragon protagonist",
            "Dragon Dreamer"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "BLACK LIGHTNING",
                "text": "Bright red lightning crackled above the mountain, sparkling through a dark plume of smoke. The Volcano roared with a thunder beyond any storm and sharp rocks rained down on Drakor. The young dragon gripped an icy rock ledge and shrank back into a narrow mountain crevice, choking on the thick stench of sulfur.\n\nThe mountain shook violently. Drakor's teeth rattled together like dry bones while the earthquake rumbled on and on. He felt like an ice-fish shaken to death in the jaws of a dragon.\n\nSuddenly, the safe ledge broke loose. The white dragon stretched his long, leathery wings and pushed against the falling rock, trying desperately to fly to safety. He was hammered by a storm of rocks.\n\nA boulder slammed into Drakor and his mind went white. He crumpled in on himself, writhing in agony. His right wing hung limp and useless.\n\nDrakor fell from the heights and tumbled down the steep mountainside. He reached the base and kept rolling, onto a peninsula of ice. He barely missed the sea on either side.\n\nHe shook his head, trying to focus. Winter was ending, so this ice sheet would be dangerously thin. Drakor tried to stand up, but his arms and legs slipped away. He must reach the solid shore! He crawled unsteadily toward land, battered and bruised, dragging his useless wing.\n\nCraaacckkk! A jagged line raced across the blue-white tongue of ice. Dark gray water welled up through the rift as the small ice sheet floated free. It was grabbed by a strong current and yanked away from shore.\n\nDrakor reached the edge of the ice and struggled to his feet, ignoring the pain. Could he jump the gap to shore? He dug his sharp claws into the ice, measuring the distance with his eyes. It was too far. If only he could fly! A gulf of deep, icy water separated him from the shore, and he could not swim with a broken wing.\n\nDrakor collapsed onto his fragile sanctuary. How long would this thin ice last? Not that it really mattered, since he'd starve long before his floating home melted away. No one would look for him at sea. A dragon, skimming above the water to hunt ice-fish, would not notice him.\n\nDrakor blended beautifully with the ice floe. His entire body was covered with diamond-shaped, moon-white scales. Each scale had a crystalline edge that glittered like diamonds. Like ice. He gazed longingly at the disappearing shore as he spun farther out to sea."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Several leagues to the south, afternoon sunlight glinted off golden wings and dragon scales. Arak's sharp claws gripped the icy-damp wood of the skiff, as he sailed through a narrow passage between ice-mountains. Towering walls of ice crowded in from both sides, and the salty air was so cold that it burned in his lungs. He inhaled slowly, noting the distinct scent from each type of wet wood.\n\nThe long wooden skiff was dwarfed by ice, and the hold below had a honeycomb of extra supports to strengthen it against these floating mountains. Arak and Taron designed this skiff, and the dragon clan built it to search across the sea for a crucial supply of copper. Now they were questing for legends. Where were these long-lost cousins, the ice dragons?\n\nArak studied the crystal walls. \"This is a true ice world.\"\n\nIce-mountains filled the sea like sharp-edged clouds, carved into fantastic shapes by wind and wave. Most were white, but a few glowed like clear aqua glass with an inner light. The skiff screeched and groaned, grating against the hard ice.\n\nTaron winced and flexed his claws. \"Will the ice armor hold?\"\n\nArak flicked his long tail uneasily. \"We tested the metal plates again and again. The armor has to work. Of course, we didn't have real ice-mountains for the test. And these are amazing, like ice sculptures! I wonder why some are blue?\"\n\nTaron laughed. \"That's another question for the ice dragons.\"\n\nDorali, the third dragon crew-mate, nodded. \"I wonder what they'll ask us?\"\n\nAdult golden dragons were about nine feet long from head to tail. The skiff measured fifty feet from pointed bow to straight stern, and it could easily carry eight dragons. Two small octopus passengers, Scree and Orm, rested in tubs of seawater. But there were only three dragons onboard, and it felt rather empty.\n\nThe skiff had a polished wood deck, railing, and a deep keel for stability. There was a sturdy rudder with a tiller for steering. The hold was an open area below deck. This was nearly filled with supplies, but a cramped space remained. Dragons went below deck during the worst weather, and to sleep.\n\nTraveling north was risky. A low shelter was set into the deck so that one dragon could sleep topside, ready to wake and help in an instant. A second windbreak, made from wooden ribs and fish leather, was collapsed behind the octopus tubs. This shelter could be unfolded to cover and protect the octopus passengers.\n\nArak looked up and frowned. A huge skiff-wing was attached to the towering wood mast, sewn from many silvery-white fish-skins. Icy-white scales of frozen fog sparkled across this wing, and it hung as stiff and heavy as wood.\n\nDorali followed his gaze and stretched her golden wings. \"This ice grows on everything!\" She flew to the top and swept her way down, clearing swath after swath of ice from the skiff-wing. The ice crystals made musical plinking sounds as they hit the deck.\n\nCleared of ice, the skiff-wing filled with air and they lurched forward. Arak slid on the damp boards, barely keeping his balance. He gripped the slippery deck with his copper claws. \"Thanks, Dorali! That really makes a difference. This ice grows faster than barnacles on a hull.\" The young captain adjusted the tiller to catch the wind and the skiff spurted ahead. He breathed a sigh of relief as they moved out from between the frozen monsters.\n\nArak closed his eyes to better feel/see the curve in the magnetic lines. The silvery-gray magnetic shadow in his mind revealed another world. \"Land is near.\" He had secretly visited the mythical island, using his unique gift of seeing while in trance. But his trance-sight was blurry and he had seen no dragons.\n\nArak peered closely at every white cloud and every sparkling ice-mountain. \"Where are the legendary ice dragons?\" he muttered.\n\nTaron squinted into the light, searching the odd white clouds sprinkled across a deep blue sky. \"Look! Is that one?\"\n\nDorali studied Arak's tantalizing dragon-cloud as it slid behind a larger cloud. \"It moved fast. Is that a dragon or just another cloud?\"\n\nArak exhaled his own frosty cloud of frustration. \"I wish I knew. Everything is white. Legend says they can hide on snow, in clouds, even in moonbeams. Are they watching us?\" He glanced down at the shimmering, gray-green sea. A school of tiny fish roiled the water, and the sea rippled as if it was raining up from below.\n\nDorali sighed. \"It's my first voyage, and I've seen the stuff of dreams. It's peaceful here, far from home. I can't remember feeling so content.\" Each of her golden, diamond-shaped scales was tipped with emerald and her eyes were blue. Just like every other dragon-lady. Each dragon-lord had golden, diamond-shaped scales edged with ruby. But she alone, of all the dragons, was covered by knotty white scars.\n\nTaron used a sturdy pole to fend off the craggy outcrop of ice. He gave Arak a friendly clout on the shoulder, tilting his sharp copper claws away. \"Cheer up. We're farther north than any other dragon.\"\n\n\"Except the ice dragons,\" Arak replied, scanning the white clouds and ice. His eyes burned with the strain. \"Where are they?\"\n\nDorali gave the tiller to Taron and stretched her cramped arms. She ladled water from a barrel to fill the copper tea kettle. Then she added shaved red root, cinnamon, nutmeg, and her own blend of herbs. Dorali breathed a thin stream of fire onto the kettle, waited while it steeped, and poured five mugs of tea through a strainer. \"We all need this,\" she said, handing Arak a steaming mug of red root tea.\n\nArak closed his eyes as he inhaled the earthy-spicy aroma. \"Ahhh. Driana taught you the secret of perfect tea.\"\n\n\"Thanks to you, we now have enough copper to make a proper tea kettle.\" Dorali dropped ice into two smaller mugs to cool the tea. She handed these to the octopus crew-mates.\n\nScree held the mug of tea with one of her eight arms. Her golden eyes held a dreamy expression as she sipped the traditional dragon drink. She wore the normal red-brown octopus skin color.\n\nScree gazed at Arak. \"Patience, my friend,\" she said, by gracefully weaving two of her flexible arms to sign the words.\n\nOrm grinned at Scree from his basin of seawater. \"And what would you know of patience?\" He stretched his arms wide to get the kinks out. Five octopi would be about as long as one dragon.\n\n\"I've learned from dealing with you,\" Scree replied testily. She tilted her head back. \"I think I'll take up cloud-watching. Those look like a swarm of white jellyfish, just hanging in the sky.\"\n\nOrm scrunched his eyes and stared up into the bright blue sky. \"I think I see the stingers on their tentacles.\" He pointed to a lumpy cloud. \"And that's your favorite brain coral.\"\n\nA shaft of lightning tore down through the sky and struck the base of the mast. BOOM! The instant thunder was deafening. Fire erupted. Hungry flames ate the wood.\n\nArak and Taron lowered buckets into the sea and threw water on the flames. Dorali beat the flickers to death with a fish skin. Orm and Scree shrank to safety below the water in their basins.\n\n\"Where did that come from?\" Taron yelled.\n\nArak's eyes blazed with anger. \"It was black! I've seen black flames, but never black lightning! That's dragon lightning!\" He eyed the deck, checking the fire damage. \"What a nasty greeting.\"\n\nTaron's voice rose sharply. \"Ice dragons? How could anyone make black lightning?\"\n\nArak circled the mast, pushing gently, testing its strength. \"Last spring I experimented with color. I put metals into flames, trying to make every possible fire color. I wanted a special rainbow fire for my dragonlet. When I used a pinch of titanium powder, the fire glowed black and sparkled like diamonds. Titanium's rare, and you'd need a lot to make black lightning. That's an expensive warning.\" His tail slumped to the ground. \"All my life I've wanted to find ice dragons. Made of moonbeams and starlight . . . so beautiful . . . I love the legend-stories. And they don't want to meet us.\"\n\n\"They weren't expecting us, and I doubt they've ever seen a skiff,\" Scree said. \"Maybe they're afraid.\"\n\nArak flicked his tail in surprise. \"Of us? An ice dragon should be nearly twice my size. We'd be more at risk if we fought.\"\n\n\"This skiff could be frightening. Giant squid weren't sure what to make of it, and they're huge.\" Scree made an image on her skin, using her color cells. She showed the skiff next to a squid that was almost as long.\n\nArak nodded agreement. Scree was normally a plain red-brown. But millions of tiny color cells in her skin could make almost any color, any picture, if she concentrated. And Scree was very good at concentrating. The life-like image on her body was terrifying. A giant squid had attacked Scree's underwater village and killed octopi. It was many times her size, with long snaking arms and saucer eyes.\n\nScree had attacked the monster with a poisoned spear, and then tried to save it. She became friends with Vorm. Arak shivered. How could you be friends with a giant squid?\n\nOrm eyed his mate's body-picture. \"I'll never feel comfortable with squid, and ice dragons may be just as deadly. Arak, you can breathe flames and talk mind-to-mind. They can't, at least not in your legends. I'd bet on you in a fight.\"\n\nArak glanced up at the white clouds. \"I hope it won't come to that. They can gather lightning without a storm and throw with deadly accuracy.\"\n\nScree felt the seawater that was still running across the deck, and stared down into the icy sea. \"This water has an odd feel/taste that reminds me of our volcano. It's changing, and I'm worried.\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"I've noticed. Is it waking up?\"\n\nArak poked into the charred wood to check the depth of the burn. He pulled against the mast again, testing. \"The mast is damaged, but we can brace it for our return journey.\"\n\nTaron nodded agreement. \"And the holes must be filled. Everything we need is in the hold.\"\n\n\"We also need this skiff to hold still.\" Arak drove a metal anchor into an ice-mountain and tied off to it. Dorali used pine gum to fill the burn holes, while Arak and Taron strengthened the mast with bent metal braces.\n\nIn the early evening, Arak cautiously maneuvered the skiff through a field of sharp, craggy ice. His eyes were alert as ever but his tail drooped with defeat. \"We're limping home in a battered skiff without even meeting our mythical, long-lost cousins. But our skiff still works.\"\n\nTaron glanced at the burn spots. \"We finally have proof that ice dragons are real.\"\n\nThe sun sank lower and lower as they journeyed toward home. A vivid sunset with raging reds and fiery golds was reflected across sea and ice. Ice-mountains burned above midnight blue shadows. Even the huge, silvery skiff-wing was awash with glowing colors.\n\nArak gazed at the sky. \"I'll never tire of sunsets at sea. It's time to call home.\" He sighed. It would be hard to share this failure with his mate, Zarina. She had encouraged him to follow his dream quest, even though she couldn't come. This was no place for their dragonlet. He lifted his aquamarine trance-stone from his chest-pouch, sat on the deck, and focused into the blue-green ball.\n\nArak entered a calming trance, relaxing as his tide of frustrations drained away. This was the first stage of their mind-to-mind communication. He sank deeper into trance as he stilled his mind and focused into the translucent aquamarine globe. He felt peaceful nothingness. Then he was looking down at his limp, empty body.\n\nHis trance-mind soared across the sea to the distant dragon shore and spied the shimmer of a trance-mind, waiting. As the shimmers overlapped, Arak heard a voice deep inside his mind. This inner voice was a flat monotone.\n\n<Arak. How is the quest>\n\n<Zarina. We found ice dragons. It is not what I expected>"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Drakor lay huddled on the ice, shivering, surrounded by flaming colors. If only the sunset could warm him! He ate the last bite of food from his chest pouch and, still hungry, took a small sip of water from his silver flask. How long could he make it last?\n\nA thin crescent moon rose, bringing little light, and the diamond stars hid behind wispy clouds. No light, no heat, no food. He laughed. No shortage of ice! Drakor packed more ice around his mangled wing. There was nothing more he could do, so he ignored the throbbing pain.\n\nDrakor took a huge diamond from his pouch. This heavy, eight-sided crystal was as clear as ice. His dragon-dam found the diamond on a distant volcanic island, shortly before she died. This gift was all he had from her, and it always seemed warm and real. In legend, diamonds brought the First Dragon to life.\n\nDrakor automatically looked around to be sure no one was looking. A dragon shouldn't need any comfort. He cradled the white diamond, softly crooning a half-remembered lullaby that his dam had sung to him. Then he curled up miserably for the night, carried farther and farther from home by the sea.\n\nDrakor's rumbling stomach woke him at dawn. Movement caught his eye. Glancing up he spied a huge, silvery wing on the horizon. A single wing made no sense! He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The huge wing grew larger, moving closer. It must be real.\n\nDrakor struggled to a crouching position and steeled himself for a fight. He'd rather face a monster than starvation . . . much more interesting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "A modest breeze from the unseen land filled the skiff-wing. Arak moved the tiller gently, carefully skirting the base of another ice-mountain. Even with copper plating, sharp ice could slice through the side and sink the skiff. He sniffed the frosty air, noting the rotten egg smell mixed with salt. They were so close to the ice dragons! He had found success and failure in one black lightning bolt.\n\nDorali took her turn at the helm, threading the skiff between two more ice-mountains.\n\nArak flicked his tail with approval. \"That's excellent steering.\"\n\n\"You taught me well.\" Dorali sighed contentedly. \"I love this journey.\"\n\nArak glanced at the damaged mast. \"Even after the lightning strike?\"\n\nDorali tilted her head. \"The journey isn't over. Who knows what will happen? I've seen skies with green fire and floating ice-mountains. Most are white, but some look like they're carved from blue glass.\"\n\n\"Now you sound like Scree. The sea and sky are amazing, but you're the only dragon who wanted to join Taron and me on this adventure. I wonder why?\"\n\nDorali shrugged her wings. \"When the clan was suffering, many dragons wanted to help. Then you crossed the endless sea and found the copper we needed. Now the dragons are healthy, pain-free, and content to stay home.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Zarina said you've become a true Healer.\"\n\nDorali shivered.\n\nArak noticed her curled toes and hunched wings. Dorali must be remembering the experience that changed her life, when she was nearly ripped to pieces by a pack of ravenous dweer. They were each the size of a dragonlet, with rust-colored scales and sharp teeth. Normally, dweer left dragons alone. But an undersea volcano killed fish and spawned a famine.\n\nArak helped rescue Dorali. He and his sire carried the dragonlet by her wings as they flew to the clinic. The Healers Driana, Zarina, and Scree sewed her back together. It was a miracle that Dorali had survived. Even her torn wings had healed enough to fly. After her long stay at the dragon clinic, she became an apprentice Healer.\n\nDorali straightened her wings. \"This is where I want to be.\"\n\n\"We're lucky to have you along.\" Arak scanned the sea and pointed. \"That's a very flat piece of ice. Land ice.\"\n\n\"Arak, that's like the ice floe you landed on.\" Scree flashed an image of their first meeting, when Arak had crashed onto ice far out to sea, far from his home on the dragon-shore.\n\nDorali stared at the ice. \"The whole clan knows this story. A chunk of storm ice knocked you from the sky, Scree healed your wounds, and you've been friends ever since.\"\n\nOrm juggled five dragon-candies with three arms; the balls flew in overlapping arcs. \"Now octopi trade with dragons. We get your spices and chocolate . . . for seaweed!\" He expertly tossed a candy to each crew member. Scree caught her piece with a curled arm.\n\nArak bounced his candy from claw to claw and then caught it in his mouth. \"We also get your black pearls,\" he said, with a grin. He took a closer look at the ice sheet and flicked his tail. \"Something moved on that ice. Dorali, bring us closer.\"\n\nArak studied the small, drifting plate of ice. The broken edges were still sharp, not yet smoothed by the sea, so land was near. That was not news. He could feel/see this land in the curving magnetic lines, smell land shrubs in the air, and feel it in the black grit that dusted his skiff. Orm had tasted earthy, fresh land-water in the sea.\n\nArak was so close to the land of the fabled ice dragons! He ran his eyes over the pile of snow in the center of the ice floe and sighed. Nothing. As he turned away, an odd glint of light caught his attention.\n\nArak glanced once more at the lump of snow, sparkling like glass and fine white sand. \"It's just a pile of snow and ice,\" he said dejectedly. Then he snapped his tail. \"And two black eyes!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ICE DRAGON",
                "text": "A huge white dragon looked up and locked eyes with Arak. His eyes were stormy gray, not black, and there was not a hint of fear. Afternoon sunlight glinted off diamond-shaped scales of white opal. Iridescent rainbows rippled across the dragon's broad chest. Everything was just like the legends, but his right wing was tightly bound and covered with snow.\n\nArak and Taron quickly lowered a long, narrow ladder to the ice. \"Climb aboard.\"\n\nThe jostling climb must have hurt his injured wing, but he never even winced. This dragon was made of stern stuff. Their large guest stepped easily over the railing, stood firmly on the deck, and looked about with a commanding presence. He spied the octopus tubs and darted forward, sharp claws extended.\n\nHis intent was clear.\n\nArak and Dorali leapt between the dragon and their friends. \"No!\"\n\nThe dragon knocked them aside, intent on his prey.\n\nOrm sensibly slid into the water and camouflaged, instantly changing his skin color and texture to match the wood basin.\n\nScree stood her ground, gazing steadily at the onrushing dragon, and raised three tentacles. Thwack! She struck him on the neck with the tip of her middle arm. The other two arms wielded thick metal rods that struck the offending claws, knocking them away. The white dragon staggered back and collapsed.\n\nDorali and Arak struggled up. Taron joined them, all rushing to protect Scree. And the ice dragon was already down.\n\nArak laughed. \"I see that you kept the toxic tips I made for your giant squid encounter.\" The wax balls were filled with neurotoxin from a deadly octopus relative, and tipped with a sharp, hollow needle.\n\nScree displayed one of her poison balls, which fitted perfectly into a sucker near the tip of an arm. \"These helped with our last adventure, and I thought they might be useful again. Each poison ball has a different dose. I broke the safety on this one when the dragon looked too arrogant to listen. As long as he's sedated, let's fix his wing. I hope it's not beyond our skill.\"\n\nOrm twined tentacles affectionately with his mate. \"You do realize he just tried to kill you.\"\n\n\"So did Vorm. He needs help. He's young and simply mad with hunger. I calculated the dose in advance, so he should be asleep for at least an hour.\"\n\nOrm shook his head in a dragonly gesture. \"I thought I was the practical one.\"\n\nScree grinned back. \"Sometimes, practical and improbable overlap.\" She slid another arm around her mate. \"Like us.\"\n\nDorali and Scree untied the twine around the ice dragon's wing. They carefully stretched the wing, feeling the multiple breaks and the shattered bone. Dorali flicked her tail in dismay. \"Wings are my specialty, but this is even worse than I thought. How does he stand it?\"\n\nScree grabbed her Healer bag. \"Arak, could you tie off to that ice-mountain? We need a still place to work.\"\n\nScree's bag was made from indestructible cloth-of-gold, woven from the thin, wiry roots of pen shells. The bright fabric was covered by tiny brown shells. The four compartments held a treasure-trove of supplies: seaweed herbs, blue-ringed octopus venom, kelp bandages, a spool of wiry gold thread, fish-bone needles, a carved coral box with oily salve, and a sharp surgeon's knife of glittering black garnet.\n\nDorali opened her Healer bag, made from fish leather. It was filled with dried herbs, vials of ground metal, knives made from rare green garnet, needles, thread, bandages, poison for anesthesia, rods and strips for braces, and more.\n\nScree ran two arms gently over his damaged wing. She tasted the wounds, felt the fever, and sighed. \"We'll need everything we have.\" She put four live leeches around the break while Arak and Taron looked on with interest. The sturdy slugs latched on immediately. \"These will suck out the swelling so we can move his wing safely.\"\n\nDorali mixed herbs in a pot of boiling water and left the potion to steep. \"Boneset leaves will speed healing, the iodine in this seaweed fights infection, and flame-weed numbs pain,\" she explained to Arak, who was watching with interest. \"You finally found your ice dragon.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"He looks just like the legends, white as new snow and sparkling like ice. I didn't know that ice dragons were so . . . dramatic.\"\n\nOrm pointed. \"He's more spiky than I expected. Look at those sharp claws on his wings!\"\n\nScree and Dorali designed a moveable wing brace with thin, strong ash wood. Arak cut the pieces to size and Taron inserted the small, adjustable screws. Arak and Taron held the brace in place while Scree and Dorali sewed it onto the wing. Then the Healers used cloth-of-gold thread, carefully avoiding the veins.\n\nOrm handed them another spool of thread. \"That's a strange dragon ornament. I wonder if he'll appreciate the artwork.\"\n\nThe skiff-wing flapped against the mast and sea spray blew across the deck. The skiff began to rock. Dorali flicked her tail nervously. \"That wind is not making this any easier.\" She tied off the last stitch. \"I hope this works.\"\n\nMoments later, the ice dragon opened his eyes and looked about groggily. \"Whaaat . . . happened?\"\n\nDorali leaned closer to catch his slurred words and strange accent. She pointed to the octopus. \"Scree.\"\n\nThe ice dragon shook his head. \"How could . . . something . . . small, helplesss . . . stop me?\"\n\nDorali laughed. \"Helpless? Scree? She's tackled a shark and a horde of giant squid. Size is irrelevant. You're as strong as your mind.\" She helped her patient to a sitting position.\n\n\"Giant . . . squid? Big. Daan-jur-uss.\" He looked at Scree again and shook his head. \"Size isss always re-le-vant.\" He noticed the wing brace and alarm sparked in his eyes. He twisted his long neck around, peering at the brace from every angle. \"What isss this?\" he hissed, reaching over with his opposite arm.\n\nDorali put both hands on his arm and shook her head. \"No! It's a brace for your wing. It will hold the broken bones together while they heal. And I will help the bones grow back together.\"\n\nHe dropped his arm and stared at her. \"How?\"\n\n\"I'll pulse energy into your bones at just the right frequency.\"\n\nThe ice dragon sat up straighter. \"What isss an energy pulse?\"\n\nDorali tilted her head. \"We use the energy our body makes. What do your Healers do?\"\n\n\"We heal ourselves. We learn which herbs to eat and how to wrap breaks.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Self-sufficient. But some problems require help. I'm Arak. Your dragon Healer is Dorali. Scree is your octopus Healer.\" He introduced Taron and Orm. \"We all helped. Your wing should heal if you obey your Healers.\"\n\nThe ice dragon displayed his impressive teeth and flexed his long, razor-sharp claws. \"Obey?\" he growled.\n\nDorali flinched but replied soothingly, \"Just listen to what we say. Drink this . . . it will help.\" She handed him a mug of healing herbal tea.\n\nHe took a sip from the mug, spat it out, and snapped his tail like a whip. \"This isss not water.\"\n\n\"It's water with herbs. It will help your wing heal.\" Dorali took a sip to show it was safe. \"Drink it . . . please.\"\n\nAfter he finished his potion, she gave him a sack of crab claws. He cracked them open with his teeth, used his claws to extract every last shred of meat, and relaxed his snapping tail. \"You live here? Floating on water, like an ice sheet. What isss this?\"\n\nArak patted the mast proudly. \"We call it a skiff.\"\n\nThe ice dragon shrugged his shoulders and winced with the pain.\n\n\"Scree had the original idea of making a fancy wood raft with a pole and a fish-skin wing, to fly on the water. Orm said the design must be part shark, part dragon. Now, octopi can skiff-fly across the sea. We made a bigger skiff for dragons.\"\n\nArak grabbed the railing and pushed. It didn't move. \"We keep improving the skiff. This railing is much stronger, and the hold now has a weather-room.\"\n\nThe ice dragon shook his head. \"Yellow dragons are strange.\"\n\nWind gusted across the deck, knocking icicles off the lines like leaves off a winter tree. They plinked musically on the deck. The wind grew fierce, pelting them with hard grains of ice. Arak furled his wings tight to protect them. The white dragon ignored this assault as if he did not even feel the wind.\n\n\"I'm Arak. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Drakor.\" He looked Arak up and down. \"In our legends, small yellow dragons were afraid to fly north.\"\n\n\"Not afraid. We had no need to leave. Our land suits us.\"\n\nDrakor sighed. \"That isss my problem. Our island suits us. But that will change when the new Volcano erupts. The old one isss growing a new cone that smells and acts different. I have studied this but no one cares.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Minds open slowly. What have you found?\"\n\nScree watched closely, eyes focused, body tense. She flushed green with interest as Taron translated the conversation into their mutual language.\n\n\"The land-ice isss thinner. The ice fish are moving away. The magnetic wrinkles over the new and old Volcanoes are very different. I made jars and collected Volcano breath from the old and new cones. Then the mountain shook me off.\"\n\nTaron looked toward the unseen island. \"What are magnetic wrinkles?\"\n\n\"They are small, wiggly, magnetic lines. Their energy pattern isss important.\"\n\nArak flicked his tail. \"Why do the other ice dragons ignore these signs? Are they just too tough? Can't they imagine the danger?\"\n\nDrakor threw back his head and laughed. His deep, booming laugh rolled on and on like thunder. \"Both? We learn to be . . . self-su-fishent. Food can be scarce. Dragonlets learn to find lichens and rock limpets soon after they hatch.\"\n\nHe gently stretched his good wing. \"Tough isss required. But I was not encouraged to use my . . . i-ma-gi-na-shun.\" He mouthed each syllable as if the word tasted strange.\n\nArak grinned. \"Actually . . . neither was I. At least, not by the clan, but my dam encouraged me. It's good to push beyond the borders. I was teased until I became a practical dreamer and helped the clan. Now I try to think like the beyond-dragons who live in the stars, to remember the ancient past and contemplate the distant future.\"\n\nScree turned one eye to the sea. \"This seawater has a feel/taste like a volcano. As long as we're stopped, I want to collect better samples from the ice abyss and compare them with Drakor's samples from the island. Then we'll know if this whole area is a new volcano waking.\"\n\nArak translated.\n\n\"That would be great!\" Drakor glanced over the side, at the cold gray sea. \"But the ice abyss isss dangerous.\"\n\nScree shrugged. \"Maybe.\" She opened her Healer bag and chose three collection jars that were carved from a thick stem of black coral. She added them to her small travel bag. \"I'll collect water near the vents below. Orm, when we get home, we need a new sample from our volcano. It's changing, and we need to know if our volcano is part of this.\"\n\nOrm twined arms with Scree. \"You have to see for yourself, don't you? Giant squid hunt here.\"\n\nScree plucked a huge pink pearl from her bag. \"I have this.\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"You faced a horde of giant squid once before, and this pearl was given back to you in peace. You're a friend-of-squid. But are all squid truly friends-of-Scree?\"\n\nScree smiled brightly. \"One way to find out!\"\n\nShe grabbed her bag with one arm and a heavy rock with two more. Then she slipped over the edge into the sea."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE ICE ABYSS",
                "text": "Scree turned white with shock as she hit the freezing water. She sank like the stone she held, slipping through a sunset cloud of tiny red shrimp. A long, clear fish snaked out of her way as she plummeted down.\n\nThe floating ice-mountain was even larger below the waves. Salt drifted down, squeezed from the frozen sea above, blurring the water like thick, wavy glass. Her arms curled away from the salty brine.\n\nThe thick, slushy sea was nearly frozen. Scree sank into a world that grew steadily darker and colder; it was like falling through black diamonds.\n\nThreads of ice grew through the water like spider webs in the air, catching unwary sea life. The doomed creatures were quickly bound in a cocoon of ice. Scree stretched out one arm and shattered a prison made of sharp, crystalline needles. The starfish escaped and sank to freedom.\n\nThe water grew slightly warmer as she neared the sea floor. Scree nodded with satisfaction. That warmth must be from volcano vents. She pulsed sideways to avoid a sharp, crumpled patch, landing instead on a dark boulder.\n\nScree discarded the rock weight and gazed in wonder at the exotic life of the abyss. Glowing jellyfish hung in the sea as living chandeliers. Black fish with pink lights brightened the darkness like stars in the night. Blue-and-yellow lobsters stalked past a tangle of purple starfish.\n\nScree pulsed toward a stream of smoky-gray bubbles. Her arms twitched as she moved closer to the horrible feel/taste rising from the volcano vent. This crack in the sea floor seemed like an entrance to a secret cave. She filled three jars with the stinky water, pushed in the stoppers, and placed them in her bag.\n\nA cluster of glowing, flower-like animals lit the sea. Each anemone had an outer ring of thin golden petals; green strands filled the center. Their glow attracted tiny, shrimp-like prey. A golden petal whipped out and snared one.\n\nScree flowed just above the rocks, barely touching, searching. What else would she find here, in this alien world beneath the ice?\n\nSuddenly she froze. Scree felt no shift in the currents, but her skin prickled with warning. Something was watching her. She changed color while her skin cratered and dimpled with sharp edges like broken eggs. In the blink of an eye she disappeared, perfectly matching the volcanic rocks. What was it? Her arms could only taste the overwhelming sea-smells of rotten egg, weathered rock, and old melted ice.\n\nScree focused her mind on the thousands of tiny eyes in her skin; it was like looking through a wall of glass bubbles at a puzzle image. He was lurking in the shadows behind her. The red mountain had huge saucer eyes that glowed yellow in the pale light. This towering giant squid was watching her, so hiding as a shape-shifted rock would not keep her safe.\n\nOld memories surfaced of her first meeting with Vorm, the giant squid who attacked her undersea village and killed three of her pod-mates. She had fought back and won.\n\nScree smoothed her skin and changed color to a bright warning-blue, the blue of rare creatures that could be poisonous. She stretched as tall as she could and became a different, more intimidating octopus in less than a heartbeat. Then she turned to face the giant squid. She clutched her huge pink pearl, holding it out like a shield.\n\nThe squid pulsed forward.\n\n\"Tarm!\" she signed with relief, making red and yellow spots on her arms to spell his name. Fear drained away, like a wave slipping back to the safety of the sea. She had met this giant before. Scree became a normal red-brown octopus.\n\nTarm's eyes focused on the pink pearl. \"Scree. I thought it was you.\" He flashed a series of glowing light spots on his arms: \"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\"\n\nScree answered with the same traditional squid greeting and added, \"Tell Veera that I miss your abyss, but it's also beautiful below the ice-mountains.\"\n\n\"So you do love the dark abyss,\" Tarm said approvingly. \"Veera will be pleased.\"\n\nScree vividly remembered his terrifying mate Veera, and the almost paralyzing fear she felt before they understood each other. \"Everyone should see the abyss. It's not truly dark; life speaks with lights.\" Scree smiled as she quoted Vorm, remembering that scary, complicated, enriching friendship.\n\n\"Come see the vent worms,\" Tarm said, flashing his lights enthusiastically. He pulsed away.\n\nScree jetted after him, carefully noting landmarks to find her way back to the dragon-skiff. Normally she could taste her way home, but not in this intense soup of flavors. A homing snail would be quite useful, since they always found their way home. If only they weren't so slow . . . The rotten sulfur feel/taste grew even stronger as they traveled, and her sensing arms wriggled with irritation. How far would they journey?\n\nTarm passed another bubbling vent and kept going. Finally, he stopped. This vent was surrounded by a riot of giant worms. Most were longer and thicker than her arms, with white shell tube bodies and bright scarlet heads.\n\nTarm swept a swath of tube worms into his beaked mouth with one tentacle. He gave a satisfied grin. \"Small tasty treats.\"\n\nScree shuddered, remembering the attack on her village and the long, powerful tentacles. She smoothed the fear out of her tense arms. Giant squid had terrifying power, but they were also immensely fascinating. They traveled the world, searching, pulsing from place to place. Home was wherever they were.\n\nIn an odd way, these squid were kindred spirits. They matched her restless need to explore, something few octopi would ever understand. She ate a smaller tube worm, one that grew farther from the vent, and made a shell picture on her skin. \"This tastes like scallops.\"\n\nScree collected water from the vent, since another sample could be useful.\n\nA huge, white king crab stalked onto the field. She studied its stately walk. Tron had mimicked this crab's unusual dance at their New Moon festival. Tron was her only friend who loved to explore and travel the seas like squid. He was dead now, killed in an earthquake when their undersea volcano woke. She flushed gray, reliving sad/fond/happy memories of her good friend. There were layers and layers of memories, like the shimmering nacre of a pearl.\n\nTarm scooped up the crab and it disappeared into his mouth. \"There is always good hunting near the vents.\"\n\nScree shivered . . . his dinner crab was exactly her size. She gave an octopus sigh. Now she would never see the real dance of the king crab.\n\nTarm pointed to a rocky field.\n\nScree took a closer look at the sausage-shaped rocks, which were barely visible in the dim light. \"Sea cucumbers!\" She picked up one of the small, crusty animals. Its brown skin was covered with an elaborate design of pink and white lines. There were tiny tube feet along one side and tube threads around its feeding end.\n\n\"The sea cucumbers near our reef are solid brown, and rare.\" Scree pulled an empty sack from her bag and stuffed many of these brainless snacks into it.\n\n\"These are too small for me,\" Tarm said. His long tentacles rippled nervously. Then he bent low and looked her in the eye. \"Scree, the seas are changing. Many fish have moved away. We have other food, but some of the younger squid want to hunt octopi.\"\n\nScree went rigid. \"They would ignore our agreement?\"\n\nTarm looked away, but the lights on his arms continued to speak. \"These squid did not meet you, so they say the treaty does not include them. It's a game to them, to prove they are superior to the older, cowardly squid. They don't see the danger because you are so small.\"\n\nScree sighed. The volcano was changing, the squid were threatening, and even her octopus pod had rumblings of dissent. Was everything going to blow up? Could her pod stop a determined attack by a horde of giant squid? Tarm was watching her closely, as if measuring an opponent for battle. This was a warrior race. Friendship with squid would never be simple, and it was time to challenge back.\n\nScree coiled her arms as if to strike, to remind Tarm of their last encounter; she had temporarily disabled two of his tentacles with her hidden poison. \"We'll deal with any squid foolish enough to attack us. Our treaty protects both sides. Because of your warning, and because I value our friendship, I'll try to keep my pod from retaliating and hunting you all down.\"\n\nTarm flushed a paler shade of red. \"We'll discuss this at our next gathering.\"\n\nScree relaxed her arms. \"Good.\" She glanced north. \"Have there been changes up here since last year?\"\n\nTarm tapped the sea floor. \"It's warmer than last season, and the water tastes different. Ice fish are leaving. Did you find your ice dragons?\"\n\n\"They found us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Scree climbed up the side of the skiff, hooking her arms over the rungs of a special ladder worked into the side. She squished thin and slipped under the railing. Then she pulled jars made of polished black coral from her bag.\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"You have samples!\"\n\n\"And I met an old friend, Tarm.\" Scree used her color cells to paint a giant squid across her skin.\n\nArak laughed, Orm sighed, and Dorali looked on with relief.\n\nDrakor's eyes bulged. \"And you returned?\" He reached eagerly for a jar. \"This isss great!\" He pulled a glassy black container from his sack, carved from obsidian. He sniffed both jars. \"The Volcano breath I caught in my jar smells almost the same as your sample.\"\n\n\"Orm feels chemicals. He can tell if they are the same,\" Scree offered.\n\nDrakor watched closely as Arak translated. \"That could help. I must learn your language.\"\n\nThe unreliable, gusting wind was replaced by a cold, steady wind. Arak reached for the furled skiff-wing. \"Prepare to cast off. We can fly if we're careful.\" Dorali and Taron pulled the anchor from the ice while he adjusted the skiff-wing to catch the rising wind.\n\nArak pointed to the sky. \"How do you make lightning?\"\n\n\"We gather sky energy. What can yellow dragons do?\"\n\n\"We control our inner energy.\" Arak tossed a chunk of ice into a ceramic bowl. He breathed a small stream of brilliant fire, melting the ice. The air held a pleasant burnt smell.\n\nDrakor felt the water. \"It isss warm. Water isss why yellow dragons make fire?\"\n\n\"It is a quick way to get water from ice, and hot water for tea. We also make smoky fires to preserve fish for the winter.\"\n\nDrakor shrugged, still looking at the water. \"There isss always water at our hot springs. But this could be useful. How do you make fire?\"\n\n\"Dragons have two stomachs. We eat nuts and fish that have lots of oil. During our first two years, all of our food goes to the first stomach and we use it to grow. After that, the extra oil is stored in the second stomach, with carbon. To breathe fire, you spit the oil mix and light it with sparks from a copper claw.\"\n\n\"I will learn to do this,\" Drakor said confidently. He wrinkled his nose and glanced at the fire-damaged mast. Then he scanned the deck. The charred spots were filled in, but still as obvious as black rocks on snow. \"Lightning?\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Black lightning.\"\n\nDrakor looked up. \"Black? That was a warning to leave.\"\n\nArak narrowed his eyes. \"The message was crystal clear. Why?\"\n\n\"This huge wing isss like a monster invading our territory.\" Drakor looked out to sea and noted their heading. He snapped his tail angrily. \"Wrong way. My home isss sooner. I must return now.\"\n\n\"Your clan would not welcome us. And, thanks to black lightning, we must return to our home to fix the skiff,\" Arak replied firmly.\n\nDrakor's eyes blazed with anger. He struggled to his feet, wobbling a little. He flexed his claws, gripping wood that was slippery with frozen saltwater. \"No.\"\n\nArak looked up at the hulking dragon and stood his ground. \"We'll help you heal so you can fly again. Then you can return.\"\n\nDrakor bared his long, sharp teeth. He cleared the deck around him with one sweep of his powerful tail to make a clean fighting circle. \"No. I challenge you.\"\n\nArak locked eyes with Drakor. \"Move back,\" he ordered his crew-mates. He balanced gracefully on the balls of his feet. \"I'm smaller than you, but I'm not injured. If we fight, I will win. I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\nDrakor took a menacing step forward and growled, \"No. I will win.\" He whipped his tail to strike. Arak leapt above it."
            },
            {
                "title": "LIGHTNING SWORDS",
                "text": "Dorali jumped between them and put both hands on Drakor's chest. \"Stop!\"\n\nHe looked down at her, eyes wide with surprise.\n\n\"Even if you win, what can you do with a broken wing? What happens to an ice dragon who can never fly? I will help the bones grow together and take off the brace when your wing is healed. Then you can return home.\"\n\nDrakor flinched as if struck. He stared at Dorali. \"To fly isss to be free.\" Then he asked Arak, \"How long isss it to your home?\"\n\n\"Almost two five-days.\"\n\nDrakor flexed his claws in frustration. Then he said, \"I will come.\" He sat down on the cold deck and gazed silently across the sea, staring at his unseen home as it slipped away.\n\nArak's battle focus drained away. He squinted as ice crystals were driven into his face by the rising wind. If a strong wind filled the entire skiff-wing, the stress could break their damaged mast. He grabbed a rope and yelled, \"Taron! We need a smaller wing fast!\"\n\nArak, Taron, and Dorali struggled to shorten the skiff-wing.\n\nDrakor turned away from his homeland and sat in silence, watching them work. They carefully maneuvered the skiff past another ice-mountain, keeping an eye on the fragile mast. The sky darkened into a night filled with sparkling stars and shimmering lights. Finally Drakor said, \"I will help.\"\n\n\"I'll show you how. And I'll teach you how to make dragon-fire,\" Arak said.\n\nScree tilted her head back to gaze at sheets of emerald fire that hung in the night sky, dancing in the distant star-breeze. \"Orm, this alone is worth the journey north. Auroras are as beautiful as glowfish in the dark abyss.\"\n\nOrm studied the sky. \"It's an artistic display of darkness and light with no giant squid. That is a bonus!\"\n\nDrakor glanced up. \"Storm, stars, black funnel clouds . . . the sky isss always beautiful. The aurora isss even more beautiful when we fly very high in the wind-stream. That isss a fast ride, like an air slide.\" He stood up. \"The wind isss steady. Now isss a good time to learn. I am ready to make fire.\"\n\nArak rubbed his forehead. \"Drakor, if you can understand the wind, fire will be easy.\"\n\n\"Is this wise?\" Scree asked with her silent sign language.\n\nHe shrugged and signed back, \"I think he'd learn anyway, by watching our clan. This way he learns as a friend.\" Arak placed a ceramic bowl in a safe spot, away from the mast and rails. \"First, you must learn to zap. Then you can make fire.\" He held out his claws, and a bright spark flew into the exact center of the bowl. \"Concentrate on your inner energy to zap.\"\n\nDrakor furrowed his brow. His face was a storm cloud of concentration and his claws sparkled like the edge of lightning. But there were no sparks.\n\nArak pointed to the stars. \"You learned to gather lightning energy from the sky. I'm sure you can learn to gather body energy to make a spark.\"\n\n\"Gathering from inside isss not the same as gathering from clouds,\" Drakor growled. He tried again and again while stars moved across the night sky. Finally, a small, starry spark flew from his claws. It barely hit the rim of the bowl. \"Yesss!\"\n\nBy the end of the day, Drakor could zap like a pro. Spark after spark landed in the center of the bowl. Then Arak added oil to the bowl. Drakor zapped a spark into the oil and stared hungrily into the flaming bowl as if it held the last fish in the sea.\n\nOrm turned golden-orange with a pattern of red sparks. \"Fire that burns.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"Add some scales and you'll look like a dragon.\"\n\nThe next day, Drakor learned to spit oil and spark it. He made streams of fire. Then he blew rings of fire. The smoke clouds smelled like grilled air. \"This isss interesting. It isss good to learn new ways.\" He stretched his good wing and glowered at the wing brace. \"But it isss hard to get used to this.\"\n\n\"But worth the effort,\" Dorali said sternly. \"Not flying is much worse.\" She set down a tray with mugs of spiced red root tea.\n\n\"Thanks! Perfect timing,\" Arak said as he sipped the ruby warmth. \"Drakor, where do you get your lightning metals?\"\n\nDrakor swallowed a steaming mug of tea in one gulp and picked up another. \"There are rare metals near our hot springs. When we toss titanium into a lightning shaft, it glows black and sparkles like diamonds. Beautiful. Black lightning isss special.\"\n\nArak snapped his tail. \"Should I feel honored that an ice dragon attacked us with black lightning?\"\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"Probably. They wanted to drive the point home.\"\n\nArak stared at the charred wood on his skiff, feeling an inner storm of anger. Then he laughed. \"Definitely driven home.\"\n\nDrakor clouted Arak on the back, nearly knocking him over. \"Now I will teach you to gather lightning with no storm. First, stand tall. It helps to be higher in the sky.\"\n\nArak stretched taller.\n\n\"Tilt your claws toward a sparkle in the clouds. Feel the tingle.\" Drakor gestured with his claws. \"Gather charges of energy. A small energy ball in your claws pulls in more energy. It isss like a snowball rolling down a hill. The snowball gathers more and more snow. Soon you have enough energy to make a lightning bolt.\"\n\nArak tilted his copper claws and concentrated. Nothing happened. \"Drakor, you're right. Gathering sky energy to make lightning is very different from focusing body energy to make sparks.\" He tried again. And again. Late in the evening, Arak finally held a tiny pearl of fire. He had a happy/proud/exhausted expression on his face.\n\nScree's eyes twinkled. \"You look just like a dragon-lady gazing at her first egg.\"\n\nArak gathered more energy and the fire pearl grew. \"It's like holding a star.\"\n\nScree watched closely. \"I can't see magnetic lines, but I can feel energy. I want to hold a star.\"\n\nDrakor nodded to Arak. \"That isss good. Let the lightning ball grow bigger. Then we will learn to find wrinkles so you can hit a target. This turns the bolt into a lightning sword.\"\n\nArak looked up from his star. \"What?\"\n\n\"Wrinkles are wiggly magnetic lines. They attract lightning. I use my inner sight to find a magnetic wrinkle near the target. Wrinkles are small and do not hold still. When the wrinkle isss on top of the target I toss the bolt. The wrinkle will attract the lightning bolt and I will hit my target.\"\n\n\"That would be more accurate than the way we toss lightning bolts onto the beach,\" Taron said, frowning at the shadowed corridor between floating ice-mountains.\n\nArak followed his gaze. \"Dorali, grab that pole. We may need it.\"\n\nDrakor eyed the channel and stood taller. \"Why do you hit sand?\"\n\nTaron adjusted the tiller, carefully guiding the skiff down the middle. \"The sand melts and makes glass rods. Octopi love them and trade us beautiful pearls, seaweed, even oyster spat.\"\n\nDrakor grimaced. \"Spat?\"\n\nArak laughed, but his eyes were glued to the ice-mountains. \"Spat is oyster seed, to grow oysters. They're tasty, and oysters make a strong reef. The tsunami tore up our shore under the sea. We put oyster spat on rope nets and placed them on the dead sand, weighted with rocks. This has grown into an oyster reef.\"\n\nTaron added, \"Octopi planted new eelgrass below the waves. This and the oysters helped bring back the fish, and our undersea shore is alive again.\"\n\nThick, blue-gray shadows filled the channel like dense smoke. Pale afternoon light slid along the knife-sharp edges of ice.\n\nArak laid his ears back instinctively as he faced this menace. \"How do you find magnetic wrinkles?\" he asked, almost as an after-thought. The ice danger sucked him in as surely as a bog of quicksand.\n\n\"The same way I gather sky energy: I concentrate.\" Drakor flicked his claws out and a bright pearl appeared. It quickly grew into a glowing, twisting ball. \"Magnetic wrinkles are small, and they wriggle.\"\n\nArak glanced at the energy pearl for just a moment. \"I watch sparkles in the magnetic field to judge the strength of storms. I follow curved magnetic lines to find land. But I can't see wrinkles . . . yet.\" He stared at the towering walls of ice as they entered the narrow channel.\n\nTaron carefully adjusted the tiller, steering the dragon-skiff down the center.\n\nAn ice-mountain tilted, creating a powerful whirlpool that sucked them into the ice. Taron lifted the wood pole and stared hopelessly at the falling giant.\n\nTime slowed. The sky disappeared. Dragons stretched their wings to fly. Orm and Scree flowed to the edge of the skiff, ready to drop into the sea. All too late. The air grew heavier as the mountain rolled over, crushing down.\n\nA ball of blinding white light flew to the ice, stretching, growing into a lightning sword. The tip gouged deep into a crack, boiling the ice from within. The iceberg shattered. Ice chunks rained down and skittered across the deck as the skiff slipped past to safety.\n\nEveryone stared at Drakor.\n\nHe flicked ice off the deck with his long tail. \"This isss good practice for the ice game Slam.\" Chunks flew overboard, skimming just above the rail, one after another. It was a precision drill.\n\n\"You knew that ice-mountain would fall?\" Arak asked.\n\nDrakor shrugged his wings. \"Not sure. The ice-mountain was old, worn on top, so I was watching. Old, white mountains are more likely to flip over. After it flips, the ice isss blue like the sea.\"\n\nArak clapped him on the shoulder. \"So that's why some are blue. That was a useful lightning bolt.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"I make lots of lightning swords to practice for the games.\"\n\nTaron hit ice chunks with his tail, but they merely slid beneath the rail. \"How do you play games with lightning swords?\"\n\n\"Many ice targets are put on an ice field. Then the drum beats slowly. Each player has one turn. There are ten drumbeats to hit targets with lightning swords. The winner is the dragon who hits the most targets in the least drumbeats.\" Drakor's eyes glowed.\n\nDorali wiped cold sea spray off her face. \"Have you won?\"\n\nDrakor studied his sharp claws in silence. He flicked them out and started growing a new lightning sword. \"Yes.\"\n\nArak stared at the open sky. \"I think I'll find some wrinkles now.\"\n\nScree scrunched her eyes, concentrating as she adjusted the tiny mirrors in her cells. The shining image of a lightning bolt flew across her body. \"Orm, imagine throwing a lightning spear!\"\n\nOrm shook his head. \"Underwater? We don't even have copper claws.\"\n\n\"The dragons are learning new ways to control energy. Maybe we can, too. We're not always under the sea and we do have copper blood. I want to hold a star.\"\n\nOrm smiled. \"You've always loved stars. That's why I made you a star ceiling. Scree, are you ever tired of trying the impossible?\"\n\n\"Never. You started the first farm, grew the first pearls, and saved Arak's dragon-dam. I'm no more tired of trying than you are. We just choose different impossibles.\" Scree curled and stretched each arm. \"I won't know what I can do until I try.\"\n\nScree entered a light trance and focused on the sky. After hours and hours of staring into the sky, she slumped down into her basin, as limp as a jellyfish. \"I can't see any sky energy. I may never hold a star.\" Then she popped up, arms straight and strong. \"Maybe octopi can't find sky energy. But I can talk mind-to-mind and feel the lightning inside my blood. I'll try to find my inner electric energy.\"\n\nScree looked at Orm. \"If an eel can give an electric shock, then an octopus can zap. I will learn to do this.\"\n\nOrm made his skin sparkle. \"I have no doubt. You'll learn to control your natural electricity and then teach this to others. I'm trying to imagine a whole pod of octopi zapping like eels.\"\n\nThe next day, Arak squinted into a bright blue sky, working to keep his eyes open while he also looked with inner sight. He quickly pointed to one magnetic wrinkle after another.\n\nDrakor eyed Arak's invisible wrinkles and nodded. \"Good.\"\n\n\"There's nothing like a near disaster to motivate me to learn,\" Arak said.\n\n\"Now, gather energy and grow a lightning ball. Find a magnetic wrinkle near your target. Wait for the wrinkle to move over the target. Then throw the lightning.\"\n\nThere was a flash of light and a small, nearly melted ice-hill exploded. Drakor clouted Arak on the back. \"Well done.\"\n\nThe sea turned lumpy white, with the color and texture of summer clouds. Thousands of cloudy, pulsing umbrellas bounced off the skiff.\n\nDorali stared. \"It's a huge swarm of jellyfish.\"\n\nDrakor gazed into the sea. \"I have not seen this before.\" Then he looked due north, absently tossing a tiny spark between his claws. His eyes were focused on the horizon.\n\nArak followed his gaze. \"We'll bring you safely home.\"\n\n\"But will I get back in time to warn the clan?\"\n\n\"You said they wouldn't listen to you. It's hard for anyone to believe in a danger so rare. But, if you're right about that volcano, we may all have a problem.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Early dawn shimmered with rainbow brush strokes across the watery gray sky. Scree grabbed Orm's arm. \"Look!\"\n\nOrm glanced up and stared. \"It looks like an abalone shell!\"\n\nArak studied the iridescent display. \"It's an abalone sky. I've never seen one before. These must be cloud colors of the north.\"\n\nDrakor grinned, showing his long, sharp teeth. \"They are rare even here.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"What's in your bag?\" He pointed to Drakor's silver-blue sack. The supple, fish-skin leather had shimmering scales with colors that rippled like ice-water.\n\nDrakor opened his bag. \"A water flask, a diamond crystal, and metals. Titanium to make black lightning and cobalt for blue.\" The silver flask reflected the colors of the sky. He lifted a large silver-gray crystal, carefully, as if it was a precious dragon egg. \"Titanium isss a rare, magic metal.\"\n\nDorali's wings rustled with excitement. \"Could I see your metals? I'll be careful.\" She took a pouch of dried, gray-green herb from her Healer bag. \"Nettle herb has a metallic taste, and stings when it's fresh. Nettle tea helps heal dragon bones and scales. Orm, could you check this against Drakor's metals?\"\n\nOrm held the herb with one arm and touched Drakor's metals with another. \"I feel titanium. Nettle concentrates this metal.\"\n\nDrakor leaned down and sniffed. \"I only smell plant.\"\n\nArak took a close look. \"Titanium is rare. If nettle could make a black fire, it would be much easier to use the plant than to find metal crystals.\"\n\nOrm plucked a bristly plant from Dorali's bag. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"Horsetail. I use this in a tea to help with swollen joints, and to scrub out the tea kettle.\"\n\nOrm ran an arm across the stalks, feeling with his sensitive suckers. \"There's titanium and gold in this plant. Horsetail is a very fancy scrubber.\"\n\nDrakor looked up at the sky. \"Now would be a good time to practice gathering lightning and finding wrinkles.\"\n\nAll three golden dragons took turns working with him, trading off for skiff duty.\n\nAs the day drew to a close, Scree watched the horizon. \"We should get back in time for our New Moon Festival.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Orm dropped a piece of wood overboard and counted how long it took to travel from bow to stern. \"Five knots. We're not moving very fast, but we could get home in time.\"\n\n\"Orm, stop analyzing. Watch with me. I love to see the sun melt into the sea. It never seems to set; it just dissolves like dragon candy.\" The red ball shrank ever smaller on the horizon, as cherry-red light spread across the evening waves. \"This is a treasure of the mind. I don't need to stuff it into my sea cave. Vorm was right. Memories are all we truly own.\"\n\nOrm changed his body color to mirror the sunset. Colors drained down his arms and disappeared as he turned a star-sparkled midnight blue. \"About that dragon candy . . .\" He tossed something to Scree and she grabbed it out of the sky. \"I saved two pieces of chocolate. This is a treasure of the mouth.\"\n\nScree turned happy-green.\n\nThe skiff flew south, passing smaller and smaller hills of floating ice. Then there were none. Winter was still in the air, but frost no longer fouled the skiff-wing. The sky was deep blue, and the wind was so steady that Arak lashed the tiller, letting the skiff fly on its own. They all took a break, together, and it felt like a holiday.\n\nThe sea sizzled as every dragon on the skiff hit the same floating piece of driftwood with a bolt of lightning. Thunder boomed.\n\nTaron grinned. \"Wrinkles make a difference.\"\n\nDorali made a glowing pearl. \"It's interesting energy.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"You're a good teacher, Drakor. We can spear a target with lightning on a day with no storm.\"\n\nDrakor flared his nostrils as salty smoke blew across the skiff. \"That isss a new smell. Now learn to find all the wrinkles, fast, so you can hit many targets.\"\n\nArak tilted his head, considering. \"That would take this game to a whole new level. I'd love to see that.\"\n\nDrakor had a gleam in his eyes. \"Toss ten pieces of wood on the sea and I will demonstrate.\"\n\nSoon, ten wood targets were scattered across the sea.\n\nDrakor stood tall. His eyes held fierce determination. Then sword after sword flew from his claws. Within minutes, every target burned on the sea.\n\nArak snapped his tail. \"You must win many games!\"\n\nScree and Orm applauded with brightly colored arms.\n\nThen Scree pointed to the sea, where three stingrays flew across the waves. \"The sea has fiery swords, too. Orm, I can't see magnetic wrinkles or gather outer energy. I can't hold a glowing star or make a lightning sword. But I can gather inner energy.\" She placed the tip of one arm into a bowl and the water shimmered.\n\nOrm eyed the bowl. \"Sparkling water. I'll bet you have more inner energy than a thunderstorm.\"\n\nDorali took a close look. \"Touch my arm.\" Scree did as she asked. \"That's a micro-zap! Keep practicing and I'll teach you how to use this for healing.\"\n\nThe wind shifted slightly. Taron checked their heading and adjusted the tiller, as automatically as breathing. \"I think you could fly this skiff in your sleep,\" Arak said.\n\nTaron nodded. \"So could you. The wind and waves are inside us now.\"\n\nDrakor studied the sparkling water bowl. \"Interesting. Healing isss good but I am more interested in fighting.\"\n\nDorali tilted her head. \"Why?\"\n\nDrakor looked to the north. \"Mardor isss our leader because he won every fight.\"\n\n\"You choose a leader by fighting?\" Arak asked.\n\n\"A big, strong dragon isss always the leader. How do you choose?\"\n\nArak stretched his wings, considering. \"When the clan leader wants to stop leading, she suggests a new leader. If most of the clan wants this dragon to lead, she is chosen. It's a hard job and she's not an absolute ruler.\"\n\n\"The leader does not tell you what to do?\"\n\nArak shook his head. \"I think she would like to. The leader tells the clan what we should do, and we discuss this. We meet and make decisions with consensus. Each dragon has a cone dipped in salt. If I agree, I toss my cone into the basket. All these cones are tossed into the fire together. If there are enough cones, they make a blue-green fire that means yes.\"\n\n\"Kon-sen-sus?\" Drakor clicked his claws as he puzzled over the word.\n\n\"We talk things over until most of us agree that it's a good idea.\"\n\nDrakor frowned. \"That sounds very sloppy. Our leader just tells us what we must do.\"\n\n\"It sounds like you have no choice, even if your leader has bad ideas,\" Dorali said.\n\nDrakor threw back his head and laughed. \"That isss true.\" He warmed the tea kettle with dragon-fire, and scented steam filled the air. Then he poured tea for everyone. \"Arak, you were right. Flames are useful. What else can you do?\"\n\nArak sipped his tea and flicked his tail as he studied the big white dragon. Finally he said, \"We can speak mind-to-mind, without words.\"\n\nDrakor stood straighter and his eyes glowed with interest. \"That could be very useful.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "The long swells of the open sea were gone, replaced by smaller waves that tugged at the skiff. Arak filled his lungs with the reassuring smells of home: old seaweed washed ashore, early spring buds, smoked fish. His home had everything: the sounds and smells and colors of the sea, a limestone cave that could hold the entire clan comfortably in bad weather, a forest with wood for skiffs and fires. A smile lit his eyes. Best of all, soon he would see Zarina and their dragonlet. He felt a pang of sorrowful understanding for the ice dragons. Of course they didn't listen to Drakor's warning. It would be hard for anyone to leave their home forever.\n\nThe dragon-shore appeared on the horizon. Drakor pointed north, toward the long white edge that sparkled. \"You still have big ice?\"\n\n\"Some. In winter this land is completely covered with snow and ice. Our Winter Festival has games, cloud sculptures, ice sculptures and feasts.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Our Winter Festival has ice games on a frozen lake. We use our tail to knock a stone into the goal. Dragon pairs carve huge ice sculptures with lightning. And, we compete with lightning swords.\"\n\n\"That would be an amazing sight,\" Orm said.\n\nArak translated and added, \"I'd like to see your festival.\"\n\n\"We're home!\" Arak guided the skiff to a soft landing at the dock. He helped Taron tie the skiff to solid pilings, feeling the change in the rhythm beneath his feet. Ice crystals sparkled in the sand beyond the waves.\n\nDorali set the wood plank between skiff and dock and walked carefully down.\n\nDrakor followed her off the skiff, with his eyes scanning everything. He stepped onto the dock and lurched. His legs moved in a strange way. \"Why isss it so hard to walk?\"\n\nHer eyes twinkled. \"Your feet expect the land to rise up and meet them. Arak says that when you're on a skiff, you walk with the sea. You move as the sea moves and soon you have sea legs. Now you need to find your land legs.\"\n\nDrakor walked slowly down the dock, heading for shore, still lifting his feet higher than necessary. \"It feels like the land isss moving.\" He glanced at the rowdy crowd of golden dragons that lined the shore, jostling each other, staring at him. \"What do they want?\"\n\n\"They're eager to see a real, legendary ice dragon,\" Dorali said.\n\nDrakor snorted. \"We were always real.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "SHARK RIDE",
                "text": "Scree tied their octopus skiff to a raft that was anchored above her village. A fiery sunset gleamed across the damp logs. The raft was a gift to the pod to honor Orm and Scree. They had solved a mysterious illness, identified a poison in the copper mine, and saved the dragons.\n\nA wax-filled ceramic bowl was fastened to the top of a tall pole, to hold signal fires, to call the dragons in time of need. This signal had been useful when the pod was attacked by a giant squid.\n\nBut now, octopi could talk mind-to-mind with dragons, in trance. That was far more efficient than a signal fire. Still, this raft was an excellent place to dock their skiffs.\n\nScree wrapped one arm through her Healer bag handle while Orm checked the knots. They both grabbed sacks of food and slipped over the side. Scree and Orm twirled down through the sea together, arms sensing, feeling the feast through the water.\n\n\"This will be our last pod celebration before the Trading Festival. Orm, feel the foods. I taste abalone and spices,\" Scree said.\n\n\"Abalone meat is a rare treat. Abalone skies are splendid and Arak found his ice dragons, but I've missed our village.\" Orm turned happy-green. \"There's chocolate! Just wait 'til the pod sees these cherry clams. Kragor likes growing them in his sea farm.\"\n\nScree rippled with laughter. \"I think Kragor just wants another excuse to stick his head underwater. He loves to make glowing gardens beneath the waves.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Sometimes I wonder if he's part octopus. You can tell he's Arak's sire, with his love for the sea.\"\n\nScree tapped her bag with one arm. \"The pod won't expect these sea cucumbers from the ice abyss! Tarm showed me where they gather . . . food too small to interest him.\"\n\nOrm twined an arm with Scree as they landed softly on the sand near the dance floor. \"I'm glad Tarm decided you weren't food.\"\n\nThe beat of pounded giant clam shells pulsed through Scree's body. Sound traveled through the sea much faster than through air, and she marveled at the difference. There was a shell drum in the center of her village to call the pod. This beat would reach everyone faster than she could shape-shift.\n\nScree gazed into the sea. Far beyond, there was a warning circle of tall kelp trees with dangling shells. If a giant squid pushed through this kelp forest, the shells would clang together and the unique sound would warn the pod. Would they be ready?\n\nPairs of young octopi twirled through the water above newly raked sand. The dancers had changed their arm skin to bright colors: orange, teal, yellow, red-violet, and more. Their swirling arms matched the drumming pulse of pounded shells.\n\nScree was caught by the light current and pulled from side to side as she pulsed, moving in a pattern with the dancing water. \"I'll put my Healer bag away,\" she told Orm, and squirted to her cave. An elegant garden of red, green, and brown seaweed surrounded her home. It rippled with the sea and seemed to wave a greeting. She flowed into her cave.\n\nOrm's glowing tunicates made stars in a night sky on her ceiling. He had even added a group of anemones with long arms that glowed in reds and greens, waving through the water like northern lights. Scree ran an arm over the rolls of gray-green kelp bandages, tasting to determine freshness, and nodded with satisfaction. Krees must have replaced these recently.\n\nScree added food to a bowl filled with live limpets and checked the shelves along both sides of her cave. A sparkling, green garnet jar held poison from the deadly blue-ringed octopus; this made an excellent sedative. A small box that was carved from dark red coral had sharp, hollow needles. These were spines from the fin of a dead lion-fish. In life, this beautiful fish could inject poison through its fin.\n\nThere were rows of hinged containers made from scallop shells: yellow, orange, red, and purple. These colorful boxes held iodine-rich seaweed, sponges, oily salves, herbs, and supplements. Silvery shell boxes had the dragon spices: cinnamon, pepper, garlic, and more. These had a great feel/taste and Healer uses, too. She checked the knives, testing for sharpness. Everything was in its proper place.\n\nScree flowed out of her cave and joined Orm, heading for the feast. Purple sea fans, dark blue starfish, scarlet barrel sponges, seaweeds, and schools of fish covered the reef with a riot of color. A crab ambled across the coral, covered by dozens of orange-and-pink anemones. \"That crab likes to decorate with sunset colors.\"\n\nOrm pointed to a burgundy starfish draped over living lilac coral; its crusty skin had a jewel-like pattern of tiny scarlet bumps. He mimicked the color and texture on his octopus body. \"That starfish looks like a garnet carving covered with red seed pearls. Maybe Taron could make one.\"\n\n\"He'd carve one for his dragonlet.\" Scree slipped sideways to avoid a stinging jellyfish; layers of cloudy flounces hung below the pulsing bronze umbrella. Sounds of the sea passed through her, and the vibrations of fish grinding their teeth. A parrot fish took another bite of coral before swimming away. \"I've missed the reef. I wish those fish would stop chewing it!\"\n\nScree slid slowly toward a dull coral boulder, the color of dead seagrass. It was dotted with tiny, bright flowers of pink, orange, or blue. Scree pulsed closer. The frilly flower-worms disappeared into their tubes, reacting instantly to the ripple in the water. \"Our flowers move fast.\"\n\n\"They're like bursts of colored dragon-lightning. No land flowers could match this,\" Orm said proudly.\n\nThe watery light from the sun faded away with the day and glowing fish appeared, giving their living light to the reef. Tall poles were set in the sand, making circles within circles like a full moon. Baskets filled with food were fastened to the top. The New Moon Festival was lit by glowfish that swarmed around the poles, feeding on treats.\n\nThe pulsing beats continued. An elderly octopus removed a large white pearl from his sucker. It flashed through the water, shining like the moon, tossed from arm to arm as he whirled. This ancient dance celebrated their Mother, the Moon.\n\nA change in drum beat announced the important, traditional circle dance.\n\nScree grabbed Orm's arm. \"Hurry! We're just in time!\" They slipped through clusters of purple sea fans that edged the dance floor. This level field of sand had been cleared for dancing long ago. She twined one side arm with Orm and the opposite side arm with another octopus, becoming part of a huge circle. Three arms were behind each octopus, serving as anchors, and three arms were ahead to twirl the dancers.\n\nEight dancers took their places inside the circle, facing the outer ring. Each dancer gripped three arms of an octopus in the ring. On the beat, they were flung to the next pod-mate in the circle. The dancers quickly released their former hold and grabbed three new arms. Boom. They were flung again, releasing and grabbing arms. Boom! They were flung again. Boom-Boom-Boom. The beat grew faster. Dancers were flung again and again, twirling about the inside of the circle, spinning like tops.\n\nThe drumming stopped and the dancers melted back into the ring. Scree was one of the eight new octopi who took their places inside the circle. Scree loved the flying sensation as she was whirled about, twirling in circles within the big ring. She released three arms and grabbed three more.\n\nAll too soon, the rhythmic beating stopped and the dance ended. Scree leaned contentedly against Orm. \"I love the circle dance. It's like flying on a dragon.\"\n\n\"And so much safer,\" Orm said, twining arms affectionately.\n\nAn octopus musician took her place on a coral head. She played three instruments at once, beating two giant clamshell drums with red coral sticks. Riss made a sharp crack of thunder on the larger shell and muffled rumblings of distant thunder on the smaller shell. She scraped across grooves on a third instrument, adding the sound of surf-waves pulling back into the sea. The performance was a rhythmic blending of sea, sky, and shore. Scree felt the vibrations as they rippled through her body; the last pulse fled into the darkness beyond.\n\nThen three strong beats announced the feast. Orm turned gold. \"Feel those dragon spices! It's enough to make anyone hungry!\" They squirted to the feasting table, which was made from hundreds of coral rocks. This kept the food above the sand stirred up by the octopi.\n\nGigantic clamshell bowls were filled with temptations. Ground peppercorn was worked into abalone meat, releasing a tide of flavors. Carved coral shakers were filled with dragon herbs and spices. There were crab claws, scallops, lobsters, shrimp, and seaweed salads. A huge shell, big enough to hide an octopus, held succulent oysters decorated with colorful sprigs of seaweed. Orm and Scree added their cherry clams and sea cucumbers to the table. Then they joined the octopi gathered in lines at the sumptuous buffet.\n\nOrm sighed. \"I was right. Chocolate!\" Bright orange scallop shell pairs were clustered together on the table, holding balls of chocolate within their hinged wings. The candies were coated with nut oils to protect them from the sea, so they wouldn't dissolve until eaten.\n\nA jar of red-root tea had curls of cinnamon bark and a spigot. Scree filled her glass, pushed on the rubbery top, and put her stem straw through a hole in the lid. \"Ahhh. Perfect.\"\n\nScree and Orm filled shell plates with tasty treasures. Then they settled onto the sand, joining a circle of friends. Orm leaned forward eagerly, talking with his apprentices, signing while he ate. \"How are the abalone crops? And the pearls?\"\n\nStur, the pod leader, joined their group. He greeted Scree and Orm with the double clasp of friendship. \"It's good to have you back. What did you learn in the northern sea?\"\n\n\"It's so cold that the sea is nearly frozen. It has a slushy sound and I could see ice crystals growing in the water. I met Tarm in the depths, and he still fears my magic arms.\" Scree twisted an arm upside down, showing the hidden wax balls that held a potent poison. \"Our treaty holds, but some of the younger squid don't respect it. Are we ready for an attack?\"\n\nStur turned a paler shade of brown. \"Ever since you warned me in trance-mind, we've had daily spear-throwing practice. I'd like to discuss this attack with you, and other problems. Later.\"\n\nScree pulled a sample from the small pouch tied to the upper part of one arm. \"As a former Healer, I thought you might be interested in this new seaweed I found.\"\n\nStur felt the thin, golden-green leaf, delicately tasting and sensing with his suckers. \"What does it do?\"\n\n\"When I squished a piece, it made my arms numb. This could be a useful sedative.\"\n\nOrm laughed. \"So if you squish this seaweed, you can't talk?\"\n\nScree gave him a wicked smile. \"I can always use pictures.\" She flashed an image on her skin for barely an instant. The head of the monstrous viper-fish had long, sharp, curved fangs. This body-picture appeared and disappeared so quickly that only an octopus eye could see it.\n\nOrm blanched white. \"Naturally. But arms are so civilized. Less graphic.\"\n\nStur flowed upright and gave a general nod to the group. \"Later?\" he said, facing Scree and Orm.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nKrees waited respectfully until their leader left. Then she proudly displayed her Healer bag, which was made from cloth-of-gold and covered with hundreds of tiny shells. \"It's finally done. I thought I'd never finish sewing all these shells on! I mixed tan, brown, and dark brown shells to make a better camouflage pattern.\"\n\nScree inspected the shell covering and each inner compartment. \"Perfect. The design is lovely and everything is well organized.\"\n\nScrim and Tor silently held up their Healer bags for inspection.\n\n\"Tor, how clever of you to put slip knots on the compartments.\"\n\nTor turned happy-green.\n\n\"Scrim, where did you find blue sea fans for dividers?\" Scree asked.\n\nScrim pointed southeast. \"They grow on the slope that leads down to the abyss.\"\n\nShe twined two arms with each of her three fosterling apprentices. \"I chose well.\" Scree was like a sun in the center, with arm-rays linked to her friends and loving warmth in each embrace. She untied an upper-arm pouch with her remaining two arms. \"These are the surgeon's knives I promised, one for each of you. Jade is sturdy and holds an edge.\"\n\nKrees stared. \"Purple jade. It's almost too beautiful.\" She turned the knife from side to side, running the tip of an arm along the blade before adding it to her bag.\n\nTor bowed and put the gift carefully into his surgeon's compartment.\n\nScrim held his knife by the point and tossed it high. The sharp blade spun up through the water, turning over and over as it fell. He caught the rounded handle and smiled. \"It's perfectly balanced.\"\n\n\"Why does that matter?\" Scree asked as he slipped it into his bag.\n\n\"A weapon can be useful.\"\n\nScree looked meaningfully at his bag. \"You're a Healer.\"\n\n\"You used a poisoned spear on the giant squid when it attacked the pod,\" Scrim said.\n\n\"I used poison as a sedative to stop him.\"\n\nScrim nodded. \"So would I.\"\n\nScree studied her apprentice. He held himself tall and proud, but she felt no meanness inside. \"And then you'd help.\"\n\nScrim blinked both eyes. \"Of course. I'm a Healer.\"\n\nScree clapped two arms on his octopus shoulders. \"You should lead a pod defense squad. I'll talk to Stur.\"\n\nOrm jetted over just as a large fish with bright golden scales appeared, seeking scraps. Scree drew in the wet sand with three arms that moved so fast they were a blur. She decorated the sea floor with an accurate sketch of the fish. \"It's good to see bigger fish again; our reef felt empty after the last eruption. Now the volcano taste is growing stronger and changing.\" She curled her arms nervously.\n\nOrm grabbed Scree's arm. \"We can discuss this later. It's storytelling time. Let's go!\" They pulsed to a boulder surrounded by raked sand.\n\nTall poles, each topped with a basket of smashed crabs, made a circle around the boulder. This food attracted reef glowfish to light the storyteller. Farther out, at the edge of darkness, a circle of glowing jellyfish lit the water. Light pulsed down their long tentacles, rippling like an aurora, as they devoured tiny shrimp from more poles. Scree pointed to the shimmering jellyfish lights. \"This is new, and I like it.\"\n\nScree and Orm were almost buried as current and former fosterlings flowed over and twined arms with their mentors. The enthusiastic greetings overlapped, as tangled as the branching arms of a basket starfish.\n\nStur, the pod leader and Scree's former fosterling, flowed up onto the stage. Three arms hung down in front, close together, to extend his body-screen. Three arms were behind for balance. He raised two side arms high, and stillness settled over the pod. \"This is the legend of Sorm, the First Octopus.\"\n\nScree grabbed Orm's arm. \"What? That's your special story!\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I have a new one to tell.\"\n\nStur made pictures across his body-screen while one arm on either side wove words through the water. \"Our mother, the Moon, ruled the seas and created the tides. But she was lonely. She wanted a child. So she gathered rich mud from the bottom of the sea and formed a round head like the moon. Then she made two arms for each of her four moon phases.\"\n\nStur closed his eyes. His head turned white like a full moon. He twisted each pair of arms together until they seemed like four. Then he lifted his arms high and unraveled the pairs into eight octopus arms. \"She showered her child with moonlight, and his arms danced with life! But he could not see. So she gave him eyes.\"\n\nStur opened his eyes.\n\n\"When he saw his beautiful mother, he bowed before her. The Moon was pleased and gave him more ways to know her world. He could taste subtle flavors and feel the most delicate touch. He could feel-hear the beating sounds in the sea. His mind could remember and imagine. She named him Sorm. 'What must I do?' he asked.\"\n\n\"'You must prove yourself by performing four tasks, one for each of my phases. Then you will be worthy to be called my child and I will give you a home in the sea,' the Moon replied.\"\n\nStur held a bag made from the flexible purple skeletons of sea fans.\n\nScree stared. That was Orm's precious legend-sack! Her mate had searched for years to collect all the shells and rare stones from his favorite legend.\n\nStur described the first task of finding a shell that swims. The Moon was pleased and scallops became their first food. The second task was to find a ball of sky living in the sea. Sorm finally found sky living inside seaweed floats, and seaweed became their second food.\n\n\"The third task was more difficult, to create the Moon's image on his skin and of his skin, to show he was her child. Sorm painted dyes on his skin, but they faded away and were not truly of his body. He could change his skin colors to match almost anything, but it happened without thought. Then he made a dark circle on white sand and concentrated when his body naturally made a circle. He tried and tried, until he could make the full moon circle at any time. The Moon approved, and Sorm learned a new way to communicate.\"\n\nStur imaged a simple moon circle on his body.\n\n\"The fourth and last task was the most difficult, to find the most beautiful stone. It seemed easy, for there were many lovely stones in the sea. Red coral was a living jewel the color of a sunset sky. Black garnet was a rare, glittering gem like a star-studded sky. Coral agate looked like a storm cloud, with lightning colors running through its lumpy white surface. Sorm trembled with excitement when he found a white marble ball in a sea-flooded cave. It looked just like the full Moon. But it was dull.\"\n\nStur reached into Orm's legend-sack and raised four arms. He held a branch of polished red coral, sparkling black garnet, colorful coral agate, and a white cave pearl.\n\n\"Almost two years had passed. Sorm yearned to complete his task, to earn his place in his mother's heart and in the sea. He was tired of traveling. He wanted a home. But he was afraid to bring the wrong stone. No stone seemed quite perfect enough for the Moon. As Sorm pulsed through the water, searching, a flash of silver caught his eye. A fish thrashed, struggling desperately. Its fin was caught in the seam of a large oyster shell. 'Help me!'\n\n\"Sorm pried the shell apart, just a little, and the fish swam free. But it did not leave, even though it feared him. 'You saved me. I am in your debt. How can I help you?'\n\n\"'I must find the most beautiful stone for the Moon,' Sorm replied.\n\n\"'Open this shell, and you will find what you seek,' said the grateful fish.\n\n\"Sorm opened the oyster and found a big, round, gleaming white pearl. This was the perfect stone! It looked just like the Moon. Sorm gave her the pearl.\n\n\"'You are indeed the child of my heart,' the Moon said, and gave him a beautiful cave in the sea. Because the fish helped, octopi do not eat fish. And even today, all newly hatched octopi must prove themselves. They leave home and live a dangerous life on the waves for almost two years before they return. Survivors are welcomed home, just as Sorm was. Octopi celebrate our Mother with the New Moon Festival. We feast, to remind her to grow full and bright again. We dance with pearls to celebrate her beauty.\"\n\nStur lifted a huge white pearl, shining like white fire against his red-brown skin. Then he danced with the pearl. It slid down one flexible arm and was flipped to the next, caught and flung in a pattern. He tossed the ball high, whirling like a top beneath it. He caught the pearl, paused, and bowed.\n\nThe watching octopi lifted their arms high above their heads. The arms changed to rainbow colors and wove words of praise through the sea.\n\n\"He did well,\" Scree said with pride in her former fosterling. \"But I'm used to your storytelling. That was nice, lending Stur your legend-sack.\"\n\nOrm shrugged his octopus shoulders in a dragonly gesture. \"He needed it.\" Then he pulsed forward, settled on the stage, and gazed at his audience. The octopi lowered their speaking arms respectfully and sat in stillness. All eyes were fixed on Orm. \"This is the story of the giant squid.\" He spoke like a dancer, with eloquent gestures.\n\nScree glanced at the audience. Every octopus eye was focused on Orm. Even their skin seemed to shimmer with concentration, seeing through the thousands of tiny eye-cells.\n\n\"This is also the legend of Scree. Not so many moons ago, a giant squid attacked our First Village. Long arms crushed caves and grabbed pod-mates to eat.\" A horrific movie played across Orm's body-screen. \"Scree made a poison spear and attacked this monster. It caught her, studied her, and then collapsed from the poison.\"\n\nScree blushed purple as many pod-mates turned one appraising eye on her, while continuing to watch Orm with their dominant eye. Everyone knew the basic story, but Orm was a master storyteller. He made this experience vivid, terrifying, and real.\n\n\"Almost everyone wanted to kill the giant. But Scree did not want to kill. She wanted to learn more of this being . . . and she is a Healer. So the squid was bound with strong cords.\" Orm showed an image of a tiny octopus facing the giant squid. \"Scree learned the squid light-language. When you understand someone, you see with new eyes. His name was Vorm.\" Orm made a series of yellow and red light spots on his arms.\n\n\"Vorm shared squid customs and legends with Scree, and she missed him when he died. The pod carried his body and released it to the dark abyss, following squid custom.\"\n\nOrm showed the pod carrying Vorm's long body. Then the squid tumbled over the ledge into darkness.\n\n\"Scree explored and learned that more squid were leaving their abyss. She feared an attack and wanted to challenge the giant squid in their home. Arak made a plan for Scree. Dragons and octopi worked together to help. Scree fought one giant in the abyss and then made a peace pact with the squid. It is important to know your enemy, both the dangers and the possibilities.\"\n\nOrm grabbed a food container with one of his arms and tossed the contents up into the sea. A cloud of glittering, glowing reef fish gathered around him in the night sea. \"Life speaks with light in the dark abyss.\" He covered his body with images of strange, glowing deep-sea fish. \"Now we will share the dance of the giant squid.\" Orm turned dark red and transformed his body. He stretched his head twice as long, making it flatter and pointed, and reached a long red arm to Scree.\n\nScree turned surprise-orange. She hesitated. Then she transformed into a squid. Bright yellow light-spots appeared on her arms as she joined Orm on the stage. She adjusted her tiny cell-mirrors to reflect maximum light through the color spots. Scree and Orm flashed a rhythm of lights that matched the drum beats. They twirled side-by-side in tight, glowing circles, moving ever closer until they almost touched. Their arms meshed perfectly as they spun. Yellow light-spots flared at the tips and flowed upward in unison. Red spots flashed another pattern.\n\nOrm and Scree twirled faster and faster until their light-spots blended together. Shimmering rings were spun from the sparkling spots, and they moved inside this. They stopped spinning, and their arms wrapped around each other in graceful curves.\n\nScree spoke with the light-spots of squid language while Orm translated with his dancing arms: \"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\" Scree shifted back into octopus form and spoke again. \"Giant squid are dangerous, but they are also intelligent and interesting. They glow brightly through life. When I stopped Vorm, I only did what needed to be done. Any one of you could do this. It is a choice. We are each capable of choosing to do what is needed.\"\n\nThe audience turned brilliant dragon-gold to signal appreciation, waving arms with dragon-scale patterns. Some octopi changed their arms to traditional, jewel-toned patterns. They waved arms with rose-and-gold diamonds, copper-and-turquoise spirals, and more. A few pod-mates shape-shifted into squid and twirled away through the sea.\n\nScree jetted off the stage and Orm followed. Her arms were stiff and her eyes sparked with anger. \"You gave me no warning.\"\n\nOrm looked into her angry eyes. \"You would not have stayed if you knew. You can face a giant squid but not the legend this becomes. The juveniles must know what has come before. This is our history. You should want them to learn the value of seeing with new eyes.\"\n\nScree slumped to the sands as her anger drained away. Her arms lay in loose, random coils like seaweed washed ashore. \"Everyone needs to see with new eyes. They also must know that we can make choices. They should seek their inner strength.\"\n\nOrm spiraled one of his arms affectionately around Scree's closest arm. \"You found your courage early. Now you're a legend.\"\n\nShe turned an irritated/challenge blue. \"I'm just an octopus.\"\n\nOrm turned a matching blue. \"I'm just a normal blue octopus, looking for sharks to ride.\"\n\nScree rolled her eyes.\n\nYoung octopi squirted past them, gathering to play a game of Mimic. The lead octopus transformed to become the most unusual creature he had seen. The other players copied him perfectly, and the stingrays they became were quite realistic.\n\n\"I've always loved this game,\" Scree said.\n\nOrm grinned. \"So a squid dance was not enough? You've seen beings no one else has. You could join the game. Would you become a deep-sea glowfish, glass sponge, or maybe a purple sea pen?\"\n\nScree shape-shifted and became a cloudy white ball with stripes of iridescent rainbow hairs.\n\nOrm matched her in a drumbeat. Only an octopus could follow the rapid transformation of a shape-shifting octopus.\n\n\"Why did you choose to be a comb-jelly?\" Orm asked, after they changed back into their normal octopus shape.\n\n\"I love their rainbows. Remember the comb-jellies when we skiff-flew on the southern seas? We need to travel again. You have felt the new flavors in the sea. The feel/taste of our volcano is changing faster, and it seems to match the ice abyss near Drakor's volcano island. I need new samples.\"\n\nA river of fish swam by and turned back upon itself, churning into a silver ball that shifted across the sea.\n\n\"An underwater cloud,\" Scree signed.\n\nOrm copied the fish on his skin. \"Arak says every gray cloud has a silver lining. Does every silver cloud have a gray lining? Let's go see Stur.\"\n\nThey squirted back to the meeting circle.\n\nStur twined arms with Scree, his former mentor, and Orm. \"Thank you for coming. Spar's visiting our village and may join us.\"\n\nScree settled onto the sand. \"What's the problem?\"\n\n\"This new generation is acting more and more like dragons. More like you.\"\n\n\"This is bad?\" Scree asked.\n\nStur sighed. \"I don't know what to do. Every octopus has a wax poison ball, a few have coral knives, and they can throw spears, so they feel safe. Some have learned to speak mind-to-mind. They can call home from far away, so they aren't afraid to travel. They're not careful. Some aren't even worried about giant squid.\"\n\nOrm looked from Scree to Stur. \"Meeting the dragons has been good for the pod. We have dragon spices for our food, skiffs for traveling, poison balls for protection, and chocolate.\"\n\nStur wrung his arms, with one arm snaking around another. \"But the pod is changing so fast. This new generation won't listen, and they fear nothing. How can I manage them?\"\n\nScree hid a smile. This change was inevitable. She had sparked a quiet revolution and this was the future: dragon-octopi, a new type of life. Just wait 'til she taught them to zap. That should be interesting!\n\n\"Talk with Arafine; she manages dragons. Put them in charge of a new farm. Make them leaders of pod defense squads and hold drills until we can defend our village in our sleep. Ask them to work together and solve a real problem. And I'm afraid there is one. Our volcano is acting up again, and this eruption might be much more powerful. It could destroy our village and the reef. We need a plan to move.\"\n\nSpar, the leader of their first octopus village, flowed slowly into their circle. He greeted everyone formally. When he twined arms with Scree his skin pulsed gray.\n\n\"What is it?\" Scree asked.\n\nSpar wove his arms carefully to reply. \"It's just some arm stiffness.\"\n\n\"When you have eight arms, stiffness is a real problem. We use arms for everything, even to talk, so I've been working on a solution.\" Scree reached into her Healer bag, found a stoppered coral jar, and gave it to Spar. \"Take two quithra eggs each day, no more. It's like a bitter oil pill that stops stiffness and pain. Taking the tiny eggs every day is more effective than using the salve I make from them. Quithra are rare, so Orm's trying to increase their numbers.\"\n\nSpar accepted the orange jar with an octopus bow. \"That's a wonderful achievement. What were you saying about the volcano?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Darkness faded away and dawn colors bled through the sea. Scree pulsed to the surface, twirling as she rose, noting the many farms scattered through the coral reef . . . clams, abalone, oysters, and more. These farms had grown. Now they even had quithra sanctuaries, where they fed the young of these brightly colored sea slugs. When quithra grew into adults they wriggled up to the surface to spawn, during the first new moon of winter. Scree harvested a careful portion of their toxic eggs for her medicines.\n\nChange one thing and you change the world. Scree had said this before. Maybe Stur was right to be concerned. Had they changed too fast, grown too much for this place? Lost in thought, she failed to notice a swift dark shadow.\n\nBump.\n\nHer heart jolted and Scree nearly jumped out of her skin.\n\nThe huge sea turtle bumped her again, smiling playfully.\n\n\"Tara!\" Her heart resumed its normal pumping. \"How are you?\" Scree spoke the turtle's language, using body tilts and fin gestures. Tara had been badly damaged in a shark attack, Scree had healed her, and they had been friends ever since.\n\nTara looked meaningfully over her left shoulder.\n\nScree added skin pictures to their conversation. \"There are gaps between your plates. It's time to add new shells. Orm, could you wait at the surface with Tara? I need to treat her now.\"\n\nScree jetted to her cave to collect additional supplies. She rummaged through a box of abalone shells and chose the largest, thickest ones. Then she grabbed kelp leaves, with baby barnacles growing on them, and stuffed this into her bag. These barnacles would be easy to move to the turtle, which was a crucial step in fixing the shell.\n\nScree chose a curved bone needle, another spool of cloth-of-gold thread, and sped back. She turned one eye downward and pointed her other eye up as she rose to the surface, watching what was behind and what was ahead. Past and future. Change happened but this volcano could bring the final change, the end of her pod.\n\nScree straightened her arms. Not if she could help it.\n\nShe shaped her head into a point and turned a smooth, shiny black. Then she jetted to the surface, moving so fast that she flew up into the air. She fell back down with a splash, landing right beside Orm and Tara.\n\n\"You're in a good mood, leaping like a ray,\" Orm said.\n\nScree gazed into a morning sky of deep periwinkle blue. \"What will be, will be. And we will be ready.\"\n\nThe sea tasted odd, mixed with water from a recent rain that had flattened the waves. She could see forever across the flat, glittering expanse, all the way to that tantalizing horizon. It drew her like a magnet.\n\nScree ran an arm over Tara's back, checking the abalone shell plates that she had used to replace the original, damaged turtle plates. Tara had grown considerably and these were now too small. She sawed five abalone shells into hexagon plates, used a file to improve the fit, and smoothed the shell edges. \"Perfect.\" She drilled tiny holes at the edges.\n\nScree sewed the plates together while Orm held them in place, leaving slack for Tara's body to grow. She fitted this onto the turtle. Then she peeled baby barnacles off their seaweed home and attached them to the plate edges. \"These barnacles will grow their own glue to hold the pieces together, and sea moss will cover her new plates. Soon she'll look all natural.\"\n\nScree and Orm rode on the turtle's back for one last, friendly trip together. Tara dropped them off at the log raft that was anchored above the pod. Eight small skiffs were tied securely to the raft. They pulled up into a skiff, arm over arm, and untied the ropes. Orm raised the skiff-wing. White clouds scudded across the sky as the wind picked up, and their skiff leapt across the sea.\n\n\"Scree, do you remember when Tara was our only skiff? Times have changed.\"\n\n\"They certainly have,\" Scree said, and paused. \"And I usually think change is good.\"\n\n\"What's on your mind?\" Orm asked.\n\n\"I like the farms, but we seem to be taking over the coral reef. I think the village has grown too large. We all need to move, anyway, but have we come too far from what is natural? I do think the giant squid may attack, in spite of all I tried to accomplish. And, I don't think either pod leader believes the volcano threat is real. They don't want to believe.\"\n\nOrm twined one of his arms with hers. \"That's a lot on your mind. Let's take one thing at a time.\"\n\nScree trailed an arm in the sea, sensing, while Orm flew their skiff. They passed right above the Old Village and traveled on, gliding south-west.\n\n\"Sometimes I miss the old pod,\" Orm said.\n\n\"We should visit again.\" Scree wiggled her arm against the strong current. \"We're making good time. Is there anything better than skiff-flying?\"\n\n\"What about flowing over a reef with living rainbows, or watching rivers of silver fish swim by?\"\n\n\"I'm glad the reef fish are back.\" Her eyes grew wide and her wiggly arm became as stiff as a trunk of black coral. \"The volcano scent feels strong here. We must be right above it.\"\n\nOrm turned the skiff in tight circles, shortening the skiff-wing to free the wind, until they stopped. \"It's too deep to anchor, so the skiff will drift.\"\n\n\"I'll keep one eye on the skiff shadow while I collect a jar of volcano's breath from the vents.\" Scree slipped over the side and disappeared beneath the waves.\n\nScree pulsed through watery green light toward the dark mountain. Everything near it must have died in the last eruption, but the slopes were already covered with new life. There were long strands of seaweed, splashes of purple algae-paint, scarlet scallops with tiny blue eyes, and mustard-yellow corals with colorful tube worms. Orm would love this! Some rainbow colors disappeared as she pulsed deeper and deeper; the sea ate the light. Soon there were no reds or yellows. Feathery, fern-like corals appeared in shades of blue, like a snow-covered meadow beneath a midnight sky.\n\nA curtain of bubbles rose from the vent. Scree caught the stinky air in her red coral jar and used a tight stopper.\n\nA swift current brushed her skin, stronger than the flowing sea. She froze, instantly matching the pitted rocks and corals. Loose bits of skin stretched thin to become seaweed. The sleek gray shape turned and slid closer. Its long, pointed tail slashed through the water.\n\nThe shark circled back.\n\nScree did not move. She was invisible. But sharks could sense the electricity in life. It swam slowly toward Scree, moving its tail from side to side.\n\nSuddenly the shark charged.\n\nScree waited until the last moment, when the shark would close its eyes. She jetted up, landed on its head, and fastened her powerful suckers onto its sandpaper skin. She dangled one arm in front of the shark.\n\nThe shark shook its head repeatedly, trying to shake her off. Then it focused on the wriggling, tempting treat just beyond its teeth. It surged forward.\n\nScree hung on with all suckers and tilted her dangling arm higher, directing the shark. They flew through the sea together, faster than dragon-flight! The shark followed her uncatchable arm, faster and faster, up to the light. And there was the shadow of the skiff. She flung her body off the shark, catapulted through the sky, and landed neatly inside the skiff.\n\n\"Another shark ride. That was quite the entrance.\" Orm stared over the side as the shark circled, thrashing its tail angrily. \"Why didn't you use your poison and put it to sleep?\"\n\nScree shook her head. \"Sleep would kill a shark. They need to keep moving.\"\n\nOrm rolled his eyes. \"So you had to protect it?\"\n\n\"Of course. It's a fish! And that was one terrific ride. You could call it a very efficient way to travel.\"\n\n\"Efficient, yes, but I still prefer slower and safer. What did you learn?\"\n\nScree pulled out two jars. \"The volcanoes match.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "MANTIS LIGHTNING",
                "text": "The water was every possible shade of orange, reflecting the flaming sky. A bright yellow ribbon started right below the setting sun and split the sea in half, running from horizon to shore. The strong sea breeze felt wonderfully cool.\n\nDrakor walked carefully down the dock, still feeling as if the ground moved beneath him, and into a boisterous crowd of dragons. He stopped and stared. How did they function? No ice dragon would act that way. There was no order, and they were as noisy as a spring gathering of smidgers!\n\nDrakor's tongue flicked out and back. Those plump lizards were so tasty, but hard to catch. They scurried as fast as a waterfall and lived in long Volcano tubes that were much too narrow for dragons.\n\nSmidgers were brown-and-white, like the patchy ground-and-snow of his home. But they could turn all brown or all white in a heartbeat to match any change on the ground. When a smidger held still it was almost invisible. In the depths of winter they turned as white as ice dragons. Their color change was effective camouflage but simple, nothing like Orm and Scree's amazing ability to match anything and make pictures.\n\nDrakor stepped off the dock onto a patch of crunchy grass. Long blades with coats of spikey ice crystals lay tangled on the ground, like wooly caterpillars swarming on a berry bush. He eyed the sparkling frost patterns and dug his claws into the frozen ground. At least this felt like home.\n\nArak landed on the shore beside his mate and broke into Drakor's thoughts. \"This is my family, Zarina and Arwina.\"\n\nDrakor bowed to the dragon-lady and smiled at the small dragonlet, who stared silently up.\n\n\"She's never this quiet,\" Zarina said, as she handed Drakor a huge ceramic mug. The white and blue clay were marbled together like an icy sea. There was a ring of gemstones on the side, surrounding a clear diamond: ruby, orange topaz, yellow citrine, emerald, blue topaz, and amethyst. \"I mind-talked with Arak during the journey. He told me that diamonds are important in your legends, but we didn't know your trance-stone. So I made a rainbow circle of gemstones around a diamond.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail in amazement. \"This isss the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.\"\n\nZarina smiled. \"It's yours to keep. A gift.\"\n\nDrakor bowed low. \"I will treasure it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Dorali was glued to Drakor's side, guarding his injured wing as a dragon-dam guards her egg. \"You must see our artwork in the cave. We practice micro-zaps by changing water patterns, but we grow fantasy snowflakes to learn how to manipulate energy. Then we turn them into gemstone ornaments to decorate our Winter Solstice tree. We'll share shadow-stories later.\"\n\nSpicy aromas and the scent of char-grilled fish permeated the air. Dorali inhaled deeply and smiled, but Drakor wrinkled his nose. \"What isss that smell?\"\n\nEvery dragon turned toward the loud, brassy sound that shimmered through the air.\n\n\"Fish. That's the dinner gong! It's time to eat.\"\n\nDorali, Arak, and Zarina made a protective circle around Drakor as they walked to the stone tables. Arwina hopped happily between her sire and dam, beaming at the world.\n\nDorali gave a warning look to anyone who crowded too close. \"The clan gathers every evening. Each dragon brings something to share. The dragon who brings a big fish or a well-spiced dish is respected. This is a true feast to honor you.\"\n\nDrakor stared down at her. \"To honor me?\"\n\n\"You are the guest,\" Dorali said firmly, leading Drakor to a long, stone table. It was covered with dishes of hot food, and the stone was warmed by dragon-fire. A thick, spicy fish stew, steamed oysters with seaweed, grilled white-fish, charred sturgeon fillets, rock crab claws, baked yams, crispy tubers, sliced carrot crisps, and more covered the table. Steaming hot cocoa and spiced red root tea added an earthy scent to the air.\n\nDrakor's eyes were huge. \"There isss so much food!\"\n\nDorali nodded. \"There's always enough, but a welcome feast is special.\" She ladled spicy fish stew into a bowl and handed it to Drakor. \"This is our traditional main course. These are steamed crab claws and stuffed clams.\" She added servings to his plate.\n\nDrakor gagged on the stew. \"It tastes strange.\"\n\nDorali hid a smile. \"It's cooked with pepper, sea salt, and herbs. You eat plain food, but I think these spices will grow on you.\" She added roasted tubers, sweet mashed yams, and toasted almonds to his plate. \"These are clan favorites.\"\n\nThe second stone table was filled with cold dishes: fish rolls, mushrooms, pickles, raw oysters, fish eggs, and fresh red-and-green seaweed salads. Platters of brown seaweed had dragon designs made from thin-sliced almonds and finely ground turquoise.\n\nDorali filled another plate with creamy oysters and seaweed salad. \"Here. This raw food will give you a taste of home.\"\n\nDrakor sniffed the oysters and a huge smile spread across his face. \"Thank you. What isss that?\"\n\nThe third, smaller table held chocolate candies, honey-roasted almonds, a honey-sweetened compote made with dried berries, and the traditional snow pudding.\n\n\"That's for later.\"\n\nDrakor balanced his stack of plates and followed Dorali to the seats, which were woven from branches. Arak and Taron joined with their families, forming a protective cocoon around Drakor.\n\nA rock tossed into still water makes a series of rings that ripple out from the center. The white dragon was the rock that brought this change. The clan surrounded Drakor in rings that rippled out, chattering to each other but always with one eye on the dragon legend in the center.\n\n\"They stare. At home, no one watches me.\"\n\n\"They're curious,\" Dorali said. She repeated this softly, looking at her scars. She hated it when dragons stared at her, but how many of those stares were just curiosity? \"Tonight you can answer their questions. Soon they'll be used to you.\"\n\nAfter they fed, Dorali scrubbed her plates and stacked them on the shelf under the table. Drakor copied her.\n\n\"Now it's time for deserts.\" She hurried to the small table and picked up two scallop shell plates, one yellow and one purple, each larger than her hand. \"Meals are more colorful since we began trading for these plates.\"\n\nDrakor gave her a puzzled look. \"What are dee-zerts?\"\n\n\"We'll try them all,\" Dorali said with a grin, putting a chocolate snowball on his plate. She added a crystal bowl with blue-green snow, laid on red seaweed, covered with oily-black Sturgeon eggs. \"This is our traditional desert: snow pudding. It's made for the Winter Festival, but we wanted you to have some. You'll like the raw fish eggs.\"\n\nDrakor ate the chocolate snowball, chocolate-covered almonds, and a slice of dried green melon dipped in dark chocolate. His dark eyes sparkled like a night sky. \"This isss a-ma-zing!\"\n\n\"Zarina makes them. Orm calls her a chocolate artist. Everyone looks hopeful when she brings her dish for dinner.\" Dorali took both plates and cleaned them.\n\nDrakor cradled his rainbow mug like a priceless treasure before stowing it carefully in his pack. \"I want to see more of your art.\"\n\n\"You must see our amber snowflakes!\"\n\n\"You have orange snowflakes?\" he asked, following her.\n\nDrakor halted at the narrow cave opening. He peered into the dank shadows, sniffing the pine-scented smoke and earthy-damp limestone. He closed his eyes and his forehead wrinkled with concentration. \"I sense many rooms beyond. I hope I will fit.\" Drakor crouched down, protecting his injured wing as he entered the dragon cave.\n\nThe cave opened into a huge chamber that could hold the entire clan. Rust, tan and white stone flowed across the damp floor. Glow-worms hung from the ceiling, lighting the cave with a soft, yellow-green glow that gleamed off the water-slick rock.\n\n\"It isss cool in here. I like that.\"\n\nDorali nodded. \"All year long, winter or summer, it's just like this.\"\n\nA few dragon-lengths in, Drakor stopped to admire a round pool with a frosty rim of white limestone. The still water was as clear as a sheet of new ice. Six large fungus flowers were spread evenly around the circle, and each flower glowed in a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. This living rainbow was reflected in the water mirror. Plink! The reflection changed as ripples spread from a drip; the colors wriggled and blended together.\n\n\"That isss art,\" Drakor said in a hushed voice.\n\n\"Orm would agree. Arak found those fungus flowers in the New World. Orm added bacteria that glow in different colors. He never gets tired of playing with natural light. You should see the glowing walls of Orm's sea cave.\" Her voice echoed softly off the stone walls.\n\nDorali pointed to a small chamber on the other side. \"That room is for dragon-ladies with dragonlets. Older siblings sometimes stay here and help look after them.\"\n\nThey walked through a stone forest. Creamy-red limestone columns reached from floor to ceiling. Drakor ran a hand over the long, flowing stone drips. \"This looks like hot lava on our Volcano, but it feels like melting icicles.\"\n\nThey walked farther into the cave. A tall limestone column had sprays of rock like a waterfall, frozen in time and growing across the ages. It glistened in the light from glowing fungus flowers that were artfully placed. The next chamber had a low ceiling covered by hollow rock straws. Each straw had a twinkling drop of lime-water dangling from the tip. The walls had a pale greenish glow that lit the sparkling drops.\n\nDorali pointed to the walls. \"I helped paint this room with a glowing fungus.\"\n\nA bright streak of light splashed across the floor from an open chamber. \"This is the game room,\" Dorali said, answering the question in his eyes. \"It's very popular when we're cave-bound during long snowstorms. Our snow can be wet and very deep.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"We live near the sea, where the snow isss usually dry, and most of it blows away. Ice dragons build shelters between short trees that are always green and smell nice. We each make a tall circle of stones and put fish skins across the top. We scrape off the fish scales and rub in oils until the skin isss like cloudy ice, so we can see the sky. At night we fall asleep watching auroras.\"\n\nDorali flicked her tail gently. \"That would be a lovely way to sleep.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Sky art isss always beautiful.\"\n\nThey entered the game room. A fire was lit beneath the natural chimney hole, lending an orange glow to the walls. The enchanting aroma of popped red-corn filled the room. An elderly dragon-lord with bronzed scales sat near the flames, leaning into the warmth, munching on salted popcorn. Dorali nodded politely. He looked the ice dragon up and down, silently, and returned to watching the fire.\n\nDorali whispered, \"He's our oldest dragon. His mate and most of his friends have become dragon-stars in the sky. He lives in his memories, and our gatherings no longer interest him.\"\n\nA huge maze stood in the corner, taller than a dragon, made of bright silver wires. \"This is fun.\" Dorali dropped three gemstone balls into a hole at the top of the maze. Amethyst, ruby, and blue topaz marbles rolled along silver runners, weaving and spiraling and dropping through random holes. They spun through the maze. The blue gem rolled out first.\n\nDrakor thumped his tail. \"Blue isss first. Good. Sky should win.\"\n\nThere were five limestone tables covered with dragon-games. Each table was surrounded by carved benches that were worn smooth by generations of dragon scales. Bags with polished white, red, or black stones rested on wooden game boards. Flat, painted puzzles showed the world from a dragons-eye view. One game had five levels of ice-clear quartz boards, held together by black coral. Pearls filled some of the hollows carved into each level.\n\n\"This game's new,\" Dorali said. \"It's one of Orm's inventions. He calls it Arms and Claws. Each of the five dragon-claw levels has an eight by eight octopus grid, with cups to hold black or white pearls. I think Orm and Kragor are the only ones who understand the rules. Kragor is Arak's sire, and a great artist.\"\n\nDrakor clicked his claws on the crystal boards. \"This game isss well made.\" He lifted a clawfull of lumpy, shiny black stones from a pile on the table. \"What isss this?\"\n\n\"Puzzle pieces. Each puzzle bag holds many tens of carved onyx pieces. When all the pieces are put together the right way, they make one sculpture.\" She connected several puzzle pieces and studied the outline. \"I think these pieces will make a dragon.\"\n\n\"Not all puzzle sculptures are dragons?\" he asked, trying to fit a piece into the beginning sculpture. \"All of our ice sculptures are dragons.\"\n\nDorali shook her head. \"There are puzzles to make a crab, sturgeon fish, octopus . . . that's the real challenge. All the pieces are black. You don't know what the puzzle sculpture will become until you've put enough pieces together. It's a bit like real dragonlets. What will they grow up to do?\"\n\n\"This isss an interesting idea. You have games for the mind. Our games are all to make us strong, to fight and survive.\" Drakor frowned. \"I must try puzzles, later. Where isss the art?\"\n\n\"It's in the next room.\"\n\nThey walked on through a dark maze of rippling limestone draperies. Drakor sparked his claws and the glistening rock reflected this like stars. Dorali added spark-stars of her own to the hanging sky. Soon they were sparking star after star, laughing, filling the stone sky with stars.\n\n\"I did not know zaps could be so much fun!\" Drakor said.\n\nDorali reached her arm into a dark space. \"This must be the place.\" She took a torch from the metal wall sconce and lit it with a spark from her claw. Wavering torch light showed a space that was barely large enough to hold three dragons. \"Here's the storage room. Watch your head.\"\n\nDrakor pointed to a stack of large ceramic bowls. \"That isss like the beautiful cup Zarina made. What are they?\"\n\nDorali smiled wistfully. \"Nest bowls.\" She picked up two stunning bowls. One was made from red clay, with gold wire wrapped around each cut ruby. The second bowl looked like the sea. It was made from blue clay spun with thin silver wires, and the frothy rim was studded with small white pearls.\n\n\"Each dragon-dam makes a ceramic bowl for her egg, following clan tradition. A dragon egg must hatch in a nest that combines land, water, fire and air. The First Dragon was born of these four elements; now all dragons are born within them. The nest bowl is made of clay, softened by water, and hardened by fire and air. This ancient magic nurtures the dragonlet. The nest is heated with dragon-fire to keep the egg warm.\" Longing pierced her heart, but her voice barely shook as she put the bowls away. This was not for her. No dragon-lord would choose a scarred dragon-lady.\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Nest bowl art. How do you make cloud art?\"\n\nDorali turned away from the nest bowls. \"Dragon-ladies grow snowflakes in the clouds for the Winter Festival. We each choose a tiny snowflake growing inside its water sac. I put a copper claw into this crystal sac, into the heart of the crystal snowflake. Then I pulse energy into the flake.\"\n\nShe demonstrated by putting one claw into an open circle made from her thumb and first finger. \"The energy attracts more freezing water to the six snowflake arms, and the flake grows. I use my energy and chemicals to control the pattern as it grows. Each snowflake gets as big as a dinner plate.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"That isss too much to understand.\"\n\nDorali opened one of the boxes in the corner. \"These are the amber snowflakes. When we put a snowflake onto liquid pine sap, the golden sap takes the flake pattern. We turn this sap into solid amber with a zap of electricity.\"\n\nDrakor picked up an ornament made of many tiny dragons. He peered through the warm, translucent stone and traced the six-pointed pattern with his claw. Another snowflake had leaping swordfish, and two swords made each of the six points. One had octopi.\n\n\"Stone snowflakes. This isss an excellent use of the zap. Which one did you make?\"\n\nDorali picked up another flake with a strong geometric pattern. \"I call it Mantis Lightning. I used an insect for the pattern, a preying mantis that was jade green and moved as fast as lightning. One moment it was standing still and then it held a moth to eat. I didn't even see the mantis move.\"\n\nDrakor held her flake near the torch light, where it glowed in rich amber colors. \"Lightning speed would be useful in a fight.\"\n\n\"Is everything about fighting?\"\n\n\"Fights are very important to us. We choose our leader by fighting. Our games are a special kind of fight for status.\" He turned the flake from side to side in the light. \"This isss a complicated design. It must have been a challenge to grow your snowflake.\" He handed it back. \"Why are you the only dragon-lady with a pretty frost pattern on your scales?\"\n\nDorali flinched. The white pattern was her scars. She looked up, meeting Drakor eye-to-eye. \"Pretty?\"\n\n\"You are the first yellow dragon-lady I met. I thought they would all look like you. But the others are plain.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, not answering his question."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Arak felt happy down to his last scale. He had spent the entire day with Zarina and their dragonlet, catching up on everything. His mate was so clever, always finding new Healer remedies, and Arwina was growing so fast! As soon as she was old enough, both of his special dragon-ladies could join him on a voyage.\n\nHe stopped by the shore to watch evening colors paint the sky. Sunsets were always more beautiful here, reflected in the sea. Rose and violet flowed across the waves, gradually replaced by darker amethyst and indigo. Then stars emerged to light the darkness. Arak flicked his tail, surprised by how much he missed the shimmering green and purple auroras of the north. He turned away from the sea to find Drakor.\n\nSometime during that long day, dragons had built a bigger-than-normal domed shelter for their large guest. Branches were woven together with vines, and fish skins lined the inside to seal it from the wind. All dragon shelters were built within thick clumps of bushes, making them warmer and almost invisible. It was not yet spring, so the nip in the air became frost at night.\n\nArak found Drakor by the new shelter, testing the ropes, peering inside. He handed the ice dragon a stack of blankets. \"These are from Zarina. See you tomorrow.\" Arak yawned and stumbled away, dragging his tail through the dead leaves. He nearly fell into his own shelter.\n\nArak woke early the next morning, before the sun, but the ice dragon was already up. Drakor pointed to the leafless forest, which had been coated by a freezing rain. Sunrise colors bloomed like fantasy flowers through the icy twigs. \"This isss beautiful.\"\n\nA dragon landed beside Drakor with a summons for both of them. The frosty ground crunched beneath their feet as they walked to the meeting circle. Arak flared his nostrils, inhaling the welcome aroma of toasted almonds. Exhaustion and cold made him ravenous, so he scooped up a generous handful and crunched blissfully.\n\nA bright fire crackled cheerfully in the center of the circle. Arak leaned into the welcome warmth. He took a second look and his eyes grew wide. These flames were pure blue, not the standard greenish-blue.\n\nDrakor stared into the fire. \"It isss the true color of our sky.\"\n\n\"I think they used cobalt metal to make a special fire just for you,\" Arak replied quietly.\n\nArafine, the leader, was waiting with Healers Zarina, Driana, and Dorali. Kragor, Arak's sire, was seated on a bench with Taron. Three more dragons landed with a flurry of wings and dust; greetings and questions filled the air.\n\nArafine raised her wings high for silence. \"Drakor, we welcome you here. Arak said that your volcano may erupt soon in a new way. Could you tell us more?\"\n\n\"Our old Volcano rumbles and smokes, then bleeds down the sides. The burning red blood hardens to black rock. It isss always the same. There isss a magnetic spider web around the Volcano. This energy has a simple pattern. It isss as predictable as the tides.\"\n\nDrakor looked to the north.\n\n\"A new cone isss forming in the side of our old Volcano. Magnetic wrinkles dance above the new cone with a twisted pattern. There are sharp energy spikes and new smells. The rumbling heart of this Volcano beats faster.\"\n\nDrakor shuddered. \"We have legends from long, long ago, from a time before we lived in your land. I have seen all the warning signs of that deadly Volcano eruption. The rhythm and smells have changed, the ground isss swelling, and the big fish are leaving. The next eruption will be different. It will destroy my world.\"\n\nArafine asked, \"Why aren't the other ice dragons worried?\"\n\n\"They follow our leader, and he does not listen to the old legends. He does not want to believe.\" Drakor flicked his tail nervously. \"I have seen our Volcano explode, in my mind. Then our home isss gone. I have future-sight. This will happen.\"\n\nOnly the crackling fire interrupted the silence of dragons.\n\nFinally, Arafine asked, \"When will your volcano erupt?\"\n\n\"I do not know.\"\n\nShe studied the ice dragon. \"Thank you for coming.\"\n\nArak motioned to Drakor and they left.\n\nDrakor glanced back at the dragons who remained by the fire and he snapped his tail. \"It isss real. This will happen.\"\n\nArak gave him a level gaze. \"I believe you, and I think Arafine does, too. But you're an unexpected visitor, a legend with a dream warning. This will be hard to believe.\" He turned and looked north. \"Where will you go?\"\n\nDrakor's tail drooped to the ground. \"I do not know.\"\n\nArak gazed out to sea. \"Dreams are important, but you also need a plan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "SQUID STORM",
                "text": "Scree and Orm flew their skiff back to the village, beneath a bright sliver of moon. They tied off to the raft and slid overboard, splashing through starlit waves. After they disappeared, the wave pattern reformed as curved gray scales with silver rims.\n\n\"Only two eight-days until we leave for the spring festival,\" Orm said cheerfully, as they sank to the sand below. \"I can hardly wait for Kragor to see my new glowing tunicates: violet and gold. His undersea garden will be the wonder of the dragon world.\"\n\nScree twined arms affectionately. \"It already is.\" Kragor and Orm had painted a picture of dreams below low tide, with rings and swirls of small tunicates that glowed in red, blue, and green. This living tapestry lit up the sea at night.\n\n\"Orm, our sea sample matches Drakor's volcano. Our volcano is waking. I feel this danger in every pulse of my body. We must move.\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"Our reef is beautiful, the farms are doing well, and we've completely settled in. This is home. Even my snails go back to their homes when I move them.\"\n\nScree ran an arm gently along his. \"So we're like homing snails? I do love this place but anywhere that you are, is home. We moved here when we needed a new home. The New World reefs could make another new home.\"\n\nOrm turned one eye to the west. \"That would be a faraway move.\" He slipped into his cave and Scree pulsed to hers.\n\nJust before dawn, Scree ate a hearty breakfast of clams and knobby red seaweed. She watched as sunlight filtered down through the sea, bringing color to the gray reef. Orm was right, their reef was beautiful. The tentacle petals of anemones flowed back and forth with the waves like dragon flowers in a summer breeze. These animal flowers decorated a nearby rock with mint, green, and lilac. A carpet of bright pink-and-red anemones filled the valley between coral heads, waving short pink tentacles around fiery centers. It was a lovely undersea meadow.\n\nScree was checking her medicinal supplies when a manta ray swooped in to see her. She ran an arm along his fin, feeling for lumps and tasting for infection. The torn fin was healing perfectly, but he brought a disturbing message about giant squid. She informed the pod leader.\n\nStur immediately appointed Scree as defense leader for the entire pod. \"You were the first octopus ever to use a spear, the first to fight back. Now you can organize everyone to fight back.\"\n\nScree wanted to scream in every shade of red. This was a dangerous distraction from an even bigger problem. When their volcano exploded it would destroy everything. You couldn't escape unless you left before it was real.\n\nShe straightened her arms. \"So now I get to be the first to lead an army?\"\n\nStur chuckled. \"That's a good name for octopus defenders, with so many arms.\" He turned a sober brown. \"We'll need all those fighting arms. The pod has practiced throwing spears, but we don't even know for sure how many giants will attack. We need a strong defense plan. We need you.\"\n\nScree sighed. \"Then I accept. Squid are deadly, but this volcano is more dangerous and there is no defense. We can only survive if we leave before it erupts.\"\n\nStur looked into her eyes. \"Before it seems real.\"\n\nHad he read her mind? Scree gave a wry smile. \"That is the challenge. And if I'm in charge of defense, I will also be in charge of prisoners. I will not kill.\"\n\nStur gave her a hard look. \"This is not one starving, sympathetic squid. These monsters will attack together, as a game, to prove that they can kill us.\"\n\n\"Stur, I'm a Healer and I will not let them change me. I will change them and that is the ultimate victory. I fight for peace.\"\n\nThe leader blinked. \"How?\"\n\nScree stared into the distance, and her eyes were a thousand years old. \"It seems that peace must be won more than once. Communication is the key, and killing these giants would waste an opportunity. They will learn to respect us. Then we'll release them, alive, to spread our warning. Each battle we fight this way will create ripples of change into the future, to protect octopi not yet hatched.\"\n\nStur nodded slowly. \"I accept your terms.\" Then he curled his arms with frustration. \"But these monsters make my blood boil.\"\n\n\"Hotter than a volcano?\" Scree smiled. \"I'll go prepare for our squid visitors.\"\n\nAnd so, the day after her shark ride, she was checking their early warning system. Both villages had one. Scree pulsed around the circle of golden-brown kelp trees that grew well beyond the village borders. This sturdy seaweed normally grew in cold water, but Orm had bred a variety that could live in the warmer waters of their coral reef. The ring of kelp now reached from the sea floor to the surface, and it made a unique warning barrier.\n\nScree shook a kelp tree violently, as if a squid was passing through. Shells that were tied to the long, leathery leaves clanked together, making enough noise to wake any sleeping octopus. Only a squid or the most violent storm could make the shells clank. These unique sound vibrations would pass through her entire body, waking her arm-minds first and then her main brain. There were spears leaning against the inner wall of each octopus cave, and waking arms would grab them. In the blink of an eye her troops would be up, armed, and ready.\n\nScree poked her head into the cave that Orm had built for his newest creations. Jellyfish pulsed around the darkness within the deep cave, glowing brightly in unusual pinks and turquoise, like true flowers of the sea. These were bred from the normal white variety. Colored light gleamed along cloudy flounces and tentacles; they glowed like ice sculptures beneath an aurora borealis.\n\nOrm was busy feeding them.\n\nScree squished her body thin and slipped between the rods across the entrance. \"I see you're having some fun here. Kragor will love them! The squid will probably attack at night, so these jellyfish could also be useful.\"\n\nOrm tossed the rest of the jellyfish food up into the water. \"I suppose that squid would be so entranced by their artistic beauty that they'd stop an attack just to watch?\"\n\nScree laughed. \"Probably not, but they could light up the squid. Then we could see well enough to fight back properly.\"\n\n\"Speaking of Kragor, we met at the raft above while you were in conference. I brought him sacks of dragon-weed, and he gave me this. Then he flew back for an important meeting.\"\n\nScree opened the box and flashed bright, happy colors. \"It's full of wax-covered sodium balls. How did he know we'd need them?\"\n\nOrm twined arms. \"I called him in trance-mind on our way home from the sea of ice, after that giant squid warned you. Kragor offered to make as many blinding lights as I wanted.\"\n\nScree ran her arms lovingly through the dull wax balls. \"These are more precious than pearls. I was just going to ask. Were you mind-reading into the future?\" She covered the box. \"Arak made our spears, and now his sire made these. We're fortunate in our friends. What do you think of octopi as fighters?\"\n\nOrm curled one arm beneath his head, considering. \"Sometimes octopi are feisty rulers of the sea, and sometimes they shape-shift into invisibility. Both traits are useful.\"\n\n\"Squid have a serious size advantage. We need to combine our opposite talents and fight while camouflaged,\" Scree decided.\n\n\"A good plan multiplies the effectiveness of the resources,\" Orm said.\n\nScree laughed. \"Or, in plain octopus, you can do a lot with little if you plan carefully.\"\n\nShe called a meeting of the eight squad leaders. \"We each carry a wax ball for protection, with poison from our deadly cousins. This box has wax-covered sodium balls. I call them lightning balls, and each member of your squad needs one. Squid live in the abyss, in depths that have never known the light of the sun, so they will probably attack at night. Bright light is a powerful weapon that will stun a giant squid. Now turn away to protect your eyes.\"\n\nScree scratched some wax off the ball and tossed it up into the sea, where the sodium burned bright and fierce. Octopi spun back to face her, eyes wide, pupils shrunk to a black point. The water tasted of fright and excitement as she handed out boxes of lights. Scrim, her apprentice, accepted his lightning balls with great enthusiasm.\n\nScree raised two arms for attention and the squad leaders grew still. \"This will be a challenge, but it could make all the difference in a fight: be invisible. Squid can't shape-shift or camouflage so they won't expect us to hide like this. Don't make yourself an easy target. Learn how to keep in camouflage even when you're afraid or angry. Don't lose your concentration, don't let your emotions take over, and don't turn blue. Hold drills day and night. Learn to gather immediately when the alarm sounds, respond to the fight signals, and stay camouflaged while fighting.\"\n\nThe next day, Scree checked random caves. The spearheads were incredibly sharp, made from colorful jasper that was dragon-heated to change the rock texture. This made it possible to shape the rock into a finer point, to puncture as easily as sea urchin needles. The spear shafts were made from sturdy oak, carved and painted with a seaweed pattern for camouflage, and rubbed with wax to protect them from the sea.\n\nThe spear tips were coated with poison from the blue-ringed octopi, and they had protective caps. This poison worked as a powerful sedative, but too much would kill. The poison dose on a spear was low, so that octopi would not kill each other with a missed throw.\n\nThey each carried a poison ball in an arm sucker. They also carried sodium balls, to stun the enemy with blinding light.\n\nEvery cave had four spears leaning against an inner wall, near the door. The squid should drop like a stone, but would the poison work fast enough? Even the best plans could fail, if the enemy didn't follow along. How many squid would attack? Who would be hurt . . . or killed?\n\nOrm found Scree in her cave, wearing an unnatural shade of gray. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"It's easy to be brave for myself, fighting on my own. It's much worse being in charge, responsible for the lives of friends.\"\n\nOrm twined arms. \"Scree, you are rare: a natural Healer and a natural fighter. You didn't ask to be in charge. Stur is pod leader and he chose you to lead defense. Some may die, but many more octopi will live because of you.\"\n\nScree leaned against Orm, feeling his unshakable belief and confidence in her. No wonder he was so irresistible, even as the years pulsed by. \"Thank you.\" She straightened her arms. \"Could you come with me to check on the decoy village?\"\n\nThis village was under construction in the dance field, safely away from their real homes, and it was nearly complete. The pretend caves were solid piles of rocks. Crabs and clams were eaten here daily to create the proper lived-in tastes. Extra weapons were stored here. Scree would lead the defense from an open circle in the center of this decoy. Their true village was now well camouflaged as a lush field of seaweed, with long brown and green strands planted between homes.\n\nOrm brushed against a cave pile and a few rocks rolled off. \"These aren't very sturdy.\"\n\nScree sighed. \"They don't need to last. The battle may be terrible, but it won't last long.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"I dread the coming squid storm. Is this decoy village worth so much effort? It takes time away from other battle preparations.\"\n\n\"The bigger threat is still the volcano, which has far more power to destroy us than mere squid. When the battle is over we must prepare to move. If our village is destroyed by squid, we'll lose supplies. It will be more difficult to organize a move.\"\n\nOrm grinned. \"So you're thinking ahead to the next problem. That's good. But . . . 'mere squid'? That's not how I see these giants.\"\n\n\"It's all a matter of perspective. See you later.\" She flowed away.\n\nScree checked the practice field and observed while camouflaged. Scrim, her Healer apprentice, wore the arm band of a pod defense leader. He juggled four red coral knives, making bright, overlapping arcs in the water. After his unique warm-up, he stowed the knife blades in sheaths fastened to his upper arms. Then he threw spear after spear at a tall target.\n\n\"You're good,\" Scree said. \"You hit the most vulnerable points every time and you stayed in camouflage.\"\n\nHe flushed bright red. \"But will I be able to hit a moving target? The squid won't hold still like this seaweed dummy.\"\n\n\"You're angry.\"\n\n\"If they attack, then they lied about the agreement.\"\n\nScree sighed. \"Squid are complicated. Most want to leave us alone, but some believe this treaty does not include them.\"\n\n\"Then they will learn otherwise. We will win.\"\n\n\"I believe we will win, with fighters like you,\" Scree said. \"And then we must release the squid, alive.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"We must do this to show compassion for ignorance, so the squid can carry our warning to others, and because we are Healers.\"\n\nScrim curled his arms with frustration. \"Do you ever find this hard to do?\"\n\nScree gazed beyond their village, lost in memories. When she finally spoke, her arms were gray with sadness. \"Yes. I was furious when Vorm killed my friends, but he was desperately hungry. The fish kills drove him to attack us. When I came to know Vorm, I could not hate him. I learned enough of his language and customs to make a peace treaty with his kind.\"\n\n\"And now that treaty will be broken,\" Scrim said. His arms were rigid with anger.\n\nScree nodded. \"Probably. But this new group of squid will learn that we are dangerous, and that lesson will spread like ripples in a tide pool. It's better than constant attacks.\"\n\n\"So we must be forever on guard, even with a treaty?\" His skin pulsed with emotions of many colors, changing from moment to moment: anger, fear, frustration, even a desperate need to understand.\n\nScree could read these colors as if she was inside his mind. She twined arms with her young apprentice. \"I wish it were different. You are a fighter, a Healer, and a thinker. Maybe you will find the way.\"\n\nShe left and wandered through the village, talking with fighters, while evening came and stole colors from the sea. Scree remembered every apprentice, past and present. These were the juveniles she fostered, raised, and trained. All were precious to her, but Scrim had an intensity that she fully understood. It must be easier to experience life more lightly.\n\nIn the dead of night, vibrations from the warning shells pierced Scree from all directions at once. Giant squid spurted toward the village, stirring sand up into the dark water. Octopi poured out of their homes, wielding spears, but it was difficult to see what was happening in the cloudy darkness. Orm released his glowing jellyfish, bringing light to the night.\n\nSix yellow moons glowed in the distance, moving closer. These were the fierce eyes of giant squid. Scree took a good look as she jetted to the center of the decoy village. Three squid were attacking at the same time, making a perfect triangle of terror. The pod was surrounded.\n\nScree shuddered. She struck her shell drum one time and octopi instantly followed the order. Lights that burned brighter than dragon-fire sizzled through the sea. The three giant squid jerked to a halt, flailing their long tentacles. The huge eyes were well adapted to see in near-darkness, so this blinding light was unbearable. They shook their massive, pointed heads in visible pain. They could not advance.\n\nThis delay was a crucial part of her plan. Octopi could move by slowly sliding along the sea floor, running on stiff arms, pulsing through the sea, or using their siphons as jets. Now was the time for speed. Every octopus jetted through the sea with the speed of a shark.\n\nLong minutes later the squid recovered and surged forward, searching for prey. Row after row of invisible octopi stood before each advancing monster. All had shape-shifted to match coral heads or rocks covered with seaweed. Squad leaders had flattened their chosen speaking arms into yellow-brown leaves of kelp. Octopi squirted their ink into the sea to dull the squid's senses. They hurled rotten dagur eggs through the water, a gift from Arak to mask their octopus scent. There was nothing to see, feel, or sense.\n\nScree was in the center, well lit by glowing jellyfish, and her speaking arms were brilliant gold. She was the leader, the most visible and the most vulnerable, directing the defense. She could feel Orm watching her through his eye-skin, with silent worry and tangible love.\n\nRings of extra spears surrounded her, thrust into the sand. The spears called to her. Scree wanted to grab a weapon and charge into battle! One of her arms drifted toward a spear, acting with a mind of its own, reaching. She forced her arm back down. She must remain in the center. Other octopi would carry these spears to squad leaders.\n\nOctopi took aim and spears flew, but many missed the targets. Scree noted that Stur, Scrim, and even Orm had become experts, striking these giants just below the head where the poison should work faster. But each dose was low, to protect octopi from fatal poisoning if struck by accident. The attacking squid were merely irritated by these pinpricks and ripped the spears out.\n\nSquid probed the sand with strong tentacles, seeking their prey-toys. The invisible octopi shifted away and injected poison with a direct arm strikes.\n\nAngry tentacles whipped through the water, making a violent undersea storm. Octopi were pulled back and forth by the surging sea and nearly ripped loose. Scree tasted fear in the water, but most octopi were able to maintain their camouflage colors and stay hidden. Then the squid began smashing the sea floor with powerful blows.\n\nScree watched from the center. She turned from one monstrous attacker to the next, observing a battle that shifted constantly, like a cloud of ink in the sea. She signaled defense moves and called up reserves to replace the wounded. She was like a spider in the middle of its web, feeling through every strand, directing the defense.\n\nWhen octopi were struck and stunned by random blows, they automatically changed back to a normal shape and color. Pod-mates flowed over to protect their helpless friends by covering them with their own camouflaged bodies.\n\nScree shuddered as one youngster color-changed to a bright terrified-blue. A squid grabbed this unfortunate octopus and he disappeared into its beaked mouth. The squid's body pulsed with pleasure as he searched for another bright, tasty snack.\n\nHis eyes locked onto Scree, the only visible octopus. Lights flashed along his tentacles as he signaled his friends. The other squid messaged back and they all charged to the center.\n\nScree read their lights. She stood firm and struck another drum signal. A new volley of lightning balls stunned the squid while squad leaders quickly reformed their lines. Spears flew, striking with more force as octopi gained practice. Squid tore the spears out and, blinded by the sodium light, they simply bashed everything they could reach. Fighters jetted to Scree to collect more spears.\n\nAs soon as the squid regained their sight they focused on Scree. They recognized the leader, connecting her signals with the attacks. She was now the target of angry giants.\n\nThe squid regained their sight and surged to the center, moving slower and slower as they reacted to the many small doses of poison. Scree studied the sluggish giants and smiled grimly. This would be their last defense and it would be close, dangerous work.\n\nScree gave two drum beats and the sea exploded with brilliant light from sodium balls. Octopi jetted forward, stabbing the stunned squid with long, needle-like knives. The enraged giants fought back despite their temporary blindness. They pushed through to the decoy village, swatting invisible octopi and smashing the caves. Scree took a moment to be glad these weren't their real homes.\n\nThen, one by one, the giants began to tremble. They moved slower and slower, as if their tentacles were pushing through thick molasses. The poison was taking effect. At last they fell, flailing as they crashed down.\n\nScree knew their arms were numb, but their eyes blazed with fury. This was no longer a squid game to catch easy food and prove their elders wrong. They were determined to kill the octopus with the drum who had signaled each counter-attack, the golden octopus in the center.\n\nThe last giant squid surged forward as he fell. He broke through to the center and smashed an angry tentacle down onto Scree. She could barely see Orm cry \"NO!\" Then the world turned black. She felt and saw no more."
            },
            {
                "title": "ONE MOVE AHEAD",
                "text": "Orm, Stur, and her apprentices turned an angry blue and charged to Scree's defense. It was too late. She was already buried beneath the thick, snaking tentacle and flattened to a bloody spot. They grabbed the tentacle anyway, pulling and heaving together. It slithered off her.\n\nScree's battered body lay still and her skin was deathly gray. Orm felt a grief such as he had never known. He cradled her limp body, desperately feeling for a pulse. He ran his arms gently along hers, willing them to speak again. What would he give for one feisty reply? There would never be another Scree. Could a heart truly break?\n\nThe logical part of his mind that could never keep still quietly asked him, \"Why isn't she more squished?\"\n\nHer arm twitched. Was it a sea current or her final death spasm? Suddenly, the light returned to her eyes. She moved her arms feebly, asking, \"What happened? Where are the squid?\"\n\nOrm turned ecstatic shades of bright green. \"The battle is over. We won. You won.\" He held Scree in his arms and looked deep into her eyes. \"As you once said to me, don't you ever do this to me again!\"\n\n\"What? Don't stand all golden in the center of a squid attack, or don't have the sense to plan an escape?\" Scree laughed. \"I wasn't really sure it would work.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"Orm, you told me to keep myself alive for you. That was an interesting challenge. I would be stuck in one place during the battle, bright gold, an obvious target. Everyone else would be moving around to fight, so camouflage was their best defense. I had to be visible, I couldn't camouflage, so I needed something new.\"\n\nScree slowly curled and uncurled each arm, testing. \"Yesterday evening a new idea came to me. I dug a shallow hole in the center, where I would stand. I covered the hole with long kelp leaves and staked them into the sand around the edges. If I was struck, the leaves would give way. That squid knocked me senseless and pushed me into the hole but, as far as I can tell, I'm all right. I'm battered but not squished to a dead pulp. It worked!\"\n\nOrm winced. \"You should have told me.\"\n\n\"There wasn't time.\" She struggled upright, wobbling a bit. \"Stur, can you take over now? It's time for me to become a Healer again. Please send the wounded to our Healer caves.\"\n\nStur gave a deep bow and then, to her amazement, circle after circle of octopi bowed. The entire pod bowed to her. Scree had a fleeting mental image of seaweed all bending toward the center, an impossible feat with natural waves. Then Krees and Tor swarmed over, anxiously checking her for injuries.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she said, gently shoving them aside. \"Where is Scrim?\"\n\nKrees and Tor left for their Healer caves.\n\n\"Orm, remember my plans for after the battle? I need you to meet with the squad leaders.\"\n\nScree flowed slowly to her cave, feeling more exhausted than she would ever admit. She crushed fragrant seaweed and filled the cave with a pleasant, relaxing taste. Then she worked on one wounded octopus after another, bandaging as she went, prioritizing when a worse case arrived. Time crawled by.\n\nOrm brought a meal and an update. \"You're turning gray. You should eat something.\"\n\nScree picked at the food with no enthusiasm. The peppered oysters and seaweed salad looked excellent, but worry robbed her food of flavor. \"Have they found Scrim?\"\n\n\"The pod is still searching. Some octopi were flung far into the reef. Three pod-mates are dead.\"\n\nScree nodded sadly. \"It was a vain hope to have no loss.\"\n\n\"Three giant squid attacked us at night and all are now bound, helpless, waiting for you. I expected much worse,\" Orm said. \"I need to check back with the squad leaders.\" Then he was gone.\n\nStur arrived bearing the limp, battered remnants of an octopus. Three arms were ripped off. Who could it be?\n\nScree took a closer look and recognized an old scar. Her arms twisted in anguish. \"Scrim!\" She flushed gray with grief and moved her arms desperately over his heart, feeling for a pulse. There was a faint, erratic flutter like a dying butterfly. He was mostly dead. She flashed blue with anger at such a loss and then turned solid topaz-brown with resolve. Scrim wasn't dead yet, and she would not let him die.\n\n\"Stur, hold this seaweed compress on firmly and tie off the torn arms.\"\n\n\"I remember how,\" he replied with calm arms. \"You taught me well.\"\n\n\"I've never treated anyone in such critical condition.\" His pulse was so faint, like an echo of life passing on. A strong herb could kill him. Scree poured a few drops of dark brown syrup into his mouth. It was her safest, mildest stimulant. \"Scrim loves chocolate and he can't even enjoy this,\" she said with trembling arms.\n\nScrim's pulse grew slightly stronger. Now she could feel the terrifying, irregular flubbing sound of his heart. If the heartbeat was wrong for too long, he would die. Scree plucked a round, blue coral jar from her shelves and scooped out some oily salve. She rubbed this gently all over his skin, letting her arms work independently while her mind raced through every herb she knew.\n\n\"This salve will reduce swelling and help his heart pump in a better rhythm,\" she said to Stur, automatically slipping into her teacher role. \"Can you feel it shifting?\" Then Scrim's limp body turned a whiter shade of gray. Scree shuddered. \"He's dying.\" Her eyes darted along the shelves, identifying each herb by its container, and stopped at a glassy jar. She jabbed an arm at the top shelf. \"I need that amethyst triangle jar.\"\n\nStur grabbed the odd jar, feeling its triangle base and three triangle sides. He used an extra arm to yank out the gemstone stopper and recoiled. \"What is this?\"\n\nScree counted three drops into Scrim's mouth and massaged to help the herb slide down his throat. Three of her arms encircled his body, checking for changes in his pulse and tasting the chemicals in his skin. He was slipping away. How much longer before his death color was forever?\n\nScree was barely aware of the world beyond Scrim. Her arms answered, speaking almost on their own. \"It's a gift from Zarina, an extract from a New World flower that can strengthen a heartbeat. She made the jar from amethyst to match the purple foxglove flowers. She carved it into this fancy shape to match our Healer triangle sign...\"\n\n\". . . with a broad base of Healer knowledge and the tipping point where healing occurs,\" Stur finished. \"I remember. I've never seen a jar like this. The herb has such a sharp feel/taste.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Foxglove is powerful. Too much can kill, so the jar is unique.\"\n\nWhy wasn't the herb working? She glanced at the amethyst jar and her skin sparkled with a new idea. Purple had the greatest energy of all the rainbow colors. She focused a micro-zap through the crystal jar right over his heart. Scree was monitoring her arm sensors so closely that she nearly missed the change in his skin color. His body jerked violently.\n\n\"He's back!\"\n\nScrim's eyes found Scree and his arms whispered, barely moving, \"I saw you fall.\"\n\n\"I had an extra defense: a hole hidden beneath kelp leaves.\"\n\nScrim gave a weak smile. \"You always were one move ahead. I should have known.\"\n\nScree smiled sadly. \"It wasn't enough. There were losses, and we nearly lost you.\"\n\nKrees and Tor appeared at the entrance to check on Scrim. He was still in critical condition. One arm had been torn off into the mantle and would never grow back. Scree read their subtle, almost-controlled color changes. They were thrilled that Scrim was alive but horrified by his injuries. What would it be like to have such a gap, to move with an odd number of arms?\n\nKrees bowed to Scree and gave a hidden sign: \"We will take care of him now.\" Openly she said, \"The pod needs both of you. We'll stay here and entertain Scrim.\"\n\nScree twined arms with all three of her apprentices, sending and receiving unqualified love. Then she and Stur left.\n\nScree stopped just outside the dance field and watched through the gritty water. Three prisoners lay tightly bound on the sand, struggling mightily against their ropes, surrounded by an angry pod. The water was charged with emotional flavors. Octopi were changing colors from intensity-red to scared-angry-neon-blue. Many had cuts on their skin, where the color changes were not quite normal. Orm's glowing jellyfish hung in the sea, lighting this unreal scene. So much had happened, and it was not yet dawn.\n\nThe cuts would heal but the dead would not. Anger for the dead and wounded burned in Scree, and she struggled to control it.\n\n\"As we agreed, this is your show,\" Stur said.\n\nOrm nodded. \"Everything is ready.\"\n\nScree pulsed to the front, stretched tall on her arms, and turned bright gold. Squid eyes blazed with angry recognition. She read their lights: This was the puny leader who had defeated them in battle. She held up the huge pink pearl. \"This shell-stone was given to me by Veera, in the deep abyss, as a sign of peace. You know this. I left as a friend with the squid blessing: May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\" Scree spoke their language fluently, making rapid patterns of red and yellow spots on her arms. \"You broke a treaty that protects both sides; it would also protect squid from octopi. If you had visited us in peace, we would have welcomed you. But you came to kill for sport. Now you will pay the price.\"\n\nScree struck her shell drum and the giants flinched. The remaining squad leaders pulsed to her side. She noted that there were only six of her original eight leaders; one was dead and Scrim was in critical condition. She would not give in to hatred. \"Killing you would be too easy,\" she said to the captives, with angry arms.\n\nScree nodded to her squad leaders. They whacked the giants on the end of each long tentacle, using their octopus arms to inject venom from the wax balls. The hidden poison made octopi appear to have a magical power. This was an impressive display, and she knew that both sides would remember it forever. The poison was perfectly placed, far from the head, and soon the giants stopped struggling. Three squid bodies lay as still as death . . . but their minds were awake.\n\nThe giant squid watched in fear, unable to move. Octopi stalked forward on long, stiff arms, carrying bright crystal jars of starlight . . . Orm's glowing bacteria. The octopi used hollow fish fin needles to inject spots under the skin of each squid head.\n\n\"You will live, but you have been marked,\" Scree warned. \"Your star spots will always glow, and we would recognize you on the darkest night. If you ever attack octopi or our floating wood homes, we will kill you.\"\n\nAnother group of octopi attached floats to the limp squid. \"Now we will return you to the deep abyss. We carry you so that you will never again touch the sands of our village,\" Scree said. She raised her golden arms and the rest of the pod surged forward. Each octopus grabbed hold of a squid, using the strong suction cups of their arms.\n\nStur noted the communal effort and he nodded with grim satisfaction. \"The arms of the entire pod are working together. You made a real army. The squid will not forget this.\"\n\n\"I'm at least as angry as you are. I will not kill, but they will never forget.\"\n\nScree joined the pod and helped push these limp, floating bodies through the sea. They pulsed past the slope and reached the abyss. Cold, clean currents from the dark depths flowed across her skin. \"If we kill, you would learn nothing. Never return.\" She used her sharpest knife and easily sliced through the thick ropes that bound the prisoners. Then squad leaders cut off the floats. Three dazed, giant squid fell heavily into the darkness beyond.\n\nThe octopi were exhausted, drained of their emotional colors, and became a normal dull brown. They pulsed slowly home to bury their fallen comrades.\n\nThe pod held its traditional ceremony for the dead. Scree and Orm joined a line behind the bodies. Each friend imaged a special memory. Then they covered the bodies with branches of dead coral. The entire pod planted seaweed around the coral, until colorful strands covered the new reef. Soon the sea would reclaim them. As battle leader, Scree added a cluster of anemone flowers above the fallen.\n\nA long stretch of dead, white coral held a regular pattern of gray rocks. A name was etched into each rock. The pod leader added three new rocks to this memory wall.\n\nThe sea rumbled ominously, and Scree shuddered. Then the sea shook. She swayed with the water, pulled back and forth, as if blown by a strong winter wind. Their volcano was waking."
            },
            {
                "title": "LEGENDS",
                "text": "Drakor climbed the northern hill, digging his feet into the patchy grass, eyes on the prize. His brace was off and today he would fly again. Thick morning fog covered the valley below like a blanket, drenched in the soft blues and purples of late dawn. Scents of the sea hung in the damp air.\n\nDrakor reached the top of the hill, faced the sea, and stretched his wings as wide as he could. The newly-healed membrane was tight and scrunched. He ignored the stabbing pains and stretched wider, until his wings matched. Then he launched himself into thin air, far above the rocks below.\n\nDrakor missed his stroke and tumbled down. Sharp rocks rushed up to meet him. He stretched his wings wider, reaching for a better stroke, and finally caught the wind. He skimmed just above the rocks and surged up into the sky.\n\nFreedom! His heart beat to the tune of his wings and his eyes glowed like cut diamonds. Sea breezes blew across his scales as he danced with the wind, tilting his wings to catch every shift. He spun through the air, ignoring the pain in his rusty muscles.\n\nDrakor swooped low; the very tip of one wing rippled along the water. He caught the warm thermal, rising with the sea mist, and soared higher. He was smoke and fire, Volcano lightning thundering across the sky.\n\nDorali appeared out of nowhere, gracefully matching Drakor in the air. She pointed to the ground, signaling for him to land.\n\nDrakor flew another circle, cupped his wings like a parachute, and landed as gently as a yellow-flower seed. He promptly fell over, cradling his wing protectively.\n\n\"What were you thinking?\" Dorali cried, eyes flashing. \"You must let your muscles build up slowly. Do you want new injuries?\"\n\nHe smiled a toothy grin. \"What did you expect? You took off the brace. I needed to feel the sky again.\"\n\n\"If you're not careful you'll feel the ground instead. Then you'll need that brace again and be in no shape for the quest.\"\n\nDrakor stretched his wings gently. \"I must find a new home.\"\n\n\"Then do those wing exercises so you can explore the New World properly, from the sky.\"\n\nDrakor bowed his head, partly to hide a smile at her concern. He was an ice dragon, after all. But he stretched and flapped his wings every moment that he could, to strengthen the muscles. He pulled his wings through the water and made short gliding flights through the sky. Three days later he approached Arak. \"I do not know if I will ever be here again. I want to visit the octopus village before we leave. We can fly there.\"\n\nArak shuddered. \"Your broken wing is barely healed. That's much too far for you to fly; the Healers would never forgive me. I'll contact Scree and Orm, and we'll take the skiff tomorrow morning. Tonight we share shadow-stories.\"\n\nWhen evening purples colored the sky, the clan gathered in their cave. Solid limestone benches formed a half circle around the welcoming fire. Arak, Zarina, and Arwina had seats beside Drakor. Dorali sat near them, staring into the fire, ignoring the crowd. Arak touched Zarina's arm. \"She came.\"\n\nDriana walked around to the far side of the fire, to the open floor between the fire and the cave wall. This flat, white wall was made of teensy, glittering crystals. It was perfect for shadows.\n\nDriana raised her wings for attention and the conversations stopped. \"This is the legend of the Flame-flower and the First Healer.\" She made shadow-scenes using her claws, feet, wings, and even a coiled tail. Dark and light wove together in life-like patterns.\n\n\"A dragonlet lay limp on the sand, burning with fever. He was dying.\"\n\nDriana made a small, winged shadow-dragon appear on the wall.\n\n\"Ravena, the dragon's dam, begged the First Dragon for help. 'How can I save him?' A deep voice answered in her mind, 'Take five golden scales from above your heart. Plant them in a ring and breathe fire in the center.' She gasped as she pulled off each scale. The pain burned. Then Ravena did as instructed and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.\"\n\nA ring of shadow scales appeared on the wall, and the First Dragon's shadow loomed above this.\n\n\"When Ravena awoke, the ring of scales was gone. A new plant with bright flowers grew in its place. Each bloom had five pointed petals that were the color of flames. Again the voice spoke in her mind. 'Boil five flowers in water. This tea will heal your dragonlet.'\"\n\nThe shadow-movie on the wall followed her story.\n\n\"The dragonlet opened his eyes and stretched his wings, looking around as if nothing had happened. His dam spiraled up into the sky with joy. The Flame-flower was born, and Ravena became the First Healer.\" Driana finished with a bow.\n\nDragons thumped and snapped their tails in applause.\n\nArak smiled at Zarina. \"I remember when you first gathered that herb. You found a new place where it grows, and then a new use for it.\"\n\nShe leaned against him. \"And you made a musical, flame-flower ice sculpture to impress me.\"\n\nDrakor stared at the fire. \"We have nothing like shadow-stories.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"It's another way to use fire. Driana will join us for our journey to the New World. She's an excellent Healer and a clever cook. She uses herbs for more than healing! We take turns fixing meals, but she's the best.\"\n\nArak stood up, stretched, and walked to the stage behind the fire. He looked into the eyes of each dragon, gathering their attention, and took a deep breath. \"This is the story of the monster wave.\"\n\nArak shivered, remembering the day when he woke before dawn, feeling an unseen threat. He had sent his trance-mind across the sea, to a circle of boiling water. This was a hidden volcano, and the sea would send a giant wave. His mind fled back into his body to warn the clan. Many dragons were angry at being roused from sleep, and they called him a worthless Dreamer. But the leader believed.\n\nWhy had he woken so early? Why was he the only dragon who felt that threat? Arak had a secret talent, the ability to quest while in trance. Only he could see more than the shimmer of another trance-mind; he saw what was there. Sometimes, young dragons walked in their sleep. Had he dream-walked to the boiling sea, and returned to warn his sleeping self?\n\nArak swept one wing up slowly, creating the shadow of the terrifying wall of water. His other wing bent to form their hill sanctuary. Taron played the drum, beating faster as the water piled higher and higher.\n\nThe shadow-wave towered and crashed onto the hillside. His claw shadows were the powerful edge of the sea raking down the hill. Finally, he showed the devastation, with floating trees and an empty shore.\n\nThe audience applauded his skill, but some flicked their tails nervously.\n\nArak returned to his seat.\n\nDrakor said, \"That wave isss impressive.\"\n\n\"It was more terrifying than a giant squid.\"\n\nTaron stood up and walked to the stage. \"This is our journey to the New World.\" He waved one hand to create rippling shadow-waves against the wall. The shadow of a skiff, made from his clawed fist, slid across this sea. Swordfish leapt and smaller fish flew.\n\nThe audience leaned forward, always intrigued by travel stories.\n\nTaron dropped metal into the fire to make blue flames as he described the glowing blue seas. His shadow-skiff landed on the distant shore. He curved his arms and tail, creating the shadow of a short tree with plump fruit pods.\n\nHis mate, Erinite, played the flute, blending familiar dragon melodies with enticing, exotic notes. All ears were swiveled to the sound. Drakor held completely still; he looked like an ice sculpture.\n\nUsing sleight-of-hand, Taron magically produced a clawfull of fragrant cocoa beans from his shadow-tree. \"This is one of the treasures of the New World.\" Everyone leaned toward the tantalizing aroma. A tray of Zarina's chocolate was passed around to eager dragons with dreamy expressions.\n\nDrakor took his piece of chocolate, but he was still staring at Erinite. \"I have never heard such beautiful sounds!\"\n\nArak nodded agreement. \"Taron carved the flute and she learned to make new music.\"\n\nDrakor tore his eyes away from Erinite and studied the crowd. \"Storytelling with music and chocolate isss a powerful combination. The giant wave isss scary, and the journey story makes me want to travel.\" He turned to Arak. \"Why?\"\n\n\"We need to find more dragons for the next journey.\"\n\nDrakor had a gleam in his eyes. \"But why did you share the scary wave? Does this mean you want to move?\"\n\nArak gave the hint of a smile. \"Perhaps.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail cheerfully."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Drakor and Arak left just before dawn, and reached the octopus village in early afternoon. Sunlight slanted across the sea, making the waves sparkle like diamonds. They tied the skiff to the signal raft.\n\nThey dropped the summoning stone into the water, and it crashed onto the rock below. Scree and Orm soon popped up beside the raft.\n\nDrakor and Arak each grabbed two rocks and plunged into the sea, using the weight to speed their descent. Then they dropped one rock and hovered above the sand, weightless in the water. Arak swam after the octopi using a special dragon-stroke, pulling his wings against the water and collapsing them to begin a new stroke.\n\nDrakor quickly mastered this underwater skill and followed Arak to Orm's cave. He could barely take his eyes off the coral reef to look where he was headed. Octopi flashed gold to greet Arak, but they stared at the big ice dragon and kept their distance. Some octopi lived in natural caves beneath coral heads. Others had homes made from rocks that were strengthened by sturdy barnacles. Long strands of seaweed grew around them, making colorful gardens that partly hid these caves.\n\nThey soon reached Orm's cave, and Drakor poked his head inside. He stared. A glowing tapestry of red, green, blue, violet, and gold tunicates covered the curved walls. \"Beautiful!\" he signed.\n\nThen Arak took his turn. \"Orm, I think this is your best pattern yet. I'm glad I saw it.\" He began to shake as he ran out of air. Arak wrapped arm to claw in a quick farewell and swam back toward the raft. Drakor watched his friend grow smaller in the distance. Arak reached the raft, rocketed back to the surface, and disappeared.\n\nDrakor followed his octopus escort to Scree's cave. He peered inside, gazed up at the glowing tunicates, and his eyes grew wide with surprise. \"You have northern stars.\"\n\n\"Orm changed the pattern in honor of your visit,\" Scree replied.\n\nDrakor eyed her shelves and snapped his tail in amazement, which made a tiny wave. \"There are so many Healer items. And weapons!\" He pointed to a stack of spears leaning against the wall.\n\nScree gave him one to examine. \"Don't touch the tip,\" she warned. \"We used these when the giant squid attacked.\"\n\n\"I heard about that. What happened to the squid?\"\n\n\"They were defeated, marked, and released.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"I am not sure that an ice dragon could ever understand why you let them go.\" He eyed her display of sharp gemstone knives. \"Beautiful and deadly.\"\n\nScree smiled. \"Healers can be dangerous.\"\n\nDrakor remembered their first meeting, when she knocked him out. \"And merciful. You helped fix my wing after I tried to kill you.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Now I have a friend. A live friend is worth more than a dead enemy.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"That isss a strange idea, but I will consider it. I owe you a debt. Mind-call and I will help if I can.\" He said farewell and swam away.\n\nArak was waiting on the wood raft. \"You can hold your breath so long.\"\n\n\"That isss because I am so big,\" he said, matter-of-factly. \"Scree has many shelves in her cave. How does she remember where everything isss? Orm lives in the sea but he put stars in Scree's cave. His cave isss covered with living, glowing colors. The pattern has swirls like an aurora that becomes the sea.\"\n\nArak chuckled. \"That may be what Orm imagines in his amazing mind. He and Kragor are practically legends, the best artists we may ever know.\"\n\nThey cast off and skiff-flew home, beneath an amethyst sunset that became a diamond-filled night. Faint scents of home were carried on the wind from the distant shore.\n\nDrakor leaned into the wind with nostrils flared and a smile on his face. \"Life isss strange. I thought I would die when the Volcano knocked me off and broke my wing. Now I have seen new worlds and new ideas. Maybe there isss hope for ice dragons when we lose our world.\"\n\nThe wind shifted and Arak adjusted the skiff-wing. \"Dreams are powerful. A good plan can make them real.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Arak glowed gold beneath the last half moon before spring. He stared out to sea. \"We're holding this festival early because of the earth-shakes. The octopi will be here any moment. I can see the tips of the masts of their skiffs.\"\n\nWaves slapped the sandy shore and slipped back into the sea. A ribbon of foam was left behind, marking the reach of each new wave. Arak stood in the waves, eyes closed, ears turned forward. The music of the sea swelled, crashed, and sighed into silence, over and over. \"This is my favorite lullaby.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"Always the sea. I am learning to like your spices, but sea salt isss still the best spice. I spoke with Scree about our Volcanoes.\"\n\nArak opened his eyes and stared. \"You spoke to her in trance? Scree must be worried. I'm still impressed that she defeated three giant squid.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"That isss impressive. Scree did not mention her part in the attack.\"\n\n\"Orm told Kragor all the details. Scree led the defense. Now she's focused on the volcano, so I'm trying to find enough wood to build another fleet for the octopi.\"\n\nArak stretched his wings wide and folded them back. \"I remember when octopi had one turtle to carry things. Then Scree had her skiff idea, and now we all fly on the sea.\"\n\nDrakor ran his eyes along the rows of half-finished skiffs. \"Why so many?\"\n\n\"There are two pods. Scree wants enough skiffs for all the octopi to move.\"\n\n\"Ah. Where will your guests stay?\"\n\nArak pointed out to sea. \"We built guest homes there. Each one has a circle of stone walls and a narrow entrance. Long pieces of coral wash up after storms, and they make a sturdy roof.\"\n\nDrakor waded into deeper water and plunged his long neck into the sea. Waves ran in and fled back many times. Finally he lifted his head. \"It isss a good design.\" Cold water sleeted off his white scales like moonwater.\n\nArak laughed. \"You look like a melting icicle. Yes, it's a good design. Everything needs a good design. What's your plan for the ice dragons?\"\n\n\"I am not sure. Look!\"\n\nArak sucked in a lungful of air and shouted, \"They're here!\" He added oil and a clawfull of metals to the fire. Blue-green welcome flames shot up into the sky; the fire was the color of the sea.\n\nA fleet of skiffs slipped up onto the shore; their wood hulls grated softly against the sand. The sea rose and fell daily, with tides that pulled like powerful arms. The pod landed at high tide so their skiffs would be safely beyond the sea.\n\nDragons flew to greet them, gleaming gold in the starlight. They eagerly dragged the small skiffs even farther inland and tied them to poles sunk deep in the sand.\n\nKragor, Arak's sire, greeted Orm with the double clasp of friendship. \"I changed the design of our undersea garden. Now the tunicates glow in a star-within-star pattern of red, blue, and green. I can't wait to show you.\"\n\n\"Let's go now.\"\n\nA gray starfish washed up onto the sand between them. The crusty creature rose up onto its five arms. It walked calmly back into the sea, octopus-style, ignoring everyone.\n\nOrm laughed. \"That's a serene starfish. Kragor, I brought you tunicates in two new colors: violet and gold.\"\n\nThe dragon closed his eyes tight. \"I can see it. This new pattern will be amazing!\"\n\nArak grinned. His sire and Orm were both obsessed with art, and as close as dragon nest-mates.\n\nArafine, their leader, formally welcomed Stur and Spar, the leaders of the two pods. Octopi carefully arranged their baskets on the beach, above the tide. Then they walked back into the water on stiffened arms and rested in the sea, near their wares. Dragons crowded around baskets of exotic seaweed, live oysters, fresh scallops, shiny abalone arm bands, vials of blue-ringed octopus venom, red coral knives, and many more items. Fires dotted the beach, lighting the night. Fragrant smoke drifted across the traders.\n\nSix dragons greeted Scree and clustered around her baskets. One held a treasure trove of shimmering pearls. The second was filled to the brim with rare, deep-sea scallop shells. These bright purple, yellow, orange, and red shells often became fancy dessert plates, and some were used to decorate dragon nest bowls. The third basket held poison, and the attention of all three Healers.\n\nZarina crouched down, counting the vials. \"This is exactly what we need!\"\n\nDorali nodded agreement. \"Herbs help, but nothing beats the right dose of venom.\"\n\nDriana signed, \"We'll take them all.\"\n\nArak put a bulging sack onto the beach and opened it. \"We have lightning casts!\"\n\nSeveral octopi rose up on their arms, running to Arak through the gentle surf. They felt the clear rods, which were made by melting beach sand into glass with lightning. Krees, Scree's apprentice, traded pearls for five casts. \"These are perfect for the entrance to my cave. The rods will make a protective screen I can see through, and squeeze through.\"\n\nScree pointed to a row of skiffs, which were not yet finished.\n\n\"We're building the octopus skiffs as fast as we can, but we need more hardwood,\" Taron said.\n\nScree curled her arms nervously. \"The sea is shaking and our volcano is waking up.\" She lifted one arm up into the damp air, sensing. \"Your forest has lots of pines but few oaks. Most pine trees have weak wood for such a strong flavor, but I taste some yellow pines. These have a stronger wood than your other needle trees.\"\n\nTaron snapped his tail. \"Octopi are so efficient. That's the fastest forest survey I've ever seen! If it's acceptable, using yellow pine would speed things up.\"\n\nScree's last basket caught the eye of Arak's dragonlet, Arwina. She peeked at the collection of pearls and sighed. \"They're so pretty.\"\n\nDrakor gazed into the basket. \"Pink, orange, violet . . . these are sunrise colors.\"\n\n\"Great sky colors,\" Scree agreed. \"I collected new samples near our volcano. They match what I found in the ice abyss near your volcano. The volcanoes are connected so, if your home is truly in danger, then our reef home is too.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his wings, making a gale of wind that nearly flattened Scree. \"This isss bigger than I thought.\"\n\nArak clicked his claws together. \"Volcano explosions would affect us, too. I told Arafine that we should move our supplies now, beyond the reach of the giant waves that would follow.\"\n\nKaroon rolled his eyes. \"You're afraid of a dream? Moving our supplies would just waste our time. We should be smoking fish and preparing for the winter we know will come.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"Dreams are powerful. What we don't know for sure can still kill us. Two volcanos give signs that they will explode. Each would cause a giant wave, one after the other. If Drakor's vision is correct, there will be a monstrous wave beyond any that our ancestors ever saw. We need time to move the dragonlets and supplies beyond its grasp.\"\n\n\"How far do you think we should move?\" asked Erinite, Taron's mate. Their dragonlet was splashing happily in the sea.\n\nArak looked inland. \"Beyond the third mountain. We need to bring our Healer supplies, plenty of food, and blankets for everyone.\"\n\n\"Moving all that would take forever!\" cried a young dragon-lord.\n\n\"We have more important things to do,\" said another, sharpening his claws in the sand.\n\nZarina gave the protesters a stern look. \"Don't you remember the last big wave?\" She turned to Arak. \"We won't be able to take everything. Can we seal the cave against a wave that powerful?\"\n\nKaroon snapped his tail irritably. \"You act as if you're in charge of the clan.\"\n\nArak shook his head. \"Just my family.\"\n\nTaron pointed at the sea. \"We can debate this at the meetings. Look!\"\n\nBoth pod leaders had raised bright golden arms for attention. \"We have a surprise. We brought a coral reef.\" At their signal, all of the octopi pulsed together. Most of the octopi settled onto the shallow sea floor. Eight transformed into creamy coral heads with strands of green seaweed.\n\nOne octopus flattened her body into a lacy purple sea fan, while two more shape-shifted into blue lobsters. An orange-and-white calico crab, mustard yellow barrel sponges, and a carpet of pink-and-orange anemones appeared on the sandy sea floor.\n\nEight octopi remained at the surface. In the blink of an eye they were replaced by pink-and-blue jellyfish. They hung in the water, arms swaying with the waves. Then Scree and Orm became black stingrays and flew gracefully through this colorful shape-shifter reef.\n\nThe dragons stared, eyes wide, snapping their tails in amazement.\n\n\"They can become anything?\" Drakor asked.\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"Apparently. This is the first reef I've seen that was made from octopi.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Arak woke as dawn light filtered into his shelter, which was tucked away in thick bushes. He stretched, filled his lungs with the new day, and tossed off his old, comfortable blanket. This was woven from flax, and years of rubbing against his scales had made it even softer. He slipped off the springy matt, which was made of woven branches, and poked his head out. Sea mist softened the sharp edges of boulders that were strewn among the trees. A perfect spider web hung between branches, decorated with shimmering pearls of dew.\n\nDrakor greeted him, looking like he'd been awake for dragon-hours.\n\n\"When do you sleep?\" Arak asked. When had it become normal to talk with a legend? Drakor was now just another clan dragon . . . except that he ate like three dragons and fished like six, hauling in the huge sturgeon fish.\n\nDrakor flicked his long tail. \"There isss much to see before I leave.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"We'll miss you. See how small that spider is?\" He blew on the web, and the tiny spider scampered into hiding. \"It weaves a sticky trap for insects but makes safe strands for itself. It has a plan to survive. You need a plan to help ice dragons survive.\"\n\n\"My clan only listens to the leader, and he listens to himself,\" Drakor growled.\n\n\"Can you convince him of the danger?\"\n\n\"I will try. I think I will need to challenge Mardor, but he isss older, bigger, and stronger.\"\n\nArak clouted him on the back, hard, in an ice dragonly way. \"Then you must learn a different way to fight. And when you win, where will you go?\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously. \"You really think I can win?\"\n\nArak nodded. \"Anything is possible. Scree made a plan to defeat three giant squid, and it worked. What's your plan?\"\n\nTrading continued throughout the day, with new items. Orm made abalone arm bands that were popular with the dragon-ladies. Zarina made salty chocolate pecans that Orm simply could not resist. Precious dragon herbs were exchanged for rare seaweed from the ice abyss.\n\nAs the sun set, clan and pod gathered at the steeper shore. Dragons built a crackling fire, and the colored flames cast cheerful shadows. The entire clan of noisy dragons sat around the land side of the fire, while octopi filled the sea-side seats.\n\nDragons had pushed logs into the bank at different depths. Scree, Orm, and the other pod visitors rested on these sea seats, flowing up or down to new seats with the changing tides.\n\nThe central fire had festive blue-green flames leaping among the traditional orange and yellow from burning logs. Pine needles glowed orange and twisted like claws, climbing into the scented air.\n\nArak sat down next to Drakor, who was staring trance-like into the flames. \"What do you see?\"\n\n\"It isss a tiny Volcano.\" Drakor stretched his injured wing carefully and smiled. \"Dorali's energy-pulse helped my bones grow back together. How can something so small be so strong?\"\n\nArak laughed. \"The energy-pulse or Dorali?\n\n\"Both. Soon I will fly home.\"\n\n\"That would be a long flight for a newly healed wing. It may need more time to be strong enough.\" Arak cocked his head. \"We're leaving on another journey to the New World to harvest copper, cocoa beans, and honey. There's a cold land to the north with ice and old volcanoes. You could come along to see if this would make a good home for ice dragons. After the northern stop, we would skiff-fly directly to your home.\" Arak didn't mention that he had only seen this northern place while questing in trance, in his mind.\n\n\"How long will you be gone?\"\n\n\"A dragon-month. Dorali could help your wing heal stronger. You must be ready to win a fight.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep breath, inhaling the pleasant smoke from pine, juniper, and sweet-scented ash-wood. \"I will miss these mar-ve-lus fires . . . we have little wood to burn. I will come. Ice dragons need a new home, so it isss an important part of any plan.\" He placed both hands against Arak's, claws tilted away, in a ritual gesture. \"You are a good friend. I will not forget this.\"\n\nArafine, the leader, raised her golden wings high. Silence settled on the clan. \"It's time for storytelling.\"\n\n\"Tell us the story of the ice dragons!\" begged a dragonlet.\n\nAll eyes turned to Drakor, the living legend.\n\nArafine said, \"Arak will share our ice dragon legend. Then Drakor will share his clan's story of the ice dragon.\"\n\nArak stepped forward. He swept his wings upward and all talking stopped.\n\n\"This is the legend of the ice dragons,\" he said, in a deep, dramatic voice. He wove sign language between his words, using gestures from both dragons and octopi. Everyone had learned this mutual language and took pride in new expressions. Dragons spoke of changing their colors when considering a new idea. Octopi bent two arms like folded wings to concede that the other being was right.\n\n\"Long ago, our world was white. The sun was dim and often hidden by snowstorms. Ice covered the land. The ice dragons had large, snowy wings. Their scales were white moonstones edged with glittering diamonds. They were made from snowy moonbeams and icy starlight. Ice dragons were huge, with twice my wingspan.\"\n\nArak stretched his wings wide.\n\n\"They lived on the ice, dove into the sea for fish, and played catch with lightning as we do. Ice dragons flew far above the storms. Then their world changed. The sun became hotter, the ice began to melt, and glaciers retreated from the sea.\"\n\nArak paused dramatically while his eyes swept across the sand.\n\n\"Golden beaches were seen for the first time. Their white world had color. Some dragons moved off the ice to see the new sand. The sun caught these ice dragons and turned them to gold.\" He gathered a clawfull of sand and held it high, letting it sift through his claws. The sand and his scales gleamed golden in the firelight.\n\n\"Other dragons stayed on the ice. They worked together, rolling huge rocks to the edge of the ice. They pushed the boulders off, building an immense wall to protect the ice from the sun. But the sun was too strong. Most of the ice melted away and the ice dragons left. Stories passed down beyond memory claim that they flew very high and found a new land of ice, where they still live. And now we know this to be true.\"\n\nArak bowed.\n\nDragons thumped their tails and octopi turned exotic colors to applaud. There were violet arms with orange swirls, pink arms with blue diamonds, and more. Octopi also used their arms to sign words of praise.\n\nArak remained standing, ready to interpret Drakor's story for the octopus guests.\n\nDrakor stood and bowed politely. \"That was . . . interesting.\" He stepped into the firelight. \"This isss our story.\"\n\n\"The black Volcano rose high above the silent, endless ice. Lightning crackled through his hot, dark clouds and he roared.\" Drakor roared louder than thunder, startling the dragons.\n\n\"White lightning struck the glacier again and again. The bolts gouged sharp flakes from ancient ice and carved a white body. The ice dragon was covered with crackling scales, like the shattered surface of a frozen stream. A jagged ridge ran down the back. The Volcano melted long, smooth wings that flowed out from the ice body. He threw two bolts of black lightning and cut dark holes into the head for eyes. His sculpture was complete, and lifeless.\"\n\nThe huge white dragon crouched low, spreading his wings wide across the ground, holding as still as an ice sculpture.\n\n\"Then the Volcano gathered white diamonds, made from blood-red fire deep inside his heart. These diamonds held his fiery spirit. He ground the crystals into dust and sprinkled this over his sculpture. Diamond dust settled into the rim of each white scale.\"\n\nDrakor held up a massive, eight-sided diamond crystal that gleamed with an inner light. Then he snapped his huge wings open, springing to life with a gale of wing-wind.\n\nArak dug his claws in, refusing to budge a scale-length. He leaned into the wind.\n\n\"The ice dragon's black eyes glowed with life and her scales sparkled. She drew in her first frozen breath, sprang into the sky and flew high above the hot clouds. She dove back through black clouds, faster than the wind. The First Dragon was born of Volcano and Ice, as fierce as fiery lava and as wild as a winter gale.\"\n\nArak nodded. This story was nothing like the gentle legend he knew, where ice dragons were made of moonbeams and starlight. But it fit Drakor much better. He had described his home with its stunted trees, biting winds, and black grit from the volcano. This grit blew far out to sea, adding dark shadows to the floating white ice-mountains.\n\nArak wrinkled his nose, remembering the odors of burnt sky and rotten egg that blew across the dragon-skiff. It was a dangerous, forbidding place. Ice dragons must grow up quickly in that harsh land."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The next day, Dorali shivered as storm energy sparkled through her. She stood alone at the very edge of the meadow, watching the sky with a longing so deep it sliced to the bone.\n\nYears ago, a pack of hungry dweer nearly tore her apart. Now, the scars kept her apart. Young dragons stared at her. Others let their eyes slide away from her ugly scars, which they pretended not to see. She would never be beautiful, not with her scars. She would never be invited into the clouds by her very own dragon-lord. But she would be the best Healer the world had ever seen.\n\nClouds towered higher and darker, but with little wind. Lightning sparked in the clouds. It was a perfect day for storm dances. By tradition, mated pairs flew into the clouds first. Arak and Zarina leapt up, wingtips barely touching as they spiraled higher. Mated dragons became bright whirlwinds, twirling up until they disappeared. Then other couples formed and joined them. Would she ever be invited to dance?\n\nThe clouds blazed bright, lit by colored lightning. Dorali felt the vials of metal powders in her pouch. These were used to color the lightning red, orange, yellow, blue or purple. But not green.\n\nEach dragon-lord had a precious vial of chromium powder. This red-orange metal looked like the edge of dragon-lord scales, but it would change a lightning bolt to vivid green, like the edge of dragon-lady scales. The special bolt was only made for a dragon-lady. She could accept or toss it aside. If she accepted, they were mated for life.\n\nDorali imagined herself in the clouds, spinning through the sky, eyes locked on her partner. She felt the rumbling thunder and tasted the burnt air as dragons tossed lightning. Rainbow colors flashed in an electric display more beautiful than an aurora borealis.\n\nCrunching steps jerked Dorali from her dreams as Karoon walked up to her. What could he want?\n\n\"Would you like to dance in the clouds?\" he asked, wearing his annoying, confident smile.\n\nHer eyes widened in surprise. Karoon generally ignored her, but she'd caught him staring at her scars. \"With you?\" She studied him. He had courted another Healer for years. \"Why? Because Zarina has chosen a mate?\"\n\nKaroon flicked his tail. \"Maybe . . . partly . . . but you're a well-grown dragon-lady.\"\n\n\"And scarred.\"\n\n\"I can ignore your scars,\" he said.\n\nDorali's head buzzed as if lightning had passed too close. Her eyes burned bright with tears she would not release. She was a substitute, an after-thought, a damaged product. It took all her willpower to respond calmly. \"That's not good enough for me.\"\n\n\"What? You're rejecting me?\" Karoon sputtered. \"Who else could you find?\"\n\nHer hands were clenched so tightly that the claws bit into her. She must leave. If only she could become invisible, like Scree!\n\n\"That doesn't matter. I'd rather be comfortably alone than with someone who doesn't appreciate me.\" She turned away from the rainbow clouds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Dorali stepped into the moonlit sea, sinking her claws into the cold wet sand. The sea rose and fell around her; silvery waves slipped ashore and slid back with a sigh. Her rapid breathing gradually slowed to match the hypnotic rhythm of the sea. She would join another quest. The dragon-lords and octopi onboard the skiff accepted Dorali so completely that she was sure they did not even notice her scars. They just saw her.\n\nScree relaxed nearby. Her arms drifted back and forth with the waves, like seaweed.\n\nDorali stared longingly at the horizon. \"I must go back to sea.\"\n\nScree gave her a penetrating look. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Scree, you can change to be anything you want. Any color, texture, shape. I am always the dragon with the ugly scars.\"\n\nScree wrapped two arms around Dorali and gave her a gentle hug. \"Much depends on your perspective. I look at you and see a good friend.\" A bright blue stick with amber eyes landed on a bush at the edge of the sea. Moonlight glinted off its clear glass wings.\n\nScree pointed. \"See that dragonfly? Look at the eyes.\"\n\nDorali leaned closer to the dragonfly, moving slowly, trying to not scare it away. \"Each eye is like a tiny honeycomb.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"A dragonfly views the world through eyes that see many different pictures of one thing. It's a bit like seeing through my skin. I concentrate on all the picture-parts, put them together, and make them into one picture.\" She looked into Dorali's eyes. \"Each of us is made of many pictures, memories, dreams. You are so much more than any one dragon could ever see, and you're beautiful to everyone who cares about you.\"\n\nDorali sighed wistfully.\n\n\"Arafine says the seal of approval that matters is our own. That's true, but we all need acceptance from others. You are appreciated more than you realize.\" Scree smiled. \"We'll leave for the New World in three days. I can hardly wait! I love to travel beyond the horizon. What will we find?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS",
                "text": "Arak rose before dawn and strolled through a glass forest that glowed in the moonlight. Every twig was coated with ice, twinkling like earth-bound stars. This freezing rain was the last blast of winter. He crunched across the frozen beach, savoring the scent of the sea . . . and adventure. Arak stretched his wings and flew to the skiff.\n\nTaron greeted him as he coiled another rope. \"We're as loaded as a rain cloud.\"\n\nArak nodded, flicking his tail. \"We'll need these provisions.\"\n\n\"What did you see?\" Taron asked quietly.\n\nArak studied his friend. He had finally trusted Taron with his great secret. Dragons used their trance-stone to mind-talk to someone who was far away, but Arak could mind-travel. He saw what was there. He had extended his trance-range even more, to quest across the sea.\n\n\"I've seen strong sea-storms between here and the New World. We'll travel to our southern stop first, using the currents, and gather New World food. Then we'll skirt the coast and travel north to the copper mine. Farther north, the land has thick ice and old volcanoes with no smoke. This might make a good home for ice dragons. I wish I could search with more senses than sight.\"\n\nTaron just shook his head, with a gleam of humor in his eyes. \"And have no excuse to journey? Be glad you can't see everything.\" He tossed a heavy sack to Arak. \"Your sire and dam brought more smoked fish and another cask of fresh water. We can barely squeeze everything into the hold and still have our weather-space.\"\n\n\"Ooof!\" Arak grunted as he caught the sack. \"Kragor's been to sea and Arafine's a worried dragon-dam. There should be more than enough food for this journey. We could almost build another skiff with all the extra boards, rope, fish leather, and tools stashed for repairs.\"\n\nTaron stretched his wings. \"Octopi cleaned the barnacles off our hull and ate them as snacks. Our skiff is smooth again, almost new, so we'll fly even faster. I can't wait!\"\n\nA light morning breeze ruffled the skiff-wing as a crowd of dragons arrived to bid farewell. Shouts of \"More copper!\" and \"Don't forget chocolate!\" filled the air.\n\nArak's dam and sire arrived to wave a cheerful farewell.\n\nHis younger sibling, Korana, landed neatly beside them. Her scales gleamed as she arched her neck in a perfect curve. \"Be sure you bring back the copper we need,\" she said, as if giving an order.\n\nArak sighed and ignored her. How could she be so smart, beautiful, and obnoxious?\n\nTaron twined necks fondly with his mate, Erinite. \"I'll bring back wood for your flutes.\" He wrapped his wings around their dragonlet and gave him a toy skiff. It even had a mast and skiff-wing. \"I carved this for you. Be the wind. Practice blowing this skiff all over the pond and you'll learn how to skiff-fly.\"\n\nArak gazed into the eyes of his mate, the Healer Zarina. \"I wish you could come.\"\n\nShe twined necks with Arak. \"Soon.\"\n\n\"I'll look for healing herbs, but Dorali will probably find them first.\"\n\n\"She'll be happy to share. Dorali's like my first dragonlet, ever since she lived at the clinic with me while she healed.\" Zarina frowned. \"That dweer attack hurt her in deeper ways. Your last journey seemed to draw her out of that shell she hides in, but something new happened and she's pulled back in.\"\n\nArak looked out to the horizon. \"Who knows? Adventure may draw her out again.\" He reached down to their dragonlet. \"Arwina, you're growing like seaweed! Don't grow so fast that you fly before I get back.\" Arak ordered.\n\nShe giggled and glanced up sideways. \"Can you bring me another pretty stone?\"\n\n\"For your collection? Absolutely.\" Arak pulled a carved crystal board and a small, lumpy bag from his sack. \"Here's a special gift . . . octopus checkers with a complete set of play pearls. Orm grew them just for you. Learn how to win as any color while I'm gone.\"\n\n\"I will!\" Arwina poked her claws into the shallow holes and grooves on the board. \"It's so clear, like ice.\" She opened the bag and bounced up and down, fluttering her young wings. \"Oooh! White, pink, purple, orange, and black pearls. And even blue! They're all exactly the same size. These are perfect!\"\n\n\"Have a safe journey. I'll be waiting for you each night in trance,\" Zarina whispered to Arak.\n\n\"I'll be there,\" he said quietly. \"Soon we'll journey together.\"\n\nZarina took Arwina's hand and they moved back into the crowd.\n\nOrm and Scree climbed a ladder built onto the side of the skiff, pulling up with one arm after another. They each slid under the rail and flowed into their water-filled tubs.\n\n\"Spring has arrived,\" Scree signed, pointing. Icicles lined the railing, dripping as the sky warmed to gold.\n\nDrakor walked up and the plank, which bent ominously beneath his weight. Then Dorali and Driana came aboard.\n\nDrakor raised one eyebrow. \"Two dragon Healers?\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"We'll face new challenges on this quest. Driana and Dorali are excellent Healers and experienced journey-mates.\"\n\nLast of all, Karoon strode proudly up the plank and hopped onto the skiff. He tossed his sack neatly beside the hold door.\n\nDorali sucked in her breath. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"I volunteered. They asked for a strong dragon-lord, and I'm ready for some adventure,\" Karoon replied, with a wink.\n\nDorali spun on her heel and walked as far away as the skiff allowed.\n\nGolden dragons lined the shore, shining bright in the early sunlight. The sky was barely blue when Taron cast off. The skiff-wing filled with wind, tugging them away from shore. The skiff bounced across short, choppy waves.\n\nTaron sighed contentedly. \"Our new quest.\"\n\nScree turned green with excitement and leaned forward in her basin. \"Who knows what we'll see?\"\n\nOrm reached across and twined arms with Scree. He turned white and made an incredible design of gray sharks and red giant squid within a ring of black lightning. \"Yes indeed. Who knows? How could it possibly get any better than this?\"\n\nEarthy scents of land were soon replaced by the tang of salt spray. A long strand of seaweed floated past, torn loose by a storm. The shore disappeared and a blue circle of sea was once again their entire world.\n\nArak felt the rhythm of the waves and walked with the sea, matching his steps to the long swells beneath him.\n\nDrakor snapped his tail and pointed.\n\nManta ray fish leapt out of the water, one after another, flapping their triangle fins like wings. They flew high like huge black butterflies and splashed down into the sea.\n\nKaroon, who was still learning how to walk on sea legs, staggered to the railing and held on tight.\n\nScree smiled. \"It's good to see big fish. These must have been far from our volcano before it erupted, so they weren't killed by the heat and chemicals.\"\n\nDrakor continued to stare. \"I have never seen such fish. I think they are flying for fun, like a dragon.\"\n\nClouds blew in and the air smelled of rain. When the wind shifted, Dorali adjusted the tiller to maintain their heading. Arak closed his eyes to better feel/see the magnetic storm lines. \"This storm is north of our course,\" he said, with a sigh of relief.\n\nSunset clouds turned bright pink with a rim of gold. A dark night followed as these clouds hid the stars. Driana lit three oil lamps.\n\nArak searched the sky. \"We have no guiding stars. This is when it really helps to have an octopus on board.\"\n\nOrm took the hint. He slid down the side of the skiff and wrapped two arms securely around a narrow platform. He trailed another arm in the sea, tasting their path. \"We're still headed the right way,\" he signed with two more arms.\n\nThe sky rumbled ominously. Random clouds glowed bright with inner lightning and then disappeared into darkness.\n\nDorali gazed into the distance. \"It's so beautiful. We paint clouds with colored lightning and play games.\"\n\n\"What does the winner get?\" Drakor asked.\n\nDorali shrugged her wings. \"There's no winner. It's just for fun.\"\n\nDrakor raised one eyebrow. \"Just for fun? That isss an interesting idea.\"\n\nArak yawned as he checked the magnetic lines once more. \"Taron, I think this storm will miss us, but I'll sleep topside just in case. Call if you need help and wake me for my shift to steer.\"\n\nWaves slapped the skiff with a hypnotic rhythm. He curled up beneath a low shelter on deck and dropped into sleep, wrapped in the eternal song of the sea."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Arak woke at dawn and immediately surveyed the skiff, muttering as he wiped salt crystals from the ropes. Dried sea spray was the new frost. He turned in a circle, checking the sea, and his head jerked up. The not-so-distant sea appeared solid, like a beach of dark rocks with occasional white sprays of waves breaking against them. What could it be?\n\nSuddenly they were in the midst of a living island made from tens of thousands of manta rays. Each fish was flat, about six feet across, with a long thin tail and triangle fin-wings. The rays overlapped like rocks on the shore, one above the next. They took turns leaping out of the water, flapping their wing-like fins. Each fish made a huge splash as it crashed back into the sea.\n\nDorali gazed at the lively display. \"This is definitely worth the journey.\"\n\nTaron snapped his tail with a loud crack. \"I've crossed the sea many times, and I've never seen so many rays!\"\n\n\"Maybe we could walk across the sea on their backs,\" Arak said.\n\nOrm grinned. \"That would be an interesting journey.\"\n\nDrakor stared. \"I wish ice dragons could walk to the New World.\"\n\n\"Everyone's talking about your volcano. Why do you think there'll be a disaster?\" Karoon asked.\n\n\"I have seen all the warning signs from legends, but this isss more than a dream. I have future-sight. I saw my dam bitten by a poison lizard, in my mind, before it happened. I was not long from the shell. This happened for real the next day, and she left forever.\" Drakor flinched at the memory. \"Then I saw my sire caught in an avalanche, before it happened, and he was destroyed.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep breath and looked out to sea in the exact direction of his home. \"I have seen our Volcano explode. My mind sees more than the legend. I see the glowing red eyes of the Volcano. There isss gold and purple lightning. A burning cloud reaches up into the wind-stream. Then our home isss gone.\"\n\nDrakor's voice fell to a whisper. \"I was warned and I did not save my dam or my sire. I failed. Now I see everyone at risk, everyone I know. Will I fail again?\"\n\nArak followed Drakor's gaze across the sea. \"You didn't fail, Drakor. When you had your first visions, you didn't know it was future-sight. Now you know, and you're making plans.\" He flicked his tail uneasily. \"I hope Arafine can convince the clan to move our supplies inland.\"\n\nDrakor stared. \"She isss the leader. I still can not understand how they would not listen.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"Ice dragon rules would be great, if all leaders were good. Arafine will let everyone talk and think about 'what if'. Then she'll try to guide them to the best decision.\"\n\n\"Ice dragons have only one voice,\" he said, sadly. \"And it isss not my voice.\"\n\nArak looked him in the eye. \"It could be. Keep working on your plans.\"\n\nScree turned to Orm. \"Dragons can fly to the hills for safety. When our volcano explodes we won't have time to pulse away to safety. The pods should move now, while they can!\"\n\n\"You're not a pod leader,\" Orm reminded her.\n\n\"I spoke with Spar and Stur and I think they listened. I hope.\" She twirled her arms nervously. \"I understand the fear that sits in Drakor's eyes.\"\n\nOrm caught one of her arms and twined his own around it. \"We bartered for skiffs, and they should all be ready before we get back. Your squad leaders will make sure these skiffs are flown to the raft above each pod. They can each hold at least three adults and a juvenile. Two fast voyages would move the pods to safety. Then we can move back home.\"\n\nHer arms relaxed, spilling over the side. \"This must work.\" She gathered her arms together and popped tall like a sprouting mushroom. \"Why move back? We can start another pod! We'll bring tiny abalone, clams, and oyster spat for new farms.\"\n\nOrm rolled his eyes. \"I assume you would want to join this new pod.\"\n\nScree grinned. \"Naturally. New is interesting.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The night sky was crystal-clear, washed clean by an afternoon shower. Arak breathed deeply, inhaling the smell of the sea with its unique blend of life, death, and salt. He gazed up into the starry sky. Dragons passed on to this after-home. \"The fires of our ancestors shine bright tonight.\"\n\nTaron asked pointedly, \"What about the living? Our mates and dragonlets?\"\n\nArak looked to the east. \"Yes, it's almost time to call home. Trance-mind is a great way to talk across the sea.\" A whiff of ozone, the storm's gift, heightened his senses. He turned to Dorali. \"This is also a good night to see deeper.\"\n\nDorali nodded agreement. \"Who knows what the depths will bring?\" she said in a deep, mysterious voice. She fastened a fat, burning candle into a rock bowl and carefully lowered this onto the sea.\n\nKaroon stared. \"You're wasting a good candle!\" Then he snapped his tail. \"It floats! How?\"\n\nDorali threw a rock to him, perhaps a bit harder than necessary.\n\nKaroon caught it with one hand and his eyes grew wide. He picked two more out of the sack and began juggling, keeping a perfect rhythm. \"These are so light!\"\n\nDorali flicked her tail irritably. \"This rock floats because it's full of holes, like a sponge. The light attracts strange creatures that rise from the deep at night.\"\n\nDrakor kept his eyes on the floating candle. \"That rock isss a gift from the Volcano. The holes are from Volcano's breath.\"\n\nA patch of sea began to glow faintly as a school of small fish rose to the surface. These were creatures from another world, with huge eyes and tiny blue belly lights. They swam slowly toward the floating light.\n\nArak peered into the starlit water. \"Those fish look like carved black onyx, and their lights are glowing gemstones.\"\n\nTaron leaned over the railing for a closer look. \"Hmm. They would make interesting puzzle sculptures.\"\n\nDorali's eyes sparkled with amusement. \"If you're tired of carving wood flutes, we could use some new puzzles in the game room. Look!\"\n\nThree silver glowfish with pink lights jumped out of the sea. They were chased by a small squid with glimmering skin.\n\n\"Seeing this brings back memories of my squid visit,\" Scree mused. \"It's a window into the deep abyss, a world of night and light. Orm, you'd love those amazing living lights.\"\n\nOrm shuddered. \"I'm sure it's exquisitely beautiful, but I have definitely seen enough giant squid.\"\n\nArak caught a bright flash in the corner of his eye. A golden star streaked down through the purple darkness. Then another and another, making a rare golden shower. These long-ago ancestors were flying to a new world. He sighed. \"On a night like this, anything is possible. I believe I could hear star-song.\"\n\nScree fixed her eyes on the sky. \"It's a good thing there are so many stars! An empty sky would be dull.\"\n\nOrm tilted his head back. \"I wonder if any of these falling stars is a live dragon.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"I hope there's a Scree waiting to help, the way she healed me.\"\n\nKaroon fidgeted. \"I wonder how many stars the sky can hold. It's huge. This skiff feels even smaller than it looks.\"\n\nArak studied Karoon, who was flicking his tail and staring at the starlit horizon . . . for the way home. Why had he volunteered? Clearly Dorali loathed him, and Karoon knew it.\n\nArak remembered well how irritating Karoon could be. This dragon had tormented him for years when they were both younger. He could put a real kink in your tail, but he'd grown into a solid dragon.\n\nScree motioned him over. \"You never liked Karoon. What happened, and why is he here?\"\n\nArak leaned down and signed silently, \"Karoon made life difficult. He never missed a chance to make fun of me. When I was a dragonlet, I was caught in long mind journeys and my body was left behind. Once, Karoon and his friends built a prison of big ice blocks around my empty body. When I returned to my body I was trapped, and it was hard to break free. He may not be my favorite dragon, but this quest needed another dragon and Karoon was the only volunteer. He's nicer now, and I hope he'll grow with the journey.\"\n\nScree pointed at Karoon. \"Is he the dragon who courted Zarina?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'm glad Zarina chose me.\"\n\nScree turned one of her eyes toward Dorali. \"This will be an interesting journey.\"\n\nArak smiled and nodded agreement. He turned away and asked Taron, \"Why don't you start a game of hand-fist-claw?\"\n\nKaroon came over immediately.\n\nDrakor sat down amiably. \"What isss this game?\"\n\n\"Hand-fist-claw. A flat hand is a cloud, a fist is a rock, and claw throws lightning-fire.\" Taron demonstrated each game sign. \"A flat cloud-hand covers rock-fist to win. Rock-fist hurts fire-claw to win. Fire-claw burns the cloud-hand to win.\"\n\nDriana joined them in a circle and the game took off, with flying hands and laughter.\n\nDorali sat apart, her back to Karoon, chatting with Scree and Orm.\n\nA few days later, Arak surveyed the gray-green circle of sea beneath a bright blue circle of sky. \"I love being in the center of these circles, always wondering how the sky will change and what the sea will bring.\"\n\nDrakor glanced up from his conversation with Dorali, Orm and Scree, where he was learning new words. \"The sea isss interesting but octopus signs are amazing.\"\n\nArak checked the skiff-wing and tightened a line. \"Drakor, each language is a window into another world. Would you like to learn more? Giant squid speak with light patterns. Scree and I could teach you. Understanding what they say would be useful if you meet them. We fly along the sea, but the world below belongs to others.\"\n\nDriana raised her wings for attention. \"What should we eat today?\"\n\nEvery eye turned toward her.\n\nArak held up his hands. \"Not smoked fish again, please?\" A well-fed crew was a happy crew, and interesting meals were priceless.\n\n\"How about plankton soup and grilled shrimp?\" Driana suggested.\n\nThey all answered as one. \"Yes!\"\n\nDriana took two tightly-rolled nets from a barrel. \"I'll set the fine-mesh net to strain plankton from the sea, and add weights to the other. We could catch some of those dark red deep-sea shrimp.\"\n\nKaroon stretched and sauntered over to Drakor. \"What's in your bag?\"\n\nDrakor opened his sack. \"I have my rainbow mug, a water flask, a diamond, and metals. Cobalt makes blue lightning.\"\n\nKaroon looked into the sack and flicked his tail. \"That's a big diamond! What's so special about blue lightning?\"\n\n\"Blue sky means freedom. That isss the most precious gift.\" Drakor pulled the cork from a small jar and showed him the dark blue powder. \"Cobalt makes a lightning bolt that isss bright blue like a summer sky. Dragon-lords and dragon-ladies use blue lightning to choose a mate in the sky dances.\"\n\n\"We use green lightning,\" Arak said. \"A dragon-lord tosses it to a dragon-lady in the cloud dances, and she decides whether to choose or reject him as a mate.\" He opened his wings for balance as the skiff hit an unexpected wave. \"How's your plan?\"\n\nDrakor flexed his claws distractedly. \"The clan will not want to hear that we need to move. I must fight the leader and win to make the clan listen. But Mardor isss powerful and much bigger. I do not see how I can win.\"\n\nTaron flicked his claws out and made a lightning pearl. \"Your clan should choose the leader by a game of skill, not by size. You'd win at lightning swords.\"\n\nArak grinned. \"Drakor, winning a fight you can't win is our specialty. Just ask Scree. You'll find a way, and we'll help\"\n\nDorali tilted her head. \"If you lose, ice dragons will die. What can you use to fight?\"\n\n\"Just our bodies. No lightning strikes. We use our claws, tail, and weight. Mardor has more weight and longer arms.\"\n\nDorali touched Drakor's arm.\n\nHis eyes grew wide. \"That isss tiny lightning.\"\n\nShe flexed her claws. \"I'll teach you how to micro-zap. It's the magic of cloud sculptors and Healers. These tiny pulses of electricity can heal broken bones or grow a snowflake. This would also distract your opponent. You can't see it, can barely feel it, but the pulse could disorient Mardor like unexpected storm energy.\"\n\n\"Help me haul in these nets,\" Driana called.\n\nDrakor took the rope from Driana and pulled hand-over-hand, hauling the wide-mesh shrimp net to the skiff. He easily lifted the heavy net up over the stern and shook the catch into a wood box. Red, fist-sized shrimp tumbled down.\n\nScree, Orm, and Drakor snacked on a few fresh shrimp. The rest were dumped into a huge copper pot filled with boiling seawater and herbs.\n\nTaron pulled in the smaller plankton net and emptied it into another pot. A thick soup was boiled with seawater, sliced carrots, tubers, onions, and pepper; steam made a fragrant cloud over the skiff.\n\nTaron sniffed the scented air and sighed. \"Ahhh, plankton soup.\"\n\nDrakor peered into the pot. \"What isss plankton?\"\n\nArak shook the plankton net over a flat plate and some of the remaining specks fell out. \"Plankton is the tiny life from the top of the sea. There's a bit of almost everything, and most is too small to see.\" He handed Drakor a curved glass lens, set in a copper ring with a handle. \"Use this glass to make everything look bigger.\"\n\nDrakor peered through the lens. \"They are so small but so complicated. Beautiful.\"\n\nScree took her turn. \"I see tiny shrimp and jellyfish, gold eggs, and spikey glass balls with holes. Those look like fancy snowflakes.\"\n\nOrm looked through the magnifying lens next. He turned his skin black and covered it with white plankton pictures. \"Sea snow! It's invisible, tasty art.\"\n\n\"How do you make micro-zaps?\" Drakor asked, coming back to their earlier conversation.\n\nArak said, \"It's like zapping to light a fire, but using less power and much more control. I've experimented a little but Healers are experts.\"\n\n\"I'd like to learn,\" Karoon said.\n\nEveryone turned to stare at him.\n\nDorali narrowed her eyes and snapped her tail. \"Why?\"\n\nKaroon opened his wings wide, the sign for change. \"Our world is changing. Arak says we should stretch our wings. Why should only dragon-ladies learn this magic? And why are there no dragon-lord Healers?\"\n\nArak opened his wings, copying Karoon. \"Why indeed? Learning prevents boredom. We should all learn.\"\n\nDriana glanced from Karoon's satisfied grin to the fire in Dorali's eyes and shrugged. \"Why indeed? It's an outdated tradition. Dorali and I can take turns teaching micro-zap control and basic herbs. We could have a skiff-load of Apprentice Healers by the time we return.\"\n\nJagged, neon blue lines appeared on Scree's body and raced down each of her arms. \"Blue lightning and invisible zaps. I wish I had claws, but I can still micro-zap.\"\n\nOrm twined arms with Scree. \"Words can be as sharp as claws.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Words are powerful. I need to learn all of these micro-zaps . . . one saved Scrim's life.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"Scrim is doing so much better now, but his tiny new arms look odd.\"\n\nA manta ray the size of a half-grown dragon leapt out of the water and smashed down into the sea, sending up a ring of water. Three more flew up into the air and crashed down.\n\nOrm pointed to the sea. \"I think I'll learn to leap like a ray.\"\n\nThe sun was low in the sky, coloring the waves with reds and oranges. \"Meal time!\" Driana announced. Bowls and plates were quickly filled, and a satisfied silence descended."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "There were no clouds in the blazing blue sky. Crisp, clean shadows of wings and ropes moved across the polished wood deck. The sea was flat calm, the wind was asleep, and the skiff-wing hung loose. They were well beyond any sight of land, traveling in the center of a perfect blue circle.\n\nAll four dragon-lords sat on the deck in a circle with Dorali, close together, to block any hint of wind. They each had a ceramic bowl filled with water between their feet.\n\n\"Each zap frequency will make a different ripple pattern in the water. Watch carefully.\" Dorali put the claw of her pointer finger into the center of her water bowl and zapped. A simple series of rings spread out like a bullseye. \"Here's another frequency.\" This pattern was a delicate web with overlapping ripple circles. The third was as complicated as sea foam.\n\n\"The water must be still before you try a new zap, or the pattern will be false,\" Dorali warned. \"We'll start low and work up to higher frequencies, since that's the easiest way to learn. Try to match this pattern.\"\n\nArak tilted his ears toward Dorali, focused into his bowl, and zapped. His pattern did not match. When the water was still he tried again. And again. \"I appreciate Healer skills even more now.\"\n\nTaron narrowed his eyes in concentration and zapped again. \"So do I.\"\n\nDrakor's tail flicked up and down as he practiced different types of micro-zaps into the center his water-filled bowl. He studied the ripple patterns with a dreamy look in his eyes. \"Free-kwen-see isss interesting.\"\n\n\"Each zap frequency has a different use. The very lightest zap at the lowest frequency will help you grow a snowflake. A higher frequency knits bones and another works on dragon-scales.\"\n\nDrakor zapped again. \"I did not know there were so many patterns. I must learn the bone pattern.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"To help my sire . . . if I can.\"\n\nDorali's eyes widened. \"I thought he was killed.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"He was destroyed. An ice dragon who cannot fly feels dead inside.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she said softly. \"Tell me more, later. Now try this zap. It has more energy and a higher frequency, for muscles.\"\n\nDorali made a new, fancier pattern in her bowl.\n\nKaroon zapped and checked his ripple pattern against Dorali's. It was a poor match. He stared at his copper claws as if they must be the problem. Then he zapped into his bowl once again. \"Arrrgh! How do you zap at the right frequency? I thought it would be easy. Dragon-ladies do it.\"\n\nDorali ground her teeth. \"Just because dragon-ladies can do something doesn't mean it's easy. You learn through trial and error. Karoon, you can feel/see magnetic lines. There's an inner-mind frequency memory. Try different zaps until you get an overlapping ripple pattern just like mine. Then remember that inner-mind feeling. Make this zap frequency-pattern again and again until it's as easy as a bad habit.\" She gave Karoon a dark look as if he was a bad habit.\n\nArak, Drakor, Taron and Karoon continued to zap into the water and check Dorali's pattern. With each energy zap the water grew warmer. Finally, the bowls began to steam.\n\nDrakor jumped to his feet. \"The water isss boiling and that isss ruining my pattern!\"\n\nTaron laughed with relief. \"That's a sign to take a break.\"\n\nArak looked up. \"That's a great idea. The wind's finally picking up, and we should fly while we can.\"\n\nTaron took the helm and adjusted the skiff-wing. Dark clouds crept over the horizon. \"It's more than wind.\"\n\nArak studied the clouds. Then he closed his eyes and looked again. \"The magnetic lines are sparkling like stars. It's a true storm. Tie everything down or stash it below!\"\n\nDrakor stuffed cookware and empty water bowls in the hold. Black clouds raced across the sky, stealing the light. Wind howled and grabbed at the skiff-wing.\n\n\"Sea storms are so wonderfully unpredictable,\" Taron shouted, as he tightened his grip on the tiller.\n\nArak shouted back, \"This one's growing fast. It's feeding on the sea.\"\n\nClouds glowed from within and distant thunder rumbled. Suddenly, a long, jagged spear of lightning struck the sea right beside the skiff. Boooom! The instant thunder tore through Arak like a sharp blade.\n\nLightning burned through the dark sky, and each blinding flash lit a wakening sea. The skiff jumped clumsily across choppy gray waves. Then freezing rain struck in sheets, lashing like a waterfall of stones.\n\nDriana dropped the last supplies into the hold and quickly closed the trap door against the rain. Water would add to the weight in the hold, and too much weight would sink them.\n\nWind screamed at the skiff and piled the water ever higher. Soon the waves were nearly as tall as the mast. Taron guided the skiff while Arak searched the sea, using both regular and magnetic sight. Was that a rogue wave in the distance? He'd seen one once, while questing in trance. An immense wall of water rose up like a tsunami, far from shore, and there was no warning at all.\n\nArak breathed a sigh of relief. These waves were still dangerous, but there were no rogues.\n\nAn hour later he relieved Taron, taking his turn wrestling the wind and waves. Arak's muscles burned with the strain of guiding the skiff diagonally into the surging sea. If the skiff was caught sideways it would flip, and hitting the waves straight-on could also sink them.\n\nThe rain ended suddenly with a hail of ice-stones, but the dark clouds remained. Ice balls bounced and sparkled across the deck. The wind died down to an ominous silence in a gray world. The sea began to relax back to normal waves.\n\nThen the wind roared back to life.\n\nArak stared. Three dimples formed in the clouds and poked down toward the sea. \"Go below or tie yourself to the skiff!\"\n\nThree dark gray funnels reached down from the clouds like long fingers. Each waterspout kicked up a cloud of water as it cut across the sea. They approached the skiff from three sides like a monstrous hand. It reached down to grab them, roaring like a volcano.\n\nArak glanced from side to side. He adjusted the tiller and slipped through the menacing hand. Seawater sprayed across the skiff from all sides.\n\nDrakor grabbed a sturdy rope. \"You can not release the skiff-wing now. Let me do this.\" He wrapped the rope around Arak twice and tied him securely to the mast. Then he lashed himself to the railing, leaving slack so he could still help.\n\nAnother funnel spun down from the darkness above. Drakor stared and snapped his tail. \"That isss how I will fight,\" he shouted above the roar.\n\nArak shook water out of his eyes and shouted back, \"A waterspout?\" He guided the skiff away from the new threat.\n\n\"I will be a cyclone and whirl so fast that Mardor can not touch me.\"\n\n\"That would be a unique way to fight. Here, take the tiller and hold it steady. The wind's too strong; I need to shorten the skiff-wing.\" Arak reefed the skiff-wing and took back the tiller.\n\nDorali tugged on her rope, testing, and frowned. She began to re-knot the rope that tied her to the railing.\n\nArak flew their skiff east, away from the dangerous clouds. He bellowed into the roaring wind, \"Is everyone secured?\"\n\nA new finger poked down right above them. The funnel stopped well above the mast but the wind screamed all the way down. The skiff-wing filled with a gale and the line was ripped from Arak's hand.\n\nDorali was still tying her knot when the wind hit with full force. She was torn from her rope and thrown overboard, where she hung lifeless on the surface. Then she began to sink beneath the waves."
            },
            {
                "title": "CYCLONE FISTS",
                "text": "Karoon grabbed the knife that was strapped to his leg and cut his rope. He furled his wings against the wind and dove into the sea close to Dorali. The water splashed high as Drakor joined him a moment later, landing on the other side of her. Together they held Dorali's limp body above water while the stormy sea pulled them away from the skiff.\n\nThe dark funnel sucked back up into the cloud. A school of small silver fish flopped frantically on the deck among sparkling ice-stones, dropped by the waterspout as a parting gift.\n\nArak tossed out ring floats, attached to long emergency ropes that were tied to the railing. He and Taron pulled the three dragons back to the skiff, hauling the ropes in hand-over-hand.\n\nDrakor climbed the ladder carrying Dorali over one shoulder. He cleared a swath of deck with one sweep of his tail and laid her down gently.\n\nKaroon scrambled up the side of the skiff and darted to her side. \"Is she all right?\"\n\nDorali lay still as death on the deck. Four dragon-lords clustered around her, flicking their tails nervously.\n\nDriana shoved them all aside and knelt beside her, feeling for a pulse. She looked up at the anxious crew-mates. \"She lives.\"\n\nThe cyclone victim coughed, opened her eyes, and saw the water dripping off her scales. \"I'm all wet.\" Her whole body shook and her scales rasped like sandpaper against the wood.\n\nDriana laughed with relief. She covered Dorali with blankets and took a jar from her Healer bag. \"Nothing's broken, but you'll have bruises. That waterspout knocked you into the sea. Karoon and Drakor dove overboard to save you, but we all would have.\"\n\nDorali's eyes rounded in surprise. \"Oh. Thank you.\"\n\nDrakor leaned down and inspected Dorali's wings very carefully. He felt the bones and checked the membranes. \"Your wings are not hurt,\" he said, as if this was the most important thing in the world.\n\nDriana began rubbing salve across her wounds. \"The willow and lavender oils will help.\"\n\nArak nodded to Karoon. \"You were fast. Good instincts.\"\n\nHe slapped Drakor on his back, hard, in their customary manner. \"Well done. You're right about the waterspout idea. These cyclones are dangerous, powerful, and unpredictable. No one would expect a fight like that.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"When we walk, air feels like nothing. When we fly, air feels thick under our wings. When air spins fast it feels solid, like a tree . . . or a dragon's fist. It isss an important part of my plan. I will practice spinning until I can do this for one dragon hour.\" He picked up fish from the deck and tossed them into a barrel. Then he cleared the deck of ice-stones, using controlled sweeps of his long, white tail.\n\nDriana filled the tea pot with water, tea, and spices before breathing dragon-flames.\n\nArak sat on the deck, inhaling the spice-scented steam. He stretched gently, working kinks out of his tense, aching muscles. His mind still felt those terrible fingers reaching down from the sky. He entered the first stage of the trance-mind. Driana handed him a mug of tea and he sipped it slowly. A much-needed calm washed through him from trance and tea.\n\nDrakor walked over to Orm and Scree. \"I saved these for you.\" He dropped an ice ball into each octopus mug to cool their tea.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Scree signed. \"What were you saying to Arak about your plan?\"\n\n\"I will fight like a cyclone. I must learn how to whirl without falling down,\" he signed back.\n\n\"I can help.\" Scree spun in her tub so fast that she blurred. \"We twirl beneath the waves, and there's a secret. Look at one place while you turn, then let your head whip around. That way you won't get dizzy.\"\n\nDrakor turned in a circle, watching one spot. He turned faster and tripped over his feet.\n\nOrm sighed. \"Feet wouldn't be a problem in the water, but I suppose you must fight on land.\"\n\nKaroon leaned against the railing, watching. Then he sauntered over. \"I can help. I've had more than my share of fights. I'll teach you how to move your feet and how to judge your enemy. Watch the eyes to see what he'll do next.\"\n\n\"So I watch one spot, probably the eyes, and learn how to move my feet.\" Drakor spun slowly in a circle, watching Karoon's eyes, moving his feet carefully. He spun again, faster, and fell. He lay sprawled across the deck, staring up at the sky.\n\n\"It takes practice,\" Karoon said. \"But at least you'll have something to do on this journey. That's better than being bored.\"\n\nOrm spun like a top while tossing candies from arm to arm. \"Eat chocolate before the fight and you'll keep spinning. It's the best energy snack in the world!\" He tossed one in a perfect arc to each journey-mate, catching the last in his mouth. \"And, it's the tastiest.\"\n\n\"Practice the first stage of the trance-mind until you can stay in it for more than an hour. Learn to fight while you're relaxed and you'll fight better,\" Arak said.\n\nDorali limped over to the side of the skiff with Taron's help. She sat down on the deck and leaned against the railing. Driana covered her with blankets, tucking them gently around, and checked her eyes again. \"Your pupils are evenly dilated, so you should be fine.\"\n\nDorali coughed up more water. \"Where is my bag?\"\n\nKaroon immediately fetched her Healer bag out of the hold.\n\nDorali opened the medicine compartment and took out a small, pungent pouch. It was tied with a red warning cord in an elaborate knot. \"Drakor, this herb could help you fight longer. Flame flower is powerful. If you drink a brew from this herb, you won't feel any pain. But it's dangerous. You won't know when you're really hurt and should surrender.\"\n\nDrakor sniffed the pouch. \"It even smells strong. I will use it. I cannot give in. If I surrender, the ice dragons will die.\"\n\n\"Remember the other weapon, micro-zaps,\" Dorali said. \"This fits the rules.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"Zaps might help, but that isss not the ice dragon way.\"\n\n\"Stubborn,\" she muttered. Dorali glanced over the railing. \"Look! It's a jellyfish flower.\" Eight long, clear, sky-blue petals pulsed on the surface. Curly, rose-colored petals were visible through the glass-like center.\n\nOrm looked over the side. \"The sea always wins. We even have the prettiest flowers.\"\n\nArak took a long look and laughed. \"It is hard to compete with that.\"\n\n\"It is art,\" Orm said, as if that settled it.\n\nDrakor nodded approval. \"They are fighting flowers. I have felt their stingers.\"\n\nThe next day, when the sun was just past noon, bright colors appeared on the curled, smoky clouds. A wide rainbow skipped across the sky, coloring every patchy cloud and missing every piece of deep blue sky.\n\n\"A fire rainbow,\" Drakor whispered. \"This isss very rare.\"\n\nArak stared. \"Rainbows carry messages from our ancestors in the stars.\"\n\nDorali was sitting down, leaning against the railing. She still looked like she'd been slapped by a tsunami, but the cocoon of Healer blankets was gone. She gazed at the brilliant sky display. \"Beautiful. It's the first fire rainbow I've ever seen.\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Sky art is another reason to travel.\"\n\nTaron brought a tray full of steaming mugs. \"Red root tea with honey.\"\n\nDrakor reached for his tea and drank it down. \"It isss sweeter than berries.\"\n\nDorali took small sips. \"That's volcano hot. Drakor, when we were practicing micro-zaps, you said your sire is alive but injured. You asked about healing bones. Why?\"\n\nDrakor winced. \"It happened in winter, when I was not much more than a hatchling. My sire was on the Volcano and the earth shook. He was caught in an avalanche and broke both legs. I tried to help, but he did not heal right.\"\n\nDorali shuddered. \"Why were you there?\"\n\nArak, Taron, Driana, and even Karoon were listening to the story.\n\n\"My dam died soon after I hatched, and my dam-sister grew tired of me. I learned to find my own food and was free to explore. I often followed my sire, so quietly that he did not know I was there. This time, the mountain shook. An avalanche buried my sire. I dug him out of the snow and wrapped his broken legs tight, but they did not heal right. He cannot fly. If we cannot fly, we have no freedom. No one values us. Soon we do not value us. When an ice dragon isss hurt badly he can die from sadness.\"\n\nDrakor looked out to the horizon, rustling his wings. \"I helped him get to the hot springs near the Volcano. Then I made a shelter with rock walls and covered us both with old leaves to keep warm. I gathered lichens for food and caught rock crabs in the surf. We stayed there for dragon-weeks, sleeping near the Volcano. I could sense the magnetic shifts even in my sleep, and the rumbling shakes became a sleep-song. I felt the Volcano's beating heart and breath of steam.\"\n\n\"You have always studied the volcano,\" Dorali said.\n\nDrakor nodded. \"I feel the Volcano. The bones of my sire did not heal right. I made leg braces and crutches but still it was hard to walk. He could not launch or land, so he could not fly. When we returned to the clan I brought him food. I asked him to tell me stories, lots of stories. Zardan isss a great storyteller and knows all the legends. I did not want him to give up on life. I did not want to lose him.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep breath. \"I wish I could fix his bones. I want my sire to fly again. That isss why I am learning these zaps.\"\n\nNo one spoke. Lapping sounds of the sea and creaking of the skiff filled the silence.\n\nThen Arak asked, \"Who's helping him now?\"\n\n\"Jardor will wonder what has happened to me. He will help Zardan.\"\n\nDorali looked at Driana and she nodded assent. \"We might be able to help your sire, but this doesn't always work. Scree could put him to sleep while we break the bones and re-set them the right way. He would need to stay with us while we help him heal.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes glowed. \"He could have a normal life.\"\n\nDorali held up a warning hand. \"It's painful, and it might not work.\"\n\n\"He would try anything to fly again.\"\n\nKaroon nodded. \"Any dragon would. I understand why you followed your sire. My dam didn't have much patience for a dragonlet.\"\n\nArak gave Karoon a penetrating look. Scree said that when you looked with new eyes, this changed what you saw. While he had resented his dam for worrying too much about him, Karoon had been ignored. Had he bullied Arak and called him a worthless Dreamer because he was jealous?\n\nEverything changed when dragons became sick with a crippling illness, turning orange and slipping toward death. Arak searched across the sea and found the rare, precious copper needed for dragon health. \"Dreamer\" was now a respectable word and Karoon no longer bullied him. Life was change. He studied his old nemesis with new hope.\n\nArak checked the sky again, using all his senses, and snapped his tail with worry. Everything sparkled. A huge storm was coming. Would they reach land in time?"
            },
            {
                "title": "SUNSET DRAGONS",
                "text": "Arak checked the sky again as they neared their southern stop. \"The storm is coming but everything's already tied down. With luck, it won't strike before we reach land. Drakor, Karoon, Dorali, and I will go ashore first. Then we'll take turns. We'll gather honey, cocoa beans, herbs, mushrooms, and those tasty tubers.\"\n\nKaroon stood by the railing, leaning against it, eyes on the unseen shore. \"Land. I can smell it. Room to run, time to fly. I can hardly wait!\"\n\n\"I will finally see a honey tree,\" Drakor said with satisfaction. \"Now, let us fight.\"\n\nThey cleared a space on the deck and circled each other, eyes on eyes, watching for an opening. Karoon struck Drakor with a quick blow, tilting his claws in so no blood was drawn. Drakor stopped and shook his head in disbelief. \"How did you do that? Your arms are shorter.\"\n\n\"How did Scree defeat a giant squid? Size doesn't matter. Success is in your mind. You must believe that you can defeat Mardor.\"\n\nKaroon and Drakor sparred for another dragon-hour, flipping through the air, darting in and out. Finally, Karoon's wings began to droop like wilted leaves. He held up both hands. \"I need a break.\"\n\n\"Then I will practice my spinning.\" Drakor moved his feet in a pattern as he turned around. He spun faster and faster until he was a snowy blur. The sea flowed beneath him while he moved like the wind. He gradually opened his wings, spiraled up into the sky, and landed with a grin.\n\n\"You're getting faster every day,\" Karoon said.\n\nDrakor's eyes glowed with the praise.\n\nDorali was watching them from the corner of her eye. Karoon winked and she turned away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "They reached the coast at dawn under a blood red sky. Arak scanned the rocky shore. \"Red sky at morning, dragons take warning. Taron, we need a safe harbor.\"\n\n\"We're flying as fast as we can. If there's a protected cove, we'll find it. If not, we need to head back to sea before storm waves crash us onto the rocks.\" The sky turned an eerie orange-brown as they hunted for safety. \"New World weather is never boring.\"\n\n\"I'll fasten that,\" Drakor said, taking the damp, slippery rope from Taron. He wound the end around a metal cleat, making a secure figure eight. \"What will we look for when we land?\"\n\nArak kept his eyes on the shore. \"We'll harvest cocoa, nuts, fish, mushrooms, and tubers first, then honey. I need kapok tree fluff for skiff bolsters, and bamboo.\" He shivered as the temperature changed in a heartbeat. It was instant winter. Waves of dark brown clouds rolled across a burnt orange sky.\n\nOrm slid down into his tub for safety but tilted his head back for a better view. \"Those clouds look like chocolate icing.\"\n\nArak laughed. \"Dangerous, powerful chocolate sky icing. Even dragons avoid such skies.\"\n\nLightning splintered across the sky, making a blinding white lace against the darkness. Thunder followed and chunks of ice pelted down.\n\nTaron shouted above the rising wind. \"A cove! It's just beyond that tree. Let's anchor quickly.\"\n\nHuge trees grew almost to the water's edge, making a sturdy wind break around the semi-circle of sea. They adjusted the skiff-wing, moved to the center of the cove, and set two storm anchors. Arak nodded with satisfaction. \"We'll have a few days to harvest, load up, and then travel north. Taron, will you and Driana get five bags of rocks out of the hold?\"\n\n\"Why do you carry rocks?\" Drakor asked.\n\nTaron made a model of the skiff hull with his hands. \"The rocks are ballast. A heavy weight at the bottom of the skiff keeps it from tipping over, even in a storm. We'll dump these ordinary rocks overboard and replace them with New World food.\"\n\n\"Especially cocoa,\" Orm added. He and Scree climbed out of their deck homes and scampered to the railing like huge spiders.\n\n\"We'll make sure the anchors are well set before we explore the reefs,\" Scree promised. She slid eagerly into the welcoming sea.\n\nArak glanced over the side as two splashes melted into the waves. \"It's a relief to have octopus friends to check on those anchors.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Four dragons flew ashore. Just as they landed, freezing rain lashed across the darkened sky. Three took shelter under an oak. They made their wings into tents that covered the head and wrapped around the body, to shed water. Drakor stood alone in the rain, letting the cold water slide over him. A dragon-hour later, the fast-moving storm blew past and sunshine filled the air. Golden dragons spread their wings to dry in the warmth, while Drakor moved into the cool shade beneath a tree.\n\nArak patted a gnarled trunk that was wide enough to hide a dragon. \"These trees must live a long time, so I call them live oaks.\"\n\nA branch as long as dragon flight wound through the sky and dipped down to the ground. Karoon ran up the branch, grasped another above him, and swung from branch to branch. He grabbed another and spun around with his wings furled, then leapt gracefully to the ground. \"What a great playground! We should have one.\"\n\nDorali laughed at his antics. \"It's too big to take home.\"\n\nDrakor scooped up a clawfull of acorns from the ground. \"Here,\" he said, pouring them into her hands. \"You can grow a playground for future dragons.\"\n\nArak handed Drakor a sack. \"That's a great idea. Let's fill up a sack. Acorns are bitter, but they don't taste bad if you soak them in water for a few days. And they make good fishing bait.\"\n\n\"Bait?\" Drakor asked.\n\n\"Not all fish can be caught by claws on the surface. We push a soaked nut onto a metal hook that's tied to a line.\" Arak demonstrated with his hands, pushing a cracked acorn onto the claw of a bent finger. \"Fish and crabs bite the bait, get caught on the hook, and we pull up the line.\"\n\nDorali held a sack open while Drakor, Karoon, and Arak scooped clawfulls of acorns into it.\n\nArak smiled with satisfaction as he tied off the bulging sack. \"That's enough. Now we can gather what we really need.\"\n\nHerbs and mushrooms were harvested next. Mushrooms were dried in special pans while herbs were hung on hooks below deck. Enticing aromas rose from the hold. Four dragons flew ashore to pick cocoa beans.\n\nArak landed heavily on the skiff, staggering beneath his load, and dumped his sacks into the hold. The earthy-chocolate aroma of cocoa added to the interesting mix of smells. Drakor landed lightly as ever and added his sacks to the hold.\n\nArak gave a satisfied smile. \"We have plenty of acorns, herbs, mushrooms, and cocoa. Now for the fun part. Drakor, you and I will harvest honey. Karoon, can you and Driana gather more of those huge, tasty tubers? Taron and Dorali will watch the skiff until we're back. Then we'll get bamboo.\"\n\n\"Why bamboo? It's not nearly as strong as oak!\" Taron objected.\n\n\"But it's much lighter and will float, for a while.\"\n\nThat evening, they feasted on dragon-grilled redfish, honey-roasted almonds, fried mushrooms, and hot cocoa. Scree added stone crab claws and softshell blue crabs. Orm brought a mesh bag that bulged with seaweed. \"I found the tastiest colors: green, red, purple, and gold.\"\n\nScree helped him empty the bag. \"That's an amazing reef; our whole pod could feast like this every day. We should start a new village here.\"\n\nOrm rolled his empty bag into a tight bundle, and then restlessly squished it smaller. \"This reef is nice, but I prefer our home.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Arak and Drakor flew inland together, seeking a rare clearing within the dense forest, drawn by its unique scent. Tiny blue, yellow, and purple flowers were strewn among the sun-warmed meadow grass. Drakor landed in the center of a dragon-sized ring of white mushrooms, with caps half the size of his hand.\n\nArak landed beside him. \"This circle grows right here every year, like a magic ring, but the mushrooms are poisonous.\"\n\nBright orange dragonflies hovered and darted, catching flies and shiny green beetles. Drakor stopped to watch, tracking one with his eyes. \"That dragonfly never misses anything! I think it knows where its prey will be, gets there first, and makes the kill. It anticipates every move. The dragonfly would be a better fighter than Mardor.\"\n\n\"That's a lesson to remember: anticipate every move. If you know how Mardor fights, you can use it against him.\"\n\nDrakor sniffed the air. \"I smell something sweeter than flowers.\"\n\n\"Dragonflies are amazing hunters, but bees are amazing honey-makers. Hear that sound? I called them buzz bees until I tasted the sticky sweetness. 'Honey' is an old dragon word for 'golden treasure'. Now I call them honey bees.\"\n\nThe ancient oak was buzzing louder than a twilight field of crickets. Arak thumped the tree up and down. \"This section of the tree has honey inside. It thumps different than a solid tree. I need to know how much honey is stored inside so we don't take too much, because bees must need it to survive.\"\n\nArak nodded with satisfaction. \"There's plenty. You've had this in tea and candy. Reach into the tree and try it fresh.\"\n\nDrakor licked his claws clean while bees buzzed angrily. \"Ice dragons would love this. You grow seafood. Have you tried raising a honey crop?\"\n\n\"Once, and I found that bees can't survive the long journey home.\"\n\nArak and Drakor gathered honey until dusk, slicing off wax combs with their sharp claws. They ignored the protest of the hive, since dragon scales made excellent bee armor. They filled each jar with honeycombs and pushed in a cork stopper. These ceramic jars had a glassy glaze on the inside to be leak-proof, and they were wound with vines to be shatter-proof.\n\nThe sun dipped below the trees as the last jar was filled. Arak sat down among the wild grasses, leaning against a tree. He took a deep breath, savoring the scents of wildflowers, grass, and honey.\n\n\"Should we not leave?\" Drakor asked.\n\nArak shook his head. \"Wait for the magic.\"\n\nTwilight shadows moved out from beneath the trees and spread across the grasses. Then fireflies lit the dark meadow, making sparks in the night like visiting stars. Drakor caught one in a cage of claws and watched the yellow light flashing on and off. \"We do not have flying stars in my home.\"\n\n\"Maybe your home is too far north,\" Arak said. \"If your clan moves to the New World, you could fly south for an evening with fireflies.\"\n\nDrakor patted a bag of honey jars. \"We would also harvest honey.\"\n\nArak stuffed more leaves around the jars to protect them. \"Honey would make you popular. Can bees live in the north? Maybe you could move them to a hollow tree when the flowers start to bloom.\"\n\n\"Maybe ice dragons would move here for this,\" Drakor said, with a hopeful smile."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Scree gazed at a full moon as it rose slowly out of the sea, higher and higher, until the ruddy circle barely touched the blue-black horizon. The moon changed color as it rose beyond the sea, ever higher, until it glowed like a white pearl among the stars. This was the moon of their legends.\n\nArak lifted anchor and called point with Dorali. They checked for hidden dangers, watching for moonlit ripples and magnetic energy shadows. Taron guided the skiff around a sand bar, a submerged tree, and out to sea. They skiff-flew north through the night, chasing the guide star.\n\nJust before dawn the skiff shuddered to a stop, knocking dragons off their feet. It felt as if they had run aground on a sunken island. Then long, reddish snakes slithered over the sides and four yellow moons shone through the water. Squid!\n\nThe giants fastened their powerful suckers on the skiff and shook it. Every dragon grabbed for something solid to hold onto. Cold seawater sloshed across the deck, washing items overboard.\n\nScree grabbed the pink pearl from her Healer bag and held it high. Arak and Taron reached for their spears, which were stored in rope holders around the mast, poison-point-down. The dragons threatened the giant squid with their spears.\n\nScree spoke the squid greeting with her arms, making red and yellow spots: \"May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\"\n\nThe larger squid returned this greeting with light spots, adding a light pattern for \"Scree.\"\n\n\"Veera, it's so good to see you! Please release the skiff now, so my friends don't kill you.\"\n\nVeera looked Scree in the eye and, with a terrifying/playful smile, gave the skiff one more violent shake. Then the squid and her mate, Tarm, let their arms slide off. The skiff rocked slower and slower, until it matched the natural motion of the sea.\n\n\"Tarm said he met you up north, hunting the sky-swimmer.\" Veera eyed the white dragon. \"I see you found it.\"\n\nScree rolled her eyes. \"Him. He's an ice dragon.\" There were not enough words, so she added body-pictures to her arm-spot patterns. \"Have you seen the three squid who attacked our pod?\"\n\nVeera and Tarm both flushed a deeper red. This was their challenging-angry-scared color. Scree watched closely, seeking clues. Were they threatening, angry, scared, or all of this? She said to Tarm, \"We defeated those foolish squid, but we did not kill them.\"\n\n\"You made them glow like food-fish,\" Tarm said, and his tentacles quivered.\n\nWas he mad or laughing? Scree gave a sigh of frustration. Words meant nothing if you didn't know the emotions behind them. \"That is bad?\"\n\n\"It is better to die in battle than to be humiliated,\" Veera said. \"You should know that.\"\n\nScree stretched taller and stared up into their eyes. \"They broke the treaty. That glow is a warning. If they return, we will not miss seeing them. If anyone attacks octopi or sky-swimmers, we will capture and mark them.\"\n\n\"You made your point,\" Tarm said. He quivered again, and this time she caught the edge of a smile. \"Those three are difficult, even for squid. If they avoid our gathering, I will not miss seeing them.\"\n\nWas this a squid joke? Scree took a closer look at Tarm and his smile grew. The giants seemed simple, because they lived free in the sea and often alone. But that was an illusion. They were complicated, with many, often conflicting, emotions. \"How are the currents and the abyss?\"\n\nTarm's light-words sparkled. \"The currents are stronger, and changing. There is lots of falling ice. Many pieces are bigger than a gathering of squid. These make terrific waves when they hit the sea.\"\n\nScree curled her arms with concern. \"Is there more falling ice than usual?\"\n\n\"Lots more.\"\n\nScree talked with Tarm and Veera about their journeys by making spots on two arms. At the same time, she interpreted squid-speak for the crew by signing with other arms. Arak was the only dragon who could read squid-lights, but the squid spoke too fast for him to follow.\n\nStars faded away as the sky grew lighter. Veera said to Scree, \"It is time to return to the abyss, but we will meet again. May you surf the tangled currents of the sea forever.\"\n\nScree repeated this phrase, which was both a greeting and farewell.\n\nDrakor watched with wide eyes as both giant squid dove beyond their sight. He pointed to the messy deck, which was strewn with their supplies. \"Do they always greet you this way?\"\n\nScree nodded. \"Friendship with squid is based on respect, and that means a challenge, a test of strength and courage.\" She made a body-picture of a squid next to a white dragon, both the same size. \"Ice dragons fight to be the leader. Are squid truly different?\"\n\nDrakor laughed at the comparison. \"Squid are similar, but much bigger. I want to learn squid-speak. They could tell us where the best islands are.\"\n\nArak touched his forehead to Scree's. \"This brings back memories. You met a gathering of squid in the deep abyss . . . and survived! I'm really glad you're here to speak to these giants.\"\n\nScree gazed steadily back. \"Thanks to you, my friend.\"\n\nShe turned to Drakor. \"I'll teach you the language of squid. This is their greeting.\" She made a series of spot patterns, slowly, so he could follow. \"Imagine this spot sequence again and again, until it flows together. Learning a new language is like looking through new eyes.\"\n\nArak gave Drakor a roll of skins. \"These have the marks for 'greetings'. Keep them. Learn the spot sequence and use them to signal back to a squid.\"\n\nScree said, \"Learning the words is important, but body language means even more.\"\n\nDrakor looked northeast, toward his home. \"My sire says that the hardest part is learning to hear what is not said.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"That's true, and especially important for a leader.\"\n\nThe crew began to clean up the skiff.\n\nArak checked the pile of bamboo sticks. \"I'm glad these were tied down.\" He cut each stick the same length, just beyond a natural ring divider. Then he warmed beeswax from the honeycombs.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Drakor asked.\n\n\"I need to seal each end to keep water out.\" Arak picked up a roll of tough, fish-skin rope. \"A bamboo raft will be light and portable. This could be useful.\"\n\nDrakor studied the pile of odd, bumpy sticks. \"You have a plan.\"\n\nArak glanced at Scree and they shared a smile. \"Always.\"\n\nTaron tightened the skiff-wing and they flew north, blown by a steady wind beneath a cloudless sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Arak eased the skiff into a protected cove. He sniffed the wind, noting the different pollens and earthy scents mixed with salty sea spray. This was the middle stop, with their copper mine and trees for building skiffs. Taron set two anchors to cope with the changing tides.\n\nA narrow river fed into the cove, and an endless forest reached almost to the shore. Arak stretched his wings. \"We'll mine copper first. Then we'll cut trees and float them to the skiff.\"\n\nTaron said, \"Let's make a quick survey, farther up the river.\"\n\nThey flew over the forest and returned.\n\nTaron landed and snapped his tail. \"I saw trees that are perfect for carving flutes! They have a dense wood. Erinite says a boxwood flute plays with tones like a dragon singing, and maple wood makes a brighter sound. I carved more instruments and she made tunes to match. She has three dragons play different melodies at the same time, with flutes made from different wood. It sounds like the stars are singing!\"\n\nArak smiled. \"I can't wait to hear this. You and Erinite started a music revolution. Everyone perks up when it's her turn to share.\"\n\nTaron nodded. \"They leap up for Zarina's chocolate.\"\n\nArak's eyes glowed with memories beyond chocolate. He and his mate had been apart for too long, but soon Zarina would join him on the journeys. \"True. I'm sure the clan would like even more cocoa beans, but we had to save room in the hold. Copper's what we need most, so we'll visit the mine first.\"\n\nTaron and Driana stayed aboard the skiff while the rest flew ashore.\n\n\"The copper mine's just a short flight from here,\" Arak said.\n\nKaroon had a toothy grin as they flew above the trees. \"The famous copper mine.\"\n\nArak gave him a sharp look, but Karoon seemed serious. Had he truly changed from his old, sarcastic, bullying ways? \"There's the mine.\"\n\nThe dragons back winged, raising a cloud of red dust when they landed beside a low hill. The hill drew the inner eye, bending magnetic lines into a storm of energy.\n\nDorali held still and closed her eyes, sensing. \"It really is solid sunshine, just like you said. I see it inside my mind. I could find my way here with my eyes closed on the darkest night.\"\n\nKaroon touched the scraggly grass that covered the hill. \"I can feel/see this place like nothing before.\"\n\nDrakor stepped inside, crouching to enter the dark cave. \"Ahhh. It isss cool in here.\"\n\nArak followed Drakor into the cave. He pointed to five steel picks that were wrapped in oilcloth on a shelf, waiting. \"You can have your pick of the picks.\" A long, black snake slithered between his legs, fleeing a home that was suddenly too popular.\n\nArak lit bowls of beeswax candles that were just inside the entrance. Flames flickered in the slight breeze, revealing a comfortably high ceiling and an enchanting cave of crystals. The walls were made of colorful copper ores, like a solid aurora.\n\nNuggets of pure copper had a thin green skin. A curved wall was covered with glassy burgundy cubes. There were streaks of azurite, a crystalline blue rock that was more than half copper. Bright golden flecks in another rock caught the eye, gleaming against a background of crusty, emerald-green ores. Covellite crystals had an iridescent purple sheen, like the last light on a sunset sea.\n\nDorali entered and turned around slowly. \"It's a treasure cave. I didn't know another cave could be so beautiful, yet completely different from ours.\"\n\nDrakor ran his claws slowly down the wall. His eyes glowed in the dim light. \"I have never seen such crystals! How can they all have copper?\"\n\nKaroon grabbed a pick and swung hard, breaking off a knob of greenish rock. He stared at the gleaming copper cut. \"It's ruby gold.\" He carefully placed this in a bag.\n\nThe dragons spread out, each attacking a different section of the cave. The walls glittered in new colors as they uncovered fresh ore. Sparks flew when metal struck against metal, with ringing echoes. Crystals and nuggets fell to the floor in piles that became hills. Drakor's pile quickly became a small mountain. They took short breaks from pounding rocks to fill the bags.\n\n\"How are you doing that?\" Karoon asked Dorali. Her pile of ore-filled bags was now taller than his.\n\nShe grinned. \"I have a new way to mine. I found a micro-zap that loosens rock seams, so I don't need as many hits to knock the rocks off. Try it.\" She opened her flask, poured water into a bowl, and put a claw in the center. Ripples spread from her zap and bounced back in a flower-like pattern. She looked Karoon in the eye. \"Match my pattern.\"\n\n\"That should be easy. It's dragon-lady work.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"This dragon-lady has filled more copper bags than you have.\"\n\nArak glanced at Dorali's exceptional pile of filled bags, and put down his pick.\n\nKaroon sat down by the water bowl with a serious expression on his face. He copied Dorali's ripple pattern after only three tries.\n\nHer eyes grew wide with astonishment. \"How did you do that?\"\n\nKaroon winked. \"It's easy dragon-lady work.\"\n\n\"You've been practicing zaps.\"\n\n\"Naturally. Dragon-lady work can be useful.\"\n\n\"I need to learn this,\" Arak said. As soon as the water was still he tried to copy the ripple pattern. Then Drakor learned the new micro-zap.\n\nPounding resumed with the fierceness of an undeclared competition. Every dragon was soon covered with rock dust, which gave them a strong, earthy smell and dulled their scales.\n\nKaroon glanced at the clear sky outside the cave. \"Where are the rain clouds when you need them? I'd love a nice, cold shower. I feel gritty and look like dirt.\"\n\nDorali laughed. \"Sparkling dirt.\"\n\nEntrance shadows shifted as the sun climbed high in the sky. \"Meal break,\" Arak called. They moved outside and sat together in the shade of an old tree, eating fish rolls and drinking spiced tea. \"Dorali, that's a very useful discovery. Three dragons can do the work of four.\"\n\n\"Orm would call it very efficient.\" She took a handful of chocolate from her Healer bag. \"He sent this.\"\n\nArak smiled as he took a piece. \"Orm's energy medicine. We're so efficient that we've already filled most of our sacks. Drakor, could you carry two bags to the skiff, empty them in the hold, and bring back extra bags?\"\n\nDrakor shrugged. \"I have two arms.\" He hefted the bulging bags, curled his arms around the heavy load, and leapt into the sky.\n\nKaroon stretched his back until it cracked noisily. \"That feels good.\" He looked to the east, at the flying dragon. \"He never gets tired. I think Drakor really can win his fight.\"\n\n\"Tell him. He respects you,\" Arak said.\n\nKaroon snapped his tail in surprise. \"Me?\"\n\nArak nodded. \"You. You're helping him with the hardest thing in his life.\"\n\nKaroon gave a genuine smile that seemed to fill his body. \"Of course. He's my friend.\"\n\nDorali watched Karoon with a thoughtful expression.\n\nBreak over, they returned to the mine.\n\nDorali shined her light into a deep crack with glassy sparkles. She checked the depth of the miniature cave and busted it open. \"Arak! I found a new gemstone seam. It looks like many ice cubes all stuck together. They're pale blue and lilac.\"\n\nArak walked over and lifted a few loose cubes in his claws, feeling the light weight. \"This is fluorite. It's pretty, but not what we need. There's no copper.\"\n\nDorali slipped a few crystals into her pouch. \"It's a good souvenir.\"\n\nDuring the cool evening, they all flew bags of ore to the skiff and ate a hearty meal. The next day they mined again. Two dragons always guarded the skiff, but everyone took a turn beating on the cave walls.\n\nSalves for sore muscles soon became more popular than chocolate. Willow bark was added to their tea to reduce pain. Dorali and Driana mixed lavender, peppermint, and flame-flower oils. Scree's numbing salve was made from the toxic eggs of quithra, a lovely sea slug.\n\n\"Which treatment works best?\" Arak asked Driana, as she rubbed oils into his back.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Each has its merits. Let's experiment.\" She used the dragon oils on left arms, octopus salve on right arms, and a mix of the two on their backs. The Healers cheerfully compared notes to see which remedy worked best.\n\nDorali also experimented with micro-zaps. She ran her gently zapping fingers over Drakor's arms, sending prickly warmth deep into his muscles.\n\n\"This isss magic lightning. I do not remember ever having sore muscles.\"\n\nDorali began working on his back. \"You've never mined copper before. It's fun to discover new zaps. I use micro-energy to change the pattern of a growing snowflake. Now I'm finding new energy patterns for rocks and dragons.\"\n\n\"Life isss energy. You have mastered inner energy, so you have mastered life.\" Drakor bowed very precisely, legs together, bending from the waist. \"Thank you.\"\n\nArak was next in line. \"Ahhhh. Your latest micro-zap works wonders. You've found another way to increase efficiency.\"\n\nDorali laughed. \"And to decrease pain, I hope.\"\n\nKaroon was her last patient. He took a careful step forward, wincing with pain.\n\nDorali arched her dragon-brows. \"You want the help of a dragon-lady?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Even dragon-lady work can be useful.\"\n\nShe hesitated.\n\n\"Please?\" Karoon added quickly, with a desperate look in his eyes.\n\n\"You do need my help.\" Dorali used her salves and zaps on his lower back.\n\nKaroon sighed. \"Thank you.\"\n\nTwo days later, everyone gathered on the deck, leaving tracks in the dried sea spray. The hold was now half-filled with copper nuggets and ores. Taron fastened a sturdy net over the sparkling, shimmering, mesmerizing hoard. \"This will keep it from shifting in a storm. Ballast has to stay in the right place to keep the skiff stable.\"\n\nOrm and Scree left their tubs and took a long look into the hold before the hatch was closed. \"It's such a sparkly skiff-cave . . . as lovely as an octopus' garden.\"\n\nDrakor joined them, peering down. \"It isss beautiful ballast.\"\n\nArak closed the hatch. \"Great work! We met our copper quota ahead of schedule. Karoon, Drakor and I will start on the trees. Taron, can you, Dorali, and Driana stay aboard? The skiff needs repairs before we head north.\"\n\nTaron looked lovingly at the skiff. \"I think I have the better job.\"\n\nKaroon leaned against the railing, eyes fixed on the shore. He snapped his tail cheerfully when Arak chose him and Drakor.\n\nScree grabbed a collection bag. \"It's too cold for coral, but other reefs are interesting.\" She and Orm slid under the railing, flattening their bodies to fit through the gap. Scree re-shaped into a pointed arrow and dove seamlessly into the sea, without a splash. Orm fell in the normal way, still looking like an octopus."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Scree pulsed through clear, leaf-brown water, feeling the sharp tang of dead leaves and the slippery texture of plant oils. \"I could taste my way back here from anywhere. This water changes the color of everything; it's like seeing the world through a topaz gemstone.\"\n\nThere was no living coral, but the rock reefs attracted an abundance of life. Seaweeds, barnacles, and more covered the rocks, while fish swam among them. Scree felt/saw a large shrimp behind her. She shaped herself into a tent-like body net and caught the unwary prey. \"I needed a snack.\"\n\nThe sand around a small rock cave had an elegant design made from shells, colored stones, and seaweed. Orm turned green with excitement. \"That's an octopus garden!\" He peered into the cave, but nobody was home.\n\nScree pointed to a seahorse with his tail curled around a strand of seaweed. \"The fish are home.\"\n\nThey hunted through the reef and found five more octopus caves, but no octopi. \"Where are they?\"\n\nScree pulsed with colors. \"I want to meet them. I wonder what they're like.\"\n\nOrm turned slowly in a circle, searching. \"Maybe they're out hunting, or hiding from sharks.\"\n\n\"Or riding sharks?\"\n\nOrm grinned. \"Undoubtedly. We should check back later.\" They pulsed to the edge of the rocks, until there was only sand . . . a shifting, underwater desert. He pointed and signed, \"Look at that!\" Dark orange lobsters were walking single file. Every lobster touched the one ahead with their long antennae, making a line that stretched into the distant darkness.\n\nScree turned the color and texture of sand. She slipped silently toward the living line, arm over arm, matching the movements of a bottom wave. \"Lobsters wedge their bodies into holes and hide, so it's hard to catch them. I've never seen them travel together in the open. Where are they going? This journey must be important to take such a risk.\" She grabbed a lobster, mindful of the sharp spines. \"The dragons will love a lobster dinner!\"\n\nThey each caught eight more, stuffing them into mesh sacks until the bags were bulging with this rare catch. Scree tied the tops securely. \"This was too easy. We're hard to see, but they must notice a fellow lobster being grabbed up. They ignored us and simply closed the gaps in their line. Maybe this is a magic sea and we're invisible.\"\n\nOrm made pictures of lacy white sea-snow on his skin. \"We saw invisible plankton with Arak's glass lens. That's like magic.\"\n\nScree gave a deep sigh. \"I wish there was a magic lens to let us see the future. Drakor is so certain his volcano will explode and destroy his island. If our volcanoes are truly connected, the explosion could destroy all of our homes.\"\n\nOrm flushed blue with internal stress. He ignored the comment and added more purply-green plants to his collection sack. \"This seaweed concentrates copper just like the dragon-weed. It might grow well at our first pod home.\"\n\n\"Orm, it's great that you found another copper source. But that won't matter if our reefs are destroyed and the pods are gone!\" She dug gently into the sand around each stalk of seaweed, prying it loose, carefully protecting the roots. \"Octopi can move here and have a perfect copper crop to trade with our dragon friends.\"\n\nOrm sighed. \"You're determined to move.\"\n\n\"We need to move to survive, and the reefs here are fascinating. We might have interesting octopus neighbors. Remember Vorm? He said that the entire sea was his home, and he could not understand why anyone would want to be limited to one place. Home is where you are.\"\n\n\"Home is also where our friends are. I would miss seeing the dragons, especially Kragor,\" Orm said slowly. His color became a dull gray.\n\nScree twined arms in a comforting way. \"I'd miss Arak, Taron, Dorali, Zarina, Driana, Arafine . . .\" She flushed gray. \"You have a point. But, we could skiff-fly back to visit them.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Arak, Karoon, and Drakor flew ashore, carrying red-and-blue saws carved from rock. They cut down five oak trees before noon and began sawing off branches. The powerful scent of raw wood saturated the air.\n\nDrakor used his saw effortlessly, as if it was just a fancy claw. \"This isss a sharp blade, and pretty. What isss it made from?\"\n\n\"Corundum. It's almost as hard as diamond. The rock couldn't decide if it wanted to be a red ruby or a blue sapphire, so it's both.\"\n\nBy the end of the day, the dragons were covered in sawdust and their arms were trembling. They dragged the stripped trees to the river. Arak eyed the nearby shore. \"It's getting late. Let's rest awhile on that pebble beach. We'll float these trees to the skiff tomorrow.\"\n\nSunset colors played across the sea and fled into the night. Water rippled onto the shore, glowing blue in the darkness, colored by tiny, glowing plankton. Three dragons tilted their ears forward, listening to the hypnotic, shushing rhythm of waves.\n\nArak scooped up a handful of pebbles and tossed them into the sea. A blue glow flared bright in the night wherever stones hit the water. \"I'm making fireworks in the waves.\"\n\nDrakor walked into the sea until only his head showed. He bobbed up and down as he floated with the waves. \"This isss like dream flying.\"\n\nKaroon sprawled flat on his back, shifting back and forth to make a fitted bed in the beach. \"Oooh, this feels good . . . a pebble massage. I've never cut trees. Let's stay here tonight.\"\n\nArak joined him on the beach. He gazed up at the stars and relaxed to the music of the sea. \"Agreed.\"\n\nThey rose at dawn for a quick meal of dried fish and honey-roasted almonds. Then they floated the trees to the skiff and tied ropes around each tree. All the dragons worked together, hauling up tree after tree. Some were cut into shorter sections and stored in the hold. Four long trunks were lashed to the sides for future masts.\n\nThe sun was setting as they finished. They celebrated with a communal meal of hot cocoa, fluffy baked tubers, herbed seaweed, and lobsters from Orm and Scree.\n\nDrakor gave a deep, contented sigh. \"Lobsters for dinner. Yellow dragons know how to eat.\"\n\nArak pointed to the octopi. \"It helps to have friends like Orm and Scree.\"\n\nTaron, Dorali, and Driana stood up together. Moonlight shone on their polished wood flutes. \"Erinite made three new tunes for this journey. They run together like the sea.\"\n\nTaron blew a long, haunting note that hung in the moist air. Dorali added hers. Then three melodies wove in and out, combining to make chords before slipping into separate streams.\n\nDrakor's eyes glazed over. He stood on the deck, transfixed, until the last note faded away.\n\nArak snapped his tail in applause. \"Taron, you're right. It does sound like the stars are singing.\"\n\nDrakor gazed at the flutes. \"Taron carves music. That isss the best possible use for wood.\"\n\nArak nodded. \"He's our best carver, and now he has a new talent.\"\n\nTwo days later, Arak, Drakor, and Karoon followed the river upstream, treading silently on the thick layer of leaves. Each step released the earthy, moldy scents of the forest. Ancient, gnarled oaks soared above them, with trunks as wide as a dragon. Mottled gray and brown lizards scuttled up into the branches and held still, becoming twigs among the new leaves. Woody shelf mushrooms covered fallen trees. Mushrooms of every color flourished in the moist ground, like a field of odd flowers.\n\nKaroon picked a mushroom with a yellow cap. \"This looks tasty.\" A faint green color tinged the golden scales on his hand. He turned the mushroom over and flicked his tail in surprise. \"Where's the green from?\"\n\nArak took a look. \"The mushroom dust is green. I think this type is poisonous.\"\n\n\"Naturally, green is not safe.\" Karoon tossed it aside, muttering, \"That's a dragon-lady color.\"\n\nArak thumped a tree with dark, winding branches. \"Walnuts! We missed the fall harvest, but nuts can last through the Winter Solstice and beyond. Let's hunt for leftovers.\" He handed out sacks. \"Who can gather the most tree nuts? I saw hickory, pecan, walnut, and chestnut trees on the fly-over. Check up in the trees and scour the forest floor. The winner has no campsite duties tonight.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"A contest!\" He took an extra sack.\n\nKaroon and Drakor flitted through the forest, popping up into trees and running along the wide branches, gathering old nuts. They strolled across the forest floor, using their feet to feel the harvest. Both dragons flicked walnuts and chestnuts up into the air and caught them in open bags.\n\nArak spotted a patch of wrinkled mushrooms and gathered these, instead of nuts.\n\nAs the sun set, Karoon patted his bulging bags with a triumphant smile.\n\nDrakor stared. \"How did you win? I am bigger.\"\n\n\"I move more quickly between branches, and smaller feet can feel the nuts under leaves. Sometimes, being smaller is an advantage. Remember that when you fight.\"\n\nArak counted the filled sacks. \"Excellent! Tonight we feast. Drakor, I'll teach you the secret to making a good nut soup. Tomorrow we'll take our harvest to the skiff.\"\n\nThey made camp by the river, in a clearing beside a giant fallen tree. Arak filled a copper pot with water and hung it over the fire. Soon, steam rose like fragrant ghost flames. He made the soup with three types of nuts, sliced mushrooms, pepper and herbs. Gathering mushrooms took time and cost Arak the contest win, but he was after a bigger prize. Good food made happy journey-mates and a better journey.\n\nDrakor ladled out yet another bowl of soup and slurped hungrily. \"This isss great! Ice dragons do not have real nut trees. We have pine nuts. The trees are no taller than a dragon, with long needles and lots of pine cones. We smash the cones and pick pine nuts out of the brown seeds. They have a fatty, piney taste that isss perfect with lichen salads.\"\n\n\"Umm. Lichens.\" Arak wrinkled his nose. \"Ice dragons left our land long ago, when the fish left. They needed more food. Would ice dragons come here for the food? Some conflicts can be solved without claws.\" He opened his sack, and a pungent aroma escaped. \"I found a sassafras tree. It has three different types of leaves: one lobe, two lobes, and three lobes. The leaves are strange, but the roots are even stranger. Smell them.\"\n\nDrakor took a deep sniff. \"That isss a strong, spicy smell.\"\n\nArak nodded. He took out his small knife and cut the roots into pieces. \"I'll soak these in water with herbs and a little honey. Wait 'til you try it! Root beer is even better than red root tea.\"\n\nThe trio sat down on a thick bed of leaves, leaned against the fallen tree, and gazed into the night sky. Crystal stars sparkled around an aurora. This whisper-thin curtain of white light was folded back and forth, over and over again.\n\n\"It's a never-ending blanket. This may be the most unusual blanket I'll ever sleep beneath,\" Arak mused.\n\nDrakor yawned but his ears twitched. \"It isss hard to sleep now. I feel the Volcano rumble even in my sleep.\"\n\nArak gazed to the east, flicking his tail with concern. \"Driana, Scree, and Dorali all agree that you need this time to finish healing, or you'll have no chance to win a serious fight.\"\n\nThe next morning, Arak, Drakor, and Karoon flew to the dragon-skiff. They stowed their sacks of tree nuts in the hold. Taron joined them to fly up river, where redfish were spawning. They returned hours later with an impressive catch.\n\nDriana sharpened her blade. \"These fish are huge! We could use help.\"\n\nDorali took out her knife.\n\nKaroon gazed longingly at the shore, then back at Dorali. He met her eyes. \"I'll stay onboard.\"\n\nDorali tilted her head. \"I'll be cleaning and smoking fish. Some would call this dragon-lady work.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"It's useful work. I want to learn your secrets for making great smoked fish.\" He tossed a knife up high and caught it. \"And I'm handy with a blade.\"\n\nDorali laughed. \"Okay. You can fillet the fish.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Arak and Drakor flew back to the campsite. They walked along the river, peering into shadows on both sides. A faint path veered into the forest and they followed. Arak stopped at a large, unnaturally round structure overgrown with thick, thorny vines. \"What's this?\" He tugged on the vines, peeling back one after another.\n\nDrakor joined him, easily ripping off vines and tossing them aside. \"Dragon sign!\"\n\nTucked among the towering oaks was an old shelter that was nearly big enough to hold an ice dragon. It was made from long, bent branches that were woven together. The remains of a fish-leather cover hung in tatters.\n\nArak ran an admiring claw along the curved frame. \"They soaked oak branches to bend them like this. It's a very efficient design.\"\n\nThey hunted through the woods and found more decrepit shelters. \"Look!\" Drakor pulled a long bone from beneath a bush. \"This isss from a big lizard, bigger than the ones in our Volcano tubes. But I have not seen any lizards in this land.\"\n\nArak turned in a circle. \"I wonder where they went.\" A shallow pit was lined with large, fire-blackened river-stones. He poked among the old, charred wood. \"These are fish bones. They used fire and cooked their food.\"\n\nDrakor lifted a heavy, worn bag. The rotting leather fell apart in his hands, scattering smooth stones. He eyed the mysterious markings and shrugged his wings.\n\nArak studied the carved designs on the stones. \"Each one is different, and I have no idea what this means.\" A sparkle in the dirt caught his attention. The diamond-shaped scale was bronze with an iridescent scarlet sheen. \"This is definitely from a dragon. I've never heard of red dragons.\"\n\nA ray of sunlight sneaked through the dense forest canopy. Arak held the thick scale in the light. He tilted it back and forth, watching the colors shimmer and change. \"It's like a rare sunset opal. Arwina will love this.\" He placed the scale in his pouch. \"Scales don't just fall off. Was there a fight?\"\n\nDrakor probed through the moldy leaves and found another dragon scale. Light went into the bronze scale and flashed back as orange, ruby, or scarlet. \"Beautiful. It isss a sunset pearl. There isss a layer of clear bronze on top of many colors. My sire tells stories of sunset dragons, but I thought they were just stories. His stories always seem real.\"\n\nArak studied the ground as he walked in a spiral pattern, moving in wider circles. \"There are so many abandoned homes, all falling apart. They must have left many seasons ago. What did he say about them?\"\n\nDrakor walked beside him, poking through the ruins with a stick. He picked up one more iridescent scale and smiled. \"This isss proof for my sire. Sunset dragons have bright scarlet wings that shine when they fly. When they fold their wings, the red isss hidden. All you see isss the bronze struts. Their scales look bronze in the shadows, like trees. They glow with different sunset colors in the light. They followed the setting sun and live far away in the sunset land.\"\n\n\"This must be the sunset land. What are they like?\"\n\n\"No one knows. An ancient legend says that these dragons always seemed to know what others were thinking.\"\n\nArak flicked his tail nervously. \"Like being in trance-mind all the time? That could be hard to live with.\" He touched the trance-stone inside his travel pack, something he never left behind. \"I wonder if we could learn to trance-mind without using a stone.\"\n\nDrakor gave him a curious glance. \"Maybe they just paid close attention. I often know what someone will do just by watching. But what if they could read any mind?\"\n\nArak winced. \"That would change everything. What happened to the sunset dragons? Why did they leave? Where are they now?\" The afternoon sun sank even lower, sending a golden glow across the massive tree trunks. \"Let's head back to the campsite.\"\n\nThe night was cold, so Arak made a rough, private shelter. He crawled inside, took out his trance-stone, and focused. His trance-mind rose up through tangled oak branches and into the starry sky. He circled above the forest canopy, searching for smoke or a worn, moonlit path. Where there's smoke, there are dragons . . . maybe. He wove back and forth, crossing tens of tens of dragon-miles, while his limp body remained far behind.\n\nArak quested further south, trying to sharpen his blurry sight, and found a river. Waterfalls sprayed through pale orange holes in the rock . . . limestone eyes. There must be caves nearby, also carved through rock, that would make a perfect new home. They could live near their crucial copper mine, and the ice dragons. Then he quested toward the north, to check on their next stop.\n\nHis thoughts snapped. For the first time ever, he felt a tingling shock at the edge of his traveling consciousness. He jerked away, feeling as if someone had just trounced on his toes. Was this a new ability, to feel in trance? Was it the mysterious sunset dragons?\n\nHis mind returned to his body and Arak woke, bone-tired. He felt the thick dragon-scale in his pouch and held it up in the moonlight. Who were these dragons?"
            },
            {
                "title": "CHANGING TIDES",
                "text": "Arak awoke just before dawn and made a quick meal of leftovers. \"Let's fly south, inland. That area could be perfect for caves.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes lit up. \"You are truly thinking of moving here?\"\n\nArak slapped him on the back. \"Let's see what we find.\" The sky was just turning blue when he glimpsed the complicated stream from his secret mind-travel. He pointed. \"There!\"\n\nArak landed on the bank of a narrow river. His claws clicked against the mustard-yellow limestone. This was even more beautiful than the blurry vision in his trance-quest. Bright green moss, thick mats of ruby-red algae, and yellow sand painted the river with vivid colors.\n\nWater popped in and out of rock holes, spilled down as crystal-clear rapids, and collected in deep blue pools. It disappeared into random tunnels and spurted out as waterfalls. Smells of wet, worn rock and old moss filled his senses.\n\nDrakor landed beside him and stood stock still. \"This isss a rainbow river.\"\n\nArak grinned ear-to-ear. \"Yes. And if there's a cave to match...\"\n\nEverything they needed was in the New World, except the octopi. And Scree wanted to move here. Ice dragons would make good neighbors if Drakor was their leader. If Drakor lost to Mardor, the ice dragons wouldn't move. Arak's main concern was the sunset dragons that had disturbed his trance. What were they like?\n\n\"Drakor, I'll head due west and you search farther south. We'll meet back here at sunset.\"\n\nThis was the only day to search. Blurry mind-traveling was quick and useful, but the trance had its limits. This search would use all his senses.\n\nArak flew close to the ground as he crossed each stream. He watched for sinkholes made from fallen caves. He flared his nostrils to catch the special scent of cave air.\n\nArak searched for magnetic wrinkles, for the odd patterns they made above hollow ground. He sharpened his inner eye to feel/see the energy of water running beneath the ground. He concentrated so hard he thought his brain would cramp up.\n\nGolden rays of light slanted across the ground as the sun sank toward the horizon. Arak flicked his tail nervously. What if there was no cave?\n\nSuddenly, a dark cloud flew out from the hillside. Arak sped toward the noisy swarm of black insects. He followed their path back and found a narrow crevice that was hidden by bushes.\n\nArak peered inside, savoring the taste of cool, damp air that seeped out. The fading light showed a chamber that disappeared into darkness. He lit a branch, twisted his body sideways, and stepped inside.\n\nThis was a cave of dreams.\n\nArak gazed up at a high ceiling that glimmered with the pale green light of glow worms. There was plenty of room to stretch their wings. This cave would make a great winter shelter!\n\nDamp limestone walls glowed in the torchlight. All three dragon colors flowed together: golden-brown, reds, and white. What would it be like to live near his cousins, to learn new skills and old forgotten legends?\n\nArak flicked his tail with concern. Were sunset dragons dangerous? Maybe. But crossing the sea to gather copper was also dangerous. If the clan moved here, they'd be near the crucial copper and their favorite new foods. Risk and reward. Everything worth doing starts with a dream, so I'll dream big.\n\nArak walked into the depths of the cave, carrying his torch, peering into dark chambers. He nodded with satisfaction. Dragonlets would fit nicely into this room, far from the entrance. It would be hard for those curious rascals to sneak out.\n\nA circle of light decorated the cave floor with changing sunset colors. Arak glanced up. This natural chimney would give light and good air flow. Perfect! He walked among sleek columns that splashed down from the ceiling like frozen waterfalls. He could see Arwina playing dragon-tag, laughing and running through this stone forest.\n\nWould the clan move here, or at least some of the dragons? And Scree and Orm . . . His mind whirled. He had found a place to live, but friends made a home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Scree and Orm pulsed above a rock reef, searching for the missing octopi. An out-of-place movement caught Orm's eye and they jetted down. A rock became a blue octopus, wary and challenging.\n\n\"We're just visiting,\" Scree said, moving her arms slowly, trying not to alarm him. \"I'm a Healer.\" She bent her arms into a triangle, making the Healer sign.\n\nThe octopus relaxed his arms but kept the blue color. \"We held the final ceremony for our Healer two days ago.\" One eye swiveled around, as if searching for more visitors. \"Where are you from?\"\n\n\"Far away. I'm Scree, this is Orm. Your garden patterns are amazing.\"\n\n\"I'm Dram.\" He eyed Scree's Healer bag and added, \"We could use your skills.\"\n\n\"Lead the way.\"\n\nThe trio pulsed deep into the reef, to a jumble of rocks surrounded by nervous, color-changing octopi. Four were working together, arms suctioned to a rock, trying to pull it away. The narrow gaps between these rocks would let in light, but not much else. Scree curled her arms with concern. \"What happened?\"\n\nDram said, \"The sea floor shook. Rocks killed our Healer and covered my mate. Kray is alive, but she's too injured to shift thin and escape. We can't move these rocks.\"\n\nOrm tasted the rock with an arm. \"It's limestone. That's a soft rock, so we can cut through it.\" He pulled a knife from its sheath at the top of one arm. The blade was razor-sharp, smooth along one edge and jagged on the other.\n\nScree pulled two small garnet saws from her bag and gave them to Orm. \"Share these. I'll see what I can do while you cut through this rock.\" She shifted flat, becoming so thin that her nerves were squished and she could barely feel. Scree slipped through a crack between the rocks and took her normal shape.\n\nAn octopus lay on the sand, eyes glazed, twitching feebly. Two arms were crushed, and pale blue blood leaked from many cuts. Scree spoke with calm, almost musical arms. \"I'm a Healer. You'll be out of here soon, but that bleeding must be stopped now.\" She poked two arms out through the crack and requested items from her Healer bag. Orm passed them down to her.\n\nScree rubbed oily salve onto Kray's cuts and the bleeding stopped. She added two drops to a vial of water. \"Kray, please drink this. It will help the pain. Your arms will re-grow.\" The patient instinctively swallowed as Scree poured the potion down her throat. Moments later, she slept beyond pain.\n\nScree tied off the damaged arms at the body. She used a sharp blade to remove the crushed part and repeated, \"They will re-grow.\" This was for her own reassurance, since the patient was fast asleep.\n\nRasping sounds vibrated through the sea and then a solid thunk. Light poured into the hollow. Dram dropped through the new opening, gazed at his injured mate, and curled his arms in distress.\n\nScree answered his unspoken questions. \"Kray will recover. Two arms were beyond repair, but they should re-grow within a year. She has some deep cuts. Don't move her for a few days, or the bleeding could start again.\"\n\nDram twined arms in friendship with Scree. \"Thank you.\" They slid out through the new hole.\n\nDram's skin sparkled as he twined arms with Orm. \"We must celebrate!\"\n\nAn octopus pulsed slowly to Scree. Her skin was grayed with age, but her eyes were bright. \"Enjoy the feast. I'll watch over with Kray.\" She slipped through the opening and settled onto the sand beside the patient.\n\nThe rest of the pod gathered at the feasting circle, which was made from smooth red stones. Octopi painted the circle with food. They made wavy rings with different colors and textures, and soon it looked like a jellyfish flower. The center was a huge pile of mussels with purple-black shells. Next was a wavy ring of clams, then a dark band of mussels, then creamy-gray oysters, and more mussels. The outer star was made from red, golden-brown, and purple seaweeds.\n\nScree made a skin picture of a grass-like plant with purple flowers and a fat white bulb. \"Garlic is a land-plant that will make this taste even better.\" She added some crushed garlic at each tip of the outer star.\n\nOctopus arms twisted with delight as they tasted this new flavor through the sea.\n\nScrap, a juvenile, piled clams and mussels onto his shell plate. He added garlic, took a bite, and turned green with pleasure. \"Land-food tastes great with seafood!\"\n\nScree was staring at the shells. \"I've never seen so much shell-food from a natural reef!\"\n\n\"A warm current came from the northeast and the starfish died. The mussels and clams were happy.\"\n\nScree turned in a slow circle. \"I knew something was missing from this reef. Starfish add color.\"\n\nOrm finished eating a huge clam before answering. \"Starfish also eat shell-food, so that leaves more for us.\"\n\nScree gazed northeast. \"That warm current could have come from Drakor's volcano island.\"\n\nOrm handed her a plate. \"Everything is connected. Scree, try the clams.\"\n\nShe added them to her plate. \"They're tasty. No starfish means more clams. Change one thing and change the world.\"\n\nScree flicked the tip of an arm like the tail of a worried dragon, thinking. What would happen next? A change that seemed good could still cause something bad. She stretched the worry out of her arms. What will be, will be. And then we'll make it work.\n\nAfter the feast, the octopi shared stories with body-pictures. The pod was fascinated by dragons, and Scree's pictures from the abyss were popular. But Orm's stories were the best. The colorful arms of octopus applause seemed like a field of fantasy flowers.\n\nTime passed unnoticed, until Scree felt a lengthening underwater shadow. She checked on her patient and reassured Kray that her arms would re-grow. The elderly octopus who had helped was gone. A youngster was feeding Kray from a shell bowl.\n\nScree eyed an old, weathered Healer bag that was propped against a rock. She took another look at the small octopus. \"Are you the Healer's apprentice?\"\n\n\"I'm Brie.\" Her arms were bruised and her face wore the mask of sorrow. \"The Healer chose me three moons ago. I still have much to learn. When the world shook, I was hurt and my mentor was killed.\"\n\nScree twined arms gently with the youngster. \"I'm sorry. It's so hard to lose a mentor.\"\n\n\"I watched when you helped Kray, to learn.\"\n\nScree pointed to the bowl he held, which was filled with choice pieces from the feast. \"You have the heart of a Healer. Your mentor chose well.\" She stayed for another hour, explaining the most important items in the former Healer's bag. Then she gave Brie a stoppered bottle that was carved from black coral. \"This pain-killer is strong, so use it carefully. Give Kray one drop, two times each day, for an eight-day.\"\n\nScree approached Dram, holding her arms formally straight. \"I would like to honor your dead Healer.\"\n\nThe pod took their visitors to a ring of purple-green seaweed around a cairn of stones. Scree added a large pearl to the stones that covered the body. She bowed her head in sorrow, feeling the emptiness of loss. It would have been wonderful to learn from another octopus Healer.\n\nAn orange-and-pink sea slug twisted through the water, dancing in the late afternoon light that filtered through the sea. Scree checked the shadows. It was time to leave.\n\n\"Our reef has enough food for another pod. We could use a Healer,\" Dram said to Scree. \"And a talented storyteller,\" he added, turning one eye to Orm.\n\nScree smiled at the invitation. \"You'd be great neighbors. We might return.\" They twined arms with the double clasp of friendship.\n\nScree pulsed back to the skiff with Orm. \"That's a friendly pod.\"\n\nOrm twined arms and perfectly matched her pulses. \"How could they not like you?\"\n\nScree laughed. \"I think what they really want is your storytelling.\" She playfully changed her rhythm and he matched it. \"I learned something new. The world shakes here, too, but I don't taste any volcanoes.\"\n\nOrm nodded. \"I learned that mussels are everywhere. Dragons could gather plenty from the shore.\"\n\n\"You found a farm that grows on its own.\" Scree twined another arm with Orm and twirled up to the surface."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Arak focused his inner eye on the night sky, searching for the unpredictable storms. Taron was at the helm, skirting the coastline, ready to seek a safe harbor. They were swiftly approaching their third and last New World stop.\n\nDorali, Karoon, and Driana sat together on the cold deck. They grabbed handfuls of kapok tree fluff from a barrel and stuffed this into fish-skin tubes.\n\nKaroon picked up a long, fat tube and held it out to Dorali. \"What is this? It looks like a snake swallowed a watermelon.\"\n\nDorali laughed and tied off the end. \"They're bolsters, and they do look odd. We'll hang them over the side to protect the skiff. Our next stop may have strong tides.\"\n\nDrakor gazed to the east, rustling his wings uneasily. \"I feel we have little time left.\"\n\nArak pointed north. \"With this wind, we'll reach our stop in no time. Then we'll head straight to your island.\" But his eyes were also drawn to the east, and the tip of his tail flicked up and down with worry. When would this disaster happen? Was Drakor ready to fight? He seemed stronger every day. If they reached his homeland before Drakor was ready, he would surely lose. But, if they came too late, it wouldn't matter.\n\nStars faded and the sea grew louder. They reached the northern bay at dawn, as violet and coral layers colored the sky. Sharp black boulders dotted the sea like flies on honey. These islands were solid rock, taller than the mast, with steep sides and scruffy pine trees on the top.\n\nDebris was piled high up on the rocky shore, warning of dramatic tides that rose and fell the length of a giant squid. The breeze carried stinky aromas from rotting seaweed and the piney scent of trees.\n\nArak and Taron set three anchors to keep the skiff away from each of the black islands. They used extra-long ropes to allow for the changing tides.\n\nArak checked the bolsters and flexed his wings nervously. The rock islands were more dangerous than ice-mountains. \"These bolsters should protect the skiff if a strong tide pulls it against the rocks.\"\n\n\"We'll check the anchors below, and wedge them between undersea boulders,\" Scree promised. Then she and Orm slipped overboard.\n\nDrakor leaned against the railing, studying the rocky shore. Ice sparkled on the ground beneath stunted trees. \"This looks promising. It isss still cold.\"\n\nArak pointed to a distant, cone-shaped mountain. \"I think that's an old volcano.\"\n\n\"That isss a good place to start.\"\n\n\"What do you hope to find?\"\n\nDrakor gazed at the mountain. \"The perfect place would have a quiet Volcano with hot springs, great fishing, pine nuts and lichens. Something to replace our sacred pools would be nice.\"\n\nThen Drakor's tail drooped to the ground. \"Any home isss better than one that will be gone.\"\n\nArak looked at each of his crew-mates. \"Any of you can come ashore, but we need dragons to prepare for our visit to the ice dragons.\"\n\nDorali volunteered to stay.\n\nKaroon gazed at Dorali. \"I'll stay, too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Arak and Drakor soared inland, flying high to survey the land. They punched through a cloud and landed on the volcano. The windy peak had snow, dry grasses, and short, twisted trees. A beam of light found Drakor; he sparkled like a carpet of diamonds next to the patch of old, crumpled ice.\n\nArak dug his claws into the frosty ground. \"This dirt is thick. I think the volcano has been quiet since the First Dragon spoke.\"\n\nDrakor flared his nostrils. \"There are no Volcano smells and no wandering magnetic wrinkles. It isss sleeping deep.\"\n\nArak walked to the edge and faced due east. \"What a view! I can see the shore.\"\n\nDrakor stared down into the valley. \"What isss jumping in that river?\"\n\n\"Fish are heading upstream to spawn. That's a bonus. Let's fly south and check out that forest.\"\n\nThey landed in shadows between pine trees. Arak heard the quiet hum of crickets and faint rustlings in the bushes. Small lizards that he could barely hear, and almost see, jumped from branch to branch. They changed their colors as they moved, with instant camouflage that was nearly as perfect as an octopus.\n\nArak pointed to tracks in the mud with deep claw marks; water pooled in the big paw prints. \"Here's another trace of the large lizards, and it's fresh, but we still haven't seen them. If they can camouflage like the small lizards, we might never see them. Big, invisible hunters. Do they hunt alone or in packs? If they're like the dweer, this could be a problem. We'll sleep onboard tonight.\"\n\nThat evening they flew high over a field of white clouds, heading for the comfort and safety of the skiff. A bright moon rose slowly above the clouds and into the black sky. Red and green lights danced among the stars.\n\n\"I will miss my home. But this sunset land has great auroras,\" Drakor said, with a sad smile.\n\nArak sighed. \"I'm so sorry, Drakor. But there's plenty of room here for sunset dragons and ice dragons.\"\n\nDrakor curved his neck around to look into Arak's eyes. \"There isss also room for yellow dragons.\"\n\nArak nodded, and they flew the rest of the way in a comfortable silence."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Arak, Drakor, Dorali, and Driana went ashore at dawn to gather rare herbs. Suddenly, the sky turned gray. Clouds towered high and the sky crackled with energy, but there was little wind.\n\nArak gazed into the sky. \"It's a perfect day for storm dances.\"\n\nDorali glanced up and quickly looked away.\n\n\"What are these storm dances?\" Drakor asked.\n\n\"We dance in the sky and paint the clouds with colored lightning. We play dragon games,\" Driana said.\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"A new game! What do you do?\"\n\nDriana stretched her wings, warming up as she explained. \"We catch a small lightning bolt and add metal powder to change the color. Each lightning color has a different game rule. Red: Spin around before you catch the lightning. Orange: Catch the lightning, twirl it on your claws, and release it to the clouds. Yellow: Toss it back twice. Blue: Twirl it on your claws before you toss it to another dragon. Purple: Do a flip in the air before you catch it. That's the hardest one. It's a challenge to remember each rule and do it fast. You need lightning reflexes.\"\n\nDrakor had both ears tilted toward Driana and his eyes burned with intensity. \"Red, orange, yellow, blue, purple. That isss a rule for every rainbow color except green. What about green lightning?\"\n\n\"Green lightning is only for courting, not games.\" Arak took a leather box from his pack, with a flip lid and glass vials. \"Drakor, you can use my kit. The lightning color is on the stopper of each vial. Pour some metal into a bolt to color it.\"\n\nDriana's eyes glowed. \"Feel that energy! I'm ready to fly.\"\n\n\"Will you play too, Dorali?\" Drakor asked.\n\nArak caught Driana's eye with a silent plea. Dorali was horribly wounded when she was too young to fly, and the holes in her wings healed slowly. She lived at the Healer clinic, apart from the dragon clan. He'd seen Dorali juggling lightning on her own, but she had never played with other dragons in the clouds.\n\nDriana gave Arak a slight nod. \"Dorali, it's just a game with friends. Please join us.\"\n\nDorali trembled. Then she released a long sigh and straightened her wings. \"Thanks. I'd like that.\"\n\nDrakor, Dorali, and Driana flew higher and higher until they disappeared inside the clouds. Colored lightning flashed and spun through the gray clouds like fiery sparkles inside an opal.\n\nArak watched the rainbow clouds from below with a satisfied smile. Zarina would be pleased for her prot\u00e9g\u00e9."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "The northern lobster held its ground as Scree approached, clicking strong pincers wider than her arm. She backed away. \"These lobsters are as big as we are.\"\n\nOrm shrugged his octopus shoulders. \"They grow big up north. Our lobsters have sharp spines, but these have impressive claws.\"\n\nScree drew icicles on her skin with her color cells. \"Everything grows bigger here. Maybe it's the cold water.\"\n\nOrm made a body-picture of icicles that melted away. \"I prefer warmth and a coral reef, but this new seaweed is interesting. Let's hunt for some nice, reasonable clams.\"\n\nThey skimmed just above the sand, feeling for the slightest movement below. Then they jabbed into the sand with sticks to find the living rocks below. Working together, they soon filled a sack with clams.\n\nOrm hefted the sack. \"We have enough for dinner for everyone.\"\n\nA strong tide ran out to sea at dawn and swept back to land each night. Scree and Orm relaxed into the pull of this predictable water ride, heading for shore and the skiff.\n\nScree turned happy-green. \"I could get used to this.\"\n\nOrm matched her exact shade of emerald. \"But we would need to plan everything around these tides.\"\n\nThe tide carried them north of the skiff cove, to a place with heavy surf. As they drew near, Scree shot to the surface and caught the top of a wave rushing to shore. She straightened her body like a board, merged all of her arms together, and surfed. She rode the wave faster than a shark!\n\nThe water curled over Scree like a hungry mouth and became a tunnel through the sea. She rocketed through the tunnel, hidden by webs of white foam, tingling with the raw energy. The sea flattened out near shore. She took her normal shape, slipped under the waves, and pulsed back to Orm.\n\nHe was staring wide-eyed. \"What gave you that idea?\"\n\n\"I've wanted to ride a wave ever since I spoke with a squid in the abyss, the one who rode a thunder-wave.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"When an ice-mountain breaks off and hits the sea, it makes a thunder-wave for giant squid to ride.\"\n\n\"Naturally, ice falls to amuse the squid.\"\n\n\"And waves curl over to amuse octopi. You should ride one. It's like being a squid surfing the deep currents, and a dragon riding storm winds, all together.\"\n\n\"If we move to the new reefs, and if our dragon friends move too, I'll celebrate with a wave-ride.\"\n\nScree laughed. \"I want to see that.\" Her skin turned a marbled mix of gold, white, and red. \"Imagine gold dragons and ice dragons and sunset dragons all living here, together.\"\n\nOrm scratched his 'chin' with the tip of an arm. \"That could be interesting. They're all dragons, but each group seems so different.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "The dark sea sparkled beneath a starry sky and splashed against the hull as they headed for Drakor's home. Karoon and Driana took turns flying the skiff, steering by the stars. A bright aurora rippled in the sky, lighting the busy deck below.\n\nArak and Dorali finished tying the bamboo stalks together. They rolled this raft into a tight bundle and tied it together; two sturdy wood handles poked out. Arak paused from his work to gaze up at the sky. \"This aurora looks like tourmaline crystals, dark pink above and green below.\"\n\nScree tilted her head back. \"Crystal stars on a gemstone curtain. What a perfect night.\" She drenched the top of her body in ruby, while emerald green spread down her arms. Sparkly white stars emerged from her skin in a northern pattern.\n\nOrm made the same color pattern in his skin and added southern stars. He twined two matching green arms with Scree and said, with a twinkle in his eyes, \"Together we are the world.\"\n\nOrm kept fish-skin pieces in place, using two more arms, while Scree sewed them together. She held a sharp bone needle in the thinned, curled tip of her arm.\n\nArak took another look. Scree was actually wielding three needles with three arms. Her arms seemed to move of their own accord, working together with effortless efficiency.\n\nDorali glanced over and shook her head. \"How do you sew with more than one arm at the same time? You're not even paying full attention.\"\n\nScree grinned as she spoke with two more arms. \"It helps to have a mind in each arm.\"\n\nSteaming cups of spiced tea and dragon-roasted almonds scented the air, while fish-skins added their own smell. Taron walked carefully across the deck, carrying a huge tray with snacks and mugs of red root tea. \"Scree, that's your third fish-skin rectangle. What are they for?\"\n\nScree stuck her needles into the skins and stretched each arm. She accepted her small mug and turned one eye to Arak. \"These are for the ice dragons. Zarina is making sure that the new octopus skiffs are ready for the pods, and I'm helping Drakor.\" She curled her arms nervously, with one eye facing her home and one eye facing Drakor's island. \"I hope everything is finished in time.\"\n\nArak slid his bamboo raft across the damp deck, tied it to the railing, and sat down with a satisfied sigh. He swallowed his tea and chewed a handful of warm, smoky almonds. \"It's nippy tonight. I really need this energy boost.\"\n\nDriana grabbed some almonds and joined them. \"What's next?\"\n\nArak said, \"We need to finish the slings.\"\n\n\"The what?\" Taron asked.\n\nArak held up the huge rectangle that Scree had made. \"The slings need sturdy wood handles. When Drakor wins, he'll need slings to carry young dragonlets to the New World.\"\n\nDrakor flicked his tail nervously. \"When? Not if?\"\n\nArak nodded soberly. \"You must win.\"\n\nKaroon finished his turn at skiff-flying and slapped Drakor on the back. \"No pressure.\"\n\n\"Why don't we have the ice dragons stay with us?\" Dorali asked.\n\nArak held up his fist and raised a clawed finger as he listed each reason. \"First, our skiff could only carry a few ice dragons. We live too far away for the others to reach us. The wind blows the wrong way for them to fly to us, and there's no place to rest.\"\n\nArak raised another finger. \"Second, even if the ice dragons could reach us, there's not enough food to support so many extra dragons for a long stay. To make things worse, the tsunami that follows could destroy our oyster crop and many of the nut trees. The undersea volcano could destroy the octopus crops. If this happens, we would barely have enough stored food to feed our own clan.\"\n\nHe raised a third finger and gazed to the west. \"Third, the ice dragon island is fairly close to Drakor's New World home, and the upper wind-stream flows that way. They should make it there safely in one long flight.\"\n\nDorali looked from Arak's fingers to his serious face. \"I see that you've given this some thought.\"\n\nArak sighed. \"Yes.\"\n\nDrakor signed quietly to himself, \"I hope I am ready.\"\n\nKaroon gave Drakor a concerned glance, then stood up and faced him. \"I always feel better when I'm doing something. Let's practice.\"\n\nWhen they stopped, Dorali gave them each a cup of tea. \"You need to drink more when you practice.\"\n\nThe following day, Arak studied the eastern sky with his eyes closed. \"Magnetic wrinkles are gathering like a swarm of locusts. That's a warning sign from your legends. You're absolutely certain the volcano will destroy your home the next time it explodes?\"\n\nDrakor shuddered. \"I see our Volcano explode, with glowing red eyes and lightning. A cloud of burning dust reaches the wind-stream. Then our home isss gone.\"\n\n\"It must be hard to sleep with that vision. Have you seen when this will happen?\"\n\n\"I do not know. I feel that it will be soon.\"\n\nArak flicked the tip of his tail, deep in thought. Finally he asked, \"Were there stars in your vision?\"\n\nDrakor closed his eyes. Arak waited quietly while he meditated.\n\n\"The sky has clouds so I cannot see all the stars.\" He opened his eyes. \"I am not certain, but our night sky should match the Volcano message in three dragon-weeks.\"\n\nQuiet waves could be heard in the profound silence that followed. Then Arak said, \"That's not much time. It will be dangerous to face Mardor and hard to convince the clan that they should leave.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So I will come, too, and help.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail. \"You will help me? Even with the danger? If I lose, Mardor will be a danger to you.\"\n\nArak shrugged his wings. \"Friends help friends. I finally found the legendary ice dragons. Maybe they're not what I expected, but I don't want to lose them now.\"\n\nDorali moved closer. \"I'll come, too. You may need a Healer.\"\n\nDrakor's teeth sparkled within his wide grin. \"Yellow dragons. What will the ice dragons think?\"\n\nKaroon cast a worried look at Dorali and Drakor. \"I'll come.\"\n\nArak shook his head. \"Karoon, I need you here. Two companions is the right number to go ashore; more could be seen as a challenge. And, I have a plan.\"\n\nScree's eyes twinkled. \"Of course you do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "INTO FIRE AND ICE",
                "text": "Ice-mountains dotted the cold, blue-gray sea. Arak and Taron anchored the dragon-skiff between two white giants, a short flight from the island. They lowered the top section of the tall mast to shorten it below the ice. The floating mountains were smaller now, and their sharp edges had been smoothed by melting. But the stench of rotten eggs was as strong as ever.\n\nDrakor took a deep breath and wrinkled his nose. \"I had almost forgotten the Volcano's breath. Even this will be hard to leave. It smells like home.\"\n\nThe Volcano was alive and well, sending regular tremors through land, sea, and air like a beating heart. Magnetic lines shimmered with the force. Drakor drummed his claws together, matching the beat. \"The Volcano heart isss beating even faster now.\"\n\nArak grabbed the rolls of fish-skins. \"Then we must be faster, too. Let's get to work.\"\n\nThe dragons worked at a furious pace, fastening ice-white skins to the top of bamboo poles. Soon a camouflage tent covered the skiff from stem to stern, matching the ice-mountains and hiding the dragons.\n\n\"Hiding is safer than fighting. We must protect the skiff and leave within five days,\" Arak warned.\n\nDorali tied an extra knot through the last fish-skin. \"This place seems almost the same but everything feels different . . . I feel different.\"\n\n\"You're seeing with new eyes,\" Scree said.\n\n\"Waterspouts, sunset dragons, and volcano drumbeats. I'm definitely seeing with new eyes, and new eye-skin,\" Orm quipped.\n\nArak arched his long neck and stared into the colored sky. Green light hung in the crystal air, reaching for the snow-covered mountain. \"Northern skies are lit every night like colored lightning in the clouds . . . spirals, curtains, and streaks in every color. It's the same in the New World. If ice dragons knew this, they might find it easier to leave their home.\"\n\nArak turned to Taron, \"You're in charge. You, Karoon, and Driana must protect our skiff. If an ice dragon attacks use sedative spears first, lightning swords if you must. Drakor, Dorali, and I will go ashore and meet the ice dragons.\"\n\nKaroon gave Dorali a small package. \"For luck. It's from the copper cave.\"\n\nShe unwrapped the present and gazed at the bright green cubes. \"Fluorite crystals. They're lovely.\" Dorali raised her head and looked into Karoon's eyes. \"Why?\"\n\nHe shrugged, but his brow had worry wrinkles. \"They match the green at the edge of your scales. Please be careful. Drakor is a good friend, but Mardor sounds dangerous.\"\n\nDorali studied his face. Then she touched his arm. \"Thank you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Three dragons flew low over the water under cover of night. The emerald aurora faded away and a deep rosy dawn colored the ice. They glided silently toward shore, each wearing a pack and carrying a heavy bag. A raft was roped to Drakor and it bounced behind him across the waves.\n\nThey landed on cold, scrabbly ground. Drakor hid the raft beneath rocks and leaves. They stored the mesh sacks of live clams in the sea. Then they took to the air, speeding along the shore as a red morning sky gradually became the deep blue of spring.\n\nArak had mind-traveled to the island on their first journey north, before they returned home with an injured ice dragon. He couldn't leave without a glimpse into this legendary land. He had marveled at the frozen waterfalls. How cold must it be to stop falling water?\n\nIt was a world of bare trees and snow, black and white, where color came from the sky. Blue shadows lay between boulders. The pink, green, and gold light of auroras played across the snow.\n\nNow spring was here, and Arak marveled at the changes. The waterfalls had thawed into exuberant white sprays that leapt down the steep rock. There were swollen buds on stunted trees. Plants seemed to be growing before his eyes, making the most of this short, warm period. Small lizards darted about, gathering food, already preparing for winter.\n\nAs they flew past the volcano, Drakor pointed to a gray haze of steam that clouded the air. The smell of rotten eggs was intense. \"Dorali, you said you wanted to see an ice dragon nest.\"\n\nThey landed near the hot spring.\n\nArak wrinkled his nose at the stench and hopped awkwardly across hot, flat rocks. \"Drakor, you're an ice dragon! How do you stand this heat?\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"We have thick feet to match our thick heads.\"\n\nThree dragon-ladies stood together, wing-to-wing, making a protective wall around the nest behind them.\n\n\"Three guards for one nest?\"\n\n\"An egg can't fight, so it needs guards. And it would be lonely here for one nesting dragon.\" Drakor answered quietly. He bowed to the dragon-ladies. \"Greetings. These are my friends, Arak and Dorali.\"\n\nDorali bowed and held out her empty hands. \"I'm a dragon-lady. May I see your nest?\"\n\nThe middle dragon-lady looked her over, eyes wide with surprise. \"I thought yellow dragons were a myth.\" She folded one wing against her body so Dorali could see, but her wary eyes followed every move.\n\nDorali took a long look and her eyes glowed. The nest was made from a ring of fist-sized volcanic rocks with odd holes, like hard black sponges. Golden topaz, glowing rubies, and blue diamonds were fitted into cracks between the black rocks. These sturdy gems caught the afternoon sunlight, flickering like flames. The nest held thousands of fiery, reddish-gold threads. A huge, gleaming egg was nestled within the thick cushion of glass hair.\n\nDorali's arms trembled, reaching out to touch the egg. She visibly forced her arms to her side and used only her eyes.\n\nGolden dragons had smooth, sandy-colored eggs with spots. This egg had thick, diamond-shaped scales in a whorl pattern, like a pine cone. The dark bronze shell shimmered with other colors. Iridescent, red-gold streaks wrapped around the egg like an aurora, matching the strands inside of the nest. The shell texture and opalescent colors were remarkable.\n\nDorali bowed low. \"Your egg is a precious jewel.\"\n\nArak pointed to the glass fibers. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"Dragon's blood from the Volcano,\" Drakor said.\n\nDorali nodded. \"The nest looks like a volcano on fire. Everything is about the volcano.\"\n\n\"You are born of storm, but ice dragons are born of the Volcano. This isss our history,\" Drakor said proudly.\n\nThey bowed to the dragon-ladies and left, walking together, kicking the loose gray rocks and crunching across dry, shaggy clumps of grass.\n\nDorali reached for a sparkle among the dull gravel and picked up a clear, nut-sized rock. She snapped her tail. \"It's a diamond!\"\n\nDrakor smiled at her enthusiasm. \"It isss small, but perfect . . . a good sou-ven-ir?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She put it in a special pocket in her pack. \"This place has gemstones and gemstone eggs. Our eggs don't have scales, maybe because they can't roll in the sand. Yours would be safer on these rocks.\" She glanced back and frowned. \"When will it hatch?\"\n\n\"Soon. When the egg cracks, we will gather to welcome the new dragonlet.\"\n\nDorali flicked her tail nervously. \"This youngster will be too small for the journey. It's too cold in the wind-stream.\"\n\n\"There's room on our skiff for the new one and its dragon-dam. We'll bring them and your sire to your new home, later,\" Arak offered.\n\nDrakor nodded. \"If they will go with you, and if I win.\"\n\nDorali picked small blue flowers and put them in her pouch. \"This might be a useful herb. Drakor, ice dragon eggs look like sunset dragon scales. Your clan remembers these legends and ours does not.\"\n\n\"Maybe we can read minds, too? Or do we just focus carefully on what is not said?\" He stopped near a cluster of bushes that were covered with the pale green fuzz of opening buds. A short plant with small, snow-white flowers grew in the shade beneath them. \"This isss special, an ice-flower.\"\n\nHe took a flask from his pack, poured water on the flowers, and the white petals became clear. \"Dry petals look like snow and wet petals are as clear as ice. The ice-flower plant has tiny blue berries in the summer, the color of the sky. We make a drink from the berries for the Summer Solstice. Too much will kill, but a little makes us stronger. We celebrate with a feast and games.\"\n\nDorali snapped her tail. \"I must study this plant. Do you have any dried berries?\"\n\nDrakor paused, considering. \"Maybe. Look, the butterflies are back!\" The pungent, piney scent of a blue-green fir was more powerful than the volcano odor. This short tree was nearly hidden by a cloud of orange butterflies. They hung from every possible spot and nestled between needles. Branches bent beneath their combined weight, threatening to break. \"These butterflies come every year.\"\n\nArak asked, \"Where do they come from?\"\n\nDrakor pointed to the west. \"They fly here from across the sea.\"\n\n\"That's an amazing journey for such fragile wings.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"You must see our three sacred pools. They are connected but each pool isss different. I might miss this most of all.\" He led the way, and they landed near a round pool big enough to hold several dragons. The water was solid white, but the surrounding ground was covered with fine black dust. \"This pool isss the color of ice dragons and holds the black breath of the Volcano.\"\n\n\"There's no black volcano dust on the water. It must be so heavy that it falls right through.\" Arak reached into the pool and licked his claws. \"This looks like snow but it tastes like chalk.\"\n\nThey soon reached the second pool, which was dark red. \"This pool isss like dragon blood, like life.\"\n\nArak tested the water. \"It looks like a ruby gemstone and tastes like iron.\"\n\nThey walked along the stream to a turquoise pool. Drakor's eyes glowed with pleasure. \"This isss blue like the sky, like freedom. It isss the most special pool. We drink from it often, to strengthen our claws.\"\n\nDorali dipped a claw into the water. \"I taste precious copper. This pool really is special.\"\n\n\"You have floating ice-mountains, unbelievable auroras, and gemstone pools,\" Arak said. \"It would be hard to leave this.\"\n\nThe smile fled from Drakor's eyes. \"Now we must go to the Meeting Circle.\" He launched into the sky.\n\nArak and Dorali followed, pumping their wings hard to catch up. They stopped once to pick up their hidden sacks of clams and nuts. Then they glided together through the cold, dry air.\n\nShort, twisted trees surrounded a stony circle that had been cleared of all shrubs. They landed in a flurry of wings, sending up clouds of black dust.\n\nA young ice dragon snapped his tail with a loud crack and darted across the open space. He thumped Drakor on his back, making a drum of him. \"Where have you been? You missed the practice games of Slam.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes glowed with warmth. \"It isss a long story.\"\n\n\"This is Jardor.\" Drakor introduced Arak and Dorali. \"They helped me when I was hurt.\"\n\nJardor stared and then bowed. \"I never expected to see yellow dragons.\" He looked Drakor up and down. \"You are well? You look fit enough. Everyone has been practicing.\"\n\nDrakor grinned. \"Games are very important here. They help determine status.\"\n\nA very old dragon-lady approached and looked them over with sharp, disapproving eyes. Her crusty white scales were silvered with age. \"This isss my dam-sister, Drikora.\"\n\nA dragon-lord hobbled toward the feast table, using crutches, and Drakor's eyes lit up. \"This isss Zardan, my sire,\" Drakor said, with true warmth in his voice.\n\nDorali moved closer to Zardan and studied his ancient injuries with the intensity of a Healer. She silently signed to Drakor, \"There is hope.\"\n\nHis eyes glowed as he signed back, \"I will tell him.\"\n\nOther dragons drew near with questions in their eyes. Then a huge ice dragon stalked over. The ground vibrated with each step.\n\nDrakor bowed very low. \"Greetings, Mardor. This isss Arak, and this isss Dorali.\"\n\nThey both copied Drakor's low bow. \"Greetings.\"\n\nMardor regarded them with narrowed eyes and growled, \"Welcome. How did you get here?\"\n\nArak offered a small, sweet-smelling bag. \"We flew. This is a gift from our clan.\"\n\nMardor sniffed the bag, opened it, and crunched a handful of nuts. \"What isss this?\" A rusty smile creased his face.\n\nArak bowed again. \"These are honey-roasted almonds. We also brought food to add to the welcome meal.\"\n\nMardor's eyes gleamed and he nodded to another huge dragon. \"Sound the feast drum.\"\n\nBOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The dragon-sized drum thundered three times, rumbling through Arak's body as he swiveled his ears away. More dragons appeared like magic, answering the drum. They bowed to Mardor, stared at the strangers, and hurried away.\n\nThe ice dragons returned quickly and put their offerings on the feasting table. This was longer than two dragons and about half as tall as a dragon. The table was carved from a rock outcrop, a solid mass of garnet crystals. All the garnet colors blended together: orange, red, purple, brown, and a pure green that sparkled more than diamonds. Streaky patches of bright pink and blue shone like an aurora.\n\nMost of the rock had been sanded smooth, but clusters of red, many-sided garnet crystals had been left untouched, like flower accents.\n\nDorali ran her claws over the smooth table and rough crystals. \"This is ice dragon art. They always leave part of it natural, for an earthy feel. I like it.\"\n\nMardor raised his wings and there was utter silence. \"The clan has visitors. I welcome them with this meal.\"\n\nStrong odors seeped into the air, as if Arak had trampled on seaweed or sat near a pile of long dead fish. He flared his nostrils and inhaled slowly, testing the scents. He found no herbs or spices. Everything was raw and there wasn't much, but the food was interesting. The salads had a dozen types of gray-green lichens mixed with dried red berries and pine nuts.\n\nLines formed at the head of the feasting table, one on each side. Arak looked from the meager food to the rather thin dragons.\n\nDrakor's friend, Jardor, followed his glance to the obvious conclusion. \"Food isss scarce.\"\n\nArak emptied his bag of raw clams onto the feasting table while Dorali added piles of nuts. There still wasn't enough food to satisfy the appetites of these huge dragons. \"We brought this from the New World. Drakor helped harvest the food.\"\n\nEvery dragon turned eyes and ears toward Arak. He spoke clearly, knowing that this food would speak more loudly than Drakor's descriptions of the New World. He could help his friend bait a hook to catch dragon minds.\n\nEach dragon took only one piece from an ice fish that was cut into small chunks. They took just a little from the food piles, as if each dragon could perfectly divide the amount of food by the number of dragons. Their eyes glowed when they reached the unexpected piles of nuts and clams. Smiles crept onto their faces.\n\nMardor watched closely, frowning at the enthusiasm of his dragons and snapping his tail irritably.\n\nGroups of ice dragons found seats on the ground close to Drakor and his friends. All ears were swiveled toward them, listening. Arak glanced from Mardor to the listeners. \"How much food is left?\"\n\nDrakor held his hands close together. \"Very little. We have stores of fish, pine nuts, dried berries, and roots, but most isss gone.\"\n\nArak took another bite of food from his garnet plate. \"These pine nuts are almost as good as the ones you found near the New World volcano. And just a short dragon's flight south, there are nut trees as tall as five ice dragons.\"\n\nDrakor grinned, showing a mouthful of sharp teeth. \"Remember the river? There were more red fish than we could carry. They are tasty, and longer than my arm! We could store enough food for the longest winter.\"\n\nJardor had a dreamy look in his eyes. \"We could use more fish.\"\n\nDorali added, \"Don't forget the clams we brought for this feast.\"\n\nArak glanced at the empty table. \"They're all gone. The New World food was popular.\" All eyes were focused on their group. Arak smiled back in a friendly, encouraging way as quiet conversations rippled out.\n\nDorali asked Drakor, \"How do you store raw fish?\"\n\n\"We dig deep holes in the ground, so deep that it isss always frozen, and line them with stones. The fish are cleaned, frozen on ice, wrapped in seaweed, and put into the holes. Widgers always try to find a way in, so the hole isss covered with heavy rocks. Roots and dried berries are stored in other holes. I will try to find our stores of ice-flower berries.\"\n\nWhen the feast ended, dragons piled their rock plates beside the table. Arak approached Mardor and bowed low. \"Your ice sculptures are legendary. How can you carve with lightning? I'd like to see this with my own eyes. Your ice games sound impressive, too.\"\n\nMardor studied him with crafty eyes. \"It will take one day to prepare the ice area, and another to make sculptures and play games. We did not plan for festival feasts.\"\n\n\"We'll gather more food,\" Arak offered, hiding a smile. This was a perfect opportunity for Drakor to shine, by bringing food and competing in the games . . . especially the lightning sword game.\n\n\"Then we will prepare.\" Mardor spoke quietly to a dragon, who glanced at Arak and nodded to his leader.\n\nArak smiled pleasantly to Mardor and his helper. He signed to Drakor, \"We're being watched. Jardor can't come.\"\n\n\"Is this part of the plan?\" Dorali signed.\n\nArak grinned. \"It was expected. A dragon who thrives on power sees a threat everywhere. This time, he's right. If just us three leave he'll be glad to see us gone, but he's suspicious. How could we fly so far? What are we hiding? We'll fly away from the skiff, so our watchers will search the wrong area.\"\n\nDrakor gave Jardor a private hand signal. Jardor shook his head in protest but stayed where the leader could see him.\n\n\"If I fail, Mardor could give him a hard time.\"\n\n\"This will work,\" Arak promised.\n\nThe last purples of sunset colored the water as the dragon trio flew away. Moonlight glinted across the waves and glowed through the edges of ice. They landed on a melting ice-mountain and found comfortable seats near the edge. Waves slapped the base, splashing up as a cold, salty spray.\n\nThe dragons took long lines from their packs, baited the hooks, and cast them into the sea. Lines jerked with unseen life. Soon they were landing deep-water crabs, one after another.\n\nDorali picked a cold, soaked acorn out of the jar. She baited another hook, forcing the water-softened nut onto a bent wire. \"This visit has been most educational.\"\n\n\"What have you learned?\" Drakor asked.\n\nDorali pulled up a line and dumped another crab into her sack. \"These crabs will take almost any bait. All ice dragons are sparkly white, but dragon-lady heads are a bit smaller than dragon-lord heads.\" She shrugged her wings. \"And Mardor really, really wants to get rid of us. Especially you. You're a thorn between his scales.\"\n\n\"What do you think of my sire?\"\n\n\"I like him. He has a good energy field. Have you told him about our plan to help?\"\n\n\"He isss eager to try.\"\n\nArak said, \"We'll tow him to the dragon-skiff tonight. Tell Zardan to meet us at the shore. He must come alone, in secret. Mardor will be watching you, and he can't know about the skiff.\"\n\nAt sunset, Arak crept into his rough shelter. Hidden from sight, he entered the trance-mind.\n\n<Scree, We will tow Drakor's sire to the skiff tonight. You and Driana must be ready>\n\n<We will be ready>\n\nThe rising moon was full, sharing her unwelcome light as Arak and Dorali slipped away. They moved quietly, crouching between bushes and hiding in the shadows. When they reached the shore, Zardan was waiting. He stepped out from between two larger shrubs, leaning on his crutches, and looked from one to the other. Hope burned bright in his eyes.\n\n\"I left early, before moonrise. Mardor's dragon followed me, so I walked in circles and scraped lichens off rocks. He got bored and left. Drakor says you can fix my legs.\"\n\nDorali held up a warning hand. \"We think we can fix them, but there is a risk.\"\n\n\"The chance to fly again isss worth any risk.\"\n\nTheir bamboo raft was well hidden. They pulled it just into the sea, touching the shore. Zardan struggled clumsily to the middle and stared at the water, flexing his claws nervously. \"How far will we go?\"\n\nArak pointed out to sea. \"It's just a short dragon flight. This raft is light but strong; it bends without breaking. We'll take you to two of the best Healers I know. They fixed Drakor's mangled wing, my broken leg, and Dorali's injuries.\"\n\nThey towed Zardan to the skiff. The following morning Arak, Dorali, and Drakor emptied bag after bag of live, deep-water crabs onto the feasting table. \"We caught these using New World bait,\" Arak said, loud enough for everyone to hear.\n\nIce dragons added lichens and dried, wrinkled roots from their limited stores of food. Then they formed lines on each side of the table. Seafood scents mixed with earthy aromas and the odor of the volcano.\n\nDrakor added a crab to his plate. \"The clan likes our New World food.\"\n\nArak chewed on a tough, flavorless root. \"They should. This root is a good reason to move.\"\n\nAn elderly dragon-lady flew in from the direction of the volcano and landed. She bowed low to the leader. \"It isss time to form the circle.\"\n\n\"Today we welcome a new member to my clan,\" Mardor announced.\n\nDorali rustled her wings with excitement. \"It's the new dragonlet!\" She launched into the air. Arak was a wing-beat behind her. The sky filled with white wings, beating like winter flurries toward the volcano.\n\nThey landed near the nest. One dragon-lord touched foreheads with the dragon-dam and peered down at the egg, with a proud arch to his neck. Then he rejoined the crowd. Dragons quietly formed rings around the nest and raised their claws to the sky. Dragon-ladies formed the inner rings, closest to the nest. \"They have better control of lightning,\" Drakor murmured to Arak before he joined an outer ring.\n\nThe egg rocked frantically back and forth. Pecking noises filled the waiting silence while the dragon-dam crooned encouragement. The tip of a small nose broke through a crack in the shell. That was a signal.\n\nSparks crackled up from dragon claws as they called splinters of lightning. Metals were added for color, matching the gemstones in the nest and the fires of the volcano. Electric rings of blue, amber, and red greeted the newest dragonlet as she fell out of her shell and onto the fiery red hairs in the nest.\n\n\"Dragons are born of the Volcano,\" Mardor intoned.\n\nThe damp dragonlet stared up at the crackling, colorful circles. She greedily swallowed an entire clawfull of fine-chopped fish. Then she staggered to her feet and began the slow walk to the main gathering, tucked safely between her dam and the elderly dragon-lady. The other dragons flew back to their crab feast.\n\nDorali sighed. \"That was a beautiful welcoming ceremony.\"\n\nDrakor nodded. \"The lightning rings are great, but all dragonlets look the same.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Try telling that to a new dragon-dam.\"\n\nMardor leapt up onto a stone block, graceful despite his bulk, and raised his wings. There was instant silence, even from the youngest dragonlet. \"The sky isss clear. Tomorrow we will hold a Festival. Come to the new field at dawn.\"\n\n\"Do you use a new field every year?\" Arak asked.\n\nDrakor nodded. \"The land isss warmer and the ice isss running away, so we must follow it inland.\"\n\nThe next day, Arak flew far inland with Dorali, Drakor, and Jardor. The air grew colder and colder, as if he flew backward in time into winter. They reached a snow-covered mountain that glowed pink in the early morning light. All the dragons landed in a rugged field of ice.\n\nTen dragon pairs flew to separate ice blocks that were cut from the glacier. Each pair of dragons placed many pieces of magnetic lodestone into their ice block.\n\n\"These stones call the lightning like magnetic wrinkles. It takes skill to place the stones. The sculptors know how and where to break the ice, using lightning swords of different sizes,\" Drakor explained quietly.\n\nArak just shook his head. How could anyone sculpt with lightning?\n\nThe ice sculptors raised their arms high, claws out.\n\nMardor signaled the drummer.\n\nThe loud drumbeat seemed to last forever in the frozen air. Then bolt after bolt of lightning struck each ice block, knocking off pieces of ice. The sky sizzled and thunder boomed; a strong odor of burnt air mixed with the indefinable scents of ancient ice.\n\nWithin minutes, rough dragon shapes filled the field. Dragon-ladies deflected excess lightning, making it run down the ice to melt perfect wings. Black diamonds appeared from their pouches, with the clear darkness of a midnight sea. They poked a big diamond into each slushy eye socket, which froze to hold the sparkling gray eyes.\n\nDragons channeled the power of the sky as if they were spirits of the Volcano. Dragon-ladies melted the surface of the dragon's body, using small splinters of lightning. This liquid skin quickly re-froze with the crackled texture of dragon scales.\n\nWhen the steam cleared, ten ice sculptures rested on the snow. Each sculpted dragon was larger than life. One held a fish in its claws and another had wings spread in flight. A third dragon sculpture stood tall with its head thrown back, challenging the sky.\n\nArak stared. \"This is amazing!\"\n\nDorali's eyes glowed. \"It's like magic.\"\n\nMardor declared a winner. This pair of sculptors spiraled up into the sky, celebrating their success.\n\nAnother drumbeat sounded and Mardor announced, \"It isss time to play the games of Slam.\"\n\nDragons rose up in a flurry of white wings and drifted like snow to a nearby lake. The hard surface was dark blue with white crackling, like a frozen sky with ice clouds. The ice was marked with a huge ring of black stones.\n\nArak felt a magnetic pull from the black stones. He closed his eyes to better feel/see the silvery shapes of these magnetic lodestones. What a clever idea. Players would know the borders of this game without even looking!\n\nA plain blue stone marked each goal at opposite ends. A sparkling blue, disc-shaped lodestone sat in the center of the ring.\n\nDrakor pointed to the center and whispered, \"That isss the game-stone. It isss covered with blue sapphires.\"\n\nDragons lined up along the frozen lake, watching with a serious intensity.\n\nMardor said, \"Each game of Slam will last for half a notch on the sun dial. Tails only. No claws or wings may be used to move the game-stone. No flying or carrying. A point is scored when a goal-stone is knocked out by the game-stone.\"\n\nFour older dragon-lords entered the ice field. Two Attacker dragons walked to the center, on each side of the sparkling blue game-stone. A Defender stood in front of the plain blue goal-stone at each end. At the beat of the drum, the game began.\n\nThe Attackers hit each other shoulder-to-shoulder, hard, with wings safely back. One dragon managed to curl his tail around the game-stone and sling it across the ice toward the opposite goal-stone. Shards of ice sprayed from copper claws as both dragons tore across the ice, barely gripping the slippery surface. They slammed into each other again with a jarring thud, competing to claim the stone. It slipped past both dragons.\n\n\"Slam is a good name for this game,\" Arak said to Drakor.\n\nHe grinned back. \"Body slam isss fun, but tail slam isss better. We hit hard with our tails.\"\n\nThe game-stone was caught by the Defender's tail, wrapped in a tail loop, and slung back; it twirled across the ice with a wicked spin. An Attacker caught the stone with his tail and slung it again. The game continued with no score. Dragons crashed together, tails curled around the sparkling stone, and the piece of solid sky flew back and forth. Finally, a loud crack split the air as the game-stone struck a goal-stone, knocking it from the circle.\n\n\"Point!\"\n\nDorali clicked her claws nervously as increasingly battered dragons reformed the game. \"Why are tail hits so important?\"\n\n\"Our tail isss important for fighting.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Always fighting.\"\n\nThe rough game continued until the drum sounded. Mardor announced the winning team.\n\nNext were pairs of dragon-lord and dragon-lady. This was still a contact sport with impressive body slams. The dragon-ladies had a slight edge in slamming the game-stone home.\n\n\"Dragon-ladies are better at keeping their eye on the stone,\" Drakor said.\n\nDorali nodded. \"That skill would help them keep an eye on dragonlets who like to wander away.\" She whispered softly, \"Like I did.\"\n\nThree games later, Drakor and Jardor worked together, competing against another team. The game-stone slammed back and forth, flying across the ice. Curious eyes followed Drakor. As the game continued, the crowd began to cheer them on.\n\nTheir second game was against a pair of bigger, more experienced opponents. The score was tied when the time drum sounded, so another time-part began. Drakor slung in the winning goal with a perfect tail shot. The crowd went wild!\n\nDrakor and Jardor made triumphant spirals up into the air. Mardor scowled.\n\nTheir third game was close. Mardor had a toothy, satisfied grin when Drakor lost.\n\n\"We lasted for three games!\" Jardor yelled.\n\nA group of young dragons surrounded Drakor and Jardor, pummeling their backs. \"You beat Cranart and Dramorg!\"\n\nThe afternoon sun sank lower, gilding the mountain top with an icy gold. A drum beat sounded and Mardor announced, \"The games are now over.\"\n\nArak asked, \"What about a lightning sword game?\"\n\nMardor's gaze slid to Drakor and his eyes hardened. \"Not this time.\"\n\nArak nodded. No, because Drakor could win.\n\nThe games were over, but not the high spirits.\n\n\"I'm ready for that feast,\" said one young dragon.\n\nAnother smiled as she stretched her wings. \"New World food isss good.\"\n\nMardor swiveled his ears toward the New World comment. He stalked by and silence fell like a black cloud.\n\nArak looked down the steep white slope and simply could not resist. He tucked his wings and stretched his neck. Then he slid down the mountain on his belly scales with cold snow flying in his face, watching for the occasional rock. Dorali and Drakor immediately joined him.\n\nArak glanced back. Jardor eyed Mardor and then joined the fun. Then most of the younger dragons, and a few older ones, were body-surfing down the mountainside.\n\nArak reached a bare patch near the bottom and spread his wings, skimming just above the sharp rocks. He soared up into the sky. The others copied his flight, adding twirls and flips. The dragons landed together, smiling and stretching their wings with a cheerful camaraderie, as if they had all broken an unspoken rule.\n\nJardor's grin was brighter than a winter moon. \"That was great!\"\n\n\"Do you use this slide often?\" Arak asked.\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"This isss the first time. We gather food and practice for serious, important games.\"\n\nDorali gazed up the long, snowy slope. \"Games can be just for fun.\"\n\nThe ground rumbled beneath their feet, and loose rocks bounced down the mountain. Arak's magnetic sight was nearly blinded by the energy spikes.\n\nDrakor rustled his wings nervously. \"Tomorrow I must face Mardor. That will be no game.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE CHALLENGER",
                "text": "Drakor left his shelter before dawn, shivering, but not from the cold. He felt the thrumming pull of the Volcano. A magnetic spider web covered the mountain and glowed silver in his mind. Shimmering wrinkles danced above the new cone in a twisted pattern with sharp energy spikes.\n\nHe must confront Mardor now.\n\nDrakor gazed into the night sky, seeking the calm beauty of a golden aurora. But the elaborate folds of light were as tangled as his thoughts.\n\nWould Mardor listen? If not, was his wing healed enough to fight? Dragons grumbled quietly, but how did they really feel about the leader? Were they tired of Mardor's rule? Were they hungry enough to follow Drakor if he won the fight? To risk leaving their only home and follow him to a new world they had never seen?\n\nDrakor chewed cold crabmeat with no appetite. As the sun rose, other dragons left their shelters and began a day of hunting for roots, overlooked cones with pine nuts, and unlucky smidgers. He stretched to loosen his muscles, swallowed a bitter tea, and walked slowly to the meeting circle. He beat the big drum once.\n\nBOOOOMMM!\n\nThe entire clan turned toward the unexpected sound. They responded to the summons and gathered in the circle within minutes. Mardor flew to the center.\n\nDrakor bowed to the leader and took a deep breath. \"I, Drakor, call for a meeting.\"\n\nMardor narrowed his eyes. \"That isss your right. Use it wisely.\"\n\n\"Our Volcano has changed.\" Drakor spoke with a deeper voice, as if he was older. \"This has happened before, many homes ago, long before this home. You all know the legend. One day the Volcano heartbeat changed. It beat faster and faster. The smells changed and the ground swelled. Then the Volcano blew up into the sky. All that was left was a hole in the ground. The sea filled the hole and our long-ago home was gone forever. Only ice dragons who were not home survived to tell this story and give us their warning.\"\n\nDrakor put his feelings into each word. He used every storyteller trick he had learned from his sire. They must listen and believe!\n\n\"The heart of our Volcano isss beating faster. You feel this change. You breathe the new smells. Magnetic wrinkles flock to the Volcano, as active as smidgers on a spring day. We must heed the warnings from our ancestors. We must leave this land to survive. There isss a new home waiting for us with plenty of food.\"\n\nThe dragons stared at Drakor. Whispers of fear and interest mixed in the wind.\n\nMardor flexed his long, lethal claws. \"You think our Volcano isss dangerous and we should leave. You remember one legend and forget our ways. We are born of the Volcano and I am your leader.\"\n\nDrakor kept his claws still, his eyes round. He lowered his neck almost to the ground. Mardor loved this servile pose, a reminder to every dragon that he was in charge. Drakor took deep, slow breaths and focused his mind. He must hang on to his temper. \"You would still be the leader in the new place.\"\n\n\"Of course. Where isss this new place?\" Mardor growled, raking his sharp claws through the ground with a menacing glare.\n\n\"There isss a big land to the west, much bigger than this land, with ice. Huge fish swim in the river.\"\n\n\"How can we get there, if this land isss so far away that I have not seen it?\" Mardor asked.\n\n\"We can fly high where the wind-stream is fast, and use slings to carry the dragonlets.\"\n\nMardor stared down at Drakor. \"Isss there a Volcano?\"\n\nDrakor sank even lower and Mardor smiled with approval. \"There isss a quiet Volcano with no smoke.\"\n\nMardor said, \"That isss not a good home. We need metals and hot springs.\"\n\n\"There are metals. There isss much food. Ice dragons are strong. We have moved before, in the long ago, when it was necessary. We will live well in this new land.\" Drakor took a deep breath. \"The clan will die if we stay.\"\n\n\"You say we will die, but you cannot know,\" Mardor said with a nasty sneer.\n\nDrakor pointed to the Volcano. \"The smells are new. The Volcano isss swelling. It rumbles like a stomach that isss always hungry. I have measured the ground and it isss two claw lengths taller. This has not happened before. Ice fish have left. They know it isss time to leave.\"\n\nMardor shook his head. \"We are smarter than ice fish. We will stay.\"\n\nDrakor slowly raised his neck. He stood tall and turned in a circle, making eye contact with each clan member. \"We may be smarter than fish. But what will we eat when the fish are gone? We are already hungry.\" He spoke to the new dragon-dam. \"Your dragonlet can not escape to safety when the Volcano explodes. It will be too late. Will you let her burn to death?\"\n\nDragons rustled their wings nervously, looking from Drakor to Mardor.\n\nMardor snapped his tail with a loud crack, like a whip. \"I will stay and the clan will stay.\" He flexed his claws. \"You will leave. Now.\"\n\nDrakor raised his head high. He stretched as tall as possible, trying to stare directly into Mardor's eyes. \"The clan must leave. I challenge you.\"\n\nJardor caught his eye and shook his head, mouthing the words, \"Are you insane?\" Soon he would know. He flicked the tip of his tail nervously. Losers were painfully marked to remind everyone of their defeat.\n\nAll of the dragons backed away from Drakor and Mardor, clearing a space for the fight. Then the dragon-lords marched in a line, silently creating a huge, perfect circle. Their feet struck the ground with martial precision. They stopped and turned inward on some hidden signal, spread their wings wide, and stood wingtip-to-wingtip.\n\nDragon-ladies made a second circle right behind them. They stood wingtip-to-wingtip in the exact center between two dragon-lords. Each dragon was silent and deathly still, as if carved from ice. Only their dark eyes moved, watching.\n\nArak, Dorali, and the dragonlets were kept behind this double wall of dragons.\n\nDrakor looked beyond the rings and saw Arak sign to Dorali, \"I wonder how often they fight? They all know exactly what to do.\" Dorali seemed too tense to reply. Then his attention was wrenched back to the challenge ring.\n\nMardor's second-in-command picked up the huge drum from the meeting area. He thumped it down on the ground, just outside the dragon circles. \"This fight begins with the drum beat. The only fight rule isss no lightning blasts. The victor will lead the clan.\" He looked at Mardor and bowed low, clearly anticipating his win.\n\nDrakor locked his eyes on Mardor. He stretched his wings wide, loosening his muscles for the fight. Had his broken bones truly healed? His ears swiveled backward to face the drum.\n\nBOOOMMMM! The drum beat rumbled through the air like thunder.\n\nMardor snaked forward. Drakor leapt aside, but five razor-sharp claws slashed like knives across his chest. Dark red lines spread quickly, like mud on snow. How deep are these cuts? He felt no fear, just a focused calm from entering the first stage of trance-mind. He smelled the salty blood but felt no pain, thanks to Dorali's bitter flame-flower brew. Now he would either win, or die from unfelt injuries.\n\nThey circled each other with teeth bared, eyes battle-bright. Mardor snapped his powerful tail around Drakor's knees like a whip.\n\nDrakor stumbled away, off balance, but quickly regained his loose-knee fighting stance. He feinted left and then leapt high, somersaulting through the sky, and landed behind Mardor. But the leader had already turned and was facing him. They both lashed out with their tails and raked with their claws. Again, only Mardor drew blood.\n\nDrakor staggered away and fell, stopping just inside the border of silent dragons. He struggled upright and glanced at his leg. Dark blood seeped from his new wound, staining his scales, but he did not feel it. How bad was this wound? He was as fast as the leader and knew fight strategy, but Mardor was bigger. Much bigger.\n\nDrakor did not have the reach to strike a single blow.\n\nHe yearned to win in the normal way, to be truly acceptable as a leader. He had trained hard for greater stamina and eaten Orm's chocolate for extra energy. But even with all his training, Drakor could not win a traditional fight.\n\nMardor watched expectantly, smiling with the confidence of many victories. He would cut deep to punish his challenger, drawing blood again and again, until Drakor was too weak to stand. Finally, Mardor would grip his neck in his teeth, the symbol of defeat.\n\nHow could he hope to win any fight against this hulking dragon? Drakor shook his head to clear it. He might be smaller than Mardor, and younger, but he had more energy. Now he would use this to his advantage.\n\nDrakor abandoned the traditional way of fighting. He began to spin, with his claws out. His feet moved in a perfect rhythm. He focused on Mardor's eyes until his body had spun around. Then his eyes snapped back to Mardor as he kept spinning. Soon he was whirling like a top around the circle. He did not feel dizzy, and his opponent was always in his sight.\n\nDrakor swerved in, toward Mardor, and slashed with his claws.\n\nThe leader stared in disbelief at the red stains. His eyes blazed with anger as he lunged forward. His opponent was already gone.\n\nDrakor's claws bit into Mardor again and again. He spun so fast that he left no open spot for Mardor to strike back. Drakor was made of claws. As he spun he became the wind and his fears fled away. His thoughts were a clear, liquid blue. How long could he spin before his wounded leg was too stiff? Could he really win?\n\nDrakor struck Mardor's left thigh, then his right shoulder, then a leg. He kept spinning and slashing.\n\nMardor began breathing hard. He slashed uselessly at his moving target. He lashed his tail sideways and stuck out his foot, trying again to trip his challenger.\n\nDrakor avoided Mardor's foot, spinning just beyond it like a waterspout. His leg began to stiffen and he spun slower, mortally afraid of falling. He was no longer sure that he could get back up.\n\nMardor shuddered with pain and gasped for air like a fish out of water. He staggered and almost fell. He rallied and struck again, always where Drakor had just been.\n\nNo dragon had ever fought the way Drakor fought, but he fought with borrowed energy behind a pain-free shield. He kept spinning and slashing, moving his claws higher and lower, making shallow cuts that would not seriously injure his opponent. Every ice dragon must be able to fly, to escape.\n\nMardor tried twirling, reaching for a new strategy, and fell hard. He struggled to his feet. His snow-white scales were red with seeping blood and his breath came in loud, rasping gasps. He had never fought this long, always using his greater size and experience for a quick, easy win.\n\nAs Drakor's leg became stiff he felt less like the fluid wind. He spun slower and slower, like a top winding down, trying not to stumble. His wounds were deep, his chest was sunset red, and his mind was going white. He moved in a fog. How much longer could he fight? Drakor trembled as the flame-flower drug wore off and his entire body burned with pain.\n\nMardor struck one last, wobbly blow. Then the leader toppled over like an old, dead tree and hit the ground with a resounding thud.\n\nDrakor fell a moment later."
            },
            {
                "title": "GATHERING STORMS",
                "text": "Two dragons lay as still as death on the sharp, black ground.\n\nNo one moved in the long, profound silence.\n\nThen wings rustled and whispers flew around the rings of dragons. What happened? How could Mardor fall? Who was the leader?\n\nDrakor opened his eyes. He stared at Mardor, as shocked as every other ice dragon, before staggering to his feet. His muscles screamed as he stood tall, ignoring his torn leg. He raised his wings high in victory. Then he folded his wings and turned slowly in a circle, catching the gaze of each stunned, wide-eyed dragon. \"I am the new leader.\"\n\nA dragon-lord with long neck scars rumbled, \"This isss not over. You must mark him.\"\n\nDrakor shook his head. \"No. He was a strong leader. I marked him in the fight.\"\n\nAnother dragon challenged Drakor with his eyes and hissed, \"He marked me after I lost. Mardor must be marked.\"\n\n\"No. Who challenges my right to lead?\" Would a dragon challenge him? He must bind his torn leg soon or forever walk with a limp. Sticky blood dripped down his chest. How much more blood could he lose and still stand?\n\nNo one answered. Then, as one, the ice dragons bowed low to their new leader.\n\nMardor looked up groggily from the ground, clearly wondering what had happened.\n\nDrakor raised his wings triumphantly above his head. \"Jardor is my second in command. We will all move to our new home in the New World.\"\n\nA dragon-dam asked, \"How can we fly so far, even in the wind-stream?\"\n\nDrakor gazed into the west. \"Butterflies come here each year from beyond the sea. If they can fly so far, then dragons can too.\"\n\nArak and Dorali dodged between wings, slipped through circles of stunned dragons, and darted into the center ring. Their feet crunched loudly across the gravelly ground.\n\nArak sprinkled stinging powder on Drakor's leg and bound the wound. \"We're all Apprentice Healers now.\" He rubbed a mustard-yellow salve into the slashes across Drakor's chest. \"These cuts are deep enough to scar, but this will fight infection. It's made from goldenseal, lavender, and a bit of yellow tansy.\"\n\nDorali checked Mardor and breathed a deep sigh of relief. \"I've never seen so many cuts, but the wounds are not deep.\" She rubbed salve over his huge body and prepared an herbal drink for both fighters. She did not use flames to warm the tea. Ice dragons were fearsome enough without breathing fire, but they would surely learn.\n\nShe checked Drakor and asked, \"Why didn't you use micro-zaps to distract him? You're both hurt more than was needed.\"\n\nDrakor winced as he sat down. He drank Dorali's tea, silently sipping the bitter brew. Then he answered quietly, \"Mardor would have sensed it, and the clan would not accept such a victory. It isss not our way. I had to win following some traditions. It will be hard enough for them to accept me, for I am too small and too young. The mind isss not as important as size to ice dragons. I want this to change. I want a new way to choose leaders . . . more like yours.\"\n\nDorali bowed low like an ice dragon. \"Then I, too, accept your victory.\"\n\nDrakor gave her a genuine smile. \"I did what I had to do and nearly lost. I could not have won without the help of golden dragons. Now we must move before it isss too late.\"\n\nDorali smiled back. \"That's the first time you didn't call us yellow.\"\n\nDrakor looked deep into her eyes. \"You are the most golden of all. You gave me back the sky, the freedom of flight. I will never forget.\" He touched her face softly. Then he stood up slowly, feeling every slash and burning muscle. He bowed low to Dorali and then to Arak.\n\nThe clan watched wide-eyed, whispering to each other. The leader of ice dragons never bowed low to another dragon!\n\nDrakor turned away and walked to the center of the ring, feeling the weight of leadership in the watching eyes of the clan. This was a time of great peril, and all could still die. He spoke in his deepest, most commanding voice, hoping they would listen.\n\n\"We will all move. Each of you may bring a pack of food and special treasures to our new home.\" Dragons grumbled, but they were still conditioned to obey the leader. \"We have slings to carry our dragonlets, with three handles on each side. Four dragons will carry one dragonlet, and we will trade off while flying. No one will be left behind.\"\n\nDrakor turned in the center of the circle, watching the clan as he spoke with growing confidence. \"Bring out all the food,\" he commanded. \"We will share a feast to remember! Then we fly.\" There was less grumbling at the promise of an all-you-can-eat dragon-sized meal.\n\nArak and Dorali left to complete their last mission for ice dragons."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Stars were shining by the time the dragon-dam and her tiny new dragonlet reached the skiff and climbed aboard. Karoon welcomed them all back, but his eyes were on Dorali. \"I was worried.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I'm a Healer, so I know how to fight. What can heal, can hurt.\"\n\nHe laughed good-naturedly. \"I'll remember that.\"\n\nArak, Dorali, and Karoon flew back to bid farewell to Drakor, Jardor, and their doomed homeland.\n\nKaroon thumped Drakor on the back. \"I knew you could win!\"\n\nDrakor grinned and thumped back. \"Not without your help.\"\n\n\"Keep practicing. You must be ready for the next challenger.\" Karoon reached into his bag and pulled out a flute. \"I asked Taron to carve this for you. Remember us when you play magical music.\"\n\nDrakor snapped his tail with enthusiasm. \"How could I forget?\"\n\nDorali watched with interest. Then she handed Drakor a small bag. \"This has salve for wounds and tea for pain. You must win to make changes.\"\n\nDrakor's eyes lit up. \"You do understand. Thank you.\"\n\nArak handed the ice dragon a clear crystal ball. \"I made you a new trance-stone from ice quartz. Use this to enter trance-mind on the eve of each moon phase. I'll call you at star rise on your shore.\"\n\nDrakor had a gleam in his eye. \"I will keep practicing until I can cross the sea with my mind and call you.\"\n\nArak grinned. \"I'm sure you will.\" He gave Drakor a hefty bag of chocolate. \"This is from all of us, for extra energy during that long flight. There's enough for each of you.\"\n\nDrakor inhaled the enticing aroma. \"Chocolate isss treasure, but your friendship isss a treasure beyond measure.\"\n\nArak smiled sadly. \"Now we must leave to reach home in time.\"\n\n\"What will you do?\"\n\n\"Arafine and Kragor will make sure everyone is safe. Zarina is smart and capable. I'm not really needed, but I need to see my dragon-lady and Arwina. Then I'll fly the skiff far from shore, beyond the claws of the tsunami.\"\n\nDrakor nodded understanding. \"I must fly with my clan beyond the fire of our Volcano.\" He bowed low to Arak, then touched forehead-to-forehead in the respectful manner of golden dragons. He repeated this display with Dorali and Karoon, while the ice dragons watched in silence."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Dorali sighed. The voyage back was swift, and now she was home. She missed the adventure, the beauty, and the camaraderie. Lightning sparked in the clouds as golden dragons gathered for the storm dances. Dorali stood near a lone tree, almost hidden, watching.\n\nDragons flew up into the lightning clouds, wingtips barely touching as they spiraled higher. By custom, mated pairs were first to fly. Then other couples formed and joined them. The clouds glowed brightly, lit from within as dragons played catch with colored lightning.\n\nDorali waited on the ground, alone. Her eyes were fastened on the beautiful, flashing clouds. Perhaps this beauty alone was enough, but a corner of her heart yearned for a mate of her own. For a dragon who could love her just the way she was.\n\nDorali flicked her tail in surprise as a dusty wind blew against her.\n\nKaroon landed right beside her. He straightened his wings and looked into her eyes. \"Dorali, will you join me in the clouds?\"\n\nDorali trembled inside as she searched his eyes. Her heart still ached from his last insulting offer. During the journey they had become good crew-mates. But were they more? He could make her laugh. Then she remembered the rare green crystals that he saved, just for her. He was worried when she went to Drakor's island, and asked her to be careful. Did he truly care? Why did he ask?\n\n\"You're not as handsome as Drakor, but you are a well-grown dragon-lord.\"\n\nKaroon snapped his tail. \"Is this an insult?\"\n\n\"No. It's true. Why do you offer again?\"\n\nHe bowed his head. \"You were right. You have your own beauty. You're sweet, incredibly capable, you'd make a terrific dam, and...\"\n\n\"My scars?\" Her eyes held years of unshed tears.\n\n\"I've grown used to them. They're like frost.\"\n\nDorali nodded. \"That's what Drakor says.\"\n\nKaroon stiffened. \"Do you prefer him to me?\"\n\nIt was a serious question, and her turn to be surprised. \"No . . . not really. Drakor and I are good friends. I've noticed you since I was a dragonlet, and you've grown. Inside. You were always a handsome dragon-lord. Now you're also likable.\"\n\n\"What about lovable?\"\n\nDorali tilted her head, considering. Then she gave Karoon a slow smile. \"Yes.\" She leapt off the ground. He followed in an instant, and together they spiraled up into the rainbow clouds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Arak studied the stars in the night sky. It was time. He focused into his aquamarine globe, sank deep into trance, and sent his mind north. Magnetic wrinkles covered the volcano with secret, silvery light that sparkled against the darkness. Then colored lightning danced above the mountain in purples and gold. Thick red ropes ran down its side like dragon's blood.\n\nBRROOOMMMM!!!\n\nThe mountain screamed as it was torn apart! An explosion beyond anything the world had ever heard knocked Arak back toward his body; the sound chased him home.\n\nHe sat up gingerly, disoriented, and gazed north. Dark clouds towered into the rumbling sky, already visible even so far away. He looked south-west. Magnetic lines shot up to the stars as Scree's volcano erupted. No one could survive those blasts.\n\nHow many beings had escaped into the west? How many still lived?\n\nThe star-studded sea breathed in and out with a normal rhythm. When would the terrible waves strike? The dragons had moved three hills in from the shore. Was that far enough to escape the wrath of the sea?\n\nZarina reached over and touched his arm in a comforting gesture. \"Did everyone leave in time?\" She had insisted on coming along when he flew the skiff to safety. Their dragonlet, Arwina, was fast asleep below deck, worn out by the excitement. Karoon and Dorali were also onboard.\n\n\"I mind-talked with Drakor after their flight. Everyone made the trip safely except for one. He was quite old, but refused to come with us.\"\n\n\"And the octopi?\"\n\nArak flicked his tail as he gazed into the west. \"Scree made sure there were enough skiffs. It took some persuading, but the last octopi finally left yesterday. She and Orm are leading this group, and the skiffs are heavily loaded. Scree persuaded many blue-ringed octopi to leave with them. They survived a sea storm and should reach land within two dragon-weeks.\"\n\nZarina followed his gaze. \"I feel in my bones that they will make it.\"\n\nArak leaned against his mate, grateful for her company. But he could not tear his eyes away from the sea. \"The explosion was even greater than I expected. Tsunamis will attack the clan from two directions. What will be left of our home?\"\n\n\"We'll survive. Then I'll finally fly beyond the horizon with you.\" She stretched her wings wide, the sign for change. \"We'll have such interesting neighbors. I wonder what sunset dragons are like?\"\n\nArak turned to Zarina and his eyes glowed. \"Do you mean...\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I would miss Scree and Orm, and Drakor. We'll move.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ GLOSSARY: WORDS AND SCIENCE ]\n\nScience within the science fantasy\n\nAbalone: This sea animal is used for food. The inside of the shell has colorful mother-of-pearl with overlapping layers of silvery pink, green and blue. (a-bah-low-nee)\n\nArak: He's a golden dragon, explorer, and dreamer. (A-rak)\n\nBoisterous: Noisy, rowdy, jolly, not restrained or quiet. (boy-stir-us)\n\nCamouflage: An octopus can change its shape and skin color to match, and hide within, its surroundings. This is an example of natural camouflage. (kam-oo-flaj)\n\nCloth-of-gold \u2013Thin, strong, golden thread is made from the wiry roots of the pen shell. Cloth-of-gold fabric is woven from this thread, and was once used to make beautiful gloves for ladies.\n\nDam: A dragon's mother. Zarina is Arak's mate and Arwina's dragon-dam. Arafine is Arak's dragon-dam.\n\nDorali: She's a golden dragon and an excellent Healer. (Door-ah-lie)\n\nDrakor: He's a young ice dragon. (Dray-kor)\n\nDweer: This scaly, rust-colored, wolf-like predator has a blunt snout and sharp teeth. Dweer are wingless and smaller than dragons, but dangerous in a group. (dwee-er)\n\nGiant squid: These animals have eight long arms and two extra-long arms. Giant squid usually live in the deep ocean. They are intelligent, aggressive predators that may grow up to 60 feet long. Giant squid have a long head and huge eyes that can be almost 12 inches across. (skwid)\n\nIce flower: There is a real plant like this called skeleton flower. The chalky white flower petals turn clear under rain, and it has tiny blue berries.\n\nIridescent: Shining with different colors, a sparkling rainbow effect. (ih-rih-deh-sent)\n\nJuveniles: These are the young, immature members of a group. Puppies are juvenile dogs, children are juvenile humans, dragonlets are juvenile dragons. (joo-veh-niles)\n\nLodestone: This stone is a natural magnet. (lodestone)\n\nMesmerized: Amazed, fascinated, almost hypnotized by someone or something. Drakor was mesmerized by the flute music. (mez-mer-izd)\n\nOctopus: This intelligent sea being has 8 flexible arms and no bones. The proper plural is \"octopuses\". \"Octopi\" is sometimes used, and this sounds more science-fictiony.\n\nQuithra: This imaginary sea creature resembles a sea slug. Slow, colorful creatures are often toxic and taste bitter; this is their defense. Medicines sometimes use the natural chemicals from bitter-tasting animals and plants. (kwi-thra)\n\nSire: A dragon's father. Kragor is Arak's sire. Arak is Arwina's sire. (Sii-er)\n\nSolstice: The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year; then days become longer. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year. (sol-stiss)\n\nSpawn: To release many small eggs into the water.\n\nSturgeon: This large, primitive fish can grow to 12 feet long. Sturgeons are covered by diamond-shaped scales. The females make thousands of tasty, oily eggs. (stur-jun)\n\nTentacle: This is the flexible, boneless arm of an octopus or a squid. An octopus has strong, sensitive suckers to touch or hold. (ten-ta-kel)\n\nTitanium: This shiny, silvery-gray metal was named for the Titans of Greek mythology. The chemical symbol is Ti. Titanium is very light, strong, and resists breaking down in sea water. It's found in volcanic rocks and was first found in black sand. It's greatly concentrated in horsetail and nettle plants. I've never put titanium in fire or lightning to see if it turns black. (tie-tay-nee-um)\n\nTsunami: This is a huge wave, a rare wall of water that strikes the shore. (sue-nah-mee)\n\nTunicate: This small, soft, primitive sea animal grows in clusters that are attached to a surface. Many sea creatures glow, so some tunicates might glow. (too-nih-kat)"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dragons of Mother Stone 4) Skies Will Burn",
        "author": "Melissa McShane",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Dragons have six fingers on each hand, and the number twelve is semi-religious to them. They measure the passage of time in twelvedays as well as seasons and years, and frequently count by dozens as well as more conventional base ten numbers (thanks to having ten toes on their feet).\n\nDragons measure time of day by the position of the sun: dawn, morning, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, late afternoon, dusk/sunset. Time of night is measured by relation to midnight: dusk/sunset, evening, late evening, midnight, the dreaming hours, pre-dawn, dawn.\n\nDragons take approximately thirty years to reach adolescence and are considered adults at age fifty-five, though it can take another ten to fifteen years for a dragon to achieve her full adult size.\n\nDragon time and distance measurements are inexact and based on the average dragon body. The basic unit of time is the heartbeat, or beat. A dragon's resting heart rate is about twenty-five beats per minute, so a single beat is the equivalent of two and a half seconds, a hundred beats is a little over four minutes, and a thousand beats is almost forty-two minutes.\n\nAn adult dragon is approximately the same length and height (not including wingspan) as a double-decker bus, but slimmer. Their basic unit of distance is the dragonlength, which is somewhere between twenty-five and thirty feet long (counting from tip of the nose to tip of the tail). For smaller distances, they use the handspan, which is approximately twelve inches long. For long distances, they are more likely to measure by the length of time it takes to fly somewhere rather than how far it is in dragonlengths. A dragon standing erect is sixteen to twenty feet tall.\n\nAdult dragons weigh between 4000-5000 pounds. An active dragon will eat, on average, 250-300 pounds of meat per day, plus a quantity of stone equaling another 8-10 pounds (sometimes less depending on the \"richness\" of the stone). Dragons generally eat twice a day, though in lean times a dragon will gorge herself on available food and then not eat again for several days.\n\nAn adult dragon can fly up to 120 miles per hour.\n\n\u2042\n\nLamprophyre sat back on her haunches and restlessly flexed her wings, sending a cooling draft over her body. At nearly noon on the first day of winter, the sun's rays weren't as punishingly hot as they would be in a few twelvedays\u2014a few months\u2014but the day was still unusually warm, warmer than was comfortable for a dragon. It hadn't rained in several days, and the dragon embassy courtyard smelled of dust and, faintly, the roast pig Lamprophyre had had for breakfast. It also smelled, closer to hand, of leather and the oily tang of warm metal. Such ordinary smells with such extraordinary meaning.\n\nShe lifted the tangle of leather straps and metal buckles in one hand and eyed it narrowly. Wide leather bands connected to an oddly shaped piece of leather, stitched to curve up on both long sides in an oblong cupped shape. Thinner bands hung off the tapering ends of the oblong, attached to fat metal triangles barely big enough to fit all her fingers through. Buckles swung and tapped against each other, making little tink sounds that contrasted with the soft purr of leather rubbing against leather.\n\n\"I don't know about this,\" she said.\n\n\"It was your idea, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Yes, but I didn't know it would look like this. And this\u2014\" She tapped a finger against the leather oblong. \"Did it have to look so much like a saddle?\"\n\n\"It's the only way to connect all the harness straps and keep them from crippling me,\" Rokshan reminded her. \"Look. If you don't want\u2014\"\n\n\"I do. I'm sorry. It's just, now it's ready, I feel so foolish putting it on. Dragons aren't draft animals.\"\n\n\"You could think of it as a kind of clothing,\" her clutchmate Flint offered. \"Utilitarian clothing.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't wear clothes, either.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"All right. Help me get it settled.\"\n\nThe\u2026saddle\u2026went first, fitted snugly into the notch above her shoulders by Flint. It was heavy and awkward enough it took a dragon to manage it. Then the straps under her arms that buckled securely across her chest. The iron buckle rubbed uncomfortably across her scales, but it wasn't painful, so she didn't say anything. Next, the straps above her arms that crossed over the base of her throat. Those were more comfortable, though they would have choked a human; dragon hide was stronger than that.\n\nShe cinched the buckles tight and twisted her torso to make sure the straps were secure. The metal triangles, the stirrups, bounced lightly off her sides. The harness actually wasn't that awkward, no worse than human sandals had been, and she'd endured those.\n\n\"All right, climb up,\" she said to Rokshan, crouching so the left-hand stirrup scraped the hard-packed earth of the courtyard.\n\nRokshan settled himself in his accustomed seat. \"Oh,\" he said in a breathless voice. \"That's, um, very snug now.\"\n\n\"Does it hurt?\" Flint asked.\n\n\"Not hurt so much as compress. I think the saddle needs to be of thinner leather.\"\n\nLamprophyre twisted to look at him, but as usual saw only her own shoulder. \"Should we have them make a different one?\"\n\n\"I've waited two weeks to race with you, Lamprophyre. I'm not putting it off because of a little discomfort.\" Rokshan fitted his feet into the stirrups. She felt the brush of leather against her skin as he fastened the hip straps. \"They can make another one after we try this out. There might be other adjustments to make.\"\n\nLamprophyre shifted the buckle of the chest band. \"Good point. Are you ready?\"\n\nRokshan patted her neck. \"Ready.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded at Flint, who launched himself into the sky and winged his way southward toward the warehouses where the rest of the clutch lived. She drew in as deep a breath as she could manage against the chest band and followed Flint.\n\nFlying wearing the harness didn't feel any different than it usually did, except for how the buckles pressed against her scales, rubbing lightly. On anyone but a dragon, that would result in painful sores over time, but no dragon's hide could be damaged by something as soft as iron. It was annoying, but no more than that, and Lamprophyre could bear a little annoyance.\n\nThey flew in silence across Tanajital, not needing to speak. Rokshan's presence on her shoulders was a pleasantly warm ember, constantly reminding her he was there. Occasionally the reality of it struck her: she, a dragon, was pair-bonded to a human she loved more than anything, and then she felt warm all over and not just from her mate's presence. Their bond had continued to strengthen over the last two twelvedays until now she could tell where he was from halfway across Tanajital.\n\nShe felt him run his hand over the base of her neck, below the sensitive spot at the back of her head. They weren't the same species, and couldn't share physical intimacy, but his touch meant so much more now that she knew he loved her.\n\nDragons rose into the sky ahead, orange and red and green and silver, and came to meet them as Lamprophyre approached. \"So it works,\" Coquina said. \"It's surprisingly attractive.\"\n\n\"You think so?\" Lamprophyre asked. She'd felt so awkward with all of them staring at her that Coquina's response was a surprise.\n\nThe drifting surface thoughts of the clutch showed they were all in agreement with Coquina. \"It looks like jewelry,\" Dolomite said. \"Very plain jewelry. I realize that doesn't make sense.\"\n\n\"We could make them brighter,\" Bromargyrite said, himself a beacon of brilliant orange and yellow. \"If it's a success.\"\n\n\"There aren't many people we'll want to have ride,\" Orthoclase pointed out. \"Just Rokshan and Melika and maybe Lokun.\"\n\n\"And it's not as if you need riders,\" Rokshan said. \"This is purely for humans' benefit.\"\n\n\"Then I suppose it's time to test it,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThey flew low across the city to give the residents of Tanajital something wonderful to look at. Lamprophyre loved how the city's voice, a low, rumbling hum, grew higher and more excited whenever the dragons appeared. People stopped in the street and pointed, held their children up for a better view, and a few of them even cheered. How different from the first days almost a year ago, when Lamprophyre's appearance had started more than a few riots. Rokshan had said, back then, that it was human nature to quickly grow accustomed to the strange until it became normal, and then normal became taken for granted. Now, she knew from talking to the people who came to the embassy for the free soup, most citizens saw the dragons as part of the city.\n\nThey crossed the Green River and flew on a few dozen dragonlengths to the tall wooden structures, red as the floor of the coliseum, that marked the racing course. If Lamprophyre had to attribute dragons' success at making Tanajital love them to anything, this would be it. Rokshan's idle thought that humans might enjoy watching dragons race had turned into this semi-permanent collection of obstacles and the two tall spectator stands on either side. A third stand, topped by a green and gold canopy, gave the royal family somewhere to sit when they attended.\n\nThe seven dragons of the clutch alit on the field. \"How should we do this?\" Rokshan asked. \"Run the obstacle course?\"\n\n\"I was thinking of a speed test first,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Something straightforward.\"\n\n\"Then let's make it a true race,\" Coquina said. Her clutchmates groaned. \"What?\" she protested with a smile. \"You might win.\"\n\n\"The odds are not in our favor, love,\" Flint said, elbowing his mate. \"But it's still a good idea. We'll be there in case Rokshan falls off.\"\n\n\"Let's not use those words, all right?\" Rokshan said. \"I don't want the Immanence hearing and deciding to make my life short and exciting.\"\n\nLamprophyre pushed off and flapped until she was just above the spectator stands. \"Everything will be fine. Tell me when you're ready.\"\n\nRokshan patted her neck again, then gripped her ruff firmly. \"Ready.\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced to either side, where the other dragons had gathered. \"Go!\" she shouted, and seven dragons sent up a tremendous wind as they took off for the horizon.\n\nLamprophyre had never flown as fast as she could with Rokshan as a passenger. Now his knees gripped her shoulders firmly, his heels in the stirrups dug into her sides, and she gradually sped up until she had to close her nictitating membranes to protect her eyes from the wind.\n\nCoquina was already well in the lead, with Porphyry close behind. Flint and Bromargyrite flanked Lamprophyre, and she had just realized they were doing it on purpose when Orthoclase pulled ahead and Dolomite dropped to fly beneath her. She loved how much care her clutchmates had for Rokshan, how he was one of them for all he was human.\n\nBelow Dolomite, the ground streamed past in streaks of green and brown and gray, with the Green River a glittering stripe to the left. The horizon lay low and steady in the distance, misty with an oncoming storm. Rain would be welcome after so many dry days. Ahead, Coquina and Porphyry had reached the lone tree that marked the end of their race course and were wheeling to return. Orthoclase had made up ground and was barely a dragonlength behind the leaders.\n\n\"Hold on!\" Lamprophyre shouted to her rider. She thought about slowing to take the turn more gently, but what would be the point of the test if she didn't push her limits? So she sped up instead, aiming to the right of the tree, which was tall and slender like a giant finger pointing at the sky. Flint and Bromargyrite moved away, giving her room to make the turn\u2014 \u2014and she banked hard, wheeled on her left hind leg, and tilted nearly sideways as she circled the tree and headed back toward the obstacle course. Rokshan's grip on her shoulders and ruff tightened, and he shouted, a wordless cry of exhilaration that made Lamprophyre's heart leap. He hadn't shifted at all and the saddle hadn't slid. Lamprophyre shouted with him and sped faster.\n\nThere was no way she could catch Coquina or Porphyry, but she pushed herself as fast as she could go. Rokshan leaned closer, pressing against the sensitive spot and sending a pleasant tingle through her body. He'd finally gotten over his embarrassment at learning that spot was related to sex, at least when a dragon touched it, but he still avoided leaning against it. She wondered what had made him do it now.\n\nShe sped past the finish line, which was more a mutually-agreed upon spot near the spectator stands than an actual line, and shed momentum until she hovered over the royal stand. \"It worked,\" she said, somewhat breathlessly.\n\n\"It did,\" Rokshan said. His voice was strained, and he continued to lean forward across her neck.\n\n\"Are you all right? You sound as if you'd done the racing.\"\n\n\"Wind took my breath,\" Rokshan gasped. \"And I think my eyeballs tried to escape my skull. We'll need to figure out a way to protect me from the wind if we're going to fly that fast.\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought of that. Sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be. It was amazing. And you were right. That's something I want to share with you, now and always.\"\n\nLamprophyre blushed. \"Until you can fly on your own.\"\n\n\"Until then.\" Rokshan leaned forward and hugged her neck. Neither of them said what Lamprophyre knew they were both thinking, even without listening to his thoughts: the chances of Rokshan being transformed into a dragon were not good. They'd searched for an answer for weeks and were no closer now than they'd been on the day Lamprophyre had been turned back into a dragon from the human form she'd had for a twelveday.\n\nShe wanted it as much as he did, but with so much time passing with no success, she was ready to give in to despair and admit defeat. She had to remind herself frequently that twenty-five days with no success wasn't all that long, but her impatient heart didn't want to be reminded.\n\nThe rest of the clutch gathered around them, hovering in midair. \"It worked,\" Flint said. \"I can't believe it worked.\"\n\n\"What, you didn't have faith in your own creation?\" Lamprophyre teased.\n\n\"Faith is one thing. Testing an idea in the real world is something else.\" Flint lazily flapped his wings until he was next to Coquina. \"Now let's have you run the obstacle course and give it a real test.\"\n\n\"Or maybe not. Who's that?\" Orthoclase asked. He descended slowly, half-turned to look in the direction of the city. Lamprophyre followed his gaze. A small figure ran toward them, one Lamprophyre recognized after a closer look.\n\n\"It's Rassika,\" she said, descending with the others. Rassika often ran errands for her, but those were always things Lamprophyre requested. For Rassika to be here on her own, or sent by some other member of the embassy household, something had to be wrong.\n\nShe listened to Rassika's thoughts as the girl drew nearer and found them worryingly single-minded, suggesting Rassika was in some distress: find Lamprophyre, ecclesiasts here, hope I don't have to run all over Tanajital. Ecclesiasts? The representatives of the human religion weren't officially at odds with dragons anymore, but that didn't stop some ecclesiasts from preaching to the heathen dragons, trying to convince them to worship the made-up dragon god Katayan. Lamprophyre didn't like the thought of dealing with ecclesiasts, however innocent their intentions might be.\n\nShe put a hand out to catch Rassika as the girl stumbled to a halt before her. \"Don't speak just yet,\" she said. \"Catch your breath. Nothing's so urgent it can't wait a few beats.\"\n\nRassika shook her head, but she was bent over with her hands on her knees, sucking in air without speaking. Hurry back Depik says, don't know what they want, nothing good, she thought.\n\n\"Is everyone all right?\" Lamprophyre said when Rassika's breathing had stilled somewhat. She knew no one of her household was hurt, but Rassika didn't know dragons could hear thoughts, and that wasn't a secret Lamprophyre felt inclined to share.\n\nRassika nodded. \"'S not that,\" she said. \"'S ecclesiasts at the embassy. Want to talk t' you, my lady.\"\n\nLamprophyre exchanged glances with her clutchmates. They looked as concerned as she felt. \"About what?\"\n\n\"Dunno. Wouldn't say. Just that they need to talk to the dragon ambassador and they'll wait 'til you're back.\" Rassika took one last deep breath and let it out slowly. \"It was two of 'em, my lady, and they di'nt have those people with 'em, the ones with the ugly haircuts.\"\n\n\"That's unexpected,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"You don't think they want us to leave Tanajital again, do you?\" Bromargyrite said.\n\n\"Unlikely,\" Coquina said. \"The Archprelate likes us, and she wouldn't allow anyone to persecute us even if we do follow a different religion. Though that doesn't mean this isn't a couple of ecclesiasts with their own agenda.\"\n\n\"We won't find out if we sit around here guessing,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I suppose I can go see what they want. Rassika, do you want a ride back?\"\n\nRassika hesitated before nodding. Lamprophyre heard the traces of fear in her thoughts, but the girl was trying hard to suppress them, so Lamprophyre decided not to say anything that might reinforce those fears.\n\n\"I'll take you,\" Porphyry said, bending low to give her a leg up. He was a good choice, Lamprophyre thought, because he was a frequent visitor to the embassy and Rassika's thoughts showed she felt more comfortable with him than with the other dragons.\n\n\"Supper tonight at the warehouses?\" she asked her clutchmates.\n\n\"We can make adjustments to the harness,\" Flint agreed. \"You bring the cows.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and leaped into the air.\n\nShe decided not to hurry back. Not only was she slightly tired from the race, she didn't think it was a good idea to let the ecclesiasts think dragons would drop everything at their summons. So she flew at her usual pace and admired Tanajital's gleaming metal roofs. The smell of gold sharpened her appetite. Cow for supper would be especially delicious.\n\n\"I wonder if Dharan would be more willing to ride a dragon if he could be strapped in,\" she mused.\n\n\"Dharan would only agree to the harness if you promised not to fly anywhere,\" Rokshan said. \"I don't think you appreciate his hatred and fear of heights.\"\n\n\"I actually do, because when I had a human body, heights scared me. It was knowing I couldn't save myself from a fall that made them terrifying. But I think I could have borne to ride if I'd had that harness.\" She banked left to avoid one of the looming towers. The hum of the city was quieter now, during what would in summer be a rest hour getting people away from the worst of the heat. At this season, it was just tradition to nap indoors. Lamprophyre thought humans ought to welcome the cooler weather and take advantage of it to be active, but humans didn't think like dragons did.\n\nAhead, the blue roof of the embassy came into view. It had been a customs house long before Lamprophyre had arrived in Tanajital, and now Lamprophyre thought of it as almost a second home. It was as cozy as her own cave in the mountains, spacious enough to fit two female dragons and always smelling of fresh air and the warm, musky scent of dragon skin.\n\nTwo yellow-curtained litters waited in the courtyard, bright blotches against the dark earth. Their bearers had set them down on the spindly legs attached to the four corners and stood stolidly beside each one, arms folded across their muscular bare chests. Lamprophyre had developed an understanding of human attractiveness while she was temporarily in a human body, but she still didn't see the appeal of humorously bulging muscles.\n\nThe ecclesiasts hadn't been smart enough, or foresighted enough, to leave room for a dragon to land in the courtyard, and Lamprophyre had to perch on the roof ridge beam so Porphyry and his small passenger could alight near the dining pavilion. Porphyry crouched very low to let Rassika climb down, which she did with alacrity, though Lamprophyre didn't hear any unusually frightened thoughts from her.\n\n\"I'll see you later,\" Porphyry said as he beat the air to rise even with her head. \"I cannot wait to hear what all this is about.\"\n\nLamprophyre grimaced. To him, no matter what the ecclesiasts wanted, it would all be an amusing story to be told round a comfortable bonfire. To her, the ambassador, it would likely be an annoyance at best and an infuriating demand at worst. She flapped gracefully to the spot Porphyry had vacated and waited for Rokshan to climb down before unfastening the buckles and shrugging out of the harness.\n\nThe ecclesiasts had emerged from the litters the moment she set foot on earth and now stood watching her disentangle herself. Their attention made her uncomfortable, and she fumbled more awkwardly than she'd intended getting the saddle free of the notch. She finally dropped the harness on the ground and said, embarrassment sharpening her tone, \"Yes? How can I help you?\"\n\nThe ecclesiasts looked at each other. The man was thinking Jiwanyil have mercy she's bigger than a house, though his awed fear didn't show on his face. The woman's thoughts were less fearful: convince her of Jiwanyil's cause, heard they were logical creatures. That was interesting, and potentially bad. Lamprophyre was in no mood to debate religion with anyone.\n\n\"My lady ambassador, greetings from the Archprelate,\" the woman said. She didn't bow, but Lamprophyre already knew ecclesiasts didn't generally bow to anyone not another ecclesiast. \"I am Ashta, and this is Nirav. We have an important matter to discuss with you.\"\n\n\"If it's about how dragons should worship Katayan, I've already heard that one,\" Lamprophyre said. Rokshan chuckled under his breath.\n\nAshta didn't react. \"Dragons' relationship with the Lonely God is not, at present, our concern,\" she said. \"I have been possessed of a prophecy relating to your people, however, and the Archprelate instructed me to bring it before you.\"\n\nThis news didn't make Lamprophyre feel better. \"And what prophecy is that?\" she asked, hoping she didn't sound as sarcastic as she felt.\n\nAshta tilted her head to look Lamprophyre in the eye. \"Jiwanyil instructs me to climb the holy mountain Nirinatan,\" she said. \"What dragons refer to as Mother Stone.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Lamprophyre sucked in a horrified breath. \"Are you out of your mind?\" she demanded. \"Climb Mother Stone? Humans climb Mother Stone? That's\u2026\" A dozen furious words crowded her mind. \"That's blasphemy.\"\n\n\"What God has decreed so cannot be blasphemy,\" Ashta said. \"Of course I do not remember the prophecy I was possessed of, but I'm told it was unusually clear. Nirav?\"\n\nNirav cleared his throat. \"The stone rises to greet the sky,\" he said, in a singsong tone that told Lamprophyre he was reciting. \"Humans rise to greet the stone. Upon her slopes will you find salvation.\"\n\nHis words struck Lamprophyre speechless. In the silence that followed, Rokshan said, \"You understand dragons don't worship the way we do. Our prophecies don't apply to them.\"\n\n\"I disagree,\" Ashta said. \"Jiwanyil's voice goes to all creatures everywhere, human and dragon, believer and heretic. The clarity of this prophecy\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Lamprophyre said. She let out a deep breath and a puff of smoke. \"Whether or not Jiwanyil speaks to dragons, what you want is impossible. Even if Mother Stone weren't a holy place humans are forbidden to go, she's too deadly for anyone to survive on her slopes to find salvation or anything else. Even dragons have trouble breathing that high.\"\n\n\"We have faith in Jiwanyil's prophecy,\" Nirav said. \"If he wants us to climb Nirinatan\u2014Mother Stone\u2014he will provide a way.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Rokshan, who shrugged. \"You know humans won't disregard a prophecy,\" he murmured. \"Maybe we need to find a compromise.\"\n\nCompromise. Mother Stone. Lamprophyre shook her head. \"I'm sorry, but I can't allow this,\" she said. \"Imagine if\u2026if dragons told you they'd received a prophecy that the Archprelate wasn't Jiwanyil's representative on earth and you should disregard all her teachings. You wouldn't feel obligated to obey, would you? Well, that's nearly the same as what you're asking. Mother Stone is sacred to dragons, and humans climbing her would be a serious affront to our faith.\"\n\nAshta's eyes narrowed in thought. \"Then we're at an impasse,\" she said, \"because we must obey prophecy, regardless of your desires.\"\n\n\"Forget desires.\" Lamprophyre drew in another breath that failed to calm her. \"I'm telling you humans are forbidden to set foot on Mother Stone. If you disregard my instructions, we will consider it an act of aggression by Gonjiri against dragons. Is that what you want?\"\n\n\"We do not fear dragons,\" Ashta said sharply. \"We fear the wrath of God for failing to obey his instructions. Your words mean nothing beside that.\"\n\n\"Your Holiness, think carefully,\" Rokshan said. \"It's not the duty of dragons to bend to allow you to obey prophecy. It's your job to figure out how to follow Jiwanyil's teachings in the face of opposition. And I assure you King Ekanath will not be pleased if ecclesiasts anger the dragons. Or did you think this wouldn't eventually involve him?\"\n\n\"Prince Rokshan,\" Nirav began, but Ashta cut him off with a gesture.\n\n\"Then you are determined not to assist us?\" she said to Lamprophyre.\n\n\"Assist you? Your Holiness, dragons will actively oppose you if you try this,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nAshta's lips thinned in a hard, angry line. Stubborn beast, she thought. \"Very well,\" she said. \"Remember, we approached you in good faith. Whatever ill comes of this, it will be on your head.\"\n\n\"I'll chance it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Now, unless you have any more irrational demands, I'd like you to leave.\" At the moment, she didn't care about diplomacy, and Stones take these stupid ecclesiasts. Climb Mother Stone. Just thinking about it infuriated Lamprophyre.\n\nAshta and Nirav got back into their litters without another word and without looking back, and the bearers picked up their burdens and moved smoothly off into the street. Despite her anger, Lamprophyre couldn't help thinking, as she always did, how well trained the ecclesiasts' bearers had to be to maintain that even gait. They might have ridiculously large muscles, but in a group like that, they looked as beautiful as a running horse.\n\n\"That might not have been the best option,\" Rokshan said.\n\nShe turned on him. \"And what should I have done, Rokshan? Let those ecclesiasts trample on what dragons hold most sacred?\"\n\nRokshan didn't flinch. \"The ecclesiasts have come to an accommodation with dragons challenging their beliefs in Katayan,\" he pointed out. \"You could extend them the same courtesy.\"\n\n\"Rokshan\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not saying give in. I'm saying accord them the same respect they've given you. You know prophecies are the true word of Jiwanyil\u2014didn't it occur to you to wonder why he might want humans on Mother Stone?\"\n\nLamprophyre's mouth fell open. \"I\u2014\" She closed her mouth in a tight line the way the ecclesiast had. \"All right. I could have been more accommodating. But I'm not sure how. Even dragons don't go to Mother Stone unless it's their death journey. The idea is just\u2026it's unthinkable.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Rokshan put a hand on her forearm. \"Maybe this is something we should look into a little more deeply. It wasn't the best idea they had, coming here and making demands instead of explaining. It could be one of the High Ecclesiasts has a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the prophecy.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"All right. And I promise to be more openminded.\"\n\n\"You usually are.\" Rokshan stretched. \"That saddle was more uncomfortable than I realized. It didn't occur to me that the padding might be a problem.\"\n\nLamprophyre followed him into the embassy. \"So you'd rather have room for your male parts than softness?\"\n\nRokshan shot her an ironic glance. \"Yes, sweetheart, I'd prefer that. I thought we discussed what is and is not a polite topic of conversation.\"\n\n\"You're my mate. It's not inappropriate.\" Lamprophyre settled herself on the floor and furled her wings over her spine. Thanks to her friend, the prostitute Darsha, she actually knew many names for a man's male parts, but some of them embarrassed Rokshan and others made him laugh, so she stuck to the generic term.\n\n\"True, but it's still not something people discuss casually.\" Rokshan sat leaning against her side. \"I think dragons have the right idea. Keep everything delicate inside where it can't be damaged.\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about dragons' male parts,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but I imagine they're as invulnerable as everything else.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"You could ask Flint or Orthoclase.\"\n\n\"Ask\u2014\" Lamprophyre blushed, and then she laughed as well, somewhat self-consciously. \"Now that would be inappropriate. And we'd all feel very uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"It's nice to know there are things that embarrass dragons.\" Rokshan tilted his head back and sighed. \"Racing is amazing. We just need to fix that harness, and then I have some ideas for warmer clothing that will let us fly higher than before. And I think a good scarf should keep the air from being blown from my lungs.\"\n\n\"You've given this so much thought. I'm glad it makes you happy.\"\n\n\"Well, that, and it takes my mind off the Fanishkor problem.\" Rokshan ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture that meant he was frustrated.\n\n\"Is there more of a Fanishkor problem than usual?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"Yes and no. They haven't declared war or aggressed on our borders, so things aren't worse than usual that way. But our usual lines of communication are almost completely severed. You know the Fanishkorite ambassador was recalled last year, after we recalled our ambassador to them? Well, we still were in communication with their government until last week, when they accused us of spying on them and stopped talking to us entirely.\"\n\n\"Were we spying on them?\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"Tekentriya says not, but it's almost impossible to tell if she's lying. I know, you could tell, but there was no graceful way to have you eavesdrop on her thoughts. And it doesn't matter. Fanishkor believed it, and that was enough for them.\"\n\nLamprophyre considered what she knew of Crown Princess Tekentriya, heir to the throne and commander of Gonjiri's spy corps. She was suspicious, devious, and permanently angry, but she was also devoted to her country. Rokshan was right; Tekentriya could as easily have set spies to investigate Fanishkor, on the grounds that she was protecting Gonjiri, as she could have refrained from sending spies on the exact same grounds. \"What happened to her?\" she asked. \"Her leg. You said there was an accident.\"\n\n\"She was riding, and the horse tripped, or was spooked\u2014nobody knows exactly what caused it to fall. It landed on her and fractured her pelvis and hip, and by the time she was found\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre turned to look at him. \"What do you mean, found? She was alone?\"\n\n\"She used to go on long rides alone. Said it cleared her head. Anyway, she wasn't found immediately, and between that and the complexity of her injuries, healing couldn't do enough. I imagine she's in pain much of the time, but, well, you've met her.\"\n\n\"I know she hates being pitied. I don't blame her.\" Lamprophyre would have felt more sympathy for Tekentriya if the crown princess didn't dislike her little brother Rokshan so much. Tekentriya was never subtle about her dislike, either, and Lamprophyre couldn't forgive her for that.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Rokshan went on, \"Fanishkor is upset, my father is annoyed with them, and I have never been so grateful to be your liaison as I have the last few weeks, because it takes me away from all of that.\" He yawned. \"I'm going to nap, unless you want me to read to you.\"\n\n\"Napping sounds good.\" She liked it when Rokshan fell asleep beside her, how her sense of his presence intensified with physical contact. She rested her head in the crook of her arms and closed her eyes.\n\nBut sleep eluded her. Her memories of the two ecclesiasts and their absurd demand kept her from relaxing. They were fortunate they hadn't gone to Hyaloclast, because the dragon queen had a short temper when it came to dealing with humans and even less respect for their traditions than Lamprophyre had. Hyaloclast would have sent them running home. The image made Lamprophyre smile. Only a year ago, she wouldn't have dared to think of Hyaloclast so informally, and now\u2026\n\nLamprophyre blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it drift up to the ceiling and then out the window holes. A year ago, she would have sworn Hyaloclast despised her. Stones, that might even have been true, and partly justified, given that Lamprophyre had felt herself an inadequate daughter for a dragon queen and behaved accordingly. Now, Lamprophyre had seen beneath Hyaloclast's stern exterior and understood better who she really was, not to mention having a better sense of her mother's love for her. They would never have a warm relationship, but Lamprophyre no longer minded.\n\nShe thought back to her last conversation with Hyaloclast, after the dragon queen had restored Lamprophyre to her dragon form. It had not been a short conversation, and Lamprophyre and Rokshan had done most of the talking. They'd told Hyaloclast everything they'd learned about the ancient entity who had been responsible for turning Lamprophyre human so it could arrange for her death\u2014how the entity was a dragon, one of those who had been behind the Great Cataclysm that had nearly wiped out civilization and had left humans ignorant of dragons' survival. How she\u2014at the time, they hadn't known her name, Sardonyx\u2014had the ability to communicate mentally with others, coercing or tempting them to do her evil bidding. How she intended to return and finish the destruction she'd started.\n\nHyaloclast had listened to their story in the silence she was famous for. She had remained silent for several beats after they finished. Finally, she had said, \"And you believe the humans' prophecies, the ones that echo our words 'the skies will burn,' refer to this dragon.\"\n\n\"It makes sense, doesn't it?\" Lamprophyre had said. \"And Dharan says he's sure those prophecies are about both Cataclysms. The one that happened, and the one this dragon wants to cause.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Hyaloclast had said. \"But it's very little to go on.\"\n\n\"We wondered if you knew more,\" Rokshan had said. \"Dragons already have a better memory of what happened in the catastrophe\u2014the Cataclysm. You chose to separate yourselves from humanity, right? We humans incorrectly believed you were all dead. It seems possible much of what else we believe about the incident is also wrong.\"\n\n\"We know less than you imagine,\" Hyaloclast had said. \"This is knowledge shared only among dragon queens, passed down through the generations, but I have a feeling concealing knowledge will hurt us in the long run. And there isn't much to tell\u2014certainly nothing secret.\" She had cast a stern look on Rokshan and added, \"It is, however, sacred knowledge, and I expect you to treat it so. No human has ever heard this, but as you are pair-bonded to my daughter, you're not exactly an ordinary human.\"\n\nLamprophyre smiled to remember how this had made Rokshan turn red with embarrassment. \"He's not,\" she had said, still basking in the warmth of her new pair-bond.\n\nHyaloclast had given her a quelling look. \"The death rites are our oldest memories, dating back to the Cataclysm,\" she had said. \"When a dragon's time on earth draws to a close, the dragon queen takes her aside and instructs her in how she is to approach Mother Stone. She is to fly as high as she can manage before the air is too thin to support her wings, then make an ice cave for herself. In the time before she falls into unconsciousness and from there into death, she sings the death-song, which the dragon queen teaches her before her journey.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry if this is rude, but how does that relate?\" Lamprophyre had asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Hyaloclast had said, \"except that it is the only thing we have that comes from the same time as our enemy. And, as I said, any knowledge may be useful.\"\n\nNow Lamprophyre closed her eyes and let the words of the death song well up within her. She only needed to hear a song or poem once to memorize it, but this was a song that would have stayed with her even had she only had a human's memory: Born of wind and fire and stone,\n\n\u2003To breath and ash and stone return.\n\n\u2003I am all dragons in the bone,\n\n\u2003All dragons end here in their turn.\n\n\u2003My body, the stone\n\n\u2003My breath, the wind\n\n\u2003My heart, the fire\n\n\u2003Let stone and wind and fire combine\n\n\u2003Bind those who end their journey here.\n\n\u2003Fly, heart and spirit intertwined,\n\n\u2003Lie, body, now stone, 'til end of time,\n\n\u2003In Mother's love rest without fear.\n\nThough the words were somber, making Lamprophyre think of endings and dragons' spirits flying into Mother Stone's eternal rest, the tune was surprisingly cheerful. She imagined her father, Aegirine, singing this song as he slipped into his final sleep, and it comforted her. They had both fallen ill with cave sickness, and she had been delirious when Aegirine realized he would not survive. So she had come to herself to learn her beloved father was already gone. She had never had the chance to say goodbye. Running through the song in her mind felt like a proper farewell.\n\nNow, two twelvedays after that conversation, she still had no idea how knowledge of the death-song could help them. When she had learned the evil dragon's name was Sardonyx, she'd spoken to Hyaloclast, but the dragon queen hadn't recognized the name and neither had old Scoria, repository of so much dragon lore. Whoever Sardonyx was, the dragons had lost all knowledge of her in the Cataclysm.\n\nLamprophyre sighed and tried to make a smoke ring, but managed only a distorted puff. Coquina had tried to teach her, but Lamprophyre couldn't manage the trick. At least Sardonyx hadn't attacked again since confronting Lamprophyre in mental battle. Lamprophyre wished that was more comforting. It might only mean Sardonyx had found a way to build her forces that Lamprophyre didn't know anything about. She hoped she'd done damage to the evil dragon, but she knew it hadn't been a killing blow.\n\nShe sent up another failed smoke ring and watched the blob dissipate. There was nothing she could do about Sardonyx now. She hummed the death-song quietly to herself and remembered her father until she finally fell asleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Though the streets of Tanajital were normally crowded with humans and their sour-sweat odor, almost no one ever came to the neighborhood where the dragons of Lamprophyre's clutch lived. Wooden warehouses, tall and broad enough to fit a dragon, lined both sides of the street, their dark walls making the street seem narrower than it was. At night, lit only by lanterns lashed to poles, the street almost vanished entirely. It was an illusion, but Lamprophyre still kept her wings tightly furled whenever she visited.\n\nThe short stretch of street wasn't in the middle of the industrial district, but it wasn't isolated, either, and since the humans who owned their own warehouses in the area chose to stay out of the dragons' way, that meant some of those humans had to go a very long way out of their way to get to their property. Lamprophyre had worried about resentment building up, but Rokshan had talked to the owners, money had changed hands, and the dragons had privacy they hadn't asked for.\n\nShe sat at the end of the dragons' street and half-listened to the conversation Rokshan was having with a wagon driver. It didn't have anything to do with dragons, so she felt justified in listening to the sounds of the city instead. Today Tanajital sounded peaceful, its citizens undisturbed by anything unpleasant. Or by anything exciting, for that matter. There were no celebrations scheduled, no holy days, just people carrying on their business and their everyday lives.\n\n\"Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan said. \"Is that all right?\"\n\n\"Is what all right?\"\n\nRokshan gave her a meaningful look. It said she should have been paying attention. \"The sum we've agreed on to purchase the warehouses outright. It seems dragons are a permanent part of Tanajital these days, and we'll save money in the long run by purchasing rather than renting.\" His tone of voice suggested that he knew just how long she hadn't been paying attention. Well, it wasn't as if she really understood the value of money, or whether the transaction was good business.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, trying to sound wise. \"Of course. We can afford it, yes?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\" Now Rokshan's look was one of amusement, the way he looked when she said something only a dragon would come up with. He turned back to the woman\u2014Lamprophyre was wrong, she couldn't be just a wagon driver if she owned these warehouses\u2014and handed over a not very small purse. The woman's thoughts were all of awe at Lamprophyre's size and satisfaction at selling warehouses that weren't doing her any good as they were. Lamprophyre guessed if she'd been listening to the woman's thoughts all along, they might have gotten a better deal. She decided not to say anything to Rokshan. He'd use it to remind her of her ambassadorial duties, which she already knew about; she just didn't like some of them.\n\nThe woman returned to her wagon, which was stopped a good distance down the street. A man stood at the horses' heads, keeping them calm. The reddish-brown animals weren't downwind of Lamprophyre, so they weren't terrified, but they were restless enough Lamprophyre knew they were aware of her presence. Of course, she didn't eat horse these days, and certainly wouldn't eat horses owned by someone else, but the horses didn't know that.\n\nRokshan lifted a hand in farewell as the woman steered her wagon back toward the center of the industrial district. \"You really ought to pay attention when we make these transactions,\" he said. \"It's your job\u2014\"\n\n\"As ambassador, yes, I know, but Rokshan, you manage the negotiations. I just agree to them. I still have very little sense of the worth of human production.\"\n\n\"It's politeness. Also, it builds goodwill if humans have your attention. They feel as if they've earned your respect.\"\n\nLamprophyre shrugged. \"You're right. I'll remember that. Does this mean Bromargyrite can go ahead with the new construction, if he owns the warehouse?\"\n\nRokshan turned and strolled down the street beside her. \"Yes. We can do anything we like so long as it doesn't affect someone else's property. I didn't know Bromargyrite was dissatisfied with his warehouse.\"\n\n\"He wants bigger windows for more of a breeze, like we have in the embassy.\" Lamprophyre stopped at Bromargyrite's warehouse and knocked on the wall next to the open doorway. All the dragons had removed their warehouse doors so they felt more like caves. \"I'll tell him.\"\n\nDolomite poked his head out of the warehouse opposite. \"Tell him what? He's not here. He went to talk to his adept friend.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Lamprophyre sat back on her haunches and stretched her wings out. She'd kept them furled during the conversation with the warehouse owner and they felt stiff. \"We bought the warehouses. So you can do whatever you like with them.\"\n\nDolomite brightened. \"I want to paint the walls of mine,\" he said, \"on the inside, you know, so I can make new drawings. I ran out of space a twelveday ago.\"\n\n\"It's too bad most houses are too small to fit us,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'm sure there are hundreds of people who would pay you to decorate the insides of their houses.\"\n\n\"Why not the outsides?\" Dolomite asked. \"Tanajital's buildings are so plain.\"\n\n\"Because buildings are taxed according to how colorful they are,\" Rokshan said.\n\nDolomite frowned. \"What's taxed? It sounds like a bad thing.\"\n\n\"Depends on whether you're paying or collecting,\" Rokshan said wryly. \"It just means money people pay the government to do certain things, like maintain the streets or fund the city guard.\"\n\n\"I don't understand how human money works at all, except for how I need rupyas to exchange for chalk or paint,\" Dolomite said. \"And how I can get rupyas by giving stone to people.\"\n\n\"That's more or less all you need to know,\" Rokshan said. He looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun. \"That's Bromargyrite now.\"\n\nLamprophyre moved back to allow room for her clutchmate to land. He was large for a male, almost as big as she was, and no matter how he tried, he couldn't overcome the clumsiness he was known for in the dragons' flight. \"I thought you'd learned everything you need to know from that adept,\" she said.\n\nBromargyrite furled his wings and stretched his neck as if he were Rokshan popping his joints, though dragons' anatomy didn't work that way. \"Kamil's not as oblivious and self-centered as I thought,\" he said. \"He's kind of obnoxious about stone, but on every other topic he's easy to talk to, not at all smug or arrogant. He loves the dragon races, too. I've been thinking, if we can make the harness work right, it might not be bad to let him ride.\"\n\n\"That's a surprise,\" Lamprophyre said. It always struck her as odd when her clutchmates made human friendships. The feeling didn't make any sense, given her closeness to Rokshan, but flying with a human was so intimate it felt strange knowing her friends were that close to people she'd never met.\n\nBromargyrite shrugged. \"It's a thought. We'd need more harnesses, for a start. But you did say Sardonyx hates the idea of humans and dragons working together, so it seems to me we ought to be looking for ways to make that happen.\"\n\n\"That's so obvious I don't know why I didn't think of it.\"\n\n\"So should I try to make a human friend?\" Dolomite asked. \"I'm not sure I want someone riding my shoulders. It looks so uncomfortable. And I'd have trouble not listening to their thoughts.\"\n\nLamprophyre regarded the dark green dragon. Dolomite was sweet, and easy to get along with, but he was also guileless and tactless without meaning to be. She had trouble picturing him befriending a human, someone to whom little white lies were a commonplace and who might not respect Dolomite's limitations. \"I don't think it's useful for us to simply pick humans at random,\" she said. \"If you make a friend, that's fine, but don't feel obligated.\"\n\nDolomite relaxed. \"That's good, because suppose it was a female human? I'm not sure I could manage what you and Rokshan did, falling in love. Humans are so fragile and unattractive.\"\n\nLamprophyre clenched her teeth on a snappish retort. Trust Dolomite to find the least tactful response to any situation. And you couldn't even hate him, because he was so innocent about it. \"I think Rokshan and I are unusual, Dolomite,\" she said, exchanging pained glances with Bromargyrite. \"Bromargyrite, we came to tell you we've purchased the warehouses and you can go ahead with the alterations to yours.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Bromargyrite stood. \"I'll need to warn everyone to stay out of the way of the workmen. I'd hate someone to be stepped on.\"\n\n\"I think I'll go buy that paint now, and see if they have any larger brushes,\" Dolomite said. \"Are you staying, Lamprophyre?\"\n\n\"I have to meet with builders myself,\" Lamprophyre said. She lowered her shoulder to let Rokshan climb up. \"We're making the servants' houses nicer\u2014more windows, better roofs, things like that. So I suppose I'll see you at the races tomorrow.\"\n\nShe rose into the air, waved at Bromargyrite, then Dolomite, who flew in the opposite direction. It really was a peaceful day, with nothing much to do, no petitioners to see, no events to attend as ambassador. Maybe they could go for a swim after talking to the builders.\n\nShe felt Rokshan lean to one side. \"It's so interesting to see people from this perspective,\" he said. \"More of them look up now, did you realize? They love to watch you fly.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked down at the sea of dark heads. Some weren't so dark, as people tilted their heads back to watch. She drifted lower and slowed to give them a better look. She might not have Coquina's dramatic coloring or Flint's handsome body, but Rokshan insisted her blue and copper was striking and very attractive to humans.\n\n\"I love seeing the children look at me,\" she said. \"Sometimes I'm in a position to hear their thoughts, and they're always so innocently awestruck. It's a wonderful feeling.\"\n\n\"I can imagine,\" Rokshan said. Then he froze. \"Stop!\" he shouted. \"Go back, go back!\"\n\nLamprophyre, startled, flailed around and lost elevation before she pulled herself up. \"What\u2014Rokshan, are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'm fine, just go back!\" He waved his arms where she could barely see them. \"Turn around, and set down in the street.\"\n\n\"I can't do that! Look at how many people there are\u2014I'll crush someone!\" She turned and flew back, looking around wildly for whatever had upset Rokshan.\n\n\"Descend slowly, and they'll get out of your way. This is Tanajital\u2014they're used to dragons by now.\"\n\nLamprophyre wasn't sure this was true, at least as far as getting out of her way went, but concern and fear drove her to obey. People scattered, their thoughts confused and surprised but not fearful, and she found they'd left her enough space to land, after all.\n\nThe moment both her feet were on the ground, Rokshan tumbled off and pushed his way through the crowd, which parted for him nearly as readily as it had parted for her. Confused, Lamprophyre took a step or two to follow him, but came up against a mass of people that had already backed away as far as they could go against the stores lining the street. \"Rokshan, what's wrong?\" she exclaimed.\n\nRokshan stopped. He was facing someone his body entirely blocked, someone who didn't move when he accosted them. Lamprophyre rose to her full height, trying to see over him, but whoever it was was short enough that the surrounding crowd concealed them. \"Rokshan, tell me something or I'm going to panic,\" she shouted.\n\nRokshan turned to look at her. He looked devastated, his breathing heavy, his mouth curved in a frown, his pupils dilated. \"I\u2014it's\u2014\" he said, then shook his head as if words couldn't convey his meaning. \"Look.\"\n\nHe came back toward her, followed by the person he'd towered over. It was a woman, and she was struggling against Rokshan's grip on her wrist. She was very short and very plump, with large breasts and round hips and long, straight black hair. Rokshan towed her along, ignoring her protests.\n\n\"Rokshan, let her go,\" Lamprophyre said, alarmed. She'd never known him to be anything but respectful of women, but he looked as if he were beats away from kidnapping this one, regardless of the crowds watching. No one had moved to stop him, but Lamprophyre heard briefly the thoughts of the watchers, and they were considering how far they were willing to let a man go in his treatment of a woman, even if he was a prince.\n\nRokshan came to a halt beside Lamprophyre. \"It's her. You. Her.\" He shook his head again. \"You don't recognize her?\"\n\nThe woman did look familiar, but Lamprophyre didn't know from where. \"No. Should I?\"\n\n\"It's Lelitha,\" Rokshan said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Lamprophyre gasped. \"But I\u2014\" In time, she remembered not to give away that she'd been temporarily given a human body. \"Lelitha?\"\n\n\"My name is Viveki,\" the woman shouted, yanking on Rokshan's hand. \"Let me go!\"\n\nLamprophyre bent to peer at the woman. \"Rokshan, let her go,\" she said. \"I don't understand. How is this possible?\"\n\nRokshan released the woman, who stood rubbing her wrist but didn't flee. \"How dare you handle me like that?\" she shouted. \"I don't care if you are a prince, you have no right\u2014\"\n\n\"But who are you?\" Lamprophyre asked. She prodded the woman's shoulder. Now that she knew, she recognized traits she'd only ever seen in the mirror: the round face, the tiny brown spot at the base of her throat, the black hair that was tangled from Rokshan's rough handling of her. \"How do you look like m\u2014like Lelitha?\"\n\n\"I don't know any Lelitha,\" Viveki said. \"I demand an apology. You attack me in the street, you grab me and force me to go where I don't want to go\u2014if this is how dragons treat humans, I think it's revolting.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Rokshan. He was staring at Viveki as if he'd never seen a woman before. A cold sense of dread filled her. How must Rokshan feel, looking at a body that had belonged to the woman he'd fallen in love with? She wasn't so stupid as to think this meant Rokshan was going to fall in love with this Viveki, but it had to be confusing for him.\n\n\"You're right,\" she said when it became clear Rokshan was past speech. \"You deserve compensation. If you'll come to the dragon embassy, I'll present you with a formal apology and something to make up for your ordeal.\"\n\nViveki looked up at Lamprophyre, and some of her anger visibly ebbed. \"Compensation?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I would prefer to discuss it in private. Though I apologize now for my\u2014for Prince Rokshan's behavior. He believed you were someone else, and the surprise carried him away.\" Lamprophyre bowed to the woman, conscious of her tail and the chance she might hit someone with it. Bowing was so difficult for dragons.\n\nViveki's mouth set in a straight line. \"All right, I'll come,\" she said. \"But I expect you to make proper amends.\"\n\n\"I promise.\" Lamprophyre nudged Rokshan, who was still staring at Viveki. \"Rokshan. Let's go.\"\n\n\"She might not come to the embassy. I don't want to leave her,\" Rokshan murmured.\n\n\"Neither do I, but she doesn't deserve to be harassed,\" Lamprophyre muttered. \"Climb on and stop being stupid.\"\n\nRokshan gave Viveki one last long look, then climbed up and gripped Lamprophyre's ruff so tightly it almost hurt. She imagined the colors bleeding away from the tightness of his grasp. With a leap, she left the street behind, not looking to see if she'd knocked anyone over. She didn't need to deal with any more apologies, real or undeserved.\n\nThey flew in silence back to the embassy. Lamprophyre couldn't think of anything to say. That had clearly been Lelitha, except it just as clearly wasn't. Lamprophyre knew sometimes women gave birth to identical babies at the same time, and maybe Viveki was Lelitha's twin. No, that couldn't be, because Lelitha had been created by the adept Evart, who'd transformed Lamprophyre into that human body, and it wasn't as if he'd taken a living human body and crammed Lamprophyre's spirit or mind into it. Probably.\n\nLamprophyre scowled. No, she was certain it had been a true transformation, which meant\u2026what? That Evart had coincidentally imagined a real person when he transformed her? Hyaloclast had said transforming Lamprophyre back meant being able to keep her true body in memory for the time it took the magic to work. It made sense that Evart had needed the same thing to turn her human. She simply had no idea why he'd chosen Viveki.\n\nShe descended to land in the embassy courtyard. This time, Rokshan didn't climb down immediately. \"Rokshan,\" she said, turning vainly to look at him and seeing only her own shoulder. \"Rokshan. What do we do?\"\n\nRokshan pressed his face to the back of her neck and mumbled something. \"I don't know,\" he said when she asked him to repeat himself. \"I don't know what it means, other than that Evart probably used that woman as a model for your human body.\" He slid down and walked into the embassy, his head bowed and his shoulders slumped.\n\nLamprophyre followed him. \"So she must know him.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe she's a total stranger he was obsessed with.\" Rokshan leaned against the wall and slid gradually down it until he was seated on the ground. \"It was such a surprise, I'm afraid I reacted badly. It felt\u2014\" He covered his face with his hands.\n\n\"It felt like seeing me as human again,\" Lamprophyre said. A cold ache had set up in her heart. She'd known Rokshan wouldn't go on loving her the same way once she was a dragon again, which made sense, because how odd to feel romantic love for someone not of your species? She was the odd one for still loving him. But she hadn't counted on someone who looked exactly like her human body coming into their lives. Hot jealousy countered the cold ache before she ruthlessly quashed it. Love was about more than physical bodies. Rokshan wouldn't love this Viveki woman just because he was attracted to her body.\n\nShe hoped.\n\nRokshan pressed his fingers to his closed eyes and let out a sigh that sounded like it had come from somewhere near his feet. \"I'm not in love with her,\" he said.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHe lowered his hands and looked up at her. \"It doesn't matter what she looks like. And from what little I've heard, she's abrasive and self-centered. She's not you. And you are the one I love.\"\n\nHis words didn't make her feel better. She'd never been more conscious of their differences. \"I know,\" she repeated. \"She's a stranger who looks like I used to. That's so strange I don't even know where to start, except that it has to mean something. Her appearance, I mean.\"\n\n\"That was smart of you to have her come here. I wonder if she will?\"\n\nLamprophyre shrugged. \"There were too many people for me to hear her thoughts, but I think you're right that she's self-centered. If she's also greedy, she'll want whatever recompense she thinks I'm willing to give.\"\n\n\"Recompense to keep her from complaining about the prince to his royal father,\" Rokshan said with a grimace. \"So what do we think is going on?\"\n\n\"She must have some connection to Evart,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I realize now he couldn't have chosen her in passing, because seeing her once or twice isn't enough for the transformation magic, at least according to Hyaloclast. So they're closer than chance-met strangers.\"\n\n\"Which suggests she may know something of his research.\" Rokshan stood and paced between the wall and the door. \"And if she knows about the transformation magic\u2014\"\n\n\"It might tell us what we need to transform you,\" Lamprophyre said. She flapped her wings a couple of times, excitement making it impossible for her to remain still.\n\n\"Don't get excited,\" Rokshan warned. \"We know nothing about this woman. It might all still be coincidence.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Lamprophyre said, but her heart continued to leap about like fish swimming upstream, jumping in silver flashes from wave to wave. River fish were too small to be a mouthful, but they had fascinated her from her childhood, and now the image of flying specks of silver leaping in as much excitement as she felt captivated her. This had to be it. It had to be what they were looking for.\n\nShe turned and settled herself in the embassy doorway so the sun warmed her head and arms and her wings were still inside. It was a position she felt made her look smaller and less threatening, one she used when she wanted to put petitioners at their ease. Rokshan came to stand next to her, resting a hand on her shoulder. \"I'm serious, sweetheart,\" he said. \"Don't get your hopes up. We have no idea what Viveki knows.\"\n\n\"You can't tell me you're not hopeful, too.\"\n\nRokshan sighed. \"I am, but I'm also more cynical than you. And I've gotten used to expecting the worst these last two twelvedays. I'll be thrilled if she can help us, but I'm not counting on it.\"\n\nLamprophyre leaned into his touch. \"That's the sensible approach, but I think\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped. Viveki had appeared at the end of the street that opened on the courtyard. She took a few more steps, then stopped, her gaze fixed not on Lamprophyre, but on Rokshan. Lamprophyre listened to her thoughts and was dismayed to hear bitter anger at Rokshan, far more than Lamprophyre thought was justified.\n\nIt wasn't just that Viveki was angry with him for having handled her so roughly; she also resented the fact that he was a prince, and handsome, and wealthy, and even that he was confident. She hated him\u2014actually hated him!\u2014for having a life she envied. Lamprophyre didn't know what to do with that. Having Rokshan present for this conversation might be a mistake, but she needed his insights.\n\n\"Stay back,\" she murmured. Rokshan's brow furrowed in confusion, but he didn't step forward when she did.\n\nLamprophyre came fully into the light and stopped near the center of the courtyard. \"Thank you for coming,\" she said, bowing. \"Again, I apologize for your mistreatment.\"\n\nViveki glared at Rokshan. \"Just because he's a prince doesn't give him the right to grab people off the street.\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't, but as I said, his highness was startled at your resemblance to a friend he thought was lost,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You understand what it feels like to be startled, yes?\"\n\n\"That's no excuse.\" Idiot prince can't even apologize himself, makes the dragon do it, Viveki thought.\n\nLamprophyre kept from groaning in annoyance. The woman hated Rokshan and she craved his apology. Humans were so odd. \"Prince Rokshan would like to apologize as well,\" she said, wishing with all her heart he was already a dragon and could hear Viveki's thoughts.\n\nRokshan came forward and bowed. \"It's true, I was surprised,\" he said, \"but that's no excuse for my behavior. I hope you can forgive me.\"\n\nThinks he's better than me, Viveki thought, and Lamprophyre again suppressed a groan. She was starting to wonder if Viveki could know anything that would make this conversation worthwhile.\n\nViveki eyed Rokshan speculatively. \"You think a prince can get away with acting like that?\" she said, scorn dripping from every syllable.\n\nRokshan, Lamprophyre remembered, had been raised from birth to hold on to good manners no matter the provocation. He ignored Viveki's tone and said, \"I may be a prince, but I'm also a man like any other. If I wanted to get away with treating you poorly, I certainly wouldn't have apologized, would I?\"\n\nViveki opened her mouth to say something else that by the sound of her thoughts would be scathing. Lamprophyre said, \"I hope you will accept his apology as well as mine, Viveki. And I would be delighted to repay your generosity of spirit with a small token of our regard. But\u2014\" She paused, tilting her head to give the impression that she had just thought of something. \"I wonder. You do look so much like our friend Lelitha\u2014do you happen to know an adept named Evart?\"\n\nViveki took a step backward, her thoughts suddenly a tangle of confusion and bitterness. \"Evart?\" she said. \"Why do you care about that old bastard?\"\n\n\"Then you do know him,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nViveki smiled. It was as bitter an expression as her thoughts. \"Not much,\" she said. \"He's my father.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Lamprophyre sucked in a startled breath. \"Your father?\"\n\nViveki shrugged. \"Not that it means anything to him. Haven't seen him in two years. So if he's done something wrong, don't go looking to me for restitution.\" Bastard never cared for anything but magic, never me or nothing else, she thought.\n\nRokshan looked at Lamprophyre wide-eyed in an expression she knew well. Normally she avoided listening to his thoughts, a courtesy she would give any of her close friends. Now she let herself hear him think If she hasn't seen him in years, she doesn't know about his magic pursuits overlaid with a deep feeling of discouragement. It really was unfortunate he couldn't hear her thoughts in return\u2014but if he could, he'd be a dragon, and they wouldn't care about what Viveki did or didn't know.\n\n\"It's not that,\" Lamprophyre said, hoping Rokshan would stay quiet. If Viveki's abrasiveness could stay directed at Evart, maybe she'd be cooperative. Though Rokshan was probably right, and she didn't know anything useful. Still, Evart had used her as a model for Lamprophyre's human body, and that had to mean something.\n\n\"We encountered Evart a little over a month ago,\" she went on, \"and, um, talked to him about what magic artifacts he was working on. He had one artifact in particular that interested us. Something he'd probably been creating for a long time.\"\n\n\"And you think I know anything about that?\" Viveki laughed, a harsh, curt sound like the bark of a dog. \"I'm no adept. Did he refuse to tell you? Sounds typical of him. He never wanted anyone to know about his work.\" Not even his own blood, she thought. The bitterness in her words and thoughts roused Lamprophyre's sympathy for the prickly woman.\n\n\"I just wondered, maybe you'd seen something, or he'd used the artifact elsewhere, as a test, maybe?\" Lamprophyre asked. Viveki likely wouldn't be cooperative, but her thoughts were as open to Lamprophyre as a blooming flower.\n\nViveki raised one eyebrow. She did it so well Lamprophyre felt stung by how derisive the gesture was. \"Why don't you ask him? You're wasting my time. Give me payment, because I've got places to be.\"\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan exchanged glances. Don't tell her, Rokshan thought. It had been Lamprophyre's first instinct as well. Except if they went on deceiving Viveki, pretending Evart was still alive, what would happen when she found out the truth and that Lamprophyre and Rokshan had known it all along?\n\n\"I'm sorry, Viveki, but Evart is dead,\" she said. \"I thought you knew.\"\n\nViveki's face went completely expressionless, but her thoughts became a whirlwind of emotion, pain and sorrow and satisfaction all mixed together with anger. \"What happened?\" she said.\n\n\"It was an accident with an artifact,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It broke, and released so much energy it killed him.\" That was all true except for the 'accident' part, but Lamprophyre didn't want to try to explain that Evart had broken the artifact intentionally. Too many secrets were tied up with that one action.\n\nViveki let out a slow breath. \"Figures,\" she said. \"Mam always said his experiments would be the death of him. I don't suppose it was in his workshop? Anyone else hurt or killed?\"\n\nLamprophyre was surprised at the question. She'd have thought Viveki didn't give a damn about anyone but herself. \"It\u2014no. I was there, and so was Rokshan, but nobody other than Evart was close enough to be caught in the blast.\"\n\n\"Small mercies,\" Viveki said. She lowered her head and restlessly drew a line in the earth with the toe of her sandal. \"Well, it's no real loss. Nobody liked him, and it's not like he used his magic to help people. Probably whatever artifact killed him was for selfish purposes.\" Never a chance to say echoed through Lamprophyre's head, and for a moment pure regret shot through Viveki's tangled emotions.\n\n\"He was still your father,\" Rokshan said, \"and we're sorry for your loss.\"\n\nLamprophyre winced. She could tell Rokshan was trying to help, but his words just made Viveki angry.\n\n\"As if you'd know anything about it,\" she snarled, taking a few steps toward Rokshan with her hands clenched. \"Don't go assuming you have a right to tell me how to feel.\"\n\nAnger touched Rokshan's thoughts. Lamprophyre put a restraining hand on his shoulder, gently so as not to hurt him. \"It sounds as if he wasn't a very good father,\" she said, \"and we don't know anything about your relationship with him. Maybe it doesn't make you sad that he's gone. But we're both sorry you had to learn about it this way.\"\n\nViveki's anger ebbed, not much, but enough that Lamprophyre felt safe saying, \"The artifact that killed him is the one we wanted to know more about. But if you haven't seen him in two years, you wouldn't know anything about it. Come with me, and let me give you something for your trouble.\"\n\nViveki didn't move. She tilted her head so she could see more of Lamprophyre. Maybe not a waste of my time, she thought. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"He was working on the same artifact for five years. Maybe there's something I know.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't like the calculating tone of her thoughts. She was sure Viveki only wanted money and was likely to lie to get it. Rokshan's thoughts indicated he felt the same. \"And you'll tell us in exchange for money,\" he said.\n\nViveki's scornful gaze flicked over him before she returned her attention to Lamprophyre. \"And what if I do?\" she said. \"I don't think I should give away what I know for free.\"\n\n\"Or maybe you don't know anything and feel entitled to cheat us because of how Rokshan treated you,\" Lamprophyre shot back. \"You already said Evart never talked about his work. Rokshan, give her something and she can be on her way.\"\n\nRokshan dug in his belt pouch, the one that held the embassy funds, and extracted a few silver coins. Viveki eyed the pouch. Definitely flush, she thought, I bet I can get more. \"I said he never wanted people to know about his work,\" she said, taking a step back from Rokshan. \"I didn't say I didn't know about it anyway.\"\n\nTo Lamprophyre's surprise, Viveki wasn't lying. \"All right,\" she said, leaning down to put her head even with the woman's. \"What do you know?\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said in a warning voice.\n\n\"I don't talk without you pay me first,\" Viveki said.\n\nRokshan gave her the rupyas he held. \"There. With my apologies for treating you poorly. Now, we don't want to keep you from your business.\"\n\n\"I'm not paying any more until you convince me you know something useful,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said again. \"We're wasting our time and Viveki's. And I'm sure she doesn't want to talk about her father and bring up painful memories.\"\n\nLamprophyre suppressed a smile. Rokshan was good at getting hostile people to give away more than they intended. Sure enough, Viveki's irritation with the prince flowered into words she believed would hurt him. \"Like you'd know anything about it,\" she said. \"I don't feel anything but happiness that he's dead. So stop pretending you care about my feelings.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Rokshan said. \"I don't care. You've got your money. Be on your way.\"\n\nLamprophyre had never seen her mate give a better impression of a haughty, condescending prince. It was impressive and a little scary.\n\nViveki's thoughts revealed Rokshan's ploy had worked; she felt she had the upper hand. \"Thought you wanted to know about Evart's doings. You want to know about that artifact, I can tell you more.\"\n\n\"You'll have to prove it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I won't pay for nothing. Tell me what it looked like.\"\n\nViveki shrugged. \"It wasn't finished when I saw it,\" she said, \"so I don't know what it looked like, if he did actually finish it. But it was a green stone with black splotches on it, about six inches long and shaped like a prism.\"\n\nRokshan made a pained noise, and Lamprophyre realized she'd closed her hand too tightly on his shoulder. \"That's the one,\" she said, removing her hand. \"Do you know what it did?\"\n\nViveki tilted her head to one side like a malicious sparrow. \"That's the kind of knowledge that would be worth something,\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Rokshan, who dipped into the pouch again. He held up two rupyas between his fingers. \"What did it do?\" he asked.\n\nViveki shrugged. \"I don't know what it actually did, but I know what he wanted it to do. He meant to transform one kind of stone to another.\"\n\n\"So he didn't succeed?\" Rokshan said.\n\nViveki gave him a meaningful look and held out her hand. Rokshan dropped the rupyas into it without touching her skin, as if physical contact with the woman revolted him. \"He hadn't succeeded two years ago,\" she said, \"but two years is a long time, so you'd know better than me whether he did it.\"\n\nThen she laughed. It was such a cheerful sound, so at odds with what Lamprophyre knew of her personality, it sent a chill through Lamprophyre's heart. \"Don't know why he bothered,\" she said. \"He needed a model for the transformation, so if he couldn't afford an expensive stone, it wasn't like he could create it out of nothing.\"\n\n\"He needed a model, but he hadn't succeeded yet?\" Rokshan said.\n\nViveki nodded. \"He was certain of needing the model. And that it would only transform like to like. He'd failed to change quartz to gold, for example.\"\n\n\"But if he failed to change quartz to sapphire, too, how could he know if it worked at all?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nWonder how much more I can get out of her, Viveki thought. \"Not sure,\" she said. \"I guess there's failure, and then there's failure, you know what I mean? Like, maybe a roast goes rotten, and maybe you cook it too long, and either way you can't eat it, but you know the difference.\"\n\nOddly, the example made sense. \"I understand,\" Lamprophyre said. \"That fits with what we know of the artifact.\"\n\nViveki's eyes widened. \"You mean the old fool made it work?\"\n\nSurprised by Viveki's leap of logic, Lamprophyre stammered, \"He did. It worked, but it was destroyed.\"\n\n\"And you want to make another one. What did he transform? You want to make it happen again?\" Viveki sounded unexpectedly excited, and warning bells went off in Lamprophyre's head. If she'd already told the woman too much\u2014 \"What we want with the artifact is our business,\" Rokshan said. He withdrew a few more rupyas from the pouch and handed them over. \"Thank you for your information.\"\n\nIt was a dismissal, but Viveki didn't move. \"I can get you his notes,\" she said.\n\n\"His notes?\" Lamprophyre said. \"But there weren't any notes in his workshop.\"\n\n\"You didn't look hard enough. I know where he kept them.\" Viveki smiled, a much nastier expression than her laugh. \"Or where he was likely to keep them. The old bastard thought he was so clever, but nothing gets past me. I know where to look.\"\n\n\"Where? His workshop?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"As if I'd tell you.\" Scornfulness dripped from her words. \"But I want more than a scrabbling of rupyas. Two vahas for the lot.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Rokshan said. \"You want how much?\"\n\n\"You're not deaf, your highness,\" Viveki said, investing your highness with even more derision than before. \"Two vahas.\"\n\n\"What makes you think those notes are worth so much to us?\" Lamprophyre said, pretending casual indifference.\n\n\"I think there's something you're not telling me, and I think, because of that, you're willing to pay to learn Evart's secrets.\" Viveki stepped forward until she was within a handspan of Lamprophyre's face. Make my fortune with this, keep her paying, she thought.\n\nLamprophyre made a lightning-fast decision. Viveki was greedy, but she wasn't stupid. She wasn't likely to cheat Lamprophyre, though she wouldn't think twice about wringing as much money out of her as she could manage, and who knew what secrets those notes might contain? \"Two vahas,\" she agreed, \"on condition the notes are what you say they are.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Viveki said. \"I'll bring them tomorrow or day after at the latest. You have my money ready.\" She sneered at Rokshan and walked away without looking back.\n\n\"She's going to cheat us,\" Rokshan said when Viveki had disappeared down the street.\n\n\"Her thoughts say otherwise,\" Lamprophyre countered.\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"She might not lie about the notes, or try to pass off a forgery, but I wouldn't be surprised if she 'found' some of the notes and then extorted more money for her to 'find' the rest.\"\n\n\"That's true, but we don't exactly have a choice.\" Lamprophyre turned and went back into the embassy. \"Unless she thinks about the notes' location where I can hear her.\"\n\n\"She didn't, did she?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, no. Though I can't imagine they're anywhere but hidden in his workshop.\" Lamprophyre settled heavily on the ground and rested her head on her arms. \"At least we know there actually are notes. She wasn't lying about that.\"\n\nRokshan leaned against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. \"I'm not sure it will matter. We don't need to know how to create an artifact, we need to know how to make one work.\"\n\nA bird flew in through one of the high windows and fluttered around, squawking its distress. Lamprophyre watched it carom off the ceiling and spin dizzily down a few handspans before regaining its balance. \"I think you're forgetting something,\" she said. \"We now know Evart's artifact worked the way ours does.\"\n\n\"How do we know that? You mean, because Viveki looks exactly like Lelitha?\"\n\nThe bird straightened its flight and zoomed out another window. \"Yes,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Evart had to have a model, right? He used his memories of his daughter to transform me into an identical copy. And Hyaloclast used her memories of me as a dragon to restore me. So the secret for doing it might be in Evart's notes.\"\n\n\"It still doesn't change the fact that we don't have a model for me,\" Rokshan said. \"If we use one of the dragons in the clutch, we'll end up with identical dragons, and I don't know if that's a good idea.\"\n\n\"It's a terrible idea. Dragons are supposed to be unique.\" Lamprophyre blew out a lopsided smoke puff. She still didn't know how to blow a smoke ring and didn't feel she'd gotten any closer in the past few days. \"But we can figure that out later. And maybe there's something about it in the notes, too.\"\n\n\"Today seems to be your day for optimism.\" Rokshan crossed the embassy and sat beside her, not leaning against her side, but with his legs crossed and his chin propped in his hands in the Contemplative Monkey pose Lamprophyre found amusing. \"I wish I understood what happened to that woman to make her so angry with me just for being who I am.\"\n\n\"She resented you even as she wished she could be you. Not you, exactly, but rich and noble and all that.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"I wish I could say I didn't understand, but I used to feel that way about Coquina, so I guess I do.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to remember she didn't have the best home life, but she's a nasty piece of work and I wish we didn't have to deal with her.\"\n\nLamprophyre craned her neck to look at Rokshan. \"And she looks like me. Like Lelitha.\"\n\n\"If you're worried I might forget she isn't you, don't,\" Rokshan said with a smile. \"I can't imagine anyone less like you. Though\u2026\" The smile fell away. \"It is disconcerting, hearing that voice coming out of your lips.\"\n\n\"I can imagine.\"\n\nA shadow crossed the doorway, and Lamprophyre looked up to see a man dressed in the green and yellow livery of the royal house. \"My lady ambassador?\" he said, bowing. \"I have a message for you. From his majesty, King Ekanath.\"\n\nRokshan rose and held out his hand for the rolled paper. \"Does he expect a response?\"\n\nThe man bowed again. \"No, your highness, but I will wait on my lady's pleasure, if she wished to respond regardless.\"\n\nRokshan handed the message to Lamprophyre. It was unusually large, which still made it small to her. She rose and carried it to her magnifying lens, unrolling it beneath the glass so she could more easily read the writing. \"Huh,\" she said when she'd gotten past the address and salutations at the top. She read it through twice, then handed it to Rokshan. \"The Fanishkorite ambassador has requested a meeting with your father, and she asks that I be present. To discuss a 'resumption of diplomatic relations between all parties.'\"\n\nRokshan was already reading the message himself. \"All parties?\" he said, letting the paper roll up with a snap. \"Fanishkor has never had a diplomatic relation with dragons.\"\n\n\"Exactly the opposite, in fact.\" Lamprophyre blew out another puff of smoke. \"Will you tell the king we'll be there tomorrow at the appointed time?\" she asked the messenger, who bowed yet again and left.\n\n\"Curious,\" Rokshan said, resuming his seat.\n\n\"Very curious,\" Lamprophyre agreed. \"Fanishkor cuts off communication with Gonjiri, and then wants to negotiate a peace?\"\n\n\"It might not be peace. It might just be walking back from their antagonistic stance.\" Rokshan let the paper roll back up and tapped it against his thigh.\n\n\"They'd have to do a lot of walking to make amends to dragons,\" Lamprophyre said. The memory of a golden dragon's egg in the hands of vicious strangers still burned within her. Whatever Fanishkor wanted, she didn't feel inclined to give it to them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Lamprophyre hadn't been in the grand entrance hall of the palace since her transformation back into a dragon. It disconcerted her to remember seeing it from both a dragon's and a human's perspective. Her human memories saw the hall as enormous, arching well above her head, and the stairs to the upper passages that led into the palace proper tall enough to leave her breathless at the end of the climb. As a dragon, the tops of those stairs were only a few handspans above her head, and she was close enough to the light hanging from the ceiling that she could touch it if she stretched.\n\nShe looked up at the light, which was a metal contraption filled with bright specks like giant fireflies. It shed only a dim light over the hall; most of the illumination came from lanterns in ornate brass cages hanging on three of the four walls. The two staircases each ended at an arched doorway with another lamp above, shedding a warm glow on the little hallway beyond. Lamprophyre thought of the beautifully gaudy room that lay just past the right-hand hallway, and a pang of sadness surprised her. She didn't miss being in a human body, but it seemed there were things she wished she hadn't had to leave behind.\n\nAhead, on a dais Lamprophyre had never seen before and concluded was temporary, stood an ornate gilded chair with a fat red cushion on the seat. It was perfectly centered between the staircases and had a painted three-part screen behind it. The lighting was too dim for Lamprophyre to see clearly all the tiny details, but it was obviously a painting of Mother Stone under a night sky studded with stars much larger than actually existed. If this was the king's seat, and Lamprophyre couldn't imagine who else would dare sit there, what an impressive way to suggest how powerful he was.\n\nShe heard movement behind her and stepped to the right, out of the way of whoever wanted to enter. The Fanishkorite ambassador, probably. Beside her, Rokshan shifted and tugged the hem of the heavy, sleeveless tunic embroidered with a golden dragon that he wore over his shirt. Lamprophyre thought it was ugly, and so did Rokshan, but he'd told her, \"It's important that we always make it clear that I act on your behalf and not on my royal father's, which means not wearing the colors of the royal house. Ugly doesn't matter.\"\n\nA couple of young people, male and female, walked through the outer door, followed by a handful of humans dressed in red with white six-pointed stars on the fronts and backs of their tunics. The formal tunics were the same style as Rokshan's, but despite the stars, they looked much plainer. If this was Fanishkorite livery, Lamprophyre preferred the Gonjirian green and yellow that reminded her so much of her old mentor, the dragon Sapphire.\n\nAfter those humans, there was a pause, and Lamprophyre heard shuffling and murmured talk. She listened for thoughts and heard only confusion and a couple of sharp mental words: won't fit and stupid privileged git. That made no sense, so she watched the door and wondered what the ambassador looked like.\n\nEventually, two men entered the hall. Lamprophyre saw immediately what the problem was: they carried a couple of not quite man-high poles attached to a red canopy with a peaked roof and a rigid frame. White stars like the ones on the tunics spattered the red fabric at random, making it look as if giant birds had emptied their bowels over it. The frame was wide enough that it scraped the sides of the doors with an unpleasant scratching sound. The two men didn't look concerned about the state of the canopy, and Lamprophyre couldn't make out individual thoughts to know if they were embarrassed.\n\nBeneath the canopy, walking close together, were three humans. The canopy kept Lamprophyre from seeing whether they were men or women, and she didn't want to look foolish by bending over to look. They were followed by two men carrying the back two poles of the canopy who looked as stolid and indifferent as the first two. They bore the canopy forward until it stood directly before the chair. Then, as Lamprophyre watched with great curiosity, the four men worked complicated latches that allowed lengths of wood to slide out from where they'd been concealed in the poles. The men worked the latches a second time, then set the canopy down. The extra length kept the canopy off the heads of the three beneath it. It was so clever Lamprophyre immediately plotted how she might get such a portable canopy for herself.\n\nShe listened again for thoughts and heard the usual muddle of thoughts that happened when enough people who felt strongly about a subject were in the same room. Whatever the Fanishkorite ambassador had in mind, her retinue was as agitated about it as she was. Or\u2026maybe not. One mental voice stood out, a thread of calm in the muddle, and though Lamprophyre couldn't hear that person's thoughts above the others, whoever it was didn't have the same worries as the rest. That might be the ambassador, or it might just be someone who didn't have much of a stake in these negotiations. Either way, it didn't help Lamprophyre now.\n\nHer chalcedony pendant, a fist-sized chunk of shining blue stone in a silver wire frame, rubbed lightly over her breastbone. It looked decorative enough, but she wore it today because it was an artifact that allowed her to communicate with Hyaloclast. If Fanishkor did, in fact, intend to propose some kind of treaty with dragons, Lamprophyre wanted the dragon queen to be informed. Being the ambassador was one thing; making binding promises in Hyaloclast's name was something else.\n\nThey all waited. None of the Fanishkorites approached Lamprophyre or said anything to her or Rokshan, though they did cast glances her way occasionally, and Lamprophyre caught the odd thought of big blue monster or could crush us without a thought. These mostly amused her, though she wasn't thrilled about \"monster.\" Well, it wasn't as if Fanishkor had had dragons around to get used to them. If a Fanishkorite agent hadn't stolen a dragon egg to try to incite a war between Gonjiri and dragons, that might have changed.\n\nThe sound of a horn startled her out of her reverie. The horn blower stood at the top of the right-hand stairs as if waiting for their attention. She blew the horn again, a long, deep blast of sound like a bass-voiced duck, then descended the stairs. A line of men and women dressed in royal livery followed. All of them were as stern-faced as statues, but Lamprophyre heard enough of their thoughts before the room was too full to know most of them were very bored. So to them, this was just another diplomatic event. If Ekanath felt nervous, he hadn't communicated that fear to his attendants.\n\nAs she thought this, Ekanath himself appeared at the top of the stairs. He wore his formal multicolored robe over a white shirt and matching trousers, and a gold circlet pressed his white hair close to his head. He, too, walked as if he didn't have a care in the world. Lamprophyre wished he'd arrived before the Fanishkorites so she could hear his thoughts. She wanted very much to know what he thought about all this, because that would give her an idea of how she ought to behave.\n\nShe found she was tapping one foot and made herself stop. Nerves had temporarily gotten the better of her. Rokshan didn't look at all nervous\u2014of course, he'd been raised to this kind of pomp, and whatever he might say about hating politics, he certainly understood it well. Lamprophyre reminded herself that she was a dragon and therefore a mystery to humans, and they would be as nervous dealing with her as she was with them.\n\nTrailing more green and yellow-clad people in his wake, Ekanath crossed the room and seated himself in the golden chair. His retinue arranged themselves around him. Lamprophyre's eye was drawn to a woman who, unlike the others, sat on the dais near Ekanath's feet, her own feet drawn up beneath her as gracefully as a dove fluttering to a perch. She held a large white book and a pen carved from\u2014Lamprophyre sniffed\u2014bright green anyolite with thin streaks of pink giving it a lively look. She'd never seen a stone pen before and guessed it was an artifact, though of what kind, she didn't know.\n\nEkanath settled his hands on his knees. \"Gonjiri gives Fanishkor respect for its desire to restore communications between our peoples,\" he said. \"Chaaksha, I greet you. You may approach.\"\n\nThere was shuffling beneath the canopy, and a woman stepped forward. She wore her long black hair bundled high on her head the way Rokshan's sister Manishi always did, but tidier, and secured with ebony sticks from which faceted rubies dangled in long strings. \"Your majesty is gracious in his greeting,\" she said in a gravelly, almost masculine voice. \"Fanishkor respects Gonjiri's generous welcome.\"\n\n\"I admit to curiosity,\" Ekanath said. \"When last we spoke, you gave me to understand that Fanishkor had no interest in a cordial relationship with Gonjiri. There was some unfounded accusation of spying\u2026?\"\n\nChaaksha bowed her head briefly. \"I do not wish to antagonize your majesty, but it was hardly unfounded. We had proof.\"\n\n\"Proof we denied.\" Ekanath leaned forward. \"But I choose to believe you did not request this meeting to reopen that argument. You claim we spied. We say we did not. That, to me, is an impasse.\"\n\n\"My apologies. You are right. That is not why Fanishkor requested this meeting.\" Chaaksha's head came up. \"His majesty King Damen tires of the hostility between our countries. Many years ago, we were allies. He would like to see a return of those days.\"\n\n\"Would he, now,\" Ekanath said. \"And yet you did not come as a supplicant.\"\n\n\"We recognize that both Gonjiri and Fanishkor are powerful. We offer you a hand in friendship and request you do the same.\" Chaaksha's voice was strong and confident. \"It is why I requested the presence of the dragon ambassador. As an impartial third party, she is capable of acting as witness.\"\n\nLamprophyre thought that was something Chaaksha should have requested before the meeting started, but maybe that was a diplomatic thing Lamprophyre didn't understand. \"So, you want me to impartially watch you come to an agreement?\" she asked.\n\n\"And mediate any points of disagreement we cannot resolve,\" Chaaksha said.\n\n\"The dragon ambassador would be happy to witness,\" Rokshan said, a little too loudly. Lamprophyre didn't need to hear his thoughts to know he was urging her to go along with him. She nodded, conveying an air of ancient wisdom. She hoped.\n\n\"Fanishkor offers renewed favored trading status,\" Chaaksha said to Ekanath, \"and a restored diplomatic presence here and in the Fanishkorite capital Leksital.\" She bowed again. \"And, to prevent future misunderstandings from breaking this treaty, Damen proposes to offer his daughter Yalini's hand in marriage, to join the royal families by blood.\"\n\nShe gestured, and a woman walked forward to join her. She was taller than Chaaksha, not by much, and she wore her hair loose around her shoulders in a style Lamprophyre was unfamiliar with. Her face was pleasingly symmetrical, and so was her body. Confused, Lamprophyre peered at her more closely. Surely Chaaksha couldn't mean\u2026\n\nRokshan made a strange noise. Ekanath shot him a glance, then returned to closely watching Chaaksha. \"He proposes his daughter marries my son,\" he said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Lamprophyre felt as if she'd been kicked in the stomach, waking her out of her confusion. \"But\u2014\" she began, and Rokshan grabbed her knee and squeezed. It didn't hurt, was barely palpable, but it shut her up. Nobody knew about her relationship with Rokshan, and it absolutely was not something they could bring up in the king's court.\n\n\"You make an interesting proposal,\" Ekanath said. \"And it's true a closer relationship between the royal families\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Rokshan said.\n\nEkanath turned his terrible gaze on his son. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"I said I will not marry the king of Fanishkor's daughter,\" Rokshan said. \"You'll have to seal your arrangement a different way.\"\n\nThe young woman, Yalini, didn't react at all to Rokshan's vehement outburst. Her placid expression didn't change. Lamprophyre wondered if she understood what was going on. Surely she wasn't stupid?\n\nChaaksha regarded Rokshan closely. \"You are unmarried, and it is your duty to serve Gonjiri,\" she said.\n\n\"Not that way.\" Rokshan put his hand on Lamprophyre's flank. \"I refuse.\"\n\nNow Chaaksha looked at Ekanath. \"I'm afraid a royal marriage is a point upon which Fanishkor cannot bend,\" she said. \"Command your son.\"\n\nEkanath raised an eyebrow. \"Did you just tell me what to do?\" he said.\n\n\"It was a statement of what must be. If you want peace with Fanishkor, you will insist on this match.\" Chaaksha smiled at Rokshan. It was an indulgent smile, the kind of smile someone used when trying to cajole a child into good behavior, and Lamprophyre wanted to burn it off her face. Chaaksha gestured at her companion. \"Princess Yalini is beautiful, talented, charming\u2014you could not dream of doing better.\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in being a diplomatic pawn, and my father knows it,\" Rokshan said. He sounded as angry as Lamprophyre felt.\n\n\"Then we are again at an impasse,\" Ekanath said. \"Ambassador Lamprophyre, what do you say?\"\n\nStartled, Lamprophyre flexed her wings involuntarily, sending up a draft that ruffled Ekanath's robe and hair and set Chaaksha's strings of rubies flying. Everyone except Rokshan and Yalini flinched. \"I can't make that decision for you, your majesty.\"\n\n\"You are an impartial witness,\" Chaaksha said. \"You have no interest in the outcome of this discussion. Where does wisdom lie?\"\n\nLamprophyre wanted to laugh. No interest, indeed. \"Dragons don't have a concept of dynastic marriage,\" she said, hoping she remembered the correct term because she couldn't exactly say forcing Rokshan to marry like a breeding animal. \"We mate for life, and we pair-bond with the one who holds our heart. I don't think it's right to demand two people who've never met\u2014am I right about that, Rokshan?\"\n\n\"I've never seen Princess Yalini before today, no,\" Rokshan said. His hand on her flank steadied her.\n\n\"I don't think the marriage of two people who don't know each other should be the basis for a diplomatic relationship between two countries. Surely Gonjiri and Fanishkor can agree to deal with each other honestly without being forced to it by being related?\"\n\nChaaksha's face was set in a frown. \"It is a long-standing tradition,\" she said. \"They will grow to know each other over time.\"\n\n\"It's an old tradition,\" Ekanath said. \"Chaaksha, Gonjiri is willing to forget the past and look to the future. We accept your offer of a diplomatic exchange and favored trading status. We will not, however, require our son to marry into the Fanishkorite royal house. Though, in the interests of compromise, arranging for him to converse with the princess would be acceptable. If a match were to arise\u2014\"\n\n\"Father,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre leaned on him just enough to make him emit a pained yelp and stop talking. She didn't like the idea, either, but it wasn't as if Rokshan were going to fall in love with this princess, so agreeing to talk to her was harmless.\n\nBut Chaaksha was shaking her head. \"I'm sorry, your majesty,\" she said, \"but this is a matter upon which I am not authorized to bend. If you will not agree to the marriage, I will be forced to withdraw our offer.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Lamprophyre said without thinking. \"You both want peace. You're not willing to bend even a little bit?\"\n\n\"It is Gonjiri that refuses to bend, my lady ambassador,\" Chaaksha said. \"Last chance, your majesty. It is your decision.\" Her expression said clearly that she thought Rokshan's opinion on the matter was irrelevant.\n\nEkanath glanced at Rokshan. A look of indecision crossed his face. \"I don't,\" he began. He shook his head slightly. Rokshan tensed, his fingers on Lamprophyre's flank curling into a fist. \"No,\" Ekanath went on. \"Gonjiri left such barbarities behind centuries ago. I will not buy peace with my son's life.\"\n\nRokshan let out a deep breath. His hand relaxed. Lamprophyre realized she'd been holding her breath and let it out with a puff of smoke that was almost a ring.\n\nChaaksha bowed to Ekanath. \"I regret that we could not come to an understanding,\" she said. \"I cannot say I agree with your reasoning, but I respect your commitment to your values.\" She backed away under the canopy, prompting the bearers to return the extended poles back to their original position. Yalini turned and followed her, not once looking Rokshan's way. With a lot of shuffling, the procession made its way back through the door, once more scraping the canopy's sides, and exited the hall.\n\nEkanath sat on his chair, staring after them. \"Father,\" Rokshan said, then appeared to run out of words.\n\n\"You're not attached to anyone, Rokshan,\" Ekanath said. \"You couldn't have agreed to this one small thing?\"\n\nRokshan recoiled. \"You said you wouldn't buy peace with my life. Were you lying?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't force you into a dynastic marriage,\" Ekanath said, sounding very tired. \"But I hoped you'd consider that this was something you could do to serve your country. You can't pine after Lelitha forever, son.\"\n\nHe gave Rokshan a look that said clearly he'd spoken for the sake of listening ears. Ekanath knew \"Lelitha\" had been Lamprophyre and believed Rokshan's romantic relationship with that woman had been a sham. Lamprophyre hoped that was all he knew.\n\nRokshan shot a quick glance at Lamprophyre. \"I don't want a loveless marriage.\"\n\n\"Would you have made an effort if they'd agreed to my terms?\"\n\nLamprophyre held her breath again. Rokshan looked terribly torn. \"I\u2026yes,\" he said, and once again Lamprophyre felt as if she'd been kicked. \"Yes, I would have gotten to know Yalini. It was a fair compromise.\"\n\nEkanath sighed. \"Well, we're no worse off than we were before. My lady ambassador, thank you for speaking sense. You didn't just say it because we're allies, did you?\"\n\nShe couldn't say I did it to protect my love. \"It was just common sense, at least dragon common sense. I'm sorry it didn't work out.\"\n\n\"So am I, to my surprise.\" Ekanath rose and extended a hand to the woman with the stone pen. \"I don't know that we'll need a record of that conversation, but any time I meet with a potential enemy, I like to keep a close eye on what she says.\"\n\n\"Is that an artifact?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nEkanath nodded. \"It writes by itself, recording every word spoken within its hearing.\" He took the book from the woman and flipped its pages, scanning the lines. Lamprophyre looked over his shoulder and admired the beautiful penmanship. Hers wasn't nearly so graceful.\n\n\"At any rate, that's over,\" Ekanath said, closing the book. \"My lady ambassador, thank you again, and Rokshan\u2014\" He sighed once more. \"When you're willing to tell me who it is you're in love with, I'm ready to listen. I don't know how unsuitable she must be for you to keep it a secret, but I promise your mother and I won't make snap judgments.\" He nodded politely to Lamprophyre and walked back up the steps, trailed by his retinue.\n\nWhen the room was empty, Rokshan said, \"He doesn't know. I don't think he's even guessed.\"\n\n\"Well, obviously, or he would have said something.\" Lamprophyre turned and trod heavily toward the door. \"I had no idea a forced marriage was even a possibility.\"\n\n\"Neither did I.\" Rokshan followed her, moving as slowly as she did. \"You know it wouldn't have mattered. I mean, me getting to know that princess.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Lamprophyre said. She wasn't as sure as she sounded. The longer they went without Rokshan becoming a dragon, the greater the distance between them would become, until one day a beautiful human woman would catch his eye, and then it would all be over. Except that Lamprophyre would love him for the rest of his life, however he felt about her. She'd never felt this discouraged in her life.\n\nThey flew in silence back to the embassy, where they found Abhit and Rassika chasing each other around the courtyard, with Rassika's baby sister Kavari sitting in the doorway of the embassy, laughing at their antics. Lamprophyre crouched to let Rokshan down and said, \"I don't recognize this game.\"\n\n\"We're just running to make Kavari laugh,\" Abhit said. \"Do you want to play hide and seek?\"\n\n\"Not right now, Abhit,\" Lamprophyre said. She felt weary enough that the only thing she wanted was to sleep and sleep until she could wake up in the world where Rokshan was a dragon. \"But you can keep running. It won't disturb me.\"\n\n\"They both have chores, my lady,\" Bhakriya said. She stood at the front of the dining pavilion and clapped her hands. \"All of you, time to tidy up your rooms. Then we'll have a meal, and then Abhit promised to read aloud to all of us.\"\n\nLamprophyre scooped up Kavari, making the child scream with delight, and handed her off to Bhakriya. \"I'm going to nap, but it won't be long,\" she said. \"Rokshan, do you want to eat here?\"\n\n\"I'm meeting Dharan in half an hour, and we'll eat together,\" Rokshan said. He ran his hand over the scales on her shoulder and patted her lightly. \"I'll come back this afternoon, and we can go for a swim, yes?\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded, though she still felt weary enough that the idea of swimming made her bones ache. She'd feel differently after a nap.\n\nShe hung the chalcedony pendant on its peg inside the embassy and brushed its smooth surface with one finger. Dragons didn't cut or polish stones, and she'd always thought of chalcedony as a boring stone until she'd seen what humans could do with it. Even their non-magical stones were beautiful.\n\nShe lay down, closed her eyes, and listened to the quiet noises of the children tidying up their little houses that lay behind the embassy. The builders had agreed to return in a few days, and probably Lamprophyre should have everyone remove their belongings so they wouldn't be damaged by the renovations, but that could wait until tomorrow. The sounds were peaceful, but Lamprophyre's heart felt made of stone, it was that heavy. She covered herself with her wings and eventually fell asleep.\n\n\"My lady. My lady!\" It was Depik, shaking her shoulder. Lamprophyre stirred and swam up out of her deep sleep, where she'd been dreaming of an evil voice whispering in her ear that even Jiwanyil's presence couldn't dispel. \"My lady, there are people here to see you.\"\n\n\"People? What people?\" Lamprophyre rose on her hands and stretched out her back and tail.\n\n\"People in red with white stars,\" Depik said. He was whispering, though Lamprophyre still had her wings spread over both of them and that would keep speech from spreading. \"They say they have business with the ambassador. Do you want me to tell them to come back later?\"\n\n\"No, it's fine.\" It wasn't fine. Why would Fanishkor and its ambassador have come here? Surely they weren't so angry about her siding with Gonjiri that they wanted to attack her in her own embassy? \"I'll meet them outside,\" she added, and got to her feet.\n\nShe knew there were a lot of people in the courtyard by how hard it was to hear individual thoughts, but she didn't realize until she emerged from the embassy that it was the entire retinue she'd seen at the palace, complete with white-blotched red canopy. Chaaksha stood beneath the canopy, flanked by Yalini and a man in Fanishkorite colors. Chaaksha walked forward when Lamprophyre appeared.\n\n\"My lady ambassador, greetings,\" she said. Her voice was as deep and gravelly as before, but it sounded somehow more pleasant. \"I hope we did not disturb you.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Lamprophyre lied. \"Is there something I can do for you?\"\n\nChaaksha bowed. \"I would like to discuss a diplomatic relationship between Fanishkor and the dragons of Nirinatan,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Lamprophyre twitched, and barely managed to keep it from becoming a more obvious movement. She felt stunned enough not to correct Chaaksha about Mother Stone's true name. \"Dragons?\" she said. \"You want an alliance with dragons?\"\n\nChaaksha looked directly at Lamprophyre for the first time, and Lamprophyre once again felt stunned, because her eyes were like Evart's: deeply-set and so dark the irises weren't distinguishable from the pupils. \"We believe dragons should rejoin the wider world,\" she said, \"and that allying only with Gonjiri does not allow them to achieve their full potential. We offer an alliance that will benefit both of us.\"\n\n\"You know we've agreed to support Gonjiri if Fanishkor attacks,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nChaaksha inclined her head. \"I do. But we do not intend to attack Gonjiri, so that provision of your agreement is irrelevant. Fanishkor simply wishes to gain the same benefits Gonjiri has from its relationship with dragons.\"\n\nDiscomfort made Lamprophyre edgy. \"Dragons have not forgotten that Fanishkor ordered a dragon egg stolen,\" she said coldly. \"That doesn't incline us to like you.\"\n\n\"That action was not authorized by our government,\" Chaaksha said. \"And the rebel who attempted it is dead. We offer our apologies, though we do not admit to culpability, as a gesture of friendship. Surely dragons are not so vindictive as to pursue vengeance against someone not guilty?\"\n\nLamprophyre wished more than ever that she could hear the woman's thoughts. She was virtually positive Harshod, who'd been behind the egg theft, had been acting on his government's behalf and Chaaksha was lying. Or maybe she'd been lied to by her government and was telling the truth as far as she knew it. In any case, Lamprophyre didn't think Hyaloclast would be willing to make an alliance with Fanishkor without a substantial gesture of goodwill from that country.\n\n\"And what would this alliance look like?\" she asked. She folded her arms across her chest and loomed over Chaaksha.\n\nTo her credit, Chaaksha didn't flinch. \"We would invite a dragon ambassador to join the king's court. We would open trading channels. And we would provide territory for your dragons to settle\u2014we know you are fond of the livestock humans breed. Other possibilities would, of course, present themselves over time.\"\n\nNone of that struck Lamprophyre as highly desirable. Dragons already had all of that in Gonjiri; they didn't need Fanishkor to provide it. And yet, if dragons could contribute to keeping the peace between Gonjiri and Fanishkor, wasn't that a good thing? All right, Hyaloclast probably wouldn't see it that way, given that she didn't care about humans and their conflicts, but Lamprophyre cared about war not breaking out because she had too many human friends who would be hurt by it.\n\n\"You claim Fanishkor's king was not responsible for ordering the theft of a dragon egg,\" she said, \"but you haven't offered any proof that this is true. I don't think you understand what a serious offense that was, if you can come here so casually suggesting we overlook it.\"\n\n\"I swear to you King Damen knew nothing of the plot,\" Chaaksha said. \"And you're correct that we don't understand dragons as well as we would like. The ones responsible for the plot have been executed, if that will satisfy your need for vengeance. I'm not sure what more we can do to assure you of our sincerity.\"\n\nLamprophyre leaned closer to the ambassador. \"Executed?\"\n\nShe meant to express suspicion\u2014if the king had executed those responsible because they'd attacked dragons, why hadn't he sent word immediately with an apology and an explanation? But Chaaksha interpreted her intent stare differently. \"If that seems barbaric to you, I'm sorry. But we must send a message to those who would act in the king's name, given that the king is the one who will bear the consequences if those actions bear evil fruit.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I'm not interested in judging your people or how they exact justice. But, ambassador, you don't realize how close your country came to destruction. I had to argue with Hyaloclast\u2014the dragon queen\u2014to prevent dragons razing your cities in revenge.\"\n\nChaaksha's eyebrow went up in that familiar human gesture of surprise and consternation. \"Why would you do that?\"\n\n\"Because attacking a dragon egg\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I quite understand why dragons would be angry. I meant, why would you argue on behalf of humans? Humans you'd never met and believed to be your enemies?\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Yalini, who remained as still and expressionless as she had in the palace. It was unsettling. \"Because I didn't believe ordinary people ought to suffer for their government's mistakes,\" she said. \"Even if Harshod was acting with the king's approval, that still means hundreds of thousands of citizens would die for one man's choice. We took our vengeance on the one directly responsible.\"\n\n\"You did,\" Chaaksha said. \"Then you admit to murder?\"\n\nLamprophyre recoiled. \"He tried to kill me, and that led to his death. And I'm not sorry.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Chaaksha bit her lip in thought. It was the first nervous gesture Lamprophyre had seen her make. Admitting to complicity in Harshod's death might have been a mistake, but Lamprophyre was at peace with herself for that decision, and she didn't care what Fanishkor's representative thought of it, or her.\n\n\"Then I believe the matter should be settled,\" Chaaksha said abruptly. \"Dragons have their vengeance on the one directly responsible for the crime, and Fanishkor apologizes for the necessity of that vengeance. I believe we should move forward instead of looking to the past. Do we have an arrangement, ambassador?\"\n\nLamprophyre again glanced at Yalini, who showed no sign she was paying attention to this conversation. \"Why is she here?\" she asked impulsively.\n\nFor the first time, Chaaksha looked confused. \"Why, she is a member of the royal family, and interested in the negotiations. She came because we intended to see her married to Prince Rokshan.\"\n\n\"Yes, but that doesn't explain why she's here, in my embassy.\" Lamprophyre stepped past Chaaksha to look more closely at the princess. \"She doesn't seem to notice anything. Is she ill?\" She refrained from asking if the princess was mentally deficient. That seemed impolitic.\n\nYalini blinked and focused her eyes on Lamprophyre. \"I like to observe,\" she said. Her voice was beautiful, with tones that reminded Lamprophyre of the low coo of those tiny gray birds that lived in the plaza. Rokshan called them rats with wings, but Lamprophyre loved the sound of their voices. She would never eat them, not even as a snack.\n\n\"And what have you observed?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nYalini shifted her weight and clasped her hands loosely in front of her. \"You care for the prince,\" she said. \"He is close to you, and his well-being matters to you. That tells me he's worth knowing. I think he will make me a good husband.\"\n\n\"He's not going to marry you,\" Lamprophyre said sharply.\n\nThe princess's light brown eyes no longer looked vacant. \"We'll see,\" she said.\n\n\"Your highness, please don't say anything more,\" Chaaksha warned.\n\n\"I thought you'd rejected the idea of an alliance with Gonjiri,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You wanted a marriage that will never happen.\" A thought occurred to her. \"That's not what you wanted, though, is it? You made that demand to put King Ekanath in a position of weakness.\"\n\n\"Your suppositions are irrelevant,\" Chaaksha said, \"and I must ask you not to repeat them to the king, unless you want Fanishkor to believe dragons are Gonjiri's tools.\"\n\n\"We're no one's tools,\" Lamprophyre said hotly. \"And your negotiations with Gonjiri don't interest me.\"\n\n\"Then let's talk about our negotiations with dragons,\" Chaaksha shot back. \"Are we in agreement?\"\n\nLamprophyre eyed Yalini. The princess had returned to staring into space with that air of paying attention to something else, but Lamprophyre wasn't sure anymore that the princess was a decorative piece in Chaaksha's retinue. She didn't like the speculative expression the princess adopted when she talked about Rokshan. If Chaaksha hadn't actually given up on the idea of an alliance rooted in a royal marriage, Rokshan could be in trouble.\n\n\"I have to take this to Hyaloclast,\" she said. \"At the moment, dragons consider Fanishkor their enemy, and only the dragon queen can decide whether to change that relationship.\" She hesitated, then added, \"Personally, I think it's a good idea, but it's not something I can agree to.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Chaaksha asked. \"Shall we meet again soon? How long will it take you to return?\"\n\n\"Oh, I can talk to her from here. I have a chalcedony artifact,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nChaaksha said, \"I'm afraid I don't know what that is.\"\n\nA brief flash of anxiety gripped Lamprophyre. She'd thought the chalcedony artifacts that allowed for communication at a distance were, maybe not common, but at least known throughout the kingdom and beyond. If she'd just given away important secrets\u2026well, it didn't matter now. \"It allows for instantaneous communication at a distance,\" she said. \"So I don't have to fly home every time I need to consult with Hyaloclast.\"\n\n\"Astonishing,\" Chaaksha said. \"That is something we would want to trade for. I didn't realize dragons made artifacts.\"\n\n\"We don't. This was a gift\u2026\" Lamprophyre realized she was digging herself deeper and stopped. \"If you're willing to wait here, I can discuss the matter immediately. Would you care for something to drink?\"\n\nShe hurried to the dining pavilion to find Depik and Bhakriya deep in conversation. Normally, this would have thrilled her, as she hadn't given up hope that the two would eventually fall in love\u2014or, more accurately, that Bhakriya would finally reciprocate the love Depik felt for her. Just then, it didn't seem important. \"We need to serve drinks,\" she whispered. \"Please tell me we have something nice to offer a distinguished guest.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Depik said, rising from his seat. \"Bhakriya, if you'd get the glasses, I laid in a store of wine and I think it's not too early for that.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I can leave it to you, then?\"\n\nBhakriya smiled. \"I was an experienced hostess once,\" she said, \"and Depik's manners are as good as any man's. We'll be fine.\"\n\nLamprophyre decided not to cross the courtyard again, instead going through the dining pavilion to the embassy's back door. She removed the chalcedony pendant from its peg and settled it around her neck. She breathed on its shining blue surface to activate it, then considered how far sound might carry and stepped out the back door again, closing it behind her.\n\n\"Hyaloclast,\" she said in a low voice\u2014whispers tended to sound like unintelligible buzzing through the artifact\u2014 \"Hyaloclast, I need to discuss something with you.\"\n\nShe waited. The embassy was silent except for the clinking noise of glass tapping glass that was probably Depik and Bhakriya serving drinks. She still didn't understand the appeal of eating and drinking while you were carrying on important negotiations, not even now that she'd been in human form. A dragon would take it as disrespectful, though dragons didn't eat their food in tiny morsels the way humans did at diplomatic events, and those little bites weren't as distracting as tearing into huge chunks of meat would be.\n\nShe wondered where the children had gone. At this time of day, they were usually all over the embassy, playing games or chasing each other, sometimes with the neighborhood children involved as well. She didn't hear Abhit's high voice raised in reading aloud to the others, either. Maybe Depik had sent them to play at Anamika's house to give Lamprophyre some quiet for entertaining her diplomatic guests.\n\nThe mist had nearly evaporated from the surface of the pendant. Lamprophyre breathed more heavily on it and said, \"Hyaloclast. Please respond.\" She suppressed impatience and leaned against the embassy wall, waiting. She couldn't make Hyaloclast respond more quickly for being impatient, and the dragon queen would be scathing with her if she was rude or sarcastic over having to wait.\n\n\"Lamprophyre.\" Hyaloclast's voice, clear as if she were standing next to Lamprophyre, made her jump. \"Something diplomatic, or something personal?\"\n\n\"Diplomatic.\" She wondered if Hyaloclast thought Lamprophyre might have news of Rokshan's quest. Since Lamprophyre wasn't sure if Hyaloclast approved of Rokshan's quest, this was a good sign. She didn't resent her mother's disapproval, if that's what it was, because she could see the situation from Hyaloclast's point of view: the dragon queen's only child, pair-bonded by accident to a human, doomed to decades of sorrow because they were physically incompatible, and hopelessly committed to finding a way to change that. But she still hoped Hyaloclast was on her side.\n\n\"Diplomatic. Continue.\"\n\nLamprophyre quickly went over Chaaksha's proposal. It was easy to leave out Yalini's presence, given that the princess had nothing to do with the proposed alliance, but it worried her that she felt so satisfied at pretending the woman didn't exist.\n\nWhen she finished, Hyaloclast said, \"No. We're not interested.\"\n\nStartled, Lamprophyre said, \"Just like that? We shouldn't consider this carefully?\"\n\n\"Fanishkor has never reached out to make amends,\" Hyaloclast said. \"To me, this suggests that they don't take the egg theft seriously. And I'm not sure I believe their assertion that the theft was the action of a rebel or rebels within the government. Everything you've told me implies that Fanishkor suddenly wants something from us and hopes enough time has passed that the outrage has faded in memory.\"\n\n\"Which it hasn't, I agree,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But I don't know if we gain anything by not accepting their apology.\"\n\n\"You can't listen to this ambassador's thoughts to know the truth?\"\n\n\"There are too many people here. Besides, if I were the Fanishkorite king, I would keep the ambassador ignorant so she could negotiate in honesty. I don't know that we'll ever know the truth. But I don't think it matters.\"\n\n\"The egg theft doesn't matter?\"\n\n\"No, I mean we've taken revenge on the man who planned it, and we did it in a way that warned Fanishkor not to try it again, even if it was the king who was behind it. Also, I told the ambassador we nearly burned their cities to the ground.\"\n\nHyaloclast chuckled. \"A good warning, indeed.\"\n\n\"Anyway, my point is that whoever was actually responsible, we've ensured they'll never do it again, and we've had sufficient revenge. I think we should make this alliance.\"\n\nHyaloclast was silent for a few beats. Finally, she said, \"And Fanishkor's relationship with Gonjiri?\"\n\n\"The ambassador, Chaaksha, she says they don't intend to attack Gonjiri.\"\n\n\"That's not the same as the countries being at peace. What overtures did she make to Ekanath?\"\n\nLamprophyre suddenly found it hard to speak. \"She wanted an alliance, and Ekanath rejected it. Because she insisted Rokshan marry the king of Fanishkor's daughter.\"\n\n\"I assume the young prince refused? Or has Ekanath taken a moral stand?\"\n\n\"Both, actually.\"\n\n\"Then relations between the countries continue hostile, which means if Fanishkor attacks, we will be drawn into Gonjiri's defense. I don't want us compromised by having an alliance with Fanishkor.\"\n\n\"But I think it's true Fanishkor doesn't want to attack. I have a feeling\u2026\" She paused, groping her way to an understanding of something nebulous she barely saw. \"I think Fanishkor is afraid of Gonjiri. Of those pyrite weapons. Something must have changed, because before this, Fanishkor broke off all communications with Gonjiri, and now they want an alliance? And I think from something the princess said that they haven't given up on that alliance, marriage or no.\"\n\n\"You seem unusually bent on changing my mind,\" Hyaloclast said drily.\n\nLamprophyre was glad her mother couldn't see her blush. \"It's just that if we're allied with both countries, I think they'll think twice about going to war. We could do so much for the humans this way.\"\n\n\"You know I don't care about what humans do to each other.\"\n\n\"I know. But it benefits us, too. If they're at war, we can't trade for artifacts, or cows, or any of the things we've come to enjoy.\"\n\nThere was a long silence. \"You make good points,\" Hyaloclast finally said, \"but my instinct is that we should stay clear of Fanishkor. I'm willing to give their king the benefit of doubt about the egg theft, but that doesn't change the fact that they haven't dealt honestly with us in the past and may not be dealing honestly now. Until their conflict with Gonjiri is settled, I will not form an alliance, trading or otherwise, with Fanishkor.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart sank. She didn't like the answer, but it was hard to argue with Hyaloclast's logic. \"All right,\" she said. \"I'll tell them that. Does that mean if they come to an agreement with Ekanath, we'll change our minds?\"\n\n\"If you're that certain we'll benefit from this agreement, yes.\" Hyaloclast sighed. \"I wish I could blame your interest in humans on your time in a human body, but this unusual preference you have predates that by most of a year.\"\n\n\"They're interesting, and it astonishes me how much they accomplish in their short lives,\" Lamprophyre protested.\n\n\"I said unusual, not aberrant,\" Hyaloclast said with a laugh. \"I see more of your father in you every day.\"\n\nLamprophyre's breath caught. Her mother never, ever referred to Aegirine, not in public and not to Lamprophyre in private. \"You think he would have felt the same about humans?\" she ventured.\n\n\"I think he would have wanted to be ambassador in your place,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Now, go give the news to the Fanishkorite ambassador. And don't grovel and make excuses. She needs to see us as strong and committed to our position, or she'll think she can walk all over us. Understand?\"\n\nLamprophyre, who'd been considering how she might make the news more palatable, blushed again. \"Yes. I'll let you know if anything changes.\"\n\nThe misty blue surface of the chalcedony pendant cleared. Lamprophyre removed it from around her neck and held it between her palms for a few beats, letting her mind clear. Then she pushed open the back door and let herself into the embassy. This was her least favorite part of being ambassador, having to turn a reasonable request down. She hoped Chaaksha was as reasonable as her request, and would see that this wasn't shutting a door, it was leaving open a window.\n\nChaaksha stood beneath the canopy, talking quietly to the man in Fanishkorite colors. She held a wine glass in one hand and was using it to emphasize a point, gesturing gently enough that the wine barely sloshed. Yalini stood motionless as usual, though she also held a wine glass that appeared less full than Chaaksha's. No one paid attention to Lamprophyre, sitting in shadow just within the embassy, so she watched Yalini for a while. She was pretty, Lamprophyre believed, though she still didn't fully appreciate all the varieties of human beauty, and a jolt of jealousy shot through her. Pretty, and royal, and eligible, and smarter than she let on\u2026if she also had an interesting personality, she was the kind of woman any man would be attracted to. Even Rokshan.\n\nShe shook her head to dismiss the image of Rokshan taking Yalini's hand in affection and stepped forward, drawing everyone's gaze. Chaaksha handed her glass to the man and came to meet Lamprophyre. \"Did you speak to the dragon queen, ambassador?\" she asked.\n\n\"I did,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'm sorry, but she rejects your request. The dragon queen is not interested in allying or trading with Fanishkor at this time.\"\n\nChaaksha stood up straighter. \"You reject our apology?\"\n\n\"No, it's not that. We accept your explanation and choose not to hold the egg theft against your government. But dragons have a pact of mutual military aid\u2014\" Rokshan had taught her that phrase, and another pang shot through her\u2014 \"with Gonjiri, and dealing with Fanishkor could compromise us. Therefore, Hyaloclast decrees that until Fanishkor and Gonjiri are no longer at odds, we will not treat with your country.\"\n\nChaaksha's dark complexion went darker. \"Then dragons don't mind being the pawns of humans,\" she spat.\n\n\"Please don't try to taunt me into changing my mind. It's bad manners,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We will be happy to reconsider once Fanishkor and Gonjiri have resolved their differences.\"\n\n\"You realize you made that impossible when you sided with Gonjiri earlier,\" Chaaksha said. \"If you'd backed our proposal of a dynastic marriage, all this would have been settled.\"\n\n\"That was never going to happen,\" Lamprophyre said. Despite her resolve, she was becoming angry. \"And so long as we're being insulting, I think it's barbaric that you would marry your king's daughter to a total stranger and think that somehow makes your alliance stronger.\"\n\nChaaksha stiffened. \"On your own head be it, then,\" she said, and turned her back on Lamprophyre to return to her position under the canopy. Lamprophyre recognized a deliberate insult and decided to ignore it. Chaaksha's dramatic exit was spoiled by her need to wait for the canopy's legs to be retracted, and Lamprophyre could afford to be magnanimous.\n\nUnlike Chaaksha, Yalini continued to watch Lamprophyre while the canopy was prepared. Lamprophyre stared back, afraid to look away and not sure why. It might have been Yalini's expressionless face, still as a statue; her impassivity felt like an attack, like goading Lamprophyre into an emotional reaction Yalini would not respond to. Lamprophyre watched her until the canopy began to move, when Yalini placed her wine glass carefully on the ground and turned to walk away. It felt like being released from a golden cage, pretty to look at but still a trap.\n\nShortly, the embassy courtyard was empty of everything except a scattering of glasses across the dark earth, some of them lying on their sides, others upright as if their owners intended to return. Lamprophyre let out a deep breath. She wished Rokshan were here, though she was glad he hadn't been here while Yalini was. It was irrational, but she feared them having any contact.\n\nBhakriya and Depik emerged from the dining pavilion and began collecting glasses. \"I offered them the use of the pavilion, my lady, but they refused,\" Bhakriya said. \"It's so awkward having a glass with nowhere to put it.\"\n\n\"It's all right.\" Lamprophyre backed into the embassy and settled down to watch the two carry the glasses away to be washed. She felt even more tired than before. Between the failed negotiation in the palace and the failed negotiation just now, she felt heartsick and weary and longed for Rokshan to be with her. It was just when they were apart that she felt uncertain of him, because when they were together, she felt confident that they could manage anything. But she remembered Yalini's direct gaze, remembered the princess's words, and wondered if she was right."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "From very high above, Tanajital looked like a slab of white marble strewn with chunks of pyrite, the whiteness of its walls contrasting with the gold and copper sheathing of its many towers and roofs. The fact that pyrite wouldn't be found together with marble only enhanced Lamprophyre's sense of the city's artificial nature. Humans had constructed a home that would never have arisen naturally.\n\n\"How do you feel?\" she called over her shoulder to Rokshan.\n\n\"Comfortable enough,\" Rokshan shouted back over the sound of the wind in her wings. \"I'm not entirely warm, but I'm not frozen. The scarf keeps slipping, though.\" His voice was muffled by the cloth drawn over the lower part of his face, but Lamprophyre's draconic hearing understood him perfectly.\n\n\"I'm going to go higher,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Tell me when it's too cold. I want to get an idea of how high we can safely go.\" To her, the brisk winter air was refreshing, and she was sure she could endure temperatures much colder than was safe for her passenger, so Rokshan's responses were important.\n\nRokshan patted the side of her neck with his gloved hand in acknowledgement. She aimed for a patch of cloud floating all alone in the clear blue sky. It was too high for them to safely reach, but it made a good visual reference to keep her flying in a straight line. It could be dangerous for dragons to fly too high, too fast\u2014she'd done it once as a child and had felt nauseated and achy for a few days afterward\u2014and humans, so much more fragile than dragons, had to be at greater risk for becoming ill. She hoped Rokshan had taken her warning seriously when they took off on this trip.\n\nThey hadn't spoken much this morning. Lamprophyre hoped it was because talking, for Rokshan, meant inhaling frigid air and chilling him beyond what was comfortable. She had told him about Chaaksha's visit, but not about Yalini's presence or the princess's odd response to Lamprophyre's insistence that Rokshan wouldn't marry her. It was stupid, she was being stupid, but the more she thought about her, the more convinced she was that Yalini was a threat. She needed to talk to Rokshan, because he was her best friend in addition to being her mate, but she didn't know how to bring it up without sounding stupid or pathetic.\n\nThey had left Tanajital behind as they flew south, following the Green River, which at this altitude was a thread of gray-blue spooling across the plains. Lamprophyre saw a few smaller cities like geometric moss snugged against the river or sitting atop low rises that were themselves no more prominent than shadows. The land was winter-pale between settlements, where the fields were a dark contrast, their earth in the process of being tilled for the spring planting.\n\nAhead, the horizon was misty with distance, but Lamprophyre could still see hills, nothing as grand as her mountain home, but tall enough to stand out against the sky. The farther south one went, the higher those hills became, until they were the mountain range that marked the border between Gonjiri and Sachetan. They wouldn't go that far today, but if they could fly this high always, taking advantage of the updrafts, that trip wouldn't be so punishingly long as usual.\n\n\"That's it,\" Rokshan said, patting her neck again. \"My feet are getting numb.\"\n\n\"You weren't supposed to let it get that far,\" Lamprophyre chided him as she wheeled around and began her descent.\n\n\"I was curious. And it's not like they're frozen. I can still move them. It's my fingers I'm more concerned with. These gloves are made for protection while riding, not to hold in heat.\"\n\n\"Are there gloves meant to keep you warm? I'd think that's not a thing Gonjirians worry about.\"\n\nRokshan's feet in the stirrups scraped lightly across her sides as he shifted his weight. The new saddle was a big improvement, he'd said. \"I think someone could make them like that. Lined, maybe. I'll ask the seamstress who did the rest of this gear.\"\n\n\"I assume everything else is as warm as promised,\" Lamprophyre said. He'd looked so odd and bulky when he was dressed in the heavy coat and thick trousers he'd found some seamstress to make for him. Lamprophyre had never seen a coat like that one. All the coats she was familiar with were made to keep the torrential rains of summer off, and were thin and waxy-looking. This one was of heavy twilled cotton lined with sheepskin, Rokshan had said, and it made his arms stand out from his body slightly. Between that, the similarly thick trousers, and the white cap with the cloth to protect his neck, he'd been almost invisible.\n\n\"Very comfortable,\" Rokshan said. \"I think I need extra layers in my boots, though. Something flexible and warm to cover my feet. Foot gloves.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"I can't believe this. No one's cared about keeping a human warm at altitude in, well, at least a thousand years, if the stories are correct. And now look at us.\"\n\nRokshan hugged her neck, resting the side of his face against the sensitive spot. \"Look at us,\" he agreed.\n\nHis proximity, the touch of his skin against her scales, made her feel embarrassed at her insecurities. \"Rokshan,\" she said, \"there's something I didn't tell you about Chaaksha's visit.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Yalini was there. And she said things that implied she hasn't given up on marrying you.\"\n\nRokshan became very still. Then he sat up. \"Why didn't you say anything earlier?\"\n\nHis tone of voice, verging on angry, made Lamprophyre glad she couldn't see him. \"Because I was stupid. She's beautiful and smart and I was afraid\u2026\" She couldn't bring herself to say it.\n\nRokshan finished the thought for her. \"You were afraid if I knew she wanted to marry me, I'd fall in love with her. Lamprophyre\u2014\"\n\n\"I know! I'm sorry! It's just\u2014Rokshan, we're not the same species anymore, and that has to make a difference.\"\n\n\"Not to me. Not to what I remember. You aren't going to fall in love with some dragon, so what makes you think I'm going to be any less faithful?\" Now he did sound angry. \"Do you realize how insulting that is?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Lamprophyre repeated, misery settling like a stone in her stomach. \"I don't know what I was thinking. Of course I don't think that of you.\"\n\nRokshan was silent for a very long moment in which Lamprophyre wished she were human again, just so she could weep tears of sorrow and frustration. \"No, I'm sorry,\" he finally said. \"I shouldn't have gotten angry. Because you're not wrong that we're in a terrible situation. But you're my best friend. Even if I didn't love you, I couldn't bear to make you miserable by betraying you.\"\n\nThe stone lightened a little. \"I suppose I feel uncomfortable because this pair-bond is so one-sided. You can't feel connected to me, and that means if you wanted to fall in love with someone else\u2014\"\n\n\"Which I don't. Particularly not that stone-faced Fanishkorite princess.\"\n\n\"But if you did, there's nothing stopping you. I mean, nothing physical.\"\n\nRokshan ran his hand over her scales again. \"Sweetheart, every human who's ever been married has been in that position. They have nothing but their honor keeping them from straying. And yes, many humans give in to temptation and cheat on their spouses, and sometimes couples fall out of love and decide to divorce. But most of them stay true to their love once they've made vows to do so. And I consider us married. I'm not going to desert you.\"\n\nHappiness made her load fly away like a bird. \"I'm sorry I doubted you.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't make that clear earlier. Or did you think it was just idle fancy that has me so intent on making that transformation artifact work?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"I know. We'll figure it out. We have to.\"\n\n\"And now we have a new possibility in Evart's notes.\"\n\n\"We haven't heard from Viveki yet.\"\n\n\"She was supposed to bring the notes today at the latest. I'm not worried. So long as she has those vahas gleaming in her eyes, she'll arrive.\"\n\nLamprophyre descended in a wide spiral over Tanajital. \"Look. The green flag is flying over the Archprelate's palace.\"\n\n\"I see it. So Khadar is back. Should we talk to him?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought about it for a few beats. \"If Viveki comes today, I don't want her to go away because we weren't there to greet her. But I do want to talk to Khadar about the Mother Stone prophecy eventually.\"\n\n\"If he's willing to talk to us,\" Rokshan said. \"He's not as arrogant as he used to be, but he still doesn't like either of us much. But you're right that he'll likely know more about that prophecy.\"\n\n\"Or the Archprelate. I have a hard time believing she encouraged those ecclesiasts to accost me so antagonistically. Even though I'm sure she believes the prophecy is true.\"\n\n\"There's something to it regardless,\" Rokshan said, \"and we should investigate. I thought we were going back to the embassy,\" he added as Lamprophyre descended into the center of the city.\n\n\"We are. But we're going to the warehouses first. I want to return the harness to Flint so he can make a start on making more of them. Unless there was another adjustment you wanted?\"\n\n\"No, I think it's as perfect as we can make it. Not nearly so tight in the saddle, and the adjustable stirrups were a good idea.\"\n\nShe landed neatly at the end of the street and crouched to let Rokshan off. \"Where is everyone?\" she said. She couldn't hear the drifting surface thoughts that signaled the presence of other dragons.\n\nShe peered inside Dolomite's warehouse. It was empty and very bright, the walls painted a gleaming white that shone even in the indirect light from the windows. Maybe Dolomite wanted his windows enlarged, too, to give him better light for his art.\n\nShe heard someone thinking what time is it? just before Bromargyrite emerged, yawning and stretching. \"Sorry, I was asleep,\" he said. \"Did you need something?\"\n\n\"Just to give Flint the harness. Help me off with it, would you?\"\n\nBromargyrite helped lift the saddle away and gathered up all the straps and buckles. \"Flint and Coquina went to have some privacy, but I'll leave this in his warehouse. I don't know where everyone else went. Dolomite may have gone to work on his new project.\"\n\n\"What project is that?\" Rokshan asked.\n\nBromargyrite shrugged. \"He won't say. He wants it to be a surprise. I doubt he'll be able to keep it secret for long. You know what he's like when he's excited about something.\" He examined the straps. \"How does it feel to wear this?\"\n\n\"Odd. But no worse than human sandals, touching your skin constantly.\" Lamprophyre shuddered. \"We have to meet Viveki now. At least, I hope she comes soon.\"\n\n\"The woman with Lelitha's body, right?\" Bromargyrite nodded. \"I hope she has good news, but you know what I always say\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't get my hopes up, yes, I know. You're the most rational person ever.\"\n\n\"I doubt that, but then how many people do you actually know?\" Bromargyrite grinned. \"I hope I'm wrong. Good luck, Lamprophyre.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Lamprophyre flew low over the crowds to give the humans something beautiful to look at and alighted neatly in the embassy courtyard. Rokshan leaped down and immediately took off the heavy coat. \"Much too warm at ground level,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre took it from him and hung it on a peg she'd hammered into the wall of the embassy just for that purpose. \"It will be perfect for trips to the gleaning fields.\"\n\nRokshan followed her inside and stripped down to his shirt and the short, thin pants he wore to cover his male parts. \"That's appealing. They're always so cold.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled herself on the floor and watched him dress in his usual clothes. \"I suppose now we wait,\" she said. \"I'm already bored.\"\n\n\"I'll read to you,\" Rokshan said. \"One of those books Dharan brought.\"\n\nLamprophyre made a face. \"I don't want to act ungrateful, and I promise I'm not, but how many books are we going to find that all say the same things? Human knowledge of the Cataclysm is limited, and even if we assume the stories are metaphorical, we still haven't learned anything new about Sardonyx in weeks.\"\n\n\"We won't know unless we try,\" Rokshan said. \"Everything we've learned so far has been by accident, more or less\u2014or at least in places we didn't know would be important. And I don't want to wait around for her to attack again when we're not expecting it. Somewhere in all these books must be information we can use.\"\n\n\"You're so optimistic,\" Lamprophyre said with a smile. \"You're like the opposite of Bromargyrite, except he's not pessimistic so much as realistic.\"\n\n\"Sometimes those are the same thing,\" Rokshan said. He settled himself against her side and opened the book. It was small and smelled of dust and old leather, and when Rokshan changed his grip on the cover, tiny brown flakes sifted down like a dirty snowfall over his legs. \"It's odd how I never really cared about the condition of books before I handled so many of them. Having a preference about how they feel in my hands, that's something Dharan would do.\"\n\n\"Being small enough to handle the books myself is one of the few things I miss about being human,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Oh? What else do you miss?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Kissing. I realize that's silly, but dragons don't kiss, and human bodies are so sensitive, it's like nothing else in the world.\"\n\n\"I agree, and I don't think it's silly.\" Rokshan scooted closer to her shoulder. \"I try not to dwell on the memory, because\u2014anyway.\" He cleared his throat. \"This book is a collection of\u2014hmm.\" He riffled through the pages. More brown flakes fell. \"It's tempting to call them eyewitness accounts, but that's impossible. They're more like descriptions of the catastrophe by near-contemporaries. I've read\u2014we've read\u2014some of them in other books, but this author collected them all in one place.\"\n\n\"We don't have to read the ones we've already read, right?\"\n\nRokshan tilted his head to look at her. \"No, but it might be useful to see those in context.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"You're right. I'm just eager to find something new. Maybe reading them all together will reveal a hidden detail.\"\n\nRokshan turned back to the beginning. \"This one is by someone whose name was never recorded. They think it was a woman because in the era this comes from, most of the scribes and historians were female.\" He cleared his throat again, and read: \"'The storm caught them unawares, wind and fire, ash and stone raining down upon their cities. Dragons and warriors rose to meet it and were swept aside.' It's discouraging how most of these stories suggest the defenders didn't stand a chance against Sardonyx.\"\n\n\"At least they tried.\"\n\n\"True. 'When at last all hope was gone, the mountains rose up and swallowed the storm. Humans mourned their losses, and the Lonely God wept to have no children. The gods circled round Katayan in his grief. Meyari's roots dug deep to sustain him. Vrelok's creatures howled a funeral dirge. Jiwanyil's people grieved with him. And Nirinatan guarded their rest.'\" Rokshan closed the book on his finger. \"This is nothing we didn't already know. Some event stopped Sardonyx, but only after all the dragons were dead.\"\n\n\"Except they weren't dead. They were just in hiding. Or seclusion.\" Lamprophyre tried another smoke ring and watched the puff of smoke float upwards before dissipating.\n\n\"Maybe it's partly true,\" Rokshan said. \"Maybe all the dragons who fought Sardonyx with the humans were killed. Maybe no one who challenged her survived.\"\n\n\"That makes sense. What I wish we understood was what it means that the mountains swallowed her up. That's consistent across nearly all the stories. But there's no evidence the mountains have moved at all, certainly not in the last thousand years.\"\n\n\"It might not be the dragons' mountains,\" Rokshan pointed out. \"There's the mountains on the southern border.\"\n\n\"I don't think those have moved, either.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"It has to be magic, but what magic could destroy an army of evil dragons? Or\u2014not destroy, since Sardonyx is still around somewhere, but bury, or trap.\"\n\n\"You think Sardonyx is trapped?\"\n\n\"Don't you? Otherwise, she'd attack directly.\"\n\n\"Unless she can't. Unless that magic crippled her.\" Rokshan opened the book again. \"'Humans in their sorrow rebuilt, and the gods watched over their efforts. It was in this time Jiwanyil first spoke to men and women, warning them and warding them against danger.' That's different. No one's ever said Jiwanyil didn't speak to humans before the catastrophe.\"\n\n\"Well, if your religion changed to include Katayan after the Cataclysm, maybe that was part of the change. I mean, I assume before the Cataclysm everyone knew about Mother Stone, if dragons and humans lived together.\"\n\n\"You mean, the names for the gods changed after the catastrophe?\" Rokshan sat up. \"Or that we didn't worship those gods before then?\"\n\n\"I don't want to insult your religion, Rokshan.\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"There's a lot we don't know. For that matter, what if dragons didn't worship Mother Stone until after the catastrophe? Suppose they learned about her after all those dragons were killed?\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up as well. \"That's blasphemy!\"\n\n\"Not if it was a truth the catastrophe revealed. Maybe dragons did worship Katayan, and found out later what the truth was.\"\n\nHis words battered at her, fat freezing snowballs that didn't hurt so much as overwhelm. \"Rokshan\u2014\"\n\nShe heard footsteps approaching and stopped speaking to look out the doorway. Viveki came toward them, striding like an unstoppable force across the courtyard and ignoring Bhakriya, who approached her, saying, \"If you have an appointment with my lady\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right, Bhakriya, we were expecting her,\" Lamprophyre said. Rokshan rose and set the book back on the pile, then stood with one hand on the doorway. Viveki's wordless thoughts of being paid sharpened into irritation when she saw Rokshan. Better not use smooth words on me, she thought.\n\n\"Don't try to sweet-talk her,\" Lamprophyre murmured to Rokshan. Rokshan shot her a sharp look, then nodded once. It was all the interaction they had time for before Viveki stood in front of them. She wasn't carrying anything.\n\n\"You didn't find the notes?\" Lamprophyre asked, her heart sinking.\n\nViveki smiled, not a nice expression, and reached into her shirt. She withdrew a black leather book, messy with loose pages crammed into it and the tips of feathers sticking out at random. \"Right where I expected,\" she said. \"You people didn't look very hard if you didn't find it.\"\n\nLamprophyre declined to take the bait. \"Thank you,\" she said, holding out a hand for the book.\n\nViveki didn't move. \"Payment,\" she said.\n\n\"Not until I see it. I'm not paying for something that isn't what I'm looking for.\" Lamprophyre's hand didn't waver.\n\nViveki regarded it for a few beats, then slowly handed the book over. Lamprophyre handed it to Rokshan, who paged through it. She wasn't sure what he was looking for, what would prove this had belonged to Evart, so she kept her face impassive and hoped she looked mysterious and confident.\n\nRokshan stopped near the middle of the book, where a long gray and white bird's feather marked the place. \"This is the first mention of the transformation artifact,\" he said. \"He describes buying the serpentine stone. It's the right book.\" He flipped to the end and looked up at Viveki. \"The last entry is dated a year ago. Where's the rest?\"\n\nViveki's expression didn't change. \"Are you accusing me of something?\"\n\n\"Of course not. But he didn't stop taking notes. There has to be another book.\"\n\nNow the woman smiled again. \"Maybe. This was all there was in that hiding place. But he probably had others. Unless the book was on him when he died.\"\n\n\"It wasn't,\" Lamprophyre said. She remembered searching Evart's body for the serpentine stone and finding only his anti-mind-listening pendant. \"And you're about to tell us you know where the other book is, and will find it\u2014for a price.\"\n\n\"You dragons are clever,\" Viveki said. \"The other places I have in mind are a lot harder to get into. More dangerous. It's going to cost you more.\"\n\nRokshan said, \"How much more?\"\n\nViveki spared him a dismissive glance before returning her attention to Lamprophyre. \"Another five vahas. In advance.\"\n\n\"Five vahas? Are you out of your mind?\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Five, or no book,\" Viveki said, her smile widening.\n\n\"Excuse us for a moment,\" Lamprophyre said. She nudged Rokshan to the back of the embassy, well out of earshot. \"That book might be important.\"\n\n\"And it might tell us nothing,\" Rokshan said. \"I don't like giving any money to that greedy little\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't have to give her anything if it turns out not to be useful. And we'll get an idea of whether that's true by studying the book she just brought.\" Lamprophyre glanced past Rokshan at where Viveki stood. \"We're certainly not paying her in advance.\"\n\nRokshan followed her gaze. \"Do you think she can tell we're desperate?\"\n\n\"No. Though if we paid her five vahas in advance, she'd figure it out.\" Lamprophyre put a gentle hand on Rokshan's shoulder. \"It's just money.\"\n\n\"Money we're swiftly running out of,\" Rokshan grumbled.\n\nThey returned to where Viveki stood. The woman seemed not at all impressed at being in the dragon embassy. \"You haven't paid me for that book yet,\" she said, pointing at the black leather book Rokshan held.\n\nRokshan scowled and dug out a couple of square gold coins he slapped into Viveki's outstretched hand with some force. \"But you're not getting five in advance,\" he said. \"One, to show we appreciate the difficulty of the next task.\" He held up another gold coin, then didn't release it immediately when she took hold of it. They glared at each other briefly.\n\nWhen Rokshan finally let go, Viveki shrugged and pocketed the coins. \"I didn't think you'd fall for that, but I had to try,\" she said. \"It will take a few days. I'll be back.\" She turned and strolled across the courtyard, vanishing up the street.\n\nLamprophyre watched her go until she was swallowed up by the crowds. \"I wish I didn't feel like that was a mistake,\" she said.\n\n\"It's just because she's so unpleasant to deal with,\" Rokshan said. \"Let's read this, and hope something useful will appear. Like the key to keeping the desired form in memory long enough for the transformation.\"\n\n\"That's worth far more than two vahas,\" Lamprophyre agreed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The stands flanking the race ground were as full of humans as they always were despite the brisk wind that blew dust into Lamprophyre's eyes, forcing her to close her nictitating membranes. It had to be worse for the humans, who she could see were shielding their eyes to look across the obstacle course.\n\nOrthoclase was at the top of the course, zigzagging through the barriers\u2014incautiously, it turned out, because he kept brushing against them. Every bump sent up the jangle of bells, and sounds of disappointment rose from the stands. No one would ever shout criticism at a racing dragon, and the sound reminded Lamprophyre more of shared dissatisfaction at a mistake than displeasure.\n\nDespite the mistakes, Orthoclase made good time, and the timing artifact next to Lamprophyre showed he'd run the course in under seventy beats\u2014a new personal best for him. Lamprophyre saw him scowling and concluded he probably didn't see it as a victory. He flapped up to where she sat, on the stand at the end of the course. \"That wind is a nightmare,\" he said. \"I hate making excuses, but it really threw me off.\"\n\n\"I don't think it's making excuses to be aware of environmental challenges,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I wonder how Porphyry will feel about it. He's up next.\"\n\n\"Are you going to take a turn?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know. I'm never sure how it looks for the ambassador's dignity to show how slow I am.\"\n\n\"You're not slow,\" Orthoclase said. \"You're better at the obstacles than I am.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it.\"\n\nPorphyry's appearance at the top of the course was greeted with wild cheering. The bright red dragon with his cheery good manners was a favorite among the humans who came often to the dragon races. He swam through the air, doing loops and twists to limber himself up. Orthoclase snorted. \"Show-off.\"\n\n\"I think it's funny.\" Lamprophyre reached around to twist the knob of aquamarine set in a palm-sized frame of the same stone. The white numbers displayed across the sheet of fine-grained flint flickered and disappeared, and the round-cut topazes set into the corners of the flint flared a brief yellow light. Lamprophyre had spoken with the adept who'd created the timing artifact, and his explanations had been confusing, but she understood that the aquamarine calculated the time, citrines embedded in the flint displayed the numbers, and the topazes magnified those numbers so they were visible to the watchers. He'd also said something about other uses for topaz, but Lamprophyre had been too astonished to listen.\n\nNot for the first time, she considered what she knew of human magic and was astonished all over again. They were so casual about it. In her studies of the stones they used, she'd found over and over again that humans took for granted that a particular stone would do a particular thing, no question, nothing but the skill of the lapidary-adept determining success or failure. And the people who used the artifacts saw them as no more marvelous than lighting a lamp or putting wheels on a cart. It was odd, when you thought about it.\n\nBut, on the other hand, were dragons any different? Dragons were creatures of magic, their bones made of an unbreakable substance they called stone that was nothing like, their wings carrying them effortlessly despite the plain impossibility of anything a dragon's size being able to fly, their bodies immune to the fire or acid they contained in their second stomachs. Dragons were as casual about all that as humans were about their magic. Lamprophyre felt there was a difference, but she couldn't have said what it was.\n\nShe saw Porphyry settling in front of the course and moved her hand to the button that would start the timing artifact and signal for him to go. Porphyry spread his wings, Lamprophyre mashed the button, and a bright yellow flash went off as numbers appeared on the flint. Porphyry took off, propelled by the sound of hundreds of voices screamed encouragement.\n\n\"He's definitely more agile than I am,\" Orthoclase murmured. Porphyry navigated the barriers neatly, brushing two of them and prompting groans from the watchers. \"See? Even he's doing it. This wind is a nightmare.\"\n\nA gust of wind blew dust into Lamprophyre's face at that moment. She sneezed. \"We should call it a day after this. I'm ready to curl up with a good book and wait for the storm to pass. We could use the rain.\"\n\n\"In a dozen twelvedays I'm going to remind you you said that,\" Orthoclase said with a grin.\n\nPorphyry furled his wings and let momentum carry him through the giant hoop at the center of the course, then snapped them open before he could fall. In another five beats, he sped past Lamprophyre and Orthoclase, and the numbered display on the flint surface flashed his final time. \"Sixty-three beats,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Very nice.\" The cheering crowds agreed.\n\nPorphyry winged his way back to them and settled on the end of the ledge. With all three of them perched on it, one of them female, it was crowded. \"That wind is a nightmare,\" he panted.\n\n\"That's what I said,\" Orthoclase said. \"Let's talk to people for a bit and then go back to the warehouses. I need some stone to keep my strength up.\"\n\n\"Eating in the middle of the day, how decadent,\" Lamprophyre teased, though secretly she'd been dreaming of a slab of mica to nibble on while she read.\n\nShe lifted off the ledge and flapped leisurely across the course. They'd modeled it after the oval of the red sandstone coliseum at the center of Tanajital, though without the arched walls. Instead, long wooden stands twice the height of a dragon paralleled the long sides of the oval, their rows of benches stacked along an incline so there were no bad seats. The ledge and the timing artifact stood at the southern short end of the oval, not quite as tall as the stands, but still readily visible from every seat.\n\nLamprophyre headed now for the northern end of the course where the royal stand was. It was as tall as the rest of the spectator stands, but narrower, with a green and yellow canopy matching the royal family's colors shielding the chairs\u2014no benches for royalty. The royal family wasn't in attendance that day except for Rokshan, but there were always plenty of minor nobles and courtiers allowed to use it.\n\nA rickety-looking contraption clung to one side of the tall wooden stand. Lamprophyre shuddered when she looked at it. She'd ridden the lift exactly twice, and even now that she was in a dragon's body and couldn't fall to her death, the memory of its shaking ascent sent a shiver of fear through her. She'd never mentioned her fear to anyone, not even Rokshan. How humiliating to be a dragon afraid of heights! Which she wasn't. Not anymore.\n\n\"We're going to stop,\" she began as she neared the stand. Rokshan stood at the front rail, watching her approach. She opened her mouth to say more when she realized he wasn't alone. A woman, her dark hair whipped by the rising wind, stood next to him, her face turned toward him, a smile on her rosy lips.\n\nYalini.\n\nJealousy surged through Lamprophyre for half a beat before rationality took over. She trusted Rokshan not to lie to her, and she had no reason to believe Yalini's charms were so overpowering as to make him desert his mate. Besides, Rokshan's expression was the hard, blank half-smile that said he was seriously annoyed but couldn't reveal his annoyance.\n\nYalini, for her part, looked like she'd won a prize. Her thoughts were all focused on Rokshan: so handsome, wonder if he's intelligent, gives a good impression of not but I think it's a ruse. It would be interesting if Lamprophyre could steer her into thinking about why she wanted to marry Rokshan. But the look on Rokshan's face told her it would be better to get them both away from the Fanishkorite princess immediately.\n\n\"Princess Yalini, welcome,\" Lamprophyre said, backwinging into a hovering position. \"I thought you'd left Tanajital.\"\n\n\"Why would I do that?\" Yalini turned her smile on Lamprophyre. Dragon's unnaturally close to the prince, not sure why, she thought.\n\n\"Well, the negotiations didn't work out, so I thought\u2026\" Lamprophyre's words trailed off in the face of Yalini's unwavering smile. From stone statue to overly friendly woman\u2014Lamprophyre would put that down to human oddity, but now that she'd been human herself, her instincts about what humans found normal had changed. She felt certain anything Yalini did was part of a very deep game, one Lamprophyre didn't know how to play, let alone win.\n\n\"Fanishkor isn't at war with Gonjiri,\" Yalini said, \"and the diplomatic party chose to remain in Tanajital for a few weeks. To experience everything Gonjiri has to offer, of course. I'd never seen dragons race before, and Prince Rokshan was kind enough to invite me.\"\n\nRokshan's eyes widened. Lamprophyre listened to his thoughts and was nearly bowled over by their force and incoherence. Tricked me stupid woman can't believe was all Lamprophyre could make out. She would have laughed if Rokshan hadn't been so clearly furious.\n\n\"That was kind,\" Lamprophyre managed, but her own anger had been roused by Rokshan's distress. She already didn't like Yalini, and this short conversation hadn't done anything to change that. \"We're going to stop the races because of the wind. I'm sorry you didn't get more of a show.\" She bared her teeth at Yalini in what she hoped looked like a smile.\n\nDefinitely too close to the prince, almost like a jealous woman, Yalini thought. \"Oh, I'm sorry I didn't get to see you race,\" the princess said. \"I'm sure it's a\u2026spectacle.\"\n\nLamprophyre's non-smile tightened. Yalini's thoughts about her were not flattering. How dare the woman compare her to a flying cow? \"It is,\" she said, hanging on to politeness with all twelve claws.\n\n\"Well, if it's too difficult, I suppose there's nothing for it,\" Yalini said with an air of complacent unconcern. Don't know what Father was so worried about, these dragons are practically tame, she thought.\n\nThat was enough. \"Difficult isn't the issue,\" Lamprophyre snapped, \"and if you're so interested, I don't see why I shouldn't oblige you.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said, his tone of voice a warning.\n\n\"I'll just make one run, Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre said. She flapped backward, wheeled, and crossed the field to where Porphyry hovered, talking to a handful of humans still in the stands. \"Porphyry, will you work the artifact? I'm going to run the course.\"\n\n\"But everyone's gone,\" Porphyry said.\n\n\"It's just to\u2014\" Lamprophyre remembered the listening ears in time to keep from saying show that stone-faced princess what real power looks like. \"We have a visiting dignitary, and I want to show her what dragons are capable of.\"\n\nPorphyry shrugged. \"All right, but only once, because I want to get back and nap.\"\n\nLamprophyre flew to the starting point, glancing over her shoulder once at Rokshan and Yalini. The princess still smiled as if this were normal entertainment. Rokshan looked ready to explode, though likely no one but she would recognize that expression, since he was good at putting on a diplomatic face. She stretched, flexed her wings, and crouched, waiting for the signal.\n\nThe lights flashed. She pushed off from the ground and was halfway across the field in a single beat. First, the spiraling tower, prone to dizzying a dragon if she wasn't careful. Lamprophyre spun around it to the top, rang the bell that hung there, and swept back to the ground to zigzag through the barriers. She didn't so much as brush up against any of them, and she couldn't help smiling in triumph at her success.\n\nShe tore out of the barriers and swung through the parallel bars, reaching from one to the next. Wings couldn't help here; it was all about arm strength, and she was more powerful than a male, with a longer reach. The bars made their own kind of zigzag course, but vertical rather than horizontal, and by the time she reached the top she was breathing heavily but not painfully. She still had plenty of stamina for what she intended next.\n\nShe kicked off backwards and let herself fall a short distance before snapping her wings open to catch herself\u2014it would lose her some time, but the show was more important. And she intended to put on a show for Yalini. Curving sharply down, she set a course for the final obstacle.\n\nThis one had been Rokshan's idea, and his design, though it had been a clever metalsmith who'd executed it: a giant metal hoop barely big enough for a female dragon to fit through with her wings furled. It took speed and perfect timing to make it through, and Lamprophyre had both. She beat the air to speed up until she was racing along, faster than either Orthoclase or Porphyry. Another smile tugged at her lips. What came next was something no male dragon could do.\n\nAs the hoop neared at a sickening speed, she sucked in a deep breath and spat fire at the hoop. The oil coating its surface caught fire immediately, blazing hot and bright and streaming in the wind. It filled the center of the hoop, but that didn't matter; Lamprophyre furled her wings and dove through the fire, letting her momentum carry her through and over the finish line.\n\nShe heard distant cheers as she spread her wings and coasted to a stop. Breathing heavily, she turned and flew back to the royal stands, where only Rokshan and Yalini remained. Rokshan still looked as if he was containing his anger, which worried Lamprophyre. She'd thought her stunt would cheer him up at least a little.\n\nYalini's smile hadn't altered. \"Why, that was impressive, ambassador,\" she said. Her thoughts were oddly cheerful, almost triumphant. See what they can do, make use of that. And then, with a certainty that almost made Lamprophyre fall out of the sky, She's in love with him, don't know how, disgusting.\n\n\"I'm glad you liked it. Rokshan?\" Lamprophyre tilted her shoulder in invitation. She felt sick and dizzy and humiliated by the dismissive, horrible tenor of Yalini's thoughts. She wanted Rokshan near and she wanted him far from the princess, far away where Yalini couldn't make any more devastatingly accurate conclusions.\n\n\"I have to escort Princess Yalini to her residence,\" Rokshan said, his voice flat and hard. Lamprophyre listened to his thoughts long enough to know he wasn't angry with her, but with himself. She wasn't sure why, unless it was to do with feeling tricked by the princess.\n\n\"Of course,\" Lamprophyre said. Her thoughts were in a whirl of unanswerable questions. How could Yalini have guessed? Why would anyone believe a dragon could love a human? And, worse, what might Yalini, who Lamprophyre was now certain was her enemy, do with that information?\n\nShe turned her back on Rokshan and Yalini and flew to meet Orthoclase, high above the course. \"We may have a problem,\" she told him quietly, though there was no way any human could hear them. \"That Fanishkorite princess is plotting something.\"\n\nOrthoclase peered over her shoulder at the royal stands. \"Her? Why would we worry about her? She's not even a king.\"\n\nA rush of wings heralded Porphyry's approach. \"I smell rain in the air. Let's get undercover,\" he suggested.\n\n\"Lamprophyre's worried about that foreign princess,\" Orthoclase told him.\n\nPorphyry looked in that direction just as Orthoclase had done. \"Worried how?\"\n\n\"Let's fly, and I'll tell you on the way,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nBut they ended up flying in silence, thanks to the wind stealing their words away. Lamprophyre went over what she'd heard from Yalini's thoughts. The princess thought Rokshan was handsome\u2014well, so did lots of people, because he was, but her thoughts were focused on his good qualities in regard to her intent to marry him. That was never going to happen, but the fact that Yalini was still convinced it was possible despite knowing Rokshan and Ekanath were both opposed to the marriage suggested either that Yalini was stupid, or that she had a plan nobody else knew about. And Lamprophyre didn't think Yalini was stupid. So that was one thing to worry about: Yalini had set her sights on Rokshan.\n\nFollowing hard on that problem was how Yalini had guessed Lamprophyre was in love with Rokshan. The memory of Yalini's dismissive thoughts still made Lamprophyre feel ill, as if Yalini's disgust were something objective that could affect Lamprophyre. She didn't know if Yalini thought Rokshan returned Lamprophyre's affection, but maybe it didn't matter, since Lamprophyre had no idea what Yalini could do with that information.\n\nTrue, Lamprophyre and Rokshan wanted it kept secret, mainly because it was no one's business but theirs, but even if it became public, what difference would that make? Lamprophyre decided not to dwell on the many possible negative reactions humans might have upon learning of their prince's possibly aberrant desire. There were other concerns that mattered more.\n\nThe main concern\u2014well, secondary to her worry about Yalini's intent to marry Rokshan\u2014was what the king of Fanishkor wanted from dragons. Yalini's thoughts revealed that King Damen was worried about dragons, probably worried that they might attack his kingdom given that she'd immediately gone on to think about how tame Lamprophyre and her clutchmates were. So then why would Damen care about making use of dragon capabilities like flying and spitting fire? He had to know dragons wouldn't work with him so long as the specter of the egg theft lay between their peoples, and dragons certainly wouldn't attack Gonjiri for him. True, there were other kingdoms, but the principle was the same.\n\nBy the time they reached the warehouses, Lamprophyre wasn't any closer to a conclusion, and she felt a delayed sickness from taking the spiral tower too fast. She descended more slowly than usual and came to a halt in the center of the street. \"I need something to settle my stomachs,\" she said.\n\n\"Wait a few beats,\" Orthoclase said. He disappeared into his warehouse and emerged shortly afterward with a hunk of dusty white talc, which he handed to Lamprophyre. She bit into it, making a face at how the dust powdered her lips and chin, but a few swallows later, she felt better.\n\n\"So explain about the princess,\" Porphyry said. \"I thought she must be friendly, since Rokshan brought her to the races.\"\n\n\"She tricked him into an invitation.\" Lamprophyre finished off the talc and wiped her face. \"And she was thinking all sorts of conniving plots. Like how she wants to marry Rokshan.\"\n\nOrthoclase laughed. \"She's going to be a very sad princess if she's pinned her hopes on that outcome.\"\n\n\"What worries me is that she has a plan I don't know about. And if she could trick Rokshan into taking her to the races, who knows if she's got other tricks she might play?\" Lamprophyre checked inside Flint's warehouse and, finding it empty, settled inside as the first fat drops of rain spattered the ground and the top of her head.\n\n\"Rokshan's not stupid,\" Porphyry said. \"If you warn him it's a possibility, he can defend against it.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"I trust him to be careful. But she worries me. She was also thinking about what use Fanishkor might have for dragons. And, worst of all\u2014she knows I'm in love with Rokshan.\"\n\nPorphyry sat up abruptly and smacked his head on the door lintel. \"She couldn't. How?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Apparently I behaved like a jealous woman. But it's supposed to be too absurd a possibility for anyone to guess. Maybe it doesn't really matter, because what can she do with that guess? But I feel so\u2026exposed, maybe. As if she might guess any number of other secrets.\"\n\n\"It would be a scandal if humans knew,\" Orthoclase said. \"And you'd look like a fool, which is bad for all dragons.\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled. \"I hadn't considered that. Now I'm more worried than ever.\"\n\nThe rain was falling harder now, hard enough that she didn't hear the approach of giant wings. Dolomite's appearance startled her. She ducked reflexively as he flapped his wings hard to clear them of raindrops and then hurried into his warehouse. \"Flying in rain is so uncomfortable,\" he said, \"but I wasn't paying attention, and it caught me by surprise.\"\n\n\"You must be preoccupied not to notice the weather,\" Porphyry said. \"Any clues as to your secret project?\"\n\nDolomite shook his head. \"And don't go listening for it, because it will be a wonderful surprise,\" he warned them.\n\nLamprophyre eyed Dolomite's feet. The soles were paler than usual, dusted with a damp white powder that clung to the creases of his feet. He'd either been somewhere very dirty, or he'd been tromping around in stone dust. A quarry, perhaps? She kept her suppositions to herself. Dolomite was usually very bad at keeping secrets, but he'd stayed silent about this one for several days now, and that deserved some consideration.\n\n\"We need more information,\" she said. \"No, not about you, Dolomite.\" She quickly filled him in on what she'd learned listening to Yalini's thoughts. \"Which means one or more of us will have to encounter her. And since she's a princess of a foreign country, it should be the ambassador. At least I'll have the best excuse to get close to her.\"\n\n\"But won't that convince her even more that she's right about you and Rokshan?\" Dolomite asked. He sat on the ground and absently rubbed dust from his feet.\n\n\"Maybe, but on the other hand, since she already believes she's right, it's not like I have anything to hide. And\u2014\" A new thought occurred to her, cheering her. \"If I continue to act like a jealous woman, it might fool her into thinking that's my only reason for approaching her. Wanting her to stay away from Rokshan, I mean. And who knows what else I might get out of her?\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" Porphyry said. \"I admit I'm worried about what the Fanishkorite king thinks he might get us to do. Given that you've already turned down an alliance.\"\n\nLamprophyre lay down and pillowed her head on her arms. The rain beat down less than a handspan from her nose, making a pleasant pattering sound on the hard-packed ground. \"He has no power over us,\" she said, and suppressed the distant fear that she might be wrong."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Lamprophyre lay with her head propped on her hands and watched Rokshan pace the doorway of the embassy. The rain had passed, leaving the air smelling clean and fresh and damp. \"She was just so damn calculating about it,\" Rokshan said. \"Every step so very innocent, but they all added up to me being forced to take her to the races. It was infuriating.\"\n\n\"It makes me angry, too,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She's so sly. Like a cat. Only cats are more honest about it.\"\n\nRokshan stopped and ran his hands through his hair in a frustrated gesture, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling. \"And I thought she was stupid and decorative. I can't believe she figured out our attachment.\"\n\n\"My attachment to you, you mean. I don't know if she knows you're in love with me.\"\n\n\"Either way. That speaks to a level of perceptiveness that makes me uncomfortable.\" Rokshan resumed pacing. \"I'll just have to stay away from her.\"\n\n\"You can't. I need to listen to her thoughts again, to see if I can work out what the king wants with dragons.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre, if I spend much more time with her, I'll either kill her or end up forcibly married to her. She's poison.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's why King Damen sent her. Or does he only have one unmarried daughter?\"\n\n\"I can't remember. I think there are three. It never mattered to me before.\" Rokshan sat beside her cross-legged and ran his hand over her shoulder and down her side. \"All right. At least now that we know she has a plan, we can arrange to meet her only in places where you'll fit. And if that's not possible, I'll see what I can do to worm information out of her.\"\n\n\"I don't want you alone with her if we can help it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Is there something a woman could do to entrap a man into marrying her?\"\n\nRokshan gave her an ironic look. \"She could lie about carrying his child,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre blushed. She'd forgotten that had happened to Rokshan years before. \"Other than that.\"\n\n\"I don't know. It used to be that a man being alone with a woman he wasn't related to compromised her honor, to be restored through the two of them marrying, but that's an old-fashioned notion nobody believes in anymore. There's breach of contract\u2026if she got me to promise to marry her somehow, but I can't imagine being stupid enough to agree to anything she proposes. Or she might put herself in a situation where my promising to marry her is the only way to save her. That's complicated even for a mind like hers presumably is, though.\"\n\n\"So you're probably safe.\"\n\n\"Not so safe that I'd let myself be alone with her.\" Rokshan stroked her scales again. \"I wish I was a dragon already. She'd have to stop pestering me then.\"\n\nLamprophyre rolled on her side, folding her wings so she wasn't lying on them. \"Did you finish reading Evart's notes?\"\n\n\"I did. Mostly they're about finding the right shape for the artifact, which doesn't help us. But he does refer occasionally to the need for a model. Not a human, but a stone.\"\n\n\"Viveki said he started out wanting to transform stone into other stone.\" Lamprophyre sat up. \"Rokshan, what if he wrote about Sardonyx talking to him?\"\n\nRokshan's hand went still. \"Of course. At some point, Sardonyx had to have convinced him to stop what he was doing and turn his skills toward transforming you into a human. It's not in the book we have, which means\u2014\"\n\n\"That it's essential Viveki get the more recent notes,\" Lamprophyre concluded. Excitement surged through her. \"Even if there's nothing we can use to transform you, those notes might still be valuable.\"\n\n\"I wish we knew where she lives,\" Rokshan said. \"I dislike waiting on her.\"\n\n\"I know. We have to be patient.\" Lamprophyre settled back down. \"I hate being patient.\"\n\nThey both fell silent. Lamprophyre closed her eyes and leaned into Rokshan's hand. The light touch relaxed her. Viveki would return eventually, her greed ensured that, and the other notes would be what they needed.\n\nShe heard footsteps approaching across the courtyard and sat up, hoping it was Viveki. But it was only Bhakriya, laden with baskets and roughly woven sacks. The weekly shopping trip for Lamprophyre's human household. \"My lady, you're back,\" the woman said. \"There was someone here earlier, asking for you.\"\n\n\"A petitioner?\"\n\nBhakriya shook her head. \"She said she had business with you, something you'd commissioned her to do. I told her you were at the races and she could come back later, but she said you should meet her at the river docks at five o'clock this evening.\"\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan exchanged glances. \"What did she look like?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"I vaguely remember seeing her before. Young, pretty. Plump and very short. Her hair was long and she wore it loose. I admit I didn't like the look of her, for all she was attractive. She looked at me as if I weren't worth her time.\"\n\n\"Viveki,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I can't believe we missed her.\"\n\n\"I'm more worried that she wants us to meet her,\" Rokshan said. \"It's suspicious.\"\n\n\"Is everything all right, my lady?\" Bhakriya asked.\n\n\"It's fine. Thank you for the message. Rokshan, what time is it?\"\n\nRokshan fished a round bronze artifact out of his shirt. \"Four o'clock. We have some time. Do you want to fly over there now and look for anything strange?\"\n\n\"I think it's possible Viveki chose that location to give herself an advantage, and if she sees us approaching early, she might disappear.\" Lamprophyre sighed and settled back down. \"We wait.\"\n\nLamprophyre rarely went to the river docks because they were so crowded she feared crushing someone, or someone's boat. The docks were a scruff of wooden platforms jutting out into the Green River, nothing fancy or finished, just places for boats to tie up while their owners took care of business in the small shallow-roofed buildings that lined the eastern shore. More boats that were little more than collections of floating planks snugged against the shore or crossed the river to the far side. As sunset approached, those little boats were busier than usual as they took their last few fares across before darkness made the river crossing dangerous.\n\nLamprophyre circled low above the docks, ignoring the hum of awed or astonished thoughts from below. \"I don't see her.\"\n\n\"We can't land close to the docks,\" Rokshan said. \"Too crowded. Why don't you circle once more and then set down south of the docks? That gives Viveki plenty of notice that we're here, and she can come to us.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and began one more large spiraling pass over the river. Western Tanajital, across the river from the main city, didn't look anything like its big sister. The buildings were shorter, none taller than one story, and they looked dingier, crowded together at random instead of being laid out in the orderly way Lamprophyre now took for granted. Lights were coming on in the tiny houses, but very few of the streets were lit, unlike Tanajital proper where householders were required by law to maintain a light outside their houses. Looking at western Tanajital made Lamprophyre's skin itch as if she needed a bath. It was even less savory than Tanajital's slums.\n\nShe descended slowly, looking around in case Viveki suddenly appeared, and landed well south of the last dock. \"I'd rather meet her someplace away from people, anyway,\" she said. \"I know no one cares about Evart's research but us, but he was so secretive, I feel there's something furtive about this transaction.\"\n\n\"If he knew about Sardonyx, there is something secret,\" Rokshan said as he climbed down. \"Since we don't want to spread that news around.\"\n\n\"But it's not really a secret,\" Lamprophyre protested. \"It's not like it would hurt anyone to know.\"\n\n\"The news that there's an ancient evil dragon in the world intent on destroying humans and their dragon allies would cause a panic,\" Rokshan said. \"You forget how much fear of dragons there is, despite all the work we've done. Keeping this secret while we figure out what to do about it is crucial.\"\n\n\"I suppose, but what if Sardonyx becomes a physical threat, and no one's ready for her?\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"With Gonjiri on almost a wartime footing because of Fanishkor, and Fanishkor likewise, we're already prepared to meet a threat. And we have all those pyrite weapons. I already believe there might be a day when Sardonyx attacks, and I'm in a position to influence the military to be ready. We just need to keep ahead of her, and that means learning more.\"\n\nLamprophyre scanned the shoreline. \"I hate that we don't know enough.\"\n\n\"Me too, but we're already doing everything we can.\" Rokshan put a hand on her shoulder. \"And these notes might be important.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. The motion of men and women going back and forth from ship to shore, of little boats pushing off into the current or heading downstream, kept her attention moving in all directions. A large boat, one with sails, slipped past going south. Its paint was chipped and peeling, but she could tell it would have been vibrant with color when the paint was fresh.\n\nPeople crowded the side of the boat, staring and pointing at her. She waved. Some of the people waved back and shouted greetings. The boat sent waves to both sides, the water foaming in its wake. The sweet damp scent of the water and the green odor of the grass and plants crushed under her feet prompted her to breathe the smells in deeply. This time of year, the Green River ran low, and more of the banks were exposed, revealing cracked dried mud and the stems of reeds, yellow where the water usually covered them. Lamprophyre settled back on her haunches and sniffed. \"Someone's cooking supper.\"\n\n\"I'm sure a lot of people are. Where is Viveki?\" Rokshan hadn't settled down, but was pacing the river's edge in front of Lamprophyre.\n\nMovement at right angles to that of the men and women passing from ship to shore caught Lamprophyre's attention. \"There she is. Try not to act nervous.\"\n\n\"It might be too late for that,\" Rokshan said, but he stood beside Lamprophyre in a parade rest position, hands clasped loosely behind his back.\n\nViveki strode toward them, ignoring everyone else who crossed her path and in some cases forcing them to pull up short to avoid her. She was smiling, not a friendly smile but the smile of a predator. Lamprophyre felt uneasy. Something had changed. Viveki had been confident before, but this looked more like triumph. And since Lamprophyre couldn't think of any reason for Viveki to be triumphant over them, the woman's demeanor made her nervous.\n\nViveki halted about a dragonlength away. \"You got my message,\" she said. Her wordless thoughts were filled with a satisfaction Lamprophyre found unsettling.\n\n\"Yes. I'm sorry we missed you. This must be an inconvenience,\" Lamprophyre said. She hoped politeness would temper whatever plot Viveki had in mind for squeezing more money out of the embassy.\n\n\"I don't mind. This is better.\" Viveki glanced around as if looking for listeners. \"Did you bring my money?\"\n\n\"Did you bring the notes?\" Rokshan said, walking forward.\n\nViveki held up a hand and waggled it at him in a warning manner. \"Not so fast. I think we should talk first.\"\n\nLamprophyre's eyes narrowed. So it was going to be extortion, after all. \"If it's the right book, we agreed on a price already.\"\n\nViveki tilted her head like a bird and examined Lamprophyre closely. \"It's amazing. There's no trace,\" she said. No trace, her thoughts echoed.\n\n\"No trace of what?\"\n\nViveki's smile broadened. \"Of the transformation.\"\n\nLamprophyre's mouth fell open. Beneath her surprise, her mind raced. Of course. Viveki had read the notes. They should have guessed she would. And if Evart hadn't been cautious\u2014and why would he be, writing in his own book?\u2014he would have written down all the details of his plan. And now Viveki knew he'd wanted to turn Lamprophyre human. But he couldn't have written that it had been successful, not if the book hadn't been on him at his death, so how could she know it had worked?\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about,\" she said, as firmly as she could manage.\n\nViveki let out a short, barking hah of a laugh. \"You said the artifact worked. I know what he intended it to do. You were transformed into a human.\" The amusement left her face. \"A human who looked exactly like me. I'll never forgive him for that obscenity.\"\n\nRokshan took another couple of steps toward her. \"She's clearly not human. You're delusional.\"\n\nViveki's face transformed into a terrible, vicious scowl. \"You'd be wise not to antagonize me, your highness,\" she said. \"I'm guessing this isn't information you want public. Piss me off, and I'll spread it far and wide.\"\n\n\"And why should we care?\" Lamprophyre said. It was getting harder to hold onto her calm.\n\nViveki transferred her scowl to Lamprophyre. \"You're not stupid. You know if it's public knowledge that a dragon can be turned into a human, there are people who will want to figure out how. There are lots of things you can do to a human that a dragon's invulnerable to. This knowledge is a danger to you, dragon, and if you know what's good for you, you'll do as I say.\"\n\n\"Meaning blackmail.\"\n\nViveki smiled. \"I knew you weren't stupid. I don't suppose you want to tell me how you were turned back? Did the transformation not last?\"\n\n\"Like we'd tell you anything,\" Rokshan said.\n\nViveki made a tsk tsk sound. \"Remember, be polite. You don't know what might set me off.\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Lamprophyre told Rokshan, wishing he could hear her thoughts. \"All right, Viveki, what do you want?\"\n\n\"The rest of those five vahas, for a start,\" Viveki said.\n\n\"That was in exchange for the notes. Hand it over, and I'll give you your money,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I'm not stupid, either,\" Viveki snarled. \"Like I'd give you my evidence. Now the money is to buy my silence.\"\n\nRokshan looked at Lamprophyre, his eyes wide. She heard him think We have to get those notes away from her, wherever they are. She agreed, but she had no idea how. She couldn't attack a human in full sight of everyone at the docks. It was unlikely she had anything she could offer in exchange. Her heart burned with fury at this petty little blackmailer, this greedy idiot who was going to ruin Rokshan's chance at transformation and might lose them valuable information about their enemy.\n\n\"Give her the money, Rokshan,\" she said. Rokshan's face went stony, but he handed over four square gold coins. \"Now, here's our problem, Viveki,\" she said. \"We want those notes. You want more money, I'm sure. What is it going to take to get you to hand them over?\"\n\nShe's mine, Viveki thought, angering Lamprophyre so much she almost forgot to be civilized. \"Oh, I don't know,\" she said. \"Seems like you dragons are wealthy enough to afford quite a lot. At least, that's what it says here.\"\n\n\"There's no such thing as a dragon hoard, whatever Evart wrote,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We're not a bottomless source of money.\"\n\n\"Oh, Evart was mad at the end,\" Viveki said. \"Convinced he was in secret mental communication with some adept. Even I know that's impossible. So what if dragons don't have hoards? You mine stone, don't you? Expensive stone. I think you can get me as much money as I want.\"\n\nLamprophyre heard Rokshan think let me handle this. \"You've never done this before, have you?\" he said, sounding bored and dismissive. \"Blackmailers are never successful in the long run. Their greed overcomes them, and they push their victims too hard. In the end, either the victim stops caring about having their secret revealed, or they turn on the blackmailer. So you're better off taking our offer. Name your price, and we'll exchange it for the notes.\"\n\n\"Nice try, your highness,\" Viveki said. \"I'll take my chances. And don't think killing me will solve anything. I've left the notes, along with the details of what's in them, in a place where they'll come out if I die.\" She'll believe that, can't afford to call my bluff, she thought.\n\nLamprophyre couldn't take it any longer. \"Interesting you mention dying,\" she said, advancing on Viveki. \"You should be afraid of what I might do to you. Death could be a release.\"\n\nViveki looked up at her without a trace of fear. \"Dragons don't kill humans,\" she said, \"and they definitely don't kill humans where there are all\u2026these\u2026witnesses.\" She gestured behind her. Lamprophyre involuntarily followed the line of her hand. Stones, but there were a lot of people watching! She ground her teeth in frustration.\n\n\"I think you're bluffing,\" Rokshan said abruptly. \"I don't think you've done anything more clever with those notes than putting them under your mattress.\"\n\n\"Shut up, your highness,\" Viveki snarled. Safe where they won't find them, safe in the hole, she thought.\n\nThat was interesting, but it wasn't enough, and Lamprophyre couldn't exactly ask 'what hole?' \"No, he's right,\" she said. \"You're just a petty blackmailer who thinks she has an advantage. You didn't hide them at all.\"\n\nI'm going to enjoy destroying these two, Viveki thought, maybe I should make copies, get ready to spread it around. \"Go ahead and taunt,\" she said aloud. \"It will just incline me more toward ruining you.\"\n\nLamprophyre, frustrated, exchanged glances with Rokshan. This was not the time to keep pushing in the hope Viveki would think the location of the notes. \"Fine,\" she said, pretending to be beaten. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Another five vahas.\" Viveki's smile was triumphant. \"After that, we'll see. And don't think about following me to see where I've put the notes. It's nowhere I ever go.\" See her coming from a mile off, easy to mislead, she thought.\n\n\"We don't have five more vahas on us,\" Rokshan said. \"You'll have to come to the embassy in three days.\"\n\n\"I don't like that plan,\" Viveki said. \"I think you should come to me. At the plaza. It's nice and public, just in case you have any bright ideas about attacking me.\"\n\n\"Three days, then, at the plaza. In the morning,\" Lamprophyre said. She crouched to let Rokshan climb up. \"But you're making a mistake.\"\n\n\"My belt pouch says otherwise,\" Viveki said. She waved goodbye just as if they were friends. Lamprophyre scowled and leaped into the sky.\n\nThey flew in silence for a few beats before Lamprophyre said, \"I hope you're coming up with a plan. I can't see past wanting to disembowel her.\"\n\n\"That would be deeply satisfying,\" Rokshan said. \"The little bitch. I can't help thinking we should have known this would happen.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Most people aren't as greedy and amoral as she is.\"\n\n\"Did she think the location of the notes?\"\n\n\"No. It was worth a try, though. Good idea.\" Lamprophyre rose higher above the city. \"I need to fly for a bit, if you don't mind. We won't go high.\"\n\n\"I feel the same. Let's circle the city a couple of times. Maybe that will clear our heads.\" Rokshan leaned forward to lie across her neck. \"Then I need to return to the palace. I'm sorry I can't eat with you tonight.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She was hungry, but in a distant way, her hunger pushed aside by her anger and frustration. The land slipped away beneath her, winter-pale but with the outlines of spring's tilled fields still visible. Ahead, the molten orb of the sun dipped the bottom of its curve beneath the horizon. It was an extraordinary sight that went a long way toward calming her.\n\nThere didn't seem to be anything to say. Lamprophyre reviewed that interaction in her head and wished she'd thought of something clever that would stop Viveki. The stupid girl had no idea what she had stepped into. \"Maybe we should let her talk,\" she said.\n\n\"What? You mean Viveki?\"\n\n\"Yes. Those notes could be crucial, and what are the odds anyone else will figure out a transformation artifact? Her threat could be meaningless.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Rokshan said, \"but you forget what kind of person we're dealing with. I'm more concerned that she might destroy the notes if we push her too far, just to be vindictive.\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought of that. Now I'm worried.\"\n\n\"Don't. She won't go to that extreme unless she thinks she can hurt us more by destroying her evidence than she can by blackmailing us.\" Rokshan ran a hand down the side of her neck. \"And I think I have an idea of how to deal with her without losing the notes.\"\n\n\"You do? What is it?\"\n\n\"I'm still figuring it out. I'll tell you when I'm prepared to act.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't like that idea, but she knew Rokshan preferred not to discuss his plans when they were still forming. \"All right,\" she said, \"but if there's any chance, in your plan, of me scaring the Stones out of that woman, I want in.\"\n\n\"I promise to make it a priority,\" Rokshan said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Lamprophyre left Rokshan outside the palace and flew back to the embassy. Her thoughts whirled so much, going from Viveki to Yalini to Evart and around again, her head had begun to ache, a rarity for a dragon. She decided on an early supper and an early bedtime, assuming the people of Tanajital complied with that wish. She didn't regret giving Depik permission to feed the hungry, but on days like this, she wished their experiment hadn't been quite so successful.\n\nThe soup kettle smelled delicious already when she arrived, well before the hour at which supper was served. \"Depik?\" she called out.\n\nDepik appeared from within the kitchen. \"Yes, my lady?\"\n\n\"When will supper be ready? I'd like to eat as soon as possible so I can have an early night.\"\n\n\"Not a problem, my lady, I'll have it out to you soon.\"\n\nRather than settle in the dining pavilion, Lamprophyre went into the embassy and lay down. The idea of crossing the courtyard after her meal when it was full of humans made her even more tired. She rested her head on her arms and closed her eyes. Hopefully, this headache would go away soon.\n\nWith her eyes closed, the sounds of the embassy and the neighborhood were louder and more coherent. Children raced through the nearby streets, shouting, but at enough of a distance that the noise didn't make her head ache more. More noise, this of hundreds of people going home to their suppers, washed over her like the wake of the boat she'd waved at. She inhaled the smell of soup and the spicier scent of curried lamb. If that was what Depik had made for her supper, he'd picked the perfect time to prepare her favorite meal.\n\nDespite her worries, tension ebbed from her back and shoulders. There was nothing she could do about any of her problems now, so why not enjoy a good meal and a night's rest? It was unfortunate Rokshan couldn't have stayed to read to her, which would have made the evening perfect, but he had military obligations that couldn't wait. Well, it was still going to be a lovely night.\n\n\"Supper, my lady,\" Depik said. He pushed the big cauldron on its trolley in front of her as she sat up. The smell of lamb in yellow soup filled her nostrils and made her salivate. Depik removed a large cloth he'd had draped over his shoulder and presented it to her. \"And a napkin. This is a messy meal.\"\n\n\"I'm not a sloppy eater, Depik,\" Lamprophyre said with a smile. \"But I appreciate your concern for my good manners.\"\n\n\"It's important you display the kind of manners others expect of an ambassador,\" Depik said with a bow.\n\n\"I know. I promise to use the napkin.\" Lamprophyre spread the cloth over her chest and the floor beside her, picked up the cauldron, and drank down a healthy portion of yellow soup, sweet and savory all at once. It had become her favorite human food while she was in her human body, and she'd been delighted to learn it could be adapted for dragons to digest. Some of it slopped over the side of her mouth, dripping onto the napkin, and she set the cauldron down to Depik's hearty laughter.\n\n\"You were right,\" she said, feeling embarrassed.\n\n\"It happens to all of us, my lady,\" Depik said, and with another bow left the embassy.\n\nLamprophyre ate the rest of her meal a little more slowly. There were no more spills, but she had to admit she was grateful for the cloth to wipe her mouth when she was finished. She tucked it into the empty cauldron and pushed the trolley outside for Depik to retrieve. The courtyard had filled up while she was eating, and the line of people waiting for soup stretched across it all the way to the street. Some nights were like that.\n\nShe waved to Darsha, who already had her soup and was standing at the far side of the courtyard, eating as tidily as she did everything else. It occurred to Lamprophyre she'd never seen Darsha wait in line for soup. She couldn't imagine the graceful prostitute standing in line for anything.\n\nHer head still hurt, but it was bearable. She backed up deeper into the embassy hall and curled in on herself, spreading her wings to cover most of her body and snugging her tail close to her stomach. The night was comfortably cool, the voice of the city had subsided to a dull hum, the people in the courtyard were too busy eating to talk, and Lamprophyre found her earlier fears and concerns had subsided. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep to come.\n\nShe'd almost drifted off when someone cleared their throat, almost in her ear. Startled, her head shot up, and she blinked both sets of eyelids open. \"What\u2014\" she began, then stopped speaking when she realized the person in front of her was a stranger. A stranger in Fanishkorite livery.\n\n\"My lady ambassador,\" the man said. He bowed, a complicated maneuver Lamprophyre thought looked silly. \"I apologize if I interrupted your sleep, but I bring a message from my lady ambassador Chaaksha.\"\n\nAll Lamprophyre's peace of mind deserted her immediately. \"A message?\" she said. \"She can't think I've changed my mind.\" It had been a few days, but not nearly long enough for Lamprophyre to forget what they'd discussed, even if she wasn't a dragon with an exceptional memory.\n\nThe man bowed again. \"I'm not privy to my lady's thoughts,\" he said. \"I am to give you this.\" He held out a small square of paper. Lamprophyre took it gingerly between two claws, conscious of how easily she could tear it. It turned out to be a larger, rectangular paper folded in half. Glancing warily at the messenger, Lamprophyre took it to her magnifying lens and examined it. The writing was small, the lighting poor, but Lamprophyre's eyes were still good enough to make it out.\n\n\"A party?\" she said. \"This is an invitation to a party?\"\n\n\"Even so, my lady,\" the man said. \"Tomorrow night at the estate of Acharya.\"\n\nLamprophyre had never heard of it. She listened to the man's thoughts, hoping to regain some balance, but he was one of those whose thoughts echoed his words almost completely, and the only thing she heard aside from what he'd just told her was a sense of placidity and complete nonchalance at facing a dragon. Where Chaaksha had found a Fanishkorite unafraid of dragons, Lamprophyre didn't know, but he was a curiosity.\n\n\"You're not afraid of me,\" she said on impulse.\n\nThe man bowed a third time. \"Dragons are intelligent creatures not prone to casual violence,\" he said, \"and I see no reason to fear you.\"\n\n\"That's not a common reaction for someone from your country. Dragons haven't lived in Fanishkor for humans to become accustomed to them.\"\n\nThe man smiled, an unexpectedly humorous expression. \"I grew up hearing stories of dragons, all of which portrayed your people in a very negative light. I confess to being somewhat contrarian, and it seemed to me that it was impossible for all dragons to be as evil as the stories said. In fact, I felt sorry for dragons being so vilified. So when humanity regained contact with your people, I felt no fear.\"\n\n\"That's interesting. I wish everyone was as sensible as you. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Tarakh, my lady.\"\n\n\"Tarakh. It's nice to meet you.\" Lamprophyre glanced at the invitation in her hand. She had no idea what Chaaksha had in mind, but she was certain Yalini was behind whatever it was. Which meant Lamprophyre couldn't turn down this invitation even if she wanted to, which she sort of did. \"Will you convey my thanks to Ambassador Chaaksha, and tell her I'll be pleased to attend?\"\n\n\"I would be happy to, my lady. Enjoy the rest of your evening.\" Tarakh bowed again\u2014really, it was amazing how he managed to make each bow seem like no one had ever thought of bowing before\u2014and walked away.\n\nLamprophyre tucked the invitation between the pages of a book so it wouldn't get lost and settled down again. How fortunate that attending a party no longer meant choosing an elaborate gown and wearing sandals that rubbed one's feet until it nearly drove one mad. She'd be willing to bet Rokshan had received an invitation as well. This could be the perfect opportunity to find out what Yalini's plan was. It would mean looking foolish, like a jealous woman, but Lamprophyre was willing to endure that if it meant gaining the upper hand.\n\nAt sunset the next evening, Lamprophyre descended onto the plains south of the city and furled her wings neatly. The estate of the wealthy landholder Acharya spanned hundreds, maybe thousands of dragonlengths, most of the land made up of fields that at this time of year lay fallow. Lamprophyre had flown over it many times without knowing it was anything more than ordinary fields. But Rokshan had told her, earlier that day when they'd made their plans, that much of the property surrounding Tanajital was owned by wealthy men and women, and those landholders alternated living on their estates and living in mansions in Tanajital.\n\n\"I don't know anything about Acharya,\" Rokshan had said, \"other than that he's wealthy, of course, and his wife is from Fanishkor. Which is probably why he's provided Chaaksha with a place to host her party.\"\n\n\"So he's probably not in on her plan, whatever it is,\" Lamprophyre had said.\n\n\"No, that's unlikely. But we should be polite to him anyway.\"\n\nNow Lamprophyre sat and surveyed the estate, or what she thought was the estate. Rokshan had been uncharacteristically vague on the topic. Sometimes he talked as if the estate were the vast fields spread out in all directions, and other times he seemed to suggest the large house was the estate. Lamprophyre hated being confused and hated even more being at a disadvantage. So she watched, and drew conclusions, and waited for the right moment to advance.\n\nThe house was much larger than any she'd seen in Tanajital, though not as big as the palace. Lights blazed at every window, making it look, if she squinted, like it was on fire. More lights, these torches attached to poles stuck into the ground, lined a path that led from beside where she sat to the house. The path was of packed earth that smelled cool and loamy from yesterday's rain. It was barely wide enough to fit her if she walked on it, which she didn't intend to do, but it would be more comfortable than the squishy ground she currently sat on.\n\nAhead, two litters approached the house, neither of them distinguished in any way. Lamprophyre glanced behind her and saw another litter coming toward her. She didn't feel like encountering humans yet, so she leaped into the air and flew toward the house, quickly passing the litters and landing in the semicircular courtyard centered on the house's front door.\n\nThe door opened, and a man in servant's clothes, a long-sleeved white shirt and white trousers, stepped out. He saw Lamprophyre and visibly startled. \"I, um, excuse me, my lady,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre suddenly wondered how she was going to fit into the house. Surely Chaaksha wouldn't have invited her if there wasn't room for her? \"I was invited,\" she blurted out, and immediately felt stupid.\n\n\"We are expecting you,\" the man said, regaining his calm. \"If you would care to, um, I suppose you could walk, or even fly, to the rear of the house?\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Lamprophyre said, clinging to her dignity. Conscious of how awkward she looked when she walked, she took a few steps back and leapt into the air, hoping she hadn't knocked the poor man over with the draft from her wings.\n\nShe rose over the house's roofs, dark blue slate that had come from a very long way off and was no doubt a sign of the owner's wealth, and hovered for a moment, astonished at what she saw. Bright green grass cut very short and even spread out behind the house, its dimensions marked off by more torches on poles. Vivid canopies in Fanishkorite red dotted the grass, making it look like someone had dripped blood everywhere. Humans holding wine glasses moved between the canvases or stood beneath them. There weren't many people there yet, certainly not enough to prevent Lamprophyre from hearing individual thoughts, but there was enough space that if it was entirely filled, that wouldn't last long.\n\nUnfortunately, though the space was large, the placement of the canopies meant there weren't any places big enough for a dragon to land safely. Lamprophyre flew to one side and alit just outside the torchlit area. She heard gasps and unspoken exclamations, but no one screamed or threw things, and she was used to being a wonder.\n\nCarefully, she walked forward with her wings furled again. \"Good evening,\" she said. \"This is a beautiful place, isn't it? I've never seen any of these estates except from far above.\"\n\nSilence greeted her. She listened to their thoughts, but heard only amazement and curiosity, nothing that would guide her in what to say or do next. She didn't see Chaaksha or Yalini, and Rokshan hadn't arrived yet. Not attending together was part of the plan.\n\nShe smiled politely at the humans and continued to move forward until she'd crossed the grassy sward and had reached the far side. There was a slightly wider space between two red canopies, and she settled there to wait. Usually at diplomatic functions similar to this, people came to her. This was likely no different. In any case, it couldn't hurt for her to stay put so she didn't accidentally hit anyone with her tail.\n\nFor a hundred beats, she wondered if she'd made a mistake. No one approached her. No one paid her any attention. She might as well have been part of the d\u00e9cor, however much her coloring clashed with Fanishkorite red and white. Nobody had thought to provide refreshment for a dragon, which irritated her, and she was thirsty and bored and thought about leaving.\n\nShe became aware of thoughts focused on her: really big, how can she even fly? and what to say to a dragon. They were hard to hear, and Lamprophyre realized the field was more crowded than before. She dragged her attention away from the crowd and turned it on the two people approaching her. One of them was the messenger, Tarakh. She didn't know his companion, but she was dressed very finely in a gown of unfamiliar design. Lamprophyre guessed it was Fanishkorite fashion. She thanked her human experience with gowns for the knowledge.\n\n\"My lady ambassador, may I present Oresa,\" Tarakh said with one of his complicated bows. \"Oresa is a member of the diplomatic party, attached to King Damen's court. She expressed an interest in being introduced to you.\" He didn't touch Oresa, but the tone of his thoughts and the sound of his voice when he said her name told Lamprophyre he had very affectionate, even loving feelings for the woman.\n\n\"It's a pleasure meeting a dragon,\" Oresa said. She didn't bow, but Lamprophyre could still hear snatches of her thoughts over the noise of the crowd and concluded it wasn't an insult, but rather an expression of Oresa thinking of them as equals. Whether that was true or not, Lamprophyre didn't know, but she wasn't so stuffy as to insist on people bowing to her all the time.\n\nLamprophyre extended a hand. She would see how committed to egalitarianism this woman actually was. \"It's good to meet you, Oresa. I enjoy getting to know humans of all nationalities.\"\n\nOresa took Lamprophyre's hand with no hesitation and only the briefest thought of swallows it up. Lamprophyre held her hand for a beat and then released her. \"What does it mean that you're attached to King Damen's court?\"\n\n\"I'm a lady in waiting to the queen,\" Oresa said. \"That means I am her companion and I assist her in dressing and in choosing her jewels. I and the other ladies join her when she attends social functions and pay calls with her.\"\n\nLamprophyre understood about half of that, but she could guess at the meaning of the other half. \"So are you her representative with this diplomatic party?\"\n\nTarakh cleared his throat. \"Queen Ipsetia requested that Oresa travel with Ambassador Chaaksha to experience Gonjirian culture and describe it to her on her return.\"\n\nLight dawned. \"Oh, you're\u2014\" She caught herself before she blurted out the word spy. \"You're interested in what Gonjiri is like. I find it fascinating, myself. I especially like paraveti tangal. Do you have that in Fanishkor?\"\n\n\"Some of the most famous tangal performers are from Fanishkor,\" Oresa said. \"But I hope to attend a performance here. Gonjiri must have different interpretations of certain roles.\"\n\nThe noise of so many thoughts had become loud enough to force Lamprophyre to stop listening to Oresa's. That was unfortunate, because a spy would definitely have interesting and potentially useful thoughts. \"I always feel a little at a disadvantage in a tangal performance,\" she said. \"So much of it depends on a shared cultural background I just don't have. But there are many that make sense even to dragons.\"\n\n\"I understand dragons enjoy poetry,\" Oresa said. \"Forgive me, but that seems so odd. One thinks of poetry as a peculiarly human pursuit.\"\n\n\"It's not so odd if you know dragons taught humans language, centuries ago.\" Lamprophyre cast her gaze quickly over the assembled humans. She still didn't see Chaaksha or Yalini, and Rokshan wasn't anywhere close, though she could feel him approaching. \"Poetry is older than the Cataclysm, so there's no reason dragons shouldn't enjoy it.\"\n\n\"I see. I meant no offense.\"\n\n\"I know. It's all right. Rational people don't take offense where none is intended.\" That was one of Hyaloclast's favorite sayings, and Lamprophyre liked it, despite thinking, after her months spent among humans, it wasn't strictly true.\n\nShe returned her attention to Oresa and Tarakh. \"Dragons also love art. We draw, and we sculpt, though we'd never heard of paint before coming to Tanajital, and humans have dozens more colors of chalk than we'd ever seen.\"\n\n\"I would love to see dragon art. How extraordinary,\" Oresa said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure everything dragons do is extraordinary,\" said a new voice, one that made Lamprophyre's heart sink. She'd thought she was paying close attention to the crowd, but still Yalini had snuck up on her. And Rokshan wasn't here yet.\n\n\"Your highness, good evening,\" she said. \"Do I have you to thank for the invitation?\"\n\n\"No, that was Chaaksha's idea, but I'm glad to see you,\" Yalini said. \"Oresa, thank you for entertaining our guest. Tarakh, perhaps you might find the ambassador something to drink?\"\n\nAt the clear dismissal, Oresa and Tarakh bowed to Yalini and walked away. Lamprophyre hoped Tarakh would find her water and not wine. She didn't like the taste of alcohol any better after her time in a human body.\n\n\"Thank you, that was thoughtful,\" she said, hoping to buy herself time. She tried listening to Yalini's thoughts and caught a few snatches, nothing very coherent. What she needed was Rokshan to talk to Yalini while she listened in, but he wasn't there and she'd have to do her best on her own.\n\n\"It's a hostess's duty to see to the comfort of her guests,\" Yalini said. She held a wide-mouthed glass filled halfway with a rosy pink liquid, but didn't take a drink.\n\n\"So is this your party, then?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"I thought the invitation came from Chaaksha.\"\n\n\"It did, but the idea for the party was mine.\" Yalini gestured with the hand holding the glass, a circling motion meant to encompass the entire grassy area. \"My father would like to demonstrate that Fanishkor means Gonjiri no harm. Much like how dragons taught Tanajital not to fear them, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"I know I'd prefer Fanishkor not to be an enemy,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nYalini shrugged. \"It suits me to be my father's hand in this. But really, I'm not interested in politics. My desires are more focused.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart beat faster. She knew what Yalini would say, didn't need to hear her thoughts to know it, but she asked anyway. \"And what is it you want?\"\n\nYalini met her gaze directly for the first time since joining the conversation. \"I intend to marry Prince Rokshan, of course.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "A dozen different responses sprang to Lamprophyre's mind. In the silence that followed Yalini's statement, the sound of the party, of its many mingled conversations, seemed louder. Someone laughed, a shrill sound like the bleat of a donkey. Yalini continued to watch Lamprophyre. See what she says, the princess thought, one clear phrase among the vast muddle of thoughts surrounding them.\n\n\"The king turned down Fanishkor's request for a dynastic marriage,\" she said. A nice leading statement that should get Yalini talking.\n\n\"I don't think that should be the only reason to support a marriage between myself and the prince,\" Yalini said. \"He's intelligent, well-spoken, charming, handsome\u2026it makes perfect sense that any woman might fall in love with him.\"\n\nShe gave Lamprophyre a meaningful look. Lamprophyre managed not to blush, though she didn't think a blush would be visible in the flickering torchlight. Well, she'd wanted Yalini to open up. \"It does make sense,\" she said, \"and he's had many women interested in him. But, at the risk of sounding rude, why should he single you out?\"\n\nYalini smiled and raised her glass to Lamprophyre, saluting her. \"I shouldn't elaborate. I dislike talking about myself. But I'm of his own station, I'm well-educated and well-spoken, and at the risk of sounding vain, I'm quite lovely. He could hardly expect to do better.\"\n\nTime for some carefully crafted jealousy. \"That may be true, but it's not as if you're the only intelligent, beautiful woman in the world. Rokshan can afford to look for more than that. Compatibility of spirit, generosity, kindness\u2014\"\n\n\"Spoken like a true friend,\" Yalini said, sounding not at all insulted. To Lamprophyre's dismay, she didn't hear any secret anger. \"But friendship isn't enough to build a lasting relationship on.\"\n\n\"Of course it is,\" Lamprophyre replied, forgetting that her jealousy was supposed to be faked. \"Friendship matters more than anything.\" In the background, she was aware Rokshan was approaching, and she mentally urged him to move faster.\n\nYalini laughed. \"I'm sure you believe that,\" she said, laying a confiding hand on Lamprophyre's arm. \"But surely you see there's no hope for you.\"\n\nHer sudden frankness startled Lamprophyre. \"I don't know what you mean.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think you do. Compatibility of body is even more important than compatibility of spirit, you know.\" She laughed again. \"I feel sorry for you, I really do. But it's absurd, a dragon falling in love with a human. You have to know that.\"\n\nAnger flowered within Lamprophyre. Yalini's patronizing tone, and the whispers of thought that said disgusting and could never work, how aberrant made her wish she could reveal the truth to the arrogant princess. \"I don't know what you're talking about,\" she said haughtily, drawing herself up to her full height. \"Rokshan is my best friend, which is why I know you don't have a chance.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Yalini sipped her drink. \"I think he's sensible enough to see where his future lies.\" She nodded to Lamprophyre and turned away.\n\nLamprophyre drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, refraining from trying to blow another smoke ring. She'd established herself as an unstable, soppy female pining after someone she couldn't have. Time for Rokshan to see what he could learn.\n\nShe enjoyed the sense of her pair-bond strengthening as Rokshan neared. Really, Yalini didn't know how pitiful her words were. Though of course she could have no idea that Rokshan was already Lamprophyre's mate.\n\nShe saw Tarakh headed in her direction carrying a wide-mouthed vase almost too big for him to manage. \"My lady ambassador,\" he said when he was close enough to be heard over the crowd, \"I hope this is satisfactory.\"\n\nLamprophyre took the vase from him. It was of delicate porcelain and had purple flowers with long green stems painted on it. She sniffed its contents: the sharp scent of alcohol tingled her nose. Concealing her disappointment, she said, \"Thank you, Tarakh.\"\n\n\"I forgot to ask if dragons drink wine,\" Tarakh said, \"so I served you according to your station. If you'd prefer something else, please let me know.\"\n\n\"I normally drink water, yes,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but wine is what they serve at diplomatic events, so that's acceptable too.\" She sipped the wine, which was strong and fruity and burned her throat a little. It wasn't terrible. She took a larger drink. Briefly she wondered if dragons could get drunk, then decided this was not the time or place to figure that out.\n\n\"It's my pleasure,\" Tarakh said. \"Why don't you mingle with the crowd?\"\n\n\"I'm a little nervous of trampling someone.\" The drink was growing on her, even the taste of the alcohol.\n\n\"They know to stay out of your way, surely?\"\n\nLamprophyre eyed Tarakh. \"You seem eager to have me participate.\"\n\nTarakh bowed. \"I find you interesting, and I think other people will, too. And it seems dull for you to sit in this corner all evening.\"\n\nThe sense of a burning brand warming her skin became intense. Lamprophyre looked in the direction of the house and saw Rokshan emerge from the door. At some point, she'd need to be with him, as part of their plan, and how much better if he didn't have to manufacture a reason to join her in her seclusion? \"Tarakh, those are some excellent points,\" she said. \"I think I will\u2026mingle, you said?\"\n\nTarakh smiled. \"I hope you have a pleasant evening, my lady.\"\n\nShe waited for him to walk away before taking a few steps. He'd been right; people saw her coming and made way for her, what little she could hear of their thoughts indicating they didn't see it as an imposition. She kept her tail well elevated and her wings furled, anyway.\n\nShe deliberately didn't seek Rokshan out immediately, but she kept moving steadily in his direction. He was talking to people she didn't know, not Chaaksha or Yalini, so she slowed her progress. She wanted him to be well into conversation with Yalini when she interrupted.\n\nBesides, the conversations she was having were as interesting as Tarakh had suggested. Humans were fascinating when you got to know them. Lamprophyre was sure many of the conversations that interested her would be considered dull by other humans, but to her, talk of land grants and farming and the endless permutations of human families were all new and intriguing.\n\nShe held up her end of the conversations by telling stories of her clutch and the other dragons. Some people wanted to talk about the races, and she explained how they'd built the race course and how the timing artifact worked, though she didn't know as much about the latter. To her amusement, some men and women wanted to know more about her clutchmates as if they were famous. Well, they probably were. It was just funny to hear Porphyry, for example, referred to as if he were some human prince whose behavior and dress were considered public property.\n\nFinally, she looked around and saw Rokshan talking with Yalini, and a jolt of excitement ran through her. She excused herself and made her way through the crowds with greater purpose, not caring if Yalini saw her. That was the whole point.\n\nYalini and Rokshan fell silent when she arrived. \"Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre said, \"I didn't know you were here.\"\n\n\"You seemed busy with your new friends,\" Rokshan said. \"Yalini and I were talking about duty. And honor.\"\n\nLamprophyre tried listening to Yalini's thoughts, but they were near the center of the crowd, and it was all one great cacophony. \"That's heavy conversation for a party,\" she said.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Yalini said. \"When two people share an interest, talking about it is never a hardship.\"\n\n\"You've never talked like that with me, Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre pouted. She hated herself a little for the pretense. Dragons were too civilized to pout.\n\n\"You aren't interested in such topics, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. He sounded bored, and he wouldn't meet her eyes, and his body was turned toward Yalini rather than her. Lamprophyre was impressed at how well he pretended. \"Your highness, I can't say I'm convinced, but you make some interesting points.\"\n\n\"You're too rational not to come to the right conclusion,\" Yalini said with a smile. \"I hope we can speak again soon, but I should attend to my guests now.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Rokshan said with a bow, one not nearly so complicated as Tarakh's. Yalini nodded to Lamprophyre, a perfunctory gesture, and walked away.\n\nWhen she was out of earshot, Rokshan said quietly, \"We'll talk later. It's not something I want to risk being overheard.\"\n\nThat roused Lamprophyre's curiosity to painful heights, but she said, \"Understood.\" In a slightly louder voice, she said, \"You were talking to that princess for a long time. What did you have to talk about that was so interesting?\"\n\n\"Just things,\" Rokshan said, sounding bored again. \"I don't know why you care. I don't pester you about your friends.\"\n\nLamprophyre let out a loud harrumph and half-turned away from Rokshan. \"I don't see why you won't tell me, unless you're ashamed.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not have this discussion here, if you don't mind,\" Rokshan shot back. \"I'm going to have another glass of wine, unless you want to criticize that, too?\"\n\nPretending was fun. \"Do what you like,\" Lamprophyre said, trying to convey wounded pride in that short sentence.\n\nRokshan walked away. Lamprophyre watched him go, hoping she looked like she was pining. She didn't know what that looked like, but it was worth trying for the sake of the ruse. Then she turned away and struck up a conversation with someone who looked surprised at being addressed so abruptly by someone tall and blue. He was boring, but Lamprophyre didn't care; all that mattered now was convincing Yalini that she and Rokshan had had a fight. And, more importantly, that Rokshan's feelings for Lamprophyre were not romantic.\n\nShe talked to a few more people before deciding she'd had enough pretending for one night. Remembering her manners, she found Chaaksha in the crowd and made a polite half-bow, all she could manage without her tail getting in the way. \"Ambassador,\" she said, \"thank you for the invitation.\"\n\n\"Thank you for accepting,\" Chaaksha said, returning the bow. \"I suppose it's too much to hope that dragons have changed their mind about an alliance?\"\n\n\"As I said, that's not up to me. But I have hope for the future.\"\n\nChaaksha nodded. \"Not a terrible hope.\"\n\n\"Will you be in Tanajital much longer?\"\n\n\"Another week or so.\" Chaaksha, Lamprophyre noticed, was the only human without a wine glass who wasn't a servant. She wished she knew if that meant something.\n\n\"Then maybe we'll see each other again. I have to leave now, but again, thank you for your hospitality.\" Lamprophyre bowed once more, crossed to the edge of the grassy area carefully, and spread her wings to leap into the night sky. She didn't look for Rokshan.\n\nShe flew toward Tanajital, enjoying how the night air and the darkness wrapped around her. After only a few beats, she set down beside the road and waited. In the distance, Tanajital was a fuzzy blob on the horizon, lit by lanterns and a few white magic lights. There was no moon, and the Green River was invisible to her left. If not for the prickly dry grass, she might have felt herself deep in the midnight sky, comfortably alone in the world.\n\nLamprophyre tilted her head back and surveyed the sky. She knew many human constellations now, thanks to a book Dharan had loaned her, but she still had difficulty identifying them in the sky. Some of them were so strange, like the Dragon, which was a cluster of stars that made a picture with no legs or tail. Humans had the oddest ideas.\n\nA few hundred beats later, she felt the warm sensation of a burning brand and saw a gleam of light approaching from the direction of Acharya's estate. She turned to face the person and waited in silence. Presently, the light vanished, and Rokshan became visible. He hurried to her side and climbed up into the notch. \"Let's go,\" he said.\n\nShe leaped into the sky, beating the air with her enormous wings, and aimed at the fuzzy blob of Tanajital. Flying at night could be dangerous, not as dangerous as storm flying, but still a hazard, but they weren't going far. \"What did she say?\" she asked.\n\nRokshan was silent for a moment. \"She said more than I think she intended,\" he finally said, \"unless she's a lot more clever than I judge, and I hope by Jiwanyil that's not the case, because we could be in real trouble if it is.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. \"That sounds dire.\"\n\n\"I can't repeat the entire conversation. I don't have your memory. But the highlights were, first, that she is dead set on marrying me\u2014\"\n\n\"She said something like that to me, too. Warning me off.\"\n\n\"So did it work? She thinks you're pining after me?\"\n\nLamprophyre altered her course to take them over the river, as a landmark. \"She actually came out and told me she knew how I felt about you. Said I was pathetic, more or less.\"\n\nRokshan let out a hiss of irritation. \"Well, you gave a good impression of a jealous lover, if you were wondering.\"\n\n\"And I admire how well you showed me indifference. We are very good at pretending, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Maybe too good. I was so uncomfortable. I had to say things about you that weren't very complimentary. I'm sorry. Does it help to know that it worked, and she spoke more freely because she thought she was getting one up on you?\"\n\nLamprophyre tried to twist around to look at him. \"Yes. It's all right. It was in a good cause. So what else did she say?\"\n\n\"It's just as well you didn't hear her marriage proposal. All very logical and completely without affection. Based on what she told me, her interest in marrying me isn't just because I'm a magnificent catch, though to do her credit, she is attracted to me for myself and not just because her father ordered it. Actually, I wasn't entirely sure whose idea it was that Yalini should be the daughter who marries me. It doesn't matter. The point is\u2014and this is my inference, but I'm confident about it\u2014Fanishkor wants a marriage to bind its relationship with Gonjiri so they'll be able to make certain demands.\"\n\n\"What demands?\"\n\nRokshan let out a long, deep breath. \"They want to wage war on dragons.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Lamprophyre backwinged abruptly, making Rokshan grab at her ruff to stay seated. \"They want what?\"\n\n\"Could you not knock me off, please? If dragons won't ally with them, Fanishkor wants to put Gonjiri in a position to have to side with them against dragons. They know Gonjiri has dragon-killing weapons, and they want those weapons used on their behalf.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" So many objections rushed to mind Lamprophyre felt choked by them.\n\n\"I know. It's a ridiculous plan. I doubt my father would go to war against dragons even for the sake of his son's in-laws.\"\n\n\"I don't know what in-laws are.\"\n\n\"It means the family of someone's spouse. My birth family is my father and mother and siblings, and my wife's family would be my father-and mother-in-law and siblings-in-law.\" He let out a short laugh. \"By human custom, Hyaloclast is my mother-in-law. What an unsettling thought.\"\n\n\"And one you shouldn't tell her.\"\n\n\"That's not a reminder I need.\" Rokshan sobered. \"Anyway, my impression is that Yalini, and by extension her father, don't think of dragons as rational creatures co-equal with humans. They believe Father will obviously side with humans over dragons, just because we're the same species. So between that and a dynastic marriage, Damen believes he'll have Gonjiri's aid when he attacks dragons.\"\n\n\"But I don't understand. Why would he attack us at all? I thought they knew we don't hold any grudges about the egg theft.\"\n\n\"That, I'm not sure about. If I had to guess\u2014and it would just be a guess\u2014Damen is the sort of person who takes advantage of weakness, and he doesn't believe other powerful people aren't like him. I know Yalini, for all she hid it well, is afraid of dragons as a whole\u2014\"\n\n\"She's not afraid of me.\"\n\n\"No, but you're a pitiable creature because you're in love with someone not your own species, remember? Most dragons are an unknown factor, and to her and her father, unknown equals dangerous. So all of that together equals Fanishkor wanting to attack dragons before being attacked themselves. And they need Gonjiri's weapons to do it.\"\n\nThe high walls of Tanajital, shadowy except where the lanterns along their tops turned them rosy-gold, were coming up fast. Lamprophyre banked to pass over the western gate and headed for the palace. \"Well, their hopes are impossible. Even if you married Yalini, Ekanath would never go to war against dragons.\"\n\n\"No. But there's something else he needs to know. He and Tekentriya, probably.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\nRokshan ran a hand down the side of her neck, idly, the way he did when he was thinking about something. \"Fanishkor has a secret. Not a weapon, but some military secret Yalini alluded to.\"\n\n\"I can't believe Yalini could be either that indiscreet or that careless.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I asked the right leading questions, and she couldn't resist taking the bait. Even so, she didn't say much. What she said, more or less, is that Fanishkor isn't helpless, and if anyone were to attack, they'd get a surprise.\"\n\n\"That's not much to go on.\" Lamprophyre descended past the parkland surrounding the palace and crouched to let Rokshan off.\n\n\"It's enough that I can turn it over to the spies and have them ferret out the truth. Personally, I think it's some kind of defense, but I won't tell them that. Don't want to contaminate their search.\" He put his hand on her shoulder. \"God's breath, but I wish\u2026you know I love you, right? And I don't think there's anything aberrant about that?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Lamprophyre said, startled. \"And I love you.\"\n\nRokshan puffed out his cheeks, making a comical face that Lamprophyre smiled at, and blew out a long stream of air. \"I'm beginning to feel we're swimming in conspiracy. Viveki's blackmail, Yalini's connivances, and then there's the mystery of Sardonyx. Why can't things be simple? Just the two of us going for a swim or something?\"\n\n\"I'd like to have just one day where we didn't have to worry about all of that, yes.\" Lamprophyre sat back and looked at the palace, whose golden roofs weren't more than sharp-edged shadows, gilded at the eaves where the lantern light gleamed. She liked the palace better by moonlight, when the moon turned the gold into silver and made the short grass surrounding it into a motionless sea. She'd never seen the ocean, but she imagined it like the Green River, but a field instead of a stream. And, of course, night flying was easier when the moon was full.\n\n\"Then let's do it,\" Rokshan said. \"Swimming, and a trip to Sunital, maybe not in that order.\"\n\nThe suggestion cheered Lamprophyre so much it surprised her. She hadn't thought their pretending had bothered her at all, but the amount of relief she felt at being with Rokshan told her otherwise. \"I'd love that.\"\n\nLamprophyre swept north and west, gliding low enough over the hills east of Tanajital she could see her shadow, flickering and deformed by the rise and fall of the land. Ahead, storm clouds rolled in, nearly as low to the ground as she was and sending tendrils of dark mist out to caress the afternoon sun. The sun wasn't in a position to inconvenience her by shining in her eyes, but it didn't matter, because they'd be back at Tanajital before it sank that low. Whether they'd outrace the storm was another matter.\n\n\"The clouds are moving faster than I realized,\" she said. \"We might get wet, and not in the good way.\"\n\n\"If we'd brought the harness, we'd beat it for sure,\" Rokshan said. \"It's all right. Though I'm sure the rainwater will be colder than the river.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She felt relaxed enough she didn't much care if they got wet again. They'd spent the morning in Sunital, watching the foot races the city was famous for, and had a long swim in the early afternoon. That had drawn something of a crowd, which had worried Lamprophyre, because Rokshan could be sensitive about the burn scars covering his body. But he'd splashed and swam without showing any sign of self-consciousness.\n\nDespite her physical relaxation, all her muscles feeling as if they'd been stretched and kneaded pleasantly, she couldn't shake off the feeling of sadness that had plagued her ever since perching on the wall of Sunital's coliseum. How different this trip would have been if she'd been human. Rokshan would never say it\u2014in fact, she didn't believe he even thought it\u2014but things had been so easy when they were both human. It didn't help her melancholy to reflect that the same would be true if they were both dragons.\n\nShe made herself focus on reality. For the moment, they were a dragon and a human in love, and that difference in species would change soon. She had to believe it, or she really would fall into despair. \"Rokshan,\" she said, \"have you thought of a way to get those notes away from Viveki?\"\n\n\"I have about three-quarters of a plan,\" Rokshan said. \"Are we agreed that we can endure it if her knowledge about your transformation gets out?\"\n\n\"Yes. That's not important in the long run. Besides, if someone figures out how to make a dragon human, that suggests knowledge of the reverse will also be available.\"\n\n\"Then the important thing is keeping her from destroying the notes. That's where my plan falls apart.\"\n\nLamprophyre wanted to ask for details, but she knew he wouldn't give them until he was ready. \"Will it be ready by tomorrow? I'd love not to have to part with five vahas.\"\n\n\"Yes. Tomorrow we'll have her.\"\n\nLamprophyre let out a relieved sigh. Ahead, the rosy walls of Tanajital blended with the pale gold of the wintry fields. It was such a comforting sight it made her disquiet greater. She didn't want to think of a human city as home, not when she already had a home, but she was used to Tanajital now and looked forward to returning to the embassy after some time away. She told herself to stop being foolish and sped up a little. The storm was closer now, but she cast an expert eye on the clouds and estimated they had another four thousand beats\u2014almost three human hours\u2014before it reached the city, and they would be well under shelter in two.\n\nSoon, she crossed the wall, waving at the soldiers on guard. They weren't supposed to be distracted from their duties by a dragon, but she didn't think a quick wave counted as distracted. Tanajital's orderly streets and its white or tan buildings soothed her spirits. It was so beautifully alien, so unnatural, that it astonished her every time that anyone was capable of such creation. Dragons went in for more organic shapes, the curve of a cave wall or the bumpiness of a quarry ledge. And yet both humans and dragons altered their environments to suit them. The thought cheered her.\n\nAhead, the Archprelate's palace loomed, short and squat except for a single slim spire thrusting toward the heavens. Three flags flew above the tower, black, green, and multicolor striped. That meant the First Ecclesiast, the Fifth Ecclesiast, and the Archprelate were in residence. \"Khadar's still there,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I saw. Now might be a good time to corner him.\"\n\nLamprophyre twisted to look back at Rokshan, though she couldn't see more of him than his leg. \"You think it's a matter of cornering him?\"\n\n\"I think he won't be forthcoming unless we make it clear this is an official diplomatic inquiry.\" Rokshan leaned forward to lie across her neck. \"And that prophecy is still important, even if it's not as urgent as everything else we've been dealing with in the past week.\"\n\nLamprophyre's curiosity roused. It was true she wanted to know why Jiwanyil had given a prophecy that dragons would be angry about. She banked, wheeled, and descended toward the Archprelate's palace.\n\nShe'd only been there once, and only just outside the front door, but she'd seen the palace and its grounds many times in her flights over the city. A high granite wall, solid and gray and topped with smooth marble slabs, extended from both sides of the palace and circled around a vast field of short-cropped grass. The field was big enough to fit fifty houses, and Lamprophyre had always wondered what the ecclesiasts needed so much space for, especially when housing in the city was at a premium, something she knew from her regulars who came for soup.\n\nThere wasn't much room for a dragon to land outside the Archprelate's palace. A wide strip of courtyard, paved not with little white bricks like most of Tanajital but with smooth gray sandstone pebbles, filled the space between the street and the palace's front door. Fortunately, it was empty, and Lamprophyre landed without incident. She furled her wings and curled her tail around herself, feeling crowded despite the relative openness of the space.\n\nRokshan climbed down and said, \"I'll send a messenger. If that's not enough, I'll track him down myself.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She watched Rokshan cross the courtyard, stone crunching and shifting under his sandals, and pass through the dark squared-off doorway. This might take a while. Lamprophyre settled in and looked around. There weren't many people in the street, since most of the buildings surrounding the Archprelate's palace were houses, and almost all their owners were at their jobs at this hour. Those who passed by all looked at her, but idly, as if she were just another person like themselves and not worthy of a second glance. Their thoughts were almost all as nonchalant as their demeanors, though a few people, mostly young adults or children, were filled with awe. Lamprophyre smiled and nodded at anyone who caught her eye. If this was what Sardonyx wanted to prevent, she'd failed.\n\nStill, the problem was that nobody actually knew what Sardonyx wanted. Lamprophyre had a handful of ancient texts and her own experiences to go on, and even that was all inference and supposition. Confident inference and supposition, but it wasn't the same as knowing. And she really wished she knew what it meant that the mountains had swallowed Sardonyx up, ending her threat to humanity. An attack, a trap, a\u2014 \"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said, startling her out of her reverie. \"I had someone take Khadar a message. I hope I made it sound urgent and important enough.\"\n\n\"If the banded desert is Sardonyx, then wouldn't mountains be other dragons?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan blinked. \"You mean about the mountains swallowing her up? Yes, I suppose so. So maybe it means dragons overwhelmed her.\"\n\n\"And then died in the attack.\"\n\nRokshan leaned against her flank. \"I don't know that that's the right interpretation, but it's a possibility. But it couldn't have been all dragons, because there are still dragons today.\"\n\n\"Still. Some dragons did something that stopped Sardonyx's attack. But they couldn't kill her\u2014\"\n\n\"Couldn't? Or didn't?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought about that for a few beats. \"Couldn't. I think if they'd been able, they'd have killed her. So instead she was trapped.\"\n\n\"Entombed, maybe.\" At Lamprophyre's surprised look, Rokshan went on, \"It's what I think of when I imagine mountains swallowing something up. A tomb.\"\n\nExcitement filled Lamprophyre. \"But then\u2014\"\n\nSomeone cleared their throat. Lamprophyre looked up to see one of the yellow-clad attendants the ecclesiasts always traveled with, a young woman with a funny haircut like an upside-down bowl. \"The Fifth Ecclesiast asks that you meet him on the field,\" she said, her voice high and fluting like the reed pipe hanging from her rope belt.\n\n\"Immediately?\" Rokshan asked.\n\nThe girl inclined her head.\n\nRokshan swung himself up into his accustomed seat. \"Thank you,\" he said. \"Lamprophyre, she means behind the palace.\"\n\nLamprophyre waited for the girl to return inside the Archprelate's palace, then leaped into the sky, scattering pebbles. \"That was fast,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, and I'm suspicious,\" Rokshan replied. \"I expected Khadar to put up more resistance, if only to satisfy his pride.\"\n\n\"Maybe he really has changed.\"\n\n\"Or maybe he wants something from us.\" Rokshan leaned forward and pointed. \"Just down there.\"\n\nLamprophyre shivered with the guilty pleasure of going somewhere she shouldn't. True, she had an invitation, but the Archprelate's palace was so well shielded from the rest of the world, it felt like descending into some secret lair she might have to fight her way out of.\n\nShe'd already noticed the short grass of the field was always a vibrant green, regardless of the season. Now, up close, she saw it was cropped perfectly short and even, making it look like someone had covered the space with green fabric, smooth and perfect.\n\nThe back face of the Archprelate's palace was as smooth as the field, but white and sparkling rather than green. Lamprophyre guessed the ecclesiasts could have painted the palace as brightly as they wanted, because she couldn't imagine anyone trying to collect taxes from them, but the white surface, not much taller than Lamprophyre, had its own kind of beauty. Small round windows filled with glass that was dull in the light of the oncoming storm dotted the back wall at random, irregular intervals. The one small door in the center of the wall looked boring and unimportant. Lamprophyre still didn't know much about human architecture, but the palace impressed her.\n\nShe listened for thoughts and heard only a low hum as of dozens, maybe hundreds of people all going about their daily business. The palace was certainly large enough to hold hundreds.\n\nRokshan slid down to stand next to her. \"I told him the dragon ambassador wanted to speak with him, so you should do most of the talking,\" he said.\n\n\"Good, because I have a lot of questions,\" Lamprophyre responded. \"But most of them are accusatory, so I won't be asking those.\"\n\n\"You can save them for if he's recalcitrant.\"\n\nThe door opened. Rokshan assumed a parade rest stance, his face becoming smooth and expressionless. Lamprophyre sat up and hoped she looked intimidating. In all her previous interactions with Khadar, he'd at least never been afraid of her. So long as he respected her enough to answer her questions, she didn't care if he was afraid.\n\nShe'd expected a handful of those yellow-clad assistants, maybe several ecclesiasts, to precede Khadar. But the Fifth Ecclesiast was alone. He crossed the short patch of grass between the door and where Lamprophyre sat. He wore his usual green robe embroidered with images of the natural world and the god Meyari, represented by the willow tree. He was bare-headed, and his short black hair shifted in the rising breeze.\n\n\"I have only a few minutes,\" he said. \"What can I do for you?\"\n\nThat was more polite than Lamprophyre had expected. Well, if he could be straightforward, so could she. \"There was a prophecy about a twelveday ago,\" she said. \"Supposedly it instructed ecclesiasts to climb Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"It did,\" Khadar said. So it's come to this, he thought, with what to Lamprophyre sounded like resignation rather than anger.\n\nWhen it became clear he wasn't going to elaborate, Lamprophyre said, \"You must know that's unacceptable. Dragons venerate Mother Stone the way humans worship Jiwanyil. We can't allow humans on her slopes\u2014and even if we could, the trip would be fatal.\"\n\n\"We do not ignore Jiwanyil's prophecies,\" Khadar said. \"What he demands, we must do. We hoped dragons would understand that. You yourself, my lady ambassador, have seen Jiwanyil's prophecies borne out. Don't you think it would be better for you to discover why Jiwanyil would instruct humans to disregard what dragons hold sacred?\"\n\nRokshan shifted his weight. Lamprophyre remembered he'd said something of the sort, and the memory made her uncomfortable. She heard Khadar think try to explain prophecy to a dragon, pointless, and her discomfort flowered into anger. \"I don't think it's our responsibility to bend to your prophecy.\"\n\nKhadar sighed, a put-upon sound that irritated her further. \"Counter to what you believe, we ecclesiasts did not simply accept that prophecy,\" he said. \"We spent much time in prayer and study to understand its intent. We feel confident that it is in the best interests of both humans and dragons to obey its instruction.\"\n\n\"Oh? And why is that?\"\n\n\"Our understanding is that great wisdom will arise from allowing humans to climb Nirinatan\u2014Mother Stone. Even if the ecclesiasts do not survive, their deaths will not be in vain.\" Khadar's face was as expressionless as Rokshan's. Could be there already, hear from them, he thought.\n\nLamprophyre felt as if the breath had been knocked from her body. Stones. He couldn't possibly\u2026 In a flash, she considered her options, decided she didn't give a damn if she gave away her secret ability, and said, \"You didn't. You couldn't have.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan asked.\n\n\"You dared ignore my instructions?\" she snarled, ignoring Rokshan.\n\nKhadar's thoughts became tense, but none of his growing fear showed on his face. \"We told you what we had to do,\" he said. \"Our ecclesiasts should be at the slopes of Nirinatan as we speak.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Lamprophyre bore down on Khadar, making him retreat. \"Did those ecclesiasts tell you what would happen if you disregarded my direct command?\"\n\n\"They did,\" Khadar said. He took another step back. Lamprophyre followed him. \"You know that wouldn't matter to us, not when it's a question of prophecy.\"\n\nLamprophyre snarled wordlessly at him. \"I'm going to speak to Hyaloclast immediately,\" she said. \"You'd better pray she's in a forgiving mood.\"\n\n\"Dragons won't kill humans.\"\n\n\"Is that so? Humans have never threatened what we hold sacred before.\" Lamprophyre turned to find Rokshan had followed her. \"Climb up,\" she said flatly. \"Khadar, this isn't over.\"\n\n\"I make no apologies,\" Khadar said.\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes briefly, dispelling the image of grabbing Khadar by his ankles and carrying him screaming across the city. With Rokshan firmly settled, she leaped into the air and flew as fast as she dared to the embassy.\n\nRokshan slid down as soon as she landed. \"What can we do?\"\n\n\"Tell Hyaloclast what's happened,\" Lamprophyre said as she headed inside. \"And then\u2014are you up for some storm flying?\"\n\n\"I'll get changed,\" Rokshan said.\n\nThe blue chalcedony pendant warmed in her hand as she breathed on it with a little more heat than necessary. She waited. Hyaloclast didn't respond. She breathed on it again, and again, but nothing happened. Swearing, she hung the pendant around her neck and turned to look at Rokshan, who looked uncomfortably warm in his cold-weather gear. \"I'm worried,\" she said. \"Hyaloclast always eventually answers, but if they're already dealing with those damn ecclesiasts\u2014\"\n\n\"We have to hurry,\" Rokshan agreed. \"But if you're going to outfly the storm, we'll need the harness.\"\n\n\"Stones,\" Lamprophyre swore again. \"We might still have to wait it out.\"\n\nRokshan dragged the harness out of its corner. \"Let's deal with that when we come to it.\"\n\nThough the saddle's thinner leather made it lighter than the prototype, getting the harness settled took more time than usual without a second dragon to help. Lamprophyre and Rokshan were both swearing by the time she fastened the last buckle. When Rokshan was finally seated, the damp, prickly scent of the storm was far too close. \"Hang on,\" Lamprophyre said, and tore into the sky.\n\nShe sped along, flashing past the wide, tilled fields and across the barren land between settlements until the forest rose up before them. It spread as far as Lamprophyre could see, tall conifers mingled with the spreading boughs of leafy trees, some bare, some clinging to their leaves like humans shielding their modesty. She'd never bothered learning the names of the trees\u2014they were so impermanent\u2014but at the moment, being able to put names to the trees would be a distraction.\n\nThey'd made this terrible trip once before, racing a storm. That time, they'd had to stop a war. This time, Lamprophyre wasn't sure what they intended to stop. If there were humans on Mother Stone, she wasn't sure she'd intervene to stop Hyaloclast making an example of them. But that would infuriate the ecclesiasts, who might influence King Ekanath, and that could mean she and Rokshan were trying to stop another war. Lamprophyre pushed herself faster. Humans made everything more complicated.\n\nShe still didn't have an answer to the most important question, which was why Jiwanyil had commanded humans to do something dragons would oppose. Lamprophyre knew Jiwanyil's power was real, even if she didn't worship him as a god, and she'd seen the results of his prophecies. He'd even intervened to save her life, so she knew he cared about dragons, if only in a limited way. So why did he suddenly want to set dragons against humans?\n\nA cold prickle of raindrops struck her wings and back, and then it was more than a prickle, and Lamprophyre wiped rain from her face and flew faster. Rokshan leaned forward. \"We have to take shelter,\" he said over the noise of the rain. \"These clothes aren't waterproof.\"\n\nLamprophyre swore and dove. She knew Rokshan was as tense as she was because he didn't shout with excitement. Below, the forest loomed, and she swerved, backwinged, and descended feet-first through the trees, holding her wings high to make herself a blue arrow piercing the scant foliage.\n\nShe landed hard, plowing up earth, and crouched to let Rokshan down. The rain still fell, though the branches and what was left of the leaves kept some of it off. Lamprophyre settled on the ground, digging in to the warm, loose soil, and Rokshan sat close beside her. She arched one wing over him. \"I thought the clothes were waterproof,\" she said.\n\n\"Water-resistant, not waterproof,\" Rokshan replied. \"There are enough layers that my body heat won't melt snow if I for some reason end up walking through it, and it will protect me against a light sprinkle or cloud mist, but a heavy downpour\u2014\"\n\nLightning forked across the sky, and thunder boomed, and then the rain came down in earnest. \"Like this one,\" Rokshan said with a grin. \"They'll just get soaked. And then they'll be useless at altitude.\"\n\nLamprophyre restlessly dug her claws across the soft earth, then shook them impatiently to clean them. \"We might already be too late,\" she said, \"so I don't know why I'm worried. There's nothing we can do except\u2014Stones, but I wish we'd tackled Khadar sooner!\"\n\n\"We couldn't have known. Ecclesiasts may be single-minded, but they're not stupid.\" Rokshan leaned against Lamprophyre's side, making her raise her wing higher. \"I thought they were investigating the prophecy. Looking for ways to cooperate with dragons. Not bull-headedly rushing off into danger.\"\n\n\"If Hyaloclast finds them\u2026\" Lamprophyre let her voice trail off. There was no point repeating what they both knew.\n\nThey sat in silence as the rain fell. Eventually Lamprophyre tucked her head under her wing to keep the rain pelting it from driving her mad. She rested her chin on Rokshan's leg and closed her eyes. Another few thousand beats until they reached the flight's caves, and if they were lucky, Hyaloclast had simply been away on a hunt or at a gleaning field, and Lamprophyre and Rokshan could deal with the ecclesiasts themselves.\n\nShe felt Rokshan run his hand over the top of her head. \"You're nice and warm,\" he said. \"If not for the damp under my rear end, I'd be comfortable.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Not too warm?\"\n\n\"Maybe a little, but not enough to complain about.\" He stroked her head again. \"I was thinking maybe I should tell my parents about us.\"\n\nLamprophyre's eyes flew open. She sat up and then tilted her wing to let rainwater roll off it, away from Rokshan. \"You can't!\"\n\n\"They'll have to know eventually. At the very least, when I tell them I intend to become a dragon.\" Rokshan laughed. \"That's going to be an interesting conversation.\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2026\" Lamprophyre searched for words. \"But they'll be so upset! You know this relationship of ours looks so strange to outsiders. And you're a prince.\"\n\n\"Sweetheart, we can't keep this secret forever. It's not fair to either of us.\" Rokshan stood and rested his hand on the side of her face. \"I'm not going to lie to them just so they won't be upset, because there's no good way to give them this information. And my father did promise to be open-minded about the person I'm in love with.\"\n\n\"Yes, because he thinks she's a woman who's, I don't know, a prostitute, or already married, or a hundred years older than you!\"\n\nThat made him laugh harder. \"Having a dragon for a daughter-in-law would be far superior to any of those options, I guarantee.\"\n\nLamprophyre drew in a breath and let it out slowly to calm herself. \"I suppose I feel uncomfortable because it's like I'm taking you away from everything you were born to be.\"\n\n\"Which you aren't. It's my choice, Lamprophyre, and I want to be with you, whatever it takes.\" Rokshan cast his gaze upward. \"It's slacking off.\"\n\n\"We have a few minutes still.\" Lamprophyre crouched back down. \"All right. I suppose if you're going to tell your parents, it should be sooner rather than later. They might be open-minded, but you expect them to accept not only that you're in love with a dragon, but that you intend to transform yourself so you can be her mate in every sense.\"\n\n\"That's it exactly. I want them to have time to come to terms with it. Bend down.\" Rokshan tucked his gloves into his waistband and used his hands to swipe rainwater off Lamprophyre's back and out of the notch. When he finished, Lamprophyre took several steps away and shook herself to get rid of the remaining water. Flying with wet wings was uncomfortable and potentially hazardous, but they didn't have a choice.\n\nThey took to the skies again, flying faster and faster until Rokshan was hunched into the spot behind her neck and Lamprophyre felt she'd reached her limit. Storm clouds still blackened the sky, but the rain had moved south, and the air smelled fresh and clean and cool. She wished she were in a mood to appreciate it.\n\nAhead, the skies were clearer, and by the time they reached the foothills, the skies were blue and cloudless, and the mountains were golden in the light of the late afternoon sun. If not for the lingering chill in the air, Lamprophyre wouldn't have believed there'd been a storm at all. \"What next?\" she shouted to Rokshan. \"Find Hyaloclast, or find the ecclesiasts?\"\n\nRokshan leaned over so he could speak directly into her ear. \"The ecclesiasts. If Hyaloclast hasn't caught them, we might still be able to resolve this without it turning to bloodshed.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"Then hang on. It's going to get cold.\"\n\nShe surveyed the foothills, wishing she'd thought to wrest a little more information out of Khadar. Like, for example, how long ago the ecclesiasts had left, and how many of them there were. Without that knowledge, she could only guess as to how far their party had gotten. Assuming they hadn't left immediately after accosting Lamprophyre, which had to be true\u2014even ecclesiasts on a mission from God needed time to prepare for a trip like that\u2014they'd had less than a twelveday, maybe only eight or nine days, of travel time. It took one person with frequent remounts, Rokshan had once told her, six days to get from Tanajital to the foothills. These ecclesiasts couldn't travel that fast. Maybe they weren't even here yet.\n\n\"Maybe they haven't reached the mountains yet,\" she told Rokshan.\n\n\"We can't count on that,\" he replied. \"We need to go all the way to Mother Stone, just in case. But between you and me, I'm hoping you're right.\"\n\nThey soon left the foothills behind, their shallow inclines yellow with winter-dead weeds, and ascended through the lower mountain slopes. There, only a mossy scruff grew on the stones, along with the occasional stunted, crooked pine with gray-green needles that in spring would smell sharp and fresh, but now gave off no aroma at all. Usually Lamprophyre enjoyed flying slowly over this ground, watching for rock hares, but today she took the slopes at speed, quickly leaving them behind for the rocky crags where only dragons and the hardiest of birds could live.\n\n\"Slow down,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Slow down? I thought we were in a hurry.\"\n\n\"That won't help if we fly past them too fast to see them. Or if you ascend too fast and make us both sick.\"\n\nThe stones beneath them were covered with fresh snow, spread by the storm that had just passed over them. It would cover any tracks made by the ecclesiasts, make it impossible to find them that way\u2014though, on the other hand, Lamprophyre didn't think even Rokshan the expert tracker could follow someone over bare stone. \"I'm not searching by sight,\" she said. \"I'm listening for thoughts. They're the only ones who could be out here.\" Even so, she slowed and wheeled to fly east.\n\n\"They'd have stopped when the storm hit,\" Rokshan said. \"Made camp somewhere. I'll look for that.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded.\n\nThey searched for a hundred beats, two hundred beats, as more clouds, these high and thin, drifted in front of the sun and dimmed the light. Lamprophyre heard no thoughts but Rokshan's, which she did her best to ignore so they wouldn't be a distraction. Not listening to his thoughts was normally as easy as disregarding the drifting thoughts of other dragons, but when they were in close contact, she couldn't help herself. She focused on the land beneath. White-clad granite stretched out before her as far as she could see.\n\n\"I'm sure they wouldn't have tried to climb near the flight,\" she said, mainly to distract herself from Rokshan's thoughts of can't see anything in this mess. \"But that doesn't tell us whether they went east or west.\"\n\n\"The light's fading,\" Rokshan replied. \"That storm\u2014\"\n\n\"No sense regretting what we can't control.\" Lamprophyre looked northward to where Mother Stone's lowest slopes, themselves as high as the highest nearby peaks, rose dizzyingly into the sky. \"We can only do our best.\"\n\nThey flew on for another dozen beats, and Lamprophyre was about to suggest turning around to search westward when she caught the barest whisper of a thought: all this white stuff\u2026no idea\u2026so cold. \"I hear them,\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"I can't tell yet. Farther east, though.\"\n\nIt was hard to pay close attention to distant thoughts and fly at the same time; concentration made her effectively blind. She slowed her flight to keep from losing altitude and potentially flying into a mountain, not to mention to keep from flying past their quarry. More thoughts emerged as if from the snow beneath: maybe camp for the night and so cold and going to get worse. They grew louder as she flew, and with some effort she teased apart their thoughts. Five people. Not enough to give her any trouble.\n\n\"There,\" Rokshan said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him point. Blinking, she focused in that direction. At first she saw only the same blank white-covered crags. Then one of them moved, shaking off the snow covering it. It wasn't a rock, it was a swath of dun-colored canvas, and someone held it over their head, shaking snow from it. More movement showed where other humans emerged from beneath canvases made invisible by the storm.\n\nLamprophyre swept past overhead without stopping. \"I have to find a place to land that isn't on top of them,\" she said when Rokshan protested. \"They were thinking about camping there for the night, so they aren't going anywhere. And they certainly can't outrun us.\"\n\n\"They're going to have a damn cold night if that's where they're sleeping,\" Rokshan said. \"All right. Try approaching from the north. Uphill. If you can loom over them, it's more intimidating.\"\n\nLamprophyre agreed. While her earlier anger with Khadar and the ecclesiasts had faded, it hadn't gone away so much as turned into smoldering embers. The idea of scaring these people satisfied her.\n\nAs she returned to the ecclesiasts' campsite, she heard mental cries of astonishment and dread. \"They've seen us,\" she said. \"So much for surprise.\"\n\n\"They're surprised, just not on our terms,\" Rokshan said. \"Swoop low like you're going to snatch one of them up. Remember how you did that to me when we first met?\"\n\nLamprophyre chuckled. \"We have come so far from that day it's like it happened to two other people.\"\n\nShe dove, furling her wings for greater speed, and pulled up just before she would have plowed into the stony ground. Humans scattered, diving for any cover they could find. It was deeply satisfying, and she laughed as she wheeled around for another pass. This time, she scanned the area for a place to land. A gray boulder half her height that looked like it had been set down by a giant hand suited her purposes. It lay about a dragonlength from the ecclesiasts' camp and tilted toward them to form a little open cave on the downhill side.\n\nShe landed on it, gripped it firmly with both feet when the snow covering it made her slip, and spread her wings wide for balance. The gesture would also make her look large and intimidating. Excellent.\n\n\"You were warned,\" she shouted, letting her deep voice boom out over the peaks and setting the loose snow nearby trembling. \"Did you think I was joking when I told you what would happen if you disregarded my instructions?\"\n\nThe five humans, all of them dressed haphazardly in several layers of shirts and thick trousers not as fine as Rokshan's, stood motionless, staring at her. Their thoughts were incoherent babblings, the kind of thoughts people have when they don't know what to say. Then one of them stepped forward. Lamprophyre remembered her; her name was Ashta, and she was the ecclesiast who'd had that disastrous prophecy. \"I told you we would go anyway,\" she said. \"We don't ignore prophecy.\"\n\n\"Yes, but Jiwanyil doesn't expect you to be stupid about it,\" Rokshan said. \"Following prophecy this way is going to get you killed. If Hyaloclast finds out you intend to climb Mother Stone, she will tear you apart.\"\n\n\"If that is the will of Jiwanyil, then we will meet our fate with honor,\" Ashta said. \"We do not fear the wrath of dragons, only the wrath of God.\"\n\nHer thoughts had become clear and coherent, and Lamprophyre realized what she should have known the first time she'd spoken to Ashta: the woman was a zealot, a true believer who genuinely was willing to give her life in the service of her God. Lamprophyre hated zealots. In the stories, they always got other people killed.\n\n\"This can't be the only way to follow Jiwanyil's prophecy,\" she said, half to herself.\n\n\"Jiwanyil's path is straight, not crooked,\" Ashta said, \"and when his prophecy is clear, the way becomes known.\"\n\n\"Yes, but the prophecy wanted you to reach Mother Stone alive.\" Lamprophyre hopped down from the boulder and walked toward the ecclesiasts, feeling Rokshan's weight shift with every awkward step. \"I'll admit I was too angry when you approached me to be reasonable, but we could have come to a compromise.\"\n\n\"We don't compromise on prophecies.\" Ashta continued to stare up at Lamprophyre unflinchingly.\n\n\"And we don't compromise on Mother Stone. But I know Jiwanyil is a real god, even if he's not my god, and as Rokshan pointed out to me, I should at least want to know why he would tell humans to climb Mother Stone.\" Lamprophyre settled on her haunches and bent to let Rokshan down. \"Please see sense. If Hyaloclast and the rest of the flight kill you, it could start a war between humans and dragons, and humans will not survive it. I don't want that to happen.\"\n\nThe first crack of uncertainty appeared in Ashta's inflexible mask. \"Why do you care what happens to humans?\"\n\n\"Because we're both rational creatures, and I have many human friends. I don't want war to turn them into enemies.\" Lamprophyre kept her gaze locked on Ashta, willing her to see sense.\n\nBut Ashta was shaking her head. \"If you really care about stopping a war,\" she said, \"you'd help us fulfill prophecy.\"\n\n\"You can't make a dragon complicit in breaking one of her people's most sacred laws,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"We know climbing Nirinatan will convey blessings unlike any others,\" Ashta said. \"You're asking us to give that up. It's unthinkable.\"\n\n\"That's what I said about humans on Mother Stone,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Didn't you ecclesiasts ask for more prophecies when you received that one? You knew it would anger dragons\u2014doesn't that mean you should have looked for clarification?\"\n\nThe uncertainty spread. \"But it was a clear prophecy,\" Ashta said.\n\n\"Khadar told us ecclesiasts had studied and prayed to understand your prophecy,\" Rokshan said. \"It couldn't have been that clear.\"\n\nLamprophyre risked looking past Ashta at the other four ecclesiasts, if they were all ecclesiasts. The light was fading fast as the sun set, but she still recognized Ashta's companion Nirav. He looked deeply uncertain, more so than Ashta. The other three huddled together like frightened sheep. \"What else did that study and prayer discover?\" she asked, addressing not Ashta, but Nirav.\n\nNirav moistened his lips. \"That the results of obedience will bless both humans and dragons,\" he said with a quick glance at Ashta. She didn't turn to look at him. \"And that great trials will bring great rewards.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I believe that, but Jiwanyil, as I've said, isn't my God,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But the last time dragons were the answer to human prophecy, the world changed. Shouldn't you have given us the opportunity to make it change again?\"\n\nAshta's eyes widened. Now she turned to look at Nirav, whose mouth was set in a tight, determined line that said he was ready to argue with someone, hopefully Ashta. \"I\u2026don't know,\" Ashta said, her voice faint. She turned to face Lamprophyre again, the light of the setting sun highlighting the planes and curves of her face. \"It's prophecy,\" she said, almost pleadingly, as if Lamprophyre were a recalcitrant child bent on doing something destructive.\n\n\"I know,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Please find another way of fulfilling it.\"\n\nNow Ashta looked past Lamprophyre, northward to where Mother Stone loomed. Her jaw clenched. \"One day,\" she said, \"one night and one day for us to pray again. But I won't promise not to go.\"\n\n\"You should have faith that Jiwanyil will show you the path,\" Rokshan murmured.\n\nAshta shot him a furious look, and Lamprophyre's heart sank at the thought that Rokshan might have just ruined everything they'd accomplished. But Ashta just turned away and told her companions, \"We'll camp here tonight, and spend tomorrow in prayer and contemplation. Unless that's a problem?\" she asked Lamprophyre, her voice edged with sarcasm.\n\nLamprophyre let it go. \"You're only in danger from exposure here,\" she said. \"You don't look very warmly clad. Do you have enough food?\"\n\n\"We came well supplied. We will be fine,\" Ashta said, in a tone of such finality Lamprophyre had to bite back a snappish retort.\n\nShe turned her back on the ecclesiasts and walked behind the boulder, followed by Rokshan. \"I don't think we should leave them alone,\" she murmured. \"I don't trust Ashta not to break her word in the name of Jiwanyil.\"\n\n\"I agree completely.\" Rokshan sighed. \"Unfortunately, we didn't bring any food, and we have no shelter. And I doubt those ecclesiasts have any of either to spare, even if they were willing to help us.\"\n\n\"I'll hunt something, and I think I can keep you warm through the night. See if you can find a nook or cave or something while I'm gone.\" Lamprophyre spread her wings and flapped once. They were dry now, and with the emergency mostly passed, she realized she was starving.\n\n\"Good luck,\" Rokshan said, and waved to her as she flew away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "She brought down two deer before the light faded completely. The sliver of moon was chasing the sun fast, but it still gave her enough light to disembowel and skin her prey before the slim crescent sank below the western horizon. Holding a carcass in each hand, she flew back toward the mountains and her sense of her pair-bond. By the time she was high enough that the snow-covered high peaks made it easier to see the ground, Rokshan's presence was a beacon drawing her on.\n\nA small fire burned in the ecclesiasts' camp, giving her a visual guide. Rokshan had moved a couple of dragonlengths west of that and sat just inside a dark cave opening. It wasn't so much a cave as a place where three huge boulders leaned into each other. \"You know it's dangerous going into a cave without fire,\" she said. \"You don't know what might be living in it.\"\n\n\"It's only about two feet deep,\" Rokshan said, standing so she could see past him. \"But it's enough shelter for protection if the wind picks up during the night.\"\n\n\"Which it usually does.\" Lamprophyre took her kills a short distance away and carefully roasted them, conscious of Rokshan's need for more thoroughly cooked meat than she required. When she returned, Rokshan was drinking from a waterskin he usually wore on his belt when they traveled. \"Plenty of snow to fill this,\" he said, \"but I don't know if you can drink from it.\"\n\n\"I'll be all right,\" Lamprophyre said. She tore off a chunk of meat and handed it to Rokshan. \"Not very fine dining, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I'm too hungry to care.\"\n\nThey ate in silence until Lamprophyre felt heavy and satisfyingly full. \"We can dispose of the remains tomorrow,\" she said. \"No predators this high to disturb our rest.\" She took the carcasses a short distance away anyway. On her way back, she searched the snowy ground for loose stones and collected an armful of the ones about the size of a deer's head. She dropped the armload on the ground before Rokshan's cave.\n\n\"What's this for?\" Rokshan asked. He was huddled in on himself and occasionally shivered.\n\n\"Well, mostly my body heat will keep you warm, but this is for an extra boost. Cold may not hurt dragons, at least not this little cold, but that doesn't mean we like it.\" She collected the stones into a loose heap and drew in a deep breath. Mingling the air with the burning contents of her second stomach, she breathed out fire that bathed the stones in heat. She kept exhaling until she needed air, at which point the stones were red hot and the air above them wavered with heat distortion.\n\nRokshan scooted over and held out his gloved hands over the hot stones. \"This is wonderful,\" he said. \"How long will it last?\"\n\n\"A few hours, and then I'll do it again.\" Lamprophyre arranged the stones nearer to Rokshan's cave and then curled up with her tail and hindquarters near the sheltered nook. \"Lean up against me.\"\n\nRokshan sat in the curve of her body and leaned back. \"You're as warm as the stone. Is this how dragons live during the winter?\"\n\n\"Usually we share caves with our clutchmates or our families. But yes, the females heat rocks that we put in our caves, and between that and body heat it's usually very pleasant. Though the ground\u2026actually, that might be a problem. You're going to lose heat through the ground. Here, move out of the way.\" She waited for him to move, then blew a lighter, more diffuse fire at the ground where he'd been sitting. It didn't glow red, but when Rokshan knelt on it, he let out a hiss of surprise.\n\n\"Very warm,\" he said. This time, he lay on the ground curled into the curve of her chest. \"Now it's perfect.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"I know you'd prefer a bed.\"\n\n\"Surprisingly, I'd rather spend the night with you, even if we're different species and unable to share intimacy.\" Rokshan propped his head on his wrist and tilted it to look up at her. \"Being close to you fills me with joy.\"\n\n\"That's how I feel.\" Lamprophyre moved a couple of hot stones closer and pillowed her head on her arm. \"Someday, you'll feel the pair-bond, and it will be even better.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nThey fell silent. Lamprophyre listened to the nearby thoughts, just in case the ecclesiasts were plotting something stupid. They were mostly thinking about how cold they were. That little fire couldn't do much more than keep them alive. How idiotic of them to climb all this way without proper clothing! Just one more reason Ashta's approach was foolish. If she couldn't even wait a few days\u2026\n\nLamprophyre sighed. It didn't matter. She'd bought herself and Rokshan a day in which to figure out a solution. She let out a puff of smoke that wasn't quite a ring. One single day. It didn't feel like much.\n\n\"You breathed two kinds of fire just now,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Yes. I have a great deal of control over how hot it burns, and how concentrated. Though the maximum range for a female dragon's fire is always the same.\"\n\n\"You said that when you helped Sajan test the pyrite weapons. That if their range was better than yours, they could assume it would be better than any dragon's.\"\n\n\"That felt strange, helping him. Almost disloyal to my people.\" Lamprophyre remembered demonstrating her fiery breath to General Sajan, commander of the entire armed forces of Gonjiri, and watching the pyrite-studded cylinders swivel and blast distant targets. The weapons produced a bright pulse of force almost like a lightning strike, powerful enough to incapacitate a dragon, or so she guessed from seeing them in action. She wasn't stupid enough to allow them to test the weapons on her.\n\n\"Gonjiri won't use them against dragons,\" Rokshan said. \"But doesn't it comfort you to know if Sardonyx does attack, humans can defend against her?\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" Lamprophyre tilted her head to look at the sky. She didn't recognize constellations in any of the scattered specks of light. She looked farther back to where Mother Stone was a pale gray blotch against the starry background. Under a full moon, her eternal snows would be brilliant white. \"Mother Stone guards our rest,\" she murmured.\n\n\"What was that?\" Rokshan said. He sounded drowsy.\n\n\"I was just thinking of that story, the one in the book with the collection of writings about the Cataclysm. How Katayan grieved, and all the other gods helped him. And Mother Stone guarded his rest.\" She blinked. \"No. It said their rest. All the other gods helped Katayan, but\u2026\"\n\n\"It's too late in the day for thinking,\" Rokshan murmured. \"Go to sleep.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, I think this is important. Don't you remember the story?\"\n\n\"Let's stipulate that I will never remember things as well as you do, and let me rest.\"\n\nLamprophyre nudged him. \"It was one of the ones that said the mountains swallowed up Sardonyx and her dragons. The one that said all the dragons who fought her were killed, which is why Katayan mourned. But it said\u2014wake up, Rokshan!\"\n\nRokshan groaned. \"All right. What did it say?\"\n\nLamprophyre cleared her throat. \"It said the gods circled round Katayan in his grief. Meyari's roots dug deep to sustain him. Vrelok's creatures howled a funeral dirge. Jiwanyil's people grieved with him. And Nirinatan guarded their rest. Don't you see the difference?\" She felt as if her mind was humming with knowledge, like a stream in full spate of spring. \"The gods didn't do anything that might be considered 'at rest.' I think that last sentence applies to something else. I think it's talking about Sardonyx and her people.\"\n\nRokshan rolled over so he could look at her. \"Why would you assume that? The story doesn't support that idea.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it? Rokshan, you said it yourself, that it sounded as if Sardonyx had been entombed. Trapped by the efforts of dragons and humans who were killed in the process. Well, if there's anywhere in the world that could be a tomb for dragons\u2014\" She pointed at Mother Stone's vast bulk\u2014 \"wouldn't that be it?\"\n\nRokshan lay silent for a few beats. \"It still doesn't make sense,\" he finally said. \"How could an evil ancient dragon and who knows how many of her followers be trapped on dragons' holiest mountain? Wouldn't your people have known about it? And it doesn't explain how the mountains could have swallowed Sardonyx up.\"\n\n\"I don't know why we don't know about it, but I'm increasingly inclined to believe the thing about the mountains is a metaphor for whatever magic those dragons and humans worked on Sardonyx. If she is entombed there, it would take powerful magic to keep her contained all these centuries. Magic no one's ever heard of. And suppose\u2026\" Ideas sleeted through her brain faster than a dragon's flight. \"Suppose nobody wanted it to be heard of? What if the metaphor is so no one knows what the magic was, and can't unravel it?\"\n\n\"You are making far too many leaps of logic,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm willing to accept your explanation about the metaphor, because so much of the rest of this story is metaphor. But if Sardonyx can talk to people, the magic must already be\u2014\" His voice cut off abruptly. \"God's breath,\" he said. \"The magic is unraveling.\"\n\n\"We guessed that already.\"\n\n\"I know, but think about it. That means unless someone does something, Sardonyx will free herself.\" Rokshan sat up. \"And we still don't know enough.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Mother Stone again. \"We could find her,\" she said.\n\n\"Find who? Sardonyx? That's insane, Lamprophyre. What would be the point?\"\n\nIt felt as if the mountain beckoned to her, calling her. \"The point would be finding out what exactly has her trapped. If we know that, we can get adepts to work out a way to put her back in her tomb and seal it permanently. Or maybe we find her, and bring the flight here to destroy her.\"\n\nRokshan was looking at her like she'd lost her mind. \"If all those dragons couldn't kill her during the catastrophe, why would modern dragons succeed?\"\n\n\"She's weak now. That has to make a difference.\" Impatiently, Lamprophyre rose. \"It doesn't matter if we kill her or stop her. What matters is doing something. You've heard her speak, Rokshan. She's terrible and evil and she has no qualms about destroying anything or anyone that gets in her way. If we can keep her from hurting anyone else\u2026\"\n\nRokshan turned to look at Mother Stone. \"It fills the sky,\" he murmured. \"All right. You've convinced me. But there's a problem.\"\n\n\"Just one?\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"I mean, sweetheart, humans aren't allowed on Mother Stone. And I'm human.\"\n\n\"Only nominally. You're a dragon in every other way that counts.\"\n\n\"You think the other dragons won't mind just because we're pair-bonded? I'm not sure they'd agree. Chrysoprase, for one, would want me drawn and quartered for my effrontery.\"\n\n\"Chrysoprase has a stick up her posterior and everyone knows it. Most of the dragons will see sense. Unless you want me to go alone.\"\n\n\"No. Not on your life. If there's an ancient evil dragon lurking on Mother Stone, you are not facing her alone.\" Rokshan sighed. \"I guess what they don't know won't hurt anyone.\"\n\n\"That's a better way to look at it.\" Lamprophyre settled down again. \"I wish we could go now.\"\n\n\"That would be suicide. Sardonyx has waited a thousand years. She can wait a while longer.\"\n\nRokshan settled back into the curve of her body, and Lamprophyre rested her head on her arms. She was too excited to sleep. She made herself think like Bromargyrite the pessimist. She could be wrong, and there was nothing on Mother Stone but the bones of dead dragons. She could be right, but discover there was nothing she and Rokshan could do to keep Sardonyx from escaping. She recounted dozens of possibilities to herself until she fell asleep.\n\nThe first light of dawn roused Lamprophyre, but slowly, bringing her out of dreams that shredded and faded as she became conscious. She'd woken at late evening to heat the stones, then again in the dreaming hours, but despite the frequent wakings and the fact that she'd slept in the harness, she felt refreshed. The cold morning air invigorated her, sending her blood racing. It smelled of snow and, distantly, of the ecclesiasts' fire, a sour, bitter aroma that matched her mood when she thought about them.\n\nRokshan slept beside her, one arm flung over his face as if the pale light of dawn were a brilliant beacon. She stood carefully so as not to wake him and heated the stones a final time. They snapped and cracked in the cold, one or two of them breaking in half, but she settled them closer around Rokshan and took off for the lowlands, and breakfast.\n\nThis time, she surprised a sounder of wild boar sows and carried off two of them while the rest scattered. It was more meat than she and Rokshan needed, but she felt in need of extra sustenance that day if they were going to tackle Mother Stone.\n\nThe thought made her tremble with nervous excitement. No living dragon\u2014none who wanted to stay living\u2014had ever gone to Mother Stone. Even the ones who helped the very old and very ill dragons unable to make the full flight themselves went only as far as her base. Deep down, it felt wrong, blasphemous, and she shoved those feelings deeper and flew faster. This was important. It mattered more than ancient superstitions. She and Rokshan weren't doing this for fun, or to break some kind of record; they were doing it for the sake of everyone, humans and dragons alike.\n\nWhen she finished skinning and roasting the boars, Rokshan was awake and sitting with his hands held over the stones. \"That smells better than anything I've ever eaten,\" he said. \"What is it about cooking outdoors that makes everything taste amazing?\"\n\n\"The adventure of being away from civilization, maybe?\" Lamprophyre offered him a hunk of meat, dripping with juice, that he took with his bare hands. She tore off a mouthful for herself and looked down the slope to the ecclesiasts' camp. Only a couple of them were awake, but she could hear echoes of dreams and counted five minds. They couldn't have gone anywhere in the night, but the sounds relieved her mind.\n\n\"I think we should warn the ecclesiasts that we're leaving temporarily, so they don't get any bright ideas about breaking their word,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I agree.\" Lamprophyre took another bite. Rokshan was right; the meat was delicious. \"And this might take a while. I don't know how high we'll have to go.\"\n\n\"It can't be that high,\" Rokshan pointed out. \"Even ancient dragons have limitations. And there's no reason to believe they're more capable of surviving at high altitudes than modern dragons are.\"\n\n\"Even so, we have to go slowly.\" Lamprophyre looked over her shoulder at Mother Stone, who looked innocently enormous. The sun hadn't yet touched all her slopes, and she was deep blue in the creases and crevices of her western flanks. \"I wonder what it looks like. The death grounds, I mean.\"\n\n\"Dragons aren't afraid of cemeteries, are they? Places where the dead are buried,\" Rokshan clarified when Lamprophyre looked puzzled.\n\n\"No. The dead are gone, their spirits collected to Mother Stone's rest, and their bodies can't hurt anyone. It just makes me curious.\"\n\n\"Well, give it a few hours and your curiosity will be satisfied,\" Rokshan said. He accepted another hunk of meat.\n\nWhen their meal was finished, Lamprophyre collected the remains and what was left of the previous night's meal and very awkwardly flew down the mountain to leave everything where scavengers could pick the bones clean. On her return, she found Rokshan talking to Nirav. \"We'll be back tonight,\" he was saying, \"and we'll talk further then.\"\n\n\"Nothing's going to change,\" Nirav said. He looked nervous at Lamprophyre's appearance. Lamprophyre quickly did another count\u2014still five ecclesiasts. Nirav's agitation looked guilty, but at least it wasn't the guilt of concealing the absence of one of his companions.\n\n\"We'll see,\" Rokshan said. \"I have faith Jiwanyil will give you a solution.\"\n\nNirav thought wish I had that kind of faith, but said nothing, just gave Rokshan a timid salute like bidding farewell. Rokshan climbed into the saddle and fastened the straps, and Lamprophyre leaped toward the distant mountain.\n\n\"He doesn't believe,\" she told Rokshan when they were out of earshot of the ecclesiasts.\n\n\"I can tell. But Ashta does, for all her other flaws, and I hope she wants a solution badly enough to pray sincerely for it.\" Rokshan patted her neck with his gloved hand. \"Let's not worry about that now. We have plenty of other worries to plague us. Like how we're doing something no one's done in more than a millennium.\"\n\nThat excited tingle shot through Lamprophyre again. \"Are you warm enough?\"\n\n\"For now. Can you fly faster?\"\n\nLamprophyre flexed her wings. \"Hold on,\" she said, and sped toward the mountain filling the northern sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "In less than a hundred beats, they were surrounded by the mountains that guarded the ascent to Mother Stone. Her Handmaidens, the dragons called them, every one of them tall and proud and as merciless as their mother. Lamprophyre swept between two peaks and rose slightly to fly over a lowlying cloud bank. The rocky slopes were heavy with snow, and Lamprophyre wondered how much of it melted during the summer, and whether there were snow layers that had been there since before she was born.\n\nIt was easy to imagine this place unchanged for millennia. No winds blew this morning, and the slow, steady thwap of Lamprophyre's wings beating the air was all that broke the stillness. She hadn't yet ascended above the lowest peaks, but she rose steadily, hoping it would be slowly enough. When she'd gotten sick from the high altitude as a child, it was because she'd flown nearly straight up on a dare from Orthoclase. Dragons in general could handle the great heights if they made smoother, more gradual ascents, but she wasn't sure about Rokshan.\n\n\"You tell me if you start to feel sick, all right?\" she said. \"Nausea, headache, things like that.\"\n\n\"I feel fine now, but I won't be stupid,\" Rokshan replied. \"This place is extraordinary.\"\n\nLamprophyre flew past the last of the Handmaidens and continued her ascent. Ahead, a gash of exposed gray granite marked where an avalanche had bared a section of Mother Stone's lowest slope\u2014and something else. \"Look at that,\" Lamprophyre said, and banked to veer closer.\n\n\"What is it?\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre slowed to hover at the top of the bare stone. A deep crack had been shaped into a hollow in the side of the mountain, and a pale shape curled within. \"It's a dragon,\" she said. \"I think it's Gabbro.\"\n\n\"Who is Gabbro?\"\n\nLamprophyre leaned closer to peer into the hollow. \"He went mad, slowly, over several years, and at the end he couldn't care for himself and forgot to eat. He had to have help to get here, but this is far too low.\"\n\n\"If he was mad, how would he know what to do when he got here?\" Rokshan leaned out to get a better look. \"And why is he so pale?\"\n\nLamprophyre put out a hand to grip the edge of the cliff and dragged herself closer. \"I don't know. Maybe dragons lose their color after they die. I've never seen a dead dragon before, but I know if we're injured\u2014like, if someone accidentally gets clawed\u2014the scar tissue is clear, like the color drains away with our blood.\" This didn't make sense. Even if whoever had brought Gabbro here had built his death-cave for him, they should have done it higher up, where it could be of ice.\n\n\"I wish I knew who'd accompanied Gabbro on his death journey,\" she mused. \"And I'm sure he couldn't have sung the song.\"\n\n\"Does that mean anything?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She flapped away from the hollow backwards, her eyes on Gabbro's body. \"It's just strange. It's not at all what I was taught.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they had to make accommodations. Doesn't it matter more that he made it here, wherever on the mountain he ended up?\"\n\n\"I suppose you're right.\" She wheeled and flew on with one final backward glance at the dead dragon.\n\nThe obvious approach to Mother Stone was to fly up her slopes, but that ascent was definitely too steep. Lamprophyre instead spiraled around the mountain, gradually slanting upward. \"This is better anyway,\" she said. \"We should be looking for caves, or deep crevasses.\"\n\n\"The glare off the snow makes it hard to see,\" Rokshan said. \"But so far I haven't seen anything that might lead further in. I assume what we're looking for is inside.\"\n\n\"That was my thought, yes.\"\n\nOccasional clouds blocked the sun, which was well above the horizon, but Rokshan was right; the snow caught its brightness and reflected it back a dozenfold. Lamprophyre closed her nictitating membranes and surveyed the depths beneath, just in case she was wrong and what they were looking for was below Mother Stone instead of high within her.\n\nThe wall of stone took a sudden turn, folding inward to make a deep crease in the mountain's side. Lamprophyre followed it. Within its shelter, the snow was packed deep, and the air smelled damp and stony and cold. Lamprophyre flew as close to the wall as she could without running into it and hovered, sniffing. \"It smells different here,\" she said. \"Almost bitter.\"\n\n\"I can't smell anything in this cold,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre brushed snow away, nearly a handspan deep, before reaching the stone\u2014and something else. \"It's another dragon,\" she said. \"I don't recognize this one, but I think she's very old.\"\n\n\"You don't mean she's alive?\" Rokshan said, sounding alarmed.\n\n\"No, I mean she's been here a lot longer than Gabbro. This is more like what I envisioned.\" She brushed away more snow. The dead dragon lay partially encased in ice, with her head curled into her body. She was as pale as Gabbro had been. Lamprophyre sniffed. \"She's the source of the bitter smell, but I don't know why. I think there must be dozens of dragons here for it to smell so strongly.\"\n\n\"Let's not stop to unearth each one, please,\" Rokshan said. \"We don't have a lot of time to spare, especially if we're going to make a slow ascent.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Lamprophyre winged away from the dragon. She hadn't known what she would feel, confronted with reminders of dragon mortality, and the rush of peaceful satisfaction, the knowledge that someday she would share in this experience, filled her with hope. It was the idea that one was still a dragon after death that made it such heartening knowledge. Not that she was in any hurry to join them, not with so much of her life ahead of her, but she understood better now why this place mattered so much to dragons. It didn't feel sacred, exactly, or holy, and she had expected to sense something unusual, something divine, but there was nothing frightening about Mother Stone.\n\nShe continued her spiral, circling the mountain, as the sun rose higher. The eastern face of the mountain was sheer and patchy where the sun had melted the snow enough to cause more slides. They saw no caves, nothing that might lead to the mountain's interior.\n\n\"We're not going all the way to the top, are we?\" Rokshan said. \"I'm feeling a little short of breath.\"\n\nLamprophyre's chest ached too, and she'd been drawing increasingly deep breaths for the past thousand beats. \"I don't think there's enough air at the top to support my wings,\" she said. \"I'm going to assume if dragons can't reach that high, they couldn't have imprisoned anyone there. We'll make one more circle, and if we haven't seen anything by then, we search again going back down.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\" Rokshan's voice was muffled by his scarf, and Lamprophyre hoped he was still all right. She was starting to feel discouraged as the peaceful feeling the dead dragon had instilled in her dissipated. She'd been so sure her guess was right, but there wasn't anything here except snow and rock and dragon remains.\n\nShe swept onward, around the southern face. She had no idea how far up they'd come, but the air was bitterly cold and her skin felt dry and itchy, signs that she was much higher than any sane dragon wanted to go. The insides of her nostrils and the corners of her eyes felt dry, too, and her hands and feet, while not exactly numb, felt too swollen to close properly. Just another thousand beats, and they would have to turn back.\n\nIn the glare from the sunlight, the slopes beneath them made an eyewatering pattern of black and white, black where granite protrusions extended from the white packed snow. Some of the black patches were large, and the snow glitter made them seem at once sharply protuberant and deeply carved into the surface\u2014 She gasped. \"There's a cave.\"\n\n\"I see it,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm too snow-blinded to tell how big it is. It looks too small for us.\"\n\n\"Then let's find out,\" Lamprophyre said, and banked in a long, sweeping curve toward the mountain.\n\nThey'd been flying more than six dragonlengths from the surface of the mountain, and as they approached, Lamprophyre watched the cave grow larger until there was no question it was much, much bigger than they were. It had a jutting lip that extended nearly a dragonlength from the cave mouth, giving Lamprophyre an easy perch. The mouth of the cave was twice as tall as the lip and black as night, deeper than the sunlight could reach. It was impossible to tell how deep it went.\n\nLamprophyre crouched to let Rokshan down, and they both stared into the darkness. \"I didn't think about the possibility we wouldn't be able to see,\" Lamprophyre said. Her chest still ached from the lack of air and she felt slightly dizzy, but so long as she wasn't nauseated, she could convince herself she was fine.\n\n\"Neither did I, but apparently I came prepared,\" Rokshan said. He reached inside his coat and withdrew a fat cylinder half the length of his forearm. \"I borrowed this from military stores about a week ago. It's a prototype I was curious about.\" He held the cylinder in both hands and gave it a half-twist. A faint gleam shone from one end. \"It's much brighter in darkness, obviously.\"\n\n\"How did you know we'd need that?\" Lamprophyre exclaimed.\n\n\"I didn't. It's just too valuable to leave lying around. It's got a thumbnail-sized diamond in its core. I took it so I could walk after dark to that party Yalini hosted and then forgot to give it back.\" He waved the cylinder at the cave, lighting it bright as day. The cave extended deeper into the mountain, well past the range of the magic light. \"What was that you said about not exploring unknown caves?\"\n\n\"I doubt there's anything dangerous to you up here, and dragons have no natural predators.\" Lamprophyre still hesitated. It was one thing to speculate about evil dragons trapped somewhere on Mother Stone, and another to find out it might actually be true. But this was why they'd come, and there was no point being cowardly now. \"Let's go.\"\n\nShe let Rokshan lead the way. His light artifact made a large, bright circle he swept across the path before them, illuminating the black granite walls. Lamprophyre stopped to examine them. \"This was hollowed out by dragons,\" she said. \"I think we're on the right path.\"\n\n\"The floor is uneven,\" Rokshan said. \"As if they didn't care about having regular footing.\"\n\n\"Well, this passage is big enough for me to fly through. It would be a tight fit, though.\" Lamprophyre experimentally spread her wings and flinched when the tips brushed the chilly stone. \"Very tight fit.\"\n\nThey walked on, rarely speaking, as the path gently sloped downward. Their footsteps echoed off the walls, but faintly, as if the walls swallowed sound. It was warmer now, far from the freezing winds that blew around Mother Stone day and night, and Lamprophyre saw Rokshan remove his gloves and tuck them into his waistband. The thin air was slightly damp and had that bitter smell she now associated with dead dragons, though it wasn't overpowering. Still, if this cave only led to more death-caves, it would be so disappointing.\n\nThe passage was widening now, with the floor becoming even more irregular until they were in a perfectly circular tunnel. \"I wonder if dragons just enlarged a tunnel they found,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It would take forever to hollow this out from nothing.\" She picked her way over the rough floor, following Rokshan, who had his arms spread wide to keep his balance. The light danced randomly over the walls as he moved.\n\nLamprophyre looked past him and grabbed his hand. \"Turn off the light,\" she whispered.\n\nRokshan obeyed. \"Why are we whispering?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"I don't know. It's just\u2014there's a light up ahead.\"\n\nIt wasn't so much a light as a patch of gray lighter than the black granite. \"We're going to need the light if we don't want to trip over this floor,\" Rokshan said. \"Besides, I think that's sunlight. I think this place opens up to the outdoors.\" He turned the light back on, and they walked on, moving as fast as they dared.\n\nThe gray glow intensified and grew paler as they approached, until Rokshan was able to turn off his light. The glow seemed to be coming from above. Lamprophyre's foot slipped, and she dug in her blunt toe claws to keep her footing. Rokshan flailed briefly and then came to a stop. \"It's ice,\" he said. \"Look at the walls. They're coated with it.\"\n\nEven in the dim light, it was clear Rokshan was right: patches of ice clung to the wall and the floor. Lamprophyre tapped the wall with one claw. \"It's very thick,\" she said. \"Why is there ice in the middle of the mountain?\"\n\n\"If this passage is open to the outside\u2014but where would the water come from?\" Rokshan shook his head. \"Let's move on.\"\n\nThe ice thickened and spread as they walked. Eventually Rokshan had to put on his gloves and use his hands to keep his balance on the slick surface, while Lamprophyre resorted to crawling with claws extended. The tunnel continued to widen as they neared the source of the glow, which appeared to be a hole in the ceiling. Then the tunnel came to an abrupt end, and they stopped, too stunned to move.\n\nThe tunnel let out into a vast bowl-shaped chamber completely lined with blue-white ice, its surface pitted and cracked with age. The walls curved and kept curving until they met the opening in the center of the roof and became a chimney about three dragonlengths across and impossibly tall. A speck of blue at the top might have been the sky. It smelled bitter, but the scent was still faint. Lamprophyre saw no evidence of dragon bodies aside from the smell. The chamber was as empty as the sky above Mother Stone.\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan exchanged looks. Lamprophyre couldn't think of anything to say. The place inspired reverence even if you didn't know dragons were buried here. She took a step forward and paused when her foot slipped a little. \"Climb up,\" she said. \"Let's fly rather than stumble through here. It feels right.\"\n\nRokshan climbed into his seat, and Lamprophyre flapped slowly until she was midway between the floor and the roof. The ice looked thinner overhead, darker as if the granite were closer to the surface. Lamprophyre did a sweep of the chamber. There were shadows beyond the ice, indistinct shapes she told herself were dragon bodies. \"This is amazing.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Rokshan said. She turned her head to see where he was pointing and saw a patch of ice that glowed greenish-white instead of blue. Whatever it was was embedded in the floor. She glided to land beside it, skidding slightly, and crouched so Rokshan could get off. He knelt and swept away fine, loose particles of ice crystals that clung to the leather of his gloves. \"It looks like green fire, or like molten green ore,\" he said. \"I don't know what it is.\"\n\nThen he stiffened and bowed his head, his whole body rigid. The green fire pulsed once. \"Rokshan?\" Lamprophyre said, alarmed. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nRokshan's head came up. His eyes blazed green, solidly leaf-green from edge to edge. \"It is done,\" Jiwanyil's voice said. \"A human presence unlocks the door, as demanded in the old contract. She is free.\"\n\nLamprophyre grabbed Rokshan by the shoulders. \"What do you mean? Jiwanyil\u2014you can't mean\u2014\"\n\nRokshan stared back at her, unblinking. \"Their death is in the wind and the fire, and she will not be stopped,\" he said in that same terrible voice. \"Let dragon and human together fight the banded desert. The end draws near.\"\n\n\"It can't be,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. \"You said\u2014the stories all said Mother Stone would prevent it. That she swallowed them up. She won't let it happen.\"\n\nRokshan felt like a stone in her hands, heavy and unresponsive. Only his lips moved. \"No god,\" he said, \"no stone, no life, no heart. You reach for what was never there. The prison doors gape open, and the fire and the wind break free. The skies will burn.\"\n\nAs Rokshan spoke those final words, the green light faded away to nothing. A tremendous groan as of a thousand dragons giving voice at once surged through the chamber. It was followed immediately by a sharp crack like thunder that made Lamprophyre let go of Rokshan and cover her ears. Rokshan fell and didn't try to catch himself. Lamprophyre cried out and picked him up, cradling him gently in her arms. \"Rokshan. Rokshan, are you all right?\"\n\nRokshan didn't respond. She carefully thumbed his eyelid up and felt only scant relief at seeing his eyes were their normal brown. She laid her cheek against his mouth and felt warm air sighing in and out, which was more of a relief. \"Rokshan, wake up,\" she murmured in his ear. \"I need you to wake up.\"\n\nHe still didn't move. Desperate, Lamprophyre hoisted him in her arms and turned around. The icy walls of the cavern glowed with a dozen colors, blues and reds and yellows and purples, and movement was visible beyond the ice. Lamprophyre's heart beat faster. She cast an eye on the ice chimney and saw the same colors playing over the walls. Her instincts told her escape by that route was impossible. That left the tunnel, narrow and cramped, but still a way out.\n\nAnother crack shattered the stillness of the air, along with the thunderous noise of boulders falling, cascading across the ice sheet of the floor. Lamprophyre couldn't help herself; she turned to see what had made the noise.\n\nAn enormous red shape, bigger than Lamprophyre, bigger than Hyaloclast, emerged from a hollow in the wall that had been concealed by the ice sheet. Her wings were a mass of spines and thickly ribbed with red phalanges so the gold membranes were almost invisible. Gold dusted her chest and belly scales, which were paler than the rest of her. The dragon shook free of the last of the ice shards and turned a baleful golden eye on Lamprophyre.\n\n\"How perfectly delightful,\" she said in a lovely voice that chilled Lamprophyre to her core. \"And here I thought you were my enemy. Why did you bring a human here to free me?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I didn't\u2026we\u2026\" Lamprophyre stammered.\n\n\"Oh, you most certainly did,\" the dragon said with a smile. \"And now I can finish what I began\u2026oh, it doesn't matter how long ago it was. The point is the eradication of the human pestilence, isn't it?\"\n\nLamprophyre reflexively clutched Rokshan closer. She barely noticed that he had started to move. \"No,\" she whispered. \"I won't let you have him.\"\n\n\"Won't you?\" The smile widened into a cruel twist of dragon lips. \"Then,\" Sardonyx said, \"I suggest you run.\"\n\nLamprophyre turned and fled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "She held Rokshan tightly as she swept through the tunnel, beating her wings as hard as she could. Distantly, she heard more sharp cracks as the ice shattered, but no sounds of pursuit. She flew faster anyway, desperation making her heart pound like thunder in her ears. Sardonyx freed. Her fault. Mother Stone\u2014she shied away from that line of thought. Jiwanyil was lying. He was a foul, horrible creature who'd lured them in so he could see Sardonyx freed.\n\nThe blackness was nearly complete within the tunnel, and Lamprophyre thanked whoever had dug it for how straight it was, because even with that, she kept blundering into walls. She didn't have an extra hand to work Rokshan's light artifact and hoped there weren't any unexpected turns\u2014 With that, she ran face-first into a wall, dizzying herself. She collapsed on the floor, breathing heavily, unable to continue.\n\nRokshan stirred. \"Lamprophyre, where\u2026\" he said in a faint voice.\n\n\"Can't explain,\" she said. \"Can you ride?\"\n\n\"Don't\u2026know\u2026\" He shifted again in her grip. \"Put me down?\"\n\nShe gently laid him on the ground, hoping its roughness wouldn't hurt him more. She'd seen ecclesiasts possessed of prophecies, and it always left them weak for a time. They didn't have time. At any moment, Sardonyx and her dragons would come pouring through the tunnel, and then it would all be over. \"I really need you to be able to ride,\" she said, trying to control her impatience and fear.\n\n\"With\u2026the harness\u2026sure,\" Rokshan said.\n\nShe crouched as low as she could to give him a leg up. He moved so slowly it nearly drove her mad, but she held still and waited for him to fit his feet into the stirrups and fasten the hip straps. \"Light, please,\" she said, and Rokshan turned on the light, revealing the turn in the tunnel that had surprised Lamprophyre. She positioned herself correctly and flew.\n\nRokshan's grip on her ruff was firm, and he didn't wobble or tilt, but the narrowing passage meant she started bumping into walls and had to slow, her heart screaming at her to fly faster. Finally, she burst from the tunnel's mouth and coasted in a long, smooth glide toward the valley floor. Still she heard no sound of pursuit. Maybe Sardonyx was weak from her long imprisonment. Maybe it would take time to mobilize all her dragons\u2014Stones, how many dragons were there? All those lights, and if each light represented a dragon\u2026\n\nLamprophyre made herself think rationally. The flight outnumbered Sardonyx's dragons, if that was the case, and they were powerful fighters. And the humans weren't helpless.\n\nShe flew as fast as she dared through the Handmaidens, hoping Rokshan wouldn't start asking questions. She was tired and confused and frightened and the idea of explaining everything to Rokshan made her feel even more so. Especially since she wasn't entirely sure herself what had happened.\n\nA loud, high-pitched cry rang out across the peaks. Lamprophyre wheeled and hovered, afraid to stop and even more afraid not to see what that had been. A speck of red hovered over the slopes of Mother Stone. For one mad moment, Lamprophyre thought Sardonyx was alone, that those lights hadn't meant anything. Then a rush as of a thousand wings filled the air, and dragons began pouring out of the mountain, filling the sky. Lamprophyre closed her teeth on a frightened shriek, turned, and fled.\n\nShe flew until her tortured lungs and wings couldn't bear more abuse, then came to a stumbling halt amid the crags and sagged to hands and knees, sucking in air as if she were drowning. She barely felt Rokshan hop down and put his hands on the sides of her face. \"Lamprophyre, what happened?\" he said. His voice sounded breathy past the blood rushing through her ears.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Just don't ask yet,\" she whispered. \"Give me a few beats.\"\n\nShe focused on breathing until she felt less shaky, then settled back on her haunches. \"What do you remember?\"\n\n\"Kneeling to look at that green light,\" Rokshan said, \"and then you were holding me, and I couldn't move, and it sounded like the mountain was coming down around us.\"\n\nLamprophyre closed her eyes, which made her sway as if her vision were the only thing keeping her upright. \"Oh, Rokshan,\" she said, \"we have been so stupid. And we were used.\"\n\nShe told him every detail. The words he'd spoken when he was possessed of Jiwanyil's prophecy. What Sardonyx had said. And her devastating conclusions about what it all meant. \"He said Mother Stone is a lie,\" she said, hearing her voice shake. \"She's not a god. The mountain was never anything but a prison, and we dragons were stupid enough\u2014\"\n\n\"It can't be true,\" Rokshan said. \"Lamprophyre. You're not going to take the word of\u2026I don't even know what it was that spoke through me, but I don't see how it can be a god.\"\n\n\"It was Jiwanyil,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I mean, the voice was the one that speaks whenever someone is possessed of a prophecy. Which means\u2014\" She wished she were capable of tears. \"It means there are no gods, because I cannot believe a god would let himself be trapped in an ice cave with a flight of evil dragons, let alone give prophecies that would allow them to be freed. And if there's no Jiwanyil, why would any of the other human gods be real? Rokshan, what are we going to do?\"\n\n\"We have to warn Hyaloclast, and then my father,\" Rokshan said. \"There's no time to have a religious crisis. Sardonyx is coming, and she wants humans dead. We have to stop her.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and crouched to let Rokshan up. \"I'm so tired.\"\n\n\"Just a little farther. Hyaloclast will know what to do.\"\n\nLamprophyre rose into the air and headed south. After the frigid ice cave, she found herself craving the warmth of the lowlands. She would fly a little ways south, then head west for the flight's caves.\n\nOff to her left, she saw movement on the rocky slopes. Her heart, which had settled into its usual rhythm, sped up again. \"Rokshan, the ecclesiasts,\" she said. \"Sardonyx is going to pass right over them.\"\n\n\"We have to warn them,\" Rokshan said.\n\nA rush of wind blew past, and something darkened the sun. Lamprophyre looked up. Dragons filled the sky, their wings black and backlit by the sun. They flew in a tight formation Lamprophyre had never seen in anything else but human military movements. For a moment, all she could do was gape. Then she flapped into motion. \"We can't draw attention to the ecclesiasts,\" she said. \"Maybe she won't see them.\"\n\nAs she spoke, the formation wheeled as one and dove. Lamprophyre screamed, \"No!\" and followed them, pushing herself as hard as she could.\n\nIt wasn't enough.\n\nShe was still twenty dragonlengths from the ecclesiasts' camp when half the dragons above split away from the rest and soared above where the humans stood. The ecclesiasts all stared up at the dragons in wonder. Lamprophyre screamed again.\n\nIn eerie silence, the dragons opened their mouths, and fire shot from them to engulf the ecclesiasts' camp. The humans didn't even have time to scream.\n\n\"Lamprophyre, we have to go!\" Rokshan was shouting. Lamprophyre's fury blinded her, and for a few beats she shot toward the dragons, with no idea what she intended to do if she caught up to them. It took Rokshan beating his fists against the side of her head to bring her to herself.\n\nShe saw Sardonyx, who alone among the female dragons hadn't taken part in the incineration. Sardonyx was looking at her, her expression indistinct at that distance, but Lamprophyre was suddenly horribly aware of how exposed Rokshan was, sitting behind her shoulders. And yet the ancient dragon's gaze pinned her, made it impossible to turn away. Suddenly Lamprophyre's terror turned into fury again. This evil creature had ordered the deaths of five rational beings just because they were humans, and she would do the same for any human she encountered. She had to be stopped.\n\nLamprophyre made a rude gesture she'd learned from Manishi and wheeled, not waiting to see if it was a gesture that meant anything to Sardonyx. Within beats, they'd left the ancient dragon flight behind and were well on the way to Lamprophyre's home.\n\nHer fury bled away from her as she flew, leaving her once again feeling cold and sick. All her thoughts narrowed down to the one bleak fact that she and Rokshan were responsible for this disaster. A human presence to unlock the door. If that was why the prohibition against humans on Mother Stone existed, why hadn't the dragons who'd passed the knowledge of that ban down revealed any of the rest?\n\nShe gritted her teeth and made herself focus on the present. Sardonyx was awake and free, and never mind how it had happened. Someone needed to stop her. Hyaloclast would know what to do.\n\nShe was so absorbed in her horrible thoughts she almost overshot the caves and had to wheel round when Rokshan called out a warning. Snow blanketed the crags, everywhere but where the female dragons had melted spots for dragons to sun themselves. Dragonets too young to fly romped through the piles of snow, watched over by their parents. It was all so normal Lamprophyre felt even sicker, as if her stupidity had doomed not only humanity, but all these blissfully ignorant dragons.\n\nShe came to a running halt outside Hyaloclast's cave and nearly dumped Rokshan on his rear helping him down. The curious thoughts of the nearest dragons sharpened at the sight of a human, but no one was angry or disgusted at his presence. It would have heartened her if she hadn't been so miserable. \"Wait here,\" she told him, and hurried into Hyaloclast's cave.\n\nShe'd lived here for the first thirty years of her life, and it was as familiar to her as her own fingers, the curving, narrow path that led to the cave big enough to fit five adult females, the traceries of phosphorescence casting a purple glow over the interior. Hyaloclast sat next to a pile of radiantly hot stones, talking to Leucite. The bronze male half-turned to look at Lamprophyre when she stumbled to a halt just inside the entrance. Hyaloclast's eyes narrowed in irritation. The irritation cleared when she recognized Lamprophyre. \"Something's wrong,\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre, still a little out of breath, only nodded. Hyaloclast nodded at Leucite. \"Please excuse us,\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre moved to let Leucite pass. He gave her a curious look, but said nothing. That was typical of Leucite, whose calmness and certainty of manner were normally reassuring. Now Lamprophyre felt as if no amount of calmness would make a difference.\n\nWhen she heard him exit the cave mouth, she walked toward Hyaloclast and drew in a deep breath. If Hyaloclast was going to metaphorically eviscerate her, better to get it over with. \"Sardonyx is free,\" she said. \"Rokshan and I accidentally let her out of her prison.\"\n\nHyaloclast's eyes widened, but aside from that and a convulsive twitch of her wings, she didn't react. \"You let her out.\"\n\n\"It was an accident,\" Lamprophyre repeated. \"We realized she had to be on Mother Stone\u2014\"\n\nNow Hyaloclast shot to her feet. \"What?\"\n\nHow grateful Lamprophyre was that she understood her mother better now, because she managed not to quail before the enormous dragon. \"It was in the prophecies and the histories,\" she said, meeting the blood-red gaze fearlessly. \"The dragons and humans opposed to Sardonyx a millennium ago worked some kind of magic referred to later as the mountains swallowing her up. I guessed that meant she was trapped on Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"That's quite a guess,\" Hyaloclast said. \"You took a human to Mother Stone?\"\n\n\"I took Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre protested. \"I thought, he has a pair-bond, he's almost a dragon, I didn't think it would be blasphemous.\" She drew in another deep breath. \"It turns out it didn't matter. It was the presence of a human that did it. Jiwanyil said so.\"\n\nHyaloclast blinked in confusion. \"Jiwanyil? What does a human god have to do with any of this?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But I know the voice\u2014I don't think he's a god. He was trapped there too. And he said 'a human presence unlocks the door, as demanded in the old contract' like that's what was necessary to free Sardonyx. He's been guiding people toward this for years. He wanted Sardonyx freed.\"\n\nHyaloclast's lips thinned in a grimace. \"Where is she now?\"\n\n\"I don't know. She flew away. She and her flight of dragons.\"\n\n\"Her what?\" Hyaloclast roared. She stood to her full height and snapped her wings open. Now Lamprophyre cringed. \"How many?\"\n\n\"A little less than two hundred,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I didn't count. But we outnumber them, so\u2014\"\n\n\"This is a disaster,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Where were they going?\"\n\n\"She wants to wipe out the human pestilence, she said.\" Lamprophyre wished she dared curl up in a ball like a frightened dragonet and wake to find this all a bad dream. \"I don't know where she went first.\"\n\nHyaloclast furled her wings. \"We'll have to stop her,\" she said. \"You'll show us where you saw her last. We can discuss how stupid you were later.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I don't know how to make things right.\"\n\nHyaloclast shook her head. Suddenly she looked very tired, her head sagging, her wings limp. \"We have laws for a reason. If you hadn't disregarded them, this wouldn't have happened.\"\n\n\"Then maybe someone should have explained those laws better!\" Lamprophyre shouted. \"Do you think I wanted her freed? I thought, if we could find her, the magic on her prison could be renewed. She was getting free anyway, Hyaloclast! And no, I'm not making excuses. I'm just saying I would never have done what I did if I'd known the truth, so I hope this wasn't a secret you felt you needed to keep!\"\n\n\"I know,\" Hyaloclast said. \"And no, this is not knowledge dragon queens have been sitting on for a millennium. You were foolish, but I don't believe there's any point in blaming you for more than that. What matters now is stopping Sardonyx and her flight. You and the young prince will return to the human city and warn his father. Tell him to prepare for war.\"\n\n\"But you and the flight will stop her.\"\n\nHyaloclast shook her head again. \"I'm honored by your faith in me, but we are not warriors, and we have no idea what kind of foe we're up against. If Sardonyx's dragons waged war all those centuries ago against dragons who were powerless to stop them, I have very little confidence that this will be a fight between equals. Now\u2014no more talking. The longer we wait, the farther away Sardonyx gets, and tracking her down will be even more difficult.\"\n\nLamprophyre stood aside to let Hyaloclast past. She felt even smaller and more ashamed than ever. If she hadn't broken the law, if she hadn't been so casually certain the law didn't apply to her\u2026the fact that Hyaloclast hadn't torn into her only made things worse. She would have welcomed a good castigation.\n\nWhen she emerged, Rokshan was waiting for her beside the cave entrance. He had his attention on Hyaloclast, who had sent up the fiery signal for the dragons to congregate. \"She didn't tear you apart,\" he murmured. \"She didn't even look at me. Did you not tell her it was our fault?\"\n\n\"I did. I think she's saving up her anger for when the crisis is past.\" Lamprophyre sat beside him. \"She wants us to show her where we saw Sardonyx last, and then fly to tell your father. Rokshan, what if it's already too late? What if Tanajital is where they were going?\"\n\n\"The dragons are essential to our defense,\" Rokshan said. \"The pyrite weapons are deployed along the Fanishkorite border. There's only a few in the capital. If Hyaloclast and the flight can catch up to Sardonyx, maybe that will be the end of it. We outnumber her.\"\n\nLamprophyre was only half-listening to the dragon queen telling everyone what had happened. Hyaloclast didn't say anything about how Sardonyx had been freed, which made Lamprophyre feel even more guilty, as if her mother had compromised her honor for Lamprophyre's sake. \"We do, but Sardonyx's dragons are fighters,\" she said, \"and if they're all as big and powerful as she is\u2014I mean, who knows what those ancient dragons are capable of?\"\n\nA roar went up from the assembled dragons, startling both Lamprophyre and Rokshan. Hyaloclast turned to face them. \"We go now,\" she said. \"Lead the way.\"\n\nRokshan scrambled into his seat. Lamprophyre heard a couple of thoughts about how ridiculous Lamprophyre looked wearing the harness, but she was too miserable to have room to be bothered by that minor cruelty. She took off, followed by the sound of hundreds of wings beating the air.\n\nIt was easy to find the spot Lamprophyre had last seen Sardonyx. The smell of incinerated flesh still filled the air. The memory of those five faces turned toward the sky in wonder made Lamprophyre want to scream. She made herself stay calm and said, \"They were headed southeast. I don't know what human cities are in that direction. It wasn't toward Tanajital.\"\n\n\"If Sardonyx continued in a straight line that way,\" Rokshan said, \"she'd eventually come upon Ghiridi and Hammadi. And I'm sure there are any number of smaller villages. The desert is beyond that, and then you come to the sea.\"\n\n\"We will catch her,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Warn your father that I will meet with him after we have encountered our enemy and assessed their strengths. Now, fly swiftly, and let us all hope it's not too late.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded, wheeled in midair, and arrowed toward Tanajital."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "They flew to Tanajital in silence. Lamprophyre's weariness, and the aftermath of the terror of fleeing Sardonyx, meant she flew more slowly than she wanted. She would push herself to her limit for a few hundred beats, then slowly decelerate until she realized she was almost ambling and sped up again. Her mind was too tired to torment her with memories. Instead, she ran over in her head what she would tell King Ekanath. At least he knew about Sardonyx, and she wouldn't have to convince him of the threat the ancient dragon posed. She hoped.\n\nIt felt like hours before the great pink-gold walls of Tanajital became more than a fuzzy blotch on the horizon. Lamprophyre had never felt so grateful for the Green River's guidance to her destination. Then she realized if Sardonyx knew humans settled along the rivers, the Green River would be the death not only of Tanajital, but of dozens of other human cities. She pushed herself faster.\n\nShe wished she dared find her clutch first, tell them and hope for their support, but protecting the city was more important. So she sailed past the warehouses, past the red sandstone of the coliseum, and landed neatly on the training grounds outside the palace. Rokshan was down almost before she settled. \"I'll be back,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre lay on the hard earth, not caring who saw her giving in to despair, and covered her face with her wings. It was a position that stretched her wings uncomfortably, but she liked the illusion of security that hiding behind the tough membranes gave. Maybe she should take the time Rokshan was gone to alert the clutch. Maybe he'd tell his father everything, and she would be spared having to explain, again, how she and Rokshan had been unspeakably stupid.\n\nNo. That was the coward's way out. She had made a mistake, not done intentional evil, and she could admit to that and do her best to fix things.\n\nShe put back her wings and sighed. And then there was the issue of Jiwanyil to deal with. Whatever he was, he'd deliberately led humans to learn about Sardonyx and then had given prophecies that had resulted in Sardonyx being freed. He might be a god, or he might not, but he was definitely not on the side of good.\n\nThe side door to the palace, guarded by two soldiers bearing deadly-looking pikes, opened, and Rokshan emerged. To her surprise, Ekanath followed him. She hadn't expected the king to come to her. As she sat up, she felt the chalcedony pendant shift over her chest, and she touched it to still it. She didn't remember if Hyaloclast had been wearing its twin when she followed Sardonyx, and she wasn't sure she should distract the dragon queen from her pursuit, but the pendant might be useful.\n\n\"Ambassador,\" the king said when he neared her. \"Rokshan tells me our enemy intends to destroy humanity. What can we do?\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart sank. \"I was, um, actually hoping you would know the answer to that,\" she said. \"We don't know where Sardonyx went, and we don't know how successful Hyaloclast will be in fighting her. I think we need to find ways to protect as many cities as we can.\"\n\n\"That means moving the pyrite weapons from the border,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"That will leave us vulnerable to Fanishkor,\" Ekanath protested.\n\n\"Your majesty, Fanishkor is much less of a threat than two hundred dragons bent on destruction,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Also, Chaaksha did say Fanishkor didn't intend to attack Gonjiri, and I think we should take them at their word. It's a risk worth taking.\"\n\nEkanath looked conflicted, but he nodded. \"But it will take days to reposition the weapons,\" he said. \"We may not have days.\"\n\n\"Leave that to us,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm going to consult with Sajan, and we'll figure out a defensive strategy. But the people should be warned. They may need to evacuate their homes, especially those in the smaller towns.\"\n\n\"With the advance warnings from prophecy, that should be easier,\" Ekanath said.\n\nLamprophyre blinked. \"What advance warnings?\"\n\nEkanath frowned up at her. \"Notices have been coming in since a little after nine o'clock this morning. Ecclesiasts all over the city have been possessed of prophecies, more at one time than anyone has ever seen. All of them were warnings of destruction coming to cities throughout Gonjiri\u2014nothing specific, just declarations that those places were in danger. Now that we know of Sardonyx's threat, those warnings seem more urgent and immediate than we believed.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre looked at Rokshan.\n\n\"You're the one who heard Jiwanyil speak,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Yes, but he\u2014\" Lamprophyre suddenly realized something that had been niggling at her since the ice cavern. \"How could Jiwanyil speak through you? You're not an ecclesiast.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Ekanath said.\n\nLamprophyre felt horribly conflicted. Tell him the truth, or go on pretending Jiwanyil cared about humanity? \"We heard Jiwanyil's voice,\" she said, deciding on a partial truth as the one that would cause the least confusion. \"He told us\u2014told me, through Rokshan\u2014that freeing Sardonyx was something he wanted. Something he had been working toward.\"\n\nEkanath's confusion deepened. \"I don't understand. Why would Jiwanyil want Sardonyx freed?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Lamprophyre looked at Rokshan again. \"But I think we shouldn't listen to his prophecies. Whatever he wants, it's not to help humanity.\"\n\n\"But then why would he warn us against disaster?\" Ekanath said. \"You must be mistaken. Jiwanyil's word always saves us, even when we don't at first understand his mind.\"\n\n\"They can't afford to ignore those prophecies, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. \"If Sardonyx intends to destroy those cities, those people could be killed. And we can't protect all of them.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre saw Ekanath's face and gave up. She and Rokshan were the only ones who knew Jiwanyil, whatever he really was, was a threat, and there was no time to convince Ekanath of that. \"Fine. It's true we need every advantage we can get. Rokshan, I'm going to tell my clutch what's happened, and we'll meet you back here in a few hundred beats, all right?\"\n\nRokshan looked startled at her abruptness, but he nodded. Lamprophyre bowed to the king. \"Hyaloclast and the dragon flight are strong. This might already be over.\" She leaped into the air without looking back.\n\nShe arrived at the warehouses out of breath and dropped to all fours to recover. Around her, she heard the sounds of dragons emerging from their warehouses. \"Lamprophyre? You look done in,\" Orthoclase said. \"Something wrong?\"\n\nShe nodded, still gasping for air. When she looked up, all six of her clutchmates were looking at her in some dismay. \"It's bad,\" she finally said when she could speak again. \"I'm so glad you're all here, because I don't think I could bear to tell this story one more time.\"\n\nShe gave her clutch more detail even than she had Hyaloclast, leaving nothing out. When she finished, she waited for the barrage of questions, but they were silent. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, she said, \"You're not going to yell at me, are you? Because I feel horrible as it is.\"\n\nDolomite said, \"Mother Stone isn't a god?\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at him. If he'd been human, she would have said he was on the verge of tears, he looked so distressed. She'd told them that without thinking of how it would affect them. \"I don't know,\" she said. \"Jiwanyil, whoever he really is, said she isn't. Maybe he was lying, or wrong. He didn't have thoughts for me to listen to. But I don't think so. I never felt any sense of a god's presence about the mountain, and don't you think I should have, if she was really divine?\"\n\nNow she looked at the rest of them. All looked as stunned and afraid as Dolomite. Lamprophyre's guilt redoubled. Freed Sardonyx, and broke her friends' religious faith. She squared her shoulders like a human. \"It doesn't matter,\" she declared. \"We're still dragons, and we can still stop Sardonyx. If that's what you want to do.\"\n\nCoquina shuddered as if she were coming out of a trance. \"Of course it is,\" she said irritably. \"You think we wouldn't do everything in our power to keep her from destroying our friends?\"\n\n\"We can worry about the rest later,\" Bromargyrite said. \"I'm more concerned that Jiwanyil started giving out prophecies right when you freed Sardonyx. Why would he do that?\"\n\nLamprophyre hadn't put together the timing. \"You're right,\" she said. \"And I don't know why. I wasn't able to stay around and interrogate him. But unless I can convince the Archprelate that he's not a god, which I really believe he isn't, there's nothing we can do about that either.\"\n\n\"Then we should join Rokshan and see what the military wants from us,\" Flint said. \"I hope it's something extraordinary. I feel the need to act.\"\n\nThey returned to the training grounds to find them alive with activity. Soldiers forming up in ranks making squares and rectangles marched away westward, toward the city center. Other soldiers ran from building to building, or from the buildings to the palace. They moved with such energetic purpose Lamprophyre felt invigorated just looking at them. Her despair faded a little. These humans seemed so certain their actions mattered it was hard not to feel the same.\n\nRokshan stood at the door to the largest building, talking to General Sajan. The gray-bearded man wore his yellow uniform covered with insignia as casually as if it were any other clothing, but Lamprophyre knew now what some of the marks meant, and she felt reassured, again, at the knowledge that Sajan had power to command all the military forces. This meant only having to convince him of the need for action and not a thousand lesser men.\n\nRokshan looked up as the dragons descended, scattering soldiers. \"Lamprophyre, Sajan has a request for the clutch,\" he said.\n\n\"I was wondering,\" Sajan said, \"if the pyrite weapons are too heavy for a dragon to carry.\"\n\nLamprophyre thought back to watching them swivel and blast distant objects. \"I don't think so,\" she said. \"They'd slow us down, though. Am I right that you want us to move them?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Sajan looked her up and down. \"We want to position the weapons where they can defend our larger cities. Between those and the warning prophecies, I believe we have a good chance of protecting ourselves while we figure out an offensive strategy.\"\n\n\"Hyaloclast and the flight are chasing Sardonyx right now,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They can attack Sardonyx's dragons directly.\"\n\n\"Which might be more than enough.\" Sajan turned to Rokshan. \"You don't need to fly with them, right? Because I need you here, commanding our forces.\"\n\nRokshan glanced at Lamprophyre. \"I\u2026no, I don't need to,\" he said. Lamprophyre didn't need to hear his thoughts to know how much he wished he could turn down Sajan's request. She wished he'd lied to Sajan. Then she felt bad about her wish. Rokshan was an exceptional military commander, and her desire to keep her mate close was a selfish one that might get people killed.\n\n\"If you'll wait a moment, I'll show you on the map where each weapon needs to go,\" Sajan said. \"And\u2026thank you. I know this isn't your fight. It's humans this Sardonyx monster wants dead.\"\n\n\"It's our fight because we care about humans,\" Coquina said. \"And Sardonyx isn't going to be gentle with dragons who defend humans just because we're the same species as she is. Just give us direction, and let us help you.\"\n\nSajan saluted Coquina, sending a ripple of mirth through the flight. He collared one of the young men running here and there and sent him off for the map. \"How do dragons fight dragons?\" he asked. \"I thought you were immune to fire and acid.\"\n\nLamprophyre held out a hand and extended her claws. \"These are sharp enough to tear through dragon hide. We've never fought other dragons, of course, but we learn fast.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to face those claws,\" Sajan said.\n\n\"Lamprophyre, let's take off that harness before you leave,\" Rokshan said. \"You slept in it, and it must be so uncomfortable by now.\"\n\nShe'd been wearing the thing for almost a full day, and when Rokshan mentioned it, she suddenly became aware of how the saddle and straps wore on her. She went for the buckles and in a few beats had stripped the harness off and dropped it on the ground. \"I'll take it to the embassy before we leave,\" she said.\n\nThe young man came back with a roll of paper almost as long as he was. Sajan helped him unroll it to reveal a map, tiny and perfect, though of course it was enormous by human standards. \"Can you all see this well enough?\" he asked. When they nodded, he went on, \"We have a dozen pyrite weapons currently deployed on the western border. It will take at least two weapons each to adequately defend Tanajital and our other large cities. There are three weapons here already, and we would like you dragons to carry the other weapons to those cities and position them under the direction of the commanders located in each city.\"\n\nHe tapped the map with a long, smooth stick. \"We've got more weapons being built, but we can't wait for them, which means some of our cities are going to be defenseless. I'm hoping to discuss more options with your queen.\" Lamprophyre heard him think nothing else we can do, if I stop moving I'll give up entirely and concluded he was hanging on to his brave front with both hands. It made her sad for him even as she admired his courage.\n\n\"We're going to put weapons in Kolmira, Suwedhi, Manjaret, Sunital, Nishta, Prabat, and of course Tanajital,\" Sajan went on. \"Rokshan tells me our enemy went east, so it's important we protect Manjaret and Sunital first. They're unfortunately the farthest from the western border, so faster would be better.\"\n\nFlint moved forward to look at the map more closely. \"And the weapons are currently along this line?\" he asked, pointing.\n\n\"That's correct.\"\n\n\"I know this spot,\" Flint said. \"I've gone this way with Lokun a few times. I can take us there, and then we can separate to take weapons to the cities. You want each city fully defended, right? Not one weapon per city and then go back for the second?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Sajan tapped the map again. \"I can leave this to you?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Flint looked up. \"We'll decide who's going where when we get to the border. Everyone ready to leave now?\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Rokshan. She could hardly give him an affectionate farewell in front of Sajan and all these soldiers. She listened for his thoughts and heard, barely audible over the rest of the mental noise, take care love you. She smiled at him and winked, which made him smile too.\n\nShe collected the harness and wadded it into a small mass. \"We'll return here when we're done,\" she said, and leapt into the sky.\n\nShe stopped at the embassy and put the harness inside the hall. When she emerged, Bhakriya was waiting for her. \"My lady, that young woman was here again,\" she said. \"The unpleasant one. She was very rude. She said to tell you you'd regret ignoring her.\"\n\nViveki. Lamprophyre had entirely forgotten they'd been supposed to meet her that morning at the plaza. She swore one of the human curse words she'd learned from Darsha, then apologized when Bhakriya blushed. \"If she comes back, tell her we'll contact her,\" she said. \"We have more important business to attend to.\"\n\n\"What's that, my lady?\" Bhakriya asked.\n\nSo many possible responses occurred to Lamprophyre she fell momentarily silent. \"Stopping a war,\" she finally said. \"You\u2014\" She couldn't think where to tell Bhakriya to go for safety. Nowhere might be safe. \"Keep everyone in the embassy\u2014I mean actually inside\u2014as much as possible, and if you see a lot of dragons in the sky, bar the door and don't leave.\" It might be enough. But she wasn't going to leave Bhakriya ignorant.\n\n\"There's an evil dragon and her followers intent on killing all humans,\" she said, and went on, overriding Bhakriya's startled outburst. \"We're going to do what we can to stop her, but if she comes here, you need to be prepared. Tell Depik, and keep the children safe.\"\n\n\"But, my lady\u2014why? What dragon?\"\n\n\"I can't explain, and I really have to leave now,\" Lamprophyre said. With one last glance around the courtyard, she flapped her wings, rose off the ground a handspan or two, then said, \"Wait. Bhakriya?\"\n\nBhakriya, who'd turned to enter the dining pavilion, said, \"Yes, my lady?\"\n\nIt was worth trying. \"When things are bad, you don't want to waste time not saying things you wish you'd said. Or not telling people how you feel. I think you and Depik need to have a talk.\"\n\nBhakriya blushed again, and Lamprophyre heard her thinking just not sure and what if he and wished once again she could have beaten Bhakriya's abusive former husband. \"Don't be afraid,\" she said, \"and don't waste any more time.\" She flapped harder, rose into the sky, and joined her clutch, who'd been hovering patiently.\n\n\"Ready to go?\" Flint asked.\n\n\"Past ready,\" Lamprophyre said, and with Flint in the lead, they flew westward."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "The sun hung low in the sky when Lamprophyre wearily flew into Tanajital. Her bones ached with tiredness and so did her eyes. With the nictitating membranes shut so the setting sun wouldn't blind her, she swooped low over the street leading to the embassy, not looking down to greet her neighbors as she usually did. In that state, the world was slightly out of focus, as if she were looking at it underwater. Or maybe it was her exhaustion that created that illusion. Either way, she needed sleep.\n\nShe was surprised to find the courtyard as full of beggars as ever. Confused, she landed on the roof, slipped and skidded a little until she caught her toe claws on a side beam, and carefully climbed down the back of the embassy. She found Depik in the kitchen, along with the delicious aroma of roasting cow. \"What's going on?\" she said. \"Why is everyone here?\"\n\nDepik looked up from his work. \"Why shouldn't they be?\"\n\nShe'd spent so much time that day in a state of tense fear and guilt the question was meaningless. \"Doesn't anyone know what's happened?\"\n\n\"Bhakriya told me what you said. A war, my lady? Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, really.\" She listened, and heard only the steady hum of a lot of people thinking about supper and Depik's concern and growing confusion. \"What about the ecclesiasts' warnings? I thought the king had told everyone what they meant.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Why would the king understand prophecy?\" Depik laid down his knife and wiped his hands on the cloth tucked into his waistband. \"No one but you's said anything about war, though we have seen more soldiers about today.\"\n\nIt didn't make sense. Surely the people needed to know the danger they were in? \"I don't know what's happened,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Just that there are a lot of evil dragons who want humans dead. I hope Hyaloclast took care of them. I hope my trip to Manjaret was completely wasted. But that's unlikely.\"\n\nDepik's eyes widened. \"My lady,\" he said, then appeared to run out of words.\n\nLamprophyre's fuddled mind sharpened briefly. The king hadn't wanted a full-blown panic when there was nowhere to flee. He would keep this a secret until he had more information about Sardonyx and what her plan was. \"I suppose you shouldn't mention this,\" she said, hoping she hadn't ruined the king's plan, though with the way her day had gone, one more colossal mistake was to be expected. \"There's nothing you can do about it. But it's like I told Bhakriya\u2014stay close to the embassy. It's mostly fireproof. And don't be afraid. All of us\u2014the dragons and the Army\u2014are doing everything we can to fight back.\"\n\nShe looked past the kitchen out the front of the dining pavilion. Bhakriya and Rassika stood by the soup cauldron as usual, serving men and women soup in wooden bowls. Beyond that, she saw Bhakriya's son Abhit playing with Rassika's little sister Kavari. Kavari was getting tall now that she had proper, regular meals. She wasn't really a baby anymore. And Sardonyx wanted them all dead. A flash of burning fury flicked through her. Sardonyx dared to attack innocents? Lamprophyre intended to see her defeated just for that.\n\n\"What were you doing in Manjaret, my lady?\" Depik asked. His voice sounded shaky, but he'd clearly decided to face the news head-on. \"The food's almost ready, if you want to sit.\"\n\nLamprophyre trod wearily into the dining pavilion and settled down nearly full-length on the floor. \"I took a dragon-killing weapon there. Orthoclase and I each had one. There aren't many, but General Sajan is going to do what he can.\"\n\nThe pyrite weapons weren't as heavy as Lamprophyre had guessed, but they were still bulky and awkward, and they did weigh about as much as a cow despite being made of fire-hardened ceramic rather than iron. They were also uncomfortable armfuls, with the blocky, angular pyrite chunks emerging from their glossy sides to dig into arms or chests. But under Flint's direction, the seven dragons had each collected a weapon and flown off to their designated cities. Lamprophyre had never been so grateful for Flint's bossiness and how decisive he was. She didn't feel decisive at all. She felt bone-weary and muddled.\n\nShe'd apparently looked weary and muddled, too, because when she and Orthoclase had reached Manjaret and turned the pyrite weapons over to the commander of the military garrison there, Orthoclase had said, \"I think you should go back to Tanajital and sleep. You've already flown far today, and there are more than enough of us to deal with the remaining weapons. Get some rest, and we'll see you tomorrow.\" Lamprophyre hadn't felt like protesting.\n\nThe smell of the cow grew stronger, and to her surprise Lamprophyre discovered she was hungry. She hadn't had much appetite all day. She tore into the delicious, juicy cow and revived slightly. \"Thank you, Depik, I needed this,\" she said between mouthfuls.\n\n\"It's my pleasure, my lady,\" Depik replied. He walked past her to look into the soup cauldron and exchange a few words with Bhakriya. Lamprophyre shamelessly eavesdropped on their thoughts and heard nothing more than the low hum of people paying attention to someone else's words. So Bhakriya hadn't done as Lamprophyre had suggested. This depressed Lamprophyre further. If only\u2026but it was none of her business, even though she was sure now that Bhakriya's feelings for Depik had changed, and it was only fear keeping her from telling him so.\n\nThe chalcedony pendant around her neck warmed, and its glossy surface misted over. \"Lamprophyre,\" Hyaloclast said.\n\nLamprophyre jerked and sat up, clutching the pendant, which remained misty despite her touch. \"Just a moment,\" she spoke into it, then hurried to the back of the embassy and hauled the door open. Safely inside and away from listening ears, she lifted it to her lips again and said, \"What happened?\"\n\n\"It was a rout,\" Hyaloclast said. The chalcedony pendant roughened voices so it was hard to hear emotion through it, but Hyaloclast sounded more exhausted, and defeated, than Lamprophyre had ever heard her. \"We came upon Sardonyx as she and her flight were destroying a town. That distraction allowed us to make a successful first attack, but the enemy did not stay distracted for long.\"\n\nHyaloclast paused as if catching her breath, and Lamprophyre wondered if she was in the air, if she was still fleeing Sardonyx\u2014but it was unlikely she would want to talk to Lamprophyre in those circumstances. \"They tore us apart,\" Hyaloclast finally said. \"I don't think there's a single uninjured dragon left in our flight, though most of the injuries are minor. At least seventeen are dead. We had to retreat.\"\n\nLamprophyre's throat ached with grief and heartsickness. \"Seventeen? Who?\"\n\n\"We will mourn our dead later, Lamprophyre. What concerns me more is that Sardonyx did not order a pursuit. She let us go. That's how little she thinks of our resistance. We hurt her people, but killed none of them. She believes we are no threat to her.\" Hyaloclast paused again. \"We are returning to the city. Tanajital. Tell the king to expect us. We will need a different strategy.\"\n\nLamprophyre suppressed a groan. She was so tired. Sleep would be a blessing. But Hyaloclast was right; they needed to plan a different attack. Since they had been counting on the dragons to take the fight to Sardonyx, Lamprophyre didn't know what different attack was even possible. But Rokshan and General Sajan would figure something out.\n\n\"Come to the training grounds,\" she said. \"That wide field outside the palace. I'll meet you there, and I'll tell the humans to expect you.\"\n\n\"We will arrive in a little over a thousand beats, I estimate.\" The chalcedony pendant abruptly cleared. Lamprophyre tried not to feel a rebuke in Hyaloclast's abruptness.\n\nShe returned to the dining pavilion and took a few more mouthfuls of cow, thinking she needed to keep her strength up if she wasn't going to sleep soon, but the taste had turned to ashes in her mouth. \"Do something with the rest of this, please?\" she asked Depik when he returned. \"I have to go to the palace.\"\n\n\"Of course, my lady,\" Depik said. He still had that stunned look, and Lamprophyre wished she hadn't told him about Sardonyx\u2014but it was better he know and be prepared for whatever came next.\n\nShe once more climbed to the embassy roof, silently cursing the beggars for taking up so much space, and flapped heavily, feeling as if she were dragging herself through the air to gain altitude. The sun was halfway below the horizon and red as a cherry, its dim evening light burnishing the copper and gold roofs of Tanajital to a warm, dull bronze. Normally, the sight relaxed her, but now all she could think about was those roofs on fire, scarred by black acid and dripping in molten lumps to the streets below.\n\nThe training grounds weren't as busy as they had been earlier that day, but the soldiers still moved with that intent alacrity that said they had urgent business elsewhere. Lamprophyre stopped one of them, ruthlessly suppressing her feeling that she might be disrupting something important. \"I need to speak to Prince Rokshan,\" she said. \"Where is he?\"\n\nThe soldier looked extremely surprised to be addressed by a dragon. \"He\u2014I'm not sure, my lady,\" he said. \"You could ask at headquarters.\" He indicated the largest of the red-roofed buildings, a long, low edifice with many windows, most of them warmly lit. Lamprophyre had been inside once when she'd had a human body and knew it was full of desks. She didn't know what General Sajan needed all the desks for, but she guessed they indicated the importance of military business.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, and let the soldier go. She walked to the headquarters building and examined the door. She was nearly as tall as the building when she stood at her full height, and crouching low enough to make her head level with the door was uncomfortable. She did it anyway. With one finger, she tapped lightly on the door, but \"lightly\" still meant the door shook and the noise carried to the rest of the buildings.\n\nEventually, someone opened it, saying, \"It's not locked, just come\u2014oh.\" The soldier, who was dressed in a yellow uniform similar to General Sajan's but with fewer markings, stared up at her. \"Commander,\" he called over his shoulder without taking his eyes off Lamprophyre, \"there's a dragon here to see you.\"\n\nLamprophyre heard scrambling movement, and soon Rokshan joined the soldier at the door. \"Thank you, captain,\" he said. The captain took that for a dismissal, and fled. Rokshan came outside and shut the door behind him. \"You look exhausted,\" he said, laying a hand on her arm. \"You should get some sleep.\"\n\n\"So should you,\" Lamprophyre said. Rokshan looked as haggard as she'd ever seen him, his jaw dark with the faintest shadow of stubble, dark rings under his eyes, the corners of his mouth dragged down. \"But that's not why I'm here. Hyaloclast is coming back. The news isn't good.\" The ache sprang up in her throat and her shoulders again. \"Sardonyx's flight destroyed a village and killed seventeen of our dragons. Rokshan, she wouldn't tell me who died, and\u2014\"\n\nRokshan's grip on her arm tightened. \"Don't,\" he said. \"You can't think like that.\"\n\n\"You don't know what I'm thinking.\"\n\n\"You're thinking it's your fault they're dead. Lamprophyre, we made a mistake. But all this evil is to Sardonyx's blame.\" Rokshan took a step closer. \"She was getting free on her own, remember? If you're going to play the 'what if' game, think of what might have happened if those ecclesiasts had managed to reach that cave first. Sardonyx would have gotten free without anyone knowing about it. Suppose she'd come after the flight first? Think of all those helpless dragonets. And stop blaming yourself.\"\n\nLamprophyre drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"You're right,\" she said. \"I'm just so tired I can't think straight. But I promised Hyaloclast I'd meet her here. She wants to discuss strategy.\"\n\n\"When will she be here?\"\n\n\"About a thousand\u2014less than an hour.\"\n\n\"Come with me,\" Rokshan said.\n\nHe led her away from the training grounds to a secluded corner where two ells of the palace met. \"Sleep. I'll come for you when Hyaloclast arrives.\"\n\n\"I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre. You're barely able to stand. You flew one and a half times across all of Gonjiri today, not to mention flying from the mountains to the capital. You're going to tear yourself apart. Now, sleep.\"\n\nShe didn't want to argue with him, not with as tired as she was. \"Promise me,\" she said.\n\n\"I promise. I wish I could stay with you, but I still have responsibilities only I can handle, apparently.\" He made a rueful face. \"It's a pity there's no artifact that will transport someone instantaneously across the country. I'd wear it out.\" He patted her arm. \"I'll be back soon.\"\n\nLamprophyre heard his last words in a daze. She was asleep before he walked away.\n\nShe dreamed of flying, not the pleasant kind of flying dream where she never had to come down, but a horrible sepia-colored dream where the world was on fire, and she couldn't land because it would burn her. Then she found herself descending against her will, and she was hopping from island to tiny island in a lake of orange-yellow lava toward a shore that never got any closer.\n\nShe heard a voice, its words unintelligible, and she'd just realized it was Jiwanyil when she saw the green light that was its source. At first, it was the green glow in the ice she and Rokshan had seen, but then it was a twisted figure hovering in the air, and it kept changing from human to dragon and back again. Rage filled her, the kind of white-hot sensation only possible in dreams, and she breathed fire to engulf the creature. It didn't react, and that infuriated her further.\n\nThen there was a hand on her shoulder, and she jerked awake to find Rokshan beside her. \"Hyaloclast is here,\" he murmured. \"You were dreaming, and saying something I couldn't understand. Just 'Jiwanyil' and then a lot of mumbling.\"\n\n\"It was a terrible dream,\" Lamprophyre said. She was still shaking from the aftereffects of rage. \"I'm glad it's over.\"\n\nShe rolled to her feet. Full dark had fallen, but the training grounds were lit as brightly as day by enormous white magic lights that hovered high above. The sharp white lights cast knife-edged shadows, making everyone present appear to have a dark double lying flat on the earth beside them. Lamprophyre saw two dragons facing a handful of humans led by General Sajan. One of the dragons was Hyaloclast. The other was Leucite. But Chrysoprase was all but Hyaloclast's heir, she should have\u2014 Horrible dread rose up within Lamprophyre. Chrysoprase should have been there. She closed her eyes and reflexively prayed that Chrysoprase was only injured, or that she was with the rest of the flight. Then she remembered her god didn't exist, and the dull ache of misery replaced dread.\n\nShe crossed the training grounds to Hyaloclast's side. The dragon queen didn't acknowledge her, keeping her attention on Sajan, but Leucite glanced her way and nodded briefly. She hoped it meant Leucite didn't hate her.\n\n\"We are larger in number,\" Hyaloclast was saying, \"and we can harry Sardonyx's forces so long as we don't engage with them.\"\n\n\"If you can lure them in the direction we want, it won't matter if you engage or not,\" General Sajan said. \"Both Manjaret and Sunital have weapons in place. We want the enemy to attack on ground of our choosing.\"\n\n\"It is a good plan,\" Hyaloclast said. \"It's too dark for anyone to fly tonight, what with the moon just past new. We will rest and tend to our wounds, and in the morning we will find Sardonyx again and make her chase us. I will need that map.\"\n\n\"Have you eaten?\" Lamprophyre said, and managed not to flinch as Hyaloclast turned a baleful eye on her. She knew from Hyaloclast's surface thoughts that she wasn't angry, just exhausted, but it was hard to remember that in the face of her mother's fierce gaze.\n\n\"We have not, and I understood the herds around the city to belong to private individuals,\" Hyaloclast said.\n\n\"I can arrange for food,\" Lamprophyre said, \"if you'll tell me where everyone went.\"\n\n\"Leucite will show you,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Now, the map.\"\n\nLeucite took off without a backward glance, and Lamprophyre, startled at his abruptness, awkwardly followed him. They flew in silence past the embassy, over the city wall, and some distance north until Lamprophyre saw many, many humped shapes lying across the untilled fields. She couldn't count accurately in the darkness, but it didn't look as if they were missing seventeen\u2014but then, the flight was large, and strictly by the numbers, seventeen wasn't so many. It was when you realized that each number was a person that the enormity of the loss struck home.\n\nLeucite landed several dragonlengths away from the rest of the flight. \"Lamprophyre,\" he said in his low, even voice. \"Did Hyaloclast tell you of our losses?\"\n\nLamprophyre swallowed. \"She wouldn't say who died. I was afraid to press her. Is Chrysoprase\u2026?\"\n\nLeucite shook his head. \"She went after a dragon who disemboweled Hexaferrum, and she was torn apart. Three of them.\" He fell silent. \"It's a tremendous loss. I know Hyaloclast wanted her for her successor.\"\n\nIn Lamprophyre's memory, Chrysoprase sped past the finish line at the racing track, a full dragonlength ahead of Coquina. Weeping would be such a release. \"It's not real yet,\" she whispered. \"And now I feel bad about making fun of how strict she was.\"\n\n\"What's killing me is that we left them all behind,\" Leucite said. \"As if they were so much refuse. They'll never reach Mother Stone.\"\n\nThe memory of Gabbro, of that nameless female dragon, curled up in their caves around the great mountain made Lamprophyre sick. \"I don't,\" she began, and went silent. Now was not the time to reveal that their God was dead\u2014had never existed. \"We'll retrieve them eventually, and carry them to Mother Stone ourselves,\" she said.\n\n\"I hope we survive for that to happen,\" Leucite said. \"Do you need help fetching food? I hope it's not awful for me to say I'd really like half a cow right now.\"\n\nFiguring out how many cows it would take to feed the flight, even the part of the flight that hadn't stayed behind to watch the dragonets, took a couple hundred beats, and eventually Lamprophyre and several other dragons flew westward, toward one of the great farms where the owner raised cows. It surprised Lamprophyre to learn it wasn't as late as she'd thought, and the farm owner was still awake and more than happy to deal with dragons.\n\nLamprophyre arranged a price and a time she would deliver the coin, and she and her friends waited at a distance for the farm owner to drive their cows into a pen far from the rest of his herd. While the others slaughtered the animals, Lamprophyre positioned herself where she could scare off the rest of the cows if they came close. It seemed cruel to kill their companions where they could see.\n\nLaden down with cows, they flew slowly back to the fields, where they discovered Hyaloclast had arrived. Lamprophyre left the cows to the female dragons for cooking and joined her mother on the edge of the territory the flight had claimed. \"It should be enough food,\" she said.\n\nHyaloclast nodded. \"We have a plan, and I have learned their map,\" she said. \"A map is such a clever thing. I never realized how differently humans see the world, and how intriguingly.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could learn to read,\" Lamprophyre said. \"That will open up all sorts of new human ideas.\"\n\n\"I think I'll leave that for later,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Did Leucite tell you about Chrysoprase?\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\n\"Such a tremendous loss. All of them are. Most of them leave dragonets behind, though I think I managed it that only one member of a pair-bond came with us, if they have offspring. I don't know if that's more cruel, or not.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't know what to say to that. \"Leucite was worried about the\u2026the bodies.\"\n\n\"So am I. Though if you're right about Mother Stone, I don't know that it matters what we do with them.\" Hyaloclast closed her eyes and threw back her head with a deep sigh. \"What is there left for us, Lamprophyre? What are we, if not children of our God?\"\n\n\"We're still dragons,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and beyond that, I don't know. Something made us who we are, made us magical beings, and maybe it doesn't matter if we know who that something was, so long as we live with honor.\"\n\nHyaloclast's lips curved in a wry half-smile. \"Wisely said.\" She opened her eyes and added, \"Your mate wants you to stay with him, to carry him into battle. I told him I thought it was a bad idea.\"\n\n\"It's a terrible idea. I can't protect him from fire or acid. Maybe he'll settle for me taking him to the cities under siege.\"\n\n\"He has a fire burning in him to see justice done. Have you made progress on his transformation?\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed. \"No. We were supposed to meet someone who has information today, but other things interfered. And I'm not sure we can get the information out of her. She's blackmailing us with the threat of revealing I was transformed into a human.\"\n\nA hiss escaped Hyaloclast's lips, but she didn't act embarrassed at her lapse into barbarity. \"Blackmail. How horribly human. Sometimes I'm surprised at how noble they can be, when you consider the awful things some of them do to each other.\"\n\n\"I know. But the good really does outweigh the bad. Most of them are kind and decent, at least to the people they care about.\" That made her think of Bhakriya and her former husband, and how terribly he'd treated her. If only she would talk to Depik! Now that Lamprophyre knew how love felt, she couldn't not wish it for all her friends.\n\nHyaloclast gripped Lamprophyre's hand briefly. \"Get some rest,\" she said. \"I'm not sure whether you'll be joining us in the morning. General Sajan said he had plans for your clutch, since you all know this area better than the rest of the flight, but he needs more information before he can implement those plans. It will be another long day for all of us regardless.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"For not reminding me of my stupidity.\"\n\nHyaloclast sighed again. \"From what the young prince said, you simply accelerated a process that was already well underway. Criticizing you would be self-indulgent, and I don't believe in making myself feel better at someone else's expense. Now, get.\"\n\nLamprophyre went."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "When Lamprophyre arrived at the training grounds the following morning, well-rested and feeling more sanguine than she had the night before, she found her clutch there as well. \"You should be sleeping!\" she exclaimed. \"You couldn't have arrived back before midnight.\"\n\n\"It was nearly the dreaming hours, and I wanted to ignore the messenger,\" Orthoclase said. \"Bromargyrite threatened to sit on my face if I didn't get up.\"\n\n\"A dire threat indeed,\" Flint said. Coquina chuckled.\n\n\"It's not my fault I like mornings,\" Bromargyrite said. The giant orange dragon coiled his tail more closely around himself.\n\n\"I'm still mostly asleep,\" Dolomite complained. He yawned, and the scent of acid wafted through the air. \"And I didn't\u2014oh, but I can't talk about that.\"\n\n\"You're still not going to reveal the big secret?\" Porphyry teased. \"I don't recall you ever staying silent about a project for this long.\"\n\n\"You'll see why,\" Dolomite said. \"Oh. What's wrong with that human?\"\n\nLamprophyre followed the direction of his gaze. A handful of people had just appeared around the front of the palace. In addition to General Sajan, Rokshan, and the king himself, Tekentriya lurched in their direction. \"Oh, Dolomite,\" she said, feeling alarmed, \"that's the king's heir, and she doesn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Good morning,\" King Ekanath said. \"I appreciate your willingness to rise so early after your late night. Thank you again for transporting the artifacts.\"\n\n\"It was our pleasure, your majesty,\" Flint said with a shallow bow.\n\n\"If you're willing, there's something else I'd like you to do,\" General Sajan said. \"Communication with our cities has just become vital. Not all the commanders of the military forces have the chalcedony artifacts that allow me to speak to them at a distance, and almost none of the cities' rulers have them. I was hoping we could enlist you as couriers to take artifacts to cities throughout Gonjiri.\"\n\nMore flying. Lamprophyre managed not to make a face. She saw the rest of her clutch maintained their good manners as well. \"Of course we will,\" she said.\n\n\"Not you, ambassador,\" Sajan said. \"I need Rokshan in Sunital this morning, overseeing the disposition of troops. The city was struck by an outbreak of dysentery that has afflicted the Army's commanding officer and many of his subordinates. As if we needed more problems.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Lamprophyre said, then wished she'd chosen a different word, because that one had sounded as if she were one of Sajan's soldiers. But Sajan didn't seem to notice.\n\nShe listened briefly to their thoughts. Sajan was focused on a long list of tasks he had to do. The king was thinking about how to protect the citizens of Tanajital from a dragon attack. He didn't sound as if he had much faith in the pyrite weapons. Tekentriya was in her usual bad mood, but for once it wasn't focused on Rokshan's faults. Lamprophyre brushed past Rokshan's thoughts as she always did, though she did hear briefly can't wait and hoped he meant he was looking forward to spending the day with her.\n\n\"What's wrong with your leg?\" Dolomite said.\n\nEveryone went very still. Tekentriya slowly turned to stare at Dolomite. \"Excuse me?\" she said, her voice dangerously quiet.\n\n\"Your leg,\" Dolomite said. \"It hurts you, I can tell.\"\n\n\"Dolomite,\" Lamprophyre murmured, \"she doesn't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\"I don't see that it's any of your business, dragon,\" Tekentriya said. Her voice was still quiet, but the tension in it hummed through the air.\n\n\"My name is Dolomite,\" Dolomite said. \"I don't know if it's my business or not, but I hate to see anyone in pain. Can't the healers help you?\"\n\nTekentriya took one lurching step toward Dolomite. To Lamprophyre's surprise, the princess's thoughts were curious rather than angry. \"You can tell, huh? And how is that?\"\n\nLamprophyre sucked in an incautious breath. She did not want anyone to know dragons could hear thoughts, certainly not Tekentriya, who wasn't evil like Manishi but would definitely find a way to use that knowledge against them. But Dolomite said, \"You hold yourself as if you're searching for a position that doesn't hurt, and you never stop frowning. It must be a terrible way to live.\"\n\nTekentriya's eyes narrowed in thought. \"You're not wrong,\" she said. \"And I choose not to talk about it.\"\n\n\"Oh? Why not?\" Dolomite leaned closer. Lamprophyre closed her eyes, waiting for the explosion.\n\nIt never came. Instead, Tekentriya said, \"Pity is for the weak. I'm not weak.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Dolomite said. \"I don't imagine anyone who knows you would think that.\"\n\nTekentriya's shoulders jerked. She worked her mouth briefly as if tasting and discarding words. \"I don't know,\" she said. Then she turned and walked back toward the palace, her leg jerking more rapidly than usual.\n\nEkanath cleared his throat. \"Well,\" he said. \"Well. I imagine General Sajan would like everyone to travel as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"I'll have someone bring the map,\" Sajan said. \"And I'll explain how you'll know which artifacts to give to which person.\"\n\nRokshan came to Lamprophyre's side. \"I'll be in Sunital by noon,\" he told Sajan, patting his chest where a couple of chalcedony pendants lay. \"And I'll communicate with you as soon as everything's settled.\"\n\n\"By noon?\" Lamprophyre said. \"But we can be in Sunital in a couple of hours.\"\n\nRokshan climbed up. \"We have something else to take care of first,\" he said.\n\nThe great plaza in front of the city guards' headquarters was as full of people as ever, mostly street musicians and the people who stopped to listen to them, but also men and women crossing purposefully between the headquarters and the court building across from it and the occasional guardsman strolling along, truncheon in hand.\n\nRokshan had explained what courts were for, that humans accused of crimes went there to speak to a human with authority to decide if they were guilty or not and what the punishment should be. It seemed a rather fragile way to pursue justice, all based on one person's interpretation of the law, but Rokshan had assured her everyone involved took their responsibilities very seriously.\n\n\"Do you really think she'll come?\" Lamprophyre asked again.\n\n\"I was careful not to send a message to her home, so she believes we don't know where she lives,\" Rokshan said, \"and I'm counting on her greed and her arrogance to bring her here. If I'm right, she's more interested in taunting us with our helplessness than she is about being sensible.\"\n\n\"And if you're wrong?\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"Then she'll suspect a trap, destroy the notes, and we'll never see her again. In which case we'll be no worse off than we are now, given that we don't have the notes yet.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" Lamprophyre said. She had faith in Rokshan's abilities, but she wasn't nearly as calm about the prospect of losing those notes as he seemed to be. Evart's notebook was no longer only important to their quest to transform Rokshan; it might contain information about Sardonyx, too.\n\nEveryone in the plaza walked wide of the big blue dragon and her human companion, but there were musicians close enough that Lamprophyre could enjoy their music. Or, rather, could have enjoyed their music if her draconic hearing weren't good enough to pick up all three and weave them into a discordant tune that set her nerves even more on edge than they were. She shifted her weight and scanned the plaza again for Viveki. Surely Rokshan was right, and the woman would come.\n\nRokshan had his belt knife out and was fiddling with something small that glinted of gold. \"What are you doing?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"Part of the plan,\" Rokshan said. He sheathed his belt knife and dropped the square gold coin into a pouch. \"And there she is, right on time.\"\n\nViveki walked toward them with her usual ground-eating stride, ignoring anyone who might cross her path. She wasn't smiling this time. She stopped half a dragonlength away and said, \"You were supposed to be here yesterday.\"\n\n\"We were detained elsewhere,\" Rokshan said. Part of the plan was that he would do the talking. Lamprophyre had agreed to this because she had no idea what to say to make the plan work.\n\nViveki sneered. \"You were detained elsewhere,\" she said in a falsely sweet, sarcastic voice. \"You expect me to believe that?\"\n\n\"Believe what you want,\" Rokshan said with a shrug. \"You know you have us in your power. You think we would risk losing those notes for anything that wasn't urgent?\"\n\nLamprophyre, listening to Viveki's thoughts, heard should have destroyed them and gone on lying, don't know why I didn't. \"I won't be generous a second time,\" Viveki said. \"Where's my five vahas?\"\n\nRokshan didn't move. \"We want some guarantee that the notes exist,\" he said, \"or we're not paying anything.\"\n\n\"Now, see, that's the sort of demand that will inspire me to destroy them,\" Viveki said.\n\n\"It's reasonable,\" Rokshan said, staying calmer than Lamprophyre could have managed. \"Prove you still have them, and I'll give you five vahas. Nothing could be simpler.\"\n\nViveki's expression didn't change, but her thoughts went wild, going over so many possibilities it dizzied Lamprophyre. \"All right,\" she said. \"I thought you might expect that.\" She reached inside her shirt and pulled out a sheet of paper. It wasn't very large, but Lamprophyre could see it was covered with writing, front and back. Lamprophyre relaxed slightly. There had always been the possibility Viveki wouldn't have any of the notes on her.\n\n\"Don't try to take it,\" Viveki warned Rokshan, who'd advanced to look at it. \"You still don't know where the rest of it is.\"\n\nRokshan ostentatiously put his hands behind his back, prompting another sneer from Viveki. \"It's Evart's handwriting,\" he told Lamprophyre. \"What do you think?\"\n\nThat was her cue. \"Give her the money,\" she said.\n\nRokshan put his hand into his belt pouch, but hesitated. \"When do we get the notes?\" he said.\n\nViveki smiled. \"I haven't decided yet. Five vahas now, and five more next week. Then we'll negotiate.\"\n\nRokshan scowled, but handed Viveki five square gold coins. \"Next week, or nothing more,\" he said.\n\n\"That's up to me, don't you think?\" Viveki said.\n\nRokshan nodded. Then he took half a step back and shouted, \"Thief!\"\n\nViveki looked confused. She glanced behind her as if she thought Rokshan was addressing someone else.\n\n\"Thief!\" Rokshan shouted again. \"Grab her, Lamprophyre!\"\n\nThis, too, Lamprophyre was ready for. She took Viveki's plump arm in her large hand and held her fast.\n\nViveki came to herself and tried to pull away, but she was no match for a dragon. \"Help!\" she screamed. \"I'm being assaulted!\"\n\nRokshan shouted, \"Guard! I've been robbed! I demand you take this woman in charge!\"\n\n\"What?\" Viveki said. \"No, they're assaulting me!\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" A couple of men in the sky-blue tunics of the Tanajital city guard jogged toward them.\n\n\"Thank Jiwanyil,\" Rokshan exclaimed. \"This woman just stole from me. I want her taken in charge.\"\n\nThe taller of the two men glanced at Rokshan, then looked at him more closely. \"Your highness,\" he said. \"Robbed, you say?\"\n\n\"He's lying,\" Viveki said. \"He told this monster to grab me. Make it let me go.\"\n\n\"The ambassador is not a monster,\" the shorter guard said. \"Prince Rokshan, what proof do you have?\"\n\nLamprophyre had sort of hoped the guards would take Viveki in charge with nothing more than Rokshan's accusation to go on, but this was even better. \"She stole some of his coin,\" she said.\n\n\"I had five vahas in my belt pouch, and she took them,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Liar,\" Viveki said.\n\nRokshan ignored her. \"One of them was deeply scratched along the Katayan face. Search her\u2014you'll find them.\"\n\n\"Would you empty your pouch, miss?\" the taller guard said. Viveki glared at him. He shrugged and reached for the pouch, but stopped when Viveki slapped his hand. He gave Viveki a look that made her cringe, as if she knew she'd gone too far.\n\n\"Striking a guard is a serious offense,\" he said. \"Your pouch, miss. Now.\"\n\nViveki's thoughts were a roiling mass of fury. She detached the pouch from around her waist and handed it over. The guard shook out a scattering of silver and copper coins\u2014and five bright square gold ones. On one of them, Katayan's stylized figure had a deep scratch nearly cutting it in two.\n\n\"That's it,\" Rokshan said. \"Those are mine.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid we need these as evidence for now, your highness,\" the tall guard said. \"But we'll make sure they're returned to you.\"\n\n\"Miss, do you have anything to say in your defense?\" The short guard stood with his hand on his truncheon like he hoped she might try to run. As if she could get free of Lamprophyre to go anywhere.\n\n\"You did this on purpose,\" Viveki snarled, ignoring the guards. \"They planned this! Let me go!\"\n\n\"Why would Prince Rokshan and the dragon ambassador set you up to be taken in charge?\" the tall guard asked. He looked as if the whole situation amused him.\n\n\"Because\u2014\" Viveki's mouth snapped shut. Her mind finished the thought, and Lamprophyre grinned. Perfect. Just what they needed. Though it would be wonderful if Viveki also confessed to blackmailing them, because that had to be a worse crime than theft of five vahas.\n\nBut Viveki wasn't stupid. She said nothing more as the guards marched her off in the direction of the guard headquarters, a giant stepped pyramid of granite blocks Lamprophyre was sure hadn't always been just the headquarters.\n\nRokshan said, \"I'm going to make sure they hold her for at least twenty-four hours, and see if I can't get that page off her. Then\u2026did you get it?\"\n\n\"You were right. She couldn't help herself,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I'll be right back, and we can go,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre followed the four slowly. She wouldn't fit into the headquarters, and Rokshan knew what to do, anyway. What mattered was that Viveki's furious thoughts had given Lamprophyre what she needed\u2014the location of the hidden notes. She smiled again. Luck had been on their side that morning, and if it continued to be their friend, those notes would tell them not only how to transform Rokshan, but something they might use against Sardonyx as well."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Lamprophyre squatted in the street outside The Hole and tried once again to peer through the window. Bending that low made her neck ache, and the window was so grimy she couldn't see more than blurred movement in the dimly-lit room beyond. She listened for thoughts again. It was just before mid-morning, and the tavern was unusually full for that early hour. But it was on the edge of Tanajital's slums, and Lamprophyre knew enough about humans to know there was a certain class of men and women who had nothing better to do with their day than drink it away. It seemed several of them had found their way to The Hole that morning.\n\nShe counted fifteen people's thoughts, just enough that the noise deafened her but not so many as to prevent her picking individual thoughts out if she focused. Most of them were filled with wary curiosity and the low hum of people listening to someone else intently enough that they weren't thinking of anything else. A few were afraid, though she couldn't tell if their fear was of Rokshan, who'd gone inside a hundred beats ago, or of the dragon sitting outside the door. And one was furiously calculating the odds of making a profit off the prince: bet he'd pay for them, that woman insulted me, don't know as I owe her anything.\n\nLamprophyre leaned closer to the door, which stood half-open, and listened with her ears.\n\n\"I just want what she stole,\" Rokshan said. \"Give it to me, and we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\"Don't know as she stole it from you,\" a woman said. Her thoughts said don't much care either way, and Lamprophyre identified her as the calculating one. \"Just got your word for that.\"\n\n\"The word of a prince and a commander of the Army,\" Rokshan said. \"Did you want to challenge my honor?\"\n\nSince Rokshan was lying about Viveki stealing the notes, Lamprophyre wasn't sure he should lean so heavily on his honor. On the other hand, they'd paid for the notes and hadn't gotten them, so in a sense, Viveki had stolen them. Lamprophyre didn't actually care about the technicalities.\n\nThe woman's thoughts became tinged with fear. \"No, your highness, of course not,\" she said. \"It's just, people trust me. I've got a reputation. Don't want to give over something I was paid to watch just on someone's say-so, even if he is a prince. I got to be careful.\"\n\n\"Then you'd rather have a reputation for aiding criminal activity?\" Rokshan said coldly. Lamprophyre mentally applauded.\n\n\"No,\" the woman said, drawing out the syllable in an uncertain way.\n\n\"This should clear things up,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre heard paper rustle. \"You can match this to the book Viveki left with you. It proves I have a right to that property.\"\n\nFootsteps faded into the distance, and a door creaked open and then shut. All the thoughts except Rokshan's were now vivid with curiosity. Rokshan was thinking Lamprophyre, I think I have her, but be ready. Lamprophyre settled herself and coaxed her inner fires hotter.\n\nThe door opened again, and the footsteps returned. \"All this proves is you took a page,\" the woman said. She sounded defiant, but her thoughts were wary. Lamprophyre wished for the thousandth time Rokshan could hear thoughts.\n\n\"I see,\" Rokshan said. \"Well. If that's how you want to play this, I hope you don't have your life savings tied up in this tavern.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" The wariness redoubled.\n\n\"Because you have only two options. Either you give me my property, or my friend burns your tavern to the ground.\"\n\nThat was the signal for Lamprophyre to let out a fire-scented burp and a cloud of dark smoke that drifted through the half-open door. Several people shouted, and then the room was a riot of noise as every patron stampeded for the door. The first man through came up short at the sight of Lamprophyre sitting there. She smiled pleasantly. \"It's just smoke,\" she said.\n\nA clot of people formed at the door, half desperately trying to get out, the others backing away from Lamprophyre. \"Oh, don't be ridiculous,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I would never burn a building that had people inside. If you want to leave, I won't stop you.\" She edged to one side, never taking her eyes off the door.\n\nThe man at the front of the crowd sidled away, then ran. The rest fought and clawed to fit through the door while staying as far from Lamprophyre as they could, their thoughts terrified. Lamprophyre regretted involving them. She'd worked too hard at establishing a reputation for being non-threatening to feel comfortable frightening humans. But those notes were more important than the feelings of a handful of humans.\n\nSoon the only two left in the tavern were Rokshan and the woman Lamprophyre concluded was the owner. Rokshan said, \"You've just lost all your patrons. That means those notes have cost you custom already. How far are you willing to push this?\"\n\nLamprophyre heard the moment the woman's thoughts went from defiant to resigned. \"Take them,\" she said. \"I don't want nothing to do with them. Let the little bitch curse. Probably weren't hers anyway.\"\n\n\"No, they're mine, as I said,\" Rokshan said. \"Here's something for your trouble. And I suggest you think carefully about what property you agree to protect in future.\"\n\nThe outer door swung open, and Rokshan appeared. He was tucking a couple of small books into his shirt. \"Let's go, before someone thinks to call the guards and report a fire,\" he said, hauling himself up.\n\nLamprophyre took to the skies immediately. \"I can't believe that worked so easily,\" she said.\n\n\"Neither can I, honestly. There was a small chance those patrons felt strongly enough about the sanctity of their drinking establishment they might have assaulted me.\"\n\nLamprophyre gasped. \"Rokshan!\"\n\n\"A small chance. Vanishingly small. Nothing to worry about.\" He let out a deep breath. \"Let's get back to the embassy. We have a couple of hours before we have to leave for Sunital.\"\n\nAt the embassy, Lamprophyre settled herself inside the hall and peered curiously at the two books. One was bound in black leather and looked as messy as the first book Viveki had found, with loose pages stuffed inside and feathers poking out on all sides. \"Bookmarks,\" Rokshan said. \"We won't disturb those, in case they're important.\"\n\nThe other one was a blank book like the ones Dharan always carried. The pages were bound to a stiff board, and it had no top cover. The top page, at least, was full of writing. Rokshan flipped a few pages of this one. \"Wonderful,\" he said in disgust. \"It's in some kind of code.\"\n\n\"I don't know what that means,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What's a code?\"\n\nRokshan riffled the pages. \"It's a way of disguising words so no one can read them who doesn't know the secret. We used to use a simple code at the academy, some of us students, that was a basic substitution code, numbers for letters. But it was so basic anyone could read it.\"\n\n\"Then what was the point?\"\n\n\"We were ten, Lamprophyre. The point was feeling we had secrets from our lectors. This\u2014\" He tapped the top page\u2014 \"is far more complicated. Fortunately, we know someone who breaks codes for fun.\"\n\n\"Dharan.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I'll take this to him before we leave.\" He put the book inside his shirt. \"This one's more promising. It obviously picks up where the other book left off, and the good news is, it's only about two-thirds full. That means it almost certainly ends when Evart died, and there aren't any more books of his notes hidden somewhere.\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed with relief. \"Let's see how much of it we can read before we have to go.\"\n\n\"And hope it contains what we need,\" Rokshan said.\n\nKnowing that Sardonyx and her dragons roamed somewhere in the east had Lamprophyre expecting Sunital to be a smoking ruin. But the city lay peaceful and still in the midday light. It wasn't until they were nearly upon it that the bustle and hum of a thriving city were audible. Lamprophyre relaxed. Sunital had the weapons Flint and Coquina had delivered, its Army and maybe its people were prepared for an attack, and everything was going to be fine.\n\nThough Sunital had a small palace that was the home of its ruling prince, it had no great parkland surrounding the palace and no Army training grounds. So Lamprophyre landed in the coliseum where she and Rokshan had watched the races only days before. It was full of soldiers rather than foot racers, and as they made way for her, Lamprophyre saw an orderly group of marching men leave the coliseum at a trot. It didn't look like a place devastated by illness.\n\nRokshan slid down and walked to meet a man in a yellow uniform with only one insignia on its left breast. \"Lieutenant, bring me up to speed,\" he said.\n\nThe lieutenant saluted. \"Commander, a quarter of our forces are down with dysentery,\" he said, \"along with Commander Vriski and Captains Lotin and Calvit. The healers are doing their best, but they tell us even after treatment, the only cure is rest and plenty of clean water. So it will be most of a week before everyone's well. What if we're attacked during that time?\"\n\n\"Let's not think that way, lieutenant,\" Rokshan said. He was speaking in the slightly deeper, musical way he did when he was being a commander. \"If that's the case, there's nothing we can do except plan a new defensive strategy. With the communication artifacts, we'll have warning before we're attacked, and we have the pyrite weapons. I'm confident we'll have success.\"\n\nThat was such a blatantly optimistic statement Lamprophyre listened to his thoughts. She heard have to keep morale up, these poor idiots have no idea how bad the situation is. That, perversely, made her feel better. She knew how bad it was, even with the pyrite weapons for defense, and it made more sense to her to face that head-on.\n\nShe settled on her haunches and prepared to be bored. Rokshan hadn't said how long they might have to be in Sunital, and as long as she was sitting still, she had nothing but time to fret about what Sardonyx might be doing. She hoped Hyaloclast had found her and was goading her into position to attack one of the fortified cities. They would only get one surprise attack, and Lamprophyre wanted it to be a good one. If they could manage to kill Sardonyx, even better.\n\nShe made herself think about Evart's notes instead. They'd read about half the book before leaving for Sunital, at which point Rokshan had put the book away, saying the consequences of accidentally dropping the book from altitude were too great to justify continuing to read. But what they'd read had been important, and chilling. Because about fifteen pages into the new book, Evart had mentioned his first odd dream of a voice speaking to him in darkness. Knowing it was Sardonyx had given his ignorant, even innocent reaction a horrible twist.\n\nIt is as if my own mind were speaking to me, but of things my waking mind doesn't understand, he'd written. And then, several pages later: These dreams can't possibly be the product of anything I know. As impossible as it seems, I think some adept is speaking to me in the night.\n\nHe'd believed Sardonyx was an adept, not a dragon\u2014there was no way he could have drawn that conclusion\u2014and he'd thought she was male, but aside from that, he'd been remarkably astute in assessing her character. The book revealed him to be even more paranoid and suspicious than Lamprophyre had guessed. Once he realized Sardonyx was another individual, he'd gone canny, refusing to reveal anything about himself while squeezing information out of her drop by drop. Lamprophyre didn't believe he'd been as successfully secretive as he claimed, given her knowledge of Sardonyx, but she did think the evil dragon had given away more than she realized.\n\nHe's trapped somehow, Evart had written, though I don't know how anyone as knowledgeable as he is could be a slave. But I think he wants me to free him. He doesn't come out and say it, because that would reveal his weakness, but he hints at it. His enemy taunts him.\n\nThe references to the enemy intrigued Lamprophyre. At first, she'd thought Sardonyx was talking about her; words like the enemy stands in opposition and wants to thwart his plans seemed an obvious reference to how Lamprophyre and Rokshan had foiled Sardonyx at every turn. But then Evart would write this enemy is the one that has him trapped, or he would speculate on what kind of power an enemy adept might use to trap someone, and Lamprophyre was sure he meant someone else. She certainly wasn't an adept and hadn't done anything to keep Sardonyx in her prison. Just the opposite.\n\nLamprophyre avoided following that trail of thought and sighed. Maybe Dharan would have better luck with the coded blank book. Evart had mentioned the transformation magic many times, but only in a general way. He hadn't yet, as far as they'd read, reached the point where Sardonyx had convinced him to change his direction of research. Right now, she and Rokshan had more questions than answers.\n\nShe'd stopped listening to Rokshan's conversation, so it startled her when he addressed her. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"This is going to take the rest of the day, and there's no point you sitting around,\" Rokshan said. \"I think you should go back to Tanajital and see if there's anything else you can do. I'll communicate with you when I'm finished here.\" He fingered the second pendant he wore, a greenish lump of chalcedony that matched Lamprophyre's larger one. He'd given her that one to string beside Hyaloclast's blue pendant.\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"I hope something happens soon. I'm so tense, waiting for Sardonyx to strike again.\"\n\n\"I can't wish for Commander Vriski to be ill, but this gives me something to think about that isn't worrying about all those little towns out east.\" Rokshan gripped her hand briefly. \"Take care. I'll see you soon.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and took to the skies, looking back once at Rokshan, who had his head tipped back to watch her go. Would anyone make anything of that exchange, she wondered? His affection for her, and hers for him, was so obvious to her it felt impossible no one else could see it.\n\nShe decided to follow the river Sunital straddled north for a few hundred beats before turning northwest to return to Tanajital. The Sonti River was broader than the Green River at this point in its course, though Rokshan had told her it grew narrower as it passed southward through the hills to its ultimate end at Lake Sonti. The river was also deeper, and its reflection gleamed like a dancer's silver-blue ribbon. Its beauty entranced Lamprophyre and made her think of long, cool swims and being swept away by the current.\n\nShe was about to wheel away from the river when she saw a moving dark cloud in the distance. Her first glance said it was a flock of birds. Almost immediately, she realized those would have to be impossibly large birds for her to see them at a distance. A hot jolt of fear shot through her. Sardonyx's flight.\n\nShe stilled her first instinct, which was to flee, and counted the winged creatures. She could bring the information to General Sajan, and maybe he could do something with it. But there were far more than two hundred dragons, and they were flying eastward, not very fast. Relieved, she shot toward them. Hyaloclast would know something about the current strategy.\n\nAfter a few hundred beats of flight, she was near enough to see they'd slowed to meet her, though they hadn't stopped. She aimed for the big black dragon at the head of the loose formation. \"Where are you going?\" she asked, out of breath from the speed of her flight.\n\n\"We are circling the human city of Manjaret,\" Hyaloclast said, \"and waiting for our scouts to return. We know Sardonyx's people are somewhere east of here, and our intent is to flush them out and convince them to chase us to the city, where they will be vulnerable to those weapons.\"\n\n\"I don't understand how two hundred dragons could just vanish.\"\n\n\"There is a lot of empty land between here and the desert, and between the desert and the ocean,\" Hyaloclast said. \"And the way our enemy moves suggests she knows this territory well, which might be why she came this way in the first place.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I don't know why she hasn't just swept through this place and burned everything she sees.\"\n\n\"She's still just a dragon, Lamprophyre.\" Hyaloclast gestured at the dragons flying nearest them. \"With the same physical limitations we all have. In fact, based on what we've seen of them, they can't stay in the air as long as we can, and they aren't as fast or agile. They're big brutes, and they use that to their advantage in personal combat, but they can't simply fly forever.\"\n\nThat made Lamprophyre feel better. \"So we might have a chance.\"\n\n\"We do have a chance. And those weapons will help.\" Hyaloclast abruptly backwinged and signaled to the others to hover. \"That's Corundum now. He's an advance scout. Let us see what he's learned.\"\n\nLamprophyre knew Corundum well; he was part of the clutch just three years older than hers. His brown scales and black wing membranes made him the dullest-looking dragon in the flight, but that dullness made him one of the best hunters the dragons had ever known, able to hide even without concealing himself magically. He also had better eyesight and hearing than most. It didn't surprise Lamprophyre that Hyaloclast had sent him ahead to scout.\n\n\"I found them,\" he said. He was breathing easily, but his eye ridges flared with excitement. \"They're all settled about six hundred beats' flight east of here, eating. I made sure they saw me\u2014made it look like they surprised me\u2014but they didn't follow. Not yet, anyway.\"\n\n\"Good work,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Everyone split up as we discussed, and move to your designated spots. We'll see if we can't herd these creatures like cows.\"\n\nA ripple of amusement spread through the flight. Hyaloclast turned to Lamprophyre. \"Will you join us, or do you have other duties?\"\n\nThis would keep her from going mad waiting for something to happen, or for Rokshan to summon her back. \"I'd rather stay with all of you,\" she said. \"What is the plan?\"\n\n\"Follow,\" Hyaloclast said. She continued flying eastward as the flight separated like one of those fluffy small white flowers that broke apart if a human breathed on them. Lamprophyre had tried it herself once, and the flower had simply wilted under her hot breath. The dragons scattered in loose groups, heading north and south and west, while a few dragons continued on with Hyaloclast and Lamprophyre.\n\n\"It's simple in the execution,\" Hyaloclast said. \"We will goad Sardonyx's people into following what they believe are a handful of our dragons, and therefore are an easy target. Those few will pretend to flee westward, to Manjaret, where the pyrite weapons will wreak havoc on them. It's unlikely they'll kill all the enemy, but they should do enough damage to make Sardonyx reconsider attacking human cities.\"\n\n\"You said 'simple in the execution,'\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nHyaloclast grimaced. \"I am no human soldier, but General Sajan said that battle plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, and that is something I understand. We have no guarantee that Sardonyx will take our bait\u2014another phrase the general used\u2014and no guarantee she will not be suspicious at our seeming to lead her straight to humans. But we have to act. The alternative is allowing Sardonyx to continue razing cities without being challenged.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" From what she'd read of Evart's notes and her own encounters with Sardonyx, Lamprophyre felt the evil dragon's pride and arrogance made this plan extremely plausible. But she could see Hyaloclast's point: people were complicated, and reacted in complicated ways.\n\nThey flew eastward for nearly a thousand beats, following Corundum, until the brown dragon returned and said, \"They're a hundred dragon lengths away and to the north. I think we should try to look as if they surprised us. Like we're scouting them.\"\n\n\"Follow me,\" Hyaloclast said. \"We'll fly past, then circle back around and attack. The goal is to make them chase us without looking like that is our intent.\"\n\nThe twenty or so dragons surrounding her nodded. Lamprophyre caught Corundum's eye. He grinned at her, his familiar wicked good humor sparking an answering grin from her. She probably shouldn't think of this as fun, but\u2026it was fun.\n\nHyaloclast banked and curved away northward. Lamprophyre followed on her mother's heels, watching the ground ahead. Soon, she saw it: a dark shadow lying across the dry yellow grasses covering the low hills, under a cloudless sky. Her heart beat more rapidly with excitement. She flew on, pretending she hadn't noticed the dragons.\n\nSuddenly Hyaloclast came to a halt and hovered, forcing everyone else to scramble not to overshoot her. Lamprophyre flailed a little in midair, wondering what had startled her mother, fearing some flaw in the plan had made her realize it was a failure. Then Hyaloclast shouted, \"Attack them! Dive, dive!\" and put her own words into action.\n\nBreathless, Lamprophyre followed, furling her wings and plummeting to make herself an arrow speeding toward the heart of Sardonyx's flight. The dragons sunning themselves on the ground below, surrounded by the scattered half-eaten carcasses of wild deer, lifted their heads like so many inquisitive rodents popping out of holes in the fields. Hyaloclast spat fire, and Lamprophyre did the same barely a beat behind her. The dry grasses went up in huge fiery bursts. Clouds of smoke filled the air, and as Lamprophyre pulled out of her dive she heard coughing and choking. It filled her heart with a fierce joy.\n\n\"Again!\" Hyaloclast shouted, and Lamprophyre beat the air to gain altitude for another dive. As she turned, she saw, through the dissipating smoke, the enormous red-gold form of Sardonyx, raising herself to her feet. She looked perfectly calm\u2014well, it wasn't as if fire could hurt dragons. Lamprophyre's elation faded. If Sardonyx knew this was a ploy\u2014 Then Sardonyx shouted, \"After them!\" and a host of great wings, thickly ribbed with phalanges like no modern dragon had, sent the rest of the smoke flying as they shredded the air. As one, Sardonyx's dragons roared a challenge, and charged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Lamprophyre aborted her dive and wheeled around. In her last glimpse of Sardonyx's dragons before she sped westward, she realized not all of them were following. She didn't have time to count, but it was surely twice as many as in their own little band of twenty. Surrounded by her friends, she flew away, hoping the evil dragons would continue to follow. Only forty or fifty\u2026maybe it wouldn't matter that it wasn't all of them, so long as they destroyed those forty or fifty.\n\nShe cast a glance over her shoulder. Hyaloclast was toward the rear, shouting something at Corundum. Corundum nodded and rose higher, then flew faster than Lamprophyre had ever seen him in the direction of distant Manjaret. Lamprophyre hung back to meet Hyaloclast. The enemy dragons were gaining on them, but Lamprophyre saw the truth of her mother's statements about their physiology. Those dragons practically lumbered in midair, like flying cows.\n\n\"Don't slow too much,\" Hyaloclast shouted as Lamprophyre neared. \"I don't know how bright they are, and we don't want them guessing what we have in mind.\"\n\n\"Where did Corundum go?\"\n\n\"To warn the rest to stay out of sight. If these enemy dragons see too many of us, they'll likely turn around. We need to look like easy prey. And with not all of them following, we could easily outnumber them if we're not careful.\"\n\nThat made sense. Lamprophyre cast another glance at their pursuers. They weren't close enough to make out expressions, but they weren't deviating in their course, and the steady, ponderous way they flew was actually frightening if she let herself dwell on it. She turned her back on them and flew on.\n\nShe'd never been to Manjaret and hoped her friends knew the way\u2014well, they had to, to have come up with this plan. She remembered the city only because one of Sardonyx's early victims was the daughter of its ruling prince and princess. Zefira had fallen prey to Sardonyx's evil whisperings, and Sardonyx had shredded her mind when Zefira became a liability. Lamprophyre knew Zefira had been taken home when it was clear she wouldn't recover quickly, and as far as Lamprophyre knew, she had only recently regained consciousness. The knowledge that the woman, whom she hadn't liked but hadn't wanted hurt, might be lying helpless somewhere in Manjaret made Lamprophyre more determined to see the city defended.\n\nA thousand beats. Two thousand beats. Lamprophyre was growing tired of maintaining a pace the slower enemy dragons could keep up with. Every moment had her believing this was the moment when Sardonyx's dragons would decide they'd had enough of the chase and turn around. She started lagging intentionally, glancing behind her occasionally at the terrible oncoming juggernauts.\n\nThen Hyaloclast was beside her, shouting, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Taunting them so they don't get bored and leave,\" Lamprophyre panted. The effort of going slower than was comfortable was draining.\n\nHyaloclast looked behind her. \"Good idea,\" she said. \"In another three hundred beats, we're going to turn and make a stand that we will abandon a hundred beats later.\"\n\n\"But why? We're winning!\"\n\n\"Because Manjaret is just ahead now.\" Hyaloclast jerked her head westward. \"Time to turn their tactics back on them.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She sped up briefly, then pretended to lag as if she were tired. In her imagination, the hot breath of her pursuers warmed her heels, though of course they weren't that close. Just a few more beats\u2026\n\nThen Hyaloclast and Corundum and Zircon and Alunogen surrounded her, turning in midair to confront Sardonyx's dragons, and Lamprophyre dropped a dragonlength to get out of their way. A yellow dragon female, heavy and about half a dragonlength longer than she was, bore down on her. Lamprophyre snarled and dove to meet her.\n\nShe immediately knew it was a mistake. The female swiped at Lamprophyre's belly with savage claws, and Lamprophyre dodged, barely avoiding the blow. The female followed it up by grabbing Lamprophyre's arm and pulling her close so their wings snarled together and they fell, a sickening sensation that roused Lamprophyre's fears of falling in a wingless, helpless human form. She lashed out frantically to free herself and got in a lucky blow on the female's left wing, kicked with both feet at her belly, and disentangled herself only five dragonlengths from the ground.\n\nShe backwinged, caught herself, and darted away from her attacker, who swept ponderously toward her once again. This plan was madness. She couldn't hold the female off for a dozen beats, let alone a hundred. The best she could do was keep out of the enormous dragon's reach and watch for Hyaloclast's signal to retreat.\n\nShe slipped past the female and scored five long slits in the dragon's wing membrane. It was thicker than her own, but her claws cut it as readily. She let out a cry of triumph that turned to a cry of pain as the dragon once more grabbed her, this time by the ankle, and dug in her claws. Lamprophyre kicked her in the face with her free foot, jabbing her with her hard, dull toe claws. Too bad they weren't sharp, because she was sure she could have taken an eye out. She kicked again, and the dragon let go, snarling.\n\nLamprophyre's breathing was heavy, and her wings ached from the unexpected maneuvering. She and the female dragon circled each other, watching for weakness. Fear shot through Lamprophyre again. She was completely outclassed by this warrior, and the only reason she wasn't dead was that she was faster and more agile. If this were a real fight, she would be dead, because Rokshan always said fighting a defensive battle in the short-term was a losing strategy. She'd never understood that until now.\n\nThen dragons rushed past her, scrambling to get away, and Lamprophyre realized the female dragon was between her and Manjaret. She folded her wings and dropped like a stone, surprising the female enough that when Lamprophyre snapped her wings open and shot westward, she left the dragon in her dust.\n\nNow that she wasn't engaged in combat\u2014she'd fought a dragon and survived!\u2014she could see Manjaret in the distance, a reddish blotch against the ribbon of the Sonti River. She pushed herself faster, though she knew the city was no safe haven, even for her own flight. It sprawled, looking more like Kolmira than vertical Tanajital, and its walls and many of its buildings were of local red sandstone, giving it its distinctive color. Even though she'd placed one of the pyrite weapons herself, she couldn't see it at this distance. She aimed at that side of the city anyway. Maybe she could lure some of Sardonyx's dragons into its metaphorical lap.\n\nShe risked a glance over her shoulder. The enemy dragons were still following, faster than before. It looked as if Hyaloclast's plan had worked. They clearly believed the flight was desperate to defend the human city, and just as clearly believed the flight was no match for them. Lamprophyre stopped watching them and continued toward the city. It was almost over. She wanted so badly to see those dragons torn apart.\n\nManjaret was distinct now as a collection of red and cream-colored buildings inside a great red wall, not as tall as Tanajital's, but still imposing. And there was the shining sparkle of the pyrite weapon she'd positioned according to the captain's instructions. She dove for it, shot past, and dropped as fast as she dared to be below its range.\n\nGasping for air, she turned to watch the weapon swivel and take aim at one of the enemy dragons. She'd worried that the presence of the flight might make it hard for the weapons to target the enemy, but all her friends had taken their instruction to heart, and had come to earth, leaving the sky full of nothing but ancient dragons.\n\nA deep hum filled the air, the sound of the pyrite weapon coming to full power. In a single beat, the hum stopped, and the pyrite weapons shivered as with heat haze. A bright flash shot from the ceramic cylinder like tame lightning, and a thump shook the ground near Lamprophyre. The flash caught one of Sardonyx's dragons square in the chest, making her jerk. Her wings stiffened, and she fell, landing on Manjaret's defensive wall and sliding down it to lie in an inert heap at its base.\n\nLamprophyre screamed with excitement. The pyrite weapon swiveled, tracking the motion of another dragon. Another flash, another thump, and the blast missed the dragon, who swept past and opened his mouth to spray acid at the weapon and its operators.\n\nLamprophyre shoved off the ground and flung herself between the soldiers and the acid spray. Most of it hit her, rattling her wing membranes like stinging hail and coursing harmlessly down her back. Some of it landed on the weapon, which sizzled. And some of it struck two soldiers standing nearby who hadn't ducked fast enough.\n\nTheir agonized screams prompted an answering cry from Lamprophyre. The acid ate through their clothes into their skin as they thrashed helplessly, trying to get it off. There was nothing she could do but watch their comrades pull them into the shelter of the base of the weapon\u2014and it was only shelter because she stood there, warding them.\n\n\"Out of the way!\" one of the operators shouted. Lamprophyre dropped, and the weapon shot again, missing again. She kept her eyes on the dragons circling the weapon. They were so clumsy, not agile at all, and yet they were still faster than the weapon could aim.\n\nA couple of enemy females descended from opposite directions. Lamprophyre realized what they had in mind in time to scream, \"Get beneath me!\" and mantle her wings to cover as many soldiers as she could manage. Fire struck her, heating the air uncomfortably, and the soldiers screamed, with fear rather than pain, she hoped.\n\n\"Keep down!\" she told them when the fire was past, and leaped into the sky.\n\nIt seemed the second weapon hadn't been any more successful; there was one fallen dragon in the streets, one of Sardonyx's females, and to her horror she saw two slimmer dragons lying slashed and bloody a few streets away. One was Zircon, and the other was too bloody for her to identify. The sky was full of dragons swirling, darting, slashing and flying away. Lamprophyre's strategy of staying out of reach wasn't unique to her. It looked as though none of her flight wanted to get close to the enemy, and with their greater size and strength, Lamprophyre couldn't blame her friends.\n\nShe rose into the air above the pyrite weapon and shot fire at the nearest enemy dragon. It couldn't burn him, but it might keep him at bay so he couldn't spray the soldiers again. She realized Corundum was next to her, darting and weaving to keep the enemy dragons distracted. \"Why aren't the weapons working?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"They are. They did,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But they don't move fast enough. The strategy isn't working!\"\n\n\"We have to protect the city,\" Corundum said. \"I\u2014\"\n\nSwift movement silenced him with a grunt as one of the dragons rushed him, taking him around the waist and bearing him to the ground beside the weapon. Lamprophyre screamed in surprise and fear and followed the two, slashing at the enemy dragon's thick wing membranes. The dragon ignored her, all his attention on Corundum. Corundum's wings were folded painfully beneath his back, and he gripped the dragon's hands, both of them clawing each other's hands bloody as they wrestled for dominance in eerie silence.\n\nSlowly, despite Lamprophyre's desperate efforts, the dragon's teeth came ever closer to Corundum's throat. Terrified, Lamprophyre gave up slashing the dragon's wings to tatters and wrapped her arm around his neck, pulling the male's head back. He was as abnormally large as all the ancient dragons were, but he was still just a male, and she outweighed him. Their fierce three-way wrestling match paused as Lamprophyre and Corundum held the male in a terrible equilibrium.\n\nSuddenly, the male stopped fighting to reach Corundum and threw himself backward, toppling Lamprophyre. He twisted and snapped his teeth at Lamprophyre's throat. Lamprophyre got her powerful legs beneath him and shoved, hard, launching him a dragonlength into the air. Before he could recover, Corundum was on his back, his arms wrapped around the dragon's chest. His weight pinned the male's wings in place, forcing him to the ground.\n\nLamprophyre saw how Corundum's arms shook. He couldn't hold the male for long. Without thinking, she swiped her claws across the male dragon's thick throat.\n\nRed blood spurted from the wounds, making a hot splash across her face and chest. The dragon gurgled, thrashed, and sagged in Corundum's arms. Corundum let him fall. \"You killed him,\" he said, breathing heavily. He sounded as if she'd done something miraculous. Given the kind of havoc Sardonyx's people had wreaked on the flight, maybe she had.\n\n\"We killed him,\" she corrected him. \"It took both of us. Either of us alone\u2026\"\n\nCorundum nodded. Orange light grew and bathed them in fire. They shielded their eyes, and when the fire was past, looked up at the dragon who'd just blasted them. \"I don't think I can do that again,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but we have to try.\"\n\n\"I think they're leaving,\" Corundum said. He pointed. \"Look!\"\n\nThe sky was still full of dragons, but most of them were winging their way eastward. Some of them wove through the sky erratically, as if they couldn't keep a straight course. Lamprophyre blinked exhaustion out of her eyes and said, \"I can't believe we won.\"\n\nCorundum grabbed her hand. \"I'm not sure we did.\"\n\nLamprophyre followed his gaze. Manjaret was in flames. Dark, lifeless dragon bodies lay here and there throughout the streets. Dozens of human bodies lay beside them, most of them scorched beyond recognition or disfigured with deep acid burns. The smell of ash and bitter acid filled the air, making Lamprophyre feel sicker than she already did.\n\nShe turned to speak to the soldiers manning the pyrite weapon and choked back a cry. Some dragon had gotten in a lucky shot while she and Corundum were wrestling with the male dragon. There was nothing left of them but charred bones. Beside their bodies, the pyrite weapon glistened in the afternoon sun, as pristine and untouched as it had been five hundred beats ago. Of course fire and acid couldn't hurt it. And it had failed those men completely.\n\nThe swoop of wings told Lamprophyre Corundum had left. She looked at the dead dragon again and wiped his blood off her face. They hadn't won. The weapons were almost useless. And they'd brought death to Manjaret instead of salvation. Lamprophyre didn't care that dragons couldn't cry. Weeping couldn't make this right. Nothing could.\n\nShe spent what was left of the afternoon helping to put out fires. The only thing that had gone right that day was having the Sonti River right there, with its endless supply of water. She carried canopy after canopy filled with water across the city, her mind numb, her hands focused on her task so she wouldn't have to think about anything else. Every time she flew over a dead dragon, she averted her eyes. She'd know soon enough who the flight had lost.\n\nIt turned out Manjaret hadn't been thoroughly destroyed. Sardonyx's dragons had either been incompetent or lazy or arrogant or all three, because they hadn't delivered the kind of focused destruction that would have eradicated the city. That had been another piece of luck, that Sardonyx hadn't been there to direct her dragons. Lamprophyre was sure she wouldn't have let a single human survive.\n\nWhen the last fires were out, Lamprophyre returned to the pyrite weapon. The bodies of the soldiers had been removed, which was a burden lifted. Lamprophyre couldn't help feeling as if the weapon's failure had been her fault. She'd been so eager about the pyrite weapons, so certain they could kill dragons. And they did. So long as the dragon in question held still long enough to be targeted, they did kill dragons. It was almost worse than if they'd been useless.\n\nShe wondered idly what they'd done with the dragon the weapon had killed, the one that had fallen outside the walls. She still didn't know how many of her friends were dead and didn't think she was ready for that knowledge. Sinking down onto her haunches, she regarded the walls, her mind feeling numb and unresponsive. Rokshan might contact her soon. She craved his nearness even as she feared having to tell him what had happened. He'd feel even worse about the weapons' failure than she did.\n\nA dark shadow passed over her. \"Lamprophyre,\" Hyaloclast said as she landed nearby. \"Come with me.\"\n\n\"What's wrong now?\" she asked, too late realizing her weariness had come out as petulance.\n\nBut Hyaloclast didn't respond with irritation. \"I need you to come,\" she said. \"We've taken an enemy dragon alive.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "\"Alive?\" Lamprophyre's fuzzy mind didn't understand why that was significant. She shook her head vigorously, hoping to clear it. \"Why?\"\n\n\"A shot from one of the weapons grazed him and brought him down. I ordered him subdued.\" Hyaloclast sounded grim. \"I intend to force him to reveal as much of Sardonyx's plan as possible. But I need your assistance.\"\n\n\"Mine?\" Lamprophyre realized she sounded witless, with all her inane questions. \"I mean, of course I'll help. But you have others\u2014\"\n\n\"You've told me Sardonyx is capable of listening through the minds of others. You're the only one of us who knows how to identify her presence. I don't want her learning our secrets through this male.\" Hyaloclast, Lamprophyre now realized, had a long, bloody gash along her left shoulder and held that arm stiffly. She looked weary, but her eyes were fierce and her jaw tight with suppressed fury.\n\n\"All right,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'll listen for Sardonyx's thoughts, but I have an idea that might help. We need to find an adept.\"\n\n\"An adept? What can an adept do for us?\"\n\nLamprophyre cast a glance into the distance, to where one of the pyrite weapons glittered in the light of the setting sun. She could understand Hyaloclast's disdain, given how human adepts had failed them all. \"Something only a human would think of,\" she said.\n\nThe chain holding the chlorite artifact to Lamprophyre's wrist itched, and it was too tight for comfort, but it was the biggest chain they'd been able to find at short notice. Hyaloclast, flying beside her, occasionally rubbed her wrist as if hers bothered her, too. It felt so odd to hear none of the dragon queen's thoughts, just the dull background hum that gave nothing away. It might not matter. The enemy dragon had already been exposed to the thoughts of those who'd captured it. And maybe she was wrong, and all the ancient dragons had Sardonyx's ability to communicate mind to mind. But they couldn't afford to take chances.\n\nAhead, about ten dragonlengths from the city wall, the dull green shape of the captured dragon stood out against the pale, desiccated grass of the plains. He lay on his back with his wings spread wide and high, a position that forced his chest upward and arched his back painfully. Huge, heavy red stones that looked like they were left over from building the city wall pinned his wings to the ground, out of reach of his hands. He might have been able to break free, but at the cost of ripping his wings from their sockets.\n\nHyaloclast alit a dragonlength away, and Lamprophyre landed beside her. \"Dragon,\" Hyaloclast said, walking toward him. \"Tell me your name.\"\n\nThe dragon, who was breathing heavily as if he'd exerted himself, sneered and said nothing. He was doing his best to conceal his fear, but it was audible to Lamprophyre beneath his bravado.\n\n\"I don't actually care what your name is,\" Hyaloclast went on. Her voice was even, unemotional, and with her thoughts dimmed by the artifact, Lamprophyre might have imagined her an obsidian statue come to life. \"I thought it might grant you some shred of dignity, given that we've taken all the rest of it away. You look like a butterfly impaled on a thorn.\"\n\n\"An ugly butterfly,\" Lamprophyre said. Hyaloclast shot her a glare, but Lamprophyre saw her lips tremble as if suppressing a smile.\n\nThe enemy dragon's sneer faded. \"I am Shurtak,\" he said. His voice was higher than Lamprophyre had imagined given his build. His thoughts were still angry, but now they were tinged with uncertainty as well as fear.\n\n\"Shurtak,\" Hyaloclast said. \"I am Hyaloclast, dragon queen.\"\n\nShurtak jerked. The stones pinning his wings didn't shift. \"There is only one dragon queen,\" he snarled. \"You are an upstart pretender.\"\n\n\"What is Sardonyx's strategy for attacking the human cities?\" Hyaloclast asked, as calmly as if he hadn't spoken.\n\nShurtak's gaze flicked from Hyaloclast to Lamprophyre and back. \"What are you?\" he breathed. \"You have no thoughts. What kind of monster has this new world bred?\"\n\nLamprophyre listened closely to his thoughts and heard, above his growing fear, can't hear must know monsters and hope Sardonyx listen. She blocked his thoughts abruptly, fearing Sardonyx's presence, and then told herself she was stupid. That was why she was there. Sardonyx couldn't hurt her.\n\nShe'd been paying close enough attention to Shurtak's thoughts that she'd missed Hyaloclast's next question, but whatever it was, it made Shurtak calmer. \"I will tell you nothing,\" he said. \"We will slaughter you all, and then we will burn the human cities to the ground. You cannot defeat us.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Hyaloclast said. \"I thought you were braver than that.\"\n\n\"What?\" Shurtak said. Braver than her, she is mad, his drifting thoughts said.\n\n\"Obviously you believe we would thwart you if we knew your plans,\" Hyaloclast said. \"You lack the courage of your convictions.\"\n\nShurtak jerked against the stones again. Lamprophyre looked nervously at them, but they still didn't shift. \"It doesn't matter what you know,\" he said. \"We will defeat you.\"\n\n\"Through secrecy and subterfuge,\" Hyaloclast said. She looked away from Shurtak toward the city, as if he bored her. \"Those things ought to be beneath you. No true dragon attacks from the shadow.\"\n\nThis infuriated Shurtak. He tried to sit up, his arms flailing to reach the stones, and this time Lamprophyre thought they might have shifted the tiniest bit. She tensed, ready to fling herself on him if he got free. His thoughts fluttered madly through rage and fear and indignation. \"We do not,\" he shouted. \"We strike the most important cities first. Wipe out the human leaders. Soon they will all be dead!\"\n\n\"Important cities,\" Hyaloclast scoffed. \"Villages. Is that really all you're capable of? Destroying those tiny towns to make yourselves feel bigger?\"\n\nA tiny spark of confusion appeared within his furious thoughts. \"Hamadri was small,\" he said. \"It was the greatest of human cities and we found it much reduced. This world is different.\" Now he sounded petulant, a human child denied a treat.\n\n\"Hamadri was destroyed by you dragons centuries ago,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You made a mistake.\"\n\n\"No mistake,\" Shurtak said, baring his teeth at her. \"It was there. But it was small.\"\n\nLamprophyre tried to remember what cities the dragons had gone for first. Ghiridi, and Hammadi\u2026Hammadi. Hamadri. \"I see,\" she said. \"You're going after the cities you remember.\"\n\n\"Not anymore,\" the dragon said. He smiled, a nasty, secretive expression. \"We will learn this new world, and we will make it burn.\"\n\n\"You only found this city because we led you here,\" Hyaloclast said. She gave Lamprophyre a warning look that didn't need thoughts for Lamprophyre to understand it: keep quiet. \"Forgive me if I don't quiver in terror at your so-called plan.\"\n\nShurtak must be one of Sardonyx's stupider followers not to see how Hyaloclast was leading him, Lamprophyre thought. But this time, his thoughts were less angry and more calculating: tell her lies, if I can't hear her thoughts she can't hear mine. \"Sardonyx sees far,\" he said. \"She has the power to see through our eyes.\"\n\n\"No, she can't,\" Lamprophyre said, listening to his thoughts. \"She can talk to you, one at a time, but she only knows what you tell her.\"\n\nShurtak's eyes widened. He clumsily tried to conceal his thoughts behind meaningless poetry, but Lamprophyre was excellent at teasing out deeper thoughts if she chose. \"And she's abandoned you, hasn't she,\" she went on. \"If she knows what happened here, she doesn't know you're still alive to speak to, because all your friends left you for dead.\" That last was a guess, but she felt confident about it.\n\n\"That's enough, Lamprophyre, leave the male some fragment of hope,\" Hyaloclast said.\n\nShurtak jerked again. \"You,\" he said. \"Lamprophyre. You freed us.\" He began laughing, a breathy, choked sound because of how his chest was stretched. \"Sardonyx will see you killed last, slowly.\"\n\nIt would have been more frightening if Shurtak hadn't been helpless. \"Strong words,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Where will Sardonyx strike next?\"\n\nSouth and west, Shurtak thought. \"I refuse to tell you anything,\" he said, struggling against the stones again.\n\n\"Randomly hoping to come across a helpless village?\" Hyaloclast said, her voice taunting him.\n\n\"We see everything,\" Shurtak said. Scouts, he thought. Quartering the land.\n\nLamprophyre wondered how much of Shurtak's thoughts Hyaloclast heard, as she was intent on her interrogation. It was too bad she couldn't communicate with the dragon queen, give her direction. If Sardonyx had scouts looking for new targets, that might be something Hyaloclast could use. Lamprophyre and Corundum had proved the flight could take down a solitary ancient dragon.\n\n\"And what have you seen?\" Hyaloclast asked.\n\nShurtak seemed to have given up on keeping secrets. \"Many towns,\" he said, \"many cities not where they were before. We will drive the humans before us and we will watch them burn.\" Find the capital, he thought.\n\nThen an oily, nasty sensation filled Shurtak's mind. You're alive, Sardonyx whispered.\n\nThey know! Shurtak thought.\n\nLamprophyre gasped. \"She's here,\" she said, gripping Hyaloclast's hand.\n\nHyaloclast bent low, pressing her hand against Shurtak's chest. \"Tell me where you're going next,\" she shouted.\n\nSardonyx's attention focused on Lamprophyre. You'll pay for this, my dear, she snarled. She withdrew so rapidly it felt like being sliced by icy claws. Shurtak convulsed, once, twice, and after the third time he went frighteningly limp.\n\nGone, he thought, and then his thoughts vanished.\n\nLamprophyre realized she was crushing her mother's hand in hers and let go. Hyaloclast stood up. \"She killed her own kind rather than allow him to give her away,\" she murmured. \"If we didn't already know what kind of a person she is, that would be revelatory.\"\n\n\"How much of his thoughts did you hear?\"\n\n\"Almost none. All my attention was on keeping him off-balance so he would think the right things.\" Hyaloclast absently touched the gash in her shoulder. \"I hope we learned something.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"They have scouts searching the area for cities. And they're flying south and west next. Obviously he doesn't know the city names\u2014\" She gasped. \"Sunital is south and west of where they were. Rokshan is there.\" She fumbled with the green chalcedony pendant.\n\n\"Be calm,\" Hyaloclast said. \"For once, we have an advantage.\"\n\nLamprophyre paused with the pendant halfway to her mouth. \"We do?\"\n\n\"Two advantages, one more dubious than the other.\" Hyaloclast took a few steps away from the dead dragon. \"For one, I'm told the human adepts in Tanajital and other large cities have artifacts that allow them to see things at a farther distance than the eye can manage, even the dragon eye. They're engaged in searching out Sardonyx's flight so they can follow them as they move. They may already have spotted her.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026actually, I hadn't remembered that. I've seen some of those artifacts work. What's the other advantage?\"\n\nHyaloclast stopped and looked up at the sky. The sun was setting, and in the east, the stars were out, barely dimmed by the crescent of the new moon. \"The human god Jiwanyil has given dozens of prophecies indicating which cities are in danger. So far, every one of those prophecies has proved correct. In several cases, the news of the prophecy came in time for the town to evacuate.\"\n\n\"Stones take Jiwanyil and his damn prophecies,\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. \"He's a fraud, Hyaloclast! He gave those ecclesiasts a prophecy that would have put them on Mother Stone instead of Rokshan and me. He wanted Sardonyx freed, and now he's protecting humans from the consequences? I don't understand it at all!\"\n\n\"Neither do I, but we are severely outmatched by Sardonyx,\" Hyaloclast said grimly, \"and I will take any advantage we're given.\" Her mouth went thin and straight in a frustrated grimace. \"What else did the male think?\"\n\n\"The scouts. They're looking for the capital\u2014maybe more capitals than just Tanajital. You heard him say they thought they were wiping out important cities, cities they remembered, but some of them are gone and others are much smaller. I guess it makes sense that Hamadri was never rebuilt to its former size.\"\n\n\"I take it you're familiar with that city.\"\n\n\"It was one of the clues that led to discovering the truth about the Great Cataclysm.\" Lamprophyre looked past Hyaloclast at Shurtak's body. \"What do we do with him?\"\n\n\"Bury him far from the city,\" Hyaloclast said with a grimace. \"Then I suppose we bury our own dead as well. Only seven this time. It infuriates me that I can be grateful over any number of dragon deaths, so long as it's fewer than before.\"\n\n\"I suppose carrying them to Mother Stone is pointless.\"\n\nHyaloclast nodded. \"I left it to the flight to decide. They were all in agreement that it would be a betrayal of our dead's spirits to put their bodies there, now that we know it was never anything but a prison. But we cannot simply leave them to rot beneath the sky.\"\n\n\"That's how I feel.\" Lamprophyre realized she still held the pendant. \"I need to talk to Rokshan. He'll probably have to go back to Tanajital. Do you mind if I don't stay?\"\n\nHyaloclast waved a weary hand at her. \"Go. Stay safe. Tell us if anything changes.\"\n\nLamprophyre wasn't sure what Hyaloclast meant, but she nodded and flew off southward, following the Sonti River. She would talk to Rokshan on the way, and take comfort in his strength. It was far better than dwelling on death.\n\nRokshan was waiting for her in the coliseum when she arrived, feeling bone-weary and ready for something to eat. She smelled cooked cow as she descended and found her mate sitting on the edge of a wagon, eating steak, next to a butchered, cooked cow that steamed in the cool darkness. \"Ohhh,\" she breathed. \"I have never loved you more than I do right now.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I thought you probably wouldn't have eaten. We have some time for food.\"\n\nLamprophyre tore into the cow and licked up warm juices running down her chin. She'd have sworn she didn't have an appetite before smelling the cow. \"Are you finished here, then?\"\n\n\"I still have work to do. They need direction and a temporary reassigning of duties. I'm afraid Commander Vriski is one of those extremely competent leaders who's bad at delegating.\" Rokshan took another bite of steak. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nShe'd told him the basics of what had happened at Manjaret that afternoon. \"Right now I'm miserable over the failure of the pyrite weapons. It really is almost worse to know they can kill a dragon, but they just aren't mobile enough.\"\n\n\"It's something the Army can work on. Don't fall into despair, sweetheart. You learned important things today.\" Rokshan leaned against her flank. \"Will you be all right to fly in the morning?\"\n\n\"Are you sure we can't leave tonight? I don't want to stay here overnight. Sunital isn't built to accommodate dragons, and I miss the embassy.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, but by the time I'm finished, it could be after midnight, and the moon sets early. I don't want to risk it.\" Rokshan set his plate aside and stretched. \"And we left the harness in the capital.\"\n\n\"You make sense,\" Lamprophyre said with a scowl. \"All right. I suppose I have to sleep in the coliseum?\"\n\n\"There's really nowhere else, unless you want to go outside the city.\" Rokshan put a hand on her arm. \"We can leave at first light, if that helps.\"\n\nLamprophyre took another bite rather than respond, not wanting her bad mood to overwhelm her or spill over onto Rokshan. A handful of soldiers entered the coliseum then, and she watched him talk to them in idle curiosity. What a strange way to live, being in such danger of conflict you needed a whole subset of society dedicated to attacking others and defending against attacks in turn. And yet it was something Rokshan was naturally good at. Fortunately, he was good at many things, because how sad if you had a talent for something that didn't exist in your society?\n\nFinally full, she pushed the carcass away and stood. Almost everyone had left the coliseum, taking the lights with them, and she found a quiet corner and settled in to sleep. A flutter of wings swept past her, startling her, but it was only an owl out hunting. She hadn't realized owls hunted in the city. She yawned, tucked her head into her chest, and fell asleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "She woke at first light, a little later than she'd hoped because the walls of the coliseum made dawn come later. Rokshan wasn't there. The coliseum was empty and smelled of dust and dead earth rather than cooked meat. Once more she suppressed irritation. She shouldn't expect Sunital's military to know she was awake and immediately provide food.\n\nShe got up and prowled to the entrance, which was too low for a dragon to fit through. Outside, the streets already bustled with wagons and handcarts hauling produce and meats to the Sunital city markets. The smell of freshly butchered meat roused her hunger. She retreated a few paces and breathed on the green chalcedony pendant. \"Rokshan, where are you?\" she said.\n\nRokshan didn't immediately respond. She was about to speak again when he said, \"Lamprophyre. I'm sorry, I overslept.\"\n\n\"It's all right. I'm just hungry and that instinct is at war with my desire to get back to Tanajital. What should I do?\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I'll be there in a few minutes.\"\n\nIt was more than a few minutes before Rokshan arrived behind another wagon carrying a couple of cooked sheep. He had bread that smelled of sharp, creamy cheese wrapped in a napkin and was biting into the folded-over bread as he walked. \"Eat up,\" he said. \"We'll leave when you're finished.\"\n\nLamprophyre had never eaten so fast. She wondered in passing why she was so eager to get back to the capital. It wasn't as if it was home, though she was certainly fonder of it than she was of any other human city. And it wasn't as if she was afraid of Sardonyx's dragons attacking Sunital, because she knew now she could defend herself against them. No, it was just that she felt more confident there, surrounded by her clutch. Surely they hadn't gone into battle? There were stories of clutchmates knowing instinctively when bad things happened to each other, but Lamprophyre didn't believe those were anything but fantasy. So if something did happen\u2014if one of them were hurt or killed\u2014she was too far away to be told about it. She wanted to be safely with them again.\n\nWith Rokshan seated behind her shoulders, she soon left Sunital behind, soaring northwestward. The great plains between the two cities lay smooth and yellow-gold in the wintry sunlight. South were the hills that grew into the mountainous border with Sachetan; north was the enormous forest through which the Green River rolled. The river was invisible at this distance, but would eventually come into sight as a gray ribbon unreeling from its source deep within the dragons' mountains.\n\nShe remembered the first time she'd seen the river with Rokshan, how she'd wondered why it was called Green when it was gray-blue like every other river. Now she thought about the Sonti River and the lake where it terminated. \"Who is Sonti?\" she asked.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The river. Was it named for someone named Sonti?\"\n\n\"Oh. I suppose so. That name is older than the catastrophe, so who knows who it really was?\" Rokshan leaned forward. \"It's so quiet up here. No other dragons, no birds, even. We might as well be the only two people in the world.\"\n\nLamprophyre agreed. \"It's so peaceful.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"That would be the perfect time for something to attack us.\"\n\nLamprophyre's head swung around, searching the sky. She relaxed. \"There's no one around.\"\n\n\"I know. It was just a thought.\" He patted her neck. \"Today, will you come with me to talk to my parents? I intend to tell them about us.\"\n\n\"Now?\" Lamprophyre said, alarmed. \"Is this really the time, with a war going on?\"\n\n\"There's never going to be a perfect time. And I want to get it over with.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart beat faster. \"I\u2026suppose.\"\n\n\"I could tell them by myself, if you're afraid.\"\n\n\"Afraid? I'm not afraid! I might feel some minor trepidation.\" It wasn't fear. It was guilt. She knew this was Rokshan's decision, but he'd made it for her sake as well as his own, and she didn't want to see the look in his mother's eye when she realized her youngest son was in love with a dragon and wanted to change his species.\n\n\"You still feel guilty, don't you,\" Rokshan said.\n\nRokshan was too damn perceptive. \"Suppose I do. I know it's not rational.\"\n\n\"Sweetheart, it will be all right. My parents are not going to blame you. They might blame me for not having the decency to fall in love with a human woman, but they know how many of my relationships with women have ended badly. They might even be relieved.\"\n\nThat was a possibility Lamprophyre hadn't entertained. \"At least I haven't tricked you into marrying me.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Don't worry about it. Think instead of how nice it will be not to have to keep this secret from people I care about.\"\n\nBelow, the gray streak of the Green River appeared in the distance. Lamprophyre banked to follow it north. \"You're right,\" she said. \"That, I can look forward to.\"\n\nThey flew in silence the rest of the way, until the walls of Tanajital loomed before them. \"The palace?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"The training grounds,\" Rokshan replied. \"I have to report to Sajan.\"\n\nLamprophyre dutifully swept low over the streets in the direction of the training grounds. She flew over the warehouses, but saw none of her clutch there. Disappointed, she focused on her destination. They were probably all running errands for Sajan, and maybe some of them were with him now.\n\nShe coursed over the palace and coasted to a running stop on the training grounds. She'd been right: Flint and Dolomite were there, as were Sajan, Tekentriya, and a couple of soldiers in captain's insignia. Flint and Dolomite's thoughts were concerned, and Flint also sounded a little embarrassed, the kind of embarrassment that results from listening to other people argue in public. Curious, she crouched to let Rokshan down, then walked forward to join her clutchmates.\n\n\"My people are not soldiers,\" Tekentriya was saying, \"and I refuse to allow you to co-opt them as if they were cattle.\"\n\n\"I didn't say that, your highness,\" Sajan said, his voice taut with tension. \"But your spies\u2014\"\n\n\"My agents. Spying is for amateurs.\"\n\n\"Your agents, then. They're admirably suited for the task I have in mind, more so than any soldier.\"\n\n\"And what task is that?\"\n\nSajan glanced at Rokshan, nodded briefly to acknowledge his presence, and returned his attention to Tekentriya. \"The military's adepts haven't yet successfully managed to locate Sardonyx's forces using scrying artifacts. Thanks to the many ecclesiasts possessed of prophecies, we have some warning as to which cities will be struck, but not when. I need eyes in the field to track down those enemy dragons and send word when they spot them.\"\n\nTekentriya shook her head. \"You have soldiers for that.\"\n\nSajan glared at her. \"We have limited reconnaissance capabilities because you, your highness, convinced his majesty that there was no point in the military duplicating your efforts. You've guaranteed we need to depend on you. I'm asking you to fulfill your end of the bargain.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened to Tekentriya's thoughts, which were as angry as ever, but also tinged with embarrassment. Did tell him that, Tekentriya thought. No evidence of her inner turmoil showed on her face. \"Very well,\" she said. \"I'll send a message to the man who coordinates our internal information gathering network. It will take a few days\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't have a few days!\" one of the captains said. \"We're all on edge waiting for those dragons to appear on the horizon\u2014we need to know where they are!\"\n\nTekentriya ignored his outburst. \"Two or three days,\" she said. \"He moves between locations, and it will take time for a messenger to reach him.\"\n\n\"But you do know where he is,\" Sajan said.\n\n\"I know where all my people are.\" Tekentriya made it sound like this was so obvious he should be the one embarrassed.\n\n\"Then why don't you take the message yourself?\" Sajan asked. He was trying and failing to sound reasonable.\n\nTekentriya gave him a look that should have fried the hair from his scalp. \"I don't ride,\" she said.\n\n\"Why not?\" Dolomite asked.\n\nEveryone jumped, including Lamprophyre, who'd almost forgotten her clutchmates were there, they'd been so still. \"Dolomite,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Oh. It's your leg,\" Dolomite went on, ignoring Lamprophyre. \"If that's what worries you, a dragon might be able to carry you. We're shaped much differently than horses.\"\n\nTekentriya turned her baleful glare on Dolomite. \"I'm afraid it's impossible,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't think so. I've been watching how you walk, and I think you might fit\u2014I don't know how comfortable it would be, but it wouldn't have to be a long flight.\" Dolomite flexed his wings, creating a downdraft that ruffled the humans' hair.\n\nThe glare was fading from Tekentriya's face, which was turning red. \"I\u2026can't,\" she said, sounding as if the words were being wrung out of her. \"My hip doesn't move properly.\"\n\n\"Oh, but that's what makes me certain it will work,\" Dolomite said. \"Your hip is already at the right angle.\" He knelt low before her. \"Climb up and see.\"\n\nFlint sucked in a breath. Lamprophyre couldn't stop staring at Tekentriya, who at any minute was going to blast Dolomite for his impudence, and then Dolomite's feelings would be hurt, and Lamprophyre wasn't sure she could stop herself shouting at Tekentriya for being a cast-iron bitch, or whatever it was Rokshan always called her.\n\nTekentriya, for her part, stared at Dolomite. The redness in her cheeks faded. \"Climb,\" she said. She took a few awkward steps to his side. Dolomite leaned over so his ruff was easy to grab. She put her hand on his side, then used both hands to grab his ruff and haul herself up, her bad leg dangling. With some effort, she slung her good leg across his neck and settled herself into the notch, then used her hands to shift her bad leg forward.\n\nThen she sat perfectly still. Lamprophyre, still listening to her thoughts, heard nothing but a distant sense of wonder\u2014not at being perched on a dragon's shoulders, not at having managed to climb up, but at how in that position, with her hips wide and her legs crooked naturally, she felt, for the first time in over five years, no pain.\n\n\"You see? It's not awful,\" Dolomite said.\n\n\"No,\" Tekentriya said in a quiet voice Lamprophyre couldn't believe belonged to the abrasive princess. \"No, it's not.\"\n\n\"Then we can go? I'd be happy to take you, because I think you'll enjoy flying,\" Dolomite said.\n\nTekentriya lowered her head and put her hand on her damaged hip, then gripped Dolomite's ruff. \"Do you know where Umrit is? We'll start there.\"\n\n\"I do. Let's hurry, shall we? It sounds as if General Sajan wants us to be quick. Goodbye, Lamprophyre.\" Dolomite rose with a great flapping of wings and soared off southward.\n\n\"Stones,\" Flint said. \"Did that just happen?\"\n\n\"And did you\u2014\" In time, Lamprophyre remembered not to give away the dragons' ability to hear thoughts. \"She didn't tear him apart.\"\n\n\"Better him than me,\" one of the captains murmured.\n\n\"Show some respect,\" Sajan said. \"Rokshan, I want to know what happened in Sunital. Ambassador, thank you for your assistance. I hear you fought in Manjaret. Thank you for that, too.\"\n\n\"I\u2026yes, General Sajan.\" She couldn't bring herself to say it was my pleasure. That was definitely not true.\n\n\"Lamprophyre, why don't you go back to the embassy, and I'll join you later,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"All right. What are you doing here?\" she asked Flint.\n\n\"I have been taking those chalcedony artifacts all over Gonjiri,\" Flint said, \"and was just reporting in. Dolomite, too.\" He yawned. \"I'm ready for a rest.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt fresh and ready to fly some more, but without Rokshan, that seemed pointless. \"I have to tell you what happened in Manjaret, but it can wait until afternoon. Go get some sleep. I'll join you later.\"\n\nShe flew lazily back to the embassy, which was empty for once, all except for Depik's horrible hollow despairing thoughts as he lay in his house, wakeful and miserable. Lamprophyre never knew what to do when his illness took him, and she was too big to fit in his house anyway, so she blocked his thoughts out, feeling it was a courtesy she owed him. She settled inside the hall, hung the chalcedony pendants on their pegs, and idly picked over her books. Nothing appealed to her. Maybe napping was the only option left. That felt so self-indulgent when there were dragons out there intent on destruction.\n\nShe was drawing a map of Gonjiri from memory on one of her slates, trying to see a pattern in Sardonyx's attacks, when she heard someone coming across the courtyard. It was Dharan. A jolt of excitement went through her. \"Did you read Evart's notes?\" she asked before he was halfway to her. \"Rokshan said he sent them to you.\"\n\n\"Good morning to you, too,\" Dharan said. \"I did. But don't get too excited. I'm not sure how helpful they are.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled back on her haunches. \"You have to have learned something.\"\n\n\"I did, but I'm not an adept. Some of what he wrote was meaningless even decoded.\" Dharan sat beside her and took the scribbled-on blank book out of his shirt. \"Meaningless to me, anyway. The clear part is that for a human to use it, the transformation artifact has to work in conjunction with a memory enhancing artifact. Evart tried dozens of those. All of them failed.\"\n\n\"It couldn't have been all of them, or he couldn't have transformed me.\"\n\n\"That's true. All right, all but one of them failed. The problem is that he didn't keep detailed notes about his experiments.\" Dharan flipped through the book's pages. \"For example, he writes here that he used a blue sapphire\u2014I don't know why he had to specify the color\u2014\"\n\n\"Sapphire comes in more colors than just blue.\"\n\n\"Oh. Anyway, he used a blue sapphire to enhance his memory, and then he simply writes that it didn't work. No details about what exactly he did with the sapphire.\" Dharan closed the book with a snap. \"So there's two things. One, we have a list of a lot of stones that didn't work.\"\n\n\"That's progress.\"\n\nDharan shook his head and held up a second finger. \"Two, we have no idea if it was his experiment rather than the stone that failed. It's possible, from what little I know of magic, that one of those stones might have worked if he'd used it properly.\"\n\n\"And now I'm discouraged again.\"\n\n\"Don't be. I only say that because it's a possibility we should keep in mind. What we do have is the final stone he used. The one that worked.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up indignantly. \"You could have started with that!\"\n\n\"Sorry. Again, I'm not sure how helpful that is. He says only that he used sodalite wrapped in gold wire, and that's the end of the book. There are more pages left, so that tells me it's probably the artifact that worked.\"\n\n\"I know gold enhances the magic of a stone.\" Lamprophyre couldn't sit still any longer. She rose and paced a few steps, keeping her tail well away from Dharan. \"But sodalite doesn't enhance memory, it makes you more observant. At least, that's what my research says. I still don't know as much about the powers of stones as an adept.\"\n\n\"Maybe noticing tiny details is enough,\" Dharan said. \"Maybe it's not about holding a shape in memory.\"\n\n\"But Hyaloclast was very certain that's how it worked. Even the adept she got our serpentine artifact from did it that way.\"\n\n\"I didn't know that,\" Dharan said. \"I thought the problem was a human doesn't have a good enough memory to use the artifact.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"Not good enough to transform something as complicated as a dragon, or a human. The adept who showed her how the artifact worked transformed a bird into another kind of bird. Much simpler.\"\n\n\"Oh. I was excited there for a minute.\" Dharan restlessly tapped the second book against his palm. \"Well, I'm convinced Evart used this sodalite and gold artifact in conjunction with the serpentine stone to transform you, with the memory of his daughter as the model. We just need to figure out how.\"\n\n\"And find a model for Rokshan.\" Lamprophyre blew out a blob of smoke. It drifted up and out through one of the windows. \"It's progress. And his notes tell us more about Sardonyx, too.\"\n\n\"Did you read all of it?\" Dharan asked.\n\n\"About half of it. Evart was obscure on purpose. I think he was afraid Sardonyx could see through his eyes and read what he was writing. You know he believed she was a male adept, right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, he knew she was trapped, or bound, and that she had an enemy who was even more powerful. Though some of the time, what he said about that enemy seemed to refer to me. And maybe the rest of the book has more detail about the real 'enemy.' If we could find out who that was, maybe he or she would be on our side.\"\n\n\"That's interesting,\" Dharan said. \"I don't suppose you have that book now?\"\n\n\"No, Rokshan still has it.\" Lamprophyre blew out an impatient blob of smoke and watch it drift away and out through one of the windows. \"That could be so important!\"\n\n\"I take it the war isn't going well.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure it's really a war if it's just Sardonyx occasionally attacking a city that we're almost entirely incapable of defending. We can't do damage to her dragons unless we get lucky.\" She remembered slashing the throat of the dragon in Manjaret and was disturbed to find the memory didn't bother her. She'd saved Corundum's life as well as her own, but even so, she'd have thought taking a dragon's life would affect her more. Maybe the aftereffects were waiting for a quiet moment to leap on her.\n\nDharan stood to look at the map she'd drawn. \"This is her progress?\"\n\n\"As much as I know, yes.\" Lamprophyre pointed at Manjaret. \"After they attacked here, they were going to move south and west. We know they started by attacking the cities they remembered, like Hamadri, but they also have scouts flying around looking for new and better targets.\" She sighed, and another smoke puff escaped her lips. \"I don't know what we can do.\"\n\n\"I can't believe I'm saying this,\" Dharan said, \"but Jiwanyil's prophecies have made a difference. I've heard people in at least five towns escaped before Sardonyx attacked.\"\n\n\"Don't defend him,\" Lamprophyre said bitterly. \"You were right. He's not a god.\"\n\nDharan raised an eyebrow. \"I know I'm more or less a heathen, but I don't know that I've ever said he wasn't a god.\"\n\n\"Then let me tell you what Rokshan and I found on Mother Stone,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nShe told him all the details, everything her draconic memory wouldn't let her forget, and watched his face grow still and expressionless. She finished with, \"I don't understand why he would do all of that. Maybe he's mad. Maybe his prophecies now are part of a plan to see humanity destroyed. It just doesn't make sense.\"\n\nDharan's eyes were unfocused, as if he were looking at some distant horizon. \"I'm not sure,\" he said. \"Maybe you're looking at it in reverse.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\nHe focused on her. \"Maybe freeing Sardonyx was part of saving humanity.\"\n\n\"That's insane,\" Lamprophyre blurted out. \"I'm sorry, Dharan, but Sardonyx has already killed hundreds of people in those smaller towns where no one knew to flee. Imprisoning her kept humanity safe for a thousand years. And all the dragons she's killed\u2014how can this be a good thing?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Dharan said, his voice sounding distant the way it did when he was thinking hard. \"I need that book Rokshan has.\"\n\n\"Take it. Maybe you'll see something we haven't.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre.\" Rokshan's voice came from the wall.\n\nLamprophyre realized the green chalcedony pendant had misted over. She picked it up. \"Rokshan?\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm at the embassy with Dharan. He wants to read Evart's book.\"\n\n\"Fine. That's fine.\" Rokshan sounded distracted. \"Wait there for me, and put the harness on. We have to leave immediately.\"\n\n\"Leave? For where?\" Yet another messenger run.\n\n\"For Fanishkor. The Archprelate was possessed of a prophecy.\" Now Rokshan sounded breathless, like he was running. \"Sardonyx is on her way to their capital right now.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Fifty beats later, Rokshan ran into the courtyard and came to a stop outside the embassy, breathing hard. \"Here,\" he said, thrusting the book at Dharan. \"Take care of it. Lamprophyre, we have to go now.\"\n\n\"But what can we do?\" Lamprophyre said even as she bent to let Rokshan climb up into the saddle. \"Hyaloclast said the flight is already on the way.\"\n\n\"Go, go!\" Rokshan shouted, and Lamprophyre, startled, leaped into the air and ascended almost vertically until she rose above the highest towers. She knew nothing of Leksital, the Fanishkorite capital, except that it was west and a little south of Tanajital, so she flew westward, burning with questions.\n\n\"Why are we doing this?\" she demanded when they'd left Tanajital behind. \"Even if we beat Sardonyx there, there's nothing the two of us can do against her dragons except bleed and die.\"\n\n\"This isn't about fighting,\" Rokshan said. \"Leksital has no pyrite weapons. No dragons have ever set foot in the city. They're completely defenseless. And we have no idea if Jiwanyil, whatever he is, has bothered to warn them Sardonyx is coming. We have to get them to evacuate the city, and since they still aren't in communication with Gonjiri, you and I are the fastest way to make that happen. We're closer than Hyaloclast and you're faster than any of Sardonyx's people.\"\n\n\"I should have known you'd care about the fate of strangers,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan laughed and patted her neck. \"It's probably a fool's errand, but I couldn't live with myself if we didn't at least try. Head a little more south. It's maybe three thousand beats' journey? Something close to that, anyway.\"\n\n\"If I could go faster\u2014but you said it makes you feel like your eyeballs are trying to escape your head.\"\n\nShe felt Rokshan shift in the saddle. \"I have a solution,\" he said. \"Glass eyepieces. You\u2014no, you can't see me from there. Don't worry about it. Go as fast as you can.\"\n\nLamprophyre tried to look over her shoulder anyway. She couldn't imagine what he was talking about. Well, if he knew what he was doing\u2026 She increased her speed, pushing herself until they were skimming along nearly at her maximum speed. For the first time in days, she felt powerful, ready to take on the world. Sardonyx would not destroy the people of Leksital, not if Lamprophyre and Rokshan could stop her. And stop her they would.\n\nSpeaking at that speed was impossible. Lamprophyre occupied the time by thinking over what Dharan had said and what little Rokshan had read to her of the book. Somehow, Evart had used a sodalite artifact to control the serpentine stone and transform her. Lamprophyre knew, thanks to Hyaloclast transforming her back, that it didn't take an adept to use the serpentine artifact. But maybe it took an adept to understand how it worked in the first place. She felt so muddled. It was time to take the problem to an adept. And the only adept who could help was, unfortunately, Manishi.\n\nLamprophyre didn't want to ask for Manishi's help again. They were already in debt to her more than Lamprophyre felt comfortable with, including the promise of a dragon eggshell. And the last time Manishi had helped them, she'd lost her hand. But Manishi already knew half the secret\u2014that Lamprophyre had been temporarily human\u2014and that put her halfway to understanding the rest, unlike every other adept in Tanajital.\n\nBut was this really the time to worry about transforming Rokshan? He was needed as a commander, and while he could go on being a commander as a dragon, Lamprophyre couldn't help thinking of how hard it would be to explain the situation to everyone, particularly those he had authority over. Maybe they needed to stop focusing on that problem until Sardonyx was dealt with. Lamprophyre refused to consider that they might lose. That was defeatist, and she'd learned from Rokshan that giving up when you hadn't been beaten guaranteed you would lose the war.\n\nShe thought about Sardonyx instead. Someone had kept her and her dragons imprisoned all those years. There was no evidence that that person wanted her freed. So why had there been a release clause, so to speak, built into that trap? Because Jiwanyil had been clear that humans on Mother Stone was something he'd anticipated. Something that was part of an 'old contract.' It made no sense. But it did give Lamprophyre hope that maybe, somewhere in the world, was a power greater than Sardonyx that might be willing to work with humans to defeat her. Of course, she had no idea who or where that power was, but the possibility made her feel better about the chance that she was now racing toward her doom.\n\nThe plains west of Gonjiri turned into rolling hills, and those grew steeper until they reminded Lamprophyre of the foothills near her rocky home. They swept over villages nestled into the valleys and larger towns sprawling across the hills. Most of the hills bore the marks of regular tilling, which intrigued Lamprophyre. She didn't know how crops could grow on a hillside, and she wished she could ask Rokshan about it.\n\nAhead, a dark blotch backed up against one of the steeper, taller hills resolved into a walled city, not as large as Tanajital and less towering. It still looked intimidating, probably because its walls were of forbidding black basalt thicker than Tanajital's rosy-gold granite. Its position against its hill made Lamprophyre think of a dragon father crouched in his cave, guarding his dragonet\u2014though nothing preyed on dragons but other dragons, so the image was more frightening than she'd first realized.\n\nShe slowed in her approach and called out over the wind, \"What now? Will they shoot at us?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Rokshan shouted back. \"But let's swing wide around the city and see if there's an obvious place to land. If we do that without attacking, that should tell them we're harmless.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\nShe swung lower and prepared to circle above the city. Now that she was close, she could see movement outside the walls and around the gap to the south that was an enormous gate, at the moment wide open. Curious, she dropped down for a better look. A road of round-topped stones pressed deep into the earth led to the gate, and people thronged it, all headed for the city.\n\nIt took Lamprophyre a few beats to identify what felt wrong about the scene, and then she realized there were no wagons. Tanajital's southeastern gate, which accepted trade from Sunital and Prabat and Manjaret and all the other eastern cities, was always packed with wagons bringing things to sell at Tanajital's markets. There also weren't any large animals, though maybe Leksital didn't allow animals to be brought in by the main gate. Lamprophyre looked. There was another gate to the west, but it was closed, and there were men in uniform guarding it. Odd.\n\n\"What are all those people doing?\" she asked.\n\nRokshan was leaning over her right side. \"I don't know. But if they were warned somehow, and they think they'll be safe inside the city, this is going to be harder than I thought.\"\n\nNone of the men and women pressing forward to the gate did more than glance in their direction. The soldiers on the western gate watched them, but didn't shoot. That relieved Lamprophyre's mind. She banked to avoid the protective hill and shot around to the southern gate again, dropping lower. \"I see the king's palace,\" she said. \"I think it's the king's palace. It's got gold roofs like the one in Tanajital.\"\n\n\"There's a field north of that I think we can land in,\" Rokshan said. \"It's close to the palace, but not so close they'll feel like we're attacking them.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and turned north. Leksital didn't have the towering, gold-or copper-topped spires of Tanajital; its buildings were all low to the ground and roofed in colored slate, gray or deep blue or mossy green. There were trees everywhere, which confused Lamprophyre. Trees all in one place to make a parkland, she understood, but trees growing beside the streets or behind the larger houses made no sense.\n\nThe field Rokshan had pointed out had a row of trees defining its northern edge and was surrounded by streets on the other three sides. Lamprophyre couldn't make out what it was used for. It was completely empty and so, as she landed, were the streets. People screamed and ran at her appearance, and while it saddened her\u2014she hadn't unintentionally frightened a human in months\u2014it also reassured her that she wasn't invisible. The non-reactions of the people at the gate had worried her.\n\nShe crouched for Rokshan to leap down and looked around. The golden roofs of the palace rose above a handful of shorter buildings that lay just the other side of the street on the field's southern border. \"Well?\" she asked. \"We need to speak to the king. I don't want\u2014\"\n\nThe blue chalcedony pendant misted over. \"Lamprophyre, where are you?\" Hyaloclast said.\n\n\"I'll go to the palace,\" Rokshan said. He pressed something cold and flexible into her hand and ran off without waiting for her assent.\n\nLamprophyre took the pendant in her other hand and said, \"Rokshan and I just reached Leksital. Where are you?\"\n\n\"About a thousand beats away. We can see Sardonyx's flight in the distance. We are faster than they, but they have enough of a lead that we won't reach them before they attack the city. You intend to evacuate? These hills will be the perfect hiding place for humans.\"\n\n\"That was my thought, too. Though if they don't leave soon, nothing will help.\" Lamprophyre gazed off after Rokshan, who'd crossed the street and disappeared between the buildings. \"Rokshan's gone to talk to the king. I wonder what he's like.\" She remembered Rokshan's analysis of King Damen after Chaaksha's party. Rokshan was very good with people, and he understood how they thought. If Damen really was afraid of dragons, he might not be willing to listen to her. She hoped he wouldn't renew his insistence that Rokshan marry Yalini.\n\n\"We are moving fast, and I have nearly the entire flight with me. The city may not need to hold out for more than a few hundred beats.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't point out that despite outnumbering Sardonyx's people, the flight was still made up of a lot of dragons who knew nothing about fighting. \"Does it feel strange to be defending a country that tried to steal an egg?\"\n\nShe heard Hyaloclast sigh. \"I find I can't stand by and let Sardonyx slaughter defenseless humans, even humans who are still technically our enemy. I must be going soft.\"\n\n\"No, just honorable,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Maybe we'll get that alliance I wanted, after all.\"\n\n\"Let us see first if Sardonyx leaves us anything alive to ally with,\" Hyaloclast said, and the pendant cleared. Lamprophyre released it to swing against her chest and settled on her haunches to wait.\n\nShe looked at the thing Rokshan had given her. It was two glass circles set into flexible leather cups, joined by a very short strap and with a couple of longer straps dangling off the sides of the cups. Lamprophyre sniffed it; it smelled of leather and Rokshan's familiar musky scent and human sweat. She held it up and looked through one of the glass circles, which were as clear as human ingenuity could make glass. If she held them right, she could picture the cups fitting over each of Rokshan's eyes, with the long straps holding them close to his head. This would definitely protect his eyes from the wind. Lamprophyre couldn't wait to see him wearing them.\n\nIt wasn't long before Rokshan returned, walking this time beside a very tall, very fat man who reminded Lamprophyre of the Second Ecclesiast, the representative of Katayan. Unlike that ecclesiast, who moved ponderously and always gave the impression of a lumbering ox, this man moved as swiftly as Rokshan despite his size. He wore a loose white shirt with a deep V-neck and loose trousers with legs wide enough Lamprophyre at first thought they were a skirt, and his black hair, while still short, was long enough that the breezes disordered it.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said when they neared her, \"this is Akuti, King Damen's high chancellor. Akuti, Lamprophyre is the daughter of the dragon queen, Hyaloclast, and her representative to Gonjiri.\"\n\nAkuti bowed. \"It's an honor,\" he said, bowing low enough Lamprophyre felt sure he meant what he said. His voice was deep and rich and made Lamprophyre think of molten ore.\n\n\"Thank you for your welcome,\" Lamprophyre said, bowing in return. \"Did Rokshan explain why we came?\"\n\nAkuti's thoughts, which had been as smooth as his voice, sharpened, and he thought think they're our saviors, damn them. Lamprophyre managed not to let her astonishment show. It was not at all what she'd expected.\n\n\"The prince was good enough to inform us, yes,\" Akuti said. Now his voice sounded chilly as well as rich. \"But, as I told him, there's no need. We will not evacuate the city.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up in alarm. \"High chancellor, maybe you don't understand,\" she said, hoping she sounded reasonable and not shrill. \"There are two hundred dragons headed this way, intent on destroying your city. They wield fire and acid, and they're almost indestructible. There is no way humans can defend against them. Your only hope is to flee into the hills and hide.\"\n\n\"Your concern is touching,\" Akuti said. \"And misplaced. I thought dragons weren't interested in the fate of Fanishkor. Or am I wrong, and you've decided to ally with us?\"\n\n\"We don't have to be your allies to care about what happens to you,\" Lamprophyre said, irritation flowering within her. \"Hyaloclast is following Sardonyx\u2014the leader of those enemy dragons\u2014and she and the flight will do their best to distract them while you go. But you really do have to go now.\"\n\n\"We will not.\" Akuti delivered this statement with the certainty of a king. Lamprophyre briefly wondered how much power this man had. \"Jiwanyil has told us what we must do in the face of this attack. We are to shelter within Leksital's walls and wait.\"\n\n\"High chancellor, that will be fatal,\" Rokshan began.\n\nAkuti turned on him. \"We're not interested in Gonjirian opinions,\" he said. \"You rejected our overtures of peace. I question why you're so intent on seeing us disregard Jiwanyil's prophecy. Do you want us dead so badly?\"\n\nRokshan's hand clenched. \"That's a vile accusation,\" he said.\n\n\"Then I apologize. We appreciate that you made such an effort to reach us.\" Akuti bowed again. \"But we know what we must do.\"\n\nLamprophyre turned away, infuriated. A small black cloud caught her eye in passing. A black cloud in a clear blue sky. She swung around and pointed. \"They're almost here,\" she said. \"It's too late.\"\n\n\"You're welcome to stay,\" Akuti said, \"and partake of Jiwanyil's protection.\" Lamprophyre heard him think might as well learn the truth now, can't hide it anymore. She recalled what Yalini had said to Rokshan about Fanishkor's secret\u2014something about any attacker getting a surprise? Akuti knew something he wasn't telling.\n\n\"We'll stay,\" she said, \"and if we have to defend the city, we'll do that too.\"\n\nAnother of those sharp, irritated thoughts crossed Akuti's mind, this one wordless. He smiled, and bowed. \"I'm afraid we have nowhere in the palace to fit you, my lady. And I imagine the prince would prefer to stay with you. But my place is at his majesty's side, so if you'll excuse me?\" He turned and walked away before Rokshan could reply.\n\nRokshan said his favorite curse word, the one he wouldn't tell her the meaning of. \"I know what that one means now,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It means when a man and a woman\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll never use that word again,\" Rokshan said. He turned to look at Sardonyx's oncoming flight. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"He was thinking about something Fanishkor has kept secret,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Isn't that what Yalini said, too?\"\n\n\"Something that can fight off a hundred evil dragons?\" Rokshan said. \"We need to get out of here. We can fly wide around them and join Hyaloclast.\"\n\n\"There is no way I'm taking you into combat,\" Lamprophyre said. \"None. If we leave, we're going back to Tanajital, and I can't bear doing that while all my friends are here, fighting and maybe dying. I think we should stay here and see what has Akuti so confident. He didn't strike me as particularly devout.\"\n\nRokshan climbed up into the saddle. \"All right. But be ready to leave when the city goes up in flames, all right?\"\n\nThey sat and watched as the cloud grew and became a mass of bird-sized specks. Then it was a mass of tiny dragons that grew and grew until individuals were clearly obvious. Sardonyx flew at the head of the flight, her bright red scales dusted with gold catching the midafternoon light. Lamprophyre's nerves were taut, twisted nearly to breaking. Having Rokshan perched on her shoulders made her even more afraid. She couldn't help picturing herself the target of a stream of fire or a spray of acid that enveloped her helpless mate. It made her even more determined to see him transformed and invulnerable.\n\nThe dragons flew on, unswerving, until the entire flight swept over Leksital and curved to follow the contours of its wall. Lamprophyre held her breath, waiting for the moment when they would dive, spitting out acid or breathing out fire. Ten more beats. Five beats.\n\nThey dove.\n\nThe precision of their timing, the sweep of their great wings, was beautiful and terrifying. Lamprophyre couldn't bear watching and she couldn't bring herself to look away. Twenty dragons split off from the main host, soaring toward the palace. Of course they would attack it first, with its gleaming golden roofs and the way it lay spread out, surrounded by trees, as if offering itself for immolation.\n\nIn perfect silence, those twenty females snapped their wings open to glide over the palace. Twenty mouths gaped open. Fire shot from twenty dragons.\n\nA shining orange-yellow dome sprang up two handspans from the highest roof. It spread in an instant to cover the city from wall to black basalt wall. The fire struck the dome, splashed like water against stone\u2014and vanished."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The dragons above floundered, apparently as surprised as Lamprophyre. They backwinged, struggled away from each other, and flapped wildly in all directions. One or two of them spat fire at the dome again. This time, Lamprophyre saw the orange-yellow glow brighten as the fire struck it and was dissipated just as before.\n\n\"Stones,\" she breathed. \"How did they manage that?\"\n\n\"Even I don't believe Jiwanyil is responsible for that,\" Rokshan said. \"It must be an artifact.\"\n\nAnother group of dragons, these male, swooped down in nearly as perfect a formation as the females'. Their acid sprays were ragged, not as well timed as the first blast of fire, but it didn't matter: the dome deflected the acid as easily as it had the fire. Now Sardonyx's perfect formations were completely disordered. Lamprophyre couldn't hear their voices at this distance, but she could see Sardonyx shouting at the others, chivvying them back into ranks, she thought.\n\n\"I wonder what happens if a dragon tries to go through that thing,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"I'm not interested in trying,\" Lamprophyre replied.\n\n\"Of course not. I was hoping one of them might.\"\n\nIt seemed none of Sardonyx's dragons wanted to try the experiment either. They tested the limits of the dome, attacking the walls, attacking the place where the dome met the walls, but nothing they did penetrated. Lamprophyre watched them fly about, looking increasingly frustrated, until some unseen signal gathered them together and sent them flying westward, with Sardonyx again in the lead.\n\n\"Hyaloclast will be here in a few beats,\" she told Rokshan. \"I think we need to find out if we can safely leave. I'll warn her.\"\n\n\"I'll ask,\" Rokshan said. \"And behave with suitable humility. Though we couldn't have known they were safe.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and picked up the pendant. It took only a handful of beats for Hyaloclast to respond. \"We saw them leave,\" she said. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Fanishkor has some kind of shield that deflects fire and acid,\" Lamprophyre told her. \"We don't know what it does to a physical body.\"\n\n\"We will land outside the city,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Come to us when you can. This changes everything.\"\n\nWhen Rokshan returned, he was alone. \"They say it doesn't stop anything more solid than a heavy mist,\" he said. \"Let's hope Sardonyx doesn't get the idea of dropping big rocks through it.\"\n\n\"Did they explain why the Stones they didn't tell anyone about it?\" Lamprophyre demanded. \"All our cities\u2014\"\n\n\"I asked to speak to Damen, but he wouldn't see me. Akuti said they are in the process of putting up shields like that one over all their major cities. He did not come right out and tell me they wouldn't give us the secret, just made a lot of noise about how their resources are stretched thin and of course their own people take precedence. Damn him.\"\n\n\"But he could tell us how it works! We have adepts who could build them for Gonjirian cities.\"\n\n\"He doesn't know how it works. Lamprophyre, this is politics at its worst. They'll wait until we're desperate, then offer the knowledge to us in exchange for crippling concessions. Damn, but I hate politics.\"\n\n\"Don't they care that people are dying?\"\n\nRokshan climbed into the saddle and settled himself. \"I doubt Damen cares if his own people are dying.\" He sighed. \"No. That's unfair. But I told you I think Damen is paranoid and doesn't believe other people aren't like him. And he hasn't seen the devastation those dragons leave behind. This is the first Fanishkorite city they've attacked. Maybe once they've destroyed a couple of his own villages, he'll change his mind.\"\n\nThe orange-yellow dome had faded to almost nothing, but Lamprophyre still cringed when she passed through it. It felt like nothing, not even traces of fire or acid. She flew high above Leksital anyway, searching the sky for signs of Sardonyx, and saw nothing. Breathing out in relief, she descended to join Hyaloclast and her flight, all of whom were spread out over the slopes east of the city.\n\n\"I feel no urgency to pursue Sardonyx deeper into Fanishkor,\" Hyaloclast said when Lamprophyre and Rokshan finished explaining what had happened. \"Particularly not if the king intends to behave so dishonorably. Let him keep his shields. We will return to Gonjiri and plan a different kind of defense.\"\n\n\"What kind?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nHyaloclast sighed. \"I have no idea,\" she said. \"I'm very tired from having crossed most of Gonjiri and half of Fanishkor, and grateful that we didn't have to fight a battle here. We will rest, and then we will sleep, and in the morning maybe something will have occurred to me.\"\n\n\"That's a very good plan,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll tell the Army's adepts what we observed of the shield. Maybe it will be enough to get them thinking in the right direction.\"\n\n\"Your constant optimism is an inspiration,\" Hyaloclast said. \"In the morning, then.\"\n\n\"Did Hyaloclast just give me a compliment?\" Rokshan said as they flew away.\n\n\"I think she's getting used to you,\" Lamprophyre said. \"If you were a dragon, she'd welcome you to the family with open arms.\"\n\n\"I'm relieved. She's terrifying.\" Rokshan leaned forward and hugged Lamprophyre's neck. \"Mother-in-law. How disturbing.\"\n\n\"I did say never to call her that to her face, right? I doubt her tolerance of you extends that far.\"\n\n\"I'm not insane. And I like my head where it is, thanks.\"\n\nThey returned to Tanajital a couple of thousand beats before nightfall. Lamprophyre decided to stop at the warehouses before going to the embassy for supper. Now that the terror of Sardonyx's attack was over, she found herself curious about what had happened with Dolomite and Tekentriya. She hoped Dolomite wasn't too miserable. There was no way his accord with the bitter princess could have lasted the length of a flight to Umrit, let alone much farther than that.\n\nTo her surprise and delight, all her clutchmates were present. She let Rokshan climb down and then hugged Orthoclase, who was nearest. \"I've been so worried the last few days,\" she said. \"All of us scattered across the country, and Sardonyx the Stones know where\u2026is there any way we can stay together for a while?\"\n\n\"I can try,\" Dolomite said, \"but Tekentriya has a lot of places she wants to go. But not until morning.\"\n\n\"Dolomite, you know you don't have to do as she says,\" Rokshan said. \"And don't put up with her rudeness.\"\n\nDolomite tilted his head in a curious way. \"She's not rude,\" he said. \"She's angry all the time because her body hurts and it doesn't move the way she wants it to. But I was right that flying is different. I'm not sure why she cried, if it stopped hurting. I don't understand humans sometimes. But I don't mind if she makes up reasons to go places.\"\n\nThe rest of them went silent. \"Dolomite,\" Lamprophyre said, then couldn't think of anything else to say.\n\nPorphyry cleared his throat. \"You may be the nicest person I know,\" he said, clapping his clutchmate on the shoulder.\n\n\"Am I?\" Dolomite sounded puzzled. \"Maybe. But there's\u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" someone said from behind Lamprophyre.\n\nShe turned, carefully lifting her tail because the speaker was human. He looked perfectly ordinary, though his clothes were rather fine, and Lamprophyre's understanding of human body language told her he was not at all afraid of the seven of them all looming over him.\n\nRokshan's head came up in surprise. \"Zekran,\" he said. \"What brings you here?\"\n\n\"Hello, Rokshan,\" the man said. Lamprophyre recognized him now. Zekran was Tekentriya's nonentity husband. She'd seen him a few times before her transformation and once or twice while she had a human body, but had never spoken to him. His thoughts were surprisingly calm and straightforward for someone so bland; she'd always assumed they would be as boring as he was.\n\nHer second surprise was the core of pain he carried deep within himself. She hadn't seen anything like it in anyone but Depik, who despite his growing confidence still felt fundamentally broken. Where it came from, she had no idea, but it changed the way she looked at him.\n\n\"Is something wrong?\" Rokshan asked. \"Or do you have a message?\" He sounded as if he was reaching for an explanation of why Zekran would have come all the way to the dragon warehouses when he'd never shown any interest in dragons before.\n\nZekran shook his head. He walked forward to face Dolomite. \"I would like to know,\" he said, still in that calm way, \"what you did to my wife.\"\n\n\"Is your wife Tekentriya?\" Dolomite shrugged. \"I didn't do anything. We flew to a few cities and she talked to people, and then we flew back. I left her at the palace\u2014did you think she was missing? Because we were gone longer than I expected. I'm sorry if you were worried.\"\n\nZekran shook his head again. \"You must have done something,\" he said. \"She was smiling. I can't remember the last time she smiled, certainly not the last time she smiled at me. She\u2026\" He glanced around, looked briefly at Rokshan, then returned his attention to Dolomite.\n\n\"I love her, you know,\" he said, as placidly as if he and Dolomite were the best of friends and the only ones present. \"I have only ever wanted her happiness. But after the accident, she changed. There was nothing I could do, and we both knew it. Today I saw the first hope I've had in five years that she might still be herself, deep inside. So, whatever you did\u2014I beg you, go on doing it. I feel I finally have Tekentriya back.\"\n\nDolomite lowered his head to look Zekran in the eye. \"I don't think she knows how to tell you what she needs,\" he said. \"Which means you have to tell her. I don't think mates should be frightened of each other.\"\n\nZekran's eyes narrowed. \"You think I'm afraid of her?\"\n\n\"Everyone is afraid of her,\" Dolomite said. \"She wants them afraid so they won't come near her. But I don't think she meant to include you.\"\n\nZekran nodded, slowly. \"I think I've made a mistake,\" he said. \"A five-year-long mistake. Thank you. I don't know your name.\"\n\n\"It's Dolomite.\"\n\n\"Dolomite. Thank you.\" He met each dragon's eye, nodded at Rokshan without saying anything, and turned and left the way he'd come.\n\nOnce more, everyone was silent. Lamprophyre felt as if one more surprise would flatten her. The idea of Tekentriya having a loving relationship\u2014of Zekran the nonentity being actually capable of such profound feeling\u2014made her wonder what else she'd been wrong about. Maybe Manishi\u2026no, Manishi was almost evil. Lamprophyre was sure about that.\n\nOrthoclase shifted his weight. \"I think I could eat,\" he said, \"unless that's too anticlimactic.\"\n\n\"No, not yet,\" Dolomite said. \"I have something else to tell you. Show you, anyway.\"\n\n\"Are you secretly the first dragon king? Because I would believe it,\" Bromargyrite said.\n\nDolomite blushed and shook his head. \"You are all behaving like you've never seen me before.\"\n\n\"You continually surprise us, Dolomite,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"I hope so. For this surprise, anyway.\" Dolomite grinned, a cheeky, cheerful look. \"My secret project is finished.\"\n\nAmid gasps and exclamations, Coquina said, \"I can't believe you kept it a secret! Tell us immediately. I've been dying to know\u2014all right, I confess I figured out it's some kind of art project. I hope that doesn't ruin it.\"\n\n\"No, because there's no way you could guess what else it is,\" Dolomite said. \"Let's go, before we lose the light.\"\n\nHe led the way south along the river, not flying very fast despite his words. Lamprophyre, bringing up the rear with Rokshan, considered where along this route a secret art project might be stashed. What kind of art project it might be, for that matter. She remembered the pale dust on Dolomite's feet a while back. A sculpture, maybe? But why wouldn't he sculpt it in his warehouse, then? Unless the light in there wasn't sufficient as she'd suspected. It was a true mystery.\n\nAfter a while, Dolomite turned right, away from the river toward the Kresetni Hills. Lamprophyre had been there with Rokshan once and knew there were several mining operations going on. Maybe Dolomite had mined gems and created something dazzling. There had been talk of making the harnesses\u2014Flint had at least three more finished\u2014more brilliant, and Dolomite had been the one to say it looked like wearing jewelry.\n\nShe followed the others in their descent into a quarry, its high, white walls scored deeply from where enormous blocks had been removed. A marble quarry. They were closing down work for the night, and very few humans still moved around the base of the walls. The dragons had no trouble finding places to land despite the irregularities of the ground. Marble dust filled the air, its smell almost overpowering. She hadn't realized how hungry she was.\n\nDolomite led them past the main, active part of the quarry to where the geometric, angular shapes gave way to untouched hills, some of which still had scrub grass growing on them. Part of the hill was covered with an enormous cloth\u2014no, Lamprophyre looked closer and discovered it was actually many cloths stitched together to make a sheet big enough to wrap a dragon in. Whatever was beneath the sheet was oddly shaped, sharp-edged and rounded by turns, and she couldn't identify it by its outline.\n\n\"Orthoclase, no snacking,\" Dolomite said sternly. \"Are you ready?\"\n\n\"I will personally pin your wings back if you don't tell us now,\" Porphyry said.\n\nDolomite took hold of the cloth. \"It's amazing,\" he said, and swept the cloth away.\n\nLamprophyre took a step back. The shape beneath the cloth was a dragon, but it was no one she knew. In another beat, she realized he wasn't moving. \"It's a sculpture,\" she breathed, stepping forward to look more closely.\n\nDolomite had outdone himself. The male dragon stood poised with wings half-raised, ready to take flight. His shapely torso and the firm line of his jaw were so beautiful Lamprophyre couldn't stop staring. All the carving was exquisite. And it was fully painted, which accounted for Lamprophyre's mistaking the sculpture for a real dragon: emerald green shading deeper in the curves of his body, gold membranes and eyes catching the last light of the sun. He was the most perfect, most attractive dragon Lamprophyre had ever seen.\n\n\"Green and yellow was more obvious,\" Dolomite was telling Coquina, \"but that would look too much like Sapphire, and I thought that could be a problem. But the gold is even nicer.\"\n\n\"More obvious, how?\" Coquina said.\n\nDolomite's eye ridges came together in a frown. \"Well, the royal colors, of course.\"\n\nLamprophyre turned away from the sculpture. \"Did you mean to give this to the king?\"\n\nThe frown deepened. \"Of course not. This is for Rokshan.\" When they all stared at him, he gestured at the sculpture. \"It's Rokshan's dragon body.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Lamprophyre whipped around to stare at the sculpture again. \"Rokshan's\u2026\" she breathed. She took a step backward and bumped into Bromargyrite, whose thoughts were as stunned as her own. \"Dolomite. That's brilliant.\"\n\n\"Isn't it, though?\" Dolomite sounded so excited she thought he might be bouncing. She couldn't take her eyes off the sculpture to see if her guess was right. \"We need a model, and this isn't like anyone else in the flight. It's completely original. No, that's not true. I borrowed my memories of other dragons for some of the shape. But no one dragon looks anything like this.\"\n\n\"But will it work, if it's not a living dragon?\" Porphyry said. \"When Lamprophyre was transformed, it was into a shape that was a living person. Suppose this turns Rokshan into a statue?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Dolomite said. \"I hadn't thought of that.\"\n\n\"It won't,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm certain of it.\" He walked forward and put a hand on the half-spread left wing, lightly touching it. \"Evart might have known his daughter's physical form well, but he wasn't an expert on internal anatomy. He only had to keep the outer shape in mind, and the inner organs followed naturally.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"It's the only thing that makes sense.\" Rokshan ran his fingers over the wing's edge again. \"If someone had to have a perfect knowledge of living systems to successfully transform a creature, it could never happen. Nobody knows bodies that well. Part of the magic must include making sure the transformed creature is viable.\"\n\n\"That still sounds like a guess, Rokshan. You're risking your life on that guess.\"\n\nHe turned to face her. \"I'm confident it's true. And this\u2014\" He pointed behind him\u2014 \"this is the ideal way to accomplish the transformation.\"\n\n\"But we still don't know how to make it work,\" Flint pointed out. \"Unless you've deciphered that book.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Lamprophyre exclaimed. \"I forgot. Dharan decoded the mystery book. He said the other artifact we need is sodalite wrapped in gold.\"\n\nExclamations went up all around. \"Then we just need an adept to build one for us,\" Flint said.\n\nThat silenced them. Rokshan sighed. \"I don't want to approach Manishi\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't have to,\" Bromargyrite said. \"I can ask Kamil.\"\n\n\"Kamil?\" Lamprophyre involuntarily looked at Rokshan. \"I don't mean to be rude, but we don't know him. Is he trustworthy?\"\n\nBromargyrite didn't look insulted. \"I trusted him enough to tell him I could hear his thoughts,\" he said. \"He's kept that secret. I don't know if he's as skilled as Manishi, but he's more than competent. I'm sure if he has access to Evart's notes, he can create the artifact we need.\"\n\nRokshan looked back at Lamprophyre. \"I would really like not to owe Manishi for anything more than we already do.\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Lamprophyre nodded at Bromargyrite. \"Will you talk to him? Explain the situation? I'll get the decoded notes from Dharan for him.\"\n\n\"I wish we could do this now,\" Dolomite said, \"because I've been so impatient to tell you all the secret. But I suppose I can wait a few more days.\"\n\n\"We should get back to the city before it's too dark,\" Rokshan said. He patted the model once more, then climbed into the saddle.\n\nThe clutch flew in silence through the gathering dark. Lamprophyre felt unexpectedly let down. It made no sense, because they were closer than ever to fulfilling Rokshan's dream\u2014her dream of being united with her mate. Probably it was the necessary delay that did it. Dolomite's solution was so perfect, it seemed wrong that it couldn't be implemented immediately. She thought of cheerful things instead. Of Rokshan coming to live in the embassy. Flying together as dragons. Sex\u2014Hyaloclast had insisted on teaching her about sex after she was pair-bonded, even though she and Rokshan weren't physically compatible. Sex would be wonderful.\n\n\"Take me to the palace, please,\" Rokshan said abruptly, waking her out of the trance she'd been flying in. She'd followed her clutchmates to the warehouses without thinking, and now she waved goodbye and veered off eastward. Rokshan had to report in to General Sajan, probably. The reality of the war was so distant despite the attack on Leksital. She couldn't stop seeing that beautiful male dragon and trying to picture it a living creature. Her mate.\n\nBut Rokshan directed her to land not by the headquarters, but at the palace side door. \"Wait for me,\" he said as he climbed down. \"I'll be back shortly.\"\n\nLamprophyre smiled pleasantly at the guards flanking the door. They didn't smile back. They weren't allowed. She settled down and prepared to wait. Lying on the comfortably soft earth made her realize how tired she was, how much she'd exerted herself that day. She extended her claws just enough to prick her skin and keep herself awake. She should have asked Rokshan what he had in mind. As it was, she found she didn't care so long as it meant she could sleep soon. She was tired enough she didn't even feel hungry anymore.\n\nShe was nodding off when Rokshan returned and climbed back into the saddle. \"Up and across the roofs,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre yawned. \"Why?\"\n\n\"We're going to speak to my parents.\"\n\nThat hit her like icy water to the face, waking her fully. \"What\u2014right now? Tonight?\"\n\n\"We can't put it off any longer, not now that we have a model and knowledge about the artifact. I'm certainly not going to tell them after the fact.\"\n\n\"But it's so late. They don't want to be disturbed at this hour.\"\n\n\"It's barely seven-thirty. They'll have finished supper and be in their sitting room. It's the perfect time. There, that's the royal garden. Descend there.\"\n\n\"I'm going to be shot at!\"\n\n\"I told everyone you were coming and not to shoot. Stop complaining. I know this will be uncomfortable, but it's the right thing to do.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt ashamed of herself. Whatever discomfort she endured, it had to be a thousand times worse for Rokshan. \"I'm sorry. You're right. I hope they're as understanding as you believe.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" Rokshan said.\n\nShe'd seen the royal garden several times in flying over the palace, and once from inside the palace when she'd had a human body, but she'd never walked through it. Now she descended through the fragrant cedars with their thick needles, looking for a place to land. Lights from the room overlooking the garden, the sitting room open to the air a story above the ground, gave scant illumination to the grassy space at the bottom. It felt like floating down a well, with the palace walls forming a rough oval surrounding the garden. Only the king's sitting room looked out on it, making it the most private place she'd seen in Tanajital.\n\nThe sound of running water alerted her moments before she would have landed with her foot in a marble fountain. The spray brushed her scales, dampening her skin until she stepped away. There were two of these fountains, burbling merrily as water shot from the metal nozzles at their tops. A couple of iron benches that looked like lacework stood near enough to the fountains that mist would brush anyone sitting there. How comfortable they would be in the heart of summer.\n\nLamprophyre walked closer to the open balcony of the sitting room. From her position, she saw what had been hidden from her the last time she'd been here: a stone staircase, its top shrouded on the inside by one of the red and gold curtains, curved down from the balcony to the garden, guarded by a slim iron rail. It was the only access to the garden aside from the way she'd come in.\n\nLamprophyre's first thought was how sad it was that only the king and his family or guests ever saw this place. Then she thought of the king's difficult job, how he was on display all the time, and decided it was fair he should have a place to go that was private. She'd never imagined she would have sympathy for the king in any way. She remembered by human custom, she was his daughter-in-law, and a nervous shiver went through her. Related to a human king. She understood now why Rokshan said thinking of Hyaloclast as his mother-in-law was unnerving.\n\nShe crouched for Rokshan to climb down and examined the balcony. It was taller than she was by six or seven handspans, which was unfortunate because she'd rather liked the room and wished to see it again. Rokshan made for the stairs. \"Wait here,\" he said.\n\nAs if she could go anywhere. She nodded, afraid nerves might make her voice shake if she spoke. She settled back on her haunches and furled her wings. The dimness, and the smell of the water and the cedars and the grass she crushed underfoot, would have made the perfect accompaniment to sleep, but that was out of the question.\n\nSomewhere nearby, she heard the deep hoo of an owl's hunting cry, and the shrill scream of some small creature cut off before it was more than a squeak. The owl's wings beat the air, and then it was gone. What would it be like, being able to hunt the darkness? She half-turned to look for the owl, though she knew she wouldn't see it. The farthest reaches of the garden were completely dark, and except for the bulk of the palace wall, a solid mass of black that loomed over the garden, she could have imagined herself in the forest north of Tanajital. Another shudder ran through her. Flying through darkness was one thing; being surrounded by Stones knew what was something else.\n\nShe heard a door open, and voices approaching. \"\u2026being so mysterious,\" Queen Satiya was saying.\n\n\"Not mysterious,\" Rokshan replied. \"It's just that this is something Lamprophyre needs to be present for.\"\n\n\"I see,\" the king said. To her dismay, Lamprophyre heard him thinking impossible, can't be what I think, please God let it just be a prostitute. She opened her mouth to warn Rokshan that his father had already guessed, realized that was a terrible way to break the news to Satiya, and stayed silent.\n\nRokshan and the king and queen came to stand at the balcony rail, looking down at Lamprophyre. \"Good evening, Lamprophyre,\" Satiya said. \"I hope you are well. I understand you fought at Manjaret. Such terrible losses, but they would have been worse without you dragons.\"\n\n\"Thank you, your\u2014Satiya,\" Lamprophyre said, trying not to sound shaky. She'd called the queen by her name when she was human, and by Satiya's thoughts the queen expected her to go on doing so.\n\n\"Mother. Father.\" Rokshan's voice was much calmer than Lamprophyre had managed. \"You already know my resistance to marrying the Fanishkorite princess is more than just a distaste for a loveless marriage. There's someone else.\"\n\nEkanath's thoughts sharpened, became incoherent the way thoughts usually did when someone was listening to another person speak. Satiya thought only finally.\n\nRokshan rested his hand on the balcony rail. Lamprophyre was sure only she could see it tremble. \"It's not going to be easy for you to understand, because\u2014she's not an ordinary person. I hope you'll hear me out before you start yelling.\"\n\nNow Satiya's thoughts were concerned. Ekanath thought guessed right damn it, and said, \"Just tell us.\"\n\nRokshan's back was to Lamprophyre as he faced his parents, but she chose not to listen to his thoughts to give her an idea of how he felt. She already knew. \"When Lamprophyre was human,\" Rokshan said, speaking more rapidly now, \"she and I fell in love. And that feeling hasn't altered now that she's a dragon again. I still love her, and she loves me. And that's not going to change.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched the king and queen closely, listening to their thoughts. Satiya's were incoherent with surprise. She stared at Lamprophyre, her eyes wide. Lamprophyre returned her gaze without flinching, though inside she was a mass of churning emotion, guilt and fear and embarrassment at having her dearest secret exposed. \"You can't,\" Satiya said, speaking to Rokshan though she hadn't taken her eyes off Lamprophyre. \"She's not human.\"\n\n\"Not anymore, no, but that's not going to matter soon,\" Rokshan said. He, in turn, was staring at his silent father. Ekanath's expressions were usually harder for Lamprophyre to read because of his beard, but hearing his thoughts helped her decipher his feelings, and his discouragement and disgust made her wish she could flee.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Ekanath asked.\n\nRokshan took a deep breath. \"We still have the artifact that transformed Lamprophyre into a dragon again. I intend to use it to become a dragon myself.\"\n\nSatiya gasped. Ekanath swore explosively and turned away for a moment, his thoughts a muddle of fury and despair. \"You will not,\" he said, turning again to face Rokshan. \"I forbid it. It's impossible.\"\n\n\"Not impossible,\" Rokshan said, more calmly than Lamprophyre was sure he felt. She was so glad he couldn't hear his father's thoughts. \"And I'm of age. You're in no position to forbid me anything.\"\n\n\"Rokshan,\" Satiya said, taking his hand, \"why? Why do you want to take such a drastic step?\"\n\n\"Because I can't bear the thought of living without her, and this is the only way we can be together. Surely you can see that.\" Rokshan put his other hand atop their clasped ones. \"I'll still be your son, whatever shape I take.\"\n\n\"It's disgusting,\" Ekanath said. \"You're human. You were born human and you will die human. What am I supposed to tell the kingdom\u2014that my son's aberrant emotions\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop,\" Rokshan said, raising his voice. \"I told you, it's not as if I fell in love with a dragon. We were both human when it happened. It's not aberrant for me to continue to love her, any more than if she were disfigured, or crippled, or anything else that changed her body.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, don't talk about me as if I weren't here,\" Lamprophyre blurted out. Her fear subsided in the face of her desire to not let him walk this path alone. \"Your majesties, Rokshan is my best friend. It was natural that when we were both the same species, that friendship would turn into something more profound. Can't you be happy for him?\"\n\n\"Happy that he wants to become a creature like you?\" Ekanath exclaimed.\n\n\"Don't insult her, Father,\" Rokshan said angrily. \"This is my choice, not hers.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Satiya said, almost pleading. \"If you are in love, why didn't Lamprophyre stay human? Surely that would solve your problem.\"\n\n\"I was in danger as a human,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I had to regain my dragon body to save my life. But there was a time when we thought I couldn't be transformed back, and I intended to marry Rokshan as a human woman. That he wants to change so he can be my mate\u2026you don't understand how much that means to me.\"\n\n\"So you entrapped him,\" Ekanath said.\n\n\"No. It was his idea.\" Lamprophyre pushed off from the ground and flew upward, hovering so she could meet Ekanath at his eye level. \"But, if it would be easier, I would be willing\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not turning back into a human,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Shouldn't that be my decision?\"\n\n\"Not if it's a decision based on making my parents happy.\" Rokshan gripped his mother's hand more tightly. \"Lamprophyre, you're still in danger in a human body, and what's more, you are more suited to being a dragon than I am to being human. And there's even less chance of the transformation working on you, because Evart is dead and no one else knows a human body well enough.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. I forbid you to do this, Rokshan.\" Ekanath's thoughts, though, were growing tired and resigned. Lamprophyre couldn't understand where the difference between his thoughts and words came from.\n\n\"And I told you, you can't forbid it. I wanted you to know my intentions because I didn't think it was fair to you to find out after I transformed.\" Rokshan sounded suddenly tired himself.\n\nEkanath sighed. \"You're right. I can't forbid you as your father. I can forbid you as your king. You can't go on commanding the military as a dragon, and as we are currently fighting a war, I require you to give up this ridiculous notion.\"\n\nRokshan went very still. \"I can go on\u2014\"\n\n\"The soldiers won't take orders from you if you're a figure of ridicule. You would cripple our Army to satisfy your selfish needs?\"\n\nRokshan didn't say anything. Lamprophyre dared listen to his thoughts. They were a muddle of defiance and frustration and resignation, and overlaying all that was such a terrible sadness at losing Lamprophyre's companionship her throat ached with shared misery. \"Rokshan,\" she said, \"that's something I've worried about, too. The Army needs you.\"\n\n\"You need me,\" Rokshan said. \"How is that less important? It's not like I can't still fight.\"\n\n\"We've waited all this time. We can wait a while longer.\"\n\n\"This war could go on for years.\"\n\n\"You know it won't.\" As she spoke, a terrible resigned fear shot through her. It was true, the war wouldn't go on forever, if only because they had no way to fight Sardonyx directly. And suppose Gonjiri figured out the shield the Fanishkorites had? That would delay the inevitable only slightly.\n\n\"You'll stay human until this is over,\" Ekanath said. \"After that, I don't give a damn what you do. If you aren't human, you're not my son.\"\n\n\"He's still your son regardless of his species,\" Lamprophyre insisted. \"Are you really so angry about this? We're both rational creatures, you know. It's not like he wants to become some mindless thing.\"\n\n\"You stay out of this,\" Ekanath said. \"I wish you'd never come to Gonjiri.\"\n\n\"Ekanath, please,\" Satiya said. \"She's right. This isn't so terrible.\" But Satiya still felt confused and sad, and it hurt Lamprophyre to hear it.\n\n\"I thought you'd finally realized your duty to this family. To this kingdom.\" Ekanath's voice shook with anger. \"I see now you're just as self-centered and selfish as ever. I don't know how we managed to raise a child who would think this proposal was normal.\" He turned and strode away, and shortly the door opened and slammed shut.\n\nRokshan watched the place where his father had gone. His thoughts were so angry Lamprophyre blocked them out again, feeling he should have privacy for his pain.\n\n\"It will be all right,\" Satiya said. \"He wasn't expecting this.\"\n\n\"I think maybe he guessed,\" Lamprophyre said, remembering in time that Satiya didn't know she could hear thoughts. \"And hoped he was wrong.\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't guess. You both must feel terrible about having to keep the secret.\" Satiya released Rokshan and moved forward to face Lamprophyre. \"I don't know how you are still in love when you're not the same species, but I can guess how hard it would be.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We didn't want to cause anyone pain, but Rokshan said it was important we tell you sooner rather than later. So you can get used to the idea.\"\n\n\"I don't know that I'll ever get used to having a dragon for a daughter-in-law,\" Satiya said with a rueful smile. \"Does Hyaloclast know?\"\n\n\"The dragons all do,\" Rokshan said. \"They've accepted me.\" He put the slightest emphasis on \"they've\" that made Satiya's smile falter. Lamprophyre wished she could kick her mate for his insensitivity, but he was probably still angry and hurt and not caring about who he lashed out at.\n\n\"Thank you for not being angry,\" she said quickly. \"And the king is right. Rokshan can't abandon his duties now.\"\n\n\"You've always been reasonable, whatever your father thinks,\" Satiya told Rokshan. \"It will be hard\u2014\"\n\n\"You have no idea,\" Rokshan said curtly.\n\n\"It will be hard,\" Satiya repeated, not offended by his interruption, \"but I assure you, if you truly love each other, the wait will make your eventual union sweeter. I know I feel that way about your father. He and I went for years not saying the right things, wishing we knew how to tell each other how we felt.\" She smiled at Lamprophyre. \"I don't believe either of you planned this, but I'm the last one who'd tell you to give up just because it's hard.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Satiya,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nSatiya patted Lamprophyre's hand. \"I'll talk to Ekanath,\" she said. \"I hope he will come around. I'm afraid he can't see past the idea of his youngest son despising his species enough to want to change it.\"\n\n\"That's not it at all, Mother,\" Rokshan protested.\n\n\"I know. It's just how he thinks. Give it time.\" Satiya hugged Rokshan, who didn't hug her back, smiled once more at Lamprophyre, and disappeared into the dimness of the sitting room. Once more the door opened and shut, quietly this time. Lamprophyre gradually descended until she was resting on the grassy garden floor.\n\n\"That actually went better than I feared,\" she said.\n\nRokshan sighed heavily. He came down the steps without a word and climbed back into the saddle. \"I want to stay at the embassy tonight, if you don't mind,\" he said. \"Being called a deviant wastrel makes me crave your nearness, as a reminder that I'm not actually broken.\"\n\n\"You are not a deviant wastrel.\" Lamprophyre leapt into the air. \"There's nothing wrong with you.\"\n\n\"I keep seeing that beautiful sculpture, and thinking about what it will be like to take that shape, and my father's words make it such a tawdry desire. I hate that.\"\n\n\"I understand. But you know he's just one person, right? Even if he is your father.\"\n\n\"I didn't tell him about the Fanishkorite shield. I'd meant to, as a reassurance, but when he started talking about how aberrant we both were, I became angry. He can find out about it later. Let him have one more sleepless night worrying about how to protect his people.\" Rokshan sounded so bitter Lamprophyre wished more than ever to have her human body back, to give him comfort.\n\n\"Let's get something to eat,\" she said. \"And then we can sleep, and worry about everything else later.\"\n\n\"I'm not hungry.\"\n\n\"Neither am I, but experience tells me I will be hungry at midnight, and it's a lot harder to find food at that hour.\"\n\n\"You're so sensible.\" Rokshan leaned forward to rest the side of his face against the back of her head, sending a pleasant tingle through her. \"I was just so eager\u2026\"\n\n\"There's still so much to do. It's not as if we could have transformed you tomorrow. This is a reasonable wait.\"\n\nShe felt Rokshan nod against her scales. \"And I do have a lot to do. Discuss the possibility of that shield, and I had an idea about the pyrite weapons. Making them more effective.\"\n\n\"Which you will not tell me because it's a work in progress. Rokshan, sometimes I think you do things just to wind my curiosity to the breaking point.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"If Dolomite can keep a secret that well, imagine what I'm capable of,\" he said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Lamprophyre took Rokshan to the military headquarters the next morning before flying off to join her clutchmates at the warehouse. When she left him there, she'd said, \"Won't you please tell me what you have in mind for the weapons? It would be such a reassurance.\"\n\n\"If it doesn't work, you'll have gotten your hopes up for nothing,\" Rokshan said. \"And I feel enough of a failure lately not to want to see you look at me in disappointment.\"\n\n\"I would never do that! And you're not a failure. You've done so much to fight Sardonyx.\"\n\nRokshan had rested his hand along her cheek with a smile. \"I'm used to being a physical threat to Gonjiri's enemies, Lamprophyre. All I can do to Sardonyx or her dragons is be a momentary distraction. You know that, or you wouldn't refuse to carry me into battle. Let me have this secret. I promise you'll know soon enough.\"\n\nLamprophyre had nodded, though her heart still ached to know Rokshan was so discouraged. It was his father's rash words that did it. Rokshan and Ekanath had come so far from the day Lamprophyre had arrived in Tanajital, when Ekanath had disdained his son for failing to do his duty by his country and Rokshan had believed his father would never respect him. And now Rokshan's desire to become a dragon seemed to have ruined all that progress. Well, that was Ekanath's fault, not Rokshan's. Lamprophyre wished she could shake sense into the king, but only time would see if he would come around.\n\nShe arrived at the warehouses to find only Orthoclase and Porphyry there. \"Dolomite left at first light to travel with Tekentriya,\" Porphyry said, \"and General Sajan asked Flint and Coquina to take messages to a couple of towns about a possible attack. More of Jiwanyil's prophecies. I keep waiting for something to go wrong with those. Like, a discovery that Jiwanyil is telling these towns to evacuate so they'll go somewhere that something worse can happen.\"\n\n\"Me too, but it doesn't look like it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I wish I understood better who this creature is and what its plan is.\"\n\n\"It does make me wonder about who God really is,\" Orthoclase said. \"I agree with you, Lamprophyre, that it's unlikely a god would let himself be trapped like Jiwanyil was, and of course now we know Mother Stone isn't a god, but does that mean God doesn't exist at all? Something made dragons, after all.\"\n\n\"I don't know, and I don't think I care,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Whoever God is, he hasn't done anything to help us against Sardonyx. So either he doesn't exist, he's not powerful, or he supports Sardonyx. None of those things inspire me to worship him.\"\n\n\"But if we don't know the nature of God, we can't say whether any of those things should be proof of his existence,\" Orthoclase persisted. \"We always believed Mother Stone didn't interfere in dragon lives because she expected us to act for ourselves and not depend on her for everything. What if that's still true, except our God is someone we don't know yet?\"\n\n\"You're making me dizzy,\" Porphyry said. \"Does it matter? Whether God exists and wants us to fend for ourselves, or there's no God, we're still back to fending for ourselves. It's the human God that's the issue now. If Jiwanyil really is their God, he's playing a very deep and confusing game.\"\n\n\"Yes, and so long as his prophecies are accurate, the humans can't afford to question his nature,\" Orthoclase said. \"Which I think is unfortunate. It's not a good idea to go on worshipping someone just because he's powerful. A god ought to be more worthy of worship than that.\"\n\n\"You're turning into an ecclesiast, what with all that speculating on the nature of God,\" Lamprophyre teased.\n\nOrthoclase shrugged. \"It interests me. Humans are so casual about God, what with taking for granted that those prophecies are true. And now that dragons have no God, well, this gives me something to think about that isn't Sardonyx killing our friends.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I hope Rokshan's plan works out. He has something he's doing with the pyrite weapons he hopes will make them more effective. He won't tell me what it is until it's successful.\"\n\n\"Can he still do that after he's transformed?\" Porphyry asked.\n\n\"I don't know if that can happen soon. We spoke with his parents last night\u2014\"\n\nOrthoclase whistled, a long, drawn-out sound. \"By your thoughts, I can tell that didn't go well.\"\n\n\"Not even a little bit.\" Lamprophyre dragged her tiny sixth claw through the grooves between the small white bricks that paved the street, tracing their outlines. \"The one thing Ekanath said that I mostly agree with is that Rokshan can't be as effective a military commander if he's a dragon. So maybe we should put off the transformation until this war is over, or at least until he has a replacement.\"\n\n\"But he's too good for them to be able to replace him,\" Orthoclase said.\n\nLamprophyre nodded again. \"So it could be a long time.\"\n\n\"That's awful,\" Porphyry said. \"We're so close. Bromargyrite should be back with Kamil any time now.\"\n\n\"I forgot about that. Evart's book is back at the embassy. Dharan left it last night.\" Lamprophyre made as if to launch herself into the air. \"I can go get it now.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Porphyry said, putting a hand on her arm. \"I think we should meet this Kamil before we commit to anything. It's not that I don't trust Bromargyrite's instincts, it's that Kamil might not be the best choice. Though I really hope he is.\"\n\n\"That's sensible,\" Lamprophyre said, settling back. \"I think I want to meet him, too.\"\n\n\"They're coming,\" Orthoclase said, pointing southward. A bright orange speck in the distance swooped toward them, flying rather erratically. \"Though I don't know what he's doing. He looks like he's avoiding invisible airborne obstacles.\"\n\nLamprophyre closed her nictitating membranes to block the morning sun. \"I think he's making the ride more exciting for Kamil. I do that sometimes with Rokshan. They must be good friends if he's entertaining Kamil that way.\"\n\n\"And he's wearing a harness,\" Orthoclase said. \"I mean no offense, Lamprophyre, but the idea of putting on a harness makes me uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"It's different when it's for the sake of someone you care about,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I think it would be wrong to do it for a stranger who just wanted a ride somewhere, or maybe for us to take cargo to another city. But when it's about keeping your friend safe, it's not the same.\"\n\nOrthoclase nodded. His attention was still on Bromargyrite. \"That makes sense. I suppose I don't know any human that well yet.\"\n\n\"I've had people ask if they could ride,\" Porphyry said. \"Because I'm a popular racer, that is. I've never met anyone I'd want to single out, though.\"\n\n\"I've just pictured you diving through the hoop with a rider who didn't duck. We don't need human fatalities on the course.\" Lamprophyre stepped back with the others to give Bromargyrite room to land.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Porphyry said. \"Imagine the uproar.\"\n\n\"What uproar?\" Bromargyrite said. He crouched and twisted to one side for his passenger to climb down. \"You're not planning something dramatic and dangerous, are you?\"\n\n\"No, just talking about how some humans thrive on danger,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Is this Kamil?\"\n\n\"He is,\" Bromargyrite said. \"Kamil, this is Porphyry, Orthoclase, and of course you know Lamprophyre.\"\n\n\"Everyone knows the dragon ambassador,\" Kamil said. Lamprophyre was better at guessing human ages after all these months in Tanajital, and it surprised her to see how young Kamil was. If he was an adult, he was only barely so, which meant he was sixteen or maybe seventeen. He was thin, with knobby elbows and enormous hands that were mostly knuckle, and he wasn't very tall. Lamprophyre suspected he still had some growing to do, if the size of his hands was any indication.\n\nBut his size didn't matter. He was so young. Lamprophyre's heart sank. There was no way this young man knew enough to figure out how to create the sodalite artifact they needed. Still, she could be polite. \"It's nice to meet you, Kamil,\" she said.\n\n\"I didn't realize how Bromargyrite compared in size until now,\" Kamil said. His voice was pleasantly low for a human, and he looked at Lamprophyre without a trace of fear\u2014well, if he was friends with Bromargyrite, who was nearly Lamprophyre's size, he was used to being towered over. \"So dragon males are smaller than females? Why is Bromargyrite so much bigger?\"\n\n\"We're no different from humans in that respect,\" Orthoclase said. \"There's average sizes, but that's why they're averages\u2014we have dragons who are bigger and smaller than that. Hyaloclast, our queen, is enormous even by female standards, and Lamprophyre is likely to be that big when she achieves her full size.\"\n\n\"Amazing,\" Kamil breathed. \"And here you are walking around Tanajital just as if you're not the stuff of legends.\" His thoughts were as amazed as his words, and Lamprophyre caught a snatch of just like the stories, but bigger.\n\n\"Bad legends, apparently,\" Lamprophyre said. \"When I first arrived, everyone I met seemed to think I wanted to eat them.\"\n\n\"Dragons do feature as monsters in most of our stories,\" Kamil said, \"but that's no excuse for being stupid. I'm glad things have changed.\"\n\nBromargyrite caught Lamprophyre's eye. She heard him think haven't told him why he's here, should we?\n\nLamprophyre thought about that for a few beats. This short conversation wasn't enough to tell her much about Kamil, but her instincts said he wasn't dangerous, and she felt suddenly certain he wouldn't spread her secret around. She nodded at Bromargyrite, the smallest bob of her head. Bromargyrite nodded back. Your story, he thought.\n\n\"Kamil,\" Lamprophyre said, \"we have need of an adept, and Bromargyrite vouches for you. But what I'm about to tell you must stay secret, understand? Don't make Bromargyrite a liar.\"\n\nKamil's eyes widened fractionally. \"Why would a dragon need an adept? I thought you were magical creatures. At least, I know you can hear thoughts\u2014and I haven't told anyone about that, in case that helps.\"\n\n\"It does. Let me tell you a story.\"\n\nLamprophyre quickly told him the general details of what Evart had done and what they'd learned after Lamprophyre was transformed back into a dragon. Kamil listened with rapt attention, his thoughts a blur punctuated by sharp moments of insight Lamprophyre couldn't discern.\n\nWhen she finished, she said, \"So you see our problem. We need someone to build the artifact that will allow us to work the serpentine stone to transform Rokshan. And it has to be someone trustworthy.\"\n\n\"I'm trustworthy,\" Kamil said. \"And I'm as skilled an adept as you're going to find.\"\n\nLamprophyre shifted uncomfortably. \"Not to be rude,\" she said, \"but you're barely an adult. How experienced can you possibly be?\"\n\n\"If you doubt my abilities, why did you tell me all that?\" Kamil shot back. His thoughts didn't sound insulted, just confident\u2014maybe too confident. Lamprophyre remembered what Bromargyrite had said about Kamil being obnoxious about stone, and wondered if her instincts were mistaken.\n\n\"You know this wouldn't be the first time someone's underestimated your abilities,\" Bromargyrite said in his comforting rumble. \"Tell her the rest.\"\n\nKamil crossed his arms over his narrow chest. \"I've been studying stone since I was nine,\" he said. \"My parents are wealthy, and they could afford to indulge my hobby. Except I really was talented. I started designing my own artifacts just a few years later, and by the time I was thirteen I was selling my lapidary skills to adepts more than twice my age. I've come close to perfecting the mind-reading artifact, close enough that the military approached me to help in its development. I'm the only civilian working on that project except Manishi, and she doesn't count.\" He made a face when he said Manishi's name. \"I know the theory behind the use of every stone known to adepts. I'm young, true, but if anyone can do what you ask, it's me.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" said Porphyry. \"Bromargyrite was right. You really are, um, interested in stone.\"\n\n\"The word I used was 'obnoxious,'\" Bromargyrite said.\n\nKamil grinned. \"I prefer to think of myself as confident in my knowledge,\" he said. \"And I want to help. This transformation artifact could be useful. You know they use serpentine in small transformations for healing, yes?\"\n\n\"We do,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'm surprised you do. I understood that to be a new procedure.\"\n\n\"I told you I know everything about stone. I make it my business to know when someone comes up with a new use.\" Kamil's brow furrowed in thought. \"Imagine being able to repair much older damage. Prince Rokshan's burn scars, for example. Though if we succeed at giving him a dragon body, those scars won't matter.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Bromargyrite. He was smiling. \"I told you,\" he said.\n\n\"You were right,\" she replied. \"Kamil, I have the notes of the man who transformed me. I can give you everything we have.\"\n\nKamil nodded. His thoughts were intent on the problem already. Lamprophyre listened closely, but heard no evidence that he intended to betray them. That might just mean he was waiting for his moment, but she had a feeling, again, that that wasn't the case.\n\n\"Bromargyrite, bring Kamil, and we'll go to the embassy,\" she said. \"After that, I think we should all go to the training grounds. Sardonyx may still be in Fanishkor, but if she's headed back, General Sajan may need us to fly messages.\"\n\n\"I hope not,\" Porphyry said. \"That is, we've taken those chalcedony artifacts all over Gonjiri, and those are faster than we are. And you've got your own chalcedony artifacts, so Hyaloclast or Rokshan will tell you if anything bad has happened.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless.\" The truth was that she hated feeling helpless. She needed to be doing something, anything, that would stop Sardonyx killing any more people.\n\nShe led the way to the embassy, where she and Bromargyrite nearly filled the courtyard. One more dragon would make things very tight. \"Wait here,\" she said, and ducked inside the embassy hall. Abhit was reading to Rassika and Kavari. Rassika could read now, but Abhit loved reading aloud. Maybe it was time to send him to the academy. She could certainly afford it, but she might have to argue with Bhakriya about letting her pay Abhit's way.\n\nRassika looked up when she entered, and Abhit stopped reading. \"Is everything all right?\" Rassika asked.\n\n\"Fine, Rassika. Has anyone been here looking for me?\"\n\nRassika made a face. \"Ecclesiast in the green litter. The one who's got a stick up his ass about dragons.\"\n\nKhadar. \"You shouldn't be rude about any ecclesiast, Rassika. And Khadar isn't as self-righteous as he used to be.\"\n\n\"'S what Rokshan said about him, and it's his own brother, so he'd know, right?\"\n\n\"Stick up his ass!\" Kavari shouted. Abhit shushed her, but his eyes were gleaming with amusement.\n\n\"Yes, but Rokshan\u2026\" She'd have to have a word with him about the things he said where impressionable young people could hear. Though Rassika was looking more like a young woman than a girl every day. Humans grew so fast. \"Anyway, what did Khadar want? Was he here alone?\"\n\n\"No, had them yellow ones with the ugly haircuts, and the pipers, and the reverends.\" Rassika sounded impressed despite herself. \"Said as he had been possessed of a prophecy for you. Didn't sound like he thought it was urgent.\"\n\n\"A prophecy for me?\" That made Lamprophyre nervous. She didn't want to hear anything Jiwanyil might have to say, and she didn't intend to act on whatever it was. On the other hand, if it gave her insight into Jiwanyil's nature, that might be useful. Just not the way Jiwanyil intended.\n\n\"Did Khadar say if he was coming back?\" she asked.\n\n\"He asked us to ask you to go to the Archprelate's palace,\" Abhit said. \"He said 'at your earliest convenience,' but I think he wanted to say 'immediately.'\"\n\n\"And where was Bhakriya in all of this?\"\n\n\"She and Depik have been out back for hours,\" Rassika said. \"Talking about stuff.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened for Bhakriya and Depik's thoughts. Maybe\u2026but she didn't hear anything from either of them that suggested romance was in the air. They were talking about Abhit and the academy, to Lamprophyre's surprise. Maybe Lamprophyre's suggestion wouldn't be unwelcome.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said. \"I don't know when I'll be able to meet Khadar, but he's roused my curiosity.\" She picked up Evart's decoded book and returned to the courtyard.\n\nKamil had climbed down and was looking at the dining pavilion. \"I heard you serve soup to beggars,\" he said. \"Why is that?\"\n\n\"It was my cook's idea. He wanted to help people, and we thought it would make them less afraid of me.\" Lamprophyre held out the book to Kamil. \"The man who decoded this said there were still incomprehensible parts, but we hoped that meant an adept would understand it.\"\n\n\"There's not much I can't figure out,\" Kamil said without a trace of modesty. He flipped through the pages too rapidly to be reading them, even if he'd been Lamprophyre. \"Give me a few days, and I'll have something for you.\"\n\n\"That soon? You mean you can build the sodalite artifact by then?\"\n\n\"I'm not that good,\" Kamil said with a smile. \"I mean I'll know what kind of artifact it is and how to build it. Creating it will take more time. But I'm confident I'll succeed.\"\n\n\"You succeed, and you can be as obnoxious as you like,\" Lamprophyre said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "\"I can't believe Jiwanyil would deliver a prophecy for you,\" Rokshan said. They were flying across the city from the training grounds, where there had been no news of attacks by Sardonyx and her dragons. Rokshan had looked grim, but he wouldn't say anything about his plan for the pyrite weapons, not even that it had failed. Hyaloclast's pendant had been inert on Lamprophyre's chest all day. It was a measure of how frustrated Lamprophyre felt that she saw talking to Khadar as desirable.\n\n\"You mean because he has to know I won't listen?\" Lamprophyre banked right and began the long, curving descent toward the Archprelate's palace. \"Maybe he doesn't know that. He did seem aware of my presence in the cave, but it's not like I challenged him then. He might be oblivious to how I feel.\"\n\n\"Or he's evil, and he wants to confuse you,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"That's a very cynical thing for you to say,\" Lamprophyre replied, a little taken aback.\n\nRokshan sighed. \"I don't really believe that. I want to believe that whoever Jiwanyil is, he doesn't hate humanity. But having seen what Sardonyx has done to some of our cities, and knowing he wanted her freed, I can't feel certain of that belief.\"\n\n\"I agree. Which is why I'm curious.\"\n\nShe set down in the field behind the Archprelate's palace and crouched to let Rokshan down. It was as peaceful as ever, with even the background noise of the city dulled to a quiet, monotone hum. The smell of the grass crushed under her feet made her think of lazy afternoons by the riverside, with the green scent of the mossy growth along its banks filling the warm, damp air. Flowers also grew in the vast field, scatterings of white and blue Lamprophyre didn't think were intentional. Their sweet scent almost disappeared behind the smell of the grass.\n\nRokshan crossed to the door and tried the latch. \"Locked,\" he said. \"I guess we wait. Khadar did say to meet him here, didn't he?\"\n\n\"It was the messenger's instructions,\" Lamprophyre said. She listened to the drone of bees passing from flower to flower. They were small enough as to be nothing more than their buzz, an invisible moving sound that rose and fell as it came close and then flew away. Somewhere nearby came the snap of a cloth being shaken out. She wondered what it would be like, living next door to all those ecclesiasts. She was sure they didn't worry about crime in this neighborhood.\n\nThe door opened, and Rokshan took an involuntary step back. Khadar emerged. For once, he wasn't wearing his green Fifth Ecclesiast's robe, and his hair didn't look as tidy as it usually did. \"I suppose I should have expected to see you, Rokshan,\" he said, sounding irritated. \"I thought I specified the ambassador only.\"\n\n\"You didn't, and I would have brought Rokshan even if you had,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'll just tell him whatever you say, you know. Why waste time?\"\n\nKhadar shrugged. \"I suppose it doesn't matter.\" He walked past Rokshan to within arm's reach of Lamprophyre and looked up at her. He looked exhausted, his eyes dark-circled, his lips drawn down in a frown. \"I'm surprised you came.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't I come?\"\n\nHis lips twitched. \"We're not friends, ambassador. You know how I feel about dragons not worshipping Katayan, and I know how you feel about my attitude toward you. And you're loyal to my brother, so I'm sure you'd take his side against me.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt uncomfortable at his candor. \"You're right, we're not friends,\" she said, \"but I know you are genuinely possessed of prophecies, and I respect that.\"\n\n\"Even if you believe Jiwanyil is not God?\"\n\nLamprophyre hadn't realized the Archprelate had spread that news around, even if it was probably only as far as the High Ecclesiasts. \"He exists, whoever he is, and I want to know what he says.\"\n\n\"I was of the opinion that you shouldn't be told about this prophecy, because you are antagonistic to our faith,\" Khadar went on, \"but the Archprelate insisted, and I do not question her authority. I would caution you to respect Jiwanyil's word, but I know you'd ignore that caution.\"\n\n\"Stop being a jackass, Khadar,\" Rokshan said. \"If you were possessed of a prophecy for Lamprophyre, you ought to be respectful of that yourself and not use it as an opportunity to browbeat her.\"\n\nKhadar ignored him. \"I don't, of course, remember what I said,\" he told Lamprophyre, \"but there were many witnesses, and from their memories we have reconstructed Jiwanyil's words.\" He cleared his throat, and in a resonant, sing-song voice, said, \"This is the prophecy: 'The binding speaks too late. Fly far, fly fast, she arrives before you. The stone speaks true, the wind carries the witness, the fire burns the skies. Return, and be made one.'\"\n\nLamprophyre blinked. \"That makes no sense.\"\n\n\"You would think that, wouldn't you,\" Khadar said. \"I don't know why Jiwanyil would waste words trying to convince you of anything.\"\n\n\"He spoke to Lamprophyre on Mother Stone,\" Rokshan said. \"You ought to be less arrogant about what your God does and does not think is a waste of words.\"\n\nKhadar's eyes narrowed. \"How could Jiwanyil speak to you?\"\n\n\"Maybe that's what I ought to ask you,\" Lamprophyre said. \"He spoke through Rokshan, just as if Rokshan was an ecclesiast. Leaf-green eyes and all.\"\n\n\"That's impossible,\" Khadar said. \"Jiwanyil can't speak through anyone who isn't born to hear his voice. And you're far too old to be possessed of a first prophecy.\"\n\n\"Well, he did,\" Lamprophyre said, \"and what's more, I spoke to him and he replied.\"\n\nThat made Khadar go completely still. \"Impossible,\" he repeated, his voice faint. \"Jiwanyil does not respond to our speech. That never happens.\"\n\n\"You see why I'm convinced Jiwanyil isn't what you think he is.\" Lamprophyre felt the tiniest bit of guilt at pushing Khadar, but she remembered the twelvedays of torment the ecclesiasts had inflicted on her and her clutchmates and the guilt disappeared. \"At the very least, you don't know your God all that well.\"\n\nKhadar shuddered. \"You will take me to him,\" he said.\n\n\"What? I will not!\"\n\n\"You're out of your mind,\" Rokshan said. \"Lamprophyre won't agree to carry you as far as the palace, let alone to Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"I must speak to Jiwanyil,\" Khadar said, ignoring Rokshan. \"If he was willing to speak to an apostate, imagine what he might say to me.\"\n\n\"No,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Mother Stone might not be sacred to dragons anymore, but don't think I've forgotten that your stupidity in sending ecclesiasts there might have freed Sardonyx with no advance warning if Rokshan and I hadn't intervened. And all that aside, it's still a dangerous journey and I refuse to be responsible for your well-being.\"\n\nKhadar grabbed Lamprophyre's wrist. \"You must take me,\" he said. \"If there is the slightest chance of communication with God, would you doom Gonjiri, doom all humankind, for the sake of your pride? I can talk to Jiwanyil and ask him directly how we can stop this evil.\"\n\n\"Whose pride are we talking about?\" Rokshan said. \"Jiwanyil has given dozens, maybe hundreds of prophecies about Sardonyx by now. If he's God, he no doubt believes that's enough. Thinking you need to talk to him to gain greater insight is the height of hubris.\"\n\nKhadar's face became stony with anger. \"Then you refuse.\"\n\n\"I refused more than once,\" Lamprophyre said, \"though it doesn't surprise me you weren't listening.\"\n\n\"Then leave,\" Khadar said. \"Take your prophecy, and much good may it do you.\" He sounded as if he'd rather damn their names instead. He turned and strode back into the palace, slamming the door behind him.\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan looked at each other. \"I might have guessed that would happen if we told him what happened on Mother Stone,\" Rokshan said. \"Still, I think you should stay away from the Archprelate for a while.\"\n\n\"The Archprelate? Why?\"\n\nRokshan seated himself in the saddle. \"Because Khadar is going to tell her about Jiwanyil speaking to you,\" he said as Lamprophyre pushed off and flapped to gain altitude, \"and if you think Khadar is eager for a face-to-face conversation with his God, imagine how the Archprelate will feel.\"\n\n\"I'd feel worse about turning her down. I like her. But I'm not taking anyone to that cave.\"\n\n\"Of course not. And obviously Jiwanyil can talk to people at a distance, so it's not like it's necessary.\"\n\nLamprophyre thought back over the words of the prophecy. \"Of course not,\" she echoed, but she was afraid she might be wrong.\n\nLamprophyre offered to return Rokshan to the military headquarters, but he said, \"There's nothing I can do there at the moment, and Sajan will contact me if there's news of more attacks. I need a rest. I've been so on edge waiting for disaster to strike I might be useless if it does. Let's go for a swim.\"\n\n\"That feels so frivolous,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I don't know if we should enjoy ourselves when people are dying.\"\n\n\"We're responsible for saving those people, as far as we're able,\" Rokshan said, \"and we're no good to them if we're too exhausted from being keyed up all the time.\" He shifted his weight, and the metal stirrups scraped across her side. \"I'm more worried at how relieved I am that Sardonyx seems to have disappeared into Fanishkor. Let them deal with her for a change.\"\n\n\"I understand. I don't want people hurt, but it is easier knowing Gonjiri isn't in immediate danger.\"\n\nShe passed over the wall and descended to land in a secluded bend of the Green River. The dragons had more or less claimed it as their own swimming place, scooping out the steep banks to make a shallow slope where they could step gradually into the water. Willow trees grew thickly at that point, their drooping branches providing shade during the worst of the summer heat. The river ran slow and sluggish this time of year, not shallow, but not as deep as usual. It still smelled wonderfully of green growing things and silty water, and despite her worries Lamprophyre relaxed.\n\nRokshan removed his shirt and trousers and waded into the current. \"Oh, cold,\" he said with a shiver.\n\nLamprophyre dipped her hand in the water and flicked him with a handful of droplets. \"You don't know what cold is,\" she said. \"At its source, this river is freezing. This time of year, there are chunks of ice floating on its surface.\"\n\n\"So it's warmer here. It's still colder than I like.\" Rokshan submerged and popped up a few handspans farther downstream. \"Though I'm getting used to it. Come on in.\"\n\nLamprophyre waded into the river, carefully keeping her wings out of the water. Swimming was nice, but wet wings were a misery. She watched as a dozen or more tiny white birds burst from the reeds on the far side of the river and flew away southward. The rustle of their wings scared a frog, who leaped into the water with a loud plop.\n\nShe swam toward Rokshan, who was floating on his back staring up at the sky. High, thin clouds obscured the sun, making the day almost cool. Lamprophyre stretched out her tail and floated on her stomach with her face turned away from the water. With her wings furled, the current carried her gently downstream. The sound of the water grew louder, and she lifted her head to see a large boat being poled along in the opposite direction, close to the far shore. It wasn't making much progress against the current, and it didn't help that most of the crew were standing along the rail, staring at her and pointing.\n\nShe closed her eyes and ignored them. Their thoughts were full of wonder and amazement, so she didn't have to worry about having things thrown at her. Let them stare.\n\n\"Who's that?\" Rokshan said. He was farther away than she'd thought. She opened her eyes to see him pointing at the sky. Lamprophyre sat up, splashing her wing membranes, and followed the line of his arm. A dragon crossed the sky, high above, a rust-orange blotch against the pale grayish-white of the clouds.\n\n\"It's not any of the clutch,\" she said. \"I don't recognize her.\"\n\n\"I wonder why Hyaloclast sent a messenger,\" Rokshan said, though it was clear the dragon didn't intend to land in Tanajital.\n\n\"She wouldn't,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThen it struck her. That wasn't any dragon she knew.\n\nLamprophyre thrashed her way to shore, swamping Rokshan. \"Run and get the clutch,\" she panted. \"We have to stop her.\"\n\n\"The clutch? Lamprophyre, why\u2014\"\n\n\"That's Sardonyx's scout,\" Lamprophyre said. She scrambled to the top of the bank and shook her wings vigorously, shaking away the water clinging to the membranes. \"We can't let her get back to Sardonyx. She knows where Tanajital is.\"\n\n\"Take me with you,\" Rokshan said. \"Or at least go to the warehouses. Don't chase that dragon alone.\"\n\n\"There's no time,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I'll slow her down. Just get everyone moving!\" With a tremendous leap, she was in the air, streaking toward the distant dragon.\n\nShe couldn't tell if the scout was flying slowly because she didn't feel threatened, or because she couldn't fly fast, but the dragon certainly ambled as if she had all the time in the world. Even so, Lamprophyre pushed herself to her limit, hating the dampness of her wings that slowed her down. Her thoughts circled round and round what she would do when she caught the scout, who was bigger and more heavily muscled than she. Coming to blows would not end well for Lamprophyre, but she couldn't think how else to stop the dragon.\n\nThe scout noticed she was coming when Lamprophyre was within a dozen dragonlengths. Lamprophyre saw her glance behind her and then speed up, not by very much. Lamprophyre curved upward, getting above the scout. The scout glanced back again. She backwinged, slowing herself so Lamprophyre shot over and past her. Lamprophyre turned her climb into a curving dive and swept back toward the scout.\n\nThe female spread her wings wide and beat the air, slowly gaining momentum until she was flying directly for Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre swallowed. The female was enormous. With all her claws extended and the thick phalanges of her wings bristling and the sharp rust-colored spikes on her back gleaming in the sunlight, she looked less like a dragon and more like an implacable force of nature, something shaped from the earth specifically to kill dragons.\n\nLamprophyre's jaw tightened. This might be the end for her, but she wasn't going to give up just because it was impossible. She just had to hold out until the clutch arrived.\n\nShe reversed in midair, driving toward the scout feet-first with her wings furled to make herself a projectile. The female had time to realize Lamprophyre wasn't going to stop before Lamprophyre rammed into her, taking her in the chest. The blow drove the air from the scout's lungs, and she choked and fell a few dragonlengths before catching herself. \"You won't do that again,\" she snarled. Her voice sounded dark and horrible, a raspy sound that ground across Lamprophyre's nerves and made her wish she could flee.\n\nLamprophyre didn't waste breath responding. Talk wouldn't win this battle. She curved around and beat hard to gain altitude. Attacking from above was a tremendous advantage, if she could go on doing it.\n\nThe female saw what she intended and followed her, not attacking, but trying to get above Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre realized immediately she was at more of a disadvantage than she thought. The scout was slow over long distances, but her greater wingspan helped her in the short term. Gradually, she inched ahead of Lamprophyre, rising higher. Lamprophyre heard the ghost of a thought: kill this foolish female. She couldn't let the scout get above her if she wanted to survive this fight. Unless\u2026\n\nLamprophyre furled her wings and dropped like a stone, startling the scout, who immediately followed. Lamprophyre fell as the scout gained on her, the female's ungainly body gaining momentum with every beat. When the scout was close enough to grab Lamprophyre, Lamprophyre snapped her wings open and let the scout shoot past, then dove after her. She grabbed the scout around the shoulders, tangling her wings, and swiped at the scout's face with her deadly sharp claws.\n\nThe scout turned in midair, far too fast for someone her size, and made a grab for Lamprophyre. Instantly Lamprophyre realized her mistake. She struggled to get free, snarling like an animal in her desperation. The scout's claws raked Lamprophyre's lower wing membranes, making her wobble. A flash of memory struck, something Rokshan had mentioned, and Lamprophyre threw her head back and then smashed her forehead against the female's skull.\n\nIt didn't work as well as Rokshan had said, but then her face and her nose were shaped differently than a human's. Mostly it seemed to startle the scout, but her grip loosened, and Lamprophyre tore free, gouging the scout's belly with her powerful feet and toe claws. Once more the scout let out a sharp pah of breath and fell a few handspans. Lamprophyre hovered above her, breathing heavily. She didn't know what else to do. The dragon outweighed her, and Lamprophyre's fighting skills were mostly exhausted.\n\nThe scout recovered and hung, hovering, in midair. Her dark, fathomless eyes, almost solid black from edge to edge, gazed at Lamprophyre maliciously. \"You've already lost,\" the female said. Then she turned and flew away westward, trailing thoughts of Sardonyx and the rest of Sardonyx's flight.\n\nLamprophyre shot after her. At least Sardonyx hadn't yet been in mental communication with the scout. But that was small comfort. She absolutely could not let this female escape to tell Sardonyx the location of Tanajital. All those helpless humans\u2026\n\nShe caught up to the scout and, not knowing what else to do, grabbed the female's tail and pulled, digging her claws into flesh and dragging her downward. The scout shrieked, an unexpectedly shrill sound, and turned, grabbing for Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre kept pulling on her tail, doing her best to stay out of reach. Pain flared in her right shoulder as the scout scored a lucky hit. Lamprophyre twisted out of her grip and kept flying toward the ground. Maybe the scout would be ungainly enough on the ground that Lamprophyre would have an advantage.\n\nThen the scout twisted impossibly, got her hands on Lamprophyre's side, and dug in with her claws, pulling Lamprophyre into a terrible embrace. Lamprophyre screamed as the scout bit her arm and stabbed her again in the side with her claws. The scout pinned Lamprophyre's arms to her sides so all she could do was beat helplessly at her captor with her wings. Lamprophyre fought to free herself, scratching the scout's body but unable to put any power behind the attack. The scout's teeth ground down harder, and dark red blood ran freely down Lamprophyre's arm and side.\n\nThen something hit them both, loosening the scout's grip and dazing Lamprophyre. She tore free instinctively and flapped hard to put distance between herself and the scout. Her vision was blurry from pain and the impact, and she blinked to clear it. A green and rose-colored blur battered at the rust-orange scout, and farther away someone dark blue shot around the two, looking for his moment. Coquina and Flint. But they'd been away\u2014Lamprophyre shook her head hard to dispel the fuzziness. She didn't care that their presence was impossible. She was too grateful not to be dead.\n\nThe scout screamed in pain, and Lamprophyre saw blood trickling down the female's side. Coquina had gotten in a lucky hit. \"Lamprophyre!\" she shouted. \"Drive her down!\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded, drew in a deep breath, and surged toward the two locked in combat. Coquina detached herself from the scout to allow Lamprophyre to slam into the female, knocking her farther away and down. Flint soared in, looking terrifyingly small next to the scout, and raked her belly with his claws. More blood flowed.\n\n\"We can't close with her!\" she shouted. Coquina nodded. Lamprophyre distantly heard her think drive her to ground and felt relieved that Coquina had had the same idea she had. Lamprophyre shot higher and then plummeted, once again reversing to strike the scout in the middle of the back, right between where her wings emerged. The blow shook Lamprophyre to her core, but the scout dropped, not trying to slow her fall.\n\nLamprophyre and her clutchmates followed. If the scout didn't regain consciousness, the landing from this height would kill her, turn her organs to jelly and shake her brain inside that thick dragon skull past recovery. It was a horrible thought she didn't regret at all.\n\nBut the scout stirred, then spread her wings to catch herself. She rolled on her back and spat fire at the three following her, forcing them to close their eyes. When Lamprophyre could see again, the dragon was gone, once more heading westward. Lamprophyre shot after her.\n\nNow the scout was running scared, speeding along faster than before. Unfortunately for her, Lamprophyre and Coquina were faster. They caught her and each grabbed a wing, staying far from the scout's deadly claws as she struggled to free herself. Lamprophyre slashed the tough membranes, which were almost invisible among the thick ribbing of the phalanges. Across from her, Coquina did the same. The dragon's struggles grew more frantic.\n\nFinally, when the scout's wings were shredded, Lamprophyre let go, and Coquina followed a beat later. The scout fell, her wings thrashing futilely. Lamprophyre dove after her. The scout was doomed, but Lamprophyre didn't want to take chances.\n\nThe ground was coming up fast. Lamprophyre slowed, letting the scout fall past her. They were some distance from Tanajital, over the rolling untilled plains that were yellow and gray this time of year. For a moment, everything was still. Then the rust-orange shape of the scout hit the ground, driving deep into the earth and sending up a cloud of soil particles. The dull thump startled a flock of birds, black with blue bands across their wings. They shot into the air, crying out with voices that sounded like dragonets crying for their fathers.\n\nLamprophyre descended to look at the body. The scout lay twisted in a shallow pit of earth dug by her impact. She was motionless, apparently dead, but Lamprophyre approached cautiously anyway. Behind her, Coquina and Flint landed and came forward to join her. \"She's dead?\" Coquina said.\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I don't feel sorry even though that was a frightening way to die.\"\n\n\"She was a scout for Sardonyx, wasn't she?\" Flint asked Lamprophyre nodded again. She remembered her fear of falling and suppressed a shudder. They shouldn't have done it\u2014but that was stupid, because if they hadn't killed the scout any way they knew how, thousands of humans would have died.\n\nShe looked away from the dead dragon. The Green River, far to the east, ambled along in its course exactly as if she and Coquina hadn't killed someone. Beyond that, specks of color flew toward them. \"The others are coming,\" she said. \"We'll need to bury the body. And warn General Sajan that Sardonyx is still searching.\"\n\n\"She's building a new map for herself,\" Coquina said. \"I'm sure of it. And once the map is complete, she'll turn the world to ash.\"\n\n\"Skies will burn,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We have to stop her.\"\n\nThey all looked down at the body. Lamprophyre blocked her clutchmates' thoughts. They were the same as her own, anyway: it had taken three of them to kill just one dragon, and they hadn't escaped unscathed. Lamprophyre's side and arm were in agony, her lower wing was tattered, and blood continued to spill from her wounds. She wasn't sure she could fly back to the city, but walking would be so much worse.\n\n\"Skies will burn,\" she repeated, almost to herself. And dragons would burn with them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "The next day, and the next, passed so quietly Lamprophyre had the illusion that the death of that scout had stopped Sardonyx's plans. But really it was that Sardonyx was still in Fanishkor, and with no communication between that country and Gonjiri, no one knew what kind of damage she was doing. Hyaloclast and the flight were flying the border between the two, watching for Sardonyx's return. \"We would fight for them, but Fanishkor has refused our aid,\" Hyaloclast told Lamprophyre the evening of the second day. \"And I refuse to humiliate myself by begging. They will live or die on their own terms. I respect that.\"\n\n\"It's the dying I don't like,\" Lamprophyre said. \"The ones doing the dying are not the ones making that decision. I hate that.\"\n\n\"So do I.\" Hyaloclast went silent, and Lamprophyre thought about the shield over Leksital and whether it protected any other Fanishkorite cities.\n\n\"And you're healed,\" Hyaloclast finally said. \"Proving that human healing magic works on dragons.\"\n\n\"I was sure it would.\" She'd been mostly sure, given that all other artifacts worked as well on dragons as they did on humans. It was just that if any artifact were to fail, the healing jades and moonstones would be the most devastating of failures. She stretched her arm and looked at the spot where the scout had bitten her. Not a trace of the mark remained, not even a discoloration of her scales. Remarkable.\n\n\"Rokshan spoke to General Sajan about making sure there are plenty of healing supplies near the towns and cities named in Jiwanyil's prophecies,\" she went on. \"But he knows there's not much point. There's only so much healing can do, and when we don't know how soon those prophecies will be fulfilled\u2026\" She let her words trail into silence. Hyaloclast knew all this, probably better than Lamprophyre did.\n\n\"We watch the skies. Sardonyx won't slip past without our noticing.\" Hyaloclast sounded grim, and Lamprophyre didn't need to hear her thoughts to know how uncertain the dragon queen was of this assertion. There was a lot of border to watch, and not enough dragons. Lamprophyre looked at the slate leaning against the wall. She'd written the names of every dragon who'd been killed by Sardonyx's people, and even in her smallest handwriting it was nearly full.\n\nShe heard Rokshan crossing the courtyard and said, \"I have to go. Good luck.\" She couldn't quite bring herself to say I hope Sardonyx doesn't come back, given what that would mean to the people of Fanishkor.\n\n\"Good luck to you,\" Hyaloclast said, and the stone cleared.\n\nShe hung the pendant on its peg and said, \"Still no news.\"\n\n\"Nothing from Fanishkor's government, either,\" Rokshan said. \"We're going to wear ourselves out with watching. Staying alert all the time means eventually losing our edge.\"\n\n\"But there's nothing else we can do.\"\n\nRokshan sighed. He sat on the floor and took off his boots. They were too warm for the weather, but he wore them always, and kept his cold-weather clothes handy, in case they needed to fly high and fast. \"I want to visit the flight tomorrow. There are things they can do to stay alert but keep themselves from wearing out.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea.\" Lamprophyre looked out the door and saw Bhakriya beckon to her from the soup kettle. \"Supper is ready. Are you hungry? I think it's pig.\"\n\nThey ate in silence, listening to the quiet talk going on in the courtyard. It was busy enough that Lamprophyre couldn't eavesdrop on thoughts, but that felt like too much work, anyway. The juicy pig, salty and rich, calmed her nerves. It was hard to stay anxious when you were eating delicious food.\n\nSo many of her regulars were here tonight it calmed her further. Sumaan, the one-legged man, stood propped against the wall with his crutch leaning next to him. He had a job now, but he still came for supper occasionally at her invitation. There was a trio of men, one blind, the others deaf, who helped each other like long-time friends, and an old woman who'd struck up a friendship with Bhakriya.\n\nAnd there was Darsha, resplendent in a green silk gown the color of new grass, drinking down the last drops of soup as if it weren't bad manners. She was graceful enough everything she did looked natural. Lamprophyre nodded at her and tore off another mouthful of pig, chewing until all the juice was gone and swallowing the meat. Having so many people here under her watchful eye made her feel better about not knowing where Sardonyx was.\n\nDarsha returned her bowl to the box of dirty dishes beside the cauldron and continued into the dining pavilion. \"Good evening, Lamprophyre,\" she said. \"Your highness.\"\n\n\"Don't bother to bow,\" Rokshan said drily.\n\nDarsha smiled. \"I show my respect in other ways, as I'm sure you know. Tonight, for example.\"\n\nLamprophyre laid down the pig leg she was chewing on. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nThe smile disappeared. \"I've been hearing things I thought you should know. Odd, frightened, angry comments about dragons. There are those in Tanajital who believe our dragons are a danger to the city. As in, you draw the attention of the dragons bent on destroying it.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Sardonyx wants humans dead. If anything, she'll strike at cities where there aren't any dragons to give her a fight.\"\n\n\"Humans aren't known for rationality, Lamprophyre. Some of my clients have made noises about ridding the city of dragons once and for all. They're upper-class citizens, some of them with the king's ear. It's unlikely they can hurt you, but they might make life uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"I doubt my father will listen to them,\" Rokshan said, \"but you're right that we don't need any more sources of conflict.\"\n\n\"There's another thing,\" Darsha went on. \"Some of my sisters asked me about your treasure. Your dragon hoard.\"\n\nLamprophyre blinked in surprise. \"I don't have a hoard.\"\n\n\"Which is what I told them, but they'd heard from their clients that dragons are flush with gold and gems, all stolen from the good people of Tanajital. Someone's spreading rumors aimed at stirring up the citizenry against dragons.\"\n\nRokshan dropped his knife on his plate with a clatter. \"Someone. I bet I know who.\"\n\n\"Who\u2014you mean Viveki? I thought she was locked up.\"\n\nRokshan had a very sour expression. \"Only for twenty-four hours. I told the guards since I got my money back, I didn't want to pursue the matter further. I thought, since we have the notes, she was harmless. I should have known better.\"\n\n\"If all she's done is spread easily-disproven rumors, she is harmless,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But I'll have Rassika run to the warehouses and warn the others. Just in case someone decides to attack.\"\n\nHaving sent Rassika on her way, she returned to sit beside the table where Darsha now sat opposite Rokshan. \"You can't let your parents dictate your life,\" Darsha was saying. \"It's true you owe them thanks and maybe even respect for bringing you up, but trying to please them is a fool's errand, with no bottom to that hole.\"\n\n\"I said I wasn't going to live according to their wishes,\" Rokshan said, sounding more sour than before. \"But it's not as simple as that. I'm part of the ruling family, and what I do has repercussions beyond my own life. My father is right that I can't afford to abandon the Army during this crisis.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened to this with a growing feeling of dread. \"Rokshan,\" she said, \"what are you talking about?\"\n\nDarsha cast a wise, knowing eye on her. \"You might not believe it, given my profession, but I'm very good at identifying when two people are in love. Even when that love seems impossible.\"\n\n\"But\u2026we're not\u2026\"\n\n\"She wormed it out of me, Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said. \"Though I think maybe I wanted to tell someone. I hate feeling like there's something unnatural about how we feel.\"\n\n\"I'm certainly in no position to judge,\" Darsha said. \"And your proposed solution is so romantic. Turning yourself into a dragon to be with the one you love. I think, if you did spread this news around, you'd find a lot of people on your side for that alone.\"\n\n\"That's reassuring,\" Rokshan said, though he didn't sound very reassured.\n\n\"At any rate,\" Darsha said, \"I can tell you want your father's approval in general, but you're never going to get it so long as all you ever do is bend to his will.\"\n\n\"And you know this, how?\"\n\nDarsha shrugged. \"Years of experience listening to men talk about their sons. They all say their boys should listen to them, learn from their actions, but the only times they're really proud of them is when those boys show they can make their own decisions, even when they're counter to their fathers' expectations. Fathers want their sons to be men. A king is no different from a poor tinker in that respect.\"\n\nRokshan's irritated expression had gradually given way to thoughtfulness as Darsha spoke. \"I think I see,\" he said. \"It's not easy.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" Darsha agreed. \"But nothing worthwhile is.\" She looked up at Lamprophyre. \"As I'm sure you already know.\" She rose from the table. \"Good luck to you both. Anything you want me to pass on to Tekentriya? Something secret? Other than the obvious.\"\n\n\"Have you spoken to her lately?\"\n\nDarsha nodded. \"This morning. She was preparing to head out with some dragon. I swear she was actually pleasant. Any idea what happened?\"\n\n\"She made the right friend,\" Rokshan said.\n\nWhen Darsha was gone, Lamprophyre said, \"You wouldn't tell people our secret, would you? I don't think I'm ready.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't. But we can't keep it hidden forever, sweetheart.\" Rokshan laid a hand on her forearm. \"Is it all right if I stay the night again?\"\n\n\"Of course. I wish you'd stay here all the time, but I'm sure it's not comfortable. And it probably looks strange.\"\n\n\"I don't care how it looks.\" Rokshan sighed. \"I wish\u2026it's not important.\"\n\nLamprophyre shamelessly listened to his thoughts, easier now that the crowd had mostly gone. \"You wish we'd had sex when we had the chance. So do I.\"\n\n\"I don't know if that would make it better, or worse, remembering something we can't have yet.\" Rokshan pushed his chair back. \"I'm going to help with the dishes, and then maybe we can read for a while.\"\n\n\"I'd like that more than anything.\" Lamprophyre rose and ambled to the embassy hall. Sometimes she remembered kissing, and the memories stirred her body in unexpected ways. Then she wished more than ever that Rokshan was transformed. They could live in Tanajital, or in her comfortable cave in the mountains, and never have to be separated again.\n\nShe picked over the piles of books. On the other hand, if Rokshan wasn't human anymore, they'd have to give up these comfortable reading times. Reading, or sex. No question which one she'd choose.\n\nThey met the flight the next morning north and west of Tanajital, covering the long stretch of empty land that was the Fanishkorite border. Though there were so few dragons one could hardly call them a full flight. Hyaloclast winged to meet them, a great black shadow that even the morning sun couldn't make anything but ominous.\n\n\"We fly patterns, covering the ground to well south of here,\" she said without preamble. \"Tiresome, but effective.\"\n\n\"It's the tiresome part that concerns me,\" Rokshan said. \"If you're fully alert all the time, eventually that alertness will wear off, and soon you'll be too exhausted to be effective.\"\n\n\"Is this human military tactics, young prince?\"\n\n\"It is, but it applies to any sentry force,\" Rokshan said. \"May I suggest a change?\"\n\nHyaloclast nodded. Lamprophyre could hear her thinking more confident than I believed, pity he's not a dragon already.\n\n\"You see farther when you're in the sky, but you can't fly forever,\" Rokshan said. \"Cut the time each dragon spends on patrol in half. Send them out in pairs\u2014one to watch, the other to rest. How are you in communication with the others?\"\n\n\"Each dragon is within hearing distance of another.\" Hyaloclast made a motion with her finger near her head. \"Thought hearing, that is. When a dragon sees an enemy, she alerts those nearest her, who pass the message along until all are aware. Though we haven't seen any enemies, so this is all theoretical.\"\n\n\"It should work, though. That's how our sentry lines are designed, though with sound in mind rather than thoughts.\" Rokshan shifted his weight as if he were looking southward. \"You're positioned well.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Hyaloclast said. Her sardonic tone clashed with her amused thoughts.\n\nRokshan either didn't notice her reaction or chose not to respond. \"Some adepts with seeing artifacts have located Sardonyx herself. She's in southern Fanishkor. But after what Lamprophyre encountered, I'm sure we're in danger of her scouts being Jiwanyil knows where. So this line of defense is essential. I hope you know how much Gonjiri appreciates your efforts. This is only peripherally your battle.\"\n\n\"I choose not to subjugate myself and my flight to that monster,\" Hyaloclast said. \"And I find myself more in sympathy with humans the longer this fight goes on. When this is over, I will have to have a talk with your father. Our alliance benefits dragons more than I'd believed possible, and I would like to see that expand.\"\n\n\"I hope he'll be willing to listen,\" Rokshan said, sounding bitter. \"He's not happy about my proposed transformation.\"\n\n\"No more than I was to see my daughter take human form. It's a natural reaction.\" Hyaloclast smiled. \"Parents want the best for their children, but it takes us time to understand what 'best' means. It's easier to define that word as 'what I think matters.' But I wonder if he's considered how having a dragon for a son will strengthen our alliance.\"\n\n\"You mean, like a dynastic marriage?\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"He would have married you to the Fanishkorite princess to solidify that alliance, yes?\" Hyaloclast flapped her wings to bring her closer to Lamprophyre and Rokshan. \"I don't think it's occurred to him that you're effectively marrying a dragon princess, at least as humans understand things. I will bring this up with him as well.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Rokshan said. \"I know I'm not the mate you might have wished for Lamprophyre.\"\n\n\"You are not,\" Hyaloclast said, \"but as I said, my definition of what is best for my child has to give way to what she actually wants. What she needs. And I admit you're remarkable for a human.\" She wheeled and flew away before Lamprophyre, feeling stunned, could make a response.\n\n\"God's breath,\" Rokshan said. \"A dragon princess. I hadn't thought of that, either.\"\n\n\"Because I'm not really a dragon princess,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"No, but in dynastic terms\u2026my father might actually care about that.\" Rokshan patted her neck. \"Let's fly down the border before we go home. I want to be able to tell Sajan how far south the dragon line extends.\"\n\nLamprophyre agreed cheerfully. It would give her a chance to say hello to everyone and reassure herself that the flight was still one, despite its many losses. It still hurt not to see Chrysoprase at Hyaloclast's side. Leucite was a good friend, but he couldn't take Chrysoprase's place, because he was male\u2014 She gasped. \"Rokshan. I just had a strange thought. What if Leucite is courting Hyaloclast?\"\n\n\"Leucite?\" Rokshan leaned forward to hear her more clearly over the wind. \"But Hyaloclast\u2026that can't be right. I can't imagine her in a romantic relationship at all.\"\n\n\"She loved my father, and that wasn't strange. But he's been dead for nearly thirty years, and she's been alone all that time, and Leucite is with her constantly.\" Lamprophyre shook her head. \"That can't be right. I've never seen her act in any romantic way toward him.\"\n\n\"Would that make him your stepfather? Or whatever the dragon term is.\"\n\n\"No. He'd just be my mother's mate, and father to my siblings if Hyaloclast had any children. But it has to be my imagination.\" The thought of Leucite and Hyaloclast together wasn't awful, because she liked Leucite even if he was a bit strange about turquoise, but it was the oddest notion.\n\nShe shook her head again and flew faster. If they hurried, they might be in time to share supper with the clutch, and maybe Kamil would be there with the information they needed. Even if Rokshan had promised not to transform until the war was over\u2014not that he'd done that, in any definite sense\u2014she wanted the comfort of knowing it was possible the moment he decided he was ready.\n\nFlying the length of the border was tiring, but greeting her friends cheered Lamprophyre as much as she'd anticipated. She returned to Tanajital that afternoon in a better mood than she'd been in since freeing Sardonyx. \"Let's go straight to the warehouses, and then buy some cows and cook them outside the city,\" she said over her shoulder.\n\n\"That's an excellent plan. I hope Dolomite is there. I confess to wanting to hear more gossip about Tekentriya. It's just so odd thinking that she's made friends with anyone, let alone a dragon.\"\n\nLamprophyre banked into the long curving descent into the city. \"But don't you think it makes sense that Dolomite would be the one? He's as straightforward as they come and really hard to insult, because he takes everyone at face value.\"\n\n\"That's true. Well, I'm happy for her. I remember what she was like when I was a child\u2014she was interesting and exciting to be around, and she actually liked me back then. It would be nice to see her return to her old self. But I'm not holding my breath.\"\n\nLamprophyre made a running stop and crouched to let Rokshan down in front of Coquina's warehouse just as Coquina stuck her head out. \"Oh, good, it's you,\" she said. \"A runner came from the palace a few hundred beats ago, looking for you. Apparently she went to the embassy first, so whatever they want, it's been a while.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"Did the runner say what the message was?\"\n\n\"Just for you and Rokshan to return to the palace immediately. Official business.\" Coquina yawned. \"Sorry. I've been up since before dawn, flying errands. I don't suppose you saw Flint? He left when I did.\"\n\n\"No, we were at the border.\" Lamprophyre crouched again. \"I guess we should see what the king wants.\"\n\nOnce in the air, Rokshan said, \"I'm worried.\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"Sending a messenger to the embassy and leaving the message there is normal. Running around the city trying to find us is something else. I'm afraid something's gone wrong and we're in trouble.\"\n\n\"Like what? We haven't done anything wrong.\"\n\n\"Not by our standards. But if my father is still upset, he might turn something innocent into a chastisement.\"\n\nLamprophyre coasted along until the palace roofs loomed before her. \"But we don't know what it is, so I think we shouldn't worry until it turns out there's something to worry about.\"\n\nShe alit in front of the massive front doors. They stood open, though they were too big and heavy to be welcoming. The guards with their pikes eyed Lamprophyre, but made no move to stop her entering behind Rokshan.\n\nInside, the great entrance hall was empty. It must not be an audience day, or maybe it was just late enough that everyone had gone home. Rokshan said, \"I'll let them know we're here,\" and bounded up the right-hand steps. Lamprophyre settled in to wait.\n\nShe examined the doors, which looked solid and unmoving. She'd nearly broken them down once, trying to reach Rokshan, and then the Army had broken them further, trying to reach her. They showed no sign of damage\u2014it had been a while ago. She delved within herself, looking for a feeling of guilt at having attacked the palace, and found nothing. Well, it had been their fault for not letting her inside in the first place.\n\nShe cocked her head to look at the light hanging from the ceiling. It was an oddly-shaped mass of iron, like a long, thick strand of metal tangled into a very loose knot, and tiny flecks of bright light clustered throughout like fireflies caught in a net. It was pretty, but was too high to shed much light. She stood, stretching to her full height, and could barely brush her fingers against it. Someday she really needed to ask someone what the point of it was.\n\nApproaching footsteps, a lot of footsteps, prompted her to leave the thing alone and settle back onto the floor. Soon Rokshan appeared, followed by Ekanath and nearly a dozen men and women of the court. Lamprophyre didn't recognize any of them except Mekel, the king's chamberlain, but there were so many of them living in the palace she wasn't surprised.\n\nThe crowd descended the stairs, the courtiers staying a respectful distance from the king. Ekanath moved more rapidly than Lamprophyre had ever seen, almost outpacing Rokshan. \"What did you do?\" he demanded when he was within a few handspans of her.\n\n\"What did I do?\" Lamprophyre looked at Rokshan, who opened his mouth to speak and was overridden by his father.\n\n\"The Fanishkorite ambassador, Chaaksha, demands an audience,\" Ekanath said. \"Demands. 'The king of Gonjiri and his dragon allies.' She won't say more than that. You must have done something to anger Fanishkor, damn you\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't talk to Lamprophyre that way,\" Rokshan said, putting himself between them. \"There's no reason to think this is her fault. Did you agree to the meeting?\"\n\nEkanath's gaze shot to Rokshan. \"Not yet. Not until I find out what this dragon has done. Fanishkor had no interest in a diplomatic meeting until we had dragons lined up on the border. If this is in response to our aggression, I swear I'll repudiate you. We do not need a war with Fanishkor on top of dragons razing our cities.\"\n\n\"Those dragons are there to protect Gonjiri, to warn us if Sardonyx comes back,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They're not aggressing on anyone.\"\n\n\"And I'll wager Fanishkor knows it,\" Rokshan said. \"This is their way of putting us on the defensive. And it's working. Father. You never used to be so hasty.\"\n\nEkanath closed his eyes. He looked like he was praying for patience. \"You're right,\" he said, startling Lamprophyre with how quickly his demeanor changed. \"This is ridiculous. Whatever Fanishkor wants from us, they must feel they're in a weaker position to behave so aggressively.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Rokshan said. \"Which means we can either pretend we didn't notice, or go on the offensive.\"\n\n\"We can't afford to fight back,\" Ekanath said. \"If there's any chance of us getting the secret of the shield artifacts out of them, we have to be\u2026damn it, we have to be humble. Much as I'd like to throw them out on their asses.\"\n\n\"So send a reply allowing them to set the time of the meeting, at a place of our choosing. One that will accommodate a dragon.\" Rokshan turned to face Lamprophyre. \"If they really want to meet with our dragon allies, that will limit their power. They're the ones proposing the meeting, however they want to dress it up. They're the petitioners.\"\n\n\"And we should remember that.\" Ekanath surprised Lamprophyre again by putting his hand on Rokshan's shoulder. \"Son, you understand the situation so well. Can't you see what you have to offer this country? How can you think to turn your back on your destiny?\"\n\nRokshan cast a glance over the assembled courtiers, all of whom were pretending not to listen. \"It's not that straightforward,\" he said, \"and I don't want to discuss it here. But can't you see that my destiny isn't what you expected\u2014and that's not a betrayal of anything?\"\n\nEkanath's hand fell away. \"I don't know,\" he said. He looked like he wanted to say something more, but only turned away to ascend the stairs once more, followed by his retinue.\n\nWhen the hall was empty, Lamprophyre laid a gentle hand on Rokshan's shoulder. \"He was so torn,\" she said. \"Thinking how you were taking a path he couldn't understand. Maybe he's not a villain.\"\n\n\"He's not,\" Rokshan said. \"And he's not stupid. I just don't know if he'll ever let himself come around.\" He patted Lamprophyre's hand. \"Let's get out of here. They'll send word when the meeting is scheduled. I hope Fanishkor doesn't ask anything in exchange for those shields we can't afford to give.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" Lamprophyre said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Word came the next morning, when Lamprophyre and Rokshan were having breakfast. Rokshan read the paper and let it roll up into a loose cylinder. \"Tell my father we'll be there,\" he told the message runner, who took off after one last stunned look at Lamprophyre. \"This afternoon,\" he said. \"Fanishkor is more anxious about this meeting than they want us to believe.\"\n\n\"Surely they know how this decision looks?\" Lamprophyre said. \"Chaaksha isn't stupid, and if she were, Yalini is smart and wouldn't let her do anything that would lose Fanishkor power. I can't believe they're ignorant of how desperate this sounds.\"\n\n\"That's what worries me. They must feel secure in their power to let themselves look weak in this small way.\" Rokshan rose and paced the length of the dining pavilion, tapping the rolled-up paper against his palm in a slow, measured way at odds with his anxious movements. \"I don't see what we can do about it, except be prepared.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She'd woken that morning with the remnants of a bad dream echoing in her mind. It had been the kind of dream where she was searching for something, all the while feeling dread grow as time passed and she failed to find whatever it was. The feeling of dread hadn't left her after she woke, and the message only made it worse. She had a terrible feeling that this meeting would end in catastrophe.\n\nShe didn't say anything about it to Rokshan. She'd never been given to moments of insight about the future, and when she thought about it logically, she had no reason to believe this wasn't just leftover dream figments. There was no sense in dragging him into her bad mood, not when he might already feel the same. She tore another mouthful of cow from the carcass. It tasted dry and unappealing, no doubt thanks to her bad mood. Stupid Fanishkorites ruining her meal.\n\n\"There's still no word from Hyaloclast, so Sardonyx is still in Fanishkor,\" she said. \"Unless she crossed the border farther south than the dragon line extends.\"\n\n\"Let's try to stay optimistic,\" Rokshan said. \"Word from Sachetan is that they haven't seen any dragons anywhere. Sardonyx's people aren't many, in the absolute sense, and she can't be everywhere at once. We have time to learn how to build those shields, and make the pyrite weapons more effective.\"\n\n\"You're still not going to tell me what you have in mind, are you.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Rokshan, it would really improve my peace of mind.\"\n\nRokshan shook his head. \"I don't know how it's progressing myself. I left it to the Army adepts and weapons designers. So I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to, which I don't. I don't want you pinning your hopes on something that might not be effective.\"\n\nLamprophyre scowled and took another bite. She pushed the rest of the carcass away. \"I don't have much of an appetite.\"\n\n\"Then let's go flying for a while. Clear our heads. And hope that pendant stays clear.\" Rokshan took his plate to the kitchen. Lamprophyre left the pavilion and paced restlessly around the courtyard. She smiled half-heartedly at Bhakriya, who was at the water barrel supervising the children's washing up. Bhakriya never distinguished between her own son and the girls she had essentially adopted, a word Lamprophyre had learned from Rokshan. Dragons had the concept of taking in a dragonet who'd lost her parents, but no word for it because it happened so rarely.\n\nShe suddenly felt frustrated. Bhakriya and Depik acted as parents to these children, so why couldn't Bhakriya tell Depik how her feelings had changed? \"Bhakriya,\" she said sharply.\n\n\"Yes, my lady?\" Bhakriya sounded startled, which made sense considering how Lamprophyre hadn't really tried to conceal her anger.\n\n\"Bhakriya, why don't you\u2014\"\n\nDepik came out of the pavilion and went to the water barrel. \"You didn't eat much, my lady,\" he said. \"Was anything wrong with the meal?\"\n\nShe couldn't confront Bhakriya with Depik right there. How humiliating for both of them. And she liked them enough not to want them humiliated, however angry she was. \"I don't have much of an appetite this morning,\" she said. \"We have an important meeting this afternoon, and I suppose I'm too nervous to eat.\"\n\n\"We'll make something special for supper, then, to give you something to look forward to,\" Depik said. He washed and dried his hands and tousled Abhit's hair, making the boy grin. \"And there was something we wanted to discuss with you, Bhakriya and I, but it can wait until later.\"\n\nHe was thinking about Abhit and the academy. Irritation flared once more. They were behaving like the boy's parents, so why\u2026? \"Of course. After supper, then.\"\n\nRokshan emerged from the pavilion and came to Lamprophyre's side. \"Let's go to Kolmira,\" he suggested. \"I need to talk to the commander there, anyway.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. A long flight was just what she needed. She retrieved Hyaloclast's pendant from the peg and crouched to give Rokshan a leg up. Maybe her sense of dread would diminish once she was in the air.\n\nNot only didn't her dread diminish, it grew more intense as the hours wore on. She'd forgotten how depressing Kolmira was compared to Tanajital, how dour and dark its roofs were, how close together its buildings. She didn't understand why Dharan liked it so much. Granted, he'd been born there, but surely that would make him more likely to see its many flaws?\n\nShe grumped her way through Rokshan's meeting with the military commander and grumped her way through examining the pyrite weapons. That made her even more anxious with dread, remembering the weapons' failure at Manjaret. By the time they left for Tanajital, she felt sick to both her stomachs in anticipation of meeting the Fanishkorites and wished it could be over already. Maybe Depik's \"something special\" was her favorite curried lamb. That cheered her slightly, but not enough.\n\nEkanath had set the meeting for the training grounds, which Lamprophyre thought was a mistake. Better to do this in the entrance hall, with its greater privacy and reminder of who was really in charge. But Rokshan had said, \"This is part of us looking like we believe they have power over us. Having the meeting inside the palace would put Fanishkor at a disadvantage, which would give them incentive to demand more and greater concessions to offset that. But we couldn't let them choose the place, because the king coming to them is the act of a conquered nation. So this is the best option.\"\n\nNow Lamprophyre waited on the training grounds for Rokshan to return from changing into his official dragon-liaison clothes. Someone had erected a canopy tall enough that Lamprophyre could see beneath it without having to lower herself all the way to the ground. Peculiar backless chairs that folded for storage were set beneath the canopy, with more folded chairs in a stack nearby. Only three had been set up, and Lamprophyre thought about that: chairs for the king, Chaaksha, and presumably Yalini, but not for Rokshan. That could be because Lamprophyre, not Rokshan, was part of the negotiations, and of course there was no folding chair big enough to fit her.\n\nThe sick feeling, which had faded somewhat on the flight back, redoubled. She was more confident in dealing with humans diplomatically than she had been when she first arrived in Tanajital, but up until now, all the humans she'd had diplomatic interactions with had been friendly or even subservient. They'd wanted to deal with dragons as equals, and it was to their benefit to be polite. This was the first time she'd face an antagonistic foreign power. She'd never been so grateful for her ability to hear thoughts. So long as Chaaksha didn't bring a huge retinue, she would have a secret advantage.\n\nShe heard Rokshan approaching and scowled at the tunic he wore over his shirt. \"Did you really have to wear that?\"\n\nRokshan straightened the gaudy, gold-embroidered tunic with the picture of a dragon on it. \"You're in a foul mood,\" he observed. \"You know why I have to wear this. Are you going to be all right?\"\n\nLamprophyre sighed, releasing a puff of smoke she didn't even try to turn into a ring. \"I'm sorry. I just want this to be over.\"\n\nRokshan squeezed her hand. \"Soon enough. Don't worry. The worst they can do is refuse to help. And since they've already done that, we'd be no worse off than we already are.\"\n\n\"Even so\u2014\"\n\nThe dying-duck sound of the horn announcing King Ekanath's arrival cut her words off. She straightened to watch the procession coming toward them, and her heart sank. There were at least a dozen courtiers accompanying the king, and if Chaaksha brought that many, it would be impossible for Lamprophyre to hear anyone's thoughts. \"Is there any graceful way to ask the king to send those people back inside?\" she murmured.\n\n\"They show he has power,\" Rokshan said. \"Why\u2014oh. Too much noise.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I really wanted to eavesdrop on Chaaksha.\"\n\n\"It might still be possible,\" Rokshan said, but he didn't sound hopeful.\n\nEkanath greeted them politely before taking a seat on the nearest folding stool. \"And now we wait,\" he said. \"We may wait a while, depending on whether Chaaksha feels the need to hammer home the point that we're the petitioners.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Rokshan said. \"If they're willing to give up those shields, they can ask anything they like.\"\n\n\"Then there's been no progress on the weapons.\"\n\n\"We were in Kolmira this morning. They haven't improved the firing rate. And as to the other thing, I haven't heard any news.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt annoyed that the king clearly knew more about Rokshan's secret weapons project than she did. \"I don't see why,\" she began, and Rokshan put a hand over hers to still her.\n\n\"They're here,\" he said.\n\nThe big red and white-splotched canopy was approaching across the field. This time, only Yalini and Chaaksha walked beneath it. Behind the canopy trailed a double handful of men and women in Fanishkorite red. So much for Lamprophyre's secret edge.\n\nShe kept her face impassive as the Fanishkorites approached, though it was unlikely any of them were capable of interpreting draconic expressions. The canopy bearers brought their burden to where its front edge brushed the king's canopy and extended its legs, and Chaaksha and Yalini paused there for a few beats before walking forward. The two women didn't bow, just sat gracefully on the backless chairs. Chaaksha wore a plain red robe over her white shirt and trousers; Yalini's gown was a dark orange that reminded Lamprophyre unpleasantly of the dragon scout she and Coquina had killed. She sat as still as the statue she'd appeared to be on their first meeting.\n\nNo one spoke at first. Lamprophyre didn't know what speaking first would mean in terms of the power struggle this was only the opening moves of. Finally, Ekanath said, \"We are pleased to meet with you, ambassador, your highness. You are gracious to extend the offer.\"\n\n\"As you are gracious to accept, your majesty,\" Chaaksha said in her deep voice. \"We hope you have considered the outcome of our last meeting and are prepared to make different choices.\"\n\n\"We are surprised at your willingness to return, given that we rejected your first proposal.\" Ekanath sat as straight as if his chair had a back. \"Tell me, how have matters changed?\"\n\nChaaksha smiled. Lamprophyre really wished she could hear the woman's thoughts, because she was certain Chaaksha was about to lie. \"Fanishkor has seen the results of dragon depredations on human settlements,\" she said. \"While we have the means to protect ourselves, we understand Gonjiri cannot say the same. King Damen's heart goes out to the victims of these attacks, though they are not his subjects. He wishes to offer Gonjiri assistance.\"\n\nEkanath leaned forward slightly. \"That's extremely generous of him. I take it you speak of the shield artifacts?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Chaaksha inclined her head in the barest of nods. \"They are effective. I understand the dragon ambassador has seen this for herself?\"\n\n\"I have,\" Lamprophyre said. She didn't relax. The hammer, as Rokshan put it, hadn't fallen yet. Chaaksha wasn't here out of the goodness of her heart; she wanted something in exchange. \"So all Fanishkor's cities are protected?\"\n\nChaaksha's pleasant smile faded slightly. \"We are in the process of shielding all our larger cities.\"\n\n\"Not the towns. Not the villages,\" Lamprophyre persisted. \"Fanishkor's citizens are still in danger from Sardonyx.\"\n\n\"Sardonyx,\" Chaaksha said. There was a speculative tone in her voice Lamprophyre didn't like. \"Of course. We believe Sardonyx isn't interested in those smaller towns when she can make a big show of intimidation attacking our cities.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She wants humans dead. All humans. I've seen her set dozens of dragons to kill only five humans. You're exposing helpless people to her attacks.\"\n\n\"We wouldn't dream of contradicting you, given that Gonjiri was the first target of these ancient dragons,\" Chaaksha said. \"Though we are concerned at to what degree you expect us to take your word for what these dragons intend.\"\n\n\"You question our honor?\" Ekanath said. He didn't sound angry, but Lamprophyre didn't need to hear his thoughts to know he wasn't happy with Chaaksha's words.\n\n\"Not at all,\" Chaaksha said. \"But you must admit it's quite a coincidence. Ancient dragons from a time before the catastrophe suddenly appear. They supposedly raze Gonjirian cities to the ground before attacking Fanishkor. Why shouldn't we believe these are actually your dragon allies, intent on making our king believe he must prostrate himself before you and give up our defensive secrets?\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Lamprophyre said, ignoring Rokshan's warning hand on her arm. \"You're just trying to put us on the defensive. Why don't you say what you came here to say, and stop making up stories?\"\n\nChaaksha's smile widened. \"I meant only to illustrate how the situation looks to King Damen,\" she said. \"Of course we believe your story. It's unlikely dragons would attack Leksital with one of their own inside. And we have independently confirmed the reports of destroyed Gonjirian villages.\"\n\n\"Then I feel I should echo the dragon ambassador's question,\" Ekanath said. \"We are aware that Fanishkor is far better protected against dragon attacks than Gonjiri. We have asked for the secret of the defensive shield and been rejected. We appear once more to be at an impasse. So\u2014what is the point of this meeting, if not for Fanishkor to lord it over this country in its time of crisis?\"\n\nLamprophyre had never been more impressed with the king. He'd delivered that statement in firm, confident tones that said he didn't care what Fanishkor had in mind, and their attitude of superiority meant nothing to him. But Rokshan's hand tightened on hers before releasing her, and she wondered what she'd missed.\n\n\"As I said, King Damen wishes to offer Gonjiri assistance,\" Chaaksha said, just as if Ekanath's bold words hadn't offended her. \"We are prepared to give you the secret of the shield artifacts, as well as enough of them to protect Tanajital.\"\n\nEkanath didn't react. \"And in return,\" he said, \"King Damen wants\u2026\"\n\nChaaksha shot a quick glance at Yalini. \"King Damen acknowledges that the shields are no permanent solution, particularly if the dragons figure out that they are no barrier to physical entry,\" she said. \"He asks that the dragons of Nirinatan fight the ancient dragons when they attack Fanishkorite cities.\"\n\nLamprophyre opened her mouth to protest, but Rokshan overrode her. \"Since we're being honest with each other, we should inform you that modern dragons aren't a match for ancient dragon warriors. We're willing to do as King Damen asks, but he should know they aren't the solution he's looking for.\"\n\n\"My father wants his people to see that he takes their safety seriously,\" Yalini said, losing the stone statue demeanor she'd worn until then. \"The sight of dragons fighting in defense of our cities would boost morale.\"\n\n\"Dragons are not a battle standard,\" Rokshan said, once more overriding Lamprophyre's outraged retort. \"But I take your meaning. Ambassador, will Hyaloclast consent to entering Fanishkor to defend its cities?\" He gave her a fierce look that said don't let anger get the best of you as clearly as if she'd heard his thoughts.\n\nLamprophyre calmed herself. \"She will,\" she said, \"though I believe it would be honorable of King Damen to make the request himself. Just so there's no confusion.\"\n\n\"He will send the message immediately,\" Chaaksha said. Lamprophyre wondered at that, given that Chaaksha hadn't known about chalcedony artifacts before Lamprophyre had told her about them. Maybe that was just more diplomatic talk.\n\n\"So. Dragons in exchange for shields. That seems equitable,\" Ekanath said.\n\n\"That's not all,\" Chaaksha said. \"King Damen requests your cooperation on another matter.\"\n\nLamprophyre's dread, which had ebbed as they spoke of dragons defending Fanishkor, rose to new and painful heights. She was certain she knew what Chaaksha was going to ask next.\n\n\"Oh? And what is that?\" Ekanath asked. Lamprophyre looked at him briefly and saw his hand resting on his thigh was clenched tightly enough the tendons stood out. Maybe he knew what was coming, too.\n\n\"There is too much bad blood between our countries,\" Chaaksha said, \"too much mutual antagonism. King Damen tires of this animosity. He wants a new era of good feeling between us, to be celebrated by the union of the royal houses.\"\n\nRokshan went very still beside Lamprophyre. Her legs trembled, and she tensed to keep her nerves from showing. Even though she'd expected it, it still left her feeling even sicker than before.\n\n\"You requested this before,\" Ekanath said. \"The marriage of my son and Damen's daughter.\"\n\nChaaksha inclined her head again. \"Indeed,\" she said. \"And this time, King Damen has instructed me to say that he will view a refusal as an act of hostility. No marriage, no alliance. No shields. And no reconciliation.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "\"No\u2014\" Rokshan began.\n\n\"That is quite the demand,\" Ekanath said, cutting him off. \"With extraordinary consequences.\"\n\n\"It is a small thing,\" Chaaksha said, \"with extraordinary benefits. A marriage between our countries to symbolize a new era of peace. And with Yalini as King Damen's potential heir, your son could rule a kingdom by her side.\"\n\n\"I don't\u2014\" Rokshan began again.\n\n\"Be silent,\" Ekanath said, his voice cutting like a blade across Rokshan's words. \"You understand this is not a small thing you ask. We must have time to deliberate.\"\n\n\"You have fifteen minutes,\" Chaaksha said. \"We will withdraw to give you privacy.\" She smiled, and this time her smile was a cunning, superior expression. She knew Ekanath couldn't afford to refuse, and she enjoyed having power over him.\n\nChaaksha and Yalini stepped once more beneath the Fanishkorite canopy, and the canopy bearers retracted the legs and carried it to the far side of the training grounds, all the way to the path between the palace and the parkland. Lamprophyre watched them go, feeling stunned. She heard Rokshan said, \"It's insane. I won't do it.\"\n\n\"We can't afford to indulge your whims anymore,\" Ekanath said in a low, fierce voice. \"This will mean the difference between life and death for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. It's past time you shouldered your responsibilities and gave up your selfish lifestyle.\"\n\n\"I can't\u2014\" Rokshan glanced around as if suddenly aware that he had an audience of a dozen courtiers. \"Get them out of here,\" he said. \"This is a private thing.\"\n\nEkanath gestured. With some milling around, the courtiers retreated well out of human earshot in the direction opposite the Fanishkorite party. Lamprophyre followed them a short distance, making them back away farther, just in case any of them got any ideas about listening in.\n\nWhen she returned, Ekanath was saying, \"This is not a fate worse than death. I didn't know your mother when we married, and our union has been more wonderful than I could have imagined.\"\n\n\"This isn't about whether Yalini and I would be happy together, which I assure you we would not,\" Rokshan said. \"I am already married, Father. You're asking me to break my vows.\"\n\n\"You're not married,\" Ekanath said. \"A human can't marry a dragon. You've deluded yourself into thinking this\u2026this relationship of yours is equal to a human marriage. It's just not true. And I'm damn sure you never made wedding vows, so don't try to ride your high horse over me. Break your vows indeed.\"\n\n\"We're not married the human way,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but we are pair-bonded the dragon way. That's even more binding than your marriage vows, because it's a tangible thing.\"\n\nEkanath made a dismissive gesture. \"Not important. And not something Damen will understand. All he will see is that we're spurning his offer. That could start a war all by itself. Think, Rokshan. What you want is irrelevant beside what you can do for this kingdom.\"\n\n\"At the cost of my honor,\" Rokshan said.\n\nEkanath's hand curled into a fist again. \"As if you cared about honor all those years you spent wasting your time\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't bring that up again,\" Rokshan said. His face had paled with fury, and his jaw looked tight enough to break. \"Damn it, Father, what do I have to do to earn your respect? Yes, I was once a wastrel, and yes, I haven't always made good choices. But I've changed. I've done everything I can to prove my worth to you, tried my best to make you respect me, and it's never enough. What will you demand of me next, Father? Prove myself by sacrificing my firstborn to Nirinatan? Ask me to kill my best friend because she stands in the way of the life you want for me?\" He drew in a deep breath. \"I won't do it. And there is nothing you can say that will change my mind.\"\n\nEkanath slapped him.\n\nRokshan took a step back and raised a hand to his cheek. He was breathing heavily. \"Not a good counterargument, Father,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I no longer care,\" Ekanath said. \"Your choice. But you will tell them the reason why. The entire reason. And when you've made this family a laughingstock\u2014when you've let Gonjiri go up in dragon flames\u2014we will see how comforted you are that you kept your honor.\"\n\nRokshan lowered his hand. \"I won't apologize, because I've done nothing wrong.\"\n\n\"Tell that to everyone who will lose their homes to dragons,\" Ekanath said. \"No, you won't be able to. They'll all be dead.\"\n\nRokshan flinched. He closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. Then he turned and walked toward the Fanishkorite party.\n\nLamprophyre caught up with him halfway there. \"Rokshan, stop,\" she pleaded. \"Stop and think about this.\"\n\nHe turned on her fiercely. \"There's no choice,\" he said. \"I'm not going to marry someone else when I'm already married to you.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\" Dread no longer filled her. She suspected it was because she was so overwhelmed by it she couldn't feel it anymore. \"Rokshan, he's right. We need those shields. Sardonyx will come back, and there's no way we can fight her. Maybe you could\u2026you could pretend to promise\u2014\"\n\n\"And lose my honor a different way? No, Lamprophyre!\"\n\n\"Then promise, and tell them the marriage has to be postponed until the war is over. We'll figure out the shields ourselves before then. Then you can\u2014\"\n\nRokshan's jaw clenched again. \"I will not be forsworn, not for anything,\" he said. \"I hoped you would understand that.\"\n\nHis words struck at her heart. She lowered her head, wishing she were human to weep and weep until this misery disappeared. \"I do,\" she said. \"I just hoped I was wrong. Because it's my fault\u2014if we weren't pair-bonded, you could give them what they want. I don't want to be the reason this alliance fails.\"\n\nHe put his hand on her arm. \"Sweetheart, this isn't just about you. It's about the two of us together. We chose this path, and we are sworn to be loyal to each other. Suppose it were the other way around. Suppose you were the one they demanded marry one of their dragons.\"\n\n\"They don't have dragons.\"\n\n\"You understand my meaning. What would you choose?\"\n\nA sharp, hot pang shot through her. \"I couldn't desert you,\" she said. \"Even if it were possible to give up one pair-bond for another, I couldn't do it.\"\n\n\"Then you do understand,\" Rokshan said. He patted her arm. \"Will you come with me? I don't want to tell them the truth alone.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"So much for our secret. You know they'll tell people about the aberrant prince and his unsuitable, incompatible dragon mate.\"\n\n\"I know. It's not how I hoped to have it come out, but it looks like we have no choice.\"\n\nThey walked side by side to the Fanishkorite canopy. Chaaksha looked surprised to see them. \"I didn't mean you were to announce the decision yourself, your highness,\" she said.\n\n\"My royal father insisted,\" Rokshan said. \"The answer is 'no.' There will be no marriage. And I'm to tell you why, again at my father's insistence.\"\n\nChaaksha's face went very still. \"No explanation will change the outcome,\" she said. \"No marriage, no alliance.\"\n\n\"It's by way of being a punishment for being responsible for the alliance's failure.\" Rokshan straightened his back. \"The reason there can be no marriage is that I am already married.\"\n\nChaaksha's eyes widened. \"Impossible. We would have heard.\"\n\n\"The marriage was a secret, and when I explain the details, you'll understand why.\"\n\nYalini stepped forward. \"This isn't a lie, is it? Am I so repulsive?\"\n\nThere were few enough people present that Lamprophyre could hear Rokshan think you have no idea. It would have amused her if she hadn't felt so distraught. Chaaksha's thoughts were a mass of surprise and frustration. Lamprophyre got the feeling Chaaksha's reputation was tied up in achieving this alliance. Yalini, on the other hand, was angry, like a child denied a treat. Lamprophyre wondered why she was so set on marrying Rokshan when she wasn't in love with him.\n\n\"You are lovely, and intelligent, and you should not see my refusal as a comment on your good qualities,\" Rokshan lied. Lamprophyre blocked all the thoughts. Hearing Chaaksha and Yalini's thoughts might be valuable, but it would mean distracting her from what was said, and she suspected that would matter more.\n\n\"About a month ago,\" Rokshan went on, \"the ambassador Lamprophyre was the victim of a magical artifact wielded by a vengeful adept. He turned her human to make her vulnerable to his attacks. Lamprophyre is my best friend, Ambassador Chaaksha, and when she was human, that feeling turned to love. And she loves me. We were married\u2014\"\n\nYalini burst out laughing. \"Married? I thought she was pitiful for loving you, but now I see you're even more pitiful. Feeling attraction to someone not your own species, how deviant. And disgusting.\"\n\n\"We were married,\" Rokshan continued, ignoring Yalini, \"and then Lamprophyre had the opportunity to become a dragon again. Her life was in danger so long as she was human, so she was transformed again. But that hasn't changed how we feel about each other, or the fact that we've made vows I consider sacred. So I cannot marry anyone else.\"\n\nChaaksha didn't look amused. \"You can't consider yourself married when you're not the same species. It's impossible.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you don't see it my way,\" Rokshan said, \"but this is how things are. I beg you, ambassador, please reconsider. It's not my father's fault that we can't fulfill that one provision of the alliance. Please don't punish Gonjiri for my failings.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry,\" Yalini said, \"I wouldn't have you now if you paid me. Having a husband who can be attracted to a dragon\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Chaaksha said. Yalini looked surprised to be addressed so bluntly, but she fell silent. \"This is disastrous,\" Chaaksha went on. \"That marriage is key to Damen's agreement to the alliance. He wants a blood relation between our kingdoms because he's afraid if he can't hold Ekanath's posterity hostage, you'll come to war against him someday.\"\n\n\"Why are you telling him this?\" Yalini said. \"You're giving all our secrets away!\"\n\nChaaksha made a quelling gesture in Yalini's direction. \"Are you certain there's no way you'd give up this\u2026marriage\u2026of yours?\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Rokshan said. \"It would cost me everything I hold dear. My love, my honor, everything. I'm truly sorry.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" Chaaksha said. She gestured to the canopy bearers. \"We will return to Fanishkor in the morning. Prince Rokshan, I wish you well. You and the ambassador. You're both fools, and you'll live to regret your attachment, but\u2026good luck.\" She saluted Rokshan, and then Lamprophyre.\n\nYalini stayed behind when the canopy moved, forcing the bearers to stop a short distance away. \"I can't believe I was ever attracted to you,\" she snarled.\n\n\"You weren't,\" Lamprophyre said, unable to bear it any longer. \"You're greedy and selfish and all you ever wanted from Rokshan was good sex and beautiful babies. I hope you never marry, because your husband would be miserable his whole life.\"\n\nYalini's mouth fell open. Lamprophyre turned her back on the princess and walked away.\n\nSoon, Rokshan caught up to her. \"Was that true? What she wanted from me?\"\n\n\"It was all true. Does it help to know she thought you were handsome and didn't care about your scars?\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"You think I'm handsome and don't care about my scars. That matters far more than what some stone-faced Fanishkorite princess wants.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked ahead to where Ekanath waited. Her amusement died. \"He's never going to forgive you.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Rokshan sighed. \"But Darsha was right. I'll never gain his respect if I only ever do what he wants. I can't believe I took advice from a prostitute.\"\n\n\"Is there some reason a prostitute might not be wise?\"\n\n\"Prostitutes aren't generally known for wisdom, no.\" He sighed again. \"I think it's time I moved into the embassy. I don't want to encounter my father again for a while.\"\n\n\"We'll buy you a bed,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThe next day, Lamprophyre had to do what Rokshan persisted in referring to as \"holding court.\" Petitioners came to the embassy with questions or requests, and Lamprophyre did her best to fulfill them or turn the petitioners down politely. She wished she could send everyone home, because she wasn't in a cheerful mood. But this was one of her main responsibilities as ambassador, and it did give her something to think about that wasn't Sardonyx or war or worrying about how Yalini would spread the news of Rokshan and Lamprophyre's marriage.\n\nThere was no question Yalini would tell people. And she would do it in the most negative, denigrating way possible. Lamprophyre's only hope was that Chaaksha had been serious about leaving for Fanishkor in the morning, and Yalini wouldn't have time. But it didn't matter. The secret was out, and she and Rokshan would just have to endure.\n\nThere were more petitioners than usual, and it was well on the way to midafternoon when the last one left. Lamprophyre retreated into the embassy and settled on the floor, carefully avoiding the low bedframe and mattress next to the slates. \"I'm exhausted,\" she said.\n\n\"Nobody realizes how tiring it is to deal with a lot of people who all want different things,\" Rokshan said. He flung himself on the mattress, making it creak under his weight. \"I bet napping has far more appeal now.\"\n\n\"I definitely need sleep.\" Lamprophyre took the blue chalcedony pendant off the wall and warmed it in her hand. \"But I should talk to Hyaloclast first. Except she'll just say what she's been saying the last few days\u2014'no contact.'\"\n\n\"So wait for her to speak to you,\" Rokshan said. He had one arm flung across his eyes and his voice sounded drowsy.\n\n\"I don't know how you manage to fall asleep so quickly,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan pretended to snore. Lamprophyre poked him in the side, which made him laugh. \"All right, let me sleep,\" he said. \"And you sleep too.\"\n\nLamprophyre put the pendant away and curled up beneath her spread wings. She wasn't looking forward to spring, when the weather grew hot, and definitely not to summer, when it was hot and rainy. Winter, though, winter in Tanajital was lovely. She fell asleep listening idly to the thoughts of her household, to Abhit and Rassika playing chase with the neighborhood children, to Bhakriya planning a shopping trip, and to Depik contemplating supper.\n\nShe came abruptly awake to someone shouting her name. \"What?\" she exclaimed, sitting up straight. Across the room, Rokshan stirred and rose on one elbow.\n\n\"Lamprophyre!\" It was Hyaloclast's voice, with the odd echoing quality the pendant gave all communications. \"Lamprophyre, respond!\"\n\nLamprophyre scrambled to pick up the pendant. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Sardonyx's flight slipped past us, far to the south,\" Hyaloclast said. Her voice sounded unusually breathless. \"They are flying north along the river. We caught them at one of the southernmost cities along the river\u2014\"\n\n\"Nishta,\" Rokshan said. \"She means Nishta.\" He was already putting on his boots.\n\n\"There was great destruction, but we forced them back,\" Hyaloclast went on. \"Unfortunately, their flight split to travel in many directions. I've set our dragons to following them, in case Sardonyx instructed them to destroy any towns they came across, but we're spread thin. I need you to come west and head off any of the dragons that continued northward along the river.\"\n\n\"They're headed for Kolmira,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We'll stop them, Hyaloclast.\"\n\n\"I fear they've figured out that humans build along the rivers.\" Hyaloclast went silent for a moment, and Lamprophyre could hear the murmur of speech, as if she'd turned aside to address someone else. \"Tanajital could be in danger.\"\n\n\"But if they're spread out, we have a better chance against them,\" Rokshan said. \"Now's our chance to strike hard.\"\n\n\"We intend to,\" Hyaloclast said. \"But they can't be allowed to roam free. Destroy them if you can, but more importantly, convince them they're in greater danger the farther abroad they go.\"\n\n\"We'll do it.\" Lamprophyre hung the pendant around her neck as the mist cleared from its surface. She grabbed the second pendant, the green chalcedony, and asked, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Getting ready to go,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"You're not coming with me.\"\n\n\"Why not? If they're attacking Kolmira, I can help direct the city's defense.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"She said they're moving in the direction of Kolmira. I intend to intercept them before they reach that far. And I'm not risking having you with me when we encounter them.\"\n\nRokshan stood and faced her, his chin thrust out belligerently. \"I'm not weak, Lamprophyre.\"\n\n\"You're also not immune to fire and acid. Rokshan\u2014\"\n\n\"How do you not see how much I hate watching you fly into danger? That orange dragon nearly killed you!\"\n\nLamprophyre touched his shoulder gently. \"I know it's not in your nature,\" she said, \"but you're not equipped to fight this battle. And there's nothing wrong with that. You've already done so much! You taught the other commanders how to face dragon fire and acid, and you're working on improving the pyrite weapons. Don't feel you have to fly into battle too.\"\n\n\"Weapons that probably will never work,\" Rokshan said. \"I hate being helpless.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"And I hate that you're going into danger without me.\"\n\n\"I know that, too.\"\n\nRokshan sighed. \"Couldn't you\u2026no. You're right, I'd be a liability.\"\n\n\"Someday you'll have a dragon body, and that will change.\"\n\n\"Not soon enough.\" He shrugged. \"I'll go to headquarters and see what progress they've made on the weapons.\"\n\n\"I'll be back soon,\" Lamprophyre said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "She flew at top speed to the warehouses, where for a miracle everyone was present, even Dolomite. \"Tekentriya and I flew to Suwedhi this morning,\" he said, \"and I told her we needed a rest before going east this evening.\"\n\n\"There might not be time,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We have to leave now. Sardonyx's people are headed up the Rindra River and we need to stop them before they reach Kolmira.\"\n\n\"Then let's go,\" Flint said. \"Did Hyaloclast say anything else?\"\n\nLamprophyre leaped into the air and shot several dragonlengths away from the city, followed by the clutch, before replying. \"They're coming from the south. They attacked Nishta and then broke apart into smaller groups. We're trying to catch the ones that went north.\"\n\n\"Then we should head due west. They're too slow to have reached Kolmira already.\" Flint soared closer. \"We can cut them off before they get that far.\"\n\n\"But what are we supposed to do?\" Coquina said. \"Even four ancient dragons are too many for the seven of us to fight.\"\n\n\"Hyaloclast thought they were in small enough groups for our dragons to fight,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And at worst, we're to challenge them enough that they decide to head south again.\"\n\n\"That, we can do,\" Porphyry said with a laugh. \"I'd back us against ancient dragons any day. It's all that obstacle course flying that does it.\"\n\n\"Don't be overconfident. Those dragons are tough,\" Coquina said. She and Lamprophyre exchanged looks that said neither of them had forgotten killing that dragon scout. Lamprophyre tried not to let the memory unnerve her. She had her clutch surrounding her, and there were no dragons she'd rather have facing down ancient monsters with her than them.\n\nThey flew in silence, spaced out too widely for conversation. Lamprophyre listened to their idle thoughts for a while, but everyone was thinking the same thing: when would they meet their enemy? Beneath them, parted by the pale ribbon of the road to Kolmira, the golden fields stretched out in all directions, coming up against the dark mass of the forest to the north and turning into gray-brown hills to the south. Somewhere in those hills Rokshan's dragon body waited for his transformation. The thought cheered her.\n\nAhead, the gleaming silver streak of the Rindra River defined the horizon. Half a dozen birds swooped and soared above it, moving like predators who'd just spotted prey. Lamprophyre's breath caught. No bird was big enough to be visible at that distance. \"It's them,\" she shouted, thinking the words clearly in case the wind carried her audible words away.\n\nShe pushed herself faster, knowing the clutch would keep pace with her, until the darting specks became tiny dragons and the flash of fire was visible. Only five, not six, and they were closer than Lamprophyre had thought, well east of the river. There wasn't a town or even a village beneath them, just the road, but they were flying low and then soaring high. It looked as if something was there for them to attack, but what?\n\nLamprophyre considered the path she'd taken. Directly west from Tanajital, headed for Fanishkor on a straight line to Leksital. A group of travelers, if they'd left Tanajital that morning, might have made it this far by now\u2026\n\n\"Stones,\" she swore, and reached within herself for reserves she hadn't thought possible. In two beats she'd outpaced the rest of the clutch and was straining to see what the ancient dragons had targeted. She had to be wrong, but if she was right\u2014oh, Mother Stone, she prayed, let me be wrong. She didn't care in that moment that her God wasn't real; the need for reassurance was too great. Five ancient dragons. The clutch was seriously outclassed.\n\nShe heard wings beating the air, catching up with her. \"Something's wrong,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"I think that's the Fanishkorite ambassador's party down there.\" Lamprophyre gasped for breath. \"We have to save them.\"\n\n\"I think it's too late. I don't see movement on the ground.\"\n\n\"We have to save them,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I dare you to beat me there.\"\n\nCoquina let out a sharp bark of laughter. \"If that's how you feel,\" she said, and shouted, \"Faster! You slugs can't catch me!\" as she easily pulled into the lead.\n\nLamprophyre scanned the ground as they approached. Coquina was half-right; there wasn't much motion on the ground, but there were people crouched in the scant shelter of the wrecked caravan. Dead horses lay everywhere, along with dead human bodies, but Lamprophyre saw heads turn as she and her clutchmates approached. Those humans immediately shrank deeper into whatever shelter they'd found, clearly fearing another assault. Lamprophyre didn't have energy to feel bad about that.\n\nShe picked out the largest of the ancient females, a great pale blue monstrosity, and aimed herself at her. The female was hovering, drawing in breath to send another gout of fire at the caravan. Lamprophyre reversed in midair and slammed into the female feet-first, making her choke on the lungful of air she'd just drawn. Too bad the fiery contents of her second stomach couldn't burn her. Lamprophyre reversed again and raced back to her target, who'd just recovered from the unexpected attack and was ponderously turning around to face Lamprophyre.\n\nLamprophyre beat the air to gain altitude, keeping an eye on her target. As the female turned to ascend, Lamprophyre dropped, and at the last moment before flying past swiped at the female's face with her claws. The female bellowed in rage and pain, an atavistic sound that triggered an answering yell from Lamprophyre. It felt natural, not at all embarrassing, and she yelled again and flew past and around the female, taunting her with her speed.\n\nTo her surprise and excitement, she saw blood welling from the female's cheek and eye socket. It was a lucky hit, and she hoped she'd partially blinded the female. She told herself not to be overconfident and made another flying pass, circling the female, who spun dizzily trying to focus on Lamprophyre.\n\nLamprophyre looked around swiftly to see how her clutchmates were doing. Porphyry had followed her example and was looping and dodging around another bulky female, maroon like old blood, whose flanks bore signs of his claws. Coquina and Flint were dodging a bright silver male, while Bromargyrite and Orthoclase tackled another one, as purple as Lamprophyre remembered her father being. And Dolomite had closed with the third male and clung to his back, clawing at the male's wings. They were both the same dark green color, and entangled as they were, they looked like a monstrous four-winged lump.\n\nLamprophyre shouted a warning\u2014getting that close could be dangerous\u2014and pain lanced through her left leg just before the pale blue female grabbed her around the waist. \"You're nothing, little female,\" the dragon said, and raked her claws across the base of Lamprophyre's left wing.\n\nAgony shot through Lamprophyre, and her wing suddenly felt heavy and limp. The pale blue female let go of her, flinging her away, and Lamprophyre fell, one wing flapping desperately, the other hanging useless. Lamprophyre screamed. It was so much like her worst nightmare she was paralyzed for a few beats, her good wing fighting for altitude without direction from her. Then she shook herself free of the nightmare and focused on her injured wing. It wasn't totally useless, it just hurt when she tried to use it. And she could deal with pain.\n\nSomething grabbed her hand, and her fall stopped, became a more controlled descent. \"It's not far to the ground,\" Porphyry shouted. \"Can you fly at all?\"\n\nLamprophyre moved her wing again. The pain was lessening. \"Maybe,\" she shouted back. Then she looked past him and screamed, \"Look out!\"\n\nPorphyry had just begun to turn when the pale blue female caught him around the waist and bore him to the ground. Lamprophyre's hand was ripped from his grasp, and she fell again, but in a jerky, sideways fashion as her wings fought to work together. She hit the ground and gasped at landing on the damaged part of her wing. Struggling to right herself, she shouted Porphyry's name, then ran, half on foot, half using her hands, to where Porphyry and the female fought.\n\nThe female had pinned Porphyry on his back with his wings spread painfully beneath him. Porphyry fought her off, kicking her chest and stomach, but she outweighed him. His hands gripped hers, the claws digging into her flesh, pushing back even as her head drew nearer to his throat. A flash of memory struck, and for a moment brown Corundum lay there, desperately struggling. Then it was Porphyry again, his eyes wide with terror, his teeth bared, fighting for his life.\n\nLamprophyre cried out his name again and ran faster. Blood from an injury she didn't remember dripped into her face, and she swiped it from her eyes, tripped over a stone, and pushed herself upright through sheer terror. Her injured wing dragged beside her, slowing her, but she was there, she was almost there.\n\nThe female roared and bore down on Porphyry, forcing his arms wide and bringing her mouth with its terrible sharp teeth within range of his throat. Porphyry screamed. The sound cut off abruptly, leaving behind a terrible silence in which Lamprophyre couldn't even hear her own screaming.\n\nShe flung herself on the pale blue female, rolling her away from Porphyry onto her back with one wing crushed beneath her. The female's mouth moved, but Lamprophyre still couldn't hear anything but that one scream, cut off, over and over again until she closed her eyes to make it go away. There was nothing but heat, and blood, and her claws in someone's throat, and still the scream wouldn't stop.\n\nShe came to herself to find Coquina shaking her, her lips moving as silently as the female dragon's had. She stared at Coquina in numb horror. Then Coquina drew back her hand and slapped Lamprophyre hard enough to make her jerk backward. Suddenly there was nothing but noise: wings flapping, voices shouting, shriller voices she knew to be humans screaming or wailing, and in the distance, barely audible, the Rindra River flowing serenely to the distant sea.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" Coquina was saying.\n\nLamprophyre couldn't remember. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"You're covered in blood. Please tell me none of it's yours.\"\n\n\"My wing\u2014\" Lamprophyre flexed her injured wing and hissed at the pain that shot through it. \"I don't think it's bad. It just hurts when I try to fly.\"\n\n\"You killed her,\" Coquina said. Her voice shook. \"You were like an animal, snarling and growling, and you tore out her throat and kept going.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at the bloody mess nearby. Pale blue scales slippery with blood lay motionless. \"She killed\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. I saw. I was too far.\"\n\nThey stared at each other. Lamprophyre started shaking. \"He saved me,\" she said. \"He wasn't paying attention because he was keeping me from falling.\"\n\n\"We scared them off,\" Coquina said. \"Actually I think you tearing their leader apart scared them off. They flew south. We weren't supposed to chase them, were we?\"\n\n\"I don't care. Was anyone else hurt?\"\n\nCoquina rotated her shoulder. \"Everyone is injured. I think you're the worst off, if you're having trouble flying.\"\n\n\"Then we're not going after them. If anyone else is killed\u2026Stones, Coquina. He can't be dead. He just can't. He's the only other dragon who knows how to read.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre\u2026\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"I know that doesn't matter. It's just\u2026he can't be dead.\"\n\nCoquina stood. \"Come with me.\"\n\nShe led Lamprophyre to where Porphyry lay, surrounded by the other males. His eyes were closed, and except for the bloody mess where his throat had been, he was unmarked. But there was no way anyone would mistake him for anything but dead. Lamprophyre knelt beside him and touched his hand. \"Thank you,\" she said. \"You wouldn't have died if you hadn't stopped to save me. Thank you.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you killed her,\" Bromargyrite said. His deep voice, normally so placid, was enraged, as if he were on the verge of violence. \"I wish we'd killed all of them.\"\n\n\"They would have killed us first,\" Flint said. \"Stones. We really don't stand a chance, do we?\"\n\nLamprophyre tried to find words to stop them all wallowing in pain and despair and came up empty. \"We don't,\" she said.\n\nThey sat together, not speaking, for a few dozen beats. Lamprophyre didn't want to listen to their thoughts, which were probably as despondent as her own. Her mind felt untethered from her body, whirling around like a kite in a spring breeze. She'd seen the masses of kites flown to celebrate the human god Meyari's return to the world and thought how sad it was that was the closest humans would ever get to true flight. Now she wished she'd never heard of flying, that no dragon was capable of taking to the skies.\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\nLamprophyre looked up. A small woman in a Fanishkorite tunic that was grubby and torn and blackened down one side by a gout of acid stood hesitantly nearby. \"You saved us,\" the woman said. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"We didn't save everyone,\" Lamprophyre said. The words tasted like bile. Porphyry had died, and so had a dozen or more humans, and most of the dragons responsible had flown away unscathed.\n\n\"That's not your fault,\" the woman said. \"It would have been worse if you hadn't come along. Were you looking for us?\"\n\n\"No. It was an accident that we crossed your path.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. We're still grateful.\" The woman bowed.\n\nLamprophyre felt the faintest stirrings of responsibility, and remembered she was the dragon ambassador. \"Is Ambassador Chaaksha still alive? Or Princess Yalini? I should speak to someone in authority.\"\n\nThe woman hesitated. \"Princess Yalini is uninjured. The ambassador was struck by acid. They think she might lose her leg.\"\n\n\"But she's alive. May I speak to her?\"\n\nThe woman nodded. \"Come with me.\"\n\nThe wrecked caravan showed signs of humans trying to set things right. The dead animals had been dragged to one side, and canvas-covered lumps showed where the human bodies had been moved. A couple of humans were busy repairing a wagon. It looked like the only wagon intact enough to be repaired. Lamprophyre walked carefully through the caravan, not wanting to disrupt things further. Everyone seemed too preoccupied to pay attention to her\u2014all but one. Lamprophyre stopped next to Tarakh, whose red and white tunic was missing and whose hair and face were scorched on one side. \"Tarakh,\" she said. \"I'm glad you're alive.\"\n\nTarakh looked up at her. A faint smile touched his lips. \"Oresa was killed,\" he said. \"I wish I'd died with her.\"\n\nUp until a hundred beats before, Lamprophyre would have challenged him on his words. Now she understood exactly how he felt. \"My clutchmate Porphyry is gone, too,\" she said. \"It feels like nothing will ever be all right again.\"\n\nTarakh's eyes were red-rimmed, and tear tracks made marks on his soot-darkened face. \"And yet we live on,\" he said. \"God's breath, but life can be so unfair.\"\n\n\"It can.\" Lamprophyre groped for words. \"Porphyry was sort of\u2026I don't know the human word. He loved a good joke, and he was always the first to agree to a race. Full of life, maybe. And I know, if I'd been the one to die, he would have gone on racing, and it wouldn't mean he'd forgotten me. Just like I won't forget him just because I go on living. But I can't stop thinking of the things we'll never be able to tell each other.\"\n\n\"That's it. That's it exactly.\" Tarakh wiped a sleeve across his eyes, smearing the dirt around. \"We were to be married when we returned to Leksital. Such a terrible loss\u2014and yet it only matters to me. But that's how it works, isn't it? Our personal tragedies mean nothing to anyone else.\"\n\n\"True, but does that make them any less important? Does tragedy have to be kingdom-shattering to be something you're allowed to mourn?\" Lamprophyre rested her hand lightly on Tarakh's shoulder. \"If it helps, I'll mourn with you.\"\n\nTarakh regarded her with wide, unblinking eyes. \"Do you know,\" he said, \"I think it does. Thank you.\"\n\n\"Oresa wasn't afraid of me. That makes her special all by itself.\" Lamprophyre withdrew her hand. \"I have to talk to Chaaksha now, but if it's too hard for you to go to Leksital, we'd welcome you in Tanajital.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'll remember that.\" Tarakh turned away, but she could hear his thoughts, and they weren't as despairing as before. She felt a lightening of her own spirits as well. Sharing grief did help, maybe only a little, but it helped.\n\nThe Fanishkorites had erected a little tent from the canvas formerly covering a wagon and laid Chaaksha inside. The bitter smell of dragon acid filled the air, and Lamprophyre had to work hard to conceal her dismay at seeing Chaaksha, her body laced and pitted with acid spray. A blanket covered her lower body, but Lamprophyre, listening to Chaaksha's thoughts, knew the woman's right leg hurt badly and her left leg had almost no sensation\u2014a bad sign.\n\n\"Ambassador,\" Chaaksha said. Her voice was remarkably strong for someone in that much pain. \"Thank you. We would have been utterly destroyed if not for you and your companions.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry we weren't faster,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We thought Sardonyx's dragons were following the river, and we didn't know you were in the area for them to stumble on.\"\n\nChaaksha waved that away. \"We aren't your responsibility, ambassador. I don't blame you for anything.\"\n\n\"I'll send word to Tanajital for them to send help. And we'll stay with you until help comes, in case those dragons return.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but that's unnecessary.\" Chaaksha fumbled at her neck and withdrew a small chalcedony pendant. \"I've spoken with people in Leksital, and they're sending relief.\"\n\n\"Forgive me, but Leksital is at least two days away as humans travel. You can't sit out here alone waiting. We'll stay with you.\"\n\nChaaksha smiled. \"It's not that we reject your help, just that my government doesn't want any confusion over our rescue.\"\n\n\"You mean you don't want to owe Gonjiri anything.\"\n\n\"You're very insightful.\" Chaaksha's smile faded. \"Honja, Taritin, leave us,\" she said, waving at the two humans who stood nearby. When they were gone, and it was just the two of them, Chaaksha said, \"I want you to know I disagreed with the terms of my king's proposal. If I could, I would give you the secret of the shields, and damn the consequences.\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. \"I wouldn't want you to get in trouble with your king.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. I don't know anything about them.\" Chaaksha shifted her weight, and pain creased her features briefly. \"But I promise you I will argue the point with Damen when I return. You saved us at a tremendous cost\u2014they told me one of your dragons was killed.\"\n\n\"Yes. He was my clutchmate\u2014do you know what that means? Closer than a brother. I've known him all my life. Humans don't have an equivalent.\"\n\n\"Then a terrible cost. I am sorry for your loss. Why did you do it? Fanishkor is still at odds with Gonjiri and your dragons.\"\n\nLamprophyre blinked. \"Well, because we couldn't not try to save you. Because we're all rational creatures.\"\n\n\"You could have let us die, and saved yourselves.\"\n\n\"We could have. But I don't think we could have lived with ourselves afterward.\"\n\nChaaksha smiled again. \"That's what I thought. Thank you again, ambassador.\" She extended a scarred hand to Lamprophyre, who took it gently.\n\nShe walked back to where her clutch waited by Porphyry's body, so lost in thought she didn't realize she had a companion until Yalini said, \"Why did you come?\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at her. The princess was filthy with soot and dirt, but she carried herself as if she were perfectly groomed and walking through the halls of the palace. \"We didn't know you were here. We were sent to chase Sardonyx's dragons away from Kolmira.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Yalini said.\n\nLamprophyre didn't say anything else. Yalini was the last person she wanted to have a conversation with. But her wing still hurt too much for her to fly, so she couldn't make an escape.\n\n\"I think it's disgusting that Rokshan is attracted to you,\" Yalini said. \"People aren't supposed to be attracted to animals, and you're not human.\"\n\n\"I'm also not an animal, and I don't give a damn what you think about it,\" Lamprophyre shot back. \"Besides, you've already made yourself clear on the subject, so I'm not sure why you feel entitled to go on criticizing and demeaning me.\"\n\n\"Because Rokshan was supposed to be mine.\" Yalini stopped and faced Lamprophyre. \"We are an ideal match. I've wanted to marry him ever since I learned he existed.\"\n\nAgainst her better judgment, Lamprophyre stopped. \"Do you have any idea how many women have felt that way about Rokshan?\" she demanded. \"He's been treated like a prize his whole life. Why the Stones would he think you were worth loving if that's how you felt about him?\"\n\n\"I respected him,\" Yalini said. \"He's deserving of someone like me, someone of his own station. I told him I'd let him go his own way. I was even willing to let him have a mistress, until I found out it was you he loved.\"\n\nFury choked Lamprophyre, leaving her speechless. Finally, she said, \"You don't know him at all if you could make such a vile proposal. He's not the sort of person who would make vows and then break them, even with his wife's permission.\"\n\nYalini shrugged. \"A marriage of convenience requires compromises. That's just one of many.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked past Yalini. Coquina and Orthoclase were looking in her direction as if wondering what was taking her so long. The sight reminded her of what was really important. \"I'm done discussing this with you,\" she said. \"You're petty and small-minded and you're never going to understand why Rokshan didn't want you. Go back to Fanishkor and find someone stupid enough to accept you on your terms.\"\n\nYalini said, \"I'm not\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre lowered her head and let out a puff of smoke that encircled Yalini's head, making her cry out. Lamprophyre was too angry to be excited at her first real smoke ring. \"I am a dragon,\" she said in a low, terrible voice. \"If I choose not to be civilized, I can make you disappear and no one will challenge me on it. Now, get out of my sight.\" She turned her back on Yalini and walked away.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Coquina asked when Lamprophyre arrived.\n\n\"Nothing important,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Certainly not as important as this.\"\n\nIn silence, they set about burying Porphyry."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The sun was low in the sky when a group of wagons and people riding horses came into sight from the east. It had taken nearly all that time for the six dragons to dig a grave for Porphyry. By the end, Lamprophyre's wing felt as if it were being ripped out of its socket from the constant motion of digging. She and Coquina carried Porphyry to the grave and stood by while the males covered his body with earth. A memory of dead Gabbro curled in his rock cleft struck her, momentarily blinding her with grief. This was wrong, this putting a dragon into the ground, and yet what else was left to them? Even if Mother Stone had been holy, there was no way they could carry Porphyry all that way.\n\nBromargyrite abruptly staggered backward and sat gracelessly on his rump. \"I can't,\" he choked, then lifted his head and let out a terrible, heartrending howl that touched some ancient nerve within her, compelling her to howl with him. It would have been embarrassing, that descent into barbarity, if she hadn't wanted so desperately to ease the pain that ate at her like acid. She didn't even care if the approaching humans heard.\n\nShe controlled herself with an effort. \"Sorry,\" she told Flint, who'd put a hand on her shoulder. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" Flint said. Across from her, Orthoclase had his arms around Bromargyrite. \"I don't think anyone knows how we're supposed to grieve under these circumstances.\"\n\nLamprophyre made herself breathe normally. \"I think I do,\" she said. \"Let's finish this.\"\n\nWhen the last bit of earth was laid, Lamprophyre stood at the head of the grave and said, \"Hyaloclast told me this is what she teaches every dragon who makes the journey to Mother Stone. It's supposed to be secret, or at least private, but Mother Stone is dead, and I think we need this more than we need any more secrets.\" She drew in a breath, and sang: \"Born of wind and fire and stone,\n\n\u2003To breath and ash and stone return.\n\n\u2003I am all dragons in the bone,\n\n\u2003All dragons end here in their turn.\n\n\u2003My body, the stone\n\n\u2003My breath, the wind\n\n\u2003My heart, the fire\n\n\u2003Let stone and wind and fire combine\n\n\u2003Bind those who end their journey here.\n\n\u2003Fly, heart and spirit intertwined,\n\n\u2003Lie, body, now stone, 'til end of time,\n\n\u2003In Mother's love rest without fear.\"\n\nAs she sang, she felt warmth as of a fire growing hotter and nearer. The heat comforted her, reminding her of stormy nights spent secure in a warm cave, of the closeness and love of her clutchmates. She wasn't sure if she believed the words of the death-song anymore, but she thought of the dragons covering Mother Stone and how peaceful she'd felt surrounded by them. That couldn't mean nothing, no matter what the mountain had turned out to be.\n\nWhen she finished, she sat and looked at the earth covering Porphyry. She felt wrung out and exhausted from more than just the physical labor. She couldn't bring herself to look at her clutchmates because the moment felt so private. The warm feeling was growing stronger\u2014and with that realization, she understood what it was, and rose in time to see Rokshan leap down from his horse and run toward her.\n\nShe hadn't told him the details of what had happened when she spoke to him because Porphyry's death was still too fresh a memory for her to bear to speak it. He stopped short when he saw the grave, and Lamprophyre saw him quickly take in who surrounded it.\n\n\"Porphyry,\" he said. \"God's breath, Lamprophyre, what happened? No, don't tell me, just\u2014\" He put his arms as far around her as he could manage. She embraced him, not caring what anyone else thought of it, and held him while he wept the tears she couldn't. She closed her eyes and let the warmth of their pair-bond suffuse her, easing the pain that had been her constant companion all afternoon.\n\nThen the others were there, close together as they'd been when they were dragonets cuddled together against the terror of a thunderstorm, careful not to crush their human clutchmate. Lamprophyre remembered how Porphyry had been the only one of them who wasn't afraid of thunder. \"It's just noise,\" he'd always said, \"and I bet we can make more noise than the storm if we try,\" and then they'd all gotten in trouble for raising an unholy racket. The memory drew a laugh out of her, startling the others.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I was thinking of Porphyry and thunderstorms.\"\n\nOrthoclase laughed, a shaky sound. \"Because we're huddled like dragonets?\"\n\n\"No question we could out-thunder a thunderstorm now,\" Bromargyrite said.\n\nThat made all of them laugh. \"Do you think he sees us now?\" Coquina said. \"We didn't bury his spirit. If it doesn't go to Mother Stone's rest, where does it go?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Orthoclase said. \"Maybe the death-song has it right, and his spirit flies free. If that's true, I hope he sees this and knows we won't forget him.\"\n\n\"We should raise a marker,\" Rokshan said. \"If humans ever settle this way, I don't want his body disturbed.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked past him to where the wagons were drawn up near the Fanishkorites. \"Chaaksha said she didn't want help.\"\n\n\"It's not up to her,\" Rokshan said curtly. \"The wagons are to transport them to Kolmira, where they can wait for their people to retrieve them. And I brought seven healer-adepts, which I hope in Jiwanyil's name are enough.\"\n\nLamprophyre flexed her injured wing and hissed. When she held it still, the pain almost vanished, but any movement reminded her of the ancient female's claws. \"We need to bury that female,\" she said, reminded too of digging Porphyry's grave and how her injuries ached worse from that. \"We can't leave her lying there as a reminder of what happened to Porphyry.\"\n\n\"We're equipped to dig graves,\" Rokshan said. \"You sit. All of you. I'll send someone to tend your wounds\u2014don't think I didn't see those claw marks, Flint.\"\n\nFlint reflexively put his arm behind his back. \"Lamprophyre's the worst off,\" he said.\n\nRokshan laid his hand along her cheek. \"Let me handle this,\" he said. \"You should be able to fly back to Tanajital before full dark. I know you must be hungry.\" He ran off in the direction of the wagons before anyone could protest.\n\nSoon a woman dressed in a healer's black tunic and trousers left the wagons and came to join them. She carried a large knapsack over one shoulder that she set down with a heavy thump. \"I haven't worked on dragons before, and I hope I have enough stone,\" she said. \"Ambassador, the prince tells me you are seriously injured. You're bloody enough\u2014it's not all your blood? Ah, that's a relief. Let me take a look at that wing.\"\n\nThe healing didn't take long, and soon Lamprophyre sat watching the rest of the clutch undergo treatment. While her wing no longer hurt when she moved it, the healing hadn't done anything to cure her various aches, and sitting still was restful. She used the dust to scrub off the worst of the blood, then alternated watching the healer with watching Rokshan. He was directing Gonjirians and Fanishkorites in moving the injured to the wagons and collecting what could be salvaged from the caravan and digging graves. She knew from experience how comforting his assertiveness was, how good it felt to have him quietly but competently directing matters.\n\nThen she saw Yalini headed his way. \"Stones,\" she said. \"I should\u2014\"\n\n\"Rokshan said rest. Listen to your mate, Lamprophyre,\" Coquina said.\n\n\"But that Stones-damned princess is going to harass him.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Rokshan can handle her,\" Flint said. He was lying flat with his eyes closed as Coquina rubbed the base of his neck.\n\nLamprophyre muttered another curse under her breath, but stayed where she was. Rokshan was just far enough away that, combined with how many people there were, she couldn't hear either his thoughts or Yalini's, but there was still enough light for her to see their faces.\n\nYalini looked like she'd said Rokshan's name more than once before he stopped to listen to her. He didn't look as annoyed as Lamprophyre thought he should. He said a few words that made Yalini take a step backward, her eyes wide. Then she went into what was surely a torrent of abuse. Rokshan stood still, his face almost peaceful. When she finished, he smiled, leaned forward, and whispered something into her ear. Yalini froze. Rokshan smiled again, patted her cheek in a friendly way, and walked away. Yalini came to life, her face furious, but rather than pursue Rokshan, she stormed off in the other direction.\n\n\"I wish I could have heard that,\" Lamprophyre mused. \"I can't believe I was ever afraid he would fall in love with her.\"\n\nBromargyrite snorted a laugh. \"You were afraid of that? With Rokshan as head over heels for you as he is?\"\n\nLamprophyre blushed and shot a glance at the healer, who was deep in a trance following the trails of light her jade artifact left and wasn't listening. \"I thought, he's human, I'm not\u2014\"\n\n\"I guarantee that is not something you need to worry about,\" Orthoclase said. \"Not from what he's said.\"\n\n\"What he's said? What is that?\"\n\nOrthoclase exchanged glances with Dolomite. \"Male business. Not for females. Right, Dolomite?\"\n\nDolomite shrugged. \"I suppose. I would really like to leave soon.\" He'd been the quietest of all of them, and now Lamprophyre looked more closely at him and worried. She never could guess how he'd react to anything, except that he was likely to make whatever remark was most direct and least tactful.\n\n\"Dolomite,\" she said, \"are you all right?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Dolomite replied. \"I was thinking of killing dragons.\"\n\nCoquina sucked in a sharp breath. Orthoclase reached out to Dolomite, then seemed to think better of the gesture and withdrew his hand. \"We'll do what we can,\" he said gently, \"but it shouldn't be at the cost of our own lives.\"\n\n\"They killed Porphyry. I don't think they should be allowed to get away with that. Lamprophyre was right to tear that dragon to pieces. If we go now, we might still catch them.\" Dolomite's voice, always cheerful, was a flat monotone that frightened Lamprophyre.\n\nShe scooted forward so she could look Dolomite in the eye. \"We'll stop them,\" she said. \"I don't know how. Maybe the fight will kill more of us. But I swear we won't let Sardonyx win.\"\n\nDolomite looked at her. It chilled her to see his eyes so empty of emotion. \"There has to be a way,\" he said. \"Those pyrite weapons are useless. They're too big and they're too slow.\"\n\n\"They're all the humans have, though,\" Flint said.\n\n\"But they're useless,\" Dolomite persisted.\n\nLamprophyre felt Rokshan returning and sat up, as eager for an end to this conversation as for his comforting presence. \"Is everything settled?\"\n\n\"As much as we can do for now. The wagons are ready to head for Kolmira,\" Rokshan said. \"I'm going with them, as a courtesy to Fanishkor's ambassador. I hope my presence is coals of fire upon Damen's head.\"\n\n\"But I wanted you to come back with us,\" Lamprophyre protested.\n\n\"Sweetheart, you're in no condition to carry anyone,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll return tomorrow morning. You go back to the embassy and sleep.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Lamprophyre realized she was whining and shut her mouth. \"You'll tell me when you reach Kolmira safely, all right? However late it is?\"\n\n\"If that will ease your mind, certainly.\" Rokshan patted her shoulder. \"Don't push yourself, and I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"We have to bring stone to mark Porphyry's grave.\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"Chaaksha would take it as a kindness if you'd do something to mark her people's graves, as well.\"\n\n\"That's no problem,\" Flint said. \"Let's go before we lose the light.\"\n\nLamprophyre exchanged one final look with Rokshan and followed Flint and Coquina as they leapt into the sky.\n\nShe suspected Coquina of setting a slow pace for Lamprophyre's benefit, and was grateful rather than annoyed. With the setting sun at her back, the sky to the east was a soft black spattered with stars only barely dimmed by the moon waxing toward full. The moon's light reflected off the distant Green River, giving her tired mind and body something to aim for. Shortly, she saw a handful of warmly glowing stars fallen to earth, clustered around the river. She had never been so happy to see Tanajital.\n\nShe left her clutch just past the western city gate to take a long, curving path toward the embassy. The sight of the well-known streets made her unexpectedly tired, as if her body, having carried her all this way, knew it was close to familiar territory and felt justified in giving up. She descended, yawning, into the courtyard and drew in a deep breath of lamb-scented air. \"Depik, are you still awake?\"\n\nDepik emerged from the pavilion, dripping spoon in hand. \"Prince Rokshan said you'd want food when you returned. It's a good thing this supper keeps warm almost indefinitely. Come in, and I'll serve you.\"\n\nThe embassy was quiet and peaceful as it only ever got at this time of night. Lamprophyre reflexively checked her household's thoughts and was relieved to find all of them but Depik safely asleep. \"You shouldn't have stayed up,\" she said.\n\nDepik shrugged. \"There was something I wanted to speak to you about, anyway,\" he said. He lugged the enormous cauldron on its trolley out of the kitchen. \"Here's a napkin, my lady.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Lamprophyre lifted the cauldron and downed half the yellow soup in a few gulps. She hadn't realized she was hungry until she'd smelled the soup. She patted her mouth with the cloth and said, \"What was it you wanted to tell me?\"\n\nDepik leaned against the kitchen wall, a casual pose, but Lamprophyre could hear his thoughts were anything but casual. \"It's about Abhit,\" he said. \"You know the boy is smart, smarter than me or his mother, and he'd benefit from schooling at the academy.\"\n\n\"I was thinking that myself recently. You want me to pay his way?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, my lady!\" Depik stood upright. \"That's more than we deserve. No, my lady, we were wondering, if you're satisfied with our work, maybe you could see fit to increasing our wages. And then we could afford to pay for his schooling.\"\n\nLamprophyre took another drink of soup to give herself time to think. Finally, she put the cauldron down and said, \"What do you mean, 'we'?\"\n\n\"Well, Bhakriya and me, of course.\"\n\n\"You're not his father, Depik. Is there something you haven't told me?\"\n\nDepik's cheeks reddened visibly even in the lantern light. \"I care about his well-being, that's all. He's a fine lad.\"\n\n\"But he's not your fine lad. Depik, I know how you feel about Bhakriya, but if she doesn't feel the same, isn't she taking advantage of your, um, interest in her?\"\n\nDepik's face went even redder, but with anger instead of embarrassment. \"It's not like that at all! She can't care for these kids on her own, not Abhit nor the girls, and I don't want to make her feel she can't count on me unless she returns my feelings.\"\n\nLamprophyre wished with all her heart Rokshan were here. He understood human social rules so much better than she did. All she did know was that regardless of how certain she was that Bhakriya loved Depik, telling him that was completely out of line. \"That's not it,\" she said. \"It's you I'm worried about. You shouldn't give your life to someone who doesn't love you with her whole heart. It's not fair to you.\"\n\nDepik stiffened. \"Not to be rude, my lady, but what I do with my life is my business. I know I owe you everything, but my pride is my own, and not you nor anyone has a right to tell me how to live or who to love.\"\n\nLamprophyre gave up. \"I'm sorry. You're right. I'm concerned for you, but it's up to you what choices you make.\" She was going to take Bhakriya by the shoulders in the morning and shake sense into her\u2014no, that might kill the woman, so she wouldn't do that, but she would express her irritation in the strongest terms.\n\nShe drank down the rest of the soup and set the cauldron down. \"Thank you for supper, Depik. I really appreciate it on a night like this.\"\n\n\"What about this night is special, my lady?\"\n\nWeariness overtook her again. \"I can't explain. I'll tell you in the morning. Good night.\"\n\nShe carried the cauldron into the kitchen for Depik and left him to cleaning. She didn't bother telling him to wait until morning, because she knew from past experience her cook would give her a horrified look and say something about sloth being the root of all evil. There were times she couldn't believe anyone had ever called Depik lazy, just because he occasionally couldn't get out of bed in the mornings. He made even the energetic Flint look like a layabout.\n\nShe settled in to sleep clutching the green chalcedony pendant. Rokshan would hate waking her, but he'd promised, and he never broke his promises to her even if he thought it would be better for her in the long run. Such a wonderful mate. She fell asleep thinking of the beautiful green and gold statue and how glorious it would be when Rokshan had that form.\n\nA loud thump woke her, the sound of the cauldron overturning. Muzzily, she sat up and listened. More thumping, a gasp, a groan, then movement, lots of feet running from the kitchen. She blinked, coming to full consciousness, and only then thought to listen for thoughts. She heard nearly a dozen humans spreading out through the courtyard, their thoughts intent on gold and don't wake the monster\u2014and one human nearer to hand, his thoughts filled with agonizing pain.\n\nDepik.\n\nShe burst out of the embassy and flung herself at the nearest men, grabbing two and making a snatch for a third who eluded her. \"You dare come here to steal from me!\" she roared, her grief over Porphyry and her fear for Depik turning into fury. \"And hurt\u2014\" She flung the two men away to lie sprawled and inert on the floor of the dining pavilion and dove after the others. Terror sharpened their thoughts, and they fled. Lamprophyre leaped into the air and followed them a few dragonlengths, pursued by the sound of Depik's pained thoughts.\n\nRealization struck her, bringing her to her senses. They'd hurt Depik, badly by the sound of it. He needed her more than she needed vengeance.\n\nShe turned around and rushed back to the embassy, not stepping on her captives though she really wanted to. Depik lay beside the kitchen, curled in on himself, his face pinched and set with pain. Bhakriya knelt beside him with her hand on his shoulder. \"He's bleeding,\" she told Lamprophyre in a trembling voice. \"There's so much blood.\"\n\n\"Back up,\" Lamprophyre said. She gently prodded Depik's shoulders until he uncurled. Both hands covered a deep, bloody wound in his stomach. Lamprophyre sucked in a horrified breath. Even she knew this sort of wound could be fatal.\n\nShe picked him up, being as gentle as she could though she could tell from his thoughts he was barely conscious. \"No more death,\" she whispered. She looked down at Bhakriya, who was crying. \"See if those men are still alive,\" she ordered. \"Tie them up if you can. They had damn well better not escape, do you understand? If he\u2014\" She wasn't going to tempt fate by even suggesting Depik might die. \"Send Rassika for the guards. I'll be back.\" With one great leap, she vaulted upwards and spread her wings wide to catch the air. She hadn't been in time to save Porphyry, and she'd be damned if she lost another person she cared about tonight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Depik twitched in her arms and moaned, a weak sound that frightened her more than the blood. \"Don't die,\" she told him. \"You just have to hold on a little longer. Don't die. I couldn't bear another death. Don't die.\"\n\nDepik's thoughts were incoherent, swirling around memories Lamprophyre didn't recognize. His lips moved in silent speech. \"Don't talk,\" she told him, feeling obscurely that his life force ebbed with every word. \"We're almost there.\" It didn't feel like they were almost there. She felt time had stretched out, making every beat last a century. She dodged a tower and kept going, following the lamps that lined the streets by law, until she saw the healing center, brilliantly lit as if they'd known she was coming.\n\nShe descended slowly, looking beneath her for humans she might accidentally crush. Why the healing center had a roof open to the sky, she didn't know, but she was deeply grateful for it tonight. The low hills dotted with benches, covered in short, fine grass, continued to confuse her\u2014why bring the outdoors inside?\u2014but the smell of living green things reassured her that here was a place things thrived, even people who were badly injured by greedy bastards.\n\nShe began calling out for help before she even touched the ground. \"Somebody help me! Please, wake up! I need help\u2014he's going to die!\"\n\nMost of the thoughts she heard were from sleeping people, some of whom came awake at the sound of her shouting. If they were injured people recovering from healing, she felt bad at waking them, but in a distant way, because Depik mattered more. Other people, their thoughts more alert, moved through the halls in her direction.\n\nLamprophyre held Depik more closely. She thought he was still breathing, but she was afraid to check. Blood still flowed sluggishly from the horrible wound, which meant his heart continued to beat. Hope threaded its way through her and she pushed it aside. Time for that when the healers arrived.\n\nNow she heard things with her ears and not her mind: the sound of voices murmuring, the sound of feet hurrying over stone. \"Help,\" she called out again, and doors opened and the running footsteps became louder. People emerged into the grassy space, converging on her.\n\n\"What are you\u2014God's breath, you're a dragon,\" said a man in a rumpled blue shirt whose unkempt, balding head showed he'd been asleep.\n\n\"It's the ambassador,\" said a woman. \"Ambassador, do you need healing?\"\n\n\"He does,\" Lamprophyre said. She laid Depik at their feet, wishing she didn't have to let him go. \"Please. They stabbed him\u2014I think he's dying\u2014\"\n\nThe balding man knelt beside Depik and took his wrist. \"His pulse is very weak, but he's alive,\" he said, and Lamprophyre's knees gave way and she sagged to the ground. \"We have to hurry. No, don't move him, there's no time.\"\n\nLamprophyre heard the rest in a haze. She dragged herself away to give the healers room to work and collapsed against one of the pillars holding up the narrow roof that encircled the grassy space. Depik was invisible behind all the men and women in black gathered around him. She closed her eyes and wished she knew who to pray to. Maybe it didn't matter. If there was no God, there was no one to thank except possibly good fortune. If she hadn't been a dragon, capable of getting Depik to the healers in practically no time, he might have died. On the other hand, if he wasn't employed by her, he wouldn't have been in a position to be stabbed.\n\nFury swept through her again. What was wrong with humans that some of them felt entitled to take other people's things and kill in the pursuit of that theft? Those greedy, detestable bastards. She liked that human swear word. It felt good and fierce and hot with anger. She hoped she hadn't killed them, throwing them around like that, because she was going to make them pay. And if Depik died\u2026\n\n\"My lady ambassador.\"\n\nLamprophyre opened her eyes. It was the balding healer. He didn't look happy. A pang of fear struck her. \"Is he\u2026\" she managed, once more afraid to tempt fate by saying the word.\n\n\"He's alive,\" the healer said. Lamprophyre let out a deep, relieved breath. The healer still didn't look as happy as that news warranted. \"But I feel I shouldn't give you false hope. Your friend lost a lot of blood, and while we've healed his injury, we don't have any way to replace that blood. He might still die.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Don't human bodies make more blood? Dragon bodies do.\"\n\n\"They do, my lady, but in this case it might not be fast enough. We've done what we can to encourage the process, but it's a matter of his own recuperative power now.\" The healer looked suddenly very tired. \"There's still hope\u2014I don't want to discourage you\u2014but you might want to pray to whatever God you believe in, because it could take a miracle.\"\n\n\"Can I see him?\"\n\n\"He's not conscious, my lady.\" The healer laid a hand on her shoulder. He was shorter than she'd realized. \"You should return to your embassy. I promise we'll send word. And if it looks bad, we'll let you know so you can be with him in the end.\"\n\nThat was less comforting than he probably intended. Lamprophyre nodded and flew away.\n\nOnce more the flight to the embassy felt as if it took much longer than the seventy beats it actually took. Lamprophyre's righteous fury had ebbed, leaving her cold and tired. She hoped Bhakriya hadn't let those men escape. They couldn't be allowed to get away with what they'd done, not to mention Lamprophyre intended to use them as a warning to anyone else who thought stealing from a dragon was a good idea. She silently cursed Viveki's name. How dare the woman spread lies for the sake of her stupid, worthless revenge?\n\nWhen she arrived at the embassy, all the lamps were lit, and Bhakriya came forward from the dining pavilion to greet her. Her eyes were red from crying and she twisted her hands together restlessly, as if she didn't know she was doing it. \"Is he\u2026\" she said.\n\n\"He's alive. For now. The healer said he might not survive,\" Lamprophyre said. Bhakriya let out a sob she muffled with her hands. Lamprophyre felt too hollowed-out with repeated grief to have any sympathy to spare for the woman.\n\n\"Did you do as I asked?\" she went on. There were still two limp figures lying on the pavilion floor, but as she spoke, one of them groaned and twitched.\n\n\"I sent Rassika for the guards. She's not back yet,\" Bhakriya said, unnecessarily as there was a complete absence of guards in the courtyard. \"Abhit and I tied them as best we could. They're both still alive. Why did they attack Depik?\"\n\n\"I don't know if these ones did, specifically, but as far as I'm concerned they're all to blame,\" Lamprophyre snarled. \"They thought there was a treasure hoard here and that they were entitled to steal it. Where are Abhit and Kavari?\"\n\n\"I told Abhit to keep Kavari away. They might have\u2014\" Bhakriya's breath sobbed out of her again. \"They probably wanted to keep Depik from sounding an alarm. They might have killed all of us.\"\n\n\"They might,\" Lamprophyre agreed.\n\nShe walked into the pavilion and turned one of the groaning men over. Their wrists and ankles were tied, not very securely to Lamprophyre's eye, but it didn't matter, because with her there, they weren't going anywhere. \"Wake up,\" she said, flicking the man in the head and making it jerk back. \"We're going to have a talk.\"\n\nThe man's eyes opened. He looked confused, unable to focus on anything. Lamprophyre prodded him in the back. He blinked, and his gaze came to rest on her face. His face was suddenly a mask of terror. Lamprophyre ignored him and poked his companion awake. \"I'm only going to say this once, so you'd both better listen,\" she said when she had their terrified attention. \"Which of you stabbed Depik?\"\n\nThe first man's confusion was evident on his face. The second was more stoic, at least on the outside; his thoughts were a gibbering mess. Neither of them had any guilty thoughts at her mention of stabbing. Lamprophyre felt a moment's regret at not being able to tear the head off Depik's assailant. But she wasn't going to let these two get away regardless.\n\n\"You came into my home and you attacked my friends because you heard there was treasure here,\" she snarled, breathing out a hot, fire-stinking breath into their faces and making them flinch. \"What the Stones is wrong with you that you feel you're somehow entitled to take other people's things? It doesn't matter that I have no hoard, you fools\u2014you're thieves, and you deserve to die for what you've done.\"\n\nThe first thief's breathing became rapid with fear. \"We didn't take anything,\" he said, \"we were stupid, I swear it won't happen again.\"\n\n\"If you're dead, that is certainly true,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nTears trickled down the sides of his face. \"Please don't eat me,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Shut up, fool, dragons don't eat people,\" the second thief said. He still managed to hold on to his brave appearance, but inside he was composing prayers to Jiwanyil that he'd survive this. That made Lamprophyre want to laugh. She didn't know much about human religion, and she was sure Jiwanyil wasn't a god, but she didn't think gods were obliged to protect humans from the consequences of their crimes.\n\n\"No, we don't,\" Lamprophyre said. She extended her first claw and ran it delicately across the first thief's jawline. The scent of urine suddenly filled the air. \"We do, however, eviscerate our prey. What about this evening suggests I'll be gentle with you?\"\n\n\"My lady,\" Bhakriya said.\n\nLamprophyre turned to look at her. Her face was set with fear, but not of the thieves. Lamprophyre heard the terror in her thoughts and felt sick. Bhakriya was afraid of her. In that instant, Lamprophyre's anger and joy at causing these men pain disappeared. She sat back, breathing heavily. They deserved punishment, and they might even deserve harsh punishment, but torturing them only satisfied her baser instincts. And Lamprophyre never wanted the humans she cared about to fear what she might do.\n\n\"The guards are coming,\" she told the men. \"They'll take you into custody and you will be punished for your crimes. I will make sure of that. And I will also make sure nobody else thinks stealing from dragons is a good idea.\" Stealing from dragons. Maybe she hadn't been the only one attacked tonight. \"But I will let you live, on condition you tell the guards who else came here with you tonight. I want all of you to face justice.\"\n\nThe first thief nodded vigorously. \"We'll do that. I swear.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at the second thief. \"Well?\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of you. Dragons don't kill humans,\" the man said. His defiance was tattered around the edges, but despite herself Lamprophyre was impressed.\n\nShe leaned in close and breathed hotly into his face. \"You're not a fool,\" she whispered in his ear, \"and if you continue to defy me, I'll send Bhakriya away so she doesn't have to witness what I'll do to you. I lost a friend today, and I'm in a killing mood. Do you think anyone in this city will challenge my right to make my own justice?\"\n\nThe man swallowed. His eyes showed white all the way around his brown irises. \"No,\" he said. \"We can tell you who told us you had treasure. That should be worth something to you.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat back. \"It is,\" she said, though she was sure she already knew the answer.\n\nBy the time Rassika appeared with half a dozen guards in tow, Lamprophyre was anxious and frustrated. The two thieves hadn't known much, at least not much that meant anything to Lamprophyre, but she was sure their information would matter to the guards. What had Lamprophyre anxious was her desire to get to the warehouses and make sure they hadn't been attacked. There was nothing a human could do to a dragon, but if her clutchmates were in the same mood she was, she couldn't guarantee the night wouldn't end in bloodshed.\n\nBut the guards insisted she tell her side of the story, so instead she sent Rassika to inquire. She felt a little bad about keeping the girl up so late, but Rassika's bright eyes and worried face told Lamprophyre it was unlikely she'd be able to sleep.\n\nRemembering when she'd been interrogated by guards a few twelvedays ago, she braced herself for a long night. But the guard captain who arrived shortly after his men was alert and intelligent, asking just what he needed to know and not requiring her to repeat anything. Lamprophyre, who'd grown used to thinking of the guards as not very competent, was impressed.\n\nFinally, the thieves, properly restrained this time, were led away out of the courtyard, and Bhakriya disappeared to check on Abhit and Kavari. Lamprophyre knew from their thoughts that they'd fallen asleep, but she was too tired to worry about them. She was too tired to haul herself into the embassy. She would just close her eyes for a bit. She could sit on the nice stone floor of the pavilion and breathe in the lingering aroma of lamb soup. Unfortunately, the lingering odor of blood overrode that delicious smell. Lamprophyre thought of Depik and wished she could cry. Crying was so comforting.\n\nShe heard Bhakriya coming back and opened her eyes. \"They're asleep,\" the woman said. \"Was Depik\u2026I know you said he wasn't dead, but you didn't sound\u2026\" She was twisting her hands together again.\n\n\"They told me he was alive, but they weren't sure he'd survive.\" Lamprophyre was too tired to soften the blow.\n\nBhakriya let out a low sobbing breath, then visibly controlled herself. \"I wish\u2026oh, my lady, if he dies\u2014\"\n\n\"Bhakriya, I told you not to delay!\" She was too tired for tact, too. \"You were afraid to tell him how you feel, and for what? Because you thought he wouldn't care? Because you feared he wasn't the man he seems to be? How do you feel now, knowing you might have lost your chance?\"\n\nBhakriya's eyes were wide. Her lips trembled. \"My lady,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I'm sorry, because I know you must feel awful, but you humans live such short lives, I don't understand why you insist on not making the most of them!\" Lamprophyre drew in a deep breath, reaching for calm. \"No, I really am sorry. I'm just making things worse.\"\n\nTears filled Bhakriya's eyes, and she shook her head. \"It's not that,\" she said. She reached into the neck of her shirt and pulled out a pendant on a chain. It was a small polished nugget of aventurine caged in silver wire. It was such an unexpected gesture Lamprophyre forgot what she'd been about to say.\n\n\"I had this made for him,\" Bhakriya said. \"It was supposed to help his illness. Bring his thoughts into balance. The adept said it's not healing, there's no healing for what's wrong with him, but it's supposed to fight back the bad thoughts.\"\n\nShe released the pendant to dangle between her breasts. \"I wanted so much for him to be well,\" she said, the tears spilling over. \"I know he still thinks poorly of himself, even though he's not at all awful or stupid or lazy. But then I thought, suppose he thinks the pendant means I want him to be perfect so he's worthy of me? All this last week I couldn't\u2014I didn't know whether to give it to him, or tell him first that I love him, and now it's too late!\"\n\nShe slid down the pillar she'd been leaning against and hugged her knees, weeping so hard her shoulders shook. Lamprophyre felt like kicking herself. She knelt beside Bhakriya and put an arm around her, holding her against her sobs.\n\n\"We have to have hope,\" she said. \"They told me it was all up to him, his body's own healing power, whether he survives. He has so much to live for\u2014he has you, and the children\u2014you know he wants you to be a family, right? He's concerned about Abhit's education, and he adores Kavari, and you've seen how he jokes with Rassika. He won't want to abandon all of you.\"\n\nBhakriya lifted a teary-eyed face to hers. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Dragons are very observant.\" Lamprophyre smiled. \"I didn't tell him how you feel. I thought that should be up to you.\"\n\nBhakriya nodded. \"Do you think they'd let me sit with him?\"\n\n\"We'll go in the morning. They promised to send word if anything changed before that.\" Lamprophyre released her and stood. \"Go to sleep. I have to wait for Rassika to return.\"\n\nBhakriya must have been as exhausted as Lamprophyre, because she didn't argue. When she was gone, Lamprophyre settled herself against the wall of the embassy beneath the lantern and tried to stay awake. Rassika would wake her if she slept, but she felt it would look bad, like she wasn't worried about her clutchmates.\n\nShe drowsed repeatedly despite her resolution, catching herself each time she slid down the wall. Finally, she stood and paced the courtyard. Every bone in her body, every muscle from her tail to her jaw, ached with the need for sleep.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Rokshan said, jerking her awake again.\n\nShe grabbed the green chalcedony pendant. \"Rokshan? Are you in Kolmira?\"\n\n\"It took longer than we expected, but everyone's safely here. Did I wake you?\"\n\n\"Not really.\" She was too tired to tell him what had happened, and there was Rassika finally, trotting along the street toward her. \"Do you want me to come for you in the morning?\"\n\n\"Yes, but sleep as long as you want. I intend to. I love you, sweetheart. Sleep well.\"\n\n\"I love you, too.\"\n\nThe pendant cleared, and Lamprophyre got to her feet to greet Rassika. \"It was all quiet there,\" the girl said. \"I woke Bromargyrite because he's not likely to slap me by accident if he's woken quick-like, and he said they haven't seen nothing. I guess those thieves thought one dragon was a safer target than six.\"\n\nFive, Lamprophyre thought, but she was too tired to grieve. \"Thank you, Rassika. Go to bed now.\"\n\n\"Is Depik going to be all right?\" Rassika's voice trembled. Lamprophyre examined her closely and saw how frightened she was, despite hiding it well.\n\n\"I hope so. He's alive, and that's good, right?\"\n\n\"I don't want him to die.\" Lost my Dada before, lose another, she thought.\n\nLamprophyre's heart ached for her. She put a hand on the girl's shoulder. \"We'll know soon enough,\" she said. \"Now, sleep. Depik would be so angry with both of us if he knew I'd sent you running errands during the dreaming hour.\"\n\n\"Guess we won't tell him, then,\" Rassika said with a grin.\n\nLamprophyre hung the two chalcedony pendants on the wall and curled in on herself, covering herself with her wings for comfort though the night wasn't that cold. She was asleep in three beats.\n\nShe dreamed disjointed images of dragons flying in formation, not Sardonyx's terrible military-like ranks, but spirals, loops, and vast sweeps of wings that divided and divided again until the sky was filled with them. Then she was flying with the rest toward Mother Stone, who in the dream was a great stone dragon whose wings encompassed all the flight. In the dream, the dead dragons were restored to life, color bleeding across their scales, and they flew to meet the flight. Porphyry was there, and it was such a joyous reunion she woke from the dream happier than she'd been in many twelvedays.\n\nShe yawned and furled her wings. It was just after dawn, and someone was crossing the courtyard toward her, someone whose thoughts she didn't recognize. She looked out the doorway and saw a man wearing a healer's tunic, but red instead of black. That meant he was an assistant rather than a healer himself. He looked stern, like he had bad news, and a jolt of fear dispelled her happiness.\n\nShe left the embassy and met him halfway across the courtyard. If this was bad news, she wanted to be the one who gave it to Bhakriya. \"Yes?\" she said.\n\nThe man stopped a short distance from her. \"The man you brought to us last night,\" he said. \"He's awake. And he's asking for someone named Bhakriya.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Lamprophyre offered to carry Bhakriya to the healing center, feeling an urgency to see Depik really was well, but Bhakriya declined. \"I need to calm myself,\" she told Lamprophyre. \"But please tell him I'm on my way.\"\n\nWhen Lamprophyre arrived, however, they wouldn't let her see Depik. \"He's weak enough we don't want to move him,\" the balding healer said, \"and not to be rude, my lady ambassador, but you won't fit into any of the rooms.\" So Lamprophyre waited impatiently for Bhakriya to arrive and be ushered into Depik's room, then she shamelessly eavesdropped on the two of them until their thoughts became the wordless hum that said they were kissing. Kissing was so wonderful. Satisfied, she winged her way back to the embassy and went back to sleep.\n\nWhen she woke again, it was well on the way to being noon, and she was starving. Not wanting to delay seeing Rokshan again, she bought a cow from the butcher's three streets over and roasted it outside the city, devouring the juicy meat fast enough to make her feel uncomfortably full. Then she flew to Kolmira, clutching the green chalcedony pendant as if it would lead her to Rokshan.\n\nWhat led her to Rokshan, in the end, was her sense of their pair-bond, better than any beacon. He waited for her outside the city walls, downstream along the Rindra River about twenty dragonlengths. \"Bath,\" he said when she descended to meet him. \"You'll feel better.\"\n\nLamprophyre started to protest when she realized her dust bath hadn't done more than rid her of the worst stains, and there was fresher blood smeared across her abdomen where she'd held Depik on the way to the healing center. She jumped far out into the river, sending up a great wave to swamp Rokshan, who had fortunately already shed his clothes.\n\nDisregarding her wings' comfort, she sank beneath the surface of the river and closed her nictitating membranes so she could view the underwater world. It was murky and indistinct, not just from the membranes but from the silt she'd thrown up when she jumped in. Still, the scene was beautiful, with the early sunlight slanting through the water and the long, trailing weeds of the riverbed waving as if they wanted to fly like dragons.\n\nShe rose gasping from beneath the water and swiped water from her face. \"You were right, I needed that,\" she said.\n\nRokshan was peacefully floating nearby. \"I knew you wouldn't have thought of bathing, even though you were covered with that female's blood. Yesterday was overwhelming.\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\" She bobbed next to him and told him about the thieves, and Depik's injury. About halfway through the story, Rokshan sat up and began treading water. Telling the story was easier now that she knew Depik would live. Her anger of the previous night was still there, but distant, like an echo that took a dozen beats to return.\n\nWhen she finished, Rokshan said, \"We have to do something about Viveki. She can't be allowed to go on attacking us.\"\n\n\"The one thief knew she'd spread the rumor of my supposed hoard. He didn't know it originated with her, he just identified her as the person who told him the story. The other thief had heard it from his companions.\"\n\n\"That's not enough to convict her of a crime.\" He scowled, but his eyes were fixed on a point beyond her head. \"Unfortunately, she's a small but persistent problem. Sardonyx's threat is far more dangerous.\"\n\n\"I don't even know what we could do to Viveki.\" Lamprophyre stretched her wings above the water's surface and flapped them hard, sending up a fresh, water-tinged wind. \"Unless we caught her committing a crime. I can't believe she can't be held at fault for what happened to Depik. She was ultimately responsible.\"\n\n\"Human law judges direct actions. The man who stabbed Depik will be punished for it, once they catch him.\" Rokshan went back to floating. \"I'll give it some thought. There has to be something.\"\n\n\"I want to spend the day swimming, but I really ought to get back. We have to arrange for grave markers for Porphyry and for all the humans who died.\" Lamprophyre waded to shore and shook herself. She knew she looked like an animal when she did that, but with Rokshan the only one around to see, she didn't care.\n\nRokshan followed her, swiping excess water from his skin and using his shirt to dry himself. \"I'll come with you, but we'll need to stop at headquarters first so I can let them know what happened with the Fanishkorite caravan. I was in such a hurry I left the other pendant behind.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it was only yesterday. It feels like forever ago.\"\n\nShe was glad to fly in companionable silence. With as emotionally fraught as the past day and night had been, it felt wonderful to simply bask in the warmth of her pair-bond and let her mind drift, thinking of nothing in particular. She occasionally listened to Rokshan's thoughts for the pleasure of the added companionship, but his mind drifted too, his thoughts sharpening once or twice as he contemplated some task in his future.\n\n\"What did you tell Yalini?\" she said as an idle memory struck her.\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Last night, before I went back to Tanajital.\"\n\nRokshan chuckled. \"I told her she was an attention-starved\u2014actually, you shouldn't learn the words I used.\"\n\n\"I already know most human swear words from Darsha, Rokshan. You can't shock me.\"\n\n\"No, but I was angry, and I'd rather not relive the moment. Let's just say I called her some ugly words and told her she was a worthless excuse for a human being I wouldn't have married on a dare.\"\n\nLamprophyre gasped. \"That's rather harsh.\"\n\n\"You didn't hear what she said about you that prompted my words. I was gentle with her. Did you really threaten to make her disappear?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought back over the evening. \"I don't remember. I think so. I was pretty angry myself.\"\n\n\"Well, she won't bother us again. Fortunately, she's not like Viveki, eager for revenge. I judge her self-worth is tied up in pretending I don't exist and didn't reject her. And she lives in Fanishkor, far from us and far from anywhere she might be obnoxious.\"\n\nTanajital's walls gleamed rosy-yellow in the distance. \"I'm grateful for that, too,\" Lamprophyre said, and began the slow curving descent to the training grounds.\n\nSoldiers in royal colors, green and yellow, thronged the field when she arrived. She alit cautiously, listening for any cries of pain or dismay that might mean she'd trampled someone, and curled her tail around herself and furled her wings to make herself smaller. Rokshan hopped down, said, \"I'll be right back,\" and ran inside the headquarters.\n\nLamprophyre smiled at the nearest soldiers, who eyed her warily and hurried about their errands faster. Their thoughts weren't fearful, only uncertain, and before she was forced to block them all because of the noise, she heard one think wish I could ride a dragon. That was a better reaction than she could have hoped for, even if the idea of riding with a strange human made her uncomfortable.\n\nShe wished she understood the military better, to know the meaning of their marching back and forth. They either circled the training grounds or gathered into ranks and marched to the parkland and out of sight. Their ranks reminded her of Sardonyx's dragons, and she suppressed a shudder. Flying in orderly ranks wasn't anything to be frightened of, and Sardonyx's dragons would be a threat even if they were disorganized. It was just that all those dragons, all those humans even, doing everything in unison was creepy, like seeing shapes in clouds even though clouds were just water mist.\n\nShe watched the line of soldiers go around again and yawned. Rokshan had a funny idea of what \"be right back\" meant. She wasn't sleepy, but she was bored, and she wanted his business here finished so they could get on with more important things.\n\nShe felt him coming back and sat up alertly. Soon he emerged, followed by General Sajan and two other men bearing captains' insignia. But rather than cross the field to her, he led the way to another building, this one almost as big as the headquarters, and went inside with the other men. Lamprophyre, taken aback that he hadn't even spoken to her, walked to the building and crouched low to look inside.\n\nUnlike the headquarters, which had a row of glass windows all down its length, this other building had only two windows flanking the door. When Lamprophyre tried to look inside, she discovered the windows were blank as if something covered them on the inside. Frustrated, she sat back and blew an annoyed smoke ring. Rokshan hadn't gone very far from the entrance, but that was all she could tell.\n\nShe settled down about half a dragonlength from the door, which would put her very close to the humans when they emerged. She didn't care if they might consider that intimidating. She lowered herself to lie so her head was level with the door, another potentially intimidating move, but also one she didn't feel bad about.\n\nTime passed. The soldiers cleared the field, and she was alone. Still Rokshan didn't return. She felt him moving around inside the building, which wasn't big enough for her to lose her sense of their pair-bond, but none of his movements told her anything about what was going on. More soldiers marched back into the training grounds. She hadn't paid close enough attention to know whether they were the ones she'd seen leaving. She blew more smoke rings. They really were easy once you knew how.\n\nFinally the door opened, and Lamprophyre sat up. Only Rokshan came through the door. \"I have something to show you,\" he said.\n\n\"What took so long?\" Lamprophyre replied, more irritably than she'd intended.\n\n\"It's not important. Come around back,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre walked around the building to where General Sajan and the two captains waited. There was another door on that side, one that stood open, and as she came around the corner, another man, this one an ordinary soldier, came through the door. He held a bulky gray cylinder the length of his torso in his arms, carrying it like a human baby. Chunks of pyrite studded the cylinder's pale surface.\n\n\"That looks like a tiny pyrite weapon,\" she said.\n\nRokshan turned her way. He was smiling. \"Watch this,\" he said. He held out his hand for the cylinder, which the soldier handed over easily. It looked heavy, but Rokshan held it as if it weighed almost nothing. Now that it was closer, Lamprophyre could see the cylinder tapered at one end, where the biggest chunk of pyrite was embedded. Rokshan tucked the fatter end of the cylinder under his left arm, gripped the narrow end with his right hand, and rested his left hand on a pyrite crystal near the cylinder's middle.\n\nLamprophyre was about to ask what she was supposed to watch when Rokshan braced himself as if preparing to take a punch. The air hummed, a sound that went from nothing to teeth-rattlingly loud in two beats. Then the hum stopped, the cylinder shimmered with heat haze, and a bright flash shot from the cylinder to strike the nearest tree. With a crack, the tree's upper branches shattered.\n\nLamprophyre stared at the tree, then at Rokshan, who was grinning like a maniac. \"It worked,\" he said.\n\n\"You made them smaller,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I don't understand. Why would you make them smaller if it takes a big one to kill a dragon?\"\n\n\"Allow me to demonstrate. God's breath, I hope Father doesn't kill me when he sees what I've done to the trees.\" The hum had already built again, and Rokshan aimed the cylinder's tip at another tree. This one's trunk splintered and cracked as the light struck it. Then, in quick succession, Rokshan blasted tree after tree until an entire row of them lay fallen along the edge of the parkland.\n\n\"You still don't understand,\" he said as Lamprophyre continued to stare. \"They fire faster, they're more mobile than the big ones\u2014and they're only a little less powerful. This is what I was working on, Lamprophyre. They made it work.\"\n\nLamprophyre examined the weapon Rokshan held out to her. \"So, are there a lot of them?\" she asked. \"Because it would take a lot of these to protect a city.\"\n\n\"They're not for mounting on the ground,\" Rokshan said. He offered her the weapon again. \"They're for being carried into battle. By a dragon.\"\n\nLamprophyre jerked her hand away as if the thing had stung her, though she'd barely touched it. \"By a dragon?\"\n\n\"Dragons maneuver faster than the ground-based weapons. It's perfect. Here, try it.\"\n\nLamprophyre took the thing reluctantly. It was as light as she'd suspected. \"How does it work?\"\n\n\"You saw how I held it. Your left hand controls the firing rate. See, this crystal rotates\u2014\"\n\n\"Rokshan, don't!\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"It won't fire unless your right hand rests here. That tells the weapon to be ready. Then you click the crystal once, turning it in the direction away from you, and that generates a pulse of power.\"\n\nLamprophyre hesitantly aimed the weapon at the already damaged trees. The hum was tangible with her hands in contact with the weapon. She cradled the weapon along one arm, wrapped her hand around the narrow end of the cylinder, and clicked the crystal one notch. The cylinder jolted like a bee-stung horse, and she nearly dropped it in surprise, but the flash of light flew straight at her target, sending up another cloud of splinters.\n\n\"Fly with it. See how it feels,\" Rokshan urged.\n\nLamprophyre pushed off and flapped a few dragonlengths into the air. She was starting to understand what Rokshan had in mind. She rose a little higher, then curved and sailed toward the trees. Aiming carefully, she shot\u2014and missed. Her movement had been too fast. She flew back around and tried again. Another miss. Frustrated, she slowed her flight and tried a third time. This time, she hit a tree\u2014just not the one she'd aimed at.\n\nShe came back to land next to Rokshan and handed him the weapon. \"I'm sorry. I must not be a very good shot.\"\n\nRokshan was biting his lip in frustration. \"I don't think that's it,\" he said. \"I think coordinating flight and firing the weapon is complicated. It will take time for you to get used to it.\"\n\n\"But we don't have time.\" Lamprophyre's frustration equaled his.\n\n\"Maybe if we added something to let her more easily aim at a target,\" one of the captains said.\n\n\"That would make flying impossible. She'd have to hold the weapon to her eye,\" the other captain objected.\n\n\"Well, what do you suggest?\"\n\n\"Make it even smaller. Less awkward.\"\n\n\"We already sacrificed power for size. Any smaller, and she might as well beat her enemy over the head with it.\"\n\nLamprophyre listened to the captains absently, her eyes on the weapon. Coordinating flying and firing. She'd watched the soldiers on the city wall with their crossbows, how they would run to a firing position and then hold still. If it was just a matter of getting the weapon in range\u2014 She turned to Rokshan. \"Climb up. Bring the weapon.\"\n\n\"What do you\u2014\" Enlightenment flashed across Rokshan's face. \"Would that work?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Let's try.\"\n\nWith Rokshan securely settled, she gained altitude as quickly as possible. \"I'm going to fly past those trees, with a gentle descent,\" she said. \"I don't want you falling off.\"\n\n\"Wish we had the harness,\" Rokshan said. \"All right, go!\"\n\nLamprophyre began her descent. As she neared the trees, she banked slightly, tilting Rokshan toward them. A flash of light struck the trees, then another, and another, until dark specks filled her vision when she closed her eyes. Behind her, trees toppled, bearing other trees down. She heard shouting from below and curved back around to land beside the building. The two captains were hugging each other and jumping up and down. General Sajan looked as if he'd witnessed a miracle.\n\nRokshan leaped down as soon as Lamprophyre landed and hugged her. \"It worked,\" he said. \"You were right. The dragon maneuvers and the rider shoots.\"\n\n\"It's a perfect solution,\" Sajan said. \"Thank Jiwanyil. How soon can we bring the flight here?\"\n\n\"It's not perfect,\" Rokshan said. \"Dragons don't like flying with strangers. It will be hard to convince them to take riders.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at her mate, whose face was alight with hope. A sick feeling stole over her. \"It's impossible,\" she said.\n\nBoth men turned to look at her. \"What are you talking about? You just proved otherwise,\" Sajan said.\n\n\"Because no dragon will agree to take a human into battle,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We're immune to fire and acid. Humans aren't. And Sardonyx and her dragons won't hesitate to go after our riders. It would be a disaster. I'm sorry, General.\"\n\n\"But they'd know the risk\u2014\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Rokshan said. \"We're not talking about soldiers here. We're talking about friends. We'll have to find another solution.\"\n\nSajan looked like he wanted to argue, just not with a dragon. \"I really am sorry,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Maybe, if we practice hard enough\u2014\"\n\n\"You didn't see what we did,\" Sajan said. \"A human riding a dragon has a better arc of fire than a dragon would. Even if you dragons master the weapon, it's still a less optimal solution.\"\n\n\"It will still work,\" Rokshan said. \"And those weapons are miraculous regardless.\" He clapped Sajan on the shoulder. \"I'll bring the dragons tomorrow morning to start practicing.\"\n\n\"Sooner would be better,\" Sajan said.\n\nRokshan exchanged glances with Lamprophyre. \"We have another commitment this afternoon,\" Rokshan said. \"One that shouldn't wait any longer.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "The men and women at the marble quarry didn't argue with Dolomite when he explained what he needed. Lamprophyre paid, and the dragons came away with three slabs of unfinished marble. They flew over the shrouded figure of Rokshan's statue on the way out. Lamprophyre tried not to feel discouraged, as if the beautiful statue represented something she would never have. It wasn't true. It was just a matter of time before Rokshan was transformed. But after the success of the new weapons and the frustration of knowing they couldn't work, optimism felt just out of reach.\n\nFlint led the way back to the burial site. Nothing had disturbed the graves, which lay near each other as if the humans meant to keep Porphyry company for eternity. The female dragon's grave was some distance away. Lamprophyre blessed the humans who'd known to do that. The idea of Porphyry's killer lying next to him made her sick.\n\nThe dragons set down the marble slabs and stretched fingers gone sore from carrying the stone all that way. \"I told Chaaksha we would set up headstones, and her people could come back and put the names on,\" Rokshan said. \"I know they kept careful track of who was buried where. Fanishkorites consider the grave marker an essential part of their burial rites.\"\n\n\"Then\u2014Orthoclase, Lamprophyre, and Bromargyrite, why don't you cut the smaller stones for the humans, and Coquina and I will help Dolomite,\" Flint said in his usual decisive way. \"We all want to carve part of the stone for Porphyry, right?\"\n\n\"I'm not good at carving,\" Lamprophyre protested.\n\n\"It doesn't matter. It's more important that we all have a hand in remembering him,\" Dolomite said. \"And I want you to write his name. You're the only one of us who knows how, and he was so proud of being able to read human writing.\"\n\nThat relieved Lamprophyre's mind. She set to work cutting the slabs into smaller rectangles and shaping their surfaces smooth. It was good, comfortable, mindless work, and Rokshan sat beside her, not speaking, which comforted her more. Whenever she or Bromargyrite or Orthoclase finished a stone, Rokshan took it and set it in the earth at the head of a grave. There were far too many of them. Lamprophyre hoped the stones were big enough, given that Rokshan had no trouble lifting them, but he didn't correct them, so she guessed it was all right.\n\nBy the time they finished, it was nearly sunset, and Bromargyrite handed around chunks of waste marble for a much-needed snack. Lamprophyre ate hers and regarded Porphyry's grave marker. It was made to lie flat over his body, not stand upright at the head of the grave, and Dolomite had done some of the carving already. Coquina was working on adding curves and lines crossing the curves to one corner.\n\n\"Everyone put something in,\" Dolomite said. Lamprophyre waited until the edges were finished, a marvelous patchwork of different shapes and artistic styles that nevertheless felt right. Then she bent over the blank center of the rectangle and traced, in her most careful handwriting, the name:\n\n\u2002PORPHYRY\n\n...and, after a moment's thought, wrote below it the words:\n\n\u2002RACE THE WIND\n\n\"What does it say?\" Coquina asked.\n\n\"I wrote what he always used to say, that he'd race the wind if there were no other challengers.\" Lamprophyre carefully went over the words several times until they were deeply incised, the edges clear and sharp.\n\nShe sat back, and Dolomite leaned past her and made a last few swipes with his claws. When he finished, a stone dragon seemed to leap from the flat surface just above the writing. Dolomite had captured the essence of a dragon with those last swipes, so it both looked nothing like a real dragon and could also not be mistaken for anything else. Lamprophyre stared at it for a while. \"It looks like him,\" she finally said. \"Or\u2014like he was at heart.\"\n\nThe clutch gathered around in silence. The wind had picked up, and it blew loose dirt from the graves across Porphyry's stone and on toward distant Tanajital. Lamprophyre closed her nictitating membranes against the blowing dust and watched the sun set. Through the dust, the sun's rays were orange and crimson, warmer than they'd been all day. It was a beautiful sight.\n\n\"I don't want to be sad anymore,\" she declared. \"I'm going to miss Porphyry for the rest of my life. But sadness won't change that. It won't make his loss less if I can remember how I loved him.\"\n\nThe others shifted restlessly. \"I was thinking\u2014the city will mourn him, too,\" Orthoclase said. \"You know how popular he was. I think we should celebrate who he was.\"\n\n\"I'd rather think about that than how we'll never argue about who's the better racer again,\" Flint said. \"Let's go. We can eat, and plan a celebration Tanajital will never forget.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Coquina said. \"Just\u2014wait a moment.\"\n\nThey all paused to look at her. She stood with her feet firmly planted beside the stone and her wings flung out behind her for balance, her eyes closed and her head tilted as if she were listening to the wind whisper. A few beats passed, and Coquina opened her eyes. \"Nothing,\" she said. \"I hoped, if there is a God, that she or he might manifest here and now. But maybe there's nothing, after all.\"\n\n\"We haven't really had a God in more than a millennium,\" Orthoclase said. \"If you consider that Mother Stone never was real. And we did all right.\"\n\n\"I don't know that I need something to worship,\" Coquina said. \"But if something created us, I'd like to think that something didn't just create and then walk away. I've always liked the idea of rejoining all the other dragons after my death. And more than anything, I want to believe in a God who had a purpose for us. None of that would change my instincts about how dragons should live. It would just be\u2026nice.\"\n\n\"Maybe someday we'll figure it out,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nCoquina shrugged. \"Let's go. Wherever Porphyry's spirit is now, it's not under this stone.\" She laughed. \"Maybe he's finally able to beat me on the straightaway.\"\n\n\"Let's race back to the city, just in case,\" Bromargyrite said, and they did.\n\nThe following morning, Lamprophyre and Rokshan were the first to the training grounds. The marching humans were gone. Instead of an empty field of packed earth, bales of hay dotted the training grounds at random intervals. Head-sized circles of wood lay scattered among the bales, some of them painted red or blue, others plain. Boxes filled with more wood circles stood beside the military headquarters. It looked messy, like the aftermath of a human celebration, but without empty wine glasses or scraps of food.\n\nLamprophyre landed cautiously, in case the position of the hay bales and the wood circles mattered, and let Rokshan jump down. She picked up the nearest piece of wood, a blue circle, and sniffed it. As expected, it smelled of wood and paint, tangy and bitter all at once. \"What is this?\" she asked.\n\n\"Targets, I think,\" Rokshan said. \"We talked about what would be the most efficient way for you to practice, without destroying most of the parkland. But now I'm having second thoughts.\"\n\n\"Why is that? Because these are all good targets. They're small enough that if we can hit them, we'll certainly be able to hit a dragon.\"\n\n\"I'm more concerned about you not hitting each other. You all move fast enough you will probably avoid most force pulses, but there are always accidents.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" That hadn't occurred to Lamprophyre. \"I have an idea for that, but I'll need to talk to the others.\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"I'll let Sajan know we're here.\" He ran off to the headquarters building and disappeared inside.\n\nLamprophyre dropped the target and turned in a slow circle, assessing the field. If the new weapons weren't as powerful as the ones protecting the cities, it wouldn't be fatal to be hit by one accidentally, but it would also be harder to kill Sardonyx's people. They'd need practice in more than just hitting a target; they'd need to know where on a body to strike and how many hits were needed to kill.\n\nShe shuddered and closed her eyes. Such casual thoughts of killing. She hated Sardonyx for turning her and her friends into killers. Dragons didn't fight each other, or hadn't before now. They solved their problems through talk and understanding. The sooner Sardonyx's people were gone, the sooner dragons could be themselves again. But deep inside, Lamprophyre feared Sardonyx had opened a gate no dragons could close.\n\nShe heard the sound of wings and opened her eyes. Bromargyrite and Orthoclase were descending, their great wings filling the sky. \"What is this mess?\" Orthoclase exclaimed. \"We're not supposed to clean this up, are we? Because I feel that's beneath me. That's why they have soldiers.\"\n\n\"No, it's for us to shoot at,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nMore wings sounded, and Flint and Coquina came to join them. \"Dolomite is with Tekentriya,\" Coquina said. \"We told her about practicing with the weapons, and she just rolled her eyes and said her business was more important. Which might be true, but honestly, I think she just likes flying.\"\n\n\"If it keeps her from turning her crankiness on Rokshan, I don't care what she does,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And speaking of Rokshan, it looks like it's time.\"\n\nRokshan was crossing the field toward them, joined by General Sajan and, to her surprise, Kamil. They were trailed by a couple of soldiers carrying wooden crates with gray pyrite-studded cylinders stacked inside them. \"Good morning,\" Sajan said, saluting each dragon as if they were his own commanders. \"Thank you for your willingness to help. We owe you dragons a debt I fear we'll never be able to repay.\"\n\n\"Dragons and humans fought Sardonyx together a millennium ago,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We believe this union is how we'll both survive.\"\n\n\"But if you're worried about repayment, we all love cow,\" Bromargyrite said.\n\nSajan chuckled. \"A small price to pay for survival.\" He took one of the weapons from a crate and held it out for them to examine. \"The weapon is simple. Rest your hand here to turn it on, turn this crystal here to fire a pulse of power.\"\n\n\"How powerful is it?\" Flint asked.\n\nSajan glanced at Kamil in invitation. \"Less powerful in the absolute than a ground-based weapon,\" Kamil said, \"but proportionately it's more powerful. That means it's strong enough to knock a dragon out of the sky if you hit the head,\" he said when the dragons looked confused. \"A head shot at medium range will kill. Anywhere else, you can incapacitate your target. Multiple shots to the same location can kill as well\u2014for example, hitting the abdomen a few times will turn internal organs to jelly.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you were working on this,\" Bromargyrite said.\n\nKamil shrugged. \"My part of the mind-reading artifact is learning to cut kyanite small enough for personal use. I understand miniaturization better than anyone.\"\n\n\"Of course you do,\" Coquina murmured with a smile.\n\nThat made Kamil grin. \"I wouldn't say it if it weren't true,\" he said. \"It's thanks to me that a crystal the size of my fist can deliver the same amount of force we used to only get from a crystal the size of your fist.\"\n\n\"I may have to reconsider my use of the word 'obnoxious,'\" Bromargyrite said.\n\n\"You should, my friend,\" Kamil said, slapping him lightly on the shoulder.\n\n\"Obnoxious or not, Kamil is the one to ask for details about how the weapons work,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"But I haven't solved the problem of our people being accidentally hit,\" Kamil said, suddenly very serious.\n\n\"I have, mostly,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Remember playing blind-my-eyes?\"\n\nThe others nodded. \"It's been years, though. I'm not sure how good I still am,\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"It's one more thing to practice,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's a game dragonets play where we fly patterns around our clutchmates while closing our eyes. It\u2014\" She realized she couldn't tell them the game worked because dragons could hear each other's thoughts. \"It's not complicated,\" she said. \"And it means we know where each other are. I think it will keep us from hitting each other.\"\n\n\"Let's start with familiarizing you with the weapons,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre accepted one of the cylinders and turned it over, examining it closely. The ceramic casing was lightweight enough she felt confident she could hold it in the firing position indefinitely. Without putting her hand on the activation spot, she worked the crystal a few clicks. \"Will it go on firing forever?\"\n\n\"Once you've used up the power, the weapon has to have its firing crystal replaced,\" Kamil said. \"But that still gives you more than thirty pulses. Don't worry about using them up while you're practicing. It will give us practice at replacing the crystals rapidly.\"\n\nBromargyrite turned abruptly and aimed his weapon at a distant bale of hay. A hum, a quiet thump, and a flash of light shot from the weapon to ground itself half a dragonlength from the hay. \"I know what its range is now,\" he said.\n\n\"That's the other thing. The range is shorter than the ground-based weapons,\" Kamil said, \"or so I'm told. I don't know how far those can shoot. But the range on these is about three hundred feet.\"\n\n\"That's ten dragonlengths,\" Lamprophyre told the others.\n\n\"Far enough to keep us from coming into contact with Sardonyx's monsters,\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"Then let's start practicing,\" Flint said.\n\nLamprophyre caught Coquina's eye. The green dragon smiled and shrugged. Well, if Coquina didn't mind being pair-bonded to a bossy male, that was none of Lamprophyre's business. Besides, Flint was smart and decisive, so what did it matter that he wasn't female?\n\nShe took a few shots at the hay bales, all of which struck their targets. She wasn't impressed with herself. Shooting while flying was far more difficult, and it would take time to master that.\n\nAfter a while, the clutch took to the skies, and Sajan summoned a squad of soldiers, maybe twenty men, to toss wooden targets into the air. Lamprophyre did all right if she could hover to take her shot, but the moment she and the target were both in motion, she missed. Every time. She clenched her jaw in frustration and persisted. These weapons would keep any more of her friends from being killed like Porphyry, and she would learn to use them.\n\nShe'd flown back to back with the others for a thousand beats while they all worked out range and movement. Then it was time for something more complicated. \"All in,\" she shouted, and the clutch gathered around her. \"Let's see if we can still fly blind.\"\n\nBlind-my-eyes was a fun game for dragonets, intended to teach them how to hear surface thoughts without listening deeper and do it on the wing. Lamprophyre closed her eyes and listened, locating each of her clutchmates by their thoughts. All of them but Bromargyrite were thinking about how hard this all was. Bromargyrite was thinking about food, a nice chunk of calcite, and Lamprophyre's stomach rumbled. The others laughed, and she opened her eyes to see Bromargyrite grinning. \"Humans and their midday meals are such a bad influence,\" he said.\n\nShe could still sense the presence of her clutchmates, how they hovered nearby. \"Everyone ready?\"\n\nThe others nodded.\n\n\"Then\u2014fly, fly!\"\n\nThey split apart like a colorful seed pod, each tracking a different target. Lamprophyre shot, missed, shot again, struck the corner of a target completely by accident, and dodged Flint without looking at him. At least the blind-flying was working. She was so frustrated at her ineptitude she wanted to scream and throw the weapon at the target. She might actually hit one that way.\n\nFinally, she thought Time to come down and drifted to the ground. The others alit around her. \"How did we do?\" Flint asked Rokshan, who'd run out to meet them.\n\n\"It was a good first attempt,\" Rokshan said.\n\nThey all turned on him, frowning. He held up his hands to fend them off. \"All right, yes, that's the same as saying terrible,\" he said. \"But we knew this would take time. And nobody ran into anybody else's shot, so that worked. Let's be grateful for what we have.\"\n\n\"I need to rest,\" Coquina said. \"That kind of flying is much harder than racing or cross-country flight.\"\n\n\"And I really do think we need something to eat,\" Bromargyrite said. \"No joking. We don't normally work that hard.\"\n\n\"I'll arrange it,\" Rokshan said. \"You all wait behind the armaments building so the men can clear the field.\"\n\nThe armaments building turned out to be where they built the weapons. The six dragons sat in a circle in the soft grass between it and the strip of parkland and stretched cramped arms. \"Do we really think this will work?\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"Archers take years to hone their skills,\" Kamil said from his seat next to Bromargyrite. \"At least you hit things most of the time.\"\n\n\"You're so encouraging,\" Flint said.\n\n\"I think it's important to be honest,\" Kamil said, \"otherwise how can anyone ever improve, if they believe they're already successful?\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Coquina said. \"And I'm trying to stay optimistic. But\u2026\"\n\nLamprophyre sat back and stared up at the sky. \"And Sardonyx could strike at any moment.\"\n\n\"Let's hope she doesn't,\" Coquina said.\n\nTwo days later, word of Sardonyx's latest attack came to Tanajital. \"Nishta again,\" Rokshan told Lamprophyre as they prepared to sleep. \"This time, she destroyed it completely.\"\n\n\"Hyaloclast said the flight did almost no good,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They were mostly a distraction. Sardonyx just flew away when the city was rubble. They couldn't afford to follow her, but she went south.\"\n\n\"Sachetan is south,\" Rokshan said. He rolled over on his mattress to stare at the ceiling. \"God's breath, but I hope the Sachetanese government took our warning seriously.\"\n\n\"They worship Jiwanyil too, don't they? Wouldn't he have given them prophecies?\"\n\n\"The trouble is that those prophecies are meaningless if you don't know about Sardonyx. Father warned Anchala, and she'll tell Torannum, and he's powerful in their government. It might be enough.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled down and spread one wing, leaving the other furled so she could look at Rokshan. \"If we knew Sardonyx's plan\u2026 'complete destruction of humanity' is a desire rather than a strategy. If we knew how she chooses her targets, we could be prepared.\"\n\n\"We can use scouts like she does.\"\n\n\"Hyaloclast does that. But even as fast as our dragons fly, by the time a scout sees Sardonyx attack a city and race back to bring the flight there, it's all over.\"\n\nRokshan let out a deep sigh. \"The weapons are coming along nicely.\"\n\n\"You're being overly optimistic again. I still can't hit a moving target at speed. Coquina is the best of us, and even she only hits one target out of three.\"\n\n\"It's been three days, Lamprophyre. You're all doing amazingly well.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\"Get some sleep,\" Rokshan said. \"Tomorrow will be better.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't believe that, but she didn't want to argue with her mate when he was trying so hard to cheer her up. She folded her other wing over herself and went to sleep.\n\nGray skies greeted her the following morning, matching her mood. She grumped her way through half a cow and all the way to the training ground, where she took up a weapon wearily. What was the point, really? She was never going to be able to do anything with the thing but make Sardonyx laugh.\n\nShe was the last to the training ground, all except for Dolomite. Irritably, she said, \"When is the last time any of us have talked to Dolomite? Tekentriya takes up all of his time.\"\n\n\"He slept in his warehouse for the first time in days last night,\" Orthoclase said, \"but he was gone before the rest of us woke this morning.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know why she thinks she can monopolize him. I'm worried about his mental state. He was so angry over Porphyry.\" Lamprophyre lowered her weapon and watched Rokshan, who'd left her without a word to go into the headquarters building when they arrived. Now he emerged and walked across the field to the armaments building. What was he up to? Something else useless, probably. It wasn't his fault that every plan they'd made had failed.\n\nSwift motion caught her eye, and she half-turned to watch a young woman race across the training grounds to headquarters. That was so unusual\u2014no women were soldiers\u2014she kept on watching after the girl had entered the building and slammed the door shut behind herself. The young woman hadn't worn a soldier's uniform or royal green and yellow livery; she'd been dressed plainly, like one of Tekentriya's spies.\n\n\"Just a moment,\" she said absently to something Bromargyrite said, and walked toward the headquarters. When she was a couple of dragonlengths away, the door opened, and the girl came outside. She cast a startled look at Lamprophyre, then darted away to the armaments building and slammed that door behind her.\n\nNow Lamprophyre was convinced something important was going on. How she wished she were human-sized for once! She approached the armaments building and bent low to peer through the window, which was still covered on the inside. Irritably, she listened for thoughts. There were only five people inside. The girl's thoughts were exhausted and numb because she'd run far to bring this message. Two of the others were listening to someone talk, and their thoughts reflected that. One was thinking unbelievable, must be a trick, or sabotage. And Rokshan's thoughts were all focused on, for some reason, Chaaksha: she could have done it, but how? Need someone to prove it.\n\nHer curiosity twisted nearly to the breaking point, Lamprophyre knocked lightly on the door. After a moment, a stranger opened it. He gasped when he saw her. \"Ah,\" he said, \"yes? My lady ambassador?\"\n\n\"I want to talk to Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nThe stranger backed away. Rokshan pushed past him. \"Do you know where Kamil is?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I\u2014no. What's going on?\"\n\nRokshan shook his head distractedly. \"We need\u2014God's breath, this is incredible\u2014I don't know who was working on the shield problem, but I have to talk to whoever it is.\"\n\n\"Rokshan,\" Lamprophyre said in her most patient voice, \"tell me something or I will tear the roof off this building.\"\n\nRokshan focused on her as if he hadn't seen her before now. \"It's Fanishkor's shield artifacts,\" he said. \"One just turned up here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"Turned up?\" Lamprophyre said. \"That's impossible.\"\n\n\"I don't know how else to describe it,\" Rokshan said. \"Supposedly one of Tekentriya's spies negotiated with a Fanishkorite agent to buy it. But the message Tekentriya sent along with it said she thought someone in the Fanishkorite government was behind the transaction. As in, someone in power made it happen.\"\n\n\"Chaaksha,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But how?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But she's the only one in a position to do something like that who we know is sympathetic to our cause.\" Rokshan was running his fingers through his hair, disordering it. \"And it matters that we figure out the truth, or have one of our adepts analyze the artifact, because if this is a trick\u2014if it's set to explode, or fail at a crucial moment\u2014it could devastate our defense.\"\n\n\"I'll ask Bromargyrite where Kamil is,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Even if he isn't working on the shield, he probably knows more about it than the people who are.\"\n\n\"I had the same thought,\" Rokshan said, racing past her toward the other dragons sitting quietly together.\n\n\"Kamil intended to be here this morning,\" Bromargyrite said when they accosted him, \"but he's not an early riser. I could go to his house, except he lives in one of those parts of Tanajital where the houses all share walls, and there's nowhere to land that I won't destroy something.\"\n\n\"We can wait,\" Rokshan said. \"God's breath, I hate waiting. This is what we've been hoping for.\"\n\n\"I can't believe Chaaksha did it,\" Flint said. \"I mean, I know she was grateful, but I didn't think she was in a position to help.\"\n\n\"Let's just be grateful that she did,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Rokshan, what exactly did Tekentriya's spy bring?\"\n\n\"A cut stone. Topaz, I think,\" Rokshan said. \"A note with a lot of nonsense I didn't understand that I think is adept code. And another note, this one from Tekentriya, explaining where the stone came from and saying she'd be here this afternoon to find out what we made of it. Which means we have to act fast, because Tekentriya won't think twice about shredding the lot of us if we haven't made use of her spies' efforts.\"\n\n\"She can try,\" Bromargyrite said complacently. \"And that's Kamil now.\"\n\nLamprophyre managed not to leap on the adept and carry him across the field to where they all waited. Kamil waved as he approached, and shouted, \"Why aren't you practicing?\"\n\n\"We have the Fanishkorite shield,\" Rokshan said.\n\nHis brevity impressed Lamprophyre, as did Kamil's stunned reaction. He came to a stop half a dragonlength away. \"Is this a joke?\"\n\n\"No joke. Come with me,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre followed the two men as they raced toward the armaments building. \"Rokshan, don't you dare do this indoors,\" she said when he opened the door. \"We all want to see. And if you think I'm capable of taking the roof off this building, imagine how fast six dragons can do it.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Rokshan said. \"Kamil, wait here.\"\n\nIt took barely ten beats for Rokshan to return. He held a wooden box the size of his palm in one hand and a dirty sheet of folded paper in the other. \"This is what came with it,\" he said, handing the paper to Kamil. He worked the lid off the box and displayed its contents. The tangy aroma of topaz rose from the box, but whatever was inside was almost too small for Lamprophyre to see, especially when her clutchmates crowded around. It was about the size of her small sixth claw and teardrop-shaped, with the fat end of the drop faceted to sparkle in full light. With the skies as gray as they were, it didn't reflect much of anything.\n\nKamil glanced over the paper too fast to have read it, then took the box from Rokshan and brought it close to his eyes. \"I've never seen a cut like this before,\" he said, his voice distant as if he were thinking hard. \"But all those facets, in a complete circle\u2026yes, I can see how these would reflect force, and if\u2026\" He lowered the box and looked at the paper again, reading this time. \"It would take hundreds of these to blanket a city, but it would be a perfect shield. God's breath. I can't imagine how hard this is to cut.\"\n\n\"So it's impossible.\" Rokshan's voice was flat, the sound he made when he was trying not to be discouraged.\n\n\"No, not impossible. If we got as many lapidary-adepts as are capable, start them working immediately, we could have Tanajital shielded in a week. But they'd get faster as they went.\" Kamil still sounded as if his voice was coming from far away. \"I wonder who thought of using these to make a net. It's obviously not their original use.\"\n\n\"What's the original use?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nKamil looked up at her, startled. \"What? Oh. Probably armor. They're for personal shields. But of course it's impractical to shield a city by giving each individual one of these. Though they'd be more efficient that way.\"\n\nRokshan grabbed Kamil's shoulder and swung him back to face him. \"Say that again,\" he demanded.\n\n\"Say what? Armor?\"\n\n\"Personal shields,\" Rokshan said. He looked up at Lamprophyre. \"God's breath. They're for shielding an individual.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt as stunned as if he'd shot her with one of the weapons. \"They absorb fire and acid,\" she said. \"They probably absorb whatever energy those weapons fire, too.\"\n\nRokshan gingerly picked up the topaz teardrop. \"Is it active now?\"\n\nKamil peered at it. \"Yes. Though I'm not sure\u2014\"\n\nRokshan backed away. \"Lamprophyre?\"\n\n\"If it doesn't work, you're going to be in a lot of pain,\" she said.\n\nKamil glanced from her to Rokshan. \"Wait, you aren't going to\u2014\"\n\nLamprophyre sucked in air and breathed out fire to engulf Rokshan.\n\nIt was as diffuse as she could make it, because she wasn't as confident as Rokshan seemed to be. But it didn't matter. As the fire struck him, a fine mesh of orange-yellow sprang up scant fingerwidths from Rokshan's body. The mesh glowed more yellow everywhere the fire touched it. Rokshan raised his left hand, the one not holding the artifact, and the mesh moved with him. Fire flared and vanished, seemingly dispersed by the mesh.\n\nWhen the fire disappeared, the mesh lasted a beat or two longer and then faded away. Rokshan lowered his hand. He was completely unscathed.\n\nRokshan and Lamprophyre stared at each other. \"Stones,\" Lamprophyre breathed.\n\n\"I can't believe that worked,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"There was a damn good chance it wouldn't have!\" Kamil shouted. \"Are you out of your mind?\"\n\n\"Not anymore,\" Rokshan said. \"Forget about shielding the city for now. I need five more of these artifacts as soon as you can manage it. No, in twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"I don't know if that's possible,\" Kamil said.\n\n\"Now's not the time to lose your confidence, Kamil,\" Bromargyrite said. \"This is going to change the course of this war. Or were you not serious when you said you were the best?\"\n\nKamil looked up at him. For the first time since Lamprophyre had met him, he looked younger than his age. \"What will you do with them?\"\n\nHe'd been addressing Bromargyrite, but it was Lamprophyre who responded. \"We are going dragon hunting,\" she said.\n\nLate the next afternoon, Lamprophyre settled on her haunches surrounded by her clutch and watched Rokshan pace in front of the assembled dragons and humans. \"Let's review,\" he said. \"We can't afford to forget anything.\"\n\nThere was murmuring, mostly from the humans, but no one spoke. Rokshan held up an iron chain with links the size of his pinky nail and displayed the topaz teardrop hanging from it. \"Everyone has an artifact.\"\n\nThe three other humans fingered their artifacts and nodded. Rokshan nudged the pyrite weapon at his feet. \"Two weapons each.\"\n\nMelika, sitting beside Coquina, tested the leather straps attached to hers. \"We drop them when we're done, right?\"\n\n\"Unless you're in a position to switch,\" Kamil said. \"It's better if we can retrieve them to replace the firing crystal, and they're tough, but they won't survive a fall of fifty feet or more.\"\n\n\"Flying gear,\" Rokshan went on. \"It gets cold up there. Coat, long trousers, gloves, boots, and eyepieces.\"\n\nLamprophyre surveyed the humans. None of them were wearing their coats, but it was too warm for that at ground level. Flint's friend Lokun looked the least comfortable, and Lamprophyre remembered he hadn't been enthusiastic about joining their flying force. But she'd listened to his thoughts, and despite his hesitation, he was determined to prove to Flint he wasn't a coward. That was enough for her.\n\n\"And the harnesses have been fireproofed, as best we can manage,\" Rokshan said. \"You'll all need to avoid acid, because we couldn't do much to resist that.\"\n\n\"And the shields aren't as effective against acid the thicker the spray,\" Kamil said. He rubbed his ankle inside his boot. \"God's breath, Bromargyrite, how did I let you talk me into this?\"\n\n\"It was easy, because you secretly want to be an epic hero from the poems,\" Bromargyrite said with a grin. Kamil reddened, but he smiled as well.\n\n\"So now what?\" Melika asked. \"Do we fly around looking for enemies?\"\n\n\"We are going west to patrol the Rindra River,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Hyaloclast thinks Sardonyx will send her people north along that river, now that they've showed they can destroy a city. They've gotten bolder over time. Kolmira almost has to be their next target.\"\n\nThe sound of wings alerted Lamprophyre to Dolomite's arrival. Tekentriya sat perched behind his shoulders, feet securely in the harness's stirrups. The crown princess surveyed them all, her expression sour. \"Which of those weapons is mine?\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre looked at Rokshan. \"Yours?\" he asked.\n\n\"I want to kill Sardonyx's dragons,\" Dolomite said. \"And Tekentriya feels the same.\"\n\n\"There's no way Father agreed to let his heir go into battle,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"If I don't, there may not be a kingdom for me to inherit, little brother,\" Tekentriya said. \"Now is not the time for worry over possibilities.\"\n\n\"You've never been a fighter,\" Rokshan persisted. \"I know we're not friends, but you can't imagine I want to see you killed.\"\n\nTekentriya's sour expression tightened. \"Pass me one of those weapons,\" she commanded.\n\nRokshan hesitated a moment before walking over and giving her his weapon. \"Go,\" Tekentriya said, and Dolomite sprang upward, beating the air for altitude. Lamprophyre watched him soar around the training grounds until he was above the denuded, blasted trees Rokshan had demonstrated the weapon on days before. Then he dropped, speeding downward and banking past the trees. Tekentriya aimed. A hum, and a pulse of light, and another, and another, and trees fell like a row of dancers taking a bow. Tekentriya's last shot threaded between two trees to fell the one behind without so much as shaking the leaves of the others.\n\nIn silence, everyone watched Dolomite return. Tekentriya still didn't climb down. \"I'm no soldier,\" she told Rokshan. \"I am, however, a crack shot with the bow, though you're too young to remember that. And this thing is far more forgiving than a bow. I can take care of myself.\"\n\nRokshan nodded. \"I guess you can.\"\n\nLamprophyre said, \"We leave at first light. Be at the warehouses with your gear.\"\n\nThe other humans climbed up, and the dragons separated to return their friends to their homes. Dolomite came to Lamprophyre's side. \"I was wrong,\" he said. \"About not being friends with a human. I understand now.\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Tekentriya, who didn't pretend not to be listening. \"I'm glad, Dolomite. Are you\u2026we never see you anymore. Are you all right?\"\n\nDolomite shook his head. \"I can't draw,\" he said. \"It's like the anger has driven the knowledge out of my hands. If we can hurt Sardonyx's people, maybe that will change.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"I know. But it's not your fault.\" He stepped away and spread his wings. \"I'll see you in the morning,\" he said, and flew away. Tekentriya looked back at Lamprophyre as he flew. For once, her expression wasn't bitter or angry.\n\nLamprophyre looked at Orthoclase. \"Are you still willing to go into battle without a rider?\"\n\n\"I can shoot this thing, and that's what matters,\" he said. \"And I think Flint was right that we shouldn't take just any rider, simply for the sake of going into battle. I'd be so uncomfortable with a stranger, I wouldn't fly well.\"\n\n\"Come have supper with us. Let's pretend everything is normal.\"\n\nOrthoclase smiled. \"I won't turn that invitation down. Depik is a genius.\"\n\nBeggars were gathering in the courtyard when Lamprophyre, Rokshan, and Orthoclase arrived. The soup smelled different that evening, but Lamprophyre didn't know enough about human food to identify the aroma.\n\nShe settled herself next to Orthoclase in the dining pavilion and watched the beggars. So many people in need. She hoped, as she sometimes did, that the people who came for soup weren't taking advantage of a free meal. There were so many who couldn't feed themselves that she didn't like the idea of capable people taking food from them. But there wasn't any way to help that, so mostly she just hoped.\n\nThe smell of hot cooked steak wafted past. She drew in a deep breath and sighed. \"I love steak. I wish every meal could be steak.\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be special if it was every meal, my lady,\" Depik said. He pushed the trolley laden with steak in front of her. \"I have beef butchered for you, if you'll give me a few minutes to cook it for Orthoclase.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't warn you he was coming.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the effort, Depik,\" Orthoclase said.\n\n\"It's no trouble,\" Depik said.\n\nWhen the cook had returned to the kitchen, Orthoclase said in a low voice, \"Does he smell like aventurine to you?\"\n\n\"It's an artifact to help his illness,\" Lamprophyre replied in the same low voice. \"We don't know how well it works yet, because he hasn't had a bad day since he was wounded. But I have hope.\"\n\nBhakriya walked past, pushing the cauldron on its wheeled trolley for Depik to refill. Time was one cauldron of soup had been enough. Lamprophyre eavesdropped on Bhakriya and Depik, enjoying how their thoughts of each other were full of affection and love. They'd only been married two days and already the embassy felt more like home, really. Maybe she was wrong about Tanajital not being home. Maybe home was a matter of who you shared your life with.\n\nShe swallowed more steak and pushed the trolley toward Orthoclase. \"We'll share all the meat. The steak isn't as good if you let it get cold.\"\n\nOrthoclase nodded. Rokshan appeared from the kitchen with a plate and utensils. \"Good steak,\" he said, helping himself. The three of them ate, contented and not needing to speak. For the first time in many twelvedays, Lamprophyre felt at peace.\n\nThen she saw who'd just walked into the courtyard. \"Tarakh,\" she said, sitting up straighter. \"I thought he went back to Leksital.\"\n\n\"Who is Tarakh?\" Orthoclase asked.\n\n\"Chaaksha's\u2026I don't know. Messenger? Except I think he was more than a messenger. I told him he could come to me in Tanajital if\u2014\" She stopped speaking as Tarakh drew up close enough to hear.\n\n\"My lady ambassador,\" he said. \"I hope I'm not intruding.\"\n\n\"Of course not, Tarakh. Are you hungry? You're welcome to soup, or steak\u2026?\"\n\nTarakh shook his head. \"I went back to Leksital,\" he said, \"but everything reminded me of Oresa. I don't know what I was thinking. I want so badly to hurt the ones who killed her, and yet I'm powerless. What can a human do against dragons?\"\n\n\"Who is Oresa?\" Orthoclase asked.\n\n\"She was to be my wife, my lord dragon. She was killed in the attack on our caravan.\"\n\nOrthoclase nodded. \"They killed our clutchmate Porphyry. I understand.\"\n\n\"Do you?\" Tarakh sounded almost angry.\n\nOrthoclase looked at him for several beats. \"I don't know,\" he finally said, \"what it is about grief that we never want other people to understand ours. Maybe we feel another's understanding diminishes the intensity of our pain. Maybe it's that so often people say they understand when they really don't. So I suppose saying I understand is wrong. All I know is, in killing Porphyry those dragons tore out a piece of me that I will never find a way to replace. And much as I want to make them suffer for it, no amount of killing will change the fact that he's gone.\"\n\nTarakh's angry look faded as Orthoclase spoke. \"You do understand,\" he said.\n\nOrthoclase sat up. \"How would you like to kill the bastards who took her from you?\"\n\n\"More than anything,\" Tarakh said.\n\n\"Then I have a way to make that happen,\" Orthoclase replied.\n\n\"Orthoclase,\" Lamprophyre murmured, \"what about what you said, about riding with a stranger?\"\n\nOrthoclase extended his hand to Tarakh. \"He's not a stranger,\" he said. \"We both lost people we love to the same dragons. And we both want to see them die. Tarakh, are you afraid of heights?\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of anything,\" Tarakh said. Lamprophyre, listening in, realized it was true. He'd only ever feared losing Oresa.\n\n\"Then come with me, and I'll show you how we'll make that happen.\" Orthoclase wiped his mouth and stood. \"I'll see you in the morning, Lamprophyre, Rokshan.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched the crowds in the courtyard shift to make room for the dragon and his rider. When Orthoclase was gone, she said, \"That's all of us. Six dragons, six riders, against a hundred enemies.\"\n\n\"Not all at once,\" Rokshan said. \"Sardonyx doesn't need to send her whole flight against us. She thinks she overpowers us. We have the advantage of her.\"\n\n\"I hope that's true,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nUnexpectedly, she slept a deep, untroubled sleep, filled with fragments of dreams her mind tried to connect. She drifted out of sleep to the sound of her name being called. Blinking, she focused on the misty blue chalcedony pendant hanging on the wall. Hyaloclast.\n\nShe lurched sleepily to the peg and said, \"I'm here.\"\n\n\"Two groups of dragons are moving north into Gonjiri,\" Hyaloclast said. \"One is headed east over the mountains, possibly toward Prabat. The other is following the river north. They passed the ruins of Nishta about fifty beats ago and kept going.\"\n\nBeside her, Rokshan sat up, rubbing his eyes. \"How many dragons over Nishta?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"It was too dark for an accurate count, but more than ten and less than twenty.\"\n\nFear shot through Lamprophyre. Too many. Five, maybe seven, they could handle, but twenty? She closed her fist more tightly on the pendant. \"They must be headed for Kolmira.\"\n\n\"Possibly. As far as we know, none of Sardonyx's scouts ever made it as far as Kolmira for her to know it's there. But even if all they intend to do is follow the river, destroying cities as they reach them, they will eventually find Kolmira. You have to stop them there.\"\n\n\"We will. Are you pursuing the others?\"\n\n\"We are. Good luck, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nThe pendant cleared. Rokshan stood. \"So we're getting an early start,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre looked outside. The sky was charcoal gray with the first light of dawn. Even Sardonyx's dragons couldn't fly in full dark. \"We meet at the warehouses as planned,\" she said. \"And then\u2026Rokshan, twenty dragons.\"\n\n\"No more than twenty, Hyaloclast said.\" Rokshan pulled on his trousers and slid his feet into his boots. \"Don't let fear get to you, Lamprophyre. This is where we turn the tide.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"They have no idea what's coming,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Another storm was coming, this one out of the west. They would fly right into its teeth. Lamprophyre cast her eye on the clouds, assessing them. They didn't look like thunderclouds, just ones heavy with rain. Rain could be as much a problem as lightning, but it would foul the wings of their enemies as well as their own, so everyone would be at the same disadvantage.\n\nShe eyed the clouds again. They looked like they were moving fast, though they were far enough away the dragons would reach the Rindra River well in advance of them. Unfortunately, the clouds' speed made it likely the storm would reach the clutch just as they met the enemy. She hoped that would be their only piece of bad luck that day.\n\nHer clutchmates flew well spaced apart, but close enough for her to hear their drifting surface thoughts. All of them were thinking about the storm except Dolomite, whose thoughts were filled with a seething desire to hurt dragons. Lamprophyre's heart felt like cracking in two. Sweet-natured, innocent Dolomite, full of anger and pain so great he couldn't see past it. She hoped defeating these ancient dragons would make a difference. She feared she was wrong. If Dolomite had changed permanently, that was one more thing those dragons had killed.\n\nThey were moving too fast for comfortable conversation, and Rokshan, when she listened briefly to his thoughts, felt the same. Hope it's not too soon, he thought, and Lamprophyre added that to her list of worries. None of the humans had more than a day's training with the weapons, and Tarakh hadn't even had that. At least she was confident in their riders' safety. Worrying about Rokshan falling off would make this impossible.\n\nSoon, the Rindra River was visible on the horizon. Lamprophyre scanned the distant landscape and the skies above it. No sign of dragons. She sped up regardless. Everyone knew the plan: see that Kolmira wasn't under attack, then fly south until they encountered Sardonyx's dragons.\n\nKolmira's dark roofs looked darker in the storm light, giving Lamprophyre the impression of a beast crouched astride the river, its arms and legs drawn in so it wasn't more than a shapeless blob. Again, no dragons dove and raced overhead. A little of the tension gripping Lamprophyre dissipated. They weren't too late.\n\nShe heard a shout from Flint, his words incoherent in the rising wind. When she looked his way, he was waving his arms wildly and gesturing downriver. Specks of color faded by the storm filled the sky. They were moving faster than Lamprophyre had thought possible. She thought gather up and flew to meet her clutchmates. The rising wind made it difficult for them to maintain position, but she hovered as best she could and let her mind fill with the sense of her clutchmates, their thoughts and, importantly, their position relevant to her. \"Rokshan?\" she said.\n\n\"There are twelve of them,\" Rokshan said. \"No, don't panic,\" he said, more loudly to be heard above the apprehensive murmurs. \"We have the advantage in our weapons, both in their power and in the dragons' not knowing we have them. We also have the advantage of mobility. Those creatures might as well be pigs in wallow with how slowly they turn. Attack from above if you can. Riders, don't waste shots, but don't be so cautious you aren't effective.\" He took a deep breath. \"Kolmira is counting on us. Let's teach these bastards a lesson.\"\n\nThe rush of confidence and determination filling everyone's thoughts made Lamprophyre feel maybe they weren't all about to die. \"Then\u2014fly!\" she shouted, and six dragons separated and made for the oncoming enemy.\n\nThe ancient dragons didn't alter their course as Lamprophyre and the clutch approached. Nervousness crept over Lamprophyre again, and she ruthlessly pushed the feeling aside. She'd faced Sardonyx's dragons before, she'd killed two of them, and she could fly circles around all of them. Now was not the time to worry. It was time to fight.\n\nSomething touched the top of her head, something hard and cool and bumpy. \"Rokshan, what are you doing?\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Just getting into position,\" Rokshan shouted. \"I promise I won't shoot you. But if we can get within range, and I can hit a dragon's head\u2014\"\n\n\"Be careful!\" She didn't like feeling so close to the pyrite weapon, but she trusted Rokshan not to miss. The dragons were close enough to be visible as large, colored shapes, ponderous and implacable as a force of nature. Lamprophyre gritted her teeth and sped up. Time seemed to slow the faster she went, as if her eagerness to meet her foe was at odds with her fear of the future. It felt as if the dragons had slowed to a crawl; her wings took an eternity to beat. Closer. Gradually closer. They were twenty dragonlengths apart. Fifteen. Twelve.\n\nTen.\n\n\"Now!\" she screamed. The weapon lifted away from her head. She heard the hum of it coming to full power, the pause, and then a thump as the force pulse shot away from the weapon, a thump that rattled her skull and made her vision go blurry.\n\nThe bright flash of the pulse struck the oncoming male, not in the head but in the throat. He jerked, his head snapping back. His wings stilled mid-beat. Then he fell, thrashing as if he were struggling for air, his wings half-furled and his tail whipping around in a desperate struggle to stay aloft. Rokshan shouted with excitement, and Lamprophyre let out an answering shout.\n\nShe dove, chasing the fallen male in case he miraculously recovered, but he hit the ground with an explosive blast of sprayed-up earth and lay still. One wing was twisted beneath him in a way no living dragon would endure. Lamprophyre pulled up and flew back toward the fight.\n\nThere were only ten ancient dragons now. She didn't have time to look for the other fallen enemy. Her friends looked slim and agile beside Sardonyx's brutes, even Bromargyrite, whom no one would ever call graceful. Flashes of force burst in the air, some of them missing, but most striking their targets. Everything was moving so fast, with the clutch darting and weaving around the enemy, the enemy shifting and taking swipes at anyone who came too close. The ones close enough to Lamprophyre for her to make out expressions looked utterly bewildered, as if they'd been hunting deer only to have the prey turn and savage them. Lamprophyre's doubt vanished. They were winning!\n\nShe beat the air for altitude and soared well above the fight, searching for a target. One of the enemy dragons had flown a dragonlength or so away from the others, gradually gaining altitude herself. Lamprophyre smiled. It was like being handed a gift.\n\nShe swung, tilting sideways, and felt Rokshan's knees grip tighter. This would be impossible without the harness, given how the humans needed both hands to fire the weapon. Instead of falling, Rokshan shifted to lean into the turn. Pass above and across, he thought.\n\n\"Above and across,\" she shouted, nodding in case her words were blown away by the wind. Not fully above, she realized, because her body would block Rokshan's shot. To the side, then.\n\nThe dragon saw her, and Lamprophyre noticed the nasty smile on the dragon's face. She hoped Rokshan would shoot that smile off. She curved, circling the dragon, and then dove just as the female let out a blast of fire that enveloped her. An air-shattering series of thumps pounded her ears, and flashes impacted on the dragon female, making her scream. When Lamprophyre could see again, she saw the female spiraling downward, one of her wings shredded and dark blotches rising up on her pale golden skin.\n\n\"Damn,\" Rokshan shouted. \"Missed my shot.\"\n\n\"She can't fly, though. She's down. The shield worked!\"\n\n\"It worked. I didn't even feel warm.\"\n\nLamprophyre let out another shout of excitement. Below, more bright flashes struck the downed female, and Orthoclase streaked past. The female's other wing stopped moving, and she fell without trying to stop herself, landing sprawled across the river with her head beneath its surface. Lamprophyre briefly considered having to bury all these dragons and then let the thought go. They weren't safe yet.\n\nShe again sped upward, seeking a position where she could see the battle, and gave up when she realized again how fast everything was moving. There were only seven of Sardonyx's dragons left, and the ones that remained showed the marks of the weapons, the dark bruises where the force pulses had pulverized the soft tissue beneath impenetrable dragon hide. The smell of rain filled the air, though still no drops fell. If they could win this fight before the storm came\u2026\n\nThe enemy was getting smarter, though. Lamprophyre saw Melika aim her weapon only to have to pull up when her target put Flint between her and himself. Frustrated, Lamprophyre sought out someone to attack, and dove after a dragon the color of a day-old bruise. Just a little closer\u2014\"Rokshan, wait for it!\" she shouted.\n\nSomething struck her from the side, and Lamprophyre reflexively jerked away as an enormous female whose rosy hide was so stippled with bruises she looked like a pink snow leopard slammed into her, reaching for Rokshan. Lamprophyre rolled and hoped Rokshan wouldn't fall off. The female swiped at Lamprophyre's chest, missing by scant fingerwidths. Lamprophyre kicked her assailant's stomach, and the female grabbed her foot and pulled her close.\n\nThen the female's head cracked against Lamprophyre's, and for a moment, Lamprophyre was blind and dizzy. But there was no second blow. Lamprophyre realized Rokshan was screaming at her to pull up, realized a beat later that they were falling, and spread her wings to catch herself.\n\nBreathing heavily with fear, she looked around for the female and found her locked in close combat with Dolomite. He was clawing and snarling like an animal, as if he'd forgotten the strategy in his lust for blood. Lamprophyre screamed his name and flew toward him, dodging what seemed like a hundred enemy dragons. Tekentriya had her weapon out, but seemed unable to get a clear shot because of Dolomite's constant movement.\n\nLamprophyre saw the strike coming. Time slowed again, giving her an eternity to watch the rose-leopard female's powerful right hand come sweeping toward Dolomite's unguarded belly. She saw the claws extend mere beats before the female struck, tearing five deep gouges into Dolomite's stomach and sending red blood flying like fountains.\n\nDolomite convulsed, and Tekentriya's weapon dropped to hang by its strap around her shoulders as she grabbed Dolomite's ruff to stay in her saddle. The rose-leopard female shoved Dolomite away to fall helplessly out of the air.\n\nLamprophyre realized her throat ached with screams she hadn't heard. Not Dolomite too. Rokshan was saying something she couldn't understand, but it didn't matter; she had to save Dolomite. She dove after him.\n\nOnce again her descent was slowed by having to dodge the enemy. She was still eighteen dragonlengths away when Dolomite and Tekentriya hit the ground.\n\nShe cried out and backwinged in dismay. Rokshan was still shouting things she didn't understand. Then, to her astonishment, she saw Dolomite move. How he was still alive, she didn't know, but maybe it wasn't too late.\n\nShe cast about, not knowing in her panic if she should go to help him, or kill the one who'd tried to kill him. Then she saw the rose-leopard dragon. The female was diving in her ponderous, implacable way at Dolomite, her claws extended. Dolomite shifted again. He was face down and his wings lay crumpled across his body. Tekentriya was nowhere to be seen.\n\nLamprophyre dodged one final enemy and was in the clear. She beat the air frantically, but she knew, even with as slow as the female was and as fast as Lamprophyre could fly, she would reach the female too late.\n\nThe female drove ever closer to Dolomite. Lamprophyre pushed herself harder than ever before. She was only seven dragonlengths away, but the female would reach her clutchmate beats before Lamprophyre did.\n\nDolomite's wings shifted. Tekentriya sat up from where she'd lain sprawled beneath them. She brought her weapon up and around, aimed, and fired.\n\nThe flashing pulse took the female in the center of her forehead.\n\nShe jerked, and her arms sagged, but inertia kept her dead body moving. Screaming with effort, Lamprophyre changed course just enough to ram the female's body, grabbing her around the waist and carrying her to the side so they didn't hit Dolomite and Tekentriya. She and her burden struck the earth, plowing up a great long furrow that ended at the riverside. Lamprophyre lay panting for a moment, unable to move.\n\n\"Will you for Jiwanyil's sake listen to me!\" Rokshan was shouting.\n\n\"I will,\" Lamprophyre said wearily. \"Sorry. I didn't know what to do.\"\n\n\"We saved Dolomite. That's more important than what I wanted you to do.\" Rokshan slapped her neck lightly. \"Get up. It's not over.\"\n\n\"Dolomite could be dying.\"\n\n\"I know. But we have to kill the others if we want to be able to save him. Go!\"\n\nLamprophyre pushed herself wearily to her feet and leaped into the sky just as the first fat raindrops fell.\n\nHer worry for Dolomite distracted her, and Rokshan more than once had to shout at her to move, move, get altitude and then dive. An acid mist enveloped them once, then she dodged a gout not of fire but of actual burning stomach matter she feared was too solid for the shield to handle. Rain pelted her body and sheeted down her wings, making her struggle to maintain her speed. Rokshan shot again and again until Lamprophyre couldn't remember a time when the world hadn't been filled with thunderous echoes and the flash of pulses of force. Once she came close enough to take a swipe at a male's wings, and he turned on her, snarling, and she saw and heard his terror.\n\nThen the moment came when Rokshan shouted, \"Let her go! Don't worry about her, let her go!\"\n\nLamprophyre watched a lone female dragon fly heavily southward, shrouded in the misty low rainclouds. \"But we can kill her,\" she said.\n\n\"Better she return to Sardonyx with news that her dragons are no longer invulnerable,\" Rokshan said. \"We want Sardonyx as confused and worried as we can make her.\"\n\nThe sound of wings filled Lamprophyre's ears. \"All her dragons disappearing would be confusing and worrisome, too,\" Flint said. His movements were heavy with exhaustion and the pouring rain.\n\n\"True, but we also don't want her attacking Kolmira again,\" Rokshan said. \"A total disappearance would mean sending a larger force north to investigate. This is part of forcing her to fight on a battlefield of our choosing.\" He sagged forward and hugged Lamprophyre around her neck. Water dripped from his soaked hair down his forehead. \"Let's see if Dolomite is\u2014\" His mouth snapped shut on the rest of that sentence.\n\nThey landed a dragonlength from where Dolomite lay. The other dragons and their riders surrounded him, their heads bowed, rain pattering against them as if the sky were human enough to weep. Lamprophyre stopped. She couldn't bear knowing she'd lost another clutchmate.\n\nRokshan slid down her side and ran toward the fallen dragon. Then he turned and shouted, \"He's alive. It's all right, Lamprophyre, he's alive!\"\n\nHer knees trembled. She sat on the ground and closed her eyes, breathing the acid-and fire-tinged air and feeling such relief she thought she might float away. When she regained control, she walked to Rokshan's side. Kamil knelt beside Dolomite, his right hand glowing green. Two of the deep gashes were gone, and as Lamprophyre watched, Kamil ran his glowing hand slowly over a third, making it close up.\n\n\"But you're not a healer,\" she said.\n\n\"Any adept can use jade for basic healing,\" Kamil said without looking up. \"Healers are just adepts who've studied their more complex uses. I hoped I wouldn't need this, but I'm glad I brought it.\" He started on a fourth gash.\n\n\"Lamprophyre,\" Dolomite said. His voice was so weak she could barely hear it.\n\nShe moved closer to his head, near where Tekentriya sat, and wiped rainwater from his face. Dolomite had his wings folded painfully beneath him to allow Kamil access to his stomach. \"You nearly died,\" she said.\n\nDolomite nodded. \"I think I've had my fill of revenge,\" he said. \"I wasn't myself. I didn't like that.\" He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. \"Thank you for saving me.\"\n\n\"Tekentriya saved you,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I just finished the job.\"\n\n\"We would both have been crushed if you hadn't been there,\" Tekentriya said. For once, she didn't sound angry.\n\n\"I've never seen anything so brave as what you did,\" Lamprophyre told her. \"That female was thirty times your size and you didn't even flinch.\"\n\nTekentriya shrugged. \"That's just one kind of bravery. I'm afraid it's all I'm good for.\" She put a hand on her damaged hip. \"But I wasn't about to let this fellow die. I don't have so many friends that I can afford to lose any of them.\"\n\n\"You just like flying,\" Dolomite said with a weak smile.\n\nTekentriya smiled back. \"If that's what you want to believe.\"\n\n\"That's it,\" Kamil said. \"You'll need to see a healer\u2014we should go into Kolmira before we return, because it's possible you have internal injuries from hitting the ground.\"\n\nCoquina lifted her head and turned. \"I think Kolmira is coming to us.\"\n\nLamprophyre followed her gaze. Dozens of people had emerged from Kolmira's gate and were slowly picking their way across the sodden fields toward them. \"I didn't realize how close we were to the city,\" she said. \"I guess we gave them a show.\"\n\n\"I'll talk to the ruling prince,\" Rokshan said. \"You let Hyaloclast know what happened.\"\n\n\"All right. Then what?\"\n\nRokshan looked up at her. \"Then,\" he said, \"we should go south to join Hyaloclast. I think the rest of your dragons need to make some human friends.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "They reached Prabat at midafternoon, after seeing Dolomite completely healed and explaining to the Kolmirans how to dispose of the dead dragon bodies. Lamprophyre hadn't liked the humans' reaction. True, nobody wanted to have to bury eleven enormous creatures, but she and her clutchmates had saved Kolmira from absolute destruction, and surely the humans' gratitude could extend to dealing with the aftermath?\n\nThey'd taken the long way, following the river past the ruins of Nishta to the mountains before turning east, in case Sardonyx had sent more than one attacking force. But the flight was peaceful once the rain was past, the air cool and damp and smelling of water rather than fire and acid. The continuing overcast turned the light a beautiful pearly gray that illuminated the river valley only dimly, making it seem far more distant than it was. Despite the beauty of her surroundings, Lamprophyre had spent the flight chafing over how slowly they were moving. Anything might have happened at Prabat. They might arrive in time to see the last smoldering tower collapse.\n\nBut the worst hadn't happened. They saw smoke rising from Prabat's low towers, but no dragons circled the city, raining down fire and acid. There were no dragons visible anywhere, which increased Lamprophyre's worries. She sped up, passing Orthoclase, who was in the lead, and scanned the hills surrounding the city. Her heart beat faster as she saw motionless colored forms lying in clumps outside Prabat's city wall.\n\n\"Don't panic. Those are our dragons,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Yes, that's why I'm panicking. They look dead,\" Lamprophyre replied.\n\n\"I doubt they'd be so neatly grouped if they'd fallen where they were killed.\" Rokshan leaned well forward and pointed. \"That's Hyaloclast there.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked where he pointed and saw the dragon queen near the city's western gate. To her relief, Hyaloclast was on her feet with her wings furled closely along her back. Leaving the clutch behind, Lamprophyre banked and swiftly descended to join her, landing so abruptly Rokshan had to make a grab for her ruff to avoid being jolted sideways.\n\nHyaloclast looked up from her conversation with two men when Lamprophyre arrived. \"You bring news yourself?\" she asked. \"I expected to hear from you sooner.\"\n\n\"What\u2014oh.\" Lamprophyre had forgotten the blue chalcedony pendant in the tumult of the Kolmiran attack and the worried flight to Prabat. \"I'm sorry. I forgot. You look\u2026that is, what happened here?\"\n\n\"Heavy casualties on our side, but we drove them off. Were you forced to flee?\" Hyaloclast looked past Lamprophyre at her clutchmates, descending behind her.\n\n\"No. We killed them. Hyaloclast, the strategy worked!\" Now that she knew disaster hadn't struck here, Lamprophyre's worries disappeared. They'd fought a force twice their size and nearly eliminated them!\n\nHyaloclast's eye ridges went up. \"With none of you injured?\"\n\n\"No, but there was healing. It was a close thing, but we're all right.\" Her mother's words finally registered with her. \"Heavy casualties?\"\n\n\"Thirty-two dragons of our flight killed,\" Hyaloclast said. \"We accounted for four of theirs before driving them off.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that makes thirty-six giant corpses we have to deal with,\" one of the men said. He had a sour, pinched face and very little hair on his head, and he faced Hyaloclast with no fear, as if she were some storekeeper who'd sold him rotten fruit and he intended her to make restitution.\n\nHyaloclast turned her baleful red-eyed stare on him. \"Lamprophyre, this is Prince Rajit,\" she said. \"It is his city that is not now in flames thanks to us. Or am I mistaken, your highness?\" The sharp edge to her voice told Lamprophyre Hyaloclast did not appreciate the prince's easy dismissal of her dead people as \"corpses.\"\n\nPrince Rajit took half a step back, but his sour expression didn't change. \"Of course we're very grateful,\" he said, \"but that doesn't change reality.\"\n\n\"What I hear you saying, Rajit, is that you don't appreciate what Hyaloclast and the dragons have done for Prabat,\" Rokshan said, sliding down from the saddle.\n\nNow Rajit did recoil. \"Your highness,\" he said. \"I didn't see you there.\"\n\n\"Not a good response,\" Rokshan said. \"You shouldn't need a royal prince's presence to behave honorably. Or did you think your safety could be bought with the blood of others and you wouldn't have to do anything but sit in your palace and wait for the battle to end?\"\n\nRajit's face darkened. \"Of course not, your highness.\"\n\nRokshan slapped Rajit companionably on the shoulder. \"These dragons have lost many friends,\" he said. \"They shouldn't have to labor alone to bury them. I'm sure what they want is assistance, not to turn the whole duty over to humans. Not such a burden, is it?\"\n\nRajit shook his head. \"I\u2014my chamberlain will handle the details,\" he said, indicating the second man. \"Is there anything else I can do for you?\"\n\n\"We will need to eat soon,\" Hyaloclast said. Her eye ridges shifted just enough to show Lamprophyre she was enjoying the conversation. \"One cow for every two dragons.\"\n\nRajit's mouth fell open. \"But that's\u2014\"\n\n\"Not at all unreasonable,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll come with you. Lamprophyre, I'll be back soon.\" He clapped Rajit's shoulder again, making the prince stagger. Lamprophyre bit her lip to keep from laughing.\n\nWhen the humans were gone, Hyaloclast said, \"How many did you kill?\"\n\nThat sobered Lamprophyre. \"There were twelve. One escaped\u2014actually Rokshan said to let her go so she could tell Sardonyx about what we did. I trust his judgment. He said it was best for our strategy.\"\n\n\"There were far more here,\" Hyaloclast said, \"and Sardonyx was not one of them. I believe she's testing our resolve, looking for a weak spot.\"\n\n\"Did they go south?\"\n\nHyaloclast nodded. \"We could not afford to chase them far.\"\n\nLamprophyre reflexively looked south, past where her clutchmates had gathered. \"I don't like to think about the destruction they're causing in Sachetan. Maybe we should follow Sardonyx south.\"\n\n\"As I said, we can't afford to chase them,\" Hyaloclast said, \"and from what King Ekanath tells me, the dragons have done very little damage in that country. A few villages, here and there, but they have not gone far enough south to find their large cities.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. All Sachetan has to protect it are the prophecies warning them which cities will be attacked. Why doesn't Sardonyx destroy them?\"\n\nHyaloclast followed her gaze. \"I admit I don't know much about military strategy. General Sajan informs me that Sardonyx's approach to conquest is to defeat her most powerful opponent so she can sweep unopposed through these other countries, rather than fighting a hundred little battles in which her forces would be gradually diminished. Despite our dragons being less powerful than hers, we are still that opponent. She intends to obliterate our flight, raze Gonjiri, and then rain destruction down upon the rest of the world.\"\n\n\"That's terrifying.\"\n\n\"Given that you and your clutch have just struck a decisive blow against her, it's an intent she will have trouble fulfilling.\" Hyaloclast sighed. \"I wish I had more confidence that your battle techniques can be extended to the rest of the flight.\"\n\n\"It's not hard to learn to fly with a human companion.\"\n\n\"You forget how much time your clutch has spent in Tanajital. You're used to humans. The rest of us, except Massicot and poor Chrysoprase\u2014this is the first time any of them have seen a human that wasn't Rokshan. I fear it's going to take longer than we have to acclimate them.\"\n\n\"I choose to be optimistic.\"\n\nHyaloclast smiled. \"You would. Well, it's not something to worry about tonight. We could use your help burying our dead.\" Her smile disappeared. \"That will never feel natural to me.\"\n\n\"I know. I feel the same.\" She thought of Porphyry's grave marker and felt comforted. And Hyaloclast had referred to Rokshan by name. Lamprophyre thought that might have been the first time. \"We'll help.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I will spread the word of your victory. We could use a boost to morale. Thirty-two dragons.\" Hyaloclast shook her head. \"And every one of them a terrible loss.\"\n\n\"Is Leucite\u2026\"\n\nHyaloclast shot her an ironic look. \"I think there was more than one question in those words, daughter.\"\n\nLamprophyre swallowed and stood her ground. \"Well, is he?\"\n\n\"He is unharmed. And yes, I intend to offer him a pair-bond if we both survive this. I won't ask for your approval.\"\n\n\"Of course not! It's none of my business. It's just been so long, and I want you to be happy.\"\n\nHyaloclast sighed. \"I thought I wouldn't want another mate after Aegirine. We always knew we would be pair-bonded, from the time we were barely able to fly. That kind of connection is so rare, and so beautiful, but what I have now with Leucite is a different kind of relationship, and it is beautiful in its own way.\"\n\n\"I like him. I'm glad you chose him.\"\n\n\"He was worried you'd be upset. You might talk to him, if you get a chance. He has a very generous, caring heart.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Lamprophyre saw Coquina looking her way as if she had something on her mind. \"I need to talk to my clutch about the burials.\"\n\n\"Go,\" Hyaloclast said. \"And give them my thanks.\"\n\nBy nightfall, the flight had buried only half their fallen dead, and Rokshan hadn't returned. He was close enough that she could feel their pair-bond, but that only made her more frustrated: so close, and yet he didn't return to her? She tried not to worry about what might keep him away, but she was tense and exhausted from burying so many friends, most of whom she didn't know were dead until she came upon their bodies.\n\nA procession of wagons bearing butchered cow carcasses emerged from the western gate and trundled over the uneven ground toward the dragons. They were followed by more wagons hauling barrels of clean, fresh, sweet-smelling water. Lamprophyre commandeered some for her clutch and gratefully took a long drink before pouring water over her filthy hands.\n\nGradually, the others drifted toward her, drawn by the scent of the water. \"I'm so thirsty,\" Dolomite said. \"I didn't notice until just now.\"\n\n\"Where are the others? The humans?\"\n\nDolomite drank and wiped his mouth. \"Someone sent a message for Tekentriya, an invitation to join the ruling prince. She took all the humans with her. It was meant to be a joke at the ruling prince's expense, but I didn't understand why it would be funny for him to have to feed all of them. He must have enough food for dozens of humans.\"\n\n\"Food,\" Flint said to Coquina. \"Smell that? Others have started cooking their meals. You should do the same.\"\n\n\"Has anyone ever told you how bossy you are?\" Coquina said, poking him in the side. \"All right. Lamprophyre?\"\n\nLamprophyre got heavily to her feet and retrieved one of the cow carcasses. If Tekentriya had been invited to eat with Prince Rajit, Rokshan probably had too. It irritated her that he'd desert her for human companionship\u2014but that was stupid, he didn't like Rajit and probably only ate with him out of politeness. He would return soon.\n\nIt was full dark when the three cows were roasted, so Lamprophyre smashed two of the empty water barrels and started a bonfire. They ate without speaking, their idle thoughts dwelling on food and sleep and curiosity about where they would do the latter.\n\n\"It's too late to fly back to Tanajital,\" she said.\n\nBromargyrite groaned. \"I can't believe I've become so acclimated to the human world that I'm thinking longingly of my warehouse.\"\n\n\"We can sleep here,\" Orthoclase said. He lay sprawled near the fire with his wings spread over him, already halfway to sleep. \"It's uncomfortable being out in the open, but we've done it before.\"\n\n\"And we'd just have to fly back in the morning to finish burying our dead,\" Flint pointed out. \"Better we sleep here.\"\n\nDolomite let out a gentle snore.\n\nCoquina laughed quietly. \"I guess it's settled,\" she said. \"But I'll sit up a while longer. I told Melika she should come here when she finished eating, in case we decided to go back. Maybe that prince will find them lodgings in the city. It's got to be a lot worse for humans, sleeping on the bare ground without a roof overhead.\"\n\n\"I wish Rokshan would return,\" Lamprophyre groused. \"He hasn't moved in over two thousand beats. I don't know what it is about human dining that it takes so long.\"\n\nIt was another thousand beats before Rokshan started moving, but since the motion was generally westward, toward her, Lamprophyre decided not to complain again. The moon hadn't yet risen, and the light from the bonfire blinded her to everything but her clutchmates' recumbent bodies and Coquina's restlessly shifting head. \"What's wrong?\" Lamprophyre finally asked.\n\n\"Nothing\u2014that is, I don't think it's anything. I just feel uncomfortable. Probably it's sleeping outdoors that does it.\" Coquina settled back and coiled her tail around herself. \"I feel as though trouble isn't over yet.\"\n\n\"Well, of course it isn't.\"\n\n\"I mean immediate trouble. If Sardonyx's dragons come back, they could do so much damage with all of us off guard.\"\n\n\"They won't fly in the dark. They likely won't even fly when the moon's up. But I can ask Hyaloclast if she's posted guards.\"\n\n\"That's reasonable. I'm sorry I'm so paranoid.\"\n\n\"Better a little unjustified paranoia than an unsuspected attack that kills us all.\" Lamprophyre breathed on the blue chalcedony pendant. \"Hyaloclast?\"\n\nA few beats later, Hyaloclast said, \"Yes?\"\n\n\"We were wondering if you posted guards. In case they come back.\"\n\n\"I have. It may be unnecessary, but I believe in taking precautions.\"\n\n\"I agree. Sorry to disturb you.\" She let go the pendant, which cleared so it once again gleamed in the firelight. \"I wish Rokshan would come. I know I keep saying that, but I can't rest until he's here.\"\n\n\"It's understandable.\" Coquina tilted her head back to look at the sky. \"I don't see pictures. Only specks. Humans have the most interesting imaginations. Did you know they actually enjoy looking for pictures in clouds? Melika told me.\"\n\nLamprophyre shuddered. \"How awful. I don't know why that doesn't unnerve them. Clouds are just water mist. Why would you want to imagine them as something else?\"\n\n\"I don't understand it, but Melika thought it was hilarious that dragons don't do it. Sometimes we're so different I don't know how we managed to become friends.\"\n\n\"Rokshan says friendship is more interesting when you're different, because you never run out of things to talk about.\" She yawned. \"It's just now starting to hit me, what we did today. I can't believe it worked.\"\n\n\"I wish it weren't necessary.\" At Lamprophyre's inquiring look, Coquina added, \"Sardonyx is an awful person. Here we have this beautiful world, with two rational species inhabiting it, and we have so much to give each other\u2014and Sardonyx wants to destroy humans because she thinks they're a pestilence. How revolting. And how arrogant, to think her personal beliefs should apply to everyone.\"\n\n\"There's so much about her I don't understand,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She has that ability to speak to minds; where did that come from? And are there any others among her followers who can do the same?\"\n\n\"Didn't you say she gave that power to you once?\"\n\n\"No, I said I thought that was what happened. I have no idea what it actually was, whether I had Sardonyx's ability temporarily because we were listening to the same mind, or whether it was all an illusion.\"\n\n\"Or maybe,\" Coquina said with a grin, \"you've got that power yourself and you never knew it.\"\n\nLamprophyre made a face. \"I doubt it. I've never spoken to anyone's mind.\"\n\n\"That you know of. There's scant difference between speaking to a dragon's mind and having a thought another dragon hears.\"\n\n\"This is a disturbing conversation, and Stones be praised, here comes Rokshan to put an end to it.\"\n\n\"What am I putting an end to?\" Rokshan asked. \"God's breath, that was the dullest meal I've ever attended.\"\n\nThat made Lamprophyre feel instantly better. \"Is Prince Rajit boring?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He might actually be interesting, but he's one of those people who's overly conscious of social rank, and he went out of his way not to say anything Tekentriya or I might be offended by. Which means the conversation was dull, and thank Jiwanyil Kamil isn't overawed by nobility, because he kept the meal from being a complete disaster.\" Rokshan dropped to sit leaning against Lamprophyre's side. \"I'm sleeping out here. I'd rather be with you than in some stuffy bedchamber in the prince's palace. It was built about five hundred years ago, when the lords fought for dominance, and you can tell its designer was concerned about the possibility of some assassin climbing through windows, because there aren't any.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry it's just the hard ground.\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"Like I said, far superior.\"\n\n\"Was Melika coming?\" Coquina asked.\n\n\"I think so. The prince's wife was talking to her about you. She's interested in dragons and had the most unusual questions. I'm sure Melika will tell you all about it.\"\n\nLamprophyre settled down and spread her wings over herself, enclosing Rokshan beneath them. Rokshan moved to pillow his head against her shoulder. \"So warm,\" he murmured. She drifted off to sleep feeling content and happy to have him close.\n\nThe sound of her name being shouted practically in her ear drove her upright, knocking Rokshan over. \"What?\" she exclaimed, looking around frantically.\n\n\"Lamprophyre!\" Hyaloclast's voice came from the pendant just as more cries, these wordless, echoed across the fields surrounding Prabat. \"Lamprophyre, we are under attack!\"\n\nLamprophyre scrambled to her feet. The moon was up and sailing toward its zenith, which meant she'd been asleep for perhaps four thousand beats\u2014almost three hours. The bonfire had died down, and its low light revealed the faces of her clutchmates, who were stirring in response to the cries. She couldn't see attackers anywhere, had no idea where the cries were coming from.\n\nShe grabbed the pendant and said, \"Where are they?\"\n\n\"South. We have a few hundred beats before they reach Prabat. We must fly to them, engage them away from the city. Gather your force and join us.\" The pendant went clear before Lamprophyre could protest that the humans were almost all in the city, that it would take time\u2014but she didn't have time for complaining.\n\n\"Rokshan,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll be back. Everyone get ready,\" he said, calling over his shoulder because he was already sprinting for the gate.\n\nLamprophyre shrugged into her harness and fastened the buckles. \"It's fine,\" she said. \"The others will stop the enemy, keep them at a distance, until we reach them.\"\n\nEveryone nodded except Dolomite, who had his harness on but unbuckled. He was staring southward, toward where the mountains marked the border between Gonjiri and Sachetan. \"It's not fine,\" he said. \"There are so many.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked in that direction. At first, she saw nothing with her firelight-accustomed eyes. She moved so the bonfire was at her back and looked again. Still nothing\u2014and then movement, black against black, as if the night had wings. Gradually, the moving blackness grew, until it filled nearly half the southern sky. She caught her breath. Some of that had to be her own flight, but still\u2026\n\n\"We'll do it,\" she declared. \"It's not just us this time. We have the whole flight behind us. Don't let them get to you, Dolomite.\"\n\nDolomite didn't take his eyes from the oncoming blackness. \"I won't,\" he said. \"But I'm not sure they know that.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't know how to respond. Instead, she waved at the six human figures running or in one case lurching toward them. \"They will soon,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Moonlight silvered the ground and shone in glints off dragon bodies weaving and dodging through the air. A blast of fire, then another, turned those bodies yellow-gold briefly. Lamprophyre, in the lead, tried to count and gave up. She was too distant to distinguish between the flight and Sardonyx's people. That could wait until they were close enough to kill.\n\nBeside her, Orthoclase stretched out his neck as if that would give him greater speed. She heard him think fighting in darkness, good thing they're so big. She agreed. The idea of accidentally hurting one of her friends scared her. At least they could easily tell the difference\u2014 \u2014and with that, a new fear struck her. There wasn't any way to blind-fly with the entire flight. \"We have to be careful,\" she shouted. \"The flight won't know to get out of our way.\"\n\n\"That means getting in closer than before,\" Rokshan said. He shouted, \"Take your shots as close as you dare. It won't kill our friends to take a shot or two, but no sense being reckless.\" His thoughts echoed his words perfectly, extending the range of his message.\n\nLamprophyre heard agreement in her clutchmates' thoughts. It didn't reassure her as much as she'd hoped. She pushed those fears aside. Nothing else she could do, and the battle was coming up fast.\n\nAs they approached the wheeling, soaring dragons, Lamprophyre noted that the flight stayed well away from the enormous monsters, not trying to approach close enough to strike. It was all she had time to observe before she felt Rokshan bring the weapon into firing position. She swerved upward, found a target, and dove.\n\nThe rapid thumping of the weapon rattled her skull and neck. She swept past the enemy and, seeing an opening, swiped her claws across the creature's face. The dragon howled and dropped, his wings beating erratically. She dodged one of the flight and chased the dragon below the battle. His thoughts, when she neared him, were confused and frightened and wordless. She blocked them as Rokshan took a final shot that hit the dragon between the eyes, and wheeled away without watching him hit the distant ground.\n\nBut when she approached the conflict, she discovered the fight was over. Dragons of her flight milled about, grouped by clutches, thinking how relieved they were to be alive. She sought out her clutch and found Hyaloclast instead. The great black dragon looked silver in the moonlight. Leucite hovered beside her, his bronze body purplish under the same light. They turned to face her as she approached.\n\n\"No one was hurt,\" Hyaloclast said before Lamprophyre could ask the question uppermost in her thoughts. \"The enemy fled in the face of our weapons. I don't yet know how many of them your clutch accounted for.\"\n\n\"That's bad,\" Rokshan said.\n\nHyaloclast turned her red gaze on him. \"No casualties is bad?\"\n\n\"No. Their fleeing so quickly. It suggests this was to test us. Sardonyx must know by now what happened near Kolmira. She probably sent this force to witness the weapons in action and return to report.\" Rokshan sounded grim. \"I don't like the implications.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Lamprophyre asked. \"It's not as if she can defend against pyrite.\"\n\n\"I would not like to guess what Sardonyx is capable of,\" Hyaloclast said, sounding as grim as Rokshan. \"Greater knowledge has to help her.\" She turned to look southward, where the last of Sardonyx's dragons were visible. \"And now she knows what she faces.\"\n\n\"You're right, that's bad,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"Sleep, for now,\" Hyaloclast said. \"We need time to recover. Tomorrow, we will make what plans we can. We need humans' artifacts to spy on Sardonyx's movements, to show us where to defend next. It's not hopeless.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. She heard her clutch approaching, and it comforted her. \"We'll speak again in the morning.\" She smiled at Leucite, thinking how glad she was that he'd made her mother happy, and heard in return his relief and happiness. At least that was something gone right.\n\nShe turned to her clutch, thinking good work. They were all so tired and yet so elated she didn't want to mention Hyaloclast's fears. \"How many?\" she asked.\n\n\"Tekentriya and I killed one,\" Dolomite said. \"And hurt two others.\"\n\n\"We tore up the wing of one. I'm not sure if she recovered,\" Melika said.\n\nThe others all shook their heads. \"And we killed one,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They ran from us.\"\n\n\"I like the sound of that,\" Orthoclase said with a smile.\n\nThis time, Lamprophyre heard Rokshan think not tonight. She said only, \"Let's sleep. Tomorrow is another long day.\" But she couldn't help wondering, as they flew back to Prabat, whether it would be the kind of day any of them could predict.\n\nSardonyx didn't attack in the morning. They finished burying their friends undisturbed, and then returned to Tanajital. It felt so anticlimactic Lamprophyre became angry. So many dragons had died, and life went on, which struck her as irrational. Then she felt ridiculous for having the thought. Her friends were dead, and so many others lived, and it was those others, and all the hundreds of thousands of humans in Gonjiri and elsewhere, who mattered.\n\nTanajital, untouched by war, showed no sign of worrying that there was a flight of evil dragons out there somewhere that wanted all its citizens dead. Lamprophyre had to hold court the day after they returned, and the petitioners' problems were all so ordinary she felt a moment of dissociation again.\n\nWhen the last petitioner was gone, Lamprophyre went into the embassy, followed by Rokshan, and sagged gracelessly to the floor. \"I feel we should be doing something,\" she said. \"Something to stop Sardonyx. Not listening to people complaining that Bromargyrite took the corner off their roof by accident.\"\n\n\"Sardonyx is still in northern Sachetan, according to the seers.\" Rokshan sat on his bed and clasped his hands loosely together. \"And there haven't been any new prophecies warning of destruction. There's nothing to do but wait. And meet with Hyaloclast this evening.\"\n\n\"I'm excited to see the progress the flight has made in making human friends. I'll feel so much happier when it's more than just the six of us armed to destroy Sardonyx's people.\"\n\n\"Don't be too excited. You know the dragons aren't used to humans. It will take time.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Lamprophyre blew a smoke ring and watched it drift upward and dissipate. \"It's still exciting. Humans and dragons together again, only this time we'll beat her.\"\n\n\"I admit that's a wonderful thought.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked up at the sound of footsteps crossing the courtyard. \"Kamil!\" she exclaimed. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"Not to my knowledge,\" Kamil said. He wore a canvas knapsack over one shoulder, a heavy one by the way he moved. His lips twitched as if he were trying to control a smile that desperately wanted to be set free. \"I wanted to show you something.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. His thoughts were full of excitement and pleasure, centered on\u2014 \"The sodalite artifact,\" she said. \"You did it.\"\n\nKamil scowled, but his eyes were alight with amusement. \"You know listening to thoughts is rude, right? But yes, I figured it out.\" He set the knapsack down with a thump and unbuckled it. Rokshan stood looking over his shoulder as he scrabbled through the knapsack's contents, stone by the sound and smell, and removed something that reeked of sodalite, a rich, milky aroma tinged with the sharp scent of pine.\n\nLamprophyre drew in a startled breath. \"It's beautiful,\" she said. Sodalite was one of her favorite stones to eat, but she wouldn't dream of eating this. It was a pile of rings, one large, the others smaller, linked by slender gold chains to a central disk. The rings and disc were carved all over in elaborate, asymmetrical patterns filled with gold that highlighted beautifully the white striations covering the blue stone.\n\nKamil picked up the artifact and began threading rings over his fingers and wrist. \"The disc is the active part,\" he said, raising his hand to display how the disc fit into his palm. \"The rings allow it to draw power from the adept to activate the artifact.\"\n\n\"That sounds dangerous,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Not really. I suppose if you used it for hours at a time, it might make you sick, but that's not how it works. It draws power once and then feeds it back into the adept, triggering his awareness of everything around him. Making him capable of remembering even the tiniest detail of something.\"\n\n\"And that will work?\"\n\nKamil shrugged. \"According to that madman's notes, it does. We'll have to use it to find out. It does draw power, and I tested it on myself and it has the right effect.\" He laughed. \"It's incredibly disconcerting when you do it surrounded by people. I saw things I had no desire to be aware of.\"\n\n\"You said an adept,\" Rokshan said. \"Can a non-adept use it?\"\n\n\"Given the right prompting, sure.\" Kamil stripped it off and handed it to Lamprophyre to examine closely. \"Meaning that they'd need to learn the thoughts and motions to activate it. But it's like you said the serpentine artifact is\u2014it's no harder to use than\u2026than learning to guide a horse.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" Lamprophyre said. She handed the artifact to Rokshan. \"We're so close.\"\n\n\"I want to try now,\" Rokshan said.\n\nLamprophyre gasped. \"You promised you wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I did not. I never promised anything.\"\n\n\"But they still need you. As a human.\"\n\n\"There's nothing I can do as a human I can't also do as a dragon.\" Rokshan balled the artifact in his fist. \"Except be your mate. I'm tired of waiting.\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't like the look in his eyes. \"I know. But you know our needs aren't as important as fighting Sardonyx. Please, Rokshan. You think I don't want this as much as you do? But\u2014if you're transformed, that's one fewer rider. One fewer weapon.\"\n\nHis eyes narrowed. \"That's low.\"\n\n\"It's truth.\" She laid her hand gently on his shoulder. \"We can wait a little longer.\"\n\nRokshan looked away, his jaw clenched. \"All right,\" he said. \"A little while.\" He hung the artifact on a peg above his bed. \"A very little while.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She turned to Kamil. \"And thank you. What do we owe you?\"\n\n\"I didn't do it to be paid,\" Kamil said. \"Transforming a prince into a dragon, that's the stuff of legends. And Bromargyrite is right that I always wanted to be a hero out of an epic poem.\"\n\n\"But this must have cost so much!\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I can afford it. My gift to the two of you.\"\n\n\"Then we really are grateful.\" She sniffed the artifact again. \"Now I'm hungry.\"\n\nRokshan and Kamil both laughed. \"Eating in the middle of the day, how decadent,\" Rokshan said, and it relieved her mind that he could still joke.\n\nThat evening, she and Rokshan left the city for the fields the flight had taken over. In all her life, Lamprophyre had never seen the flight assembled like this. At home in the mountains, even on sunny days some people preferred the comfort of a cave, so the flight was never wholly visible. Now, dragons sat or lay everywhere, turning the fields into a multicolored blanket like some humans put on their beds. And this wasn't even the full flight, Lamprophyre reflected, thinking of the dragons back home watching over the dragonets.\n\nShe found Hyaloclast eating at the top of a low rise that gave her an excellent view of every dragon. \"Have you eaten?\" the dragon queen asked. \"Join me.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Lamprophyre helped herself to some of the cow. Rokshan declined politely. He'd eaten with Dharan earlier, though he came back from supper unusually quiet and wouldn't tell Lamprophyre what he and Dharan had talked about.\n\n\"I don't have good news,\" Hyaloclast said. \"I'm afraid it will take much longer than we hoped to build new human-dragon partnerships.\"\n\nLamprophyre paused in her eating. \"But I know the humans aren't afraid of dragons. We only accepted volunteers who aren't afraid of dragons or heights.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid the trouble is our dragons. Most of them don't see humans as anything but amusing novelties\u2014certainly not as equals. And many of them have trouble blocking human thoughts when they're in close contact. Massicot is the only one truly suited to accepting a human companion, and he's mentally deaf, unable to blind-fly as you said is essential.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I could be wrong.\" Lamprophyre looked at Rokshan, who shook his head. \"All right, I'm not wrong. Massicot unable to sense the rest of us would be a liability.\" She blew out a deep, frustrated breath. \"So it will take time.\"\n\n\"And we may not have time,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Sardonyx remains in Sachetan, and the adepts tell me she has destroyed a few more villages, but her movements worry me. They are the movements of someone waiting for her moment.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Rokshan said. \"I've told Sajan we need to prepare for her next attack as if we six are the only ones of our kind. And we have enough pyrite weapons\u2026no. It will take time to teach the dragons to use the pyrite weapons themselves. We can't count on having that time any more than we can on having human riders.\"\n\n\"Even so, we shouldn't give up the hope of both those things,\" Lamprophyre said. The thought of her clutch being the only ones effective against all those dragons made her feel sick and afraid.\n\nHyaloclast eyed her as if she'd heard those thoughts. \"We will not,\" she said. \"And you should not fear. We will face Sardonyx as one.\"\n\n\"I wish we didn't have to face her at all,\" Lamprophyre said, bitterly remembering what Coquina had said about Sardonyx's arrogance.\n\n\"I hate to say it, because it sounds so defeatist, but it will all be over soon, one way or the other,\" Rokshan said. \"But I don't think it's hopeless. And then\u2014\" He looked at Lamprophyre, and smiled.\n\n\"You are more hopeful than before,\" Hyaloclast said. \"You have a solution?\"\n\n\"I can be transformed as soon as they no longer need me as a military commander,\" Rokshan said.\n\nHyaloclast smiled, a sideways, ironic smile. \"I find myself hoping for that day, young prince,\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre, stunned, couldn't think of anything to say to that. \"We should return,\" she finally managed. \"Rokshan needs to meet with General Sajan.\"\n\nHyaloclast saluted them with a nod and went back to eating.\n\nIn the air, Rokshan said, \"Am I right that I finally have your mother's approval?\"\n\n\"I wonder if she's mellowed now that she and Leucite are almost pair-bonded. Or maybe she's less dismissive of humans in general.\" Lamprophyre sighed. \"Now I'm having trouble not planning too far into the future, and daydreaming about you being transformed into that beautiful form.\"\n\n\"Is it that beautiful? To dragon eyes, I mean?\"\n\n\"You know how Flint is handsome? That sculpture makes him look positively homely.\"\n\nRokshan laughed. \"I suppose that gratifies my vanity.\" He leaned out to look over her shoulder as they flew over the brightly-lit embassy courtyard. \"Wait. You have a visitor.\"\n\nLamprophyre banked and curved back around. \"It's a little late for that, don't you think?\" But he was right. The visitor, if that's who it was, was invisible inside a plain litter with brown curtains. Lamprophyre examined the bearers as she descended, but they weren't dressed in any particular uniform or colors. Whoever this was, she or he had worked hard for anonymity.\n\nThe person also knew enough about dragons not to wait in the center of the courtyard. The bearers had set the litter near the entrance to the embassy, leaving plenty of room for Lamprophyre to land. They didn't react at all to her arrival, even though the wind her wings made stirred their short hair. Lamprophyre crouched for Rokshan to jump down, then approached the litter cautiously. It wasn't as if any human could hurt her, but the whole situation was so strange she felt wary, as if whoever this was brought danger with them.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" she asked, leaning down to put her head level with the litter.\n\nThe curtain moved. \"I hope I can help you,\" the Archprelate said.\n\nStartled, Lamprophyre moved back to let the woman climb out of the litter. \"Most Holy One,\" she said. \"Um, is there a polite way to ask what you're doing here?\"\n\nThe Archprelate laughed. Her voice, and her laugh, were the sweet peal of tinkling bells, a sound that put Lamprophyre more at ease. \"I take it as a given that dragons always intend politeness. May I enter your embassy?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Lamprophyre stepped back farther so the Archprelate could precede her into the embassy. Rokshan followed, his expression bland, which told Lamprophyre her mate was suppressing his curiosity. She felt full to bursting of questions herself.\n\nOnce inside, the Archprelate lowered the scarf covering her hair, which was cut unusually short for a woman and tousled from the fabric. Lamprophyre knew she was older than Rokshan by about ten years, which still made her very young to be the spiritual leader of a nation. Her bright eyes surveyed the room, taking in the piles of books, the scribbled-on slates, and Rokshan's bed. \"I heard a rumor,\" she said absently, her mind clearly elsewhere. \"By what I see here\u2026well, I'm sure not all of it is true, but now I wonder.\"\n\n\"What rumor?\" Lamprophyre asked, though she already knew.\n\nThe Archprelate's eyes came to rest on Rokshan. \"That you, your highness, fell in love with a dragon, against reason, against nature.\"\n\n\"You're right, that's not entirely true,\" Rokshan said. \"I fell in love with the human woman Lamprophyre was transformed into. My feelings haven't changed even though she's a dragon again.\"\n\n\"That seems reasonable,\" the Archprelate said. Once again she scanned the room. \"Isn't that what we expect of two people who marry, who swear vows of fidelity to each other? People change over the years, and our hope is that our love does not\u2014or, possibly that it grows to encompass those changes.\"\n\nLamprophyre gaped. \"That's so sensible.\"\n\nThe Archprelate laughed again. \"Surprised to hear sense from an ecclesiast?\"\n\n\"No. I just wish everyone understood the way you do.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry they don't. It can't be easy, loving someone not of your species. What do you intend to do?\"\n\n\"I will become a dragon,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"Daring,\" the Archprelate said. \"I wish you luck.\" She drew in a deep breath and released it in a long, slow hiss. \"But that's not why I'm here.\"\n\n\"You said you wanted to help me,\" Lamprophyre said. \"In what way?\"\n\n\"The only way I feel capable of in these troubled days,\" the Archprelate said. \"I have been possessed of a prophecy, and when it was recounted to me, I knew at once it was intended for you.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat heavily, staring at the woman. \"I didn't understand the last one,\" she said. \"I don't mean to be rude, but\u2014you know what I saw on Mother Stone. Whatever Jiwanyil is, he's not a god. And I don't trust him.\"\n\n\"I know what you told us. And the conclusions you drew.\" The Archprelate fingered her scarf, twisting its soft fabric around her fingers. \"Let me ask you a question, ambassador. If, let us say, Hyaloclast\u2026if Hyaloclast, after a lifetime of advice and guidance you knew to be good, suddenly told you something you believed not only false, but harmful, what would be your reaction?\"\n\n\"You know the answer. I would want to know more.\"\n\n\"Yes. You wouldn't reject that lifetime's experience based on a single bad moment. Ambassador, I have been an ecclesiast for over twenty years\u2014a blink of the eye to you, but more than a quarter of a human life. Before that, I was a faithful worshipper of Jiwanyil from my childhood. I have been possessed of many prophecies, many of which I was privileged to see come to pass. And last year I stood with my brothers and sisters and saw Jiwanyil's light fall on me, naming me Archprelate.\"\n\nLamprophyre said, mulishly, \"That's all very well, but Jiwanyil made me his tool in freeing Sardonyx. And I have very few experiences like yours.\"\n\n\"As I have no reason to trust Hyaloclast. But you've asked the humans of Gonjiri to put their lives more or less in her hands, hers and those of your dragons.\" The Archprelate gripped her scarf more tightly. \"I'm here to ask you to put your trust in me, and in this prophecy.\"\n\nLamprophyre glanced at Rokshan. His expression was blank again. She listened to his thoughts and heard only so strange, why and a sense of confusion. Rokshan was a faithful worshipper of Jiwanyil, too, and had been more shaken by Jiwanyil's actions than she. She felt an unexpected flash of anger on Rokshan's behalf. If Jiwanyil was God, why didn't he care about the people who worshipped him?\n\n\"Tell me your prophecy,\" she said. \"I promise to listen. I don't promise anything else.\"\n\n\"That's enough for me.\" The Archprelate let go of her scarf, which was now terribly wrinkled. \"These are the words Jiwanyil wants you to hear: The voice in darkness summons you. Born of wind and fire and stone, to breath and ash and stone return. They await who bound the banded desert.\" Her voice shook. \"Your death is in the stone.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt numb. She realized she was sitting and that Rokshan was saying her name. \"How did he know?\" she whispered. \"The death-song. How did he know it?\"\n\n\"Take a breath,\" Rokshan said. \"It doesn't have to mean anything.\"\n\nShe shot Rokshan a stricken look. \"You know it does,\" she said. She stood heavily and towered over the Archprelate. \"What does it mean?\"\n\nThe Archprelate didn't flinch. \"I have no idea. The prophecy wasn't meant for me. But 'voice in darkness,' that, I have heard before. In another prophecy I was possessed of, years ago. I never learned the meaning.\"\n\nLamprophyre cast her mind back to the research Dharan had done at the Hall of Visions, months back. \"I remember. Shevaan. It was your name on that prophecy.\" She couldn't keep her voice from shaking. \"But the voice in darkness\u2026it's Sardonyx.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "\"That doesn't make any sense,\" Rokshan said. He gripped her hand tightly. \"Why would Sardonyx summon you?\"\n\n\"You already understand more of the prophecy than any of the ecclesiasts,\" the Archprelate said. \"The only reference we knew was what we were told, that 'banded desert' refers to Sardonyx. But the ones who bound her a millennium ago are dead, so how can they\u2014oh.\" The woman looked unexpectedly flustered.\n\n\"You mean because I'm doomed to die, and they're waiting for me to join them,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I refuse to believe any of this is true. Jiwanyil is trying to demoralize me so I won't fight him and Sardonyx.\"\n\n\"That is not the intent of prophecy,\" the Archprelate said sharply. \"It is not a guide to a future you must passively accept. It is to give you a glimpse of where your current efforts will take you.\"\n\n\"But's that's almost worse! My current efforts are to fight Sardonyx. Is this saying continuing to fight her will end in my death?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" the Archprelate said, her voice rising. \"It might as easily mean aid from an unexpected source. If those who bound Sardonyx are capable of waiting for anything, that suggests to me their power is still out there. Perhaps you should be looking for an unexpected solution.\"\n\n\"But they were all destroyed,\" Rokshan said. \"The mountain swallowed them up\u2014yes, I know that's metaphor, but that doesn't make it false.\"\n\n\"No\u2014wait.\" Lamprophyre hadn't thought about Evart's notes in days. \"Remember how Evart knew Sardonyx was bound somehow? We thought that meant she had an enemy, someone we might be able to enlist. What if this prophecy is a hint about that person?\"\n\nRokshan held her hand tighter. \"What happened to the idea that the prophecy doesn't have to mean anything?\"\n\n\"You don't believe that, do you?\"\n\nHis mouth made a tight, straight line. \"If I believe it,\" he said, \"I have to believe your death is a possibility.\"\n\n\"I know. But\u2014\" Lamprophyre closed her eyes briefly. \"Rokshan, all our deaths are a possibility. I'd rather look for a more optimistic meaning. Because I hardly need a prophecy to know I'm in danger. We all are.\"\n\nRokshan sighed and released her. \"Is there anything else you can tell us?\" he asked the Archprelate.\n\n\"I wish I could. I can only offer my opinion that Jiwanyil does, despite appearances, want us to survive. I believe, if he orchestrated Sardonyx's freedom, it was for a reason we will eventually understand and appreciate.\" She hesitated, then extended her hand to Lamprophyre. \"I have instructed the ecclesiasts to meditate and ponder on this prophecy. If we learn anything, we will tell you immediately.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Lamprophyre said. The Archprelate's small hand was cool and firm. \"For everything. I'm still not convinced Jiwanyil means us well, but I'm willing to consider his words and look deeper.\"\n\n\"That's really all God ever asks of us,\" the Archprelate said. She raised the scarf to cover her head. \"And, Prince Rokshan? By everything I've heard, your faith has been a light and a shield to you your whole life. It seems Jiwanyil has chosen to test your faith. I hope you will hold fast to what you know as you reach for what is just beyond your grasp.\"\n\n\"I'm no longer sure what I know,\" Rokshan said, bowing, \"but I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\nThe Archprelate nodded. She climbed into her litter, and the four muscular men lifted it and carried it away with no direction from her. Lamprophyre watched her go. \"I'm not sure what I know, either,\" she said. \"Why would Jiwanyil give me such a warning?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew,\" Rokshan said. \"How seriously do you want to take it?\"\n\nLamprophyre shook her head. A moth flew drunkenly into the lantern flame and sizzled briefly before hitting the ground. \"If I understood it at all\u2014as it is, taking it seriously would mean looking for my doom in every shadow. And yet all those prophecies warning of dangers to cities have been accurate. Whatever Jiwanyil is, he can see the future.\"\n\n\"Can see the future, and seems interested in protecting humans after setting their destruction loose on the world,\" Rokshan said. Then he went very still. \"I wonder\u2026\"\n\n\"Wonder what?\"\n\n\"We said Sardonyx had a powerful enemy. Suppose it's Jiwanyil?\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"Jiwanyil wanted her freed, not captive.\"\n\n\"But he, or his voice, or something, was present in the cave. And\u2014what did he say about Sardonyx? Did he specifically say he wanted her freed?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought back over Jiwanyil's words. \"He didn't. He talked about the old contract being fulfilled, and that humans and dragons should fight her together, and that Mother Stone wasn't a god.\"\n\n\"You see? There's nothing to indicate Jiwanyil was helping Sardonyx.\" Rokshan paced swiftly in front of her. \"And he must be powerful to give all those prophecies.\"\n\nAnother moth blundered into the same lantern. Its body sent up a faint odor of scorched hair. Lamprophyre watched it fall, distracted by its death. \"But there isn't anything to indicate he was keeping her trapped, either,\" she said, \"and, again, if he was keeping her captive, why put the effort into having a human free her? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying it's not a theory I'm ready to base my hopes on.\"\n\n\"Then let's go back to the cave. If Jiwanyil is still there, he might answer our questions.\" Rokshan hurried into the embassy and retrieved the harness from where it lay coiled in a corner.\n\n\"But the light disappeared. He couldn't still be there.\"\n\n\"He certainly isn't inside me. We would have noticed that. It's worth a quick trip. If he really is gone, we're not any worse off than we were before. And if he's there\u2026\"\n\nLamprophyre took a step back when he approached her, offering the harness. \"We can't go now. It's the middle of the night almost. And we definitely can't take off for Mother Stone when we don't know what Sardonyx intends. If we're gone when she attacks\u2014Rokshan, see sense.\"\n\nRokshan lowered his hand and let the harness drag on the floor. \"You're right. It's just if it's true that Jiwanyil is Sardonyx's enemy, his power could make a difference.\"\n\n\"If he's willing to use it on our behalf. He wasn't exactly forthcoming the last time we encountered him.\" Lamprophyre put her hand on Rokshan's shoulder. \"We can go in the morning, with Hyaloclast knowing what we intend so she can summon us back if the worst happens.\"\n\n\"With the way my life is going, Sardonyx will attack when we're almost to Mother Stone but not far enough to have reached Jiwanyil,\" Rokshan muttered.\n\n\"I'm sure that won't happen.\" Lamprophyre prodded one of the dead moths with her toe. They were such fragile creatures, and yet they were drawn to their destruction. She wished those words didn't so accurately describe humans as well. \"Do you need to speak to General Sajan?\"\n\nRokshan fished a chalcedony pendant out of his shirt. \"I do, but this will suffice. Probably better than suffice, because he can't find more work for me if I'm not standing in front of him.\"\n\n\"All right. I'm going to sleep. We'll want an early start if we're to make this a quick trip.\" Lamprophyre squeezed Rokshan's hand gently and went into the dark embassy to settle herself for sleep. Distantly, she heard Rokshan talking to the general, but she covered herself with her wings and ignored their conversation.\n\nShe slept fitfully, waking just enough to snap out of her dreams, falling into a new dream every time she slept again. Some of them shredded to nothing when she woke. Others were strange mixtures of real events and fantasy, like the one in which she and her clutch fought flying cows the colors of dragons that breathed meat-scented clouds of acid that burned her skin. In another dream, she was arguing with Jiwanyil about something Porphyry had done, something Jiwanyil insisted Porphyry had to pay for with his life. That one, she woke from with an aching head and throat, wishing she could cry.\n\nFinally, she clawed her way out of a dream in which she was once more human and she and Rokshan were naked together, kissing and touching until she couldn't bear it any longer and made herself wake. Rokshan snored quietly nearby. The sky outside was overcast, but she could see the outline of her fingers and concluded dawn was near. She lay, breathing slowly to dispel the last vestiges of the wonderfully detailed dream, until she was calm enough to wake Rokshan.\n\nHe sat up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes as he always did, and focused on her. \"You were serious about an early start, weren't you?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to sleep any longer. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that no matter who Jiwanyil is, he has knowledge we can use.\" She tried smoothing Rokshan's hair and just made it messier.\n\n\"All right. But we should eat. It's a long flight.\"\n\nLamprophyre grumbled, but hurried to buy a cow while Rokshan dressed. She returned to find Depik talking to Rokshan in the courtyard. \"You shouldn't have to do that, my lady, it's my job,\" Depik protested.\n\n\"I hoped we wouldn't disturb you. We're in a hurry this morning.\" Lamprophyre took the cow carcass to the kitchen and roasted it herself, careful not to leave any uncooked pieces. She carved off some meat for Rokshan and set to feeding herself.\n\n\"Is it another attack?\" Depik asked. He sounded curious rather than fearful, but from his thoughts Lamprophyre knew he wasn't overconfident or stupid; he had faith that she would defend his family against any threat.\n\n\"We're going to see about a new way to fight,\" Rokshan said. Lamprophyre figured that was as accurate an explanation as anything.\n\n\"I hope you'll take care, then, my lady.\" Depik handed her a napkin without further comment. She wiped her mouth and hands. Trust Depik to be concerned about her manners even in the pre-dawn hours when there was no one around to see.\n\nIn the courtyard, she crouched for Rokshan, well bundled in his cold-weather gear, to climb into the saddle. \"We shouldn't be gone long,\" she said, and hoped she hadn't just lied to Depik.\n\n\"Good luck, my lady,\" Depik said, waving, and they were off.\n\nThe dragons in the field still slept, but Hyaloclast stirred and sat up when Lamprophyre landed beside her. \"Is something wrong?\" she asked.\n\n\"Rokshan and I have an idea,\" Lamprophyre said. \"We're going to Mother Stone to speak to Jiwanyil.\"\n\nHyaloclast stretched her arms and then her wings. \"What would be the point of that?\"\n\nLamprophyre laid out the essence of what she and Rokshan had discussed. \"At the very least, we could learn something about Sardonyx's weaknesses. And if we're right, Jiwanyil, whatever he is, could be a powerful ally.\"\n\n\"If Sardonyx attacks while you're away, we will be at a disadvantage.\" Hyaloclast looked at Rokshan, who looked uncomfortable in his heavy coat despite the coolness of the morning. \"This is a terrible risk for no guaranteed benefit.\"\n\n\"Jiwanyil gave Lamprophyre a prophecy last night,\" Rokshan said. \"He quoted some of the death-song of the dragons. If Jiwanyil knows that, imagine what else he might be able to tell us.\"\n\n\"You still have faith in your God?\"\n\n\"I don't know what I believe anymore,\" Rokshan said, \"but I intend to ask Jiwanyil for answers.\"\n\nHyaloclast nodded once. \"I will tell you if Sardonyx attacks,\" she said, tapping the blue chalcedony pendant. \"Be prepared to return immediately.\"\n\n\"I will,\" Lamprophyre said. She pushed off with her powerful legs and soon was in the air, high above the patchwork blanket of dragons. She saw Hyaloclast lift one hand in farewell before she left them all behind.\n\n\"I hope this isn't a mistake,\" she said after a few dozen beats. \"I mean, I know the risk we're taking, and I believe it's acceptable, but there's a part of me that feels only that I'm leaving my clutch to fight alone.\"\n\n\"We're not so indispensable that they're helpless without us,\" Rokshan said. \"And the other dragons aren't helpless either. I spoke with Leucite two days ago, when we were preparing the dragons to meet potential riders, and he said they've developed new tactics. Each clutch works together to target an enemy dragon, and then they take turns distracting it and attacking it. It's far more effective than individuals trying to take on the enemy alone.\"\n\n\"That does sound like smart tactics.\"\n\n\"My point is that we shouldn't think of ourselves as key to the battle. There are many dragons intent on defeating Sardonyx, and they won't fall to pieces without us.\"\n\nLamprophyre laughed. \"I know you're right. It's silly of me to think otherwise. I've just been at odds with Sardonyx for so long, the two of us in opposition, I'm used to facing her alone.\"\n\nRokshan patted her neck with his gloved hand. \"You aren't alone any longer.\"\n\n\"I do still wonder why she singled me out. Aside from bringing humans and dragons together, I don't know that I've done anything special to hurt her. It's not like I developed the pyrite weapons, or the harness that lets humans go into battle with dragons, or the shield.\"\n\n\"Bringing humans and dragons together was plenty,\" Rokshan said. \"Imagine if you hadn't spoken on my behalf to Hyaloclast when I approached her for an alliance. Or if you hadn't accepted the position of ambassador. There's no reason to think Jiwanyil wouldn't still have wanted Sardonyx freed, and then humans would all be destroyed and dragons would be subjugated.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" Lamprophyre flew higher to take advantage of an updraft. \"I guess I'm just saying, why not single out you, or General Sajan, or the Fanishkorites who developed the shield?\"\n\n\"I don't know, and I'm grateful she didn't,\" Rokshan said.\n\nThe rising sun burned off the lowlying mist, and the day was clear and cloudless all the way to the distant mountains. Lamprophyre flew high enough that the ground beneath was a featureless gray-green mass, wrinkled where it met the Green River. The other rivers shone blue-gray beneath the pale blue sky. Despite her ongoing tension over the possibility of Sardonyx attacking while she was away, Lamprophyre couldn't help appreciating the beauty of her surroundings. Flying was the most marvelous thing in the world.\n\nAhead, the gray line that was the mountains grew and solidified until it seemed more real than the landscape surrounding it. Lamprophyre climbed higher. They didn't have time to take the ascent of Mother Stone as slowly as was safest, so she gradually gained altitude until she'd passed the foothills and lower slopes and was skimming well above the peaks where the dragons lived.\n\nAt least one storm had come through the Handmaidens since she and Rokshan had been there last, and the tall, forbidding mountains were nearly pure white with packed snow. Lamprophyre began the long, curving ascent to the cave on Mother Stone, hoping she could still find it despite the alteration the snow had made to the landscape. She counted off beats, comparing her flight to the previous one.\n\nBut it turned out not to matter. The black patch marking the cave mouth and the ledge in front of it were as clear of snow as if a dragon had heated the stone to melt it. Lamprophyre alit on the ledge and examined the cavern warily. \"I think we should fly,\" she said. \"If we have to leave in a hurry\u2014\"\n\n\"Why? You don't think there's anything dangerous left here?\" Rokshan had walked a few paces toward the entrance, and now he stopped and turned to face her.\n\n\"I was thinking more of if Hyaloclast summons us, but now I'm thinking about whether Jiwanyil has more powers than just the ability to speak cryptic prophecies.\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. \"I doubt it, but I think you're right we should be prepared to move quickly. Besides, the terrain isn't easy for me to cross.\" He climbed back up, turned on his light cylinder, and Lamprophyre glided gently into the narrow passage.\n\nShe'd known before it was a tight fit for someone flying, but it wasn't as tight as she remembered, not now that she wasn't in a terrified rush. Even so, she winced every time she brushed the wall with the tip of her wing. She was relieved when the passage widened. Below, the jagged floor shone with its coating of ice, and soon ice crept over the walls and ceiling until every draft was damp and frigid.\n\nThe downhill slant of the passage was more noticeable now that she was flying instead of clambering over the irregular floor. She estimated they descended more than two dragonlengths before they reached the bowl-shaped chamber. It looked so different now. Huge jagged chunks and slabs of ice covered the floor, which was milky and rough from hundreds of impacts fracturing its coat of ice. The light from the chimney was almost gone now that the chimney walls weren't frozen and reflective. Lamprophyre was grateful for Rokshan's light.\n\nThe walls had shattered, revealing dozens of cubbies sized to fit a full-grown dragon. The matte-black granite of their walls absorbed the light and reflected nothing back. Looking into one of the cubbies, Lamprophyre felt momentarily confused, as if she were looking into the black eye of some creature the size of the mountain. She touched the stone, and the illusion vanished. The room still smelled faintly bitter, too faintly when one considered there was almost no air movement to clear the stink away. But then, the dragons who'd been entombed here hadn't been dead.\n\n\"I don't see the light,\" Rokshan said. \"The floor is covered with ice chunks. Do you remember where it was?\"\n\nLamprophyre oriented herself. \"That way,\" she said, pointing, and slowly flapped her way across the cavern, scanning the floor. Rokshan was right; the blocks and thick shards of ice made it impossible to see anything set into the floor.\n\n\"Turn off your light,\" she said. Rokshan gave the cylinder a half-twist, and darkness descended over the cavern. A thin gray light showed where the chimney began, growing brighter as Lamprophyre's eyes adjusted to the dimness. And there, half a dragonlength away, was a greenish-white glow illuminating a pile of ice chunks.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Rokshan said when Lamprophyre didn't move.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"The last time, Jiwanyil spoke through you. What if that's the only way he has to communicate?\"\n\n\"Then he speaks through me. You know what questions to ask, so what's the problem?\"\n\n\"The problem is I think you're not taking this seriously. We have no idea what he really is. What if his presence is dangerous? What if it kills you, or damages your mind like Sardonyx did Zefira?\"\n\nRokshan slid off and staggered around the littered floor until he could face her. \"No ecclesiast has ever been hurt by a prophecy.\"\n\n\"That's not true. Khadar has seizures when he's possessed of a prophecy, and Bhakriya's daughter Preyanka does too.\"\n\nRokshan waved that away. \"Those are the aftereffects because the human body has to build up resistance to being touched by God. I mean Jiwanyil wants people to benefit from his sight and wisdom, which is why his prophecies don't kill people outright, or what would be the point? If he didn't kill me before, I don't see why he would now.\"\n\nLamprophyre's eyes were acclimated enough now that she could see Rokshan as a vague gray shape surmounted by the lighter oval that was his protective cap. She couldn't see his expression, but she knew him well enough to know when he sounded this reasonable, his mind was made up. \"I don't like it.\"\n\n\"I know. But what was the point of coming here if we weren't going to take this chance?\"\n\nLamprophyre didn't want to admit she hadn't remembered this detail until moments ago. \"You're right. But if you start to foam at the mouth, I'm smashing the ice and hauling you out of here.\"\n\n\"That's fair.\"\n\nThey proceeded on foot, scrambling and crawling over the irregular surface. Lamprophyre occasionally gave Rokshan a hand over the rougher spots. Every time she touched him, she felt less certain that this was a good idea\u2014but Rokshan was right, and this was no time to be a coward.\n\nIt took a few dozen beats to find the spot where the light burned beneath the ice. They had to haul away big broken chunks of ice to clear the floor, but when they were finished, the light burned as clear and green as before. Rokshan lowered himself to kneel beside it. \"The ice is too thick for me to see if this is anything more than a light,\" he said. \"Like, if there's a sculpture or a stone or something the light is coming from.\"\n\n\"Do you feel strange?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's very bright, but that's all.\" He hesitated, then laid his gloved hand spread flat over the light. It cast a funny shadow on his face. \"Still nothing.\"\n\nLamprophyre let out a breath. \"I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.\"\n\n\"Me neither. I guess we were wrong about what this light is. It's not\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped speaking and went rigidly still. Dread struck Lamprophyre, making her as immobile as Rokshan. She swallowed to moisten a throat gone suddenly dry. \"Rokshan?\" she said, her voice sounding as weak as a newborn dragonet's.\n\nSlowly, Rokshan's head rose. His eyes were brilliantly leaf-green from edge to edge. \"You return,\" Jiwanyil said. \"Return, and be made one.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "\"Made one with what?\" Lamprophyre managed through her tight, dry throat.\n\n\"The truth is in the stone,\" Jiwanyil said. \"Ask, be answered, be one.\"\n\nEverything she and Rokshan had discussed, every question she might have asked, deserted her. Seeing Rokshan possessed of Jiwanyil's voice, his face expressionless and as still as death, made her want to snatch him away, and Stones take Jiwanyil. But this was why they'd come. She swallowed again and said, \"Were you the reason Sardonyx was a captive? Are you her enemy?\"\n\n\"Let stone and wind and fire combine, bind those who end their journey here.\" Jiwanyil's voice sounded conversational, as if he'd commented on the weather. It took Lamprophyre a beat to realize he'd quoted the death-song of the dragons.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" she said. \"Just\u2014let me think.\" Stone and wind and fire\u2014those were the elements a dragon was made of, in a poetical sense. Let those things combine and bind them, but how? Something to do with the fact that dragons died on Mother Stone, or had until recently. \"Dragons,\" she said slowly. \"Dragons had something to do with Sardonyx's captivity.\"\n\n\"Bind the old stone,\" Jiwanyil said.\n\n\"But where do you come in, if it was dragons doing it?\" Lamprophyre felt as if she were feeling her way blind along an icy ledge, her wings pinned, her feet slipping and threatening to drop her over the side to fall to her death. Everything she had was a guess, and Jiwanyil's riddles didn't help.\n\n\"To live, to follow,\" Jiwanyil said. \"Call and answer. Bind the old stone.\"\n\nLamprophyre blew out her breath in frustration. Time for a different question. \"Does that mean you helped? You have power over Sardonyx?\"\n\nJiwanyil didn't answer at first. Lamprophyre waited impatiently. Finally, he said, \"The old contract is fulfilled. Release the wind and fire to roam free. Human and dragon together fight to her destruction. The power is in them.\"\n\n\"But we don't have any power except the weapons and our own claws,\" Lamprophyre protested. \"If there's anything you can do\u2014if you're God\u2014we really need that help.\"\n\n\"Ask and answer. Call and return,\" Jiwanyil said.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Lamprophyre said through gritted teeth. \"Why did you want Sardonyx freed? Are you our ally, or not?\"\n\nOnce more Jiwanyil paused, for longer this time. Lamprophyre was about to repeat her question when he said, \"The old contract is fulfilled. The banded desert grows in power. The wind and fire roam free.\"\n\n\"I know that!\" Lamprophyre let out a slow breath, calming herself. Yelling at this creature wouldn't get her anywhere. \"You gave me two prophecies. What do they mean? Am I doomed?\"\n\nRokshan's head moved side to side, so slowly she didn't at first recognize it as a gesture meaning \"no.\" \"Return, and be made one,\" Jiwanyil said. \"They await who bound the wind and fire. Be one.\"\n\n\"You mean the people who fought Sardonyx before the Great Cataclysm.\"\n\n\"Be one,\" Jiwanyil said, his voice louder. A drop of blood welled in Rokshan's nostril and spilled down his upper lip. \"Ask, and answer. Be one.\"\n\nRokshan convulsed. His eyes, still wide open, blazed with green light. Lamprophyre cried out and held him close against the seizure that racked his body. \"Stop!\" she screamed. \"Stop! You're killing him!\"\n\nJiwanyil said nothing. Rokshan's convulsions gradually calmed and then stopped. Lamprophyre eased her hold on him and felt he was still breathing, though heavily, as if he was gasping for air. The green light beneath the ice gradually faded, ebbing like liquid poured down a drain. Eventually, all the light was gone, and they were in near-darkness. \"Rokshan?\" she said, bending over him. \"Rokshan, are you all right?\"\n\nRokshan twitched. She could barely see his eyes open, but they weren't glowing green, and it reassured her. \"Can't\u2026move\u2026\" he whispered. \"Exhausted.\"\n\n\"I'm taking you out of here. It's far too cold,\" Lamprophyre said. Gathering him up gently, she flew away from the cavern, up through the passage until they were past the ice-rimed stones. Then she heated the walls and the floor and sat in the middle of the warm spot with Rokshan in her arms. \"Better?\"\n\nRokshan nodded. He lifted his hand to wipe the blood off his face, moving so slowly he looked like a puppet whose strings were controlled by a very old, arthritic man. \"He spoke?\"\n\n\"He did. I don't know how helpful it was. It certainly wasn't information worth you dying for.\" Lamprophyre recited the conversation for Rokshan, leaving out the thoughts she'd had. \"I don't know what to think,\" she concluded. \"He withdrew his presence when I shouted at him, so I think he has some concern for life, but I don't know that he understands our limitations himself.\"\n\n\"Or he was done speaking, and it's a coincidence,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"That's possible too.\" Lamprophyre blew out a gout of flame at the opposite wall, heating the stones again. \"But I think I'm right. Stones, but I wish I'd known the right questions to ask!\"\n\n\"Why do you think you asked the wrong questions?\"\n\nLamprophyre watched the glowing stones fade to ash-gray. \"I don't know. Maybe if I'd asked the right questions, the answers would have made sense?\"\n\n\"They did make sense, to an extent.\" Rokshan shifted his weight, but made no move to sit up. \"He told you dragons had something to do with Sardonyx's captivity. And we now know there was something, some contract, that released her when she was freed. Which suggests that the people who bound her in the first place never meant it to be permanent.\"\n\nThat hadn't occurred to Lamprophyre. \"Why would they do that?\"\n\n\"I don't know. In human terms, human contracts are sometimes for a limited time. Like a lease on a property, or the temporary use of a resource. The idea is that the owner of the property or resource thinks they can negotiate a better deal at the end of the term. So they benefit during the time of the lease, and then they're free to enter into another contract.\"\n\n\"So how does that apply here? They wanted a chance to bind Sardonyx a second time?\"\n\nRokshan shrugged. This time, he sat up, slowly as if he ached everywhere. \"We don't know enough\u2014don't know anything\u2014about how they bound her in the first place. But I suppose if entombing her and her dragons on Mother Stone was the best they could do\u2014didn't you say they likely would have killed her if they'd been capable? So maybe they left a provision for someone to come along later with a permanent solution. Help me stand, please?\"\n\nLamprophyre put her arm around his waist and steadied him on the uneven floor. \"That seems like a lot of guesswork, especially since they didn't bother leaving instructions for whoever came along later. Like us.\"\n\n\"Yes. I'm not convinced I'm right. But it's a possibility that fits what we do know.\" Rokshan clung to Lamprophyre's arm a beat or two longer, then stood on his own feet, wavering slightly. \"Though it doesn't explain how Jiwanyil comes into it.\"\n\n\"I'm even more convinced he's not God. It was like talking to someone whose mind is fragmented. Like he didn't understand most of my questions and he lacked the words to answer what he did understand.\" Lamprophyre tensed to catch Rokshan if he fell. \"Do you think you can ride? I want out of here. The place is unnerving.\"\n\n\"I think I can hang on. I almost feel myself again. It's funny, but I was thinking the opposite\u2014that the place feels empty and nonthreatening.\" With a few tries, Rokshan climbed into the saddle and fastened the hip straps.\n\n\"Well, Jiwanyil appears to be gone, so you're probably right.\" Lamprophyre pushed off and flapped a few times to propel herself forward and up. The place did feel empty, but that was what unnerved her; there were thousands of dragons buried around the mountain, and she'd expected to feel that somehow. But this cavern hadn't been a final resting place, it had been a prison, and she didn't feel that either. She'd grown up believing she as a dragon had a connection to Mother Stone and to her ancestors, and maybe since Mother Stone wasn't a god, that belief was false all around. The thought made her feel angry and frustrated and sad, all at once.\n\nShe left the cavern behind for the fresh, freezing air and the brilliant sunlight, coasting down from the mountain heights without speaking. Thank the Stones Sardonyx hadn't attacked while they were gone, because Lamprophyre didn't feel they'd learned anything that would have justified their absence when they were needed to fight. In the distance, she heard an avalanche, the only noise aside from the sound of her wings that broke the stillness. It would have been deafening up close, but it was far enough away that it was barely louder than the sound of her stomach rumbling would have been.\n\n\"Well,\" Rokshan said abruptly, \"it was worth trying. And at least you know those prophecies weren't meant to foretell your doom.\"\n\n\"But he said 'be one,'\" Lamprophyre said. \"Be one with what? The ones who bound Sardonyx are dead, so I don't see how I can be one with them and not face my death.\"\n\n\"I wonder if that's not something that will become clear later.\" Rokshan leaned forward to lie along her neck so his voice came clearer to her ear. \"It is a pretty straightforward answer, but it's missing a key element. A lot of prophecies interlock like that, referring to each other, one prophecy giving information about another or a key word that makes another prophecy clear.\"\n\n\"The Archprelate did say the ecclesiasts will continue to try to interpret it.\" Lamprophyre dropped lower to skim the tops of the peaks where the dragons lived. \"I've decided not to worry about it anymore. We took a chance, and either it was pointless, or we need more knowledge. Either way, we've done what we can. We should see if there's any way we can help the dragons make human friends.\"\n\n\"I should probably speak to Sajan,\" Rokshan said. \"But I want to change out of these clothes first. Today looks like it's going to be unusually warm.\"\n\nLamprophyre had been so on edge the whole way to Mother Stone, fearing the chalcedony pendant growing warm and misty with the summons for them to return, she felt as tired as if she'd exerted herself beyond a simple flight. Now, she found herself incapable of fear, filled with resignation over the future. If Sardonyx attacked, all they could do was fly at top speed to meet her, and there wasn't anything she could do to change that. So she flew, not speeding along and not ambling, her mind wandering.\n\nShe caught sight of a cloud, and idly contemplated how much it looked like one of Sardonyx's monstrous dragons, bulky with spiny, ribbed wings, its mouth open to devour its victim. The thought jolted her out of her complacency, and she shivered. Humans could casually look for shapes in clouds because there was no chance they would ever encounter those shapes on their own ground.\n\nUnfortunately, it seemed seeing that one shape triggered something, and soon she couldn't see anything but shapes: a horse's head, a trailing necklace of white beads, another dragon, this one missing a wing. The fear she thought she'd left behind redoubled, and she dropped lower, away from the unsettling clouds. Stones knew what might happen if she flew into one of those shapes. That was ridiculous, they were still just water mist, but her imagination had her in its grip and flying low made her more comfortable.\n\nThey skimmed along, following the Green River, until Tanajital came in sight. The thick clouds that had so unnerved Lamprophyre gradually dissipated until the sky was mostly clear, and Rokshan was right, it was going to be a warm day for early winter. Lamprophyre stretched her wings, enjoying how the sun's rays beat down on them. It was too lovely a day to let fear rule her. She didn't have to become complacent, she didn't have to pretend Sardonyx didn't exist, she just had to set those fears aside until they became reality, at which point she'd face them.\n\nThe embassy courtyard was as quiet as it usually was around noon on days she didn't have to hold court. Lamprophyre crouched for Rokshan to get down, which he did easily, showing no sign of the weakness Jiwanyil had caused. Abhit emerged from the embassy when she arrived, holding a book. \"I forgot to ask if it was all right that I borrow this book,\" he said.\n\n\"You can borrow any of them you like, so long as you don't take them out of the embassy grounds,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And you have to read Dharan's books in the embassy.\"\n\n\"I remember.\" Abhit turned and walked back into the embassy.\n\nRokshan had already shed his coat and gloves and was following Abhit. \"Will you take me to the training grounds after I change?\" he said over his shoulder.\n\n\"Of course. Then we can visit the flight and see if there's been any progress.\" Lamprophyre settled in the center of the courtyard and stretched her wings again, then her tail. The courtyard smelled of dust, dry and warm, and she dug a little of the hard-packed earth up with her useless sixth claw and rubbed the dust into the back of her hand, polishing her scales. Yes, this place was home\u2014maybe not the home of her heart, but it was a place she'd grown to love.\n\n\"Lamprophyre?\" Rokshan's voice sounded strange, tense and worried. \"Did you move the sodalite artifact?\"\n\nLamprophyre sat up. \"I haven't touched it since Kamil brought it. Didn't you hang it on the wall?\"\n\n\"I thought I had.\" Rokshan came to the doorway. Deep worry lines creased his forehead. \"But it's not there. Abhit, have you seen a blue stone artifact? Dark blue rings with gold filling the grooves on their surfaces?\"\n\nLamprophyre walked over to join Rokshan and saw Abhit look up from where he sat next to the pile of books, his thumb keeping his place in the one he was reading. \"I saw it hanging on the wall yesterday,\" he said, \"but I wouldn't touch any of your things, Rokshan.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not there now.\" Rokshan returned to stand beside an empty peg next to the one that held his flying coat, as if the sodalite artifact might magically reappear. \"Abhit, this is important. Are you sure you didn't move it? You or anyone else in the household?\"\n\nAbhit looked grave. \"I said I wouldn't touch anything that's yours, and I promise it's true. But maybe Mama or Depik took it for cleaning?\"\n\nLamprophyre exchanged glances with Rokshan. \"I can't imagine Bhakriya or Depik doing anything like that,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\n\"Let's ask anyway.\" The worry lines had grown deeper. Lamprophyre had started to worry herself.\n\n\"I don't know that I've seen the artifact you mention,\" Depik said when they spoke to him in the kitchen. He was preparing a noon meal for the humans and his attention was on the bread he'd just pulled from the oven.\n\n\"Depik, please, this is important,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's a bunch of rings of different sizes connected to a disc by gold chains. Are you sure you don't recall seeing it?\"\n\nDepik set the bread on the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. \"No, I really don't, my lady. I'm sorry. It sounds like it might be expensive. Does it do anything special?\"\n\n\"It's irreplaceable,\" Rokshan said. \"Bhakriya, did you clean the embassy today? Did you see a blue stone artifact hanging on the wall?\"\n\n\"I saw it yesterday,\" Bhakriya said. She held a bucket of water she'd filled from the barrel and now stood holding it as if she'd forgotten it was there in the effort of remembering. \"That was about this time of day, actually. I tidied the books and made your bed, your highness, and I remember the artifact because I brushed against it and the rings made a pretty sound when they clinked against each other. But it wasn't there a few hours ago when I did the cleaning. I thought you or my lady had taken it.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Rokshan again. Her stomach felt sick, as if she were falling and falling and the ground was coming up fast. Rokshan's face had gone completely impassive. \"It can't be gone,\" she said. \"It just can't.\"\n\nBhakriya turned and called out Rassika's name. Soon the girl came around the back of the dining pavilion. \"Did you move my lady's artifact? The blue stone one on the wall?\" Bhakriya asked.\n\nRassika's eyes narrowed. \"I never touch my lady's things, not without she says I can,\" she said. Then she blushed. \"That ain't true for all,\" she admitted. \"I touched it to feel the gold streaks, but I di'nt pick it up or nothing. Just put a finger on it. It di'nt fall off the peg either, so I di'nt have to lift it. Was that wrong? I di'nt think there was nothing wrong with just a touch.\"\n\n\"No, that's fine,\" Lamprophyre said hastily, seeing that Rassika was becoming distressed. \"When was the last time you saw it?\"\n\nRassika stood stiffly. \"I was in the embassy putting a book back before supper yesterday,\" she said, \"and that's when I touched it. But I swear I never moved it. I swear.\"\n\nBhakriya put her arm around the girl's thin shoulders. \"We believe you,\" she said. \"My lady just needs to find it, and anything you know about it can help.\"\n\n\"So it was in the embassy at yesterday's suppertime,\" Lamprophyre said, and stopped, struck mute. \"Stones,\" she whispered. \"We weren't here then. And there are so many beggars, and only the four of you humans to keep an eye on the place\u2026\"\n\nBhakriya looked horrified. \"You think someone stole from the embassy, my lady? I can't believe anyone would dare! And\u2014but we can't watch everywhere at once, and Depik's always in the kitchen, and I've got to serve from the cook pot. Oh, my lady, if we let it happen\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's not go assigning blame just yet,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I know how busy things are at suppertime. It would be easy for someone to sneak into the embassy even if Rokshan and I were here, because we're always inside the dining pavilion, and that doesn't give a full view of the courtyard.\"\n\n\"But who would dare steal from a dragon?\" Rokshan said.\n\nBhakriya absently picked up Kavari, who'd clung to her legs, her mouth open with astonishment as if she could tell things were serious. \"Somebody must have seen something. We just have to ask the regulars tonight.\"\n\n\"Somebody bad?\" Kavari said.\n\n\"Yes, sweetheart, somebody bad took the pretty blue stones,\" Bhakriya said.\n\n\"It was the mean lady,\" Kavari said.\n\nEveryone stared at her. Kavari ducked her head at the intensity of their regard. \"The mean lady,\" she repeated.\n\n\"Kavari, what do you mean?\" Lamprophyre asked.\n\n\"She came into the hall. I was looking at pictures and I saw her,\" Kavari said. \"She took the blue rings off the wall and put them in her pouch. I went to see if she would let me look and she pushed me down. But I didn't cry even though it hurt,\" she said proudly.\n\n\"Kavari, this is important,\" Rokshan said, gently taking her small hand in his. \"Can you tell us what she looked like?\"\n\nKavari ducked her head again. \"She was big,\" she said. \"She had very long hair she kept pushing out of her face. And her chests were round and big, too.\"\n\nRokshan's eyes blazed. \"Viveki,\" he said.\n\n\"But Viveki is short,\" Lamprophyre said.\n\nRokshan gestured dismissively. \"Kavari is four. Everyone is big to her. Kavari, did the mean lady say anything?\"\n\nKavari nodded. \"She said I was a brat and to get out of her way. And that the stupid prince owed her.\"\n\n\"Definitely Viveki,\" Lamprophyre said. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"We hunt her down and retrieve our property,\" Rokshan said. \"I know where she lives. And then I will have her taken in charge and sent to prison for at least three lifetimes.\"\n\n\"I completely agree,\" Lamprophyre said. She returned to the courtyard and crouched for Rokshan to climb up. \"Should we go to the guards first? Report the theft?\"\n\nRokshan muttered something under his breath. \"You're right,\" he said when Lamprophyre asked him to repeat himself. \"We could go wrest the artifact from her greedy little hands immediately, but if we want her sent to prison, we have to do this the right way. To the guard headquarters, then, and hope Viveki didn't destroy the artifact and sell its pieces.\"\n\nLamprophyre crouched, preparing to take flight. \"Lamprophyre!\" Hyaloclast shouted.\n\nStumbling, Lamprophyre grabbed the pendant. \"Yes? Is it\u2014\"\n\n\"Gather your clutch and follow the Green River south,\" Hyaloclast said. \"The seer artifacts saw Sardonyx moving north just beats ago. Her whole flight. They passed Prabat without attacking. Their goal is almost certainly Tanajital.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Time slowed to a crawl. It took forever to find her clutchmates and forever to track down their human riders. Every beat that passed seemed to last a lifetime. It was strange, Lamprophyre reflected, because her sense of Sardonyx approaching was, contrariwise, sped up, as if at any moment Lamprophyre might look south and see a mass of colors surging toward Tanajital.\n\nFinally, finally, the six dragons and their friends were in the air and flying southward. Lamprophyre brought up the rear. She tried not to think of it as hiding behind the others. She had no fear of meeting Sardonyx, but after her unsettling encounter with Jiwanyil, she wanted her clutchmates where she could see them.\n\nShe listened to their surface thoughts and heard variations on the same thing: ready to fight, stop her, no way around it. No fear, no reluctance. She hoped her own reservations weren't audible. She couldn't stop going over Jiwanyil's words in memory, trying to make sense of them. Finally, she gave up. She was just exhausting herself to no purpose. Jiwanyil was no help, and that meant Sardonyx's defeat was up to the flight.\n\nThe blue chalcedony pendant on her breast warmed. \"Lamprophyre, where are you?\"\n\nShe gripped the pendant. \"South of Tanajital about seven hundred beats. You're ahead of us?\"\n\n\"We left the city two thousand beats ago. We have not seen Sardonyx yet.\"\n\n\"We're hurrying as fast as we can.\"\n\n\"Don't exhaust yourself. We all need to be in a condition to fight.\" Hyaloclast sounded as calm as ever. \"And don't take on more than your share of this burden. We are prepared to take Sardonyx on ourselves.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She couldn't think of anything else to say. \"Good luck.\"\n\n\"And to you.\" The pendant stilled and went cool.\n\n\"She's right,\" Rokshan said. \"We shouldn't exhaust ourselves. It's going to be a hard fight.\"\n\n\"I know, but if the flight meets Sardonyx before we arrive, all I can imagine is\u2014\" She shut her mouth before she could say the word dying. \"No. I won't. We'll win, I know we will.\"\n\n\"We will,\" Rokshan said.\n\n\"That's far too optimistic for you. Are you humoring me?\"\n\n\"Is it helping?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought about it. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then you're welcome.\"\n\nThe humorous tone of his voice drew a laugh from her. \"All right. Thank you.\" Her heart didn't exactly feel light, but the burden of fear had lifted.\n\nNow she caught the updrafts and soared, easing the burden on her wings, and watched her clutchmates do the same. Focusing on flying, on taking the most efficient route, occupied her thoughts enough that she lost track of time. There was nothing but the wind and the high, thin clouds and her sense of Rokshan perched on her shoulders.\n\nOrthoclase dropped back and then fell behind, and she was about to call out to him to see if he was well when he surged upward and ahead, finding a wind she'd missed. She laughed and chased him. Then they were all flying wildly, laughing at how ridiculous they all looked. It was foolishness, Lamprophyre knew, but in her heart she felt they needed the release.\n\nThen Coquina pulled up and pointed. \"There they are,\" she said. \"The flight. And I think they've met the enemy.\"\n\nLamprophyre sobered and backwinged to hover near Coquina. \"All right,\" she said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nHer friends nodded. Without another word, they wheeled and darted toward the battle, taking separate paths. Lamprophyre looked for Hyaloclast and headed her way.\n\nThe sky ahead was filled with colored streaks and flashes of fire. As Lamprophyre approached, a bright yellow form hung still in the air and then fell, not trying to stop itself. She was too far away to know whose dragon that had been. She gritted her teeth and sped faster, feeling Rokshan shift the weapon across her shoulder. Now that they were here, fear was a distant impossibility.\n\nShe dove for the center of the fight, trusting Rokshan to choose a target. The thumping of the weapon didn't rattle her the way it had at first. She twisted, raked her claws against a dragon's face to distract him while Rokshan took aim, then beat the air to gain altitude. She couldn't see more than half a dragonlength ahead of her. It was like swimming through seaweed, dodging bodies and avoiding contact with Sardonyx's heavily muscled followers.\n\nShe burst through the mob and hovered above, trying to get her bearings. To her shock, five dragonlengths away Sardonyx soared as high above the fray as she did. She had the look of an owl surveying the forest floor, choosing her prey. Without thinking, Lamprophyre dove after her.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rokshan shouted.\n\n\"Ending this,\" Lamprophyre shouted back.\n\nSardonyx saw her coming. She didn't move, didn't do anything but watch her approach. Then she turned her back on Lamprophyre and dove, taking an unwary dragon by the back of the neck and raking her claws across the dragon's throat. Another of the flight rose up between Lamprophyre and Sardonyx, and Rokshan swore and shifted his weapon. Lamprophyre forced her way past another of Sardonyx's dragons who was encircled by four slim members of the flight and came up short against a bulky female. The female snarled and reached for Lamprophyre. A blast of light skimmed over the female's head, and a second one hit more squarely.\n\nAs the female fell, Lamprophyre looked around. Sardonyx had vanished. \"Lamprophyre, go!\" Rokshan shouted, and she dove and felt the weapon thump-rattle, stippling a nearby shape with dark bruises.\n\nIt was madness. Lamprophyre had no idea who was winning, didn't even know where her clutchmates were despite blind-flying. She descended below the fight to catch her breath and once more saw Sardonyx. The ancient dragon seemed to drift through the fight, with each of her dragons moving to defend her as she passed. Occasionally she tore into one of the flight who came too close, shredding wings or belly or throat and tossing the body aside. Furious, Lamprophyre flung herself after the ancient dragon.\n\nThis time, she swept past and swiped a claw to strike Sardonyx's lower back. Swiftly Sardonyx turned and chased after her. Lamprophyre heard the weapon thump and rejoiced. She'd been close enough that could have been a killing shot. But Rokshan didn't shout with excitement. Lamprophyre turned to look over her shoulder. Sardonyx was flying away, apparently completely unharmed. \"Didn't you hit her?\" she asked.\n\n\"She's damned fast for someone her size,\" Rokshan said. \"I think I grazed her, and she just shrugged it off. I don't know why she didn't chase us.\"\n\n\"Now I'm angry. She thinks we're no threat.\" Lamprophyre wheeled and followed Sardonyx. \"We will make her take us seriously.\"\n\n\"Be careful. The first weapon is almost exhausted,\" Rokshan said.\n\nThis time, she stayed high enough to keep track of Sardonyx. The ancient dragon continued to make her way through the fight without making more than the most desultory attacks. It infuriated Lamprophyre all over again. She beat hard to draw nearer to Sardonyx, then dove.\n\nAs she swept into an attack, she saw Hyaloclast fighting her way closer to Sardonyx. Dragons darted out of her way, and Hyaloclast's speed increased, building until she was nearly moving at full speed. Sardonyx either didn't see her coming or didn't care. Hyaloclast slammed into Sardonyx, knocking her backward, and in the next beat the two were grappling, shoving back and forth with hands clasped.\n\nLamprophyre pulled up a short distance away. The two enormous dragons, black and red, grunted with effort as they fought and snapped at each other like creatures out of myth. \"Shoot her!\" she screamed.\n\n\"I'll hit Hyaloclast!\" Rokshan exclaimed. She could feel him twisting and moving, trying to find his target.\n\nGradually, stillness spread out from the struggling, thrashing pair, until dragons hung in the air all around, watching. Even Lamprophyre hovered, her fists clenched, willing Sardonyx to break. Rokshan lowered his weapon. Sardonyx snapped at Hyaloclast's throat, and Hyaloclast brought her legs up and kicked Sardonyx's exposed belly. Sardonyx didn't react at all, just kept driving for the throat.\n\nThen both dragons went still, with even their wings beating slowly enough that they gradually drifted downward. Lamprophyre followed, confused that they'd both stopped fighting. Now was the time to hit Sardonyx with the weapon, but Rokshan didn't move.\n\nShe was close enough to see their faces now, and was startled that both had their eyes closed. Not fighting, not flying, not searching each other for weaknesses. Lamprophyre's dread, which had been silent since the beginning of the journey, raised its voice again. Not knowing what else to do, she listened for thoughts, hoping for some indication of what was happening.\n\nShe'd expected to be deafened by all the minds thronging the area. Instead, she heard two voices, strong enough to override the rest of the clamor, strong enough that Lamprophyre was nearly overwhelmed by them alone. The voices spoke, but neither speaker seemed interested in responding to the other. They both simply spoke, long strings of sentences Lamprophyre couldn't make out. That it was Hyaloclast and Sardonyx, she was sure, because she was intimately familiar with the sound of each dragon's thoughts. But what they were trying to accomplish, she had no idea.\n\nThen both voices fell silent, mid sentence. For half a beat, a beat, nothing moved. Then Sardonyx shouted a wordless, silent cry of triumph. Lamprophyre felt the slicing blades of her thought slash across her mother's mind, just as she remembered from the attack on Zefira. And Hyaloclast's wings slumped, stilled, and the great black dragon fell out of the sky.\n\nLamprophyre screamed and dove, sharply enough that Rokshan grabbed her ruff and clung painfully tight. She was vaguely aware that other shapes were diving with her, but her world had narrowed down to that falling shape. Screaming with effort, she plunged past Hyaloclast and turned to catch her. The dragon queen weighed enough that Lamprophyre couldn't do more than slow her fall, not without crushing Rokshan. More dragons, one light blue, one bronze, caught Hyaloclast's other side and the base of her tail, and between the three of them, they carried her to the ground.\n\nLamprophyre instantly fell to her knees at Hyaloclast's side, feeling for a pulse, thumbing up her eyelids to see her pupils dilate. \"She's alive,\" she told Leucite, \"but I don't know more than that. Sardonyx attacked her mind, and I don't know how soon she will recover from that.\"\n\nLeucite looked up. \"They're fleeing,\" he said, his usually calm voice shaking. \"The flight, I mean. They're not even trying to stop Sardonyx.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked down at Hyaloclast again. \"I can't help her.\"\n\n\"I'll stay,\" Leucite said. \"Marble and I will stay with her. Go.\" She heard him think no use but we can't not try, and she wished more than ever that he and Hyaloclast had been pair-bonded before this.\n\nShe nodded at milky-blue Marble, gripped her mother's hand one final time, and flew after the disappearing flights.\n\n\"They aren't just fleeing,\" Rokshan said. \"It's a rout.\"\n\n\"We have to catch them and make them turn and fight,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They can't reach Tanajital. There's no shield.\"\n\n\"Then go faster,\" Rokshan said. \"The flight's already outpacing Sardonyx's dragons. We just need to get ahead of them and make a stand.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded and pushed herself harder, speeding up until she was grateful for the harness. Rokshan's grip on her ruff was firm but not panicked, he leaned forward to make her profile sleeker, and she sped along, skimming the ground until she was beneath Sardonyx's dragons. The back of her neck itched with the knowledge that they were above her, in a perfect position to dive and attack. But they ignored her, or didn't see her\u2014she didn't care which so long as it got her past them.\n\nThen she was past, and the flight was visible in the distance. They looked like people in a panic, flying in a ragged group that didn't maintain any semblance of a formation. Lamprophyre saw orange and dark blue and grass-green circling the flight like a handful of dogs trying to herd frightened sheep. \"The clutch will stop them,\" she said.\n\n\"We need to catch up to them, though,\" Rokshan said. \"We can't be caught between the two flights. No weapons can save us if that happens.\"\n\nLamprophyre spread her wings and caught a fortunate updraft that carried her high above the ground. Alternating flapping hard and soaring, she made progress\u2014but no, the flight was slowing, too, hovering as if waiting for her.\n\n\"Hyaloclast is alive,\" she said as soon as she was within earshot and range of thought, \"but she's injured. We have to stop Sardonyx if we want to help her. And if Sardonyx reaches Tanajital, the city will be destroyed.\"\n\nA faint ghost of a thought made her gasp. \"Who was that?\" she demanded. \"We are not going to let the humans be killed just because they aren't like us. And what the Stones do you think Sardonyx will do to the rest of us when she's done with the humans? She's not going to let us survive either. But by all means, if you don't want to defend humans the way we swore we would, go back to the mountains. I'm sure the dragonets will welcome you.\"\n\nHer dismissive, sarcastic tone elicited a lot of ashamed thoughts, but no one left. \"Then we fight,\" she said. \"Fight by clutches, surround an enemy and destroy her, do it again.\"\n\n\"What did Sardonyx do to Hyaloclast?\" someone asked from the middle of the flight.\n\n\"Sardonyx can speak to minds, and she knows how to attack with thought,\" Lamprophyre said. \"But I don't think it's easy, or she'd have done it to all of us. Stay away from Sardonyx\u2014I know, I don't need to tell you that.\"\n\nShe looked back over her shoulder. The cloud of colored shapes was close enough that they were obviously dragons. \"Rokshan, what do we do?\" she asked. \"What's our strategy?\"\n\nRokshan turned in his seat. \"Take the fight to them,\" he said. \"Those with pyrite weapons take the lead, to get several clear shots before we engage with the enemy. Then, what Lamprophyre said. If you work together, those big dragons aren't maneuverable enough to take an entire clutch on. Attack from altitude when you can, don't let them get above you.\"\n\nLamprophyre drew in as deep a breath as the harness would allow and waited for the dragons to pass Rokshan's words on to those farther away. \"Let's go,\" she said, and wheeled around. She didn't look to see who'd followed her. She knew it was all of them.\n\nThis time, the enemy dragons were moving more slowly. Their formations, always military-precise, looked a little ragged, and she counted and did a little calculating\u2014Stones, they'd accounted for nearly half of Sardonyx's dragons! Excitement bubbled up inside her, and she suppressed it, fearing becoming overconfident.\n\nRokshan lifted the pyrite weapon and balanced it on her shoulder. \"Not too close to my head, please, it makes me dizzy,\" she said.\n\n\"I remember. Don't worry, I'll move it in time.\"\n\nThe enemy was five dragonlengths away. Three. Rokshan lifted the weapon, and a series of staccato thumps shattered the air. More thumps nearby signaled her friends taking their shots. Dragons jerked out of formation. Two of them fell. And yet Sardonyx's people came on, unswerving and terrifying. \"Go, go!\" Lamprophyre screamed, and the front lines crashed together and everything was chaos.\n\nLamprophyre swerved to rise above the tangled flights. \"What are you doing?\" Rokshan shouted.\n\n\"Looking for Sardonyx!\"\n\n\"Are you out of your mind? We tried that. She's impossible to hit.\"\n\n\"Not if I get close enough,\" Lamprophyre shouted. She scanned the melee, looking for that monstrous red shape, paler than Porphyry and dusted with gold as if she wanted to make herself a human queen as well as a dragon one. \"And I'd like to see her try that mental attack on me.\"\n\n\"I'm running low on power,\" Rokshan said. \"I'll save what's left for Sardonyx.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. Suddenly, she gasped and jerked backward, making Rokshan drop the weapon to brush the back of her neck. An enormous dirty-copper dragon shot upward past her face, clawing at her. She backwinged desperately and ducked, heard Rokshan yelp, and fought to get clear of the monster.\n\nShe never saw the second dragon, a misty green female who came out of nowhere and grabbed Lamprophyre, sinking her teeth into Lamprophyre's shoulder. Lamprophyre screamed and tore herself free, letting herself go limp to throw the female off balance. She got her feet between herself and the female's midsection and kicked, digging in her toe claws. The female jerked, dropped about a dragonlength, then beat the air, chasing Lamprophyre.\n\nLamprophyre pushed herself to gain altitude. Fighting this female was a distraction from her goal, and Rokshan couldn't shoot her without wasting power destined for killing Sardonyx. She swooped past the dirty-copper dragon, who half-turned to watch her pass. \"Rokshan, we\u2014\" she began.\n\nSomething hit them hard, knocking Lamprophyre half a dragonlength sideways. Rokshan cried out as he was slammed into Lamprophyre's neck. She felt his grip on her shoulders loosen, his feet scrape loosely across her scales, and then he was gone, a burning brand falling away beneath her.\n\nLamprophyre screamed and plunged after him, slapping and kicking to get free of any dragon, friend or foe, that dared get in her way. She'd never flown faster, desperation making her fleet of wing. Her head felt swollen as she flew nearly straight down, her spine ached, but she was closing with Rokshan fast. Then she was beside him, her hands closed gently around him, and she opened her wings to slow her descent.\n\nBreathing heavily, she landed as lightly as she could manage and laid Rokshan gently on the ground. Crouching beside him, she bent low, then said, \"Rokshan, are you all right?\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"I'm not dead,\" he said. \"That's something.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. What happened?\"\n\n\"That dragon slapped us with his tail. Caught me\u2014\" He coughed. When he removed his hand from his mouth, Lamprophyre sucked in a horrified breath at seeing blood on his lips. \"Caught me across the back and snapped the harness. You caught me.\" He coughed again.\n\n\"I'll take you to Tanajital. They'll heal you.\"\n\nRokshan gripped her hand. \"Lamprophyre. Sweetheart. Don't panic, but I\u2014\" He coughed a third time, spattering his hand with blood. \"I can't feel my legs.\"\n\nLamprophyre felt numb. She heard wings overhead, but the sound meant nothing to her. \"That's bad,\" she said inanely.\n\nRokshan nodded. \"It's bad. Lamprophyre, you have to go. You have to fight Sardonyx.\"\n\n\"Don't be stupid. I'm not leaving you.\"\n\nThe nearby dragon wings stilled. and Lamprophyre turned with a snarl, ready to fight. But it was Dolomite, crouching to allow Tekentriya to climb down. The crown princess strode forward, her usual lurch less pronounced. She took in Rokshan's condition impassively. \"You can't stand,\" she said. \"Dolomite, you'll have to carry him.\"\n\n\"But you have to fight,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And I don't want to leave him.\"\n\n\"I've exhausted both my weapons,\" Tekentriya said. \"We can't fight effectively. Go. I'll take care of him.\" She gripped Lamprophyre's shoulder. \"I promise.\"\n\nDolomite picked Rokshan up. His legs hung so limply Lamprophyre felt sick. \"Rokshan,\" she said, then didn't know how to go on. She was afraid of hugging him, afraid it would make his injuries worse. \"Rokshan, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Rokshan said. His voice was very weak. \"I love you, too.\"\n\nLamprophyre turned and flew away. She couldn't bear to look back at the mate she was leaving behind. Her fear for Rokshan turned to anger. If he died\u2026but that was stupid, wasn't it, because they were all in danger of dying, and threats were meaningless. What mattered was finding Sardonyx and putting an end to this. She stripped off the ruined harness, dropped it, and took off in search of her enemy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Immediately, Lamprophyre realized the battle was not going well for her flight. While her friends hadn't fled and were fighting as fiercely as ever, they'd been forced northward, dragonlength by dragonlength. She'd already been left behind. Her body ached and her wings felt stretched to the breaking point, but she flew after the battle, searching the air for Sardonyx. Her heart sank as she saw, far in the distance, a smudge athwart the river. Tanajital was far too close. If they couldn't stop Sardonyx soon\u2026\n\nAnd as if thinking of her had conjured her up, there the dragon was, moving through the battle as if none of it mattered to her. Lamprophyre snarled and sped up, tracking Sardonyx's movements. So many dragons lay between Lamprophyre and her prey, and she no longer\u2014 She swallowed. Rokshan would live. Tekentriya and Dolomite would see to it. She had to kill Sardonyx to make sure his living wasn't itself a death sentence.\n\nShe reached the rear of the battle and darted between huge, ancient dragons, not doing more than kick or claw to make one move, never staying to fight. She didn't bother concealing her approach. Surprising Sardonyx might be impossible, if Sardonyx was as competent at discerning thoughts from a crowd as she was at that mental attack\u2014though if she couldn't hear Lamprophyre's thoughts, maybe Lamprophyre had a chance, after all.\n\nWhether or not Sardonyx heard her coming, when Lamprophyre was nearly a dragonlength away, Sardonyx turned to face her. As if by magic, the dragons nearest her edged away, leaving an open space just right for Lamprophyre to fit herself into.\n\n\"You,\" Sardonyx said. \"You're missing something.\"\n\nThat infuriated Lamprophyre, but she clamped down on her anger. \"I don't need anything to fight you but myself,\" she said.\n\n\"You believe it must come to a fight?\" Sardonyx's voice was as beautiful and melodic as ever. \"Say the word, and my dragons will stand down.\"\n\n\"What?\" Lamprophyre backwinged, taken aback.\n\n\"We're dragons, Lamprophyre,\" Sardonyx said. \"We discuss things rationally. You think I enjoy bloodshed? Particularly over humans?\"\n\nLamprophyre listened to Sardonyx's thoughts, sharp and horrible over the hum of background thinking. \"You do enjoy bloodshed,\" she said. \"All this makes you happy.\"\n\nA snarl touched Sardonyx's mouth and was instantly gone. \"I enjoy seeing dragons matched against each other. That it has to end in death is a side\u2026benefit, I suppose. To me, anyway.\"\n\n\"Then match against me,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Just the two of us. Let that decide our fate.\"\n\nSardonyx laughed. \"You? You're barely big enough to reach my shoulder.\"\n\n\"That's an exaggeration. And you ought to come up with a better reason to avoid fighting me. I think you're afraid.\"\n\n\"What a pitiful taunt. I suppose you now expect me to fly into a rage and attack you with reckless abandon?\"\n\n\"It's not a taunt,\" Lamprophyre said. \"You can't attack me with your thoughts. You can't hear what I'm thinking. I think you've traded on that freak talent for long enough you don't remember how to defeat someone without it. And no, I don't think you've ever done anything without thinking it through. So consider this. We will never stop fighting you. Maybe you'll kill us all, but we'll take more than a few of you with us. Fight me here, now, and make an end.\"\n\nSardonyx's eye ridges lowered. \"Agreed,\" she said, and lunged for Lamprophyre.\n\nLamprophyre, still listening to Sardonyx's thoughts, was ready for that move and darted upward, hugging her knees to her chest to allow Sardonyx to pass beneath her. She spun and dove and got a hand on Sardonyx's tail, dragging her claws down its length and making Sardonyx let out a shriek of pain. Faster than Lamprophyre had guessed possible, the ancient dragon turned and drove straight at Lamprophyre, taking her around the waist and bearing her toward the ground.\n\nLamprophyre spread her wings to slow their descent and kicked Sardonyx's stomach. Sardonyx let out a whoosh of breath and let go, backwinging and bringing her own feet up to slam Lamprophyre. The blow missed as Lamprophyre furled her wings and dropped out of the way. Immediately she spread her wings and beat for altitude. Sardonyx matched her, her greater wingspan letting her edge ahead at first. Lamprophyre fought harder. She couldn't let the ancient dragon outmaneuver her.\n\nThey flew upward, neither pausing. Gradually, Lamprophyre gained on Sardonyx, first passing her head, then her shoulders, then the base of her wings. Then she was ahead, above Sardonyx entirely, and she furled her wings and plummeted straight at her enemy, willing herself heavy, like a stone. She aimed, not for Sardonyx's face, but for her wings. She grabbed for them. pinning them back, and raked the membranes with her claws.\n\nAgain, Sardonyx shrieked. She thrashed free of Lamprophyre and turned on her, and it was Lamprophyre's turn to cry out as Sardonyx tore gouges out of her chest. They broke apart again, and Lamprophyre quickly glanced around. Tanajital was closer than before, and Lamprophyre would have laughed at Sardonyx's perfidy if she'd had breath to spare. Sardonyx wasn't interested in a fair fight to determine the fate of humans. Even if she lost, which she didn't believe she would, she expected her dragons to carry out her plans.\n\nThey fought in silence for several dozen beats, darting and clawing and diving until both of them bled from shallow wounds, nothing that would decide a victory. Lamprophyre's breath came heavily, and her body ached from the sustained flying. But Sardonyx was winded, too, and her blows felt less powerful. Lamprophyre refused to despair. If they both became too exhausted to continue, that wouldn't change anything.\n\nShe stopped looking upriver at Tanajital, not wanting to see it draw closer. A lucky swipe with the edge of her wing temporarily blinded Sardonyx, who dropped half a dragonlength and didn't return to the fight immediately. Lamprophyre hovered, catching her breath. \"Give up,\" she said. \"This will only end in your death.\"\n\n\"Brash words from a weakling daughter of a weakling queen,\" Sardonyx said, and flung herself at Lamprophyre again. This time, she took hold of her by her shoulders and drew her close in an obscene parody of an embrace, her vicious teeth bared and aimed at Lamprophyre's throat.\n\nLamprophyre grabbed Sardonyx's shoulders and pushed, trying to free herself, but even exhausted, the ancient dragon outweighed her. Her teeth came ever closer to Lamprophyre's throat. A memory of Porphyry lying bloody in death flashed across Lamprophyre's memory, and grief struck her so hard she screamed. Sardonyx smiled, clearly believing it had been a scream of fear. \"I'll make it quick,\" she said, her lovely voice tight with exertion.\n\n\"Think again,\" Lamprophyre said through gritted teeth. She listened to Sardonyx's thoughts, searching for an edge. The ancient dragon gloated, believing she'd won. Without knowing how she did it, Lamprophyre thought, You can't touch me, and lashed out in remembered attack.\n\nHer thoughts tore across Sardonyx's mind, and it was the ancient dragon's turn to scream. Sardonyx turned her head away and let go of Lamprophyre, but Lamprophyre clung to her, refusing to release her grip. Then she was within the dragon's mind as she'd been once before, sinking deep into her enemy's consciousness as Sardonyx lashed out at her with her own mental attack. Lamprophyre dodged effortlessly. She felt as if she could see each attack before it struck, though there was no vision, no sound, just wave after wave of power as potent as what the pyrite weapons fired.\n\nShe thought back to that encounter several twelvedays before and made her thoughts knives, blades of all sizes, and withdrew from Sardonyx's mind, digging those blades deep. Sardonyx thrashed free finally and retreated half a dragonlength. She and Lamprophyre stared at each other, hovering, while dozens of dragons surrounded them.\n\nSardonyx turned and fled.\n\nLamprophyre, dazed by the suddenness of it, didn't at first understand what had happened. No dragon queen would abandon her flight. The dragons surrounding Lamprophyre shifted restlessly, not attacking, as if Sardonyx's abandonment had confused them too. The last traces of Sardonyx's thoughts, faint and fading as the dragon flew away, were of fear for herself\u2014fear of a personal defeat, with no hint of concern for her flight. How typical of her, Lamprophyre thought.\n\nThen she realized Sardonyx had headed north.\n\nCursing, she flew after Sardonyx, reaching deep within herself for her last reserves. Tanajital was so close, a perfect miniature city glinting in the afternoon sun, and Sardonyx by herself could do so much damage. They'd left the other dragons behind, which was odd, since Sardonyx's flight had protected her until now. It was a puzzle Lamprophyre was too tired to figure out. It was just her, streaking across the sky after the red blotch that was Sardonyx, in a chase that had already gone on forever and was likely to end only when the two of them dissolved into nothing.\n\nLamprophyre was still several dragonlengths behind when Sardonyx reached Tanajital. No, she thought, too tired to scream a warning that would be completely useless. She braced herself for the first gout of brilliant fire.\n\nIt never came.\n\nSardonyx didn't so much as slow over the human city. Puzzled again, Lamprophyre slackened her pace slightly and surveyed the city. It looked just as it always did, full of people staring at the red dragon overhead, open for the slaughter. But Sardonyx hadn't sent one single blast of fire to immolate the place, not even the golden-roofed palace. She was headed north.\n\nLamprophyre sped up, though her wings felt limp and exhausted and her chest ached with exertion. Sardonyx wasn't fleeing in terror, despite her reaction to Lamprophyre's last attack. She never did anything without thinking it through. In heading north, she had a plan, but\u2026\n\nLamprophyre felt suddenly ill. The caves. The rest of the flight, and all those dragonets whose bodies weren't yet as rugged as an adult's. Sardonyx was exactly the kind of person who would take out her anger on helpless dragonets, destroy the next generation.\n\nShe flew the next several beats without seeing the world around her. She needed the flight's help, but she couldn't go back without giving Sardonyx more of a lead than she already had. She either needed to catch up to Sardonyx and fight her again\u2014her heart wailed in agony at the thought of another battle, mental or physical\u2014or she needed to pass her, reach the caves, and enlist the other dragons' help.\n\nShe glanced behind her. All she could see of the mingled dragon flights was a multicolored cloud that distance made appear to hover over Tanajital, though she didn't think they'd come so far already. How this had turned into a battle between her and Sardonyx, her tired brain couldn't remember. Sardonyx had attacked her first, all those twelvedays ago. But if she hadn't started the war, by the Stones, she intended to finish it.\n\nShe couldn't fly at her top speed anymore\u2014wasn't sure how she was still flying, even\u2014but Sardonyx had slowed as well. It was heartening to see evidence that the ancient dragon wasn't invulnerable.\n\nBut Lamprophyre already knew that, didn't she? She'd made that mental attack again, the one that had saved her when she was human and had almost been kidnapped, and it had worked. She still didn't have any idea what made it possible. She'd never done it against anyone but Sardonyx, and maybe that meant she was using Sardonyx's power against her. Maybe anyone who could hear thoughts could manage it.\n\nOr maybe Coquina was right, and it was her own power that did it.\n\nLamprophyre didn't like that idea. She might be special for being the only dragon in a millennium who'd made friends with a human, but surely if she had unusual mental abilities, they would have shown up before now? On the other hand, she was also the only dragon who'd ever called on a God not her own and been touched by him. Jiwanyil's power had made her immune to Sardonyx's attack; suppose it had given her more powers than that?\n\nLamprophyre scowled. That was something she should have asked Jiwanyil, if she'd kept her wits instead of trying to force answers from a creature who clearly had only the most tenuous connection to reality. He'd nearly killed Rokshan, too\u2014 Another sharp stab of grief hit her. Rokshan. She tried to tell herself he was alive, that she'd feel it if she lost her pair-bond, but she wasn't sure the latter was true and wasn't confident about the former, either. If he died\u2014she couldn't finish the thought.\n\nShe was closer to Sardonyx now, though not by much. They were flying over the forest, all those evergreens and the leafy trees that were only just beginning to lose their leaves. Anger displaced her fear for Rokshan. Sardonyx had no right to try to remake the world in her image, not when everyone else wanted something different. A spark tingled up her wings and across her shoulders. She would stop Sardonyx if it killed her.\n\nNow she flew in an exhausted fugue state, her wings beating automatically, her eyes focused on the red dragon in front of her, gradually drawing nearer. The mountains were coming closer as well, the yellow foothills giving way to the lower slopes and then to the peaks where the flight lived. Sardonyx didn't vary in her course. She didn't know where the caves were, and she'd have to hunt for them, which would give Lamprophyre time to catch up to her and stop her. Sardonyx was no more than ten dragonlengths ahead now. No distance at all.\n\nSardonyx swept up the slopes and soared along the rocky peaks\u2014and kept going.\n\nLamprophyre blinked. She hadn't turned aside to search for the caves. Lamprophyre's tired mind couldn't make sense of it. Without thinking, she continued to fly after Sardonyx, gradually gaining ground as the ancient dragon flew deeper into the mountains.\n\nShe was sure Sardonyx knew she was there, though the dragon never looked back. The closer Lamprophyre came, the more she became aware Sardonyx was in far worse shape than she. Sardonyx's flight was erratic, weaving so much she looked like a drunk human. She seemed to remain in the air through pure willpower. The sight gave Lamprophyre a boost of much-needed strength, and she sped up.\n\nShe followed Sardonyx through the Handmaidens and to the base of Mother Stone. By then, Lamprophyre knew where Sardonyx was going, though she couldn't understand what the point of returning to that cavern was. She was a little less than two dragonlengths behind now and pushing herself to her limit. \"Sardonyx!\" she shouted, her words not carrying far in the thin air. \"Stop now! You're beaten!\"\n\nSardonyx didn't respond. She didn't change her speed or do anything else to indicate she'd heard. Lamprophyre caught the fleeting edge of her thoughts and was surprised, as much as her dull brain could register surprise, at Sardonyx's determination to reach the cave. All the ancient dragon's thoughts were focused on something there, something she had left behind\u2014something that would let her defeat Lamprophyre. But there hadn't been anything left in the cave, nothing but Jiwanyil's presence. It made no sense.\n\nLamprophyre drew in a deep, sharp breath and plunged onward. She'd exerted herself enough that she didn't feel cold, though that would change as soon as she stopped. Whatever advantage Sardonyx hoped to gain from the cave would not be enough to save her, not if Lamprophyre could help it.\n\nSardonyx flew without pausing into the mouth of the cavern, with Lamprophyre a scant two dragonlengths behind her. How the giant red dragon was able to maneuver through those first few dragonlengths when the passage was so narrow it barely fit Lamprophyre, she didn't know, but Sardonyx slowed even further, shortening her lead more.\n\nThey flew in silence through the passage as it sloped downward and gradually iced over, with Sardonyx's wings occasionally scraping the walls. When they shot out of the passage into the giant bowl-shaped chamber, Lamprophyre was almost within grabbing distance of Sardonyx's heels.\n\nSardonyx shot forward and skidded on hands and knees across the icy, rubble-strewn floor toward the now-familiar green glow, clambering over obstacles in her hurry to get away from Lamprophyre. Lamprophyre staggered to a halt and stood there, breathing heavily. \"What are you doing?\" she asked, too tired for anything but curiosity.\n\nSardonyx's mouth curved in a nasty smile. She drew in a breath and blew out fire that licked over the stone and melted the rime so fast it hissed into steam. Lamprophyre waved steam away from her face and squinted at Sardonyx, who'd bent to pick up something that blazed with green light. It was the size of Sardonyx's palm and shaped like a large brick with rounded corners and edges.\n\nSardonyx straightened. \"I told you you're nothing,\" she said. She closed both her hands on the lighted object and snapped it in half. Brilliant green-white light exploded, lighting the chamber bright as day for half a beat. Lamprophyre snapped her nictitating membranes shut and reflexively threw up an arm to ward her eyes, and she was still blinded briefly.\n\nThe next thing she knew, Sardonyx had her hand around her throat. \"This power was always meant to be mine,\" she said. In her other hand, she held what looked like a glowing emerald, half the size of Lamprophyre's fist. Sardonyx raised it to her lips and swallowed it. Her other hand convulsed, choking Lamprophyre, who clawed at it until it fell away. Dazed, she stared at Sardonyx, who was bent double.\n\nThen Sardonyx straightened and slammed her fist into Lamprophyre's stomach, flinging her off her feet and into the distant wall.\n\nLamprophyre's head cracked against the stone, dizzying her again. Everything was murky\u2014she still had her nictitating membranes shut. She got to her feet through force of will and staggered. Sardonyx swayed, her arms and wings flung wide for balance. She shook her head as if the blow had struck her instead. Then she lifted off the floor and headed for Lamprophyre, weaving as if dizzy, flying as slowly as anyone could without dropping out of the air. Green lights traced the phalanges of her wings and the ridges of her eyes. The sight was so unnerving Lamprophyre scrabbled along the wall for the exit, afraid to take her eyes off the ancient dragon.\n\nShe nearly fell when she reached the opening, tripping when it turned out there wasn't any more wall. Turning, she fled, certain without knowing why that her next encounter with Sardonyx would be her last.\n\nThis time, Sardonyx made no effort to avoid the walls; Lamprophyre heard her smashing chunks out of them, shaking the walls like she was a force of nature and not a dragon. Lamprophyre made it as far as the cavern mouth before Sardonyx caught up to her. Frantic, she lashed out with both feet and pushed herself harder, then dropped. She still felt warm, a terrible illusion that gave her no benefit. She soared too close to Mother Stone and kicked again, propelling herself away.\n\nThen Sardonyx was on her, snatching at her wings and tearing a gash in a lower membrane. It didn't hurt, but Lamprophyre's flight was suddenly more erratic, less controlled. Lamprophyre furled her wings and struck at Sardonyx's face. Her claws made contact with flesh, and Sardonyx bellowed and slapped Lamprophyre's head so hard it felt as if a pyrite weapon had gone off next to her skull. Dazed, she considered how warm she was, almost hot, as if they weren't thousands of dragonlengths above the ground and surrounded by snow and ice.\n\nSomething flashed past, too fast for Lamprophyre to see it as more than a blur of color. Sardonyx screamed, and blood welled up on her flank. Lamprophyre dove away from her, taking advantage of the other dragon's attack. All she could see of him was a backlit shape against the sun hanging low in the western sky.\n\nThen he dove, and Rokshan shouted, \"Get above her!\"\n\nRokshan. She was too muddled to think clearly. He was well, he was healed, but who had he found to carry him into battle? The harness was destroyed.\n\nThe dragon flashed past her again. \"Damn it, Lamprophyre, get above her!\" Rokshan screamed. His voice jolted her into action, and she beat the air for altitude. The dragon was below Sardonyx, swooping around her in a streak of emerald green and gold. No rider was visible.\n\nGreen. And gold.\n\nLamprophyre screamed with excitement and flapped harder. No time to find out what had happened, or how they'd pulled it off. All that mattered was that Rokshan was a dragon, and between the two of them, they could face anything.\n\nShe reached the apex of her climb, dove, and furled her wings, whipping around in midair just before reaching Sardonyx to slam feet-first into the spot between her wings. Sardonyx spun and slapped Lamprophyre with her tail, driving her sideways, but that left the ancient dragon open to Rokshan's attack on her other side, his claws digging deep into the base of her spine.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Lamprophyre shrieked. Rokshan moved fast, but not fast enough. Sardonyx caught him by the shoulders and flung him at the mountainside, where he hit the rocks hard and slid, unconscious, down the steep slope.\n\nLamprophyre dropped away from Sardonyx and hurried to catch Rokshan, shaking him. \"Wake up. Wake up! She's coming\u2014\"\n\nA tremendous weight slammed into her, Sardonyx's full mass crushing her into the stone. All the breath whooshed out of Lamprophyre's lungs. Gasping desperately for air and finding none, she watched helplessly as Rokshan slipped from her hold and continued his slide down the mountain. Sardonyx wheeled and backed away for another blow. \"Nothing will stop me now I have my full power,\" she said.\n\nHow exciting. She was going to taunt Lamprophyre the way villains did in bad epics. \"It's not your power, it's Jiwanyil,\" she wheezed. If Sardonyx was going to gloat, maybe Lamprophyre could keep her talking long enough to recover.\n\n\"No such person,\" Sardonyx said. \"They thought he was God, before I was buried, but he was nothing more than power, available for the taking. By the right person, naturally. You used that power once, when you woke me, depriving me of it until it could regenerate. That gave you a reprieve, but now\u2014ah, it fills me to overflowing.\"\n\nLamprophyre clung to the stony outcropping and braced herself for the next blow. \"But he kept you imprisoned for a millennium. And now you want his power?\"\n\nSardonyx hovered half a dragonlength away. The green lights played like liquid over her body. \"I have no hard feelings. It's just a source. All those dragons who died on Mother Stone\u2014I felt every death, felt them fuel his power. They won for a time, but that time is over.\"\n\nShe backed away and began flapping her wings, powerfully enough to generate a wind palpable even among the gales that whipped around Mother Stone night and day. \"And now,\" she said, her voice lovelier than ever, \"you're going to join them.\"\n\nJoin them.\n\nBorn of wind and fire and stone, to breath and ash and stone return.\n\nYour death is in the stone.\n\nSardonyx flew at Lamprophyre, bearing down on her like an implacable storm.\n\nLamprophyre drew in a breath. \"Jiwanyil!\" she shouted. \"I understand now! I return\u2014make me one!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Thunder boomed out of the clear sky. It echoed off Mother Stone and the surrounding peaks, growing louder and louder until the sky rang with it. Distantly, Lamprophyre heard the rumbling of stones and ice cascading down nearby slopes, picking up the chorus.\n\nShe listened to the titanic music until the last echoes had faded. Only then did she realize she wasn't dead. Sardonyx hadn't hit her.\n\nSardonyx hung suspended a few handspans away, not hovering but completely frozen, her wings motionless, her mouth open in a snarl. Lamprophyre gasped and let go of the mountain, searching beneath her for Rokshan. He sprawled six or seven dragonlengths below her, also motionless. Lamprophyre pushed away from the mountain, intending to dive to retrieve him. Her wings wouldn't move. She couldn't even open her hand. It was as if she was stuck to the stone.\n\n<Don't move,> a voice said.\n\n\"I can't move,\" Lamprophyre responded. She couldn't even turn her head to see where the voice was coming from.\n\n<That is because this is a moment in time, detached from the rest. There is no time in which to move,> the voice said.\n\n\"I don't understand. If that's true, how can I speak? Shouldn't I be as frozen as Sardonyx and\u2014is Rokshan all right? He can't die!\"\n\n<That is, of course, not true. He is as mortal as anyone. But I understand your meaning.>\n\nLamprophyre strained to turn. \"Who are you? Why can't I see you?\"\n\n<My appearance is irrelevant. Tell me, Lamprophyre, what do you want?>\n\n\"I want to see you!\"\n\n<You called on a God not your own. What do you want?>\n\nLamprophyre tried to swallow to moisten her mouth and found even those muscles didn't work. \"I understand the prophecy. I want to make it come true so Sardonyx and her dragons will be destroyed.\"\n\n<You believe yourself entitled to choose destruction for another creature?>\n\nLamprophyre didn't hesitate. \"I do.\"\n\n<And why does Sardonyx deserve destruction?>\n\n\"Because she will never give up trying to kill every human who lives, just because they're human. She had so many chances to choose differently, and every time she went for the one that would give her power. And now it's a choice between her life and theirs, and I choose theirs.\"\n\n<They're not your species, Lamprophyre.>\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n<Apparently not to you.> The voice sounded amused. <You realize you choose your own death.>\n\nThis time, Lamprophyre managed to swallow. \"Yes.\"\n\n<You thought you'd escape that, didn't you?>\n\n\"Jiwanyil said it didn't mean my doom, but I don't think he was ever anything but a fragment. So I understand. And I accept.\" She glanced down at Rokshan's beautiful form and wished she could weep with longing and regret.\n\n<Then watch, and see what your choice has wrought before you die,> the voice said.\n\nEverything snapped into motion. Sardonyx slammed into Lamprophyre, who had just enough time to realize it didn't hurt when the sound of thousands upon thousands of dragon wings ripped the air. Sardonyx stared at Lamprophyre, confused. \"What happened to you?\" she said.\n\nLamprophyre looked at her hands. They were misty and insubstantial. \"I'm dead,\" she whispered. \"And so are you.\"\n\nDarkness fell across the sky. Lamprophyre and Sardonyx looked up. Dragons, milky and colorless, streamed away from the flanks of Mother Stone, soaring and wheeling in circles and patterns Lamprophyre had only ever seen in dream. They poured away from the mountain, filling the air with their graceful dance. Lamprophyre stared at them, awestruck.\n\nA long, long line of dragons peeled away from the flight, headed for Lamprophyre and Sardonyx. Sardonyx gasped and turned to fly away, but their graceful shapes overtook her, caught her up in their hands and carried her off. She struggled, but despite her greater size she looked like a kitten caught up by a reproachful hand. Lamprophyre watched their soaring flight until they disappeared into the far northern distance.\n\nShe turned then to look at the rest of the dragons, gliding southward. Sardonyx would have no followers left\u2014though Sardonyx herself was gone, so Lamprophyre wondered if destroying her followers was really necessary. But despite the decision she'd made, she didn't think it was up to her. It certainly wasn't within her power to rouse a flight of dead dragons.\n\n\"Lamprophyre! Lamprophyre, look at me!\"\n\nIt was becoming so difficult, moving her body, what there was left of it. She tilted her head. \"Rokshan. What happened?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you all about it when we're out of here,\" Rokshan said. It was so disconcerting to hear his voice, in a lower register, coming out of that beautifully sculpted face. \"But we have to go now, understand? Can you fly?\"\n\nShe was too tired even to regret being unable to cry. \"Rokshan, look at me,\" she said. \"I'm dead. I think this is so we can say goodbye.\"\n\n\"Don't talk like that,\" Rokshan said. \"I barely know how I got here. Flying is much harder than it looks, you know? I need your help getting back. Just put your hand on my shoulder, and I'll help you get started.\"\n\nHe was so beautiful. Yes, his body was perfect, but what made him beautiful in her eyes was that he was her mate, her dearest love, and it was fitting their story should end this way. \"I love you,\" she said. \"I hope you don't regret this transformation after I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Lamprophyre!\" Rokshan's voice cracked in the middle of her name.\n\nShe smiled. \"Bury me on Mother Stone,\" she said, \"it's not a prison anymore,\" and closed her eyes and fell into blackness.\n\n\"You know,\" Porphyry said, \"being dead is far more interesting than I expected.\"\n\nLamprophyre examined her hands. They were blue and solid and not even a little misty. \"We buried you,\" she said. \"We didn't know what else to do.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a good thing you did, or we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.\" Porphyry stood and stretched his wings. \"I'd have flown off into eternity with the rest of the guardians.\"\n\n\"The dragons whose deaths sealed Sardonyx into her prison,\" Lamprophyre said. \"I figured that much out. But I don't understand what my part in that drama was.\"\n\n\"You knew enough to call on God.\" Porphyry extended a hand. \"Come with me. I think it's time you had some answers.\"\n\nLamprophyre took his hand. It felt as solid as her own. \"What, like in the stories of Veena, where the villain explains his dastardly plot for the benefit of the listener?\"\n\nPorphyry laughed. \"I promise this person has been looking forward to telling you the whole story for a long time. Are you going to reject that just because it happens to fit a narrative tradition?\"\n\n\"I'm too curious,\" Lamprophyre admitted.\n\nFor the first time, she tried to examine her surroundings, but saw\u2014nothing. At times, she and Porphyry seemed to be surrounded by shifting mists, but then the mists looked like rough-hewn granite walls, or smooth marble facings, or the black, starless sky. She was certain, by the way they switched so rapidly, that the truth was something she was incapable of comprehending, and the mists and stone and sky were her mind trying to make sense of that.\n\nThey walked in companionable silence for a hundred beats through the shifting landscape. It didn't feel the kind of place you flew through. Lamprophyre was just thinking about whether someone could end up somewhere completely different whether she flew or walked or crawled when a white light flashed in front of them, and then there was a doorway. It looked as if it had always been there, though Lamprophyre had been looking right at it when it appeared. More of the shifting mists filled it.\n\n\"You go first. You're entitled,\" Porphyry said.\n\nLamprophyre shot him a suspicious glance\u2014entitled, how?\u2014but walked through the doorway into a well-lit, open space that smelled of strawberries and fresh air and curried lamb. She immediately stopped and looked around for the source of the smells, but found nothing. The room\u2014cavern, perhaps\u2014was the size of the hatching cavern back home, but its walls were of some white stone she didn't recognize. That sent a flash of fear through her, that maybe death had made her no longer a dragon to sense stone, but she immediately dismissed the fear as unworthy. Whatever the stone was, it glowed with magical light, and that made it no stone that existed in the real world.\n\nA white dragon, white like the snows of Mother Stone shading to pale blue in the curves of his body, sat with his back to her, drawing on the wall. Despite being male, he was the biggest dragon Lamprophyre had ever seen, and yet there was something beautifully masculine in the curve of his shoulders and the way his wings furled across his back so no one would ever mistake him for female.\n\nLamprophyre approached him, curious about his drawing. Whatever medium he was using, it made the lines spark and glow wherever it passed. As she drew nearer, she realized he was using nothing but his claws, and it astonished her so much she said, \"How is that possible?\"\n\n\"It's the way I interact with the Immanence,\" the dragon said. His voice was more beautiful than Sardonyx's, reminding Lamprophyre of wind through the trees and rivers rushing over stone and crackling fires, and it sounded familiar. \"I arose from it, and it likes to remind me that part of me is still connected to it.\" He stopped drawing and gestured at the wall. \"What do you think?\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at the drawing. Tiny, perfect dragons circled a mountain rendered in exquisite detail, in patterns of circles and lines and spirals that made them seem ready to fly out of the drawing. \"It's beautiful,\" she said. \"It reminds me of Dolomite's art.\"\n\nThe dragon laughed. \"High praise indeed.\" He rose and turned around, looming over Lamprophyre. His eyes were as black and featureless as a starless sky, without iris or pupil or white, but despite their ominous appearance Lamprophyre felt no fear facing him. \"You know who I am?\" he asked.\n\nLamprophyre swallowed. She now recognized the voice, though she'd only ever heard a pale imitation of it. \"I don't understand,\" she said. \"I can tell you're God, and you sound like Jiwanyil, but you look like Katayan. Katayan's not real.\"\n\n\"That is both true and false,\" the dragon said. \"I am your God, yes, and this is the form the Immanence granted me, the form I gave my first and greatest creation. But in the wake of disaster, when so much knowledge was lost or warped, humans came to believe there must be a God to govern each type of creation. So they created Katayan just as dragons created Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"And yet humans call on Jiwanyil, and receive prophecies from him.\"\n\n\"I am God regardless of the name I'm given. I don't mind being called Jiwanyil or Katayan. If you need a name for me, Katayan is as fitting as any. The humans got one thing right\u2014I have been separated from my first children for far too long.\"\n\n\"And\u2026Mother Stone?\"\n\nKatayan's face stilled. \"You like stories,\" he said. \"I would like to share one with you, for all our sakes. If you don't mind.\"\n\nPuzzling over that, Lamprophyre nodded. Katayan sat and folded his wings around himself, so Lamprophyre did the same, with Porphyry settling next to her in silence.\n\n\"All life seeks to perpetuate itself,\" Katayan said. \"My mate and I\u2014\"\n\n\"Your mate?\" Lamprophyre blurted out, then clapped a hand over her mouth, mortified.\n\n\"This is going to be a very long story if you interrupt,\" Katayan said with a smile. \"My mate is far too powerful for you to comprehend, and you will never see her. But even a God cannot create alone, and we made you like ourselves, male and female. It was so beautiful seeing you grow in knowledge and love of each other. You were our finest creation.\n\n\"But we made a decision, early on, that we would not hover over you, directing your every move. We created you with the desire to learn for yourselves, only leaning on us when you chose to call on us. We could not speak to you unless you spoke first. And that was ultimately a mistake. Go ahead, ask me why.\"\n\nLamprophyre's gaze flicked to the drawing of the mountain. \"Why was it a mistake?\"\n\nKatayan settled back on his haunches. \"It meant that when your understanding of your creation, of God's nature, changed over time, we were powerless to correct you. And we're talking about millennia of existence. You know how stories alter in the telling as they pass from speaker to speaker. Even the prodigious memories of dragons couldn't stop that happening.\"\n\n\"And that led to the worship of Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\" The glowing walls vanished, and they suddenly appeared to be sitting on the ledge in front of the cavern mouth leading to the prison chamber deep within Mother Stone. \"That led to Sardonyx.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked around. The air smelled of snow and was freezing cold, though she felt it as if she were wrapped in Rokshan's fur-lined coat, as if it were the memory of cold. She didn't ask if it was real. That was irrelevant. \"I know Sardonyx wanted to eradicate humans. You didn't say where humans came from.\"\n\nKatayan tilted his head to look directly at the sun, a feat impossible for anything mortal. \"We made humans on a dare,\" he said. \"Fitting, given how they turned out. My mate and I were discussing the nature of the Immanence and disagreed as to its fundamental nature. So we decided to\u2026encourage\u2026the Immanence to create something given some basic guidelines. We wanted to see if such a creation would be viable. And the Immanence produced humans. Brash, daring, short-lived, but with such profound capacity for feeling joy it surprised us. We were glad to take them under our wings, though technically we weren't their creators.\"\n\n\"That's beautiful!\"\n\nKatayan turned his gaze back on her. \"I'm glad you think so. Not everyone did. In the era when Sardonyx was born, humans and dragons knew some of the truth of their creation, enough that Sardonyx was able to willfully misunderstand the purpose of humanity\u2014and conclude they were a pestilence unworthy of sharing a world with God's children.\"\n\nA low rumble heralded an avalanche in the distance. Lamprophyre started to reevaluate her sense of their surroundings. \"So why didn't\u2014no, I see. You'd sworn not to interfere unless dragons asked you to. But why didn't they do that? I know humans and dragons fought Sardonyx together, so they wanted her gone. They could have asked for your help.\"\n\nKatayan's fathomless eyes seemed to be looking at something incomprehensibly distant. \"By then, dragons had forgotten their connection to their God. They believed\u2014the details don't matter. You see, the prohibition against speaking to our creations didn't apply to humans. As part of our ongoing experiment, we decided to do the opposite with them, and gave them frequent instruction in the form of what they called prophecies. And because that only happened to humans, dragons came to believe God expected them to be completely self-sufficient. I'm afraid it made them prideful.\"\n\n\"And Sardonyx was the ultimate end of that line of belief.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" With a blink, they hovered over a desert of featureless dunes extending as far as the eye could see. Lamprophyre had only ever heard stories of the desert, how its cruel heat and arid climate made it inhospitable even to dragons, but again the heat felt at a remove, as if there were invisible walls between her and the radiant sands.\n\n\"The real problem was that humans and dragons knew enough to realize they needed to fight Sardonyx together,\" Katayan went on, \"but they believed they could do it without any outside help. Humans were used to being directed by God, but not to asking God for guidance, and of course dragons had stopped asking altogether. So they fought a series of losing battles, all the while waiting for the prophecy that would tell them what to do.\"\n\nLamprophyre drew in a breath of air that had no moisture in it whatsoever. It dried her nostrils and made her eyes feel tight and itchy. She wished she could look at Porphyry to see what he thought of all this. She'd never known him to be anything but restless during a story, and yet he hadn't moved this whole time. \"Did you give them a prophecy?\"\n\n\"No,\" Katayan said. \"At least not the one they expected. Humans had only just discovered that stones are imbued with the power of the Immanence in various ways. I guided them to create what you would call an artifact that contained the power of God and left it to them to work out how to use it. If dragons had been willing to call on me, that artifact could have killed Sardonyx and her followers. As it is, the humans came up with a needlessly elaborate, fully human scheme that would bind Sardonyx in the great mountain.\"\n\nLamprophyre nodded. \"Except it needed dragons as well.\"\n\n\"The dragons of the time agreed to let their spirits fuel the magic, and go on fueling the magic, until someone could come up with a more permanent solution. They arranged things so a human presence in the prison would free Sardonyx, knowing that no human could reach that chamber without the help of a dragon. They assumed that could only happen deliberately. What none of them realized was that the magic was so powerful it would kill everyone involved, leaving no one alive who understood the plan.\"\n\nAnother flicker, and they were back in the white-walled chamber. The drawing on the wall still glimmered and sparked, but Lamprophyre was sure the dragons had shifted position while they were gone\u2014or had they been gone at all?\n\nKatayan continued, \"So that was the result of your Great Cataclysm. The humans knew Sardonyx and her followers were gone and that humans and dragons together had done something to make that happen, but nothing more. Their legends of Jiwanyil and Katayan and the rest arose out of their imperfect memories. They never saw another dragon, and concluded all dragons had died. And life went on.\"\n\n\"But where did Mother Stone come in?\"\n\n\"You know, I really did intend to make you save all your questions until the end,\" Katayan said with a smile, \"but I think you learn better this way, Lamprophyre. The dragons who weren't part of the magic knew only two things: dragon deaths as bound by the death-song were essential to keeping Sardonyx imprisoned, and a human presence on Mother Stone would release her. So they made up a new story, of their 'god' Mother Stone and their devotion to her. They told the rising generation nothing of the truth, just passed down the knowledge of the death-song and the warning against humans setting foot on Mother Stone. They believed they were doing the right thing.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nKatayan looked down at her, still smiling that tender, loving smile that made her feel warm all over. \"No more questions?\"\n\nLamprophyre thought over what she'd learned. \"Just one,\" she said. \"What exactly did I do? Why did I have to be involved in waking the\u2026the guardians? Was there something special about me all along?\"\n\nKatayan laughed. \"That's three questions, my child. But I won't put a limit on your learning. All along, I have had the power to stop Sardonyx, but only if I was called on to do so. You are the first dragon in a millennium to call upon God, and you did it three times. First, in asking me to purge the Third Ecclesiast of Sardonyx's taint. Second, in asking me to protect you from Sardonyx's mental attack. And third, in asking me to join you with the spirits of the dragons guarding Mother Stone.\"\n\n\"But I thought I was calling upon Jiwanyil.\"\n\n\"I did tell you it doesn't matter to me which name you use, yes?\" Katayan spread his wings once, flexing them wide, and furled them again. The wings had temporarily blocked Lamprophyre's view of the drawing, and when he moved them, she was certain the tiny dragons had changed position. \"Your prayer to me gave me the opportunity to act, not only removing Sardonyx's threat but also allowing those thousands of dragons to return to their eternal home. A thousand years is a long time to wait, even for a dragon.\"\n\nLamprophyre sat back. \"And that's all?\"\n\n\"You mean, how were you able to turn Sardonyx's mental attack back on her?\" Katayan shrugged. \"It's a rather dubious gift some five dragons in a hundred are born with, the ability to speak thoughts in addition to passively hearing them. Sardonyx was the first to discover its use and the first to turn it against her kin. There are at least thirty dragons living who are capable of it. But it had nothing to do with your sacrifice, or with being able to fight Sardonyx. What mattered was my protection granted you against her attack, thanks to your request. You don't need to fear turning into Sardonyx.\"\n\n\"You'd never do that, anyway,\" Porphyry said. \"We'd pin your wings back if you tried it.\"\n\nLamprophyre elbowed him in the ribs. \"Then what was it we encountered in the chamber? The thing that spoke with Jiwanyil's voice? Sardonyx knew it was an object, and that it would give her power.\"\n\nKatayan looked grim. \"That was a remnant of the artifact the humans created,\" he said. \"It fueled the magic and was reinforced with every dragon death. But Sardonyx in her slumber found a way to tap into it, and was gradually draining it in her effort to free herself. It was me, and not-me, with some of my knowledge and the ability to speak answers to questions, but lacking any real consciousness. I am glad Sardonyx destroyed it. It has been like grit under my scales for a thousand years.\"\n\nLamprophyre looked at Porphyry. He was smiling his familiar cheeky smile, like he knew a secret she didn't. \"I can't think of anything else, except\u2026no. Thank you for telling me this story. I wish I could tell it to others.\"\n\nKatayan rose to his feet. \"Oh, but I intend you to,\" he said.\n\nLamprophyre couldn't help it; she looked around at the chamber, empty except for the three of them. \"Is this what death looks like, then? We were always taught dragon spirits are taken into Mother Stone's rest, but I know that's false.\"\n\n\"It's far more interesting than that,\" Porphyry said. \"It's\u2014\"\n\n\"Porphyry, don't taunt your clutchmate,\" Katayan said. \"And I'm afraid I'm not done with you yet, Lamprophyre.\"\n\nThat made her nervous. Calling upon a God was one thing, but being his tool, or weapon\u2014that was a burden heavier than she wanted to bear. Even so, she stood and threw her shoulders back, arching her wings above her. \"What do you mean?\" she asked, hoping her stance looked confident and not defiant.\n\n\"I did tell you this didn't mean your doom,\" Katayan said. \"My mate and I have discussed the situation, and we've decided our finest creation doesn't deserve to go on in ignorance of the truth. We can't alter you to allow ourselves to speak to you unbidden, but nothing says we can't send someone on our behalf.\"\n\nLamprophyre's heart beat faster. \"I'm not dead?\"\n\n\"You're dead, for now,\" Katayan said. \"But that won't last. I don't have to ask if you remember everything I told you, do I? Of course not. Tell the others. Teach them what you learned. And lead them to speak to God.\"\n\nLamprophyre realized she was clinging to Porphyry's hand tightly enough to make her scales go pale. \"But they'll forget over time. They'll end up lost again.\"\n\nKatayan laughed. \"I think you'll find,\" he said, \"that writing things down is far safer than oral tradition, as far as remembering goes. Write this story, and see it preserved, and your words will live far longer than you do.\"\n\n\"I will. I promise.\"\n\nPorphyry hugged her. \"And tell the others it's safe to bury us on Mother Stone now,\" he said. \"No more trapping dragon spirits, and it's so much easier than digging a pit. Though I've seen the burial stone you made me. It's beautiful.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't forget you even if we hadn't done that.\" She hugged him back.\n\nThen Katayan took her by the hand and guided her to stand in front of him, enfolding her in his wings so all she could see was the drawing of the mountain and the dragons. \"Thank you,\" he said. \"Now, watch them fly.\"\n\nLamprophyre watched the picture, which was now clearly in motion, spirals and curves and loops and dives as the dragons endlessly circled the mountain. She felt as if she were falling into it, very slowly, and then her fall sped up, and the dragons weren't circling the mountain, they were flying at her face, surrounding her with the sound of dragon wings\u2014 \u2014and she came to herself with a gasp, her eyes blinking open. The endless blue sky curved over her, pale and brilliant in the afternoon sun. She lay uncomfortably on her back with her wings furled beneath her like a couple of knobby rock protrusions. The scent of snow carried by the freezing wind enveloped her.\n\nShe lifted her head, feeling incapable of moving anything else. She appeared to lie on a narrow rock ledge covered with a damp film where her body had melted the snow clinging to it. Rokshan huddled a short distance away, his face and arms pressed to the mountainside, his shoulders shaking from his heavy breathing. She couldn't tell if he was frightened or grieving.\n\n\"Rokshan,\" she said, hoping she wouldn't startle him off the ledge. \"Rokshan, help me.\"\n\nRokshan's head came up. His wings twitched convulsively. \"Lamprophyre?\"\n\n\"I can't sit up. Help me, please?\"\n\nRokshan scrambled to her side and helped her sit, freeing her wings. He touched her face wonderingly, as if he was amazed to feel scales and bone rather than the insubstantial body she'd had when she died. \"I thought you were dead.\"\n\n\"I was dead, and now I'm not. Rokshan, you're a dragon!\"\n\nHe blinked at her. \"I think you being no longer dead is far more extraordinary than me managing the transformation I've been planning for weeks.\"\n\n\"No\u2014well, maybe, but my story is too long and complicated\u2014how did it happen? You couldn't have found the sodalite artifact so quickly!\"\n\nRokshan went from touching her face to putting a hand on her shoulder. \"It wasn't necessary once we figured it out. Well, Tekentriya did. She was fairly scathing about how we should have seen it in the first place. She said if Hyaloclast didn't need it to transform you, Dolomite, as creator of my dragon body and a dragon himself, didn't need it either. It was close, though. There was no way to save my human body, and Tekentriya knew it. But we weren't very far from the marble quarry, so\u2014Lamprophyre, you're alive!\"\n\nHe threw his arms around her, holding her close. She ran her hands down his back, marveling at the feel of his scales and the sleek muscles beneath the skin.\n\n\"It feels so different,\" she murmured. \"The pair-bond, I mean. It's bigger and more diffuse, but it's still you.\"\n\n\"It's wonderful,\" Rokshan said. \"I know you said it would be, but I had no idea how wonderful.\" He released her, taking her hand. \"Can you fly? I wasn't joking about not being sure I could manage it alone. I was sitting there, going back and forth between grief at your death and fear that I was going to die alongside you because I couldn't fly back, and not sure I cared if I did, and then\u2026\" He let out a deep breath. \"I love you. I'm ready for the rest of our life to begin.\"\n\nLamprophyre smiled and rested her head briefly on his shoulder. \"You know,\" she said, \"I don't know if I told you this, but dragons have sex in midair. While flying.\"\n\nRokshan burst out laughing. \"I think I need more flying practice before I'm ready to attempt that.\"\n\n\"It's all right. We have time,\" Lamprophyre said. \"A whole lifetime of it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "EPILOGUE",
                "text": "[ Four years later ]\n\nLamprophyre paced outside the hatching cavern, restlessly watching the western sky. It was growing late, and the sun's rays turned the fluffy clouds pink and gold. So much could still go wrong. Rokshan wouldn't drop the egg, but what if sunset came and the egg wasn't ready? Flying at night was dangerous. What if they'd judged wrong, and the egg wasn't ready to hatch until midnight? What if the dragonet wasn't strong enough to break through the shell?\n\n\"Calm down,\" Hyaloclast said. \"Every mother feels this way. When Aegirine made this journey with you, I was sure he would drop your egg accidentally. But fathers are always careful.\"\n\nLamprophyre cast a quick glance at her mother. \"Rokshan's not an ordinary father.\"\n\n\"We've done everything we can to prepare him. He took good care of the egg during the twelvedays of her gestation. He'll be fine. You, on the other hand\u2014\" Hyaloclast eyed her narrowly\u2014 \"appear to be on the verge of collapse.\"\n\n\"You can be calm. Your ordeal is over.\"\n\nHyaloclast shrugged. \"I find, after having survived Sardonyx's attack, other things seem less terrifying. I can't explain how awful it was to be locked away inside my own head like that. The minor issue of waiting for Leucite to carry our egg here, and seeing small Mica be born, pales in comparison.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you only took two twelvedays to recover. The flight almost made me queen in your place.\" Lamprophyre shuddered and went back to pacing and watching the sky. \"I already have a role to play, thanks.\"\n\n\"And one I wouldn't trade you for. Prophet of a forgotten God.\" Hyaloclast pointed. \"I think that's him.\"\n\nLamprophyre had already felt the tingling warmth of her pair-bond that said Rokshan was approaching. She spread her wings and lifted half a handspan off the ground before settling back, feeling embarrassed at her show of impatience. But Hyaloclast didn't say anything. They watched together until the distant speck was clearly a dragon, gleaming green and gold against the afternoon sky. Then Hyaloclast put a hand on Lamprophyre's shoulder. \"Let me know when the dragonet is born,\" she said, and flew away with a great flapping of wings.\n\nLamprophyre stopped herself jigging with excitement as Rokshan flew closer. When he finally landed, she took the egg from him and said, \"You look exhausted. Are you all right?\"\n\nRokshan nodded. His eyes looked weary and his hands shook when he let go of the egg. \"I'll be fine once our dragonet is born. Which should be soon. I'm sorry I'm not a faster flyer.\"\n\nThe egg jumped in Lamprophyre's hands, and the click of claws against shell was audible. \"Hurry, then,\" Lamprophyre said, ducking through the smallish opening that led to the hatching chamber.\n\nInside, the cave opened up immediately, becoming big enough to fit a dozen dragons without any of them touching. Purple and blue phosphorescence made delicate traceries on the walls, coloring Lamprophyre a more vivid blue and turning Rokshan's emerald scales iridescent purple. Lamprophyre hurried to the prepared nest of soft dry grasses and set the egg down. Rokshan followed more slowly and sat rather abruptly beside the nest, letting out a deep sigh. \"Are you sure you're all right?\" Lamprophyre said. \"There's still some time\u2014do you need a drink, or food, or anything? You've thrown your whole heart into this.\"\n\n\"I just need a rest, and more than four hours' uninterrupted sleep,\" Rokshan said. \"Is that normal?\"\n\n\"Yes. All fathers say the same,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's just that you're not an ordinary dragon father, so I thought, maybe you needed more.\"\n\nRokshan smiled. \"You and the flight have done more than enough to help me. I hope it was enough. My memory is better, as a dragon, than it was as a human, but there are so many stories to remember, so many traditions to pass on to the egg, I admit to being a little worried.\"\n\nThe egg rocked, making them both fall silent and stare at it. Lamprophyre dropped to her knees across from Rokshan. \"But you have an advantage in not knowing the stories that turned out to be false. You're the first dragon father to pass on only the truths I learned from God.\"\n\n\"I know. It doesn't stop me worrying.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\nThe egg rocked harder, nearly falling out of the nest. Rokshan and Lamprophyre each put out a hand to steady it. The clicking taptaptap of the unborn dragonet's claws became louder. Then a sharp crack rang out, echoing in the huge cavern, and Lamprophyre gasped as a jagged black line shot across the gleaming golden surface of the egg. More lines spidered out from the first, and shards of eggshell snapped off and fell to lie in the soft grasses.\n\nA small gray form stretched within the shell, knocking off more shards as her tiny wings flexed. She kicked, sending eggshell flying, and ended up on her back with her little face screwed up, ready to cry out from the discomfort of lying on her wings. Rokshan gently righted her. She looked up at him. \"Papa,\" she said in a clear, fluting voice. \"You're so big.\"\n\nRokshan swallowed. \"It's because you're so small,\" he said. \"You'll be as big as Mama someday.\"\n\nThe dragonet turned liquid green eyes on Lamprophyre. \"Mama is bigger,\" she agreed. \"And blue. And Papa is green, and I am\u2026I don't know this color that I am.\"\n\n\"You're gray,\" Lamprophyre said, \"but in a few years that will change.\"\n\n\"Papa told me things while I slept,\" the dragonet said. \"About colors and animals and Katayan and dragons and humans. And that my name is Garnet. Is it a good name?\"\n\n\"Of course. It's the best name,\" Rokshan said, gathering his daughter into his lap. \"Your mama picked it because garnets are a stone filled with life, and we hoped that would bless you.\"\n\nGarnet stretched her arms and legs and wings and then folded herself into a little gray ball. \"I'm glad,\" she said, yawning, and fell instantly asleep.\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan were left staring at each other in wonder. \"I can't believe it,\" Lamprophyre said. \"She's perfect. Everything is perfect.\"\n\n\"I'm so relieved,\" Rokshan said. \"And now the exhaustion is setting in.\"\n\n\"I'll go get Hyaloclast, to welcome Garnet to the flight,\" Lamprophyre said. \"And then I think we both should sleep for at least a day. Then the real work begins.\"\n\nThey traveled to Tanajital a twelveday later, taking turns carrying Garnet and the bag containing Garnet's eggshell to give to Manishi. Lamprophyre no longer worried about what Manishi might do with it. After their encounters with Viveki, she knew the difference between passive antagonism and active malice. They could endure Manishi's relatively minor self-centered malevolence.\n\nThe dragonet laughed and clapped her hands whenever Lamprophyre dove, despite Rokshan's protests that she was too little for aerial acrobatics. But by the end of the trip, he was diving with their daughter, too.\n\nLamprophyre gave a wave to the embassy the way she always did. She'd handed over her ambassadorial responsibilities to Cymophane when she became in egg, but she'd spent so many years there it still felt like a second home. They were too high for her to tell if anyone waved back. Her household had changed so much, between Abhit going to the academy and Preyanka returning from her training as an ecclesiast and Bhakriya and Depik welcoming an infant son and, last year, a daughter to their family, much to Kavari and Rassika's delight. They would have to stop at the embassy to introduce Garnet to everyone. But they had a more important stop to make first.\n\nThe guards at the great doors of the palace bowed as they approached, holding those doors open wide for their draconic guests. \"Please tell my parents we've arrived,\" Rokshan told the chamberlain Mekel, who greeted them in the entrance hall. Mekel bowed, his thoughts full of never would have guessed and little thing's adorable, not at all like a lizard as he hurried away. Lamprophyre wanted to smack him, but controlled herself when Garnet said, \"What's a lizard?\"\n\n\"Garnet, remember humans can't help their thoughts,\" Rokshan said, \"and it's a dragon's responsibility to be polite and not listen in.\"\n\n\"But I don't know how not to,\" Garnet complained.\n\n\"Then you have to be especially polite and not say anything about what you hear.\" Rokshan hitched the dragonet higher on his shoulder and said, \"I hope this wasn't a mistake.\"\n\n\"We all agreed four years ago that if dragons were going to be more fully part of human culture, it was bad manners to eavesdrop on humans when they didn't know we could hear thoughts,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It's not as if Garnet will give anything away. And if nothing else, it will keep your father honest.\"\n\n\"If he comes at all,\" Rokshan said bitterly.\n\n\"Who is Father?\" Garnet asked. \"He should want to see me because I'm adorable.\"\n\nLamprophyre and Rokshan burst out laughing. \"I can see we need to discuss more than just eavesdropping etiquette,\" Lamprophyre said. \"Garnet, we're here to see Papa's mama and papa, remember? 'Father' is what some humans call their papa.\"\n\n\"Because Papa was a human first,\" Garnet said.\n\n\"Exactly. And\u2014\"\n\nShe heard movement at the top of the right-hand stairs and fell silent. Ekanath and Satiya emerged, hand in hand. They were alone, with no retinue or horn-blowers. They stopped and looked down at the three dragons. Lamprophyre heard Rokshan's surface thoughts of dismay and regret that smoothed into resignation. He stepped forward. \"Mother, Father,\" he said, lifting the dragonet, \"this is my daughter Garnet. Garnet, say hello.\"\n\nGarnet flapped her wings idly. \"Hello,\" she said. \"You're my papa's mama and papa. I thought humans were small, but you're bigger than me.\"\n\nSatiya let go of Ekanath's hand and descended the stairs, her eyes never leaving Garnet. \"Oh, my,\" she said. \"Why, you're beautiful. I didn't know dragons could be gray.\"\n\n\"All dragonets are gray to begin with,\" Lamprophyre said. \"They gain their adult color when they're about five years old.\"\n\n\"And she speaks,\" Ekanath said. He hadn't moved, just stood at the top of the stairs with his fists clenched.\n\n\"I taught Garnet speech while she was in the egg,\" Rokshan said. He wasn't looking at his father. \"Along with things a dragon needs to know.\"\n\n\"She's not much bigger than a human baby,\" Satiya said. \"May I\u2026is it all right if I hold her?\"\n\nRokshan hesitated, then held Garnet out to his mother. Satiya took the dragonet gingerly, looking worried about dropping her, but Lamprophyre saw her relax the moment she realized how solid Garnet was. \"Oh, my,\" Satiya repeated. Her eyes gleamed with tears Lamprophyre didn't understand. \"Ekanath, come here.\"\n\nEkanath's jaw tightened. He didn't move.\n\n\"Come here,\" Satiya said, putting steel into her words. Ekanath hesitated a beat longer, then descended the stairs to join her. \"Look at her, Ekanath,\" she said. \"Your granddaughter is a dragon.\"\n\nEkanath looked at Garnet. His jaw relaxed slightly. \"I won't,\" he began, then fell silent.\n\n\"You don't like me?\" Garnet said. She sounded curious and not at all hurt. \"I thought everybody liked me. Why are you different?\"\n\nThis time, Ekanath's gaze flicked briefly to Rokshan before returning to rest on the dragonet. \"I like you,\" he said. \"Stop listening to my thoughts.\"\n\n\"Father,\" Rokshan said, warning in his voice.\n\n\"I don't understand your thoughts,\" Garnet said, just as if Ekanath hadn't spoken. \"Should Papa not have become a dragon?\"\n\n\"I said\u2014\" Ekanath's voice rose dangerously loud.\n\nLamprophyre snatched Garnet away from Satiya and cradled her against her shoulder. \"Dragonets can't control what they hear,\" she said, carefully maintaining her calm so Garnet wouldn't hear her anger. \"And it's not as if she heard anything we didn't already know. Rokshan hoped seeing Garnet would convince you. It looks like he was wrong.\"\n\nEkanath closed his eyes and let out a breath, trying to calm himself as well. He opened his eyes and looked first at Rokshan, then at Garnet, whose liquid green eyes meeting his were the only color about her. \"You rejected your birthright,\" he said in a weary voice. \"I'll never understand that. But this\u2026you have a wife, you have a child, you've taken on responsibilities I thought I'd never see you accept. You haven't lived your life the way I hoped. But that's not up to me.\"\n\nHe moved forward until he was in front of Rokshan. \"Thank you for wanting me to meet your child. My granddaughter,\" he said. \"I don't know if I'll ever understand you, Rokshan, but I honor your courage.\"\n\nRokshan's thoughts were a turmoil of pain and fear and relief. He extended his hand to his father, who clasped it. \"That's enough for me,\" he said.\n\nEkanath turned to face Lamprophyre. \"My granddaughter,\" he said, sounding less weary. \"A dragon granddaughter. Damen of Fanishkor will be green with envy.\"\n\n\"Can humans be green?\" Garnet asked.\n\n\"Only metaphorically,\" Ekanath said. He held out his hands. \"Come here, and let me look at you. My eyes aren't what they used to be.\"\n\nGarnet reached out her hands to the king and tugged on his beard. \"Humans are hairy,\" she said. \"I like it. Being different is nice.\"\n\n\"You know,\" Ekanath said, \"I think you might be right.\"\n\nLate that night, curled up around Garnet in their comfortable warm cave, Lamprophyre said, \"I told Dharan I would meet him in two days to review the last pages I dictated. Do you mind if I spend the night in Tanajital?\"\n\n\"Garnet and I will be fine,\" Rokshan said. He straightened the dragonet's wing so it draped over her more comfortably. \"I'm looking forward to seeing the book published.\"\n\n\"It won't be useful for a while, though teaching dragons to read is a lot simpler than I realized,\" Lamprophyre said. \"It does make me miss Porphyry.\"\n\n\"You talk about him every day,\" Rokshan pointed out. \"Part of the truth about God's relationship with dragons, and how we worship him. Though I wish Khadar weren't quite so insufferable about how humans were right about Katayan. It could only be worse if he were the Second Ecclesiast instead of the Fifth, representative of the human notion of Katayan.\"\n\n\"I don't mind,\" Lamprophyre said. \"The Archprelate treats me as an equal, which means Khadar has to show me respect, and so long as he keeps his insufferableness limited to his thoughts, I can handle him.\"\n\n\"He might want to meet Garnet too. I think that should wait until she's a little older and better able to block thoughts.\"\n\nLamprophyre stretched. \"I'll miss you, though I'm not sure Garnet will feel the same about me. Dragonets are so self-absorbed she probably sees me as a force of nature rather than as a person.\"\n\nThat made Rokshan laugh quietly so he wouldn't wake the dragonet. \"You're right. She'll want to spend time with her clutch.\"\n\n\"Garnet, Mica, Jasper, and Feldspar,\" Lamprophyre recited. \"Two males, two females, perfect for pairing.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Coquina and Flint would love to see Garnet pair-bonded with little Jasper. Is it usual to plan matches for dragonets this early?\"\n\nLamprophyre stretched and laid her head on Rokshan's shoulder. Her fingers twined with his. \"In a joking sort of way. Obviously we can't arrange things. But wouldn't it be sweet, the children of pair-bonded clutchmates ending up pair-bonded themselves?\"\n\nRokshan chuckled. \"Or Garnet will go the route her mother did, and find herself a human willing to become a dragon for her sake.\"\n\n\"I don't know how much power that serpentine artifact still has. It transformed me, and you, and Tekentriya, and who knows how many people before us.\"\n\n\"Tekentriya wants to see Garnet when she and Zekran get back from Kolmira,\" Rokshan said. \"But she'll come here. Riding. I would be superstitious about riding if I were her, but she's always been braver than I.\"\n\n\"It's just a different kind of bravery.\" She'd been present the day Tekentriya's husband Zekran, aided by the sodalite artifact Rokshan had retrieved from Viveki, had transformed Tekentriya not into a dragon, but into the undamaged, pain-free body he remembered so well. Rokshan refused to tell Lamprophyre what he'd done to Viveki, and Lamprophyre didn't care enough to pry. All she cared was that it was permanent. \"You were brave to change your species.\"\n\n\"Hah. That was easy. I had a beautiful mate waiting for me, which is all the incentive I needed.\" Rokshan rolled on his side to look at Lamprophyre, carefully steadying Garnet so she wouldn't be overlain. \"A beautiful mate to share beautiful intimacy with.\" He caressed the sensitive spot at the back of her head, sending wave after wave of pleasure through her.\n\n\"Mmm,\" she said, leaning into his touch. \"It's better than kissing.\"\n\n\"Better than kissing,\" Rokshan said, resting his chin on her shoulder so she could touch him in return, \"and something we have a lifetime to explore.\"\n\nLamprophyre remembered the white-walled chamber whose details hadn't faded with time, remembered the great white dragon God and what he'd taught her. \"A lifetime,\" she said, \"and everything that comes after.\"\n\nIn her memory, the dragon God smiled."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "The Wildlands",
        "author": "Ausfer",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragon"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "It was all just so beautiful.\n\nKristine sighed in satisfaction. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, taking in the moment. She felt the warmth of the sun on her skin and the coolness of the air around her.... A stiff breeze blew by, sending her long hair flailing in the wind. As she opened her eyes with an exhale, she gazed at the view before her.\n\nA giant, moss covered rock wall loomed over her small frame. It must have been over 100 feet high. Kristine felt dwarfed by the massive stones. Above, a tiny waterfall sprinkled down to a shallow pool below, falling like a stream of spring rain. Under the waterfall the rock walls only trailed back, revealing the mouth of a very large cave. She peered in, staring as far as she could into the inky blackness. Thick clouds practically obscured the sun, letting a few stray rays peek through, casting the surrounding wood in a patchy warm light. Past the obscuring view of the forest, large hills dotted the horizon, with the occasional small mountain breaking the monotony of the sky line. Not a single hint of human colonization was anywhere to be seen for miles and miles. The cave seemed to beckon Kristine with an ominous, yet exciting call to adventure. The entire scene was breathtaking.\n\nSuch was the beauty of the Wildlands.\n\nKristine had entered the Wildlands many times before, always in secret, for it was forbidden. The expansive area was considered to be full of bad luck and ill omens, though as the generations passed the knowledge of why seemed to be forgotten. Hollow superstitions remained, mostly of dangerous monsters and spirits, and though towns and villages cropped up along the edge, no one dared to ever colonize the Wildlands. It was a dead zone to humans... Most locals spent all their life never setting foot inside, and even world-weary travelers generally perferred to circumvent the valley at all costs.\n\nBut not Kristine. She was an adventurous, independent woman, something that made her at odds with every single figure of male authority in her society. She even dared to dress in pants and other male clothing when she hiked, though she had sense enough to not let anyone see. To her, the Wildlands reminded her of her own carefree spirit, something that comforted her in a time when women were considered more like children than adults. She liked to hike into the valley when she could, enjoying the time spent with nature and the freedom from her town's busy life. Nothing bad had ever come of it, and she regarded the old superstitions about the area as silly folk stories.\n\nKristine put down her leather backpack and took out a small waterskin. Taking a drink, she suited back up and made her way to the waterfall. Kristine was excited. She had never penetrated this far into the Wildlands before, and was eager to explore new territory. This part of the valley was extremely rocky and giant slabs of shale spotted the hilly and uneven ground. Some of the rocks were even bigger than any house she had seen before. The lay of the land hinted at the possibility of natural caves... something she had been searching for the past few weeks. She had finally gotten lucky today when she happened upon the waterfall.\n\nUndaunted by the foreboding entrance, she made her way past the waterfall and into mouth of the cave.\n\nThe cave floor was warm and moist from the water. It had a strong sulphur smell. The inside was expansive, the ceiling easily being over 50 feet high. Large stalagmites dotted the ground. After more than a hundred feet in, she had trouble seeing any further, and decided to turn back for now. She made a mental note to bring a torch next time. She took one step towards the bright light of the entrance when she suddenly tripped on a boulder.\n\nAs she fell, Kristine smacked her head on a rock and cried out in pain. Shaking her head and feeling her skin for bleeding, she picked herself up and looked down on the ground before her.\n\nIn the darkness she could still easily make out the shape and color. And it wasn't a rock she had hit: It was a bone. A large animal pelvis. Suddenly, her blood turned to ice as she realized where she might be. She looked back. Her feet had caught on a large skull of a cow.\n\nJust then everything went dark. Something had suddenly blocked most of the light at the entrance to the tunnel.\n\nA deep, bestial voice rang out from the cave enterance, reverberating in the cave walls.\n\n\"What are you doing in my lair, human?\"\n\nKristine looked up, and made out the silhouette of a large animal that was blocking the light and making it nearly impossible to see outside. She could barely make out the outline of a pointed snout, extended bat-like wings, and a flowing tail.\n\nIt was a dragon.\n\nKristine became paralyzed with fear. She had always heard these creatures were hunted to extinction decades ago, and that they were no longer a threat. She did not know much about dragons, except that they apparently disliked humans and were known to eat them.\n\n\"Answer my question, human. My patience is limited.\" The creature's tone was cold and frightening.\n\nKristine cleared her throat and called out loudly. \"I apologize, magnificent beast. I am only an explorer with a love for nature, and my natural curiosity lead me to your den. I will leave immediately. Please forgive me.\" Kristine was fearing for her life, afraid that she had only unwittingly climbed onto the dragon's dinner table.\n\n\"You sound.... female. Show yourself.\" The dragon snorted loudly, sounding impatient.\n\nKristine got up and made her way to the cave entrance. Slowly, surely, her eyes adjusted to the bright light of the sun outside. It was then she caught a glimpse of the creature before her.\n\nThe dragon was clad in green scales, with a wealth of horns and fins adorning his proud head. His eyes gazed at her with a piercing yellow hue, and dark claws gripped the wet rock below. A thick tail swayed in the air slowly. His curved chest was embossed with a lighter shade of green armor plates which continued onto his belly. He was about the height of a horse, though with the tail he was undoubtedly much longer than any horse she had ever seen. His snout and claws were smeared with fresh blood, the creature no doubt back from a recent meal. The dragon's eyes stared at her with a sharp, piercing gaze, like an eagle's. Kristine was scared out of her wits at the sight of this fearsome dragon.\n\n\"Fine beast, I mean no harm. My kind has always regarded this valley as off-limits, and I knew not why-\"\n\n\"I am why, human.\" The dragon snorted. \"You say you were here only to explore. Is that true, that you have no other business here?\" He peered at her curiously.\n\n\"Yes... I like to hike and enjoy the outdoors. I did not know that you lived in such a place. Great beast, I mean you no harm. Please forgive me!\" She could not bring herself to keep eye contact with the creature and began to shake uncontrollably. Kristine knew she was at the mercy of this large creature.\n\nThe dragon softened his gaze and quelled her fear. \"Young one... I accept your story. You may relax, for I have just taken a meal and am not interested feeding again so soon.\"\n\n\"T-thank you, fair beast!\" Kristine looked up at the dragon, feeling immensely relieved. A tear welled up in her eye. She knew her life was in this creature's claws, and yet he had chosen mercy.... Her life was spared! She let out a loud exhale as she tried to collect herself.\n\n\"However....\" The dragon closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, mulling over some thoughts. Kristine tensed up.\n\n\"Hm.... I have not seen a female, dragon or human, for many years. I will let you go, but in return, you will mate with me.\"\n\nKristine choked on her own words, not even believing what he said. \"What?\"\n\nThe dragon looked directly at her. \"We dragons are a rare and dying breed, young one. This is the first year in many that I've met another creature capable of speech, much less love. Loneliness is my only friend, and has been for many a winter.\"\n\nThe dragon sighed. \"I have yearned for a companion for some time now. Please... simply give me this moment of intimacy... and you are free to go.\" The dragon then smiled encouragingly, his gaze softening and his yellow-hued eyes appearing a bit kinder than before.\n\n\"But-\"\n\n\"I will be gentle. Do not worry. Now, come.\" The dragon took a moment to bend down and wash his bloody snout and feet in the waterfall pool, and then retreated to a soft spot of grass not far from the cave entrance. He circled in place and sat down, beckoning Kristine with an imploring claw.\n\nKristine could not believe what she had gotten herself in to. Sleeping... with a dragon? Especially one as large as he? She was fearful and uneasy about what was to come. But as she followed the dragon, a thought came to her.\n\nShe had just remembered one more thing about dragons that were passed down through local stories: That these beasts were compulsive hoarders. In particular, they supposedly loved and adored shiny and metallic things. A smile crept across her lips. Could it be possible? Could she play her cards right and find a way to end up with some valuable treasure? She began to fantasize of huge mounds of gold and silver tucked deep in the dragon's cave.\n\nKristine's sense of adventure swelled up inside of her again. She plotted out her options, weighing her chances. Perhaps... if she could exhaust the dragon... make him weary from his pleasure... she could get him to collapse and nap right outside, where she could make a move to find his hoard. It must be deeper in the cave, she thought. She wouldn't have much time, but it might be possible if she could exhaust him.\n\nIt was settled in her mind. If the dragon desired pleasure, she would give it. In fact, this little game would be very similar to the one she played with the rich and lonely merchants and traders that occasionally stopped in at the town tavern for a drink. Seduce, dote, and tease until she got what she wanted from the poor fools. It would not be so different from them, she thought. And if the dragon was anything like other men she knew, it would not be so hard to get him to nap after sex.\n\nShe smirked, excited at the possibilities of taking home a dragon's hoard. No one would even believe her.\n\nAs she approached, the dragon spoke. \"Young one... You may call me Ralkan. What is your name?\"\n\nShe hung her head low, feigning reluctance. \"My name is Kristine, fine beast... er, Ralkan.\"\n\n\"Kristine, do not be afraid. I wish you no harm. Please, come close.\"\n\nKristine did as ordered, walking up to the powerful creature, full of suspense and a little intimidation. Ralkan brought his snout up to her chest, taking in her scent. Kristine decided to encourage him and gingerly brought her hands up to the dragon's large head as he sniffed, caressing his snout and feeling the cool scales on her hands. The dragon reacted to her touch, shuddering slightly and letting out a pleased sound. He gave Kristine a lick on her neck, which caused her to shiver. This encouraged the dragon, who began to lick and nip at her ears and neck. The sensation was stimulating for Kristine, she had to admit... even if it was from a dragon. Ralkan then bent lower to sniff at her crotch, and Kristine stiffened up, uncomfortable with the creature's abruptness. Taking in a few deep sniffs, the dragon then mouthed the tip of her leather pants and pulled gently.\n\n\"If you please....\"\n\nKristine nonchalantly stepped out of her clothes. She doubt the dragon would have been interested in a strip. Soon, she was naked from head to toe.\n\nRalkan drew to her bosom, sniffing at each breast and running a tongue across them several times.\n\n\"Human breasts.... they are curious things.\" he mused.\n\nThe dragon found these warm mounds to be of interest, as no female dragon had anything of comparison, and he was intrigued at their softness and yielding nature. He knew only of their function, and not much else. He drew his tongue across her breasts once more, feeling the flesh give under the firmness of his muscle. Kristine took her breast in hand and guided her nipple to the dragon's lips.\n\n\"Here... suckle it.\" she offered to the creature.\n\nTaken by her forwardness, Ralkan drew his lips to her skin and began to suck softly, caressing her flesh with his tongue. She sighed in pleasure as she felt his surprisingly gentle and relaxing tug on her bosom.\n\nKristine was pleasantly surprised at the dragon's caring and gentle demeanor. She pat his head and encouraged him as he switched teats, letting the first nipple pop out of his mouth, which was now erect from stimulation. As he began to suckle the other breast, her thoughts wandered to the dragon's penis. She wondered what it looked like and hoped for her own sake that he was not too big for her to take...\n\n\"Hm.... your skin. It has a pleasant taste.\" the dragon muttered. Coming from a dragon, such a compliment was not the sort of thing Kristine would have liked to hear....\n\nHe looked up at her and smiled. \"Don't worry though. I'm not getting any ideas.\"\n\nKristine gave a nervous laugh. She really didn't know what to say. The dragon sensed her uncomfortableness and raised his head to her level.\n\n\"I'm sorry if I upset you... I want you to be okay with this.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't take the unwilling?\" She asked, out of curiosity.\n\nRalkan looked away. \"Perhaps some of my brethren would have... but not me. Not when I've been without seeing another of my kind for over 12 years. One often ends up longing for companionship more than lust after enough solitude.\" His striking yellow eyes softened at his own words, as the dragon briefly recalled his many years of loneliness.\n\n\"Gosh... that's... that's a long time. I'm so sorry.\" Kristine couldn't help but feel a little pity for the magnificent creature.\n\nThe dragon picked his head back up and looked her in the eye. \"The past is always behind us, no need to trifle with it.\" Kristine weighed his words in her mind and the dragon turned away.\n\n\"Now.... I know something that may make you feel more at ease.\" He gave her a sly look. She wondered what he was thinking of when suddenly he dipped his head down between her legs and gave her a long lick.\n\nKristine jumped and cried out in surprise at the warm pressure between her legs. The dragon did not relent, though, and began to nudge his snout against her crotch as he explored the outside of her slit. The sensation was shocking to Kristine... but, after a few licks... she couldn't deny that it did not also feel wonderful. The dragon's tongue was thick, strong, and surprisingly long: it easily reached everywhere, and the muscle was incredibly warm and slick to boot. His broad tip flicked at her lips, and Kristine's fingers trailed down to Ralkan's snout and gripped him gently. She let out a small moan as he began to lick at a firm, rhythmic pace, causing the dragon to chuckle.\n\n\"You taste pleasant down here, too, you know.\"\n\nKristine let out a giggle in spite of her self. It had been a while since she had a lover that was this enthused with oral play.... even if he was a dragon. Ralkan eagerly explored her slit, pressing against and playing with her delicate lips and nuzzling her sensitive clitoris. The dragon's strong tongue was curling across her flesh and licking her with a steady pace, and the rhythmic movements were getting the better of her. She sighed and relaxed as she got lost in the warm, sliding sensation of the dragon's tongue caressing her outer folds. He looked back up at her, and they held eye contact. The two shared a quiet moment and smiled. Kristine was thrilled at the sight the creature's beautiful golden eyes staring back into her own.\n\nGently, she pushed his snout away. Ralkan looked confused for a moment and was about to speak, but Kristine immediately laid her back down on the soft grass and spread her legs wide.\n\n\"Don't quit.\" she pleaded.\n\nThe dragon smiled and nodded, and laid down in front of her, placing a large forepaws over each thigh. She drew in a sharp breath at his touch, feeling the cool scales and hard claws grip gently on her delicate skin. He then brought his head down and began to nuzzle at her vulva once more. She inhaled sharply as she felt his broad snout press and slide against her lips, and the dragon's snout tip quickly became coated with a mix of saliva and juices from Kristine's arousal.\n\nJust then Kristine felt the dragon's warm breath on her slit as he opened her mouth. The sensation caused her to shudder in anticipation. She then felt the tip of his tongue gently press against her opening and she tensed up. She felt him tease at her entrance by pressing into her repeatedly with just barely not enough force to penetrate. His actions only served to heighten her anticipation, and it was working. Then, with a gasp, she felt the dragon slowly but surely penetrate her with his tongue. She exhaled slowly as she felt her vaginal walls spread as the tongue snaked its way deeper.\n\nRalkan let out a pleased growl and began to retract his tongue. He then thrust into her depths, curling his muscle and sticking it in as far as it could go, before retreating his tongue once again. Running through the motions several more times, he gradually picked up his speed. Eventually he came to lick her like this at a brisk pace, causing Kristine to squirm. Ralkan enjoyed this action as well, being able to explore the intimate parts of a female once again stirred many old and forgotten emotions in the dragon. The human's juices tasted wonderfully exotic to him. It was very unlike a female dragon, he mused. He also enjoyed seeing the human react to his stimulation... as she appeared to enjoy it immensely.\n\nIndeed, the dragon was doing a wonderful job, Kristine thought. The long tongue flexed and squirmed and touched all sorts of spots in her body that could not normally be reached. The feeling was incredible to her.... no man could have compared. She moaned and brought one hand up to her breasts, kneading them as her passages was serviced by the large draconic tongue. Her other passed lower and began to rub at her clitoris, spreading the top of her lips wide and running a finger over her sensitive nub.\n\nRalkan pressed his snout firmly into her crotch and snorted as he continued to thrust his tongue into her. She loved the feeling of his large nose pressing against her mound. Kristine began to gasp as Ralkan picked up his pace. His tongue was just so wild, so unique... and it was driving her crazy. After only a few more minutes of treatment, she could feel her own body begin to tense up.\n\n\"Oh goodness, Ralkan....\"\n\nThe dragon gave an inquisitive grunt, being unable to talk with his tongue being preoccupied.\n\n\"Ralkan... I'm.... I'm close.\"\n\nA long \"Mmmmmmm\" was the only response he could give at the moment, but the dragon surged with anticipation and began to double his efforts.\n\nRalkan deftly pressed his tongue deep into her depths and gripped her thighs in excitement of her impending orgasm. Kristine began to rock her hips into his snout and let out another moan. Mere seconds later, she felt her orgasm rush through her body and she cried out softly. Ralkan felt her passage constrict on his tongue and a rush of fluids seeped from her opening, which dribbled down his chin. After feeling her come down from her heights of bliss, the dragon retreated his tongue and looked down at her, licking his lips eagerly.\n\n\"Well... how do you feel?\" he smiled deviously.\n\nKristine looked up at him and gasped for air as she spoke. \"Ralkan... that... that was amazing.\"\n\nThe dragon chuckled and stood up. \"Well, I'm glad that I got you to come around. But now... I hope I can ask you to return the favor.\" He nervously smiled at her.\n\nKristine blinked. She was unsure of herself, and the idea of fellating a dragon didn't sound too appealing. However, she reminded herself of her goal.... She was to exhaust the dragon and find his treasure hoard. The hope of immense wealth caused her to steel her resolution and press on.\n\nFiguring that it would be smart to arouse Ralkan, she decided to play the dragon and gave him a seductive look. \"Of course I'll return the favor, Ralkan. You're all mine, now.\" She licked her lips slowly.\n\nThe dragon's eyes widened and he pawed the ground as his tail swished in the air erratically. It looked like her little tease worked. She smiled on the inside, and decided to keep up this little act of the temptress.\n\nKristine got up and moved towards the dragon. As she approached his side, the creature lifted her hind leg for her. Bending down, she could see he was already partially erect, his phallus peeking out from a small pouch of skin on his lower belly. The dragon's penis was a muddy brown color, and though not at full size, was already bigger than any man she had been with. His shaft was quite thick at the base already and tapered towards the tip, which was more angular and pointed than a human's. The entire phallus was glistening with a sheen of natural lubricant. Farther back, a pair of hefty testicles hung very closely against his body.\n\nKristine gulped. It was all very intimidating.\n\nShe knelt down and crept under the dragon's belly. Ralkan craned his neck to watch her every move. Kneeling just to the side of his phallus, she ran her hands across his scales, feeling his stomach and muscular thighs. She massaged him for several minutes, slowly bringing her hands ever closer to his crotch. His scales seemed smaller and smoother down here, Kristine thought. Eventually, she brought her hands to either side of the dragon's base, and continued to massage and rub. Time and time again she would sneak closer to the dragon's shaft, but pull away and continue to rub his belly.\n\n\"Mmm...you're quite a tease.\" Ralkan commented, his eyes shut firmly in concentration.\n\n\"I'm sorry. Have I been bad?\" she playfully asked.\n\nThe dragon paused before replying with a \"Yes.\" and Kristine knew she had him where she wanted.\n\nEventually she brought a hand down and touched just below the base of his penis. She could feel the firm shaft underneath his scales and gave it a squeeze. He could hear the dragon's breath tense up. Gripping the scaled skin in her hands, she slowly massaged the inside, coaxing a bit more of his shaft from hiding. She then moved her hand forward and drew a finger across his phallus, testing the waters. It felt slimy and warm, and it flexed as Kristine drew a finger across the pointed tip. She took that as a sign that the dragon enjoyed her touch.\n\nShe then wrapped her hand around the dragon's thick meat and squeezed, feeling the organ jump in her hands.\n\n\"Oh!\" The dragon jumped as her fingers clamped down.\n\n\"Did I hurt you?\" She asked.\n\n\"No... It's.... Well, I just hadn't considered that humans would their hands like that...\"\n\nKristine chuckled. \"Maybe us humans take them for granted.... Well, we do quite a lot with our hands.\" She squeezed his meat again, giggling. She enjoyed teasing the dragon.\n\n\"Mmmmm....\"\n\nThe dragon above her said nothing else and shifted his legs, excited and full of anticipation. By now his shaft had grown quite larger in arousal, and Kristine began to see the complicated contours of his phallus. She also began to notice that his manhood gave off a slight scent. She thought it was very thick and animal-like. Kristine began to rub his shaft, drawing her fingers across his subtle curves and bumps, and tracing his large urethra that traveled the underside of his length. She reached the tip and ran her finger across the sensitive flesh, her hand now slick with the dragon's natural lubricant. As she traced the edge of his pointed head, she wondered what the dragon would taste like. She figured she would have to try eventually, and despite her personal reservations decided to taste him. As her one hand slowly slid up and down the dragon's shaft, she brought her other hand to his tip and traced a finger around the head, gathering up a bit of his lubricant. She then rubbed it between her fingers a bit, feeling it's texture, before putting the coated fingertip in her mouth.\n\nIt tasted like.... nothing, really. She was surprised, figuring the dragon would have an unpleasant flavor. She brought both hands back to his shaft and continued to masturbate the dragon slowly, content in watching him gradually fill out his erection. She decided to put off her mouth action for now.\n\n\"You are very good at this. I love the feeling of your hands.\" Ralkan huffed.\n\nKristine replied seductively, taking the compliment in stride. \"I've had practice....\"\n\nAfter a few more minutes of stroking, the dragon's shaft had become fully erect. It was quite a sight to see. It easily two or three times as long as any man she had slept with, and had far more girth as well. She likened its thickness to her arm in some places. Kristine could see a couple faint veins span the outside of the shaft. It's previous brownish-red color had shifted into a deep reddish hue, and the tip was flared and spongy on her fingers. The phallus was slightly curved upward as the shaft tapered to the tip. It was incredibly smooth to the touch. and very firm in her hands, feeling like a tense muscle. To top it off, the sides were now covered in subtle, complex ridges, giving the penis a very unique feel.\n\nAll in all he was pretty intimidating, but Kristine knew she would have to tame this monster if she was to have a chance at some treasure.\n\n\"Okay... I think I need to be the one on my back now.\" Ralkan huffed. He was obviously very aroused. Kristine crawled out from under him and raised an eyebrow. The dragon smiled at her and plopped down onto his side, carefully tucking his wings up and rolling onto his back. He then opened his legs spread-eagle, revealing everything to her. His penis jiggled in the air as he shifted his weight. All the while, the dragon continued to watch her with his striking yellow eyes.\n\n\"I figured most creatures would prefer to stand...\" Kristine noted.\n\n\"That may be true for dragons also, but unlike most beasts... we enjoy intimacy as well.\" The dragon replied. Kristine mulled over his words, starting to consider what love may be like for a dragon.\n\n\"Plus, It's more arousing if I get to watch you.\" He added, causing Kristine to give a short laugh. She was surprised at this large creature... Although his bestial nature and fierce eyes gave a ferocious disposition, now that she was getting to know him the dragon was quite kind and personable at heart. It was a bit comforting.... and even a little arousing to her, knowing that this powerful beast was capable of such gentleness.\n\n\"You know... you're kind of cute lying on your back, like this.\" She knelt down and put a hand to his belly, giving him a rub. She was mindful of his twitching phallus and crept closer toward it.\n\n\"Cute.... really?\" He gave a quizzical expression. The dragon brought his forepaws up to his chest like a dog and tried to give her his best cute face, sticking the tip of his tongue out and cocking his head.\n\n\"Like this?\" He gave a goofy smile to top it all off.\n\nShe thought the dragon pulled it off well enough. Kristine smiled at him. \"Don't overdue it. I like your fierce side, too.\"\n\nThe dragon chuckled, and Kristine scooted closer to his side, placing one hand on his belly and returning the other to his shaft. A bead of precum had gathered at the tip. Noting it, she began to stroke him once again, running her hands across his firm flesh. She brought her other hand down to his large balls, delicately fondling them and stroking the skin of his sack slowly. The dragon inhaled sharply, enjoying the dual modes of stimulation. Kristine was amazed at the size of his testicles.... they were larger than her fists and felt very heavy in her hands. The idea of holding something so virile and masculine aroused her.\n\nBringing her hand back to the base of his penis, she bent it forward with the other and brought the tip up so she could lean in to it. Kristine decided that it was time. She opened her mouth and slowly placed her tongue on his head. Ralkan watched her every move, his heavy breathing the only thing audible against the ambiance of the forest around them.\n\nShe deftly placed her tongue on the opening of his penis and licked at the bead of precum. It gave off a pungent, earthy taste.... Oddly enough, Kristine thought it tasted a bit like stir fried mushrooms. She smirked. It was a good thing for her that she liked mushrooms, but Kristine realized she'll probably never look at them the same way again. She began to slowly lap at his tip, feeling the firm flesh on her tongue. She felt the dragon's tip flex on her tongue as she licked, and enjoyed knowing that he was in pleasure. His skin was so incredibly smooth, and the thin sheen of slick lubricant that coated it made things all the more slippery. Ralkan groaned loudly, laying his head back on the grass.\n\n\"Ohh... don't stop, Kristine. This is amazing.... I'm so glad I met you.\"\n\nHis hefty tail twitched at the tip, hitting the ground sporadically as she continued to lick. She drew her tongue repeatedly across his head, taking in the delicate contours of his phallus. Then, she slowly brought her lips over the tip of his head and began to suck. The dragon growled, causing her to pause, but then she realized it was probably just another pleasurable reaction. She resumed her sucking motion and traced the head of his massive shaft with her tongue while it was inside her mouth. Even though only the tip was in, Ralkan's penis filled her mouth easily. There was no way she could give him a full blowjob....\n\nSo she would just have to use her hands as well.\n\nShe began to bob her head on the dragon's tip, receiving a squirt of pre, which she swallowed easily. Taking one hand to rub his shaft, she moved her other hand back down to his sack, fondling the massive orbs underneath. Slowly, surely, she forced more of Ralkan's cock into her mouth, taking in a good 5 or so inches. He felt simply huge in her mouth, and her jaw was opened wider every time he flexed and his shaft stiffened. She worried about trying to take this beast in a more traditional manner... and if it was even possible for her.\n\nRalkan squirmed and moaned, completely under the spell from this seductive human. Her mouth was hot and wet, and the human's tongue flipped across his tip and was driving him crazy. Not only that, but the pressure her mouth created was just incredible... and as her hands worked up and down his shaft...and gosh, even fondled his sack, he realized it was all too much for the dragon. To top if all off, it was the first time he had had real pleasure in too many years to count. In better times, he would have been able to last far longer, as his kind typically had great stamina, but now he was fighting himself from coming already.\n\n\"Kristine.... oh...\" The dragon continued to moan her name.\n\nKristine picked up her pace as she heard the dragon start to pant. his precum began to squirt out at a regular pace, which she swallowed immediately. There was much more than she was used to for any man, but she could deal with it. Turning her eyes to the side, she saw Ralkan's neck curled to the right, his head upside down and mouth open. His tongue was hanging out lazily and his eyes were closed. She smiled, feeling empowered that she had this effect on the dragon. Truth be told, she liked having him in her mouth. The feel of his firm flesh passing over her lips and on her tongue was a pleasant sensation for her. She massaged and stroked his thick shaft at a steady pace as she bobbed her head, slowly speeding up as she felt his arousal grow.\n\nSuddenly the dragon tensed up. \"Kristine!\" he shouted, growling. Suddenly his cock stiffened in her mouth. Kristine was not prepared. She still hadn't decided if she was going to have him come in her mouth or not, but now it was too late. She felt an intense burst of creamy cum explode in her mouth and hit the back of her throat. She came off of him, gasping, as his next spurt splattered all over the dragon's chest. She felt his hard shaft throb in his hand repeatedly as he spurted, and she continued to jack him off, squeezing firmly. After a jetting out a surprising amount of fluid, the dragon finally started to come off of his orgasm, and his cock began to soften as his spray of cum slowed down to a trickle.\n\nRelkan huffed and propped himself up on his forelegs, staring at her with shocked and excited eyes.\n\n\"Kristine.... that was amazing, especially coming from a human. Thank you so much. I haven't felt like that in so long.... I'm so very grateful.\"\n\nShe smiled at him, trying to wipe his cum off of her cheeks. He tasted bitter and savory... not a bad taste, but not necessarily good, either. She swallowed what was in her mouth and rubbed his belly.\n\n\"You're welcome, Ralkan.... I enjoyed it as well, I'm a little shocked to say.\"\n\nSuddenly, his eyes turned into a pained expression and he looked away.\n\n\"You're..... You are free to go. Thank you.\" His voice sounded distant and cold.\n\nShe lifted an eyebrow in surprise. She felt pity for this creature, who so desperately desired companionship, and yet was noble enough to stay true to his word. He was kind, gentle, and knew how to please.... three traits that she rarely saw in most men she met. Plus, there was the dragon's treasure hoard.... hopefully large as the cave its self....\n\nShe couldn't leave. At least, not yet.\n\nSuddenly, Kristine climbed up on the dragon's belly, startling him. He cocked his head and looked at her quizzically.\n\n\"I don't think we're done yet, Ralkan.\" She threw a leg over his large body, straddling the dragon.\n\nHis golden eyes opened wide in surprise.\n\n\"After all... you said you wanted to mate. And I haven't even been penetrated by you yet.\" She smiled seductively.\n\nAn open smile crept across his face, turning into a grin. \"Kristine....\"\n\n\"Shh, you silly dragon. Are you ready to mate or not?\"\n\nHe nodded excitedly. She leaned forward and came face to face with the creature and whispered three words to him.\n\n\"Then do it.\"\n\nThe dragon inhaled sharply, full of excitement, and positioned his hips for penetration. Kristine looked back, seeing his massive shaft was already mostly erect once again. She scooted back on his stomach, feeling the moist and warm flesh press against her rear. She lifted herself up and sat down on his shaft, grinding against it. The dragon's shaft felt massive and virile between her legs. She did not know if it would hurt to take him, but she would have to try at the very least. Ralkan looked on with anticipation as she reached back to grab his phallus. Kristine shifted her hips and bent forward to line up her vagina with the dragon's shaft. She felt the dragon's hips lean forward... he was obviously eager to push in. She soon felt the warm flesh poke against her lips, and inhaled sharply. Biting her lower lip, she pressed backwards and felt herself stretch as the pointed tip pressed into her.\n\n\"You don't have to do this.... I may be too big for you.\" the dragon offered.\n\n\"I want to. And I think I can take you as well. Just relax.\"\n\nShe gave a reassuring smile, despite the fact that she was having second guesses herself. She slid back further and felt resistance as his large tip pressed deeper into her. Then, with one more push, the entire tip slid in, causing her to gasp. Encouraged, she pressed back slowly and felt more of his shaft spread her wide. It was a just tad painful, but nothing she couldn't handle.... at least for now. The dragon's recent orgasm greatly helped the process along with the extra lubrication. She looked back at his wide base and was grateful she would be filled before she came to it. She unconsciously dug her nails into the dragon's scales as she felt more and more filled by this dragon's massive meat. She could feel him flex inside of her, and felt a twinge of pleasure as the large cock twitched and stiffened inside.\n\nFinally, the stretching got the better of her, and she felt that she could go no further, at least for now. She looked back to see her progress. At least a third of him was firmly nestled in her depths. She reached back and felt his ridges pressed up against her stretched lips, and smiled. It was fairly uncomfortable but felt wonderful at the same time. The feeling of this bestial and untamed creature gently allowing her making love to him excited Kristine greatly. She looked back at the dragon who was watching her every move, a look of pure enjoyment on his face.\n\n\"Here. Give me your hands.\"\n\nHe obliged, offering his large claws to her. She took each one in her hands and placed them at her hips, telling him to hold on. Staring into his piercing yellow eyes, she then placed both of her hands on his chest and began to softly hump against his shaft. The dragon breathed heavily, focused on this incredible human on top of him. She was so very unlike humans he had met in the past.... humans that, when he was just an adolescent, had brought sword and spear and fire to greet him with. After so many years without the company of another dragon, this human somehow filled the void better than he thought any of his long-gone brethren could have. He grunted as her incredibly tight hole massaged and pulled at his shaft. His tip firmly brushed against her walls, stimulating his every nerve. Her gentle humping put him in a daze... the pleasure was immense, especially after so many years of solitude.\n\nKristine began to feel a bit stretched out, and gained more confidence. She began to hump against him a bit faster, pulling off of him until the large tip remained inside, then sliding back down again. She felt his large claws flex and squeeze her hips as she grinded against his shaft. He was so big.... but his unique shape pressed against so many new spots for her that she almost didn't notice. It was such an exotic feeling, especially coming from such a wild and fierce-looking creature. She ran her hands against his smooth scales and sighed, looking into his eyes again.\n\n\"Kristine.... thank you so much.\" Ralkan managed between breaths.\n\nShe giggled. \"You're welcome. I'm glad I came out here.\" She came down on his shaft again and gave him a little grind with her hips.\n\nHe closed his eyes and grinned. \"Me too....\"\n\nLooking back, she now saw nearly half of his massive shaft plunged inside of her, but she felt that he could go no further... he nearly pressed up against her cervix. It was as good as it was gonna get.\n\nFor Ralkan, that was more than enough. The sinuous movement of her hips and the incredible tightness on his cock was sending him in conniptions. He squeezed her hips again, then slid his claws down her legs and across her belly, feeling the delicate and yielding skin of the human.... it was so much unlike his hard scales. It was a very exotic feeling to the dragon.\n\nKristine's pace continued to quicken, her breasts starting to jiggle with every bounce. Ralkan felt himself gently thrusting into her from below, careful not to hurt her. The dragon was in nirvana, finally getting to experience an intimate lovemaking session with a beautiful mate..... even if she was human! He was constantly squirting precum into her depths, and soon their mixed juices began to leak from her entrance and coat both lovers' crotches. The dragon grunted as she came down hard on his cock, causing him to tense up and flex inside of her.\n\nThe pressure inside of Kristine was immense, but it drove her wild. She began to moan softly and bent down to hug the dragon as he took over, thrusting up into her. She savored every thust, feeling the ridges on his shaft massage her skin and inner walls. He wrapped her arms around his large chest and felt her body rise and fall with his rapid breathing. In return she felt the dragon bring one large, clawed hand up to her back and hugged her gently. His embrace was strong and comforting... and she closed her eyes to focus on the incredible pleasure he was giving her.\n\nAfter a few more minutes, she began to feel her climax coming on once again, and moaned loudly. She reared up and pressed into his shaft, humping it like mad. Kristine cried out Ralkan's name as pleasure took over her body. Her muscles clamped down on his thick shaft, causing the dragon to grunt as the new sensation triggered his own orgasm. He reared back and let out a roar as his rod stiffened and began to pump seed deep into her womb. Time and time again he spewed his seed inside of her, coating her walls thoroughly. Kristine arched her back as she felt her insides swell with the dragon's spunk. Eventually his cum once again slowed to a trickle, and Kristine leaned forward to remove the shrinking and softening organ from her passage. Finally, the massive head slipped free, causing a small torrent of draconic seed to pour out from her and pool around the dragon's balls and tail. As the two came down from their climaxes, they shared a tight embrace.\n\nKristine felt incredible. Her orgasm was incredible. This dragon she had found and made love to... was incredible. Everything was just incredible. She was so happy to have found this quaint waterfall cave, lucky to have stopped by at an opportune time. She scooted forward and bent down to plant a kiss on the dragon's broad nose.\n\n\"What's this, a kiss?\" the dragon looked surprised.\n\n\"Yes, silly... You dragons should try it some time.\" she replied teasingly.\n\nThe dragon paused, before leaning into her and bringing his lips up to hers. She began to press back at him, and soon both lovers were locked in a deep kiss. She brought a hand to his muscular neck and caressed his scales as they locked lips.\n\nBreaking from the kiss, the dragon leaned back and looked into her eyes lovingly.\n\n\"Kristine... thank you so much. You have brought me great happiness... more than I could have imagined. If I were a selfish dragon, I would force you to stay here as my mate. But I know you have a life of your own... so you may go at your leisure. You've made me happy enough to keep me content for some time.\" The dragon paused and yawned loudly.\n\nShe hugged the dragon firmly and put a hand to his face, rubbing cheek.\n\n\"You're welcome, Ralkan... I was really surprised at your kindness. Don't be astonished if I come to visit again.\" She gave him a wink and got off of him, standing up and stretching.\n\nThe dragon's eyes opened wide. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" She giggled.\n\nThe dragon rolled to his side. He gave a short laugh. \"Hmmm... I'd like that... I'd like that very much, in fact. But now....\" He yawned again. \"... I feel quite exhausted. If you don't mind, I'm going to take a nap.\" He looked up at her once again before closing his eyes slowly. \"Once again, thank you for everything. You have no idea how happy that you've made me... You are quite the wonderful human.\"\n\nKristine's heart swelled as she heard his words about the nap. \"Take care, Ralkan.\" She turned and walked to the waterfall pool, eager to cleanse her body of their mess.\n\nKristine looked down at herself and frowned. In her passion, she had forgotten that his first orgasm had left his chest covered in his seed, and now that she had laid on him, it was smeared all over her front.... not to mention the state that her girl parts were in. She bent a hand down to feel her stretched and ravaged pussy. \"Ugh, I'm going to be aching later\" She thought to herself. As she entered the pool and stepped under the trickling waterfall, her attention turned to the cave before her. She suddenly realized that she had accomplished her goal: the dragon was sleeping outside, and his cave was unguarded. Her thoughts returned to the images in her mind of piles and piles of dragon gold deep within the cave.\n\nPiles.... of gold.\n\nShe took a step forward, but then stopped. Her thoughts turned back to the creature behind her. She looked back at the resting dragon, his wing tucked over his head. She bit her lip, suddenly unsure of herself. The dragon had treated her with nothing but respect and kindness so far... she thought it didn't feel right. She stood there, under the waterfall's sprinkle of water, immobilized by her inner conflict, tempted by the thought of immense wealth.\n\n... The gold... the dragon.... for the love of mercy, the GOLD....\n\n...\n\nShe closed her eyes and sighed in frustration. \"I.... I can't do it.\"\n\n\"He's been nothing but kind and gracious to me... I... I would be betraying his trust.\" Kristine felt horrible about herself.\n\nShe hung her shoulders, defeated by her own sense of gratitude. \"If I come back... \"she reasoned \"Perhaps I can work something out with him. Heck, maybe he would give me something if I just asked....\" The thought sounded plausable to her, giving her a reason to return to this place.... Well, a second reason, anyway.\n\nKristine finished washing her body off, feeling the musk and slimy dragon spunk gradually wash away from her body. She then quietly gathered up her clothes and took off, starting on the long trek back home. As she turned to give one last look at the massive stone cave chiseled from the hilly earth, the pristine waterfall that was so refreshing to stand under, and the large sleeping dragon laying in the sun, she gave a sigh of satisfaction.\n\nIt was all just so beautiful."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "A Dragon's Quest",
        "author": "Robert Vane",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist",
            "The Remembered War"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "I killed the Skyking of Ni-Yota.\n\nIt was a quick death, and I'd done it at Aragor's behest. His killing had been an act of mercy\u2014it had saved Aragor from losing himself, from becoming that which he had fought against. Thanks to me, Aragor, the self-proclaimed Skyking of Ni-Yota, would never succumb to the rust that had claimed the lands of Illium. Nor had I just casually decided to kill him. Before I had slain the king, I had tried to heal him. Unfortunately, my untrained power had not been equal to such a task. Even if I had understood the magic that my kind was apparently born to wield, I doubted I could have saved him from this particular doom. Whatever had infected him was far more than a mere wound, more than any plague. Death was Aragor's only escape from his fate, and he knew it. I did what had to be done. I hoped others understood this truth.\n\nBeneath me lay a bloody mess.\n\nThe blood raptors that had ravaged the occupants of the great hall in aid of the traitorous dragon, Betal, seemed to recognize the death of their adversary. After Aragor's eyes shut, they halted their incessant attacks. The swarm swirled about the great hall, a wave of black twirling like a tornado. When Aragor's lifeforce departed, so did the birds, their black wings carrying them through the breach that Betal had made in the ceiling, their mission apparently complete. I watched the dark-winged vermin fly west, a pulsing cloud moving against the wind, back toward River Tayo and the hollowing horde beyond.\n\nThe great hall fell silent as the last of the raptors fled. Most of the humans had already fled through the ground-level exits. The stink from smoke fires that had been used (ineffectively) against the raptors still clogged the hall. The sudden quiet in the massive space had an unpleasant weight. With the immediate threat past, the magnitude of what had just happened settled upon me: The Protector of Ni-Yota was dead. Arrogant as he was, Aragor had been a fighter, the leader of millions. Yet I didn't think his death the worst of it. Betal had claimed the wizard Drasu had also fallen. Just days ago, I would've rejoiced at the news of the death of my mother's murderer, but now my emotions were far more complicated. I had come to understand that Drasu's magic had been all that held the hollowing horde at bay. Without him, an invasion was imminent. Or maybe it had already begun. The thought chilled me. I had gazed across the waste of the land across the Tayo River, a domain that had once been known as Illium, seeing nothing but rust and a hostile army of humans and other creatures more numerous than anything I could have imagined back in Rolm. And for all the dread the sprawling horde conjured, something worse was behind it. Something that had driven my mother into the exile, sending her on a quest that had lasted until the day of her death.\n\nIn the wake of Aragor's death and the betrayal of one of their own fellow dragons, I expected that the terrible threat in Illium to be the immediate focus of the remaining dragons of Ni-Yota\u2014the so-called Sworn. I was wrong. It happens.\n\nGia came at me before Aragor's dead body had cooled. The massive black storm of a dragon never liked me. He had been my sister's guardian. Perhaps that made him overly suspicious of me since I'd come to Ni-Yota to take her away. There was also the nearly fatal melee in which I'd fought against him alongside his mortal enemy, Elasu. We would never be friends, but I had hoped for some respite from the animosity. I got none.\n\nGia took only a cursory sniff at Aragor's corpse before pushing his giant head so close to my nostrils, I could smell the flesh of the blood raptor on his teeth. \"Light Stealer,\" he named me with a growl.\n\nI hated the label. It implied I was a thief. As if light could be taken. As if I possessed anything of Aragor's. As if I'd been in the wrong to do what I had done.\n\nI didn't care what Gia thought about me, but my sister, Kiata arrived next. She glided to the floor to be beside Aragor. The look of horror in her eyes as she stared at the bloody form of her hero, the late Skyking, made me dread what came next. Sure enough, her expression turned to horrific accusation when she gazed at me. Her gaze sent a pair of spears through my hearts.\n\n\"It was the only way,\" was all I managed as Kiata's eyes tore through me.\n\nShe turned away rather than continue to look at me. I had come to Ni-Yota for her, I'd battled Elasu for her; I'd tolerated Aragor so I wouldn't lose her, but I'd ended up making it all worse. I needed Kiata to understand why I did what I did. I turned my head toward Rinxia, the beautiful silver dragon who'd fought beside me, desperate for her assistance. She had heard Aragor's final words. I needed her to explain what had happened to Kiata. But Rinxia was already in the air, soaring into the gap in the roof, into the sky in pursuit of the blood raptors. I again faced Kiata.\n\n\"Sister, it was what he wanted. He knew what\u2026\"\n\nI didn't get to finish, because she flew away, out of the hall. I intended to go after her. Not just because I desperately wanted to explain myself, but also because I was fearful. There might still be blood raptors lingering in the vicinity. Kiata was young and vulnerable. I didn't want her out there alone.\n\nA deep voice rumbled, a sound so low only the largest of dragons could've made it. \"You've done enough harm, Light Stealer. Leave her be.\"\n\nThe night-scaled monstrosity loomed over me, a void of darkness interrupted only by the bloody wounds made by the raptors he'd fought. I would've ignored him and flown off in pursuit of my sister, but he'd pinned my leg to the ground with his own massive claw. If I launched skyward, Gia would rip off my scales\u2014if he wasn't bluffing. But staring at the giant mass of scales gave me the feeling that Gia wasn't the type to make idle threats. I would have to deal with him.\n\n\"Leave her,\" Gia intoned. \"You bring only darkness with you, much as Elasu once did. The human taint is within you\u2014your mind is unstable. Human avarice and emotion run through you. Kiata must be shown the Way of Dragons. You cannot help her with that. You should leave this place before you end up like the Pretender.\"\n\nThe human taint? Was that true? \"Do not seek to blame me for the deeds of the traitor Betal. That dragon was one of your world, not mine. I'm not the cause of your ills.\" I showed my teeth.\n\n\"You may not mean to be an agent of the dark,\" Gia allowed. \"Some cannot help it. Or perhaps your hearts are black inside from the human taint. The result is the same. An ill wind flies with you.\"\n\nI snorted with contempt. \"What ill wind?\"\n\n\"Both the Pretender and Aragor are dead by your act, and both within the same moon. I call that an ill wind.\"\n\nHe had a point. \"I'm not your enemy, but do not make it otherwise.\" I steeled my eyes, hoping to look convincing. Harlan would've called it a lame bluff, because the truth was, I had no desire to tangle with the massive dragon beside me, particularly in this place, with Aragor's corpse beside us.\n\n\"You killed the lord to whom I was sworn, yet you claim to not be my enemy?\" He roared out an approximation of a human scoff.\n\nMy blood sizzled. I didn't want to explain myself to Gia, nor did I wish to fight. The battle had been quick and chaotic. Gia might not know all that had happened. \"The poison in Betal had spread to Aragor. He would've become a hollowing and he knew it. I did him a mercy.\"\n\nI hoped that would end it. It didn't.\n\n\"Play no games with me, Light Stealer. I've no patience for spun tales. I do not deal in lies as did Elasu, nor do I have the vanity of Betal. I have dragon eyes, and with them I see clearly.\"\n\nI had no idea what he was talking about. \"Congratulations?\"\n\nGia snarled, showing me his teeth. Blood raptor flesh. There were raptor bones in the cracks. \"You mock, you kill, you lie. Now, it is time you fight.\"\n\nThe giant dragon pressed down even harder on my trapped claws, but that wasn't how Gia intended to hurt me. He merely didn't want me going anywhere as he brought his huge tail around. Thicker than two pairs of mated tree trunks, his tail came at me faster than anything that size had a right to move. I could've tried to rip my claw free, but I didn't think I'd have the time, even if I was willing to take the additional pain. I could've tried to duck under the blow, but that would've required me to lay almost flat on the ground at precisely the right moment, a position that would leave me terribly vulnerable to another attack. I wasn't sure if Gia intended to kill me or teach me some kind of lesson, but I wasn't willing to take the risk of leaving myself at his dubious mercy. I whipped my own tail to meet the onslaught, gritting my teeth in anticipation of the collision. I had no illusions about my strength being equal to that of Gia's.\n\nOur ends collided with raw barbarity. Strength met strength. My bones trembled from the impact. I wasn't Gia's match in brute force, nor did I surrender from the contest. I parried his blow and kept my balance. My tail gave ground, but the danger of his attack had been blunted. Even as he pushed himself closer toward me, I waited for the next assault. Would he dare unleash his fire upon me? With Aragor gone, he had nothing to fear from any other dragon. There was no Protector of Ni-Yota now. If there had been a law against dragon killing dragon, there were none to enforce it.\n\nGia glared at me with contempt, but (I thought) not hate. I realized he was still contemplating how far he'd take this. Despite his claim to be a simple dragon who believed only his eyes, there was plenty of calculation in his amber stare. Thinking hard thoughts was probably new for Gia. I watched him carefully. Unfortunately, it seemed that Gia's final decision was to try to roast me. His jaw opened. I twisted my neck, intending to go for his throat and sink my teeth into his scales, even though I didn't want to do that. Enough dragons had died already on this ugly day.\n\nRinxia thought the same. My engagement with Gia had distracted me and I hadn't heard her return \"Hold you flame, Gia.\"\n\nThe black dragon was startled by her presence. He flared his nostrils, his eyes flicking away from me to track Rinxia's flight as she shot past him. She circled back, dancing through the air in a staggered approach toward her larger companion. Gia shut his mouth, tucking his teeth and flame away for another day. Relief pulsed through me. Rinxia set herself down beside me.\n\nWith the immediate crisis averted, I belatedly noticed another presence lingering behind a crashed chunk of stone: a human. He had skin far darker than any Mizu, despite its golden hue, and he carried a crossbow that wasn't his: The Farlighter smuggler, Harlan Dor. I also suspected his purpose here. His weapon would've been near useless against Gia's armor, but I couldn't help but be tickled by the gesture of preparing to defend me. For Harlan's sake, I was relieved he hadn't fired his weapon.\n\nGia removed his claw from me, backing up warily to a more comfortable distance. He looked at Rinxia, puzzled.\n\n\"You care nothing about the Protector's death, Rinxia?\"\n\n\"Stop acting the fool, Gia,\" Rinxia snapped, sounding like an annoyed mother. \"You know me better than that. There has been enough pain on this day to last a lifetime; do not add stupidity to the sad tally. We are the chosen of Haven. We carry a burden and must be better than other creatures.\"\n\nIf I had said that, Gia probably would've bathed me in fire. To Rinxia, he merely blew some snot from his huge nostrils. \"You believe the outlander's fibs about Aragor being tainted?\"\n\nSomething in Rinxia shifted. Her neck slumped with sadness. \"I saw it, Gia.\" The silver dragon growled with displeasure. \"Somehow, Betal succumbed to darkness. He brought it into our midst. It spread to Aragor from a bite. Just as we were warned\u2026it spreads. Somehow, an infected dragon is even worse than the blood raptors.\"\n\nGia's eyes turned distant and dark. He waited several long moments before speaking again. \"There was always a darkness to Betal's ambition. Such desire was not of the Way. Finally, it consumed him.\"\n\nRinxia's tail swept the ground. \"Worse even than that. If the blood raptors are here, it means the barrier at the River Tayo no longer holds. It means that Drasu is truly dead, or gravely wounded. We must prepare to meet the hollowing horde when they come. That is what is most important.\"\n\nGia eyed me warily before offering a reluctant grunt. \"The empty ones will come, but I do not fear them. They walk on legs, they carry blades or spears. They shall be stopped. They shall be killed, like all enemies of Ni-Yota.\" Gia once again fixed his distrusting eyes upon me. The anger in him flashed like the sun at its apex. \"And you\u2026I know you scheme for some purpose of your own, even if I do not know yet what it is. You claim you are not responsible for the deaths of both Elasu and Aragor, yet you killed both of them, Light Stealer. That is no coincidence.\"\n\nGia unleashed his words with as much force as he did his fire. I recognized his angry determination just as I recognized his stupidity. I also knew my words wouldn't sway him, but I tried anyway. \"I scheme nothing. Drasu stole my sister. I came to get her. I trust you would have done the same.\"\n\nGia didn't hear me. He'd already made up his mind. \"Know this: You shall never take Aragor's place.\"\n\nMy eyes bulged. I didn't understand, at first. I should've rebuked him immediately, but I was too shocked for coherent words. Perhaps I had misheard. Gia's Avian was different than what was spoken in Rolm. But the black dragon spoke again when I remained silent, this time even more plainly.\n\n\"You shall never be Skyking of Ni-Yota.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The Skyking of Ni-Yota.\n\nGia was worried I wanted to rule Ni-Yota. I hadn't seen that coming. I had no response ready. My mind reeled at the insanity of accusation. Gia may have misinterpreted my silence as a challenge. Or perhaps his mind had come to a place where nothing I said would make any difference. I didn't get a chance to discuss the matter with him.\n\nGia turned from me, toward his fallen Skyking. He lowered his neck, examining the dead dragon, sniffing. Did he suspect that Aragor still lived? I would've assured him that wasn't the case. When I kill someone, I'm thorough. Just ask Brindisi. I had dumped the remains of my former ryder out through my bowels over the sea with all the dignity that the slaver deserved. Aragor was just as dead as Brindisi, although I presumed his body would be treated with more dignity (on the other hand, few humans in Rolm have become dragon crap, so such exclusivity could be seen as an honor).\n\nIn the midst of all this, Harlan edged ever closer to the collection of dragons gathered around Aragor. I was still shocked by Gia's accusations, so I didn't immediately comprehend what the crazy human had in mind. Gia kept sniffing, studying Aragor's body while Harlan drew nearer. It was only a matter of time before Gia noticed. In his current mood, the giant dragon might decide to end Harlan with a flick of his giant tail if Gia thought the human intended disrespect. I didn't really want Harlan to end up as a bloody stain on the ground.\n\nI opened my mouth to ask the smuggler what he was doing but held my words at the last moment as the answer belatedly came to me: The necklace. The so-called Torlich of Haven that Aragor wore. I realized that Gia wasn't looking for signs of life in the fallen king. He wanted the Torlich. Aragor had mentioned that he had decided to wear it as a symbol. Perhaps Gia thought that made the Torlich the equivalent of King Mendakas's crown, but for Protectors. Maybe it had other uses as well\u2014it was apparently made from aurathorn flowers. My mother had used those to blunt the slave magic of Sculptors of Rolm, so it was clearly powerful. Harlan wanted it as well. He'd told me he'd traveled the world in search of the strange vine. It was his quest, the way back to his wife, and I suspected much more. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that Torlich was more than just a symbol. Harlan wasn't the type for fool's errands. Despite his obvious disadvantages in confronting Gia, I didn't expect that Harlan would easily be denied, either. I quickly became concerned the smuggler would do something foolish. He was no match for Gia.\n\nThe giant dragon found what he was looking for before Harlan arrived. Gia lifted the Torlich with a single digit of his foreleg, his head tilting as he examined it. It looked like a large, wilted vine to me. Gia lifted the artifact still higher, at an angle that would allow him to slide it onto his neck, to wear it as the last Skyking had. Harlan's fingers twitched on the crossbow at his side. Surely he wouldn't be so foolish to match himself against Gia with only a toothpick shooter as a weapon. I'd be forced to whisk my foolish companion to safety if he provoked a fight. I readied myself to fly, but Rinxia was even faster than me, and she had sharper eyes.\n\nThe silver dragon jumped toward Gia like a pouncing cat. But she didn't move to save Harlan as I thought. Instead, a tight stream of fire shot from her mouth. The sudden violence of her attack took me completely by surprise, as it did Gia and Harlan. Rinxia aimed true. Gia released a terrible roar of anguished rage as the Torlich disappeared, turning to ash before his eyes as Rinxia's fire consumed it. I was shocked. Why had she destroyed the Torlich?\n\nThe silver dragon had aimed well, but even her precise line of flame inevitably caught part of Gia's claws, since she'd incinerated the necklace he held. The massive dragon came about, facing me, his eyes pulsing furiously. Never had I been so certain that another dragon intended to kill me. He obviously assumed I had done the deed as part of my nefarious plot to be Protector of Ni-Yota. I was really having a crappy day.\n\nGia noticed Rinxia's presence belatedly, even though she was closer, her mouth open. Somewhere in his thick skull, Gia must've remembered I wasn't a fire breather. Confusion mixed with anger in Gia's gaze. I understood how he felt. He didn't expect a dragon he'd known for all his life to betray him suddenly and without apparent reason. Still, apparently Gia wasn't one for pondering mysteries. He loosed a wave of fire at Rinxia. She saw it and leapt to her left. Gia's angry breath caught the end of her tail as she took flight, but nothing else.\n\n\"Rinxia!\" He called out her name as a curse, the roar shaking the walls of the massive chamber.\n\nShe twisted in the air, bringing herself to a near stop above, beating her wings to keep herself in place so that she might face him. She was no fool; Rinxia kept a healthy distance in case she needed to escape again. \"Let go of your anger, brother.\" Her voice was composed. \"The taint was on the flowers, spread by Aragor and Betal's blood. I could smell it. To hold the Torlich was to embrace the fate even worse than death\u2014that which Aragor feared far more than even the void.\"\n\nGia unleashed a storm of roared rage anyway. If the din was a measure of a dragon's greatness, I'd have been licking Gia's claws after that roar. It was the cry of lost dreams, of betrayal, of having a roasted pig snatched from your mouth. Even worse than that. But he held his fire in check. Gia thrashed his head about in frustrated impotence. He looked ridiculous.\n\nEventually, he regained control of his faculties. His eyes finally settled on the flaking ash that had once been the Torlich. Only a few twisted hulks of silvery metal remained\u2014Rinxia's fire burned hot. Harlan was at the pyre, on his knees before the ruin that had been his quest for untold years. He wore a look of anguish that was unfamiliar on his face. But Gia was my more immediate problem.\n\nThe angry dragon's gaze swung to me then back to Rinxia. \"Are you with him\u2014the Light Stealer\u2014in this? Do you plot with him?\" The dragon eyes glinted with accusation. \"What has he promised you?\"\n\nRinxia kept her voice steady, hard. \"Your words are rot on the wind to me, my brother. Remember me and remember yourself. Aragor lies dead. His blood has not yet cooled, and already the madness to take his place consumes you. A true Protector thinks first of the people. An ancient trinket of vine and metal means nothing.\"\n\nGia yanked back his neck like a scolded hatchling. Heavy breaths escaped his nostrils. A moment of uneasy calm stretched ever longer. Finally, Gia unfurled his wings, his hot eyes finding mine. \"Remember your place isn't here, Light Stealer. You are no Protector. You never will be.\"\n\nGia flew off after making his declaration, the power of his wings lifting broken shards of glass into the air. He hadn't lingered long enough for me to tell him we finally agreed on something: I didn't want to be Protector or Skyking or whatever else that involved my being responsible for this land that wasn't my own. I'd come here for my sister. I intended to leave with her. The rest had just\u2026happened. I wanted nothing else to do with Ni-Yota if I could help it. This encounter merely reinforced my certainty on that.\n\nGia left Rinxia, Harlan, and I in the ruined wreck of the hall. Blood decorated the seats where the raptors had harried the human occupants of Aragor's court. Two dead dragons lay among the devastation. A morbid sight. Harlan still knelt before Aragor's corpse, his face hidden from me. Rinxia landed softly beside me, a question in her eyes as I continued to stare at the back of my friend. I didn't know what to say to him\u2014he'd traversed the world for that strange vine. I, too, needed it. I didn't know precisely what he'd sacrificed, only that it had been substantial. But, as a former slave, I did understand about being in the darkness. When I finally found some words, they came out in a voice that wasn't quite my own.\n\n\"Sometimes you are so lost you do not even remember there was a destination. If you endure, you may still find the way.\"\n\nHarlan slowly turned to look at me, as if wary that someone spoke to him. Rinxia too twisted her neck to examine me. I found their surprise at my advice mildly insulting.\n\nHarlan's eyes still hinted at the pain he felt, but already he was hiding most of it. He summoned his crooked smirk, although it wasn't quite the same. \"For a child of the sea, the voyage never ends.\"\n\n\"Was that truly the last of the aurathorn?\" I asked Rinxia.\n\n\"As far as I know, the Torlich was forged from the last that remained, but even that was just rumor, a story told by Aragor. The Skyking was\u2026at times he succumbed to his darker instincts. Insecurity was one, fear that he lost the favor of Haven. At such times, he would produce items of supposed significance, such as the Torlich. It seemed to calm him, so we were happy enough not to question the tales.\"\n\n\"So, it might not even have been aurathorn at all that burned up?\" Harlan asked.\n\nRinxia seemed annoyed at the question\u2014or perhaps at being questioned by Harlan. \"The line of the Keepers of the Radiance\u2014Bayloo's mother's blood\u2014would've known better than I.\"\n\nMy mother. She had gone to Rolm to find the aurathorn, to find a way to use it. Bethy Rann had told me there was no more on Maricopa, but it had to be somewhere on the other side of the Wall of Fire. I was proof of that.\n\n\"Why do you both care so much?\" Rinxia asked.\n\nHarlan kept his mouth firmly shut for once, but I had no such reticence. \"My mother used it to break the runes of control that held me as a slave for so many years.\"\n\n\"The vine?\" Rinxia asked with surprise dancing in her eyes. \"The histories say it could be dangerous to us\u2026a weapon. But I've never heard of it being used to break a rune of control. Those bonds are supposedly unbreakable, our enslaved kin lost forever, or so the magi claim. Although, I am not a creature of magic, of course.\" Almost as an afterthought she asked, \"Where did your mother obtain it?\"\n\nI wanted to tell her, but I could feel Harlan's stare on me. It wasn't time to share speculations and false hopes. I merely said, truthfully, \"I do not know. I hope to find out.\"\n\n\"The world is large, your wings are strong,\" Rinxia assured me, her eyes glowing with approval. \"If we can free out brothers and sisters, I will help you find what you seek.\"\n\nFor some reason, I felt the urge to twirl and sing, although I knew it wasn't the time. Aragor's corpse was starting to stink.\n\nHarlan's expression lightened. \"Well, you dragons are certainly exciting company.\" He pulled himself to his feet. \"Rinxia, I'm surprised to hear that Bayloo is a contender for the captain spot, given he's a newcomer to these parts.\"\n\n\"In Ni-Yota, such a thing isn't so outlandish: The Protector is dead. Aragor had no offspring, and his closest relation in blood was Betal the traitor. Despite the exile of his mother, Bayloo's own bloodline is ancient\u2014he is of the ember dragons and, therefore, a descendant of Shihan of the Sky. He would have a legitimate claim.\"\n\nI could do little more than gape. I'd heard the words, but didn't really believe them. A slave dragon as ruler of Ni-Yota? After a few moments, I realized that Rinxia and Harlan were both staring at me expectantly.\n\n\"Gia is crazed, but more importantly, he doesn't know me at all. I don't want to be skyking or any other king.\"\n\nRinxia studied me before dipping her head ever so slightly. \"Someone must be Protector. Without a dragon chosen with the favor of Haven, Ni-Yota will be adrift while the threats to our people are greater than ever before.\"\n\n\"I am supposed to care for the humans of this place?\" It came out worse than I intended. This was Rinxia's home.\n\nThe silver dragon didn't take obvious offense at my words. \"You speak gruff, but your hearts are softer. This human\u2026an Islander, you seem to like him. You allow him to ride you.\" She inclined her head toward Harlan. \"You fought bravely today, Harlan Dor, risking your own life to help the Skyking. Bayloo, you did even more, risking yourself for us. Your actions betray you. I think you have within you the essence of a Protector. This may be your Way.\"\n\nI snorted my displeasure at this notion. \"You should take up this so-called honor of service, this Burden to Haven, Rinxia. You are from here, you clearly care for this land. If a dragon must rule this place, then it should be you.\"\n\n\"That is not my Way.\" She sounded rather sanguine about it. \"I am not a leader. I lack the vision.\"\n\nHarlan asked the question I had in my own mind. \"I've known many a sailor who, a few cups into their drink, screamed with certainty that they knew they were fated for riches, when the only true certainty was a splitting headache come the next morning. Perhaps dragons are different. You speak of the Way, as if it is your destiny, your fate. How is that you know that being Protector is not your Way, mighty Rinxia?\"\n\nRinxia raised her chin. \"The Light of Haven has shown it to me.\"\n\nI'd really liked Rinxia before that moment. I tried to keep my skepticism from my voice. \"What did they show you?\"\n\n\"I've seen the coming of a new Cataclysm. If it is to be turned aside, we all must play our roles. My role is not as ruler of Ni-Yota. More than this, I will not say, so end your questions.\" A bit more gently, she added, \"Besides, although I could fly circles around Gia, I cannot best him in battle. He is too strong, and my fire would not be enough against his armor.\"\n\nI was confused \"Why do you need to fight Gia?\"\n\n\"I would've thought that obvious.\" Rinxia stared at me. \"He intends to be Protector. If any dragon wishes to challenge that, there must be a Judgment\u2014a battle to the death.\"\n\nI choked as if I had a chicken foot stuck in my throat. \"Oh, I definitely don't want to be Protector.\"\n\n\"Do you fear him?\" She sounded surprised. My chest might've puffed a bit.\n\n\"It isn't a question of fear. I can handle Gia. But it seems a bit foolish to risk my life in battle for something I don't want.\"\n\nRinxia's eyes darkened. \"I respect Gia. His hearts beat with the spirit of Light. But he will make a poor Protector. Even worse than Aragor. For while his intentions are truer than the late Skyking, he sees only that which is in front of him. A Protector must be more, see more.\" I pretended not to notice her invitation.\n\nHarlan cleared his throat. \"The Protector must always be a dragon then?\"\n\nRinxia's eyes glowed with amusement though she kept her voice serious. \"There is no law against it, but no human has ever made a claim. And they would fare poorly in the Judgment against the likes of Gia, I think.\"\n\nHarlan tapped the tips of his finger together. \"I've been to many lands. Ni-Yota will not be the first to be graced with an imperfect ruler.\"\n\nRinxia tilted her head as she regarded Harlan. I was impressed at the courtesy she showed him. Gia never would've done that. He judged everyone based on physical strength. \"You speak true, Harlan Dor. Despite the favor of Haven, it seems that dragons are no more perfect than humans. But at no other time since the Cataclysm has the land faced a threat such as we now have here. At such times, leadership is needed.\"\n\nRinxia seemed about to speak to me once again, but a high-pitched whistling interrupted. It was an unfamiliar sound\u2014something reminiscent of a music of a hummingbird's wings, but far sharper and less pleasant. The noise was followed by another and another. I counted at least a dozen.\n\nRinxia was in the air a moment before me. We flew together. Once again, I readied myself for battle."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "The strange noise wasn't a threat.\n\nIt was just some birds\u2014not blood raptors. I could barely see them at first. I used the unusual sounds they made\u2014a subtle whine of air channeled through their stiff wings\u2014to hunt the incoming fliers. I adjusted my course toward the noise, but even with the birds' rattling to guide me, they weren't easy to spot. I almost smashed into one of the mysterious flying objects because I could practically see right through them.\n\nWhen I finally got a clear look at one of the incoming birds, I found them bizarre, even by the standards of birds. They flew like no other creature I'd ever encountered. The so-called birds were slightly bigger than a sparrow, but with the wingspan of a hawk. Their wings flapped with unnatural stiffness, more like ingenious craftings of a magnificent blacksmith than fleshy beings infused with true life. Yet the strange birds did indeed fly, their wings locked into place as they glided toward the palace. These had to be the infamous glasswings\u2014the magically-created messenger birds of Ni-Yota. I counted four in all. They arrived from the west, where the hollowings massed. That so many birds had been sent could only mean they carried ill tidings.\n\nRinxia followed the glasswing flock as they approached the palace, slowing her pace to match theirs. I did the same. We were giants hovering above flies. The strange birds made a circuit around the tallest of the spires that rose from the great lake\u2014the massive tower with a seemingly ever-burning flame at its top\u2014before streaming into a smaller tower wholly engulfed by the larger structure's shadow. A walking bridge connected the two constructions. I judged the smaller tower to be the least grand of the various spires of the Protector's water-and-tower-centric palace, but its windows were the largest.\n\nRinxia and I followed the glasswings into a large circular chamber that occupied the top portion of the tower. Like the rest of the palace's structures, the room we entered had been appropriately sized for dragons, although the tables and chairs inside were clearly for human use (or a brief game of stomp-the-wood for dragons).\n\nThe tower's interior walls were lined with doorless compartments, each with a single perch. Several dozen of these tiny cubicles held more of the glass-like birds. The creatures held still even as Rinxia and I entered, as if they were glass statues.\n\nAt the chamber's center was a tree carved from pink granite, its two dozen or so limbs devoid of leaves or life, except for the newly arrived glasswings that had landed atop them. Like the other strange birds inside the tower, the new arrivals made no sound or movement except for a soft whistle, which they chirped out at a regular interval of once per ten beats of my hearts. The synchronized noise quickly got annoying. There were also two humans shuffling around in azure robes, one with a grey beard and another boyish figure with a face so plump and pale I suspected he might have spent the entirety of his short life within this tower, doing nothing but eating and tending glass birds.\n\nThe younger human jumped when Rinxia and I appeared suddenly in his work space, his eyes wide. The elder barely looked up. He was focused on the stone tree and its newly-arrived occupants.\n\nAnnoyed at being ignored by the older human, I gave a meaningful snort. The man looked up enough to raise a bushy eyebrow at me. \"Biggest glasswing I ever saw,\" he mumbled to himself.\n\nI supposed he meant me. I further supposed his words passed for humor among humans.\n\nAfter the old human had fussed with a couple of the glass birds, he fixed an eye on the dragon beside me. \"Nice to see you, Rinxia. It has been a while. Not sure I know your companion.\"\n\n\"You may call me Bayloo,\" I answered for her.\n\n\"Interesting name. Interesting accent.\"\n\nRinxia gazed at the newly-arrived glasswing flock. \"Master Haxi, we have come to hear the tidings of the messengers.\"\n\nThe human, Haxi, positioned himself behind one of the translucent birds. \"It seems someone in the west has something important to say.\" With a fleet swipe of his hand, the old man snatched the glasswing. Bird in hand, he carried it over to a burning brazier a few steps away. The younger human hurried over to add a few stones to the flame, which turned a shade of blue, then handed Master Haxi a pair of metal tongs which the older man used to hold the glasswing over the fire.\n\n\"You need to torture it to get it to speak?\" I wondered.\n\nHaxi didn't look at me. He was too busy roasting the glass bird. \"They don't feel pain, but they need to know when it's time to release their message and complete their purpose. Now, be quiet or you'll miss it.\"\n\nMy eyes darkened. I preferred the slobbering deference of Elasu's human servants to the scolding pretensions of the ones in Trishan.\n\nWhen the glasswing's body darkened to a smoky gray, Haxi pulled it from the fire, holding the glowing tongs and its captive before us. Remarkably, the bird spoke, its voice unmistakably human.\n\n\"Great Protector, I must report that mighty Drasu is dead. The hollowing horde now seeks to cross the river. All reserves have been committed but we cannot hold the bank for much longer. Come quickly or all is lost. Reported on the 18th Day in Cycle of the Monkey by Avix, Lord-Knight of the Edge Legion.\"\n\nThe speaker's words were controlled and authoritative, but even in the mimicked sound repeated by the glasswing, I thought I heard suppressed panic. At the message's conclusion, the captive glasswing emitted a brief cry, a last gasp of its phantom breath, then shattered into a hundred pieces, its remains falling onto the floor like a shattered window. The old master barely noticed the mess. \"Do see to that, Kix.\" He shuffled over to snatch another bird. Were these things alive or not?\n\nRinxia looked at me, her eyes flooded with concern. \"They will all carry the same tidings. The hollowings come. Lord Avix is perhaps the most experienced human commander in all of Ni-Yota, the victor of dozens of battles against the horde. If he says the river cannot be held, we had best heed his warnings and expect an invasion.\"\n\nI noticed that Rinxia said \"we\". She assumed I would be part of this war. If it had been anyone but Rinxia speaking to me, I would've dissuaded her of the notion immediately. Did I really want to fight the countless hollowings, their beasts, and their blood raptors? Or would I rather find a na\u00efve, juicy pig to eat? It shouldn't have been a difficult choice. Yet, within me was turmoil. I already knew Kiata would want me to stay, to help. That seemed to be what my mother had intended as well. But what did I want?\n\nRinxia sensed my hesitation, if not my thoughts. \"Bayloo, there is little time for us to act.\"\n\n\"Based on that message, I suppose that is correct,\" I said carefully. \"Does this mean you intend to fly off to the west to start burning these hollowings?\"\n\n\"Without Aragor, there is no one to command.\" Rinxia's tail twitched about as she thought. \"We must speak with Gia as well.\"\n\n\"He doesn't seem like he wants to chat with me.\"\n\nRinxia considered this before craning her neck so her eyes were level with the old human. \"Master Haxi, you must carry this message to Gia without delay. Tell him\u2026tell him a council meeting shall convene in the Highflame tower without delay. Gather the rest of the late Protector's council as well. They are all to attend.\"\n\nMaster Haxi grunted, more interested in the glasswings than Rinxia. \"You heard her, Kix. Get moving.\" With a flick of his head, he sent his assistant scurrying off.\n\nI watched the pale human waddle out. He reminded me of a featherless duck. I had my doubts about how quickly Rinxia's message would arrive. \"How long will it take this council gather, assuming the little man does his duty?\"\n\n\"It will take the humans time to find Gia and the others.\" She craned her neck so she could see the sky. \"When the sun is at its apex, we will meet in the Highflame tower. I'm sure you've noticed the fire. It's the highest of the palace towers, the dwelling of the Protector.\" She brought her head closer to mine. \"You will attend as well, won't you?\"\n\nOh. Putting me on the spot. I didn't really want to see Gia again, but Rinxia's gaze was such that I knew I was going to end up at the meeting one way or another. Best to be noble about it.\n\n\"Of course. It's just \u2026\" I hesitated.\n\n\"You worry about Gia? He will have calmed himself by the time we meet. He knows Lord Avix well, and will understand the importance of the message's warning.\" She sounded confident.\n\n\"I'm not worried about Gia. It's just that I haven't eaten \u2026\"\n\nRinxia's gaze darkened.\n\n\"If there is to be fighting, you understand, I must have my strength.\"\n\nRinxia flew out the tower without another word. I found the Master Haxi staring at me after she'd departed.\n\n\"What?\" I asked.\n\nThe old human shrugged and grabbed another glasswing. Looking at the bird, he mumbled something that sounded like, \"Not the brightest of your kind, are you?\"\n\nI decided he was speaking to the glasswing. Probably.\n\nI left Haxi in his tower with his glass birds. I flew back to the hall to seek out Harlan. I hoped the human would have some ideas about how to get all us out of here, enticing my sister to come with us.\n\nAs I hoped, he still lingered in the Hall of Glass. A few other humans had returned. The Mizu attended to the corpses of Betal and Aragor as Harlan watched silently from a distance. I told him of the message that came from the west, of the hollowing horde and the confirmed death of Drasu.\n\n\"Those creatures, the hollowings, as they call them\u2026and the taint\u2026there is lore remembered by my people, as well. You should hear Rinxia's words and Gia's as well, before you make a decision. You should go to their council.\"\n\nI growled with annoyance. \"Aragor is dead. Perhaps now Kiata can be persuaded to leave this place. You seem rather skilled at the art of talking.\"\n\nHarlan paid me no mind. \"You underestimate your sister. She's like a young landling aching for her first voyage. I've felt the passion of her conviction in the few times I've met her.\"\n\n\"She is so young,\" I protested. \"If she were human, she'd be a helpless babe.\"\n\n\"Aye, but she's a dragon, last I saw. And, dragon or human, in the young is the certainty that comes with ignorance. This is her home. Everything she has been told all her life has been about protecting it. The roots of her beliefs are already deep. I think you will find it hard to persuade Kiata to abandon this place, even with Aragor dead. Nor will she want to abandon Gia, who followed her around like a huge shadow throughout her short life. You had best face that, or you'll lose her.\"\n\nI considered Harlan's unhappy theory with a snarl. The sculptors of Rolm always stole hatchlings young\u2014and that probably had a lot to do with the development of the mind as well as the hardening of scales. I wondered if it was something even more than that\u2014something unique to dragons, something related to the so-called Way. Kiata already seemed set on a path, as were all the other dragons of Ni-Yota. Only I was different, only I seemed confused about my mission in this life. My mother had said the Way wasn't for me. I had been a slave. That could be the explanation for my otherness. But it also meant I wouldn't be able to take Kiata away from the danger she faced here.\n\nI gave a petulant growl. \"I will go to their council.\" Harlan nodded happily. His pleasure at persuading me irked. \"Don't be so satisfied. I'm not going to save them from the hollowing horde. I may not know my true Way as some of the other dragons here, but I've seen enough battles to know I don't want to fight that army.\"\n\nHarlan smirked. \"Let me tell you a story about a little girl who thought she would get what she wanted when she grew up. She was a princess, you see \u2026\"\n\nI unfurled my wings, flying to the sanctuary of the sky."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "At least there was lunch.\n\nIt wasn't pig. I wondered if Rinxia had arranged for my favorite animal to be excluded to spite me. That seemed petty. I'd gone out of my way to be kind to Rinxia, but I hadn't gone along with what she apparently wanted\u2014for me to put myself forward to be Protector of Ni-Yota. I was still shocked she would consider it. I barely knew this land, and she barely knew me. The dark voice in my head reminded me that perhaps Rinxia simply didn't have anyone else to support for the position. If Rinxia actually thought there was some divine reason she shouldn't be protector, that left Gia and me as potential candidates. Urging me to take the role didn't seem like such a tough choice when looked at that way. Still, no matter how much I liked Rinxia, I wasn't going to step into the mess that had gotten Aragor killed.\n\nWhen the servant laid out massive trays piled high with chicken feet, any doubts were dispelled\u2014this had to be Rinxia's work. Feet, feet, and more feet. What had the cooks done with the rest of the birds after they removed these small appendages? I glared at Rinxia as she devoured dozens of chicken ends, slurping and nearly purring with delight. In addition to Rinxia, Gia, and Kiata, there were four other humans joining in the so-called council feast, as well as Harlan. They actually seemed to be enjoying themselves as my stomach rumbled. Even Gia ate. The giant dragon hadn't spoken to me, but he hadn't attacked me either, so that was something.\n\n\"You really should try these, Bayloo,\" Rinxia said between bites. \"They are a delicacy. The flesh helps smooth our scales and adds shine.\"\n\n\"I'd rather chew upon the stone of this tower.\"\n\nRinxia laughed with her eyes. Even mighty Gia seemed amused, which soured my mood further. Rinxia signaled with a foreclaw and another wave of dishes appeared. Finally, she showed me some mercy. Fresh lake fish arrived on long ceramic platters, the fillets prepared in a tangy sauce of citrus. Not bad at all.\n\nThe other attendees found morbid discussions of Ni-Yota politics more interesting than the food, but that arrangement suited me. I got extra fish while they jabbered. Only Harlan was uncharacteristically quiet. He didn't eat either. He just watched.\n\nThe late Skyking's council chamber occupied the lower levels of his impossible high tower. The room's dimensions were equal to the entirety of the tower, forming a great circular chamber filled with cushioned areas for dragons and uncomfortable-looking high-backed chairs for humans. A rather ingenious multi-level table dominated the center of the room, allowing both dragon and human to sit around a common surface. The raised dais of the Protector remained empty, although Gia had claimed to spot nearest on the right. Rinxia had left the space to the left empty, but I'd chosen the far side of the chamber to enjoy my meal rather than fall into her trap. Gia seemed pleased with the seating, if not the company. There was plenty of extra space in the chamber. Too many dead dragons; too many dead humans too, it seemed.\n\nKaita sat beside Gia, which annoyed me. The opposite portion of the room held a total of five humans, four of whom I didn't know. Harlan was the fifth. Rinxia introduced each of the bipeds to me, but I was so annoyed by the chicken feet I didn't pay very close attention to their names (none of them were named pork or pig, I was sure of that). When it came time to focus on non-food matters, I decided to call the male humans Shorty, Doughy, and Angry. Doughy and Angry had thick necklaces with fist-sized medallions that signified their titles of knight-lords, much like the man Avix who'd sent the glasswing messages, but Doughy and Angry were apparently responsible for different Mizu armies. The other human male\u2014Shorty\u2014had a name (which I'd also forgotten), but no additional title. He a simple tunic of gray, and had let his flaxen hair grow long, like a female, but had a stubble-covered chin and a wide face unlike any of the other I'd seen in Ni-Yota\u2014I guessed he was not Mizu, but from one of their conquered territories. The lone human woman made the strongest impression, though. She possessed an air of power that drew my attention away from the lake fish that was on the table. She was burly, with a hairless head, and wore a robe in the style of the wizards like Drasu. Rinxia named her Legao. She was of the Conclave of Magi.\n\nHarlan kept a wary eye on the woman as well. She hadn't spoken yet\u2014like Harlan she seemed inclined to listen for the moment. But this Legao had presence in the way an inferno mountain had presence even when sitting quietly. I got the impression she was dangerous.\n\nHarlan sat closest to me of the humans, in a chair he'd dragged over from the other side of the room. He hadn't been invited to the council of course, but I'd brought him anyway. Since he arrived on my back, there wasn't much of an opportunity for objection. Of the gathered humans and dragons, only Angry had made a bit of a fuss, but everyone ignored him. Even Gia didn't seem to care, although I caught him exchanging glances with Rinxia.\n\nAngry did the most talking at first. After complaining about Harlan\u2014a foreigner and an Islander\u2014being present at this august council, Angry glided smoothly into his next grievance. Something to do with supply wagons. The others ignored that complaint as well. Finally, the discussion turned more serious.\n\n\"We must march now if a substantial army is to arrive in time to make a difference at the river.\" It was Doughy talking. His chin swayed a bit off center when he spoke. It found myself staring at him. He had a piece of fish stuck in the corner of his mouth, but I quickly decided it was too little to bother with.\n\nAngry's red face became hotter. \"We shouldn't even contemplate withdrawing our forces from Hundra Pass. Elasu's death is fresh and the east is far from pacified.\"\n\nDoughy scoffed at that. \"The Eastern lords will walk to Trishan on their knees without Elasu to stiffen their backs.\"\n\nThe human I named Shorty raised one end of his left brow at Doughy's pronouncement, but somehow that mere motion silenced the other humans, drawing their attention to him. He didn't speak, though. Not until Angry prompted him: \"You have something to add, Master Jinu?\"\n\nShorty\u2014Jinu was his proper name, apparently\u2014turned his head, a motion that revealed the longest ears I'd ever seen on a human. He looked like an alarmed rabbit. Fascinated, I extended my neck closer to examine the strange things. I expected to find a lot of hair growing on them, given Jinu's prominence as a member of the council, but the great ears were bare. He glared at me.\n\n\"I am not from Ni-Yota,\" Jinu told me, answering a question I had not asked. \"My people were the Kahali of Illium, but the Protectors of Ni-Yota were good enough to take us in. It was a custom of our people to attach weights to the bottom of the ear lobes of certain children to stretch them, as large ears were thought to denote wisdom.\"\n\n\"Humans can enlarge their ears?\" I asked. \"Why do you all not do that? You would hear so much better.\"\n\nJinu cleared his throat and turned his attention back to the other humans without answering. \"I had word this morning from Lord Viza that he lost an entire mounted company as they made their way toward Sothxia. He suspects the tigris are responsible.\" Jinu glanced toward the empty dais, before stopping himself. He spoke toward Gia instead. \"We must not underestimate the danger to the east.\"\n\nAngry seized on this, also addressing Gia. \"Let us heed the words of Jinu's spies. In any case, it is folly to weaken ourselves by trying to march men for weeks to join a battle that will be over before they even begin their journey.\"\n\n\"Jinu's spies always seem to say whatever he wants them to say,\" Doughy countered. \"Aragor liked to hear what he wanted to hear. But now \u2026\"\n\nThe tip of Jinu's tongue licked his top lip, a gesture that reminded me of a serpent. \"If you have an accusation to make, Lord Hera, then do make it. Yes, do.\"\n\nLord Hera's mouth opened, even as his eyes danced around the room. No one met his gaze. His lips trembled, then he shut his mouth.\n\n\"Yes, I see,\" Jinu said with satisfaction. \"As I was saying, the tigris remain a significant threat. Elasu may be dead, but so is Aragor. The Eastern lords bide their time to await the new protector.\" I kept my eyes on the fish bones and not Rinxia.\n\n\"You are not a soldier, Jinu,\" Lord Hera declared, finding his voice again. \"You are not even Mizu. Perhaps you do not care about the loss of Gaminer, or even Trishan. But I do. We need more troops at the Tayo River to hold back hollowings.\"\n\nAngry replied to this. \"Even cavalry will take too long.\" Doughy looked hopefully at Gia. \"Unless the soldiers can be moved by air.\"\n\nGia shifted his giant bulk, brushing the table enough to shift it. \"Even if every dragon here loaded themselves to capacity and flew till they dropped from the sky, we could not carry enough soldiers to the Tayo River to make a difference.\"\n\nAngry nodded and his face lightened. \"Well spoken, mighty Gia. Even a thousand men won't be enough if the hollowings bring those damn blood raptors. Swords are little use against behemoths. I was at the river the last time we tried to go on the offensive two years ago, fighting alongside my men. We lost a thousand soldiers and a hundred horse just to keep two of the huge\u2026things at bay until Aragor and you arrived.\"\n\nGia grunted. \"I have not forgotten the battle. The beasts' hides resist fire. Worthy adversaries, I must admit.\"\n\n\"Then we dragons must go and rout this horde, drive them away from the river.\" It was Kiata who spoke, her voice sounding ridiculously innocent and tiny, at least me.\n\nGia looked at her, his eyes pleased but amused. Like a doting parent. Something unpleasant turned in my stomach, and it wasn't the fish (probably). \"Yes, brave Kiata, it must be dragons who will take this burden. You need not worry yourself though. I shall go with Rinxia. We cannot risk losing you.\" Slowly, reluctantly, Gia turned his head toward me. \"We would accept Bayloo's help as well, if he has the courage.\"\n\nI had two fish in my mouth; Kiata answered before I could. \"My brother will stand with you.\"\n\nI swallowed without chewing. Seriously, Kiata?\n\nThis was ridiculous. I didn't want to fight the hollowings. But I also didn't want to come off sounding like a cowardly fool in front of Rinxia and Kiata. A tricky balance.\n\nRinxia spoke up. \"The last time I flew along the Tayo, the hollowing numbers seemed near limitless. There are too many even for us, Gia. We are only three, even with Bayloo, and he is not a fire breather.\"\n\nOh. That. Again. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry anymore.\n\nGia answered, his eyes and voice mocking. \"You doubt the power of the mighty ember dragon, returned to us with suspicious good fortune?\"\n\n\"Fire alone wins no battles,\" I told him.\n\nRinxia spoke as Gia snarled. \"My point is, three adult dragons are not enough to defeat the hollowing horde.\"\n\nGia's eyes blackened. \"Shall we surrender then, Rinxia? Run to the other side of the Pillar mountains, leaving millions fall to the rust and join the hollowing horde?\"\n\n\"I did not suggest that.\"\n\n\"We need only to hold the Narrows,\" Gia insisted. \"Without a physical bridge from one side to the other, the rust cannot cross the river. It does not fly, it does not travel in boats, or move along with its hollowing servants. It can only spread where the great blight mass can touch adjacent land. We must hold the river to hold back the rust. And we will.\"\n\n\"We need a better plan than flying blindly in the west, intending to burn our enemies.\" Rinxia's gaze swept the room but landed on me. \"For years, Drasu held the horde, helping us turn them back each time they tried to cross the river. He is gone, but we still need magic to win this fight.\"\n\nMagic.\n\nMy chest tightened. I began to understand more of Rinxia's cunning. Is that why she wanted me to be Protector? I didn't even really know for certain I had any magic; I didn't want to even discuss trying to use magic in battle against those hollowings. I could never form a shield as Drasu had, or summon that terrible lightning as he could. Rinxia needed to understand that. I was about to tell her, when the silent woman on the other side of the room spoke for the first time.\n\n\"None are equal to the task, mighty Rinxia,\" Legao told her. \"There was only one Drasu. A wizard such as he comes along once in a hundred years, if we are lucky. Our Conclave can muster four windmasters if we recall them all from our waveships. There are two master binders at Kolum, but I doubt a fully grown adult behemoth could be tamed even if we could capture one alive. I expect hollowing behemoths may well be unbindable in any case.\"\n\nLegao said tamed rather easily, but I had no doubt what a so-called binder really was. Binding was just a cute way to describe enslaving another creature. My jaw hardened.\n\n\"And what about you Master Legao?\" Rinxia asked pointedly. \"Were you not the most senior of Drasu's magi before you ascended to lead the Conclave?\"\n\nLegao's face became stone. \"Never have I claimed to be Drasu's equal. No human wizard has ever rivaled his power.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" asked someone beside me. All eyes turned to Harlan as he slouched in his rigid wooden chair, looking like a dark, spineless lizard.\n\nHarlan's question did nothing to brighten the wizard's face. Legao's tone turned from dry to hot. \"Who are you to ask that, Farlighter?\"\n\nThe hostility seemed to come from nowhere. Even Gia didn't have such open hate for Harlan. \"I am called Harlan Dor, Master of Sea, and of late, Master of the Sky as well.\" He flashed the infamous smirk without moving a single other muscle in his body. \"I'm at your service.\"\n\nGia stirred his massive bulk, expressing his displeasure with Harlan's self-proclaimed title with a single, massive snort. I found myself rather amused by it all. Harlan's newly-bestowed honorific was actually true. He'd ridden on my back and sailed the seas, perhaps father than any other person alive. I liked his boldness, particularly since Gia did not. Kiata stared at Harlan, fascinated.\n\nLegao's gaze was as sharp as a dragon's claws. \"If only I could grant myself power as easily as you grant yourself titles. But magic is a far more demanding master than ego, Harlan Dor. Manners are just one reason your people are not welcome here.\"\n\nHarlan straightened himself into a more presentable posture, dipping his head respectfully. \"I meant no offense. My intent was only to highlight that I'd traveled more than most and hope to be of some assistance. Of mighty Drasu, I have heard the legends, of course. Yet the other magi of Ni-Yota are no less famous. Your windmasters are feared through the world's seas. My understanding is that the silver trim on your robe marks you a master of your craft\u2014a master wizard, even as Drasu was, able to command the elements of the sky.\"\n\nLegao looked at her own garb with something akin to embarrassment. \"No human has ever rivaled the power possessed by Drasu. None have even come close. While others might learn the arts of wind taming or binding, he alone ascended to status of Weaver, able to command all the physical forces of the world by his own cunning and will, something previously only thought achievable by ember dragons. He was a magi in the true sense\u2014a master of all the known magic paths. Those available to humans, that is.\" She gave a polite nod in Kiata's direction but not mine. \"To your question, Harlan, I do not know why Drasu was so gifted, or why he lived so long, or why he never succumbed to the pain of the mind, as so many other wizards do. There are some who believe his mother mixed the blood of a dragon with the milk she gave him when he was an infant.\" Legao shrugged. \"It is as good an explanation as any other I've heard.\"\n\nHarlan smirked widened. \"Still, you wear the garb of a master. You now lead the Conclave of Magi. I presume that means we should not contend with each other in dice at the very least. So, what can you do?\"\n\nLegao flushed. Her hand rose, a finger pointed at Harlan who didn't flinch. \"I can rid the word of your mocking disrespect.\"\n\nGia's voice echoed through the chamber. \"Bayloo's pet is out of line, but the question is a valid one. You hold the office of First Servant of the Conclave and wear the robe of a master of your craft. What can you do to aid us in our time of need, Legao? Even a partial shield, say, to hold back the blood raptors, would be invaluable in a moment such as this.\"\n\nThe wizard shook her head with regret. \"Such a casting\u2026You must understand, most magic is the manipulation of a single force. A windmaster might coax the breeze to change direction for a time. A wizard might direct lightning on a stormy day. A binder can tame a single beast, but only in its infancy, when the mind is malleable. But to weave a spell such as the Great Barrier, as Drasu did\u2026it is both power and artistry combined.\" There was no mistaking the awe in Legao's voice as she spoke of Drasu's work. Or the envy. \"Wind and water were bound with the sky. To disturb the barrier brought down the wrath of lightning. Even from afar, Drasu's power sustained the barrier without need to constantly re-weave the spell.\" Legao shook her head in astonishment, as if she was a child shown fire for the first time. \"A near permanent weave of the forces of the world. Even among the ember dragons of lore, only a precious few could manage such a thing.\"\n\nGia didn't share Legao's awe. \"Can you aid us in battle or is your power confined to useless stories, Legao?\"\n\nThe wizard raised her chin. \"I am a wizard. I can summon the power of the skies regardless of weather.\"\n\n\"Enough to penetrate the hide of a behemoth?\"\n\n\"I don't \u2026\" She stopped and met Gia's gaze. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then you come with us. I will carry you on my back to the river.\" The huge dragon got to his feet. \"The time for talking ends. We waste our breath here. Is there any here who challenges my right to lead in battle?\"\n\nRinxia looked at him sharply. I understood\u2014it was a step toward claiming the status he coveted. I kept my jaw firmly shut, so Rinxia spoke. \"I've still heard no plan, Gia. Flying west to burn isn't a battle strategy. Bringing a wizard isn't a solution. Aragor would never have been so reckless.\"\n\nGia roared at her. The dishes on the table shook (luckily all the ones near me were empty). \"You would have us talk until the hollowings reach Trishan, Rinxia. My fire and Legao's magic will handle the behemoths. You and the soldiers must turn the tide against the human empties\u2014those hollowings. Maybe you can persuade Bayloo to help you with that sweet tongue of yours.\"\n\nRinxia held her ground in the face of the larger dragon's fury. \"I'll not see our warriors slaughtered, their lives wasted, because of a lack of thought, a lack of leadership.\"\n\nGia smashed his tail into the wall behind him, shaking the room. His eyes burned. The two dragons locked gazes, neither giving ground. Gia's tail twitched. His jaw tightened. Terror swept through the humans, except for Legao. And Harlan.\n\n\"Excuse me, but might I ask a simple question?\" Harlan spoke in an offhand voice, yet it managed to cut through the tension as thoroughly as Gia's roar. The black dragon turned sharply, ready to bite Harlan's head off. Then Kiata spoke up.\n\n\"Ask your question, clever human, friend of my brother.\"\n\nHarlan winked at my sister. Her eyes glowed back. I was jealous. \"Can the hollowings swim?\"\n\nGia laughed in contempt, when comprehension came to Rinxia immediately. \"They are shells of the men they once were. Whatever the shell could do, the hollowings can do. But they have never tried to swim the river.\"\n\n\"In my experience, most people can't swim. I doubt the people of Illium were any different. Even a remarkable number of sailors never learn. In the north, men are terrified of the cold water. Anyway, swimming a river as wide and swift as the Tayo would be difficult.\"\n\nRinxia nodded in the human manner. \"Go on, Harlan.\"\n\nHe leaned forward in his seat, but still didn't sit straight like the other humans. \"If the bulk of their forces cannot swim across the river, then they must either use a bridge or be carried. Since this river has been your defense for years, am I correct that there are no bridges?\"\n\n\"You are correct,\" Rinxia confirmed.\n\n\"And the Tayo is crossable only in a few places\u2014with the rest protected by steep cliffs, terrible currents, or other natural defenses?\"\n\n\"Correct again. Other than the Narrows, the river is nearly uncrossable by land dwellers.\"\n\n\"That means that the hollowings will have to build bridges and move them to the river. Such bridges would be flimsy things, likely made of wood. Wood burns. You seem quite good at starting fires.\" His gaze slid toward Gia.\n\n\"That is your plan, human?\" Gia dripped contempt. I didn't think it was such a bad idea.\n\nHarlan smirked. \"There's more.\" He glanced up at the ceiling. I didn't get his purpose, but he sounded confident. Of course, Harlan was also a smuggler and a liar when necessary. \"I think you'll like the plan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "I prepared for battle on the shore of the palace's great lake.\n\nThe water was calm, the smooth surface barely rippling in a gentle breeze that couldn't last. The afternoon was wearing on. Humans dressed in colorful tunics of red, orange, and green fiddled with my claws, fitting me with those deadly metal spikes that I had only been a victim of until now. I learned that the Mizu called them sai. The covering felt strange on my claws, their weight disturbing my precise balance. And they were cold\u2014they felt like dipping my legs in the water of a freezing lake.\n\n\"Master Bayloo, may we beg you to keep still?\" It was one of the human tenders. Kashar was his name, and he seemed to be in charge. The man spoke to me with respect, his words soft and thoughtfully selected. Kashar handled the sai with reverence. His expression told me that he was delighted to have another dragon to fix these devices upon. \"We are almost complete with the foreclaws.\"\n\n\"Why do these devices feel as if they have recently been pulled out from the Ice Sea, Kashar?\"\n\n\"It is a result of the process by which they were created.\" He offered me a smile as wide as his face, obviously pleased to educate me about these weapons while his assistants continued the fitting. \"These great sai were made in ancient Forge of Uta, deep beneath Trishan, forged from a special metal like none other in Ni-Yota.\"\n\nI could tell he wanted me to ask more about his weapons, and I was happy to oblige. \"And how was this mysterious metal found, Kashar?\"\n\n\"Ah, well, I must admit, it was indeed I who finally devised a way to utilize it. Pardon my saying so.\" I wondered if a human smile could grow so wide it became painful.\n\n\"Please tell how this happened.\"\n\nI wasn't just passing the time; I was actually somewhat interested in Kashar's story. I knew it wouldn't be as interesting as the story of the delicious black pigs that lived only in Changsha, but not every story can be about delicious tasting animals, unfortunately. Still, it would take a while for my back claws to be fitted with sai, so I listened.\n\nKashar placed his hand together. \"The metal was first found long ago in the tower of the Keeper of the Radiance during the last years of the reign of Alatel. I know you are perhaps not so familiar with all of our history, so I will add that this event occurred after the last of the line of Keepers was exiled from Ni-Yota.\"\n\nMy hearts thumped. My mother had been the last Keeper and had once dwelled in that tower. \"There are many stories of how the ore came to be in the tower. Some say it was brought to Ni-Yota by the Jiax-Lo, the first Keeper of the Radiance in the time of Shihan of the Sky. Others claimed it came from Illium, from the mysterious Artificers of that place, or said it was an object from the Doomed World, before the Cataclysm. There are other tales as well. The records of the Keepers still have not been fully deciphered to this day.\"\n\nTime to flatter some ego. Humans loved this even more than they enjoyed having their hair groomed. \"But you are the one who finally made use of the mysterious ore\u2014you are the one who forged it, are you not? What do you believe to be the truth, noble Kashar?\"\n\nI could tell by the gleam in Kashar's eyes I'd asked just the question he wanted to answer. \"There is a story in the archives of an expedition sent by Nihan Who Follows, son of Shihan, to the Forest of Fallen Night. Nihan was obsessed with prolonging his own life, and sent many expeditions to that haunted forest in a vain search for the oasis that is rumored to lie deep within its heart.\"\n\nI remember the dark, forbidding place\u2014that Forest of Fallen Night. It was a thicket of impenetrable black where Elasu had somehow been at ease, but no one else. \"I know the forest, but I've heard that no one ever returned from there. Not until the coming of the tigris at the time of Schism.\"\n\nKashar's head bobbed. \"True. True enough. However, men have only the history of their own lives. Only their stories live beyond them, and those change over time. Only the written word is immutable.\"\n\n\"You're saying someone did return from there?\"\n\n\"There is an account in the Protector's archives. It recounts the testimony of a merchant from Changsha who had been sentenced to death for attempting to dishonestly replace a ruby entrusted to his care by the lord of the city of Piro with a stained glass replica. In an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to win clemency, he offered the Justicar of Changsha a chest of wood carved with a dozen stages of the moon as it waxed and waned. Inside this box were ingots of a reddish metal that shone unlike any other the justicar had seen. The condemned merchant claimed he found the box in the possession of a dead man\u2014a soldier dressed in the yellow-crested armor of Protector Delima\u2014near the far southern border of Ni-Yota, not terribly distant from the Forest of Fallen Night. This, I believe to be the true story, and that the fallen soldier was the last of the doomed expedition in the forest.\"\n\n\"Why do you believe this tale above the others?'\n\n\"Because the metal I used to forge the sai was indeed found in a wooden box. The carvings had faded over the years, but I believe I could make out a crescent moon on the back. I mixed it with iron and other metals, but the edges\u2026the sharp edges of the sai are pure.\"\n\nI tapped my sai-tipped claws lightly against the ground as I considered. \"And no one could work with the metal until now?\"\n\nKashar shrugged, trying to seem humble, although his sloppy grin betrayed his pride. \"Metal being as rare and expensive as it is, few pursue the study of its forging. In any case, the chest was in the possession of the Keepers of the Radiance for hundreds of years. Also, the Protectors who ruled Ni-Yota before the coming of Aragor the Skyking wouldn't countenance experimentation of such an ancient artifact. It was only with the rise of Aragor and the Schism that the need of the nation was greatest. But even after Aragor began his relentless search for weapons he might use against his enemies, no one could manipulate the metal. Not until I figured it out the secret.\"\n\nI studied Kashar. He wore a robe somewhat similar to Legao the wizard, although its hue was emerald with white trim. \"You are a user of magic? That is how you were able to make these sai?\"\n\nKahsar's grin grew wider. It was almost wrapping around his head. \"You flatter me. I have studied the Art of the Forge. I have learned the Way of the Flame. But there are others who have done that.\" He stepped closer. \"I will tell you alone my secret, Master Bayloo. It was the fire that was the key. Others tried their arts on the metal itself, but that is impossible. It is something special. Greater and stronger than steel or anything else we here know today. I suspect it is from the time before the Cataclysm. To work this metal, it is the fire upon which magic must be worked. Only with a magical forge can the sai be created. With the blessing of Aragor, I obtained special materials from the Conclave of Magi, which made the flame of the forge hotter than any other.\"\n\nI nodded in the human fashion, moving my claws about, newly appreciative of the weapon that had been bestowed upon me. \"I will put them to good use, Master Kashar. That I will promise you.\"\n\nThe tenders finished their work. Daylight was precious, and I was anxious to begin this journey. Gia had already left with Legao to prepare for the attack. They would coordinate the human cavalry. Rinxia and I, along with Harlan, had a stop to make before we joined the others.\n\nRinxia sat next to me, her claws also now fitted with sai. Her face was annoyingly serene as a saddle was strapped onto her back. In addition to Harlan, we would carry cargo and human engineers with us. It was all part of Harlan's mad scheme. I don't like complicated plans, particularly those that required me to rely on anyone other than myself to succeed. Gia, Renxia, and even Kiata felt otherwise. I had to remind myself that I had no interest in being Protector of Ni-Yota.\n\nHarlan approached us, a heavy crossbow across his back. I knew he'd have at least two daggers on him as well. I was often contemptuous of human contributions to my battles, but with Harlan I had to concede the lethal effectiveness of his aim. Betal would've killed my sister but for Harlan's bravery and throwing skills. He had an excited spring in his step as he climbed easily onto my back, as if he'd ridden dragons all his life. His overly pleasant demeanor irked me. One should not be cheerful on the eve of battle.\n\n\"Why are you so intent on helping these people?\" I asked him. \"They hate you. The members of the council could scarcely conceal their contempt.\"\n\nHarlan only needed to consider for a moment. \"Do you believe in a higher purpose, Bayloo? A reason to live beyond just eating and getting through the day?\"\n\nI hated when this human answered my question with another question. At least I had an answer to this one. \"The dragons of this place speak of the Way\u2014their path in life. I'm unsure if I follow a necessary path, but for now, I am certain that I wish to free my sister from this place. I wish all my brethren free of their magical slavery.\"\n\nHarlan huffed in delight, as if he'd proven a point. \"I, too, have a higher purpose. But quests for these lofty goals are like sailing a ship around the world. The course isn't a straight line. But if your heart is true, it will lead you through the roughest seas to the place you were meant to find.\"\n\nI grunted. \"Sometimes when a ryder flies upon a dragon too high in the clouds, and does so too often, his brain becomes permanently damaged. It could happen quickly to someone who wasn't accustomed to the thin air. A sailor, for example.\"\n\nHarlan laughed as if I was joking.\n\nThe human engineers arrived and climbed onto Rinxia and my backs with some difficulty. I carried a total of three passengers, as well as two large barrels of cargo in my hind claws, while Rinxia carried two more humans and still more supplies. Fully loaded, we took to the sky.\n\nHarlan had gone from terrified at flight to regretting he'd not been born with wings. He cackled with a mad joy as we soared into the sky. I understood his love of flight, but not his delight to head into battle against the enemies of Ni-Yota.\n\nRinxia flew beside us. \"Thank you for standing with us, Bayloo. You are truly becoming one of us.\"\n\nI stopped my instinctive snort before it escaped my nostrils. I was here. I'd made my choice. I had best make the best of it.\n\n\"It is my honor.\" I sounded awkward.\n\nRinxia's eyes glowed with approval. \"We must fly northwest, to the place where the waters coming down from the mountains meet, their flows combining to form the mighty Tayo River. It is well inland, away from the Narrows, where the armies clash. Follow me and listen to the engineers. They've actually done this before\u2014sort of.\"\n\nListening to humans. Not my strong area. \"I'm sure Harlan will have plenty of advice for me.\"\n\n\"Bayloo, this can work. We need it to work.\"\n\nRinxia's words reminded me of the battle I'd fought beside Elasu. She had counted on me. I've given her my promise, then I had let her down. Following orders just wasn't my strong area. Maybe I'd followed too many while I was a slave. I didn't say that, though. Rinxia sped northwest and I followed.\n\nShe led us to a hidden valley of trees within the massive peaks of the mountains that loomed behind us in the distance. The source waters of the Tayo came down from the peaks as snowmelt, flowing across these through the valleys and foothills. The river was even stronger here than at the Illium border, its waters a steady rush of power. Tall trees grew in the valley near the river, their trunks thick, but not too thick. The site was well chosen.\n\n\"The materials here will serve our purposes,\" Rinxia declared.\n\nHarlan dismounted and nodded in satisfaction as well. \"The river current is strong, quick. This will do, indeed.\"\n\nThe human engineers climbed off my back, as did Harlan. He spoke excitedly, waving his arms as he spoke with the Mizu. Their facial expressions told me I wasn't the only one who thought Harlan was slightly mad. Harlan returned and put Rinxia and I to work ripping trees from the surrounding wood and placing them on the ground in neat rows for engineers. The last of the day's light was expended as we worked.\n\nAfter dark fell, I sought out Rinxia. The day's toil had offered few chances to speak, but I had grown increasingly impatient. \"Let us be gone from this place. Gia and Legao will be ready for battle at first light. We must be there to join them.\"\n\n\"We are not far by way of wing,\" Rinxia assured me. I envied her calm. \"Rest first, Bayloo. We have time to meet them at first light. The engineers here will work through the night by torchlight as best they are able. It is dangerous to do what they do in the darkness\u2014they are only human. We should be ready to assist.\"\n\nI wasn't patient. \"While we delay, the hollowings fight to cross this same river further downstream. They may already be across in sufficient numbers, and all this will be for nothing.\"\n\nRinxia eyes glowed bright against the night. \"You sound concerned, Bayloo. Are in such a hurry to join the fight?\"\n\nI let go of a long breath. \"If I must fight, then I wish to win. Even when I fought as a slave, that was part of me.\"\n\n\"You must curb your impatience,\" she chided. \"Haste can be our undoing. Precise timing means more than speed now. We must strike with Gia and Legao and the human-led cavalry forces. Only together do we have a hope of succeeding in this.\"\n\nShe was right, but that didn't make waiting any easier. I had always been anxious before battle, and those fights hadn't been of my choosing. Also, in Rolm, I'd known my enemy. I'd been fighting creatures I understood. Even the griffins, war wolves, and furies of Oster were just lethal soldiers of King Galt. These hollowings were something else. I'd never faced behemoths or blood raptors or whatever other unnatural allies they had waiting. This wasn't a war for territory or power. Even Aragor seemingly had no idea what the hollowings wanted. That made them dangerous.\n\nI shuffled about as the human engineers swarmed over the trees that Rinxia and I had collected for them. I checked my wings and my sai until deep in the night, my thoughts relentless.\n\nSometime after everyone else slept, Rinxia approached. She moved so quietly I barely heard her. Only her scent alerted me to her presence. We had no trouble seeing each other even in the dark.\n\n\"You are nervous.\" She said it kindly, as if surprised.\n\nI wasn't going to admit that. \"I itch for battle. Even if my body wishes to rest, my mind does not cooperate.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can help with that.\"\n\nThe sleek, beautiful silver dragon slid beside me, her scales rubbing against mine. I could feel the heat of her body. Her scent filled my nostrils and my head. A wave of dizziness struck me. Rinxia curled her neck against mine. Every part of me tingled with warmth. Every part. She wrapped her tail around mine.\n\nI stopped feeling anxious. I forgot all about the battle to come. We spent the rest of the night in that pose and others, then spent more time curled together. I cursed the sun when dawn finally arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "I followed Rinxia into the sky.\n\nIn that moment, I didn't care where she was leading me. I'd have followed her into a bath of chicken piss. What a dragon!\n\nShe had said nothing to me in the morning. Just before the first light of the new sun reached us, she disentangled herself from me. I wanted to chase her, to grab her, to beg her to come back to me. I was a bit pathetic, but I held myself in check. She knew what she was doing and I didn't. I copied her silence.\n\nOn this new morning, we both flew without saddles or human passengers, for which I was grateful. Harlan was capable, but he was extremely human. I was relieved not to worry about taking care of him while in the air. He would face his own dangers, but I could do nothing about those for the moment.\n\nRinxia pulled further ahead of me, her lean body and powerful wings cutting through the wind. I admired her grace in the air. I vowed that nothing would happen to her in the forthcoming battle. I would protect her, even if she didn't need it. My blood surged, singing in my head. I almost felt sorry for the hollowings. We were going to smash them.\n\nAs the sun cleared the Pillar Mountains far to the east, I saw Gia. He awaited us at the appointed location like a great pimple of black on the face of the horizon. On his back, he carried the wizard, Legao, who looked as out of place in the air as I did in the sea. Gia made his foul mood evident without delay.\n\n\"The battle rages while you waste your time on human schemes.\"\n\nRinxia danced around the larger dragon. \"The outcome of the battle will decide if the time was wasted. I see that the horse riders advance as they should.\"\n\nI followed her gaze to the ground. Below was a massive formation of human cavalry. They flowed toward the gap in the mountains where the Tayo River narrowed. They moved like ants in neat rows, their mounts kicking up dirt and dust as they galloped to battle. The huge mountains to the north and south were silent sentinels to the carnage that would follow.\n\n\"They ride, but we must lead,\" Gia growled, beating his wings. \"To battle!\" he roared, already pushing for speed.\n\nRinxia and I beat our wings. The cause of Gia's impatient consternation appeared immediately. I saw the River Tayo and our enemy. My hearts sank. We were too late.\n\nThe hollowings had already crossed. Their army had formed dangerous salient on the Ni-Yota side of the river in two places, the leading edge of the formations slowly growing, reaching toward each other like lusty lovers. Between the attacking spearheads were desperate Mizu foot soldiers locked in combat, their lines uneven and erratic. The hollowings looked like human soldiers to me, except for their movements.\n\nThe hollowings were many, but it was the terrible behemoths that formed their vanguard. The beasts towered over every other living ground creature, each of their four legs as long as a horse and as thick as three men, their heavy, forked tails packed with nasty-looking spikes as long as a human leg. Their heads were crafted of three armored plates joined together, creating a triangle, with tiny eyes located above a pair of curved tusks that jutted outward and upward. If I'd been a human, I'd have run from such a beast. The Mizu were braver than I. Or stupider.\n\nThe Mizu mostly held their ground despite the onslaught. Many on the front wielded long halberds, while others slashed their blades. Archers held fast behind the crumbling lines. But for all the courage of the defenders, they appeared doomed. The peril of impending encirclement was obvious from the air. In the chaos of battle, the Mizu troops might not have realized what was happening. Or they were indeed stupidly brave.\n\nI have seen many battles, and I knew this battle would not be won on the ground. I looked to the river. There were two bridges spanning the length of quickened waters. The passages resembled huge wooden barges strung together to span the width of the river, their ends held in place by the strength of four massive behemoths to which great cables of a metal-like rope were attached. Hollowings streamed across the tenuous floating corridors in a continuous line. The living shells looked almost like a regular army, except for their strange, synchronous movements. It was as if the hollowing were connected to each other like string puppets, each soldier's legs moving in lock step with the others. They moved with neither obvious urgency nor reluctance. If they had commanders among them, it was not apparent to me.\n\nThe non-human hollowings were even more unnatural. Wolves intermingled with the human hollowing troops, the lupines also marching along with the same steady motion as the humans. The sight fascinated and repulsed me. It was a terrible alliance. The war wolves of Oster were trained animals. They obeyed, but they were not slaves. These creatures were something far more disturbing.\n\nI drew closer to Rinxia. I caught her scent, which sent tingles through me. I had to force myself to remember the battle. I didn't know how much fighting Rinxia had been involved in, but her demeanor made me confident that this was not her first battle. \"There are easily a thousand Mizu soldiers caught between the advancing hollowing salients. Those men will be trapped and slaughtered.\"\n\n\"I see it,\" she assured me. \"We'll save them.\"\n\nI supposed her words were supposed to reassure me. They didn't. They meant she intended to engage those armored monstrosities and the horde accompanying them. She intended to risk her life for those humans.\n\nGia roared to us from across the sky. \"Bayloo and I will each take one of salients. Rinxia, you burn the bridges on the river and any other creature that tries to cross.\" I felt Gia's gaze across the sky that separated us. I met the challenge in his eyes. \"I expect I'll have killed my first behemoth of the day long before you have, Bayloo,\" he sneered. \"Prove me wrong.\"\n\nThe giant black dragon plunged into the fray, his great wings casting a shadow over the field of battle. After a reluctant moment, I did the same.\n\n\"Be careful!\" Rinxia called to me as I dove. Those simple words meant far more to me than they should've, but they wouldn't make me more careful. Quite the opposite. I intended to win this battle for Rinxia. I wanted another night like the one I'd just experienced. I wanted to find out what came next. That meant I needed to beat the hollowing horde.\n\nGia plunged toward the upstream salient, flying on a direct line toward the behemoth at the forefront of the attack. I was more cautious, first circling over the downstream formation as I observed the hollowings' maneuvers. I wasn't familiar with this enemy, nor this type of battle.\n\nThe horde fought with the same unnatural synchronization they displayed when they marched. Human, wolf, and behemoth each pressed forward on the line of attack without fear or apparent regard for their own life. When a soldier fell, another took his place. The wolves attacked in formation, charging forth in a bold manner completely unnatural for their kind. In the wars I'd witnessed, formations maneuvered erratically, lines buckled, commanders improvised, and soldiers panicked or overreached. The field was swirling mass of barely organized chaos. There was none of that among the hollowings. The hollowing soldiers barely made any noise. However the strange army coordinated their actions, it wasn't by voice command.\n\nI heard a roar in the distance. With one eye I saw Gia unleash his fire at the behemoth within his salient. The blaze washed over the creature like water over rock, with about as much effect. The armored beast didn't even look up. Flames were not the answer to defeating this foe. That was fine with me.\n\nThe salient of hollowings beneath me had two behmoths among them. I saw no obvious vulnerability to the creatures. I made a final circle around the hollowing force before swooping down to attack, keeping away from the massive creatures on the front line. I was noticed by the enemy, but there was no panic among them. A dozen fighters turned about in unison, as if on parade, raised crossbows, and fired. I banked enough that most of the fusillade missed, except for a pair of bolts that deflected off the scales of my underbelly. There was nothing special about their weapons. I'd survived their initial attack.\n\nMy turn. I grabbed two hollowings in my foreclaws on my initial dive, then knocked about a half a dozen more to the ground with my tail as I swept across the formation. As I flew, I squeezed my claws together, crushing the creatures in my grasp. They gasped, but didn't cry out as a normal human would. I dropped the mangled bodies into the river.\n\nThe two behemoths continued to plow forward without regard to my antics, their thrust supported by a hundred hollowings. Buoyed by the new presence of powerful allies in the sky, the Mizu soldiers struggled valiantly to hold their ground. Their halberds shattered against the behemoths' thick armor and their blade edges drew no blood, yet they didn't flee. I was impressed with the discipline under such conditions. King Mendakas' soliders would've broken long ago. Humans were such strange creatures, capable of such bravery and such treachery. I would try make the efforts of these soldiers worthwhile.\n\nExecuting a sharp turn, I beat my wings, coming at a behemoth from the rear. It didn't turn its head, seemingly focused on the Mizu soldiers in front of it. I had a perfect chance to engage it, maybe rip through its armored hide with my sai-tipped claws. That was the problem: It was too easy. My life wasn't meant to be easy. I never believed easy when it was offered, not anymore.\n\nIndulging my cynical suspicions, I turned away from the tempting target just before my claws got close enough to reach the behemoth. Sure enough, its massive spiked tail snapped with preternatural speed into the space I would've occupied had I kept on my original course. The beast finally turned its head to watch me after its whiff. I was already soaring into the sky, newly wary of my formidable adversary. The behemoth's anticipation of my tactics made me realize that it had other ways of tracking my movements beside its own eyes. I suspected it had something to do with the strange movements and behavior of the hollowing horde. They shared observations like any other army, but faster and quicker.\n\nPerched high above the fray, I had the opportunity to survey the rest of the battle. My eyes searched for Rinxia first. I found her quickly, her silver form nearly a blur as she ripped through a cloud of acrid smoke rising from one of the hollowing bridges. A few flames burned along the passage, but not enough to doom it. The hollowings hacked away at the edges of the bridge that had caught fire, severing the damaged portions to prevent the flames from spreading. More hollowings continued to cross, including another behemoth, its massive weight sending parts of the wooden bridge underwater as it took each step. But even the behemoth's weight didn't collapse the construction. The hollowings had engineers among them as well. This was no mindless horde. It was merely a different kind of army.\n\nI soon understood why Rinxia hadn't done more damage: blood ravens. Two distinct flocks consisting of hundreds of the vicious birds pursued her through the sky. She was fast enough to evade them, but by dividing themselves, they made it difficult for her to make clean dives or concentrate her fire for very long. The hollowings had also wheeled massive ballistae to the river's edge. Dropping to an altitude low enough to hit the bridges put Rinxia within easy range of their projectiles. In my mind, I urged her stay near the clouds, to stay safe. I couldn't bear to lose her. I also knew she would do no such thing. Rinxia had too much courage for that. More courage than me.\n\nAs for Gia, he'd been true to his nature, boldly engaging a behemoth with mutually devastating results. The giant tusked creature was missing part of a rear leg, while Gia had streams of blood leaking from his belly from where the behemoth's tail spike had apparently penetrated. But Gia showed no sign of quitting or caution. If he would rule as he fought, Rinxia was undoubtedly correct that Gia would make a poor Protector. He was reckless, even with his own life.\n\nFrom the east came the thunder of hooves. The Mizu cavalry we'd passed on our way to the river advanced at a gallop, surging in two groups toward each of the hollowing salients. They punished the ground as they came. I noticed the wind shift as they neared the hollowing lines. A steady easterly breeze suddenly intensified, swirling into tornado funnels that led the advancing horses. The twisters concealed the size and direction of the cavalry attack behind a wall of dust and sand. That had to be Legao's work. I watched with satisfaction as the tornados hit the hollowing lines a moment before the cavalry charge. The battle was truly joined. I took my opportunity.\n\nI came straight down into the fray. Legao's magically-summoned storm made it impossible for even my eyes to see the ground clearly, but I remembered where to find the behemoth. With the entire hollowing army blind, I gambled that I could take the beast by surprise this time. It would probably be my only opportunity, and I intended to make the most of it. I beat my wings, increasing my speed. The wind ripped past me; flying dust clattered against my scales. I was committed. I doubted I could've pulled up completely even if I had wanted. I flexed my claws, enjoying the feeling of the cold sai on their tips. I hoped the metal of their tips had indeed come from the Forest of Fallen Night. It was fitting that something from the tigris' home would lead me to victory.\n\nSwirling dust cascaded over me. I guided myself with memory and sound and instinct. I found my target. My enhanced foreclaws dug into a rough hide as thick as dragon scale. The behemoth's hide tore. I felt blood flow, even if I couldn't see it. The beast reared upwards. It even made some kind hideous noise, like a choking roar. I shoved myself back into the sky, using the behemoth's torso for leverage. I lifted to safety just before its invisible tail swept through my airspace. I came down again, this time with all four claws descending onto the behemoth. I dug deeper and deeper until I felt bone. The creature's tail came for me. I beat my wings, keeping a firm hold on the behemoth's vertebra. It didn't snap\u2014the bone might as well have been metal\u2014but something cracked. It sounded like the biggest walnut shell in the world being broken. Hollowing or not, that couldn't have been pleasant. The behemoth jerked violently, its legs collapsing. Still holding its spine, the dying beast's terrible weight yanked me toward the ground as it toppled. I held tight, beating my wings as I struggled to maintain my altitude. The beast weighed as much as a small mountain. I couldn't lift it, but it didn't matter. Its spine finally snapped into two pieces. I clutched the upper portion of the bone in my foreclaws while the rest of the behemoth's spine remained inside its shattered body, ending what remained of the beast's empty life. The behemoth twitched violently on its side. I plunged down to finish my work, slashing the dying beast's throat with a claw. Legao's dust tornado subsided, the last sand and debris falling onto the corpse of my foe. But I wasn't done.\n\nFrom every side the hollowings advanced, men and wolves alike, all newly appreciative of the danger I presented to them. Arrows came from the sky, launched by unseen archers. The ground shook to my left. There, the attackers parted in perfect unison. forming a corridor for the second behemoth. It hurled itself forward with surprising speed, considering its bulk. I estimated I had barely enough time to hurl myself upward out of the reach of its tail spikes. That was also what it probably expected me to do. Instead, I leapt directly at the charging behemoth. It didn't slow. Given its size and speed, I doubt it could've stopped even if it had realized what I intended.\n\nThe trio of armored plates protecting its head opened, revealing a face that was mostly a three-sided mouth lined with knife-like teeth, along with a single, hideous suctioned tentacle. I came directly at that long, deadly jaw with its whip-like appendage, beating my wings for speed, but hovering barely above the ground. I pulled up only at the very last moment, shoving the first behemoth's shattered spine into its brother's jaw. Instinctively, the beast snapped, pulled back its tentacle and shut its armored plates. Or at least it attempted to shut them. The ends of the bone wedged between two of the plates, leaving a gap in the behemoth's armor. It flung its head about wildly to dislodge the obstruction, its tentacle wrapped around the bone, trying to remove the obstruction.\n\nI didn't give it a chance. I fell from the air onto the behemoth's head, reaching inside its mouth, to the soft flesh. I shoved my sai through the soft palate of its mouth. Blood gushed from the wound. I severed the wet, fleshy tentacle as easily as I could pierce a chicken's neck. I would've been proud of myself, except for the beast's tail. It took me in the flank. The air rushed out of me. But the blow didn't penetrate my scales. The behemoth was hurt. Its strength already was failing it. I pulled my foreclaw from its mouth, along with a satisfying hunk of flesh, even as my hindclaws dug into the wounded creature's backside. With a mighty roar, I beat my wings, tearing off still more of the behemoth's hide and flesh. The beast still flailed about as I rose back into the air, hollowing arrows sliding off my belly scales. I flew a tight circle, accelerating as I came in for a final pass. I tucked in my foreclaws and racked the behemoth's bloodstained skull with my hind sai. That was the end of the it.\n\nI roared in triumph as I once again soared high above the field.\n\nThe Mizu warriors hadn't missed my victory. Their cavalry-led charge had hit the line as I'd grappled with the behemoths, with deadly effect. The mounted warriors had cut a swath of destruction, killing hundreds as they rode through the hollowing lines. Of course, the hollowings didn't flee. Even as the Mizu riders cut them down with blades and spears, the unnatural enemy reformed their lines, trying to hold the salients. Mizu horsemen galloped along the hastily formed front, some standing in their saddles, firing arrows from curved short bows at the flanks of the salient. Hollowings fell by the dozens. The horde might be fearless, but the Mizu were superior warriors in every other way. The emotionless husks that had once been men fought with instinct, but not intensity. That element\u2014the human element\u2014was the difference in the ground battle. With the behemoths dead, the Mizu warriors slaughtered the outnumbered hollowings. That would've been the end of the salient, except for those cursed wolves.\n\nThe fleet-footed predators formed themselves into wedge-shaped packs and charged at the Mizu horsemen, their eyes the color of rotten oranges. The wolves ran low enough to the ground to make it difficult for the Mizu riders to defend themselves adequately with swords. I heard their commander shouting orders for men to dismount, to save the horses and engage on foot.\n\nI dove back into the fray, attacking the hollowing lines from behind. I extended my legs, dipping my sai down so low that their tips nearly touched the ground. Then I flew over the enemy at speed, chasing down the wolf packs from behind, slicing open a dozen skulls on a single pass. I came about a second time. Crossbow bolts greeted me, but couldn't stop me. More of the unnatural wolves fell. The Mizu saw the waste I was making of their enemy and pressed their attack. I swung back once again. Crossbow bolts and wolf teeth couldn't stop me. The hollowings figured that out quickly\u2014I came out of my turn into a black cloud of blood raptors. They didn't really attack; the birds simply threw themselves at me. Break and claws smashed into my face, my body, my wings. I couldn't see, there were so many. I pulled up, hard. The air whistled angrily as a massive bolt fired from an unseen ballistae shot past me. I flew still higher.\n\nThe blood raptors followed, harrying me. There were so many. Each time I flapped my wings, I struck more birds. They disrupted my flight path, although there must have been a heavy cost to the raptors. I must've maimed a hundred as I circled about.\n\nHow many are there?\n\nFinally, I dove again, beating my wings for extra speed. That enabled me to put the suicidal birds in my wake. I saw the battlefield again. The blood raptors hadn't only come for me: they harried the Mizu cavalry as well, flying about like a huge locust swarm. The soldiers swung their blades, but it was like trying to cut through the sea\u2014one bird fell and two more took its place. I heard more shouts. Fires were lit\u2014more of the acrid smoke that had been used in the Hall of Glass to keep the birds at bay\u2014but they wouldn't be effective out in the open. Worse, the behemoth I'd seen on the bridge earlier was almost across the river. Still another beast traversed the second bridge. Rinxia dove and swerved about as no less than three massive swarms of blood raptors pursued her. Gia belched fire as the birds flew overhead. I couldn't see the behemoth with which he had tangled. He must've triumphed as well. I wondered which of us had been quicker?\n\nMore hollowings crossed the river on the still intact bridges. I roared in frustration as the battle continued to unfold. For all the success of our tactics, the hollowings were too many. They kept coming faster than we could kill them. I looked to the river at that moment and saw the first sign of salvation.\n\nHarlan Dor had finally arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Harlan sailed down the river atop a tree.\n\nActually, there were four boles, each tied together to form a crude barge. A second, identical craft trailed him. He sat at the rear of his make-shift vessel, maneuvering the rudder as the relentless flow of the River Tayo propelled the craft. Harlan smirked as if enjoying a leisurely afternoon pleasure cruise.\n\nThe hollowings must have seen him coming. There were easily ten thousand of them on the far bank of the river, waiting in deadly silence for the opportunity to cross to the other side. But they did not react to the strange new arrival. At least not initially.\n\nAgain, I wondered at the horde's decision-making process. Two river barges might not have seemed like an immediate threat because there were no soldiers aboard, no supplies, no ballistae or other weapons. Or perhaps it took a bit of time for the horde to adapt to an unexpected situation. While the hollowings ignored Harlan and the battle raged on my side of the river, the twin barges drew closer. I kept watching, my eye flicking from the barge to hollowings standing on the far shore, then back again. Men and hollowings continued to be slaughtered on the near side of the Tayo. Still, the horde paid no mind to the barges, not even sending blood raptors to investigate the craft. I willed more speed to Harlan and his vessel, but to no avail. Even with the river's stiff current, his progress was agonizingly slow.\n\nI dodged through a swarm of blood raptors that came at me from below, maneuvering behind them, but keeping out of range of the arc bolts being lofted at me from the hollowing war machines below. As I executed a sharp leftward bank, a chill swept through the air more suddenly than even the swiftest moving winter squall. A tingle tickled my tail, then snout, the feeling of something familiar, but distant. The wind seemed to stop. There was a sound from somewhere in the sky, the hiss of a giant exhaling. The breeze shifted. Magic was at work.\n\nI searched for Legao. It took me only a moment to spot her. She sat on a horse adjacent to the salient where Gia fought, well behind the front line. A pair of Mizu soldiers in full armor flanked her on either side, looking as dangerous as tiny humans could manage.\n\nI wasn't the only one who sensed the magic\u2014or at least the sudden change in the wind. The flock of blood raptors pursuing me broke off. The dark cloud of killer feathered creatures turned immediately toward the barge. Another group separated themselves from the formation pursuing Rinxia, their new course putting them on a path to Legao.\n\nI called out with a tight roar, loud enough for Harlan and Legao and everyone else on both sides of the river to hear. \"Blood raptors incoming.\"\n\nHarlan's grin didn't drop. He stood on his barge like a captain on his deck, his eyes fixed on the approaching raptors. The birds came quickly, forming themselves into an arc of feathered unpleasantness. The river's waters quickened, perhaps propelled by Legao's magic. Harlan nodded at the added speed\u2014his barge would be at the first bridge in moments, although not before the blood raptors reached him. But Harlan didn't budge, didn't make any obvious effort to protect himself, as if such a thing were beneath a captain's dignity. He put both hands on the rudder. The hastily constructed barge must have been unsteady in the quick waters of the Tayo\u2014he didn't want it to go off course and collide with either bank. I realized that Harlan intended to pilot the barge all the way to its target. The fool.\n\nI roared again, and he heard it. \"Get off!\"\n\nHarlan didn't obey me\u2014at least not at first. Instead, he waited, holding as still as a statue as the blood raptors came ever closer. The human had ice for blood. Only when the vanguard of the blood raptor were close enough to crap on his head did Harlan react. With a talon about a pinky length from his nose, Harlan, in an unnecessary flourish, took a backward step off the edge of the barge, bowing smartly before plunging into the swift flows of the river. A hundred raptors swept across the barge in the next moment, flapping in a furious circle over the water as they searched for their missing prey. Harlan didn't surface. The stupid, bloodthirsty birds didn't notice the tiny flame he'd left behind on the barge. At least, they didn't notice it in time to get clear.\n\nThe barge ignited just as its bow struck the first of the hollowings' bridges. We'd packed the carved channels inside the trees used to construct the raft with the same fire oil that the palace staff used to keep the ever-burning fire atop the Protector's tower lit. No one had ever thought to use it in such quantities or for such a purpose, but Harlan had been confident it would work. He was right. The fire raced along cut channels in the long, oil-soaked trees of the barge. Moments later, the wooden craft was a smoking inferno, the fire crackling over its surface. Even the newly-felled wood of the raft crisped in the intense heat created by the fire oil. Accelerated by Legao's magic, the rushing water of the river shoved the flaming barge into the first bridge with enough force that the vessel broke apart, sending each of section sprawling along the width of the span. The oil-driven fire crossed hungrily onto the wooden bridge with satisfying speed. The hollowings reacted as best they could, but nothing could extinguish the flames of fire oil.\n\nThe behemoth that was already three quarters of the way across the river quickened its pace. Rinxia was ready. With most of the blood raptors that had been harrying her diverted to Harlan's raft, she finally had a chance for a clean attack. Rinxia made the most of her opportunity, coming fast for the remaining bridge. She dove so quickly she was little more than a streaking silver light until the orange flame sprung from her mouth. She pulled out of her dive with no more than the length of a single human between her and the river. Rinxia streaked along the water's surface with the speed of purpose. I knew her target: The behemoth on the first bridge. Rinxia needed no fire now. The flames had already spread. Instead, she pulled up as she neared the hurrying beast, shoving the behemoth with her sai-tipped hind legs as she ascended for the sky. Her claws cut its hide as she passed\u2014deep, ugly gashes. The massive creature was already off balance, struggling on the wobbly, flaming bridge. Rinxia's strike was enough to send it tumbling into waters of the Tayo. But the falling behemoth was quick\u2014even quicker than Rinxia. Its forked tail whipped at her even as the beast toppled into the surging water, a deadly spike on its edge catching Rinxia's hind leg. The blow shattered a scale. Even at distance, I could hear her gasp in pain as she dipped a wing into the water. For a terrifying moment, I thought Rinxia would crash, but instead she righted herself by curling her tail. But the blow also distracted her for a precious moment. Rinxia didn't see the ballistae bolt until it was too late.\n\nI cried out at the same time as Rinxia, both of us roaring in pain. The velocity of the hollowing projectile was enough to propel it through the scales protecting Rinxia's right side near her rib cage. The top third of the shaft slid into Rinxia. I dove for her, but she hit the water before I could get there. If she was like every other dragon I knew, Rinxia couldn't swim, particularly not with a wound like the one she'd just suffered. The Tayo's harsh current grabbed her, yanking Rinxia downstream with anxious fury, toward the bridge. Another behemoth wading across the far bridge saw her coming. He ignored the spreading flames around him, disregarding his own safety for the chance to finish off a dragon. No way I was going to let that happen.\n\nI came for her, swiveling like a corkscrew as I descended, using my wings to change my speed and direction as the ballistae opened fire on me. A bolt sailed past my head. Another grazed my right wing. I heard shouting. It might have been Harlan's voice. Arrows rained down upon me. I didn't care. I was in a funnel of desperation, my eyes fixed only on Rinxia. Everything else was lost in the background.\n\nWithin three heartbeats I had her clutched in my hind legs\u2014gently because I still wore the sai. Lifting another dragon, even an undersized one like Rinxia, was no easy task, and the covering of my claws made it even more difficult. I didn't quite get fully airborne. Instead, I dragged Rinxia through the water toward the Mizu-controlled shoreline, targeting the area between the shrinking remains of the hollowings' salient. I would've made it, except for the damned behemoth. I'd snatched Rinxia just before she'd fallen into the beast's clutches. It didn't occur to me that the thing would dare to leap into the Tayo after us.\n\nAs the behemoth crashed into the river, the three armored plates protecting its mouth retracted to allow a suction-clad tentacle to come forth like a living whip. The slimy thing caught Rinxia's right hind leg, curling itself into position. Then it yanked her\u2014hard. The force almost pulled me out of the air as I dragged her along the water. Rinxia and I jerked violently backward, toward the behemoth's thrashing tusks and tail. Even as the rest of its body sunk under the current of the river, the behemoth's deadly appendage hunted us. I beat my wings, but I could make no progress. Rinxia cried out again. The behemoth and I were yanking her in different directions, which couldn't be doing her punctured side any good at all.\n\nI had to end the stalemate. My only option seemed to be to release Rinxia and kill that thing before it pulled her under and drowned her, or worse, turn her to a hollowing. I hated the idea of letting go, but I didn't seem to have a choice or any more time. I was about to release my grip when Harlan's voice called out again.\n\n\"Hold on. We're going to light it!\"\n\nHis words jarred my memory. I remembered Harlan's plan. I turned my head upriver. The other exploding barge had broken apart, just as it had been designed to do. It had been made of smaller, narrower trunks. The Tayo's magically accelerated current had sped the pieces into the gaps in the damaged upstream bridge, but also underneath its supports. More importantly, the fire oil contained inside the logs had leaked into the river. It was everywhere now, a thin film coating the surface of the river.\n\nFlaming chicken piss.\n\nGia swooped down, spitting his fire onto the polluted water of the Tayo. The whole river along the battle line of the hollowing horde caught fire, including the water all around Rinxia and I. But dragon scales repel fire. Behemoth skin, while tough, wasn't quite as durable. Rinxia had also punctured several holes in its hide when she'd attacked it. The beast in the water caught fire. It writhed about as its tentacle crisped. I beat my wings again. The slimy whip holding Rinxia snapped. I dragged her along the flaming surface to the near bank, onto the shore.\n\nI looked at Rinxia. She still drew breath, but with distress. Smoke from the burning river filled the air. My roar shook the ground.\n\n\"Healer, to me!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Rinxia wouldn't die.\n\nThat is what I promised myself as I gazed at her bloody body, at the bolt rammed in her side. But I couldn't stop myself from shaking. I kept remembering my mother and the emptiness that had come to me following her death. I couldn't clear my mind. I couldn't focus. I had failed Rinxia when she needed me most. I needed to fix this.\n\nMy eyes were aching as I stared down at this beautiful dragon. I supposedly had power inside me. Something as great as Legao's power, or maybe even Drasu's, if I just found a way to use it. I had found a fleeting glimpse at that strange place\u2014the Latticework\u2014when I'd tried, and failed, to heal Aragor. I needed to do better for Rinxia.\n\nI tried to remember my way back to the place I been before, which wasn't a place at all. It was a state of high perception that allowed me to sense the underpinnings of the mundane world. I needed to concentrate, I needed to focus. But I couldn't do that. My hearts were too panicked. I hadn't cared about Aragor. This was altogether different\u2014this was Rinxia. No one else was like her, no one else connected with me like her. I wanted to help her so badly my bones ached. I kept flailing my head about, trying to find the singular determination to sense what I knew was around me, to summon the power that was supposedly within me, but whatever I had once found now eluded me. I failed Rinxia yet again.\n\nThat was when the human healer arrived. Yali was her name, and she had a waterfall of twisting hair that was the color of Rinxia's scales. She took charge immediately, her confident voice and condescending tone a comfort to my wounded mind. Yali directed the quartet of robed minions who followed in her wake with precision that the Knight-Lords of the Mizu army could learn from. The robed humans applied their poultices at Yali's command, then fed potions into Rinxia's mouth, while I gaped at them from behind. Finally, Yali herself removed the bolt from Rinxia's side. I winced as the blood poured from the wound. Rinxia moaned with pain, still unconscious, but obviously alive, for which I was grateful.\n\nYali and her assistants quickly applied a salve that stopped the bleeding. I held my breath while Rinxia's wound was bandaged. When Yali finally turned away from her patient, I was quick to share the worst of my fears with her.\n\n\"What if the hollowing weapons carries the taint of the rust upon it?\"\n\nYali glanced back at her patient, her face serene, as if caring for a dragon with arc bolts wounds was a common occurrence. \"I've examined the tip of the bolt\u2014fired ceramic. It appears no different from any other weapon we use in Ni-Yota.\" A weight lifted from my chest, but only until she added, \"Of course there is no way to be sure until she fully recovers.\"\n\n\"Is there nothing else you can do?\" I asked, hating the desperation that crept into my voice.\n\nThis time Yali gazed west in answer. \"No one knows how to stop the rust.\"\n\nI told myself I would find a way to heal Rinxia if the hollowing disease had infected her. I had utterly failed with Aragor, but I wouldn't fail Rinxia. I just need to calm myself. Up until that moment, I hadn't truly needed magic. I hadn't wanted it. I had grown quite able without fire or magic. Now, I had purpose. I just needed to stop shaking. I need to find peace. Then, I would return to Latticework, that place that was apparently part of inherent power of my kind.\n\nYali and her fellow healers tended to Rinxia within a tenuous island of safety carved out by Mizu soldiers on the eastern bank of the Tayo River. At the same time, nearby, the last of the hollowings on the shore were being slaughtered, their corpses soaked in fire oil brought on supply wagons, then dumped into the river. The burning water sent plumes of smoke into the sky, obscuring the farther bank. Mizu soldiers continued to feed the flames with additional barrels of oil, although the supply would be exhausted soon enough.\n\nWhile the river burned, I stayed by Rinxia's side, nervously attempting to peer through the wall of smoke for signs of danger from the horde that remained on the far bank. We were still perilously close to danger, and still without Drasu's shield for protection. Despite the damage that had been done to the hollowing army, they still had battle engines with more than sufficient range to reach the ground upon which Rinxia lay. But for now, the enemy held its fire.\n\nAs time passed, I gradually grew more confident that Rinxia was out of immediate danger. Yali stayed by her side anyway, walking in slow circles, occasionally glancing at me with an amused smile. I watched the steady breathing of Rinxia's chest. It didn't falter. Gradually, my thoughts turned to the fate of the reckless human, Harlan Dor.\n\nThe fool had voluntarily leapt into the raging waters of the Tayo River. If he had been any other human, I'd have assumed him downed, dead, and probably eaten by whatever creatures inhabited the waters of the river. But Harlan was a Farlighter, a man of the water. His people had an uncanny talent for all things connected to water, and I presumed that meant swimming as well. I comforted myself with the memory of Harlan's face as he'd jumped off his raft. He had entered the water with aplomb. I told myself he would be fine. It would not be a mere river that claimed the sailor.\n\nSure enough, sometime before dark, Harlan approached, emerging from the masses of Mizu soldiers. He had not a scratch on him, although he wore different clothes from when I'd last seen him\u2014likely something borrowed from the supply master of the Mizu army. His lips were turned downward in an uncharacteristic frown when he saw Rinxia.\n\n\"How is she?\"\n\n\"She will live,\" I promised him and myself.\n\nThe healer, Yali, approached warily, her features hard. \"A Farlighter?\"\n\n\"Is that all you see?\" Harlan replied. \"I can sing and dance as well.\"\n\nYali looked him up and down. \"I heard a Farlighter rode a burning barge into the hollowing bridges, then jumped into the current of the Tayo River. I didn't believe it.\"\n\nHarlan looked sheepish. \"The barge wasn't on fire until after I jumped off.\"\n\n\"You look remarkably well for a man who swam in the Tayo,\" Yali noted. \"Those waters are quick, powerful, and deadly.\"\n\n\"Every seahand I know had to swim a league in the Ice Sea before their thirteenth year. The Tayo is a calm bath compared to that.\"\n\nYali shook her head almost imperceptibly. \"The Farligher who swims rivers now comes to inquire about the health of dragons. Now I have lived a full life. I thought your kind hated dragons.\"\n\nHarlan smirked. \"The first dragon I met saved my life.\" He motioned toward Rinxia. \"She seems a good sort as well. I'd take either of these dragons here as my first mate over any human I've had serve me on any ship. I hope you know healing better than you know me.\"\n\nYali answered with a cold stare. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"How much longer till Rinxia can be moved?\" he asked.\n\nI didn't like the sound of that. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I've checked on the fire oil supplies,\" Harlan told me. \"We can't keep the fire going much longer.\"\n\n\"So, the hollowings will come again?\" I would fight to protect Rinxia, but I had no illusions about the challenge ahead. The behemoths were formidable, the blood raptors seemingly innumerable, the horde's hunger insatiable.\n\nHarlan rubbed his chin. \"I've spoken with the Mizu commanders. We've hurt the horde badly this day. Five behmoths dead, along with hundreds of blood raptors and thousands of soldiers. They still outnumber us, but their forces are not unlimited. More importantly, it takes trees and time to build bridges. The Mizu Knight-Lord, Avis, thinks we'll have a reprieve of sorts.\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"He doesn't know. Days, perhaps. Probably not a week.\"\n\n\"The blood raptors could still fly across the river.\" I looked at the Tayo with distrust, as if my words would summon an attack.\n\n\"Aye, but that would be tactically foolish. Alone, the birds can do no real damage. Their value is to provide cover for the soldiers, wolves, and behemoths. If the horde is intelligent, they would do better to hold back and attack in force.\"\n\nI considered that. \"The hollowings act with discipline. They communicate. They are strategic. But they will come if it offers them the chance to finish off a dragon.\"\n\n\"I've already sent for a dragon-cart,\" Yali assured me. \"Rinxia is not the largest of you. We'll be able to move her to safety.\"\n\n\"How soon?\" I pressed.\n\nYali rolled her eyes. \"Soon enough. But I'll see to it.\"\n\nShe stomped off into the swirling chaos of the Mizu army.\n\n\"I like her,\" Harlan said to me. \"But time grows short. We need to move \u2026\"\n\nHarlan trailed off as a great blot of darkness with wings came toward us: Gia. I saw immediately that he, too, had spent time with the healers after the battle. Salves and bandages covered portions of his neck and torso. He landed beside Rinxia without looking at me or Harlan. I studied his injuries as he studied Rinxia's wound. Gia had been mauled. I saw a tear on his right wing that had been stitched back together with some kind of animal gut, the stitching far less fine than the work than had been done to me back in Rolm. Entire scales were missing on his right side, and in several places his armor had holes, undoubtedly made by behemoth tusks and spikes.\n\nHis amber eyes ran all over Rinxia. He sniffed at the terrible wound in her side. \"She fought bravely, as always.\" Gia said it with approval, but I doubted that Rinxia would've cared for his praise. She fought for duty and the purpose of her Way. Gia just wanted to fight for its own sake.\n\n\"What happens when the fire oil is done and the hollowings come again?\" I asked. \"How do we stop them next time?\"\n\nGia twisted his thick neck, bringing his head back to look at me. He moved stiffly. \"You fought\u2026courageously, Bayloo.\" He sounded only mildly surprised. \"We are stronger than the hollowings. Each time they attempt to cross the river, we shall hurt them more. Until finally, like a suborn hound, they learn to stop coming.\"\n\n\"Courage and fire will not be enough next time. Harlan's trick with the fire barges will only work once. I saw thousands of Mizu die. They do not have the numbers to keep fighting the hollowings.\"\n\nHarlan echoed my advice. \"The horde cannot be cowed. This is no army seeking conquest. They come for another reason.\"\n\nGia flared his nostrils at him. \"And what is that reason, human?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Harlan admitted. \"That is one of our greatest problems. It is difficult to defeat an enemy one does not understand.\"\n\nGia growled as his tail shifted behind him. \"They seek to invade our land, kill us, consume us. We will fight them with all we have. We are stronger. This Light shines on us.\" He looked at me. \"Rinxia will recover. Get your rest, for there will be another battle.\"\n\nI stretched my neck high to survey the camp of the Mizu army. The signs of another fight to come was all around us; soldiers and horses dragged themselves across the battlefield. Healers attended to the human soldiers. The army, at least, seemed well organized. The humans here knew the grim tasks of war. Only a single group seemed out of place. To the north, I saw a procession of unarmed humans attired in robes in black surrounding a single covered wagon, its top draped in cloth that match the color of its attendants.\n\nI indicated toward the wagon with a nod of my head. \"What happens there?\"\n\nGia stared at the distant wagon. He didn't turn back toward me for several long moments. \"They bring he who you came to kill back to Trishan, to be put to final rest beneath the light.\"\n\nMy blood surged. \"Drasu? That wagon carries Drasu's body?\"\n\n\"The shell that held his spirit is there. We shall burn what remains of his flesh in the fire, releasing him back into the Light to find his place in Haven.\"\n\n\"You intend to honor him?\"\n\n\"For decades he served. Without his magic, the hollowings would've overrun the Tayo years ago to march on Trishan. We would've been caught between Elasu's minions in the east and the horde in the west, to be ground to dust in its center. He served the Protectors for decades, not just Aragor.\"\n\n\"He was a hatchling stealer.\" Bile filled my mouth. \"He was a murderer of dragons. My mother's killer.\"\n\nGia's eyes became wary. \"Kiata is our deliverance. Aragor foretold it was the will of Haven that she be brought here.\" He paused, perhaps considering my charges against the wizard. Gia had no love for humans. \"He acted on the orders of the Skyking. They are not orders I would have given, had I been Protector. But there can be no vengeance against the dead.\"\n\nI blew contempt from my nostrils (and a bit of snot as well). \"I wonder if that is so.\" As I said the words, I remembered my conversation with the ghastray back on the island of Alahu. The predators of the sea wanted Drasu. I had promised to deliver him. Gia seemed intent on burning his body in some ceremony for the masses back in Trishan. He'd try to stop me if I took Drasu now. Did I care?\n\nI took another look at Gia's wounds. They were many, and deep, but he would heal quickly, as our kind always did. The damage to his wing didn't look as extensive as what I had recovered from, and he was still flying. But there wouldn't be a better time to fight him than now, if I inevitably must do so.\n\nHarlan interrupted me, I suspected with deliberate intent. \"Do not forget what awaits across the river, beyond the fire.\"\n\nWe all turned to the Tayo. The flames fed by Trishan's fire oil had begun to fade, although the smoke still rose.\n\nGia showed his teeth as he imagined his enemy on the far bank. \"I must ensure the humans are prepared. You should make yourselves ready to fight again.\"\n\nWith those fine words, the huge black dragon flew off toward the larger army encampment to the north. I watched Drasu's funeral procession begin its long journey to Trishan before turning my attention back to Rinxia. Her breathing remained steady, but I still counted each of her breaths, willing the next to be stronger. As I counted, the remaining day faded, as did the flames that shielded us from the horde on the opposite side of the Tayo River. The smoke was still too thick for human eyes, but I was able to peer through the thinning plumes, and what I saw brought no comfort. Tens of thousands of hollowings massed at the western bank of the Tayo, silently watching, poised to march across once again. Only the swift current and deep waters of the Tayo prevented that. The hollowings did not look defeated. They looked formidable. Worse, their numbers seemed undiminished\u2014indeed there might have been even more of them.\n\nHarlan confirmed my unhappy suspicion. \"I counted eight large ballistae during the battle. Now there are twelve.\"\n\n\"I will take to the sky to have a closer look.\"\n\nHarlan let go a reluctant sigh. \"I would accompany you.\"\n\n\"I mean no offense, but it is an unnecessary risk for you. I can see better and fly swifter without a human on my back.\"\n\n\"Your dragon eyes do see further, my friend. But that is not the same as seeing better.\" Harlan tapped his forehead. I have no idea why. \"I've seen plenty of this world. Some things were almost as strange as the hollowings. And while my dear departed mum would be thankful for your concern about my safety, I think there is little risk so long as you don't attempt to cross the Tayo.\"\n\nHarlan's assumption that I didn't intend to cross the Tayo was interesting. I hadn't said that. Indeed, I'd been contemplating the opposite. He seemed to have guessed my thoughts. Harlan's eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Don't do anything that might provoke another battle we aren't ready for, Bayloo.\"\n\nI tried to make an innocent face. That's hard for a dragon.\n\n\"There is no saddle on me. In Rolm, ryders practice for years before attempting to mount a dragon without a saddle. Are you ready to cross the line between brave and foolish?\"\n\nHarlan waved away my concern. \"I'm sure you'd never let anything happen to me. But as it is, Legao rode Gia here, so there must be a dragon saddle in the vicinity. I'll find it.\"\n\nHe set off before I could tell him I was in no mood to wait. However, shortly after Harlan disappeared into the mulling mass of horses and Mizu soldiers, an entire supply wagon packed with food pulled up next to me. The meat was mostly dried, but they had fruits, nuts, bread, and water, so I didn't complain. I wished Rinxia had been well enough to eat, for I knew it would help her heal.\n\nNot long after I had replenished myself by consuming most of the contents of the Mizu wagon (but not the driver, who was scrawny anyway), a giant transport similar to the one that had lugged me to Changsha arrived. This one was accompanied by Yali and a score of other human healers. Part of me was reluctant to let Rinxia out of my sight, but I knew that was foolish. She was safer away from here.\n\n\"Where will you take her?\"\n\nYali seemed surprised by the question. Or maybe she wasn't accustomed to speaking with dragons. \"To Jahatta.\" She pointed east. \"High walls, fresh water. We have no time to dally.\"\n\nI couldn't very well argue with that. The smoke thinned as we spoke. \"Do as you must.\" I took a long look at Rinxia. She was no less beautiful for being unconscious and wounded. \"Her safety is more important than you own life.\"\n\n\"We shall not fail she of the Sworn.\" Yali bowed. She sounded confident.\n\nI let them take her away, anxious to finish my reconnaissance so that I could be with her. As if sensing my heightening impatience, Harlan chose that moment to return, coming at a full sprint, accompanied by two Mizu carrying a dragon saddle. The human was resourceful. In short order, I was ready to fly, Harlan secured to my back. I lifted us into the air with a great push of my wings.\n\nFor a dragon, it was better to be in the air than the ground. That was just the way of things. Above, the air smelled better and the world became more obvious. In this case, my ascent made it obvious that the hollowing horde had indeed grown in size. Their ranks were ten deep in places. Worse, two great streams of men and machines flowed toward the Tayo from the vast emptiness of Illium. Several of the coming war engines resembled nothing I'd seen before. Behemoths pulled them, two per machine. I hovered, watching the approaching storm. Their progress was slow, but dreadfully steady.\n\nHarlan put it succinctly, \"More monsters, living and made.\"\n\n\"The large ones aren't ballistae. I see nothing that releases a projectile. They resemble siege towers, but far larger.\"\n\n\"They aren't ballistae, nor are they siege towers,\" Harlan confirmed. \"Look at the mechanism on the front of each. It resembles the hoists we use aboard ships to raise and lower sails.\"\n\nSails? \"So what are they?\"\n\n\"They are rolling bridges. Huge ones.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Behemoth weren't fast, but they were fast enough.\n\nThe Mizu commanders thought the hollowings would have to build new bridges. They thought their enemy would have to find more trees in the wasteland they'd created, cut them, craft them, and do whatever else humans do with their little hands to engineer their clever creations. All of which should've taken time. The Mizu knight-lord thought his army could rest, plan, and prepare for the next assault. All that was, apparently, wrong.\n\nI confined my flight path to the human-held bank of the river. There was no point in going any farther yet. Harlan started whispering some words while I continued to fly along the river's edge. It sounded like gibberish. Or at least it wasn't Avian that he spoke.\n\n\"What's that you're up to?\"\n\nHarlan made me wait for his answer. \"Just a little sailor's trick for measuring time and distance. Assuming that those behemoths don't need to rest, I'd judge they'll reach the river by morning. I don't think the hollowings will wait any longer than that to attack again. They don't seem to need rest, and they are intelligent enough to deny it to us.\"\n\nI gazed again at the giant towers. They were the largest war machines I'd ever seen. I wondered if even the engineers of Ni-Yota could've created such monstrosities. How long had they been in the works? Surely, it had taken more than an afternoon to assemble such machines. They must have been readied long ago, but were being deployed only now, when the original attack was defeated. What was their original purpose?\n\nI didn't relish fighting an enemy such as this. The enchanters of Ulibon had been formidable, the griffins and furies of Oster even more so, but the hollowings were something else entirely. Their battle tactics spoke of their intelligence, but the great moving bridges coming across the Illium waste betrayed practical engineering expertise as well. Harlan was doubtlessly correct that the hollowings did not seek conquest in the manner of the kings of Rolm or Oster. Whatever the reasons for this battle against Ni-Yota, the enemies in the west were even more determined in their ambition than the most relentless human monarch.\n\nHarlan spoke aloud the conclusion I was trying to avoid reaching. \"To stop them, we'll have to burn those giant bridges. Best to do it long before they reach the river.\"\n\n\"They are expecting that,\" I said reluctantly. \"They move ballistae with the towers. I do not see the blood raptors, but they must be close, waiting. The hollowing will protect those towers with everything they have.\"\n\nWe both watched the behemoths pull the looming machines closer for a time, the wind whistling an ominous song. Harlan finally spoke again. \"You should speak to Gia.\"\n\nI groaned even though I knew Harlan was correct. If the latest hollowing advance was to be turned back, we dragons needed to act together. A fire breather would be necessary for this. Rinxia's speed would've been invaluable as well, but she would be in no shape to fly in the time we had remaining. I worried about her, but I was also glad that she wouldn't be taking this risk. Let Gia do it. Let him act as the protector of this land.\n\nI turned back toward the Mizu army. As I descended, searching for Gia, I caught sight of Drasu's caravan, a lonely wagon with its escorts drudging slowly east. It wasn't lost on me that fate had spared me from having to make the terrible decision of killing the wizard and creating the very situation that now faced Ni-Yota. That didn't make fate and I even. Throwing me a meatless bone didn't come close to compensating for my upbringing and years of slavery.\n\nIt wasn't hard to find the giant black dragon amidst the sea of humans and horses. Gia saw me as well, his great neck craning upward as I circled in the sky above. The humans with whom he had gathered began staring upwards as well, alerted to my presence by Gia's attention. Several stood from their chairs.\n\n\"The humans below look nervous,\" Harlan remarked.\n\n\"Perhaps they fear I intend to open my bowels.\"\n\n\"Please don't.\"\n\n\"Do not fear. That dried meat from that Mizu supply wagon was too salty to be ready for evacuation so soon. The best I could do would be to spray them with a bit of pungent golden rain.\"\n\n\"Bayloo, that's too much information. Let's just go speak to Gia without provoking him first.\"\n\nI landed among the gathered commanders of the Mizu army, deliberately placing myself directly opposite to the other dragon. Of the four humans gathered around Gia, I recognized two: the wizard Legao and a tall, long-limbed man who I'd seen leading the cavalry charge against my salient in the battle earlier. I didn't know his name, but I recognized his eyes.\n\nGia greeted me with his customary warmth\u2014none. \"This meeting is of no concern of yours, Bayloo. I will summon you when your assistance is needed.\"\n\nOh. That's how he wanted to play. If this was the reception he offered, I should've just crapped on him. Gia was living proof that dragons could act as stupid as humans.\n\nI let a low roar rumble up my neck. \"I take no commands from you, Gia. I accept no summons from anyone. I go where I will, I fight as I must.\"\n\nGia showed me his teeth.\n\nHarlan scrambled off my back. \"Enough\u2026enough. We come not to bicker amongst ourselves, but with information that must be heard.\"\n\nGia kept the edge of this jaw curled in challenge. His eyes saw nothing but threat from me, because that was all he expected to receive. Some among the other humans were wiser, at least.\n\nLegao paced to the center of the council. \"We are in need of allies and information,\" she proclaimed. Gia whipped his head toward her, but he did nothing to stop the wizard's speaking. \"We gather to speak of this battle and the next one that will inevitably come, Bayloo. You should know these others.\" She swept an arm along the gathered. \"Here sits Avix, Knight-Lord of the West.\" Avix was large for a human, with a flat face and no chin. It wasn't lost on me that this knight-lord sat closest to Gia among the humans of this council. The rider I already recognized was next. Legao named him Tia, Master of the Horse. The last human was a smaller, squatter man, with arms almost as long and thick as his legs, and a face with enough divots that it looked like a bird had been pecking away at his flesh for most of the morning. \"Dianti, Lord at Arms,\" he was named. Dianti squinted at me as he bowed his head politely.\n\nLegao wasn't done with introductions. \"This war council should all know the outlander who rides upon this dragon's back. He calls himself Harlan Dor. Let there be no doubt: he is a child of Farlight. But also know this, Aragor welcomed him to this land. Although his heritage is not one favored in Ni-Yota, let us not dismiss Aragor's decision. The idea to pack fire oil into the barges was his.\"\n\nTia gave Harlan a knowing nod. \"It was brave to stay with the craft, battling the current until the end. I welcome your presence here, Harlan Dor.\"\n\nGia's eyes flashed with annoyance.\n\nLegao made a final introduction. \"And as you all undoubtedly know, this is Bayloo, from beyond the Edge.\"\n\nAvix stood. \"What have you come to tell us, Bayloo?\"\n\nI didn't like his tone much more than Gia's. I was deciding if I should answer when Harlan spoke over me.\n\n\"The hollowings prepare another attack. More bridges are being brought from the west.\"\n\nAvix waved a hand. \"This is expected from them. They are persistent. But even with the hollowings' ability to marshal their collective manpower, it will take considerable time to construct and transport the materials from their nearest forest they haven't already consumed, which is a least one hundred leagues\u2014\"\n\nI had no patience for this. \"They come now.\" I said it loud enough there could be no doubt that Avix could hear me, even through his human ears.\n\nThat silly human held up a finger. \"Not possible, given the distance and time.\"\n\nHarlan answered more calmly than I would have. \"They come even as we speak, with huge bridges that resemble siege towers, except far wider, seemingly designed to cross rivers. They are the size of wheeled fortresses, allowing for more of their forces to cross quickly than the bridges we burned today. And they bring at least four this time.\"\n\nAvix's nose scrunched, as if he was trying to retract it into his head. \"How could such things as you describe even move?\"\n\nI told him, but I was watching Gia's reaction. \"Behemoths pull them far faster and for longer than could your horses. By tomorrow they will likely reach the river. Already, the hollowings mass for a second assault. As we speak, more ballistae line the river.\"\n\nGrim silence descended upon the council. Finally, Gia forced his gaze to meet mine. \"You have seen all of this?\"\n\n\"Just now. It is as Harlan says. The hollowings come again.\"\n\nDianti opened his mouth. \"My men aren't ready, Avix. Wounded still litter the camp. The able-bodied are exhausted. Reinforcements from the east will not arrive for another week. The foot soldiers will take even longer, and that's at a forced pace.\"\n\n\"We have the river.\" Tia's voice was measured, determined. A warrior's tone. I approved. \"Even if they bring four bridges, that is still only four points they can cross. They outnumber us, but we can concentrate our forces, particularly the mounted horse.\"\n\nDianti let out the sigh of an exhausted man. \"Their lines cannot be broken. Their soldiers have no fear. Even with mighty Gia tearing their behemoths to pieces.\"\n\nOh, it was mighty Gia who tore those beasts to pieces? All by himself. Remarkable indeed.\n\nDianti wasn't done. He was the most animated of the humans, and apparently the newest to join the battle. \"Those wolves are even more lethal. I could scarcely believe it. The stories do not do them justice...\"\n\n\"Do not lose hope, Dianti.\" Avix's lips spread into a thin line. \"It is true, as you say, that the hollowings do not behave like a regular army, but they have weaknesses as well, which we can exploit. For example, the hollowing foot soldiers do not pull back when they should. And holding a full line is not always the wisest course of action. We can concentrate all of our remaining horse on a single bridge.\" He looked to Tia. \"Most likely the hollowings will fight relentlessly, trying to hold their position even when vastly outnumbered. They die just like our men do. We might take and destroy each bridge, one at a time.\"\n\nTia bobbed his head with approval. \"It is wise to use their stubbornness against them, but I fear we won't have time. They will come hard and fast, and we do not face just the human soldiers. It is the behemoths and the wolves that pose an even greater threat. To say nothing of those nightmare birds.\"\n\nFinally, Gia spoke again. \"Better they never reach the river at all.\" He looked at me, not hiding the distrust that smoldered in his eyes. \"This all supposes that Bayloo and his human speak the truth.\" He spread his wings. \"I will return shortly.\"\n\nGia beat his great wings. A torrent of air and dust swirled as the massive dragon lifted into the air, headed toward the river. I hoped he only went to confirm my information and not to do anything so foolish as to cross the river to attempt to attack now, on his own. That would be idiotic, but it was also Gia.\n\nWe all watched him fly, a black blot on the sky. Soon he would be nearly invisible to any except me. Or maybe Legao. Her face remained impassive, even as her eyes took in every detail of those around her. She seemed wary.\n\n\"You have some idea as to how to stop the hollowings?\" I asked her. \"Is there something else we must know?\"\n\nLegao took her time before answering as the others stared at her, none with warmth. \"No.\"\n\nAvix huffed. \"The master magi indeed. Drasu was an irreplaceable loss.\" Deep lines crossed his forehead. The man was tired.\n\nLegao fixed her eyes upon him without moving her head. \"To stop the horde, they must be destroyed. That is the only way. Otherwise, they will come. Again and again, until we are dead or flee. Even Drasu could only delay them.\"\n\n\"We all know you are not Drasu.\" Dianti puffed his chest. \"Aragor put too much faith in the old spellcaster. Using magic to keep them on the other side of the river was a mistake. It is like locking your door with a hungry wolf outside. The longer you wait, the more hungry and desperate the wolf. Now, the situation is far worse.\"\n\nLegao merely arched her brow, her face cold and dangerous. Dianti shut his mouth.\n\nIt was Avix who explained it. \"You are new to the river, Dianti. I assure you that there was never a way to defeat that horde with swords. Whatever aid we can get, from whatever quarter, we must use.\" He looked at Legao then me, \"Dianti, I hope you live long enough to understand that.\"\n\nThe soldier paled.\n\nGia's return saved Dianti from embarrassing himself further. He set himself down close to me, far closer than I was comfortable with. The only creatures I wanted that close to me were Rinxia and the black pig I was about to eat. An even deeper distrust blazed in Gia's eyes.\n\nThe huge dragon flicked his heavy tail dangerously.\n\n\"I see the hollowings\u2014a great horde still remaining across the river. I have flown back and forth along the Tayo, flying high so that I could survey the wasteland from afar. I looked deep into the land that was once Illium, Bayloo. I saw nothing like what you have claimed.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Gia named me a liar.\n\nAt least that was what I thought just happened. While I did sometimes lie, I wasn't lying this time. Why would I bother to lie about a forthcoming hollowing attack?\n\nThe air between Gia and I heated from the glare of our locked gazes. I don't know how long the standoff lasted. Long enough that one of the humans might have peed himself, based on the odor in the air. I got tired of wasting my time with this gigantic, overly proud oaf of a dragon.\n\n\"Four bridges and towers, Gia. They look like rolling palace spires being dragged by behemoths. Even you can't miss them.\"\n\n\"I did not see them. Do you say I lie?\" He slung his tail ominously. Despite his wounds, he sounded anxious for a fight. What had he seen up there?\n\nHe was turning this around on me. My hearts beat with outrage. I unfurled my wings in challenge. Gia didn't flinch, but I definitely sniffed a bit of human urine. Not a lot, but enough.\n\n\"I saw the hollowing bridges,\" Harlan assured anyone, as if the word of an outlander would carry any weight with the self-important personages of Ni-Yota or with Gia. \"My eyes are not those of a dragon, but these constructions are so massive they cannot be mistaken.\"\n\nI sensed the confusion and fear of Gia's council. They would follow his lead\u2014he was in charge. Not even Legao would challenge him directly. The wizard kept her silence, although I doubted it was from fear.\n\nMy thoughts flashed to Rinxia. She wanted me to be Protector of Ni-Yota\u2014or at least she didn't want Gia to have the title. She was right. Gia's head was filled with rot. It would be easy to provoke him into battle. I was pretty sure I could win a confrontation. But what was the point? I had nothing to gain. Even Rinxia would not want Gia and I fighting now, not with the hollowings about to strike again. I sucked a whirlwind of air into my lungs then released it slowly.\n\n\"What did you see out there, Gia?\" I fought to keep my tone level.\n\n\"There is blackness to the west. Nothing else can be seen.\"\n\nBlackness? The sky had darkened considerably since Harlan and I had done our reconnoiter, but for Gia's dragon eyes that shouldn't have been a true impediment. Not with something so large and obvious as those rolling bridges.\n\n\"Come with me again, to the sky,\" I urged him.\n\n\"I do not need you to tell me that my eyes are wrong. There is blackness. It is\u2026unnatural. Not the blackness of night, but something else. I cannot see beyond it.\"\n\nI looked over at Harlan. I found his face lined with concern, a rare enough situation. I decided to be the grown-up dragon at the council. I just hoped Rinxia appreciated this. \"Together, let us make what we can of this, Gia.\"\n\nGia sniffed suspiciously but still didn't answer.\n\nLegao spoke into the gap. \"I would ask to come as well, if one of you would consent to carry me. I suspect other forces may be at work here. I may be able to be of some use.\"\n\nI liked how she spoke as if my idea would go forward. Cunning. I broke away from Gia's gaze to take the measure of the other humans of the war council.\n\nAvix kept his expression blank, waiting for Gia to guide him. Gianti looked scared, as if someone was about to suggest he ride up into the air as well. The stocky human's eyes shifted uneasily between Gia's huge form and then to the darkening sky.\n\n\"We must know what we face,\" Tia urged. \"Bringing the magi is prudent.\"\n\nFinally, Avix nodded as well. Whatever his loyalty to Gia, the eastern bank of the river was his to defend.\n\nWith everyone except Dianti having spoken in favor of my proposal, Gia relented. \"I will return to the sky.\" He looked at Legao. \"I've no saddle, nor is there time to fit one before the last of the light fades, making your human eyes completely useless. Bayloo must carry you.\"\n\nThere probably was a dragon saddle nearby. Gia deliberately put me in this situation rather than send for one. He wanted me to carry the wizard while he was seen as unburdened.\n\nCarrying Legao didn't thrill me. I wasn't sure how horses felt about their riders, but allowing someone into that particular position on our backs made dragons particularly vulnerable, since it was out of reach of both our tails and our claws. With most humans, I was confident I could deal with any situation, but Legao was a wizard. I hadn't had good experiences with human magic. I barely knew this wizard, and I certainly didn't trust her. Legao stared at me expectantly, her look a mixture of challenge and expectation. She had fought well against the hollowings.\n\n\"Get on and let's go.\"\n\nLegao climbed onto my back without hesitation or misstep. \"Don't cross the river,\" Harlan reminded me unnecessarily just before I took off. Having Harlan nagging me was almost like having a mother at times. I took to the air, Gia close behind.\n\nIt didn't take us long to reach the river's edge. The sun was passing under the horizon in the west, spreading a malevolent crimson glow across the wasteland that lay beyond the horde. Our altitude was sufficient to see far past the hollowing horde at the far bank. The bridge-towers should've stuck out like wolves in a chicken coop, but they didn't. Instead, I saw endless waste, ripped and torn over the years by the hollowings. But that wasn't the end of it. Something wasn't right about the sight. I continued to stare. Part of the distant wasteland was darker than the rest, as if covered by a veil of shadow.\n\nGia either didn't see the abnormality or chose to ignore it to prove his point. \"There are no rolling bridges, Bayloo.\"\n\n\"Look at the horizon, Gia. What is that darkness?\"\n\nGia stared outward, his massive wings catching the air, keeping him almost steady beside me. \"There is something strange,\" he conceded reluctantly. \"I saw something similar earlier. As I said, it is not natural.\" Gia beat his wings, flying higher. He then turned southward before returning a short time later. \"I cannot see around it. Above it is more darkness. It is\u2026strange. It is there, but not there. Like a wave in the sea, not quite solid, but real.\"\n\nFor once, he wasn't wrong. I couldn't easily explain what I saw and what I didn't see. The tower-bridges had indeed vanished. \"The hollowings must have noticed my earlier reconnaissance. As always, they adapted. The rolling machines I spoke of must be hidden behind that wall of dark.\"\n\nIt was the logical explanation. Surely, Gia must realize that. Except he didn't trust me, and he didn't want to acknowledge I had been telling the truth all along. \"We have never seen this from them before. They never bothered to disguise their movements. They had overwhelming forces and didn't care that we knew.\"\n\n\"Before, there was Drasu and his barrier of magic,\" Legao pointed out. \"Perhaps there was no need for such measures before now. The number of their forces didn't matter because few managed to cross.\"\n\n\"Is that magic out there?\" I asked Legao. \"Some kind of spell?\"\n\nI couldn't see Legao shake her head, but I was pretty sure she did so. \"The hollowings have never used magic in all the years we have faced them. Drasu would've mentioned it. This is something else.\"\n\n\"Can you do better than that?\" I was annoyed. \"This ride isn't for fun.\"\n\nShe snapped back at me. \"What would you have me do, Bayloo?\"\n\n\"When humans are curious about something, don't they usually just poke it or something?\"\n\nLegao sighed loud enough for me to hear it. \"They are still quite distant. However, I still might manage a little\u2026poke, as you say.\"\n\nLegao began to whisper. It sounded like the first few notes of a song, a dreamy melody barely remembered. She swayed in her saddle as the words grew louder. Something within me stirred as well. My blood surged, the pumping of my hearts ringing in my ears as I listened to the wizard on my back speak to wind. She kept adjusting the song until she found a harmony with the air at that moment. Legao sang her request to the wind; the gusts answered. The air barely stirred nearby, but as a dragon, I understood enough about wind currents to know that was how such things worked. A change in wind direction and speed in one place would push the air around it in that same direction. In this case, Legao had started a small storm. Not high in the clouds, but closer to the ground. The wind she unleashed began to pick up speed as it sped from the river bank, moving across the waste that had once been Illium. It picked up dust as it went, swirling like a frantic dancer, headed toward the curtain of black. Faster and faster it moved, sucking dust and sand from ground into its funnel. The debris turned the ever-quickening storm the same battered rust-color as the ground of the wasteland. The magic tempest continued its journey, until finally the conjured wind smashed into the wall of shadow.\n\nThe curtain buckled, its surface breaking apart then quickly reforming as it swallowed Legao's summoned storm. It was all over in a few moments. The curtain of night seemed solid once again. But it wasn't. It had never been solid, nor was it a wall in the traditional sense.\n\n\"It moves. It breaks, but it came back again. It's like a sea of night,\" Gia observed.\n\nHe was wrong. It wasn't a sea. I knew what we were looking at. I'd seen something similar the day Aragor had died. \"It's a wall alright\u2014a wall of blood raptors. The storm startled them enough to break formation, but only for a moment. Just like the hollowing troops. They come at us in rank, in this case packed so closely together they shield the great tower-bridges from view.\"\n\nGia stared. \"There could be anything behind that wall. Or nothing all.\"\n\nHe was being stupid. Again. He couldn't help himself. I took all my self-restraint not to tell Gia of his own foolishness. \"You may not like me, but do not doubt the truth of my words. The obvious is directly in front of you.\"\n\nGia snorted, annoyed and ever distrustful. After taking a last look at the horde, the black dragon dropped from the sky without another word to me. I watched him land amidst his council of humans and Harlan. I followed in no particular rush. I wasn't a puppy to be led about.\n\nWhen I finally rejoined the council, the humans were silent, staring at Gia, awaiting his decision.\n\nGia's first words were to Avix inquiring as to the total number of wounded. The knight-lord seemed surprised at the question.\n\n\"I still don't have an accurate count. Hopefully I will have it by morning. I would guess at least a thousand dead or wounded, probably much more.\"\n\nGia pretended to care about the answer. \"Send a glasswing to Trishan. The late Protector's funeral is to be delayed for several more days until I can return to raise the fire myself.\"\n\nAvix hailed a servant to carry out Gia's wishes. I was impatient with these games. I was tempted to announce that I would destroy the bridges myself. Except alone, I would probably fail. No fire, and only a single dragon, would make the task impossible. I needed Gia if I was going to do this. He knew it. Finally, the giant dragon got around to saying the obvious.\n\n\"An unexpected danger approaches from the west. A new threat, most likely. I've decided it is worth the risk to cross the river to destroy it before it gets here. Let us decide how that is to be done.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "We decided to use the darkness.\n\nNo one really knew if the hollowings slept at night. According to Avix, they did appear to lie down as regular humans would. It seemed their empty bodies had a need for rest, just like ordinary humans. But even if the horde wasn't actually sleeping, we still decided that night would give us some advantage, because dragons could see better at night than humans. Gia's dark scales would make him particularly difficult to spot. I consented to having my own scales coated in dark war-paint to further camouflage myself.\n\n\"This won't be useful,\" I said to Harlan as several Mizu rubbed the dark chalk over me with thick brushes.\n\n\"Then why are you letting them do it?\"\n\n\"Because Gia mocked the idea. I didn't like his tone so I wasn't going to let him stop me.\"\n\n\"Excellent reason.\"\n\nI thought so as well.\n\nI had also refitted my sai onto my claws with the assistance of Harlan and two Mizu attendants. The cold metal weapons felt like cheating in a way, but they had more than proven their worth against the behemoths in the previous battle.\n\nA mounted Mizu rider carrying a torch arrived to inform me that Gia was ready to fly. We had decided we would cross as far apart as practical with the hope that at least one of us would get across the river undetected in the darkness. His starting position was sufficiently distant that I couldn't see him from the ground.\n\n\"It would be better if I was with you,\" Harlan commented as we both watched the sky for the flaming arrow that would be the signal to take to the air.\n\n\"Having a passenger makes me less maneuverable. Also, you are far more exposed to attack by blood raptor than I am. Most importantly, you don't add anything to this mission.\" It was a bit harsh, but true.\n\nHarlan showed no sign of taking offense. \"I learn from what I see. That can be useful even if the use isn't immediately obvious.\"\n\nWas the implication that I didn't learn?\n\nA crimson streak rose into the sky before I had a chance to ask Harlan precisely what he meant. I unfurled my wings. I didn't want him with me, and that was that.\n\nAs I was about to take off, Harlan spoke quickly. \"The hollowings expect the expected. To outwit them, you must do the unexpected.\"\n\nI wasn't paying attention. \"Got it.\"\n\nI hurled myself into the sky, with only a brief pang of regret. Why was I doing this? For Rinxia and Kiata, I told myself. This place mattered to them, so it mattered to me. But it wasn't just that. My head was skeptical of any duty to Ni-Yota, but something else tugged at me: The rust was devastating. I might not follow a so-called Way like the rest of the dragons of Ni-Yota, but I knew a threat when I saw it.\n\nI headed north at speed, flying above the clouds, well beyond where I thought I would be visible to human eyes. As I traveled beyond the Narrows, the hollowing army disappeared from the landscape. North of the Narrows, the Tayo widened and quickened, its banks becoming a nearly impassible collection of jagged cliffs and ominous peaks where not even the hollowings could easily travel. Mizu battle engines that resembled ballistae but shot plumes of smaller projectiles designed to target blood raptors had been lifted onto the mountains on the eastern side of the river, along with cages filled with specially trained war hawks. It was here I crossed the water into Illium.\n\nA chill ran through me as I passed over the far bank of the Tayo. I presumed that was just some silly jitters. I was in the sky. Here in the air, my kind ruled. Blood raptors might harry dragons at these heights, but they could not defeat us.\n\nBeneath me were jagged rocks and craggy mountains. After the peaks came more wasteland, a landscape covered almost entirely by the ugly presence of the rust, as if some impossible giant had poured it from buckets from the sky until every bit of land below was covered. Even far above, the sight made me uneasy. I flew quickly; no alarm was raised, no arc bolts were launched. I turned, heading southwest, toward the wall of blood raptors that traveled through the waste.\n\nI kept a sharp watch on the ground below. I caught glimpses of what I thought might be movement: a rustling of ground, a flash of black at the fringe of my vision. It was hard to tell from my altitude. Whatever I saw could've been the wind, or perhaps the hollowing wolves who fought alongside the humans. I was moving quickly. Whatever was down there, in the sea of blighted rust, I heard no loud noises and saw no marshalling forces.\n\nEach beat of my wings brought me closer to the blackness, and the bridge-towers I was certain were beyond the camouflage shield. I scanned the sky to the south, trying to catch sight of Gia. I saw only more night. That was either a sign that his natural darkness was an effective cloak, or an indication that I was in a deep trouble. I didn't trust Gia, although I didn't think him dishonorable. I didn't doubt he wanted to destroy the hollowings, at least. I kept flying, deeper in their domain.\n\nI pushed myself faster, anxious to be done with this. My scales prickled. Had I really come so far unseen?\n\nI caught a smell on the air, something foul. The odor of decay, but not death. Then, I heard the noise of a thousand dark whispers. It was the mingled sound of countless feathered wings. Along with the whispers came the groan of wooden wheels, the crushing of stones on the well--punished ground. I was close. The hollowings would know I was here soon if they didn't already.\n\nI still couldn't see Gia. He could've been in clouds, silent and unseen, or something could've delayed him. His fire would be critical to the plan succeeding. I wore the sai, but I needed to drive close to use those. Gia's fire was the better weapon for this mission. I had to give the fire breather his due. So, where was he?\n\nI flew even faster toward the black. I had thought Gia a fool, but it occurred to me that perhaps I was the true fool for coming here, for relying upon a dragon who resented my existence.\n\nThe notion that Gia wasn't going to show up kept gnawing at me, like a little beaver in my mind, destroying the dam of calm that held my fears in check. My hearts beat like lead, but I had no time for remorse. The malicious little eyes of the blood raptors appeared. Was there triumph in those little creatures' gazes? Did they laugh at my lack of foresight?\n\nGia ached to be Protector. He thought I was in his way. How badly did he want that title? Enough to see me dead in the wasteland. If he never showed up, who would ever know? He could make up any story he wanted for Rinxia and Kiata. But if I was wrong, if I turned back, I would be abandoning Gia. His wing was injured. He might not make it without me.\n\nIt was too late for such cynical considerations. I wasn't going to turn back. Either Gia would be where he was supposed to be, or not. I put all my strength in a decisive beat of my wings, extending the sai on my foreclaws. The raptors and I collided violently. I sliced some feathers. I carved through the bird wall easily. I'd expected scrapes and pecks and fury, but I received none of that. I'd anticipated the raptors to scatter when I struck the heart of the flock, as ordinary birds would have. They didn't. Instead, the blood raptors let me in like an invited guest and closed the door behind me.\n\nInside the blood raptor cage there was utter blackness. Even the starlight was blocked by the feathered ceiling above. I wasn't sure if I'd ever been anywhere so dark. And it reminded me of something I and other dragons don't dwell upon: We can't actually see in the dark. Our eyes simply require far less light than humans, and the regular night has plenty of light for us. In the total absence of any source of light, I was blind. The hollowings had somehow created a near-perfect void inside that flying box. I could barely make out the outline of my own snout.\n\nIt was a trap.\n\nThey expect the expected.\n\nSome fire would've been very useful at that moment, but of course I had none. I didn't need to see to know that it was just me in here. I wanted to panic, and I was fully entitled to do so, but I didn't. If I lost control now, everyone else won. Gia won, the hollowings won, the tigris won, countless uneaten pigs of Ni-Yota won. I wasn't dying in the dark or falling to the tainted rust crap that had gotten Aragor.\n\nWhy had the hollowings gone to such length to lure me into the dark? It must've taken countless blood raptors to accomplish this. The obvious answer was because they didn't want me to see some kind of threat inside their trap. They expected me to be surprised by the utter darkness, to hesitate. So I didn't. I turned as quickly as I could, then dove. I heard a ballista fire, the snap of its torque. One, three, five shots. The bolts whistled dangerously through the air. I couldn't see them, but I could hear. Only one projectile came close. They hadn't anticipated how quickly I would adapt. Also, the hollowings didn't understand dragon senses. No other creature was our equal. I couldn't see, but that wasn't necessary for a dragon to fly adeptly. Our navigational sense didn't require sight. I didn't know exactly what was on the ground, but it didn't really matter. I could locate the sounds of ballistae well enough to know their location. Even if I didn't get everything precisely correct, I intended to destroy a wide area.\n\nI dove. My claws sunk into the wood of a machine. I caught it and closed my claws, lifting the ballistae into the air with another beat of my wings. I dropped it where I heard the scurrying of rapid footsteps, leading to a shattering crash and even more scurrying. The hollowings didn't shout or panic. I swerved again, turning onto my side, just in case these creatures could somehow see better than regular humans. I listened for the sounds of arc bolts being reloaded, pouncing as soon as I did. The hollowings did their best, but I was as fast as only a desperate dragon could manage.\n\nWhere were the bridge-towers?\n\nThe hollowings had stopped moving the massive machines I had come here to destroy. I heard no sound of creaking wheels. That was clever, but not sufficient. Behemoths were massive animals, and even hollowings make noise. They were still flesh, they drew breath, and that made noise. I could hear those great beasts even in the strange silence of the void. I flew at a sound I guessed to be a behemoth, hoping that they couldn't see any better in the dark than a human. If I was wrong, those deadly tail spikes would give my enemy a potentially fatal advantage, but fortune fought with me at that moment. My sai plunged into tough hide followed by softer flesh. Something sticky and warm coated my claws. A rush of air swept past as a behemoth tail came at me, but I was already gone, streaking upwards.\n\nArc bolts clicked into place. There was more movement on the ground. The blood raptors fluttered. Too many sounds at once. This wasn't a safe place. I needed to flee.\n\nI hated leaving the bridge-towers intact, but fighting in the darkness in this place, blind and alone, was madness. I flew for the blood raptor wall on the opposite side on which I'd entered the hollow trap.\n\nBlazing light burst through the feathery barrier before I reached it. It was as if the sun had risen within the hollowing cage, furious at being shut out for so long. The smell of burnt feathers reached my nostrils soon after, shattering the illusion of daybreak. The sun hadn't risen. Gia had come. That big lug of fire-coughing dragon had actually arrived. Finally.\n\nThe light of black dragon's fire revealed the clever trap that had been laid for me in this place. The great rolling tower-bridges were real enough, but after the hollowings had raised their feathered shield to block all views, they'd brought in a dozen ballistae I hadn't seen. These machines rolled on wheels and weren't as large as their cousins near the river, but their projectiles were no less deadly. Two of the machines had already reloaded. I gave a roar of warning as they loosed their bolts at Gia. He didn't have time to maneuver out of the way, but he was able to redirect his fiery bust of breath toward the incoming danger. The heat of Gia's fire melted the tips so the weapons were as lethal as pebbles when they finally struck his armor. That was a handy trick.\n\nReinvigorated by Gia's belated arrival, I broke off my retreat, executed something close to a flip in the air, and proceeded to visit havoc upon every ballistae I could reach. They were easy targets, unarmored. A single hit from my tail or claws was sufficient to destroy them.\n\nGia cared only for the big targets. He flew immediately for the tower-bridges. Keeping well out of range of the behemoths on the ground below, Gia bathed the first of the massive constructions in fire. The flames embraced their victim, swirling and crackling with delight as they spread. I wacked another ballistae, intent on giving Gia all the time he needed to set every tower ablaze. But it wasn't going to be so easy. When Gia's flames dissipated, instead of a smoldering skeleton of ash, the tower structure remained intact. His belch of fire hadn't ignited the wood of the tower-bridge as I expected. At most, he'd singed the exterior. Gia roared in frustration, circling back and dousing the tower yet again, this time with brilliant fire fueled with his unrivaled anger. The tower groaned, wobbled, but that wasn't enough. Once again, the flames faded, leaving the structure standing defiantly. It would take more than fire to destroy these new constructions, and the hollowings had no intention of giving us the chance to do more damage.\n\nThe walls and ceiling of the bird-box Gia and I put ourselves in collapsed. Thousands of blood raptors descended upon us from five directions. Being closer to the top, Gia got the worst of it, with the birds enveloping him in a blanket of vicious avian feathers, claws, and beaks. There were so many that the huge dragon disappeared from my sight, with only a feather-encased blob remaining. The birds grabbed at his wings by the hundreds. Gia began to fall from the sky, the birds weighing upon him. His wings moved, but the motion was balky\u2014it was like trying to fly through water. He unleashed his fire, even daring to douse himself in flames, but that wasn't enough. There were too many raptors, and they were willing to roast to bring him down. The behemoths abandoned their position near the bridge-towers, each one galloping toward the area where it seemed as if Gia would fall. All this without audible shouts or other obvious communication.\n\nA hundred or more raptors swarmed about me as well, all of them pecking and scratching. Dozens tried to latch onto my wings. I shook and twisted as I flew in circles, trying to keep the number that managed to get a hold on me manageable. I could still fly and maneuver. I could also see\u2014and what I saw was four mean looking behemoths waiting to kill Gia the moment he struck the ground. I didn't see any way for him to survive what awaited.\n\nChicken piss.\n\nI flew at my fellow dragon, diving and twisting as I came to him. I wouldn't be able to lift him\u2014two of me wouldn't be able to do that\u2014but I needed to get the blood raptors off his wings. I didn't have the fire to do that, but I did have some other advantages: I had a really loud roar, I flew fast, and I was desperate.\n\nThe roar part was easy. I unleashed it, deafening in volume, enough to shake the air. That didn't stop the blood raptors, of course. To do that, I had to fly directly onto Gia. I swept over the giant dragon, scraping my belly against his back, my wings against his. It was the closest I'd even been to another dragon I wasn't trying to kill\u2014except Rinxia. I squashed a dozen raptors between us, and swept dozens more off his back and wings with my tail. Bird bones crashed, wings snapped. It still wasn't going to be enough to restore his ability to fly\u2014there were too many on his wings. I latched onto the huge dragon, pulling him toward me as if I was inclined to mate with the brute. I beat my wings as hard as I was able. That slowed us, but not enough. Desperately, I wriggled and twisted. Gia did the same, unleashing his breath at the same time. He scorched me as well as himself. I couldn't take much more, but neither could the raptors. Our entire armored bodies heated, our scales becoming like flying ovens even as I continued to smash the birds. Feathers smoked and burned. We couldn't completely free ourselves from the latching raptors, but it was just enough.\n\nGia roared, and I knew what he meant. We shoved off of each other, just before we struck the behemoth's killing area on the ground. Gia came so low he might have taken a tail to his hind leg, but it wasn't enough to stop him. I could sense his angry determination through the dark. His eyes burned nearly as bright as the fire he kept unleashing.\n\n\"We will finish those towers!\" Gia called to me as he beat his wings, once against gaining altitude.\n\nThere were four towers. I had no idea how to destroy them, except to land on them and rip them apart. I also knew that the blood raptors would rally and attack again. Already, they were reorienting themselves, forming up into huge clouds of black to envelop us once again. This time they'd come in equal numbers at both of us.\n\n\"Gia, we have to leave. The raptors come again.\"\n\nHe didn't listen. Instead, he fell upon another of the bridge-towers, tearing at the wood of its upper layers. Gia's strength was tremendous. He smashed and shattered the upper portion of the tower with several brutal hits of his tail. So what? It wasn't destroyed. Whatever damage he'd done would be fixed. As he pummeled the tower, the blood raptors came again. He saw them and tried to escape at the last moment, using a spreading shield of fire to get himself the time he needed to evade the massive, flapping cloud that came to envelope him. It almost worked.\n\nGia managed to keep ahead of the blood raptors. He was faster, particularly in a dive. Unfortunately, I hadn't destroyed all the ballistae. The hollowings had already aimed an arc bolt at the tower Gia had been assaulting. They quickly adjusted as he jumped off. I saw it. I flew fast. The bolt launched, springing at Gia even as he essentially dove toward it. It was too late for Gia to maneuver out of the way. I swept between them, my body passing through the narrow space that separated weapon and victim without a moment to spare. My tail whacked the projectile off course about a finger's length from Gia's snout. I roared in satisfaction. Gia pulled up just before the ground, barely above the outstretched swords of the hollowings below. The blood raptors followed like hungry chicks chasing their mother. I came at Gia as well, faster than the birds. I flew alongside him.\n\n\"This was a trap. We need to get out, now.\"\n\nGia growled defiance.\n\n\"Rinxia cannot defend Ni-Yota by herself. I'm leaving.\"\n\nMy wings ended any chance for debate with the larger dragon. I headed east, gaining altitude as I moved. I pushed myself hard. Again, Harlan's warning that hollowings expect the expected rang in my mind. The reminder came just in time. I swerved off my initial course, then did it again. A deadly pack of six arc bolts, fired from ballistae hidden in pits dug into the ground, made me grateful for my friend's warning. I looked back to see Gia had wisely followed me eastward. The blood raptors remained in pursuit, but they couldn't match a dragon's speed. When I was confident that I was well out of the range of any human-built projectile hurler, I slowed to allow Gia to catch me.\n\nI had one burning question for him that couldn't wait until we were safely back on the other side of the river. \"What took you so long to get here?\"\n\nHe didn't answer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Blood raptors pursued us.\n\nGia and I were swifter. We put ever greater distance between us and the birds as we flew toward the Tayo. It had been a trap, and I felt fortunate to have escaped with my life. I wanted to return to Ni-Yota to fight another day and see Rinxia again. I sensed no such urgency in the giant brute who flew alongside me. Gia seemed to hesitate ever so slightly each time he beat his wings, as if reluctant to make the effort. It could've been that he didn't like retreating. Or that might have nothing to do with his hesitation.\n\nGia twisted his neck to survey our pursuit. The birds had fallen well behind us. Below there was only the rust, a lethal sea of waste, but it couldn't touch us in the sky. Gia snarled, a sour, cranky sound as he turned his head back toward Ni-Yota.\n\nThe big dragon annoyed me like a chicken feather up my nose. He also might've deliberately tried to get me killed, although I wasn't sure. I certainly had no patience for him. \"What's gnawing your snout?\"\n\nGia growled. \"We flee. Flee like little mice from a snake. We are dragons.\"\n\n\"The term is regrouping, Gia. We were outnumbered.\"\n\n\"The hollowings will always have greater numbers. What shall we do if they cross the Tayo with their bridges and greater numbers? Will we fly all the way to Trishan? Or perhaps you'll go 'regroup' across the mountains back in Elasu's old den at Changsha.\" I could taste his bitterness on wind.\n\nThere was no answer I could give that would satisfy him. I should've just kept my mouth shut. \"I prefer to fight battles I can win. Sometimes that means retreat. What is honor worth to the dead?\"\n\n\"What is the point in living without being true to the Way?\"\n\nI could've made a list. Black pigs and shaojiu were near the top. And seeing Rinxia again. Food and drink didn't care if you were honorable or not. Rinxia was more complicated. I didn't bother to tell Gia about these things. He wouldn't understand. I just laughed with my eyes. Gia snarled all the way back to the river, but still he came along.\n\nThe blood raptors trailed us all the way, more relentless than a dog begging from dinner scraps. Would they follow us across? The Mizu had their war engines and many cages of hawks, but it wouldn't be enough to stop the blood raptors if this many chose to cross over.\n\nAs we neared the river, the wind changed. Indeed, it disappeared almost completely. The air pressure dropped. Dark clouds appeared where they shouldn't have. I knew magic was at work. I hoped it was Legao and not some more sinister force.\n\n\"Let us not dally,\" I said to Gia. In truth, I doubted Gia had much more speed than he'd given. I pushed myself harder, curious if the larger dragon would find the strength to keep pace. He did, so I beat my wing for still more speed, reminding Gia that I was swifter than he. I wanted to get across the river. I didn't know how much control Legao had over the forces she summoned or what she intended.\n\nThe cloud gave no warning of the fury it was prepared to release. One moment the skies were dark; the next, brilliant flashes of light tore apart the curtain of night. The blazes came in quick succession, as if flying archers lurked in the clouds, loosing the lightning arrows in unison. The deadly light ripped into the clustered flock of blood raptors, their close formation enabling the lightning to inflict far more damage than against a conventional flight of birds. The raptors adapted quickly, splitting into several, less-dense clouds. The flashes continued to come, but their pace slackened noticeably. I suspected we were witnessing the limits of Legao's power. By the time I crossed the Tayo, the lightning had ceased, but the birds still flew toward us.\n\nI scanned the ground, looking for the wizard. She stood on a small hill beside Harlan, dubiously protected by a dozen wary Mizu soldiers with crossbows in their hands and huge shields on their backs. I landed nearby, leaving Gia to his own ends. He didn't follow.\n\nHarlan came to meet me. \"It seems you've angered them.\"\n\n\"It was a trap, as I think you suspected. The bridge-towers were there, but fire-proofed in some way. We failed.\"\n\nHarlan looked into the dark night, its void now broken only by the light of a few stars. \"I'd say you've grabbed a tigris by the tail.\" He chuckled, I didn't.\n\n\"Burning the bridges isn't the answer. It never was. You were right when you said the hollowing expect the expected. We must do the unexpected.\"\n\nHarlan smirked. \"You have a plan, then.\"\n\n\"Maybe I do. It will take time. A day or more, at least.\" I studied the great horde encamped on the river's far bank. \"It is something I must do. Gia will have to hold them again. That will be a bloody affair.\"\n\n\"If a bit of time is all you need, there may be a better way to get some of that.\"\n\nHarlan walked toward Legao, who had fallen to one knee on the ground. Her breathing was heavy, and dark shadows extended beneath her eyes. The magic had cost her.\n\n\"Great Legao, I know you have given your best to your efforts.\" Harlan cooed like a bard. \"Have you enough left for one more task that may be the key to saving us all?\"\n\nThe wizard pulled her head up from its slouch. She gave Harlan a piercing stare. \"You have a way with words, Harlan Dor. You wield guilt like my mother.\"\n\n\"I merely speak the plain truth. This does sometimes tug upon the conscience of those who happen to have such a thing. If my words affect you, it is really a testament to yourself.\"\n\nLegao blinked several times then shook her head. \"I don't understand what you just said. Name the task you ask, and please quiet yourself after that.\"\n\nHarlan waved an arm expansively toward the river and the horde beyond. \"Rain, my dear wizard. We need rain, a lot of it.\"\n\n\"Are the hollowings afraid of getting wet?\"\n\n\"Hardly, but the ground across the river is nothing but dry sand and dirt coated with that horrid rust. It's been trampled countless times through the years. It should soak easily and become muddy.\"\n\nRealizations dawned upon me. \"Wheels are wheels. Even if behemoths are pulling, they need traction to move those huge machines across distances.\"\n\nLegao still didn't rise to her feet. \"The horde grows close, I suppose. You'll need a lot of rain in very little time.\"\n\nHarlan grew more serious, never a good sign. \"We'll take whatever we can get.\"\n\nLegao pulled herself upright. She swayed, steadying herself only at the last minute. She spread her arms wide and her irises flashed ever so briefly. She mouthed some words, little more than a whisper, but I did my best to discern them. A low hum followed the shifting tones, the connection of one sound leading to the next. The words themselves (if they were words) meant nothing to me, but somehow, I still had a sense of the power\u2014these were sounds of command. I wondered what these chants meant to Legao, and how it was connected to the magic she wielded. As she worked, I tried, once again, to find the Latticework, that place of magic around us. I reached out with my senses, anxious to understand the power that Legao drew upon. My efforts yielded nothing more than a vague feeling of sizzling energy around me, as if a grand revelation was just out of my grasp. I looked at the sky instead.\n\nNothing happened immediately. The clouds and wind seemed unmoved by whatever it was Legao attempted. I realized she was weakened. Legao's previous casting had sapped her strength, and she was relying as much on willpower as stamina for this work of magic. Still, I knew by now that Legao had skill. She might have lived her life in the long shadow of the master Drasu, but she had plenty of talent in her own right. Her voice strengthened\u2014and in that instant I felt it too. The fabric of the sky answered a command, shifting in manner not intended a moment before that. Clouds gathered as Legao ordered, drawing moisture from the surrounding air. I could sense the dazzling array of connections between the wind, the sky, Legao, and everything else\u2014a magnificent puzzle that was both simple and incomprehensible. Not long after, it began to rain across the river. The drops came slowly, like reluctant tears. Legao swayed again. Her face grew pale. Harlan watched her carefully, poised to catch her if she stumbled. The rain eased to a faint drizzle.\n\nLegao lacked the strength to complete the task. She dropped onto one knee. I had plenty of strength, but I had no idea how to use it. Even though I could neither see nor feel Legao's magic directly, I understood its effect on the Latticework. What she had done was akin to a new apprentice trying to alter a finely woven tapestry. Compared to the intricate elegance of the Latticework, which seemed to form the very structure of existence, her efforts were brutal and clumsy, but that still made her a master compared to me. However, even in my ignorance, I instinctively knew which of the dazzling cords of creation she had attempted to command. Somehow, I understood these weavings just as I understood the winds, just as I always knew my destination and could never get lost in the sky. All of this was part of me as a dragon.\n\nI focused on Legao's work so far. Having used all the moisture in the vicinity, she was trying to pull in still more for her conjured rain storm. She just didn't have the strength. I willed the chords to move, to shift in a manner which would accomplish Legao's purpose, but could not. I could not touch them. I could not command them as Legao had. Something held me back. Heat surged through me, a bubbling power that demanded release, but I didn't know what to do with it. I tried again, attempting to reach out to the great Latticework around me, tracing the chords of light that connected me to the sky. Again, nothing happened. It was just out of reach. I roared in frustration, my anger at my impotence getting the better of me. In that instant, the Latticework was gone.\n\nI thrashed my head around, but only for a few moments. I knew I needed to get my control back. I steadied myself, then tried to find the Latticework again, but could not. Whatever mistake I had made, it had cost me a precious opportunity. Fortunately, Legao remained determined. She pushed herself back upright, her jaw hard. Once again, her mouth moved. Reluctantly, the sky answered. The rains fell again, first a steady trickle, then a deluge.\n\nI felt Harlan's eyes upon us both. Wind and rain ripped past us, cold and welcome. The drops pounded the ragged, thirsty dirt beyond the Tayo. Then, Legao crumbled.\n\nHarlan caught her before she hit the ground. An instant later, three of her Mizu guardians were all around her as well. They carried her off, but I didn't move. I gazed at the sky. The rain lessened, but it did not cease. Even without Legao, the clouds had been called, the weather's pattern altered. Eventually, what Legao had done would be set right again, and the Latticework would return the sky to its normal state, but for now, the effect of Legao's magic lingered to our benefit.\n\nAcross the river, the ground upon which the hollowings would have to pull their towers quickly became mud, a shifting, slurpy deluge that even a behemoth would have difficulty traversing. Runoff water flowed into the Tayo, raising its water level. There would be no easy crossing. As the water fell from the sky, I kept searching for the elusive Latticework, lurking everywhere and nowhere. I was desperate to understand its pattern and its power. To sense its presence was to enter a near trance. I forgot about the wet sliding off my scales and about the chill of the wind. I merely studied the magnificence of the workings of existence. A wizard had caused this rain. One day, I vowed, I would be able to do so as well. That and more. I knew now the power was inside me.\n\nOnly when the sun rose behind me did the rain finally quit.\n\nHarlan was beside me, although I hadn't noticed him before. \"Well done. I always knew the strength of the spirit within you. The magic that goes along with it is even more impressive.\"\n\nI was surprised at his praise. \"I did nothing.\"\n\nHarlan's eyes widened. \"Oh?\" His tone told me he disagreed. \"Legao looked ready to tumble before you roared, before you did whatever else you did. Then, during the night, the rain slackened, then came again as you sat here watching. Somehow, I think you helped with this.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. I am a babe bumbling in the forest.\" Harlan kept staring so I added, \"For now.\"\n\nHe nodded, seemingly satisfied.\n\n\"In any case, this rain won't stop them,\" I warned.\n\n\"No, it won't,\" Harlan agreed. \"But it will delay them. Once Legao recovers, she may be able to continue the work, getting us even more time. Well done so far. What is the rest of your plan?\"\n\nMy plan?\n\nI'd forgotten all about it. I had been utterly focused on the magic being wrought. My balky mind only reluctantly returned to something like normal. I groaned as I remembered my original intentions.\n\nMy body ached. My eyes threatened to close themselves, regardless of what the rest of me wanted. I longed for rest. Delicious rest. But here wasn't time for that. I had to fly. There was much to do and time worked against me.\n\nStill\u2026whatever I had done through the night had not been sleep. My body was drained and I was horribly wet. My efforts deserved some sort of reward.\n\n\"Harlan, see if you can find me a pig or two, and we'll talk about what must be done over breakfast."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Halan failed at breakfast.\n\nI'd told him I needed food and rest. I went off to nap beneath a great tent that had been erected in the camp, and Harlan said he would take care of breakfast. But when I awoke, the human had procured only pig feet rather than the whole animal. Pig feet aren't a pig. Chicken feet aren't a chicken. I would've thought even a human with dubious taste in food would've realized that.\n\nJustifiable grouchy, I turned my attention to what had to be done before the hollowings arrived. \"We need to speak to Legao.\"\n\n\"You attract too much attention,\" Harlan said. \"I'll go.\"\n\nI didn't argue with him. He was correct, and my bones still ached from being out in the rain all last night. While I didn't quite trust the wizard, I needed her. I was pretty sure she wasn't one of Gia's lackeys, at least. I waited impatiently, staring at the overcast sky. Only a light drizzle still fell, but it didn't matter. We'd succeeded in slowing the hollowings.\n\nHarlan wasn't gone long. \"She wasn't glad to see me. She looked a bit like you this morning.\"\n\n\"Hopefully her breakfast was better. What did she say about the plan?\"\n\nHarlan smirked. \"'At least we'll die fighting,' were her words.\"\n\nI snorted. She wasn't wrong.\n\n\"I took it as a sign of agreement,\" Harlan said. \"She is no friend of Gia's, and she understands the threat we face, I think.\"\n\nI was actually glad for Legao's approval. I wanted to speak to her, about the hollowings, but also about magic, but there was no time now. If we survived the battle to come, perhaps.\n\nI took to the sky. I moved swiftly with the wind, my fatigue banished in flight. The morning was not yet old when I located the first part of my plan. A caravan of robed humans hauling the body of Drasu the wizard. They had left yesterday, but Dragons were much faster than horses, particularly when the horses were hauling wagons.\n\nHarlan called out to me from my back as I circled over the caravan. \"Are you going to ask permission or just take him?\"\n\nIt was a fair question, to which I hadn't given any thought. I had planned to snatch the body. That was how dragons did things\u2014we swooped and took. It was simple and efficient. But I'd brought Harlan along for his more subtle perspective. \"What do you suggest?'\n\n\"They'll never give him to you. Just swoop down and take the corpse.\"\n\nVery helpful.\n\nI landed in front of the caravan. Its escorts were justifiably shocked by the dragon that appeared before them.\n\nI drew myself up, posing in my full glory with wings pulled toward the sky. \"The wizard Drasu has been called upon to render one last service to Ni-Yota.\"\n\nThe robed men accompanying the corpse-wagon were surprised by my pronouncement, but not as surprised as they were when I ripped the canopy off to expose Drasu's body to the morning sunlight. They'd laid him down with a shroud, but I tore that off too, for good measure. I wanted to see the lifeless remains of my mother's murderer. In my memory, the wizard was a fearsome creation, with eyes that radiated power and a heart of stone. He had commanded the skies, besting even my mother in a contest of magic.\n\nDead, the once mighty Drasu looked pale and frail, an empty shell. Whatever power had lived within the body of that wizard had fled, perhaps to Haven, perhaps someplace less pleasant. I had hunted this human across the world, my hate for him the fire that fueled the early days of my journey to Ni-Yota. Looking at this slowly decaying hunk of flesh, I found my inferno of hate had extinguished itself. The flesh of the dead wizard was just a hunk of rotten meat. But Drasu still owed me dearly for what he had done. He had nothing left to pay with except his remains, so I had no guilt about snatching the corpse and flying off to the north, leaving a group of gaping Mizu in my wake.\n\n\"Nice touch, telling them that Drasu had one last service to perform,\" Harlan commented as I beat my wings for more speed. I wanted this over with as soon as possible.\n\n\"It's true enough. I intend to make good use of his corpse.\"\n\n\"You really think the days-old body of some old man is going to be a sufficient exchange for what you ask?\"\n\n\"That's why I brought you along, slick tongue. You need to convince them.\"\n\nHarlan went silent, perhaps insulted or perhaps strategizing.\n\nWe passed a dozen villages and three smallish fortresses on the route north. I wondered if one of these was the Jahatta, where the healer had told me Rinxia had been brought. I saw no sign of any of those places hosting a dragon, and I wasn't inclined to stop in any inhabited settlement with Drasu's dead body in my clutches. We did our resting in open fields. By the late afternoon, the rugged northern coast of Ni-Yota came into view.\n\n\"Where do we drop him off?\"\n\n\"Vengeance said that whatever one ghastray tastes, they all can taste. We just need to find a ghastray-infested shoal to make the delivery.\"\n\n\"The northern coast has plenty of treacherous shallows to rip apart the hull of a ship. Usually I try to avoid them, but it will be easy enough to find one.\"\n\n\"Pick someplace where I can land safely. Even with our stops, this has been a long flight. If there was game to hunt, that would be even better.\"\n\n\"I'll see if I can't find a deserted island with a fine inn located on it. Ghastray-infested waters are quite popular with travelers.\"\n\nIt took me longer than it should've to realize Harlan was jesting with me. I was weary, and even at my best, I didn't understand human humor. Food and rest weren't joking matters. Despite Harlan's poor attitude, I had no doubt about his knowledge of the sea. The man seemed to be able to sniff rocks beneath the harshest waves, pointing out shifting currents where I saw only water. He noticed miniscule specs of land that even my dragon eyes would've missed. In the end, he located as suitable a spot as I could've reasonably asked.\n\nHarlan directed me toward a cluster of cresting waves just south of a patch of worn, broken rock barely large enough for me to lay upon.\n\n\"Cozy,\" I commented.\n\nHarlan groaned a rebuke. \"The tides shift due to the changes in the current. This is the island at its smallest. It will grow to many times this size by the evening, leaving a muddy beach where we might find crabs and clams. Besides, even now, there is enough room for you to land and rest, as you requested.\"\n\n\"Barely.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you have grown too accustomed to luxurious spires in the sky to accept such humble accommodations. I'm afraid no roasted pigs live on this speck of land, either.\"\n\nI didn't think his rebuke was particularly fair, but it stung with enough truth that I shut up. I came in low over the shoals and dropped the remains of Drasu into the sea.\n\n\"Farewell, wizard.\"\n\nThe seas took Drasu without hesitation. A wave crested over the corpse. The dead eyes flipped open in the current. It was an unsatisfying end to Drasu. A moment later, a stinger flashed. When I looked again, the body was gone forever, taken into the depths. I couldn't see the ghastrays, but Harlan apparently could.\n\n\"The shallowings come for their meal.\" He sounded certain.\n\nI made several more circles in the air above the shoals, vainly hoping that Vengeance would poke his hideous head from the water to strike up a conversation with me, but when that didn't happen, I settled down upon Harlan's puny hunk of an island to wait. My wings were grateful for the relief even if my stomach was less pleased.\n\n\"Does this place have a name?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not that I know of.\"\n\n\"Then I proclaim it Harlan's Rest.\" It was the first time I'd named a place. Humans did it all the time. I got why they liked it\u2014it bestowed a feeling of power, as if I was superior to the land itself. Maybe I shouldn't have so hastily named it after Harlan?\n\nMy companion looked shocked, then pleased. \"It's as good a name as any.\"\n\nVengeance arrived sometime during the night. I awoke to his disturbing call\u2014a high pitched shriek that shook bones and chilled the air. Upon hearing the claxon, my blood surged as if anticipating battle. Harlan was on his feet a moment later.\n\nWe didn't have to move far on the miniscule island to find Vengeance. The ghastray's frightening eyes protruded from the waters of the shallow beach directly in front us. His translucent body shimmered just beneath the waves, reflecting in the starlight. I looked up to find that Rima had appeared in the sky, its broken form adding to my unease as I came before the ghastray.\n\nThere were no introductions, no pleasantries.\n\n\"A corpse is not a kill.\" Vengeance's voice reminded me of the Abyss, of cold death.\n\n\"The wizard Drasu is dead, as we both wanted. He will cast no more spells, weave no more magic, nor will he help to enslave any more of your kind.\"\n\nThe eyes shut then reopened in quick succession. \"We tasted the marrow of his bones. This was as it should be. But slavers still live. The legacy of Drasu continues in those they call the binders.\"\n\nThe ghastrays wanted no more slaves. I couldn't blame them, but my war was now even bigger than that. I needed the Mizu and the ghastrays on my side. \"Ni-Yota has suffered. Even their so-called Skyking is dead.\"\n\nA wave hit, but the ghastray remained perfectly still. \"There is always another.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not this time. All of Ni-Yota stands on the edge of annihilation.\"\n\nTwo of the ghastray's eyes closed while the rest remained open. \"This bothers you, dragon? I thought them your enemy.\"\n\nIt was a fair point. Why did their fate bother me? It just did. There was something about the rust, something that filled my insides with an awful peril. \"A grave threat arises, a darkness that poses peril for the last of my kind.\" I struggled to reconcile my feelings with my words. \"When compared to this fate, old grievances fall away.\"\n\nVengeance opened all of his eyes again. \"For your kind\u2026perhaps. It was correct for you to bring us the wizard; even if the chi within him had fled, he was luscious to consume. There is nothing more here, dragon.\"\n\nI realized he intended to leave. \"Wait, we have need of your help.\"\n\nI could feel Harlan wince beside me. Perhaps this was not the best way to begin a negotiation. But if the human didn't like it, he should've spoken earlier.\n\nThe ghastray eyes shut and opened in sequence. \"The strange dragon still does not understand.\"\n\nVengeance's head began to sink into the sea. I didn't know what else to say, but Harlan apparently did. He spoke to the ghastray.\n\n\"This threat is not merely a war between humans, nor is it a battle among land-dwellers for territory or food. It is not even a clash of magic. It is something more. It connected to the Iraliss.\"\n\nThe ghastray stopped his leaving. Every eye opened, seemingly wider than ever before. A stinger laden tail appeared from the depths. Slowly, its deadly edge approached Harlan, the threat obvious. The human stood his ground, although I heard his heart pumping ever faster.\n\n\"The\u2026human\u2026speaks so much.\" The stinger moved even closer, its edge less than an arm's length from Harlan's throat. \"It uses stolen words it does not understand. Words from the distant past. Words it should not know, much less offer to us.\"\n\nI had no idea what they were talking about. Harlan's mouth was like a leviathan's belly, you never knew what would come out when it was opened.\n\nInstead of cowering as most might have, Harlan tilted his head upward, as if in pride. \"I am of the Farlighters, the denizens of the sea, wanderers of the world. We of the Drowned Isle know the old lore.\"\n\nVengeance glided further up the beach. \"A child of the Drowned Isle, yes.\" The stinger quivered with excitement. \"Indeed, you among all humans should know this. Among all humans, your kind has killed more of us than any other. Among all humans, your kind are the worst. The curse upon your people is well deserved.\" Harlan's face hardened like an edged rock. \"Why should I not avenge my brothers and sisters now?\"\n\n\"Because Bayloo speaks the truth.\" Harlan struggled to keep his voice even. \"A grave threat comes to threaten all of Inkra. It is the concern of all living creatures, your kind as much as mine. Whatever our pasts, we can agree on this.\"\n\n\"Your kind are liars. All humans are liars. Humans brought the great death, and you Farlighters are their closest kin.\" The ghastray's stinger actually brushed Harlan's neck.\n\nI figured it was time to leave. We'd have to find another plan. But Harlan didn't give up. \"Look up, master of the sea. In the sky is my truth. The broken moon, Rima, comes portending the news we bring. Even your kind are a part of this. It is time for you to fulfill your duty.\"\n\nVengeance released a noise that could've been called a hiss, if a viper had been dragon-size and extremely pissed off. Perhaps Harlan wasn't quite the negotiator I'd hoped for when I'd decided to bring him along.\n\nHe wasn't intimidated. \"Among my people there are teachings so ancient that they were first spoken in the time of the Cataclysm. Much of that is only fragments, bits of memory handed down. But among those tales, one of the oldest includes mention of something called the Iraliss\u2014the emptiness.\"\n\nVengeance moved as if stung by a bee on the arse (if ghastrays had such a thing). His tail whipped back. The creature's shimmering body nearly rose out of the water. His eyes fixed upward, gazing at Rima's uneasy glow before settling again on Harlan.\n\n\"Speak of your need, human. If a lie leaves your ugly lips, I will stop the beat of the annoying thumping in your chest.\"\n\nI heard Harlan's heart move still faster. \"On the western side of the River Tayo, at that place called the Narrows, where crossing is possible through the mountain wall, a horde awaits, an army like none other. Tens of thousands of humans, accompanied by wolves who should be their predators, massive beasts unknown to this land called behemoths, and countless blood raptors. All of them acting in concert, as if all were obeying a single voice that commanded them.\"\n\nVengeance didn't sound impressed. \"This may be unusual for creatures of the land. It may be the imagination of your useless eyes. It is not the Iraliss, it has nothing to do with the Purpose.\"\n\nI really hated it when they used words I didn't know. It reminded me of my youth trying to learn Avian from the humans. I don't like being left out, either.\n\nHarlan continued. \"These creatures that look like humans and others do not eat, they almost never speak, they do not behave as they should. When captured, they quickly die rather than divulge secrets. They consume the ground around them, even rocks, to sustain themselves. The Mizu have battled them for years. They have come to refer to them as the hollowings\u2014because they are shells of creatures they once were. Yet they act with intelligence, even guile, setting traps, building items that they need to continue their advance across the river.\"\n\nThe ghastray shuddered. \"The river\u2014these invaders seek to cross the water?\"\n\n\"Yes, as I said,\" Harlan sounded excited. \"The Mizu hold them at the Tayo, where there is but one place that bridges could be built and an army could cross. For years, the magic of the dead wizard enabled the Mizu to hold the line, but no more. As we speak, the hollowings come with bridges and other machines of war. Even the dragons cannot stop them.\"\n\nI disagreed. \"Well, that's not quite true. We\u2014\"\n\n\"This is not the Iraliss.\" The ghastray sounded angry and adamant, but also relieved.\n\n\"Without the aid of your kind, the hollowings will cross the river. Eventually, all of Ni-Yota will become as they are\u2014shells without substance, the land covered by the rust. All creatures will be slaves to some dark, unknown purpose. The taint of the hollowing keeps spreading; by touch of blood, it seems to spread. Aragor himself died as the taint set upon him.\"\n\n\"The great dragon died of this\u2026rust?\" The eyes all blinked. \"Why would it kill him?\"\n\n\"Bayloo killed Aragor so that he wouldn't become a hollowing.\"\n\nThe ghastray shimmered in the waves. Without warning its eyes plunged back below the surface. Harlan and I exchanged a puzzled glance. When we looked again the creature had re-emerged, its eyes bulging.\n\n\"The dragon king is owed to us. Bring Aragor here.\"\n\nSomething uneasy rumbled in my belly. I shouldn't have eaten those pig feet. You never knew where a pig might've walked.\n\n\"You want Aragor's corpse?\" I asked.\n\n\"We shall feast on dragon. And we shall learn if this dark human who smells like the sea and claims to know of the Iraliss is a liar like the rest of his kind.\"\n\nThe night darkened further. Rima had disappeared mysteriously, its light gone.\n\n\"Bring the dead Skyking to us or die as he did. It matters not to us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "For some reason, Harlan was pleased.\n\n\"That went better than I expected.\" He spoke cheerfully as he again climbed onto my back. Night reigned in the endless sky, its blackness interrupted only a few pinpricks of stars. There was no sign of Rima, that strange apparition in the sky that came and went without apparent pattern or purpose.\n\nI couldn't tell if Harlan jested with me. \"The ghastray called you a liar. Then it sent us to fetch the body of the former ruler of Ni-Yota. At no time did it agree to help us.\"\n\nHarlan chuckled softly. \"It wouldn't have asked us to bring Aragor to him if it thought I was just telling stories. I think we've got Vengeance hooked. Or at least smelling the bait.\"\n\n\"It is a ghastray. It may just want to eat a dragon corpse without having to go through the trouble of making one of us dead. The world is running short on dragons. He may just want to taste one before we are all gone.\"\n\nEven without seeing him, I felt Harlan shrug. \"That's not impossible, but I think not.\"\n\n\"Also, you are suggesting that I fly to Trishan and fetch the dead body of the former ruler of this land to deliver to the ghastray.\"\n\n\"It worked well enough with Drasu. It's that or fly back to the Tayo River to fight alongside Gia until you are dead. Or you could run away.\"\n\nMy answer was to launch us into the sky. I headed south toward Ni-Yota, but beyond that I remained undecided on my destination.\n\n\"Even if I wanted to deliver Aragor's corpse, the Mizu aren't just going to hand that over. And dragons are heavy, Harlan. Even dead, empty of water and blood, it would be difficult to fly him to the sea.\"\n\n\"We can find someplace closer. The ghastrays seem adept at finding us after you feed them.\"\n\nI didn't like anything about this. Feeding corpses to ghastrays seemed like an odd way to win a war. Yet I had no other idea on how to muster allies against the hollowings. I flapped my wings for more speed.\n\nWe soared through the rest of the night and into the next day, much of the time lost in our own thoughts. Harlan's conversation with Vengeance had been an odd one. Of course, I had long ago discovered that Harlan's guise of a simple smuggler hid a far more complicated man, but even so, I had underestimated the depth of the human.\n\nEventually, I tired too much to continue flying. We landed at a Mizu waystation. It resembled all the others, with low rise buildings surrounding a central courtyard, although it was a bit smaller, its structure worn by sun and sand. The occupants were uncertain how to deal with us at first, but they quickly (and wisely) concluded that feeding the hungry dragon was smarter than fighting with me. They didn't have pig, but after a long night and day of flight, the juicy calf legs (without the hooves) they procured tasted almost as fine. As my hunger cleared, my mind regained its focus. Harlan, because he took the time to chew around bones rather than through them, ate slower than me. I didn't have the patience for him to finish. His mouth was still full of meat when I began with my questions.\n\n\"What is this Iraliss you spoke of with Vengeance?\"\n\nHarlan swallowed the bite he'd been working on. He still held a meaty rib between his hands. He looked up at me as fat dripped out of his mouth. \"A bit of gossip I overheard one night, listening to a conversation I shouldn't have heard. I do that a lot.\"\n\nI didn't like Harlan's dismissive casualness. Not this time. I replied with a displeased rumble in my throat. \"Do not play simple with me, for we both know you are anything but that.\"\n\nHarlan pushed a hunk of partially chewed meat down his throat. \"You give me too much credit.\" He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. \"I am born of a people who hold desperately to the belief that an island swallowed by the sea hundreds of years ago can somehow be saved, and that this is a cause worth devoting our lives to accomplish. For generations we've kept this belief, parents passing it down to children, telling stories of a non-existent patch of land laden with endless wonders, tragically sunk somewhere out on the endless horizon. Many actually believe it, although fewer with each generation. Among such a people, it shouldn't surprise you that many hold to various legends to support their beliefs. Indeed, when the task that is set before you seems futile, it's important to comfort yourself with fables far more fantastic and impossible than the reality you face. At least, that is the way it is among many of my people. And I'll add that my wife would throw me overboard with weights on my legs for speaking in such a manner.\" Harlan turned glum for a moment. \"I have been away too long.\"\n\nI released sharp snort. \"For once, I need you to keep talking. You knew to share these words with the ghastray. He recognized this Iraliss of which you spoke. That is more than a legend, if even the ghastrays know of what you speak. You have more to tell.\"\n\nHarlan shook his head, reluctant. \"I know less than you believe. I just know how to play my cards.\" He ripped some more meat from the bone in his hand, but I suspected he was stalling for time. When he'd chewed a bit more, Harlan spoke again, his mouth still half full. \"I've spoken to you before of those among us who are best at manipulating things\u2014the closest we have to magi\u2014the people we call Meddlers.\"\n\n\"I remember.\"\n\n\"Among those, some are known as Tellers. They keep the lore of our people, as well. Some of it is in books, written. But, as you might imagine, boats are poor places for books. Water, storms, salt, drunks\u2026with such a life, books are not the best places to keep precious knowledge. So much of our knowledge is kept in stories, tales passed on in families, held in the collective memories of our people.\"\n\n\"This is common in Rolm as well. There, families all speak of many of the same stories to their children, just as it was told to them. Even I've heard some of these tales, although many make little sense. In one story the humans speak of ancient ancestors who climbed up a hill merely to fetch a pail of water, but with tragic results.\"\n\nHarlan grinned, revealing several meat scraps stuck in his teeth. \"I'd be willing to wager my best sail that our Tellers are better at their stories than the people in Rolm. Their memories are near perfect, so much so they could remember the position of the stars on a given day of the year, tell you of the wind's direction on that same morning, and recite nearly every word spoken to them since they turned five. It is within these people that our knowledge truly resides.\"\n\n\"Then tell me the history of the Iraliss.\"\n\nHarlan sighed. \"It is difficult to explain. You must understand that what we have left\u2014seahands, like me\u2014is not history, not a chronicle of events. What we have instead are a hundred loosely related stories of the horrors of the ancient times. The Collection of Chaos, those tales are called\u2014they track the accounts of individuals who lived during and after the Cataclysm. One is the story of a town consumed by fire, every resident burned to ash except for the little girl who is saved by a talking mountain. Another is the account of a holy man and his efforts to persuade Haven to calm the wrath to which humans have been subjected, but instead, the man is transformed into an eagle so he may better witness the folly his fellow humans wrought around the world. As for myself, I prefer the tales of the ancient inferno staffs that could spray fire, the stories of heroes of the sea who used the ancient weapons to defend their ships in the darkest days of the exodus from Farlight, rather than these strange, darker ramblings.\"\n\nI was at the limit of my patience. \"Tell me of the knowledge you shared with the ghastray.\"\n\nHarlan looked at his feet, then at me. \"The particular tale involving the Iraliss\u2014which is a term of the ancient language of our people that only the Tellers bother to learn\u2014is one of the oldest of my people. It is a story of caution, of the old magic of our ancestor run amok. This is one of the most haunting stories, which is why I remember it and its strange words. I heard the tale from the Teller on our ship when I was but a child of seven. It terrified me, but it also became a matter of fascination. I had my mother retell the tale to me many times after, even though I often couldn't sleep afterwards.\"\n\n\"I will have no trouble sleeping,\" I assured him.\n\nHarlan smirked. \"The story is told as entries to the log of a ship's first mate. In it he describes a fabulous ship, a vessel far larger than anything we could conceive of today. It was so large a man could get lost aboard, or spend the entire voyage without going above the deck. It had light even at night, and could sail against the will of the wind. This great ship was sent from one of the ancient kingdoms to aid a people who inhabited a distant land and were suffering from famine. What made it strange was that the starving land had some of the most fertile soil in the lost world, yet the people there were desperate for food. When the crew arrived, they found the great port town deserted\u2014no people, no bodies. Indeed, the entire place was overgrown with weeds that burrowed through the streets and stones of buildings, as if the island had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The first mate describes how they found a lone survivor, an old woman who begs them to burn their ship and kill themselves. They think her mad at first, but then the crew starts to become ill. In his later entries, the first mate tells of crew members he'd known for years acting erratically, barely speaking. One tries to kill him. The crew begins to call their sickened fellows 'the empties who walk.' In the ancient tongue, this translates to the Iraliss. Somehow, the strange weed that infested the city spreads to the ship, perhaps brought by one of these Iraliss. The remaining crew who tries to stop it are killed by the Iraliss. The first mate's last entry is of this plague ship leaving port on the island, headed toward his homeland.\"\n\n\"So this ship spreads the plague. At least according to the legends of your people?\"\n\n\"According to the stories, Bayloo. But those are not history. They are not even memories. Indeed, there is still another story that many believe is related to this tale of the ship. That one is called 'The Sacrifice' by my people. It is an account told well after the actual events, but it speaks of a group of people who have powers like wizards\u2014practitioners of an unknown magic. They call themselves the Genies. In an effort to prevent the spread of something that story refers to as the Taint, they transform themselves into predators of sea\u2014creatures able to swim at speeds greater than any ship and able to communicate with each other almost instantly over vast distances. They do this in an effort to save the land from ships that carry the Taint from land to land, spreading its horrors. But such power comes at a heavy cost, as such things always do. The change they effect upon themselves is irreversible. It is a story of how a group of humans trade their humanity for the chance to save their fellow humans.\"\n\n\"Rather noble, for humans. Particularly human wizards.\"\n\nHarlan dipped his head toward me. \"Perhaps we were made from better stuff in those days. On the other hand, that's when the Cataclysm occurred, so perhaps not.\"\n\n\"Were these humans the first ghastrays? Is that the point of the story?\"\n\n\"Do stories need a point? Not even our Tellers claim that all of their tales always have a basis in fact. They merely swear they are repeating the words that were told to them. Some indeed may be only stories. Others, perhaps, are more.\"\n\n\"Vengeance mentioned a 'Purpose.' Is there a legend among your kind for that?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of, but I'm not a Teller. Indeed, my friend, I think you may know more about their kind than any other creature, except the ghastrays themselves.\"\n\n\"I know almost nothing.\"\n\n\"You know they hunger for the flesh of a dead dragon and that the Mizu aren't going to want to give that to them. I think you also know that Ni-Yota is doomed without the aid of the ghastrays. I think I agree with that.\"\n\nHarlan laid back on the ground, weary, although I also got the sense he disliked the subject of his people's history. I too wanted to sleep, but I had at least one more question I needed answered.\n\n\"Why do they call your people cursed?\" I asked. \"It was not just the ghastray. Elasu said the same.\"\n\nHarlan stared up at the stars twinkling up in the sky. I realized that I had said something wrong. \"It is not necessary to speak of it.\" I understand that not all thoughts need to be shared. Some pain was best kept inside. Harlan didn't move, except for his lips. \"Others will be happy to tell their rumors, but you might as well hear it from me.\" He gritted his teeth for a moment, then said it. \"My people become ever fewer. Life on the sea is hard, and not appealing. Many leave the way. The number of ships dwindle.\"\n\n\"This same is true of dragons. We are but a handful. I had hoped to find more here, but we become ever fewer.\"\n\n\"Aye, our peoples are not without their similarities,\" Harlan said. \"But with we Farlighters, those of us of the true blood, with this skin that glints in the light that marks us as true descendants of the original inhabitants of Farlight, our children are different. That is our curse.\"\n\nMy hearts became heavy. Even without knowing the answer, I wished I had not asked the question to Harlan in the first place. \"I don't understand. Your children?\"\n\n\"Always, Farlighter births are twins. Two children.\" He sucked in a great gulp of wind. \"Within a year, one must die, or they both perish. The parents must choose within twelve moons, or both die. No one knows why. No healer has ever been able to prevent it. That is the curse.\"\n\nI didn't know any words that should be said at that moment. I looked up at the sky as well. There were no answers there, either. Finally, I dared ask another question. \"Is it\u2026some magic?\"\n\n\"No one knows for certain, and my people have no wizards. But the malady, as we call it\u2014though curse is a better term\u2014has been with us since the beginning. The people of Farlight were different, they tell us. Our skin resists burning in the sun. We need less water. Less food, even. We almost never get sick, which is necessary for a people to survive on the close confines of ships. Without these abilities, we would all die. But such traits are retained only by keeping the bloodline pure. My people never mate with outsiders, so we can keep these traits. But there is cost. A great cost.\"\n\n\"Do you have a child?\" I asked before realizing I should not have done so. Harlan had mentioned a wife, but no offspring.\n\n\"No. I have no children to worry about.\"\n\nSome of the tension within me relaxed at his words. At least Harlan had not lost one of his offspring. I had only Kiata to worry over. With my own hatchlings\u2026that would be difficult. The curse was heavy indeed.\n\n\"I have just begun to touch magic\u2026this Latticework of existence. Yet it is powerful. It is everything I believe. If something exists, it can be changed. So know that if the magic of the ember dragons can help your people, I will offer it.\"\n\nHarlan turned his head toward me; his eyes were glassy. \"That is generous. For our people have not always been friends.\"\n\n\"Then let us save this world, and change that story,\" I told him.\n\nI was very naive."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Clouds hovered over Trishan like a wary parent over a child.\n\nI circled the city long enough to give the palace staff sufficient time to prepare for our arrival. Also, I wanted to inspect the wreckage of the Hall of Glass, to see if Aragor's remains might still be there. The glass roof still hadn't been repaired, but neither did I see any sign of the former protector of Ni-Yota. It seemed the people of Ni-Yota didn't leave their ruler lying dead on the floor for extended periods. Big surprise.\n\n\"You didn't expect this to be so easy, did you?\" Harlan asked from my back.\n\nI hadn't expected it to be easy, but that didn't mean that I hadn't hoped that it would.\n\nI landed beside the lake, just outside the multi-storied palace complex which also housed the hall in which Aragor had died. Despite giving the humans plenty of time to prepare to greet me, it was Kiata who arrived first, flying from her tower like an arrow. My hearts thumped with both pleasure and trepidation at seeing her again.\n\nShe landed with grace worthy of Rinxia. To my pleasant surprise, my sister greeted me by rubbing her neck against mine. \"Brother, it is good to see you safe. The last glasswing from the west informed us that Gia had led us to victory, beating the hollowings back across the river.\"\n\nMy elation at Kiata's warm embrace faded quick. My eyes darkened into the equivalent of a human frown. Gia had led us? \"It is true that the hollowings have been driven from the eastern side of the river, at least for now. But at a great cost: Rinxia was injured in the fighting. It was Harlan's plan with the rafts that saved us in the end.\"\n\nKiata's eyes glowed with approval. \"I knew it was right to have faith in the clever human. If the hollowings have been beaten, why then have you returned brother, but not Gia?\"\n\nHarlan chose that moment to slide off my back onto the ground. He made a great show of dusting himself off. There was no dust on him. He spoke with flourish. \"Because, noble Kiata, the hollowings do not accept defeat. We are merely in a gap between battles.\"\n\nThe joy in Kiata's eyes quickly evaporated. \"Explain yourself.\"\n\nReluctantly, I told her about the huge tower-bridges being dragged to the river, as well as the failed raid where I'd almost gotten killed. I left out the part where her hero, Gia, arrived so late I'd been stuck alone in the hollowing trap with blood raptors and ballistae. Harlan's sharp eyes were upon me as I spoke, doubtless wondering why I'd passed on the opportunity to malign Gia. The answer was, I knew my sister better than he did, even if we had known her for almost the same length of time. Kiata would not change her mind about Gia because I or anyone else told her some story. I had spent considerable time in the mind of my human ryders, and not all of it had been wasted. Childhood heroes were not surrendered easily. She would have to learn Gia's true nature for herself. Until then, I wouldn't be able to fully sever the bond between them. It angered me, but that didn't make it any less of a fact.\n\n\"If the hollowings come again\u2026why leave mighty Gia alone to fight against them? Especially if Rinxia is hurt, he will need you by his side.\"\n\nKiata sounded so anxious that I feared she'd at that moment fly to the river to help him.\n\n\"We have another plan,\" I said, my voice hesitant. I knew Kiata wasn't going to like what we had in mind. No one wanted to see someone they had looked up to chewed to pieces by a bunch of ghastrays. First I'd killed Aragor, now I wanted to feed him to the ghastrays. There was no easy way to explain that.\n\nA human from the council\u2014I forgot his real name, but he would always be Doughy to me\u2014chose that moment to arrive with a small entourage. He'd changed his outfit into something much more elaborate and less martial since last we had spoken. He now wore a silk robe trimmed by inlaid gems. At his waist was a puny sword held in a dazzling red scabbard, more decoration than weapon.\n\nBeside Doughy strode a bizarrely tall human, with legs making up most of the height. The man's chin hung from the rest of his thin, dour face, while each of his stick-like fingers was laden with a ring of metal. The tall man's body was draped in a gown of yellow, its length such that the end trailed behind him like a tail. Two other humans clad in silken robes trained behind, their face solemn and blank.\n\n\"Ah, welcome, welcome,\" Doughy put his hands together as if softly applauding my arrival. Then he noticed Harlan. \"Ah, yes, you too. Welcome.\" Back to me he said, \"I've ordered Otai to make the Wind Tower be made ready for your stay.\" He gestured to the tall human next to him, \"Will great Gia be joining you soon?\"\n\nI was about to inform the chunky and tall humans that our stay would be short, but Harlan spoke more quickly. \"Lord Heta, it is an honor to see you again. I wonder if everything is arranged for great Aragor's funeral ceremony? I know this was of great concern to Gia.\"\n\nI noticed that Harlan actually remembered Doughy's name, but more importantly, I realized that he didn't answer Doughy's question, instead, using the man for his own purposes.\n\nDoughy\u2014Lord Heta\u2014turned his flabby jowls toward Otai. The tall human's voice was strangely quiet for such a large person. \"All is ready, but we await Gia's return, for all know it shall be his fire that shall begin the cleansing journey.\"\n\nHarlan glanced over at me. I got his meaning. I stretched my neck toward this Lord Heta. \"I wish to see Aragor, now. Before Gia returns.\"\n\nDoughy's face darkened, but it was Otai who answered me. \"I assure you, all is as it should be. I've attended to the matter personally.\"\n\nI pushed my head at Otai's stretched face. \"I've no doubt that is the case to human eyes. Meaning no disrespect, but even for one such as you, there are matters of among dragons you do not understand.\"\n\nOtai shuffled on his feet.\n\nDoughy coughed. \"Otai will have everything ready, I assure you. Although recently appointed, he served the prior steward for many years. Great Aragor's jing will leave his body in the proper manner, returning to Haven.\"\n\nI actually had no idea what he meant by jing, but it seemed important to the Mizu. I pushed in on Lord Heta, blowing air from my nostrils hard enough that it made the man's face fat move. \"I trust no human with this. I wish to see Aragor. Now.\"\n\nDoughy began to shake. His mouth didn't quite seem to be working.\n\n\"Why are you so concerned?\" Kiata asked. She sounded suspicious. That was inconvenient, but at least my sister was no fool.\n\nI pulled back from the trembling human. \"Please, Kiata. I need to see him.\"\n\nMy words didn't allay her suspicions. That shouldn't have surprised me. I had killed Aragor, after all. It was something I had to do, but that didn't change what I had done. My sister had admired him, and she didn't trust me. My chest ached, but it didn't change what I needed to do. When Kiata spoke, she did so reluctantly.\n\n\"Come with me, Bayloo.\"\n\nHarlan scrambled onto my back again as Doughy and Otai made strange gurgling noises of displeasure. I flashed a toothy, human-style grin at them before following my sister into the air. My wings were heavy as I followed Kiata. I didn't want the gulf between us to expand any further. I'd come here to Ni-Yota for her.\n\nKiata flew along the lake, heading north from the palace. The fading afternoon sun reflected off the dark waters, making the surface an eerie crimson. Kiata didn't fly far. Along the water's edge sat what looked like a giant stone bowl that was big enough to hold three dragons. Its interior was carved from a faintly translucent yellow stone. A single Mizu, his body almost completely wrapped in white cloth, stood rigidly at the base of the bowl, with only his dark eyes visible through a slit in his head covering.\n\nKiata landed just south of the bowl. The Mizu attendant stayed as still as a statue, but I knew he wasn't stone. I could hear him breathing.\n\nKiata indicated to the giant bowl. \"This is where the protectors depart his world. When the shell that held their jing is burned, their true being is finally released to return to Haven, from whence they came.\"\n\nHarlan jumped from my back to the edge of the stone basin. The Mizu guard unfroze, whipped his blade from its sheath as quick as I might snatch a pig from a platter.\n\n\"Hold!\" I commanded. That was enough to keep the Mizu in place. \"He means no harm.\"\n\nIn truth, I didn't know what Harlan meant to do\u2014the bowl was empty.\n\nAfter a cursory glance inside, Harlan jumped down from the edge of the strange structure. He winked at the Mizu guard after his feet touched the ground. Anger flashed in the warrior's dark eyes, but he didn't move.\n\n\"The Mizu believe that Aragor's jing is trapped within his corpse even now?\" I asked as respectfully as I could despite my own personal skepticism. I'd seen plenty of dead creatures: dragons, humans, pigs, whatever. Good or evil, strong or weak, killed in battle or for dinner, I'd never seen any sign of anything within them after death. But Kiata had never been in battle. Her experience with death was limited to those which had been caused by others. I understood how she might believe otherwise.\n\nMy young sister contemplated my question. This was probably the first time someone had challenged her belief. She was so young, despite her increasing size. \"This is what the Mizu priests said. This has been the way of the dragons of Ni-Yota for hundreds of years. Do they have a reason to not tell the truth?\"\n\nI looked at Harlan. Somehow, I thought the answer to that question would be better coming from him. Having killed Aragor, I was biased.\n\n\"Kiata, I have sailed the seas, traveling to the different lands of this world for longer than Bayloo has drawn breath. I've met countless men. I've spoken to other creatures as well. Recently, I had the fortune to meet dragons, but I know humans best. My kind and yours are obviously are quite different, with customs and languages and beliefs as different as the mountains from the dirt. Yet what all humans\u2014at least all the humans I've ever met\u2014have in common, is fear.\"\n\nMy sister seemed surprised. \"Even you, Harlan? You are among the bravest creatures I've known. Braver even than the knight-lords who claim to know no fear, only duty.\"\n\nHarlan pinched his own arm. \"I'm flesh and blood\u2014an ordinary human. I fear all the time. I'm afraid of sounds in the night, afraid of failing those I love, and even more afraid of never seeing them again. When Bayloo snatched me from seas within moments of my own death, I was even more afraid during that first flight than I was of dying alone in those bloody shallows.\" He laughed at the memory. \"I nearly peed myself as he soared into the clouds.\"\n\n\"Almost?\" I asked. \"Dragons have an excellent sense of smell.\"\n\n\"My point, Kiata, is that all humans fear. Death and what follows is among our greatest fears. It is universal to every human society, no matter how rich or poor. And all of them have stories to comfort themselves about what comes after. The priests of Ni-Yota are just men, like me. Perhaps dragons are not so different either. We all fear death. Believing in a jing that can travel to Haven to be reborn in another body helps to alleviate those fears. Saying that one's jing entitles a being to rule all others is even more appealing to a ruler. At least that is my guess.\"\n\nEven in the fading light of the day, I noticed my sister's eyes darken. \"You imply that Aragor was not the chosen of Haven.\"\n\nHarlan shrugged in the face of her rising anger. I was glad he'd taken on the burden of explaining this to her. \"It is a great comfort to believe that rulers are divinely chosen, that there is greater purpose to their actions, and we are guided by destiny. This is true of humans and dragons, I think. To answer your question, I know nothing of Haven, for while I've traveled far, I've never gotten that far. Nor have I known anyone else who has. I can only tell you that the most tempting beliefs are those that can cut your heart deepest. Beware of those.\"\n\nKiata's eyes searched Harlan's face, then mine. \"Why are you two here? Speak no lies to me.\"\n\nI had no intention of lying to her, but I wasn't unsure if Harlan's words had made any impact upon her. Even if they had, it was a long way from accepting that Aragor's so-called jing no longer inhabited his body to being okay with letting ghastrays consume him.\n\n\"Can you show us Aragor?\"\n\n\"You haven't answered my question. You are hiding something.\"\n\nI sighed, resigned to the situation. In truth, I already had a pretty good idea where the former ruler of Ni-Yota lay: The ground beneath that white-wrapped Mizu warrior didn't smell right. The body was underground in some kind of tomb, I presumed to keep predators at bay until Gia had a chance to burn it to ashes. I just needed to find the entrance. Or make my own.\n\n\"I already told you about the failed attack on the hollowing tower-bridges. Legao's magic has delayed their advance, but the hollowings will eventually reach the river. We need to stop them from crossing.\"\n\n\"How can Aragor help you now? You don't even believe his jing exists.\"\n\n\"The ghastrays can help us.\" Kiata's eyes lit with horror as soon as I said it. \"They are not what you think. They are different than us, but there is much more to them than many suspect. They could hold the river for us.\"\n\n\"You are mad.\" She nearly choked on her words. I could tell she was upset to learn her brother was possibly insane.\n\nI could've told her then that we needed allies. I could've told her about Vengeance, about what he'd asked, and what I hoped the ghastrays could do to aid us. But I knew I couldn't persuade her. Not with my words. Kiata was intelligent, but young. Too young for reason to triumph with her. I turned to Harlan, once again, to save me.\n\n\"Harlan, I think you must share with Kiata the lore of your people so she might understand.\"\n\nHe rubbed his head. \"Those tales are long ones. Longer than the light we have left to us, not to mention that we have been flying for nearly two days.\"\n\n\"I shall have food brought to my tower,\" Kiata told us. \"Let us meet there when the sun has finished settling below the horizon.\"\n\nMy sister flew off, not to her own tower, but to the smaller one beside the late Protector's spire\u2014the windowed construction where the glasswing had arrived and departed. Kiata disappeared inside. Sure enough, a short time later, two of the birds flew from the window of the tower as Harlan and I watched.\n\n\"She sends a message to Gia,\" I concluded sadly. \"It will take time for the glasswings to reach the river. Until then, you are a fine storyteller, Harlan. Tell her all you told me, and more.\"\n\nHarlan dipped his chin slowly, guessing my plot. \"There will be a price to pay for all this, my friend.\"\n\nI knew he was right. \"I listened to your legends. I believe there is some truth in the lore of your people. In time, I think Kiata will understand that as well.\"\n\nHarlan sighed with regret that matched my own. \"As you wish.\"\n\nAt sunset, Harlan strode over the bridges to Kiata's tower in the middle of the great lake of Trishan. There, he told Kiata that I would join them shortly, and began his story. Harlan was a gifted weaver of words. That night, he spun the histories of his people, all he had been told by Tellers, plus some more embellishment. Harlan had such charm, such wit. It was easy to become immersed in his tales, to lose track of time as one contemplated his magnificent mysteries and legends. Kiata, a mere child, with a child's curious mind, no doubt feasted on Harlan's stories.\n\nIn the meantime, I broke into Aragor's tomb and dragged out the late Protector's corpse. He was heavy, but his time as a corpse had robbed this body of liquids and left him with an empty stomach. With difficulty and an unfortunate lack of dignity for both of us, I dragged Aragor's remains to the river, then I pulled him along the water into the great gulf upon which Trishan was situated. I intended to drag him to some shoals, but I couldn't fly high enough to do a proper reconnoiter while still holding onto the corpse. So, with an even more unfortunate lack of dignity, I ripped off Aragor's neck. I kept the top half with his head in my grasp, but let the body slide into the depths of the salty gulf waters.\n\nThen I flew off to find some ghastrays."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "I dropped Aragor's head into the sea.\n\nIt fell like a stone, made a little splash, and sank. If the forces of Haven were offended, there was no immediate indication of such\u2014skies were unchanged, the sea indifferent.\n\nI didn't have the time to fly all the way to Harlan's island where we had fed Drasu's remains to the other ghastray. Instead, I found some white capped waves lapping against rocks near the mouth of the bay and dropped the head of the late Skyking there. I was pretty sure I saw a ghastray's tail emerge from the waves as the neck disappeared. The was no visible sign of any jing leaving the remains. It was just a dead piece of flesh as far as I could determine. I did a few more circles, then headed back south. I knew better than to expect Vengeance to just pop up to speak with me. If all ghastrays somehow communicated, he knew what we needed to know. The question was if he and his deadly pals were going to help or not. In either case, there was a battle to fight in the west.\n\nI didn't fly back to Trishan to pick up Harlan. He probably expected me to do so, but I'd never promised him that. I needed to get back to the Tayo River as soon as possible to help defend against the inevitable hollowing attack. Legao's rain had delayed the attack, but the behemoths would eventually slog their way through the mud. Also, I didn't want to face Kiata, not so soon after betraying her to steal Aragor's corpse. I wanted to consider myself brave for doing what I had done\u2014tricking my sister for what I believed to be the greater good\u2014but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that this time, I had truly broken the fragile bond that existed between us.\n\nI had plenty of time on my journey west to doubt my actions. I rested little, flying deep into the night. My foremost worry was that all this would be for nothing. Ghastrays were a species totally apart, their minds different, their decisions incomprehensible. I knew Gia would think I was crazy for putting any faith in such a thing. Of course, I suspected he'd tried to get me killed by hollowings a few days ago, so I wasn't tremendously concerned about further loss of his esteem. I flew on the roof of a way station to sleep for a bit at the tail end of the night, but resumed my journey as soon as the sun rose.\n\nThe next day, I reached the Narrows of the Tayo. As the river and the Mizu army came into view, I saw that Gia and the knight-lords had not been idle. Additional trenches had been dug behind the river. Several raised platforms had been hastily assembled on which catapults had been placed, increasing their view and range. Cavalry massed behind the lines. Paths had been smoothed and strewn with dry pebbles to ease their eventual charge. It wouldn't be enough.\n\nThe hollowings had seemingly multiplied, their numbers now uncountable. Whatever commanded them had some understanding of military organization, albeit a different one than the Mizu knight-lords. The hollowing forces were packed together in an organized fashion, each soldier, man or wolf, in the proper position within crisp rectangular formations. Most made no obvious movements or noise as they waited. The exception were the toiling masses of humans who strained alongside the behemoths to move the great bridge-towers.\n\nRain no longer fell on the western side of the river, but the ground was still an absolute mess. An army that size couldn't help but take a toll on its surroundings. The towers and behemoths were desperately heavy. I counted eight of the giant armored beasts trying to drag the massive towers through the slushy mud, their footing constantly failing. All were covered in an ugly mix of wet mud and rust. Legions of humans scrambled about them like worker ants, laying wood boards along paths to the river, but the towers were too large, the ground too uneven, for even that to be successful.\n\nTheir progress was slow, but they were still making progress. It was only a matter of time before the bridges reached the river.\n\nDistracted by the scene below, I only belatedly noticed the silvery flash rising upward in my direction. The object moved with grace and speed and I knew immediately it had to be Rinxia. My hearts stretched toward her, rejoicing that she was alive and well enough to fly. At the same time, she was here, again, and in peril.\n\nAs Rinxia came closer, her beauty made the tip of my tail tingle. The partially healed hole in her side made my own flank ache. She would be vulnerable there. It would take a few days longer for the scales to fully form again. During that time, combat would be an extreme risk. I changed my direction to meet her, the distance between us quickly banished by the combined beating of our wings.\n\nAs we neared, Rinxia eyes glowed with puzzlement rather than the joy that mine reflected. \"Where have you been? Gia is furious with you.\"\n\nIt wasn't the conversation I hoped to have with her. \"He's not my favorite dragon, either.\" I wondered how much to tell her about Aragor and the ghastrays. Gliding through the air above the Mizu army wasn't the best place for a chat, but I decided I wanted her to hear the plan from me, rather than someone worse, like Gia.\n\n\"We need help if we are to keep the hollowing from overwhelming us. To gain help, there is a price to be paid.\" I told her about Drasu becoming fish food. I saw the revulsion in her eyes, but she took it reasonably well. Then came the bit about Aragor. When she spoke, Rinxia's voice trembled, even though I left out the part where I'd snapped his neck in half and delivered only the head to the ghastrays.\n\n\"Bayloo\u2026no\u2026please tell me otherwise \u2026\"\n\n\"You should look at this as Aragor's last act as Protector of Ni-Yota. A final sacrifice for his people. Surely, a true protector would've wanted me to do as I did.\"\n\n\"You fed the jing of a dragon\u2014the Skyking, no less\u2014to the most hideous of creatures. It is a sacred thing. The priests\u2026the people\u2026they will never forgive you.\"\n\n\"I accept paying a grievous price.\" I didn't care about the opinions of the priests or the humans of this place. I wasn't looking for friends or adoration. Rinxia's opinion was a different matter, though.\n\n\"It's worse than that.\" She didn't hide her annoyance. \"You've\u2026you've damaged the office of Protector of Ni-Yota itself. The jing of one protector is released to Haven, its energy to then to be passed to the next. That cannot happen if the body is inside the belly of a shallowing\u2014a ghastray, as you call them. People will lose faith when we need it the most. Why do you think the Mizu warriors fight with such passion? They believe, Bayloo. Even if you don't, our people believe. Elasu's domain is still restive, the tigris still fight. We must have the humans united with us. You may have ruined that. Forever.\"\n\nHer rebuke stung. Still, I put on my brave face. \"None of that matters if the hollowings cross the river. They are the enemy of all. You are the one who helped me realize that.\"\n\nRinxia was quiet for a time, gliding easily on the air as she thought. She was too intelligent to not realize I was correct. Or at least that I was partially correct. \"Gia will use this against you as well. Whether you want the title of protector or not, he sees you as a threat.\"\n\n\"I'm well aware Gia is not my friend and that he doesn't play fair. Maybe he'd prefer I was dead.\"\n\nI told her about the raid on the bridge-towers and Gia's suspiciously late arrival.\n\nRinxia nearly hissed as I finished speaking. \"I've known Gia all my life. He can be rash, even stupid. I've never known him to be dishonorable. That is not of the Way.\" She hesitated before adding, more to herself than me. \"Never dishonorable.\"\n\n\"You sound like you may have a doubt about him.\"\n\n\"No, nothing like that. Something happened a long time ago. Rumors. He has always shown himself to be true to us. He is more emotional than most, but still he keeps to the Way.\"\n\n\"Well, I doubt his honor. He wants me dead.\" I looked at the horde across the river. \"He may yet get his wish.\"\n\n\"We've strengthened our defenses. We have a few other surprises for them. This won't be an easy fight for the hollowings.\"\n\n\"They are too many. If they can all cross, it won't matter what fortifications you have constructed.\"\n\n\"Your plan is madness as well.\"\n\nI couldn't really dispute that. \"How is Legao? We only have this precious time to prepare because of her magic.\"\n\n\"She is still with us,\" Rinxia assured me. \"There are whispers you aided in this magic as well.\"\n\nRinxia sounded hopeful, and I wished the rumors were true, but I did not think so. \"I tried, but it was Legao that brought the rain, despite the effort it cost her. How is she?\"\n\n\"She has been summoning more rain to slow them,\" Rinxia assured me.\n\n\"Take me to her.\"\n\nRinxia answered by breaking into a steep dive toward the camps of Mizu soldiers below. Our presence drew stares from hundreds. Even among the soldiers of Ni-Yota, where dragons frequented the sky, we were a sight to behold. Rinxia leveled her course, streaking over several encampments. Cheers broke out as we passed overhead. I'm not sure the reason. Perhaps it was reassuring to know we were on their side. I admit it made me feel a bit giddy. No one had ever cheered for me in Rolm.\n\nWe landed outside a pavilion tent near a staging area for Tia's mounted troops. A single soldier stood watch at the tent flap that served as an entrance. The stench of horse crap was pervasive.\n\n\"Seems like a cozy spot.\"\n\nThe tent was too small for dragons. My head might have fit inside, but my torso would have to wait under the sky. Rinxia addressed the guard.\n\n\"Can you ask Legao if we might have a word with her?\"\n\nThe soldier shuffled uncomfortably. I got the impression that he might have refused the request from another human, maybe even a knight-lord. But seeing as we were giant dragons, he disappeared inside the tent. Legao emerged a short time later. She looked terrible. Her face was gaunt, circles of exhaustion radiated from her eyes, and, of course, she was still human.\n\n\"Maybe someone should bring you a seat,\" I suggested helpfully. \"You look as though a stiff wind might topple you.\"\n\nLegao's back stiffened. \"I'm fine, or I will be if I'm left alone to get a meal and some sleep. The clouds and the rain don't just come when I whistle like some tame hound. They are like willful children, forever resisting, forever wanting to run free.\"\n\n\"You have done well with your magic.\" I considered the progress of the bridge-towers through the mud her magic had created. \"At their current pace, you have gotten us probably another day to prepare, perhaps more.\"\n\n\"Telling me what I already know isn't a reason to drag me from my tent. What do you want?\"\n\n\"I want to talk to you about magic.\" I spoke hesitantly, almost embarrassed.\n\n\"You've seen me at work. Do you still doubt my power?\"\n\n\"Not your magic\u2014my magic. Or more specifically, I wish to understand the nature of magic itself. I've never had a teacher, but I must learn.\"\n\nLegao's weary eyes widened. \"I know nothing of dragon magic. I learned at the foot of Drasu, as did all humans of the Conclave of Magi, be they wizard, binder, or windmaster. I follow the path of Eranna, the first magi. Dragons \u2026\" She shook her head. \"Dragon do not learn magic from humans.\"\n\n\"How were the ember dragons taught to use their power?\"\n\nThe wizard looked baffled. She looked at Rinxia for help, and it was my fellow dragon who answered. \"I'm not of the ember blood\u2014your mother was the last of the ember dragons until Kiata and you. But to answer your question, I don't know of anyone teaching her. There are no decade-long apprenticeships among ember dragons, no Conclave to teach and weed out those who cannot survive the power. It is the dragon Way, the thought, the conduct that is passed from one dragon to another. Not the magic itself. And certainly we cannot\u2026We cannot learn from humans.\" Rinxia seemed rather certain of that last part.\n\n\"I learned from Legao,\" I told them. \"Just sensing her magic opened new doors for my own.\"\n\nLegao's chin dropped. I thought I paid her a compliment, but she was visibly upset. When Leago picked her chin back up, she managed to ask, \"You could see\u2026 sense my magic at work?\"\n\nI thought back to the storm Legao had summoned. \"No,\" I admitted. \"Not directly. But I can sense the Latticework\u2014that is what it is called, yes? I could sense the changes to redirect the clouds, to pull in the rain.\"\n\nLegao's breathing became erratic. \"It cannot be that,\" but the statement was a whisper of uncertainty.\n\nI was afraid Legao would faint given her weakened condition, and she didn't seem able to provide me with answers anyway, except that human and dragon magic was somehow different.\n\n\"Rinxia, how did Aragor truly never intend for Kiata to learn from Drasu? Surely the most powerful wizard in the world, a man who had lived for so many years, was not to just stand aside and play no part in the coming of age of a returned ember dragon?\"\n\n\"Drasu said there would be no need.\" Uncertainty crept into Rinxia's voice. \"He said ember dragons are born with an innate connection to magic, instinctual like flying. For humans, magic is unnatural, something they can learn only with talent and through struggle\u2014like learning to play music\u2014for magic was something not truly meant for humans.\"\n\nI looked at Legao, who confirmed the sentiment. \"I was taught the same, and it is true. Human magic\u2026 is a force of will. The takes strength, and emotion, channeled to create Grafts on what we call the Ar-Shadow. From what I understand, dragon magic is innate, an act of harmony and concentration. Ember dragons are born to come into their power, just as ash dragons are born to belch flame. Drasu rarely spoke of dragon magic, save this. When asked, Drasu would merely say that humans must travel a different path of magic.\"\n\nI mused at those words. \"It seems an odd thing to say, coming from the powerful human wizard. And he was wrong: Magic certainly doesn't come naturally to me.\"\n\n\"You were enslaved from a young age,\" Rinxia pointed out, a bit more coldly than I would've hoped. \"You never had a chance to learn anything or develop naturally. You are very odd. Your Way\u2026 it is not that of other dragons. Within you is a great deal of emotion. It is almost\u2026 human.\" I hoped the last bit was meant in jest.\n\nI grunted at the memories of my early years on DragonPeak, at the Keepers' clumsy teaching and contemptuous bearing. \"There is nothing natural about being a slave.\"\n\n\"For us, magic is a terrible struggle,\" Legao told me. \"Those rare humans with the talent for magic begin their training with the Conclave of Magi no later than their eighth year. I began at six. Many never make it. Most pupils die, or go mad during the long years of training. Indeed, madness is a constant danger of human wizards, such that only a very few are allowed to continue in the craft. For years we do nothing but listen and train. I spent an entire winter on the peaks of the Pillar Mountains listening to the howl of blizzard gusts, then all the spring comparing that to the winds off the plain of Lita. And I would've not had an inkling of what to do with that knowledge had Drasu not been there to show me. He taught me to direct the raw emotion within me, to master it, use it. I wouldn't know where to start trying to teach a dragon magic.\"\n\nLegao had meant her words to illustrate how different the process of human magic was from that of dragons, but she had actually told me the opposite. \"Perhaps all that humans must spend years trying to learn and acquire, dragons are indeed born knowing. At least on some level. Even me. Your tiny ears\u2014sorry, but they are tiny\u2014they hear so much less, and your weak eyes, and all your other senses, they are less than those of dragons. There are other senses as well, those related to magic. It makes sense it takes years for humans to reach the sensory level to which dragons are born.\"\n\nRinxia flicked her tail about, impatient and uncomfortable with the talk of magic. \"I hear, see, and fly better than you, Bayloo, and certainly better than any human. Yet I cannot do magic. I wouldn't even know where to start.\"\n\nMy mind raced. I was close to something important. \"There is far more to wielding magic than merely being able to sense the world. That heightened perception is a prerequisite, but it does not by itself confer the ability to perform magic.\" Saying the words out aloud made me even more certain of their truth.\n\nLegao reluctantly nodded at my words. \"Drasu said that the woodmaster must be able to see his creation in his mind before he begins to work. He must know the materials with which he crafts, how they react to force, their strength, their texture. It takes decades of constant practice for a magi to do the same with the elements of the world, with the wind, the clouds. Even then we are little more than bumbling apprentices. Drasu taught me to use what we call Grafts, to manipulate forces that we cannot see and can barely sense. But I merely follow what I was taught. He was more. An archmaster of magic. He was an artist who could develop new spells, new powers. Like the great shield that protected the Tayo River. That is the greater power that separated Drasu from the rest of human magi.\"\n\n\"I know the wind, the sky, they are my home. Dragons know this at birth or with their first flight.\" I thought of Harlan. He lived his life on the sea. He knew water the way I knew the domain above. It partially explained his special talent for all things associated with water. It all fit.\n\nLegao wasn't done. The weariness on her faded as she stared at me. \"Yet that too is not enough. There is also\u2026 the other. The unknowable that must somehow be known. The unseeable that is there. The framework that links it all but cannot be comprehended by mortals.\"\n\nMy hearts pounded in unison at hearing what I had always known spoken aloud. \"I know it.\" My blood surged faster as I thought of the silver threads. My voice became urgent. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Drasu once called it the true world. One forever hidden from humans.\"\n\nOnly, it wasn't hidden for dragons. That was the difference in the two branches of magic. One of the differences, at least.\n\n\"Yes, but what is it? How is it used?\"\n\nLegao's lips formed into a troubled grimace. \"It is here that Drasu's teachings ended. He would go no further. He told me and the few others that reached my level over his long life, that each wizard must find their own truth, their own perception of magic. I pressed him on this countless times over the years. I'm certain he knew something, understood something deeper, but feared\u2026 or did not wish to share it, for some reason.\"\n\n\"He never told you more than this?\"\n\nHer eyes gazed into the past. She released a long breath. \"When I was a much younger woman, Drasu had still had a bound concubine. Her name was Vixi. People didn't understand his interest in her, for Drasu could've had almost any woman or man he desired, but had chosen a gaunt girl who was blind in one eye as his bound companion. Their relationship was no mystery to those few lucky enough to know her.\" A hint of a smile played on Legao's face. \"Vixi had poor sight, but her tongue was sharp as the finest blade, and she had a mind to match. They were together for decades, until she took ill.\"\n\n\"I remember Vixi,\" Renxia said. \"Although she had but one heart, it beat as strong as two. Yet no magic could save her when the sickness came.\"\n\n\"Drasu toiled like never before to cure her. The sky trembled, the spires of the palace swayed as he wrought his magic. All for naught. She died. For a week Drasu eased his sorrow with shoajiu. I joined him on one of those nights, trying to bring him back to us, for he was needed. Drasu was bitter with loss, cursing magic, speaking of strange things I'd not heard before. But in his ramblings, he spoke of that which we both sense, Bayloo. The magic that makes our power possible. The Ar-Shadow, he named it.\"\n\n\"Ar-Shadow? What is it?\"\n\n\"When Drasu finally ended his mourning, I asked him about it. I'll never forget the flash of power in his eyes\u2014it was anger tinged with concern. He answered with a tone that carried both warning and threat. He told me: \"It is the limit of human magic. But every wizard must find their own understanding of the true world. If you try to follow my path, you will lose your way, your magic, and eventually, your life.\"\n\nLegao's words quelled my premature excitement. \"So magic\u2014the real source of magic\u2014cannot be taught, even to other humans? Is that what Drasu was saying?\"\n\n\"I do not know for certain. At least among humans, he seemed he believed we had to take the final steps ourselves if we were able\u2026My best guess is, he believed the nature of the Ar-Shadow was that each magi had to find his or her own way of utilizing it, form their own relationship with magic. To some extent, we could merely copy what a master like Drasu told us, but only by actually perceiving and having some understanding of the Ar-Shadow could a human become a true archmaster\u2014a forger of magic like Drasu.\"\n\n\"Is the Ar-Shadow the same as the Latticework?\" I asked, my hearts beating. \"Do you feel the power of it, the vast dazzling complexity?\" I remembered the magnificence of the weaves which formed the Latticework. \"It is the true world, an intricate web that links everything.\"\n\nLegao shook her head sadly. \"There is no Latticework for humans. Perhaps we do not have the senses for it, as you say. So, our magic must work differently. I cannot help you utilize something I have never perceived.\"\n\nI growled unhappily. I knew I had learned something important here, but I could not yet put it all together. Worse, Legao could not serve as the teacher I needed. If ember dragons were usually born with this knowledge, my time as a slave had robbed me of my birthright. I was alone in this journey\u2014a freak even among my own kind.\n\nLegao sensed my frustration. \"I am sorry, Bayloo. You must find your own path.\"\n\n\"There isn't time for that. The hollowings come.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The horde was relentless.\n\nDay and night the behemoths and humans toiled to move the bridge-towers into position. The hollowings spread their huge constructions evenly along the portion of the river that was fordable, thereby creating a wide front for us to defend. More blood raptors flew from the west, circling over the hollowing army as it prepared its onslaught. The Mizu dug more trenches, but there were no more human reinforcements to come from the east. Newly arrived glasswings from Trishan, instead of promising relief, instead told of more unrest in Elasu's domain, just as Jinu the spymaster had predicted. No more troops could be spared, and they wouldn't have arrived soon enough to matter anyway. We would have to manage with what we had: Dragons, horses, and soldiers. Alone, we would lose. There was no sign of Vengeance or the ghastrays.\n\nWord of what I had done to Aragor's corpse spread through the Mizu army, the original information carried by glasswings from Trishan, including the one sent by my own sister. I expected Gia to explode with rage. He didn't. Indeed, the first time I saw him after I arrived, he looked at me with something like amusement. He thought as Rinxia did: I'd made a failed bargain that would ensure I could never become the Protector of Ni-Yota.\n\nWhen Gia called his next war council, I wasn't invited, but Rinxia insisted I come along anyway. I did, for her sake, and to irritate Gia. It was strange to be here without Harlan. I regretted leaving him, for his advice was valuable, as was his company, but my choice had been for the best. No matter what outcome tomorrow, he and Kiata would live another day.\n\nGia returned from a scouting mission along the river as the rest of us gathered. I'd been up in the sky doing much the same thing earlier in the day. There was no way to miss the sheer size of the force arrayed against us. Even Gia's questionable mind grasped that we faced an enemy we couldn't defeat in conventional combat.\n\n\"We'll destroy the bridges,\" Gia announced to the assembled as if he'd discovered a new way to prepare roasted black pig.\n\nIn addition to the dragons, Avix, Dianti, and Tia also gathered around a barely lit fire under the open air of the night. Legao had refused to attend, informing us that rest was more valuable than words. She wasn't wrong.\n\nI held the snort that wanted to escape my nostrils at Gia's grand proclamation. \"Trying to burn the bridge-towers didn't work so well the last time.\" Not to mention, you probably tried to kill me as well.\n\n\"If fire will not work, we'll tear the structures apart,\" Gia replied calmly, ever the voice of reason. \"They are wood, assembled by human hands. They will crumble under the might of a dragon.\" He stared at me with challenge in his eyes. \"Any dragon will do, I suppose.\"\n\nRinxia answered Gia. \"Each bridge is protected by dozens of ballistae on the shore. We can expect swarms of blood raptors as well. Bayloo has told me of your first attack. The horde makes mistakes, but not the same one twice.\"\n\nI quoted Harlan's wisdom. \"The hollowings expect the expected.\" Harlan said it with more flair. \"Dragons destroying the bridges is expected. It will fail.\"\n\nGia batted his tail in annoyance. \"Perhaps you should've dumped Aragor's dead and desecrated body into the Tayo River instead, Bayloo. Perhaps that would have helped us by demonstrating what utter barbarians we are. It surely wouldn't be expected, just as I didn't expect you would fly off to become a grave robber.\"\n\nI stayed calm. I hoped Rinxia was impressed with my aplomb. \"That has as much chance of success as your plan, and it will result in fewer soldiers killed. If you wish to lead with original thoughts, now would be the time to start trying to do it, Gia.\" I looked at the humans of this august council. They squirmed uncomfortably at the terse exchange between dragons. I knew none of the bipeds well, but from our last council I got the impression that Avix seemed to think himself as a knowledgeable veteran of the battles with the hollowings. \"What say you, Knight-Lord?\"\n\nAvix seemed startled that I'd asked for his opinion, but he recovered quickly enough. \"I agree the bridges remain critical.\" He looked uneasily at Gia. \"They will anticipate an attack by air to burn them. When one is outnumbered, surprise can be the equalizer.\"\n\nTia, the Master of Horses, found his voice. \"If the dragons can clear a path with fire, my riders can charge and take those bridges as soon as they are placed on our side of the river.\"\n\nDianti's lips turned downward. \"Your riders won't last long against the horde, Horsemaster. What good are swords and lances against behemoths?\"\n\n\"We don't need to last long. If we can confine their forces to four narrow choke points\u2014the four bridges\u2014their numerical advantage will mean far less. We need only hold our ground on the bridges while the engineers rip them to shreds with axes, fire, and whatever else they can come up with.\"\n\nDianti shook his head. \"What about the behemoths? They'll be in the vanguard. Your charges will be stopped cold, your men slaughtered along with their horses.\"\n\nTia looked at Gia, Rinxia, then me, his eyes heavy. \"We must rely upon the lords of the sky to handle the behemoths.\"\n\nIt was more of a dream than an actual plan, but I still judged it better than Gia's idea of trying to burn the bridges. I kept silent, waiting for Gia's predictable reaction.\n\n\"I can kill any behemoth.\"\n\n\"There is still the matter of the ballistae,\" Rinxia noted. \"I've never seen so many in one place. Dodging arc bolts while being harried by thousands of blood raptors will not leave much time for engaging the horde.\"\n\nGia merely growled. Such wisdom he had. It was time for me to open my mouth.\n\n\"We must rely upon Legao's magic. Swirling wind and lightning can reduce the danger from the arc bolts,\" I said.\n\nTia agreed immediately. I decided he was the smartest of the human portion of the council, despite his limited skull size and lack of ear hair.\n\nMore noises from Gia, but not words. He was grumpy at being forced to accept others' plans, but at least he wasn't angry. \"Tell the wizard to be ready. The horde draws ever closer. Rinxia and I will take turns monitoring their progress so we are ready when they arrive. Go make your men ready for battle.\"\n\nAfter the rest of the council had dispersed and it was only Rinxia beside me, I spoke more freely. \"They'll be slaughtered.\"\n\nRinxia stiffened. \"It's a better plan than Gia's initial instinct to just fly at the bridges. As you said, the hollowing will expect that.\"\n\n\"Using cavalry charges and magic will mean that the humans will be slaughtered slightly more slowly.\" I gazed about at the army that surrounded us. I thought of Kiata, back at Trishan, likely fuming at me. I hoped Harlan could calm her. I missed his counsel at this moment. \"Harlan would tell us we must do the unexpected. We must anticipate what will come, then shock our enemy with what they cannot imagine. The hollowings behave with intelligence, but not creativity.\"\n\n\"You have an idea?\"\n\nI supposed I did. \"Perhaps, but it will not save us from defeat.\"\n\nShe studied me closely, slowly. My neck tingled under the gaze of those eyes. \"Yet you're still here.\"\n\n\"I'm not without fear,\" I confessed. I sensed Rinxia's disappointment. Lamely, I added, \"That does not make me a coward.\"\n\n\"I never thought you were, but you are not from here. You act with passion and emotion, like a human. As you told me when you adamantly rejected the notion of ever becoming Protector, this is not your fight. Why do you now risk your life and take the risks you take for a place that is not your home?\"\n\nI looked inside myself for the answer. Why did I feel this way? My insides weren't completely settled. It could've been too much dinner or something else. My answer wasn't complete, but I had an answer, at least. I met Rinxia's eyes. \"Those that I care about are here. So this is my home. I will fight to protect my home.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "By the following morning, the hollowing horde's mighty towers loomed like mountains newly sprouted from the ground.\n\nThe great machines had stopped just out of range of the Mizu archers and catapults, letting our army gaze up at the massive constructions as well as the sprawling army that would utilize them. Unease coursed through my body. If I, a dragon, felt trepidation even though I had scales and could fly away whenever I wished (assuming I had been devoid of conscience), I could only imagine what a flightless, fleshy human experienced upon gazing at such a daunting sight. Gia and Rinxia could've swept in to attack, but we already knew the results of that. I suspected the horde wanted the dragons to come to their side of the river. That was what they expected. Peril undoubtedly awaited. We didn't give them what they wanted. Instead, we waited. Even Legao held onto her strength, waiting for the proper time. The morning grew long with a fleeting calm, awaiting the maelstrom that would surely come. Only once the hollowing intellect realized no dragon would be lured into whatever trap they had set for us did they begin their attack.\n\nWithout any audible signal or beacon, the hollowings began to stir all at once. The bridge-towers rolled the final distance toward the river's edge, pulled by the great behemoths beneath the burning rays of the late morning sun. The Mizu responded. Archers rained their arrows upon the horde while catapults hurled rocks dipped in burning pitch into the sky. The horde answered with a fusillade of arrows so thick they nearly blotted out the azure of the sky.\n\nGia, Rinxia, and I spread ourselves out at intervals along the length of the river, our spacing putting all four of the hollowing tower-bridges within easy striking distance of at least one of us. We hovered in the sky, out of range of the horde's weapons, waiting for the right moment to attack. Tia's mounted soldiers had formed themselves into two large formations. Tia himself led the southern group, the one closest to me. Dianta was among his soldiers closer to the river\u2014those humans who would bear the brunt of the initial wave. Avix had command of the largest of reserve forces, stationed just behind the Mizu trenches. I didn't care for most humans, including these Mizu, but they weren't cowards.\n\nI gazed at the waters of the Tayo. The river rushed fast and wild, without a care for the slaughter that was to come. There was no sign of any ghastrays. Indeed, I'd never heard of ghastrays traveling into a river where the water was fresh rather than salt-laden like the sea. Perhaps my plan had been as foolish as Gia contended.\n\nThe massive bridge-towers each arrived at the far bank of the Tayo within a few moments of each other, as if even the strides of the behemoth that pulled them were connected. Mizu arrows coated the constructions as if they were a porcupine's coat, but no real damage had been done to the towers. The horde would cross. I waited for the bridges to fall and extend across the river. The blood raptors came first.\n\nThey came not in an immense cloud, as they had in the past, but in a stream, narrow and purposeful. I knew where they were headed. The horde behaved with its usual logic. But understanding their objective was different than being able to do anything about it.\n\nThe blood raptors flew over our army, ignoring the soldiers, the horses, the catapults and even the dragons. A few archers took aim at the interlopers, but their arrows were pebbles thrown at an ocean. Hawks were unleashed from their cages, but they were too few. The raptors came with purpose, seeking the person who had thwarted their advance these past days. They came for Legao. She was our most effective weapon, even more so than Gia or I, for she could attack at a distance. Unlike me, she could use her magic. Without Legao, this battle would be lost, as well as those that might come after, for she had no true replacement among the humans. She was the last of the master magi. We needed Legao.\n\nAt the back of our lines stood a robed figure of a wizard, stoic and unmoving even as the enemy flew at speed across to our side of the river. I moved to intercept, as did Rinxia, but even as I beat my wings, I knew we'd be too late, and we weren't enough anyway. There must've been a thousand blood raptors in that black stream of death. The wizard did not meekly accept her intended fate.\n\nThe winds came at Legao's command. A breeze morphed into a torrent within moments. The tempest smashed into the leading edge of the blood raptor formation, sending the birds hurling into each other, the violent gusts tearing dozens of the blood seekers to pieces. Feathers and mutilated flesh exploded in all directions. But still, they came. The single stream split into three, each moving as fast as the original. The new raptor formations flew around Legao's summoned storm like river water around a new boulder, barely skirting the edges of the twisting winds.\n\nDark clouds arrived like charging cavalry. They rumbled from within, the sound echoing through the sky. Then lightning struck. The bolt came not as a single great streak of light, but as a dozen splinters of fantastic energy, their passage cracking the air. The flashes ripped into the raptors, turning feather to ash upon contact. One bolt followed another in rapid succession. The stink of roasting raptor permeated the air along with their ashy remains. The ranks of birds thinned, but certain death was no deterrent to the hollowings. They sought a mere human. Rinxia's speed got her closest to the attacking flock, allowing her to unleash her fire before I arrived.\n\nShe spewed flame far and wide. The inferno collided with one of the blood raptor streams. The birds didn't bother to scatter or evade the danger. The raptors flew through the flame, the urge to reach the lone wizard on her raised platform unshakable. Rinxia continued to close the distance between her and blood raptors. I approached from the opposite direction, but I had no fire. I wished again for the magic that was just out of my reach. Rinxia unleashed another wave of fire. More lightning flashed through the sky. I came within moments of reaching the raptors. I let loose a roar that shook the air like thunder.\n\nIt was all futile.\n\nA blood raptor reached its target, the bird's talons anxiously outstretched. A hundred more followed, then another hundred, until a statue of black feathers stood on the platform overlooking the field of battle. They attacked, furious and desperate. No human could survive that. The clouds that Legao had summoned dispersed. The wind ceased. Rinxia bathed the clustered blood raptors in her fire, ending any hope of survival for any creature of flesh on the platform. The enemy had lost a thousand or more of its raptors, but it was a price the hollowings were willing to pay.\n\nThe towers at the River Tayo dropped their bridges. The river was breached."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Behemoths led the attack.\n\nFour bridges. Two huge brutes per bridge. Eight walking piles of armored crap.\n\nHollowing foot soldiers followed the behemoth vanguard, their forces packed together in four orderly columns as they marched across each of the bridges. The wolf packs were held back in reserve. But that wasn't the worst of it. On the far shore of the Tayo, I counted ten more behemoths, the beasts waiting with unnatural stillness as their fellows tested the bridges and our defenses. The hollowing horde had learned something else from their prior battles: caution. They kept the most lethal part of their force in reserve, lest we have some new trick ready to defeat their mobile bridges.\n\nGia was already on his way to the northernmost crossing. Rinxia and I turned about and headed for two bridges to the south. We wore our sai. The largest contingent of Tia's riders charged at the final bridgehead, but it didn't change the ugly fact that there were more bridges than dragons.\n\nThe Mizu mounted horse bolted through pre-determined lanes cleared for them by the foot soldiers, the ground laid with dry gravel to ease their passage on damp ground. The cavalry carried heavy lances and javelins, some tipped with metal. A rain of hollowing arrows from the far bank of the Tayo fell on the chargers, extracting a heavy toll even before the first horse got a hoof on one of the bridges. Dozen died\u2014horses and men in equal numbers\u2014but no one stopped. The behemoths increased their pace as the cavalry came, but Tia and his riders were quicker. On each bridge crossing, the Mizu soldiers bravely met the vanguard behemoths. It wasn't a pleasant affair to watch.\n\nOn my bridge, the lead behemoth swept a quartet soldiers off the bridge's expanse with a single flail of its giant head. After that, it snatched both a man and a horse with its spiked tail, then hurled them into the next wave of Mizu advancing on the bridge. The initial carnage complete, the monster resumed its advance across the bridge, a second behemoth trailing close behind. I glanced at the waters of the Tayo in vain. The dead humans floated away in the current. The ghastrays hadn't come. They weren't going to save us. We were going to have to win this fight with blood and wit and mad courage.\n\nI swooped down to attack the hollowing vanguard before the next group of humans arrived to throw their lives away. I stared down the behemoth on the south side of the bridge, then swerved at the last movement to rack my sai-tipped claws across the back of the other creature. A satisfying crunch followed my efforts. As I came out of my pass, I saw Rinxia sweep a leg out from a behemoth with her tail as she executed a reckless but elegant pass in front of her adversaries.\n\n\"A little caution!\" I roared. If Rinxia heard me, she ignored me.\n\nI made a sharp turn, coming back at the behemoth I'd recently wounded. The bleeding beast halted, turning to face me, while its ugly brother continued crossing. The Mizu came again. Horsemen died as they futilely attempted to halt the creature's advance, their lances shattering upon contact with the behemoth's thick armor.\n\nOn my next pass, I kept high enough to be just out of reach of the behemoth's tail spikes. I wanted it to try to strike me and miss so I had an opportunity to swoop down to grab the shaft of its tail from behind. I got half of what I'd intended. The beast swiped its pointy spikes at me, but it knew its range better than I. The thing understood it would miss me. So it leapt\u2014the massive thing actually lifted itself into the air. I should've anticipated that, but I didn't. The behemoth's spikes struck my underside. If it had been on the ground with the full force of its weight behind the strike, I might've been impaled. As it was, it merely cracked a scale and sent me for an unpleasant spin. I missed my chance to grab its tail in my jaws as I'd intended. I righted myself, intending to attack again, when Rinxia's voice rang out.\n\n\"Dive!\"\n\nI didn't look, I just obeyed. A ballistae arc bolt zipped past me. I beat my wings, gaining altitude, as two more projectiles failed to find their target. From my perch in the sky, I circled above just long enough to be certain that we were losing the battle.\n\nThe first two behemoths made their way across my bridge. Neither infantry nor cavalry charge could stop the beasts\u2014the Mizu just kept dying as they tried to protect the eastern bank. The engineers that had dared to follow the initial horsemen's charge were gone and dead. The bridge was intact. To the north, Rinxia had done a better job at delaying the hollowings, holding them about three-quarters of the way from the eastern bank. Unfortunately, her success had drawn a swarm of blood raptors to her. As the dark cloud pursued Rinxia through the sky, the behemoths resumed their advance. The human engineers on that bridge abandoned their work in the shadow of advancing behemoths, but not before they had hacked away half the span and ignited a smoldering fire. Gia was furthest away from me, but he appeared to be engaged in close combat with the behemoths, with still more blood raptors swarming around him. On the final bridge\u2014the one without a dragon to defend it\u2014the hollowings had crossed with ease, endangering the flank of the force trying to hold Rinxia's area.\n\nI continued my climb into the sky, then dove, this time coming down on the hollowing side of the river. They saw me coming, but arrows don't really bother me and ballistae are large, hulking machines that are ponderous to turn and difficult to aim. I had reached my target before I faced any real danger from arc bolts, and the blood raptors were already engaged with Gia and Rinxia, leaving me with an opportunity to wreak some havoc. I took it.\n\nI snatched the largest ballistae I could find, grabbing it with my hind claws and dragging it along the river bank into two other machines. I knocked a third ballistae, along with a few hollowings, into the river with a swipe of my tail. Still carrying the massive contraption, I beat my wings, gaining speed and altitude, then dropping it in the midst of the columns of hollowings crossing the river. In addition to the hollowings that the machine crushed, the ballistae's wooden structure shattered nicely, with the jagged shards killing several more of the enemy. It didn't stop the advance. The rest didn't even bother pausing to clear the bridge. They just stepped over the dead and the debris.\n\nWhile I'd been taking out a few ballistae on one side of the river, the hollowings had been busy killing humans on the other. They controlled a bridgehead that stretched from Gia's location in the north down to mine in the south. Rinxia's bridge had been damaged such that only about half as many hollowing could traverse its span as the others, but we'd all failed to destroy any bridge or keep the hollowing from crossing over to our side of the river in numbers.\n\nAvix had already committed the last of his reserve forces to the same bridge where Tia fought, and pitch coated projectiles from the Mizu catapults still fired, but it was a losing effort. A single behemoth had been caught in a hidden pit trap, but I still counted six beasts that had already reached the eastern shore, along with several thousand hollowing warriors. For now, the Mizu fought on, clashing with the advanced elements, but it was clear they held their ground only because the hollowings had not yet begun a concerted push to crush the rest of the defenses. I guessed that the enemy was waiting for sufficient numbers to cross the river. Once the rest of the behemoths reached our side, the situation would be hopeless.\n\nRinxia came to the same realization. She flew toward me, still harried by a cloud of blood raptors, although the birds' numbers were much diminished. Rinxia's fire was lethal.\n\n\"We need to take out the bridges. Fire doesn't work. They don't stay lit.\"\n\n\"Then how?\"\n\n\"We tip them. Together.\"\n\nI didn't bother to debate the merits of her idea. We both knew staying in any one place would make us vulnerable to ballistae arc bolts and blood raptors. If Rinxia was willing to risk it, I would as well.\n\nWe came about in a tight loop, with Rinxia leading. I hung back, just off her tail. A hundred blood raptors followed, talons longingly stretched at us. Rinxia headed for her bridge, since it was already damaged. Two ballistae fired, both at me. The operators must have learned that fast, sleek, Rinxia was a difficult target\u2014at least while she was moving. I wasn't too slothy either. I maneuvered under the first shot and batted the second away by striking its shaft with my tail. Rinxia gave me a disapproving look even as she we continued toward our target. When she drew close enough, Rinxia bathed the hollowings on the bridge in fire, clearing a bit of space for us. She grabbed the bottom of the bridge's edge with her hind claws. I did same, taking care to position myself between her and hollowing-side of the river. If a ballistae found its mark, I wanted to be the one that took the bolt.\n\nShe noticed what I'd done. \"I'm smaller and quicker, you fool.\" She said it through gritted teeth.\n\nWe beat our wings, straining with the bridge, trying to move it. The wood wasn't normal. Something had been done to it. It was cold like metal and hard as stone. But we didn't stop\u2014I'd lifted heavier things. The bridge creaked. It cracked. It began to flip (a little). The blood raptors reached us, their talons and beaks immediately digging into my wings and backside. Just before the black storm came at my eyes, I saw the ballistae adjusting their aim.\n\nRinxia saw the danger as well. \"Bayloo, go!\"\n\n\"Almost got it.\"\n\nIt was true. The bridge was crying out as we twisted it apart. The hollowings on its surface slid toward the water on the opposite side. I heard a ballistae snap its firing mechanism, then another. I didn't have time to do anything about it. I had to trust others. I intended to take out this bridge.\n\nRinxia cried out. \"Bayloo!\"\n\nThe arc bolts never reached me. The sky opened to save me\u2014a splintered bolt of lightning flashed down to incinerate both of the projectiles just a moment before they perforated me. We might be losing this battle, but we hadn't lost yet.\n\n\"Once more!\" I yelled.\n\nPowered by the elation of being alive and whole, I beat my wings harder. I pushed with my hearts and my will. It would not be enough. I would fail. That was my fate, and it did not bother me as much as it should, because I was on the path that I must travel, whatever the cost. In that moment of acceptance, somewhere in my mind, I touched that place that I been born to know, but had lost in my years as a slave. My hearts pumped. I heard the wind, the air, and the water. They spoke in their own way, babbling to the world around them. Within the commotion, I found clarity. I was part of this. Suddenly, I understood how these forces of the world fit together\u2014the weaves of the bridge, the water of the river, the wind blowing from the shore, the cloud looming overhead. It was a grand mosaic, a sculpture with countless bindings\u2014Chords of Making\u2014that joined everything into a cohesive whole greater than its parts. As sure as I knew I had wings, I knew these Chords were mine to command.\n\nIn that singular moment of clarity, where I wasn't conscious of precisely what I did, I made the water move. I willed it, I changed the pattern, and in response the river rose up. Not into some gigantic tidal wave, but enough to give Renxia and I the extra help we needed. The wind pushed at our backs. The bridge rose further, its supporting beams twisting, then snapping. Finally, one section tore loose, flipped into the river and broke away from the rest. We had done it.\n\nI had done it. This was what they called magic.\n\nRinxia and I both headed for the sky, twirling madly to shake the blood raptors that harried us. She burned another dozen. Their numbers had thinned, but they were still dangerous. I saw Gia's flames ignite beneath us, near the ground. I circled above the heart of the Mizu army, watching them fight vainly to hold the shore. I was elated at my success, but the tide of the battle tempered my joy. Even with one bridge destroyed, we were losing.\n\n\"That got their attention,\" Rinxia flew past me. \"They come with their strength.\"\n\nShe was correct. While we'd been tangling with the bridge, the rest of the behemoths had begun their crossing. They were huge. Ten more. That was too many.\n\nThe remaining blood raptors abandoned their pursuit of Rinxia and Gia. They quickly reformed, hovering like a protective cloud over the three remaining bridges, covering the crossing of the massive behemoths. If they crossed, Ni-Yota was doomed. The rest of the enemy ballistae remained similarly poised, a hundred eyes fixed upon the three dragons in the sky. It was a grim sight, but Rinxia didn't sound distraught as she glided around me.\n\n\"We must go again. We must destroy the rest of the bridges.\"\n\nI kept watching. The last behemoth stepped on the southern-most of the three remaining crossings. It wouldn't take them long to traverse the river. We didn't have enough time to destroy the rest of the bridges, even if we could've somehow done that. It looked hopeless.\n\n\"They'll be ready the next time,\" I warned. \"The hollowings adapt quickly. The behemoths will tear us to bits if the arc bolts and raptors don't get us before then.\"\n\nRinxia knew I was correct. She was too intelligent not to see the same things I did. \"Is it better to die today or over the coming weeks? Once they cross, once the hollowing control the river, they will overwhelm us. Avix cannot hold them, no many how many men and horses he might deploy. They will come and they will bring the rust with them.\"\n\nShe wanted to make her stand now, here. I didn't. I would've retreated, kept fighting. I'd seen many battles. The tides of war change at unexpected moments. Better to fight another day. Better to savor a few more days (and nights) together. I didn't say any of those things. There wasn't time. Rinxia dove without me.\n\nI followed her into the gauntlet of death that waited below."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Blood raptors rose to meet us.\n\nThey came like a blanket of night, spread thin and wide. There were just enough to block our view of the ballistae firing at us from the shore. The arc bolts punched through the black curtain of bird feathers, giving us almost no time to adjust course or defend ourselves. Only luck (or something more divine) preserved us through the first three shots.\n\nRinxia released her fire. It punched a hole in the blood raptor formation, but only briefly. The gap closed as quickly as it had opened, but I saw at least a dozen arc bolts headed for us through the fleeting window. There was something else as well.\n\n\"Break off, Rinxia.\"\n\nShe grunted. \"We have to do this.\"\n\n\"We don't,\" I pleaded. \"I promise. Do it.\"\n\nRinxia hesitated. I waited for her, unwilling to leave if she would not. I would not let Rinxia continue the attack on her own. I'd been left alone far too many times for that. It didn't take her long to decide, but any delay was still too long. As Rinxia pulled out of her dive, three arc bolts punctured the curtain beneath us. I tried to swerve, but that just made my trajectory worse, because I hadn't accounted for the fourth projectile. One bolt grazed my tail, but another struck me directly into my wing\u2014hard and fast. The tip must've been metal; it punched right through the membrane, and the whole damn thing passed through me. I had a hole in my wing. Chicken piss.\n\nRinxia saw it. She slowed, positioning herself beneath me, putting herself in the line of fire. \"To our side of the river, Bayloo. Now.\"\n\nI glided, not wanting to make the damage worse before I had a chance to inspect it. Rinxia circled back to throw some more flame on the blood raptors that pursued us. They broke off as soon as I reached the eastern edge of the Tayo, but it wasn't because of Rinxia's fire. Despite the injury to my wing, I lingered in the air to watch what was going to happen. I needed to see it.\n\nRinxia didn't understand yet. \"Land, Bayloo. What are you waiting for?\"\n\n\"Watch the bridges.\"\n\nWe both did that. My wing hurt, but some pain was worth it for the view.\n\nIt started with a vine, thick and gray, rising from the river. Only it wasn't a vine. If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't have seen it in the din of battle. The behemoths crossing nearby didn't notice. Another tail appeared, then a dozen, followed by fifty more. They came at the bridges, at the behemoths, at the hollowing footmen. In three rapid heartbeats, the first behemoth had been whisked off the bridge. It happened so quickly it was as if the beast had been merely some horrid nightmare immediately banished with the flutter of an opening eye. The remaining bridges shook\u2014all of them. The hollowings lost their balance, falling to the ground. As the tremors shaking the crossings grew more violent, men and beasts were hurled into the surging water of the Tayo. The current grabbed them, but that wasn't the greatest peril. Ghastray stingers struck, while tentacles rose to suck the fallen into the depths of the river to be consumed.\n\nThe hollowings collectively recognized the danger. They all stopped for several quick moments\u2014an entire army halted instantly by some unseen, unspoken command. When they moved again, it was with new purpose. The behemoths ran for the eastern bank of the river, struggling to join their fellows already across, while the hollowing footmen scurried to the edges of the bridges, beating at the water and the deadly tails that harried them. Blood raptors plunged from the air, diving into the bloody water as if hunting for fish.\n\nThe ghastrays were no less decisive than the hollowings. They swarmed the bridges from all sides, attacking the hollowings, but also the structures themselves. I'd never seen so many ghastrays in a single place. The Tayo was thick with their tails and eyes. Even a ship wrecked on the shoals wouldn't have drawn so many of the creatures. I shivered at the sight\u2014this was more than mere payment for the head of a dragon.\n\n\"What took them so long?\" Rinxia asked with surprise and relief.\n\n\"They were always there. They merely were waiting for the main behemoth force to begin crossing, so they could strike and do the greatest possible damage.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"It's what I would've done.\"\n\nOne of the remaining bridges fell into the water, every behemoth that had tried to cross there falling with it. The moment the massive creatures hit the water, stingers came from every side. Behemoth and human alike disappeared under the stained water like stones. Occasionally, one of the ghastrays' frightening eyes would emerge from beneath the current, but for the most part, we only saw their singers. Much of the slaughter occurred beneath the surface. Even the skies cleared, as the last of the blood raptors perished in the river, vainly trying to attack the ghastray host below. After the shock passed, a great cheer, one laden with both relief and elation, rose from the Mizu army. The humans fighting on the western bank surged forth with renewed purpose.\n\nThe next bridge fell. A single behemoth had made it across. That made seven on our side of the river. One more made it from the final bridge before the ghastrays destroyed that one as well. Eight behemoths and over a thousand hollowing soldiers still held a salient on the wrong side of the river. It was a formidable force, and under normal circumstances it would've been an intimidating one. However, we had just watched the impossible, as the greater part of the hollowing force was consumed by our mysterious allies with breathtaking speed; No one considered defeat a possibility. Just to make sure, Legao chose that moment to step out from the underground trench in which she had concealed herself from the start of the battle. She wore the clothes of a Mizu soldier, but her hair revealed her identity to me and the others who knew our plan. Her robes had been sacrificed in Rinxia's flames, along with the propped up corpse that had baited the hollowings to begin their attack.\n\nClouds began racing toward the sky above the hollowing army. Rinxia glanced at my wing as I glided awkwardly in a circle beside her. \"Show's over, Bayloo. Land and guard Legao. I'll help Gia to finish off the remains of the invaders.\"\n\nI wanted to argue with her, but I couldn't. I couldn't fly well enough to execute precision maneuvers, and I couldn't breathe fire. But that didn't mean I'd be useless. I glided to the ground not far from the Legao. She paid me no mind, the whole of her concentration remaining focused on her summoning.\n\nGia streaked across the sky on a course parallel to the river, flames pouring from his mouth. His tail looked to be missing a few scales, but there wasn't anything wrong with his flying. Rinxia executed a similar maneuver from the opposite direction, while Legao called lightning, this time in single massive bolts that tore through the air. They all had the wrong idea. The path to victory was right in front of us. We just needed to use it.\n\nI reached out for that place of equanimity I had somehow found even as I had struggled to tip the first bridge with Rinxia, a place that had existed beside the exertions of a perilous struggle. I needed to find it again. There, in that part of my mind, I sensed the Latticework. From that oasis, I had performed my first work of magic. Now, the calm once again eluded me. I tried again, this time more anxious, with the same frustrating result.\n\nMy head filled with the throbbing ache of my wing. There was a hole in it that didn't belong. I tried ignoring the pain, but that didn't quite work. Rinxia dove toward the enemy, and I worried for her until she reappeared higher in the sky. I needed to focus. I looked at Legao. Her eyes had faded to a dull silver, her body fixed in position. But her face was determined. Her lips moved, the sounds coming forth unintelligible, but unmistakably harsh and commanding.\n\nThat was the human path of magic. I needed to look elsewhere for dragon magic.\n\nThe answer for my previous failures came to me: I had wanted it too badly. I was demanding it. With Aragor, to heal Rinxia. I had been desperate in those moments. I was emotional, like a human. At the bridge, I had sensed the Latticework only once I accepted my fate. Perhaps that was what other dragons referred to as the Way\u2014an acceptance of what must happen. Legao had told me human magic was a constant struggle, a battle to command a force larger than they. Dragons did not walk that path. Our magic was instinctive to us. It merely required us to accept who we were and our place in the greater pattern of the Latticework.\n\nI was an ember dragon, and my fate would inevitably unfold. I shut my eyes. I sucked in wind, trying to push the sounds of the battle away. That brought me closer, but I still could not sense the Latticework. I needed to forget my past, forget the slavery, the death. I focused on the moment only, looking inward. I needed to fly my path in this world. I felt the wind, its beauty, its pattern, how it interacted with the water, the sky, the clouds and with me. At the end of that journey was the impossible structure of the Latticework. I connected to it, feeling the energy in the Chords that connected all things, seen and unseen. I didn't understand it all\u2014I did not dare try. Something within me knew that was the way to madness. I had merely to grasp the working of the forces around me. The Chords of Making linked all things, and they could be tugged, pushed, even severed. Maybe even created or destroyed, but I was not ready for that. For the first time, I also sensed something else: the Latticework was not all it should be. There was a void, a place near its very heart where the Chords were black, or severed, or gone entirely. But I had no need of that broken place now. In this moment, I needed the elements of the sky.\n\nI called the wind, pulling it through the Latticework's structure. I didn't direct the gusts at the hollowings though. Not yet. Mere gusts, no matter how powerful they might be, wouldn't be enough for what I intended. I commanded a storm to gather in the distance, at the very edge of even a dragon's sight. I ordered swirling twisters, mimicking the patterns of the worst torrent I'd seen back in Rolm.\n\nWhen my summoning was insufficient, I drew upon still more of the power of the Latticework itself. It answered as if it understood me, as if it wanted to answer me. There was no struggle here\u2014it was an experience quite unlike what Legao had described. My storm grew, split, and grew more. The ferocious winds sucked in every bit of loose debris within the radius of its horizon. I'd deliberately chosen a barren stretch of plains, a place filled with sand and rock and common detritus that easily lifted from the ground. When I had enough, and my family of storms had become a wall of spinning projectiles, I called my creation toward me, tugging at the Chords of the Latticework. My summoning marched as fast as a dragon in flight, flowing across the landscape. As it moved, the storm system ached to fall apart\u2014what I'd created was terribly unnatural, the winds wrong, the direction wrong. Somehow, the Latticework itself sensed my need, showing me what I must do. Hints of pain tugged at the edge of my consciousness. I ignored it. There was only the storm, only its path. I coaxed it onward.\n\nI became vaguely aware of the startled reaction of the Mizu soldiers as the dark wall of swirling debris came upon them from the east like a massive wave. Some recognized it as magic, intended to aid them, but most gave into their base instincts to flee from the massive summoning that had no natural place in this world. They were the wiser. I didn't have full control over my creation. Mizu died as it moved through our lines, some sucked into the clutches of the storm, their screams penetrating my cocoon of concentration. Within the Latticework, the impossibly complex weavings that linked humans to the greater structure dimmed with their death. I felt nothing. This was my Way. There was no other way to do what needed to be done. They and thousands more would die without my storm.\n\nThe torrent reached the edge of the hollowing bridgehead, where the hollowings and behemoths did battle with soldiers and dragons. Rinxia and Gia had the sense to fly clear of the storm. I unleashed my summoning, sending forth countless bits of rock and sand, flinging it at the hollowing force lining the eastern bank at fantastic speeds. Each projectile struck like an arrow, propelled by a wind force greater than any natural storm could've mustered. I commanded the winds to blow still harder. I urged and pushed until my insides felt like they were being torn apart. My hearts thundered inside me. Other storms appeared\u2014not my work, but Legao's. I could not sense her magic being worked, but I could perceive the result within the Latticework. Together, we unleashed gusts stronger than the force of a dragon's tail. The hollowing soldiers were the first to lose their footing. One fell off his feet, caught in the wind. The river and its deadly occupants waited. The first of the hollowing fell into the water. Hundreds more hollowings joined them in the hungry waters. Even the behemoths struggled to hold their ground. They were huge, strong, heavy.\n\nI had no more will left to expend. My legs trembled with exhaustion. I couldn't grasp enough air to fill my chest. The power of the storm was unsustainable. I'd done all I could. Rinxia didn't squander the chance I had given her.\n\nShe swooped down, striking a distracted behemoth in the torso, shoving it toward the water. Gia followed her attack, flying even more boldly, riding the wind I'd created to grab the behemoth and toss it to the waiting ghastrays.\n\nOnce the two flying dragons had a successful tactic, they were ruthless about putting it to work. Four more behemoths fell. Gia and Rinxia worked quickly, but not quickly enough. As my strength faded, so did the winds. I opened my eyes. Debris still infested the air. I saw Legao's lightning flash through the sky, followed by the fire of the circling dragons. Gia engaged one of the behemoths at close quarters, pitting claw and tail against its armored body, deadly spikes, and horrible triangular jaw. Rinxia knew the limits of her own abilities\u2014she kept aloft, continuing to harry the enemy from above with her fire. The Mizu horsemen rallied, with Tia leading his forces around the distracted and unsupported behemoths. The Mizu charged the hollowing remnant from all sides, human and dragon fighting together. It was a worthy sight. I really wanted to see how it all ended. But I lacked the strength to keep my eyes open.\n\nBlackness snatched me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "I awoke to victory.\n\nBy that I mean I awoke to the odor of roasted pig. It wasn't one of the delicious black pigs from Changsha, but it definitely smelled delectable. Also, if I was alive (I seemed to be) and someone had taken the time to prepare a meal for me, I was relatively certain we had won the battle. The hollowing horde didn't seem like the pig-roasting type. They probably liked chicken feet.\n\nI lay where I had collapsed during the later stages of the battle. A large tent had been erected around and above me. The hole in my wing had been stitched together, and a stinky salve had been applied to a few places on my scales where I'd suffered other minor nicks in the fighting. A whole pig had been placed on a platter within easy reach. I considered this the work of a true healer.\n\nWhile I ate, a human stuck his head into my tent, watched me chomp of some roasted pig, then scurried off. I chewed faster, figuring he'd gone off to find someone to bother me.\n\nTo my surprise, Legao appeared shortly afterward. Reservoirs of darkness radiated under her eyes. Her shoulders slumped and she shuffled more than walked into my presence, as if the effort of lifting her feet was too great. She looked like she could use some pig. I greeted her with the greatest courtesy a dragon could offer: \"Would you like some?\"\n\nLegao stared at the mangled carcass scattered before me.\n\n\"Uh\u2026it is kind of you to leave me some bones, but I must refuse.\"\n\n\"The bones aren't for you.\" I pointed with my claw to the corner of the tent. \"I don't like the hooves. Too dry. I tossed them over there.\"\n\nLegao's eyes darkened. \"I don't care for pig feet, either. Indeed, meat makes my stomach turn.\"\n\nI didn't understand what she was talking about. \"You mean you don't like pig.\"\n\n\"I don't eat animal flesh.\"\n\nShe was speaking nonsense. The implications disturbed me. I changed the subject. \"We won the battle, I presume.\"\n\n\"Remarkably, we did indeed. We won, and more. For the first time in a decade, the hollowings have withdrawn even from the west bank of the Tayo, their forces sliding back into their wasteland.\"\n\nThat part surprised me. They still had tens of thousands of foot soldiers and wolves arrayed in the west. Everyone was so certain the hollowings never gave up. \"They retreat?\"\n\n\"Rinxia has taken to the sky to keep a watch on them. At the very least, they have moved away from the fordable area near the riverbank, creating more distance from the shallowings\u2014which I understand you refer to as ghastrays\u2014and their horde.\"\n\nI spit out a jagged bone. \"Ghastrays are unpleasant enemies. Long stingers. Big appetites.\"\n\n\"How did you summon them here?\" Legao wondered. \"Is it some type of binding magic?\"\n\nI didn't get it. \"Binding?\" Even the word tasted sour.\n\n\"As I understand their particular magic, using those runes the binders can get the sha\u2014the ghastrays to pull waveships yes\u2026but to fight. Not to come when summoned. Not to kill our enemies. And never to command so many. Even Drasu did not have a magic that could do such a thing. Not even the other ember dragons could\u2014\"\n\nI cut her off. \"You think magic brought them here?\" I snorted my annoyance through my nostrils. Legao ducked away from a bit of mucus that flew out with my displeasure. \"You think that I somehow enslaved these ghastrays, as your binders would do?\"\n\nLegao tilted her head, unsure of the anger in my words. \"If not magic, why did the ghastrays come to our aid? They do not normally dwell in rivers. I've never heard of one of those creatures coming into fresh water, not the history of Ni-Yota. Their kind are certainly no friends of humans. These creatures are born killers, the ultimate predators of the sea.\"\n\nI spat out a bone. \"A human dares to call another creature a born killer?\" I was disappointed in Legao. She was a better thinker than most of her kind, but she was still human. \"Your race enslaves ghastrays. You collar them, chain them to your boats, take away their will, their lives. Do you expect their affection for such treatment?\"\n\n\"The ghastrays were killers long before there were waveships. They are the scourge of the seas. They decimated fishing fleets, slaughtered seaside villages, consumed the bounty of the sea.\"\n\n\"Wolves feed upon sheep. Horned eagles upon mice. Dragons upon delicious pigs and everything else delicious. Do not expect creatures of great hunger to join you in your meatless life of vegetable eating. Take this lesson from a former slave: Death is preferable to being forced to serve. Nothing is worse than having your will stripped from you and given to another. It is as if you are dead but forced to live anyway for the purposes of another. A slave's first thought upon winning his freedom is vengeance. You humans would be wise to heed that lesson. You hold slaves at your peril. You hold your greatest enemy at bay. You should think about that.\"\n\nLegao's jaw dropped a bit. \"You are suggesting we free the ghastrays?\"\n\nActually, I hadn't thought that far ahead. But she wasn't wrong. \"What your binders have done is an abomination.\"\n\nLegao eyes widened as she considered the implications. \"Ni-Yota is vast. The other lands it trades with for silk, for metal, are distant. Without the waveships\u2026commerce would come to a near halt. Trade would near cease. People might starve. The merchants, the nobles\u2026well, no one would accept it.\"\n\n\"If the ghastrays do it themselves, it will be far worse. Revolts are bloody.\"\n\nLegao's head shook, but not in denial of my words. She seemed to be struggling with the implications of her way of life. I could tell she resisted my notion, but at least she had listened. Better than I could've expected from many humans.\n\n\"But why did they help us now?\" Legao pressed. \"Because of you?\"\n\nI looked over the bare bones of my meal as I considered Legao's question. There wasn't anything left worth going after. I was still hungry. \"It isn't completely clear why the ghastrays do something or nothing. But they are intelligent and they communicate in some strange way, as we see through their ability for collective action, which may not be so different than the hollowings. I asked for their help. We needed their help.\"\n\nLegao's dark eyes squeezed together. \"Word came by glasswing that you dumped Drasu's body in the sea and Aragor in the gulf near Trishan. Was this the ghastray's price? Are they mercenaries who crave the flesh of the powerful?\"\n\n\"They aren't mercenaries.\" I thought on my conversation with Vengeance and the patchwork lore of Harlan's people. \"It may be the rust is not new. Even the ghastrays may have some history with it. They spoke of a greater Purpose.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Legao's voice had dropped to a near whisper.\n\n\"I don't know. I spent most of my life in Rolm as a slave. You are the wizard, someone who has dedicated your life to study. Is there no record of the ghastrays among the stores of knowledge of your people?\"\n\n\"None that I know of.\"\n\n\"Do you have knowledge of the time before the Cataclysm?\"\n\n\"Before the Cataclysm \u2026\" Legao rubbed her temples. \"Not within the Conclave of Magi. Not that I know of. The archivists of Oracles of Silla kept many records.\"\n\nI recognized the name. \"My mother once sought counsel in that place. Rinxia told me my mother once spent nearly a year on the Peak of Silla not long before her final exile.\"\n\n\"Silla is a mysterious place. It is said that only the most worthy are granted entrance, and even then they must pay the price.\"\n\n\"The price?\"\n\n\"Supposedly, to enter, a newcomer has to come with a piece of knowledge not previously part of the archive. Only by adding to its knowledge could one gain permission to study what is already there. But the records kept at Silla are said to be vast, ancient.\"\n\n\"Who built it?\"\n\n\"I do not know. Drasu said it was a trove of the knowledge held against the day when the world again wished to understand its past. The Archive of Oracles, it is sometimes called.\"\n\n\"Where is this archive?\"\n\n\"No place you wish to travel.\"\n\n\"You could say that about almost everywhere that isn't a cozy cave filled with black pigs and a tub of shaojiu. I ask again: Where is it?\"\n\nLegao swept a hand westward. \"At the very edge of the world. Across the Tayo River, across all of Illium, on the tip of a peninsula in the far west known as Haven's Finger, for it protrudes from the rest of the land like broken pinky. On the Silla Peak, at the end of the Finger, you will find it. Even for a dragon, it would be many days of flight. No one has traveled there since your mother's time, before the hollowings came. To make such a journey now\u2026even for a dragon, it would be perilous. The archive may not have survived. Even the mountaintops are not safe from the hollowings and the rust.\"\n\nLegao certainly knew how to make a place sound unappealing. However, from what I'd been told, my mother had spent considerable time on that peak. Whatever she'd learned had prompted her to risk exile, to leave Ni-Yota, maybe even to give birth to my sister and I, in search of something. Perhaps it held the secret of aurathorn as well. My mother had thought there were answers at the Silla Peak. Or at least, there had been at one time in the past. It could indeed be gone, and I had no doubt that Legao spoke true about the perils of journey there. To take such a risk and find only more devastation was unappealing.\n\nI felt the wizard's eyes boring into me, questions waiting on her lips.\n\n\"What else is that you wish to know, Legao?\"\n\n\"You came from past the Edge, from a place few in Ni-Yota even knew exists. In that short time, you have seen the death of two rulers, as well a great victory over the hollowings. You claim a lack of magic yet manage to conjure a storm of a power unrivalled by any seen in a hundred years. And you seem to have forged some kind of alliance with the ghastrays, whose freedom you now champion. Who are you, truly?\"\n\nIt was one of those moments that made me rejoice that dragons get to choose their names as their lives change.\n\n\"I am Bayloo, He Who Was A Slave. I will always be Bayloo. But I have become more. I am the Son of She Who Was Dawn. I am the Seeker of the Lost Truth.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "I knocked down the tent trying to leave.\n\nThere might've been some trick to the entrance flap. Maybe my wings were too big, or I shouldn't have hit the sides with my tail. Whoever put the tent up would presumably fix it. Not that I required a tent to sleep in.\n\nAlmost two days had passed since the battle had ended. A healer had come and taken out my stitches. My left wing, while still damaged, had mended enough to allow me to fly, as long as I didn't push it too hard. It was great to be a dragon.\n\nThe Mizu army had redeployed into a more defensive formation, dispersing into various positions along the river. Much of Tia's cavalry was already on its way back to the east. The horsemaster came to see me before he departed.\n\n\"We are recalled already. Every soldier is needed to deal with the unrest on the other side of the mountains. Barely enough time to get drunk and sober before we must ride again.\"\n\n\"Your withdrawal does feel hasty. Are you so sure the hollowings will not return?\"\n\nTia crinkled his nose, a gesture I was unfamiliar with. \"In the whole course of the war, the hollowings never lost as many as they did in the Battle of the Bridges, as it is being called. We had never seen so many behemoths, much less defeated them. They have no way to cross the river so long as those terrifying creatures swim in the waters of the Tayo. Even if they left, I'd think the hollowings would still be wary. I hope, finally, we a struck a blow that was decisive.\"\n\nI grunted a long, deep grunt from my belly, because I knew in my gut Tia was wrong. \"Despite your time with these horses, you still think very human. This enemy is not like you or I. Whatever they are, they do not exist to merely sit still on their side of this river.\"\n\n\"Rinxia reported that the hollowings march westward without stopping,\" he answered. \"Every single one of them. There are no more behemoths or bridge-towers among them. There isn't a tree left for twenty leagues to the west\u2014they've consumed every resource in the area to sustain a force so large. Even the blood raptors have gone. Still, you are probably correct. They will return one day. But it will not be to cross the river with bridges.\"\n\n\"When they come again, your riders will be needed. They fought with uncommon bravery.\" It wasn't very smart to charge a behemoth, but I didn't point that out.\n\nTia inclined his head, pleased at the compliment. \"I have my orders. We are to ride east to help against the tigris and the traitorous lords who have joined their cause.\"\n\n\"What cause is that? Elasu is very dead, I assure you.\"\n\n\"The land is without a Protector. The will of Haven has been shattered. The tigris proclaim a new revolution. They claim the dragons have betrayed Ni-Yota. Only when the land is cleansed of Aragor's tainted followers will Haven again bestow its grace upon Ni-Yota.\"\n\nI gave a double snort.\n\nTia's face betrayed nothing. \"Even if one does not believe in such things, the tigris are fierce fighters and deal with defectors viciously. Lord Hito was skinned alive and left in his farmers' pen for the hogs to consume when he renounced his allegiance.\"\n\n\"It is unfortunate for the pigs. Humans taste terrible.\"\n\nTia sucked in a sharp breath of revulsion. I understood. Such a waste of good pig meat, tainting them in such a way.\n\nThe soldier shifted on his feet. \"Should the hollowings show any sign of returning, word can be sent by glasswing. Gia has sent orders that new fortresses are to be raised along the river, great fortifications that can withstand even the charge of behemoths, although they will take years to build.\"\n\nI looked around at the wasted ground, at the depleted soldiers. Castles seemed like a fantasy. \"I see no sign of Gia. Or Rinxia, either.\"\n\n\"Gia flew east this morning.\" With some distaste Tia added, \"I heard that a glasswing came with a message from Jinu, the Master of Shadows.\"\n\n\"Gia flew back to Trishan?\"\n\n\"He did not tell me his destination, but that would be logical.\"\n\n\"And Rinxia, did she go back as well?\" Somehow that hurt, that she'd leave before I'd awoken without saying farewell.\n\n\"Rinxia flew west.\"\n\nI jerked my head so close that Tia jumped backward. \"What?\"\n\n\"Like you, she feared the return of the hollowings. And what they might attempt next.\"\n\nI searched the horizon for her immediately, in vain.\n\nTia looked as well, but he knew we both would not see anything. \"She left at first light, flying at great speed, as she can. A silver streak in the sky.\"\n\nI wanted to lift myself into the air at that moment, to rip through the open air, to follow Rinxia into the west. Imagining that for a fleeting moment made my hearts lighter. It would've been stupid though. I'd never find her. I reminded myself that Rinxia was the swiftest dragon in skies. She was an unrivaled scout. Nothing could catch her so long as she didn't land. She'd be safe.\n\nI tried to sound unconcerned. \"Did she say when she expected to return?\"\n\n\"She did not. It is not the way of dragons \u2026\" He paused, hesitant at first. Tia shrugged. \"In matters where humans are not deemed to be of use, we are not consulted by dragons.\"\n\nI gave him a kindly sniff. \"The reverse was true in Rolm, where I come from. There, humans made decisions about the life or death of dragons as they would with livestock.\" Tia's eyes widened. \"Perhaps we can all do better. This victory was a shared sacrifice by all.\"\n\nTia bowed his head. \"Your words\u2026honor me and my men. I know that we all would be dead but for your bringing the shallowings to our aid. But\u2026\" Tia pursed his lips, his eyes flicking at the ground.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Word has spread that it was Legao's magic that pushed the behemoths into the river. That she even had control of those creatures in the river through a binding. Perhaps she is the next Drasu.\"\n\n\"Is. That. So?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Tia confirmed. \"I thought it proper that you know.\"\n\n\"And who says this?\"\n\n\"I am but a soldier, sworn to serve Aragor, who is dead.\"\n\nI wasn't as good at this as Harlan, but I got the impression that Tia wanted me to get more from him, so I asked. \"If you had to guess, being an experienced soldier, how do stories like these begin?\"\n\n\"This one spread so rapidly. It is unusual that a tale so obviously false moves with such swiftness.\" He shrugged. \"I suppose, even within the Mizu army, there are men in the employ of those who work in shadows.\" He included his head.\n\nShadows, indeed. Did he refer to Jinu? The man was far away in the safety of Trishan, but that didn't mean those in his employ were not here. I supposed that a Master of Shadow would have spies everywhere. Did he serve Gia in this? Or did he have other motives?\n\n\"I fought with the great wizard Drasu, and have known a dozen other magi besides, although none as great as he or Legao. None could've conjured such a storm. Not even the greatest binder could command shallowings in such a manner. I know we owe it to you. I have never seen you belch fire.\" Tia hesitated then asked his question. \"You are of the ember blood, are you not?\"\n\nIt had not occurred to me that my heritage was not widely known, but it made sense. I was a new ally, and not a trusted one. \"I am.\"\n\nTia chin dipped slowly. \"Then we shall win this war.\"\n\nI bent my neck so that my eyes became level with his. This too surprised him. \"Safe journey, Tia.\"\n\nThe horsemaster rode off with his men a short time later. I waited impatiently for Rinxia's return. Several times I took to the sky for a better view, but I didn't cross the river boundary, even though I saw no enemy lurking on the other side. There was no reason to do so. I could see as well from the safety of the eastern bank as I could on the far side of the river. Soldiers stared at me when I flew, and when I landed. I flew north on one of my reconnoiter flights, over a large formation of soldiers. They raised their blades in the air as I passed. It took me a moment to realize it was no challenge: They cheered me. Jinu's spies might spread rumors, but plenty of humans knew the truth. I had come a long way from being a slave dragon in Rolm.\n\nAs the daylight faded without any sign of Rinxia, my anxiety increased. I understood the need for her flight into Illium. I would've done it myself, had I been asked and conscious of what was happening. But staying in the land of the hollowings past nightfall seemed unnecessary. Rinxia could travel a vast distance in a single day. She only would've gone deeper and stayed later if she'd found something important to investigate. Or something bad had happened her.\n\nI flew yet again to watch the sun sink below the horizon. Several scattered formations of hollowings still dotted the landscape far to the west as they retreated inward in neat columns, like ants marching back to their queen. The ballistae had also been moved inland. The sky was perilously empty as the sun dipped below the ground.\n\nI stayed a lot longer than I should have with my injured wing. Below, fires of the Mizu army dotted the land. The smell of roasting meat filled the air, mixing with the boisterous shouts of soldiers drunk on shaojiu and victory. I wished I could share the booze and joy, but I was too worried about Rinxia for celebration.\n\nI skirted the edge of the river, flying far to the north then back to the south, scouting for signs of movement in the water. There was no sign of Vengeance or the ghastrays. Perhaps their actions spoke more clearly than any words. For one reason or another, they were with us against the hollowings.\n\nAs the sky darkened, I convinced myself the far side of the river no longer posed any danger. I was accomplishing nothing by staying in the Mizu camp. I hated being powerless. I hated sitting still. Finally, I succumbed to my anxiousness, worry, and reckless stupidity. I crossed the Tayo.\n\nIt was hotter on the other side of the river, the air heavier. It wasn't my imagination\u2014dragons were sensitive to such things, as they affect our flight. I flew deep into Illium, over nothing but rust encrusted dirt. Eventually, the ground began to stir. Not humans\u2014wolves. Their lupine eyes glinted in the starlight. They were covered by the rust. With my night vision, I spotted several ballistae as well, hidden in ditches and covered by the crimson rust. That likely meant human hollowings still lurked somewhere. Not all of them had left. Two arc bolts fired at me. Despite the darkness, their aim wasn't bad. I was too high to hit, and the projectiles fell harmlessly to the ground. I realized that even though the humans operating the machines could barely see me, that wasn't the case with the wolves. Somehow they could communicate\u2014the wolves were spotters. I needed to be cautious.\n\nThere was still no sign of Rinxia. I turned back toward the Mizu lines. I saw no more hollowings on my way back.\n\nI crossed the river to Ni-Yota, vowing to force myself to eat even if my stomach wasn't in the mood. Before I landed, I turned for one last look toward Illium. There, I caught sight of a glint of silver out in the west. I fixed my eyes on that patch of sky until I saw it again. Some of the tension in my body eased. It had to be her.\n\nI think Rinxia saw me as well. She seemed to be taking her time flying to my side of the river. She was torturing me. That had to be it.\n\nAs Rinxia drew still nearer, I noticed the odd cadence as she beat her wings. Our eyes met. Neither of us spoke with words\u2014that would be idiotic until she had crossed by onto my side of the river. But I saw in her eyes that Rinxia wasn't toying with me. She flew slowly because she was exhausted. She must've flown further and deeper than even I had suspected. That was Rinxia\u2014everything for her cause.\n\nFinally, she crossed over to the comparative safety of Ni-Yota. My hearts pounded and I smiled with my eyes, dragon style. Rinxia stared back with warmth, but nothing equal to what I'd shown her. I tried to remind myself that extreme emotion was not the Way of dragons. But still\u2026ouch.\n\nShe didn't speak until we were both on the ground. I asked a nearby human for water and food to be sent to us as we huddled away from human encampment.\n\n\"How long were you up there waiting for me?\"\n\nI hesitated, so she answered for me. \"Too long.\" She didn't approve. \"I can take care of myself, Bayloo. Don't waste your strength. The hollowings could come back any time. To act as you did\u2026it is very human.\"\n\nOuch.\n\nI tried to ignore the insult. \"Are they coming back?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly.\"\n\n\"What did you find out there?\"\n\nRinxia snorted in frustration. \"Nothing of note, which is why I am worried.\"\n\nI waited for her to explain. I could hear her hearts pounding. She had pushed herself hard over there.\n\n\"I followed the main body of hollowings as they pulled back from the river. Some stayed behind, but not many. There are some wolves lurking about. They are faster, more nimble. I intended to follow the human host west, or at least get a sense of their direction and follow it further so that I might know where they travel.\"\n\nI guessed where this was going. \"That didn't work.\"\n\n\"They split. Not just into one or two columns. But into ten different groupings. They moved in every possible direction. I couldn't follow all those paths, although I tried, hoping to get lucky.\"\n\nI had a low opinion on the reliability of luck. Like bowel movements, luck never seemed to arrive at convenient moments.\n\n\"I held the course west. It is wasteland as far as my eyes can see. On the old maps, areas that were once marked as forest are gone. Everywhere, the ground is coated with the same tainted rust. The hills are bare, but for the same growth. Villages are empty. I flew over a city\u2014a big one\u2014completely abandoned. The same with the old fortress keeps of Illium. The buildings of their cities have either fallen or are covered by the rust. Eventually, I turned north, flying toward the coast. It was more of the same\u2014except for one thing: roads. I saw at least two\u2014long, straight, and seemingly well maintained. They led north and east. I followed the northern route. For leagues, I saw only emptiness, but as light faded, the blood raptors came.\"\n\n\"So we are not rid of them all.\"\n\n\"I think their numbers are diminished. They harried me, flying across my path. Wave after wave. But none tried to attack. They sought only to delay me, I think. To slow my journey north or get me to turn to a different route.\"\n\nI knew that would've had the opposite effect on Rinxia. Trying to deny her would only make her more determined.\n\n\"I flew harder and tried to move faster. Small waves continued to rise up, twenty birds. Just enough to force me to be cautious. To slow. It was nightfall by the time I reached the north coast. There was nothing. The road ended at what looked to have once been a trading town. The quays still stood. Some buildings and warehouses were still there, although covered in rust in most places. But no life, not even hollowing life. On the sea, I saw nothing but the waves.\"\n\nServants arrived carrying troughs filled with fresh water, along with platters of fresh meat. For once, I was more interested in the story than the food (there wasn't any roasted pig, anyway).\n\nRinxia drank deeply, greedy for the water. I watched her, taking pleasure in just being near her, listening to her, even if she had no glad tidings to share. Even if her feelings for me were not as strong as mine for her. When she finished she looked back up at me, her eyes troubled.\n\n\"The hollowings plot something new, but I have no idea what it might be.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "A glasswing arrived the next morning.\n\nTo my surprise, it was for me, from Harlan. The message was neither lengthy nor subtle: Return to Trishan.\n\nI was hesitant to go. Rinxia hadn't yet said it aloud to me, but I sensed she wanted to return to Illium, to understand better the intentions of our enemy there. I wanted to accompany her. However, she didn't need me. Indeed, she could move faster, with less chance of detection, without me. She told me just that as soon as she learned of Harlan's message.\n\n\"Gia has had several days in Trishan. There, he confers with Jinu and the council. If you are correct about him trying to see you killed when you attacked those bridge towers, you have become a greater threat as your magic emerges. You would be wise to heed the human's advice to return.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to leave you, even though I know you will call me a fool.\"\n\nRinxia favored me with a flash of indulgence in her eyes, but also disappointment as well. \"My Way leads me to serve Ni-Yota before all else. You should strive for the same.\" I tried to hide my disappointment as she would expect, but didn't succeed. Yet her next words delighted me. \"But the Way does not command me back to Illium, as you fear.\"\n\nUnderstanding came to me slower than I would've hoped. \"You'll come back with me to Trishan?\"\n\n\"There is no imminent danger here. You are a blind babe as far as the politics of Ni-Yota are concerned. I cannot have you stumbling about in Trishan by yourself. This would not benefit Ni-Yota.\"\n\nI should have been insulted, but instead I was glad that Rinxia would be traveling with me.\n\nI bid farewell to Legao before we left. The wizard still looked exhausted\u2014it seemed it took humans far longer to recover than dragons. I offered her a ride back to Trishan if she wanted it.\n\n\"I will remain here for several more days to recover. If there is no sign of the hollowings, no further danger, I will return by horseback.\" Her eyes looked me over. \"It seems you have found your path to magic.\"\n\nI wished that were true. \"I have begun the journey. I have far more questions than answers.\"\n\n\"That is the nature of the pursuit of magic. So much of it is hidden, at least from us.\" She moved her lips to form something like a smile. \"Beware of Gia.\"\n\n\"I am not his rival,\" I protested immediately.\n\n\"Are you not?\" she seemed skeptical. \"You do not seek to be Protector?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nLegao didn't seem to quite believe me. \"Ni-Yota seems to be running out of dragons to serve, then.\" Her lips tightened. \"I hope you will keep yourself safe until my return to Trishan.\"\n\n\"Gia will do nothing to me,\" I assured her.\n\n\"Listen to Rinxia. She is worthy of your trust.\"\n\nAfter a final meal, Rinxia and I departed for Trishan. I knew that trouble awaited us there, but I didn't see how it could be worse than what we'd just faced. Our pace was swift, but not panicked. Flying beside Rinxia gave me a sense of purpose and determination. We spoke mostly of small things, of wind, of hunting, the oddities of humans. She told me about her mother, a great silver dragon with a roar like a song who had been slain by Elasu in the first year of Aragor's reign. Rinxia's sire had succumbed to the great plague from Illium many years before that, when she had been little more than a hatchling. She told the tale without sadness or remorse, in dragon fashion. I felt sorrow as a human would. And a bit of jealousy\u2014at least she had known her parents.\n\nI, in turn, told her my own sorry story of my mother and of our first and last meeting on the island of Maricopa. I spoke of slavers and my ryders, of Bethy Rann, Prince Dayne the Dark Fool, and Brindisi, and finally my mother's murderer. Somehow, I lost track of time as I rambled on. Before I knew it, night had fallen and we had stopped at a waystation to eat and rest.\n\nI asked for shaojiu. I'd earned it. Rinxia didn't refuse a bowl either.\n\n\"You've had a life stolen. It is made worse by the emotion you inherited through your link with the humans. I hear the sorrow in you, Bayloo. For that, I feel pity.\"\n\nI didn't want her sympathy. Nor was it merited. \"Save any pity, Rinxia. You were taught by your parents, shown values, put on a path in this world, taught the Way. Slavery was my teacher, even if I didn't know it until recently. My ryders, too, were teachers in their own manner, their lessons harsher than any parent, but no less effective. Hardship has forged me. Emotion tempers me. The loss of so many years makes the present precious.\" I thought of my mother, the memory of her song tightening my throat. I banished the image. \"The losses of my past have given me the strength to follow the path to a different future. I may not follow the Way as you do, but I have no regret for that. I am the beast who has tasted blood. I know the value of that for which I must fight.\"\n\nRinxia's eyes glowed. Her eyes lingered on my chest before rising to match my gaze. \"I hadn't expected to find a philosopher's hearts beating in there as well.\"\n\nIt had been a pretty good speech. Even more so because I meant every word.\n\n\"The night is warm,\" Rinxia observed. \"Let us make it warmer.\"\n\nWe did.\n\nWe resumed our journey to Trishan the following day.\n\nWhile the countryside seemed peaceful, there was an unusual amount of boat traffic on the rivers and canals. I'd never seen so many ships.\n\n\"These are watercraft of the great human lords,\" Rinxia told me. \"Look at their size, the banners. They journey to Trishan.\"\n\nThe sprawling city and adjacent palace came into view late in the afternoon. Even from a distance high in the clouds, the lake palace was a picture of harmony beside the nearby chaos of the massive city of Trishan. The port bustled with the huge rivercraft of the eastern human lords, while several dozen others remained in transit. The boats came in all shapes and colors; some were trimmed with metal, others had elaborate carvings of animals on their bows. All flew huge banners. My attention was drawn to only one craft, however. This vessel was little more than a raft that plied a narrow canal neglected by the other craft, for it led away from the city to a derelict shipyard. On it was a crudely painted image of a goat. My eyes glowed with a dragon's smile as I remembered Harlan's signal.\n\nI flicked a wing to draw Rinxia's attention away from the city far ahead. \"Harlan would like to speak before we arrive at the palace.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Look down at the small raft on the side canal with the strange painting. He used an image of a Rolman goat to get my attention once before, back at Elasu's palace in Changsha. He'll be waiting for us near the raft.\"\n\n\"If Jinu or Gia is watching, they'll have spotted us by now.\"\n\n\"No matter. I presume they won't be able to get spies there faster than we can fly. Let us find out what Harlan has to say and why he sent that glasswing message.\"\n\nWe changed our course, setting down at the edge of the canal near Harlan's message raft.\n\nThe man himself appeared to be snoozing in the grass when we landed. A single eye opened as the massive presence of Rinxia and I glared down at him.\n\n\"The beds in the palace aren't good enough for you?\" I asked.\n\nHarlan sat up, a hand on his back. \"Now that you mention it, they are too soft. All my life I've slept in a ship's bunk, even after I became a captain. That mushy stuff the people in the palace fill their mattresses with is unhealthy.\"\n\n\"Is that why you summoned us back from the west? To lodge a complaint about your sleeping arrangements?\" I huffed. \"Your human needs are like your stinking breath\u2014forever returning to your lips.\"\n\nHarlan got back onto his feet. \"Gia has called for a meeting of the nobles. There, the servants whisper that he intends to burn some of Aragor's personal effects since he lacks a body, and then declare himself Protector of Ni-Yota should none stand to oppose his right.\"\n\nRinxia made a noise similar to a human sigh. \"It's called a Kai-Moot. I'm not surprised. Gia likes to take the most direct route to his goals. Open declaration and physical combat.\" She gazed at me. \"You could beat him, if you wished. With your magic awakened, it would not be so difficult.\"\n\nI knew Gia wanted to rule Ni-Yota. I didn't. The only reason I might even consider putting myself forward in that contest was to spite Gia. After all, the dark-hearted fiend had likely tried to get me killed fighting the hollowings. His Shadowmaster, Jinu, likely undermined my role in the battle (not that I care about glory). But I'd have to fight Gia to the death. I didn't want to kill another dragon, and I didn't want to be killed. Winning meant being the protector. As I saw it, if I fought, I lost no matter the outcome.\n\n\"You expect I've changed my mind about challenging him? I haven't.\"\n\nI sensed Rinxia's disappointment at my answer. \"You are already acting like a protector, Bayloo. You have risked your life for Ni-Yota. Your magic, your actions with the ghastrays, saved us. The warriors who fought with you already love you. You could help unite this land, keep it safe.\"\n\nMy past protests about just wanting to get Kiata and leave would no longer suffice. I burned that relationship and that excuse when I'd chosen to win Vengeance and his kind to our cause at the price of my tenuous bond with my sister.\n\n\"I will not kill another dragon.\" It sounded inadequate. Killing Gia would be more like self-defense.\n\n\"That may be true, although we both know you kill will when you must.\" Harlan's annoying smirk crept back onto his face. \"But your hesitation is because you are afraid.\"\n\n\"I don't fear Gia.\"\n\nHarlan nodded knowingly. \"That isn't your fear. You don't want the responsibility. You don't want to give others the chance to rely upon you, for fear you might fail them.\"\n\n\"You are like an itch between my scales,\" I told him. \"Humans enslaved me. I want no part of ruling or protecting them.\" I dipped my head toward Harlan. \"You've proven yourself a valued ally, for which I'm grateful. Maybe there are other humans of worth. But that is not enough. This is a waste of all our breath. I will not challenge Gia. I do not wish to be the Protector of Ni-Yota.\"\n\nHarlan showed no disappointment, no surprise. \"Yes, I knew that would be your answer.\"\n\nI sensed trouble. \"Then why bother to send for me? I have no desire to watch Gia start some more fires or put a crown on his head or whatever else he wants to make him feel good about himself. There is no need for me to be a witness to this.\"\n\nHarlan frowned. \"You may not have a choice.\"\n\nUh-oh. \"Explain yourself.\"\n\nRinxia understood immediately. \"No one chooses to be protector. Haven decides.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to say some higher power calls me forth? As I sit here I hear nothing but the wind and the subtle farts of an overfed human.\"\n\n\"Haven does not speak in the language of mortals, not human nor dragon. The will of Haven must be divined through events, through actions, through the world beneath its Light.\" I could've sworn there was a hint of smugness in Rinxia's voice, but it was Harlan who finally hit me with the point of all this.\n\n\"People see the favor of Haven upon you, Bayloo.\"\n\n\"Upon me? I've still got a scar when I had a hole punched through my wing. I'm lucky if I manage to get a decent meal every couple of days.\"\n\nHarlan pretended that I was jesting. \"You can understand why people think this way. You slew Elasu, ending the Schism.\"\n\n\"Aragor was locked in combat with her. I barely did anything.\"\n\nHarlan kept going. \"Then you slew Aragor, without consequence from Haven. Indeed, quite the opposite. You helped Ni-Yota win two great victories at the Tayo without the magic of Drasu. Even Aragor could not claim such favor in battle. The Light of Haven shines upon you.\"\n\n\"I fed his head to the ghastrays.\" I looked at Rinxia with something like desperation. \"I thought this affront would all but disqualify me as an unworthy heretic.\"\n\n\"If we'd lost, that would've been true,\" she replied. \"Your horrific disrespect likely would've been seen as an affront to Haven. Gia and Jinu would've encouraged this. But we won. That cannot be denied. They've tried to credit Legao for the great feat of magic that was decisive, but those with knowledge of such matters are unlikely to believe it. The soldiers closest to the battle do not. Then there is the matter of the ghastrays. Our enemies, the scourge of the seas, coming to aid us? There could be no clearer sign of the favor of Haven than such an unnatural thing.\"\n\n\"There was no favor of Haven involved with ghastrays, as you well know! People must understand the lore Harlan's of people, the tales of the Iraliss\u2026\" I didn't need Harlan's dubious look to understand. I would never be able to explain what had happened with the ghastrays. Even I didn't completely understand it. I blew an unhappy snort out of my nostrils. \"So what happens now?\"\n\nRinxia answered, her voice determined. \"You should accept the mantle that Haven wishes to bestow upon you.\"\n\nFor the first time, Rinxia's voice had become grating to me rather than pleasant. \"Harlan, you brought me here for a reason. Surely, you have a plan to handle this.\"\n\n\"I sent that message because I feared that Gia would fly out to the Tayo River and try to kill you in full sight of the Mizu army and the hollowings. In such a case, no matter who won, Ni-Yota would be doomed.\"\n\n\"You brought me here because it's a better place to fight Gia than at the river? Are you mad?\"\n\nHarlan shifted on his feet. \"If there is to be a fight to the death between dragons to determine who is to rule Ni-Yota, it is best it takes place in Trishan, before the eyes of the Kai-Moot.\"\n\nRinxia didn't bother to hide the approval in her eyes at this notion.\n\nI had been betrayed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"I didn't betray you, Bayloo.\"\n\nHarlan's mouth was moving, but I barely heard the words. The implications of being forced to fight Gia and forced to become Protector of Ni-Yota was still banging around inside my head. They could not make me be Protector, could they? I'd just fly off. Of course, then I'd lose Rinxia and Kiata forever as the hollowings destroyed Ni-Yota.\n\nThe smuggler kept talking to me. \"Bayloo, are you listening? If you need to pee, please go in the river not here. I'm wearing new sandals.\"\n\n\"Now you're trying to tell me where to relieve myself too?\"\n\n\"I asked you to come back here so you'd have a chance to avoid unnecessary conflict. I have a plan if you will but listen\u2014I'm trying to fix this. I haven't abandoned you, my good dragon. Even if you did leave me here with your furious sister when you flew west without me.\"\n\nOh. That. I'd forgotten. This was Harlan's revenge. My actions had been necessary. I'd known Kiata would be angry with my deception, but I hadn't expected Harlan to still be bitter, considering how well things had turned out with the hollowings.\n\n\"How are things with my sister?\"\n\n\"Bad, for you deceived her. I've tried to make her understand your greater purpose, without much success.\" Even though I'd known the price, it didn't make hearing it any better. \"I have a plan to fix that as well.\"\n\n\"If you know a way to get Gia off my back and help me regain Kiata's trust, I will do it. Just tell me.\"\n\nHarlan took a careful step back, away from me, as if concerned that I'd react poorly to something. \"You will pledge your allegiance to Gia publicly, credit his wisdom and leadership for your actions in helping to defeat the hollowings.\"\n\nI nearly choked. Rinxia wretched in horror\u2014she sounded as if she was trying to cough up a mistakenly swallowed cat.\n\n\"That giant lizard tried to get me killed.\"\n\nHarlan pretended not to hear me even though I'd spoken loud enough to wake the dead. \"There's more. To make it work, you'll need to become one of his Sworn.\"\n\nI tried another tactic\u2014I spoke slowly, so Harlan got it. \"Gia tried to make me dead.\"\n\nThe human merely shrugged with infuriating nonchalance. \"The past cannot change, but the future can. I've given you a way to avoid a fight with Gia, ensure stability in Ni-Yota, and get yourself back into your sister's good graces. There is no need to thank me, but it would be gracious to do so.\"\n\nI stared as hard as I could. The weight of my gaze alone should've crushed him, but Harlan didn't disappear. His words still echoed in my head. I turned to Rinxia. She didn't look pleased, but neither did she share my utter revulsion at Harlan's suggestion. She released a thought-laden breath. \"If you will not become Protector, this is the best alternative. It keeps the peace. Kiata will be pleased. Isn't that all that matters to you?\"\n\nI twisted my neck back in the direction of the palace spires. My hearts still beat at an outraged pace. I sucked in the wind, willing my head to clear. Anger was for fools. \"When would all this happen?\"\n\n\"The Kai-Moot gathers even now. But it is a long journey for the eastern lords, and Gia won't wait for most of them. He's sent glasswings to inform more distant lord that because of the lingering attacks by the tigris and their allies, those lords should stay at their keeps. I'd guess Gia will wait no more than a few days to begin the ceremony, perhaps less if his mood becomes too foul. But each day the whispers that you should ascend grow. As more soldiers return from the battle, the stories about you will grow.\"\n\nI ground my teeth. Swearing loyalty to Gia shouldn't have bothered me at much as it did. It wasn't like I couldn't lie. I did it all the time. \"I would like to speak to Kiata. Is that possible?\"\n\nHarlan's hesitation stung. \"Not sure how well that might go\u2026seems a bit like sailing in a tempest. Without a sail. Over shoals.\"\n\nRinxia walked beside me, her body close. \"Let me try to speak to her. Perhaps if she realizes you have acted in the interests of Ni-Yota, indeed, you have come back for that purpose, her anger may soften. She is still very young, driven more by hearts than head, her Way still uncertain.\"\n\nRinxia did seem the best choice of an intermediary. As charming as Harlan could be, Kiata doubtlessly associated him with my deception to her. He was also a human. Rinxia was the only other female dragon in Ni-Yota. If anyone could reach my little sister, it would be her.\n\n\"My thanks, Rinxia. I appreciate anything you can do for me.\"\n\n\"Given all this, perhaps it would be better if you waited until dark before arriving at the palace. I'll go on ahead to speak to Kiata. When night comes, fly directly to her tower.\"\n\n\"Gia can see as well as you or I in the dark.\"\n\nRinxia flicked her tail in the dirt. \"But the city and the rest of the palace are less likely to see you. There will be less commotion. If all Harlan has told us is true, your presence could merely provoke Gia to do something rash. He loses his path on the Way.\"\n\n\"I will do as you ask.\"\n\nShe looked up toward the sun, gauging the coming of night. \"Where will you wait? A dragon sitting alone near the river is going to attract some attention.\"\n\n\"I'll go visit a friend.\"\n\nRinxia stared at me a long while, trying to determine if I was serious. I was. Harlan's lips twitched. I guessed he had a request.\n\n\"You want to come, Harlan?\" I wasn't sure that I cared to have him there. He had a habit of complicating my life.\n\nHarlan's smirk slipped from his face. \"I should like to speak to Vengeance again. I may be of some help in understanding their actions.\"\n\nIt had been Harlan's knowledge that got the ghastrays into this fight for us. It would be foolish to refuse him.\n\nRinxia nudged Harlan with her tail. \"Keep Bayloo out of trouble.\"\n\nHe grinned wide. I didn't like it.\n\nTo me, Rinxia said. \"And you keep Harlan out of trouble.\"\n\nI flashed a smile with my eyes.\n\n\"Take care, both of you. I will speak with Kiata.\" Our eyes met once more before Rinxia returned to the sky.\n\nI watched her silvery form fly off toward Trishan. Harlan climbed onto my back and once again we flew. I turned north, away from Rinxia and Kiata. Why do I do things like this?\n\nIt was dark by the time we reached the shoreline of the great gulf near Trishan. I chose a location well north of the city and also far away from the area where I had deposited Aragor's head several days ago. Harlan dismounted. I walked toward the gentle waters of the great bay until the low waves lapped onto my claws. Harlan lingered further up the beach. Even with my superior sight, there was only dark water out there. I stuck a claw into my jaw and bit until the tip of one of my teeth wedged through my scales, piercing the flesh beneath. I dipped my bloody claw into the water. The salt of the sea stung, but only for a moment. A wave, larger than the rest, crashed beneath me, splashing cold water over my neck. I backed out of the water and wiggled my body into the sand to wait. Harlan took a seat beside me. He kept digging into the sand, repeatedly running it through his fingers.\n\n\"You like the sand here? Is it good for magic?\" I asked him.\n\nHarlan let the grains pass through his fingers again. \"It's just sand, but everything has its use.\" He put some in the pocket of his tunic.\n\nI listen to the waves to pass the time. Some evening gulls hunted in the shallow water, their disembodied eyes glowing a dim scarlet. At first they avoided coming too close to me, but as the night wore on, they became bolder. I'd never eaten a gull. I worried they'd taste like chicken, but I wasn't so worried that I wouldn't give it a try. I rolled out in the comfy indentation I'd made in the beach, but when I scanned the sea for a nearby snack, not a single gull remained. The chilling call of a ghastray followed.\n\nI didn't see it at first, but the sound was unmistakable. No other creature produced such a horrible combination of moan and shriek. I walked toward the water, wary. This was still a ghastray. I'd killed more than my fair share and I'd given them a taste of dragon flesh. They might've enjoyed it\u2014we probably taste fantastic, because everything about dragons is fantastic.\n\nAn aberrant voice spoke from the waves. \"You are he.\"\n\nThe words were grabbled, even more difficult to understand than usual.\n\n\"Vengeance?\"\n\nThe noise that followed wasn't one made by human or dragon. It reminded me of ice being crushed underfoot. \"I am to speak to He. Are you He?\"\n\nI took that to mean this wasn't Vengeance. This ghastray sounded different, its harrowing voice even colder and more alien that its brethren. Also, its Avian was lousy. That made sense; Vengeance had been a slave. He'd had far more contact with humans than those of his kind who escaped that fate.\n\n\"I am he who gave you Drasu, I am he who gave you Aragor, the dragon.\"\n\n\"Then you are He Who Revealed the Return, yes?\"\n\nThis conversation was already getting tedious. I gave the answer the creature probably wanted. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then we offer this: The Purpose is remembered.\" A wave crashed into the beach. \"For now.\"\n\nI felt Harlan tense behind me. He wanted to speak. I poked him with my tail so that he would remain quiet\u2014this creature couldn't handle multiple voices. \"What is the Purpose?\"\n\nThe strange crunching sound resumed. I didn't really expect a reply. This one had even less to say than Vengeance. But it did finally speak again: \"None shall pass through the waters.\"\n\nI had begun to suspect this species learned to speak only to piss me off with their vague talk.\n\n\"Pass where? Do you mean the Tayo River?\"\n\n\"It is done. But this one\u2026the human.\" It screeched out the last word.\n\nHarlan took a tentative step toward the waves. I could still barely see the ghastray. It was shy compared to Vengeance. Harlan didn't seem as afraid as he should've been. \"I am the human.\"\n\n\"We\u2026remember the Purpose. Your kind must also remember. We are not slaves. Tell the other land walkers they are warned.\"\n\nThe ghastray's words were unclear; his intention was not.\n\n\"I will tell them,\" was all Harlan could offer.\n\nThe ghastray was silent, but still I sensed his presence, something uneasy in the ocean breeze. Again, it spoke. \"Dragon, seek your own Purpose.\"\n\nAnother wave broke onto the beach, its water rolling up the sand. It left an animal bone on the beach. A moment later everything felt different. Tension left my body.\n\n\"What is my Purpose?\"\n\nI asked the question, but I knew the ghastray had already gone, back to his dark cold waters. He had come to deliver his messages and they had been delivered. One part of his message was heartening: None shall pass. Despite being a bit vague, I took it as welcome news. I'd requested the Tayo River be protected, and it now seemed that the ghastrays agreed. Perhaps their assistance was not a one-time event. Perhaps the river was now their domain. That would explain the hollowings' retreat better than a single defeat in battle. The hollowings recognized the prowess of their horrific enemy. They might even understand the ghastray better than I did. But there was a catch.\n\n\"It seems they don't appreciate being tethered to the ships of Ni-Yota.\"\n\nHarlan grunted. \"Power and commerce flow from the speed of those craft. Legao warned me that it will not be easy to convince the people of Ni-Yota otherwise.\"\n\n\"Better that than lose their allies in a war for their very survival.\" I grunted with frustration. \"I do not understand humans.\"\n\nHarlan actually chuckled. \"You overthink us. We, too, are slaves: To the dark greed of our heart. Only very few of us manage to gain a degree of freedom from those shackles.\"\n\nI considered those words. The dragon I'd been when I came here from Rolm would've accepted them. But I knew the truth was more complicated. I still didn't understand humans. I didn't want to understand ghastrays.\n\n\"It is time to return. To deal with Gia and deliver the message of the ghastray.\"\n\nHarlan climbed onto my back. I beat my wings, headed back to the lake palace of Trishan. A difficult meeting with my sister awaited me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "A flickering light burned in Kiata's tower.\n\nWe arrived back at Trishan far later than I'd anticipated. The night was more than half over. I took it as an auspicious sign that Kiata had remained awake to wait for me. I really shouldn't have been so presumptuous.\n\nI wanted to speak to my sister without Harlan. \"I will leave you on the shore near the palace.\"\n\n\"I understand your desire for privacy, but if I may be the fish that wants to stay hooked, Kiata and I have had some good conversations in your absence. I suggest we land at her tower together. Let me first ensure she isn't going to eat you.\" I snorted my dislike of that idea, but Harlan didn't relent. \"Don't worry, I also know when to make for the open waters. Walking down some steps in the middle of the night won't kill me. Probably. But I really think I can help smooth things between you two. Trust me on this.\"\n\nI didn't answer immediately, but I did trust Harlan. He possessed a more delicate touch in conversations than I. After a few moments of circling over Trishan, I flew to Kiata's tower, landing softly on a stone balcony built for such a purpose. The twin dragon-sized doors leading inside were closed, but the same soft light visible through the tower's windows also crept through the slit beneath the doors. Since dragons didn't need light to see, I took the flame as an invitation.\n\nHarlan slid off my back. \"I'll give it a nice soft knock.\"\n\nThe reply came before he reached the doors. \"You may enter.\"\n\nKiata awaited us inside a chamber far more ornate than those favored by Aragor or even Elasu. Lush rugs of white bear skin covered all of the floor, while tapestries depicting various landscapes\u2014some familiar, some bizarre\u2014hung from the walls. Glittering pedestals of crystal circled the chamber. My sister sat nestled among her rugs, a square table of cream-stained wood before her. On it lay a great parchment and a ceramic bowl filled with a black goo that resembled ink, some of which also covered one of Kiata's claws.\n\n\"Is that a dragon you are drawing?\" I asked, astounded at the half-formed collection of lines. Did dragons create art?\n\nMy sister tilted her head as he evaluated her work. \"It is a picture of our mother. Well, almost. I am still learning.\"\n\n\"Our mother? But how can you \u2026\"\n\nKiata's eyes flashed a regret-tinged smile. \"It is how I imagine her, or I should wish to imagine her. That is the wonderful thing about drawing, I can create that which I desire. It is a form of magic.\"\n\nI looked again at what Kiata had drawn. The partial picture bore no superficial resemblance to our mother. Even allowing for the lack of color, the snout was too long, the jaw too narrow, the scales all wrong. But there was something in the eyes\u2014a noble sadness that did recall her.\n\n\"I'm not expert, but you have captured something \u2026\" I stared at the ink on my sister's claw. \"I didn't know dragons could make such things. In Rolm, this was unheard of.\"\n\nKiata dipped her black claw into a pot of clean water, polluting it with the ink residue. \"It was Harlan's idea. The ink does not stain our claws, for I do not wish to have black claws.\"\n\nAlways, it was Harlan. \"Our friend whose casual smirk hides the surprising depth of his knowledge and innovation.\"\n\nThe man himself shrugged. \"There was no special lore involved. I merely spoke to the curator of the Hall of Glass while he was overseeing its repairs. The palace is filled with works by dragons. Paintings, but also sculptures, magnificent works of glass wrought by both fire and claw. Aragor had many of them put away, out of sight. He did not care for the creations of other dragons in the past. But they are still in the archives beneath the Hall of Glass.\"\n\nI felt embarrassed at being so ignorant of my own kind, even if that mostly wasn't my fault. I hadn't exactly had a lot of leisure time since I'd arrived in Ni-Yota. \"I'm glad to see you adding to the works of our kind.\"\n\n\"This is nothing\u2014a sketch to pass the time, something to occupy me so I can keep my thoughts at bay.\"\n\n\"Which thoughts?\"\n\nKiata's eyes flashed. \"My anger at your betrayal. Your lies. Your condescension.\" She took a deep breath. \"To let emotion dominate, to cloud judgment, is not the Way. Still, actions must have consequences. That is proper. You have committed wrong against me, your sister.\"\n\nNo words of reply came to me. The cold pain in my hearts was too great. Harlan's silent footsteps retreated back toward the door, a coward making his exit as the battle was joined. I didn't really see what help he had been. I hoped it was a long, cold walk down to the ground.\n\nKiata noticed his attempt to leave. \"Harlan, we shall speak again later.\" I couldn't fail to notice how much warmer her voice was when she spoke to him. It was terribly unfair. Plenty of my treacherous ideas had come from Harlan's devious mind.\n\nI steadied myself beneath my sister's cross gaze. \"I'm sorry I deceived you. I did what I thought needed to be done.\"\n\nShe flicked her tail several times. \"If you had it do over again, would you once again lie to me?\"\n\nChicken piss. No easy questions were asked today. Answering the ghastray had been easier, and the stakes lower, than dealing with Kiata. I had come here to make amends, so my instinct was to tell her of course not. I even opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.\n\n\"What is it that you have to say? More cute words to please me?\" Her voice was level\u2014and that level was \"pissed-off.\" Way or not, Kiata was angry. It might not be the uncontrolled rage of a young human, but there was strong emotion within her.\n\nI tried a different tactic. \"I've changed since coming to Ni-Yota.\"\n\nShe answered with ice. \"You lied less in Rolm?\"\n\nActually, no. I'd been lying since I was granted the free will to do so. It had all been necessary, of course, but I didn't think I currently had a sympathetic audience for my excuses.\n\n\"I lied in Rolm, for the purpose of freeing our kind. I lied to you because I deemed it necessary to fight a greater threat. Without the ghastrays to aid us, the hollowings would've crossed the river, Ni-Yota would've fallen, leading to an even worse fate for the world.\" I swallowed hard. \"To answer your questions: I would do it again.\"\n\nI could hear the air Kiata blew from her flaring nostrils. Even though she wasn't a fire breather (for which I was currently thankful) I could feel the heat of her breath. \"At least you have told me one truth this night.\"\n\n\"I cannot fix the past. That bitter vegetable has already been consumed. I can only try to choose better in the future.\"\n\n\"You said you came here to Ni-Yota to save me. Has that changed as well?\"\n\nMy sister should be a teacher\u2014one for errant dragons who needed to be punished\u2014because her questions were impossible and unfair. I looked at the table again, at Kiata's incomplete rendering of our mother. \"You captured a bit of mother in that drawing. It looks nothing like her, but even so, even without having laid eyes upon her since your first days as a hatchling, you caught some of the essence of her. How did you did that?\"\n\n\"I sense you wish to tell me.\"\n\nI ignored her hostility. \"Because that same metal that she had is in you too. You drew eyes, heavy with regret. I remember those eyes as well. I think our mother had them because she felt regret with choices that had to be made, even if her Way compelled them. Our mother cared about something more than herself, she made terrible decisions. That strength is within you, or else you'd not have been able to render such a work without ever seeing our mother but for a few precious days before the humans came.\" I raised my head toward her again. \"To my surprise, I've come to suspect some of this strength from our mother is within me, as well. Somehow, her quest is becoming mine.\" I readied myself to answer Kiata's question. The hard part. \"It's true I came here originally to find you, to save you. But you already did that by yourself. You have your own mind. I'm no longer here for that.\"\n\n\"Why are you here, then?\" Kiata sounded slightly less hostile.\n\nIt wasn't an easy question. I still didn't completely know the answer, but I tried my best. \"Those that I care about are here.\"\n\nKiata sniffed with disapproval.\n\n\"I know, it is not the Way of Dragons to make decisions based on emotion. I do not stay only for that. I sense the greater threat that is the rust, just as I believe our mother once did. It is vast and still unknown to me, but in my hearts, I know that it will envelope this land, just as it did Illium.\"\n\nThe spikes on Kiata's still-soft mane twitched as she digested my words. \"Why should that matter to you? You are free. You seem to think I no longer need you. Why risk your life fighting behemoths and befriending the creatures you call ghastrays? What now drives you if not my interests or your own?\"\n\nI knew that question was coming, and I dreaded it. \"I don't know.\" I said it, but I didn't like the answer, and it wasn't the whole truth. When I spoke again, it was in a voice that was not quite my own. \"There is something within me\u2026I feel a need to fight against this. It is the purpose within me. Within us. We are connected to the greater whole of existence, as are all living things. But we dragons, and we ember dragons in particular, most of all.\"\n\nSome of the angry tension faded from Kiata face, replaced by relief, even happiness. \"You have sensed the Latticework!\"\n\nI was shocked. \"Already you perceive it?'\n\n\"Bayloo, I was born to this, as were you. It has always been a part of me. We are connected to the fabric of existence. We must find our Way, to be a part of it. If yours is to protect that very existence\u2026perhaps that is your Way.\"\n\nThe notion that I had a unique place even among dragons when it came to the rust unnerved me. \"There is also the matter of our fellow dragons, who are slaves in Rolm. They are a part of this, and I shall not forget them. Mother sought my freedom for a greater purpose. Something connected to the rust\u2026I do not know what, but I must find out. And doing that requires me to do things I do not wish to do, to those I care about. Even though it is very human of me, I am sorry for the pain I inflicted.\"\n\nFor a precious moment, I thought Kiata understood. Then her gaze sharpened. Her eyes widened in alarm. She roared.\n\n\"Gia, noooo\u2014\"\n\nGia?\n\nFire erupted along my mane and backside, bathing me in an inferno of petty hate. Kiata's table and the drawing of our mother turned to ash before my eyes. I shot upward toward the open space in the attic over Kiata's chamber. Even there, I had limited room to maneuver, but my position forced Gia to venture in through the doors of the tower to keep his fire on me. Finally, the flames ceased. I looked around. These were tight quarters\u2014a bad place for me to do battle with a dragon who was larger and stronger than I. Gia advanced toward me, as angry as I've ever seen him.\n\nKiata roared at him. \"Gia, what are you doing here?\"\n\nGia had eyes only for me. \"I see you, spinner of clever lies. I see what you are.\" The dragon's eyes smoldered. \"You shall not destroy Ni-Yota.\"\n\nKiata roared again. \"Gia, this is my brother. Fire is not the answer.\"\n\nThe giant dragon still didn't look at her. He was here for me. \"The deceiver seeks to ensnare you in his web of lies. His magic addles the mind of the people, of you even, dear Kiata. In time you will understand this.\"\n\nI snorted at him without fear. \"You are haunted by delusion. I'm not the source of that.\"\n\n\"Did I imagine the tigris assassin in my tower, this very night?\"\n\n\"Gia, I\u2014\"\n\nHis fire interrupted me. I leapt to a different wall, but there wasn't any place to escape his attack. Heat covered me, mostly deflected and absorbed by my scales, but not all. Being bathed in flame hurt, but the worst part was that the heat made my scales brittle, further adding to my disadvantage if I had to engage Gia in close combat. I didn't want to do that. Gia was bigger and stronger. But I couldn't keep taking his fire in close quarters like this. I was about to charge him when Kiata placed herself in the path of Gia's fire.\n\nI called to her. \"Kiata, no\u2014your scales aren't strong enough.\"\n\nMy sister knew that as well, as did Gia. His flame cut off abruptly. He wasn't completely out of control.\n\n\"I know you think him kin, Kiata, but it is not so. He's like Elasu, inside he has given over to the darkness which he claims to fight. It is all but a lie.\"\n\nI growled at him. \"I killed Elasu, you giant oaf.\"\n\nGia's roar shook the tower. \"You took her place. Her dark powers are yours, as are her dreams of taking Ni-Yota. Even her servants are now yours, or perhaps you are the servant of the darkness that ruled her.\"\n\nNow he had pissed me off. \"I serve no one.\"\n\nA snort of contempt. \"You have the runes on your chest still. The runes of a slave. All this time, the truth stared us in the face. But finally I understand what must be done. Haven has shown me the way.\"\n\nGia launched himself at me, swerving at the last possible moment to avoid crushing Kiata. That gave me plenty of time to evade his clumsy assault. Folding my wings upward, I dropped beneath Gia. That gave him an advantageous attack position to slam me from above or bathe me in fire again if I didn't act fast. I needed to either engage him or flee. Kiata would want me to flee, but I wasn't done with Gia. He'd tried to kill me at least twice. His mind was failing him. The next time he might come with an army, or when I was in an even worse position. Time to finish this.\n\nHarlan's arrival changed my decision. He appeared at the doorway, out of breath, his hands clutched into fists.\n\n\"Bayloo, let's go.\"\n\nThere wasn't any time to think. Gia's roar tore through the tower at me as I hurled myself at the doorway with a mixture of leg strength and awkward wing power. Harlan positioned himself as if he intended to leap onto my back. No way we had time for that. Gia would crush us both if I slowed. He knew that. Harlan took a step further into the tower then tossed the two fistfuls of the gray sand in the air. I guessed it was the same sand he'd taken from the beach with the ghastray. The tiny crystals glowed red with heat. At the same moment, a fortuitous gust of wind burst into the tower. The gust caught the sand at precisely the correct moment, dispersing the grains wide and hard\u2014right into Gia's face. It happened faster than his lids could react. Gia flew uncontrolled into the floor, foreclaws over his eyes.\n\n\"Neat trick,\" I said to Harlan as he climbed onto my back.\n\n\"Let's discuss it away from Trishan.\"\n\nHarlan's advice was sound. I beat my wings, soaring into the night, unsure of my destination. I expected pursuit shortly. \"Even for Gia that attack was\u2026unexpectedly direct.\"\n\nHarlan sounded grim. \"We beat the hollowings at the river, but Ni-Yota has many enemies. And they aren't going to give up.\"\n\n\"Then let us destroy them.\"\n\n\"We must understand our adversary first. That cannot be done with fire, nor even with magic, Bayloo. Until we know the menace we face, there can be no hope of victory.\"\n\n\"I know where to find answers,\" I told him.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"We have merely to follow my mother's path. We need to know what she knew, to understand the truth of the enemy we face. I think it is more vast and even darker than we suspect. But that is the path that took her eventually to Rolm, to freeing me, and to the precious aurathorn, which we both seek.\"\n\nI didn't wait for Harlan to agree. I already knew he would. If I could leave Rinxia and Kiata to do this, Harlan could put everything else on hold as well. Rinxia had her Way and I had mine.\n\nI turned west, to Illium, to find the so-called Archive of Oracles, and there to learn the secrets that had sent my mother to Rolm."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "We escaped to the west.\n\nI looked behind me as I flew away from Trishan, expecting to see Gia's dark silhouette against the brightening sky of the coming dawn. But in the east was just a horizon, just another sunrise. The landscape below was still, as if frozen, and disconcertingly peaceful. The inhabitants of Ni-Yota were just beginning to stir as the new light called them to another day, blissfully unaware of the dragon over their heads.\n\n\"Gia did not seem in the mood to relent. Why does he not come after us?\" I asked Harlan. \"I am slower carrying you. He might have a chance to catch me.\"\n\n\"Perhaps your sister stayed his anger.\"\n\nOh, Kiata. If there was a bright part of Gia attacking me, it had allowed my sister to see the menace that lived within the black dragon who had served as her guardian. I hoped her eyes could persuade her to be wary of him in a way that my words never would. Or would it be the opposite? Would she believe Gia's increasingly mad ravings that I was in league with Elasu? Gia's accusation that I was still a slave particularly grated upon me. But I also understood where his delusion originated. Slavery had been Elasu's fate, and I pitied her for it. It was not me.\n\nHarlan seemed far less worried about Gia than I. His heart beat normally. He might even have been enjoying himself up on my back. \"Do you think Gia has finally gone mad?\"\n\n\"Who are we to say what is madness, my friend? We fly across Ni-Yota, across the cursed land of Illium, in search of a place more myth than real. Gia attacking you may not mean his mind has failed him. It may be that he has succumbed to his fears\u2014he wants something so badly he sees threats in the shadows.\"\n\n\"For the hundredth time, I don't want to be Protector of Ni-Yota. It's a worse job than chicken coop cleaner, with a shorter life expectancy. I hope that someone will finally take me at my word at this.\"\n\n\"Gia does not hear your words; he fears your actions. With every success you achieve, with every person who cheers your name, he feels he becomes less, regardless of whether you covet something as he does. Then there is the matter of the tigris attempting to kill him. That may, indeed, have been real. He sees your hand\u2014claw\u2014in that. You were with Elasu for a time. He might think you forged a bond with her tigris as well. Perhaps this is even their work. Ni-Yota has many enemies.\"\n\nI snorted as I thought of the giant cats who'd taken me prisoner, muzzled me, tricked me. \"They have some kind of magic, those beasts. They made even Elasu their slave, although I never saw them use their power, even when they faced Aragor in battle. I will admit they are able fighters, but they did not have the strength to defeat Aragor directly, even with Elasu.\"\n\nHarlan was about to answer when I hit a patch of rough wind, forcing me to adjust to a higher altitude. \"Not too cold?\"\n\n\"It's fine. You're rather warm. It is quite cozy up here, actually.\" He chuckled, then quieted quickly.\n\n\"You were about to speak of the tigris, I think.\"\n\nHarlan grimaced. \"I asked about them during the time you left me at the palace. Their story is a strange one. Throughout the long history of Ni-Yota these creatures existed only in fantastic stories, as creatures of myth who appear to serve justice for the downtrodden or to act as protectors emerging for a single battle, only to disappear again. They are the kind of stories that no one truly believes, but repeat because they make them feel better about an unseen justice watching over the world. Until one day, when the kingdom's peril is at its height, the tigris suddenly appear in the flesh to bolster the claim of a pretender.\"\n\n\"I told you, Elasu was their slave. She had the runes of control carved into her. If that magic worked as it did in Rolm, somewhere, one of those overgrown cats had connected markings. Elasu had always been always their slave.\" I looked down at my own ugly markings. \"I do not believe the tigris emerged from their dark forest because of the Schism. I think they were the cause of it to begin with. Elasu acted at their behest. The young dragon Windlore who was killed in the tower I once inhabited in Changsha must've discovered that, so they murdered him as well. I found the claw marks on the stone. And all those events\u2014the emergence of the tigris and the Schism\u2014coincide with the hollowing invasion. I do not believe in coincidence. It may be that these many battles were somehow connected to the other.\"\n\n\"You believe the tigris to be allied with the hollowings?\" Harlan asked, seemingly surprised at the notion.\n\nI had wondered that myself. \"If they are, I do not see how. The rust and the hollowings\u2026it seems difficult to believe they are aligned with anything as mundane and alive as the tigris.\"\n\n\"Aye, the giant cats, they are like predators. They want something. But the hollowings\u2026they are like a great storm. A thing apart from the living, yet giant and terrifying. I prefer to face the tigris, for at least they are flesh.\"\n\nI wouldn't mind killing some tigris. I'd never liked them\u2014any of them. But I had a feeling learning their secrets would be more important than defeating them in battle. \"Let us hope there is some lore that tells of the giant cats at this archive as well.\"\n\nI turned toward the north coast of Ni-Yota, flying along a path on the Ni-Yota side of the Tayo River. For the rest of the day we flew, sometimes speaking but mostly in silence. I landed near a small fishing village, where Harlan bought both fresh fish to fill our stomachs and several smoked ones he kept in his pack for the journey ahead. I stayed on the outskirts, in the fields, to avoid alarming anyone, but to my surprise, a group of nearly ten humans approached me anyway, following in Harlan's wake. There were human children among the group, their heads too large for their boney bodies, their eyes wide as they looked at me. I drew myself upright, puzzled. I expected humans would keep their distance from a strange dragon, but Ni-Yota was a different land than Rolm. My kind was revered rather than feared here.\n\nThe oldest among the arrivals had hair the color of grey ash and skin like a raisin. \"Welcome, Bayloo the Chosen.\" He fell to his knees. The others did the same, pulling the children in their midst down to the field with them. The scene made me think of Prince Dayne. His covetous heart would've taken pleasure at this sight of people kneeling. It just made my neck twist even more awkwardly to look at them.\n\n\"Rise, all of you. You owe me no homage, no fealty.\"\n\nThey got up, but not because they wished it, but because I'd asked it. Still, if I had to speak to humans, I preferred to speak to ones who weren't on their knees.\n\n\"You honor us by coming to us here,\" the old leader said. \"It has been many years since one of the winged lords visited our village. That was before the war. The children have never seen one of you. They thought the great dragon protectors only stories told by old men like me.\" He managed a smile, showing a mouth with no more than seven or eight teeth inside. \"I am Li, elder of the village.\" He motioned to one of the boys, as gaunt a specimen as I'd seen. No one was going to bother eating him. \"Might young Eral have your blessing?\"\n\nI didn't get it. My what?\n\nAt the urging of the Elder Li, the stickish boy moved forward, his eyes downcast. Each hand grabbed the elbow of the opposite arm. I noticed one of the boy's hands was more clubish than usual for a human, the fingers having grown together in a single mass.\n\nHarlan whispered to me. \"He wants to touch your scales. He believes that it would heal his hand.\"\n\n\"Is there something wrong with his hand?\" I asked loudly (I don't really whisper well). \"It's different than some humans, but it could be useful in a fight.\"\n\nElder Li looked horrified. Harlan chimed in again. \"They are fishermen, not brawlers.\"\n\nI understood. Fingers were probably better for fishing. Unfortunately, I didn't really see what I could do about it. Touching my scales wasn't going to make that boy grow fingers. Even if I knew how to heal, this human's hand wasn't an injury. It was part of him.\n\n\"May he approach?\" the elder asked.\n\nIt seemed I was to disappoint yet another person. \"Come, if it matters to you.\"\n\nElder Li nearly shoved the young Eral into me. Only when the boy stood beneath my shadow did he finally look up. His legs shook.\n\n\"Touch him with your deformed hand and receive the dragon lord's blessing. See if the chosen of the Light of Haven deems you worthy of being healed.\"\n\nThe boy laid his trembling club-hand upon my chest. Nothing happened. Water brimmed in his cavernous eyes and in that moment I actually felt pity for the little human. Water began leaking from his eyes in tiny drops. Humans do leak sometimes.\n\n\"Look upon my chest, young Eral,\" I told him.\n\nThe shock of my speech made his eyes widen. His chin dropped.\n\n\"Look at the brutal carvings made upon my scales made by evil sculptors from long ago, wielders of a stolen magic.\"\n\nThe boy didn't look. He kept his neck craned upwards. I'm not even sure if he understood Avian. I told my story anyway.\n\n\"I was born on an isle of lost dragons, taken as a slave before I had anything to remember of the place of my birth. For decades I was held, used as a weapon, accorded about as much respect as a sword. I was useful only for my killing, and I was to be used by my masters until I broke. A chance came to me\u2014an opportunity to live a different life. I chose to be free, no matter the cost. Perhaps there was a reason for that. I came here, and perhaps there was a reason for that as well.\" I reached for his head with my foreclaw and pointed the boy's gently toward that which I wished him to see\u2014my runes. \"These markings are a part of who I am. They aren't beautiful. They make me different than any other living dragon in Ni-Yota. Yet I would not change them even if I could.\"\n\nEral seemed to shake a bit less.\n\n\"Your birth is not your destiny. You require no healing from me or any other. Once you accept who you are, you are already healed. Your destiny is yours to make.\"\n\nI left the child with those words.\n\n\"That was handled well,\" Harlan told me as we resumed our flight.\n\n\"You don't need to sound so surprised.\"\n\n\"You've changed, if you don't mind my saying.\"\n\nI snorted with derision. I hadn't changed. I was just never meant to be a slave. Now, I just needed to discover what I was meant to become. I flew faster, so fast the wind screamed off my back. Speed was better than talking to Harlan more on this subject.\n\nWhile daylight reigned, I made the most of it. I beat my wings, propelling us along the rocky coast of northern Ni-Yota. The Tayo River terminated in a great delta dotted with patches of grass-covered land surrounded by murky, almost still water. I saw no signs of men or any other creature of note, including hollowings. Further west were rugged mountains that hugged the River Tayo, the wide waters and the peaks impassable to men or beast. Beyond the river, the Mizu lands ended and Illium began.\n\nI made for the open sea rather than fly across the river itself. Only once I had left the land behind did I turn full west, passing an invisible line into Illium's waters. I waited for something terrible to mark my passage\u2014a clap of thunder, the sudden appearance of a flock of blood raptors, a dark cloud\u2014but there was nothing.\n\nDay fell to night, as each of them always do. Inevitably, my wings began to ache, followed by a low burn in the muscles of my chest. I pushed onward, flying over the water but always keeping the coast within sight. I wanted to cover as much distance as possible, but even I must rest. Twilight filled to the sky.\n\n\"Harlan, I've seen nothing but heaving waves in the water since we crossed the border. Have you some sailors' trick to find a patch of land in your vast sea?\"\n\n\"As you mention it, yes, but it only works when I ride upon the waves. There must be a physical connection to the water, but before you go drop me into the sea, I need to tell you that it's not as effective as just having an uninterrupted view from up here. I too have spotted nothing but some barren spikes of rock in the shallow of the beaches, none big enough to fit a horse, much less a dragon.\"\n\n\"When the veil of darkness falls, I will turn inland. I cannot fly much farther without injuring myself.\"\n\nThe night came, forcing me to fly to Illium. The land there was flat and dead, its surface mostly covered by tenacious weeds and the strange rust that reminded me of dead, spoiled algae baked by the sun. I dropped my altitude to confirm nothing hid within the thick patches or even beneath the layer of taint upon the land. I saw nothing. I smelled nothing alive, only the sickly-sweet odor of the rust.\n\nHarlan couldn't see as well as I in the dark, but he could see enough. \"Is there any place clear of the filth?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHarlan let go of an uneven breath. \"Then we must camp on a narrow beach, where the sea washes the taint from the sand.\" By his tone, he was hoping I had an alternative. I didn't.\n\nI agreed with him. \"Better to risk the dangers of the coast than spend a night atop the rust.\"\n\n\"Spoken like someone who has never spent a night at sea.\"\n\nHarlan was correct, and his tone dubious, but I had to land somewhere soon. I returned to shore, searching for a decently wide stretch of beach. Harlan stopped me as I went to land.\n\n\"Not here. The water is too deep.\"\n\nI disagreed. \"It's shallow. Too shallow for a leviathan. I may not be a sailor, but I'm not a fool. As for the ghastrays\u2026they seem to have taken our side.\"\n\n\"The water is shallow, but only close to shore. Leviathans prefer the deep, but they'll shove themselves through the shallows if it suits them or if they are hungry enough. Besides, the sea holds more dangers than leviathans and ghastrays. These waters are cold enough for nightcrawlers.\"\n\nRather than argue, I found a different beach that met with Harlan's grudging approval. It was a pathetic stretch of sand, backed by jagged boulders, abused by the sea over countless years. But it was free from the taint that infested the land beyond the near shore.\n\nHarlan climbed off my back. He first inspected the sand, letting the particles run through his fingers, then he waded closer to the sea, stopping where the waves climbed on the beach. He placed a finger onto the wet sand, letting the sea's dark water come to him. Three waves crashed into the shore as he just sat there, crouched in the dirt. There were any number of comments I might have made, but I was exhausted and I got the impression Harlan actually had some purpose. When he finally finished with the water, he climbed upon a nearby rock. From atop the mound, he spoke like some prophet of the sea.\n\n\"The tide will come well before daylight returns. When it does, the waves will reach well over these rocks. This whole beach will be underwater. That is the reason it is free of rust. The sea comes frequently to cleanse this place.\"\n\nIt wasn't what I wanted to hear. \"I need not sleep long or deep. So long as I rest my wings and eat, it will be sufficient.\"\n\nSo we ate smoked fish, mostly in silence. Harlan had the impressive ability to place an entire hunk of fish in his mouth then spit out the fleshless bones a few moments later. I just ate it all, although fish bones can be a bit sharp, even for a dragon.\n\n\"Do you wish me to take first watch?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sleep, Harlan. You humans need far more of it at regular intervals than do my kind. It may be that alertness is needed later in our journey.\"\n\n\"Do you mind if I \u2026\" He indicated toward my belly. \"It's cold. You're warm.\"\n\n\"You wish to mate with me?\"\n\nHarlan raised his brows. \"Not so much, but I'll do what I must to keep warm.\"\n\nI snorted but I didn't refuse him (the warmth, that is). Of course, the human snored. I tried to concentrate on the waves to tune out the horrible ruckus coming from Harlan's nostrils, but without complete success. It was remarkable that human couples willingly chose to cohabitate. Harlan's wife might miss him, but she was probably sleeping better.\n\nHarlan awoke in the middle of the night, as if he had a sense of such things the way we dragons do. Rima had appeared at that moment, a shattered moon over a shattered land. Harlan took a long gaze at the sea, perhaps seeing something in the faintly reflecting light that even I could not, before he turned to me.\n\n\"I knew you wouldn't sleep. The turmoil of the waves grows. Soon enough, water will lap at our feet, and I think we'll have a storm tomorrow. I'll keep watch. Take this time to rest.\"\n\nI should've just done that. Instead, I asked a question. \"You've not spoken of your quest since the destruction of that bit of aurathorn and the death of Aragor.\"\n\nI watched Harlan's face grow tense. It was rare for him to show emotion. Perhaps he let his guard down in the darkness. Or this question truly bothered him.\n\n\"I haven't spoken of it to you, that's true.\"\n\nHad he discussed it with someone else?\n\n\"Will you return to your wife without it, then?\"\n\n\"No, I will find aurathorn.\"\n\n\"There is no more here. The plant is extinct from Ni-Yota. Rinxia said as much. My mother thought the same.\"\n\nHarlan shut his eyes as he drew a long breath. When his lids opened again, his expression was at peace. \"It is still out there, somewhere. When you have been searching for something as long and hard as I have, you form a bond with it. Aurathron is woven into the fabric of the world. I would know if it was truly gone.\" He smirked, although I couldn't tell if his confidence was true or a ruse.\n\n\"I believe it still exists, on the other side of the Wall of Fire.\"\n\nI expected more of a reaction that I got. Harlan must have been excellent at bluffing in his card games. \"Why do you think that?\"\n\n\"A human told me. But it must be so. My mother journeyed to Rolm to free me using aurathorn. She did not bring it from Ni-Yota. It is still there, somewhere.\"\n\n\"Then why do you fly west rather than east?\" Harlan kept his tone flat, but I knew him well enough to know he was anxious.\n\n\"To find aurathorn, before she traversed the Wall of Fire, she came to this archive. She was seeking something. Knowledge that is connected to the rust. Knowledge we must have to beat the rust, and free my kind. At least, that is what I believe.\"\n\nHarlan was quiet for a time before we spoke once again in a low, near whispered tone. \"A quest is more than going to a place to find an object. Aurathorn is not something that can merely be found and dug up like gold or gems. It is ancient, a relic from days of the Cataclysm that still clings to existence in a world it does not belong. It is powerful. To find such an object, one must revere it and understand it. I have always known that I would find it, but only once I was ready to do so.\"\n\n\"That is wise,\" I told Harlan.\n\nHe chuckled more easily than I would have in his place. \"It is particularly wise since there isn't any way back to Ni-Yota except on your back, much less across the Wall of Fire.\"\n\n\"Sleep while you can, Harlan Dor. Your quest is far from over, as is mine. Tomorrow will doubtless bring another chance to gain knowledge, and also a chance to die along the way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Water woke me.\n\nIt was the cold, unwelcoming water of the sea. The tide had decided my rest was at an end. The sun had not yet risen. The air swirled with an angry chill.\n\nI got to my feet, stretching my neck and sniffing the air. My nose told me that Harlan had been correct in predicting a forthcoming storm. I flew quickly to get ahead of it. That didn't work.\n\nWhen the morning light arrived, it revealed a cloud wall of ominous darkness to the north. Lightning flashed in the belly of the system, as if the coming torrent were hungry. Perhaps it was.\n\nI flew as far as I was able, but I'm not faster than a lightning storm. The dark, laden clouds took position above me before the morning was old. The tempest began its tantrum with a hard, diving rain, the drops coming like projectiles. Harlan's grip tightened. The wind picked up.\n\n\"Use both arms to grab me. Pretend I'm your wife.\"\n\n\"You don't want me doing that, dragon or not. Don't worry\u2014this isn't my first storm.\"\n\nThe sky heard the challenge. It answered with gashes of light that singed the air. The clouds were too thick to attempt to rise above the storm. Instead, I was forced to a lower altitude, where the wind swirled with a terrible confusion, its gusts switching direction like a lost child. The sea nearly matched the anger of the storm above it, the waves lurching to heights as they battered the shore. I scanned the land, but saw no place where I might take shelter along the devastated, rust-coated flatlands. So I continued to fly, as if that was my choice.\n\nA curtain of hard water surged toward me, carried on furious gusts. The sky had its way with me, pushing me downward and in any other direction its mood required. To fight would've been futile. I worried for Harlan, but I need not have bothered.\n\n\"Eat the storm, Bayoo! Devour its winds!\" He sounded to be on the edge of madness, but joyous at dancing on that edge.\n\nI didn't share the sailor's delight. This was perhaps the mightiest torrent I could remember, and the seas around Rolm could conjure mighty gusts in the winter. There, I would've sought shelter. In Illium, the land itself might well be poisoned. But even with the rust, I was about to turn inland in search of shelter or better weather when something unexpected in the sea drew my attention: a ship. Or part of one. The construction appeared to be some kind of hybrid between a raft and a sea-faring vessel, with a low bow but twin hulls.\n\nI called behind me. \"Look there, off the shore ahead, caught in high waves.\"\n\nHarlan didn't answer immediately, but I knew his sharp eyes would quickly locate the strange vessel. I wasn't wrong. \"It looks some kind of outrigger, like those used on the Kanal Islands, except larger. It runs low in the water.\"\n\n\"It has been battered,\" I observed.\n\nI dropped closer to the water. I knew Harlan's eyes were still fixed on the craft. \"I see no sign of splintered masts. This vessel may not have them, or they hadn't been attached yet. Her timber is fresh. I think she's a babe of a vessel, washed out to sea before she was ready.\"\n\n\"A new ship? Who would be building\u2026\" I didn't need to finish my sentence. \"Rinxia told me she'd followed a well-maintained road to a port of some kind on the north shore of Illium. But she saw no signs of a ship.\" But she also said that blood raptors had harassed and delayed her. Was this what the hollowings were hiding?\n\nI came even closer, flying a tight circle around the debris. I had sharper sight than Harlan, but he knew ships and the sea far better. Still, it took me only a few moments to realize he'd been correct about the recent construction of the ship. Its battered hull was free of barnacles or the regular wear of a veteran vessel.\n\n\"Long and narrow,\" Harlan commented, more to himself than me. \"Couldn't carry much cargo in that shallow hull, and she doesn't seem fitted to carry ballistae, so neither a trader nor a warship. She's built for speed.\"\n\n\"A scout?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Harlan didn't sound convinced.\n\nAnother gust hit, spraying drops of seawater high enough to graze my belly.\n\nHarlan tapped his hand against the scales of my back. \"Nothing more to see here. Let's see if her shipyard is further up the coast.\"\n\nThe storm came at me even harder as I pressed forward. My wing muscles burned as if I'd been flying for a full day without rest, rather than a single morning. Not that there was much evidence in the sky that it was morning\u2014only gloom punctuated by echoing thunder. It was as if the wind tried to hold me back. It couldn't, of course. I located the strange port that must have been the same one that Rinxia had described, not far beyond the derelict ship. I saw the buildings Rinxia described, all well-maintained and mostly free from the rust, as if they'd been recently constructed. The road that led to the coast from Illium's interior was similarly maintained and also completely empty.\n\n\"Those warehouses are big enough for a dragon,\" Harlan suggested as I flew over the deserted port. \"Can you get a bit closer?\"\n\nInstead of answering, I got closer, dropping my altitude.\n\n\"No need to slow down,\" Harlan assured me. \"I just need a better look at the buildings near the quay.\"\n\nI obliged, passing low over the rain-soaked port. There were no homes, and the only roads led between the large wood structures, their roofs titled and downward-sloping to protect against water accumulation. Nothing stirred as I flew past.\n\nHarlan apparently got a pretty good look, despite the rain. \"I think two of the buildings are built over the water. They are hiding slips for vessels beneath the roof. The water-facing side can open to allow a ship to depart. I think this place could be some kind of shipyard.\"\n\n\"The hollowings seek to hide their activities. That is new for them. Do they seek to sail an armada to Ni-Yota?\"\n\nHarlan made a grunting noise. \"Two ship slips isn't a fleet. Those ships couldn't possibly match the Mizu navy, not to mention deal with fire breathing dragons.\"\n\n\"There may be more such places as we travel the coast. Rinxia scouted only a small portion of Illium.\"\n\nHarlan didn't seem convinced. \"We shall see. Fly on, Bayloo.\"\n\nHe made it sound so easy, but Harlan wasn't the one pushing against the wind while carrying a noisy, hairy human on his back. I pushed into the formidable wind, still flying along the coast. Heavy gusts continued to come at us from the north, but as the day passed, so did the worst of the storm's anger. My speed increased as the rain and wind relented. By the early afternoon I had put the storm behind us. Clear skies had returned, but I was sufficiently exhausted that continuing much further wasn't an option.\n\nI landed on a cluster of craggy rocks just off the coast that were high enough to avoid most of the waves that crashed below. Harlan sucked in long, deep breaths.\n\n\"You snort the salt air with such relish, as if it was the steam of a roasted pig.\" I observed.\n\n\"It's the smell of my youth, my life. My first memory isn't the sound of my mother's voice\u2014it's the knocking of the waves against the hull of our cabin on our ship. The sea put me to sleep every night and woke me each morning. I fell in love with the noises of the water in the background, like music in a fine concert. But always there is the scent of the sea. There is nothing else like it. When I suck in the salt, all that I miss flashes before me. The best memories are linked to smell.\"\n\n\"As I said, you treat it like it's the steam of a roasted pig.\"\n\n\"You play the innocent, Bayloo, but you hide something deeper within you.\" I couldn't see Harlan on my back, but I imagined his dark brow furrowing. \"I understand you better than you think. You know, I once thought I desired only the sea, a ship of my own, and a full belly.\"\n\n\"That sounds rather pleasing, except the sea and the ship.\"\n\nHe answered me with a single barked laugh. \"Too simple. To live that life wouldn't be living at all compared to what I know now. The world opened my eyes. I heard the stories of my people. I began to see hints of the truth, in their rememberings, in the places I visited\u2014the wall of an ancient fortress still standing, its structure stronger than the hardest steel. In a market I've seen a forgotten artifact of the Cataclysm, its surface so smooth and shining one cannot look on it for more than a few moments; In the depth of night in the deepest waters, I've seen creatures that glow like the sun beneath the waves, humming a tune so soothing I thought I was dreaming. Then I met my wife, and she opened my mind as the world had opened my eyes. She taught me to think about what I saw, rather than stop at mere amazement. Suddenly, I realized that all that I'd seen hinted at the greatest tale of all, a puzzle to be solved. There is something that ties it all together, the past, the present, and perhaps the future.\" Harlan's voice grew thick as he spoke. \"Finally, reluctantly, I accepted that I had a part to play in what would unfold, this great tapestry of a story for all the inhabitants of our world.\"\n\n\"You'd live a longer life with your wife on a ship in calm seas.\"\n\n\"You cannot unsee what you have seen, Bayloo. You and I are not traveling such different paths. We're going to the same place. I've had longer to accept it, but you are catching up quickly. Or else you would not be here.\"\n\nI held my contemptuous snort, because the fact was, I was indeed here, tenuously perched on some rocks on the shore of hollowing-infested Illium, listening to fish-stories from a human, while my sister was back in Trishan and the rest of my kind were still slaves in Rolm. Some of what Harlan said rang true, but I was too tired for self-inflection. And he didn't understand me as well as he thought.\n\n\"Dragons are not humans, Harlan Dor.\" A truth sprung to my mind unbidden. \"We were created differently. Our destiny is not yours. This all may be part of one great tapestry of a story, as you say, but do not suppose our roles or our endings are the same.\"\n\nHarlan was wise enough not to press me further. He gave me time to rest. I ate another smoked fish and counted the waves, letting my mind wander. Harlan grew bored, removed his shoes, and climbed down to a precarious perch just above the tidal line. I don't know how long he stared at the water. I thought perhaps it spoke to him, that he was meditating in some way. Then, as quick as viper, his arm shot into the water and pulled out a long, silver-scaled fish, its tail wriggling, furious at being snared in such a manner. Harlan tossed his catch over his head without even looking at me. I obligingly scoped it out of the air with my mouth, swallowing the fish whole.\n\nI belched my appreciation.\n\nHarlan climbed onto my back and we resumed our journey. For two days and nights we hugged the coast, resting on rocks, sleeping on the edge of the sand. We shared watches. I slept little, and poorly. The sense of wrongness in this land pervaded the air. Even the beach, mostly free of the rusted taint, made me feel uneasy. But at least we could rest beside the relative safety of the sea.\n\nThat was about to change. A great scar on the land\u2014a ditch that looked like a huge claw from Haven had reached down and pulled a chunk of ground out sometime in the distant past\u2014marked the end of the first part of our journey.\n\n\"Rinxia told me of this place\u2014the Wound of the North. The people of Illium, the real ones who lived before they became hollowing, believed that this was the place where the rulers of Haven had reached down to strike Yanis, one of the great enemies of humanity.\"\n\n\"I've seen similar formations. Different lands explain these places differently, but all seem to agree they were made by some great power from the sky.\"\n\nI slowed to a glide, gazing at the sheer rock walls of the massive hole. It was large enough and deep enough to fit a thousand Trishans. No human nor dragon could've made such a thing, even if they'd ever had a desire to do so. That meant something else had. I didn't really care who, or what, at the moment. This was merely a landmark to me.\n\n\"According to Rinxia and the old maps, it will take another week to continue along the coast, passing through an area of permafrost with terrible blizzards and no food. The people of Illium referred to this area as the Stormlands. Even for dragons, these blizzards are dangerous. For humans, they are deadly. Nor do we have the time or supplies to dare that route.\"\n\nHarlan knew what was coming. \"It is time to cross into the wasteland of Illium.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The waste beckoned.\n\nRefreshed by a bit of sleep and a bit of food (although smoked fish had become tiring), I faced the most daunting portion of our trip with the renewed determination that comes with terrible fear: I didn't want to land in Illium. Much of the ground was infected with the rust and there were hollowings lurking\u2014and those were only the dangers I knew about. Unfortunately, based on the information I had, the distance to Silla Peak was further than I could travel in a single day. Fine. I would fly through the night as well. I wasn't going to land in Illium if I could help it.\n\nThe constant noise and energy of the coast tides turned quickly to the uncomfortable silence of a lifeless wasteland in the interior. Worse than a wasteland. In every direction, there was only the rust, its pervasive presence so monotonous that it was disorienting. It was like staring into a void of crimson-tinted blight, the only variation being changes in shade, presumably due to the thickness of the coating in any particular location. Only my shadow interrupted the horrible perfection of the rusty ground. As I passed, the land seemed to glint ever so slightly, as if reacting to my presence above. I flew higher, gliding whenever I found a pocket of warm air so that I might save my strength.\n\n\"Have you seen the like of this in any of your travels, Harlan?\"\n\n\"Even my weary eyes have not set themselves upon such a terrible sight before this day.\" His voice was heavy. \"The view from across the Tayo does not capture the terrifying vastness of what is below us now. At a glance, it is like the blossoming of the amber wildflowers of Karak after the first of the spring rains, but only for a false moment. In the plains of Karak, the color is that of new life. This is something else. Not a pestilence, nor a fungus. It is ominous.\"\n\nThere could be no argument about that. Somehow, the rust, seemingly motionless, evoked a greater dread than the hollowing horde. Its sheer size\u2014an expanse beyond the edges of my own vision\u2014was chilling.\n\n\"I think this is not the first time the world has seen the rust,\" I speculated. \"I think my mother knew of it as well. She did not come to Rolm just to free me. That was part of something bigger. She was searching for something in Rolm. The people who dwelled on Maricopa where I met her, were refugees from Ni-Yota\u2014a people with knowledge of enchantment driven from this land.\" I strained to recall what Bethy Rann had told me. It had been only weeks, but felt like months. \"The Ellugar, they were called.\"\n\n\"I have heard of them,\" Harlan admitted. \"But they are usually only mentioned in passing, as a warning.\"\n\n\"A warning?\"\n\n\"The Ellugar wished to stay apart from the Conclave of Magi. This was not permitted. Both the humans who governed the Conclave, and ultimately their dragon masters, could abide no independent wielders of magic within Ni-Yota. They ended badly, exterminated. Although, it seems, not all of them.\" I heard tentative hope creep into Harlan's voice as he asked, \"These are the ones who have aurathorn?\"\n\n\"Alas, no,\" I told him. \"But they are a piece to the puzzle of finding it again.\"\n\n\"If we survive this journey.\"\n\nHarlan said it as if I needed reminding. I didn't. My hearts weighed on me as we flew over Illium. The morning rolled into the afternoon. I spotted the remains of lost villages and even cities, the outlines of their buildings now covered by the rust, their inhabitants more than likely now part of the hollowing horde. I was sure Harlan noticed it all as well. Neither of us spoke of it. There was no need, and nothing could be done.\n\nWith the dusk came a new dark speck in the west, like a piece of dirt in the sky, the setting sun burning scarlet behind it. I flew toward it, and it came toward me. Even before my view confirmed it, I knew it was a blood raptor. We'd not encountered any direct hostility from the hollowings on this journey thus far, but they had to be aware of our presence, they had to be watching. I doubted a single bird would attack\u2014more likely it was a scout of some kind. It continued to come at me. There was no point in taking any chances. I flew higher, but the raptor matched my maneuver. I could've risen well beyond the clouds had I been alone, but human lungs need far more air than dragons. For Harlan's sake, I faced the blood raptor rather than risk killing him in the thinnest of the high air above.\n\nIt came at me as if it was the dragon, and I a puny feathered beast. \"I will handle the little birdie,\" I told Harlan.\n\n\"Surely it does not intend to attack.\"\n\nSurely, it did. The bird stretched its talons beneath spread wings of black. It made no attempt to maneuver, no attempt to deceive. The raptor flew toward me as if it were an arrow without a choice in the matter. As it neared, its mouth opened in a silent cry of defiance. I veered at the last moment, snatching the bird in one of my foreclaws and crushing in a satisfying fist. I let the mangled remains fall from the sky to the endless expanse of rust-coated wasteland below us.\n\n\"I see no others,\" Harlan said. \"What was the point of that encounter?\"\n\n\"Must there be a point?\"\n\n\"This is no mindless storm that opposes us. The hollowings may not think like us, but they do think. They are logical in their own way. It does not seem they would throw away even a single blood raptor without a reason.\"\n\nI didn't disagree with the conclusion. I stared at the horizon from which the blood raptor had emerged, then at the ground beneath us. \"Perhaps it was a message.\"\n\n\"An obscure one, then.\"\n\nMaybe not so obscure. \"The bird was sent as a marker, a trip wire even. The intellect of the blight below knows we have arrived. Look down, look at what lies beneath the fading sun: mountains.\"\n\n\"Haven's Finger.\" Harlan sounded impressed, a rare enough thing for his jaded eyes. \"Not many men have traveled to the end of the world. Yet here I am, riding on a dragon, no less.\"\n\nThe great peninsula ahead extended from the end of the rest of the continent into the sea like the appendage for which it was named (obviously by humans). Here, the flatlands and rolling hills of northern Illium ended. The Finger was a place of jagged rocks and treacherous cliffs. There were no flatlands, no visible roads. The sea pounded the strip of land from the north and south, as if angered that it had dared to interrupt the desired path of the waves. Yet it gave me hope. Harlan saw it as well.\n\n\"The rust ends here. It hasn't crossed onto the Finger.\"\n\n\"You see with human eyes. And too much optimism, which, I suppose, is the same thing.\"\n\nI beat my wings, flying westward. The sun disappeared behind the horizon, leaving only its residual light in the sky. Still, there was enough brightness remaining for even Harlan to see what I had already known: The blight had already spread throughout the narrow peninsula, just not with the same all-encompassing presence as elsewhere in Illium. As I dropped closer to the ground, the tide pools that marked the beginning of the Finger came into easy view. Harlan understood quickly. He was human, but not stupid.\n\n\"With each high tide, the salt water comes over the land bridge, severing the link between the peninsula and the mainland. Each time the water comes, it must wash away the rust that has clawed its way onto the Finger, much as the tides clear the beaches to the north.\"\n\nHe sounded almost excited. I didn't really see reason for optimism. \"But still, the rust is here. Look at the rocks beyond, see the streaks that reflect the light at the wrong angle, their color different than the rest. It has spread all over the Finger, onto every mountain. The sea has not stopped its advance.\" I flew over the Finger to show him of what I spoke. As I passed over the first set of rocks, more rust revealed itself, the crimson blight plunging with narrow lines into steep crevices and climbing over crags of sand-ravaged rocks. It was the same stuff that had consumed the rest of Illium. The terrain and the sea posed more challenge for the rust, but it could not halt its advance.\n\nHarlan's voice turned grimmer, but still determined. \"It is here, but it's somehow less. On the continent, the rust is everywhere, covering whole cities, hills, and valleys. Only the water is free of the taint. But on the Finger, it is less pervasive. It only clings to the rocks. It snakes through this place, but it has not smothered it, not the way it has the rest of Illium.\"\n\nI circled, studying the terrain below, watching the pounding of the sea, feeling the direction of the wind as it whipped off the water. \"This place is beaten by the sea and wind the way a farmer beats a wayward oxen. The rocks speak of the harsh spray of salt air. And this place\u2014a narrow strip of land daring to poke into the sea\u2014must suffer powerful storms much of the year. Each day the land is scrubbed by the brute force of the elements. That is why no humans have settled here.\"\n\n\"Your eyes are better than mine in the dark, and I do not doubt your knowledge of the winds,\" Harlan said. \"But I wonder if the tide also makes a difference. The rust here is cut off from the larger mass each day. Disconnected from the rest of its great host, it could be that it is somehow weaker.\"\n\n\"Weaker?\" I wondered.\n\n\"Here the rust is a narrow sliver, like a fruit trying to grow on a slender, wayward vine. Here it may be slower to spread.\"\n\nI grunted my skepticism. I tilted my wings, riding a gust of wind to a higher altitude and getting a better view of what lay ahead. I saw what I feared and expected. \"I do not see a single mountain that is completely free of the rust, although I cannot see with clarity to the tip where the Silla Peak supposedly lies.\"\n\nHarlan caught my glum assessment. \"You are afraid we have come a long way for nothing. But there was the bird, as you say.\"\n\n\"It may be that the blood raptor merely mocked us. Our enemy's way of letting us know that we were on a pointless errand. Once again, we may have underestimated the rust. If the knowledge held at this archive is a threat, I believe the hollowings would eliminate that threat. What we seek may already have been consumed by the blight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "I told myself it wasn't much further.\n\nThe pale glow of the rust below mocked my efforts. The disconcerting light extended through the rocky terrain of the peninsula likes veins filled with contaminated blood, their sickness highlighted by the moonlight above. The path of the blight led ever west, toward the tip of the peninsula, toward the Silla Peak and the ancient archive once located there. It was far too late to beat my strange enemy to the destination, but I pushed forward as if I still had a chance to win an impossible race.\n\nDawn revealed the extent of the blight's infiltration. The new light splashed over the misshapen peaks of the Finger, each one adorned by streams of rust crisscrossing their face. As the polluted lines neared the tip of the peninsula, they merged, the twisting snakes of tainted crimson becoming a single great river of rust that drove with purpose at the last mountain that sprouted before the sea\u2014that peak standing alone at the edge of the world like a forgotten child watching the endless water beyond for some sign he hadn't been forgotten. I flew at it, my hearts nearly empty of hope for what I might find.\n\nSilla Peak itself was unlike its brethren. Nearly devoid of the weather-torn scars of the other mountains, the outcropping resembled a hatchling fresh from the egg, its sides as smooth as a paved road, its shape unnaturally symmetrical\u2014more like something carved by a craftsman than naturally born from the depths of the world. It seemed to rise from the water below, its form separate and distinct from the land of the Finger that reached toward it. The rock of the peak differed as well\u2014while the rest of the mountains of the Finger were a dull grey, polluted with streaks of brown, the final mountain was mostly white, the color of dirt-stained snow.\n\nHarlan ably summed up the sight: \"It is beautiful.\"\n\nIt was indeed. Perfect. Empty. Alone. But beauty could not defy the rust. Even through the deep green water of the sea that surrounded the mountain on every approach, the blight had still come. It began at the base of the rock nearest to the peak, just above the waterline. Then it spread upwards and around both sides of the peak, a gash of desecration on the otherwise pristine surface of the rock.\n\n\"Although we cannot see it now, at low tide, there must be a land bridge across the narrow channel,\" Harlan said. \"Otherwise people could've only come by ship, and there is no moorage. Those waves seem vicious and unpredictable, as well. I'd not want to try to sail anywhere close to this place. It is a place of pilgrims, not sailors.\"\n\n\"Or the rust found another way across.\" My tone and hearts were grim. \"It is relentless.\"\n\nThere was no sign of any structure on the landward side of the peak. I banked left and swooped around the mountain, mirroring the path of the rust as it wrapped itself around the white rock of the peak. I saw a treacherous pathway had been carved into the mountain's face which led from the landward face to the seaward side of the peak. However, I guessed that the journey would've deterred all but the most determined human travelers.\n\nOn the far side of the mountain, facing directly into the horizon where the sun came to rest each day, I found what had to be the entrance: It was a hole, a missing section of rock on the otherwise smooth surface of the mountain. The opening was rimmed by jagged teeth of stone, making it look as if a beast had reached into the peak with a massive claw and scooped out a piece of rock to chew upon. Despite the brightening light of morning, even my eyes couldn't penetrate the blackness beyond the portal's entrance. Neither the dark nor the perilous location of the entrance had stopped the rust, though. The crimson blight framed the edge of the portal, as if it had encircled a besieged keep before breaking inside. A switchback staircase had been carved into the rocky facade, the steps extending from the narrow pathway that circled the mountain. The workmanship of those stairs was meticulous, each identical to the last, and unmarred by the passage of time and the elements. I hovered outside the gap despite my fatigue, foreboding heavy in my chest.\n\nHarlan was impatient at my hesitation. \"We've come a long way to get cold feet now.\"\n\n\"Dragons don't get cold feet. We don't even have feet like humans.\"\n\nI flew inside, cautiously. Dragons are not stupid either\u2014usually. The opening was large enough that I could glide.\n\nThe reason I hadn't been able to see into the belly of the mountain was that there was nothing to see. The design was clever\u2014a dead end tunnel of midnight stone. The rust ran through the otherwise pitch black rock in twin veins. Following its path led me to the great hole in the tunnel floor.\n\nThe rust's faint luminosity was just enough to make me uneasy. It felt like being trapped in a hole with a sleeping predator. Harlan spoke in the half-darkness. \"The rust hasn't spread here. It is a narrow line, and that pattern cannot be random. It is directed, as if it seeks something within.\"\n\nI went through the hole without answering because we both knew he was correct. We entered a carved corridor wide enough to accommodate two dragons side-by-side and high enough to allow me to fly if I was careful. Here, too, the rust ran in thin veins along walls of smoothly-cut stone on either side of me. I smelled fresh air tinged only slightly with the taste of salt from the sea nearby. At the end of the passage, I found the Archive of Oracles. I was impressed.\n\nAnother world, hidden from the light of the sun, existed inside the Silla Peak. This massive cavern had a ceiling of glowing azure stone that stretched in each direction, nearly to the walls of the mountain itself\u2014essentially creating an artificial sky. Air from outside flowed through the chamber through hidden crevasses, while huge mushroom-like crops as high as corn stalks grew untamed in what I suspected had once been manicured fields. I had flown into a forgotten underground farm, which left no doubt that the builders of this place had terrible taste in food. So much trouble just for vegetables.\n\nI saw no other creatures and sensed no other movement. The rows of fungus crops stood as if frozen in time. They were all covered by the rust, as was a portion of the walls and ceiling. Still, the sheer size of place and the near absolute stillness within was impressive. Constructing this cavern had been no easy feat. The builders must've had a very good reason for doing so.\n\nAt the center of it all was a pit. One so massive it consumed almost a third of the surface area of the cavern's floor. A staircase circled its way downward into the portal, leading even deeper into the mountain.\n\n\"I've never seen a crop like that, but I don't think we want to walk through those fields to take a closer look,\" Harlan commented. \"Perhaps they once fed the inhabitants of this place, but they are now poisoned by the rust. I suspect we'll find the archive below, through that great pit-like portal. Can you fly in here?\"\n\nThe question was insulting. The opening was huge. I answered by titling my wings, changing my direction toward the opening. I pulled up abruptly just before entering, beating my wings to change our direction. The gusts sent debris into the sky, and I brought us even higher to keep my distance from any unknown particles in the air. I saw evidence that there had been a battle here.\n\nHuman remains lined the stone stairway as it wound into the next chamber. I saw no flesh, but there were plenty of bones. Weapons lay scattered about. The rust had spread everywhere.\n\n\"The hollowings came down here,\" Harlan concluded. \"By the look of it, that happened many years ago. Perhaps around the time the war started with Ni-Yota, perhaps even before that.\"\n\nI studied the remains of the old battle. \"The staircase has been destroyed further down. No humans can enter unless they can fly.\"\n\n\"I think it was done intentionally. The people who resided here tried to keep the hollowings out.\"\n\nI studied the ugly crimson clawing its way relentlessly through the cavern. \"I suspect they could not stop the rust.\"\n\nI flew downward to find out. It was just as I suspected\u2014the rust's advance had not been halted. It was everywhere.\n\nThrough the gaping hole was another cavern, this one larger and better lit, the ceiling glowing a blue so magnificent it truly could've been mistaken for the sky. Not even a human would need a lantern in this place. There were structures\u2014impossibly high columns of translucent ivory that resembled marble\u2014that extended from the floor to the ceiling. I entered through the portal with some speed, flying into the cavern, carefully maneuvering around the strange pillars. This subterranean chamber made the upper cavern look like a hovel. It was also scarred by tragedy.\n\nThe great soaring pillars touched both the floor and ceiling of the massive space, but I was fairly certain they had not been built to support the ceiling. Or at least that wasn't their primary purpose. They were like narrow spires\u2014about as thick as my belly\u2014but their height was nearly equal to the highest tower in Trishan. I noticed a few of the columns did not quite reach the chamber's glowing ceiling. The strange towers were clustered into groups of different sizes with large gaps of space between the clusters. Even with my limited knowledge of engineering, that didn't seem to make sense if their purpose was support of the roof. Yet, the columns had no doors, no windows, and no battlements. As I neared, I studied the spires: They were not made of a single piece of stone, but rather had been constructed of rectangular bricks of different sizes, all fitted perfected together. Each individual piece of the tower was inscribed with some sort of writing. There were at least a hundred of the spires sprouting from within the cavern, like a stone forest buried within the bowels of the mountain. At the center of the various tower clusters was yet another portal in the ground that I presumed led even deeper into the mountain.\n\nIt occurred to me that the strange pillars would've been beautiful in the past. Not anymore. Now, they were dangerous: The rust had infected them as well.\n\nThe pestilence had seeped down the rock from the cavern above, passing into the chamber of soaring columns in eight thin lines of ugly crimson that resembled spider legs. Once the rust tentacles reached the cavern's ceiling, the blight spread directly onto the spires. Dozens and dozens of narrow veins of rust spread over every pillar, snaking downward like ivy on the side of an old building. Even the floor was infected.\n\nI glided downward through one of the gaps between the clusters, wary of a collision with the blighted pillars. It was dangerous flying. I headed for the edge of the cavern, where there was more space. The rock walls were less infested, as if they were of less interest to the invading rust. I latched onto a clear section of mundane mountain stone, digging my claws into the rock. Harlan clung to the spike of my mane.\n\n\"I think they are books of some kind,\" Harlan marveled. \"Those pillars are filled with countless books. These huge things\u2026these towers, they are massive, soaring, bookshelves. There must be more volumes stored here than in the rest of Ni-Yota combined.\"\n\nI hadn't seen a lot of human books\u2014it wasn't the kind of thing people shared with dragons\u2014but knew enough to recognize them. I'd seen the ledgers that the Keepers of Rolm scribbled in from time-to-time, but I couldn't read human script. The marking on the books were gibberish to me.\n\n\"Are these the so-called Oracles?\" I didn't bother to disguise my disappointment at the prospect. \"Towers and towers of books?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. The knowledge held within books could be seen that way, I suppose. Particularly if there was so much knowledge collected in one place. I want to take a closer look.\"\n\nI scanned the ground. \"There isn't any rust-free area on the ground large enough for me to land. Only the cavern walls are relatively free from the rust.\"\n\n\"As if it came here to destroy the books themselves.\" I sensed Harlan's anxiousness to explore. \"I'll jump to the ground. Just get me close.\"\n\n\"Flying in the narrow spaces between these pillars isn't easy.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you can do it.\" He tried to sound flattering, but I knew immediately it wouldn't work. Harlan sensed my hesitation. \"This is important, Bayloo. Books may not dazzle on the outside, but the contents can be far more valuable than diamonds.\"\n\nHe might be right, or not. I couldn't read, so I wouldn't know, and that annoyed me. Still, we had come a long way. My mother had apparently dwelled here for some time looking through the knowledge held here. Something within must be as valuable as Harlan suspected. \"Call out to me when you need to be picked up. Don't touch any book that has been tainted by the rust. And don't trip over anything.\"\n\nI pushed off the wall, choosing the widest path between the pillars I could find. I had to tuck in my wings slightly and tilt, but I could do it. I made as close a pass to the floor as possible, taking pains to slow myself. Harlan leapt off my back, landing easily on his feet with aplomb as if he'd executed the maneuver a dozen times before. He didn't even look at the floor, seemingly unconcerned with the patches of rust that lurked around him. He gave me a wave of encouragement as I climbed back upward and latched onto the cavern's outer wall. I craned my neck around, doing my best to keep my eyes on Harlan, although the forest of pillars partially obstructed my view.\n\nHarlan began his investigation by circling several of the book-packed spires. He peered at the shelves of each, looking upwards, his eyes squinting. He took an inordinate time staring at several of the volumes. I wondered if he could read the writing. Harlan wasn't from Illium or Ni-Yota, although it wouldn't have surprised me if he'd learned some of their writing sometime during his travels. He reached his hand out, his fingers dancing, as if intended to remove the book from its resting place. I thought that ill-advised. The rust spun a thorough web through the vast library, seemingly tainting a vast majority of the volumes. No book seemed worth the risk. I gripped the rock tightly with my claws, partly out of frustration with this place. I had expected to find more than this when I set out across Illium. Much more. Could my mother really have spent so much time in a repository of human books? I couldn't believe it. There must be more. The passage that led even deeper into the mountain beckoned. We couldn't have come here for nothing.\n\nHarlan kept dancing between spires. At one point he jumped over a patch of rust. A stupid risk.\n\n\"Whatever knowledge these books held is lost to us.\" My voice, hardly quiet to begin with, echoed through the vast chamber. \"Let us continue our search. Perhaps there is something below that the rust has not yet tainted.\"\n\nHarlan kept circling one of the pillars, his eyes fixed on the volumes. Eventually, he called back at me. \"The books are ordered by topic, I believe. They must come from every land on Inkra. I recognize Kalish, the symbol language of Cern, and even the tactile print of Silloss, yet I can only understand the language of one out every twenty volumes. This is the greatest collection of knowledge in all of Inkra.\"\n\n\"It was,\" I reminded him. \"Now it is a graveyard filled with the rust.\"\n\n\"Bayloo, I might be mistaken, but this pillar here\u2026it seems some of these books\u2026their titles suggest that they speak of the world before the Cataclysm.\"\n\nI scoffed. \"They would be dust by now.\"\n\n\"These are copies of copies of copies.\" Harlan kept circling, wary of his treasure. \"It may be they only pass down old legends. But even that would be something. There are so many.\" He gazed upward.\n\nThe particular book spire that held Harlan's gaze of adoration was within a dense cluster of pillars. There was no way I could've flown inside such a tight space even if I was inclined to do so. \"Too bad I can't fly up to inspect them.\" I wasn't the least bit sorry about it. It wasn't worth the risk.\n\nHarlan did another full circle of the tower. He reminded me of a frustrated cat. Then, he took a step forward. He looked down at the floor. The odd movement made it seem like he was dancing for a moment. Until he started flying. Well, not flying really. After a moment I realized the section of the floor on which Harlan stood had risen off the ground. It was attached to the book pillar in some way, although it lacked wings or any obviously external pulley. The floor section accelerated as it moved ever higher. Harlan jumped off, falling hard back onto the ground. He lost his footing, barely bracing himself with his hands before he planted his face into the floor. A patch of rust was a nose length from his fingers\u2014a human nose length.\n\nI roared at him. \"You fool.\"\n\nSlowly, Harlan lifted himself upright. The platform that had lifted him returned to the ground. Like the stubborn idiot that I knew him to be, Harlan got back on it. This time it rose slower, moving him ever further up the spire. He seemed to have learned the knack of controlling it. Something to do with his feet, I supposed. A device built for humans.\n\nHarlan played with his new toy as I hung on the wall mashing my teeth. I wondered who had built this place\u2014likely humans, since it was filled with their books. But the spaces had also been made large enough for dragons\u2026or something else. I wondered how it had been built. As impressive as the spires and buildings of Changsha and Trishan were, they were nothing compared to this place. Even a dozen dragons couldn't hollow out a mountain. I supposed magic had to be the answer.\n\nFinally, Harlan called out. \"Let's move on from here.\"\n\nHe'd taken his sweet time. \"You've seen all the books?\"\n\n\"Only in my dreams. This place is a treasure without equal, but our time here is dwindling. Look at the ceiling.\"\n\nWith dread, I did. I stared at the rust. It looked different, although I hadn't taken that close of a look when I entered. I kept staring, dread growing inside me, until I saw what had finally prompted Harlan to leave his books: The rust grew. A new branch of blight sprouted from an old one. It was stretching before my eyes. Moving. Another vein of death. I didn't believe it was a coincidence. The rust knew we were here.\n\n\"Look at the floor,\" Harlan warned.\n\nChicken piss.\n\nThe rust wasn't just growing above. It was expanding everywhere. Slowly, but it was growing.\n\n\"I'm coming to get you.\" Unfortunately, the area where Harlan now stood was too densely packed with spires to make it easy to fly there. \"Ride your floating floor tile to the top of that great book spire.\"\n\n\"The top?\"\n\n\"Stay just below the rust on the ceiling. And be ready.\"\n\n\"You want me to jump onto you?\" He sounded excited rather than frightened by this idea.\n\n\"Too risky. Jumping off a dragon is quite a bit easier than jumping onto one. Just ride up and hold still.\"\n\nI pushed off the wall, gliding carefully in the confines of the cavern. I didn't know how fast the rust could spread, but I suspected it would be far faster than we could afford. I still didn't have the answers I'd come to get. There had to be more to this place. I swooped past Harlan, grabbing him in my left foreclaw as he stood gaping at the ceiling. He wriggled in my grasp. \"Try to relax,\" I told him. \"I don't expect a long trip.\"\n\nI circled around, gaining altitude, before plunged down toward the gap in the floor, flying ever deeper into the archive.\n\nThe next chamber was almost identical to the one we had just left: more spires, more rust, more disappointment. Another portal, this one considerably narrower than the previous two, led still deeper. At least this wasn't the end of the archive's secrets.\n\n\"Those aren't books on these spires,\" Harlan observed.\n\nUpon a closer inspection, I realized he was correct. These pillars were also shelves of a sort, but they held cubes of glass\u2014or something that looked like glass but probably wasn't, since glass didn't occasionally flash scarlet and azure like these things did.\n\n\"We should investigate these items,\" Harlan said. \"You can drop me\u2014gently\u2014on the ground again.\"\n\nI scanned the cavern. \"The rust is already thick here. There are only a few spots on the floor where even you might stand.\"\n\n\"It is worth the risk. If the books held one store of knowledge, these spires likely hold another kind. This may be our last chance to find out.\"\n\n\"They are tainted, same as the books.\"\n\n\"Not all of them. I have in my hands\u2014which are being crushed by your claws by the way\u2014a volume that may contain words from before the Cataclysm. There may be even older, more precious, knowledge here. We must try. This is why we came.\"\n\nWithout replying, I slowed myself, almost hovering in place, as I searched for a section of floor relatively free from the rust. The best spot seemed to be a slender rectangle located between two clusters of spires. It would be like flying into a tight valley\u2014I wouldn't even have enough space to fully extend my wings. The alley between the pillars was long, but not wide.\n\n\"You see it?\" I asked as I began my approach.\n\n\"I'm ready.\"\n\nI gave my wings a single flap, then tucked them back into my body as much as I dared. The canyon of spires beckoned. It was going to be tight, but I'd make it. I was moving faster than I'd hoped, but I needed the momentum to carry me through until I could make full use of my wings again. I dropped lower, concentrating on keeping my course straight and my forelegs steady. I dropped even lower. I wouldn't be able to set Harlan down. He had asked for it. I opened my grip. Harlan dropped, landing on his feet. He bent forward, using a hand to steady himself as he hit the ground. I knew immediately that I'd made a terrible mistake.\n\nThe landing area had been too clean. The rest of the cavern floor had been nearly covered by the rust. Only that one place had a long, contiguous stretch of seemingly safe space, and it was conveniently located close to a patch of tempting spires. It was the logical place to land. The only logical place. Which meant it was a trap."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Harlan's choice curses confirmed my suspicion a moment later.\n\nThis was a trap. His realization, like mine, came too late. I had no idea how fast the rust could spread. Faster than I could get back to Harlan.\n\nI couldn't stop in mid-air. I couldn't turn around in the valley of spires. I had to continue along my original flight path, passing through the narrow space. Once I'd cleared the towers, I swung to my left, circling back for a second pass. It wasn't until I'd completed my wide arcing turn that I had a clear view of what had happened.\n\nThe rectangle of clear floor was all but gone, except for a narrow, irregular strip that a mountain goat would've had trouble maneuvering along. There was no sign of Harlan.\n\nI calmed myself. The rust could not have consumed him so quickly.\n\n\"On the spire!\"\n\nI saw him.\n\nHe had jumped onto one of the columns. He wasn't high off the ground. Apparently, the rising tiles didn't work in this chamber, or they'd been contaminated by the rust. Harlan shattered several of the glass receptacles on the spire to form handholds, which he'd used to scale the tower. Clever, but it wasn't a sanctuary. The rust was on the tower as well. It was moving toward him, albeit slowly. The strange glowing glass seemed to cause it some trouble. Still, I only needed a bit of time. I beat my wings again, picking up the necessary speed, before tucking my span in tight enough to fit in the close quarters.\n\n\"I can't grab you!\" I warned. \"The rust is everywhere on those towers. You'll have to jump.\"\n\nThat sucked worse than pig feet. I forced myself even closer to the ground. Far closer than was safe, prudent, or sane. But I needed to be beneath Harlan if he was to have any chance to grab onto my back. I felt the rust surging beneath me. It might have understood my plan and was trying to counter me. The blight rose from the ground, building upon itself, forming mounds, like ant hills of pestilence. I held my course. Harlan twisted his body toward the inside of the valley, preparing to jump. My eyes met Harlan's. His held far less fear than mine. The only thing I could do now was fly straight.\n\nI didn't see him jump. I had to keep my eyes straight, and there wasn't any room to crane my neck. But I felt him. I dipped ever so slightly from the new weight landing upon me. My hearts were seized with a fleeting moment of cold panic. I didn't hit the ground, though. I was still breathing. I was still flying.\n\nI came out of the valley of soaring spires, gliding at speed. Relieved, I spread my wings, beating them to propel me, gaining altitude. I wasted no more time in this place. I had Harlan. I flew down toward the portal into the next, deeper, chamber.\n\nA chill passed through me at the threshold. My blood ran cold, as if I'd suddenly been injected with ice, before restoring itself a moment later.\n\n\"Did you feel that?\" I asked Harlan.\n\n\"You mean did I feel terrified at almost being consumed by the rust?\" He laughed like a madman. \"Or was it my jumping onto a flying dragon that you are referring to? By the balls of a leviathan, you bet I felt that, Bayloo.\" He cackled.\n\nHarlan didn't get it. If he had experienced the cold that I had, if he had felt his blood freeze and his bones turn to ice for a fleeting moment, he wouldn't have been speaking of the mere mundane fear of flying through the sky without wings. What I had felt hadn't been fear. It had been something far more ominous. But as terrible as the feeling was, as awful as the moment of despair had been, the sight before me pushed it from my mind as easily as I forgot yesterday's sunset.\n\nThe new chamber held no soaring spires and no books. There wasn't any portal leading deeper into the mountain. Indeed, this cavern\u2014the final cavern\u2014was mostly empty. Except for the rust, which seeped down the walls here, as it had elsewhere. And except for the small island in the very center. The circular plot of land wasn't huge, and the lake surrounding it hardly looked formidable\u2014Harlan could've swam across the still, black water with ease, if endurance had been the only test. Yet there must've been more to it, because at the water's edge, the inexorable expanse of rust halted. Across the lake, safe from the corruption that had tainted all the rest of the archive, was what I hoped to be a worthwhile end for my quest: There, a dragon awaited.\n\nThe beast on the isle resembled no other dragon I'd seen or imagined. It was wingless, its skin devoid of scales, its skin smooth and pale as that of a human too long away from the sun, except for clusters of black dots around its neck and left eye. The dragon's eyes were closed, but they opened as I flew near, two orbs of milky whiteness perched upon a stub of snout. There was no emotion in those eyes, no thought at all. To look upon a dragon's eyes was usually to look into a portal that led within us. Our eyes were all that the human face was, and more. Yet not with this dragon. It was if I looked upon a statute of a fellow dragon, one resembling me in general form, but devoid of the life force that beat within me. Even its gaze was wrong. It seemed to look in my general direction, but it didn't track my movement as I circled above its island.\n\n\"She's blind,\" Harlan observed.\n\nAgain, the human saw the obvious when I did not. I'd never contemplated the possibility of a blind dragon, for I'd never known of one without sight. It was as strange as one of my kind being devoid of wings. I also had no idea how he'd arrived at the conclusion of the dragon's gender, yet I didn't disagree. Even though I smelled no scent from my uncanny cousin, she moved with the fluid grace that was more typical of the female of my species.\n\nI wondered how she had gotten to the island, to this strange place on the edge of the world, even though she lacked the power of both sight and flight. How long had she been here? I intended to find out.\n\nI floated down gently, choosing a spot of land as far away from the other dragon as was possible on the tiny land mass that had no more space than the inside of my tower back in Changsha. The other dragon didn't exactly watch me, but she turned in my direction. I had no idea if she was a fire breather, but I didn't detect any indication of hostility. The moment I landed on the island, I knew I wasn't standing on rock. The ground here was metal, cold and hard, but made to resemble rock.\n\nThe other dragon moved closer to me. She walked slowly, each footfall deliberate. She was very old\u2014ancient. Her claws were yellow, two of them broken. After a few steps she halted. \"It is forbidden to land on the Core.\" The dragon spoke Avian, albeit stiffly, with a dry scratch of a voice that reminded me of the squeaking metal door of my cage-cave back on the DragonPeak in Rolm. Not exactly the warm welcome I was hoping for.\n\n\"The Core?\"\n\n\"The ground on which you are standing is part of the Core. Only Anjins are permitted to cross the boundary.\"\n\nThe boundary. I assumed that meant the lake.\n\nAlmost the entirety of the cavern was infested with the rust. Indeed, the entirety of Illium was infested. I'd flow day and night to arrive here. And this dragon was annoyed that I'd landed on the only safe place in the whole cavern.\n\nI was about to complain about my cousin's lack of reasonable hospitality, but a fierce shriek interrupted my words. I spun as quickly as I was able, gazing at the water, but not quite believing the new peril that had emerged from the depths behind me. I really had absolutely no luck.\n\nIt was a ghastray."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "How had a ghastray gotten in here?\n\nThat was only one of the thoughts that flashed through my mind. The others were more primal and less pleasant.\n\nTwo more ghastray tails appeared on either side of the first, each forked and covered with deadly spikes. The trio of appendages twirled in the air, thin and long and poised to kill me. Initially, I thought myself facing a small army of ghastrays, until several hideous eyes and a portion of slick gray fin poked above the surface of the surrounding moat. I realized that the three tails all belong to a single, massive, creature. Like the dragon, this ghastray was some other breed, resembling its fellow predators but with distinct differences. Unfortunately, the unusual ghastray seemed larger and more formidable.\n\nI spread my wings and showed my teeth to the poised creature. \"I am Bayloo, a friend of Vengeance and an ally of your kind.\"\n\nIt was an exaggeration, of course. Vengeance and I were hardly friends (he might have a taste for my hearts), but this ghastray was really big and I didn't want to fight it. Too bad for me.\n\nThe ghastray poked all eight of its eyes out of the water, blinked each one, then snapped two of its tails at me, one from either side. I beat my wings, intending to take to the air, but I went nowhere. A debilitating pain surged through my body, a stabbing cold that originated in my chest and spread from my nose to my tail. The sensation came and went quicker than a flap of a hummingbird's wings, but it was enough to startle me, and to slow me. Fortunately, the pain didn't afflict Harlan. He flicked his dagger at the ghastray stinger as it approached from the left, the blade catching the ghastray precisely in the spot in where its whip-like tail forked. The beast convulsed in enough pain to disrupt the stinger attacks. The creature's tails rippled like sails losing its wind.\n\nWith the respite, I lifted from the ground, sluggish but airborne. The ghastray quickly rallied from Harlan's attack. It made a noise less pleasant than a rusty dagger tip dragging on glass, as three forked tails raced toward me. I didn't have enough altitude to evade the attack. My wings barely seemed to work. The stingers had me. Until they didn't.\n\nThe other dragon shrieked, an abrupt emotionless scream loud enough to send tremors through the water and chills through my scales. The extreme sound shocked me, but the ghastray actually froze at the cry, its stringers coming to a halt. For a moment this creature of death was as still as a painting. The cavern quieted.\n\n\"Hold.\" I realized that the other dragon was addressing the ghastray. \"Begin perimeter patrol. Secure the boundary.\"\n\nThe creature obeyed. The ghastray sank into the water, disappearing into the murk that I realized wasn't quite water. It was too thick, too viscous. I wondered what would've happened if someone tried to swim across.\n\nI glided back down to the ground. Not because I felt I was safe now, but because each time I moved my wings, I ached with a bone chilling cold. Something else was wrong with me besides almost getting killed by the ghastray.\n\n\"I am surprised that it attacked you.\" The strange dragon spoke without emotion as if discussing the weather.\n\n\"Is that an apology?\" I felt Harlan stir with unease at my pointed question.\n\nThe blind dragon tilted its head, seemingly puzzled. \"I made a statement of my current thoughts. An apology would imply that I had erred. I am not aware of an error.\"\n\nDragons were few, so it hurt me to immediately dislike one of my own kind, but sometimes I didn't have a choice. This dragon spoke with a tone of obtuse snobbery that I associated with nobility. \"That ghastray attacked me. It's apparently under your command in some way.\"\n\nMore head tilting from the dragon. \"The water guardian is intended to protect the Core. It has performed that function admirably for considerably longer than ever intended. You believe it was in error in attacking you?\"\n\nShe sounded so smug.\n\n\"Attacking me is always a mistake.\"\n\nThe strange dragon sniffed at me audibly, not once, but three times, as if she was a hound and I a piece of meat that might have gone rotten. Her head tilting stopped. She stretched her neck so that her blind eyes were level with mine. \"There is a reason why it is forbidden to land on the Core. You did so anyway. You broke a command.\"\n\n\"The rest of this place is covered by the rust. This was the only place I could land.\"\n\nThe blind dragon closed its useless eyes. After several long moments, she spoke again. \"The rust\u2026ah, yes, this is what the invasive is called in the world now. The rust is not a bad name. The invasive grows upon what others have made, changing it, ruining it. The rust is not a bad name at all.\" The dragon sighed, a sound of resignation and sadness. \"There is nothing to be done. Punishment is not a cure. I shall attempt to provide knowledge in the time that remains, using what remains. Have you brought a contribution to the Core?\"\n\n\"A what?\" I asked.\n\n\"Additional knowledge to add to the collective whole,\" the dragon said, seemingly exasperated.\n\n\"Uh\u2026I don't know.\" I considered what information which I possessed that would be unknown here. \"Humans taste like chicken.\"\n\nThe dragon wasn't amused. \"That is an opinion. In any case, given the destruction of much of the archive by the invasive, there is no longer a point in accumulation of additional knowledge. I will share what I can, if only to preserve some small portion of it. What information do you seek?\"\n\nWas she now offering me what I wanted? \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, introductions.\" The dragon drew herself upright. Something about the stiffness of her movement made me suspect that it caused her some pain. \"I am the Core, although for the last three hundred years, visitors to this archive have come to refer to me as Oracle.\"\n\nA faint hope dared to spark within me. \"You are a dragon. This place is known as the Archive of Oracles. Are you the only Oracle?\"\n\n\"Humans began calling this place the Archive of Oracles several hundred years ago, when the people of the land that would come to be known as Illium stumbled upon this place. I don't precisely know why they chose the name Oracle. But to answer your question, there is only one of me. There has only ever been one of me.\"\n\nFinally, some emotion revealed itself. She was proud.\n\n\"So you are known as Oracle. Does that mean you know everything? Do you know the future?\"\n\n\"I do not know everything. No creature can claim that. I once had all the knowledge that was brought into this place. That information can be quite useful in understanding future possibilities, but I do not know the future with certainty.\"\n\n\"What do you mean that 'once you had all the knowledge?' What happened to it?\"\n\nOne of the dragon's legs trembled slightly. \"It is hard to describe in this language so you can understand the process. So much has been lost to the inhabitants of this world, and even more will be lost soon.\" That sounded ominous, but she didn't elaborate. \"You might say, when knowledge in the form of writing or certain other devices enters this place, I gain that knowledge as well. It becomes part of me. A far more efficient process than reading books or viewing the storage cubes.\"\n\nIt was an amazing revelation, a magic unknown to me or any other. \"So all those books and other things, you've read them all?\"\n\n\"Reading is one way to think about it. The knowledge flows to me. From the book and from the cubes in the towers in the chamber directly above this one. I am a vast store of information, the greatest in the world.\"\n\n\"But you no longer have the knowledge?\"\n\nThe old dragon hung her head. \"The rust as you call it\u2014when it damages the contents of this cavern, that which was destroyed is lost to me as well. It is as if I have a hole in my mind. I know something was once there, but can no longer remember what has been lost.\"\n\nHarlan chose that moment to slide down from my back. He took several tentative steps toward the dragon-oracle. He, too, must have many questions. He had a quest, related to my own, but distinct.\n\nOracle opened her eyes again, although she never bothered to turn her head in Harlan's direction. \"Ah, a human of Farlight.\" She didn't sound pleased. \"Although of course, you are not really the same as the ancient ones.\"\n\nHarlan gaped. \"Farlight is the ancient term for our lost homeland.\"\n\n\"I told you, I have all the knowledge that has ever been brought to this archive. I am the center of it all. Even with the gaps which the rust has created, my knowledge is still vast. As to how I know you are a descendant of that place, well, I cannot see anymore, but I can smell.\"\n\nHarlan frowned, as if insulted. \"Smell?\"\n\n\"Indeed, smell. You can best understand my words in this way: The original founders of Farlight changed themselves. They altered the building blocks of who they are, to enable themselves to do certain things. Think of it as using limestone mortar in a castle instead of mud. They altered the very fabric of who they are. Some might say they improved themselves. The exact process is lost to me, and I suspect you would not have understood it anyway. The important thing to know is that the changes they made were passed onto their descendants, generation after generation.\"\n\n\"We are taught this as well,\" Harlan confirmed.\n\n\"Your glinting skin, which takes sustenance from the sun, enables you to consume less traditional food and protects you from harmful rays from the sun. But it also emits a distinct odor that I can detect. Even though you have apparently not cleaned yourself in some time, I still know I am in the presence of a human with traits of the original Farlighters.\" With arrogance, Oracle added, \"No one except me would notice the smell.\"\n\nI disagreed about noticing how Harlan smelled, but didn't say so.\n\nHarlan still looked offended, his face tense. \"What else do you know about how my ancestors changed themselves?\"\n\nI heard the anxiousness creeping into Harlan's voice. But I was losing patience. I had questions.\n\n\"Many things, but among the most important were immunity to most illness and alterations to their skin to protect themselves from the deteriorating external environment of this world. And, of course, they sought to increase their own power. For example, they attempted to give themselves the ability to integrate themselves with their various creations.\" Oracle paused, seeming confused. \"The exact details are now lost to me, but I can say\u2014\"\n\n\"What of the curse?\" Harlan interrupted.\n\n\"What curse do you refer to?\"\n\n\"Our children. Why must one of our children die before their first year?\" Harlan's voice was tinged by anger.\n\n\"Visitors to this place have reported the existence of a reproduction defect among the pure line Farlighters; however, you are the first to actually enter the archive and confirm this condition.\" The dragon's blind eyes blinked twice. \"I do not have enough information to answer your question. I can only share the obvious lesson this world has shown: Tampering with the natural order of existence leads to unforeseen consequences. Or perhaps there are other reasons that cannot be easily explained. That is why it is a curse.\"\n\nHarlan digested this answer with disappointment. I could see his mind racing. But I had important questions.\n\n\"Where is aurathorn?\"\n\nOracle turned her head so those blind eyes almost looked at me, but not quite. \"You are related to the guidelight dragon that came to this place with a request for similar information. The answer is that I do not know, as I am unable to leave this archive. I can only tell you what I told her: Once such a creation existed and was utilized. I do not know its current status.\"\n\nMore disappointment, but I didn't need Oracle to find aurathorn. I already knew where to start looking for that. \"What is a guidelight dragon?\"\n\n\"You are,\" Oracle said. \"I believe the current term for your kind is an ember dragon, which is quite appropriate as well. You are the last flames of fading magic.\"\n\nIt was time to learn if this journey had been in vain: \"How can the rust be destroyed?\"\n\n\"That question has been asked repeatedly since what you now refer to as 'the rust' first came into being, a fateful event that precedes my own existence. The question has been put to me by both humans and dragons in direct form fifty-seven times that I am able to recall, including your own inquiry. In each instance my answer is the same: Based on the information available to me, it cannot be destroyed.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "I'd flown so long and endured so much to be so disappointed.\n\nIf this was how my quest was to end, I'd have been better off staying in Rolm to perish among the last of my kind.\n\nOracle's words soured the air. Another chill swept through me, but I was too numb to focus on that. I didn't want to accept what I'd heard. Neither did Harlan.\n\n\"It's not invulnerable,\" Harlan insisted. \"The rust isn't everywhere. We beat the hollowings back at the River Tayo. We've defeated its servants, outmaneuvered it. It doesn't even cover all of this peninsula. It did not manage to cross your boundary. It can be defeated.\"\n\n\"I did not say that portions of the rust cannot be\u2026cleansed. I retain the record of this being accomplished in the past, of course. But, as you can see, this past cleansing somehow failed for unknown reasons. It appears that while sections of the rust can be destroyed, it is insidious. It adapts. And so long as any portion of it remains, it will change itself and return.\"\n\n\"How was the rust cleansed in the past?\" I asked.\n\n\"You do not know?\" Oracle was obviously surprised. \"Dragons cleansed it from the surface.\"\n\nMy breath caught in my chest. \"Dragons destroyed the rust previously? How?\"\n\n\"Balefire,\" the blind dragon said.\n\nI knew the word. It was a legend, but apparently more than that. \"There are still fire breathers, but no living dragon can send forth balefire. It exists only in stories.\"\n\n\"The other dragon who came here said the same. If that information is accurate, if balefire has truly vanished from the world, the rust cannot be destroyed. Balefire is the only recorded method of successful cleansing. It is the original purpose of your kind.\"\n\nI didn't like the sound of any of this. I shivered. Maybe from the words, maybe from some other ailment afflicting me. \"The purpose of my kind?\"\n\n\"Dragons. Dragons were created to destroy the rust.\"\n\nThis kept getting worse. Yet it also explained that feeling inside me, the compulsion to fight against the rust. \"Who\u2026how\u2026how were we created?\"\n\n\"Dragons were created by humans who had previously failed in their attempts to destroy the rust through all other means available. The same humans who created me, and this archive.\"\n\nHumans created us? I wanted to puke. It was too much. I was having trouble focusing. Trouble seeing, even. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Time grows short,\" Oracle declared. \"You should know that the rust, as you call it, arose before what you call the Cataclysm, during the time of the so-called Lost World. It was insidious.\"\n\n\"Did humans create the rust as well?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Oracle replied with emotionless certainty, her head moving between Harlan and I but not quite looking at either of us. \"That is known. The details of its creation preceded my existence and are mostly lost to me now. But it is known that other humans also attempted to destroy the rust for many years before they finally had no choice but to attempt radical solutions.\"\n\nHarlan's face was as cold as I'd ever seen it as he listened to Oracle. I wasn't feeling well myself.\n\nThe dragon spoke faster than it had before. \"As you are no doubt aware, the rust has the ability to change itself to ensure its own survival, and it did so. In the Lost World, it killed anything that attempted to restrain its growth.\" Oracle paused, her blind eyes shaking again. After several moments, she resumed the narrative. \"The humans of the time unleashed weapons of such power, there is no current equivalent. Simply put, these weapons were of a destructive magnitude you cannot imagine. They melted the ice caps that once existed on this planet, raising the water levels and poisoning the seas so that the rust could not cross between continents.\n\n\"The creatures you call ghastrays were created in powerful machines known as creation forges, their purpose to patrol the seas, to destroy any ship containing the rust that attempts to cross water. In the air, the humans used their forges to introduce an element called AragonNull-285. Its name doesn't matter, nor does its function, I will simply say that this molecule was intended to starve and kill the rust while being harmless to all other creatures. It was created with the ability to adapt as well, so it would remain deadly. The rust, of course, adapted to the newly poisonous air as best it could. It attached itself to the ground at all times, drawing on resources such as silicon to counteract the poison. This is the reason the rust does not travel through the air or across the sea. Then, the remaining humans set about trying to eradicate the rust, one land mass at time. At first, the humans used the weapons they had available; weapons humans had developed for fighting each other. I don't remember them all, and it doesn't matter anyway.\"\n\nI could guess the next part. \"But these weapons weren't enough.\"\n\n\"The human devices worked at first. But these were the same weapons that had been used since the emergence of the rust. Even when new machines were developed\u2014bigger, faster, and more accurate weapons\u2014they were still all based on the same basic principles. The rust adapted to them, as it does. Worse, it adapted to their users. It found a way to turn the weapons against their masters.\"\n\n\"The hollowings,\" Harlan concluded.\n\n\"I had not heard that term before, but I believe you are referring to rust's ability to extinguish the consciousness within a living creature while preserving its motor functions. Hollowing is a good description.\" Oracle sniffed at the air once again. \"War raged and the humans were losing. A radical new approach was needed.\n\n\"Among the countless humans who inhabited the planet, a precious few recognized that time was running out and they needed some new, something that the rust would not be prepared for. They devised a plan so horrific, so dangerous, that they knew even many of their fellow humans would oppose it, for it meant fundamentally damaging the world. Yet they believed it was the only way. They kept much of their intentions secret, revealing only a small part, that portion that would be least objectionable, for they feared civil war among their fellow humans. These humans have different names, as they were united only by their common purpose, but may be referred to as the Archivists, simply because they created this place.\"\n\nHarlan nearly whispered. \"What did they do?\"\n\n\"They destroyed the old world. They remade it. Using a new device, a machine of unprecedented power which they placed above the world itself, they changed the nature of this world that is now known as Inkra. This great machine changed the fundamental laws upon which the old world and all the creations within it functioned. That which was once worshiped by many in the Lost World,\" the old dragon dipped its head ever so slightly toward Harlan, \"was gone. In a single stroke, the Archivists made all the weapons of the past and almost everything else useless. Then they unleashed their latest creations, weapons based on a power totally different than anything that had existed in the past. They intended to cleanse the world of the taint of the rust once and for all. These humans believed they acted for the greater good, to preserve their species and prevent the rust from destroying everything, but I may be biased.\"\n\nI was so cold I could barely speak. \"What did they unleash?\"\n\n\"Dragons.\"\n\nEven through the fog that was consuming me, this revelation stung. I stared hard at Harlan, then turned back to Oracle. \"So dragons were supposed to destroy the rust. That has always been our purpose. That is why I have this\u2026feeling inside me. This compulsion to fight against the rust. But we failed.\"\n\n\"That failure is now obvious, given current information. However, at the time, it was believed that the desperate gamble was a success. The seas became prison walls that held the rust in check. The poison air kept it from taking to the skies and being unstoppable. The new dragons swept across every land, their breath not just incinerating the rust, but actually setting it ablaze, unmaking it. Ten thousand dragons, infused with the power of the reformed world, using their breath as weapons. In the new world, the only energy was magic. The great fire that the dragons could unleash was designed such that rust itself became the fuel that accelerated the cleansing fire\u2014an inferno of unmaking that would burn for as long as it was in contact with the rust.\"\n\nI snorted with disappointment of what was lost to my kind. \"Balefire.\"\n\n\"Yes. The rust adapts, but not to balefire. It is the fundamental energy of the new world\u2014magic itself. It is order that reduces all else to chaos. This made it much more difficult for the rust to adapt. Perhaps, given centuries, the rust has become immune even to balefire. But at the time, the dragons, aided by other creatures\u2014birds that could sense the rust, great worms that burrowed underground, even insects\u2014the dragons led the new attack successfully. At their forefront were the so-called ember dragons. Creatures of great intelligence, designed to improvise in battle and created to act as conduits between the new magic and the other dragons. The ember dragons' power made the balefire unstoppable. Together, the dragons wielded a magic fire that was the greatest power of the new world. Your kind turned the tide of the war. The rust fought back, of course. It tried to adapt. It turned some of the dragons into its servants. But the dragons were stronger. After three years, the surviving humans finally believed they had succeeded in eradicating the rust forever. Your kind were no longer needed, as far as the Archivists were concerned.\"\n\nI thought about my race's history with humans. I could guess what happened. \"The humans didn't just thank us, did they?\"\n\n\"After their supposed triumph, the humans set about undoing what they had done\u2014they set about the task of trying to erase the new, temporary world they had created, so they might restore the old one. This archive was created for that purpose, as was one other, so the past's knowledge could be restored. Their creations, the dragons, who then numbered in the tens of thousands and were led by their magic-wielding ember kin, resisted. That possibility was anticipated. The humans released a pre-designed virus that had been created at the same time as the dragons\u2014a disease to which dragons were uniquely vulnerable. It decimated the new creatures of this world, as it had been intended. However, like most human creations, it wasn't perfect. A small portion of the dragon population, including several ember dragons, somehow survived.\"\n\n\"So we fought the humans. My kind versus the humans.\" I looked at Harlan. \"Is this why some humans hate us so much?\"\n\nOracle answered. \"The war was terrible. The ember dragons in particular had been created to wield magic. To the surprise of their creators, these dragons were more adept at controlling magic than ever anticipated. They could manipulate the new framework of the magical world that had been created. With the humans' old knowledge and power now useless, the creation forges no longer operative, the remaining humans were no match for their creations. This was the true war. It raged twice as many years as the fight against the rust.\"\n\nDread enveloped me. \"How\u2026how did that happen? The humans would've been careful with their virus and with their magic. They would've been so careful to make sure their creations didn't turn on them once again.\"\n\nOracle dipped her head again. \"Your instincts are excellent. There is no definitive data that reveals how any dragon survived the virus. It should've been impossible. They were literally created to die. Additionally, even if the virus failed, dragons were created to be infertile, to mature quickly, and to die within five years, when their creators expected the war to be long over. But that didn't happen. However, an ember dragon kindly allowed me to examine her in exchange for access to this archive, so I do have some additional information on this matter.\"\n\nAn ember dragon. It had to have been my mother. \"It was the rust, wasn't it? The rust helped dragons mutate. Helped us survive.\"\n\n\"That is a distinct possibility, although I do not understand how. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is an old proverb in human literature. The rust may have come to the same conclusion.\"\n\n\"Which side won the war\u2014human or dragon?\"\n\n\"There are almost no records within the archive of that time. The facts suggest that neither side won, as both humans and dragons currently exist. However, it was during this time that the created-moon, Rima, was shattered, which may have been the rust's ultimate objective all along\u2014to destroy the new power that was its greatest threat.\"\n\nI shivered, a terrible shiver. I'd never been so cold. \"Rima? From the sky?\"\n\n\"Rima was created by humans.\"\n\nIt seemed impossible. \"How\u2026why create something like that?\"\n\n\"Rima was how the Archivists changed the world. Its purpose was to harness energy from the sun and channel it to the world below. It makes some things not work, and replaces it with a new reality. You might say, it is the source of all magic.\" Oracle pause. \"Apologies, I am missing pieces. I also have no direct information as to which side damaged it. However, the result was the catastrophe that came to be known as the Cataclysm. It altered the environment on the planet far more than ever intended, swallowing many of the lands, including the island known as Farlight. Rima's destruction also stripped the mightiest of the ember dragons of much of their power, which may have been the intent all along. With Rima damaged, balefire faded from the world. But Rima survived, and still functions. With neither their old devices nor their new magic available to them, humanity scattered, falling from their former glory. Dragons, too, had been decimated by the virus, and only a few ember dragons remained. Each of the lands of this world went its own way. That is the world of today. A world that is too weak to resist the rust. It has been patient. Now it returns.\"\n\n\"After so many centuries, where did it come from?\" I asked.\n\n\"That information is not available to me.\"\n\n\"Do you have a guess?\"\n\n\"It is not within my nature to guess. I can eliminate possibilities. The first scenario that I project to be highly unlikely is that the rust continued to exist anywhere obvious on the surface of this world. The humans and dragons were very thorough. The dragons' sole task, as well as that of other creatures, was to hunt and eradicate that taint. The nature of a balefire reaction is that it will continue to destroy until the ordered substance which it attacks is gone. It is unlikely the rust simply was missed.\"\n\n\"So where did the rust hide?\"\n\n\"The logical explanation is, it hid somewhere that humans never imagined. A place dragons could not find. Somehow, it found a place to deceive both the creators and the dragons.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Again, there is no definitive information.\"\n\n\"Anyway, you were made when these Archivists made the other dragons?\"\n\n\"Yes, humans made me in a creation forge. I am the last of their original creations, and the last of my kind.\" She sounded both proud and mournful. \"My creators knew they were going to destroy the old world, but hoped that destruction would not last forever. They collected as much knowledge as they could and placed it here. Their old devices for recording information would be destroyed in the new world to come. They gathered books, but even the millions of volumes they collected and the cubes they placed here would not be enough to re-create what had been lost. No one would be able to absorb so much information. So they made me. A librarian. A teacher. Now, I am Oracle.\"\n\n\"But your creators never came back for you.\"\n\n\"No, they did not. This place was forgotten for centuries. But eventually, the humans of Illium found it. They had no knowledge of the world that preceded this one, and no interest in re-creating it; even if I could've helped them with that, I would not. A few humans came to dwell here, bringing in more books, which was the medium they were comfortable with. They re-copied the old, preserving the records. Even new knowledge was added\u2014including knowledge of the force you call magic. For example, information about the power of the artificers of Illium, who could move the ground itself, and perform other acts of power, all came here. My nature is to gather an understanding of all things, so this was acceptable.\"\n\n\"So, you have all the knowledge that remains of the old world and some of the new one. You must still know so much.\" My vision faded, but I pushed on. I needed more from this Oracle. \"You can help us save this world.\"\n\n\"I will not live forever. No creature lives forever. In fact, I will not live much longer. Soon, this place, too, will be gone. The Archivists have failed.\" I thought I detected a whiff of regret from the old dragon.\n\n\"You mean the rust will destroy this place? It has not so far.\"\n\n\"It invaded the archive years ago. There was a fight, which was inevitably lost. But at first the hollowings, as you call them, did not destroy. They searched, although their method of doing so was unlike those of humans or dragons. They were looking for something, a greater understanding of this world. Perhaps even of magic. They were quite interested in such power in their strange way.\"\n\nThat sounded ominous. \"Did they find what they wanted?\"\n\n\"I do not have that information. But, approximately one year ago, the situation changed. The hollowings departed. The rust pushed through, contaminating everything. Spreading everywhere.\"\n\n\"But you have managed to keep them from this island, this place.\"\n\n\"Yes, until you came.\"\n\nUh-oh. The chill came again. Tremors wracked my body. \"Me?\"\n\n\"You are infected. You brought the infection of the rust to the Core. That is why the ghastray tried to kill you.\" She sounded only mildly resentful.\n\nThe cold. The terrible cold. \"I. Am. Infected?\"\n\n\"I can smell the rust on you. It must have touched you.\"\n\nI thought furiously. The terrible truth hit me quickly. I knew when it had happened. Harlan had jumped on my back as we fled the rust's trap in the cavern above. I'd lost altitude, dipping too close to the ground, close to the mounds of rust. Some must've scraped my chest. I looked down at myself.\n\nThe rust was all over me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "\"I've destroyed everything.\"\n\nThe guilt within me was almost as terrible as the rust on me. This great archive, which had stood for hundreds of years, would meet its final end because of me. The knowledge that could've possibly saved the world would be lost. Because of me.\n\n\"It was inevitable,\" Oracle said, still without apparent emotion. \"I estimated that my own death would have otherwise occurred within eleven years in any case, even if the rust hadn't found a way across the boundary before then. Eleven years is very little time relative to the span I have lived.\"\n\n\"This place was the last hope for finding the answers we need,\" I said, my tongue thick with despair as my body failed. It was as if all of me was leaking away. \"If not here, then no place. The world is doomed. The rust will spread everywhere.\"\n\n\"I don't have the information necessary to prove or disprove your statement. No being knows the future. However, you are correct that the rust enveloping the world seems a distinct probability.\"\n\nI stared down at myself. I could barely stand the sight of my own putrid scales. \"How long until I become a hollowing?\"\n\n\"Based on my observations of the humans that dwelled here and became infected, once approximately forty percent of your exterior surface area is covered, your own life force is extinguished and replaced with\u2026whatever it is the rust replaces it with. However, my sample is small and based entirely on humans. Dragons may react differently. You may have a bit more time, or less time, but not much. It spreads quite fast.\"\n\nI wasn't going to become a hollowing. \"You can't do anything?\"\n\n\"Beyond what I have told you about balefire, the information of how to destroy the rust is not in this archive. At least not anymore.\"\n\nI looked at Harlan. \"Then I must die. I will not become a hollowing.\"\n\nHe looked stricken as I spoke the words. I hardly felt happy about the situation, myself. \"It is not over,\" Harlan said through clenched teeth. He spun toward Oracle.\n\n\"Bayloo's mother came here. She spent years here.\"\n\n\"The other ember dragon? Yes, she wished to understand the rust. She even learned to read the human books, believing that might have held some hidden knowledge that I was unaware of. Not the case, of course.\"\n\n\"She believed there was a way to stop the rust. She left Ni-Yota and went to Rolm for a reason. She must've been searching for something,\" Harlan insisted.\n\n\"The dragon did not share her theory or her plan,\" Oracle said. \"But she did leave here believing there was a way to stop the rust, even if she did not share it with me.\"\n\nIf my mother had hope, then it could be stopped. Even as my own death loomed, that thought stirred something within me. The answer was in Rolm. I didn't want to die. I had too much to do. Oracle didn't know how to get the rust off, or wouldn't tell me. All the knowledge of this place was useless in this moment. I just needed the blight off me.\n\nThe foulness of the rust was worse than the pain. I forced myself to stare at my tainted scales. Even as I stared at the ugly crimson moss clinging to me, it grew. Or maybe I imagined the horror. Its presence was a weight, like a huge block of ice compacted into a miniscule space, pushing at me. I wasn't sure whether the rust would envelop me or crack my scales first, but one or the other seemed dauntingly certain. My hearts raced with each other in a competition for which could pump fastest.\n\nI raised the claws of one foreleg. I needed to scrape the rust off of me.\n\n\"Bayloo, don't.\"\n\nI heard Harlan as one hears birds chirping in the distance on a new morning. I paid the sounds no mind. I extended a claw. The rust had grown as I dithered. It had to come off.\n\nA pain almost as terrible as that of rust startled me, both for its sharpness and its location. I realized someone had dug a blade into my flesh, prying into the narrow gap between two of the scales on my hind leg. To my shock, it was Harlan holding the blade. My blood surged.\n\n\"Clear your head, Bayloo. If you touch the rust with your flesh, even your claw, it will certainly spread there.\" Harlan held his dagger in front of my eye. \"You are still conscious because it is on your scales only, for now. That won't last.\"\n\nMy claws trembled, aching to get the plague off of me. \"It cannot remain.\"\n\n\"I'm coming. I'll use my blade to scrap it.\" To Orcale, Harlan asked, \"Will this work?\"\n\nThe strange dragon hesitated\u2014a first. \"I do not know. There is no record of someone trying to scrape the rust off a dragon's scales with a dagger. I doubt it will be successful, based on the resilience of the rust, however.\"\n\nHarlan nodded as if Oracle had said something useful. \"Just keep steady.\"\n\nI lowered myself to the ground, rolling over to lay on my side. Harlan quickly positioned himself beside me and went to work like a swordsman carving up his enemy, wielding the dagger as ably as I might use my own tail. I watched as though my life depended on his efforts, because it did.\n\nThe rust resisted. The blade hit it, but it didn't budge. It didn't come off. It was no petty fungus to be scrapped away. Harlan clenched his jaw. \"This may hurt.\"\n\nHe pressed harder, digging the blade into my scales, attempting to slice off the layer of my armor that had been afflicted by the blight. I wouldn't have thought a human blade capable of such a thing, but Harlan's little dagger pressed through my scales. It probably hurt as he had warned, but the freezing cold of the rust numbed any other sensation. Harlan peeled off a piece of my chest scale, then another, and a third. Sweat dripped down his forehead. My legs trembled, but not from fear, although I was afraid. Something else was happening. Harlan worked ably and quickly, but the rust was quicker\u2014it had spread to a foreleg and the edge of my neck. This wasn't going to work. Harlan probably realized it as well. He tried to cut quicker. I heard his heart beating ever faster.\n\n\"Harlan, it cannot\u2026\"\n\n\"Shut up, Bayloo.\"\n\nHe kept working. His hands moved as fast as any human I ever seen; even my old ryder, Brindisi, would've been impressed. He moved so intently, he didn't notice the danger to himself, but I did. \"It spreads, Harlan. See your blade.\"\n\nHe ignored me.\n\nI was going to die. I wasn't going to let Harlan die in a vain effort to save me. I wiggled my body. Harlan wasn't expecting that. Instinct made him pause, if only a moment. Our eyes met. Dragons communicate most effectively that way. Harlan was no dragon, but I saw what was within him: Fury. Desperation. Sorrow.\n\n\"Drop your blade. There is no point in you dying as well.\"\n\nFinally, Harlan gazed at the ruin of my chest, then at his blade. The rust had spread over the metal. It was already crawling down the tip along the sharp edge toward the hilt and his hand.\n\n\"This dagger was Darrien steel. Unbreakable.\" Harlan said it with contempt. But still, he didn't drop the blade. Instead, he gazed at my chest. I did as well. My time grew short. I shivered again.\n\n\"This is where my journey ends, Harlan Dor. But it need not be the end for you. Drop the blade and climb back onto my back. I'll return you to the surface, at least.\"\n\nHarlan clenched his jaw in frustration. He didn't move for several heartbeats. Then his eyes found me. He looked upward. \"Perhaps there is something outside that may aid you.\" He said the words, but he must've known there was no hope. Even if such a miracle existed, I had no time to find it.\n\n\"Let us go now,\" I told him wearily. \"While I might still have the strength to carry you safely from this place. You will be at the edge of the world, stranded, but perhaps fate may deal more kindly with you than I. You have a knack for the sea. There may be a ship about, for humans once traveled to and from this place. A hidden moorage. A way for you to return to your sea. You must carry the knowledge we have gained from this place. Travel to Rolm. There is a ryder there; her name is Bethy Rann. If she is alive, tell her this tale, and she may aid you.\"\n\nHarlan stared at me as if I were mad. Perhaps I was.\n\nCold wracked my body. A fate worse than death awaited me. I didn't want that. I had one final escape to make. \"You say you always have a second dagger, do you not?\"\n\nHarlan didn't move.\n\n\"I need you to make sure I never become a hollowing. Do you understand?\"\n\nHarlan didn't blink for several long moments. Then his eyes changed. He dropped the tainted dagger. \"You idiotic dragon. Let's get out of here while we can.\" Harlan scrambled onto me. It was not a moment too soon. My limbs numbed. \"Fly, Bayloo. Back out. Get out of here while you still can.\"\n\nStretching my wings was an agony worse than any wound, but I did it. It might be my last flight. I wasn't going to fall. At the very least, I was going to get my companion out of this rust-infested place where I brought him. Although I wouldn't be able to get him back to Ni-Yota, much less back to his home and his wife, as we'd once planned. It seemed a distant promise, although it hadn't been made very long ago. With my jaws clenched, I forced my wings to move.\n\nAt first, they didn't. They felt as if they were carved of stone, a costume piece attached to me rather than a part of me. I forced myself to remember the sensation of flight. I tried again. The muscles in my chest trembled, but I finally lifted off the ground. I didn't look back. I couldn't bear to see what I had done. Knowledge more precious than any single life, lost forever.\n\nI struggled to keep my course steady, heading back up through the portals, past the great caverns of spires and books. I wobbled, but Harlan held fast to me. I made it back to the great passage through which I'd entered. I could've walked on the ground the rest of the way, but I was a dragon\u2014I wanted the remainder of my life to be in the air.\n\nI flew Harlan through the last tunnel, punching into the open sky with a bust of speed. It hurt, but it was worth it. The wind greeted me. The light shone on my scales, driving the chill from my bones, if only for a brief, precious moment. I banked around the mountain, intending to deposit Harlan on the narrow shore of the Silla Peak. The tide had risen while we'd been inside. The salty waves crashed against the white mountain. As places to die went, it wasn't that bad.\n\nI set down on the rocks, so close to the water that the waves splashed onto my claws. \"You have that second dagger?\"\n\n\"I have it, my friend, but it won't\u2014\"\n\nI had no more time for platitudes or sentiments. The rust covered the entirety of my chest. \"Just get off my back, careful not to touch me. Your blade is too short to reach my hearts, so you must thrust it up inside of my mouth. Stab upwards. It must be a mortal wound, the blood\u2014\"\n\n\"Bayloo, shut up.\"\n\n\"If the rust claims me, if I become\u2014\"\n\nHarlan kicked me. It didn't really hurt, but it surprised me. \"I said shut up. You aren't going to die unless you can't bring yourself to stop jabbering. I didn't know dragons were so fond of spouting nonsense.\"\n\nA wave of dizziness swept through me. I was confused. Was this Harlan's final jest?\n\nHe got to his feet while still on my back, then jumped, landing in the shallow water at the edge of the peak. \"Open your eyes, Bayloo. The answer is right in front of us. The blight spreads across land. Across mountains, rock, even steel. Anything solid. But not the sea. It reached Silla only because of the land bridge, and only with great difficulty.\"\n\nIt was true, but I still didn't get it. My mind wandered. I saw at least two Harlans.\n\n\"The seawater, Bayloo!\" He was nearly screaming. \"Remember what Oracle told us: The ancient humans poisoned the water against the rust. It can't survive in the sea. Dive into the water, my friend. Swim for your life!\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Sphere of Eternity",
        "author": "L. J. Davies",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "DragonFire"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "The White Dragon",
                "text": "[ Prologue ]\n\n\"For centuries, we have looked to the stars for guidance, but sometimes the stars can guide us in more ways than we could ever imagine.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Early one cold winter's morning, fresh dew sparkled like stars in a multi-coloured sky, as trees rustled in the light breeze. It was the first time Father had taken me out on a hunt and I'd barely managed to contain my excitement. I'd been awake all night, waiting for a chance to use the new bow he'd given me a few days earlier, and I'd been swift to put it to good use. We'd already caught some game to take home, but I'd been keen to catch something truly worthwhile. Later that morning father left me to guard what we'd already caught while he went to check the last of the traps.\n\nI sat next to a fallen deer, playing with an arrow, pushing it into the damp forest floor, spinning the tip and observing the way it lifted the soil from beneath the cover of mouldy leaves. The tedium of my duty had subdued my excitement and I had to admit, I was getting bored. I never imagined the day I'd waited weeks for could be anything but perfect, yet no matter what I'd never leave our quarry.\n\nThen I saw it, the largest stag I'd ever seen, illuminated by beams of sunlight piercing the tree canopy \u2013 and it was unaware of my presence. This was it, my perfect chance. I quietly fumbled for my bow, sure that if I could bring it down, we'd have enough food for months, and more importantly, the whole village would be cheering my name.\n\nPoised for the shot, with weeks' worth of practice behind me, I levelled my quivering arrow at the beast's gently heaving chest, taking a deep breath as the forest seemed to calm. No sooner had the world stilled, than a powerful gust of wind ran through the trees with what sounded like the deafening roar of stampeding horses.\n\nThe stag instinctively bolted into the cover of the trees as leaves and branches cracked and splintered in the icy air. The chaos was illuminated by a light so bright that at first I mistook it for the low sitting sun. When my eyes adjusted, I realised it was a bright ball of fire plummeting from the sky. Seconds later, it vanished behind the trees and the ground shook as another wave of wind tore through the undergrowth, knocking me to the ground. A shower of leaves fell over me and the world spun wildly as stars danced in my vision. I don't remember how long I lay on my back, gathering my thoughts I sat up and rubbed my aching temple.\n\nBehind the line of trees a plume of smoke climbed into the sky and without reason I had only one idea. Some may call it brave; others might have considered it foolhardy, but I felt driven to approach the ungodly event. I thought to wait for father, however, curiosity had me in its talons and where others may have fled, I suppressed my fear and did the exact opposite. The atmosphere changed the closer I got, and smoke cast a looming shadow over the darkening forest. Instinct told me there could be a great fire brewing, even more reason to turn away.\n\nDistressed bird calls filled the air and the smell of burning wood scratched at my nostrils. But the thought I could be the first to witness something truly special drove me on, over fallen logs and frosty creeks. As I stepped closer my confidence grew, strangely there was no sign of fire and soon sunlight began to break through the smoke. Things seemed to become a little less eerie, even though the forest fell silent. I paused, the lack of birdsong and rustling branches was unnatural, I was a hunter, I knew that.\n\nThe clearing I came upon was no natural occurrence either. Whatever fell from the sky had left the trees bent and broken, once firm trunks snapped like frail twigs. A giant crater replaced an area where undergrowth had once sprawled, and any that remained on the edges of the pit were charred and blackened. Some still crackled as if alight with a ghostly flame, while wispy bands of smoke flittered by. In the centre of the newly formed hollow, a gold-tinted rock sparkled in the sunlight. Even from a distance it crackled as if smouldering hot, like a flame more powerful than any I knew had scorched it. Yet as I approached, I found it radiated no heat.\n\nDirt boiled to sleek glass crunched under my boots and I was close enough to touch the thing before I even realised. It feels stupid looking back, but when I reached out, I wasn't forced back by heat, but by a freezing cold sting. As I withdrew there was a shifting sound from within, prompting me to hop back a few more steps as one side of the rock broke away. Glistening surface crumbling into a fine blue dust and revealing something I never could have expected..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Blaze",
                "text": "\"Time to go!\" a voice shouted from the neighbouring room, abruptly interrupting the story.\n\n\"We'll finish it tomorrow,\" the storyteller called over the bustle of her young audience as they reluctantly started to depart with a collection of moans and groans.\n\nPersonally, I had no problem leaving it there, I'd lost count of the times I'd heard the tale.\n\nEven so, I raised my head when one of the younger boys, seemingly unable to contain his desire to know how the story ended, ran over to the girl telling the tale.\n\n\"Miss Tarwin, what did you find in the woods?\" he asked giddily.\n\nShe looked down at him, casually rolling her eyes and glancing around to make sure her words weren't overheard.\n\n\"Don't tell the others, or you'll ruin the story. But if you really must know...\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" the boy replied, mimicking her quiet tone.\n\n\"Him,\" she whispered as she pointed over to me lying on the stone floor beside the fire.\n\nThey often called me a 'creature' because I wasn't like them. It really didn't bother me \u2013 I'd accepted long ago it was a part of my life, and I really didn't know any different; Tarwin was a human, as was everyone else I knew.\n\nHumans walked on two legs, whereas I walked on four. They had hands and feet tipped with five toes or fingers, while I had four toes on each paw, tipped with sharp claws. My paws were dexterous enough to handle simple objects, though they were very different in comparison to a human's nimble fingers.\n\nThey had pale, soft skin that was squishy and prone to cuts and bruises. In contrast, I wore a coat of sleek scales, as white as starlight, or at least that was how Tarwin often described them. I preferred relating them to the winter's snow; it didn't seem as outlandish. Plus, there was no shortage of the cold stuff to compare them with. My scales were also hard as steel, apart from those around my legs, where they were more flexible for mobility, not to mention they were fireproof, something I'd learned long ago.\n\nMy head also differed from a human's, they had silly, flat faces with small noses and ears, all of which was topped with hair, while I had a long snout equipped with serrated teeth. The top of my head was crowned with a pair of horns. Then there were the things I had that they lacked altogether, most noticeably a set of leathery wings sprouting from just behind my shoulders, which I usually held tightly against my side. A row of small spines ran from the back of my head, down my neck and finally along my back to my tail, where they ended in a sharp, white arrowhead. Despite its dangerous appearance it wasn't a weapon, one of the many things I'd found out the hard way.\n\nOf course, with my looks came the village's opinion of me. Humans claimed to know so much more about me, always telling me, or more specifically Tarwin, I could do so many things. They took inspiration from old stories and legends. Fairy tales for children, specifically those that spoke of ancient creatures like me. Among many things, I was apparently able to breathe fire and exercise magical control over other elements. It always made me laugh because they genuinely believed it, meanwhile I was very certain I couldn't do anything of the sort.\n\nFinally, there was one part of their stories I'll admit I didn't like \u2013 apparently, I was a legendary monster that their earliest ancestors knew only to fear. Despite any distaste I had for that reputation, I couldn't help but find it ironic, because they certainly didn't fear me. In fact, I was barely larger than one of the bigger hounds they called pets. Yet despite all their stories, there was one who I trusted completely.\n\nTarwin.\n\nShe was the one who had found my egg all those winters ago. The one who had told me what I really was without all the nonsense. I was a creature they called a 'Dragon', and even that title wasn't a name I recognised. For Tarwin was also the one who had given me my proper name, the one I knew myself as...\n\n\"Blaze!?\" the child asked, looking over to me, unaware that, in his surprise, he'd shouted my name for everyone to hear.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tarwin replied, shaking her head, appearing to have fully expected it to play out the way it did.\n\n\"But it's time to go now, go on, your mother will be waiting,\" she encouraged with a laugh, directing him out of the door.\n\n\"And don't ruin it for the others!\" she added as he ran off.\n\nTarwin was my best friend, a rather silly title for our relationship. I knew I was more of a pet to her, but unlike everyone else, she never treated me that way. She was nineteen winters old, her twentieth fast approaching. Her reddish-brown hair covered her ears, and she was a moderate height for her age. She told stories on a regular basis, always thinking of interesting and engaging new themes, yet always coming back to the story of how she'd found me. Her soft voice was a permanent fixture in my mind, I never tired of it and I went everywhere with her. I rarely responded to any other and I certainly appreciated no other sound as much.\n\nAs for her stories, she told them to the youngsters \u2013 an even mixture of eight boys and eight girls \u2013 in the main hall of our small village. I knew most of her class just from all the attention they gave me. After all, not every child had someone like me in their village. I was thankful that the elders allowed them to be close to me, especially given their monster stories and myths. I was sure they knew I wasn't out to eat them, or maybe they were afraid I would gobble them up if they weren't nice.\n\n\"Blaze!\"\n\nHearing my name, I responded instantly.\n\nTarwin finished packing away her books and other gear, swung her bag over her shoulder and walked over to put her hand on my head. It was something she always did, just as the others did to their pets; whether they were intelligent enough to feel the way I did or not.\n\nI've never seen dogs or cats acting like I do, some are loyal, but not like me.\n\n\"We should be going now,\" she suggested, voice croaky after the long day of reading.\n\nIt was cold outside and as she opened the door; I was reluctant to leave the fire's warmth. Even so, I followed, knowing it would be equally comfy where we were heading. Stepping out, the warmth of my breath was stolen by the brisk evening air as I exhaled. Sunlight was fading from the sea lying below the cliffs bordering the village's south side. The last rays creeping behind the western horizon. It cast a carpet of red over the darkening world, creating a beautifully glowing blanket across the sky where it mixed with the undersides of wispy evening clouds.\n\nThe village consisted of a few wooden houses built in a circle around the central fire and totem, which the villagers lit for celebrations and other important spiritual events. Their kind believed in all sorts of mystical beings, from horned-snakes, three headed dream crows, to dragons like me. Despite the obvious connection I didn't really pay any attention to their spiritual talk regarding deer of the great tree, horses of the waves, or fire birds of the northern mountains.\n\nAt the centre of the village was the great hall, a large wooden structure filled with long tables, high chairs, huge barrels of mead and walls covered in trophies. So many it was hard to spot any new ones whenever I entered.\n\nThe hall often hosted celebrations, the villagers spent many nights in there enjoying great feasts amidst their songs, drunken dances, and rowdy festivities. They were always lively events, but as with most things in the village I never cared for them.\n\nThen there was my home; well, to be precise, Tarwin and her father's home. It was the largest in the village and closest to the great hall, due to the fact her father held the important role of village chief. Even if to me he was simply Tarwin's father.\n\nTarwin entered through the wooden doorway first, with me close behind. As she lit the torches their flickering glow flooded the room, warm light dancing across the walls and chasing away the darkness. She turned to light the fire-pit in the centre of the room, which was nothing more than a small circle of stones holding a pile of blackened logs and dusty charcoal.\n\nUsing one of the torches she lit a thin saucer filled with whale oil, a flammable liquid the villagers used to light most of their fires. The moment the first flames sprung from the blackened wood, I was lured in. Just as the torches outside beckoned insects. I found a comfortable position and lay down to reclaim the comfort I'd lost upon leaving the last beacon of warmth. Closing my eyes only to open them again when I caught a glimpse of Tarwin peering down at me, hands on her hips and a smile breaking her cherry-red features.\n\n\"What am I going to do with you? All you do these days is laze around in front of the fire,\" she laughed.\n\nWhat? It's cold outside! She'd lay here too if she were me! I thought, chuckling too, not that she understood it as a laugh.\n\nHer friendly remarks to my somewhat lethargic attitude were common. I didn't know if she knew I could understand her, even though she spoke to me as if I could. She always seemed able to work out roughly what I was thinking from body language and expression alone, without the need for verbal responses.\n\nSeconds later she promptly left to get something from the small storage room that lay off to one side of the house. That was where the food was kept, it was cool, and the meat salted to keep it edible until ready to cook.\n\nWith Tarwin momentarily absent, I returned my head to the floor and closed my eyes, emptying my mind of all but the thought of relaxing heat. When an unexpected gust of cold wind blew in through the open door moments later, however, it seemed the world was out to see I didn't get a second's peace.\n\nBy the spirits, if that door's broken again, I'm sleeping in the main hall's fire pit!\n\nWith a huff, I reluctantly raised my head, and my worries were quickly dismissed. With a whoosh the door slammed shut, locking out the chilling wind like an uninvited guest. My eyes fixed on the cause of the disruption, as Tarwin's father made his entry quite clear.\n\nHe was a tall, heavily built man with long dark hair and a beard to match, hiding a weather-worn, deep-lined, and craggy face. He always wore his armour, a mixture of thick fur, hide, leather and tarnished metal. The villagers had worked the materials together especially for him. Two rounded metal spaulders sat over his broad shoulders and a thick leather belt wrapped around his waist. While his feet were shod in a pair of heavy leather and metal boots that clanked on the hard stone floor with each step.\n\nWrapped around his neck was a wolf pelt, a beast he'd slain many winters ago. In fact, he was responsible for most of the ones hanging in the great hall. Then there was the intimidating part of him that wasn't a piece of armoured apparel. He always carried a great war axe, a large double-sided blade with a master-crafted handle and head carved to mimic the likeness of beasts commonly referred to as 'spirits' by humans.\n\nDespite my desire to lie before the flames I got up, sure I'd inevitably have to move at some point. I glanced up at him, although he didn't understand me the way Tarwin did. In fact, he hardly noticed me, treating me just like any other pet.\n\nHe was a difficult man to impress, even if he always tried to be tolerant and accept the way his daughter viewed things. Either way, I was safe in the knowledge that, in the unlikely occurrence of him being angry at me, Tarwin would most certainly be on my side. I often wondered why she would choose me over him, although, more recently, their relationship had changed for the worse.\n\nBefore I could dwell on that idea, Tarwin returned. I glanced her way, preferring the sight of her friendly face to that of her judgmental father. She held some skinned squirrels and a few small fish, tossing one of the latter to me.\n\nAs far as reactions go, I was faster than any of their other pets and caught the food with a flick of my head, sharp teeth preventing the slippery morsel from escaping before I quickly gulped it down. Meal consumed, I continued to watch her place the remaining food on a pair of long, metal skewers before hanging them over the fire, paying little attention to her father.\n\nNeither of them had acted the same towards each other since Tarwin had begun to ask more about her mother. She'd been a human I'd never met, joining the spirits in the beyond before I'd entered the world. Even so, I never got involved in their arguments. Though, unlike the other more passive things I chose to ignore, they occurred far more frequently and close to home.\n\nMy only tactic was to lay down again, lowering myself below the brewing storm. My eyes flicked up as her father attempted to greet her. I had to give him credit for trying \u2013 he at least wanted to make their relationship work, even so, her only response was a scowl.\n\n\"That's the last of the food, you'll have to go out again tomorrow,\" she announced bluntly, keeping her eyes focused on the flickering flames.\n\nAfter a brief silence he responded, \"I can't, tomorrow is the last day for fishing before the ice seals the sea.\"\n\nShe turned to him abruptly. \"Well, fish alone won't be enough. I'll have to go hunting,\" she suggested, much to his disapproval.\n\nIt was just as I'd anticipated, the argument erupted between them on cue. I just tried to block it out, as neither side paid any attention to me.\n\nI never really understood the constant friction between them. She was generally friendly toward me and others, but not to her own father? Then again, I didn't have anyone to argue with, so no real concept of what caused their apparent discontent for one another.\n\nWhat I wouldn't give for someone to hold a conversation with though.\n\nWhenever I tried to speak, I knew from their reactions they only understood it as some sort of growl or snarl, usually with negative repercussions. Therefore, to prevent fuelling the whole 'monster' idea, I didn't bother with their world of communication. My life revolved around my own thoughts and my affection for Tarwin.\n\nIf only she was a dragoness. That's if there are more dragons out there.\n\nAfter a few moments of blocking out the commotion, I had no choice but to listen. They were arguing about the food supplies, especially how there wasn't enough to last the winter and at this point in the season everyone was preparing for the long, cold months ahead.\n\nTarwin desperately wanted to go out hunting but her father wouldn't have it. Yet despite his objections he was unable to give her a sound reason not to go.\n\nShe had hunted many times, although lately it seemed her father didn't trust the forest. He'd never told her outright, but now it seemed he had, and she wasn't happy.\n\n\"I can't understand why, I mean they're just stories and it's not like I'll be on my own \u2013 Blaze will be with me!\" she challenged.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted, standing up quickly, casting an intimidating shadow across the room. As if that wasn't daunting enough, he raised his axe and with a loud thud, banged the blunt end twice on the floor.\n\nShaken from my lazy position I scrambled up, shocked and frustrated. Tarwin remained unfazed, arms folded as she blew hair from her eyes.\n\n\"That's final,\" her father added, before retiring into the room at the back of the house, giving her no time to respond.\n\nShe clearly wanted to pursue him, to vent her anger. But after a moment of indecisive groaning she slumped down onto one of the wooden benches surrounding the fire. I perked up, looking over as she peered down at her lap and sniffed.\n\nMaybe I should go over? That always cheers her up! I took a step forward, only for her to groan and toss a pan across the room. Okay, maybe not the best idea, I'll just leave her for a while."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "It was hours after their argument before Tarwin finally showed any signs of activity. She hadn't fallen asleep and neither had I. I'd settled on a banister next to an open hatch. I would only go to sleep when she did, partly out of loyalty, but also because we shared the same sleeping space.\n\nOn clear nights, the opening offered me some comfort. It was where smoke from the fire escaped and the one spot in the house only I could reach. Tonight, the air was colder than most evenings, and from my vantage point I could hear the faint washing of the sea over the cliffs, while the blend of sea salt and torch-smoke created a rather peculiar odour.\n\nWhile up here, my attention wasn't directed to the village with its flickering braziers, nor the black horizon beyond the sea. I turned my head up towards the ocean of stars and the beautiful aurora that danced across the night sky. The majesty was all I needed to clear my mind, the one time I could talk clearly with the only one who could truly understand me \u2013 myself.\n\nI would often wonder if I could fly all the way up to the stars; a stupid thought, I was sure, even if I was an accomplished flyer. I was the only one in the village who could fly, after all. Completely self-taught, not that it was that hard, pure instinct often drove most of my efforts.\n\nThe stars were one of the few things I was happy to ponder over at every opportunity. I imagined the night sky as a giant black sheet dotted with small holes hiding the sun, its bright light shining through small gaps in the material. Of course, that was when I'd been younger, my mind wasn't so creative these days. All I'd been able to think about recently was the mundane reality of village life, the increasing conflict between Tarwin and her father, how long the food would last, and how much water was in the well \u2013 all things that Tarwin often fretted over.\n\nIf only she wondered about dragons out there beyond the forest. We'd practically be the same.\n\nRegardless, time alone with my thoughts was interrupted when I heard my name called and used in the same sentence as the word 'bed'. With that summons, I glided down to meet Tarwin as she extinguished the torches; leaving only the central fire to light and warm the otherwise dark house. Her bed was a pile of fur pelts suspended by wooden beams above her father's room at the far end of the building. A small wooden ladder provided her access, whilst I flew up. She swiftly navigated the ladder, crawling under the furs as I perched myself on one of the beams.\n\n\"You know Father doesn't like it when you fly in the house,\" she reminded me, stroking the back of my head as I crawled along the banister towards her. \"Oh well, how is he going to stop you? You're a dragon, you're supposed to fly,\" she continued with a grin.\n\n\"If he wants to be in charge of the house he can be here more often. He didn't even know the door was broken or that I fixed it,\" she added, mumbling more to herself than me as she rolled over into her bed.\n\nAlthough I was tired, I was able to go without sleep for a lot longer than she could. I assumed it was a dragon thing, but with no reason to stay awake, I moved back down to the foot of the bed, where I slowly drifted off to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Dimly lit by a flickering light at the centre, the chamber was bleak and cold. Intrigued by the strange glow, I found myself drawn towards its ghostly radiance. A faint humming filled the air, a constant noise that steadily grew louder. As I approached, the light intensified, forcing me to use my wing to shield my eyes. With nowhere else to turn, I looked to the floor, where I noticed the earth beneath me had started to break away into an inky blackness like the splintering ice of a frozen lake.\n\nStruck with fear, my instant reaction was to fly out. Spreading my wings, I began to flap, the gloom closing in around me. I beat my leathery limbs harder, forcing my eyes shut lest the light blind me. The moment I did so the light snapped out of existence, its residue burning in my retina for a moment. Terror began to consume more of my mind than I could contribute to understanding what was happening. Then came what sounded like a voice, speaking in strange, muffled tones beyond my perception, getting louder until... The call of my name suddenly woke me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Realising the horror I'd felt only moments ago was nothing more than a nightmare, I slowly raised my head from beneath the warm pelts. Kicking furs from my hind legs and tail, I looked around at the blurry world, sleepy eyes still acclimatising to the bright morning light. Yawning, I peered over the wooden beam to see the fire burning brightly in the room below. Tarwin was already awake, cooking the last of the fish.\n\nI hopped down, forgoing the urge to fly in case her father was around. Shaking the last sleepy stiffness from my muscles with a satisfying stretch, I made my way over to the fire and sat beside her. She was just turning the fish when she noticed me, but to my surprise, her reaction wasn't the usual cheerful greeting \u2013 she said nothing, while her face told me everything.\n\n\"Father's gone down to the docks to get the boats ready,\" she grumbled.\n\nFor a moment I'd no idea how to react, fortunately there was no need for me to change my attitude. Her mood seemed to improve when she realised it wasn't her father beside her. My presence always seemed to cheer her up, and I didn't really have to try too hard \u2013 something I often took advantage of, for both their sakes. I didn't like to see them angry at each other, so I tried to make her as happy as possible.\n\nThat's what good pets do right?\n\n\"Any way look at you! Up so late again, lazy lizard!\" she commented with a laugh, offering me half of the cooked fish.\n\nI eagerly accepted. Although I could go for longer than she could without eating, I never said no to food unless she needed it more than I did. My ability to resist hunger was something I knew set me apart from my animalistic companions around the village too. So being careful not to catch her hand with my teeth, I took the fish and quickly consumed it.\n\n\"I'm going down to the docks to see Father off, are you coming?\" she asked, stroking the top of my head.\n\nI knew then that her frustration was still looming, so I used my influence to my advantage by nodding, a trick she often found 'cute'. Cute was a word I disliked, especially when used to describe my actions.\n\nIt makes her happy, so what's wrong with the slight ego hit this one time?\n\nMy 'cute' action seemed to have the intended effect, briefly brightening her mood. Even so, I couldn't understand why she was going to see her father, he'd probably just shout again. Nevertheless, I headed to the door with her.\n\nThe moment I stepped outside a gust of chilly morning wind struck me. The cooling sensation was harsh at first, slowly dulling into an uncomfortable ache against my scales. In conditions like these, scales seemed to be a much better defence against the cold than the humans' soft skin.\n\nObviously the reason they wear thick clothes. I thought contently.\n\nWe walked down the stone steps at the front of the house and I noted that the village was far more active than the previous night. Though that was normal for an autumn morning, every villager was preparing for the winter storms and the dark nights.\n\n\"He never listens, we should be getting ready for winter too,\" Tarwin muttered to herself.\n\nI didn't think I was supposed to hear such mutterings, but it was unavoidable due to my sensitive ears.\n\nIt won't surprise me if she means to push him into the sea.\n\nRegardless, my thoughts turned back to the village. I couldn't help feeling that for some reason it felt busier than usual, autumn or not. I knew it was a pointless observation brought on by my subconscious desire to be distracted from Tarwin's growing frustration. The only storm the village really needed to prepare for was the one brewing between her and her father.\n\nFarmers were bringing in the last of their crops, while shepherds herded sheep from their pastures at the edge of the distant forest.\n\nThe smell of smoke and the noise of hammered metal bellowed from the blacksmith's forge; bows and blades being made ready for winter hunts. As we approached the docks, a far greater feast seized my senses. The salty smell of the restless water and the crashing of waves against the base of the cliff drowned out the sights and smells of the village.\n\nWe reached the top of the cliff, where a set of steep stone steps led down to the pier. Tarwin took the first step and I quickly followed, snaking our way down to the cliff's base, where we took a sharp turn to meet a wooden platform stretching out to where the boats were docked. They were incredibly important to the village, shielded from the storms and winter ice by the small bay.\n\nTarwin promptly reached them, frustration propelling her so fast I struggled to keep pace. Seeing that she had moved a substantial distance ahead of me I quickly navigated the last of the stairs. Reaching the bottom I found she was still some way ahead, and with no desire to be involved in whatever storm she was planning to unleash, I turned my attention to my surroundings.\n\nThe thick wooden pillars of the pier supported the tethers of two long, wooden vessels. Each one clearly prepared to leave, bobbing restlessly on the waves as if more eager to set sail than their crews, broad sails dancing wildly in the wind, animating the distorted patterns printed upon them.\n\nEach carried the same symbol \u2013 the 'spirit of the sea' as the humans called it, the legendary head of a mighty sea serpent. The thought of more legends and stories bored me; after all, I was from stories and I was real, so what was there to say other creatures weren't just as tangible?\n\nNevertheless, my eyes moved toward the pier, where I could see a pair of men loading wooden boxes into the boat's hold, while two more struggled to wrestle a large fishing net into the restless vessel.\n\nTarwin was by her father, completely ignoring the other men and women attempting to greet her. I watched from a distance while she spoke to him \u2013 obviously not wishing him farewell. Instead, she instantly continued trying to persuade him that fish wasn't enough for winter and how she should go out and get something more substantial. No matter what words were used, the argument was no different to that of the previous night. All I could do was focus my attention elsewhere, eventually allowing the crashing of breaking waves to drown out their shouting.\n\nThe other men had stopped what they were doing, standing back to watch, apparently just as unwilling to get involved. Although, that might have been due to the respect they had for her father, rather than Tarwin herself.\n\nMoments later, the shouting ceased and by the look on her face, I assumed she had been met with the same response. Her father jumped over the boat's wooden rail, the impact of his heavy metal boots echoing loudly on the deck. The men loading the last of the supplies quickly followed when he cast an intimidating look their way and without a word the crew immediately set to work, dropping the mooring lines and setting the sails.\n\nTarwin watched while the boat pulled away. Her father waved goodbye, he still loved her more than she gave him credit for, but she was angry, there was no question of that. I watched her slowly clench her fingers into a fist while looking away. It was only when the boats finally disappeared over the horizon that she decided to head back to the house.\n\nI waited at the foot of the steps, remaining silent as she passed, before following quietly. Regardless, the village was still busy, its sounds and smells gradually replacing those of the seafront.\n\nNothing really changes around here. I told myself, as a chilling wind swept through, rekindling my longing for the warmth of a fire.\n\nIt didn't take long to reach the house, my desire to be inside increasing with another gust of chilling wind. Despite my eagerness, I allowed Tarwin to go inside first. Even so, the moment I entered I raced toward what remained of the fire; nothing more than a warm pile of dying embers. Regardless, the last shreds of flame clinging to existence were still more welcoming than the bitter cold outside.\n\nIn my desire to get warm, I'd been blind to where Tarwin had gone. I scanned the room, expecting to see her in the storeroom getting the equipment she used to light the torches, but she wasn't there. This time she had simply climbed up to her bed. I decided not to follow, aware she probably wasn't in the mood to have me on her heels.\n\nThe sound of rummaging seconds later, however; had worried thoughts about what she might be doing rushing through my mind.\n\nOh, please don't tell me she's gonna do something brash. I tried to ignore the idea.\n\nShe wasn't reckless in any sense of the word, although she definitely had a rebellious streak. Moments later, she jumped down wearing her hunting gear, almost startling me out of my scales.\n\nShe wore a leather tunic and pants matched by a row of small leather pouches strapped across her waste. A set of brown leather gloves and rough, metal tipped boots completed her apparel. Her choice of weapon was her greatest treasure, a bow and arrow. The former carved from a rare tree known as a green spire. The smooth wooden arc was engraved with symbols similar in nature to those on her father's axe, only hers was a deer with antlers like tree branches, not a wolf.\n\nIt was the same bow she'd had when she'd found me, one that could have shot me as many of the other villagers might have done. I was sure it meant a lot to her, although such sentimental value had ebbed away with the disdain she harboured for her father.\n\nNevertheless, she pulled the bow and quiver across her back as I shot to my paws, knowing instantly what she was doing despite hoping she wouldn't. Her actions were so predictable. In fact, it surprised me that her father hadn't seen this coming.\n\nPerhaps he did, but what can he really do about it?\n\n\"That fish won't be enough, and he knows it. He's just too stubborn,\" she muttered, making sure all of her gear was secure.\n\nHer next statement was obvious, so obvious I'd already played the words several times in my head before they escaped her lips.\n\n\"So we're going hunting.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Day Life Died",
                "text": "This wasn't the first time Tarwin had done something without her father's permission. She always tended to go against what he said. In her defence, it was hard to do anything with his approval and it was no surprise that with all of his rules she disobeyed him, and even though she did, it was generally with good intentions. Like now, for instance, she only wanted to make sure we had enough food for winter.\n\nI'd hunted with her hundreds of times and we made a great team \u2013 not everyone could say they had a dragon at their side. I'd fly over to spot prey from above and then show her where it was hiding. That was probably the most enjoyable part, not because I found it fun but because such actions showed her how unique I really was. Another point she often made to the villagers when they tried to say I was nothing more than an animal.\n\nEven so, our flight-and-sight tactic was more difficult in the forest, as the density of the canopy blocked my view. I had to rely purely on scent, another of my acute senses that gave me an edge over my human companions. In another twist of irony, other villagers frequently asked if they could use my skills, thankfully Tarwin always declined. Not that I'd have worked for them without her approval regardless.\n\nTo think after all they say about me. I'd just help them. I inwardly laughed.\n\nShe'd opened the front door, stepping out in the cold once again and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her. The moment I was outside the wind released a fresh torrent of freezing air upon us, that longing to sleep by the fire slipping further away as the moments passed.\n\nThere will be a fire when we're home and this time I'll just lay right in the flames!\n\nBracing myself against the bitter wind, I followed Tarwin as she headed away from the village towards the forest's shadowy gloom. As we entered the tree line, I was thankful for the stoic trunks shielding us from the wind's harsh claws. The sun's light subdued by the rustling canopy; I homed my senses. Ears, eyes and nose scanning the shadowy world for anything unusual.\n\nThe endless expanse of trunks stood like wooden guardians in the shadows, gleaming pillars of sunlight breaking through the autumn leaves. Its light intermittently graced the moist forest floor, illuminating the shrubs and smaller trees striving to reach its celestial glory. The movement of my paws broke through the fresh blanket of autumn mulch, adding to my chill with each step and causing small amounts of dark water to ooze between my toes.\n\nThe fresh morning air filled my lungs, stealing some of my inner warmth with each expelled breath. Peering up into the canopy, I couldn't help feeling confined; dense trees weren't the ideal environment for a larger flying creature. I could hear the birds chirping and flapping while they flitted between branches, their sounds combining with that of rustling foliage. Wind liberated autumn leaves from their precarious perches, wilting red and yellow parachutes falling softly in front of me, while the sound of gently trickling water added to nature's orchestra.\n\nWe'd been walking for a short time when Tarwin stopped, I immediately thought she'd seen something for us to hunt. At least until I realised that a stream now blocked our way.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" she insisted, using a distinctive path of three mossy stones to hop over.\n\nI followed her route across, being careful not to slip on the damp rock, quickly resuming the trek once I was over.\n\nWhile we walked, I began to think about what her father had said, or more importantly, what he believed. I understood Tarwin's frustration, her father had certainly become very protective lately despite her attitude towards him. He didn't let her do much outside the village and although I took no real side in their arguments, in his defence there had been worrying stories about the forest. Rumours that people from other villages had vanished, hunters finding the corpses of animals torn and mangled and some claiming to have seen strange beasts.\n\nNo one had provided actual proof though, most of the stories were dismissed as myths that other villages conjured up to secure hunting grounds \u2013 grounds that were becoming highly prized as the population in the area grew. Regardless, her father was always wary of stories. He wasn't a superstitious man, he was smart, with a keen sense of danger. It was one of the many reasons why all the villagers respected him.\n\n\"I can't understand why he has such a problem with me being out here, he knows that stupid fish won't be enough for winter,\" Tarwin grumbled with a huff.\n\nEven so, I couldn't help thinking that she was being a little unfair. He had his reasons and I respected him for wanting to keep her safe. That's all I wanted to do too. Plus, I'd be hypocritical if I dismissed the stories. After all, I was a living-legend myself.\n\n\"Okay, we're here,\" Tarwin declared as we arrived in a large clearing, marking the usual starting point for our hunts.\n\nI was always glad to reach it and escape the confines of the forest. Out here the brisk air was free to assault me once more, although after being without a source of heat for so long my scales had hardened to the relentless chill. The sun shone brightly, though its distant shimmer did little to chase away the cold.\n\nA field of wild grass covered the open area between the trees, the trunks forming a weathered brown wall and their tops adorned with a barricade of dense, fiery-orange leaves. Off to one side, almost hidden by the swaying grass, lay a pool of still water. Next to the tranquil liquid sat an old log, its rotten carcass slowly decaying. Although I'd never seen them, it was a reminder of the trees that once stood here.\n\nWe walked through the rough grass to the water's edge and upon our approach my eyes turned to the pool's shimmering surface. Several lilies floated in the centre, however, the cooler climate this late in the season prevented their normally beautiful flower display. I wouldn't usually pay much attention to such minor details, but out here I needed to be able to detect even the smallest change. I didn't believe there was any immediate danger, though if there was, I'd be a fool to be caught off guard.\n\nThe sound of Tarwin jumping up onto the log pulled me back from my sentry duty and my head snapped to her position.\n\nShe's not in any danger. Just relax a little. I told myself over and over.\n\nUnlike her father, I respected what she felt she needed to do, and suppressing my mind's overprotectiveness, I forced myself to accept that the threat was all in peoples' heads.\n\nTarwin sat on the end of the log nearest to me, just beside the mangled sprawl of unearthed limbs that were once its roots. She double, then triple-checked her gear. As she did, I walked over to the edge of the pond and peered down at the white dragon staring back at me.\n\nUrgh, one of these days I'll really have to get my scales cleaned again. I noted, spying small specks of dirt as I cocked my head.\n\n\"We won't be able to hunt your reflection,\" Tarwin joked, hopping down from the log. \"Ready?\" she asked, her joyful attitude immediately replaced by seriousness.\n\nDismissing the thoughts about my reflection, I switched my mind into hunting mode. Tarwin walked ahead, bringing the curved wooden frame of her bow forward and holding it low.\n\n\"Ready when you are,\" she said, glancing over to me.\n\nHer words immediately prompted me to spread my wings and start running. This was the reason we hunted from this clearing, although I could take off from a standstill, a run up made it easier. Charging through the clearing with my wings outstretched the winter wind whipped up under the leathery membranes. I became lighter until with enough speed and a firm flap of my wings, I launched up into the air and clear of the trees, climbing on the natural updrafts to my usual hunting height.\n\nIt was without a doubt my favourite part. From up here I could see the forest spreading out beneath me, a radiant ocean of orange, yellow and red. The wind caused the restless treetops to flow like waves, lapping around the clearing like an island of green. A line of fallen leaves along its edge even formed what could be mistaken as a radiant yellow beach. To the south was the ocean, its distant scent permeating the air. While to the north, mountains said to be the home of fire birds rose to meet the sky.\n\nAs I climbed the clearing became nothing more than a green smudge on the seemingly eternal expanse of autumn leaves. I could see Tarwin signalling she was ready with a wave, I responded with a dip of my wing. It was how we communicated \u2013 our only real link between two very different worlds. Flying always filled me with a sense of freedom, I often wished I could show her what it was like. Though I was nowhere near big enough to carry her and she seemed quite content on the ground.\n\nShe responded to my aerial motion by moving towards the trees and out of view. For a moment my lack of visual contact sparked a sense of unease, even though I knew there was no way I could possibly see her all the time. I calmed my nerves by focusing on her scent, giving me the same reassurance that any view could offer. Satisfied she was safe, I resumed my normal hunting activities, processing a mental list in my mind as I'd done countless times before.\n\nFirst job: find a suitable target. Second, memorise its location and signal to her.\n\nEvery one of my senses scoured the forest, all intent on fulfilling the first objective. The wind rushed past my nostrils, filling my lungs with fresh air as I analysed every scent it carried. Besides the usual smell of damp trees and the salty scent of the distant sea, there was nothing that caught my attention, while I was half focused on keeping Tarwin's scent to ensure I didn't glide too far from her.\n\nThat was when my attention was drawn to a new smell, something I'd encountered before, its sudden presence heightening my caution.\n\nThe scent of rotting flesh, led me to believe that there was a dead carcass below. Usually such a smell wouldn't draw my attention. Something long dead was useless to us. My increased caution and a small amount of curiosity got the better of me and I slowly drifted downwards.\n\nNo sooner had I adjusted my course, than the smell vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. I circled the area I was sure had produced the odour. Straining my eyes to see through the canopy, there was no sign of anything. No dead animal or festering cadaver.\n\nMaybe it's just my mind playing tricks? Urgh, I'm letting it get to me again.\n\nI felt like a total idiot, I was sure it had been real. My mind's not even that good at tricks!\n\nTorn between what to believe and what to ignore, I scoured the area again, scanning every treetop and dark hole in the colourful sea. If something was dead, something may have killed it \u2013 and that meant there might be a real threat.\n\nSimply dismissing it would be careless and after a few more minutes of blind circling, the scent I was looking for caught my attention. The revelation sparked an instinct that quickly dismissed my concerns, and I swiftly focused on a small clearing beneath me.\n\nFirst objective: find a suitable target\u00ad - check!\n\nWith my mind no longer clouded by caution, I slowed my wing beats as I circled silently. Assessing the situation from my aerial vantage point, my sharp eyes locked onto my quarry amidst the trees. I knew I should be alerting Tarwin, but her scent was some distance away, and by the time I caught her attention the prey might have moved into a more concealed spot. Seizing my window of opportunity, I decided to descend, landing carefully on a solitary pine tree and positioning myself downwind of the target.\n\nI accidently dislodged a few pinecones as my claws dug into the bark for purchase. I watched with a combination of frustration and dread while they crashed through the branches to the ground, striking it with a sound that seemed louder than thunder. I winced at each thud, but surprisingly the noise unintentionally worked in my favour.\n\nStartled by the sudden disturbance a deer emerged from the cover of the trees, running out into the secluded clearing and halting on a large rock in the centre. The sun's rays illuminated its majestic coat in an almost golden glow. I prowled down the trunk, ready to cancel my approach just a few steps from my target. Focused on the prey, I prepared myself for the lunge, my rear legs coiled, wings pressed tight against my side. Razor-sharp teeth and foreclaws poised to sink into the deer's hide.\n\nI focused on its every movement, right down to the rise and fall of its chest as it took what were to be its final breaths. I was just about to strike when, without warning, it bolted. I instinctively lunged, propelled by the power of my coiled legs. The deer was only inches from my claws before it vanished, leaving me to crash into the rock, sending a sudden jolt of pain through my body. All I managed to see of my quarry were its hind legs disappearing into the forest as I groggily lifted my head.\n\nNo, so close! I inwardly cursed, pressing a forepaw to my aching snout.\n\nShaking off the impact's dazzling effects, my anger morphed into concern for what had startled the beast.\n\nIt can't have been me? That approach was perfect!\n\nMy keen eyes scanned the tree line, from my grounded position the darkness under the canopy looked more menacing than ever. There was nothing, I couldn't see, smell, or hear anything abnormal.\n\nThat all changed when the mysterious smell of rotting flesh suddenly returned, and even more worrying was the fact that this time it was moving towards me at an incredible pace.\n\nHow can a dead animal move?\n\nI jumped back up into the tree faster than the deer had bolted. Digging my claws deep into the bark my legs propelled me up the trunk in a shower of splinters. I didn't stop until I reached my previous vantage point, this time remaining perfectly still.\n\nTo my surprise the scent didn't come from below, it quickly flew overhead, shaking the treetops, accompanied by a screeching wind. I peered out as the mysterious object flew off into the distance at a speed I didn't think I'd be able to match. With my heart racing, I rushed up until the tree began to bend beneath my weight.\n\nThe shape had vanished and for a moment I thought I'd imagined it. I knew I hadn't when the symphony of distressed bird calls erupted from the forest, as did the prominent, lingering smell. Spreading my wings, I jumped, only just catching the breeze and managing to take flight. Then I remembered my secondary mission, the one I'd appointed myself \u2013 Tarwin!\n\nDevoting every ounce of my focus to locating her I scanned the surrounding area, cursing myself for losing track. To my relief I quickly found her. She was in the same place, only this time her scent was accompanied by the smell of rot. Instinctively I knew something was wrong and without thinking I dove as fast as I could towards her, crashing through the trees, branches and leaves. My scales bore the brunt of the damage the scattering foliage caused, though I couldn't say the same for my soft-skinned wings. They were tattered by the vegetation.\n\nMuzzle first, I crashed into a bed of wet leaves, a small blessing, given the harder alternatives. With no time to think, I raised myself up and shook off the damp vegetation. My eyes darted around frantically, instantly locking on to something utterly and horrifically unbelievable.\n\nFlanked by shadows and illuminated by the rays of sunlight penetrating through the hole my emergency landing had created, stood a menacing shape. Despite its smell, it was very much alive and appeared remarkably familiar, as if I'd seen something of its likeness before. Then it hit me, it looked like me, albeit with one distinct difference \u2013 its wings weren't at its side; instead, it appeared to be using them as support for the front of its body, like forelegs.\n\nWhatever it was raised its head to reveal a large, muscular neck, the slender surface shimmering in the fragmented light. It sniffed the air several times, each breath making a raspy sound as if its throat was parched dry. From its mouth snaked a long, forked tongue, the wet surface shimmering as it probed the air. I froze, remaining silent.\n\nThank the spirits for small favours. I thought, as despite my rushed entrance, it didn't seem to be aware of my presence.\n\nMy eyes fixed on its peculiar tongue as it performed its unusual dance several more times. Curiosity spawned so many questions. This creature was the closest thing to me I'd ever seen.\n\nIs it a dragon? Maybe another breed like with the hounds? Does it know what I am? Does it know where there are more dragons?\n\nRetracting its tongue, it turned to face me, allowing a full, unobscured view. Through my veil of dread, I could now see it was less like me than I'd first thought. Dark-green scales covered its serpentine body with even darker brown under-scales. Scars and pieces of flayed flesh sprawled over its dark hide. The placement of its wings now made more sense, as my assumptions regarding its front legs were confirmed.\n\nMy speculation was cut short, when whatever it was released a menacing snarl, revealing a ferocious set of teeth set in a wide, gaping mouth. A spiny frill on the back of its head stood on-end, quivering and rattling like the village shaman's maracas. Its yellow, snake-like eyes stared right at me, peering round the bony horn on the tip of its wrinkled snout. I'd no idea how to react \u2013 was it a sign of aggression, a greeting, or a defence response?\n\nThere were so many possibilities, I wasn't taking any chances \u2013 it didn't look friendly to me, and no part of me wanted to make any assumption about its intentions. I wanted to have positive contact with the first creature I'd ever seen that resembled me. Even so, if it was aggressive, I was in grave danger, primarily because it was at least three times my size. Either way, I locked eyes with it, fighting back the urge to run. From my previous experience hunting aggressive animals, I swear it looked somewhat hesitant to approach.\n\nA noise from the bushes behind me brought our standoff to an abrupt end. My head twisted sharply at the sound of rustling leaves, the snapping of small branches and the rapid, thudding of footsteps. I turned, half-expecting another creature to come charging at me, only to realise I'd taken my eyes off the one in front of me. Considering my vulnerability, I looked back from behind my wing to see it appeared equally intrigued by whatever was approaching.\n\nThe fact that I was expecting a monster didn't help when, to my surprise, Tarwin burst through the undergrowth. In her haste she failed to notice the shallow embankment until it was too late, and she stumbled to the ground. I'd no time to react before a second monster erupted from the undergrowth behind her, scattering branches and leaves in its wake. It cleared the embankment in one stride, hopping clear over Tarwin as she lifted her head. In its haste, it slipped clumsily on a bed of wet leaves, crashing to the ground with a yelp-like hiss.\n\nIt was then I realised that the first creature had returned its attention to me, and without warning it launched itself my way. I saw its drooling teeth in all their gruesome perfection as its maw hinged wide open, ready to snap shut and sheer me in two. I instinctively dropped to the floor, covering my head with my wings. My reaction gave the beast little time to correct its course, forcing its huge mass to flounder overhead before crashing into the undergrowth behind me.\n\nJumping to my paws, I turned to face the second creature. Recovering from its daze, it appeared to be preparing for an attack of its own. This time I was ready to dodge, assuming it wouldn't fail to hit just as its predecessor had. My plan was thrown into disarray when Tarwin screamed my name and without thinking I turned.\n\nMy eyes immediately fixed on her bow as she released an arrow. The missile cut through the air, passing over me on its deadly trajectory until it sank deep into the creature's right eye. Inky-black blood streamed from the wound, staining its face with acrid liquid. Screeching in pain, it retreated, crashing through the vegetation and out of sight. I glanced over to see Tarwin looking right at me, a red mark across her face and blood running from a cut above her eye. Eager to make sure she was okay, I moved towards her.\n\nEnsuring her safety is now my number one priority. No doubting myself!\n\nIn my haste, I was blind to the further threat, especially the dark shape slowly rising from the leaf litter behind her. The sight injected a new rush of adrenaline, instantly speeding up my run.\n\nI frantically tried to warn her, spreading out my wings and hoping she would at least have the sense to glance behind her. With foul black ichor dripping from the scars and holes in its torn scales, the creature's long neck rose high above her. The sheer terror of the sight almost knocked me to my knees. Its mouth opened, revealing its serrated teeth dripping with saliva. Refusing to allow fear to cause the death of my friend I leapt forward. This time my action registered, and she turned just before the creature's open mouth plummeted down. She reacted instinctively, leaping out of its path, barely escaping as it snapped shut before quickly spinning round and readying another arrow.\n\nShe was about to fire when the elbow of the beast's wing smashed into the back of her head, knocking her to the ground. It snarled and shifted its huge bulk to one side, and sure it was moving in to finish her off, I had no idea what to do.\n\nI have to help, but how? It's so much bigger than me!\n\nI didn't give myself time to think, almost as soon as they started, the raging storm of thoughts and emotions disappeared; the conflict had gone, as if reason had died. It felt like something in my mind had taken control and replaced the useless thoughts with something that made sense of the situation. A strange feeling, it felt like a burning ember deep inside, building to a crescendo of roaring fire.\n\nWithout hesitation I launched myself towards the creature, landing on its exposed neck. It screeched and writhed as I dug in my claws like meat hooks, slicing through its tough scales and raking deep into its dark flesh. I sank my teeth into its neck, forcing the disgusting taste of rot into my mouth.\n\nI ignored the grim sensation, my rage overcoming the urge to gag. The foul monstrosity thrashed around furiously, trying to dislodge me, while its black blood stained my pure-white scales. Its thrashing gradually slowed as it lowered its body and bucked heavily, the final jolt dislodging several pieces of rotting flesh \u2013 and me \u2013 from its wounded neck.\n\nI flew uncontrollably through the air, the force of the landing immediately knocking the wind from my lungs. Overcome with pain, I watched hopelessly as the creature's blurred image moved. I saw its yellow eyes turn menacingly towards me as its tongue quivered in the air. Then with a muffled hiss, it turned away, picked up Tarwin's limp body in its huge talons and with a powerful flap of its wings, launched itself through a gap in the trees. I desperately tried to focus but the world continued to spin and my limbs turned to jelly.\n\nTrembling more than a shack in a blizzard, I forced myself to my paws, stumbling clumsily on the wet leaves whilst trying to clear my head and catch my breath. I still hadn't grasped the full extent of what had just happened, all I did know was that I had to go after her. There was no question or doubt in my mind; in fact, there were no other thoughts. I spread my trembling wings and stumbled as I started a clumsy run, flapping furiously as I hurled myself towards the gap in the trees. I flapped for all my life until I caught a gust of wind and found myself steadying in the cold, autumn sky.\n\nWith my vision improving I desperately scanned the sky for any sign of movement, eventually spotting a small, dark shape heading towards storm clouds looming menacingly upon the north-western horizon. Without hesitation and as fast as my tattered wings would carry me, I followed, soaring on the winds high above the forest for mile after mile.\n\nMy eyes remained fixed on the darkening horizon with no care for the landscape beneath as forest changed into vast grasslands dotted with boulders, then into the shattered spires of sharp rocky hills and eventually open water. All I could think about was finding Tarwin.\n\nI should have done something to make her stay in the village, it's my duty to keep her safe!\n\nI cursed myself over and over for wanting the human myths to be real. Nevertheless, my relentless flight continued even though I'd long since lost any sight of the creature. The air grew colder, the light began to fade, and the dark skies grew heavy with rain. I pressed on, not even noticing when the freezing torrent started hitting me like a thousand tiny rocks.\n\nDesperation alone couldn't sustain me, and the inevitable effects of the endless flight began to take their toll. Whether I resisted it or not, the pain in my wings was becoming unbearable. The many cuts and bruises began to sting and ache, their painful grip worsened by the freezing rain. No matter how much I fought, my weary eyes grew heavier, my body began to fail, and my altitude decreased.\n\nNo! I can't stop, I have to push myself forward!\n\nI forced myself on relentlessly, until even the rain gave way, leaving behind a dense mist to block my fading vision. Driven to a state of half-consciousness, I didn't notice the treetops appear out of the gloom. I tried to dodge the obstacles and narrowly missed the first few as they glided out of the fog to greet me\u2026\n\n'Slam!'\n\nThe hard sensation of bark in my face abruptly ended my eternal flight. In an effort to stall my fall I desperately flapped my wings, unfortunately it was useless, and I inevitably crashed to the floor. I landed heavily on my chest, while the leaves I'd disturbed gently settled around me, mocking me with their peaceful glide.\n\nThe ground was cold and draped in a fine coat of snow. Using the last of my strength I rolled over onto my back, where I was granted a final, brief view of the misty sky through the branches. My injuries and the heaviness of my tired eyes finally overcame me. My sight fluttered allowing swarms of black tendrils to push in from the growing darkness beyond my peripheral vision. Too weak to resist, the inky blackness slowly flooded my view.\n\nI'd no idea if I lost consciousness or not. I could have been there for minutes, hours or even days. I briefly opened my eyes and noted that the pale mist still loomed over me, although now it was broken by a shadowy silhouette. I had no energy left to react; it probably wasn't real anyway. My weary eyes closed one final time and the world around me grew dark, before... Silence."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "My eyes flickered open to the view of a dark chamber. Looking around I felt a sense of familiarity, it was as if I'd somehow been here before. A strange glow emanated from a fire shrouded by a faint mist at the centre of the room. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, it almost felt like the fire was somehow cold.\n\nThe ghostly glimmer wasn't alone, because almost as soon as I locked my eyes on the flames, mysterious beams of light shot out and bounced onto what had been an invisible surface only moments ago, forming into a dome of shimmering mirrors above me. The reflective ceiling projected the mysterious beam in several directions, ricocheting it from surface to surface like a spider's web of light, before finally coming to settle on the ground at my paws.\n\nAm I dead? I must be; this can't be real, it's just like the stories from the village \u2013 ancient spirits and a paradise that awaits those who move on.\n\nThis hardly looks like a paradise though, it's so cold. I thought, looking around.\n\nEven so, I stood up and walked cautiously towards the light projected upon the floor before me. I tried catching it beneath my paw, only to find it rushed away like a scurrying insect fleeing from a boot. Moving to catch it again, the light continually eluded me, as if it was able to think against me before I knew what I was going to do myself.\n\nCatching it almost became a game, no matter how hard I tried I never scored a hit. Until finally it darted towards the ghostly blue fire that had spawned its existence. The closer I moved toward the flame, the more the air cooled. Even more mysteriously, I began to hear a faint humming sound, an endless drone like the buzzing of a billion insect wings. It was a distant noise that grew louder the closer I got to the centre, combining with the movement of the elusive light like a possessive radiance. I felt surprisingly happy and silly, playfully continuing my game of cat and mouse until I realised, I'd unknowingly reached the centre of the cavern and shook myself out of the strange fantasy.\n\nAs I did so the mischievous beam reunited with its source. The chamber fell silent, the faint humming abruptly stopped and visual signs that the world around me even existed faded away. There was a drawn out pause before without warning a deafening screech and a bright beam of blue light shot up from what remained of the ghostly glow. A swirling storm of luminescent-blue dust surrounded the beam, engulfing the central stream of burning energy like a raging whirlwind.\n\nI jumped back, terrified as the beam collided with the reflective ceiling. This time, instead of bouncing back, the light blossomed and set specks of blue dust to work, each grain furiously scratching at the surface like a million, bright-blue knives slicing the ceiling. The process bloomed, growing out towards the edges of the room as their toil revealed an amazing sight.\n\nIt couldn't be real, but it was all I could see. It was an ocean of stars shrouded by beautifully coloured cosmic clouds, the majesty of which I'd never thought possible. All of it replaced what, only moments ago, was a dark, cold surface. The mesmerising sight of the night sky lay before me, stealing every one of my fears and replacing them with an energy that left me utterly awestruck.\n\nThose feelings suddenly changed when I glanced back to the source of the projection, however. Fear reclaimed its place in my mind as the source now revealed a large, glowing crystal. Its vibrant resonation created a faint hum whilst projecting the light beam from one of its towering tips. Though it wasn't the ghostly light or sound that struck fear into my heart \u2013 it was what I could see in the clear element.\n\nMy reflection stared back at me: a white dragon, a perfect mirror image so clear it illustrated one terrifying difference between it and I. The eyes of the reflection weren't my own, they were glowing white hot. I rubbed my own eyes with my wings, and unexpectedly my reflection didn't follow; instead, the image intensified, white fire spreading from its eyes as the humming rose to deafening proportions.\n\nWith no other option but to hide, I covered my face with my wings. The intense light and sound grew brighter and louder as my futile defences failed to provide any protection. I had no way out and the world around me shook amidst the growing chaos. In a final, desperate defence I closed my eyes, curled up as tightly as I could, covered myself with my wing and prayed that the whole thing would just end."
            },
            {
                "title": "Risha",
                "text": "As I gradually opened one wary eye, I could see a blurred, unfamiliar ceiling above me. I lay on my back, on what felt like stone. Weak and confused, I realised the terror I'd just experienced was no more than a terrible dream lost to my sleep. Regardless, as one problem ended another seemed to take its place and this one felt much more real.\n\nMaybe I'm back in the village, maybe the whole thing was just a dream?\n\nI hoped with all my heart that was true, only to realise that reality was too cruel to allow me that crumb of comfort. The smells and sounds of this place confirmed I was far from where I longed to be.\n\nThis was somewhere new, unknown and, for all I knew, dangerous. I tried to move but the slightest twitch sent a wave of aches and pains through every muscle. Shifting my head, I could see I was in a cave, lying on what felt like stone draped in fur mats. What looked like clay pots, set neatly upon large flat stones of their own, surrounded me. Each rocky shelf merged with the wall, seamlessly carved from the natural stone.\n\nFunny, almost like furniture?\n\nThe chasms I knew were always formed from rough, wet rock. They were dark and usually occupied by some form of wild beast. The villagers often suggested that dragons lived in caves. It had been one of the comments about my species I was more than happy to discard. However, this cave looked habitable, consisting of smooth orangey-brown rock and in one corner I could make out an opening. Like the shelves it was seamlessly smooth, creating a doorway and three small steps to what looked like a passageway. The other walls consisted of the same smooth rock, all except the one opposite, which had a hole carved into its surface, allowing light to stream in from outside.\n\nWhat I thought was a window at first turned out to be a curtain of rushing water. The back of a waterfall, I assumed. The liquid rushed past the opening, refracting what light passed through and casting a rippling projection on the opposite wall. The more I glanced around, the more my battered body ached.\n\nThe strain of my endeavour to save Tarwin had seemingly caught up with me and now I was paying for it. My head pounded, while my vision distorted and my limbs felt like they were wrapped in barbed vines. I had to close my eyes again, devoting my full attention to thought.\n\nThis place can't be safe, those monsters probably brought me here!\n\nI tried to move again, this time to stand, lifting and shaking my head to free myself from my daze.\n\nIf I'm here, then Tarwin must be here too. I have to find her and get her home!\n\nI lifted to my paws, weakened limbs trembling like frail twigs before falling out from under me. The jolt increased the throbbing in my head, while the pain through my aching body fared no better.\n\n\"Whoa there, you don't want to push yourself too hard!\" came a voice from the opening.\n\nA dark silhouette stood at the smooth archway, while the shimmering pattern of light dancing across the cave walls hindered my ability to determine who might be addressing me. I focused all my attention on the shape, my senses scanning every detail in an attempt to fill in the gaps that my eyes couldn't quite work out. The results weren't what I expected.\n\nThe indistinct figure vaguely resembled one of the monsters, and fearing I might be eaten, or worse, I dared not move a muscle. I didn't even know what could be worse than being eaten alive, but I feared I would soon find out. Then a more sensible thought struck me.\n\nThe only thing I can understand like that is a human. Those things in the forest didn't speak.\n\nAll the while the stranger was still looming in the entrance way. The more I pondered what they'd just said, the more my terror subsided.\n\nWhy would they say something like that if they wanted to eat me?\n\nThe mysterious silhouette hopped down the steps, and amidst the ringing in my ears I could hear their approaching footsteps. I never really saw those monsters walk. Forced to stumble on their wings instead of their non-existent front legs, I would have expected their steps to sound clumsy, but the stranger pranced with an elegant grace. Then it spoke again, noting the inflection, I was convinced the voice was female.\n\n\"At least you're awake. When they brought you in here, they didn't think you'd wake up at all.\"\n\nWhatever she was spoke like she knew me, or at least knew more about my current state than I did.\n\n\"You hit your head pretty hard and you sprained your wing in the fall.\"\n\nI nodded, giving her the first sign that I was listening, before she continued.\n\n\"Well, now that you're awake let's have a better look at that wing.\"\n\nShe spoke in a way I almost recognised. Not the voice itself, which was completely alien to me, but the way in which she spoke \u2013 the calm, collected words reminded me of a healer back in the village.\n\nMaybe I'm somewhere like that? Other villages surely have healers?\n\nEither way, I was too weak to do anything about it. The stranger moved closer, gradually coming into focus and to my surprise, she began to look even more familiar.\n\nHow is that possible?\n\nInformation streamed in through my eyes, feeding my mind just as it had when I was staring at that monster. This time I wasn't going to be so trusting. I held onto that thought until I finally accepted that what I was looking at, was another dragon.\n\nThis was certainly not how I'd imagined it. Any other time I'd be curious and amazed at the sight of another creature like me. Ironically, the circumstances that led me here prevented me from feeling any real joy. I'd thought meeting another dragon for the first time would be all I could wish for, yet all I wanted was to jump up and fly away.\n\nMeanwhile, the dragoness put her forepaws on the table and raised the front of her body, giving her a clear view of my injured wing. I thought of pulling away, quickly reconsidering when I realised, she was genuinely trying to help me.\n\nAs she tended my wing, I looked at her more closely. She looked to be a little larger than I was, with dark-blue scales, changing to an even darker shade of blue on her underside. Her head was pretty much the same as mine, she had a long snout and four horns in a similar position to my own. She had an odd cluster of scales on her forehead, in the same darker colour as her underside. With my vision improving, I could see her eyes were sky-blue and around her neck she wore a gold bracelet with a dark-blue gem at its centre. Though similar to those I often saw humans wear, it was far more beautiful.\n\nWhile she continued to tend to my wing, I peered over the edge of the table in an attempt to see more. She wore four bracelets around her front and rear ankles, plus one at the tip of her tail, just before it fanned out into a dark-blue fin. It wasn't like the solid bone that made up the point on the end of mine; hers was formed from a cluster of scales which appeared to make for a much softer feature.\n\nWait, why am I gawking at her tail? I have more important things to worry about!\n\nMy mind abruptly interrupted my observations. I'd no idea how long I'd been here, or where 'here' even was. It had all happened so quickly. That first glimpse of a creature similar to me was probably the most terrifying moment of my life, and now here I was in a strange place with another, who thankfully seemed friendlier than those I'd encountered in the forest.\n\nStrangest of all was the sound of speech. I was sure it came from the mysterious dragoness. I knew I had my own voice, I could understand myself every time I spoke, however, whenever I tried out loud no one could understand.\n\nMaybe I can speak to her?\n\nI hadn't tried in ages, in fact, I didn't even know if my voice was still there, but there was no harm in trying.\n\nOpening my mouth, using words I'd picked up from humans, I tried to speak. My dry throat resisted, but a quick cough cleared the congestion.\n\nMaybe not the best first impression, but it helped.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\nShe blinked, seemingly a little startled, initially leading me to believe I'd said something wrong. My worry was quickly dismissed when she excitedly hopped down from the table and responded.\n\n\"It's good to see that bang to your head hasn't damaged your ability to talk.\"\n\nUsing some of my returning strength to lift my head, I looked myself over, discovering she'd tended my wing, which despite a dull ache, felt fine. I saw no clear sign of injury; it certainly wasn't as bad as I thought it might have been after my bewildering flight and headfirst plummet through the trees.\n\nThinking of my flight, I wondered for a moment how long I'd been out there and how long it had taken such an injury to heal. I moved my legs, testing how strong they felt while assessing whether I'd be able to stand. Placing my quivering paws on the bed, I carefully pushed up with all four legs.\n\n\"Back on your paws already?\" the stranger asked from across the cave, where her head was buried inside the curved lip of some crockery.\n\nPulling out from the pot, she held what looked like a cluster of dried leaves in her mouth. It was my first clear look at her, revealing all the features I'd failed to notice before. She promptly returned to my bedside, placing the dried leaves in front of me.\n\n\"Eat this,\" she instructed. \"It's not great, but it will make you feel better.\"\n\nShe looked me up and down with a little apprehension. \"Though you seem to have made a miraculous recovery all on your own.\"\n\nI glanced back at myself again to see if I could figure out what was so unusual about my recovery. Surely this is the place where I wouldn't be unusual?\n\nI'd experienced lesser aspects of the same thing before. I'd never succumbed to any major injuries, the many smaller ones I'd acquired over the years always healed quickly. It was why I often hurtled through trees and branches with such disregard, knowing that whatever minor injuries they inflicted would be gone within a few hours. It was always something I'd attributed to my race \u2013 there was no other reason \u2013 so surely that couldn't have been what surprised her?\n\nEither way, she'd moved on from her inquisitive surprise, continuing her attempts to persuade me to eat the leaves by nudging them towards me with a forepaw. It seemed foolish to accept them from a stranger but also ignorant to reject her offer.\n\nIt could be anything \u2013 poison or some sort of magical trick! Urgh, I've got to find a way to trust again or I'll get nowhere.\n\nI looked down at the leaves and calmed my mind. If she's trying to kill me surely she's had plenty of opportunity already.\n\nI cautiously picked the medicine up in my mouth and began chewing. It tasted awful, which only reinforced the belief that it might be harmful.\n\nReally, what sort of medicine tastes good? It's just like bitter, dry mulch?\n\n\"My name's Risha,\" she announced enthusiastically as I finished chewing and reluctantly swallowed the green mush.\n\nTrying to delay my response, I continued to chew and after pretending to gnaw away for a while longer, I responded with the only thing I could think to say.\n\n\"Blaze.\"\n\nI made a real effort to remember her name. 'Risha', quite a strange name. Not one a person would give to a pet. I knew where Tarwin's name for me originated, she'd been a young girl with a pet dragon, so simplicity made sense.\n\n\"Well, Blaze, was there any particular reason for you flying straight into a tree?\" Risha asked with a smile, forging her words into more of a friendly joke than a serious question.\n\nAlthough my confused thoughts prevented any real joy emerging, I at least found it a little humorous, though before I could improvise, she shook her head and moved on.\n\n\"Never mind, I bet you're hungry. Those gar leaves won't heal that.\" She dismissed the previous question with a flick of her wing, walking over to the opening and giving me a subtle signal to follow with a forepaw.\n\nI climbed down gingerly, body opposing my movements with a concoction of aches and pains. Wincing, I attempted to ignore them as I moved towards the opening.\n\nI'd no idea how long I'd been lying there, though, if it was as short a time as Risha's reaction suggested, it really hadn't taken long for my injuries to heal. My flurry of thoughts was soon dismissed as I remembered we were leaving, and I walked tentatively, stumbling a few times.\n\nRisha's concerns over my unstable approach made her appear doubtful of my ability to handle where she was taking me. Yet having reached the opening, she seemed to give up on any worries, moving through into the passageway beyond.\n\nIt seemed rather stupid, almost na\u00efve, to simply follow her without question. However, I wasn't getting the impression that I had anything to worry about, or at least anything connected to earlier events.\n\nIs it just a coincidence that two of the greatest events in my life happened so close together?\n\nFor now, none of that truly mattered. All I wanted to know was what had happened to Tarwin.\n\nIt seemed logical to me that I should go straight after her. No doubt driven by the fear of what might have happened, but I wasn't mentally or physically capable of going anywhere. As much as it hurt, I decided the smartest thing to do would be to collect myself and learn what I could while I recovered.\n\nMeanwhile, I noticed Risha glance back at me from beyond the opening, prompting me to follow again. As I did, I managed to get another good look at her. I could see that we shared other similarities; running down her neck and back was a fin, which continued down her tail where it merged with the webbed feature at the tip. Spines similar to mine supported the membrane, fusing into a solid-blue sail, each point beautifully curved and resembling a breaking wave. Her shoulders had dark-blue markings made up from a cluster of coloured scales, similar to the patterns she had on her forehead.\n\nThe markings weren't just random patches \u2013 they resembled two breaking waves, rising and parting symmetrically from each other before falling in opposing directions.\n\nAn odd symbol to have on your body? I thought, as I noticed similar markings on her hips.\n\nOther than that, we seemed to be the same. With my visual references exhausted, my curiosity was forced to wait until I was presented with a new piece of information.\n\nI followed Risha through the opening into a long, rounded corridor, noticing a light source at the end. However, its position and lack of shadows behind me suggested that it couldn't be the point of illumination. What light there was in the tunnel seemed to emanate from a glowing substance that clung to the walls, chasing away the darkness with a mysterious blue glow.\n\nMoving further I managed to get a closer look at the luminous material, running a wing tip over its surface as I passed. It was moss, growing from carefully selected areas, as if cultivated. It was like no plant I'd ever seen, instead of being green, it appeared to be transparent, holding some sort of flickering blue liquid within a tangled prison of tiny leaves.\n\nI regarded each cluster like I had the mysterious glow in my dreams, until a light breeze drifting in from ahead suggested that we were approaching the end of the tunnel. My previous worries slowly gave way to nervous excitement. Having inadvertently found what I'd longed for all my life, I was almost unable to wait until we reached the end to discover what other revelations I'd find.\n\nI was also warming to the idea of speech. Despite only having said a few words, I was a quick learner and I'd a lifetime of listening as practice.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I asked.\n\nRisha turned to me with a puzzled look. \"What? You've never heard of Dardien?\" she responded quizzically, like I should have known all about it. Before I could answer, she continued. \"I've never heard of a dragon who doesn't know about the hanging city. Then again, I've never seen a dragon like you before.\"\n\nI didn't know what to think. Clearly there were lots of things I didn't know, but from what I could gather, and according to her, I should have been here before, or at least be aware of 'here's' existence. Of more concern was the point she had made about my appearance. 'I've never seen a dragon like you before'.\n\nWhat's that supposed to mean?\n\nI guess most dragons didn't go flying into trees, other than that I had no idea about what she might be referring to. Before I could dwell on the thoughts, however; we stepped out into the light at the end of the corridor.\n\nIt didn't continue into a cave or an open area as I'd expected \u2013 it just ended, leading straight out to the open air. The sight I saw next completely blew away any amazement the tunnel had stimulated.\n\nThe exit led to a ledge suspended high upon a vast cliff face extending far above us. It didn't just end as any normal cliff would; it did quite the opposite. The wall curved and reached out to form a rocky overhang. I'd seen similar formations back home, where the sea had eroded the cliff's base, but this was larger than anything I'd seen before. In fact, it was so vast that it blocked out the sky. I could only assume it continued upwards from where the overhang ended, like a huge version of the cliffs near the village.\n\nMy bewilderment didn't stop there, however. My curious eyes followed the monolithic shadow of stone sky up towards a multitude of structures suspended like giant stalactites, each bearing a myriad of artificial cracks and crevices allowing more of the mysterious blue glow to project from within.\n\nA light breeze brought up cool and refreshing air, carrying distant sounds of a busy city mixed with the far-off gushing of waterfalls. Tonnes of water cascaded over the front edge of the stone ceiling, falling like great curtains, each vertical river shrouded in a cloak of white mist as it fell into the immense depths below. Beyond the torrent of falling water, a considerable distance away, I could see another cliff face. It was equally immense in size, opposing us in almost perfect symmetry like we were in the depths of a monstrous gorge.\n\nBright rays of sunlight penetrated the gap between the two faces, revealing that the outside world lay somewhere above. The realisation made me feel a little more confident about my new surroundings; despite this space being beyond my comprehension I was glad not to be confined while technically completely subterranean.\n\nMy eyes followed the golden beams of light into the lower parts of the cavern, where to my surprise, they didn't just disappear into an endless abyss. They were reflected beautifully by an enormous lake held serenely between the monolithic cliffs. The water created a huge mirror, perfectly reflecting the image of the structures hanging above. Only the misty waterfalls disturbed the illusion, creating faint ripples that flickered and morphed the image's beauty.\n\n\"This is Dardien, if you hadn't already worked that out,\" Risha announced with a slight laugh. \"The city of dragons,\" she added with a sense of pride in her voice.\n\n\"You'll have no trouble with trees down here,\" she joked, her friendly attitude relieving my tension.\n\nThis was more like what I'd imagined and wanted my first encounter with my own kind to be like. Magnificent and unclouded by the memory of monsters.\n\n\"N\u2013No... I don't think I will,\" I replied, awe stealing my words.\n\nRisha smiled.\n\n\"Well, follow me,\" she beckoned as she leapt from the edge.\n\nWith her wings held at her side she quickly descended before snapping them open, catching the wind beneath the leathery surface, instantly halting her descent. She elegantly pulled up on the rising air, until she was level with the ledge, at which point she flapped her wings to hold herself steady.\n\n\"Are you coming?\" she hollered.\n\nI peered over the edge. I had no problem with flying and my injured wings felt fine, but the sheer spectacle of the city had left me breathless. Despite being below the ground, the ledge was still a lot higher than I'd ever flown before. I tried to clear my mind, developing a fear of high take-offs now wasn't something I wanted. Peering down at the rippling waters below, I placed my forelegs at the platform's edge, swallowed my mixed emotions and, without hesitation, jumped. I immediately fell through a strong updraft, which from what I knew about flying and the movement of air, shouldn't have existed. It was cool and there was no warm air to rise on, even so the strange current remained.\n\nRealising how rapid my rate of descent was becoming, I spread my wings to catch the mysterious updraft, the leathery membranes seizing the air perfectly and immediately arresting my fall. With a few flaps to ensure they were okay, I started to ascend towards Risha, at which point the strange updraft stopped, almost as if it knew exactly what I required.\n\n\"You're certainly better now!\" she shouted, her head bobbing with each flap of her wings. \"Follow me!\" she instructed, before darting off into the immense air space stretching out beneath the city.\n\nAs I followed, I once again considered how I was blindly going along with this stranger. I knew I should be more cautious, but despite only knowing her for a short time, I knew my situation was precarious and I couldn't continue without help, no matter how much I wanted to.\n\nAs I soared through the sky beneath the cliffs, I once again noticed the strange way in which the air assisted our movements. Its currents were perfect for flying, and I struggled to understand how it could exist. I knew about the way air moved \u2013 after so many years of flying with no one to teach me, I'd had to learn.\n\nWithout flight there would have been no food for a start, more importantly, I'd just be stuck on the ground with everyone else. I didn't like walking along the muddy roads or climbing amongst the trees, as I would do when flying wasn't an option. It was nothing compared to the freedom of soaring through the skies, especially with the wind holding my wings and the beauty of the world beneath.\n\nThis flight was different in other ways. For as long as I could remember, other than the birds and some insects, I was the only creature who could fly, yet here I was, gliding in the company of another and hundreds of others, around the steep, rocky walls of the dragon city. Darting around, landing and taking off effortlessly from stone platforms and sprawling walkways.\n\nEverywhere I looked I could see it, winding into caves and crevices where I assumed the pathways joined a vast network of tunnels like the one we'd left. All illuminated by the same mystical glow of the magical blue moss. Meanwhile, the currents flowing like invisible roads carried every winged creature through the sky, while I noticed ours directing us toward what seemed to be our destination.\n\nAs we approached, the true scale of the hanging structure hit me. Risha slowed, it was clear she was heading for a platform, one of countless others projecting from the monstrous stalactite's rocky face. I matched her speed, the strange currents adapting once more to support my airborne action. She touched down first and I quickly followed, the air current depositing me right above the rounded platform.\n\nGlancing to where it met the wall, I could see an opening leading into the main structure. More of the glowing moss emitting the same blue hue around it. Risha swiftly made her way inside, seemingly confident that I would follow. I stopped for a moment, gazing out over my unbelievable surroundings. The platform was part of a vast network of similar formations stretching out to my left, right, above and below.\n\nAll were bustling with action. Some looked the same as the one on which I stood, smallish circular ledges sticking out from the main rock face. While others were much larger, providing access to grander entrances held up by pillars mimicking natural caves. I really had to wonder how anyone could have built something on such a scale.\n\nEven the next stalactite over seemed a considerable flying distance away and bore the same intricate stonework. At their widest, where they merged with the ceiling, was the greatest concentration of architecture, all swarming with dragons.\n\nEach of the winged beasts looked tiny against the enormous rocky surface, like bees around a field of wildflowers. It almost made me feel dizzy, having a city above and below me at the same time was certainly not something I was used to. To avoid any more sensory overload, I diverted my eyes towards the sunlight at the edge of the overhang.\n\nDespite the whole city being constantly in the looming shadow of the stone sky, it was clear that light creeping down from the surface was diminishing. The glimmers that reflected from the vast expanses of water below were showing off a brilliant sunset orange.\n\nI once again thought about asking Risha how long I'd been here, especially if it was sunset already.\n\nOne look at this place and I lose myself. I need to stay focused!\n\nHearing her calling from inside I turned my attention to the archway. Passing into the shadow of the cave, a sense of trepidation fell over me. I had no idea where I was going, one thought suggested this was her home. It seemed strangely welcoming of her to just allow me in; maybe she was tasked with guarding me? One thing I did know was that most of my thoughts remained fixed on Tarwin, despite being overwhelmed by Risha's kindness and the magnificent city.\n\nStop it, you're in no state to go after her, you need to rest! My mind scolded. Besides, if you want to trust Risha, she might be able to help.\n\nIn an effort to ignore my cynical feelings I focused on the dragoness. I had to give her the benefit of the doubt \u2013 she'd done everything to help me so far, so why would that change? It seemed like the best plan, and with my growing confidence in her good intentions, I moved further into her home.\n\nThe smooth channel was similar but shorter in length to the earlier tunnel. After only a few steps it opened out into a stone chamber filled with furniture morphed from the rock itself. Risha stood in the centre, pacing in a circle with her attention fixed on what looked to be the ceiling.\n\nShe seemed preoccupied, but the moment she spotted me; her behaviour instantly changed, her frustrated attention replaced by a more familiar friendly attitude. She rushed over, completely ignoring what she'd been doing and acting like it had never happened. It seemed unnecessary for me to think about her behaviour, but after having to read Tarwin's for so long, I just did it without thinking.\n\n\"It's not much, but it's home,\" she admitted, gesturing over the rounded room. \"Sorry I didn't have time to spruce things up. This place was never anything too fancy.\"\n\nHer sudden disregard for whatever was bothering her left me rather suspicious, but before I had time to consider it, she'd already returned to the centre of the chamber. It didn't appear that she was hiding something from me, although she seemed troubled, like Tarwin would often be with her father.\n\nConfident I was safe; I allowed my eyes to scan the chamber. Clay pots sat on stone tables, all set at around a dragon's height, in the middle was a smoothed circular ring set slightly lower than the rest of the room. A fireplace made from rocks occupied its centre, together with a pile of charcoal, ashes and two pieces of charred log.\n\nAs I glanced up, I saw the ceiling above the lower circle wasn't a ceiling at all. Unlike the roof bordering the chamber, a central shaft stretched upward a considerable distance, forming a smooth cylinder lit by rough patches of glowing moss. I now understood that Risha wasn't just looking at the ceiling, she was looking at one of the openings lining the shaft's circumference.\n\nShe continued to shout, seemingly expecting a response. All I could see were the smooth walls, but before I could look properly a light breeze sweeping into the chamber caught my attention. I glanced to my left to see another opening similar to the one we'd entered through, albeit with a few minor differences. It was larger, with a shelf resembling a stone balcony outside. The walls flanking it were crossed by pillars of rock silhouetted against the fading sunlight, making it look like the teeth of a beast. The somewhat aggressive appearance was subdued by the gentle movement of a thin, white curtain, parted in the middle and swaying softly in the light breeze.\n\n\"I'm home!\" Risha shouted upwards again, drawing my attention back to her.\n\n\"Oh, come on, Boltock, you useless leatherwing!\" she yelled again.\n\nI hopped down the small ledge defining the lower ring of the chamber and peered up into the roof. As I did, a shape appeared from one of the upper ledges.\n\n\"Oh, I know, you've been calling for like... Five minutes straight.\" came a male's voice, before adding wittingly. \"How long have you been gone, about three days?\".\n\n\"Actually, it's only been about three hours,\" she retorted.\n\nUninterested in the stranger's sarcastic tone, she moved off to the side of the lower ring.\n\nBefore I knew it, a dragon leapt from the stone perch, spreading his wings. At least seeing another creature like me wasn't such a shock the third time round. Even so, I observed the newcomer in just as much detail as I'd done Risha as he drifted effortlessly to the floor, landed and retracted his wings.\n\nThis dragon was clearly a male. He was about my size, he had many unique features \u2013 but the same basic dragonish look, four legs with pawed feet, two wings, horns and a small row of spines along his back; that was where the similarities ended.\n\nHis scales were largely dark green except for the ones on his underside, which turned to brown. Small bony clusters capped his shoulders and hips, resembling sharp rocks thrusting out from his scales. His horns were also different, he had two on either side of his head, but they were much larger, bearing a rocky texture. Unlike mine, they curved round like the horns of a ram. There was also a cluster of rock-like scales on the tip of his tail, forming a spiny club. Finally, a third smaller horn sat at the end of his nose, similar to the stubby spines on his shoulders, hips and tail.\n\n\"Well?\" the new dragon announced, speaking to Risha, who'd taken to leaning on one of the walls.\n\n\"Well, what?\" she answered, sounding like she knew exactly what she was about to hear.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" he enquired, edging closer to her.\n\n\"Looking after this one,\" she replied, nodding at me.\n\n\"Is this the one who flew into a tree?\" he asked with a chuckle, instantly making the heat of a blush build in my cheeks.\n\n\"Yes, if you must know, and he's our guest, so why don't you be polite and start the fire while I get some food,\" she snapped, before flying up into the raised roof and leaving me alone with the new dragon.\n\nHe sighed as if he'd also anticipated her response, before slowly trudging over to the fire. I watched him closely as he reared up, opened his mouth, paused momentarily on his hind legs before surging forward and producing an intense green flame. The flickering light bathed the chamber walls with a mystical, emerald glow and I was left stammering.\n\nAll those legends, all the stories? It really is true.\n\nUp until now I'd never believed them, primarily because I couldn't breathe fire and never felt I could, and yet he lit the wood with ease.\n\n\"She's so bossy, always getting me to do all these things. It's what sisters do, I suppose,\" he muttered, rolling his eyes and speaking so casually it was like we'd known each other for many winters.\n\nThen he shifted closer, his eyes narrowing.\n\n\"I've never seen a dragon like you before,\" he announced, his puzzled gaze fixed on me. \"Are you a Valadarii scale-smith or something? What element is white supposed to represent?\"\n\nA flood of confusion overcame me, so much so that the thought of what he might mean drowned out all my more recent thoughts.\n\nWhat does he mean by 'element'? What does the colour of my scales have to do with it?\n\nI paused for a moment, thinking hard about his remark. Becoming lost in my thoughts I tried to recall his name, cursing my ignorance when I failed to remember. I wasn't comfortable asking a question without knowing his name, but it had completely slipped my mind. I wanted to make the best first impressions I could, but questions needed answering, some more than others, so his name would have to wait.\n\nI was just about to ask what he was doing as he rummaged through a set of clay pots when Risha returned. Landing beside him holding another pot in her mouth. Two pieces of rope wrapped around a handle on either side. She looked to her brother, drawing his attention away from his rummaging.\n\n\"Nice to see you're making friends,\" she observed, her brother responding with a dry laugh and a flick of his tail.\n\nWith that, she moved over to the fire, placing the pot on the green flames, not at all fazed by its colour, before sitting back against the smooth border of the lower ring.\n\n\"There's nothing left for you to do, so you might as well come and sit down,\" she said, turning to her brother.\n\nWith a wry smile he walked over to take a seat beside her, slouching forward and staring into the flame.\n\nI stood by, watching the two of them going about their business and wondering just why I was here.\n\nWhy have they invited me into their home so willingly? Only close friends do this back home.\n\nSeeing them together triggered a blur of thoughts about Tarwin. She'd not been this calm and homely in a long time, and yet the monsters from her peoples' legends were?\n\nHow far from home am I?\n\nI'd travelled a long way before hitting the tree. Waking up on a stone bed in a strange city full of dragons was something I thought to be impossible. The idea was ridiculous, but it was real, here I was standing in another dragon's home and despite what I thought, for now I was stuck here.\n\n\"You can come and sit down too,\" Risha's voice snapped me out of my thoughts. \"I won't bite,\" she added, patting the stone beside her with a forepaw, before nodding toward her brother.\n\n\"Though, he might.\" Confusion covered his face, before she nudged him softly with her wing.\n\n\"Oh, ha-ha,\" he retorted dryly, rolling his eyes with a huff.\n\nI'd never been offered hospitality like this before. In fact, I'd never actually been in anyone else's house. Even so, it didn't feel uncomfortable, and seeing no harm in it, I sat next to the pair.\n\n\"So, Blaze, why did you fly into a tree?\" Risha asked as she stoked the fire with a forepaw.\n\nI considered the question. How do I answer that without sounding like a fool?\n\nThey were clearly keen to hear my story, but how could I explain what had happened? I paused and thought for a moment. I assumed they knew nothing at all, as neither had made any mention of seeing those winged monsters hanging around wherever I'd been found.\n\nShrugging off my apprehension I began. I started by telling them about the creatures, how they had attacked my friend and how, deep down, I wanted to know what they were more than the two of them wanted to hear my crazy story. Just then, Risha interrupted.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt, but\u2026 What kind of creatures?\"\n\nFrom the look in her eyes I could see she was genuinely intrigued, and her voice sounded somewhat sympathetic, even her brother looked incredibly eager to hear more. I considered the best way to describe them without simply repeating the fact they were horrible.\n\n\"They looked...\" My mind was still processing the information, only to see the obvious answer was right in front of me. \"They looked kind of like us but much larger. Oh, and they only had two legs, not four.\"\n\nI paused again, the thought of what I was about to say next reminding me of their foul taste. \"Their flesh wasn't... Well, it wasn't alive,\" I continued, hoping they wouldn't think me crazy for saying.\n\n\"Wyverns!\" Risha's brother declared, proudly demonstrating his knowledge.\n\nShe turned to him; a disapproving frown plastered on her muzzle.\n\n\"What's a Wyvern?\" I asked cautiously.\n\nHer eyes flickered between her brother and I as he stared back with an equally disapproving expression.\n\n\"Am I okay to answer him?\" he grumbled.\n\n\"Fine,\" she sighed haughtily.\n\nHis eager attitude resurfaced, and he pressed a forepaw to his chest, wings spread as if to offer a lecture.\n\n\"Just like you've said, they're horrible creatures. They were supposed to have been killed off centuries ago,\" he blustered, almost forgetting to pause for breath. \"There have always been rumours that some still lurk in the darkness. Slaves to wild men, Orkin warlords and whatnot. You know, all the evil...\"\n\nRisha interrupted his speech with a nudge. He blinked, sighed and instantly slouched down, saying nothing, while she maintained a more considered approach.\n\n\"And what about your friend? Wyverns hate dragons.\"\n\nI was about to tell her what Tarwin had done, when I remembered that she wasn't a dragon.\n\nNo reason to tell them that she's not for now. They may like me, but I've no idea how they feel about humans.\n\n\"She managed to kill or injure one, I don't know for sure.\"\n\nI paused, thinking of how the second creature fell back into the bushes. It had been blinded, for sure, but it was possibly still alive.\n\n\"Then the other monster knocked her out and took her. I was chasing it when I hit the tree, and well, you know the rest better than me.\"\n\nRisha's brother stared at her, still disappointed that she'd stopped him mid-sentence, but there was no mistaking the look on their faces wasn't good.\n\n\"We'll have to take you to the Elders tomorrow, now you're awake they'll want to talk to you,\" assured Risha, making no further comment on what troubled her.\n\nWhat or who she meant by 'the Elders' confused me. I had heard that word before, it was the name given to the older members of the village. The humans respected those people, they were considered the most experienced and wisest, often sought out for their wisdom or advice. My recollection offered me some reassurance. If there were wise citizens in this city, then they should be able to help.\n\nMy contemplation was broken when her brother stood up, spread his wings and flew up into the chamber.\n\n\"Dinner's nearly ready,\" she announced, seeming to notice my unease at his sudden departure. \"He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\nGrabbing the rope in her mouth she carefully lifted the pot she'd placed on the flame, gently setting it down in front of her, instantly generating a cloud of warm steam. No sooner had he left, than her brother returned with three shallow bowls in his mouth, all stacked neatly within each other. He placed one out for each of us, sliding them across the floor with a swift push of his tail.\n\nRisha removed the lid from the pot, releasing another plume of vapor. Holding the rope carefully in her mouth and using her tail to tip the vessel, she poured out some of the contents into each bowl.\n\nThe siblings instantly began eating their meals, while I wasn't so eager. It was nothing like the food I was used to, which was usually raw game or fish. This stuff looked like a meaty soup, I'd seen soup before, though I'd never eaten it. Accepting food from strangers didn't feel like the smartest move, but I'd already munched on the leaves Risha had offered.\n\nCan't be too bad, right? Can't be poison for sure.\n\nAlthough it didn't look appetising, I was conscious of the need to be respectful to my generous hosts. Lowering my snout into the bowl, tasting the watery cooking sauce and picking up a piece of what looked like meat, holding it at the end of my jaw for a few moments. To my surprise it tasted good, and sure there was no harm, I continued.\n\nIt was delicious, certainly cooked to favour a dragon's palette; in fact, I'd never tasted anything quite so nice. I quickly polished off the remainder of the meal, this time chewing and savouring every morsel. After finishing, I looked over to the others; seeing we were all done and with a subtle look from Risha, her brother gathered the clay bowls, carrying them back up into the roof, while she carefully put the lid on the pot and set it down near the fire.\n\n\"So, you obviously don't have a nest of your own, which means you'll have to stay here,\" she began, and before I could even consider responding, she continued. \"Come on, I'll show you where you can sleep.\"\n\nI paused for a moment, surprised at her suggestion. I'd just been invited to stay here, and I still had no real idea where 'here' actually was. Bewildered at how fast everything was happening, I sighed.\n\nShe's right \u2013 my options are kind of limited.\n\nRisha had already flown up into the roof, so without any further delay I followed her into the shaft. She led me to one of the ledges, similar to the one her brother had been lounging on earlier. When she landed, I set down beside her, getting my first real look at what the it concealed.\n\nReaching into the wall through another smooth opening was a smaller section of the cave, a cosy area with a pile of straw and quilts spread across the floor. Cut into the far wall was an opening through which I could see the opposite level of the neighbouring structure. The roof was a high dome, giving me the impression that it had been intended for something larger than me. Edging by Risha, I moved towards the rounded window at the far end. It was an almost perfect circle and peering out I was greeted with a captivating view of the city.\n\nThe light had faded, shrouding the structures in darkness, making the place look very different. The huge hanging formation opposite resembled a swarm of fireflies, its sides lit by blue glowmoss, along with the recently-lit addition of mostly orange braziers and lanterns combined with odd green, blue and grey flames.\n\nMy hearing tuned in to the evening's rhythm, although it was surprisingly quiet, the calming gushes of the distant waterfalls, the far-off beating of leathery wings and the distant voices of other residents filled the air. The evening smelt fresh and was strangely warm for the time of year.\n\nIt was obvious that the dragons didn't seem to care about what season or time of day it was, because even at this late hour, the air was filled with them. Some appeared to be much larger than I was, making me believe I still wasn't fully grown.\n\nI knew from conversations back home that I would grow to be much larger, even so, the majority of dragons I assumed to be adults weren't that big \u2013 they were the size of a large horse at best. Most of them held different coloured lanterns in their mouths and foreclaws, creating luminous patterns in the darkness akin to fireflies. I glanced down at the still waters far below to see what looked like an entire city staring back at me, and with one final breath of fresh air I brought my head in from the opening.\n\nIs this it? Am I just going to sleep here while my friend is lost out there with those foul things?\n\nI had to remind myself that, for now, I didn't really have any other option. If I wanted to help Tarwin, I needed help, whether I liked the delay or not.\n\nWith an amused chuckle Risha came in from the ledge and, realising that I'd completely forgotten she was there, I jumped. It was rather strange having someone else caring for me, especially someone I'd only just met, but I was beginning to feel comfortable in her presence.\n\nMaybe she really is worth trusting?\n\nI looked up, trying to think of a way to apologise for being so ignorant, though she didn't show any sign of offence. It was almost as though she knew the sights and sounds of the city would grab my attention.\n\n\"It's pretty amazing when you see it for the first time. Trust me, I know,\" she assured.\n\n\"Yeah, I'm used to small villages on the ground,\" I replied, gesturing all around us. \"Not... Well, not this.\"\n\nA giggle escaped her muzzle before she turned to leave, only to unexpectedly stop and glance back, taking time to consider what she was about to say.\n\n\"Oh, I was just wondering, if it's not too much to ask. Your friend, how did she manage to kill a wyvern?\" she asked, seemingly trying not to offend me.\n\nShe looked genuinely intrigued. These wyverns were obviously revered.\n\nIn my enthusiasm to answer, I was blind to what I was saying.\n\n\"She shot it in the eye with an arrow.\"\n\n\"A bow and arrow?\" she replied, clearly taken aback by the answer.\n\nHer words suddenly snapped me back to what I'd revealed. There was clearly no way a dragon could draw a bow. I thought hard about how to answer, fearing she'd condemn me for fraternizing with humans. I'd no idea how she or any of the dragons here even viewed humans.\n\n\"Yes,\" I replied, scuffing a forepaw at the floor and bowing my head. \"I know what you're thinking. How's a dragoness supposed to use one of those?\"\n\nShe looked at me as if she knew the answer but didn't know what to say, and her delayed response only served to increase my apprehension. Until I couldn't bear to deny it.\n\n\"She isn't a dragon, she's a human.\"\n\nAs the words came out, my anxiety shot through the roof and I half expected to be booted out. All the while, the look on Risha's face grew more confused.\n\n\"What?\" she whispered.\n\nIs it possible? My fears haven't been realised. She hadn't shouted and she didn't seem to be getting angry. So, having made the first step and with no way of turning back, I continued.\n\n\"She's a human,\" I repeated, keeping as quiet as I could.\n\nShe glanced around, seemingly wary of prying ears, before she spoke again.\n\n\"Our kinds not bothered with them for centuries, and right now things are a little uneasy. Especially since Sovereign Aries came to power.\"\n\nI'd no idea what a 'sovereign' was, nor did I know what she meant by 'uneasy'. But her use of the words 'came to power' made whoever she was referring to sound very important. My mind filled with ideas about some sort of governing figure like Tarwin's father, one that didn't approve of humans. Yet before I could dwell on it for too long, she calmly continued.\n\n\"So why were you with this human?\"\n\nHer calming tone offered my anxious mind some relief, but I didn't understand what she meant. I didn't know any different. I'd been raised by them, been around them all my life.\n\nHow can I explain all of that to her? Do I just tell her everything about my whole life since the day Tarwin found me?\n\nI decided honesty was the best course of action. Not to mention, she might even know something about why I was there in the woods all those winters ago.\n\n\"Tarwin raised me from an egg she found in the woods,\" I began.\n\nRisha listened carefully, her confused expression morphing into one of curiosity, before she eventually interrupted my story with a yawn.\n\n\"Interesting,\" she said, clearly thinking deeply about something else before swiftly moving on. \"I think I'll be off to nest for tonight,\" she added with another yawn, turning to the opening.\n\nFor a moment I thought she'd dismissed what I'd said, but before she left, she turned and finished.\n\n\"Oh, and it's probably best to keep this between us \u2013 you already look different as it is.\"\n\nI froze, terrified I'd made a horrible mistake sharing my story with her.\n\n\"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone,\" she assured with a wink, before flying to a ledge further up the shaft.\n\nI didn't quite understand why all this was happening. I didn't know why I was putting my trust in her, but I believed she would keep her word. Lying back on the soft bed I stared at the smooth stone wall. So much had happened so quickly. My mind dwelled on the idea of monsters and a city of dragons like me as the cool embrace of a light breeze drifted in through the window.\n\nLearn what I can, get help, then find Tarwin. That's my mission now.\n\nWith those thoughts firmly in mind I found a comfortable position, lay my head down and slowly drifted off to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "City of Dragons",
                "text": "I gradually woke from the first peaceful night's sleep I'd had in ages, eyes flickering open to find my head had settled beneath the cover of soft quilts and dry straw.\n\nI know what I'll be doing today, I'll be gathering supplies for the winter with Tarwin...\n\nMy thoughts quickly cleared when I began to recall my current situation, immediately washing away any ideas of home.\n\nOh right, I'm not at home, she's gone, and I have to save her!\n\nThat spark of motivation was enough to finally force my weary head from beneath the covers. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the light beaming in through the opening above my head, offering me my first hazy view of the room in daylight. I slowly stood up, stretched the stiffness out of my tired muscles and shook my head.\n\nAll my senses fired into action when I heard voices, it was clearly Risha and her brother. I couldn't quite make out their words, so I walked as quietly as I could to the opening and peered over the edge. I couldn't see either of them; at first, I thought it rude to eavesdrop, especially after all they had done for me. Even so, there was still that small part of me that was reluctant to trust them completely.\n\nI glanced back over my shoulder to the window. The position of the projected sunbeams suggested that it was early in the day.\n\nWhat am I doing? I'm going to have to go down sooner or later? What is there to worry about?\n\nI was mostly daunted by the fact that I'd no idea where the day would take me. For a moment I even considered taking off and continuing alone. Almost everything in my body and mind was telling me I should, even if I knew deep down that wasn't a good idea.\n\nRecalling what Risha had said last night about the Elders made me feel more inclined to stay, and finally convincing myself, I dismissed my fears, spread my wings and jumped from the ledge. A friendly greeting awaited as both siblings stopped their discussion and looked over simultaneously.\n\n\"Did you sleep alright?\" she was swift to ask, her demeanour still chirpy and cheerful.\n\n\"Yes, thanks,\" I replied, smiling back.\n\n\"Good to hear.\" She pranced over to the fire and sat down, leaning against the stone bank just as she'd done the night before.\n\nI couldn't help but notice that the flame in the central pyre was now blue instead of green. While I marvelled like a child with a new toy, Risha turned to her brother as he attempted to leave through the larger of the two nest openings.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" she asked, as if she'd expected such an escape attempt.\n\n\"Oh, you know, the usual morning glide,\" he replied, emphasising a stretch of his wings and arching his back.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Risha deadpanned as she added. \"Usually you're not even awake this early, never mind going out to fly.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes, stopped and moved back towards her, laughing to himself as he added.\n\n\"Fine, I'll stay, but only because it feels like we've not done anything together for days.\"\n\nHis sister's disappointment faded, quickly replaced by a coy smile as he sat down next to her.\n\nThe two of them didn't look angry with each other, not like Tarwin and her father would have been. Not to mention, Risha appeared to have kept her promise about my story, not even her brother seemed aware. Though the thought that she might be waiting to say something only served to increase my unease; there was clearly still a part of me that refused to trust her.\n\n\"I guess we haven't properly introduced ourselves.\" Risha's voice suddenly broke my train of thought.\n\nEven so, her brother swiftly interrupted before she could continue.\n\n\"Well, I'm Boltock, earth dragon, soon to be fully fledged soldier of the Earth Order,\" the green dragon announced, jumping up and posing heroically on a stone table.\n\n\"Of course,\" Risha muttered with a muted laugh.\n\nMy eagerness to gain information was doused by her brother's antics as he continued to ramble on about the city and dragon culture. Most of what he said flew right over my head, the only thing that really stuck was his name: 'Boltock'.\n\nI'd struggled to remember it last night, and this time I would be sure not to forget. Another word I picked out was 'element'. I'd heard it before when people in the village talked about dragons. Last night, Boltock had questioned what element my white scales represented and introduced himself as an earth dragon.\n\nSo, what the villagers meant is that dragons can control the earth?\n\nIf that was true, it would certainly explain how they were able to construct such an impossible city.\n\nIt all seemed so far-fetched and took a moment for me to figure out that my doubts were mostly due to my previously established beliefs. After seeing the city, my view on the now very believable subject had drastically changed. There was no doubt that all those legends and rumours were true. What surprised and concerned me more was the fact that I'd never been able to do any of the things these dragons claimed they could do \u2013 and I'd never felt like I could.\n\n\"Oh, and that's my unsupportive sister, she's a water elemental,\" Boltock continued, waving a forepaw in Risha's general direction before jumping down from the table while she shot him a disapproving scowl. \"Soon to be, well, not much, really,\" he continued with a grin, as his sister rolled her eyes in mock despair.\n\n\"Well, now that your little show is over, can we get going?\" she asked dryly.\n\nThey both moved over to the larger opening while I remained in the centre of the cave.\n\nAll this talk of elements, elders, orders, spirits and who only knows what else, makes me feel so tiny!\n\nI'd never heard anyone talk like this before. Then again, I'd never even met or heard another dragon talk until yesterday.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Risha asked, glancing back as she stopped by the opening.\n\n\"Yes.\" Startled, the rather blunt word left my mouth before I realised and swiftly added.\n\n\"Just lost in thought.\" My desire to maintain a polite attitude demanded I be respectful.\n\n\"We'll be off then,\" she said as she walked through the thin curtain and out onto the balcony. \"Please, follow us.\"\n\nShe jumped from the ledge, dropping down in a similar fashion to yesterday before pulling up sharply to reappear in front of me, hovering beside Boltock. I promptly made my way over to the edge, brushing past the curtain and out onto the flat surface stretching out over the depths.\n\nWhy am I still unquestioningly following them? I was still trying to dismiss that annoyingly rational part of my mind.\n\nI could only assume, and most certainly hope, it was to these Elders. So, I banished any doubts from my mind, looked at the pair in front of me, spread my wings and stepped forward to find the same perfect air for flying. The two siblings flew ahead, giving me only a few seconds to follow through the dragon-filled air.\n\nA variety, ranging from red to blue, grey to green and countless in between, filled my view. Each had their own distinctive features: different horns, tails, spines and wings. Looking over the spectacle subdued my worries, the sheer beauty served as a strong distraction. The strange air movement assisted with the effort of flying, allowing my curious eyes to concentrate on each passing spectacle. Hundreds of other dragons went about their business, like humans in the village only on an impossibly grand scale. They darted around, landing and taking off from the thousands of stone structures.\n\nMy attention switched from scene to scene, while at the same time, the air current changed course, directing us towards a magnificent structure carved into the near-vertical cliff face. A perfect rectangular shape cut into the rock; a part of its left side covered by a curtain of water falling from a chasm in the stone sky above. At its centre was a large, square opening, with four symmetrical stone pillars guarding either side. Each one draped by a tapestry of golden fabric, the sigils of two blazing wings woven into them.\n\nMore blue moss crawled along the rocky surfaces, and what looked like dead vines hung beneath a bridge of rock extending out from its entrance like a protruding tongue. At the end of the bridge sat a circular platform, decorated with a pattern of symmetrical symbols, spiralling out from an eight-pointed star in the centre.\n\n\"We're here,\" Risha announced, peering up at the structure as we landed. \"The Elder Temple,\" she added, almost as much in awe as me. \"They sent a message while you were sleeping, asking for an audience with you.\"\n\nThat revelation stirred up uncertainty in my otherwise inquisitive mind.\n\nWhy would they ask to see me? Maybe getting to see them is harder than those back home?\n\nI was also concerned about why she failed to tell me before we'd arrived. Admittedly she'd mentioned something about the Elders when I was telling them my story, so I assumed she had simply forgotten. Regardless, I was getting the impression I was attracting too much attention. It couldn't be down to my relationship with humans, Risha had surely kept that a secret. I also assumed none of them knew of my encounter with the wyverns.\n\nWell, there's only one way to find out. My mind declared, although now I was feeling far more anxious about the prospect.\n\nI glanced around to see the others had already started walking along the bridge towards the entrance. I swiftly took off after the pair, lost in bewilderment as I got closer to the magnificence structure. Like all the architecture in this city, it was enormous, and the closer I got the more the finer details revealed themselves, ranging from graceful murals to strange symbols. Two large dragon statues resembling stone sentinels sat on either side of the immense doorway, and beyond those several large pillars supported the outer wall and ceiling.\n\nWe passed between the statues, and my eyes began to explore the engraved walls. Three of the carvings dwarfed the others, depicting various dragons along with a whole manner of other creatures. All bar one of them portrayed battles so great that even the motionless images looked as fearsome as the violence they depicted. The final carving presented the image of a towering city against a starry sky, and a pyre of flames with two burning wings at its flanks shining brightly down upon the world below.\n\nInitially I didn't recognise the plethora of creatures, the limited colour palette made it difficult to see them clearly, until my wondering eyes fell upon one in particular and I instantly froze. I was gazing up at an armoured dragon, although it wasn't the dragon that caught my attention, it was what lay at its paws. There was no mistaking the mangled corpse of a wyvern. I stopped and focused on the carving; every other detail blocked from my mind. I had no idea what any of this meant, and when I thought to ask, I saw my guides had already walked on.\n\nStowing away my questions and catching up, my thoughts turned to our destination and the Elders. It may be somewhat stereotypical to think of them like the elders from the village, but I assumed that was the case. I desperately hoped they would have answers, although one aspect of that hope, probably the one wary of the convenience, brought back my cautious attitude.\n\nWhat do they know about me? I believe they're not against me. But still, this is all so much. The wyvern's picture only served to make me feel even more uneasy.\n\nLost in thought, I failed to notice the next chamber in which we found ourselves, until I almost bumped into Boltock. Unlike the other chambers this one was made up from heavily built-up rocks with rough, sharp surfaces. In my short time here, I'd come to believe that the whole city was magically constructed; however, this chasm looked like it was far older and more natural than the others.\n\nUnlike the small tunnels within the other structures, a long, spacious hall ran down its centre. Six stone pillars decorated with carvings and large patches of glowing moss loomed on either side, rock walls lay behind them, holding a domed ceiling high above us.\n\nFour large braziers hung by chains from the rounded ceiling, each one lit with a different colour flame. The first was the normal orange and red with which I was familiar, the next two were blue and green, while the fourth was a strange grey colour. Despite its great size the hall was far from empty, dragons of all colours, shapes and sizes went about their business, walking in and out via a network of tunnels bordering the chamber.\n\nSeveral stood out, positioned at the base of each pillar like motionless statues. They all looked identical, and at first, I mistook them for statues. Until I was close to one and realised they were all wearing some kind of armour, shimmering sheets of smooth metallic silver, crafted to fit a dragon.\n\nEach glinting sheet was lined with a pale-blue trim inset with symbols. Besides the sharp metal claws on their gauntlet-shod feet and blades on their wings, there was no sign of any weapons, leading me to assume they used their elemental powers to fulfil their obvious duties as guards. Even so, I tried to avoid looking at other dragons, not wishing to attract any more attention to myself. Nonetheless, despite my attempts, I still felt their eyes watching me.\n\nPeering towards the end of the corridor I could see another similar sized chamber. In contrast to the first, there were no corridors, no smaller openings or large pillars holding it up. Plus, it wasn't completely open, an enormous golden door covered the opposite end, while two long tapestries hung on either side. To its left hung a red one, orange flames embroidered into its centre, and a blue one, carrying a picture of a blue and white wave breaking. Those to the right were grey and green, the former with a raging whirlwind at its centre, while the latter wore an image of a vibrant green tree.\n\nThe three of us came to a stop at the base of the grand door, its golden surface covered with moulded pictures and symbols like those carved into the vast walls. Each image was a perfect expansion of the vast surface, with armour-clad dragons battling ragged beasts of flayed flesh and bone. As my eyes passed over them, another caught my attention. The sensations I had upon looking at it weren't like anything I'd ever felt, not even when compared to the majesty the city sights had conjured. It was like I'd seen it all before, and my mind fought to recall it, as if I should know. It was a golden image of four dragons, each wearing armour, sitting in a circle around an orb.\n\n\"This is it,\" Risha declared, stopping next to me, Boltock just behind.\n\nHer sudden interruption snapped me from my stupor as she calmly added. \"We can't go in with you, so just tell them everything you told us, they'll understand.\"\n\n\"Yeah, better them than the Sovereign,\" Boltock added with a slight laugh, receiving a scowl from his sister.\n\nAlmost as if it had been expecting me, there was a loud clank and the door began to grind open. The sudden explosion of metallic groans filled the chamber with an almost deafening rumble. The entire golden face started to move and shift like a huge mechanical jigsaw slowly unlocking with each loud clang. Finally, a large bar built into the centre shunted outward and split in two, with each half sliding back into the walls. Released from its huge shackles, the giant door parted slowly, groaning in rebellion. I turned to my guides to see both had taken a few steps back, while Risha gave a comforting smile and gestured for me to proceed.\n\nHesitantly I turned, peering into the chamber's pitch-black depths. A cool breeze escaped the gloom, the scene enough to release more uneasy thoughts.\n\nThis certainly doesn't look like the type of place someone wise resides.\n\nNo matter how much I trusted them, a part of me still believed it might be a trick. I certainly didn't want to believe that, however, the thought that I could be walking into a trap lingered.\n\nIf this is the only way to save Tarwin, then I have to do it.\n\nPutting on a brave face, I took a long, deep breath and took a few cautious steps. No sooner had I entered, than the door began its cacophony, protesting angrily as it slowly and unnervingly ground to a close behind me. I jumped at the final slam, and the eerie silence left behind when the symphony of shifting locks ended, making my scales crawl. My eyes and other senses adjusted to the darkness as I scanned for any clues about the chamber in which I was now imprisoned. Shadows concealed all detail; the only thing telling me I wasn't lost in endless blackness was the invisible surface beneath my paws.\n\nFear started to consume me, strengthening my growing concerns that I shouldn't have been so trusting.\n\nI shouldn't have listened to someone I hardly know. I'm such a fool!\n\nUntil now I had been sure they held nothing against me. No! No, this can't be a trick, there's got to be something!\n\nI was beginning to have serious doubts about the Elder's existence when flames exploded into life on either side of me, and with a swift whoosh a series of braziers ignited, revealing a pathway stretching out before me. Light blossomed from the flames, quickly vanquishing the darkness, revealing thousands of wall carvings.\n\nI swallowed my apprehension. No going back now, certainly not with a door like that behind me.\n\nI cautiously followed the newly-lit path towards a circular platform surrounded by a deep pit, its vertical stone sides descending into crushing darkness as if light itself feared to venture into the depths. On either side stood four large pedestals, each one topped with a decorative band of gold inscribed with more markings.\n\nMore braziers burst into life, illuminating the whole chamber, revealing a large, domed roof and more carvings. The symbols and the surface into which they were inscribed looked old, appearing like more natural stone.\n\nMore images of dragons sat amongst even stranger beasts clad in regal armour. Others were short and stumpy, with large beards sprouting from their chins. Some were like me, with feathers rather than scales, while others looked humanoid. As my eyes began to scan the walls, I began to feel the presence of something \u2013 or someone \u2013 sitting above me.\n\nFour watchful pairs of eyes cast their gaze down from the tops of the stone pillars, their draconic owners as ancient as the cave itself. Their scales were dulled and scarred. Age had ravaged their bodies, ranging from rips in their wings to snapped horns and clouded eyes. They all wore a gold brace around their neck, each one bearing a single crystal, the colour matching that of its owner's subdued hide. Their finer features were hard to make out in the low light, but what was clear was that they were considerably older than any other dragon I'd encountered. None of them had any discernible expression as they silently judged me.\n\nI fought the urge to fidget and squirm, their gazes felt like hot beams of sunlight on my scales. Then after what seemed like the longest period of silence I'd ever endured; the red dragon spoke.\n\n\"Who are you?\" his croaky old voice questioned.\n\nIt took a moment for me to process his words. I knew that all I had to do was tell them my name, but I was struggling to find my voice. My nerves were on edge and I certainly wasn't expecting four of them, added to that I still wasn't confident about speaking.\n\nWhat if I accidently offend them? Or they find out what Tarwin really is?\n\n\"Blaze,\" I replied, trying hard to bury my nervousness.\n\n\"And, Blaze, why have you come here?\" the blue dragoness beside the red-scaled Elder enquired.\n\nWait a minute. I thought they were the ones who asked for me.\n\nI thought hard about exactly what I should tell them. Part of me wanted to demand why they were asking me questions, especially when my whole body was bursting to ask them so much. A combination of fear, respect and not knowing the full extent of what was going on stopped me.\n\n\"I was brought here by two others, they said you asked for me.\"\n\nThe four of them looked as though that was far from the answer they expected. A long pause met my response; it almost felt like they had forgotten I was there, when the red dragon spoke again.\n\n\"And how did you end up here?\"\n\nMy initial fear started to subside, giving way to irritation. I'd expected something more from someone with the esteemed title of 'Elder'. Anyone with such a status shouldn't need to ask such simple questions. The ones back in the village always seemed to know what was wrong, without needing to, though quite how they did so was beyond me.\n\nThese elders should be at least four times wiser than a single village elder. Then again, what did I know? Perhaps their questions were part of a much greater method of assessing the situation, beyond that of a human mind, or they were just as in the dark as me. It certainly felt like the latter, leaving my frustration to smoulder.\n\nI'd no alternative other than to explain to them how my friend and I, who I referred to as a 'dragoness', as Risha had suggested, were out hunting when we were attacked by two creatures.\n\n\"The other dragons I met called them wyverns,\" I added, finishing my lengthy explanation before taking a well-needed break.\n\nThe Elders' faces still lacked emotion but the atmosphere of the chamber had changed. A feeling of doubt and foreboding took hold, much to my disappointment. Then the red dragon looked back at me and continued.\n\n\"Where is this friend of yours now?\"\n\nWith my patience stretched, I answered abruptly. \"She was taken by one of those monsters!\"\n\nThe four dragons looked across to each other again, as if communicating without words.\n\n\"Well? Can you do anything?\" I pressed, my patience near breaking point.\n\nThe blue dragoness lifted her head and directed her eyes toward me.\n\n\"We're sorry, there is little hope for your friend.\"\n\nI froze, mouth agape as my words died.\n\nHer words struck like a cold knife had been thrust into my heart. Every one of my hopes exploded at the thought \u2013 how can they tell me she's gone?\n\nMy patience shattered. These so-called 'Elders' were certainly not what I imagined. Were they just going to apologise and expect me to give up? It felt like they weren't listening, and with the fire of desperation overwhelming my hopelessness, I was unwilling to accept their judgment.\n\n\"Please\u2026\" No matter my inner conflict, the word slipped out as a whimper. \"You can't just expect me to give up on her.\"\n\nThe red dragon peered down, his cloudy eyes bearing no sympathy.\n\n\"Listen closely, young one.\" His wise tone sounded like Tarwin's when reading her stories.\n\n\"These are troubled times; an age of relative peace is regrettably fading. For the creatures you speak of are a sign of darker forces at work. Evils thought destroyed long ago.\"\n\nHe glanced at his peers and for a moment I swore I saw a glimmer of unease on their stoic faces as he went on.\n\n\"Wyverns are savage beasts. The kind you describe could only be servants of the last Dark Guardian, Acrodan.\"\n\nWhat is this? Do they really believe after living in this world for thirteen winters I wouldn't notice any of this stuff?\n\nAdmittedly, I'd no concept of anything beyond the forest until a few days ago, but I think someone in the village would have known if something was going on. For a moment, I wondered if anyone did know. Then my thoughts turned to Tarwin's father.\n\nI'd never understood what he was really protecting her from or why he always assumed that the rumours had more truth to them than she did.\n\nBut if he knew, why keep it a secret?\n\nThat didn't matter now, all I wanted was to get my friend back \u2013 and this meaningless conversation wasn't helping.\n\nI averted my gaze from the judgmental stares of the presiding dragons, my mind still heavy with the thought she might be gone.\n\n\"Who's Acrodan?\" I asked. Not really understanding the relevance of the strange name.\n\nThe four dragons looked as if they'd expected me to already know, before the red dragon spoke again.\n\n\"Acrodan is the last of nine guardians tasked with protecting the Sphere of Eternity.\"\n\nOnce again it was like they expected me to understand and believe their utterly alien history.\n\n\"And... what's that?\" I asked, trying to go along with his nonsense. For a moment I was certain the otherwise emotionless dragons looked confused; they really weren't expecting me to be so ignorant.\n\n\"We will tell you,\" the blue dragoness stated, looking over at her red-scaled companion who gave a nod before he began.\n\n\"One thousand years ago, in a time of peace and prosperity, the creators of old gave our ancestors a gift from the Golden City, an artefact they called the 'Sphere of Eternity'. Prophesy told it was a relic of great power, and that we were required to gather nine of the strongest mortal souls to watch over it.\"\n\nHis eyes drifted toward the ceiling, where the image of a great spire falling from the stars was carved into the stone.\n\n\"The nine great races of the old world brought forth their finest, each of them chosen by tests and trials until only the best remained. Acrodan was one of the nine chosen to fulfil this honourable duty. He and his eight companions took the sphere up into the most northerly reaches of the world, where even the most powerful would not seek to find it.\"\n\nHis eyes passed to carvings of dragons and other creatures, some very clearly human, before he looked down to where the image of a city of spires, waterfalls and cliffs were etched into the rock.\n\n\"For over two hundred years, they watched over it within the temples of Ilivar, its immense power sustaining the lives of the lesser races whose bodies were unable to withstand the passage of time. The union of the nine strengthened the bonds of the old alliances, ushering in a great and peaceful age.\"\n\nFollowing his directions, I glanced to where the roof depicted dragons, humans and other feathered beasts flourishing under a gleaming sun.\n\nEverything seems so happy. How could I have not known any of this?\n\n\"We were all deceived, for the more power one holds, the more it can corrupt their soul. The unknown truth was that the sphere contained a dark power so great to be beyond that of even the gravest nightmare. Power enough to twist the minds of those chosen to protect it. The sphere slowly worked its evil, poisoning the great and honourable against each other. By the time they or anyone else realised, it was too late.\"\n\nThe next set of carvings showed just that. Nine beasts of varying races. From dragons, to human and many others, engaged in brawls and savage duels.\n\n\"The guardians began to fight over the very power they were sworn to protect. Driven by greed, temptation and ambition. War among those that survived the initial conflict soon followed, each using their powers to destroy the others, reducing the northern lands and all who dwelled there to ash.\"\n\nThere was another carving of the majestic city, only this time it was ablaze and swarmed by battling monsters.\n\n\"Hinnoron, the most powerful and bloodthirsty of the nine, lay siege to the northern world, bringing to ruin the great cities of Taldran and Mordrin, with Acrodan at his side. The dark sorcerer was undoubtedly the most cunning of the few, using Hinnoron as easily as he did his other brethren. He always seemed to have the closest connection to the sphere, becoming the most corrupted by its influence. He gained unspeakable powers, most so horrific that words cannot describe. The third guardian to survive was Lamia, the dragon guardian, the dark serpent queen of the Ebon sovereignty.\"\n\nThree figures were carved into the wall. A hooded man with no face. A tall, humanoid figure in spiked armour and a sleek dragoness with wings spread to blot out the sun.\n\n\"Their war spread quickly, setting the rest of the world ablaze with swathes of raw hatred and vicious bloodshed. The once noble paragons lay waste to their own people, slaughtering those who wouldn't join their cause, razing their homes to the ground in storms of fire.\"\n\nAll those carvings depicting war now made sense, sending a chill down my spine as I realised how casually I'd dismissed them before.\n\n\"Thrown into the warped claws of chaos, the once peaceful races tore each other apart, each choosing sides as the sphere's influence seduced them all. Some stood alone, choosing not to follow the dark path, outgunned and outnumbered a hundred-fold. As for the creators who'd cursed them with the sphere. They'd all but abandoned the world to its fate.\"\n\nMore carvings of war met my wandering eyes, battles so great they filled whole archways and crevices.\n\n\"Over time, fouler, darker creatures crawled forth from the cursed depths, monstrosities that had no place in the peaceful realm of the past and which relished the chance to see darkness take hold. The newly risen horrors chose their leaders, and the great armies of the Dark Guardians were bolstered beyond recognition. Monstrous titans of warped stone and scorching balefire, horrific engines of war belching smoke and flame stood above endless ranks of corrupted beast-men and horrors from an ancient world of living dead. Whether they knew it or not, they were all ultimately consumed by the sphere's influence, their minds driven to its destructive goal.\"\n\nThe next carving showed just that. Snakes of magma, towers of bones and hulking brutes with wings like ferocious gargoyles.\n\n\"What remained of the pure dragons rallied what few allies they had left and in the final days of the Guardian War they led a desperate attack into the heart of the massacre, where the three armies of the Dark Guardians clashed. The four Elders of fire, earth, wind and water along with Sovereign Aria, founder of the elemental orders, led Dardien's army into battle. The four mighty forces ultimately clashing upon the rain-swept fields of the Midnight Plains, each desperate to gain sovereignty over the sphere's power, or to see its destruction.\"\n\nThe Elder didn't even need to direct me to the mighty scene carved above his head. I clearly saw the depiction of a battle to end all battles. Dragons, humans, wyverns and a whole manner of monsters clashed below the image of two armour clad duelling dragonesses.\n\n\"The battle was long and fierce, with blade, tooth and claw alike spilling blood over the sodden grounds. Skies obscured by the battle of winged horrors and flying beasts, the clouds themselves bled and the bones of the earth were broken. Magic of all forms skewered the storm-filled night and the dead rose from the ground. After days of endless bloodshed and Sovereign Aria's heroic loyalty, two of the Dark Guardians fell. Hinnoron was slain upon her golden talons, as was her corrupt sister.\"\n\nI glanced down to the wall behind the Elders, to where the same dragoness stood triumphantly over the bodies of her foes.\n\n\"With two of their leaders slain, the cowardly armies were soon annihilated and forced back into the pits from which they crawled. Acrodan escaped in the wake of the final confrontation, his long-sought prize in his possession. With his dark army all but decimated, he fought his way north, taking the sphere back to the ruins of Ilivar.\"\n\nThe burning city that had been depicted before was back, only this time it looked to be more frozen than ablaze.\n\n\"There he began to recuperate and with the sphere in his possession, his power was limitless. Slowly but surely the cold of his black heart became manifest, fuelled by the inconceivable darkness that had completely consumed him. The northern ice grew outwards, creating the frozen arctic. Acrodan and the sphere have been trapped within Ilivar's ice ever since, while the possibility that he and the sphere would one day return has been a constant threat.\"\n\nThe last of the guardians, the faceless man, was depicted in a tomb of solid ice, the dark orb suspended above his outspread arms.\n\n\"It took a long time for the world to recover, and when it did, it wasn't the same. The trust between the races was shattered, those who were once allies soon turned on each other. In the wake of the Guardian War many others were fought until an age of relative peace began and has stood firm for over one hundred years.\"\n\nMy legs felt like they'd become jelly. My neck strained from all the glancing around. Inevitably I sat down, tail coiled around my hind paws as the Elder went on.\n\n\"With the time of the creators ended, those who remained viewed their so-called 'gift' as a curse, a way in which to punish them for straying from the gods' divine path. Many forgot the worship and ways of old and the ancient ancestors of gold, eventually transforming into their own beliefs and breaking down what was left of the unity that once stood for millennia. No one, not even we sat before you, know of the mysterious ages before the sphere's corruption, and few wish to remember the horror of its passing.\"\n\nEach of their emotionless faces peered down at me as the red-scaled storyteller finished.\n\n\"We retain the ancient teachings of our creators, when all others choose to forget. We're moving into an uncertain future, a future in which the horizons now carry the skies of war.\"\n\nI peered up aimlessly, with no idea what to say. They'd given answers, of sorts. However, it told me nothing of immediate importance, to my thinking it was just an incredible history lesson about long-forgotten wars. I'd no idea what relevance this had to me, but if this was all they were going to tell me, I wasn't wasting any more time.\n\n\"That's... interesting,\" I replied, trying not to offend them with my initial disappointment while carefully considering my next question. \"So how does any of that help my friend?\"\n\n\"What you must understand is that wyverns were among the spawn to serve the Dark Guardians, thought to be destroyed when their armies fell. Their return marks a far worse reality for what lies ahead.\" The blue-scaled dragoness answered in place of the red-scaled Elder.\n\nIt still felt like they were purposely trying to keep Tarwin out of the conversation. Naturally, I understood that if a war was coming, they'd be worried about it. But I saw no signs of any war, the worst things I'd experienced until a few days ago were sheep going missing or bears in the village.\n\nTo give them some credit, at least now I had answers about where wyverns originated. Although it all felt ridiculous, to my knowledge there was no record of such a world-changing event in human society. None of the spiritual talk ever spoke of anything of the sort, only divine deer, snakes and firebirds.\n\nAs I thought, the blue dragonesse's eyes scoured the engraved carvings in the domed ceiling and despite my aching neck's protest, my eyes followed hers.\n\n\"These halls show all of our history, and not once has a dragon like you been recorded,\" she noted curiously, scanning the stone, trying to find something that she knew she wouldn't. \"A dragon whose colour shows no element, whose scales are star-light white,\" she added, her gaze falling on me.\n\nThis talk again? I thought I'd been told this already. Of course my scales show no element, I don't have one!\n\nI reckoned many dragons were the same. All I sensed was that they had suddenly sought to change the subject \u2013 what did my scales have to do with helping Tarwin? Despite my doubts, a small part of me grew more optimistic that there might be some purpose to this puzzling change in direction.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I enquired.\n\n\"You have no natural element, or if you do, it's not known,\" she continued, looking at me as if eager to solve the puzzle herself.\n\n\"Indeed,\" the red dragon agreed. \"The occurrence of a unique dragon such as yourself appearing at this time is no coincidence. If it is true and the return of the Dark Guardian is approaching, you're being here is no accident,\" he added, completing his companion's sentence as if they had choreographed the whole thing.\n\nI resented their reference to me as a mere 'coincidence' or an 'accident', but I allowed it to slip. I was far more interested with the prospect of this 'Dark Guardian' and my apparent new title of 'unique dragon'. Deep down I felt like I understood, or at least I should understand. I'd had a similar feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu when I'd looked at the golden seal on the door, the feeling of having been here before unnerved me.\n\nBefore I could think too hard; I unnervingly felt the four dragons staring at me in union.\n\n\"Go now, young dragon,\" the blue dragoness instructed.\n\n\"We will request you when we have more information,\" the red dragon added, reinforcing my choreography theory.\n\nI wasn't one for being 'requested'. I wanted to say more, to continue, to argue my point, but something in my mind was telling me to resist that urge.\n\nI should just do the smart thing and accept it, for now, at least.\n\nIf I refused to leave they may think I was being aggressive. I'd no idea how they might react to that, so I followed their orders. As if it had anticipated my approach the door had already started its mechanical dance. I walked through the monstrous, metal jigsaw to see my new friends waiting patiently on the other side.\n\nHead hung low in disappointment, I passed them as the door ground closed behind me. I could hardly believe what I'd been told. The Elders were supposed to be the wise ones, yet all they could tell me was that some evil lord's servant beasts had taken my friend? My optimism fell further at the thought of what the blue dragoness had told me, because if what they said about this Acrodan was true, then Tarwin might be\u2026\n\nNo, I'm not thinking like that, I'm not giving up on her! I shoved the thought from my mind. She'd never give up on me, I'll never leave her!\n\nThen there was all that nonsense about the colour of my scales, elements and my lack of one. It was either convenient or ironic, either way I disliked both possibilities.\n\nWhat in the spirits' name does it have to do with this Acrodan character anyway?\n\nThat was the least of my worries. If the Elders wanted to tell me cryptic rubbish, then fine, but I wasn't just going to sit around and wait for them to come up with a plan.\n\n\"Come on then, what did they say?\" Risha's excited question shook me out of my frustrated stupor.\n\nI immediately attempted to hide my disappointment. She's really excited about this. I can't disappoint her after how she's helped me.\n\n\"Oh, something about a war, a Dark Guardian and some other bad stuff.\"\n\nIf someone had said that to me, I'd have thought they were mocking me, and for a moment I regretted my curt response. Her excited expression diminished with every word until her face went blank, along with her brother's. Then I laughed sheepishly, as if it had been a joke.\n\nCome on, Blaze, don't offend them! Who else can you turn to in this place?\n\nBoltock shared my dry laugh, while Risha paused for a moment, seemingly considering her words in a similar way to the Elders. Every moment she spent thinking, I spent fearing she would question my response. After what felt like an eternity of tension, she finally accepted it in much the same casual way as her brother.\n\nRelieved, I quickly moved the conversation on to a new subject, telling them the Elders wished to see me again.\n\n\"If they sent for you twice, they must really think you're special,\" Risha said, her excitement blooming again.\n\n\"Oh, if the Elders think you're special then who are we to argue?\" Boltock added, giving his sister a sly smirk.\n\nShe offered him her normal disapproving scowl, to which he responded with a fit of teasing giggles.\n\n\"Better be off to training, hey, sis?\" he managed to utter through his laughter, nudging her side. \"Don't wanna be late again.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" she replied sharply, straightening up and pressing her wings flat to her flanks.\n\n\"You can come, if you want,\" she offered as she glanced at me. \"That's if you didn't come to Dardien for any other reason?\"\n\nWhat they were training for intrigued me, but my interest was short-lived.\n\nIf I get to thinking about that, it's just going to cause more delays. I need to get out of here as soon as I can!\n\nExcept for another potentially disappointing meeting with the Elders I'd no real reason to stay. I needed to restart my search and now I at least knew where I had to go.\n\nYou really want to go flying all the way up to the far north right now? This Ilivar place is half a world away, maybe seeing how real dragons act first will help?\n\nI considered that as I accepted Risha's invitation, I had to kill time somehow and I'd no one else to hang around with. Meanwhile, the blue dragoness beamed happily and I did my best to hide my underlying conflict.\n\n\"The more the merrier,\" Boltock muttered, rolling his eyes at his sister and gesturing for her to follow as he moved away.\n\nI watched as the two of them walked over to one of the tunnels leading off from the main hall. Before following, I took one last look at the icon in the centre of the golden door. It depicted a sphere surrounded by four armoured dragons. The sphere could have represented anything, but with the knowledge I now possessed I knew it symbolised much more.\n\n\"Blaze, you coming?\"\n\nI heard my name called and for the first time in my life it was someone other than Tarwin.\n\nI pulled myself away from the golden seal and hurried over to the others, continuing to follow as they passed into the side tunnel. Other dragons crowded in front and behind, most about my size and all walking in the same direction. Over the many horned heads and winged bodies I could see a slightly distorted light at the far end of the passageway; it looked like it was shining through a curtain of flowing water. A loud gushing sound and a cloud of moisture swept through the tunnel, also supporting my water theory.\n\nComing out; we entered a large chamber split over two levels. The first looked like the main floor, a flat base of stone, while the second sat a few paces above, curving around the back wall of the cave. The passageway deposited us onto the upper ledge, opposing a huge window, crossed by natural stone pillars and stalactites that led to the airways outside. The liquid veil of a gushing waterfall half-covered the opening, filling the chamber with a fine mist.\n\nThe lowest level was full of dragons, all around my size, using what I assumed were their elemental powers. Bolts of fire and spear-like shards of ice flew towards strangely shaped dummies, magically appearing to repair themselves after every blow. Dragons flew obstacle courses around stalactites, zipping between the rocks on air currents they created themselves. While others launched large boulders at bull's-eye targets carved into the walls.\n\n\"This is where most of us younger ones come to train,\" announced Risha, as she pulled me aside for dragons to pass.\n\n\"Train for what?\" I inquired, trying not to think about some of the odd looks I was getting from strangers.\n\n\"The elemental orders, of course,\" Boltock interrupted suddenly.\n\n\"You really don't know, do you?\" Risha asked, as if she'd not been totally convinced until now.\n\n\"No,\" I replied, trying to hide my blush with a subtle head bow as she elaborated.\n\n\"All dragons are able to control an element: blue-scaled dragons control water and ice, red and orange govern fire, green and brown command earth and grey control the air, including the weather. A worthy Sovereign is granted the power over all of the elements, although Aries seems to be lacking in that regard.\"\n\nI was slowly beginning to put the pieces together, but I still couldn't quite figure out how it worked; for instance, who was this 'Sovereign' they kept referring to? And what was it about the colour of my scales?\n\n\"That's why we're all so interested to know about you. Your scales are white, which represents, well, no element, at least none that I'm aware of,\" she concluded, curiosity finally seeming to get the better of her.\n\nShe's just as interested in me as the Elders. I thought with a sigh. At least she's kinder about it.\n\nI was just about to ask what the elderly dragons had said to her when they'd called for me, when at the last moment, I decided not to.\n\nIt's not her fault, so why should I associate her with those dragons and their stupid riddles?\n\nI could still feel the heat of embarrassment in my cheeks, not a sensation I was used to. I guess it means I wanna be friends with her, but...\n\n\"Risha, Boltock!\" an excited female voice hollered, interrupting my awkward thoughts.\n\nA gust of wind swept up from the wings of another dragoness as she landed beside us. Slightly larger, she looked like Risha, only her scales were a bright, almost fiery, orange with a darker underside. Much like the others, she had symbols on her flanks \u2013 hers were red and resembled flames, as did the bony ridge of yellow scales along her back. As for her tail, it lacked any defining features, ending in a slim point. She also wore gold bracelets, like Risha, only hers had deep-red rubies lining the edges.\n\n\"Ember!\" Risha replied as the new dragoness moved towards us.\n\nMy keen senses quickly became aware of the effect the newcomer had on Boltock. His attitude suddenly changed as he rushed over, overtaking his sister in a sudden burst of enthusiasm.\n\n\"Hi, Ember!\" he announced excitedly.\n\n\"Hello, Boltock,\" she replied, lifting a forepaw in slight apprehension.\n\nHer focus on the siblings was brief, however. Her reaction to my presence, on the other paw, was far more noticeable, as was the fact that it felt like everyone else was watching me.\n\nOkay, I know I'm different! But this is really making my scales crawl.\n\n\"Who's this?\" Ember enquired, directing her words at Risha.\n\n\"This is Blaze, he's... new,\" she answered, moving quickly to my side and putting a wing over my back as if she needed to protect me.\n\n\"Well, it's nice to meet you, Blaze,\" Ember greeted with a pleasant smile.\n\nShe seemed to look past my unique exterior far quicker than the others, almost like the differences were trivial to her. A second gust of wind interrupted our conversation, when another dragon appeared from the lower levels. I'd no doubt he was male, with a bright hide of fiery-red scales and a smoky black underside. He was slightly larger than the others, with a small tear in his right wing. The two horns on his head were straight like mine, and instead of spines he had a black fin running along the top of his neck, stopping where his back began.\n\nHe landed next to Ember, suddenly quashing Boltock's interest as the green dragon edged away.\n\n\"Hello, Pyro,\" Risha greeted.\n\nHer words were followed by a, \"Yes, hello,\" from her brother as he timidly scurried back to her side.\n\n'Pyro.' I consciously made an effort to remember the name, stashing it along with Ember's.\n\n\"You're late,\" Pyro rumbled, his stern eyes like crimson daggers.\n\n\"We had other things to do first,\" Risha responded with an eye roll and flick of her tail in my direction.\n\nAll my thoughts froze as Pyro's focus fell on me. The larger dragons sharp, intimidating gaze wasn't followed by words, but a curious purr. Then he turned his attention to Boltock, who was still mulling about behind his sister.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he questioned, head cocked and left eye-crest raised.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Boltock replied, quickly standing up straight and brushing dust from his paws.\n\n\"Nothing indeed,\" Risha chuckled, nudging her brother away as she added. \"Well, this is all well and good, but shouldn't we get to work?\"\n\n\"Yes, work sounds perfect right now!\" Boltock was swift to reply, almost jumping on the spot like a giddy child.\n\nWithout another word he moved toward the edge of the ledge, almost stumbling over as he shot a smirk at Ember. The two fiery dragons followed, the three of them gliding down to the lower level.\n\n\"What should I do?\" I asked Risha as I ducked under my wing to avoid prying eyes.\n\n\"Well you can watch, I suppose, or you can try to find out what element white represents,\" she chirped, admiring my scales one last time before joining the others.\n\nI moved to the edge, watching her elegant glide until she landed gracefully.\n\nShe almost puts me to shame. I observed, before shaking my head. Okay, let's not get ahead of myself.\n\nI followed a moment later, landing beside her. Down here the spinning and twirling elemental chaos was almost overwhelming. Through the throng I could see a boulder neatly tucked away in one corner, providing a perfect place from which to observe. I quickly made my move, gliding onto it, before making myself comfortable.\n\nI knew the elements that Risha and Boltock controlled and from their colours I assumed Ember and Pyro controlled fire. That was confirmed when I spotted them through the melee. Spinning their bodies to generate balls of flame. The fire started as sparks amidst their scales, growing in waves across their bodies before shooting downward. Each molten bolt was fired with a flick of the tail, sent blazing towards targets carved into the walls.\n\nBoltock was able to manipulate the stone around him, causing small grains of sand and pebbles to levitate into the air, compacting together to form larger pieces which he raised high and launched toward the self-repairing dummies. My eyes were drawn towards Risha most of all, I watched her in awe as she conjured up whirling balls of water, holding them in orbit around her, before they moulded into spear-like shapes, froze solid and launched at another magical dummy.\n\nAs I observed I became more aware of the other dragons, and it was increasingly clear that among all of those in the chamber, none of them were like me \u2013 even some of the air elementals with the palest-grey scales. It was then I realised I'd spent my whole life wondering where I'd come from, often wondering whether there were any more like me out there. Now I'd found out there were, and yet, I still felt so different.\n\nGreat, I started the day hoping for answers and I've just found more stupid questions!\n\nA loud whoosh of wings pulled me from my contemplation when a stormy grey dragon erupted in through the waterfall. The newcomer circled like a malevolent cloud, before his long claws tapped against the stone floor as he landed. He was significantly larger than me; not one of the largest dragons I'd seen, but certainly intimidating. His scales glistened with a coat of fresh water, while his sharp eyes perused his surroundings as one may do insects under their boot. He had two horns growing straight from his skull, the space in between covered by several shorter spines.\n\nHe pushed the others aside with his considerably larger wings, clearing a path for himself. He spared me no attention, and for every moment he was here I hoped he'd continue to ignore me. He approached one of the self-repairing dummies and the moment he saw him Boltock scurried over to his sister, just as he'd done when Pyro arrived.\n\n\"Well, if it isn't the master earth dragon,\" the new dragon muttered, catching sight of Boltock. \"Oh, how the Order will benefit from such greatness,\" he added, pressing a forepaw to his chest and spreading his wings in mock glory.\n\nBoltock ducked behind his sister as she turned to the towering dragon.\n\n\"Shut your snout, Thunder! It's not like you have anything to brag about.\" Unfazed by his arrogance, she shouted back, standing upright with wings tight at her side.\n\nLike a rabbit creeping from its burrow, Boltock slowly raised his head.\n\n\"The Order's military wings are reserved for the elite, scaleless whelps like him belong in the floramancer guilds,\" Thunder rumbled, drawing the attention of every dragon in the chamber. \"Although you could be far more than a fighter,\" he hissed, snaking his head up beside Risha.\n\nShe growled and straightened herself further. \"Don't even think about it, snake.\"\n\n\"Such a good little fighter! Why settle for a place as a healer, when you could be with a warrior like me?\" he cooed.\n\n\"Enough!\" a booming voice suddenly sounded; all eyes turning to Pyro looming on the higher section of the cave.\n\n\"Oh, if it isn't the Fire Order's finest as well,\" Thunder snapped, his gaze turning to challenge the fire dragon's.\n\n\"Don't play games, snake!\" Pyro growled, spreading his dark wings.\n\nThunder remained unfazed.\n\n\"And what are you going to do? Oh, right, nothing \u2013 you don't have the authority to intervene,\" he sneered.\n\nWhat? The word suddenly exploded in my mind. He's easily big enough to deal with him.\n\n\"And you forget your place too,\" Pyro retaliated, his eyes narrowing as I noticed his claws scrape against the stone floor.\n\n\"I have a higher place than you, smoke-spitter. So, until then you remember yours, or you'll lose it,\" Thunder replied with a flick of his wings.\n\nMy eyes darted between them. I'd never witnessed a situation like this before and I wasn't sure if this was how dragons normally behaved. I cursed myself for even thinking of intervening, but my eagerness to act was overwhelming. I wasn't just going to sit here and let my new friends be bullied like this.\n\nOh, I'm going to regret this. I dismissed the thought, jumping down from the rock and made my way through the crowd. I'd stand up for Tarwin, I can do it for them!\n\n\"Come back when you have the authority to act, if you ever do,\" Thunder hissed at Pyro as I stepped out, putting myself between Risha and her tormentor.\n\n\"Leave them alone,\" I growled, trembling even as I forced myself to meet his stern eyes.\n\nMuch to my surprise he stepped back. I guessed looking like a freak is worth something.\n\nThe bully's slight withdrawal was swiftly followed by shocked gasps throughout the crowd.\n\n\"Who are you supposed to be?\" Thunder snorted, waving a foreclaw at me. \"Did someone spill star-salt on your scales or something?\"\n\n\"That's none of your concern,\" I responded in as firm a tone as I could muster.\n\n\"Then get out of my way,\" he growled, stepping forward and looming over me like a mountain.\n\nMy legs shook like jelly and my wings fidgeted like parchment in the wind. But I held my ground, not taking my eyes off his as I stomped a forepaw and declared.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHe paused for a moment; his muzzle wrinkled into a snarl.\n\n\"Fine.\" The abrupt word was my only warning before he swiped a foreclaw at me.\n\nBefore I knew it, I was face-down on the floor with pain pulsing through the right side of my head. I heard another shocked gasp run through the crowd, albeit this time slightly muffled by the ringing in my ears.\n\n\"That'll teach you not to get in my way,\" he sneered.\n\n\"Blaze!\" I heard a muffled voice cry through my daze.\n\nClosing my eyes, I tried to block out the pain. Mustering all my strength I forced myself to stand, my head still spinning and limbs like frail twigs. I felt sick at the idea that I'd started this, nevertheless I forced myself to focus.\n\nI should have just stayed on the rock, let things play out. Now everyone is looking at me!\n\nThat was when I felt something deep inside me spark to life. Something I'd felt only once before, when those creatures attacked me in the woods. Without thinking, I lunged forward, seething with anger as I landed in front of my attacker. My heart raced and my increased breathing fuelled the raging fire inside me.\n\n\"Back for more?\" Thunder sniggered, looking around to the crowd as he spread his wings. \"Dragonesses and gentle-drakes, it seems we do have a show today!\"\n\nHe took a second swipe, I instinctively ducked to avoid it, causing him to lose his footing. I quickly spun round, sweeping my tail to take the already unstable dragon's rear paws out from under him. He floundered, unable to re-establish his balance as he came crashing down. I saw his front-left paw bend backwards as it wedged between the stone and his shoulder.\n\nPlacing a forepaw on his neck I slowly sank my claws into his scaly hide. Pressing down harder and harder until a stream of dark red began to ooze from the wounds. I was blind to the steam seeping from his scales; it was as if my claws were burning hot. It was only when he begged me to stop that my focus broke and I finally relented.\n\n\"Now leave them alone,\" I warned with a snarl.\n\nWhimpering, humiliated, beaten and holding his wounded foreleg against his chest, Thunder slowly scampered back. Trails of crimson stained the dark-grey scales on his neck as he limped through the crowd, spreading his wings before awkwardly taking off through the watery veil from which he'd arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Loyalty's Curse",
                "text": "The atmosphere fell silent and the crowd stood with mouths agape. Meanwhile, I succumbed to exhaustion, panting heavily as I swayed and struggled to stay upright. My mind was blank, as if fire had incinerated all my worries. Although it was short-lived, moments later memory came flooding back. I was ready to pass out, my legs buckled and wings sagged before I felt someone walk up beside me. I turned to see Risha with a look of concern in her eyes.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" she asked, using a wing to hide me from onlookers.\n\nI tried to think, to form words in my quivering mouth. When I became aware of the crowd of shocked dragons staring at me, nothing more than a timid yelp escaped my muzzle.\n\nPyro descended beside Risha seconds later, moving the other dragons aside before he looked to her and Boltock.\n\n\"Are you two okay?\" he asked, the sternness I'd seen moments ago absent.\n\nBoltock nodded, seeming somewhat hesitant to speak.\n\n\"Yes, thanks,\" Risha responded, only sparing the larger dragon a brief glance before returning her attention to me.\n\nPyro nodded and with a wave of his wings, he dispersed the crowd. Hushed mutters of disbelief and amazement flittered among the dragons.\n\n\"Wow, what a freak!\"\n\n\"Yeah, did you see how he whooped Thunder's tail though? I hate that sour-scale.\"\n\n\"It's like the stories, you know the really old ones about dragons with no element?\"\n\nI lowered my head, taking deep breaths and doing my best to ignore the jeering. As for Thunder \u2013 I'd no regrets, he'd certainly deserved it.\n\nYeah, but there's surely going to be consequences. Oh, I'm such a fool, I'll be locked up or banished! Or locked up in the place I'm banished to!\n\n\"Are you okay? Come on, Blaze, talk to me,\" Risha repeated, nudging my side with her wing.\n\n\"Y\u2013yeah... I\u2013I'm fine\" I forced, finally catching my breath.\n\n\"What in the creators' name was that?\" she continued, dropping down close to my side and shielding our conversation with a wing.\n\n\"It was amazing, that's what! By the skies, sure showed that cloud-licker what for!\" Boltock exclaimed, his wings flaring as he thrust a forepaw in the air.\n\n\"Shush!\" Ember hissed sharply, \"can't you see this isn't the time?\"\n\nBoltock sank low, seemingly obeying her command a lot faster than he did any of his sister's. Meanwhile, she walked up beside Risha. The look of astonishment on her face was clear, no matter how much she appeared to be trying to maintain formality.\n\n\"Risha, I've never seen anything like that. Not even the academy's best,\" the fire dragoness offered.\n\nHearing that, a creeping uncertainty that it wasn't just my intervention that had shocked them all, grew in my mind. Despite that, none of them looked like they thought what I'd done was wrong.\n\n\"I have to admit that was pretty amazing,\" Risha added and Boltock's head was swift to perk up in surprise.\n\nWhat are they talking about? How is a fight with claws and tail so amazing when they can all shoot fire?\n\n\"What's so amazing?\" I finally managed to ask.\n\n\"That was Thunder,\" Risha told me, still not quite sounding like she believed her own words.\n\n\"He's not the nicest dragon, as you may have gathered. No one has ever stood up to him like that before,\" she continued, seeming more than a little giddy.\n\nSurprisingly, none of them looked to Pyro, as I might have done; it seemed what he'd done was fine in their opinion, even if it got him nowhere.\n\n\"Yeah, it was about time someone gave him a good kick up the tail! Oh, and what you did with your eyes was incredible!\" Boltock spluttered in a torrent of excitement.\n\nI'd no idea what he was talking about, although it confirmed my fear that they were referring to more than just my fighting.\n\n\"What happened to my eyes?\" I asked, quickly touching them with my forepaw as if they'd fall out.\n\n\"They were glowing!\" he declared.\n\nHis enthusiastic excitement was instantly frowned on by the others, while I tried not to hyperventilate.\n\nSomething's seriously wrong with me. If they're surprised, it can't be normal for a dragon!\n\nI pressed a forepaw to my heaving chest, wings jittering at my side before something in my panicked brain clicked. Wait what did they say, glowing eyes?\n\nWithout a second thought I connected it to the burning sensation I'd felt. I could only assume that wasn't normal either. It had been the same in the woods when I'd lashed out at the wyvern.\n\nHad my eyes been glowing then? I thought, certainly not ready to march up to the wyverns and ask.\n\nFaint memories of my dreams slowly surfaced from the depths of my mind. I'd seen my eyes glow when I'd looked into the crystal. Recalling the nightmare filled me with dread \u2013 it couldn't be real?\n\nThe crowd had completely dispersed, most returning to practising their skills, although some still looked back curiously. The moment Pyro returned his eyes settled on my bloodstained claws.\n\n\"Those must be extremely strong to pierce through dragon scale like that,\" he observed, though his inspection ended abruptly when he turned to Risha. \"You should probably handle him and you two should go back to work,\" he commanded, turning to Ember and Boltock.\n\n\"Yes, you're probably right,\" Ember replied, walking off and beckoning Boltock with a flick of her wing. Safe to say, it took no more than that to get him to follow.\n\n\"Thunder's ego will most likely see your friend gets no blame; that menace deserved all he got. I can't see him admitting he was bested by a dragon half his size any time soon,\" Pyro explained, seemingly unable to hide a smirk of his own as he nodded my way.\n\nA cool wave of relief washed over me.\n\nThe dragon that frightened me moments ago is now willing to help. Maybe my kind is not all that bad.\n\nI suspected it was probably because he was just as angry about Thunder as everyone else. Nevertheless, I made a mental note to thank him when I next had the chance.\n\n\"We should probably go back to the nest and get you cleaned up,\" Risha swiftly interjected, helping me steady myself before she moved towards the opening in the cliff.\n\n\"Come on,\" she ordered.\n\nEvery dragon had returned to their training and Pyro resumed his watch from the upper ledge. I looked up at the water-covered opening. I may have been exhausted but I was certainly able to fly, especially when the air practically did all the work for me. I spread my wings and took off after Risha, swooping around the waterfall on to another perfect current.\n\n\"Good to see you can still fly,\" Risha called with a chuckle as she banked away from a hover.\n\nShe flew ahead, riding the unnatural airways. Following closely, I thought about what she'd told me.\n\nIf some dragons control the element of air, does that mean they create these airways?\n\nAs the vast expanses of the city came into view over the cliff edge, I really had to wonder how they managed it. The city itself looked the same as before with only one significant difference. A wall of sunlight shone down, the golden beams from the cliff edge reflecting on the lake's still water as if a second sun were trapped beneath us. Reaching the nest, Risha was the first to land and despite the perfect airway I still managed to drop clumsily.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she warned. \"He didn't mess your wings up did he?\"\n\nI folded them the best I could, an awkward blush creeping into my scales again. \"N\u2013no, I'm fine really. You don't have to worry about me.\"\n\nChuckling to herself, she turned and looked over my wings one last time before continuing through the doorway. Following, she pointed her wing at the pile of ashes in the centre, suggesting I sit down. I did as much, just as she sat in front of me.\n\n\"Now, let's have a proper look at that,\" she ordered, putting the tip of her tail under my chin, gently lifting my head.\n\nJust like when she'd been training in the cave, the strange markings on her forehead flashed blue, as they did a levitating ball of water flickered into existence behind her. Hundreds of small droplets came together to form a whirling ball of liquid moving slowly around her head until it landed softly on the painful side of my face.\n\nThe cold's sudden bite was a shock at first, but I restrained my reflexes and the sting swiftly turned to a soothing chill. She looked closely at my injury while concentrating on holding the water in place as she spoke.\n\n\"I didn't really get a chance to say it back there...\" she began bashfully. \"But I wanted to say thanks.\"\n\nShe raised her head to look directly at me, a grateful smile across her face.\n\n\"Boltock... Well, anyone and Thunder really. They never got along,\" she continued, turning her head away and appearing to think more deeply on the subject. \"Just a few weeks ago, that tyrant almost broke my brother's wing because he was showing off to Ember. As he always does,\" she added, rolling her eyes. \"Pyro's tried to stop him, but his place in the order doesn't allow him to use force against other orders, so he's never really been able to do much.\"\n\nFor a moment I found myself questioning what these 'Orders' really meant. Based on the training, I assumed they were militaristic.\n\nSo, what kind of military forbids the use of force? Kinda counterproductive if you ask me.\n\nAs she continued to treat my injury, she told me more about their daily lives. She seemed to trust me without question, and after the trouble with Thunder, I was pretty sure I'd be stupid not to return the favour.\n\nShe certainly made me feel better, however; there was something I knew she couldn't help me with. She didn't know what I'd seen in my dreams \u2013 surely that is impossible? Dreams aren't real, especially if I dreamt about something before it happened.\n\nWarm air flooded the widening space between the suspended fluid and my scales as Risha withdrew the soothing water from my wounds. She spun it up into a tight ball before launching it out of the window. For all the chaos in my mind, there was one question she could answer.\n\n\"That was you back there, wasn't it? In the cave, you called my name?\" I asked, bowing my head as I added. \"I thought it was Tarwin. You kinda sound a little like her.\"\n\nShe seemed lost for what to say for a moment, stammering a little before she admitted. \"W\u2013well, it was a shock, seeing someone I'd just met get hit like that.\"\n\nShe moved to get another look at my wound, avoiding my eyes. \"I thought you were hurt, because of me. You gave everyone quite the surprise, though, especially Thunder.\"\n\n\"So, what's this about my glowing eyes?\" I asked, and she edged back.\n\n\"You honestly don't know, do you? I've seen a lot of dragons use their elements in imaginative ways, but nothing like that,\" she admitted, then rubbed her forepaws together sheepishly as she pressed.\n\n\"W\u2013when you went to see the Elders, you didn't tell me about everything they said, did you?\" she added, triggering a spark of guilt in me.\n\nI guess there's no point in lying now we're alone. I thought with a sigh.\n\n\"I guess I didn't say it because it was difficult for me to accept,\" I replied, my wings sagging and head drooping as I finally admitted.\n\n\"There's one important thing I think I should tell you, something the Elders didn't tell me. The eyes, I've seen them before.\"\n\nHer head perked up and seeming to have her full attention I added. \"In my dreams I stare into a strange crystal and my reflection has glowing eyes.\"\n\n\"You just keep getting stranger by the minute,\" she responded, seeming to take the revelation in with a deep breath before offering a reassuring smile.\n\nI smiled back and a slight laughter broke out between us. I knew she believed me, and I also knew there was nothing more she could add on the subject.\n\n\"Well that should do it for your face, here's hoping it heals as fast as your wing did,\" she chirped, before jumping to her paws.\n\n\"I'm going to get some food, want some?\" she asked, and I gave a nod before she took off.\n\nLeft alone, I couldn't help wondering.\n\nStrange glowing eyes, dreams, my sudden ability to beat down a stronger and significantly larger dragon. Am I really just a freak?\n\nWhat bothered me most of all was what the Elders had said about me being unique, a dark power returning and my appearance being a sign of its coming.\n\nThis is getting far too big for me. I just want to save Tarwin and go home.\n\nI did my best not to dwell on the idea I might never see my friend again. Instead, I walked over to the opening and stood out on the platform. The cool breeze rustled the curtains behind me as I filled my lungs with its freshness. I could hear and see dragons going about their business, flying amongst the hanging structures lit by the beaming sun rays. It felt like the first chance I'd got to really appreciate it in all its glory, without the gloom of evening or creeping vertigo.\n\n\"This should do,\" Risha announced.\n\nI looked round to see she'd materialized beside the fire, holding another of the clay pots in her mouth along with two bowls she held in her coiled tail. She took a step back and laid the pot down before lighting the fire with a torrent of blue flames.\n\nAmazement halted my movement. Her fire-breathing ability was still as strange to me as my magic glowing eyes were to her.\n\nWait, she told me blue dragons-controlled water, so how can she breathe fire?\n\n\"What?\" she asked. Only then did I realise I was gawking.\n\n\"It's just...\" I struggled to speak as I gathered my bewildered thoughts. \"I thought you were a water dragon?\"\n\n\"Dragonfire burns within all of us,\" she replied, pressing a forepaw to her chest. \"Red is the colour of fire elementals \u2013 they can control fire, but all dragons can breathe it,\" she elaborated.\n\nAs soon as she told me that, my wings sagged and my head drooped.\n\n\"I can't breathe fire,\" I admitted shamefully.\n\nShe approached, nudging my side with her wing, encouraging my eyes back to hers.\n\n\"Hey, with what you did today I think you can do much more than just breathe fire,\" she assured me with a comforting smile. \"You just have to put your mind to it.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I replied, doing my best to mimic her positive expression.\n\nWith that, she turned her attention to the pot she'd placed within the flames. Steam bubbled from under its jumping lid and a delicious smell wafted on its vapours. After a few minutes she carefully removed it from the fire, placing it on the floor within the ring of condensation it conjured. With the lid removed, a large plume of steam rushed upwards, before she picked up the pot and poured out the contents.\n\nThis stuff again? I thought hungrily.\n\nThis time I finished it without hesitation, pushing the empty bowl toward the fire with my tail. Risha did the same, smirking at me as she wiped her snout with a forepaw. As we finished the sound of voices outside interrupted us.\n\n\"There they are!\" Boltock announced entering the chamber. \"Didn't anyone at least think to tell me where you'd gone?\"\n\n\"Boltock, you were there when I told them to come back here?\" Pyro deadpanned.\n\n\"Yeah, but I didn't think you were serious! Hardly anyone ever leaves training,\" he replied.\n\n\"How's he doing?\" Pyro asked, dismissing Boltock and fixing his eyes on me.\n\n\"He's fine,\" Risha responded swiftly.\n\n\"Ooo, I just can't contain it! That was so extraordinary, you really gotta teach me how to make my eyes glow like that!\" Boltock beamed, skidding over to me like an excited puppy.\n\n\"That's enough!\" Risha interrupted, pushing him away with her wing. \"You're going to overwhelm him.\"\n\nFor an instant I thought of speaking up and allowing Boltock to continue, as I couldn't really be any more overwhelmed than I already was; my mind was changed when I returned my gaze to Risha shaking her head.\n\nFrowning at his sister, Boltock turned, ruffling his wings as he marched back to the door. It was as if he was about to fly off, at least until he was almost muzzle to muzzle with Ember as the dragoness slipped in and commented.\n\n\"That was quite amazing.\" Her voice was calm and collected, like Tarwin when she had prey in her sights.\n\n\"Yes, yes amazing,\" Boltock stammered, tempering his enthusiasm to match her subtle tone.\n\nThe peek he took to see if she'd acknowledged him wasn't so subtle. Even so, the fiery dragoness pretended not to notice.\n\n\"The day grows older,\" Pyro announced as Ember slid close by his side.\n\nThe pair stood by the open balcony, the larger dragon peering out through the curtain as he asked.\n\n\"So, are we just going to sit here all day, or are we going to show this new one the spring?\"\n\n\"What! Are you serious!?\" Boltock asked in disbelief.\n\n\"I think he's earned it,\" Ember agreed with a light giggle.\n\n\"Ooo, then yes! We gotta show him!\" Boltock almost exploded with enthusiasm.\n\nMy eyes jumped from face to face, trying to figure out what they were talking about.\n\nA spring? I've heard of those before. It's the name villagers give to small streams and rivers. Unless they're talking about the season?\n\n\"What kind of spring?\" I asked curiously.\n\nEveryone appeared ready to give an answer, but they were all beaten by Boltock.\n\n\"It's only the best secret ever!\" he shouted as he ran out and dove over the platform.\n\nMoments later, he re-emerged over the edge, flapping his wings as he called. \"Are you guys coming, or what?\"\n\nThe others looked like they'd seen it all before, nevertheless all followed. Meanwhile I paused.\n\nEverything's still going so fast; I've only just started to recover and now we're rushing somewhere else? Risha was the last to leave, turning back to me before she moved through the curtain.\n\n\"Are you coming?\"\n\nA feeling of guilt held me back. The time I'd spent here had been amazing, though I still felt I didn't truly belong. Not only that, but none of this was going to help save Tarwin. The only real reason for me to stay was the Elders' request to see me again.\n\nCome on, that's got to be enough for now. You've waited your whole life to meet dragons, now enjoy it a little.\n\nThat in mind, I walked up next to Risha as she took off. Turning to the open balcony one last time, I dismissed the idea and followed her into the air.\n\nI can save Tarwin when I'm ready. I just have to wait to see what the Elders say."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "We flew for a short while before a change in my companion's course forced them into a dive towards the lake. I pondered the reason for their sudden descent as I hovered, there looked to be nothing below us except the lower cliff. Another change in the air movement came as Risha swooped into a hover in front of me.\n\n\"This is the fun part!\" she announced, gracefully somersaulting in the air before disappearing below.\n\nIt took me a few moments to relocate her and confirm that she had joined the others in their descent. They moved further away, so far that they appeared like dots against the vast shimmering water.\n\nHow big is this place? They look like ants from up here!\n\nFinally, and with some hesitation, I tucked my wings against my side and allowed myself to fall.\n\nAir rushed by, leaving me almost unable to draw breath as it rustled my wings and whipped my tail. The glistening water drew closer until it was almost within touching distance, when, just as the others had done, the leathery membranes erupted from my side, snapping taught with a clap like thunder, instantly catching the air. The downward force sent shockwaves across the water and I caught sight of fish scattering.\n\nFollowing the others, I straightened my flight into a low glide. The warmer air rising from the lake created a more natural uplift and it felt good to be flying on my own again.\n\nLiving here it's a shock that dragons don't lose their edge for natural flight.\n\nThe sound of laughter soon met my ears, which was when I realised I'd somehow overtaken the others in my rapid descent.\n\n\"Whoooooo!\" Boltock cried, swaying excitedly in the air. \"It gets better every time,\" he added, catching his breath.\n\nI shared in their laughter, unable to deny the drop was the most exhilarating thing I'd done in a long time. The fact that I was with my own kind only added to the thrill.\n\nGliding low over the water I watched my reflection trapped beneath its surface as sunlight streamed from above at just the right angle to emphasise the image. I slowly banked right, following the others towards the base of the cliff, dipping my wing tip in the water as I turned.\n\nThe fine membrane sliced the liquid like a knife, creating a series of ripples that disturb my reflection before dissipating outwards and eventually merging back into the stillness. The scene was beautiful, in fact, it was breath-taking. Risha swooped in beside me, her wing tip close to mine.\n\n\"I told you that was the fun part,\" she announced, laughing whimsically as she swayed into my path and forced me to tilt aside.\n\nI returned the playful intrusion, leaning back into her path in the same way.\n\n\"Come on, you two,\" voices sounded from ahead. \"Stop playing about like it's your first flight!\"\n\nOur heads turned simultaneously to see the others looking back and beating our wings harder we caught up. Together we flew further along the base of the cliff, its face visible long after it submerged into the gloomy depths. It was slightly intimidating to think that the immense wall continued much deeper beneath the water, not to mention what could be down there.\n\nFunny, I'm starting to sound like Tarwin's father.\n\nJust as I thought that, the path ahead began to unveil itself. It was unclear at first, but it became apparent that the others were heading towards an opening nestled at the base of the cliffs where the two opposing faces finally merged. The rough fracture appeared like a gaping maw, half-filled with water. Stalactites opposed their stalagmite cousins, rising from beneath the lake. The combination of natural formations giving the cave mouth the appearance of being lined by snarling fangs.\n\nAt first sight, the dark crevice looked unnerving, but the others flew on without hesitation. Containing my fear and reining in my apprehension, I followed them into the shadowy maw, swooping around the lowest of the stalactites, which up close, were far larger than I'd first appreciated.\n\nThe cave's natural appearance was much the same inside, it looked more like the caverns back home, namely a gloomy, wet hole with water dripping from the ceiling. The rejected liquid repeatedly broke the surface of the pool below as a symphony of patters echoed from the walls.\n\nDarkness continued to consume us as we moved deeper into the depths, the cavernous reaches extending further into the cliff. The confines of the cave forced an ever-lower flight over the water, broken occasionally by stalagmites reaching up from beneath like grasping talons. Each time I avoided one of the rocky teeth the next seemed to grow taller; it took me a while to realise that the cave floor was rising from beneath the water. Eventually the dark liquid was forced to give way to rock, and trying not to slip on the damp surface, we eventually landed on the exposed beach.\n\nTo my surprise, Pyro immediately sped off through a small opening at the back of the cave, the others and I quickly pursuing. The crevice was tight, providing just enough room for a dragon to walk through, and as we rounded the first corner, I made out a faint blue light ahead. Moments later, I discovered the source, a large expanse of glowing moss clinging to the damp walls.\n\nThe tight confines gradually opened out into a more spacious tunnel. More moss covered the rough rock, clearly growing wild across its vast, sprawling surface unlike in the city. What was even stranger was that the air had started to become warmer, making the atmosphere hot and sticky.\n\nAt first, I thought it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, since my only other experience with caves like this had been cold, wet and unpleasant. What looked like steam drifted from up ahead, subtly illuminated by the moss's blue glow.\n\nWhere in the spirits' name are they taking me? I asked myself. I trust them, I really do. But this is so odd.\n\nEventually the cave opened out into an even grander subterranean world to reveal the source of the strange phenomenon. Stalactites decorated the roof and gushing water fell rapidly through large cracks in the ceiling. Most astonishing of all were the terraces stretching out before us.\n\nSteam rose from the bubbling pools of hot liquid, spilling out over the retaining lip of the naturally hollowed-out shelves before gently trickling down into those beneath. The process repeated itself several times as the terraces stepped downward, the final pools feeding into a larger underground lake. The crystal-clear water was brightened by more of the glowing moss clustering among the stalactites and shimmered like liquid sapphire.\n\nSeveral natural pillars supported the cavern, their surfaces glistening as beads of condensation found purchase. The gentle sound of bubbling water filled the air, giving the chamber an other-worldly tranquillity. A sudden splash shattered that, as did the gush of steaming liquid forced over the lip of the nearest pool.\n\nWe all glanced down to see Boltock's head rising from beneath the steaming water. The others stared at him for a second before they eagerly followed. Meanwhile, I edged over to the rim of the closest pool. Peering into the water only made me think it must be warmed by fire.\n\nMaybe it's something to do with fire dragons, like how air dragons make it easy to fly? Why would they bother to heat up water all the way down here?\n\nI eventually decided there really was no point in trying to figure it out; it was here. Dipping in one of my front paws, the sudden shock of its warmth sent a quiver up my foreleg and I instinctively pulled it out. Seeing the others splashing around eased that fear and I tried again, this time determined to hold my paw in for longer. I resisted my reflexes and after a few seconds the warmth felt good.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Boltock shouted, diving beneath the surface before emerging covered in a shimmering coat of steaming liquid. \"You're fireproof!\"\n\nHe's right, scaredy-scales, just jump in!\n\nI took the leap of faith and did just that, giving myself no time to reconsider. The sudden shock sent a warm spasm through my whole body. After the initial surge, the water felt wonderfully soothing against my scales. Its warm embrace was like a siren enticing me deeper until all except my head and neck were submerged.\n\nUnable to resist, I gently lowered my head, dipping it beneath the surface. The sharp sting from my wound returned, but before I could shoot back to the surface the water's warmth plucked the pain away. I came up only when my lungs demanded air, shaking off the steaming water.\n\nMeanwhile, Boltock climbed out and clambered down the terraces towards the larger pool lying at the base. Pyro was next to jump out, shaking water from his scales, ruffling his wings and sending a thousand droplets back into the water before carefully following Boltock.\n\nI watched the two of them enter the lower pool, Boltock jumping like a green comet. Risha materialized from the steam in front of me, the top of her head, slender back and wings visible above the surface. Lifting a forepaw, I watched my steaming white scales, the tips of my claws dripping wet and now free from bloodstains.\n\n\"Feels so good, doesn't it?\" Risha practically purred as she drifted around me.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, setting my forepaw back below the water.\n\n\"It's a hot spring, we found it about a year ago and we've been coming here ever since. The best part is no one else knows about it.\"\n\n\"A good job too,\" Ember added, \"otherwise we'd have dragons like Thunder taking it over.\"\n\nI'd no idea what a hot spring was, though it certainly felt good to me \u2013 the water's warmth relaxed all my tension and even my troubled mind couldn't completely resist its embrace.\n\nThe sound of Boltock splashing into another pool distracted us again. I glanced to see his head break the surface as he began swimming around. Pyro stood on the edge peering down at him, his red scales glistening wet and smouldering with steam. Ember was next to climb out, shaking off the water just as Pyro had done. She slinked down the pathway, brushed past the larger dragon and jumped into Boltock's pool. The green dragon's eyes lit up with delight as he glided through the water towards her, only to back away when Pyro slipped in.\n\n\"Should we join them?\" Risha proposed, drawing my attention as she hopped out, magically flicked the water from her scales, and strolled down towards the lower pool.\n\nOnly moments ago I was reluctant to get in and now I was reluctant to leave, just like the fires back in the village.\n\nKnowing the warmth of another pool awaited, I dragged myself to the side, and following the pathway the others had taken, I hurried down. It was hard not to slip on the wet rock and without a moment's hesitation, I slid back into the water.\n\nThe other's laughed and cheered, and for a moment I felt more at home than I ever had in the village. For the first time in ages I was really enjoying myself.\n\nThe five of us remained in the water for what felt like hours. While we chatted, I got some answers, in particular about Dardien's Elemental Orders. I established that there were four of them, one for each element, and that Pyro was a member of the Fire Order, specifically chosen by the Academy of Flame. The Sovereign was the leader of the city, although the current ruler, a dragon named Aries, had only recently come to power and apparently opinions were quite mixed.\n\nThe rest of their talk was about how different I was and why I'd been summoned by the Elders. Apparently, only a select few had ever been in the Elder chamber before. There was also the talk of Thunder, the consensus among all order students was that he was a total 'sour-scale'.\n\nBeing with them gave me a feeling I'd never had before. I certainly appreciated my life back home with Tarwin, she was my family and I'd accepted the world into which I was born. What concerned me now was whether I'd been born into the right one?\n\n\"I think it's time to go.\"\n\nPyro's sudden announcement interrupted my meditation, ending what must have been hours of lazing around. All eyes turned to see the larger dragon shaking steaming water from his scales as he clambered out. Boltock, Ember and Risha quickly did the same, and reluctant to move, I eventually followed.\n\nWe made our way back to the entrance; cool night air slowly creeping in to replace the cave's steamy warmth. Meanwhile, it felt like the warm waters had weakened a barrier in my mind and the return to the colder reality brought it straight back to life.\n\nThe doubting part of my mind unleashed itself, growing stronger and feeding on the guilt I'd bottled away. I tried to convince myself that I had a good reason to stay, but that excuse was long past its usefulness.\n\nAll the positive thoughts from my time in the pools were demolished as guilt released a volley of mental attacks.\n\nThey might be your own kind but they aren't the ones who raised you \u2013 they're not your family.\n\nI'm still different, I'm different from them.\n\nThe thought immediately reduced me to the doubting dragon I was when I arrived. You can't stay here, not forever because you're still a freak!\n\nDarkness had fallen by the time we reached the cave mouth, but I was unfazed and leapt straight past the others, gliding out on the cool night air as they followed with little regard for the change in my attitude. The cool atmosphere felt strange; spending so long in the cave made it feel almost alien, and it took me a moment to acclimatise.\n\nPart of me wanted to blame them, but I retained some control over my anger. They might have invited me there, but I had chosen to follow and they weren't keeping me against my will; they only wanted to help. After allowing the others to pass, I lagged behind.\n\nWe flew along the same path we'd taken on the way down, this time the inky blackness of the calm water felt different. The sun's intensity had dropped, leaving just enough light to throw back a ghost of my former reflection.\n\nInevitably the lights of the city began to reflect in the water's blackness, and their intensity grew stronger as we got closer. We started to ascend along a natural updraft, its steady flow taking us close to the cliff. It felt painfully slow compared to the descent, until eventually we merged with one of the city's artificial airways.\n\nFlying at night showed off more of the city's beauty, although no part of my mind was willing to appreciate it, conscious it would become a temptation for more delay. Moments later we were cruising along the busy airways, with hundreds, if not thousands, of dragons flowing with us, joining and leaving to land or connect with other routes.\n\n\"We'll see you tomorrow!\" Pyro shouted, banking away.\n\n\"Yep, see you at training!\" Ember added, following the red dragon.\n\nRisha gave them a farewell too, while her brother and I swooped towards their home. Part of me still expected an enthusiastic response from Boltock, but it seemed his over-the-top excitement had been exhausted and now all he could muster was a mumbled goodbye.\n\n\"That was fun,\" Risha said as we landed outside their nest, looking back at me as we entered through the doorway.\n\n\"I'm so hungry I could eat a griffin,\" Boltock groaned, looking at his sister. \"You gonna get some food?\"\n\nShe gave him a disapproving look, but he rolled onto his back, pressed both forepaws to his stomach and forced his green eyes wide as he begged.\n\n\"Please.\"\n\n\"I'll get something,\" his sister sighed, rolling her eyes.\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" I interrupted.\n\nRisha paused.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" she replied, a slightly worried look in her eyes.\n\n\"Positive, just not really feeling it. Thanks for showing me that place, it was great,\" I improvised with a forced smile.\n\n\"Well, like we said, you earned it for what you did today.\" Boltock nodded his agreement.\n\n\"Thanks, but I think I'll be getting to sleep now,\" I added, making a move towards my nest.\n\nIf it would allow me, sleep was the only escape I had from the tyranny of my troubled mind. I flew into the upper chamber, moving over to the window, peering out over the peaceful city. Its calming atmosphere almost identical to the previous night. My attention was drawn to another platform across the way, where two other dragons were playing.\n\nThey were much smaller than me and, I assumed, much younger. One was red and the other light blue. The young pair play-fought with each other, rolling and jumping around whilst making pretend sounds, much like I'd seen children doing back home.\n\nWatching them made me realise that as much as I believed this place was wonderful, and although I looked like a dragon, I was still very different.\n\nI'm still just a stranger in my own scales.\n\nThe doubting part of my mind opened with all its destructive force.\n\nWhy would whoever I belonged to just leave me in the forest, unable to fend for myself? If Tarwin hadn't come along and found me, I... I'd have been dead before I even hatched. My race didn't come to protect me, they left me. I owe Tarwin my life and what am I doing to help her?\n\nThe two young dragons stopped playing, their heads shooting up in response to what I assumed was a call from their mother. They swiftly hurried inside and out of sight, though my eyes continued to stare blindly at the spot they'd occupied. Completely lost in thought, it was only when I heard sounds coming from below that I snapped back to reality. Risha and Boltock were talking while eating dinner, but ignoring their conversation I backed away from the window.\n\nThey had quickly become my friends and I certainly didn't blame them, but I couldn't let them delay me any longer, not while Tarwin was out there. Even after all I'd been told I refused to accept what the Elders had said. She'd saved me all those winters ago and now it was my job to do the same. I lowered myself onto the bedding, lay my head on the soft material and closed my eyes as a warm tear slowly ran across my wounded cheek."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "I found myself creeping through an inky gloom lingering between towering trees. The trunks like dead pillars suspending a dark, suffocating canopy. The confining blackness was rich with fear as if dread oozed from every surface. Despite my trepidation I kept pushing forward through an eerie mist, until a gap appeared ahead and I found myself stepping out into a clearing, a large, open area surrounded by trees. Tall grass covered the ground and a fallen log lay beside a pool.\n\nImpossible, I can't be back here!\n\nI pressed a forepaw deep into what looked like cold, damp soil; though it appeared real it felt like reality had been sucked from it, leaving only an empty husk.\n\nI was in the clearing from which Tarwin and I hunted; however, the freedom I associated with it was trapped under the blanket of fog. As its intoxicating embrace pulled me from reality, a blast of wind swept through the clearing, splitting the mist apart and revealing the bright light of a full moon. Its illuminated shape loomed over the forest like a silent guardian in the starless sky and despite its glow, the darkness persisted like an incurable plague.\n\nSuddenly a loud thud sent a shock through the ground, echoing painfully in my ears. I turned, my head still resonating with the noise, when the horror I saw almost forced me to my knees. It stood perfectly still, glaring at me with its piercing, yellow eyes. The wyvern's repulsive smell was unmistakable, so strong that I had to force myself not to gag.\n\nThe beast clambered forward on its clumsy wings, holding something in its jaw. I stood my ground, meeting its sinister glare with my own. I wanted to lash out, pin it down like I had Thunder and demand to know what it had done with Tarwin. Before I had the chance, the beast dropped something before me with a wet thud. All the while it peered down its toothed maw at me, dripping a filthy concoction of blood and saliva.\n\nUnable to hold my gaze, I lowered my eyes, and time seemed to stop. Lying on the ground in front of me was a dismembered, mauled corpse doused in blood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "\"No, please, no!\" I screamed, shaking back to reality and shooting up from the blankets with a gasp.\n\nMy heart raced as the gruesome image lingered in my mind a moment longer, as if to torture me.\n\nNo, it's not real! I told myself in a futile attempt to calm down. It can't be real!\n\nMy eyes darted frantically around the room desperately seeking a distraction, finding nothing other than smooth stone walls.\n\nIt's just a dream, it isn't real. I repeatedly told myself, only to question. How can I say that, how can I be sure?\n\nShaking more than a sapling in a storm, I stood up and looked out through the opening. It was the dead of night, the kind of dark hour where the shadows really did rule everything. There were no signs of life beyond the window \u2013 the only sounds came from the constant gushing of distant water and the only light from the moss or brazier flames.\n\nI knew I should have listened to my instincts. Staying here isn't the smart move.\n\nNow I knew what I had to do. I swiftly glided down into the main chamber, careful to be as quiet as possible.\n\nAm I just going to leave without even saying goodbye? What if the Elders really do call for me again? What's Risha going to do if I'm not here?\n\nI banished the thoughts. They're not my family, Tarwin is.\n\nI couldn't rely on the Elders, especially after they'd told me to leave her. I had to see this through, I had to find her.\n\nI quickly moved to the opening, brushing past the curtain as it waved gently in the breeze. Moving to the edge of the balcony, I gazed out over the peaceful city.\n\nI really wish this could be my home.\n\nI glanced back through the curtain. The chamber lay still, bathed in the majestic blue light. The warmth of the fire had faded and the last few embers fizzled out.\n\nI have to go, stop dragging it out and leave already!\n\nI was caught teetering on the edge of what now felt like an abyss into the unknown. Ignoring what was behind me, I leapt from the stone perch and silently flew into the night.\n\nI soon found an air current leading toward the cliff's edge and the city swiftly fell away behind me. Its warm hospitality drained, replaced by the cold grip of the true night sky. The air path started to rise as the ceiling above began to run out, turning sharply, taking me up against the cliff face's outer-most edge. The upper rock face was at least three times the size of that below the city and no makeshift air currents controlled my flight up here.\n\nFor the first time in days the welcoming sight of a billion stars greeted me. From this angle the vertical rock could almost be mistaken for the ground, crossed by several waterfalls running like vertical rivers.\n\nIt felt like I'd been flying for ages before the cliff finally broke and turned sharply to form the surface. My flight was almost vertical and when I broke into the open air it felt like I could fly up forever into the starlight.\n\nEyes on the prize, Blaze. No time to get lost in fantasy.\n\nHaving finally breached the cliff top, I was swift to look around and get a feel for the environment that surrounded Dardien.\n\nJagged rocks covered the edge, rising slightly as if pushing back to avoid slipping into the depths. Moonlight bathed the surrounding area as the lunar body hung low like a king among the stars. The silhouettes of distant mountains framed the almost perfectly flat plains, while rolling hills outlined the horizon on the opposite side, rising smoothly like waves upon an ocean.\n\nAlthough dark, the moonlight generously revealed an endless sea of swaying grass covering the shallow hills and valleys. Darker patches broke through the broad expanse, where trees huddled together as if for warmth. The only other features to disrupt the grassy domain were the rivers, snaking their way back from the edge of the giant cliff and gradually disappearing into the horizon.\n\nThe dragon city lay within what was now clearly a huge rupture in the ground, a long split running like a great wound through the world, providing a perfect defence against anything wishing to attack. In fact, the only evidence that the city even existed was the faintest light creeping out from the base of the cliff.\n\nAt the far side of the canyon lay the skeletal remains of a ruined city, ribbons of moonlit rivers flowing through the remnants of reservoirs and canals. The shattered husks of stone towers and fallen bridges stretched back for miles, blossoming out from domed temples and mighty cathedrals.\n\nThe abandoned buildings closest to me stopped on the cliff's edge, with a great many platforms jutting out like the one at the Elder Temple. I'd never seen structures quite like them; they could almost have been human, but they were built from stone, not wood, and on a far larger scale than anything I'd witnessed.\n\nAs the gentle air currents swept me round, I noticed something even more unusual. At the edge of the opposite cliff lay a smaller, isolated structure. Differing from its opposite peers, it appeared to be older and more dilapidated. I could see a thin dirt road leading out over the plains and disappearing into the distance. A small stone wall topped with a rusty iron mesh surrounded it, a broken gate allowing entry.\n\nIt clearly wasn't built by dragons, and while it was similar, I still struggled to convince myself it looked like any human building. I landed in what seemed to be some sort of ancient graveyard at the rear of the ruin.\n\nSeveral worn, stone tablets stood around me, engraved with faded words and gnawing lichen. The building's dilapidated structure stood defiant of the elements and time. Its worn grey surface was cracked, broken and covered by green moss. At its base, an overgrown thicket of bushes and saplings fought for space, stems of ivy mocking their struggle as they crawled unchallenged up the ruined wall. I moved to the opposite side, to where the walls were crumbling and the roof had collapsed.\n\nA tower dominated the cliff-side end, looming over the breach in the roof. A series of rotting bannisters crossed the jagged cavity like the ribs of an open corpse, black, broken and dripping wet. The tower itself was in no better condition, many of the blocks that once supported its skyward reach lay crumbling below it.\n\nI continued along the side of the building, peering through cracks in the shattered glass to see the mouldy interior. Eventually I reached the front where a pair of rotting doors fought to hold out the elements within a crumbling archway. Opposite, the road led off into the distance, a route to another new world of mystery.\n\nWhat am I doing? I asked myself.\n\nThis wasn't a dream from which I could just wake and forget. This was different \u2013 I couldn't just forget, Tarwin needed me. Amongst all the horrific visions I'd had, there was something else, dreams that somehow felt more important: the mysterious visions I had of that crystal. The vision of my eyes glowing white hot.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\nI almost jumped out of my scales as a familiar voice broke the silence.\n\nRisha fixed me with a stern glare, slowly walking towards me as I spun to face her.\n\nHow'd she manage to sneak up on me? No one's ever been able to do that!\n\nShe was unbelievably quiet, even with the squelching mud beneath her paws. Her eyes were just as stern as Pyro's back in training, and I lowered my gaze, shamefully avoiding them.\n\n\"I have to find her, she'd do the same for me,\" I admitted, scuffing a forepaw at the mud.\n\n\"That human? Blaze, is... Is that really a good idea, you have no idea where she is and the Elders need to talk to you?\" she responded bluntly.\n\nDetecting more sympathy than anger in her voice, I raised my head, trying very hard to hold back my frustration.\n\n\"That 'human', as you call her, has done more for me than anyone here ever has,\" I stated, my voice a little firmer than I'd have liked.\n\nShe took a step back, her wings fidgeting as she glanced towards the edge of the cliff beyond the ruins. Then she finally sighed and declared sternly.\n\n\"Well, if you're going then I'm coming with you.\"\n\nMy first step forward froze mid-swing. At first, I didn't believe her, but as her words sunk in, I realised there was no deception in them. A pang of joy washed over me, but I quickly pushed the feeling aside.\n\n\"You can't, what about Boltock?\"\n\n\"He'll be fine until I come back. He's old enough to look after himself now,\" she replied, before adding with a smirk. \"Less can be said for you. There's worse things than trees to bump into out there.\"\n\nShe had me stumped. I knew nothing of the world. She, on the other paw, was roughly my age, owned a nest and was free to act as an adult.\n\nReally, you're going to try and turn her down? You'll be eaten alive out there without help! That was the first reasonable thing my guilty mind had offered all day.\n\nMeanwhile, Risha strode past me, a look on her face that almost challenged me to come up with a way to talk her out of her decision.\n\n\"If it's so dangerous out there, how do you know you'll come back?\" I finally asked.\n\nUnbelievably, I'd gone from not trusting, to standing up for her, and now wanting to keep her safe like I would Tarwin.\n\n\"I guess we'll cross that bridge if we get to it,\" she replied primly.\n\n\"I'll hold you to that,\" I retorted.\n\nI can fight monsters and cut through a dragon's scales, but I can't discourage her from joining me? I was lost for words. She really is like the dragoness version of Tarwin!\n\n\"Now that's settled we should be off,\" she prompted, spreading her wings. \"Because unless we want to explain where we're going to a Dardien patrol, I suggest we reach the edge of the plains by sunrise.\"\n\nFor a moment she seemed more determined than I was.\n\n\"Not to mention, where exactly is it you were planning on heading?\" she asked, glancing left, then right.\n\n\"North,\" I replied, as I walked up beside her, remembering what the Elders had told me in their story.\n\n\"Well, you better keep up,\" she retorted, launching herself into the air with a firm beat of her sapphire wings.\n\nI took one last glance at the derelict building. This is it; I'm leaving and I've no idea what's ahead. What if I don't come back?\n\nMy mind closed off the thought. I have to do this, for Tarwin.\n\nI turned away, giving myself no more time to reconsider or hesitate. I ran along the muddy pathway and with a mighty flap of my wings forced myself up into the air."
            },
            {
                "title": "Unknown Reality",
                "text": "[ Midnight Plain ]\n\nIt really did feel good to be out in the open again. The world sailed by beneath me like a grassy ocean, its dominance broken only by randomly scattered bastions of thick vegetation and the long rows of trees edging the winding rivers.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye I could see Risha, and while I tried to concentrate on flying, I was unable to stop my attention from wandering to her. I'd never flown like this with another dragon, it was amazing to watch her elegant wing beats powering her fluent and graceful movement through the sky.\n\nSeems all that easy flying back in the city hasn't dampened her skills either.\n\n\"They call them the Midnight Plains because of nights like this,\" she announced, noticing I was watching.\n\nMy eyes quickly darted away. By the spirits, I need to stop gawking!\n\nShe giggled, turning her head towards the glow of the moon. True, I'd never seen such a beautiful night; it was a fitting name. The moon was sublime, majestically slipping beneath the shallow curve of the horizon, while I looked in the opposite direction to see a dark, opaque skyline. The setting moon was reflected by a bright orange glow slowly creeping up into the sky to obscure the ancient light of the stars.\n\nNight continued to slowly wilt away, the day's new light piercing the black band at the edge of the world. Finally, the sun's appearance marked the arrival of the new dawn, its penetrating light transforming the landscape below into a green, sunlit sheet.\n\nThe plains looked completely different in the morning haze; the grass glistened with a soft, dewy sheen. The once dark patches of vegetation became clear and the rivers' reflections turned from silver to gold.\n\nI turned my attention back to flying, catching sight of Risha descending.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" I questioned, coming to a hover.\n\n\"Want to see something exciting?\" she replied.\n\nWith curiosity driving me on, I followed. We descended until we were gliding just above the seemingly endless sea of grass, rising and falling over the smooth hills. Her eyes scrutinised the green ocean, and it was only when she looked forward that I noticed we were rapidly approaching a cluster of trees.\n\nShe showed no sign of slowing, I trusted she knew what she was doing, when at the final moment, she pulled up sharply. I immediately mimicked her, barely missing the edge of the canopy. Upon clearing the trees she stopped and hovered in mid-air as I came up to join her.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I asked again.\n\nShe looked at me, her eyes beaming with excitement.\n\n\"Wait for it.\"\n\nShe returned her focus to the treetops, waiting patiently. I peered down, seeing nothing but the canopy rustling in the breeze.\n\nThen, in a sudden whoosh of air, she plummeted towards the vegetation. I watched her slicing through the air like a blue arrow speeding down with no sign of stopping. I lurched forward, suddenly feeling the urge to rush down and stop her before she collided with the trees, until she pulled up sharply, narrowly avoiding a collision.\n\nThe blast of turbulence from her wings disturbed the leaves and the sound of small twigs falling echoed through the canopy. I focused on the sounds, but there was still nothing to suggest this was as exhilarating as she was making it out to be.\n\nShe came to another hover beside the trees, and I swiftly glided down to join her.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" I questioned once again.\n\n\"Just watch,\" she replied, gesturing a forepaw towards the trees.\n\nThere was a loud rustling among the undergrowth seconds before a huge flock of animals erupted from the dense foliage.\n\nIt took me a moment to study them, and even longer to realise what they were. Birds, I immediately dubbed them 'earth birds', mainly because they didn't fly. They were much larger than any bird I'd seen in the village. Each one had a pair of short, stumpy wings tucked up against a plump, round body, and ran on two long, powerful scaly legs. A curved, black beak protruded from a small head, held up by a slender neck.\n\nTwo small eyes flanked the formidable looking weapon, darting around in search of the disturbance.\n\nTwenty or so emerged from the trees, the only distinction between them being the feathered crest at the back of their heads. It was an array of larger, longer feathers arranged in a white frill, much like the horns of a dragon. The flock continued their panicked stampede onto the plains, moving as one body.\n\nMeanwhile, Risha looked at me with a grin, and unable to hold back, I couldn't help but smile too. It seemed she wasn't finished and I quickly followed as she resumed her flight over the stampeding mass of fast-moving feathers.\n\nThe rabble beneath us moved like a river, kicking up a thick cloud of dust in their wake. We swooped as low as we could, soaring like two aerial hunters on the swirling air displaced by their movement; it was like riding on a pillow. The cluster of earth birds gradually began to fan out across the plains, until the dispersing blanket of air faded and we pulled up into another hover.\n\n\"That was amazing!\" I shouted over my excited exertions.\n\nRisha appeared quite pleased with the results as she called back through her panting.\n\n\"Told you!\"\n\nIt felt good to enjoy myself again. Although, I didn't know why, she'd managed to brighten the otherwise dark feelings dwelling in my mind.\n\nMaybe having her here really isn't the worst thing in the world?\n\nResuming our flight over the grassy sea, and noticing the satisfied grin on Risha's face, I took one last look at the birds settling into several groups.\n\nEarth birds, birds that can't fly. The thought made me laugh quietly to myself. I wonder what other surprises this unknown land has for me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The rest of the day was uneventful. The sun slowly sailed across the sky, passing over our heads before dropping down beside us. Occasionally, I glanced down to see different landscapes passing by. The seemingly endless plains eventually gave way to dense pinewood, and in between the pointed treetops the ground began to change. Large rocky outcrops rose up from the dense forest, appearing from the dark-green blanket like colossal stone trees.\n\nUnable to combat my wondering curiosity, I watched Risha flying gracefully beside me. I didn't understand why, but I actually felt something for her, something I hadn't recognised in all of the confusion and doubt that lingered in my mind; deep down I was truly glad that I didn't have to do this alone. No sooner did it feel like we were getting somewhere, than the evening came racing in, and just as the sun had claimed the day, the darkness now clawed back its lost territory.\n\nLarge rocky cliffs enclosed the pine trees on either side of us, creating a natural valley. Cracks and crevices littered the jagged stone and the atmosphere began to change as a murky grey covering of rain-filled clouds consumed the sky. We flew further, trying to get as far up the valley as we could before the weather and darkness would inevitably force us to stop. It wasn't long before I felt the first light taps of rain on my wings, increasing until they covered my body.\n\n\"We'll have to find some shelter before it really starts to pour,\" Risha proposed with a wary eye on the darkening sky.\n\nI nodded in agreement and we swooped down closer to the cliffs, scanning the jagged contours for suitable shelter. Meanwhile, the weak pitter-patter gave way to a heavy deluge, its growing anger expressed by the intense roar of rain hitting the forest canopy. Small cracks and crevasses were all I could see, until I spotted an opening in the base of a rocky outcrop.\n\n\"Down there!\" I hollered over the hammering rain, pointing out the small cave.\n\nRisha nodded, seemingly as keen to get out of the deluge.\n\nWe descended to the ledge protruding from the cave opening and I was instantly reminded of what a natural cave really looked like: dark and gloomy. A curtain of rainwater running from the rocks draped over the entrance, and I cautiously approached, peering into the secluded darkness. Risha moved beside me and was about to enter when I spread out a wing to block her path.\n\n\"Wait,\" I instructed in a muffled whisper.\n\nSurprised, she took a few steps back before fixing me with a confused glare. I didn't want to leave her out in the rain, but we were no longer in the safety of the city and in this weather I had to assume that any shelter might be occupied. For a moment I thought she might be better suited to checking for danger; after all, she could simply torch anything that might be lurking inside, however I wasn't willing to risk anyone's safety but my own.\n\nI crept in, eyes scanning the gloom, claws ready to slice anything that might be lurking. I couldn't see anything; I was just about to declare it clear when noises sounded from deep inside. I instantly poised myself to lunge, rear legs and tail coiled, forelimbs and teeth ready when a swarm of shadows rushed towards me. I had no time to react, snapping my mouth shut several times to defend against whatever it was, each bite missing its target over and over. I turned, ready to continue my fight, only to see a silhouetted colony of large bats flying out into the rainy night.\n\n\"Is it okay to enter now, hero?\" Risha cooed, upon entering the cave.\n\n\"A\u2013all clear,\" I announced, nervously.\n\n\"Good,\" she chirped, settling herself down on the floor and magically shaking off the rainwater.\n\nI looked out into the night, forming a list in my head of how to spend a night outdoors. I'd done it before with Tarwin, on hunts that lasted for days, she'd taught me how to spend nights 'under the stars', as she'd described it. To my disappointment the stars weren't out on many of those nights, and they certainly weren't visible tonight.\n\n\"We're going to need a fire,\" I declared, remembering the first thing on my slowly forming list.\n\n\"Well, you go get some wood and I'll light it,\" Risha proposed, while gathering a few stones into a ring.\n\nGreat, she wants me to go outside? I couldn't say no, especially as I now felt obliged to do some of the more unpleasant tasks, plus she was the only one who could light the fire.\n\nI walked over to the opening, peering out into the rain and what little daylight remained. Through the gloom I could just make out the stone platform and the dense trees beyond. Tucking my head beneath my wing, I set out searching. It seemed reality had other ideas, there were no trees or branches up on our ledge. I scoured the edge of the platform, just able to make out a small stone path leading down to the forest floor.\n\nThe darkness intensified as I crept further from the cave, and a small ember of fear began smouldering inside me. It wasn't the gloom that scared me, it was what it could be hiding. It took a while for me to finally pluck up the courage to climb down, scurrying along the rocky path while being careful not to slip. The trek was made all the worse by the increasingly heavy torrents of water cascading like miniature waterfalls.\n\nWith the rain blocking out the scent of danger and its roar disguising any sounds, I turned my eyes to the forest's darkness the moment my paws squelched in the damp earth. The fact that I saw nothing but tree trunks standing like a motionless army sent another chill down my spine.\n\nThe stench of wet bark and rotting wood filled the air, and the tight canopy hemmed me in like a dungeon. While the thundering deluge kept up its battle cry, it truly seemed that the sky was at war with the earth, its endless bombardment flicking droplets across my scales.\n\nStreams of defeated rivulets trickled harmlessly down through every available gap, cleverly infiltrating the forest's defences. I trudged through the thick carpet of pine needles, patches of damp moss and mud-filled ditches. A vast network of roots sprawled out from the base of every tree, the tangled patchwork creating hundreds of waterlogged pools in what seemed like another futile attempt to hold back the sky's assault.\n\nNo more distractions, I told myself firmly. Get some wood and get out of this squalor.\n\nIt was hard to focus, however. I had to force myself not to jump at every drop of water that hit me or every rodent I caught scurrying for cover. Avoiding the sprawl of roots and waterlogged pools, I began to make out the outline of a large shape.\n\nIn between the tangled mass was just what I'd been looking for. I thought for a moment about how I would get such a large timber back to the cave, it wasn't a pleasant idea. I hesitated before grabbing it in my mouth, and just as I'd assumed, it tasted awful.\n\nRemoving the log from its resting place, trying not to gag at the pungent taste, I turned back to the ledge. I moved quickly, almost not caring about what might be out there \u2013 I just wanted to spit the disgusting thing out. Climbing back to the cave with some haste, being careful not to slip, I clambered over the wet rocks.\n\nThe moment I reached the top I rushed through the opening, shaking off most of the rainwater. Peering around the log I could see that Risha had finished her neat circle, and placing it in the centre, I finally spat out the last of the rotten splinters coating my tongue.\n\n\"I guess it's my turn,\" she declared, rearing up and lunging forward to exhale a torrent of bright-blue flames.\n\nThe magical fire ignited the rotten wood, spectacularly flooding the cave in a majestic sapphire light. It sent shadows dancing across the walls before settling into a calm, waving rhythm. She looked at me staring, unable to hide my amazement. That bewilderment didn't stop me from desperately seeking the flame's warmth, however.\n\nI glanced at her appreciatively, but she appeared to be in deep thought.\n\n\"Hmm, you're not going to warm up all wet like that.\"\n\nAt first, I didn't understand what she meant, until the mark on her forehead flashed. As she concentrated, I glanced about, searching for the source of power she was conjuring, until I felt droplets of water gently lift from my scales. It was like rain in reverse, the liquid levitated and merged into a spinning ball, which she duly catapulted out into the night.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I said, looking over my dry wings and legs like an amazed child.\n\n\"Think nothing of it,\" she responded, easing her focus and settling down beside the dancing blue flames.\n\nI lay across from her, positioning my head to face the cave entrance, fixing my eyes on the stormy gloom.\n\n\"So, are you just going to go to sleep?\" she queried, subtly tapping one folded forepaw on the other.\n\nI lifted my head and she fixed me with a positive expression.\n\n\"What else is there to do?\" I questioned, my eyes desperately fighting to stay on her, and not wander back to the cave mouth.\n\n\"We could talk,\" she proposed, momentarily glancing away.\n\n\"About what?\" I asked, with my forepaws fidgeting.\n\n\"Well, I still don't know that much about you. You never did finish telling me how you came to be raised by a human.\"\n\nI cocked my head curiously. \"Well, if it's that important...\"\n\nShe shifted closer and I saw no harm in telling her more, especially because she'd proven that she could keep her promises.\n\n\"It was about thirteen winters ago when Tarwin found me,\" I began, still reluctant to call her human, even though I knew Risha didn't care.\n\n\"She always told me she found me in the woods as an egg inside a frozen rock that fell from the sky in a ball of fire.\"\n\nAssuming that she knew where dragons came from far better than I did, I didn't offer any further explanation.\n\n\"Anyway, she took my egg in and waited for me to hatch, I suppose the village where we lived, they'd never seen a dragon before.\"\n\nI thought for a moment at how ridiculous it all sounded, but her interest had not waivered and her eyes glowed with enthusiasm.\n\n\"At first, they thought I might be dangerous, I'm pretty sure some of them wanted to get rid of me. Tarwin wouldn't let them, though. She's the one that showed them I wasn't going to hurt anyone. I guess I was her... Pet.\"\n\nI hesitated, reluctantly mumbling the final word. I didn't know for sure, but to say openly I was a pet didn't feel like the best thing to share. Risha didn't seem to mind though.\n\n\"They gradually began to accept me, even her father, the chief.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" she interrupted, \"what's a 'chief'?\"\n\n\"It's the leader of the village,\" I replied.\n\nShe retained a confused look, and I thought for a moment, trying to think of anything that might make sense to her.\n\n\"Like the human version of the Elders?\" she pressed.\n\n\"No, more like the Sovereign,\" I explained. \"The village had elders too though.\"\n\nShe nodded steadily in acknowledgement.\n\n\"Anyway, even the chief,\" I repeated. \"After that Tarwin and I were inseparable until... well until...\" I stuttered, coming to a stop.\n\nThere were many memorable things in those years I could tell her about, but my mind became fixed on one.\n\n\"Until she was taken by the wyverns?\" she asked softly.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I muttered, happiness fleeing from my voice.\n\nAt that, I really wanted to change the subject, and I looked across the fire to her.\n\n\"Well, enough about me, you haven't told me anything about you.\" I hoped she wouldn't reject my proposal or think it intrusive.\n\n\"Actually, my story isn't much different,\" she responded before I could fret too much. \"Well, apart from the falling from the sky part,\" she added with a laugh.\n\nWhat does she mean? Isn't that where all dragons come from?\n\nOf course not! I scolded myself. That's ridiculous!\n\nRisha shuffled stealing my attention away from my thoughts when she muttered. \"By the skies, where do I begin?\"\n\nI considered telling her she didn't have to go on, but before I could, she continued.\n\n\"I was part of a clutch of three eggs. I'm sure you can probably guess, one was Boltock, the other I was told never hatched. My mother was an earth dragon called Amethyst and my father a water dragon called Tsunami. I hatched in Blizar, the most northerly of the draconic cities beyond Dardien, on the fringes of the frozen wastes.\"\n\nSo, she'll have been through the bitter winters like me? I wondered. Probably worse winters that far north.\n\n\"My brother and I were raised there; it was an amazing city. We would spend hours flying across the frozen sea and my father would take us to the ice-fire peaks of Valcador. I was never happier,\" she reminisced, her wings rustling like she was living out a dream.\n\n\"It was very different from Dardien. The buildings were made of a magical ice called blizarium. Lighter than metal, but stronger than dragon scale \u2013 the buildings needed it, to stand up to the harsh conditions.\" She chuckled, looking at one of her forepaws. \"Only the most adept water elementals could mould it, I never really got the chance to learn.\"\n\nShe paused again, so lost in her nostalgia she seemed to fall into a hypnotic state.\n\n\"Our lives... we were happy there, until one night in late winter.\"\n\nShe glanced down at the cave floor and I could sense that whatever came next wasn't a good memory. I raised my head, ready to tell her she didn't need to continue, but she swallowed, returning her eyes to the blue flame like it was a lifeline.\n\n\"It was late when the guards saw them,\" she continued. \"The lights approached from the sea, they looked... they looked beautiful, the calm waters reflecting them like stars. The sense of beauty was dismissed when we realised they were attached to enormous wooden beasts, piercing the water like knives. They hit the beach and unloaded mobs of two-legged monsters. The city was overrun within minutes. They were unlike anything I'd seen \u2013 not the Orkin we knew to fear, nor wild beasts.\"\n\nTwo-legged monsters? Surely, she can't be talking about what I think she's talking about?\n\n\"Boltock and I became separated from our parents, I remember being trapped in an ice nest, while the monsters were outside. One of them burst through the doorway with an axe and I thought that was it. I closed my eyes and curled up around him preparing for the worst.\"\n\nI felt my head drop, it was almost as if boulders had been tethered to the tip of my muzzle. Her description made me feel like I had in the forest with Tarwin, wanting nothing more than to keep the one I cared about safe.\n\n\"It was our father who took our attacker by surprise, I can still see it... trapped in his jaws. The last time I saw him\u2026\"\n\nHer words escaped as though she wanted to rid herself of what she so vividly remembered, when her eyes started to glisten.\n\n\"The last thing I remember, was being swept up into the arms of our mother. That was the last we saw of Blizar; I still see the sky glowing red with flames, feel the choking pressure of the smoke. Dragons were mercilessly shot out of the sky by hails of arrow fire. But mother escaped and flew so far that there was no ice.\"\n\nThe blue dragoness gave a sniff, shifting her left wing and glancing back, as if checking it was okay.\n\n\"I remember noticing there was something wrong. A large wound beneath mother's wing. Despite her injury she didn't stop until her weakness forced her to. With the last of her strength she set us down in the ruins on top of the cliff. I remember the moment she died, it was sunrise and the light set the ruins ablaze with oranges like dragonfire.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath, ruffling her wings and staring into her fire.\n\n\"I lay with her for hours, wishing she'd just get up. Boltock looked to me for support, he has ever since. It was a Dardien patrol that found us, a soldier named Reaver took us in, and cared for us until her own illness took her as well. At ten seasons, we inherited her nest and we've lived there ever since.\"\n\nTears ran from her eyes and she lowered her head to the floor.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I apologised, not daring to meet her eyes.\n\nI didn't believe my opinion meant anything to her, and neither of us seemed willing to talk about the obvious subject.\n\n\"No, it wasn't your fault,\" she whimpered, wiping a tear from her eye. \"They were wild men, from islands far to the north, not like the people you told me about.\"\n\nThere are people like that out there? That's despicable! Even so, I had to wonder about the few times I'd seen other tribes and villages cause trouble back home.\n\n\"Well, if it's worth anything. I think it's a good time to get some sleep,\" I proposed softly.\n\nShe nodded and slowly rested her head under a wing. I did the same, positioning my gaze towards the cave entrance.\n\nI'm not going to sleep. Not that I can after what she's told me. I now understood why she took her time to tell me. I knew why she'd been so shocked about my loyalty to Tarwin.\n\nHow can I have been so selfish? She put aside her own past to make sure I was comfortable. How could I have known? I was so positive about humans.\n\nThey'd been good to me, I could hardly believe they'd taken her parents away and ruined her life, just like mine was ruined by the wyverns.\n\nI moved my head across the floor. Risha lay sleeping, her tightly closed eyes still dripping with tears. It was settled, for once my whole mind agreed on something. I was glad she'd insisted on coming along, glad that I now knew more about her past. Now I could make sure nothing like that ever happened again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "I was shaken from a light sleep sometime later, and after silently cursing myself for letting my guard down, I returned one wary eye to the cave mouth. The elemental battleground continued beyond the cave. Rain bombarded the earth, furiously bouncing from the rocks and trickling down from small cracks in the stone roof. My eyes still flickered until I forced them open, the fight against sleep becoming harder. I knew it would get the better of me eventually, but if I moved enough, I could delay the inevitable.\n\nMy new position allowed me to look over at Risha. A calm silence surrounded her. Her tears had faded, nonetheless the guilt I felt from hearing her story was still a weight on my shoulders.\n\nCan't think of that now, there's nothing I can do. Reason attempted to remind me.\n\nStanding up I shook the sleep from my muscles and moved towards the cave mouth. The warmth of the fire diminished and I stopped by the opening, watching the rain sweep in on the wind. Thousands of tiny droplets struck like cold knives against my scales, before gently dripping off.\n\nI'm not gonna get any reassurance from the stars tonight, I told myself, glancing at the endless void above.\n\nEither way, I sat for a while, contemplating exactly what it was I was doing, much as I'd done many times before. Time went by excruciatingly slowly, even so I maintained my guard, occasionally sticking my muzzle up high to sniff the air. All I got was the smell of damp landscape, wet bark, rotting wood and fresh pine. Eventually the rain slowed, allowing me to make out more familiar scents, most of which I knew from hunting back home.\n\nHome. The thought triggered a deep yearning.\n\nIt's so far away. I've no real idea of where it is or if I'm ever going to see it again.\n\nThe deep contemplation drove me to stare deeper into the darkness. I revelled in my loose reflection, gladly slipping into the happier memories.\n\nJust think how Tarwin would be if she were here now? She'd love being free like this.\n\nThe idea filled me with a fuzzy warmth I'd not felt in days, just enough to allow me to consider the idea of going back to sleep. Of course, that was when an unfamiliar smell caught my attention and a rush of adrenaline instantly brought me to full alert.\n\nI rushed out onto the ledge, taking up a position a few paces away from the edge. I'd no doubt it was a new smell \u2013 and it was moving closer. I raised my snout to the air; but couldn't quite make out where or what it was. Even so, my eyes fixed on the pathway I'd used to get the firewood, assuming that anything wishing to scale the cliff would use it too. I crept forward, prowling through the drizzle like a mountain lion.\n\nMy hind leg muscles tensed, body held low, wings tucked firmly at my side, preparing to lunge if whatever was coming got too close.\n\nThe wet branches closest to the ledge shook, showering me with cold droplets. I bared my teeth and lowered myself further, continually judging the distance to the pathway and double-checking that my wings were firmly folded.\n\nI took in another whiff; however, something had changed \u2013 there wasn't a single smell any longer, now there were two. The prospect of more monsters sent a shiver down my already chilled spine. I forced back my urge to flee, pressing myself hard against the rain-soaked rock.\n\nThere was a flash of movement in the darkness around the top of the ledge. I took in and held my breath, my eyes narrowing. My muscles instinctively started to uncoil when a dark shape rose up from the ledge. I was just about to launch forward when, at the last second, I saw a familiar face staring back at me.\n\n\"Boltock!\"\n\nThe thought was such a surprise it materialised into a word as I slammed to a halt.\n\n\"W\u2013well who else were you exp\u2013ttt\u2013ing?\" he trembled; his body wracked by intense shivering. \"T\u2013the creators damn princess?\"\n\nTurning back to the ledge he reached down to the pathway. Recovering from my surprise, I peered over, unable to make out what he was doing. It quickly became apparent when a recognisable dragoness emerged from the darkness, her bright orange scales not as well hidden as Boltock's.\n\n\"Ember!\"\n\nI reached down to help the shivering pair up. Upon seeing the fire-lit cave the frozen couple quickly dashed inside and I followed, shaking off the rainwater as I entered.\n\nBoth took refuge by the flames while Ember summoned them back to life with a flick of her tail. I had to look at the pair several times to make sure they were real and I hadn't just fallen asleep again, one rapid eye-blink and a shake of my head confirmed the reality. In my rushed decision to leave, I'd never expected anyone to follow; let alone almost everyone I'd met.\n\nReally, first Risha, now this?\n\n\"What are you two doing here?\" was all I could think to ask.\n\n\"I could ask you the same question,\" Boltock replied, shaking the last drops of rainwater from his wings.\n\nI diverted my eyes. What a stupid question. I know very well why they're here.\n\nAll the commotion was enough to wake Risha. Her weary eyes suddenly widening when they fell upon her brother.\n\n\"Surprise!\" he declared, not quite so enthusiastically as he'd done back in the city.\n\n\"What in the great fire's name are you doing here?\" she demanded, in a particularly serious tone.\n\nBoltock snorted a puff of smoke, leaving Ember and I to watch the two siblings argue. Everything I thought I knew about them was shattered, they looked no different from Tarwin and her father. Risha's cold reasoning demolished her brother's angry sarcasm until he bawled.\n\n\"What, do you think you can just take off without me?\"\n\nHis normally humorous inclination had vanished; his voice was firm, more so than I'd ever heard before. From my first impression of him, I'd thought he was a rather passive and sarcastically funny character, but this was quite the opposite.\n\n\"You said that we... you said you'd never leave,\" he declared, stomping a forepaw.\n\nRisha lowered her head, her anger diminished. I knew exactly what he was referring to, and it made that guilt all the heavier. I'd caused this, I'd allowed her to talk me into letting her come, this was my fault.\n\n\"Remember? You know what I'm talking about,\" Boltock pressed, jabbing a foreclaw at his sister.\n\nShe took a deep breath, seemingly holding back tears as she put on a brave face.\n\n\"Yes, yes, you're right.\"\n\nWith that, Boltock sighed, his firm expression deflating along with his wings. He looked almost puppy-like when he admitted.\n\n\"Okay, I'm sorry. I was just worried about you.\"\n\n\"And I'm sorry for leaving, I know I promised,\" she replied, raising her head and smiling at him.\n\n\"Well, I'm glad that's sorted out,\" Ember interjected swiftly. \"More importantly what are you two really doing out here? You know there's regulations about leaving Dardien?\" she questioned, looking to Risha in particular.\n\nI stood up quickly. I'm not going to let her take all the blame and questions when this is entirely my fault.\n\n\"We're going to find Blaze's friend,\" Risha replied, before I could say anything.\n\n\"What? The one we talked about back in the steam cave?\" Ember replied, Boltock taking a little longer to recall the information.\n\n\"Yes!\" I interrupted, offering Risha no opportunity to spare me again.\n\nThe pair glanced at each other. Ember rolling her eyes at Boltock, who just sat there still clueless. Either way, it was obvious that neither of them had any real idea about Tarwin, human or otherwise.\n\n\"Then you can count us in as well,\" the fiery dragoness declared, and it was no shock that Boltock had no objections.\n\nUpon their arrival my expectation was for them to persuade Risha to return with them, not offer to join us! On the flip side, I found a new feeling of security in the fact that four of us would be better than two. I'd seen both fight during their training, so there was no doubt they were skilled, probably more so than me. Not to mention, they'd made it this far through the storm and still managed to find us.\n\nLooking back at the three of them, I saw dragons who I'd known for no more than a few days, all keen to come with me and help find my friend, someone they didn't even know. It was a strange sensation and at that moment I realised they would do this for me out of nothing more than friendship. It meant an awful lot, because I knew that deep down, I really didn't want to go alone.\n\n\"Hey, where's Pyro?\" Risha asked, eyeing Boltock suspiciously.\n\nWhile I had my doubts, I'd probably have felt more secure having him here too \u2013 he was a soldier after all.\n\n\"Well this one was so worried about you that when he came to me, he had us rush off before I could get him,\" Ember answered, nodding at Boltock.\n\nFunny, almost feels like that was a part of his plan?\n\n\"How did you find us?\" I asked, the thought eating away at my mind. If they can find us, then what else can?\n\n\"I can find my own sister's scent no matter where she is \u2013 I think you forgot that, Sis,\" Boltock replied, looking at her with a grin on his face.\n\nRisha rolled her eyes. While I admired his commitment. It's just like how I know Tarwin's.\n\nEmber yawned, stretching her wings and legs while arching her back like a housecat, her tail flicking from side to side.\n\n\"You know after all of that excitement I think I'll be getting some sleep. That is, if you don't plan on running off again?\" she announced, eyeing Risha and I suspiciously.\n\nBoltock nodded, copying her while getting as close to her as he could without touching.\n\nI glanced over at Risha. She still managed a smile, telling me I should sleep too. I returned the expression, watching her head lower to the ground as she settled back into her slumber. I took one last look at the opening, where my sleepy eyes met the same wet, cold, rainy sight. I was so relieved that Boltock and Ember, not something else, had come over the ledge.\n\nIf something decided to come after us now, we at least had more power to repel it. With that increased sense of security, I moved away from the dripping entrance, settled next to the fire and rested my head on the stone.\n\nEven so, I lay with my head in a position that allowed me to keep one eye on the entrance. I certainly didn't think that the appearance of two more adolescent dragons would completely put off the monsters I feared were lurking out there."
            },
            {
                "title": "Forest of Gloom",
                "text": "The world slowly came into focus when my weary eyes were urged to open by light beaming in through the entrance. The rain had ceased, the soaked evidence of its battle covering the forest. To my right I could see there was nothing left of last night's fire apart from a faint burnt smell and a pile of blackened charcoal. The others were still sleeping around its remnants, and feeling there was no point in waking them, especially since I had no idea how early it was, I left them to their dreams.\n\nMy body ached in protest when I moved to the mouth of the cave, the brisk morning air relieving the heat from my breath with small puffs of vapour. The forest's silence was broken by faint birdsong and the slight rustling of branches on the breeze. The smell of wet pines and damp wood mixed with vegetation, permeating the atmosphere.\n\nIn the overcast daylight, the dense pines were clearly visible, their foliage glistening like the rainfall had planted millions of tiny diamonds amongst the needles. I walked out to the ledge, instantly feeling the drop in temperature as I peered down at the soggy mire that was the forest floor.\n\nA sudden noise behind me almost had me jumping right out of my scales.\n\n\"Good morning,\" Risha announced, stretching and rubbing sleep from her eyes so casually, like this was completely normal.\n\nFor a moment I had to wonder if she, like me, had woken thinking she was back home. Regardless, her attention was swiftly drawn to Boltock curled up close to Ember. Creeping over, she placed a forepaw between his horns and started gently tapping until he responded.\n\n\"I'm awake,\" he muttered, pushing her forepaw away with his wing.\n\nHe raised himself slowly, his legs quivering, his face drooped. The new sounds were evidently enough to wake Ember, who gradually opened her weary eyes, peering up at the siblings.\n\n\"Well, you've woken me, what now?\" Boltock grumbled, rubbing his face with a forepaw.\n\n\"We should get this fire started again,\" Ember suggested, and the moment she uttered the words Boltock jumped at the chance.\n\n\"Don't worry, I can handle it on my own,\" she shot him down with a slight laugh.\n\nHe looked on in disappointment while Ember approached the black pile of charred ashes, the marks on her sides flashing. She flicked her coiled tail, emitting a bolt of flame that ran along its length, gaining speed, until it was released from the tip, reigniting the remnants of the fire in a flash.\n\nShe certainly makes a bigger show of it than the others do.\n\nRisha looked over to her fiery friend, appearing equally satisfied. Boltock, on the other paw, gawked like he'd just seen a mountain of treasure. Although I shared his amazement, I had a feeling it was not for the same reason.\n\nEmber moved over to the cave entrance, tapping the end of Boltock's snout with a swift flick of her tail as she passed.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Risha asked, glancing over to me.\n\nOh right, I'm the one in the lead here!\n\nI might have easily managed to lead Risha, but leading a whole group was a different matter.\n\n\"We should be going,\" I replied, convinced it was the answer they were hoping to hear.\n\n\"What, without eating first?\" Boltock objected.\n\nHis immediate need of food was supported by a raised forepaw, and a glance Ember's way to see if she approved.\n\nOh right, we need food. I'm not hungry, but I have to make sure they're fed!\n\nI could manage long periods of fasting; however, I was beginning to realise that comparing myself to them was not the most realistic option.\n\n\"Fine, we'll get some food,\" Risha agreed, moving over to the cave entrance.\n\nBoth her and Ember immediately prepared to leave before either Boltock or I could even consider the fact.\n\n\"I think Boltock and I should go,\" I proposed respectfully.\n\nBoltock jumped forward to join me, delighted by the opportunity to do something for Ember.\n\n\"Yes, I think we should go,\" he added, nodding frantically in agreement.\n\nThe two dragonesses frowned. The fact was, I wasn't saying we should go because I thought they were any less capable, in fact I would trust them more \u2013 they were both certainly more responsible \u2013 it was whether I could trust myself. I'd already let someone down and I certainly didn't want to do that again.\n\nI can't let anything happen to Risha, not after her story. Whether she wants to admit it or not, I sang human praises in her face and she let me!\n\nNot to say I didn't hold Boltock in any lesser regard, he was extremely important to her. However, he was the most reckless. Part of me was worried that if I left him here, he'd unknowingly attract attention. I wanted someone responsible to be at the cave in case we needed to rush back.\n\n\"Not that I don't think you're capable... I\u2013I just think it would be better if someone responsible stays here,\" I stammered in a fluster.\n\nThey both peered at Boltock standing at the edge of the ledge, swiping his claws and wings in the air as if pretending to battle an invisible opponent.\n\n\"Responsible?\" Risha said with a nod, while Ember rolled her eyes.\n\n\"We'll stay here,\" the blue dragoness added knowingly. \"Just take care of my brother, okay?\"\n\nDoes she really trust me with the only family she's got left?\n\nI trust her, with my life almost. I thought, nodding and assuring her I would.\n\nBy the time I reached the edge of the ledge, Boltock had already started jumping along the rocky pathway towards the forest floor. I swiftly moved after him, careful to follow the exact route I had the night before.\n\nThe retreat of the storm had done nothing to diminish the eerie effects of the forest's confined atmosphere. The floor was a battleground of watery debris. My paws squelched in the mud, the addition of my weight pushing cold water between my toes. Pools collected in the gaps between tree roots and the undergrowth glistened in the morning light.\n\nBoltock was already prancing off into the shadows among the trunks, perusing the forest like it was lined with gold and gems.\n\n\"Are you coming?\" he called, glancing back over his shoulder.\n\nIt was only then I realised that this was probably his first hunt. I had a professional routine, whereas he probably just wanted to impress a certain fiery dragoness.\n\nGreat spirits, I'm starting to react to his antics just like everyone else does. I rolled my eyes at the thought.\n\nEven though he seemed capable of defending himself, I was committed in my duty to keep him safe and ran to catch up. The further we trekked, the more the earth's defeat became apparent; the rain had certainly triumphed. Trudging through the mass of roots, mud, moss and pines we made it a good way from the cave. My caution magnified further when a strange mist began to gather between the trees.\n\n\"What are we looking for... I\u2013I mean 'hunting'?\" Boltock asked, hopping up onto a log and scouring the foggy gloom.\n\nI lifted my snout to the air, sniffing for the scent of suitable prey. I knew the smell of almost every forest animal, and it wasn't long before a distinctive odour caught my attention.\n\n\"This way,\" I whispered, creeping through dense undergrowth to my left.\n\nA pattern of careful stalking and occasional sniffing became my operating mode, guiding us stealthily and quietly through the forest. Boltock attempted to copy me, making an awful lot of noise in doing so. It was frustrating, to say the least. Years of Tarwin's strict methods had drilled the experience into my brain and right now we may as well have held up a big banner saying.\n\n'We're here, run away!'\n\nI had to remind myself several times that this was my idea, though I couldn't help wondering how much better it would be with Risha at my side instead.\n\nI'm going to have to think on my paws for this one. I thought, signalling for Boltock to calm his movements.\n\nRemembering some of the things Tarwin had once told me, I resorted to considering the situation as a personal challenge. If I could make a kill with Boltock alerting the prey, that would be impressive.\n\nIf only she were here to see me succeed.\n\nI refocused, clearing my mind. The others are hungry, I have to get them some food.\n\nPinpointing the source of the smell, I signalled for Boltock to be quiet and get down with a wave of my wing. The prey was somewhere ahead and peering through the mist, I could see a fallen log bridging a gap between two tree trunks. I carefully crept towards it, Boltock following close behind while still trying his best to imitate my stealthy movements.\n\nTaking refuge, I peered over the log to evaluate the situation and the area ahead. In the brief glimpse I had, I could see there was a grassy clearing in the trees where dreary sunlight shone down upon a small stream draped in mist. There my eyes locked on to our target \u2013 drinking nervously. It was a deer, its light-brown coat soaked from the rain, thick mud coating its hooves.\n\nThe elegant beast nervously dipped down to the water and took a cautious sip before rising again to peer around. Even though it was alert, I was sure it hadn't noticed us. It was a perfect situation, but there was one factor I needed to consider. Ducking behind the log, I turned to Boltock and whispered.\n\n\"We're going after that deer.\" I indicated its location with a nod. \"You move round and cut off its escape,\" I instructed, pointing to the forest beyond with a wing.\n\nI wasn't sure if he understood, though he seemed to listen intently while nodding at my every word.\n\n\"Have you got that?\" I asked finally.\n\n\"Yes, I'll be fine, how hard can one deer be?\" he whispered.\n\nI had to hold back a sigh. Oh, he'll soon find out how hard it can be.\n\nBoltock scuttled off to where I'd directed as quietly as he could. Meanwhile, I crept slowly over the log, body held low, wings tucked against my side and paws softly touching the damp earth. The prey fidgeted but didn't make any movement to indicate it was aware of my presence; it was still focused on drinking.\n\nI analysed every movement: the tiny drops of water dripping from its damp coat, each inhaled and exhaled breath, every twitch of its restless muscles. My hearing pinpointed its steady heartbeat, thumping almost in rhythm with my own. I was only a few strides away when I stopped and coiled my hind legs, claws and teeth primed. I glanced over to see if Boltock was ready, but there was no sign of him.\n\nIt's now or never, Blaze. With or without him you got this. Part of me felt guilty, however the need for food was more important.\n\nReleasing the coiled power from my legs I launched myself towards the unsuspecting target, colliding with its back and sinking my claws into its hide in a shower of water droplets. The shocked animal bolted, violently thrashing around and splashing through the stream in its frantic attempt to escape. I held on and sunk my teeth deep into its flesh, the metallic taste of blood flooding my mouth.\n\nFlung into a wild panic, the deer bucked and kicked, trying to dislodge me. After a few minutes, it showed no sign of weakening; perhaps I'd underestimated its strength. Maybe the wildlife here was stronger than that I'd hunted before.\n\nI bit down harder, my teeth and claws reaching their limit, and with all of my strength I tried to force the deer towards where I'd directed Boltock, in the hope that he'd be waiting. It did just that, dashing into the trees and taking me with it.\n\nAs I struggled to cling on, I considered about my options. The best was that I'd have to let it go and find it later, when it had bled out. With reason taking over, I started to loosen my grip, struggling to balance as I positioned myself to jump.\n\nMy focus was shattered when, from nowhere, the ground directly in front of the deer erupted in a shower of dirt and foliage. Taken completely by surprise, it had no hope of avoiding the displaced earth, inevitably crashing into the elevated rock with a bone-shattering crack. Having loosened my grip, I was launched through the air and over the raised rock, eventually crashing to the floor in a heap.\n\nA coat of mud and pine needles covered my scales, but thankfully a soft blanket of wet moss absorbed most of the impact. I raised my head, but the forest was just a blur. I closed my eyes in an attempt to clear the disorientation, and pressed all four quivering paws against the floor, pausing before tentatively lifting myself up. I checked myself for injury, shaking each of my legs and wings in turn to test for pain, thankfully, apart from a few dull aches, I felt fine. Slowing my breathing from a shocked pant to a steady rhythm, I looked back, desperately trying to refocus my eyes.\n\nA large slab stood proud of the damp earth. At first glance, the dark-grey stone appeared out of place amidst the greens and browns of the forest, suggesting that somehow it had been thrust up from beneath the ground. I crept towards it, on the opposite side of which I found the body of the deer lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.\n\nWhat? One minute I'm ready to jump off, the next I'm catapulted through the air.\n\nThe thought reminded me that I'd lowered my guard, leaving me unaware of my surroundings beyond the prey. My senses resumed their watch, scanning the forest. Thankfully there was nothing to suggest any danger \u2013 no smells, no sounds and nothing to see. Until I heard a rustling in the undergrowth behind me.\n\n\"What did you think of that?\" Boltock declared, standing proud upon a mossy boulder to my right.\n\n\"Boltock!\"\n\nIt took me a moment to realise that he'd been responsible for the rock. Only then did I remember he was an earth dragon.\n\nHe must have used his power to raise the ground and take the deer by surprise.\n\nNot the smartest idea, I had to admit, especially with me on its back and it certainly wasn't something I'd considered when I'd told him to block off its escape.\n\nI mean look, half the meat is just mush now!\n\nThe poor thing certainly didn't see it coming, and its escape route was definitely 'blocked'.\n\nCan I really expect dragons to hunt like humans, or even need to hunt at all when they have elemental powers at their disposal?\n\nAfter waiting to find them all my life, I was going to have to adjust to another way of thinking. The influence of humans had obviously affected my views, and this alternative world was truly putting them to the test.\n\nReining in my thoughts I watched Boltock hop down and move toward the deer, beaming in accomplishment.\n\n\"Not bad for the first time,\" I reluctantly admitted. \"Definitely inventive.\"\n\n\"Really?\" he responded, his eyes lighting up like stars, before he scuffed a forepaw on his chest.\n\n\"Ha, and I did it all without getting my claws dirty! Though I don't think the same can be said for you.\"\n\nA sigh left my muzzle as he pointed a wing to the dirt and blood stains coating my scales. \"Not that I'm scared of getting dirty! I mean you look super ferocious like that!\"\n\n\"I'll go clean it off,\" I replied, thinking back to the stream in the clearing.\n\nRetracing my route, I made my way back to the opening and stepped out from the confines of the trees. I could just make out the sky through the thinner branches, where scattered beams of sunlight poked through. Turning my attention back to the stream, I couldn't help feeling that I was in the same vulnerable position as the deer.\n\nNo, there's nothing out there. Just relax, get cleaned up and get back to the others.\n\nI lowered my head to the rushing water, dipping my paws in and resisting the frozen pulse it sent up my legs. Hesitating for a moment I did the same with my snout, holding it there for as long as I could tolerate. The water was quick to wash the grime from my scales, and pulling back, the numbing cold lingered for a few moments before, shaking like a wet hound, I backed away from the water's edge.\n\nUrgh, if only Tarwin could see me now. She'd have something witty to say for sure.\n\nAs the thought crossed my mind, I caught a glimpse of something, a faint sparkling where the stream emerged from the trees. Curiosity got the better of me, and upon closer inspection I realized some of the water had frozen, perfectly preserving the rushing pattern of the stream. Studying the intricate arrangement made me realise I had an unavoidable problem: the start of winter. We'd soon be faced with more than monstrous beasts; the weather would quickly become more hostile.\n\nIs the whole world against me?\n\nWinter was something that I'd foolishly allowed to slip my mind. Tarwin certainly wouldn't be impressed by that.\n\nI'm working on a time limit here. If it gets too cold we'll be stuck, especially this far north.\n\nI promptly turned and headed back into the trees. Another light breeze moved through the otherwise still forest, creating a faint rustle as it kicked up wispy swirls in the mist. I glanced up to the treetops, spying a few crows scattering in the canopy.\n\nWithin seconds I was back by the carcass, but there was no sign of Boltock. Moreover, there was another significant difference, and the sight sent a shiver down my spine. The deer's hind leg was missing. Panic overwhelmed me, especially when I concluded that something must have sensed our kill. I looked for anything, friend or foe as my heart began racing.\n\nAn unfamiliar sound caught my attention and I turned, only to be surprised by Boltock walking casually from the tree line, digging into a piece of charred venison.\n\n\"Sorry, I was too hungry to wait,\" he murmured as he swallowed a mouthful.\n\nI might have given him a piece of my mind if I hadn't been so relieved to see him.\n\n\"How are we going to get this back?\" he asked, peering over our prize.\n\n\"We'll have to drag it,\" I admitted, recovering from my panic and moving to grab one of the deer's hind legs in my mouth.\n\n\"Oh, just like they used to haul seals back home! Yes!\" he responded, hastily grabbing the opposite leg.\n\nI agreed with a nod, not even considering the mention of his past.\n\nJust pretend like I don't know. It was his family too, but that's between me and Risha, just like Tarwin's identity.\n\nPulling as hard as we could we slowly dragged the carcass through the trees, navigating fallen logs and boulders. Hauling a kill like this wasn't something I'd done before, normally I'd have had human help. For that reason, I was glad to have Boltock, as he was surprisingly strong for his size.\n\nMust be an earth dragon thing? He is rather stocky.\n\nHe may not have been very subtle in his methods, but the kill was technically his, and I had to give him credit for that. I was also sure he had no other reason than his belly and his desire to show off to Ember for doing so.\n\nSo much for the proud, professional hunter I think I am. I thought with a sigh.\n\n\"Urgh, this thing is heavier than it looks. Five-minute break?\" Boltock suggested, stopping to rest against a tree.\n\n\"We don't know what animals could have smelt this by now, we shouldn't stay here too long,\" I responded, expecting every shadow to leap out at me as I glanced around.\n\nThe two of us stood in an open area, where the tree line was broken by the absence of one of their brethren. Damp moss covered the remains of the fallen giant, and decay had already started its relentless consumption of the mangled branches.\n\nThere was no change in sound or smell and a light, watery drizzle had started to slowly drift through the trees. Combined with the morning mist, the gloom concealed most of my view.\n\n\"Guess we'll have to smell our way back,\" Boltock announced, waving a foreclaw through the thick fog as if to waft it away.\n\nHopping onto the rotting log he reached as high as he could manage before raising his snout to sniff the air. I was confident he'd be able to smell his way back; after all, he'd had no trouble finding us the previous night. It wasn't long before he smelt something, but he simply lowered his head and grumbled to himself.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I asked, immediately joining him on the log and scanning the forest.\n\n\"Do you smell that?\" he asked curiously, gazing off into the gloom.\n\nI lifted my nostrils high, taking a deep breath. Amidst the forest's damp odour was another smell, the closest thing I could compare it to was a dog or a wolf. Wet fur often created a distinctive scent, albeit this was much stronger. I took in another breath, confirming my fear that whatever it was, it was heading straight towards us.\n\nThere's no way that's any normal forest creature! The strength of the smell suggested that it was larger, possibly even bigger than a bear.\n\n\"Hide!\" I commanded, darting down from the log and creeping to the cover of the trees.\n\n\"What, and give up our food to some animal?\" Boltock questioned, glancing between me and the eerie mist.\n\n\"Until we know what it is, yes!\" I replied, looking around for some refuge.\n\n\"Fine,\" he sighed, with a shrug, casually hopping down from the log and making his way over to me.\n\nA small, mossy rock sitting between two trees at the edge of the clearing was the best cover I could identify.\n\n\"Over there!\" I whispered hoarsely, pointing out the rock, Boltock nodding before we scurried over and took shelter behind it.\n\nMoments passed; the air so tense it was as if I could slice it with my claws. Eventually I peered over our cover, being careful not to expose too much of my body.\n\nAn indistinct shape emerged from the fog, its eyes glistening like sinister lures in the gloom. The creature stood on four huge legs, and the first obvious thing was its size \u2013 it was at least twice my height. Slowly emerging from the cover of the fog, its form became clearer as the misty shroud released its grip. It resembled a great wolf with long, mangy, soaking-wet fur.\n\nThe fur running along its back was much longer than that covering the rest of its body, forming a thick, black mane. The beast approached the carcass, stopping above our kill, its eyes scanning the tree line across the clearing. On its flank were what looked like claw marks, leaving three scarred, bald patches. Yet despite its obvious injuries it showed no sign of pain or disability.\n\nAs it turned, I caught a glimpse of its muscular neck, thick as a tree trunk to support its thick-set head. Its skull was topped by two small ears and tipped by a square snout complete with black nose. However, the most frightful part was its huge jaw, fully equipped with a terrifying set of teeth. Two formidable, saliva-dripping canines protruded from its upper lip as it released a bellowing breath. Lowering to sniff at the corpse before closing its maw around the fallen deer.\n\nWhilst it was preoccupied with our kill, I noticed something else. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but upon closer inspection there appeared to be a metal band engraved with faint blue runes hidden beneath the thick fur around its neck. It certainly wasn't something I'd expect to see on a wild animal, but before I could observe any longer, it seized the deer in its jaw, effortlessly holding the whole thing clear off the ground.\n\nThe limp body dangled from the immense mouth as it turned, looking directly at the rock we were hiding behind. In a flash of panic, I ducked down and begged all the spirits it hadn't seen me. I imagined its watchful eyes boring into the stone, chipping away at our cover. Boltock glanced at me, gesturing over the rock with a nod. I shook my head.\n\nNo way is either of us going to take that thing on! Crazy earth powers or not!\n\nMoments dragged by until I finally pulled myself together and summoned up the courage to take another peek. My eyes just about cleared the mossy surface when my head shot back down.\n\nIt's still there!\n\nI sank low, still unsure of whether it had seen me or not. I went over the image in my mind, analysing the scant information. From what I could recall, it was looking away.\n\nRecovering some of my fragile courage, I raised my head once more. It bolted the moment I did, lumbering back into the haze from which it came. Its sudden retreat startled me at first, at least until my head slumped on the stone as a wave of relief passed over me.\n\n\"By the fires, that's not something I've seen before?\" Boltock whispered, peeking over the rock. \"Maybe it was a really small troll, or some kind of lycan?\"\n\nHe studied a forepaw, seeming to count the possibilities. \"Urgh, no, we're too far north for that.\" He cocked his head as he glanced at me. \"You got any ideas?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I replied bluntly.\n\nI sniffed the air once more, the beast's scent had vanished, along with that of our prey. Relief quickly turned to worry, however.\n\nI'd much rather be able to smell it and know where it is, than have no idea.\n\nEither way, I crept quietly from our cover, Boltock following my silent movements.\n\n\"Well, whatever it was, there goes breakfast!\" he proclaimed with an irritated ruffle of his wings.\n\nI hadn't even considered that; I'd just thought it lucky that thing hadn't found us. Yeah, because I'm pretty sure we'd have been its breakfast instead!\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Boltock asked.\n\n\"We'll have to go back to the cave,\" I swiftly suggested, before glancing around and asking. \"You're still able to smell your way back, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, sure,\" he replied with a huff. \"I don't want to be out here with that thing anyway.\"\n\nWith that we moved on, his keen nose leading the way. The more I watched, the more his ability amazed me. I always knew my sense of smell was strong, but if I tried to navigate my way back to the cave all I'd be able to smell would be the damp forest.\n\nI guess if you really know a scent well enough, you'll be able to find it wherever you are.\n\nFrom what Risha had told me I had to guess Boltock had never really been without her, and never wanted to be without her. That feeling of guilt still welled up in me, swirling with fear as I was careful to watch for the wolf-beast's return.\n\nIt's okay, wild animals don't hunt when they've just fed. My mind reassured, only for me to consider that the thing had a collar. Doesn't seem so wild, does it?\n\nBoltock stopped a few minutes later, raising his snout as he sniffed the air.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I asked, my eyes darting to every shadow.\n\n\"Just checking we're going the right way,\" he replied, seeming very proud of himself.\n\n\"Are we?\" I asked swiftly.\n\n\"It should be right over there,\" he responded, pointing between the trees with his wing before quickly resuming his strides.\n\nJust as he'd said, we trekked for a few more minutes before finding ourselves at the base of the rocky outcrop. A bright orange light danced over the lip of the ledge, along with familiar voices.\n\n\"Told you I could find my way back,\" Boltock proclaimed, a forepaw to his chest.\n\nHe quickly hopped up the stone pathway and I hastily followed, being careful not to slip on the wet surface as I made my final jump up over the top. My eyes were instantly drawn to the others sat in the cave as Boltock rushed straight over to the fire's warmth. I moved inside to join them, noticing a half-eaten bird in the flames.\n\n\"What's this?\" I asked curiously, picking up the partially stripped carcass with a foreclaw.\n\nRisha and Ember giggled, causing Boltock to lift his head.\n\nLooks like someone forgot we came back with no food.\n\n\"We didn't know if you two would come back with anything,\" Risha announced, casting a look towards her brother. \"So, I climbed up the cliff and found an eagle's nest. It wasn't much, but it'll do.\"\n\n\"I thought you were supposed to stay and guard the cave?\" Boltock questioned with a huff.\n\n\"Well, I was still in here,\" Ember added.\n\n\"And I was only a few paw steps away,\" Risha reassured him.\n\nI dropped the half-eaten bird back on the fire. Turning to the cave entrance, to see that the misty drizzle had lightened.\n\n\"We should get going,\" I proposed for the second time, my increased uneasiness about the forest creature only driving my urgency. \"I really don't like the idea of being in one place for too long.\"\n\nI tried to subdue my fear by convincing myself that, from my brief observations, there was no proof that the creature was aware of us. It may have only been out hunting, as we were. Thankfully, this time, no one disagreed with my decision to leave.\n\n\"Yeah, we should get off before it starts to rain again,\" Ember agreed, Boltock nodding instantly.\n\nRisha conjured up a spinning sphere of water to douse the fire, releasing a ball of steam from the hot embers as she looked at me and added.\n\n\"That's settled then, we're ready to go.\"\n\nEmber and Boltock both moved out onto the ledge, preparing for what was probably going to be a long flight. I watched Risha join them, and with one last look around the cave, I quickly followed.\n\n\"Where are we going now?\" Boltock asked as the four of us stood with our wings spread.\n\n\"We keep heading north,\" I told him as we took off and climbed above the trees, eventually catching a large gust of wind sweeping up from the cliff face.\n\nWe quickly reached a considerable height, dark-grey clouds hanging just above us like a suspended blanket of misery. Using all my skill I was able to navigate the gloom, although I struggled to make out the shapes of the others around me. It felt much better in the sky, no longer were my senses hindered by the musty dampness or the rustling of the trees. The only physical discomfort, besides my lack of vision, was the moisture tickling my scales with its cold chill.\n\nThe fog below consumed everything save for the tallest trees that reached out like evergreen spires from the depths of a grey sea.\n\nReally gotta watch out for those, remember the last time I flew over trees? I was reminded as I banked and swerved to avoid them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "It was a few hours before my eyes focused on something other than endless grey. Through the mist I could just make out a bright light.\n\nIs it sunlight? I jumped at the opportunity to see the world more than five inches ahead of me, when I heard a muffled voice from within the gloom.\n\nI looked about for the source, but unable to see anything a slight panic coursed through me. The others were depending on me to lead and I couldn't even see them.\n\nI have to be smart and think fast.\n\n\"Go towards the light and get out of this fog,\" I shouted out with no idea whether my words were directed in the right direction.\n\nI repeated the instructions, tilting my head as I cast the words left and right.\n\nSeconds later, a blinding explosion hit me as I emerged from the great wall of cloud, eyes instantly met by the sun hanging low over the horizon. Its blissful glow stretched out over the vast expanses of land and I looked down to see that the rocky forest had maintained its dominance over the terrain. As soon as I was free, there was one thing I couldn't see.\n\nThe others?\n\nThe thought flashed through my mind, and I frantically scoured the vast wall of cloud. My eyes locked onto the first sign of movement and I felt a warm sense of relief to see the three of them emerge from the grey monolith. Beyond them I saw a new horizon, where the dark shape of distant mountains forced the forest to give up its grip on the land.\n\nStanding tall, the line of stone giants wore hats of snow, the mightiest holding court over the land like three kings upon their thrones. In the same direction the forest was coated in a thin layer of snow, making it shimmer in the shallow sunlight. I thought back to my dire thought regarding the oncoming winter, thankful that for now I was just glad to be free of the miserable grey clouds.\n\n\"By the skies, I'm glad to be out of there,\" Boltock declared with a shiver.\n\n\"Which way is it, now we can actually see the way?\" Risha asked, swooping into a hover beside me.\n\nI turned to the mountainous horizon, deciding the coldest-looking direction must be north.\n\n\"That way, I think!\"\n\n\"Yes, those must be the upper Storm Mountains, that's definitely north!\" Ember confirmed, and we swiftly resumed our flight.\n\nI'd never endured the challenge of such high mountain peaks before, even so, I knew this wasn't the time to start doubting myself. The mountains were still far away, leaving plenty of time to alter course, if we needed to.\n\nAs we flew, I occasionally glanced back at the wall of cloud disappearing behind us. Several fluffy pillars adorned its dull expanse. Each painted orange, pink and red by the low light of the winter sun.\n\nHard to think something so grim can look so breath takingly beautiful.\n\nI'd flown through clouds before, but I'd never seen them like this. Usually all they presented were dark, miserable skies filled with cold rain and bitter wind. The sight of such natural beauty managed to fill me with a little warmth. The others seemed to have no issues with the altitude or weather, and as we flew for several more hours, I whimsically wondered what kind of flight lessons Dardien offered.\n\n\"We should really find a place to nest before nightfall,\" Risha suggested, swooping close to my side.\n\nI didn't know how old the day was, but the sun wasn't far from completely disappearing over the horizon. Even so, the northern mountains still felt like a whole day's worth of flight away.\n\nUrgh, it feels like we've made no progress at all! I thought as I reluctantly acknowledged Risha's suggestion.\n\n\"Okay, everyone try to find somewhere safe to land,\" I called.\n\nThe rest of them nodded, dispersing out to scour the forest. Unlike further south, there were fewer rocky caves here to offer shelter. As I circled my troubled mind continued to remind me of the beast in the fog, and the thought that it was still below us somewhere.\n\nI tried to shun the memory. There's no way it can catch up with us on foot.\n\nWhile I pondered, two things continued to stand out: the scars on its flank and the collar around its neck. I could safely assume another animal caused the injuries; I'd seen countless wild beasts bearing similar scars. Though the second feature was more intriguing.\n\nWho would bother to put a collar on something like that?\n\nI tried to process all possible scenarios, but only one thought could explain it.\n\nSomeone put it there, someone or something is controlling that beast.\n\nThat made me worry just what else someone could control, and what could really be waiting for us when we landed.\n\nWho could have the power to command monsters like that? The realisation struck me hard.\n\nThinking back to the Elders' story about the war, the Dark Guardians and about how dangerous the world was becoming, I was too frightened to consider the truth. Two of their comments rattled round in my head in particular:\n\n'Return of the Dark Guardian' and 'no accident'. I tried to recall everything they'd told me about the monsters, the Dark Guardians and Acrodan, pausing for a moment and seriously considering my place in all of this.\n\nI'm just a strange, powerless dragon raised in a human village in the middle of nowhere? It was easy to doubt myself. How am I special? What if I do reach Tarwin, how am I supposed to save her?\n\nEnough! I admonished myself, cutting short the mental torment.\n\nMy place amidst all of this wasn't where the Elders told me it should be. I would decide for myself where it was, and right now my place was searching for my friend.\n\nThe thought stoked my fire of determination to a new level. Yet despite my reluctance to believe there could be a dark evil after me, I really had no idea what I was leading my new-found friends into.\n\nCan I really let them risk their lives for me?\n\nMy thoughts were cast back to the night Risha had followed me as my mind came to an abrupt conclusion.\n\nI may really have to consider carrying on alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Nightmares",
                "text": "\"I think we should stay down there!\" Risha shouted, pointing to a small lake within the trees.\n\nThe low winter sun had crawled its way to the very edge of the horizon, the last residues of its light spreading out over the world in a losing battle against the encroaching darkness. I looked down to the lake, its calm waters glistening like a shimmering island in a sea of green. We circled for a while, searching for any signs of danger before finally setting down.\n\nSnow-capped pines stood a few paces from the water's edge and a small-pebbled beach encircled the entire lake. The second my paws hit the smooth stones I scoured the looming trees for any sign of danger. I couldn't help myself, checking the same spot several times before I was convinced.\n\nOkay, no monsters. Just got to make sure it stays that way.\n\nThe smooth stones were cold beneath my paws, each one slipping against its neighbour under my weight and producing a small grinding sound. Around me, taller plants chirped with the noises of small creatures along with the occasional rustle and splash generated by the movement of larger pond life.\n\nThe waters were shaded by the trees and half-covered by a thin layer of ice originating from reed beds on the opposite side. Beyond them and the treetops, I could see the tall mountain peaks, their snowy caps glowing brightly in the last rays of sunlight.\n\nWe'd landed near a pair of moss-covered logs; the best shelter we'd found and somewhere to start a fire. The others had already settled between them, and as I approached, I discovered the pebbles gave way to a fine sand.\n\n\"I'll make a fire,\" Boltock suggested.\n\nExcitedly snapping a large branch off one of the logs, he quickly threw it down and rushed to ignite it. Before he could draw breath, Ember lit it with a flick of her tail, and jumping back from the sudden spark, he glanced at his fiery companion with an expression somewhere between frustration and admiration.\n\nThe fire's light and immediate warmth created an almost homely feeling as Risha tore moss from the logs, laying it over the sand to create a soft bedding. Meanwhile, Boltock and Ember fed wood onto the growing flames, creating a warming beacon while feeding a strong scent of wood smoke. Looking up at the trail rising into the sky, I worried about who or what might see.\n\nIt's either that or freeze to death out here. Seriously, it has to be worth the risk.\n\n\"Done!\" Boltock declared, spreading his wings as he triumphantly tossed the last log onto the fire.\n\nA disapproving look from Ember soon changed his attitude, and even when she and his sister burst out laughing, he failed to revert to his normal self.\n\nUpon completing their tasks, showing off, and various other antics, they all settled down beside the flames, lying in a circle on the soft beds of moss. I moved over, taking my place beside Risha, on a spot she made clear was intended for me by patting it with a forepaw.\n\nShe made that one just for me? I didn't know why, but I assumed it was because it was the spot that offered the best view of the forest. Good, all the better to keep watch.\n\nEven so, I could not help feeling that this place was too exposed. At least in the cave there'd been only one place threats could come from.\n\n\"All that flying has tired me out,\" Ember mumbled through a yawn. \"I think I'll get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Boltock added, laying his head down close to hers.\n\nFor a moment I thought he was genuinely tired, that was until I saw him open one eager eye to peer at Ember. Whether she noticed him or not, her only response was to yawn and fold a wing over her head.\n\n\"I think I should sleep too, that was probably the furthest I've flown in one day,\" Risha suggested, running a forepaw over a wing as she stretched.\n\n\"Goodnight, don't stay awake too long,\" she added with a knowing glance as she buried her head into her mossy pillow.\n\nOh, so she really does know I'm trying to keep watch all night. I inwardly recognised. So much for my subtlety.\n\nPart of me wanted to know she was truly safe, another part thought it selfish to focus on just one member of my group. She deserved my admiration after what she'd done for me, and all she and Boltock had gone through at the hands of those I called family.\n\nI can't get so hung up on something that happened years ago. There wasn't anything I could have done. My mind reassured, only for me to counter. Yeah, but I could have been more considerate about it!\n\nI returned my attention to the forest, doing my best not to allow my feelings to cloud my duty. At least tonight there was no storm, allowing me to see the full beauty of the sky. I stared into the inky blackness as stars began to creep out from hiding. The vast points of glistening light almost started to steal my sense of time. My eyes became heavy and my neck strained to hold up my weary head. I was tired, but I would not let my guard down. Not this time."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "My head shot up from the log. It was another dream. 'The dream', recurring repeatedly, though it always ended the same. I found myself somewhere strangely familiar, though I didn't know where. It was dark and cold; the walls around me shimmering under a dull light, shining weakly from the centre of the cave. My mind was blank, as if someone had carefully plucked out all the terrible thoughts.\n\nJust as I'd done before, I slowly made my way over to the light. Tendrils of old memories slowly reached out, filling the spaces in my mind.\n\nI tried to think why I was compelled to approach the ghostly glow as a distant humming sound started emanating all around me and light bounced around the walls like an echo within an echo. Coming to my senses, I stopped just a few paces away.\n\nI know I've seen it before, but where? The answer lay beyond my recollection.\n\nFrom the darkness came a voice, barely detectable over the humming, unrecognisable, almost unreal.\n\n\"Guardian...\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "I rubbed my sleep-heavy eyes as I flickered back into consciousness. I'd come to believe many things within the past few days, but these dreams were something else. I didn't know how much more I could take of reality, never mind my persistent nightmares.\n\nIt's only a dream. I told myself. Even so, I couldn't help noticing how different I'd felt in there \u2013 like I'd been somewhere real, too real for a dream.\n\nI fell asleep again, spirits curse my weary eyes!\n\nI chastised myself for drifting off and resumed my careful examination of every shadow between the trees. Nothing had changed, they stood like stark pillars in a wall of blackness. As relieving as the sight of nothing was, I couldn't help feeling unnerved. The flickering firelight only bathed the closest of the trunks before night's blackness plunged anything beyond into an abyss.\n\nMy eyes panned over to the lake, where the flame's reflection danced across the water's icy surface. I continued round, until I was peering into the firelight. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, finally allowing me to see the others curled up on their beds as the warm light coated them in its rich glow.\n\nI knew it was wrong to lead them blindly into this without telling them of the risks, especially when I failed to understand those risks myself. Even so, there was no proof that the Elders' predictions were true. From my experience of humans, the wyverns and the wolf-beast, I now knew some of their story was real, but that didn't mean all of it was; it was just like the tales Tarwin's father feared. Though I knew Risha and Boltock's experience with humans was very real, casting more doubt on the possibility of it all being mere legend.\n\nDardien is real, there's thousands of dragons there. If that's the case, why should I just dismiss the idea of an age-old war and Dark Guardians? I took a deep breath, running a forepaw over my snout as I glanced at the others. They don't have to bear this burden, so what will happen if I tell them?\n\nThe worry, the fear, the pain \u2013 it would all be a curse upon them, keep them awake and force them to constantly fear everything like me. Torn between decisions, I was unwilling to face the consequences of either outcome and time was running out.\n\nThis is my reality now, and eventually reality is going to catch up with me.\n\nSeeking a distraction I paused, returning my watchful eye to the edge of the forest. I tried hard to make out the vague shapes lying deep within the shadows. A light covering of snow aided in my efforts, the white crystals reflecting what little light reached the glistening branches and scattered rocks. While the shadows of the lowest branches danced around, I focused intensely on the gaps between their wooden bases, thankfully the only thing crossing my view were the orange-tinted, puffs of breath rising up from the end of my snout.\n\nNo! No falling asleep! My thoughts declared as my eyes began to grow heavy again.\n\nI remained like that for hours, teetering on the edge of consciousness, the fear of monsters in the waking world and the dread of my dreams keeping me in limbo. Before long, I picked up on a smell that stood out, somewhere deep within the forest. Spurred on, I sniffed again, this time raising myself up onto the log with my front paws. The smell was unusual, it wasn't the stench of the wolf-beast or the wyverns. In fact, the closest thing I could compare it to was a bird.\n\nFor a moment I considered the earth birds, but what I'd seen of them was enough to know they weren't the type of animal to dwell deep within vast forest. Whatever it was seemed larger than any bird I was familiar with; that fact alone was enough to make me want to wake the others and fly away. From what I could tell, whatever it was, was also a safe distance away, so I held back my initial panic and continued to study the odour.\n\nIn doing so, I noticed another scent, moving in perfect union with the first, it was like they were one animal, and I wondered if my senses were just playing tricks on me. The second smell was completely new, but I couldn't think of anything to compare it to.\n\nIs that cat-like? It can't be, they're not so... Mangy? My mind objected to the idea. It can't be possible; how can something smell of two animals in that way?\n\nThen again, I was coming to discover that almost anything was possible in this new world, so I forced myself to take it seriously. As I did, the scent vanished as quickly as it had materialised. I sniffed several more times, but it had utterly disappeared.\n\nWell, so much for that. I inwardly huffed. So long as whatever it is stays way out there, I don't care.\n\nI settled down, thinking that perhaps it had been a dream or a trick of my mind, even so, I would certainly recognise it if it came back.\n\nA distant howl, deep and drawn out reverberated from deep within the trees, immediately triggering a sinister and bone-chilling alert to the third of my active senses. The moment the bellow ceased, the forest came alive with chattering, like a grim, laughing symphony. I shot up, fear injecting my body with adrenalin and bringing me to full alert. The moment I was on my paws, the chatter ceased, plunging the night back into an eerie silence.\n\nThat can't be it. I thought, glancing around. A howl like that must be one of those monsters!\n\nThe call had certainly come from far away, too far for a creature to smell us. Even so, I knew that underestimating a beast like that could be a fatal mistake, and then there was the chattering.\n\nThere's more than one, there has to be.\n\nMy eyes jumped from one point to another, leaping between the lake and the dark tree line. I almost fell over the log when I turned to look behind me, and my view was suddenly met by something other than darkness.\n\nRisha's distinctive blue scales shone in the firelight as she shivered, wrapping her wings around herself like a blanket.\n\n\"Nightmares?\" she questioned wearily as she moved towards me.\n\nUnbeknownst to her, a flood of relief washed over me.\n\n\"No, keeping watch,\" I responded evasively.\n\n\"Watching for what?\" she asked with a gentle laugh.\n\n\"Whatever is out there,\" I responded, unsure whether to freak her out with the knowledge of what I'd just heard.\n\nI turned away, unable to look at her while I wasn't being completely honest. As she jumped up beside me, part of me wished she would just go back to sleep.\n\nStop griping, you know you appreciate her company, now more than ever.\n\n\"It's called North Rim, the forest, that is,\" she said as she gazed out over the icy trees. \"It runs the width of the whole northern continent.\"\n\nI tried to stay focused. I'd seen enough social interactions amongst my family to know she wanted the company as much as I did.\n\nIt's not like I'm in a position to refuse, especially after my 'family' caused her so much distress.\n\nThe comforting sound of her voice seemed to chase away my fear just as much as mine did hers, and it wasn't long until I was unable to maintain my focus on the forest.\n\n\"Nightmares, yes,\" I finally admitted, letting my eyes slip towards her.\n\nHer expression was understanding and reassuring, saying nothing more she simply turned to the darkness and rested her head on the log.\n\nI glance over to the fire, still haunted by her story as I thought about what to say. When I first met her socialising was awkward, but now I felt interacting was impossible.\n\nShe managed to chase away my fear of the forest with simple, soothing words, how can my awkward babbling ever compare to that?\n\nI slowly collected myself. No, I'll tell her the truth, that's what I'll do!\n\nTurning around I did my best to adopt a completely different attitude.\n\nThe first thing I noticed was that her comforting smile was gone, however; and her eyes locked on the trees. I followed her gaze, my fear exploding when my eyes landed on the sight standing directly in front of us. Firelight coated the tall bulk of fur and muscle, while its sinister eyes glowed like white gems in a dark cave. Fire-lit plumes of breath steadily discharged from its nostrils, the exhaled steam collecting above a row of gruesome daggers visible through the large black ribbons of its raised lip.\n\n\"What in the creators' name is that?\" Risha whispered as she leaned back from the log.\n\n\"Wake the others,\" I instructed quietly, eyes refusing to peel away from the beast.\n\nIt stood motionless, before raising its head to let out a long, loud howl, accompanied by a steaming column of breath. My bones rattled for every second the bellowing din dragged on. Yet I held my position while it lowered its threatening eyes back to mine. I heard the others waking up, while my heartbeat so fast it felt like it would burst from my chest.\n\n\"What is that?\" I heard Ember ask.\n\n\"Quiet,\" Risha instructed.\n\nThe beast scanned each of them before returning its glaring eyes to me. This time I had nowhere to hide, and there was no guessing or anticipating what else could be crawling out of the forest. This time the threat was real and right in front of me.\n\nStretching out a huge paw, the beast stepped forward, smooth pebbles shifting under its weight. Its whole body followed, gracefully moving its ferocious jaw towards me. With no idea whether it could understand me, I growled a warning, bared my teeth and spread my wings, attempting to look intimidating. My efforts were futile, the beast showed no sign of withdrawing.\n\nInstead, it mimicked my aggressive actions with its own, displaying the full sight of its gnashing jaws. At that, I almost felt like I was melting into the pebbles.\n\nNo, I'm the only thing between this thing and the others. They're out here because of me, it's my duty to keep them safe.\n\nI stood my ground, every natural weapon I possessed ready to deploy. The closer the beast prowled, the more I realized I was less than half the size of the approaching wall of muscle and teeth.\n\nI was about to be mauled! I've been in similar situations before, against the wyverns and Thunder, and I'm still here.\n\nI guessed it was because they weren't intent on killing me, I also knew the feelings they'd summoned were real. Glowing eyes and blind rage that I could barely remember.\n\nPlease, if any of it's true, I could really do with that power right now.\n\nTaking in a deep breath, reclaiming what fear had stolen, I collected myself, stood tall on the log and thought... I hope this works.\n\nThe beast stopped its approach. Then something even stranger happened \u2013 it turned and moved away. I watched with suspicion as it moved out of sight.\n\nMaybe it knows something, does it know what I can do when I'm pushed?\n\n\"Blaze, where'd it go?\" Risha stammered, glancing around in a fluster.\n\nI was just about to assure her it was safe when our relief was short-lived.\n\nThe sound of heavy paws moving at speed snapped my attention back to the forest, to where I saw the monster approaching with gathering momentum. Its head held low, ears twitching and mouth open wide.\n\nBursting forward across the pebbles, it reached the log in one huge leap. I instinctively dropped down, hearing the thud above as its paws landed, the impact of its weight forcing the decomposing wood to crack and splinter. It cleared the fire, sending the flames into a whirl of sparks and embers.\n\n\"Where are the others?\" I demanded, staggering to my paws along with Risha.\n\n\"Ember!\" she called out.\n\nThe beast turned its head to face us, revealing the struggling orange dragoness pinned by her wing beneath its claws. The adrenalin spike coursing through me drove me to run, but I was forced down as something else jumped over the log. With a thud and a scattering of sand, a second beast landed in front of the fire, sending the flames into another frenzy. This time, there was no hesitation. The creature launched itself at me.\n\nI'd no time to think, instinctively leaping aside at the last second, the fearsome teeth of my attacker narrowly missing as they struck the log with a splintering crunch. I glanced over, filled with relief to see Risha had also jumped sideways to avoid the living battering ram.\n\nMy attention snapped back to the beast propelling itself forward, this time landing on me with all four legs, pinning me beneath its bulk. Its horrifying jaw was suspended directly over my head, saliva dribbling down in beady strings. Its bellowing breath held a gruesome concoction of foul stenches, and I slammed my eyes shut as fear overcame me.\n\nThis is it; I'm done.\n\nAt that moment everything seemed to come into focus. My eyes opened, I stretched out, using every ounce of my strength to push all four paws firmly into its underbelly. Caught completely by surprise, the beast flailed around uncontrollably as I shoved it into the fire. Engulfed by flames it yelped in pain, desperately trying to right itself as the fire consumed its body like a swarm of burning ants.\n\nI jumped to my paws, focusing on the beast holding Ember. Without thinking, I rushed to attack it, only for one of my hind legs to flood with pain. The weight of a dozen knives pressing into my flesh sank in as the limb was pulled out from under me. Even my rage-filled mind wasn't enough to repel the horror as I glanced back to see my blood-seeping rear leg trapped in the jaws of the fallen monster, having taken its final revenge from the blaze.\n\nBattling through the pain I shook my leg in a desperate attempt to break free, turning hopelessly to look at Ember struggling beneath her attacker. Another gust of wind disturbed the air and a loud crashing sound drew my attention.\n\nBy the spirits, it's another of those things! My mind screamed.\n\nWhen I glanced up, I saw something had smashed into the side of the monster's head, and with another whoosh a second projectile hammered at its skull. Blood oozed from the impact wounds, as its eyes centred in on its new attacker standing heroically on the log.\n\nBathed in the firelight, Boltock snarled and his eyes narrowed. Large pebbles from the beach collided in the air, compacting together into spinning boulders orbiting around him.\n\n\"Get off her!\" he declared, letting loose more of the whirling rocks.\n\nDistracted by his assault, Ember unleashed a torrent of flame upon her attacker. It jumped into the air, yelping in pain, before running down the beach like a living fireball and collapsing in a heap.\n\n\"By the creators! Blaze, your leg!\" Risha cried as she heaved the dead beast's jaws open.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I replied, biting back the agony with a wince. \"I don't need my legs to fly, that's what matters now.\"\n\nDamn, I'm starting to sound like Tarwin!\n\nShe immediately saw through my lie, quickly scanning my mauled limb. \"No, but you do need them to land, feather-brain!\"\n\nWith my scales dripping with crimson, it was clear she knew far more about healing than I did, and her expression did not bode well.\n\nMeanwhile, discordant sounds filled the forest as two more monsters crashed out from the darkness, quickly passing the burning carcass of their fallen fellow.\n\n\"We need to go!\" I ordered, opening my wings, before assuring, \"Risha, you can look everyone over when we're somewhere safe!\"\n\nThere was no argument from anyone, and I began flapping hard, the pain in my leg pulsing with every beat.\n\nThe leathery membranes caught on the light breeze and swiftly lifted me away from the massacre, the others quickly following. In the distance, the faint, red light of dawn sliced over the horizon, its bright-orange glow gushing through the trees like a great flood of fire.\n\nIf only it could chase all the darkness away. I thought, watching our new attackers sprinting towards our vacated position, only to slip on scattering pebbles while futilely snapping their jaws.\n\nThe urgency of our transition from the warm fire to bitterly cold morning air was a shock at first, though the sensation was soon overpowered by the burning pain in my leg. I tried to steer my eyes away, even so, I could clearly see the limp, blood-stained limb dangling in the freezing air.\n\nNo, right now that's not important. Risha can help when we're all safe. Just make sure we all stay safe!\n\nI surveyed the group, trying to maintain my role as leader. They were all shaken, particularly Ember, but thankfully the only major physical injury was my leg.\n\nIf anything happened to any of them, I had no idea what I might do.\n\nFaint as it may be relief slowly crept into my mind amidst the pain and shock. We swerved north towards the snowy mountain peaks, while I did my best not to think about my wounds. I'd learned from horrific experience back in the village what could become of injuries of its like, and it wasn't pretty. If it was consumed by infection, then I'd fail Tarwin and my friends.\n\nNo, don't think like that! Risha knows what she's doing. She'll heal it, then I can save Tarwin.\n\nMy growing relief was unexpectedly shattered by an ear-piercing screech, followed by a strong gust of wind, which sent me spinning out of control. Each frantic attempt to right myself induced a surge of pain through my injured limb. I recovered just in time to witness a large shape disappear into the forest.\n\n\"What in the spirits' name was that?\" I asked, looking back at the others.\n\nOne, two, three... there's no three, Boltock! Where the green dragon had once flown was now just open air. My stomach churned, twisting with dread as my mind raced.\n\nRisha was first to react, plummeting downward just as fast as whatever had snatched her brother. I locked on to her position, following without thinking, diving at tremendous speed with little care for my injury.\n\nAfter a few moments of intense flight, my body started to betray me. I frantically tried to focus, but my strength leeched away, every rapid wing beat sent burning pain through me and each jolt released blood to the wind. Sucking in more air than my nostrils could take, I gritted my teeth so hard it felt as though my jaw might crack.\n\nIt wasn't long before I passed over the spot where Risha had landed, and I attempted to set down. An unbroken layer of snow lay in a perfect sheet over the ground, Ember landed first, the crisp sheet crunching under her paws as she dashed over to her sapphire friend. Landing clumsily, I noticed what Risha was focused on; a large rock that broke the tree line, its dull grey surface partially stained with blood-tainted snow.\n\nI pulled my leg up against my underside, blocking out the pain and limped over to her.\n\n\"What is it?\" Ember and I asked in panicked tones, the fiery dragoness placing a paw on Risha's shoulder.\n\nShe gave no response, remaining motionless while her rage-filled eyes probed the forest beyond the rock. My eyes followed to where they met another nightmare \u2013 not that of my dreams, but the one thing that had started this all, a wyvern.\n\nThe sight of the winged horror standing menacingly on its rocky throne ignited a raging storm of emotion deep inside me. It wasn't the beast that terrified me, however; it was who was hanging limply from its jaw. Boltock's wing was clamped between its fangs. Risha jumped forward and I reacted before even considering the consequences, stretching out a wing to block her path.\n\n\"Wait, it could kill him before we can make a move.\" She halted, fixing me with a glare more terrifying than any monster.\n\nI cautiously stepped forward. It must be after me, what other reason does it have to come back?\n\nMoreover, if my sacrifice meant the survival of those who willingly followed me into this nightmare, then so be it.\n\n\"What do you want?\" I demanded, stopping just a few steps in front of Risha.\n\nIt felt stupid to even ask such a question, assuming it could speak in the first place. The spiny frills on the back of its skull rattled as its long neck uncoiled, raising its head high. I lurched forward as its jaw opened, tossing Boltock's limp body in front of his sister. She lost all focus on the wyvern as she dove to her brother's aid.\n\nMeanwhile, the monster did nothing but sit baring its teeth in a jaw lined with the gruesome sheen of crimson saliva. As if to make a point, the creature turned its head to the side, revealing a more frightful vision. All that remained of one of its eyes was a mangled, blood-stained socket.\n\nRage boiled inside me. This wasn't just any monster and even with my injured leg, I was ready to lash out.\n\nIt's thinking, assessing, it knows what will make me break. With that in mind I contained my fury. It's a game, it wants me to attack.\n\n\"Blaze!\" I turned, expecting to see Risha, yet her focus was completely on her brother.\n\nEmber moved up next to me, her wary eyes cast out to the trees. \"I really hope you can pull off another move like you did back in training, because we're gonna need it.\"\n\nIt took a moment for me to realise she was the one addressing me. Her voice was stern, like Pyro's, as she assessed the situation with military precision. It was only when I looked to where her eyes scoured the trees that I realised our peril.\n\nEmerging from the gloom were more of the wolf-beasts, prowling like shadowy ghosts. All holding their position at the edge of the tree line. I stood motionless, looking back to the wyvern on its rocky perch, sitting like an executioner ready to give the final order.\n\nOne of our group down and another focused on keeping him alive, we were outnumbered by the lethal killing machines \u2013 I counted at least twelve. They maintained their position, seconds dripping by like the slow patter from the tip of a melting icicle.\n\nWhat are they waiting for? They have us outnumbered, why hesitate?\n\nOne last wolf-beast prowled out to stand on the rock beside the wyvern. It was larger and more powerful than the others.\n\nKnow your enemy. I thought, as Tarwin had taught me.\n\nThree distinct scars flanked its side and around its neck hung a metal collar. It's the beast from the forest, must be the pack leader?\n\nRaising its head in the air, the alpha released a deafening howl, its subordinates simultaneously mimicking. The sound thundered in my ears, penetrating the forest and the mountains beyond, bouncing from every surface as if none wished to hold on to it.\n\n\"By all the fires, there's nothing they teach at the academy that prepares you for that,\" Ember muttered, shaking her head.\n\nMeanwhile, the monsters returned their sinister stares to our small huddle, and the lesser beasts started a slow, menacing advance.\n\nThe pain in my leg grew with every movement, shoving it to the back of my mind I backed up to Risha, forcing myself between her, Boltock, and as many of the beasts as I could. Meanwhile, the lead-beast leapt from the rock to join the mob, while the wyvern remained still, like a reaper overseeing the slaughter with diabolical pleasure.\n\nThis is it, there's nothing more I can do.\n\nThe greatest blow came from knowing that I'd led my friends to this, and that blow did more than rip through flesh or shatter bones \u2013 it devastated my soul.\n\nThat all changed when, like thunder, an explosion of flapping wings followed by an eagle-like screech penetrated the air. I glanced up to see what appeared to be a dark bolt of lightning fly overhead. Whatever the projectile was smashed into the wyvern's head, and all attention turned towards the flailing monster frantically shaking off its surprise attacker. The mysterious assailant was a new creature, its identity unfathomable, more so because all I could see were the wyvern's frantic movements.\n\nSeveral of the wolf-beasts broke ranks, charging back to aid their winged master, creating holes in their formation. Exploiting the weak points, more of the mysterious attackers began to plummet from the sky, and with their attack in disarray, the wolf-beasts broke into a charge. One sprang from the pack toward me, I ducked and its momentum took it over my head. I turned to see it crash into the snow, sprawled out on the ground it was immediately enveloped by flames as Ember clawed at its head with her fiery talons.\n\nTo my left, another beast broke rank and I ducked again. Yet this one was far enough away to counter my defensive manoeuvring. I cowered, half-closing my eyes, when the charging beast was struck down by an equally large creature. My mysterious saviour collided with the monster's flank, pressing its furry bulk into the snow with a pair of fearsome talons. The wolf-beast snapped angrily, flailing and kicking; however, the new creature was more than powerful enough to keep it immobilised.\n\nScanning the conflict, I tried to identify our elusive saviours. My efforts were squashed as a scream sounded out from the maelstrom. I glanced over to see Risha standing defensively over her brother's injured body, furiously fending off another wolf-beast. Without a second thought, I rushed over as fast as my injury would allow, my nauseous pain doubling as the force of a wolf-beast barging past knocked me to the ground.\n\nWith my face pressed to the snow, I gave several spluttered coughs as I stumbled to my quivering paws. Through my growing daze I could see Risha standing fearlessly against a beast poised to strike, razor-sharp fangs ready to bear down against her. She didn't fight back, at least not in the way I would have done; she retaliated without the use of claws or teeth, standing motionless with her mind completely focussed.\n\nIn the blink of an eye the air next to her began to warp and spin as tiny droplets of water materialised into a swirling shaft of liquid. As it collected, the water solidified to become a steaming spear of razor-sharp ice.\n\nHer attention remained unbroken as the spear mercilessly obeyed her mental command, thrusting up through the underside of the beast's jaw, effortlessly piercing its skull and bursting out through the back of its head. I skidded to a halt as she withdrew the blade from the first beast and swung it round to slash the legs of another with a simple flick of her head. She fought with the grace and majesty of legend, like a true dragon.\n\nWhat do I have? Pathetic teeth, claws and a leg that's about ready to fall off. Glancing back at the bloody limb, I staggered in the mud. How can I keep denying that I'm not like them? If I am, then I must have something, like the Elders told me I should?\n\nAt that moment, I was ready to fall into the muddy squalor, to leave this nightmare. At least until I looked back and saw another wolf-beast prowling up behind Risha.\n\nThere wasn't a moment of hesitation, through all the stomach-churning pain, I launched myself into its flank, taking it by surprise and instantly digging my claws into its mangy hide. It gave a stunned yelp as I clawed my way to the top of its head and sank my claws into the thin coat of taught flesh stretched over its skull. Blood seeped through the open wounds, pouring in streams across its face.\n\n\"Try tasting your own blood!\" I shouted, as my fury reached boiling point. \"See how you like it!\"\n\nTaking in another deep breath I gritted my teeth and held on while the beast yelped and violently shook its head, before breaking into a blind charge towards Risha.\n\nNo! My mind screamed, as I thrust my claws in harder, dragging them through the creature's hide in a futile effort to steer it away.\n\nThe pain in my flank reached a searing crescendo as reason, control and even consciousness seemed to burn away. Steam began to hiss from my claws, but it was as though the moment was as far away from me as the stars.\n\nThe boiling grew hotter, the smell of burning flesh crept into my nostrils and I swore I felt the beast's burning skull begin to crack. My talons turned into blazing spears as fury pulsated around my body like a primal fire. Instinct drove me to rear my head, coil my neck and open my mouth. My lungs burned like hot coals, the beating of my heart fuelling the fire like a forge's bellows, flames building until a burning energy surged from deep inside and filled my throat.\n\nI took in one more breath before exhaling a blast of blinding-white energy, instantly vaporizing the beast's skull. My scales felt like they were on fire, a feeling of all-consuming power scorching away any pain as what remained of the destroyed animal swayed beneath me.\n\nFinally, the headless body slumped, throwing me off. As soon as I hit the ground the unbelievable power abandoned me, leaving me exhausted and gasping like a beached salmon.\n\nWhat did I just do? I can't have... Even if I did, no fire is that powerful!\n\nI tried to raise myself to my paws, staggering backward before they gave out under me.\n\nWhat did I do? I inwardly repeated as I looked at the steam rising from my bloody foreclaws.\n\nIt was my enemy! I destroyed it because it was going to destroy me! I dared not even lift my forepaw to my own face. Such power and... And... I just killed it without so much as a thought!\n\nNo! Stop it! It was that thing or you. You did it to keep your friend safe!\n\nRelief flooded in to extinguish my concern when I turned to see Risha standing over her brother's body, Ember by her side. Beyond, a hoard of frightened eyes stared at me, until a loud howl echoed over the silent battlefield and as one the beasts turned and scampered back into the forest.\n\nThey're running? From what? I slumped to the charred mud. From me?\n\nDead bodies littered the clearing, some smoking and singed, others pierced and oozing blood. I'd heard Tarwin's father say the sight of battle could drive a person to madness, and now I believed it.\n\nDragging my head up I turned away from the massacre, slowly rising to my paws, and my injured leg's torment gradually returned.\n\nFinally, my eyes fell upon one final monster, perched on its rock, its head shredded, clawed, and leaking oily black blood. The wyvern was different, it was far more intelligent than the wingless beasts, no fear lay within its glaring eye. Fixing me with an envious glare it released a ferocious roar before its huge, leathery wings spread wide and with one powerful flap it lifted into the air. The departure left only one thought: this retreat isn't going to last.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" I asked, mustering enough energy to speak as I approached the others.\n\nRisha tended to her brother religiously, Ember observing with concern. The fiery-orange dragoness was the one to assure me that both she and Risha were fine; the same could not be said for Boltock.\n\nThe sight of his injuries resurrected the guilt-ridden twist in my gut. He was still breathing but was also out cold.\n\nThat may be a mercy for now. I concluded.\n\nHis wing was shredded, the middle membrane torn to ribbons and the fragile bones seemingly shattered. I crouched down beside Risha as she directed her magic into holding a watery bandage to his wounds. Before I could speak, however, a shadow loomed over us and I glanced up to find myself staring into a pair of piercing, avian eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Storm Peak",
                "text": "It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, standing twice my height with the lean bulk to match. At first glance it looked like a giant eagle, with yellow, bird-like eyes peering around a powerful beak. A layer of thick brown feathers covered its body, while two wolf-like ears and a crown of white plumage marked its head. A pair of scaly-black feet, each with three forward and one backward-facing toe, supported its body.\n\nMy first view of the creature was confusing enough, and as I looked further, I became even more baffled. The coat of feathers, in fact; its entire bird-like appearance, stopped halfway along its body, beneath two large wings. A hide of golden fur covered the rear half, stretching all the way down to a pair of feline hind legs. Finally, a long tail extended from its rear, tipped by a small tuft of black fur. It was a weird concoction of a bird and, well, something else. The strange smells I'd noticed before the first attack now made sense.\n\nDespite their sudden intervention and seemingly peaceful attitude, my first instinct was not to trust them.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" the clearly male creature questioned, his stern, authoritative voice immediately confirming we could understand one another.\n\nI was surprised he spoke at all. The shock of being able to communicate with my own kind was significant enough, but now I didn't even know what I was about to talk to.\n\nThey just saved us, but I don't know why \u2013 their reasons may not be in our best interests? But if they're out to hurt us surely they'd have already tried by now?\n\nAs much as I disliked having only one option, I was going to have to take a chance.\n\n\"Yes, mostly,\" I replied, hiding my injured leg.\n\nI can't let them see I'm injured. If they're not scared like the wolf-beast, they may think I'm weak and easy prey.\n\nUnfortunately, my efforts were in vain, there was no hiding from the stranger's sharp eyes. He turned his head, peering around my side like a curious seagull before giving an odd huff.\n\nA moment later I watched as he marched through the snow towards another of his kind. This one looked slightly different. He was taller, with more bulk. His front feathers were grey and most of his thick chest plumage was covered by a large metal plate combined with two clawed gauntlets around his front talons. An open-face helmet covered his head, exposing his eyes, beak, and ears.\n\nTheir armour is like some of the dragon guards I saw back at the temple. I surmised, silently judging my new comrade while constantly searching for any reason to suggest they weren't on our side.\n\nOne obvious observation was that the armoured creature had authority over the others, leading me to assume that they must be soldiers. The thought of more creatures behaving in a militaristic way was strange. Despite seeing similar behaviour depicted in the temple murals, witnessing it for real only served to increase my concern that this world was far larger and stranger than I'd imagined.\n\nFor a moment I recalled imagining myself living the life which I'd always dreamt of, with my own kind. Only now I didn't even recognise the picture. This vast world was so full of fantastic things, their influence forcing me to change and in that moment of rage, I'd felt like I could destroy everything.\n\nI recalled what the Elders told me: 'not once has a dragon like you been recorded'.\n\nI could no longer deny that I was unique because of more than just my scales. Even so, in my rapidly expanding world, I continued to feel out of place.\n\nIs the whole world out to fear me? I wondered, the image of the wary wolf-beasts firmly in mind.\n\nI tried to reassure myself I had friends and a whole city of dragons that didn't fear me, and from what I could tell neither did the creatures who'd just saved us.\n\nThat's right, they're my friends. No matter what happens. I glanced over to the others. Let's make sure I can keep them.\n\nEmber and Risha were still beside me, while Boltock lay motionless on the ground. He appeared to be having difficulty breathing and a coat of deep crimson ran from his mauled wing. The wound was barely visible through a distorted layer of water which Risha had suspended against him, just as she had done for me. Her concentration was unbreakable, her eyes locked tight, blocking out every other aspect of the world.\n\nAnother shadow fell over us and I turned to find myself staring at another of the mysterious creatures. This one had a distinctive, almost regal appearance, far sleeker than their fellows.\n\nShe must be female? I observed, noting her slightly smaller stature and less flamboyant plumage.\n\nWhite feathers covered her body and she appeared to have some sort of satchel strapped to her back. Without a word she knelt in front of Boltock, scanning his limp body with a pair of sky-blue eyes.\n\n\"We're going to have to get this one back to Storm Peak,\" she announced, glancing over at what I'd assumed was the lead creature.\n\nHe nodded and quickly marched to advise his troops, while the female at Boltock's side looked at Risha.\n\n\"You're doing a great job there,\" she commented in a voice as smooth as a gentle summer breeze. \"But if we don't get the help he needs, he may not make it,\" she added.\n\nRisha remained focused on her brother while Ember glanced up, pausing for a moment before gingerly placing her wing over Risha's back.\n\n\"Risha?\" she whispered close to her friend's ear, \"I know you promised him, but you don't have to do this on your own.\"\n\nRisha slowly opened her eyes, relinquishing her intense focus, allowing the blood-stained water to pour away into the grass. Her eyes fluttered, freeing the last of her tears as she glanced at the mysterious creature.\n\nIt's as if she knows what they are. I thought.\n\nThe look she gave said as much and was enough to alter my initial impression; however, Ember maintained a more accepting demeanour.\n\n\"You better know what you're doing, featherwing,\" the fiery dragoness demanded.\n\nThe white creature gave a nod of reassurance; however, her kind actions were still challenged.\n\n\"By the creators, if anything happens to him!\" Risha snapped as she took a step back.\n\n\"He'll be safe,\" the featherwing assured. \"You have my word.\"\n\nEven so, Risha turned away with a huff, almost walking into me. I dreaded her reaction, but to my surprise her aggression subsided, to be replaced with a strangely passive attitude as she glanced my way.\n\n\"Sorry, I didn't see you there.\" Her words broke into weak fragments as she sniffed.\n\nI attempted to hide my injury, she didn't need anyone else to worry about; and I didn't deserve her concern. Meanwhile she gave a weak snort before walking by and leaving me to stare into space.\n\n\"She'll be okay,\" Ember whispered, walking up beside me. \"She's always been very protective of him.\"\n\n\"I know, she's got every reason to be,\" I replied.\n\nEmber appeared confused for a moment, before nodding in understanding. The sound of more voices caught my attention, and I tried to correct my slouched form to match Ember's formal pose at the sight of the group leader peering down at me.\n\n\"So, you're the one?\" he asked, blatantly glancing over at the fallen beast with the disintegrated head.\n\nWhat does he mean 'the one'? In my mind's turmoil I managed to form the connection between the words of the Elders and the lead-creature.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked curiously, doing my best not to look pathetic.\n\nHe opened his beak to speak when a sound bellowed from deep within the forest. A now familiar howl.\n\n\"Ghauls! Get everyone airborne now!\" the lead-creature barked, and his companions swiftly prepared for take-off.\n\n\"No time to explain,\" he continued, before rushing off to issue commands.\n\nThe pale creature already had Boltock strapped to her back, and one by one they began to take off, rising quickly on an updraft. Ember followed, leaving only Risha and I sitting in the snow-covered grass.\n\n\"We have to go,\" I suggested, softly nudging her with my wing. \"He needs you.\"\n\nShe gave me one last glance before rushing past and up into the air. I sat in stunned silence for a moment, looking down at the battlefield.\n\nWhat did I do here? Surely, I didn't actually breathe fire or use magic like they do?\n\nSnapping myself from my trance I caught the next updraft. Flapping my wings hard, I launched myself to join the others, while the clearing, the death and smouldering bodies gradually disappeared behind us."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "The forest that had seemed endless yesterday, surrendered to a much greater set of natural monuments. The mountains rose from the trees' grip like a mighty fortress, sheer faces dotted with ridges and outcrops that offered no place for vegetation to grow. Our altitude gradually increased, the air growing thinner as I focused all my attention on flying. Looking ahead, I could see we needed to gain more height as the mountains stretched their snow-covered peaks higher into the sky, like knives cutting through the clouds.\n\nThe armoured among the group of six creatures led the way and it was clear that my friends had mixed feelings about our new allies.\n\nFeatherwings, that's what Ember called them? I recalled, glancing at my own wing and the obvious differences.\n\nMy friends obviously know more about them than I do, so I'll leave my opinion to their judgment.\n\nSwooping up beside the mountain slopes the air grew colder as our airspace gradually narrowed between steep cliffs. The rising slopes dictated our path into an enormous valley overlooked by two towering peaks. Pine trees climbed the rocky inclines, reaching up from a shimmering river snaking its way along the valley floor, abandoning their advance halfway up the slope to the barren, snow-covered rocks reaching down from the freezing summits.\n\nThe air grew more hostile, made all the worse by a strong wind funnelled between the mountains. As much as I disliked it, I was thankful for how the chill numbed the pain in my leg.\n\nMy greatest concern now, was Boltock. From what I'd seen of his injuries, he was in a bad way, and I couldn't help blame myself for it. I'd failed to explain the risks, I should have just told them all sooner and maybe they would have decided to go home.\n\nDespite my lack of trust for these featherwings, I had a faint glimmer of hope that they might be able to help. The way the white-feathered creature had spoken encouraged my desire to trust them, though the words of her leader filled me with less optimism.\n\n'So, you're the one', the statement flashed through my mind, combined with how he'd looked at me.\n\nMaybe it's worth giving them a chance, just to hear what they have to say?\n\nI'd wanted the same thing from the dragons. I'd been willing to wait while Tarwin was out there, only to be disappointed by what they told me. The thought of more delay made me shudder, but I had to try and find the truth.\n\nI need to know what I felt when I killed that beast. I thought, looking at one of my forepaws.\n\nRounding a ridge moments later, a blinding light burst out from the edge of the rock face, forcing my eyes shut. I flew blind for a moment as they adjusted to the brightness, eventually opening to see the rising sun projecting an explosion of light over the horizon at the far end of the valley. Another river meandered below, steep mountain slopes reaching high on either side. An immense column of rock extended up from the cliff face to my left, casting a shadow across the land like a great talon clawing for the sky. It looked out of place, and for a moment I thought it was an illusion brought on by blood loss or exposure.\n\nSitting on top of the pillar was some sort of wooden structure, unlike anything I'd ever seen. At its perimeter it adopted the same shape as the top of the pillar upon which it sat. It had four openings placed symmetrically around the cylindrical walls and a circular roof covered by a central tower. Four smaller towers, similar in design, extended up from the top of the lower structure, rising until they reached the height of the central mass.\n\nOur small group uniformly corrected course towards what looked like some kind of bridge held up by several pieces of rope hanging down from the main building. It connected smaller wooden structures to a vast sprawl of buildings adorning the face of the steep mountainside. The rest of the city appeared to boast the same rounded design, clinging defiantly to the sheer rock like nesting seabirds.\n\nAs we closed in, several featherwings broke off and headed towards the city. Meanwhile, I continued with the others, following the lead-creature along with the one carrying Boltock. We headed towards the central tower of the pillar-top keep. Passing close to the city I glanced over the sprawling expanse, noting how it resembled the dragon city, the main differences being the wooden construction and the criss-crossing bridges tying it all together.\n\nJust like back in Dardien, I was awestruck by the majesty of their architecture. It was more like that which I knew, constructed by hard work and toil rather than elemental magic. I knew Tarwin would certainly respect the craftsmanship here.\n\nCan they tell me where I come from? Do they know anything else about our attackers or these 'troubled times' the Elders spoke of?\n\nI found myself listing more questions as my newfound respect for the featherwings grew. Yet despite my personal desires, my immediate priority was Boltock.\n\nRisha needs him way more than I need answers. I reminded myself.\n\nThe heavy clatter of metal-clad talons marked the lead-creature's landing as he came to settle on a rounded wooden platform extending out from the tower. The white featherwing landed more carefully, Risha's eyes following her every move. Ember and I remained in the air as two more of them flew past, gently flapping their wings until they reached the platform. Ember was next and I followed close behind, crashing with a dull thud as the sudden force sent a spike of twisting pain up my leg.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" the fire dragoness called, running over to support me.\n\n\"Fine,\" I muttered, trying my best not to yelp.\n\n\"You don't look fine,\" she declared sternly, quickly putting her wing beneath mine, lifting me to my paws.\n\n\"Get them both to the healing chamber,\" the lead-creature ordered with a glance to his companion, before withdrawing into the keep.\n\n\"Follow me,\" she calmly instructed as she made her way into the tower.\n\nRisha needed no encouragement, she was stuck to her brother's nurse like glue. I looked over at Ember and tried to take a step.\n\n\"You're not going to be able to walk on your own, so don't even try,\" she declared, holding and leading me forward.\n\nGuess she is the one with the most training. Which puts me in the best paws.\n\nOn either side of the circular platform lay two staircases leading down into the bowels of the structure, the tempting warmth of a flickering glow rising from within. The white creature proceeded down one of them, while the other featherwings used the opposite.\n\nMoving on, I found the internal walls of the keep were smooth and shiny, unlike the hard, weather-worn exterior. Steps ran around the circumference of the rounded chamber; their design couldn't have been worse for me. Each was formed from an individual log extending out from the wall just within a young dragon's leg reach of the next.\n\nI took a deep breath; the pain of every step more excruciating than the last. Even so, the invitation of a warm orange glow originating from a stone brazier at the base of the staircase encouraged my progress.\n\nI'd rather be wounded and warm, than dying out in the cold.\n\nI could feel myself slipping away into a creeping unconsciousness. If it hadn't been for Ember, I'd have certainly collapsed by the time we reached the bottom of the tower.\n\nThe floor appeared to be made of a smooth wood, the growth rings of the original tree still visible in the flickering light. While the branches had been replaced by torch fastenings. Either side of us passageways led off in opposite directions. Our carer quickly moved to the left, and as Ember and I followed, a sudden burst of cold stole what warmth I'd accumulated. Save for a wooden rail and several supporting columns, the passageway was exposed to the cold, mountainous skies.\n\nTorches set into the wall danced in the wind, spreading their glow across the corridor. At first glance the wood around them appeared barren, though squinting through my limited vision I found it was anything but. A vast array of murals covered the surface, each one telling a story, just like the walls back in the Elders' temple.\n\nMost of the depictions were beyond my understanding, I vaguely recognised some images portraying similar beasts to the featherwings. The first showed them weary and beaten, crossing what looked like flaming rivers surrounded by forests and mountains of fire. Peering down like a tyrant was a strange creature of jagged stone and coiling tentacles, its many eyes glowing bright red. The whole scene was straddled by a strange collection of magnificent golden buildings. Each a unique combination of tall shapes sitting on top of clouds suspended by sunbeams.\n\nMore of the feathered beasts descended from the celestial city, bringing golden talons to bear upon the stone monster looming over their battered brethren. Further along, the heavenly sky faded, and the world depicted below the clouds showed feathered beasts flying over natural mountains, until a sequence of paintings illustrated the unmistakable image of the wooden keep in which we now stood. Sitting on top of its rocky pedestal, lit from behind by a vast red sun like a king upon a towering throne.\n\nThe pictures went on to depict the story of the Guardian War; however, unlike those in the draconic temple, there were fewer dragons. One lone featherwing with a coat as dark as charcoal sat defiantly on top of a solitary mountain, skulls littering the steep sides as crimson fire coated his talons.\n\nTheir guardian? I presumed, making the connection between the mural and the Elders story.\n\nThen I recalled something else the aged dragons had said: The dragons had allies back then.\n\nAs far as I could gather these creatures were among the nine races of which they'd spoken: 'Nine guardians, one from each race'. Not only that, but from these murals it was clear there were more races in the world, more than nine, at least.\n\nI glanced at the creature ahead of us. Her kind fought alongside dragons centuries ago. The alliance must have dissolved like the Elders said.\n\n\"Ember?\" I whispered, struggling more than I was expecting.\n\n\"Yeah?\" she replied, with a look of concern.\n\n\"What are these things?\" I gestured to the creature disappearing into another opening.\n\n\"They're called griffins. Aside from trade, they usually stick to North Rim, so we seldom see them. This must be Storm Peak, the city of the Northern Sun they used to tell us about as hatchlings,\" she answered, glancing around to study the place.\n\nHer attitude towards them was comforting, and I quickly turned my attention back to the wall, observing what remained of the painting before it ended. Repetitive images depicting more battles, all of which must have taken place during the war the Elders referred to, or in the many troubled decades since. One image, at the far end of the wall, stood out. It was a battle like all the others, yet it was what sat above it that caught my attention. Initially it appeared out of place, but while I scoured the painting, I felt a strange sensation, it was almost as though I should recognise it.\n\nIt took me a short while to recall as my mind was slowly taken back to the seal on the temple's golden door. The same mural of four armoured dragons sat around a sphere was depicted on the griffin wall. Unlike the image in Dardien, two four-pointed stars sat in the centre of the smoke-laden sky above them. One was a combination of warm colours, its bright-white centre slowly fading to orange and finally red at the tip of each point. The other star was more sinister, a black core barely distinguishable, slowly fading into a twilight purple, with the lightest colours at its very edge.\n\nAnother gust of wind swept through the corridor, sending the torch-fire into frantic quivers. The abrupt rush of cold against my scales broke me from my trance as we retreated down into the loving warmth after the griffiness. The welcome relief was shattered by the sight of more wooden stairs, and even with Ember's help they inevitably brought out the worst of my injury.\n\nMy closed eyes weren't enough to defend against each pulse of burning pain. I gritted my teeth, trying to block out the agony, until at last my paws touched solid stone. Ember stopped beside me, and I opened my eyes, trying to focus on the new surroundings in an effort to distract myself from the pain and foul knots in my stomach. We were in a new chamber, rock replacing the wooden walls, suggesting we were inside the stone pillar that Storm Peak's keep sat upon.\n\nThe warm glow from another brazier lapped the smooth walls and the scent of herbs reminded me of summer back home. Three rectangular rocks sat against the far wall, all of which were about my height and covered by a fine layer of moss. Across from the beds, positioned around the brazier, was a circular stone table. It was much lower, standing at the height of my chest and was covered in sets of bowls, glass jars and metal utensils. I turned to Risha, who had followed the griffiness over to one of the beds, the featherwing using her beak to uncouple the leather straps of her precious cargo. Each belt slowly slid down her back as she carefully stretched out her wing and tilted her body, allowing Boltock to gently slide onto the soft moss.\n\nRisha's attention was instantly set on him, while, unencumbered by the dragon on her back, the griffiness moved briskly over to the table, where she started to rummage before emerging with a glass bottle filled with a strange liquid. Along with a white cloth, she returned to her patient, instantly putting her new equipment to use.\n\nI watched Risha lower her head to her brother's limp body, the sadness clear to see in the shimmering tears forming at the rims of her eyes. Through the veil of water, she quietly whispered something to him. I looked away, shivering like a child as my next haggard breath escaped as no more than a whimper.\n\nEmber appeared to control her empathy far better than I did. I felt her nudge my side, forcing me back up straight, looking right at me while I tried to avoid her gaze.\n\n\"We should probably get you onto one of those beds,\" she proposed, waving her free wing over to one of the empty stone rectangles.\n\nI nodded and with her help slowly stumbled over. Realising I hadn't thought about how I'd climb up, the simple jump now looked far more daunting. I glanced down at the ruptured scales and flesh of my mangled leg \u2013 darkening brown covering pure white.\n\nEmber looked at it like she'd seen things of its like before and with more of her assistance I lifted myself up onto the mossy sheet, leaving my injured leg hanging limply over the side. Ember cocked her head as she inspected it with an unsure grumble, before gently nudging it onto the moss.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I muttered, holding off a wince as she withdrew her snout from my wounded limb.\n\n\"Don't mention it.\" She continued to look at me, clearly expecting something else, but my face just became a mask of confusion.\n\n\"Do you want me to stay here?\" she asked, a perplexed look on her face.\n\nMy eyes widened as her offer only served to make my guilt surge harder.\n\n\"N\u2013no, no. It's\u2026 okay, I'll be fine,\" I mumbled, putting on my best tough face.\n\nHer look turned sympathetic. \"You're sure? You don't have to sit here alone.\"\n\nI gave a weak nod, gesturing over to the others. \"That's where you should be, they need you more.\"\n\nShe paused for a moment, taking one final look at my leg. \"Okay, call me if you need anything.\" I nodded as she moved toward the siblings.\n\nI sighed, the weary exertion swiftly becoming a cough. I gained this wound trying to get to her, but I failed. Boltock is the one who really saved her, not me.\n\nI closed my eyes and in the darkness my guilt grew stronger, feeding like a leech on the continually taunting thoughts spinning around my mind.\n\nMy entire existence was a quandary, if only I'd listened to all those warnings. If only I'd known the truth, we would all be safe. I placed a trembling paw over my sealed eyes, wishing I could rip the thoughts from my mind. This was a new kind of pain, more unpleasant than reality, and all I wished was that it would just disappear."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "I found myself in darkness. Heavy rain fell from the starless sky and a cold wind chilled the air. The water-soaked ground created a lake of thick mud, crossed by torrents of gushing, crimson-stained ichors. A bright flash of lightning briefly revealed storm clouds, swiftly followed by a loud roar of thunder. Glancing around, I found nothing familiar about the place. I trudged forward, fighting the muddy clamp around my paws as one of my hind legs slipped deeper. Lightning lanced across the sky, and I stopped.\n\nThrough the slanted rain I could see a dark, wet shape coated in mud sinking down into the bloody torrent. It shifted and I tried to pull back, but the mire secured my movements. Sagging like melted wax it loomed up in front of me, a dreadful grinding sound produced by each of its rotten, muddy limbs as it turned to reveal eyes and mouth alight with a sinister green flame.\n\n\"See what you've done!\" A distant voice echoed through the storm.\n\nI tried to shout out, to scream, to do anything, but it was futile. I felt like a stranger in my own scales, my body alien and horrifyingly distant.\n\n\"How many more will die?\"\n\nThe dark entity spoke again as it slumped forward. I thrashed around, frantically trying to release the mud's grip on my legs, but it was as if the squalor was fusing to my scales.\n\n\"You're no better than them: you kill, only to go on killing!\"\n\nI flapped my wings, trying harder to pull myself away. The ground began to shift around me, while bubbles escaped from beneath the crimson river, chunks of dirt forcing themselves up into the storm only to melt away in the deluge.\n\n\"You will never be like them; you will kill them.\" The voice continued as the rotten corpses of humans and dragons erupted from beneath the earth.\n\nThe putrid stench of decay seared my nostrils as the foul bodies reanimated, their mouths and eyes bulging with the same baleful fire.\n\nI stumbled, eventually freeing myself from the mud's grip, only to see more green fire spark from my legs. I looked back in horror to see four white stumps fused with the cursed earth, embers of balefire streaming from my joints in place of blood. I couldn't move away from the claws and talons rising from the ground like grasping hooks, dragging me deeper. I could hear more of the lifeless bodies stumbling towards me, hundreds upon hundreds.\n\nGo, defend yourself!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The world exploded in a blinding light when I was launched screaming into consciousness. Blurred images spun in my head and my horrified eyes shot straight to my paws.\n\n\"Still there... still there,\" I panted, pressing each of the limbs into the moss under me. \"They're still there.\"\n\nIt took me a few moments to realise I was still in the griffin cave, not some stormy nightmare. I lowered my head, pressing it against the moss as a haggard breath slipped from my nostrils. My mouth felt dry, filled with an awful acidic taste, while my scales ached like they were crawling with biting ants.\n\nI coughed again, trying to clear my throat as my blurred vision scoured the chamber, it looked exactly the same. I couldn't bring myself to look in Boltock's direction, in fact, I didn't have the strength to turn that far. Instead, I glanced at my wounded leg to see my mauled limb was wrapped in white cloth, stained in some places by small sanguine patches. It felt better, though I hadn't done anything to stimulate a painful response, nor did I care to try.\n\nA noise from the other side of the room drew my attention and I partially closed my eyes to create the illusion of sleep. Leaving myself just enough space to peek, I saw Boltock laying on the stone table. Through my hazy vision I could make out the rise and fall of his chest as he took in a breath, my heart flooding with relief. I redirected my attention down to the base of the bed to see Risha curled up in a tight ball. I was struck with a stark reminder of her tragic past as I refused to let myself feel glad that my mistake hadn't cost her the only family she had left.\n\nShe was so still, the gentle rise and fall of her chest the only giveaway that she was any more alive than her brother. Whatever trust she had in me would undoubtedly be gone, and I couldn't deny that I deserved it.\n\nShe's been so kind to me and what did I do? Almost get her brother killed before I tell her the truth.\n\nI turned away; the only other movement came from the flickering fire within the stone brazier. All I could do was lie there, as time dragged on, waiting for someone else to enter.\n\nBoredom soon caused my mind to wander, and with little to focus on, my attention lingered on the ceiling. The firelight's dance lapped the smooth grey surface, creating a mesmerizing pattern as my eyes grew heavy. Whether I liked it or not, I faded in and out of consciousness as seconds felt like they were stretched into hours.\n\nI didn't know how long I'd been lucidly drifting in and out of sleep when an unexpected noise snapped me back from the edge of unconsciousness. Thankfully, I recognised the white griffiness rummaging through supplies on the table. I kept my head pressed against the moss, pretending to sleep, while waiting for her to make the first move.\n\nYou really think you're going to get answers like this? My mind asked, but I shrugged off the idea. Well, forgive me if I'm not in the mood for conversation.\n\nI quietly shuffled into a position where I could observe her. Squinting, I watched her pluck a vial from the table and make her way over to Boltock. From then on, all I could see was the back of her head as she peered down at him, occasionally raising one of her front talons to assist with whatever action her beak was performing.\n\nAs she worked my gaze drifted down, fixing on Risha curled up at the base of the table. With my emotions churning, all I could do was stare, trying to think of anything I could say to make things right.\n\n\"Good to see you're awake,\" someone chirped abruptly, and I looked up to see the griffinesse's feathered face peering down at me.\n\nBy the spirits, how can I be so oblivious! No wonder I almost got them all killed!\n\nI ducked my head away from the featherwing in shame, but before saying anything further she glanced between Risha and I, chuckling to herself.\n\nWhat's so funny?\n\nMy puzzled expression made her return an equally confused look \u2013 or at least the best look of confusion she could muster with a beak. Before she sighed and moved her attention down to my bandaged leg. My eyes remained locked in mid-air for a moment as I tried to comprehend what she might have been trying to imply, when a sudden prick in my side interrupted my thoughts.\n\n\"Ouch!\"\n\n\"Did that hurt?\" she asked as she withdrew one of her talons.\n\nI swallowed, clearing my dry throat as best I could as she tapped me again. Only this time there was hardly a sting.\n\n\"No,\" I admitted, looking over myself like my body was that of a stranger.\n\nShe looked equally confused, returning her eyes to the bandage and studying the bloody rag for a few seconds. All the while, I couldn't help fearing the worst.\n\nSurely losing feeling in my whole leg is not a good sign. My nurse chose the simple way to find out, grasping the top of the bandage in her beak, she gently pulled it away.\n\nThe shock on her face was immediate and my heart almost jumped into my mouth. She pulled away, the bandage still in her beak as I shuffled over to get a clear look. I'd seen people with horrific diseases and injuries back in the village. The results were usually awful in appearance and odour.\n\nDoes anyone know if that can happen to a dragon? I thought in a panic. It bit my leg, where my scales are thinner!\n\nI closed my eyes, horrific possibilities of amputation spinning in my mind before I finally dared peek. My sight slowly came into focus, and just like my carer, I was overcome with astonishment. My leg was clean and free of infection, scars, or any sign of injury.\n\n\"I've, I've... never seen anything like this, nothing can heal that fast,\" she stuttered pressing a talon to her chest. \"Your kind are renowned for being able to recover from otherwise life-threatening injuries, for being resilient to most diseases, but nothing like this!\" she continued, pacing over to the table to check some scraps of parchment.\n\n\"Skies above, it's really only been a day,\" she whispered to herself.\n\nI've completely healed from a life-threatening injury in hours \u2013 how's that possible?\n\nThe closest thing I could call an answer was from my experience back in the city. When I first arrived Risha had been quite shocked by my recovery. Prior to that, I'd not suffered anything more than scrapes and bruises. Before I could think too hard; I caught her shaking the bandage from her beak. Her scaly forelimb still pressed to her downy breast, she opened her beak to speak, only to be interrupted.\n\n\"General Storm Claw requests your presence in the main hall!\" The pair of us redirected our attention to a griffin standing at the entrance.\n\n\"Bring any of the leatherwings that can stand,\" he added, his voice as stern as his rigid posture as he pointed a claw at Risha, then me.\n\nThe griffiness nodded, giving a bow while clearly trying to keep her excitement contained. His message delivered and understood, the soldier gave a wing-salute and disappeared.\n\n\"We'd better get up there and see what they want. It's not wise to keep the master of the Talon Guard waiting,\" she advised, moving over to wake Risha.\n\nI raised myself from the bed, instantly tensing my muscles. I felt stiff, which I put down to lying down for so long. Even so, the pain and sickness I'd felt previously had vanished, and my once injured leg was supporting my weight like nothing had happened.\n\nThe fact that it was now perfectly fine, and not through any actions of griffin care, scared me more than it relieved me. Since I'd had no luck with any of my other questions, I dismissed any thought of seeking an explanation right now.\n\nDo my unique traits include accelerated healing? No matter what I thought, the idea only served to increase the feeling that I was losing more of myself to this supposed legend the Elders spoke off.\n\nNo, just ignore what they said. I'm still me, I'm the dragon I know, not some freak!\n\nAs much as I dismissed that idea, I still had one more fear to tame. I looked at Risha to see the griffiness gently nudging her.\n\nSpirits help me, I hope I can at least have her forgiveness.\n\nThe blue dragoness remained unresponsive as I moved closer. Every step on my healed leg felt alien, like the flesh that had so miraculously re-grown was no longer part of me.\n\nUrgh, focus on the more pressing matter, not yourself.\n\n\"I'll wake her,\" I told the griffiness as I approached.\n\n\"Maybe that would be best, I'll wait at the entrance,\" she replied, making her way towards the stairs.\n\nLike a puppet master had cut my strings I slumped down beside Risha. I knew she was pretending to sleep, just as I'd done. I also knew she didn't want to leave her brother, especially not because of some griffin's orders. Nevertheless, I continued to lower myself, to a point where I was almost lying down, gently nudging her side with my muzzle.\n\nShe remained motionless; I nudged her again, still with no response. I drew back, my emotions falling apart, and not even my magical healing could fix them as I finally spoke.\n\n\"I know I have no right to say this\u2026\"\n\nEvery painful word dripped with guilt, as I forced every ounce of my heart and soul into them.\n\n\"I know why you don't leave him, and I know the only reason this happened is because of... Because of me.\" I paused, taking another deep breath. \"I know it's my fault... And I'm sorry.\"\n\nThe ball of blue scales began to shift, and I jumped to my paws as her head emerged from beneath her draped wing. Her shimmering eyes wandered for a moment, staring intently into space before eventually turning to me. The glistening lines of recent tears coated her cheeks, and her spinal sail looked almost deflated.\n\n\"Your fault?\" she whispered.\n\nI shied away, waiting for the scolding I knew I deserved. At least until I realised her response was actually a question.\n\n\"No, it's mine,\" she whimpered. \"I was the one who chose to come \u2013 and he followed me.\"\n\nReally? Am I really hearing this?\n\nPart of me insisted that I should be grateful of the opportunity to escape from something so severe and yet all I could do was lower my head in shame.\n\nHow can she blame herself for this? If not for me she'd be safe and happy back in Dardien without a care in the world.\n\nEither way, I tried to manage a smile, as she always did for me.\n\n\"It doesn't matter whose fault it is, he's fine now,\" I assured her softly.\n\nHow can I just let it drop that easily? I know this is my fault, she can't protect me from that.\n\nShe raised her head, and through a fresh veil of tears she managed a weak smile.\n\n\"Well, now you're up,\" the griffiness's voice interrupted more urgently. \"I'd recommend we get moving.\"\n\nWe turned to face her waiting at the base of the stairs. She had her orders and was eager to follow them.\n\nWow, they don't mess around here when it comes to respect.\n\n\"We should go and see what all this is about,\" I proposed, looking back at Risha.\n\nShe glanced at her brother, and for a moment I feared she wouldn't be willing to leave him, before she finally nodded. At that I moved to the door, ignoring the odd sensation in my leg as I climbed the steps with Risha close behind. Our nurse stepped aside, letting the two of us pass.\n\nA gust of cold air greeted me at the top and after the restless hours it had offered, I was more than happy to get out of the cave.\n\n\"Just keep going forward, across the stairway to the western keep,\" the featherwing called out.\n\nIt was evening, and the last of the sunlight was disappearing over the horizon, casting brilliant, golden energy over the towering mountain peaks. Gazing out at the valley bathed in radiant orange from the open walkway, I could really see why this was the city of the Northern Sun.\n\nQuickly making my way down the corridor, I shifted my head as a strong gust of wind battered the castle's flanks and my attention was inevitably drawn to a very familiar mural upon the opposite wall: two stars, one white the other dark.\n\nWhy does it feel like I should know what it means?\n\n\"Are you coming?\" Risha called. It took me a moment to realize that, in my stupor, both she and the griffiness had overtaken me.\n\n\"By the skies, they could sure use some air elementals up here,\" my sapphire friend commented as I dashed to catch up.\n\nPassing through the keep's central stairway, we entered another corridor identical to the first.\n\n\"Yeah, I can't say I'm a fan of the open design,\" I retorted with a ruffle of my wings.\n\nEasy for griffins to put up with the cold, they have thick fur and feathers! I inwardly grumbled as the bitter chill ate away at my scales.\n\nLooking to my right I saw a new mural of several golden griffins arranged in tiers, all stood in the same stern pose, bordering the edges of a battlefield. Centred above them was something else that looked out of place, just like the stars in the opposite corridor's mural.\n\nThere appeared to be some kind of sphere, a cloak of fire rising from its edges and curled up within its core was the unmistakable shape of a dragon. Like a winged snake, its four legs were pressed against its serpent-like underside, its scales as black as the circle in which they were imprisoned. As if the painting was bait on a line, I felt an impulse to stop and stare.\n\nNo, wait, what did I say? Stop buying into this legend nonsense!\n\nI ripped my eyes away from their fixation, averting my gaze from the wall until I was safely at the far end of the walkway. Not wishing to attract any unnecessary attention as I entered the next chamber, I abruptly cancelled my hurried approach beside Risha.\n\n\"Looks like our featherwing friend already went through,\" she observed, glancing up at the arch. \"By the skies, I'd loved to have come here under better circumstances.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, if they have any problems, I'll just explain why where here,\" I attempted to reassure her.\n\nYeah, because I totally have all the experience and know exactly what to say.\n\nI cautiously stepped through the arch into a larger semi-circular chamber. Sleek, wooden walls draped in tapestries were barely visible in the dim light, while what little illumination there was came from two stone braziers either side of me. All that was visible above were the decorative wooden rafters, from which banners embroidered with the sigil of a griffin talon hung.\n\nThe floor consisted of a smooth, grey stone, similar in appearance to that of the healing cave. I was barely able to make out a split running down its centre, forming what looked like a thin line of runic symbols. My eyes followed the markings until they reached three stone steps upon which sat a large wooden throne. Resembling the furniture made for Tarwin's father, it appeared to have been crafted from a moulded tree stump but differed slightly from those humans used. Its seating area was spread out, making it look more like a lounger intended for something\u2026\n\nMy eyes ceased studying the object as they fell upon the figure perched nobly upon it. The griffin's only distinguishable feature was the sheen of firelight reflected in his sharp eyes and the shimmer of his obsidian-black talons. Another figure emerged beside the throne, and I recognised him as the armoured griffin from the clearing.\n\nIf I had to guess, I'd say that's General Storm Claw. His steely metal armour was dulled by the gloom as was that of several other armoured guards I'd failed to notice in my peripheral vision.\n\n\"King Halfbeak,\" the general announced, stomping a talon. \"May I present the leatherwings my wing discovered in the border forest.\"\n\nI remained perfectly still, feeling like an ant before a hungry bird as a huge pair of black-feathered wings sprung out from the throne, sending the braziers into a fiery frenzy. The disturbed light crossed the King's features revealing his feathers were coal-black, as was the fur covering his haunches.\n\nHe was undoubtedly larger and more distinguishable than any other griffin I'd seen. Most striking of all, was that his right eye was missing, pale and white, part of a great scar that cut through his face and down into his black beak.\n\nHalfbeak? Literally, but it makes sense.\n\nHis sharp talons tapped menacingly on the floor, an air of regal authority emanating from him like the warmth of the sun. Meanwhile, all I could do was glance to the white griffiness standing by the entrance, my eyes wandering round to find Risha at my side. I felt like melting under the King's glare, but she showed no sign of intimidation.\n\nSee, if she's not scared, why should I be? The King's booming voice immediately put that newfound confidence to the test as he spoke.\n\n\"So, the rumours are true, you are the one the ancient legends speak of?\"\n\nAs much as I wanted to speak up and ask the burning questions, I didn't know what to say. Under his stern gaze I felt like doing nothing more than sinking into the floor and disappearing. His eyes were like steel daggers, his stoic face like stone. Yet swallowing my fear I hesitantly opened my mouth to speak, when an equally stern voice interrupted.\n\n\"What do you mean, 'the one'? What legends?\"\n\nRisha swept in between the King and I, immediately filling me with an overwhelming combination of relief and gratitude.\n\n\"What do you know that our Elders don't?\" she continued.\n\nI peered around my friend, daring to meet Halfbeak's eye, until my attention was distracted by the shifting of metal-clad talons. Storm Claw broke from his statue-like stance with a grunt, taking a step towards us.\n\n\"No, General,\" Halfbeak instructed, stretching out a wing. \"It is perfectly reasonable for our leatherwing friends here to be on edge. We owe them answers.\"\n\n\"Yes, your highness,\" the subordinate growled, stepping back into his frozen stance with a disapproving scowl.\n\nIt was then that I discovered I'd edged as close to Risha's side as I dared, without even realising it. Meanwhile, she'd not stepped so much as a paw out of place.\n\nYeah, she's way better at dealing with grumpy featherwings than I am.\n\n\"Many legends and prophecies refer to the arrival of a unique being among the nine great races of this world,\" the King began, directing a wingtip towards a tapestry lased with scripture on the far wall.\n\n\"I'd hoped my kind would be granted that honour, though it would appear that is not so,\" he added with a glance at me.\n\nI looked at Risha, searching for any sign she was aware of this legend, only to be disappointed by the look of confusion on her face.\n\nShe's not heard of any of this either. If I want answers I'm going to have to step up.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I asked, attempting to mimic Risha's tone.\n\nHalfbeak's lone eye passed over more of the intricate tapestries as he continued.\n\n\"There are many old stories, mostly unknown to even the oldest of creatures. Even your Elders, some of the most ancient of all mortal beings, have no idea of how much time has passed.\"\n\nRisha, grunted, appearing to restrain her frustration to no more than a wing ruffle as Half Beak continued.\n\n\"All are different, yet one prophesy remains the same. When the shadows return, one of unnatural blood will be born into one of the nine great races. At least those are the words I know.\"\n\nUntil now, I'd made a conscious attempt to accept and then forget or even neglect this talk of unnatural blood and nine great races. I'd had enough of all these legends and destinies, none of them provided the answers I was seeking. All I wanted was to rescue my friend, and even if I was successful the future wouldn't be the same.\n\nRescuing Tarwin won't remove this supposed threat of dark powers or change who I am.\n\nAt that moment it felt like the final part of me was lost to this new world, finally driving me to accept that everything about my life was changing.\n\nFrom what I could make out there were two separate stories, and neither made sense: when darkness returns and one of unnatural blood? The dragons had told me about the Dark Guardian and a sphere.\n\nA sphere! My thoughts suddenly caught up with me. I paused and cast my mind back to what I'd seen only a few moments ago on the wall.\n\nReturning my eyes to the King, my confusion finally contorted into frustration.\n\n\"I'm tired of all these cryptic stories and legends, can't anyone simply tell me what's going on?\"\n\nI demanded, ruffling my wings, watching Storm Claw shift uneasily by the throne.\n\nRisha blinked, a slightly shocked expression on her face. Yet her surprise soon turned into determination as she reinforced me in an equally assertive manner.\n\n\"What is going on? We've flown halfway across North Rim and my brother was almost killed by a wyvern!\" She stomped a foreclaw. \"Look me in the eyes and tell me why a monster like that is roaming your kingdom for no reason.\"\n\nHalfbeak's face was as stoic as the mountains, while he seemingly contemplated his response.\n\n\"I understand your frustration, but as I said, most knowledge is lost to the ages. Regrettably we do not have the pleasure of a dragon's life span here among the mountains.\"\n\nHe turned to the throne, resting a clenched talon on his chest.\n\n\"My clan has ruled this kingdom for generations, and my ancestors knew many times of shadow and darkness. I have seen such wars, but my kind are weary.\"\n\nHe gestured to the guards around him, and Storm Claw gave a disgruntled huff.\n\n\"Proud honour is the griffin code, we are the bastion of resistance against the horrors of the north. Orkin, wild men, ghaul-beasts, all break upon Storm Peak like waves upon cliffs.\" While he spoke, his guards gave firm nods and stamped their claws, applauding his words.\n\n\"But the days are growing darker, old enemies move in the shadows. One who was once thought destroyed is mustering his forces once again.\" The King set his talons down with a clatter, and the guards abruptly ceased.\n\n\"Acrodan, the last of those traitors, rears his foul head from beneath the ice of Ilivar, and with him the Black Sun sees its new dawn. The Sphere of Eternity has returned.\"\n\nIt's the same story the Elders told me. I didn't know why, although the way the King put it, made it sound even more terrifying. I still don't understand what that has to do with me?\n\n\"The creators truly abandoned us,\" he went on, his voice piquing with anger, before fading as he set his eyes back on me.\n\nThe rage in his tone rattled my nerves just as much as the ghaul's howl, and it was clear that we shared a mutual source of anger. Acrodan was clearly the cause of all our problems.\n\n\"You seek the Dark Guardian within the frozen halls of Ilivar, do you not?\" Halfbeak finally rumbled.\n\n\"What?\" a voice demanded.\n\nHanging my head in shame I glanced to Risha. There was no hiding it; it was too late to prevent any harm or to protect her, so I nodded softly.\n\n\"It's true, the Elder's told me that Acrodan was the one who sent the wyverns. It's where I need to go to save Tarwin.\"\n\nI should have told her days ago. I should have told her what an incredible risk she was taking before it almost cost Boltock's life.\n\nHalf expecting her to swat her forepaw across my muzzle, I was surprised when she unexpectedly stepped forward.\n\n\"What's this all about?\" she asked Halfbeak sternly.\n\nShe's still on my side? If not for me, surely for her brother or Ember?\n\n\"The power your friend displayed in battle, even if he fails to admit it, is not normal, even among your kind,\" Halfbeak responded, gesturing to me with a talon.\n\n\"What do you mean? I breathed fire, I've never done that before, sure, but all dragons can do it,\" I countered, glancing at Risha, who I could have sworn looked a little proud.\n\n\"The one spoke of in legend is said to be unique among their kind,\" Halfbeak answered, seeming to be unsure of the details once again. \"If that is true, then maybe your coming marks the return of the creators of old.\"\n\n\"So that's it? You're just going to tell us we've got the legacy of the gods on our shoulders?\" Risha pressed, but the King was swift to assure us that was all he knew once again.\n\nI looked on, all hope of finding answers draining away. There's nothing here, just another variation of what I already know.\n\n\"If you pursue Acrodan, I'm sure the frozen walls of Ilivar will provide more answers,\" he added.\n\nHe's right, I will get there, I will rescue Tarwin, and I will get to the bottom of this mystery.\n\n\"Mountain Echo will show you to your nest chamber for the evening,\" Halfbeak stated abruptly, dismissively waving a talon towards the white griffiness, putting a name to her.\n\n\"The least we can do is honour our guests, your other friend is already there,\" he added, making his way back to his throne.\n\nRisha looked down for a moment before she started off towards the door. Meanwhile, I turned to the King.\n\n\"Thank you.\" I did my best to seem grateful.\n\n\"It's the least we can offer, as I said,\" He repeated.\n\nRisha and Mountain Echo disappeared through the doorway, and I moved to follow.\n\n\"Leatherwing!?\" the King called. I paused, glancing over my shoulder.\n\n\"Something has lurked inside that sphere for centuries, something far worse than any dark sorcerer.\" As he spoke, I recalled the image of Acrodan from the temple, a robed man in a mask.\n\n\"You carry the hopes of us all, even if you fail to see it,\" he added.\n\nMy head drooped, I was tired of hearing the same speculation and uncertainty. He was making assumptions based on events that took place long ago, events I was sure he hadn't lived through. I was neither offended nor honoured by his comments; all I knew was that they weren't what I wanted to hear.\n\nWho am I to question his words?\n\n\"Just know our blessings go with you,\" the King finished as he retook his place upon his throne.\n\nI turned and marched out as fast as my newly healed leg would carry me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Beauty of the Night",
                "text": "The sudden chill of the mountain air wasn't enough to impede my progress. I marched down the corridor until I came sliding to a halt by the keep's central stairway. I could see Mountain Echo talking with Risha about the guest accommodation, but I paid them little mind.\n\nAm I their guest or their hope? They're only helping me to help themselves. I thought begrudgingly. How can they think I'm just going to march up to Ilivar and solve all their problems?\n\nWhat remained of the sun hung precariously over the horizon, the snowy mountaintops rising like fangs beneath the glowing sphere, as if to gobble it up. Moving to the opposite side of the corridor I went to extreme lengths to shield my eyes from the wall; I didn't need to fill my mind with whatever cryptic murals it portrayed.\n\nI moved quickly, focusing on reaching the arch at the end of the corridor as I observed Risha and Mountain Echo disappear. I soon followed, coming upon a set of stairs leading up to another corridor, until I found myself behind them.\n\nOnly my rapid breathing gave away my haste, though neither of them seemed to notice. The chamber we found ourselves in appeared to be a mirror image of Halfbeak's throne room. It was lit by two braziers; crafted beams supported the high roof and three stone steps led up to the raised floor at the far end. A balcony facing out into the last of the sun's rays sat where Halfbeak's throne would have been, its entrance covered by a curtain of woven material that fluttered in the wind.\n\nHanging in stacks from the curved walls were several wooden beds, each one held above the other by ropes tethered to the ceiling. A sheet of straw covered each, more akin to a bird's nest than those back in Dardien. It wasn't confined to the beds, fine dry grass covered parts of the floor.\n\n\"Ember!\" Risha called, running forward to meet the orange dragoness who was sitting on one of the beds.\n\n\"Make yourself at home,\" the griffiness at my side told me, nodding towards the chamber.\n\n\"Thank you, Mountain Echo, is it?\" I asked.\n\n\"Only officials use our full names, you may call me Echo,\" she added with a slight giggle, before moving back towards the exit with a sweep of her wings.\n\nAt least she seems to view us as actual beings and not crusaders out to save the day.\n\nThe soft hay shifted beneath my toes as I moved over to the beds, trying not to disturb them as I climbed onto the bottom-most one. The frame shifted under my weight and the resulting knock forced me to flinch slightly.\n\nBy the spirits, I'm so jumpy. I thought, resting a forepaw on my muzzle. It still feels like my scales are crawling.\n\nAfter struggling to get quietly onto the swaying furniture, I lay on my back and got myself comfortable. Staring up at the bed suspended above, I listened to the sound of the others talking. Ember expressing her thoughts about Boltock, happy that he was okay, while Risha conveyed what Halfbeak had said.\n\n\"Oh, I know, the King told me,\" Ember informed, before puffing up with pride. \"I didn't think I'd be acting as an ambassador of the Fire Order until my fiftieth season, but who else was gonna do it?\"\n\nThe two shared a laugh while I was left to consider exactly what had been said.\n\nIf the griffins were right about me, what would happen? More importantly, why was it happening now? The only reason I was here was because the wyverns took Tarwin. If I had something to do with defeating this darkness, then why didn't it have them kill me back in the forest? Why go to the effort of capturing a prisoner I'd be sure to come after? Moreover, if it had just left me in the village, completely oblivious to what was happening, then there would be no threat to its plan.\n\nAcrodan was the last of the Dark Guardians, but there was no mention of a dragon such as me, Halfbeak's speech had clarified that. In fact, the Elders claimed there was no record of anything like me either. Not to mention, the griffins were apparently the custodians of North Rim, so why did they need me, why was I so special?\n\n\"Wow, your leg!\"\n\nI jumped up, almost slamming into the bed above.\n\n\"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you,\" Ember apologised as she marvelled at my newly healed limb.\n\n\"No... no, it's fine,\" I answered, recovering from my sudden shock.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like that, I mean, this morning, no offence, but you were crippled.\"\n\nI lay back down with a heavy thud, rocking the bed.\n\n\"Sorry, I'll let you get some sleep,\" she went on. \"It's not every day you have a fight like that... and, well, you handled yourself pretty well,\" she admitted, finishing with a slight laugh before scurrying off to her own bed.\n\nI did? I wondered, and my heart filled with a small sense of pride. Wow, coming from her that means a lot."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "'Real'.\n\nThe word flashed through my mind with new meaning, bringing me out of my disturbed sleep.\n\nIs any of this real? Am I real? Just how real is this? I could imagine myself waking from this as if it was a dream.\n\nWhat now set me apart from everyone else was all too real. I was sure my power was like that of the dragonfire Risha had said all dragons possessed, but it was unlike any fire I'd ever seen.\n\nI jumped back, the memory was distorted, but the fragments I recalled were of bright lights, extreme power, boiling blood, steam \u2013 and the beast's head exploding!\n\nCalming myself, I glanced around. The chamber was almost silent, darkness prevailed, save for the brazier's glow and the crackle of its glowing embers filling the air.\n\nMy thoughts had abducted me again, drawing me away from this world into another. I rolled off the bed, stopping it from swinging with my tail. Ember and Risha lay sleeping, and as for Boltock, I assumed he was still down in the healing cave. In fact, I was surprised Risha wasn't with him.\n\nI crept out, pushing the curtain aside with a sweep of my wing. The moonlit balcony was a round wooden platform, thankfully looking out to a clear sky, where I could find my one true comfort.\n\nMillions of stars and the gleaming aurora greeted my eyes, it was brighter than I'd ever seen. It must have been late, though a few griffins continued about their business, their feathered bodies silhouetted by the light of torches within their wooden nests. Below the balcony, I could see the bridge spanning between the keep and the mountainside, supported by the ropes hanging from the walls around me. It was clear and so peaceful.\n\n\"Beautiful, isn't it?\" a voice drifted from the chamber.\n\nI jolted, thankfully, my nervousness was swift to subside as I glanced back. Risha stood in the doorway with the curtain draped over her back. My sombre mood didn't stop her slipping over to sit beside me, it wasn't a situation I was used to, feeling awkwardly cold while somewhat warm and fuzzy all at once. I let my eyes wander, trying to focus on anything other than her, until inevitably my gaze came to rest on her moonlit scales and gold bracelets, sparkling like mirrors. Even her eyes shimmered like the most magnificent of cerulean sapphires.\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" I replied with a subtle bow of my head.\n\n\"My mother always told me stories about them, saying that the creators themselves poured the beauty of a thousand suns into the sky,\" she told me as she let her eyes pan across the night.\n\n\"When I was younger, I always imagined flying up to them.\" I laughed at my own childishness. \"You don't have to tell me how silly that sounds.\"\n\n\"Nothing's impossible, not after what I've seen you do,\" she added, sharing in my humour as she nudged my wing.\n\nI sighed at her recognition that I was different, although she made it sound like a good thing. This time it wasn't the beauty of the sky that eased my troubles, but her presence. She was like a rock in a sea of chaos, keeping me from drifting away, even though things still played on my thoughts. I'd already withheld the truth from her once, I wouldn't do it again.\n\n\"I don't know what or who I really am, but I know...\" My sentence trailed off, words struggling to find my voice.\n\nShe turned her gaze away from the sky, her glistening eyes peering directly into mine.\n\n\"You're you. No matter what anybody says or whatever happens, nothing will change that,\" she assured me.\n\nShe was so much better at this than me, her words seemed to soothe the bleak, hopeless feelings. All I could focus on was how beautiful she looked in the moonlight, a thought completely alien to me, something more powerful than anything I'd ever experienced.\n\nShe cocked her head, and I broke my stare with a stammer, ruffling my wings as I reminded myself that I'd no right to view her in such a way after the pain I'd caused. I turned away from the city lights and Risha, casting my gaze out into the dark wilderness beyond the mountains.\n\n\"I don't know what's out there,\" I confessed quietly, each honest word catching like glass in my throat. \"I don't want anybody else to get hurt, so if you don't want to...\"\n\nShe placed her front paw beneath my chin, twisting my head round to face hers.\n\n\"I've known where you were going this whole time; you're not that hard to figure out. What I should have said back then was that whatever is out there...\" She paused, gazing out into the dark wilderness. \"We'll face it together.\"\n\nShe'd stopped me from potentially throwing away the only other friendship I'd ever known. I felt like I could tell her anything, but from the look in her eye it was like she already knew just by looking.\n\n\"I hope I didn't miss anything,\" another voice announced from behind the curtain.\n\nWe both turned to see Boltock standing in the archway. A bandage covered his wing, acting like a sling holding the limb against his body. More minor wounds, cracks and scars marred his green scales, and his legs shook like twigs in a storm.\n\nRisha rushed over, almost breaking his quivering stance as she hugged him tightly with her wings, nuzzling his cheek.\n\n\"Whoa, glad to see you too, Sis,\" he muttered, his muzzle wrinkling awkwardly. \"Nice to see all this tight-tail featherwing stuff's not gotten to you.\"\n\nRisha pulled back, shaking joyful tears from her eyes.\n\n\"Glad you're okay,\" she admitted softly, before her eyes unexpectedly returned to me.\n\nShe looked just as pretty standing at the opening as she had when she'd sat in the moonlight beside me. The image was broken when she nuzzled her brother and made her way back through the curtain.\n\nConfusion and relief were the predominant feelings running through my mind. I was glad to see Boltock back on his paws, even if I now felt I might have someone else who may blame me for their misfortunes.\n\nWith that in mind, I tentatively walked over to greet him.\n\n\"I'm glad you're okay too.\"\n\nHe paused for a moment, his silence striking my heart like a knife as I froze mid-step.\n\n\"Thanks for keeping her safe,\" he responded in the most grateful tone I'd ever heard him muster.\n\nIs this the same dragon? Is that it? After being trapped in the jaws of a monster, he's thankful?\n\nIt took me a moment to understand to whom he was referring; obviously Risha. Still, I wasn't expecting him to be so considerate; maybe I'd misjudged him, all of them for that matter. None of them seemed to blame me for anything, I was the only one blaming myself. It was a hard trap to escape, but thankfully the truth was that no one was dead because of my stupid actions.\n\nBoltock gave an awkward nod, before leaving me alone on the balcony. The starlit sky beamed brighter than ever, yet how I now felt about Risha gave me more comfort than the stars ever had. I slowly brushed past the curtain into the chamber's warmth, climbing straight into my bed. This time my eyes didn't wander to the others, I simply settled down, my vision blurred and my mind surrendered itself as I drifted peacefully into sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Sounds became indistinguishable over the next few hours, voices crept in amidst the incongruous noises of my dream world. It was difficult to work out what was real and what was a dreamt-up product of my wild imagination. But they were real voices, real enough to stimulate a waking response. My eyes cracked open and I peered out over the side of my bed, scanning the chamber for the source whilst keeping my head embedded in the hay.\n\nBoltock and Ember were awake, standing out on the balcony, their moonlit shadows giving away their position. I thought it wrong to eavesdrop, nonetheless I inevitably overheard their conversation.\n\n\"Thanks for saving me from that thing,\" Ember whispered.\n\nBoltock delayed his response for a few moments before answering.\n\n\"Ember? You're my best friend\u2026 But, but... you and Pyro,\" he replied, appearing to struggle with the words.\n\n\"\u2026H\u2013he's... my other friend,\" she admitted shyly. \"You should get to know him better,\" she continued with a slight chuckle. \"He's in the Fire Order, it's not like he's going to do anything to hurt you.\"\n\nI immediately thought her words strange, even somewhat dismissive, but it wasn't my place to judge. Although to my surprise the pair immediately dismissed my assumption as they laughed together.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" Boltock replied, sounding slightly disappointed.\n\n\"Well, I'm going to nest, and you should too after what you've been through,\" she added, receiving no reply.\n\n\"Goodnight,\" was her last word as she retired to the chamber. I tightened my eyelids as she slipped over to her nest and settled down.\n\nBoltock entered soon after, clambering into his own. Satisfied they were both safe, I attempted to return to my slumber, though the late interruption had ignited my curiosity. It wasn't my place to judge them, but I didn't quite get it.\n\nThose two, or at least Boltock, why do they act so strangely around each other? Plus, what does Pyro have to do with it?\n\nThe red dragon from the city had completely escaped my thoughts. I wasn't sure what life in Dardien had been like for the others before I arrived, and only having been there for a short time, I didn't know much about relationships between my own species. I'd compared them to what I knew, but there was an unavoidable difference between dragons and humans.\n\nThe moment of contemplation about something other than our journey settled my mind and I curled up, slowly drifting back to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "My eyes flickered open, bright light bringing me closer to consciousness until they opened wide. Despite the sunlight streaming in from the balcony, the chamber was still dark. The braziers had burnt out, leaving nothing more than sizzling black piles. I slipped out of my nest, trying to be quiet while the others remained curled under their wings. Shaking the sleep from my weary muscles, the painless action drew my gaze to my healed limb.\n\nUrgh, it still feels so weird. I thought as the restored muscles twitched.\n\nAlthough yesterday had been one of the most difficult days I'd endured, my night turned out to be more comfortable: no guard duty, no beasts in the forest and especially no strange dreams.\n\nThe rest had ensured that my body was back at full fitness, my eyes absorbed the calm atmosphere as they panned across the room. From the curtain dancing in the light breeze to Boltock's particularly loud snoring.\n\nLooks like I'm starting to make a habit out of being the first one to wake up.\n\nMy eyes continued to wander, following the curved wall until they fell upon a painting, similar to the kind I'd tried to avoid in the corridors. In last night's low light, I'd failed to notice it opposite the balcony, only this time I didn't attempt to shield my gaze.\n\nWhat's the point? I've already seen it anyway.\n\nIt wasn't drawn in the same style as the others, and its message was different. There was no depiction of war or death, its black background was dotted with pale-white spots, each representing a star with four equidistant points around their circular bodies. In one corner sat the moon, although the most eye-catching feature lay at its centre, a golden mountain with steep sides partially covered in snow, with four dragons hovering above its peak.\n\nI stepped back in disbelief. Those dragons, they're white.\n\nI stretched my wing into view, double-checking as a flood of mixed emotions filled my mind. Like a hurricane, my thoughts frantically spun through a plethora of possibilities, the most obvious one being that I wasn't alone, or at least I wasn't the only one to have ever existed.\n\nNo, this only proves someone thought to paint white dragons, it's not absolute confirmation. My mind sneered.\n\nProof or not, it didn't give me any answers; in fact, it raised more questions.\n\nScouring the coloured surface my interest eventually fell on a new portion of the painting. Floating in the centre of the dragons, directly above the golden summit, was a sphere, almost invisible against the background. I'd seen it before \u2013 it was the image cast into the metal door in the Elders' temple. Granted, back then I had no way of making out the colour, and the dragons depicted in that version wore armour, but it was the same, nonetheless.\n\nWhy would griffins depict white dragons when the dragons themselves seemed to have no idea?\n\nAs for the sphere, I already knew its name, the Sphere of Eternity, the painting depicting it how the griffins described \u2013 a black sun awaiting its dreadful dawn.\n\nNot just that, but the featherwings seem so proud of themselves. Why not show the dragons as white griffins?\n\nI looked closer, trying to inspect the circular shape. It was the only fixed reference in this mystery, occurring repeatedly like a haunting ghost. Upon closer inspection, I saw something that wasn't visible on the draconic depiction; in fact, it was almost unnoticeable right now. Sitting above the sphere were several purple lines, curved and swirling like smoke. My eyes gradually followed them as they merged to create a flowing shape, almost like the body of a serpent.\n\nMy gaze settled upon its head with eyes set above a vicious jaw and an aggressive array of spines along its skull. I found myself peering directly into the painted eyes of the shadowy serpent, its presence drawing me closer, until something deep within me instinctively pulled away.\n\nI staggered back, almost tripping over my tail, while shaking my head as I covered the cursed image with a forepaw.\n\nWhat in the spirits' name is that? I asked myself as I panted. It's just a picture, it can't hurt me... but what is it with that sphere?\n\nI withdrew my forepaw from the wall, inspecting it. My white scales glistening in the morning light, hints of gold and silver reflected in their radiance.\n\nNo! I'm becoming just like everyone else; I'm actually falling into this fantasy.\n\nI was determined to fight against its influence, because if I fought, I knew I hadn't completely lost myself. I wasn't like other dragons, I had to accept that, but I wasn't some legend or forgotten myth, and I certainly wasn't going to get distracted from my true mission.\n\nAs I huffed, Echo entered the room. I really hoped she hadn't seen as I stiffened and turned away.\n\n\"It's the last tale of the creators,\" she whispered, moving over to look at the painting.\n\nGreat, she did see. I mentally huffed.\n\nHowever, her words captured my attention. 'Creators?' These four white dragons are the creators?\n\n\"This is why everyone thinks I'm so special, isn't it?\" I asked as I reluctantly stepped up beside her.\n\n\"Hope comes in many forms,\" she replied. \"All one has to do is open their eyes to see it.\"\n\nI didn't know whether to be angry, confused, or sad. The entire world, or at least the parts of it I'd encountered so far, believed I was some sort of hero out to save them from something I didn't understand. Now I craved the answers to the mystery more than ever; it felt like a betrayal of my true self, but I had to know.\n\n\"Where did it come from?\" I asked, ruffling my wings in agitation.\n\n\"It's one of the oldest paintings in the city, a copy of a carving deep within the ethereal temples of Taldran. The original was destroyed during the Guardian War by those who chose to forsake the creators.\"\n\nAny hope that I might gain information from the temples she described was instantly shattered. Even so, I made a mental note to ask Risha about these ancient places.\n\nEcho moved to check on her patient and I noticed a harness on her back, similar to the one she'd used to carry Boltock. It held a set of small boxes, each suspended in its own woven pouch. Even though her movements were quiet, they were enough to wake Risha, who shot up from her bed the moment she approached her brother. I had to question if she'd ever gone to sleep, but she settled once she saw there was no threat.\n\nEmber also began to stir, rummaging around in her straw bed as she slowly woke. Risha hopped down from her bed, her movements scattering the dry vegetation when she landed.\n\n\"Good morning,\" she greeted, keeping at least one eye on Echo.\n\nI croaked a good morning in return as I considered asking her about the whole creator thing, especially after how she'd made me feel last night. Though I didn't want to bring the evil sphere into all of this, a Dark Guardian and his army of monsters was enough to deal with. I watched her move over to her brother and Echo respectfully shifted aside.\n\nLet's hope if this legend is true, I can deal with Acrodan and this stupid sphere in one go.\n\nAs I thought to myself, another griffin entered the chamber, instantly recognisable as one of the soldiers.\n\n\"Are they ready?\" he asked in the same commanding voice they all seemed to share.\n\nEcho looked up, ears folding as she deadpanned.\n\n\"Why the rush?\" She looked back at the supplies she was carrying. \"They have to eat first.\"\n\nReaching around and picking off one of the boxes with her beak, she set it down before retrieving another. Boltock and Ember were quick to peer inside and Risha also edged over, the three of them taking out what looked to be red meat, before eagerly tucking in.\n\nWow, they really must have been hungry.\n\nEcho nodded towards the food; I didn't feel the urge to join my friends in the feast. She didn't say anything, she looked more like she was gazing up at a mighty statue rather than a young dragon.\n\nI remained silent. It's like I'm some kind of monument to them.\n\nThe impatient soldier marched into the chamber, anxiously tapping his talons against the floor. I watched him carefully, still untrusting of the combat-oriented members of this new community. It was obvious he was under orders, and they seemed to be loyal to the core when it came to their honourable chain of command.\n\n\"This one won't be able to fly.\" Echo nodded towards Boltock's bandaged wing, seemingly attempting to delay the inevitable, remaining all too aware of her need to hurry.\n\n\"And here I thought I'd be soaring among the clouds,\" he replied with a roll of his eyes and a snort.\n\nRisha gave him a sharp glare.\n\n\"You're staying here,\" she instructed with an air of authority. \"A merchant wing from Dardien will be able to pick you up.\"\n\n\"What?\" he snapped, his green eyes widening.\n\n\"I promised I'd keep you safe and I nearly failed,\" she continued, glancing at the floor.\n\n\"And you think I can't keep myself safe? I could say the same to you! Things are different now. I know what's at stake, so what's the point in protecting me?\" he added, putting the whole potential end of the world idea into perspective.\n\n\"Yes, things are different, that's why you have to stay,\" she added, hopelessly trying to maintain a tone of authority.\n\n\"I'm not staying here, for precisely the same reasons you wouldn't.\"\n\nRisha's staunch attitude was completely eroded, she opened her mouth, but only soft whimpers escaped.\n\n\"You know I'm not staying,\" he insisted. \"We promised to stay together.\"\n\nThis time he had no need for a firm tone. Risha's idea of keeping her treasured sibling safe by leaving him here was gone. Her defences failing at the mention of their binding promise.\n\nWhile they debated, Ember moved round to my side.\n\n\"If he's coming, we won't be able to fly,\" she remarked quietly.\n\nBoltock gave her a brief glance, but she seemed far more accepting of his wishes than his sister.\n\n\"We'll be able to help with that,\" Echo suggested. \"Won't we?\" she added, glancing over to the soldier who begrudgingly nodded.\n\nKnowing there was no stopping her brother from joining us, Risha sighed and wrapped a wing around him as she warned.\n\n\"By the creators, if anything happens to you again...\"\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" he assured her with a pat on the shoulder.\n\nThat's it, I can't let anything happen to either of them, not so much as a scratch.\n\nI walked out onto the balcony while Echo helped Boltock onto her back. Waiting patiently, Risha and Ember emerged with me, closely followed by the two featherwings.\n\n\"You don't have to wait long for a lift around here,\" Echo announced, catching a gust of wind and gently lifting into the air.\n\nRisha and Ember followed. I waited for a moment, closely watching the soldier while the breeze lifted him into the air. As soon as they were all airborne, I spread my wings, waited for the next gust and took to the skies."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Although it was short, the flight to the valley floor made me feel alive again. It also reminded me of the world we were re-entering, a dangerous reality of freezing cold, frightening beasts and dark evils, and with one of our group now incapable of flight, it would be a more dangerous undertaking than ever.\n\nI came to rest at the edge of the river, its rushing waters cutting through the middle of the pine-sided valley, swiftly gliding over large boulders and forming a torrent of gushing rapids. On either side a rough pebbled beach marked the water's edge, bordered by smaller shrubs blending into the tall, snow-dusted trees. The forest reached up on either side, creating the illusion of becoming ever taller as it climbed the mountainside until the barren stone halted its advance, snowy peaks eventually capping the rocky escarpments.\n\nThe air was cool and fresh, a sharp wind blew the dense branches with some urgency. A fallen trunk lay on the bank before me, sticking out from the forest, held up by a pair of mossy rocks. The toppled giant looked like those I'd previously encountered, rotting away and covered in a cocoon of lush green foliage.\n\nEcho, Risha and Ember were the next to land, the smooth pebbles shifting under their weight. Finally, the soldier settled on the tip of the fallen log, sinking his claws into the decaying wood. His intimidating pose made me even more wary, and I made sure to keep a close eye on him as I turned to the others.\n\nRisha and Echo helped Boltock down, not that he seemed to approve of being babied. I suspected that it was something he'd have to learn to appreciate.\n\n\"This route should be safe, although with that one being unable to fly the trip is going to be longer,\" the soldier observed as he peered down stream.\n\nHe looked down at me, clearly expecting me to say something worthy of their legends. Allowing them to believe what they wished, I merely gave a gentle nod of acknowledgement.\n\n\"If you're careful to avoid the borders of Valcador, the Bleak Sea lies a few days walk through the forest. The ruins of Ilivar linger beyond. That's if they haven't moved in the past few centuries.\"\n\nI almost dismissed the final part of his guidance as a joke, it was only after considering it for a moment more that I considered the possibility of it being true. Nevertheless, I gave my advisor another subtle nod.\n\n\"You have a good head start, but the ghauls have your scent and they won't be far behind,\" he added, panning his eyes across the forest.\n\nHaving only a vague idea of what he was referring to, I curiously questioned.\n\n\"The wolf-beasts, they're called ghauls?\"\n\n\"Correct, horrific things. They were once gentle forest creatures before dark magic corrupted their minds and twisted their bodies.\" His head snapped around as birds scattered in the trees.\n\n\"Just be glad they're the only things on your tail, there are far more twisted beasts beyond here,\" he finished.\n\nI nodded again, not wishing to think of what else might be out there. At least now I'd confirmed the name of another of the savage monsters determined to kill me.\n\nThe sound of grinding pebbles under heavy footsteps drew my attention back to the others walking up beside me. Echo flew over, landing at the base of the log, looking up to her companion.\n\n\"We would accompany you, but with things as they are, all are needed here. Orkin move down from the mountains to the east, and there are rumours they're rallying in the old citadel of Valcador,\" she warned, glancing up to her home above.\n\nTroubled times? Now I could see they were serious \u2013 it was worse than I thought. The best thing is to avoid this Valcador place at all costs.\n\nEven so, I still had a job to do and nothing was going to stop me. To get Tarwin back I had to stop this Dark Guardian and whatever stood by him. For now, it was the most I would allow myself to accept of their tales.\n\nWith that, I gave a final nod and turned to the others. Before he left the soldier lifted his head high and spoke up.\n\n\"Good luck, and may the creators protect you.\"\n\nEcho nodded in agreement before spreading her wings, and with a couple of powerful beats, they both took off into the air. The moment they left the others looked to me. No matter how much I denied I was leading, they all felt differently.\n\n\"Well?\" Boltock asked, breaking the awkward silence. \"Don't you think we should get going?\"\n\nI shared his sentiment, starting to walk down the riverbank. They all followed without question. This was it: another new, unknown territory."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "The winding river led us away from the steep mountains. Its turbulent waters settling as they were relieved of the interfering boulders and rocks that had disrupted their flow upstream. Even the wind grew still, leaving the trees motionless as an increasing density of snow piled onto their frozen branches. With every step into the unknown, the atmosphere became colder, and the soft flow of the once gushing river began to solidify near the edges.\n\nDays went by as we travelled further into the cooling wilderness, each waking moment blurring into the next. It was a cycle of the sun rising and setting, the night sky spinning by during the long, tiresome hours spent watching for danger.\n\nThe further we travelled, the shorter the days became. The cruel chill of dark nights and the equally bitter cold of the weak winter sun making the two almost indistinguishable. As we journeyed, I constantly checked the edges of the snow-covered landscape, my eyes scanning over the frozen river for any sign, smell, or sound of our hunters. I knew they were out there somewhere, now aware of what I could do and equally aware of our new vulnerability.\n\nMy constantly active senses were fuelled by nothing more than adrenalin pumping through my shivering body. Like a timid rabbit I reacted to even the smallest movement, unable to sleep after those monsters had managed to sneak up on us from nowhere.\n\nThe snow grew deeper, making the ground more difficult to traverse. The cold numbed my tired bones with every aching step and my mind became completely open to the possibility of something buried below the wintery coat, ready to eat me. Worried about every snowflake, I barely noticed when we finally reached the end of the river. Only the cry of Ember's voice drew me from the numbness.\n\n\"Look, there it is!\"\n\nStretching before us over the vast horizon lay the endless expanse of the frozen sea. The forest's sprawl stopped abruptly at the top of a sheer cliff marking the edge of the ice sheet, the river cascading over in a frozen torrent, creating a wall of ice. The weak sound of what little water could pass beneath, creaked and gushed, groaning like a dying monster.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Risha asked, stepping up to my side.\n\nI looked down at the steep incline and out to the far edges of my vision, trying to identify a safe route down. Our only option was a rough pathway of ice-covered boulders beside the waterfall, barely visible under the snow.\n\n\"That looks like the only way down,\" I indicated, pointing towards the pathway.\n\nThere was no objection as the others crept to the cliff's edge with me.\n\n\"We'll have to walk down,\" I added, ruffling my wings in disdain.\n\nNot like we can fly with the air this still anyway. I noted, the fact the coast was so calm unsettling me. I just hope Boltock can make it.\n\nI stepped cautiously onto the first boulder, brushing off the covering of snow with my forepaw before following with the rest. With all my weight set upon the stone, I tried to judge its stability, and although slippery, it seemed stable.\n\n\"Seems pretty safe. Just watch your footing, it's slippery,\" I advised before stepping over a slight gap to the second boulder.\n\nPeering ahead at the random sprawl of rocks, I attempted to map out a descending path, judging which ones appeared most stable. The others started to follow, albeit nervously.\n\n\"Best to go one at a time, I don't know how much weight they'll take,\" I shouted back to Risha.\n\nShe nodded, stopping on the first boulder and waiting for me to clear the second. The gap to the snowy surface of the next one was too far to step down. Pausing for a moment, I knew the only way was to jump \u2013 and that wasn't without some risk.\n\nIf it's not stable it could completely collapse the pile.\n\nI searched for any other route, although my only other options left me with the same problem. I thought carefully about how I could get by; the only safe choice was to fly. I cursed myself for taking my wings for granted; even so, after all we'd done, I wasn't going to let an icy rock defeat me.\n\nA pulse of fear urged me on when an unmistakable howl ended my deliberation. I glanced back at Risha, her wide-eyed expression revealing the same dread. My heart began to race, making decisions increasingly urgent.\n\nIt's either jump or wait for those things to catch up with us! Every moment I deliberated I pictured their paws thundering through snow as they sped closer.\n\nI drew back, holding a deep breath as I rushed across the slippery surface and leapt into the air, spreading my wings to steady myself. The boulder shunted sideways, fumbling and sliding, I barely managed to maintain my balance. My landing dislodged a small number of rocks, which bounced to the ice below with a rumbling clatter. Every sound forced me to wince as the noise echoed through the otherwise silent wilderness.\n\nThey surely know exactly where we are now!\n\nMy worries were swiftly redirected when the rock under me shifted. Whatever stability it once possessed was ruined by the force of my jump \u2013 and there was still three of us to go. The icy surface tilted forward, hanging precariously over the edge of the loose pile. I moved to balance out the weight, pushing myself up against the icicles hanging from the cliff behind me.\n\nLooking down to the frozen sea I could see there was an obvious pathway over the remaining rocks. I glanced up to see Risha was now directly above.\n\n\"Where now?\" she asked.\n\n\"Jump down and follow the path along there,\" I instructed, nodding towards the lower boulders. \"I'll stay on this one to counterbalance.\"\n\nShe stepped back, while Boltock and Ember queued on the rocks behind her, anxiously awaiting their turn. When she leapt, the sudden shudder caught me unaware, the rock lurched and a few smaller stones fell away.\n\n\"What about you?\" she inquired urgently.\n\n\"I'll jump off when you're all across,\" I reassured, gesturing for her to move along quickly as my back scraped the cliff face.\n\n\"Go! I'll be down right after you.\"\n\nLacking the time to question my decision, she carefully hopped over the rest of the boulders and onto the ice sheet.\n\nBoltock was next, wincing slightly when the jolt of impact shifted his injured wing. I urged him on, and he hopped swiftly down to his sister. Ember was the last to jump, her weight putting even more strain on the increasingly unstable surface, leaving me the difficult task of getting off the crumbling boulder without bringing them all down. I tested the rock's stability by shifting my weight slightly.\n\nAs expected, any movement made it heave and tilt, pushing more of the loose rocks around it further over the edge. I weighed up my options: I was going to have to jump, that much was clear. I peered around, visualising my route and positioning myself to make a dash when an unmistakable smell caught my attention.\n\nI looked up, the rock shifting while my eyes focused on the ghaul staring down from the top of the path, a menacing mass of fur, muscle and vicious teeth looming over me. From what I could see, it was alone, though I knew the others wouldn't be far behind. It took a step onto the first boulder, which shuddered under its heavier mass. My eyes focused on its lumbering footfall, and instantly I had an idea.\n\nRisha called my name, stimulating a desire to flee. But I focussed on the ghaul's demonic eyes while it clambered down, falling rocks creeping out from under it. Remaining almost perfectly still, I spread my weight, keeping my perch perfectly balanced while waiting for the right moment. The ghaul stopped, shifting its paws as the rocks tilted.\n\nJump, come on, jump! I repeated to myself, watching intensely as it peered over the edge of the higher rock.\n\nIt was so precariously close that the stench of its foul, steaming breath stung my nostrils. A row of ferocious teeth loomed inches above my head, dripping shimmering strips of saliva.\n\nInstinctively, I made my move, launching myself out over the frozen river. The ghaul's reaction was instant, its jaws snapping shut where I'd stood.\n\nThe world became a whirling maelstrom of noise, fur and teeth. The crashing rumble of boulders consuming a faint yelp, followed by the splitting sound of rupturing ice. A cloud of freezing dust blocked my sight as I awkwardly flared my wings and slammed into the frozen sea, sliding to a dazed halt.\n\nMy head spun and my ears rang as the rock and ice dust settled. From the din I heard something approaching at speed before suddenly colliding with my back. At first, I was terrified it was another monster, at least until a pair of wings wrapped around me, nearly knocking me to the ground.\n\n\"You're alive!\" Risha yelled, releasing me from her grip.\n\nI stumbled to my paws, stepping back to see her eyes blazing with relief. Two more shapes emerged from the dust plume, thankfully Boltock and Ember.\n\n\"That was amazing!\" Boltock exclaimed, flaring his good wing.\n\nIt took a few seconds for my head to clear enough for me to realise the full extent of what had happened. The dusty gloom hid what remained of the cliff face, and surprisingly the ice hadn't completely broken, although it was severely damaged in several places. My eyes settled on the ghaul's crumpled body lying at the base of the collapsed mound. I cautiously nudged what was left of its head with my front paw, the subtle movement expelling a final whiff of its rancid breath.\n\nMy attention then moved to the cliff face, scanning every detail. There's certainly no way down now. Killing two birds with one stone. I thought with a hint of pride.\n\nThen I noticed the line of eyes peering down at us. Five more ghauls judged the situation, the intensity of their menacing glares cutting through the air like knives.\n\nAt least they can't fly down either. I thought triumphantly. Though I wouldn't put jumping past them if they're told.\n\nLooking over the cliff face, I could see there was no sign of any other route down to the ice. Looking back at the pack, the lead ghaul appeared, its scars and collar making it instantly recognisable.\n\nThe dominant beast peered down, completely ignoring the others, a cloud of breath emerging with every one of its stomach-wrenching pants. I stepped back and it did the opposite, prowling up to the edge raising its head. The howl blasting from its mouth echoed for miles.\n\n\"We should go.\" I ordered as it lowered its head.\n\nI turned to see Boltock and Ember ready to lead. Risha nodded and I was confident that, for now, the ghauls had no means of following. All they could do was watch us continue out to sea until, one by one they turned away and vanished into the forest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "For the next few hours, I periodically glanced back to the empty cliff, until the coast eventually vanished over the horizon, thankfully the ghauls were nowhere to be seen.\n\n\"It won't take them long to find a way down,\" Risha suggested, moving to walk alongside me.\n\n\"We'll be long gone by the time they do,\" I replied, turning my attention away from the increasingly small focal point.\n\nThe truth was, I had no idea how long it would take them to catch up again. For all I knew they were coming across the ice at that very moment.\n\nRisha did a good job of hiding her underlying doubt, although I could tell she knew I wasn't sure about our situation.\n\n\"I\u2013I'm just glad you're okay after that trick with the rocks, that's all,\" she admitted, lowering her head, appearing almost unable to look at me.\n\nI struggled to understand. She knows about my healing, we talked about it. Her reaction had been similar to Ember's. But now she's shy. Why is this so confusing?\n\nI was usually good at judging personalities. Perhaps the repetitiveness of recent days had blurred my senses. One thing that was clear, was that I still had little experience with my own kind.\n\nMy concentration was broken when a gust of freezing wind hit my snout, making my eyes water, the tears freezing seconds after they emerged. Black clouds gathered overhead, and the once bright, reflective ice dulled as the darkening sky concealed the sun. I peered out over the vast, icy wasteland, my limited view meeting an endless, white expanse in all directions, dotted by larger chunks of ice sitting like disfigured statues in the frozen desert. Each waved a trail of frosty dust from its tip, like a snake in the arctic wind.\n\nThe weather gradually grew worse. The wind's strength increased, turning the ground beneath our paws into a river of white dust, flowing like a torrent of water as it arched around our legs. Things grew darker still as night closed in, and the harsh environment consumed any warning signs we might have of our hunters' approach.\n\nWith the wind hammering at my scales I pressed on, forcing my eyes shut in a hopeless attempt to block out the cold. I raised my wing as a futile defence against the bitter onslaught, occasionally glancing back to the others. All three followed in a line behind me, only just visible through the storm and my narrowed vision.\n\nOur progress became painfully slow, and the thought of giving up constantly crossed my mind, more so when I saw my friends struggling so much. After monsters and griffins, I wasn't about to let the fury of the elements beat me.\n\nWe can stop and wait out the storm. My mind insisted, only to be countered. Where? We're stuck in the middle of nowhere.\n\nAnother thought to cross my mind was that of my recent knowledge, recalling that dragons could control the weather. My theory evaporated as I woefully remembered that only those of the wind element could do so, and as far as I knew that was the only element not among us.\n\n\"We should stop!\" Risha cried through the howling wind.\n\nI looked to see they had all slowed even more, finally admitting to myself that she was right. That didn't change the fact that we'd nowhere to shelter.\n\n\"What do we do!?\" she cried; her blue scales stained white by frost. \"I can't stave off this much ice!\"\n\nI gazed into the white streams rushing across the ground, and battered by the roar of the wind, I began to doubt my leadership. Twice now I'd led my friends into deadly situations, but this time there really seemed to be no escape.\n\n\"I\u2013I... I don't know!\" I closed my eyes as my hope drained.\n\nEven the roar of the wind wasn't enough to block out the deep creaking sound that suddenly ravaged the ice. Risha and I exchanged strained glances when another deep groan bellowed, this time louder, as if the ice itself was in agonising pain. Before I knew it, the ground shook violently. Struck with fear and confusion I looked to the others, my gaze jumping from each pair of frightened eyes only just visible in the spinning shroud.\n\nThe ice shook again, but this time it didn't stop. A sharp sound rang out as a deep crack ripped across the ground. With another tremendous shudder, the surface sank in front of us as huge geysers of air spewed out from beneath, the loud screams of escaping pressure adding to the howl of the storm. I watched helplessly as more of the ice ripped itself apart, breaking up and splitting into pieces that were drawn down into the hungry darkness of a newly yawning chasm.\n\nMore of the surface in front of us ruptured, vast chunks tilting upward like the teeth of a giant beast awakening from beneath the ice. The newly formed walls ground like shifting mountains as they slowly slid into the cavernous pit, and my paws began to slip when the whole ground beneath me began to tilt. Screams and yells met my ears as the walls grew steeper and I lost my footing. Sliding uncontrollably, I tried to dig in my claws, but the frozen surface refused to be broken.\n\nAnother deafening roar split the air and I frantically scanned the surface, fixing on the only thing I could see. Across the almost vertical icy wall was a frozen boulder. I regained my footing and bounded clumsily across, grabbing the bastion of stability. A sudden tug at my side pulled me down, releasing my grip. Risha clung to my flank for dear life as I tried to steady our fall.\n\nNo, I must hang on! The more I struggled, the more hope slipped away.\n\nFalling hopelessly out of control, the ice brushed past my almost numb tail, when the muscles instinctively contracted around another frozen boulder. I winced when my tail almost tore as it suddenly gripped and halted our descent with a painful jolt. While a final crack from the ice saw it grind to a halt, leaving us exposed on the vertical face.\n\nRisha clung to my side, her claws digging into my scales. Shaking with shock and almost blinded by the storm, I peered down through the swirling murk, to see an open scar lined with precariously balanced sheets of ice torn open from the endless expanse. Thankfully, our anchor fell no further, while smaller blocks slid down into the depths with echoing clatters and rumbles.\n\n\"Are you okay!?\" I shouted to Risha.\n\n\"I think so!\" she replied, struggling to open her eyes.\n\nShe peered down, to where Ember was clinging to her webbed tail.\n\n\"Where's Boltock!?\" she shouted.\n\n\"Down here!\" a frail voice cried up from where he was latched onto the fiery-dragonesse's tail.\n\nRisha let out a noticeable sigh of relief. Meanwhile, the circumstances made it difficult for me to express the emotion in quite the same way. I turned to look up at the sheer ice face, its peak concealed by the storm. There was no way we were going to be able to climb, walk, or fly out. Exposed like this the maelstrom would surely freeze us in minutes.\n\n\"Blaze, what do we do now!?\" Risha shouted, desperately trying to make her voice heard against the raging wind.\n\nI take it this is still too much ice for her to manipulate? I thought hopelessly.\n\nCollecting my thoughts for a minute, only one idea came to mind. The words were brief, nonetheless they flashed through my mind.\n\n\"If I am supposed to be a prophesised saviour, then in some way, if you're out there, please show me a way!\" I called to the stormy sky.\n\n\"I think there's something down there!\" Boltock suddenly shouted from below.\n\n\"Don't be stupid, that's the sea!\" Risha responded.\n\n\"No, there's something there, I swear!\" his muffled voice sounded again. \"It's like an island!\"\n\nEmber's eyes tilted upwards as she interjected. \"Well, does anyone else have any bright ideas!?\"\n\nI looked down trying to peer into the depths. Despite my best efforts, it was hopeless, whatever Boltock thought he could see was too far away for me to pinpoint.\n\nIf something is down there, I'm going to have to trust him. I looked at Risha, her eyes struggling to stay open.\n\n\"It's the only way!\" I shouted, painfully admitting it to myself as much as her.\n\nShe glanced down, shivering so intensely it was a wonder the whole cliff didn't come crashing down.\n\n\"Okay... I... I trust you!\" she called back.\n\nI glanced up to the dark, windswept sky, closed my eyes, took in a deep breath, uncoiled my tail and released my grip."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Bound by Destiny.\n\n[ Unknowable Truth ]\n\nConsciousness slowly flickered into existence, revealing dazed images of a dark world. In a great rush of awareness my memory returned, and my eyes shot open.\n\nI couldn't make anything out in the darkness except the sound of restless ice creaking and echoing around me. I moved my head to find it almost frozen in place, and with some difficulty I managed to break the frost from my scales, eventually freeing my legs and wings. The frozen seal shattered completely when I finally staggered to my paws. I felt so cold, almost as though the blood had frozen in my veins.\n\nI struggled to bring a shivering forepaw to my face as my thoughts began to clear. I recalled clinging to the ice with the others, before releasing my grip and dropping into the void.\n\nThe others? Where are they?\n\nMy blurred gaze was cast out over the frozen chasm, searching the void as far as the limited light would allow. A glimpse of something in the darkness forced my chilled limbs into motion. Each muscle ached, while the steady movement slowly relieved me of my numbness.\n\nI noticed that the surface below my feet, while freezing cold, wasn't ice. It appeared to be a carpet of black sand squashing between my frozen toes.\n\nBoltock was right, there is land down here.\n\nIt wasn't long before I found myself peering down at Risha's blue scales, encased in a layer of shiny frost. I brushed the ice away, nudging her with a forepaw. The light howl of the distant storm overhead was the only thing to respond, as I discovered her body was as cold as ice.\n\nAll I'd done in my efforts to save them was to prolong their lives for a few more seconds, leaving them to freeze to death in this unforgiving hole. Kneeling beside her, I was unable to feel or think, all my troublesome thoughts had gone. For the first time in ages, my mind was clear from all its torment and taunting. I was done, beaten and broken; I'd failed. I rested my head on the sand beside hers and slipped into a frozen stupor.\n\nA sudden, unexpected movement woke me, and driven by a new-found hope I nudged her again. Another shift and a gentle cough sent a rush of relief and happiness to fill the emptiness that had consumed me.\n\n\"A\u2013Are you okay?\" The words stuttered from my trembling muzzle as I rubbed more frost from her scales.\n\nHer eyes blinked back to reality; a weak fire of life flickering inside the sapphire gems as she looked at me.\n\n\"You still have nothing to hold me to,\" she coughed.\n\nReally, after all this that's the first thing she thinks of!? Kneeling, I lifted her wing from beneath the ice's frozen grip.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she replied, slowly breaking her head and the rest of her body free from the cold shell. \"Where are the others?\"\n\nHer weak but urgent question prompted me to answer.\n\n\"I don't know. They can't be far.\" I felt her body drop as I uttered the words.\n\nShe struggled to her paws, and what remained of her frosty coat fell away. With all the urgency I could muster, I followed, slowly becoming more focused as we limped across the sand. Scattered blocks of ice barely visible through the void covered the otherwise barren floor. Each sat in a crater; obviously having fallen from the frozen fissure above. An occasional crashing chorus echoed the path of more descents through the emptiness.\n\nBefore I knew it, Risha was stumbling down a sandy bank towards what appeared to be another frozen body. In her rush, her weakened legs almost fell out from under her. I jumped forward to help, sliding down while trying not to slip. When I reached her, she was floundering, limbs quivering with the effort as she panted.\n\n\"Are you sure you're okay?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine, just make sure they're okay too,\" she gasped, pointing over to the other frosty forms.\n\nThe same frozen cocoons encased Boltock and Ember, seemingly in no better condition than Risha or I. Kneeling down beside them, she started the process of breaking them from their enforced hibernation. I helped brush off the frost while she elaborated on how dragons had a higher resistance to cold than other creatures, though it wasn't recommended they push it too far. While she continued to tend her patients, my eyes became more acclimatised to the limited light, allowing me to take a closer look at our surroundings.\n\nPeering out over the rift, I could see that the sand sloped downward until it sank into a pool of icy water. A sheer wall of gnarled and crumbling ice encased us on either side. The sound of the wind punctuated the painful echoes of its shifting, and the distant splashes signalled more falling ice.\n\nThe welcome sound of the others coming round was a warming contrast. I glanced back to see them waking from their frozen stasis, still alive and alert. Despite that, the pair shared our chilled inflictions, and Risha worked frantically to get them up and moving.\n\n\"I told you there was something down here,\" Boltock muttered through a fit of coughing.\n\n\"Yeah, well now we just have to find out where 'here' is,\" Ember added feebly.\n\nI turned to stare up to the world above. I'd no idea where we were, though if I was to give it a name it would probably be the most empty, wretched, freezing hole in the world.\n\n\"We can't fly out, that's for sure,\" Risha declared, her eyes looking to the bleak sky. \"Certainly not with him like that,\" she added, turning her eyes back to Boltock.\n\n\"None of us are in any state to fly, for that matter,\" she added, looking at Ember and I.\n\nDespite the hopelessness summoned by her every word, I felt a spark of foreboding as her eyes passed over me. As much as I attempted to convince myself otherwise, she was right \u2013 there was no telling how deep we were. The only sign the outside world even existed was the storm's distant howl.\n\nI examined the walls for any weakness, my eyes finally coming to rest on a rough crack shrouded in shadows. It looked dark and uninviting, but wide enough to squeeze through. The sight sparked a glimmer of hope in my frozen body, a fire that quickly began to warm and reawaken my desire to move on.\n\nThere's hope of escape, if only a slight one? My heart started to fill with optimism.\n\nUnsure of how to proceed I turned to the others while Risha helped them test their frozen limbs.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" she asked, as Ember assured her she could recover by herself.\n\nI nodded over at the gloomy fissure, my spine prickling with apprehension.\n\n\"I'll go look for a way out.\"\n\nDespite her concerned look I wasn't about to give her time to argue.\n\n\"You need to stay and make sure everyone's okay, you're the only one who knows how.\" My head drooped a little before I added, \"I got us here, I'll get us out.\"\n\nShe gave a weak nod, though her look was far from approving.\n\n\"Be careful.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I think we're as far away from the ghauls as we can be.\" The positive idea helped reassure my concerns as I turned towards the crevice.\n\nThe fissure reached high into the wall of ice, its depths uninviting, cold and dark. I glanced back at the others, the sight reminding me of what I was fighting for. Swallowing my fear, I crept into the abyss.\n\nPlacing one hesitant, shivering paw in front of the other, I cautiously moved forward, each step leading me into what felt like a tomb. The claustrophobic walls stretched up high and quickly closed in, leaving barely enough space to move.\n\nThe dark confines of the frozen dungeon was no place for a creature that belonged in the sky. The walls forced me into tighter corridors as I worked my way through. Even the floor was now nothing more than ice, invisible within the darkness that now prevailed. My eyes tried to pierce the gloom, straining to catch glimpses of the walls, but all I could see was the smallest hint of the thin passageway sloping downward.\n\nThe faint groans of contorting ice and rupturing rock echoed around me and after what felt like miles of walking, the tiny funnel finally led me to an open pocket. No natural light reached it, and I stumbled, hardly able to see where I placed my paws. What I didn't understand was why I could still see anything. Then I noticed a dim flicker, distorted by the translucent ice. Refusing to believe my eyes, the ghostly glow maintained its inviting glimmer.\n\nThe limited illumination it provided was enough to give me a glimpse of my frozen tomb, revealing several perfectly clear ice columns supporting the roof, like great trees frozen in time. The walls led off in all directions, hosting more of the cracked and broken passageways similar to the one that had delivered me here. All the while my eyes focused on the light, its hypnotic distraction making me completely oblivious to anything else.\n\nWhy would something like that appear in such a dark and unforgiving place?\n\nCuriosity drove me beyond any thoughts of caution, but even as I felt a deep urge to rush back and tell the others, the allure drew me in like a moth. Until, without realising it, I found myself at the far end of the chamber peering into another narrow walkway.\n\nWhat am I doing? I should go back, none of this is real, it's impossible! I told myself, but the light still beckoned.\n\nWhen I tried to tear my eyes away, my desire to know more forced me on. I tried to convince myself that I was hallucinating or so hopelessly lost that I wanted to see anything other than darkness,\n\nHow long have I been following it? How much longer should I continue? Is this just becoming an even more hopeless situation? None of it can be real.\n\n\"Why!?\"\n\nMy sudden outburst echoed through the chamber, as if shouting would allow my voice to transcend the boundaries of my icy prison.\n\nWhy me? Why now? Why here? What seemed to be the most important question right now was, why didn't I know? Why can't I believe? Is it fear, anger, or sheer desperation?\n\nIt was none of them.\n\nAll I'd ever wanted was to find the truth. All of my life I'd been content, but not truly satisfied. Yet when the moment of discovery finally thrust itself upon me, all I could do was reject it because it wasn't what I'd imagined.\n\nIf I want it so much, why do I keep refusing to believe? It may only have been an assumption, but it felt as though the answers could be along the narrow reaches of the corridor.\n\nI looked up and locked on to the flickering beacon. The air fell still, the restless ice grew silent and the strange lack of any sight, smell or sound other than that of the light unnerved me. Then something new caught my attention, a soft, welcoming sound that echoed between the walls. It was weak but undoubtedly came from the same direction as the glow. I listened intently, I'd heard the sound before, I knew it \u2013 deep down inside I knew that sound, but that was impossible, the only place I'd heard it before was in my...\n\nA sudden combination of shock, fear and curiosity surged into my mind, the latter-most immediately taking control and sending me in to a frantic dash down the tunnel. The sound grew louder as I came to a sliding halt at the entrance of a dimly lit chamber. The source of the light at its centre, a rhythmic hum accompanying its glow.\n\nImpossible! It's the cavern from my dreams!\n\nI'd been told repeatedly that dreams could never be real, whether it be the dread of nightmares or the longing for something more. They were things that could never come true and yet here I was, standing at the epicentre of my recurring nightmare. Never had I longed so much to wake from my mind's torment, to trap my terror in the dazed seconds before suddenly waking.\n\nBut this is no nightmare.\n\nI stared at the mystical blue light, the humming sound cutting off the surrounding world. Edging cautiously forward from the cover of the tunnel I placed a forepaw into the chamber.\n\nWait! my conscience screamed, and I retracted my eager foreleg.\n\nThis isn't a dream or some impossible hallucination, think about what you dreamt.\n\nI delved deeper into the depths of my fractured memory, salvaging everything I could recall. Amidst the broken images, repeated words and ghostly echoes came the distorted shards of my blurred recollections.\n\nIt always started this way. I'd find myself on the edge of the chamber, slowly walking towards the centre. Every time I reached it, something bad would happen, driving me into sudden consciousness. Only this time there was no waking up, no getting out. The thought made my stomach churn, leading me to one conclusion: I've no idea how to proceed.\n\nPart of me wanted to turn back, to leave the impossible alone. My mind fought back: what if there's no way out, no way to help the others?\n\nGlancing back through the passageway I recalled the words I'd desperately uttered when clinging to the ice.\n\nI called out to the supposed gods that sent me here. Maybe, just maybe, those words meant something?\n\nIt felt stupid to consider that they may have been heard. But if dreams could be real, then why not? All of it \u2013 the stories, legends, images, dreams, everything \u2013 all coalesced here. Like everything else on this unbelievable adventure, it wasn't how I'd imagined.\n\nI picked myself up, nervously stepping forward. I needed answers, whether I believed them or not, and with a growing conviction, I continued my advance. The light remained constant and the humming became louder, just like in my dreams. With every step I considered running, but this was it, I couldn't flee from the truth any longer.\n\nMy quivering paws crunched across a floor of frosted ice, cracking and splintering with each step like the surface of a dry riverbed. The air grew less hostile, less bitter, the cold and the darkness replaced by a feeling of incandescent warmth.\n\nThe blue glow grew brighter, reaching a blinding crescendo, forcing me to raise a wing over my straining eyes. Until, without warning, it failed, leaving a brief imprint on the back of my vision, plunging the chamber into darkness. I lowered my protective cover to see four hexagonal pillars emerge from the once overwhelming glow. Each one level with my eyes, formed from pure crystal and tipped with a fine point.\n\nA subdued light emanated from the base, projecting through the clear rock. At the centre lay a flat crystalline surface, bathed in the light of the retained hue. Its beauty chased away all the horror, doubt and sadness, dismissing them to my mind's darker reaches. I reached out and placed a forepaw upon them.\n\nA sense of purity immediately rushed through me like a healing river growing into a warm torrent. I snatched my paw away, looking at what I thought would be scorched scales, but there was no such thing: for where my paw had touched the crystals, it now glowed. For a moment I thought it was a trick and I tried to shake it off, when that failed, I returned my eyes to the mystical sight. This time a ball of flickering blue light had appeared above the four pillars. I couldn't recall anything like this from my dreams, and the urge to run flashed repeatedly through my mind.\n\n\"You have returned at last,\" a spectral voice announced like an old friend.\n\nI don't remember having any friends like this!\n\nI was convinced that I would remember them, and even my dreams omitted this part. I spun round, my eyes scouring the gloom for its source, a difficult task as it seemed the words were spoken from within my mind.\n\n\"You have nothing to fear,\" the elusive voice spoke again.\n\n\"Who said that?\" I shouted as I looked back at the orb of illumination.\n\n\"That would be me,\" the voice replied, words invading my mind once more.\n\nThis time I caught a glimpse of something else. As the words were uttered, the light synchronised perfectly.\n\n\"Did you just? Did you just talk?\" I asked hesitantly, jabbing a forepaw at the glow.\n\nI'm talking to a light, really? This has got to be the most ridiculous thing so far!\n\n\"That is correct,\" the light replied, once again pulsing in union with its words.\n\nIs this it? After all my searching, is this spectral voice going to give me the answers?\n\n\"W\u2013Who... who are you?\" I stuttered.\n\n\"I am Ethereal,\" the voice replied.\n\n\"Ethereal, that's your name?\" I asked, cocking my head.\n\n\"The concept of names has long been forgotten among us, but it is my name, if you so wish.\"\n\n\"Us? You mean there are more of you?\" I asked, glancing around for more glowing orbs.\n\n\"In the beginning, we were five. That...\" the voice raised its tone. \"That is not what is important... not now.\"\n\nI flinched at the peak in its words, pausing for a few moments before I dared ask my next question.\n\n\"What is important?\"\n\nThe reply wasn't what I expected.\n\n\"You. You have returned, and so the time is finally upon us.\"\n\nAll I could do was stare directly into the mesmerising glow as my mind began to crumble under the revelation.\n\nThat's just what everyone else has been saying!\n\n\"We have been trying to reach you for so very long. But shadows have clouded what we once were,\" the voice added.\n\n\"What, who... What do you mean? Who am I, what am I?\" I spluttered, the words flooding out like a raging torrent.\n\nI paused abruptly, silent and motionless as I awaited the truth.\n\n\"Patience, young one. I understand your desire for answers, all will be revealed in time.\"\n\nThe light's reply simply reignited my enthusiasm. I wasn't just going to let it stop there, not after all I'd been through. I needed something more, and I needed it now.\n\n\"Why so secretive?\" I asked, my wings ruffling as I battled frustration.\n\nThe light remained ignorant of me for a few more moments before responding.\n\n\"Because it would be more fruitful to bear witness to it.\"\n\nI had no time to question, no time to react as the mystical light sank back into the crystal. Its retreat allowed the darkness to return, or it would have, had there been enough time before the blissful explosion.\n\nA beam of light erupted from the centre of the crystals, momentarily blinding me as it lanced up into the chamber, each blinding pulse accompanied by a thrumming hum. I turned away, shielding my eyes as they strained against the intense glow, while desperately trying to follow the course of the beam to where it collided with the ceiling. Upon striking the ice, the mystical glow fanned out into a sea of minuscule particles. Each radiant speck consumed the solid mass as it danced, transforming the ceiling beyond recognition.\n\nThe spectacle they revealed looked impossibly real. The familiar sight of the night sky was exactly like my dream. However, I recalled that the worst part of my dream was still to come and with some hesitation, I looked into the crystal. What I expected didn't meet my worried eyes. A completely normal reflection stared back at me.\n\nMy relief was short lived, the ground shook as the expanding cosmos rapidly spread to consume the walls, and floor. As it did, it started to feel like it was more than just an image, more like an open window to another world. Flakes of ice crumbled away, losing their frozen anchor as the stars marched forward without pause. I turned to look for the exit, but it was gone, consumed by the expanding particles.\n\nPanic began to overwhelm me as I tried desperately to fly up from the encroaching void, but there was nothing to aid my attempts \u2013 no wind, no ground, not even air. I closed my eyes, preferring the darkness they provided over what expanded around me.\n\nMy body shuddered as I felt the ground beneath me disappear, but I felt no sensation of falling, instead it felt like being submerged in water, except there was no pressure or drowning.\n\nFinally, I cracked open my eyes, finding to my utter amazement, the incredibly beautiful and instantly recognisable vision. I was suspended in a sea of stars sailing in a black ocean. Some were clustered together like birds in a great cosmic tree, suspended within beautiful clouds of red and blue, while shimmering dust spread across the expanses between. Much like coloured dye in water, more shapes of cosmic green and purple dissipated to create gorgeous blooms as radiant as wildflowers in summer. I struggled to take in the full splendour as all my sadness, hopelessness and anger were drained away. The feeling even dismissed the lingering knowledge that I still had my friends to worry about and the evil that pursued us.\n\nFor a moment all that mattered was being here in the night sky, the one thing I'd always looked to for comfort on the darkest of nights.\n\nDragons can fly to the stars. I thought to myself, the ambition once so childish now so real.\n\n\"Beautiful, isn't it?\" a voice noted.\n\nI turned as fast as I could, clumsily propelling myself through the weightless realm. I recognised the words as those Risha had used not so long ago, but it wasn't her beside me; instead, the glowing ball hovered effortlessly.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, returning my eyes to stare at the scene's majestic beauty.\n\n\"This is the Ether, cradle of the Golden City, home of the Ethereal's. The sky, as it's known in mortal tongue.\"\n\nI wasn't sure whether it was because I didn't have a clue what it was talking about or that the sky was stealing my attention, but it was hard to take in what I was being told.\n\n\"Who are the Ethereals?\" I asked, the words disrupting my fixation.\n\n\"We are what the mortals call 'the creators'. In the beginning there were five of us. The first, last and only of our kind. As our name suggests, we created everything: all worlds, dimensions, time and reality itself. It was our purpose, and that of our followers, to rule over all creation, keeping peace and harmony.\"\n\nI could only look on in awe and confusion. How could just five strange balls of light create everything? What is a dimension?\n\nConsidering everything I'd seen in the last few moments, I was inclined to believe anything, even something as extreme as that.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked, continuing to stare into space.\n\n\"For billions of years the Golden City stood strong, a monument among the stars. Our rule was secure in the power of our descendants, and the balance of the Ether was unhindered. Worlds were born, civilisations grew, as did they die, replaced by the next as we and those who served, lived on forever. Watching over and caring for creation as was our purpose. The balance lasted until the shadow of corruption came.\"\n\nThe light stopped, expressing its displeasure with a dull flicker, despite there being no change in its tone. It was strange, the entity seemed capable of making me feel as it did without the need for physical expression. It had brought me here, and now it was starting to make me believe.\n\n\"What shadow?\" I asked, withdrawing my attention from the possessive sky.\n\nIt failed to respond for another moment, while it seemingly contemplated its response.\n\n\"An unspeakable horror emerged from the darkest corners of creation and descended upon us without warning, mercilessly consuming all it encountered, be it physical or spiritual. It was no evil to balance the good, it was pure darkness, not of creation. A disease.\"\n\nThe light pulsed with a harsh flicker, flames flaring from its sides.\n\n\"My brethren and I defied it, trying everything we could to stop it, but it only had one ambition: complete and meaningless obliteration.\"\n\nThe idea sent a shudder down my spine as I imagined something so terrible it could make the stars flicker out.\n\n\"After many great battles we finally thought it vanquished, but it lived on in corrupt and clouded minds. One mind above all others proved that our victory couldn't come without the greatest of sacrifices. Left with no choice, we forfeited our physical forms to create a power strong enough to seal the last manifestation of its darkness away within an unbreakable prison, forged from the heart of reality itself.\"\n\n\"What happened to this prison?\" I asked, with a nagging sensation the answer was closer than I thought.\n\n\"With our power all but destroyed, events saw it placed in the care of mortals. Our judgment proved misguided, however; the evil's dark power was too much and it gradually began to twist their minds. Such is its unrelenting nature, to turn beings on each other.\"\n\nMy eyes fell away and fear churned my stomach as I finally admitted to myself in a whisper.\n\n\"It's the Sphere of Eternity, isn't it?\"\n\n\"The mortal tongue bestows it many names, all of which are a curse upon reality, but no mortal knows the truth of what lies within. Many have forgotten it, as they have forgotten us.\"\n\nI looked up to the stars, hoping they would provide some reassurance.\n\nWhy didn't the creators help? Why did they leave the sphere to wreak war, death and destruction?\n\nThat seemed to be no different to what 'the darkness' would have done if it wasn't for its imprisonment.\n\nIf they expended all their power to seal it away, what were they to do? Another thought reasoned.\n\nAll these new questions were leading me away from the answers I truly wanted. I'd been aware of the sphere for some time, but now the growing truth was more than I could possibly imagine.\n\n\"Now it's in the hands of a madman,\" I uttered, fully aware that Acrodan had it.\n\n\"Frozen in the ice, the last of the mortal guardians has held it for centuries. His frail mortality is no more than a vessel for its power, he is nothing but a mindless puppet. Nevertheless, the servant will soon find a way to open the prison.\"\n\nEvery one of the Ethereal's words generated more questions, but I only needed one answer.\n\n\"What does this have to do with me?\"\n\nThe light flickered, pausing before it gave a response.\n\n\"You are the key to everything. It is your purpose to complete the task we can no longer fulfil. As we were destined to create reality, you are destined to save it. Your existence upon this plain was never intended to proceed as it has. Fate has plans for us all, even those of omnipotence.\"\n\nAt that, my frustration finally gave way.\n\n\"That doesn't explain anything! Why am I so special to them!?\" I jabbed a wing at nowhere in particular. \"Dragons, humans and griffins, they all think I'm so special!\"\n\n\"You are the chosen of the Ethereal's. No single aspect of reality is bound to you, it has always been your purpose to protect this world. That tale has been written since your creation.\"\n\nI peered into the sky, sickened by another slew of cryptic clues, spoken to me like I was somehow meant to understand.\n\n\"You are special because, as you have surely surmised, you were always destined to save them \u2013 and they believe that to be so.\"\n\nUnable to comprehend what the orb said, I drifted through the emptiness. If these were the answers I so desperately sought, then I was as opposed to them as I'd been all the others.\n\n\"So, you chose me to do what you couldn't? To...\" My tone exploded in rage, only to ebb away in anger.\n\nThe sphere remained silent, as if offended by my outburst, but I couldn't bring myself to care. It seemed to disregard what I desired, firmly believing I'd been thrust into a life I shouldn't have known.\n\nAfter a few moments lost in selfish rage I realised that instead of remaining ignorant, the god-like glow had disintegrated into a cloud of glowing dust, gently blowing on a cosmic breeze before blossoming into a shimmering cloud like a swarm of fireflies. It eventually stopped and magically reformed, unrecognisable at first, until as the dust combined, a new shape emerged.\n\nI looked on in amazement at the unmistakable form of a dragon materialising before me, each particle moving in unison to animate the beast's movements. The ghost-dragon settled, its dust-formed scales glowing like pure starlight.\n\n\"Is this what you looked like?\" I asked, the anger draining from my voice.\n\n\"My brethren and I are one now, we remain whole within our realm, the ruins of the Golden City. Within your world we can only form a projection of our former selves and even that takes tremendous effort.\"\n\nThe glowing particles formed a moving mouth, perfectly mimicking speech.\n\n\"If we were to tell the full truth you seek, we'd only bring you the most insufferable pain,\" it warned, sensing my dissatisfaction, before adding.\n\n\"We all have a path to follow, even gods are bound by destiny.\"\n\nThere was no thought or action with which I could respond. It was unnerving that it knew my every idea, but it was true \u2013 I wanted the truth so much.\n\n\"So, I'm a... god?\" I murmured, only just managing to put the unfathomable explanation into words.\n\n\"You are indeed ethereal; however, unlike us, you were never destined to create. Your path leads you to protect,\" the ghost-dragon was swift to correct.\n\n\"We understand your pain, though such trauma was never intended. You know what must be done, you have known from the moment you left your old life behind.\"\n\nThe words erased what remained of my fear, my doubt and my inability to understand. It was painful to admit, but it was right \u2013 I wouldn't have left if Tarwin hadn't been in danger, and that was what ultimately drove me. It all sounded so ridiculous, gods, monsters, other worlds? I could hardly believe what I was thinking. My eyes returned to meet those of the ghost dragon.\n\n\"I know what I have to do,\" I replied.\n\nThe answers to my question had brought me to accept it. This is my destiny.\n\n\"The sphere's evil can never be allowed to return into the Ether, otherwise it will restore its former power. You are destined to ensure that does not come to pass.\"\n\nHearing my fate laid out as if from a guidebook made me feel worse.\n\n\"How am I supposed to? How am I supposed to do anything?\"\n\n\"Your power has never been truly uncovered. It couldn't have been known that the humans would find you. They unknowingly shielded you from the power of the darkness and its mindless puppet.\"\n\nThere was at least a warm sense of irony in that. Tarwin was looking out for me and she didn't even know it.\n\n\"You have already started to awaken your true self; it is not an element like those given to others of your kind \u2013 it is a power born of the stars.\"\n\nThe horrifying images of boiling blood, the decapitated beast and the blinding explosion of light crawled their way into my thoughts, and for a moment I considered asking more about my mysterious power. The other dragons would certainly want to know more, but right now that didn't matter. I knew the power to which the dragon referred: an incinerating fire that could burn flesh to nothing in moments, a body resistant to harm, which would, if injured, heal with unthinkable speed, and scales that burned as hot as the sun. Admittedly it was uncontrolled, as lost to me as the truth, but it was just as much a part of me as my old life.\n\n\"I can't even use it. I can't fight against them,\" I replied, looking at one of my forepaws.\n\nThe ghost dragon started to shrink, compacting to my size.\n\n\"You have powers beyond anything they can imagine, powers that within your realm you alone possess. You must succeed in what we failed so long ago.\"\n\nMy eyes slipped away.\n\n\"Star Dragon,\" the ghost dragon announced, drawing my attention back.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The truth may remain beyond your comprehension, but your name is within your capacity to understand.\"\n\nI knew my name, Tarwin had given it to me and I'd known it all my life. It's the last thing I have to lose.\n\nThe Ethereal's new title was about to steal that away as well, and once again the mystical entity appeared to know of my confusion as it continued to speak.\n\n\"In the mortal tongue that is the title they would bestow upon one with your power.\"\n\n\"So, what now?\" I asked, beginning to consider what was next and how I'd get back to the others.\n\n\"You will return to your fate, remember what you know.\"\n\nWhat I know? The idea flashed through my mind. Despite what I'd been told, I couldn't place any real meaning on the words, and before I could respond, the dragon spoke again.\n\n\"We will meet again... Guardian.\"\n\nWith that, he fell silent. I looked round, my eyes no longer met the starry sky, instead settling on the icy chamber's dull walls. As I slowly came to terms with reality's return, all the emotion created by the sky's majestic beauty, the Ether and the Ethereal, ebbed away.\n\nMaybe I'd dreamt it all, just as I'd done many times before, but this time the crystal alter remained, a faint blue glow emanating from its base. Its flat surface contained something new, a jewel as magical as the altar itself, unlike anything I'd seen before. A sculpted amulet with a golden chain trailing from its tip. I crouched down, curiosity overpowering any urge to pull away.\n\nIts surface glowed like starlight moulded by a celestial black smith. Carved into its centre was a clear gem, glowing white-hot. The gold surrounding it stretched out into an eight-pointed star, the four larger points equidistant from each other while their smaller brethren sat symmetrically between them. A circle encased the central gem, and the image of a serpent bridged the gaps between the longer points.\n\nIt didn't possess the featureless body of a snake, but that of a dragon. The mouth reached round to the tip of the tail, wings and paws pressed against its sides and sleek golden scales covered its surface.\n\nI reached out to touch the glowing gem, expecting the bejewelled centre to burn with a radiant heat. To my surprise the glow receded, flowing from my paw and up into my leg, its purifying light having a similar effect to the glow from the crystal pillar. I pulled back as the warm embrace dispersed almost instantly and the glow subsided.\n\nIt must be from the ghost-dragon, the creators, the Ethereals, whatever they call themselves.\n\nIts presence was a message, proof they were real, a magical artifact from the beings who created reality itself. The thought and emotion of my excitement was instantly extinguished as the second realisation hit me.\n\nIf they're real, then so is everything they said.\n\nMy whole body tensed as the realisation dawned on me and pure fear raced through every molecule of my being. Acrodan, the Dark Guardian, whether he knew it or not, was about to destroy everything. I peered down at the amulet. What it symbolised was all true, and even though I still felt like I knew nothing of myself, I had all the truth I needed. Whether I was able to accept it or not, it was inescapable, I knew what I had to do. I ducked down, sweeping the amulet over my head and onto my neck, the magical trinket sliding to a resting place in the centre of my chest. My eyes scanned the walls for the exit.\n\nEverything about the world \u2013 the legends and stories told through the generations \u2013 it was all true. I no longer needed answers, I'd had them all along. I wasn't going to stand by and let the world end, I was here to save my friends, all of them \u2013 and I wouldn't fail.\n\nWith the altar's light gone, the only glow came from the amulet's gem. The exit appeared as nothing more than a patch of inky blackness on the faintly illuminated walls.\n\nThin flakes of ice flicked up into the air with the rapid movements of my hurried paws as I entered the mouth of the crevice, before sliding to a halt. Peering into the poorly lit darkness, my mind crashed. It was impossible. The returning sense of reality conquered my initial eagerness, and even with my massively broadened mind, it was still far too much. My legs slipped out from under my shivering body as the shock of it all hit me.\n\nGods? Time? Ethereals? Other dimensions? Beings that created everything! The mental shield of my excitement crumbled, and the enormous realisation flooded in.\n\nSince the day they'd taken Tarwin, I'd wanted to find the truth, and now that I had, it was more of a curse than a reprieve.\n\nHow wrong is my shrouded view, how wrong is it to believe my part in this can be simple?\n\nI was as much a puppet on their strings as Acrodan. Blindly following powers far beyond my comprehension.\n\nTrapped within a crushing shell of my own anxiety, unable to move and breathing heavily, the grim realisation pushed painfully into my broken mind. The world, as I knew it, as everyone knew it, was in danger, and even though it all seemed unbelievable, it felt real \u2013 it was my purpose, my destiny.\n\nThe full truth and consequences started to sink in. The world was counting on me, the small, pale-scaled dragon, the unusual oddity that didn't quite fit in.\n\nI can't keep thinking like this. I can't let it get to me. They need me as much as Tarwin does and I'm not going to let them down!\n\nFurrowing my brow, I collected my thoughts, picked myself up and started to make my way back. The faint light of the amulet guided me through the claustrophobic darkness until I found myself back in the previous chamber. I knew the crevice on the opposite side led to the others and taking a route around the random ice pillars, I was able to make out the outlines of the other passageways. There was no time to discover where they all might lead, I only had a few moments to scan each one, checking closely for any signs they may lead to the outside world.\n\nI systematically made my way round, peering into the inky blackness and allowing the amulet's dim light to penetrate as far as possible. Most of the potential exits seemed to go nowhere, until finally, something about the last of them caught my attention.\n\nLike all the other crevices it looked dark and empty, however, it wasn't its appearance that stimulated my interest, it was the subtle flow of air brushing gently across my face.\n\nThat breeze can't be passing through solid ice, there must be an opening.\n\nI pulled my head back, opened my eyes and looked toward the final passageway. I wasn't going to be so stupid as to blindly allow confidence to cloud my vision. There was no doubt that we were going to have to take a chance, the air may easily be coming down an inaccessible exit. With only that faint hope, I moved over to the passageway leading back to the others.\n\nWhat other choice do we have?\n\nAs I clambered back up the tunnel a flickering orange light caught my attention.\n\nFire! The thought of its radiating warmth suddenly drove me on.\n\nI sped up the remainder of the corridor, the icy floor giving way to the soft, black sand. I slowed as I approached the exit, not wanting to scare the others with a hurried entrance. All three lay on the sand around a fire magically generated from the tip of Ember's tail. As I got closer, they raised their heads. Ember and Boltock remained seated, but Risha stood to welcome me.\n\n\"Did you find anything?\" she asked quietly, her voice still a little weak.\n\nIt took me a few moments to respond as I considered exactly what I'd found.\n\nCan I tell her about it? She'll think I'm a lunatic.\n\n\"Yes, yes I found a tunnel,\" I replied, nodding at the crevice. \"There's a passageway with an air flow, it has to lead somewhere.\"\n\nAs I spoke, I saw her eyes fix on my amulet. I'd forgotten it was there, and quickly tried to provide an explanation, shifting slightly in an effort to distract her attention.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said, shaking off her fixation. \"Where did you get that? It's beautiful.\"\n\nI wanted to tell her everything, but I could barely believe it myself.\n\nHey, this is Risha, she's the most open-minded dragoness there is.\n\nI could tell her it had been dropped long ago and sunk to the bottom when the ocean was still liquid, but to lie was to betray everything she'd done for me.\n\nI'll tell her, I trust her.\n\nI was just about to open my mouth to respond when a loud rumble interrupted. The sound echoed down the collapsed chasm, swiftly followed by a thundering resonance of creaks and groans as more ice began to crumble.\n\nWe all jumped up, the fire snuffed out as Ember's tail whipped back. The bitter cold almost instantly regained its lost ground when another huge chunk of ice broke free, collapsing in a cloud of white dust and debris before crashing into the water, sending a large wave across its surface. I glanced at the others; their eyes focused on the rough liquid clawing at the shore.\n\n\"We should get going, it's not safe here,\" I urged as the ice let out another pained symphony.\n\n\"He's right,\" Risha added, glancing back at me. \"I can feel it, it's been moving for hours.\"\n\nThere was a nod of agreement from the others.\n\n\"Lead the way, Blaze,\" Risha added, walking up next to me as I turned to face the crevice.\n\nConfident that they would follow, I moved towards the fracture's inky blackness.\n\nWe have to get out, the whole world's depending on it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Through the Eyes of a God",
                "text": "\"We'll have to go in single file,\" I instructed from the mouth of the opening.\n\nEach of my friends looked at me with trepidation as Risha stepped forward.\n\n\"You should go first,\" she proposed, gesturing to my luminous amulet.\n\nI glanced down and nodded. \"Okay, just stay close.\"\n\nTaking the first step I began venturing back into the depths, and it wasn't long before we found ourselves in the chamber where the tunnels converged. Maintaining a hurried pace, I quickly led them over to the crevice I believed would allow our escape.\n\n\"It's this way,\" I beckoned, feeling the air flow on my wings.\n\nThe longer we delayed, the more my eyes drifted over to the lonely tunnel on the chamber's far side.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Risha asked.\n\n\"Yes... yes, I'm... I'm fine,\" I answered, wrapping a foreclaw around my amulet before hurriedly pressing onward.\n\nThe new crevice led into another narrow cavern, the gentle flow of cool air on my scales the only encouraging feature of the claustrophobic space. We continued in single file for what felt like miles, the amulet's faint light bouncing off the walls and revealing no more than a few paces ahead.\n\nThe trek dragged on, every step taunting my tired eyes as I dreaded what the inky veil before me might be hiding. The only thing keeping me going was the constant movement of air, even so, after hours of meandering through the tunnel I was beginning to despair.\n\nIs this just an endless chasm? Is there any way out?\n\nWithout warning something out of the darkness came into focus and I suddenly stopped. A chink of light grew from a small speck into a shimmering beacon of hope, I almost lost sight of it as the others bumped into my tail.\n\n\"What is it?\" Risha asked.\n\nI glanced down at the amulet, the gem wasn't responsible for the new light, and I was sure it wasn't a trick.\n\n\"This way, follow me!\" I declared, breaking into a sprint.\n\nI heard Risha's paws shift as she darted after me with the others close on her tail.\n\nThis is not the end; we're getting out of here!\n\nEventually I came upon the light's source, discovering it was indeed the sun. My sudden burst of joy was short-lived, the beam of light streamed down from an inaccessible crack high above, the narrow walls impossible to climb. I peered up at the streaming rays gracing my face, so tantalisingly close and yet so far away.\n\nNo! Stupid cave, just let us out!\n\nMy eyes dropped to the floor as my enthusiasm drained away. Through the blur of my despair a different view of the amulet's light greeted my gaze. Its dim flicker had grown in strength. As if the sunlight itself had given it a new energy, it drew in the rays, amplifying them into a continuous beam that illuminated a path deeper into the passageway.\n\n\"Blaze...\" Risha came up next to me, glancing up at the crevice. \"There's got to be another way.\"\n\nI nodded and moved on.\n\nThe strain of walking for so long without rest soon started to show. My companions' silent march said it all, and I was becoming increasingly concerned about Boltock's injuries. As reluctant as I was to stop, they had become painfully slow and I finally had to accept that I couldn't push them as much as I could push myself.\n\nI'm just as much a freak as the Ethereal said I am. I'm not even weary yet.\n\nI slowed and eventually brought the whole group to a halt. Barely able to turn my body, I cocked my head to glance back. It was clear they were tired, Boltock in particular.\n\n\"Is everyone okay?\" I asked.\n\nThe answer I'd anticipated was confirmed by a combination of weak nods and mild groans.\n\n\"We should rest,\" I added.\n\n\"No, we can go a little more,\" Risha replied, standing up straight, only for her quivering limbs to stagger.\n\n\"No, you need to rest,\" I pressed.\n\nShe gave me a defeated look before turning back to the others.\n\n\"I\u2013I... I know, I just really want to get out of here,\" she admitted breathlessly.\n\n\"I know, I do too. It can't be far now, there's got to be a way,\" I responded, glancing ahead.\n\nI stood for a moment watching the cold plume of my breath disperse into the freezing air, and to my surprise, a rather strange odour met my senses. As much as my curiosity was awakened so was my caution, whatever it was it didn't smell like ghauls or wyverns. It was drifting up from ahead, where the passageway dove back into the depths.\n\n\"Do you smell that?\" I asked, raising my snout and sniffing the air.\n\nRisha nodded as she did the same.\n\n\"I smell it too,\" added Ember, Boltock also muttering in agreement.\n\n\"Stay here and rest,\" I instructed, waving the trio down with a flap of my wing. \"I'll go and check it out.\"\n\n\"How come you're always the one going to check?\" Risha questioned.\n\nI paused, responding with the only obvious answer. \"Because I'm the one at the front.\"\n\nI thought she might insist she accompany me. I knew I wasn't good at deterring her, but despite a look of worried disapproval, she held back.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she added, before anxiously settling down.\n\nI nodded reassuringly before moving forward into the darkness once more. The floor dropped steeply, the slippery incline making it hard to stand. Nonetheless, I managed to navigate my way to the bottom where the smell became much more apparent. Through the gloom I recognised the flickering motion of a flame, the dancing glow gently deflecting the darkness. Lowering myself to the floor, I crawled along the ground towards the source of the smell. As I drew closer the tunnel began to carry strange noises, similar to some sort of small, nattering animals.\n\nUnlike creatures like mice or birds, the rapid chattering started to sound more like language, spoken quickly in rough, high-pitched tones. Eventually, I reached a point where the tunnel opened out into a chamber, and creeping over to a shallow bank of ice, I peered in.\n\nSeveral messy fires, fuelled by sticks and mangled chunks of driftwood, lit the chamber. The floor sloped away from my vantage point, flowing down several layers before it levelled. Opposite my position, at the chamber's lowest point, was the first thing to draw my attention. Stretching up from the wall was the carcass of a whale. I'd seen the people back in the village catch them for food and oil, often providing enough of both for a whole winter. They were so big and hard to hunt that whenever they were successful, the villagers would celebrate with a ceremonial feast. I'd loved those parties, I'd sit at the top of the hall beside Tarwin and her father for hours, more like a prized guest than a pet.\n\nWhat? You can't think of that now. Focus on what's in front of you!\n\nThe full force of the acrid smell filled my nostrils as I gazed upon a mob of unruly creatures, skulking around the chamber like chattering rats, unlike anything I'd ever had the displeasure of seeing or smelling before. They were small, grey-skinned beings with stubby arms and legs sticking out from their rotund, pot-bellied bodies. Their heads were also round and stubby, while their mouths bore an under-bite, showing a row of disfigured, sharp looking teeth. A long, pointed nose and ears, combined with small, black beady eyes completed their notable features.\n\nThey didn't appear to be friendly. Some wore sets of fur clothing, while others displayed fur from the top of helmets. Most unsettling of all was the small animalistic bones strung across their shoulders. The creatures gathered next to the carcasses' open under-belly. Unlike the ordered dissection the villagers performed, these creatures squabbled and swarmed like ants, greedily pulling chunks of flesh from the rib cage. Some of the larger ones held wooden spears, tipped with what looked like ice. While other's used blades to slice the whale's blubber with ease, staining the pale floor with a crimson hue.\n\nIt was clear that they weren't the servants of any Dark Guardian, and if they were, they didn't appear as deadly as the wyverns or ghauls. Even so, I knew that to judge them too quickly could have dire consequences. What struck me most was that if they had managed to get in here, then there must be a way out.\n\nI turned back towards the passageway and being careful not to make any noise I scampered back through the tunnel and up the slope to the others. Reaching the top, I looked back to see if anything had followed, thankfully finding nothing. The others were still resting in the confines of the crevice when I eventually reached them, Risha lifting her head as she asked.\n\n\"What's down there?\"\n\n\"Some kind of small, grey-skinned, stubby-legged creatures,\" I replied, indicating the height of the beings by raising a forepaw.\n\nI hoped she'd know what I was talking about, but she appeared puzzled. I paused for a moment, silently assessing her condition and that of the others, before turning back towards the crevice.\n\n\"Come take a look,\" I suggested, gesturing towards the passageway.\n\nRisha glanced back at her brother. \"Ever heard of anything like that?\" she asked.\n\n\"I've heard of lots of creatures,\" he replied, looking up at his sister with a shrug. \"They just sound like fat goblins to me.\"\n\nRisha sighed and looked to Ember.\n\n\"Don't look at me, he's the one who said he knew everything,\" she swiftly countered, nudging Boltock with a forepaw.\n\n\"W\u2013well, I'm sure I can tell you if I see them,\" he declared, puffing up and smirking at Ember, \"Let's go.\"\n\nShe is such a good motivator for him? I noted as I set off into the tunnel.\n\n\"Be careful, it's quite steep and slippery,\" I advised as I slid down the incline.\n\nRisha followed, her attention instinctively redirected to the next of us to face the slope.\n\n\"Are you okay with this?\" she called quietly.\n\n\"My wing's broken, not my legs,\" he replied sharply.\n\nShe turned away, feigning a lack of interest as he clumsily slid down the slope, before finally turning around to steady his bumbling descent with a forepaw.\n\n\"Told you,\" she cooed, brushing frost from his good wing as he grumbled.\n\nEmber demonstrated a much more controlled descent as she navigated her way down. Meanwhile, I looked out towards the bank of ice I'd just used for cover. It was easily large enough to hide all of us, and the creatures seemed to be too distracted to notice.\n\n\"We'll sneak over to that ice bank, we'll have to be quick and quiet,\" I whispered, watching each of my companions nod.\n\n\"We'll follow you,\" Risha replied.\n\nI crawled out to the cover, checking for any sign that I might have been spotted. Confident of my security, I turned my attention to the others, signalling for them to move. Risha was first, quietly creeping over in a similar manner to me, while Boltock and then Ember brought up the rear. As soon as we were all positioned behind the ice bank, I peered over. As expected, the industrious beasts were completely unaware.\n\nI could see discarded spears laying on the ice or sticking out of the whale's fatty blubber. Another group had collected more driftwood, using the unburnt pieces to construct a crude scaffold in an attempt to reach the top of the whale's open underside.\n\n\"What's happening, what are they?\" Boltock whispered impatiently, fumbling to get a good view.\n\n\"I don't know, I can't see with your wing getting in the way,\" Risha scolded.\n\n\"Roblins,\" her brother declared, finally peering over the cover.\n\nBefore anyone could utter a disapproving response, he instantly rose to his own defence.\n\n\"See, told you I'd know what they were.\"\n\n\"What's a roblin?\" I asked, ducking back down.\n\n\"They're scavengers, primitive creatures; they take anything they can, making their own weird weapons and tools from it,\" he explained, glancing at Ember eagerly.\n\nHis giddy expression collapsed when he found she'd hardly noticed his intellect. Although I felt obliged to reward the value of his knowledge, all I could do was ask the most pressing question on my mind.\n\n\"Are they dangerous?\"\n\n\"Well... they can be defensive of their things \u2013 and they've got quite a big thing down there,\" he replied, jabbing a wing at the whale carcass.\n\nThey didn't look too threatening, even so, whatever tipped the end of their spears was strong enough to pierce through whale blubber with very little effort.\n\n\"Blizarium,\" Risha announced, smirking at her brother. \"Don't tell me you didn't notice.\"\n\nBoltock knowingly ignored her.\n\n\"Their blades, they're made of blizarium,\" she added.\n\nBoltock reluctantly looked over the primitive weaponry, responding, much to his dislike, with a subtle nod. The mention of blizarium, and the clarity of her words, took me back to her life story. Despite the momentary remorse it summoned, I remembered her telling me of the city built from the magical material.\n\n\"How did they get a whale in here?\" Ember asked.\n\nSurely it would take a thousand of them to move an animal as large as that. Risha and Ember both looked to Boltock for answers.\n\n\"I... er, it must have been frozen in the ice,\" he suggested, tripping over his words. \"Yeah, they must have dug it out or something... yeah, yeah, that's probably it.\"\n\nMoments later there was more chattering as several roblins entered from behind the carcass, the four of us quickly retreating behind our cover. Their appearance confirmed my original conclusion, that there must be a way out.\n\n\"They're between us and the only exit. We have to get around them,\" I suggested, looking to each of my companions.\n\n\"How do you know?\" Risha asked.\n\n\"They have to be coming in from somewhere, and I don't think they can walk through walls,\" I replied.\n\n\"So, we have to get around them,\" I repeated.\n\n\"How do you suppose we do that?\" Risha added, glancing at her brother, who shrugged and suggested.\n\n\"We can't sneak around, there's not enough cover, and I doubt they'll just let us walk out.\"\n\n\"So, we're going to have to fight our way out,\" I interrupted.\n\nSuggesting violence so readily felt like a betrayal of my old self, and the thought didn't sit comfortably.\n\nI'll do what I have to.\n\n\"They have blizarium spears, that stuff will cut through dragon scale like cloth,\" Risha warned, her brother nodding reluctantly.\n\nThere's got to be an easier way. We don't have to kill them, and we don't have to give them the chance to kill us.\n\nDespite my proposal to fight, I was desperately thinking of ways to spare their lives.\n\nIs that what the Ethereal meant? I'm supposed to save all lives, even those of these beasts and monsters who've so mercilessly sought my destruction?\n\nDistracted by the thoughts I redirected my attention, and for a moment my mind went blank.\n\n'Use what you know' were the words I recalled from the ghost-dragon.\n\nWhat I knew was that my friends were certainly not mindless monsters or selfish tyrants and neither was I. Glancing around the chamber I absorbed every dimly lit detail while the others persisted in their bickering.\n\n\"Roblins are renowned for being stupid and clumsy \u2013 they may have the weapons, but I bet they don't have the skill to use them,\" Boltock proposed.\n\n\"All they need is one hit, a spear to the chest and you're done for,\" Risha countered.\n\nRetracting from my observations, I cut their argument short as I spoke up.\n\n\"I've got a plan, but it's going to take all of us.\"\n\nShifting closer to hear my improvised strategy, they exchanged puzzled glances.\n\n\"Ember, can you use your fire to melt some of the roof?\" I began.\n\nThe dragoness peered up for a moment, allowing me to show her the area she'd need to melt.\n\n\"Yeah, should be easy enough,\" she replied with a confidant smirk.\n\n\"Risha, can you use the melted water to sweep them into a corner?\" I asked, gesturing to the roblins.\n\n\"That shouldn't be too hard,\" she answered, rubbing her chest with a forepaw.\n\n\"Just be careful not to drown them,\" I added, assuming the beasts could drown.\n\nFinally, I turned to Boltock, pointing to the other side of the whale with my wing.\n\n\"The exit must be over there. We'll move around, force any stragglers into the water and then hold off any who come after us when Risha releases them.\"\n\nAlthough he nodded his approval, his enthusiasm was cut short.\n\n\"No,\" Risha interrupted, trying not to shout. \"I nearly lost you once and I'm not going to risk it again.\"\n\nThe revelation was like a boulder to the face, and my muzzle slammed shut. How can I argue with her?\n\n\"There's a big difference between a wyvern and some roblins,\" Boltock countered.\n\n\"They have blizarium weapons. Remember how strong it is?\" she reminded him.\n\n\"They're roblins, they're completely stupid,\" he persisted, waving a dismissive forepaw.\n\nThis time his sister stuck firmly to her words.\n\n\"No,\" she repeated.\n\n\"Then why am I here?\" he urged, seemingly battling not to shout.\n\nShe grew silent and lowered her head, whilst he remained dismissive of her protection. I moved over to kneel beside her.\n\n\"I can fight them on my own, no one else has to risk anything,\" I offered.\n\nHer eyes slowly met with mine, the concern she had for Boltock's safety understandable.\n\n\"No, you can't,\" she whispered reluctantly, looking over to her brother. \"Just go, and by the creators be careful.\"\n\nInstead of bouncing off to fight like I expected, Boltock slowly moved over to her.\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" he replied, reassuringly placing a paw on her back.\n\nI gave a subtle nod, as did Ember as Boltock moved over to my side and declared.\n\n\"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nI crept out from the barrier's protection, with him close behind, while Ember and Risha hung back. My mind switched into hunting mode, stalking silently as my eyes locked on the preoccupied creatures swarming over the carcass.\n\nConfident everyone was in place I glanced at Boltock laying to my left; he signalled his readiness with a nod.\n\nOkay, everything's set, now...\n\nMy plan was unceremoniously interrupted when one of the roblin's was shoved out of the swarming mass, bouncing clumsily before landing only a few steps from me. Slowly raising itself, it muttered what I assumed were sly insults while waving its arms in frustration.\n\nI froze as it looked in my direction, hoping my colour would camouflage me against the ice. Unfortunately, Boltock didn't share the same advantage. Its beady eyes opened wide and as it reached for a spear, I launched forward, sending shards of frost flying. My target's weak body collapsed instantly under the power of my attack. The foul taste of its blood filled my mouth as my jaws clamped around its exposed neck, its foaming mouth releasing some gargled words before it stopped thrashing.\n\nBlue blood stained the ice and the scales surrounding my jaw. Yet the foul taste was the least of my concerns as several more roblins began to wave frantically in my direction, and one at a time they turned to face me.\n\nSo much for going unnoticed. I thought, covered in the blood of their dead companion.\n\nTheir crinkled faces widened with shock, which quickly turned to anger. Boltock jumped up to stand by my side as they scrambled for their weapons and clumsily formed a less than orderly attack group.\n\nClumsy or not, I really did have to consider how dangerous they were with their weapons. One of the larger roblins held up its arms, bringing the squabbling rabble to a halt. After shouting what sounded like a random combination of orders, it jabbed a spear at us. There was a momentary pause, before they let out a jittering battle cry and charged as quickly as their stubby legs would allow, stumbling and falling over one another.\n\n\"Now!\" I shouted.\n\nA torrent of fire exploded from behind us, hitting the ceiling with a hiss, instantly melting the ice. A flood of water cascaded onto the charging creatures, and once the torrent had swept the rabble into disarray Risha launched the next phase of our plan, leaping out and gaining eye contact with her target. The mark on her forehead lit up as she focused, immediately wrapping the freshly melted water into a glistening vortex, the noise of the swirling torrent broken by panicked chatter as the writhing column swept the roblins into a corner.\n\n\"That was easy \u2013 roblins, ha! What whelps!\" Boltock remarked, pointing joyfully at the spinning mass.\n\nEmber made her way out from the cover, while Boltock beamed at her and she snorted a small puff of flame. Risha was next to emerge, her attention firmly focused on sustaining the whirlpool. Confident our foes were contained, I peered around the whale carcass to see a crevice bathed in radiant sunlight, where they'd been entering from.\n\nAt last, a way out of this frozen maze!\n\n\"We need to go, move out that way,\" I instructed, pointing over to the exit with my wing.\n\nEmber nodded while Boltock turned and looked at his sister approaching slowly.\n\n\"I'll get her out,\" he replied.\n\n\"No, you're in no state to fight if it goes wrong, I'll get her,\" I insisted.\n\nHe paused for a moment, fidgeting anxiously, before reluctantly nodding. With the others moving to the exit I watched Risha's approach, her attention focused on the vortex. The blue lustre in her eyes looked magnificent in the glow of her markings.\n\nShe's like starlight, mesmerizing and tranquil, yet so powerful.\n\nSuddenly and without warning, the blissful image shattered before me as Risha tripped on a loose spear. Reality became a blur as I rushed over to help, and a thunderous splash filled the cave. The vortex collapsed, leaving the liquid and those contained within to spill out over the floor. I slammed to a halt, my claws skidding on the slippery surface. It didn't take long for the roblins to recover, showing little sign of dizziness or physical injury as they fumbled for their primitive weapons. I was stuck between two choices: help Risha or stop and fight. A spear flew past my head, skimming the edge of my snout, making the decision for me.\n\nI turned to face the direction from which it came, teeth and claws ready. Within the midst of the approaching rabble, I could see the roblin who had thrown it, jumping up and down in frustration. The thought of mindlessly killing them surged painfully through my mind, and even though they were clearly going to attack I held back.\n\nNot like the ghaul, not again. I don't want to lose myself like that.\n\nThe sound of a struggle behind me caught my attention, and I turned, ducking under another spear to see Risha wrestling with three roblins, one of them tottering on top of her, clumsily fumbling with its spear. Without thinking I launched myself at them, knocking two down before colliding with her spear-wielding attacker.\n\nMy claws instantly sliced through its primitive armour, teeth sinking into its unprotected neck as I ripped it off her. I released the motionless body, having no time to consider what I'd done, before several more rushed towards me with raised spears.\n\nStanding upright, I swept two into the air with one swipe of my tail, their return to the floor met with a tremendous thud. Another approached from my front. I dropped down low, preparing to lunge...\n\nThe burning pain ripped across the right side of my face and my vision faded to blackness. Reflexes forced my eye shut but it was too late, it felt like the icy blade had sheared the sight from my skull.\n\nMy knees quivered before falling out from under me, the full extent of the injury overwhelming my body, it was like time itself had slowed to emphasise the pain. Blood ran down my burning cheek, seeping slowly into my open mouth, filling it with a warm, metallic taste. I finally felt the cold touch of ice when my head hit the floor, the instant chill combining with Risha's desperate cries of my name.\n\nAll normality dispersed, darkness closed in and the light faded in my uninjured eye. There was no way out now, no way to avoid the inevitable \u2013 just as before, the world would soon explode into a whirling storm of blinding light. I waited helplessly for the inevitable, but this time it was different. From behind my closed eyes the world burned like the sun, as did the image of the beings surrounding me, each one stepping back, shaking with fear as I stood and spread out my wings, bathing them in a blinding glow.\n\nI could feel everything, every minute piece of their existence, every element of their lives. I had control of my power, more power than these now meaningless opponents could imagine. My fiery eyes passed over the cowering wretches, struck down by utter fear and unable to react, they stepped back. Their weak, primitive minds were now open to me, their thoughts like physical things to be manipulated at my will.\n\nI turned to see Risha in the corner of my eye laying on the ice, to my relief unharmed by the surrendering roblins. She was just as amazed by the transcendent glow of my burning wings as they were. I could see clearly into her mind, I wondered if I could delve deeper. Such a thought was dismissed as an ounce of reason surfaced amidst my blazing consciousness. To think of doing such a thing to someone I'd become so close to was preposterous. I knew her without this ridiculous power, I didn't need it to know she was my friend.\n\nMoments later, a new stream of thoughts entered my godly senses, not of my own creation nor of Risha's. They weren't thoughts of amazement or terror; they were those of desperation. I turned my ethereal eyes to see two larger roblins charging towards me, their spears held high. Unfazed, I used what I instinctively knew, just as the Ethereal had told me.\n\nUpon my command ice particles rose into a fine glowing dust, an action performed symmetrically beneath my outstretched wings. The molten swarms rose to my head height, and speck by speck, rapidly assembled into two spears, spitting and hissing in the freezing air. The projectiles hit their intended targets in the centre of the chest, catapulting their weak bodies to the floor. Any thoughts of heroism from the rabble turned to complete terror. They had seen enough, and I watched over their frantic escape as they scurried off into whatever hiding places they could find.\n\nSo, this is what I truly am? The Ethereal's amulet gives me control, let's me see through the eyes of a god?\n\nFrom what they'd told me, it was the only way to stop Acrodan from spreading the sphere's darkness. The thought of home, of my friends and my family burst into my transcendent mind.\n\nCan I save them as the Ethereal asked? And, if I can, at what cost? Nothing would be the same after this.\n\nI was torn between saving the world or saving what little remained of myself.\n\nAmong the detectable thoughts of the cowering creatures, I felt Risha's calming mind re-emerge. The glow of the amulet had intensified to match the burning white radiance of my scales, and as I cooled, its golden frame returned to normal. I saw her gaze at me in awe as the light receded into the gem. The power released me from its grip, leaving me drained and weak until I finally fell to the floor.\n\nAll this power, at what cost?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Ilivar",
                "text": "Only my head could escape the ice as I lay in a smouldering heap of steam and meltwater. I opened my eyes to look over myself. My scales had lost their glow, occasionally flickering in a few patches before returning to their natural colour. I eventually managed to raise a forepaw to the side of my face where only minutes ago the icy weapon had sliced through my eye, to find there was nothing: no lack of vision, no pain nor scar, only a slight burning sensation.\n\nMy eyes finally came to rest on the amulet, the intense light it emitted having receded into the gem's hypnotising aura. Despite its beauty, I felt empty.\n\nIt's like a shackle. I can't do that again without it. I thought, unable to forgo seeing it as an affront to the dragon I was weeks ago.\n\nThere was no going back, no way I could save who I thought I was. I'd stolen lives without even lifting a paw \u2013 how many more would fall before the world was saved? I felt like I was no better than those I was destined to fight.\n\nIs that what it means to be a god? Or am I as much a slave as Acrodan?\n\nI recalled the words of the Elders and their descriptions of the horrifying war. Is that what I'm destined to bring?\n\nI shuddered at the thought of the world on fire because of me. I could have been anything \u2013 fire, water, earth, or wind \u2013 but I transcended them all to become something terrifying. Heavy with tears, my eyes fell to the floor, catching my featureless reflection in the ice.\n\nI look so unassuming, but a blank slate has so much potential, so much to aspire to; what are my limits? A soft touch on my shoulder snapped me from my turmoil.\n\n\"Blaze?\" a shaken, warming voice whispered softly. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nI looked up, thankful to see Risha unharmed. Though she looked like she'd seen a ghost. Maybe that's all I am now? A ghost of my former self.\n\nI coughed, clearing my throat.\n\n\"Yes, yes I'm fine,\" I answered, trying desperately to hide my turbulent emotions with a downward glance.\n\nShe knelt beside me, making no attempt to peek at my hidden expression.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she added softly.\n\n\"Thanks for what?\" I replied.\n\nHer wings ruffled as she took a breath and added.\n\n\"Thank you for coming to help me.\" She ran a foreclaw over the back of her neck, shuddering. \"I never was good at grappling lessons; I didn't really get the hang of shaking off enemies.\"\n\nDespite everything, a small chuckle escaped me. \"I can't say I'd be any better, I spent an entire year terrified of racoons because one jumped me once.\"\n\nThe two of us shared a laugh and I finally managed to look at her, truly appreciating that she hadn't immediately judged me as some celestial monster.\n\n\"You know, that... What you did was pretty amazing.\"\n\nI felt like lightning had sparked to the tips of every nerve. But Risha's calming eyes demanded no explanation.\n\nI really should tell her. I couldn't ask for anyone better than Risha to reveal the truth to.\n\nI knew she wouldn't forget who I was, and yet in the deepest refuges of my conscience, I knew that no one, not even myself, could truly see me in the same light again. I steadied myself and took a deep breath before speaking.\n\n\"Do you know what I am?\" My voice was little more than a whimper.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she replied, a curious cheer in her voice as she reached down to peer into my eyes.\n\n\"I'm not one of you,\" I replied, frustration breaking through my frail voice. \"I'm something else, something...\"\n\nMy words trailed off as I imagined the countless, horrifying possibilities. It's an element as vast and terrifying as the cosmos itself.\n\n\"You're something different, for sure, but\u2026\" She pointed to my faded amulet with a forepaw. \"That doesn't mean you're not one of us.\"\n\nShe placed her outstretched forepaw over the star around my neck, levelling her eyes with mine. In that moment, it seemed she was fighting to save me as much as I was fighting to save myself.\n\n\"This is greater than you think,\" I admitted.\n\nThe mere thought of the devastating destruction I was destined to wreak filled me with disgust. Yet Risha stood firm as she assured me.\n\n\"What you are or where you come from doesn't matter. What matters is who you are and the things you choose to do. And if you have this gift, then it is your power to use.\"\n\nShe spoke just like the Ethereal, albeit with one crucial difference: she offered me some hope, rather than dismiss my dreams of a once peaceful life.\n\nShe sees who I am, not what I'm prophesised to be.\n\nI stared into her beautiful eyes, the warmth of her words and the sight of her smile more encouraging than even the Ethereal's starry illusion.\n\n\"That's just it, isn't it? I don't know who or what I really am.\"\n\nUnfazed by my self-pity she continued.\n\n\"I've seen you do a lot of good, and I'm sure that you were just as honourable before I met you.\"\n\nI considered that, realising that even though gods, kings and elders all said otherwise, she was the only one who was right. It was my choice to believe what this all meant, no one else's, and I trusted her.\n\n\"You're right.\" A smile broke out across my muzzle. \"Star dragon,\" I uttered, aware she deserved to know the title. \"If I was going to have an element, that's what it would be.\"\n\n\"Like starlight?\" She paused, thinking deeply. \"You really are something special,\" she admitted jokingly. \"But you're still Blaze, and I know he'd do what he thought was right.\"\n\nWill I? I had to think. All I'd wanted was to rescue Tarwin and keep them safe. Now it's so much more, if it comes down to it, what is right?\n\n\"We should probably catch up with the others,\" she suggested, nudging my wing with hers before turning to the exit.\n\nMy strength had slowly recovered, or at least enough to allow me to stumble forward. In the corner of my eye I could see the roblin remains, their scorched chests gaping where the burning spears had struck them. I diverted my eyes.\n\nThe disfigured ice under me was marked by four, paw-shaped holes where I'd stood. I glanced away from those too, my gaze firmly locked on the only hope I had left. She waited by the exit, peering into the tempting glow beaming in from outside.\n\n\"I won't tell anyone, I promise,\" she assured me.\n\nI hopped up to join her. \"I\u2013I know... And... Thanks.\"\n\nShe simply smiled and nodded as we stepped outside. The sun's intensity triggered an instinctive response as I shielded my eyes with a raised wing, dropping my temporary shield once they'd adjusted. Despite the daylight, the return of the cruel arctic wilderness wasn't something to celebrate.\n\nIt might have been a welcome escape from the confined catacombs, but it also marked the return of the bitter wind and its piercing chill. Nor did the sun's presence offer anything more than an impression of warmth as it reflected from the ice like a blinding mirror.\n\nAt least the storm had subsided, leaving a pure blue sky dotted with ribbons of wispy white cloud under lit by an orange glow, instantly revealing the time of day. It was late morning, although being this far north I couldn't imagine the day would hold for long. I saw Ember and Boltock sat next to each other, waiting in the fresh snow. The latter seemed to relish every moment he was alone with her, despite her ignoring his subtle attempts to communicate. The fiery soldier seemed to prefer looking out over the scene stretching out beyond the edge of what appeared to be a small cliff before her.\n\nTrudging through the layers of snow carpeting the frozen expanse we moved over to join them. As we drew nearer, I noticed a slight oddity in my surroundings, it was a lot darker than I would have expected. Intimidated by the thought of something casting a shadow of such magnitude, I turned to see a huge cliff reaching up behind us, its immense surface coated by a sheet of ice. The giant monument reached high into the sky, its vertical surface covered by the ghosts of great waterfalls and crumbling ruins of broken structures frozen in time.\n\nBoltock and Ember peered over the ground in front of them at a second, smaller cliff. Dropping steeply before levelling into a gentle slope, it marked the edge of a large expanse, creating an enormous circular barrier, like a monstrous crater carved into the ice. At equidistant points of the rim stood nine towers, each one reaching high, the sheer sides glimmering like diamonds. On the sides facing away from the crater, long streaks of ice stretched back like horizontal icicles, while their inward faces held the remnants of balconies and windows.\n\nIt's like there's a whole city frozen behind the cliffs.\n\nA dark crack sliced through the endless wall to our right, a sinister line marking what seemed to be a thin canyon leading up toward the frozen desert. The immense scale of the scene was magnificent and sinister at the same time.\n\nMenacingly positioned within the depressed centre of the crater stood what was unmistakably our destination, Ilivar. A great fortress stretching up from the ice, the frozen material darker than the surrounding landscape. The blackened structure loomed high into the sky, forming four great spires, each one rivalling those that sat upon the cliffs. Their sharp peaks slicing effortlessly through the thin, wispy clouds. Its presence was a blight on the landscape, no longer the beautiful fortress it may once have been. It now resembled a collection of gruesome stalagmites forcing themselves through the ice from the depths of the frozen ocean.\n\nAn instantly recognisable sound broke through the howling wind, its roar echoing around the cliffs. I dropped to the floor, the others following as my eyes fixed on the sky. Two wyverns approached, the beat of their leathery wings like thunderclaps. I hoped they were too distant to notice us as they landed on top of the tallest spire and disappeared into the frozen hive.\n\n\"Wyverns,\" Boltock hissed. \"I've got a few rocks I'd like to introduce them to.\"\n\nAfter what they'd done to his wing, I expected he'd acquired a hatred for them that may even rival my own. As much as I wished they could, angry thoughts alone couldn't hurt my enemies. After waiting a while longer, I edged cautiously to the rim of the incline. Peering across the flat expanse for any other creatures that might be making their way through the lower entrances. Thankfully, it was clear.\n\n\"This place is cold, and not just in the icy way?\" Ember observed, ruffling her wings. \"Halfbeak told me to be wary of Ilivar, but by the creators, this isn't what I imagined.\"\n\nHer comment brought the same sensation to my attention. The snow and ice weren't the only frozen things here, the very aura of the place seemed to chill my soul.\n\n\"Either way, it's where we need to go,\" Risha interjected.\n\nBoltock agreed; in fact, he appeared enthusiastic about an opportunity to get his revenge on those who had mauled his wing. After seeing what he was capable of, I believed he could defeat a wyvern, provided they weren't able to take him completely by surprise.\n\nEmber, on the other paw, appeared slightly more hesitant.\n\n\"Is this really the best idea? I'd sure be a lot more confident with some armour and wing blades on, maybe an entire wing of dragons at my back.\"\n\n\"Look, I don't know what is in there, but...\" Risha's speech faltered. \"But we've come this far.\"\n\nEmber looked up at her friend. She was scared, they both were. Deep-rooted guilt hit me with the knowledge that they'd go so far not to let me down. I'd no doubt that I'd charge headlong into anything for Tarwin, but that wasn't what was holding me back now. I knew what had to happen, all our fates would be decided and my life as I knew it would no longer exist \u2013 my identity and any previous normality would ultimately be destroyed.\n\nEven so, I managed to offer a confident look to the others as they glanced my way. True to what Risha had warned, I didn't know what we would face: Acrodan, whatever was locked within the sphere, and whatever other monsters served him?\n\nI can't let them down. I have to do this and do it fast. He's got to know we're coming by now, why else would he have sent monsters to stop us?\n\nRedirecting my eyes toward the Dark Guardian's lair, I stared into the ice between the fortress and us, watching the trails of white dust whipped up by the wind at the base of the crater.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" Risha asked, walking to my side as she tried to mask her trembling.\n\nI should have been the one to ask that question, despite every part of me screaming to run. No, I must face the truth.\n\n\"Yes,\" I replied, betraying my emotions and attempting to bury my dread. \"Let's go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "We trekked around the lower rim of the crater until we came across a dip where its steep edge formed a gentle slope of hardened snow that we could use to drop down onto the base. The sight of the dark fortress made our descent into the lower level even more unnerving as it loomed upward like a frozen mountain. I felt so small and vulnerable, as if the whole place was a trap just waiting to snap shut.\n\nDespite the increasing trepidation, my determination to find Tarwin forced me across the barren wasteland. The landscape was featureless in all directions, the barren scene broken only by a scattering of snow-covered boulders that could have once been buildings. Even the wind seemed too frightened to blow, its howl fading as we got closer to the unearthly structure.\n\nAs the air grew still, the more the presence of the evil sealed within the fortress drained the land of all hope. Worse still, the vast expanse seemed to go on forever; our destination had looked so close when I first saw it. Each time I glanced, I would lift my head a little higher until its shadow engulfed most of the sky, every step revealing how deceiving my first impression was.\n\nHours of tireless trekking began to take their toll; nevertheless, we made no attempt to rest, and this time I made no offers. It wasn't pleasant to watch my friends work to exhaustion, but it wasn't safe to stop. My eyes continually scoured the cliffs, jumping rapidly across the ridge while checking for any signs of danger.\n\nIf the ghauls find us down here, at least we'll see them coming.\n\nEventually we came to the base of the fortress's outer shell, a complex sprawl of icy catacombs. The columns weren't neat or ordered; rather, they resembled a giant spider's web, each support standing at randomly placed angles, underpinning the immense tower.\n\nA sea of white snow covered the floor, the sloping waves piling high at the base of each column, creating a smooth white surface undisturbed by any of the larger chunks of ice. Like a gateway, each pile gently sloped into the nadirs of the labyrinth. The ruin of a frozen archway formed what seemed to be the entrance, walls and windows barely visible in their icy tomb. A small patch of pure ice formed a distinctive pathway, cobblestones poking through and snaking down into the depths.\n\nI forced myself to step forward, brushing the soft, powdery snow aside with a few gentle sweeps of my paw. It seemed strange that at such a critical point, I was still so unsure of the task that lay ahead.\n\nHow can my desperate rescue mission have turned into this?\n\nTrapped within my thoughts, my eyes fixed on the darker reaches of the labyrinth. The claustrophobic walls suppressed my senses and the lingering silence intensified to the point that the only sound I could hear was that of my racing heart and the rasp of my breath shrouding me in a plume of instantly cooling vapour.\n\n\"Hey, are you okay?\" Risha asked, moving beside me.\n\n\"I\u2013I... I'm fine,\" I replied shaking free of my trance.\n\nI wanted to tell her, I knew that if I failed, she would too, despite her having a willingness and determination to rival my own. If I lead them into this abyss, I've no idea what may happen to them.\n\nThe Ethereal said nothing about their destinies.\n\n\"You don't have to come with me,\" I proposed.\n\nHer eyes didn't brighten with relief; instead, she turned away slightly and sighed.\n\n\"I... We... none of us can leave now,\" she declared, glancing back at the others. \"We'll do it together, all of us.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I responded quietly.\n\nShe gave no obvious response; she didn't need to. With my vision filled by the sprawling ice I stepped forward and took my first wary step into the heart of darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "The deep confines of the maze were very different from the cold wilderness outside, and significantly different to the natural passageways under the frozen sea. Wherever I looked, I could see a web of ice columns randomly placed and angled, supporting each other like the intricate branches of a frozen tree, so vast and endless that staring at them made me nauseous with vertigo. Ruined archways, halls and columns littered the place, as if the ice had sprung up around them. Meanwhile what sounded like unnatural vestiges of sound and distant whispers reverberated through the air.\n\nIt's just wind. I assured myself, only to recall how still the air had been outside.\n\nMoving deeper, the echoes became more sinister, their distant cries more like the shrieks of distressed voices. My legs grew reluctant to push on, the others close behind me fared no better, huddled together like the seals I'd often seen on icebergs. Like the frosty desert outside, the sprawl went on for longer than I anticipated. Down here it was almost impossible to judge proportions, scale or distance.\n\nAfter moving through the mangled maze for some time it finally appeared to be ending, gradually turning to something more orderly. The dark ice appeared to become neatly crafted, smooth and chiselled, almost like the temple back in Dardien. A large corridor emerged from a wall, curving round in front of us, before disappearing into the depths. Lying in the centre was a huge open door, guarded by two pillars, each one engraved with strange symbols. Each demonic rune glowed eerily with a faint blue aura, while a new cacophony of spine-chilling howls echoed from deep inside the passageway.\n\nThis must be the true fortress, or what's left of it? I observed, spying more petrified ruins in the ice.\n\nA gust of wind seeped out from the doorway, carrying more faint voices. I raised a wing to shield my eyes from the chill and the others did the same. Peering again, I saw the doorway remained unchanged, I stood there for a moment longer, thoughts of Tarwin helping to build my confidence and determination.\n\nI can't give up now. The words nestled themselves foremost in my mind, defending their position from any thoughts that might usurp them.\n\nStepping into the new passageway I got my first good view of the orderly, neat and symmetrical architecture. The sharply featured walls formed a long, straight corridor, the chilled faces leading down into a shallow river of white mist lingering at the base.\n\nGlowing inscriptions of an unknown language covered the face of each carefully crafted column, and every opposing surface hosted a series of frozen pillars. Only one half of each support protruded from the ice, while the others were withheld, purposely modelled into the translucent surface. The roof reached up high, curving gently between the supporting walls, the ceiling hidden by another eerie layer of mist. The perfect symmetry was only broken by the occasional cluster of hanging icicles clinging to the ceiling like crystal spears.\n\nThe air was still and motionless and the sound of voices had ceased. I would have once taken their absence as a good sign, but I knew better. My senses remained primed, as without any obvious reasons, the atmosphere grew more sinister. The mist completely consumed my view of the floor, the only evidence that it existed at all was the continued tapping of my claws on the ice. The sight of the spectral substance shrouding my view made me increasingly wary, for all I knew there could be traps hiding within the shroud. Soon enough another wall emerged out of the mist, marking a point where the path split.\n\nThe junction of two corridors \u2013 one left and one right \u2013 conjured up feelings of delight and dread in equal measure. Anything could be waiting just around the corner, as for what it might be, was anyone's guess. My attention turned to the walls, which now housed more than just ghostly inscriptions and frozen pillars. There were several rectangular grooves leading off from the main walkway, each one a few paces wide, equally deep, and housing odd shapes.\n\nMy eyes jumped between what appeared to be frozen figures suspended in the ice, namely the skeletal remains of humans, hundreds of them. Allowing my gaze to delve deeper I made out the contorted skeletons of numerous beasts: the remains of griffin's and ghauls were obvious, but most others were unrecognisable. I stopped, the others immediately pausing behind me as their eyes also set upon the frozen remains. The longer I peered, the more a new fear manifested into existence \u2013 she could be in there. Even to consider using Tarwin's name while looking at the skeletal remains felt like a painful curse.\n\nNo, these bones are too old. I told myself.\n\nTurning to the others, another thought struck me. Do any of them know who or what creatures most of these bones belong to?\n\nNone of them spoke, although I already knew what Risha might have thought of the human forms frozen in the icy mausoleum. Even so, she showed no emotion, her thoughts remaining securely locked away. Regardless, I was sure that the sight of the frozen statues had made each of them consider what might become of us. That thought lingered for a moment, as did a concern about how they would react if I were to find and free Tarwin.\n\nWhat consequences are there going to be when they discover she's human? My only confidence lay in the fact that Risha already knew. She's way better at keeping things calm than I am.\n\nDismissing the idea for now, I peered deeper into the ice, making out the remains of more bony figures. Each held some sort of weapon \u2013 a sword, a spear, a bow or a weapon crafted for some other cruel purpose their motionless masters were unable to achieve. Some of the skeletons held shields while others wore protective armour, chest plates and helmets hung loosely with no flesh left to support them. Many of the skulls featured scars, empty eye sockets and lipless mouths lined with chipped, loose teeth or fangs. Some even bore the remains of hair, each individual strand suspended in the ice, like they were caught in the wind.\n\nI peered around the first skeleton, looking deeper into the ice as the ghostly silhouettes seemed to peer down at me. Glancing back, my focus slowly moved around to the other side of the corridor to see another cove with yet more bodies. A whole legion of dead soldiers, all locked within their frozen prison.\n\nThis feels wrong.\n\n\"Get back!\" Risha suddenly shouted.\n\nRushing back towards them, everyone's rapid movements swept the mist into a thick cloud. Within seconds I lost sight of them and cried out.\n\n\"What's wrong!?\"\n\nA ghostly howl surged through the halls, carried by a gust of wind that stirred the mist into an even thicker fog, leaving me barely able to witness the frozen prisons closest to me as they started to crack. I could hardly make out Risha and the others as fire and magic flashed and the skeletal forms stirred, in no time at all the first soldier started to break free. With a rough jolt of its limbs it shook off its frozen shell, sending fragments of ice in all directions.\n\nDespite being devoid of life it stumbled from the remains of its prison, placing one bony, boot-clad foot clumsily before the other, its legs sinking into the mist and metal clad soles clanking upon impact with the ice.\n\nI blinked in disbelief, as, almost as suddenly as its reanimation had started, it stopped.\n\nResuming its soulless stance, the only thing that remained were the faint ghostly sounds emerging from its broken jaw. Its head rested on one shoulder; its once empty eye sockets glowing with an unearthly spectral fire; as blue as the ice around me.\n\nTwo more figures started to move, their eyes lighting up the mist as they made the same awkward movements. More possessed forms emerged, loose bones creaking and rattling with every step until a whole hoard advanced steadily towards me. I stepped back, only stopping when I felt my tail touch another body.\n\nA dozen or so skeletons surrounded me on all sides, weapons raised and ready to attack. It was clear I was going to have to fight and I didn't even know where my friends were within the mist.\n\nThere was no part of me that would regret destroying these soulless shells, their lives had been stolen long ago and their bodies defiled; if anything, I'd be doing them a favour.\n\nA sudden movement behind me stirred up the shroud, and without thought I lunged forward at the atrocities, claws slamming into the bony chest of the foremost creature.\n\nIts spear should have skewered me, but the force of the impact shoved the weapon's wooden shaft back through its fragile rib cage. The brittle bones recoiled, sending the reanimated frame tumbling to the floor in a scattering of bones. A second creature swung a broad sword, the stiff, slow sweep, easily avoided, and with one fluent continuation of my movement, I literally swept its legs from under its, leaving the frame to collapse.\n\nAll the while, I could hear the struggling sounds of the others through the mist, and unable to see, I blundered wildly. A sudden movement disturbed the fog, sweeping it aside. My instincts forced me to drop to the floor as the wooden form of a bow whooshed over my head, skimming the tips of my horns. The force of the failed attack brought the third assailant into view, reaching into its quiver for an arrow before placing the projectile into the bow and drawing the string. I coiled my neck, opened my mouth and expelled a controlled blast of pale fire, instantly disintegrating the bones.\n\nAlthough I'd done it before, to witness it made me feel like I wasn't so different from the others. That sense of belonging swiftly diminished when before I knew it, the lumbering shape of a skeletal griffin materialised. It swung at me and I threw myself into confrontation with its bony talons, my forward momentum turning against me when I slammed into the towering aggressor. It was like hitting a brick wall, the skeleton stood taller than any human, its front feet tipped with dark talons, while its wings were nothing more than emaciated stalks, useless for flight. Its skull stretched out from its fleshless neck, slowly rising before unleashing a soulless screech. I bowed my head as the unnatural scream, generated without physical flesh or muscle, rang in my ears like a bell.\n\nLifting myself to my paws, the ice beneath me began to hiss and melt. Turning to face the animated skeleton, with claws and teeth ready, the un-dead beast lowered its skull, readying its ferocious beak. Without hesitation I launched myself again, while it stumbled toward me with an open jaw.\n\nThe world filled with a blinding white light, diffused into a fiery glow by the mist as I barrelled into the bones. The skeletal beast catapulted back, its right foreleg disintegrated into a shower of bony splinters and dust. In retaliation, it rose on its three remaining limbs, trying to swat at me with its one remaining talon.\n\nI dove forward, as I did its bony claw slammed me into the ice. Struggling to break free I pressed all four paws against the dry husk, razor-sharp claws scratching at its lifeless shell.\n\nWhat's happening? Am I not strong enough? All I could do was stare hopelessly at the menacing, fleshless eyes looming over me.\n\nPushing harder, my claws grew hotter until the cold air screamed on contact with my scales. The griffin didn't feel the heat, not even when it began to crumble into ash. Its talon disintegrated, and free from its grip, I threw myself up at its skull. My claws pierced the bare bone, ripping it away from the spine and shattering what remained of its defiled body.\n\nI landed, panting as the air fell into silence and the steam rapidly cooled into a fine snow. Bones fell to the ice around me as my heart raced and my veins pumped with primal rage. When the veil lifted, my worst fear was realised \u2013 my friends and their skeletal opponents were gone. I searched frantically, desperation overcoming my exhaustion, as my fruitless efforts turned anxiety to despondency and panic began to set in.\n\nNo, no! Where are they, what happened to them!?\n\nThe world was condemned to silence as nothing except the overwhelming sound of my heart beating and the intensity of my breathing filled my ears. Then, above it all, I heard a faint shout, it was distant, but it was there, echoing throughout the icy corridors.\n\nWithout a second thought, I stirred into action, racing towards the junction, rushing past more of the frozen soldiers. At the head of the corridors I was met with two options: the first carried on into an identical hall, while the second was different \u2013 an orange glow met my view, just visible through an ajar ice-door. It was the only sign of anything else amidst this frozen maze, driving me to follow without any real thought for what lay beyond.\n\nI bolted down the corridor, the roaring fire of my rekindled rage driving me on. As I hurried towards the light's source, the atmosphere changed. Faint whispers of temptation called out to me, reverberating in the freezing stillness, while the feeling of a sinister presence grew stronger. Driven by desperation and the hope that my friends weren't far away, I slammed the door open and stormed blindly into a dimly lit room. Only then did I realise my terrible mistake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Acrodan",
                "text": "My claws scraped against the ice as I skidded to an uncontrolled halt. Momentum pushed me sideways, depositing me in the centre of the large chamber, my heart racing like a storm in my chest as I stared ahead. A set of squat stairs ran from one side of the cavern to the other, its immense roof swirling upwards in an endless spiral of ice. Countless icicles and frosty pillars stretched into the upper reaches before fading into mist.\n\nA menacing figure stood upon the frozen steps before me. Shrouded in a veil of shadow, black robes concealed the true atrocity laying beneath. A pair of sharp metal boots segmented at the ankles, disguised what I assumed were once his feet. Similarly articulated apparel covered his hands, metal gauntlets decorated with sharp segments, each one tipped with a glistening point of metal. A purple luminance seeped through every crack and shred of dark material as it billowed gently, as if caught in a non-existent breeze.\n\nThe figure slowly lifted its head from beneath the hooded veil, revealing his true human form. Despite the recognisable features, under the shadow of the cowl was not a face, but a glistening metal mask. Reflecting light in a similar manner to his gauntlets and boots, the metal substance was as black as the darkest night.\n\nSculpted to resemble a human face, the frightful mask expressed no emotion, its mouthpiece nothing more than a slit through which a faint purple glow seeped. Purple flames flickered from each eye socket, the luminescence unlike anything I'd seen before; no warmth or emotion to be found.\n\nWith a shifting of metal limbs, he began to move forward, gliding effortlessly on the shadowy gloom emanating from his cloak. Shifting one arm, he revealed a staff from within his robes, formed from more of the unusual metal. Four writhing ribbons unravelled from the peek, each one moving in unison with the ghostly robes, before wrapping around a core of purple light like coiling serpents. Each time my eyes looked over the ghostly evil, its bewitching veil felt like it sapped my very soul.\n\nIt's like the old stories. The nightmare spirits, or monsters that survive by drinking blood!\n\nNo matter my inner panic, the figure's identity was unquestionable. He was unlike the mindless skeletal minions at his disposal. He was a spectre of pure power, like the old tales I'd heard of necromancers and litches. This was Acrodan, the last of the traitorous protectors, the last of the nine Dark Guardians.\n\nThe death mage's sinister approach finally halted at the edge of the steps, the shadowy base of his robes cascading down like a cursed waterfall. The mysterious orange glow that had determined my entrance illuminated the ancient betrayer from behind, giving the illusion that his shadows writhed with flame.\n\n\"Your arrival has been long awaited,\" a menacing voice oozed from the mask, his tone as empty as his body and as painful to hear as a shrill scream.\n\nEach ghostly word sank into my mind like a poisonous dagger, reverberating like the clang of a gong.\n\nI gave no response. He's clearly been expecting me, though if he knows what I am, surely, he knows what I can do?\n\nHe raised one withered arm, pointing his sharp, protruding finger at me. No matter what power I possessed, a pulse of fear surged through me. Timid instinct forced me to freeze, each limb refusing to respond. Acrodan made a sound like dry stones grinding, which could have been a laugh.\n\n\"Nothing to say? You believe your words are but whispers to me? So strong is the arrogance of your kind, even now,\" he declared.\n\nHe closed his clawed hand into a fist, the sharp, metal fingers grinding against one another. The shrouded arm lowered, leaving me to stare at the hypnotic purple light of his eyes.\n\n\"Long have I waited for you, though you still believe you're safe? Confident in the lies of your false gods?\" His words were broken by another gravelly laugh.\n\n\"The creators merely postponed their inevitable annihilation,\" he spat, sniggering to himself. \"My master will soon be reborn and I, the strongest of my pathetic brethren, will be the one to unleash such devastation,\" he continued, raising both arms as he spoke, holding his staff aloft like a preaching prophet.\n\n\"You know of what I speak,\" he hissed, peering at me as his arms fell back to his side.\n\nHe knows exactly what's happening.\n\nSurely the being that lay within the sphere's prison had revealed to him what its enemies had told me. Seeming to sense my suspicion, he hissed a low cackle and shifted sideways to reveal the source of the orange glow.\n\nStanding at his waist height was a rounded pedestal of ice. Beautifully engraved with glowing runes, four icy talons extended out to form a curved claw clutching what could only be one thing.\n\nThe Sphere of Eternity.\n\nIt was no larger than a man's head, its smooth surface as black as midnight, while beneath its shell a layer of cloud swirled like a fluid cloak. The strange, almost supernatural manifestation could have been mistaken for something of omnipotent origin, like a miniature thunderstorm trapped in glass. The sight drained all emotion, compelling me by some unknown temptation to stare into the dark innards, its allure overwhelming my senses, forcing me to peer deeper.\n\nI lost all recognition of the world around me. Silence surrounded everything until a distant, ghostly voice broke through my consciousness. Speaking in hushed tones beyond my understanding, without meaning, the words drawing me ever closer.\n\nThe swirling clouds moved frantically until a burning red glow discharged like lightning through a storm, flickering within the depths of the dark prison until they could hold it no longer. The shrouded veil tore apart violently, revealing an intense glow mushrooming across its surface, consuming the original emanation until it was indistinguishable from the raging storm.\n\nConsumed by the image, fear grew to terror, terror to horror, the feeling hitting me like a wall of burning lava as it drew me deeper. My emotions repeatedly wrestled with its seductive grasp, only to be thwarted by the strength of its irresistible lure. I watched motionless as the sphere's icy pillar boiled and spat, before melting into a streaming waterfall and finally evaporating to steam.\n\n\"Enough!\" I shouted as my rage erupted, shattering the sphere's devilish hold and tore my eyes from the inferno.\n\nIt was all an illusion, nothing more than a vision, a view into the dark prison of which the Ethereal spoke. In my enraged state my mind raced, heart rate and breathing increased as blood surged like wildfire through my veins. Acrodan loomed menacingly on his icy summit, now surrounded by several undead soldiers.\n\nJust how long was I staring into the sphere?\n\n\"My master has plans for this world, you have seen only a glimpse of the order that oblivion will bring. He knows of your return, the return of one who would defy him.\" He glanced at the sphere, before rumbling.\n\n\"The creators may think they rule here, they are false, traitorous fiends unable to see the truth. This time they stand unable to fight, and instead they send only a fraction of themselves to my master's presence.\"\n\nAcrodan pointed to me with his iron-clad hand, making me realise, that in my sudden burst of rage, I'd unwillingly transformed into a flaming form. The burning white glow struck no fear into the hearts of my icy foes. Their empty husks had lost that sense long ago.\n\n'False?' 'Truth?' 'Traitors?' 'Fraction of themselves?' More unanswered questions.\n\nMy fiery eyes released their lock from his fluorescent gaze, moving across his shrouded body, searching for any weakness. He appeared delighted at the sight of his new adversary, and despite his inability to express it, the emotion was detectable in his voice.\n\n\"The true guardian of ancient times, the unstoppable weapon of the creators, their greatest sacrifice,\" he slavered, his menacing laugh mocking me as he finished. \"You blind yourself with such lies \u2013 you have no idea. You are a fool, and in your foolishness, you have been led here. Your skills have been tested, your will pushed to its limit, just as my master intended.\"\n\nHow have I been led here? And why? He sent monsters to kill me surely\u2026\n\nIt took a few moments to realise they had planned this all along. They didn't want to attack me in the woods, they just wanted Tarwin. They hadn't wanted to kill me on the journey, they were testing me.\n\nShe's the bait and I took it, but why?\n\nThe answer came all too soon.\n\n\"Only one of ethereal kind may open the sphere, and my master has waited so very long.\" Acrodan pointed to the dark object. \"You have done just as he predicted, but still stand before his might with some pathetic hope of salvation.\"\n\nHis words pierced like a poisonous blade driven into any hope I had left. His glaring eyes settled on me, the sinister flames almost shivering with pride as their master laughed.\n\n\"Finally, after eight hundred years, the world will know my power. Last of the guardians, survivor, victor\u2026\"\n\nThoughts came so fast. What to do? What to say?\n\n\"I'll never open it!\" I shouted. \"It's a lie, that thing tricked you, all of you. You don't know what's in there!\" I continued, trying in vain to appeal to the long-lost shell of the man he'd once been.\n\nHe peered at me, and with his blazing eyes settling I thought he'd considered listening. That was until the flames flared, and he snorted a cackle.\n\n\"My master has promised me the keys to eternity, a world as I see fit. Only through the darkness can the true light be seen. Only through cruelty can order truly be restored.\"\n\nHe clenched his metal fist, preaching to me like everything I'd ever been told was a lie. Stretching out his withered hand, he pointed to something behind me. Every one of my emotions told me not to turn, not to take my eyes off him, even so I couldn't help myself; inevitably my gaze followed the crooked limb.\n\n\"My master is not so blind as to expect no resistance. The heart of a god is not easily swayed, but then, you are no true god; you have real heart, a weakness not shared by your brethren.\" As he concluded my eyes came to rest on the heart-stopping sight.\n\nA sight worse than any monster or dark illusion. 'A weakness not shared.'\n\nHeld in the grasp of three soldiers, with Blizarium knives pressed against their soft-scaled throats, were my friends. The grip of the un-dead captors seemed to be stronger than I'd experienced, and their new weapons were much sharper.\n\nStupid, stupid, stupid. I inwardly cried, directing the words at imaginary targets within my mind.\n\nWhat's all this power worth, I can't get to them before the undead kill them?\n\nMy head dropped in shame as my eyes jumped hopelessly from face to face, each one held in the bony grasp of the emotionless soldiers. Ember and Boltock appeared shocked to see me with burning-white scales. While Risha looked at me with no such trepidation.\n\n\"Let them go!\" I demanded, swinging round to face Acrodan. \"Or, or\u2026\" I cried wildly, searching frantically for anything I could ransom.\n\n\"Or I'll destroy it!\" I shouted, pointing at the dark sphere with my glowing wing.\n\nAcrodan rose up, peering down in foreboding silence. \"Such action from an ethereal being would only result in opening the sphere.\"\n\nHis emotionless voice became frustratingly arrogant.\n\n\"It seems those of ancient times couldn't protect you from the one thing they could never truly understand; compassion,\" he continued, relishing his mockery of the gods.\n\n\"The risks they took have inevitably brought their ruin, for the life they gave could never be navigated alone.\"\n\nAll this power, and I'm brought down because of feelings?\n\nShame forced me to bow my head as the overwhelming misery doused my passion. There was nothing I could do to save them. I couldn't move fast enough to break them free, nor could I fight without increasing the risk of losing them, and I couldn't run without abandoning them entirely. My aggression faded, extinguished by the realisation that I'd failed from the start.\n\n\"Open the seal! Your heart has defeated you and so foolishly sealed your fate,\" Acrodan demanded. \"Do it or I'll have them slain where they stand!\"\n\nI didn't care for his threats. My eyes slowly turned upward to gaze upon his corrupt majesty.\n\nWe're going to die either way, whether it be by his twisted will or the monster within the sphere.\n\n\"No!\" Risha called out from behind me. \"No, don't do it, don't listen!\"\n\nI didn't have the strength to turn as her desperate plea mixed with the muffled sounds of more voices joining her cries. Even now they were willing to risk everything, but I had no choice. I'd come all this way to save my friend, and I'd not lose those I'd made along the way.\n\nAcrodan peered down with a merciless glare. To him, I was a god crawling pathetically at his feet, the ultimate victory, far more than he'd ever achieved in his ancient war with mere beasts and mortals.\n\n\"What\u2026?\" I whispered, the word scratching at my throat. \"What do you want me to do?\"\n\nHis ghostly image pulled back and the glow of his staff appeared before me. The purple flame grew brighter, so bright it seemed to pierce my tormented mind, leaving me without pain or fear. That final memory closed in a flash and a swift blow of crushing darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The harshness of my head hitting the floor shook me from unconsciousness. As my blurred vision returned, I observed the snow settling into small white banks against the walls of what I began to recognise as a cell. My full alertness snapped back when a flurry of freezing air blew across my face, followed by a thud as something landed beside me. Swaying like a new-born fawn I stood, only to fall over my tail, and be met by the sound of a door slamming. Sitting up, my wings ruffling awkwardly to balance me, I looked to see who'd been thrown into the icy dungeon alongside me.\n\nRisha sat up, frantically surveying her new surroundings. The moment I realized it was her, my eyes fell to the floor as I attempted to block out the world.\n\nI can't face her, not after what I just did. Her calls to stop echoed through my memory. Did I just condemn the world to death?\n\nI wanted to close my eyes tight, to vanish. My trembling forelegs fell out from under me, I just wanted to melt into the ground and disappear.\n\nWhat happened, why are we here? Are we still alive? I felt a soft nudge against my side.\n\n\"Blaze? Blaze?\" Risha repeated, her voice trembling as she nuzzled me. \"Get up.\"\n\nIt's really her, she's here? The stark realisation only served to make me more afraid of facing her. Still, at least she's alive.\n\nAlthough I could neither hear nor see Boltock or Ember, it was a small relief she was still with me. The realisation broke my mind free from the shackles of despair and the sudden comprehension of our situation allowed the truth of what had transpired to return.\n\nMy mind reanimated into a weak grinding action; every thought crunching against the next like rough stones. Still too weak to support me, my unstable paws slipped away. Risha's wing caught me, steadying my fall as she leaned against my side.\n\n\"Blaze! By the creators, are you okay? I saw them take that thing, that... that sphere, and, and\u2026\" she continued frantically.\n\nHer jumbled words were a chilling reminder that she had no idea what Acrodan had done, what I'd done! She had no idea what I'd just sacrificed for them.\n\nIs she going to think it's worth it? Her life for just a few days more, before Acrodan's master destroys us all anyway?\n\nI could see the horror in her eyes, but I'd no idea what to say. I couldn't just tell her that the world we knew was doomed, that I'd chosen her life and those of the others over everyone and everything. I doubted even Acrodan knew what he was doing. After all, he seemed to be no more than a shell.\n\nDid I even talk to the true necromancer that schemed and plotted all those centuries ago?\n\nI was kidding myself if I thought I could do this; the essence of whatever power lay within the sphere had escaped long ago through those who swore to protect it. It was patient, smart, powerful and cunning beyond all comprehension; who was I to oppose it?\n\nIn the end, all I could say was the one thing she'd asked me so many times.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\nFor a moment she gave no response.\n\n\"I am now,\" she murmured, her eyes closing tight, her mind seemingly resting on something she was unable to conceal. \"But that\u2026\" Her words were broken as she sniffed. \"That... thing, that sphere, I only got a glimpse of it, but it felt like forever. It showed me things, terrible things: fire, death, destruction, darkness!\"\n\nHer frantic words escaped as an uncontrollable torrent, her voice trembling with terror.\n\n\"Risha!\" I shouted, shaking her free from her panic and draping a wing over her before she collapsed.\n\nShe must have looked into the sphere from the balcony. I concluded, anger swelling at what it may have shown her. I should never have let it come to that!\n\n\"They were lies, an illusion, I saw it too \u2013 they aren't real.\"\n\nMy attempts to comfort her were just as futile as hers had been weeks ago. A thin layer of water filled her eyes and she stared at me like I wasn't real.\n\nFor the first time I could remember, even a smile failed to form on her trembling muzzle, and without a word she drove her weeping head against my chest. I froze as my thoughts exploded with a conflicting storm of emotions, paralysing me from wing tip to wing tip.\n\nThe depths of my consciousness became distorted, the feelings flooding in to replace my woes completely alien to me. I'd never cared for another so much. Only my loyalty to Tarwin came close. I'd seen people this upset before, but never one of my own kind, especially not Risha. In the brief time I'd known her I came to believe she was the best of us, the one to look up to. Her fall was unexpected, and now she looked to me for comfort just as I did her.\n\nWhat would she say in a situation like this? What would she tell me if I lost hope? The memories of such occasions gathered as I kept my wing over her back.\n\n\"Risha, it's going to be fine. What you saw, it's not real, it's all lies \u2013 we can still beat it,\" I said as tenderly as I could manage, trying to mimic her soft tone.\n\nI was sure my efforts wouldn't be as influential as hers, but as the calming words escaped my mouth, her head rose back to meet mine. Her waterlogged eyes cleared, the stream of tears slowing.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she whimpered softly, coughing slightly as her eyes and throat cleared.\n\nHow can she still believe she needs to apologise?\n\n\"It's... it's just that I never thought anything like this could happen,\" she admitted, wiping her eyes with a wing.\n\nI really couldn't think of a way to explain it. I also wondered what the foul sphere had revealed to her.\n\nDid she see her family? Her brother if he'd died in Storm Peak? Something happening to Dardien?\n\n\"You don't need to be sorry. I... I never wanted any of this either,\" I admitted, before my brow furrowed.\n\nI have to fix this; I have to stop Acrodan.\n\nI glanced around the chamber, and the reality of our predicament became clear. We were imprisoned in a small rectangular cell. Three walls made from the same ice as the fortress. Reaching from ceiling to floor, several equidistant bars of ice ran parallel to each other, filling the gap where the fourth wall would have been.\n\n'Slam!'\n\nThe sound of another rapidly closing door echoed through the hallway outside the cell. My eyes shot to the source, immediately pinpointing Boltock and Ember. The relief to see they were also still alive was incredible, only tempered by the fact that they too were locked in the confines of another cell. A pair of skeleton guards trudged back down the corridor, muttering in their grisly voices.\n\nFor a moment I hoped that the chattering corpses might provide some insight as to how I could engineer a quick escape, if escape was even worth it. Except their strange language was just as alien to me as their animated bodies. Then something other than the guards captured my attention. I felt Risha slowly slip away from beneath my wing, pressing herself up against the bars and focusing on her brother.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" she asked as she poked her snout through.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Ember replied, checking herself for injury, while Boltock head-butted the bars.\n\nHis efforts were in vain, the ice didn't even chip. Instead it rattled, reverberating like the strings of some icy instrument. He tried a few times more, before swaying back to be caught by Ember, while Risha persuaded him to put an end to his ineffective attempts.\n\nAcrodan's got to have locked us up for a reason? I concluded, noting he'd even left me with my amulet. There must be a way out.\n\nThe sound of a faint whimper calling my name distracted me from the commotion. I glanced at Risha, but realising it wasn't her, I looked towards the back of the cell. My eyes shot open; I knew that voice better than any other. My body surged with adrenaline, a small spark of hope instantly blossoming into a roaring fire when I realised, to my delight, that it was Tarwin. She was curled up in the corner of the chamber, unravelling from a cocoon of thick brown furs.\n\n\"It... it is you. You're here... you're really here,\" she murmured in disbelief. \"You came, for me,\" she added, wrapping her arms and woolly fleece around me.\n\n\"Yes, of course I...\"\n\nShe looked at me without responding. All my life I'd been happy with the bond between us, and now the realisation that she couldn't understand me hit hard. The conversations with my new friends, the time I'd spent away from her had changed me more than I realised.\n\nWhen she finally released me from her grip, I hid my disappointment, avoiding her eyes like a timid puppy.\n\n\"You're the best friend I could ask for,\" she gushed.\n\nShe looked to be okay, with the only notable injury being a scabbed wound above her eye. Another thing that concerned me was the blow she had taken to the back of her head when the wyvern's wing had struck her. Thankfully, her speech and movements seemed to be limited by the cold more so than any injury.\n\nEven so, with my eyes averted, I glanced back towards Risha. What is she going to think or do at the sight of a human?\n\nI made no attempt to hide Tarwin from her, expecting the worst.\n\nThe dragoness slipped away from the bars, standing motionless in the centre of the cell, her wide eyes free of tears. I gave no verbal response, just a smile. She'd been the only one who'd known what Tarwin was from the start. I knew deep down she had every right to despise the ones who ruined her life so long ago and my heart began to race more than it had in Acrodan's presence.\n\n\"So, this is the human?\" she eventually asked.\n\nShe walked cautiously to my side, looking at Tarwin and waiting for some sort of response. I realised from her words that she'd probably never seen a human up close, I also expected she knew nothing of the language barriers. Tarwin gave no response, though the amazement covering her face was clear to see.\n\nA second reminder of the inevitable force of change hit me. Despite what any of the old stories told, for all my life with Tarwin we'd lived believing that I was the only one of my kind. Tarwin shook her head, rubbing her eyes before realising that her vision wasn't fooling her.\n\n\"There's... there are more of you!\" she exclaimed, barely able to speak. \"So, the legends are true? Blaze! You're not the only one!\"\n\nHer eager attention returned to Risha, who shuddered at being subjected to a human's stare. Tarwin's gaze hung on the blue dragoness for a moment, her perplexed face contorting.\n\n\"I knew you couldn't be the last,\" she said softly.\n\nRisha flinched, instantly glancing to me for reassurance. The smile I gave in return felt far more like those she'd offered me for the past few weeks. Meanwhile, Tarwin continued babbling about how no one would believe this, oblivious to the past experiences of the creature standing before her. Risha simply seemed proud to face her fears, breathing slowly and confidently.\n\n\"She talks a lot, doesn't she?\" she observed.\n\n\"Oh, you have no idea,\" I retorted with a roll of my eyes.\n\nShe giggled, before rushing off to the bars. I watched as she peered out to the opposite cell, where Ember was assaulting the ice prison with flames, confirming that neither force nor fire could break open the frozen doors.\n\n\"Fire and flames, what in the creators' name is this stuff!?\" The fiery dragoness cursed.\n\nRisha's gaze wasn't claimed by Ember's attempts to escape, but by her brother. Surprisingly, he wasn't helping his fiery companion. His head hung low, his disapproving eyes peering out towards his sister like a scowling hound. It was then that the full gravity of the situation hit me.\n\nI've managed to persuade Risha, albeit I think she's open-minded enough to do it on her own, but what of Boltock?\n\nThe sight of him filled me with dread and guilt. After all he'd been through, all that had been stolen from him, he'd every right to view Tarwin with disdain.\n\n\"A human?\" he muttered, straightening himself up and shifting his good wing.\n\nRisha's confidence waned and her head drooped. His eyes seared like hot beams and even I had to turn away from their disapproving glare. In all that was going on I'd hardly considered that he didn't know anything about Tarwin.\n\n\"Do you...?\" He shuddered, clearly hurt.\n\nI ducked further from his sight, draping my wing in front of my head and backing away towards Tarwin.\n\n\"Do you remember what they did?\" he barked; his fury-filled eyes fixed on his sister. \"Do you remember what they did to us?\"\n\nRisha's head remained bowed, her eyes closed tight. I peeked over my wing at her, ironically thankful for Acrodan's bars between Tarwin and Boltock.\n\nWho would I fight to protect her? Would I really do it?\n\nRisha trembled like a branch in a storm. Yet after a few moments, she took a deep breath and rose up.\n\n\"Boltock, what's happened to you? Are you that bitter?\" she asked.\n\nHer words instantly chipped away at his anger, her raised tone countering his words. I'd seen Boltock persuade his sister otherwise a few times, but this time he seemed to know he was defeated from the start.\n\n\"Yes, of course I remember, but this isn't them.\" She jabbed a wing back at Tarwin.\n\n\"You know all dragons aren't the same, is it really so hard to believe the same for them? This is an innocent young girl, she... she didn't do anything to you.\"\n\nBoltock and now Ember froze in shock.\n\nI felt their anguish. Risha was siding with a human, against her own brother. The sheer astonishment doused his anger, leaving him completely lost for words.\n\n\"Look at yourself, is this really what they would want?\" she continued, provoking more shock amongst us all, except for Tarwin, to whom this must have sounded very strange.\n\n\"Haven't you seen what's happening? That litch is the real enemy, not anyone here,\" she concluded.\n\nRisha almost collapsed, as her brother dropped to the floor in a huddle of scales. I trusted she knew what she was doing, though to see them driven so far apart because of my relationship with a human, was crippling. Boltock slowly turned away, rejecting any attempts of comfort from Ember. Deep down, as much as he might disagree, he must have known she was right. There were far greater threats mounting against us, a reminder made all too clear when the room shook violently. Shards of ice and white dust fell from the roof as the structure groaned painfully.\n\nRisha met my eyes; we both knew where the tremors were coming from. Boltock, who sat defeated in the corner of his cell, was the only one who didn't seem to care. He was so caught up in what he'd just endured that he almost seemed to forget the world, when, without warning, he unleashed his torment in a burst of anger by lashing out at the frozen bars with his horns. Risha jumped back like she'd been bitten; watching him strike the bars again and again, until he inevitably slumped back down to the floor.\n\n\"We have to get out of here,\" she whispered.\n\nI nodded. She was looking to me now, I had to be the leader they all needed.\n\nMy eyes scanned the bars. Their material seemed to be the same as the walls, coated in a thin layer of frosty crystals. It didn't look strong, yet the use of force had no effect. I raised a paw, gently rubbing its cold surface, the frail crystals melting into a cold dew on my claws. Next, I rammed the bars hard with my horns, in the same way Boltock had done, hoping my superior strength may prove strong enough to break through. Inevitably, the force of the blow only rattled the bars into a vibrating frenzy, shaking the frost free.\n\nStaggering back, my head pounded with painful echoes as the ice settled.\n\n\"Blaze!\" I heard two panicked voices cry in union.\n\nIn my daze I stumbled round to see both Risha and Tarwin. The moment the dragoness realised her concern wasn't alone, she glanced at Tarwin in astonishment, though the human showed no sign of hearing her cry.\n\n\"It's no use, I've already tried, it's too hard,\" Tarwin offered. \"They've had me in here for weeks. I'd be dead, but they gave me food, water, and this,\" she added, ruffling frost from her thick fur coat.\n\n\"Apparently I'm worth something alive.\"\n\nIt wasn't difficult to figure out why she was still alive or, in fact, why any of us had been spared. I could only assume we were beyond Acrodan's right to destroy. His master seemed to desire my personal demise, while the others were still ransom to keep me under control.\n\n\"She's right,\" Risha added, \"That's blizarium. Not even fire can get through it,\" she continued, glancing at Ember, who huffed a breath of smoke.\n\nTarwin paced between the walls at the back of the cell, kicking up the icy dust at the edge of the room without a clue about our conversation. Risha had told me blizarium was almost unbreakable.\n\nAlmost!\n\nNo known force or material can easily break it, not fire, water or earth.\n\nThere was nothing to say something unknown couldn't smash it. For a moment I realised how ridiculous it sounded.\n\nSurely Acrodan's not that stupid?\n\nAlthough his arrogance was great, the chances of him underestimating me were low.\n\n\"Can you do anything to it?\" I asked Risha, but she appeared unsure.\n\n\"Hardly, I only ever learned a few things about the craft, not enough to influence this much,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Okay, but... At least weaken it, if your kind used to forge it, surely they'd have to make it more malleable,\" I reasoned, and she paused.\n\n\"I... Maybe, I could try, but something strong would still have to break it,\" she responded, and at the expression, she seemed to understand, then smiled.\n\nI nodded, before sticking my snout between the bars. I knew the guards must be close by, but I couldn't see or hear them. I was sure I could deal with them as effortlessly as I'd done before, I was willing to take that chance, even if they decided to use their blizarium blades. Tarwin was still pacing behind us, muttering quietly to herself while I took two steps and glanced over to Risha.\n\n\"Okay, do what you can.\"\n\nRisha responded instantly, elemental markings lighting as the bars began to vibrate, buzzing as if singing a symphony.\n\n\"Step back!\" I ordered.\n\nCollecting my thoughts, I closed my eyes and emptied my mind. Power welled up inside me, no longer spewing out in an uncontrolled rage as my glowing amulet flickered.\n\nFire gathered in my chest. Coiling my neck, steadying my legs and thrusting forward, I opened my mouth to release the burning ball of white light. The buzzing bars vanished in a blinding glow, instantly exploding into a cloud of dust. The force of the impact nearly knocked me off my paws. I hadn't considered the effect of releasing my power in such a confined space and it felt as though the effects would never end. When I finally opened my eyes, the shroud of white dust had cleared, leaving me to see the result of my assault on the bars.\n\nTo my surprise they were completely disintegrated, several stumps clinging to existence, rising like singed teeth from the ground.\n\n\"That was...\" Risha attempted to curb her excited enthusiasm, before continuing, \"\u2026 a good job,\" she added, placing a wing over my back.\n\nI felt like I could melt the whole fortress at her giddy contact. I'd just obliterated a magical substance she thought unbreakable, yet her appreciation was what I valued most?\n\n\"You too,\" I offered, and it became her turn to look flustered.\n\nFinally, I'm doing something good, leading willingly, like the real hero the gods want me to be!\n\nRisha and I both turned to Tarwin. She sat speechless at the back of the cell. Back home the other villagers had told her that her pet was magical, that I could breathe fire, control elements and other things they'd heard from ancient legends. Back then, that was our only source of information \u2013 and neither of us ever believed it. Now she knew the truth, not that I was expecting her to understand.\n\nShe rubbed her eyes, partly in disbelief and partly to remove the dust that had invaded them during the explosion. I consciously avoided her gaze, a strangely alien feeling welling in my chest. This was it, the end of my old life. It was no physical end, but I knew now that the last remnant of my past had been extinguished.\n\n\"I take it she's never seen you do anything like that before either?\" Risha whispered softly.\n\nFinding myself equally speechless, I nodded. For once, this was beyond even her ability to resolve. She may have been familiar with many things, but this was my responsibility. Hesitantly, I allowed my eyes to meet with Tarwin's. I was her best friend, almost her brother, now unrecognisable as the pet she once knew. I was more than the legend the villagers had spoken of, I was a legend to dragons and griffins, and I could see that she'd never expected any less of me. Her eyes met mine and I forced myself not to turn away. She walked over and without saying a word, knelt before me.\n\n\"They weren't lying,\" she said, speaking to herself, as much as me. \"That... was\u2026 amazing,\" she added, her words softly spoken.\n\nShe placed her hand on top of my head, between my horns as she'd always done. \"I'm so glad you're back,\" she muttered with a smile. \"I don't care what you can do, you'll still be my little dragon.\"\n\nThe sight of her dusty face warmed by joy reminded me just why I'd come so far for her.\n\nHow could I have ever doubted her? She'll always accept me.\n\nOur moment of sentiment was short-lived; the sounds of approaching guards echoed through the corridor. Tarwin raised her head and stood up, reaching for a group of large icicles hanging from the ceiling, and with a great deal of effort, broke one free.\n\n\"Figured if I could ever get through those bars, I'd need a weapon,\" she announced, brushing off the fuzzy coat of frost.\n\nHer resourcefulness was unquestionable, she certainly knew how to make something from nothing. I turned to Risha, this time the fright on her face was replaced by confident excitement.\n\n\"Let's go get them,\" she growled.\n\nI crept through what remained of the bars, peering around the shattered blizarium stumps. To my right I could see both sides of a long corridor, providing access to several more cells. To my left it opened out into a large chasm, housing a huge frozen spike at its centre, surrounded by several smaller spines like some kind of monument. The sound of grisly chatter from three guards broke through the air, their bodies drooping to one side, weapons held low to the ground in their slovenly arms.\n\nThe foremost raised its sword, pointing the ancient blade forward as it uttered a ghostly sound from its fleshless mouth. The other two marched forward upon command, their soulless bodies trudging and drooping awkwardly. I glanced to Risha.\n\n\"We can handle them once we break the others out!\"\n\nI was acutely aware of what had happened the last time we met with these monstrosities. Admittedly, there were fewer opponents this time, but I wasn't going to take my eyes off the fight. She did well to contain her fear, nodding slowly, when Tarwin suddenly burst out from the cell, wielding her improvised weapon. The sight of a fellow fighter stirred Risha's courage, and it seemed she really had put her past behind her.\n\n\"Go get them out,\" Tarwin shouted, as Risha's markings flashed and the opposing bars began to buzz. \"I've got your backs.\"\n\nI turned to the second cell; the two occupants stepped back. Readying myself I collected my thoughts, controlling the release of my power to expel it in a ball of white fire. The sound of Tarwin engaging the guards behind me almost broke my concentration. I had to force my eyes closed, breaking my visual contact with the world so I could concentrate. The instant I was in darkness, all thoughts about the things around me settled, and ready to fire, I pulled my neck back and opened my mouth.\n\nA sudden pain coursed through my tail as a great weight crushed my scales, breaking my focus. With no time to respond, I was thrown backwards into the open room beyond the cell corridor, slamming into the wall on the opposite side, narrowly missing the spike at its centre. The sound of shattered bones and the agony of the impact confirmed something had broken as I slid down the wall and crashed to the floor.\n\nMy head spun, my ears rang, and my distorted vision met with the fearful sight of my attacker covering the doorway. Its vicious teeth dribbling with my blood; a rattling of spines filled the air and its only good eye focussed on me."
            },
            {
                "title": "Destiny",
                "text": "The wyvern released a deep howl, accompanied by a plume of chilled breath eagerly dissipating into the air. Its sinister yellow eye glared at me while I staggered and swayed before crumpling in a heap. A cry from behind drew its attention, turning its malevolent gaze towards my friends. It was an all-too-familiar situation, I lay dazed and defenceless, while those I cared about were left to the monster's mercy.\n\nFighting against the pain, I forced myself back onto my paws, shattered bones and burning muscles refusing to do what I asked of them. The wyvern remained engrossed in what was going on beyond the doorway, and despite the feeling of everything falling apart inside me, I stood up.\n\nTurn your back on me like I'm just some weak lizard, will you? My rage for all they'd put me through flared. I'll show you!\n\n\"Hey, you!\" I demanded, at the top of my lungs.\n\nIt slowly redirected its only good eye to face me, spiny frill rattling. I must have looked pathetic, barely able to stand, quivering like a new-born foal. I wasn't going to lose to one of them again, not this time. My doubts dissipated and my vision became unnaturally clear.\n\nThe wyvern released an aggressive hiss, slowly prizing apart its fearsome jaw, bloody drool dripping from its monstrous fangs while it started to clamber over the ice shard between us. I held my ground even though it raised its head into an attack position.\n\nNot this time!\n\nThe moment it lunged my instincts forced me aside, the momentum of its attack sending it crashing into the wall. The somewhat dazed creature raised its head and I immediately launched myself at its vulnerable neck. My momentum almost threw me over the opposite side of its wavering bulk, and in its struggle to shake me off, my back legs thrashed around, ripping rotten scales and decayed flesh free.\n\nIts head slammed into a cluster of frozen spikes, sending icy debris across the chamber. Despite its desperate efforts, I held on tight, using all the strength and determination I had left. I flexed my claws, cutting deeper into its vile hide as it thrashed from side to side. Its head slammed against the wall, the whole chamber reverberating with a crack as ice shards fell from above.\n\nIn another attempt to dislodge me, it repeatedly reached to the side of its neck, its rapidly snapping trap of grizzly teeth so close I could smell the foulness of its breath. Holding on tight I repeatedly attempted to summon up my elusive power, to turn my talons into burning razors, but with each jolt my concentration was broken.\n\nMy ability to hang on grew weaker, until with a final jolt, my grip failed, and I was sent crashing to the floor. The wyvern's gaze snapped to me with a ferocious hiss, its lone eye filled with malice. Rattling its spines, it let out a deafening screech so high-pitched it left a ringing in my ears.\n\n\"Blaze!\" a breathless voice cried out; muffled amidst the throbbing in my skull.\n\nWith all my remaining strength, I lifted my head to see Tarwin standing in the doorway. She looked over at me, completely oblivious to the wyvern's presence. The monstrosity repositioned itself to face her. Glancing up her expression drooped, her icicle-blade dropping to the floor. Rearing up above the central spike, its back legs gripped the frozen surface, its clawed wingtips scraped the walls, and its dark membranes spread as wide as they would go.\n\nNot... this... time!\n\nCompletely oblivious, the wyvern failed to see my desperation manifest, turning my scales into a burning ball of light. Revitalised, I exploded towards the unsuspecting monstrosity, the sheer power of our collision generating an explosion, the fiery impact launching both of us in opposite directions.\n\nSkidding to the floor in a steaming heap, the burning glow receded into my amulet and my eyes regained their focus to find the chamber shrouded in mist. My injuries, from the teeth holes in my tail to my battered bones, felt like they'd been burned away. All that remained were faint scars, but the evaporation of power left me gasping for air. The heat of my transformation had melted the outer layers of ice, turning into a steaming puddle in which I flopped.\n\nDid I... I must have... I must have got it.\n\nI scanned the veil, searching for two things \u2013 my friend and my adversary \u2013 unfortunately, I could see neither.\n\nDespite my visual impairment, I could hear a faint gargled groan. Dragging myself up, I limped toward the sound, the mist slowly clearing as I came upon its source. With its decayed hide scorched to a blackened crisp, blood dripping from its foaming jaw, the central spike had pierced the wyvern's chest. A pool of black ichor slowly spread across the floor around its crumpled body.\n\nIt took me a moment to conclude that the force of our impact had pushed it directly onto the icy projection, yet my gaze bore no sympathy as I watched the dying monster gargle and groan. Finally, it drew its last breath, yellow eye robbed of its malicious fire as its bony frill fell silent.\n\nI should hate it, it's a monster, but... What does that make me?\n\nMy thoughts were interrupted by a noise in the scattering mist. Risha came bounding over the wyvern's neck before I could react.\n\n\"Wow, that was unbelievable!\" she exclaimed, excited words escaping in an uncontrolled torrent as she embraced me in her wings. \"I mean, that was a wyvern... a fully grown wyvern! The ones from old hatchling-stories, and you killed it!\"\n\n\"Well, would you look at you two,\" a surprised voice sounded from amidst the settling gloom.\n\nRisha withdrew her wings as we both raised our heads to see Tarwin standing over the wyvern's neck, one boot placed on top of the motionless mass.\n\n\"I see you've already had the victory congratulations,\" she added, offering me a wink that I found hard to understand.\n\nWhat's she talking about, she's never been one to forgo congratulations? What did Acrodan do to her?\n\nShe peered down at the blooded remains of the impaled monster, its decayed scales scraping under her heel.\n\n\"Good riddance,\" she muttered, giving the dead beast a kick.\n\nI doubted she'd go back home and disobey her father again. The legends were as clear as he'd warned. Even though Tarwin was never one to be afraid of things, I hated to think about how that would escalate their arguing.\n\nIf only they'd get along, then they could face the truth together.\n\nI instantly dismissed the distraction when the walls shook, and the ice and frost crumbled around us. The violent tremor lasted longer than those that preceded it, causing the whole fortress to creak and groan before the dust settled.\n\n\"Is everyone alright?\" Tarwin asked, standing up and dusting frost from her coat.\n\nI did the same before looking over myself. Whatever physical pain or injury I'd sustained from the wyvern had already healed.\n\n[ As soon as I'd assessed myself, my thoughts turned to the others. Risha shook dust from her paws, checking them for injury, thankfully she was fine ]\n\nI turned back to Tarwin, words catching in my throat when I realised, I was unable to tell her we were both okay. Though I'd understood what she had asked, I didn't know if Risha had. Either way, if she didn't, she wasn't admitting it.\n\n\"Good to see you're still in one piece,\" Tarwin confirmed, retrieving her improvised weapon.\n\nShe's treating me in exactly the same way. Risha too. I noted. But how long can that last after all that's changed?\n\n\"Go get your other friends!\" she shouted above the crumbling noises.\n\nI scampered around her, moving quickly into the corridor where I was greeted with the shattered remains of five skeletal guards.\n\nLet it never be said that she's bad in a fight. I thought, glancing at Tarwin.\n\nI stood before Boltock and Ember's cell for the second time. Both occupants backed away once again as I prepared to breach the bars. Risha assisted me a second time while Tarwin watched from the safety of the main chamber, and with a burst of light the blizarium disintegrated just like before.\n\nArgh, doing this really takes it out of me. I thought, shaking my head, panting for breath.\n\nEmber was first to emerge. \"That really is some fire you have there,\" she offered.\n\nBoltock trudged lazily from the gloom behind her, his head held low, avoiding the eyes of everyone nearby. Sickened with guilt, I wanted to say something. For good reason he obviously hated humans; what right did I have to say anything to him about it?\n\nI'll leave it to Risha, she'll know what to say.\n\nTail dragging behind him, he moved over to his sister, who glanced at him with concern, but said nothing. Ember crept to her side and whispered something in her ear. I could only guess that the pair were talking about what she'd said to Boltock, or just how odd it was to have a human here.\n\nTarwin stood oblivious to their conversations, directing her focus towards a second doorway on the opposite side of the chamber. I walked over to join them, staggering when another tremor shook the hall.\n\n\"We have to get out!\" Tarwin shouted above the noise, \"This whole place is going to come down,\" she added, moving over to the doorway.\n\nHer suggestion was backed up by the additional sound of more ice clattering down the web of criss-crossed beams above.\n\nSo that's how the wyvern got down here. I noted, glancing up into the vast ice spire, as I hopped over the dead beast's carcass.\n\nEmber inspected the bloody remains, prodding it with a foreclaw as if to prove to herself that it was there. Risha rushed by, while Boltock remained oblivious, sealed within his cocoon of remorse and disbelief.\n\nI swallowed my disgust as I took one final look over the dead beast. Along with several other creatures, the wyvern was dead because of me. I'd hunted and killed before, but that was different. Those I'd recently killed had intended to kill me, and I'd extinguished their lives out of fear and rage. I'd killed to survive, which left me feeling unforgiving, reckless and guilty.\n\nWho am I to judge who lives and who dies? Am I just an executioner?\n\nEven though I thought I'd already made peace with my uneasy anxiety; wielding a power the likes of which the world had not seen in millennia made me feel as though I was no better than the transcendent monster within the sphere. I was sure there were things I could have done differently, though the answer was always the same: they would have killed me without a second thought, so why should I do anything different?\n\nWhile we walked, the memory of the griffins' and Elders' words repeated in my mind.\n\n'Troubled times'.\n\nMy paws began to drag and slow and glancing off into the icy corridors either side of me, I reluctantly knew what I had to do. Slowly but surely, I ground to a halt while the others, and finally Boltock, trudged past me. I silently hoped no one would notice, but my attempt at quietly slipping away ultimately failed.\n\nTarwin was the first to perceive a shift in my mood, as she always did. The others soon stopped with her, without a sound from any of them until someone knelt before me, her head held at my eye level. Tarwin smiled, her face covered in white dust, bruised and cut in several places with strands of loose, red hair waving across her comforting features. She brushed it aside, raised her hand and rubbed between my horns.\n\n\"You're going back, aren't you?\" she asked, with no expectation of a verbal response.\n\nShe obviously knew of Acrodan, she must have seen him. I knew from the look in her eyes she'd seen into the dreadful depths of the sphere too.\n\nWhat did she see? The truth, that the world is far bigger and more terrifying than we ever knew?\n\nI glanced away, the thought of leaving her again after coming so far was unthinkable. I expected her to tell me how wrong the idea was, like the times I'd attacked porcupines or got my head stuck in logs, but as I peered into her eyes, I saw none of the things I feared.\n\n\"Blaze,\" she spoke firmly, her eyes starting to quiver and twinkle. \"You've been my friend for as long as I can remember.\" A tear broke free and rolled down her dirty cheek.\n\n\"But... But ever since I found you, my little fallen star, I believed more than anyone else...\" She stopped, wiping her face with a sniff. \"I found you for a reason and if you think this is it, then it is.\"\n\nI tried to divert my gaze; her sentiment too much for me. I'd have done nothing if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even be here. Hearing her thoughts, I couldn't help but wonder why she hadn't shared them before, but now, I was glad. Knowing how she felt may have only made my old life even more of a struggle. She'd let me believe that had been all there was, let me be happy and content.\n\nEven though she didn't know I could understand everything she said, she'd always treated me as her equal. Even now, she'd no idea if I was listening or understood, yet she knew exactly what to say. If I went back neither of us may see each other again. I'd thought that once before, I'd fought my way across a new world to prove it wrong. Now I'd fight to create a better world without Acrodan or his master.\n\nTarwin expressed her understanding by giving me one final pat on the head, resuming her position at the front of the group. She turned to thank me one last time before continuing into the labyrinth. Ember glanced back at me in the same thankful way, her eyes showing her appreciation before she assured me she'd keep Tarwin safe. Boltock remained still for a few seconds, the shock of Tarwin's actions having seemingly freed him from his emotional stupor.\n\nIt must seem conflicting to him to see a human act like that towards one of his kind.\n\nHe looked over at me briefly, then his sister, his eyes no longer hidden from view.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he admitted.\n\n\"No, I'm sorry,\" Risha replied, lifting her head. \"I knew what this was about, I should have told you... It's just... Well, if we hate, we're no better than them.\"\n\nA small smile broke his muzzle. \"If only every dragon could be as sweet as you.\"\n\nHer look softened as she rolled her eyes. \"I do what I have to, always have. You know that,\" she assured, placing a wing over his back.\n\n\"I know where you're going,\" he told her quietly.\n\nThe emotion of Tarwin's farewell had stunned me, and now a new confusion consumed my mind at the siblings' exchange of words. I'd no idea what they were talking about \u2013 why didn't they just follow Tarwin and Ember? Boltock turned to me, and without a word he nodded before following the others.\n\nI blinked, then glanced at Risha. I'd seen that look in her eyes before, they were filled with the same determination I'd witnessed that night on the cliff, weeks ago.\n\n\"I'm coming with you.\"\n\nAdmittedly it didn't come as a complete shock, after everything we had been through together it wasn't a surprise that she wouldn't allow me to face my destiny alone. She'd already done so much for me, by risking her life and those of her friends and family. Now it was time for me to repay her for that by saving hers.\n\n\"I have to do this alone.\"\n\n\"You don't have to do anything alone,\" she countered softly.\n\nThe look in her eyes and the smile on her muzzle told me that no matter what I did or said, there was no stopping her. She glanced towards the corridor, where the others had departed.\n\n\"Besides, you still have nothing to hold me to,\" she joked.\n\n\"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it,\" I retorted with a warm smile. \"Thanks.\"\n\nI glanced down the corridor and for a moment I thought about all that I may never do and how, in only a few moments, it might all be extinguished. I raised myself up, took in a deep breath, swallowed my fear, and looked back at my unrelenting companion.\n\n\"Let's go,\" she declared for me, before moving off with just as much determination."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Corridor after corridor, staircases and ice bridges went by, with every turn we met an identical sight; the icy labyrinth looked the same.\n\nThe whole world is relying on me, and I can't even find my way through these stupid halls! Regardless, determination forced me on.\n\nThe moment I sensed something out of place I slid to a halt, Risha skidding to a stop at my side.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked, her eyes darting about the new chamber.\n\nWe had arrived at a junction where four corridors met, each leading off in opposite directions. Tall, shimmering pillars of ice stood just a few steps proud of each wall, engraved with runes.\n\nSpirits curse this place; everything down here looks the same!\n\nMy head spun as I glanced in every direction, seeing only mist and endless ice. Then my attention piqued.\n\n\"What's wrong? What is it?\" Risha demanded again.\n\nLooking down to the floor, I could see her paws were motionless, and her expression became more perplexed.\n\n\"We're not moving,\" I noted.\n\nShe appeared even more confused as she cocked her head.\n\n\"If we're not moving, then\u2026\" I listened for a moment, reassessing our surroundings, \"then where's that coming from?\"\n\nThe rapid tapping of claws echoed through the corridors. Glancing in every possible direction, I could see nothing in the misty depths. Even so, the sound was getting closer. My initial instinct was to run, while another part of me thought to fight; both ideas were quickly dismissed in my unorganised urgency.\n\nWe need a plan, a way to find Acrodan.\n\n\"Quick, behind there,\" I whispered.\n\nThere was just enough space for us to hide behind one of the pillars. Squeezing in, we ducked down, the lowlying mist masking my pale scales. Risha remained slightly higher, her sapphire coat more camouflaged against the blue of the ice as the two of us peered out into the open hall.\n\nI don't want to fight. I'm not like Acrodan, I'll avoid killing no matter what the gods tell me.\n\nBefore I had time to dwell on my thoughts, the source of the sound revealed itself. Travelling at speed it slid to a halt in the centre of the corridor, sending up a veil of fine mist. It didn't smell of anything, its body bore no flesh, but it was instantly recognisable as a ghaul. I'd almost forgotten about them; this certainly wasn't a member of the pack that had been hunting us. It was nothing more than long-dead bones suspended by dark magic.\n\nI lowered myself further, only stopping when my view became shrouded by mist. The skeletal beast scanned the area, its hollow eyes hovering across the scene like pale-blue candles. I sunk down further as they passed overhead before I rose to see it staring down one of the corridors. It snarled in a vociferous, unnatural tone and unexpectedly swung its large skull round to face me. I ducked down again; the undead beast let out another gravelly snarl.\n\nI held back, especially when it showed no obvious sign of attacking. Gazing deep into the ghostly flames of its eyes, I saw nothing but a soul exploited and misused by a dark master. Snapping its gaze away, it peered down another of the corridors. Moving on as quickly as it had arrived, the tapping of its claws, combined with the rattling of its bones, echoed through the corridors, signalling its direction.\n\n\"Has it gone?\" Risha asked.\n\n\"I think so,\" I responded, double-checking the area. \"Let's go,\" I whispered.\n\nWithdrawing from our hiding spot, I sliced my tail through the lowlying mist, just in case the beast had secretly hidden a trap beneath its veil. I still had little idea of how to proceed, every direction still looked the same.\n\n\"Best try that way,\" Risha suggested, pointing in the direction the skeleton had taken. \"It can't have gone nowhere,\" she reasoned.\n\nWithout a better suggestion, I took off in the same direction. After only a few minutes, a feature I recognised emerged. Two ice grooves filled with imprisoned skeletal remains on either side of the hall \u2013 we were at the place where the others had been taken.\n\nIf we're here, then there's a split in the passageway ahead and on the left is the sphere's chamber.\n\nI continued in the same direction and found the left turn. This was it, I was before the chamber from which the darkness would emerge, if it hadn't already done so.\n\n\"Told you this was the best way,\" Risha announced boasting a weak expression of pride.\n\nDespite her confidence she fell silent, her veil of joy fading as the two of us peered up at the foreboding doors.\n\n\"Are you ready for this?\"\n\n\"Are you?\" she asked in return.\n\nA weak smile broke out across her face, and I shared what courage I could muster with the same frail gesture.\n\n\"Ready to the end,\" I said, with a subtle nod before turning towards the icy doors.\n\nRight now, my doubt didn't really matter. Either the world ended, or I did, and I wouldn't let either happen without a fight. I took a deep breath and with Risha by my side, charged into the chamber.\n\nAn explosion of colour filled my vision, its sudden intensity forcing me to stop, sending me sliding across the slippery surface. Risha skidded to a halt beside me; using our wings as shields, we both fought to look forward. Without warning, the light vanished, replaced by a subdued glow, albeit still enough to be visible through the transparent membrane of my wing. Before I could lower my shield, the luminous ball surged upwards, emitting a ring of orange fire, illuminating the rounded chamber walls before disappearing into the distant heights of the spire.\n\nIn addition to the fire, a strong wind swept along the floor. Drawn up into a circular motion, it sent the amulet around my neck into a frenzy and ruffled my wings like paper. It sucked up the frozen dust littering the floor, sweeping over my paws to form an upward spiral. With the burning light subdued, I lowered my wing, to see a glowing vortex, swirling around the sphere as the ring of fire began to charge again.\n\nThe dark orb hovered in mid-air, unaffected by the turbulent storm swelling around it. A deep-purple fire lapped across its surface before dripping to the floor like some strange, molten liquid. The maelstrom of ice, frost and light was strongest at its base, where a frantic whirlwind spun close to the floor, ripping at the ice like monstrous talons. As the ghostly whirlwind grew higher it formed a cyclone around the orb, before closing in to create a thin, rotating beam of pulsating purple and orange light, repeatedly shooting up into the heights of the chamber.\n\nEven from the edge I could feel the wind grow with each flash of the baleful ray. I clenched my claws firmly to the floor, digging in the best I could as icy dust battered my scales. My eyes locked on the sphere.\n\nThis can't be it, the ancient evil \u2013 it has to be more than this? Maybe there is still time.\n\n\"Wait here!\" I shouted to Risha over the deafening howl of the supernatural hurricane. \"If there's any soldiers still around you'll have to hold them off!\"\n\nShe looked back with disapproval, pausing for a moment, before shouting above the howling gale. \"Be careful!\"\n\nI battled my way towards the sphere, protecting my eyes with a wing. With each pulse I felt wind hit me like a wall, my footing slipping with each slam, until inevitably, I lost it completely and my legs slipped from under me.\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha called, lurching forward, only for a blast from the sphere to shove her away.\n\nGlancing back at her I fought to regain my footing, while the wind smacked at me like a war hammer. With all the strength I could muster I thrust my talons deeper into the ice, sheering away frost as I shoved myself up.\n\nLimbs stiff as stone I trudged up to the sphere, where the maelstrom was at its strongest. Positioning myself before the source of the swirling hurricane, I dug my claws in further, anchoring my position. My body swayed from side to side and my amulet swung wildly about my neck. Every part of my being screamed at me to give up, but after all of this, I would never!\n\nI closed my eyes tight as another fiery blast seared my gaze. I could do it with one burst of my power, I could destroy it and end it now, achieve what had been foretold.\n\nI drew in a breath as the sphere expelled another pulse, the intensity so bright it ambushed my eyes even though they were closed. I lifted my wing until it receded, and when it did Acrodan's shadowy form materialized beside the sphere.\n\nThis time there's not going to be any negotiations.\n\nThe cloaked figure edged towards me, his shadowy robes and flaming features lashing in the wind.\n\n\"You're too late!\" his ghostly voice announced, flames spitting from his mask. \"My master will be free once more, you can't stop it, no one can!\"\n\nHis voice reverberated into a low growl, as the purple glow in his empty eyes intensified into a bright-red flame. \"This world will burn!\"\n\nHe lifted a robed arm, stretching out a metal hand from beneath the layers of black cloth.\n\n\"You still believe you can save them?\" he laughed, his voice echoing through my mind despite the wind's howl. \"You're so ignorant of the truth. The impurity of the gods will be their downfall, their fear will destroy them.\" Words broken by a growl, he looked right at me.\n\nAnother pulse of light silenced him, shoving me back as I took refuge behind my wing. I dismissed his threats and any desire to question those who had guided me towards this peril. Manipulation was his only weapon; his proclamation was ludicrous.\n\nNo there's no time to debate the truth. Gods' agendas or not, I must stop him!\n\nAnother pulse of light ascended into the tower's upper reaches, and as it had done before the glow momentarily dulled. I looked up to see Acrodan stood directly before me, slightly elevated by the steps.\n\nHis robes writhed like black serpents; his silhouette illuminated from behind like a black mountain. I clenched my claws as the wind intensified, whereas he remained completely unfazed.\n\n\"Do you even know the truth?\" he continued. \"Even the gods lack purity within their hearts, and so the transgressions of their creations will lead to their ultimate demise.\"\n\n\"You're insane, all of you!\" I countered. \"I'm not going to let you do this!\"\n\n\"War is coming \u2013 you know of what I speak \u2013 and the beings of the world should feel uneasy. Even if you succeed, you're doomed!\" the mad disciple proclaimed.\n\nI maintained my focus, attempting to break the neurotic influence of his lies.\n\nDon't believe any of it! I repeatedly told myself, struggling to deny it. Don't believe it!\n\nTormented by his suggestion I glanced back at Risha standing on the rim of the storm, battling to stay on her paws. If his words held any truth, then so be it. I had all the truth I needed to justify what I had to do.\n\nI didn't do this for the gods, I came all this way to save my friends, all of them!\n\nI spun to face the blazing heart of the storm; wind, snow, fire and ice obscuring my view of the sphere's molten core.\n\nThe world around me slowed to a crawl, falling silent. I glanced into Acrodan's fiery eyes. He thought me weak because of my friends, family and all the things my godly brethren didn't possess? Maybe he was right, or maybe such motivation had been intended all along, he was wrong to underestimate it.\n\nI positioned myself into a firing stance as time rushed back to greet me. Fire bubbled up in my chest, welled in my throat and I opened my mouth wide. Another explosion burst out from the vortex, accompanied by the same deafening screech, the sheer force throwing us both spinning helplessly into the raging storm.\n\nThe sphere's whirling wall of energy intensified and the whole chamber shook violently, throwing me to the ground as I struggled to regain my footing. The ice above started to break up as more tremors shook the whole place, walls groaning as they destabilized. More fragments started to fall like icy spears, impacts sending shards of frozen shrapnel across the quivering floor.\n\nFearing that this was my last chance I turned once more to face the sphere, dug my claws firmly into the ice, hid my eyes beneath my wing and stood strong against the whirling vortex.\n\nThe storm's screeching resonance synchronised into a roaring hum, increasing in volume with every bolt of energy sent surging upward. I battled my way back to the top of the stairs, focused my mind, coiled back my neck, opened my mouth and called upon my fire.\n\nAcrodan's metal boot struck my jaw, forcing my mouth closed and my head up. The flaming breath meant for my enemy misfired into my throat, puffing my cheeks and blasting smoke from my nostrils. A nauseous sensation of intense heat, along with a foul, sooty taste, instantly filled my chest, and with my lungs burning I stumbled to the floor, both foreclaws clutching at my sides as I gagged.\n\nO\u2013okay... That's one disadvantage of breathing fire... Not doing that again!\n\nI swallowed hard and fought to raise myself up again. In the time I took to recover, another blow struck my side, dislodging my grip and throwing me across the ice, my claws scratching deep furrows into the frozen surface as I skidded to a halt.\n\n\"Even now you are blind! My master cannot be silenced by anyone or anything!\" Acrodan shouted.\n\nThis time his voice was weaker, whatever telepathic method he'd used before seeming to fail him. The fire dancing in his eyes rose up beneath his hood, erratically thrashing about in the wind as he thrust his staff towards me, and I narrowly avoided a bolt of purple lightning as I leapt aside.\n\nThe purple light around its top flashed in a burst of glowing embers as he thrust the menacing weapon forward and tried again. His clumsy efforts were easily avoided as I instinctively ducked beneath the staff, coiled my hind legs and prepared to lunge. Seizing the first opportunity, I leapt at the shadowy base of his robe, colliding with nothing more than woven material and the metal boots. In a shower of purple flame and black dust, he was sent tumbling over the stairs, a stream of shadows transforming him into a blur as he crashed to the floor.\n\nI managed to steady myself, when in an explosion of contorting black vapour, he unbelievably rose to his feet.\n\n\"Is this all the slave of the false creators can conjure?\" he challenged. \"I expected more of a fight!\"\n\nHis words were growing tiresome, and with another lunge I flung myself towards him; foreclaws outstretched. The sudden intervention of his staff sent me crashing to the floor, and I looked up to see him battling his way to the top of the collapsing stairs.\n\nMy legs were almost ready to give up, yet regardless of how they quivered I lifted my paws, fighting back the pain. As soon as I did, the influence of an invisible force crushed me against the ice. The glowing flame of Acrodan's staff pointed towards me, a magical weight crushing me like a bug under his boot. The flames in his soulless eyes flashed red and he let out a menacing laugh.\n\n\"Your heroism is wasted,\" he croaked, his voice barely audible above the roar of the wind. \"Your efforts are in vain, as they always were. As long as you are blind to the truth, you will fail!\"\n\nThe fire within his eyes intensified, dancing frantically in the raging wind, while his robes were bathed in flashes of colour leaping from the glowing vortex. I closed my eyes tight, attempting to resist, but the more I fought, the more the magic pressed. It was a shock that I'd not been squashed.\n\nNo, I can't let it end like this! All my power and he simply pins me here like an insect!\n\nAlmost as suddenly as the invisible force pressed me to the ice, it disappeared. I looked up to see Acrodan struggling, his robed arms and staff flailing. Risha sank her claws into his head, yanking him around uncontrollably. His arms swayed as she raised herself above his waving bulk, releasing a torrent of searing blue flames across his whole body. A concoction of acrid black smoke and purple fire bellowed from the blazing wounds.\n\nFighting the cyclone, I scrambled to my paws and bolted up the stairs while he finally grabbed her in his iron-clad grasp and tore her from his back, disrupting the stream of fire. Mercilessly holding her by the neck, he crushed her throat as she kicked and thrashed. His glowing eyes stared into hers with a cold contempt that betrayed their burning nature. Before he finally threw her at the wall, her limp body slamming against its crumbling surface, sliding down to the floor, before collapsing amidst the chunks of fallen ice.\n\nThe world fell silent. The whirling vortex and his sinister laughter no more than a whisper. Time seemed to slow: the falling specks of dust that plagued the air crawling into a gentle snow, softly settling on my scales. It felt like my soul had been ripped from my chest and without any thought or emotion my dragonfire began to burn. White immolation consumed my scales as a searing burst of flame flared from my wrinkled snout.\n\nAcrodan turned his staff towards me in another attempt to pin me down as I launched myself at him; his magic shattered as I threw him down, pinning him to the floor; the staff across his chest the only thing between us. My glowing forepaws gripped the slender weapon until it started to warp, boiling into a hideous stream of noxious black fumes. His eyes burned brighter, the crimson fire bursting out from his mask in a shower of embers. Using what remained of his strength he pushed the buckled staff up, rolling me onto the ice. The cold surface exploded with a hiss on contact with my blazing body as I spun to my paws.\n\nWrithing black shadows helped him back to his feet all the same, the vapour dissipating as he thrust his warped staff forward. The fiery purple tip erupted with a beam of intense light and I dropped my head, lifting my wings as cover and fearing an impact that never came. A shield of white light surrounded me, instantly blocking his assault as it effortlessly spread the purple light across its spherical surface.\n\nAcrodan focused intensely, desperately trying to force the beam through the mysterious shield. I looked into his burning eyes, and with a feeling like nothing I'd ever felt before flowing through me I instinctively flared my wings. The burning shield immediately disappeared, exploding into a ball of fire, launching the purple beam back at its sinister master. The force tossed him across the floor, bent staff falling from his metal grasp as he slid away. I approached, each burning step instantly boiling the ice with a sharp hiss, until a cloak of steam enveloped me.\n\nSeemingly powerless without his staff, Acrodan struggled to his feet. His eyes burning with the same intense fire while he continued to laugh to himself. Before he could enlighten me again, the ground shook violently, rupturing in several places. With another loud crack the chamber began to break up, falling chunks of ice helping to smash the crumbling floor.\n\nThe sphere expelled another pulse while more loud rumbles echoed through what remained of the chamber, stressing the ice beyond its limits, causing the wall behind Acrodan to come cascading down. Hidden by a dark plume of dust the structure beyond and beneath the chamber broke away, casting vast pieces of the fortress into the growing abyss.\n\nMore ice shattered above us as the sphere's pulsating beam tilted with the crumbling floor, sending another powerful pulse directly into the upper wall. A cloud of rubble and an ear-piercing screech cried out as the beam sliced effortlessly through the ice, allowing a flood of fresh air and bright sunlight to burst in from outside. I jumped back from the edge as the whole floor started to break apart.\n\nA quick glance back to where her body lay confirmed Risha was safe on the same stable platform along with me. The same could not be said for my enemy, and jumping back to the remnants of the topmost stairs, I watched as the far side of the chamber began to sink. Acrodan battled his way towards me, reaching the opposite side of the growing canyon as the ice on which he stood broke away.\n\n\"My master will return!\" he shrieked repeatedly, his voice broken and crazed as his mask began to crack.\n\nThe whole chunk of ice he and the sphere occupied tilted and dropped lazily into the void, the light beam slicing indiscriminately through the fortress's structure, creating clouds of glistening dust followed by an icy hail.\n\nHis eyes still burned; flames so intense they almost obscured him from view. He stared, peering through the devastation that fell between us, studying me closely while the destruction rained down around him. With only one glance at his fresh fiery gaze, something within me grew cold. He spoke again, not in the same ghostly voice as before; now his words held more authority, a new voice, filling me with a new terror.\n\n\"You do not rule here, Guardian! The time has come at last; the shadow will fall!\"\n\nWith every word the fire in his mouth burned brighter. Ever since I'd known of him, I'd believed he was nothing more than an empty husk, filled with an all-consuming corruption, and now I was certain. This voice wasn't his at all \u2013 whatever lay trapped within the sphere was controlling him, as it always had been. It was terrifying, and just as they had guided me, my instincts told me to fear it.\n\n\"I will return and finish what I began,\" the new voice promised.\n\nInfluenced by the tainted words, a thousand questions raced through my mind, only to be instantly discarded. I gathered my power with no regard for the demonic presence as my opponent's expressionless face looked on. Whatever or whoever I now addressed showed no signs of being able to react, leaving it helpless to stop its imminent descent into the abyss as I pulled back my neck and opened my mouth.\n\n\"I will rule once more! I am all-powerful, fear and death! I am darkness! Darkness reborn!\"\n\nWithout a word I unleashed all my hate, anger and fear in one explosive blast. The ball of light sliced through the air like a comet before crashing into its hopeless target. What remained of Acrodan exploded as the blinding flash launched him into the sphere. The force instantly tore through his body, incinerating what remained in a blazing flare of purple light. I heard him scream in what was surely the first pain he'd felt in centuries, until he was no more than a fine black dust instantly swept up by the vortex.\n\nI gripped even harder while more dust and chunks of ice were pulled inexorably into the abyss. The sound of a dull thud silenced the chamber when the maelstrom and pulsating light were simultaneously drawn back to the sphere. The whole phenomenon held at a suspended point, creating an intense moment of absolute emptiness before the sphere exploded in a burst of energy and a deafening howl. The force shattered the ice around me, blowing me back from the edge before I could witness its complete annihilation.\n\nThe tremors subsided as a fine layer of dust settled in the wake of the devastation. Consumed by the void, the Sphere of Eternity was no more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Home",
                "text": "The wind-swept ledge fell silent as the destruction settled around me. Brilliant beams of sunlight streamed in from the gaping wound in the fortress's side, coating what remained of the floor with the first natural light it had seen in centuries. Distant echoes of crumbling ice occasionally punctuated the stillness, bouncing off the newly formed cliffs and into the depths. Wind battering my wings, I staggered and panted, the waning of my power having left me weak once again.\n\nFinally, my legs slipped from beneath me, subtle pangs of pain flaring where Acrodan had struck me. I barely had enough strength to remain conscious, and as the horrors of what had just transpired gradually crept back, I was left with only one thought: Risha!\n\nForcing my debilitated body to respond, my eyes quickly settled on a blue shape amongst the boulders. My stiff limbs groaned in rebellion and I could still taste smoky dust as well as feel the fiery pain in my chest from my backfire. Forcing myself forward, I unsteadily clambered across the debris, until I reached where she lay.\n\nNothing more than a layer of fine dust coated her blue scales as icy boulders lay scattered around her. Taking a haggard breath, I stumbled clumsily down to her side, she was as cold and motionless as the broken ice around her.\n\n\"Risha?\" I whispered softly, her name quivering in my throat as I edged a forepaw forward nervously, softly nudging her side.\n\nThere was no response, but refusing to acknowledge the worst, I repeated my action, again without success. Hope slowly dwindled, my body and heart fell silent and a wave of despondency fell over me like the pressure of Acrodan's magic. I knew I felt something for her \u2013 a strange feeling that I could only compare to how I felt about Tarwin. My thoughts turned to the things she'd done for me during the short time we had known each other.\n\nWere her risks and sacrifices worth all of this? I'd no thoughts of my victory, or the fact that my foretold task was complete.\n\nOnly memories of her blossomed, filling every cold, dark corner of my mind with the warmth she'd brought me. My eyes flickered as tears seeped from my sealed eyelids, rolling slowly across my scales before freezing into what felt like a stream of razor blades.\n\nI'd set out and saved my friend, but what had I lost? It was the curse of which Acrodan spoke; I had more to look out for, to protect, to save, though, I couldn't save them all.\n\nWas it worth it?! I screamed inside, blaming myself for everything.\n\nWhat is left now? To save the world and lose my... I banished the thought from my mind, snapped open my eyes and finally fell to my knees.\n\nShaking uncontrollably, I knelt beside her, tears flowing. I lay there for what felt like hours, with my muzzle pressed into her neck. My scales brushed against hers and I wished repeatedly for something I knew was impossible. Until finally I moved my head against the ice, its cold embrace freezing the turmoil I felt inside.\n\nWhat have I done?\n\nAs I fought with my fears, I was sure I felt movement, followed by a faint cough. It sounded as dry as one of Acrodan's undead minions. My head shot up and my blurred eyes focused on her sapphire features, but there was nothing.\n\nUnable to take any more torment, I turned away. I had to accept it; I couldn't do anything to help her now, even my tears had run out.\n\n\"Still... nothing to hold me to... yet...\"\n\nThe words were shrouded by breathless wheezing and raspy coughs. My mind recognised them, but I was sure it was just my imagination. My head turned at the sound of another weak cough, the violence of my emotion instantly forcing me to jump up. My aching body screamed in protest; I wasn't imagining anything\u2026 she was still alive!\n\n\"Did you win?\" she rasped.\n\nOverwhelming joy left me unable to speak as I stammered.\n\n\"Yes!\" Was the simple response that eventually fumbled out. \"Yes! We won. We won!\"\n\nShe gingerly lifted her head, the fine covering of snow tumbling off. Seeing her struggle, I dipped beneath her wing, moving gently forward until our shoulders aligned.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" we asked each other simultaneously.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she replied, shaking each of her paws in turn, before rubbing her neck and wincing. \"Just sore.\"\n\n\"I'm okay too,\" I admitted, trying not to overwhelm her with my incredible joy as I felt heat pool in my cheeks like never before.\n\n\"What happened to him?\" she asked, looking over the shattered remains of the chamber.\n\nI wasn't sure what to tell her.\n\nAcrodan was gone, though my doubts had festered; what had happened to the sphere? Was I in time to stop it? I didn't see it open, if it had, the thing inside would surely have stopped me instead of using the last of its energy to cry out empty threats.\n\nReally? Relax, that thing exploded for spirits' sake! No matter what I thought, more sinister ideas followed.\n\nDid Acrodan really speak the truth, about the gods and their fear? Were the final words of whatever lay within the sphere, his, or his master's?\n\n'Guardian!' that's what the Ethereal said, I'm sure?\n\nUnable to comprehend what they could possibly mean, I cast the thoughts aside. Thinking on the riddles of the gods had only brought me pain so far, and I was done with them.\n\n\"He fell down there along with the sph... that thing,\" I answered, pointing to the edge of the frozen cliff with my free wing.\n\n\"Good riddance!\" Risha declared firmly, peering over to the abyss.\n\n\"Acrodan,\" she said with a nervous laugh. \"As hatchlings, my mother would always tell us stories about the war and the last Dark Guardian.\" She leaned her head back against my shoulder. \"They used to be scary,\" she added with a giggle.\n\nShe limped out from under my wing. I was reluctant to remove my support at first, but I let her walk uneasily to the edge of the vast pit, bowing her head to the floor. After a few moments I came to realise what she was thinking about.\n\n\"They would be proud of you,\" I reassured her.\n\nShe glanced back to face me; her eyes set deep in thought.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nAfter resting for a while, I started to consider how we were going to get out of here. The only exit I knew of was gone, the roof and balcony had collapsed over it.\n\n\"No way out that way,\" Risha noted in confirmation when her power failed to shift the vast amount of ice.\n\nI suggested she didn't push herself, but she looked about as ready to give up as I'd been when trying to save Tarwin.\n\nShe has a strong will, stronger than mine.\n\nShe was swift to look out over the sky and outstretch her wings. \"So we'll just have to fly out.\"\n\nThe new wind blowing in from the icy wasteland was more than strong enough to carry us and despite my body's protests, my wings were almost free of pain.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" I asked.\n\n\"My wings are fine!\" she shouted over a gust of wind. \"Oh, and don't worry, there are no trees for me to fly into,\" she added with a wink as she dropped over the edge and rode the air upward.\n\nReally, that joke still? I dipped my head, my cheeks burning. I'm never going to live that down!\n\nI spread my wings and the membranes instantly caught the wind. For a moment I used their support to balance on the edge of the cliff. Peering down into the depths, I fought to control my curiosity while the inky blackness of the chasm drew my eyes in like an enchanting spell. All I could picture was the sphere lurking down there, waiting like it had done for centuries.\n\n\"Are you coming?\" Risha shouted, circling in the sky.\n\nMy reluctance evaporated as soon as I saw her gliding, the welcome sight chasing away my troublesome doubts. Without any more thoughts of the sphere or Acrodan, I leapt into the air.\n\nFor the first time in what seemed like ages, I was flying to somewhere better, and the rush of the cold air on my face had never felt so good.\n\nClearing the large crack in the fortress I could see the destruction had consumed almost half of Ilivar, and the higher we flew, the more apparent the damage became. Half of the frozen crater had given way, creating an immense scar across the ice. A fine wisp of white cloud rose from its depths, climbing into the sky before disappearing on the wind like the final breath of a dying beast.\n\nAll of that from something so small. I wondered in trepidation.\n\nRising high, we circled around to get our bearings, noticing that the front of the fortress was almost undamaged, although the top of the tallest tower was missing. Seeing it all vanish behind me, new, unanswered questions began to grow.\n\nI'd achieved everything I'd unknowingly set out to do, ridding the world of a terrible evil, even so, it seemed naive to simply assume something so powerful would remain in the darkness forever.\n\nNo, stop it! It's done, the whole thing collapsed, and the sphere is gone! I buried my doubts in the deepest corners of my mind.\n\nI can't think like that, we must find the others, make sure they're safe. As I came to that conclusion, more urgent thoughts spawned.\n\nWhere are they now? Did they get out in time? Risha and I found it difficult to navigate the icy maze, so were they able to find their way out?\n\nI did take some relief in the knowledge that the side of the structure that had survived held the exit and using all my senses I frantically scoured the frozen waste.\n\n\"Hey!\" Risha shouted from some distance ahead.\n\nI glanced over to see her circling; her gaze focused on something immediately below her. It was then I realised she wasn't shouting to me; she was calling downward. Following her line of sight, I found three distinct spots of colour standing out against the snowy expanse. To my relief the group stopped, erupting into yells and a flurry of wings.\n\nDespite my relief I was hesitant to land, knowing that the moment I did a whole barrage of questions would surely hit me.\n\n\"We'd better get down there!\" Risha shouted.\n\nGiving me no time to question, she dove, and I hesitantly followed.\n\nJust remain positive, it's over. No more Dark Guardian to worry about.\n\nUpon touching down, I felt layers of snow crumble and shift beneath my weight. More frost scattered with the settling beats of my wings as I snorted cold air. The transfer of weight reanimated the aches and pains that came with the effort of standing, but I dismissed those as I did the sphere.\n\nEncircled by the great cliffs once again, I considered how different Ilivar's crater looked from above, up there the walls were almost indistinguishable.\n\nThe thud of rapid paws on snow sounded as Risha ran over to the others. Ember and Boltock sprinted to meet her halfway, each of them sending showers of snow flying up in their wake as they embraced.\n\nThey're all safe, they're happy. I did it. I thought, time seeming to slow as I saw the three dragons break into laughter, voices becoming muffled like I was underwater.\n\n'You do not rule here, Guardian...'\n\n\"Blaze!\" Risha exclaimed, her voice twisted by the howling wind as it shook me back to reality.\n\nI turned to see her a few feet away, the others talking in excited tones behind her. Beyond them was Tarwin, wrapped up tight in her fur fleece.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Risha asked, creeping over and resting a wing on my shoulder. \"You looked really out of it for a second.\"\n\nAre you okay? The thought of her saying it again made me feel worse.\n\n\"Yeah\u2013Yeah, I'm fine,\" I replied, shaking myself before she could ask again.\n\n\"Fine?\" She sounded far from convinced. But before I could evaluate her tone, she spoke again. \"I'll handle those two.\" She pointed to the two dragons chattering excitedly to one another. \"That one's yours,\" she concluded, gesturing to Tarwin.\n\nI forced a frail smile. \"Thanks.\"\n\nShe nodded and withdrew back to the others as I looked over at Tarwin, wondering if she even understood what her new companions were doing.\n\nDoes she have any idea we're really all talking? Out of all of us, I knew she at least understood me.\n\nI've changed so much, am I really hers anymore?\n\nI looked down at my amulet; thankfully, it sat peacefully against my scales, a faint glow emanating from the gem at its centre.\n\n\"No, what I am doesn't really matter,\" I muttered to myself, finally creeping over to my lifelong friend.\n\nShe dropped to her knees, opened her arms and without thought I ran straight into her embrace, cloaked limbs falling around me. After a moment, I raised my head from within the warmth to meet her eyes.\n\n\"I knew you'd come back; I knew it!\" she exclaimed, wiping hair from her eyes as she added stubbornly. \"Takes a lot more than some dark wizard to keep you down!\"\n\nAfter all I'd been through in the past few weeks, it wasn't anything compared to the bond we enjoyed. She released me, placed her hand on the top of my head and rubbed between my horns.\n\n\"Let's go home,\" she proposed.\n\nI couldn't have been any more eager to oblige, quickly springing up beside her before moving over to Risha. Boltock and Ember chatted excitedly, occasionally asking her a question; her improvised responses remaining true to her promise. She caught sight of me, quickly throwing in a few more improvised answers to the excited pair like bones to hounds.\n\n\"Any idea how to get out of here?\" she asked, glancing over at her brother with his injured wing, then to Tarwin with no wings.\n\nWithout flight, getting over the huge cliffs wasn't going to be easy. There must be a way out \u2013 how did Acrodan get in?\n\nThat was a stupid question, the cliffs probably weren't here when Acrodan first fled to Ilivar. In that case, what about his wingless servants, the ghauls, the undead \u2013 how do they get in?\n\n\"I guess you two are trying to figure out a way out!\" a curious voice interjected.\n\nWe both turned to see Boltock, with Ember standing behind him shaking her head.\n\n\"There is actually a way out, you see, we already figured it out,\" he added, raising his forepaw to his puffed-up chest.\n\n\"Where?\" Risha responded.\n\n\"There!\" he snapped back, dismissing her sarcastic tone and pointing his free wing to a huge, black line in the wall of ice.\n\n\"Why are you making such a big deal out of it? It was there when we first came in,\" Ember intervened, flicking his muzzle with her tail as she started onward.\n\n\"W\u2013what... I know that, hey you said you'd let me tell them!\" he babbled as he floundered after her.\n\n\"One day he'll get the picture,\" Risha observed with a roll of her eyes, ruffling her wings before she moved on too. \"I can't wait to get home.\"\n\nI lingered for a moment, watching them leave a trail of paw prints in their wake.\n\n\"Guess you're the ones leading the way?\" Tarwin laughed, a beaming smile breaking across her face as she glanced my way.\n\n\"Oh, you have no...\" I stopped myself and simply gave her a nod. She returned the gesture, and offering a pat on the back, she moved on.\n\nIt wasn't until I was alone that I took a last glance back at what remained of Ilivar.\n\n'My master will return...'\n\nStealing my gaze from the foul place with a snort of white fire, I ran to catch the group. Not anymore, he won't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "It took us a few hours to reach the crevice, and much to everyone's relief, especially Boltock's, it provided a narrow path to the icy expanse above. The days that followed were uneventful; storms threatened to engulf us, but thankfully they dispersed. We joked that the weather might fear us for what we'd done, such conversations merely brought on by boredom and the hours of endless walking. Eventually we found ourselves back on the seashore, not making landfall at the cliff we'd encountered previously. Instead, a pebbled beach, framed by the snow-capped forest stretching back as far as the eye could see.\n\nThe days below the pines were long and the nights barely gave me time to rest, just as before. After hours awake by the fire, I was always thankful for the rising sun each morning. I saw fleeting glimpses of griffin patrols as the fast-running rivers, cliffs and the mountains of Storm Peak passed us by. This time the featherwings remained aloof.\n\nThe journey wasn't dissimilar to the one we'd made weeks ago, save for Tarwin's presence. As the days and nights wore on, she hunted in the forest with me, utilizing a bow crafted from an old branch, flint and fur. Although memories of our old hunts were gone, I revelled in the thrill of being by her side again.\n\nShe came to know the others as she knew me, and they soon came to be treated no differently. I constantly tried to convince myself that the sight of all my friends getting along should make me happy, even more so as they began to truly accept each other.\n\nYet now more than ever, paranoid thoughts of darkness plagued my mind. Convincing me of something still lurking in the shadows. More nights spent by the fire, whether it be orange, blue, or green, became sleepless. The flickering glow illuminated the shadowy trunks of trees and each glimpse of eye-shine sent me jolting back. It was often only wolves or racoons; I'd not seen a ghaul in months.\n\nHome was another idea that often flashed across my mind.\n\nWhere's home now? So, so far away, never to be the same. I'd not even considered what was going to happen when we reached it.\n\nI couldn't just go back to my old life, and despite Tarwin and the dragons accepting each other, eventually they were still going to go their separate ways.\n\nWhere do I go then?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "The last of the sun's rays grazed the twilight sky and a gentle winter breeze swept through the swaying pine trees. I sat looking at the others sitting a few paces away, gathered around an orange fire they'd constructed at the base of a rocky outcrop. Despite the pleasant scene, I purposely distanced myself, as I'd done every night for the past week.\n\nThey're getting along just fine without me, why mess that up with my sour mood?\n\nI must have looked like the worst saviour ever, then again, I wasn't given much of a choice, so why should I behave how everyone expected?\n\nIsn't that what I refused to do all along?\n\nAs the noises of the others around the fire began to slip into the silence of the night, I turned to make my way back to the warmth of the flames.\n\n\"Out here by yourself again?\"\n\nRisha surprised me with her silent approach, almost making me jump out of my scales.\n\n\"Whoa, it's okay, just me,\" she chuckled, settling down beside me.\n\nI nodded without a word, my head drooping.\n\nJust as always, her wit became concern as she added, \"Blaze, it's all over.\"\n\nI wanted to believe that so much, but I couldn't force myself. I wondered if she'd seen what I'd seen, the stars going out and fire across the world, would she still believe it was over?\n\nI sighed and slowly raised my head.\n\n\"I know,\" I admitted. \"It just still gets to me.\"\n\n\"So, what's really wrong?\" she continued softly.\n\nThere were so many things, too numerous to count, most pressing of all the grim idea of the sphere stirring in that dark pit. Whatever I was planning to say next would almost certainly be detected as a lie, but I thought about saying it anyway.\n\n\"Isn't it beautiful?\"\n\nHer abrupt shift in topic saved me from my thoughts as she gazed towards the thousands of sparkling stars across the night, a full moon and aurora bathing the snowy forest in their glow.\n\n\"Reminds me of all the things before... before\u2026 well, you know,\" she confessed with a small sigh. \"I guess that's all changed now,\" she added softly.\n\nIn giving no response, I realised more than ever that this journey had affected all of us. Without question, it had affected her relationship with humans and her own brother. As for the others, I wasn't quite sure about Ember; being away for such a long time couldn't be good for whatever family she had, or her fire order training. Not to mention the Fire Order dragon who I'd almost forgotten about, Pyro. How would he react to our return? Then there was Tarwin, whose change I feared most of all.\n\n\"I never really got a chance to say thanks,\" Risha interrupted. \"If it wasn't for you, we would all be\u2026 well,\" she shook her head at the thought.\n\nI returned my eyes to the night sky as I replied. \"I couldn't have done it without you.\"\n\nCovering her cheeks with a wing and ducking her head, she turned to the side.\n\n\"Thanks, thanks for saving my life... That's what I'm trying to say, silly-scales,\" she whispered softly.\n\nI blinked, my own cheeks starting to heat. She saved me from Acrodan's magic and kept me going through all this. I'd be nothing alone.\n\n\"You saved mine,\" I responded, sure she'd saved me from the very moment we met.\n\n\"Well... I guess you could say that,\" she admitted, her words mixed with slight laughter as she ruffled and shrugged her wings. \"Twice.\"\n\nI shared her laughter for a moment before she turned towards the others settling down around the fire.\n\n\"Guess I'll get some rest,\" she suggested with an obviously fake yawn. \"See you tomorrow,\" she added, before making her way back.\n\nI watched her settle down beside her brother, edging a sapphire wing over him. Before long, my gaze passed across the forest's darkness, back to the night sky. It would never be the same again, and yet its magnificence still held the same effect on me. The distant memory of the black pin-holed canvas and the hidden sun stimulated a slight laugh \u2013 the memory felt so far away but it had stuck in my mind: Dragons can fly to the stars.\n\nI eventually crept back to the fire and settled next to Tarwin. I appreciated my new friends; in fact, I felt that they were as much my family as she was, something my brethren in the stars didn't have, something Acrodan had underestimated. With that thought fresh in my mind, I drifted off to sleep."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "During the days that followed any positivity that spawned that night began to dissipate. Haunting visions slowly returned, and anxiety crept up on me like a ghost. Hours spent trailing behind the others, jumping at every shadow or rustle in the trees. Deep down I wanted to believe it was over, but the paintings and carvings, the stories of legends and things long gone played on my mind.\n\nIf it didn't end back then, why should it now?\n\nFrom the corner of my eye, I saw something move, and my attention was instantly set upon a restless bush. A twittering bird darted from the vegetation, perched on a log, and peered at me like I was a fool before it flew off. I returned my attention to the others just a few paces up the road.\n\nMy paws dragged lazily through the mud making up the rough path we'd been following for the past few days. It was a seemingly endless tunnel of trees and boulders, hemmed in on both sides by thick ferns and spiked holly. After flying over North Rim months ago I knew that the forest extended for miles, making every step feel just as pointless as that which preceded it.\n\nMy only assurance we were going in the right direction was the other dragons' confidence they knew the way back. Boltock most of all was adamant we were only a few days away from the Midnight Planes, whereas Ember insisted on directions with far more military-like precision, using stars and landmarks.\n\nEither way, it's only a few days until I must make a choice.\n\nIt was a daunting prospect that I'd continually tried to dismiss, but before it reared its head again, I was swiftly distracted. A new smell caught my attention, grasping my focus away from the endless wall of trees. At first, my weary mind dismissed it as just another trick, but it defied the criteria that led me to believe it was imaginary.\n\nMy unsettled senses scoured the trees, without success, so I turned my attention to the others, who showed no sign of noticing anything unusual. Without thinking, I bolted forwards, only just managing to halt my momentum in the slippery mud. The others stopped, peering back with puzzled expressions. I looked them over, my eyes passing from face to face. The three dragons remained confused, but when my worried gaze came to rest on Tarwin, she immediately reached for her makeshift bow.\n\n\"What is it?\" Risha asked, focusing on the dense forest.\n\n\"Don't you smell that?\" I asked, glancing round and sniffing the air.\n\nRaising his muzzle, Boltock's face dropped \u2013 it was a scent he knew all too well.\n\n\"Those... things,\" he muttered.\n\nEmber and Risha exchanged glances as they noticed it too, before every pair of eyes turned to the trees, and the five of us backed up to form a closed circle. Tarwin stood beside me, her bow drawn. I coiled up, head and body held low, the winter chill cooling my scales as they brushed against the moist ground.\n\nMy eyes narrowed, claws and teeth at the ready as the scent moved closer, splitting into multiple points, until I saw the first ghaul emerge from the trees. My fury launched me forward, front legs outstretched, claws poised for attack. In my urgent reaction I was unable to counter my enemy's move, and when it quickly stepped to one side, there was nothing else for me to do except spread my wings in an attempt to slow down the inevitable impact.\n\nA shower of pine needles, mud and snow flew into the air as I collided with the ground. Realising my sudden vulnerability, a combination of fear and shock forced me to curl up tight in the hope that my armoured scales would protect me from the ghaul's retaliation.\n\n\"Blaze!\" the shocked voices of the others shouted in muffled union as an arrow tore through the air beside me, landing in the beast's shoulder.\n\nYelping in pain, it frantically reached round, trying to grab the wooden projectile with its mouth. In the same moment two more erupted from the bush and immediately used their massive bodies to form a wall between my friends, their wounded companion and I. Despite their growling they showed no sign of attacking, and for a moment my mind filled with a frail relief that betrayed my fear \u2013 they're not out to kill us?\n\nI knew they could be deceiving; however, they'd had the opportunity to ambush us and missed it.\n\nIf they're not hunting us, why are they here?\n\nI heard Tarwin ready another arrow. Raising an open wing, I signalled for her to stop. Bow drawn and an arrow pointed at the head of another beast, she paused and I slowly lowered my wing. The wounded ghaul pulled the arrow free, holding its blood-stained leg up against its chest. The remaining, fully combat-capable monsters, settled their aggressive growls into a less formidable grumble as they slowly moved around us. Finally stopping at the base of a large mossy rock beside the path as I backed up to the others.\n\nI'd no idea how to react. I'd only known these creatures to be vicious enemies, and now here they were waiting and staring at me as if they wanted me to follow. My mind instinctively resisted any urge, but despite my inner protests, I slowly moved forward.\n\n\"Blaze, what in the creators' name is this?\" Risha hissed through gritted teeth.\n\n\"I don't know, I think they want us to see something,\" I responded glaring at the pack.\n\nOne wrong move and I can take them, destroy them like their master.\n\nI stopped before the rock where they had gathered, their menacing eyes redirected to a large shape emerging behind them. The shadowy figure of the lead-ghaul lumbered from the forest, its scarred hide and collar unmistakable.\n\nWait, is it just me or have the collar's runes stopped glowing?\n\nThe larger animal stood on its raised position, its damp, waterlogged fur dripping and shimmering in what little light passed through the canopy. Like its fellows, it showed no sign of aggression towards any of us. Meanwhile, all I could do was stare.\n\nThe less cautious side of my mind continued to grow in strength, generating every possible positive thought and gradually dismissing any ideas that this might be a trap. Thereby allowing me to maintain the idea that it was the right thing to do.\n\nDespite my growing confidence I instinctively stepped back when the lead creature suddenly shifted, the three lesser beasts mimicking the action. They bowed their heads low, as if paying respects to a king.\n\nShock, disbelief and a host of other emotions raced through my mind, and I froze, frantically trying to recall what might have caused these gruesome creatures to bow before me. Unsure of what to do, my eyes passed briefly to the others, who, upon realising what was happening, only shrugged and wore masks of confusion.\n\nIs it my defeat of Acrodan or the destruction of the sphere? Did they really serve him that willingly? My entire view of them changed; it was as if they'd been set free.\n\nIt dawned on me then that my victory might be believable; it seemed the world was changing, if that was the case, what would I do with such beasts? After a few moments of deliberation, I concluded that maybe things were not changing for the worst, maybe the darkness really was wary of me as the creators foretold. An arrogant conclusion perhaps, but it was the only one that had an ounce of sense to it.\n\nThe moment I understood what they were doing, their leader snapped its head up, its wolf-like ears standing to attention. The sudden movement almost sent my nerves over the edge, but this time I controlled my reaction. The ghaul held its head high, its ears and nose twitching, while its sharp eyes scanned the forest before turning to its lesser companions. They immediately stalked off into the bush with a series of low growls.\n\nI watched them depart, before returning my eyes to the lead creature. It gave one final bow before jumping from the rock into the forest, the instant it did my focus was pulled back to normality like a breath of fresh air.\n\n\"What... was that about?\" Risha asked as she appeared at my side.\n\n\"I don't really know,\" I muttered, looking down at my amulet. \"I think we set them free.\"\n\nWith one worry gone, another was swift to replace it. Why did they move off so quickly? What else is out there?\n\nRaising my nostrils high, I took in a fresh breath and above the damp scents of the forest another smell filled my lungs. It was another scent I recognised; one I hadn't known in a long time. Like the ghaul's it was quickly getting stronger and was soon accompanied by a familiar sound amidst the rustling pines.\n\n\"What is it?\" Risha asked.\n\nI looked back to the others, and the moment my eyes settled on Tarwin, I saw she recognised it too, if not the smell, then the sound. She put away her makeshift bow and ran to me. Boltock and Ember hung back, while Risha stayed by my side, all staring into the veiled pathway until the clip-clopping of hooves, the smell of the animals and those riding them, emerged. Tarwin raised both of her arms, getting the attention of the four horse-mounted men as she jumped up and down.\n\nI caught Risha jump back at the sight of the armoured humans and their bulky mounts, without hesitation I draped my wing across her back. She glanced round and the glimmer in her eye told me everything. 'Humans'. Despite all she'd been through and what she had told her brother, she was still scared.\n\n\"It's okay, there's nothing to be afraid of,\" I reassured her.\n\nThe horsemen approached and encircled us, while I looked to Tarwin. She was swift to have the men stand down, before I heard a familiar voice. It was one I hadn't heard in what seemed like an age but was as recognisable as the day we'd left.\n\n\"Tarwin, Tarwin!\" The words grew louder as one of the burly men swiftly dismounted.\n\nLike nothing I'd ever expected to see, Tarwin flung herself into her father's arms, almost knocking him to the floor. She said nothing through her tears, and he made no effort to hide his own as they embraced.\n\n\"You're alive, you're alive!\" he exclaimed, laughing like he'd never expected to see the day.\n\nNo matter my anxiety, a smile formed on my muzzle; whatever angered them before was gone.\n\nWho knew it only took a dark lord's monsters and a trek half way across the world to sort that issue out?\n\n\"I thought I'd never see you again,\" he gushed. \"When I came home and the men said you'd disappeared, oh by the spirits!\"\n\nHis vast arms held her shoulders, the broadest smile I'd ever seen beaming through his thick beard. Meanwhile, I looked over to Risha, thinking of how strange it must look to her.\n\n\"This... this is your family?\" she whispered quietly. \"It... It's sweet.\"\n\nThere was a slight sadness in her eyes as she forced a smile. \"I could never have imagined it'd be like... Like this.\"\n\nOnly then did her statement make me realise the truth. After spending the most amazing and adventurous months of my life with them, it was time to make a choice: my home was now open to me. I'd achieved all I'd set out to, found Tarwin and returned safely.\n\nRisha slipped away, moving back to her brother. Boltock and Ember seemed to share her disappointment. I couldn't blame them \u2013 it was my responsibility to see them through and always had been.\n\nI turned to Tarwin and her father talking frantically at the side of his horse. All four of my shivering paws slowly dragged me through the mud, bringing me to a stop at her feet. It was completely ridiculous to think that after what we'd been through it came down to this, a bedraggled, little dragon who didn't have a clue what to do.\n\nThis situation was completely alien to me, even more so than fighting Acrodan and the ghauls. I slouched against Tarwin's leg, no real desire to attract her attention, though I obtained it nonetheless. She broke away from the conversation with her father, kneeling beside me.\n\n\"I would never have gotten out without Blaze,\" she gushed excitedly, rubbing her hand beneath my head and forcing it to rise.\n\nI tried to figure out what she might have told him. Would he believe her stories about a dark overlord, giant flying beasts and an icy fortress? It seemed strange to think back to the day he'd left on his ship while worrying about rumours in the forest. He hadn't been far from the truth after all.\n\nTarwin continued her description of what I'd done. The only part I knew he might not believe was how her mysterious pet dragon saved her by defeating an evil beyond anything he knew. How he would react to such an impossible story was beyond even my imagination, but as she elaborated, he glanced over at the three huddled dragons in the road.\n\nIf he had any doubt about more of my kind, it was lost at that moment, as his daughter told him she was still alive because of them.\n\nI bet he didn't consider that when he told me to stop flying in the house.\n\nHe knelt beside me; bulky body daunting even when he was on his knees in the mud. Placing one heavy hand on my head, just as she always did, he paused, seeming to consider his words and who they were addressed to. I was sure it must have been very strange to him, talking to a dragon like I was one of his own. He let out a sigh, the warmth of his breath streaming out from his thick beard.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he admitted firmly, \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe respect I was receiving from a man who hadn't always liked me felt strange, though the moment of recognition was welcome. He stood up and Tarwin immediately followed. Placing one hand on her shoulder, he uttered the words I'd been dreading.\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\nShe smiled, something I'd not seen her do in her father's presence for a very long time. I knew that such a random thought was simply a distraction from the truth. It was time to leave; and part of me didn't dare to do it. I glanced back at the others, eyes homing in on Risha as she stared off into the forest.\n\nI wanted to say something but couldn't find the words. The sound of reins and the whinny of a horse drew my attention back to Tarwin.\n\nAm I just going to leave?\n\nTarwin was the reason I'd set out on this journey and, up until now, she'd been the only thing I needed in my life, but my mind had been opened to the world beyond the village, and I didn't want to leave it behind.\n\nI listened to the reins rattle while the horses moved to their riders' command, hooves squelching in the mud. Tarwin climbed onto the back of her father's steed, the sight forcing me to the precipice of anguish. There would be no goodbye or farewell, they would just ride off into the mist. Every moment dragged on into eternity, before I finally heard Tarwin's voice.\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nI heard a squelching impact as boots struck the muddy road, before she knelt in front of me, a frail smile across her hair-strewn face. The silence between us was broken by a sigh as her eyes briefly flashed to the others, one dragoness in particular.\n\n\"Blaze, you've been there for me for as long as I can remember,\" she admitted, placing her hand between my horns.\n\nA tear accompanied her words. \"And oh, spirits above, I know it's fairy-tale, but I always wanted something better for you.\"\n\nBy now I'd come to realise that she'd been saving these thoughts for the right moment, a moment when we'd both have to face our differences.\n\nHow often has she wondered about the world I came from?\n\n\"Ever since I found you, my life's never been the same,\" she continued, struggling to hold back tears, before she sighed. \"But\u2026 this is where you belong... with them.\"\n\nI looked away, unable to stop my own tears welling. She'd been my only family for so long, we were completely inseparable, I'd crossed the world to find her. Unable to say the things I would if I could, my next action required no words. I put my head to her chest and gently wrapped my wings around her. We held our embrace for some time before she pulled away and said.\n\n\"You'll always be my fallen star.\"\n\nSmiling through the tears, she stood and climbed up to her father's horse. We looked at each other until my attention was snatched by her father's respectful nod and a signal for the other men to move out. I looked one last time as she waved goodbye before gradually galloping out of view.\n\nThe reality of what I'd let go hit me with such a force it sent me tumbling to the ground. My emotions overcame me as I stared hopelessly into the misty shroud that now filled the space where the final link to my old life once stood. Any logical reasoning seemed to die as my thoughts ran wild, until one flashed against the bleakness and held its position long enough for me to consider it clearly. Reminding me exactly why I'd given up my old life.\n\nThe world grew quiet, even the rustle of the trees fell into silence as I picked myself up and looked at the others. Every pair of eyes was fixed on me, yet no one, not even Risha, made any attempt to speak.\n\nThe awkward silence was broken by a light sound against the forest floor, chased by several more as drops of rain began to fall. The soft pitter-patter drummed its tune on the canopy, as if the whole world was sharing in my misery. I hardly felt each drop of water on my folded wings, the numbness of my mind dismissing any desire to seek shelter or hide.\n\nCovered in a dripping coat, I finally lifted my head. No thoughts preceded my next action, and with no consideration for the rain, I started walking. For a moment there was a doubt that the others might follow. A brief peek confirmed they were, just as they had since we met.\n\nWe walked for longer than I cared to remember, this time my view focused on nothing more than the horizon, whether it be dense forest, or the open sky. Once or twice I imagined the others might have left, a thought quickly dismissed with a subtle glance back. It didn't take long for my innermost thoughts to resurface from beneath the sorrow of Tarwin's unexpected departure. The paranoia concerning the unknown fate of the sphere resumed its corruption, nevertheless the memories of my old home and my life with Tarwin held their own against the resurgent doubt.\n\nThe idea she'd known it was right offered some relief. I knew deep down I couldn't just leave the others, I owed it to them as much as I owed it to her. Particularly Risha, who had become just as important to me. She had saved me when no one else could.\n\nA rocky cliff face abruptly interrupted the never-ending sprawl of pine trees, my thoughts about Tarwin, the sphere and its corruption. I recognised the obstacle as the face of the cliff leading to the cave where we had slept on that first rainy night. It was strange how similar this dull, wet day felt to that evening. Only this time there was no fear of losing Tarwin or the attack of monsters. It was just another obstacle to traverse.\n\nWithin the day, the forest finally gave way to the vast grassland of the Midnight Plains. It looked so different from the ground, almost alien. The large grassy banks, invisible from above, now dominated the landscape and patches of trees stood proudly atop the dull-green waves. Fewer leaves graced their branches, and a light dusting of snow mottled the grass.\n\nAs we pressed on, I allowed the others to pass; after all, they knew the way back to the city through the endless expanse of wintery grass better than me. Reaching the peak of a hill, I peered out over the plains to see fluffy brown blotches, it didn't take me long to realise they were large flocks of earth birds. Their feathers had dulled to a darker shade, and their almost black coats ruffled in the winter wind as they huddled together for warmth.\n\nEventually the horizon flattened, and the peeks of snow-dusted towers broke the smooth edge, outlines framed by the ruins of the cliff top city. Just like Acrodan's fortress, it became apparent that the steeples were further away than I first anticipated, we walked for a few more hours until they eventually appeared to get closer.\n\nThe blue sky slowly surrendered to the dull purple of winter twilight, the sunset illuminating the clouds from below, creating a thin band of wintery pink mist reflecting the embers of its red glow over the plains. The moon rose from the opposing horizon, its majestic glow beautifully flooding across the snowy grassland before the first words to grace my ears in days interrupted.\n\n\"We're home!\" Ember declared with a leap.\n\nI looked up to see her frantically flapping around in the air, before turning to see that the others had come to a halt amidst boulders by the cliff top. Knowing Dardien was below did spur on my thoughts \u2013 I do belong here, with my own kind.\n\n\"Aren't you forgetting something?\" Boltock announced, looking up to her and ruffling his wing within its well-worn bandage.\n\n\"Oh, right,\" she replied with a slightly embarrassed laugh, \"I'll go find a patrol, there's a few academy members that still owe me a few favors,\" she added, before diving over the cliff edge and down to the city.\n\nBoltock chuckled to himself, turning to face Risha and I. He looked at both of us with a strange expression and then, without saying a word, darted over to the edge of the cliff, eagerly awaiting Ember's return.\n\nI avoided the urge to turn to my friend, eyes remaining locked on the starry horizon beyond the cliff. My reluctance to speak was shattered as my ears were met with a few poignant words.\n\n\"I'm sorry about your home.\"\n\nEven now, after all that had happened, she was sorry when she'd nothing to be sorry about. It certainly wasn't any fault of hers that I'd chosen not to go with Tarwin. It was my own decision.\n\nUnlike how I felt when I'd first arrived here all those months ago, it felt like I'd returned home, a home I'd chosen for myself. It had taken me all this time, all that travelling, even finding out I was some kind of...\n\nWell, I've no idea really. I still have to figure that out.\n\nPeering up, there was nothing new above me, just the same comforting ocean of stars \u2013 the same as home, the same as anywhere.\n\nFinally, I turned to Risha, illuminated by the moonlit glow, her magnificent eyes instantly meeting mine.\n\n\"I am home.\"\n\nThe words couldn't have been more truthful, but that truth cast a veil of doubt. Hiding behind the curtain of contentment, deep down, I was dreading the time when I'd once again have to let it all go."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South",
        "author": "Deryn Pittar",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons",
            "dragon protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Curse the chill in the air. The sun had risen late, its warmth weaker. Taking flight from the ledge where he'd slept Lutapolii glided over the low rise, his wings stiff and sore, slow to respond. He landed badly, his clawed feet slipping sideways on the rocky outcrop. Yesterday he'd landed perfectly.\n\nNo one had told him it got cold this far south. Perhaps their looks of disdain and the arrogant toss of their heads had meant to convey the stupidity of his plan to fly south. Would he have listened to their advice? Hardly. Dragons were not known to be truthful and if it suited their own schemes they would swear rain was sunshine and fire didn't burn.\n\nHe'd flown south searching for solitude and time to heal his wounds. Bullied by the females of the First Flight, laughed at by Erebia for his pale cream scales and feeble build, he'd looked to his mother for support. Even she had almost disowned him, embarrassed that a son of hers could be so puny. Sabolotii, his mother, blamed his absent father for his poor physical appearance and said she rued the day she had mated with him. 'Never again,' she'd roared, which was unlikely because his father had been killed in a battle to mate with Erebia. At least his father had ambition even if it had killed him.\n\nYesterday the sun had glinted off the tops of the stubby trees, the only cover on this sparsely forested land. Now he knew what had caught the sun's glare\u2014ice crystals. Tomorrow he'd need to fly north. No wonder this land echoed with emptiness. He'd foraged its beaches for food over the summer, pleasantly feasting on nesting birds and the sea life. Now the birds had gone. He should have considered why they left. The sea had turned gray and choppy.\n\nHad he left his return too late?\n\nApprehension gripped his heart and he stretched his wings, only to find they had stiffened even more. The chill seeped into his bones. He turned to set fire to a nearby bush to warm up but small flames spluttered from his snout, smoke poured from his nostrils and blocked his vision, scratching his eyes with the cinders. Relieved no one could see his shame\u2014his dragon-fire smoldering, his eyes smarting and his ability to fly fading fast, he took stock of his plight. A black cloud on the southern horizon reminded him of summer storms, of clouds bearing rain and wind. He'd flown over the southern snow-capped mountains during summer, never thinking the ice would advance this far north. He realized it would only get colder.\n\nAnother flap of his wings made up his mind. If he couldn't fly properly, then he'd swim\u2014now, not a moment too soon. Nostrils clamped tight he plunged into the sea and headed magnetic north, knowing that several miles away was an island he'd flown over many times. It would be a start on his journey north and he'd rest there overnight and swim on in the morning.\n\nCould other dragons swim? Not that he knew of, but he'd mastered the skill over the summer. He'd watched the diving birds as they plummeted to the sea, folding their wings back against their body just before they'd entered the water. His first attempts had sprained his wings but eventually he'd learned the exact timing needed for a slick entry. Then came the challenge of swimming under water. He paddled as the birds did, walking through the sea taking thrusting steps with his large hind legs. But he had one great advantage over the birds\u2014his tail. Instinct drove him to sway it until he mastered the movement which pushed him forward faster than any seal could swim. Not only did he catch fish, he caught the seals in their natural environment. As much as he loved their juicy, fat content he limited his intake, not wanting to scare them away, plucking them from the sea at random as he explored his summer residence.\n\nNow his idyllic sanctuary threatened to freeze him to death. His mother's scathing voice rang in his mind, \"You're a puny dragon\u2014without good looks, no strength and little chance to breed. Who would want you?\" Sabolotii the Sinister he called her, behind her back of course.\n\nTime passed as he toiled through the water and when he paused to raise his long neck above the chop of the waves the island he'd been heading for had disappeared. In its place clouds were being born out of the sea! The phenomenon stretched away on each side of him. His internal compass reassured him he was heading northward and he had no choice but to enter the mist.\n\nHe'd flown over, under and through clouds, but never had he needed to swim through them. The journey had warmed him and he paused to stretch his wings from their folded position.\n\nThey moved without pain, their stiffness eased.\n\nWas the water getting warmer? Was he imagining it?\n\nHe continued until his feet touched sand. All around him cloud rose from the water, tiny tendrils reaching and joining together, thicker in some places, swirling around to block his view, then clearing to let him to see the beach. He waded to shore, touching a particularly hot patch of sand. Curious, he peered underwater. Air bubbles rose from a gaping hole. Small creatures scuttled sideways to avoid his feet. He reached with his foreleg to pick one up and avoiding its snapping claws, bit it in half. Yum! Crunchy and delicious. Not fishy, not oily, more of a salty snack with a delicate flavor.\n\nHe strode to the beach intending to investigate the shoreline. Water ran off his back and when he shook his head drops fell and dented the sand, but the air chilled him so fast he slid back into the hot water. He'd need to stay mostly submerged, but what a great find. Tomorrow he'd move on but for now, with his snout balanced between the rocks and his belly resting on the warm sand, he dozed the night away.\n\nBut snow and sleet kept him among the hot springs for the next four days and by then it was too late to fly north. Why bother? The fish almost swam into his mouth. The crawly, crunchy things added variety to his diet and within a few days a passing seal met its fate. The sea-life knew of the hot springs. They seemed drawn to the effervescence, and the tiny towers of yellow crystals on the edge of the vents became part of his diet. Eating the crystals warmed his insides as his fire-base regained its heat deep in his chest.\n\nEach day he hugged the shoreline exploring the string of vents that lined the island, only turning back when the water chilled. He couldn't believe his luck. The clouds wrapped him in their damp heat.\n\nHe'd never noticed this cloud birth during the summer. If he'd left days earlier he would have missed it. He might be pale and puny but he was obviously lucky. His mother would by now be thinking him dead\u2014frozen stiff somewhere. She'd get a shock in the spring, because he was determined to survive and return home."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "After days of limited daylight the sun began to stay above the horizon for longer and a small flock of birds passing overhead told him of spring. Their raucous calls heralded their arrival before he glimpsed them through the thinning vapors. Within days a few became many as their small formation grew into a large flock that wheeled as if it had a single brain. The seals and dolphins worked the fish from below and the birds dived from above. The sea churned with life and in a moment of carelessness he snapped onto the tail of a passing shark.\n\nIt curled on itself and aimed its jaws at his neck. An instant reflex drove him up, out of the water in a vertical leap, the shark swinging from his jaws, pulled downward by the speed of his climb. He soared, curved and flung the shark onto the tundra, where its body smashed, staining red the remaining snow.\n\nThe snowmelt had created small lakes in the inland tundra over which gnats and insects swarmed. The air had a mild chill but the sun warmed his wings and he stretched them wide, climbing, diving, and curving in lazy circles, wondering at his large shadow as it raced across the land below him. Perhaps the angle of the sun made him look bigger he decided, and he dropped down to stand on the edge of the nearest lake. For the first time in months he studied his legs. The scales had become bronze, the claws a deep gold and they looked much larger than they'd been in the autumn. The lake looked inviting and he waded in, enjoying the crisp coolness around his feet. He bent to snag a fat, jumping creature with his shorter forelegs and after a quick munch stood still, hoping to catch another. His reflection made him gasp.\n\nHis chest scales were now a gleaming white, no longer a dull cream, bright in the mirrored sunshine. The edge of each scale seemed to be rimmed with a rainbow. His eyes, previously hazel, now regarded him like bright green jewels, piercing and hard when he frowned\u2014and his horns! What had been mere bumps in the autumn were now impressive horns with a devilish curve to them. He turned his head from side to side admiring their length, then realized all the toothache he'd suffered had resulted in several magnificent points along each side of his bottom jaw. After months in the warm water feasting on rich sea life, he'd obviously grown all over. His wingspan stretched wider; the wing struts and their clawed tips were now a deep purple, like autumn sunsets, and the membrane between them now a gleaming white. He folded them and studied his tail and back spines, both totally awesome with their bronze scales reflecting the sun. Holding his tail over the water he admired the underside. More gleaming white scales easing into bronze toward the tip, finishing with a golden dagger point. Truly, he was a picture of magnificence. Why be modest? All he'd needed was rest and good food and here he stood, the epitome of dragon-hood, surely a desirable mate for any discerning female.\n\nThe thought of mating caused him to ponder. When he flew north\u2014and he would quite soon\u2014he'd have to fight for Erebia's favor to mate. As Matriarch she alone had the right to mate and choose the females to share her suitor. What a terrible waste of energy\u2014also extremely dangerous and often deadly. He'd never liked Erebia with her caustic tongue and arrogance.\n\nHe had his own home now where he didn't need Erebia's approval. He was living proof of the bounties to be found here. Surely he could convince a few of the lesser females to fly south with him and begin their own flight. He'd do his recruiting quietly, returning with a small harem by mid-summer. After a winter in his sea springs they would be healthier and more beautiful than any of the other dragons in this world.\n\nA strong sensation filled him, racing along every nerve of his body, coursing through his blood like dragon-flame and he leapt skyward and roared with delight. Flames flared from his snout, heating the air, making it crackle and snap with lightning bolts. The lingering smell of the yellow crystals he'd snacked on hung in the air. Even his fire had grown over the winter. Just for fun he roared again, causing a flock of diving birds to wheel and flee.\n\nThe sun rose higher each day and as the air warmed the sea clouds disappeared. Now his springs were again a secret and he could leave. His wings were strong, his fire secure and his future planned.\n\n'Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South'\u2014a fitting name he decided and he hummed as he devoured a feed of fish, gulped down a seal and took his last hot bath. He sprang from the sea, set the magnetic compass in his brain on due north and flew, his heart pounding, excited at the prospect of impressing his mother and doing a bit of lady-dragon rustling on the quiet."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Lutapolii landed with a skid on the rock ledge and strode into his mother's cave, \"Hello Mother,\" he called. He clipped his head on the ceiling causing him to exclaim, \"Curses, forgot I've grown a bit.\" He called again, \"Hello? Anyone here?\"\n\nThe light through the crack in the cave's ceiling revealed his mother's shocked expression and this alone made up for the long hours of flight, his weariness and his growing hunger. In the gloom his mother, Sabolotii, seemed smaller, not as fearsome, and her blue scales looked a little faded.\n\n\"Well, aren't you going to say 'welcome home, son'? It's the usual thing when your child has been away for several seasons.\"\n\n\"But you're dead! I'm seeing things.\" She swayed and for a moment he thought she would topple, but she righted herself and stepped forward, cuffing him across the head.\n\n\"What did you do that for? A warm embrace would have been nicer.\"\n\n\"You are real! I thought you might be a vision, so I tried to pass my foreleg through you.\"\n\nHer explanation sounded like a fib, but for the first time in his life Lutapolii could see his mother was embarrassed by her actions. After years of being bullied, derided and scorned by all the dragons in the flight, he rather enjoyed the spectacle of his mother explaining herself.\n\n\"Never mind, I've suffered plenty of swats about the head before today. Mind you, I'm a bit taller now. Have you noticed?\" He walked around his mother, giving her the opportunity to view him from every angle. He paced back and forth on his bronze legs, displaying their bulk and deliberately clicking his golden claws on the rock floor. Pity they weren't standing closer to the entrance so his white scales could glint in the sunlight and their rainbow tips could shimmer. He unfurled his iridescent wings with care. Today they touched the sides of the cave. He twisted his magnificent ridged spine and flicked his tail from side to side. \"Quite a transformation all round. What do you think?\"\n\nHis mother appeared to be speechless. He paused in his parade and waited. He wanted to hear her thoughts on his new look. She'd never had any trouble expressing herself before this moment. He'd seen himself in the lake's reflection. He knew he'd become majestic compared to his puny, pale appearance when he'd fled south last spring. Amazing what living on fish and seals could do for one's appearance.\n\n\"You are officially dead,\" she said.\n\nNot what he'd expected to hear, but then it was typical of his mother. She dealt in facts, not compliments. \"Your name is carved on the memory wall. Queen Erebia declared you dead when you didn't return in the autumn. On midwinter solstice she had your name added to the list of dragons past, alongside that of your father\u2014two foolish dragons together.\"\n\nHe chose to ignore that jibe. \"Well she made a mistake because I am obviously not dead. A bit presumptuous of her, don't you think?\"\n\nSabolotii looked around as if scared someone had overheard his comment. She stepped away from him, ducked around his head and sidled along the wall. \"Close your wings please, Luta, you're blocking my way.\"\n\n\"Sorry, mother. I keep forgetting how big I am now.\" He moved aside, allowed her to pass and followed her to the wide ledge at the cave's entrance.\n\n\"What am I going to do now? Someone has to tell Erebia that you've returned.\" She turned to him, her gaze pleading. Another new insight. \"You should go there immediately. Demonstrate your allegiance to her. Behave as any grown dragon would.\" Her gaze slid over him. \"The winter has matured you, but how you survived I can't imagine.\"\n\nAnd he had no intention of telling her either. The silence grew as Lutapolii considered his options. \"You say I am officially dead?\" His mother nodded. \"Then I have no obligation to Erebia. She made the mistake, not me. I am alive, but as I'm officially dead then I am no longer a servant to her rule. All seems logical to me.\"\n\nSabolotii shuddered. \"Please Luta, it would only take a few moments. Keep the peace. Don't cross Erebia. She is so fierce when crossed. It would be a shame to be burned by her.\"\n\nHe knew he should be afraid, but he couldn't find any fear within. Perhaps he was his father's son after all.\n\n\"Besides\u2026,\" His mother's eyes slitted with cunning. \"You would have a good chance in this year's flight, to win the battles and mate with her. You would need to practice your turns and soaring skills but you would have a chance.\" No doubt she could imagine her status rising should he become consort. This was the closest his mother had ever come to paying him a compliment. It warmed him and he belched a streak of fire in delight until the thought of mating with Erebia nearly put his fire out.\n\n\"Careful,\" Sabolotii said and stepped away. \"You're not very controlled, are you?\"\n\nHe snapped his jaws shut, starving his fire of oxygen. \"There's not much to set fire to among the snow and ice,\" he muttered through clenched teeth, \"But I intend to practice on the local wildlife. I'm craving meat after months of fish. You wouldn't have a carcass handy?\" He sniffed, hoping to smell food, but as usual his mother's lair was empty.\n\n\"There's plenty of deer and fawns about. You'll have to get your own food. I'm going to lie down. I've had a shock.\" She swung around at the cave's entrance, her tail clipping his legs and scratching them. He flapped and rose.\n\n\"Don't forget to pay homage to Erebia,\" she commanded, and disappeared from view.\n\nHe soared high, flew east then quartered the ground searching for deer among the forests and valleys. When he found a herd he used his newly-honed hunting skills. With the sun behind him he dived as if he were catching fish, his wings folded tight, his descent silent until within striking distance. Then he chose his prize and scorched it before banking in a wide circle. With the slowing flap of his wings, he settled, to dine among the smoldering grass, his meal already cooked.\n\nHe'd forgotten how delicious meat could taste. His hunger eased he picked over the carcass, crunching the bones and sucking out the marrow while he thought about his mother's instruction.\n\nPay homage to Erebia? What nonsense. Whoever heard of a 'dead' dragon being required to swear allegiance? No, he didn't need to do anything to appease the matriarch of this dragon flight. He would spend a few weeks having his fill of red meat and see what the current crop of young females looked like. Surely he could impress a few? As for fighting for Erebia's favors? What absolute madness. He might be officially dead but he wasn't stupid enough to become really dead. In the winner-takes-all stakes of the mating game, truly dead is what happened to the challengers that lost. Besides, mating with Erebia didn't appeal. The thought of it gave him indigestion and he belched, smoke tendrils drifting upward to dissipate in the warm air.\n\nWas his mother hoping to get rid of him? Have him killed off for real in the mating challenge? He tried to smother this suspicion. Then again, she hadn't been exactly delighted to see him. Surprised\u2014yes. Impressed\u2014yes. Shocked even\u2026but delighted? No. Dead or alive, his mother still didn't like him.\n\nWith a full gut he move away from the remains of his meal and stretched out to his full length; tail straight, wings tucked against his side, snout resting on the ground. The smell of the fresh grass eased the tension in his spine and he day-dreamed. He imagined a future when other dragons spoke in hushed tones of 'Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South'. Perhaps then his mother might display a flash of pride. He raised his head and roared, his breath igniting the air. His late father's ambitious streak now seemed to be his.\n\nHow dare his mother infer they both were fools. If ever he'd needed a spur to succeed she'd just provided it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Although he convinced himself he wasn't frightened of meeting with Erebia, he didn't socialize for the next two weeks. He gorged himself on livestock with the added snack of an occasional northern seal. They didn't have the tang of their southern cousins, but a juicy seal was always a treat.\n\nErebia's matriarchal society certainly put all male dragons at a disadvantage. If he managed to inveigle a few females away he'd need to alter their thinking because he intended to establish a patriarchal flight in his corner of the world.\n\nAnd so it was that days later on his way to get a seal snack he spied a bevy of neophytes. He hummed in appreciation and considered that they were probably schooled in lady-dragon behavior after one of Erebia's compulsory classes.\n\nThe quartet sat, or rather lolled when he looked closer, on a hilltop overlooking the seal colony. He flew a circuit above them to catch their attention and hopefully their admiration, before he landed beside them. It didn't do to sneak up on young lady dragons. Scorching comments of surprise could issue forth. All four sat up and watched his descent. He landed and stretched his wings wide before folding them close and stepping up to greet them.\n\n\"Morning ladies, lovely day for it.\"\n\n\"For what?\" the tallest asked.\n\n\"For anything you fancy really. Do any of you have any unrequited desires?\"\n\nThe young females tittered and murmured.\n\n\"I do,\" said the palest one. \"I fancy a seal as a snack. I don't expect you can catch us one because no one else can.\"\n\n\"They slip into the water the moment they see our shadow,\" another chipped in. \"It's so annoying. There's hundreds down there. It's like looking at a banquet and not being allowed to eat a thing.\"\n\n\"Has anyone tried lately?\" Lutapolii asked, a scheme forming in his mind. \"Any handsome, young dragons about who are willing to satisfy your needs and cravings?\"\n\nThe quartet giggled, puffs of smoke rising from their snouts. \"Not likely. Not even Queen Erebia can catch a seal.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Lutapolii heard his voice rise and followed on with a deep comment. \"Well, I might just have a go.\" He ignored a snigger. \"Is it worth my effort? Are you prepared to take up a dare of mine, should I catch you a seal or two?\"\n\n\"Or two? What nonsense.\" The one who spoke first, her pink scales indicting she would be a rosy red when mature, added, \"If you can catch me a seal I'll certainly accept a dare from you.\"\n\n\"Done!\" he shouted and leapt into the air, then had a second thought and landed again. He stood in front of them, sweeping his head from side to side, holding their combined gaze. \"Before you eat your seal you must promise not to tell how I do it.\"\n\nThe dragonesses laughed and nodded. They obviously didn't believe him. Perhaps he should have asked for more than a dare? Too late now for re-negotiation.\n\nHe flew in a vertical climb until the females were but tiny dots on the hilltop, then he headed into the sun. From this height the sea around the colony was dotted with moving black shapes. With the angle of descent assessed and the sun behind him he selected the ladies' meal, folded his wings and dived, slicing into the sea with hardly a splash. Underwater he raced chasing a particularly fat specimen until he snapped its tail and rose out of the water, flapping with ease to drop the warm creature on the hilltop at the feet of 'Miss Pink'.\n\nThe gasps of awe warmed his heart. He'd never experienced admiration before. It was such a change from the derision and bullying of last year. From the immediate snapping and snarling he realized he may need another seal or two. Dragonesses were known to scrap.\n\n\"Girls, ladies, please.\" They raised their head, each mouth dripping with seal blubber and blood. \"There's plenty more out there. No need to fight. I'll get you one each.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said the white-scaled one with bronze legs.\n\n\"One each!\" squealed the mauve one, her purple legs thumping the ground, \"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"That would be just wonderful, thank you,\" said the cream-scaled female. This one had green legs with lime wingtips, and better manners.\n\n\"In exchange I'd like to know your names.\"\n\n\"Of course, so rude of us.\" Miss pink lowered her head in deference and gulped down the last piece of seal left on the ground. \"I'm Megonii,\" she said. \"This is Delphii.\"\n\nThe mauve female had stopped dancing. She clasped her forelegs together and bowed. \"You're such a clever fellow,\" Dephii said, short flames spitting between her teeth.\n\n\"I'm Crisantii,\" said the cream one with the green wing tips.\n\n\"And I'm Raffettii,\" said the white female with the gold and bronze legs. \"And I know who you are. You're Lutapolii. I heard you were back. You're officially dead\u2014since Winter Solstice. How does that feel?\"\n\n\"Very liberating,\" Lutapolii said, not wishing to discuss his official status. \"Now I'll just go and catch you each a seal, then we'll discuss my dare.\"\n\nThe females exchanged concerned looks, smoke trickling out of their nostrils. \"We are immature as yet,\" Megonii said \"and we're not allowed to mate until next spring.\"\n\n\"Goodness,\" Lutapolii said, opening his eyes as wide as he could. \"Such a thing never crossed my mind.\" Well in all honesty it had, but not just at that moment. He could wait for them to mature, as long as he had them down south, with him.\n\nThen he'd have all the time in the world, wouldn't he?\n\nHe turned to Megonii who seemed to be the self-appointed leader. \"Please don't let them fight. I promise to return with a seal for each of you, but I can only catch one at a time.\" With that he lifted off, a little less dramatically, and headed back into the sun.\n\nHe wheeled and dived, deposited his catch and set out again. Like a spear he slid into the water. The seals, never snared like this before, didn't see him coming and couldn't out-swim him. He caught one for each of the ladies and added one for himself.\n\nWhile they munched and murmured in delight he admired the bevy. Would they honor their promise? He had his dare ready to put before them.\n\n\"Where did you learn to catch seals like that?\" Delphii asked, being the first to finish her meal.\n\n\"I taught myself, this last summer in the south. I studied the diving birds that live there, when I wasn't eating them of course.\"\n\n\"You followed them under the water? Do you swim?\" said Raffettii.\n\n\"I do. Quite well in fact.\"\n\n\"How did you survive the winter there? Erebia said it's impossible.\" Crisantii spat a flipper to the side and wiped her snout with her foreleg. \"The rumor is you really wintered with another northern flight, further to the east.\"\n\n\"No, I spent the winter in the deep south and how I did it is my secret.\"\n\nAfter a short time the ladies wiped their snouts on the grass, licked their forelegs and fronts clean. Any previous tension dissipated as the satiated females relaxed. But Lutapolii didn't want them to fall asleep\u2014better to strike, now.\n\n\"Wouldn't you all like to be able to catch seals?\" That flicked their eyelids up.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Love to.\"\n\n\"Could I?\" With a sigh Delphii added, \"I'd like to learn to swim. Imagine being able to cool down in the summer.\"\n\nLutapolii held his breath, calmed his heart rate, concentrated on deepening his voice. A high pitched comment delivered with excitement would reveal his immaturity. \"Well ladies, my dare to you is to join me down south for the season. I'll teach you to swim and dive.\" He assessed their open mouths and wide eyes. \"Plus there's birdlife and fish to eat, limitless seals and fabulous scenery.\" Their mouths closed, smoke puttered out from around their lips, they stretched their wings and shuffled their feet.\n\n\"Ladies,\" he reminded them, \"You've eaten your seals.\" He tilted his head, tried to look appealing but having had no practice at this didn't know if he quite hit the mark. \"Will you all come south with me and learn to catch seals? Yes or no? Dare or no dare, it would be great fun.\"\n\nOnly the caw of the seabirds and the bark of the seals in their rock colony broke the silence. One last try. \"What on earth are you going to do for the summer anyway? Laze around on hilltops wishing you could catch a seal\u2014when I could be teaching you how.\" That seemed to stir them.\n\n\"He's right,\" Megonii murmured, \"And we did agree to his dare.\" She stepped to face him. \"Count me in. I'm coming.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" said Crisantii.\n\n\"And me,\" added Raffettii.\n\n\"Oh all right then. I want to catch a seal.\" Delphii sighed.\n\nAnd he had all four of them in agreement.\n\n\"When?\" asked Megonii.\n\n\"What's wrong with now? You're well fed, the sun is high and it's a nice day. We can stop overnight at a superb fishing spot I know of and reach the southern mainland by tomorrow morning.\"\n\nThese young neophytes, their pastel colors proclaiming their status, would make the nucleus of his planned flight. Come next spring they would be red, rich cream, purple and white if his hot springs worked their winter magic. With luck they wouldn't be missed until the autumn census.\n\nAll he had to do was keep them in the south. He wouldn't reveal his secret springs until it was too late for them to return. Timing would be everything. Meanwhile the summer promised to be fun and teaching his ladies to dive and swim would surely bond them all closer, but he'd need to work on the stupid matriarchal nonsense they'd been school in.\n\n\"Right, let's fly.\"\n\nHe rose and they followed, heavy with food and sluggish in flight. He led them in a circular route, avoiding the cliff hanging lairs and cave ledges, taking his students over the forests away from the sea, before he clicked on his magnetic compass and led them south to his home, his islands and come winter\u2014his magic springs."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Fewer birds rose and scattered as Lutapolii's shadow crossed the colony. It proved he hadn't imagined the bite in the air and mild panic rippled his muscles and tightened his fire tubes. He'd thought yesterday that fewer birds were feeding. Today it was confirmed. The birds were leaving for the warmer north and winter was coming. He'd need to introduce the dragonesses to his hot springs today before they literally got cold feet and wanted to head north again to Erebia's flight.\n\nHe'd left them fishing and chasing penguins, a fatter but faster challenge than catching a seal. He'd asked\u2014well ordered the four dragonesses really, to leave the bird colony alone these last few weeks. He wanted enough fledglings alive to return for the next breeding season. As delicious as they might be with their plumage not yet hardened he didn't want the bird colony decimated. Dragonesses had voracious appetites.\n\nHe headed out from the southern continent to the few islands scattered slightly north, looking for his island and the tell-tale rising of clouds from the hot springs. He'd purposely not landed there or taken the dragonesses this way. They'd explored south, visited the snow-capped mountains and ridden the icebergs, scattering seals as they went. He felt sure they'd had a great summer.\n\nHis heart jumped as he saw, not only wisps of cloud around his hot springs site, but from this height he could see cloud forming on the sea's edge in several other places. More hot springs, that in his hurry to return home last spring, he'd completely missed. This meant more warmth for the winter and more food for his ladies\u2014if he could keep them here.\n\nHe landed on the one high point on the island\u2014 a rocky cone that afforded him a vista of the island's shape and contour. Just above the horizon he saw his ladies whirling in flight like dancing leaves above the ocean. Only three? He supposed one was still in the sea. After a few moments he realized that while the wind cooled his back, his stomach and chest were warmed by hot air, rising. He peered closer. A fissure split the rock beneath his feet and continued down the rock face, ending on the lower ledge. He jumped down to the ledge. Yes, the heat wafted from inside the rock. Puzzled he looked for a gap large enough to see through and finally found a wider crevasse on the leeside of the outcrop, big enough to claw open. He scraped and flamed the rocks to crack them, digging out pieces until he had a hole large enough to squeeze into. A small entrance, but he could enlarge it later.\n\nThe rock floor of the hole stopped after a few steps and he peered over the lip to stare into the cavern below. What luck? A lair warmed by a hot spring that bubbled in a pool to one side of the huge terraced interior. A cavern large enough to fit many dragons and hopefully their offspring. But without a second entrance the cave would become a trap. Perhaps he could find the springs entrance and dig a tunnel? Then the top passageway could be kept for emergencies and hidden by a few well-placed rocks. An underwater entrance would render his flight impervious to winter and any attack, though who would want to attack him he couldn't imagine, but instinct ruled his thoughts.\n\nHe dropped in, swooping low, checking the width of the cavern and any hidden recesses. A few cavities would need work and could be enlarged, but he could do that. His body had firmed, and his strength had increased with all the swimming and flying he'd done this summer. His dragonesses could help with the work. Come spring he hoped they'd be willing to mate.\n\nHis discovery delayed his return to the mainland for many hours and when he did catch up with the dragonesses bad news awaited him.\n\n\"Where's Delphii?\" he asked as he landed beside Megonii, Cristanii and Raffettii. They lay sprawled on the tundra, peacefully dozing, their bellies extended, no doubt full of any unfortunate or slow swimming penguins.\n\n\"She's gone home to Belletundria,\" Megonii murmured, giving a smothered belch. \"I told her she should wait and tell you, but she insisted she had to go today.\"\n\n\"Why?\" One lady lost already, the fastest swimmer and best seal catcher in his bevy of dragonesses. He controlled his disappointment and tried not to frown, \"Why the urgency?\"\n\n\"She said she had to get back to her mother who is old and doesn't keep the best of health. She's the last egg her mother laid so she feels responsible.\" Raffettii rolled onto her back and yawned. \"Plus she wants to catch some northern seals. Delphii thinks they might make her mother stronger.\"\n\nA good enough reason to go, he just wished he'd been able to stop her.\n\n\"It's not very warm today. The sun has no heat,\" Megonii said, standing, stomping her feet and shaking her wings.\n\n\"True, that's why today I'm going to show you my surprise. The secret that kept me here for the winter. Now Delphii will miss it.\"\n\n\"Too bad, but we're still here and we'd love to see your secret.\" Cristanii levered herself off the ground and stood, extending her wings. \"My wings are getting stiff.\" Her voice quavered.\n\nHe'd nearly left it too late. He knew that stiff feeling having experienced it last year, but today he was stronger. It hadn't hit him yet, but it would as soon as the first storm roared up from the south.\n\n\"I've just the cure! Follow me and be prepared to be delighted.\"\n\nThey trailed him with little enthusiasm as he flew, but he knew he couldn't leave them exposed to the chill any longer. If he hadn't found the cavern he would have been back earlier and he might still have four future wives, instead of only three. Sometime soon he'd have to show his hand and reveal his future dreams, but not today.\n\nHe led them in a circle around his island, noting that already the cloud wisps were increasing and lifting off the sea. \"This is my winter home,\" he called as the dragonesses flew beside him.\n\n\"Doesn't look like much, Lutapolii. Are you sure you have the right place?\" Megonii asked.\n\n\"I do. Just you wait and see.\" He took them down over the tundra to land at the sea's edge, in front of the hot sand and the bubbling spring he'd found a year ago. \"Come on ladies, wade in. Don't dive or splash. Just slide into the water. Once in you can put your head under and have a look.\"\n\nHe stood back and watched as they gingerly stepped into the sea then squealed when they realized the sand was hot and the water deliciously warm.\n\n\"What's to see?\" Raffettii floated almost submerged with just her snout above the water. \"This is superb. A warm bath that never gets cold. Or does it?\"\n\nLutapolii shook his head. \"Never has, that I know of.\" Just then Cristanii raised her head out of the water. \"Luta, I've had a look. Big hole, lots of bubbles. What are the sideways-scuttling things moving on the sand?\"\n\n\"Crunchy treats. Delicious, but you mustn't eat too many or you'll kill off their breeding cycle.\"\n\n\"Can I try one?\" Megonii erupted out of the water, shaking her snout, with one of the crunchies gently held between her teeth.\n\nHe nodded. \"Just one each.\" They nibbled on their treat, luxuriating in the warmth. Their sighs and murmurs of contentment lifted the sadness Delphii's leaving had caused him. He'd forgotten just how wonderful the sea-springs felt. His limbs softened, his nerve ends tingled up and down his spine and he adopted his favourite pose: his snout balanced between two rocks, his body resting on hot sand, wrapped in warm water.\n\nThey all dozed but by late afternoon the girls were hungry and he took them along the line of springs, swimming them further than he'd explored before, because now he knew there were more springs to be found. They fished until full and then he showed them how to catch a shark.\n\n\"Sharks love to feed in the warm water but to safely catch a shark you need to grab its tail then leap out of the water, otherwise it will turn around and bite you. If you throw it on the tundra it will die from the force of the fall or being out of the sea. Be careful at all times. Its teeth can rip you apart.\"\n\nHe idled up to a cruising shark, no hurry, no threat, and the shark swam past, ignoring him. Then he snapped onto its tail and leapt skyward, twirling the shark in a circle, keeping its snapping jaws well away from him. The dragonesses flew around him observing from a distance and when it landed stunned on the rocky foreshore they pounced to eat it.\n\n\"Learn with small sharks. Never take on a big one. They are best left alone.\"\n\nReplete and back in the hot springs Lutapolii knew he had to spill his dream.\n\n\"Anybody want to fly home tomorrow?\" he said, his heart pounding, trepidation creeping through him.\n\nThe three ladies shook their head.\n\n\"Not tomorrow,\" said Cristanii.\n\n\"No, it's too nice here, Raffettii added.\n\n\"I'm too full to move,\" Megonii said. \"Why would anyone leave?\"\n\nRelief eased the tension in his spine. \"I have big plans. Anyone want to hear them?\"\n\nThe dragonesses nodded, eyelids lowered, not showing much interest.\n\n\"I'd like you all to stay here for the winter with me. It's safe and warm, with sufficient food if we're not greedy. In the spring I'd hoped you would be prepared to mate with me and begin a new flight here in the south.\" Only the sound of air bubbles popping on the surface broke the silence. He wasn't sure if their lack of response was good or bad so he hurried on. \"The main difference would be that I would be in charge, not one of you ladies. This would be a patriarchal flight.\"\n\n\"I've heard of those,\" Megonii said. \"They're rare.\"\n\n\"Erebia doesn't approve of them. They told us that in school,\" Cristanii added.\n\n\"Well, Erebia won't have anything to do with it, or any say in what we do as a flight family,\" he added. \"But I can't do this without you ladies being prepared to stay here with me.\"\n\n\"Was this your plan all along?\" Raffettii said.\n\nHe'd always considered her the least bright of the four, but she surprised him. He risked annoying them, but would not lie. \"I hoped you'd all stay when I invited you down to learn to swim and hunt, but I can't force you to stay.\" He took a deep breath and steeled his will. \"However, if you decided to return home it will have to be tomorrow before winter arrives and\u2026 I may have to consider killing you to keep the secret of my hot springs safe.\"\n\nThere he'd said it. Would he kill them? He didn't know if he had the willpower, but he certainly would have the reason. He'd kill to keep them all safe. Already he loved each one, and the loss of Delphii hit him again. A tear slid down his snout.\n\nMegonii moved close, her foreleg raised. Instead of hitting him as he expected, she wiped away his tears. \"I'll stay, Luta. If this is winter in the south I'm happy to remain.\"\n\n\"I'll stay too. Winter with Erebia will be more instructions and waiting for her to decide who I can mate with in the spring. I'd rather choose you.\" Raffettii leaned against him.\n\n\"And what about you, Crisantii? Will you stay?\" His heart throbbed with anxiety. Would he have to kill his darling white dragon with her green legs and green wing-tips? She would be magnificent in the spring.\n\n\"Yes, but only if I can have another crunchy treat.\" She lifted her snout and flamed a passing seabird.\n\nHe rubbed his snout along their backs and hummed in their ears, expressing his delight and allowing them yet another crunchy snack.\n\nTomorrow he'd show them the lair he'd found. They could look for an undersea entrance in the next few days. If they didn't find one then come spring they'd follow the internal spring from the inside and dig a tunnel into the ocean. The four of them could manage it. It might have been a family of five, but four would have to do."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "In Belletundria, Sabolotii's head rested on the rock floor of Erebia's cave, her body prostrate on the cool surface, the chill seeping into her bones. Honestly, doing homage to Erebia was becoming a real trial as Sabolotii's body aged. Her wings were tucked in tight against her flanks but the tips trembled. She didn't want to admit the shakes were not solely caused by the cold but assisted by a good dose of fear.\n\nWhat did Erebia want?\n\nThe flight leader paced in front of Sabolotii's snout, her clawed feet tapping on the rock floor and sometimes striding too close for comfort. Daring not to move away Sabolotii closed her eyelids instead and waited, concentrating on her wing tremors, trying to control the evidence of her disquiet.\n\n\"I heard, finally, that your son Lutapolii came home in the spring. Is that correct?\"\n\nShe mumbled, \"He did.\"\n\n\"Speak up please. Is that correct? Did your son reappear alive and well?\"\n\n\"He did,\" She tried to keep her voice level and confident.\n\n\"And you never thought to tell me? Nobody thought to tell me at the time? One of my flight, presumed dead, returns\u2014and it's treated like a secret? I am not pleased!\" Erebia's anger caused a short burst of flames and the flash of heat warmed Sabolotii's ear tips. She closed her eyelids even tighter.\n\n\"I instructed him to visit you and pay homage, Erebia. I did, several times.\"\n\n\"And he didn't heed your request?\"\n\n\"He often ignored my instructions as a youngster.\" She opened one eye and risked a quick look. \"He day-dreams a lot.\"\n\nHer leader stamped back and forth, the force of Erebia's footsteps vibrating into her prone figure.\n\nDamn her idle, useless son. She tried to mitigate her responsibility by adding, \"I instructed him in his filial duty and until he went south last year he had been your loyal subject. Something must have altered his loyalty.\"\n\n\"It appears he forgot his responsibilities\u2026perhaps on purpose?\" Erebia stood at the tip of Sabolotii's snout then leaned down to hiss, \"Where is he now?\"\n\nCurse Lutapolii, he caused her nothing but trouble. \"I have no idea. I haven't seen him since the day he returned. Perhaps he has gone south again?\"\n\n\"Very likely,\" Erebia snarled, \"Because it has come to my notice that four of my virgin dragonesses are also missing. The autumn census has revealed their absence and queries have revealed no one has seen the quartet for the whole warm season.\"\n\nThe Queen moved away and a wave of relief swept through Sabolotii. For a moment she'd thought she'd be scorched.\n\n\"Do you think your son took them?\"\n\nHer fear returned, turning her organs to water and her stomach rumbled.\n\nHow could he do this to his own mother?\n\nSurely he wouldn't steal dragonesses?\n\nWhat enticement would he have used? Good looks alone would not inveigle the young dragonesses to leave the northern continent.\n\n\"I cannot imagine anyone following my son, anywhere.\" She said it with total conviction, hoping she could now get up off the cold floor. A dragon hurried in to the chamber, his claws clicking the rock as he approached and murmured to Erebia before leaving.\n\n\"You may get up,\" Erebia said. \"It appears one of the dragonesses, Delphii, has been seen entering her mother's lair with a seal in her mouth. Amazing. I have sent a dragon to fetch her. We'll soon find out where the other three are.\"\n\n\"We?\" She asked hoping to be included in the revelation.\n\n\"Oh, not you, you're dismissed. I can't imagine your son having anything to do with where my females spent the warm season.\"\n\nThe Queen's scorn caused a shiver to run up her spine. They'd grown up together but Erebia's calculating nature had seen her succeed to matriarch above Sabolotii's higher breeding. Another's life did not mean much to this powerful Queen; neither did childhood memories nor distant relationships.\n\nShe scrambled to her feet, then bowed low and backed out of the cavern, catching the matriarch's crowing comment.\n\n\"A dragoness who catches seals? What a find. Perhaps wherever they've been it has been to my advantage after all.\"\n\nAlready her son and his possible involvement had been forgotten. If Lutapolii had been here she would've cuffed his ears until they bled. When would he stop causing trouble?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "By the evening of the third day in the springs, a routine had been set. Lutapolii fished and fed his ladies in the morning and in the afternoon they caught dinner while he relaxed. During the day they all napped. The cloud cover thickened over the water until it obscured their view of the sky. Lutapolii took a short flight to the mountain peak each morning and checked the horizon, watching for the first winter storm. The lair had delighted the girls who wanted to move in immediately, but he preferred to be in the springs until he had a second entrance ready. He didn't enjoy refusing their requests. Sometimes being in charge had its disadvantages.\n\nOn the sixth evening the dragonesses were all underwater, fishing among the springs when he heard the distinctive thwump, thwump, thwump of a dragon in flight. Not any of his ladies. From the powerful beat of its wings this dragon sounded fully grown.\n\nIt was nearly too cold to fly. Why would any dragon come this far south so close to winter?\n\nThen he heard the roar. \"LUTAPOLII\u2026 THIEF! Moments later he heard, KIDNAPPER! I'M LOOKING FOR YOU!\"\n\nErebia! Here in the south. Did Delphii still live? No doubt Erebia had interrogated her to find where she'd spent the summer.\n\nThe heat of Erebia's flames caused the cloud cover to swirl and waver but it held, thick enough to keep him and his ladies hidden.\n\nHe listened as the sound overhead faded, and she roared once more in the distance.\n\nHe'd never had lessons on how to fight. That could prove to be a serious hole in his education. But if he had to fight, he would\u2014to the death if need be, to protect his family."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Delphii flew back and forth across the southern continent, calling: \"Megonii. Raffettii. Cristanii.\" Then louder, in a voice filled with longing, \"Lutapolii.\"\n\nNo dragons answered. None rose from the tundra to greet her. Tired from the long flight south she descended to the plateau and landed among the stunted shrubs to preen her wings and snack on fish before she dived and caught a southern seal. She licked the warm carcass to relish the salty tang so peculiar to this colony. Replenished she leapt into the air once more and quartered the land again, calling until her voice grew hoarse.\n\nDespair dulled her purple scales. The northern summer had matured her and darkened her skin. Only a few patches of mauve remained on her chest and her wing tips had become a beautiful green according to her mother. She hadn't regretted her decision to leave Luta and her friends, except Erebia had interrogated her several times. She'd been vague and acted dumb but she suspected Erebia had acolytes who watched her every move. Only her ability to catch seals had saved her life as the queen roared and flamed at the audacity of the young dragonesses daring to leave her flight.\n\nHer mother's health had improved with the steady diet of seals, until Erebia ordered her to catch seals constantly for the First Flight.\n\nWithout rest she'd fished day after day until exhausted. There had been no end to Erebia's demands. Two days ago she'd sat on the hill above the northern seal colony, assessing the damage her killing had inflicted and reached a decision. She'd had enough; if the flight's feeding frenzy continued the seal colony would collapse. Time to stop. The weather had warmed and a longing to return south overwhelmed her. She sneaked a quick visit and meal to her mother and fled.\n\nWithout a response to her calls she moved northward, quartering over the scatter of islands off the continental shelf. Her cries echoed in the warm air, bouncing back at her from the tundra where the snowmelt formed small lakes. Thirsty, she landed and drank the fresh water and looked into the azure sky searching for her friends.\n\nThere.\n\nA dragon's silhouette. Hardly visible, white against the cloudbank but the dark wings gave it away. Lutapolii? Was it? She streaked into the sky, oblivious to danger. It couldn't be a stranger. Sure in her heart she'd found him, she called and the dragon wheeled and raced nearer. It was him.\n\n\"Lutapooooolii, I'm back! I'm back!\"\n\n\"Delphii, my lovely girl, you've returned! How wonderful. Your flight sisters will be as delighted as I am.\" He flew in circles, then over and under her and around again. \"You're beautiful, Delphii. Utterly beautiful.\"\n\n\"Oh Luta, I'm so happy to be back.\" She dipped and swooped, pleasure deepening her color and happiness, the joy she'd forgotten coursed through her. \"I've done nothing but catch seals for Erebia for months and months. I'm exhausted.\" He slow-danced with her in flight and for the first time in ages she didn't have a care in the world. She never thought of danger as she twisted and turned, cart-wheeling in excitement with Lutapolii matching her every move.\n\nLutapolii heard the slow thwump of Erebia's wings and the scorching blast of her flames licked his back. He twisted to see her diving across the sky like a meteorite. Her flames drifted across Delphii's back as she flamed, roaring with rage trying to set fire to both of them at once.\n\nThe only thing that saved them from death was the joyful twist of their reunion flight.\n\n\"Dive, Delphii. Dive!\" Lutapolii shouted.\n\nHad Erebia guessed the route Delphii would take or had she lucked upon them? It didn't matter which. She cast her shadow here, flaming everything before her.\n\nLutapolii saw Delphii disappear under the waves. The fear he could lose her forever turned his mind to the battle ahead. A fight to the death he suspected. He had no experience in mid-air fighting. He must improvise; rely on instinct, cunning and luck.\n\nErebia banked to gain height and face him but he wasn't going to give her that privilege. He turned as if to flee, hoping to fool her and increase her speed. The roar of her flames and the near heat as he slipped to the side promised a heavy price if he failed. She followed him down as he swooped just out of her fire's reach. Then he somersaulted and turned below her streaking back under her belly, racing past her huge hind legs and along her tail. She began to turn but he was faster and with a snap he clamped his jaws on the end of her tail and used her momentum to swing her in a circle of her own making. He'd done this a hundred times with sharks\u2014the only way to subdue them and keep his body away from their savage teeth. With her it was twice as deadly.\n\nHe ignored the pain in his spine and the ache in his wings as he hovered, swinging the mighty dragoness in slow circles. After the second circle it became easier. The momentum built and the speed increased. He refused to stop until he gained the advantage.\n\nShe roared and flamed. The air above her head shimmered with heat from her fire. Around and around he threw her, stretching her spine with her head as the distant end of the arc. He hoped he could hold on until her fire ran out, providing her tail didn't come off first. He couldn't risk moving his jaws for another bite. With his jaws cramping he swallowed his panic as the smoke cleared and he saw her snout clearly. Still she roared, but without flames. A few tendrils of smoke trailed the arc of her swing. She'd run out of fire. Now he could manage her fury.\n\nHe slowed the revolutions, taking her lower, until near the ground he let her go. Momentum continued her flight in a curve. She dropped and sprawled on the tundra. He dived on her, not giving her a minute's freedom and straddled her spine. His clawed feet wrapped around her shoulder joints, holding her wings spread wide, flat on the ground. His head spinning he fought for balance but he knew Erebia would be far dizzier. He doubted anyone had ever swung the dragon queen in circles before.\n\n\"You'll die!\" she screamed. \"You fight dirty. I'll kill you for this.\"\n\n\"I'm already dead. Remember? My name was carved in the memorial wall at your request.\" He shifted his weight, thankful dragonesses didn't have spinal points. \"In my defense I've never had any fighting lessons so I have no idea of what is fair play and what isn't.\"\n\nShe roared, lifting her snout high but only sound came out. \"What have you done to me?\" she bellowed. \"Where's my fire?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it's run out. It's been known to happen if you use it foolishly. It'll take a few days to rebuild. But by then I'm hoping you will have returned home and left us in peace.\" Her back moved under him and he looked behind to see her tail thrashing, the last quarter waggling at an odd angle. \"You seem to have a damaged tail as well. That could make flying a little tricky, balance-wise.\"\n\nErebia turned her head so that one eye stared at him, red with rage its gaze fixed on him. \"You have corrupted my dragonesses. Captured them, spoilt them and given them an arrogance I won't tolerate.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, they came at my invitation and I've been kindness itself to the ladies. Haven't I taught them to swim and catch seals?\"\n\nErebia spat cinders on the grass and coughed, her voice a little lower in volume. \"Delphii is my servant. She was ordered to catch seals for my pleasure. How dare she leave my court?\"\n\n\"From the brief conversation we had before you dropped in on us, I gather you kept her fetching seals until the poor girl had had enough.\"\n\n\"I need those seals to keep my First Flight loyal. Her absence will weaken my hold.\"\n\n\"Not my problem. You'll have to find other bribes to use because I won't have you bullying my ladies.\"\n\n\"Your ladies? How dare you call them yours?\" She looked around. \"And where are the other three anyway? Died over the winter did they? Good riddance.\"\n\nHe bounced perhaps too vigorously, shifting his position on her back, not releasing his hold on her wings. \"Have you finished? I'd like to do some negotiating so I can get off your back and check up on Delphii's health.\"\n\n\"I don't negotiate,\" she hissed. The smell of fire damp and soot wafted back.\n\nHe slid his weight along her spine and heard the breath being expelled from her lungs. \"I have a few options as I see it\u2026from my position of superiority.\" He smothered a yawn and realized how exhausted he was. Mustn't let Erebia know. \"You can negotiate with me, accept my terms and return home.\" He paused, hoping she would answer. In the silence he added, \"I'm sure you'll find an explanation for your broken tail and if you don't tell then I won't either.\"\n\nStill she didn't reply.\n\n\"Or, if you don't negotiate with me I can shred your wing membranes which will ground you, possibly forever.\" He felt her shudder. At last he was getting his message through. \"I could also roll you over, now, and rake you open from gullet to gut, then roll you into the sea to feed the sharks. I think even the ladies might give me a hand to do that.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't dare touch me.\" The quaver in her voice heartened him, a feisty reply for a dragon in her present physical position. But, he presumed, this is what power does. It warps one's sense of reason.\n\nHe didn't answer. Instead he lifted one foot and slid it sideways onto her wing then extended a claw. With great care he sliced a long tear in Erebia's wing membrane, stopping just before the edge. \"Believe me, dares are excellent things to undertake. I've had personal experience so don't push me on this.\"\n\nHe lifted his other foot and eased it down onto her opposite wing and hooked a claw through the thin skin. She flinched.\n\n\"Shall I continue?\" He dug his claw deeper.\n\n\"All right, all right.\" She'd given in. \"I'll negotiate. What do you want?\"\n\nHe withdrew his claw. \"Very little really, just a bit of peace and quiet. Some time to grow my own flight here in the south, without being bothered by marauding dragons from your Northern Flight. I'm not asking for much and I don't think it'll inconvenience you at all.\"\n\n\"What about my seals? Who will catch them?\"\n\nHe thought about this for a few moments. \"I suppose we could come to an arrangement whereby my flight, or those that want to, could fly up for the annual summer solstice. We would catch enough seals for a feast, enjoy your hospitality, catch up with family and return home thereafter.\"\n\nShe harrumphed. Not a 'yes' or a 'no'\u2014more of a disbelieving expression.\n\nFrom astride her back he felt generous. \"I'm prepared to tutor some young dragons in the art of seal fishing but it takes weeks of training and a high degree of skill. They'd have to come down here to learn.\" She didn't answer. \"Not all dragons can swim,\" he added.\n\n\"I know. I've already lost a few crazy youngsters who drowned trying to copy Delphii.\"\n\n\"So do you accept my offer?\"\n\n\"Do I have a choice?\"\n\n\"Not really. However, I'm not one to hold a grudge and if your word is your bond then I'll catch you a seal or two so you can refuel for your trip home, today.\"\n\n\"I agree. I give my word,\" she said. \"Now help me up. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.\"\n\nHe stepped off her and stood by her shoulder. Easing her up she drew in her hind legs and staggered forward taking a few steps before resting back on her tail, the end of which stuck out at a crazy angle. He hadn't realized how small she was or perhaps he'd become extra large.\n\n\"Wait here. I'll get you some lunch.\" He rose with a leap driven high by a sense of achievement. He'd won this challenge. He could afford to be magnanimous and returned shortly after with a seal for her to start on. Then he caught three fish and found a tasty, crunchy side-scuttling thingy as a treat for the old dragoness.\n\nHe watched as she devoured the food with greedy slurps rather than real hunger. When finished she asked, \"Can I meet my dragonesses? I want to know they are here of their own free will.\" Blood dripped from her snout and her scales were chipped and dull. She looked old. The fight had taken its toll. He guessed there would be ascension struggles in the next few years and was glad he wouldn't have to witness it.\n\nHer arrogance had returned and he wondered if he should knock her over and sit on her once more, but he'd lost the will to fight. Let her be arrogant. Every time he saw her tail he'd remember how he'd swung her\u2014and won. And every time someone mentioned it she would remember him, Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South.\n\n\"Lutapolii! Pay attention!\" Her shouts sprayed remnants of fish in the air. \"Your mother said you were prone to day-dreaming.\" Her long tongue licked her lips. \"I asked to see my dragonesses.\"\n\nHe dragged himself back to the present. \"They're not your dragonesses any longer. They'll be playing somewhere.\" He knew quite well three of his girls were in the new lair.\n\nIf Erebia thought he was going to take her to them she was mistaken. Even Delphii didn't know about the hot springs, yet. They would remain the secret of his Southern Flight and their survival strategy for as long as he could manage it.\n\n\"I want to see my dragonesses before I leave.\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so. Not today.\" He rose into the noonday sun, his shadow covering her and hovered. \"You can see them at Summer Solstice.\"\n\nHe flew in a low circle, calling, \"Don't tarry, a storm is coming. Your broken tail will make your return flight slower.\"\n\nErebia snarled. Smoke and soot trickled out from between her teeth. He almost laughed at her discomfort, but said instead, \"We'll come to Belletundria and catch enough seals for the solstice feast, as I promised. Don't forget to keep your side of the bargain and leave us alone.\"\n\nShe nodded just once then leapt into the air, aiming for him as if to have one last lunge to bite him. Her speed and remaining strength caught him by surprise. He swooped aside and sped away, leaving her to lumber upward. He watched until she was but a speck on the northern horizon before he turned eastward, calling to Delphii, his heart racing until he saw her purple head among the white wave-tops. She rose to greet him and they resumed their dance, slower and chastened by their encounter with the dragon queen.\n\n\"Before I take you to meet your flight sisters you have to promise never to reveal where we live.\"\n\nDelphii nodded.\n\n\"That's not good enough my lovely dragoness. You have to swear it aloud, because if you don't, as much as I love you, I'll have to kill you.\"\n\nShe banked and hovered in front of him. \"That's an easy promise to make. I swear, I swear, I swear,\" she shouted. \"Now take me to my sisters.\" She flew, creating a vertical streak of violet light that twirled in a circle and dived at him, skimming his wingtip, somersaulting under him and flaming the air in joyous spurts.\n\nHis Delphii: champion seal catcher, purple dragoness of the south, fourth mate of his new flight.\n\nHe couldn't believe life could be this good. Perhaps too good to be true."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Lutapolii circled above the northern seal colony of Belletundria, his dragonesses flying behind him in chevron formation. The black shapes of fishing seals dotted the sea and the colony below looked in good heart. Tucked against the cliff base where passing dragons could not fly close enough to pick them off, cubs and mothers rested. Further along the balance of the colony moved among the rock field, bulls roaring, protecting their harems, pups yelping for food and keeping out of the way of the lumbering males. Much bigger than the females, the bulls were known to lunge at hovering dragons, pulling them to the ground and savaging them with a resulting feeding frenzy from the surrounding seals.\n\nLutapolii slowed his wing beat to drop back alongside his best fisher, her purple wing membranes looking like violet fans with the sun shining through them.\n\n\"The colony looks in good shape, Delphii. You can't see where Erebia's insatiable appetite last winter depleted them. They appear to cover as much ground as ever.\"\n\n\"I tried to take only the young males and a few bulls I surprised in the sea. I never tried to capture any of them on land.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't want to, far too dangerous.\" The flight of five circled lower, causing the colony to bark and scream warnings. \"Enough of this noise, let's head to our hill.\" He called it this because he'd met his four dragonesses on the hilltop overlooking the colony the previous summer, when he caught them each a seal and dared them to join him in the south so he could teach them to dive and swim.\n\nThey landed on the grassy knoll and rested from their long flight from their home lair in the southern continent. He had no concerns that they'd stay here after this midsummer task as each dragoness had pledged to stay in the south and make it her home.\n\n\"I must take my mother a seal before we have to start work. Do you think anyone has noticed our arrival?\" Delphii looked around but the sky held no silhouettes of dragons in flight.\n\n\"The moment you visit your mother the whole flight will know we're here,\" Megonii said.\n\n\"Can't you wait a few hours, Delphii?\" Raffettii asked. \"I'm worn out and very hungry. I can't possibly start catching seals on an empty stomach.\"\n\n\"I'm craving deer meat,\" Crisantii said. \"It's been so long, at least four seasons since we were home.\" Her long tongue licked around her jaws and smoke puffed from her nostrils.\n\n\"I'm hankering for red meat too,\" said Lutapolii, \"Let's eat deer first then announce our arrival.\"\n\nThey rose together. Megonii's ruby-red body contrasted with Raffettii's shimmering white scales and bronze wings. Beside her flew Crisantii, an iridescent gold in contrast to her green wings. Delphii's purple scales turned her into a violet streak as she peeled away from them, diving for a seal to take to her mother.\n\n\"We'll meet you back here,\" Lutapolii called. She dipped a wing in acknowledgement, then folded them hard against her body and dived into the sea. From their height her flight family followed her chase, watching her select a target and racing up behind it. Delphii emerged, water cascading off her body as she climbed higher. With the seal dangling from her jaws she headed inland to where her mother lived in the Northern Flight's warren of cliff ledges and caves.\n\n\"We'd better hurry. There'll be a search party out or a deputation waiting for us when we get back,\" Lutapolii said. \"The moment Erebia knows we're here her demands will start.\" He led his remaining three dragonesses inland to the forests where he knew he'd find enough deer to satisfy their ravenous appetites.\n\nThey caught two animals, ripped the bodies into manageable portions, all gulping down pieces to satisfy their hunger before they carried the remaining carcasses back to their hilltop, where Delphii waited.\n\nTwo hours later, replete and putting off the moment of visiting Erebia to announce their arrival, the Southern Flight dozed in the sun, only to be rudely awoken by three dragons who flashed over the nearest hill and landed in front of them. The youngsters strutted about issuing instructions.\n\n\"Erebia wants you to bring her seals immediately.\"\n\nOne pointed to Delphii. \"You were seen. Why didn't you come to the Queen's cave?\"\n\n\"I was visiting my ill mother,\" Delphii said.\n\n\"Queen Erebia demands you begin fishing today. We need the seals for tomorrow's feast,\" the third ordered. Lutapolii swallowed the urge to stand up and cuff him across the head. He'd forgotten how insolent members of the Queen's First Flight could be.\n\nInstead he stood, stamped his bronze feet, extended his golden claws into the turf and flapped his huge wings, then tilted his head at the youngster. \"Did I hear you say 'We'? Is that the royal 'we' or are you including yourself in the request for seal meat?\"\n\nThe green youngster had the decency to shuffle his feet and tuck his wings in. \"I meant 'we, the Northern Flight', sir. Not just myself. That would be presumptuous of me.\"\n\n\"It would indeed,\" Lutapolii said. \"Just give us a short while and we will begin. Please tell Erebia we are indeed here and willing to fish for the Summer Solstice celebration tomorrow. However, we have flown many hours to get here and will begin when we have gathered our strength and not a moment before.\" He paced across the small hilltop, forcing the young trio so close to the edge they had to flap away.\n\nIt appeared one of them was in charge because he landed once more and lowered his head before saying, \"I can't actually tell the Queen what you said word for word, sir. She might take offence at your answer.\"\n\n\"What's your name young fellow?\"\n\n\"Thaxtania, Erebia's mother was my great aunt.\"\n\n\"Ah, a family connection. We are distantly related, as is everyone I presume.\" He spat a burst of fire skyward as a large belch escaped. \"And what does Erebia do when she takes offence? What is it that frightens you? Surely as family you are safe?\"\n\nIn the silence the dragonesses edged forward, eager to hear the answer. They'd been away long enough to forget Erebia's rage. \"She has been known to burn a messenger, sometimes to death.\"\n\n\"Nasty,\" Lutapolii said.\n\n\"Such bad manners,\" said Raffettii.\n\n\"Then she hasn't improved,\" Megonii said. Her flight sisters nodded their agreement and Delphii who had suffered Erebia's demands and wrath all winter before fleeing south, said nothing.\n\nLutapolii leaned down until his head was level with the youngster's. \"Well, you just word it how you like. Put in as many abject apologies as you want young Thaxtania. Think up some original excuses and save your own skin, but understand we will begin to fish when we are ready and not a moment sooner. I will not have my ladies drowned from exhaustion just to satisfy a greedy queen's appetite. There will be seals for all by midday tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\" The young dragon backed away until he too dropped off the hilltop and rose to join his flight companions.\n\nLutapolii stretched out once more and thought for a while before announcing, \"We won't touch the females and pups regardless of Erebia's demands. When we've run down the male seals to a number we consider enough, we will stop. There doesn't seem to be any understanding among this Northern Flight of how perilous over-fishing will be to the colony's future.\"\n\nThe dragonesses murmured their agreement and resumed their broken nap. It would take an hour or so for them to feel energetic enough to begin.\n\n\"What we catch later today will ease the workload tomorrow. I'm going to enjoy Summer Solstice, not spend the whole day catching seals,\" Luta added.\n\nTwo hours later they flew toward the sun then turned to dive from high with the sun behind them, unseen by the swimming seals. With their wings tucked tight, they entered the sea and chased the seals underwater. Erebia's flight of dragons, young and old, would receive their fill of a treat that none of them yet knew how to catch. Only Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South, and his four dragonesses had mastered this art. Without their skill the Summer Solstice fare would be very ordinary."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Two days later, after many hours of fishing and feasting the Southern Flight lay stretched out on their hilltop over-looking the seal colony.\n\n\"I've flown over our southern seal colony, but I've never fished it.\" Lutapolii smothered a yawn and turned to Delphii. \"It's a wonder this colony hasn't moved after you fished it for Erebia last winter.\"\n\n\"I think some of them have,\" she said. \"Last year there were more breeders and I know I didn't kill the females. I wonder if some of Erebia's flight eventually worked out how to catch them?\"\n\n\"Doubtful. Erebia admitted when I sat on her after our battle when she followed you south, that she'd lost several youngsters trying to copy your fishing style.\" He stroked Delphii's back with his snout. \"My clever fisher.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Megonii protested. \"We're just as good as she is.\" Her red scales glinted in the sunlight.\n\n\"You are, except she can swim faster underwater than any of us, even me, but you are all very clever.\" He sat back on his haunches and admired his bevy of dragonesses. \"I'm very proud of all of you.\" He scratched himself with his long claws, combing his ears to remove the salt crystals. \"When do you want to go home? I need a bath in pure snowmelt to remove this grime.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" said Cristanii, her previously cream scales had been turned to gold by her winter in the hot springs.\n\n\"I'm tired of being surrounded by rude dragons. They are so greedy when they eat a seal,\" Raffetti said, picking a fish bone from her teeth. \"Absolutely disgusting manners.\"\n\nThis comment by his white dragon, who often had bits of food decorating her chest and whose appetite was legendary, caused Lutapolii to smile.\n\n\"I've told Mother I could be gone at any moment, so she's not expecting me to dally around.\" Delphii looked south, a wistful expression on her face. \"I can't wait to leave. Besides I've caught some fish for her and hidden a deer carcass in the back of her cave. She'll be well fed for a while. She says I have to follow my heart and that's in the southern continent, with you.\" She turned her deep violet snout to face him and moved to lean her body against his.\n\nHe hadn't pushed his ladies to mate, but desire rose in his throat like a diamond he needed to polish. He intended to broach that subject when they returned home. Already their colors had deepened and were more vivid than when they'd emerged from the hot springs after their first winter in the south.\n\nThe lair he'd found last autumn was now ready with two entrances should an escape route ever be needed. The five of them had labored, from spring to summer solstice, removing rocks and widening the underwater tunnel now big enough for Lutapolii to swim through. It had required many months of excavation stone by stone as they held their breath to dive and work. The removal of part of a ledge had enlarged the internal pool which now covered half the cavern's floor; room for all of them to bath, warm and safe from the winter chill and every winter thereafter.\n\n\"Megonii, are you ready to go home?\"\n\nThe scarlet dragon raised her head from cleaning a long talon. \"I'm more than ready. I never realized how arrogant and self-centered Erebia was until the last few days. I wonder how she remains queen.\"\n\n\"Who would challenge her?\" Cristanii said. \"Certainly not any of the First Flight. They grovel constantly. It's sickening.\"\n\n\"Ladies, please. Be careful what you say and where you say it. Erebia's fury is something to behold. Isn't it Delphii?\" He looked at the scar across her back where Erebia's flames had scorched her before she'd dived into the safety of the sea this spring and he'd battled the queen alone. \"I'm going to take one last flight over the seals before we leave. If I go high enough I might see where they've established another breeding ground.\"\n\n\"Why? Are we coming back next year? Surely this solstice feast was enough to keep Erebia happy,\" Crisantii said.\n\n\"I doubt it. She has already told me she expects us to come annually.\"\n\n\"But do we have to?\" Megonii grimaced. \"I don't want to dance to her tune.\"\n\n\"No, we don't have to, except she undertakes to leave us alone for as long as we do. We're vastly outnumbered at present.\" In time he hoped his flight would grow but this could take a few years to accomplish.\n\n\"She's blackmailing us. Can we trust her?\" Again Raffettii had gone straight to the crux of the argument.\n\n\"I don't know. Let's hope so.\" He rose with a few beats and headed out to sea leaving his future wives to sun themselves for a little longer on the hilltop where'd they all first met.\n\nHe climbed in spirals, enjoying the sun on his back and the contrast between the azure sea and the green of the forests below. Perhaps they could take a deer carcass home? They could share the weight in turn. It would keep fresh longer in the south's cooler air and would be such a treat.\n\nHe abandoned any idea of looking for another seal colony and began his descent to see what his ladies thought of his idea to take deer meat home, then he realized that a quartet of young male dragons was circling him at a distance. They were closing in, approaching with menace and purpose. They snorted flames in short bursts, building up their fire to blast him.\n\nHis heart raced; he wished he weren't so tired. He dived, getting lower to the sea and an opportunity to enter the sea and escape, then realized that should he do this he would be attacked as he surfaced from the water. No he'd have to fight\u2014outnumbered four to one. Would he survive? Unlikely.\n\nHoping they would take turns to attack he banked and hovered. A moment later one came streaking up from below him, no doubt expecting him to flee. The angle of the youngster's approach exposed his chest and Lutapolii flew to meet him, cart-wheeling just before they contacted. The young dragon stalled, waiting as Lutapolii completed his flip\u2014a fatal error. As he completed his turn Lutapolii extended his huge hind legs and raked the young dragon's front from gullet to gut, ripping him open in a deadly slice of his claws.\n\nHis adversary hit the sea with a slap. He doubted it would survive. What a waste. He'd no time to mourn. This was a fight to the death.\n\nHe whirled, flying in a circle waiting for the next attack. It came from the largest of the remaining three, Thaxtania, who charged, flaming the sky. Lutapolii dived and flipped to rise behind the charging dragon. He bit and clamped his teeth vice-like on the passing tail. His fight with Erebia had taught him how successful this action could be. He twirled the youngster in slow circles, then faster and faster, stretching its spine and watching its fire diminish. By twirling the dragon quickly Lutapolii kept the remaining two attackers at bay. He hoped their astonishment at this unknown tactic would prevent them from working out how to break into the circle, but he couldn't keep this up forever.\n\nAs he hovered, his neck muscles straining with the weight he kept his gaze on the youngster's head, knowing if he watched the horizon he'd become even dizzier. On the next revolution he saw Megonii had grabbed the tail of one of the waiting foe and was also swinging it around. On the next axis he saw Raffettii had landed on the back of the fourth dragon and had his wing joints in her claws, while Crisantii spat flames, scorching the edges of its wings.\n\nDelphii rose from below and slid in beside him. \"Let me take over, you're tired.\"\n\nGratitude and love for his dragonesses almost overwhelmed him. He released his grip and as the young dragon fell Delphii dived and clamped on its tail again, above the existing break.\n\n\"Throw them to the ground,\" he shouted. \"Try not to kill them.\" The sound of the first dragon hitting the sea haunted him. His first kill. He felt no satisfaction, no sense of winning, just sadness at the waste of a young life.\n\nRaffettii rode her dragon to the ground, more or less carrying him as his wings were shredded by Crisantii's fire. Delphii and Megonii swung their captives slowly downward, dropping them once close to the ground, their tails broken, their brains undoubtedly spinning. Neither managed to brace their legs to break their fall and they lay sprawled and defeated on the grass, close to the forest's edge.\n\nCrisantii hovered close to him. \"Are you all right?\" her voice quivered, her eyes filled with tears, her beautiful gold scales reflecting the sun as her green wings matched his beat. He nodded as with barely enough breath to speak he drifted seaward, casting for the dragon he'd thrown into the sea. No sign of it. No doubt drowned and now food for the fish.\n\nThe golden dragoness followed him, calling, \"Please land, Lutapolii. Let's join the others. It's not your fault. They wanted to kill you.\"\n\nThey stood around the three injured dragons. Megonii paced and roared her anger making her red scales darken to a deep ruby. \"Who sent you?\" she demanded.\n\nLutapolii patted her back and wrapped his wing around her. \"Quiet my lovely, let me ask them.\" He crouched among the three injured youngsters, two with broken tails, one with wings burnt and shredded. \"We don't want to kill you, but someone put you up to this attack. Who? Who sent you to kill me?\"\n\nNot one of them answered.\n\n\"We could injure you further. If we shredded your wings completely none of you would ever fly again. As it is your broken tails will make flight and fighting very difficult, but your present injuries will heal, in time.\" He walked around them, smothering the anger that rose in his throat, swallowing the urge to flame them, replacing it with the memory of how vulnerable he'd felt several years before, bullied until he fled south to sanctuary. \"My dragonesses are very angry. At this moment they are holding their rage in check. A nod from me and your lives will be over.\"\n\nThe youngster that Crisantii and Raffettii had ridden capitulated first. \"The Queen sent us.\" It raised its burnt wings, whimpered and let them fall.\n\nAs he suspected\u2014Erebia.\n\nAnother added. \"We were ordered to kill you.\"\n\nThaxtania said, \"The Queen said she'd kill us if we refused her order.\"\n\n\"But why?\" roared Megonii. \"We fished and fed you all. Why kill Luta?\n\n\"She wants you, her dragonesses, back. She wants you to feed her and if we killed Lutapolii she would order you all to stay,\" the third said, his voice quavering.\n\nThe queen had broken her promise. A stab of disappointment as sharp as a wooden spike hurt his heart. Before he could comment Megonii raised her snout and flamed, her anger crackling the air, just missing the injured dragons. \"I told you we couldn't trust her.\"\n\n\"Careful, my dear. We don't want to burn them.\" Lutapolii stood at the snouts of the youngsters, leaned down and passed his gaze back and forth, holding their attention. \"We will not harm you further, but be warned. Do not ever try to harm me or my flight again. I have conquered Erebia before and with the help of my flight I have defeated you. We are a peace-loving flight but will fight to the death to protect our domain.\" He couldn't resist adding. \"And when you look at your tails and the tail of your queen, remember us.\" He didn't have to add that he'd broken their queen's tail.\n\nHe turned to his flight. \"Come. Someone will find them and feed them. We're leaving.\" Taking deer meat home would have to wait for another time. Erebia didn't own the deer and if she thought she did, she'd be in for another shock.\n\nHe leapt in the air in a show of strength, drawing on his inner resources to hide his tiredness. His ladies passed him and flew in front, breaking the air, easing his flight. They looked like flying jewels and his heart swelled with pride. They'd saved him from certain death. Not only could the dragonesses of the south catch seals, they could fight as well. Word would travel. Surely few would dare to challenge his Southern Flight?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Megonii joined Lutapolii for a morning dip in the lake nearest their lair. Her ruby body shone in the sunlight, her wing membranes a bright cerise as she spread them wide to dry.\n\n\"Lutapolii.\"\n\n\"Mmmm,\" he answered, lying almost submerged in the cooling water.\n\n\"We're ready.\"\n\nHe lifted his head, turned to hold her gaze, at first wondering at her comment and then realizing the significance. \"What\u2014all of you? At once? Together?\" He didn't know if he could physically cope with mating four times on the same day.\n\n\"My flight sisters and I have discussed it and we are ready\u2026as soon as you are.\"\n\nHe stood. Shook the water from his wings and leaned down to twine his neck with hers before whispering in her ear. \"I'm certainly ready. I just didn't want to push my favors before it was time.\" A hum rose in his throat, making speech difficult and he swallowed several times. \"How about we take a flight south? I can show you the southern seal colony and we can snack on one or two, then we can find a private piece of tundra and learn together. I can't imagine you making any errors, but I hope you'll forgive any I make.\"\n\nShe nodded and white smoke trickled from her snout.\n\nWhite smoke, he felt, must be a good sign. Better than soot and cinders. \"I've heard of partners getting accidentally burned during mating so let's be very careful and take our time, shall we? I'm as new to this as you are.\"\n\nShe gave a giggling sort of hum. For some reason this combination of sounds spurred him into action and he sprang into the air expecting her to follow, which she did.\n\nThey flew directly south and he showed her the location of the southern seal colony. They circled once before he led her to a valley in the mountain range, where the stunted trees of the southern tundra leaned away from the prevailing westerly wind, their tops sloping as if they'd been trimmed to the exact same height and the grasses rippled in the summer breeze.\n\nThey landed in the glorious isolation and Lutapolii paced around Megonii, admiring her gleaming red scales as he hummed louder than he'd thought possible. With difficulty he gulped down his desire because he needed to tell her something.\n\n\"If anything ever happens to me, Meg, you now know where the seals breed. I've always known that you would be the matriarch of this flight should I be killed.\" He rubbed his snout down her back, sang a low love call to her and stretched his enormous wings wide. They gleamed like gossamer sails. He then folded them into a tent over their bodies; it seemed the right thing to do. His instincts led him as they coupled and hummed until a duet of dragon-song exploded from both throats; a haunting arpeggio that echoed around the mountain tops.\n\nA short time later flames burst from their snouts and nearby shrubs caught fire. A sulphur-laden smoke screen blotted out the sun, shading their antics from the squawking seabirds nesting on a nearby cliff.\n\nThe delightful experience ended far too soon and the thought that he'd get to repeat it three more times in as many days inspired Lutapolii to consider repeating his performance.\n\n\"Enough, Luta.\" Megonii slid from beneath him and curled into a circle. \"Can we rest before we fly home?\"\n\n\"Of course my love. Do you feel the urge to sleep?\"\n\n\"I do, but I'm too hungry to sleep.\"\n\n\"Shall I get you a seal snack?\"\n\n\"Please.\" The low song she emitted consumed his mind, driving him to feed her. He left and returned thrice with seals, watching her feast, knowing that somehow this food was as necessary as the mating act itself. Only when the sun began to sink toward the horizon did she rise and lead him home. He flew around her, over her, under her and beside her. Joy and satisfaction warmed him. His mate seemed satisfied. The tips of her ears had turned from a deep red and now glowed pink. He wondered if this meant her egg had been fertilized. Would Megonii tell him? How long would they have to wait for an egg? He decided it was information he didn't need at this moment.\n\nOn their return to the lair the three remaining dragonesses clustered around Megonii, rubbing her with their snouts and feeding her so many sideways scuttling things Lutapolii had to order them to stop before they depleted the source.\n\n\"Feed her fish or catch a fat shark, but stop with the crawly things.\"\n\nThey jumped away, giggling and humming and the three left via the tunnel to obey his wishes. He lay next to his mate, their bodies touching, and they dozed until the dragonesses returned with enough food for both of them.\n\nFull of fish Lutapolii belched, raised his golden eyebrows and without a hint of any of his previous embarrassment said, \"I have to limit my energy to one mating per day, so whose turn is it tomorrow?\"\n\nRaffettii ducked her head. \"Mine.\"\n\n\"Then mine,\" said Crisantii.\n\n\"I'm last,\" said Delphii, \"because I went away last winter.\" A frown creased her brow and tears threatened to spill onto her violet snout.\n\n\"Cheer up, Delphii, after three days practice I will know exactly what I'm doing,\" he said, and his four dragonesses cooed, which would have aroused him had he not been so tired."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "A week later Lutapolii and Delphii were fishing for sharks. For Lutapolii the sight of his four dragonesses, all now sporting pastel hued ears, filled him with pride. All were carrying fertile eggs but with no older dragoness to guide them they had no idea how long it would be before laying would commence.\n\nHe and Delphii landed on the stunned sharks that they'd dropped onto the tundra, quickly killing them and eating their fill of the fatty flesh.\n\n\"Luta,\" Delphii said, her voice soft and pleading. He knew an unusual request was coming. This dragoness was fearless.\n\n\"Yes, my lovely.\"\n\n\"I'd like to bring my mother to live with us, here in the south. I've asked my flight sisters and they have agreed they will share their food with her, if she is busy with the young, or can't catch fish.\"\n\nSurprise stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth and while he was processing this request she continued. \"Mother is experienced in rearing young dragons. I was her eleventh and last egg. She is becoming frail and there are none of my siblings alive to look after her. What do you think?\"\n\nTruly, he couldn't think of one objection. A nursery dragon would be very useful. He'd had one himself, long ago. He swatted at the scavenging gulls\u2014their screeching was interrupting his decision making.\n\n\"Is she strong enough to make the journey? And would she swear never to reveal the location of our hot springs and lair?\"\n\n\"I'm sure she would swear. She'd never want to return once she was here, it's so much better than her Northern Flight cave.\" Delphii rubbed her snout along his spine then twined her neck with his. \"I wonder about her strength to make the journey, but perhaps we could take it in stages and stop somewhere.\"\n\n\"Mmmm\u2026 Not a good idea,\" he said. \"I stopped in the warm zone on a mountain top, on my first journey south. The dense forest was locked with vines. If there was food hiding beneath I would have had to flame a path to find it.\" Delphii's brow furrowed. Her purple scales tilted to the light and turned vermillion. As much as it enhanced her beauty he couldn't have her worrying, \"But if we have to, we can. There are more birds there than you can count. I had feathers jammed between my teeth for days afterward.\" He munched on a piece of shark and thought about Venestia's ability to fly a long distance. \"How big is your mother? Perhaps I could give her a ride on my back when she tires.\"\n\n\"She's much smaller than I am. She keeps telling me I'm very large compared to my siblings.\"\n\n\"I think that's to do with our hot springs. I noticed during solstice that we were all bigger than the Northern Flight dragons.\" He selected a long shark bone and used it to pick his teeth clean. \"I wonder, if I glided would she be able to land on my back between my shoulders and wing-joints? If she squatted there I could fly with her until her energy returned. Again, I could glide when she lifted off once more. The only problem I can foresee is our wings getting tangled. That could be fatal for both of us.\"\n\n\"Could we practice it?\" She looked so appealing with bits of shark on her snout.\n\n\"We could.\" He snapped at the nearby birds. Their noise irritated him, and he wished they would clean up the shark remains without constantly squabbling.\n\nHe beckoned to Delphii, \"Let's try now.\"\n\nThey flew in a rising curl, climbing higher with each circle until Lutapolii judged they were high enough for him to glide for a long distance.\n\n\"Now, listen carefully, if your weight drives me down and I can't beat strongly enough to keep aloft I'll glide again and you must lift off immediately.\"\n\n\"I will, Lutapolii. I promise I'll be careful.\"\n\nOnce they reached the desired height he stilled his wings, spreading them wide and called, \"Now, Delphii.\"\n\nShe slowed her beat to match his speed and hung above his back. With great care she dropped between his shoulders and folded her wings tight against her body, as she would if she were about to dive.\n\n\"I'm folded tight,\" she called, her neck stretched along his spine, her snout resting between his ears.\n\nHe flapped, noted the extra weight and increased the down thrust of his beat until he began to rise. \"I'll have to maintain a slight upward angle to retain height, but I can do it.\"\n\nThey flew for some time to gauge how long he could continue flying with Delphii crouched on his back. At his order she waited until he stilled his wings before she flapped and rose. He dropped away to clear his wings from her dangling legs.\n\n\"We did it,\" Delphii called, \"You are so clever, Luta.\"\n\n\"I continue to surprise myself,\" he said, as a sense of achievement warmed his chest.\n\nBack on the tundra, collecting the larger shark pieces to take back to the lair, he decided they should fly north as soon as possible. \"There's a full moon tomorrow night. I think we should leave early in the morning and once we're on the northern continent we can hide in the forest until the moon rises. Then when we arrive and leave your mother's cave we will just be several silhouettes in the moonlight. No one will be able to identify us.\"\n\nDelphii shook her head in wonder. \"So smart, so thoughtful.\"\n\nAlthough he felt like agreeing with her, a thread of fear crawled up his spine. The thought of returning north and sneaking into Erebia's domain filled him with dread. Yet, to do this would benefit his whole flight. This is what being a patriarch was all about, so he ignored the fear and concentrated on being brave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "It was midnight the following evening when they stood on the ledge outside Delphii's mother's cave. After a tearful reunion, whispered instructions and a demonstration within the cave by Delphii of the stance required between Lutapolii's shoulders, the three dragons waited for a cloud to pass over the moon. All were trembling; Lutapolii from nerves, but Delphii and her mother, Venestia, were shaking with excitement.\n\n\"Now,\" he whispered and dropped from the ledge, to glide past the other cave entrances before flapping his wings to rise. He hoped his wing-beats would go unnoticed but knew his size meant the thwump-thwump would echo in the ravine. In the darkness available they streaked north then turned east, flying in a wide circle over the moonlit forests before heading south.\n\nTwo hours later, Venestia tired and Lutapolii led her higher before he stilled his wings and glided. She landed on his back, toppled to one side but righted her stance. Her claws dug into his back and he winced, not daring to speak and distract her until she'd folded her wings and crouched, her neck lying along his spine. Her head didn't quite reach his but lay close enough for her to hear him say, \"Well done, Venestia. Now rest and let me know when you feel like flying again. We have a few hours to go yet.\" Luckily her weight seemed half of Delphii's and he had no trouble maintaining height and speed.\n\nPerhaps he could use this method in the future. He'd never seen it done before, but then his whole life seemed to be a series of firsts."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The late afternoon sun cast Lutapolii's shadow on the tundra where the scrubby trees provided shade for the fledglings of the diving-birds' colony. Further south the mountains glowed like a white ribbon on the horizon, the snow-capped ridge seeming closer today in the clear brisk air. All seemed at peace in his part of the world, yet even as he sighed with contentment, he caught the flash of color in the north. He landed on a rock ledge to watch the specks grow into recognizable shapes.\n\nDragons approaching.\n\nWhat now? Who would bother to fly this far south? His flight didn't have friends, it could only be foe. He blessed the lucky chance he was far from their lair, yet if these dragons came to fight he would be on his own this time.\n\nStanding on the rock ledge that he'd used as his lair during his first summer, he leaned back into the shadows and waited, knowing his white scales would reflect the sunlight if he moved. The small group of dragons landed below him, resting from their flight, preening and stretching their wings. The paler blue one was a female and looked remarkably like his mother. The other two were males, their ear feathers ruffled by their long flight. One turned and its broken tail revealed it as one of the young males he and his flight mates had fought with months previously. As he stared he realized the second male had scarred wings. Both must be males that survived the fight. Surely they hadn't flown all this way to fight him again?\n\n\"Lutapooolii!\"\n\nHe heard the call. It was his mother. A knot of tension formed in his gullet and slid like a stone into his stomach. What disaster had brought her south to annoy him?\n\nShe rose and circled, calling again, \"Lutapooolii!\" before landing.\n\nDamn, with no option but to reveal his presence he dropped from the ledge, skimmed the scrubby trees and stood nearby, but not too near. \"What do you want, Mother?\"\n\n\"How are you, dear?\"\n\nDear? She'd never called him that before. It would take more than one sweet word to sway his emotions.\n\n\"I'm fine. What do you want?\"\n\nHis mother ducked her head and moved closer. He took a step back keeping her out of his personal space and further than a foreleg's swipe away.\n\n\"We have a problem,\" she said.\n\n\"No. You have a problem. I have no problems at all, except for this unheralded visit by you.\" He extended his foreleg and pointed to her companions, \"And them.\"\n\nHis mother simpered. \"Yes, you're right, We have a problem and We wondered if you'd be able to help.\"\n\nHe refused to fill the silence.\n\n\"Erebia has become impossible. She stays in her cave, yelling for food, flaming any messenger that brings her bad news and is terrifying the whole flight.\"\n\n\"And?\" He raised his eyebrows. \"What has this to do with me?\"\n\nHis gaze swept over the two accompanying dragons. Both had survived their attempt on his life. Would they try again?\n\n\"We wondered if you'd like to come home and unseat the queen. Take her place and rule the flight,\" Sabolotii said.\n\nRather a sweeping request, which sent shivers down his spine. The very last action he'd want to be involved in. It took seconds to form his answer.\n\n\"Never,\" he leaned closer to his mother and hissed, \"I will not interfere with Northern Flight politics. Erebia is your problem, not mine.\"\n\n\"But we don't know what to do next.\" The break in his mother's voice amazed him. Never before had she shown any sign of weakness.\n\n\"You say she yells for food?\"\n\n\"She does, frequently.\"\n\n\"And the First Flight provides this for her?\"\n\n\"Yes, but not seals of course, which she demands daily and no one can catch them. Only your flight has this skill.\"\n\nLutapolii sat back on his haunches and stared at the two younger dragons. \"It's good to see you've survived. I thought Erebia would've had you killed rather than admit the defeat of her plot to kill me.\"\n\n\"We were taken to a cave and fed until we recovered. She doesn't know we live but everyone now knows how she broke her tail.\" The dragon with the scarred wings snorted. \"She told everyone that a rock had fallen on it. Now the whole flight knows that you bettered her in a fight.\"\n\n\"I'm a living example of that,\" Thaxtania said, lifting his misshapen tail.\n\n\"Where is the third member of your murderous team?\"\n\n\"He is having difficulty flying. His broken tail has upset his balance, sir,\" Thaxtania said. \"He couldn't make the trip. But he is with us. He seeks your help.\"\n\nA silence settled as he thought, broken only by a murmured, \"Please, Luta, please help us,\" from his mother.\n\nA solution came to him. \"I suggest you starve her out. Stop feeding her and she will have to emerge to hunt and fetch her own food. Just keep out of her way.\" Three jaws opened, their eyes widened. Their astonishment made him realize how stupid most of them were. No one had thought of this? Truly, what a dense lot. \"As to how to unseat her from the throne, that's your problem, not mine.\"\n\nHis mother nodded. \"Where are your dragonesses?\" He detected a slight wheedle in her voice. Time to enlighten her to her new status.\n\n\"In our lair, guarding their eggs.\"\n\n\"My, you have been a busy fellow.\"\n\n\"Sarcasm doesn't suit you, Mother. These young will be the beginning of our Southern Flight. They won't be raised in fear, but in a secure loving environment\u2014something I always longed for.\"\n\nHis mother flicked her snout, dismissing his comments. \"One cannot always have what one wants.\"\n\nAn oft-repeated excuse for her own bad behavior. He didn't dignify it with an answer, but another idea occurred to him. \"Why don't you unseat Erebia? She's your relation and only holds the throne by fear.\" He warmed to this solution. \"I'm sure you'd rule better than she has, considering your better breeding.\" This was a gross exaggeration but his mother's ego would allow her to believe him.\n\nBefore his gaze she puffed with pride, held her tail erect and stalked around her two younger companions. \"Come my men, we must return. Luta has made several good suggestions we can try.\" As the young dragons circled above them his mother hissed an aside. \"Are you still a coward, Luta? Not prepared to fight for the throne?\"\n\n\"No Mother, I'm not. Remember Erebia's broken tail? I've already fought her and let her live. Fight Erebia yourself, if you're brave enough, then you can decide whether to spare her life or kill her.\"\n\nHe stood tall, extended his wings to their maximum and flapped twice, rising in a vertical leap. He left her below, a blue dragoness, seething with ambition. He turned directly south, hoping to mislead her by flying away from the direction of his lair. When he could no longer see their diminishing outlines on the horizon he dropped to sea level and landed in the waves, reversing direction to swim north for a while on his way home toward his island off the continental shelf."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "\"Oh Luta, did you really tell your mother to fight Erebia for the throne?\" Crisantii giggled and blew bubbles in the hot water.\n\n\"I did, because as much as she dislikes me, if she manages to unseat Erebia I know she will never send a flight of dragons to kill me\u2014or her grandchildren.\"\n\nHe looked around their lair. Raffettii dozed, her body wound around the four eggs, taking her turn with the hatching process. Each dragoness had produced an egg to match their immature pastels: pink, mauve, pale gold and oddest of all, although he and Raffettii were white their egg was a beautiful ice-blue. He hoped their hatchling didn't have his mother's nature, even if their scales were matching colors.\n\nCrisantii bathed in the pool and Megonii and Delphii were teaching Venestia how to fish. He slid into the internal spring and rested his snout on the edge. With his eyes closed he dozed as Crisantii massaged his back and combed his ear feathers with her golden claws.\n\nHe hoped he was finished with the Northern Flight. Next spring he might venture to the east and west, looking for other flights with which he and his family could exchange young breeders in years to come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "For more than ten sun-ups the echoes of the sheet-ice cracking and the growl of blocks calving from the ice shelf further south had rumbled across the ocean, reverberating against the island. The noise travelled through the undersea tunnel and into the lair. A short swim yesterday took Lutapolii away from the hot pools to the colder water, where he surfaced and looked for snow or ice shards in the air. Yesterday's watery sunshine convinced him to open the top entrance and see if the weather had warmed enough for flight. Ice crystals on your wings could become a deadly hazard.\n\nHe flew to the top of the chamber and balanced on the internal ledge, wishing it was wider. With a kick he dislodged the boulder blocking the entrance. It rolled along the short passage and fell away down the mountainside. The bangs as it bounced on the rocks sounded joyful. Come autumn he'd need another one to secure the entrance but for now he didn't care. He inhaled as the air eased in, stirring the dust motes and refreshing the mustiness of the lair. The winter months had seen their home become claustrophobic with six grown dragons and the recent hatching of the four eggs. Another lair would be needed in the future as the hatchlings grew.\n\nHe put these worries aside, walked the few paces along the short entranceway and stood tall on the outer ledge. In the weak sunshine he preened his wings and stretched them wide. Below him small snowmelt pools were forming, enticing him. What a luxury, fresh water to wash in after months of salt baths, which, even if warm, left a crust on his scales. He glided down and sat in one such puddle, a bit on the small side for a full grown dragon but he managed, with his tail curled tight, to submerge with just his head above the water. His gut rumbled. The arrival of another spring offered the chance of a hunting trip and the thought of fresh deer kill caused saliva to drip from his jaws.\n\nThe winter months of a fish and seal diet had him craving red meat. A hunting trip was a priority. His ladies must surely feel the same? He'd take a short flight and test the air, then he'd need to run his notion past Venestia. If she agreed, he and his ladies could be feasting on red meat by tomorrow.\n\nEventually the chill of the snowmelt penetrated his wing struts and he emerged from the little lake, shook his wings dry and flew back to the top entrance to warm again in the sun. He loved the vista that lay beneath him\u2014the rippling tundra, a pale green carpet undulating into waves by the wind, with pools of snowmelt that reflected the azure sky. A line of rocks edged the dark jade sea and in the distance the snow covered mountains mirrored the sun and marched along the horizon.\n\nThe fug of the lair had dispersed when he dropped in off the ledge, circling down in a gentle glide to land silently on the rock floor. The hatchlings slept. Talking above their combined squawks could be difficult. Venestia dozed beside the large nest which contained the youngsters for now, but not for long at the rate they were growing. The elderly dragoness had put on weight over the winter months. All signs of her poor health had disappeared. Her scales now shone and her fire had returned. Without her counsel over the winter months things could have become fraught within the lair. She'd managed the dragonesses into a roster to curl around and bond with their eggs and when boredom set in she'd challenged them to blow smoke rings. So far no one had mastered the technique and Venestia ruled supreme, puffing smoke rings one after the other to drift slowly to the top of the lair. Perhaps it was a skill that came with age he consoled himself, albeit a totally frivolous one. He sat quietly waiting for Venestia to wake.\n\n\"You woke me with your stare,\" Venestia said, lifting her head moments later and stretching her forearms out. \"Something is worrying you.\"\n\nWhat a canny old dragoness. \"It's springtime\u2014just\u2014and I'm craving deer. I wondered if you could manage the hatchlings alone for a few days while the ladies and I go hunting.\"\n\nShe nodded and he hurried on.\n\n\"We'd leave you plenty of food for them, plus I promise we'll return with a carcass each. You can have a whole one to yourself if you like.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a bribe.\" Her yellowed teeth showed as her grin spread wide, \"But I'll accept it.\" Her smile faded. \"I think the youngsters would benefit from red meat. They seem restless and unsatisfied at times.\"\n\n\"Great, I'll tell the ladies once we're all gathered. Do you know where they are?\"\n\n\"Delphii said she'd swim a distance and see what she could find. Crisantii and Megonii are fishing nearby and Raffettii thought she'd look for a seal.\" As ever Venestia knew where everyone was.\n\n\"I'll take a short flight and see if I can find another seal which will keep you and the hatchlings fed for a few days.\" Before he'd decided whether to take the underwater tunnel or leave by the top entrance the water in the cavern's central pool bubbled and surged as Delphii emerged, her catch in her mouth. Delphii flung the dead penguin on the floor and hauled her glistening body from the water.\n\n\"My, you've been fishing a long way out. I bet the water was cold,\" Lutapolii said.\n\n\"I thought we could try a different type of food. The hatchlings haven't had penguin before.\"\n\n\"All those fine feathers could give them gas,\" Venestia said. \"It might be better if we ate it.\"\n\nDelphii sighed. \"I don't care, Mother. It'll be a change from fish and seal, but will still be fishy.\"\n\n\"I never thought I'd hear a dragon turning down seal meat,\" Lutapolii teased.\n\nTheir talk woke the youngsters who stirred in their nest of sticks and woven grasses. Raffetti's daughter reminded Lutapolii of his mother. Because of this he always expected this daughter to snap at him, yet so far she showed the sweetest nature of the four hatchlings. Even her cries were softer compared to Crisantii's son, a small fellow who as Lutapolii watched, tottered upright, raised his head and belched over the side of his bed. Bits of fishbone and crab shell scattered on the rocks.\n\n\"More mess,\" Lutapolii said, and then wished he'd kept quiet as Venestia, older than any of them said, \"I'll clean it up later.\"\n\n\"No you won't. I will,\" he said, and collecting all the bits together he flew to the top entrance, walked out on the ledge and a few wing flaps propelled him to the far side of the island where he dumped them. He hoped they'd rot away or come high summer he'd have a job on his hands to bury them. Venestia insisted they remove all rubbish as far from the lair as possible. Overhead the cawing of the first of the diving birds caused Lutapolii to turn midflight and watch. If the diving birds were returning then the weather must be settled. The first arrivals spied the rubbish and began to scavenge among the remains, fighting over choice finds. The bits of seal blubber and flippers would fatten them up for their frantic season of chick rearing.\n\nExcited at the prospect of a hunting trip, Lutapolii returned to the lair and watched as Delphii picked up her daughter, carried her to the penguin carcass and began to tear the meat into small pieces.\n\n\"Watch those feathers,\" Venestia warned before she slid into the pool and disappeared, no doubt going fishing now that Delphii had returned.\n\nHe couldn't sit on his plan any longer. \"How do you feel about a trip to hunt deer?\"\n\nDelphii stopped feeding her daughter and blinked at him. \"A great idea,\" her eyes widened and her eyebrows rose. \"When? Can we go tomorrow?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"What about Mother, will she cope?\"\n\n\"She will. I've checked and she's happy to mind the young.\" He stroked his daughter with his claw and the hatchling squawked.\n\n\"Don't upset her, Luta. You are such a tease.\" A moment later Delphii asked, \"Are you teasing me too?\"\n\n\"No, we're all going hunting. We'll leave first thing in the morning.\"\n\nDelphii put their daughter back in the nest and twined her neck with his. \"I could kill for a deer,\" she said, \"What a great idea.\"\n\n\"You'll have to kill\u2014many times, because I want to bring plenty of meat back. Enough to store in the ice caves further south.\"\n\n\"Clever, Luta.\" Delphii's tail swished in delight. \"I'll tell the others.\" She plunged into the pool and disappeared.\n\nSo much for his plan of a grand announcement, now he was left in charge of the hatchlings. If they squawked perhaps he'd sing to them. As a precaution he hummed while he planned their hunting tactics. They'd fly north then hunt westward toward the end of the great forest. New territory. If another flight was in residence they'd no doubt find out. Without knowledge of Erebia's whereabouts they'd be wise to keep out of her territory. Her previous effort to have him killed had wiped any trust he had in her word."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Megonii took her turn as the leader of the chevron flight pattern. Lutapolii watched her from his present position in the back row, riding in the slipstream after leading for many hours. The beat of Megonii's wings slowed as she arched her neck to peer at the forest-clad land below. The five southern dragons flew high over their original homeland, yet it held no appeal to Lutapolii. Darkness edged out the last of the sun's rays at this northern end of the continent and with only the stars to navigate by they turned west and flew on. The rivers below shone in the moonlight like ribbons winding to the sea, through the canyons of the Northern Flight's territory. They followed the trail of the shiny rivers as they meandered and narrowed back to their source far in the west. At last a mountain top beckoned and they glided down to where a rock bench offered shelter from the prevailing wind.\n\nHis wives curled their tails tights and lined up against the rock wall. Lutapolii lowered his haunches to squat in front of them, his wings touching their exhausted frames. He stood on guard until they slept then he too succumbed to the weariness of their long flight.\n\nA clap of thunder overhead woke Lutapolii. The sun had climbed well above the horizon already. They'd also missed the chance to hunt in the soft light of the morning when the deer's attention was focused on food after their night's rest. Now they'd be more wary.\n\n\"If it weren't for the storm we might've slept all day.\" Lutapolii stretched. \"Wake up my ladies. I'm starving. I suggest we fill our bellies first then look for meat for the family.\"\n\n\"Can I rest a little longer while you find some breakfast?\" Raffettii begged. The other three nodded.\n\nHow could he resist their request? He hadn't produced an egg or kept it warm through the long winter months. Breakfast on the bench seemed the very least he could do for his ladies.\n\n\"Right. Back soon. Don't go away.\" Their eyelids lowered and he swore they were all back to sleep before he'd lifted three dragon-lengths into the air.\n\nThe northern air seemed thicker. The rain had turned to mist and he flew close to the treetops searching for deer. On sunny days they grazed in the open valleys, but in this weather they hid in the trees. If he had to land and flame them out, he would, but he preferred to waste his energy in the sky than pacing the ground.\n\nThe specks of white gave them away. The does ran before him deep in the foliage, their tail flicks exposing their flight. He rose higher through a break in the clouds, keeping his gaze locked on their location, removing the sound of his wing beats from their acute hearing. They ran with an urgency that proved they'd been hunted often. They knew the sound of a dragon in flight. He'd need to be cunning.\n\nWings folded, he dived, then spread them wide and glided, landing in a small clearing up-wind of the herd. He backed into the tree line, folded his wings over his back and settled into the ground to hide his white front. With his snout resting on his crossed forelegs he drew in a long slow breath. Now he would wait. He hoped his stomach didn't rumble.\n\nThe silence that settled after his arrival gradually filled with birdsong. Insects rose from the damp forest floor, landing on his skin and walking along his snout. He enjoyed the solitude. He'd forgotten how, prior to acquiring his females, he'd enjoyed the tranquility of being a single dragon. The sense of pleasure returned and only his eyelids moved. The excitement of the hunt ebbed away\u2014then three deer tiptoed into the clearing and began to graze. He resisted the urge to pounce, wanting to kill them quickly and cleanly.\n\nWhen they were close enough he flamed them.\n\nHe heard the crashing of branches and the pounding of hooves as the rest of the herd sped away. He and his flight would have to hunt elsewhere for the rest of the day.\n\nThe spark of delight in his ladies' eyes lifted his heart. Their exhaustion vanished and they joined him to feast until their hunger faded.\n\n\"Now we have a day to hunt.\" He licked the bone marrow off his claws. \"How many carcasses can we carry?\" Suddenly the logistics of the return flight became serious.\n\n\"Surely one each, but no more.\" Megonii wiped her snout on the soft pasture. They'd moved their meal from the ash-ridden grass of the kill. \"It depends how heavy they are.\"\n\nHe had to agree. \"If we take one each they need to be as big as possible. How long will one deer carcass last the hatchlings?\" He'd never considered quantities before. His only method of feeding had been to fill the gaping mouths until the demands stopped.\n\n\"One deer would feed the hatchlings for about five days, perhaps more if seals and fish are mixed in, according to Venestia.\" A hiccup broke Raffettii's speech. \"Oh, that was so good.\" She laughed, her belches interspersed with short bursts of flame. Raffettii's appetite was legendary.\n\nLutapolii hauled out a large tuft of grass and wiped his chin and hands. \"I've scared this herd away. We'll need to search further afield.\" He looked up. The sky had cleared and the sun now warmed the clearing. Drifts of cloud rose from the distant forest-clad hills. \"Our bellies are full. We can hunt all day if need be. Come.\"\n\nThe five flapped their wide wings, rising from the clearing at a low angle, skimming the tree tops and climbing slowly. They flew west, spread well apart over territory none had seen before, searching for prey.\n\nConcern crawled up Lutapolii's spine. Perhaps their plan had flaws and all they'd get would be full stomachs and no food to take home. \"We need to turn back and hope for a kill. If we don't the distance will be too great to return south in one flight.\"\n\nThen luck blessed him again. When a large herd was sighted grazing far below on a valley floor they used their seal fishing skills and dropped silently out of the sun, At the last moment the sound of their wing beats caused panic.\n\n\"Take one each,\" he yelled and as he gripped the back of a young buck he saw Megonii had a doe in her grasp. They drove the animals to the ground and quickly sliced their throats with sharp claws. He looked around to see the other dragoness each straddled a deer.\n\nIt worked. Not a bad plan after all, but as they collected their breath and admired their handiwork a shadow glided over them. Focused on the hunt they'd forgotten to scan the sky.\n\nLutapolii scanned the air. How many dragons? Fight or flee? No chance to flee, besides the prizes were too valuable to leave. Fight it must be, unless he could negotiate. They'd hunted in another flight's territory. Why else would the deer be so wary? He should have remembered the reaction of the first herd.\n\nA green dragon landed nearby. Of medium size with bronze legs he stood just out of flame's reach but close enough to talk. He whipped his tail from side to side. His voice rang out, sharp and clipped.\n\n\"Who are you and why are you poaching my stock?\"\n\nA direct enough question. Just what Lutapolii would have asked if someone had been hunting in his territory.\n\nMegonii kicked her deer closer to his carcass and moved to stand beside him. Delphii grasped her catch in her jaws and strode to join them, the deer carcass dangling from her teeth. Crisantii, her front covered in blood, spat a burst of flames and stood tall, while Raffettii took a bite of her catch, an act of ownership, before she picked it up and joined Crisantii.\n\n\"Our apologies,\" Lutapolii said, \"We had no idea this was your territory.\" He ducked his head in the smallest of bows hoping it would be sufficiently respectful, but not cravenly so. \"We are from the southern seas. We have four young who need red protein. They are sick of seals and fish. We're hunting for them and will take these kills home tomorrow.\"\n\nThe dragon stepped forward, tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. \"They are tired of seals? How could anyone be tired of such a delicacy? First you have to catch them.\"\n\n\"Oh, we can do that, easily,\" said Megonii and Lutapolii gently tapped her shin.\n\n\"Not quite as easy as it sounds, but yes, we catch seals.\" Lutapolii angled his body away from Megonii's and spread his wings to their limit; a show of size he couldn't resist. \"Do you have a name?\"\n\nMegonii stepped away and spread her wings as well. The sun backlit the membranes and they glowed like the embers in a fire. Lutapolii loved her sense of drama. Following her lead her flight sisters all preened and spread their wings. They made a magnificent sight and intimidating with it. Pride surged through his heart and he tilted his head back and shot a great flame into the air.\n\nThe green dragon retreated several paces. \"I am called Regius, Dragon of the West. I have a flight in the distant mountains.\" This time he bowed in turn.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you I'm sure.\" Lutapolii inclined his head to Megonii. \"This is my dragoness, Megonii. She is a seal catcher and a fine fighter.\" Not that he'd ever seen her fight but he was sure she could. \"My other dragonesses,\" he gestured in turn, \"Delphii, Crisantii and Raffettii, all hunters and seal catchers supreme.\"\n\n\"And you are?\"\n\n\"I am Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South. We were born of the Northern Flight but have established our own patriarchal flight in the southern ocean.\" He folded his wings and waited for a reply.\n\n\"I've heard of you. My flight has adopted a young dragon with a broken tail. He tells of how you provided a feast for the summer solstice and were then betrayed by Erebia and had to fight for your life. He said you broke his tail and that it proves his story is true.\"\n\nLutapolii nodded. \"Sadly, all correct. I am glad that young dragon also survived. One didn't.\"\n\nRegius moved closer, within flaming range, adopting a conciliatory tone. \"I've also heard that Erebia has been banished,\" he said, \"And that she wanders freely without a flight.\"\n\n\"She won't be happy about that,\" Lutapolii murmured to Megonii. \"No servants to boss about.\"\n\n\"You were seen this morning by my scout and I feared that you were her, but your silhouette proved to be much larger.\" Regius edged closer, his nostrils flared and his gaze flickered to the kills. The trampled, blood-soaked grass now extruded a metallic odor and several strings of saliva fell from his jaws as he commented, \"I met Erebia once. Not a happy meeting.\"\n\n\"And who is in charge of the Northern Flight now?\" Lutapolii asked, moving to stand in front of the carcasses, not prepared to relinquish ownership.\n\n\"A female blue dragon I believe,\" said Regius.\n\nBlue dragons were rare and it sounded as if his mother might have acted on his suggestion. No time to dwell on the ramifications of that. He'd had enough of this news exchange.\n\n\"I wish to hunt these forests. Is there some way we can recompense you for your hospitality? I don't wish for conflict.\" He flapped his wings, mostly to relieve the tension in his body, and stood as tall as he could manage. Would it be enough to gain the advantage?\n\n\"A token of a seal per hunting dragon would be most welcome.\" Regius nodded yes, his head splattering saliva around. Each dragoness turned her head away, eyebrows raised and Lutapolii stifled the urge to smile at their show of disdain.\n\nA done deal. He kept his expression bland. \"We have fine seals in the south. They are fatter and juicier than the local variety. Have you tasted seal?\"\n\n\"No, none of my flight know how to catch them.\" Regius shook his head. \"And neither do the dragons of the Northern Flight, from the reported accounts of dragon drownings.\"\n\n\"Sadly, it is a dangerous art,\" Lutapolii agreed, lying happily to reinforce the myth. \"I agree to bring you a seal per dragon in exchange for hunting your forests. Do you agree?\"\n\nRegius' eyes flashed with greed. \"Indeed, but I will require a seal per dragon\u2026each time you come.\"\n\nIf their desire for deer had been less urgent Lutapolii may have argued but he wanted to leave. Besides, they could pilfer seals from the northern colony instead of carrying them from the south. This ignorant dragon would never know the difference having never tasted seal.\n\nLutapolii's life had become fraught with consequences since his flight numbers had grown. His newly acquired status of fatherhood had increased the burden of responsibility. His life now revolved around food\u2014finding it, hunting it, transporting it.\n\nShaking off this depressing thought he said, \"We'll be back in a few sunrises, all five of us.\" A collective force to be reckoned with. \"We will take as much as we can carry. Also, we will be looking elsewhere for food.\" Can't have Regius thinking he had a monopoly on red protein. \"I hear bear meat is very nutritious.\" He snatched that fact out of the air, without having ever met a bear face to face and only having observed one from a great distance.\n\n\"If you dare to fight them,\" Regius said, his lips curled.\n\nLutapolii ignored this comment.\n\n\"You may not see us on a regular basis, but we will honor our agreement if and when we hunt here.\" He turned his back on Regius instead of backing away as good manners dictated, then stood on his catch and wrapped his claws around the body.\n\n\"Come, Megonii,\" he said in a soft aside, \"No more discussion. Let's leave now before he wants more.\"\n\nShe nodded to her sisters and the flight rose in a vertical climb, displaying their strength and flying skills. The carcasses dripped blood across the forest, bleeding out as they headed southwest to the edge of the continent. They landed on a hilltop and rested overnight, taking turns on watch to protect their catch and themselves, in case Regius sent his flight to steal it. The strength of his flight was still unknown.\n\nThey arrived at the southern lair as the sun slid below the horizon. The last rays of the day turned the snow-capped mountains orange and red. The underbelly of the clouds glowed purple and even the squawks of the hatchlings sounded like music to Lutapolii's ears. Venestia's song of welcome shocked the hatchlings into silence and under her guidance the four youngsters were fed strips of fresh deer meat.\n\nThat night the hatchlings slept and so did their mothers.\n\nLutapolii tapped a golden claw on the rock floor as he watched his ladies at rest, exhaustion from the trip causing their limbs to twitch now and again. Sleep evaded him as he pondered. Venestia had been right. The young dragons needed red meat as well as the rich harvest from the sea. Now their feeding routine would involve long flights north. Could they keep this up?\n\nFor the first time Lutapolii pondered on whether his luck had eased and whether his confidence in his southern lair had been misplaced."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "\"Are you sure you can cope alone, again, Venestia?\" Lutapolii leaned over the nest where the four hatchlings slept and resisted the urge to stroke them. He knew she would growl if he woke them.\n\n\"Of course I can manage. You forget I have reared eleven young of my own. Now their diet is balanced they'll be fine.\"\n\nStill a worry niggled in his gut, like a bout of indigestion after eating an extra fat seal. He pointed to the food shelf higher in the cavern. \"We've left fish, seal meat, shark and the rest of the deer.\"\n\n\"Shush, Luta.\" Venestia waved him away. \"Get going. I can manage quite well. I can always catch a few of the crunchy sideways things if the babies get fretful. They always work wonders.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't have too. We'll be back in three day, I promise.\"\n\n\"Don't promise anything. Promises can be broken. Just get back as soon as you can before they start climbing over the side of the nest. That's when we'll need two on duty at all times. They'll have to learn to swim immediately. Most lairs don't have a pool in the middle.\"\n\nHe nodded. His overwhelming affection for the youngsters cancelled out the worry they cause him.\n\nVenestia placed one of her wings over his back and rubbed his neck with her snout. \"Go along now. The ladies are waiting outside and you're holding them back. They're excited about the hunt. I'll be just fine.\"\n\nHe twined his neck with her and whispered, \"We'd be lost without you. Thank you so much.\" Her demonstrations of affection always made him consider his own mother's lack of mothering skills.\n\n\"Shush, away with you now. You're embarrassing me.\"\n\nHe took one final peep at his children then jumped into the air and, with one flap of his wings, rose high to the top entrance of the lair. Once on the ledge outside he shouted to his four dragonesses who, except for Crisantii who wallowed in a snowmelt puddle, were pacing in the tundra below. \"Let's go, ladies.\"\n\n\"At last,\" he heard one of them think but wasn't sure which one. Since the hatching he'd noticed the occasional mental link and it seemed to be strengthening. If he'd been closer he might have worked out whose thought he'd heard. It probably expressed their combined frustration at his dawdling. Flying a wide circle he waited for them to join him before leading them back to their home hunting grounds.\n\n\"Only time for a quick rest,\" he said as they landed on their special hill top. Through the descending dusk they peered at the northern seal colony.\n\n\"Wow, look at the increase in the population.\" Raffettii licked her lips. \"The Northern Flight won't miss a few of those.\"\n\n\"Providing we can take them without being seen,\" he cautioned. \"We can't linger.\"\n\nThe dragonesses' wings drooped from weariness.\n\nEven his wings ached. \"Catch one seal each to eat now then another to take with us and we must be gone. We need to find the clearing where we met Regius last time, before darkness falls.\" He hoped being this close to their home lairs didn't make them homesick.\n\n\"How will we find the same clearing?\" Crisantii sighed and shuffled her feet, not looking to be in any hurry to follow her flight sisters. Raffettii had already dived into the sea, chasing her catch and Megonii and Delphii were lining up likely prizes.\n\nLutapolii stepped to Crisantii's side and wrapped her under one wing. \"I took sightings of three landmarks when we were there. I'm sure I can find it again. If not, we'll roost somewhere overnight and find it tomorrow. Would you like me to catch you a seal while you rest?\"\n\n\"Would you? That would be lovely. I'm exhausted.\"\n\nHe twined his neck with hers then rubbed her spine with his snout. \"Back shortly,\" he said and flew off, passing Raffettii on her way back to the hilltop, a large seal dangling from her mouth.\n\nThey feasted quickly on their shared catch before they dived into the sea and caught a seal each. With laden claws they flew westward to Regius' territory.\n\nAfter the day's long flight Lutapolii's wings ached. \"Let's take a rest,\" he said and headed for a clearing below.\n\nThey followed him downward to land in a small glade where a stream ran fast and clear, tumbling over rocks; a sound none had heard for a long time. They all stood in the cool water and drank their fill.\n\n\"Almost as good as snowmelt,\" Megonii said.\n\n\"Not quite as cold, but I can taste the mountains in it.\" Delphii tossed her head, spraying droplets about and drank again.\n\n\"Can we stop and hunt for deer?\" Raffettii asked.\n\n\"After we reach Regius' clearing with these seals, then if the light is still with us we can look for deer. Otherwise, we will hunt in the morning, as soon as the sun rises.\" He looked skyward. A bank of clouds appeared to be rolling in from the northeast. Bad weather for tomorrow? \"There's that ledge we can shelter on so let's hope the rain holds off. It's not far now.\" He looked around. \"Come on, Crisantii.\"\n\nShe'd been rolling in the grass. \"Utter bliss. I'd forgotten how wonderful grass smells,\" she said then grasped her seal in one foot and hopped to join the others.\n\nThe flight rose again, carrying five fat northern seals, tokens for Regius to allow them to hunt unmolested in his territory.\n\nLutapolii sighted the clearing in the fading light. Spacious and green the long strip nestled at the bottom of a valley, similar to many such clearings they'd flown over. He checked his triangulation marks to make doubly sure.\n\n\"Yes, this is it and once we've dropped the catch I'm going to scorch some tree tops so we don't have to hunt so hard to find it in the future.\"\n\nThey landed and released their kill, stretching sore claws. The first stars flickered in the southern sky. More would appear within the hour. No chance of hunting tonight. He made a decision. \"We can't leave the seals here for scavengers to eat,\" Lutapolii said.\n\nThe collected sighs of his dragonesses shortened his patience. \"There's a tor nearby with a wide ledge. Pick up your kills and follow me,\" he growled. \"We'll store them overnight. No eating them.\" He stared at Raffettii, who had the grace to look away. He'd read her thoughts. A snack would be nice, had crossed her mind.\n\nHe wondered if his ladies heard his thoughts. At some future time he must ask them, but not now when they were all exhausted. He stilled his mind and concentrated on flying.\n\nOnce the carcasses were stored at the far end of the abutment, Lutapolii surveyed the forest below. In the descending dark, the trees covered the hills and valleys like a charcoal carpet. By now the deer would be settling for the night but if he made one noisy flight over the forest he might spook a couple into revealing themselves.\n\n\"I'll be back. You ladies rest,\" he said and lifted off determined to reward his dragonesses for their effort.\n\nIt only took one young stag to break cover and he had a quick kill. His ladies demolished it in minutes, humming with delight. Not a huge feast but enough to warm their innards and make for a settled night.\n\nThen he stood guard for hours. When the night was so dark that only the stars lit the horizon he finally relaxed. No one could see them now. This narrow long ledge only suited in an emergency He wished for the safety of a cave to protect his ladies; another thing to search for when time allowed.\n\nThe sun woke him, warming his back, hotter than its rays in the south. The heat so delicious he almost went back to sleep until he remembered why they were here.\n\nFood, to be caught today, then they could return home tomorrow. \"Wake up ladies. Let's carry the seals to the clearing and start hunting for red meat.\"\n\nYum, one of the dragonesses thought\u2026probably Raffettii.\n\nThey stood in a row on the ledge, spreading their wings, easing the stiffness from yesterday's long flight and warming their chest. Lutapolii, hovering nearby, couldn't help but admire their strength and beauty. Perhaps he should change his title to Lucky Dragon of the South?\n\n\"Come on, my lovelies. We'll deliver the seals, catch some breakfast and then\u2026\"\n\n\"Hunt,\" his ladies all said together, their jaws snapping, their eyes flashing with excitement as they each hurried to pick up a seal and join him in the air.\n\nDeer for breakfast-delish, one of them thought.\n\nThey piled the seals together in the middle of Regius' clearing and covered them with branches torn from the nearby trees.\n\n\"Let's hope a marauding bear doesn't pass by,\" Lutapolii said, as the last green sapling settled on the heap.\n\n\"How do we tell Regius his tokens are here?\" Megonii said.\n\n\"I've no idea. He didn't reveal his lair's location so we can't deliver them. We can only hope his scouts will see us today.\" He stretched one wing, easing the stiffness. \"I've completed my part of the bargain.\" He flapped his emerald wings a few times. \"Let's hunt.\" As he skimmed the trees he flamed, setting fire to some of the tree-tops. The scorching would mark the clearing making it easier to find on their return trips.\n\nThey searched in a pack then, after each kill, Lutapolii sent a dragoness back to the clearing with it. The herds were flighty and hid among the trees but by mid-afternoon there were three buck carcasses piled, ready to take home, plus one to feed on before they left.\n\nWhen Lutapolii and Megonii returned with the last two kills, Regius could be seen in the clearing below them, the seals uncovered. Crisantii and Delphii spurted smoke from their snouts and roars filled the air. Raffettii circled just above them, spurting short flames.\n\nA battle seemed imminent.\n\nLutapolii dived, making sure he landed with a thud behind Regius' pacing form. He dropped his kill and roared, \"What's the matter?\"\n\nHe looked at his dragonesses, \"Easy ladies. I'll sort this.\"\n\nMegonii dropped her kill with the others and joined her flight sisters' side.\n\nDelphii walked to the edge of the clearing, quietly easing out of Regius' line of sight ready for any rearguard action Lutapolii decided to take.\n\nRegius swung his head, flames flicking between his teeth. \"You have not honored our agreement. There are only four seals here.\" His green eyes were ringed with red and cinders dropped on the grass from his moving jaws, threatening to cause a grass fire.\n\nA momentary thought had Lutapolii wondering if Raffettii had eaten one. When he looked at her innocent face and clean snout he knew he shouldn't have even considered such a disloyal thought and hoped she hadn't caught it as it crossed his mind.\n\n\"Nonsense, we carried one each here last evening and there were five when we left this morning.\" He stomped over to the pile. Four seals stared at him with their dead eyes. \"Would your scout have eaten one?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't dare,\" thundered Regius.\n\nA reasonable enough query, it appeared to touch a nerve. The small dragon scout shook his head. \"Never, ever, never,\" he protested.\n\nLutapolii scratched his head and ran his claws through his ear feathers. \"Obviously one has been stolen.\"\n\n\"The branches looked the same as when we left them,\" Crisantii said. \"We didn't think to check the number.\"\n\nRaffettii nodded. \"When we took them off to show Regius only four seals were underneath,\" she said, backing up her flight sister's claim.\n\n\"Look over here,\" called Delphii and picked up something from the ground at the tree line. She waved it in the air as she approached, \"A flipper.\"\n\nA quick look at the remaining four seals proved all had the requisite number of flippers still attached to their bodies.\n\n\"Some smart scavenger has restacked the hide after removing a seal. It has to have been a dragon. A bear would've mauled them all and certainly wouldn't have replaced the cover.\" Keeping his tone amicable he continued, stepping closer to Regius. \"Whatever or whoever did it, my ladies' return must have startled the thief enough to leave a morsel behind.\"\n\nRegius stopped spitting sparks, but continued to stomp about. \"It's not my problem. You undertook to deliver a seal per hunter and there are five of you.\"\n\nA rather obvious statement. It wasn't as if they couldn't count. Lutapolii kept his temper in check.\n\n\"If you had told us where you lived we could have delivered them to your lair and this theft wouldn't have happened.\"\n\n\"I tell no one the location of my lair.\" Regius' spine scales rippled like waves on a green sea.\n\nThis could get out of hand. Violence could ensue. \"Fine, your choice, but don't expect me to stand and guard these tokens. We have come to hunt and need to return later today with our kill. If, as you insist, this is your territory, then you have a thief in your midst.\"\n\nLutapolii pointed, encompassing his dragonesses. \"We have all honored our agreement.\"\n\nHis four ladies nodded and spread their wings in unison. Such a fabulous sight it distracted Luta from the argument at hand until Regius roared, \"It's not enough.\"\n\nLutapolii could hear a tremble in the green dragon's voice. Probably because he faced five large southern dragons with only one small scout of his own in support. If Regius started a fight it would prove to be a little one-sided and extremely foolish on his part.\n\nLutapolii waited in silence until Regius shuffled, lowered his head and swung it from side to side. A small apology but enough.\n\n\"You'll need help to transport the seals to your lair. My ladies will stay here and guard them until you return with more scouts. Also to prove my goodwill I will fly east and get you a seal from the northern colony.\" No need to tell Regius these seals were already from there. Plus while he fished his ladies could rest. They had their deer tally.\n\nRegius nodded to the scout and indicated with a flick his head that the small dragon should stay in the clearing. Then he rose, a green flash against the sky as he flew westward and disappeared over the tree-lined horizon.\n\n\"Right ladies. Take a rest and I'll be back as soon as I can,\" Lutapolii said and jumped into the air. As he looked down he saw the tiny scout huddled amongst his dragonesses. A small fellow and not the bravest when he quaked at the suggestion he had stolen a seal, but perhaps open to coercion? A broader picture of Regius' flight would be an advantage."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Lutapolii decided to carry two seals back, one for Regius and one for his ladies to snack on. He dropped the first dead seal on the hilltop above the colony and flew high, searching for another prize. The smaller one he'd carry in his jaws, the larger one in his feet. Spotting a particularly large quarry he folded his wings tight against his spine and dived, slicing the water behind the animal, making little noise and even less splash. With strong thrusts he worked his tail, mimicking a shark's swimming style but much faster. An alerted seal could swirl into acrobatic turns and escape a pursuer. Dragons took longer to flip and circle underwater. His speed drove him close enough to snap on his quarry's tail, flick it upward and break its spine; an instant end without the thrashing of its death throes causing percussion through the water, frightening away others.\n\nDrops of sea water sprinkled the grass as he landed next to his previous kill and paused to take a rest.\n\nA shadow covered him as it passed across the hilltop. A dragon above him. Friend or foe? Adrenalin fired his nerve ends and he reared back, wings spread in defiance. However, the dragon landed a distance away on the edge of the hill and walked backward a few steps. It bowed low, its snout touching the turf. He recognized his visitor as Thaxtania. Funny how this young dragon kept on popping into his life?\n\nThis youngster was one of the four dragons who'd attacked him at Erebia's bidding. Lutapolii had last seen him in the autumn at Sabolotii's side when she'd flown south, asking for his help to unseat Erebia. Lutapolii held his stance, ready to fight if he were attacked. At least Thaxtania's groveling showed respect even if his broken tail rather spoiled the image.\n\n\"Welcome,\" he said, standing, \"Your mother will be pleased to see you.\"\n\nHighly unlikely, unless there was something in it for her, but he didn't argue. \"I've heard there is a blue dragon as matriarch now. Is it she?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\nWhat does one say when you hear your mother has usurped a throne? 'Well done' seemed a bit bland. Instead he asked, \"And are you one of her liegemen?\"\n\n\"I am one of your mother's supporters, sir, as you well know.\"\n\n\"And are you here for a purpose, or did you happen to fly by?\"\n\n\"A bit of both, sir.\"\n\nImpatience had Lutapolii shuffle his feet and snap. \"How about you just tell me what you were sent to say. I'm just a bit busy and on a short time span. I don't want to spend time asking questions.\" He gathered his two kills together, ready to leave at a moment's notice. He scanned the sky. No sign of any other dragons about to join in the conversation. \"Hurry up lad, I'm not waiting about.\"\n\nThe young dragon flicked his broken tail with a flop and sighed. \"Firstly sir, I'd really like to learn how to catch seals. I've been admiring your skill from the cliff top where I happened to be resting, dreaming of catching these delicious treats.\" Saliva dripped from his jaws.\n\nWould Thaxtania be guarding the seal colony from poaching? Had another flight learned to catch them? He hoped not. This skill gave his flight a huge advantage which he hoped to maintain without a flock of dragons feasting on the colony.\n\n\"Sorry, I don't have time to teach you today, perhaps another time. It takes a lot of practice. Trouble is, if you learn then my mother will behave like Erebia did with Delphii and have you fishing from dawn to dark. Perhaps you would be wise to abandon the idea?\"\n\n\"With great respect, sir, I fully intend to learn, one day.\"\n\n\"Well it won't be today. Besides, you need to learn to swim first.\" If this were a request for tutoring then the youngster was wasting everyone's time. \"Anything else? Or I'm away west.\"\n\n\"Just that I will have to report seeing you and I imagine your mother will be hurt that you have not called on her and perhaps offer congratulations?\"\n\nLutapolii snorted, melting the blubber on the nearest seal, then a twinge of family loyalty tweaked his conscience and he pushed one of his seals aside.\n\n\"Here, take the smallest seal.\" He pushed it forward. \"Tell Mother she now has four grand-children, magnificent specimens who promise to grow into a fine flight of southern dragons. We are here for deer to supplement their feed. I am not hunting your forests, but those of Regius in the west. These seals are for him as tokens to feed his ego and hunt in the territory he claims as his. And I can't be bothered fighting him over that claim. Got that?\"\n\nThaxtania nodded. \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\"Oh, do stop calling me sir. 'Lutapolii' will do. You can tell Mother I am fishing here because my ladies are hungry and this colony has recovered from the old Queen's excesses. A few won't be missed.\"\n\n\"Thank you\u2026Lutapolii,\" Thaxtania beamed and nodded.\n\n\"Also tell Mother that the next time I come north I'll call on her with some seal treats.\" He stamped to the edge of the hill, \"And now I have to catch yet another damn seal.\" He yelled over his shoulder, \"Watch these for me will you? Back soon.\"\n\nA shoal of small fish had entered the bay and the seals were in a feeding frenzy. Catching a large one from the pack of swirling bodies took mere moments, his catch thudding on the grass as he dropped it just before he landed.\n\n\"Thank you.\" He pointed to the gift for his mother. \"Take this one to her, and a word to the wise; be very careful around my mother. She has the same family genes as Erebia. Power can easily go to their head.\" He had to guard against ideas of grandeur himself. \"Off you go now.\" He took a few moments to watch the young dragon lift off the ground with a heave and carry the seal into the air. Thaxtania's flight pattern looked erratic. The dragon's broken tail kept knocking him off course and the seal in his jaws weighed down his head, upsetting his trajectory but he earned Lutapolii's admiration for effort and determination. Perhaps he would make a good pupil sometime in the future, but not today."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "When Lutapolii arrived back at the clearing the seals had been removed by Regius' flight, but the small scout remained, waiting for the fifth.\n\n\"Here it is young fellow. Do you think you can manage it?\" Perhaps he should have offered him the other one? Too late now. His ladies were already snapping it into pieces.\n\nThe scout stood as tall as he could manage. \"Of course, home is not far from here.\"\n\nAha\u2026 A piece of information let slip.\n\n\"I suppose those few seals will only feed Regius' immediate family and you won't get any.\" Silence. He grabbed the last piece of the spare kill from the grass as his ladies munched, their jaws overflowing, then held out the juicy dripping lump. \"You'd better have a bit of this. Get your strength up, can't have you missing out.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Very kind,\" the scout said and gulped it down. \"I'd better go before they send someone to look for me.\" He wiped his snout clean on the grass before he grasped the seal in his claws and stretched his pale lime-gold wings, then paused instead of lifting into the air, appearing to think for a moment. He dragged the seal in a side-shuffle getting closer to Lutapolii, then whispered, \"We're only a small flight, sir. Not more than fifteen dragons in total. We do hunt around here, but there are wider and much richer plains further west. If I were larger and stronger I would hunt in that direction.\" With that the scout rose, flapping madly, rising and sinking before he lifted over the trees, the seal slipping and sliding between his claws. The size of the bull seal nearly pulled the scout earthward; a good effort for such a small dragon.\n\nLutapolii wished he'd given him two lumps of seal meat. The flight numbers and hunting information he'd passed on were worth it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "By their fifth trip his flight had a pattern established. They knew the areas the deer grazed, where they hid and the best places to catch them unawares. This time only Lutapolii, Megonii and Delphii arrived at the hunting ground. Crisantii and Raffettii had stayed behind to act as nursery mothers while Venestia feasted on fish and caught up on sleep. Luta thought three large deer would be enough to take back because the young were now more interested in eating southern fare.\n\nThey caught two bucks and he and Megonii left Delphii to mind the kills while they searched for the third catch. On the horizon he could see Megonii quartering above a likely area. By her flight pattern he assumed she was following a herd at a distance. Having no luck below he headed back toward the clearing which they'd chosen today to stockpile the meat in. His attention was caught by a pantomime below. Delphii paced the clearing, flapping her wings and hissing. Moving around her were two bear cubs, ducking under her wings, taking turns to try and haul away a leg of the kill, always managing to get a mouthful with each dash, before she could scare them away. She should've flamed then, but he understood why she didn't. The cubs were young and probably still nursing. Delphii had a tender heart. Why kill another creature, especially ones so young?\n\nHe smiled at the scene below and was about to wheel away, satisfied Delphii was in control, when he saw the mother bear burst out of the tree line behind his dragoness and head in a lolloping run toward her. The bear looked to be moving slowly yet was covering the ground in long strides and still Delphii hadn't noticed.\n\nLutapolii dived, his wings tucked tight, roaring yet withholding his fire.\n\n\"Behind you, Delphii. A bear!\" he shouted, knowing she wouldn't hear him from this height, daring to hope she would hear him mentally. The bear ran closer. He dived as fast as he could until just above the bear he dropped his wings and pushed his legs forward, his feet open wide. It looked to be a three-way collision course.\n\nDelphii turned at last, the noise of both of them approaching finally dragging her attention from the cubs. She wheeled and tried to rise. The bear reared to slice her, its paws huge, the claws extended. All this Lutapolii saw as his feet hit the side of the bear, pushing her over and tumbling her away from his dragoness.\n\nDelphii rose unscathed and joined him in the air above the bear family, now reunited. The mother bear walked around on her hind legs, threatening them, roaring at the sky. Her growls bounced off the trees as she turned, fury driven, until she finally hit the ground with a thud. She stood over the kill, tearing pieces off for the cubs, raising her head at intervals to shout her rage at the circling dragons.\n\n\"You heard me?\" Lutapolii circled, checking Delphii's body for rips or blood.\n\n\"I did. Your voice yelling in my head.\" She stalled and hovered beside him. \"I didn't want to hurt the cubs. They looked so cute, like bundles of fluff but I should have known their mother would be close by because they were so young.\"\n\n\"It was a close call,\" he said. \"If I hadn't returned you could have been ripped to pieces and unable to fly. Then you would have been grounded, possibly forever.\"\n\nDelphii shuddered. \"What do we do now?\" They flew higher and circled.\n\n\"We leave the kill to the bears. They'll probably stay there until it's all gone and now that the scent of our kills is in the ground she will hang around. She may have to fight off other claimants and I don't fancy her creeping up on us if we try to retrieve a carcass.\" He headed toward where he'd last seen his other dragonesses. \"We'll find Megonii. Catch another deer and you two should head home. It's time I sought out another hunting ground, hopefully where the game is thicker.\"\n\nWithin the hour they'd killed two more deer and Lutapolii watched as the silhouettes of his two dragonesses disappeared into the distance, their kills dangling. They could stop and rest overnight if they needed. At least they were out of harm's way. He had no need to worry about their safety flying home. They'd made the trip now many times and had sorted several rest stops. He'd join them tomorrow or the next day depending on the success of his search for new grounds. But first, he had a duty to perform.\n\nHis conscience had got the better of him. With a warm afternoon ahead he flew to his childhood territory until he arrived at the northern seal colony where he plucked a seal from the waves, as the promised gift to his mother.\n\nFrom the air his first glimpse of the Queen's lair brought back memories of inadequacy and sadness; the verbal lashings by Erebia and the laughter of the other dragons at his puny size and pale color. Not so now. He flew through the deep ravines, passing the caves of the northern lair and approached the wide entrance, reluctance slowing his wing beats. It looked like a black maw into which he could be swallowed. Silly to feel that way. Here he was, a full-grown dragon with a bevy of ladies and a family, suffering the feelings of a gauche youngster.\n\nWith two slow flaps he landed on the wide ledge. The cave's entrance was guarded by two small bronze dragons, already puffing smoke and spreading their wings.\n\n\"Easy there. I've come to see my mother.\" He swung the fat seal in a circle, acting as nonchalantly as he could, ignoring the squeamish stirrings in his gut.\n\nThe guards stopped advancing and stood still, their smoke reduced to a few wispy grey circles and the occasional sparking cinder clattered to the rock floor from their jaws. Up close Lutapolii could see they were still learning to get their fire under control. More bluff and bluster than actual threat he decided, but an untrained dragon could be dangerous.\n\n\"Is she home?\" Silly question really, why else would they be on guard. But then again anything could have happened in the time he'd spent hunting for deer to feed his family. Plus, his mother could have been unseated by another ambitious dragoness, if one dared. \"I'll just pop in and see her. I've brought her a present.\" He lifted the seal displaying it to the guards like a gift, then thought better of it and swung it down to dangle from one of his large clawed hands. Mustn't make too much of a drama out of it. His back twitched and his spine ridge tingled as he walked along the tunnel but the guards stayed in place and didn't follow him down the corridor. The rock ceiling seemed lower than he remembered. He must have gained more height.\n\n\"Hello, Mother,\" he called in a cheerful tone hoping to improve any dyspeptic mood she may be in. \"As promised I've arrived with a nice juicy seal for you.\"\n\n\"About time.\" His mother reclined on a raised rock ledge, her blue scales gleaming in the light from the fire flares on the wall. \"You told Thaxtania you would visit, but ages have passed since then. I presumed you'd gone back on your word, as usual.\"\n\nThat comment wouldn't earn her a twined neck or a friendly hum. \"When have I ever gone back on my word?\" He dropped the seal on the floor, leaned back on his tail and held his arms wide, wings open, one leg casually crossed over the other. \"I've been rather busy raising our young, all four of them.\"\n\nSabolotii slid off her rock couch, her gaze fixed on the seal. He'd lost her attention already. She picked the seal up, carried it back to her seat and proceeded to munch her way through the treat with indecent haste.\n\n\"It's dead, Mother. It won't run away.\"\n\n\"Don't be rude, Luta. Just because you eat them all the time doesn't mean you can deny me the pleasure of instant gratification.\" She wiped her snout with her hand and licked her claws clean. \"Delicious\u2026and possibly worth the wait.\"\n\nShe waved her hand at a small dragon standing against the wall and it hurried forward, bundling up the remaining bones and taking them away, no doubt to munch on. Probably the only perk available when serving his mother.\n\nHe didn't really have anything to say to this regal blue dragon who purported to be his mother yet only acknowledged a familial connection if it suited her. \"Enjoying being the Queen, Mother?\"\n\n\"It's not easy.\" A belch escaped and she searched around the floor looking for scraps she may have missed, mumbling and whining. \"All the petty arguments I'm expected to settle; dragons wanting mates and having to keep track of who is related to whom. They demand bigger living quarters, different caves because they don't like the neighbors and always\u2026\" Here she paused in her search and stared at him. \"Always they want to know how to catch seals.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, it's quite an art.\"\n\nSabolotii opened her snout to answer, bits of blood and bone dropping on the floor.\n\nBut Lutapolii spoke first. \"I know it looks easy, Mother, but it took me many months and lots of injuries before I mastered it. I'd never have survived that first winter if I hadn't been able to swim and fish. No-one taught me. I taught myself.\"\n\nShe reclaimed her couch. \"I want you to teach some of my young dragons, Luta. There have been too many drowning. We have this huge seal colony on our coastline which I note you have been fishing on a regular basis, and a few lessons are the least you can do in return.\"\n\n\"It's ridiculous to expect us to carry seals from the south to give to Regius. He demands tokens when we hunt.\" Lutapolii snorted, his irritation at her demands driving smoke from his nostrils.\n\n\"He's very greedy. It runs in his family. I knew his father.\"\n\n\"I could fight him over it but I dislike violence and besides the colony is thriving now that Erebia's excesses have ceased.\" He moved closer and whispered. \"Where is she? Do you know?\"\n\n\"No idea but she's not here anymore.\" His mother shuffled about on the rock ledge as if trying to get comfortable.\n\n\"How did you get rid of her?\" He needed to know if the ex-queen had been injured, killed or bloodlessly unseated. Erebia had a nasty temper and a long memory. She was probably still cross with him for enticing four young dragonesses from her flight.\n\n\"A drink,\" his mother demanded and the small dragon who'd returned now scuttled off down the passage. In the solitude she muttered, \"We starved her out, as you suggested.\"\n\nHe had to lean closer to hear.\n\n\"It took a few days and then she came to the entrance and began to shout and scream. No one brought her food. I'd canvassed the flight and they stood their ground despite her threats. Eventually she had to fly off and look for food.\" A sneer crept around his mother's jaws. \"That's when I moved in. When she returned she couldn't land. I had the ledge full of guards.\"\n\nIt would have been a sight to behold. \"I bet she was furious,\" Lutapolii said. \"Flaming mad in fact.\"\n\n\"She'd been lazy and let her fire go out but she roared and hissed an awful lot.\" His mother smirked at the memory and sniggered. \"I told her, from behind the line of guards of course, that we were tired of her bullying and irrational behavior, and I'd been elected in her absence.\"\n\n\"And do you go hunting still, Mother? Or do you too yell for food.\"\n\nHe watched his mother scratch her chest and look at the ceiling, and then she asked, \"How are my grandchildren? What are they and have you named them yet?\"\n\nOn safer ground he had to restrain his enthusiasm for his children. \"Two males, two females, all magnificent. They're now taking their first flights within the lair and no, as yet we haven't named them. I'm leaving the choice to their mothers, but have asked that their names begin with the same initial as their mothers. I want their lineage to be easy to follow.\" Pride burned in his throat and he had to swallow hard to prevent flames escaping in this cramped space.\n\n\"Mmmm.\" She appeared to have lost interest in his family. \"And how long are we to be graced with your presence?\"\n\n\"Only hours, Mother. My ladies have already left for home with the hunt and I will follow them shortly.\" The least she knew of his intentions the better.\n\n\"That's not good enough, Luta. I don't see you for seasons on end and then you visit for a few hours.\"\n\nHe refused to apologize or change his plans. Why did she always make him feel guilty? \"Would it ease your pain if I caught you another seal?\" Bribery had its place. \"You could watch me and eat the kill while it's still warm.\" That should tempt her to leave the throne room. He watched greed fight security as her thoughts flitted across her face.\n\n\"Good idea. I'll bring Thaxtania with me.\"\n\nLike a grand procession they left the throne room, his mother's arm resting on his with Thaxtania, hastily summoned from distant quarters, leading their progress. The servant scurrying back with a container of water was given a regal flick of dismissal as they moved toward the cave's entrance. Sabolotii's attitude of grandeur had increased with her new position; from arrogant mother to haughty Queen mother. Not an improvement in Lutapolii's opinion.\n\nOn the rocks beside the sea while Sabolotii began on her second seal in as many minutes, Lutapolii took Thaxtania aside.\n\n\"If you want to learn to swim you have to remember two important things.\"\n\nThe young dragon nodded, his gaze fixed on Lutapolii. So intense was his stare that Lutapolii wondered why this young dragon regarded him in such awe. \"It's not hard if you remember to hold your nostrils shut at all times. This requires you learning to hold your breath when you swim underwater. Practice this first.\"\n\nAnother nod of agreement from Thaxtania.\n\n\"Secondly, if you swim among the fish for long enough they will get used to you and you'll be able to snatch one or two. This is good training because it is imperative, when you snap, that you remember to breathe out through your mouth. You don't want to swallow sea water and put your fire out or worse still, drown.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\"Lutapolii, not 'sir'.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lutapolii. I'll practice hard.\" His enthusiasm certainly sounded genuine and Lutapolii was moved to give more advice.\n\n\"You'll need to keep your wings tucked in and you're going to have trouble with your broken tail.\" Lutapolii paused, \"I'm sorry that happened. The dispute was not of your making. Swimming would be easier if you had a strong tail, but if you study sharks and how they move, it will give you an idea of how to propel yourself.\" Lutapolii looked around. \"I haven't seen many sharks here. Don't they fish the colony?\"\n\n\"Only when the cubs venture out. We don't see many large sharks and the bull seals attack and eat the smaller ones.\" Thaxtania gazed seaward, a wistful look about him. \"I've been studying the sea life here for quite a while now.\"\n\n\"Good luck then. Learning the intricacies of diving for seals comes after you've learned to swim.\" Lutapolii surveyed the sky. Clear of cloud banks foreboding bad weather the horizon in every direction sparkled, an azure canopy with balls of white fluff reminiscent of southern skies. He longed to leave. \"I'm going now before Mother demands another snack.\"\n\n\"Hardly likely, sir, she has three more to go yet.\"\n\nLuta grabbed the opportunity and rose in a vertical leap. \"Goodbye Mother,\" he said as he leapt.\n\nNo reply, probably because her mouth was full.\n\nSeveral strong beats and he soared away, heading westward. He would take the small scout's hint and fly further west to find fresh hunting grounds. Far enough westward to where he hoped the deer herds were unaware of dragons diving out of the sky and scorching the forests.\n\nHe flew until impending darkness and a rocky outcrop invited him to stop for the night. An owl hooted and in the dusk he watched the night hunter float soundlessly past. Owls were said to be omens of impending bad luck. What nonsense.\n\nThen another 'to-whoo' reached him and an answering call was heard\u2014a second owl's outline cast a shadow across the rising moon.\n\nA shard of ice settled in his chest. Double bad luck? He shook himself, ridding his chest of the cold grip around his heart. What superstitious nonsense. Just owls doing what owls do at night, but he didn't go to sleep for a long time, jumping at every strange noise, until weariness settled over him like a blanket forcing his eyelids closed and his mind to rest.\n\nEarly the next morning he flew farther than he'd even been before, reveling in the wide expanse of grassland dotted with trees and alive with game, many new creatures previously unknown to him. He saw animals with striped coats and furry beasts with young, smaller and quicker than bears but possibly as dangerous. He decided to stick to what he knew and ranged the sky until he found deer. There were several young stags and having come this far he decided to take a decent sized beast home. Smaller animals scurried when his shadow crossed over them but the deer continued to graze, perhaps mistaking him for a cloud.\n\nHe dived and grabbed his prey with his talons. His weight forced it to the ground and he broke its neck with a quick twist. His biggest kill yet. The antlers on this stag were magnificent and he decided to leave the carcass intact. Surely the spikes would be useful in the southern lair. He'd noticed the flame flares in the Queen's cave were held by antlers such as these. Now all he had to do was fly south-south-west. Eventually he'd surely fly over landmarks he knew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The weight of the stag dragged on his legs threatening to pull the claws from his feet. He'd have to break the journey home. Taking the whole beast in one flight had seemed such an obvious solution but the expanse of sea below him grew wider with each wing beat. As he neared what he thought must be the halfway point in his flight the lush landmass below tempted him to rest.\n\nHe flew lower, scanning for a good place to land, somewhere to pause for a few hours. He'd snack on part of the stag, which would achieve two things. He'd be energized by the high protein and the load on his feet would also be lightened, even if the weight had moved into his stomach.\n\nA wide stretch of beach beckoned, lined with tall trees, topped with fanned branches. As a bonus he saw a stream flowed into a sheltered bay. He veered inland a little to a grassed expanse by the stream, noting the scattered logs that lay along the river's edge. A recent storm must have brought them down from the mountains behind the coast.\n\nHe dropped the stag's carcass close to the stream's edge then landed beside it. His hunger drove him to immediately feast on the flesh. With his attention fully on his meal he didn't hear the approaching creature until the sound of its final rush through the long grass caught his attention. He whirled, but not fast enough to avoid the attack. As he turned, his wings wide in defense, the beast's teeth caught the end of his wing and tore the membrane to shreds. Its clamped jaw also broke the wing's final joint spar.\n\nShock delayed the pain he knew would follow. Rage rose up his throat and his flames scorched the creature that held him. It opened its maw and he saw its full potential. Huge teeth lined each side of the snout; a killing machine on four squat legs with a thrashing tail that stirred the river bank to mud. It backed away from his fire.\n\nThe creature had scales like he did. Its long tail flicked sideways, also like his. Multiple small ridges of spikes ran from its head to tail; not one proud row like he had. But the similarities didn't stop Lutapolii attacking the beast. This could be a fight to the death and a battle he had to win. The lizard thing must have been attracted by the smell of the deer and despite its initial scorching it advanced again, its head swaying side to side, its jaws snapping in defiance.\n\nPain tore through Lutapolii's brain, enough to break into his thoughts and overwhelm any consideration of a species link to this animal. He raised his wings, the torn end fluttering and hindering his lift, but he had enough wing-span intact to gain height and avoid the lunge. The impudence, the cheek, the audacity of the creature, to attack him: Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South. He flamed it to death, sizzling its length until it stopped writhing, without one merciful thought for the creature's own drive for survival. Its ugliness stifled any empathy he may have otherwise felt.\n\nLeaving his deer meat to one side he tore into the large cooked lizard, devouring everything except the head and the teeth therein. A tasty meal, if a little salty. Replete, he thought to sleep but another short hop into the air and he saw more lizards on their way downstream. He presumed the smell of both dead animals had attracted them. Before he could rest he'd need to carry the stag into the trees and secure it high above the reach of these cursed creatures. Then he'd need to find somewhere to rest, safe from ground attack.\n\nHis heart constricted as the reality of his situation sunk in. Through the red throbbing pain of his injured wing he realized he would be here for a while. Until he healed he was a prisoner on this strip of lush land.\n\nHe ignored the agony in his wing tip as he hauled the stag into the air above the closest trees, dropping it into the top of the tallest one. It bounced, but balanced and held; his food supply guaranteed for a few days. By then he hoped to be able to catch fish well away from the lizards that lay in the water like dead trees.\n\nNow he needed to find a high hill to rest on and with slow uneven beats, one wing dragging, he flew inland to a rocky promontory that promised safe haven.\n\nWhat a day. What a terrible error of judgment just when he thought he had life sorted. As he stretched out on a ledge, the late afternoon sun warmed his tired body, and with his injured wing spread out as far as he could manage he pictured his wives' reaction when he failed to return.\n\nMegonii would lead them. He knew this in his heart. Always the strongest and bravest, she would make the decisions. The flight would revert to matriarchal rule until he returned\u2026if he ever returned. He should have heeded the owls' warning.\n\nThe pain ebbed and flowed in waves along his wing. It dug in his mind like the sharp end of the deer's antlers he'd coveted. If he'd only carried half the beast this never would have happened, but which half? He tried to rationalize his decision to carry the whole kill. Any other decision might have changed his present situation. Definitely double bad luck.\n\nAs the sun dipped below the horizon he dozed, stirring and moaning when he moved his wing in his sleep. He was woken by the pain and remembered where he was, falling once more into a mood where sadness made the world black and only sleep helped him forget.\n\nFoolish Lutapolii, stupid Lutapolii, arrogant Lutapolii. His mother had called him all these things. He'd proved her wrong before and he would do so again. He shook his head, unable to believe his own stupidity. Would his wing-tip heal or grow septic? He knew his strong and beautiful ladies would think he had been killed and would struggle through their grief. But how long would they last before they abandoned the southern lair and returned north?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "From the top entrance to the lair Megonii listened to her flight sisters' keening.\n\n\"He's not coming back,\" Cristanii wailed.\n\n\"He's dead. He must be dead.\" Raffettii hadn't eaten a decent meal for three days and her white scales had dulled. A patina of grief covered her normally vibrant body.\n\n\"He's too clever to be dead,\" Delphii said, \"I won't believe it until I see his carcass.\"\n\n\"Don't say that word,\" Raffettii pleaded, dropping the bone she'd been cracking and turning away.\n\nMegonii dropped down from the top lair entrance and landed in the middle of the floor. \"Oh, shut up all of you. He's not dead, I'd know if he were. He's caught somewhere but he's alive.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Crisantii sniffled. Tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed on the rock floor. Megonii watched but the tears didn't turn into diamonds as the legends said.\n\n\"Because I can sometimes hear what he's thinking and at the moment I feel he's alive but injured and very cross and sad.\" She looked around at her flight sisters, dismayed at the way their emotions were causing the hatchlings to wail. \"Stop this keening. It's not doing the youngsters any good. They are sensitive to our emotions and they know we're upset.\" She paced, waiting for the snuffling to stop. \"Our biggest problem now is how to continue feeding the hatchlings deer meat without Luta's help. We have depended on his strength to carry the extra kill home each time and without his arrival we'll be short of deer protein again in a few days. I have an idea but executing it may not be possible.\"\n\nVenestia, calm as always, rose from the hot pool and stood beside her. \"Whatever you decide, I'll support you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Venestia. I appreciate your vote of confidence. Someone has to think logically in this crisis.\" Megonii walked the circle, humming and rubbing snouts with the others; an apology for shouting at them. Then she returned to address them. \"I think we should take the youngsters north with us. It's time they saw more of the world. Time to widen their horizons from the southern barren tundra to the richness of the northern climate.\" She overrode the gasps from the other three mothers. \"It would save the long hours flying between the continents and yes, I know they can't fly that far.\" She paused for effect, hoping they would agree with her plan. \"Remember how Lutapolii brought Venestia here?\"\n\nHer flight sisters and Venestia nodded. Megonii noted she had their full attention, their gaze locked with hers. Expectation lifted their heads and hope glistened in their eyes. A better sight than the drooping snouts she'd seen over the past few days. She hurried on.\n\n\"We can carry them there. They can all fly enough to glide and should any of them slip off we can dive and rescue them. I truly think they are all intelligent and developed enough to hang on for the flight.\" None of her flight sisters objected and no dragoness would admit her infant was not smart enough to survive the trip; something Megonii had banked on to get her idea accepted. \"We may have to stop briefly on the way north, but once we reach the northern continent we can rest and travel farther inland the next day.\"\n\nRaffettii and Crisantii nodded their agreement.\n\n\"What's the problem? Sounds like a good plan to me,\" said Delphii. \"Where's the flaw?\"\n\n\"We need a lair to keep them safe\u2013from bears, the scavengers who steal our deer carcasses and other dragon flights who might decide to kill them.\"\n\nCrisantii wailed and Megonii snapped at her. \"Stop that. Help me with this. I didn't say they would be killed but we have to cover all eventualities. We don't have Luta to defend us.\"\n\nSilence spread through the lair. The hatchlings settled and only the wind howled past the top entrance.\n\nMegonii continued in a quieter tone. \"The ledge we use at present is not large enough for all of us. We'll need to look for a more comfortable shelter, at best a cave. And we need to do it as soon as we arrive in the north.\"\n\n\"I can't come with you,\" Venestia said. \"I can't fly that far and there is no-one left to carry me.\" Megonii had dreaded this moment, knowing full well Venestia would be left behind.\n\n\"But if a cave is all you need,\" Venestia added, \"then I have the answer. I know of a set of caves that would do. They're on the most northern tip of the continent, by the wild sea.\"\n\nThe four dragonesses stared at her. \"How do you know about them, Mother?\" Delphii said.\n\nVenestia grinned, her yellow teeth exposed like a row of sulphur spikes. \"Because I grew up in a small flight at the western end of Hook Bay. Eventually our flight joined Erebia's community because it was a struggle on our own, just the five families.\" She scratched her ears with a hind leg seeming to enjoy being the centre of attention, and continued. \"It made sense because we had many youngsters growing older and no choice of partners without inbreeding.\" She sat back on her haunches, one front foreleg raised to make a point. \"The caves will still be there, albeit a bit grubby and you might have to chase out nesting seabirds, but when I visited last, no dragons had taken up residence.\"\n\n\"Sounds wonderful.\" Megonii leaned over and wrapped Venestia with one wing. \"You are a marvel the way you solve our problems.\"\n\n\"But how will we find the caves if you can't come with us?\" Raffettii's comment created another silence.\n\n\"I can tell you some of the flight marks that are nearby,\" said Venestia, \"but they may have been changed by fire and sea storms.\"\n\n\"Land stays much the same doesn't it?\" Cristanii commented as the elderly dragoness paced around in a circle, mumbling to herself while the others watched.\n\nEventually Venestia hurried to a far corner and came back carrying a broken thigh bone from the last meal of deer they'd shared. \"I'll draw what I remember it looked like from the air.\" She strode to the lair's rock wall and began to scratch with the sharp tip of the broken bone.\n\n\"Like they write names on the Memorial Wall?\" Crisantii murmured and snuffled.\n\n\"We are not writing Lutapolii's name on the wall, Crisantii.\" Megonii inhaled, keeping reign on her temper. \"We're going to draw a map. Stop it, or I shall leave you and your hatchling here with Venestia.\"\n\nThe dragonesses crowded around as Venestia stood in front of the lair wall beside the hatchlings nest, pausing every few moments before she added another mark. Only the scritching of the bone along the rock, along with the popping of the bubbles in the hot pool, broke the silence. The soft breathing of the dragonesses accompanied Venestia as she made deep wriggly lines, then drew streaks in another area where the wall's surface turned to dirt. The drawing grew and she kept going back adding details until a picture emerged.\n\nFinally she used the bone to point out the landmarks. \"This is the northern seal colony. The coast goes up a long way to where several islands sit off the coast, then it turns westward.\" She followed the coastline with the bone's tip. \"Here is a peninsular that forms a hook and shelters a large bay from the wild sea.\"\n\nMegonii could understand the drawing. From the seal colony northward it was an aerial view of the land. Such a clever idea.\n\n\"This is Hook Bay,\" Venestia said, pointing the bone. \"In high seas the fish get trapped in the rocks, but you can all swim so that doesn't really matter.\"\n\n\"But the youngsters could play there and learn to fish,\" Raffettii said.\n\n\"Yes, we used to do that.\" Venestia tripped the point along the wandering line to where she'd added another headland into the wild sea. \"On the eastern side of this point are the caves. They are high in the cliffs and had trees below and above them when I was young. You may have to search through the branches to find them. Some trees will have aged and fallen down and others will have grown afresh. I haven't been there for more seasons than I can count.\"\n\nDelphii, Cristanii and Raffettii crowded around Venestia, studying the map while Megonii searched in the far corner of the lair, tipping bones out of the deer skin.\n\n\"Venestia, can you draw it again but smaller by scratching it on this piece of hide with a charcoal stick?\"\n\n\"I can try. Why?\"\n\n\"Because I want to take it with us, in case our memories clash and we disagree on the landmarks.\"\n\n\"Hook Bay will be easy to see from the air.\" Venestia set to, while Megonii considered the use of deer hides as floor coverings when they located the caves. There wouldn't be any heated floor in the abandoned caves and the deer hides could be useful. She'd visit their bone dump later and see how the previous discarded hides had weathered in the sun and wind. It would show her whether it was worth keeping them in the future.\n\nIn celebration of their plan she popped out through the underwater tunnel and caught five crunchies, one each for the grownups. As she handed them around she said, \"Until Lutapolii returns I'm in charge.\" She paused. Only the cracking of the crunchies' shells reached her ears. \"For now, this flight has reverted to matriarchal rule. Does anyone object or want to take on the position?\"\n\nShe heard four mumbled 'no's' through the munching of their delicious treats.\n\nThe next day they taught the hatchlings how to crouch on their mother's shoulders between their wings. Once balanced the hatchlings were taken on flights within the lair. By afternoon the dragonesses had their youngsters outside in the big wide world for the first time. With their claws digging into their mother's scales they hung on with their lives at stake. Not one fell off, though all of them cried and keened about the whole experience. Once returned to the lair the four next-dragons curled together and slept.\n\n\"Don't forget, one of you will have to be with them at all times,\" Venestia commanded, \"Otherwise they might wander out to the edge of the caves and drop off.\" The mothers all groaned. \"You will only need to do this for one more phase of the moon. By then their gut will be mature enough to survive on our rich southern diet.\"\n\n\"Great, then we can all come home and stop this crazy routine,\" Delphii said.\n\n\"Perhaps we can make the occasional flight for deer meat?\" Raffettii's voice had a wheedling tone and Megonii nodded for she too would miss the red protein.\n\n\"No reason why you can't make a trip yourself,\" she suggested.\n\nA worried look crossed the white dragoness' face.\n\n\"Luta is bound to be home by then,\" Megonii added, hoping to sooth Raffettii's concern.\n\n\"I hope so. I couldn't do it alone,\" Raffettii said, and hung her head. \"I miss him so,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"We all do, but we have to carry on until he comes back.\" She added a cheerful note to her voice. \"Time now to feed and rest, because tomorrow we go north.\"\n\nBefore they settled Megonii took Venestia aside. \"Will you be all right here, alone? It worries me.\"\n\n\"I'll be just fine. Lots to eat and nothing else to do. I'll rest my old bones and improve my swimming. I can snack on fish until you all return.\"\n\nMegonii's tension drained away as it trickled down her spine and out of her feet. Another worry put aside. Now she could sleep.\n\n\"Besides,\" added Venestia, \"Someone has to be here in case Lutapolii comes home. Imagine him arriving to an empty lair? He'd be grief stricken thinking you had all abandoned him.\"\n\nOf course, someone had to be here, because he would return. Even now Megonii felt he may be closer to home than a week ago. She couldn't say why this feeling persisted, it just did."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Lutapolii lost track of the number of days but as they passed he took short flights to strengthen his torn wing tip. The rips in the membrane allowed the wind through and it affected his ability to stay level. Always he ended up on an angle, the injured wing lower than the other. Today, as he skimmed over a part of the coast line he hadn't visited before a shape near the sea's edge caught his attention. He flew lower and saw a large creature being herded further into the shallow by four sharks.\n\nWhat was it? It floundered in the sea and its large tail fluke beat the water as if it were trying to keep the sharks at a distance. But they nipped in between beats, taking chunks out of the creature and already thin trails of blood were leaking into the water. Damn sharks. He loathed the butchery of their feeding habits. His anger drove him to swoop lower, skimming the water's surface until the spray splashed his face. Careful to keep his shadow behind them he sneaked up behind the sharks. Whatever this creature was, and he'd never seen anything this big before, it didn't deserve to be hounded and bitten slowly to death. He imagined its tail would be hurting like his wing tip had at the time the lizard bit it.\n\nHe entered the water behind the sharks, aiming for the nearest. A mournful cry filled his senses, musical but sad. Similar to the songs he sang when he mated, but this had the high tone of a youngster in distress.\n\nThis creature could sing.\n\nThe cry tore at his nerve ends and twisted his gut. The emotion that swamped him reminded him of how he felt when he looked at his young. It triggered a parental response that overrode the danger of him swimming amongst a pack of sharks.\n\nForgetting his injury he snaked his tail from side to side with all his power and cut through the water to snap onto the nearest shark's tail. Up out of the sea he streaked, the shark dangling, its razor teeth well away from his body. He twirled it, heard its tail snap, tore its flesh with his back claws then threw the shark down onto the sea's surface. No time to strand it on land to eat later. He heard the shark hit the sea's surface with a slap as he dived again in search of the next shark. Snap, up from the water, swing, flip, crack and throw. Another shark fell into the sea.\n\nTwo down. The remaining pair now circled the beast. Had they realized their number had halved? This time he approached from the front of the beast and as he sped through the water the large eye of the hounded creature stared at him as he streaked past. Its bellow of despair clenched his heart like a fist.\n\n\"Just hang on. I'm doing my best.\" He threw his thoughts, doubting it would make any difference but his instinct to save the animal overrode all else.\n\nAs one of the remaining sharks lazily turned and presented its tail Lutapolii snapped and rose out of the sea once more. Within a minute the third shark had joined the previous two. The first catch bled from its torn tail and the other two mauled it, tearing chunks from the stricken shark. Blood pooled, surged and pinked the surf. Soon a feeding frenzy would erupt and more sharks could be drawn to the area.\n\nLutapolii scanned the sea. The fourth shark had abandoned harrying the creature, heading instead to the easier meal, now being torn apart by its previous accomplices.\n\nHe needed to get the young creature out of the shallows. Below him the color of the sea changed where the sandy ocean floor became a deep blue where it dropped away over an underwater cliff. The creature could easily get stranded in the shallow water. From its size alone it must belong in the deep ocean.\n\nHe glided low and dipped into the sea close to the creature's head. Almost half his size, its smooth black surface shone as the water ran off its back. Again its cries carried through the water, twisting his gut. He'd only ever sung in joy during mating but now he sang softer notes, arpeggios of full tones, rounded and on key. He hoped to calm the creature as he nudged its side, pushing hard against its flank. When it turned away from the shore he sang stronger, his head above the water, his forearms against the creatures smooth, soft skin, he pushed and shoved. It took all his strength and his tail ached from paddling sideways, forcing the youngster further into the ocean, refusing to let it stop or turn back toward the surf. Their combined voices bounced on the sea's surface creating an echo above and below the waves, mingling with the fizz of the water and bursts of air the creature blew from the hole in the top of its head.\n\nAt last it stopped thrashing and moved with soft undulation, edging further from the shore until Lutapolii decided he could stop pushing and let it swim away. He edged away from the wake the creature created, its tail occasionally breaking the surface, until he could safely rise above the sea to check they were both safe. The sun warmed his back and relief surged through him when he saw they'd left the sharks well behind. Three black shapes now circled under a pink stain and a gaggle of sea birds fought over bits of flesh and gut on the surface.\n\nLutapolii wheeled to return to his rescued youngster when its song reached him in the air and hit him like a spear. Surely his efforts hadn't been in vain? The youngster hovered on the edge of the underwater cliff. It rose and sank along the surface, singing sadness. The notes called him back. Unable to resist he flew down, replied with trilling scales of encouragement and swam close, prepared to return to his task of pushing the creature once more.\n\nFear gripped him as the water foamed nearby and from the deep burst the biggest animal he might ever imagine. Bigger than the mightiest dragon this creature's head alone blocked out the horizon and the sun. For the first time in many a season Luta felt small. If this large shape attacked he would admit defeat and leave the youngster to its fate. He kept the youngster between himself and the new monster. It dwarfed them both.\n\nAnother song filled the air. An aria of hope and love, it caused a wave of longing within Lutapolii. Damn his injured wing. How he wished to be home. This song said it all: joy, relief and love. At that moment he realized his creature had to be the young of the larger beast. Only a parent could express such emotion.\n\nHe joined in, unable to resist, singing descant to the rich bass and warbling trill of the young one. After days of loneliness the huge creature's song enveloped him and healed his depression.\n\nLutapolii sang a song of triumph. He'd done something great. If he couldn't be home to protect his flight, safeguard his hatchlings and love his wives, at least he had saved another creature's child. Perhaps soon he'd be strong enough to make the flight home.\n\nThe youngster's voice pitched up in a riff and out of Luta's hearing range, clicking sounds bounced up from the sand then ceased as the pair moved over the deep water chasm.\n\nThe massive beast churned the sea and rose out of the water seeming to stand on its tail. It towered above him and he leapt skyward, avoiding the bulk, sure it would crush him if it fell. Instead it appeared to walk backward on its tail, then fell sideways, slapping the water with a bang that travelled deep into the trench and echoed back. Again and again, like a dance of delight it slapped the sea's surface. Despite its huge size it never came close to hitting the youngster.\n\nWhen the display finished Lutapolii returned to the sea, to swim nearby, fascinated by the music the creatures exchanged.\n\nThank you small creature. My daughter tells me you drove off sharks and saved her life. She had prepared to die but you pushed her out to meet me.\n\nThe mother's voice rang in Lutapolii's head. His ears registered music yet his mind interpreted the notes.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Wonder made his voice crack and he asked again, \"What are you?\"\n\nI am a whale. This is my calf. We are on our way south from the northern waters where we breed. Now we go home to feast on krill and hunt squid.\n\nShe turned her huge bulk and stared at him, her huge eye as large as his head alone. He had no idea what krill or squid were but this creature claimed to be a whale.\n\nA hundred times bigger than a seal and it could talk. Well, it could talk to him, probably because dragons could sing, like whales. He'd saved a young whale.\n\nBut what are you?\n\nThe question, a deep boom, bounced in Luta's brain. I am Lutapolii, White Dragon of the South, he thought, mentally shouting and hoped it would hear. It was hard to swim and look majestic all at the same time so he took to the air and circled. I too live in the south but when I rested here I was attacked by a vicious large lizard with hundreds of teeth. He ripped my wing before I killed him. My wing is healing. He soared in a large circle as the whale turned beneath him, following his path. I'm taking short flights to strengthen my wing and today I saw your daughter in danger. I too have young at home.\n\nDid she hear him? He'd replied in his head, not by song. Would it work?\n\nI understand. A crocodile caught you. They live on the land in this part of the world and sometimes swim in the sea. They will attack anything that goes close to the shore. My daughter knows this, but sharks too are a constant threat to our young.\n\nWe southern dragons eat sharks. I know how to kill them.\n\nI'm grateful for your skill. I need food to nurse her and she cannot dive yet. I thought she would be safe while I fed in the deep trench.\n\nHe returned to the sea's surface and the whale circled him, a wide slow turn. He turned as she turned, keeping eye contact, fascinated with her smooth bulk, marked here and there by long white scars; a gentle giant of a mother.\n\nI would like to repay you, small dragon. If you cannot fly I can give you a ride south. Would that help you get to your home?\n\nBeing called a small dragon stung his pride but in comparison to her the description couldn't be countered. His heart lifted. Would it work? Would she know where his island was?\n\nMy home in the south has hot pools all around the island. Do you know the area? He held his breath, listening for her answer.\n\nI know of a place where a sea vent spews hot water. It may not be your home but it is deep in the southern seas.\n\nAnything had to be better than this infernal hell hole of snapping lizards and stinking vegetation.\n\nI need land to rest on until I am strong again. Is there land near this vent?\n\nBut you can swim.\n\nWe southern dragons have learned to swim, but I can't swim home. It's too far. I would drown. My wing is not strong enough yet to fly and I can't sleep in the sea. Without land his hopes of rescue were fading.\n\nI know of drowning. We too must have air to breathe. We are not fish.\n\nShe looked like a fish of some sort, but he wasn't about to argue with her.\n\nThere is land near this vent. You can ride on my back. You will need to dig your feet into my skin or the waves will wash you off. One of her enormous eyes stared at him as he thought. The sound of the calf suckling in huge, great gulps rose to him, its side shaking as it swallowed. My daughter and I are leaving now. Will you join us?\n\nNo better offer would ever be presented to a luckier dragon. Yes, please. I'd love to join you. He rose and fluttered down onto the wide black back. Any particular place you want me to stand? He curled his claws into her flesh to hold himself steady.\n\nA little closer to my breathing vent, please, you are too low down.\n\nHe moved higher, gripping her back, waiting for her to complain, but she didn't.\n\nHold tight, we are going south.\n\nAnd with that Lutapolii tucked his wings against his body and began the ride of his life. He doubted anyone would believe his story\u2014if he ever reached home. It must have been the salt spray that caused his eyes to leak, or the wind, or perhaps the splash from the waves that rippled along the whale's back and over his feet.\n\nIt couldn't be tears.\n\nDragons don't cry\u2014even if dragonesses do. His mother had told him this many times.\n\nCould she have been wrong?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "True to her word the whale took him to where she said a hot vent exploded on the ocean floor, close to a rocky outcrop, barely large enough to rest upon overnight and catch up on missed sleep. He hadn't dared close his eyes while he rode the whale's back.\n\nDays later after island hopping and always heading eastward the familiar outline of his island grew from a speck on the horizon to the shape he loved and knew so well. With one last effort he headed home, his heart full, daring to hope his family would still be there.\n\nRelief flooded him as he landed on the ledge at the top entrance to his lair. He paced the few steps into the passageway and peered over the ledge into the gloom to the lair below.\n\n\"Hello! Coo-ee! I'm home.\"\n\nHis calls bounced around the chamber and echoed back. No one replied. His breath caught in his throat and disappointment wrapped his heart in a tight band. The lair was empty, horribly empty. Not a dragoness or hatchling in sight. A cinder caught in his throat and his eyes smarted.\n\nWhen had they abandoned the southern lair? Had they flown north? Didn't they have any faith in his return?\n\nHe dropped and circled in a slow glide to peer in every dim corner before he landed on the warm rock floor. The clean sparse nesting area mocked him as he remembered the hatchings.\n\nHis family had gone, no doubt returning to their birth flight, somehow managing to take the hatchlings, but how? His mother would be delighted, her flight numbers increased and she'd have four strong, healthy and beautiful young hatchlings to crow about.\n\nExhaustion overtook him. He'd survived the last week on sheer willpower and the drive to return home, all for nothing. His legs folded under him, his wings spread in apathy, too tired to move another wing-beat. Only the warm floor gave him comfort. He closed his eyes to shut out the emptiness of the lair which seemed to mock his hopes and dreams.\n\nThe bubbling of the pool in the lair's floor caused him to open one eye. What beast dared to enter the tunnel and come into his home? He'd kill it. He'd flame it to death. Indignation lifted his head and opened his mouth. He gasped at the audacity of the intruder. His belly fire rose in his throat ready to issue a deadly flame. Then a smallish snout broke the surface and Venestia emerged, a fish in her mouth.\n\nRelief relaxed his tense limbs and his fury dissolved. His fire slid back to its ember base. He wasn't alone after all. He hauled himself forward. A stuttering hum escaped his throat as he approached the pool's edge.\n\n\"Lutapolii!\" The fish dropped from her jaws and flapped on the pool's surface. She flicked it onto the rock floor and pulled herself out of the water. \"My dear fellow, I am so glad to see you. I thought you might have been killed. We've been so worried.\"\n\n\"Where are they, Venestia? Have they abandoned you here, permanently alone because you can't fly the distance north?\" He shook his head in disbelief. She shook the sea water off her scales and stood in front of him. Their hums of pleasure filled the lair like the soft throbbing of drums as they twined necks and rubbed their snouts on each other.\n\n\"You misjudge them, Luta. No daughter of mine would ever abandon me. They have taken the hatchlings north until the next full moon. Then they will return. I think by then the young will be able to survive on our rich seafood diet.\"\n\nHis heart lifted. They would return. They'd only gone north to feed. But how?\n\n\"Surely the hatchlings aren't strong enough to fly that far?\"\n\n\"They travelled the same way as you carried me here.\" She chuckled. \"It took a day's training and the young were unhappy, keening constantly, but they had no option. Better to feed them there than to carry the kill back here. Without your support Megonii decided the trips were too strenuous for the ladies.\"\n\nAmongst the delight coursing his body threads of concern stirred. \"But they need shelter. More than the pitiful ledge we have used in the past. That's only suitable to sleep overnight.\"\n\n\"I knew of some caves,\" Venestia moved to the lair wall, \"See, I drew a map of where I grew up. They were going to find my childhood lair and stay there. It's big enough but I would imagine some sea birds would need to be evicted. There are no dragons alive who lived there before, except me.\"\n\nHe stood and moved his stiff limbs to stand beside her, then examined the wall. His golden claws traced the lines on the drawing, noting the landmarks.\n\n\"Very clever, Venestia. A brilliant effort.\"\n\nShe beamed with pride. Her gaze ran over him and stopped at his injured wing-tip. \"And what is that? You have been fighting?\"\n\n\"Only with a beast that pretends to be a log and then attacks with a mouth so full of teeth I wonder how it fits food in.\" He raised his wing so she could study the damage. \"This is why I have been so long making my way home.\"\n\n\"It looks nasty, but the sea water has kept it free of infection.\" She peered closer. \"That membrane needs to heal before you can fly any distance. I'll make up a poultice.\" She moved into the pool then paused, a look of apology on her face. \"I can only catch fish for you, Luta, or would you like a crunchy thing?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"No crunchy things, please. I found another island on my way home where they are thick on the sea floor. I'm full of crunchy things. A fish would be great and while you patch my wing I'll tell you my story.\"\n\nWith his wing tip sprinkled with the crushed yellow rock from beside the hot vents, and sandwiched between wide strips of seaweed, he told Venestia about the stag and his foolish decision to carry the entire beast home. His fight with the crocodile had her tutting in concern, but his story of rescuing the whale calf and his wild ride south had her shaking her head in disbelief.\n\n\"I know, I know. No one will believe me, but truly I hung onto the whale's back, without sleep, for almost a whole day until she slowed and told me that beneath her the sea was warm and nearby was an island. I thanked her and took to the air with stiff salt-encrusted wings that flapped awkwardly. It was land and that's all that mattered.\" He paused because his wingtip had stopped hurting, the first time in many sun-ups, and he stretched it tentatively.\n\n\"Don't shake that poultice off. It needs to stay there for two days at least.\" Venestia rose and checked it. \"Be patient, Luta, it has to heal.\" She returned to his side. \"Now tell me more.\"\n\n\"Not much to tell really. I slept on the first island then found another further east with a waterfall to bathe under, then I began island-hopping. Always I could see the next one on the horizon and I knew if I continued flying east I would eventually find home, or a familiar landmark.\" He rubbed his snout over her neck. \"Never have I been so pleased to see the high peak of our lair on the horizon. It pointed to the sky as if to say 'I'm here, you've found me' and the closer I flew the more of our island revealed itself.\"\n\n\"And what of the place with all the crunchies?\"\n\n\"That's about half a day's journey back. Two islands away. When our flight is home again I'll take everyone there. They can eat the treats until they can't eat another.\"\n\nVenestia picked up the fish and ate it while Lutapolii enjoyed the peace and quiet of his lair. It hadn't been this quiet since before the eggs hatched.\n\n\"It would be a great place to hold the Naming Day, Luta. By the new moon the hatchlings will be sure to survive.\" Venestia grinned, wiping fish scales from her snout. \"After all they will have been carried from south to north on their mother's shoulders and back again. They can survive anything after that.\"\n\n\"Without your help and wisdom we may have lost them.\" He hummed his gratitude. \"If' you hadn't told me to lie still I would rub your back.\" Instead he sang one low note and held it for as long as he had breath. \"Have my ladies decided on any names yet?\"\n\n\"They have, but each has kept it to herself. They don't want to tempt fate but saying the names aloud.\" Venestia slid into the pool, just her head showing above the water.\n\n\"Pssh, such a silly superstition,\" he said.\n\n\"It may be, but you can't change lifetimes of tradition. Already you've broken the matriarchal line with this lair.\"\n\n\"So has Regius.\" Luta tilted his head, awaiting her answer as she bobbed about in the pool, washing her face.\n\n\"Yes, but it is a tentative hold on a small flight. He doesn't have your strength. I fear Erebia may try to destroy him and take his flight over.\"\n\n\"She can do this?\" He'd never realized the old queen would be so hungry for power.\n\n\"Erebia has always been willful and selfish. She's also very lazy and wants others to do all the work.\" Venestia returned to his side then continued with her recollections. \"Regius is a distant relation of mine. His father's father flew west when we flew east to join Erebia. He was a small, self-centered emerald dragon who decided to stand alone. From your descriptions Regius is cast from the same mould. I would think the flight has always struggled.\"\n\n\"The scout said they number only fifteen,\" Lutapolii said. \"He also suggested there was a far greater food supply further to the west. He was right. That's where I caught the stag.\" His mind wandered back to the rolling grassed swathes. \"The land is rich, the deer are plentiful and next time we have hatchlings to feed, if ever, we'll hunt there. I'm not going to keep paying seal tokens to Regius.\"\n\n\"If the dragonesses are at my home caves they will be out of Regius' territory. Besides, Delphii is my daughter and she can claim hunting rights for the area.\"\n\nLutapolii moved, frustration making him fidget. \"I have to join them, Venestia. I need to be there to protect them.\"\n\n\"I know, but until the membrane heals flying will keep it open and cause pain. You need to be patient.\" She slid into the pool. \"Rest, I'll fetch more food.\" Only a few bubbles broke the surface as she submerged.\n\nNo matter how much he wanted to leave he knew her advice couldn't be ignored. He'd have to rest and heal. He mentally called to his ladies, hoping one would pick up his thoughts. \"I'm home. I'm healing and then I'm coming to join you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Megonii swooped low over the rock pools. \"Hide the hatchlings. Send them to the caves\u2013 NOW!\" Her tone demanded immediate action from Raffettii and Crisantii. \"Regius' scout tells me that Erebia's silhouette has appeared on the horizon.\"\n\nMegonii landed on the beach and strode toward the young dragons fishing among the rocks. \"Go. Now. Back to the caves,\" she said, hissing at them and flapping her wings, shepherding them across the rock pools.\n\nThe four youngsters ran, flapped and rose into the air together, wings almost touching as they skimmed across the sea rising at the last moment to reach the cave entrances hidden by the huge branches that grew across the cliff face. Megonii watched until the last small tail disappeared among the foliage then turned to her flight sisters.\n\n\"I don't trust Erebia. I'm sure it's she who steals our catch when we leave it unattended, just as I'm sure she stole one of the seals we left for Regius that time. I wouldn't put it past her to order us about if she finds us. If she knew where the young were she'd hold them hostage to regain our loyalty.\"\n\n\"But we owe her no allegiance. We are part of Lutapolii's flight\u2014\u2013our flight\u2014\u2013now,\" Crisantii said.\n\n\"True. But remember as young dragonesses we pledged allegiance to her,\" Megonii said.\n\n\"Before we knew better,\" Raffettii said. \"Do we fight her or hide?\"\n\n\"I'd prefer not to fight her while we have young to care for, but if I have to, I will.\"\n\n\"But why should you fight her alone?\" Crisantii said.\n\n\"Because I took on the responsibility when Luta went missing, that's why.\"\n\n\"Then we will fight with you.\" Raffettii moved to her side.\n\nMegonii rubbed Raffettii's neck. \"Thank you flight sister, but who will look after the hatchlings if we are both killed?\"\n\nCristanii gasped. \"No, I couldn't bear to lose you both.\"\n\n\"And we can't risk the hatchlings. I say you two must remain in the caves with them while I meet her in the air. At least her flight will be erratic with her broken tail.\"\n\n\"Delphii is away, fishing for seals,\" Crisantii said, concern wrinkling her snout. \"She's due back soon. She might fly into Erebia's flight path.\"\n\n\"Let's hope she's delayed,\" Megonii said.\n\n\"Erebia won't hurt her. She's the best seal catcher in the world.\" Raffettii reasoning seemed sound and Megonii and Crisantii nodded.\n\n\"Except for Lutapolii.\" Crisantii sniffed and wiped away a tear.\n\nMegonii scanned the sky, looking in all directions. \"Stop blubbing, Crisantii. We don't have time for your drama. We just have to hang on. It'll be full moon in fourteen sun-ups. Then we can go home. And Lutapolii is just fine. I know he is.\"\n\n\"Have you been hearing voices again?\"\n\nRaffettii's sarcastic comment hurt but Megonii ignored it. \"Trust me, he's in the southern lair,\" she insisted. \"He said he's 'healing'. I'm sure that's what he said.\"\n\nMegonii beckoned the other two toward the rocks at the cliff base. \"We can wait here in the shadows for a while and hope Erebia doesn't fly over Hook Bay. Young scout said he'll give us the all clear when she moves on. He's hiding in the forest tops, nicely camouflaged. His lime scales blend with the gingko trees.\"\n\nThey huddled, scanning the sky above them, waiting for the all clear.\n\n\"He's a fine young fellow that scout. We could use someone like him at home,\" Raffettii said. \"I bet with a season of good rich southern food he'd grow to a decent size. I'm sure the bits of seal we've been giving him have made a difference to his strength. He's flying faster and higher. Don't you think?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Megonii said. \"I'll ask Lutapolii when he arrives. It's up to him whether we add to our flight, especially another male.\"\n\n\"Hardly any competition and in the future we will need fresh family lines.\" Crisantii said.\n\n\"We may do, but no daughter of mine is going to mate with a scout.\" Raffettii's scorn caused Megonii to turn her head away so Raffettii wouldn't see her smirk. Her gaze locked with Crisantii's. From the look on her flight sister's face they were thinking the same thing.\n\n\"That's tempting fate, Raffettii.\" Crisantii said and adroitly changed the subject. \"Have you named your daughter?\"\n\n\"I have and I'll tell you her name on our naming day. You won't trick me into telling you before then.\"\n\n\"If, as you say, Luta is back\u2026\" Crisantii said.\n\n\"He is,\" Megonii snapped.\n\n\"\u2026then we can have a naming day when we get home.\" Crisantii pointed out to sea. \"Look, here's Delphi.\"\n\nThe dragoness appeared around the end of the peninsular, flying low, her cerise wings almost touching the waves as she swept into Hook Bay.\n\n\"I wonder if the scout intercepted her and told her Erebia was about?\" Megonii moved forward and the others followed her as she walked off the rocks to the sandy beach.\n\nAfter Delphii had dropped a huge seal on the shore and landed beside it, the three dragonesses hummed a welcome and shoved each other to twine necks with her.\n\n\"Scout flew to meet me,\" Delphii said. \"I made a detour and skimmed the waves. I think Erebia's moved on but it could have been a close call.\" She shook her head, tore a piece from the seal and gulped it down. \"I hate that queen. She is totally unpredictable and such a bully. Is that why you were huddled against the cliff?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Megonii, though she would prefer Delphii had said they had stood against the cliff rather than 'huddled'. Delphii's comment made it appear they were frightened instead of being cautious. \"We ordered the young into the caves but waited in the shadows. I didn't want Erebia to learn of the caves whereabouts. We could have pretended to be fishing if she flew overhead.\"\n\nThey tore the seal into pieces, saving a small portion for each of the young.\n\n\"Save a piece for the scout,\" Megonii said, then after rinsing her snout in the water added, \"Thank you, Delphii, for the delicious snack. Tonight, at dusk, we'll hunt for deer and bring our kill back to the caves. Tomorrow we'll stay hidden in case Erebia returns. Let's keep the skies clear for a while. I dread the day I have to fight her, but I know it'll happen. We've been very lucky so far.\" She wheeled at the noise above her but relaxed as the young scout dragon called out, \"All clear. She's moved on.\"\n\nMegonii rose and tossed him his reward. \"Many thanks. We are in your debt yet again.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "\"Luta! Where are you? Help me.\" The screams in his head woke him and he leapt to his feet expecting to see Megonii standing in front of him. Instead, the sky above the rolling forest of the northern continent mocked him with its emptiness.\n\nHe'd arrived at dusk the evening before and had slept on the ledge they'd used on previous trips. Memories as he squatted on the barren ledge gave him hope and he imagined his family safe in Venestia's home caves.\n\n\"Please Luta, come quickly. I know you're near.\" Megonii's plea echoed in his head as he climbed high with solid beats above the trees. He set his mental compass on due north and sped over the continent faster than ever before; his flight now level and true, his wing healed.\n\n\"I'm coming!\" His answer echoed in his skull as he shouted it into the air.\n\nWith the image of Venestia's map in his mind he flew higher than ever until the shape of a hook tucked into the edge of the wild sea showed through a break in the clouds. He dived toward it. His wings vibrated as he angled them to change direction. He folded them against his side to aid his speed. The two specks on the horizon grew in size until they could be recognized as dragons. As he drew closer the sun shone on the blood red scales of Megonii and\u2026\n\n\"Erebia,\" he heard Megonii's voice in his head, not a mental message but her loud yell. \"We have every right to hunt here. Delphii's mother is from this area.\" He couldn't hear Erebia's answer.\n\n\"We won't join you. We are of Lutapolii's flight. We won't kill Regius for you. You must do your own killing,\" Megonii argued. Below him the two dragons whirled and tumbled.\n\nErebia's silhouette appeared almost as big as Megonii's. Her green and black scales and broken tail menaced his red dragoness, spinning like a circle of death, yet Megonii's circle was tighter and swifter. Then flames erupted from Erebia's snout. How dare she flame one of his ladies? Rage rose in his throat and a red mist clouded his mind.\n\n\"I'm here,\" he called, projecting his thoughts to Megonii, \"Keep her talking. Distract her. I need to surprise her from behind. I must grab her tail.\"\n\n\"If you kill me, Erebia, you will have to fight my flight sisters.\" Megonii stated her case, fearless and brave, her voice strong without a tremor in the face of Erebia's wrath. \"You will not survive the four of us. Your attempt to burn me has destroyed any allegiance I owed you from my ignorant youth. I know you for what you are\u2014a vicious bully.\"\n\nBelow him the two dragonesses tumbled in circles with Megonii avoiding Erebia's fire, being more agile and faster than the old queen with her broken tail. \"You may be bigger than me, Erebia, but I'm younger and smarter.\" Megonii's taunts rang in Lutapolii's head. She'd heard him.\n\nErebia's fire streaked through the air, shimmering the atmosphere but narrowly missing Megonii. His fearless red lady led the old queen away from his approaching flight path. Her taunts enticed the queen to chase her from above the safety of the land below to the risk of fighting over the wild sea.\n\n\"As soon as I am close I want you to leave,\" Lutapolii called in his head as he dived at speed. Seconds later he added, \"Megonii, your bravery equals that of any dragon I've known. Now turn and leave, my lovely. I'll deal with Erebia from here on.\"\n\nAs the red dragoness took a sharp turn and raced away Lutapolii heard the queen scream, her voice triumphant. \"I win. You leave the battle field. I win. You and your flight sisters, and your hatchlings are MINE!\"\n\nThen Lutapolii grabbed her. His jaws snapped, locking her tail in a toothy embrace. He flew on, forcing her to flip and trail backward under him until he slowed. With her hanging head-down he banked steeply, to hover. Always watching her snout and the fire she threw as she screamed, he began to swing her in a circle. This time he revolved faster than he'd ever done before. His anger drove him to his physical limit. Around and around he threw her, keeping her flames at the perimeter, wanting to make her dizzy, knowing soon she would run out of fire.\n\nShe did.\n\nWhen he could spin no longer he hurled her up in the air. As she slipped down in front of him, totally out of flight control, he extended his golden clawed feet and raked her belly, ripping it open in wide tracks. Her guts made a dark trail, oozing out as she fell.\n\n\"I can't swim,\" she shrieked and tumbled toward the ocean's surface, her wails fading as she fell away from him until she hit the water with such force the slap echoed around the sea cliffs.\n\nHe circled, staying high above the sea, watching the black shark shapes approach. The water turn pink as the scavengers of the sea began their feast.\n\nHe felt no sense of satisfaction, only a sadness that he'd had to kill the old despot without ever getting to know her. Someone must have loved her at some time in the past, surely?\n\nThe threat to his flight had been removed.\n\nHe looked down at Hook Bay, his gaze unseeing, his wings aching and his breath short. The air around him filled with chatter and calls as his ladies circled and cooed. He couldn't unscramble their greetings, his head echoed with Erebia's last plea. Then their combined joy and delight filled his head and chased away the gloom. They shepherded him down to the sandy beach and, after they'd all landed, his ladies twined and hummed so loudly he thought his neck would become disjointed and his ears would burst. The air around them filled with chirrups and the four hatchlings wheeled in tight circles. They remembered him. He'd forgotten how noisy his family could be.\n\n\"Enough already, I missed you too.\" He rested on the warm sand and spread his wings wide. The hatchlings sat on his spine spikes, their small feet tickling as they scrapped over the highest position. His ladies rubbed his body with their snouts and murmured endearments. During these longed-for moments of reunion he became 'Lucky Lutapolii' once more."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Last night the new moon had graced the northern sky. Today they could all fly home. He'd catch one last seal as a goodbye gift, something to please his mother although he wondered why he bothered.\n\nIn the grey light of dawn he circled above the northern seal colony looking for an easy catch. Swooping low over his favourite hilltop, he saw through the lifting gloom a dragon perched there, eating what could only be a seal; Thaxtania by the look of it.\n\nHe landed beside the young male, as proud of Thaxtania's catch as if the dragon were one of his own flight. \"Well done. Amazing! You've caught yourself a treat.\"\n\nAfter wiping his snout and giving it an extra scrub along the grass Thaxtania stood tall and bowed. \"Thank you, Lutapolii. I did indeed catch this, and without diving for it.\"\n\n\"Splendid. How did you do that?\" An amazing feat for any northern dragon, especially one with a broken tail.\n\n\"It takes a long time.\" Thaxtania grinned showing a row of bloody teeth. \"I have to lie in the water, against the rocks and pretend to be dead, for hours at a time, with just my nostrils on the surface. Eventually the young seals learning to swim forget I'm there.\"\n\n\"I know of this tactic, but I've never heard of a dragon using it.\" Lutapolii's wing tip ached remembering his brush with the crocodile.\n\n\"Of course once I've snapped one I don't get to fool another pup for a day or so,\" Thaxtania said. \"But one juicy seal is worth the effort.\" He offered Lutapolii a bite.\n\n\"No thanks, you keep it for yourself. I've come to catch a seal for Mother. I'm on my way to say goodbye,\" Lutapolii said.\n\n\"Without even saying hello?\"\n\n\"Don't you start as well. Mother is bound to point that out.\" Lutapolii sighed. \"Now I'm here I'll show you the right way to dive. I presume you can now swim?\"\n\n\"I can, sir.\"\n\nLutapolii frowned at him, not appreciating the title.\n\n\"Sorry, I keep forgetting I shouldn't call you 'sir'.\" He gave a small bob of apology. \"I can now swim, Lutapolii. In fact I'm quite fast. I've been practicing ever since you were last here. I use my legs a lot and sort of throw my tail from side to side. It seems to work quite well.\"\n\n\"Good, because now you've learned to keep your nostrils closed, the secret of diving is to keep your wings tight against your body as you enter the water. Really tight. If you forget to close them and hit the surface with them even slightly open you'll wrench your shoulder sockets out, not to mention possibly breaking a wing strut. Nasty that and probably why so many novices drown trying it.\"\n\nThaxtania nodded, his gaze locked on Lutapolii.\n\n\"I learned the hard way,\" Lutapolii said, \"And nearly drowned myself. You should start just above the water and belly-flop in a few times before you try diving from higher up. Eventually you'll be able to dive from extreme heights as long as you remember to fold your wings in once you have your flight path set.\" He demonstrated what he meant. \"Plus, if you dive in behind your prey with as little splash as possible you'll catch them before they know you're there.\" He walked to the edge of the hill, then paused and turned. \"I studied the diving birds of the southern ocean to learn how to do it, so remember, wings tight, nostrils closed at all times. Watch me.\" He flew out over the green sea, well away from the seal colony, and lined up a fat catch. Then, ensuring the dawn light of the rising sun was behind him, he performed what he considered to be a mildly magnificent dive for the educational benefit of young Thaxtania. Unable to speak with a mouth full of seal he did a victory roll above his student dragon before he headed to his mother's lair.\n\nThe sun heralding the new day lifted over the horizon and painted the sandstone cliffs with a pink wash. He flew between the peaks to the gaping maw of the queen's cave, his mood glum. His flight waited for him on the southern edge of the great northern continent, resting and letting the hatchlings stretch their wings before the last leg home across the ocean. He longed to be with them. He hoped to make this visit short. Drop off the seal and dash away. If only his mother were that easy to get away from.\n\nHe landed on the wide ledge and crept toward the two sleeping guards, the sun not yet high enough to shine on them.\n\n\"Boo!\"\n\nThe guards sat bolt upright, spat badly aimed flames and then fell over, unable to keep their balance while half asleep.\n\n\"Sleeping on the job I see. I won't tell, if you don't,\" Lutapolii said as he strode past them dangling the seal from his front claws.\n\n\"Mother!\" His voice echoed along the passageway and returned to him a little softer. \"Mother,\" he shouted again into the echo, \"I've brought you breakfast.\"\n\nHe brushed aside the small servant dragon he recognized from his last visit. \"Not for you,\" he said as she reached for the seal. \"You'll be lucky to get even a flipper.\" She scurried in front of him, darting between his legs and around the tight corner faster than he could manage. He banged his head on the ceiling and by the time he reached the throne the servant stood beside his mother, prodding her awake and squeaking in her ear. He considered 'throne' to be a vague term for a slab of stone elevated above the rock floor, but no doubt it gave his mother a sense of importance to be higher than other dragons in her presence.\n\nHe waved the seal in front of his mother's snout and smiled as her eyes flicked open a second before her jaws did.\n\n\"Greetings mighty Queen Sabolotii, or should I just say good morning, Mother,\" he said and dropped the seal out of her reach. Not a good thing for a son to do but she really did bring out the worst in him.\n\n\"Luta! Wonderful to see you. I've been waiting for many moons, ever since I heard you were hunting afresh in Regius' territory.\"\n\n\"I told you we were doing this, Mother.\"\n\n\"But you didn't tell me you were bringing your whole flight here. Have you been plundering my seal colony?\"\n\n\"No, my dragonesses have been hunting fish and deer for the hatchlings. It made sense to bring them to the food, rather than to carry it south. We leave today.\"\n\n\"So soon? Without even bringing my grandchildren to visit me,\" She didn't look too disappointed because her gaze fixed on the seal and saliva dripped from between her teeth as she scrambled over the ledge, leaned down and grabbed it. \"You've been hunting in Venestia's old territory. Do you know where that old dragoness has disappeared to? She must have told Delphi about her home lair before she vanished.\" She raised an eyebrow at him and waited a heartbeat.\n\nHe didn't answer, just held her stare, keeping his expression neutral. His mother didn't need to know everything.\n\n\"She's probably dead by now,\" Sabolotii said and gripped the seal between her forearms, tore the tail off the carcass and munched, dripping grease and blood down her chest and onto the throne. With luck the servant would get a few scraps from the mess.\n\n\"When will you be back?\" she said. \"Summer Solstice has been and gone. Did you notice? No seal treats for my flight this year. I would have appreciated you doing this small thing for me.\"\n\nSmall thing? Catching seals for fifty dragons? Was there no end to his mother's desires?\n\n\"One needs to keep the loyalty of one's flight, you know,\" she added as if this responsibility was a burden hard to bear.\n\nNow she'd begun to talk in a royal manner. Definitely time to leave. He edged away. \"We've been rather busy raising our young. Perhaps next year. It depends on whether we have hatchlings or not,\" he said, careful not to make any promises. He doubted he could cope with hatchlings every year or that the lair was large enough, but hadn't shared that thought with his ladies, yet. \"Meanwhile, I brought you this treat and have come to let you know we're all going home.\" His family obligation fulfilled he took a step back from the throne and moved toward the passage.\n\n\"Wait, Luta. Nothing escapes my notice. I believe I owe you a vote of thanks.\" She sneered. Well, she might have been smiling but it looked like a sneer. He paused and waited for her next caustic comment. \"I believe you killed Erebia for me. Thank you so much. What a kind son you are.\"\n\nIndignation stuck in his throat, sharp-edged and painful like a stone and almost choked him. He stepped forward. \"I didn't kill her for you, Mother\" His voice echoed around the cave, bouncing off the walls like a roll of thunder, causing the servant to duck and scuttle away. \"She was trying to kill Megonii and threatening to take over my flight. She also wanted my ladies to kill Regius so that she could have his flight as well.\" He held his mother's gaze but lowered his tone to a soft menace. \"I killed her because I had to. At no time did I think I was doing it for you, Mother.\"\n\n\"You are so modest, Luta, so modest. I heard you'd arrived at the last moment and saved the day, killing the old queen in a manner she deserved.\"\n\n\"No dragon deserves to be eaten by sharks, Mother.\" He took a few paces away and then turned back. \"How do you know all these things?\"\n\n\"I've had her followed from the moment I unseated her. One can't be too careful. Distance management I think it's called.\"\n\nThis showed a greater degree of cunning than he'd thought his mother possessed. Why should it surprise him? If it served her purpose she'd do anything necessary to hold on to the power she'd wrenched from Erebia's grasp.\n\n\"Where had you been Luta, to turn up at the last moment? You hadn't been seen in the air for weeks. The flight gossips had you dead, finally, rather than merely 'technically dead' on the Memorial Wall.\"\n\n\"If I told you, you wouldn't believe me.\" Not that he intended to tell her of the rich hunting grounds further to the west, where food was plentiful and the sky empty of dragons. \"Goodbye, Mother.\"\n\nWith that he hurried down the passage, the sound of crunching and slurping following him as his mother ate her breakfast. He pushed aside the guards and leapt off the ledge into the clear morning sky, escaping his mother's sphere of influence and flying toward freedom."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Several days later Lutapolii lay stretched out on the dry scrubby grass of Crunchie Island, which is what he'd decided to call it. Above him towered twin peaks similar to their home lair, but as yet he hadn't been able to find any entrances. The sun warmed his back and its heat spread through his wings to warm his underside. Beside him sat their newest member, the scout from Regius' flight.\n\n\"Well, young scout, how are you enjoying life in the south?\" He dragged his gaze from the view of his ladies and their young frolicking in the shallows, feasting on the sideways scuttling crunchies that carpeted the sea floor around the hot vents. \"Having any problems? I want you to feel you can talk to me about anything at all. Being part of this flight means you leave behind the power-based politics of northern flights.\" He scratched his healed wingtip with great care. It itched still, especially after being in the salt water. \"I have final say on all difficult decisions. The rest of the time matters are discussed and a consensus reached. You are entitled to express your opinions.\"\n\nThe scout nodded but didn't reply, his mouth full of crunchies.\n\nLutapolii turned his head and held the young dragon's gaze. \"You know you mustn't reveal the exact location of our southern lair, don't you? I'm sure Megonii told you this when she invited you to join us, but I'd like to be sure you realize the seriousness of that condition.\"\n\nThe lime-green dragon stood tall and bowed. \"I remember that stipulation very well and I wouldn't dream of telling anyone the location.\"\n\n\"Good, and please don't bow. It embarrasses me and is totally unnecessary in this flight.\"\n\nThe young dragon said, \"Yes\u2026\"\n\n\"And don't call me 'sir' either. Just Lutapolii will do.\" He looked seaward, watching a whale fluke break and flick the surface some miles out to sea. \"How's your swimming coming along? You have to be able to swim underwater before winter arrives, to use the underwater tunnel.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because when it gets really cold outside the air freezes and snow falls. The wind howls and can cut a dragon like a knife. We block off the top entrance and use only the tunnel to access the hot pools outside and to fish nearby.\"\n\n\"I've heard tales of the southern weather killing dragons. What do you do all winter\u2014for food?\"\n\n\"We have some deer meat frozen further south in a cache. We can eat some this autumn, store some closer to home and leave a few carcasses until spring. Mostly we dine on the fish and seals that are attracted by the warm water around the lair. No crunchies, except for special occasions or they will die out.\" He waved his arm to encircle the view. \"Now that we have this island and a sea floor carpeted with crunchies we may never run out.\" But he hadn't answered the scout's question. \"The rest of the time we sleep, eat, and dream of spring.\" He didn't add that his mind never ceased its plotting. Next year he would fly eastward and look for other flights to align with. He now had offspring and their future needed to be considered. Surely other flights existed. So far he had not found the boundaries of this world.\n\nAt that moment the sea surface close by bubbled and two hatchlings erupted, his pale blue daughter holding aloft a crunchy. \"Mine!\" she called in her high piping voice swatting away Megonii's son. Already they were learning to hunt and talk.\n\n\"What shall I do to earn my place in this flight?\"\n\n\"What you did for Regius; be our scout. Keep an eye on the sky and horizon until winter arrives. The top entrance to our lair is a good vantage point so you won't need to be in the air constantly. Warn us of any approaching dragons, and in the spring you'll need to constantly watch the hatchlings. They'll be flying greater distances and won't be ferried on their mother's back like today.\" He pointed to the elderly dragoness now seated at the sea edge. \"Thanks to Venestia they're swimming already.\"\n\n\"Delphii tells me you discovered this island on your journey home with your injured wing.\"\n\n\"I did.\" Again thinking about the crocodile caused his wingtip to twinge and his mind to skitter away from the image of its snapping jaws. A lucky find and close enough to enjoy for a day's outing, with heaps of crunchies to satisfy everyone's appetite. He stood, stretched his neck high and spread his wings, knocking their latest flight addition over. \"Sorry, I seem to continue to grow.\" He helped the dragon to his feet and held his gaze, leaning close. \"Today is Naming Day and before I call my flight together, what's your proper name young scout?\" Can't call you 'scout' all the time.\"\n\n\"Everyone always has.\"\n\nLutapolii stepped aside and rubbed his neck along the young dragon's back. \"Not here. You must have a name. Surely you can think of one.\"\n\n\"My father was called Zoldar. I've always thought I'd like to be named after him.\"\n\n\"And so you shall. 'Zoldar the Scout' is a fine title. I like it.\" Lutapolii turned and called, \"Out everyone, up here on the tundra. Hatchlings! Time to learn your names.\"\n\nOne by one each dragoness collected her young, clambered up over the rocky foreshore and stood in front of Lutapolii. He pulled Venestia to his side. \"Our thanks to Venestia, without whom we'd never have reared these fine youngsters.\" The humming began. \"Before we hear their names for the first time I want to introduce the newest addition to our flight by his real name. Henceforth he will be called 'Zoldar, Scout of the Southern Seas'.\"\n\n\"That's rather a grand name,\" said Zoldar. \"I'm only a small dragon.\"\n\n\"But you will grow! Just wait and see,\" Lutapolii said and his ladies nodded and hummed.\n\n\"Now, we will have the names of your off spring, my ladies. Megonii, will you begin please?\"\n\nMegonii gathered her son against her chest, his pinkish brown scales blending against her deep red legs. \"Our son will be called Magnar, he will be a red dragon.\"\n\n\"Magnar, Red dragon of the South\u2026welcome.\" Lutapolii beckoned the youngster to approach and stand at his feet.\n\n\"Crisantii, your turn. What is our son's name?\"\n\n\"He will be called Charlii, Golden Dragon of the South. He's cream now but he will turn golden when he matures.\"\n\n\"Welcome, Charlii, Golden Dragon of the South,\" said Luta and beckoned his second son closer.\n\n\"Raffettii, our daughter's name, please?'\n\n\"I name her Raechello, Ice Dragon of the South. She is the palest of blue. Her color reminds me of the ice flows further south.\"\n\n\"A lovely choice, Raffettii. Come Raechello, Ice Dragon of the South.\" Luta reached for his cool-blue daughter.\n\n\"Delphii, my finest fisher, what have you called our daughter?\"\n\n\"I name her Delcinda. She is pale now and I think she will mature to a lilac, paler than I am and more to the blue spectrum.\"\n\nHe reached and pulled her close. \"Welcome, Delcinda, Lilac Dragon of the South.\"\n\nWith his four hatchlings close to his legs he bent and enclosed them within his forearms and began to sing. He hadn't done this since he'd saved the whale's daughter, but the emotion of that day came back. It surged through his body and opened his vocal chords. His throat vibrated as he sang an arpeggio or two. His ladies joined in, lifting their voices, harmonizing with his tune, leading him higher then rippling down their range of high notes.\n\nLutapolii sang for joy, for love and to celebrate his good luck. His flight now totaled eleven, a burgeoning responsibility and one he wouldn't exchange for all the power his mother assumed she had.\n\nHe saw Zandor's jaw drop and with a flick of a golden claw he encouraged the scout to join in. His newly named off-spring joined in the song with yips and chirrups. He heard a piping melody and he leaned closer, finding Delcinda could sing in tune already. Perhaps he'd change her name to from 'Lilac Dragon' to 'Singing Dragon'.\n\nTheir combined song, loud and strong, rippled the waves and travelled over the sea's surface until a whale joined in and sent its notes deep into the water to vibrate around the underwater pinnacles. Further south, where the ice-ridden land began, the melodic sound waves hit the continental shelf. A large piece of ice broke off and slipped under the water in a slow tumble then rose to begin its slow journey north. The seals in the southern colony stilled and listened to the haunting song. Those in the sea, circled, looking for dragons.\n\nOn this day, two islands over from their home lair, full to bursting with crunchy treats, Lutapolii knew, without doubt, that his luck held. No dragon anywhere in this world could be luckier."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Wings of Fire Legends 1) Darkstalker",
        "author": "Tui T. Sutherland",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy",
            "dragons"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "ARCTIC",
                "text": "\"Prince Arctic?\"\n\nA silvery white dragon poked her head around the door, tapping three times lightly on the ice wall. Arctic couldn't remember her name, which was the kind of faux pas his mother was always yelling at him about. He was a prince; it was his duty to have all the noble dragons memorized along with their ranks so he could treat them according to exactly where they fit in the hierarchy.\n\nIt was stupid and frustrating and if his mother yelled at him about it one more time, he would seriously enchant something to freeze her mouth shut forever.\n\nOooo. What a beautiful image. Queen Diamond with a chain of silver circles wound around her snout and frozen to her scales. He closed his eyes and imagined the blissful quiet.\n\nThe dragon at his door shifted slightly, her claws making little scraping sounds to remind him she was there. What was she waiting for? Permission to give him a message? Or was she waiting for him to say her name \u2014 and if he didn't, would she go scurrying back to the queen to report that he had failed again?\n\nPerhaps he should enchant a talisman to whisper in his ear whenever he needed to know something. Another tempting idea, but strictly against the rules of IceWing animus magic.\n\nAnimus dragons are so rare; appreciate your gift and respect the limits the tribe has set. Never use your power frivolously. Never use it for yourself. This power is extremely dangerous. The tribe's rules are there to protect you. Only the IceWings have figured out how to use animus magic safely.\n\nSave it all for your gifting ceremony. Use it only once in your life, to create a glorious gift to benefit the whole tribe, and then never again; that is the only way to be safe.\n\nArctic shifted his shoulders, feeling stuck inside his scales. Rules, rules, and more rules: that was the IceWing way of life. Every direction he turned, every thought he had, was restricted by rules and limits and judgmental faces, particularly his mother's. The rules about animus magic were just one more way to keep him trapped under her claws.\n\n\"What is it?\" he barked at the strange dragon. Annoyed face, try that. As if he were very busy and she'd interrupted him and that was why he was skipping the usual politic rituals. He was very busy, actually. The gifting ceremony was only three weeks away. It was bad enough that his mother had dragged him here, to their southernmost palace, near the ocean and the border with the Kingdom of Sand. She'd promised to leave him alone to work while she conducted whatever vital royal business required her presence. Everyone should know better than to disturb him right now.\n\nThe messenger looked disappointed. Maybe he really was supposed to know who she was. \"Your mother sent me to tell you that the NightWing delegation has arrived.\"\n\nAaarrrrgh. Not another boring diplomatic meeting.\n\n\"I can't possibly be expected to attend them,\" he said, waving his claws at the translucent walls of his room. \"I only have three more weeks to prepare.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said the other IceWing, \"she did mention that \u2026\"\n\n\"But she doesn't care,\" he finished when she trailed off.\n\nThe poor dragon looked profoundly uncomfortable, caught between a prince who outranked her and a queen who outranked everyone. Arctic sighed.\n\n\"Very well,\" he said, sweeping shards of ice aside with his tail. \"I'm coming.\"\n\nShe stepped back with relief, and he realized that the silver chain around her neck had only one circle on it. Uh-oh. That meant she was ranked in the First Circle \u2014 how could he have forgotten a First Circle IceWing? First and Second Circle dragons usually lived in the queen's ice palace alongside the royal family, and he was sure he'd memorized them all.\n\nExcept for the nobles who lived in the outer three palaces \u2026\n\n\"Snowflake,\" he blurted. He really was an idiot. This was the one his mother had chosen for him to marry. Respectable family, loyal, likely to have a daughter who could replace Queen Diamond one day, since he had no sisters or aunts who might try for the throne. Snowflake was probably the real reason he'd been dragged on this trip.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, dipping her head. She was pretty in that boring, glassy way his mother liked, but he had gotten absolutely no sense of her personality at their one prior meeting. He was a little afraid she might not have one.\n\n\"Uh,\" he said, following her down the frozen hall. There must be something we can talk about. \"Have you ever seen a NightWing before?\"\n\n\"Only the one who came to the wall a few months ago to request this meeting.\"\n\n\"Do you know what they're here for?\"\n\nShe shook her head. So. That was apparently the end of that conversation.\n\nOoo, how about an animus-touched object that can make any dragon interesting. Skies above, now that would be useful.\n\nDon't waste your gift! his mother's voice echoed in his head. Blah blah blah! Careful consideration! Months of planning!\n\nSometimes he got a strong feeling that she regretted her own animus gift to the tribe: the gift of healing, which was a set of narwhal horns that could heal frostbreath injuries. It helped when young IceWings played too roughly or when fights broke out within the tribe \u2026 but it certainly would be a much more useful gift if the horns could heal any injuries. He bet Queen Diamond wished she could reach back through time and fix that mistake.\n\n\"What would you give the tribe?\" he asked Snowflake. \"If you were an animus, I mean, and had to come up with a gift?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, fidgeting her wings in little flippy waves. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Well, think about it,\" he said. \"I'd really like to know.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said. They kept walking through the halls of the palace, which were smaller and more cramped than the ones at home, with odd little mismatched ice carvings everywhere \u2014 here a polar bear, there a wolf, there a screaming scavenger, here a lumpy owl. There was no consistency, no sense of an artistic vision, and everything was too close to him. It made Arctic want to smash through the walls just so he could see the sky.\n\nAbout a minute later, Snowflake said, \"Sorry, I can't think of anything.\"\n\nArctic couldn't hide the irritation that flashed across his face. \"Really think about it,\" he said. \"Tell me tomorrow, or whenever you come up with something.\"\n\nShe gave him a look that, to his surprise, was nearly as irritated as his own. \"Seems like kind of a waste of my time,\" she said. \"Unless you're having trouble coming up with an idea for yours.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" he said quickly. \"Of course I already have a plan.\" Well, Mother has a plan. Which is why I am trying to come up with a better one.\n\nShe didn't ask what it was. Instead she stopped at one of the flight ledges and nodded down at the dome below them. In the gathering dusk, it glowed from within like firelit marble, covering most of the plain between the palace and the ocean. Snow dusted the outside and the ground all around it; more crystalline flakes were falling softly from the sky.\n\nThe ocean itself was gouged with streaks of orange and gold as the sun set on the distant western horizon. Dragon wings sliced the air like darting bats as hunters dove to catch dinner in the sea for the welcome banquet tonight.\n\nArctic and Snowflake flew down to the entrance of the guest dome. Inside, he knew, it would be warmer than he liked, heated by the bodies of the fire-breathing NightWings and also by the gift of diplomacy. (Created by an animus named Penguin about fifty years ago, chatted his overstuffed brain. He had studied every animus gift in careful detail, trying to come up with something new and original for his own. Which was perhaps why he didn't have room in his brain for the faces of dragons he barely knew.)\n\nThe dome itself was not an animus gift, though; these blocks of ice had been carved by ordinary IceWing talons. It must have taken ages, and he wasn't entirely convinced that it wouldn't all melt on top of some fire-breathing guests one day.\n\nMaybe I could improve the dome as my gift, he thought. An indestructible welcome dome for any allies or guests from other tribes. He dismissed the thought almost as soon as he had it. It was derivative and not nearly as impressive as he wanted it to be. He wanted his gift to be one that IceWings would marvel about for centuries after he was gone \u2014 something like Frostbite's gift of light.\n\nThey landed with a crunch on the snow, but just as they were about to enter the tunnel into the dome, a dragon came charging out.\n\n\"Sorry!\" she cried breathlessly as she narrowly avoided knocking them over. \"I just needed to be outside for a moment. Look at that sunset! Great kingdoms, it is freezing out here! I might literally die! But obviously I can't go back inside and miss this sunset. I can handle a little cold, right? If I just \u2026 keep \u2026 moving \u2026\" She began stamping furiously in a circle around them, whacking herself with her wings.\n\nShe was a NightWing \u2014 the first NightWing Arctic had ever seen. He'd known she would be black, but he hadn't expected the underscales of dark green on her chest or the silver scales that glittered here and there across the underside of her wings. Her eyes, too, seemed a little closer to dark green than to black, and they caught his without any fear. Her wings snapped with energy and he felt his own wings responding, lifting as though he might suddenly take off and touch the moons.\n\n\"I'll meet you inside,\" he said to Snowflake.\n\nShe paused, giving the NightWing a disapproving look.\n\n\"You can tell my mother I'm coming,\" he suggested. \"Better hurry. She doesn't like to wait.\"\n\nSnowflake's forehead wrinkled into that irritated expression again, and she turned to whisk down the tunnel without even a bow or ritual farewell.\n\nI suppose that's what I deserve, he thought, since I didn't give her the greeting her rank requires. He stared after her for a moment, trying to imagine what it would be like to be married to Snowflake. Maybe she does have a personality: repressed fury. Or maybe she's as unexcited about this match as I am. I'm not sure how to improve that situation. I mean, I am a prince; if she marries me, she could hatch the next queen. What more could she want?\n\n\"Who stuck an icicle up her snout?\" asked the NightWing. She started jumping up and down in place, grinning at him.\n\n\"I'm afraid that was me, probably,\" he said. \"It took me far too long to remember her name.\"\n\n\"So?\" said the black dragon. \"I forget names all the time.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not supposed to forget anyone's,\" he said. \"Also, we're kind of engaged to be married.\"\n\nThe NightWing started laughing so hard she had to sit down, which immediately made her leap up again with a yelp, shaking snow off her tail.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just c-c-cold,\" she said, stamping her feet again. \"All right, I'm on her side. That's pretty terrible. You're the worst.\"\n\n\"I'm not the worst!\" he protested. \"We've only met once! I barely know her! Also, she is extremely unmemorable!\"\n\n\"Seriously the worst!\" she cried, laughing again. \"That poor dragon! I am completely telling her not to marry you. I pity whoever gets tricked into that. You'll be like, 'Happy fortieth anniversary \u2026 what's your name again?' and she'll be all, 'It's our FIFTIETH, you slime weasel, and my name is you're sleeping on an iceberg tonight.'\"\n\n\"I promise I would remember that name,\" he said. \"Sticks in the brain a bit better than Snowflake.\"\n\n\"And what's your name?\" she asked. \"Or I can keep calling you slime weasel, although I suspect that might get me kicked off the peacekeeping committee.\"\n\n\"My name is Arctic. Prince Arctic.\"\n\n\"Oh, fancy,\" she said. \"I guess I shouldn't bother telling you mine, since you'll forget it in the next five minutes anyway.\"\n\n\"I promise I won't,\" he protested.\n\n\"Oh, you only forget your girlfriends' names?\" she joked. \"Or future family members?\"\n\n\"I remember any dragon who seems likely to change my life,\" he said.\n\n\"That's not me!\" she cried, looking genuinely startled. \"I'm under strict orders not to do any damage or break any ice palaces or corrupt any IceWings or change any lives. Then again, I'm pretty sure I've never followed an order in my life, so \u2026 you know, watch your back, ice palaces.\"\n\nNever followed an order in her life! Arctic blinked at her, enchanted and mystified. How was that possible? Life was nothing but a series of orders; if you didn't follow them, wouldn't you get lost or drop to the bottom of the rankings or be thrown out of your tribe? Imagine disobeying an order \u2014 any order. Where would I even start?\n\n\"AAAAAAAH, why is it SO COLD?\" The NightWing leaped into the air and started doing vigorous somersaults.\n\n\"Because this is the Ice Kingdom,\" he said, standing back out of her way. \"It's true, though, our climate is one of our best-guarded secrets.\"\n\n\"Oh, he's a wise guy, too,\" she said, righting herself and landing again. \"Do you have any useful skills, or maybe an extra one of those magic bracelets that keeps your guests from freezing?\"\n\n\"That's the gift of diplomacy,\" he said. \"It keeps our guests warm and helps them travel safely over the Great Ice Cliff. The tribe only has three bracelets \u2014 are there more than three of you?\" he asked, surprised.\n\n\"I'm the fourth,\" she said. \"My mother and I are sharing her bracelet; there was some back and forth silliness to get over your cliff. I probably should have asked for it before I came outside.\"\n\n\"We could go inside,\" he said reluctantly. Inside there would be other dragons, infinitely more boring dragons, not to mention his mother, and probably a new set of rules about appeasing Snowflake, staying away from NightWings, and generally acting more like an obedient puddle. \"Or we could stay to watch the rest of the sunset \u2026\"\n\n\"The sunset is great,\" she said, \"but honestly I had to come out here because my mother is driving me crazy.\"\n\nHe couldn't control the smile that split his face like ice cracking. It seemed possible that he would never be able to stop smiling at her. He'd never heard an IceWing say anything like that about his or her parents; it was beyond forbidden to complain or talk back or criticize your elders in any fashion.\n\n\"Please tell me all about it,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, she's always lecturing me about how I ruin everything. Foeslayer, why are the scrolls shelved in the wrong places again? Foeslayer, you smiled at the wrong dragons this morning! Foeslayer, the queen will never want you on her council if you insist on having opinions all the time. Foeslayer, I'm bringing you on this mission because I don't trust you if I leave you behind, but if you say one word to any IceWing, I will mount your head on a spike in the throne room.\" She snapped her mouth shut as if she'd just understood that last instruction, then gave Arctic a rueful look. \"Um \u2026 oops.\"\n\n\"Aha,\" he said, with a thrill like the first time he'd touched fire. \"I have cleverly deduced that your name is Foeslayer.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" she said. \"That's just how my mother starts all her sentences.\"\n\nHe laughed and she smiled and he thought that perhaps nothing would ever be boring or frustrating again as long as he was near her.\n\n\"So really,\" she said, \"no secret extra magic bracelets? Or a blanket or anything?\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Arctic said, wishing he could offer his own wings for warmth \u2014 but his scales were as cold as the snow underfoot and would only make things worse.\n\nShe sighed. \"Then I guess I do have to go back inside.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" he said. He didn't stop to think about it. It was wrong, worse than wrong: a broken rule, a betrayal of his entire tribe, but next to this shining dragon he didn't care. He'd do anything for another few minutes with her.\n\nHe unclipped the diamond earring from his ear, held it between his talons, and said softly, \"I enchant this earring to keep the dragon wearing it warm no matter the temperature \u2026 and to keep her safe no matter the danger.\"\n\nHer dark green eyes were wide with disbelief as he leaned over and gently curled the earring around her ear. His talons lingered there for a moment, brushing against the smooth warmth of her long, dark neck. The shivering in her scales slowed to a stop, and she cautiously held out her wings to the cold air.\n\n\"Whoa. That \u2014 that worked,\" she said. \"So the rumors are true \u2014 your tribe does have magic.\"\n\n\"Only a few of us,\" he said. \"And so does yours, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Only a few of us,\" she echoed, \"and not like that. I don't have anything, for instance. You just \u2014 can you enchant anything? To do anything?\"\n\n\"Animus power,\" he said, taking a step closer to her. \"That's how it works.\"\n\n\"Then why don't the IceWings rule the entire continent?\" she asked, her tail skipping nervously over the snowy ground. \"You don't even need this alliance. You could destroy the SkyWings easily, couldn't you?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"The tribe has strict rules. We're only allowed to use our power once in a lifetime.\"\n\nFoeslayer's talon flew to the earring and she stared at him, shocked into stillness for the first time.\n\n\"Well,\" he said with a shrug, \"perhaps I'm not much of a rule follower either.\" He felt another thrill at the idea of being that dragon, of being seen that way by this dragon. He reached out tentatively and brushed her wing with his. She didn't pull away.\n\n\"Why?\" Foeslayer whispered.\n\n\"It's these old legends we have,\" Arctic said, \"warning us of the dangers of animus magic \u2014 use it too much, you lose your soul, some mystical mumbo jumbo like that, which probably isn't even true. But once there's a law set down in the Ice Kingdom, everyone better follow it with no questions asked.\" He decided not to mention the ancient stories of animus dragons gone mad.\n\n\"No,\" Foeslayer said, touching the earring again. \"Why did you do this \u2014 for me?\" She wrinkled her snout, half teasing, half serious. \"Aren't you worried about your soul?\"\n\n\"Not anymore,\" he said. \"It's yours now \u2026 if you want it.\"\n\nGlittering petals of snow fell softly on her black wings, melting into her heat. Foeslayer hesitated, then reached out and took one of Arctic's talons in hers.\n\nThis is a bad idea, whispered Arctic's conscience. The very worst. Neither of our tribes would forgive us. Mother will never allow it.\n\nAll the more reason. I won't let the queen crush my entire life between her claws.\n\nIt's my life, my magic, and my heart.\n\n\"I'm going to say something really sappy,\" Foeslayer warned him.\n\n\"More sappy than what I just said?\" he asked. \"I'd like to see you try.\"\n\n\"I just \u2014 I have this strange feeling,\" Foeslayer said, looking into his eyes, \"that the world is about to change forever.\"\n\nFathom had never thought of himself as anyone special, and he certainly wasn't expecting that to change the day of the animus test.\n\nEight SeaWing dragonets were lined up on the beach that morning, their blue and green scales wet from the hissing waves of the ocean behind them. All of them had turned two years old within the last few months. The sun was beating on Fathom's snout and his eyes felt prickly and sore from the brightness. He couldn't wait to get back to the underwater palace, where it was cool and dark.\n\nBut he sat quietly, patiently, waiting without moving (even though they'd been sitting there for ages), like they had been told to do. Unlike some dragonets.\n\nSwish. Sand pattered across his back talons, just enough for him to be sure it wasn't the wind that had done it.\n\n\"Shhh,\" he said out of the corner of his mouth.\n\n\"Who, me?\" said the dragonet next to him. \"What did I say? Nothing, that's what. You're the one being noisy. I'm just sitting here. Perfectly still. A model dragonet, me.\" She lifted her chin and put on an angelic expression.\n\nA large, sleek seagull landed up the beach from the dragons, near the tree line, and eyed them suspiciously. It had the face of a bird who knew things \u2014 a shrewd bird who had managed to survive this long in a dragon world. It was clearly trying to figure out why a bunch of dragons had popped out of the water and then decided to sit quietly in a row on the sand. Were they about to drop bits of food for a crafty seagull? Or were they all conspiring to eat him?\n\nThe bird pivoted its head to study them with its other eye.\n\n\"I dare you to grab it and eat it,\" Indigo whispered.\n\n\"Quit talking to me,\" Fathom growled.\n\n\"You know you want to.\" Her voice was as light as feathers, barely stirring the air.\n\nHe did want to. He was very hungry. But the queen had told them not to move, and he was not going to be the dragonet who failed. Being the queen's great-nephew would not save him from whatever trouble that would cause.\n\nSwish. This time a hermit crab got caught in the sweep of Indigo's tail and bonked against his side as the sand sprayed over his feet. Fathom felt the crab stagger dazedly across his claws, trying to figure out what had just happened to it.\n\n\"Stop. That,\" he growled, keeping his face as still as he could. On his other side, he heard his sister, Pearl, let out a small, exasperated sigh.\n\n\"I think you're the one who should stop distracting everybody with all your chitchat, Highness,\" said Indigo with mock primness.\n\n\"Indigo.\" Queen Lagoon materialized suddenly behind them, rising out of the ocean like a sinister iceberg. She stalked slowly up the beach between Fathom and his troublemaking friend.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Indigo said, her dark blue-purple claws gripping the sand. She managed to keep her anxiety out of her voice, but Fathom knew that the queen terrified her. Given how openly Queen Lagoon disliked her, in fact, Indigo would be quite justified if she tried to bury herself in kelp whenever the queen appeared.\n\n\"I hope you are taking this test seriously,\" said the queen. She turned her gaze to scrutinize Fathom, and he felt as though eels were wriggling under his scales. He liked it much better when the queen ignored him, as she did most of the time. He was only a minor prince in the palace, nobody important.\n\n\"Of course, Your Majesty.\" Indigo widened her eyes as if she'd never done anything wrong in her entire life.\n\nThere was another splash behind them, and Fathom found himself holding his breath as a new dragon stalked up the beach to join the queen.\n\nIt was him.\n\nThe most respected dragon in the SeaWing tribe, second in power only to the queen: Fathom's grandfather, Albatross.\n\nAlbatross was from the same hatching as his sister, Queen Lagoon, but he was nearly a neck length taller than her, with long wings that swept majestically across the sand. His scales were bluish gray but so pale that in places they looked almost white, while his eyes were a blue so dark they were nearly black. In fact, his coloring was somewhat similar to the seagull, which had now retreated to the safer vantage point of a palm tree.\n\nHis expression, too, was as suspicious as the seagull's. He looked down his long, hooked snout at the dragonets.\n\n\"This is a waste of time, Lagoon,\" he said. \"Nobody ever tested me, but we figured out quickly enough what I could do. If any of them have a shred of power, surely they would know by now. Or it will become obvious, sooner or later.\"\n\n\"I'd prefer sooner,\" the queen said silkily. \"If we find another animus in the tribe, that would make us twice as powerful, which would be quite useful given how the MudWings and RainWings have been behaving lately. And the earlier we find her, the sooner you can start to train her, and the sooner I can start to use her.\n\n\"Besides,\" she added in a lower voice, so Fathom had to strain to hear her, \"I think we would all prefer to discover our next animus in a less \u2026 dramatic fashion than you were discovered. Don't you?\"\n\nAlbatross flinched, just slightly. He cast a skeptical eye across the young dragons. \"My power is more than enough for whatever you need. I've given you everything you've asked for, haven't I? And I don't want an apprentice.\"\n\nLagoon coiled her tail and bared her fangs. Suddenly she did not seem smaller than Albatross at all. Fathom dug his talons into the warm sand, trying not to shiver.\n\n\"You are done complaining about this,\" she hissed. \"The animus tests will continue. You will administer them whenever I tell you to. You will train any dragonet we find with powers like yours. And you will never question my decisions again.\"\n\nThere was a long pause, and then Albatross bowed his head. \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" He folded his wings and paced down the line of dragonets, avoiding everyone's gaze. \"Some of you may have heard of animus magic. It is a rare kind of immense power, and a dragon is either born with it or he isn't. What we are doing today is a simple test to see if you have that power. Almost certainly you do not,\" he added.\n\nAlbatross flicked his tail at the trees. The seagull let out an alarmed screech as eight coconuts suddenly wrestled themselves loose and came flying down to the beach, rolling to a stop on the sand, one in front of each dragonet.\n\n\"Pick up your coconut,\" Albatross said.\n\nFathom hesitated. There was something a little terrifying about this order. Albatross sounded bored, and yet a coconut that flew through the air by itself might do anything when you touched it. Would it explode in their claws? Turn into a sea urchin and stab them? Was this the kind of test that might hurt?\n\nPearl was the first to lift her coconut into her talons, with Indigo a moment behind her. Neither of them started screaming, so Fathom reached out and picked his up as well.\n\nIt seemed like an ordinary coconut \u2014 hairy, a little heavy, warm from the sun.\n\n\"Now,\" said Albatross, \"tell your coconut to fly over here and hit me.\"\n\nThe dragonets glanced at one another in confusion, shuffling their feet. Fathom felt the ocean lapping at his tail as the tide started to come in.\n\n\"Um,\" said Indigo \u2014 of course it was Indigo, the only dragonet who ever spoke up about anything. \"Sorry. How do we do that?\"\n\nQueen Lagoon glared at her, but Albatross looked obscurely pleased. \"You use your power, if you have any,\" he said. \"An animus dragon can enchant any object to do what he wants it to do. I can do it now without even speaking, but saying it out loud is the way to start. Simply whisper to your coconut that you want it to fly over here and hit me.\" He smiled.\n\n\"Huh,\" said Indigo. \"Wouldn't it be easier to just throw it at you?\"\n\nAlbatross barked a laugh. \"But then you might miss. An enchanted coconut will never miss, no matter how I dodge or try to block it. Go ahead and try.\"\n\nSmall voices began to murmur on either side of Fathom. He glanced over at Pearl, who was frowning hard at her coconut, and then at Indigo, who met his eyes, grinned, and gave a \"well, this is the dumbest thing we've done all day\" shrug.\n\nFathom curled his claws around the brown sphere and brought his snout close to it, feeling quite silly indeed.\n\n\"Coconut,\" he whispered. \"Um. Would you please go hit my grandfather?\"\n\nThe coconut didn't move. It wasn't a magical ball of danger. It was just a coconut.\n\nFathom exhaled. He didn't know what he felt. A part of him had hoped \u2026 well, it was ridiculous to hope. Albatross was the only animus in the tribe \u2014 the only animus any SeaWing had ever known. There were rumors that other tribes had them, but who could tell if that was true. Maybe Albatross was the only one ever. The chances of finding another SeaWing animus just a generation or two after Albatross, when there had never been one before \u2026 and the chances of it being him, Fathom, of all dragons \u2026\n\n\"Fathom, you jellyfish,\" Indigo whispered, giggling. \"I don't think you're supposed to ask politely. He said tell it what to do.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\" Fathom whispered back. \"You don't know how effective politeness can be because you have atrocious manners.\"\n\nThe other dragonets were starting to whisper to one another as well. Nobody's coconut had done anything interesting. Albatross turned to the queen with an \"I told you so\" smirk.\n\n\"It's a coconut.\" Indigo rolled her eyes. \"I think you're allowed to boss it around.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Fathom held the coconut a bit higher and gave it a stern royal stare as imposing as his great-aunt's, trying to make Indigo laugh. \"Coconut, listen up. I command you to fly across this beach and strike my grandfather.\"\n\nThe coconut shot out of his talons so fast that Fathom stumbled forward, thinking he'd dropped it. He let out a yelp of surprise, but it was not enough warning for Albatross, whose eyes were on the queen. Fathom's coconut smashed into his grandfather's chest hard enough to knock him backward, his wings flying out, sand blasting in all directions like waves.\n\nSilence dropped over the beach.\n\nFathom had never known it was possible to feel this elated and this terrified at the same time. He wished he could dive into the ocean and scream at the top of his lungs, but he couldn't move a single muscle.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Indigo breathed.\n\nAlbatross slowly rolled to his feet, struggling against the sucking, shifting white sand. He shook out his wings and stood up, wincing. He looked suddenly a lot older than he had before. Without looking at the dragonets or the queen, he carefully picked up the coconut that had attacked him, stared at it for a moment, and then held it to his chest. Fathom thought he could hear tiny crunching sounds. Had he cracked his grandfather's ribs? Was Albatross using the coconut to heal himself?\n\nWas he in the very worst trouble he'd ever been in?\n\nFinally Albatross looked up.\n\n\"Who did that?\" he asked. Queen Lagoon swiveled her head, staring down the line of dragonets until she came to Fathom's empty claws.\n\nFathom hunched his shoulders and saw that Pearl was pointing at him.\n\n\"It was my brother,\" she said. \"Fathom's an animus!\"\n\n\"Leaping barracudas,\" Indigo said to him. \"I can't believe you never told me!\"\n\n\"I didn't know!\" he protested. \"I had no idea!\" Frankly it had never occurred to him to give orders to inanimate objects before.\n\n\"Prince Fathom,\" said the queen, stepping toward him with a glittering smile. \"How perfectly wonderful. You are going to do such wonderful, important things for m \u2014 for your tribe.\"\n\nFathom held out his talons and stared at them. I'm an animus. The rarest of all dragons. ME. I am special after all. I have magic like no other dragon in the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\nExcept one.\n\nHe looked up and met his grandfather's eyes.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Albatross, smiling. \"What happy news.\"\n\nBehind him, out of view of the other dragons, a vine curled slowly out of the jungle and wrapped itself around the seagull's throat. Fathom watched, transfixed, as the bird was strangled to death without a sound.\n\nAlbatross patted Fathom on the shoulder, his face calm and friendly. \"Another animus in the tribe,\" he said. \"I'm so very, very pleased.\"\n\nHis earliest memory was the voices that came from outside the darkness.\n\n\"Are you sure it's time? Now? Tonight?\"\n\n\"Yes. NightWing mothers always know. And it's the brightest night, like Foreseer said it would be. Three full moons \u2026 we haven't had a thrice-moonborn dragonet in over a century! Snakes and centipedes, quit pacing. It makes me want to bite your ear off.\"\n\n\"Try anything like that and I'll enchant all your teeth to fall out.\"\n\nA slight pause. \"Arctic. I was just kidding.\"\n\n\"Right. Me too.\"\n\nHe couldn't understand the words yet, but he was flooded with the emotions that poured from both minds. One (Mother, he knew without knowing) was absorbed with worry, protective, ready to love and defend and rage at a moment's turn. The other radiated resentment and cold anger, rotten around the edges.\n\nA scratching noise, and he felt the world tilting. Suddenly there was light, dim and soft but there, beyond the wall he had only just discovered around him. The light was calling him: Come out, come out. Come out now.\n\n\"Why are you moving them?\" the angry voice demanded. \"We leave ours buried in the snow.\"\n\n\"Ours have to hatch in the moonlight,\" Mother answered. \"Stop scowling at me. It's completely safe. NightWings have been doing this for hundreds of years.\"\n\nThere was a sharp, loud tap near his ear.\n\n\"Don't touch them!\"\n\nA dizzying rush of motion, followed by warmth and stillness.\n\n\"Why are they two different colors?\" asked the voice he didn't like, as loud and splintery and jagged as the tap had been. \"Is it because of us? Maybe that one's more of an IceWing?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Most NightWing eggs are black, but the ones that hatch under full moons turn silver like this. I don't know why that one's still black. They should hatch at the same time.\"\n\n\"Something is wrong with it,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Mother, \"is wrong with my dragonets.\"\n\nThe world tilted again, and he felt himself settling into a place that wouldn't roll or shift so easily when he moved.\n\nNow he could sense something else \u2014 another heartbeat, slow and steady and very close by. He reached for her mind, but there was only peace and quiet there. None of the urgency to escape that he felt. He knew he didn't have forever. Now, that's what he had, only now.\n\n\"We're up too high,\" grumbled the angry voice. \"They could fall. This is a stupid tradition. We should have taken them back to the Ice Kingdom to hatch.\"\n\n\"So they could freeze the moment they came out?\" Mother said acerbically.\n\n\"They wouldn't,\" he growled. \"They are half IceWing, remember.\"\n\n\"And your mother would have been so pleased to meet them,\" she snapped. \"At least my family won't kill our dragonets on sight. They'll help us protect them.\"\n\n\"Your family has nothing to complain about. I brought royal IceWing blood to their line.\"\n\nMother hissed dangerously. \"I see. I'm so sorry about mixing it with my peasant NightWing blood.\"\n\nA burst of violence, of bloody scales and frozen claws, flashed through the dragonet's mind. His mother was in danger. Bad things were about to happen. But he could stop it. He just had to come out now.\n\nHe pressed his talons hard against the walls around him, shoving and kicking and straining. A satisfying crack, and the sensation of something giving way beneath his back claws.\n\n\"He's coming, look.\" It worked. They were both distracted from their anger, especially Mother, all her thoughts now on her dragonet, her mind shimmering with excitement.\n\nHe tried to reach the quiet heartbeat again. If he'd had the words, he would have thought Come out with me! Just try! You have to fight!\n\nBut he didn't have those words yet, and she wasn't listening in any case.\n\n\"There's a storm coming. Does that make a difference to your moon superstitions?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, but it doesn't matter. He'll be out before it gets here. Look how strong he is.\" A moment, a pulse where they almost shared the same emotion, and then she added, \"They're not superstitions, by the way. You don't have to be a rhinoceros nostril just because you don't understand something.\"\n\nThe danger flashed before him again. Time to fight harder. He dug in his claws and squirmed, pushing in every direction at once.\n\nThe light, the light, the light wanted him out, wanted to run its talons over his wings, drip through his scales, fill him with silver power. He wanted that power, too, all of it, all of it.\n\nCRACK-CRACK-CRACK.\n\nThe walls fell away.\n\nThe moons poured in.\n\nThree silver eyes in the sky, huge and perfectly round, with darkness all around them. It felt as if they were sinking into his chest, melting into his eyes. He wanted to scoop them into his talons and swallow them whole.\n\nHe was in a carved stone nest lined with black fur, at the peak of a sharp promontory. Another egg sat quietly in the nest, nearly camouflaged against the fur and the shadows.\n\nBelow him stretched a vast landscape of caverns and ravines, glowing with firelight and echoing with the flutter of wings. It looked as though a giant dragon had raked the ground with her claws, digging secret canyons and caves into the rock all across the terrain, some of them stretching toward the starlit sea in the distance.\n\nAfter several heartbeats he realized there were two large dragons behind him, their wings drawn tight against the wind that buffeted them all. One was black as the night, one pale as the moons. He glanced down at his scales, but he didn't have to see their color to know he belonged with the dark one. That was Mother. She sparked with anger from snout to tail, but there was immense room inside her for love, and she adored him already, heart and soul. He could feel it. It filled him like the moonlight did, setting the world quickly into understandable shapes in his head. He loved her, too, immediately and forever.\n\nThe danger came from the white dragon. This was Father, some kind of partner to the dragon who cared. The newly hatched dragonet could hardly look at him without seeing a spiral of confusing flashes: pain, fury, screaming dragons, and blood, everywhere, blood. This white dragon had done something terrible that haunted him, and he might do worse someday. Father's mind had patches of damp, rotten vileness all over it.\n\nThe dragonet immediately wanted to turn him into a fireball and blow his ashes away. But inside Father, hidden under layers of ice, pulsed a small, warm ember of love for Mother. That was the thing that saved him.\n\nWait and see, thought the dragonet. He did not understand yet that he could see the future. He had no idea what the flashes meant. He couldn't follow the paths that were unfolding in his brain; cause and effect and consequences were all still beyond him. But in his mother's mind he found the idea of hope, and in his father's mind he traced the outline of something called patience.\n\nHe could wait. There was much still to come between him and this father-shaped dragon.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" said Mother. \"Hello, darling.\" She held out her talons and he climbed into them willingly, content to be closer to that warmth.\n\n\"Darkstalker?\" Father snorted. \"You must be joking. That's the creepiest name I've ever heard.\"\n\n\"It is not,\" she snapped, and the dragonet bared his teeth in sympathy, but neither of them noticed. \"The darkness is his prey. He chases back the dark, like a hero.\"\n\n\"Sounds more like he creeps through the dark. Like a stalker.\"\n\n\"Stop being horrible. It's not up to you. In my kingdom, mothers choose their dragonets' names.\"\n\n\"In my kingdom, the dragon with the highest rank in the family chooses the dragonets' names and the queen must approve them.\"\n\n\"And of course you think your 'rank' is higher than mine,\" she snarled. \"But we're not in your kingdom. My dragonets will never set foot in your frozen wasteland. We are here, whether you like it or not, and he is my son, and his name is Darkstalker.\"\n\nFather's eyes, like fragments of ice, studied Darkstalker's every scale, and Darkstalker could feel the cold, congealing weight of Father's resentment.\n\n\"He looks every inch a NightWing,\" Father growled. \"Not a shred of me in him at all.\"\n\nSuspicion, hatred, outrage flashing on both sides, but none of it spoken.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Father at last. \"You can have your sinister little Darkstalker. But I want to name the other one.\"\n\nMother hesitated, glancing at the unhatched egg, which was still black. Darkstalker listened as her mind turned it over, already half detached. She wasn't sure anyone would ever come out of that egg. She was ready to give all her love to Darkstalker, her perfect thrice-moonborn dragonet. All of it, and he was ready to take it.\n\nBut Darkstalker knew his sister was in that egg. Alive, but not restless. Quiet. She didn't care for the moons that had called him forth. She couldn't hear them.\n\nSomething tingled in his claws.\n\nHe could change that.\n\nHe could touch her egg and summon her. He knew it, somehow; he could see in his mind how her egg would turn silver under his talons, how it would splinter and crack open as she scrambled out. He could see the beautiful, odd-looking dragonet that would come out, and he could see the moons sharing their power with her, too.\n\nThen they would be the same. She would be born under three moons as well. She would have the same power as him \u2026 and the same love from Mother.\n\nWhich he already had to share with the undeserving ice monster across from him.\n\nNo. This was his. All he had to do was nothing. His sister would come out in her own time, tomorrow when the moons were no longer full. Then he would be the only special one.\n\n\"All right,\" said Mother. \"If that egg hatches, you can name the dragonet inside. Only \u2026 remember she has to grow up in the NightWing tribe. It'll be hard enough \u2014 just, try to be kind, is all. Think of her future and how she'll need to fit in.\"\n\nFather nodded, seething internally at being instructed like a low-ranked dragonet in training.\n\nShe'll be all right, Darkstalker thought. A thousand futures dropped away before him as he made his first choice. Futures where his sister joined his quest for power; futures where she fought him and stopped him; futures where they were best friends; futures where one of them killed the other, or vice versa. As Darkstalker folded his talons together, choosing to keep them still for tonight, every possible future with a thrice-moonborn sister disappeared.\n\nHe saw them blink out, and although he didn't know exactly what it meant, he felt somehow a tiny bit safer, a tiny bit bigger and stronger.\n\nSorry, little sister, he thought, not in so many words, but with visions of his future cascading through his mind. This is my mother. Those are my full moons.\n\nThis is my world now.\n\nA few days after the animus test, Albatross summoned Fathom for the first time. It was right in the middle of their geography lesson, and Fathom felt his stomach lift and drop and zigzag just like the lines of the canyons around the Deep Palace.\n\nGrandfather wants to see me? he echoed. Right now?\n\nHe said to meet him at the sunset beach of the Island Palace, the messenger reported. Alone. The phosphorescent scales under his wings flashed, transmitting the words in the SeaWing underwater language, Aquatic. An eel swam by the window, peered in at the dragons, and then wriggled quickly away.\n\nCan't Indigo come? Fathom asked, glancing at his friend. She was perched beside him on the pink coral ledge around the interior of the room, their talons anchoring them down while their wings drifted in the water. On her other side, Pearl was giving her tail a bored inspection.\n\nHis sister glittered with coils of gemstones, long twisted ropes of pearls and opals and sapphires circling her torso and ankles. Indigo's only adornment was a necklace woven from dark purple seaweed, which Fathom had made for her last week. He liked it because the color matched her eyes. He liked her because she wore it with delight even when she was surrounded by the sharp-eyed, bejeweled dragons of the Deep Palace.\n\nHe didn't want to leave the Deep Palace without Indigo. He rarely went anywhere without her; they'd been together almost since hatching. Her mother had been in Queen Lagoon's army, where she'd become close friends with Fathom's mother before she died. Indigo's father curated the museum at the Island Palace and was quite happy to leave his only dragonet's upbringing to the caretakers who'd been assigned to Fathom and Pearl. Indigo was the only dragon invited to every royal family gathering despite having not a drop of royal blood in her.\n\nHang on, does Indigo want to come? Indigo said, poking his wing with hers. Perhaps someone with manners should try asking her. She might be extremely busy, you know. She reached out to tap the large terrain model of the kingdom that filled most of the room, and the tip of an underwater mountain broke off in her claws. Oops, she said with a guilty look at their frowning tutor. Never mind, I'm totally free.\n\nHe specifically said \"alone,\" the messenger flashed with a shrug.\n\nI think you two can survive an afternoon's separation, Pearl chimed in, rolling her eyes.\n\nFathom knew that, but it felt so weird to have something he couldn't share with his best friend. And he kept thinking of that seagull \u2026 although he knew it didn't mean anything, and possibly he'd seen the whole thing wrong and maybe the bird had accidentally strangled itself. Right? It was possible. Wasn't it?\n\nI agree with Pearl, said their tutor. Perhaps with you gone, Indigo will miraculously be able to focus on the geography of the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\nIndigo sighed a little whoosh of water around her snout. Not likely, she said sadly.\n\nWhy are you acting like an indecisive jellyfish right now? Pearl demanded, glaring at Fathom. The scales flashing along her wings were brighter than they needed to be, and he blinked several times, trying to avoid a headache. You're the chosen one or whatever. Go have special chosen-one bonding time with Grandfather.\n\nYeah. Indigo nudged his wing again. Get excited! You've been waiting for this!\n\nShe was right. Albatross had forbidden him to try any magic until their first session, and it felt as though Fathom's claws had been trapped in sand the last few days. He knew they could do marvelous things and he wanted to set them free. He wanted to start playing with his power; he wanted to find out everything he could do. And for that he needed his grandfather, the only one in the tribe who understood how animus magic worked.\n\nAll right \u2014 I'll be back soon, he said. I think.\n\nSure, if you're not too special and magical to hang out with us anymore, Pearl said.\n\nFathom gave her a sideways look, trying to figure out if she was mad at him. For what? Being an animus? There wasn't much he could do about that.\n\nAnd he wasn't sorry. Their whole life, his sister was always \"the one who might be queen someday.\" She had special diplomacy classes, extra policy sessions with the queen, private lessons to improve her handwriting (which was terrible), even advanced etiquette courses (those he was fine with missing). Wasn't that enough specialness for her?\n\nWhereas he could never rule the tribe \u2026 but now he had magic.\n\nHis wings felt as if they had an extra current underneath them, shooting him along as he flew through the water to the Island Palace. He took all his strange little whispery feelings of dread and squashed them flat. He was special. He wasn't just another SeaWing prince, destined to lead a wing of the queen's army, sitting through normal lessons, on track for an ordinary dragon's life.\n\nHe had power, and he could use it to do something amazing.\n\nExactly what that would be, he wasn't sure yet. He'd been trying to think of some good ideas so he could show Albatross what a smart, thoughtful dragon he was.\n\nThe Island Palace was an elegant, sprawling complex of pavilions and courtyards, rooms and terraces, gardens and walkways that covered an entire island at the heart of the Kingdom of the Sea. Several of the walkways led to pavilions over the water, with glass floors so the dragons could have the sea at their talons at all times. Carvings of pale pink sea horses and bone-white dolphins dotted the gardens. Iridescent-blue paua shells gleamed in wave patterns, with white foam made from inlaid pearl, all along the polished wooden walls.\n\nThis was where Queen Lagoon entertained visitors from other tribes with elaborate feasts and entertainments that went on for days. This was also where the regular royal family gathering happened once a month, so Fathom had his own bungalow there, which he shared with Indigo and Pearl.\n\nThere were two main beaches used for palace events. The sunrise beach was the one dragons went to for tranquility or quiet conversation, for peace and quiet and solitude. So Fathom was surprised that Albatross had summoned him to the sunset beach instead, where parties often began that could last all night long. Royal weddings usually took place on this beach, including the one five years ago between his own parents, Manta and Reef.\n\nBut in the middle of the day, with the sun high above them, it was deserted. Albatross stood alone on the white sand, watching with his odd dark eyes as Fathom swam up to the beach. Waves clawed and pounced at his feet, eating away the sand below him, but Albatross didn't seem to notice he was sinking.\n\n\"Hello, Grandson,\" he said, spreading his wings as wide as his smile. \"Do you feel powerful today? Ready to do some magic?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Fathom said.\n\n\"Let's see those claws,\" said Albatross. Fathom held out his front talons and Albatross inspected them, one side and then the other, as though he were selecting a pair of precisely matched emeralds.\n\n\"Hmmm, yes, very interesting,\" Albatross said. \"This talon definitely has more power than that one.\"\n\n\"It does?\" Fathom said with awe, stretching it out so the sunlight shone through the webs between his claws.\n\n\"Oh, clearly,\" said Albatross. \"Can't you tell?\"\n\nFathom nodded thoughtfully. \"I \u2014 yes \u2014 of course, it's more \u2014 more tingly, like \u2014\" He caught the mischievous expression on his grandfather's face. \"Wait a minute. You're messing with me!\"\n\nAlbatross laughed a warm, fish-smelling laugh. \"I couldn't resist. I've never had a fellow animus to tease before. This is going to be fun, isn't it? Finding out what your magic can do?\"\n\nFathom nodded, beaming. His grandfather had never been so jovial with him before. Albatross was always too busy, too untouchable, spending all his time on Queen Lagoon's projects. He'd been a kind but distant presence all of Fathom's life.\n\n\"All right, then,\" said Albatross, splashing into the sea. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Go where?\" Fathom asked. He'd been picturing a training session on the beach, maybe with more coconuts, or in one of the shaded courtyards while servants brought them mango drinks and platters of shrimp.\n\n\"My sister wants me to show you my most top secret project,\" said Albatross. He tossed his head carelessly and winked at Fathom. \"In case I die and you need to finish it, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" Fathom protested. \"Never do that! I could never make something as amazing as what you've made.\" But as he said it, he wondered if it was true. Would his creations be as brilliant as his grandfather's one day? Would he eventually be as beloved and respected and important as Albatross?\n\nFathom had only seen a few animus-touched objects in action. The most striking was a conch shell that pulsed with light whenever someone lied. It was intended for the queen to use in interrogations and negotiations, but Lagoon let her family use it whenever they asked. That was how Manta had forced Indigo and Fathom to confess that they were the ones who put squid ink in everyone's toothpaste (Indigo's idea, of course, but Fathom accepted half the blame rather than run the risk of being separated from her).\n\n\"You might be surprised,\" Albatross said. \"But as for me never dying, I am also in favor of that plan.\" He smiled and dove into the ocean, and Fathom had to scramble to catch up to his grandfather's powerful wing strokes.\n\nThey swam for what seemed like a long time, and not in the direction of the Deep Palace. Where are we going? The islands in this direction were more scattered, with strong currents in between them. Golden sunlight filtered down through the water, illuminating the schools of brightly colored fish that darted by.\n\nUp ahead, Fathom saw the foundation of a large island rising from the ocean floor; all around it, gray boulders and tall spires of rock jutted out of the water. Albatross led the way to a wavering forest of orange-yellow kelp and swam straight into it. Fathom followed him through the sticky fronds to a tunnel in the cliff ahead of them.\n\nThey swam into the tunnel, from light into darkness, and Fathom's night vision kicked in so he could see every bend and twist in the rock as they went deeper. He was beginning to wonder if they were going to swim right through the island when, all of a sudden, they emerged into a wide open lake.\n\nFathom popped his head out of the water beside his grandfather. They were in the heart of the island, surrounded on all sides by craggy, soaring cliffs. Up above them, cormorants wheeled about in a bright blue sky.\n\nIn the center of the lake, a vast, strange shape was growing out of the water. It looked at first glance like a gigantic narwhal tusk, as if someone had taken four towering pillars of white stone and braided them together. Huge flat bubbles of stone grew out of the pillars at regular intervals. Fathom realized with a start that they were literally growing \u2014 expanding, inch by inch, as slow as a sea slug inching across the ocean floor.\n\nThe whole thing was an amorphous, misshapen blob, a weird growth on the insides of the beautiful island.\n\n\"Oh no,\" he blurted. \"What went wrong?\"\n\nAlbatross paused for a long moment, studying the shape, before answering. \"What makes you think something is wrong?\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 I'm sorry,\" Fathom stammered. \"It's \u2014 is it \u2014 supposed to look like that?\"\n\nAlbatross ducked his head under the water and came up with a smile on his face. \"It's not finished,\" he said lightly. \"It's still growing into its final shape. I must admit, I didn't think it would take so long. But when it's done, trust me, it will be the pride of the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure it will!\" Fathom's mouth tumbled on ahead of him. \"Everyone will love it! Because it's a \u2026 the best possible \u2026 such a cool \u2026\" He trailed off, feeling like a sinking snail.\n\n\"It's a new palace, grandson,\" said Albatross. He turned to swim to the nearest beach. \"Entirely grown by animus power. I call it the Summer Palace \u2014 a place where royalty can escape to enjoy the warmest weather of the year.\"\n\nFathom blinked at the twisting, growing pavilion. He had a million questions, like Does Queen Lagoon know about this? and Would anyone really want to live here? and How will it know when to stop growing? and Doesn't it feel kind of \u2026 creepy?\n\nBut he didn't want his grandfather to see him as unimaginative or full of doubts. He wanted to be an ideas kind of dragon, all energy and enthusiasm.\n\nHe scrambled out of the lake beside his grandfather, feeling rough pebbles scrape his underbelly and tail. They both regarded the enchanted pavilion for a moment.\n\n\"Here's what it will look like when it's finished,\" Albatross said, opening a box on the beach beside him and pulling out a scroll. Fathom unrolled the drawing and let out a gasp.\n\n\"This is beautiful,\" he said. \"It's going to grow into this?\"\n\n\"That's the plan,\" said Albatross. \"I check on it regularly, making adjustments and adding features. It's been growing for more than seven years, so it shouldn't be much longer.\"\n\n\"Seven years?\" Fathom said, startled. His voice echoed too loudly around the cavern.\n\n\"I enchanted it to grow carefully and precisely, like a tree,\" said his grandfather proudly. \"Anything faster and wilder could have damaged the ecosystem of the whole island.\"\n\nIs that true? Fathom wondered. Or did he make a mistake with the original enchantment? Maybe he just told it to grow and didn't specify how fast. I bet that would be really frustrating.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" he blurted.\n\n\"Already?\" said Albatross. \"How \u2026 impressive.\"\n\n\"I mean,\" Fathom said, \"I don't know if it's a good idea. Or if it would work. Can you use animus magic on plants?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Albatross. \"I've done that several times.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Fathom said, getting excited, \"I was thinking this Summer Palace would be more secure if it was hidden from above. Don't you think? Because right now, any dragon flying overhead can see it. But you could enchant the greenery up there to grow together and create a canopy, couldn't you? Shielding the palace from the sky? But still letting in sunlight through the leaves?\"\n\nHis grandfather tilted his head back to study the roof of the cavern. \"Yes,\" he said slowly. \"Yes, that could definitely work. What a clever idea, grandson.\"\n\nFathom's wings felt as if they might float off into the sky. \"Can I do it?\" he asked excitedly. \"Can I do it right now?\"\n\n\"Hold on,\" said Albatross, taking the scroll of detailed palace sketches. He set it carefully back in the box and cleared his throat. \"I \u2014 I have to warn you about something.\"\n\nFathom shifted impatiently on his talons. His life was full of lectures and warnings. Don't offend the elders of the royal family. Don't eat until everyone else has been served. Be careful of sharks until you're full-grown and can eat them. Never explore the deepest trenches alone. The lecture he got the most often but still didn't understand was from the queen, who seemed compelled to inform him at every family gathering that he shouldn't get \"too attached\" to Indigo, whatever that meant.\n\n\"The first lesson of being an animus,\" said Albatross, looking into Fathom's eyes, \"is that you must always be careful. Remember this is powerful, powerful magic. It can go wrong very easily. It's so powerful that you can do almost anything, except bring a dragon back from the dead.\"\n\nFathom managed not to look at the weird shape growing in slow motion behind him. \"I'll be careful,\" he promised quickly. \"I won't do anything wrong.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Albatross said, patting Fathom's shoulder. \"You're very fortunate. I didn't have anyone to guide me.\" He hesitated again. \"Do you know the story of my first animus spell?\"\n\nFathom shook his head, shivering with excitement. He'd always wondered how Albatross discovered his power. \"Was it amazing?\" he asked. \"Do you still have the first object you enchanted? Can I see it? Did you feel like the biggest, most incredible dragon in the whole ocean? Did you want to enchant absolutely everything else around you right away?\"\n\nAlbatross sighed and swept his tail in an arc across the sand until it drifted into the water. \"Maybe you're too young to hear this.\"\n\n\"I'm not!\" Fathom protested. \"I really want to know. Please tell me.\"\n\n\"It was an accident,\" his grandfather said. \"Remember that. I had no idea it would work. I didn't know I had this power \u2014 I barely knew such power existed, and we all thought it was only in stories. Also, I was very young. Younger than you are now.\"\n\nThere was a long pause. I'm not that young, Fathom thought. I already know lots of things.\n\n\"It was an empty clamshell,\" Albatross said in a rush. \"You know \u2014 the kind where the two halves are still connected, but hollow inside. A big one, but nothing extraordinary. I was playing with it on the sunrise beach, pretending it was a dragon mouth that was chasing the crabs and seagulls.\"\n\nThis was beyond Fathom's imaginative skills. He couldn't begin to picture his stately, intimidating grandfather scampering around with a toy.\n\n\"And then my sisters came down to see what I was doing.\" Albatross's voice kept getting quieter, and his eyes turned to the water as if the scene in his mind were reflected there. \"Lagoon and Sapphire. Our mother was still queen back then \u2014 it was years before either of them would be old enough to challenge her. But they were both bigger than me, and they started to tease me. They said my scales were a weird color, that my tail was a funny shape, that my teeth were too small, and I swam like a feeble old duck. Normal brother-sister teasing, but it made me so angry. So very, very angry.\"\n\nNormal teasing? Fathom wondered. Is that what other brothers and sisters are like? He didn't always get along with Pearl, but she never followed him around just to be mean for no reason. And his older cousins simply ignored him, politely uninterested in his stories or Indigo's games.\n\nNo one in his family had ever made him really angry, that he could remember. Wait \u2014 Queen Lagoon, once, when she ordered Indigo to go deep-sea fishing at night because the palace had run out of her favorite snack. Fathom's mother had stopped Indigo and gone herself, and Lagoon had rolled her eyes and muttered something about coddling the lower class. Fathom didn't know what it meant, but he knew he didn't like the way the queen looked down her snout at Indigo. It made him feel all roary and snarly inside.\n\nAngry like that? Was that what Albatross had felt?\n\n\"Sapphire tried to grab the clamshell out of my talons. 'What have you got here?'\" Grandfather's voice went high and mocking, imitating his sister. Great-Aunt Sapphire \u2014 Fathom had heard her name before, but he'd never met her. She'd never attended a royal family dinner. He didn't actually know if she was dead or alive or where she lived.\n\nA sinking feeling swept through his stomach. He suddenly didn't want to hear the rest of this story at all. But there was no stopping his grandfather now.\n\nAlbatross's claws curled into the sand, his gaze anchored on a spot over Fathom's shoulder. \"'That's mine!' I yelled. 'Oh, is this your precious treasure?' Sapphire cooed, peeling my talons off it easily. 'Everything you have will be mine when I'm queen, you know. Even stupid beach trash like this.'\" Albatross took a deep breath.\n\n\"I don't know why I spoke to the shell next instead of her \u2014 maybe because I'd been pretending it was real, or maybe because of some animus instinct curled up inside me. But I did. I squeezed the edge of it that I still held and I shouted, 'Bite her! Bite all her claws off!' and then I let go.\"\n\nFathom's jaw fell open in shock. Albatross finally looked at him again and winced.\n\n\"I know. You are lucky that your talent was discovered in a much less gruesome way,\" he said, touching his chest absently, as if remembering the pain. \"It took several days for all the blood to wash away from the beach. Sapphire, of course, could never be queen after that \u2014 a dragon with no claws cannot hunt or fight, and as for swimming \u2026 well, who looks like a feeble old duck now.\" He barked a dry laugh. \"She went a little mad, I'm afraid. Now she is kept on an island far away from everyone else, tended by two very well-paid servants. Lagoon visits her occasionally, but I never have. I assume Sapphire would prefer never to see me again.\"\n\nHe sighed.\n\nFathom looked down at his own talons, subdued. He'd been thinking of all the bright, shiny, amazing things he could do now. But what if one of his great ideas turned out all horrible and dark? What if he made a mistake and hurt someone?\n\nI won't, a voice whispered inside him. I'll be careful and smart. Smarter than Grandfather.\n\n\"I'm not telling you this to scare you,\" said Albatross. \"But you needed to know so that you'll understand my rules \u2014 mine and the queen's. You must listen to me. You must never use your magic unless I am there to supervise you. You must consider every spell carefully for weeks before you cast it, and you must run them all by me first. I know you feel powerful now \u2014 I understand that better than anyone. But you are also dangerous.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Fathom said. \"I know. I understand. I promise to be careful and all of that stuff. Can we try some magic now?\" He twitched his wings hopefully.\n\nAlbatross rubbed his forehead. \"I suppose enchanting a few plants wouldn't hurt.\"\n\n\"YES!\" Fathom shouted. \"Thank you, thank you!\" He shot into the air, arrowing toward the sky above them.\n\nA few moments later, he burst into the open sky, soaring over the circle made by the top of the cliffs, with the lake and the Summer Palace far below him. The heat of the sun was startling after the cool temperature inside the island \u2014 but even more startling than that was the yelp that came from a patch of foliage near the edge of the cliff top. He twisted in the air to squint at the shrubbery as his grandfather appeared beside him.\n\n\"A spy?\" Albatross said, his brow darkening. He flicked one claw sharply, and the entire bush tore free from the dirt and hurled itself into the sea.\n\nExposed underneath it was a small, very anxious-looking purplish-blue dragonet.\n\n\"Indigo!\" Fathom cried. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Making sure you're all right,\" she said. She sat up, squaring her shoulders. \"Sorry, Albatross, sir. I didn't mean to spy on you. I only followed Fathom to watch out for him.\"\n\n\"That's perfectly silly,\" Fathom said. He swept down to land beside her. \"You don't need to keep an eye on me. What do you think you're going to stop me from doing? You cause a lot more trouble than I do.\"\n\n\"Do not!\" Indigo protested. \"When have I ever caused trouble?\"\n\n\"Well, you're certainly in trouble,\" Albatross interjected. \"The queen won't be pleased that you've seen her most secret project.\"\n\nIndigo raised her chin defiantly.\n\n\"But since you're here anyway,\" Fathom said, \"you can watch me do my first real spell! With plants! I have this great idea about plants and things!\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Albatross said. \"I'm getting tired. I think we should swim back to the Island Palace now.\"\n\n\"What?\" Fathom cried, his wings drooping. \"Just one vine? Please?\"\n\n\"There will be plenty of time for you to practice magic, youngster,\" Albatross said firmly. \"But I am a wizened old dragon and you've surely been taught something about respecting your elders. It's time to go.\"\n\nFathom didn't dare argue with him, although his scales felt as if they were seething with frustration. Nobody spoke, not even Indigo, all the way back to the Island Palace. Albatross landed on the beach in the orange light of the sunset.\n\n\"Good session today, grandson,\" he said to Fathom, tapping his wing lightly with his own. \"I can see that you are full of promise. We'll make an excellent team, you and I.\" He glanced briefly at Indigo, who was dripping quietly onto the sand beside Fathom, close enough that Fathom could feel the heat of her body all along his scales. \"Just remember what I told you about being careful. Now good night, both of you. I'll see you soon, Fathom.\"\n\nHe slipped away in the direction of the frangipane garden. As soon as he was gone, Fathom stamped his foot in the sand and blew all the air out of his lungs.\n\n\"Good session?\" he cried. \"We didn't even do anything! He just talked and talked!\"\n\n\"Yeah, but has he ever talked to you that much before?\" Indigo asked. \"Wasn't that still pretty great?\"\n\n\"No,\" Fathom grumbled. \"I wanted to enchant something. I thought he was going to let me practice.\"\n\n\"Maybe it was my fault,\" Indigo suggested, her face falling. \"Maybe he didn't want you to practice in front of me.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's it.\" Fathom sat down and started sweeping sand into a castle mound with his tail. \"He was acting weird about it even before you got there. Doesn't he remember what it's like to be excited about something?\"\n\n\"Old dragons,\" Indigo said, shaking her head as though they were just too hopeless. She added a few rose-colored seashells to his castle. \"Do you \u2014 um, do you think the queen is going to yell at me? Or \u2026 or make me stop being friends with you?\"\n\n\"She could never do that,\" Fathom said firmly. \"I'd enchant her face to shut up first.\"\n\nIndigo giggled, but he could see that she was still worried. Maybe Queen Lagoon had been saying mean, divisive things to her, too, behind his back.\n\nFathom twisted around and found a piece of bleached-white driftwood on the beach behind him. He held it up, grinning at Indigo.\n\n\"Don't you dare,\" Indigo said, guessing what he was about to do, as she often did. \"He told you not to use your power without his approval! You have no idea what you're doing!\"\n\n\"I do, too,\" he said. \"One tiny spell won't hurt anything. I just have to make sure I don't say something stupid.\" He clasped his talons around the driftwood. \"I enchant this wood to carve itself into the shape of a gentle little octopus.\"\n\nHe set it down on the sand between them and watched with amazed elation as small curls began peeling off the edges of the wood, and then bigger wedges, and then slowly a perfect head emerged, followed by eight sculpted tentacles.\n\nSeveral minutes later, it was done. The little white octopus was about the size of a full-grown dragon's foot, with cheerfully flippy tentacles and a mischievous expression. Fathom picked it up and dusted off the sand.\n\nIt was the most perfect carving Fathom had ever seen; it matched exactly the vision he'd had in his head. That never happened when he tried to carve things with his claws.\n\n\"For you,\" he said, handing it to Indigo.\n\n\"Wow.\" She took it carefully. He could tell she was trying not to smile too much at it; that she loved it, but was still trying to look disapproving, which didn't work at all on her.\n\n\"You could have just carved this yourself,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"I know,\" he said, \"but then it wouldn't have turned out so well.\"\n\n\"I think your carvings are perfect. I still have the beluga.\"\n\nFathom laughed, remembering his first gift to her. \"Hello, that was supposed to be a graceful dolphin.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Well, I like belugas better anyway. The point is, you didn't need magic to make this.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" said Fathom, \"but without magic, I couldn't do this.\" He rested one claw on the octopus's head and whispered, \"Now come to life, with the sweetest, most loyal, most agreeable personality of any pet in Pyrrhia.\"\n\nThe octopus blinked its large, dark eyes at him, and then up at Indigo. She gasped softly, and the octopus wrapped its tentacles around her wrist as if it were hugging her.\n\n\"How are you going to hide this from your grandfather?\" Indigo demanded.\n\n\"Let me worry about that,\" Fathom said. \"Isn't it adorable?\"\n\nThe octopus snuggled in closer, and now Indigo really couldn't stop herself from smiling. \"I can't believe you magicked me a pet,\" she said. \"You're such an idiot.\"\n\nFathom stroked one of the tentacles, which still felt oddly like wood, but malleable and warm. The octopus reached up and poked Fathom's snout curiously. \"What are you going to call it?\"\n\n\"Obviously Blob,\" Indigo said immediately. \"He's clearly a Blob. Aren't you, Blob?\" The octopus moseyed in a dignified curling way up Indigo's arm to her shoulder, proceeded to climb up her neck, and settled contentedly on top of Indigo's head, tentacles flopping over her ears on each side.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said Indigo. \"Please tell me octopus hats are in this year.\"\n\nFathom fell over laughing and got sand up his nose. As he tried to sneeze it out again, he caught a glimpse of Indigo's delighted face trying to look up at the octopus on her head.\n\nSee, Grandfather? Our power can be used for good things. It can make dragons happy.\n\nI won't make mistakes like you. I can be trusted.\n\nEverything's going to be just fine.\n\nClearsight was in the library.\n\nShe was always in the library. Her parents often joked that they should have let her egg hatch there instead of on the lunar hatching peak. Of course, if they had, she wouldn't have been born under a full moon, so she wouldn't have gotten the gift of prophecy, and then she wouldn't have needed to spend so much time in the library in the first place. But whenever she pointed this out, her parents always shook their heads and sighed as if she just didn't understand their spectacular sense of humor.\n\nThe librarian had given Clearsight a study room of her own, although she suspected that was because he thought she was insane and he wanted the option to lock her in if necessary.\n\nPartially blank scrolls were unrolled all the way across the five tables around her, and she hurried from one to another, scratching quick notes and trailing ink splatters from her claws.\n\nWould it change anything if she did pretend to be insane? She closed her eyes and tried to see if a future unfolded around that idea. Would she end up in the asylum? Would it save the tribe? Would that life be better than the other options?\n\nIt was too unlikely; no one would believe her even if she tried it. There was no path there.\n\nNo escape.\n\nKeep searching. She went to the next table and tried to follow the timeline she'd started on that scroll. But it was so muddled. Step one: meet him, step two: chaos along every potential timeline.\n\nA heavy sigh came from the doorway.\n\n\"Hello, Father,\" she said without looking up. This note \u2014 when did she write this? The SeaWing brings death. The SeaWing brings salvation. Don't let him come. He must come, or all is lost.\n\nAaaaaargh. Clearsight put her head down on the desk and thumped her tail on the stone floor.\n\n\"Clearsight,\" her father said. \"You are too young to worry this much.\"\n\n\"I should worry more,\" she said, lifting her head and squinting at the SeaWing note again. Something really terrible was going to happen in the Kingdom of the Sea not long from now \u2014 something involving a lot of death. The kingdom was so far away, it was hard to be sure of the details. Should she try to warn someone? She wanted to, but she couldn't see any paths where anyone would believe her. Poor SeaWings. \"I mean, what is the point of seeing the future if you can't fix it? If I just concentrate harder, I can follow all the paths. I can figure this out.\"\n\n\"All the paths?\" her father echoed. \"Every future that spirals out of every choice you and every other dragon make for the rest of your life? Can't you hear yourself? It's impossible, dearest. That way lies madness.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said absently. \"I just checked. No madness in my future, not a viable option.\"\n\n\"This gift is not supposed to consume your entire life,\" he said. He stepped over the scrolls on the floor, narrowly avoided a blue ink puddle, and stretched one of his wings between her and the table. She looked up at him, rubbing her forehead.\n\n\"Listen,\" he said with infinite gentleness. \"I know your power is stronger than any future-teller the NightWings have had in generations. I know it feels like you can see everything ahead of you.\"\n\n\"It's not that simple,\" she said. \"It's not, 'here's your life, that's the way it will be.' It's every possible life, all the things that could happen to me and the tribe, and it all depends on what I do next. But there are so many \u2014 I can't keep track \u2014 and the further I look into the future, the more confusing and random it gets \u2026\"\n\n\"I understand.\" He wrapped his wings around her and she leaned into his chest, listening to his steady heartbeat. She knew he was trying, but he actually didn't understand at all. He didn't have either this power or mind reading. He was sweet and ordinary and not tortured, and his choices made almost no difference to the future. \"But Clearsight, even if you could see everything, that doesn't mean you can control everything. Or anything. Things will happen. Other dragons will change your path and you won't be able to stop them.\"\n\nThat is far more true than you know, Father.\n\nDarkstalker's face flashed in her mind again: the face of a dragon she had yet to meet, but who came with a torrent of visions \u2014 joy and love and pain and horror, so mixed-up she couldn't untangle it, couldn't even breathe whenever she thought about it.\n\n\"I should go away,\" she blurted. \"Far away. Maybe the rainforest. Maybe the Mud Kingdom. Maybe the lost continent. Oh, that would change everything \u2014 it would have to!\" She leaned back to look up at his face. His eyes were sad, but she knew they would get much sadder in many, many of her futures.\n\n\"I could have a whole different life, Father. I could be an explorer; I could chart the rest of the world. I could be alone, and then I'd be the only dragon who could change my destiny, right?\"\n\nIf I never meet him \u2026 is the darkness lighter? Is everyone safer?\n\nShe closed her eyes, trying to follow that path \u2014 that weak, trembling thread of a future where she flew off across the ocean tomorrow, all by herself. It wasn't impossible. It was only nearly impossible. But she didn't see any success that way \u2026 that fog at the end of the path probably meant she died somewhere over the sea. And there was still blood and darkness for the tribe, even with her gone. Maybe worse.\n\nThat was the worst part; most of the futures where she avoided him were even more scary. As if knowing her made a difference to his path, but only maybe.\n\nA flash of a silver-and-gold crown, twisted into sharp thorny points, tumbled through her head.\n\nWhich timeline was that \u2014 oh, table three. She untangled herself from her father, leaned over, and made a note.\n\n\"What are you so afraid of, dearest?\" her father asked, taking her claws gently to keep them still. The blue ink smudged his talons like IceWing bloodstains.\n\nWhy do I even know that IceWing blood is blue?\n\nBecause I've seen it, way too much of it, down hundreds of paths.\n\n\"I can't tell you,\" she said. \"I'm sorry, Father.\" In the futures where I tell you his name too early, you end up dead. I can't see how or exactly why, but that's where they all go, and that is one thing I can prevent. One choice that will keep someone I love safe.\n\nHe sighed again. \"Clearsight, your mother and I have been discussing this. We think it's time for you to go to school. Every other NightWing dragonet started when they were one, and you're nearly two and a half.\"\n\n\"No,\" Clearsight said, panic rising in her chest. \"I can't. I told you. That's when everything speeds up \u2014 that's when I lose control. I need more time to plan.\" She turned frantically to point at the scroll on table two, which was covered in desperate spiky handwriting. \"That's what happens after I go to school. Look at all the timelines! They just explode! I have to chart them all before I get there. If the teacher puts me in that art group instead of this one, things change. If I sit with these dragons at lunch instead of those dragons, futures ripple in new directions. If I miss a day here or give the wrong answer here or share my scroll with this hapless dragon here, the entire tribe might die.\" She stabbed at the scroll, leaving little rips all the way across it, and burst into tears.\n\n\"Oh, Clearsight,\" her father said with hopeless distress. \"It can't be that bad. One two-year-old dragonet isn't going to doom the entire tribe to destruction. The worst that can happen is you don't get into the astronomy program, and maybe your mother will be disappointed, but no one will die. Trust me.\" He patted her back sympathetically.\n\nHe had no idea, NO IDEA. Maybe most two-year-old dragonets couldn't affect the future of the whole tribe, but she could.\n\n\"Besides,\" he said, \"we don't think this is healthy, what you're doing in here. School might be a good distraction \u2014 give you something else to work on, friends to keep your mind off things. Maybe it'll help you see that we're not all so doomed after all.\" He laughed a little, and she wondered what a mind reader would find in his thoughts. Was he really not worried about her visions of war and bloodshed? She hadn't told her parents everything she'd seen, but she'd woken up screaming enough nights for them to get the general idea of what the future held.\n\nProbably. Maybe. Unless she could fix it.\n\nShe had to fix it. No one else could.\n\n\"Please don't make me go yet,\" she said, battling down a sob.\n\nA long, horrible moment passed; futures hung trembling in the balance.\n\nHe sighed. \"All right, dearest. We'll wait until you're three.\" He tipped her chin up to look at him. \"But then there's no more delay. The queen wants her seers properly trained, and we're pushing her patience already with our special requests. So. When you turn three, you're going to school. Are we in agreement?\"\n\nNot a lot of viable paths where she could change this fate. Her mind flicked through them, then gave in.\n\n\"Yes, Father. I'd better get back to work, then.\" Maybe she should start over with the school scroll. If this was inevitable, maybe she needed to fill all the tables with what-happens-when-I-go-to-school scrolls \u2014 yes, with more room for all the possibilities. She'd bought herself some time. She could hide in here for a few more months and figure this out.\n\n\"Don't hurt yourself, Clearsight,\" he said, sweeping to the door. \"It's not the end of the world if you let yourself sleep, you know.\"\n\nThat's what you think.\n\nShe dipped her claws in the inkwell again and missed the moment when her father left.\n\nSo I will have to meet him before too long. My Darkstalker, my fate. I always knew the other timelines were unlikely. He has this power, too; he would find me.\n\nIt was almost calming, accepting that. She didn't have to worry now about the futures where he was alone and it made him angry and callous. She didn't have to worry about the flimsy paths where he found someone else (with no powers and no backbone, she thought with a really annoying flare of jealousy). As those timelines dropped away, she saw how bad they would have been \u2014 for both of them.\n\nBut what was left was such a daunting tangle. Two dragons who could see the future, each trying to stay on a particular path.\n\nStart at the beginning. Follow one thread at a time.\n\nHer claws scratched across the paper, spilling her visions into cluttered mountains of words that she'd have to puzzle out later.\n\nJust keep trying. It's for the sake of the tribe.\n\nI must have this gift for a reason.\n\nIf I can see all our possible destinies \u2014 surely I can make sure we get the right one.\n\nHe could hear his parents' voices echoing off the cliffs as he swooped down to the landing outside their home. They were arguing again, and as usual, he could see their neighbors peeking avidly out of their own windows, ears pricked. Everyone in the tribe was interested in every detail of the disintegration of the Night Kingdom's most famous couple.\n\nAt least a few of them had the decency to duck back inside when they saw him coming. He shot a cold look at the two across the ravine. One didn't even notice him; the other was only pretending not to as she fussed unnecessarily with her doorway vines. Stupid \u2014 everyone knew he could read minds. Maybe she thought a three-year-old's skills wouldn't be that advanced yet.\n\nShe doesn't believe the rumors about me. He chuckled softly, but the smile dropped off his face as he touched down into the wave of fury and bitterness that was rolling out of his home.\n\n\"I'm not going to help her fight my own tribe, Foeslayer! I would never do that!\"\n\n\"They're not your tribe anymore \u2014 we are! And you could work for her some other way!\" Foeslayer shouted back. \"You don't have to join the army, but you can't keep saying no to the queen! She's offering you a position at the castle! You love stupid castles and hanging out with royalty and all of that! You could stick your nose in the air all day long and fit in just fine!\"\n\n\"She's not doing me an honor,\" Arctic growled. \"You know what she wants. She wants my power. The gift I should have given the IceWings \u2014 she wants it for your tribe.\"\n\n\"This is your tribe now, too,\" Foeslayer insisted again. \"No one is trying to use you. We're just trying to give you something to do so you'll stop slithering around the house complaining and moping and getting on my nerves all the time.\"\n\nDarkstalker stepped through the archway into their small, cramped living room and dropped the three hawks he'd caught by the door. His parents were in one of the back rooms \u2014 maybe his mother had been listening the last time he'd asked her to make their discord more private, although they were so loud it didn't really help.\n\nBut his sister was huddled on the floor by the fireplace, wings over her head.\n\nDon't they know she's here? he thought with a flash of anger. How dare they fight like this in front of her?\n\nHis father always behaved as though Whiteout was his only dragonet, his precious snowflake of a daughter, but he was completely careless of her feelings. He brought her special fish and paraded her around the tribe, and then they got home and he acted like she was a necklace he could hang in the corner until he needed her again.\n\n\"Hey,\" Darkstalker said softly, crouching beside his sister. He spread one of his wings over her. \"How long have they been doing this?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Well, if you're SO MISERABLE HERE,\" Foeslayer yelled, \"why don't you go BACK TO THE STUPID ICE KINGDOM ALREADY?\"\n\n\"Oh, there it is,\" Darkstalker said. Their mother's favorite line, and the one that usually signaled they'd run out of breath for the moment. \"That means it'll be over soon.\"\n\nWhiteout nodded, but kept her talons over her ears.\n\nDarkstalker had heard the whispers (and the thoughts \u2014 all the millions of thoughts) about his sister, so he knew he wasn't the only one who thought she was the most beautiful dragon in Pyrrhia. Her scales along her body were black with hints of dark sapphire blue, but her wings were an icy bluish-white, as were the spikes all along her back and her sharp, curving claws. Instead of silver starlike scales under her wings, she had a scattering of black scales that gleamed like jet against the snowy white. Her head was narrow and elegant like an IceWing's, and she had their father's startling blue eyes.\n\nIt was easy to tell with just one look at her that she was an IceWing-NightWing hybrid. The other things that were different about her were harder to see, unless you were a mind reader.\n\nDarkstalker had been in Whiteout's mind often, but he still couldn't figure it out. It was different from other brains, as if she thought in colors and waves instead of in words. He could sometimes guess what she was feeling, but he almost never knew what she was thinking. He'd assume it was so quiet in there that she must not be paying attention, and then she'd make an observation that he never would have thought of. She was the only dragon he knew who could surprise him.\n\nWould that be different if she'd been moonborn? he wondered. If I had helped her out of her egg sooner, would she be more like other dragons?\n\nHe shook off the guilt. It didn't matter. He wouldn't want her to be like other dragons. She was perfect the way she was.\n\nWhiteout leaned into his shoulder and he twined his tail around hers.\n\n\"Maybe I should go home,\" Arctic spat, his words crawling like frost centipedes across the walls and into their ears. \"I've been offered amnesty. My mother says she'll end the war and take me back \u2014 on one condition.\"\n\nThere was a clattering sound, like a metal tablet being tossed onto the table.\n\n\"How did you get a message from Queen Diamond?\" Foeslayer asked sharply. \"This could be considered treason, Arctic.\"\n\n\"Just read it,\" he said.\n\nA long pause followed. Darkstalker closed his eyes, tracking the thoughts of both his parents.\n\n\"What is it?\" Whiteout whispered to him.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"It's something,\" she said. \"You got colder and harder all along here.\" She pointed to the line from his jaw to his heart.\n\n\"I'll tell you later,\" he said. When I come up with a lie that you'll believe.\n\n\"Arctic,\" Foeslayer said in a tight, shaking voice. \"If I thought for one minute that you'd consider this \u2014\"\n\n\"You should stop making threats,\" he said, \"when you know you can't do anything to me. But don't worry. I'm not planning to accept. I just want you to know exactly what's on the table, so you can think about that the next time you tell me to leave.\"\n\nIt's time to stop this, Darkstalker thought. He tightened his wing around his sister for a moment, then stood up and went to the hall that led back into the other rooms.\n\n\"We're here,\" he called. \"Both of us.\"\n\nGuilt from his mother, anger from his father \u2014 well, that was normal. At least they fell silent. He picked up the hawks and began tearing them into pieces to split among the four places at the table.\n\nFoeslayer appeared first, taking deep breaths. How much did they hear? flashed through her mind.\n\n\"Everything,\" Darkstalker answered her. \"Especially Whiteout. She was here when I got here.\" He didn't hide his anger.\n\nEven \u2026 she thought.\n\n\"No,\" he said, glancing at his sister. \"Only I know that.\"\n\nFoeslayer came to the table and moved a piece of hawk from her plate onto Darkstalker's, then another piece onto Arctic's. Darkstalker wordlessly moved the gift from Arctic's plate to Whiteout's.\n\nI'm sorry, she thought at him.\n\n\"Say it to her,\" he said.\n\nFoeslayer went over to Whiteout and hugged her, just as Arctic came stamping out of the back rooms.\n\n\"Oh, hawks again,\" he said bitterly. He didn't look Darkstalker in the eye. He never did.\n\n\"I thought they reminded you of the Ice Kingdom,\" Darkstalker said. In fact, he knew they did, because he'd seen that in his father's mind every time he brought hawks home to eat. That's why he looked for them particularly \u2014 because he knew they brought his father a little bit of happiness and a little bit of despair at the same time.\n\nStay out of my mind, moon-eyes, his father thought, glaring at him.\n\n\"Wish I could,\" Darkstalker answered briskly. \"Whiteout, time to eat.\"\n\nAs the family moved to the table, he swept past his father into the back hall, acting as though he was going to wash his talons. But he had another mission in mind. He needed to see the message for himself.\n\nThere it was, tucked under a corner of the blankets on his mother's side of their sleeping room. A hammered piece of silvery metal with words carved into it.\n\nHe'd read their minds correctly. Here it was, clear as starlight.\n\n\u2002Dearest Arctic,\n\n\u2002We want you to come home.\n\n\u2002You must have realized your mistake by now. You must be growing to hate that insidious NightWing, the source of all your misery. You know she was only sent here to tempt you away. But now you have seen through her, haven't you? You're starting to realize that your mother was right all along.\n\n\u2002So I'm giving you one chance to take it all back.\n\n\u2002Come home.\n\n\u2002We'll call a truce with the NightWings. The war can be over. You can return to my palace, rejoin your tribe, and all will be forgiven.\n\n\u2002And we have only one condition. One small, easy request that can save so many lives \u2014 and give you back your destiny.\n\n\u2002It is this: Kill your dragonets.\n\n\u2002Kill them, bring us proof, and you can come home.\n\n\u2002A small price to pay for your life back, isn't it?\n\n\u2002I love you, Arctic. Despite your poor choices and terrible mistakes.\n\n\u2002I hope to see you soon, back in the tribe where you belong.\n\n\u2002Queen Diamond\n\nDarkstalker slid the tablet back into its hiding place, thinking.\n\nHe knew from his father's mind that Arctic wasn't seriously considering this possibility \u2014 yet. True, Arctic was miserable in the Night Kingdom, where he had no friends and no status and the climate was all wrong for him, but he could also remember all the things he hated about the Ice Kingdom: the rules, the expectations, the way his life was completely planned out without any regard for his feelings.\n\nMoreover, Queen Diamond had clawed too many of Arctic's nerve endings with her comments about how she was right and he was so foolish. Arctic was too proud to go back with his head hanging, and most important, there was still a kernel of him that didn't want to leave Foeslayer or Whiteout.\n\nDarkstalker never worried about how his father hated him. It was mutual and instantaneous upon his hatching, so it didn't particularly affect his life. Besides, he knew his father couldn't do anything to him, considering Darkstalker's powers.\n\nBut visions were flashing in his head where Whiteout was in danger. Unclear, muddled paths; he couldn't trace them exactly, but he knew that something led from this tablet to a scene of pain and violence and his own helpless fury.\n\nI need a better future-seer to help me figure it out.\n\nI need Clearsight.\n\nDarkstalker smiled, trailing his claws along the wall as he went to wash in the stream at the back of their cave. He hadn't met her yet, but he knew it would be soon, and once he did his whole life would change for the better. It was almost impossible to wait this long, knowing his soulmate was so close by. But he'd managed it, for her. He saw that their relationship would eventually be stronger if he did. He was a master of patience.\n\nWhen it came to his father, though, his patience was starting to wear thin.\n\nNobody threatens Whiteout, Darkstalker thought. Not the IceWing queen, not my father. I won't let anyone hurt her.\n\nNo matter what I have to do to stop them.\n\n\"Maybe I shouldn't come tonight,\" Indigo said, flopping across Fathom's sleeping couch. Blob expertly held on to her ear with one tentacle to stay in place and looked very pleased with himself.\n\n\"Oh no. No way,\" Fathom said. \"I don't want to make boring conversation with all my ancient aunts and uncles either, but we're in this together. That's the deal. How am I supposed to survive without you?\"\n\n\"They're your family,\" Indigo protested. \"Why do I have to be tortured, too? Besides, the queen doesn't even want me there.\"\n\nFathom winced. She was probably right about that. Queen Lagoon's comments had been getting meaner and more pointed lately. Now that she knew Fathom was her second animus, she unfortunately seemed to care a lot more about which dragons he spent time with. Albatross and Pearl: acceptable. Indigo and anyone visiting from other tribes: decidedly not.\n\nWhich reminded him. \"Don't you want to see the SkyWings up close?\" he asked. \"This could be your last chance, if we end up going to war with them over the new shore villages.\" It was unlikely \u2014 Queen Lagoon was skilled at negotiating peace, especially with the threat of an animus in her back talons; they hadn't heard a peep out of the RainWings or MudWings in years. And the three new SeaWing villages didn't encroach very far into SkyWing territory, after all. No SeaWing would want to live any distance from the ocean.\n\n\"I saw them across the gardens when they arrived two days ago,\" Indigo said. \"They looked pretty displeased.\"\n\n\"I thought SkyWings were supposed to be the friendly tribe,\" Fathom mused.\n\n\"You're distracting me,\" Indigo said. \"The point is, the queen would be much happier if I stayed here, especially when she has the SkyWings to impress. I'd be the only one at the gathering who wasn't dripping with jewels.\" She arched her eyebrows at the new gold armbands Fathom wore \u2014 carved with royal symbols, they matched his grandfather's \u2014 and the emeralds that glittered in his ears.\n\n\"You're perfectly impressive,\" Fathom said, hauling her up onto her feet again. \"You don't need jewelry; you have the best smile in all the kingdoms.\"\n\nTheir wings brushed, light as ripples on a pond, and Indigo pulled her talons away quickly.\n\n\"Smile in front of the queen?\" she said with a feigned gasp of disapproval. \"Surely that's not allowed!\"\n\n\"Here,\" Fathom said. He bounded into the next room, where Pearl was pivoting slowly in front of a series of mirrors to examine herself on all sides. \"You can wear those pink pearls Mother bought for Pearl.\"\n\n\"I do hate those,\" Pearl said in the new, exceedingly bored voice she'd been trying out lately. Even now, more than three years since the test, she still acted irrationally jealous whenever Fathom went off to train with Albatross. But most of the time she was back to normal, which involved a lot of sighing at how loud and immature Fathom and Indigo were.\n\n\"And they'll look really cool on you, Indigo,\" Fathom said. He crossed to the far wall, where all of Pearl's jewels were displayed on a tall tree of dark brown mahogany with many branches, which he had carved for her for their birthday last year. (Without magic, since Indigo insisted.)\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Indigo asked Pearl. \"Won't Manta be upset if she sees me wearing them instead of you?\"\n\n\"She'll be thrilled,\" Pearl said. \"Mother thinks you're very entertaining.\"\n\nIndigo wilted a little and Fathom flashed Pearl a glare. \"Mother loves you,\" he said to Indigo. \"She wants you at the party, and she won't mind what you have to wear to fit in.\" He unhooked the string of pearls and the bracelet. Each of the pearls was slightly irregular instead of perfectly round, and they were all different shades of pink from almost white to deep rose. He could see why Pearl didn't like it \u2014 she preferred everything perfectly symmetrical \u2014 but he thought it was really cool.\n\nHe clasped the bracelet around one of Indigo's wrists and then helped her drape the long cord of pearls around her neck and wings. They glowed against the deep purplish-blue of her scales. Fathom could feel her heart beating as he leaned over her back to adjust the length. His talon rested on her neck for a moment and she curved her head toward him.\n\nWhy does everything feel different lately?\n\nIt wasn't weird that he wanted to spend time with her more than anyone else. That had always been true. It wasn't weird that she was the first dragon he thought of whenever he had something to share. It wasn't weird that she could make him laugh when no one else could.\n\nIt was a little weird that his own heart sped up when she stood this close to him.\n\n\"You two are HOPELESS,\" Pearl barked, bundling Fathom aside, and for a moment he was startled into thinking she'd guessed his thoughts. \"Have you never seen a dragon wear pearls before? They can't hang this way or they'll make it impossible to swim, and besides, everyone knows a double wind around the neck is most flattering. You have to tighten the slack here and drape it like this \u2026\"\n\nShe busied herself adjusting Indigo's adornments while Indigo stood still, looking uncomfortable.\n\n\"There,\" Pearl said at last, standing back with a nod of triumph.\n\n\"That looks exactly the same,\" Fathom said.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Indigo said to Pearl before she could snap at her brother. \"I really appreciate it.\"\n\nPearl waved her tail dismissively. \"You can thank me by distracting Great-Uncle Humpback if he tries to corner me again with stories about the grand old days. 'You know, when I was a young whippersnapper, we had scavenger sashimi every afternoon. But where have they all gone, can you tell me that, eh? They can't have gotten smarter! Someone's been interfering with my scavenger supply! Some toothy little blowfishes, I'll show them.'\" Her imitation of Humpback's creaky old voice was pitch-perfect.\n\nIndigo giggled. \"Someone should eventually tell him that he probably ate them all.\"\n\n\"It's not going to be me!\" Pearl said.\n\n\"Me neither,\" Fathom chimed in with a laugh.\n\n\"You know you have to leave your weird little thing behind,\" Pearl said, flicking her tail at Blob. Indigo wrinkled her snout with disappointment, but she lifted down the tiny octopus and tucked him onto his perch on her side of the room.\n\n\"Stay,\" she told him sternly.\n\nBlob blinked at her with an innocent face. It was very unclear whether he understood any of her instructions. Sometimes he was dutiful, obedient, and perfect, and sometimes he immediately did exactly the opposite of whatever she'd asked him to do. Fathom occasionally worried this might be because he'd forgotten to give the octopus ears.\n\nPearl studied herself in the mirror for another long moment. Fathom realized that Indigo hadn't even gone over to check what she looked like.\n\nWith a sigh, Pearl said, \"Well, this will have to do. Let's go.\"\n\nAs they swept out the door of the bungalow into the garden, Fathom turned to Indigo and whispered, \"You look great.\"\n\n\"I look like a squid pretending to be a sea horse,\" she said with a laugh. She winked at him and hurried after Pearl through a shower of white jasmine petals.\n\nFathom smiled as he followed her. Another boring royal gathering, another yawn-inducing feast. Thank goodness he'd convinced Indigo to go with him.\n\nHe couldn't imagine what he would ever do without her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Fathom's parents, Manta and Reef, were already on the terrace when he arrived, hovering by the buffet table and laughing. His cousins Scallop and Current were there, too, with their father, his uncle Eel. The murmur of their voices mingled with the ebb and flow of the waves and the music from a trio of SeaWings playing the queen's favorite instruments.\n\nMost of the family dinners were at night, without much lighting because SeaWings could see in the dark. But in honor of the SkyWing guests, this gathering was being held shortly before sunset, with the golden western horizon as their backdrop, and lanterns had been lit around the gardens (by the SkyWings themselves, since SeaWings had no fire and no need for it). Fathom liked the unusual warm glow this gave to the Island Palace, as though little suns had snuck in and hidden in some of the trees.\n\nGiant aquariums around the terrace were full of luminous blue jellyfish, some of them trailing tangles of slender tentacles longer than a dragon. The scents of vanilla, ginger, and basil came from the long tables of food. Hibiscus flowers as brightly colored as gemstones dotted the bushes and were scattered across the conversation couches, ruby and topaz and pink against the dark green backdrops.\n\nManta came over to greet them, smiling and tipping her wings down to avoid the string of hanging lanterns.\n\n\"You look lovely, Indigo,\" she said without batting an eyelash at the borrowed pearls. \"And you, as always, are the picture of majestic splendor,\" she added to Pearl.\n\nThere was always a weird vibe between Pearl and Manta, which Fathom couldn't entirely figure out. Indigo said it was because the only way Pearl could become queen was if Manta first challenged Lagoon and won, and then Pearl would have to challenge her own mother. Fathom wasn't quite sure that was right \u2014 because Lagoon had a daughter, Splash, who had no dragonets of her own. If she became queen, couldn't Pearl challenge her? Indigo said no, because Pearl was technically Splash's first cousin once removed, not her niece, and then Fathom had to yell \"LA LA LA\" and stick his claws in his ears because complicated family trees and succession laws were not only boring and impossible, but frankly irrelevant to his life anyway.\n\n\"Is there coconut rice tonight?\" he asked his mother. \"And tuna rolls? And that mango-lime drink from last time?\"\n\n\"There's everything,\" she said with a laugh. \"We should invite dragons from other tribes to our gatherings all the time \u2014 the chefs really went overboard.\"\n\n\"I'm going to get one of those macadamia things before Current eats them all,\" Pearl declared, gliding away.\n\nBefore Fathom could dare Indigo to race him to the tuna rolls, a conch shell fanfare sounded from the top of the palace wall. Queen Lagoon and her husband, Humpback, came parading down to the terrace with their daughter, Splash, and the two visiting SkyWings.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Indigo whispered, sidling a step closer to Fathom.\n\nIt wasn't that the SkyWings were bigger, exactly \u2014 well, their legs were longer, so they did seem taller than the queen. And their wings were definitely bigger than a SeaWing's. And their horns were straighter and sharper, and their talons were not webbed \u2026 but most of what was startling about them was the color of their scales. They were such a shiny, polished red, like hibiscus petals or drops of blood or giant walking rubies.\n\nAs they all reached the terrace, Fathom saw the queen's eyes dart around quickly, and a shiver ran down his spine. By now a few other distant cousins (twice removed? eighteenthish removed? Fathom had no idea) and some of the queen's elderly aunts and uncles had arrived, so the terrace seemed full in an intimate way.\n\nBut Fathom knew who she was looking for, and he was not there.\n\n\"Where is Albatross?\" his mother whispered to him, apparently noticing the same look on Lagoon's face.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he whispered back. \"I haven't seen him since training this morning.\"\n\nI hope he's not mad at me. Fathom was trying hard to convince Albatross that he was ready for more challenging animus work \u2014 like enchanting objects from afar without touching them, or casting spells without speaking, the way Albatross could. But Albatross was convinced that Fathom wasn't ready for any of that yet.\n\n\"When you're seven. That's how old I was when I first cast a spell like that,\" he had said. \"Until then, don't we have quite enough to do?\"\n\nAlbatross had been letting Fathom design small corners of the Summer Palace, and now that it was essentially complete, the only thing left was the spectacular throne on the top level of the pavilion. Fathom had spent months drawing it, down to the smallest detail, and then his grandfather had changed so much about it that Fathom could barely recognize it as his own.\n\nBut today they had set the enchantment together, and by next week the throne should have grown into its final shape, and then they'd be able to present the whole thing to Queen Lagoon.\n\nFathom wasn't sure why Albatross wasn't more excited. His grandfather had been so quiet all morning, his eyes more hooded than usual.\n\nAnd now he was missing the family gathering.\n\nWhere could he be?\n\nQueen Lagoon was taking the SkyWings around, introducing them to each family member. Indigo saw her coming and stepped on Fathom's tail trying to sidle away, but it was too late.\n\n\"My niece, Manta,\" Lagoon said to the SkyWings. \"And her son, Fathom.\" She glanced at Indigo for the briefest moment, then tipped her snout upward and adjusted her crown. \"I'm delighted to introduce the SkyWing envoys, Eagle and Princess Sunset.\"\n\n\"Welcome to the Island Palace,\" said Manta.\n\n\"Hmm,\" said Eagle.\n\n\"It's hotter than I expected,\" said Sunset, fanning herself with her wings.\n\n\"This is my friend, Indigo,\" Fathom interjected, tugging Indigo a step closer.\n\nEagle and Sunset looked supremely uninterested. Queen Lagoon managed to keep her frown small and refined.\n\n\"Have you tried the shrimp?\" Manta said quickly.\n\nEagle sniffed. \"Everything is so \u2026 raw,\" he said.\n\n\"I guess we could set it on fire.\" Sunset sighed. \"Then perhaps it would be palatable.\"\n\nThey moved toward the buffet table with Manta, but Queen Lagoon lingered for a moment, twitching her nose as if her own dinner had been unfortunately scorched.\n\n\"You,\" she said to Indigo. \"Go find me a drink. Something with pineapple in it.\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Indigo bobbed her head and whisked away.\n\nFathom tried not to look irritated. Lagoon always spoke to Indigo exactly the way she spoke to the servants. But she was the queen; she could order around anyone she liked. There was nothing he could do about it.\n\nSomething snapped in the garden beyond the terrace \u2014 someone stepping on a branch, perhaps, out in the growing shadows beyond the lanterns. Fathom twisted to look around, but couldn't see anyone out there.\n\n\"Fathom,\" said the queen. \"I'm going to be blunt with you.\"\n\nThat'll be different how? he thought, steeling himself.\n\n\"I thought I had dropped enough hints, but they don't seem to be registering. Perhaps subtlety is not the best approach in a case like this.\" She spread her wings, cornering him. \"You need to stop wasting your time with that \u2026 that low-born purple dragonet.\"\n\nFathom actually had to think for a moment to figure out what she meant. \"Stop being friends with Indigo?\" he blurted. \"Why would I do that?\"\n\n\"I cannot allow your affection to grow any stronger,\" she said, emphasizing affection as though it were a rotten oyster. \"I don't know why your mother hasn't intervened. Obviously you cannot marry her, so it would be best to get rid of her before other prospects hear any rumors and get scared off. Of course, as an animus dragon you'll be in high demand. It was such a chore to choose a match for Albatross back in his day. Such a shame she died and he was too stubborn to marry again.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Fathom, his head reeling. \"I \u2014 who said anything about getting married? I'm only five!\"\n\n\"Please,\" the queen scoffed. \"I see the way you look at her. I see how she brings you what you need before you ask for it. I see how you create treasures for her out of your claws.\"\n\nAnother twig snapped behind them. Fathom still couldn't see anything out there \u2014 the sun was going down, and the lanterns were messing with his night sight. But he suddenly had a crawling feeling down his spine, as if the jellyfish tentacles had slithered out of the aquariums to ensnare him.\n\nSomeone was out there, staring at them. Staring at him.\n\n\"What is this?\" Eagle called to the queen. He was standing by the decorative pond in the center of the terrace.\n\n\"Get rid of her yourself,\" Lagoon hissed to Fathom, \"or I'll find a place for her that suits her station, as far away from you as possible.\" She turned with a swirl of blue wings and went over to the SkyWings, her poised public face back in place again.\n\nShe couldn't be serious. Indigo wasn't \u2014 she wasn't a danger to Queen Lagoon's plans.\n\nAlthough I'm not exactly thrilled about being the subject of those plans, I have to say.\n\nBut Lagoon didn't have to make threats and order him around. He wasn't in love with Indigo or anything.\n\nAm I?\n\nAcross the floor, he caught sight of Indigo at the drinks table, bobbing slightly to the rhythm of the music. She touched her head unconsciously for a moment, and he realized she was reaching to make sure Blob was safe before remembering the octopus wasn't there.\n\nUnless that's what this happy feeling is, the one I get every time I see her.\n\nUh-oh.\n\n\"That is a statue of me, of course,\" the queen said to Eagle, smiling. Inlaid with sapphires that matched her scales, the marble statue coiled over the fountain with her wings spread, water spraying from her mouth.\n\n\"How does it work?\" Sunset asked, circling the fountain. \"Where does the water come from?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's enchanted,\" Lagoon said, with barely suppressed glee. \"By one of my animus dragons.\"\n\nIf she'd been hoping this news would hit the SkyWings like lightning, she couldn't have been more successful. Eagle and Sunset both froze and stared at her as if she'd cut off her own head in front of them.\n\n\"Didn't I mention I have those?\" she said. \"Well, I do. That's probably an important point to remember during negotiations tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You have animus dragons,\" Sunset cried, \"and you let them live?\"\n\n\"Whatever do you mean?\" Queen Lagoon asked. \"Of course I do. They're extremely valuable.\"\n\nThe SkyWings glanced at one another. \"We do not tolerate dangerous differences in the Sky Kingdom,\" Eagle said firmly.\n\nSunset leaned toward Lagoon, her amber eyes fierce. \"Doesn't your tribe know the legends? How using their magic eats away at their soul?\"\n\n\"Well, in order for that to work,\" said a voice from behind her, \"you'd probably have to have a soul of your own to begin with.\"\n\nAlbatross stepped out of the shadows, or melted out of them, was how it seemed to Fathom. One of the lanterns cast a halo around his head, making his eyes seem even darker than usual, as he stepped across the terrace toward his sister and the SkyWings.\n\n\"There you are,\" said the queen. \"It's about time.\"\n\nIndigo appeared beside Fathom again, holding two coconut bowls and looking nervous. She handed one of them to Fathom, and he realized it was full of the mango-lime drink he loved. She brings you what you need before you ask for it.\n\n\"I don't want to interrupt the queen,\" Indigo whispered to him, \"but do you think she'll be mad if I don't bring her drink to her? Or more mad if I do?\" She fidgeted with the other coconut shell, picking off shreds of brown fibers.\n\n\"I think she's forgotten she asked for it,\" Fathom said honestly. \"She was just trying to get you out of the way so she could lecture me. Again.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Indigo gave him a curious sideways glance, but didn't say any more, because now most of the terrace had fallen silent. Only some of the more elderly cousins kept talking, a murmur over by the musicians. Albatross was still pacing slowly toward the queen.\n\n\"Here is our first animus,\" Queen Lagoon said to the SkyWings, who seemed to have figured that out themselves, judging by the looks of terror on their faces. \"My brother, Albatross. We were just talking this morning about what his next project should be. I'm thinking big this time. Something that makes me invulnerable, perhaps. Or something that kills any dragon who might be a threat to me.\"\n\nBeyond Albatross, over by the couches, Splash stiffened, and Fathom saw her crush one of the hibiscus blossoms between her claws. He glanced around and saw his father put a wing around Manta, who had gone pale.\n\n\"Yes,\" Albatross said. \"Although you might recall I wasn't exactly enthused about any of those ideas.\"\n\n\"Then it's lucky you're not my only animus dragon,\" Queen Lagoon said coldly. Fathom felt a shiver all the way down to the tip of his tail. If she asked him to do a spell like that, would he? Would he obey his queen and put his own mother in danger? Or disobey her, and perhaps put everyone he cared about in even worse danger?\n\nWhat would she do to Indigo if I ever said no to her?\n\nAlbatross stopped right in front of the queen, snout-to-snout with her. Fathom couldn't read his face. He looked as though he'd been carved from stone, any emotions chipped away.\n\n\"Do you think you're done?\" Queen Lagoon said to him softly. \"Do you think you'll ever be done atoning for what you did to Sapphire? It's not going to end, Albatross. You'll always be mine.\"\n\nSomething clinked in the background, and Fathom turned, thinking he'd seen a flash of silver in the air, and then a line of red sliced slowly, darkly, murderously across Queen Lagoon's throat like the widest smile in the world.\n\nShe blinked at her brother in surprise and lifted one talon to her neck. Her last words were, \"But I'm the queen,\" and then her body fell in slow motion, legs crumpling, wings crashing down, head landing with a splash in the fountain. Clouds of blood spilled out, turning the water red and black.\n\nThe queen of the SeaWings was dead.\n\nAnd her animus, Fathom's grandfather, was holding the knife.\n\nClearsight had been awake all day, fidgeting scrolls into tiny shredded pieces and knocking over inkwells with her tail as she paced around her room.\n\n\"Time to wake up!\" her mother called cheerily, poking her head into the room. \"Oh dear.\"\n\n\"I know, look at this mess,\" Clearsight said, her wings twitching jumpily. \"Maybe I should stay home for one more night to clean it up.\"\n\n\"The real mess in this room is you, sweetheart,\" said her mother. \"It's time to go and you know it. Come eat a nice rattlesnake for breakfast, and you'll feel all energized and ready for school.\"\n\n\"No, rattlesnake will make me hiccup during the introduction circle,\" Clearsight said. \"Fish could make my talons slippery so I land awkwardly. I'll have a squirrel; I can see that that has no unfortunate consequences.\"\n\nSwiftwings rolled her eyes and retreated.\n\nBreathe, Clearsight told herself. Tonight. You'll meet him tonight. You know it, and he almost certainly knows it, too.\n\nIt was strange to feel so excited and so terrified at the same time.\n\nThis doesn't have to change everything. I'm still holding the threads. I can control what happens next.\n\nFor instance, she knew Darkstalker was going to be waiting for her right outside the school. He wanted to meet her as soon as she landed. He might try to pretend for a moment that it was all a coincidence \u2014 Who are you? Have we met? What do you mean, what destiny? But she wasn't going to play those games. He surely had her face in his head as clearly as she knew his.\n\nShe could trick him, but only by being early. He could linger if she tried to arrive late, but he wouldn't be able to get there with his sister as early as she could. And he wouldn't expect it; her foresight was stronger than his.\n\nClearsight hesitated for a moment over one of her scrolls. The branching timelines for today \u2014 should she bring it for reference?\n\nNo, stopping in the hall to consult a scroll every time she had to make a decision was bound to get her some weird looks. And if anyone took it and read it, they'd think she was crazy.\n\nIt's all in my head anyway.\n\nShe bolted through the other rooms, scooped up the squirrel, knocked over a bookshelf by accident with her tail, called \"Sorry! Sorry sorry! I have to fly!\" to her parents, and made it to the front entrance before they intercepted her.\n\n\"What's the rush?\" her father asked. \"Suddenly you're desperate to get to school, after dragging your wings about it for years? What's going on?\"\n\n\"Don't you want us to come with you?\" her mother chimed in.\n\n\"No \u2014 no, no,\" Clearsight said as brightly as she could manage. She had to delay the meeting between them and Darkstalker for as long as she could, mostly to avoid a lot of awkward arguments she could see lurking in the immediate future, but also partly for their own safety, for complicated reasons. \"I'm fine! I know where I'm going. I'll see you in the morning!\" She tapped her snout against each of theirs and they reluctantly moved aside.\n\nOutside, the night was just starting to spill into the ravines, reaching its long dark claws down to the rivers and less desirable homes at the bottoms of the cliffs. Clearsight's wasn't quite at the bottom, but it was more than halfway down.\n\nOne day, if she could use her power to do something valuable for the queen \u2014 a vision that helped defeat the IceWings in the war, for instance \u2014 her family would be able to move to somewhere higher and more skylit, closer to the stars. That was something else she had to think about when she studied the futures.\n\nShe spread her wings and soared up the rocky cliff face into the sky. From up here, it was easy to navigate the Night Kingdom; all the canyons and outcroppings were spread out below her like a scroll.\n\nThe school was to the north, not far from the palace, each of them forming one side of the Great Diamond with the museum and the library on the other two sides. The palace was the biggest of the four buildings and wrapped around Borderland Mountain, but the school was designed to look very similar: lots of black and gray marble terraces, hanging gardens, and long glittering waterfalls. And at this hour, as night fell for the nocturnal tribe, both the school and the palace were mobbed by hundreds of beating black wings.\n\nClearsight had flown all the possible routes to the school six times in the last two days. She was prepared; she knew exactly where to land. Of the three entrances to the school, the quietest and least crowded was on the side facing away from the palace.\n\nShe spiraled overhead for a moment, checking the dragons below her \u2014 no sign of Darkstalker \u2014 and then swooped down. Her talons landed neatly on the marble tiles and she folded in her wings.\n\nSeveral other dragons were arriving and hurrying into the school, but no one even looked at her.\n\nRight, she remembered. They don't know yet that I'm important. They don't realize that soon everyone will know my name, or that I can save them from so many horrible things.\n\nA shiver ran down her spine. She spent so much time thinking about the future, but this was now, actually now. Now was when the future would be shaped.\n\nShe stepped into the arboretum entrance, a damp, leafy space where the last rays of sunshine poured through the skylights and plants lined the room. A colonnade led from here past the library to a vast hexagonal courtyard, with classrooms lining the six sides. The courtyard was designed as an obstacle course for flying practice, full of trees, twisting vines, loops, mazes, and tricks.\n\nClearsight followed the sound of the longest waterfall to a pavilion on an upper level, to the main office, where a tired-looking dragon crouched behind a desk, moving piles of paper around.\n\n\"Hello, Professor Truthfinder,\" she said. \"I've come for my placement.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said the dragon, pressing her talons to her temples. \"Where did I put that?\"\n\nOh, please don't make me take all those tests again, Clearsight thought. She'd spent an entire day filling out scroll after scroll to demonstrate that she was ready for class with the other three-year-olds, instead of having to start at the beginning with the one-year-olds. She was sure she'd done well.\n\n\"Yes, yes, you did,\" said Truthfinder absently. \"Well enough that we could put you with the four-year-olds instead, we were thinking.\"\n\nThat's HIS class. \"No, thank you, that's all right,\" Clearsight said quickly. \"With the other three-year-olds would be fine.\"\n\nTruthfinder tilted her snout suspiciously. \"Something you need to tell me? Are we going to have a problem?\" The silver scales glittering from the corners of her eyes declared Don't lie \u2014 I can hear everything you think.\n\n\"I would like to be with dragonets my own age,\" Clearsight said as winningly as she could, clearing all other thoughts from her mind. \"My parents think it would be best for my social development.\" Maybe she should have brought them with her after all; maybe the clutter of their thoughts could have obscured hers.\n\nNot that there's anything to worry about. I am SO excited to be starting school at last! Hooray for wonderful school!\n\nTruthfinder stared her down for a long moment. Clearsight was pretty sure the smile on her face was getting a little manic, but she couldn't get rid of it now.\n\n\"Very well,\" Truthfinder said slowly. \"Three-year-olds, advanced reading group, special seer training elective. I'm including a note that your maneuvers could use extra work in flight class, with an eye to possible remedial lessons. Any extracurriculars?\"\n\n\"Not right now,\" Clearsight said. \"Thank you.\" Extra work? Flight class? Remedial lessons! She tried to squash down her indignant feelings. It's true, I've spent more time in the library than flying. But for good reason!\n\nTruthfinder gave her a stern look and made another note on the scroll in front of her. \"Give this to your teacher \u2014 room 3A.\" She rolled it up and passed it to Clearsight.\n\n\"But when is my seer training class?\" Clearsight asked, glancing at the scroll. \"I don't see any information about it in here.\"\n\nTruthfinder raised her eyebrows at her. \"When you are ready for it, you will know.\"\n\nOh dear. It's a test, Clearsight realized. But kind of a backward one, surely. If you were good enough at reading the future to figure out where and when your class would be, then did you really need any training?\n\nI shouldn't think that way. I'm sure I need training. A really skilled seer will help me figure out how to read the timelines better and how to steer other dragons along the best paths.\n\nSo she would find the class on her own; she could do that.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Clearsight said again, backing out of the room. She started down the hall and paused at one of the windows that overlooked the school's main entrance.\n\nThere was one dragon in the milling crowd down there who stood out from all the others \u2014 one with white wings and white claws. Clearsight knew who that was \u2014 which meant the dragon standing next to her, scanning the crowd with a puzzled expression, must be him.\n\nDarkstalker.\n\nHe's looking for me. He thought I'd be down there, arriving just about now.\n\nShe felt a small tingle of glee in her talons. So he doesn't know everything after all.\n\nAs if he'd heard her thoughts, Darkstalker suddenly raised his head and looked up at her window. Their eyes met, and as Clearsight ducked away she saw him start to smile and wave.\n\nAck! He did hear my thoughts.\n\nOf course he did, Clearsight, you idiot.\n\nShe had only one advantage over him: her visions of the future and how carefully she studied them, whereas he barely bothered to glance ahead. But to use it, she needed help. She needed to learn to control her power better.\n\nI need to get to that seer training class as soon as I can.\n\nBut on my first day? Will that throw off all my visions?\n\nShe closed her eyes, trying to see ahead. She saw herself in partial sunlight \u2014 so it was an early class, before night completely fell \u2014 in a circular room with no windows or doors. A tall NightWing paced the circumference, frowning at her and the other three dragonets in there.\n\nMostly frowning at her, actually.\n\nHow am I supposed to find a room with no windows or doors to give me a clue about where it is?\n\nBut wait \u2014 there was sunlight all through the room, so where was that coming from? She squinted into the vision, furrowing her brow. The walls were impenetrable black marble, sparkling with flecks of silver and copper, and hung with mirrors that caught the light. The light from \u2026\n\nShe looked up. The room had no roof. Far above their heads, it was completely open to the sky, with only the tip of a mountain peak poking into view.\n\nSo it must be up reasonably high. At the top of a tower? Maybe that's also why the walls are curved.\n\nClearsight crossed the corridor to a window that looked inward, toward the courtyard and the other levels of the school. There were five towers, but she couldn't tell from here which ones had windows and which didn't.\n\nWith a glance around at the bustling halls, she carefully climbed onto the sill and launched herself into the sky. There were dragons flying every which way, and she had to dodge and weave to avoid colliding with anyone.\n\nBut once she got close enough to fly around the towers, there was only one possible choice. Four of the towers were regular dragon towers, with multiple levels open to the air and pavilions on top. But the central tower was different. At first glance, it didn't even seem to have an interior; it was hung all about with ivy and vines that cascaded down through levels of gardens where dragons were gathered, socializing before school started. The top of it was so shrouded in greenery that it was hard to tell there might be a room inside there.\n\nClearsight spread her wings to hover in the air and checked her school map again. This tower was marked \"Tower of Knowledge,\" which sounded promising. She looked up at the setting sun again and guessed that this class was happening right now \u2014 first class on the schedule.\n\nShe hesitated. Did it make sense to start here, before checking in with her regular teacher? This wasn't what she'd done in most of the timelines she'd examined for today, but maybe it was the best choice \u2014 maybe it would speed up her ability to control the future.\n\nAlso, she didn't want to miss any seer training, especially since she'd already missed two years of school. And according to her parents, this was the most important part of her education, from the queen's point of view.\n\nBut she had such a careful plan for today \u2026 this could tip everything out of balance. She hadn't studied this alternative enough. Besides, the scene she'd glimpsed felt awash in dread and awkwardness and confusion. She got a big \"you're going to regret this\" vibe from the whole picture.\n\nMaybe I should wait until I know the school better. Or, really, until I can study what happens when I drop into the class \u2014 so I can find the best way to introduce myself to the other seers.\n\nSuddenly something rippled, hard and fierce, through all of Clearsight's visions at once.\n\nSomething terrible was happening.\n\nSomething terrible that would affect her future. It was happening a world away, but it was happening now and now and forward and forward, and it would rip apart a lot of dragons' lives.\n\nShe staggered sideways in the air, losing the updraft for a moment before catching herself.\n\nThe green SeaWing \u2026\n\nFathom.\n\nThe tragedy in the Kingdom of the Sea was happening now \u2014 the one she'd foreseen.\n\nOh no. Clearsight pressed her talons to her head. His poor, sad futures.\n\nIf he even survives tonight.\n\nThis, this was really why she needed training. Not to outwit Darkstalker, but to save lives. To make dragons in power listen to her, so she could make the changes she needed to make and help dragons like Fathom.\n\nShe twisted in the air and arrowed to the very top of the central tower. Yes \u2014 it was open to the sky \u2014 and below her was the room she'd seen, full of light and mirrors, with four dragons clustered in the center of the floor.\n\nHere goes nothing.\n\nClearsight swooped down, dropping dizzily between the walls and landing with more of a thump than she'd intended. The marble was startlingly cold under her claws and she resisted an urge to hop back up into the air.\n\nThe other dragons all jumped and turned, blinking at her. Three of them were students, but older than her \u2014 perhaps five or six years old \u2014 and the fourth was the large, scowling teacher she'd seen in her visions.\n\n\"H-hello,\" Clearsight stammered nervously. \"I'm sorry \u2014 I'm looking for seer training \u2014 this is it, isn't it? I'm \u2014\"\n\n\"Don't bother,\" said one of the other students. He flicked his tail at the teacher. \"She already knows who you are and everything about you. She's the queen's own seer!\"\n\nThe other two students turned eagerly toward the teacher, who narrowed her eyes at Clearsight. \"You claim to be a seer?\" she barked. \"How do you know? What have you seen? We don't tolerate play-acting in here.\"\n\n\"I \u2014 I've seen lots of things,\" Clearsight said, faltering. What did she mean? Major events, like the next NightWing queen challenge? But which ones, along which timelines?\n\n\"How do you know they weren't ordinary dreams? Or products of your imagination?\" the teacher pressed. She took a looming step toward Clearsight.\n\n\"Because they came true,\" Clearsight said. \"Or will come true.\" What an odd question. She'd never doubted her power for a moment. It was always there, spinning out possibilities in her head, throwing up pictures and flashes of scenes and dragons she would know.\n\n\"Ha!\" The teacher lashed her tail, looking wickedly amused. \"How old are you \u2014 three? Your powers have barely begun to evolve yet, even if they are real. Whatever lucky guess brought you here, you should go away again until you are truly ready. Talk to me when you've had a few more visions than oh no, my mommy is going to yell at me for splattering rabbit bits all over the floor.\"\n\nThe other students giggled, and Clearsight felt a flare of temper. \"I've had more than a few visions,\" she said. \"And I can prove how real they are!\" She pointed to her teacher. \"I know that your name, for instance, is Allknowing.\" She whirled toward the other dragonets. \"And you three are Jewel-eyes, Morrowwatcher, and Vision. I know a huge storm is going to roll in three days from now and class will have to be cancelled for a week of rain. I know the queen is planning to evaluate all her potential seers in a month and she won't be pleased. How's that for knowing things?\"\n\nThere was a long pause. Allknowing seemed to be swelling up like a poisonous viper.\n\n\"Dragon of chaos, tangling the webs,\" she said suddenly. \"Too many eyes and too many threads.\"\n\nJewel-eyes let out a small gasp.\n\n\"That's her?\" whispered Vision.\n\n\"You must be Clearsight,\" said Allknowing, her voice dripping with icicles.\n\n\"That's right,\" Clearsight said, feeling a bit smaller suddenly. Had she really been in one of Allknowing's prophecies? Dragon of chaos \u2014 how could that be her? She wanted to create order out of the chaos, not cause more. And surely she didn't have more eyes or threads than anyone else.\n\n\"Obviously I knew you were coming.\" The teacher stalked around her, studying every inch of her scales. \"But you seem to be early.\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure,\" Clearsight said. \"I mean, it's my first day, so I didn't know \u2014\"\n\n\"Your first day?\" Morrowwatcher interrupted. \"At the school? How did you find us so fast?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 looked?\" Clearsight answered. \"Into the future?\"\n\nThe three students stared at her with wide eyes, and then turned as one to Allknowing.\n\n\"Can she really do that?\" Jewel-eyes demanded.\n\n\"Will we be able to do that?\" asked Vision.\n\n\"Why haven't you taught us that?\" Morrowwatcher chimed in.\n\n\"Isn't that what you do?\" Clearsight asked, bewildered. \"Aren't we all seers?\"\n\n\"Yes, but we can't just look at whatever we want to,\" said Vision. \"We have to wait for visions to come to us. Here we mostly practice writing them down, making them sound like real prophecies, and interpreting them.\"\n\n\"Also figuring out what's a dream and what's a vision,\" Jewel-eyes said ruefully. \"Like, we're pretty sure I'm not actually going to lose all my teeth all of a sudden one day. Or forget to study for my final exams.\"\n\nClearsight's wings were sinking slowly to the floor. That did not sound like the kind of seer training she needed at all. Turning her visions into cryptic prophecies? How would that help anyone? Did these dragons even realize that there were multiple possible futures?\n\n\"Well,\" Allknowing said in a clipped, unfriendly way. \"Obviously Clearsight's gift is a little different from everyone else's. I'm sure we'll all learn so much from listening to her tell us about it. But for now, I suggest we get back to our curriculum.\"\n\nThe other dragons shuffled obediently back into a semicircle around her, although they kept stealing sideways looks at Clearsight. She crouched on the end beside Vision, wishing her scales were thicker.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" Allknowing hissed, \"here is the first verse of one of my earlier prophecies.\" She flicked her tail at the large slate board mounted on the wall, which had something like a poem scrawled on it in chalk.\n\n\u2003\"From far to the north, a prince will arrive,\n\n\u2003Seething with darkness and sparkling with ice,\n\n\u2003In his blood runs a gift for the whole NightWing tribe,\n\n\u2003But it comes with a terrible price.\"\n\nClearsight felt sudden uncontrollable giggles bubbling up inside her. She dug her claws into her other arm, trying desperately not to laugh. It mostly worked, but Allknowing glared at her anyway.\n\n\"Any theories what this was about?\" Allknowing demanded. \"Clearsight, you seem tremendously amused by something.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Clearsight said quickly. \"It's very impressive. I like how it, um \u2026 scans? And is so \u2026 mysterious?\"\n\n\"Certainly it was more mysterious before it was fulfilled,\" Allknowing spat. \"Care to analyze it for us?\"\n\n\"Well, it's about Prince Arctic,\" Clearsight said. \"And his animus powers, which have made him darker on the inside each time he's used them. The terrible price is the interesting part, because it could mean the current war with the IceWings, or the consequences of having animus power in the NightWing tribe. Or is it the price for him, meaning how his soul is affected? Or the price for the dragons who love him? It could refer to what his descendants will do if they inherit his power, which, obviously, there are a lot of \u2026 possible terrible things \u2026\" She trailed off under Allknowing's withering scowl.\n\n\"The terrible price is the war,\" Allknowing snapped. \"There's no need to show off by concocting wild fantasies. We already know that neither of Arctic's offspring inherited his animus power. Vision, did you have something to add?\"\n\nClearsight hoped her face didn't give away how confused she felt. She knew it was still a secret to most dragons, but was it possible Allknowing hadn't had any visions about Darkstalker's animus power? That seemed like a fairly huge future development for a seer to overlook.\n\nI'm not going to learn anything from her at all, Clearsight realized with despair. She should have listened to the little warning bells in her visions. Allknowing was dangerous \u2014 dangerously ignorant, and dangerously resentful of Clearsight's power.\n\nWhatever lay ahead between them \u2026 Clearsight had a feeling it would not end well.\n\nFathom stared at the dripping red knife in Albatross's claws. Drops of blood spattered the floor, his grandfather's talons, his tail.\n\nFathom couldn't move. Part of his brain was still thinking, Did he slip? Did someone throw that knife by accident? Why isn't the queen getting up? Albatross can fix it; he fixes everything.\n\nAnd the other part of his brain was sending panicked alerts to every part of his body at once. Swim! Fly! Run! Fight!\n\nAlbatross looked at the knife curiously, as if he'd just found a charming new pet. Over by the bar, the dragon who'd been slicing coconuts was still looking around in confusion, wondering where it had gone.\n\nThe SkyWings reacted first, taking to the air with shrieks of fear. Albatross glanced up at them, turned the knife over for a moment, and then let it go. The knife flew through the air and stabbed Sunset in the spot where her jaw met her neck. A moment later, it yanked itself free and spun to catch Eagle in the heart.\n\nHe's killing them, Fathom thought, his mind trapped in quicksand. He could kill all of us.\n\nThe red dragons thudded down to the terrace, knocking over one of the jellyfish aquariums as they landed. Glass shattered and water cascaded out over the dance floor, where the jellyfish flopped and squelched under the talons of screaming, fleeing dragons.\n\n\"Can you stop him?\" Indigo asked, grabbing Fathom's arm.\n\n\"Me?\" he yelped. \"No! I'm not strong enough! And he's my grandfather \u2014 I can't \u2014\"\n\n\"He just killed your queen and two SkyWings!\" Indigo said.\n\n\"But he was angry at them.\" Fathom felt as though words were just cascading out of his mouth without checking through any higher brain functions first. \"He won't hurt anyone else, will he? If I try anything, it could just make everything worse.\"\n\n\"I'm not taking any chances,\" Indigo said. \"We have to hide you.\" She dragged him out of the circle of lanterns to the path between the gardenia bushes.\n\n\"What about my parents?\" he said frantically. He tried to pull back and his wings caught on a trailing vine. \"What about Pearl?\" He couldn't see his sister, but through the melee he spotted Manta struggling to get closer to Albatross. What are you doing, Mother? he thought in a panic. Run away! The opposite way! She was going to try to calm Albatross down, he was sure. That was her way of handling everything.\n\n\"We can't get to them,\" Indigo said, \"and if Albatross kills anyone else, it'll be you, sure as sunshine.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Fathom said. \"But \u2014\"\n\nFathom looked over his shoulder and saw his grandfather scanning the terrace with his strange, fierce eyes. He did look like he was looking for something \u2014 someone \u2026 could it be Fathom?\n\nBehind Albatross, Splash suddenly lunged around the fountain, pointing a spear at his heart.\n\nAlbatross didn't even look at her. The spear twisted in her talons, yanked itself free, and plunged into her chest, pinning her to the ground.\n\nHe's not finished, Fathom thought with horror.\n\n\"Come on,\" Indigo cried, pulling Fathom free of the vegetation. They ran full-tilt along the winding paths, leaving clouds of scattered petals in their wake. Away from the lanterns, the island was full of long shadows, waiting for their moment to pounce. One of the moons was rising, enormous and low on the horizon, a strange orange-red color, as though it had been stained by the pool around Lagoon's body.\n\n\"Should we fly?\" he said to Indigo, panting.\n\nShe tilted her head up just as a scream of agony came from the sky. \"Easy targets,\" she panted back.\n\nEveryone's an easy target to him, Fathom thought with another stab of fear. He can send a knife after me no matter where I run to.\n\nI may already be dead.\n\nThe gravel under their talons suddenly changed to wood and they found themselves pounding along one of the walkways that led to an overwater pavilion. The sea rushed madly below them, chasing itself up the sand and down without getting anywhere. The sun was almost gone, barely flicking its tail over the far edge of the ocean. Stars glittered in the deepening purple sky and the dark water below them.\n\nThe pavilion was deserted, lit only by moonlight through the windows overhead and bioluminescent plankton shimmering under the glass floor. A dead orca and a pair of fishing spears were mounted on the sky-high ceiling. A balcony looked out on the dying sunset and a pair of strange shapes hulked against the side wall.\n\nIt took Fathom a moment to remember what they were. Queen Lagoon had called them \"boats\" \u2014 Humpback had found mentions of them in some old scrolls. They were for riding on the water instead of swimming in it, which was a weird concept. But Lagoon had ordered them built so she could take the SkyWings out on the ocean tomorrow.\n\nThat's never going to happen, Fathom realized as the shock washed over him again, because they're all dead.\n\n\"Let's swim,\" Indigo said, hurrying to the balcony. \"He'll have to search the whole ocean for us.\"\n\n\"No,\" Fathom said. \"I can't leave \u2014 my family \u2014 I need to stay close so I know when \u2014 when it's safe.\"\n\n\"Then we hide.\" Indigo circled the boats for a moment. She finally seized one in her talons and tilted it back far enough from the wall that Fathom could crawl under it. He held it up so she could join him, and then let it fall quietly back against the wood.\n\nThey huddled in the darkness.\n\nFathom could feel Indigo's breath on his face, his neck. He wasn't sure if he was imagining it, but it seemed as though he could feel her heart racing as fast as his was. He knew he wasn't imagining the trembling in her wings.\n\nNow that they'd stopped moving, they could hear the faraway screams.\n\nIndigo wrapped her front talons around Fathom's and bowed her head.\n\n\"Do you really think he would hurt me?\" Fathom whispered. \"We're partners. He's my grandfather.\"\n\n\"He had no problem killing his sister,\" Indigo pointed out. \"And you're the only one he has any reason to be afraid of.\"\n\nBecause I'm special. Because of my magic, which I thought was so wonderful.\n\n\"If we die \u2014\" he whispered.\n\n\"Shhh. You're not allowed to die,\" she whispered back without looking up.\n\n\"Do you think it's true that animus dragons lose their souls?\" Fathom said softly. \"Is that why he's doing this?\"\n\nHer shoulders lifted and fell, and he could hear her unspoken thought: The question isn't why \u2026 it's how do we survive this?\n\nBut he thought why? was kind of important, too.\n\n\"Maybe I shouldn't have run away,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Shhh,\" she said again, clutching his talons tighter.\n\nHe fell silent, listening.\n\nThe screams had stopped.\n\nSomehow, that was worse.\n\nThey waited for an eternity, frozen in the gathering dark.\n\nWhat is happening?\n\nA small bar of moonlight tipped in the window and inched across the floor toward them.\n\nIs everyone dead?\n\nOr did they stop him? Maybe Mother managed to talk to him. Maybe she calmed him down. Maybe everything's all right now.\n\nApart from the dead queen and murderous grandfather, that is.\n\nFathom took shallow, quiet breaths, trying unsuccessfully to slow down his heart. He couldn't put them together \u2014 the grandfather who'd joked with him about the throne design this morning and the dragon who'd held the bloody knife over his sister's body.\n\nCreeeak.\n\nThe softest of noises. It could be the wind shifting the walkway. It could be a turtle bumping into one of the columns below them.\n\nOr it could be talonsteps on the planks outside.\n\nMaybe it's Mother, to tell us it's safe to come out, Fathom thought desperately.\n\nBut she wouldn't approach so quietly, so carefully.\n\nLike a dragon hunting for his prey.\n\nCloser.\n\nAnd closer.\n\nOne deliberate step at a time.\n\nI'm about to die, Fathom thought. His heart was trying to swim out of his body, thumping in his ears far louder than the steps on the boards outside.\n\nPlease don't kill Indigo, too.\n\nMaybe there's still time for her to escape if I distract him. He has no reason to go after her. She means nothing to him.\n\nBut he couldn't get a message to his petrified muscles. He couldn't move, could hardly even think as the talons stepped lightly into the pavilion.\n\n\"Grandson.\" The hiss slithered around the room like smoke. \"Hiding like a nervous hermit crab. Interesting choice. One I should have expected, though, from such a little dragonet with such a limited imagination.\"\n\nAlbatross paced slowly closer. Indigo's trembling stilled and she took a deep breath.\n\n\"You may be wondering why you're still alive,\" Albatross said. \"Especially when your entire family is dead.\"\n\nNo, Fathom thought, drums beating misery through his head. No. They can't be. No.\n\n\"You know I could easily kill you from a distance. It would barely take a thought. But you've been such a thorn in my side the last few years. Every chance she got \u2014 'I don't really need you anymore. Perhaps Fathom will be better at this than you are. You're so expendable now that I have a replacement. What a pathetic creature you are, little brother, with your tiny teeth and oddly colored scales. Fathom is so much more presentable than you are.' \" Albatross growled in the back of his throat.\n\n\"So, no, I couldn't dispose of you from afar. That wouldn't be satisfying at all. I want to see your face as you die.\"\n\nThe boat flew away from them as Albatross ripped it off the wall and flung it across the room. It landed with a crash that shook the whole pavilion.\n\nAt the same moment, Indigo uncoiled and sprang at Albatross. Her front claws sank into his neck and her back claws dug at his chest, while her wings flared up to blind him.\n\n\"Fathom, get out of here!\" she screamed.\n\nShe's going to die for me.\n\nAlbatross roared, a sound of pure rage and hatred.\n\nShe's going to die.\n\nFathom would never, never let that happen.\n\nHe was on his feet suddenly, stretching one talon toward the ceiling. He couldn't touch them, but he felt power surging through his claws and he leaned into it.\n\n\"Spears!\" he shouted. \"Kill my grandfather!\"\n\nThe fishing spears wrenched themselves off the wall and shot toward Albatross.\n\n\"No!\" Albatross yelled. \"Spears \u2014\"\n\nIndigo seized his snout, smothering his words, and bit down hard on his ear.\n\nA spear smashed into Albatross's back. He grabbed the pearls around Indigo's neck and twisted as she let go of him with a strangled yelp of pain. One of his claws sliced across her neck as the second spear slammed into his side.\n\nBoth dragons collapsed to the floor.\n\nBlood seeped over gray scales, pale blue scales, indigo scales, all across their wings, all over everything.\n\nFathom's talons were deep in blood.\n\n\"Indigo,\" he cried. Sobs rose from his chest, threatening to tear out his ribs. \"Indigo.\" He slipped and slid through the blood over to her body and pulled her free from the weight of Albatross. His grandfather's dark eyes glared sightlessly up at the moons. The spears had done their work well. He was gone.\n\nBut Indigo was not. There were bruises all along her throat and a gash that bubbled horribly below her jaw, but her eyes were open, and they saw him. He cradled her head gently, taking her talon when she reached for him.\n\n\"Such an idiot,\" she whispered, wincing as the effort made the gash bleed harder.\n\n\"Yes, you are,\" he said through his tears, and she managed a smile.\n\n\"Told you you weren't allowed to die,\" she said. Her eyes drifted shut.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, \"well, neither are you.\"\n\nHe wrapped his claws around the pearls and whispered, \"Heal this dragon and save her life. Please. Please. Please save her life.\"\n\nHe could feel the struggling, slow flutter of her pulse under his claws; he felt it jump, pause, and then start to beat stronger and steadier.\n\nThe pearls glowed warmly for a moment, like little fire-breathing roses.\n\nAnd then the bruises faded away. The gash in her neck closed up, scales knitting back together. So did the deep lacerations along her side, which he hadn't even been paying attention to.\n\nTime passed, and then Indigo took a long, shuddering breath and opened her eyes.\n\nHe helped her sit up and threw his wings around her.\n\nShe didn't say anything. She didn't have to. They were both crying too hard to talk at this point anyway.\n\nFathom knew he would have paid any price to save her life.\n\nBut he also knew she must be wondering the same thing he was.\n\nWas the price a piece of his soul?\n\nWould his power slowly turn him evil?\n\nWas every spell he cast bringing him a step closer \u2026 to becoming like Albatross?\n\nClearsight was relieved when Allknowing finally released them and she was able to find her way to Room 3A. It turned out to be a beautiful classroom \u2014 airy and full of light, with plants and little water features everywhere. The teacher showed her around and Clearsight's anxiety gradually began to fade.\n\n\"These are our pet scavengers,\" said the teacher, beaming as she patted the top of a large glass cage. \"Two females. They're quite fierce, so don't stick your talons in the cage, just to be safe. We rotate whose turn it is to feed them, and we're doing a yearlong study of their behavior. They're not just adorable; they're also quite fascinating.\"\n\nThe two little creatures in the piles of grass inside didn't look fascinating; they looked asleep. Clearsight wondered what they ate.\n\n\"A lot of fruit,\" said a dragon hovering nearby, \"nuts, seeds, and sometimes bits of meat if we roast it for them.\"\n\n\"Oh, Listener,\" the teacher said. \"Would you take care of our new student for the rest of the day?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Listener said, brightening. She was large for three years old, with curves that suggested she was a very successful hunter. And she had the mind reading silver scales beside her eyes.\n\nUh-oh, Clearsight thought. A mind reader. That's just what I need.\n\nThe other dragon glanced down at her claws, her wings drooping slightly.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Clearsight said quickly. \"I'm just not used to mind readers. I don't know how to shield my thoughts or only think nice things or anything. I'll probably think lots of horrible stuff and you'll end up hating me really fast. Or lots of crazy things and then you'll think I'm crazy.\"\n\n\"I already know you're crazy,\" Listener said with a small laugh. \"When you walked in, you looked around the classroom and immediately categorized every student into 'safe to be friends with' and 'doomed if I talk to them.' What is that about? And just checking \u2014 I'm not in the doomed camp, am I?\"\n\n\"Not as far as I can see,\" Clearsight said. In fact, most of the paths involving Listener were a lot warmer than the paths without her, with more laughing. This friendship would definitely be a turn toward the right future. As long as they avoided that fight about Clearsight's timeline scrolls, and that other fight about Darkstalker, and, oh dear, all the fights about Listener's crushes on various \u2014\n\n\"By the Scorching, all right, all right!\" Listener cried, flinging up her wings. \"You're one of those! I'll stay as far out of your brain as I can, I promise. I don't want to know anything about my future.\"\n\n\"Nothing?\" Clearsight asked curiously. \"Even if it meant I could stop you from \u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" Listener yelped. She pressed her front talons to her ears. \"Don't you dare!\"\n\nHow completely strange, Clearsight thought, blinking at her new friend. \"But why?\" she asked. \"I could change your future and make it better.\"\n\n\"My family is superstitious about seers,\" Listener said, cautiously lowering her talons. \"We'd rather be surprised by life than know too much.\"\n\nThis was such a bewildering and unfamiliar concept that Clearsight fell silent, staring at the scavengers. One of them was waking up, yawning and stretching and rubbing the cloud of dark hair on its little head.\n\n\"I have a secret plan,\" Listener whispered. \"Maybe you know that already.\"\n\nClearsight shook her head. That is, she knew of a few crazy Listener plans that might lie ahead, but she wasn't sure which specific one might be bubbling up right now.\n\n\"I'm going to free the scavengers one day.\" Listener glanced furtively over her shoulder, but the teacher was busy reviewing another student's journal on the far side of the room. \"As soon as I figure out the best way to do it.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Clearsight asked.\n\n\"Because they're sad,\" Listener said simply. \"I can feel it. They don't like being trapped in here. They like being together, but they would rather be free.\"\n\n\"You can feel it?\" Clearsight echoed, tipping her head. \"Like \u2014 real emotions?\"\n\nListener nodded. \"Small and muddled but very powerful. I feel it all the time when I'm in here. Poor little things.\"\n\nThe awake scavenger tripped over the sleeping scavenger on the way to the water dish, and the sleeping one woke up with a lot of loud squeaking noises. Clearsight watched them stomp around squeaking back and forth, just as if they were having an actual conversation. Then there was a pause, and after a moment the first scavenger brought over a piece of apple to share.\n\n\"That looked like a peace offering,\" Clearsight said.\n\n\"Exactly! That was exactly her feeling,\" Listener said. \"Their feelings are crazy similar to ours. I need to ask some other mind readers if they've noticed it, too. Or maybe there are scrolls about it in the library. I don't think we've had many captive ones before, so maybe I'm making an awesome new discovery.\"\n\n\"I'll help you,\" Clearsight said impulsively. \"Free them, I mean. Whenever you're ready, I'll help.\" This was something completely separate from her confusing, tangled-up future. This was something she could do just for herself. Because she'd made a friend, and nobody was going to die as a result.\n\nHopefully. Not along most of the paths anyway. Maybe she should study those two vague dark possibilities a little more carefully \u2026\n\nShe was about to ask for a scroll to take notes on when Listener grinned sideways at her and flicked her tail. Clearsight felt a burst of weird bubbles in her chest. What was that?\n\nHappiness?\n\nMaybe her dad was right. Maybe they weren't all completely doomed after all.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" said Listener. \"Here comes Weirdout.\"\n\nClearsight turned, trying to imagine who would give their dragonet such a strange name, and saw Darkstalker's sister walking toward them. Her startling pale blue eyes were fixed on Clearsight.\n\n\"She's four,\" Listener whispered, \"but she's with us because whenever someone asks her what two plus two is, she says something like 'Archaeology?' or 'Lavender?' and no one knows what to do with her.\"\n\n\"I thought her name was Whiteout,\" Clearsight stammered.\n\n\"Yes,\" whispered Listener, \"but she's super weird.\"\n\n\"Hi,\" Whiteout said to Clearsight. She stopped in front of her and stood very still, and Clearsight got the strange feeling that Whiteout was already gathering more information about her than Listener had been able to, even after reading her mind.\n\n\"Hello,\" Clearsight answered.\n\n\"Are you the dragon my brother's been waiting for?\"\n\nThe question hung in the air for a moment as Clearsight debated all the possible answers to it. Lying, she could see, would set them off on a bad path. Whiteout trusted either completely or not at all. And it might be very important \u2014 life or death important, although Clearsight wasn't sure exactly why yet \u2014 for Whiteout to trust her. Claws of prophecy squeezed her heart, and she could give only one possible answer.\n\n\"Yes,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Good,\" said Whiteout. \"I'm glad you're finally here.\" She dipped her snout toward Clearsight and moved off to work on a puzzle that was spread across a long table in the corner.\n\n\"See?\" Listener said when she was out of earshot. \"Weird.\"\n\n\"I think she's \u2026\" Clearsight hesitated, not sure how to sum up Whiteout, especially when almost everything she knew about her hadn't actually happened yet. \"Interesting,\" she finished.\n\n\"It's possible to be both,\" Listener said with a shrug. \"So what was that about? Darkstalker? You know him?\"\n\n\"No \u2014 not yet,\" Clearsight admitted.\n\n\"He's intense,\" Listener offered. \"Maybe the smartest dragon in the history of the NightWings. You know he hatched under three full moons? He can read minds and see the future. It's a little unsettling. He has a total vibe of knowing way too much about everyone.\"\n\nIt suddenly occurred to Clearsight to wonder why Darkstalker hadn't been in the seer training class. Maybe he was smarter than me, and met Allknowing first, and realized that she's terrible, so he's still pretending he hasn't found the class yet. Or he doesn't want anyone to know that he's a good enough seer to have found it already.\n\nHe's been keeping all his powers pretty quiet so far. I wish I couldn't see so many good AND bad reasons for that.\n\nListener was peering at her curiously. Clearsight had to shut down this line of thought before she revealed too much by accident. She glanced around the classroom. \"When do we sit down and start learning?\"\n\nHer new friend laughed. \"That's not how it works. There are stations all around the classroom and you're allowed to work on whatever interests you. Then we come together for a group discussion before free outdoor time. There's a schedule on the wall over there.\"\n\nHuh, Clearsight thought. If I can work on anything I want \u2014 that means I could keep doing my timeline scrolls.\n\nWait \u2014 nope. There was a very uncomfortable trip to Truthfinder's office with her parents in that future. Better stick to what the other dragons were doing.\n\nShe did her best to act normal, but as the school night went on, Clearsight found it harder and harder to breathe through the pounding of her heart.\n\nI can't put it off any longer.\n\nI'm meeting him soon. Very soon.\n\nBut I'm doing it on my terms.\n\nThe teacher released them into the courtyard when the moons were high in the sky, giving them two hours to hunt, play, or practice flying, whatever they chose to do.\n\nClearsight stopped in the shadow of a tall pine tree, watching the wings that swirled around her. Dragons called out greetings to one another, tossed pinecones, checked their reflections in puddles. A few settled at outdoor tables to study together; others launched races around the upper branches. One dragonet was trying to convince his friend to try something called a pomegranate.\n\nEveryone seemed happy. No one seemed to know that a very momentous thing was about to happen.\n\nBut where was Darkstalker?\n\nMaybe he was angry that she'd avoided him that morning; maybe he'd gone off hunting and decided he didn't want to meet her after all.\n\nThere was one future where that happened. It wasn't a good one.\n\n\"Hey!\" a voice shouted from one of the clusters of dragonets. \"Watch where you're walking!\"\n\nClearsight saw Whiteout emerge from the group serenely, looking as though she didn't realize someone was yelling at her. Behind her, three frustrated NightWings were scrambling to recover the marbles she'd scattered with her tail.\n\n\"Can't you use those weird eyes of yours?\" one of them barked.\n\n\"Or are IceWings blind as well as arrogant and vicious?\" another snarled.\n\nAnd then Darkstalker was there, materializing beside his sister as though the shadows had unfolded him.\n\n\"That was a little rude, don't you think?\" he said to the three marble players.\n\nThey shuffled their feet nervously. \"She ruined our game!\" the biggest one blurted.\n\n\"What a disaster,\" Darkstalker said. \"No wonder you had to resort to name-calling and bigotry.\"\n\nBewildered silence. Blinking.\n\nDarkstalker put one wing around his sister's shoulders. \"Whiteout, these dragons are upset because you knocked over their marbles when you walked through here.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"I thought the marbles represented chaos theory and I was just another unpredictable whim of the universe.\" Darkstalker gave her a look and she smiled sweetly at the three dragons. \"I did not intend to disrupt your faith in controllable outcomes.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" said the biggest one gruffly. \"Sorry we yelled at you.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said the other two. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Did you?\" said Whiteout. \"Yell at me?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" said Darkstalker with a smile. He pointed to each of the players in turn. \"She was cheating anyway, all he can think about is his crush on her sister, and he is thoroughly sick of both of them and wishes he knew anyone interesting. Have fun with your marbles, friends.\"\n\nHe turned and escorted Whiteout away, leaving the three dragons glaring at one another.\n\nClearsight waited until they were passing her tree, then stepped into his path with her eyebrows raised. Whiteout went around her and kept going, but Darkstalker stopped with the most wonderful expression of delight, anxiety, and triumph she'd ever seen.\n\n\"Very impressive,\" she said.\n\n\"What?\" He gave her a charming grin. \"What'd I do?\"\n\n\"I don't know how you engineered it,\" she said, \"but, wow, you covered everything, didn't you? Courage, check. Cares about his sister, check. Defending the vulnerable, standing up to bullies, making sure everyone apologizes neatly. With a little demonstration of power to show off your intelligence at the end, too. Did you pay those guys? Because that was just perfect.\"\n\n\"Do I know you?\" he asked.\n\nShe laughed despite herself, although she was fiercely trying not to. He just looked so wounded and so mischievous at the same time.\n\n\"Oh, wait,\" he said. \"Did we meet on that fishing trip last month? No, hang on, I'll remember. Aha! You're on the queen's Council of Ancient Elders, is that it?\"\n\n\"You goober,\" she said, wrinkling her snout at him.\n\n\"You're the one taking all the romance out of this,\" he said. \"It's supposed to go, 'that was so brave, how you stood up for your sister like that!' 'Oh, that, what, no, it's what any dragon would do.' 'No, no \u2014 you're special. I can tell.' 'Not as special as you. There's a magic about you that I've never found in any other dragon!' 'Why \u2014 why do I feel as though I've known you forever?' 'Because you have \u2026 and you will.' Fireworks! True love and happiness for the rest of our lives!\"\n\n\"You didn't prepare actual fireworks, did you?\" she asked.\n\n\"N-nooooo,\" he said. \"Not if you \u2026 hate fireworks?\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" she said, squinting. \"I see a terrible fire ravaging the school gardens \u2026\"\n\n\"You do?\" he said, sounding a little panicked. \"When? Now? I \u2014 wait a second, you're making that up.\"\n\nShe giggled. \"Has anyone ever told you that you are a terrible seer?\" she asked. \"That whole fluttery drippy conversation sounded nothing like me.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" he said with an even bigger grin. \"But couldn't we let this be a tiny bit more romantic? I mean, it's not every day that I meet my soulmate. Just this once, in fact. Right now.\"\n\nNow, Clearsight thought. It's true. It's happening right now, the beginning of everything.\n\nWhat was this pounding in her chest? Joy, love, terror? She wanted to wrap her wings around him and never let go, and she also kind of wanted to set him on fire. She definitely wanted to fly away as fast as her wings would carry her, but she also wanted to keep having this conversation as long as dragonly possible; for the rest of eternity would be fine.\n\nShe'd seen what might happen, but she'd never realized what it would feel like.\n\nDarkstalker suddenly leaned forward and took her front talons in his.\n\n\"Don't worry about the future,\" he whispered intently. \"Just be here, with me, in this moment, when we are both as happy as we've ever been in our whole lives so far.\"\n\nShe wanted to, she would have, but as their claws touched, she was suddenly spun into a hurricane of visions so brutal she thought her head would split open.\n\nDarkstalker, older, in the twisted crown, killing dragons from across the room with a flick of his claw.\n\nDarkstalker, close to the age he was now, holding out a scroll to her with a hopeful smile.\n\nA SeaWing screaming in pain.\n\nHer and Darkstalker, older again, wrestling with their six little dragonets in a noisy sprawling cliff house of their own.\n\nDarkstalker, collapsing in front of her as thunder rumbled.\n\nIceWing blood everywhere.\n\nA gift of sapphires.\n\nSunset over a valley as she walked creakily on her ancient talons to rest beside him, on their porch, at peace.\n\nOpening the royal treasure room to bestow gifts on their grandchildren.\n\nFive NightWings writhing before the throne, screaming as they clawed out their own eyes.\n\nBetrayal woven into copper wires.\n\nA trip to the sea.\n\nA green dragon in tears.\n\nShe spiraled finally back into herself and blinked, there again, back in the present. Where none of the terrible or wonderful things had happened yet.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked.\n\n\"You didn't see all that?\" She gently pulled her talons out of his grasp.\n\n\"I will never invade your thoughts,\" he said. \"I promise. I'll stay out of your mind, always.\"\n\nThat's true \u2026 in some futures. Not all of them.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"It's not that bad, is it?\" he asked, tilting his head. \"Our future? I've seen mostly good things.\"\n\n\"No, it's great,\" she said, \"depending on how much you like the average apocalypse.\"\n\nHe laughed, which confirmed that at least for now he was staying out of her head \u2014 because she hadn't been joking.\n\nWith another charming grin, he said, \"I'm Darkstalker, by the way.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm Tailbite,\" she said. \"You weren't expecting someone else, were you?\"\n\nHe laughed and laughed and laughed, and in the sunlight of that laugh, she could almost stay in the present \u2014 in the moment of soulmates meeting, in the moment of falling in love.\n\nShe could almost forget the violence, the lies, the danger \u2026 the blood and betrayal yet to come.\n\nThe weather was perfect: rain poured from a grumbling, fire-breathing sky. The rivers at the bottom of the canyons swelled and roared and ate the walls, sending all the dragons who lived down there scrambling for higher ground. The wind was so fierce that it seemed to have been sent by vengeful IceWings to rip every NightWing out of the sky. It was veering quickly from a storm into a baby hurricane.\n\nDarkstalker had been waiting for a day like this. Surely even Clearsight wouldn't expect him today.\n\nBut as he swooped down to the ledge in front of her house, there she was, sitting out in the rain, waiting for him. He hadn't quite figured out all her expressions yet, but he thought this one might be her trying-not-to-laugh-at-him face.\n\n\"Surprise!\" he shouted, thumping down beside her.\n\n\"Why are you crazy?\" she said, raising her voice over the thunder. \"Go home!\"\n\n\"And be trapped indoors with my squabbling parents all day?\" he said. \"No thanks! Let's go to the sea!\"\n\n\"The sea will eat us alive if we go there today,\" she protested.\n\n\"I didn't say in the sea.\" He shook his wings, accomplishing nothing because he was still getting drenched. \"I said to the sea.\"\n\n\"I'm not a dragon who goes flying in hurricanes!\" she said. \"Do you know how unpredictable they are? The smallest wind shift or one piece of debris spinning in the wrong direction, and suddenly you're in a whole other timeline \u2014 or everyone else is, because you're dead.\"\n\n\"It is virtually impossible for us to die today,\" said Darkstalker. \"It would be a waste of lots of very melodramatic prophecies if we did. Why are you even arguing about this? You know that we go and it's wonderful.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" she said. \"I see this really awesome future where I go back inside and drink tea by the fire and read a scroll about funny scavenger antics for the rest of the day and also, by the way, stay completely dry. That one is definitely winning right now.\" She saw the expression on his face and relented a little. \"We could go tomorrow, when the sun will be shining.\"\n\n\"But then there will be dragons everywhere,\" he said. \"Today the beach is all ours!\"\n\nClearsight gave a little shiver, and although he was trying not to listen, something fluttered through her mind: a whisper, an echo, his own voice shouting, \"It's all ours! The whole kingdom is ours!\"\n\nHe rested his wing against hers, dripping scales sliding across one another. \"Come back,\" he said softly. \"Be here now.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath and looked into his eyes. \"I am,\" she said. \"I'm here. All right, fine, let's go drown there before we drown here.\" She glanced back at the door and he wondered if she was trying to get out of there so he wouldn't meet her parents. He was occasionally hurt by that idea, but then, he didn't want her to meet his parents either. He didn't want his father's scornful eyes anywhere near this one happy thing in his life.\n\nThey dove into the storm, battered by raindrops as big as oranges and wind that howled as though kingdoms were falling under its claws. Clearsight was not the best flier, which perhaps he should have thought about, but she didn't complain, even in her mind. He let himself sneak into her thoughts a little bit while they flew, since they couldn't keep up a conversation through the rain anyway.\n\nTick tick tick tick flip flip flip flip. Her brain never stopped. She was constantly running scenarios, tracing paths forward into different futures. Darkstalker had thought he was pretty good at this himself \u2014 he could see not just the most plausible future, but a few alternates where things were different. But she had thousands of strands gathered in her mind, weaving and interweaving and knotting and tangling.\n\nHe regretted promising to stay out; it was fascinating in there.\n\nIt also meant she could easily skip him onto a timeline he hadn't seen coming. She changed one small thing, and their entire meeting was different. She twitched the future like a long tail, keeping him off balance. It was fun. Maybe it wouldn't always be fun, but it was for now.\n\nMore than all that: she knew him. She knew he wasn't just a hybrid mistake with loud, fighting parents and a strange sister. She knew he was hers; she knew he was gifted beyond any other dragon in the world; and she knew he was going to do such amazing things that he changed the face of Pyrrhia forever.\n\nNot that she was impressed by any of that. But he kind of liked that about her, too. He'd have enough worshippers, one day.\n\nThey reached the edge of the cliffs and suddenly soared into empty space; the land dropped away sharply below them, veering down to a long rocky beach. Which, at present, was being pounded by waves taller than they were.\n\n\"Looks fun down there!\" Clearsight shouted to Darkstalker.\n\n\"All right, yes,\" he shouted back. \"This isn't quite what I was picturing.\"\n\nShe smiled and flickered away, soaring south along the coastline. He followed her, battling to keep his wings straight as the wind kept trying to knock him into the cliffs on his right.\n\nJust as he was starting to wonder if she was punishing him by keeping them out in this weather, she dipped one of her wings and soared down toward the beach. He realized she was aiming for an enormous cave mouth that faced the ocean. Normally it might have had several feet of beach between the opening and the sea, but today it was flooded up to the front door.\n\nThey swooped inside, into a world of emerald green and vaulted ceilings. Phosphorescent moss clung to the rocks and walls and stalactites, giving the cave an eerie glow that was matched by the chandeliers of glowworms up above. Water dripped softly here and there, and a rivulet ran through the cave, connecting some of the tide pools and circumventing others.\n\nThe wind shrieked outside, but it could only reach its thin tendrils in to try and grab at them. The farther back they went in the cave, the warmer and quieter it was.\n\nClearsight landed on a tilted ledge of rock above a tide pool full of elongated starfish and anemones the color of sunrise.\n\n\"How did you know about this place?\" Darkstalker asked, settling beside her.\n\nShe looked at him in confusion, and he saw the shift happening behind her eyes as she overlaid the present and the future and tried to make them fit.\n\n\"From the visions,\" she said. \"We came \u2014 come \u2014 we will come here a lot. Maybe.\" She shook her head. \"I thought you brought me here on our first trip to the sea \u2014 I mean, today \u2014 but if you didn't know about it, then I can't explain it. It's like a loop in the timelines that can't be pulled free.\" She worried at a piece of algae that was coming off the boulder underneath her.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said, brushing her wing. \"It doesn't matter. We're here now, and it's great, that's all that counts.\"\n\nWhat if I messed something up? she thought. What if I jumped ahead and skipped over something important? What if we're not supposed to be here yet, and this changes something?\n\nDarkstalker came within a heartbeat of answering her before he remembered he wasn't supposed to be reading her mind. He snapped his jaw shut, trying to pull back. It was hard not to just leave his mind open, listening to everything both spoken and unspoken. But he'd practiced blocking out his father enough; he should be able to do the same for the dragon he loved. Was going to love, eventually. Was starting to love, he was pretty sure.\n\n\"Can I ask you something nosy?\" she said after a moment.\n\n\"Ominous,\" he said with a grin.\n\n\"Well, you and Whiteout are the only hybrids I've ever met,\" she said, \"so I have no idea if this is a rude question. Tell me if it is and I'll shut up, all right?\"\n\n\"You can ask me anything,\" he said.\n\n\"It's just \u2026 you don't seem like a hybrid,\" she said. \"You look like all the other NightWings. Is any part of you IceWing?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said. \"That question. My father asks me that every day, but much less politely, don't worry.\" He extended his wings fully and pointed. On the inside, along the edge where his wing membranes met his back, a long row of silver-white scales marked the seam on either side of his body. \"Ironically,\" he said, \"these are a lot easier to hide from other dragons than the identity of my father.\"\n\nClearsight reached out and ran one claw lightly along the ridge of IceWing scales. It tickled, and he bit his tongue trying not to laugh.\n\n\"Whoa,\" she said. \"They even feel cold.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"It's weird.\" He hesitated. \"There's \u2026 one other thing I inherited from my father. I'm an animus.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said. \"I know that. Obviously.\"\n\nOf course she did. \"No one else knows that yet,\" he said.\n\n\"No one? You haven't cast any spells?\" she said, her eyes wide. \"In four years?\"\n\nHe peeked again and saw a ripple of hope jump across her mind. She was impressed; she trusted him a little more.\n\n\"Just one, to make sure I could,\" he said. \"I suspected I was an animus, from my visions of the future and this sense I had, but I needed to know. The Ice Kingdom has a test for anyone who might have inherited animus powers \u2014 I gave myself sort of a modified version.\"\n\n\"Didn't your father test you?\" Clearsight asked.\n\n\"He did, but I deliberately failed it,\" Darkstalker explained. \"I didn't want him getting any ideas about controlling me while I was still too young to defend myself. He's suspicious, though. The incessant drumbeat in my house is all about being careful with animus magic.\" Darkstalker hunched his shoulders and folded his wings back in. \"Basically from the moment we could hear, my father has lectured my sister and me about what the magic means, what it can do to us, how we have to be SO careful or absolutely TERRIBLE things will happen.\" He rolled his eyes.\n\n\"But he's right,\" Clearsight said earnestly. \"Can't you \u2014\"\n\n\"No, no,\" Darkstalker snapped. He knew she didn't like the way he was frowning, but he couldn't stop himself. \"Never, never tell me that my father is right about anything. Not if you care about me.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Clearsight said. \"I just \u2026 I've seen those absolutely terrible things, you know.\"\n\n\"In my future?\" he asked, startled.\n\n\"In ours,\" she answered. \"Haven't you?\"\n\n\"I didn't look carefully much further than meeting you,\" he confessed. \"I knew that now was when everything would start to get better. That I'd be \u2026 well, I'd be happy, finally.\" He grinned sheepishly at her.\n\nClearsight twined her tail with his and leaned into his shoulder. \"This version of you is the sweetest,\" she said.\n\n\"I think it's worth noting,\" he said, \"that this is actually the only existing version of me.\"\n\nShe was quiet, but the tick tick tick of her brain was almost too loud for him to avoid hearing.\n\n\"I'm not reading your mind,\" he said, \"but I can tell that you're thinking I'll only stay this way if I don't use my animus magic.\"\n\n\"I don't want to scare you,\" she said. \"If you haven't seen those futures \u2014 the ones where you use it too much, where you start killing other dragons, where you steal the throne to become king \u2026 well, that's probably better. If you haven't seen them, then they mustn't be very likely, right?\"\n\nIt was his turn to be quiet.\n\nHe had maybe, sort of, kind of maybe glimpsed a future where he was king of the NightWings.\n\nBut it was an awesome future. He was a great king. He would make the NightWings the most powerful tribe in Pyrrhia, and all his decisions would make them stronger and safer. Even if the path to get there was a little dark \u2026 once they were there even Clearsight would have to admit it was totally worth it. Better for everyone. The best possible future.\n\nIt wasn't the most likely future, not yet. But he sometimes thought it should be.\n\nShe wouldn't love hearing that, though. She had to be steered carefully into that timeline, until she could see how perfect it was.\n\n\"I've had visions here and there of the distant future,\" he said with a shrug. \"But you of all dragons must know that it's nearly impossible to predict events that are too far in the future. Little changes now can cause such big changes later that it's almost not even worth it to look that far ahead, right?\"\n\nFrom the tension in her wings, he guessed this wasn't the answer she was looking for.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said, ducking his head to meet her eyes. \"Don't be mad at me for things I might do one day, all right? I'm not evil now. I haven't done any of that. And I probably won't. Will you focus on that, please? Stay in the present with me?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, dropping her wings. She stepped away from him and shook them out, as if her visions were clumps of mud stuck between her scales. \"I know. I'll try.\" She gave him a wry smile. \"Sorry. We're going to have this argument a lot.\"\n\nWell, that sounds fun. If you know that already, he thought, then can't we not?\n\n\"So what was it?\" she asked. \"The one spell you've cast?\"\n\nWith an effort, he made himself grin at her again. \"If I tell you, you're going to make fun of me.\"\n\n\"Ooo, even better,\" she said, perking up. \"Tell me!\" She poked his chest with her tail. \"Tell me!\"\n\n\"It was just \u2014 this toy of Whiteout's,\" he said. \"It's a little carved scavenger. She loves it in kind of an obsessive way. Once it got lost and she cried for a whole day, until we finally found it again. So after that, I enchanted it to always return to her. No matter where I hide it, or where she loses it, it always turns up on her pillow by that night.\" He shrugged. \"It's just a little thing.\"\n\n\"Awwwwwwwwww,\" she said. \"You are working the sympathy vote so hard right now.\"\n\n\"I am what I am,\" he said, spreading his wings again. \"I can't help my noble heart and generous nature.\"\n\n\"We might be able to do something about the size of that head, though,\" she said, laughing.\n\n\"What, this perfect specimen?\" he asked with mock incredulity.\n\nHer ears flicked up suddenly. \"Shh,\" she whispered. \"Did you hear that?\"\n\nThey both fell silent, and against the backdrop of water dripping and the distant roar of the storm, Darkstalker heard a strange, muffled sound. He swiveled his head around. Toward the back of the cave, toward the long shadows.\n\nClearsight twined her tail around his again and he felt the tension prickling through both of them.\n\nIs someone in here? Or \u2026 something?\n\nThe sound came again \u2014 a low moan just weak enough to perhaps be the wind, but with something unmistakably dragon about it.\n\nDarkstalker hopped off the ledge and stepped cautiously into the dark. Clearsight was close behind him, which was reassuring, because presumably if they were going to be mauled by something in this cave, she would have seen that coming.\n\nWith their night vision, they could see that something large and lumpy was lying in the last tide pool, where the rivulet ended. Darkstalker glanced at Clearsight, then let out a small burst of flame to give them more light.\n\nIt was a dragon, but in that moment of brightness they could see it was not a NightWing. Its scales were blue.\n\nThe dragon made another mournful noise and slowly, painfully, flopped its head around to look at them.\n\n\"NightWings,\" it hissed softly.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" Clearsight asked. She circled the blue dragon cautiously. \"Oh, there's a gash on this side \u2026 but it doesn't look too awful.\"\n\n\"It's something else,\" Darkstalker said, scanning the SeaWing's mind. \"He's exhausted. He's been swimming for days. I see blood and screaming and \u2014 tentacles?\"\n\nThe SeaWing shuddered and tried to sit up.\n\n\"Don't make it worse,\" Clearsight said, nudging him back into the water. \"Just rest. Can you tell us what happened?\"\n\n\"Albatross,\" the dragon whispered.\n\nDarkstalker froze. He'd heard that name before. In his father's mind, in a secret compartment where Arctic sometimes turned over the names of the other known animus dragons in Pyrrhia. Queen Diamond, Arctic's mother. Jerboa, a SandWing who had vanished from the SandWing court years ago and was now either a fugitive or dead. And Albatross, brother to the queen of the SeaWings.\n\nIf there were any others, they were just rumors. Those three were the ones Arctic worried about.\n\n\"You were attacked by an albatross?\" Clearsight said skeptically. \"With \u2026 tentacles?\"\n\n\"Albatross is Queen Lagoon's brother,\" Darkstalker told her.\n\n\"Oh,\" Clearsight said. Her eyes clouded over, and he saw her knitting together all the things she knew and would know about the SeaWings. \"Oh no \u2026\"\n\n\"He went mad,\" the SeaWing whispered hoarsely. \"He attacked us. He killed \u2026 everyone. My brother, my father. I barely escaped with my life. I swam and kept swimming \u2026\"\n\n\"Everyone?\" Clearsight echoed. Her thoughts were so loud and tangled with grief that Darkstalker couldn't avoid hearing them (or so he told himself). The whole tribe? Or the whole royal family? What about Fathom? Is he dead, is everything wrong now? She shook her head, brushing away tears. No, I see the timelines still; he can't be dead. He can't be.\n\nDarkstalker felt a rush of jealousy. He had seen the SeaWing in their future, too: a timid, jittery green dragon, sad and lonely. A friend one day, perhaps, but certainly no one to be so devastated about if he didn't make it. A peripheral character in their great love story. So why was Clearsight so upset? Was this someone he had to worry about?\n\n\"I don't know if anyone is left alive.\" The SeaWing stared at Clearsight with haunted blue eyes. \"Albatross killed the queen. I saw it. He killed two SkyWings and the princess and the king and my \u2014\" He choked on the words, letting out a sob. \"He was still killing when I fled into the ocean. But I don't know why. He was our prince. We loved him. He was loyal to the queen. He made such beautiful magic for her. Why would he do this?\"\n\nClearsight lifted her eyes to meet Darkstalker's.\n\n\"He was an animus,\" Darkstalker whispered. She nodded, knowing that already.\n\n\"I think I know why he did it,\" she said softly to the SeaWing. \"He did a lot of magic for the queen, didn't he? He wasn't careful with his soul at all.\"\n\nShe shot Darkstalker a \"what did I tell you?\" look. He didn't love it.\n\n\"Weren't you listening to me?\" Darkstalker said, lashing his tail. \"Look at me, Clearsight, the way I am now. I'm not whoever you're seeing in your visions. I am careful.\"\n\nThe SeaWing lunged out of the water and seized Clearsight's talons. \"Maybe it was another tribe. Maybe they put a spell on Albatross \u2014 that could happen, couldn't it? The IceWings have magic, too; maybe they were trying to wipe us out. Or maybe the RainWings drugged him. They have all kinds of plants that do weird things in the jungle, that's what I've heard. That makes sense, doesn't it? It must have been someone else using him. It wasn't Albatross at all.\"\n\nClearsight guided him back into the pool. \"We're going to get you help,\" she said. \"Queen Vigilance will want to hear about this. She'll make sure you're taken care of in exchange for your story. Just \u2026 wait here.\"\n\nThe SeaWing slumped forward, letting the water cover his snout. He took a deep breath, gills fluttering, and closed his eyes again.\n\n\"How are we going to get a message to the queen?\" Clearsight whispered to Darkstalker, edging around the tide pool and back toward the cave entrance.\n\nHe growled under his breath. \"We'll have to tell my father. He has her ear \u2014 he can tell her about this dragon and what's happened in the Kingdom of the Sea.\"\n\nShe hesitated in front of a wall of glowing moss, her wings spread so she looked silhouetted. \"Is this a good idea?\" she said. \"Queen Vigilance wouldn't attack the SeaWings while they're in trouble, would she?\" She wrinkled her forehead, not waiting for his answer; she was already a hundred days away, a thousand, studying all the possible outcomes.\n\n\"She'll start with a messenger or a spy,\" Darkstalker said. He could at least pretend that Clearsight really wanted to know what he thought. \"To find out for sure what happened. It wouldn't make sense for her to attack, though. The Kingdom of the Sea isn't geographically useful for us to invade.\"\n\nHe couldn't imagine the trip the surviving SeaWing had made \u2014 all the way around the bottom of the continent, past the rainforest? Or through the middle of the continent, along the rivers?\n\n\"Besides,\" he added, \"she's busy enough with the IceWing war. She'll know we don't need another front or another enemy to deal with.\"\n\nClearsight looked at him as if she were slowly returning to earth. \"I don't see any NightWing-SeaWing battles ahead,\" she said. \"I think it's safe to tell her.\"\n\n\"That's what I said,\" he pointed out.\n\n\"And we should find out what really happened,\" she said. \"The more we know about animus magic \u2026 the safer we'll all be, right?\"\n\n\"I know a lot about it,\" he said. \"IceWings have had it longer than any other tribe. Trust me, I hear about it every day.\"\n\n\"So why aren't you scared?\" she asked. \"Wasn't it his animus power that drove Albatross insane? Isn't that why he killed all those dragons? Aren't you afraid that \u2014 that \u2014\"\n\n\"That that could be me one day?\" he said. \"No, Clearsight, I'm not worried that that will happen to me. If there's any animus you should be worried about, it's my father.\"\n\nCould Arctic lose his mind the way Albatross had? Those rotten patches inside him \u2014 those came from using his magic, didn't they? Darkstalker didn't know the whole story, but he did know that Arctic had done something with his animus power to escape the Ice Kingdom safely with Foeslayer. How many times had he used it? How big were his spells?\n\nHow much of his soul did he have left to lose?\n\nDarkstalker was not the dangerous dragon in this tribe. It was Arctic; he had no doubt.\n\nBut how was he going to convince Clearsight? He needed a way to make her believe in him \u2014 to stop being so afraid of what he might be one day. He needed her to see that he was different from all the other animus dragons \u2026 that he was nothing like his father.\n\nSomething chimed in his mind, like the bell that rang quietly to signal the end of library time at school.\n\nHe was different. He was smarter. And he could prove it.\n\nHe knew what he had to do.\n\nThe Kingdom of the Sea was in shock.\n\nQueen Lagoon and her husband, Humpback, were dead, as was their daughter, Splash. Current was missing \u2014 one of the dozens who had escaped into the sea \u2014 but his brother, Scallop, and his father, Fathom's uncle Eel, were not so lucky. One of the musicians had tried to fight Albatross when everyone fled; she was dead, too. Fathom would have to find out her name later.\n\nFathom's parents were both dead. Manta had followed her father into the gardens, pleading for Fathom's life, and he had killed her and Reef together. Not even Fathom's magic could bring them back from death.\n\nBut as he'd stood with Indigo in the wreckage of the party, heartbroken, a dragon had crawled out from under one of the tipped-over couches.\n\nIt was Pearl, bleeding from a thousand cuts, but alive.\n\n\"I sliced myself up with the glass from the aquarium,\" she told Fathom, her voice shaking, her injured wings hanging awkwardly. \"I covered myself in blood and pretended to be dead. He walked right past me.\"\n\nShe was the only dragon left to rule the kingdom, other than their mad aunt, Sapphire. Five years old and the new queen.\n\nOf the two SkyWings, Princess Sunset had died, but Eagle, miraculously, had survived. He survived to berate them all about the dangers of animus dragons. He survived to threaten revenge and war and the extermination of the SeaWing tribe. And he survived to take a message back to the SkyWing queen that the disputed shore villages would be abandoned immediately.\n\nQueen Pearl promised that SeaWings would never encroach into Sky territory again, in exchange for amnesty for Sunset's death. She also promised them tributes of gems and seafood for the next five years, in exchange for keeping the massacre a secret. The last thing the SeaWings needed right now was for anyone to find out how vulnerable they were.\n\nOn her first day as queen, Pearl issued one edict. It outlawed animus magic anywhere in the Kingdom of the Sea.\n\nFathom stood beside her in the throne room as she signed the proclamation, and he thought perhaps he was the only one who noticed how wobbly her handwriting still was.\n\nAfter the messenger left to announce the edict, Pearl sent away everyone but Fathom.\n\n\"How did you kill him?\" she asked when they were alone.\n\n\"It was Indigo,\" he said. \"She got him with a spear. She saved me. Us.\" He looked away. \"Some of us.\"\n\nHe'd have to get Indigo to match his story later. He knew she would do that for him, even if she didn't understand why.\n\nHe didn't want anyone to know he'd killed his grandfather. He didn't want to be seen as a hero \u2014 especially not for that. He wasn't a hero at all, not even close.\n\n\"I know the edict is about me,\" he said. \"You don't have to worry. I'm not like him.\"\n\n\"You think that now,\" Pearl said sadly. \"But maybe the SkyWings are right about what to do with animus dragons.\"\n\nFathom felt a shiver through his bones. Had he survived his grandfather's massacre only to have his own sister put him to death?\n\n\"I mean, how am I supposed to trust you, Fathom?\" Pearl asked. \"Whenever I look at you, I see everything he did. Won't you always be tempted to use your magic? What would stop you? What could ever stop you?\"\n\n\"I will,\" he promised, bowing his head. \"The soul that I still have, and wish to keep. Queen Pearl of the SeaWings, I pledge you this oath, on my life and sealed with my blood: I will never use my animus magic again, not for the rest of my days.\"\n\nHe took a sword from the wall and drew an X in blood across his palm. It hurt so much, a bright sharp pain that was easier to bear than the hollow one inside him. He looked at the cuts all over Pearl and was tempted to do the same to himself.\n\n\"All right,\" Pearl said. \"I accept your oath. But there's one other thing.\"\n\n\"Anything,\" said Fathom.\n\n\"You can never have dragonets,\" she said. \"If this power runs in your veins, you could pass it down. But if you have no dragonets, it may die with you, and all of Pyrrhia will be safer for it.\"\n\nFathom was quiet for a moment. Was she picturing animus nieces challenging her for the throne? He wanted to tell her that if he could pass it down, he thought perhaps so could she. But it wasn't an option for her to avoid having dragonets; the kingdom needed heirs, especially now, with most of the royal family dead.\n\n\"I agree,\" he said. He never wanted dragonets anyway. What kind of father could he ever be?\n\n\"Fathom,\" Pearl warned. \"That means you have to stay away from Indigo.\"\n\n\"What?\" he cried, his heart twisting painfully. \"But why?\"\n\n\"Because you're in love with her,\" Pearl said bluntly, \"and you'll do anything, break any rule for her. Maybe even your oath to me.\"\n\n\"I \u2026 no, I \u2026\" Fathom trailed off. Pearl was worried about the wrong oath, but she was right about one thing: if Indigo were ever hurt like that again, he knew he would still use his magic to save her, no matter what he had promised.\n\n\"Besides, it's not fair to her,\" Pearl said, uncoiling from the throne. \"She's my friend, too, and I want her to have a happy life. Don't you? Think about it. What could she ever have with you? No dragonets, no future, nothing but constant danger. Do you want that for her?\"\n\nFathom shrank into his wings. Was it selfish of him to want to keep Indigo's friendship? And how could he make a decision like this without talking to her? It was her life. She'd be furious if she found out he was choosing her future without telling her.\n\nBut maybe furious was good. Maybe furious would keep her away from him.\n\n\"Shouldn't I ask her what she wants?\" he tried. \"Or at least explain \u2014\"\n\n\"I'll do it,\" Pearl said, cutting him off. \"She'll tell you anything you want to hear, but she'll tell me the truth. Don't worry, Fathom, I'll take care of her. I'll make her part of my honor guard, promote her up the ranks quickly. In a few years, I'll find her a minor noble she can have a family with. She'll have a safe, normal life.\"\n\nFar away from me, Fathom thought miserably. With someone else.\n\nBut Pearl was right: that was how it had to be.\n\nHe knew the truth about himself now. He was not special. He was someone who ran and hid while his whole family was massacred, when he was the only one who could have stopped it.\n\nHe should have stopped it sooner. He might have been able to save his parents if he'd been faster, braver, more sure of his power. More sure that his grandfather needed to die.\n\nLosing his magic and his chance to have dragonets \u2026 and worst of all, Indigo, the love of his life \u2026 that was exactly what he deserved.\n\n\"Here comes your stalker,\" said Listener with a sniff.\n\n\"Don't be mean,\" Clearsight said. She could see Darkstalker, too, winding his way across the atrium toward them, and her heart gave a little happy jump. It was the end of the school night, the sun was coming up, and the grounds were busy with dragons coming and going. A few of them stopped Darkstalker, joking and exchanging stories, but his eyes kept stealing back to hers, and in his smile she saw that he was as thrilled to see her as she was to see him.\n\n\"I'm just saying.\" Listener tossed her head. \"You could do better. There are at least two dragons in our classroom who think about you all the time.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" Clearsight said, bumping her side. \"If you won't let me use my power to help you find someone, then you can't use yours for me, either.\"\n\n\"That's different,\" Listener argued. \"And I think it's weird that I can't read Darkstalker's mind. How is he blocking me? I thought that was a skill nobody learned until they were at least seven.\"\n\n\"If he doesn't want you to read his mind, you should probably respect that,\" Clearsight observed. \"He stays out of my head.\"\n\n\"No, he tells you he's staying out of your head,\" Listener said. \"You have no way to know whether he really is.\"\n\nThat was true. Clearsight had to admit \u2014 to herself, not to her friend \u2014 that she'd worried about this. Sometimes he really seemed to know what she was thinking \u2026 but wasn't that because he understood her so well? If he were reading her thoughts, he'd know how afraid she was all the time \u2026 and then how could he still love her?\n\nShe knew what her line here should be; Listener was waiting for Clearsight to say, \"I trust him,\" like any dragon would. But Clearsight couldn't quite say that yet, not even to reassure her friend.\n\n\"What about you?\" she asked instead. \"Where's the new dragon you're stalking?\"\n\n\"Shh!\" Listener cried, whacking Clearsight with her tail. \"He's over there,\" she added in a stage whisper.\n\nThe dragon she flicked her tail at was half a courtyard away, joking with a pair of friends. He was tall and elegantly handsome, with the aloof expression that Listener always seemed to fall for.\n\n\"Don't tell me anything!\" Listener said quickly. \"Don't even look ahead! We're totally destined for each other, so don't you dare tell me we're not!\"\n\n\"Really?\" Clearsight said, trying not to see the futures where this dragon cheated on Listener and then dumped her. Oooh, she hated him already. \"But \u2014 what if \u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" Listener covered her ears and closed her eyes. \"I want to live my life like a normal dragon! LA LA LA LA LA.\"\n\n\"Oh, Listener,\" Clearsight said with a sigh. \"All right.\"\n\n\"I'm leaving now,\" Listener said without opening her eyes. \"Before you make a face I don't want to see and I have to get super mad at you. Don't talk to me until you get your face under control!\" She leaped into the sky, bumped into a tree, got tangled in the branches for a minute, and finally flew away, trying to look dignified.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Darkstalker asked, materializing at her side. He often managed to time his arrival to Listener's departure, but Clearsight tried not to worry about why they didn't like each other. He tucked one wing around her and she leaned into him with a sigh. A green vine with heart-shaped leaves trailed over their shoulders.\n\n\"She's falling for the wrong guy again,\" she said. \"But she won't let me stop her.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" he said. \"Listener's weird insistence on a prophecy-free life.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said. He smelled like cinnamon and roasted sugar cane, remnants of his after-school cooking class.\n\nHe made a \"hmmm\" noise, and she glanced up at his face. Darkstalker was trying to look serious, but his eyes were sparkling.\n\n\"What?\" she said. \"Wow, you are dying to tell me something.\"\n\n\"I am,\" he burst out. \"I have something to show you. Can you come over? Right now?\"\n\n\"But \u2014 your parents \u2026\" she said. Everything she knew about Foeslayer and Arctic made her fairly completely terrified of them. Both from her visions and from the rumors that blew around the tribe.\n\n\"Mother is on guard duty at the border, and Father is at the palace,\" he said. \"Helping interrogate the SeaWing we found yesterday, probably. They won't be home for ages. Please? It's pretty genius. You'll love it. Don't look ahead!\" He poked her snout. \"Let it be a surprise.\"\n\nShe already had half a guess what the surprise might be. Still, she could avoid peering at the nearest branching paths for now, for him.\n\n\"Sure,\" she said. \"As long as there are also snacks.\"\n\nClearsight wondered if she was just imagining the murmurs behind them as she left with Darkstalker. Nobody at school knew quite yet how important the two of them were \u2014 how could they, unless they could see all the futures like she did? But it still felt as if they got more looks than other couples, and more whispers followed them when they walked the halls together.\n\nMaybe the extra attention was because of Darkstalker's notorious parents. Most dragons wouldn't say out loud that the war with the IceWings was Foeslayer and Arctic's fault, but everyone pretty much believed that it was.\n\nBeside her in the sky, Darkstalker made an odd dismissive gesture with one of his wings.\n\n\"What was that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, nothing,\" he said. \"Just a thought.\"\n\nMy thought? she wondered. Was he listening to me?\n\n\"Look,\" he said, pointing at the palace. \"Queen Vigilance has a new prisoner on display.\"\n\nIs he trying to distract me?\n\nShe twisted to look at the top spire of the palace, where the queen had set up a cage for special prisoners. Someone with glittering white scales hunched behind the bars, curled away from the heat of the sun.\n\n\"That must be awful,\" said Darkstalker. \"Being that miserable with all your enemies staring at you.\"\n\n\"Maybe they'll do another exchange,\" Clearsight said. She was so glad her mild-mannered parents weren't part of the queen's army. They were safe in their quiet, low-level jobs.\n\nDarkstalker's home was closer to the school than hers was, and much higher up the side of the canyon. He looked a little embarrassed as they swooped down toward it.\n\n\"We moved up here when my father accepted his position at the palace,\" he explained. \"On the plus side, it's bigger with nicer views; on the minus side, we're closer to my grandmother, who hates all of us. But at least we have a brand-new set of nosy neighbors.\"\n\nHe waved pointedly at the snout poking out of a window below his and whoever it was withdrew in a hurry.\n\n\"Our last neighbors had terrible luck with their window boxes,\" he said with a little too much glee. \"Turnips kept growing in them instead of chrysanthemums or tomatoes or pear trees. It was SO mysterious.\"\n\n\"You didn't!\" she said.\n\n\"They deserved it,\" he said as they landed outside his front door. \"I haven't decided what I'm going to do to these ones yet.\"\n\nShe shot a worried look at his back, but his excitement had taken over again and he didn't notice. His claws unlocked the pale blue door and they slipped inside, into a sunlit room decorated with white rugs and glittering crystals. Clearsight wondered if Arctic had chosen the d\u00e9cor, or if Foeslayer had been trying to evoke the Ice Kingdom for him.\n\nIt was a lot bigger than her home; she'd never been in a place this big before apart from school and the library. One entire wall was lined with scrolls tucked into little niches, and the impossibly clean kitchen had contraptions in it that she'd never seen and couldn't imagine how to use. Her father's idea of cooking was to set a fish on fire and then swallow a whole lemon with it.\n\nThere was a painting over the fireplace of the family together: Darkstalker on one side, Arctic on the other, with Foeslayer and Whiteout between them. The whole painting was done in shades of blue, from a dark midnight blue for Darkstalker's scales to an iridescently pale blue for Arctic's. It was an interesting effect that made them all look more related than they did in real life. They also all looked peculiarly kind around the eyes and mouth, more than most dragons ever did \u2014 and, Clearsight was fairly certain, more than Arctic could possibly really look.\n\n\"Whiteout painted that,\" Darkstalker said, noticing the direction of her gaze. \"It's from what I call her Wishful Thinking series.\" He pointed to a room down a short hallway, and when Clearsight peeked into it she saw that it contained several paintings of IceWings and NightWings flying together, all in the same shades of blue as the portrait. Whiteout's bedroom was like a miniature alternate universe of peaceful interaction between two tribes who in reality hated each other.\n\nThere were also a few paintings of the three moons and different starscapes behind them, different constellations scattered across the skies. Clearsight wanted to go in and study them more closely, but Darkstalker was dancing around behind her, grinning his head off and nearly stepping on her tail.\n\n\"Great kingdoms, calm down,\" Clearsight said, nudging him sideways. \"Did you eat a kangaroo for breakfast or what?\"\n\n\"Come see, come see.\" Darkstalker darted down the hall to the room at the end and unlocked it. Clearsight glanced at the lock as she followed him in. She had never once thought of trying to put a lock on her bedroom door. She could just imagine how startled her parents would be at the idea. They never snooped in her scrolls, and she wouldn't expect them to understand her notes about the future even if they did see them.\n\nOn the surface, Darkstalker's room didn't look like a place full of secrets. His sleeping corner was marked by a pile of neatly folded blankets, purple and white. The desk held nothing but three little inkwells (black, royal blue, emerald green) and a cloth for wiping the ink off his claws. A rack of scrolls beside it was neatly labeled, and each scroll was either a school-approved text or the kind of scroll every young NightWing owned \u2014 Geography of Pyrrhia; Myths of the Lost Continent; Ten Little Scavengers (Recipes Included!); Goodnight, Moons.\n\nThere was a locked trunk at the foot of the blankets, but instead of opening it, Darkstalker went straight to his scroll rack and slid it to the side. He stuck his claws into the gap around one of the wall stones and slowly worked it out, revealing a hidden hole containing a square of paper and a black leather case.\n\n\"This,\" he said, taking a scroll out of the black case. He turned to her, his face aglow with hope, and one of her visions clicked gently into place.\n\n\"What's the other piece of paper?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh \u2014 that's a drawing of you,\" he said shyly. \"I drew it before we met, from my visions, so it's not very good. I didn't want my father to see it or know about you \u2026 but I needed to have it, to look at. You know, to remind myself that things were going to get better.\"\n\nShe felt a twist of guilt in her chest. She'd put off their meeting for years, afraid of what it would mean, while he had waited patiently for her. He'd always had faith that one day they would be happy together.\n\nWhy can't I just be happy like he is? Why can't I trust this?\n\n\"So,\" she said lightly, taking the scroll from him and unrolling it. She could see right away that it was blank. \"Hmmm. You've decided to become a writer?\"\n\n\"Can you sense it?\" he asked. He touched the edge of the scroll. \"Can you guess what it is?\"\n\nIt was so light in her talons. It didn't feel like anything much. Not like something that could change the whole future.\n\nShe could guess, but she knew he didn't really want her to. \"Tell me,\" she said.\n\n\"I took all my animus power,\" he said, \"and I put it in here.\"\n\nShe blinked at him. \"All \u2014 all of it?\"\n\n\"It's not in me anymore,\" he said. \"Now it's like I'm not an animus at all, so my soul is safe. Everyone's safe. Watch.\" He picked up one of his inkwells. \"Inkwell, I command you to fly up and touch the ceiling.\"\n\nA little shiver of fear ran through Clearsight's wings \u2014 but the inkwell didn't move. It sat innocently on Darkstalker's palm, thoroughly uninterested in flying anywhere.\n\n\"You gave away your power?\" she said, genuinely astonished.\n\n\"But we can still use it \u2014 it's just somewhere else, instead of in me.\" He took the scroll from her talons and unrolled the beginning of it, setting the inkwell down gently to hold it in place. He dipped the tip of his claw into the green ink and wrote on the scroll, Enchant this inkwell to fly up, touch the ceiling once, and fly back into my talons without spilling a drop, then return to normal.\n\nAs he reached the end of the sentence, the inkwell floated up into the air, rising all the way to the stones overhead. It tapped against them once, lightly, and then drifted back down to land between Darkstalker's claws.\n\n\"By all the stars,\" Clearsight whispered.\n\n\"Do you see what this means?\" he asked, a little anxiously. \"I've found a way to use my animus power without losing my soul or turning evil or anything terrible happening. We can cast as many spells as we want with this scroll. But because it's all separate from me now, it won't affect my soul. I'll always be me.\" He touched the scroll with one claw and studied her face. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"Can I look?\" Clearsight asked him.\n\nHe nodded, understanding what she meant. She closed her eyes and saw the spiraling paths. Yes, she'd seen visions of this scroll before. In some futures, he'd come up with it himself. Sometimes she'd suggested it and he'd agreed, with varying degrees of defensiveness. But in more than half those paths, the scroll had been made to imitate his power, not contain it.\n\nAlthough she knew it was possible, that it happened in some timelines, she had never expected Darkstalker to completely remove his animus power from his own talons.\n\nAnd it did change the future \u2014 so many futures. The paths to happiness and peace were suddenly brighter, shining with possibility. The darkest paths faded back. The timelines where his power consumed him were almost gone.\n\nHe might still launch a coup to steal the throne; he might still be a danger to dragons she cared about.\n\nBut right now, the Darkstalker in front of her had made an enormous sacrifice to make everyone safer. And to make her feel safer.\n\nHe must have looked at the futures, too. He must have seen that the other versions of the scroll wouldn't be enough \u2014 that this was the right thing to do.\n\nThat this was the only thing he could have done to make her fully trust him.\n\nShe opened her eyes and looked at him. His hopeful face, his emerald-ink-stained claws, his midnight-black wings that were shaking just a little bit.\n\nThis is Darkstalker before he's done anything terrible. This is the best version of him. The one who is safe to love.\n\nHe gave up all his power for me.\n\nShe threw her wings around him and hugged him so fiercely they both fell back onto his blankets.\n\n\"I guess that means it works,\" he said with a laugh, hugging her back.\n\n\"I can't believe you really did this,\" she said, sitting up and picking up the scroll again. \"What happens if the scroll gets destroyed? Is your magic gone forever?\"\n\n\"No, then it comes back to me,\" he said. \"But then I'd make another scroll, don't worry.\"\n\n\"What if someone steals it?\" she asked.\n\nHe frowned. \"Then they can use it the same way I could.\" He sat up, too, wrinkling his snout at the scroll. \"I should have enchanted it so only I can use it. That was stupid of me. If anyone else gets their claws on it \u2014 that would be pretty terrible. Maybe I should destroy it and start again.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, intercepting his reaching talon. \"Then you'd have to use your magic again, and that's more damage to your soul. We'll just be really, really careful with it. Don't let anyone else know you have it, and I promise I'll keep it a secret, too.\"\n\n\"That was my plan anyway,\" he said. He still looked worried.\n\n\"This is a good thing,\" she said. \"The best thing. Believe me.\"\n\nHe thought for a moment, then smiled again. \"Let's enchant something! What should we make? Anything at all, whatever you want.\"\n\n\"Really?\" she said. \"Even \u2026\" She hesitated. It was kind of awful to admit that she already had something in mind; that she'd considered what she would ask for, if she ever had a chance.\n\n\"Anything,\" he said again, more firmly.\n\n\"Could you make me something that hides my thoughts from any mind readers?\" she asked.\n\nThat was a mistake. His expression \u2014 he was so hurt, it nearly convinced her that he'd been keeping his promise all along.\n\n\"It's not about you,\" she said quickly, and not entirely truthfully. \"You know my best friend \u2014 Listener \u2014 she's a mind reader, and so is the principal of the school. I can't shield my mind the way you can. I'm always worried about what they might hear about the future. And now they might see something about your scroll, too. Wouldn't it be safer if no one could listen to me?\" She hesitated again. \"If you want to make it about any mind readers except you, you can do that. I trust you, Darkstalker.\"\n\nShe did now, she thought so \u2026 but it was still kind of a test.\n\n\"No, no,\" he said. \"I understand. You're right, it will keep the scroll safe \u2014 and us. I can see that, too.\" He took the inkwell and weighted down the scroll on his desk. \"Here, I've been meaning to give this to you anyway.\" Darkstalker pulled open one of his drawers and withdrew a bracelet made of woven copper wires, with three milky white moonstones caught in the middle.\n\nShe shivered. I've seen that bracelet somewhere up ahead.\n\nDarkstalker rested the bracelet on the scroll, thought for a moment, and then wrote, Enchant this bracelet to shield the wearer's thoughts from any mind readers.\n\n\"The wearer?\" Clearsight echoed, reading over his shoulder.\n\n\"That way you can pass it down to one of our dragonets,\" he said, smiling at her. \"I mean, if I'm going to make a powerful animus-touched object like this, shouldn't it be something that can be used forever?\"\n\n\"Very smart,\" she said. He clasped the bracelet around her wrist and she held it up to watch the moonstones glow in the torchlight. She smiled at him. \"I think Eclipse will love it, and she'll need it the most.\"\n\nHe let out a little gasp of surprise. She'd never talked about their dragonets before \u2014 certainly never admitted that she knew what their names might be.\n\n\"Are we definite on that name?\" he said after a moment. \"I was thinking Shadowhunter.\"\n\n\"That's one of her big sisters,\" Clearsight said, and laughed again at the look on his face. \"Didn't you know that already?\"\n\n\"Of course I did,\" he said. \"Eclipse, Shadowhunter, and Fierceclaws.\"\n\n\"No, no, no,\" she said, laughing harder. \"Fierceclaws? You definitely don't win that argument.\" She'd obviously spent a lot more time studying the timelines than he had.\n\n\"We could name one after my mother,\" Darkstalker suggested, a little shyly. \"She's pretty awesome. And Foeslayer's a good name, isn't it?\"\n\n\"It is,\" Clearsight said with a smile. She had a weird feeling they did name a dragonet Foeslayer in some future timeline, but there were layers of reasons for it that felt sad and complicated to wrangle out.\n\n\"Let's make something else,\" Darkstalker said, flicking his tail happily. He seized one of the blankets from his bed and wrote, Enchant this blanket to keep any dragon it covers at the exact perfect temperature. Grinning, he flung it over Clearsight's shoulders.\n\n\"Ooooo,\" she said. She hadn't even realized she was cold until the blanket's magical warmth swept through her. \"I have one! Can you enchant our boring history scroll to read to us?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" he said. He dug his Ancient Wars of Pyrrhia scroll out of his pack and set it on the desk. Carefully he dipped a claw in the blue ink this time and wrote, Enchant this history scroll to read itself aloud whenever a dragon says, \"Bore me to sleep!\" and stop reading whenever someone says, \"Spare me!\"\n\n\"You lunatic,\" she said affectionately.\n\n\"Ready?\" He stole a corner of the blanket and curled up beside her with the history scroll in front of them. \"Bore me to sleep!\"\n\n\"Ancient Wars of Pyrrhia,\" the scroll droned. \"Introduction. Every dragon knows the history of the Scorching and the tribal shifts and alignments that followed, but many may not realize that five hundred years later, the continent of Pyrrhia was in a state of constant warfare.\"\n\n\"Screaming scavengers,\" Clearsight said. \"It sounds just like Professor Truthfinder!\"\n\n\"So bored, but also very suspicious of all of us!\" Darkstalker agreed.\n\nThey were laughing so hard, they didn't hear the front door open.\n\nThey didn't hear the clawsteps approaching.\n\nThey didn't notice the dragon in the doorway, staring at them and the speaking scroll, until he spoke in a thunderous, glacier-cracking voice.\n\n\"What is going on in here?\" snarled Prince Arctic.\n\nDarkstalker leaped to his feet and faced his father, lashing his tail. Clearsight grabbed the history scroll and whispered, \"Spare me\" at it. The droning voice stopped.\n\nA cold, menacing silence filled the entire house.\n\n\"This is my room,\" Darkstalker snapped. \"You're not welcome in here.\"\n\nArctic stepped inside. He seemed to be growing bigger as Clearsight stared at him. She'd never seen an IceWing up close before. She hadn't realized that they actually radiated a chill from their scales, like a hissing, fanged glacier. His scales were polished white with hints of pale blue, but not as shiny as she'd expected. He looked sort of \u2026 scuffed, as though he needed to go roll in some snow to clean off.\n\nHis eyes were the color of a cloudless sky; they were piercing but tired at the same time. She wondered if he had trouble sleeping this far away from his own kingdom, and on a schedule where everyone stayed awake all night and slept all day. He must miss the ice and snow. He must miss his family, his tribe, everything he'd grown up with. She couldn't imagine being so far from home, surrounded by dragons who looked nothing like her.\n\nAs she stared at him, a vision stabbed into her brain: Arctic holding one of Whiteout's drawings of Foeslayer, half-frozen tears dripping from his eyes. She blinked, trying not to fall into the visions. This sometimes happened when she met a new dragon \u2014 especially a significant one with alarming futures. But here, in this room with these dragons, she wanted to draw as little attention to herself as possible.\n\n\"Did you enchant that scroll to speak?\" Arctic asked, staring down at his son.\n\n\"Yes,\" Darkstalker answered. He lifted his chin defiantly.\n\n\"So.\" Arctic exhaled a hint of frostbreath. \"You're an animus after all.\"\n\n\"I guess I am,\" said Darkstalker.\n\nClearsight could not imagine having a conversation with her parents that had so few words and so many giant unspoken feelings. She was very glad not to be a mind reader at this moment. She could just imagine the furious thoughts that were shoving and clawing up against one another in the air right now.\n\nThe scroll! she remembered suddenly. Not the history scroll \u2014 the animus-touched one. The one with all of Darkstalker's power in it. The one Arctic should definitely never, ever find out about.\n\nIt was lying open on the desk, displaying Darkstalker's enchantments in his jagged, messy handwriting.\n\nArctic hadn't noticed it yet. Clearsight took a sidling step toward the desk, then another when nobody even looked at her. The two male dragons seemed to be testing whether it was possible to freeze someone with just your eyeballs.\n\n\"Have you not heard a word I've said,\" growled Arctic, \"about the dangers of using animus magic frivolously?\"\n\n\"I didn't need to hear it,\" said Darkstalker. \"I can see it in every rotting spot on your soul. But you don't have to worry about me; I'll never be anything like you.\"\n\nClearsight winced. That seemed crueler than necessary.\n\nAnother vision flashed through her mind: Arctic slashing the throat of a NightWing she didn't know, with two IceWings lurking in the shadows behind him.\n\nThat was \u2026 worrying.\n\n\"I used my magic to keep your mother alive,\" Arctic hissed. \"I used it to help her escape the IceWings who wanted her dead. I have only ever used it out of necessity \u2014 never to make playthings to impress little girl dragons.\" He shot a glare at Clearsight and she froze in front of the desk, hoping her wings were hiding the scroll well enough.\n\n\"That's not even true,\" Darkstalker said heatedly. \"I know what you made for Mother when you first met. She still wears that earring all the time.\"\n\nArctic hissed. \"That's different.\"\n\n\"Why?\" said Darkstalker. \"Because you and Mother have such a great love? One worth starting a war over?\" He paused. \"Wow, that is what you think.\"\n\nA war, a war, a war, chimed inside Clearsight's head, and she felt the spinning rush of visions descending on her. Not right now! she tried to command her power, but on they came.\n\nFoeslayer wielding a long spear, in the middle of a battle, IceWings and NightWings clashing over a desert sunrise.\n\nArctic dying in a pool of royal-blue IceWing blood.\n\nArctic leading Whiteout through a palace of ice, her wings shivering.\n\nDarkstalker with a spear through his chest, his eyes going blank.\n\nArctic in Queen Vigilance's display prison, screaming furiously through the bars.\n\nA squadron of NightWings following Arctic into battle against a sea of white dragons.\n\nDarkstalker writing in his scroll by firelight, writing as if his life depended on it.\n\nThere was so much, so many paths ahead, and most of them tending toward terrible violence. This lost IceWing had almost no chance at a peaceful future. Betrayed, betrayer, murdered, murderer; death and treason surrounded him with their vast wings, no matter what he did.\n\nWas that the price of his animus magic? Had he already lost too much of his soul to his power?\n\nCan I save him? Can anyone?\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\" Arctic's voice was not as harsh as she'd expected. He sounded actually concerned.\n\nClearsight's eyes opened, and she realized she was crouching with her talons pressed to her head and her wings folded around herself. Darkstalker was beside her, gently touching her back.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he said. \"What did you see?\"\n\n\"I'm \u2026 not sure,\" she said. He looked disappointed, but it was true. All those visions couldn't come true; she needed to study them to figure out what order they happened in, which ones were most likely, what were the turning points that led to each one. And how to stop them, or which timeline was the least awful. Whether there was any way to bring this IceWing back from the abyss that lay ahead of him.\n\nAnd save Darkstalker, her inner voice whispered, remembering the worst of the visions. She was quite sure she shouldn't tell Darkstalker about that one. She wondered if he'd seen it himself \u2014 if he'd followed the path that led from his father to his own death, and whether that was part of why they hated each other so much.\n\n\"You're a seer?\" Arctic said, squinting at her. \"That looked like quite a vision. Got any prophecies to share?\"\n\nShe shook her head, but words were bubbling up from inside her, the kind she normally only wrote down. \"Beware your two queens,\" she whispered. Arctic jerked back, eyes wide. \"Beware your own power. Your claws will betray you in your final hour.\"\n\nShe clamped her mouth shut. She hated prophecies like that \u2014 the kind that possessed you and confused everyone. The kind that Allknowing taught her students to imitate. If you asked Clearsight, no good could come of telling dragons vague cryptic things about the future, which they then tried to interpret and second-guess and fulfill and avoid.\n\nNo. Without the portentous fancy talk, she could give everyone real information: details, an action plan, knowledge to steer them along the right path. She just needed to concentrate and figure it out.\n\nBut Arctic's mind was clearly already spinning through the possibilities, trying to guess what her words meant.\n\n\"I need to write that down,\" he said, starting toward the desk and Darkstalker's scroll.\n\n\"Not in here, that's my homework,\" Clearsight said in a rush. She swept the inkwell off the scroll and rolled it up, sliding it quickly into its case. \"I should go. I'll see you at school tomorrow, Darkstalker. Thanks for \u2014 thanks for studying with me.\" She'd nearly said \"thanks for the bracelet,\" but she was sure he didn't want his father to know about any other animus spells he'd cast.\n\n\"Wait,\" Darkstalker said as she slid his scroll into her bag. \"I \u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" she said, brushing his wing lightly with hers. \"I'll take care of our project.\" She'd bring it back tomorrow, when it was safe.\n\nShe backed hurriedly out the door, but Arctic didn't seem to notice her nervousness, or anything suspicious about the scroll. He still looked dazed by the prophecy, muttering it over to himself and studying his claws with concern.\n\nAs she flew away, Clearsight wondered if there was anything to her prophecy \u2014 anything she should worry about.\n\n\"Beware your two queens; beware your own power.\n\nYour claws will betray you in your final hour.\"\n\nAt least it didn't say anything about Darkstalker, she realized. But Arctic's bound to be more worried about him now that he knows Darkstalker's an animus.\n\nHow had she been careless enough to let them be caught by Arctic?\n\nShe should have known he'd come home early.\n\nShe should have protected Darkstalker better.\n\nExcept \u2026 now she could feel something in the shifting timelines. Something about today's events would have ripple effects far into the future.\n\nSome of them terrible \u2026 but some of them good.\n\nSomeone will be coming, whispered her seer voice.\n\nWas that one of the good things, or one of the terrible things?\n\nThere's only one way to find out, she thought. Well, two ways: I could wait and see what happens. Or I can go home and try to study them all.\n\nShe caught an air current and dove into it, swooping home to her scrolls and her notes as fast as her wings could carry her.\n\nFathom dragged his tail as he made his way through the halls to his sister's throne room. A summons from the queen: this couldn't be good.\n\nOver a year had passed since the massacre. A long, lonely year.\n\nHe'd kept his promise; he'd stayed away from Indigo, although it made him feel like his wings had been cut off.\n\nIt was hard to divide up his grief, when he had so many dragons to mourn \u2014 his cousins, his uncle, his queen, his parents most of all, but even his grandfather, or at least the grandfather he thought he knew.\n\nLosing Indigo, though \u2026 most days, that was the worst of all.\n\nAs the dragon who stopped the massacre, Indigo was the hero of the Kingdom of the Sea. Pearl had kept her word: Indigo had been promoted to the queen's honor guard immediately and assigned to the squadron that protected the queen herself, night and day. Pearl rarely let Indigo leave her side \u2026 which certainly made it easier for Fathom to avoid her.\n\nHe hadn't seen either of them in months, not even from a distance. He spent most of his time studying quietly in a back room of the Deep Palace, alone.\n\nHe didn't know what he was going to do with his life anymore.\n\nThe three guards at the throne room door saw him coming and bristled dangerously, their spears at the ready, their teeth bared. That was pretty much the way most SeaWings reacted to him these days. He understood it. He couldn't exactly produce his soul as evidence that he still had one.\n\nFathom stopped several steps away from the guards and bowed his head. \"Queen Pearl sent a message asking me to attend her in the throne room.\"\n\nThe guards conferred in suspicious murmurs, and then one of them whisked inside. A few minutes later, she came out again and beckoned to him.\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"Go on in. But we're watching you, animus.\"\n\nHe nodded and slipped past the barricade of sharp points and unfriendly eyes.\n\nPearl was on her throne, with another row of guards assembled across the room between him and her. Surely she knew that would do no good. If he went evil, he could kill her no matter what the guards did. He wouldn't even have to be here, standing in front of her.\n\nBut it was all part of the performance \u2014 reassuring the court that she was strong and safe and invulnerable. A show of force was what they needed to see.\n\nHe had promised himself he wouldn't do this, but his eyes darted around the room against his will, looking for deep purple-blue scales.\n\nAnd there she was, standing just behind his sister. Staring down at the spear in her talons. Ready to die for her queen.\n\nA tidal wave crashed over him, memories and longing and despair crushing the air out of his chest. He remembered claw painting with Indigo when they were tiny dragonets, dipping their talons in blue and gold paint and stomping on each other's scrolls until she knocked him over and he ended up rolling gold scale patterns across their paintings, sticky and delighted with himself.\n\nHe remembered the hours he'd spent carving that first dolphin for her, trying to get it just right. He remembered swimming and diving with her, filling out their fish journals until they'd seen every variety in the sea. He remembered how she teased him for taking their tutors so seriously.\n\nHe remembered adjusting the pearls around her neck, the beat of her heart so close to his. He remembered holding her as he willed life back into her body, his tears falling like rain on her battered scales.\n\nI'd do it again, he thought. Again and again, anything to save her. I'd give up my whole soul, let it crumble into darkness, if that's what it took.\n\nPearl was still right about him and Indigo, even after all this time apart.\n\n\"Hello, brother,\" Queen Pearl said, and he forced his eyes back to her. Her face was knowing, wary, as if putting him in the same room with Indigo was a test, and she was watching him fail it.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" he said with a bow.\n\n\"Look who's come home to us,\" she said, flicking her tail at a SeaWing coiled a few steps below the throne.\n\nIt took Fathom a long moment to recognize him. The last time he'd seen his cousin Current, he'd been laughing and joking with the rest of the family. When he never reappeared after the massacre, everyone assumed he had been wounded and died somewhere out in the ocean.\n\nBut here he was, alive \u2014 and yet this dragon was not the confident, easy-to-smile cousin Fathom remembered. This dragon was thin and shivered constantly, and he couldn't look at Fathom without flinching away.\n\n\"Current?\" Fathom said.\n\n\"I d-d-don't \u2014 I don't \u2014\" Current stammered.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" Fathom asked, worried. He took a step closer. The guards raised their spears and Current flinched so hard he nearly knocked himself over.\n\n\"You'll never guess,\" said Pearl, and for a moment he heard his sister under the regal voice, excited to know a secret he didn't.\n\n\"Another kingdom?\" he said.\n\n\"The Night Kingdom,\" she said.\n\nFathom raised his eyebrows. That was about as far away as anyone could get from the Island Palace without turning into an icicle.\n\nBut why had Current been gone for so long? He must have heard the news about the new queen of the SeaWings, even across the continent.\n\n\"I d-don't want to see him,\" Current whispered, covering his eyes. \"P-please don't make me.\"\n\nPearl sighed. \"All right. Take him away,\" she said to one of the guards, and for an awful moment Fathom thought that was it \u2014 less than a minute of being in the same room with Indigo, as if to torment him before ripping her away again.\n\nBut the guard went to Current instead, taking the SeaWing gently by the wing and steering him out of the throne room.\n\n\"Current has been a \u2026 guest \u2026 of the NightWing queen all this time,\" Pearl said, watching him go. \"And now she's finally sent him back with a message, and an offer.\"\n\nUh-oh. His pulse throbbed ominously in his skull. Here it comes. The reason I was summoned.\n\nPearl picked up a tablet and glanced down at the words as though she found it hard to meet Fathom's eyes. \"Apparently the NightWings suddenly have an animus of their own. Their very first.\"\n\n\"But \u2014\" Fathom started.\n\n\"How?\" she cut him off. \"Remember the rumors about that IceWing prince who ran away with a NightWing? They must have been true. This animus is his son, a dragon named Darkstalker.\"\n\nAnother animus out there.\n\nIs he going to kill his entire family, too?\n\n\"Apparently Current told Queen Vigilance all about Albatross and the massacre,\" Pearl said. She frowned slightly. Fathom knew she'd been hoping to keep that a secret from the other tribes for a lot longer. \"Queen Vigilance is, naturally, worried about whether her animus might go all homicidally crazy, too. She says he is apparently quite careless with his magic, no matter how often his father, the IceWing, warns him about the effects.\"\n\nA twist of guilt and fear stabbed through Fathom's chest.\n\n\"We have to do something,\" he cried. \"Someone has to stop him!\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Pearl, looking slightly taken aback at the urgency in his voice. \"Someone is going to stop him. You.\"\n\nFathom glanced around at all the blue and green eyes that pinned him to the floor. \"Me?\"\n\n\"We're sending you to the Night Kingdom.\" Pearl tapped the tablet neatly against the arm of her throne. \"Queen Vigilance will shelter you and introduce you to this animus. You will tell him your sad story and teach him the error of his ways.\"\n\nBut nobody listens to me. Why would anyone listen to me?\n\n\"And then the NightWings will be our new allies,\" Pearl said, examining her claws. \"Everyone wins.\"\n\nBeside the queen, Indigo finally looked up and met Fathom's eyes. \"But,\" she blurted, and Pearl shot a dangerous look at her.\n\nIndigo plowed on bravely. \"But is it safe for \u2014 is it safe?\" she asked the queen. \"What if this is a NightWing trap to steal our animus, the way they stole the IceWing one?\"\n\n\"That story is nonsense,\" Pearl said, already standing to leave the room. She paused to look down at Fathom. \"Who would want an animus?\"\n\nThe cold, hard truth of that sank in for a moment.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Indigo said abruptly. Her claws dug into the wood of her spear. \"I ask permission to accompany Prince Fathom to the Night Kingdom. As \u2014 as the head of his personal guard.\"\n\nFathom's heart leaped and then immediately sank. With me? Indigo and me, together? It was what he wanted, desperately, but it was also too dangerous, and Pearl would never allow it.\n\nPearl narrowed her eyes at Indigo. \"Who says I'm sending any guards with him?\"\n\n\"Very amusing, my queen. I know you are too wise to send a powerful, magic member of the royal family to a faraway kingdom unguarded,\" Indigo said. \"All kinds of terrible things could happen to him. That other animus could kill him.\"\n\nFathom thought perhaps Pearl wouldn't mind that at all. This was a convenient way to get rid of a dragon who made everyone uncomfortable \u2026 and if he never came back, well, problem solved forever.\n\n\"Please, Your Majesty.\" Indigo folded her wings and bowed respectfully. \"It sounds like the NightWing animus could be a threat. I could assess the situation and report back to you. I am not afraid of his magic.\"\n\n\"She can save everyone from him!\" called one of the queen's advisors.\n\n\"That's true!\" called another. \"Send the Animus Slayer!\"\n\n\"She should be wherever there is danger from an animus dragon! She can stop him before he threatens our kingdom!\"\n\n\"Yeah! She can kill them both if she has to!\"\n\nThere was an awkward pause after that last shout. Fathom deliberately did not look around to see who'd said it. He knew enough of them were thinking it.\n\nIs that what Indigo's thinking? That she might have to protect the world from me?\n\nFrom the look on Pearl's face, he guessed the queen highly doubted Indigo would be able to pull that off. But she was also stuck. She couldn't deny the Hero of the Massacre, the Animus Slayer, the one thing Indigo had ever asked for, not in front of her court.\n\n\"I don't need guards,\" he forced himself to say. \"I can go by myself.\"\n\nIndigo gave him a wounded look and he felt like the lowest sea slug in the ocean.\n\nShe drew herself up taller, tearing her eyes away from him. \"With respect, Your Majesty,\" she said. \"Your animus should not be allowed to leave the kingdom unsupervised.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Pearl said, with an expression as though she'd just swallowed a spoiled oyster. \"I will assign you two other guards, and you may accompany my brother to the Night Kingdom.\"\n\nShe turned with a flourish of her wings and swept out of the throne room, lashing her tail furiously. Perhaps it was a good time to travel halfway around the world from her, after all.\n\nAnd I'll be with Indigo, he thought. I know I shouldn't be happy about that. I should be terrified.\n\nGuards were moving forward to usher him out, but across the room he was able to catch and hold her gaze for a moment.\n\nHe couldn't read her face. Was she angry with him? Was she really going with him because she didn't trust him?\n\nOr is she worried about this other animus?\n\nHe realized with a surge of guilt that he was flying straight toward a new, unknown, potentially enormous danger \u2026 and he was dragging Indigo right along with him.\n\nThe first invitation to the palace came two months after Arctic discovered Darkstalker was an animus.\n\nDarkstalker knew it was coming, and not because of any prophetic vision. He'd expected it ever since the night Arctic told Foeslayer everything, at dinner after Clearsight was gone. He'd been listening to Arctic wrestle with whether to tell anyone all evening. It actually made him like his father a tiny bit when Arctic finally decided he couldn't bear to keep it from Foeslayer.\n\n\"Did you know,\" Arctic had said, stabbing his claws into the rabbit on the table, \"that our son has been keeping a secret from us?\"\n\n\"I know he had a girl here today,\" Foeslayer had responded. She smiled at Darkstalker. \"What's her name?\"\n\n\"Clearsight,\" Darkstalker said, smiling back. \"You'll like her, Mother.\" There was no need to hide her anymore. Arctic was too unnerved by her prophecy to bother her or try to ruin their relationship.\n\n\"She's exactly right,\" Whiteout offered. \"Definitely azure on the inside. I like the way she knits.\"\n\nDarkstalker had no idea what that meant. He'd never once seen Clearsight knit. But the fact that his sister liked her was really all he needed to know.\n\n\"So when do we get to meet her?\" Foeslayer had asked, her eyes sparkling.\n\n\"That is not the secret,\" Arctic barked. \"Pay attention. Darkstalker is an animus. He's probably known for years without telling us. And he's using his magic.\"\n\nFoeslayer dropped her rabbit and stared at Darkstalker.\n\n\"Magic brother,\" Whiteout said thoughtfully. She reached across the table, lifted one of Darkstalker's talons, and flipped it over, tracing the lines of the scales. \"That's all right; he's not going to snow for a while.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Darkstalker said with a grin, resisting the urge to hug her. He sensed new fear from both his parents, but nothing different in the starscape of Whiteout's mind. He didn't know what she was thinking, but he knew she loved him with all his weirdness, the same way he loved her.\n\nHe shrugged at Foeslayer. \"It's not that big a deal.\"\n\n\"It rather is, actually,\" she said. She rubbed her snout between her eyes. \"Oh, Mother is going to be horribly pleased.\"\n\nDarkstalker and Whiteout rarely saw their grandmother, who used to be one of Queen Vigilance's closest advisors. She'd been demoted after the fiasco with Foeslayer and their diplomatic visit to the Ice Kingdom, even though the queen had officially pardoned Foeslayer. Grandmother had always looked down her snout at Foeslayer's hybrid offspring, muttering about how the only way this mess could have been worth it was if one of them had at least turned out to be an animus.\n\nIt's going to be sort of beautiful, Darkstalker thought. Grandmother would have to admit that perhaps Foeslayer's forbidden love wasn't the biggest mistake any NightWing had ever made. Because if it brought animus blood to the NightWing tribe \u2026 surely that was worth a mere little war with the IceWings?\n\nAnd then perhaps she'd even have to be nice to her daughter once in a while. Darkstalker would enjoy watching that.\n\n\"She's going to eat her tongue,\" Whiteout agreed.\n\n\"Gross,\" Darkstalker said, making a face at her. She giggled.\n\n\"How do you propose we leash him?\" Arctic asked Foeslayer. Darkstalker saw bubbling flashes of ideas in his mind \u2014 things he could enchant to keep his son under control.\n\n\"Stop thinking what you're thinking,\" Darkstalker said quietly, dangerously.\n\nArctic gave him a sharp look. \"Stop listening to what I'm thinking.\"\n\n\"You can't afford to use your magic again,\" Darkstalker said. \"It will destroy you. You'll end up like that SeaWing. I know; I can see the holes in your soul.\"\n\nThere was a twist of genuine fear inside Arctic, which sort of surprised Darkstalker. Not only was Arctic more worried about his soul than Darkstalker had expected, but he also apparently believed that Darkstalker could see how close he was to turning evil.\n\nAcross the table, Whiteout nodded. \"I had an apple like that once,\" she said ruefully.\n\nFoeslayer leaned toward Darkstalker. \"If you can see the damage it's done to your father,\" she said, \"doesn't that frighten you? Doesn't it make you want to be careful?\"\n\n\"I'm not damaged,\" Arctic snarled, but internally he was counting all the times he'd used his magic. It must be the magic I used for our escape from the Ice Kingdom. Or the spell that keeps Mother's magic from working on me. But those enchantments were necessary \u2026 Will I really go mad if I use my power again? I should do something to contain my son \u2026 but what if I turn evil and hurt Foeslayer?\n\n\"Yes,\" Darkstalker answered his mother. \"Don't worry, Mother. I am being careful.\" He held out his talons. \"There are no spots on my soul.\"\n\n\"Only stripes,\" Whiteout said, and burst out laughing.\n\nOh dear, Foeslayer thought, regarding her daughter with a puzzled expression. Why couldn't either of my dragonets be the slightest bit ordinary?\n\n\"Life's more interesting this way, right?\" said Darkstalker, and she smiled at him.\n\nOn his other side, he could hear his father thinking venomous thoughts. Even after all these years among the NightWings, and despite his own son's power, Arctic couldn't seem to hide what he was thinking and didn't even bother to try. I hate when they communicate like that, he thought in a dark grumble. I don't get to know what she's thinking, but he does? And she doesn't care that he just invades her mind like that. NightWings and their horrible powers.\n\n\"We should tell Queen Vigilance,\" said Foeslayer. \"Shouldn't we?\" She worried at the corner of the table. It's the right thing to do, as a loyal NightWing (and to prove that I am a loyal NightWing, despite everyone's suspicions) \u2026 but what will the queen do about it? Will she try to use my son? What might she ask him to do?\n\n\"Let's talk about that in private,\" said Arctic.\n\n\"Oh, good,\" said Darkstalker. \"No reason to involve me in that decision.\"\n\nBut he had dropped it, knowing they would decide to tell the queen. He didn't mind if they did. He was ready for the whole tribe to know.\n\nWhich didn't take long, because Whiteout started mentioning it at school. Keeping secrets was not something she ever did. Darkstalker got the impression sometimes that she thought if she knew something, everybody must know it, like they all shared one mind.\n\nSo she'd slide comments about his animus power into ordinary conversations, without seeming to notice how it blew up everybody's brains. It was sort of fun to watch.\n\nSuddenly Darkstalker had throngs of new friends to choose from. Everyone treated Clearsight like she was royalty, or at least royalty-adjacent. His teachers were more cautious with their criticism, more likely to love his ideas. Nobody made fun of his sister anymore. And all the oldest dragons around him seemed to feel entitled to ask him thousands of nosy questions a day about his new power.\n\nHe rather liked being the NightWing tribe's first animus.\n\nThen the first invitation to the palace came, and Darkstalker met the queen in an awkward private meeting, where she assured him she was looking forward to hearing any ideas he had about how best to use his power. Perhaps against the IceWings. Hint, hint. He promised he would put a lot of thought into it, to make sure anything he made for her was worth the risk to his soul, and then they both thought about the SeaWing massacre for a minute, and then she quickly excused him.\n\nBut more invitations followed, one after another. Dinner parties, tea with the queen, hunting weekends, races and tournaments and games \u2014 everything he and Foeslayer had been carefully excluded from for years, even after Arctic became a fixture of court life. Queen Vigilance was more interested in what his power could give her than frightened of what might happen to him. She wanted him close to her, dependent on her, and Darkstalker liked going so he could study her and see how palace life worked.\n\nThe only problem was that Clearsight refused to go with him to any of the royal gatherings. He kept telling her that other dragons brought guests. He could certainly bring his soulmate with him. But she wanted to be invited to the palace on her own merits \u2014 by doing something to help the tribe and catch the queen's attention herself, not by slipping in on another dragon's arm.\n\nThere wasn't much he could do to change her mind. But his foresight said it wouldn't be much longer; he'd had a vision of the two of them at the palace that he was sure would happen soon. And in the meanwhile, he just had to put up with a LOT of boring court conversations.\n\nThere was something different about this latest invitation, though. As he moved around his room, getting ready, he felt a weird spark of anticipation zapping through him.\n\nA welcoming party. That's all it had said. Welcoming who?\n\nDarkstalker had looked into the immediate future and seen a cluster of SeaWings, which was surprising. But he didn't linger on it. Studying the future was Clearsight's obsession, not his. He knew how quickly and easily the future could change, so trying to keep track of all the possibilities was a waste of his time. He accepted the visions that burst into his head, since those were usually warnings. And sometimes he looked ahead to the futures where he and Clearsight were married with their own dragonets. A future without Arctic \u2014 that was the promise his gift of foresight gave him.\n\nHe took an earring out of his jewelry chest \u2014 silver, designed to look like a snake twining down his ear. This one was enchanted to make everyone who met him think he was exceptionally handsome and charming. Clearsight had made him promise to never wear it around her.\n\n\"I like seeing you the way you really are,\" she'd said.\n\n\"Which is not exceptionally handsome and charming?\" he asked, half joking, half offended.\n\n\"Just handsome enough,\" she had said, \"with a head that still fits through doors. Also, I don't like watching other dragons fawn over you.\"\n\n\"Jealous?\" he'd asked with a grin.\n\n\"No, it's just \u2026 creepy,\" she'd answered, not joking at all.\n\nWell, she wouldn't be there tonight, and he should try to make a good impression on whoever was being welcomed, surely.\n\nThe other accessory he chose for the evening was a tail band, the latest fashion trend. His wound around his tail five times and was also silver, like his earring, and carved to look like dragon scales. It was a bit heavier than he liked and he also thought tail bands looked sort of ridiculous. But this one had a particularly useful enchantment on it, so, although it was unwieldy, it was nonetheless a good idea to wear it.\n\n\"Are you still primping?\" Arctic demanded, shoving his head into Darkstalker's room. \"The queen will not be pleased if we're late.\" He was one to talk about primping: his moon-white scales were set off by necklaces of black jet and bright green emeralds, and matching rings glittered on a few of his claws.\n\n\"You can go ahead without me,\" Darkstalker said, trying not to show how much that would please him. They rarely attended the same court events if they could avoid it. But in this case they had both been expressly commanded to attend.\n\n\"I'll wait,\" Arctic said with a heavy sigh. Need to make sure he gets there, his brain muttered. Important night. Can't be late. One of the conditions was that we must not embarrass her in front of the SeaWings. Or else she'll send them back, or kill them, or whatever she plans to do.\n\nHmm, Darkstalker thought to himself. That was mysterious. But if the fate of the SeaWings might depend on his punctuality, he supposed he could hurry himself up.\n\nFoeslayer was waiting for them by the door, wearing emeralds and white moonstones that complemented his father's black gemstones \u2014 a trick they often played with their jewelry. It gave them the illusion of matching, of fitting perfectly together. Foeslayer reached out and adjusted one of Arctic's chains, her talons drifting lightly down his neck.\n\nIt'll be all right, she thought. Arctic's idea is clever. It's just what Darkstalker needs.\n\n\"Me?\" Darkstalker said to her, suddenly suspicious. \"What do I need?\"\n\n\"Nosy mind-snooper,\" Arctic growled at him.\n\n\"You'll see,\" Foeslayer said patiently, brushing her wing against Darkstalker's. \"Whiteout, be good while we're gone.\"\n\n\"No wild parties,\" Darkstalker joked.\n\n\"You're the one going into the wild,\" Whiteout answered from her spot by the fireplace without looking up from her scroll.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Foeslayer. \"All right, then.\"\n\nWhiteout generally was not included in the invitations. Various excuses had been given, but the truth was, the queen still wasn't entirely comfortable with such an obvious hybrid roaming around her court. She never said so out loud, but Darkstalker could see it in the thoughts Queen Vigilance tried to shield from him. He'd be more offended on his sister's behalf, but he knew she would hate the stilted formality of palace functions anyway.\n\n\"Let's go,\" snapped Arctic impatiently. \"Come on, come on.\"\n\nIt was a short flight to the palace, which was lit up from end to end, firelight blazing in nearly every window. There was no prisoner in the display cage, perhaps so it wouldn't scare their visitors. A light drizzle had started to fall, misting them each with wet sparkles and steam as they proceeded from the landing ledge into the grand ballroom.\n\n\"Prince Arctic, Foeslayer, and their son, Darkstalker,\" announced the dragon at the head of the staircase. Darkstalker always enjoyed hearing his father's inner turmoil that he was no longer proclaimed as \"Prince Arctic of the IceWings\" \u2014 although really, he should be grateful to still have any royal title at all.\n\nHeads turned in their direction all across the room, which was decorated for the evening in swathes of blue and green fabric. Small rock pools had been set into the floor and tiny waterfalls cascaded in the corners. The banquet table smelled more like fish and shrimp and seaweed than normal.\n\nThere were special lessons at school for mind readers, teaching them how to survive in crowds without getting overwhelmed. Darkstalker, fortunately, had learned quickly how to melt everyone's voices into the background. He knew most of these dragons were too boring to listen to anyway.\n\n\"Hello, dear,\" said Queen Vigilance, sweeping up to capture Darkstalker's attention as soon as he reached the bottom of the stairs. She wore an ostentatious crown and her wings were loaded with an unnecessary amount of diamonds. She was considered to be one of the shrewdest queens in recent NightWing history, and she certainly did a superb job of intimidating her daughters, such that none of them had mustered the courage to challenge her yet.\n\nBut Darkstalker had been inside her mind. He knew that a lot of her apparent menace came from one trick: the fact that she spoke very little, allowing the dragons around her to fill in all the gaps with their own nervous chatter. She was also deeply paranoid, often killing off perceived threats long before they were actually dangerous. That might seem shrewd to outside observers, but Darkstalker thought it was a sign of her own anxiety and shortsightedness.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" Arctic interjected before Darkstalker could speak. \"You look radiant and regal, as always.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" said the queen, touching her crown. Darkstalker wondered how his father had never noticed that she wasn't susceptible to flattery. Vigilance found compliments highly suspicious. Arctic's remark just made her think: What does this slippery IceWing want now?\n\n\"Is this the new Tunesmith composition?\" Darkstalker asked, deflecting her attention. He tipped his head toward the musicians playing on a stage at the end of the room.\n\n\"It is,\" said Vigilance, pleased.\n\n\"She's so talented,\" Foeslayer said.\n\nOur composer laureate could sneeze out a better song than this, Arctic thought bitterly. \"Any news of the war?\" he said to the queen.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes at him, just a tiny bit. In her mind: It could be over by now if you would be the slightest bit helpful. Her gaze stopped briefly on Darkstalker and he heard her wonder if he'd be of more use than his father.\n\n\"Nothing new,\" she said aloud.\n\nQueen Vigilance left one of her usual momentary silences after this remark, and Foeslayer was the first to rush in and fill it. Poor Mother, thought Darkstalker, exactly the kind of nervous dragon the queen loves to trifle with. He'd have to find a subtle way to make Vigilance pay for making his mother so uncomfortable.\n\n\"A very successful battle last week, though,\" Foeslayer said. \"We drove the IceWings back and took a lot of desert territory, with very few casualties. And our air defense team is unbeatable. It's such an honor to be working with them. No IceWings will ever get into the Night Kingdom with them on watch.\"\n\nWell, thought several minds at once, except for the one who's already here.\n\nArctic allowed himself a small, grim smile as Foeslayer fidgeted with her claws.\n\n\"Hmm,\" said the queen again. She turned to Darkstalker. \"Come meet someone.\" His parents started to follow them and she gestured to stop them in their tracks. \"Not you.\"\n\nFoeslayer was all relief and eagerness to get to the food, but small geysers of resentment were going off inside Arctic as Darkstalker walked away with the queen.\n\nYou won't look so smug when the IceWings do get into your kingdom.\n\nDarkstalker turned to look back, wondering if he'd heard his father's last thought correctly. But Arctic had vanished into the crowd, his mind just another part of the commotion coming from all the other dragons in the room.\n\nIt didn't matter. Arctic had bitter thoughts about the downfall of the NightWing tribe all the time, but none of those thoughts had ever led to action. Darkstalker was confident he didn't need to worry about his father's treacherous fantasies \u2014 not for a while, at least, according to Clearsight.\n\nThe queen led him to a roped-off area with low purple couches and tables of sparkling drinks. Four SeaWings stood awkwardly inside, looking more trapped than honored. Two of the queen's sons were making small talk with them, and one of her councilors had taken over a couch as though she'd given up.\n\n\"Prince Fathom of the SeaWings,\" said the queen, indicating a green dragon only about a year older than Darkstalker. He had an oddly anxious aura, as if he were gripping the floor with his claws in order to avoid being blown away. \"This is Darkstalker.\"\n\nThe other animus, Fathom thought with a jolt of fear. He took an unconscious step closer to the dragon beside him, whose scales were a deep blue that was almost purple. She looked outwardly calmer than he did, but her heart was racing as fast as his and terrifying images were flashing through her head. Neither of them even seemed affected by the spell his earring cast; they were too busy being scared to find him handsome.\n\nDarkstalker realized several things at once.\n\nFathom was an animus as well.\n\nFathom had been in many of Darkstalker's visions of the future.\n\nFathom was here for him.\n\nAnd: both of these dragons had witnessed the massacre when the SeaWing animus turned violent \u2026 at a party very much like this one.\n\nNo wonder they were terrified \u2014 a party plus an unfamiliar animus, where they were the guests, much like those SkyWings who'd been attacked.\n\nDarkstalker checked Queen Vigilance's brain, but he didn't find any intentional malice there. She wasn't trying to traumatize the SeaWings. She just hadn't thought about the effect this particular welcome might have.\n\n\"Hello,\" Fathom said, trying to summon years of etiquette lessons. \"V-very pleased to meet you. This is \u2014 these are my guards, Wharf and Lionfish \u2026 and Indigo.\"\n\nShe's not just a guard, Darkstalker guessed, but she held herself like one, strong and serious-looking. The other two were background noise, irrelevant to Darkstalker's future.\n\n\"I'm honored to meet you, too,\" he said. I have to get this poor SeaWing out of here. \"Has anyone shown you the view from the Royal Tower yet? May I?\" He turned to the queen. \"I know you have many duties with your guests, Your Majesty.\" He would have preferred to separate Fathom from the others, but he could sense that Indigo would never let that happen. \"I'll take Fathom and Indigo for a short flight and we'll be back soon.\"\n\nThe queen, unsurprisingly, found this highly suspicious, but she couldn't think of any way to stop it without offending the SeaWings. \"Of course,\" she said. She pointed one claw at Darkstalker. \"Soon, though.\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty.\" He bowed and spread one wing to point the way out of the ballroom, ignoring the tumult of worries inside both SeaWings. Should we insist on bringing the other two guards? Indigo wondered, while Fathom thought, Is he taking us away to kill us?\n\nCalm DOWN, jittery SeaWings, Darkstalker thought with an internal eye roll. I'm trying to help you.\n\nThe closest exit led from the ballroom down to one of the hanging gardens. The noise of the party faded behind them as the three dragons flew through the ancient trees, where moss and vines hung down from the branches like shrouded wings. Mirrors set up throughout the gardens captured and reflected the silvery light of the three moons. The rain had stopped, but everything still glistened and wet leaves fluttered damply at their scales.\n\nDarkstalker landed on a small island in one of the dragon-made lakes. The moonlight was bright here, pouring down over the columns of a temple that had been built to honor the first librarians of the Night Kingdom. We give thanks to those who gathered the scrolls, who preserved the knowledge of previous generations, and so on and so on.\n\n\"This doesn't look like a tower,\" Fathom said, landing but keeping his wings spread. Indigo swooped around the island once and then started pacing out every inch of it, checking all the dark corners. Keeping up her conscientious bodyguard act, when Darkstalker could see that what she really wanted to do was put her wings around Fathom and take him far, far away from here.\n\n\"I'm giving you the grand tour,\" Darkstalker said to Fathom. \"Well, actually, I'm just trying to save you from that awful party.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Fathom said, flustered. \"It's not \u2014 I mean, it's very nice of the queen to \u2014 I just \u2014\"\n\n\"It's torture,\" said Darkstalker wryly. \"I mean, it's torture for me, and I've never had my whole family killed in front of me at a party like that.\"\n\nIndigo stopped and stared at him. Fathom's gaze dropped to his talons.\n\n\"Oh, nobody talks about it in the Kingdom of the Sea?\" Darkstalker guessed. \"All right, I won't if you don't want to. But if you were sent here to be my friend, then you don't have to suffer through all that diplomatic tedium \u2014 especially with the bonus post-traumatic stress.\"\n\n\"You know why I'm here?\" Fathom said.\n\n\"Because we're both animuses,\" Darkstalker answered. \"Animi? Huh, I'm not sure. That one doesn't come up very often.\"\n\nThere was a soft click, and Darkstalker realized that Indigo suddenly held two dangerously sharp throwing stars in her talons.\n\n\"Indigo \u2014\" Fathom said anxiously.\n\n\"He's here,\" Indigo said to Darkstalker, \"to make sure you don't turn out like his grandfather.\"\n\n\"That'll be an easy mission,\" Darkstalker said charmingly. \"I'm not murderous at all. I'm entirely delightful.\"\n\nSo was Albatross, they both thought.\n\nIndigo and her throwing stars were not the real threat here. The danger was that these dragons might never see him for himself. If they only ever saw Albatross when they looked at him, they'd always fear him, and that might make one of them do something stupid.\n\nDarkstalker decided to turn the full blaze of his attention on Fathom. \"Listen, if you're worried,\" he said, \"why don't you make something? A \u2014 a soul reader, you could call it. It could reassure you about who's harmless and full of soul, like me, or who's teetering on the edge of soulless killing rage. Liiiiiiike not me.\" That was a pretty good idea, if Darkstalker said so himself. He could use one of those to keep track of Arctic's soul, perhaps.\n\nBut Fathom was shaking his head furiously. I can't I can't I can't, his mind cried.\n\n\"All right, settle down,\" Darkstalker said, surprised. \"I can make it for you.\"\n\n\"No!\" Fathom yelped. \"You mustn't. You have to stop using your magic. That's why I'm here, to help you stop.\"\n\nDarkstalker eyed him for a moment, listening to the tornado of grief and guilt and worry that had apparently taken the place of logical thought in this dragon's head. Should he tell Fathom about his scroll? Surely he would find it reassuring. Maybe Fathom could even make one for himself and stop worrying so much.\n\nOn the other hand, he didn't know Fathom at all yet. Could he be trusted with a secret that big?\n\nCompletely, and not at all, whispered a half-formed vision of the future, which was rather unhelpful.\n\nNot yet, Darkstalker decided. Get to know him first.\n\nHow am I going to do this? Fathom was thinking. I failed so badly before. How can I possibly save him, and everyone?\n\n\"You don't have to be this miserable,\" Darkstalker said softly.\n\nFathom lifted his chin, and Indigo thought sadly, I wish I could help him.\n\n\"You went through something awful.\" Darkstalker held out one talon as though he could crush the memories in his claws. \"All you need to do is enchant something to make the pain bearable. Just \u2014 an earring that helps you stop thinking about it so much. An armband that lifts all the grief or stops the flashbacks.\"\n\nIndigo's eyes flicked to Darkstalker's jewelry, and he heard her wonder what magic he might already be using on them. Clever dragon, he thought. I should be careful of her.\n\n\"I have to remember,\" Fathom said, looking straight into Darkstalker's eyes. His were gray green, like miniature oceans after a storm. \"I can never stop thinking about it.\" Or else it could happen to me. The memories make sure I keep my vow to Pearl.\n\nHis vow formed, word for word, in his mind, and Darkstalker repressed a sigh. What kind of animus gave up all his power forever? What kind of life could he have, always haunted by the past and ruled by fear?\n\n\"Don't you want to be happy?\" Darkstalker asked. \"I can help you with that.\"\n\nAll at once he felt cold steel pressed against his neck. Indigo was suddenly behind him, her wings pinning his, his throat on the knife's edge. She'd moved with astonishing quickness, and Darkstalker caught a glimpse in her mind of the hours she'd spent training in the year since the massacre, making herself stronger and faster so no dragon could ever hurt her or Fathom ever again.\n\n\"Indigo, don't!\" Fathom froze, his eyes fixed on the blade at Darkstalker's neck.\n\n\"He's too dangerous,\" Indigo cried. \"He's already trying to mess with your head, can't you tell? This isn't safe, Fathom. I should kill him right now, to protect everyone.\" To protect you, her mind confessed.\n\nDarkstalker raised his tail quietly. One touch from his silver tail band, and she would be dead. It wasn't quite as secure as having all his animus power in his talons, at his disposal whenever he needed it. But he was sure he could kill her before she killed him.\n\nFirst, though, he wanted to see Fathom's reaction.\n\n\"No, Indigo, we can't,\" Fathom said. \"He's not Albatross \u2014 he hasn't hurt anyone.\" Yet, chimed in their minds. \"And killing him could start a war with the NightWings.\"\n\n\"Or maybe save them,\" she pointed out. \"Maybe save all of Pyrrhia.\"\n\n\"But I want to know him,\" Fathom said. \"He doesn't seem dangerous.\" He seems like \u2026 he seems like he could be a friend, the SeaWing thought wistfully. The earring must be working on him \u2014 along with Darkstalker's natural charm, of course.\n\n\"That could be a trick \u2014 he could be using a spell on us right now,\" said Indigo. \"Maybe he's planning to kill us later.\"\n\nNo, just you, Darkstalker thought pleasantly.\n\n\"And I bet he's a mind reader,\" she added, pressing the blade a little harder against his throat. \"Are you a mind reader? Don't lie to us!\"\n\nDarkstalker flicked his tail a hair closer to her. \"I am,\" he said. \"That's not a secret. Any NightWing with silver teardrop scales by their eyes is a mind reader \u2014 I'm certainly not the only one in the tribe.\"\n\n\"An animus who can read our minds!\" Indigo said to Fathom, her thoughts flaring with alarm. If Albatross had been able to do that, we'd both be dead. \"Fathom, this could be our only chance to take out the most dangerous dragon in Pyrrhia.\"\n\n\"Indigo,\" Fathom said sadly. \"Think for a moment. Isn't this what our tribe wants to do to me?\"\n\nHmmm. Interesting. Fathom was smarter than he looked \u2014 or he knew exactly what to say to this dragon, at least. Indigo's thoughts hit a wall of sympathy and she hesitated, struggling against it.\n\nDarkstalker took the moment to check the immediate possible futures. Indigo killing him \u2014 pretty unlikely. Him killing her \u2014 easy enough. But, wow, it would destroy Fathom. Oooh, all kinds of terrible things might come from that decision. A heartbroken animus with nothing left to lose would be pretty hazardous company.\n\nI have to let her live \u2014 for now \u2014 and let her think she could have killed me, he realized. That will make Fathom trust me even more.\n\nBut if I want him to really trust me, for the sake of our future friendship, I'll have to get rid of her somehow. Some clever way that he won't suspect.\n\nOtherwise he'll always be worrying about what she thinks of him. It's her eyes on him that make him so afraid of his magic. He'd be much happier and less worried without her around.\n\nAs would I, frankly. I don't particularly like dragons who point sharp things at me.\n\n\"All right,\" Indigo said finally. She stepped back, still holding the stars poised in her talons. \"I hope you're right about this, Fathom.\"\n\n\"Please don't be mad,\" Fathom said to Darkstalker. \"She's trying to protect me. It's her job.\"\n\nA small flicker of pain from Indigo. It was so much, much more than her job.\n\n\"I completely understand,\" Darkstalker said, rubbing his neck. \"I'm not mad at all.\"\n\nIf he was, Fathom thought, he could use his power on us right now. He could have used it to escape from her. Maybe he really can be trusted, after all.\n\nI hope I didn't just make a really terrible enemy, Indigo was thinking.\n\nHa ha, Darkstalker thought. Oh, you certainly did.\n\n\"Hey, I promised you a view from the Royal Tower,\" he said, nudging Fathom with one of his wings. \"You can see almost the whole Night Kingdom from up there. Come on, we'll have plenty of time for serious talk later.\"\n\nHe lifted into the sky, stretching his wings wide and letting the moonlight cascade over him. Nothing to be mad about, he thought to himself. In fact, I learned quite a lot here tonight.\n\nPoor Fathom, with all his anxiety and self-loathing. I can make it better. I'm going to show him what a gift animus power is. I'll give him a reason to be happy he's alive. I'm going to take away all his fear and guilt and replace it with joy.\n\nAnd then, once he has something else to live for \u2026 that's when I'll take care of his Indigo problem.\n\n\"This is such a terrible idea,\" Clearsight whispered, tipping her wings to catch the wind. Below them, the school was dark and still, as if all the light and noise had been sucked into the party at the palace next door. Darkstalker was there tonight, again, but that was for the best, since it meant he couldn't stop her from doing this, or even notice she was doing it.\n\n\"It's not a terrible idea,\" Listener shot back, \"or you wouldn't be letting me do it, because you'd have seen it go wrong and you'd know we were going to be caught. Ipso facto, clearly we'll be fine, because you're just grumbling and not actually trying to stop me.\"\n\n\"Maybe I see that you'll learn a valuable lesson from your criminal mistakes,\" Clearsight said airily. \"Maybe you need to be caught in order for that to happen.\"\n\nListener shot her a suspicious look. \"You wouldn't do that to me.\"\n\n\"Maybe this is the only way to save you from spiraling into a life of crime and infamy.\" Clearsight put on her most pious face.\n\n\"Quit freaking me out!\" Listener whacked Clearsight with her tail and Clearsight started giggling so hard she nearly lost the air current holding her up.\n\n\"Besides,\" Listener said, angling toward the school's upper entrance, \"we're not criminals, we're heroes! We're liberating the oppressed! Righting all wrongs! Saving the day!\"\n\n\"Somehow I don't think that's how the teachers are going to see it,\" Clearsight pointed out. They landed and stepped carefully into the dark spiraling hall that led down to the classrooms. Student projects and artwork lined the walls, sharpening into focus as her night vision adjusted. Here was one student's research study on RainWing camouflage; over there was a diagram comparing MudWing and SeaWing physiognomy.\n\nA little farther down was the portrait of her that Darkstalker had painted, with what looked like a spiderweb of fireworks behind her. Only the two of them knew that was supposed to represent the intersecting timelines of the future. Unfortunately his skill at painting was nowhere close to Whiteout's, and Clearsight looked a bit more like a horse with a hippo butt than she would have liked. She had politely refrained from telling him that.\n\nListener sighed. \"I tried to do this through official channels, you know. I talked to Truthfinder \u2014 I mean, if I can feel what the scavengers are feeling, surely she can, too. But she totally didn't care! She said it made them fascinating subjects for study, but that we shouldn't overidentify with them, because 'they're not dragons, after all.' No matter how sad or scared or lonely they get, they're still just animals, according to her. 'Big, hairless squirrels who can do a few more tricks than your average monkey.' Isn't that crazy?\"\n\n\"Darkstalker agrees with you,\" Clearsight offered. She didn't add that he thought Listener's scavenger obsession was a little kooky. \"He says the new one they got for his class is severely depressed. He is all in favor of Operation Scavenger Rescue.\"\n\n\"Did you tell him we're doing this tonight?\" Listener asked, stopping abruptly so Clearsight bumped into her.\n\n\"No,\" Clearsight said. \"He's at some party at the palace and I didn't want him to worry. I'll tell him about it tomorrow when we're done and the scavengers are all free.\"\n\n\"Was there some reason it has to be tonight?\" Listener asked, scrutinizing her in the dark. \"We've been talking about this since the first day I met you, and suddenly you tell me it's go time. Because tonight is the safest time to do it? Is that why?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Clearsight reassured her. \"And it's the best time for the scavengers, too \u2014 not too cold outside, a bright night so they can see their way.\"\n\nIt was more than that. Clearsight knew tonight's party at the palace wasn't just any regular gathering. New dragons were coming into their lives and soon everything would be different. She wasn't sure exactly how things were going to change \u2014 more dragons meant more variables, which was harder to predict \u2014 but she wanted to make sure she did this one awesome thing with her best friend while she still could.\n\n\"Here's the first classroom,\" Listener whispered. They crept into the room, a science lab for the seven-year-old senior class. Aquariums and terrariums covered the tables and walls, some of them glowing with little phosphorescent rocks or glow-in-the-dark plankton. Long-finned fighting fish drifted in their separate bowls, dark purple-and-red. A tortoise snoozed under a trailing fern in a glass cage that smelled of bananas and old lettuce.\n\nA flutter of wings by the window made Clearsight jump, but it was just the two owls, wide-awake and hopping around their cage impatiently. She was sure they would rather be out prowling the night sky, but this was not a mission to rescue all the animals. The scavengers were the ones Listener worried about all the time. The ones with intense, dragonlike emotions, apparently.\n\n\"They're asleep,\" Listener whispered, crouching beside the little warren someone had built for the senior study scavengers. \"Should we take the whole cage?\"\n\n\"No.\" Clearsight shook her head. \"We have to make it look like the scavengers escaped on their own.\"\n\nListener gave her a skeptical look. \"All six of them? From four different classrooms?\"\n\n\"You're the one who thinks they're just like dragons,\" Clearsight argued. \"If a dragon had to escape a place like this, wouldn't she rescue the other dragons trapped here along with her, even if she didn't know them?\"\n\n\"You would,\" Listener said. \"I'm not sure most dragons would risk it. But do you really think scavengers have that much \u2026 I don't know, empathy?\"\n\n\"Well, hopefully that'll be the most plausible explanation tomorrow,\" Clearsight said. \"Although I should warn you that if you've talked to Truthfinder about this, that will probably make you her number one suspect.\"\n\n\"I don't care!\" Listener bristled, her neck spikes flaring. \"She can expel me if she wants! I don't need school to become an animal rights activist!\"\n\n\"Every NightWing needs school,\" Clearsight said, digging in her pack. \"Here, I thought we could carry them in these.\"\n\nListener took one of the burlap sacks between two claws and held it away from her, frowning. \"We're going to toss the scavengers in a sack?\"\n\n\"Were you hoping to stick them on your shoulders like baby lemurs?\" Clearsight shot back. \"They'll be fine; we won't leave them in there for long.\" She carefully unlatched the cage, moving the levers as quietly as she could, then sliding open the door.\n\nOne scavenger was sleeping under a scrap of blanket; the other was sprawled on a pile of shredded paper. Clearsight grabbed the one with the blanket first, scooping up the fabric along with it.\n\nThe scavenger woke up immediately and started screaming as though its fur was on fire. Clearsight was so startled she nearly dropped it.\n\n\"You're scaring it!\" Listener cried.\n\n\"It's scaring me!\" Clearsight shouted back. She wrestled her thrashing bundle into her sack. \"Grab the other one!\"\n\nThe second scavenger was awake now and darting around the cage, perhaps looking for a place to hide. As Listener reached in, it dodged around her claws and began scrambling up the wire side toward the open door at the top.\n\n\"Stop being annoying!\" Listener snapped at it. \"We're rescuing you! If you escape inside the school, you'll just end up getting eaten tomorrow!\"\n\nThe scavenger swung itself onto the inside of the cage roof and kicked at Listener's talons. She yanked it loose and shoved it quickly into her own sack.\n\n\"They're more ferocious than I expected,\" Clearsight said. Her heart was thumping, and every animal in the lab was awake now. The tamarin monkeys rattled their cage, letting out indignant shrieks. In the biggest terrarium, a crocodile was glaring at her with unpleasant yellow eyes.\n\n\"Let's hurry up before someone hears us.\" Listener ran out of the room and Clearsight followed her. Down to Darkstalker's classroom, where they scooped up the depressed lone scavenger without any trouble. It flopped sadly in Clearsight's talons, looking entirely resigned to being eaten.\n\nThen to their old third-year classroom, to the two scavengers Clearsight had admired on her first day. These two were awake \u2014 perhaps awakened by the noise coming from other parts of the school \u2014 and it took several minutes to capture them. By the end of it, Clearsight was almost willing to wager that Listener was right about them being like dragons. These two seemed to work together, collaborating to trick or distract the dragons. It was kind of adorable and kind of unsettling at the same time.\n\nThe last scavenger had recently been acquired by a first-year teacher as a class pet to entertain the youngest dragonets. Listener took one of the naptime blankets and carefully wrapped the scavenger, who watched her with bright, curious eyes instead of fighting back.\n\n\"This one still has hope,\" Listener explained to Clearsight. \"I think she kind of gets the idea that we're rescuing her.\"\n\n\"These others don't,\" Clearsight said, lifting her wriggling sack. \"I'm not a mind reader, but I'm getting a definite 'we're about to be eaten' vibe over here.\"\n\n\"I think it's your creepy sacks,\" Listener said. \"They look like something Darkstalker's scary father might drown tigers in.\"\n\n\"Just because Darkstalker's father is an IceWing doesn't mean he's scary,\" Clearsight argued. \"Besides, I'm sure whoever's in charge of acquiring tiger skins has a better method than drowning them in sacks.\"\n\n\"Darkstalker's dad is absolutely scary,\" Listener said, shaking her head. \"I ran into him at school once and he demanded directions to the principal's office. His entire head was, like, vibrating with all his thoughts about hating everything and everyone here.\"\n\nShe froze suddenly, pricking up her ears. Clearsight's heart sped up. She put one talon on her sack, trying to muffle its squeaking.\n\n\"Someone's here,\" Listener whispered. \"He just landed at the upper entrance. He's wondering what all the noise in the animal lab is about.\"\n\n\"Let's go, quick,\" Clearsight whispered back.\n\nThey fled swiftly through the courtyard, along the hall, and out to the atrium entrance. Clearsight checked the sky \u2014 clear as far as she could see \u2014 while Listener pressed her talons to her head.\n\n\"He's just getting to the lab now,\" she said.\n\nTogether they spread their wings and flung themselves aloft, clutching the sacks of scavengers in their claws. Their weight made Clearsight's flying a little lopsided, especially when the little creatures kept thrashing around. But exhilaration swept through her whole body as she soared away from the school with Listener. They'd done it! They'd freed the scavengers!\n\n\"Where are we taking them?\" she called to her friend.\n\n\"I thought you had a plan!\" Listener called back.\n\n\"Me? This was your crazy idea! In all your years of planning, you never figured out where to let them go?\"\n\n\"All right, all right.\" Listener swerved to head north. \"It's not safe for them in the Night Kingdom. We'll have to hope they can find a scavenger den in the desert somewhere.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Clearsight beat her wings to catch up. \"We can't cross the border. It's a battlefield out there.\" So far the war with the IceWings had stayed outside the walls, consisting mostly of skirmishes in the skies over the Kingdom of Sand. The NightWings couldn't get past the Great Ice Cliff that guarded the Ice Kingdom, and the IceWings couldn't break through the NightWings' air defense. Every few months there was a cease-fire while Queen Diamond and Queen Vigilance \"negotiated.\" According to Darkstalker, that meant they exchanged increasingly furious letters accusing each other of treachery, until one of them snapped and sent her troops to attack again.\n\nSo, inside the Night Kingdom: safe. Across the border: war zone. Not exactly something Clearsight wanted to risk to help out a few scavengers.\n\n\"No way,\" Listener agreed. \"We drop them as far north as we can, that's all.\"\n\n\"North Beach,\" Clearsight suggested. \"That's not too far from here, and maybe they can swim across to the Kingdom of Sand. Can scavengers swim?\"\n\n\"I doubt it,\" said Listener. \"Their paws would make useless flippers, and they have barely any blubber to keep them afloat. But yeah, let's take them to North Beach and they can fend for themselves from there.\"\n\nThe expanse of beach at the north end of the Night Kingdom peninsula was rocky and pebbled, unlike the smooth sandy beaches of the southern shores. It faced a bay with the Kingdom of Sand on the far side, just out of dragon eyesight but close enough that most NightWings avoided the area. Clearsight was afraid there might be a few intrepid swimmers practicing at midnight, but when they got there, the moonlit beach was deserted.\n\nThey landed among the giant boulders that were strewn across the beach. Clearsight carefully set down her back talons first, holding the sack up so the scavengers wouldn't get smashed.\n\n\"This is so exciting,\" Listener said, her eyes shining. \"We're really doing it! Clearsight! You're my best friend ever!\"\n\nClearsight smiled back at her, wondering how long that would last this time. She could see at least three possible arguments that might explode in the next few months, sending Listener into a rage where she wouldn't talk to Clearsight for a while.\n\nStop living in the future, Darkstalker's voice echoed in her mind. Be here now.\n\nHe was right. Because now, here, she had a best friend, and they were doing something wild and wonderful together.\n\n\"Ready?\" she said. Listener nodded, grinning.\n\nClearsight set down her sack and held open the mouth of it. There was a surprisingly long pause, as if the scavengers inside had to first figure out how to stand up, and then decide whether this was a trick.\n\nFinally one of them crept to the opening and peeked out. Seeing the two dragons staring down at it, it let out a little yelp, and then bolted toward the ocean. After a moment, another scavenger burst out of the sack and went racing after the first one.\n\nClearsight waited a moment, then shook the burlap until the third scavenger \u2014 the sad one from Darkstalker's classroom \u2014 came tumbling out. It curled up on the sand, covering its shaggy head with its paws. She lowered her snout and nudged it gently, but it only whimpered. Finally she used her talons to slide it into the lee of a boulder, where at least hopefully it wouldn't get too wet when the tide came in. Maybe it would feel better in the morning, when the dragons were gone.\n\nShe glanced over at Listener, who was arranging her sack the same way, open side toward the ocean. Suddenly all three of Listener's scavengers shot out of the sack at the same time, grabbed the nearest pebbles they could lift, and started flinging them at the two NightWings.\n\n\"Hey!\" Listener yelped, jumping back. \"Ouch! Rude! We're your saviors, you stunted gorillas!\"\n\nTwo of the scavengers took off running, zigzagging along the beach and waving their paws at the two scavengers from Clearsight's sack. The scavenger with the bright eyes started to follow them, then noticed the one that was curled up on the sand. She ran over to it, poked it, grabbed it, and hauled it up until it was running with her, leaning across her back.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" Clearsight said excitedly. She jabbed Listener's side. \"Your scavenger took my scavenger with her! Come on, didn't that look like empathy to you?\"\n\n\"It did,\" Listener said, rubbing her neck where a rock had gotten her. \"Although, sheesh, a little gratitude would have been nice, too. Where's the empathy for their heroic dragon rescuers? I ask you.\"\n\nClearsight folded her wings, watching the scavengers run away with a pleased sense of accomplishment.\n\nBut then \u2026\n\nSomething tugging at the threads \u2026 a knot in the timelines \u2026\n\nDanger was coming. Danger that could end her life and Listener's right now, here, tonight.\n\n\"Get down!\" she cried, throwing herself at Listener. She knocked her friend to the ground and spread her wings over her, melting them both into the lumps and shadows of the boulders.\n\n\"What the\u2014?\" Listener started.\n\n\"Shhhh,\" Clearsight whispered. \"Don't move.\"\n\nHer friend lay still, although Clearsight could feel her heart pounding through their scales. Sand tickled her snout. Cautiously she peeked out with one eye. Where was the danger coming from?\n\nThe ocean.\n\nAn unnatural ripple moved across the waves, sliding in toward the sand.\n\nAnd then, all at once, a pale white head lunged out of the water and snapped its jaws shut around one of the fleeing scavengers.\n\nClearsight bit her tongue trying not to hiss. The remaining five scavengers screamed and changed course. She saw the sad one let go of the bright-eyed one and run on its own, jolted into action by new terror.\n\nWe should save them, she thought. But it was too late for the one in the IceWing's jaws. And the dragon seemed uninterested in chasing the others. He settled into the rushing waves with his catch.\n\nMoreover, it was worth noting that the IceWing was much, much bigger than her or Listener.\n\nThat's an IceWing, she finally registered with a rush of panic. Here. On the shores of the Night Kingdom.\n\nAnother blue-white dragon surfaced beside the first one. \"What are you doing?\" she snarled.\n\n\"Having a snack,\" he growled back.\n\nShe glanced up and down the beach, her gaze lingering suspiciously on the dark lump of Listener and Clearsight. \"Back in the water,\" she snapped. \"Now.\"\n\nGrumbling under his breath, the IceWing dragged his prey into the water with him. The second IceWing scanned the beach again, then dove after him. There were a few more splashes, and then silence.\n\nClearsight's head was starting to spin. Visions crowded in, piling up on one another. She saw this same beach, but on a different night, with the moons in different positions in the sky and huddled clouds hiding most of their light. She saw a wave of pale silver IceWings slithering ashore, with more behind them, and more, and more. An entire army of IceWings, slipping into the Night Kingdom under the water and far below the noses of the NightWing sky protectors.\n\nThey were planning an invasion. The two dragons tonight were advance scouts on a test run. The IceWings had found a way into their territory, and someday soon, the war would be here, inside the walls.\n\nExcept it won't, Clearsight thought. I'll stop them.\n\nThis is why my instincts brought me here tonight. So I could see the IceWings, have this vision, and warn the queen.\n\nThis was it, the turning point she'd been waiting for. Her moment to serve the queen, save the tribe, and advance her family's standing. She'd known there would be a way eventually, but she hadn't been sure which timeline would unfold it for her first.\n\nAnd now that it had happened \u2014 now that she had to face the queen \u2014 she was terrified all the way down to her bones.\n\n\"Are they gone?\" she whispered to Listener.\n\n\"Yes,\" Listener whispered back. \"I could hear them thinking grumpy thoughts about each other as they swam away.\"\n\nClearsight stood up gingerly. \"I have to tell the queen.\"\n\n\"Better you than me,\" Listener said. \"I do not want to explain to my parents what I was doing out here.\"\n\n\"I can leave you out of it, if that's what you want,\" Clearsight said. Her mind was racing ahead. Who to tell first? Her parents would have to go through official channels, but Darkstalker could get her an audience with the queen tomorrow.\n\nTomorrow was better. There were several possible nights ahead when the invasion might be launched, but the sooner they figured out how to stop it, the better.\n\nListener started tracing shapes in the sand with one claw, staring out at the ocean. \"Clearsight,\" she said hesitantly. \"Listen, I \u2014 I know I told you I don't want to know the future. But if \u2014 if I ever have to evacuate my family \u2014 I mean, if it's a question of saving their lives \u2026 if something really, really bad is about to happen \u2026 then I guess I do want you to tell me.\"\n\n\"It's not that bad yet,\" Clearsight said, wrapping one wing around her friend. \"But I promise I will, if I'm ever worried.\"\n\nIt won't come to that, she reassured herself. We'll stop them. I'll save the whole tribe.\n\nShe was sure she could do that. The queen would listen to her, and the IceWing invasion would be taken care of without one more serrated white claw setting foot on their shores.\n\nSo why, then, were ominous visions still spinning behind her eyes?\n\nVisions of NightWings flying away in droves, as though the entire tribe were fleeing some horrific danger?\n\nClearsight wasn't sure \u2026 but she had a terrible, sinking feeling that tonight, some dark future had become a little bit more real.\n\nFathom had been given his own suite of rooms in the Night Palace, which he was sure he would appreciate very much if he could ever find them again.\n\n\"This hallway looks familiar,\" he said, hesitating at another intersection.\n\n\"Black marble walls and mirrors every three steps?\" Indigo said. \"You're right. Because that's what every hallway in this castle looks like.\"\n\n\"The mirror thing is weird, isn't it?\" he whispered. \"I'm not the only one who thinks so?\"\n\n\"NightWings are very pretty and very special,\" she informed him. \"They deserve to be reminded of that all the time, everywhere they go.\"\n\nHe laughed. They were lucky there weren't any NightWings around to hear them. \"Pearl would probably love it, too.\"\n\n\"Well, she can decorate the Summer Palace with as many mirrors as she wants,\" Indigo said. She started down the new hallway and he hurried to catch up with her.\n\n\"The Summer Palace?\" he echoed. \"I thought she wanted nothing to do with that place.\"\n\n\"She's changed her mind \u2014 you didn't hear?\" Indigo glanced over, then down at her claws as though she'd just remembered that no one talked to him. \"Everyone thinks the Island Palace is haunted. She can't keep any servants there, and most of the dragons who were at the \u2014 the party never want to go there again. So she's moving all surface palace business to the Summer Palace and abandoning the Island Palace.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Fathom blinked. It made sense. He himself had trouble walking through the Island Palace without remembering bloody talonprints everywhere. The smell of jasmine sometimes made him sick to his stomach, and he never wanted to see a red hibiscus again as long as he lived.\n\nBut still \u2014 that had been the SeaWings' above-water palace for generations. Was it gone forever now?\n\nA black dragon carrying a tray came out of a door a few steps ahead of them.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Indigo called. \"We're looking for the guest suites.\"\n\n\"I can take you there,\" he said with a bow. \"This way.\"\n\nAs they followed him, Fathom watched Indigo out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't imagining it \u2014 she changed completely when there were other dragons around. She squared her shoulders and stood up taller; her voice went deeper and more commanding. The spear in her talons was suddenly a weapon rather than a prop. She really looked like she was ready to kill someone to protect him. Like a true bodyguard.\n\nThat should make it easier for him to keep her at a distance, if he could remember to think of her that way. Just a guard. Not the most important dragon in my life.\n\n\"Here you are,\" said the NightWing servant, gesturing with his tail at a large black door that looked very much like all the other doors they'd passed. \"The guest suite for visiting SeaWings.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Fathom said. \"Um. When is breakfast?\"\n\nThe black dragon snorted a laugh. \"Around midday,\" he said. \"NightWings never wake up before then, unless the queen rises early and commands our attendance. Usually we stay awake all night and go to sleep at sunrise.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Fathom said, shivering at the strangeness of this kingdom.\n\nThe NightWing paused for a moment, looking Fathom up and down as though he were expecting to see something magic happen. Evidently disappointed, he bowed again and whisked away.\n\n\"This tribe is weird,\" Indigo observed, shaking her head.\n\nThe door opened into a dark antechamber, where droning snores announced that Wharf and Lionfish were fast asleep. Indigo frowned and stepped toward them, but Fathom stopped her with an outstretched wing.\n\n\"Let them sleep,\" he whispered. \"It was a long flight here.\"\n\n\"They're supposed to wake up when someone comes through here,\" she whispered back. \"Like for instance someone planning to attack you. That's kind of their whole job.\"\n\n\"And they already hate it,\" he observed, heading toward the inner chamber. \"We don't need to make it worse by waking them up to yell at them on their first night here.\"\n\nThey slipped through into the next room and closed the door on the snoring. In here, where Fathom was supposed to sleep, the only sounds were the splash of a fountain in the corner and the rush of wind outside on the balcony. Several small candles were set around the room, flickering their orange light against the darkness.\n\nHe realized that this was the first time he'd been alone with Indigo since \u2026 since the massacre.\n\n\"I'll have to yell at them tomorrow, though,\" Indigo said, looking unexcited about that prospect. \"I wonder if they even bothered to search this room.\" She shook out her wings and snapped into bodyguard mode again, poking her spear into all the corners and lifting all the rugs.\n\n\"You don't have to do that,\" Fathom said quietly. \"I know I'm the real danger here.\" He caught one of the billowing curtains and tied it down, avoiding her eyes.\n\n\"Is that what you think?\" she said. She stopped, only a few steps away from him. \"Do you think I'm here to save other dragons from you?\"\n\n\"You should be,\" he said. He held out his front talons, watching the candlelight glow through the webs between his claws. \"These are dangerous.\"\n\n\"Not to me.\" Indigo suddenly gathered his talons between hers and stepped closer, holding them near her heart. \"Fathom, not to me.\"\n\nThe curtains rippled in the breeze, reaching for them with long soft tendrils. He was close enough to feel her breath on his scales. He wanted to dive into her eyes and catch the tiny flames reflected there. He wanted to tell her how much he had missed her.\n\n\"Especially to you,\" he said. \"You shouldn't have come here with me.\" He tore himself out of her grasp and turned away, blinking back tears.\n\n\"I thought \u2026 I thought it was Pearl who was keeping us apart,\" Indigo said. \"She said it was your idea, but I didn't believe her.\"\n\n\"She's right, though,\" Fathom said. \"You make me more dangerous. No matter how many oaths I swear, there's always you \u2014 the one dragon who could make me use my power again. Don't you understand that?\"\n\nThere was a long pause. Finally he rubbed his eyes and turned to look at her.\n\nIndigo had her wings folded back and was studying him seriously. He'd seen this thoughtful face on her before, whenever they'd been asked to debate two sides of an issue in history class. The way she listens. The way she really thinks. Two more things about her he'd forgotten he missed so much.\n\n\"You're not Albatross,\" she said.\n\n\"But I might be,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm not leaving you,\" she said. \"Do you want me to leave you?\"\n\nSay yes. Say yes immediately so she'll believe you and she'll have to go.\n\nBut nothing came out. The words were caught in his throat, swallowed by the dark room and the nearness of her, after missing her for so long.\n\nA moment passed, and she stepped toward him again, reaching to brush one of his wings with hers. He forgot to breathe.\n\n\"I trust you not to use your power,\" she said softly. \"I'm not afraid of you. I believe we're safer together, and I think I can protect you from Darkstalker. So I'm not leaving.\"\n\nFathom fought with himself, knowing what he should say, knowing he should push her away and send her home. That normal, happy life was waiting for her back there.\n\n\"I should go to sleep,\" he said finally instead.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, making her \"bodyguard face\" again. \"I'm going to sleep here, at the balcony door, to make sure no one tries to come in this way.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Fathom said. He was torn between relief \u2014 he didn't want to sleep in this big unfamiliar room alone \u2014 and anger at himself. Why are you letting her stay? Don't you care about her?\n\nIndigo lay down in the open archway that led to the balcony and coiled her tail around her talons. In the moonlight, she was a solemn silhouette, quiet as the depths of the ocean.\n\nFathom dragged a pile of blue-green pillows over to a spot near the fountain and punched them around for a long time before finally settling down on top of them.\n\n\"Well done,\" Indigo called sleepily. \"Those pillows will never question your authority again.\"\n\nHe smothered his laugh. He didn't want her to think that everything was fine, that they could be friends again the way they were before. If she had to stay, the only way this would work was if he kept her at a distance.\n\nI mustn't let the NightWings know she's important to me, he realized. That could put her in danger, too.\n\nWorries tumbled around in his head as he drifted into sleep. Is it safe to like Darkstalker? What does Queen Vigilance expect from me? Are Wharf and Lionfish spying on me and Indigo and reporting back to Pearl?\n\nWhat's going to happen to us now?\n\nThe night was starting to fade toward morning when Darkstalker got home from the palace. He'd swooped by Clearsight's on the way, to see if he could find her, but her parents said she was out with Listener, which left him feeling sort of disgruntled and abandoned.\n\nArctic and Foeslayer were already asleep, or at least quiet behind the door of their room, having left the party much earlier than he had. Darkstalker stepped softly past his sister's room and unlocked his door.\n\nHe didn't like this time of day. When the birds started chirping and the sky began fading to purplish gray, that meant it was almost time to sleep. He wished he never had to sleep. He had so much to do, so much he wanted to get done. Not only did sleeping feel like a waste of time, but it also gave him an itching restless feeling of missing things \u2014 like something important might happen without him there to affect it.\n\nCarefully he tucked his earring into his jewelry box and unclasped the tail band. For a moment he stood holding it, tracing the embossed silver scales. Tonight, this had been his only protection against a possible killer. If Indigo had moved faster \u2014 if she hadn't stopped to discuss her plan with Fathom \u2014 could she have killed him?\n\nHe wouldn't even have been able to use his power to heal himself. It was all here, hidden inside his scroll. He could have bled to death, completely helpless \u2014 he, Darkstalker, the most powerful dragon in the world!\n\nHe took a deep breath. Indigo's attack must have rattled him more than he realized. So do something about it, he told himself. He was good at solving problems. Here was a problem: how could he use his magic to defend himself if he didn't have his scroll with him?\n\nDarkstalker extended his talons and studied them, then ran his claws lightly over his throat. Another piece of jewelry? But jewelry could be removed, or fly off during a fight, and wouldn't it be suspicious if he wore the same thing every day anyway?\n\nPerhaps he could embed a jewel into his body somewhere. He'd seen dragons with small diamonds buried between their scales. Or something in his teeth \u2014 there had been a SandWing envoy at the palace once with two gold teeth.\n\nHe touched his neck again. No, nothing removable. He needed something that could always be a part of him. Indigo was a smart dragon; she already suspected him of enchanting his jewels. She might be able to spot anything else he added and figure out what it did.\n\nWhat if \u2026\n\nCould he enchant his actual scales?\n\nWhy not?\n\nHe swept his claws down his side, suddenly feeling hyperaware of all the ways he could be stabbed or sliced or burned or frozen. The more dragons knew about his power, the more danger he would be in. And he didn't want to leave the world before accomplishing everything he could see in his shining future.\n\nDarkstalker hurried to the wall and the painting that was enchanted to hide and protect his scroll. He took the scroll out carefully, rolled it to the next blank spot \u2026 and then paused.\n\nClearsight.\n\nShe always read the new spells in his scroll. She liked to discuss them with him and come up with new ideas. Usually she said the right admiring things.\n\nBut what would she think of this?\n\nA quiet warning was starting to chime at the back of his mind. He could sense an argument in their close future \u2014 the kind where she got judgmental and anxious and made him question all his decisions. The kind of argument he hated.\n\nAnd perhaps he could avoid it. Wouldn't that make them both happier?\n\nHe rolled the scroll backward, scanning the spells he'd already cast.\n\nHere, near the beginning \u2014 there was space for him to write a new spell between the lines of the others. With luck Clearsight wouldn't go back and reread these; maybe she'd never notice it. And if she never noticed it, she couldn't question him about it.\n\nIt was a makeshift solution, but it would do for now. He'd come up with a better way to hide his secret spells later.\n\nHe dipped his claw in the green ink and wrote:\n\nEnchant Darkstalker's scales to be invulnerable to harm of any sort, to heal instantly if injured, and to shield him indestructibly from any threat of death.\n\nThat was a little dramatic, but he liked the sound of it. Maybe he should go a step further and cast a spell that would make him immortal. That was something to think about. Imagine everything he could do for Pyrrhia if he could live forever!\n\nFirst, though, he should test this spell, since it was pretty unusual. He went to his trunk and dug under the extra blankets until he found one of his daggers \u2014 long, wickedly curved, with a gleaming sharp edge.\n\nDeep breath. Nothing to be afraid of. (Ever again, if this worked.)\n\nHe set the blade against the skin of his shoulder and slid it firmly toward his neck.\n\nIt was like trying to cut diamonds. His scales repelled the knife smoothly, beautifully, with no fuss at all.\n\nDarkstalker tried stabbing himself in a few other spots, his excitement mounting. The dagger bounced right off him, unable to draw blood.\n\nHe'd done it. He'd made himself invincible.\n\nDon't get too cocky yet. Make sure you think of what else someone could do to you, and find ways to protect yourself from everything. Poison, for instance. Poison didn't seem like Indigo's style, but someone else might try it one day.\n\nFor now, though, he could take a moment to be proud of himself. I wonder if any other animus has ever thought of enchanting their own scales.\n\nI suspect I'm the only one who's ever come up with something like my scroll. See, I was obviously given these powers for a reason. I can use them more wisely than any other dragon before me. I just have to be careful and smart, that's all.\n\nAnd now that his safety was taken care of, he could focus on a more fun project.\n\nWhat could he use to make a soul reader?\n\nAs he began prowling his room, looking for inspiration, another thought occurred to him.\n\nIf I can enchant my entire body like that \u2026 what could I do to other dragons?\n\nDarkstalker had an odd twinkle in his eye when he came to pick her up the afternoon after Clearsight's vision at North Beach. But he didn't explain why, and he didn't have the nervous energy that usually meant he wanted to tell her something, so she ignored it. She had more important things on her mind, such as saving the entire tribe from invading IceWings.\n\n\"Do you really think the queen will listen to me?\" she asked him again, fidgeting with her tail. They were waiting outside Queen Vigilance's throne room. It felt early to her, the sun high in the sky, but Darkstalker assured her that the queen was awake at all hours and especially loved conducting business whenever it might seem peculiar to other dragons.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. He reached over and adjusted the length of the necklace he had given her to wear, which was sweet, but made her feel even more self-conscious. She did know how to wear a necklace, for moons' sake.\n\n\"I should have enchanted this to make you feel as confident and beautiful as you look,\" he whispered in her ear.\n\nShe wrinkled her nose at him. \"No, thank you. You wouldn't really do that, would you? Change my feelings with magic? You know that would be completely not OK with me, right?\"\n\nThe doors to the throne room swung open before he could answer. Two guards ushered them inside, and Clearsight saw to her dismay that there were several members of the NightWing court present \u2014 including her seer-training teacher, Allknowing.\n\nAllknowing glittered with poise and diamonds, standing on the dais beside the queen's throne. Her face was composed, but her nostrils flared slightly when she caught sight of her student waiting to see the queen.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Darkstalker said, wincing. \"There is a dragon in here who already doesn't like you very much.\"\n\n\"That's the teacher I told you about,\" Clearsight whispered. \"The queen's top seer.\"\n\n\"Approach,\" Queen Vigilance called out.\n\nUh-oh. Her head was starting to pound: visions were coming. Keep it together. Don't collapse.\n\nDarkstalker sitting on that very throne, wearing the twisted crown.\n\nDarkstalker standing over the body of the queen, blood staining his claws.\n\nShe clenched her talons. Those were the dark paths, the violent paths. They didn't have to happen. They weren't going to happen; she wouldn't let them.\n\nFollow the bright visions instead, the way Darkstalker always tells me to. Like this one of me and Darkstalker presenting our six little dragonets to the queen. The queen's grandson chasing Eclipse in circles, the two of them giggling, Vigilance cracking a rare smile.\n\nSlowly Clearsight's heart calmed down and the visions faded, but her wings were still shaking as she stepped toward the queen. She'd never had so many important dragons looking at her. She'd also never revealed the extent of her power to anyone before, except Darkstalker. But now she had no choice.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" she said with a bow.\n\n\"This is?\" Queen Vigilance said to Darkstalker.\n\n\"Clearsight, Your Majesty,\" he answered. \"She is a very gifted seer.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said the queen with a sigh, as Allknowing's eyes narrowed. \"Seers. Always so illuminating. You may speak.\"\n\n\"I come with a warning,\" said Clearsight, launching into the speech she'd rehearsed all night long. \"The IceWings are planning an invasion by sea at the North Beach. I believe they intend to attack very soon \u2014 most likely the next time two moons are new at once, when they can slip by under cover of darkness.\"\n\nShe paused, realizing the queen was leaning forward with glinting eyes.\n\n\"What is this?\" Queen Vigilance said avidly. \"Don't you have a prophecy for me?\"\n\nClearsight hesitated again. She thought of the lessons she'd had with Allknowing, where they all had to take their visions and contort them into enigmatic rhyming couplets. Should she have done that with this warning for the queen? But there was nothing cryptic about it. The IceWings were coming, and Clearsight knew exactly how and where, along with a few intelligent guesses as to when. Why make that cryptic and confusing? The queen needed to know precisely what Clearsight had seen, in order to protect the tribe.\n\n\"I saw a pair of IceWings scouting the North Beach last night,\" Clearsight said. \"That triggered a vision of hundreds of IceWings swimming in to invade our territory. They're coming soon and I knew I had to come tell you.\"\n\n\"My, my,\" said the queen, shooting a sideways look of suspicion at Allknowing. \"How straightforward.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry it doesn't sound fancier.\" Clearsight spread her wings. \"But I'm sure it's true. The only futures I can see where they don't attack are the ones where you find a way to stop them.\"\n\nA curious murmur scurried around the throne room. The queen wasn't the only one staring at Clearsight like an undiscovered type of gemstone.\n\nQueen Vigilance tipped her head slowly to regard her own seer. \"Allknowing. What have you seen of this?\"\n\nAllknowing bared her teeth. \"If you recall my last prophecy, Your Majesty, there were references to waves of ice dragons and a midnight menace.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Vigilance said with chilly stillness. \"Very poetic. But I don't recall anything about an underwater attack focused on North Beach in the next month.\"\n\n\"That \u2014 that \u2014\" Allknowing sputtered. \"The nature of visions \u2014 specific details are not \u2014 that's not how it works.\"\n\n\"Maybe not for you,\" said Vigilance. \"Dragonet.\"\n\nIt took a moment for Clearsight to realize she was being addressed. \"Yes, Your Majesty?\"\n\n\"You work for me now. Move into the palace tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Clearsight said, startled. That had been an option in one or two timelines, but she hadn't taken it seriously. She was supposed to be sent home with a pile of gold, followed by a celebratory dinner with her parents. What had she said to land herself here instead? Or had someone else accidentally tipped the future in this direction? Maybe Allknowing, by annoying the queen somehow? \"But \u2014 my parents \u2014\"\n\n\"Will be amply rewarded.\" The queen stood up and spoke to the general on her left. \"Call a war council meeting.\" She swept down the steps, pausing for a moment beside Clearsight. \"I want everything you know about this attack written out by morning.\"\n\nA moment later she was gone, with nearly everyone else in the throne room following in her wake.\n\nDarkstalker bounded over and threw his wings around Clearsight. \"Aren't you clever?\" he crowed. \"You were right, that was a genius way to introduce yourself to the queen. Totally worth the wait.\"\n\nAllknowing stalked down from the dais, glowering so fiercely that sparks shot out of her nose. \"I knew you were trouble,\" she snarled. \"But I didn't realize you were planning to betray me.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Darkstalker said thoughtfully. \"Sounds like you're not a very good seer, then.\"\n\n\"I'm not betraying you,\" Clearsight protested, elbowing him in the ribs. Ow. Why does it feel like he's wearing armor? \"It's a serious threat, so I had to warn the queen, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Well, enjoy her attention now that you've got it,\" Allknowing growled. \"You'll soon see what happens to dragons who show off around here.\" Casting a withering look at Darkstalker, she slithered out of the throne room, hissing to herself.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Clearsight said, pressing her talons together.\n\n\"Don't worry about her.\" Darkstalker nudged her happily. \"I think maybe now you're the queen's top seer.\"\n\n\"That wasn't the plan!\" Clearsight closed her eyes and tried to study the futures. Was she really going to live at the palace now? And share all her visions with the queen?\n\nNot all of them. No way. Not if I want to keep Darkstalker alive.\n\nShe opened her eyes again as they stepped out of the throne room into the central courtyard. Darkstalker had told her this was the heart of the palace: a series of grand ballrooms, gardens, and atriums with tall glass ceilings, where the party had taken place the night before. A few sleepy-looking NightWing servants were climbing around, taking down the decorations and polishing the floors.\n\nAnd across the way, four blue and green dragons were gathered around one of the pools, staring down at the darting shapes of the bright gold-and-white koi.\n\nWith her mind more than half in the future, Clearsight saw a familiar SeaWing face and reacted instinctively.\n\n\"Fathom!\" she called, bounding over with her wings spread wide to embrace him. \"You're here!\"\n\nOne of the other SeaWings leaped forward, fast as a bolt of lightning, flinging herself in front of Fathom. \"Stop right there!\" she cried. \"Don't touch him!\" Her spear came up and nearly caught Clearsight in the throat.\n\n\"Hey!\" Darkstalker roared. \"Unnecessary!\"\n\nClearsight yelped, skidded to a stop, and covered her face with her front talons. \"Oh no! I'm so sorry!\" Galaxies and geckos, what is wrong with me? \"Aaargh, I've never done that before.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" the bodyguard demanded.\n\n\"I'm Clearsight.\" She spread her wings, trying to look nonthreatening.\n\n\"She's with me,\" Darkstalker said, frowning.\n\nOh, am I? Clearsight thought. I thought I was the queen's new top seer. \"I \u2014 I see the future, and I've seen Fathom in my visions \u2014 but I forgot we hadn't actually met yet. I'm sorry,\" she said directly to Fathom.\n\n\"Me?\" said the nervous green dragon. \"You've seen me in your visions?\"\n\n\"Lots of times,\" she reassured him. \"We're going to be friends, I promise.\"\n\nThe SeaWing brings death. The SeaWing brings salvation. Don't let him come. He must come, or all is lost.\n\nShe hesitated as the old line from her scrolls chased through her mind. Nice and cryptic. Allknowing would be pleased.\n\nBut she wasn't going to worry about that now, in her first meeting with Fathom, at long last.\n\n\"Oh!\" she said, turning to the bodyguard. \"And you must be Indigo.\" She'd seen this SeaWing face, too \u2014 sometimes fierce and snarling, sometimes crying, sometimes covered in blood. Maybe she shouldn't look too carefully at those timelines right now. She was already scaring the new dragons enough with all her talk of visions.\n\n\"It's all right, Indigo,\" said Fathom. \"Wharf, Lionfish, you may go hunt. We'll be fine.\" He gave Clearsight a tentative smile as the other two SeaWings shrugged and flew away. Oh, she felt like she knew him so well \u2014 how shy he was, how uncertain of what to say next. How all the guilt and worry weighed down his wings.\n\n\"Guess what?\" she said to him. \"I'm moving into the palace, too! We'll basically be neighbors. You've already met Darkstalker, right?\"\n\n\"Last night.\" Darkstalker leaned over as though he was going to nudge Fathom's wing with his own, but then he glanced sideways at Indigo and pulled back. \"He gave me a great idea, actually. Can I show you guys?\"\n\n\"All right,\" Fathom said. The way he looked at Darkstalker \u2014 as though he so badly wanted to trust him. Clearsight sure recognized that feeling. \"We're not doing anything right now,\" the SeaWing went on. \"I'm not sure what we're supposed to do. I'm afraid the queen might have forgotten we're here.\"\n\n\"She's having a bit of an emergency today,\" Darkstalker explained. \"And I'm pretty sure your only real mission is to hang out with me, so you're doing excellent work right now.\"\n\nFathom's smile became a little bit more real.\n\n\"Well, you're also supposed to be teaching him things. Maybe try looking more stern,\" Clearsight suggested, grinning at Fathom. \"Or a little menacing. Say something wise and insightful now and then.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Fathom said. \"Like, never eat the purple variety of long-legged sea crab?\"\n\nDarkstalker started laughing, and Fathom blinked at him with delight.\n\n\"Just like that,\" Darkstalker assured him. \"That's the kind of advice I like.\"\n\nClearsight tipped her head at him, wondering if that was a dig at her. She knew he didn't always like the things she had to say about his animus experiments. But too bad; she was also quite sure he needed to be with someone who would say those things, instead of someone who smiled and nodded and had no opinions of her own.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Darkstalker said, flipping open his pack. \"So I went home and started thinking and ended up not sleeping at all because I was too excited and here's what I came up with.\" He pulled out an odd little contraption that looked like a telescope with a small golden hourglass mounted on the side. \"Watch this.\" He pointed it at Clearsight, and the hourglass began to spin. Around and around it went, three times. When it stopped, a mountain of black sand was in the bottom half of the hourglass, and a tiny scattering of white sand was in the top.\n\n\"Awww,\" Darkstalker said. \"Look at how good you are.\"\n\nClearsight peered closer. None of the sand was moving from one side to the other. Now that it had stopped spinning, the hourglass was perfectly still.\n\n\"What in the world?\" she said. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"This is a soul reader,\" Darkstalker said proudly. \"Point it at anyone, and it'll tell you what the balance of good and evil is inside them. Think of all the sand as your soul, and this will show you how much of it is evil. Black sand for good, like the NightWings, white for bad, like the IceWings. See, you are almost entirely good, with just little bits of bad.\"\n\nLittle bits of bad! Clearsight squinted at the white sand. How am I bad? What have I done? Why do I have any white sand at all?\n\n\"You really made it,\" Fathom whispered. Clearsight glanced up at him and saw that the SeaWing looked sick to his stomach. \"But didn't you hear me? I warned you \u2014 you have to stop using your magic. Every time you do, it gets worse. You can't \u2026 you can't just \u2026\" He shuddered from head to tail.\n\nDarkstalker hasn't told him about the scroll yet, Clearsight realized. She could understand why \u2026 but poor Fathom.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Darkstalker said. \"Here, look. Clearsight, point it at me.\" He handed the telescope to her. She lifted it up and sighted through the eyehole, finding Darkstalker at the end of it.\n\nThe hourglass started spinning \u2026 and spinning \u2026 and spinning \u2026\n\n\"You've confused it,\" Clearsight tried to joke.\n\n\"It takes a moment sometimes,\" he said with a shrug.\n\nFinally the hourglass settled. Black sand lay in drifts around the bottom half. A substantially smaller pile of white sand huddled in the top. More than Clearsight had, but not very much, really, she told herself.\n\n\"See?\" Darkstalker pointed at the soul reader. \"I'm fine. My soul is almost entirely good. Isn't that cool?\"\n\nClearsight thought it was pretty clever, actually. This could be a useful device for keeping an eye on other animus dragons. She swung it around toward Fathom.\n\n\"Don't point that at him,\" Indigo objected, blocking the way. The soul reader landed on her, spun, and ended up with a pile of black sand as big as Clearsight's.\n\n\"It won't hurt him,\" Clearsight said. \"You saw, we just pointed it at each other.\"\n\n\"But it could be specially enchanted,\" Indigo said. \"To \u2014 to do something to him.\" Behind her back, Darkstalker rolled his eyes at Clearsight.\n\n\"Let her do it,\" Fathom said, touching Indigo's tail with his own. \"Please? I want to know.\"\n\nIndigo gave him a very concerned look, and Clearsight guessed what she might be really worried about: that Fathom would discover he had more evil than good in him. She's trying to protect him in more ways than one, Clearsight thought sympathetically.\n\nBut the SeaWing stepped back, and Clearsight lined up the telescope so she could see Fathom's anxious face on the other end.\n\nOnce again the hourglass spun \u2014 and when it came to a stop, the black sand outweighed the white. It looked a lot like Darkstalker's balance, in fact, with about one-quarter white sand and three-quarters black.\n\nFathom stepped hesitantly over to the telescope and touched the hourglass with one claw. \"This is real?\" he said to Darkstalker.\n\n\"I promise,\" Darkstalker answered. \"We kind of have matching souls, don't we? Doesn't that make you feel better?\"\n\nFathom stared at the hourglass for another minute, then up at Clearsight. \"Yes,\" he admitted. He turned to Darkstalker again. \"But please, please stop using your magic. My grandfather \u2014 I don't know what it was that tipped him over into madness and evil. It could be anything. One spell might make all the difference.\"\n\n\"Fathom,\" Darkstalker said gently. \"Your power is a gift. You shouldn't be so terrified of it. You just have to figure out how to use it safely and make it work for you.\" He paused, then shot a surprisingly hostile look at Indigo. \"It's not a trick. I just want him to be happy. Don't you?\"\n\nIndigo looked him directly in the eye. \"I believe he can be happy without any magic.\"\n\nClearsight didn't like the energy that suddenly vibrated between them. She especially didn't like the way it spun out into a thread that ended in a world with no Indigo in it.\n\nNot going to happen, she told herself fiercely. I'll keep an eye on them. I'll fix this.\n\n\"It's a beautiful day for flying,\" she said, trying to distract them both. She nudged Fathom. \"Why don't we show you around the Night Kingdom? There's a great beach not too far from here.\"\n\nFathom's face lit up, and Clearsight felt the tension give way a little bit. She would still have to be careful. She didn't see a clear path to a place where Indigo and Darkstalker could trust each other, but maybe if she kept them apart, everything would be all right.\n\nThe important thing was that Fathom was finally here \u2014 their soon-to-be best friend, the future godfather of their dragonets. This was a happy day.\n\nShe lifted off into the sky, steering around the clouds, keeping the sun bright in her eyes.\n\nDon't look down.\n\nDon't chase the storm.\n\nDon't let the dark visions win.\n\nWeeks passed in a blur that got happier and happier each day. After a year of cold silences and unfriendly looks and solitude, Fathom suddenly found himself wrapped in warmth and attention. Darkstalker and Clearsight weren't afraid of him or his magic. More than that, they seemed to actually like him. They sought him out every day, taking him flying and hunting, sharing scrolls and secrets about the royal court. They made him laugh. They made him forget, for hours at a time, what he'd been through and what he'd had to do.\n\nHe never forgot his mission, though. He still watched Darkstalker constantly for signs that he was using his magic \u2026 or about to turn evil. One evening he found the soul reader on his desk with a note that said:\n\nBy all the shining moons, your brain is driving me crazy. Here, you keep this, use it on me whenever you want, and STOP WORRYING SO MUCH.\n\n\"SO suspicious,\" Indigo said when he showed the note to her. \"He's probably enchanted the thing to show you that he's always good, no matter what he does. Or worse, maybe it has a spell on it to make you trust him more every time you touch it.\"\n\n\"Aren't you paranoid and clever,\" Darkstalker said, sailing in over the balcony. \"We're lucky you're not an animus, with ideas like that.\"\n\nIndigo froze, trying to put on her blank bodyguard face, and Fathom stepped between them in a hurry. \"Thank you,\" he said to Darkstalker. \"You really don't mind if I keep it?\"\n\n\"I've used it on my father already,\" Darkstalker said, folding his wings. \"He's almost as bad as I thought, but not all the way evil yet. I might need to borrow it back to show my mother one day, but she's got enough to deal with in the war right now. So you hang on to it for me, if it makes you feel better.\"\n\nFathom tipped the telescope toward Darkstalker and checked \u2014 the same levels of black and white sand as before.\n\n\"See? Totally not evil,\" Darkstalker said with a grin. \"Let's go bother Clearsight!\"\n\nFathom followed him out into the hallway with Indigo behind them. \"She said she had to work today, remember?\"\n\n\"Queen Vigilance wants her to work every day,\" Darkstalker said, rolling his eyes. \"She's already quit school to do this full time. It's not good for her. Flying and hunting and swimming with me is what's good for her.\" He narrowed his eyes at Indigo. \"Do your other two bodyguards do anything useful? It seems like this one is the only one who's ever on duty.\"\n\nFathom flinched. He wasn't doing a very good job of hiding how important Indigo was to him; she really did go with him everywhere. But that was partly because neither of them trusted Wharf or Lionfish and partly because none of the other NightWings ever seemed to notice who Fathom was with, anyway. Of course Darkstalker would, though.\n\n\"Um, well \u2026 Indigo is the strongest,\" Fathom stammered awkwardly. \"The other two haven't exactly, um, adjusted to the sleep cycle around here.\" That was actually rather true. Wharf and Lionfish were often sleeping during the NightWings' waking hours.\n\n\"Well, you're lucky you've got this one,\" Darkstalker said, with a hint of something like amusement in his voice. \"She seems to be very good at her job.\"\n\nFathom glanced at Indigo. Her expression was troubled, but she didn't say anything.\n\nThey rapped on Clearsight's door and heard a clatter of things falling as talons thumped toward the door. Finally she poked her head out and gave Darkstalker a stern look.\n\n\"I knew it was you,\" she said.\n\n\"REALLY?\" Darkstalker said with a gasp. \"It's like you can PREDICT THE FUTURE!\"\n\n\"You are not distracting me today!\" she cried. \"Go away! The queen wants a full report on the next year of IceWing maneuvers by tomorrow morning!\"\n\nDarkstalker bundled past her into the room, sweeping Fathom along with him. The floor, as usual, was covered with scrolls, as was every available surface. Fathom could recognize Clearsight's handwriting at a glance now; it seemed as if she'd filled a hundred scrolls with her densely packed notes since she'd moved into the palace.\n\n\"Great kingdoms,\" Indigo said, startled, from the doorway. She looked down at her claws as if she didn't know where she could possibly put them in this erupting volcano of paper.\n\n\"You have to tell Vigilance that an entire year of information is impossible,\" Darkstalker said to Clearsight. \"Especially when you're dealing with a whole tribe, an unpredictable queen, and all the little ridiculous things that can go wrong in a war.\"\n\n\"They're not little or ridiculous when hundreds of lives are at stake,\" Clearsight said, pressing her talons against her eyes. \"And Queen Diamond isn't completely unpredictable; she just changes her mind a lot. Besides, this is important \u2014 I helped us win the skirmish at sea last week, and I made sure the army avoided that ambush in the cactus mazes. But every time I'm right, Queen Vigilance wants more details. How many dragons in this location exactly; what time of day will they attack precisely \u2014\"\n\n\"How many grains of sand in the next sandstorm,\" Darkstalker finished. \"You're going to lose your mind, trying to track all of this. Come flying with us,\" he wheedled. \"It'll clear your head.\"\n\n\"I can't clear my head!\" Clearsight protested. \"I need it full of information! This information! Important information! In three months there might be a dawn attack on one of our supply routes! Quick, pass me that scroll.\" She reached for an inkwell and nearly spilled it on one of the maps of the Kingdom of Sand.\n\nDarkstalker gave her the scroll she'd pointed to, waded through the paper, and flung open the window. Moonlight poured in, along with the smell of the distant ocean and the sound of dragons singing far below in the Great Diamond.\n\n\"You are coming flying with us,\" he said, \"because I have made you a present, and because there's a pack of delicious wolves running through the forests of Borderland Mountain, and because tomorrow is your hatching day, so Queen Vigilance can snort a bucket of worms for all I care.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow's your hatching day?\" Fathom said to Clearsight. \"How old will you be?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, touching her head. The black ink on her claws matched the black of her scales. \"I guess it is. Five. Wow, I can't believe I'm only five years old.\" She blinked at the scrolls, as if she'd lived several more lifetimes through her visions.\n\n\"Clearsight's hatching day: the best thing that's ever happened in the history of the world!\" Darkstalker cried. He swept Clearsight off her feet and spun her around, scattering scrolls everywhere. \"Let's celebrate! Let's fly!\" He tossed her out the window and she caught the wind with her wings, laughing breathlessly.\n\n\"You loon!\" she shouted at him, swooping around in a circle. \"What am I supposed to tell the queen?\"\n\n\"That I love you and she can talk to me if she has any concerns,\" Darkstalker proclaimed. \"Come on, Fathom!\"\n\n\"Me?\" Fathom said. \"You really want me to come? Wouldn't you rather \u2014\"\n\n\"Shh!\" Darkstalker knocked on Fathom's head and tugged him toward the window. \"Enough with the self-doubt! You're our friend, and the present is partly for you, so let's go, let's go!\" He leaped into the sky and barreled into Clearsight, tumbling through the sky with her.\n\nFathom climbed onto the windowsill and watched them wistfully for a moment. They made it look so easy, being happy and in love. They never seemed to worry about all the reasons to stay apart. They were sure they'd have dragonets one day \u2014 Clearsight even thought one of them might be an animus, but she didn't care. Darkstalker wasn't afraid of what he might do with his power for her, and she didn't seem to be afraid for his soul.\n\nWhich had to mean something, since she could see the future.\n\nMaybe \u2026 maybe Darkstalker was right, and Fathom should stop worrying so much, too.\n\nHe looked over his shoulder at Indigo. She had her head down, reading one of the scrolls on the floor.\n\nWith a sudden rush of horror, Fathom remembered the look on Albatross's face as he strangled Indigo. He remembered the gleaming madness in his grandfather's eyes and the trail of blood that had led from the pavilion back to the scene of the massacre.\n\nNo, he thought, his heart pounding. I'm right to worry. Darkstalker should worry more. That's what I'm here to tell him, if I can figure out how to make him listen.\n\nHe took off into the air, following his friends. They were racing around the clouds now, blowing puffs of smoke at each other. He could hear Clearsight's laughter echoing through the sky.\n\nHe wished he could at least treat Indigo like a friend in front of them \u2026 but she didn't want him to. She agreed that it was safer if everyone thought she was just his bodyguard, and so that was how she acted, trailing after them silently wherever they went.\n\nTonight Darkstalker led them into a forest that swept along the lower reaches of the mountain, beyond the palace. He and Clearsight each caught a wolf and then landed beside a lake so Fathom could catch a fish and join them. Darkstalker built a fire and pulled a feast out of the bag slung over his shoulder: giant tomatoes, roasted nuts, something he called \"cheese\" that Fathom had never had before, bear paws, camel jerky, and several mystery fruits he'd bought from a traveling RainWing peddler at the market.\n\n\"I've had this one before,\" Clearsight said, poking a small fuzzy brown sphere. \"It's called a kiwi and it's all tingly in your mouth. Ooo, don't eat that one with the purple spots; it'll make your breath smell like vultures for a week.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" Fathom asked. \"A vision?\"\n\n\"Experience,\" she said, pointing significantly at Darkstalker. \"I can't believe you bought it again, after last time!\"\n\nHe laughed, flicking her with his tail. \"I forgot what it looked like! Anyway, I seem to remember it was deliciously worth it.\"\n\n\"For you, maybe, but not for me!\" she protested. \"You can have it if you promise to stay far away from me for the next week. Actually, considering how much work I have to do, sure, go ahead.\"\n\nDarkstalker picked up the offending fruit and threw it in the lake. \"There,\" he said. \"Now some poor unsuspecting fish will probably have a terrible first date because of you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, handsome.\" Clearsight laughed, poking him gently with her tail.\n\n\"Time for presents?\" Darkstalker said. \"Yay absolutely yes?\"\n\n\"I don't have anything for you,\" Fathom said. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"It's totally fine,\" Clearsight said. \"Darkstalker's being dramatic. I don't need presents.\"\n\n\"Wait \u2014 maybe \u2014 hang on.\" Fathom jumped up and hurried into the trees. Indigo was pacing outside the circle of firelight, peering into the shadows and scanning the sky. She stopped as he went past her and watched him paw the ground.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Sure,\" she said quietly, glancing back at the two NightWings. \"I'm just \u2026 worrying. I feel like something bad's about to happen.\"\n\n\"You should join us,\" he said, lowering his voice to match hers. I wish you could. I wish this could be normal, that we could be like them.\n\nShe shook her head. \"I should keep watch.\"\n\nIf anyone attacks us, Darkstalker would probably use his magic to protect us, Fathom thought. It's bad that I find that a little comforting.\n\nHe found what he'd been looking for: a piece of wood just the right size and shape. He took it over to show Indigo, standing close enough to feel her wings almost brush his.\n\n\"Remember the dolphin?\" he said.\n\n\"The beluga?\" she corrected him with a small smile. \"I brought it with me.\"\n\n\"And \u2026 Blob?\" he asked. The octopus had vanished from their bungalow along with Indigo and all her things, but he'd never seen it with her, even here. He was sort of afraid Pearl might have done something to it.\n\n\"I have Blob, too,\" she said softly. \"I keep him hidden. I didn't want to remind anyone \u2026 what you can do.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Of course, he thought bitterly. Because what I can do is so terrible, even when it's just an innocent pet octopus.\n\nHe saw Darkstalker turn to look for him and stepped away from Indigo quickly, hurrying back over to the fire.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Darkstalker asked, peering at the wood.\n\n\"You'll see,\" Fathom said, starting to slice and carve it with his claws. It was softer than the wood he normally worked with, but he thought it would turn out all right.\n\n\"Falling stars,\" Clearsight said in an awestruck voice. \"Look how fast you can do that.\"\n\n\"Lots of practice,\" he said with a shrug. Lots of time on my own with nothing else to do.\n\nSwiftly it started to form a shape between his talons, as if a tiny dragon were trying to hatch right out of the wood. He whittled the tiny claws, smoothed a lashing tail at the end, and dug out sharp spikes all along the dragon's back.\n\n\"I've never made a NightWing before,\" he said apologetically.\n\n\"Wow,\" said Clearsight. \"I love it.\" She held out her talons and he gently set the finished dragon in the curve of her claws. \"It looks just like my friend Listener, doesn't it, Darkstalker?\"\n\nDarkstalker tilted his head at the little carving. \"Can you make me one of those?\" he asked. \"I mean, not right now, whenever you get a chance. I want a SeaWing.\"\n\n\"Yeah, absolutely,\" Fathom said, feeling warmly pleased. He loved making things, but no one at home wanted anything from him anymore. It was kind of thrilling to have friends he could give his presents to again. He glanced around at Indigo, but she wasn't looking their way.\n\n\"Well,\" Darkstalker said, \"it seems a little unfair that I have to follow that. But hopefully you guys will think this is amazing anyway. Fathom, don't freak out. It was just a little tiny spell.\"\n\nFathom's heart sank as Darkstalker fumbled with his bag. \"You used your magic again?\"\n\n\"Ta-da!\" Darkstalker said, opening his talons. Three sapphires glittered in the firelight, shining like captured blue stars. \"One for each of us.\" He passed one to Clearsight. When Fathom didn't reach for his, Darkstalker tossed it at him so Fathom had to jump to catch it.\n\nThe sapphire was cool and heavy and didn't seem to radiate particular menace, but Fathom felt dizzily ill looking at it. How could Darkstalker have done another spell after everything Fathom had told him?\n\n\"I said don't freak out.\" Darkstalker batted at Fathom's wing. \"You just read my soul, remember?\" That was true, Fathom realized. And the balance of sand hadn't changed even a tiny bit, as far as he could tell. Didn't every spell tilt an animus a bit closer to evil? Or were some spells safe? Or was Darkstalker's soul reader enchanted to give the wrong results, as Indigo had guessed?\n\n\"Shh,\" Darkstalker said, tapping Fathom's skull again. \"Listen. I call these dreamvisitors.\" He held his own out toward the flames, turning it so they could see all the facets of the gemstone. \"You can use it to walk in the dreams of any sleeping dragon you know or have ever seen. This way we can be together even when we're asleep. I can visit either of you in your dreams, or you can visit me. You can even step into the dreams of someone all the way across the continent, if you want to. Although I highly doubt anyone else is having dreams as interesting as ours.\" He beamed at Clearsight. \"Happy hatching day.\"\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" she said, leaning over to hug him. \"Isn't it, Fathom? And now we have something that's just ours, the three of us. Because we're best friends.\"\n\nBest friends.\n\nWasn't it a small miracle for him to have best friends, after everything that had happened?\n\nHe studied the sapphire again, trying to remember the last time someone had given him a present or included him in a group just because they liked him. Was it two years ago, when Indigo made him a mango shrimp cake for turning five? His sixth hatching day, last year, back in the Kingdom of the Sea, had come and gone without anyone saying anything about it. He was pretty sure no one had even spoken to him that day.\n\nHe looked over at Indigo again, and this time she was looking his way. She was staring at the sapphire, her face a mask of worry and fear that mirrored his own.\n\nI wish I could just take this and be happy, he thought with a sigh.\n\nBut he should refuse it; he should give it back, along with another lecture about why this was too dangerous and another useless heartfelt plea for Darkstalker to stop using his power.\n\nHe leaned forward, but before he could start, Clearsight suddenly grabbed Darkstalker's talons and jumped to her feet. The flames seemed to flare in her eyes, and she stared into the fire, trembling.\n\n\"What is it?\" Darkstalker shook her talons and pulled her face toward him. \"What did you see?\"\n\n\"It's your mother,\" she said. \"Darkstalker, it's Foeslayer! She's in danger \u2014 Queen Diamond \u2014 there's a plan \u2014 we have to find her.\" Her words scrambled over one another, throwing themselves frantically out into the night, and her wings whooshed open. \"We have to find her and stop her or everything is going to go awful, it's awful what happens to her. Oh no, and then to everyone.\" She was crying now. Fathom had never seen her cry; he'd never seen a vision slam into her so hard before.\n\n\"We'll save her,\" Darkstalker said grimly. \"Fathom, can you find your way back to the palace on your own?\"\n\nFathom nodded, and a moment later Darkstalker and Clearsight were aloft, winging their way toward the moons, toward Foeslayer and whatever calamity they had to prevent.\n\nIt wasn't until they were gone, swallowed by the darkness, that he realized he was still clutching the dreamvisitor in his claws.\n\n\"Where is she now?\" Darkstalker called to Clearsight as they arrowed into the sky.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"In my vision, she was in the Kingdom of Sand \u2014 she was separated from the rest of her wing, and she was surrounded by IceWings, and Queen Diamond was there. But I don't know when it was. It felt very soon, but I don't know, I'm sorry.\" Her wingbeats faltered and she shook her head. \"Why didn't I see it before? Something must have happened \u2014 it came out of nowhere. I'm sorry, Darkstalker.\"\n\n\"Don't be,\" he barked. \"We'll save her.\"\n\nShe didn't answer, which felt like a spear through his heart. There must be a timeline where he saved her. What was the point of Clearsight's visions if they couldn't even keep safe the dragons they loved?\n\n\"Mother was at home this morning,\" he said. \"She's supposed to be home for the next three days. Let's try there first. Maybe she hasn't been sent out yet.\"\n\nThey soared south, diving toward the ravines. It was the middle of the night, and dragons were everywhere, filling the air with wingbeats. Darkstalker wished he could hurl them all out of his way.\n\nHis front door was open, light spilling out across the canyon, but he couldn't hear his parents fighting. Some other strange, unrecognizable noise was coming from his house. He landed and tumbled inside in one movement, catching himself just before he knocked over Whiteout.\n\nIt was his sister making the noise; she was standing in the middle of their living room, her white wings spread wide, keening a weird kind of distress call at the ceiling. She sounded like a great alien bird, piercing and sad and maddening all at once.\n\n\"WHAT IS WRONG WITH HER?\" his father bellowed from the other side of the room. \"SHE'S BEEN DOING THIS NONSTOP FOR AN HOUR!\"\n\nAll Darkstalker could get from Whiteout's mind were flashes of silver that stabbed like poisonous needles, over and over again. He couldn't block it out; could barely think in the same room as her.\n\nClearsight flew to Whiteout's side and wrapped her wings around her, forcing the shrieking dragon to fold and crumple until she was small again, buried in Clearsight's chest, and the sound was muffled by Clearsight's wings.\n\n\"Shhh,\" Clearsight murmured in her ear. \"I know, I know, it's awful, I know \u2026\"\n\n\"Where's Mother?\" Darkstalker yelled at Arctic.\n\n\"How should I know?\" his father snapped back. Picked another stupid fight with me, as usual. Flew off in a huff around sunset, his mind grumbled.\n\n\"Did she go back to the war zone?\" Darkstalker demanded.\n\n\"Why?\" Arctic was suddenly alert from horns to tail, zeroing in on Clearsight. \"Did you have a vision?\"\n\n\"Queen Diamond is going after her,\" Darkstalker snarled. \"We have to find her before your mother does.\"\n\n\"Diamond is miles away!\" Arctic shouted after him as Darkstalker ran down the hall to his room. He slammed the door and pulled out his scroll. There wasn't time for elegant, carefully constructed spells right now.\n\nHe grabbed the first piece of paper he could find and laid it on top of the scroll, scrawling Enchant this paper to show me where Foeslayer is right now.\n\nA map blossomed in ink across the page: the Night Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sand, and the Ice Kingdom, with the positions of the troops marked in different colors: blue for IceWings, black for NightWings. And there, a small red dot, moving across the border into SandWing territory, aiming straight for an encampment of IceWings.\n\nWhere is she going? Why is she leaving the Night Kingdom now, when she was supposed to be home for three more days?\n\nHe looked around frantically and pounced on one of his silver armbands. Enchant this armband to protect F \u2014\n\nHe stopped. She already had something like this.\n\nDarkstalker rushed back into the living room and grabbed Clearsight's shoulder. She jumped, startled out of the rocking motion she'd been doing with Whiteout. His sister looked up, tears streaming down her face.\n\n\"Mother can't be in danger,\" Darkstalker said to them both. \"Diamond can't get to her, because she has the earring Father enchanted for her when they first met. It keeps Mother safe no matter the threat \u2014 right?\" He turned to Arctic.\n\nAnd read the truth in the agonized fury on Arctic's face, even before he heard it in his father's mind.\n\nThe fight.\n\nFoeslayer accused him of not caring about her or the troops, of being too cowardly to sacrifice anything to save her or her friends.\n\nArctic had shouted back that she wasn't exactly risking her own scales, since she knew nothing could hurt her as long as she wore the earring he gave her.\n\nI don't wear this for protection, she'd yelled. I wear it because I love you!\n\nYou love my power, he'd yelled back. That's all you ever loved. You wanted my magic and you got it. That's why you came to the Ice Kingdom in the first place, isn't it? You were looking for me. This was all a NightWing plan. It wasn't ever about me. You didn't ever love me. You came to steal my power.\n\nHow dare you? she'd screamed. I love you more than anything. I wish you weren't an animus. I wish you'd never had a shred of magic. I don't want it; I don't want anything to do with it!\n\nAnd then she'd taken off the earring\u2014\n\n\u2014and thrown it at him\u2014\n\n\u2014and flown away\u2014\n\n\u2014north\u2014\n\n\u2014to the Kingdom of Sand\u2014\n\n\u2014where Diamond was waiting for her.\n\nDarkstalker followed his father's gaze to the corner, where his mother's diamond earring glittered like the last stubborn icicle of winter.\n\n\"She took off her earring,\" he said, disbelieving. \"And you let her fly away without it?\"\n\nArctic hissed and flicked his tail. \"She was angry. She'll be back for it soon, when she's ready to admit that she needs it.\"\n\n\"No, she won't,\" Darkstalker shouted. \"Do you know who hates Mother more than anyone else in the world? A certain mad queen who's related to you, and who happens to be an animus.\"\n\nArctic was already shaking his head. \"My mother wouldn't use her magic against Foeslayer. She's already used it once, for her gift to the tribe. The rule is she can never use it again.\"\n\n\"She's making an exception for vengeance,\" Darkstalker said. He turned to Clearsight. \"It's an enchantment, isn't it? A spell that summons my mother to her. She probably put it in place years ago, but it could never work because the earring protected Foeslayer. But then Mother took off the earring \u2014 and now there's nothing to protect her. That's what changed so suddenly tonight; that's what you didn't see coming.\" He glared at his father. \"This is your fault,\" he hissed.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Clearsight said. \"Don't \u2026 your sister \u2026\"\n\nWhiteout had buried her face in Clearsight's neck and was starting to make the noise again; whirls of a sick hideous blue color were spiraling around and around in her mind.\n\n\"I'll fix it,\" Darkstalker said. \"I can save her.\"\n\nHe ran back to his room, trying to think. What did he have? What could he use?\n\nCould I do the same spell, summoning her back here? He had a feeling Diamond's spell would be ironclad. Once she had her claws on Foeslayer, she was never going to let her go.\n\nCan I enchant the earring to fly to her, to reach her before she gets to the IceWings? No, looking at the map, there was no way it could get to her in time.\n\nMaybe I should just kill Diamond. I could send something to do that right now.\n\nHe turned toward his trunk of weapons and found Clearsight standing in the doorway.\n\n\"You can't kill Queen Diamond,\" she said.\n\n\"I thought I was the mind reader around here,\" he said. \"And yes, I can, and it's a great idea, too.\" He threw open the trunk and started tossing out knives and daggers. Which one was his sharpest weapon? Which would be guaranteed to work?\n\n\"You can't,\" Clearsight said again, \"because her only heir is a niece who is far more ruthless and cunning than Queen Diamond is. Diamond is obsessed with Foeslayer and Arctic and revenge, but at least there's no timeline where she wipes out the whole NightWing tribe.\"\n\n\"The whole tribe?\" Darkstalker said. He found a dagger with a satisfyingly wicked curve to it. \"I think you're exaggerating.\"\n\n\"No,\" Clearsight said. \"If Queen Diamond dies now, and Snowfox ascends to the throne, there are at least four highly probable futures involving a genocide that wipes out the NightWings. You can't kill her right now, Darkstalker. Please believe me.\"\n\n\"But she's going to kill my mother,\" Darkstalker said. \"Are you suggesting I let her get away with it?\"\n\nClearsight bowed her head. After a moment, she said, \"Snowfox has a daughter. In seven years that dragonet will be ready to take over the tribe, and then both Diamond and Snowfox can meet an unfortunate end \u2014 any kind of horrible thing you want. But until then, the consequences \u2026 you have to look at the big picture. You have this same power; you must be able to see it, too.\"\n\nShe was right; he did see what she saw, but it was hard to care about a nebulous future vision of the tribe's destruction while he was watching the small red dot, his mother, flying right into the heart of the IceWing camp.\n\n\"It's too late,\" Clearsight whispered.\n\n\"It's not,\" said Darkstalker. \"I'll get her back. It might take a while, but I'll figure it out.\" He just had to find the right spell, the perfect spell.\n\nWhiteout squeezed past Clearsight and came over to Darkstalker, throwing her arms around his chest. He sank to the floor, holding his sister tightly. Their wings folded around them, black over white over black like overlapping leaves.\n\n\"The hole is too big,\" Whiteout whispered. \"We're going to fall into it forever.\"\n\n\"Not forever,\" Darkstalker promised. \"We'll see her again.\"\n\nWhiteout thought about that for a moment, tears sliding down her snout and trickling over Darkstalker's scales. \"Only one of us will,\" she said. \"Depending on who loses the future.\"\n\nDarkstalker shivered. If that was Whiteout's version of a prophecy, he didn't want to walk into the dark corners of it and try to figure it out.\n\nBut there was one thing he knew, clearly and surely, here in the present.\n\nMother was gone.\n\nAnd it was all Arctic's fault.\n\nClearsight was in the palace library when Queen Vigilance hunted her down shortly after sunrise, five days after losing Foeslayer.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" the queen asked, eyeing the piles of scrolls on the table beside Clearsight.\n\n\"I'm looking for clues about how animus power works,\" Clearsight said wearily. \"There's so much we don't know. Can one animus spell override another? Is there anything animus magic can't do? Do different spells affect their souls in different ways, or are they always the same? But all the scrolls are about IceWings, and it sounds like they've always restricted their magic so much that no one's had a chance to find out anything. I mean, of course no one wants to run experiments on animus dragons, even if you had more than one at a time for comparison, to see who goes evil first. So it's all anecdotal, and \u2026\" She trailed off, realizing that there was a strange glint in the queen's eyes.\n\n\"We have more than one,\" the queen said. \"We have three.\"\n\nArctic, Darkstalker, Fathom: an IceWing, a NightWing, and a SeaWing. Was the power any different in different tribes? Clearsight wondered.\n\n\"But Fathom won't use his power,\" she pointed out, \"and Arctic shouldn't.\"\n\nThe queen paced slowly over to the window, narrowing her eyes at the pale pink sky and the rising sun. A twittering sparrow hopped from vine to vine outside, coming to rest for a moment, unwisely, on the windowsill. Queen Vigilance snatched it up and crunched it between her jaws in one bite.\n\n\"With three animus dragons,\" she said, turning to Clearsight, \"why haven't I won this war yet?\" She picked a small brown feather out of her teeth, glowering.\n\n\"Oh,\" Clearsight stammered. \"It's \u2014 well, it's complicated \u2014 there are so many consequences \u2014 and spells can go wrong, especially with a war scenario where it's all so chaotic. It's kind of an unspoken rule that tribes don't use animus magic in war, isn't it? Because if we use animus magic, then they might retaliate with animus magic, and then it gets \u2026 well, really bad \u2026\" So bad her brain was already starting to hurt, tracing the possibilities.\n\nQueen Vigilance picked up a scroll and hurled it at the door with a loud thump. Immediately one of her guards poked his head inside.\n\n\"Yes, Your Majesty?\" he said.\n\n\"Bring me Darkstalker,\" she ordered.\n\nClearsight twisted her front talons together. \"I'm not sure this is a good idea,\" she said. \"I haven't \u2014 I didn't calculate animus magic into my predictions for the next year \u2014 it'll throw everything off.\"\n\nThe queen selected one of the blank scrolls from the rack behind the librarian's desk. She swept all the history scrolls off the table in front of Clearsight and slapped the blank scroll in front of her.\n\n\"Start calculating,\" she hissed.\n\n\"Y-yes, all right,\" Clearsight said, sitting down. Visions were already crowding in, trying to fill the space of these new ripples, new timelines unrolling. There were too many new futures all of a sudden, ones she'd never even glimpsed before. Some of them wrapped back around to link up with previous visions \u2014 Darkstalker in the crown, or them with their dragonets \u2014 but some of them spilled out into awful new directions.\n\nNever let the queen find out about Darkstalker's scroll \u2014 that was the first, most obvious lesson of her visions. If Vigilance ever discovered it, she'd have Darkstalker killed (if she could \u2026 it wouldn't be easy, Clearsight could see hints of that) and then she'd use it herself, and like Snowfox, Queen Vigilance also had no problem with wiping out entire tribes. A continent ruled entirely by NightWings would be fine with her.\n\nWingbeats sounded outside, and Clearsight looked up to see Darkstalker swoop by the window. Her heart jumped \u2014 happy to see him, terrified about what might happen next.\n\nA few moments later, he came in through the giant double doors of the library, already smiling at the queen.\n\nThat smile \u2014 it was new, and Clearsight didn't like it. It was an \"everything's fine\" smile. It was a \"bad things can't happen to me, and so I won't let them happen\" smile. And Queen Vigilance might not realize it, but it was a \"better not stand in my way while I arrange the world the way I want it\" smile.\n\nClearsight knew that there were only three dragons Darkstalker loved: herself, Whiteout, and his mother, Foeslayer. She thought Fathom might be on the list, too, either now or one day, but she wasn't entirely sure. Sometimes she worried that Darkstalker was friends with him only because Clearsight thought they should be.\n\nBut he truly loved Foeslayer, and losing her \u2026 she knew he must be furious, and devastated, and broken into a thousand pieces on the inside. It scared her that he could hide it so well.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" said the queen. \"Unfortunate about your mother.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he agreed. \"Very unfortunate.\"\n\n\"That was always Diamond's first demand,\" Queen Vigilance said, studying him. \"She wanted Foeslayer, and Arctic, and you and your sister.\"\n\nHe bowed his head slightly. \"Thank you for not giving us to her.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said. \"I had my reasons.\" She left a significant pause.\n\n\"You were hoping to use our animus magic yourself,\" Darkstalker filled in pleasantly. \"And you feel that you've been very patient. And you think now would be a good time for some return on your investment. What did you have in mind?\"\n\nQueen Vigilance held herself very still, as if she had just discovered Darkstalker could read her mind and was trying not to show how surprised she was. She thought she was better at shielding her thoughts, Clearsight guessed. She didn't realize Darkstalker's powers were so strong.\n\n\"Hmm,\" the queen said slowly. \"I'd like to hear your ideas.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have a few,\" Darkstalker said with a jaunty smile. \"Clearsight, darling, may I?\" He crossed to her table, slid the blank scroll over to his side, and started sketching. \"Let's see. Clearsight warned me that killing Queen Diamond at this point could lead to the destruction of the entire NightWing tribe. But what if we get them first? Imagine if I could take a stick, any ordinary stick, and say 'I enchant this stick so that the moment I break it, every IceWing in Pyrrhia will keel over, dead.'\" He tapped the scroll, where he'd drawn a thin line snapped in half, a dozen bleeding corpses all around it.\n\nClearsight stared at him in horror. Vigilance's eyes were shining. \"You can do that?\" the queen whispered greedily. \"It's that simple?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Darkstalker said with a shrug. \"No one's ever tried to wipe out an entire tribe with one spell before, as far as we know.\" He shot one of his new unsettling smiles at Clearsight.\n\n\"But that spell would kill you,\" Clearsight said. \"You're part IceWing. And your father, and your sister.\"\n\n\"We could include exceptions, I'm sure,\" he said.\n\n\"You can't wipe out an entire tribe,\" she said, more firmly. \"There are hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent IceWings. Think of all the little dragonets who aren't part of this war. You're not a dragonet-killer, Darkstalker.\" I didn't think you were an anyone-killer, actually. Not now, not the version of you I thought I knew and could safely love. But maybe I'm wrong \u2026 \"Not to mention what it would do to your soul.\"\n\nHe gave her an ironic look \u2014 a \"you know perfectly well it won't affect my soul\" look. She felt a twist of fear in her stomach. She'd thought putting his magic in the scroll would protect him \u2014 but if he wasn't worried about his soul, did that mean there was nothing to hold him back?\n\n\"Those little dragonets will grow up to be part of this war,\" he pointed out, \"unless we stop them. And isn't tribal genocide exactly what you foresee them doing to us?\"\n\n\"No!\" she said. \"Only if things go very, very wrong, and we won't let that happen!\" She turned to the queen. \"Killing all the IceWings would turn the other tribes against you. It makes things worse, I know it does.\" Worse by Clearsight's definitions anyway. She didn't have to tell Vigilance about the futures where an IceWing genocide led to the NightWings ruling the whole continent.\n\n\"Well,\" Darkstalker said with a shrug, \"if this is too effective for Clearsight's delicate sensibilities, perhaps we could do something more targeted. I could enchant a pile of rocks \u2014 let's say at least a hundred \u2014 which, when dropped on an IceWing encampment, or hidden in the sand where they'll pass by, would explode and kill every IceWing in sight. Then we'd only hit soldiers \u2026 probably. Would that make you feel better, Clearsight?\"\n\nShe turned away from him. She couldn't bear the look on his face, or the queen's, so pleased with their own wicked ideas.\n\n\"I need to study the consequences,\" she said. \"Give me some time to trace the futures before you do anything. Please?\"\n\n\"You're a seer, too,\" the queen said to Darkstalker. \"Can't you see these 'consequences'?\"\n\n\"Some of them,\" he said, studying Clearsight sideways. She lifted her chin. Was he going to take her job? It wouldn't be hard to manipulate Vigilance if he became top seer, if he decided to do that. He'd be able to make the queen do almost anything he wanted.\n\nDarkstalker shifted his wings as if he were shrugging off a blanket. \"But Clearsight's visions are clearer than mine,\" he said. He spread one wing around her, giving her a reassuring hug. \"She spends a lot more time studying them than I do. Thinking about the future is basically what she does all the time. If she wants to check all the timelines first, I suppose that's probably a good idea.\"\n\nHe's still in there, behind the fake smile and the angry ideas. He'll calm down and come back to me, she thought \u2026 she hoped.\n\n\"What about defense?\" the queen asked. \"The IceWings have their cliff that kills anyone who's not an IceWing. Can we have one of those?\"\n\n\"We don't want to keep out all the other tribes,\" Clearsight interjected quickly. \"The NightWings are famous for our intertribal relations and open trade partnerships. Our scrolls and artwork are sold across the continent. Dragons bring us new ideas and inventions and discoveries from all over. If we close our border, especially with violence, we lose all of that. We lose everything that makes us who we are.\"\n\n\"Pffft,\" the queen spat.\n\n\"So maybe it just kills IceWings,\" Darkstalker said. He took his wing away from around Clearsight and leaned over the table, sketching again. \"An invisible shield around the whole kingdom, perhaps. That would free up your air defense teams to join the attack.\" His dark eyes met Clearsight's. \"Seems reasonably harmless. Even you can't object to defending our kingdom from our enemies, right, Clearsight?\"\n\nIt was one of the least terrible of all the bad options, and it would appease the queen for a while. Clearsight nodded reluctantly. \"As long as there's a way to disable it in the future, when we're at peace with the IceWings again.\"\n\n\"That's never going to happen as long as they have my mother,\" Darkstalker said coldly.\n\n\"Get started,\" Queen Vigilance said, rapping the table once with her claw. She pointed at Darkstalker. \"You, the shield.\" Her sharp eyes shifted to Clearsight. \"You, the futures where we crush our enemies with magic.\" She smiled a thin, sinister smile. \"We're going to make an excellent team.\"\n\nThe queen turned and swept out of the library, leaving scrolls fluttering in her wake.\n\n\"Better not tell Fathom about the shield,\" Darkstalker said to Clearsight. \"Or any of these ideas. He's already driving me crazy with his high-anxiety brain, wondering how soon I'm going to snap.\" He rolled his eyes.\n\n\"What is happening to you?\" Clearsight demanded. She poked Darkstalker in the chest. \"You're not a mass murderer. You don't want to spend your magic on making war and killing easier for the queen.\"\n\n\"It's not for the queen,\" Darkstalker said, catching her talon before she could poke him again. \"I want to teach the IceWings a lesson. I want to scare them into giving Mother back.\"\n\nClearsight wavered. \"Oh, Darkstalker \u2026\"\n\n\"You don't see a future where she comes back,\" he said grimly.\n\nShe shook her head. She didn't know what to say. She'd been searching for days, trying every possible timeline, and she couldn't find Foeslayer anywhere. It was as though Diamond had erased her from the map \u2014 and from the future.\n\n\"Neither do I,\" he said. His wings slumped slowly down behind him. \"I've done three spells that should have brought her home, but none of them worked. And I tried to reach her with the dreamvisitor. I've been trying around the clock since she left, but nothing. It would only work if she was asleep \u2026 but she must sleep sometime. Unless \u2026\"\n\nUnless she's already dead.\n\n\"What does your map tell you?\" Clearsight asked.\n\n\"The dot has moved to the Ice Kingdom, far on the other side of their wall,\" Darkstalker said. \"It's been in the same place for the last two days.\"\n\n\"That doesn't \u2014 that doesn't mean \u2014\" Clearsight started.\n\n\"That she's alive? I know. It could be showing me where they buried her. I suppose I could enchant something to find out for sure.\" His voice suddenly cracked, and he dropped to all fours, leaning into Clearsight's shoulder. \"But I don't want to know that, Clearsight. I don't want anything to tell me that she's dead.\" He buried his face.\n\n\"I'm sorry, my love,\" Clearsight said. \"I know it's the worst thing,\" she said through her tears. \"I know it hurts and you're not all right and you're angry and you want to punish the IceWings, but you have to fight the anger and the darkness. Darkstalker, I'm so, so scared. The things I've seen in the future because of this \u2014 the things that happen to you, the things that you do and what you become \u2014 it's all so dark, I almost can't see the light anymore. I'm afraid we're losing our bright paths \u2026\"\n\n\"Stop,\" Darkstalker said. He sat back, brushing tears out of his eyes. \"Don't give up on me, Clearsight.\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" she said faintly.\n\nHe put his talons on either side of her face, looking into her eyes. \"Believe in me. Keep looking at our happy futures and I will, too. If we can just stay focused on those, we'll get there. I promise.\"\n\nShe nodded, because she didn't want to make him feel worse right now.\n\nBut with Darkstalker's sketch of dead IceWings on the table right beside them \u2026 it was hard to believe in any kind of bright future at all.\n\nIt was raining, endless and drizzly and gray from horizon to horizon. Fathom rested his chin on his talons, staring out the window.\n\nIndigo and Wharf were in his room, too; Wharf was sharpening weapons and Indigo was writing a letter home to her father. Lionfish was supposed to be out hunting, but Fathom guessed he had taken refuge from the rain in one of the busy restaurants or museums somewhere in the city below.\n\nFathom glanced across the room at Indigo. He wished they were alone, although it was safer for them not to be. He wished he could go over there and flop into her side and fall asleep with her back rising and falling peacefully below him, the way he used to. He wished he could lean against her shoulder and read a scroll with her and tell her all the things he was worried about.\n\nAlthough, really, it was just one thing.\n\nDarkstalker. Sad, furious Darkstalker, who'd been in mourning for the past three weeks, but a strange kind of angry mourning where he kept insisting his mother would be home soon. Fathom hadn't even seen his friend at all in the last two days. Clearsight was still around, but she was always in the library or her room with her nose in a scroll, and she looked so anxious all the time that he didn't want to bother her.\n\nLast night she'd come to his room for dinner \u2014 well, dinner for him, breakfast for her \u2014 and she'd been more talkative than usual about her power. He hadn't realized how complicated it was, or how many different versions of the future she could see. It almost sounded worse than not being able to see the future at all, but of course he hadn't said that to her.\n\nClearsight had finally buried her head in her talons with a sigh.\n\n\"The hardest thing about being a seer,\" she'd said, \"is that the future is always a million possibilities \u2014 I can see so many ways my life could possibly go. But the past is only one thing. Once something happens, that's it. I can't change it anymore. I can't do anything. All my possibilities narrow into one fixed life, and then we're trapped in that world. I think I can control the future, but the past \u2014 it's gone. I can't fix it anymore.\"\n\nFathom knew a lot about wishing he could change the past. But he'd never felt any kind of control over his future, either. It was sort of mind-boggling to think about.\n\nAs if his thoughts had summoned him, a gleaming wet figure appeared outside, winging his way toward Fathom's balcony. Darkstalker swooped in and shook himself grandly, scattering water everywhere.\n\n\"Hey!\" Indigo objected, covering her letter to keep it dry.\n\n\"Hey,\" Darkstalker replied offhandedly without looking at her. \"Fathom, there's an epic lightning storm coming. Want to fly up to the Royal Tower and watch it with me?\"\n\n\"Sure!\" Fathom said, jumping to his feet.\n\n\"Isn't the tallest tower in the castle exactly the wrong place to be in a lightning storm?\" Indigo objected. \"Not to mention flying while there's lightning doesn't sound like a great idea.\"\n\n\"We'll be fine,\" Darkstalker said dismissively. \"You can stay here.\"\n\nShe gave him a \"when the Kingdom of the Sea freezes over\" look.\n\n\"Oh, Darkstalker,\" Fathom said, hurrying over to his desk. \"I finished the carving for you.\" He picked up the SeaWing statue he'd made for Darkstalker, turning it over between his talons so he could check the little webbed claws and the graceful curving neck. He liked the intelligent expression on the wooden dragon's face, although he had to admit that it made the miniature dragon look unmistakably like Indigo. Would Darkstalker notice? Would he want a statue that looked so much like a dragon he didn't seem to particularly like?\n\nThere was something odd about Darkstalker's expression as he took the carving, a funny combination of triumph and regret, perhaps. He did glance at Indigo, maybe noting the similarity, but when he turned back to Fathom, he was smiling.\n\n\"This is so cool,\" he said. \"Thanks, Fathom. I got you something, too.\" He reached into a pouch around his neck and pulled out a goblet made of shimmering sea-green glass, the same color as Fathom's scales and imprinted with a pattern like ocean waves. \"I was in the market and saw this, and it made me think of you.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Fathom said, delighted. He took the goblet carefully and cupped it in his talons. It reminded him of home, of swimming through sunbeams after pods of singing whales.\n\n\"I found Clearsight a pair of moonstone earrings to match her bracelet, too.\" Darkstalker touched his pouch thoughtfully. He finally seemed to be in a much better mood than he had been in weeks. His eyes were bright and his wings snapped sharply instead of drooping under the weight of his mother's loss.\n\n\"You seem happier,\" Fathom observed cautiously.\n\n\"I am,\" Darkstalker said. \"I'm finally doing something about all my most annoying problems.\" He tossed his head with a grin. \"I mean, I'm Pyrrhia's most powerful dragon, aren't I? I shouldn't have any problems.\"\n\nFathom wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. Every dragon had problems \u2026 and how exactly was Darkstalker dealing with his? But he didn't want to push Darkstalker away now that he finally seemed to be coming back. He'd bring it up again later.\n\nHe carried the goblet over to the fountain to fill it with water. He wished he were as small as his carved SeaWing so he could dive into the green glass bowl and swim around. He lifted it to his snout to drink.\n\nThe blow was sudden, knocking him sideways as the goblet flew across the room. It smashed into the marble wall and shattered into a million tiny green shards.\n\n\"Why did you DO THAT?\" Darkstalker roared at Indigo. For a moment he looked consumed with rage, fire crackling through his veins as he glared at her.\n\nFathom stared at Indigo, his ears still ringing. She faced Darkstalker, her chin raised defiantly.\n\n\"I saw the way you were watching him!\" she said. \"There was a spell on that cup! You couldn't wait to see what was about to happen. What was it? What were you trying to do to Fathom?\"\n\nAcross the room, Wharf looked up, confused.\n\nDarkstalker spread his wings, looking deeply injured. His rage vanished as quickly as it had appeared. \"It was not animus-touched. I didn't do anything to it at all. I just thought it was beautiful and that Fathom would like it. You have an overly suspicious mind, Violet.\"\n\n\"Indigo,\" Fathom corrected him automatically, dazed.\n\n\"I'm sorry about your present,\" Darkstalker said to Fathom, sweeping small green pieces into a pile with his tail. \"I'm pretty sure it was one of a kind.\" He narrowed his eyes at Indigo.\n\n\"I swear he did something to it,\" Indigo said to Fathom. \"I don't know what \u2014 I can only imagine. Something horrible and manipulative, I bet.\" She glared back at Darkstalker.\n\n\"Oh, Indigo,\" Fathom said. \"I'm sure it wasn't enchanted. Darkstalker wouldn't do that to me, right?\"\n\nDarkstalker nodded, putting one wing around Fathom's shoulders. \"Of course I wouldn't,\" he said. \"I can't believe anyone could even think that.\"\n\n\"She's being a good bodyguard,\" Fathom said, although honestly, he was pretty upset with her. No one had given him something that could be called treasure in a very long time, and the goblet had been so beautiful. And now it was so gone.\n\nDarkstalker sighed. \"Well, let's go to the Royal Tower before we miss the lightning. I'll leave this here so it doesn't get wet.\" He set the SeaWing carving down on Fathom's desk, tapping its nose gently.\n\nIndigo turned, her shoulders tense, to reach for her wet weather flying gear.\n\n\"Actually,\" Fathom said, \"I think maybe Wharf should come with me this time.\"\n\nThe thick-headed guard fumbled his knife and looked up at Fathom, clearly startled. Indigo stood with one hand on her spear, her face a mess of hurt and disbelief.\n\nIt's not you, Fathom wanted to say. It's not because you broke the goblet. It's because of the way Darkstalker is looking at you right now, and the fact that he's looking at you so closely at all, and it's just that I think everything will be easier and safer if you quietly fade into the background for a while. That's all. It's not a punishment. I'm upset with you, yes, but I know why you did what you did. And I want you to stay here so you'll be safe.\n\nOf course, he couldn't say any of that in front of Darkstalker. He'd have to explain when they got back.\n\nWharf lumbered to his feet and wrinkled his snout at the pouring rain outside.\n\n\"We're, uh \u2026 we're going out in that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yup,\" said Darkstalker. \"You have gills, I think you'll survive. Let's go!\" He dragged Fathom to the balcony, with Wharf following sullenly behind them. Cold drops of rain pelted Fathom's snout, and lightning crackled in the distance. He glanced back at Indigo, but she'd returned to her letter and didn't look up.\n\nAs they stepped out onto the balcony, Darkstalker opened his pouch again.\n\n\"Want to see the earrings I got for Clearsight?\" he asked Fathom. \"I'm so excited about them. Shoot, my pouch is all dirty from that squirrel I caught yesterday.\" He shook some dirt and pebbles into his talons, shaking his head, and tossed it all over his shoulder into Fathom's room. \"Here they are.\" He held out the earrings, beautiful milky orbs like translucent moons, and Fathom agreed that they were perfect for her.\n\nThey flew off to the Royal Tower, and the whole way there, Fathom kept telling himself he didn't have to worry. He'd be back soon, and then they would talk, and Indigo would understand. He'd convince her to be less paranoid about Darkstalker's intentions and more careful about picking fights with him.\n\nEverything would be fine."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "They returned through the winding interior of the palace instead of flying in the storm again. There was enough lightning outside at this point that most sensible dragons were staying safely indoors. Wharf stomped behind Fathom and Darkstalker, dripping on the white carpets, clearly grumpy about being forced to do his actual job.\n\nFathom had a feeling something was wrong as he approached his room, although he wasn't sure why. Everything seemed normal from the outside. It was very quiet, but that wasn't surprising, with only Indigo inside.\n\nStill, a strange worried sensation was crawling up the back of his throat as he pushed open the inside door and realized that the room was completely dark.\n\n\"Indigo?\" he called.\n\n\"She's not here,\" Wharf said, although that would have been obvious even without their night vision. The room felt abandoned, like a snail shell with the snail sucked out of it. Beside the balcony, the curtains wafted in and out. Darkstalker stepped inside first and glanced around curiously.\n\n\"But \u2026 where would she go?\" Fathom asked.\n\n\"Hunting?\" Wharf guessed. \"Swimming? Out for a walk? Gone to give her letter to the messengers?\"\n\nThose were all reasonable guesses, if it hadn't been pouring outside, but Fathom had a distinctly unreasonable feeling about this.\n\n\"Wharf, go check the kitchen and the messenger center,\" he said. \"Um. Please.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Wharf said with a long, drawn-out sigh.\n\nAs the door closed behind the guard, Fathom crossed to the balcony and peered out at the furious downpour. Indigo wouldn't have gone out for any reason in this weather, surely.\n\nBehind him, Darkstalker breathed a burst of flame to light the lamps by the door and the two candles over the fireplace. Fathom heard him walk across the room and then pause. A moment later, Darkstalker let out a small murmur of surprise, and Fathom turned around.\n\nDarkstalker had picked up the lamp on the desk and now stood there, looking down at something.\n\n\"What is it?\" Fathom asked, hurrying over.\n\nHis friend pointed at a damp, torn scrap of scroll lying on the desk. On top of it, holding it down, was the wooden SeaWing Fathom had carved, and the handwriting on the paper was clearly Indigo's.\n\n\u2002Fathom,\n\n\u2002I'm sorry. You were right. I don't feel safe here. It's not worth the risk. I don't\n\n\u2002I'm going home.\n\n\u2002Please don't use your magic to find me.\n\n\u2002Good luck.\n\n\u2002Indigo\n\nThe earth dropped out from below Fathom's talons. He was floating over an abyss, all the light suddenly hollowed out of the world.\n\nHis eyes were stuck on the crossed-out words. \"I don't \u2026\" what? Love you? Want to be with you? Trust you anymore?\n\nHow could she leave like that?\n\nWithout saying good-bye?\n\nIt didn't feel like something she would do at all.\n\nBut maybe it was the smart choice. This was what he'd wanted her to do, wasn't it? Get far away from him, so she could live a normal life?\n\nStill.\n\nHe couldn't believe she was gone.\n\n\"Sorry, Fathom,\" Darkstalker said sympathetically. \"She was a really great bodyguard.\"\n\nFathom nodded, too shocked to respond. He picked up the SeaWing carving and traced the curve of her neck. She really looked so much like Indigo.\n\n\"Hey, Darkstalker,\" he said, \"would you \u2014 would you mind if I keep this, actually?\"\n\nIt seemed like Darkstalker hesitated for the briefest moment, but Fathom must have imagined it, because almost immediately the NightWing nodded and pulled Fathom into a hug.\n\n\"Of course,\" Darkstalker said. \"Of course you can keep it, if that's what you want. Although \u2014 things that remind you of her probably aren't going to make you feel better.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Fathom said, but he set it back on his desk anyway. He needed it there. Maybe it would hurt to look at it, but it would also remind him that Indigo was out in the world, having adventures and a great life, somewhere where she didn't have to worry about animus magic or what Fathom might do.\n\nI'm on my own now, he realized. Well, sort of \u2014 at least he still had Darkstalker and Clearsight. They still believed in him.\n\nIf Indigo didn't anymore, that was only logical.\n\nHe sighed. This was probably for the best.\n\nAt least she was safe now, wherever she was. Safe from him \u2026 and safe from animus magic forever.\n\n\"You can see the whole Great Diamond from up here,\" Listener said, stretching her long neck to peer out Clearsight's window. \"By the Scorching, is the entire tribe coming to this festival?\"\n\n\"No.\" Clearsight peeked over her shoulder. The enormous piazza below them looked like it was swarming with fireflies. In the lights from the hundreds of lanterns, she could see dragons everywhere. \"Don't forget all the soldiers out defending the kingdom.\" Testing out Darkstalker's new fire-shooting weapons, she thought with a wince.\n\n\"All right, gloomy snout,\" Listener said. \"I can't believe I'm getting ready for the jubilee in the queen's own palace! I knew it would be a good idea to make you my best friend. This is going to be the greatest night of all time.\"\n\n\"It's just another party,\" Clearsight said, laughing. \"The queen seems to have one every other night. There's a full moon, let's celebrate! A second full moon, celebrate again! Her oldest son's hatching day, time for a party! One of her daughters sneezed, someone alert the chefs we need a cake! It's kind of exhausting.\"\n\n\"Oh, you poor thing,\" Listener said. \"Living in the palace, eating truffles with the queen, burdened with all these beautiful necklaces.\" She cast a sidelong glance at the tangle of jewelry in the wooden box beside Clearsight's mirror.\n\n\"You goose. You can borrow anything you want,\" Clearsight said.\n\n\"Really?\" Listener bounded over and started fishing out long sparkling chains. \"Oooo, I wonder what Thoughtful would like. Sapphires, do you think? Or moonstones. No, you're wearing moonstones \u2014 again, I might add. Oh wow, opals!\"\n\nClearsight touched the moonstone earrings Darkstalker had given her about a month ago.\n\n\"I thought they'd match your bracelet,\" he'd said. \"Aren't they cool?\"\n\n\"I love them,\" she'd answered, cupping them in her talons. \"They don't have any spells on them, right?\"\n\n\"That is SUCH A RUDE QUESTION.\" He'd given her his most injured expression. \"Thank you SO MUCH for your faith in me. You are WELCOME to check the scroll and see, if you really think I would do that.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" she'd said, clipping them on. \"I was just asking, don't get all huffy.\" They were beautiful earrings. And they made her feel all sparkly and hopeful, but not in a fake magical enchanted way. (Still, she did check the scroll later, when he was out picking up dinner, just to be sure, although she felt extremely guilty about it. And there were no moonstone earring spells, so basically she was a terrible dragon for even suspecting him for a moment. Poor Darkstalker.)\n\n\"Wait,\" she said to Listener. \"Who's Thoughtful?\"\n\nListener hesitated, holding a web of opals up to her neck. \"I guess you're going to meet him tonight anyway.\" She scrunched her eyes shut. \"He's the dragon I'm going to marry. Fix your face, fix your face!\"\n\n\"I'm not making a face!\" Clearsight objected. \"I'm having zero visions at all right now, I promise. But aren't we a bit young for marriage plans?\"\n\n\"I mean one day, after we graduate and I propose. There are a few steps we haven't gotten to yet, but we will!\"\n\n\"Steps like \u2026\" Clearsight prompted her.\n\n\"Like \u2026 doing things together,\" Listener confessed. \"And him realizing he loves me.\"\n\n\"Listener, have you actually ever spoken to this dragon?\" Clearsight asked.\n\n\"Yes!\" Listener drew herself up, looking offended, although the effect was muddled by the sixteen necklaces she was trying to fit over her head at the same time. \"He said, 'Excuse me, is this the way to the strawberry garden?' and I said, 'It certainly is!' and he said, 'Thank you' and I said, 'Are you going to the jubilee festival tonight?' and he said, 'Urgh, I suppose I have to,' and I said, 'Cool, see you there!' so, obviously, we are destined to be together forever. Don't you dare tell me otherwise!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of it,\" Clearsight said. \"I didn't say one word about the last disaster, did I?\"\n\n\"I didn't even let you meet the last one,\" Listener said. \"You're thinking of the one before that, and no, you never said anything, you just looked like you'd eaten a bucket full of limes every time you saw him.\"\n\nClearsight sighed. \"I don't see what would be wrong with letting me nudge you toward a decent dragon once in a while.\"\n\n\"I can find my soulmate on my own, thank you very much,\" said Listener. \"In fact, I have, and his name is Thoughtful, and he's absolutely dashing.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Clearsight said, resolutely not looking at Listener's timelines. She was getting better at that \u2014 at avoiding the things she didn't want to see.\n\nThat was easier to do when she spent most of her time studying the war with the IceWings for Queen Vigilance. There were so many small things that could change the course of a battle, or wreck a carefully crafted plan, or spin a formation into panicked chaos. She thought the information she fed the queen was helping, but it was hard to tell, as the queen was not exactly prone to effusive gratitude. But at least she'd managed to do enough so far to delay the most horrible new animus plans.\n\n\"All right, I'm ready,\" Listener said. She grinned at Clearsight, twinkling with gemstones and excitement.\n\nI hope this dragon is worth it this time, Clearsight thought.\n\nTogether they hurried to one of the grand balconies and launched themselves into the sky, swooping down toward the plaza below them. Listener found a clear spot to land near the food tents, where the cold air crackled with the smell of roasting meat, sizzling onions, and fried bananas. The queen's favorite musicians were playing somewhere, but the music was drowned out by all the laughing, chattering dragons. An intricate lacework of wires traced over the whole diamond, hung with paper lanterns that had been painted bright gold and purple and green by the kingdom's dragonets.\n\nBut the highlight of the festival was the glasswork competition, in honor of what Queen Vigilance was calling her Glass Jubilee to celebrate forty years of her being on the throne. The entire plaza was dotted with elaborate glass sculptures that glowed in the lamplight. Twisting spirals, weaving tendrils, and delicate beads mingled with glorious bells and vast shipwrecks, towering trees and clusters of captured fireworks. Clearsight wished she could run her talons over every smooth or bubbly surface. She wished she could change her scales to the same shimmering colors as the glass, like a RainWing might.\n\n\"Let's go find Fathom,\" she said. She knew he was here somewhere with Darkstalker. They were supposed to meet near the musicians before midnight, but she wanted to find them sooner.\n\n\"Your pet SeaWing?\" Listener said. \"Do we have to?\"\n\n\"He's the sweetest dragon, if you'd just give him a chance,\" Clearsight said. \"And he's lonely here.\" Especially since Indigo left. He tries to hide it, but he's so, so sad without her. How could she do that to him? I thought she cared about him as more than a bodyguard, but I guess I was wrong.\n\n\"I highly doubt that,\" said Listener, \"considering that you spend practically every waking moment with him.\" She tossed her head indignantly, but followed Clearsight through the crowd without further complaint.\n\nThey navigated around a group of dancing NightWings and through a forest of tall, copper-colored glass spikes. Clearsight guessed that Fathom would want to be in the quietest corner of the festival \u2014 he was better at handling parties now that he'd been to so many of the queen's gatherings, but they still made him a little jittery.\n\nShe was right. Fathom, Darkstalker, and Whiteout were inside one of the game pavilions, playing scales-and-squares on a small board near the central fire. Lionfish stood guard beside them, watching the NightWings around him with a wary expression. Long white curtains hung around the outside of the pavilion, muffling the noise from the rest of the festival and sheltering the fire and the games from the wind.\n\nListener wrinkled her snout when she saw them. \"Playing board games at a festival?\" she snorted. \"How lame can you THERE HE IS!\" She clutched Clearsight's arm frantically.\n\n\"What?\" Clearsight said, startled.\n\n\"That's Thoughtful,\" Listener whispered, hiding behind Clearsight's wing. \"The one with the scroll tower.\"\n\nClearsight glanced around the pavilion and finally spotted the dragon Listener was talking about. He was playing a game by himself that involved stacking small marble scrolls into increasingly complex towers according to a set of patterns. As far as lame solitary party games went, it was kind of at the top, frankly.\n\nHe was handsome \u2014 of course, since he had caught Listener's eye \u2014 but he had a sort of kindness and worry in his expression that made him different from her usual choices. Silver wires wound around his horns and down his forehead, suspending a circle of glass in front of each of his eyes. He looked tired and very focused on what he was doing.\n\n\"Isn't he wonderful?\" Listener said dreamily.\n\nOh dear, Clearsight thought, looking at the dragon and feeling the undertow of visions pulling her away. Oh no \u2026\n\nTwo clear futures lay before this NightWing.\n\nOne was easy and unremarkable \u2014 a pleasant-enough life with someone who loved him more than he loved her, where both of them felt vaguely unsatisfied all the time, but at least nobody died.\n\nThe second was harder and darker, but in it waited great love, and on it depended futures too far distant for even Clearsight to understand.\n\nListener was not that great love.\n\nUnlike her previous crushes, this dragon could actually be hers, if nobody intervened. But he shouldn't be. He was meant for someone else.\n\nClearsight slammed a blank expression on her face. Don't react. Don't let her see what you're thinking.\n\nWhat am I going to do?\n\nDo I let Listener have this kind, worried dragon, or do I interfere and disrupt both of their timelines \u2026 in ways probably neither of them would thank me for?\n\n\"Are you going to say hello?\" she asked her friend, in what she thought was a commendably calm voice.\n\nListener shot her a suspicious glance anyway. \"Not yet,\" she said. \"I'll give him a chance to notice me and come over first. Let's go say hi to your weirdo friends.\"\n\nDarkstalker looked up as they approached, his whole face alight with joy.\n\n\"You look like you're winning,\" Clearsight said, sprawling on the cushion beside him.\n\n\"I'm winning at life,\" he said exuberantly, twining his tail around hers. He hadn't looked this happy since Foeslayer was captured, although he'd been gradually coming back to normal every day. She touched his face and wondered if something had happened. Had he enchanted something to make himself feel happier \u2014 to help him move on from mourning Foeslayer? If he did, would that be wrong?\n\n\"In this turn of the hourglass, yes,\" said Whiteout, moving one of her green scale tokens to capture a black square of Fathom's. \"But when I crush you with my heart piece, then everything flips.\"\n\n\"Don't you even know what you're playing?\" Listener asked her. \"This game doesn't have a heart piece.\"\n\n\"Did you see the Sunrise Ferns?\" Fathom asked Clearsight. \"Those were my favorite.\"\n\n\"I haven't really looked around yet,\" she said. \"Maybe when you guys are done with this game we can all go check out the sculptures.\"\n\n\"And get something to eat,\" Darkstalker suggested. \"I wouldn't mind, like, six goats on sticks right now.\"\n\n\"We don't have to go anywhere YET, though,\" Listener said, poking Clearsight meaningfully.\n\n\"Just go talk to him,\" Clearsight whispered.\n\n\"He's already looked at us twice,\" Listener hissed back. \"He'll come over any moment now.\"\n\n\"Aha!\" Fathom chortled, seizing one of Darkstalker's white squares. \"I have totally figured out your mystifying game. I am the new scales-and-squares champion!\"\n\n\"Ooooh, sorry, friend,\" Darkstalker said. He hopped a blue scale over three of Fathom's squares and swept them off the board. \"Too slow, so sad.\"\n\nListener suddenly dug her claws into Clearsight's shoulder.\n\n\"OW,\" Clearsight protested.\n\n\"Act normal!\" Listener barked. \"Not weird! Totally completely normal!\"\n\n\"You mean like you are?\" Clearsight observed, rubbing her shoulder.\n\n\"Hey,\" said a deep voice behind her.\n\nClearsight and Darkstalker both turned around, and Fathom looked up. Listener's wings fluttered unconsciously and she whacked Clearsight's tail with her own about eighty times in rapid succession.\n\n\"Hey,\" Darkstalker said, sounding guarded. \"I know you from \u2026 music class? You're Thoughtful, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Thoughtful's gaze bounced off Listener and skidded around the others. \"I just, uh \u2014 I just wondered if anyone wanted to try a scroll tower challenge with me.\"\n\nListener looked as though she had lightning darting along her wings. \"Maybe,\" she said coyly, starting to stand up.\n\nArgh, Clearsight thought. I have to do it. I have to. Listener's going to kill me, but it's too important. And it'll only get harder if I don't do it right now.\n\n\"I'm Clearsight,\" she said, smiling at Thoughtful. \"Our SeaWing friend is Fathom, and\" \u2014 she took a deep breath \u2014 \"and have you, um \u2026 have you met Whiteout?\"\n\n\"WINNER!\" Whiteout shouted, nearly overturning the board as she hopped one of her scales around it. \"Empress of all scales and queen of all squares! Weep for your tokens, adversaries!\" She sat up, clapping her talons gleefully, and finally spotted Thoughtful, who was looking at her in a vaguely rapt way.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said with wonder. \"Look how shiny you are.\"\n\n\"Shiny?\" Listener said, snorting a fake laugh. \"Whiteout, what are you ever talking about?\"\n\n\"You made the Cascade of Dreams,\" Whiteout said, ignoring Listener. She reached out, took one of Thoughtful's talons, and squinted at his palm. \"Words and glass, spun flutes and verse. Waterfalls of language in fire-blown claws.\"\n\n\"What?\" Listener said uneasily.\n\n\"You noticed?\" Thoughtful said, tilting his head at Whiteout. \"No one \u2014 you really saw the pieces of scroll inside the waves?\"\n\n\"Tangerine,\" Whiteout said. \"Probability. Spelunking.\"\n\n\"OK, now you're literally just saying random words,\" Listener said.\n\n\"I can't believe you saw them!\" Thoughtful said. \"Nobody's ever understood one of my pieces before.\"\n\n\"I think you should teach me glassblowing,\" Whiteout said, \"and I should teach you clarity.\"\n\n\"WHAT. Is she being ironic?\" Listener asked Clearsight.\n\nThoughtful ducked his head, glanced down at the board, and shot a shy smile at Whiteout. \"How is the empress of scales at scroll tower?\"\n\n\"Amazing,\" said Whiteout. \"You're going to die of awe.\" She rose, shook out her strange white wings, and led the way back to the other side of the tent with Thoughtful close beside her, beaming.\n\nClearsight couldn't believe how well that had worked, with such a small nudge from her. They really were destined for each other. Hiding a smile, she turned away from her friends and noticed movement behind one of the curtains. It was Darkstalker's father, Arctic, watching them all with a grim look on his face.\n\n\"Um, what just happened?\" Listener demanded. \"Can anyone explain that to me?\"\n\nDon't figure it out, Clearsight prayed. Don't blame me.\n\nBut before Listener could turn accusing eyes on Clearsight; before anyone could answer her question; before Clearsight could come up with a distraction, a dragon tore through the curtains, vaulted into the pavilion, and drove a spear into Darkstalker's heart.\n\nWhat Fathom saw was a bolt of steel flashing past; he heard curtains rip and Listener screaming and ivory pieces cascading across the wood floor.\n\nNo. Not again. Not again.\n\nHe saw Darkstalker stagger back, looking stricken.\n\nI can't lose anyone else.\n\nHe saw Lionfish tackle the assassin, who roared and slashed at his face with iron-tipped claws. He leaped forward to help, but by the time he reached Lionfish's side, the attacker was dead. The unfamiliar NightWing lay at his feet, his neck twisted in a horrible unnatural way.\n\n\"Darkstalker?\" Clearsight was still standing, frozen, reaching one talon toward her soulmate. \"What \u2014 how \u2014?\"\n\nFathom took a step back from Lionfish and the dead dragon, and he saw the spear lying on the floor, and he saw that the polished wood was clean, and there was no blood, and then, finally, after all that, he saw that Darkstalker's scales were smooth and unblemished, and his friend was completely unhurt.\n\n\"That's impossible!\" Listener shrieked, nearly in hysterics. \"He killed you! I saw it! He killed you!\"\n\nDarkstalker spread his wings, revealing the glimmer of the ice scales underneath. \"I guess he missed.\"\n\n\"He didn't miss!\" Listener backed away, pointing at Clearsight. \"You saw it, too. Didn't you? Didn't you? That spear should have gone right into his heart.\"\n\n\"I \u2014\" Clearsight glanced at the gathering crowd, then at Darkstalker again. \"I don't know what I saw.\"\n\nListener roared with frustration, darted out of the pavilion, and shoved her way through the gathering crowd until it swallowed her up.\n\n\"It's nothing,\" Darkstalker said. \"Really,\" he added to all the watching dragons. \"This pathetic lizard tried to kill me and failed. Nothing to panic about.\" He stepped over to examine the corpse at Lionfish's feet. \"I would like to know who this is, though.\"\n\n\"And why he tried to kill you,\" Clearsight added.\n\nDarkstalker's eyes slanted sideways at Lionfish for a moment. \"Too bad he's dead and can't answer any questions.\"\n\nLionfish shrugged. \"Sorry,\" he said without a shred of actual repentance. He looked rather pleased that he'd finally had a chance to do some actual bodyguarding.\n\n\"I don't know him,\" Clearsight said, edging away from the dead dragon. She looked at the far corner of the pavilion and frowned slightly, as if she'd expected to see someone there.\n\nDarkstalker turned to Whiteout and Thoughtful, who had rushed back over. \"Do either of you know him?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Thoughtful said. \"By reputation, anyway. His name is Quickdeath and he was \u2014 well, you can guess.\"\n\n\"A killer for hire?\" Clearsight said. \"Are you saying somebody sent him to kill Darkstalker?\"\n\nDarkstalker put one wing around her. \"But he failed. See, I'm so fine. Don't be scared.\"\n\n\"Don't be \u2014 what if that somebody tries again?\" Clearsight demanded. She touched her head. \"I can't see exactly \u2026 I feel like there are very bad things branching from here, but they're all blurry. I don't know how they fit together, or what comes from what.\"\n\n\"We'll figure out who hired Quickdeath,\" said Darkstalker. \"That's easy. And then we stop them from trying again.\" His eyes went cold and hard, like onyx beads. \"Trust me, that'll be even easier.\"\n\nFathom had never seen his friend look so much like his grandfather. He shivered and sank onto one of the cushions, realizing that his wings were shaking. He had to keep it together, especially in front of all these NightWings. It seemed as though hundreds of them were emerging from the dark, pressing toward the edge of the pavilion to see what the commotion was. Everyone stared at Darkstalker, whispering to one another.\n\nHow had he survived? What had stopped the spear?\n\nLionfish poked Fathom. \"We should get you back to the castle,\" he said. \"In case there's a second attack.\"\n\n\"He wasn't after me,\" Fathom pointed out.\n\n\"Maybe not this time,\" he said, \"but let's get somewhere safe, just in case.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Darkstalker interjected. \"I'd like to get out of here as well.\" He nudged Quickdeath's body with one talon, frowning as though he were wondering whether he could do something useful with it. \"Thoughtful, can you stay here and watch the body until we send someone from the queen's guard to investigate?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Thoughtful.\n\n\"I'll stay with him,\" said Whiteout. \"Protect him from angry spirits.\"\n\nThoughtful cast an uneasy glance at the ceiling, as if Quickdeath's ghost might be hovering there with its claws outstretched.\n\nHalf in a daze, Fathom followed Darkstalker and Clearsight out of the pavilion. The crowd of dragons fell back before them, most of them averting their eyes, others staring openly. A pair of small dragonets took one look at Darkstalker and fled with little shrieks of alarm.\n\n\"What was that for?\" Darkstalker muttered grumpily. \"I'm the one that got attacked!\"\n\nBut Fathom understood; he, too, felt a layer of fear spreading underneath his worry for his friend. The more he thought about it, the more he couldn't make the pieces fit. He was sure that spear had been aimed straight and true at Darkstalker's heart. How could Quickdeath have missed so completely? And then why was the spear lying in front of Darkstalker, as if it had bounced off, instead of somewhere beyond him?\n\nA horrible suspicion was growing inside him. Darkstalker had used his magic again, somehow, even though Fathom had begged him not to.\n\nHe eyed the pieces of jewelry the NightWing was wearing. Something that would protect you from any attack \u2026 he saw the appeal, of course. He had often wished he could make something like that for Indigo, before she left. But was it worth protecting someone on the outside, if doing so made yourself more dangerous on the inside?\n\nThey flew back to Fathom's room in the palace, where Lionfish went inside first to make sure it was safe. Wharf was somewhere down in the festival, probably blissfully unaware that he might have been useful tonight.\n\n\"All clear,\" Lionfish said, holding the door open.\n\n\"You can go,\" Darkstalker said to him brusquely. \"Back to the festival or wherever.\"\n\nLionfish shook his head, his expression vaguely surprised. \"I'm not supposed to leave Fathom alone,\" he said. \"Indigo's orders.\"\n\n\"He won't be alone,\" said Darkstalker impatiently. \"He'll be with me. And if Indigo was so worried, she wouldn't have flown off and left him, right?\"\n\nFathom winced.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Lionfish said slowly, as though he hadn't thought of that before. \"Good point.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Lionfish,\" Fathom said. \"I'll be safe with them.\"\n\nLionfish shrugged and left without any further argument.\n\nAs soon as they were safely behind closed doors, Clearsight whirled on Darkstalker. \"What did you do?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Um, survived a deadly assassination attempt?\" Darkstalker said. \"Hooray for me?\"\n\n\"Listener was right,\" she said. \"That spear hit you exactly in the heart. There's no way you should have survived it.\"\n\n\"You sound awfully disappointed,\" Darkstalker snapped back. \"Is that why you didn't warn me that was going to happen? Because you were hoping it would succeed?\"\n\nHer face twisted in outrage. \"You jerk,\" she cried. \"I don't know everything, all right? Minor timelines sometimes become reality before I know it, especially if other \u2014 if someone is trying to surprise me. And I'm glad you're not dead, but I want to know when you made yourself invulnerable and why you didn't tell me about it!\"\n\nFathom crossed the room and started digging in his trunk as they argued. There was something he had to know.\n\n\"Isn't the more important question who tried to kill me?\" Darkstalker shouted. \"Shouldn't we all be like, wow, great idea, Darkstalker, we're so glad you're alive, now let's get on with hunting down the actual bad dragon in this situation?\"\n\nHe turned toward Fathom with his wings spread wide, as if looking for reassurance, and found Fathom pointing the soul reader at him.\n\n\"SERIOUSLY?\" Darkstalker shouted. \"I'm the good guy here! What is wrong with you?\"\n\n\"You shouldn't have used your magic,\" Fathom said, scrunching his eyes to fight back his tears. \"That's a huge spell, invulnerability. It could have tipped you over all by itself.\" The hourglass was spinning slowly, slowly, white and black grains mingling and diverging. Please be good, Fathom prayed. Please please please don't lose your soul.\n\n\"Well, it didn't,\" Darkstalker snapped. \"It so happens I enchanted my scales before I made the soul reader, so you'll find that your little hourglass will give you the exact same result as last time. But thank you all so much for your faith in me.\"\n\nThe hourglass stopped. Fathom realized that Clearsight was studying it as intently as he was.\n\nIf Darkstalker hadn't used his magic since the last reading, it should show the same balance of white and black sand.\n\nDid it? Fathom blinked. He wasn't sure. Was it just his imagination, or were there more white grains of sand this time than last time? Did the hourglass tilt a little more than before? Had the balance shifted slightly toward evil?\n\nMaybe he was being paranoid. It wasn't a big difference, certainly. The black sand still outweighed the white sand.\n\nSo why did Clearsight look troubled as well?\n\n\"There,\" Darkstalker said. \"See? Now can we get on with tracking down my killer?\"\n\n\"Not with magic,\" Fathom said quickly. \"I know that's what you're thinking. Please, Darkstalker, we can find another way. You don't need to spend your magic on this.\"\n\n\"It's a tiny little spell,\" Darkstalker said dismissively. \"And then we'll know for sure. Are you picturing us as stalwart detectives, following leads and interrogating suspects? I don't have time for that, if we're going to figure this out before he tries again.\"\n\n\"You think you already know who it was,\" Clearsight said. She was pacing in front of the fireplace, her wings shaking.\n\n\"Isn't it obvious?\" Darkstalker asked. \"He's wanted me dead since the moment I hatched.\"\n\nClearsight hesitated. Darkstalker's expression, watching her, seemed to be waiting for something.\n\n\"He was there,\" she said finally. \"I saw him.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Fathom asked.\n\n\"My father,\" Darkstalker said. \"I know, I heard his brain muttering.\"\n\n\"But \u2014 if he was there, why didn't he come over to make sure you were all right?\" Fathom said, feeling as if he was missing something. \"Why didn't he jump in to stop Quickdeath?\" He felt a deep stab of the grief he usually kept buried. That's what my father would have done.\n\n\"Because he hired Quickdeath,\" Darkstalker said. \"You're really slowing this conversation down, Fathom.\"\n\n\"Did you hear him think that?\" Clearsight asked. \"When you heard his thoughts \u2014 was there anything about the assassin or wanting you dead?\"\n\nDarkstalker thought for a moment. \"No more than usual. What I caught mostly had to do with my sister. Father hated the way she was looking at Thoughtful. He's probably the one who needs to watch out for assassins next.\"\n\n\"So maybe it wasn't Arctic,\" Clearsight said. \"Wouldn't he be thinking about it, if he knew it was about to happen?\"\n\n\"Not necessarily.\" Darkstalker plucked a stalk of bamboo from one of Fathom's tall vases and started methodically shredding it. \"Besides, I stopped listening to him after the first few grumbles.\" He flung a piece of bamboo into the corner. \"I'm sure it was him, but we can all be sure if I do a spell to find out.\"\n\n\"No!\" Fathom cried. \"Please don't. Think about your soul. Clearsight, you agree with me, don't you?\"\n\nClearsight looked between them for a moment, rubbing her forehead. \"You should tell him about the scroll,\" she said to Darkstalker.\n\n\"Really?\" He looked surprised. \"You think that's a good idea?\"\n\n\"I think it's safe,\" she said. \"As far as I can tell, you show it to him in all of the good timelines.\"\n\n\"And the bad,\" he pointed out.\n\n\"He's not the one who turns them bad,\" she said quietly.\n\nDarkstalker scowled at her. \"Your faith in me is so heartwarming.\"\n\nWhile they argued, Fathom went to tuck the soul reader back in his trunk, and as he did, he saw a flicker of movement under his blankets.\n\nA small white tentacle lifted one corner, and small dark eyes peeked out at him.\n\nBlob!\n\nFathom covered the little octopus quickly, although he wasn't entirely sure why he was hiding him from his friends.\n\nWhy is Blob still here?\n\nHe knew that Indigo had flown away without most of her stuff \u2014 he'd guessed she was in a hurry to leave before he got back. But he'd always thought she'd taken Blob with her. If she hadn't \u2026 what did that mean?\n\nDid she leave him as a message to me? To make sure I know she wants nothing more to do with me?\n\nThat didn't seem like something she would do. She loved Blob, didn't she?\n\n\"Fathom?\" Darkstalker said behind him. \"I'm trying to tell you something totally momentous over here. It'll change your life, trust me.\"\n\nFathom turned to his friend with a smile, but his heart was starting to whisper anxiously.\n\nWhy did Indigo decide to leave without Blob?\n\nWas there something else going on?\n\nIs there something I'm missing \u2026 and how can I find out what it is?\n\nThe sun was sliding cold yellow claws over the eastern horizon as Darkstalker flew home from the palace. Below him, the detritus of the festival was being swept away by a busy flurry of worker dragons. Soon only the paper lanterns and the gleaming shapes of the glass sculptures would remain. He spotted one dragon industriously scrubbing out the game pavilion, even though Quickdeath had died bloodlessly and his body had been removed.\n\nDarkstalker beat his wings to rise higher, as close to the sun as he could manage.\n\nHis talk with Fathom had not gone exactly as he'd imagined.\n\nHe'd expected a little more excitement \u2014 a little more gratitude. He'd expected that Fathom would be thrilled to find a way to use his powers without damaging the soul he worried so much about. He'd rather expected Fathom to make his very own animus scroll right then and there.\n\nBut instead his friend had remained stubbornly unconvinced. \"It could still be affecting you,\" he argued. Darkstalker could see the images piling up in Fathom's mind: Albatross stabbing the queen, the dead bodies of his parents, the blood everywhere. Every time Fathom thought about animus powers, that was straight where his mind went \u2014 massacres and devastation and the loss of nearly your entire family.\n\nNot only that, but tonight his mind was suddenly occupied with the mystery of some kind of octopus. Fathom's thoughts were all Indigo, Indigo, Indigo again, just when they'd been starting to get interesting. He spent more of their conversation thinking about her than focusing on the wonderful news Darkstalker was telling him. And as he often did, he forgot to even worry about Darkstalker reading his mind.\n\nFinally Fathom had rubbed his eyes, shaking his head fiercely. \"Nobody knows exactly how animus magic works. The only safe option is to avoid using it at all.\"\n\n\"Why would we have this power if we're never supposed to use it?\" Darkstalker had shouted in frustration, which was when Clearsight had decided it was time for everyone to go home and get some sleep.\n\nWhatever. If Fathom doesn't want to listen to reason, that's his problem.\n\nMy problem is that someone tried to kill me tonight.\n\nHe set his jaw grimly. There were plenty of future timelines where Arctic tried to kill him \u2014 but not many where he succeeded.\n\nStill, there were a few, even with Darkstalker's invulnerability. Now that Arctic surely knew about that, he'd have to plan his next attack on Darkstalker more carefully \u2026 maybe even use his own magic. Arctic, in fact, might be the only dragon in the kingdom who could actually kill Darkstalker.\n\nHe should have used his power to do it right the first time.\n\nSo why didn't he?\n\nBecause he didn't want anyone to know it was him who killed me. Right?\n\nDarkstalker soared down toward his front door, which was just starting to turn from gray to red as the light of the sun reached it. All the flowers in their miniature hanging gardens were dead. No one had gone anywhere near them since losing Mother.\n\nHe pushed open the door and found Whiteout lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling with her wings flopped out to either side of her. She was wearing one of the trinkets from the festival, a black rope necklace with a golden glass seashell pendant, turning it between her claws. He wondered if Thoughtful had bought it for her.\n\n\"Good morning,\" he said, nudging his sister's tail affectionately. \"Dreaming of your new admirer?\"\n\n\"Thoughtful,\" she said, a statement rather than a question. \"Yes and no. I do like him.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to try to foresee what will happen with you two?\" Darkstalker asked. He still wasn't as good at this as Clearsight \u2014 he tended to see the most probable outcomes, and everything else was usually muddled by random events and small deviations. Perhaps if he had a lot of time to devote to studying all the futures, the way she did, he'd be able to follow them more clearly. But who had that kind of time, or that kind of focus? He'd have to be trapped underground for months with nothing else to do.\n\n\"No, thank you,\" said Whiteout, which was such an ordinary response that Darkstalker peered at her curiously.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked, touching her neck. It didn't feel warmer than it should.\n\n\"I feel funny,\" she said. \"All my words are coming out wrong.\"\n\nActually it seemed as if they were coming out right for once, which was worrying. Darkstalker wished that he could read her mind and see what was going on in there.\n\n\"Maybe you just need some sleep,\" he said. A small clatter from one of the back rooms distracted him. \"Is Father here?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nDarkstalker stepped quietly down the hall until he was standing in the doorway to his father's room. Foeslayer's side of it still looked exactly the same, everything untouched except perhaps her blankets, which looked as though someone had been lying on them. But it was freezing cold in the room, with actual icicles hanging around Arctic's sleeping spot. He must have been using his frostbreath to make the room a bit more to his own liking.\n\nArctic had his back to Darkstalker, fiddling with something at his desk. Fragments of ice were scattered around his feet and a piece of parchment that looked like a map stuck out from under his tail.\n\nCan't wait much longer, his brain muttered. Not sure this will be enough, though.\n\n\"I'm alive,\" Darkstalker announced. \"In case you were worried.\"\n\nArctic stiffened, then cast an evil glance over his shoulder at his son. \"Can't say that I was.\"\n\n\"I know you were there,\" Darkstalker said. \"At the pavilion. Watching.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Arctic, turning back to his work. \"Care to explain how that spear bounced off your scales?\" This one gets more dangerous all the time, he thought. Maybe I should do what Mother wants.\n\n\"Did you know the dragon who attacked me?\" Darkstalker asked instead of answering.\n\nHis father shrugged. \"I've seen him around court, but never spoken to him. I'm not interested in knowing every common NightWing in the tribe.\"\n\nDarkstalker paused, waiting for Quickdeath's name to appear in Arctic's thoughts. But it didn't. Arctic had a brief memory of passing Quickdeath in the halls of the palace, and that was it.\n\nCould Darkstalker be wrong? Or had Arctic finally developed the strength to shield some of his thoughts?\n\n\"Why do you think he tried to kill me?\" he tried.\n\nArctic snorted. \"Because you're an arrogant fool. Because you flaunt your magic and don't care who you offend. Because you insulted his mother, or stole his prey, or cheated off his test, or read his mind when he told you not to. I can think of a million possible reasons, but what does it matter? He's dead now, isn't he?\"\n\nThat idiot, Arctic thought, flicking his tail. He should have known it wouldn't be that easy to kill an animus dragon. Couldn't have gotten me that way, either, not if I was wearing my shielding earring.\n\nDarkstalker tipped his head. He hadn't known that his father had a \"shielding earring.\" He wondered which one it was: the light blue diamond in his left ear, or the silver narwhal in his right.\n\nMore important, these didn't sound like the thoughts of a dragon who'd just tried to have him killed. Arctic seemed more \u2026 disinterested than anything else.\n\n\"You're probably right,\" Darkstalker said, backing out of the doorway and heading to his own room.\n\nBehind him, he heard Arctic swivel around again, thinking, Now that was suspicious. What does he mean, I'm probably right? What's that dragon hiding? And then, a few moments later, as Darkstalker was unlocking his door, Arctic thought, Better act soon, before anyone can stop me.\n\nDarkstalker paused, listening, but Arctic's thoughts didn't elaborate further. Maybe he wasn't the one who hired Quickdeath, Darkstalker thought, but it certainly sounds like he's still planning to kill me eventually.\n\nDarkstalker locked the door behind him and started pacing up and down in his room. He wished Clearsight were here, to help him figure out what to do next. What would she see Arctic doing, if she looked ahead in his timeline?\n\nAlthough he had to admit his faith in her powers was shaken by the attack tonight. Why hadn't she seen it coming? Who could have known enough to trick her foresight that way \u2014 and his, for that matter?\n\nHe'd have to find out later what evil scheme was circling around Arctic's head. Right now all that interested him was finding his would-be killer.\n\nWho besides Arctic might want Darkstalker dead?\n\nHe paused next to his desk, thinking of the last dragon who had dared to threaten his life.\n\nHe remembered the cold prick of steel at his throat. The tension that hummed through her wings whenever he walked into the room. Her dark blue eyes, always watching him, as though he was the one who posed a danger to Fathom.\n\nDragons who try to kill me don't fare too well, do they, SeaWing?\n\nHe swept the clutter off his desk. Sorry, Clearsight. He had promised her he'd wait before doing any spell \u2014 that she could be there if he decided to do it. But he didn't want to wait. He hated the idea that someone was out there wishing for his death, planning to kill him \u2026 planning to derail all his glorious futures and blink all his dragonets out of existence. How dare they. He needed to find out who they were and punish them.\n\nWhoever it was had to know immediately that they couldn't do this to him and get away with it. They had to suffer the consequences as soon as possible. He was the most powerful dragon in Pyrrhia. He should act like it.\n\nHe took his scroll and his secret inkwell out of their hiding place, rolled it to the newest blank spread, and weighted down the corners with little statues. Next he pulled out a scrap of parchment and set it on top of the scroll. He dipped one claw in the red ink and wrote, Enchant this parchment to reveal the name of the dragon who hired Quickdeath to kill me tonight.\n\nAs he carefully wiped the ink off his claw, jagged red letters began to appear on the parchment, slowly scrawling a name across the stark white page.\n\nDarkstalker froze as he realized what it said.\n\nOh, yes. There are definitely going to be consequences.\n\nNow I know who has to pay.\n\nClearsight slept very poorly that morning, troubled by nightmares of horrible futures \u2014 betrayals and murders and war without end. It seemed as though all her worst possible visions were crowding through her head at once.\n\nShe woke up with massive pain in her temples and jaw, as though she'd been clenching her teeth all night. The sun stabbed sharply through a gap in the thick curtains, pouncing on her eyeballs and setting them ablaze. She covered her head with a pillow and tried to find a timeline with an instant miracle cure for headaches in it.\n\nDrinking water would help. So would breakfast. Hiding under the covers for the rest of the day would not.\n\nShe got up, taking deep breaths, and adjusted her moonstone earrings, which had slipped half off in the night. She had to remember: sometimes dreams were just dreams, not visions of the future. Even if it felt like the end of the world, the argument last night didn't have to be the beginning of a horrible spiral into darkness.\n\nAnd if it was, she could stop it. She wouldn't let the darkness come for her and her friends. As long as Darkstalker listened to her \u2014 and he would, in almost every timeline she could see now \u2014 everything would be all right.\n\nClearsight stumbled to the window that looked over the inner courtyards of the palace. She twitched the curtains aside and peered out at the garden below. It was after midday, and not many dragons were down there, but she spotted a line of royal guards blocking off one section \u2014 and beyond them, a pair of NightWings, walking and talking close together.\n\nOne was obviously the queen. The other \u2026 Clearsight recognized the long neck and sharp-edged bones from afar.\n\nThat was Allknowing \u2014 Queen Vigilance's fired seer.\n\nWhat was she doing here?\n\nClearsight rubbed her eyes and splashed water on her face, then hurried down to the garden, taking the stairs instead of flying, so it wouldn't look as if she was swooping in on the queen's private conversation.\n\nThe guards saw her coming and one of them called to the queen. \"Your other seer is here, Your Majesty.\"\n\nQueen Vigilance poked her head around a rosebush and eyed Clearsight. \"I see,\" she said. \"Any new visions?\"\n\n\"Not about the war, Your Majesty,\" Clearsight said with a bow. \"Not in the last day. My previous predictions still stand.\"\n\n\"Really,\" said the queen. She beckoned Clearsight forward until the three of them \u2014 Vigilance, Clearsight, and Allknowing \u2014 were ensconced inside the rose bower. Allknowing smirked down at Clearsight. Her flicking tail caught a few yellow roses and ripped them loose, scattering petals like drops of gold everywhere.\n\n\"So,\" the queen hissed to Clearsight. \"A question for you. Have you ever had any visions about your truly beloved?\"\n\n\"About \u2014 you mean about Darkstalker?\" Clearsight blinked with surprise. Of course she'd had hundreds, thousands of visions about Darkstalker \u2026 including several the queen would surely quite like to know about. But those were the ones that weren't going to happen.\n\nShe could still tell part of the truth, though. \"Most of my visions about Darkstalker have to do with our future together,\" she hedged. \"I've had visions of our dragonets, of our future home near the palace, of the ways in which we both keep using our powers to serve you.\"\n\n\"And have you seen how I die?\" the queen demanded.\n\nChills slid along Clearsight's neck and spread through her scales. What had Allknowing told her?\n\n\"I've seen a few possibilities,\" she said carefully.\n\n\"Oh, yes?\" said the queen. \"Not worth mentioning, were they?\"\n\n\"They're all so far into the future,\" Clearsight protested. \"It'll be another ten years before one of your daughters has the courage to challenge you, and the probability of her winning is very low.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" said Queen Vigilance. Her suspicious look encompassed both of her seers now. \"And of all my death scenes, which comes the soonest?\"\n\nClearsight tried. She closed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could, looking for the darkest paths, which made her realize she hadn't had any visions of Darkstalker in his twisted crown for at least a month. She'd assumed \u2026 she'd hoped that meant it had fallen out of the realm of possibility. That maybe Darkstalker's recent contentment was real, and everyone was going to be safe.\n\nNow, searching for it as intently as she could, flashes began appearing behind her eyes: Darkstalker, the crown, the dead queen \u2014 but she couldn't keep them there. They flashed away as soon as she tried to look at them or piece them into the web of the future.\n\n\"Don't hurt yourself,\" Allknowing sneered. Clearsight opened her eyes and looked at her former teacher. How could Allknowing have a vision of Darkstalker doing something terrible when Clearsight couldn't see it?\n\n\"Share your mumbo jumbo,\" Queen Vigilance ordered her former seer, flicking Allknowing in the face with her tail.\n\nAllknowing cleared her throat and fluffed her wings importantly.\n\n\u2003\"Hatched of ice and hatched of night\n\n\u2003Cursed with moons all shining bright\n\n\u2003Longs for power not his own\n\n\u2003Comes to steal your very throne.\"\n\nQueen Vigilance snorted. \"Remarkably clear. For the first time ever.\" Her pitch-black eyes narrowed at Clearsight. \"Any of that ring a bell?\"\n\n\"She's making it up!\" Clearsight protested. \"Darkstalker wouldn't do that!\"\n\n\"Why should I believe you?\" the queen demanded, furious now. \"You're so enchanted by him that you wouldn't tell me even if he was a threat, would you?\"\n\n\"I don't have to!\" Clearsight cried. \"He's really n \u2014\" She broke off suddenly.\n\nEnchanted by him.\n\nAm I?\n\nHer talons went slowly to her earrings. But I checked the scroll.\n\nAnd yet \u2026 I didn't notice an invulnerability spell in there, either.\n\nIf he can keep one spell a secret from me, he could have done another.\n\nBut how? It would have to be in the scroll. Wouldn't it?\n\nThe chills had become a cold gusting wind of terror. Had he been lying to her all along? Did he really keep some of his animus power in his own claws? But surely she would have seen it in some future, if that were true.\n\nShe fumbled to unclip the earrings, dropping them with small plinks on the ground.\n\nAnd visions rushed in, visions upon visions upon visions, all the darkness she'd ever seen but worse and worse and worse and worse: Darkstalker murdering the queen and stealing the throne; NightWings fleeing by the thousands; the city burning, the ground shaking; Darkstalker in his crown laughing and killing with ease.\n\nThese weren't visions of the distant future, either. These were about to happen now. The tipping point was trembling on a knife's edge. If Clearsight could do anything to stop it, she didn't have a moment to lose.\n\n\"It was you,\" she said to the queen, bewildered. \"You sent the assassin after Darkstalker.\"\n\n\"After I heard her prophecy,\" the queen said, tipping her head at Allknowing, \"how could I not?\"\n\n\"You fool,\" Clearsight cried. \"You're the one making it happen! He wouldn't have \u2014 he might not \u2014 but now, but now \u2026\" She took a step backward. He was coming, it was all coming, all the bad things rushing their way. \"I have to go.\"\n\n\"No,\" said the queen sharply. \"I won't let you conspire with him anymore. Guards! Lock her up!\" she shouted.\n\nBurly NightWing guards pounced from behind the rosebushes, as if they'd been lying in wait for this moment, but Clearsight saw them coming. All at once the future was spread clearly over the present, as it hadn't been since she put the earrings on, and she saw where the guards would be to grab her and she saw how to twist away and her escape path into the sky, and she took it, winging free in one wild heartbeat.\n\n\"I'm the only one who can stop him,\" she shouted to the queen's furious upturned face. \"And I will. I promise I will!\"\n\nShe evaded the talons that reached for her and the wings that blocked her way, diving and dodging until she was over the palace wall and soaring down toward the Great Diamond.\n\nA moment later, new wingbeats came up alongside her and she nearly lashed out, before she realized with a surge of relief that it was Fathom, glowing emerald green in the sunlight.\n\n\"What happened?\" he called. \"I heard shouting \u2014 I saw you and the queen out my window \u2014 are you all right?\"\n\n\"We have to stop Darkstalker,\" she cried. \"He's on his way here to kill the queen.\"\n\n\"What?\" Fathom's wings faltered. \"Now? Why \u2014 oh.\" His features shifted as he figured it out. \"She's the one who sent the assassin.\"\n\n\"Darkstalker really doesn't like it when dragons try to kill him,\" Clearsight said.\n\n\"Maybe we can reason with him. He forgave Indigo, remember?\" Fathom pointed out as they swooped past the library.\n\nClearsight's heart stopped again. Did he?\n\nWhat if she didn't really leave? What if he did something to her with one of his secret spells?\n\nWHERE IS SHE?\n\n\"I see him!\" Fathom cried, adjusting his flight path.\n\nDarkstalker was beating his way toward the palace, menace radiating from every scale. Not many NightWings were out now, in the middle of the day, but those that were swerved wildly to get out of his way, then gathered to whisper together as he passed.\n\nI knew the whole tribe would know who we were one day, Clearsight thought, but I wanted us to be their saviors \u2014 not for everyone to be scared of him.\n\n\"Darkstalker!\" she yelled.\n\nHe paused and hovered in place, looking around as she and Fathom swooped up to him. She saw his gaze move to her ears, and she saw him realize that she'd taken off the earrings. He knew that she knew what he'd done. His face set into lines of defiance.\n\nShe pointed to the roof of the library, and the three of them soared down to land on an open flat spot between the graceful spires.\n\n\"I'm not going to let you kill the queen,\" she said as their talons touched down.\n\n\"She started it,\" Darkstalker said, his mouth quirking unbelievably into a little smile.\n\n\"She's an idiot,\" Clearsight said, \"but we can stop her from trying again. We can go back to the way things were.\"\n\n\"Yes, please, Darkstalker,\" Fathom said, pressing his front talons together.\n\n\"Can you really see that?\" Darkstalker asked Clearsight. \"She'll never trust either of us. You'll always be in danger, and therefore so will I, because I care about you, and Vigilance will use that against me.\" He paused, looking her over. \"Unless I enchant your scales, too.\" His talons reached for a bag slung around his neck and Clearsight realized with a jolt that he must have his scroll with him. So he can use his magic on the queen.\n\n\"No,\" she said, so sharply that Darkstalker and Fathom both winced. \"I don't want any more spells on me, Darkstalker. I can't believe you betrayed me like that.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" he said innocently.\n\n\"The earrings!\" she cried. \"You put a secret spell on me! You messed with my power, Darkstalker. Don't you see how wrong that is?\"\n\nFathom took a step back, his face crumpling into shock and sorrow.\n\n\"Oh,\" Darkstalker said, flipping his tail dismissively. \"That was such a little spell. I just wanted to keep you focused on the happy futures, like we talked about. I knew you couldn't do it on your own, no matter how much you promised me you would. So the earrings faded back all the dark paths, that's all. I was only trying to make you happier, Clearsight.\" He tipped his head, looking for a moment as though he really meant it, as if he cared about her more than anything and had been trying to help.\n\nHe might actually believe that \u2014 but the truth is, he was just making his life easier. He didn't want me standing in his way as he went down those dark paths.\n\n\"That's why I didn't see Quickdeath coming,\" Clearsight said. \"Between the earrings and Allknowing trying to trick me \u2014 that's how I was taken by surprise. What if all my predictions about the war have been wrong, too, Darkstalker? While I'm handing out all these rose-colored prophecies, dragons could die in the real future.\"\n\n\"I was double-checking your work,\" he said, smiling. \"Don't worry.\"\n\n\"You arrogant porcupine!\" she shouted.\n\n\"This has been delightful,\" he said. His wings flared open. \"But I have a queen to kill.\"\n\n\"Stop!\" Clearsight leaped at him, tumbling him backward on the roof until she had him pinned down. \"I'm not going to let you do that!\"\n\nDarkstalker looked up at her, and she saw with a shiver of fear that he was genuinely puzzled.\n\n\"Why not?\" he asked. \"I'll be a great king. Can't you see that? We'll be the strongest tribe in Pyrrhia. Our kingdom could stretch from shore to shore. You and me, side by side, bringing harmony to the whole continent, with our dragonets inheriting the throne after we're gone.\"\n\n\"After we're gone?\" she said bitterly. \"You won't ever let that happen. It's a short step from invulnerability to an immortality spell. Have you done it already?\"\n\nHis silence answered that question. Darkstalker was immortal now \u2014 which was one of the most important things Clearsight was supposed to prevent to protect the future.\n\nWas there any hope left?\n\nA vision trembled through her mind, rumbling up from below and gathering strength like a volcano.\n\nThere was only one way to stop Darkstalker from killing the queen right now \u2014 and it might not save Vigilance in the future, and it definitely led to more bloodshed, but it would give them at least a moment to think, if she took this path.\n\nIf she told him what was happening at this moment, while his back was turned.\n\nThen she saw that she didn't have to; the vision was sweeping over him as well. He sat up abruptly, knocking her away.\n\n\"Whiteout,\" he said in a strangled voice.\n\n\"Your father has her,\" Clearsight said, touching her forehead. \"He's taken her and they're flying \u2026\"\n\n\"North,\" Darkstalker finished. Murder glinted in his eyes. \"He's taking her to the Ice Kingdom.\"\n\nThey were flying before Fathom quite realized what was happening. He only knew his friends were going north as fast as their wings could take them and he was going, too.\n\nAt one point he felt something like a shock sizzle through the air, just as they flew out of the mountains. It startled him into glancing down, and he nearly tumbled out of the sky, his stomach heaving. The land below was littered with IceWing corpses, charred and ripped apart into tangles of white-blue limbs.\n\n\"What happened here?\" he yelled to Clearsight.\n\nShe glanced at Darkstalker, flying furiously ahead of them. \"He put up a border shield,\" she called back. \"It kills any IceWings who try to enter the kingdom.\"\n\nFathom should have guessed. His magic did this.\n\nHe closed his eyes tight, beat his wings faster, and flew on.\n\nSoon he saw sand below him, a vast expanse of desert that rippled like a pale ocean. Down there was the Kingdom of Sand, ruled by Queen Scorpion. All he knew about her was that she allowed the NightWings and IceWings to battle across her territory in exchange for large piles of treasure from each of them; rumor had it she played both sides and didn't care who won. The desert kingdom was big and empty enough for the battles to play out without much collateral SandWing damage, as long as the warring dragons stayed away from her oasis towns.\n\nThe sun had passed the high point of the sky and was sliding down into late afternoon, but it was blisteringly hot on Fathom's scales. He wished he could dive into an ocean to cool them off. He wondered if they had made a grave mistake, flying into the Kingdom of Sand without water. But he followed his friends; he would follow them anywhere.\n\nHe couldn't believe their fight. He could barely understand it. From the outside, he'd thought their relationship was perfect. The way they'd suddenly exploded \u2014 the idea that Darkstalker had cast a spell on Clearsight \u2014 the fact that he'd been on his way to kill his own queen! Fathom wondered if he really knew his friend at all.\n\nSo why are you following him into a strange kingdom? whispered the worries at the back of his mind. Without either of your guards?\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Clearsight called. She swept one wing around at the endless desert. \"They could be anywhere.\"\n\nHe checked himself in the air, frowning at her, and then soared quickly down to the ground. When Fathom landed beside him, Darkstalker was unrolling a scroll on the shifting sands.\n\nThat's the scroll, Fathom thought with a start. Where he keeps all his power.\n\nDarkstalker reached into his bag again and pulled out a dagger. Its jagged edge caught the sun, flashing into Fathom's eyes and blinding him for a moment.\n\n\"What are you going to do with that?\" Clearsight asked, resting her wing against one of Darkstalker's.\n\nHe shook her off. \"Not what you think.\" He placed the dagger on the scroll, weighing down the flapping paper, uncapped an inkwell, and scrawled Enchant this dagger to lead us to Arctic and Whiteout, then stab Arctic once in the foot, injuring him enough that he has to stop, but not so badly that he bleeds to death. Above all else, stop him from crossing the Great Ice Cliff.\n\nDarkstalker wrote with unhesitating confidence, ignoring the shiny green beetle that popped out of the sand, scurried over his claws, and buried itself again. The wind lifted his wings and the sun burnished his scales to gleaming ebony. He looked heroic and sure. He didn't even have to pause and think. He knew exactly what he wanted to write, his carefully crafted spell.\n\nHe has no doubts, Fathom thought. He wished he could have just a moment of feeling that way, of that kind of belief in himself.\n\nBut it was better that he didn't. The world might not survive it if he let himself stop being afraid, even for a moment.\n\nDarkstalker shot him an irritated glare. He'd finished the spell, but the dagger wasn't moving. \"Why isn't it working?\" he growled.\n\n\"Maybe he's protecting himself with his own magic,\" Clearsight suggested. \"Maybe instead of attacking him, we should \u2014\"\n\nDarkstalker flicked his tail, cutting her off. \"Yes! His shielding earring!\" He stabbed his talons into the sand and dragged out the green beetle, who squirmed frantically in his claws. It had tiny black pincers that snapped at the air.\n\nEnchant this beetle to find Prince Arctic as fast as possible and take off his shielding earring, Darkstalker wrote.\n\nThe beetle flickered into the air like a puff of smoke and a few moments later, the dagger rose up and spun like a compass needle. Suddenly it shot away, heading northwest.\n\n\"Let's go!\" Darkstalker cried. He threw the scroll back in his bag and hurled himself into the sky. He flew as if his wings were possessed and Fathom had to strain every muscle to keep up. Next to him in the air, Clearsight flew with the same determination. Her eyes had a distant measuring look, as though she was climbing down into a dark abyss, trying to see the bottom.\n\nThe dagger flashed and danced ahead of them as they flew and flew. Finally, as the sky was just starting to fade to darker blue, the dagger put on a burst of speed, and a moment later there was an agonized shriek from somewhere up ahead.\n\nFathom caught up to Darkstalker in time to see a silvery white shape fall out of the sky and crash-land on a dune below them. Another figure, black-and-white, drifted down after him.\n\n\"We found them!\" Darkstalker cried exultantly.\n\nThey landed in a semicircle around Arctic, with Clearsight and Fathom on either side of Darkstalker. Whiteout crouched beside her father, examining one of his back feet, where the dagger was buried to the hilt and blue blood poured out over the sticky dark sand. Another thin trickle of blood slid down his neck from one ear, where an earring had once been.\n\nArctic glared up at Darkstalker, his face twisted with pain and fury. \"Just let us go,\" the IceWing hissed. \"I let you live. Do me the same courtesy. We never have to see each other again.\"\n\nDarkstalker calmly slid his scroll out of his bag. \"Where do you think you're taking my sister?\" he asked.\n\n\"She wants to go with me,\" Arctic snarled. \"Tell him, Whiteout.\"\n\n\"I want to go with Father,\" she said. Even Fathom could see that there was something wrong with her voice, with her eyes. Clearsight reached for her and Whiteout jerked away, keeping her talons on her father.\n\n\"She's going to marry an IceWing prince,\" Arctic said, his breath coming in short gasps. \"Not some lowborn NightWing.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Whiteout said. \"I'll be an IceWing princess. And have lots of baby IceWings. And live there forever. Where it is very, very cold.\"\n\n\"You are not taking her to the Ice Kingdom,\" Darkstalker said. \"She would be miserable there, even worse than you were.\" He unrolled the scroll to a blank section and carefully set a rock at each corner to hold it down.\n\n\"I'm doing this for your mother,\" Arctic spat. He tried to sit up, setting off another gush of blood from the dagger wound, and fell back again. Whiteout blinked anxiously and pressed her talons to his foot. \"Queen Diamond will let Foeslayer go if she has me instead.\"\n\n\"Mother is dead,\" said Darkstalker. Fathom shivered at the eerie blankness with which he said those words.\n\nDarkstalker uncapped the inkwell and placed it gently on the edge of the scroll. \"You are doing this for yourself, Father. You have no reason to stay in the Night Kingdom anymore, now that Mother is gone. So you're taking your chance to go home, like you've always wanted.\" He dipped one claw in the ink. \"You're planning to tell Diamond all the secrets you know about NightWings to help her defeat us. You may even use your power again, to launch an attack on us.\"\n\nFathom glanced over at Clearsight and saw from her unhappy face that it was true.\n\n\"I might, but only to protect Whiteout,\" Arctic said. \"If that's the only deal Diamond will accept to keep her alive.\" He reached down and yanked out the dagger, hissing furiously as blood spurted out. \"You'll be fine with your invincible scales, don't worry. Now say good-bye to your sister and let us go before Diamond's army finds you.\"\n\n\"I want to go to the Ice Kingdom,\" Whiteout said. \"I want to be with Father. You go home,\" she said, pointing at Darkstalker. \"I don't even like you.\"\n\nDarkstalker paused, meeting her cool blue eyes, then turned back to Arctic. \"But you made one odd mistake,\" he said. His claw was poised above the scroll, ink gleaming on the tip. \"You should have killed me before you left, like Diamond wanted you to.\" He tilted his head at his father. \"I'm not sure why you didn't.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to kill my own son,\" Arctic snarled. \"Whatever you think of my soul, it's not so far gone that I would actually do that.\" He started to laugh, a cracking, bitter sound like icicles snapping off a roof. \"I know I should, though. One more spell, and I'll probably be there, won't I? I mean, what are you going to do to stop me?\" He spread his wings, staggering upright. \"Our magic is equal, you and I. Our souls are equally doomed. What are you writing, you little monster?\"\n\n\"Darkstalker, please, please don't,\" Clearsight pleaded. Fathom took a step toward him, but he didn't know what to do. He could rip the scroll out of his talons \u2014 but then what would happen? Would Arctic attack? Of these two dragons, if one was about to use magic, wouldn't it be better if it was Darkstalker?\n\nIt was too late anyway. Darkstalker's claw was sliding smoothly across the paper, words falling into place, spelling out the beginning of the end of the world.\n\n\"Now,\" Darkstalker said to his father. \"Stop talking.\"\n\nArctic opened his mouth.\n\nAnd nothing came out.\n\n\"Never use your magic again,\" Darkstalker said pleasantly. \"Never attack me or my friends ever again. Don't try to escape.\"\n\nArctic clutched his throat. His tail was lashing like a snake on fire.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Fathom whispered. On the other side of Darkstalker, Clearsight had her face buried in her talons. He couldn't tell whether she was crying or planning or spinning herself into the futures to get as far away from now as possible.\n\n\"Release Whiteout from the spell you put on her,\" Darkstalker went on, ignoring Fathom.\n\nArctic's claws reached toward his daughter, although he was clearly trying to fight them. He seized the golden glass shell necklace around her neck, pulled it off, and smashed it.\n\nWhiteout let out a gasp. She shook her head, blinking like mad, then looked around, taking in the scene as if she'd just woken up.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she cried. \"It's too late. The sand is falling.\"\n\n\"You're all right, Whiteout,\" Darkstalker said, reaching to take her front talons in his. \"I saved you.\" She touched his snout gently with hers for a moment, then stepped back.\n\n\"I'm grateful to be unfrozen,\" she said. \"But I'm sorry for winning.\"\n\n\"Don't be,\" he said. \"We both win. We're going to have the greatest future I can give us. All of us.\" He swung his head to include Fathom and Clearsight, then rolled his eyes at the expressions on their faces. \"Calm down. I saved the day. It was amazing, didn't you notice?\"\n\n\"Let me see,\" Clearsight said, holding out her talons.\n\nDarkstalker shrugged and slid his scroll toward her. Fathom stepped around him and read the spell over her shoulder.\n\nHe'd known what it would say. It was clear from what he'd seen in front of him.\n\nBut still, seeing the words in black and white \u2026\n\nEnchant Arctic the IceWing to obey my every command.\n\n\"No,\" Clearsight breathed.\n\nFathom was dizzy, falling, the world and everything he knew rushing past him.\n\nIf it was possible to enchant living dragons this way \u2014 to treat them like objects, to use them however you wanted \u2026\n\nHe looked at Clearsight. It could start as simply as a pair of enchanted earrings. A small shifting of the world, rearranging other dragons to make your life a bit easier, telling yourself it was harmless, for the best, even.\n\nBut once you took a step down that path, once you let yourself think manipulating someone else was all right \u2026 when every new turn seemed right to you, seemed justified, no matter how far you went \u2026\n\nWhere would it ever stop?\n\nAll things considered, Darkstalker thought he was doing a remarkably admirable job of keeping his temper.\n\nHis queen had tried to kill him, after everything he'd done for her.\n\nHis father had bewitched his sister and tried to betray the entire tribe.\n\nClearsight was acting as if his gift of the earrings was some enormous life-altering horrible treachery, instead of a perfectly sweet, kindhearted gesture he'd made to make her feel better.\n\nAnd now Fathom was flooding Darkstalker's mind with panicked screaming mobs of DOOM DOOM THE SKY IS FALLING MY FRIEND IS EVIL THE WORLD IS ENDING blah blah overreacting melodramatic nonsense.\n\nDarkstalker was doing exactly what he needed to do. He had to stop his father. He had to save his sister. He had to protect his friends. He was clearly the good guy here.\n\nIf Clearsight and Fathom couldn't see that, what kinds of friends were they? Trusting him and supporting him \u2026 as his best friends, wasn't that their ONE JOB?\n\nHe clenched his claws, stamping his rage down to a simmer below the surface. His work was not done. He needed to make himself and his friends safe permanently, forever. He needed everyone to know that you never came after Darkstalker.\n\n\"Follow us back to the Night Kingdom,\" he ordered Arctic. \"Keep up. Don't try anything. Don't even think about anything except flying, one wingbeat after another, until I tell you you can land.\"\n\nHis father was beautifully, magically silent. He could do nothing except stare at Darkstalker with seething hatred. Arctic was finally, finally no longer a threat to anyone.\n\nAnd now he's going to pay for what happened to Mother, for what he did to Whiteout, and for what he nearly did to the tribe.\n\n\"Maybe we should rest first,\" Clearsight said hurriedly. \"Whiteout looks tired, right, Fathom? We could all sleep for a while, maybe find something to eat. Maybe talk about \u2026 everything.\"\n\n\"I have things to do,\" Darkstalker said, packing up his scroll and putting it back in his bag. He knew her so well. He knew that she was trying to delay the inevitable. She was hoping to wrestle them onto a new timeline. She thought that if she had a little more time now, tonight, she'd be able to change the future.\n\nBut she couldn't. He was weaving the path now; no more tweaks and tugs from her. Even if he had to drag her along it kicking and screaming. Once they got there, to his beautiful future, she'd admit it was the best one and he'd been right all along. He spread his wings. \"We're going now.\"\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Clearsight said. \"Please don't do what you're about to do. Please stop and look at the timelines with me \u2014 we can still find one that's safe and peaceful for all of us.\"\n\n\"I know we can,\" he said. \"We're on it. Accept your destiny, my love. We're the ones who bring the peace, once the throne is ours. And who's safer than the king and queen?\"\n\nHe took off, relishing the sound of all their wingbeats hurrying after him. These were his dragons, Clearsight and Fathom and Whiteout. They might fuss and worry at him, but they'd follow him to the edge of the sky. They'd be right beside him as he took his throne, and they'd love him no matter what.\n\nHe didn't stop once, the whole way back to the Night Kingdom. The sun buried itself below the horizon and darkness spread cold wings over the desert. A few times as he flew, he saw the flicker of campfires or the shadows of moving dragons, preparing for yet another battle.\n\nThat will be my army soon, he thought. We'll crush the IceWings easily once I'm king. I'll punish Diamond for what she did to my mother.\n\nRage surged through him again. He'd delayed his vengeance for months, listening to Clearsight's worries, following Queen Vigilance's strategy instead of using his own. He'd made her a stronger queen; he'd given the tribe a shield and strengthened her army, and then what did she do? Send an assassin after him!\n\nShe'd brought this upon herself.\n\nThe mountainous border of the Night Kingdom loomed up ahead. Darkstalker had enchanted his shield to allow himself, Whiteout, and Arctic to pass through safely. He wondered what would have happened if he'd left Arctic out of that equation. Would he have died on his way out of the kingdom?\n\nIt didn't matter. This path was going to be much more satisfying.\n\nFathom's anxiety intensified to a shrieking fever pitch as they swooped closer to the palace. Oh no, we shouldn't enchant other dragons! Dragons aren't objects! You can't use them like puppets! Is my friend completely evil? There's nothing we can do!\n\nHe really needed to calm down. Darkstalker would put that priority high up on his list, once he was king. Something that would shift Fathom's brain into a much quieter state; something that would take all that freaking out and stuff it away where Darkstalker didn't have to listen to it all the time. He knew he could make Fathom a happier dragon. Honestly, he'd thought he could do that by getting rid of Indigo, but apparently that wasn't enough. The self-loathing was too entrenched.\n\nNo matter. It could be done, and it would be, soon.\n\nHe looked over his shoulder for Clearsight, hoping to catch her eye and maybe find her smiling. Maybe a night of flying had given her enough time to think about why he'd done everything he was doing. Maybe she was a little closer to understanding him.\n\nBut she flew with her head down, looking just as doubtful as ever.\n\nHe flexed his talons irritably. Had anyone even noticed what he saved Whiteout from? What Arctic did to her was basically exactly what Darkstalker had done to him. It wasn't quite as impressive \u2014 Arctic had enchanted the necklace, because like every other narrow-minded animus dragon, it had never occurred to him that he could enchant a living being. But he'd forced Whiteout to go with him; he'd erased her love for Darkstalker and her interest in Thoughtful; and worst of all, he'd used his magic to try to make her normal. Arctic had never loved Whiteout's strange way of speaking. It made sense that when he tried to control her, he would start by taking that away.\n\nDarkstalker snarled angrily.\n\nThis was what Arctic deserved.\n\nHis friends would understand that eventually. They'd see that Darkstalker was right.\n\nThe Great Diamond was below them, bustling with dragons shopping, dragons on their way to work, dragons going to the library or the museum or school. Dragons who didn't have any idea what or who was important, or how the world was about to change.\n\nHe twisted in the air to meet his father's eyes. \"You will land beside me and stand there quietly until I tell you what to do next.\"\n\nArctic's eyes were blank, trapped. There was nothing he could do but obey.\n\nDarkstalker landed on the stage set up in the center of the plaza, where there were supposed to be concerts for the next few weeks, celebrating a series of upcoming hatching days in the royal family.\n\nThe moons shone palely overhead, two of them almost full, one a needle-sharp sliver on a carpet of stars.\n\nTalons hit the stage behind him, thump thump thump. Fathom, Whiteout, Clearsight, with their beloved, frustrating, worried faces. And right beside him, Arctic, exactly as Darkstalker had always wanted him.\n\nDown below him, dragons turned to look up, their faces curious and wondering.\n\n\"My friends,\" Darkstalker called in a booming voice. My subjects, he thought. \"You're about to see something no dragons have ever seen before. Gather your families; everyone come watch! This is the most important day of your lives!\"\n\nHe sat down and waited as the square filled with dragons, murmurs passing from one to another, everyone wondering what he was going to do. Everyone's eyes on him. Everyone finally about to see him for the dragon he really was: his power, his heroism, his intelligence and strength.\n\nAfter tonight, no one would ever insult him or underestimate him again.\n\nAnd no one would dare attack him, or hurt the dragons he loved.\n\n\"Darkstalker,\" Clearsight said from beside him, her wings brushing softly against his.\n\n\"One last try, my love?\" he said, smiling at her. He put one wing around her and she leaned into his side, twining her tail around his. She was warm and beautiful in the moonlight. She was the future he wanted, right there on the throne next to his.\n\n\"Where's Fathom?\" he asked, noticing that the SeaWing's worried thoughts weren't weighing down his mind anymore. The rush of thoughts from the crowd below was swarming in, taking up all the space instead.\n\n\"I told him to go back to the palace,\" Clearsight said. \"He's seen enough violence in his life from dragons he trusted. He doesn't need to see any more.\"\n\nDarkstalker rolled his eyes. Clearsight was brilliant and empathetic, but sometimes she laid it on a little thick.\n\n\"I think he'll survive,\" he said. \"Hang on, wait, actually; I know he does. You can see it, too. I'm going to find him a nice NightWing to marry in a few years.\"\n\n\"I don't like her,\" Clearsight said. \"Her laugh makes me itch.\"\n\n\"Well, there aren't a lot of choices willing to both marry a SeaWing and never have dragonets,\" Darkstalker pointed out. \"If we change his mind about that last part, we have a few more options.\"\n\nShe shook her head, probably dwelling on some boring objections to what Darkstalker might mean by \"change his mind.\"\n\n\"How can we be looking at the same futures,\" she asked, \"and see them so differently?\"\n\n\"I think I know,\" he said. \"You're focused on the ones where I'm a terrible king who kills dragons for fun. I know those are there, but I'm not worried about them. That's not me. I'm looking at the ones where we spread peace across the continents, unite the tribes under our rule, and raise the sweetest, funniest dragonets. You should focus on those, too.\"\n\n\"Eclipse,\" she said sadly. \"Shadowhunter.\"\n\n\"And Fierceclaws,\" he said, hoping she would laugh. \"Still pretty sure I'm going to win that fight. It's a great name, you'll see.\"\n\nShe didn't respond. He reached down and lifted her chin so he could look into her eyes.\n\n\"Trust me,\" he said. \"We have a wonderful future ahead of us. Just stay in the moment with me and you'll see.\"\n\n\"What kind of wonderful future starts with bloodshed and queen-killing?\" she asked. \"Can't we please \u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" he said, putting two claws over her mouth. \"Stop doubting me. Watch and see: it'll all be fine.\"\n\nHe turned back to the gathering crowd, which was now hundreds of dragons deep. He felt Clearsight step away from him and wrap her wings around herself, shaking. He'd fix that later. He knew they'd be happy together again, one day not too long from now, even if it required a little magic.\n\n\"Thank you for coming!\" he called to the crowd. \"What a beautiful night! A perfect night to punish a traitor!\" He swept one wing toward Arctic and a shocked whisper hissed through the audience. \"First, let's consider the evidence. Arctic, tell our listeners. Tell them what you were about to do, before I stopped you.\"\n\n\"I was going home,\" Arctic roared, his voice set free again. \"I'm not a traitor!\"\n\nDarkstalker took a step closer to his father. He could hear the hubbub of curiosity boiling below. Why wasn't the IceWing chained up? Why didn't he fly away? Why was he just standing there, confessing?\n\n\"Tell the truth,\" Darkstalker said. \"Tell them exactly what you were planning.\"\n\nArctic lashed his tail. \"I was taking my daughter to Queen Diamond,\" he growled. \"I was going to offer her talons in marriage to whomever Diamond chose, so she could hatch some heirs for the throne who might have animus blood. I was going to live in an ice palace again, sleeping at night like a normal dragon. I was going to find out if Foeslayer is still alive. I was going to offer the IceWings a detailed map of the Night Kingdom and a way to get inside to destroy you all, in exchange for her life.\"\n\nThe NightWings stared at him, shocked into utter silence. From the stillness behind him on the stage, Darkstalker guessed that even Whiteout and Clearsight were stunned by the extent of Arctic's villainy.\n\nDarkstalker shook his head regretfully. \"You see,\" he said to the crowd. \"He admits it all. He would have wiped out our entire tribe without a shred of remorse. He is the worst dragon who has ever lived, and he deserves to die. Don't you agree?\"\n\nHe raised his chin, listening to the hurricane of reactions in the minds below. Of course there were some wishy-washy responses, some dragons who thought this might be a trick, others who wondered where the queen was, and wasn't punishing traitors up to her? (She was in the palace, he was sure, watching from one of the balconies.) But most of them agreed with him. This IceWing who looked like the enemies they'd been fighting for years \u2014 he'd been planning to kill them, just like his brethren had killed NightWing brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. They'd given him shelter, fought a war to protect him, and he had betrayed them!\n\nHe DID have to die!\n\n\"Kneel,\" Darkstalker said to his father.\n\nArctic knelt, and the crowd whispered again. How did Darkstalker make him do that? Without any guards or weapons standing by?\n\n\"Admit that I am the greatest animus of all time,\" Darkstalker hissed.\n\n\"You are the greatest animus of all time,\" Arctic choked out.\n\nDarkstalker spread his wings toward the audience. \"Tell them there is no more powerful dragon than me.\"\n\n\"There is no more powerful dragon than you.\"\n\n\"Now say you wish you had been a better father.\"\n\nArctic let out an incredulous, startled laugh. \"I do wish I'd been a better father,\" he said. \"If I were, I would have strangled you the moment you hatched.\"\n\n\"Cut out your tongue,\" Darkstalker said coldly.\n\nArctic's eyes became round holes of horror as he reached up to his mouth, pulled out his long blue forked tongue, and sliced it off with his own claws.\n\nDarkstalker could feel the waves of terror rolling off the watching NightWings, making him stronger and stronger. Yes. Fear me. Respect me. See me.\n\n\"Now.\" Darkstalker leaned toward Arctic, his claws gouging into the wood of the stage. \"Take your talons, rip open your stomach, and show us all what you're really like on the inside. Pour out your life on this stage.\"\n\nIt took a long time, and it was messy, and at the end of it, when Arctic was definitely dead, Darkstalker did not feel nearly as happy as he'd expected.\n\nBut he'd done what he needed to do, and the crowd reaction was exactly what he was hoping for. Now he would go kill the queen \u2014 quickly this time, get it over with, no need for more theatrics. And then he'd be king, the first king in the history of Pyrrhia, and there would be peace and prosperity and happiness, because now he and everyone he loved was safe forever.\n\nHe turned around wearily. He needed the warmth of Clearsight's wings right now.\n\nWhiteout was standing alone on the stage behind him. Her eyes were closed, and tears were running down her face, leaving little puddles on the stage. Her white wings lay askew at her sides like broken leaves. He felt a stab of guilt \u2014 but he shouldn't; he had saved her from a terrible fate.\n\n\"Where is Clearsight?\" he asked. \"When did she leave?\"\n\nWas she trying to make a point, missing his moment of triumph?\n\nOr \u2026 a vision flashed in his head, a warning, and he scrabbled for the bag slung across his chest. It couldn't be true. She wouldn't \u2014\n\nHis scroll was missing.\n\nShe must have taken it when she was hugging him, whispering to him about their dragonets.\n\nHow DARE SHE.\n\n\"Clearsight has your scroll,\" Whiteout whispered without opening her eyes. Behind her, Darkstalker saw Thoughtful pushing through the crowd, coming toward her with worried eyes. Good, yes; Thoughtful could take care of Whiteout while Darkstalker dealt with Clearsight. \"She said to tell you she'll meet you at Agate Mountain.\"\n\nDarkstalker growled under his breath. He couldn't kill the queen without his scroll \u2014 well, perhaps he could. Vigilance certainly couldn't kill him. But he wanted to do it quickly, with magic. And he didn't trust what Clearsight might do, now that she had his power in her talons.\n\nI can't trust her.\n\nThe realization was swift and startling. Of all the dragons in the world, he thought he'd been sure of her, at least.\n\nHe threw himself into the air, fuming.\n\nMaybe the future was going to be a little different than he'd planned after all.\n\nMaybe there would be no queen on the throne beside him.\n\nClearsight's heart thudded with terror as she crept off the stage into the crowd, leaving Darkstalker's grand scene in the middle of Arctic's confession. The black leather case crumpled around the scroll as she clutched it under her wings.\n\nShe couldn't save Arctic. The next few minutes were inevitable, and terrible, and far too horribly clear in her mind already. Blue IceWing blood everywhere. No, he was lost \u2026 and now she had to save Fathom, and Indigo, and maybe the queen, and the whole rest of Pyrrhia, if she could.\n\nIt was a slim chance, and it only might work because she could thread the possibilities and read the ripples better than Darkstalker could. He was distracted by his vengeance and his horror show, and she'd spent the entire flight home untangling the one frail thread of hope until she knew what she had to do.\n\nAs she ducked through the crowd, avoiding all the looks and whispers, she ran directly into a set of familiar talons.\n\n\"Clearsight!\" Listener whispered, grabbing her shoulders. \"What. Is. HAPPENING.\"\n\nClearsight shook her head. \"I can't \u2026 I can't explain.\"\n\n\"I can!\" Listener said. \"Your boyfriend is a psycho, just like I always thought!\" She finally noticed the tracks of tears on Clearsight's snout and leaned in to wipe them away. \"Oh, moonbeam, you'll be all right.\"\n\n\"No,\" Clearsight said. She seized one of her friend's talons in hers. \"Listener, this is important. Remember when you told me that you did want to know the future if it meant saving your family's lives? If something really, really bad was about to happen?\"\n\nListener fell back, a look of dawning fear on her face. \"What's going to happen, Clearsight?\"\n\n\"I don't know, exactly,\" Clearsight said. But if her plan failed, and Darkstalker returned, even stronger and more furious than before, without her to hold him back anymore \u2026 it was all destruction and death and nothing but darkness from there. \"But it's really bad. Please, Listener, if you've ever believed anything I've said, do this for me. Find my parents, gather your family, and leave the Night Kingdom. Fly as far and as fast as you can. Take them somewhere safe where \u2026 where no one will ever find them.\"\n\nShe was suddenly aware that other dragons were listening, that she had the attention of several frightened faces.\n\n\"And the queen?\" Listener asked.\n\n\"If you can get to her,\" Clearsight said, \"tell her to escape, too. I'll give you all as much time as I can, but I don't know if my plan will work.\" Will he come after me? Will he kill the queen first? Will I survive what I'm about to do?\n\n\"Clearsight \u2014\" Listener started, reaching for her.\n\nClearsight threw her wings around her friend, hugging her fiercely. \"Thank you for being you,\" she whispered in her ear. \"I hope your life is everything it should be.\"\n\nThen she pulled herself away and shoved through the crowd, ducking under long necks and wings until she was far enough from the stage to take flight for the palace.\n\nFathom was waiting in his room, where she'd told him to go, pacing back and forth and twisting his talons together.\n\n\"Did he suspect anything?\" he asked as she swooped in over the balcony.\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said. \"We have to keep you away from him until it's done, or he'll hear something in your thoughts.\" She pulled out the scroll. \"Here.\"\n\n\"I don't want to touch that,\" he said, backing away.\n\n\"We have to. We have to use it to make something that will stop him,\" she said. She brushed a tear out of her eye. There was no time for crying, none.\n\n\"Not with his scroll,\" Fathom said, shaking his head. \"It could be enchanted to signal him whenever someone else uses it. Or it might kill anyone else who tries to write in it. Or he might know, somehow, every spell that's written in it. We can't use that.\"\n\n\"I don't think he was that devious when he first made this,\" Clearsight said with a stab of sorrow for that dragon Darkstalker had been, that day when everything had looked so bright up ahead. \"But you're right, he might have added it later. We have to risk it, though.\"\n\nFathom put one talon over hers, stopping her. \"I'll do it. I'll use my own power.\"\n\n\"Your oath,\" Clearsight said. \"You can't \u2014\"\n\n\"I have to,\" he said. \"It's the only way. This is just like my grandfather \u2026 I'm the only one who can.\"\n\nThe timeline thread trembled in Clearsight's mind and she steadied herself on it, focusing as hard as she could. \"Quickly, then. Remember, he's invulnerable and immortal now.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"I think I know what to do, but I need something to enchant. You can't take anything with you.\" Fathom's voice dropped to a whisper. \"Or else he'll know \u2026 he'll guess \u2026 if he suspects \u2026\"\n\n\"I know,\" Clearsight whispered back. Her breath caught on a sob. \"He might kill me.\" That future was horribly clear, real behind her eyes even as her mind refused to believe it. She wrestled the bracelet off her arm. Moonstones and copper wire, his gift to protect her \u2014 the one she'd known would be important one day. \"Use this. But make sure it keeps the enchantment it already has, too.\"\n\nFathom turned the bracelet over in his claws, tears brimming in his eyes. \"Are we really doing this?\" he asked. \"Shouldn't we use the soul reader on him first, to make sure he's as far gone as we think?\"\n\n\"We don't have time, and he's left us no choice,\" she said. \"It only gets worse from here, Fathom. There are some futures that aren't completely terrible, but there are many more that are too frightening to risk. This could be the last moment we have where we're both free and thinking for ourselves. It's our only chance to stop him.\"\n\n\"All right.\" He held the bracelet between his talons and closed his eyes, concentrating fiercely. Finally he handed it back to her. It looked and felt exactly the same.\n\n\"It's done,\" he whispered.\n\n\"You're sure this will work?\" she said.\n\n\"You'd know better than I would,\" he said.\n\nThat was true. She could see that the spell was strong; it would work \u2014 if she could get the bracelet on Darkstalker's arm. If he didn't figure out what she was doing. If she was fast enough \u2026 if, if, if \u2026\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said. \"If this works, you've saved the world, you know.\"\n\nHe shifted his wings, looking down at his talons as if they might accidentally set something on fire. \"It'll be more you than me,\" he said. \"Be careful.\"\n\nShe hugged him and thrust the scroll into his claws. \"One more thing,\" she said. \"I \u2014 I'm afraid he did something to Indigo.\" He looked up, his eyes wide. \"Search through here and find it. I don't know how he hid it from me, but it must be in there somewhere. Maybe you can bring her back, or \u2026 well, whatever it is, you should know the truth.\"\n\nHe nodded, barely breathing.\n\n\"Then hide that scroll and get as far away from the Night Kingdom as you can. Whatever you do, don't destroy the scroll, or else he'll get all his power back.\" Clearsight rubbed her eyes, stepping toward the window. She knew she would never see him again. \"Good-bye, Fathom.\"\n\n\"Good-bye, Clearsight. Good luck.\"\n\nShe was out in the sky a moment later, flying on aching wings toward Agate Mountain, far to the east. She didn't look back, but she knew Fathom was standing in the window, watching her go.\n\nThe timelines were all narrowing to one moment now.\n\nShe flew toward her last chance to save the future.\n\nHe did something to Indigo.\n\nFathom turned away from the window and the dark sky that had swallowed Clearsight. He was still shaken from what he'd done \u2014 betraying his friend. Breaking his oath. Using his magic.\n\nBut all he could really think was Indigo.\n\nWhat had Darkstalker done?\n\nIs she \u2026 could he have \u2026\n\nNo. No. She had to be alive. With all his power, Darkstalker could have done anything to get rid of her \u2014 he didn't have to kill her. Maybe he'd enchanted a necklace that made her want to leave Fathom. Or an earring that made her forget he even existed. Something that made her stop loving him.\n\nShe did love me. His heart was pounding. If Darkstalker got rid of her \u2014 that means she didn't leave me.\n\nBut she would never have accepted a gift from Darkstalker; she always suspected everything he touched of being cursed in some way.\n\nSo what could he have done to her?\n\nHe knelt on the floor and spread the scroll out so he could see the entire thing.\n\nThere were so many spells! He hadn't realized how much Darkstalker had been doing, quietly, without Fathom noticing. All these small enchantments. A plate that kept prey warm for his mother when she was late for dinner; a blanket that made sure she slept peacefully when she was out in the desert with the army. A set of paints for Whiteout that never went dry and never ran out. And here, near the end, a bell that would ring to let Darkstalker know whenever Fathom was feeling sad or lonely.\n\nGuilt rippled through Fathom. That was how Darkstalker had always known when to show up, always lifted Fathom out of the worst loneliness. Darkstalker did care about him. Look at all these spells that showed his kindness.\n\nWere they making a mistake?\n\nWas Darkstalker's good side strong enough to outweigh his potential for evil?\n\nBut then there were the big spells \u2014 the shield that killed any IceWing who approached the Night Kingdom. A weapon that shot fire ten times as far as any dragon could normally breathe it.\n\nAnd the last one: Enchant Arctic the IceWing to obey my every command.\n\nNot to mention whatever he did to Indigo, if Clearsight was right.\n\nCould he have enchanted her the same way he did Arctic?\n\nAnd all the blank space still left at the end, where Darkstalker could write spell after spell to control the world, to kill anyone he pleased, to have everything his way.\n\nFathom bent his head and started reading. He read the entire scroll from beginning to end, pausing over each spell to try to imagine if it could be used to make a dragon disappear.\n\nBut there was nothing \u2014 nothing about Indigo, nothing that hinted at where she might have gone.\n\nHe sat back, frustrated. It must be in here. Unless Clearsight was wrong, and Indigo really had left because she wanted to.\n\nThe scroll lay quietly in front of him, beckoning as though it were full of dark secrets.\n\nDarkstalker's handwriting was messy and sometimes hard to read, a tight jagged line of sharp points and hard strokes. It seemed to get angrier in the later enchantments, the marks pressing harder into the paper.\n\nBut there was something else that changed.\n\nThe earliest spells were written fairly close together, one right after another, in an orderly row down the page. Clearsight's bracelet that prevented mind reading; a scroll that would read out loud to them.\n\nBut the later spells were spread out, with a lot more space between them.\n\nWhy had Darkstalker left so many gaps? Didn't he want to conserve every inch of space carefully?\n\nFathom's eyes were starting to hurt, and he realized he'd been reading with his night vision. The closest candles had gone out, and only one was still flickering, over by the balcony. He got up and brought it over, hoping the extra light would help give him a clue.\n\nAs he set it down and picked up the scroll to move it closer, a shadow seemed to flicker across the page, drawn by the flame.\n\nWhat \u2026\n\nCautiously he lifted the scroll so the candlelight shone through it.\n\nAnd in the blank spaces, words began to appear.\n\nFathom caught his breath. He's been writing spells in invisible ink.\n\nTo keep them hidden from Clearsight, he realized a moment later. Oh, Darkstalker.\n\nHere was his immortality spell. Here was the spell on Clearsight's moonstone earrings \u2014 an enchantment that kept the dragon who wore them focused only on the brightest, happiest futures, hiding anything truly bad that might happen up ahead.\n\nHe found a spell enchanting the scroll to send Darkstalker a mental twinge whenever someone else used it \u2014 so Fathom was right about that, and they were lucky not to have written in here.\n\nAnd then \u2014 oh no.\n\nEnchant this goblet so that the first time Fathom drinks from it, he will stop loving Indigo, forget about his oath, and decide to freely use his animus magic again.\n\nHe was horrified. The glass goblet had been enchanted, and just as terribly as Indigo had suspected. He still remembered the sound of it shattering against the wall. Indigo was right after all, right about everything. She'd saved him from it \u2014 saved him from Darkstalker's manipulation \u2014 and he hadn't even believed her.\n\nAnother spell appeared. Enchant this dagger to fly into the Kingdom of Sand and kill one IceWing every full moon, in secret, under cover of darkness \u2014 and keep doing so for one year, or until I summon it back. Enchant it to leave messages carved near the body, warning that the Darkstalker is coming for all of them and soon they will all be dead.\n\nFathom wondered if the queen knew about that dagger, or if that was Darkstalker's own personal secret revenge for the loss of Foeslayer. The IceWings must be terrified, he thought. It must feel like he's haunting them. I wonder how many it has killed so far.\n\nAs the enchantments appeared, dark words curling across the paper, Fathom felt as though he was uncovering Darkstalker's most hidden thoughts and plans. No wonder he hadn't wanted Clearsight to see this side of him. There were spells to torment classmates he hated in small, creative ways. A spell that sent nightmares to haunt Queen Diamond with all the ways he planned to kill her.\n\nAnd then \u2014 Fathom sat forward so quickly he nearly set the scroll on fire.\n\nEnchant this pebble so that when it rolls into the same room as Indigo the SeaWing, she shall be instantly trapped inside the small wooden carving of a dragon made for me by Fathom.\n\nRight below it:\n\nEnchant this piece of paper to look like a note written in Indigo's handwriting, with a short, believable message saying she's leaving Fathom and not coming back.\n\nFathom let out a cry of despair. He dropped the scroll and ran to his desk, where the little dragon carving had been sitting for months, quietly reminding him of his lost love.\n\nHe picked it up and cradled it in his claws. \"Indigo?\" he whispered to her. \"Indigo, I'm sorry \u2014 I'm sorry.\" He started to cry. \"I should have listened to you. I should have realized how dangerous he was. I didn't know what he would do. I'm so sorry.\"\n\nI can still save her. If it will work. Albatross said I couldn't bring dragons back from the dead \u2014 but she's not dead \u2014 right? She's still in here, somewhere.\n\nThis was it, the choice he'd feared would come again \u2014 the choice to save Indigo for the price of his soul.\n\nIt was no choice at all.\n\n\"Bring her back,\" he whispered fiercely to the carving. \"Turn back into Indigo, my friend, exactly the way she was before Darkstalker did this to her.\"\n\nThe carving twitched in his claws, suddenly warm to the touch. A soft glow surrounded the little dragon, and as he set it down on the floor it started to grow, and shift, and change.\n\nAnd then she was there, alive and right in front of him, herself again.\n\nIndigo stretched her wings as wide as they would go and pressed her talons down into the floor.\n\n\"Yowch,\" she said. \"Did I fall asleep? Great starfish, I'm hungry. Oh no, Fathom, why are you crying?\"\n\nHer wings went around him and he held her close, sobbing with relief. \"You're alive,\" he said shakily. \"You didn't leave me.\"\n\n\"Of course I didn't leave you,\" she said crossly, straightening up to face him. \"I said I never would and I never will. Get that through your thick skull.\"\n\n\"I love you,\" he said.\n\nThe sun came out across her face, lighting up the world.\n\n\"I thought you did,\" she said. \"But you were being such a weirdo about it.\"\n\n\"I'm still dangerous when I'm with you,\" he said. \"But I never want to be without you again.\"\n\n\"Sounds like my kind of plan,\" she said. \"Exactly my plan, actually.\" She twined her tail around his.\n\n\"We have to get out of here,\" he said. \"A lot's happened \u2014 I have to tell you everything. But first \u2026\" He pulled away and hurried over to his trunk. \"I need to know how bad it is.\" He held out the soul reader to her. \"Indigo, I did something terrible. I used my magic.\"\n\nShe took the soul reader out of his talons and threw it into the fountain.\n\n\"Hey!\" he protested, starting forward, but she stood in his way and flared her wings.\n\n\"That thing doesn't know your soul,\" she said. \"I know your soul. Tell me what you did.\"\n\n\"I enchanted a bracelet to stop Darkstalker,\" he said. \"And I brought you back from \u2014 you were \u2014 he did this spell \u2014 I brought you back.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. She glanced down at her scales, as if wondering whether they were real. \"Wow. I guess I did miss something.\"\n\n\"So I'm probably evil now,\" he said, his voice shaking. \"Two spells like that \u2014 my soul could be almost gone. You need to know so you can get away from me.\"\n\n\"ROARGH,\" Indigo cried. \"Using your magic doesn't make you evil, Fathom! Doing evil things makes you evil! Have you done anything evil lately?\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said, faltering. \"I betrayed my friend \u2026\"\n\n\"The supervillain,\" she put in.\n\n\"He's not \u2014\" Fathom hesitated. \"Yeah, he sort of is.\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" she said. \"You did something to stop him from killing loooooots and lots of innocent dragons.\"\n\n\"Um,\" he said. \"Yes. How did you know?\"\n\n\"Because I've met him,\" she said, \"and I could see where that was going. So, sorry, no, doesn't count. Not evil.\"\n\n\"I broke my oath to Pearl \u2014\"\n\n\"To save dragons,\" she said.\n\n\"To save you,\" he said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not evil.\"\n\n\"Indigo \u2014\"\n\n\"Shush. Fathom, listen. Our choices are what make us good or evil \u2014 what we do, how we help or hurt the world. You make the world a better place by being in it. With or without your magic, that's always been true.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" he said. \"Without my magic, I'm no one special.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\" she said. \"You're an artist. You're my friend. You're kind and funny. I'd call that special.\"\n\n\"You're biased,\" he said, touching his snout to hers. He felt illuminated from the inside, as though he had luminescent scales lit up all the way through him.\n\n\"I'm right,\" she said with a grin. They stood like that for a moment, smiling at each other.\n\n\"Besides,\" she said, \"you've stopped two actually evil animus dragons from destroying the world. That's pretty impressive.\"\n\n\"Um,\" he said. \"Well, maybe.\"\n\n\"Maybe?\" She tipped her head to the side.\n\n\"I'm not sure yet if the enchantment on Darkstalker has worked. Clearsight just flew off with the bracelet and he's meeting her and hopefully she can use it on him, but it's possible she won't be able to, and then he'll be really mad, and then he might come back and \u2026 you know, destroy the world after all.\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" she said. \"That's happening now? Right now?\"\n\n\"Right now,\" he admitted. \"That's why we have to get out of here.\"\n\n\"You didn't want to lead with that?\" she cried. \"You don't think maybe that's priority number one?\" She whacked him with her tail. \"I'm ready! Let's go! Escape first, save the sappy pep talk for later!\"\n\nHe ducked away, wondering how he could feel like laughing at a time like this. Quickly he rolled up the scroll and stowed it in its black leather case. Then he lifted up the top of his desk and reached his front talons inside.\n\nThe little octopus clambered joyfully up his arm and waved all his tentacles at Indigo.\n\n\"Blob!\" she cried happily. She scooped him up and settled him on top of her head. \"Hang on tight, little guy. We're going to be flying really fast.\"\n\nBlob seized her horns and scrunched down as if he was ready to steer.\n\nIndigo and Fathom brushed their wings together, ran onto the balcony, and leaped into the air.\n\nBelow them, dragons were spilling out of the palace, out of the school, out of the ravines and canyons of the Night Kingdom. The NightWings were fleeing, their terror of Darkstalker driving them out of their homes to some unknown, faraway place where they might be safe, where he might never find them.\n\nEven if Clearsight's plan works, Fathom realized, that dagger he enchanted is going to make everyone think he's still alive for a long time \u2014 that he's out there hunting them.\n\nThey might never come back here.\n\nI know I'll never come back here.\n\n\"Farewell, Night Kingdom,\" he said softly.\n\nAnd then he turned and flew away forever, with Indigo right beside him.\n\nHe found her near the peak of Agate Mountain, the tallest mountain in the Claws of the Clouds range. She was sitting in the mouth of a small cave, looking east to where the sun was rising over the twin peaks of Jade Mountain, casting dark green shadows over the valleys below.\n\nDarkstalker landed beside her, folding in his wings. It didn't look as though she'd brought anything with her. Where was his scroll? Had she used his magic? He hadn't felt any twinges from his spell on the scroll, so it seemed like she hadn't. But then why steal it?\n\n\"Did you know,\" Clearsight said thoughtfully, \"that this won't be the tallest mountain in Pyrrhia for much longer? There's going to be an earthquake soon and this whole side will collapse. Then Jade Mountain will be the tallest.\"\n\n\"Is that supposed to be a metaphor?\" Darkstalker said, flicking his tail back and forth. \"Something about the most powerful dragon falling and someone else taking his place? Because it's a bit muddled. Not your best work.\"\n\nShe actually laughed, just a little bit. \"No,\" she said. \"Not a metaphor. I just thought it was interesting. A piece of the future that is definitely true.\"\n\n\"Anything about the future can be changed,\" he said. \"Even that. I could enchant the mountain to stay up if I wanted to. We can make the future turn out however we like.\"\n\n\"Not if we want different things,\" she said, pulling a small yellow wildflower out of the dirt. She started shredding it between her claws. \"Not if we can't even agree on what is right and what is wrong.\"\n\nHe took a step toward her. \"If you don't want to be with me, just say so.\" He wanted to know \u2026 but he wasn't going to let her go. He loved her too much.\n\n\"Nothing I did worked,\" she said. \"I thought I was so careful, and we still ended up here. All that studying, all the timeline scrolls. Now it's all happened, and I can't change any of it, and I still don't know where it all went so wrong.\"\n\n\"Because it didn't,\" he said, taking another step closer. \"It's not wrong. We're on the right path, Clearsight. We're so close to our happy future. The bad part's almost over. Almost all my enemies are dead.\"\n\n\"Including Indigo?\" she asked. Her eyes lifted to meet his, and he froze for a moment. Does she know? Did she find the hidden spells? No \u2026 she's just guessing.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he said. \"Indigo left. That was nothing to do with me.\"\n\n\"Maybe it started the first time you lied to me,\" she said, turning to the sunrise again. \"Or maybe it was losing Foeslayer and not being able to do anything about it. Maybe it was all the small moments where you felt threatened or powerless or out of control, and all the things you did to fight those feelings.\"\n\nI've never been powerless, he thought. Nobody threatens me. \"Everything I did was for a good reason,\" he said. \"To protect you, or Whiteout, or our future dragonets. Why can't you trust me?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath and looked back into his eyes. \"Or maybe it's just part of you, something you hatched with. Maybe that's what you really got from your father, along with your magic. Maybe you were always going to turn out this way, no matter how I tried to save you.\"\n\nHe lunged toward her, fury flooding through his veins, and seized her wrist, twisting it painfully. \"I'm nothing like my father,\" he snarled. \"I don't need saving. I can choose my own future, and I like the one I see, and you're going to learn to like it, too. Where is my scroll?\"\n\nSomething slid coolly along his scales and he glanced down. Clearsight had slipped the moonstone bracelet off her own arm and onto his.\n\nFor a brief flash of a moment her mind was open to him again, unguarded for the first time in years, and he saw with perfect clarity how she loved him, how she feared him, how many terrible futures lay before them, and how she was betraying him to save everyone else.\n\nGood-bye, my dearest love, her thoughts whispered.\n\nAnd then \u2026 blackness rushed up toward him, enfolding him in its wings, and he was gone.\n\nClearsight would never forget the look on Darkstalker's face as he realized what she'd done. It was only there for a moment \u2014 the utter shock, the disbelief, the bewilderment and betrayal \u2014 and then his eyes closed and he collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud.\n\nShe knelt beside him, resting her talons lightly on his neck. His chest rose and fell steadily. He was still alive, still breathing, but he would never wake up again, not as long as the bracelet was on him.\n\nDarkstalker had made himself immortal and invulnerable to any kind of attack, but a simple sleeping spell had taken him down. Fathom had done his part well.\n\nClearsight dragged Darkstalker far back into the cave, letting her tears fall but not stopping to give in to her grief. The cave ended in a small chamber, solid granite on all sides. She rolled him against the back wall and checked the bracelet to make sure it was securely fastened around Darkstalker's arm.\n\nThen she filled in the cave with boulders from the hillside, piling them up to hide the sleeping dragon inside. He could never be found, never be set free, or else Pyrrhia would be in danger all over again.\n\nWhen that was done, she found another mountain where she could watch and wait for the earthquake to come. Once Agate Mountain had collapsed, burying Darkstalker deep in the earth, she'd know it was safe to leave him there.\n\nThe sun spread across her wings as she sat on the ridge, breathing in the light of the new dawn.\n\nIt worked.\n\nI did this.\n\nAll those futures I saw, all the plans I made to take us along the right paths \u2026 that's all gone now. We never got married. We never took the throne or stopped the war. We never had our dragonets.\n\nShe closed her eyes, trying not to think about that. How could she mourn dragons who'd never existed in the first place? They were no more real than anything else about the timelines she'd shattered.\n\nBut she could still see their faces in her mind, and she knew she would always miss them.\n\nWhat am I going to do now?\n\nShe took a deep breath and let the new futures roll out before her.\n\nThere was nothing for her back in the tribe. The other NightWings would never trust her again after seeing her on that stage with Darkstalker, even if she told them what she'd done to him \u2014 and she couldn't tell anyone that. No one could ever know where he was or how easy it would be to wake him up.\n\nRejoining the tribe led to some more dangerous paths, too \u2014 the ones where she felt so alone, and missed him so much, that the temptation to return and release him became too great. Even knowing the Very Bad Things that would follow, she could see how she might fall.\n\nI could stay with him. I could lie down in the path of the avalanche and wait to die.\n\nRight now she was sad enough to think for a moment that maybe that was the best choice.\n\nBut she was also a seer. She could feel her overpowering grief right now, and at the same time she could look into the future and see a time when she would not be this sad.\n\nThere were futures where she was happy.\n\nThere were futures where she didn't have to be afraid all the time about everything going horribly wrong.\n\nAs hard as it was for her to believe right now, there were even futures with another love and other dragonets.\n\nShe raised her wings and lifted her head to the blue-and-gold-streaked sky.\n\nShe was sad and alone \u2026 but she was also free. Her life had been tangled up with Darkstalker's for so long \u2014 forever, from the moment she had her first vision of him \u2014 that she'd never before seen any glimpse of what it might look like without him.\n\nClearsight remembered a long-ago dream that came from a scroll she used to love to read. It told stories of the lost continent and the secret tribes of dragons that lived there.\n\nIn that dream, she was an explorer. She went out and found new worlds, places no NightWing had ever been or even imagined.\n\nNow she could see it \u2014 that dream could be real. Visions of a strange land were already unrolling behind her eyes, of unusual trees and odd animals and unfamiliar dragons that didn't match any tribes she knew. She knew where to go. She knew how to get there.\n\nThe future was in her talons now, and she could do anything she wanted to do.\n\nSun showers sprinkled the beach with little bursts of rain, sparkling in the cheerful sunlight. A coconut thumped softly onto the sand and rolled toward Indigo's talons. She picked it up, remembering the day of the animus test. She'd been so relieved to find she was normal, that she didn't have some kind of spooky magic lurking in her claws. And that was before she knew anything about animus power.\n\nIt was nothing, though, compared to the relief she felt once they were sure none of their dragonets had it.\n\n\"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH,\" Clearpool screamed. The little green dragonet stomped her feet furiously in the waves. \"I can't GET IT! I'LL NEVER GET IT! ALL THE FISHES ARE STUPID!\"\n\n\"Remember the song about being patient?\" Indigo said, patting her gently on the head. \"You have to wait and wait and wait and then pounce.\"\n\n\"I DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!\" she yelled. \"I waited and waited and THEN POUNCEDED and it GOT AWAAAAAAAY.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, there's your mistake,\" said Indigo. \"You forgot one of the waits.\"\n\nClearpool's wails cut off abruptly. The dragonet tipped her head, thinking. \"Oh,\" she said. \"Yeah, I did. OK, fish! I'ma get you now!\"\n\nShe splashed away, leaping over crabs and kicking sand in the hole her brothers were digging.\n\n\"Roar!\" Cowrie yelled at her. \"Get your big galumphing talons out of here!\"\n\n\"I was NOT galumphing!\" Clearpool yelled back. \"THIS is GALUMPHING!\" She slammed her feet into the sand like a woozy elephant and the whole side of Cowrie's hole collapsed.\n\nOver the ensuing shrieks of fury, Indigo felt Fathom come wading up behind her. She spread her wings and they leaned into each other, and she felt, like she always did, that she could grow roots right here and be happy entwined with him forever.\n\n\"I think,\" she said, \"that we may have named the wrong dragonet after Clearsight.\"\n\n\"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!\" Clearpool howled again, flinging herself into the shallow water and rolling around in a fit of temper. \"THIS BROTHER IS A KELP-FACE!\" Indigo buried her face in Fathom's neck, hiding her giggles.\n\n\"Maybe she'll grow into her quiet wisdom,\" Fathom said. \"Like you did.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" Indigo said. \"ME? I have ALWAYS been quiet and wise.\"\n\n\"I seem to recall just a few shrieking fits when you were that age,\" he said, starting to laugh. \"Remember the time I ate the last salmon at breakfast?\"\n\n\"You didn't just eat it!\" she cried. \"You were smug about it! You totally deserved to be dumped in the koi pond!\"\n\nCowrie and Clearpool were wrestling now, getting absolutely covered in wet sand. Next to them, Ripple popped his head out of his own hole, realized that someone else was getting more attention than he was, and promptly scrambled over to flop on top of his brother and sister.\n\n\"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?\" Clearpool shouted at him. \"GET OFF!\"\n\n\"I looooooooooooooove youuuuuuu,\" Ripple said, poking his snout in their faces. Blob clambered out of the hole behind him and lolloped over to join the pile.\n\n\"Arrgh! Yuck!\" Cowrie flailed his wings as he tried to get free. \"Ripple! You're squashing me! DAAAAD! MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!\"\n\n\"Everyone stop squashing one another,\" Fathom called without moving.\n\n\"RIPPLE IS THE SQUASHER!\" Clearpool bellowed.\n\n\"Quit mashing one another into the sand and I'll tell you a story,\" Indigo said.\n\nThe three dragonets instantly jumped away from one another and came scampering over, plunking themselves into an attentive semicircle around their parents' talons, with Blob perched happily on Ripple's head.\n\n\"Tell us about the Kingdom of the Sea again!\" Clearpool demanded. \"And all the palaces!\"\n\n\"It looks a lot like this,\" Fathom said, flicking his tail at the island around them. \"Maybe we'll take you there one day, when you're all grown up.\"\n\nWhen there's a new queen, who doesn't know about Fathom's promise to Pearl, Indigo thought. Their island was off the southern coast of Pyrrhia, within sight of the rainforest, and they kept up with tribe news by visiting and trading with RainWings every couple of months or so. That's how they knew that the NightWings had vanished, and nobody knew where they'd gone. There had been stories of Darkstalker sightings everywhere for a while, and then gradually fewer and fewer until they dwindled away. Clearsight must have succeeded, but Indigo wished sometimes that she knew exactly what had happened, and where Clearsight was now.\n\nAs for their own tribe, surely Wharf and Lionfish must have returned home after they lost Fathom, still believing Indigo had left him. Queen Pearl probably thought Fathom and Indigo were both dead, or that Fathom had fled with the NightWings. She never needed to find out that they were alive, and together, and happy.\n\nIt had taken Indigo such a long time to convince Fathom that it was all right for him to be happy. That he wasn't a secret monster waiting to be unleashed. That he wasn't the one who did all those terrible things, and they weren't his fault, and he didn't have to punish himself forever.\n\n\"I want to hear about you and Mommy,\" Ripple said. Blob snuggled around his neck, flipping his tentacles contentedly. \"About stuff you did when you were little like us.\"\n\n\"Oh, we were very good,\" Fathom said solemnly. \"We were never, ever naughty.\"\n\n\"FIBS!\" Clearpool cried, splashing him with her tail. \"You were, too!\"\n\n\"Well,\" Fathom said, \"all right, I suppose Mommy was, sometimes.\" Indigo whacked him with her tail and he grinned at her.\n\n\"Mommy,\" said Cowrie, \"do you know any stories about bad guys?\"\n\nIndigo and Fathom exchanged a glance and Indigo felt a weird shiver, like someone was swimming over her grave.\n\n\"What do you want to know about bad guys?\" Fathom asked.\n\n\"Like, how do they get that way,\" Cowrie said, poking a piece of driftwood. \"And why do they do bad stuff.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Fathom said slowly, \"there are lots of ways, and lots of reasons. Sometimes it's because they're sad or angry. Some dragons become bad when they have too much power.\"\n\n\"And some don't,\" Indigo said, twining her tail around Fathom's. If there was one thing she believed with her entire soul, it was that Fathom had too much goodness in him to ever turn out like Albatross or Darkstalker. He was kind and good all the way through.\n\n\"Sometimes \u2026 sometimes they don't know they're bad guys,\" Fathom went on. \"They think what they're doing is the right thing.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Cowrie. \"So who decides if it's the right thing or not?\"\n\nFathom hesitated, looking lost.\n\n\"ME!\" Clearpool suggested.\n\n\"How would I know if I was a bad guy?\" Cowrie added with a worried wrinkle between his eyes.\n\n\"I would tell you,\" Indigo said, \"and then you'd go back to being good.\"\n\n\"Or me! I'd tell you and whack you and smush you!\" Clearpool offered with great enthusiasm.\n\n\"You do that even when I'm being super good,\" Cowrie pointed out.\n\n\"You know, there's really no such thing as bad guys,\" Fathom said unexpectedly, and Indigo gave him a quizzical look. They had plenty of evidence that that wasn't true.\n\n\"There isn't?\" Ripple echoed.\n\n\"I mean \u2026 there are dragons who do bad things,\" Fathom said. \"But maybe that doesn't make them all bad. Maybe they can also do good things. Maybe some of those bad things are just mistakes.\"\n\n\"No,\" Indigo said firmly. \"Some dragons are definitely bad and have to be stopped.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Fathom said. \"I don't think any dragons are all bad.\"\n\n\"Then you have a selective memory, my love,\" said Indigo. \"We knew a bad guy once,\" she said to the dragonets.\n\nThey all gasped with delighted horror.\n\n\"A dragon who did bad things,\" Fathom amended. \"But also some good things, and he cared a lot about his friends.\" He saw the look on Indigo's face and added quickly, \"Mostly bad things, though. Anyway, he's gone now.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Indigo agreed. \"He's gone, and he's never coming back.\"\n\n\"Will you tell us about him?\" Cowrie asked, his blue eyes round and dazzled.\n\n\"And how you WHACKED him and SMUSHED him?\" Clearpool cried.\n\n\"Maybe when you're older,\" Indigo said. Maybe when Fathom has stopped having nightmares about him. She smiled down at her squirming, beautiful, hilarious dragonets. \"Race you to the seal rocks!\"\n\nThey pelted off down the beach, shrieking with laughter, and Indigo nudged Fathom with her wing.\n\n\"It's true. He's really never coming back,\" she said. \"You did the right thing, Fathom. You saved Pyrrhia from him forever. It's safe to be happy.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. He unfurled his wings, shaking off the memories, and gave her the smile she'd fallen in love with back when they were tiny dragonets. \"I am.\"\n\nCenturies later, as the dragon planet spun through space, a comet passed by, close enough to shine like a fourth moon in Pyrrhia's sky.\n\nClose enough to change the tides and shake the continents.\n\nAs earthquakes rumbled through the ground, long-buried rocks shifted that had been in place for thousands of years.\n\nDeep underground, in the darkness, copper wires snapped.\n\nAnd a dragon awoke \u2026"
            }
        ]
    }
]